Chapter 13: Calling Card
It would take another two days for all of her sy
stems to come to full power, but Lana decided it was time. She had reached a point where she was capable of beginning her new mission. As dusk fell on Slocomb, Alabama, Lana Wilson counted the minutes, then the seconds, until the moonless night would be dark enough.
Theresa and Jason Stevens sat, as always, in their trailer, eating a noxious combination of Doritos and Ramen noodles, served with Bud Light. They did not notice the light slowly fading outside. They were transfixed by the TV where
Desperate Housewives of New York
was playing. The stations no longer reported every day on the tented communities of people waiting to return to their irradiated hometowns, or the devastating effect it was having on the economy. Apparently people were bored with the topic and wanted something more entertaining, so the stations had started running shows once more, and filling the news with stories that were more heartwarming, despite the seriousness of the eco-political shockwaves washing outward from the once affluent East Coast.
Oblivious, night fell on the community of aluminium and plywood trailers that dotted the park where the Stevenses lived, as inevitable as the rising danger in its wake from under their home. As the darkness set in, Lana stretched her arms for the first time in three weeks. Levering herself up on her elbows and heels, she crab walked sideways to a point next to where two breeze blocks formed the steps to the door of the Stevens’ cabin. Scanning the area, she checked the heat signatures of the neighboring domiciles, plotting the whereabouts of the various characters she had come to know and loathe over the past few weeks. Sliding out from under the trailer, the lithe shadow that was her skinned black presence stood and flexed, checking her systems one by one.
She smiled. She was ready.
The knock was so light. So innocent. Jason shouted a question at their visitor but no reply came. Just another quiet knock.
“Jesus fucking christ, who is it?” he shouted again.
Again, silence.
He levered himself out of the couch and cursed as Theresa looked on curiously, “Better be fuckin’ important!” Jason threatened.
It was, in many ways, the most important knock of his life, for it was the knock of death’s own hand. Theresa watched from the couch as the door opened toward her, unable to see outside. Jason paused and stared out, uncharacteristically silent. He seemed confused by what he saw. A black silhouette rose through the opening and Jason seemed transfixed as it reached up to his neck. A flick from one pitch-black finger to his throat sent Jason stumbling back, clasping his neck and rasping for breath.
His silence, at first due to shock, was enforced now by a neatly ruptured voice box. Neither he nor his wife could know what a precise and calculated death monger had just dealt the tiny blow. Theresa stared up at the black, smooth female figure that was stepping into their home and closing the door, baffled and mute, like her husband.
- - -
The next hour was an ever-increasing swarm of terror for the poor couple.
After throwing the muted Jason on the couch by his wife, still clutching at his throat, Lana had turned on Theresa. The woman had risen, ill-placed bravado fueling her rage as she faced the black apparition invading their home, but as harsh words formed in her throat, they were suddenly stifled by a black hand striking out to grip her by the neck.
Theresa’s eyes widened as she felt herself pinned inside the black graphite grip. Jason muted, Theresa leashed, they both stared at the nightmare that had come to them as it spoke at last, a sultry woman’s voice emerging from her black lips, “Ahh, peace and quiet. At last you two are silent. You have no idea how long I have endured your inane bickering.”
The woman stared at them a moment longer, seeming to savor the peace and quiet, and then went on, “Tonight, my friends. Oh tonight you will sing a different tune, one for my benefit alone. Tonight you will sing a tune I will conduct, using you like the dull instruments you truly are.”
She smiled viciously. Then, as she placed one of her feet firmly onto Jason’s torso, pinning him to the couch, she stared into Theresa’s terrified eyes. Theresa stared back at the woman gripping her by the neck and tried in vain to release herself from her clasp. Then she felt something strange on the back of her neck. It was like the woman’s black fingers were probing the back of her spine. Then there was a sensation like a hundred tiny needles in the back of her head, like ants were in her skull.
