BlackWatch

Another few minutes to load and they'd be able to get The Fuck Out of Dodge. Men were climbing the webbing to get aboard, and it was slow going.

A sonic boom, then another and another. Heavy transport shuttles re-entering atmosphere over the city; reinforcements arriving from another city-state. He reached for the intercom:

"Hurry it up back there! At least three shuttles inbound!"

Stormgren looked out his window; only a couple of men remained, one talking on a radio handset, pointing at the angry looking shuttles overhead, arcing down toward the airport like predators. Stormgren looked up at the shuttles; he'd never seen anything like them before. And they weren't lining up to land on the runway! They were coming straight down, like helicopters, aiming right for the runway.

"Start one!" he yelled at the co-pilot. "Dad? You see those?"

"I'm on 'em," he heard his father say, but his F35 had gone to 'invisible mode' once again.

"But..." he heard his co-pilot object...

"Goddamnit, start one! Inbound fighters..." he said as the first laser guided bomb slammed into the runway.

"Starting one!" and Stormgren heard the turbine spooling up seconds later. The remaining men on the ground turned and looked up at the cockpit; one was still talking on the radio, Austin pushing him to the boarding web.

A commando burst into the cockpit. "All aboard!"

Jamie didn't bother looking aft as he put his hands on the throttle: "Let's go!" he shouted. "Now!"

The co-pilot nodded, looked at the engine temps and pressures as both engines spooled up.

"Confirm take-off flaps," he said as the aircraft gathered speed.

"Set and confirmed."

He looked back at the the runway, then ahead -- and something caught his eye. The first troop transport was flaring to land far down the runway -- and they were heading right for the old Boeing.

He pushed the throttles to the stops and pedaled the rudders to full command authority, all thought of his father up above fading as this new reality settled-in just ahead: he might not be able to clear the shuttle and it's heavy, down-firing landing thrusters. The 737 gathered speed, the old concrete runway rumbled away underneath as it passed through one hundred knots, and Stormgren looked down the runway at the approaching shuttle.

"V-one!" the co-pilot called-out.

"Fuck!" Stormgren yelled. Another shuttle was now landing behind the first, and the shadow of a third shuttle appeared on the runway ahead, blotting-out the sun as it turned to land.

"V-two, rotate!" the co-pilot called out.

Stormgren pulled back on the yoke as explosions rippled through the air ahead. The first shuttle disappeared in a roiling fireball, then the third shuttle, the one still airborne, tumbled from the sky and fell into the old terminal.

As the air around the airport exploded, and Stormgren wrestled the old jet into a steep left turn; with throttles still set at take-off power he headed straight for the Santa Monica Mountains just north of the airport. Warning lights and threat receivers on the panel howled, yet he concentrated on keeping the aircraft as low as possible. A surface-to-air missile roared by a few hundred feet overhead; the threat receiver remained full red, continued howling as the missile disappeared into the deep haze over the city. He pushed the stick down a bit more; at fifty feet over the ground and three hundred knots indicated the landscape rippled by in a blur. He pulled up sharply to clear the ruins of a fallen skyscraper and the threat receiver howled again. He jinked hard high and right, then slammed the nose over and to the left as a second surface-to-air missile roared past and slammed into the hillside a half mile ahead. He leveled the wings as they topped the rubble and he pushed the stick down and eased off the throttle. They crossed the mountains, then flew over the ruins of the San Fernando Valley while Stormgren scanned the panel for the first time since take-off.

"Hull integrity, pressurization, secondary hydraulic reservoir are gone," the co-pilot said. "And my fucking nerves are shot, too!"

"Roger that!" he sighed. "What do you make our fuel?"

"About two hours forty, a lot less if we stay down here in the weeds."

"Okay."

The cockpit door opened and Stormgren turned, saw Thor Bergtor-son -- who until a few minutes ago had been Tribonian to the Senatus -- standing in the doorway. The old man's arms were stained with blood, his shirt ripped in several places.

"You guys alright back there?" Stormgren asked, his eyes wide, full of concern.

"It's pretty breezy, but yes!"

"Breezy? What? Why?"

"Maybe you better come take a look!"

"Can't right now..."

"Right. Well, the entire right side looks like Swiss cheese..."

"What about the wing?"

"Brown fluid coming out of the engine pylon, a big hole just shy of the wingtip."

