Revelations (5 page)

Emily placed both hands on the girl’s shoulders and knelt down until her face was level with Rhiannon’s. It was so very easy to forget the kid was only thirteen, but when Emily stared into her eyes, she could see the traumatized child still hiding just behind those blue orbs, a reflection of Emily’s own inner fears.

“Listen, kiddo. I don’t know what’s going on out there, but I promised you when we were on our way here that I would
never
let anything bad happen to you, do you remember?”

Rhiannon nodded.

“But the truth is, I just don’t know what’s out there anymore. But guess what? Now we have all these other people who are going to help keep you and me safe. So, don’t you worry, okay?”

Rhiannon nodded and Emily watched as her frown turned into a smile again. “MacAlister likes you,” the kid said from nowhere.

“No way?” Emily replied with mock shock, nudging Rhiannon gently with her shoulder.

“Does too,” said Rhiannon.

Emily stood, her knees cracking in protest.

“Yeah, well, I quite like him as well,” she said, and ushered Rhiannon down the corridor toward the radio room.

Emily heard familiar voices floating down the corridor as she and Rhiannon headed to the communications room. One of them was definitely Jacob’s, the other MacAlister’s, but the third was too faint for her to make out.

MacAlister smiled when he saw Emily and Rhiannon in the doorway.

Only when Emily stepped into the room with the two men was she able to hear the voice clearly.

“Fiona?” she blurted out just as Rhiannon let out a happy cry of “Commander Mulligan!”

The microphone must have been open because the commander of the International Space Station immediately replied. “Emily! Rhiannon! It’s so very good to hear your voices and know that you made it to Jacob safely. I was so worried about you both. The storm blocked all radio transmission from us to you. I…” She paused as if wondering whether she should bring up the next painful subject. “I am so very, very sorry to hear about Simon and Ben. I wish…well, I just…I’m just
so
sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Rhiannon, her voice barely loud enough to be picked up by the radio’s microphone. “They’re both with Mommy now.”

Emily pulled the girl closer to her, rubbing her hand up and down her arm.

“Commander, it’s good to hear your voice too. I’m assuming Jacob has told you about our new arrivals? The crew of the
HMS
Vengeance
?”

“Yes, yes, wonderful news in so many ways, Emily. And it’s good to know that a little bit of Great Britain made it through all this.”

“Their timing could not be better; it looks like the storm we outran has disappeared. How does it look from the ISS?” Emily continued, steering the conversation away from Rhiannon’s deceased father and brother as succinctly as she could.

“The commander and I were just discussing that very thing when you walked through the door,” said MacAlister, his smile broadening even more. “Emily, the storm seems to have vanished…worldwide.”

“Everywhere?” Emily said, astonished.

“That’s correct,” said Mulligan. “We noticed it beginning to dissipate about six hours ago. Its disappearance was almost as strange as its arrival.”

“What do you mean, strange?” asked Emily.

“Storms usually take days or even weeks to really lose their full power, but this one was gone in a little over two hours,” said the commander. “It was almost as though it disintegrated, bit by bit. From what we could see up here, the edge of the storm just began to dissolve toward the center until there was nothing left, as though the original process was being reversed, only at a much faster rate. I’d tell you it was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, but I’ve seen some very odd things these past few weeks.”

“So that’s it? Everything is back to normal again?”

There was no reply from the space station.

“Commander? Are you still with us?” Emily asked, even though she could hear the astronaut breathing slowly over the radio.

“There’s something else,” said Fiona. “While the storm has vanished, it appears to have changed everything on a global scale. I can’t see any sign of Earth’s indigenous flora, nothing is green down there anymore. It’s all red. Everywhere.”

Emily knew that she should feel something at the commander’s shocking revelation, some kind of surprise or remorse at the passing of the final vestiges of the world that had existed since life first sprang forth on this tiny rock. But the truth was that she felt none of those things. She had suspected that when, or rather
if
the storm ever subsided, the world would be a very different place, transformed and as different as its former human rulers had been when they crawled from their cocoons after the red rain. Even Rhiannon seemed to have accepted that the world was no longer theirs. Only Jacob, who had witnessed the demise and eventual transformation overtaking the world from this distant, isolated island, seemed taken by surprise at the commander’s words.

“Nothing? It’s all gone?” he said, aghast. His skin was slowly fading from pink to a waxy gray, in spite of the warmth of the room.

“Yes” was the answer from miles above their heads. “While I obviously can’t be certain this far from home, I see little other possibility for the changes we are seeing.”

Jacob’s voice became momentarily childlike, almost a squeak. “What are we going to do?” he asked, his eyes wide. He was asking her, Emily realized. Why was everyone asking her what to do? Being a mother figure was not in her survival plan, and she sure-as-shit didn’t fit the job description.

