The Briefing room was rather more sophisticated than the one in the mobile command base had been. That one had been nothing more than a portacabin, still sitting on the back of a truck, containing a long table, some chairs and a vending machine by the door.

  The room to which Malcolm Starr led David Jeffcott was much larger and had several computer screens mounted on the walls, on the largest of which was displayed a map of South Central Arizona with a circle indicating the current extent of the anomaly. It had swallowed up a large part of the city of Phoenix, he saw, and was advancing steadily on the city centre. His current location, in the Arizona National Guard Headquarters, was less than ten kilometres away. If the anomaly continued its advance, it would be swallowed up within three days.

  The centre of the room was occupied by another long table, but instead of a crude thing standing on folding legs it was thick and heavy with a surface of polished mahogany. Twenty places had been set around it with leather mats and shiny name holders, and by every place was a plush leather chair. The walls were covered with polished wood panelling and the floor was covered by a thick blue carpet. It was clearly an important room, and Jeffcott half expected to be marched away under arrest just for being inside it.

  All the chairs except two were already occupied by important looking people, most of whom were in military uniform. Starr took the empty chair at the head of the table and directed Jeffcott to the other one, half way down. The physicist took his place between a serious looking middle-aged woman in a tan suit and a short-haired Arabic looking man with glasses. They both smiled at him as he lowered himself into the chair, which creaked as it accepted his weight.

  "I apologise for keeping you waiting," said Starr, looking around at the other people present. "May I present Mister David Jeffcott. The first and, so far, the only person to return from the centre of the anomaly."

  "Good to know that it's possible," said the Arabic-looking man. His name holder identified him as Assad Ziani. He turned to Jeffcott. "You give hope to us all." Jeffcott gave him a nervous smile but felt too intimidated to say anything.

  "We've all read the transcripts of your debriefing," said a black General with a vast array of medals on his uniform. He fixed Jeffcott with an unsettlingly direct gaze. "If I might be allowed to summarise...?"

  "Please do," said Starr. Jeffcott just nodded.

  The black General, identified by his name holder as Samuel Bromley, opened a folder on his desk and glanced down at it. He leafed through some of the papers inside. "You state that an individual named Ernst Jorgensen Bergman, a world famous physicist, created a device in the basement of Kensington Labs. A device called a Furnace that..." He frowned. "It gets rather technical."

  "The eggheads can deal with the technicalities," said Starr. "Just stick to the basics."

  The General nodded gratefully. "It caused our universe to come into contact with another universe. This close proximity between the two universes is what is causing the anomaly. A region in which electricity will not flow, explosives will not detonate and fossil fuels will not burn except in the proximity of a powerful magnetic field. It also causes certain solid substances such as metals and glass to crystallise, greatly reducing their structural strength. It also causes living organisms, animal, plants and human beings, to undergo transformations. People die, slowly and horribly, and shortly after their deaths creatures emerge from their corpses. Creatures under the control of some kind of alien intelligence, presumably originating from that other universe." He looked at Jeffcott again. "Is that accurate?"

  "Yes, Sir," Jeffcott managed to say.

  "So it's an invasion," said the General. "The United States is being invaded."

  "That may not be the intention," said Jeffcott, beginning to grow in confidence, "but it is the effective situation."

  The General looked at him for a moment longer, then looked back down at his folder. "People can survive inside the anomaly if they are protected by permanent magnets worn on the chest. Diesel engines and electrical devices will work with similar protection. Guns still do not work, but you speculate that they might if they're surrounded by an even more powerful magnetic field."

  "The Furnace generates a magnetic field of around 20 teslas," said Jeffcott. "In comparison, the iron nitride magnets we wore on our chests had a strength of only 1.5 teslas."

  "So if the soldiers wore fifteen magnets on their chests..." said a woman with greying hair further down the table.

  "I'm afraid it doesn't work like that," said Jeffcott. "You can wear as many magnets as you want. It's still only 1.5 teslas. The Furnace gets its magnetic field from superconductors which have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen. They're not portable."

