zg_shadows | London's burning - throughout the world

PASADENA CONTROL: Hey, wait. I'm getting a no-go signal. Now I'm losing one of the craft. Hey, Bermuda, you getting it?

BERMUDA CONTROL: No, I lost contact. There's a lot of dust blowing up there.

PASADENA CONTROL: Now I've lost the second craft. We got problems.

BERMUDA CONTROL: All contact lost, Pasadena. Maybe the antenna's...

PASADENA CONTROL: What's that flare? See it? A green flare, coming from Mars,
kind of a green mist behind it. It's getting closer. You see it, Bermuda? Come in, Bermuda! Houston, come in! What's going on?

Tracking station 43, Canberra, come in Canberra! Tracking station 63, can
you hear me, Madrid? Can anybody hear me? Come in - come in...

***

The red star is brighter in the sky tonight. If any of the astronomers were at their posts at the observatories, there would be talk about how close it's getting; about orbits and velocities and ranges and gravitational anomalies.

There's just silence in Cape Canaveral.

The newspapers haven't printed; they're relying on the net to let people know what's going on, to save on anyone having to go outside. All the archivists would be tutting if they weren't busy trying to hide the relics of past civilisations from the end of this one.

The Ark is empty in London.

Armies have been called in instead of the emergency services; NATO, the UN, peacekeeping forces - for the first time in years, American troops are firing on American citizens on American soil. Soil occasionally roils and rumbles of its own accord, as the eastern seaboard seems to twitch.

911 rings out unanswered in New York.

Bunker-mentality survivalists are screaming how they told us so. Otaku are charting every uprising, calculating every percentage of the dead, the maimed; of when the supplies will run out and when the world will go nuclear.

There's no food left in the shops in Tokyo.

Can anyone hear me?