MONDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2042

Asteroid 2034L
Approaching Earth
1905 hours CDT

The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it had been originally. The nuclear detonation had vaporized some hundreds of tons of rock and surface dust, and a number of house-sized pieces had split off in zero-G avalanches as rock expanded under the thermal shock and deeply buried pockets of ice turned to steam. The largest piece, still over one hundred meters across and massing over two and a half million tons, moved now on a slightly altered course, one that would carry it past the Earth, missing by well over a hundred miles. Tracked by hundreds of radar-and laser-ranging facilities in orbit and on Earth, it tumbled past the planet, crossing the terminator from night into day. Accelerated sharply by Earth’s gravity, it hurtled above a suddenly flattening horizon of blue and swirling whites in a breath-holding cosmic near miss that slung it sunward along a new orbit that was now the concern only of future generations of humankind.

Of the myriad fragments and splinters that had accompanied 2034L on its near-miss swing-by, most either missed entirely or were small enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. A few boulders, some the size of a house, were large enough to cause significant damage. Over the next few minutes, thousands of fragments entered Earth’s atmosphere, flaring brilliantly for a few seconds. Observers all along the Atlantic coast, in a vast footprint from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland and extending west as far as the Rocky Mountains, reported a dazzling display of shooting stars, including numerous bolides leaving long, persistent, slightly greenish trails. Several large fragments exploded in the sky as they rammed into increasingly thicker air, loosing their payloads of kinetic energy in violent blasts of heat, light, and sound. One fragment, massing twenty-five thousand tons, exploded eleven kilometers above the North Atlantic with a blast equivalent to twenty-five megatons of high explosive. Dozens of ships—most of them warships of either the US Second Fleet or the European Union Joint Military Command—burst into flame as the fireball expanded overhead, flames extinguished half a minute later as the shock wave arrived from the sky as a gust of hurricane wind. Over eight thousand men and women died, and thousands more were injured in an event initially thought by both sides to be an enemy nuclear strike. A second chunk passed over the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec with a light rivaling that of the sun before exploding thirty kilometers above Ogoki, Ontario. The three-megaton explosion ignited forests and blew down trees for tens of miles in all directions. Hundreds died and hundreds more were blinded, mostly people in Ogoki and in Fort Albany, on St. James Bay, who’d come out to watch the light show in the sky.

In both Washington and the EU military command center at Brussels, frantic requests for the release of nuclear weapons were received as reports flooded in from units across the Atlantic and North America. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed on both sides of the conflict; both Brussels and Washington were expecting the near passage of 2034L at an hour and a half past sunset EDT and were prepared for spurious reports of nuclear attack. The situation was confirmed when observers both on Earth and in orbit noted that neither of the reported blasts had the characteristic EMP signature of a nuclear detonation.

At approximately 1930 hours CDT, one final fragment entered the Earth’s atmosphere high above Pennsylvania. Plummeting sharply, trailing a plume of metallic vapor three hundred kilometers long, it sliced through the atmosphere in a flaring, sun-bright tumble that took it over Toledo, southern Michigan, and Benton Harbor. Ironically, it was not part of the original carbonaceous chondrite at all. The EU warship Sagittaire had been drifting away from 2034L at the time the nuclear warhead detonated; the plasma-borne shock wave and reaction from vaporizing metal had by chance all but countered that movement. As a result, as the main body of 2034L had edged off on a new vector at six meters per second, as the cloud of splinters and debris slowly expanded, the shattered, dead hulk of the Sagittaire had continued on more or less the same vector that the asteroid had been following just before the detonation.

Unfortunately, when the warhead had detonated, most of the ship’s aft hull had been in the shadow of the forward hab module and so was still coated with a black, light-and radar-absorbing polymer designed to give the vessel extreme stealth characteristics. When the debris cloud was probed by radar and ladar after the asteroid-nudging blast, the wreckage of the Sagittaire, eighty meters long and massing twenty-five hundred tons, had had a radar cross section of only a few meters; it looked, in short, to radar eyes, exactly like one more broken piece of rock within a cloud of tens of thousands of broken rocks, one small enough that it would certainly burn up when it hit Earth’s atmosphere.

The tumbling wreckage began vaporizing almost eighty kilometers up. The hab module flared brilliantly somewhere above southern Michigan, exploding in an eye-searing detonation that set trees, houses, and telephone poles smoldering in communities along the St. Joseph River.

