“All attempts at trying to re-establish contact have so far failed, sir.” said the mission supervisor as he spoke through the real-time live feed from Mission Control.
Raymar sighed. Everything looked like it was going great, that is until the crew entered the strange object on the grey planet.
“Any ideas what might be causing the disruptions?” he enquired.
“Frankly sir, “ the supervisor said, looking quite nervous, “ we’ve tried everything so far, but it doesn’t look like there’s something that’s causing any disruption. Everything points to the crew and automated equipment not communicating back. I don’t want to speculate much, but it looks like something bad has happened, something really bad.”
Raymar paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He then leaned back on his leathered chair, sitting comfortably but feeling too anxious and tense while pondering the events that were unfolding. Not now! He thought. Not like this!
His company, which he had build from the ground up until he went public, had invested a lot during the last decade to make space travel feasible for the private sector, creating excellent new technologies which put it in the front seat on conquering the dark unknown, ahead of even the best countries on the world. When they found the strange alien-looking artifact on the neighbouring barren grey planet, it felt like they had won the lottery.
Well, not anymore. The crew that was sent there wasn’t communicating back. They lost contact with the ground team that was instructed to investigate it a few hours back, and shortly after, the orbiting spaceship went dark too. Years of preparation, hard work, state of the art inventions and six months of travel until the expedition arrived were quickly going down the drain. And on top of that, Raymar’s company and himself are responsible for the lives of the six crewmembers too.
“Is there anything we can do?” he asked the supervisor.
“We have a whole group of dozens of scientists and engineers working on it sir, but it will take some-” the supervisor suddenly stopped as somebody was yelling from the control room towards him. He turned back and listened, nodding, but the voice was too low for Raymar to hear from the live-feed.
“What is it?” he asked.
The supervisor turned around. “Seems like we’ve just lost one of our communications satellites sir.”
Raymar frowned. “One of ours? We only have one.”
“I’m sorry sir.” he said, waving his hand. “I meant one of our general satellites, one of our countries’.”
“What?” Raymar was now confused. “What the hell is happening?”
“I don’t know sir.” the supervisor seemed very worried now, looking at the different monitors that sprawled in front of him. “Reports are just coming in of an explosion. It seems like-”
And the feed ended in that moment, displaying only static. Raymar jumped out of his seat, holding his hands in a questioning way, angered by the abrupt failure of the live feed. He wasn’t used to the secure link breaking like this, it never did. He immediately ran towards his desk, opening a line on his com line with her assistant.
“Donna, my feed just went out. Send someone up to fix this, fast!”
“Yes sir.” she replied straight away. There’s nobody Raymar trusted more to handle things than Donna.
Raymar closed the com line, sighing again. He stood there for a moment, hands resting on his office desk. An explosion, he thought. I can count the number of countries that can bring down a satellite in one hand! He stood up straight, holding a hand on his forehead and closed his eyes, trying to calm his nerves. No way! It simply doesn’t make sense! No country would risk war, there isn’t much to be gained now. The world has advanced way past that point.
He opened his eyes and they focused on the wine-glass that stood on top of his desk. He took it and filled a random bottle of wine that he took from his collection. This day was quickly turning into a disaster, a disaster that he hadn’t anticipated at all.
He walked towards the windows, sipping from his glass of wine, and regarded the sight beyond towards uptown Main Island, glimmering slightly on the morning sun. He had an excellent vantage point from his office atop one of the tallest buildings in downtown, providing a magnificent 360 degree view of the richest and most important city in the world. Especially the island with its slightly more than two million daily inhabitants.
He tried to clear his head and make sense of this, to find a simpler explanation. But his thought train was interrupted abruptly by a bright blueish light suddenly shining from the sky. Raymar held a hand in front of his face, staring at the light through the cracks between his fingers like you would sometimes try to look at the sun.
“What the…” It lasted just a few seconds before it faded away. He moved his hand down immediately, but couldn’t make anything out anymore.
“What was that?” he said to himself. A few seconds after, he heard a booming sound that came like a very strong lightning strike thundering in the sky. He stood paralyzed for a few more moments before he finally felt safe enough to judge that it wasn’t some sort of explosion, at least not one that would be dangerous now.
He then immediately turned around and headed for his desk, holding his glass filled with wine, noticing that the display had gone completely dark instead of just showing static. He ignored it, he had more immediate concerns now. He tried to form a com line with Donna again, but the device wasn’t working anymore, it had completely shut down.
“God damn it!” he shouted “This can’t be happening!”
At that moment, he noticed something that calmed him. The small lights that lined up all around the office, usually serving as a way to manipulate the ambient light, had completely turned off, as did the two small lamps on his desk. He moved his head towards his private bookcase and the lights that usually shone behind them. They had turned off too.
