Chapter 2

“History is never repeated, only perfected. I live in fear of the one who may complete the task.”

- Private diary entry of Governing Ambassador Arla Sonra recorded three days prior to her disappearance.

Fennen’s legs turned hard as he pushed himself back, his arms swung back to the right as he pulled on the fishing rod, trying to extend himself as far as possible. The rod bowed and the line pulled back at him so hard, he thought it would snap, but carbon flexsteel never snapped. He let loose and leaned forward, his body harness keeping him from from leaving his seat. He spooled the reel furiously, trying to take up as much line as possible. “You're not getting away!” he screamed at the giant on the other end of the reinforced line.

“When's dinner?” his daughter Deena called from the lower cabin. Fennen pulled back on the rod again and strained to get the words out.

“When it jumps on the plate!”

“Well hurry up, we're hungry.”

“I could use a little help here!” he yelled back, but got no answer. His reel gave way, but he managed to recover before all the line spooled off. Fennen cursed the fish, “Butter-dipped dream,” he whispered through the strain, “I ain't letting you go.” He was sure this was the same fish that always escaped him on their annual vacations to the Mediterranean. Each year, the giant found some way to elude Fennen's boatside barbeque, but not this time, Fennen promised himself. Each year Fennen returned to the battle—as he liked to imagine it. And if he never caught the giant? Secretly, it wouldn’t matter. The fun wasn’t in the victory as much as in the battle.

Fennen's more than twenty years with State Security had been the most challenging of his life. He lived for his job. He was ambitious, not for promotion or professional status, but for the chase. More than ambitious, work was Fennen’s hobby—until he retired. A few too many battles, and a little too much enjoyment taken in the battle instead of the end result, sent Fennen home with a forced early retirement. Fennen no longer had criminals to catch, just one criminal fish that eluded the former officer, taunting him boat side every year. The chase. The battle. The struggle. Victory was good, but often an adrenaline letdown. Fennen couldn’t eat his former opponents—but he meant to now.

A small alert symbol flashed in the top right corner of his vision. “Deena! Get that for me, will ya?” He pulled back hard, his forearms, biceps, and shoulders straining, then let loose to reel in the line. His hand moved like lightning until the giant pulled back, the force catching Fennen by surprise as his whole body jerked forward. The icon for the call changed, showing that someone else had answered the family link. A moment later, the image of his wife Kali, appeared in the icon's place. She looked horrified. “What's wrong?” he asked, loosening his grip. The line spooled off. Detecting that Fennen had let it go, the rod auto-clipped the line, letting Fennen’s prize escape once again.

“Fennen, it's your brother. He logged a message. Holy lights, Fennen!” Kali transferred the call replay to him. As it clicked through, he heard his wife coming up from behind. Deena was alongside her.

“Hello, big brother. I logged this message to reach you before you see it on the news or the authorities call you. By the time you get this, I'll be gone. I've always loved you, big brother. I've always loved you. Please remember that. And try to have a good Judgment Day. Today, it has new meaning.”

Fennen was stunned. Dead, my brother is dead?

The message concluded, “Look up, brother. Tell me what you don't see.”

The log ended. Through watery eyes, Fennen looked to the sky. His grief turned to shock as he looked through the broken clouds. For the first time he noticed in the distance the dark streaks of black and fireballs the peppered the blue sky.

City of Heaven was gone.

Fennen pushed full-throttle to get his boat across the sea and into a dock in time for a transport to Tether Base. “Daddy,” Deena asked, “what did Uncle Tellen do?”

“I don't know, sweetheart, I don't know. News, get me a news link.” Deena patched her father and mother into her link and dialed in a news feed.

“…incident at City of Heaven severed all tether connections between the city, and its base on Terra. The Terra-side of all twelve tethers are falling. Most of Tether Base is destroyed. Satellite imagery has revealed explosions on the ground, with tethers falling into the atmosphere. Details are sketchy since all communications with City of Heaven have been severed. From ground-based observations, the City appears to have lost all power. As many as two hundred thousand may be dead at Tether Base, which by early accounts has been completely destroyed. Hundreds of thousands more are critically injured. Authorities are already calling this an act of terrorism unlike any seen in more than twenty-three hundred years...”

“Link off,” Fennen commanded. The image faded from his view. The boat's engine screamed in protest as Fennen pushed harder on the throttle. “Link on. Copy the last message from Tellen So'tar and forward it to State Security. Flag urgent. Include my destination and arrival time.” The biochip signaled confirmation of his request.