Lana felt the probes snake out of her fingers and penetrate the woman’s skin, reveling in the pathetic human’s struggle. She felt as the fibers worked their way into the gelatinous tissue between the links in the woman’s spinal cord, seeking the soft core within. She could feel the signals flowing inside the all-important cord of nerve fibers inside, she could feel the ebb and flow of Theresa’s fear as the woman amplified her futile attempts to release herself. And as the fibers pushed deeper, the pulses became louder and clearer, refining into audible signals until her fibers finally broke through to the hot cable within.
Jason stared up at his struggling wife and wrenched at the leg pinning him. He tried to scream but the noise wouldn’t come. Only a hoarse whisper and searing agony as the air ripped over his fractured vocal cords. He paused as the black figure spoke.
“OK,” Lana said, “we have connection. Now, let’s see how this works, shall we?”
With that, Theresa’s entire body spasmed, tensing as a whole. Jason watched as his wife bucked back and forth. He stared in fear and disbelief. What the hell was the woman doing to her?
Lana looked at the sweat dripping down Theresa’s face. Fear and pain poured from her eyes as a thick flow of tears, spilling from them like the spittle coagulating at the sides of her gasping, mute mouth.
“OK, that was a bit amateurish. Sorry about that!” said Lana with a chuckle, an incongruously pleasant smile on her lips. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
Based on the woman’s thrashing response to the first assault, Lana’s systems had compiled a map of her victim’s central nervous system. Using that map, Lana selected a limb. Theresa’s left arm tensed suddenly, unnaturally rigid, neither flexing or extending, but tensing inhumanly as each muscle group fought each other with antagonistic intensity.
“Good, that’s a bit less … hectic, isn’t it?” Lana beamed as a hoarse scream rattled from the poor woman’s throat. “But those aren’t called antagonistic muscles for nothing, now are they?” and with that Lana cut the signal to Theresa’s biceps, but kept the triceps flexed to capacity. Now Theresa tensed for a whole new reason, as the muscles in her arm tried to bend it backward, wrenching at the elbow with unnatural imbalance. Theresa grasped at her rigid left arm with her right, trying to stop the growing tide of agony, and the tears flowed even more liberally as the muscle started to tear. But muscle is surprisingly tough stuff, and suddenly she felt a new level of pain, an electric shock of grinding, splintering torture as her humerus bone started to bend under the strain.
“Not going to give, is it?” said Lana eventually, and with psychopathic glee Lana changed the signal ripping Theresa’s arm apart, from constant to pulsing. On the third wrenching tug, the bone in her upper arm parted and Jason recoiled in new horror as his wife’s left arm suddenly snapped just above the elbow, shattered bone slicing out through the skin like some alien animal trying to escape.
“One bone down …” said Lana, laughing as Theresa wept and gargled with unparalleled suffering, wetting and soiling herself as she convulsed. Lana smiled a disturbingly beatific smile, and then went on, “… two hundred and five to go.”
- - -
An hour later, Lana was leaving the now still trailer, and appropriating Jason’s old Dodge Ram for the long drive to Florida. Her two disproportionately unfortunate former hosts lay on the floor of their home, shattered and broken. The police and coroner would struggle for days to discover what had caused the gut wrenching disfiguration that had left them so contorted. But it would not be until the senior government officials sent to investigate Lana’s next crime heard of the Stevens’ unfortunate ends that a link would be made, and some answer be given for the terrible way Theresa and Jason had died.
The authorities were left in no doubt as to the profound evil that had emerged that night, but no one would have guessed that this marked but the beginning of an epic rampage.
- - -
In the end Lana had gotten bored long before she had broken their bodies completely, but not before inducing unbearable pain, fractured pelvises and shattered collar bones. The two had hung limp when she had decided to end it. Unable to move, but also unable to slip into the unconsciousness their minds sought because of the link she had to their spines.
When she had finally decided to end it, Lana had sent a signal that lit their every nerve ablaze and laughed as their muscles twitched, broken limbs contracting inhumanly, like poorly strung marionettes twisting and flopping on the stage. The spasms in their intercostal muscles and diaphragm finally tensed inward, crushing their lungs, driving their last breath out through clenched jaws and tear streaked cheeks as their alveoli collapsed and surged up their bronchi, filling their mouths with blood.
