Egregoros

“Yesterday’s assessment holds. Intelligence thinks it has finally completed whatever it is it was doing in Antarctica and decided it’s time to advance. Today’s mission is confirmed, standard profile. I don’t think we need to go over it again. Any questions?”

No one said a word.

“Launch is in half an hour, so get ready.”

They all stood up and began to walk out of the briefing room in silence.

“Good luck up there.”

The General’s voice didn’t carry much optimism. Jones had expected some banter, a little bragging or friendly jabs when the time for the live mission finally arrived, but he had nothing. They knew it wasn’t going to be that simple—they had studied in detail the footage and telemetry from all the lost drones, satellites, and the one manned mission that had been sent to try to spy what was happening over Dome Argus. No one felt like joking.

His passage through the prep room was quick and silent, the only words he exchanged with the orderlies who helped him don his flight suit were the confirmations required by the safety checklist. On his way out, as they wished him good luck, he merely nodded. Pilots exchanged salutes as they boarded the carts that would take them to their launch tubes, and were gone. Jones hummed an old song as he sped through the tunnel, reviewing the mission specs in his mind.

At the end of the tunnel he stepped off the cart, and the support team helped him climb into the cockpit. The visible section of his sub-orbital bomber looked like a winged flat chisel standing on its handle, sleek and angular, the matte black paint absorbing even the copious power of the floodlights. Most of it was hidden beneath the blast doors that at the moment acted as a floor, a massive rocket that would catapult him to the edges of the atmosphere in a little more than a minute.

“Let’s go over the pre-launch checklist.”

[continues]

Jones followed the checklist mechanically, his mind wandering through a past that he could scarcely convince himself had existed. He was too young to have seen blue skies and the idea still felt unreal to him. When he was born the moon had already disintegrated—an explosion in slow motion watched by an almost catatonic mankind.

The smoke had arrived soon after that, with the impact of lunar fragments that had killed millions. For a few months large red clouds had roamed the Earth, destroying crops and forests, killing animals and men, corroding machines and buildings wherever they passed. Panic killed millions more, but true horror only dawned when the clouds began to move against all winds and coalesce in the South Pole—when it had become impossible to deny its intelligence. That had been his world. His memories of it all as a child were of missing a moon and sky he had never seen.

“All set, Colonel, launch is in ten minutes. Good luck, hit that thing hard for us.”

The leader of the support team gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“Will do, Sergeant, we’ll hit it right in the mouth. With a nuke.”

The Sergeant laughed, saluted, and was off, the armored hatch that sealed off the tunnel through which they all had arrived closing swiftly behind him just as the immense blast doors that formed the floor began to slide apart. Ahead of him the tunnel continued for what seemed like miles, faint stars glittering in the maroon circle of sky at its end. Straining to look backwards he could glimpse the missile that would shoot him away, sinister in the dim light of the silo, the shaft of a gargantuan arrow with his bomber acting as a nuclear arrowhead.

He tried to smile, feeling that a little of the Sergeant’s enthusiasm had seeped into him.

“Five minutes to go, global synchronization confirmed.” The voice had come from mission control. The countdown continued on the center screen on his console—similar numbers would be flashing through forty-nine other cockpits on this base and fifty more in Australia. He willed it to go faster, a flash of eagerness to see himself rid of all the rock and metal that buried him briefly overcoming the sullen moodiness that appeared to have hit almost everyone in the base. The numbers dwindled.

“Thirty seconds.”

[continues]

The light coming from the bottom of the well grew brighter—the ignition flame had activated. He didn’t even pay attention to the final countdown, just felt a sudden pressure as he sank into his seat, saw the circle of sky growing rapidly as flames shot past the canopy and suddenly he was out and rising. The sky grew blacker and the stars brighter as reports from the command center streamed in through the radio. A clang, and the rocket was gone, his bird was free just as the day’s first rays of sunlight reached him.

Argentina rushed past below him, titanic clouds of dense smoke streaking the surface, now like the Earth’s own bleeding wounds, now like the tentacles of a lovecraftian beast gripping the world. They grew larger and more numerous as he sped toward the ever-shifting horizon, a crimson glow rising above the limb of the planet. Jones could now make out what looked like a violent sandstorm from which the glow emanated.

“Your distraction is arriving, boys, prepare to engage boosters.”

Jones checked his main screen, where myriad arrows converged on the south pole—one large group arrayed from the South American side, a mirror image of that from the Australian side, and several smaller formations coming in from above on all sides, well ahead of the bomber waves. The largest live ICBM launch in history, and it was the distraction.

He checked the position of the closest missile swarm and searched for it in the sky. His visor quickly highlighted them, up and to his left, moving in considerably faster than he was.

“They’ll cross the estimated reaction threshold in five seconds.”

Right on cue the cloud woke up. The scarlet sandstorm wall receded as if taking a breath, and a red colonnade rose at impossible speeds, sprouting branches as it grew—a forest of dead trees, many-fingered skeletal hands reaching for the incoming missiles, their long shadows reaching far to the west.

The first blinked out, then the second, then they started vanishing too fast for Jones to tell the order. Two managed to get through, though, and split into twenty independent warheads, their limited evasion systems doing what they could to throw them into diverging arcs. New branches of red smoke coalesced around the nearest pillar to intercept those, but he had no time to follow the action above: the signal arrived and he flipped the switch that would activate the booster rockets built into his bomber.

Suddenly crushed against the back of his seat, Jones focused on the sight ahead. The red sandstorm had done much more than recede: entire canyons had opened through it as it rose to fight the incoming nuclear bombardment.

[continues]