Power outage. He thought. But the reserve generators should have gone online by now! Something’s wrong. He moved towards the windows again, analysing the city below. It was hard to see it in broad daylight, but he still noticed that all the usual lights on top of various towers that had antennas had gone dark too. City wide power outage. He acknowledged.
He picked up his phone from his pocket, wanting to test if he still had reception, but it was dead too, and it wouldn’t turn on. That disturbed him more than anything. Power outages were understandable, a battery-powered device suddenly being dead was not. Raymar tried to think about what could cause such a thing, but nothing came to mind, nothing except…
“No way.” realisation dawned on him. “No fucking way.” He raised his left arm and looked at his watch, a simple classic one. Its hands weren’t moving. “But it can’t be!” Raymar said as he moved his head towards where the blueish light came.
That had been an EMP burst, disabling every electronic device in the area. Raymar’s company had something like that in development for a long time now, but still hadn’t figured out how to generate a strong enough electro-magnetic pulse, let alone a working prototype. And he wasn’t aware of any other country that did.
Then the screeching sound came, blasting through the sky and hitting the main bridge that connected the island with the mainland, incinerating it into a huge ball of fire that completely destroyed it in a massive explosion, along with everybody who had the incredibly bad luck of traversing it at that moment.
Raymar put a hand on the window, trying to shake off the sensation of pure disbelief. He needed to remain calm, to witness the break out of what surely was another world war, he needed to remember everything he saw in vivid detail because he could potentially help his government fight whatever this is. He needed to ignore all the alarms on his head that screamed the fact that there should have been a sign, no matter how small, that would have foreshadowed this. How could he have missed it?
Seeing the brightly glowing aftermath of the wreckage, Raymar finally resigned himself to the fact that his city upon which he had build all his dreams was being attacked from a so far unknown enemy. Not long after, he noted a few more of the horrifying sounds that came from the sky, blasting any bridge or tunnel that led to the mainland to smithereens, completely trapping more than two million people on an island that in just a few moments was reduced from a beacon of the world into a deadly concrete jungle stripped of its basic needs for survival.
He took another sip of his wine while seeing it all from his office as if he was looking at a strategic map. But his mind, assisted by the experience of his military past, saw through it all. The thorough destruction of the infrastructure with surgical precision was simply a waste of time. Main Island was indeed the most important city in the world, but not for strategic reasons. There was nothing here of much military importance that needed to be captured from on an invasion, which he assumed it to be since they weren’t yet turned into dust by hydrogen bombs. But destroying all the bridges and exit points, thereby trapping so many people was simply a bad move in that scenario if you wanted to capture the city eventually.
And on top of that, even though he was seeing it with his own eyes, he simply couldn’t believe that any nation in the world would be capable of this and at the same time capable of hiding the needed technology. There was no way, not even every other nation combined. His mind raced through all possible scenarios, but not one of them made sense. None of them, except… the artifact.
Raymar’s eyes widened at the cold shiver that suddenly ran through his spine. An extraterrestrial attack? He started laughing madly at that outlandish thought, and raised his head immediately, looking at the pale blue sky as if he could simply look at the celestial neighbour and have his answer, but fate warranted that action by showing him the beam of light that suddenly shone from the sky, hitting the bay just outside of the island with a powerful force, causing feet-high waves to ripple relentlessly outward from the point of impact.
“What the heck!?” sad a suddenly shocked Raymar, he had never seen anything like it, nor could his mind make any sense of what purpose the beam of light served. But he wasn’t given any opportunity to think about it further as the beam suddenly increased in intensity by orders of magnitude, pulsing rapidly and bathing the area with an intense blinding glare that forced everyone including Raymar to protect his eyes immediately.
He ducked on the ground, still holding his precious glass of wine but suddenly fearing that the dreaded atomic explosion finally came, although on a quite strange manner. And it was almost confirmed by intense gusts of wind and the tower itself shaking quite violently too, but it all faded away in mere moments after, even the light.
Raymar opened his eyes and looked at the glass on his hand, filling him with disbelief that he was still alive, and immediately rose up to look at what had happened at the point where the beam of light had shone.
He had remained calm during the EMP blast, and maintained his composure even during the blasts that destroyed the bridges and tunnels. And he would have accepted a lot more than what had happened until now because he had trained himself to do so, which is why he was so successful. But nothing could have ever prepared for what he was seeing at that moment.
His shocked state finally let go of the glass of wine, letting it shatter on the floor while he was gaping at the sight of a naked female figure standing hundreds of feet high on the bay just outside the city.