Rise of the Beast (61 page)

However, Les had suffered no ill effects from the passage. He would spend the night in the hospital under observation, but that was just a precaution. They had just pioneered a new mode of transportation, and it was safe. Several more weeks of tests confirmed that as still other people made the short journey through the wormhole. Now it was time to proceed on to the next phase—teleportation to a ring on another island, an atoll 27 miles to the south. Already, a smaller and more portable version of the fusion power plant had been developed to power this third ring. If all went well, by the end of the year, other rings in New Zealand and Europe would open the door to worldwide travel without the need of ever stepping on a plane.

It all sounded so wonderful—the sort of thing that Nobel Prizes in Physics were made of. Still, Les and Nabuko were troubled. When all was said and done and Lusan had his teleporter, what would become of them? They would no longer serve a purpose in his grand scheme—none of the project scientists or engineers would. Would he allow them to leave, knowing what they knew? And Les and Nabuko knew enough to be very frightened. Inevitably, they would have to share what they knew with the others, but not yet. They didn’t want a general panic on their hands. That might hasten their demise. They knew enough about this process that the guards referred to as union to know that it was something to be avoided. They would keep their eyes open and look for a means of getting the entire team off the island before it was too late.

Lusan sat back in his large, comfortable chair in the conference room of his Paris office. He felt so much more comfortable there. The political environment of Europe was far more to his liking.

Word of the success on Katafanga had catalyzed Lusan’s people in Paris. A key element of their plan’s for Earth depended upon the development of a usable teleportation ring. Now they had one. If all went well, they would soon have an international network of them.

The next step would be more difficult, linking the ring in Katafanga with the one in his audience chamber in Hell. General Krell assured him that it was in working order. If he and his minions could move at will in their physical form between Hell and Earth, he might well be able to control both worlds. Being the leader of the angels of Heaven was beyond his reach. He knew that now. But ruling over both an infernal and Earthly kingdom might still be attainable.

Still there would be obstacles to overcome in reasserting his rule of his infernal kingdom. There was the issue of Abaddon, that muscle-bound, overly sentimental leader of the fallen dark angels. Lusan realized that he should have dealt with him when he had the chance to so long ago—the first time he tried to shelter humans from their well-deserved torments in Hell.

Still, for the moment, he had more pressing concerns. His plan to rule this pathetic Earth and her people was entering a critical phase. He needed to focus on consolidating his power. For now, Abaddon and his followers had about the same importance as a pack of rats scampering around within the walls of a once immaculate and well-run home. He would see to it that this pathetic excuse
for an angel and his followers, both human and others, would spend the rest of eternity paying for the inconvenience they had caused him. Some of those others were, sadly, his own minions.

For the moment, he would allow them to feel a false sense of security. Let them believe that they were poised at the dawning of a new era. They would discover the folly of their own intentions soon enough.

His mind returned to the here and now. He would have a special guest this morning—Julien Deveraux, the president of the European Union. He would be meeting with his spiritual leader to seek guidance. The whole idea made Lusan chuckle.

Lusan rose to his feet and walked down the hallway to the reception area. There would be a brief photo op for the press, a few statements of support, then he and the president would retreat back here for their meeting.

The photo op was friendly enough. The European press loved Lusan and the American press had been barred from the event. After a few minutes, the two men proceeded down the hallway.

“It is indeed strange how all of this has worked out, my lord,” said Julien.

“Yes indeed,” confirmed Lusan. “When the bullet struck your host in the head, I feared that our well-laid plan had come to nothing.” Lusan paused. “By the way, how is your host, Menlock?”

“Mentally, there is not much left of him,” replied the president. “The bullet did indeed do extensive damage. The parts of his brain regulating his bodily functions suffered little damage, but his higher mental functions nearly perished. Without my intervention, he would have been little more than a child mentally, if he had lived at all. I still sense him, but he is confused, unaware of what is going on around him. The ritual of union would have availed little more than that bullet.” Menlock paused. “Interestingly, he still recognizes his son. There is a very strong bond there. When I am around Adrian, I follow Julien’s lead. It seems to pacify him, make Julien easier to control. If I treat his son well, and I do, he cooperates with me.”

“Very good,” said Lusan, smiling slightly, “and what of the investigation into the shooting?”

“That has worked in our favor, my lord. The person who assisted this Luis Zapatta, the man who would have been our assassin, was one Carlos Cappello, who
has ties to the American CIA, though I suspect he no longer works for them officially. Still, we can make a credible argument that supports our accusations that the Americans were behind the attempted assassination. Their president is already very unpopular abroad. Her strong Christian heritage has become a great liability in Europe. This revelation will further weaken her standings in the world.”

“That may be true,” noted Lusan, “and it works to our advantage, but we still have to deal with Serena Davis.”

“But, my lord, she is just some Christian evangelist traveling her country in an old, gas-guzzling RV,” objected Menlock. “Of what real consequence could she possibly be?”

