Capt. Bradford had returned to his command station at the entrance of the facility and seated himself at his, large, crescent shaped, desk. He started by opening his S.O.P. Orders and reading them.
His orders were pretty straight forward in that, he was charged with maintaining order and the proper safety and working conditions of the facility.
There was a secured and sealed envelope inside, that contained his classified manifest. It contained the identities of government agency personnel who had been inserted at the beginning of Dr. Swan's development of the nano-armor lattice design, just before he had been awarded the government contract.
He put the envelope in his safe and started turning on his station.
The three sheets of what appeared to be clear Plexiglas lit up as computer monitors and were showing a great deal of data that seemed to be updating in real time.
The central monitor was divided into several different sections that had video feeds from different areas inside the facility in an upper section and in the lower section, was an overall view of the Granite Geode from the entrance of the facility.
To his right hand side was a monitor that showed the earth from orbit, via a camera on the International Space Station in one section, a view of space from a satellite in orbit around earth and a long section to one side with data updating also in real time.
To his left was a monitor that had satellite images from various places around the globe that rotated in views as different signals were displayed on the monitor.
Capt. Bradford got a feeling of power, from being able to use a few of the surveillance satellites to focus in on individuals from space and see them plainly going about their daily lives.
Capt. Bradford had been given clearance to use the satellites, to keep an eye on the ranch above him and oversee it's operations while in Lock Down. He could only dream of being able to end groups of people or individuals with the push of a button. It would be like being God, he thought.
Capt. Bradford was getting accustomed to his working area and it's rather vast capabilities as far as surveillance was concerned. There were a few things he would have preferred to have, that he didn't have, principally visual surveillance of the interior of the laboratory.
He did have visual surveillance of the ranch house, it's exterior and interior rooms, aside from bedrooms.
He even had visual surveillance in the house's storm shelter which was rather large. It consisted of both a very sturdy concrete storm shelter and stable combination. The STEM students had even planned for the safety of the horses and draft animals from in-climate weather, that was common in this part of the country.
The satellite communications dishes had been mounted to the tops of the wind turban generators and weren't noticeable unless one was looking for that sort of thing. Even then, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that STEM College students used satellite communication.
He had noticed that since he last spoke with Lt. Mitchel, Lt. Mitchel was apparently removing some stores that were thought to be lost. He had a brief list of supposedly lost stores, provided by the last accounting which was in 1952.
It listed rifles, hand guns, automatic weapons and munitions for them among food-stuffs both canned and in bulk. There were no exact lists, as it was thought to be lost, due to a collapse of the underground storage facility, caused by illegal construction demolition dumping and therefore non-viable.
Yet, Lt. Mitchel was removing quite a few wagon loads of items from the storage area. Capt. Bradford decided to inquire about that, during their next scheduled conference.
Capt. Bradford had been sitting at his desk, absently going through views on his monitors, settling finally on watching the buck-board wagon of The Ranch, on the center monitor, being loaded with sacks of some sort when the monitor showing the view of the earth from the International Space Station went black. Then the monitor that had the many views of the earth from space, divided into a grid, took on a red hue as the many views went black in bunches and randomly until they were all black.
In the center monitor, the only one showing anything besides a blank screen, the view of the granite geode showed a ball, of what could only be described as ball lightening, in the center of the geode's void with arcs of lightening dancing from it to the walls of the geode.
If it had ever gone dark it could be said that it flickered. But, it only got brighter and less bright kind of flickering, sometimes really bright and sometimes not as bright, it was captivating, almost hypnotic in it's flickering.
Capt. Bradford saw on the other half of the split screen, that outside the ranch house, flaming balls of fire were falling from the sky and hitting the ground.
Then the shaking started and the lights went out. The shaking lasted for perhaps two or three seconds before it quieted. Deeper in the facility, safety protocols automatically started the electric generators that would supply emergency power until the system had been switched over to D/C backup.
Capt. Bradford initiated a full internal lock down, opened his WCS orders and read them.