The Black Ships

  ~*~

  “What the hell are we doing?” Frank yelled suddenly, startling the people in his office. 

  Brecker shook his head in disgust. “Frank’s right; everyone get across the hall into boardroom three. Even at this height, we’re in danger if we stay on this side. The elevator core is made of concrete and reinforced steel; that’s the only place that can save us from the blast.”

  They ran out the door, suddenly aware of how foolishly exposed they were. They ran down the hall for fifteen feet before turning right and pouring into the empty meeting room. “The first five feet are storage  and mechanical rooms,” shouted Brecker. “Everyone huddle right here.” He chopped his hand towards a spot on the wall and the small crowd complied. “The elevator shafts are behind this section.”

  There was a short wait, almost anticlimactic after their mad dash from Frank’s office. Frank was about to suggest that maybe the bomb wouldn’t detonate when they heard a loud roar. At first, it sounded like a large helicopter flying overhead but it continued to grow in volume and a shock wave struck the building, knocking Frank’s head away from the wall and leaving him dazed.

  The shock wave was clearly visible through the window for a few moments as it flowed across midtown, shattering windows and tearing away loose structures such as gargoyles and water towers. Parts of the ship traveled with the wave, embedding in buildings or tearing large chunks out of their corners to rain debris on the pedestrians below. The expanding dome of pressure quickly reached the top of the Secretariat Building, sending glass shards, filing cabinets and sections of wall through the walls to either side of the huddled group. The debris smashed out through the windows of the Manhattan side of the building with almost undiminished force.

  Looking down the length of the building, Frank could see no walls, only the concrete columns that held up the building. Sparking wires and bits of acoustical tile dangled from the ceiling. His ears were ringing from the sudden pressure and he felt as though his head would explode. Walking over to the edge, he looked down to see a tidal wave, twenty feet high, racing inland. The wave only had a small section of the East River to draw from and its awesome force was quickly spent.

  It was a strange feeling to watch such destruction but not be able to hear any of it. The combination of ringing ears and their height above the tsunami gave the scene an eerie unreality.  The water had lost half its power just getting across 1st Avenue and as it receded, he was shocked to see an Abrams tank embedded sideways between the first and second floor of a Tudor City apartment block.

   Massive shards of metal continued to rain down on the entire south end of the city. Pieces of the ship, ranging from a few ounces to over a ton, continued to fall for over a minute. A little girl who had run ahead of her parents on the sidewalk of 6th Avenue turned suddenly at the sound behind her. She saw a ship’s bulkhead laying between her and her startled parents, exactly where she would have been walking had she not raced ahead.

  Less than ten blocks away from the river, Jules King, the undisputed master of the corporate chop shop, was on the verge of closing a new deal. They would take a marginally profitable electronics plant, shut it down, sell off its assets and develop the land for mixed residential and light commercial. Jules would throw the money on his growing pile and a few hundred workers would be looking for new jobs. Those jobs were saved as the two-thousand-pound anchor shaft crashed through the corner window and, in a rare moment of poetic justice, took most of Jules with it as it smashed its way through the 23rd floor and out the far side of the building.

  Ten miles away at JFK International Airport, passengers lining up to board a flight to Detroit abandoned the usual silence and talked among themselves about the loud blast they had just heard. The talk turned to screams of fright as the anchor fluke, easily twice the weight of the one ton shaft, smashed into the jet that waited for them. It struck just behind the wings, the force of the impact shearing off the tail and driving the rest of the aircraft forward. Its nose smashed the outer glass, driving across the Arrivals walkway and shattering the glass wall of the inner side, nearly toppling the status kiosk.

  The boarding clerk looked up at the open jawed face of the pilot, seven feet from his desk, before routine intruded itself on his shaken mind. Perhaps finding refuge in mundane tasks, he turned to his keyboard and began to type. The screen behind him updated; TGA 3346 – Detroit – Delayed.

   

  Barnum Island

  New York State

  January 16th, 2027

  Ellen woke slowly. She was looking up at rusty steel trusses. Where am I? she wondered absently. She realized, with a start of fear, that her wrists and ankles were bound. Kidnapping, her last conscious thought came back to her. She struggled to a sitting position on her cot and looked around. The building appeared to be an old metal shop. There were massively heavy machines that looked like they could bend just about anything, but they were coated with at least a decade’s accumulation of dust. A police cruiser sat facing the steel, garage-type loading door and to the right was a large aluminum framework supporting a white sheet. An array of lights and wires surrounded a chair in front of the screen and a camera stood on a tripod opposite the chair.

  Frank…

  “Misery loves company, yes?”

  Ellen spun to the left in surprise at the voice; she had thought the building was empty. She saw two other cots; one had a middle-aged man sitting on it. His wrists and ankles were similarly bound with electrician ties. She looked down at a cable-type bicycle lock that ran between her arms to a shackle mounted in the concrete floor.

  “My name is Jarl,” he said. “I’ve been here for at least a month.” His beard seemed to confirm his story. “I was kidnapped when I got into a taxi at the airport.”

  “I was taken by a cop,” she answered, nodding over at the cruiser. “Where is our host right now?”

  “He said he was going out to get supplies,” Jarl answered. “He’s been gone for less than an hour, I would think, though it gets hard to tell time when you’ve been locked up as long as I have.” He shrugged apologetically.

  Ellen looked down at the ties on her wrists. They operated on the same principle as the tag holders on store merchandise. A plastic clip in the head allowed one way passage of an insert that would then be locked in the closed position. She had a lifetime habit of removing the tags in a way that would allow them to be reattached. Growing up in a low-income family meant that they returned shoddy merchandise that many families would have simply thrown away. That meant preserving the ability to reattach the original price tag.

  Ellen still maintained the habit, even though both she and Frank were successful in their respective fields. Clothing tags were no challenge at all. She simply pushed the little plastic insert cone to one side, then down one of the slits at the side of the lock and finally, back into the center. The insert would slide right out. She held her wrists close to her face for a closer inspection. The only difference is that the lock is adjustable, she mused, immune to Jarl’s excitement at having someone to talk to. She realized that she still had a paper clip from a client invoice in the tiny watch pocket of her jeans.

  She fished out the clip and quickly unfolded it before setting it in her lap. With her teeth, she pulled the tie around her wrists so that the lock sat over her left wrist. Picking up the piece of wire, she moved her right hand under her left so she could get at the inbound side of the locking mechanism. She slid the wire into the lock until it reached the little plastic arm that held the teeth of the zip tie. With a gentle push, she shoved the wire under the arm, separating it from the teeth and the tie came loose.

  With a feeling of triumph, heightened by Jarl’s surprised approval, she repeated the procedure with the tie at her ankles and sat up a free woman. She frowned for a moment as she looked at her fellow prisoner. If we call for help but they don’t get here before our captor, he’ll find us missing and make a run for it. Then again, he might come back and move us
as well, or even use us as hostages in a standoff with the cops. She got up, heading over to Jarl’s cot. Screw it, I’m getting out of here. She bent down, freeing her fellow captive’s bonds far more easily than her own, now that she was able to use both hands.

  “How bad was the bomb?” He stood up and followed her over to the cruiser. “I could hear it as though it were next door.”

  Ellen opened the driver’s door and looked inside; the keys were in the ignition. “I don’t know,” she said as she turned the key to the accessory position. “I was unconscious before it happened.” Is Frank alive or dead? The radio crackled to life and she grabbed the mike off the dashboard. “This is Ellen Bender. I  was kidnapped from UN headquarters and I have…”

  “Jarl, Jarl Brevik, also from the UN,” the bearded prisoner said in surprise.

  “… Jarl Brevik with me. Does anyone hear me?”

  “This is Nassau County dispatch.” The voice replied. “All units are currently assisting victims of the blast. Are you able to get away on your own?”

   “Hang on.” Ellen dropped the mike and had just stepped out of the car when she heard a key in the employee entrance next to the garage door in front of the cruiser. “Carl, get in the car right now,” she hissed as she shoved him in through the driver’s door and climbed in after him.

  “It’s Jarl,” he corrected nervously.

  “Quiet.” She twisted the key, starting the engine. She pulled the door closed with her left hand and pulled the shifter to the drive position with her right. The door opened as she hit the gas. The cruiser rammed through the old garage door in a cacophony of squealing tires, breaking wood and screeching metal. Directly in front of her was another building and she frantically wound the steering wheel to the right, putting a fifteen foot long dent in the corrugated metal wall as they picked up speed and swerved back into the middle of the narrow alley.

  A quick look in the rear-view mirror showed their captor standing in the middle of the alley with a gun in his hand. It was hanging at his side and Ellen took that as a good sign. If he was going to shoot, he would have done it by now. They turned again, the cowling of the front bumper dragging on the pavement as they drove. After a few aimless turns, they turned right onto a street and came up short at a dead end in front of a huge industrial building.

  The radio had been busy with the disaster response throughout the drive but now Ellen heard her own name coming from the speaker. She picked it up. “This is Ellen,” she said simply. Am I supposed to say ‘over’ or something?

  “This is Nassau County dispatch, Have you managed to escape?”

  “Yes, we took the cop car that the kidnapper used to grab me. I don’t really know where we are but don’t these things have GPS?” She looked around, half expecting to see their former host come jogging up the road. Army helicopters flew back and forth constantly in the distance.

  “Ma’am, could you tell me the city and number of the vehicle?” She somehow managed to keep a calm professional voice despite everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and Ellen resolved to follow her example.

  She climbed out and took a look at the side. Reaching back inside she grabbed the mike. “NYPD 304225,” she said as she leaned in the door. She was still too keyed up from the narrow escape to sit still. 

  After a few moments, the dispatcher came back. “No GPS signal from that unit. He must have destroyed it when he stole the vehicle. Can you describe anything about your surroundings?”

  “We’re on McCarthy road or street, I’m not sure which. There’s a large building that looks like a power plant and then a bunch of big oil tanks to the left.”

