Without warning

The brigadier general dropped his gaze. They were standing by the crumbling edge of a two-lane road, the bitumen surface shimmering in the heat a few hundred yards behind them, a natural phenomenon. The much more powerful haze directly in front was decidedly unnatural. The small convoy of Hummers and Cuban vehicles had pulled up here ten minutes ago and Musso’s heart was still beating hard from the sight. Any last, lingering doubts placed in the way of belief by his rational mind had been banished. Visible from well over the horizon, it not only reached up to the stratosphere, it curved away towards the horizon in both directions like a giant standing wave, raised by an unknowable deity.

It was alien.

It sat there, in front of him, utterly removed from any human context to give it meaning. He had no idea what it was, and having seen it up close for himself now, he doubted that anybody ever would.

‘You still got nothing, Lieutenant Kwan?’ he said.

Lieutenant Jenny Kwan shook her head. She seemed too young to Musso, almost baby-faced, but she was one of the smartest, scariest individuals he’d ever met. An MIT grad, Kwan was a Marine first lieutenant, the boss of an Incident Response Unit, which was a bland name for a bunch of very smart people trained to look for and respond to some of the worst things in the world: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Her crew and equipment took up three of the seven Humvees that had driven deep into Cuban territory, escorted by Major Nuсez and a platoon of his men in a couple of old Soviet-era BMP-2s.

Musso had to hand it to the Cubans. This monstrosity wasn’t an abstract proposition for them, something to be intuited from indirect evidence provided by web links or satellite data. It was sitting literally a stone’s throw away, bisecting their country. Given all that, he was impressed by their professionalism and no-bullshit attitude, although Nuсez had probably picked his Praetorian guard for this gig. They helped Lieutenant Kwan whenever she asked for it, and kept to themselves when she didn’t. Not that Kwan was having any luck with her equipment – no matter what sensors or sniffers or magic wands she waved at the haze, it made not a damn bit of difference.

‘According to my readings, General, that thing isn’t even here,’ she told him.

‘Uh-uh,’ he muttered. They’d had the same result plugging into FAA and weather satellites back at Gitmo. As far as their technology was concerned, the haze didn’t exist.

He could feel the warmth leaking out of the late afternoon as the sun dropped towards a line of low, scrubby hills in the west. There was a faint but noticeable dry heat radiating from the haze, but that was all.

‘Care to take a closer look, Major?’ he said.

Nuсez shook his head. ‘No. But what else is to be done?’

The Cuban officer took the first steps away from the convoy, towards the new edge of the known world. Musso fell in beside him as they cautiously approached the barrier. The country hereabouts was little different from the area around Guantanamo. Both were nestled at the edge of the Sierra Maestra ranges, the remnants of huge fractured slabs of continental plate, raised from the ocean floor over millions of years by tectonic impact, volcanic eruptions and the 100,000-gigatonne blast of the Chicxulub comet punching into the surface of the planet just a short distance away, some 65 million years ago. The Maestra was perfect guerrilla territory, a vast contrary maze of steep valleys, volcanic dykes, abrupt fault lines and almost impenetrable karst areas, all riven with limestone caves and covered in dense forest. The ranges gave out on the far side of the haze, smoothing out into the low, rolling plains that made up nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s land surface. For all of the earth-shattering violence that had gone into creating this environment over the eons, it was nothing compared to the immediate spectacle of the static energy wave.

Musso was able to make out the lowland steppes on the far side without much trouble. Nothing moved there. He had earlier compared it to looking through a waterfall, but now to his mind it was more like a few layers of plastic wrap. He stooped down to pick up a rock as they walked, wondering what would happen if he threw it in. Nuсez slowed as they approached the face. It appeared to billow, like a sail, just as the Cuban had described. They stopped about fifty yards away.

‘I would not think it safe to get much closer,’ Nuсez warned.

‘I wouldn’t argue with that, Major,’ agreed Musso. ‘Let’s just accept we’re both possessed of stainless-steel cojones and take it nice and careful from here.’