  "I'm authorising Mister Jeffcott, and everyone else around this table, to be given clearance to know about the MCV system," said Starr. "He'll need to know about it anyway if he's going in with the second expedition."

  General Bromley nodded and turned back to Jeffcott. "The MCV was developed in the 1980's as a defence against soviet EMP weapons. It stands for Magnetically protected Command Vehicle. It's obsolete now because we have hardened electronics in all our systems, but when one of my people was reading the transcripts of your interviews she thought it might be useful in our present situation. The vehicle is surrounded by superconducting magnets which generate a field of..." He sorted through the papers on the desk in front of him until he found the one he wanted. "Fifteen teslas," he read. "Our tech people say it ought to allow weapons to fire and electricity to flow within ten metres of it."

  "Two prototypes were made," added Starr. "They've been gathering dust in a warehouse for thirty years. My people say they can have them up and running in a couple of days."

  "Assuming they live up to their promise," the General added, "each vehicle will be surrounded by four conventional armoured personnel carriers. Armed with machine guns for the most part, but each platoon will include a Stryker mobile gun armed with a 105mm cannon."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "Explosive shells won't detonate in the anomaly," pointed out Jeffcott.

  "They'll be armed with kinetic ammunition," the General replied. "Basically large shotgun cartridges. No explosives, but easily able to remove any obstacles the enemy may have put in our path. Each MCV will form the core of a platoon of five vehicles which will also include an M113 outfitted as a hospital and two Rhinos carrying 24 troopers. Say around sixty people in each platoon."

  "They'll have to remain in very close proximity to their MCV, of course," said another military man further along the table. "None of them will be able to go away on a scouting trip. If they drift too far away they'll stop working."

  "They'll be tethered to each other by chains," Bromley replied. "It'll be physically impossible for them to go more than fifteen feet away from their command vehicle. Fortunately they can go all the way to Kensington Labs on dual carriageway roads so we can have two vehicles side by side."

  "How many hostiles will they be up against?" asked a grey haired colonel.

  "Maricopa had a population of around 66,000," said the tan-suited woman. Her name holder was turned away from Jeffcott, towards Starr at the head of the table. Jeffcott couldn't read it. "One human corpse can become host to one of the small alien creatures." She picked up the remote control that had been sitting on the table beside her, pressed a button and a video of an alien creature appeared on one of the wall-mounted computer screens. It was looking around with its six-eyed flower-head and slithering around an animal pen on its myriad of tiny tube feet.

  Jeffcott leaned forward, staring. "You captured one of them?" he said.

  "We have several of them," said Assad Ziani, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "They emerged from the corpses of the victims you saw in the hospital before you set off the first time. They show little sign of intelligence, though. They don't appear to be in communication with the intelligence whose existence you suggest."

  The tan-suited woman waited patiently for Ziani to stop talking before resuming. "In addition," she said, "there were forty thousand livestock animals and an estimated ten thousand household pets in the city and surrounding townships. The desert within thirty miles of Maricopa is estimated to have had ten thousand animals of small dog size or larger. Deer, foxes, cougars and suchlike. Mister Jeffcott also tells us that smaller animals, mice, snakes etc, can produce what he calls fish-egg body modules, and that the fish eggs from a couple of hundred small animals can assemble to form one of the small alien creatures. He then tells us that three or four of the small creatures can merge to form a creature large enough to be a match for an armed human civilian. Put that all together and you have a total of thirty or forty thousand hostiles."

  "But they only have claws as weapons," said a younger soldier sitting on the other side of her from Jeffcott. "Mister Jeffcott tells us that he killed one of the large ones himself with his bare hands. I can't see them being much of a threat to professional soldiers armed with modern weapons."

  "They are designed creatures," the tan-suited woman reminded him. "We were able to determine that for ourselves before Mister Jeffcott gave us his testimony. The intelligence controlling them may be able to modify them as new information becomes available. They might soon have stings capable of delivering deadly venom, for example. Mister Jeffcott tell us they can already throw their claws. What if they start throwing venom darts instead?'"