  “You see a large open field farther to the left?” The dispatcher sounded excited.

  “Yeah, it’s about the size of a baseball diamond,” Ellen answered with relief, giving Jarl a thumbs up. “Where are we?”

  “You’re on Barnum Island. Please stand by and transport will be there in a few minutes.”

  In less than ten minutes, Ellen and Jarl were sitting in the back of an army Blackhawk helicopter, looking out with dismay at the scene below. From the epicenter, an area of devastation extended for almost a mile in all directions. Though the skyscrapers had avoided falling over, those closest to the blast had been scoured of all but their concrete and steel frames. Most buildings within the one mile radius had lost most of their windows.

  Traffic on both sides of the midtown tunnel was blocked as the tunnel had been closed. The force of the blast had scoured the river bottom away from the tunnel roof, cracking it in the process. Now fully exposed to the weight of the water, the cracks were growing.

  The helicopter followed the channel down to the upper bay, landing on a large circular patch of grass on Ellis Island. “This is where you get out, folks,” the pilot’s voice crackled in her ear. “Please leave your headsets on the tabs above you.”

  Ellen climbed out and crouched as she ran under the spinning rotor, heading for a man in dark blue camouflage who was moving towards them. Her breath caught in her throat as she recognized the familiar gait of the big man. “Frank!” She threw herself into his arms.

  “The prison hasn’t been made that can hold my girl!’ He beamed at her as he brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes.

  “You look good in uniform.” She leaned back to get a better view. “How did you end up wearing this?”

  “They brought us straight here after the blast and sent over temporary clothes from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They even had some for you sitting in our quarters in the hope that…” His voice trailed off, thick with the rampant emotion of a sleepless night. They held each other tighter as the Blackhawk lifted off.

  His last sentence began to sink in as a new imperative began to assert itself. After a close brush with death, the human mind often turns itself to the preservation of the species. Though Ellen didn’t address it in quite those terms, it was nonetheless a very sudden and powerful feeling. “Did you say quarters?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded.

  “Private quarters?”

  He grinned.

  From Darkness - Light

  Red Flag Mineral Co.

  Sixty Meter Observatory

  Mauna Kea, Hawaii

  March 15th, 2027

  “How much do you have?” Mike jumped as Colonel McCutcheon’s voice suddenly appeared at his left shoulder. Though he’d sent Wes to get him, he hadn’t heard his approach because of the earphones.

  “We have five transmissions over a forty-minute period.” Mike took his eyes from the screen and turned to face the officer. “Then everything just went dead. We probably moved out of alignment with the signal. It’s a laser based transmission so you have to be within the path to receive it.” He shrugged with a grin that threatened to split his head in half. “We got seriously lucky.”

  “Laser,” the Colonel said with a tone of disbelief. “I thought atmospherics would keep a signal from getting off the planet or was this a ship-to-ship transmission?” There were two of the massive ships in orbit around Mars.

  “Neither,” Mike got out of his chair and walked over to one of the whiteboards that stood on frames around the central working area. He picked up a marker and drew two circles, one on the lower left corner and one slightly above and to the right. “Earth,” he said, drawing an ‘E’ in the center of the lower circle. “Mars.” He drew a corresponding ‘M’ as an excited Sgt Davis returned with the rest of the team. 

  “These are the ships.” He sketched in a couple of wedges. “Not to scale, of course.” He engaged in a theatrical pause, the kind that gave an audience time to laugh. Nobody cracked a smile and he cleared his throat nervously and turned back to the board. “Tough room,” he muttered under his breath. This will win them over, he thought as he drew a circle in the top right hand of the board and a line leading past Mars to Earth. He put the characters ‘HW?’ in the circle. “This,” he said, stabbing the circle with the marker, “is the origin of the s
ignals.”

  The team stared at him in shock. Jan was the first to speak. “Mike, are you telling us that this signal is coming from their home world?”

  “Either that or from an invasion fleet bound for Earth.” McCutcheon’s statement brought the alarmed gazes of all but one of the team members.

  “You’re both right,” Mike said. “But, more accurately, I believe that Jan’s option is the most likely.” He drew a cone on the board. “This is an exaggeration of the beam but it gets the point across. As the light from their communications laser travels to its destination, it spreads out. Now they seem to have a way to make a far more coherent beam than we can, but it still spreads and we can measure that effect pretty accurately with the ‘60’. We should also be able to notice if the source is getting any closer.”

  He turned from the board to face the group. “A fleet would most likely be travelling pretty damn fast but we didn’t see any evidence of that during the forty minutes we were recording the signal.” He smiled, feeling like he was back in front of a class at Cal Tech. “Anyone want to guess at the significance of that little nugget?”

  Hal Tudor’s eyes lit up. “You can tell us exactly where to find their home world, can’t you?”

  Mike nodded, his head-splitting grin making a return appearance. “Direction and distance, but wait,” he said in his best TV announcer voice. “There’s more!”  Quizzical frowns greeted his latest attempt at humor. You’re losing the crowd again numbskull, just let them hear it. He walked over to the table where McCutcheon had startled him and pulled the headphone jack out of the laptop. The speakers turned on automatically, spilling a strange warbling sound that continued to change in pitch and frequency.

  “That’s the transmission?” Jan asked as she stepped nearer. “Some sort of data stream?”

  “Yep.” Mike sat in his chair and angled to face the audience. “And every now and then it stops and someone…”

  Jan came to a halt and everyone felt a tingling sensation dance across their skin. A voice was speaking. It carried on for a few moments and then another data burst followed. “Spooky, huh?” Mike was grinning at them, seeing his own original reactions mirrored in their faces. “I was listening to that when the boss nearly scared me out of my shorts.”

  “It almost sounds human,” Jan said quietly.

  “It is human.” Everyone turned to look at Corporal Rob Farquhar who had arrived with the Colonel when the military had taken over the site. He looked troubled. “I can recognize a couple of words but not nearly enough to have any clue what it means.”

  Mike had originally been surprised at the easy-going relationship between the intelligence officer and his operators but the informal atmosphere gave the men room to use their own initiative. They often contributed to meetings and their contributions were rarely wrong. This particular offering, however, seemed a little hard to believe.

  “You shittin’ us, Rob?” McCutcheon frowned at his NCO for a few seconds before his features showed a sudden understanding. “Your Mom?”

  Rob nodded slowly, still troubled by the implications. “My Mom is Hopi,” he explained to the group. “I speak that language, but this is something different. It’s almost as if they borrowed a few words of Hopi, maybe a few words of Zuni – I need to hear more.”

  “Zuni?” Jan asked. “I’ve heard of the Hopi; are the Zuni another tribe?”

  Rob nodded again. “A lot of people think the Pueblo tribes can trace their roots back to the  great Anasazi civilization.”

  “I’ve heard of the Anasazi,” Jan brightened. “They left all those magnificent ruins behind, right?” She frowned in alarm and took a step towards Farquhar. “Rob? What is it?”

  Rob’s face was deathly pale and McCutcheon grabbed a swivel chair and eased his corporal into it. “This just makes too much sense. It changes everything I thought I knew.” He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Anasazi wasn’t the name my ancestors used; nobody knows what name they gave themselves. It was a word used by the Navajo whenever discussing them.” He looked at his colonel. “It means ‘Ancient Enemy’.”

   

  U.S. Military Academy

  West Point , New York

  April 24th, 2027

  Sam walked into the commandant’s office with a tablet in his hand. The president was sitting in a leather club chair opposite the commandant having a coffee and he looked a question at his chief of staff. “Mr. President, I think you should take a look at this.”

  “If you gentlemen need some privacy, I need to go check on the assembly anyway.” Brigadier General Hill rose from his chair. In twenty minutes, the president would be addressing the cadets and staff of the academy. The US would be deploying almost a quarter of a million troops in the coming months as part of the Stability Assistance Program. SAP deployments were drawing troops from more than twenty nations and they were intended to augment the police forces of countries where unrest was threatening to shut down the governments.

  Announcements regarding troop deployments tended to happen in front of military audiences. Withdrawals were more likely to be announced in the press room at the Whitehouse. It was the generally accepted way of things and now was no time to start experimenting.

  Sam handed the tablet over as the door closed behind Hill. The president put his glasses on and began to scroll through the images and text. “How big was it?”

  “Big enough that we had to destroy the entire site just to get it out.” He sat down in the chair vacated by Hill and, after a moment’s consideration, appropriated the cup of coffee that Hill had been drinking. “We buried a couple thousand pounds of C4 throughout the area and simulated a tremor, so the geologists will confirm our cover story for us.” He sighed and balanced the mug in his lap.

  “All traces have been eliminated from the site?”

  Sam nodded. “It just looks like a cave now. The money to rebuild the whole thing has been appropriated and channeled through a couple of NPO’s, so most of the damage will be undone.”

  Parnell set down his empty mug. “Why has this never been found before now? That site has had archeologists crawling all over it for decades.”

  “People tend to point their ground penetrating radars at the ground, not at the back wall of cave cities. We saturated the place with GPR after our team translated the intercept.” The voice portions of the alien transmission had been handed over to a team of Pueblo elders and linguists who had been set up at the growing center on Mauna Kea. They had cobbled together a translation and the results were chilling.

  By now, most of the people on Earth harbored no doubts; the aliens were hostile. The new information, however, proved that they had been to Earth before. An ancient outpost had been caught off-guard by the humans they’d been sent to scout. Isolated and few in number, they had been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers and all killed.

  The bodies had been piled inside their ship, which had been placed at the back of a deep cleft in a cliff face. The victorious humans had then closed off the opening and built a small collection of buildings to house the warriors chosen to guard it. In time it had grown into a small city of homes and shops built under the overhang of the cliff.

