Chapter 17

Sgt. Chapman wore a glum expression on his face, and regarded Mike with barely concealed exasperation. “What the hell are you talking about? You mean like in the sky?”

After a long, grueling night, sequestered alone in his lab, Mike finally concluded his data modeling and analysis, confirming his worst fears. Realizing they had no time left to lose, he ran from the rear of Leavitt Hall, into the bright, midmorning sun, and told the first people he found.

Cpl. Ibarra, appearing equally forlorn, sounded at least moderately receptive. “Like the Sun?”

The two men were in the middle of a halfhearted inventory of the disaster relief supplies they’d brought from the armory. It was the first time Mike had seen them without their protective suits.

“No, probably not like our Sun,” he said, sounding manic in his fatigue, “but yes, a star in the sky. A huge star, with tons of energy. And it must have been pretty damned close too. Definitely somewhere in our local part of the galaxy.”

“A star?” Chapman asked, unwilling to accept that explanation. “I think you’ve been up too long. Maybe you should try to get some sleep.”

Mike shook his head vehemently. “No! You’re not listening. This isn’t just some wild ass guess on my part, okay? It was a star. I’m certain of it.”

Something Chapman had been holding inside finally spilled over. He jabbed a shaking finger at the dormitory.

“Have you seen those people in there recently, Mike? Because I have. While you’ve been locked up in your basement, doing god knows what for days, we’ve been in there watching good soldiers die! Watching those girls die! Now you tell me, how the fuck could a star do that?”

Stunned by his words, Mike stared at him through bleary, bloodshot eyes. “They died?” he asked in a low voice.

Chapman chucked the box of MRE’s he’d been holding into the Humvee’s trailer. “Yeah. They fucking died.”

Although he’d been preparing himself mentally and emotionally for this inevitable, the reality of it still hit him like a punch.

“W-who?”

“Private Grainer and Corporal Wojtewicz,” Ibarra said quietly. “And those girls you were with the night we met.”

Mike’s voice trembled. “Which one?”

“All of them.”

Already bone-weary with exhaustion, the crushing news cratered what tiny bit of reserve strength Mike had left. He took two steps backwards and fell on his ass, blinking rapidly as his vision blurred.

“Oh god, Natalie...”

The final image of that sweet girl holding his hand flashed in Mike’s mind, and brought him to tears. Ibarra laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry for your loss, homie.”

Mike wanted nothing more than to curl up into a ball, and he might have, were it not for the deep, guttural roar of approaching diesel engines, bringing him back to his weary feet. He wiped his face as an enormous, six-wheeled Army truck with a canvas cover over the bed, and an equally large white work truck carrying utility poles, rumbled slowly down the narrow gravel road from the corner of Leavitt Hall, coming to a stop just behind the tan Humvee. The loud hiss of air brakes just before the engines shut off caused him to flinch.

An overweight blonde woman in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing desert fatigues, hopped down from the cab of the Army truck and strode confidently toward them, crunching gravel under her boots.

“This the guy?” she asked Chapman, looking and pointing directly at Mike.

“Yes, Staff Sergeant.”

“He’s cute,” she said under her breath.

Mike took a step back as she approached, and stiffened when she grabbed him roughly by the arms with deceptively strong hands and pulled him closer for an unexpected kiss.

“That doctor friend of yours said if it weren’t for you, she wouldn’t be here, so I guess I fuckin’ owe you one for saving my soldier’s life,” the woman said when she finally let him go. She stuck out her hand. “Staff Sergeant Charmagne Pollard, Army National Guard.”

At a loss for words, Mike took it and the two shook.

“Strong, silent type, huh?” she asked, squeezing his hand and pumping his arm with more vigor than necessary. “I like that in a man. God damn, look at you. Anyone ever told you before that you’re drop dead gorgeous?”

Mike looked at Chapman and Ibarra, who seemed just as surprised by her brashness as he. The bombastic woman clapped him on the shoulder and finally let him go, but continued talking.

“Good talk, stud. We gotta do this again soon.” She turned to Chapman. “So, what were you ladies jabbering about anyway?”

“Nothing much, Staff Sergeant.”

“Bullshit. What was it?”

“He lost three of his students this morning,” Ibarra said.

Staff Sgt. Pollard’s face fell. “Oh, fuck me sideways,” she muttered. “I’m real sorry for your loss, um,...” She looked at him expectantly.

