Now that Martin was in the air he was easier to relax. He still couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t being followed. But for now he felt relatively safe.
The mission scope had been down-loaded into ANGL a bit earlier than planned, but whenever it was necessary, Martin would be briefed. Some data was encrypted and required RF codes. Other data was locked with specific time locks to be accessed later. For now, with the launch window a full three weeks away he would have some free time in Europe; at least the part of the continent that hadn’t been demolished by the CME.
Martin’s trip to London was aboard the newest thing in the air. Aeroflot had designed the Wave-Schooner, a heavier-than-air tethered mono-wing.
Martin hadn’t crossed the Atlantic since before the CME. This trip was therefore a rare and welcome luxury. Since the oil crisis of 2012, the world at large had adopted a new economy, lean on fossil fuel energy.
After the CME, the need for mass transportation had dropped off drastically. Besides not having any fuel, the airline industry couldn’t fill an airplane with business flyers or customers who could or would pay the price. Tickets were at a premium, and often distributed through a lottery.
It was a matter of debate as to whether the CME had been a blessing or curse. With the world in unrest and the sky filled with toxic dust, humanity was rapidly moving up the endangered species list.
Global climate change threatened to do us in, within a decade or two. We were simply a petri dish full of diseases, both social and physical. The oceans had become an un-navigable, toxic red tide. Fifty-foot waves ruled the oceans, and hurricanes were being numbered rather named.
It had all started when armies from around the world gathered in the Middle East ready to claim the remaining oil resources, and to settle the world supremacy issue for the last time. Oil rich Israel stood by like a lone sheep surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves.
There was no way out. Diplomacy was a joke. Iran and North Korea had played the UN like a cheap fiddle for years. Even fraternal orders were signing non-aggression pacts, and most of those were violated before the ink dried.
Every finger caressed a trigger. Who would blink first? Countries had postured themselves into a corner. The world was on the threshold of World War III and no one wanted to take the blame for starting it.
The Muslim Extremists were experts at terrorism but an all out war was something entirely different. They had rudely pushed everyone’s button. They were truly “equal opportunity” offenders. They had been fighting among themselves for centuries, but now their in-your-face diplomacy had royally pissed everyone off.
The USA, the land of the free and home of the brave, had been hijacked by perverted self-serving interpretations of the Bill of Rights. The extremists with the help of the every-present “useful idiot”, and hordes of godless crackpot groups in the country made a mockery of all freedoms thought to be inviolate. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” had corroded into a mantra of “greed, growth and power”. The words of President Bush had proven to be truer than anyone could have guessed; “money trumps peace”.
The US had been out maneuvered at every new opportunity. The Chinese had one-upped every major tactical weapon development of the West and used North Korea as their straw-dog bait to draw out any takers.
The public was blinded with self-interest from decades of prosperity and was willing to back anyone who would tell them “they could have their HD TVs and cheap gas too”. As fast as they backed away from God, God distanced himself from them. In their panic to maximize the bottom line, they were about to lose it all.
The European Union moved with the grace of a drunken clown. They spoke with a cacophony of voices, agreeing on nothing. On the one hand, they condemned the violence in the Middle East, and on the other hand sold and shipped them weapons. “Money trumps peace”.
Russia spoke out of both sides of her face as it had done for decades. In reality, she was rooting for the winner, whoever that would be. Their plan, historically, had been to move in at the last moment and reap the spoils in co-harmony with the winners.
Who would shoot first? It wasn’t that no one wanted war; it was that no one wanted to lose it. And so, there they sat, in the sand of the Middle East, waiting for the other guy to make the first move.
Blink, damn it, blink! Then, suddenly while all were posed in the hot, dry Valley of Megiddo, there was a blink. Though some scientists had theorized the possibility, never before had humankind experienced it on this scale. The sun blinked! Not so it could be seen with the naked eye, but every astronomical solar sensor registered an outrageous fluctuation of energy greater than any other in recorded history. Coronal observatories saw it first. It started out to be a solar flare, it quickly mushroomed into what is known as a Coronal Mass Ejection; CME. A huge chunk of solar mass suddenly ejected off the surface of the sun. It has happened before but always, mercifully, the earth was spared the brunt of the blow.
Initial measurements set the speed of the ejection in excess of three quarter of a million miles per hour. The plasma mass rapidly expanded and belched outward from the solar surface into a gigantic yawing splay. It raced across the chasm of empty space, reordering into an immense elemental dust cloud; on a collision course with the planet earth. For nearly a dozen days, the on coming cloud shadowed the sun’s light. The moon hung in the sky, draped in burnt umber. By the time the dust reached earth, its density had reduced to about 10 pounds of matter per cubic mile. No biggie except that it was still traveling at nearly 100,000 miles per hour with a shadow far exceeding that of the not so sunny side of the planet. Its impact pounded the stratosphere and troposphere for just under an hour as it flashed by our planet on it’s way to deep space.
If it had been one square mile of the earth’s surface, it would not have been noticed. But, over half the surface of the earth, now that is one giant velvet hammer.
The dust that directly impacted the upper atmosphere passed through and filled the sky with a rain of meteoric streaks. The sky rolled up like a scroll. The plasma tracks in the stratosphere generated a barrage of lightening for the duration of the CME. It looked like every star in the sky was falling.
I looked when he opened the sixth seal, and behold a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood. And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. Matt 6:12,13
. . . a third of the sun was struck and a third of the moon and a third of the stars . . . . Rev 8:12