Legends of Amacia The Caverias Rebellion

Celestial Complications

Meanwhile in the Temple of Tiamat on the surface, Brother Paul sat relaxing with Dan, listening to the news services from around the world. News services from America reported rising internal unrest against the US President and the way he’d handled recent events, from the meteor strikes to the War on Terror and the Muslim Alliance to dealing with the North Koreans, the Chinese, and Russians. Many of the major cities in the US were now under martial law with twenty-four hour curfews and compulsory implantation of the President’s electronic national ID chip for every citizen. Punishment for refusing the ID chip included being branded a terrorist enemy of the state and summary public execution in the guillotine before the live cameras as an example to others. The penalties for violating curfew ranged from arrest and detention to summary execution without due process.

Because of the civilian population’s desperation brought on by a lack of food, clean water, medicine and medical care, combined with the mass detentions and publicly televised executions of political and religious dissenters, they ignored the government edicts and demonstrated en mass in the streets against the President and his dictatorial regime, demanding his immediate resignation and arrest for treason. Under orders from the President, troops loyal to the President confronted the unarmed demonstrators with lethal force. Those same troops rounded up hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and dissenters, shipping them to massive detention centers, which became the last stop for anyone rounded up. They met any resistance with brutal lethal force, many times publicly executing dissenters and displaying their corpses to dissuade anyone from resisting. Often, those who refused to compromise their fundamental beliefs and integrity, particularly Christians, found themselves targeted for detention and summary execution if they resisted any policy forwarded by the President. Even members of the federal and state governments suspected of being disloyal to the President found themselves on the wrong end of the machine guns, being slaughtered in their offices and homes as Federal troops went house-to-house searching for anyone that could be a threat to the President’s totalitarian regime. They started with those people on the Main Core list compiled by the intelligence services, particularly the NSA’s surveillance program of the US population. No one was immune from the Nazi-style political and religious purge, not even members of the government-controlled media or members of the government itself.

Unfortunately for the President and those loyal to him, these brutal Nazi-style tactics elicited the opposite reaction from the American people. Instead of being divided into warring segments and cowed into submission, all of the individual factions saw through the propaganda to the terrible danger posed by the US President’s power grab and united, rising in violent revolt against the totalitarian regime of the President, who had effectively suspended the Constitution and installed himself as a dictator-for-life. As the country deteriorated into a Nazi-style police state, some of those within the government became horrified and disgusted with the President’s abuse of power, turning against him, particularly rogue elements within the US intelligence community and military. Citizen militias came out of hiding and together with segments of the military still loyal to the American people and the Constitution, they began to hit checkpoints and detention camps to liberate the people imprisoned because of their views.

Word came across that these rogue elements were becoming more brazen in their attacks as rumors of mass executions in the detention facilities spurred these attacks on. These same rogue elements also started hitting federal facilities and military bases under control of the Federal government with the backing of the state governments, who began to support them militarily. Open civil war had erupted inside the United States for the second time in its history with both sides committing atrocities on their enemies and to innocent civilians.

With the collapse of the United States into a second civil war, the Dollar became worthless currency in a matter of hours, sending the global financial system into total collapse. The Russian, Chinese, and the BRICs union offered a stable global reserve currency backed by gold and silver as a way to stem the global financial firestorm. The rest of the world pounced on the offer, further draining the US leverage over them. Even the European Union abandoned the US dollar and their treaties with the US, finally seeing the US as a burden and enemy. They ordered all US military troops out of Europe under threat of arrest, imprisonment, deportation, even execution if the US military resisted. All the other countries where the US had a military presence followed the European Union’s example. A complete paradigm shift had occurred in the world geo-political stage. The political places occupied by the US and Russia had dramatically changed places in a matter of weeks, making the US government the enemy while the Russians became the hero trying to keep the world from descending into anarchy and world dictatorship. Only England stood with the US government.

