Editor's Note -- I began writing this story in 2006. As with all things, it was put aside for only a moment and now it is six years later. What is funny about this piece of fiction is that I had written about a possible revolution in the Middle East and now that the Arab Spring has come about, I find myself imitating real life. No worries I am sure there are no aliens watching from above .....
Part One -- Introduction
The moon in the night sky hung like a lead weight as Johnny shook his head trying to remove the image of it. What he looked at it now was not the moon of his youth. It was blue, purple, and reminded him that the war had taken its toll. An old quote charted its way through his memory, he smirked at its remembrance as he plodded homeward, "It was the best of times and it was the worse of times," and so began Johnny's long reverie of his day.
Johnny had not always been one to lose himself in fantasy. No, he had once been a great leader of men. Now, Johnny was a mere mortal who had lost his wings. His family, his wife, and kids were all gone, because the desolation of the Earth had befallen to the Great Empire of the Pegasus galaxy.
The Earth laid in ruin. All of the great cities stood in silence, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow, Mecca, Cairo, Tokyo, New York City, and San Francisco were crumbled heaps of ashes. Johnny's head hung low as he continue to plod home.
Sadness squeezed at his heart, it suffocated him, his was grief palatable as he remembered the the great cities. He felt his life had been wasted. He had wantonly sewered his youthful indiscretions on trivial matters. He had thrown away his wealth playboy antics as he let the scrapings of it feed his frenzied friends; and, the cities rubble reminded him of that waste.
At first, the explosion, which was thought to be a nuclear bomb in a cargo container ship in the Boston port had actually been a meteorite. A celestial object from space on April 1, 2011 destroyed Boston, Massachusetts. At first, he thought of it as a bad joke. There had been no warning, and the government had assured the public days earlier that the last of the terrorists group had been captured. The now defunct Red Brigade members had been either jailed or killed.
The "War on Terror" had been hard fought and the "good guys" had won. He had said to a friend earlier that morning that, he would celebrate the news that night with his wife, Maria, and his sons, Franklin and Gerald, in Boston, one of the birth places that had spark democracy itself.
So, when he boarded the family Learjet in the late part of the afternoon on the Western Coast, and found out, in the air, the demolition of his home by an meteorite, Johnny sat stunned as the pilot tried frantically to find another location to land. Everything that he had known was gone.
Then, other reports of large city (just the cities) destructions began to crawl through the static of the airplane speaker from his pilot: New York City, Washington DC, Baltimore, Miami, Louisville, St. Louis, and Detroit at first, were thought to be impacted by stray pieces of meteorites.
But NASA and the scaled back NORAD soon realized the mistake, the rallying of the troops, to defend the planet had been lost. The day of petty squabbling amongst ourselves had left us blind to the space fleet that had approached us. The very danger was not among us, but from the another place far away -- "in a galaxy far far away." The danger came from stars in space.
In the trying to kill each other, when we forgot the golden rule of life, in order to have a life, one must look up at the sky to enjoy the complexity of the darkness, the beauty of the sparkling stars, and be in the awe of their danger among the void of space.
Then, the question of why just the cities, began to stir on the edge of the citizenry consciousness
It was as if massive tidal wave realization had struck the planet. The randomness was not random, but orchestrated. Space Command of the European Space Agency was first to spot the distortion, but NASA confirmed it. NORAD commanders rushed back to the bunker of Cheyenne Mountain, and the remaining government representatives gathered under the hills of Camp David.
Secretary of State, Joan Wilder, tried to pull herself together and organize what was left of the government. The information bombarded her, NASA and the ESA had just informed her that the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, were being knocked out of their orbits by a space fleet of some sort.
The enormity of it all crushed her chest as she began to hyperventilate. She was having a panic attack, "This was not the time or place for this," she thought. But, how could she defend the country against such an enemy?
