Doomsday Conquest. Don Pendleton

was trudging up the rise, searching the forested high ground, wondering if any of his cousins could forsake this wrong and find redemption before it was too late, when the animals began crying, shuffling and bucking against their burdens. The line lurched to a sudden halt, his cousins cursing the beasts as the braying and snorting rose in what he sensed was panic. He was wondering if the animals were spooked by the sudden arrival of the two giant black transport choppers as they appeared, hovering over the tree line of the high plateau, Ghazin on the field radio, confirming, he assumed, the helicopters ferried the Russian gangsters, when the sky erupted in a brilliant white light. Something inexplicable happened next to the helicopters, Dozmuj watching, shocked, as what appeared like a web of blue sparks began shooting, dancing around the hulls of the choppers. A heartbeat and one of the choppers was thrown into a whirling dervish, then propelled, it seemed, by the shroud of blue lightning, aimed on a course to smash into the heart of the caravan.

      Whether it was instinct or some haunting premonition of doom he’d gnawed on since the border, Dozmuj knew something far out of the ordinary was blanketing the sky.

      Terror then gripped him as the animals burst in a pellmell scatter off the trail, his cousins shouting, torn between chasing after the beasts of burden and staring, frozen in fear, at the heaven’s spread of dazzling—

      Fire?

      Dozmuj backpedaled, the assault rifle slipping off his shoulder, falling to ground as his mind tried to conceive that he bore witness to a vast sheet of white fire blossoming but rolling like ocean waves in a great storm across the width of the sky. And it powered the heavens above into instant day, as if the sun had burst through the celestial blackness, light so piercing he was forced to shut his eyes, afraid for a moment he was blind.

      When he opened his eyes, he found the world on fire, the seeing all but beyond any belief.

      Shouts of panic flaying the air and animals braying loud enough to further warp his senses, Dozmuj turned away and ran.

      “PULL BACK!”

      For all of their—what was to him—incoherent physics babble, it hardly explained the blue lightning shooting from the comm and tracking station amidships the transport chopper. More conjecture than anything else, the best his science people could come up with by way of explanation was that the storm of space lava created a supercharged electromagnetic field. Highly charged alpha particles, the most powerful of ionizing agents, the way he understood it, were in the process of fusing, splitting deuterium nuclei as they collided, but somehow creating antienergy in the process. One of the end fantastic results was that the ore emitted EMP—electromagnetic pulse—similar, but vastly more powerful in ways they couldn’t yet explain than those produced by a nuclear blast. Had he believed in God, angels or even an afterlife, he might have agreed with his scientists when they referred to the phenomenon as Heaven’s Vomit.

      The pilot didn’t need to be told even once, Kolinko roaring the order again, though, through the cockpit hatchway just when the bird was thrown to a steep dip to port. He tumbled to the floorboard, his soldiers falling from their stations in a thrashing heap of limbs, Kolinko still fearing the fire in the sky would overtake them. As opposed to arriving on-site after the three previous showers, this was the first time he’d been eyewitness to the falling space matter. Cursing the horrifying unexplainable, he hoped it would be his last, but he wasn’t about to see his choppers bathed in celestial soup, sure to send them crashing to earth.

      Jumping to his feet as his pilot straightened the chopper, Kolinko marched to the door, hollering for one of his men to pull the plug to their monitors from the battery-powered generator. He was just in time to find the two black Mi-14s—drug ships, he suspected, taking the high ground and waiting on the Tajiks to climb up the trail from the gorge—erupt into fireballs that defied any blast he’d ever seen on the battlefield. It was all lightning and blue flame along the plateau, two giant, sizzling orbs that appeared like electrical charges gone haywire, blinding-white explosions touching off, one after the other, inside the spheres, the jagged streaks seeming to gather renewed angry force, as if whatever energy they consumed from the doomed birds inside the blue furnace fed their unearthly power core.

      It was the rolling molten tidal wave in the sky, though, that commanded his full and terrified attention. Patching through to his other flight crews, he confirmed them engaged in evasive maneuvers, all of them falling back in southerly vectors at top speed.

      Kolinko watched, squinting against the brilliant sheen as the molten rain washed over the forested plateau, then pounded a path down the gorge. With nowhere to run or hide, he saw the sea of molten stew drench man and animal. The Tajiks and their Russian end purchasers were little more than criminal scum, but Kolinko wondered, just the same, if they died quick, or slow and in great pain as they drowned in the ore.

      “IN TERMS OF PURE scientific theory, as defined by Isaac Newton and Einstein, the laws of gravity and inertial mass being proportional to gravitational mass—G-Force—this shouldn’t even exist. Alpha particles, if that’s what they even are, will yield their energy quickly, but whatever the particles, they are fusing, multiplying and growing in mass and strength, creating in the process what I can only describe as…antimatter?”

      Kolinko bared his teeth, stepping toward the hastily erected work area. He found himself growing exasperated to the point of boiling anger, what with their lack of plausible scientific explanations, but realized, under the circumstances, he needed them more than they needed him.

      The good news was that the laser field, a reverse electromagnetic barrier, as he understood it, held back the undefined particles that created this purported antigravity. With the extended poles rising forty feet high, laser beams interlocked at the speed of light, the abominable stench of sulfur was held in check, but the unreality of the moment was still there for his eyes to behold. Unable to look at the frightening spectacles farther down the gorge and just inside the laser wall, he watched his eight best and brightest, still donning hazmat suits, while striding closer to the banks of monitors, his science detail having informed him the lethal doses of radiation were cocooned behind the bars of blue laser light and presently dying off at an inexplicable rate. Only flaring back to life, fusing together again, they told him, at a speed faster than light, mounting in hyper-strength, though giving off no measurable radiation! Impossible, he decided, would be the most preposterous understatement he’d ever heard. Moscow would never buy it.

      Geiger counters, he saw, were hooked into a radiation monitor, the clicks no longer audible, but Kolinko stole a read on the digital screen just the same, confirming he was in no danger of coming down with cancer in the near future. The last problem—no, the last nail—he needed was another Chernobyl in what was, essentially, a militarily occupied Russian protectorate. His own anger and mounting fear fusing like those particles they mentioned, Kolinko looked at their dark baffled faces inside the bubbled helmets as several of the geniuses filled test tubes with white crystals collected from the ground near the field station, then mixed them with a clear liquid. With syringes, they extracted the concoction, squirting drops on Petri dishes, sliding them under microscopes.

      “It makes no sense at all how this could be happening.”

      “But it is happening, Comrade Bukov!” Kolinko snapped, forcing himself to not even glance at the figure no more than twelve feet in front of him to confirm the terrible truth. Should this happen again, he dreaded, and in a heavily populated area…

      Kolinko keyed his com link, scoured the skies with an anxious search. When informed by his flight crews that soldiers were now on the ground and securing a wide perimeter, erecting more laser walls, he turned back to his scientists. Two of them were hunched over the control panel of a solid aluminum cylinder they called a gravitational wave detector. When he saw them shaking their heads at each other, he nearly erupted, aware the mystery was only growing as they appeared to understand less with each passing second.

      “I want answers, and within the hour, do you understand me, Comrade Bukov?”

      “Then we’ll need to return to our laboratories for further and more accurate testing, Comrade Colonel. I am thinking this substance will first need a laser burst of at least a hundred picoseconds…”

      “Picoseconds?”