Old Glory Chapter 6

Commander Deacon Hall felt disjointed from time itself, as though his body had been dragged forward but his soul had been left somewhere behind. The moment they activated the time dilation field, there had been a hum, a sense of tension thick enough to drown in, and then nothing but silence and white. For two weeks they had waited inside the Ark, nervous, half-believing they would emerge to ash or vacuum or some misfire of time itself. Those days were filled with whispered conversations and the clack of boots in metal halls, every breath heavy with the weight of expectation. And then came the return, not into the familiar world they had left behind, but into a strange, hostile expanse that bore only the faintest echo of Earth.

Their reentry had not been graceful. The Ark tore its way into existence in an eruption of fury and force, ripping an entire mountaintop apart as it slammed into the world with all the elegance of a meteor strike. Deacon remembered the silence breaking, the world shuddering, and then chaos. Debris rained down for miles in every direction. Chunks of mountain the size of buildings were hurled into the distance as the shockwave rolled out. The crater left behind was monstrous—its walls towering over even the Ark itself, the rock around the landing site turned to slag and glass under the brutal heat and pressure of their return. The landscape was scarred in ways that would take centuries to heal, if it ever did.

The crew had not fared much better. They were alive, but rattled to their core. Most walked the corridors with hollow stares, too stunned to speak above a whisper. Only a tenth of the Ark's population had any formal military experience; the rest were a scattershot of survivors and specialists, engineers and medics, teachers and technicians, all civilians who had simply won the survival lottery. The Ark had not taken the best of humanity. It had taken what was left, what was immune, what was available. The Plague had seen to that. And now, those remnants were expected to be pioneers and scouts in a world that seemed to hate them.

Deacon had never expected to be in charge. He wasn’t supposed to be. He had been an aide, a support officer, a glorified handler for the man who was supposed to lead them: General Ravenwood. But the General had never made it. When the Atlantic Line fell, he’d been cut off in Washington, and they’d sealed the Ark without him. Deacon had taken the chair not because he wanted it, but because there was no one else. His division heads were competent, steady, and loyal, but they looked to him. All of them did. And now, every lost drone, every missed report, every name etched into the casualty roll was his burden to carry. He was not ready. But that didn’t matter. There was no one else.

The plan had been, in theory, elegant. The alien-derived time dilation field was technologically complex but mechanically simple, a controllable temporal gradient that seemed easy enough to use on the outset. Once activated, it would anchor the Ark in a temporal fold where time outside would accelerate by a factor of multitudes. Two thousand years would pass in the blink of an eye beyond its hull, each week inside a millenium. By the time they stepped outside again, the Plague would be long gone, burned away by entropy or devoured by its own hunger. The worst of the world’s horrors, the bioweapons, infected, and endless hordes would be ancient history. They would step into the future as custodians of humanity’s final hope.

That future had a name. The Vault Reclamation Protocol. Once the Ark returned, they were supposed to make landfall, secure the area, and begin the process of unsealing the hardened millennium vaults, all massive repositories of resources, industrial machinery, construction drones, cultural records, and more. The network of Vaults had been scattered across the nation, each designed to survive anything short of the planet exploding, hidden in places deemed geologically stable and hardened against even the natural degradation of time and nature. With them, the survivors aboard the Ark were meant to begin again, as the inheritors of the world. It wasn't an ideal plan. It wasn't even a good one, really. Riding by the seat of their pants and hoping that the alien tech didn't vaporize them or give them all super cancer from some unknown form of radiation or something along those lines.  And as the world burned around them, the old adage held true. What could go wrong, did go wrong.

Most of the science division hadn't managed to make it back before the Rocky line collapsed, trapping them at Ark 5's launch site as they tried to get the last of its systems online. Deacon remembered the last few calls over the encrypted line, as they were cut short mid-sentence. Desperate men who were trying to save a few more lives as their defenders held on for dear life, dying in droves for just a few more seconds, but ultimately pointless in the end. They had all watched as the Ark was overrun by infected and monster alike, damning them and all who were there to an agonizing end.

The few techs and engineers who managed to make it to Valhalla barely understood the damned thing. They were smart, sure, but not the ones who unlocked the secrets behind the alien ship, not the ones who signed off on the final integrations. Those people had died screaming on the Rocky Line. All that was left were techs who’d memorized procedures like gospel without ever knowing what the verses meant. So when they told Deacon the time jump had gone to shit, all they could offer were phrases like "cascading fault" and "temporal dampener failure." What it really meant was that their narrow, carefully calculated launch window had amounted to all of Jack and shit, and Jack left town. The neat little bubble that was supposed to drop them two thousand years forward had unraveled into a fraying mess of stretched seconds and bloated centuries. Something had gone wrong with the field alignment, hell if they knew what, but in the end it didn't matter.