Because of England’s position, the United Kingdom dissolved. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland violently broke from England, standing with Ireland and the rest of the European Union as it teetered on collapse itself. The split happened so fast, the government in London was caught off guard and was powerless to stop it. Large portions of the United Kingdom’s military defected to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, choosing to protect them from English aggression rather than attack and kill their own people. Ireland, France, and Germany offered Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland both military and financial assistance in the break from London. Ireland immediately accepted Northern Ireland back into its territory by an overwhelming vote by the people of Northern Ireland and Ireland itself. Furthermore, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales made a military alliance with one another in case England tried to reclaim the breakaway provinces. They also refused to trade with England in retribution for the English position concerning the US government’s unprecedented imperial and dictatorial actions. The European Union followed suit, slapping sanctions and trade embargos on England. The English government in London became completely isolated from the rest of Europe politically, economically, and militarily. Even the average English citizens rejected the US government’s blatant imperialistic, dictatorial, Nazi-style actions. They demonstrated en mass in the streets demanding the English government cut ties with the US government and expel their diplomats and military. Dan and Brother Paul listened grimly to the terrible reports coming from the United States and Europe, seeing the political chaos of the US spreading worldwide like a virus.

Suddenly, from the new services out of the European Union centered in Germany came a strange report from Argentina and Chile. The peoples of both countries near Mt. Aconcagua suddenly dropped dead of no apparent cause: tens of thousands of them. At the same time, a major electrical disruption over a radius of two hundred miles in all direction of Mt. Aconcagua shorted out electrical and electronic equipment completely, blacking out the entire region. The sudden death of tens of thousands apparently healthy people inside the blackout zone baffled scientists across the globe.

Then to make matters worse, volcanoes in the southern, central, and northern Andes volcanic belts roared to life, some for the first time in centuries. The twin volcanoes Tunpungato and Tunpungaito erupted without warning in simultaneous major eruptions that rained ash and pumice as far away as Santiago, Chile. The San José volcano rumbled to life in a moderate explosion that sent ash four miles into the sky while the Maipo volcano detonated in a catastrophic eruption that destroyed all life within a twenty-mile radius, sending multiple mammoth pyroclastic clouds down its slopes in all directions followed by floods of lava. Ash from the eruption rose into the stratosphere. Many other volcanoes in the southern Andean volcanic belt south of Cerro Aconcagua erupted without warning in moderate to severe eruptions, throwing ash often five to six miles high and decimating everything around them. The eruptions proceeded in a chain reaction starting with Volcanoes Tunpungato and Tupungaito and then moving south along the spine of the Andes. Volcanoes in the central Andean volcanic belt blew at the same time in the same chain reaction of eruptions moving north, starting with Volcano Copiapó, which erupted the most violently, obliterating everything within thirty miles of the mountain. In both the southern and central Andean volcanic belts, the farther from Cerro Aconcagua the volcano sat, the less violent the eruptions were. At the same time, swarms of moderate-sized earthquakes ranging from 4 to 6 on the Richter scale shook the Andean volcanic belts, with many of the larger quakes centered around Aconcagua inside the blackout zone.

“Whoa, all hell is breaking loose down there. What do you make of that?” Dan asked Paul with a tone of concern as they listened to the disaster reports from Argentina and Chile.

“I don’t know,” Paul answered. “This is a new one on me too. Many of those volcanoes have been dormant for centuries or longer. Why they’re suddenly waking up like this is troubling. The Lord is definitely doing something here, but I can’t really figure out what it is. Wait, there’s more.” They listened very intently as new reports came over the wire from Argentina that many animals were acting strangely in that they were fleeing the area around Mt. Aconcagua like something was after them. Just then, a special report broke in on the news.

“This is a Euro News Service special report from Berlin,” the news anchor announced. “We take you to Ed Trundle on the phone live on the ground inside the blackout zone in Argentina. Ed, can you tell us what is happening?”

“It is beyond words, Ron,” the reporter, Ed Trundle replied. “Military escorts are escorting us into the town of Mendoza. We are forbidden to take pictures or shoot live footage, but they have said that I can describe to you what we see over the phone. We are presently wearing protective gear. My God; there are people down in the streets, hundreds of them. They appear to be dead. There is no power at all anywhere and many of the buildings have moderate quake damage, some of which are collapsed and burning. I also see cars, trucks, all manner of vehicles crashed into each other, into utility poles, even buildings. The wrecked vehicles are smoldering along with some of the burned-out buildings around us. Smoke from the fires is drifting through the street. God, this place looks like a war zone. We have stopped and I have been informed that we must remain in the truck. But our escort is moving into the streets, checking on the people. I cannot tell what happened here, but I can tell you there isn’t a sound anywhere except for the sound of our trucks, the soldiers, and the fires burning everywhere. I’m looking out the side window. I see dead animals on the ground with the people: dogs, cats, and hundreds of birds that look like they just dropped dead out of the sky. Wait, the soldiers are returning,” Ed stated.