The aft module, however, fifty meters long, containing Sagittaire’s plasma drive unit, reactor, and a massive block of lead shielding and still massing over seventeen hundred tons, plunged in a long, flat trajectory toward the southern end of Lake Michigan.

Grant Park
Chicago
1931 hours CDT

“We are here today, my brothers and sisters, to reach out to the cosmos, to reach up and make divine contact with the Masters of the Stars!”

Liana stood in the press of the crowd, only a few meters from the stage that had been set up in Grant Park just in front of the enormous fountain. The plaza before the fountain was filled with people, a vast and colorful throng congregating shoulder-to-shoulder in the center of the park and spilling out in all directions along the Chicago lakefront. The temperature during the day had hit the high nineties, but now, just past sunset, a breeze coming in off the lake was cooling the air somewhat. The sky was clear, a fast-deepening blue with only the usual band of haze around the horizon characteristic of the Chicagoland area. A single shooting star, a brief flash of yellow-white, streaked from east, over the lake, toward the west. Few in the crowd noticed, though here and there, someone turned to his or her neighbor, pointing up into the evening sky. Everyone else was watching the Reverend Blaine and his impassioned, arm-waving performance.

“Yes, Brethren, the Masters of the Stars! Those highly evolved superior beings who, at the very dawn of creation, ordained that there would be life on this small, blue planet of ours, who raised up Man from among the beasts of the field and gave him reason, who gave him the divine spark of rational intelligence and understanding!…”

He was such a thrilling speaker. Liana wished that David could have been more like Pastor Blaine, warm and caring and, most of all, understanding.

She wondered if she should give David another chance, once he was released from prison. She thought she’d made up her mind—ever since that woman had shown up on her doorstep—but she was finding herself still trapped between her pain and her basic belief that divorce was just plain wrong.

“We know from the Bible, Book of Revelations 12, verses seven and eight, that there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought, and prevailed not, neither was their place found in heaven anymore! And we know now from the work of the xenoarcheologists that there was war in heaven, long ago, between the creating Masters of the Stars, and another group we know only as the ‘Hunters of the Dawn.’ That is scientific proof, dear brothers and sisters, of the perfect accuracy of the biblical record, of divine revelation, of the very bedrock principles of our faith! It seems clear to me, brothers and sisters of the Star, that those scaly, repulsively reptilian beings the archeologists call the An, the beings who enslaved Mankind at the very beginning of human civilization, must be the serpent, the dragon, the fallen morning star mentioned in Revelations, and in the Old Testament, especially in Genesis. In fact, brothers and sisters, I believe…”

Blaine trailed off, looking up into the deep blue of the evening sky. Hundreds of people in the audience now were no longer listening to him, but looking up, pointing, murmuring among themselves. Liana looked up to see what the excitement was about and gasped. Dozens of falling stars were flashing across the sky, hurtling overhead on tightly drawn, fast-fading streaks of white and vanishing over the tops of the city buildings to the west. One meteor in particular far outshone the others, a blazing light brighter but much smaller than the full moon that tumbled lazily across the zenith, trailing green smoke as constellations of bright-burning fragments spilled off to either side, flaring and disappearing in an instant, the display eliciting a vast, swelling chorus of oohs and ahhhs and even some scattered applause.

Liana squealed and clapped as the large meteor soundlessly exploded in a flash and a cloud of drifting fragments. It was a celestial fireworks show of unprecedented beauty and spectacle.

“The Masters!” someone in the crowd screamed. “The Masters have come!”

“It is a sign, brothers and sisters!” Pastor Blaine yelled, pointing skyward…as though trying to recapture his audience. “It is a sign that we—”

His listeners never heard what the sign signified. Sagittaire’s drive module was growing rapidly brighter in the sky low above the lake, casting a brilliant reflection on the dark gray water as it fell toward Chicago.

At precisely 7:32 P.M. CDT, the corpse of the UN ship exploded just nine hundred miles off of the original target of Cheyenne Mountain, a savage detonation less than two kilometers above the water and some fifteen kilometers short of the Chicago lakefront. Pastor Blaine’s declaration was cut off in mid-sentence as the sky to the northeast suddenly turned as bright as high noon above a fast-expanding sphere of light as brilliant as the sun itself. Massing seventeen hundred tons and traveling at 11.6 kilometers per second, the Sagittaire’s stern half, with the reactor, plasma-drive unit, and shielding, carried a kinetic energy of nearly twenty-five kilotons, slightly more powerful than the warhead that destroyed Hiroshima.