It wasn’t a simple switch flip. That was the fantasy. The real machine was a snarling knot of alien principles, too big to fail and too opaque to understand. What should have been a precise jump across time had turned into a skid across the skin of eternity. Instead of a few thousand years, they’d gone forward millions. Twelve million, if the rough calculations that their few scientists could parse out held true, and that was the conservative estimate. They were in an entirely new Era, a blink in the lifespan of the planet but enough to rebuild the planet into something far different from when they left.

When they arrived, they were seven hundred miles off center and God only knew where, as any kind of geomapping had been long since outdated. It was being kept at the highest levels, but the place they landed was closer to the Atlantic coast than they'd ever imagined, in what seemed to be a swamp the size of Texas. What used to be plains was now miles of water-choked fen. The lonely mountain they'd leveled when they arrived had been an anomaly that made no geologic sense, surrounded as it was by the expanse of wetlands, but that was only one small issue amongst many.

Worse, something was interfering with long range scans and radio transmissions, making long-range drone scans nearly impossible. There was something in the upper atmosphere that bent signals unnaturally, like it was eating the transmissions bit my bit until what remained was a garbled mess. It reminded Deacon of those first transmissions from India, talking about the magnetic storm that choked out their comms network and resulted in the deaths of those poor bastards who had no idea what was coming. What it meant, he didn't know, but he suspected that the anomalous storm that had consumed Asia, then Europe, had crawled across the ocean and changed something fundamental worldwide.

Laser comms, direct link and otherwise, still worked, thank Christ, but anything that relied on wireless or radio transmission was.... limited at best. The end result left them blind and deaf when they began sending out recon teams, the crater blessedly empty of threats and everything for miles around had likely been scared off by the blast, but he knew that was only a temporary state of affairs.

Things had been going poorly. Hostile fauna from rabid animals to strange demi-humanoids had been reported, monsters and creatures and things straight out of myth. Not just dangerous, either, but alien. Deacon had seen the helmet feed from a survey team, maybe thirty miles out, barely a hop as the Pandion flied, showing something... strange. The creatures wore primitive armor armor and carried blades that glowed like phosphorus in the dark. That team had come under attack a dozen times before they were extracted, and many were still holed up in the medical deck after being mauled. He'd had them confined away from the rest to stop the spread of rumors, but that was a fool's wish. Word was already filtering around.

Ruins of spanning cities made of stone and strange metals dotted the landscape. Towering obelisks choked with moss, temples half-sunk into the mire, crystalline lattices that buzzed and hummed when the wind changed. This is what his recon teams had brought him, but they had yet to see hide nor hair of the other Arks. Originally the plan called for them to converge to the same rally point, share resources and support one another in the reclamation efforts. But then, with the odd time dilation effects, even a few seconds difference at the end would mean tens of thousands of years of difference between each ship's arrival. They could already be buried. They could be thousands of years in the past, or in the future. There was no way to know.

But that, it seemed, was a later problem. Right now he was stuck juggling a dozen different operations, from recon to survey, and none of them were going well. No mission came back clean. Those few reports he was getting from his field teams were showing a constant, crushing slog, calls for reinforcements, for drone support, for help or supplies were being filtered down constantly, and he only had so much. Every day, his list of losses grew longer. It was like trying to plug a leak in a dam and he only had so many fingers to do it with

The Ark's Pandion transports barely numbered a dozen, and most of those were being used as relays. They couldn’t spare them for rescue ops, not when they were the only way to maintain line-of-sight comms across the vast wet hell they’d landed in. They were a difficult to replace resource, and one that he'd prioritized with the autofactories, but they could only do so much and they only had so many resources to do it with. Which is why when word hit that one was shot down, its signal terminating on a survey op turned recon and rescue, he was immediately alerted.

Deacon's hands were tied by a myriad of compounding tragedies, but none twisted the knife quite like this. He had tried, really tried, to get a bird in the air, to scramble something in the Pandion’s direction. But they had nothing to go on. No distress call, no warning, just a cold silence. One moment the drone had been skimming low over the wetlands, telemetry strong, relays humming, and the next: a blip of red across the main board. One heartbeat later, it was gone. The fault alert flared once before it died into flatlined static. The feed had died at the edge of their mapped region, like the earth itself had reached up and swallowed the machine whole.

He didn’t even know if it had been shot down, brought low by hostile fire, or if it had simply run afoul of the same maddening weirdness that blanketed this cursed swamp. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The Pandions were critical to their operations- airborne comm nodes, ferry transports, mapping platforms, lifelines in a land where no signal traveled clean. Losing one was a damning blow, and they had no idea what had caused it. But whatever had happened, what it meant was Valkyrie-5 was on their own now.

The sad truth was that there wasn't anyone to send, not without risking burning even more of his precious resources on what could be a meat grinder. The scramble teams were already committed, running round the clock reinforce and rescue ops. He just... didn't have anything he could do, not until dawn, when hopefully the comms would clear and his options would grow from the nothing they were now. Ultimately, Valkyrie-5 would be on its own and he just hoped that whatever was happening over there, they could handle it.