In elementary school they had grown strawberries. The weather was too cold, so the children constructed little greenhouses in the classroom. Jessica was consistently bored by the task. She passed the time by multiplying the length and widths of the wood and glass, eager to get back to the world of arithmetic.
Still, when the low plants began sprouting early berries—white miniature versions of the fruit she knew—it was magic. Each was a different size, each slightly misshapen in its own unique way. Every day she glanced at the plants when she arrived at class, watching the white flesh plump up and turn bright red.
They got to take a few of the berries home. Her mother split them in half and sprinkled sugar on top. No other fruit had ever tasted as good. It took her first real experience with introspection to discover why.
When she came back to herself she was slumped against the open hatch of her CATV. She hadn’t passed out, but had lost presence in the glare of red light.
The sky wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t registering in her brain. She blinked, shook her head, and her neurons began to resolve the world again.
People were yelling. Her platoon.
Hovering above the horizon was a huge patch of white. It sprouted gradually extending gaseous arms that swirled and combined like ink drops in water. Little sparks illuminated the center of the pattern, blinking in and out of existence. She watched as the tendrils dissipated into nothingness, replaced by a river of orange light, spreading from the east to the west. A daytime aurora?
I need to make commands.
“LT? LT! What do we do?” Remington yelled from behind the wheel.
What do we do? Stop. Wait to die. No, she shook herself. Continue going. What else do we do?
“Injury check,” she ordered into the cabin. She triggered her mic, “Everybody ok? Sound off.” She listened as each voice responded in turn, counting up to eleven.
Dropping back into the cabin, she tapped Remington’s shoulder and pointed at the hatch. He got the message, and climbed behind the machine gun.
“What do you think?” she asked McAiden, “you’re promoted to our space expert.”
The radio operator stoked his chin, “Could have been an exoatmospheric nuclear detonation. Clearing out the last of the satellites.”
Before she could answer, Remington yelped and called out a contact to the left. Out the CATV’s window a bright white circle was growing, rapidly covering the whole horizon. It crossed the sky, a half-hemisphere of pure light, encompassing everything in its glare.
Marinakis hunkered down, seeking shelter behind the front seats, and watched as the otherworldly light swept in front of the windshield, as if a glowing curtain was being pulled across the sky.
Whatever it was, the light never reached ground level. There were no features in the hemisphere, no clues as to depth or structure. All it did was sweep. The CATV’s cabin was never illuminated.
As swiftly as it appeared it vanished, proceeding eastward and leaving undisturbed blue, off to complete whatever unknowable mission objective had spawned it.
A sharp crack suddenly carried over the ice.
Something banged against her vehicle’s hull.
She felt a blast of air.
Another metallic bang.
Remington swore and started firing. The ear shattering racket of the fifty-cal filled the cabin, shaking the whole vehicle. Ahead, the FO swung his gun around and opened fire in the same direction. The rear gunner did as well.
Tracer streaks shot over the ice. Marinakis looked out her window, seeing the three streams converging at something on the horizon. The clean lines beat at the point in the ice, sending up clouds of heated water. Briefly mesmerized, she caught herself and yelled into her mic at the same time Brent did. “Cease fire!”
“Something out on the ice, boss,” Watts crackled into her headphones, “looks like it took a shot at us.”
“I don’t see anything, you sure you didn’t…” What? Imagine it?
“Definitely saw a flash out there. It get ya?”
Good question. She searched around the cabin, and sure enough, there was a bright hole on the left. Entry point, which meant there should be…
She sucked in her breath.
“Hey, Sergeant…”
Bryce turned to her, raised an eyebrow, and followed her gaze.
Two inches behind his head there was the exit hole. He looked at it and nodded. “No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.”
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