“Never underestimate that wench,” said Lusan, anger in his voice. “I never shall. Serena and her husband have become all the rage in Christian circles. It is said that people flock from all around just to stand in their presence, to have their shadow cross them, especially Serena’s. There are hundreds of documented miracles regarding her. She is at the forefront of yet another nationwide revival. Churches in America are packed with believers. And now Julio and Karina Mendoza travel with them, two more humans who managed to slip through my grasp. They have a gift of casting out my minions with a level of authority I have rarely seen in people so young. Now the four of them have started speaking out against me in public. Polls claim that less than 10 percent still follow me in America. And that number is still dropping. The situation in Britain is little different. She is holding revivals there even as we speak.”

“What would you have me do, my lord?” asked Menlock.

“Look for an opportunity to remove her from the equation. Bring her to me. I wish to deal with her personally,” Lusan snarled. “Get me the others too, if you can, but mainly I want her.”

“Perhaps an accident could be arranged,” suggested Menlock. “The American highways can be treacherous places.”

“No, I want to deal with her myself,” said Lusan. “I want to look into her terrified eyes when her last moment on Earth comes. Come up with a plan, Menlock. Bring it to me for my approval.”

“I shall,” confirmed the demon.

Winter was once more turning to spring when the first of a series of titanic eruptions on the surface of Comet Florence occurred. The Herschel Spacecraft had been forced to back away from the comet by another 20,000 miles, yet it still was taking impacts from ice and rock particles. Fortunately, those impacts came at a relatively low velocity, and its large Kevlar shield could be positioned in such a way as to protect it. However, any Earth orbiting satellite would not be so fortunate. It would encounter this same debris coming in at 20 or 30 miles per second. And that debris was not just in the form of sand and dust. Chunks of the comet the size of a small car had been blown off of its surface by the powerful steam explosions, especially on its daylit side.

Amazingly, the venting was changing the path of the comet, carrying it still further from Earth, but the debris cloud was drifting the other way, right into Earth’s path. They had no contingency plan for this. Sam Florence was confident that friction with Earth’s atmosphere would make short order of these chunks of ice and rock. But the damage they would wreak to satellites in orbit might be far reaching, not only destroying them, but creating a cloud of space debris that would hamper spaceflight for years to come.

It was only then that a terrible thought crossed his mind. No, this was an absurd concept, but he had to check it out. He looked at the projected orbit of the comet one week after it passed Jupiter, then he compared it to another projection from a month ago. Finally he looked at the latest data. Maybe it wasn’t absurd after all. He threw in still more orbital data, then did a least squares plot. He sat there in silence.

Yes, the Earth was safe from the comet, but the moon, that was another matter. The comet would cross the orbit of the moon twice, once on its way into the system and once on the way out. But on the way out, a collision with Luna was now an actual possibility.

Oh sure, team members had spoken of the possibility of lunar impact before, almost jokingly. No one had taken the possibility too seriously. But the odds of impact were going up. It all depended on just how much the venting changed the comet’s trajectory in the coming months.

Sam smiled. No, he was just being silly. The amount of venting needed to produce that sort of deviation in the comet’s course was enormous. He saved the information and walked out into the backyard.

His new Queen Creek, Arizona, home offered him a much nicer view of the night sky than he had downtown from his old apartment just off campus. His
eyes settled on the comet, low in the east. It was growing brighter, easily visible with the naked eye, and it sported a pretty nice tail. There was still a chance that the venting would subside and the dust around the comet would be driven away by the solar wind before the comet got here. The comet was still five months away. Predictions of doom for the halo of satellites around our planet were probably premature. He needed to turn in for the night. He needed to be at the university by nine in the morning to see the new ultraviolet imaging camera data. He headed on inside without noticing the sudden brightening of the comet in the east.

He heard the news over the radio on his way into the university and not from one of his colleagues. There had been a titanic explosion on the surface of the comet overnight, the worst one yet. Still, the radio announcer’s details were sketchy. It wasn’t until he walked into the Bateman Science Center that the magnitude of the event became clear. The explosion had occurred along a fissure that had been the site of several previous eruptions.

The massive amount of debris scattered by the eruption was currently obscuring the spacecraft’s view of the fissure. However, it quickly became clear that some of the debris cast off by the explosion was the size of a house. A huge cloud of material was expanding into space, and mission controllers were currently evaluating any dangers the cloud might pose to the Herschel Spacecraft. The spacecraft might have to retreat still further from the comet, using valuable propellant in the process. Still, they could ill afford to lose this eye in the sky.

By late afternoon the debris cloud had cleared enough to allow them to see the fissure once more. It was now twice as deep and perhaps three times longer. The terrain around it appeared jumbled and chaotic, as though some powerful force was trying to escape from its prison deep below.

The comet had grown unusually quiet now, though the expanding debris cloud would make it a spectacular sight when it rose, around 11 that night. This wasn’t a typical comet, if such a thing existed at all. This one had an attitude, and it would be passing within 150,000 miles of Earth. Sam wondered if this wayward comet had any more surprises in store.