Legends of Amacia: The Gathering Shadow

A few hours after the monster storm in the Indian Ocean was nullified, the President of the United States was called into a special meeting in middle of the morning. In a secure White House briefing room, senior military and intelligence officials sat around a long table waiting for the President. He sat down at the head of the table and said, “Good morning, gentlemen. You may proceed anytime you’re ready.” At that, the briefing commenced.

The generals and admirals took turns giving him updates on their war efforts against the Muslim Alliance along with the preparations for attacking Syria, Iran, and the Ukraine. The reports were good as were the intelligence reports by the intelligence officials. They went down the line informing of the various things that was going on.

Finally, they came to two people clad in civilian clothes. “All right,” the President said, “Everything sounds like it’s going according to plan. What do you have to tell me, Joe?” One of the men in civilian clothes sighed and stood with a grim look on his face, preparing to address President. The President saw his expression and became concerned.

“Mr. President,” Joe said. “We have a problem. Our attack on Indonesia has been thwarted by an unknown agency.”

The President’s face fell and he barked, “Clear the room.” The military officials and intelligence operatives left the room. As one of the generals walked by the President, he reached out and said, “You stay, Bob. This has to do with you.”

“Yes, sir,” the General said as the door was closed.

“Okay Joe. What happened?” the President asked.

“As I said, our weather attack on Indonesia was somehow thwarted,” Joe reported. “We used the HAARP and six other related devices to construct the largest, most dangerous cyclone in the history of the Indian Ocean. We created it, and then steered it toward the western end of Sumatra without any problems. Then, four hours ago, the storm was suddenly obliterated by a high-energy burst far stronger than anything I’ve ever seen before. The burst lasted only three seconds and completely destroyed what took us three days to make.”

The President’s face soured and he looked at the General, asking, “You’re our resident expert on high-energy weapons, Bob. Is there anyone who has the capability to do what has happened?”

“No, sir,” the General answered. Then the General asked Joe, “How big was the pulse?”

Joe shook his head and said, “It pegged our instruments off the scale and shorted them out. The power unleashed was phenomenal.”

The President rubbed the side of his face, asking, “How high do the instruments read?”

“We can broadcast at the power of five terawatts,” the General said. “However, we can measure up to twenty terawatts.”

“Sir, when the energy surge took place, we had feedback through the entire system and it overloaded our fail safes,” Joe stated.

“Stop dancing around the fucking answer,” the President said coldly. “Can any of you give me some kind of idea of what kind of power we’re dealing with?”

At that, the second man, who had remained silent spoke up, saying, “Sir, the power we’re taking about is on a planetary scale. All we have is estimates but out closest estimate is that we’re talking about a surge on the scale of over one hundred million terawatts. That, of course is only an estimate. It’s my opinion that what we saw was a fluke, an aberration caused by the magnetic fields of the Earth getting crossed up and discharging into the storm. We know so little about the Earth as a system. We take a great risk by manipulating the weather and the Earth with our machines. We may have inadvertently caused our own failure by pushing it so far with the tropical system. When the energy in the Earth’s system was pushed so far out of kilter by our machines, the system had to compensate and in this case, it compensated in the very mechanism we created.”

The President sat there for a moment, trying to comprehend what he was being told. His face suddenly hardened and he leaned forward toward the table, putting his elbows on it. “And how do you know this?” the President hissed, staring icily at the man.

“Mr. President,” Joe intruded. “Hammond is our resident expert on energy weapons. He designed many of our systems, including the HAARP system. Hammond knows what he’s talking about. Besides, he was present when this pulse blew our system’s circuit breakers.”

“Is that so?” the President growled, leaning back in his chair. “Can he fix it?”

“It’s already been repaired and reinforced, Mr. President,” Hammond reported stoically, not intimidated by the President’s bluster. “I supervised the repairs myself. Our high-energy weapons are ready for action.”

“They’d better be, for your sake,” the President snarled. “No one knows we are using the weather machines and high-energy weapons against our enemies. If they were to ever find out and could prove that we were using them as weapons of war against them, the rest of the world would immediately denounced us and possibly unite against us. No one must ever know of this.”

