EXTRACT FOR
Penance
(Author Unknown)

Chapter One

    

    Raymond Pickett stood on the bare site of what had once been his large Tudor-style home, a residence that had once presented an astonishing view of the cool blue waters rippling over Lake Erie. He had never actually visited his magnificent house after the Takans had covered the skies above with warships, and then swept away human civilization as though it had been nothing more than an ant colony, but he occasionally did so in his dreams. The power of Earth's adversary had been enough to turn what had been a mountain range of buildings in neighboring Detroit into a perfectly flat, smoking prairie in less than a microsecond. Lake Erie, just beyond the backyard that Ray had once had a special deck and hot tub installed on to admire, was now a vast smoldering, empty canyon. Smoke hung like a fog everywhere around the world, the incinerated clouds of what had been countless people and everything they had created. MILLIONS OF YEARS OF EVOLUTION ??" NOW HUMANITY HAS BEEN REDUCED TO NOTHING! Even in the desperation that had become his waking life, he realized that back when Mankind had it all, he always wanted more, but only for himself. Yes, he did admit of his past insatiable greed to himself now, but there was another ghost haunting him: the man he'd always thought that he'd been was really something so much darker, concealed beneath the surface. His entire life had been a storefront covering a horrifying inner nightmare, and this terrifying true self was now starting to push into his conscious mind. He was losing himself to something he didn't know or remember, and he fought against it with every sweating, aching thought he had - even screaming in the end. This was when he always woke up.

    Out of a life-threatening necessity, Ray never made an actual sound after returning from one of his dreams. He now looked down the dark, metallic cargo bay. It stretched down the length of the alien ship for several miles, a gloomy and benighted cavern, that was filled with the shuffling sounds of half a million other humans. A loud pounding stabbed him through his metal seat, and filled the air with noise. But he'd gotten used to it, the weeks of constant WOMP, WOMP, WOMP. No one talked, yelled, laughed or whispered. It was cold, maybe forty-five degrees, and he wore only a thin, grey coverall garment for warmth, the same as everyone else. Four weeks of hell, with only a lifetime of slavery to look forward to, a reality that would greet them very soon. Everyone in the hold was silent out of fear, most having seen the horror of a twenty-foot-tall Takan materializing out of thin air in front of some person who'd somehow offended it. The usual punishment was then administered, a white-hot heat beam of heat into the person's eye, shining through the back of his head. Ray had held his tongue to the roof of his mouth for all of this time not only out of fear but because of intense thought. He had a secret.

    Michelle Rawlins was thin; this not being lost in the over-sized jump suit she wore that looked more like a potato sack. Very attractive with her bright blonde hair. It was uncombed, ratty even, and, combined with the dark rings around her eyes against a sickly white complexion, made her look like a tormented spirit. But a few months ago, during the glory days of lush food and hair sculpting mastered to artful perfection, she'd obviously been a definite a knock-out. Ray had seen her constantly since they departed their world. They had slept mere inches apart for many nights, like they were married, and yet she'd neither smiled nor whispered to him. He'd learned by careful observation that the Takans were not all-seeing, and now he could no longer repress his desire to speak. It had hung in the back of this throat like the deepest of thirsts.

    "Where are you from?" Ray mumbled, his head lowered. Michelle demurred, but he persisted and asked again.

    "Cincinnati," she quietly groaned. Grieved looks were exchanged among six or seven people. The Takans had hit what used to be the American Mid-West first, and hit it the hardest. Michelle continued. "I was in Washington D.C. attending a management seminar. I guess that's why I survived to be here now." Everyone remained silent, remembering the shock of First Day. She looked at him, her wildly hazel eyes her only feature not exhausted or starved.

    "You?"

    "I'm a professor of physics at the University of Michigan. I was in D.C. also, working on a project for the Department of Energy."

***

    Radioactive waste management had been the latest hot-button topic keeping a perpetual intra-government feud alive. Partisan griping in the House of Representatives had escalated into a furor, but to Doctor Pickett, this was opportunity. During the summer break, he found himself in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the District of Columbia, working for the Administration. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT NOW CAN HELP. I'LL FIGURE OUT A SAFE PLACE FOR THEM TO STORE THE RADIOACTIVE CRAP, AND THEY'LL BE GENEROUS WITH THE GRANT MONEY FOR MY OWN HOBBIES. ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER IN THIS TOWN. THEY'LL SWING MORE ACCELERATOR TIME FOR ME NOW, AND IN RETURN I'LL GIVE THEM MORE ENERGY THAN THEY WOULD HAVE EVER IMAGINED IN THEIR WILDEST HALLUCINATIONS OF GRANDEUR. U.S. REPRENTATIVES WILL BECOME SENATORS, AND I'LL WIN RETIREMENT WITH SOME REALLY SERIOUS COMFORT BEFORE I'M FORTY! Up north at the university, his ivory tower colleagues had often scowled at him, heckling him as being a money-grabbing opportunist. To this he'd always offered his standard defense: "What some entrepreneurs do with M.B.A.s and stock markets, I'll do with science and mathematics. People will be better off from my ideas, and they'll in turn make me better off, so what's the problem?" Of his snobbish judges, he couldn't understand why there must always be a conflict between academia and capitalism. He was creative, possessing a dozen patents, with two more about to go on the books, and several of them generating royalties that were quite lucrative. Now Doctor Pickett was in D.C., ostensibly working on shielded radiation-proof containers that were destined to become designer furniture for the upscale Yucca Mountain Apartments in Nevada. But he was also putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would take his research to the next level, a working experiment on sub-nucleon fission. Quark fission was a wild fantasy, an impossible idea of a single reactor being equal to millions of conventional nuclear breeders. To break apart an atomic nucleus was incredible, and splitting up an individual neutron into a bunch of separate quarks was unheard of, and had never been done. But Ray wanted to go one step further, and rip apart the tiny quarks themselves. Once THAT soup settled down, there was a whole lot of heat released. He knew he could make it work, and was down in Washington to convince allies of this, even though there were precious few of those on that damn House subcommittee. But before any of this could happen, the radios and televisions and lights and cars all suddenly stopped for no apparent reason one midday.

    The people in the initially silent streets became sporadically panicked, as they stared at the dozens of plumes of smoke off in the distance that had once been aircraft filled with thousands of people; whether on the ground or airborne, all flights had been cancelled. Most people kept their wits though, waiting by their defunct cars for a while before walking home. But it was the not knowing that really got under Doctor Pickett's skin.