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“We still do not have confirmation from any source that debris from Verdant, or the satellite itself, has been sighted entering the atmosphere… but we also cannot get confirmation that it is still in orbit. All com signals from the satellite have simply stopped transmitting, according to officials, and no optical equipment has managed to locate the satellite anywhere. Already, we’re receiving word from overseas news agencies that the United States is being accused of using some experimental weapon on Verdant, and has in fact destroyed the satellite. The High House publicly denies these allegations… however they state they are also in the dark regarding the status of Verdant. Denver has also not yet recalled the fighters and troop carriers sent into orbit to stabilize Verdant and Tranquil, citing the threat posed by both satellites, and the allegations that Verdant has developed a secret weapon of its own, has yet to be answered to the government’s satisfaction. It is presently estimated that at least 250 American citizens were aboard Verdant when it went dark…”

A noise at the front door roused him. He heard a click, and the telltale sound of the door opening, and slowly, he levered himself out of the sofa. He trudged towards the entry, which was hidden from the living room by a privacy wall, but it didn’t matter. Only one person would be coming in.

A moment later, the door closed, and Anise Lenz stepped around the corner. She saw Sergei approaching her, and she hurried over to him, and folded herself into his arms. They had been living together for the better part of the year, and weren’t that far from committing to their first marriage contract.

Sergei spoke first. “I’m glad you made it home. I know the trains are running slow with all this ash…”

“I didn’t think I’d get here until tomorrow!” Anise said, and kissed him warmly. Sergei barely seemed to be able to muster up any energy for her, which drew her up short. “Are you okay?”

Sergei’s shoulders sagged. “Been listening to the news,” he said simply.

“So have I… what I can get, anyway,” Anise agreed. “They say Verdant threatened to drop bombs on the U.S., and we attacked. The last I heard, they said Verdant is
destroyed
.”

Sergei shook his head, but it wasn’t really a
no
. “There was no sign of an explosion. There’s debris reported worldwide, but so far nothing is confirmed… they’ve all been labeled as hoaxes or hysterical claims. There’s no sign of anything de-orbiting or crashing. It didn’t just blow up.”

“Then… what happened to it?” Anise looked up at the ceiling as if she could look through it, all the way to orbit. “What happened to my daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

~

“We still don’t know, Ma’am. Every sensory instrument we have is pointed up there, and no one can locate Verdant. We’ve even flown fighters directly through its original coordinates. It’s just not there.”

The man speaking was wearing a general’s multiforces uniform, and he stood at-ease with his hat tucked under his armpit, yet he still gave the impression of being at attention before the Vice President. Lena Carruthers frowned at him, but it wasn’t so much in anger, as much as it was in confusion. “How can it possibly
not
be there? Those things can’t
go
anywhere… and even if they could, they sure can’t go anywhere
fast
!”

“We’re trying to ascertain if something else happened to the satellite,” the General explained.

“Like what? That they blew themselves up? Or that they just turned out the lights and drew all the shades?”

The man in the corner of the room threw a glance at Carruthers, but said nothing. Brandon Kang, her Chief of Staff, had accompanied the General into the executive office, after similarly exhausting every avenue to ascertain what had happened to Verdant. Carruthers’ sarcastic response to the General did not bode well for the mood in the building, and he knew it. But there wasn’t much he could do about it.

In the meantime, Carruthers was telling the General, “So help me, if this is the result of some super-secret weapon your people deployed on that satellite without my knowledge, I’ll have you all loaded onto the next waste rocket scheduled for the Sun! If I find out you people have killed the President, there’ll be no hole on this planet deep enough for you to hide from me! Find that satellite! Dismissed!”

The General gave the barest nod of his head, turned, and strode wordlessly out of the room. The stiffness in his back was evident, but Carruthers gave no indication that she was sorry for her response. Once the door closed behind the General, she turned to Kang.

