The Armageddon Effect Read online

“No, Shifu. The missiles were away. All successfully launched,” Shao Xiao Chin said.

  “Assemble the men, retrieve all special equipment, then execute the extraction protocol,” Shang Xiao Li said. He frowned as he reflected on the issues with working in a hostile foreign nation.

  Great Falls was flat, visibility good, and satellites would easily spot the squad exiting the city unless something was forcing citizens to flee. Stepping over to his vehicle, Shang Xiao Li reached in and pulled out a small black box from the driver’s seat. He flipped the switch on the small box. A red diode lit up next to the switch.

  The ground and walls shook as seismic waves rolled past the warehouse. The clear night sky over Great Falls filled with smoke and debris from twenty simultaneous explosions around the city.

  Shang Xiao Li wrinkled his eyebrows and peered into the fire-lit night.

  “So much for satellite surveillance.” He got into his vehicle and followed the team out the large front doors.

  Thick smoke filled the air, and the acrid smell of burning oil seeped into the SUV. Towards downtown, flames licked low billows of smoky clouds. Chunks of solid debris rained from the sky.

  He chuckled to himself, remembering the careful placement of an explosives-laden truck in front of Frontier Jack’s Casino. With any luck, the owners of the Chinese diner would be dead as well. If not, the Wraith agents would tie up that loose end amid the confusion.

  NUKED

  Malmstrom AFB

  Brigadier General Raines clenched his left hand. The other hand scanned real time video. Fire trails lit the video. The sleek missiles sped through scattered clouds as their silhouettes grew dim in the black night.

  “Jim, we have fifteen minutes for U.S. cities close by. Can the new Patriots knock them down?” the general said.

  “Doubtful. They will be traveling two hundred and fifty miles per hour on the descent vector,” Colonel Rawlins replied, grim-faced.

  “The targeted cities have been notified?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Something is happening to the missiles,” a captain yelled above the chaos in trajectory analysis. “They are exploding!”

  Flashes at suborbital altitude appeared on monitors around the room, first one then clusters. Faraway flashes of light blossomed in the night sky, high over the horizon like a string of firecrackers.

  “They’re gone. They’re all gone except one!” The captain danced at his station.

  Next to him, a flushed lieutenant couldn’t stop saying, “My God, my God, my God.”

  “Only one left, General. The target is Colorado Springs,” Colonel Rawlins said.

  “We have electromagnetic pulses. Satellites in range are down. HEMP ground effect reports are coming in from Colorado and Wyoming, but so far, most detonations are near apogee.”

  “Notify Homeland, Jim. Also notify the FAA of the detonation altitudes and notify emergency responders. Anything new on the Colorado Springs bird?”

  “Negative, General. We’ve notified Homeland and the FAA of HEMP effects. So far, the power grid shows minimal disruption. The first explosions are masking the rest, just as the eggheads predicted.”

  # # #

  Lane

  A hammer slugged nails through my brain stem.

  “Steady, Lane,” a disembodied voice said nearby. Arms floated in and out of my vision. A blurry figure lifted me from the sleeper tank. A loud siren blasted a relentless scream. Stabbing pains in my cortex caused white hot stars behind my eyes with each rising note of the siren. The room smelled acrid like ash.

  “Was there a fire?” I said.

  Leaning on the sleeper tank, I tried to orient myself, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. Distant clicking sounds rattled off the walls. It sounded like someone banged on a tin sheet in staccato. It took a moment for the gunfire to register.

  “Who is shooting?” I wobbled to my feet.

  Doc injected something into my deltoid muscle and rushed over to another tank. Vision returned as Doc and TJ pulled Kane and Sam from the tanks. Neither showed signs of life. Sam’s eyes were staring, pupils dilated as drool rolled from her slack lips and jaw. As I gazed at her in horror, the room shook, explosions reverberating through the mountain complex. I could hear small rocks bouncing off the exterior metal sheeting along the roof of the Octagon. The smell of wet dust mingled with gunpowder.

  Doc came over. “Lane, please follow me. We need you to lie down on the conference table while we transfuse your blood into Sam and Kane. Otherwise, we will lose them.”