  The aliens had mentioned the massacre and it was clear that they wanted to come back and do a proper job this time. They were building up forces on Mars rather than transporting them across the light years in no small part because the standing military they did have seemed to be tied up on internal security operations. In just over a year, they would be launching ships to establish orbital superiority. The revelation had been shocking, but it also brought hope. The intercept was dumb luck and humans were only just barely capable of deciphering it. The enemy had transmitted the entire stream in the open. They placed far too much faith in encryption and it would end up costing them dearly if humans could develop an understanding of their computer systems from the structure of the data that had been transmitted.

  “So the ship is off to Area 51?”
Parnell raised a conspiratorial eyebrow. It rankled him that he had never been able to get a straight answer about the place.

  Sam shook his head. “Far as I know, they only do defense testing there. The ship is on its way to join the wreckage from Roswell. This will be the first time they get to study an intact ship, though it’s obviously made by a different civilization.” He grinned.

  He’s managed to find out where that is, Parnell realized. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Different civilization?” He frowned at his old friend. “Just how many races have been coming here?”

  “Dunno,” said Sam before taking another drink. “General consensus is that the Roswell bunch were just biologists but I figure they were doing a nature show.”

  “Alright, but where does all this fancy equipment get sent if not Area 51?”

  Sam’s grin came back. He had managed to find out what none of his predecessors had ever learned. “What’s the one place where regular shipments and airtight security are completely unnoticeable? What place has become a synonym for ‘secure’?” There was a pause as Parnell looked blankly at Sam. “Alright, here’s a hint - Kentucky.”

  “No,” Parnell blurted, grinning. “Fort Knox?” A slow nod. “I suppose there hasn’t been a lot of gold there in a hell of a long time…” He handed the tablet back to Sam and got up from the chair. “Do we share this with the UN?” he asked as he put on his jacket.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why absolutely?”

  “This is just an orbital ship. If we want a share of the big prize, we need to play nice.” Sam shrugged. “If the UN force manages to seize one of the enemy starships, we don’t want to be left out in the cold when they figure out how their systems work.” He turned off the tablet and they headed for the door. “Anyway, Mary tells me that the alien engine is based on existing theory, we just hadn’t managed to come up with a working model yet. With some reverse engineering, we can have a hybridized engine on some modified VU-22’s within a few months. So we can start moving personnel and lighter equipment into orbit before year’s end.”

  Parnell stopped with his hand on the door. “So we can stop building those damn drop capsules?” He was referring to large coffin-like capsules that were intended to put individual troops on the ground quickly to seize strategic points. Nobody had much faith in the design, least of all the troops who were expected to use them.

  Sam nodded. “We can use them to land troops on Mars and we should be able to jam any radar-guided weapons. I get the feeling the enemy hasn't fought many major wars lately, just counter-insurgency against some of their own worlds.”

  “Let’s go tell some bright-faced youngsters that we’re sending a few hundred thousand troops to force our fellow humans back to work.” He opened the door and walked out into the hall, his protective detail falling in as they emerged.

  “I hope Jack worded it a little better than that,” Sam muttered as they  headed for the assembly hall.

   

  Galileo Shipyard

  Low Earth Orbit

  May 25th, 2027

  Son of a bitch, that’s big, thought Frank looking out the cockpit window of the orbital airship. They were on final approach to the dockyard where the hull of the Ares was almost complete. At fifteen hundred feet, it was easily a couple hundred feet longer than the cruise ship he had been building and it was staggering to think it was being built in space. The hull was over ninety-five percent complete and there were only thirty-two modules left to attach around the outside edges of the vessel.

  The seals for the massive internal hangar deck were complete and the ship had been declared operational. The airship that had carried Frank into orbit was also loaded with the first of the carrier’s breaching assault vessels. The BAV’s were designed to carry a platoon of marines on a fast approach to the enemy ship. Once within range, they would fire everything they had at one focused point and attempt to ram their heavily-armored nose through the hull. The inner hull of the BAV was designed with a complement of pneumatic and hydraulic dampeners that would help the platoon inside to survive the impact.

  Assuming that was successful, shaped charges would blow a hole through both hulls and it was hoped that the boarding party, wearing combat EVA suits, would be able to find a way through the wreckage and fight for control of the ship. There were a lot of assumptions at work.

  “Alright Frank, that’s as far as we can take you,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “You better get down and hook up if you still plan on going over to the Ares.”

  “This seemed like a good idea when I was sitting at my desk back on Ellis Island,” he grumbled, earning a laugh from the four-man bridge crew. He pushed off and spun in the air like a two-hundred-pound cat, moving neatly around the stair rail and down to the lower deck. Brad, the loadmaster, held the door open for him and he glided into the airlock, fumbling with his helmet as the door closed.

  “De-pressurization in three, two…”

  “WAIT,” Frank yelled as he scrambled to engage the seal on his EVA suit. He could see Brad laughing through the window.

  “If you had paid more attention when I briefed you on this yesterday, you would remember that you’re the one who has to de-pressurize the airlock.” Brad was wiping tears from his face and Frank could hear more laughter from the control deck. “Have fun, Frankie.”

  “Thanks, jackass,” Frank felt the seal click and hit the button to clear the air from the small room.

  At least I didn’t crap my pants… The light turned red and he threw the switch to open the outer airlock door, grabbing a handhold before aiming for the BAV. He pushed off and reached the pre-marked spot where he was to tether. Hooking on, he looked up to see the cargo bay door opening. The view was spectacular. Behind the hive of activity that was Ares, the Earth looked fragile and vulnerable, its thin layer of atmosphere seemed hardly enough to sustain life.

  The thruster team came into the hold and attached their units. The lead hand drifted over to Frank and checked his tie before grasping his helmet and bringing their visors together. The gesture was unsettling for Frank until he realized that this was how they talked without having the entire shipyard listening in.

  “Mr. Bender, your tether looks fine but make sure you keep a firm grip on the bulkhead, OK? We don’t want you coming loose and de-orbiting on us. My cousin Tony asked me to keep an eye on you.” The man grinned. “He’s not getting all sentimental or anything, it’s just that he hasn’t finished paying for his new place in the Azores and the invoices will pile up if you go missing.”

  Frank had known he would run into John sooner or later. Tony’s cousin had one of the contracts for module placement. “Tony would have come with me but you can’t smoke in these helmets.”

  John moved back to his control module and attached it. After a quick confirmation that it had control of all eight thruster units, he started them moving out of the hold. This was Frank’s first time in space without the comforting bulk of an orbital airship surrounding him. I should probably be afraid of falling but this is just too amazing, he thought as they headed for a point a few hundred meters astern of the largest vessel humans had yet made.

  The stern was where the inbound doors were mounted. The portside half of the stern was one large airlock door while the starboard side was split between one larger door and two smaller ones. John steered the OAV towards one of the smaller doors as it began to open. They passed through and stopped in front of a second door while they waited for the outer door to close.

  After a couple of minutes, the lights on the wall turned green and John removed his helmet. Frank had half-expected gravity to assert itself when the air was pumped in, much like a diver in an underwater airlock. He knew the difference, of course, but he was nervous and a nervous mind likes to cast about for familiarity.

  He tentatively rotated his helmet lock to the open position and winced as a rush of air came in. The pressures weren’t completely equal between his suit and the airlock. He pul
led the helmet off and looked over at John who hovered over his control module with a grin. “Welcome to the Ares,” he said expansively as the two inner doors swung out of their way.

  The hangar deck was roughly thirteen hundred feet long, three hundred feet wide and fifty feet in height. A series of structures ran down the center line of the hangar, linking the dorsal and ventral halves of the ship.  The thruster team took the OAV to the first empty docking cradle and rotated it sideways before ‘lowering’ it to the huge clamps on the ventral deck of the hangar. The clamps closed around the small hull, locking it firmly in place.

  There were clamps on almost every surface of the vessel and some of them would have to be replaced. The new, modified V-22’s would need their own section of deck to call home and they would need to be secured or else they would simply start to drift around the hangar, smashing the ship to pieces when she accelerated or maneuvered.

  “The engineers were over by the port launch door when I saw them last.” John nodded in the direction of the huge door where a small knot of figures in the new, reddish combat EVA suits were floating.

  Frank pushed off and started to move from clamp to clamp, picking up speed until he judged he had reached the middle and then began to slow his progress a little each time his hand came in contact with a clamp. He wouldn’t mind trying one of the new suits. They were intended for soldiers and gave better freedom of movement and visibility. The reddish, patchwork pattern was intended for combat on the surface, but the suits, embedded with Kevlar fiber, would also be of use to any boarding party fighting in orbit.

  Suits were mandatory in the hangar, though helmets would only be worn during combat operations. While fighting, all of the ship’s aft hangar doors would be left open: a lucky shot could cause a closed door to fail. If enough doors were to fail while closed, the Ares would become a ship without a purpose, filled with combat vehicles and troops who couldn’t deploy. Keeping the aft doors open would prevent that but it meant that the hangar deck would be unpressurized during combat operations.

  “Afternoon, Ted,” Frank greeted the DARPA officer as he came to a halt. It seemed odd to refer to times of day when they were in space, but it was afternoon at the new UN headquarters on Ellis Island and he preferred to stay in touch with his own time zone whenever possible.

  “Hey, Frank,” Ted responded with a nod. “We think we have it worked out.” A drawing floated beside him, showing the interior walls of the hangar.

  “Let’s take a look,” Frank said as he drifted closer. “If we can agree on it, we might be able to catch a ride back on the same ship I came up on.”

   

  Red Flag Mineral Co.

  Sixty Meter Observatory

  Mauna Kea, Hawaii

  April 27th, 2027

  Mike pushed his chair away from the group and rolled backwards, leaning as far back as he could he stared up at the trusses rather than the newcomers. Almost a week with these guys and nothing but arguments.  The team from Echelon, the five nation signals intelligence network, had arrived six days earlier and had set to work immediately. Each nation had provided an officer of equal rank and Mike wasn’t sure whether that was by design or accident but it certainly wasn’t helping. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the U.S. had each sent a major and they each spent more time in pushing their own ideas than they did in analyzing the signals.