Through salt spray and tears, Fennen So'tar cursed the day his brother was born.

***

Deena stood on the bow, watching her father and mother talk with security agents. The pier was surrounded by hover patrols. The Telvi City news media were out in force, having intercepted Fennen's transmission to State Security. Several reporters desperate for a scoop with the brother of "The Man Who Brought Heaven Down," tried to hack into Fennen's link while he was being interrogated by security. Fennen detected the intrusion right away and the reporters were arrested. Amateurs. It helped that Fennen was a former security agent himself, and had the implanted hardware to detect such intrusions.

Telvi was a small resort community of eighty thousand. Most major correspondents wouldn't have been caught tapping into a link. But the network journalists were caught in the downfall, as Ammos, where most of the major Terran media centers were located, was pummeled by falling tethers.
Deena couldn't believe what was happening. How could one man destroy the work of four hundred years of Terran achievement? It hardly seemed possible that that one man was her uncle. No one had been closer to Tellen than Deena. Although her family celebrated Judgment Eve every year, it was Tellen who explained the mystery of its songs, symbols, and celebrations. Yes, Mom and Dad celebrated Judgment Day. But they didn't really believe in it, not like Tellen. Tellen always believed. Whereas most children grew out of it at an early age, Tellen kept on believing. “All myths have a basis in fact,” he would say, “except Judgment Day. Judgment Day isn’t based on fact. Judgment Day is fact. Judgment Day is true, has always been true, and will always be true.”

Her father thought Tellen had trouble discerning the difference between fantasy and reality, which had contributed to Tellen’s conviction on evidence tampering charges and eventually cost her father his job. But Tellen spoke with such certainty about the King, the City of Nations, and the Great Generation, that she could not help but wonder if some part of what he believed was right, at least in part. Even if it was a myth, who could it harm? She caught herself in mid-thought. How would the King judge the man who destroyed Heaven?

Deena stepped off the bow and onto the pier. Her father approached with two armed officers. “Deena, are you okay?”
“How can anyone be okay?” she responded.

Her father didn’t answer directly. “Everyone who knew Tellen is being questioned. The agency needs to know everything Tellen ever told you about his involvement with the Synod.”

“The Synod? You knew more about that than I did. You were with him.” Fennen’s flash of anger didn’t have the desired effect.

“Deena, agents will be with us at all times from now on. Our family is in trouble,. You’re right—people know about Tellen.” Fennen paused, “And me.” His face gave away his shame. “It’s worse now. So they will be guarding us for a while, and watching us—maybe for a long time.”

***

Mawn Seetal grabbed the hand rails on either side of her. Her knuckles turned white from the grip. Every muscle in her body seemed to seize up, turning to rock. Fear froze her in place. Floating weightless through the maintenance tube at the time of the accident, Mawn had been buffeted against the walls and equipment when the shock wave reverberated through her section of the web. Fortunately, she was on the farthest end of the City. Bruised and a little bloody, she wondered what happened that could have flung her against the walls. Her engineer's mind went to work on the solution while her eyes searched for the closest view port. That was when she realized that she hadn't hit the walls—the walls had hit her. For that to happen, there must have been a catastrophic event somewhere along the web. Reaching a view port, she quickly scanned for breaches, then hit the transparency sequence.

Nothing happened.

“Shakhath!” Primary power failure, it must be bad. She opened the access panel and patched an emergency power cell into the leads for the window. The current charged the designated segment, forcing the molecules to uniformly realign, turning the segment transparent. At first, nothing was visible. She scanned the vicinity, as far as she could see. All running and external node lights were off. Except for pitch-black beams against the blue and white planetary field, she couldn't see the city structure. “Holy Cause, this is bad.” She pulled out a pair of scopes she kept in her tool pouch to watch transports during the lunch break. She scanned the web, auto-adjusting the range and focus until she saw it. Barely visible from her distance, but discernible right at the center, the location where the main transfer nodes and transfer control station should have been, there were only pinpricks of debris. Mawn gasped. Though details were sketchy from her two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer range, she could see light that bounced off Terra reflected in the metal debris and the severed ends where tethers were supposed to connect to the Center Node. Beyond, she saw the thread-like remains of ground tethers receding toward the atmosphere. Worst of all, the city’s severed node tethers were venting gas.

