Nemesis: Book Four (15 page)

P
resident James Hayley
addressed the nation yesterday, discussing the dangers of nuclear energy. He vowed that the corporations which allowed this disaster to happen would pay. He told the world that no one had been harmed yet, and that anyone who lost a single dollar because of this displacement would see full restitution.

He said these things, and all the while, Georgia Power—the company in charge of the nuclear plant supposedly melting down—has said nothing. No reporter who has reached out to them has been able to get a single response, not even a "No comment." It's as if the executives at Georgia Power have all left the country, and then cut off all connections to the rest of the world. Which is odd for a company that the President is blaming for the evacuation of an entire state.

It's not only odd to this reporter, though. It's becoming very odd to leaders around the world. France's President said this morning that the United States needed to be more forthcoming about the realities in Georgia, going so far as to say that what the President said in his speech didn't add up.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

What we know for certain is that the state is completely evacuated, or as close to it as any state can ever get. We know that last night, the National Institute for Science detected high levels of radiation, and we know that the highest levels weren't in Savannah. The highest levels of radiation were found in a small town called Grayson. In fact, the NIS detected virtually no radiation at all in Savannah.

So that leaves a few questions, the largest one being, how does a nuclear meltdown happen in a remote part of the state, while all the radiation detected is hundreds of miles away?

The President promised us that people will begin returning to their houses at the end of the month. Again, this is a maybe, maybe not situation. We really have no way of knowing, but we do know the President has been quiet since his press conference yesterday. We do know that other governments are becoming increasingly interested in Georgia. We do know that the press' interaction with the ongoing situation has been limited, to put it mildly.

This editorial asks what is happening in Georgia, perhaps leading readers to think this reporter knows more than the general public. The truth, though, is that no one knows. We have the official story, then we have radiation levels that don't match up. We have news reports of people who have been near the Georgia border stating that there is a strange, white plant growing, a plant that no one has seen before.

We don't actually
know
if anyone has died. We have only the President's word that they haven't.

If you were hoping for an answer to the editorial's question, you won't find one here. This author is just as confused—nay, frightened—as anyone else paying attention. There are a lot of possible answers, but all I can say is that the official answer isn't adding up, and the American people—and the world—deserve to know what is going on in the south-east portion of this country.

“
I
…," the human said, the single word dying in the still air.

Morena stood a few feet from her. She didn't know exactly what use this woman could be, but she had been in the tent with Kenneth Marks. The woman knew Will. She was connected, and perhaps with that connection came knowledge. That's what Morena needed from her, the knowledge to understand how to maneuver out of this situation.

“I… " the human tried again, yet still couldn't find another word to follow.

Her first born, Briten, walked to the side of Morena, his blue aura stretching out a little more than usual. He didn't stop though, but walked behind the human, so that he faced Morena and the human was in between the two of them. That was good. He didn't understand everything yet, but he understood that this human was different.

Morena could see the men killing her children from where she stood. She was sure that they could see her too. They didn't flee though. Perhaps the destruction their cold caused bolstered their courage. Perhaps their superiors refused to let them flee. Either way, the result was that they kept on killing while Morena stood here, a mile away, not doing anything to protect her kin.

"You wanted peace?" Morena said.

The woman nodded, smiling. A real smile, not one laced with fear or apprehension. That was good. The woman wanted to be here. The woman, somehow, trusted Morena.

"Look around you," Morena said. The woman didn't move, though, and so Morena lifted a hand and pointed at the men behind her. "Look at them."

The woman followed her directions, turning and looking beyond Briten.

She said nothing and neither did Morena. She could, of course, simply invade the creature's consciousness, take whatever she wanted as she had all the others. That came with risks, though—risks that Morena didn't know if she wanted to test right now. Thinking back to Thera, she tried to murder Morena in the end, and consequently died. Morena didn't need this woman panicking when Morena settled in, thus having to murder her as she did the other. That would leave Morena in the exact same place, standing in a shrinking world, where Bynums would shortly begin dying.

She needed this human to
want
to help. There would be no need to invade her body, then—not if the woman thought they were partners.

"They won't give us peace," Morena said. She let the words hang there for a few seconds before continuing. "The being in front of you, that's my son. He was just born, and even now, he stands in front of you to try and protect me if necessary. He senses the danger, even as a newborn. They're going to kill all my children, and then me."

The woman said nothing. The three of them stood in silence. Only Morena’s green aura moved, floating in the air, wanting to touch the human, but not daring yet.

"You don't think there can be peace?" the woman said, finally.

"I offered peace. I didn’t start chasing them. They arrived ready to eradicate me, to eradicate my kind. They showed up with tanks and weapons. There is only my son and myself right now, and even though he's ready to protect me, he can barely protect himself."

"I could talk to them…," the woman whispered.

"You could have done that before you came here. Why didn't you?"

Silence.

"You didn't because you knew that they didn't want peace. They want war. They want my death. My children's death." Morena's aura tasted something with that word, with
children
. She didn't know what, exactly, but the woman reacted when she heard it.

