as we know it

The jeep died just past the main gate into the facility hidden in the New Mexico desert. The four people in it were forced to abandon the body wrapped in a tarp. Time was running out, while the wind rose and tore at everything without mercy. It would take everything they had left to carry the device they'd brought back from Antartica to the entrance into the underground bunkers that were the real heart of Project Blackhole. There was no time or energy to waste on the man who had turned on them at the end. If they didn't get under cover soon, the violent sandstorm battering the whole southwest would flay the skin from their bones.

Vast veils of black smoke streamed from the Wolf Mountains in Montana down the Rockies to Colorado as drought-dry forests burned before the screaming wind. Baseball sized hail hammered one city, towering tornados swept over the Los Angeles basin, and rising water lapped at the Statue of Liberty's waist. New Orleans drowned as the Gulf took back the Delta and the Mississippi flood plain became an inland sea from Minneapolis south. A news report from San Francisco showed the Golden Gate still survived, but it could only be a matter of time. A steady and unending cloud-burst filled the rivers and great cracks were snaking up the face of the Shasta Lake Dam. Built by the same man who designed the Hoover Dam, when it went, the flood would sweep away everything along the Sacramento River to the Bay.

They were faceless figures in sepia-toned light, wearing ripped and dirty black fatigues, mirrored sunglasses protecting their eyes, heads and faces wrapped in scarves and torn up shirts to save them. Red dust coated them but didn't touch the gleaming, copper-gold sphere they pulled out of the back of the jeep. It seemed to hover over the ornate pallet beneath it, completely untouched by the wind or gravity. Opalescent streaks chased themselves around its constant curve, following some vertiginous pattern.

The four people leaned into the wind and headed for the entrance, the device balanced between them.

Information from other parts of the world was sketchier. Africa and South America burned. Moscow sparkled and glistened under five feet of ice. A giant sinkhole had opened and swallowed most of Paris. Venice was gone. The Acropolis had crumpled under an electrical storm fiercer than Zeus' wrath. Waterspouts and maelstroms plagued an otherwise eerily peaceful Pacific in the Far East and a storm surge whipped east from the South Pacific, building into a wave that would inundate Baja California and smash against the coast north from there to British Columbia. In India, the bloating bodies backed up the river from Delhi to the Ganges Delta.

The doors had been torn off their hinges by the wind. Sand spilled inside in a steady, insidious slide, an hourglass spill charting the end of the world. A small surveillance camera, protected in its high corner, tracked the four intruders' approach.

Many levels below, a man named Kendall watched the monitors in the security center. In a another room, a carefully guarded holding cell, Arvin Sloane waited, paging through the original Rambaldi manuscript under the watchful, cold gaze of Jack Bristow.

Sloane smiled. "This is it, Jack."

"If you're playing a game this time, Arvin," Jack replied, "I'll let Irina deal with you."

"It was never a game, Jack," Sloane said. He waved his hand toward the world above them, torn apart by nature turned against itself. "This is what Rambaldi foresaw."

Buried in the DSR installation, hardened against everything from an EM pulse to a direct nuclear strike, the men and women of Project Blackhole were safer than almost anyone else on earth. Even so, nature's unleashed fury could be sensed. The shriek of the sandstorm above them reached all the way down to the seventh level. Most of the cameras in the aboveground portions of the facility had already been lost, but a few in more protected positions were still working and showed the buildings being ripped apart.

Gave a whole new and personal meaning to the word sand-blasted, one tech commented. No one laughed.

A few steps before the entrance, one of the people carrying the device slipped. Kendall clenched his fists, watching the grainy black and white images. The wind threatened to tumble the fallen figure away, but one of the others reacted, catching an outstetched arm with one hand, while still supporting the device with his other. The pallet wobbled, but stayed aloft. The sphere never shifted.

The second figure reeled in the first until all four of them were supporting the sphere again, then they resumed their laborious trudge.

"Jesus," Kendall breathed.

Hard to say who had faltered or who had caught the other up in that instant. They were just two men and two women.

"Send the elevator up," he commanded.
So far the sat dishes had survived, positioned by a fluke in a hollow that protected them from the worst of the wind's wrath. A terrible, bone-deep creak was coming from them regularly now, though. They wouldn't last much longer. Not that it really mattered, less and less was getting through the heavy dust occluding the atmosphere.

Monitors were flickering out as the feeds died or were interrupted. The steady hum of the air conditioners sounded loud and labored. The ventilation system was threatening to fail as the air intakes on the surface were overwhelmed by the dust and sand.

