John Birmingham - Without warning

And like a curtain, it moved. Not much, just a lazy drift back and forth across the ground, no more than a couple of yards in either direction. Just enough to wake up the primitive creature dwelling in the darkest parts of Musso’s mind, to fill him with an atavistic fear of whatever danger lay in the darkness just outside the mouth of the cave.

Musso the modern, rational man, dressed in a short-sleeve khaki shirt and olive drab pants, ground down on that ancient terror and watched, fascinated, as the cloud drifted into the energy wave. It seemed completely unaffected as it passed through. Its form became less distinct on the far side, but it was discernibly the same shape and size as before.

‘Seen any birds fly into it or out of it?’ he asked, still peering upwards.

Major Nuсez shook his head. ‘None. Some of my men say they saw large flights of birds moving away from here earlier today, but I do not know where they came from. And there are none here now. Not one.’

The brigadier general dropped his gaze. They were standing by the crumbling edge of a two-lane road, the bitumen surface shimmering in the heat a few hundred yards behind them, a natural phenomenon. The much more powerful haze directly in front was decidedly unnatural. The small convoy of Hummers and Cuban vehicles had pulled up here ten minutes ago and Musso’s heart was still beating hard from the sight. Any last, lingering doubts placed in the way of belief by his rational mind had been banished. Visible from well over the horizon, it not only reached up to the stratosphere, it curved away towards the horizon in both directions like a giant standing wave, raised by an unknowable deity.

It was alien.

It sat there, in front of him, utterly removed from any human context to give it meaning. He had no idea what it was, and having seen it up close for himself now, he doubted that anybody ever would.

‘You still got nothing, Lieutenant Kwan?’ he said.

Lieutenant Jenny Kwan shook her head. She seemed too young to Musso, almost baby-faced, but she was one of the smartest, scariest individuals he’d ever met. An MIT grad, Kwan was a Marine first lieutenant, the boss of an Incident Response Unit, which was a bland name for a bunch of very smart people trained to look for and respond to some of the worst things in the world: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Her crew and equipment took up three of the seven Humvees that had driven deep into Cuban territory, escorted by Major Nuсez and a platoon of his men in a couple of old Soviet-era BMP-2s.

Musso had to hand it to the Cubans. This monstrosity wasn’t an abstract proposition for them, something to be intuited from indirect evidence provided by web links or satellite data. It was sitting literally a stone’s throw away, bisecting their country. Given all that, he was impressed by their professionalism and no-bullshit attitude, although Nuсez had probably picked his Praetorian guard for this gig. They helped Lieutenant Kwan whenever she asked for it, and kept to themselves when she didn’t. Not that Kwan was having any luck with her equipment – no matter what sensors or sniffers or magic wands she waved at the haze, it made not a damn bit of difference.

‘According to my readings, General, that thing isn’t even here,’ she told him.

‘Uh-uh,’ he muttered. They’d had the same result plugging into FAA and weather satellites back at Gitmo. As far as their technology was concerned, the haze didn’t exist.

He could feel the warmth leaking out of the late afternoon as the sun dropped towards a line of low, scrubby hills in the west. There was a faint but noticeable dry heat radiating from the haze, but that was all.

‘Care to take a closer look, Major?’ he said.

Nuсez shook his head. ‘No. But what else is to be done?’

The Cuban officer took the first steps away from the convoy, towards the new edge of the known world. Musso fell in beside him as they cautiously approached the barrier. The country hereabouts was little different from the area around Guantanamo. Both were nestled at the edge of the Sierra Maestra ranges, the remnants of huge fractured slabs of continental plate, raised from the ocean floor over millions of years by tectonic impact, volcanic eruptions and the 100,000-gigatonne blast of the Chicxulub comet punching into the surface of the planet just a short distance away, some 65 million years ago. The Maestra was perfect guerrilla territory, a vast contrary maze of steep valleys, volcanic dykes, abrupt fault lines and almost impenetrable karst areas, all riven with limestone caves and covered in dense forest. The ranges gave out on the far side of the haze, smoothing out into the low, rolling plains that made up nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s land surface. For all of the earth-shattering violence that had gone into creating this environment over the eons, it was nothing compared to the immediate spectacle of the static energy wave.

Musso was able to make out the lowland steppes on the far side without much trouble. Nothing moved there. He had earlier compared it to looking through a waterfall, but now to his mind it was more like a few layers of plastic wrap. He stooped down to pick up a rock as they walked, wondering what would happen if he threw it in. Nuсez slowed as they approached the face. It appeared to billow, like a sail, just as the Cuban had described. They stopped about fifty yards away.

‘I would not think it safe to get much closer,’ Nuсez warned.

‘I wouldn’t argue with that, Major,’ agreed Musso. ‘Let’s just accept we’re both possessed of stainless-steel cojones and take it nice and careful from here.’

He could see a burnt-out car wreck on the far side, near a bend in the road, and wondered if that’s where Nuсez’s superior officer had disappeared. This close to it, he avoided looking up. The scale of the thing was enough to give him a teetering sense of vertigo without making it any worse by craning his head back. He turned around to check on his people. They were all watching anxiously, their bodies rigid with anticipation.

Suddenly there was a whooshing noise and he saw them all jump, like an audience in a horror movie frightened by a cheap stunt. ‘What the fuck?’ he said, turning to Nuсez.

But the Cuban was gone. Only his smouldering uniform remained.

The cries of his comrades and of Nuсez’s men reached him a moment later. ‘Run, General! Get the hell outta there!’

Admiral Ritchie found his eyes straying from the television news broadcast to the silver-framed picture of his daughter on the desk in front of him. The photograph was old. Nancy was nineteen now, but on his desk, she remained forever three, holding a small bear, sucking her thumb, and staring off a thousand miles into the distance.

He had to tear his eyes away. It was almost too painful to bear. She should be all right – she was supposed to fly out from Chicago for Europe very early this morning. But they had heard nothing from her. Had she made the flight? Had it escaped the Wave? He didn’t know. His wife Amanda was frantically trying to find out, but without much luck. With a grinding effort of will, Ritchie turned his attention back to work.

Thank God for cable news at least, he thought. He had wondered if he might have to press the Governor’s office for a declaration of martial law, fearing that violence would be inevitable as the population of the islands digested what was happening. But far from sending mobs onto the street, the wall-to-wall media coverage, all of it sourced from Asia and Europe, seemed to be keeping Hawaii’s civilian population glued to their TV and computer screens. Every available police officer had been called in, and a battalion apiece of Marines and the army were hurriedly kitting out with crowd-control gear, just in case, although all of the reports he’d received so far had the streets half deserted. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed. The surf breaks off the north shore were a little less crowded than usual, but not much. Apparently even the end of the world wasn’t going to interfere with some people’s search for the perfect wave.