Dateline

New Year's Eve, 2015 local / T plus 15 hours, 15 minutes

Edwards Air Force Base, California

If there was a lesson to be learnt from this whole debacle, General Taylor was unsure what it was, or whether it even mattered. From his vantage point, lying on the sandy scrub ground a little way from the nearest buildings, his back propped up against a jeep lying on its side, it all seemed quiet and peaceful. His left leg hurt abominably, the tibia and fibula shattered, the result of the crash that had done for half his team, and nearly himself, when they arrived at Edwards.

The wreckage of the C-17 Globemaster transport that had taken him from Washington to Edwards lay a few hundred feet away, still emitting smoke and spreading a smell of kerosene and burning plastic across the airfield. A few minutes earlier, he could still see it; a grey-black shape on the brown desert floor, but now darkness was all but complete, and the only light was the staccato muzzle flash and occasional larger explosion from the gunfight taking place over a mile away at the other end of the runway. 

When they had got near to the base, it had been impossible to get any response from the tower, or anyone on the ground. Their approach had been into the sun, and the pilots were obviously having problems. His aide said something about all the aids to navigation having been spoofed - the readings they were getting were unreliable, so they made a visual approach. It wasn't apparent a fire-fight was taking place until the ground-to-air missile hit them. It was a small missile - probably shoulder launched - but it had been enough to cripple the big aircraft and bring it down hard, the nose hitting first before the rest of the plane pancaked, breaking into several pieces as it slewed off to one side. The runway was strewn with debris. Several crew and members of his team had been killed.

Mathers, his aide-de-camp, had gone off with two of the crew to find out what was going on, leaving him with a nervous private holding a 9mm pistol and hand-held radio. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of his wife, away at her sisters in Miami, and his daughter, gone now under the gaze of the extra-terrestrial beam. The Death Ray, Mathers had called it. He'd made it sound like something out of War of the Worlds. 

He started to laugh, realising that of course, it was almost certainly exactly that. He stopped laughing when the pain got too much.

"General? Sir, Colonel Mathers is on the radio, sir." The private, who's name he couldn't remember, was holding the radio out to him. He noticed the absence of gunfire then, the silence profound in the dark.

He took the proffered radio and pressed the transmit button. "Colonel, report."

The radio was full of static, but through it, he could hear Mathers' voice coming through in a state of constrained excitement. "General, the threat is neutralised. It seems most of the base personnel left a several hours ago, leaving a small number of volunteers to secure the base. It appears some of those volunteers had been promised a plane out, but got upset when they discovered no plane existed. Seems they got drunk and tried to break into a commercial hangar, which unknown to them had several Delta Force guys inside."

"Delta Force? What the hell were they doing here?"

"Don't know, sir. They said they were on exercise, but why they were in this particular hangar, I haven't a clue."

"Tell me, is the hangar the one owned by Stone Sky?"

"Yes ... how did you know, sir?"

"A hunch. As it happens, I directed us to come here because of what's in that hangar. Come and get me."

"Yessir, on our way."

Fifteen minutes later, he was outside the hangar, sat on a luggage cart covered in folded tarpaulins to make him more comfortable. Mathers and the Delta Force leader stood close by, the rest of the plane crash survivors and Delta squad arrayed loosely within earshot.

The Delta Force Master Sergeant stood by Mathers was a huge man, bearded and all muscle under his uniform, but his intelligent face was focussed on him and he was struck, as was often the case when confronted by special forces, by a sense of immense competence.

"I expect you'll want to know why I'm here. Well, to be honest, I didn't come with any grand plan to enact, and I don't have a 'Hail Mary' to offer you. This is purely a mission of personal survival. I'm sorry to tell you that for all intents and purposes, the chain of command collapsed hours ago."

The men around him didn't show any sign of disgust or dismay at his statement. They'd all come to the same conclusion, and had already had to deal with the consequences. The bodies lined up neatly on one side of the hangar spoke of that, as did the holes and scorch marks in the hangar doors.

That damage gave him some anxiety, knowing that what was inside that hangar was likely there only hope.

"Now, has Able Stone arrived yet?"

Mathers looked confused, not knowing what he was talking about, but the Master Sergeant gave him a knowing look.

"So you're here on Able's invite too, are you?"

"Not exactly. I just heard he was headed here, and I'm aware of his little project. Thought I'd try my luck. I know, it's selfish and ... maybe even cowardly. But it's doing something and you never know. Good might come out of it yet."

No-one said anything. He suspected ... knew even, that the reason the Delta Force team were defending this very hangar was for the same reasons hed just given himself. "Care to tell me how you know Able, and how you got a ticket for this ride?"

"I'm married to his niece. We happened to be out here since last Tuesday on exercise. Able called me about four hours ago and told me to secure the hangar."

The big soldier looked concerned for a moment, his eyes scanning the airfield briefly before returning to him. "To be honest, I thought he'd be here by now. And some people from his lab in Los Angeles too; they were supposed to be picking up my wife on the way here."

General Taylor considered this for a while. There were five Delta Force team members, Mathers and himself plus three of the flight crew from the C-15. More coming from L.A., and Able, already late, with who knew how many more?

Another worry pushed itself to the fore. Those hangar doors had taken some pasting, and they were thin and fragile. "Is it damaged? Where's the pilot?"

For the first time, the Delta Force Master Master Sergeant looked worried. "Well, far as we can tell, it's not scratched. But the pilot for this thing ... he's over there, with the others."

Taylor looked at where the man was pointing, to the line of corpses on the ground.