The Phoenix Descent Page 2

  As one, he and Subbotin lowered their side blackout curtains, clicking them into place. As Bodrov reached for the front curtain, he looked at Subbotin and saw in the man’s eyes exactly what he himself was feeling. No aircrew had done this since 1945, in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both men lowered their darkened visors, which, along with the curtains, would reduce any chance of flash blindness.

  It is a mission, nothing more, nothing less, he tried to convince himself. They were ordered to drop a weapon, and performed their mission without error. Bodrov knew death would come quickly for those left below and allowed himself some solace from that fact. He and Subbotin would live to fight another day, if need be, but he hoped this would end whatever was happening in the forests below.

  He didn’t know that the dead—in the weeks and months to come—would be the lucky ones.

  White House Situation Room

  “Mr. President, we’ve detected three nuclear detonations—check that, four. Looks like low-yield weapons. Tactical nukes. Southwest Russia, near the Ukrainian border.”

  Four detonations, in the span of a few seconds. Four atomic bombs.

  “Make that seven, Mr. President. Now showing four additional low-yield events in southern Belarus as well. Most likely air-delivered weapons, from fighter-bombers.”

  This was happening too fast. “Could this be some sort of military revolt?” the president asked. “The start of a coup?”

  “Doubtful, sir,” the secretary of defense replied. “Ulyanov has trouble with the eastern military district, but the troops in the west and south are completely loyal, as are their ballistic missile submarine commanders. The Russian sub captain launched because he was ordered to, and that order had to come from Ulyanov himself.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupted. “We’re showing possible targets in northern Ukraine for the submarine launch, Mr. President.”

  “How many warheads?”

  “Unknown at this time, sir.”

  “What the hell is Ulyanov shooting at?” the president asked. Other than his own troops, he silently added.

  “It’s mostly wilderness, uninhabited ever since the Chernobyl meltdown back in the mid-eighties. They’ve bombed the living hell out of the place since the invasion, Mr. President. It’s full of their own troops. It makes no sense.”

  “Is there any threat to the United States at this moment, General?”

  “No, Mr. President. We’ve detected no hostile Russian action directly targeting the United States. Yet.”

  The president paused for a second, letting the situation sink in. None of it made sense. It was madness. “General, how long until their missile reaches its targets?”

  “In less than ten minutes, the northern portion of Ukraine is going to cease to exist, along with a sizeable portion of the ground forces they’ve pumped into that region.” The chairman paused and took a deep breath. “And I don’t know why,” he added. “We’re completely in the dark, Mr. President.”

  The electronic warning came through the speakers: Nuclear detonation detected. Belarus. Nuclear detonation detected. Belarus.

  “Three more, sir. Low yield. Southern Belarus.”

  “What in God’s name is Ulyanov doing?” the president asked, to no one in particular.

  “We’ve always known this day could come, Mr. President,” the chairman said. “But not like this. They’re nuking the holy hell out of themselves.”

  PART I: HOME

  Chapter 1

  SIF

  In response to the threat warning screaming in her headphones, Lieutenant (junior grade) Caitlyn “Sif” Wagner instinctively slammed the stick to the left and pulled hard, grunting against the g-forces and popping flares as she strained to look at her six.

  The bastard was there, close, his nose tracking her tail. She reversed her turn, jettisoned her centerline and wing tanks, and strained to look over her other shoulder. He was still on her. She cursed the fact that she was all alone, and worse, in the skies over a patch of dirt that no US warplane was supposed to be anywhere near. At least officially.

  “All right, Ivan,” Sif breathed into her oxygen mask. “Let’s play.”

  In another few seconds, the Russian pilot would fire one of his missiles at her, and she would take a piece of shrapnel in her leg when it detonated . . . but, how did she know that?

  Wait, she thought, the noise is wrong.

  It wasn’t the threat warning. Something else. A familiar tone she was trained to recognize.

  Slowly, her awareness began to return.

