Colonel Wesley Denvers was a generally composed man. He never overstressed nor obsessed. That helped in his line of work, and more specifically, the monitoring of the Pentagon’s main Situation Room.

In peacetime, The Room was lightly staffed. A handful of duty officers sat at triple-screen posts, which displayed the results of multiple intelligence feeds, both real-time and filtered by layers of analysts. And Col. Denvers got the main summary displayed on his own post, with red flags to direct his attention to any specific event that those duty officers found important enough. He could then bring up the summary, or usually, go and chat with the appropriate duty person.

Like right now. Without a world war underway, “attacks” targeted infrastructure through the Internet, not air bases and missile silos via ballistic attacks.

“Got that on cyber-threat board about 10 minutes ago. The cyber defense command says we have a large-scale outage of the Internet in western Washington State. Looks like a number of data centers and tier-one links went down.”

“Yummy,” his non-regulation comment almost made the officer smile.

“Anything else?” Denvers added.

“No,” she replied, before the duty officer on the next post interrupted.

“Got a notice of part of the electricity grid down. Around Seattle.”

“Could it be the cause?” Denvers asked, turning back to the first duty officer.

“Unlikely,” the cyber officer replied. “All those high-tier facilities have batteries and generators. In a few hours, maybe. Not after…”

The monitoring officer checked again and specified.

“… 12 minutes. Or about so.”

“So? What threat model?” the colonel asked.

“Looks like the gaming mecca of the world is in trouble. The West Coast will probably have lots of frustrated gamers tonight. And… yes, that e-commerce-slash-infrastructure provider has some outages too. Its northwestern and main data center is among those down. Okay, this is a major world-ending crisis.”

Denvers allowed himself a chuckle. That lasted until a third voice from one row behind him added a new element.

“Space command status board just notified of a GPS satellite down. They lost comms and the signal is… ah, no. It’s back.”

“Back?”

“Spaceforce command channel indicates the satellite is restarting. Looks like it went on safe mode due to… power bus shutdown?”

“Does that happen often?”

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“I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone mentioned that type of problem during my training, let alone a procedure to even do a restart from scratch… ah, looks like it’s going to take several hours just to recalibrate the ephemeris. Consider it offline until then.”

The first duty officer said, “You know the adage. Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, thrice enemy action.”

Denvers shook his head.

“Well, that’s only two out of three. The last is in space, not in Seattle…”

The fast-clicking of keys was his answer. Denvers looked at the space monitoring officer, seeing his face scrunch. The duty officer waved to him and the colonel moved to see what it was about.

“It was… crossing just over the Seattle area when it went down.”

Denvers swore internally. The joke suddenly wasn’t funny anymore.

He raised his voice.

“Listen everyone? Anyone got anomalies in Washington State?”

The rest of the duty officers made negative signs, save for one.

“PacWest says they got an interruption of service in the northwest. They don’t have status updates on a number of cell towers and are trying to get… new status updates. They just lost links to another set of cell towers.”

“Link types?” he asked.

“That’s the direct line-of-sight antenna relays,” the telco monitoring desk replied.

“Don’t they have fiber links as backup?” Denvers asked.

“The line-of-sight are backups. The fiber went down earlier… the main nodes are all at the edge of Seattle.”

“Okay, everyone, looks like we have all sorts of cascade failures in the Seattle area. Start doing active checks on whatever you can get.”

He debated with himself mentally. Most of the upper echelon was probably gone home, or maybe on the road for those working late. The situation didn’t make sense. Coordinated Cyber-attacks on the infrastructure could explain a lot, but not a GPS satellite falling briefly. Besides…

“Can’t raise Jitsap base,” a voice said. “I’m already trying satellite coms, but nobody’s answering.”

“Get me any local base. Or facility.”

He almost ran back to his desk. General Markus would be annoyed, but he would be the one to decide to call in the Joint Chiefs, not him. Once military bases went offline, it was a serious attack on the USA.

“What do you mean, is there any disturbance?”

The duty sergeant at the supply depot found the person on the phone odd. But it was a secure line, and the call came straight from the Pentagon.

“What do you mean, all military installations west of here are down? Okay, I’ll have a look. Switch to Satcom.”

Duty Sergeant Milton picked up the bulkier military satellite phone, waited a few seconds until it rang, and confirmed that the Pentagon Situation Room officer was back on the line before he headed out.

“Okay. I don’t hear any bombing or someth… WHAT THE FUCK!”

He almost dropped the phone, as he looked up in the late afternoon sky.

“What’s happening,” the tinny voice of the distant duty officer came.

Sergeant Milton didn’t answer immediately. He was looking at an utterly baffling sight.

There were lines in the sky. Blue on blue, like neon inked on the sky. Drawing some kind of mesh. There were a few wispy clouds, but despite some being between him and the lines… the lines still showed somehow. He looked at the edges of the mesh, trying to gauge how far away the thing was and noticed the lines were slowly advancing.

As he watched, two lines joined up, making another distorted hexagon. Something, like colorless light, was falling down from the netting. Then a new line started from the angle, moving in another direction. Almost straight toward Tiger Mountain.

“Sergeant? Sergeant???” the distant voice came.

Milton didn’t even bother replying. He fished out his non-regulation cross necklace and kissed it. That terrifying view was all that he needed to know the End of Days was coming. Then he sprinted toward the parking lot, sat phone dropped and forgotten. He was going to get his wife and two kids, and bug out, army duty be damned.

We… we should get east. The wife’s cousin, Josh Valetta, got a pair of cabins out of the way, at his diner off the 90 near Montana.