For an hour they sat still, watching the west horizon. After nothing else happened, Marinakis assumed that they had killed the sniper, but tactical considerations dictated not following the lead into what could be a trap. Baffled, she ordered them on. They could sit all day waiting, but they had a job to do.
They drove for a few more hours before needing to refuel. Stepping onto the snow, Marinakis’s boots crunched on the crystals, the ground of an alien landscape. For the past many hours the CATV’s cabin had isolated her from the external world, acting as a metaphysical pressure vessel.
Scanning the horizon, pivoting on her heel, breathing in the cold Arctic air, she wondered what she was looking for. Would there be something different about this morning breeze that would hint at the conflagration they had escaped? A smell? Something more subtle, triggering primal reflexes hidden deep under the piles and piles of evolutionary structure?
There was nothing, other than the harsh glare of the northern sun, pure and undiffused. She looked into it, shielding her eyes. Seemed brighter than she expected. It shimmered off the white ground, terrain that seemed permanent but was so susceptible to the variations of season and temperature, turned fragile under the continuing degradation of humanity’s industrial byproducts. Maybe it’d have the chance to recover, the cycles of freeze and thaw tampering down from their wild greenhouse-induced oscillations.
The privates in the third CATV were dismounting and starting to remove the fuel tanks from their trailer. Good boys.
She was shivering. Or shaking. The space nuke and the dome of light had left her rattled. The mushroom clouds had been huge. But something on that scale… something manmade covering that much of the sky…
Brent came around the nose of the CATV with a map. “We made good time. The terrain wasn’t as bad as the Captain expected.” He squinted to the west and pulled his collar tighter. “Don’t know who took a shot at us, can’t guess why…”
As if on cue, Remington’s machine gun fired.
Marinakis screamed in surprise, holding her hands over her ears to stop the rattling blast. Remington kept shooting, firing ahead.
She leapt into the cabin, scrambled over the front seats and grabbed his legs. That didn’t work. She started punching his knees and yelling his name.
The gun stopped, but the legs didn’t move.
Back out on the ice, she looked up at her gunner. The gun barrel hissed. “Man, what the fuck?” Remington extended his finger forward, pointing north.
Following his gaze, she saw three suns. The normal, disk-shaped one, then two other misshapen ones, strange elongated ovals connected by a faint ring.
“Sun dogs,” she shouted. “It’s an illusion. Caused by ice crystals.”
The young face turned and looked down at her, glistening with fresh sweat. “I’m from Alabama,” he muttered.
McAiden came around to stand with her and Brent. “Start refueling,” she told the sergeant, then bent down with her hands on her knees and took deep, shuddering breaths. When she calmed, she realized that nobody’s boots had moved. She straightened, “Is anybody going to follow my orders?”
They were staring towards the sun dogs. The wind had strengthened, picking up the very top layer of snow and blowing it in twisting sheets. More and more of it was caught up, and soon the whole horizon was shimmering and recombining in incoherent patterns. The swirling crystals refracted orange, red, and brownish sparkles. Watching the visual noise, she began to make the shapes into something meaningful. Like clouds in the sky, animals emerged. Something that looked like a fish. A sleek shape that looked like…
“A horse,” Brent said, and sucked in his breath. “And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone.”
“That’s it,” Marinakis snarled, and grabbed her sergeant by his arm. She pulled him; he didn’t resist. They stumbled around to the back of the CATV. She pushed him up against the rear bumper of their trailer.
“You need to knock that shit off,” she growled, tapping the deep reservoir of command authority that had come with her promotion, the capability she had been born with.
He looked innocently naive. “Knock what off, LT?”
“That’s Lieutenant Marinakis from now on and you know what I’m talking about. Those creepy quotes. The fuck you think you’re doing, trying to freak us out?” His face began to drive her mad. “And wipe that flat expression off your face.”
“You want me to knock off my faith?” He asked, pitching his voice into a childlike naivety, as if he still, with his commanding officer right in his face, didn’t realize why she was so angry. Where he learned such helplessness, this way of immediately bending without actually acknowledging that he was doing anything wrong? Like he didn’t know. Like he was somehow above her and her heathen emotions. “It’s an integral part of my being.”
She raised a finger, but found no words.
“And they aren’t creepy to me,” he continued, eyes suddenly dulling, “To me those are prophecies being fulfilled.”
“You… goddamn it. The return of Christ,” she snorted, “we all know about that, us secular people, the religiously unaffiliated. We know your theology. It's not hidden; the Bible’s not some big secret that only you have the intelligence to understand. It’s a touchstone of Western civilization, for godsakes.
“So. Did you want this?” She waved at the air to encompass the collapsing world. “You happy with this? All those bodies, they make you feel vindicated? Who do you think is on God’s side in this? The missile engineers? The guys who built the rocket motors? The strategic planners with their binders and graphs and theories and justifications? Doing the good Lord’s bidding, huh, getting the world ready for his return? Lucky us.”
She stepped back from him. “Fuck,” she swore, “do what you want I guess.”
He shrugged, “You can’t stop me, I have a right to practice my religion as I see fit.”
First Lieutenant Jessica Marinakis suddenly felt anger in a way she never had before, a deep rage at having such a solipsistic cliche thrown at her after everything they had seen. In a flat, low voice she said, “Actually, no. Stow that shit for as long as you’re around me. Want to take it up with someone? Our country’s been nuked out of existence. The Constitution's a pile of ash. Congrats. You got what you prayed for.”
She left him and marched around the side of the vehicle.
McAiden was there. “Heard that. About time.”
“Get these things fueled up. I want to get moving.” She went to check on the forward observers.
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