On the first day, the whole world reacted to the message from the Tantibalic Tendency.
And the reaction, averaged out across the whole, was 'Go screw yourself'.
Even in areas that had been the worst affected, that had been torched and decimated with all the fury the Tendency could bring to bear, the overwhelming response was one of stark refusal.
Call it defiance, call it a found unity amidst calamity, call it sheer bloody-mindedness; whatever it was, it worked for Coraline, and she almost found herself cracking into a full-blown smile at the news.
The day went on and piled her workload high, for all that Bernstein had shouldered as many of the domestic affairs as he could. The attacks seemed to be dwindling in number, but the body count stayed high and the reports and her now-rote statements still had to be provided. She had to address Congress halfway through the day; rehashing the same condolences she'd given the public mixed with some more forward planning and promises of all possible retaliation.
The intelligence agencies were unusually quiet. Many of the foreign agencies were tied in matters on their home soil, and any who weren't were, she imagined, working flat-out on finding the Tantibalic Tendency.
Old emergency preparedness plans were dusted off, altered where necessary, and invoked to corral the efforts of the vying defence agencies. Proposals for her evacuation were deflected (she was determined, no matter what, to not leave the wounded city), proposals to evacuate homeless and injured civilians to places with the facilities to care for them were passed through with her approval.
She confirmed rumours that the creature behind the attack on Washington and mastermind of the Tantibalic Tendency was indeed a psychephage, and that it was likely a rogue one, acting against its own kind in its insanity. The creature slotted neatly into the role of 'villain' in the overall narrative, and the day ticked on, winding towards the evening and the tail end of the season's storms.
There came no word from Nevada save that the project was underway and that Wybie sent his love.
On the first night, whatever parts of the world slept were haunted with nightmares, and those awake received no respite from their own waking terrors.
On the second day…
"What was that, ma'am?" The question came from the Secretary of the Department of the Supernatural, Maria's old deputy, over a phone.
"I'm going to be reckless and venture that Tantibus was somehow involved," said Coraline, pinching at her red eyes and tapping her free hand against the rim of a steaming coffee mug. The nightmares had afflicted nearly everyone sleeping, with dark thoughts and paranoia afflicting those awake. Nobody had been spared them, although they had been afflicted to varying degrees.
Personally, Coraline felt she could have very done without spending the night running endlessly down dark and twisting passages, pursued by clacking needle-feet and piercing and mocking voices while her vision misted over with dark cross-lines of blood, obscured but for four clear circles over each eye … and she was in an understandable foul mood for it. Waking up drenched in cold sweat and trembling as she tried to pick apart the dream from the night-lit reality around her hadn't been any fun either.
The answer she'd given the Director was true, she believed, but if it was, then it disturbed the hell out of her. There could be no reasonable way Tantibus could have exerted that amount of power, to give every single person in the world, practically all of whom would have been outwith an Eroder-cast field, nightmares and waking horrors. It should be impossible.
Unless it could seep its power out from existing Sur-real places in the world, with the strength of the nightmares diminishing with distance and thus accounting for the varying strengths, unless it really did have or had acquired that much raw power to throw around.
"What effect has it been having?" she asked.
"I've been talking to the FBI and Press Office, and as far as we can tell, not enough to spur riots, but enough to leave people rattled," said the Secretary, her tone careful and considerate. "Everyone's scared of Tantibus now if they weren't before. They can make speculations of their own when they find out that everyone else around them had nightmares right after the President confirmed that a powerful Sur-real creature's on the loose. There are worries that it'll escalate the next night and … and there's been a few cases where people right next to what we suspect could be Sur-real doorways haven't woken up yet, and can't be woken no matter what. They've just stayed sleeping, but turning and trashing and … and screaming without waking up. Anaesthetics calm them, but when they wear off…"
"I get the picture."
With all the possible areas for Sur-real bleedthrough in her own nation impossible to account for, and no feasible way of evacuating the areas around them if they were identified, there was nothing Coraline could do about this one save wait and hope to blazes it didn't happen the next night.
Not so for the next significant item to cross her path, a handful of hours later.
She was still in her office when the call came through from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Micah.
It wasn't every day that you got a lead pinpointing the location of a Tantibalic Tendency base; and that was why those days ought to be valued.
"You're sure it's a base for them, General?"
"Yes, Madam President. It's believed to be a storehouse for the most part, accommodating around forty of their agents. Certainly not their main base of operations, but it's most likely a regional hub for them, it'll likely contain intelligence we can badly use, and it's on our soil." General Micah could normally sound assured when in the midst of a hurricane. It spoke volumes that some note
"What forces do we have in the area?"
"A company from the 17th Cavalry's been prepped, organised according to established entry-and-retrieval protocols, and is ready for immediate deployment. All they need is your go-ahead."