The initial damage was caused by thermal radiation, a blaze of heat intense enough to set boats aflame, then by the shock wave racing across the water at nearly the speed of sound. There was radiation as well—though that would not become a serious problem for some hours yet. Sagittaire’s main drive consisted of layers of corrugated sheets of plutonium though which water was forced, creating a white-hot plasma of dissociated hydrogen and oxygen nuclei. The blast hurled enough plutonium into the atmosphere to cause considerable contamination downwind and to have deadly consequences within the lake itself…but the actual fallout, in a long, oval footprint that eventually would stretch from Chicago southeast to Gary, Michigan City, and South Bend, was still not as severe as the yield of most nuclear weapons.

Deadlier by far was the pulse of thermal radiation that set tankers, freighters, and pleasure craft ablaze as far away as Waukegan and Benton Harbor and flashed from the polished tops of skyscrapers along the lakefront like lightning. In Grant Park, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people stared directly into that sudden, intense fireball in the northeast and had their eyes melted from their sockets as every inch of exposed skin blistered, as their clothing melted, then burst into flame. Forty-seven seconds later, just long enough for the crowd to realize that, if this was a divine visitation, it was an uncommonly hostile one, the shock wave shrieked across the water, exploding across Lake Shore Drive, pushing ahead of it the fast-expanding surface of a bubble of superheated steam.

Liana hadn’t been able to see the fireball because of the people and the trees between her and the Grant Park waterfront, but she did see those trees burst into flame, saw screaming people, many with clothing or arms and air ablaze, running in a pain and terror-goaded madness away from the water. Pastor Blaine, high on his stage, still had his hand raised, finger extended to make a point, his entire body shriveling as it burned like a living torch. Cars, snatched up off Lake Shore Drive, sailed overhead.

Then the steam hit her. In a span of time too brief for her to feel or know just how badly she’d been burned, the shock wave itself thundered off the water, scattering burning trees like matchsticks, and scouring the surging, screaming crowd of the devout from the pavement in a searing instant of death and utter devastation.

The wave front shattered Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain in chips of concrete, steam, and spray, boomed out of the park and across Michigan Avenue, hitting the skyscrapers beyond with a shock wave far stronger than the blast of any mere hurricane.

More people were killed or injured by flying shards of glass exploding from the skyscrapers than by the hurtling wall of heat, tens of thousands of them. Several buildings toppled, spilling into streets crowded with traffic, an avalanche of glass and concrete and steel crashing down on people who’d survived the thermal flash, deep within the dark-shadowed canyon floors of the city. North of the Chicago River, the Hancock Building, well anchored and with a base broader than its top, remained standing, but the Sears Tower, still one of the ten tallest buildings in the world, was sheared through a quarter of the way up its 443-meter height. The wreckage tumbled across the South Branch of the Chicago River, Union Station, the Post Office, and parts of the Eisenhower Expressway, that one collapse alone killing thousands. The historic Wrigley Building, the Marina City Towers, and the nearby Twenty-first Century Sun Tower, all badly damaged the year before by a UN cruise missile attack, vanished within the fiery maelstrom, as did other lakefront landmarks, like Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, exposed and isolated at the tip of its causeway. The Field Museum, massively constructed of marble and granite, remained standing, though every window was blown out, every person above the basement level was killed, and the northern and eastern sides were scorched jet-black; a few blocks to the south, the brand-new Institute for Exoarcheologcal Studies, on Waldron and Lake Shore Drives just south of Soldier Field, dissolved into flying splinters of glass, aluminum, and steel.

The city itself, like a wall, dissipated much of the heat and blast, though buildings were badly damaged as far away as Downers Grove, twenty-three miles to the west. Above Lake Michigan, steam boiled skyward in a vast and roiling pillar, spreading out at eight thousand meters in the characteristic cap of a mushroom cloud, and the city was blanketed in a pall of smoke and falling ash. Most horrifying of all, some hours after the blast, the first burning white flakes began sifting from the sky like an unseasonable snowfall—tiny flecks of plutonium from Sagittaire’s disintegrating drive module.

And in the shadow of the cloud, the city of Chicago, for the second time in 171 years, was burning….