"How big?"

"'Bout a foot 'round."

"Jenn, can you see it?" Stormgren said to his co-pilot.

"Leading edge looks okay -- can't see much else."

A small mountain range loomed ahead and Stormgren increased power, settled on a four degree climb at seventy eight percent EGT -- low and slow.

"Where are we headed," Bergtor-son asked. "Edwards?"

"Nope. Hole in the Wall."

"No kidding? Never been there."

"What's the Hole in the Wall?" Jennie asked, and Stormgren looked at her, smiled.

"Once upon a time it was called Area 51."

He saw her mouth drop, her eyes flickering with disbelief, then he flashed his best ever 'shit-eatin' grin: "Wanna go see a Starship?"

+++++

The 737 taxied to a rough stop by an ancient tan hanger, while two very well preserved F-22 Raptors circled overhead. Stormgren chopped power, set the brakes, began shutting down systems one by one, and the cockpit suddenly grew warm, then hot.

"Well, that was fun!" his co-pilot said.

"Nothin' to it," Stormgren said, but his shirt was soaked through with sweat, his hands were still shaking. And the sun was now high in the sky, the air conditioning shut down when the engines idled down. The APU was fried so there was no power now.

The cockpit door opened, letting in more hot air, and he saw a stairway had rolled up to the fuselage and cadets and bureaucrat-cum-spies were filing out on the tarmac and jogging for the closest shade they could see -- which was inside the open hanger door. Bergtor-son stepped back into the cockpit, fresh bandages on his arms and neck.

"A hundred fifty four out there," he said, stating the obvious. Blistering hot air filled the cockpit now and it was beyond stifling. "We'd better get inside."

When he was down on the concrete he heard the F35 on final, but still -- he just couldn't see the thing. He heard the tires hit the runway, saw puffs of smoke as the tires hit, then he saw the shimmering air. Oblivious to the heat now, he watched his father turned the jet and make for the hanger, then he felt Jenn by his side, looking up into his eyes. She tiptoed up and kissed him, then took his hand and pulled him to the hanger.

'Goddamn! Why haven't I noticed her before?' he said to himself as he watched her. 'That's something that's about to change,' he sighed, looking at her red hair flying in the desert wind.

+++++

The hanger, like all the other buildings at the old base, was an empty shell; all it provided was access to a major R&D facility located deep underground.

James Stormgren sat in a small auditorium with the commandos who'd been on the flight; there were about forty men in the room and a handful of women, including his co-pilot Jennie.

His father walked in a few minutes later, and he stood before the assembled commandos, his eyes tense, full of concern.

"Social-Continental forces have breeched the Mag-Lev platform," Bergtor-son began. "In about twenty minutes we're going to detonate a large device east of the city. That'll be the end of our access to the west coast, for good, I'm afraid."

He looked around the room. "We're not sure how Social-Continental party will react, but we've just learned of a startling new development..."

Bergtor-son burst into the room, swearing under his breath. "We have eight hours until they detonate the device," he said to Thomas. "The BlackWatch have just confirmed this. We must launch now, or as soon as we can."

Stormgren nodded.

"I guess that's it, then. Is everyone ready for this?"

He turned to his old friend then, asked the one question he had been dreading for some time. "Will you come, or are you going to stay and watch?"

"Oh, Thomas, I wouldn't miss this for the world. We'd better get moving."

+++++

Something was pinching her earlobe, the what? The right one.

She opened her eyes, saw an impossibly black face hovering over hers, shining a bright light into her eyes.

She tried to speak -- but couldn't -- and an impossible terror welled up inside, seeking release.

"I'm Doctor Uhuru, Justinian," the woman said. "You are in the recovery room. You were injured, very badly I'm afraid, and have been in surgery to repair your leg, and to remove shrapnel from your neck and chest. As soon as you can breathe on your own we will take you to the ICU, but first I'm going to have to take the tube from your throat. This will feel strange..."

When the physician was finished Sinn tried to sit up and cough but she felt to weak; still, she drew-in deep gulps of air through her nose and mouth while the woman looked at her vital signs on a bank of instruments -- then she saw a gauze pad floating in the air over her bed...

"Where am I!?" Sinn August-dottir cried.

