Luna Marine(111)

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.