Greig Beck - Dark Rising

Shihab hoped the test run’s success would not benefit the soldier too much. He liked Hakim’s quiet presence and his stay-out-of-the-way approach to managing the security of the site. A big promotion would mean reassignment, and the facility may end up with a more intrusive guard. Shihab would take one Hakim over a hundred of those psychopathic Revolutionary Guard any day.

He put down his cup and wiped his hands down his sides; it was nearly time. On the computer screen nearby, a single line of ten glowing circles were all green except for one – and then this too changed to green, indicating a positive all systems go sequence. Shihab started the image recording of the laboratory floor and commenced the data transfer program to distribute the information back to their sister facility. The second site was a few months behind Jamshid I, so if anything went catastrophically wrong with this test they would learn from those mistakes. Please, oh merciful Allah, don’t let there be any mistakes, Shihab prayed.

He keyed in a few commands and the overhead lights in the laboratory dimmed. The technicians and scientists pulled protective visors over their eyes and the observation window darkened to deflect any laser scattering. Shihab pressed the microphone switch down and his voice echoed over the floor of the chamber. ‘Is everyone ready?’

He scanned the floor for any dissent, and licked dry, nervous lips. Hoeckler turned and smiled. Shihab felt a bead of perspiration run down beside his left ear. He drew in a deep breath, feeling his heart thump sickeningly in his chest.

‘Allahu Akbar,’ he whispered as he entered the final codes and made a single stroke on the keyboard.

An infernal shriek tore through the laboratory and permeated the thickened glass as if it were paper. In the centre of the laboratory, where the sphere had stood, there was now a blackness darker than night. At its core was a pinprick of nothingness that hurt Shihab’s eyes. He felt as if he were caught in a thick mucus that trapped his limbs. Time slowed, or perhaps stretched, and a cold darkness spread out into the laboratory. It was the only thing moving; everyone else seemed frozen in time too. As Shihab watched, he realised to his horror that the growing mass of darkness was absorbing everything in its path. He watched helplessly as the bodies of his colleagues elongated and then began to tear as they were pulled towards that dark curtain of space.

His eyes met those of Herr Hoeckler for a second – or perhaps it was for an eternity – before the large man was engulfed, his body stretched into a plume of flesh-coloured streamers.

We all died when I pressed that final key, he thought, and now we are in hell.

From the corner of his frozen vision, Mahmud Shihab saw his friend, Hakim, become a long white streak as he was dragged mercilessly into the void. And then his sanity left him as he saw his own tongue and the lining of his throat distend from his body and rush towards hellish oblivion.

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska – US Military Space Command

‘What the fu-’ Corporal Marcs scooted his office chair across the floor of his horseshoe-shaped booth to replay what he had just seen on one of his screens. ‘Holy shit. Major, you gotta see this! VELA just picked up a whale of a radiation spike from the Middle East.’

Offutt Air Force Base was one of the most strategically placed and defensible military bases in the world, home to the Strategic Air Command, the 55th Wing and also the primary hub of the United States military network-centric space command. Its role was to manage the constellation of military hardware orbiting the planet and oversee the billions of bits of information received from their flock of extremely attentive high-orbit birds. Normally the command centre was a place of professional calm. Today all hell was about to break loose.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ Marcs went on. ‘This is strong gamma – just gamma – where’s the rest of the radiation package? Is this a detonation?’

Major Gerry Harris was instantly at the corporal’s shoulder. A brilliant military specialist, Harris had been heading up the space command centre for the past eighteen months. His background in physics and information technology were the perfect credentials needed to understand and manage the complex information received by the satellites and translated by the sophisticated computer applications. But these signatures defied logic; they refused to make sense even to his analytical mind. The advanced VELA satellites used radiofrequency sensors to detect electromagnetic pulse prints and could measure the strength of high-intensity ionising radiation even from high orbit. If there was a higher than naturally occurring radiation signature across the X-ray, alpha or beta particle, neutron or gamma-ray spectrum, a VELA would see and taste it. But these pulses? Their sudden appearance and strength made them seem almost non-terrestrial.

‘Can’t be a detonation,’ Harris said. ‘These guys shouldn’t even have fission capability yet. And if it’s some sort of sub-surface nuclear test, why aren’t there any seismic signatures – and why are we seeing this single particle in such concentrations?’

Harris paced for a moment, then started yelling commands across the floor to his technicians. ‘I need all our birds with digital, thermal and ground-penetrating imaging capabilities looking at these coordinates now!’

Then he reached for the phone on Corporal Marcs’ desk. ‘Get me General Chilton,’ he said. ‘ASAP.’

Frank and Lorraine Beckett had been driving in stony silence for the past hour. They had left the Interstate at the Limon hub after sharing soggy, coffee-flavoured peanut butter sandwiches and disintegrating donuts – apparently Lorraine had left the top loose on the goddamn thermos, yet again.

Both in their mid-fifties and comfortably stout after years of double-portion dinners and chocolate candy in front of the TV, the Becketts were making a once-in-a-lifetime road trip, weaving all the way from their home in Knoxville to Santa Barbara on the West Coast. It was a joint gift to each other to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but what had seemed like a magical and exciting idea when they planned it was turning out to be days on end of featureless highways, frightening-looking hitchhikers and roadside motels with orange and brown decor that should have been put out of its misery in the mid-seventies. To really ice the cake, Lorraine’s stomach was acting up again and Frank was threatening that if she let loose one more fart in the car he was going to leave her at the next bus stop.

Praise the Lord, he thought. Just one more hour on Highway 24 and they’d be in Colorado Springs – which meant warm showers, a nap before dinner and maybe even some plain, home-style food that would help slay the dragon making war in the pit of that damn woman’s stomach.

The flat purple-grey highway cut through the dry and scrubby landscape like a new zipper down an old canvas sheet. Frank was starting to get his good mood back, and was about to break the silence by telling his wife a bad joke when the car died. Everything just stopped at once. Frank coasted the car to a halt, frantically pushing buttons and stamping on pedals.

‘Did you see that, Frank?’ Lorraine said, pointing through the front windscreen. ‘The sky seemed to shimmer slightly, like we were driving through a curtain of oil.’ She touched her fingers to her face and they came away slick and bright red. ‘Frank, I’m bleeding.’

Frank noticed that his nose was streaming blood too. ‘Outta the freakin’ car!’ he said. He didn’t want them soiling the beautiful leather seats with bloodstains. There would be a nasty amount to fork out on the insurance if there was even minor interior damage.