  After a brief pause as they watched him glide away, they got back to the important business of arguing over methodology. Mike’s head bumped the conference table hard enough to knock over an empty glass left near the edge. He sat up with a loud curse, rubbing his head and glaring at the five men.

  When he had applied to go with the response fleet, his acceptance had been immediate, thanks to Colonel McCutcheon, and he had been given a rank equivalency of major.  That didn’t mean that he was an actual army major but it did give him a place in the hierarchy.  He had been surprised at how useful it was in working with technical officers. It was almost like a military version of tenure.

  He took his hand away from the back of his head and was relieved to see that it had no blood on it. These guys are all too similar, he mused as he went back to massaging his bruised scalp. No wonder they can’t agree on how to move forward. He winced. I hope I don’t end up with a concussion. Then an idea hit him and he forgot about his head. I can embarrass them into cooperating.

  He sat up, looking at the Echelon officers who were grinning at his accident now that it was obvious he was fine. “You guys need to just flip a coin and get to work,” he said reasonably. “Chances are, you each have a good plan for analyzing the data but you need to pick a direction and go with it.” He picked up the glass, which hadn’t broken despite falling on the hard concrete floor. “My cousin Mickey in Van Nuys could have had this done by now.”

  They looked a little embarrassed by this but Major Edwards - Mike still wasn’t sure if he was the Aussie or the Kiwi - was unconvinced. “Y’ reckon some shonky bludger in his mum’s basement can run rings around us?” He grinned. “Too bad you can’t have him take a squiz and prove you right, seeing as he’s all the way out in California.”

  I thought I was the one who hit his head, mused Mike. He realized that he might have to carry through on his bluff and that it might be a good thing. “If by ‘squiz’ you mean ‘look’, then why not?” he asked mildly, looking around the room to see how it was being received. They seemed dubious. McCutcheon looked as though he was considering whether it would be worth the wait to fly Mike’s cousin to Hawaii. To his credit, the colonel was willing to consider just about anything if it brought results.

  “Take days to get him here and it might be a waste of time,” Angela Compton chimed in. She had a slightly twangier accent and Mike was starting to think she might be the officer from New Zealand.

  “You folks don’t quite get what I’m suggesting here.” Mike couldn’t help smiling at what he had just decided to do. “I’m suggesting a full dress interview. We call Mickey, explain ourselves and see what happens in the next twenty minutes.” He turned calmly and snagged his mug, getting up from his chair to fix a new cup of coffee. “If my cousin can penetrate our network, find the record of the alien data stream and tell us something useful about it in twenty minutes, we add a new team member.”

  McCutcheon called over to Mike who was putting his fourth packet of sugar into the mug. “Is your cousin really that good?”

  Mike turned from the table, noticing the Canadian and American Echelon officers were giving the colonel an indignant look. “Yep.” He took a deep drink.

  McCutcheon said nothing more. He simply gestured to the speaker phone on the conference table.

  Be careful what you wish for. Mike punched in the number and hit the speaker button to start the call. The speaker warbled a couple of times before the line was picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Monique, is Mickey there?”

  “Hang on…” There was a pause as the phone travelled down the hall of the small Van Nuys apartment.

  “Mike, is that you?” The voice was undeniably feminine.

  Mike looked up at Pete, whose attention had suddenly piqued. He began scratching his new beard. “Hi, Mickey, I have you on speaker.” Mike looked around the room. “I have some army officers with me who specialize in intercepts and I kind of told them that you could run circles around them.”

  “Well gosh, Mike, it’s sweet of you to be so supportive but why exactly are you telling me about this? Don’t you have a planet to save?” All the Wilsen family talked about was how Mike was doing such important work and Mickey was probably a little tired of it.

  “Well, they don’t quite believe me so I sort of told them that you could break into our network and make some sense of a recorded alien data stream in less than an hour.” He knew he should have given her the real time limit but he was worried that she would just hang up in disgust.

  “How much less than an hour?”

  “Forty minutes.?
??

  “You said I could do all that in forty minutes?” She sounded amused.

  “Um, no, forty minutes less than an hour.” Mike made shushing sounds as the team members chuckled at his delivery. “I said you could do it in twenty minutes.”

  “I wish Dad had that kind of faith in my abilities,” she grumbled, keys clacking in the background. “You’re still at the telescope?” she asked as she typed.

  “Yeah, we have a whole nerve center thing going here and some specialists who keep the security up to military standards.” He looked over at the colonel who had sat down next to him. McCutcheon was leaning on the table propping his chin on his hand as he stared at the speaker.

  “OK, the front door’s probably locked so let’s check the windows,” Mickey murmured as the staccato noise of the keyboard rattled the speaker. “Nope, nope, nope, disco. OK, I’m in  the network, let’s find the right file.” More keys rattled.

  McCutcheon sat up with a start, throwing his hands out to the side with an expression of resigned amusement on his face as he shook his head. “That had to be less than a minute,” he whispered to Mike.

  “Yeah, well, she probably already had her laptop running.” Mike shrugged.

  “Here’s a nice big file on Mike’s desktop,” Mickey said with a tone a surgeon might use in locating a tumor. “Before I open this, have you been surfing any naughty websites? I wouldn’t want to embarrass my big important cousin in front of all his co-workers.” Despite their wounded pride, the Echelon officers joined the rest of the team in chuckling at her playful attitude.

  “Yeah thanks, Mickey, but I’m clean.”

  “Alright, let’s have a look at what we have here. Looks like it breaks down by method. I see stretches of frequency modulation; looks like sound transmission.” Another flurry of keystrokes. “The rest is data but it’s not base 2 like we use. These guys must have some smoking hot computers; this is base 10 data.” She sounded impressed.

  “Base 10?” Mike prompted.

  “Yeah,” she replied absently, fingers back at work on the keys again. “It takes more power than most of our computers can provide. Listen, Mike,” she sounded worried. “This is a digital translation that I’m looking at; please tell me you have an actual optical recording of the full stream.”

  “Well, yeah, the whole thing is in our data bank. What’s wrong?”

  “This file is probably missing most of the data. You have the voice because they used frequency modulation for that but the rest is a mess.” Her keyboard was silent now. “I would bet you everything I own that they’re using hundreds of colors. I would suggest that we’re looking at a transmission based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. They fire up a huge bank of lasers, each one a different color, and send hundreds of separate data streams in one shot.”

  “So how do we decode this?” Mike was starting to hope that his cousin could walk the team through it on the phone. He wasn’t sure how she would take being drafted onto the team. His worries were unfounded.

  “Does the term Fast Fourier Transform mean anything to your team?”

  Mike looked at the faces around him. “Nothing but shrugs here, Mickey.”

  “First thing you need to do is book me on a flight out there.” Her voice was calm but determined. “Luckily, your favorite cousin used to work at SoCal Cable so I know how to cram a hundred Terabits of data into a laser signal.” The keys began to chatter again as she talked. “I’m sending you a list of parts. Please make sure they get there before I do.”

  McCutcheon joined the conversation for the first time. “You seem pretty sure that we’re sending you a plane.” His grin gave the lie to his stern voice.

  “Who am I speaking with?”

  “This is Colonel McCutcheon. I run this little dog-and-pony show.”

  “Well, Colonel, you’re welcome to carry on without me but I was under the impression that the Army never turned down a suitable volunteer.”

  The colonel grimaced at Mike’s screen as a list of parts popped up. “I believe we’ve more than established your abilities.” He looked over at Sgt Davis. “Nellis,” he said quietly. Davis nodded and pulled out his phone to find the right number. McCutcheon pulled Mike’s laptop over and brought up a map of Van Nuys. It had a busy airport.

  “Mickey, I need you to get over to Van Nuys Airport and announce yourself to the management. I’m getting you an aircraft from Nellis Air Force Base so you should have about an hour before it lands. It’s going to be a fighter so you’ll only be able to take a small bag – pack only the absolute essentials. We’ll cover a shopping trip once you get here.”

  “Don’t you know how to recruit a girl,” Mickey replied, amused. I’ll be out the door in ten minutes.

   

  U.S. Bullion Depository

  Fort Knox, Kentucky

  April 28th, 2027

  Sometimes consensus got it right. Adam Sundin took an involuntary step backwards as the crew hatch slid open. Despite the intervening centuries between the concealment of the alien ship and its arrival deep beneath the famous gold depository, he still half-expected to see a small hand appear at the edge of the opening. He began to relax slightly.

  They had been right in their theory. The small hatch on the underside of the fifteen-foot-wide vessel was for an induction-power umbilical. Now that the vessel  had a charge, its systems were coming to life.

  Adam stepped over to the hatch, pulling a mini penlight from his back pocket and shining it through the opening. Five small desiccated corpses lay on the floor, a black smear from the hatch leading to one of the bodies indicating that one of the aliens may have been bleeding as it was placed in the ship. “Shit!” He nearly jumped out of his skin as he felt the tap on his shoulder. He turned to see Dr. Will Francis decked out in full biohazard gear.

  “Sorry, Adam.” Will grinned. “You better wait over by the door. When the decon shower is set up, we can get you processed and then you’ll have to serve a quarantine.”

  “I need to decontaminate?” Adam looked nervously at the open hatch. “Doc, it’s been centuries. You don’t really think there’s a problem, do you?”

  The older man shrugged. “The original work on the Roswell ship was before my time but they had no precautions back then and one of the researchers ended up killing most of his home town over the Christmas holidays.” His eyes wandered to the exit as he spoke. A team was setting up a modular decontamination shower around the door to the large lab. “He carried an incredibly virulent bug home with him and only five people out of more than three hundred managed to survive. The government put out the story that it was a gas leak from the local coal mines.”

  He reached out and put a comforting hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, that bug was carried by a completely different species. We’ll lock you up, just to be sure, but chances are slim that anything would survive for centuries without a host.” He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “We never expected the hatch to open. I should have insisted that you suit up.”