In the infirmary, Irina Derevko heard the elevator and looked up from the face of her comatose daughter. One hand clenched on Nadia's limp hand. They had made it, she realized. Nadia's sacrifice hadn't been futile. She hoped Sydney was with them, believed she would be, but didn't move.

She wasn't going to leave Nadia alone.

The brainwave monitor registered the cessation of all activity first. Then the heart monitor began to keen.

Irina didn't move. The brain damage from the overdose of Rambaldi's memory serum had been too great, the doctors had told her. Trying to revive her would be no kindness.

She watched until Nadia stopped breathing and a doctor entered the room and disconnected the alarm. She kissed her daughter's forehead for only the second time - just once she'd held her before the KGB wrested her child from her - and walked out into the corridor. There she leaned against a cold, concrete wall and stared up at the flickering fluorescent lights, unable to cry.

Deep in an a cave carved from the side of Mt. Erebus, Michael Vaughn aimed his M16 at the three people he had accompanied on the mission. "You killed her!" he shouted. He fired a burst at the ice just in front of them.

"She's not dead, Mike!" Weiss shouted at him. "And if she dies, it's Rambaldi's fault, not Sydney's, not Irina's, not anyone else's. Christ."

"Vaughn," Sydney said, taking a slow step toward. "Vaughn, don't do this. Nadia's my sister. Do you think I wanted anything to happen to her?"

"She chose to have the serum administered so we could find the device before the Covenant," Katya said scornfully. "Will you make her sacrifice be for nothing!"

"My father died so that The Passenger wouldn't be found, so that no one would ever have the power in this ... this thing!" Vaughn shouted, waving his rifle at the eerie sphere waiting for them at the back of the cave. "Now you want to trust Sloane to know what to do with it."

Marcus Dixon was waiting when the elevator reached the bottom-most level. Several armed DSR guards were with him. He waved four of them forward. "Take it into Room 47."

The four exhausted figures in the elevator stood aside and let the soldiers take the pallet's handles and heft. They watched silently as the device was taken away.

"Are all of you all right?" Dixon asked.

The tallest figure stripped off the makeshift headgear and revealed Eric Weiss' haggard countenance. Dust floated out his hair when he shook his head. White spots of frostbite marked his cheeks and lips and his eyes were red and sunk deep in his face.

"It's a hell out there," he said hoarsely.

Dixon nodded. "You can shower and clean up in the infirmary. The VIP quarters are full up."

Katya pulled off her scarf, chuckling to herself as she did. "Full of very important people, I am sure."

Dixon turned back to the last two. "Sydney, Vaughn - "

The face under the layers wasn't Michael Vaughn's.

"You!"

Julian Sark quirked his mouth into a half-smile. Before Dixon could do more than make an abortive move toward his own sidearm, Sydney was interposing herself. "Wait, Dixon. He's on our side. We would never have made it out of Antarctica without his resources."

"Where's Vaughn?"

She closed her eyes, clearly pained. "Vaughn's - "

"Vaughn turned on us," Weiss interrupted. His shoulders slumped. "He sabotaged our vehicles and tried to kill us."

"Sark pulled us off Erebus," Katya said.

Dixon shook his head. "Why?"

"I'm not mad enough to believe an object of the power Rambaldi predicted belongs in the hands of the Covenant, Director Dixon," Sark said. "My purpose within the Covenant was always to monitor and influence its actions; my loyalties have always lain elsewhere."

"Julian has always worked for Irina," Katya said. She brushed a hand along his cheekbone, a gesture that was at once possessive, familiar, and fond. Her eyes were laughing. Sark jerked his head away as she fingered the raw cut just outside his eye. Sydney glared.

Dixon took a deep breath. Under his natural, rich coloring, he looked gray and exhausted as the other four. He'd managed to bring his children with him when the JTF evacuated LA, but hadn't had a moment to be with them since arriving in New Mexico. Robin and Steven were babysitting Marshall's child, while the op-tech genius worked with the NSA and FEMA, trying to computer model the insane weather patterns building across the globe.

"Why would Vaughn try to kill you?" he asked helplessly.

"Michael Vaughn was, and always had been, a Follower of Rambaldi," Sark said.

"He didn't have the tattoo," Dixon protested.

"No, because it's a distinguishing mark and he was slated for infiltration operations from the first."

"We never knew him at all," Weiss said bitterly.

"What happened?"

"I killed him," Katya said baldly. She leveled her dark, knowing eyes at Dixon. "It was necessary. Now I want to wash. If you want to know more, we will speak later." She slid past Dixon and began walking.