Emily laid a reassuring hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “We’re going to do what we’ve always done: continue to survive.” It was the best reply she could come up with under the current circumstance.

Jacob stared up from his chair at her with watery eyes. “How? Can you tell me that, Emily? We have a limited amount of food and nowhere to go. So, how? How do we make it, exactly?” His voice held no malice, she knew, but Jesus, she expected a little more backbone from the man who had dragged her ass out here in the first place.

“We have allies now,” she said, looking at MacAlister. “We have the
Vengeance
and her crew. And once they get the sub fixed we have a way off this island.” She tried to sound as positive as she could.

Jacob laughed, an ironic grating snicker. “Well that’s just wonderful, but
where
do we go? You heard the commander, nothing out there is the same anymore.”

“Anywhere,” she said. “We go anywhere. Because if we stay here, then we’ve given up and the one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I
never
give up.
Never
.” She paused and sucked warm air deep into her lungs, calming her nerves. “Look, we are all there is right now, but the chances have to be good that there are other survivors out there, other submarines, maybe ships, bunkers. People are like roaches, we have a way of surviving even the worst of situations. We
will
find a way to survive this.”

“And that about sums us up, doesn’t it: bugs. We’ve been on the receiving end of a fucking galactic pest control effort and we’re the survivors.” Jacob paused in his diatribe for a moment, closing his eyes tightly, a vein pulsing periodically in his temple. He sucked in a deep breath of air before he began talking again, this time there was less of a panicked edge to his voice. “Jesus! I’m sorry, Emily.” He forced a bleak smile as he tried to pull himself together. “I’m just so sorry for all this. Truly.”

“We’ll find a way,” Emily said gently, laying what she hoped was a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “Commander?”

“Yes, Emily? Is everything okay down there?”

Now there was a question. Everything was far from fine, but compared to the crew of the ISS, trapped in that tin can circling the world, the survivors encamped here on the Stockton Islands were just peachy-keen, thank you very much.

“We’re fine, Commander, just ironing out some problems is all.” An idea had begun to form in the back of Emily’s mind, hell, she might even classify it as a plan. “Tell me, Commander, apart from the obvious changes to the landscape that you can see, is there anything else you can tell us? Do you still see cities? Any other sign of human life?”

There was a delay before the commander replied. “It’s hard to be exact, but we see some cities along the coasts of most countries that appear to be somewhat unaffected by whatever this red…stuff…is. But it’s really rather difficult to be sure from up here. We haven’t seen any distinguishable signs of any human activity though. If there is anyone else alive down there, they’re keeping quiet about it.”

“Okay, okay. That’s good.”

Everyone else in the room looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Good?” said MacAlister. “By what stretch of the imagination can that possibly be classified as ‘good’?”

“Bear with me on this: Look, every alien life-form I encountered—from the spiders right through to the trees they constructed—seemed to me to be a small piece of a much bigger…machine, or…” she hesitated, looking for the right word to describe the sense o
f what she had seen, “or a part of a plan, yes, part of a plan. I mean, think about the progression we saw: The rain created the spider aliens, they made the trees, the trees made the dust, and the dust created the storm. Now that the storm is done, doesn’t that mean that whatever-the-hell plan was being implemented is probably done too? Ding! Ding! Ding! The timer on the stove is going off, because everything down here is cooked to perfection. I mean, that makes sense right? Tell me if I’m wrong?”

“It makes a strange kind of sense, I suppose,” said Jacob. “When you described your experiences to me there seemed to be a very definite progression of effects. Even the creatures that attacked you in the woods outside Valhalla could have been there protecting or maybe tending to the things growing in the white orbs. And the alien that attacked you and Rhiannon’s family—” Jacob paused and glanced at Rhiannon, measuring his words carefully, “—from the way you described the creature, it seemed very purposeful in its actions. It obviously had some kind of rudimentary intelligence, at least enough to be able to mimic the speech patterns of its prey—I mean, Rhiannon’s father. The fact that it didn’t just kill Simon outright, instead using him as a lure for the children and you, does suggest that it was following some kind of program or plan. Yes, I think you might be on to something, Emily.”

She hadn’t given that much thought to the motivation behind the takeover of the planet, and truth be told, there could be any number of reasons for the actions of the alien that had killed Simon
and Benjamin, starting with it was just downright fucking evil, but Jacob’s theory of its motivation seemed as possible as any other. After all, every alien she had encountered had seemed…
single-minded in its actions, designed for a very specific, even obvious, task.

“So, if the storm has truly ended and whatever changes it was designed to make have run their course, then the world should at least be safe again, right?” she said with a little more hope in her voice than she actually felt.