Why?
Morena wondered. What's there that you're not showing me? She could find out, easily, with her aura if she wrapped it around the woman, but that could end poorly. Yet, that word felt like a pressure point Morena could push down on, could twist in order to get what she needed.

"What do you want to do, then?" the woman said.

"I want to protect my species. My children." Morena lowered her voice, playing off the information her aura gathered. She needed to sound meek, perhaps even frightened. "You came here wanting peace, but they won't let us have it. I have no choice but protection. Look at him. His name is Briten. I named him after my husband, and he and I are the last of our kind. The last and the first. Have I tried to harm you since you arrived? No, because I don't hate your species. They hate me."

She paused for a second as the woman's eyes turned to Briten.

"They're going to kill him, and though he stands taller than you, he's no different than the babies the mothers on Earth carry in their arms. He can't defend himself. He has no hope without me. None of them do."

Morena's aura stretched out in front of the woman then, pointing to all the other capsules of colors around her. "They will all look like him. Soon, too. Their births are coming. If they're not all dead."

R
igley's eyes
fell across the color filled pods.

They were babies. And how many? Endless. Rigley turned again, doing a slow circle, as she looked out at the white fields, and knew that she couldn't possibly count how many pods she saw. All of them full of life. All of them wanting to live.

Just as her own child had wanted to live. Rigley never had the chance to talk to her daughter, but who could doubt that life wanted to live? Who could doubt that every cell in every creature to ever exist wanted to continue existing, to replicate if possible?

What was this creature, this alien, asking Rigley to do?

To help her save these children. Nothing else. The alien didn't ask for war, didn't ask to help kill, didn't threaten Rigley at all. She only wanted help
saving
those that depended on her most. An alien that wanted the same thing any mother would want, a safe place for her offspring.

I can help her
, Rigley thought.
I can help save all of these children.

Tears pricked at her eyes. How many men had she killed in Bolivia? Hundreds. And here, right now, she could redeem herself—she could make up for those murders by saving these beings. None of them had harmed a soul, none of them had even been given a chance to harm anyone. Humanity judged them before their births, the same as fate judged Rigley's own child.

Rigley turned back and looked at the men shooting the ice across the white fields.

"I can help," she whispered. "I can help save them."

"
H
ow
?" Morena asked. The speed at which the conversation progressed made her want to see inside the woman. Something was desperately wrong with her, something irrevocably broken, and Morena wanted to explore it. She wanted to know why the word
children
seemed to matter so much. She wanted to know what could make a woman show up here and agree to betray her own species in such short order.

Perhaps humans weren't attached like Morena. She remembered Bryan and Thera inside the Ether, remembered the way they shrieked when Morena hurt their parents. Morena witnessed attachment amongst a small group, but here, there appeared to be none? Perhaps humanity's attachment didn't truly extend to those outside of one's own social group.

Perhaps the survival of the species mattered only in that one's own group must survive, and that is why those on the edge of Morena's grasp were trying to kill her. They weren't concerned with those across the world, only concerned with making sure that those here, those close, didn't die.

Morena could never see life like that. Each Bynum, each one waiting to come out of their capsule, was her child, and each one dear. No social group existed outside of their species. They were one.

Whatever lay broken inside this creature had severed the remaining ties she held with humanity. Morena need not plunge inside her mind. This woman would walk the entirety of humanity to extinction.

"Do you have the ability to attack? While being assaulted?”

"It depends on the range, on what I'm attacking," Morena said.

The woman turned back and met Morena's gaze. Her look of wonder, her whispers were gone. "There are strategic places you can attack that will disrupt them. The problem is, they're a long way from here, and attacking one probably won't do it. You'll need to attack multiple places simultaneously. And even then, it's going to bring more people to fight you. A lot more. It'll give you time, but it won't free you from what they're trying to do."

“Time…," Morena said, thinking through what the woman told her. Time was what she needed. Time enough to let the birth occur, time enough to try and mature some of the Bynums, because with an army behind her, it didn't matter how much cold these humans amassed. They would fall. She needed
time
to gather strength, nothing more. "Time will work."

"Okay, then," the woman said. "Let's talk about how you'll attack, and what your plan is after you do it. If we don't have a plan, they'll all be back, and you won't get another chance to save any of your children."

Morena looked at this woman. These weren't the words of a mother, or of a broken being, but the words of a leader. Words Morena might have said herself, if the roles were reversed.

T
he woman
, Rigley, was….

Fucked.

That's how Will's mind had termed it when she came to visit him, and Morena picked up on the word. Now, Morena understood the intricacies of the word, because Rigley was most definitely fucked. Even so, now that she had decided to help, her mind was like that of a general. She seemed made to do this work.

Morena, if being honest, had been somewhat scared before this woman showed up. She didn't see a way out, didn't understand how to combat a world she barely knew. Now, though, she might be able to create enough room to breathe a bit, and in that breath, her children would come to life, and then all of this would end. The woman might be fucked, but she wasn't dumb, and she understood how important that breath, that time, was.

