Luna Marine(110)
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…”