“Of course, Mr. President,” the General agreed.

“Good,” the President replied coldly. “We will continue to use the machines against the Muslim Alliance and our other enemies. Indonesia will pay dearly for their allowing the terrorist elements to operate inside their borders in defiance of me. They’re a threat to the Order and will be dealt with in any manner that I see fit. Maybe our storm did overload the system, but that will not stop us. We will use every new weapon in our arsenal to deal with these renegades to global peace. Since HAARP is back online, create more storms. Just don’t try to peg it off the scale like it did this time. Also, prepare the Seismic Research and Weapons Initiative for action. Damascus is our first target. Create a quake that will flatten the city and destroy the regime. I want the Syrian president and his entire government dead. Then I want Iran targeted before they can launch any strikes against us in Syria. Shake Tehran to pieces.”

“Are you sure that is advisable?” the General asked bluntly. “The SRWI has not been fully tested yet and is notoriously hard to control. Our orbital ion cannons would be a much better option and wouldn’t destroy the entire country in the process.”

“You heard me, General,” the President snapped. “Both Damascus and Tehran must fall. Just consider it a full-scale field test of the SRWI. If it performs like we hope, then we’ll have the ultimate weapon that will give us mastery of the world.”

“You play a very dangerous game, Mr. President,” Hammond warned. “These weapons are not like your nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that you can lob around like an idiot. They require careful control and planning. Creating an earthquake, just like creating a storm with the HAARP system, is an exact science. You just can’t go pushing on the planet without knowing how the planet will push back. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, especially when dealing with these kinds of systems. If you push it too hard, you could end up hurting us more than our enemies and it’ll be all on you.”

“You have a big mouth, Hammond,” the President snapped viciously. “No one tells me what to do. I’m the President of the fucking United States.”

“I’m not telling you what to do, sir,” Hammond replied with a stone cold expression. “I’m merely reminding you that there are repercussions…severe repercussions for excessive use of this technology. It’s experimental alien technology we’ve retro-engineered and we don’t fully understand the scope of its power yet. It’s like one hundred year old nitroglycerin. Hit it the wrong way and it’ll blow up in your face like the storm did. Don’t push it past the red line again like you did with the cyclone. There are natural forces at work here we still don’t understand. I’d rather not see this genie let out of the bottle without a damned good leash on him. Furthermore, if you insist on repeated use of this technology in a short amount of time, someone will inevitably put two and two together, linking us to these natural disasters us, and then you’ll lose that trump card for making us the undisputed master of the universe. You said no one could know of our use of these technologies.”

“He has a point, Mr. President,” the General agreed. “Don’t try to push ahead so quickly. We need to keep a cool head and plan these attacks carefully so it doesn’t look like we’re behind it. It has to look like a force of nature and not a man-induced phenomenon.”

“I see your point,” the President conceded. “Okay, we’ll slow down a bit. But I still want SWRI activated and ready to strike Damascus and Tehran at my command.”

“We can do that,” the General stated. “And we’ll come up with some other contingency plans that may be useful. What shall we do about our Russian counterparts?”

“Keep a very close eye on them,” the President ordered. “They have their own weather machines and high-energy systems, so we must be ready to counter their moves. They’re friendly to Muslim Alliance and they’re interfering in our Ukrainian operation. Their annexation of Crimea proves it. We must watch them carefully. They must not be allowed to interfere. I want Moscow and their weather machines targeted with SRWI, just in case. If the tests in Damascus and Tehran go well, we can use it to destroy their ability to respond without them knowing it was us.”

“Is that wise, targeting the Russians like that?” Joe asked. “We know they have their own versions of what we have and they could very well retaliate with it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the President stated venomously. “They’re an enemy friendly to the Muslim Alliance and they’ve defied me. We must protect ourselves against anything they may have planned. By targeting Russia with SRWI, we have an ace up our sleeve they don’t know about.”

“And China?” Hammond asked bluntly. “What about them? They watch us like a hawk, looking for any weakness in our systems, both militarily and financially.”

