– PROLOGUE –
On the fourteenth day of the fourth month, in the one hundredth year of the new Earth, while I voyaged among the tropical islands of the Caribbean Union, the heavens were torn apart and I saw visions of death.
As the thunder echoed above me, the great clap of the riven skies resounding over waters turned gray by misery, I looked up and saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud of blackened earth whipped into a maelstrom fury by forces that surpassed my understanding. The cloud crackled with flashing lightning, and held within its swirling gates a brilliant light that pierced from the top of the sky to the bottom of the sea, setting the world afire with its burning passage from heaven to hell, and all in between.
The cloud grew to cloak the skies, choking the sun with charcoal dust and darkened eddies, erasing the brilliant blues and whites behind the wind-torn fury of a thousand lamented cries. The water ran black, the beings of the realm fled in terror, and I, I sat along on my boat, encompassed by the swirling wall of eternal darkness ripping across the silenced world.
I cried out for mercy as the whirlwind tore the very water from the oceans, sending great waves crashing upward and emptying deep trenches through which I fell, fell downwards into the horrifying crash far below, where these unnatural forces warred over my battered body, pulling me down in the pounding whirlpool of frenzied storms and shooting me upwards with the power of a hundred geysers. I couldn't yell, I couldn't speak, I couldn't draw a breath amidst the fury ripping apart water and air, land and life, under the all-encompassing darkness above me.
Rain came in torrents, black and ashen as it poured down upon me, hailstones hurtling down like avenging missiles from on high, and the violent winds burst forth, creating great walls of thickened water before beating them down into the nothingness of nonexistence. With destructive fury the currents of ocean ripped asunder in the storm crashed down upon the foundation laid bare, and as it fell, I knew I would be destroyed, for what am I compared to such wrath?
The earth seemed to quake beneath the depths of Neptune. Through it all, the sun remained black, the cursed skies turned blood-red, and flames fell to the earth as though the stars were freed from the grasp of the heavens. The sky itself receded like a scroll before the storm, the great beam of light and power rolling through the firmament and unleashing the might sealed within. Mountains shook, islands quaked, and the waters were removed from their place.
The beam of light cut through it all, filled with fire and hurled down upon the woe-filled world below, bringing with it peals of thunder, rumblings, dances of lightning and the resounding roar of cannons. Hail and fire seemed to mix with burning blood, stewed as one and poured below. The water steamed, the dry land burned, and my lungs ached for air in the heart of the storm.
With a shudder, the waters separated beneath me, and the abyss split open below. Thick smoke rose from it like that from a gigantic furnace, captured and whipped into frenzy by the rampaging winds of the storm, and even the fire of the abyss paled before the bleakness of the storm and the piercing light of the beam. The sky above was black, and the fires below were red, dark blue, and yellow as sulfur, churning as liquid flame…
...
Starfleet Chief-of-Staff Admiral Forrest had barely arrived in his San Francisco office before real-time reports of the early morning attack began to roll in.
The satellite grid in high-Earth orbit failed to detect the probe before it started firing, illuminating a technological problem with which Forrest was well-aware; the probe was not even two meters in diameter, and while the satellites did see it, the software ignored the reading as being inconsequential space junk that would simply burn up upon entry into Earth's atmosphere, just like tens of thousands of other chunks of space debris each year. With its small size, and without a recognizable power signature, the probe blended into the background.
Until it fired.
A powerful beam of energy shot down, piercing the levels of Earth's atmosphere. Far more potent than any laser beam, the particle-energy beam shot through the thermosphere. Its charged particles bled out an insignificant fraction of their energy, causing a stunning display of auroras in the sun-kissed morning sky, creating a diffuse dance of green and red high above the Caribbean.
Its strength barely touched, its focus barely spread, the beam continued its rapid descent, plunging through the ionized levels of the mesosphere. The interaction of charged particles sent a crippling wave of ion storms sweeping around the planet, the first real indication that anything was seriously wrong; Earth's inhabitants would later determine that the atmospheric communications systems had fallen victim to the massive ionic wave nanoseconds before the brunt of the disaster struck.
