Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Read online

  Julia blushed a bit, and answered, “I am usually not as unable to describe the items as I did with these, but I do have a superb understanding of each piece.”

  “Think nothing of it!” replied the Queen. “We are very impressed and appreciate your gracious recitation.”

  The Queen chuckled again and was about to ask Julia another question when several of the guards returned.

  They conferred briefly with the Queen’s Escort while the Queen observed the men. She had a slightly puzzled expression, but then rolled her eyes and sighed “Not again.”

  “Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, but we must be leaving directly,” said the guard.

  He managed to remain professionally alert while maintaining an air of detached subservience.

  He excused himself and the rest of the party from The Queen’s presence and set about assuring a defensive perimeter was arranged around Her Majesty.

  Julia found the entire affair intriguing but was soon left behind as the Royal Guards came to attention and formed a phalanx around the Queen.

  She was escorted to a side room, where a special motorized wheelchair was brought forward. The Queen stepped up into it and sat down. She was then strapped in securely. Once that was accomplished, the entire group raced to the nearest exit.

  Outside of the Smithsonian there were several armored cars waiting with their engines running. The Queen’s wheelchair rolled up next to one of them. It had gull-winged doors that opened as the Queen come broadside to it.

  A special lift extended out from inside the vehicle, and grappling arms attached to the wheelchair, which was then pulled into its interior in seconds. The Queen always found that part of the experience a bit dizzying, and had complained more than once that something need be done to alleviate the rapidity of the retrieval action.

  The doors slammed down and locked, and the vehicles sped off. The convoy raced across the city, heading for the Dulles Airport.

  Inside the car, the Queen was briefed on what exactly had occurred regarding the Martian impact of The Wave.

  She asked for a secure telephone connection, and when it was established, uttered a simple phrase into it.

  “Rome Has Fallen,” she said.

  She broke the connection.

  Now, as the convoy of armored cars rendezvoused at the prescribed waypoint, near Dulles International Airport, the machine that had lain in waiting for all of the interminable years was slowly grinding into life.

  The Queen’s vehicle separated from the others in the pack and went towards a hangar near the Northern end of the airfield.

  The great steel doors opened on their hinges, and the car sped inside. As the doors closed, the car stopped over a rectangular outline of yellow chevrons. The elevator floor immediately began a descent to the ark transport area.

  The Queen sipped at a cup of Earl Grey tea, and snacked on a cucumber sandwich while watching reports of the impending departure on an iPad.

  “I do so expect that Steven will be pleased,” she thought idly.

  The Queen had exited her armored transport, and, surrounded by her entourage of armed Royal guards, strode into an exact recreation of the throne room at Buckingham Palace.

  She approached and took her seat on the red crushed velvet cushions, and laid her forearms along the gilt-covered arms of the chair.

  She held the Royal Sceptre and pronounced that it was evidently time for tea.

  As her servants busied themselves with setting up the proper English tea arrangements of fine China, Sterling silver utensils and trays of gourmet delicacies, the Queen handed the Sceptre to a worthy, who stood by her and held it firmly and with decorum.

  He did not move, nor bat even an eyelash.

  In a sideboard off to her left sat the original pair of Ruby Slippers, which she had acquired many years earlier from Liza Minelli.

  The Queen spoke briefly into another microphone, hidden from view. “Steven, do you have any new information regarding The Wave?” she asked.

  “From all available data, the Ark launches need to proceed as scheduled,” replied the mind of Steven Jobs from its storage cells deep under the Arabian Desert.

  The Queen then looked at another report and spoke two more words into the microphone.

  “Oh. Wow,” she said.

  *****

  Immediately, there began a rumbling that felt like an earthquake throughout the Ark. The servants quickly ran to special cubicles that contained reclining chairs into which they strapped themselves to brace against the launch forces.

  The secondary engines were firing, and huge gouts of flame began to shoot from the manholes outside the White House.

  Throughout Washington D.C., the pavement started to crack and fragment. Pedestrians fell over, and cars smashed into each other. Windows blew out of the taller buildings, and the Reflecting Pool suddenly looked as though a hurricane had blown onto it as waves thrashed and tipped over the sides.

  *****

  Julia came staggering out of the Smithsonian, barely managing to dodge aside as the front of the building collapsed. She ran towards the center of the quadrangle but fell. She saw hundreds of other people, tourists and employees struggling to stay upright and failing.

  The ground around her was undulating and moving in several directions at once. She felt she was riding a mechanical bull.

  Suddenly, flames shot out of every sewage drain and manhole in the vicinity. Enormous roars and sounds cascaded across the sky and the windshields of the cars began to shatter as car alarms blared incessantly.

  Julia’s eardrums burst, and she clamped her hands over her ears, the pain and fear causing her to feel nauseous. Her equilibrium destroyed, she fell a final time and rolled onto her side.

  She didn’t understand what she was seeing, as an area of ten square miles lifted up around her.