“How many fucking ways do I need to spell it out?” the President snapped, hammering the table with his fist. “Anyone who is an enemy will need to be dealt with, including the Chinese. I will provide a list of targets to you shortly for SRWI and HAARP. Now go! Syria and Indonesia will fall to us as will the other nations in the Muslim Alliance.”

“Yes, sir,” the General said and Joe nodded.

Hammond looked coldly at the President. “We will be ready, sir, just as you ordered,” he hissed, letting his anger finally show. “But know this…if something goes wrong, it’s all on you. You have been warned, sir. You tamper with forces you cannot possibly comprehend that can easily spiral out of control. This is all on you.”

The President’s face flushed with anger. He pointed at Hammond, hissing, “Get him out of here, General. He’s no longer an asset to me. Deal with it.”

“Yes, sir,” the General replied as Hammond walked out of the room. “I’ll take care of it.”

General followed Hammond out, leaving Joe with the President.

“That wasn’t necessary, sir,” Joe declared. “Hammond is a good man…the best we have. He was just trying to keep you from doing something foolhardy.”

“Don’t you dare defend that traitor, Joe. He’s a liability…as you are on the verge of becoming,” the President declared. “I cannot have people who refuse to take my orders out of some displaced sense of right and wrong. Now, can I trust you, Joe?”

“Yes,” Joe replied, hiding the disappointment he felt. “I’m with you, Mr. President.”

“Make sure Hammond is neutralized,” the President ordered. “That traitor will take what he knows to his grave.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe stated, walking out of the room, leaving the President by himself in the conference room.

The President sat brooding over the news of the failure of the storm to strike as he wanted. Moreover, Hammond’s insistence on restraint further angered him. He pulled out his personal phone, calling the chief of White House Security.

“Yes, Mr. President,” the security chief answered through the phone. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” the President replied coldly. “Find Joe Tara and Hammond Jordan and arrest them on a charge of high treason against the United States of America. I just found out both of them are traitors that are armed and dangerous. Find them now and shoot on sight: shoot to kill. They just left the briefing room in the West Wing.”

“Yes, sir,” the security chief replied smartly through the phone as the President snapped the phone shut.

“If you want something done right, do it yourself,” he grumbled angrily, brooding in his chair. As he brooded, a thought occurred to him, which soured his mood even more. “Beowulf!” he snarled. “It has to have been Beowulf!” He clenched his fist in rage and smashed it against the table, and then stormed out of the briefing room in fear and rage at another setback, heading to the Oval Office. Hades is not going to like this at all, he thought. By time he sat down at his desk in the Oval Office, the chief of security entered with a grim look on his face.

“Did you find the traitors?” he asked the security chief.

“No, Mr. President,” the security chief replied in a worried tone. “We found General Bob Ulfred unconscious in the secret passage from the Lincoln Bedroom with no sign of Joe or Hammond. Sir, we’re making a second sweep as I speak but it appears as if they vanished into thin air.”

The President’s face twisted in anger. “No one vanishes into thin air,” he snarled. “Turn this place inside out. Find them and shoot them on sight. No mistakes…both of them have classified information that cannot be disseminated. It would mean the end of the United States if they divulge what they know to the world.”

“Yes, sir,” the security chief answered quickly, flashing a salute before fleeing the President’s anger.

“I’m surrounded by god damned incompetent morons!” the President growled. “I can’t let those two interfere with my plans.” He quickly picked up the phone and dialed a special number.

“Yes, Mr. President,” a voice answered from the other end.

“There’s been a security breech, General Blake,” the President stated. “Our advance weapons division has been compromised. Find and eliminate Joe Tara and Hammond Jordan with extreme prejudice, and then upgrade to Defcon condition Delta. Ready the packages for delivery. I’ll provide targets for the packages shortly. We are taking the war to the next level before anyone gets the jump on us. Put the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets on high alert and tell them to ready their rail guns and cruise missiles. We’re going to stop this shit before it goes any further.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” General Blake replied stoically. “We shall implement immediately.”

“Good,” the President hissed. “Expect target lists within the hour.” He hung up the phone before the Blake could reply. “Now, we’ll see who’s in charge of this planet,” the President murmured icily.