There was a muffled exchanged as the convoy moved forward. “Ron, are you still there?” Ed asked after the exchange.

“Yes, Ed. We are still here,” Ron replied. “What is happening?”

“Our escorts have just informed me that everyone and everything is dead. I repeat: all are dead. They don’t know what did it, though I suspect that they may think a biological agent, which would account for our protective gear,” Ed reported as they rolled through the center of town. Suddenly, the truck stopped again and there were exclamations from the soldiers as they lifted their eyes toward Aconcagua in the distance. “Wait, Ron. Something is going on. They have stopped again, and are pointing at something. Let me see if I can get a look.” A few seconds later, Ed said, “Ron, this is beyond reason; the mountain.”

“What is it?” Ron asked intensely. “What do you see, Ed? Ed?”

Ed answered finally, saying, “Words cannot do this justice. I am seeing Mt. Aconcagua to our west. There is a cloud hanging over the peak the likes of which I’ve never seen. The whole top of the mountain seems to be enveloped in this strange cloud.”

“Slow down, Ed. Describe the cloud,” Ron ordered.

“I don’t believe I can,” Ed answered in astonishment. “It is a cloud, yet it isn’t. It’s like a ghost. The cloud seems to be translucent and of a greenish gray color as it boils like a thunderhead. It reminds me of a volcanic ash cloud, but I know it isn’t. It seems to be rotating too, like a hurricane. Ash clouds don’t rotate like that. I also see a reddish glow near where the mountain disappears into the cloud.” Suddenly, a terrible hiss roared over the communications link, followed by an explosion.

“Ed, Ed...are you still there!” Ron called out with concern. After a few moments, Ed replied, “Yes, I’m still here. There has been a massive explosion near the mountain. The soldiers are turning us around. Wait, oh my God! The sky is on fire! The sky is on fire! Come on, go, go, go!”

“Ed! Ed, what is happening?” Ron asked intensely with rising fear. “Ed!”

Ed replied a few moments later, saying, “This is like a nightmare. The sky is full of giant fireballs that are falling everywhere. It’s hundred, no thousands of them. We are fleeing Mendoza and I’m looking back. The rain of fireballs as reached the city limits. Meteors; giant meteors! My god, the sky is ablaze with them. Wait, the cloud...it looks like a face. Oh, God help us, here comes a big one! Ron, this may be my last....”

The line went dead, leaving Ron calling out, “Ed, Ed. Can you hear me? Ed, speak to me.” After almost two minutes of nothing but static, Ron said to the audience in the grimmest of tones, “Ladies and Gentlemen; we have lost all contact with Ed in Mendoza. He was a brave reporter, always taking on the most dangerous of stories. We at the Euro News Service will try to reestablish contact, but I fear that he may have been witness to something so dramatic that may have cost him his life. Stay tuned here for details as they come in. We shall be here as long as this phenomenon persists.”

Dan and Paul looked at each other with solemn looks. “I think we should look into this,” Dan told Paul.

“Yes. That may be wise,” Paul agreed. They immediately went to the portal chamber and Dan retrieved the earpiece remote, activating the search hologram on the console. As usual, the planet appeared first. However, to their utter astonishment, they saw a great cosmic bombardment of the area around Aconcagua. Asteroid fragments up to the size of semi-trucks pummeled the entire blackout zone spanning a two hundred mile radius of Aconcagua with the worst strikes occurring within a hundred mile radius of the mountain. Hundreds of large mushroom clouds rose from the strikes, merging with the strange glowing cloud that rotated over the mountain, enlarging it as it seemed to absorb the energy from the asteroid strikes. The glowing cloud even drew the ash clouds from the nearby volcanic eruptions towards itself, feeding on them as well. Massive static discharges ripped through the glowing cloud as it boiled like a thunderhead, reaching for the upper atmosphere.

“Holy shit!” Dan cried as he immediately widened the search to show the solar system out to Jupiter. “This is not good,” he declared with great concern as he saw a stream of debris stretching from Venus to the Earth, arcing back toward the asteroid field. The stream of debris was dense and thick, covering a million miles just ahead of the Earth in its orbit with multiple dense filaments of large chunks of rock and ice separated by gaps of relatively no debris, only very small chunks ranging from sand-sized up to baseball-sized debris. The stream with its individual filaments seemed to link with a large planet-sized body just passing through the asteroid field. It was as two-thirds as large as Mars with a strange scarlet color. However, the large planetoid seemed to be breaking up somewhat because of the pounding it took moving through the asteroid field. Another, unmistakable feature of the planetoid was it had a great cloudy tail of debris that moved along the magnetic field lines between it and the sun, stretching for a hundred million miles away from the main body toward the sun and also away from the sun in a sweeping arc toward Jupiter.