  The Ark’s pyramidal structure punched upwards on columns of white light. Explosives were being detonated all about the area to loosen the soil and shed the extra weight from the Ark.

  Julia suddenly felt as though she was rising up into the air, and then an enormous yellow and orange light covered her face.

  She screamed as the Ark lifted off beneath her, chunks of the surrounding terrain falling off the steeply angled sides.

  The noise was beyond her hearing now, and as she rose, the enormous pressures flattened her body as though she were pressed beneath a large granite brick.

  More debris slid off the Ark as it slowly climbed, incinerating everything beneath it with nuclear fires.

  The remains of Julia’s body joined the rest of the doomed population, atomized in the enormous force of the Orion engine detonations, as the Ark began its long climb into space.

  *****

  Down below, for miles around, cars and buildings were destroyed, the inhabitants not even able to understand what had happened to them.

  The force of the Orion explosions drove even the bridge pilings away from them, and the Potomac boiled from the intense heat. Hundreds of thousands of commuters died instantly, their bodies turned to ash from the heat, and then blown into fragments by the force of the repetitive blasts.

  Inside the Ark, comfortably sitting on her throne, The Queen resumed sipping her tea. She noticed that three of the China teacups had fallen off the serving table, and broken on the floor.

  She knew the servants would clean up the mess, once they were safely above the Earth. She smiled, knowing that, in a little while, she would continue to discuss the fate of the world with the ghost in the machine.

  *****

  10 HOURS PRIOR TO WAVE IMPACT ON EARTH – JODRELL BANK

  “Sir, I think you should take a look at this,” said the radio telescope technician at Jodrell Bank.

  “Yes, yes. What is it?” said the chief engineer.

  “I’m not sure, Sir, but it appears to be heading away from Earth at a high rate of speed,” said the technician.

  The two men were observing data being collected by the Australian S
quare Kilometre Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP.

  Located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Mid-Western region of Australia was the Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Array.

  VLBI methods identified a type of astronomical interferometry signal, generally originating from an astronomical radio source, such as a quasar. Data for each message was usually collected at multiple radio telescopes on Earth.

  The distance between the radio telescopes would then be used in calculating the speed of transmission using the time difference between the arrivals of the radio signal at different telescopes.

  This allowed for observations of objects being made simultaneously by many radio telescopes creating a pattern that emulated a telescope with a size equal to the maximum separation between the telescopes.

  The two men watched as the signals indicated the departure of two large objects from the eastern seaboard of the United States of America. The two objects followed different vectors as they left the earth and headed into deep space.

  “They appear to be accelerating, Sir,” said the technician.

  “I need you to try to contact Murchison and find out what they’re saying about this,” he responded.

  A man in a blue business suit, wearing a white French-cuffed long-sleeved shirt with black onyx cufflinks and a solid, blood-red tie, entered the room, walking to a desk behind the others.

  He opened his briefcase and quietly withdrew a suppressed FN Five-seven pistol from a briefcase. While the two men were still discussing how best to report their findings, he shot them in the backs of their heads.

  Another of the technicians, a woman screamed and was silenced by a shot into her face.

  Suddenly, a team of several armed officers entered the room and began to systematically execute all the personnel present at the facility. Efficiently, they moved from office to office, and lab to lab.

  They were very thorough in eliminating all of the employees.

  “Destroy those tapes!” barked the first assassin.

  Two of the armed officers began to type commands into the computers that would eliminate the backup records and purge the existing data. They worked quickly and efficiently pushing dead bodies out of the way as needed.

  When they were finished, another set of officers reviewed the work they had performed. Seeing no changes were needed the four men fired automatic weapons into the consoles. Sparks flew about the radio equipment and small fires began to burn.

  The man in the blue business suit removed a twenty round magazine from his pistol and replaced it with one containing thirty rounds. He went from body to body, firing one well-placed shot into the base of each corpse’s head, severing the spine.

  None was excluded.

  He returned to the central operations center and issued a few further orders. The team placed a series of timed explosives at strategic locations among the facility.

  When they had finished, they rendezvoused back in the OC, and then quickly exited the building.

  They got into a fleet of forest green Range Rovers and sped off.

  The man in the blue business suit came out a few minutes later, having done a final pass through the offices to assure there were no survivors.

  He got into a black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, placing the briefcase behind the passenger’s seat.

  “Go,” he said to the driver.

  As the Sprinter left, he carefully observed the scene to assure that no one had noticed the massacre from the street.

  A few minutes later a gigantic explosion destroyed the entire facility.

  None of the bodies was ever recovered.

  *****

  2 HOURS PRIOR TO WAVE IMPACT ON EARTH - SECRET UNDERWATER PACIFIC NAVAL BASE – OFF THE ISLAND OF OKINAWA

  The U.S.S. Pennsylvania was underway, heading towards the Okinawa Trench, where one of the best-kept secrets of the United States Navy was located.

  As it approached the secret submarine base, the crew became intent on assuring that all the procedures for access to the State of Lemuria were followed exactly.

