Apocalypse Genesis: An Apocalypse Squad Prequel

The rocket’s red glare lit up the night sky before the mushroom cloud eradicated the darkness, replacing the tranquility of the evening with the first sign of the end.

In the security of her military bunker, Captain Amanda Vryce had seen it all unfold, much to her horror and chagrin. She’d been the one to sound the alarm at the military base in Colorado. But though her superiors had kept the stoicism of men and women who believed in possibilities, Amanda had finally cracked, faced with the reality that there was only one truth.

This was the end of Earth as they knew it.

Oh, the minerals and geographical structures that created the shape of the planet would continue hurtling around the sun until the life-giving star turned into a red giant. Some of the hardier species, cockroaches and bugs that had gone from annoying to the source of envy, would last generations longer. But humanity?

Humanity had cast itself out of its place on Earth by, in no particular order, destroying the atmosphere, poisoning the ecological system and rivers, radiating the entire continents of North America, Europe, and Asia as if crops needed uranium, and destroying much of the would-be healers of this damage, the forests.

It was time to start anew.

And there was not a chance that Amanda felt ready or good enough to do what was required of her.

“Captain Vryce! Report to Bay Four-twenty-six! Your team will meet you there!”

Amanda, a hardy forty years old, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, tall and lean woman often confused for being five years younger than she was, was now charged with piloting one of the last vessels of the human species, the Nostroma.

“Yes, General!” Amanda said, her voice betraying none of the fear and despair that she truly felt.

Her fear had nothing to do with the outside world, but the one she would soon inhabit. She marched, trusting the discipline of movement she’d built over the years—both inside spacecraft and on her feet—to silence her mind. That was arguably a harder task than believing humanity would never have come to this.

Around her, soldiers carried on their duties to the best of their capabilities; Amanda tried not to ponder that for many of them, they would never know anything other than an overly radiated Earth for the rest of their lives. But if there was one thing Amanda was all too good at, it was pondering… and ruminating… and contemplating…

She came to a freight elevator that she boarded with several other pilots, generals, and scientists. All had rehearsed this day for weeks, and none dared to speak at this hour. No one in this elevator knew if the nuclear bomb that had just dropped was the only one of its kind; no one knew if other bombs might disrupt the power sources supplying this military base with basic operations.

Amanda held her breath. When the lights above dimmed as the Earth shook from bombing, she closed her eyes, praying that her death did not entail a free-falling elevator.
Mercifully, on the twentieth floor beneath the surface, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Amanda hurried through.

The same could not be said for about half of those in the elevator, who fell to their grisly deaths when a cable supporting the elevator snapped a second later.

Amanda pulled herself away from the carnage, not allowing herself to mourn. She did not have time to mourn. She did not have time to feel anything except urgency.

No longer seeing the need to merely march, she sprinted through the military hangar, rushing to Bay Four-twenty-six. She knew the location by heart, but as the lights struggled to stay on, dust accumulated, and spirits plummeted, those of sound mind became less so. Amanda was not immune—she never had been.

Of great fortune, though, was that the bright lights displaying the number of each bay kicked in. Shortly, Amanda bumped and navigated her way to Bay Four-twenty-six. When she arrived, she punched in the passcode, hurried through the jetway, and entered the Nostroma. She turned right, hurried about another twenty feet—an extremely short distance relative to the rest of the ship—and jumped in the cockpit.

She did not need to wait for permission to turn on the ship or even to take off. The debriefing in this scenario had been clear. Amanda did not need the green light from her superiors to ignite her engines. Nor could she afford to wait for those who did not get to the ship in a timely manner.

The Nostroma, a giant ship that the soldiers joked could pass for a celestial body in quieter times, roared to life in the massive bay hangar. Amanda felt like she was igniting an avalanche, and she tightened herself into the pilot’s seat. There was a brief delay between her turning the engines on and her actually being able to fly. She desperately tried to push off the distinct possibility she was about to encounter.

She could very well be entirely alone.

Pilots had gone to one level; scientists, to another; and all other civilians to the last. But no matter how often they rehearsed this planetary evacuation, one ship invariably would have taken off with no one but the pilot on board. It was part of the reason they had populated the ships in other ways beforehand, but…

What good would it do for anyone if the only other life forms on board were embryos that would be raised not by the tender touch of a woman or the stern but warm guidance of a man, but by the cold, sterile forces of technology?

Questions like that did not matter when it was life or death. The only question that mattered was what it took to keep one’s life over one’s death; everything else was not so much secondary as irrelevant until death had been pushed away for good for another day.

The engines kicked in.

And then Amanda heard footsteps behind her.

“I don’t think I’ve run that hard since we got chased by the black bear in Aspen!” Damian cracked.

Damian Aran. An electrical engineer who never—ever—took himself seriously. And, her husband.

“You’re alive!” Amanda shouted.

“Of course I’m alive, you think I’m going to let you explore new worlds without your handsome husband?”

Amanda cracked a small smile. The worst had not come to past. He had made it. He had—

A loud thud broke the reunion and refocused Amanda.

“Strap yourself in,” Amanda said, flustered at the crashing sound within the hangar. “We’ll talk more if we get to safety.”

“If,” Damian chuckled, a telltale sign he was nervous beyond measure.