"I told you, in the recovery room," but the doctor's eyes followed Sinn's and she plucked the paper from the air, wadded it up inside her coat pocket. "Much has happened in the past few hours, much you may not be ready to hear, and your body is weak. There are people waiting for you, when you get to the ICU, and they will explain things."

"You can't tell me where I am?"

But the physician walked from the room, leaving her bereft and alone, so alone. She'd never felt so isolated, abandoned in her life...

Yet the woman had said people were waiting for her.

The commandant! It had to be! She was in the hospital under the mountain -- it could be nothing else...then she felt that warmth again, and she was floating...

Her eyes opened, but she was in a different room now.

Yes, but everything felt different here. Now, aside from the noisome glow of all this strange machinery, she felt a strangeness, a foreignness about everything she saw, and even the air she breathed tasted strange, almost manufactured. And she still felt alone, a profound loneliness enveloped her being inside this strange, glowing darkness -- so what was this place? And -- could she feel the room spinning, or was there some sort of medication affecting her senses? But, over there! Someone was sitting in a chair by her bed. It was a man. Was he a nurse? Where was that doctor?

"Could I have some water?" she croaked. The man in the darkness moved uneasily, reached for a cup and stood. He came to her, holding an odd looking cup and spoon in one hand while he held on to the bed frame with the other, and after he secured himself to the floor he fed her bits of crushed ice.

"Ice! Real ice! Oh, God, I feel so stiff. Where am I?"

"Well, I'm sure not God," the man said, "but we did pull off a few miracles."

"Aurie -- Aurelius?" She could feel his voice in the core of her being.

"Try Austin."

"Oh, right. Stormgren. I remember now."

"More ice?"

"God, yes please!"

She took more from his spoon, chewed it slowly. The entire sensation was so foreign: "Ice...it's been so long since I had ice."

"Good stuff, frozen water," Austin said. "Nothing like it."

"Could you turn on a light?"

"You sure?"

"Yeah? Why wouldn't I be?"

He ignored the question, the authoritarian tone of her voice, flipped a switch by her side and the room lit gradually, as if he had made arrangements for her own personal sunrise. Blue light, deep and radiant, glowed from the ceiling; in a moment streaks of gold and orange appeared in this "sky". She looked around as the room grew lighter, but everything was all wrong! The room was too narrow, the ceiling too low, and everything was rounded -- there wasn't a sharp angle or corner anywhere -- and one wall was all wrong... like she was inside a dome.

A dome! Of course! His people must have been building domes for as long as we had been building caves, maybe longer!

Yet the closest wall was sloped, curved! As the wall fell away from the ceiling she could tell that it too was curved, part of the dome; even the window inside this wall was curved! And the window? The glass was black, the corners of the window radiused, and the glass itself was -- what? Too thick?

He watched her face, watched for signs of panic, even fear. As the light grew stronger it also became less radiant, somehow white and diffuse at the same time...like a cloudy day, perhaps. Her face was as soft now, but still radiant, and he hated what the next few minutes would bring to her life.

It was then she saw his face. He seemed older, or was it just a newfound maturity she saw in his eyes?

"Where are we? Is this a Dome? Am I a prisoner?"

"This -- place -- is called The Emissary, and no, you are not a prisoner."

"But, you didn't say -- where this place is..."

He nodded, looked down at her legs, willed her eyes to follow his own...

She saw a canopy over her right leg, and suddenly knew it was gone. A short stump was, she guessed, all that remained.

She felt her throat closing, a scream building and he reached out, brushed away hair that seemed to be floating in front of her eyes, just beyond her silently falling tears.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he said.

"Right, right, that's easy for you to say..." He wiped away more tears and only then did she notice her hands were secured to small railings on the bedside with thick padded straps. She pulled at the straps, then panic filled her eyes. "Oh, God no, I am a prisoner!"

Yet Aurie smiled -- again. "No, not quite, but you keep trying to pull out your IV, even in your sleep, so they tied them off a few hours ago." Then he was trying not to laugh, and she was suddenly filled with blind rage and furious hate.

"You fucking bastard! You think this is funny!"

"In a way, yes. Yes, I do, because it is."

"Get out of here, you arrogant fool! Go away and leave me be!"

"In a minute." He grew stern, watched her now as a biologist might examine a specimen under a microscope. "We have a few things to discuss."

There WAS something different about him. She wasn't imagining it -- because she saw it in his eyes, in his hair, and she grew afraid -- quiet and very afraid.