“Mike.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mike, but you bet yer ass, we’re gonna get the fuckheads responsible for this.”

“I really wish that were possible, Staff Sergeant,” Mike said despondently.

“I can’t think of a damn thing less sexy than getting called Staff Sergeant by you. You’re gonna call me Charmagne from now on. Clear? And don’t you worry, Mike. We’ll get ‘em.”

“Mike doesn’t think it was the big one, Staff Sergeant,” Ibarra said.

“That’s enough, Ibarra,” Chapman said between his teeth. “Button it.”

Charmagne appraised Mike. “Oh, yeah? Well, what do you think it was then, gorgeous?” she asked with a smile.

Mike looked into her pale, blue eyes for several seconds before saying it.

“A star.”

Her smirking reaction made him scowl.

“It’s called a gamma-ray burst,” he said. “It’s like...” He exhaled a deep breath. “Okay, imagine pointing a giant laser beam directly at Earth. Except, instead of being made of visible light, it’s made of the highest-energy gamma rays imaginable.”

“Yo, hold up,” Ibarra said. “How can a star shoot a laser beam? Are we talking about the Death Star here, or what?”

“I’m not an astrophysicist, okay?” Mike admitted. “But from what I understand, it happens sometimes when a star goes supernova.”

“Like, explodes?”

“Implodes, actually, but yes. Under certain conditions, when a star that’s spinning really, really fast goes supernova, all the stuff that falls into the collapsing core can rebound and get ejected from the poles as jets of high energy radiation, which can travel at near the speed of light for millions or even billions of years.”

“But you said this one was close,” Ibarra said, proving that he’d been paying attention.

“Right. From what I understand, those long-range ones happen every day, but they’re pretty harmless to us because, by the time they reach us, the laser beam is all spread out, and what little bit hits us gets deflected by our ionosphere. If it’s close enough, though, like within, say, ten thousand light years or so, and happens to be pointed directly at us, like this one seemed to be, then it’s like sticking a blowtorch in your face. You’re toast.”

“Wait,” Charmagne said. “So you think an exploding star a million billion miles away just jizzed all over Earth’s face?”

“I’m not sure that’s the scientific term for it, but yes. Pretty much exactly that.”

“Fuck, man,” Ibarra said, lifting his middle finger. “That star just said, ‘Fuck you in particular, planet Earth!’”

“You’re more right than you know,” Mike said. “The odds of a star that close going supernova, and emitting a gamma-ray burst of that magnitude, while also just happening to be pointed directly at us are, well ... astronomical. Literally.”

“Lucky us,” Chapman muttered.

“How sure are you about this?” Charmagne asked. “What if it was something else?”

“Right. Like a nuclear bomb,” Chapman said.

“Pretty damn sure. I mean, everything fits perfectly. No explosion, no fire disk, no blast cloud, no fallout, that distinctive smell of ozone, the intense radiation, the loss of GPS, the constant static on the radio, all of it. Especially the aurora. That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from ionizing radiation in the upper atmosphere. It was a gamma-ray burst. I’d bet my life on it.”

“Couldn’t it have been a neutron bomb?” Chapman asked, still clinging to his theory of a North Korean attack.

Mike shook his head and said, “I don’t think so. I mean no, definitely not. As far as I know, a neutron bomb is just a regular nuclear bomb with the neutron shielding removed.”

“Can we pause and rewind?” Ibarra asked, making a timeout signal. “You said a minute ago that we lost GPS. What did you mean by that?”

“Haven’t you noticed that the GPS in the Humvee isn’t working?” Mike asked.

Ibarra frowned. “Yeah, but we figured it got fried by the EMP.”

“There was no EMP,” Mike said, surprising them all. He pulled a small handheld device from his pocket. “The gamma rays interacting with the atmosphere produced a shower of secondary high-energy particles, and that’s what fried our electronics.” He held up the device. “This is a Garmin GPS. I take it with me whenever I go hiking. It was down in the basement with us when the event happened, so it was shielded from the radiation.” He handed it to Ibarra. “What does it say?”

“Lost satellite reception,” he said, handing it back.

“I’m sure you guys use these, or something like it, so you must know these devices only need a signal from three or four satellites to get an accurate position. There’s supposed to be at least thirty of them up there, but I’ve been monitoring this device for almost twenty-four hours, and it hasn’t received a single signal.”