  If I’m stuck down here for a while, I might as well make myself useful, Adam thought as he looked out the lab window at the work crew. “Will, I might as well keep working during the quarantine,” he suggested. “I can wear a suit from my quarters to get to the lab and just decon the suit on my way back.” For an engineer, it would be absolute torture to sit on a bunk forty feet away from the most exotic engines on the planet and not get a chance to ferret out their secrets.

  Dr. Francis thought the proposal through and nodded. “No reason why not,” he responded cheerfully. “We want to adapt this technology as soon as we can.” He paused for a moment to recheck his assumptions, then nodded again. “Absolutely. Let’s do that.” He smiled at Adam. “Without you around, I tend to overcomplicate things. We need you if we’re going to figure these engines out.”

   

  Ellis Island

  New York Harbor

  April 28th, 2027

  “C
an’t sleep?” Ellen reached over and took Frank’s hand.

  “Just thinking about my current employer,” he answered quietly. The walls here didn’t do a very good job of stopping sound. “Maybe it’s time to let go of the past. The U.N. that got Dad killed doesn’t really exist anymore.” He sighed. “Not sure this new version is any better, but it'll do for now.”

  Much had changed over the last year, but the blast had more impact than any other factor in changing the organization. So few had survived the explosion that they were able to live and work at the Ellis Island facilities with room to spare. The island that had welcomed countless thousands of immigrants to the New World now played host to the representatives of their original homelands.

  Within a week, the General Assembly had reconvened in the great hall of the main building and the business of defending Earth was back in hand, thanks largely to logistics units from the New York National Guard and the US Navy. There was a decidedly military feeling throughout the island and Frank couldn’t shake the feeling that the institution had permanently changed. Many of their programs had been cast adrift in the aftermath of the attack. The bureaucracies that had administered them had simply ceased to exist. Staff, records, computer systems, all were destroyed in a heartbeat and there simply wasn’t enough people, money or time to resurrect them.

  What remained was an organization of diplomats focused on the new fleets and on the various global economies. Few were allowed to leave the island. Soldiers patrolled the grounds and the Navy patrolled the harbor. Though the Navy was publicly there to secure the new, temporary U.N. headquarters, they were really there to prevent another attack from devastating the heavily-populated region. Thousands of Americans had died on that cold January afternoon and the military was making it abundantly clear that no subsequent attacks would stand a ghost of a chance at success.

  There was no talk about returning to the old site. It had originally been chosen for its metropolitan amenities. The attack had revealed the dangers of placing such a controversial guest in the midst of a huge population. Other options that had existed in the past quickly disappeared as well. Cities like Singapore, Montreal and St. Petersburg, who had actively lobbied to host the General Assembly, suddenly decided that the security risk wasn’t worth the prestige. Locations that had been offered throughout America in the ‘50s were also off the table.

  After decades of other nations questioning the location of the Secretariat, Americans were in full agreement: nobody wanted the U.N. to remain in the United States.

  Wherever they went, it would have to be someplace remote, someplace easy to secure and far from innocent civilians. The idea had chilled Frank as he lay awake in the dark. Just before Ellen had begun to stir, he had pictured a cabal of diplomats on some Caribbean island with a fleet in orbit and their hands on the economies of every nation.

  “I’m through with hating them for what they did to my Dad, but I’m not sure I like what they’re turning into.” He turned to look at his wife, just visible in the moonlight that came through the threadbare curtains.

  “I don’t much like what I’ve been seeing here either,” she said softly, “but laying awake all night isn’t going to help change anything, is it?”

  He chuckled. “Gives me something to do when I wake up worrying about work. Better than wondering if we should be bringing kids into a world that’s this messed up.”

  Her laugh carried a playful undertone that never failed to capture Frank’s interest. “If you’re looking for something to do while you can’t sleep,” she purred as she moved closer, “we can work on your second question…”

  An hour later, he finally got started on a good night’s sleep.

   

  Red Flag Mineral Co.

  Sixty Meter Observatory

  Mauna Kea, Hawaii

  April 28th, 2027

  Corporal Farquhar tapped Mike on the shoulder. “Hey Mike, this stuff showed up at the front gate with your name on it.” His eyebrows raised when he got a look at the new team member. Mickey, or Michelle, was anything but ordinary. When considered in isolation, few of her features would be labeled attractive. Her nose would be called pointy, her eyes small and unremarkable and her mouth was a thin line set above a slightly jutting chin. The cart behind Rob was completely forgotten.

  In much the same way that seemingly random splashes of paint produced beautiful works of impressionist art, Mickey’s features came together to produce an impression of lively beauty. Mike had always been able to view her with a neutral eye because of the close family tie and they had grown up as best friends. He wondered if the same features would be as attractive on a woman who didn’t possess the same spirit as his cousin.

  He knew that men tended to see her as a hot geek. Her looks gave the impression of someone who enjoyed science fiction and computer games. Though it was unfair to make such a connection, it was correct in this case. Mickey was every nerd’s wildest dream come true, plus forty percent.

   “Thanks, Rob, let’s just pile it right here for now.” Mike and Mickey both got up to help. “Rob, this is my cousin, Michelle.” He tended to use her full name for introductions.

  “Just call me Mickey,” she said as she strolled over to the cart, pulling the manifest from the clipboard on top.

  “Looks like you’re planning to build one hell of a system with all this gear.” Rob was moving eight-foot sections of extruded aluminum beams to make a neat pile beside the cart. “Those quantum cores still don’t come cheap and they’ve been on the market for almost a year now. Schrödingers cost more than my car. ”

  Mickey looked up from her list. “You know your way around a custom build?”

  Rob gave a modest shrug. “I haven’t had my hands on anything like this,” he said, hefting a processor case with a picture of a cat in a wooden box on the front. “But I usually build my own computers rather than wait for the big companies to catch up.”

  “Go Army,” said Mickey with a friendly grin. “You wanna help put this together?”

  His face lit up like Christmas morning. “Are you kidding me? Are we starting right now?”

  Mike smiled to himself; Rob had been a bit of a mess since learning that aliens had been in contact with his ancestors. This new enthusiasm was a pleasant change. Given Rob’s love of computers, Mike wasn’t quite sure how much of his new attitude was entirely due to the quantum processors. He figured part of it might be due to his cousin’s impressionist beauty but that was a question for them to figure out on their own.

  Mickey smiled at Rob’s response. “Well, Mike was going to take me over to the mess tent for lunch and meet the rest of the team first. Why don’t you come along?”

  The young corporal looked down at the parts for a moment, then back up with a smile. “Sure, I’m kind of hungry, now that I think about it.”

  Maybe it’s 50/50, Mike thought as they headed for the large heated tent that served as a cafeteria for the mountain-top staff.  He seemed a little disappointed to leave the fancy gadgets but he seems happy enough to join us. Anyway, it’s none of my business.

   

  Groom Lake Testing Range

  Edwards Air Force Base

  Flight Test Center, Nevada

  June 27th, 2027

  Frank stepped down from his Gulfstream and looked at the buildings that stood in the hazy distance. He knew it was foolish but he half-expected to see tiny green men wandering between the hangars. This detachment of Edwards Air Force Base (or perhaps Nellis Air Force Base – he still wasn’t sure) was deeply entrenched in the public psyche. Commonly referred to as Area 51, the small base was first established by the CIA in 1955 to support Project Aquatone, the development of the Lockheed U2 spy plane.

  Over the years, it played host to a number of aircraft development programs as well as the evaluation of foreign fighters including several captured Soviet MiGs. That all served merely as a colorful background to the wildly popular theory that alien aircraft and personnel were
kept there for study. The secrecy of the base, understandable given its purpose, did little to dissuade the conspiracy theorists and each passing year brought new and more fantastic tales.

  Frank was amazed at how difficult it had been to get clearance to land here at all. He had been obliged to stop at Nellis AFB, on the fringe of Las Vegas, and pick up two Air Force captains as well as two operators from the Air Force’s Special Operations Command who were armed with what appeared to be highly compact and deadly descendants of the venerable M-16 assault rifle that Frank had used in the Florida National Guard.

  Herman Brecker, Frank’s body guard, had been required to hand over his own arsenal for the duration of the visit and he had reluctantly agreed, knowing that his principle was likely to be safe while on such a secure base. Frank’s flight crew had been asked to sit in the passenger compartment and the two Air Force officers took the controls for the short hop from Nellis to Groom Lake, taxiing the aircraft to the south end of the western-most runway, farthest away from the base facilities.

   He turned to follow one of the captains towards a large temporary structure at the end of the runway. A group of men stood in the shade cast by the building, a mix of uniforms and civilian clothing. As the introductions were nearing the end, a radio chirped to life, initiating a conversation with one of the majors in the small group.

  “Alright, we have confirmation,” he announced to the group. “The test window is now open, no eyes are on us for the next two and a half hours.”

  Frank was no astronomer but he knew that Mars wouldn’t see this side of the planet until shortly after nightfall. The window was probably concerned with the United States’ rivals on Earth as well. Not sure why we have to bother, since we plan to hand these babies over to the UN Fleet anyway, Frank thought as the large doors slid open to reveal the hastily-adapted V-22.

  Looking like a cross between a helicopter and a C-140 Hercules, the V-22 could carry a full platoon or up to twenty thousand pounds of cargo. This modified version would first have to prove that it could, at the very least, carry itself. The massive prop nacelles as well as the two six-thousand-horsepower engines had been removed and  replaced with the new Anasazi system, named for the civilization that had captured them from the enemy so long ago.

  The new thruster nacelles were grafted onto the original wings. They were ring shaped and roughly six feet in diameter. “This is just half the propulsion system.” A man had wandered over to Frank as the hybrid aircraft was wheeled out of the hangar by a ground crew tractor. He extended his hand. “Adam Sundin.” He smiled as they shook, nodding at Frank’s name as if he had known it before coming over. “I helped to build this engine,” he said as he watched the preparation.