"You're older," she said, her voice trembling.

"Yes."

"Have I been in a coma?"

"No."

"Aurie -- Austin, would you stop this! Why do you speak in riddles? Or is the truth so hard to speak?"

His movements were jerky, somehow forced, as he turned and stepped over to the window. "There's no easy way to tell you this, so just try to be look at what you see, and listen carefully to what I have to say." He reached out and turned a dial; the intensely polarized window began clearing, then a white metal shutter of some sort slid up into the ceiling and out of view.

The moon hung before her, seemingly just outside the window, but it was rotating -- like the room was fixed and the moon was orbiting a point outside the window. And the stars! Everywhere she looked -- vast fields of stars! The sight was too strange, too unreal for her mind to take in. She was looking at a the moon, and behind, she saw two stars -- one fierce and blinding white, the other a malevolent red eye.

"What is this? A hologram?"

"No." He looked at her as he moved back to the bed, but he smiled even as her eyes grew wide, as her lips began to tremble. She tried to speak but only fractured bits of parched words crawled from her sundered mind.

"But, what is this? Two stars?"

"The white one is our sun, the red one is earth."

"What?" she cried. "The earth?"

"The Senatus elected to send it's people deep underground, then detonated a weapon that fused nitrogen to all available hydrogen and oxygen. Unfortunately, their scientists assumed the reaction would stop with those elements in the atmosphere. It did not. The earth itself is fusing even now, and will within a few months reach critical mass. The earth will become a star at that point, and we must be far from this orbit when it happens, or we will meet their fate, on their terms."

"They destroyed the earth?"

"That about sums it up. After they moved the remaining population under their control to the caves, the broadcast a warning. They were purifying the earth, they said, to rid the planet God made of human imperfection, and only those chosen by God would remain to repopulate the surface."

"Oh my -- God."

"If you insist, but I wouldn't."

"What? What does that mean?"

"Well, the concept of God isn't real popular around here right now, if you know what I mean. Maybe that will change, but I'd keep that in mind when you talk to people around here, for the time being, anyway."

"You said you were older. And Austin, you DO look older. What happened?"

"We'd best talk about your leg, first. The docs harvested cells during surgery, and they're growing you a new one from your own DNA and stem cells. The docs will talk to you soon about what they plan to do, but the short version is you should have a new leg within a year or so. Still, the process won't be pretty."

She blinked, looked up at him. She understood his words, yet they made no sense to her world. Nothing made sense of this place, not without God.

"Second. In case you're having trouble with the idea, Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore."

"I got that. But are you saying that this is, well, Oz?"

"Not quite," he laughed, "at least not yet. The Emissary is, well, more like a shuttle." He watched her eyes; they were trying to follow his lips as he spoke, trying to wrap around the meaning behind his words. "We're heading to L1, to a so-called LaGrange Point, and when we approach there'll be a burn, a long burn. Like a rocket, except you won't hear anything. But the acceleration will be powerful, and to you I'd guess painful. You won't be able to fight the effects of the burn as your wounds move -- at all. I was hoping they'd let you sleep through this, so, well, that you'd wake up after. It will be very disconcerting, disorienting."

"And, I suppose...like this place isn't disconcerting?" She pointed at the moon rotating outside the window -- and at all that rotation implied.

"About two days ago, when we launched from Nevada, you were pretty much on your way to dead. You'd lost so much blood and expanders weren't working anymore and, well, anyway, they got you to surgery here, then stabilized you until the ship left orbit. Once the initial acceleration stopped the operated, and that was about ten hours after we left. But the thing is, my dad and I left on a ship. About a day and a half passed here, on The Emissary, but I was gone almost eight years -- completely the opposite of Einstein's prediction, too, or so we thought at first."

"You're losing me."

"Me too. The short version? We left in a ship, or I should say we disappeared in a vehicle of some sort and were gone a couple of days, then we reappeared, but for dad and myself eight years had passed."

"That's not possible."

"No, it isn't."

"Where'd you go?"

"Well, we don't know. The correct question is why were we taken where we were."

"Why? You mean someone...?"

"Uh-huh."

"The ship? Who built it?"

Austin shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. "Yo no se, darlin'. But the important thing here is understand that we're not alone. There're other civilizations out here, and that's going to be hard for you to grasp..."