Paul saw the massive celestial body and he whispered, “Lord be merciful! It’s Gabriel’s Hammer! No wonder the Vatican didn’t want anyone to see it!”

“But where is Planet X?” Dan replied as he expanded the search again, searching for Planet X. In seconds, he found it. “So there you are,” he said as he found the rogue planet deep below the ecliptic, passing just inside Mars’ orbit on the far side of the solar system from the Earth, heading for the perigee of its orbit within the orbit of Mercury. Dan looked at Paul, saying, “Tell me this isn’t good.”

Paul looked at it, replying with confidence, “Believe God. These are but signs and portents of what is to come. The Lord will have His way with this wicked world.”

Dan stared at Planet X and Gabriel’s Hammer, and then began to notice the position of the other planets. The Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were going into a strange spiral alignment with Planet X and Gabriel’s Hammer. “Hold on,” Dan suddenly said.

“What is it?” Paul asked.

“I have seen this alignment before,” Dan replied.

“Where?” Paul asked plainly.

“In the Archive,” Dan said. “I’ve seen a representation of this in the prophecies uncovered there. Lord have mercy; I know what it is,” he cried out in epiphany.

“What?” Paul asked again.

“Look here. When Gabriel’s Hammer gets to this position,” Dan said pointing to a spot between the orbits of the Earth and Mars, extremely close to the Earth’s orbit. “And Planet X comes out from behind the sun there,” He pointed to a location just outside of Mercury’s orbit at twenty-five degrees to the left of the sun. “The solar capacitor is going to go off like no one has ever seen in the history of man. It is this alignment, according to the writings, that will raise Amacia from the grave. Look, the process has already begun,” Dan said urgently as he narrowed the view to show Aconcagua and the area that had been blacked out. It showed the damage the first wave of debris did in the area and more importantly, the strange glowing cloud that hung ominously over the mountain, growing larger by the minute.

“You heard what they said happened there,” Dan said intensely. Paul nodded, letting Dan follow through on his logic. “They said that thousands died in this area in an instant for no apparent reason. Many animals were killed and those who weren’t killed were fleeing like there was no tomorrow. They also said that there was a total failure of all things electrical. All this happened simultaneously and at the same time that weird cloud appeared over the mountain. Now Gabriel’s Hammer is unloading galactic buckshot on the area. Don’t you see? The solar capacitor went off in an unprecedented way when Gabriel’s Hammer moved into position with the big planets and Mars. We witnessed an electrical surge from the sun that hit there because of the alignment. The hit penetrated the magnetic envelope of the Earth and nullified it there even if it were for just a moment, exposing the entire area to cosmic radiation and killing anything in direct contact with it. As the alignment moves into it optimum position, there will be a storm the likes of which the world has never seen in recorded history. The magnetic field of the Earth will fail there on a large scale and heaven help anyone that is there. According to the writings we’ve found, this particular alignment will cause the lost Amacia to be uncovered somehow. I am not going to even pretend how such a feat can be accomplished.”

Most of what Dan said went right over Paul’s head intellectually, but in his spirit, the Lord bore witness to the truth of it. “So it has truly begun then,” Paul replied soberly. “I’ve got work to do.”

Dan nodded, saying, “Yes. Tell the remnant to be ready and keep their heads down for the chaos will be upon us quicker than anyone thinks.” Paul left the portal chamber heading for the radio uplink. Dan watched the cloud and the terrible meteor storm abate as the Earth moved out of one of the many filaments of debris coming from Gabriel’s Hammer into an area of the stream that didn’t have the level and size of debris from the rogue comet. He watched helplessly as the storm of meteors destroyed almost everything inside the two hundred mile radius around Aconcagua. His heart was heavy with concern for Hanna and her team, so he uttered a prayer for their safety.