  I stumbled after Doc, and we passed by the large round door to the hoist room and the access shaft. Lieutenant Sanders, Sergeant Ragnas, and Corporal Fletchin were firing their carbines straight down the shaft. Corporal Dawkins reloaded behind them while glancing overhead. Spent cartridges spun around the floor as the tinny burp and whine of carbine rounds ricocheted off the shaft walls below. In the brief moment we rushed by, I noticed something else. The hoist cable. It was gone, and a faint golden glow surrounded the chamber. The glow came from four brick-sized golden bars embedded in the floor.

  “What the hell are those bricks?” I coughed as smoke filled my lungs. No one paid any attention to me.

  As soon as I was down on the conference table, Doc plunged a transfusion needle into my arm. I knew the medical exams had established the team had the same blood type, O-negative. TJ rolled a COW, or computer-on-wheels, into the room for monitoring while the transfusions were taking place. Sam was first on the table next to me. She hadn’t improved. Her eyes were vacant, and her lips slack.

  Sam. Dammit. Sam. I’m so sorry.

  My heart felt like it would burst from my chest in agony. I’d done this.

  Clacking, sporadic carbine fire continued to reverberate off the walls.

  “Doc, are we under attack?” I croaked. They had Sam plugged in. I watched her face as my alien bot-enriched blood flooded her system.

  “I’m not sure what’s happening, Lane. Several people tried to breach the Octagon, and the air erupted in blue-gold flame and lightning. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Then the cage cable snapped. It sent a cage full of terrorists to the bottom. I heard Lieutenant Sanders say the terrorists in the CMC facility below are now trying to climb the hoist shaft walls. I don’t know how they got into Cheyenne Mountain.”

  Sam soon filled with a unit of my blood and was gently lifted off the table to a mat nearby. Doc stretched Kane out next. He breathed regularly, and color returned to his face after a few minutes of the blood transfer.

  He woke up about halfway through the transfusion.

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” Kane spit blood and tried to sit up.

  “Son. Stop. You have to lay down. I have a transfusion needle in you,” Doc said.

  “No time. Someone’s playing my song.” Kane swung his legs off the gurney and extended his arm. “Now, Doc.”

  Doc cursed and pulled the long needle from his arm. Kane rolled off the table and stumbled through the door.

  Jeff came running in, breathless, as I sat up.

  “Daedalus is under cyber-attack. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not Denial-of-Service. Bizarre bit patterns pound every port. Thermals are spiking, and electromagnetic signals appear out of thin air and hammer the qubit memory infrastructure. It’s crazy, Doc.” Then he rushed back out.

  Daedalus?

  Doc and TJ hurried from the room, following Jeff back to the sleep chamber. Another tech monitored the COW hooked up to Sam. I wobbled after the scientists. As I passed the Octagon door, a pale humanoid shape dropped from above and landed on the edge of the shaft. It burst into blue flames with a screech, clawing at thin air. Kane fired his M4A1. The bullets left little puckered gray holes in the humanoid’s naked chest. The shape lurched forward, long pale arms ablaze as the rest of the squad pumped bullets into it. Burning red eyes fixed on mine and pain grew in the back of my skull. Clawed fingers reached for me. The barrage forced it back. It tumbled into the shaft as Kane and the squad ben
t over the shaft’s edge, firing into it.

  “What the fuck was that?” someone said.

  The smell of ozone calmed my shaken nerves when I entered the sleep chamber. Jeff pulled and wrapped wires at the super-cooling unit.

  “Fixed the short,” he yelled.

  Doc twisted some knobs on a large gas cylinder, while TJ watched a monitor. The dilution refrigerator sputtered with a vacuum-sucking sound and threatened to stop any second.

  “A-Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

  “If the temperature rises, the quantum chip gets too hot and will fail,” Doc said over his shoulder.

  “We’re good, Lane. Close the partition on your way out,” Jeff said.

  The quantum computer enclosure looked like a large front-opening, commercial meat freezer. Oddly shaped cylinders and rods hung from the ceiling, encased in twisted wires, blinking lights, and solid metal components. Clouds of white gas fell in torrents from the roof. The large cylinders reminded me of submarine periscopes.

  So this is Daedalus.

  Doc and TJ moved to the security monitor scanning the server and adjoining network devices. I watched as they adjusted the computer’s defense perimeter in response to breaches.