Amanda did not wait a second longer, pulling back on the yoke and pushing the Nostroma out of the hangar. Miles upon miles passed as the elevation slowly picked up, preparing to launch all ships that had made their way out of the hangar to the heavens. Amanda prayed that no other ship had stalled out or crashed on this runway.

Then the stars appeared.

The most blessed sight, yet the most cursed feeling—that one should finally achieve one’s childhood dream of making it to outer space, but at the expense of never being able to return to Earth. Even Damian had fallen speechless.

All her life, Amanda had heard that her dreams would never come true. At first, her parents laughed when she dreamed of using magic as a young child. Then they said people like them didn’t get to go to space when she stated her career goals. Then they said the world would destroy itself before they got to space when she joined the United States Space Force.

How cruel it was to realize that Amanda had found truth in her dreams, yet would still live with the reality her parents had warned her. Two things could, in fact, be true at once.

A bright white light blinded Amanda, who had to shield her eyes. Another nuclear bomb had gone off nearby. Most likely, Fort Collins or Denver, if either had been left standing, were no more.

And that meant her parents were no more.

Amanda suppressed the thoughts of sympathy for those convinced their homes would never fall or that evacuating to military bases somehow represented a violation of their rights. Sometimes, the same trait that could enable someone to sculpt their own perfect life in one set of circumstances was the very tool that could break everything apart.

Amanda did her best not to look at her husband of seven years. She could not afford to let her mind control her anymore than it usually did.

It did not take long for Amanda, Damian, and the Nostroma to escape Earth’s atmosphere; though they were not yet safe, they had eluded many of the Earth-bound weapons, limiting the arsenal that the enemy could inflict. Although, Amanda wondered, would the enemy, upon seeing American ships not so much engage as outright flee Earth, realize what they’d done and also escape for the stars?

Or would they—and her side’s, she understood well enough—continue launching weapons out of spite, depleting their arsenal in the name of utter annihilation and destruction?

It did not matter. Living or dying were both still equally likely outcomes. All other questions were irrelevant to the one of survival by any means. Not that that stopped questions from constantly bombarding Amanda’s psyche.

And yet, there was nothing more that Amanda could do other than to keep the ship steady, monitor incoming missiles, and pray that none came at her.

Minutes passed. Even just five years ago, she would have been well safe by now, but the arms race had turned its attention from firepower to range, and now, in theory, her ship would not be safe until… well, ever. She reminded herself that the Russians and Chinese being able to track her ship beyond the Solar System did not inherently mean they could shoot it down from afar, but…

She held her breath, keeping her focus on the radar and the stars ahead.

She ignored the fact that, in this scenario, they had no definitive end point. For all the years spent desperately searching the universe for an Earth-like planet, every single one had fallen short in some fashion. Some had oxygen and water but too much nitrogen. Some had too little water. Some were too close to a black hole or dying star.

In short, they were shooting straight for the darkness and hoping a gift would present itself, even if said gift came with painful strings attached.

This move was born out of desperation, a willingness to do anything to prolong humanity. To an outsider, under normal circumstances, this might have been inhumane. But if there was no humanity left otherwise, would it really be inhumane?

Finally, after nearly thirty minutes, when the ship showed no imminent warnings of incoming fire, Amanda let her tension down. She flipped one monitor to a view of Earth, of the home she’d never return to.

She gasped.

The beautiful blue-and-green mother planet was littered with fire and smoke, visible even from this far out, the fallout of nuclear warfare. She could only see her half of the world, the North American side, but she knew too well the Eastern half of the world had suffered the same fate as well.

Anyone not on any of the ships that had escaped Earth had died or would die within months, if not weeks.

“No more,” Damian muttered, a solemnity Amanda had only seen when his mother died. “I’m sorry, Amanda.”

“Yeah,” Amanda said weakly. To say anything more would bring tears at a time that she could not allow.

As for those on the ships? They would never see each other again. Everyone had gone in a slightly different direction, a difference that, over thousands of years in cryosleep, might as well make them forever gone. Humanity would hopefully colonize pockets of the galaxy, yet would struggle to ever reconnect across the fabric of the Milky Way. They might even evolve into completely different species.

The humanity Amanda would know from now until her death were those on board—herself; her husband; anyone else who’d sneaked on board at different levels; and, if the scientists’ promise had held true, about two hundred embryos being grown in test tubes at the rear of the ship.

Amanda quickly had the ship’s AI run a biological lifeform scan, detecting all living organisms on board. It would not give strict details on the lifeforms, just a picture.

Two human adults.

Two hundred in sleep.

Nothing more. No co-pilot. No other scientists or engineers.

Amanda slumped in her chair and sighed.

She had saved herself, her husband, and whatever future humanity had.

But to what end?

80 pages

Ten thousand years ago, the Earth died.

In a last, desperate attempt to prolong humanity, humanity dispatched various ships to the stars. One of them, led by the Apocalypse Squad, landed on Kannan. From afar, it seemed like the perfect match, the closest thing to a new Earth.

But all is not as it seems.

And as the days, weeks, and months go by, the Apocalypse Squad discovers that the frontiers of Kannan are nothing like anything they could have prepared for.

Mysterious.

Magical.

Deadly.

Only by bonding together and embracing the truth of Kannan can they have any hope of surviving the hell the Apocalypse Squad has found itself in.