That's when she felt a light breeze.

Mawn grabbed a handrail and pulled hard to propel herself toward the transfer pod, thirty meters away. “Link on!” she screamed as the breeze coming against her turned into a light wind. “This is Mawn Seetal in Tether Forty-Five, Conduit Four, Section Seventeen. I need emergency assistance.” There was static on the normal comm channel. She switched to the emergency frequency as she grabbed handrail after handrail to fling herself forward. Before she could speak, she heard overlapping transmissions. There was no way she would be heard. Mawn struggled against the strengthening wind that blew against her. It wouldn’t be long before it became an enclosed gale. There was a sound like a distant explosion, followed a moment later by the sound of metal twisting and tearing. A gust suddenly pushed her back down the tube and she tumbled uncontrollably, reaching for passing handrails, slamming back and forth against the metal rods. Though the wind was getting stronger, she could feel the air pressure decreasing. Her skin started to tingle and prickle. She grabbed another handrail to fling herself forward. Time was running out. “Link open!” The icon appeared in her vision. “Emergency protocol,” She puffed hard to get the words out. “Tether Forty-Five, Conduit Four, Section Seventeen.” There was no confirmation from the link. “Emergency protocol, seal this section!” No response. She just made it to the closed pod hatch. The wind pounded her. She tried to grab a breath. “Link open, Pod Forty-Seven, emergency access, open.” At that, the hatch opened and a violent burst of decompression from the pod slammed her back. She smashed into the opposite wall, and then hurled back down the shaft. With both hands out, she grabbed at anything within reach. She barely kept one hand gripping a rail to keep her from flying back down the conduit. She screamed but barely heard her own terror. She tried to calm herself as she felt dizziness begin to claim her. The near hurricane-force wind blowing through the tube was strong only because of its velocity. The air itself was dangerously thin. In a last desperate move, she struggled to muster her strength and swung herself around the corner, then hit the panel just inside the pod. “Close pod door!” The words barely escaped her lips, her voice weakened from the lack of air pressure. The wind screamed. She smashed her fist on the button again. “Close pod door!” No response. She keyed the panel’s command sequence for pressurization. Air exploded from vents, screaming past her like a second hurricane. The sound was deafening. The pressure around her increased, but rushed past her into the conduit. Unless she could get the pod door closed, the system would keep pumping out air until the reserves were exhausted. Her lungs grabbed some of the atmosphere screeching past her, she shouted again, “Close pod door! Close pod door!” Her shout was like a whisper in a storm. “Close pod door!” She rammed her face up against the microphone plate on the bulkhead.

“Close pod door! Holy lights, close pod door!”

An icon flashed in her vision and the door slid shut. Mawn gasped to reclaim oxygen. She could hear the hurricane beyond the metal. Inside the pod it was calm, except for a frantic voice, which she heard for the first time, from the pilot's control station. “BNC to all pods. This is Beta Node Control to all pods. Is anyone there?” Her presence of mind awakened, Mawn scrambled to the pilot's seat and opened her link.

“This is Pod Forty-Seven. Go.”

“Thank the Great Cause! We've been trying to reach pods for ten minutes. What's your status?”

“I'm a little winded.” She winced. “I'm secure. What happened?”

“No time to explain. Get to Center Node, on the double!”

“Center Node? Center Node is gone!”

The voice on the other end screamed at her. “I know it’s gone, you idiot! We need you to seal the tethers—move!” Mawn disconnected her docking clamps and engaged thrusters. “On my way. Have you accessed the emergency seals?”

“Back-up systems are down. We have power failures in every quadrant. We can't seal the hatches. Every node is losing atmosphere.”

“What about the other maintenance and cargo transports?”

“You’re the first we’ve been able to reach. Are you go?”

“Affirmative” Mawn checked her board stats, “ETA forty-five minutes.”

“Everyone will be dead in forty-five minutes!”

Mawn pushed the pod thrusters for all they were worth. Acceleration pressed her deeper into her chair. If the city nodes weren't stabilized, she knew, the counterweight tether rising more than sixty-four thousand kilometers into space would pull the entire complex into a higher orbit, and further from help. Without ground connections for a stable geosynchronous orbit, the City’s orbital momentum would take over, ensuring that more than a million people would die.

“BNC to Pod Forty-Seven.”

“I've got you. Go,” Mawn replied.

