On the wall mounted screens, a hundred signals and indicators and gauges and the such blinked and beeped and swam about, trying to sort themselves into intelligible information.

  Selman had eyes for only three of the signifiers.

  One, a long string of numbers, rose unsteadily, in ones and two of hundreds here and there, pausing for a moment or two before leaping up again, by the tens and hundred of thousands, then stabilizing back into slow rise or more large leaps. The one thing it never did was stop climbing.

  Dear God… Selman almost couldn’t… couldn’t take it, couldn’t believe it, or maybe just couldn’t accept it. It didn’t seem real to him.

  His mind skipped and spun, half-unmoored from reality.

  As far as he knew, the most people to ever die in one day in a war was something around 80,000. The Battle of the Somme, he thought. He wasn’t too sure.

  100,000s of people killed by the atom bombs.

  He had stopped outside, shaking as he lent against the wall some hours ago, desperately typing at the screen of his phone.

  830,000.

  That was supposedly the most people to have ever died in a single day. In China, in the sixteenth century. An earthquake that was said to have reduced the population by almost sixty percent.

  Not anymore, he thought, with the odd, detached mindset that had come to dominate his thoughts these last few days.

  He almost couldn’t believe the number scrolling up on the screen.

  His eyes flickered to the second indicator.

  500 Kiloton - 3.5 Megaton…

  The pictures from LEO satellites had shown a clear, semicircular scar torn across the surface of the lowland delta. Freshly exposed soil, bare flesh of the earth; the detritus of millions of lives and the slow trickle of water flowing in to fill the massive crater. Ringed mounds circled around, almost a new range of hills with their bumpy, malformed structures; but for the almost perfect circle they left behind in their absence.

  The third number his eyes almost couldn’t find in the flood of constantly changing and updating information.

  Zero.

  0.00001 Roentgens/hour. Less than estimated background radiation.

  The first indicators had come from low fly-overs, from FEMA response teams and other IR organizations and UN response efforts, had trickled rapidly up the information structures of the world, showing the startling lack of residual radiation.

  India had been the first to mobilize massive relief efforts, following immediately in the steps of local response forces. The world as a whole had pitched in quickly, following the lead of the United Nations, larger nations and smaller neighbors alike each attempting to show solidarity and lack of hostile intent.

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  Hundreds of international and national organizations had rapidly mobilized in the first few days after the unexplained devastation. Thousands of volunteers and responders had swarmed and crawled into the open, seeping wound left behind.

  Accusatory eyes and sharp gazes had been turned upon the greatest suspects. The Indian Government, Pakistan, Russia, China, even the US’ own intentions and actions had been searched and savaged, picked through and inspected upon the stage of international politics.

  The fundamental questions had gone unanswered. Even here, in the center of the US military’s own massive information networks, the two most pressing questions hung heavy, unanswered and oppressive over the heads of the hundred or so gathered figures of importance.

  Selman himself had been rounded up from his own home, shoved without dignity into a military convoy, and shipped out of the capitol to this blacksite, where he had hidden for the last few days with the other dignitaries and important figures quarantined alongside him.

  The world was in panic, nowhere so much as in the spheres of power and influence.

  Who? And how?

  These were the two questions, the only two significant questions left to ask, it seemed.

  Other questions, human, realistic questions of death and loss and how to respond in the face of such tragedy, those had been left for the less important, the less busy to answer, it seemed.

  For him, and for the other men and women shoved alongside him into the too-small conference room they had inhabited for the last few days, the only two important questions were who and how.

  Who had done this? How had they done this?

  The three numbers his mind kept catching on swam across his vision, competing with each other for attention.

  830,000, the most people to have ever died before in a single day. Not anymore, his mind repeated.

  The first number had steadily risen past thirteen million early this morning, and seemed to be steadily on its way past fourteen.

  14,000,000.

  The highest estimates guessed at something between seventeen and eighteen. He almost couldn’t accept it.

  The second, .5-3.5 Megatons, wasn’t much on its own. Horrifying, yes, devastating in potential as the yield of any ordinance, but only in context did it gain the new horror with which it grasped at Lt. Gen. Selman.

  That was the third number. Functionally zero radioactive remnants.

  It hadn’t been a nuclear device?

  It meant that something new had been found. A new weapon, a new device of massive destruction. A new unparalleled threat.

  And no one knew who had wielded it. No one knew how it had been delivered, or the simplest basics of the explosives composition. No information had been forthcoming.

  So, they sat, and squabbled, and bickered and debated. Trying, trying and failing, to tease truth and understanding from the hundreds of thousands of conflicting and confusing information and rumor and data flows.

  Somewhere, deep in his mind, Selman had realized something.

  A new world had dawned.

  Something new had been born. Something unknown.

  Whoever captured or mastered it first would find themselves by default at the top. A reshuffling of world order such as anything unseen since the last world war.

  He shivered, deep inside, and tried not to fear.

  Someone out there wielding an unknown Power. An unknown actor who could hold power over death and life akin to an atom bomb yet seemingly untraceable and undetectable by known methods.

  He could feel it, grating against his conscious. A world changing, restructuring. Dawning.