Lana had dropped their wrecked bodies with undisguised loathing and turned to leave, her fury satiated for now, but keen to start the real killing. These two had been but test subjects, poor rats in her maze. Though she had a little bit of murder in her for every human, her real wrath was focused elsewhere in the chaos that America was becoming.
She commandeered Jason’s truck and drove out of the trailer park at last. She did not know exactly where the true targets of her expansive rage were just yet, but she would find them soon enough.
Her first lead was an easy one: it was the only place she had ever seen one of them in person.
She drove through the night, arriving at Madeline’s mother’s retirement community just after one o’clock in the morning. The place was already quiet, but Lana waited until the last of the building’s countless TVs and radios had gone quiet before entering through a side entrance. A security camera blithely recorded her unobtrusive ingress, but she tripped no alarms. Nor did she awake any of the building’s slumbering guards with her quiet departure an hour later.
In the morning, the small community awoke unaware that anything was wrong. It would be one of the resident nurses, checking in after Madeline’s mother missed breakfast, that would discover the horror.
Chapter 14: Catalogue
Ayala
arrived at her regular meeting with Madeline with her usual sense of trepidation. She had nothing new to report and she was frustrated. Over the last two months she had built up an unprecedented intelligence network in the search for Lana. With full access to the US/UK program called Echelon, her team had set the ears and eyes of the massive processing power it encompassed to scour massive swathes of the world’s phone calls and e-mail traffic for any mention of a black-suited figure, or any other description that might fit the woman who had begun terrorizing them. But after the FBI and local police had pursued a thousand hoaxes, false alarms, and even some near misses, they were still no closer to catching the Agent known as Lana Wilson.
As she had too many times before, Ayala had come to update Madeline on the situation. Though the updates had become more and more self-defeating, she had continued to answer her friend’s requests for information without complaint, knowing it was the least she could do in the face of her continued failure to find her quarry.
Usually their meetings were by teleconference, what with the wildly different locations Ayala’s work now took her to. But because of this day’s particularly important event, this meeting was going to be face-to-face, Madeline having a key role in the auspicious launch about to happen, and Ayala’s specialized team being in charge of security. Still well in advance of the countdown, the two women met in a private conference room at Cape Canaveral.
The meeting did not go well.
“What the hell does she have to do, Ayala?” screamed Madeline. “Come up and punch you in the fucking face?”
Ayala did not reply in kind, but in a calm voice reiterated her point, “We have been working around the clock to catch her, Madeline. I know that is no comfort to you, but it is all we can do. She is very clever and extremely resourceful.”
“She is utterly fucking skinned! How difficult can it be to find a hairless, earless, pitch-black robot? For Christ’s fucking sake, Ayala, how many of our family and friends does she have to kill before we stop her?”
Ayala started to reply, again in her calm, conciliatory tone, but before she could, Madeline let a throaty scream of frustration escape her lips, her face turning red as she slammed her balled fists on the table. Ayala fell silent, standing across the table from her tormented friend and waiting. Waiting to see if there was something else she could say.
Knowing that she truly was doing everything she could to find their stalker, Ayala stood her ground and waited for her friend’s tumultuous rage to subside.
Madeline let her head fall into her hands and the tears started to come again. Months before, they had tried to keep the pictures of her mother’s corpse from her, but Madeline was almost as resourceful and well connected as Ayala. Thoughts of what she had seen still haunted Madeline more often than she cared to admit. Madeline raised her head again, opening her bloodshot eyes wide. Whenever she closed them the sight of her mother’s naked, brutalized body came back to her, and so she kept her eyes transfixed on the far wall and gathered herself.
Ayala watched her, drawing from a profoundly deep well of patience for her friend’s grief. What had happened to Madeline’s mother had been a terrifying return of the enemy they knew as Lana Wilson. After the initial shock, they had responded by gathering all of the team’s close relatives together, secreting them in one of the nuclear fallout bunkers that lay hidden in the Colorado mountains to protect them from further attacks. Their plan had been simple: even Lana was not strong enough to break into those deep, atomic-bomb proof bunkers, and if she tried to attack them, the team assigned to guard them would seal the doors and wait for John and Quavoce to come to their aid.