With a shrug, Weiss followed her. Katya slowed one step so that they were parallel, threaded her arm through his, and smiled at him. "I like to relax after a mission. Would you join me, Agent Weiss?"

Sydney set her hand on Dixon's arm. "We need to see my mother. And Nadia."

Dixon sighed and gave in.

"Come on, then."

Sark wrapped his arm around Sydney's waist and she leaned close without thinking about it, as much for the emotional support as the physical.
With a screaming crack that echoed into the buried installation, the first satellite dish tore away from its foundation, shredded in an instant as the howling, tearing wind hurtled it across the barren desert.
In the security center, a bank of monitors went to static. After a second of shock, the tech in front of tit hit a button and the screens went black.

"We just lost the feeds from KH-16 and Arianespace Com," he calmly reported. "That was our last link with Europe."

Kendall nodded.

"It doesn't matter. It's too late to do anything for them and there's nothing they can do for us," he said in the silence that followed.

He rubbed his hands over his face.

'If we're lucky - "

Someone laughed bitterly.

" - if we're lucky," Kendall repeated. "If this thing Agents Bristow and Weiss and the others have retrieved works, it won't matter."

"Yeah, right," the tech at the bank of dead monitors muttered.

Kendall didn't bother reprimanding him.

She was still standing in the corridor. Dixon hesitated and Sydney rushed forward.

"Mom?"

Irina turned toward Sydney and let Sydney wrap her up in a hug. Her expression was painfully blank.

Dixon turned to Sark and said, "Maybe we should - "

"Julian," Irina called.

Sark's carefully neutral mask softened and he left Dixon. When he was close enough, Irina pulled away from Sydney far enough to draw him into their embrace. "I worried," she admitted.

Blue eyes closed briefly.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought she would be safe when the CIA breached Sloane's security in Kyoto. I never believed she would take the serum herself."

Irina touched his cheek. "I know."

Sydney buried her face against Irina's shoulder, shaking with sobs. Sark leaned back against the wall, one arm around Irina, the other resting between Sydney's shoulder blades. He stared past them both into the infirmary room where the doctors were detaching Nadia's body from the tubes and monitors and needles. A sheet was drawn over her face.

Sark closed his eyes again.

In his mind, he watched the medical examiner zip the body bag closed over Lauren's face. Drying blood darkened her pale hair where the sniper's shot had entered her temple. Poor little fool, she'd never had a chance, born to be another pawn in the pursuit of Rambaldi's secrets. She'd been broken long before Vaughn's bullet killed her.

He missed her.
"We believe now that Rambaldi's prophecies detail the total global weather changes the world is experiencing at an exponential rate," Kendall said. Outside, hail pounded the streets of Los Angeles. "While most scientists have been preoccupied with the prospect of global warming and the greenhouse effect, recent changes in weather patterns have now confirmed that the planet is plunging into a sudden, extended and intense ice age."
"Milo Rambaldi foresaw this," Sloane said from the doorway. Everyone at the table jerked around stared at him. His hands were secured with plastic ties before him, his clothes were ruffled, and Katya Derevko stood just behind him with a gun to his head. He ignored that and nodded to everyone. "Hello, Jack. Sydney. Irina." He paused and smiled at the final figure at the table. "Nadia."

She glared at him, then deliberately turned her face away.

"Everything that is happening, Rambaldi predicted," Sloane went on. "His last and greatest invention was meant to deal with all of this."

"How?" Kendall demanded.

Sloane smiled and shook his head. "I don't know." He looked at Nadia again. "Without the location of the device, it's moot, isn't it?"

"There's still a chance the Covenant will reach it," Jack said.

"And if they do ...," Kendall said.

"Sark will contact me," Irina said. She took Nadia's hand and squeezed it. "You don't need to do anything else."

"No," Nadia said. "Millions of people are dying. If there is something I can do to stop it, to help, then I have to." She looked at Kendall. "I'll take the serum and finish the translation."

Kendall sighed.

"I wish I could tell you no,"he said. "All I can do is thank you for making this choice."

Arvin Sloane looked at the device they'd retrieved from Antarctica. Light flickered off his glasses and caught against the bristles of his unshaven beard. He touched the archaic looking copper and bronze pallet the sphere hovered above like a man would touch his lover or his child. Then again, everyone knew Sloane had put the pursuit of Rambaldi above both of those things.

