[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (77 page)
The canopy blew off and air rushed out. There had been no time for oxygen masks and the air was sucked from all four people’s lungs as the cabin pressure equalized. Captain Billy Kellar screamed. He was not fully strapped in yet and his body flew upward as the air blew explosively from the cabin. Martin was incoherent with fear as he gasped for breath in the suddenly thin air. He pulled the chair’s eject lever. The chair flew upward, wrenching Captain Kellar by the lone strap that was properly attached and snapping his spine like a rag doll. The massive tug broke off the captain’s scream as it broke his back, the instantly dead man’s weight unbalancing the seat’s propulsion and pulling Martin’s seat around as it launched upward out of the cabin.
Martin was already unconscious when the missiles hit. They flew up the B-2’s engines and erupted in the flow of jet-powered air, igniting the plane like a tinderbox. Within a fraction of a second, the detonation reached the bomb bay and the fresh addition of the remaining missiles’ fuel and munitions sent the explosion supernova. Martin was consumed along with Captain Kellar’s body in a mile-high pyre.
Where the plains of northeastern Iran meet Afghanistan, they are all but unguarded. But despite the lack of obvious border installations, regular patrols and surprisingly advanced radars still diligently sweep the skies for any encroachment by Allied forces into Iranian airspace. They had long since alerted the authorities of the airborne conflagration approaching from the east. But no one noticed as a lone man ran, unbidden, over the border in the aftermath, chasing the fiery shells of the fallen planes with reckless abandon.
In the middle of a wide, sandy plain, the burning wreckage of a Dassault Rafale fighter burns and smolders. A little over a mile away lies the remains of its pilot, equally blackened, equally charred, but not equally destroyed. A cinder of life still burns in its machine mind as it tries desperately to repair some of its systems. The lone runner sees the black outline of the body and veers wildly, coming to a skidding halt not far from the smoking remains. He approaches the body slowly, examining it closely as he does so. He is cautious despite the stupendous impact the body has suffered, aware of what the battered hulk was once capable of.
Stepping gingerly up to the blackened shape, the redeemed Lord Mantil of the Hamprect Empire kicks it over and scans for signs of life. A part of the wreckage that was Agent Jean-Paul Merard’s mind stares back at him and recognizes him, trying desperately to compute some tactical option. Their black eyes connect for a moment and Shahim smiles bitterly. After a pause filled with all the tension of retribution, Shahim’s left eye rolls back into his head, and a lethal array of needle-thin spines emerge from its socket. Agent Jean-Paul experiences a last moment of despair before the laser cuts into his head to cleanse his machine body of life. Within a few moments, the white-hot syringe finally smites the Agent’s infectious presence on Earth, and Lord Mantil turns and walks away.
As the planet reverberates in the aftermath of the attacks, its effects spread across the globe.
In America, a cloud of radioactive dust from the explosions at King’s Bay washes up the Georgia coast. Born on the wings of the northern Atlantic trades, the cloud carries death and mutation to the scattering population. Amid the millions fleeing its silent lethality, a scarred and battered Lana Wilson drives west into the heartlands of America to heal and recover. She needs shelter, she needs time. But her machine body’s convalescence will also give her time to focus her fury, forcing it to fester and boil inside her. Her rage is tumultuous, her thirst for vengeance palpable. She wishes death to the world, but for now her enmity is focused on three individuals: Neal Danielson, Madeline Cavanagh, and her former ally John Hunt.
The loss of the satellites’ sight and protection is like the loss of a sense for all of the surviving Agents. In China and Russia, the suddenly isolated Agents Pei Leong-Lam and Mikhail Kovalenko reach out to each other via phone. They know they have been discovered, that much could not be clearer, and like Lana they suspect that Agent John Hunt is the Mobiliei’s Judas. The discovery of the antigen just before the satellites were destroyed indicates that the humans were somewhat prepared for that branch of their attack as well, and they must assume the coming viral attack will only kill that small slice of the world’s population that is not already inoculated against it.
Deciding that John must surely have also revealed their own identities, they conclude correctly that their own discovery is probably imminent. So the two Agents agree upon a remote meeting place in the mountains of eastern Russia and close their brief call. Without ceremony or hesitation, they gather their remaining equipment and vanish, fleeing the backlash they know must find them in a matter of days, maybe even hours.
In a naval base in Singapore, the now awake and disgraced crew of the HMS
Dauntless
is still unaware of the vital role they have played in Earth’s defense. Furious and humiliated, their captain turns a blind eye to the beating that his crew is giving the prisoner deep in the ship’s hold. For his part, John Hunt takes the blows, ignores the mental abuse, and blanks his mind while his former shipmates and friends urinate and defecate on him as he lies in chains in the ship’s brig. He hopes that at some point soon, Neal or the colonel will reach out to the British government and secure his release, but until that time he will not fight his captors. He has abused their trust, and though he knows that he did it all for their own good, they cannot be aware of that yet, and he does not begrudge them their revenge.
All around the globe, the final weapon of the now destroyed satellites floats down through the upper atmosphere. The small pods contain the worst virus the world has ever known, and while the antigen has already reached the vast majority of the world’s population, several large bands remain unprotected. The desperate efforts of Major Toranssen and his now dead friend Dr. Martin Sobleski have saved millions in the most exposed zone of all, but the mission has cost Martin his life, and many more will also die before the antigen stops the spread of the synthetic plague that now falls, unseen, upon the ignorant and innocent.
The Agent that had been known as Shahim Al Khazar has done much to atone for his sins. Preeti Parikh and Jean-Paul Merard lie dead at his hands, and the earth owes the destruction of one of the four mighty satellites to his savage attack on Peshawar Base. But the deaths of a thousand innocents weighs heavy on him as he walks away from the mutilated body that was Agent Jean-Paul Merard.
He saw only one parachute drop from Jack and Martin’s B-2 bomber, and that at great altitude. But if there is even a slight chance that one of the brave men is still alive then he must do what he can for them. Unfortunately for the lone parachutist, its greatest peril lies ahead it as it floats to the ground, for it is a highly visibly remnant of an illegal US Air Force flight deep into Iran’s skies. Long festering anti-American hatred, fueled by fear and confusion from the past days’ aberrant missile attacks, awaits any who survive the long drop, and Shahim has no illusions as to the welcome they will receive if the Iranians get to them before he does.
In Israel, Ayala Zubaideh’s old handler from her days in the Mossad follows the Israeli Mobiliei Agent at a safe distance. He is nominally aware of some of Raz Shellet’s extensive abilities, and so he watches her from afar as she calmly walks away from her post, and from the double life she had led up until the satellites were destroyed. Each week he has been reporting her movements in regular coded letters mailed to a post office box in Boston, but those reports are about to change dramatically.
As the world spins and the many players in the great game take their new positions, another vastly more powerful foe is eyeing them from afar. Just starting to become visible in the night sky, a small cluster of new stars are shining. Still ten years away, they bring with them untold firepower and merciless purpose. At this great distance they are too far away to have been inside the range of the subspace tweeters that had beaten aboard the now destroyed AI satellites. They do not know that the advanced team is discovered. But they have always assumed that we will not go quietly. In virtual conferences of massive scale, the admirals and generals of the Mobiliei meet and discuss their plans, and behind the great fires of their decelerating engines, the huge Armada readies itself for war.