  “The other half would be the thruster units?” Frank was noticing the various points where the fuselage had been sliced open to allow for protruding elements of the new power plant.

  “So you’ve read the briefing paper from Dr. Francis?” He carried on as if Frank hadn’t, perhaps too excited about his project to resist talking about it. “These thrusters interact with the magnetic field. Gravity is actually one of the weakest forces in the Universe and magnetism can kick gravity’s ass any day of the week.” The young engineer stopped for a moment as the wings began to rotate into the flight position. “With a little help from our dead aliens, we finally managed to build an engine that wouldn’t steal the silverware from every house in a hundred-mile radius.”

  “So once you prove this technology, you’ll add on the rocket-based thrusters for maneuvering outside of the planet’s magnetosphere?” Frank asked politely. I’ve read the paper, remember? Tell me something I don’t know. “How stable are the magnetic anomalies on Mars?”

  “The thrusters are an easy addition,” he paused to sneeze. “Faster to do this one thing at a time rather than trying to troubleshoot two propulsion systems simultaneously.” The wings locked into flight position. In storage they could rotate 90 degrees to align with the fuselage. “The anomalies are strongest where huge patches of magnetized material sit near the surface. Those areas tend to be the best sites to look for minerals so it’s no wonder the space monkeys use this type of engine for landings.”

  Frank wasn’t sure what he thought of the new slang for the aliens. Since they had tails, it had probably been just a matter of time before the name came up. He had the uneasy feeling that history would come to look back on the term in much the same way that it now looked at the denigrating cartoons of Japanese and German soldiers from the forties. Frank’s own grandfather had shipped off to the Pacific expecting an easy victory but soon learned the difference. The marines had fought hard for every inch of ground taken.

   “If there’s no magnetic field,” the young engineer continued, “there probably isn’t any life anyway. If there are huge mineral deposits, chances are they produce enough of a localized magnetic field to let these engines overcome gravity.”

  “Looks like we’re ready to start.” Frank nodded towards the ground crew who were moving away from the aircraft. “Let’s go join the rest of the group.” They moved over to a small canopy where a bank of telemetry equipment was set up, just as a throbbing whine began to emanate from the test vehicle.

  A man sat at a terminal labeled ‘flight control’ wearing a headset and looking intently at the readout in front of him. “Roger, Anasazi One,” he said in a crisp voice. “You are green across the board. We are go for five percent power.” 

   The whine increased slightly and Adam suddenly clutched Frank’s shoulder. “Look at that,” he hissed. “Only five percent and the wheels are bouncing off the ground.” As they watched, the modified V-22 rocked slightly as the pilot attempted to keep it steady.

  “Still green, you are go to move to ten percent power,” the flight controller announced over the headset. Without any appreciable change in sound, the thirty-thousand-pound chimera lifted off the ground and began to float gently upwards and slightly backwards. “Learning gradient at fifty percent, sixty-five, eighty, gradient complete,” the man announced, still having seen nothing but the screen. The aircraft could have been at Pensacola for all he cared. Anasazi One leveled off and hovered. “Power output stabilized at 6.3% by gradient software.”

  “The control system had to calibrate in actual flight,” Adam explained in a low voice. He had finally released his death grip on Frank’s shoulder. “The best thing we could come up with was to define the entire operating envelope as it compares to level hovering. Now that we’ve calibrated a hover state, the rest should work.

  “Go for forward flight,” the controller announced.

  The nacelles began to rotate slightly, one forward and one backwards. Anasazi One began to spin gently rather than gliding forward.

  “Oh, dear,” the young engineer muttered. “That’s my bad folks. Sorry!” The pilot brought the vehicle back to hover mode and Adam displaced one of the techs at a terminal marked ‘Firmware’. He opened a screen and selected a sub menu. With a simple click of a button he turned to the controller. “Try that, Igor.”

  This time, the vehicle moved forward at a steady pace. “Got a control subroutine mixed up but it’s an easy fix, provided the aircraft is still under control.” Adam didn’t seem terribly worried and it did seem to be a relatively small hiccup considering that they were watching an aircraft that could theoretically reach orbit several times on a single fuel cell.

  “How long until we see something more exciting?” The thrill of the moment had worn off for Frank and he was already turning his thoughts to the conversion of the two hundred similar airframes that currently sat in storage.

  Adam consulted a binder on a table behind them. “Slow and steady brings the test pilot home for dinner,” he intoned cheerily. “Looks like we don’t go above twenty feet until after lunch.”

  It’s going to be a long day, thought Frank. After all the fuss to get here, it was hard for him to simply wave and walk away. He felt bad for his aircrew, who were cooped up
in the jet under guard. I could say I need to leave for their sake, he mused.

  He walked over to one of the captains who had joined him at Nellis. “We should hit the road next time that thing is on the ground,” he said, noticing the man looked disappointed at the idea of missing aviation history. “We left my flight crew in the plane and didn’t even crack the windows. We should get moving before the SPCA takes them away on us.”

  The man nodded reluctantly and walked over to clear their takeoff with the test controller.

  Now we won’t have to spend the night in a hotel before flying home tomorrow. He suddenly realized his mistake. Now the crew, Herm and I won’t have an excuse to spend the night in Vegas. He shook his head in disgust. “Fabulous,” he muttered.

  “Thanks, Frank.” Adam was gazing up at his pride and joy as it slowly crabbed sideways.

   

  Red Flag Mineral Co.

  Sixty Meter Observatory

  Mauna Kea, Hawaii

  July 3rd, 2027

  McCutcheon stood up and looked around the boardroom table. The large central atrium of the telescope facility had changed drastically over the last year and a half.  Most of the changes had been gradual but the last four weeks had seen a frenzy of activity as the crowded central area had become too congested. What had served as their conference area was now completely overgrown with desks and office equipment.

  The octagonal central atrium was roughly seventy feet in diameter and sixty feet in height. A military engineering unit had spent the last month assembling two extra levels in the space. Using a modular, extruded aluminum framework, they constructed a second floor with a twenty-foot octagonal hole in the middle. The new twenty-five-foot wide ring of added space played host to two new conference areas on opposite sides of the opening. The second floor also housed workspaces for visiting staff, a secure discussion room and a small lunch area complete with a staffed barista machine.

  A third level had been built on four sides to allow workspaces for the senior staff. It was a ten-foot-wide section of aluminum flooring with eight cubicles built against the outer wall of the main structure. A four-foot-wide walkway overlooked the second floor, where the current briefing was taking place.

  “It looks like Mickey is ready to start,” McCutcheon announced, bringing the low-level chatter to a gradual halt. He grinned and waved at the young woman as he sat, indicating that the show was hers.

  If Uncle Harold could see you now, thought Mike as he watched his cousin stand up and walk to the railing that surrounded the central opening. Even before Mike became associated with the discovery of the aliens, Mickey’s father had always compared her to his nephew the scientist, the doctor. She always seemed to be second banana in Harold’s eyes.

  Her work at SoCal had freed up so much bandwidth for them that they had easily generated enough capital to justify her salary for the next century. An ambitious VP had added their group to his portfolio shortly after work was implemented and he’d laid her and most of her team off, trying to show his superiors that they would achieve labor savings by promoting him. Her father assumed she had been laid off for performance reasons.

  Of the original staff who remained, none had any idea of how to maintain the system that now crammed over ninety terabits of data through their optic network. Mickey had been contacted by Fred, her old boss, who had managed to hang on in a diminished capacity and she had politely declined his offer of assistance. Despite her respect for her old boss, she had no interest in providing backdoor assistance to the new VP. The lucrative new optical service would fall on its own, very soon in fact, due to a maintenance subroutine, as she liked to call it.

  Though it was borderline sabotage, Mickey was reasonably sure that no jury would side with a company claiming that the staff they had laid off should have done a better job of anticipating that they would not be around to maintain the system. Any day now, subroutines would start running system diagnostics and requesting acknowledgement from password protected accounts. Without those manual confirmations, the system would start to shut down.

  Even though there had been a slim chance of successful legal action, Mickey was completely unconcerned. The staff of the UN effort enjoyed diplomatic immunity from prosecution. Having proven her ability to contribute to the team, she had insisted on making that immunity permanent for any existing legal entanglements. After a quick back-and-forth with New York and the US Justice Dept., the paperwork had been amended and she signed on.

  SoCal was about to lose millions and they would have no legal recourse.

  She smiled at the assembled team, then touched the tablet in her left hand, bringing the eight-foot screen hanging behind her to life. The massive display, centered over the twenty-foot hole in the middle of the second floor, showed a graphic user interface with pictographic characters. “This is the first workable interface that we came up with last week using a base 10 operating system.” The emulator had taken more than a month to program and required a bank of quantum processors.

  She touched the screen and a sea of pictographs began to scroll across the middle window of the screen. “This is the translated data in its original text and, thanks to our friends from the mainland,” she gestured to four tribal elders who were among the newest permanent members of the increasingly unusual team, “we have been able to provide real time translation of the interface into English.”

  She touched a few buttons on the pad’s screen before continuing. “Folks, this may well be remembered as the greatest hack in human history,” she intoned in a calm but forceful voice as she stabbed her finger at the tablet. The screen behind her flickered for an instant and the interface was now in English.

  The scrolling text contained orders. Page after page of information rolled across the screen. “The translation seems a bit odd,” Hal Tudor observed. “The sentences seem very jumbled. Are you sure it’s accurate?”

  Kaya, one of the Hopi translators, spoke up. “This is a literal translation, word for word,” the elderly woman asserted. “English is such a mix of different languages that it’s filled with extra words and grammatical tangents. The alien language was ancient long before they first landed here on Earth. Their way of speaking has undergone thousands of years of evolution, independent of any human tongue. We can’t expect them to sound like us.”

