Emily took the opportunity to take a long swig from her water bottle and pour some into a plastic bowl she had brought with her for Thor. “Just so long as there’s nothing nasty in the ocean either,” she said.
“Always the optimist, I see,” said MacAlister, giving her a sardonic raised-eyebrow smirk.
Emily smiled too. “Better a living, breathing pessimist than a dead optimist.”
“You do have a point. Ready?”
They followed the coastline south for a few more miles but as their hilltop reconnoiter had predicted, there were few signs of the jungle expanding any farther. By the time they reached the nub of land where it met the ocean, Emily could feel the ache in her underused calves and she gave a silent cheer when MacAlister cut back inland and began the trek back to the camp. By the time the group stepped through the security gate and into the compound, Emily’s feet and thighs had begun to complain too.
Commander Mulligan watched the world spin by beneath her. The ISS was over land now. South America, maybe Bolivia, she guessed. It was hard to be really certain anymore. In the week or so since the storm had ended, every mark of man on the planet had been overrun by the red vegetation as it rapidly spread out in thick clumps from all of the major population areas, much as the storms had done. Now there were few visible signs left, other than the occasional stretch of highway or coastal town, to even hint that this planet had once been home to almost seven billion people and cultures that had existed and molded the planet to their will for thousands of years.
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the planet has changed on a radical scale but what I thought you might appreciate is some good news for a change,” Mulligan said.
“We’re all ears,” said a new voice. The commander smiled again when she recognized her friend’s voice.
“Emily. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Same here,” said Emily.
“So, in the time we’ve been incommunicado we have been busy monitoring the weather patterns since the storm and you’ll be happy to know that, as far as we can tell, everything seems to be pretty much returning to how it was, before—”
Emily finished the sentence for her, “—everything went to hell in a handbasket?”
“Precisely. So the good news is, the weather patterns appear to have only marginally shifted away from what the typical trend was pre–red rain, and the consensus up here is that we think you will probably see a return to ‘normal,’ whatever that might be, over the next few weeks to months. The good news is, that means we’ll be able to attempt the Soyuz reentry within the next couple days to a week; we just need to be one-hundred-percent sure of the weather conditions before we leave.”
“Well that’s certainly good to know,” said Emily, smiling. She was looking forward to finally putting a face to the angel that had helped guide her to safety.
“Unfortunately, there’s bad news too,” said the commander, “but it’s news I think you already are aware of. The spread of the red vegetation, it seems to have encroached on almost every continent and island, other than the poles. It’s as though…”
Mulligan’s words trailed off suddenly as a hint of movement on the edge of her peripheral vision caught her attention out beyond the observation port of the ISS. She repositioned herself just in time to catch a bright flash of light against the blackness of space.
“Stand by a second, Emily. There’s something—”
Another brilliant flash appeared in the distance, close to the curve of the Earth’s horizon. It was followed in rapid succession by two more blinding bursts as, one after another, dazzlingly bright globes of white light punctured the blackness of space. They materialized just outside the Earth’s atmosphere, bloomed momentarily, and then streaked down toward the surface. In the space of a few seconds, Commander Mulligan counted five… no… seven blindingly bright flares.
“My God,” said Mulligan, the intensity of the light so great her eyes reflexively shut as she turned her head away from the window. “Emily, there’s something happening outside the station,” she said urgently. “I can see objects, huge spheres of incredibly bright white light; they’re appearing outside the planet’s atmosphere and streaking toward the earth.” The commander opened her eyes fully again, the afterimage of the lights still flaring in her vision. She could see the tails of the orbs as they dropped through the atmosphere toward Earth.
“There are multiple objects,” Mulligan continued, breathless with excitement. “Each one appears to be heading to a different continent, I could be wrong though. They’re spread out so widely I—”
“Commander? Are you alright?” Emily interrupted. The other occupants of the makeshift radio room had seemed to freeze in place as they listened to Mulligan repeat what she was seeing through the observation window.
“Yes, I’m fine. Emily, I think I know what these are, Emily. My God, they are so incredibly beautiful. It’s as though—”
Commander Mulligan’s words were cut short as another of the immense orbs, dwarfing the space station and burning with an intensity that blotted out the sun, materialized just several hundred feet off the station’s dark side.
“Oh no,” said Commander Mulligan and closed her eyes.
Far below, on the narrow outcropping of land they had claimed for their own, Emily and the others waited for the radio signal to reestablish with the ISS.
“Commander? Can you hear me?” Emily asked for the third time in as many minutes. Her reply was a static hiss. Through the window she could see that night had finally chased the sun from the sky, and darkness now cloaked everything that lay beyond the illumination of the camp’s security lights.
“They probably just moved out of radio range,” said Parsons.
“They only just got in range,” MacAlister reminded him.
Emily felt a pang of nervousness tingling in the pit of her stomach as her mind ran back over the final words of the conversation before the connection was severed so abruptly. “She said something about seeing some kind of objects, spheres of light?”
“Aurora Borealis, perhaps?” suggested Captain Constantine.
“Maybe,” said Emily without conviction. “Surely they would have seen the northern lights on an almost daily basis? I doubt that would have stopped her mid-conversation.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Parsons added.
The headphones Jacob had placed on top of the table next to the radio moved slightly, and for a second, Emily thought that the sound had simply switched back to them, but a low-frequency, throbbing vibration passed through the soles of her feet as she started to pick them up, and she stopped mid-reach. The vibration was faint at first, like the gentle purr of an engine, but the sound grew increasingly louder. The headphones rattled away from her reaching fingers and then rolled off the edge of the table, tumbling to the floor. The glass panes of the window thrummed and vibrated, rattling in their fixtures… then the entire room began to vibrate like the cone of a huge speaker.
“Earthquake!” someone yelled.
“Christ!”
Emily looked at the other confused and frightened faces staring back at her as she grabbed the table for support. From elsewhere in the building she could hear yells and curses as the thrumming grew toward a bone-rattling crescendo.