US Marines Space Combat
Training Center
Quantico, Virginia
2025 hours EDT

The twelve-and thirteen-hour days were beginning to wear on Jack as badly as the eighteen-hour days in boot camp. The physical stress wasn’t the same, though he still had morning PT and long runs along the trails that wove through the woods along the banks of the Patuxent River. In boot camp, the nonphysical part of his training had been lumped together under the general heading of knowledge, as his DIs had barrage-fed him isolated facts and figures on everything from the range and power output of a UN H&K Laserkarabiner LK-36 to the exact chain of command up the ladder from a recruit to President Markham. Jack still had all-too-vivid memories of Gunny Knox’s scowling face as he bellowed, “All right, recruits! Time for knowledge! What is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps?”

And the answer—in this case, a chorused “Sir! The birthday of the United States Marine Corps is 10 November 1775, sir!”

At Quantico, knowledge was presented in a far more organized and school-like fashion. In fact, most of every afternoon was spent in classrooms, learning a bewildering array of technicalities, an almost encyclopedic mass of data on the myriad aspects of science, engineering, and medicine necessary for a man to live and function in space. Mornings and evenings, after chow, were reserved for hands-on training and simulator sessions, times when Jack actually got to work with the equipment that would help him survive in space.

Most important, at least in terms of emphasis, was the USMC Hughes/McDonnell Douglas EVA Combat Armor, Class-One. For the past week or so, Jack felt like he’d spent more time in the suit than out of it.

Space suits had come a long way indeed since the days of the first primitive shuttle orbiters. The gloves were thin enough they no longer needed thick rubber fingertip pads, or an additional aluminum fingernail attached to the left thumb in order to pick up small objects. Still, the suits were unpleasantly clumsy, especially under a full Earth gravity. They consisted of an inner cooling garment of tiny plastic tubes, covered by a two-piece insulation layer, and the outer hard-shell sections of reactive camouflage Kevplas and molded-ceramic composites, which snapped and sealed over most of his body like the pieces of a suit of medieval armor. The helmet, with its built-in computer, comm system, and internal HUD, and the backpack Personal Life Support System and power plant completed the basic suit.

The current space-training class was a special one, consisting of just five Marines, two women and three men. Training had been intensive for the first two weeks, and two other men who’d begun the class on 1 September had already dropped out, unable to keep up with the barrage of facts, figures, and engineering esoterica they were expected to learn. There were more instructors for Class 42-C than students, though Staff Sergeant Ellen Caswell, another veteran of the MMEF and Garroway’s March, was their primary instructor. This evening, after chow, they were gathered in Squad Bay 2, suited up, as usual, as Caswell put them through their paces, drilling them at disassembling their M-29 ATARs and putting them back together again, while wearing heavily insulated overgloves.

During a pause in the drill, he raised a clumsily gloved hand.

Caswell was also suited up. “Yes, Private Ramsey?” she said over the squad comm channel. At least no one here had started using his embarrassing Flash moniker.

“I was just wondering, Staff Sergeant, when we were going to get to go into the zero-G hangar?”

He’d heard about the hangar from some research into Corps space training that he’d done back home, before he’d joined up. The trainee was fully suited up in Class-One armor, complete with fifty-kilo backpack and power unit. A special harness was attached to the suit, which in turn was attached to a complicated-looking tangle of gimbals, pivots, and suspensor rigging dangling from the overhead, a carefully stressed and balanced arrangement that simulated the effects of zero G.

Traditionally, a student’s first exposure to the rig came when he was hoisted into the air and given an empty M-29 ATAR and a loaded magazine. Other personnel cleared the hangar, and the student was ordered by radio to load his weapon, switch to full auto, and fire at a man-sized target at the other end of the hangar.

That amusing exercise was designed to demonstrate the need to brace a projectile weapon precisely at the suit’s center of gravity, a point marked by a hollow cup positioned at about navel height that exactly fit the rounded butt end of an M-29 modified for zero-G combat. The idea was to keep the weapon centered and aim by controlling the pitch and yaw of the suit itself, aiming with the targeting cursor projected on the helmet’s HUD. Most students ended up in a wild, uncontrollable, and embarrassing spin in the dangling support apparatus. Jack, however, knew about action-reaction and was pretty sure he would be able to impress his instructors by firing on-target, without throwing himself into a spin.

“Not this go-round, Ramsey,” Caswell told him. “Next week we’ll pop you into the hangar rig to give you a feeling of moving in one-sixth G, but we’re cutting zero-G work from the curriculum for you five. Maybe you can pick it up later, after your mission.”