  That seemed to satisfy Dr. Tudor and Mickey spent a few more seconds with the controls on her tablet, turning the screen behind her to static. “The fifth data burst caused this to happen to our interface.” She turned to look at the screen before continuing. “At first, we thought it was some sort of security mechanism, but it was hard to believe.” She strolled over to her place at the middle of the table and set her tablet down, picking up her coffee mug and cradling it in her hands.

  “These guys had shown only the most elementary interest in securing their network,” she mused, “or even in considering that their transmissions might be intercepted by us. As the colonel likes to remind us, they don’t consider us to be a threat. As far as they are concerned, we’re barely a step up from pointy sticks. What we see as state of the art technology is far behind what they use.

  “And yet, somehow, we manage to get by…”

  She held the mug in her right hand, touching the screen with her left forefinger. A screen of text came up. It showed a list of systems - processing, helm, fire control, life support, data retention, and hundreds of barely recognizable items. “We backed up to the last working state and began feeding the data from burst five, bit by bit – literally,” she said with a chuckle. The group sat quietly, riveted to the screen.

  “Forget it, Micks,” Mike said quietly from across the table. “It’s a tough room.”

  She grinned. “We got this list at the start of the burst and then everything went belly-up a second time.” She killed the current display, bringing up the translated interface before taking a drink. “It was Corporal Farquhar who got us moving again,” she said, waving her mug across the tab
le at Rob, spilling coffee on her tablet in the process. A low chuckle broke out. “So that’s how it is,” she asked with a look of mock indignation. “I give you comedy gold with bit by bit and get nothing, but a little slapstick gets you laughing?” 

  With a sigh, she leaned over to the middle of the table to grab some napkins. “The trick to this,” she remarked with the casual air of one who regularly spills coffee on electronic devices, “is to wipe the screen without letting your skin touch it.” She dropped the napkins beside the tablet, looking up at the main screen to ensure that she hadn’t lost the view of the interface.

  “OK, as I was saying, Rob here suggested that the list I just showed you indicated a firmware update. Basically, that would be an update of the little bits of software that do various things throughout the ship. We went back and figured out how to apply the updates to our emulator, giving us the latest and greatest version of the enemy’s systems.”

  “So we can access all of the data from their transmission?” Mike was seriously impressed. He had originally suggested calling his cousin simply to embarrass the team from Echelon into cooperation. He was glad they called him on what he had thought to be a bluff. Mickey may not be big on rules but she was the most results-oriented person he knew.

  “Better than that.” Her voice took on a conspiratorial aspect. “Now that we understand the architecture of their firmware update, we can put together one of our own and send it to them before the fight starts.”

  “We can gum up their engines,” McCutcheon slapped a hand on the table in glee. “We can shut down their weapons, blind them and board the little bastards before they even get a chance to fight.” He smiled up at Mickey. “What do you need to make this happen?”

  “I need a ship equipped with a bank of lasers and fitted with a transmission unit that we can put directly in the path of the mother ship,” she stated, holding out her index finger. “It needs to be fast enough to get there and transmit before the rest of the fleet goes into battle,” she added as a second finger extended. “And it needs to survive long enough to send the signal.” Three fingers.

  “Three or four ships should do the trick,” McCutcheon mused as he looked absently at the main monitor. “Just big enough to convince the enemy that we’re trying to split their forces; they’ll probably stay together to fight against the main assault force. As long as our little software expedition looks like they overshot and ended up too far away to be a threat, they’ll probably be left alone long enough to send the signal.”

  He stood up. “That’s a good day’s work folks,” he boomed. “Mickey, give some thought to the broad strokes of the plan so we can get it moving. I want to see the lasers ordered right away, and we need to get our hands on some ships and start modifying them to send this signal. I don’t care if it’s a sketch on the back of a napkin but I need to start giving the shipyard some idea of what they need to do to make room for the systems involved.”

  He looked over at Farquhar, then back to Mickey. “Ed’s been helpful?”

  She nodded. “His idea about firmware updates is the reason we managed to keep the door open on the alien system, but he has incredible practical knowledge as well. He would be a big help now that we need to put together some laser transmission systems.”

  “He’s all yours,” the colonel waved a hand negligently at his subordinate. “He’s been driving me nuts with all his tech talk lately so good riddance,” he grinned good naturedly at Rob who shook his head and sighed, the very model of an abused employee.

  As the group broke up, Mike caught McCutcheon’s attention and walked over to the lunch area. He took two bottles of water from the fridge and threw one to the colonel as he walked up. The sub-zero climate on the mountain top was very dehydrating. “Would you say my cousin has made a hell of a big contribution today?” he inquired in a low voice.

  “I’d say that and more,” he responded enthusiastically.

  Strike while the iron is hot, thought Mike. “I have a thought on how we could show some appreciation for all the lives she’s going to save with this idea.” He looked quickly over the officer’s shoulder. Mickey was still at the table, deep in discussion with Rob. Her hands were waving excitedly as she described technical details. “I know this is going to sound presumptuous at first, but I think you’ll agree that it’s justified when you consider the contribution she’s making.”

  It took less time than Mike expected to sell the boss on his plan. Now he had to wonder whether the colonel could sell it all the way up to where the decision would really be made.

   

  Greyhound Main Terminal

  Calgary, Alberta

  August 25th, 2027

  Callum sat in the waiting area of the large atrium, watching a newscaster from the local twenty-four-hour news channel as she rehashed the surprise announcement that Humanity’s response to the aliens would launch early with only one augmented fleet rather than two. The revelation regarding the enemy timetable had left no room for a defensive plan. A quick offense was now considered the species’ only hope. How does this make sense?  he wondered. It puts a kink in the UN’s main excuse for dominating the planet. Maybe it has something to do with the doubt that I sowed when I made the New York broadcast. Could be they’re trying to counter the growing belief that there are no aliens.

  His thoughts ground to a complete halt as he stared up at an image of himself. Goddamn Jeff, he raged silently. The picture on the screen was from his work ID photo and it showed him with his new beard. He’d been working as a form carpenter on a high rise construction crew and he’d made a start on recruiting new followers from among his coworkers. His superintendent had been out drinking with them at a downtown pub last night when the TV over the bar had displayed the standard ‘Callum McKinnon most wanted’ screen.

  Even four months after the blast, every station in North America ran that screen twice an hour for five minutes. The FBI had been on to him from his first arrival in New York but they had left him his freedom and assigned him a controller. It hadn’t taken Cal long to realize that Kevin’s cousin wasn’t his cousin at all, but a trained agent. The man’s eyes were always on the move and he carried himself like someone who was ready for action. Driving a cab in New York may not be the safest job on Earth, but it didn’t justify what Cal was seeing.

  He assumed he was only free until they could figure out whether he had any other associates in the city and so he had played that up. He cut Mark out of the plan to abduct a UN diplomat and gave him the impression that he had one of his teams carry out the grab. Using his extended freedom, he had boarded a bulk freighter carrying fertilizer down the East River, killed the crew and set the nav computer to ground the ship next to the Secretariat building.

  He saturated the cargo by diverting fuel oil into the hold, creating a volatile product known as ANFO or Ammonia Nitrate and Fuel Oil. It was exactly this kind of mixture that invariably resulted in the deaths of several farmers every year, leaving only a smoking hole where their truck had been sitting. A simple timer attached to seven sticks of dynamite would be enough to start the violent reaction and bring down his riverside target.

  He climbed back into his Zodiac and raced across to the riverbank, heading for the roadblock that had been thrown up from a prearranged force based on the warning from whoever was pretending to be Mark. He approached one of the cruisers. “We’ve been directed to pickup the Secretary General,” he said to the patrolman standing by the car.

  The man, seeing a captain’s badge hanging on his belt, shrugged. “Keys are in the ignition.”

  Cal had planned to use his next captive in conjunction with a new attack but her escape had forced him to go on the run. He had hoped that leaving the country would leave the chase behind, but the Canadians were almost as angry about the attack as their neighbors to the south. He had been keenly aware of every glance that turned his way, certain that he was about to be denounced at any moment. After several months in Calgary, he had gr
own a beard and shaved his head, looking like half the construction crew. Exposed to the elements at high elevations for twelve months of the year, they preferred beards for their winter warmth as well as protection against the summer sun.

  Then Jeff had made his offhand comment last night.

  “Y’know, Tim,” he roared across the table to be heard over the noise of the crew. “Y’look a bit like that Callum bastard, if I squint just right.” He held up his hands in a frame and rotated them, along with his head until he fell off his stool to the enthusiastic enjoyment of the crew. Callum had laughed it off and left twenty minutes later.

  This morning Cal called in sick.

  Someone must have remembered the reason why Jeff had fallen off the stool last night. Rolando was pretty sober, he thought. The six-foot-tall Philipino welder rarely drank more than one beer and would have remembered the whole story. They were probably retelling stories from last night and ended up putting two and two together. I should have gone to work today and then left tomorrow, he thought, now keenly aware of the police who walked about the station. Two soldiers in body armor also stood by the exit to the bus ramps equipped with the shortened Canadian version of the M-16 designed for armor crews.

  The heavy, armed presence was common now in the city. The whole country was a tinderbox. After more than a generation of state-funded universal health care, everyone was now at the mercy of the health insurance companies. Cal had nearly been caught up in a riot himself last week when Darryl, one of the riggers responsible for attaching loads to the crane, had lost his little finger while guiding a three-cubic-meter drop bucket filled with concrete.  The insurance wouldn’t cover the re-attachment and he couldn’t afford the eight grand that the procedure would cost. The angry crew shut the site down and went looking for trouble, brandishing the severed finger on a piece of rebar like some kind of holy relic. Cal had slipped away and gone home before the camera crews could show up.

  Cameras were the least of Callum’s problems now as he looked around the departure area. A drug store was perhaps thirty feet away from the men’s room. He would buy a razor, some shaving cream and turn his beard into mutton chop whiskers. OK, breathe easy, you just need five minutes to change your appearance. He reached down and grabbed the small backpack at his feet and stood up. It was a slow day for bus travel and the seats between him and the drugstore had only one little old lady who smiled at him as he walked past.