He was the only one who understood how to operate the device. Otherwise, he would never have been allowed into the sanctums of Project Blackhole. Marcus Dixon and Kendall had argued long and hard on the subject. Now only Kendall stood to the side, watching him suspiciously. Dixon had chosen to join his children and the Flinkmanns. Eric Weiss guarded the door.

"This is the answer," Sloane said reverently.

Standing to one side, Jack Bristow grimaced. Across the room from him, Julian Sark looked just as skeptical. The head of Covenant North American operations had revealed his true colors, proving he'd always been loyal to Irina Derevko, but that didn't mean he trusted either Sloane or the DSR.

Sydney slumped against the dark steel wall next Sark. Both of them were still in torn, dirty, black operational fatigues. A vivid, painful bruise discolored her jaw where Michael Vaughn had hit her in the final confrontation. Vaughn's defection to the Followers of Rambaldi had been more shocking than Sark's choice to save Sydney; Sark had always had a soft spot for Irina's daughters.

Irina and Katya stood together.

"Just do it, Arvin," Katya said, sounding bored.

Sloane looked at Sydney and Sark. Irina followed his gaze and her eyes narrowed. So did Jack's.

"Arvin," Irina said very quietly. "Don't think I will ever forget."

"Blame Rambaldi," Sloane replied.

"There were other ways to get here."

"Perhaps."

He held out his hand toward Sydney.

"Sydney, my dear. The Chosen One."

Wearily, she pushed herself away from the wall. "All right, you son of a bitch."

"Thank you."

"Now, Julian. The Prince."

Sark raised an eyebrow.

"Your Romanov blood is the least of what the Followers of Rambaldi were breeding for through the generations," Sloane said. "Your birth and part in this was foretold too."

"In other circumstances I would find that disturbing."

"It is all destined, Julian."

"Precisely."

Sark shrugged, though, and joined Sydney beside the device.

"What now?"

"Give me your hands," Sloane told them.

Sydney and Sark held out their hands. Sloane picked an ornate dagger out of the assemblage of Rambaldi artifacts lining the room and scored their palms. Sydney hissed and Sark raised an eyebrow.

"Now," Sloane said, "both of you must push your hands inside the sphere similtaneously. Whatever happens, you must not draw back until you have reached each other and your blood has mixed inside."

"Understood," Sark said. He met Sydney's eyes. "Are you ready?"

She nodded.

"I'm ready."

Moving in concert they both reached toward the sphere. For an instant, their hands seemed to slide off it, then the blood touched the seemingly solid surface and their hands and arms slid into darkness inside it.

Both of them grimaced and began to sweat. Their muscles twitched, galvanized by the power pulsing from the sphere. A painful whine filled the room. Every light in the facility dimmed.

"Sark, damn it, where's your hand?" Sydney gritted out. "I don't know how much longer I can stand this."

"Push deeper," he rasped. A trickle of blood ran from his lip where he was biting it.

"Oh God - "

"There, I felt your fingers," Sark said swiftly. "Turn your hand ... right."

"Yes."

"I've got it."

The whine powered up into the eardrum piercing howl. Half the lights flickered off.

"Hold on," Sloane instructed them.

"Go to hell," Sydney snapped.

Cracks ran across the sphere, light exploding out of them. The noise became a scream that cut to the bone. Katya's nose began to bleed and Weiss slapped his hands over his ears. Sloane watched avidly. The light became brighter and brighter, bleaching out everything in the room, until the glare blinded everyone and the noise reached a pitch they could no longer hear but only feel.

Jack stumbled blindly forward and grabbed Irina, holding her close. Katya fell to her knees and fumbled her way to Weiss' side.

Kendall screamed at Sloane but no one could hear him.

And as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Sydney and Sark let go and stepped away. The sphere seemed to spin and then collapse back into itself, transforming into matte black orb the size of a walnut that fell onto the filigree covered pallet.

Blinding afterimages played across everyone's retinas, even as the lights came back on.

Sydney and Sark waited patiently for everyone else to recover. Sark held up his palm for her to see, smiling. Rambaldi's Eye was seared into the skin, but the scar was white as though years old. Sydney held out her own hand, showing the same scar there.

Sloane looked at them almost worshipfully.

"What did it tell you?" he whispered.

They looked at each and answered in tandem. "Everything."

"Everything?" Kendall echoed. His eyes narrowed. "What happens the day after tomorrow?"

"The end of the world," Sydney said gently.

"As we know it," Sark added.

"And the beginning of the next one," they finished together and clasped hands again.
Far above them, the wind died.


-fin