Age of Power 1: Legacy Read Online Free PDF

and Mom had been friends since high school.
That they did this showed me how frightened people could—and would—get. I
thought that Mom and I wouldn’t be alone when the world ended. I thought we
were that close as families went. Now I knew we weren’t. My
mistake. But Mom and I’d already talked about leaving. Mom decided not
to try. She knew what would happen when Yama hit Earth. And her decision was
the right one. And that was because, in the end, Dad came home.
    When he’d heard
about Yama, he dropped everything and headed here. It took him longer than he
expected, thanks to the panic. From the sounds of it, he’d done some things he
wasn’t proud of, and I later noticed that the car he’d driven here in wasn’t
the one he owned when I last visited him. When I asked him about it, he
admitted that it wasn’t his. But he didn’t elaborate on the subject. And we
didn’t ask.
    When he first
entered the house, Mom and I were watching news about the exodus. Mainly, the
news channels were showing looping videos of cars in long lines. I was only
sure of some locations by the signs they showed with city names on them. What
made it even worse was that the looped videos were on every news channel. And
with them, came repeating phrases about panic over what was going on. Yet, we
kept watching to see if there was any change in Yama’s path.
    The first moment
we saw Dad was when we heard a floorboard creaked behind us. We both looked up
and stared. We forgot all about the news when we saw the dark-haired
forty-year-old standing there, in the dining room. Mark Hagen had been a
well-built man, just starting his construction business in Chicago, when Mom
had met him. He still had the rock like hardness to him when Mom and I nearly
bowled him over in a hug.
    Mom once told me
that they had a whirlwind romance that ended with them marrying three months
later. They did love each other, but they had a more pressing reason for
marrying. I was already on the way. But I wasn’t enough to keep them together.
They divorced five years later because they had grown apart. But Dad was here
now. He told us he belonged with us and not somewhere else, alone, wondering
how we were making out. I’m not ashamed to say it; there were tears.
    Dad let us know
that things were bad in Chicago. Businesses were closing everywhere. And,
obviously, Chicago wasn’t the only place. Every city had its very own exodus going
on. It was while we were catching him up on the news he missed—while driving
here—that I began to understand that humanity was ready to destroy civilization
for staying alive in the short-term. Ironically, on television, news people
kept pushing that nothing bad was going to happen. Given the amount of panic
going on, nobody really believed them.
    I think that was
because there were too many scientists agreeing with earliest assessments about
what Yama had done. They gave a clear view of what would happen physically. One
well-known news anchor promptly quit and walked out of the studio after the
scientist finished with his explanation. No, no one was happy with the
continuous talk about the subject, but that trajectory did give the military a
short window they could use. And they did.
    Announced by the
leaders of the G20 nations, billions of people prayed for the success of the
one thing we could use against such a monster. Nuclear missiles flew from silos
and submarines all over the world, aimed and timed to explode to push Yama
onward, when it reached the point where it would begin to swing back toward
Earth. Together, we watched as the days and hours counted down to that final
moment. They told us that only half the missiles launched actually reached that
point.
    Don’t get me
wrong; the missiles had been the best option we had. If there was one thing
this planet was good at, it was the ability to deliver weapons of mass
destruction. Unfortunately, missiles designed to come back to Earth from a low
orbit made it hard to take