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3.19 BLACK BOX By Eddie Nambulous Big freakin' nuclear warheads. Leave it to humans to create something as heinous and inane. Then leave it to the Gua to refine the notion and make it into something even more terrifying. Tell me something, Loyal Brethren, what's with the need of both our races to find ways to annihilate life? And I'm not just talking about the lives of the top-bananas on the food chain; I'm talking about life in general. People, plants, animals, insects, dirt ... everything. All gone. Sayonara. And often it's for no flippin' reason other than some super-powers' ego-sizing contest. I don't get it. Never will. That desire to destroy and then the audacity to carry it through. It's enough to make a guy wanna pack it all in, disappear from society and live in a trailer for the rest of his days. And some of us do. Or did. Back to the drama-of-the-moment. The Gua have gone ahead and taken the next step in their desire to conquer, creating a nuke with the power to wipe out ten times the life of the standard human-built mega-destroyer. Foster and I found one of Œem thanks to those handy-dandy Omega Quatrains we happened upon recently. Turns out a Gua-ship had crash-landed in the Colorado Rockies -- Foster and I were there when it happened. We figured out what was up with the help of a Gua hostage - the downed-ship's pilot, but we never could've expected what happened next. Joshua found the payload - the bomb itself. And he didn't want Foster or I to get anywhere near it. No, Joshua wanted to set the sucker off right in the middle of the woods. Thought it would wake up the world and take the surprise out of Mabus' planned first strike. Our once-ally figured if he could engineer a disaster of such catastrophic proportions then the earth would be forced to finally sit-up and take notice of the alien forces among us. We'd unite, spook the aliens and the Gua would simply go home. Naturally Foster wasn't having any of it. Yeah, maybe Joshua had lost faith in Cade since Foster refused to kill Mabus in Jordan's body, but no way were we gonna let Josh take such drastic action - not even with the Second Wave threatening to throw our collective boogie boards way the heck up onto the beach and crush us beneath its might. Foster's never taken lightly to casualties and he wasn't about to let Joshua create a death count in the hundred thousands to millions. To the good guys, the ends simply CANNOT justify the means. But Joshua believed in his cause. He armed the warhead right there in the middle of the mountains. And then the Gua backup were there, a recovery team to take the weapon back to Mabus. The Gua agents weren't worried, the emergency override code for the warhead was in the flight recorder, and they still had eighteen minutes to find the device and stop the bomb from going off. You know how cocky those suckers are - what could possibly go wrong. Thing they didn't know is that I was hidden in a quantum pocket created by the recorder. I had to think fast if I was gonna get all of us out of this one (and save anyone living in this and the neighboring states). At nine minutes to detonation Foster was still trying to convince Joshua that his thinking was gonna get us all killed and slaughter millions of innocent people. Joshua wasn't gonna be swayed. He wanted to win. Foster had enough. Cade told Joshua if he truly believed those lives were expendable he was no better than Mabus. The Gua soldiers found the box and I set off a charge from within that sent them flying. It gave me the second I needed to get out, free Cade and kill the Gua ... but not before Cade took a serious hit. Foster was down and it looked really bad. With his last breath he begged Joshua to stop the bomb. I couldn't do anything but comfort Cade, he'd fought so hard -- in a way I just wanted him to have peace. He died. For an instant, Cade Foster was truly dead. And then Joshua finally took a turn for the sane. He saved Foster with a healing agent we'd lifted from the Gua pilot. Cade came back from the dead. It was enough to convince Joshua we still had hope. He defused the bomb. Later, Joshua admitted that he'd become so desperate he lost perspective -- he couldn't ultimately kill a million souls. Joshua didn't want to be Mabus - he'd been fighting against that for the past two years. He admitted his mistake. And he and Cade agreed to fight the war together, to the very end. That's when I found something interesting in the alien computer - the invasion plan! Day One: Major cities and military bases hit. There would be one million Gua soldiers. And the worst part comes now. There was a countdown: 170 hours left. Seven days. There were seven days until the Second Wave. God help us all. READ CADE'S CORRESPONDING JOURNAL
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