“Brandon, you’d know if this was some sort of weapon,” she said, almost voicing it as a question. “We’d know.
We’d know!
”

“It wasn’t one of ours,” Brandon assured her. “That much is certain. I doubt it would be someone else’s weapon that we wouldn’t know about… especially since it was only used on Verdant. But without remains to examine… I mean, you saw the video. One second it was there, and the next…”

“Yes,” Carruthers said, turning away and leaning heavily against the desk. The video from the troop carrier had already been sent to them, and they had watched it repeatedly, trying to make sense of the abrupt disruption of the video, a split-second
pop-flash
of static much like that caused by an electro-magnetic pulse, followed by… an empty space where Verdant, and some of the fighters in its vicinity, had been a moment before. There had been no inbound missiles from the fighters or carriers, no visual artifacts or shock-waves, and no other signs of violence directed at Verdant. “Nothing just…
vanishes
like that! But nothing explodes like that, either!” She looked over her shoulder at Kang. “What does that leave us with?”

“Questions,” Kang replied. “But we’ll find the answers.”

“They’d better be good ones. The world already thinks we did this. Bad enough that freighter disabled Tranquil right in front of our people. If we can’t prove we didn’t cause this, too…” Carruthers looked out of the camouflaged window at the grounds surrounding the High House. The night traffic was even more sparse than usual, due to the disruptions caused by the ash layer. The night had become a blessing in the last few days: The daytime sky was a now-perpetual red that was beginning to make her eyes hurt whenever she looked at it. But even at night, the lighter ash that blew through the air created a dark fog that limited visibility, and made everything seem as if it was trapped in a small bubble of reality, all alone and surrounded by nothing. Not that much different than being in space, she imagined.

Lena Carruthers looked at Kang sadly. “This is not the country I wanted to be running, Brandon.”

“Of course not,” Kang replied, thinking to himself:
No one wanted you to run a country…
any
country.
“But with the President gone, and we have to presume dead, the helm is yours now. We’d better figure out how to make the best of it.”

~

“I want all department heads to check in directly with CnC, full damage report checks! Do a level-two diagnostic check on all sensory equipment in here! I want to know what’s going on!”

Julian shouted and stalked angrily through a CnC that was in a state of pandemonium: Technicians struggled over workstations that had gone black, or were flashing and flickering with conflicting, nonsensical data; a few people had the top panels of their workstations open, looking for burned-out components; the main workstation in the center of the room was flashing like a frenetic Christmas display, readings that constantly changed, rotated, blanked out, then ran through the chaotic pattern again and again; the main display column was literally a tankful of static, mirroring the sound coming out of the room speakers; and even the GLIS had gone silent.

He stopped at one of the few workstations that was closed and operating, though probably not optimally. “Chet,” he asked of the technician seated there, “has our orbital status changed?”

“Sir, I just don’t know,” the technician replied. “None of my readings make sense, and everything keeps trying to reset itself over and over…” He shrugged helplessly. “I can’t get it to stop!”

“Keep working on it,” Julian advised quietly, and moved on.

The door to his office opened, and Reya charged out of it. “The display in your office is out, too,” she said, hooking a finger over her shoulder. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”

Julian cursed loudly. “I need to know what’s going on outside! Try again to get our fighters on the com!” Reya rushed over to one of the workstations, only to find it opened and a technician waist-deep inside it. With a frustrated growl, she searched desperately for a workstation that would give her an outside line.

There was an urgent rap on the glass doors sealing off CnC. Julian spun about to see Aaron Hardy on the outside, his fist poised over the glass. He pointed at the security guard. “Open us up!” The guard jumped to the door controls, and after a moment, the doors started to slide open.
Thank God the power is still functioning
, Julian thought, as Aaron slipped through the doors and rushed into the room.

“What’s going on! I thought maybe we were hit!—”

“Everything was hit,” Julian replied, “we just don’t know with what! I thought this facility was supposed to be hardened enough to handle an EMP.”

“It is! The electrics are still on, aren’t they?” Aaron looked about the room. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t an electro-magnetic pulse.”