  "Good luck getting them inside the armour of an APC," said the younger soldier.

  "Or they could produce powerful acid," added the woman. "Capable of incapacitating a vehicle. Like in that movie..."

  "The weapons the vehicles will be carrying will keep them from getting close enough to be a threat," said Bromley confidently.

  "It's not just the animals you'll have to worry about," said Jeffcott, though.

  "Ah yes," said the tan-suited woman. "Your potato plants with legs and eyes. I'm half inclined to believe that you hallucinated that incident."

  "Dustu, Seabreeze and Doctor Summers saw them as well," said Jeffcott stiffly.

  "Relax," said the woman with a smile. "I said half inclined. I've seen what happens to animals. Why shouldn't plants also be affected? You believe that crop plants were being turned into an early detection network?"

  "Mark Summers thought so. The plants were arranging themselves into a grid pattern stretching across miles of desert. We think, thought, I mean they thought as well, that they were drawing water up from underground aquifers and distributing it by means of rhizomes connecting them. Those rhizomes could easily be used to send signals back to Maricopa telling the Intelligence that they'd seen something moving out there. We were fortunate enough to make it past them before the network was up and running."

  "So the enemy will know we're coming," said Bromley.

  "What if they do?" said the younger soldier. "It'll take us just forty minutes to drive from here to the lab. They won't have time to do anything."

  "The Intelligence may anticipate what we're going to do," said Bromley, though. "It may be preparing traps and ambushes right now, and Maricopa is full of plants that may have been modified to become hostile to us."

  "There's no living creature on the planet a Browning can't take out," said the younger soldier confidently. "I can't see anything stopping us from getting to Kensington Labs."

  "And when we get there," said Jeffcott, "what are your intentions? Are you going to just blow up the Furnace?"

  "You're the physicist," said Starr. "You tell us. Will destroying the Furnace destroy the anomaly?"

  "I'd need time to study it," Jeffcott replied. "When we went in, we were hoping to have time to study the thing. Days at least. We weren't expecting to be driven away by the creatures. If we get there and secure the lab, how long will you be willing to give me to study it?"

  "We won't want to be in there any longer than necessary," said the younger soldier. "I say we blow the thing the moment we get there. Take our chances."

  "And if we find out that only the Furnace can end the anomaly?" said Jeffcott. "We may end up with the anomaly still growing and with no way to stop it."

  "How much time would you need to study it?" asked Starr.

  "Depends on whether I can find Bergman's notes. If I can't, it might take me years to figure it out."

  "You can have twenty four hours," said the General. "With Captain Daniels having the option to blow the thing before that if he deems it necessary." The younger soldier nodded.

  "What about communications?" said the Colonel. He turned to Jeffcott. "You say you failed to see the Starlight satellite replying to your communications?"

  "I don't know what the satellite was called," Jeffcott replied, "but Sergeant, er, Sergeant... I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name."

  "Sergeant Edward Boyd-Rochfort," said Bromley helpfully.

  Jeffcott nodded to him and turned back to the Colonel. "He used the Polaris three times to send messages to you."

  "Which we received," said the Colonel. "And the Starlight sent a reply less than a minute later. Just an R at first. A dot, a dash and a dot to signify that we'd received your message and were composing a longer reply. We sent the longer reply a few minutes later.. You didn't see it?"

  "No," said Jeffcott. "And we looked. We searched the skies for a long time. We thought you might be havng some kind of technical issues."

  "The Starlight uses a high power laser beam, doesn't it?" said Ziani. "Perhaps normal light can travel through the anomaly but coherent light can't."

  "That makes no scientific sense," said Jeffcott, though. "There's nothing magical about laser light. It's just monochromatic light with its wavelengths synchronised."

  "Nothing about the anomaly makes any scientific sense," said Starr with a smile. "We'll look into it. See if we can find some other way to communicate with the expedition. I'd like to move on to the logistics of the expedition. Fuel, food, ammunition. That sort of thing. Captain Callahan, this is your department I believe."

  A woman in a Captain's uniform at the other end of the table nodded and began to speak.