  She wasn’t in the cockpit of her Super Hornet, feet dry over North Korea.

  That mission was years ago, when she was a lieutenant with VFA-11, the Red Rippers. She was fished from the Yellow Sea after punching out of her damaged fighter that day, the first pilot to down a Russian Su-50 in air-to-air combat, earning her the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart—citations that would probably remain classified forever.

  That mission happened a couple of years before her divorce. Before she was selected for the USAF test pilot school, joined Astronaut Group 24—the “Marvins”—and was picked as a crew member for the first manned mission to . . .

  She was dreaming. The tone meant it was time to wake up. To come out of stasis.

  Sif willed herself to open her eyes. Her six months of chemically induced sleep were coming to an end, and Mars, she knew, was only days away. The mission for which she trained for years was finally coming to fruition, and she felt a rush of excitement.

  Confusion, grogginess, joint stiffness, and blurry eyesight were symptoms they were trained to expect, aftereffects from spending months in an induced sleep state. Waking was supposed to be a slow, gradual process, minimizing the stress on body and mind. Months of zero-g spaceflight would take a certain unavoidable toll on their bodies, but the numbing effects of stasis would soon wear off, and they could get to work.

  But this didn’t feel gradual.

  Sif swam in blackness as she struggled to open her eyes. She could feel herself breathing, but it was strange, as if she were loosely connected to her body and someone else was breathing for her. Yes, she was wearing a mask, and the system was probably still controlling her breathing—which might explain the odd out-of-body sensation she was experiencing—but the docs never mentioned anything like this. Nor did they mention the pain she was experiencing in her extremities. Her arms and legs were on fire, tingling as if poked with thousands of sharp, icy needles.

  When Resolute was seven days away from entering Mars orbit, the life-support system was programmed to start waking the crew—Hunter Webb first, as the mission commander, followed by Lucas Hoover, mission specialist and medical expert, and lastly, Sif. She had argued against being last, but was unable to sway the eggheads at NASA. She knew Resolute better than the designers did, and if anyone should wake first, it should be her. If there were any problems, she would be the one most able to take care of them. But, no. She would be last. Sure, wake the pilot last and see where that gets you. If anything’s wrong, do you honestly think Hunter or Lucas could handle it? No. Friggin’. Way. Even though she knew they could, she wasn’t about to admit it, and it still pissed her off.

  Nothing would go wrong, they told her. Resolute was the most advanced piece of technology ever built, they said. Years of planning and preparation went into her design and construction. Built in orbit over the span of three years—at the cost of billions of dollars—she was simply a thing of beauty, stretching the length of a football field from tip to tail. It was called, and maybe rightly so, humanity’s greatest achievement. The level of acceptable risk, the designers said, was exceptionally low.

  But things go wrong all the time, regardless of how solid the design or careful the planning. Machines break, and usually at the worst possible moment. Even though Resolute was the most remarkable spacecraft ever built, it was still a machine, and although controlled by cutting-edge artificial intelligence—AI—that could make decision
s while the crew was in stasis, it could still break.

  To Sif, though, it all seemed like a crash program. Hurried. There was a new space race going on—with the Russians and the Chinese—and the US was going to be the first to send a manned mission to Mars. Period, dot. Somewhere within the miles of wiring, thousands of welds, and millions of lines of computer code, there might well be a devil lurking. Even some of the most advanced space probes smacked dead into the moon or Mars because someone flipped a 1 and 0, and none of those craft were as complex as Resolute.

  Flying is a dangerous business, Sif remembered her dad telling her mom. He also used to say that he was safer in his Tomcat than in his car. A true statement, but painfully ironic, since it was a car accident that took both of her parents from her.

  Space travel was a dangerous business, too. She personally (and privately) gave their mission a sixty-forty chance to succeed, and even that seemed optimistic.

  The pain in her arms and legs subsided, and her breathing grew steady, but still, this wasn’t what she expected, and it worried her.