"They have it."
Ninety minutes later, they had a victory.
Coraline had spent those minutes flitting between the makeshift Situation Room and her office, fielding calls from other heads of state while a seemingly-abandoned farmhouse in Iowa found itself the recipient of an invasion.
"Our casualties were minimal," said Micah, after the raid had wound down. "We estimate around half of theirs fell in the initial gunfight, and the remainder fled through a doorway to the Sur-real. They made attempts to destroy their logs before they left, but the officers on the ground were able to recover a fair amount. A fair amount's ciphered, but that won't last for long."
"Pass whatever they got on to the CIA. They're working round the clock on what scraps they've got, and they'll probably want new things to play with."
The Press Office would want a piece of it as well, and Coraline was happy to give it to them; thinking on the ramifications of the successful raid as she looked round at the screens flashing images from it; at smoke tumbling from open windows, wood shards littering dusty floorboards, scissored bodies lying slumped in spreading dark pools while armed and armoured soldiers stepped carefully around them, holding briefcases and folded-up electronics.
Even if nothing else came from it, it would serve as a suitable antidote to the nightmare plague for many people, knowing that the Tantibalic Tendency were stoppable.
The rest of the day, as these things could be measured, passed relatively quietly. The reports of attacks abated, and the raid was cautiously taken as the potential reversal of fortunes that Coraline hoped it would be. There even came reports of attacks by the Tendency in Bolivia and the East African Federation being thwarted, of bombs being discovered and their agents either being killed or fleeing.
These same reports were marred, however, by the news that as the Tantibalics fled, they took people with them into the Sur-real. Either hostages they'd already captured or people dragged struggling off the street as they went, taken to a fate that, since it involved a fear-eating soul consuming monster, Coraline could assume involved very few upsides for the victims.
She devoted the rest of the evening and night either sending messages of support to the nation and troops involved with the raid or going over these reports with the Security Council, and she ended up falling asleep at her desk in the small hours of the morning.
On the second night, the world was reseeded with nightmares.
On the third day, the world simmered.
"What's the mood on the streets?" asked a sleep-deprived Coraline, who, while nursing a creaking neck from her position leaning on the desk, kept reaching one hand nervously up to her remaining eye as a consequence of the nightmares, subconsciously checking that it was still there.
"People won't last for much longer," said the similarly sleep-deprived Director of Homeland Security, to nods from others in the cabinet. "More people are comatose. Nearly everyone is on edge. One night of nightmares was horrific and unsettling enough, another right after has made more than a few think about nothing apart from how they can make it stop. And when they can see no way of destroying Tantibus and they can't see their government doing so either, then they're going to think hard about that message from two days ago. They'll become desperate."
"Desperate enough to take a shot at me and divide us further and feed more fear towards Tantibus." Coraline would have likely broken something had the only she'd been holding not been her own neck. "Hell's bells. It's laid this out. It's thought about this."
From mass devastation where everyone could see it, to promises of salvation if civil war ensued amidst the devastation, to constant and growing nightmares that promised only one outcome. At this rate, if Tantibus could keep on terrorising the world's dreams and still remained beyond their grasp, they'd lose in a week. Most likely less.
"We do what's necessary," said the President, coldly, reluctantly. "The governors in every state have placed the National Guard on standby to help maintain order. If everyone remains calm, great. If not, we can hold them at bay. If the guard's compromised, then the citizens will be the least of our problems. And we hope that every other country can do the same."
Words that involved the possibility of wielding military force against your own people ought to have been harder to say. They should have involved torturous soul-searching and argument over objections and the most carefully worded of statements while every other part of your energies was devoted to fixing the problem that required this sort of stopgap.
Instead, they involved the Secretary nodding while General Micah said "I'll make the calls,", and while the CIA worked in impenetrable silence in some other rooms out of her sight.
The victory yesterday would mean nothing in the face of this, she realised. It hadn't fixed their problems, it didn't stop the terrors sent against them, and now they were stepping closer to beginning to destroy themselves.
Despair like this would only help Tantibus, she acknowledged. But without a reason for hope; without lead, clue, means, weapons, or targets, what was there to inspire hope? What was there that wouldn't deceive people?
For the hope of others, replied a part of her. So that others don't see their psychephage-hunting President give up. You don't want to be insincere? So what? This isn't even close to being small enough to be about what you want.
She watched the other end of the table, chin supported by her linked hands, brooding while others spoke and papers shifted and screens flickered.
Why have hope at all if not for moments like this?
There came the beginning of a muffled conversation from outside the Situation Room as General Micah began to present revised plans for securing strategic buildings in the event of Sur-real attack. The national security team resettled, and Coraline tried to ignore everything in favour of the General.