Then at a whim, Dan widened the view to an orbital view that encompassed the moon’s orbit. He immediately saw several large ongoing impacts occurring on the lunar surface. As he watched for a few moments, he was suddenly aware of something strange going on. In and around the moon, he noticed flashes of light, small ones that looked like explosions, yet they didn’t seem to be coming from the debris impacts. “What is this?” Dan asked aloud to no one, perplexed by this new phenomenon. He zoomed in closer to the strange phenomena and was dumbfounded. In the hologram, he witnessed two armadas of celestial warships locked in mortal combat with each other. There were hundreds of them firing on each other with strange exotic energy weapons. Dan was utterly stunned and fear began to rise in his heart as he began to see a pattern in the chaos of the battle. He zoomed in and changed the perspective to the battle, looking more behind the moon. “Good Lord!” he breathed. “What am I seeing?” With the change in perspective, he saw two armadas of warships in a picket line, battling fiercely with each other. One armada was apparently in a defensive posture, sitting between the other, larger armada and the Earth. Dan looked at the other armada that was obviously in attack formation. When he looked on the attacking armada, a terrible feeling of dread sank into his stomach as he watched them battle. The defenders were outmatched and outgunned, but managed to hold the invaders at bay. Ships blazed and exploded in slow motion, one after another on both sides. Dan looked down at the console and tapped the controls, using the generator to scan for any kind of communications coming from the battle zone. Immediately, strange sounds filled the chamber as alien languages full of urgency and fear spilled out of the console.

Dan could not tear himself away from the spectacle. It was as if he was watching a sci-fi movie, except that this was real. After ten minutes of his watching the great stellar combat, the attackers withdrew, leaving the defenders tattered but intact. The voices from the audio dropped in intensity and calmed down. Suddenly, all went quiet as the defending ships ceased communications to one another. For five more minutes, Dan monitored the picket line. The defenders had lost five ships of approximately fifty that he could count. The invaders, however, had lost fifteen ships out of nearly eighty that he could see. The invaders continued to back away, congregating well away from the battle zone. The invaders perked Dan’s curiosity, prompting him to zoom in, following the invader’s fleet into the depths of space with the hologram. It wasn’t long until he found their rendezvous point and to his further stupefaction, he saw three massive starships far bigger than the attacking ships. Each was capable of easily holding twenty of the smaller attacking vessels with room to spare. Dan watched in curiosity at the mother ships. He pushed the portal generator even further, zooming into one of the ships lagging behind, to see what manner of beings these were. In moments, he was seeing the bridge of the ship. It was smoking and heavily damaged. Then he saw the beings manning the vessel. He recoiled in fright at seeing the aliens. There were two distinctly different species on the ship. One was the standard gray alien: humanoid with large, dark eyes, no nose and a slit for a mouth. They were a deathly gray in color and were no more than five to six feet in height. These didn’t surprise Dan, but it was the others that caused him to recoil. The others, on the other hand, were malevolent reptilians looking like a cross between a man and a draken. They were bipedal, nearly eight feet in height with strange armor and a very fierce, warlike look. Hideous they were to behold. Scaly abominations they were with clawed arms and legs and draken-like heads that had a secondary set of fanged mandibles outside the primary mouth. As Dan gazed in fear at these terrible beings, the hologram suddenly hissed and sizzled, static filling the image. “What is this?” Dan asked as he puzzled over the new development.

Suddenly, the hologram went blank and resumed a standard orbital view of the Earth. Dan immediately went to checking to see that all was okay. He zoomed back to the defender’s line and the hologram went there without any problem. He then pushed on past the line toward where the invaders were and as he approached the location, the hologram began to hiss and shake with static. He immediately stopped and backed off. The hologram cleared up. “Somehow they must have jammed the portal hologram,” Dan muttered. “How did they know I was watching?” He went back to the defender’s line and zoomed in on the largest ship he could find. In seconds, he found that he could not penetrate the ship with the hologram. Several more attempts were useless, so he abandoned it. He looked at them for a few more moments, and then changed the view back to Aconcagua. The strange cloud was swirling over the top of the mountain, concealing its peak in its strange translucent form as it slowly rotated clockwise, drawing in the ash clouds from the volcanic eruptions to the north and south along with the fires burning below it. Immediately below the cloud, the entire region around the mountain was burning with the meteor strikes. He sighed as he finally shut the machine down. It was a troubled sigh because of what he’d just witnessed. As he put the earpiece back in the console, he asked aloud “Lord? What should I do about this? Was I hallucinating or was it real? Did I really see what I saw?” The Lord did not answer, choosing to remain quiet on the question, so Dan rubbed his face and headed off to the cafeteria for something to soothe his rattled nerves.