  She fought to open her eyes, and when she did, she realized her initial suspicions were correct. From inside her stasis capsule, with IV lines taped to her arms and thigh, and a mask covering her face, Sif didn’t see the smiling faces of Hunter Webb and Lucas Hoover through her view port; rather there was only debris, spinning, floating by in the weightlessness of Resolute’s crew compartment. The lights were flickering, unsteady.

  Reality cut through her fog, and it dawned on her what must be happening. She was awakened early for a reason, and not a good one. As her mind began to fire more clearly, she remembered how—if something happened to the ship that the AI couldn’t handle—the crew would be brought out of stasis as soon as physically possible. Shocked awake by a flood of chemicals. And it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.

  The docs were right. It wasn’t pleasant. It hurt.

  The light level in her stasis capsule gradually increased, and she squinted against the glare. To her left, she glanced at a readout showing how much time was left until unlock, when her capsule’s lid would open. Two minutes. Below her readout were two identical timers, one for Hunter, and one for Lucas. In ten seconds Lucas’s capsule would open, but there was a malfunction with Hunter’s. It had reached zero, but was blinking red, which meant it either failed to open, or he was incapacitated.

  And there was nothing she could do about it.

  Dammit.

  To her right was an environmental status readout. Whatever had happened to the ship could have fried a circuit board or two, allowing their stasis capsules to open into a vacuum. She quickly scanned the numbers and was relieved to see that air pressure and atmospheric gas levels were in the normal range. The temperature, however, was in the low range—42 degrees Fahrenheit—and that in and of itself was concerning.

  The AI program that monitored Resolute’s functions was a brilliant piece of technology, but was still a computer. The techies called it OLIVIA., which stood for Operational Linguistic Isolated Variable Intelligence Algorithms. The crew called it—her—Liv.

  Lucas’s capsule was now open, according to the timer. She couldn’t see to the side, as the only view was her small viewing port facing the ceiling. The stasis capsules were designed to protect the crew from the high levels of interstellar radiation they would encounter on the trip to Mars and, as such, were heavily shielded.

  Lucas’s numbers were green, not blinking red like Hunter’s. Everything should be okay. In a few seconds, after removing his IV lines and mask, he should be free of it and his timer should blink off.

  Sif was fully awake now, and the severity of what she might be facing began to sink in.

  First, something had happened to the ship that caused some of their equipment to break free from the tie-downs. It would take one heck of a jolt to do something like that, but at least there was no hull breach.

  Had they been struck by an object of some sort? Had one of the fuel tanks ruptured and exploded? Were they off course? Stranded?

  Stranded.

  The thought of drifting through space waiting to die was not a happy one. “Come on, Lucas, where the hell are you?” Her voice was rough, thick, another side effect of the stasis. She pressed her face close to the view port glass, trying to get a better view. Nothing.

  Lucas’s timer blinked off.

  The top of a bald head floated into view, followed by the welcome face of Lucas Hoover. He peered inside, and Sif could see in his eyes what she, too, was feeling: confusion, urgency, and a little fear. Sif could barely hear him as he mouthed, “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, and pointed to her right, toward Hunter’s capsule. Lucas was already moving, aware of the problem, too.

  Thirty seconds until her capsule would open.

  And that’s when the lights went out.

  Chapter 2

  LITSA

  A slight breeze caressed her skin as Litsa stood on a rock outcropping, squinting as the horizon to the east brightened. The endless vault of stars in the night sky was losing its brilliance. The first warning bell had already rung, and the second was minutes away.

  Below, the gatherers were binding their take, preparing to haul it back to the Dak. The things were in the fields during the day, crushing some of the stalks. From her vantage point, she could see the trails they took through the fields, cutting across their crops like termites through wood. It slowed the night’s harvest, though, as the gatherers took extra care not to disturb the patches of black death the things left behind, spending precious minutes they couldn’t spare. The crop must be harvested before any more damage was done. Downwind from where she stood, smoke rose into the sky as those crops too soiled to save were quickly consumed by flames. A finger of blackish smoke curled into the sky. There were no clouds, and a bright, sunny day would soon dawn.