How to defend against a technological superior enemy? How to defend against the sure destruction of humanity? How to defend the US? What could she do? Her mother, her father, her grown children were more likely all dead in the early salvo of "meteor storms" of the cities.
What could she do? Her aides were screaming in her ears, asking the impossible questions of what to do next? The phone, barely working, was ringing and the room was spinning--and now, now she had no control over herself. She passed out.
Part Two
The commander of the space fleet surveyed the darkness of space, the asteroid field before him, and his ships. The stars glittered in the distance, while he pondered how long before the Gusfack surrendered, (a term later to be translated as Earthers), the blue ball, if at all.
They had studied Earth for centuries, from a distance, but the impossibility of maintaining such observation was becoming more difficult because of their galactic shifts of the galaxies.
The Pegusans were a people as such that prided themselves in ritual, in strategy, and in conquering those who were and are technologically less advance themselves. The destabilizing of asteroid was one of their many tricks to “persuade” a world to surrender to them.
The one true enemy that had defeated them, Oriusians, and had been a near fatal miscalculation on their part, they were an older race that had walked a different path, but were seriously more dangerous. This lesson had taught them that, the underestimating an enemy was a dangerous mistake that could not be repeated.
So, they became cold and calculating, and now the commander of the space fleet discerning, malevolent, black eyes smiled as he receive the message from Earth. The stars’ light reflected in his eyes as his communication officer relayed the communiqué.
“Commander Moortje,” the officer began in the clicks, grunts, and sighs with body movements that indicated the commander’s authority and his dominance of the crew, The Earthers’ have transmitted a message…..”
Joan Wilder woke up with her aides in her face. The closest aide, Mark, was nervously, frantically fanning her face with a stack of papers in his hand. A young nurse, had her wrist and was looking at her watch as she took Joan's pulse. And, the last remaining Joint Chief of Staff stood uncomfortably in the corner across the room. She leaned up shooed away the nervous ninny of an aide and asked with her eyes, "How long had she been out?"
The nurse answered, "About five minutes." Joan felt the embarrassment in her face. She braced herself as she got up. The room was no longer moving. She took moment as she felt her confidence assert itself as she walked toward the desk that had once been the president of the United States--John Sheridan.
A one time friend and confidante, now most likely killed in the devastation of what was Washington DC. She had been on mission to the Middle East once again to settle a dispute and was returning when the meteorite struck the nation's capital.
It was all coming back to her now, as the events flashed through her mind. She unconsciously picked up a picture frame from his desk. It was of a Zebra, a picture that his daughter Elly had taken at the Denver Zoo in Colorado.
For a moment she smiled, and then the tears began to flow. Damn it! She was stronger than this! She looked around the room once more and she fixed her eyes on the only person in the room who she felt she could trust. She dismissed her staff, say for one-John Becker. No, that was Major General John Becker and her most ardent foe before the demise of DC....
Major General John Becker had been in the military most of his life. He had seen presidents come and go, and watch many men and women under his command die for causes that he did not always agree with his Commander in chief, but he followed his duty as always. 
Today was different, however. All had been lost. His family resided in New York city, his two daughters, and only son along with his wife had been killed in the impact of the first series of "meteorite storms." He was on his cell phone with his wife, when it struck.
The silence at the other end was deafening, the last thing he had heard her say was she was picking up their youngest, 18, from the Bronx Zoo.
The harden warrior now stood before the only remnants of his government pondering what to do next. Joan Wilder, who he grudgingly respected, was the last of the civilian government.
He patiently waited in the corner, as the nurse finished examining the Secretary of State.
Part Three
It had been a day! “The General,” as she referred to him, she was on the cellular telephone. Her “General” was John Becker. He had been sent into danger once again. He had been sent to the Middle East to assist the Secretary of State—Joan Wilder. Her goal and her mission were to assuage the leaders of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Israel into rationality.
Lebanon had been entrusted to the secure Beirut for the mediation. It was the final meeting before the signing of the peace accord. Iran and Syria had been the focus of the world stage because of the turmoil inside their boarders.
