The silence that follows is ominous and far more unnatural to my ears than what came before. I look up to the skies, dark gray and empty, and feel a slowly swelling dread seizing my heart. Then there’s a new sound, faint in the wind but undeniably present and growing with every second, a sharp slicing sound that’s just short of a whistle. Just like Lanky calls, I’ve heard this noise in the atmosphere before, and I know what it portends. I wasn’t afraid when the Lanky slammed me aside on his way past me, or when tens of thousands of them started their unearthly wailing, but I am afraid now, scared to death of what I know is coming down through the atmosphere. I don’t see the warheads, but I can feel their malevolent presence in the air and in my bones. The end of the world is coming, and there’s nothing that can stop it, no shelter deep enough to hide in, no creature tall and strong enough to survive what is about to come.
In the last few moments before the detonation, there’s a ripping sound in the air, small and dense objects displacing air as they streak toward the ground at hypersonic speed. Then the valley in front of me, all the Lankies and their elaborate latticework structures, disappears in a brilliantly, blindingly white flash, a new sun rising into existence right here in front of me on the surface of this planet. I feel the searing heat radiate out from the explosion instantly, and it’s like standing right in front of the thrust nozzles of a fusion rocket. I should be incinerated already, reduced to my component atoms in a nanosecond, but my body holds together as the flash and heat from the nuclear explosion wash over me. I stay in one piece long enough for the sound and the shock wave of the multi-megaton nuclear burst to reach me up here on the plateau. It’s impossibly loud, a world-ending crash, sound with so much physical force behind it that it might as well be a solid. But I can still hear and see, still feel the heart thundering in my chest, even as the shock wave lifts me off the ground, squeezes the air out of my lungs, and flings me into the air. I hit something solid with my head, and the sudden and unexpected sensation floods through me and yanks me out of the dream.
I wake up on the floor of the bedroom. The side of my head is throbbing with a dull ache. My heart is still hammering in my chest, and I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling for a minute or two until my heart rate has come down to a reasonable level. I’m wearing nothing but military-issue skivvies and an undershirt. The environmental controls in the building are turned off at night to save energy, and there’s a cool fall breeze coming in through the filter screens in front of the open windows, but I can feel sweat trickling down my back. I check the chrono projection on the ceiling: 0438.
I get up slowly and without much enthusiasm. In the bed next to me, Halley is asleep. She’s taking deep and regular breaths, so I know her dreams—if she has them—are a little less dramatic than mine. She has a med injector strapped to her arm that monitors her state and keeps her asleep with targeted injections. It’s been over a month since we returned from the Leonidas system, and the bruises on her face and side still haven’t fully faded.
The upstairs guest room at Chief Kopka’s place is tiny, maybe half the size of the already-cramped quarters we shared on Luna in the year before the Leonidas mission, but it’s down here on Earth in civilian country, not on a military installation. It’s also only a fifteen-minute maglev ride away from Homeworld Defense Air Station Burlington, which is where Halley is going to rehab therapy every other day. She survived the ejection from her disintegrating drop ship, but the titanium clamshell capsule of the pilot-ejection pod closed prematurely and wrecked the left side of Halley’s body pretty thoroughly. Her arm, leg, and hip were shattered, she suffered multiple internal injuries, and her skull now has titanium implanted in it. I know that she’s still in a fair bit of pain, but I also know that the injuries don’t hurt her half as much as having her flight status pulled. When it comes to shrugging off physical pain, my wife is the toughest person I know. I hate to see her hurt, but I’m more worried about what her idle status is doing to her head.
I walk over to the bathroom, close the door behind me, and turn on the water in the sink to splash my face. The water here in Vermont still tastes a little wrong to me. It’s as clean as it can be—there’s a pump in the basement of the property that pulls the drinking water right out of the water table in the ground below the town—but I’ve had reprocessed and filtered water all my life, first in the PRCs and then in the service, and my palate is still primed to it.
There’s a window next to the sink, and I open it to let in more of the cool fall air. The street outside is quiet. There are no pedestrians or hydrocars out and about at this hour, and the upper-middle-class ’burber town of Liberty Falls completely lacks the nighttime soundtrack of the PRCs. The first time I slept down here, the lack of constant low-level background noise was so disconcerting to me that it took me half the night to fall asleep because I jumped at every little sound.
When I get back to the bed, Halley is awake. She is blinking at me sleepily, her head surrounded by a self-adjusting inflatable pillow. There’s a big bruise running down the left side of her face from her hairline all the way to her jawline. It was black at first, then faded to blue green, and has now settled into an unhealthy-looking yellow and brown.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry if I woke you up.”
“’S okay,” Halley mumbles. She blinks up at the holographic time display on the ceiling. “Jeez. You going back to sleep?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Gonna go for a run.”
“At this hour?”
“It’s perfect. No civvies to avoid.”
“Okay,” Halley replies. “But you’re on your own on that one.”
The med injector on her arm lets out a soft beep. She reaches over with her right hand and pushes the override sensor that prevents the unit from putting her back to sleep with a dose of painkillers.
“Why are you up? Shit dreams?”
“Shit dreams,” I confirm.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’ll go run a bit and clear my head.”
“Okay.” Halley looks at me with concern. “Be back for breakfast, or I’ll call in the Rapid Reaction Force.”
“Affirmative, ma’am.”
The air outside is pleasantly cool and clean. It’s late fall, and the nighttime temperatures have been dipping below freezing for a week or two now, but I like running in the cold air. I run down Liberty Falls’ Main Street, past the shop fronts that are closed at this hour, exhaling little puffs of condensating breath with every step. I’m running in my camouflaged Combat Dress Uniform trousers and an undershirt, with a sidearm strapped to my belt and my personal data pad in the hip pocket. Technically, I’m supposed to carry my alert bag everywhere I go when I am not on duty, but it’s hard to run with twenty-odd pounds of lightweight armor and automatic personal defense weapon slung over my shoulder.