  Those kinds of days were the most dangerous.

  The things were getting closer again, venturing into regions free of Riy for years. Their lives depended on these fields, and if the damage continued, they would have to act. Some on the council might want to move to another place, but she was tired of running. The Dak had been her home for the last ten years, and she would run no more.

  Litsa gripped her bow tightly as the second warning bell rang through the early morning silence. They must get moving.

  She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, “Second bell. Grab what you can and let’s get moving.” The lead gatherer, a man named Colin, waved his arm in response. The sun was almost up. They were cutting it close. Too close. Personally, she liked to have the harvest crew halfway back to the Dak by the second bell. There was a small emergency haven located on the trail between the Dak and the fields, large enough for all of them to squeeze into, but they would have to abandon their take. They needed those crops. Litsa was sick and tired of eating wall greens, and she wasn’t the only one.

  She slid her darkened goggles over her eyes and raised her field glasses to the east. Even though one lens was cracked, she could still scan the horizon with one eye. Nothing, yet. If there was a new hive close by, and she figured there must be, then the light level was getting dangerously bright. The drones might already be on the move.

  She kicked at the fire at her feet, making sure there was still enough flame to light her torch, and then she heard the scream.

  Without thinking, she grabbed a handful of arrows from her quiver and brought one to the bowstring, three more intertwined between her fingers. Just before she dipped the head of her torch into the fire, she realized what was happening. One of the gatherers had fallen and was hurt.

  A crowd quickly gathered around the injured person—from the looks of it, Jeremy, one of the older ones—and dropped their bundles in place. This was a delay they couldn’t afford.

  “Colin,” she shouted, “get the others moving, now.” It was too damn bright. “I’ll take care of him. Get the others back to the Dak.”

  He waved his arm again, and her
ded the others toward their bundles, and the safety of the Dak.

  Litsa took a quick glance at the horizon as the first fiery finger of the sun became visible—and saw them. Black specks in the distance, growing closer. Closely spaced. Forty, maybe fifty.

  “Dammit.” She dipped the soaked tip of one of her arrows into the fire, drew her bow, pointed it skyward, and let the arrow fly. A signal to the watch standers back at the Dak. Hopefully they would see it and send more warriors, but the sky was already too bright.

  She couldn’t count on any help. She would face the swarm alone.

  The gatherers below saw the signal and ran, dragging their bundles behind them as best they could. Colin, she saw, stayed behind with Jeremy.

  Litsa lit her torch, slung her bow over her shoulder, and ran down the rough face of the bluff, careful not to lose her balance and end up in a heap at the bottom. She sprinted to Colin.

  “Are they coming?” Colin asked.

  Litsa nodded and knelt by Jeremy. His ankle looked broken. “Can you move?”

  Through gritted teeth, he answered, “No, I can’t stand. Leave me here.”

  Not a chance. She had known Jeremy her entire life, and he was one of her favorites. He was a little slow at times, but he was strong, always smiling, and he was a good gatherer. “Colin, you’re going to have to carry him,” Litsa said. “Carry him as fast as you can, and try to make it to the middle haven. You’ll be safe there.”

  She could see Colin was starting to panic. “I don’t think I can—”

  Litsa put her free hand on Colin’s shoulder, gave him a squeeze. “You can do it, Colin. You have to. Otherwise Jeremy is going to die. Do you understand me?”

  Colin darted his gaze toward the rising sun, and then back at Litsa. “I’ll try,” he said.

  Litsa slapped him on the arm. “Good man. I know you can do it.” At least she hoped he could. She helped Colin pick Jeremy up off the ground, and saw he was at least able to hop on one foot with Colin’s support. “Okay, get moving. I’ll buy you some time.”