As the beam hit the thickened skies of the troposphere, bare kilometers overhead, the first alarms were sounded by weather monitors. The beam sliced through the air, creating an instant storm as powerful as a hurricane but localized in an area no larger than a twister, causing booming roars of jet engines as the air sought to balance around the depressurized center of the beam. Claps of thunder roared out mightily, and black clouds billowed away in terrified flight.
Then the beam struck ground.
The miniature packets of high-energy particles comprising the beam entered into the receptive dirt below, passing their energy along with an impact similar to that of a cue ball striking a racked group of billiard balls. The rapid increase in temperature and energy excited the recipient atoms until, within scant seconds, they exploded apart at an atomic level, utterly destroying their previous forms and wiping the surface clear of a cognizable face.
In this manner, the probe's beam—itself no wider than a handful of centimeters—carved a hole into the Earth's crust a kilometer deep and a kilometer wide, consuming any material in its path. Rock, dirt, buildings, beings, even the air—all of it came apart in the onslaught of the beam.
From its initial strike point in the reconstituted swamps outside Kissimmee, the beam started slicing its way south down the panhandle known as Florida, consuming fresh earth with every kilometer of its progression. In the beam's wake, a fierce windstorm chased along, eager to fill the vacuum left behind by the all-consuming particles, and along the margins of the scorched path, thousands of miniature fires broke out, spreading the effect of the beam laterally in every direction.
Foreshadowed by an immense cloud of dirt and debris, Earth's tracking satellites now followed the weapon's beam as it laid waste down the center of the peninsula, destroying town and city, forest and swamp alike in its ferocity. To Forrest's eyes, it seemed to unravel in slow motion; the beam seemed to track ever-so-slowly along the ground, although its actual speed had to have been considerable. But from overhead, powerless to intervene, the admiral felt as though he could see every centimeter of the beam's progression.
As the beam finished dicing Florida, it slid out into the open sea, skirting the windward side of the Keys. The massive cloud of dirt diminished, replaced with a dazzling, leaping display of superheated water, and instantly, thousands of water spouts formed around the beam, destroying the crystal seas and eating the sealife therein.
Forrest could only watch and beg that the beam would stop. The death toll in Florida was already—incalculable, he realized. The waters of the Caribbean were largely unpopulated, but ahead, in the projected path of the weapon—
Leaving the water behind, the particle beam steamed into the island of Cuba. Reports streaming across Forrest's desk indicated that the civil authorities were already responding to the disaster unfolding to the north, and Forrest grimly noted that emergency services had begun to mobilize in advance of the beam as well. But there was little they could do to stop the assault; the beam cut its path down the center of Cuba, gouging a kilometer-wide canal across the large island.
Leaving the tropical land behind, the beam crossed into the water again, whipping the sea into a frenzied storm around it as it miraculously split the distance between the islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola, leaving Forrest thankful for such twists of fortune. On his map, the beam appeared to be curving to the east; Forrest recognized that the beam itself was straight, and the curve was due to that of the Earth, but still—it allowed him to predict the future course of the beam.
If it didn't stop—and it showed no signs of slowing down—the beam would miss the majority of the Caribbean islands before making South American landfall to the northeast of the Columbian city of Barranquilla, before crossing into the affiliated state of Venezuela, which would be brutalized in incomparable fashion.
...
The planet Earth, circa 2153, was still prone to natural disasters—the weather modification grid of the future was not even on the drawing boards yet—and the emergency rescue crews were crack teams of professionals, well-trained and versatile in their duties. It was with that degree of hope that Earth's Interior Minister, Steven Newsome, dispatched the first teams as he ran to his office, taking reports over his handheld communicator.
When he reached his office, and the scale of the disaster began to make itself clear, Minister Newsome declared a planet-wide civil emergency, allowing him to draw upon myriad resources from across Earth. Behind the first waves of responders, he called up platoon after platoon from other districts, commandeering civilian transports to move people and supplies into the aftermath of the beam's passage. In the forefront of the storm, he issued mandatory evacuations.