“We've got a few other pods on the way to help. One went to rescue a passenger ring before it hit the atmosphere. The ring is safe for the moment. The pods are on the way to Center Node now.” As Mawn propelled her pod toward what was left of Center Node, she scanned the web.
She could see light reflecting from tether sections that still vented atmosphere. As the gas hit the vacuum of space, it froze into billions of tiny crystals shooting like spray into the freezing void. Reflected light from Terra caused it to sparkle in the vacuum. As she scanned, she saw the reflections everywhere. They were all that told her where some of the tether nodes might be. Running lights that normally pulsed along all connecting tethers were black. To avoid impact, since she was coming from a non-lighted angle toward the backside of the inner tethers, she watched for breaks in the planet view. A thick black horizontal line appeared and Mawn fingered the stick to push up and around it.

Everywhere she looked on the web, parts of it moved and vibrated. Without an atmosphere and something to stabilize its free movement in microgravity, the vibrations would continue far longer than they would under the influence of normal gravity. “The stresses will tear everything apart!” she said to no one. For a moment she imagined what was happening inside the web. As vibrations reverberated across the tethers, enormous stress was being applied to the grid work. Nano-carbon may be harder than diamond and stronger than steel, but even it has a breaking point. She imagined that there were already ruptures in several tethers or node junctions where air would leak.

“Air will leak!” Mawn slammed the stick to the right. “Pod Forty-Seven to Beta Node.”

“BNC. Go.”

“Recall your pods and reassign them to the city nodes. Get engineering teams to the inner seals and have them shut access at all tether connections.”

“What are you doing?” the voice on the comm screamed. “Get back on course to Center Node!”

“Who is this?” she asked the unknown voice.

“I'm the Beta Node comm manager on duty. Stay on course for Center Node!”

I’m taking orders from a radio-jockey? “Listen up, you idiot,” she emphasized for effect. “The problem isn't air. It's the tether vibrations. We have to separate the city nodes from their tethers before the stresses rip apart the node walls. If we don’t, we will lose everything anyway.”

“Separate the tethers from the nodes…are you crazy? Those are the only connection the nodes have to the rest of the city!”

“Listen, hot shot! This is Mawn Seetal, Chief Engineer for this station. Understand? The shock wave is twisting the grid work web-wide. You're going to lose the air anyway. I’m telling you the tether vibrations will rip apart the node walls and kill everyone. We have to seal what city nodes we can before they finish venting! Now call those pods and patch me through to give instructions, or I'll be sure Beta is last on the repair list!”

There was a moment of silence, then “Orders relayed. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know it was you.”

***

Mawn disconnected the tethers designated east and west, one hundred meters out from Alpha. Though the solution was not perfect, she knew each city node could sustain air through recycling and other means for several months in the event of an emergency. She remembered the year when a rare strain of influenza hit Lambda. The node was cut off for weeks before open traffic was re-established. This was worse. They still had to restore internal power. She didn't have time to think about water and waste management issues. According to the Beta comm, three of the city nodes had already been sealed. She felt her tension ease when he told her more pods had been launched from various nodes. Within thirty minutes, if they weren't too late, each node would be floating free from the web; that had never happened in over four hundred years. Judgment Eve was turning out to be a rotten holiday.

“Pod Forty-Seven,” Beta Node called out.

“This is Forty-Seven,” Mawn responded. “Go.”

“I'm transferring a data stream to you. It came in coded 'urgent' just before Center Node went off line.”

“Don’t you think I'm a bit too busy for personal calls?”

“Sir, I think you're going to want to stream this right away.”

“Fine, pipe it.” Mawn's link kicked in. Words from a popular holiday poem scrolled into view, noises of joyful children playing and laughing filled the background:

The King’s justice is not blind,
With open eyes He sweeps aside the shadows of the past.

As my eyes behold the painful sight, the old is swept away,
And a new day dawns upon the ashes of my loved one’s Judgment Day.
I will forget them all my days, looking straight ahead,
For the blinding light is my comfort over shadows long since dead.

Bless my King!
Troubled days come no more, until the darkness rise.
For now the Judgment reigns supreme, and the shadows are denied.

Good Judgment Day!

“What the...Beta Node, who sent this?” Mawn asked, confused.

“The same guy who blew up Center Node: Tellen So'tar.” Mawn gasped. Her ex-husband had destroyed City of Heaven.

Continue to Chapter 3...