Last updated on September 17, 2024
Prologue: Sede Vacante
When the dust of the universe finally settled, Father Vincente Mariani looked back at this day and realised he was mistaken. What mattered to him at the time would prove trivial, and what seemed trivial would in fact be a harbinger of peractum est. And the events of the day, as devastating as they seemed, were just the beginning of a long trail through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
The day began brightly enough, with sun and fried eggs on the small patio at the rear of his cottage, a bracing walk around the shops; chatting and blessing as he wove through the women in their faded best, laughing with the men and artists in frock coats and football shirts; and penultimately, but gloriously, a celebration of Mass in his small church high in the Italian hills, just fifty kilometres north of Rome.
Vincente was a middle-aged man, who, both in outlook and appearance, was not so much middle as aged. He was a man for whom tradition was more than just a code. It was an instinct carved in the rock of his faith.
On that day, at eleven-fifteen in the morning, as always, he concluded morning mass in the old church in Calcata Vecchia and stepped out onto the street with a beatific smile, ready to receive his flock as they exited the church. It was a smile that slipped dramatically into a mask of horror as he watched a nickel and iron rock half the size of a football field, fired from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, hurtle across the sky and smash into the Italian capital. The detonation obliterated the Vatican, dug a crater eight-tenths of a kilometre wide, where St Peter’s Basilica used to be, and threw plumes of smoke and ash high into the late morning sky. That was the first of four such boulders to hit the city within forty-five seconds, each thundering as they streaked through the atmosphere at more than seven thousand metres per second.
His Biretta fell to the floor as he dropped to his knees at the foot of the worn steps leading up to the church, unable to speak, such was the shock of the vision before him. The remaining members of his flock, the stragglers who sought his personal blessings, encircled him, hands reaching out, and expressions of concern tumbling from their lips.
“Porca puttana, what in all creation was that, Father?” Cecilio Natalino, a snaggle-toothed artist, who rented his apartments to tourists to fund his artistic lifestyle, demanded through the smoke of a freshly lit cigarillo.
“It is,” sobbed Mariani as he pointed with a trembling hand at the rising mushroom clouds, his face lined with anguish, “the end of days.”
*
Seventy-four light minutes from Earth, another priest, Father Elias Banks, his gaunt, clean-shaven face frosted with a patina of ice crystals, slept in a hibernation pod aboard the exploration ship S. Maribel, unaware of the devastation of Rome.
Trusted with a vital undertaking, Elias, equipped with his geology background, had a responsibility to secure resources for the Catholic Church in the outer solar system, a venture crucial to ensuring the continuance of the Church’s mission. He would not awaken for another seven months, when S. Maribel’s orbit took it beyond the Oort Cloud surrounding the Sol system, almost into interstellar space. In this dreamless sleep, his once athletic frame would wither to a shadow of his former glory, as outdated hibernation technology struggled to cope with demands far beyond their design specifications.
*
The room wasn’t really a studio; it was a hastily constructed set in a warehouse on an industrial park outside what was left of Manchester after the city suffered a single kinetic energy weapon strike which demolished Media City and everything around in a half-a-mile radius.
Three men, dressed in newly acquired suits, sat around a table beneath lights salvaged from the partially destroyed Palace Theatre, in front of a single camera. They discussed the attack three weeks earlier by a task force of alien marauders the authorities labelled the MIOETO (Note: Military Incursion of Extra-Terrestrial Origin – formerly Moaik). The attack killed nearly half the population of Britain, but these men were more concerned with the physics of kinetic energy weapons and what could be done to prevent a reoccurrence of such an outrage.
Professor Alan Daiceman, a tall, balding man with hunched shoulders, said: “Our initial investigations conclude a relative velocity of approximately sixteen thousand miles per hour can be assumed. At that speed, the projectile will have a kinetic energy potential of roughly twenty-six megajoules per kilogram, as you can see from the equation on the screen behind us.”
KE=12mv2=12×1kg×(7150ms)2=25,561,250 J≈26 MJ
“Thank you, Professor,” Tony Ainsley, a handsome man with a bouffant of dark brown hair, an intense manner, and glittering eyes said, as he turned to his second guest. “What does that mean in lay terms, General?”
General Brian ‘Taffy’ Jones, the retired head of the British Army, leaned forward and lifted a thick finger to emphasise his point. “Well, Tony. TNT has an explosive energy of about five megajoules per kilogram. That means the impact energy of the KEWs is over five times that of a detonating warhead of the same mass. For comparison, fifty megajoules is the equivalent of a school bus weighing five metric tons, travelling at three hundred miles per hour, hitting a wall. These KEWs…”
“Kinetic energy weapons,” Ainsely interrupted.
“Yes, precisely,” the general responded, furrowing his bushy eyebrows and resetting his TV face, a combination of concern and bluff tell-it-as-it-is. “These KEWs were mostly one hundred million kilograms or more and had the explosive force of a nuclear bomb. Britain was hit with thirty of them as best as we can determine. Frankly, we’re lucky there’s anything left. Although London took the brunt of the harm, every major population centre suffered some damage. It’s the same story over much of the world. Both the north and south Americans got off lightly and lost only a handful of cities, but Europe, Russia, and Asia may never recover.”
“Professor,” Ainsely said smoothly, turning back to the academic. “Have we ever experienced anything like this before?”
Daiceman nodded and stabbed at the air with his pen as he spoke. “I can give you two examples, the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona, and the Tunguska event in 1908. The Barringer crater is approximately a half mile across and resulted from an iron-nickel meteorite with a diameter of about fifty metres. But the only entry of a large meteoroid into Earth’s atmosphere in modern history with firsthand accounts was the Tunguska event. This meteor struck a remote part of Siberia in Russia but didn’t quite make it to the ground. Instead, it exploded in the air a few miles up. The force of the explosion was powerful enough to knock over trees in a region hundreds of miles wide. We think the meteor itself was about forty metres across and weighed just over one hundred million kilograms. Locally, hundreds of reindeer were killed, but there was no direct evidence any humans died in the blast. Unfortunately, this was not the case when the so-called MIOETO launched hundreds of rocks from the asteroid belt at Earth. Billions were killed before Earth forces destroyed the invaders.”
“Thank you, professor,” Ainsely said to the camera. “Now we return to our Taunton studio, where the Prime Minister pro tem, Dame Alison Mainwaring, is to broadcast to the nation.”
*
When a Pope dies, the period of sede vacante begins, which is the time between the death of the old pope and the election of the new pontiff. The first person to be notified of the Pope’s death is the Camerlengo, who handles the formal determination of death.
“If there is no Camerlengo,” Cardinal Pierre Skaunce said to the gathered conference of surviving Cardinals, “then I will go to Rome and take on those duties.”
While his fellow survivors in the College of Cardinals predated him by several decades, Skaunce, a young man in relative terms, possessed an authoritative presence that none of them could match. In the present company, few would seek to oppose him, and those who had sufficient standing and the will to do so had been cultivated by him with assiduous care. He was a man with his eyes on the future.
So, it was Skaunce who stepped from the military helicopter when it settled outside the still smoking blast zone of what was once Rome and called the Holy Father’s name three times before turning, head bowed, hands pressed in prayer, towards the witnesses brought at the insistence of the dissenting cardinals.
“Fathers,” he said, once satisfied there would be no response, “the Holy Father is dead.”
Be First to Comment