“Why don’t we have detonation?”
General Smith’s voice over the secure telephone unit carried a tension that Captain Everett could feel like static electricity.
“Sir, we’ve lost comms to the nukes.”
“Captain, I don’t care if you have to manually initiate, I need that detonation. Whatever it takes.”
“Wilco.”
“Captain. Your country is counting on you.”
Captain Everett set the handset back in its cradle, then began running toward the doorway that led to the ATLAS cavern. He was going to die today anyway. But maybe, just maybe, he could pull the plug on the thing that was about to eat his wife, his baby girl, and the whole damn planet.
“Far-gate active!”
The notification entered Commander Ketaan-Ra’s mind through the nano-bot communication swarm distributed throughout his brain.
“Synchronization?”
“Not yet initiated from the far end.”
“Why not?”
“It appears the wormhole is directed at a point in galactic zone 3AF2344XZ.”
Ketaan-Ra hissed. He’d waited too long to have something go wrong now.
“Override from this end. Lock it down now.”
“Dangerous.”
“Do it.”
“As you command.”
As power was diverted to the activating gateway, Ketaan-Ra’s detachment came to the ready. When the synchronization reached its final stage, Ketaan-Ra braced himself as the millions of nano-bots throughout his body compensated for the new world’s atmosphere, gravity, and pressure differential. The process was straightforward. Start the change as the gateway went final, charge through the opening as the change progressed, arrive in the new world ready to breathe its air and function in its environment. It always hurt and this time was no different.
Unable to remember the atmosphere he’d been born breathing, Ketaan-Ra exhaled his final lungful of the ammonia-methane mixture he’d come to regard as normal, and leaped through the portal into a nitrogen-oxygen world.