Don Pendleton - Doomsday Conquest

The pilot didn’t need to be told even once, Kolinko roaring the order again, though, through the cockpit hatchway just when the bird was thrown to a steep dip to port. He tumbled to the floorboard, his soldiers falling from their stations in a thrashing heap of limbs, Kolinko still fearing the fire in the sky would overtake them. As opposed to arriving on-site after the three previous showers, this was the first time he’d been eyewitness to the falling space matter. Cursing the horrifying unexplainable, he hoped it would be his last, but he wasn’t about to see his choppers bathed in celestial soup, sure to send them crashing to earth.

Jumping to his feet as his pilot straightened the chopper, Kolinko marched to the door, hollering for one of his men to pull the plug to their monitors from the battery-powered generator. He was just in time to find the two black Mi-14s—drug ships, he suspected, taking the high ground and waiting on the Tajiks to climb up the trail from the gorge—erupt into fireballs that defied any blast he’d ever seen on the battlefield. It was all lightning and blue flame along the plateau, two giant, sizzling orbs that appeared like electrical charges gone haywire, blinding-white explosions touching off, one after the other, inside the spheres, the jagged streaks seeming to gather renewed angry force, as if whatever energy they consumed from the doomed birds inside the blue furnace fed their unearthly power core.

It was the rolling molten tidal wave in the sky, though, that commanded his full and terrified attention. Patching through to his other flight crews, he confirmed them engaged in evasive maneuvers, all of them falling back in southerly vectors at top speed.

Kolinko watched, squinting against the brilliant sheen as the molten rain washed over the forested plateau, then pounded a path down the gorge. With nowhere to run or hide, he saw the sea of molten stew drench man and animal. The Tajiks and their Russian end purchasers were little more than criminal scum, but Kolinko wondered, just the same, if they died quick, or slow and in great pain as they drowned in the ore.

“IN TERMS OF PURE scientific theory, as defined by Isaac Newton and Einstein, the laws of gravity and inertial mass being proportional to gravitational mass—G-Force—this shouldn’t even exist. Alpha particles, if that’s what they even are, will yield their energy quickly, but whatever the particles, they are fusing, multiplying and growing in mass and strength, creating in the process what I can only describe as…antimatter?”

Kolinko bared his teeth, stepping toward the hastily erected work area. He found himself growing exasperated to the point of boiling anger, what with their lack of plausible scientific explanations, but realized, under the circumstances, he needed them more than they needed him.

The good news was that the laser field, a reverse electromagnetic barrier, as he understood it, held back the undefined particles that created this purported antigravity. With the extended poles rising forty feet high, laser beams interlocked at the speed of light, the abominable stench of sulfur was held in check, but the unreality of the moment was still there for his eyes to behold. Unable to look at the frightening spectacles farther down the gorge and just inside the laser wall, he watched his eight best and brightest, still donning hazmat suits, while striding closer to the banks of monitors, his science detail having informed him the lethal doses of radiation were cocooned behind the bars of blue laser light and presently dying off at an inexplicable rate. Only flaring back to life, fusing together again, they told him, at a speed faster than light, mounting in hyper-strength, though giving off no measurable radiation! Impossible, he decided, would be the most preposterous understatement he’d ever heard. Moscow would never buy it.

Geiger counters, he saw, were hooked into a radiation monitor, the clicks no longer audible, but Kolinko stole a read on the digital screen just the same, confirming he was in no danger of coming down with cancer in the near future. The last problem—no, the last nail—he needed was another Chernobyl in what was, essentially, a militarily occupied Russian protectorate. His own anger and mounting fear fusing like those particles they mentioned, Kolinko looked at their dark baffled faces inside the bubbled helmets as several of the geniuses filled test tubes with white crystals collected from the ground near the field station, then mixed them with a clear liquid. With syringes, they extracted the concoction, squirting drops on Petri dishes, sliding them under microscopes.

“It makes no sense at all how this could be happening.”

“But it is happening, Comrade Bukov!” Kolinko snapped, forcing himself to not even glance at the figure no more than twelve feet in front of him to confirm the terrible truth. Should this happen again, he dreaded, and in a heavily populated area…

Kolinko keyed his com link, scoured the skies with an anxious search. When informed by his flight crews that soldiers were now on the ground and securing a wide perimeter, erecting more laser walls, he turned back to his scientists. Two of them were hunched over the control panel of a solid aluminum cylinder they called a gravitational wave detector. When he saw them shaking their heads at each other, he nearly erupted, aware the mystery was only growing as they appeared to understand less with each passing second.

“I want answers, and within the hour, do you understand me, Comrade Bukov?”

“Then we’ll need to return to our laboratories for further and more accurate testing, Comrade Colonel. I am thinking this substance will first need a laser burst of at least a hundred picoseconds…”

“Picoseconds?”

“Measurements of trillionths of a second, done in a laser fusion chamber, therefore determining, if we are lucky, if these nuclei of atoms initiate fusion on their own, which, I already fear, they do.”

“You fear? What do you mean by that?”

Bukov went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Beyond that I am afraid that what, or part of what we are looking at, judging the previous samples and testing is an ongoing, unexplained fusion-fission reaction, but far more fusion than fission.”

The enormity of what he believed Bukov implied left Kolinko speechless for a long moment. “You are telling me that what is inside this force field is…that what came from deep space is…”

“Yes. We are perhaps looking at the possibility of a thermonuclear explosion. Developing critical mass as we speak, from, as you said, the far reaches of the galaxy.”

Kolinko swallowed his terror, wondering how long he could keep this from Moscow. The truth, of course, would get buried, but if Tajikistan was wiped off the map in a nuclear mushroom cloud with its unknown origins from deep space, there would be no way to hide it from the rest of the world. There would be international outrage. There would be sanctions. There would be much threatening noise, to say the very least, from the Americans. There would be fallout, and clear up the Ukraine, depending on the prevailing winds, with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dropping dead in their zombied tracks from radiation poisoning so high it would be off the charts of gigajoule and human-sievert measurements. There would be…

Numb, he was about to turn away, return to his chopper, when he found Dovkna pulling his visor away from his microscope. “What is it?” he barked.

Dovkna muttered something, shaking his head.

“Speak!”

Dovkna pointed a rubber-tipped finger at the crystallized rock formations on the ground, where the snow was still melting to puddles, a faint trace of sulfur still lingering in the air. “This white substance?” he said, and paused.