"The Basilica Plan would require co-operation from multiple Departments, and it would need to be checked against the knowledge we possess on psychephages," he started, as the conversation continued. "The initial proposal is that each vital building which we know to be open to the Sur-real or near a Sur-real entry point be, if it and its contents cannot reasonably be relocated, reinforced with…"
"Ma'am?" came the voice of one of the door guards from a small intercom on the desk by Coraline. "The Director of the CIA requests entry to the meeting, claiming that the matter permits a protocol breach. What's your call?"
"Let her in," said Coraline, intrigued.
The door slid open, and the CIA Director stepped in, her own eyes red bloodshot with weariness. The sort, however, not born of a bad sleep, but of the absence of any sleep at all. She held a file in a sealed case by her side, her fingers impatiently tapping on its side. The room hushed as she stepped in, Micah halting and acknowledging her with a nod.
"Madam President?" said the Director, breathlessly.
"What is it, Director?"
"We found them," she said. She looked from Coraline to the rest of the room. "We know where they are." She reached down, snapping open the hard case as she did so. "Let me show you…"
Coraline sat bolt-upright, more alert and ready than she'd ever been, an unbidden fire rising in her. "Their base of operations? Where?"
Papers fanned across the table. "In Russia. In the Ural Mountains. At Mount Narodnaya."
On the third day, it was night in Nevada. Or at least you'd have thought so, from the thick bank of stormclouds overhead. Colour diminished to black skies, grey desert, white salt flats, and silver networks of lightning pulsing far above amidst a constant thunder.
To Wybie, it seemed only appropriate.
"The team that placed the device are back, Mr Lovat," said Vasili, looking from a phone and up at Wybie past a hood dripping with water. "The prototype should be ready when we are."
"They called me mad, you know!" cackled Wybie, his own coat buttoned up and hood left down, his hair refusing to be flattened by anything so trivial as a thunderstorm's downpour. "Mad! But they'll never call me mad again after tonight!"
"I didn't say you were mad," said Vasili cautiously, calmingly. "I just thought the project was inapplicable on the basis of our current knowledge and technology. I'd not considered the Cleveland-Holly device, nor had I correctly estimated the capacity of an internal assembly. Nor had I correctly estimated how much welding and mathematics one man could do in three days."
"Mad! They shall all be shown!"
"Indeed. Shall we get ourselves ready?"
Vasili, for his part, hoped that the storm wouldn't confound the experiment in whatever fashion, and also hoped for a weapon and a wall to back up against whenever the First Gentleman started talking like … like that.
Of the past seventy-two hours, Wybie had spent perhaps three of them asleep. The rest had been invested into the ferrobomb, into the math and blueprints and prototype about to explode just north of them, across the Lake Groom salt flat. Fortified by caffeine and adrenaline pills, he'd made it from a cheerful eagerness, which had devolved to a careful and cool focus, which drifted into a drowsy haze, which reassembled itself into irritability, and which had flickered between previous stages before finally alighting onto something which Vasili felt would be happier sewing bits of body together.
The several other scientists and technicians sharing the platform with them reached for reinforced goggles, complete with lead-lined and radiation-reading face masks, brushing some of the constant downpour off them as they did so. A sudden flash of lightning split the sky open above them, a roar of thunder chasing on its heels.
"Send the signal, minions! Let the whole world wonder at what I've done!" Wybie said, muffled by his own mask.
"Will you comply with sedatives later, Mr Lovat?" Vasili felt his lab assistant would rise far in the profession for ensuring those sorts of precautions.
"Fine! But let it be triggered! In fact, pass it to me."
Against every common-sense neuron firing in his brain, Vasili passed the radio trigger over. Wybie took it, smiled a sinister slash behind his mask, and jabbed the trigger.
The device they'd made had a low yield, inasmuch as these things could be applied to nuclear weapons. One kiloton had seemed sufficient, and even that from this long distance was terrifying to behold.
In the split second after the trigger had been pressed, the world had seemed to hold its breath.
Then came the flash, a pure white-gold blaze that battered even at the team's shielded eye lenses, fiercer and more violent than anything the sun could conjure up. Along with it came the noise, a massive earth-shaking rumble that persisted after the flash, and along with the shockwave of torn-up ground and ash.
Above that shockwave rose a great plume of smoke and dust, silhouetted against the fading flash and outdone lightning. Rings of dust rolled out across the skies as the plume rose, condensed, lost its fire as it became grey as stone.
Throughout, the scientists stared with keen interest, or eagerly pointed out in low tones aspects that indicated an iron-producing reaction, or gasped, or were lost in their own thoughts.
Not Wybie, who knew in his sleep-addled heart exactly what the situation demanded.
"MuahahahahaHAHAHAHA-HA!"