Already, the news reporters were clamoring with his communications director for an audience; and realizing that, for the moment, the unfolding terror was in the hands of others, he strode to the press room, mentally preparing a "do not panic" speech to calm the panicked people of Earth.
...
Starfleet's best scientists would ultimately be unable to determine why the probe stopped firing. Their best guess was that it simply ran out of fuel; it was an exceedingly small object to have sustained such a powerful particle beam for so long, and the simplest explanation seemed the most likely.
Forrest sank into his chair in momentary relief when the beam terminated, leaving its final patch of scorched earth in the outskirts of Mérida, Venezuela. The path—he estimated in his head that the beam had traveled fully four thousand kilometers. The collateral effects of the beam's passage—fires, concussive shock waves, dirt and windstorms, localized earthquakes—covered a swath of ground many times larger. The number of people in the affected area was beyond calculation.
With practiced force, the admiral set aside his worries about the victims of the assault. There was little Starfleet could do; it was not set up for planet-bound first response, and he lacked the resources to pitch in and help. No, he recognized, that part is up to the professionals. His aides were already reporting that Minister Newsome was mobilizing teams from around the world.
At the same time, Admiral Forrest was not going to sit still—in the wake of such a disaster, he had to give his people, give himself, something to focus on, to ease the pain and forestall the anxiety, and Starfleet was uniquely positioned to fill in a crucial gap.
"Lieutenant Pfeiffer!" Forrest exited his office at a trot, crossing into the giant Command Operations center that formed the heart of Starfleet Headquarters. "Shut down all orbital traffic immediately! Get every sentry vessel we have on patrol—until further notice, this is a closed star system! Any ship that moves will be shot down!"
Forrest jogged down the row of monitors, issuing orders as he went. "Mahler! That thing slipped past the satellite grids—I want to know how, and I want to make sure there's not another! Get your team on it!"
"Admiral!" Another aide shouted across the suddenly-hectic room. "We're reading an energy explosion in the vicinity of the object! It looks like it self-detonated!"
Small favors, Forrest recognized. "Gunderson, get a science vessel up there, and verify the detonation, then backtrack its route! I want to know where that damn thing came from! Are we tracking any debris?"
"Yes, sir!" The same aide spoke up loudly. "It's not burning up on entry, Admiral. It looks like—predicting planet fall in central Asia!"
...
To say that pandemonium reigned would be a grotesque understatement—it was more apocalyptic than pandemonious as the citizens of Earth, decades removed from such cataclysmic disasters—fell into a frantic panic. It wasn't the scope of the calamity so much as the uncertainty—what was it? Where did it come from? Would it happen again? Was there another weapon up there, right now, ready to fire on the defenseless people below?
Earth's security forces were pushed to the brink dealing with the twin disasters—the utter destruction left in the wake of the beam, and the panic ensuing in myriad cities across the globe. Millions of people poured into the streets, suddenly convinced—irrationally but completely convinced—that another attack was imminent, and it was going to strike right here, right now, on the very building, in the very plaza where they were located. Rumors of bombs and missile swept through the terrified populations, and the scared people—born long after the apocalyptic destruction of the Final World War—whipped themselves into a frenzied belief that an Earth-shattering battle was drawing nigh.
Earth's leaders, those in the United Earth government lead by Prime Minister Samuels, those in charge of the large, regional districts, and those handling local affairs, recognized the reality of the situation: they could do little about the actual attack, and if the panic was left unchecked, it would unfold into another disaster as terror and fear prompted people to take unheard-of actions in the pursuit of safety. On every communications network, at every major cluster of people, government authorities soon emerged, telling people to calm down, that the disaster had passed, that they were in no more danger.
As the fourteenth day of the fourth month, in the one hundredth year of the new Earth, passed on, the frenzied panic slowly ebbed and subsided, to be replaced with a hardened, stomach-twisting fear of what tomorrow might bring.