“Define ‘safe,’” said MacAlister. “Just because the aliens you encountered may have executed their programmed plan, doesn’t mean they aren’t still out there, either in their original form or maybe they’ve changed again. Or that there isn’t still another stage yet to come.”

Emily shook her head at that. “No, it’s over. Everything about this event has been so efficient, so incredibly neat, so precise in its execution. Whatever is behind this, its plan has succeeded. I can feel it.”

Jacob considered her words for a time. “If you’re right, then maybe
we
can start over again. Assuming the commander is correct and at least the coastal cities are free of this red ‘stuff,’ then there must be years’ worth of food and supplies left in some of those cities. All we have to do is find it. Who knows? Maybe we can find an island, preferably one that’s a little warmer than this one, and settle down. If there are other survivors out there, we can find them, and with enough determination and the right men…and women,” he added quickly, “we can start all over again.”

It was a beautiful dream, the idea of a second chance for humanity, a chance to get it right this time, but was it a plausible plan? The only way to find out would be to try, but they were painfully short of options: stay on this island and last as long as the food did or travel with the
Vengeance
and see what was waiting out there.

But what that really boiled down to was a simple choice: give up or forge ahead.

It was all starting to make sense to Emily, but as she said her farewells to the commander and headed back to her room, there were still far too many unanswered questions eluding her. But she needed two answered most of all: Why? Why had all of this happened? And if all the events
had
been part of a plan, then whose plan was it?

Commander Fiona Mulligan tried to quash her growing excitement, she had to remain professional after all, but damn it, the news that there were other survivors, and a submarine crew of all things, was just so wonderful.

There was a chance for them up here. Some of them, at least.

She had a secret that she had held back from Emily, not wanting to cause her anymore undue distress than the poor girl had already gone through, but now that the
Vengeance
had shown up, she had new hope.

Mulligan shifted her body and maneuvered herself with practiced skill through the narrow spaces between modules, floating down to the Destiny module. For the third time since she had said good-bye to Emily earlier that day, she repositioned herself in front of the round observation port. Through the window she had a clear view of the rest of the station’s modules. And there it was. Their last and only chance. Locked onto the side of the space station, between the two Heat Rejection Subsystem radiators, was another spacecraft: a single Soyuz-TMA escape vehicle.

The Soyuz-TMA was a specially redesigned version of the Russian spacecraft used to ferry loads, supplies, and crew back and forth to the ISS. But this iteration of the craft had been specifically reengineered by NASA to act as an emergency escape vessel from the ISS. Normally, there were two of these space lifeboats docked with the station, enough to accommodate all of the crew. But just two weeks before the red rain had arrived, a life-threatening injury to an astronaut had proved too much for the medical facilities available at the station, and with no resupply craft scheduled for several months it meant one of the spacecrafts had been used to return the critically ill astronaut back to Earth. No replacement craft had ever arrived.

After the rain came, there seemed little reason to even consider the capsule. The commander and her crew had discussed it, of course, but the single escape pod could accommodate only three astronauts; the remaining would be forced to stay on the ISS, doomed.

The craft was programmed to land on the steppes of Kazakhstan in central Asia, but it was feasible to override that programming and to use the manual guidance system to navigate the spacecraft for the majority of the two-and-a-half-hour trip back to Earth to any location. This latest edition of the Russian craft, while designed specifically to place the astronauts safely on land, did have the capability for a water landing. It could last up to three hours at sea before the crew either were rescued or abandoned it, forced to take to the inflatable emergency life raft.

And right there had been the sticking point for the crew.

Even if they did make it back to Earth safely, with no recovery crew to pick them up, whether they splashed down in the middle of the ocean or managed to survive a landing somewhere in that strange spread of red that now covered the majority of land, they would still face almost certain death.

Her crew had chosen to remain together.

Emily, she was such a sweet girl, so strong, but she had faced her own trials and problems, so Commander Mulligan had chosen not to tell her about the one escape route they had. There had been no reason to trouble her even more than she already was, but with the arrival of the
Vengeance
and its crew, there was a chance for half of her crew to escape.

When she got off the radio with Emily and Jacob she had immediately called her crew together and told them the news.

There had been arguments about who should go and who would stay. Her crew, as always, had made her proud, each volunteering to remain behind, insisting that someone else should take one of the three precious seats available, but eventually, they had resorted to the time-tested short-straw pick. And, with only one spot left, it had come down to herself and Muranov, the Ukrainian astrochemist, and two straws (actually, plastic toothpicks). Muranov had drawn the short one.

The commander had insisted that the Ukrainian take her place on the Soyuz, but he had refused.

“My family is gone,” he said in his heavily accented English. “I stay here, join them when I am ready.”

And so it was settled; they had a way off of the station and back to Earth. Now all she needed to do was persuade Captain Constantine that the three of them were worth risking his crew and craft to collect.