The Black Clouds

By Steve Matthew Benner

A series of meteorites strike the Earth in a line from northern Mexico to Kazakhstan, wreaking havoc. But a greater menace soon emerges; Black Clouds start rising from six of the craters and threatening to destroy all life on Earth. The Clouds are living beings that consume protein, in the process reducing animals to skeletons and plants to empty husks. Nations mobilize against the invaders but nothing seems to work as the Black Clouds continue to grow and devastate the planet. A group of scientists located 50 meters below ground in a specially designed facility are trapped by a Cloud and work desperately to determine a way of destroying these aliens before all life on Earth is obliterated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Matthew Benner
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310221576

Steve Matthew Benner

Dr. Steve M. Benner received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Ohio State University in 1979 and has worked in industry, academia, and the federal government. He retired from NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 2016 after 28 years of service. He has written numerous scientific articles as well as several articles on ancient history. Dr. Benner's extensive knowledge of science and history has led to his having an ego the size of New Jersey and may account for his being one of the most self-centered people in America today.

Book preview

The Black Clouds

Steve Matthew Benner

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Steve M. Benner 2014

Where the hell’re my data?

Keep your blouse on. I’m finishing up the final calculations now.

It’s about time. I thought we were in a hurry.

I gotta make sure it’s right before I give it to you, unless you want crappy data,

The words shot across the room like stones, hurdled more than spoken. Dr. Snowden and Dr. Weisz might not have been exactly friends, but it wasn’t animosity that tinged their words; it was fear. Dr. Snowden understood the urgency in his colleague’s voice. He understood the importance of what they were doing was weighing on both of them; stress exacerbated by a lack of sleep. Every second that passed was a second that they couldn’t afford to lose. Time, the resource that can’t be recovered or saved, was running out; life was running out.

Dr. Jeff T. Snowden differed from his colleague in a number of ways, especially temperament. At 55 years old, he looked every bit the detached scientist: an intelligent face sporting a graying goatee and a receding hairline and a slender build always cloaked in a white lab coat. He was considered one of the top analytical chemists in the world. His wife had died three years earlier, but his four children and two grandkids were a major part of his life and were constantly on his mind during this crisis. Dr. Carol Weisz was slightly overweight at five feet eight inches tall with close-cropped greyish-brown hair and a round face with striking blue eyes. She had been very attractive when she was young, but she chose a career over a family and had never married. In contrast to Dr. Snowden, Dr. Weisz eschewed normal lab attire, opting more for blue jeans, shirts, and the like. Now 52-years old, she was not nearly as renowned as Dr. Snowden, but she had an ego that made up for any shortcomings in accomplishments. Her degree was in microbiology, and she was an expert in modeling living systems.

It appears the Cloud is made up of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with traces of some metals and noble gases. The elements are mostly incorporated into amino acids, aldehydes, and alcohols, and there is a strong presence of organic and inorganic acids, which probably serve as its digestive agents. But there is nothing that would indicate life. As he spoke, Jeff looked at the glass container in the emergency evacuation chamber. A dark-brown cloud moved from side to side along the bottom of the container, like a tiger pacing in a cage. Snowden wondered, ‘What the hell are we dealing with?’

Well, let’s see what I can do with your data. Carol began the process of inputting the compositional data into her model. The simulation was designed to recreate the entity that currently had them trapped in their lab fifty meters underground; an entity destroying all life on Earth. The earlier simulations had failed to reproduce this deadly life form, but then again the compositions were not accurately known. Mike Howard, the mechanical wizard for the lab, had designed a sampling tube that projected out a vent into the air above ground. This had to be strong enough to withstand the chemical corrosive nature of the Cloud and safe enough to not let the Cloud into the sealed lab, a result that would’ve been deadly to them all. He had managed to do both and had drawn a sample of the Cloud into an evacuated glass test chamber of 50K cubic centimeters; the sample Black Cloud’s current home.

When the sample was first drawn, the small cloud seemed agitated, moving rapidly back and forth in the chamber; it appeared to be trying to get back to the main Cloud or angry about being separated or both. The doctors still found it hard to get their minds around the fact that something resembling an exhaust plume from a truck was actually alive.

~

They all referred to it as The Black Cloud or just Cloud, because that was what the press had called it when it first appeared. The present dilemma had started just about three months ago. An extra-terrestrial object like a comet or asteroid had entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a sharp angle. It glowed so brightly that it could be seen by most of North