But Lana had not been so blunt or predictable. She had spread her net wider, and first Neal’s aunt’s entire family, and then two of Madeline’s college-age cousins had been found. All had suffered the same horrifying fate that had become Lana’s trademark, and it had become ever harder to keep the whole string of deaths secret. Moving as if at random, Lana would strike and then vanish. Each time she struck, a massive team would descend on the area in an attempt to flush her out. Three times one of the many FBI teams searching for her had found her, at least that was what Ayala and her advisors assumed had happened. No one from the ill-fated teams had survived the encounters to report on what had actually transpired.
As Lana’s net widened, so did the group of people sequestered, and a race had formed between Lana’s appetite for cold-blooded murder and the FBI’s ability to gather every cousin, best friend, ex-boyfriend, college mentor, or other randomly associated character from Neal or Madeline’s past. Intermingled amongst the killings, Lana then started more wholesale attacks. Neal’s hometown high school was first to go. Lana left nothing but a burning hulk to mark the graves of the children who had been unable to escape the inferno. Then the Marine Research Institute, where Neal had first met Madeline and the doomed James Hawkson, had been spectacularly demolished. Since then the Array Neal had worked at had been shut down, and Madeline’s high school had been temporarily closed due to ‘fire hazards.’
Lana had turned Neal and Madeline into pariahs. Anything they had ever touched in their lives was being systematically turned to dust. Any relationships that predated the madness that had been the last two years had been utterly violated. But in the end Madeline had suffered the greatest loss, and the first, with the gruesome murder of her mother, and she was still the most devastated.
Madeline stared at the wall through eyes strained by the weight of her grief, and anger tempered her breathing. Ayala had given up trying to console her with hugs or kind words, at Madeline’s strong request. She had had enough of that. Madeline needed action. She needed Ayala to find the bitch, and then she needed John and Quavoce to kill her, and in the meantime Madeline needed to throw herself into her work.
Madeline sensed that Ayala was about to speak and held up her hand. Her own voice came out shakily at first, but became stronger as she spoke, “Don’t, Ayala, I know there is nothing more you can do. And I know that you don’t begrudge me my tantrums, which I am grateful for. That’s why I let it rip on you rather than on my team.” She looked at Ayala and managed an askew smile, which was answered by a simple nod.
“How long do we have till takeoff?” said Ayala, taking Madeline’s cue.
“Two hours. But there’s really nothing more for my team to do. It’s in the hands of NASA and the ESA now.”
Ayala nodded, “Shall we head down to mission control, or do you need a minute?”
Madeline shook her head firmly and stood, her chair grinding on the concrete floor as her legs pushed it back.
- - -
Two hours later, Madeline stood amongst a seemingly chaotic throng of people, some standing and some sitting at terminals. Voices rang out with updates and confirmations, checklists ticking down through the exhaustive process of the last of five launches from this site in only a few weeks.
Technicians typed furiously on keyboards as swathes of information slid across screens in the final, frenetic buildup to takeoff. The massive volume of information passed out of mission control, through a thick vein of optic cables surging under a concrete plain for over a quarter of a mile, to the tall scaffolding that supported the vehicle they were prepping. The cables then joined a maze of wires, hoses, and pipes that converged on the base of the launch pad like roots, carrying their wares to every one of the thousand systems they fed. From fuel stirrers to ignition control, from bridge retraction motors to the still hardwired telemetry that linked them to the astronauts on board.
07:34:44 PM … Countdown begins (T minus 9 minutes)
The frantic activity of a thousand technic
ians stops for a moment’s peace as the countdown begins, an enforced time of careful review and consideration.
07:36:14 PM … Access arm retracts
The
crew aboard the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, nervous despite their countless hours of training, busy themselves throughout the retraction of their access bridge, symbolic of their cutting off from the ground below.
07:38:44 PM … Launch window open; hydraulic power system (APU) start
Stepping into their window of opportunity
, the sense of urgency builds. The reality of the launch becomes tangible. Nerves tingle as possibility turns into imminent reality.
07:38:49 PM … LO2 replenish terminates
Fuel loaded, systems ready. Cool liquid oxygen propellant stirs in the rockets
’ vast tanks, waiting to expend itself in flaming glory as the rocket surges into space.