Morena had her plan and now it needed to be operationalized.

Rigley floated behind Morena, wrapped inside her aura. The heat from below would have ravaged her just as it had the surrounding landscape, but Morena's aura protected her from the brunt of it. Morena could have killed Rigley now that she understood the spots she needed to hit with this attack, but she saw Rigley as valuable. Not indispensable by any means, but worth keeping around because of her knowledge. And her apparent commitment.

Morena flew over the core, staring down into it again, but this time not thinking on what should be done. Now she looked down thinking about exactly
how
it would all be done. The strands remained tied to the core, stretching from the very edge where the cold killed them, to the outer ring of the hole that Morena floated over. They told her what was inside the core as well as out, letting her know both their pain and the amount of internal heat available.

Morena had to be careful here, not only with herself, but with the
core
. What she was attempting would weaken every piece of strand extending across this world. It might even weaken her, and certainly would weaken her children nearing life.

And in truth, she didn’t know if she could do it.

She told Rigley that she had a way to attack, and this was it. Truly, the only way that she could hit multiple targets at once.

There was no sense in sitting here and thinking about it any longer. The humans around her perimeter hadn't slowed; indeed, they still pushing inward, and within the hour the first of her children would be frozen and killed in their wombs.

Morena might die doing this, or weaken herself so much that it came to the same in the end. She had no other choice though; that was one thing Rigley helped her see in their walk to the core. Humanity would keep coming. They wouldn't stop, and now that they knew her weakness, they would press on until not a trace of her or her children remained.

Morena nodded, steeling herself for this, for the
weight
of it.

M
iles into the Earth
, the first wisps of a green smoke like substance filtered in. It moved around the edges of the inner sanctum which held the liquid rock, tracing along the cavern's ceiling. It didn't venture into the lava, only kept pouring down from a single spot, like some kind of green, ephemeral waterfall. It spread, trying to understand the new world around it and at the same time trying to envelop that world.

Finally, the green aura finished wrapping the lava in a cocoon, and then it waited, the color still shifting and moving as if trying to gain a better position.

It waited thirty minutes as it took information it gathered and fed it back up the waterfall to the aura's source, to its home. Finally, though, it was ready to act, ready to take in the information flowing down from its source and use it.

From across the cavern's ceiling, tiny points of the aura formed needles, and started pushing inward. The outer shell of the aura remained, creating what looked like a circular iron maiden, only with smoke instead of steel. The points moved inward and inward, until at the same time, they reached the molten lava. The churning liquid took the aura in as it would anything, afraid of nothing, accepting of all. The aura disappeared at once, the points of it flowing into the lava.

The outer aura connected with the inner lava, and across the entire cavern, poles of green light grew from the outer edges to the churning liquid, feeding more and more of the aura into it, where it dispersed with each passing second.

The aura across the cavern lit up, shining brighter than it had ever before, all at once—and then with the same immediacy, shot that light down through the poles and into the lava.

There had been churning, constant churning inside the Earth's core. For millions of years.

Yet when that light entered, a wave pulsed through the entirety of the moving lava. It started on the edges, sending ripples across the outer circle, and then pushing inward, moving through the churning, and stilling the entire mass of liquid.

For a single second, maybe less, as the pulse reached the very center of the circle, the whole of the Earth's core was dormant.

And then it started moving again.

Churning, but very differently. A section of the lava, the section closest to the waterfall, rose from the rest of its brethren, twisting and turning around itself, but obviously heading upward. It kept going, though physics said it should fall back in, splashing down into the boiling liquid below. It didn't. Up and up it pushed, slowly, even though the churning with which it wrapped in on itself again and again was rapid.

The section grew long, with more of the liquid following behind.

Higher, until it met the sunlight for the first time in its existence.

M
orena floated above the Earth
, perhaps three hundred feet above Rigley.

Every muscle in her body held the tenseness of wire supporting a massive weight. She wasn't moving though, only holding position with her eyes shut. She refused to open them. Her aura relayed every piece of information she needed back to her immediately. If she opened her eyes—to actually see what was happening around her, the beauty of it—she would lose focus and the missile she now created would collapse back to the ground.

She felt it rising above the Earth, felt it rising into the air, even felt the temperature rising around her as the core's heat infected the rest of the atmosphere.

The weight of it consumed her entire being. No other thoughts went through Morena's mind for the first time in her life, only the focus on moving this weapon. Any deviation from that focus and all was lost.

She took the tunnel of lava and spread it in an ever increasing circle, creating a kind of massive, orange mushroom. Nothing above looking down, no satellites, would be able to see it because it still resided within the protective wrap. Soon though, when it breached the strand's perimeter, everyone would see it. Everyone would know exactly what Morena had done.

The lava continued rising from the hole, and the umbrella forming above Grayson kept growing, spreading a wave of heat across the land never before witnessed.

Morena, eyes closed, pushed onward.