Jack was disappointed, though he tried not to show it. They’d told him at the start that the program he’d be going through with the handful of other special selectees at Quantico was going to be abbreviated. They needed Marines with AI programming experience now, for a big, upcoming mission no one wanted to talk about, and so the space training course was being tailored just for them, cut down to include only what they needed to know to survive and fight on the surface of the moon, not in space.

Well, he was still going to the Moon, and that was quite as challenging an environment as Earth orbit or deep space. He looked down at his ATAR with its attached under-barrel M-440 grenade launcher. In another month, if he was able to tough out this course, he would be in space.

It didn’t seem possible.

Caswell appeared to be listening to something, her head cocked to one side behind the visor of her helmet. He felt a chill, a kind of premonition. There was a horror in the staff sergeant’s eyes that he’d seen before…in the trenches in the Russian Far East.

“Listen up, people,” she said, her voice hard. “I’ve just had a report come down from Battalion. Approximately one hour ago, a fragment of that asteroid diverted by the UN entered Earth’s atmosphere and struck the southern tip of Lake Michigan with an impact equivalent to the explosive force of a small nuclear weapon. Reports, reports are still kind of confused, but it sounds like the city of Chicago has been destroyed.”

There was a roaring sound in Jack’s ears, and he felt the hammering of his heart. He felt dizzy…short of breath, and he reached for his suit’s controls to up his O₂ feed a notch. Chicago…gone? He’d been there so many times, visiting Aunt Liana and Uncle Dave.

Hard on the heels of that thought came another. His aunt and uncle…if they were in the city, they must be dead…

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” another voice put in, and Marielle Polanski crossed herself, the gesture oddly cumbersome in Marine armor. Then he remembered that Marielle was from Chicago; she’d mentioned once that her folks lived there.

“Private Polanski?” Caswell said. “Are you all right?”

“Y-yes, Staff Sergeant…”

Suddenly, Marielle began fumbling with the latch for her helmet, clawing at her armor, trying to get out. Jack could hear her retching over the open circuit. Caswell was in front of her in an instant, hitting the emergency release and pulling the bulky helmet off her shoulders. Then Marielle was running from the bay, her boots clacking on the concrete floor as she made for the head.

“That’s all for this evening, Marines,” Caswell said, pulling her own helmet off. “I’ve called Sergeant Honeycutt to come down and check in your gear and weapons. Secure your gear, and you’re dismissed for the day.” She walked away quickly, following after Marielle.

Chicago…destroyed. The thought went around and around in his mind, inescapable, incomprehensible. The news hit him on several different levels. On the one hand, it meant that the UN had just drastically escalated the war, that they were no longer trying for some mere political victory, but to destroy the United States itself, or at least to cause such terror and devastation that Washington would be forced to surrender.

That was bad enough, though the information had the cold and remote feel of a class text download in civics or history. On a far more very personal, more direct level was the shock of personal loss. He’d never cared much for Liana Alexander, but he knew his mother loved her, knew that Liana’s death was going to hurt his mother a lot. And even the death of a relative you didn’t like carried with it a shock and a cold ache in the heart that wasn’t going to go away soon.

And as for David…

Hell, David Alexander had been more like a father than an uncle for a good many years. So much of Jack’s own life—his fascination with ETs and the discoveries on Mars, his joining the Corps, his love of space—all had been the direct result of his uncle’s stories. David Alexander had shaped one hell of a lot of Jack’s life, and his dying meant that a part of Jack had died as well.

Jack couldn’t look at the possibility of David’s death with anything like rationality. There was a chance, maybe even a good chance, that his uncle was still alive. Joliet was a good sixty miles from downtown Chicago, and the last Jack had heard, his uncle had been in the federal prison there.

He’d heard a story, once, about the sole survivor of a devastating volcanic eruption on the island of Martinique back in 1902. He’d been a prisoner in the deepest-buried cell in the city’s jail.

At the same time Jack felt that stirring of hope, he shoved it back, told himself that David had to be dead as well. He couldn’t bear the thought of being hit by this icy shock twice, to allow himself to hope that his uncle was alive, then to find out that whatever had hit Chicago had been big enough to take out Joliet as well.

Someone had once pointed out that ignorance is bliss, knowledge is power…and uncertainty is sheer hell.

He knew the truth behind those words now, in a way he’d never before imagined.