One event had finally brought these two turbulent countries to the table—revolution.
The students of Iran had finally reached their tipping point with their imams for their religious fanaticism. The angst and the rage that filled the hearts of the students had broken the bond they had with the clerics and the Iranian theocratic government. The stillness of political disruption that had been perceived from outside in the Western world had been incorrect. The festering of dissatisfaction had been subverting the contentment of Iranian society even before the overthrow of the Shah, twenty-eight years later was the clerics turn.
They had gone too far. The mass execution of students had breached their trust with religious leaders and their government. The students' felt they had nothing left to lose. Tens of thousands of student had been slaughtered in the fear of a major political course correction and the movement towards a stable Islamic democracy.
The overthrow of the imams and the Iranian government had been more dramatic than the seizing of the US Embassy in the late twentieth century. It had been more dramatic than the fall of the Berlin wall and the desolation of communism. The mass hysteria, witnessed via Internet and Al-Jeezer Television, of 10 million voices in unison had overran the armed services, government offices, and religious mosques.
The sea of humanity thundered throughout the streets of Tehran and every other major Iranian city and culminated in untold millions of deaths. Not since the French Revolution had such a purging of political, religious, and the veracity of the people's anger culminated in the destruction of cultural ideology.
The students had bullied, crashed over, government militia outposts, dragged out “elected” government officials to the streets backed by the imams—and executed them on the spot, while the clerics hunted down and killed—or at the least severely beaten in a few cases.
The enormity of the violence fed the blood fugue raged for nearly three years. It began in May 2008 and ended as abruptly in February of 2011.
Joan Wilder, Secretary of State, had been appointed by President John Sheridan after the fall elections of 2008. Her appointment was met with controversy, but the near unanimous approval had the Washington DC politico’s tongues wagging for months. The one contentious rival to her appointment was Major General John Becker. He felt that she had undercut the military as a former US Senator, but he respected her directness and her integrity.
Now Gina’s husband, “The General,” was with Joan Wilder, and returning from the Middle East on board Air Force Two talking to her on his cellular telephone. It had been the first time he had traveled with the Secretary of State, because of their adversarial roles, which had been widely reported, the opportunity to work together had been limited.
The General described the white and blue interior of the Air Force 3, the leather seats, and the long oak conference table in the room he sat in.
He told his wife, of thirty years, of Roger Troutman, an American Persian, was now head of Iranian Provisional government.
He told her of Roger Troutman's history, of Roger's adoptive parents. How Roger decided to keep his American name. How he had decided against returning to his birth name that his birth parents had given him. How his adoptive parents had always encouraged him to seek out his heritage.
The Major General had told his wife of Roger's belief in democracy. He told his wife the optimism he felt. And, for the first time in his life, the Major General told his wife, Gina, he believed that peace awas attainable in the Middle East.
He hold his wife, he believed that Roger Troutman was the wild card needed to that would stabilize the newly democratic Iranian government—and the region.
Gina and John had often these cursory discussions of his work, he didn’t discuss specifics, but had talked often of his impression of events, and the people he met. The surface chatter to “clear” his brain from work was one of their rituals—he and she did this out of habit. They exchanged information the usual husband and wife banter, but the warmth of their voices communicated that they were still in love. She informed him that she was going to pickup their youngest.
Boom—boom—boom—boom thundered in the day-lit-sky. She immediately recognized the sound. Years of living on Air Force military bases told her the sonic booms were close. The store windows rattled, and Gina looked up into the instinctively toward the sky. She saw the entrails of reentry fire and smoke from a meteorite, and studied its projected impact.
She cursed as the realization struck her, the concussive blast engulfed the city from the tidal blowback, waves of soot, dust, dirt, and ash surged through the streets only to leave the tallest building protruding from the debris. Major General Becker phone had been left with silence of a “drop” cellular call—and the last word from his wife of “Shit!” imprinted on his memory....
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