Prologue

Pamir Mountain region, Afghanistan

Five years ago

Twelve minutes after the Arachosia Rift Event.

 

“Medic! I found Inman!”

Walter Inman’s eyes popped open to find Sergeant Bateman leaning over him with his helmet off. No blue light in the sky. No writhing, shapeless mass descending from above.

It was over. They were still alive.

How long had he been out? The last thing Inman remembered was something slamming down on his head and a blinding jolt of pain. Now all he felt was numb.

I’m in shock, he thought idly. I’m in shock and I’m going to die.

Bateman turned his head down to look at him. The right side of the soldier’s face was smeared with blood. The rest was covered in swaths blue and black liquid. He frantically dug into his pocket, then reached up and jammed a small sliver of wood between his lips. That made Inman smile. Even when things went to complete shit, Bateman still had to have a toothpick in his mouth.

“There he is,” Bateman said, grinning back at him. “You hanging in there with us?”

Inman wanted to respond, but speaking felt like an insurmountable task. Instead, he looked to his left at the shattered platform, the bulk of which had toppled less than ten feet away. His eyes moved back to Bateman, hoping that the sergeant understood his silent question.

“You did it,” Bateman said, putting a hand on his chest. “You shut it down. We took care of the rest that made it through.”

Inman already knew that. The rift had closed just seconds before the platform careened into him, a storm of steel and wires that seemed to want him dead as badly as the thing that rammed into it.

He closed his eyes. It was all coming back to now. The air ripping around him. The ground shaking beneath his feet. The roar that made his ears feel like they were on fire.

In the final moments before he lost consciousness, he’d accepted that his life was about to end. The primal fear of ceasing to exist had disappeared, replaced by a stabbing realization that he would never see his family again. The same work he’d neglected them for was about to remove him from their lives forever.

But an instant before that could happen, someone had stepped into death’s path, wielding one of the blue-tipped spears every villager kept in their home. The next few seconds after that were a blur of blood and screams, both human and non-human alike. The part of the platform that hadn’t collapsed yet was met with a second, much closer collision, obliterating whatever tenuous hold it still had on remaining upright. A falling metal beam had been the last straw for Inman’s body, which went limp and unconscious before he could call out to the man who’d saved his life.

“Armaghan.”

Bateman looked both shocked and relieved to hear his voice. “What was that?”

“Armaghan,” Inman repeated, barely above whisper. “Was standing in front of me and to my left.”

Bateman turned to look. Inman tried to look as well, but his view was blocked on that side. The only bit of daylight visible to him was at ground level, where Armaghan’s spear was still propping up the enormous, shimmering carcass.

“Shit!” a voice yelled from the other side. “Found R-Mag! He’s bleeding out!”

“Don’t call him that,” Inman whispered. He suddenly felt an urgent need to make sure his friend’s name was said correctly. “Hates that nickname.”

“Someone help me get him down off the spike!”

Inman recognized the voice this time. It was West, the unit’s head field medic. A cluster of soldiers’ feet converged around the spear, causing him to feel a pang of anxious relief. They were moving fast. That was good. It meant Armaghan was still alive. It wouldn’t have been fair if Armaghan died trying to save him, especially since he wasn’t going to make it, himself.

 “Lung’s collapsed!” West shouted. “We need a flutter valve plugged in now or he’s done!”

The feet beneath the carcass shuffled frantically as West continued barking orders.

“Marsh, start dressing the area while I prep the valve. Notton, go to the other side with Bateman and start working on Inman.”

Inman’s mind drifted. For some reason, he found himself fixated on the normally soft-spoken West and his oddly commanding tone. When people were dying, West went from being the unit’s doctor to the one in charge. He got to boss everyone around, even Bateman. Not a very good trade off, though. Taking orders wasn’t so bad, especially when your friends were still alive.

Inman hoped Armaghan was alive.

Notton, the unit’s other medic, slid across the sand into Inman’s rapidly deteriorating view. Bateman got up and began tossing scraps of metal off him while she tugged and patted at his right leg.

He could feel that. Probably a good sign.

Inman craned his neck to watch what Notton was doing. She tore open his pant leg, revealing a bone that was sticking straight out from his calf.

That was probably bad.

“Hang in there, Walt,” Bateman grunted.

He lifted a beam off Inman’s waist and heaved it to one side while Notton began to apply a field dressing. He wanted to tell her to stop. Why was she worried about trying to fix his leg? He wasn’t going to be able to use it after he died, anyway.

“Coming over to you!”

West’s voice cut through the fog pulling Inman’s mind towards numbness.

 “What about Armaghan?” Notton called back. “What’s happening with him?”

West slid down beside her, his teeth gritted in such a way that it wasn’t clear if he was angry, trying to not to cry, or both. His croaked reply was the last thing Inman heard before the world went dark again.

“Nothing. Nothing’s happening.”


****

 

Lanier Military Research and Development Facility

Southeastern United States

Now

 

Something was happening.

The first dot on Kendrick Bennett’s radar was so small and unexpected that he’d actually wiped the screen’s surface, making certain that it wasn’t just a piece of ceiling tile. It was an absurd precaution, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. Just one reading meant the entire base would need to go on alert. That made him wonder what would happen when another reading popped up seconds later.