  Sparks flew from an overloaded bus panel on the wall nearby, and smoke poured from the fuse circuit. A lady tech rushed over to it. Homely-pigtails-in-coveralls, a fashion mag might have called her. I liked her look. She opened the panel, replaced fuses from a pack at her belt, and powered it back on in less than thirty seconds. Impressive. There were several techs, and to my shame, I hadn’t paid much attention to them.

  “Anything I can do?” I asked.

  She pushed me back. “Stay out of the way,” she said.

  I stepped into the hallway and was headed to the hoist chamber when the ground rolled. I glanced up at the ceiling. The hairs on my arms stood up. My scalp itched and tingled.

  Suddenly, the floor jumped a foot in the air, throwing me over a chair loose in the hallway. I came down hard on my hands and hip. The wind was knocked from me.

  The lady-tech flew from the open door behind me and smashed her head into the wall with a loud crack. She crumpled.

  As I was getting to my feet, the ground lurched sideways, throwing me down on my elbow. Blood seeped from open cuts on my arms and face where my nose smashed into the stone.

  I heard the metallic squeal of cabinets straining against their supports; chairs skittered and fell over, while loose keyboards clattered off desks. Ominous cracks appeared in the walls, followed by a muffled boom that sounded like hundreds of deep-throated howitzers firing at once. People rolled around the floor like struck bowling pins. The distant thundering roar continued for several seconds.

  Even muffled by the solid granite around us, I could hear the ominous reverberating crackle of superheated air over the mountain. Though the Octagon had the same spring-mounting supports as the CMC below, the power of the ground shear rocked the facility. Hot smoke filled the hallway. The squad rushed into the Octagon. Flames licked the walls as the blast door shut. The roar of fire echoed through the steel door.

  Secondary rumbles and explosions reverberated around us. It sounded as if the honeycombed mountain crushed inward. Moments later, two more violent ground jerks and shifts rocked the mountain, each massive seismic jolt tossing me into the air and shoving me sideways as I tried to hug the Octagon floor. Seconds after the ground roll, the dull thunder of the explosions followed.

  Compression and shear waves, a distant voice echoed above the din of screams, curses, and rumbles.

  The thuds of falling rock continued for over a minute. Giants fractures widened along the walls.

  # # #

  The power stayed on. Bruised and bloodied, we seemed safe for now. The Octagon looked trashed. Debris and equipment littered the floor. I dusted myself off and helped the bruised lady-tech to a chair in the sleep chamber.

  The haunted expression in her wide brown eyes made me want to comfort her.

  “We’ll be okay.” I gently squeezed her shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Max Strenna, the Octagon’s maintenance chief, staggered into the room. Dark creases in his forehead combined with sparse white hairs that struggled to cover a receding hairline.

  “Equipment’s fine, Doc. Are you okay, Molly?” Max asked.

  Dust fell from her coveralls as she got up. She was a husky gal and looked attractive in a down-home country way.

  “Ja, I’m all right, Max,” she said.

  Sam?

  I hurried to the conference room. As I entered, a tech wiped dirt from Sam’s face.

  “She hasn’t changed,” the tech said. I leaned over and pushed a strand of hair from her pale brow. Her skin was cold.

  “Thanks for taking care of her,” I said and went back to the sleep chamber.

  TJ and Jeff stumbled out of Daedalus’s room.

  “Daedalus survived,” Jeff said, as he helped TJ over a fallen beam.

  “D-Dear God. Those were nuclear explosions,” Doc said, his eyes wide.

  The room grew quiet.

  “Colorado Springs’ population has over one million men, women, and children,” TJ murmured. She held her hand over her mouth, and her eyes teared.

  Max wrung his hands. “Maybe the landlines still work. I need to call home.” He rushed from the room.

  “How much damage do you think the bombs did, Doc?” I coughed up some dust.

  “We got a twenty-minute warning of a Minuteman launch,” Doc said.

  Wet dirt glistened on his cheek.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “It’s roughly eighty times larger than Hiroshima, eighty times, Lane.” Doc’s voice shook.

  “So, the whole city is gone?”

  “No. Modern steel and cement structures are tight. The blasts will only melt buildings close to the detonation point.” Doc looked down.

  I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the destruction.

  “So you’re saying there may be people still alive out there in that holocaust?” I asked.

  “Yes. Most people think everyone’s vaporized in a nuclear strike, but that’s only true for half-a-mile around the core fireball.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  Everyone gathered around as Doc laid it out for us.

  Record audio. May as well keep a record of this.