  There were protocols and call-signs, acknowledgments and challenge/response signals given for almost three-quarters of an hour as the submarine was scanned and identified.

  All surface and other ocean traffic were monitored, and the timing of the docking maneuvers was carefully scheduled to minimize or eliminate the potential for discovery.

  In the spring of 1942, President Roosevelt assigned Lyndon Baines Johnson to a three-man survey team of the Southwest Pacific, with specific instructions to report back on anything unusual that was found on the Japanese-held islands.

  This team became the lead for an expeditionary force that had landed and defeated Japanese soldiers guarding Lemurian artifacts.

  During the search for suitable islands in World War II whereby the United States Navy could deploy forward advance forces, Johnson and his platoon of soldiers uncovered secret evidence of the existence of ancient undersea bases off the island of Okinawa.

  The Japanese soldiers had fought to the death to prevent the US forces from uncovering this secret.

  When the survivors of the battle had brought their findings to Johnson, he examined the ancient scrolls they found.

  He was able to decipher only a few words, but the most prominent was a recurring reference to “Lemuria”.

  Johnson had only a hint of what that meant but was familiar with the writings of the occultist and seer Madame Helena Blavatsky.

  He knew that, according to legend, the Lemurians lived on islands in the Pacific Ocean before recorded history.

  Their existence was passed on by the occasional deciphering of a cryptic hint in other historical documents, or through the oral tradition of Pacific Islanders.

  Similar to the Atlantean’s of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean mythologies, the Lemurians were purportedly highly advanced.

  Johnson immediately realized the possible strategic importance of the documents. He communicated his findings to General Douglas MacArthur, who relayed the information to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Prior to his involvement in the Lemurian affair, Johnson had been a Texas Congressional Representative. When World War II had broken out in the Pacific, he became a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve.

  When he made his report on the discovery of the Lemurian Scrolls, Johnson was given orders to suppress the information and downplay the event. He agreed, with the suggestion that he be placed in charge of managing the project moving forward.

  Under instructions from President Roosevelt, he falsely reported to General MacArthur, to the Navy leaders and to Congress that the conditions in the South Pacific were unacceptable, and that the living quarters for the troops were deplorable.

  He argued that the South West Pacific urgently needed a higher priority and a larger share of war materiel from the budget and that an expeditious resolution be undertaken to prevent further encroachment by the Japanese.

  The current situation, he said, necessitated that the Pacific Fleet add 7,500 additional men, and a commensurate amount of money to add logistical support.

  Johnson then proposed a twelve-point program to bring these resources to the region, stressing "greater cooperation and coordination within the various commands and between the different war theaters."

  The United States Congress, impressed by Johnson’s initiative and resourcefulness, made him the Chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee.

  Johnson then began to assemble the necessary teams and allocated a portion of the “South West Pacific” war budget as a top-secret operation that was hidden in the standard accounting procedures. Forty-two percent of the program resources were diverted to a “black” program devoted to solving the Lemurian puzzle.

  *****

  Once the project was underway, a team of historians carefully preserved and transported the Lemurian documents to California, where experts in ancient mythological languages and modern-day linguists who had been tas
ked with deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls worked for over a decade until they had developed the rudimentary basis and rules of the language.

  Scores of women were trained and educated in the language. These women were given little understanding of the actual import of their work. They were informed only that they were performing a valuable service for the United States of America. It was their patriotic duty to work hard at their tasks, and not ask questions. Given these restrictions and the compartmentalized nature of the work, it took quite some time to achieve breakthroughs. However, by early 1950, Johnson was convinced beyond doubt of the existence of these undersea bases.

  By the advent of the Korean War, the United States Navy had identified and isolated the secret bases. The Lemurians had built many bases in the Pacific Rim island chains. Several had been destroyed by volcanic activity, the most famous of these being the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, in August of 1883.

  Massive tidal waves had collapsed other bases, and long forgotten wars between the Lemurians and the Martians had decimated their population.

  The historical documents that had been decrypted by the US Navy had hinted at a migration, but there was nothing substantive to indicate to where the Lemurian race had vanished.

  Speculation centered on South America or even Antarctica as viable locations that could have been colonized or having provided a haven for refugees.

  However, there was no concrete evidence, (such as the Japanese scrolls), that linked the cultures of South America to the Lemurians, nor was anything found that would provide a definitive link to some manner of South Polar relocation.

  In the late 1940’s, it had been discovered that one of the Lemurian facilities was still operable although abandoned. It was an immense submarine cavern located at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Okinawa Japan, near the site of the Johnson expedition’s original discovery.

  The United States continued nuclear weapons testing programs in the Pacific provided an additional cover for the activities and explorations surrounding the Lemurians.

  Massive convoys of ships and supplies crashed through the Pacific waves, ostensibly on their way towards missions where they would construct forward operations bases throughout the Marshall and Solomon Island chains.