07:39:44 PM … Purge sequence four hydraulic test, IMUs to inertial
Systems begin to reconfigure themselves for the coming press of acceleration
, and the ensuing escape from gravity. Years of perfection hone their delicate structures to the brief but glorious task only moments away.
07:40:14 PM … Main engine steering test
Nozzles designed to focus the stupendous energy of launch flex and turn under the watchful eye
s of expendable cameras, which are soon to be consumed in the fury.
07:40:49 PM … LO2 tank pressurization
07:41:09 PM
… Fuel cells to internal reactants
07:41:44 PM
… Crew close visors
07:41:47 PM
… LH2 tank pressurization
07:43:13 PM … Orion’s own GPCs takes control of countdown.
Mission Control gives up control of the launch to those that will live and die by it.
07:
43:37 PM … Main engine start (T minus 6.6 seconds)
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …
07:43:44 PM … CBC ignition
go
Years of experience don’t even slightly blunt the feeling of being driven back into their harnesses as the rocket powers upward. No amount of appreciation for the vast forces at work can possibly temper the sheer, childlike joy that comes from being catapulted by humanity’s greatest achievement into the greater void.
With nothing left to do but watch, the four men and women grin broadly. Leaving common sense behind, they reconcile themselves to the spectacularly dangerous career they have dedicated themselves to by smiling and thinking:
if you have to go, you might as well go big …
- - -
Below them, the earth shakes with the thunderous roar of fifty-seven million horsepower as seven massive boosters send four tiny astronauts surging into space. The Delta IV Heavy was already one of the most powerful rockets in the world. When they attached four extra CBC boosters to it, they made it the biggest, most powerful machine ever made.
The big rockets’ cones vibrate with insane abandon as they fight to tame the mayhem exploding out of them. At six thousand degrees, the fiery plume from the combustion of their liquid hydrogen fuel is hot enough to boil iron. The engine burns its liquid fuels so quickly it could drain a swimming pool in twenty seconds.
After only eight minutes of this mad burn, the rocket has reached seventeen thousand miles per hour and is already passing Low-Earth Orbit, two hundred miles above Earth’s surface.
But this rocket’s mission will take it much farther. For they are going far outside their ordinary orbit, and they are not alone. Like their sister ships that are already in space, Cable Lift Vehicle-19 (CLV-19) carries an unusual cargo. For along with the small module carrying the four astronauts is a massive length of nanotube cable wound into twenty spools. It is the nineteenth section of a greater whole to be hefted into space over the past month by US Delta IV Super-Heavies and modified European Ariane-5 MEs. But this is only the second one that has been manned, and it will hopefully be the last.
Sixteen hours into the mission, the commander acquires their destination visually, a lonely white dot floating in a strange-looking cloud of grey dots. Like an explosion of grey that has been paused, the first of the CLV manned Orion modules sits among the loosely tethered batch of more than seven hundred tons of cable, like a shepherd keeping eye over a grazing flock of grey sheep.
As CLV-19 approaches her rendezvous, she is now only a fraction of her launch weight, her First Stage Rocket along with its six CBC boosters have long since been jettisoned. Left behind as empty husks, mere memories of their former glory, after they wantonly expended the hundreds of tons of fuel that had made up 90 percent of their mass at launch.
CLV-19 is now left, a long, thick cylinder, and after the might of its exit from Earth’s embrace, it takes only small attitude thrusters on her sides spraying gas to maneuver her, to roll her over, spinning her gently and silently. For her pilot and commander looking out of her cockpit, the glittering white globe of Earth seems to rotate around the module, the clouds swirling on its panoramic surface adding to the eerily beautiful effect. Her other two crew members are prepping for egress as the module closes in, attitude thrusters in her nose slowing her as she slides closer to her sister.
In the final meters, the pilot has a disconcerting view of the other module’s large final stage booster, cold now, and silent in the vacuum. Along her near side, the commander and pilot see two white-clad figures tethered to four powerful-looking clamps. They are matched by the two other members of their own crew now outside in the vacuum.