“Then what—”

“Julian, we’re getting some coms back!” Reya dashed up to him, holding a handheld com unit. “It’s patched through to tactical. I have the fighters!”

Julian took the com from her. “This is Verdant CnC. Ranking Wasp outboard, report in!”

After a moment, there was a hiss from the com, then a voice.
“This is Wasp four, Lt. Goldie Maina reporting.”

“Lieutenant, CnC is blind at the moment,” Julian stated. “Until we get our systems back up, you’re our eyes. What’s going on out there?”

“Sir, we’re as confused out here as you are in there,”
Goldie reported.
“One second, we’re dogfighting fifty Raptors… the next, the Raptors are gone, the carriers are gone, and… I know how this is going to sound, sir, but… Earth
moved
. And it looks
different.
”

Julian looked at Reya and Aaron, who returned his confused looks. “Back up, Lieutenant. The fighters and carriers: Were they destroyed by something? Did they de-orbit?”

“Neither, sir. They just…
vanished
. There are now three Raptors out here with us, and they’ve broken off their attacks… they’re maintaining station a kilometer away. But the rest of them… it’s like they were never here.”

Julian shook his head in confusion. “What about Earth? What do you mean, it moved?”

“As in, it
was
in one position in the sky, relative to Verdant,”
Goldie replied,
“and now it’s in a
different
position. Or maybe I should say, it’s like Verdant, and us fighters, changed our orientation with regard to Earth. But if we did, we all did it at the same time, instantaneously, with no sense of motion involved. I can’t say for sure, because my positioning sensors have crashed.”

Julian turned to look at Chet, who returned his look with one of utter confusion. “How does Earth look different?” Julian asked.

“Well, we seem to be higher in orbit, because it appears smaller from here. And I think Yellowstone may have erupted again, because the sky is redder than before. I can’t make out any land masses, the ash cloud seems to be covering everything.”

As Julian listened, technicians came to Reya and spoke to her in low voices. When Goldie seemed to be done, Reya put a hand on Julian’s arm. “Some systems are coming back,” she said, “but not all of them make sense.”

After a moment, Julian nodded, and handed the com back to Reya. “Have two Wasps maintain station outside for visual info. Try to coordinate getting the others back inside.” Reya nodded and began speaking through the com, as Julian moved to a workstation that a technician had just closed back up. It was a communications station that normally monitored com traffic from the Global Weather Service. “Is it back up?”

“Sir, the board’s working,” the technician replied. “But it’s just not getting anything from the GWS. They’re off the air.”

“That’s…” Julian looked around to the other stations. “Is anyone else getting com traffic from the ground?” No one responded. “What about the other satellites? Or the lunar beacon? Is anyone getting anything at all?”

“Sir,” one technician called out, “Wendy and I are both getting this one signal from the ground.” Julian approached the tech, and looked from him to the girl at the adjoining station. “We’ve both confirmed the signal is from the ground. We just can’t figure out what it is… it’s nothing I’ve ever heard, and it’s not coming up in our databases.”

“Voice?”

“Data. But I don’t know what language or code it’s in.”

Julian looked around the room. “Does anyone get voice?” A few heads shook, but mostly everyone stood or sat stock still. A sound emanated from the speakers of the GLIS, as if it was trying to respond to the question, but the sound was cut off immediately, and the GLIS was silent again. Julian stared at the nearest monitor for a moment, before turning away and searching CnC again.

As his eyes roved the room, he saw Aaron throwing a hard stare across the room. He followed his gaze, and saw he was fixed upon Kris Fawkes. Julian could tell some silent exchange was happening between them, a mutual animosity… or distrust. At that moment, Kris seemed to realize Julian was looking at her, and her eyes turned in his direction. He locked eyes with her, and after a moment, strode over to her.

He moved close to her, and in a low voice, said, “Miss Fawkes, if you know that this was some kind of weapon that was used against us, now would be a good time to speak up.”

Kris looked at Julian with a sick expression. “I swear to you, this is nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

Julian regarded her closely. “Do you think this is an American weapon?”