Almost a full minute passed before he realized that the other operator, Thomas Ward, hadn’t said anything. Normally, a lack of communication between them was the way he preferred things. But right now, Bennett needed to know that he wasn’t the only person in the room completely paralyzed by the image in front of him.

“Hey Ward, are you seeing this?”

He didn’t answer at first, which made Bennett even more nervous.

“Got two pings out near the lake,” Ward said after clearing his throat. “Less than thirty seconds apart. Should we call this in?”

Bennett already knew the answer to that. He got up from his chair, crossed to the other side of the room, and picked up the red phone, knowing that the simple act of pulling it off the receiver would put someone on the other end of the line.          

“Two readings just popped up on radar,” Bennett said with as much calmness as he could muster.

His declaration was initially met with silence, which made him wonder if anyone had even heard it. Maybe the person on the other end was like him: Senses dulled from weeks of fruitless observation, making the one action he was finally supposed to take feel strangely wrong.

“Please tell me you’re not serious,” a low, raspy voice finally replied.

“Three pings now,” Ward called out from his station.

“Three pings now,” he repeated into the phone. “How would you like me to proceed, sir?”

Bennett immediately regretted his last statement. He had no idea if the person he was speaking to had any sort of rank. Calling them ‘sir’ may have been a safe bet, but there was no guarantee that he was a superior officer. And as far as how to proceed, his orders ended with alerting whoever was on the other end of the phone about the readings. Anything else wasn’t in his jurisdiction—or his problem.

“Don’t do or say anything,” the voice on the other end of the line commanded. “We’ll be there momentarily.”

Bennett didn’t know the physical location of the person he’d spoken to, so ‘momentarily’ could have meant anything. In this case, it was less than two minutes before four men stormed into the radar room. Two of them were high ranking officers—colonels by the looks of their stripes and the eagle insignias on their chests. Another was dressed in the standard black suit, white button down shirt, and plain black tie worn by the ‘agents’ stationed at the base. Men and women who carried all the authority in the world without any rank to back it up. It was never revealed to any of the military staff what department they worked for or where they came from, but everyone had been told in no uncertain terms to defer to them on all matters. When you combined their mysteriously sourced jurisdiction with their uniformly monochromatic appearance, the agents seemed downright spooky—which was why everyone referred to them simply as ‘spooks’ when they were out of earshot.

The last man to enter the radar room was outfitted in work clothes like he’d been on a construction job. He was also chewing a toothpick the size of a two-by-four. After the group stared at Bennett and Ward’s radar stations for a moment, he was the first one to speak.

“Yep. Exactly what we saw before getting hit at Arachosia five years back.”

“How do we know this isn’t a false positive?” one of the colonels asked. “Couldn’t these radars be picking up something else, like an untagged aircraft?”

“Negative,” the other colonel replied. His voice was like boots crunching across broken glass, indicating to Bennett that he’d been the one on the other end of the emergency line. “This station is calibrated to detect event-related incidents only. Nothing else.”

“And besides, aircraft don’t do that,” the construction worker added, pointing to the screen. “That’s the telltale sign of a harbinger incursion.”

The three pings had grown significantly in size and were now pulsating at an alarming rate.

“We need to contain this,” the man in the black suit said, still staring at Bennett’s screen. “The countermeasures we have in place shouldn’t have even let things get to this point.”

“They’re still being utilized.” the raspy-voiced colonel replied. “Spear Point and Pluto’s Gate personnel still think they can rein it in. But if they can’t—and this goes as badly as we’ve drilled for—then we’ll need to mobilize and transport all personnel, munitions, vehicles, and research materials from here over to Woodstock. We’ll also need to alert and scramble any other available combat ready units within a 250 mile radius—and that still might not be enough if the last time was any indication.”

“We need to get Inman on this,” the other colonel said. “He did most of the tech work on Spear Point. He’s also one of the few people we have who’s dealt with things at this point in the process.”

“I think Walt’s at his family’s lake house right now,” the construction worker added. He pulled a toothpick from his mouth and pointed to one of the circles on the screen “And if I’m not mistaken, one of those readings is almost directly on top of it.”

“He doesn’t need to know that,” the spook replied. “And we don’t need to call him yet. Let’s finish prepping the gate platform at Woodstock. That’ll put us in a position to contain this if our people can’t. We’ll call him if it comes to that.

The four men turned around and headed back out of the radar room without any further explanation, leaving Bennett and Ward in the familiar position of silently staring at their monitors. But unlike the thousands of hours before, Bennett’s mind was now alert and racing with ‘what-ifs.’ Every one of the men who just left the room knew more than he and Ward did, and that information had them on the verge of full-blown panic. Even the spook had started to sweat a little.

In that moment, Bennett’s job staring at a screen all day didn’t seem so bad. If two colonels and a spook were nervous, then things might be going south in a hurry. Part of him wanted to find some way to help, but another part was selfishly glad that he didn’t have to carry whatever burden those men had walked out the door with. All he had to do was keep staring at his monitor and watch for any changes.

That happened five minutes later when a fourth reading appeared.

Next Chapter: Chapter 1: Michael