  Cal heard a tiny gasp as he continued to the front door of the store. “That’s him,” the lady said in surprise. Cal kept walking, hoping she meant something else but the lady suddenly screeched at the top of her lungs. “That’s him. That’s the murderer.” Cal turned to see her standing in the middle of the aisle, her bony index finger pointed at him like the beckoning hand of death.

  He looked past her to where a police officer was looking sideways at him, talking into his microphone while he drew his sidearm with his right hand. To his left, both soldiers were moving his way across the clear space in front of the exit doors, their assault weapons tight to their shoulders, ready to aim and fire. He cursed to himself as he realized that he’d lost track of the other two policemen before he stood up. They could be anywhere.

  His quick assessment left him with only one viable option.

  He raised his hands.

   

  Galileo Shipyard

  Low Earth Orbit

  December 11th, 2027

  “OK, hold it right there.” Mike took an awkward step to the right. He lifted his video camera, putting on his best fake newscaster voice. “I’m standing here with Mickey Willsen, the genius whose idea led to the creation of mankind’s first space-faring electronic-warfare squadron.” He panned the camera and zoomed out to show the frigate looming behind her in the massive hangar deck. There had been just enough room to bring the command ship of the small, three-frigate force in through the port-side hangar doors of the UNS Ares. It had come in on its side and there was five feet of clearance at the most.

  For this occasion, the regulation requiring EVA suits on the hangar deck had been waived and they both stood in front of the blunt bow of the frigate in formal attire, except for the magnetic soles strapped to their feet. Mickey’s hair had looked perfect when they boarded the shuttle on Earth, but she hadn’t counted on the lack of gravity in the orbiting carrier.

  “Tell us how it feels to be here for the official christening of the Danube,” he prompted her.

  “Well, Mike, it’s quite a thrill to be an astronaut for a day, and getting a ride in one of the new orbital landers was a real mind-blower.” She quickly combed her hair into a loose pony tail, securing it with an elastic from her purse. “Meeting the Secretary General will be pretty neat…” She stopped talking, her smile melting into confusion as she stared beyond her cousin. “Oh my God,” she said in a small voice.

  Mike couldn’t suppress a grin as he panned the camera around to show the small group that was rooted to a hangar elevator by magnetic soles. They rose slowly through a square opening in the deck like a troop of gladiators in an ancient Roman amphitheater. Standing there, along with Secretary General Sisulu, her staff and a collection of military officers, were Mickey’s parents.

  The elevator came to a halt and Sisulu led the group in a jerky procession to where Mickey was standing. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t wear heels for this?” she asked the stunned young woman in a loud stage whisper. She reached out a hand, thoroughly enjoying the look on Mickey’s face. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Michelle.” She gestured toward the bow of the new frigate which floated above the deck. “Shall we?” Jess turned to receive a bottle of champagne from an aide. Someone at the back of the group sneezed.

  Mike got a close-up of Uncle Harold as he and Aunt Jen flanked their daughter, taking her hands. The old man cuffed at his cheek as he looked up at the huge tarp that was draped across the dorsal end of the bow. Mike had failed to get them cleared for the trip but he had managed to broker a deal where they would go into quarantine until the battle had finished. The existence of the electronic warfare squadron was a closely-guarded secret and Mike had moved Heaven and Earth to find a way for Mickey’s parents to learn what she had done.

  “Though the frigates of the fleet are named for rivers,” Jess began, “it was deemed fitting that the frigates of the electronic warfare squadron be named for leaders in the field of communications. Two of these vessels will be known as the Bell and the Morse, but the command vessel will be named after a visionary who is not only still living but, also, the reason for its very existence.”

  Jess turned to the crowd now, gesturing to Mickey. Mike was able to get a close shot of his confused cousin who, until this moment, had thought the command ship would be named the Danube. At a second gesture, she lurched into motion, oblivious to the surprised reactions of her parents.

  Jess handed her the bottle. She leaned in and whispered in Mickey’s ear. Receiving a vague nod in return, she turned back to the assembled dignitaries. “It is my great honor to christen thee the UNS Willsen.”

  Jess gave Mickey a slight nudge and Mike’s cousin took one last stunned look at the Secretary General before hurling the bottle at the new ship. It spun quickly toward the bow and shattered against the tarp which quickly pulled away from the hull by its four corners, containing the loose liquid and revealing the Willsen family name on the bow in raised metal letters.

  Mike swung the camera back from the ship to focus first on Mickey and then on her parents, who were staring in shock at their name, specifically their daughter’s name, on the hull of a ship that might just save the species.

  He finally shut the camera off and walked over to the Willsens. He shook Harold’s hand and was surprised to see a barbell shaped tear break free from the old man’s eyelids. It spun for a second, the two ends almost separating before surface tension forced it into a perfect, tiny sphere. He handed over the camera. “You’ll need this video someday when you’re telling your grandkids a
bout it.”

  To spare his taciturn uncle the embarrassment, Mike turned to hug Aunt Jen. Out of the corner of his eye, and through Jen’s medusa-like mess of hair, he could see his uncle wrapping Mickey in a fierce hug. In the thirty-five years Mike had known the man, he hadn’t even seen him hold hands with his own wife.

  Location Unknown

  V-22-Anasazi Variant

  December 15th, 2027

  Cal woke as the landing gear touched the ground. The ride had sown doubts in his mind. If the aliens were a lie, where had the engines come from for this vehicle? The ride was smooth and almost entirely silent. He could almost believe he’d spent the last five hours sitting on the tarmac at JFK.

  Until the rear ramp opened.

  Hot, humid air hammered it’s way inside and the palms surrounding the landing strip were bent almost double from the force of the tropical wind.

  He stood, flanked by four military policemen, and shuffled down the ramp, the familiar clinking of his leg irons drowned out by the storm. A green Humvee sat just outside the yellow landing circle, and a civilian stepped out as they approached.

  Guilderson? Cal halted in surprise, then stumbled forward as one of his guards gave him a shove. The security guard from Moffat field? What agency is she really with? This put things into a new perspective. Her apparent incompetence as a security guard must have been part of a larger plan. Had they been on to him from the very start?

  As they reached the vehicle, she opened the back door and Cal was bundled in by the army cops, one hand on his head expertly guiding his forehead directly into the door frame with an alarming thud.

  He dropped into the rear seat on the passenger side and Guilderson leaned in to belt him in place. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, but he knew better than to ask. Nobody cared if he was losing his circulation. 

  He realized the MP’s were heading back to the aircraft and he knew no paperwork had been handed over. Prisoners weren’t just passed around like cigarettes, they always came with paper. What was happening here?

  Guilderson got into the seat behind the driver. “Let’s get back before the storm cuts the road, Eddie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The army specialist threw the vehicle into gear and they lurched away, swinging around to head for an opening in the trees.

  “Wondering why you’re here?” Guilderson was looking out at the storm.

  “Yeah,” Cal answered simply. If she was bringing it up, she obviously planned on telling him.

  “Well, thanks to President Parnell, we’ve clean run out of states that still have the death penalty, which is why we put you in front of a military tribunal.” She turned to give him a look that made him feel like something on the bottom of her shoe.

  “Your death penalty has been put on hold for the time being, just in case more attacks occur on American soil.” She grinned. “Even if it has nothing to do with you, I’ll be pulling your fingernails out and shoving them under your eyelids, just to see if you have anything to add to your existing testimony.”

  “So, I’ll be chained inside some hut until the government decides to kill me?” This was exactly the brand of big government that he hated.

  “Officially?” A shrug. “You were executed three days ago by firing squad. Drummers, blindfold, the whole thing. You were cremated and scattered because no cemetery in the world wants you drawing vandals and protesters.

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t get to sit around in a hut all day. You’re a carpenter, so you’re gonna work sixteen-hour days building this facility.”

  They came out of the trees and started descending into the shelter of a deep valley that faced out onto a beach.  A village was springing up on the valley floor. Swarms of heavy equipment were driving the lush tropical growth back while workers filled the open space with attractive, craftsman-style homes. A small commercial district was taking shape nearer to the waterfront, as evidenced by the industrial air conditioning and refrigeration units on their roofs.

  It looked like a nice place. Looked. He had the feeling this was just a nice prison for more slaves – maybe not slaves in chains like Cal, but slaves all the same. “And if I don’t work?”

  She shrugged. “You’ll get hungry. You’ll get thirsty. You’ll end up strapped to a cot on life support until we need to talk to you. Frankly, I’m hoping you decide not to work. I’d like to sit outside your bars and eat my lunch while you drool.”

  A sigh. He nodded over his shoulder. “If I work, I’ll need these shackles off.”

  “Won’t be a problem.” She grinned at his surprise. “It’s not a very big place. There’s no way off this island for you, unless it’s me tossing a bag of ashes out the back of an Osprey. If you try to run, we can have a search craft in the air in five minutes and they’ll find your  heat signature inside of three minutes. Hell, they’ll even know your heart rate.

  “And we’ll be hiding an implant on your body that broadcasts your location twenty-four seven. It also carries enough charge to shut your nervous system down, so yeah, we’ll take the shackles off and work you like a rented mule.”

  She leaned back and looked out at the piles of overturned palms, waiting to be cut up and hauled away. “Welcome to Petite Tortue Island.”

  The Flood Tide

  Low Earth Orbit

  UNS Hannibal

  January 15th, 2028

  The ships lay in an arrowhead formation, like migrating geese. The massive Ares sat in the middle of the formation, flanked by nine frigates and six cruisers. A thousand meters ‘above’ the Ares sat the smaller electronic warfare squadron consisting of the Bell, the Morse and the command ship, the Willsen.

  It was a much smaller force than the two fleets that the plan had originally called for, but they had to launch now if Humanity was to have any hope of survival. The data stream that had been intercepted in March had made it perfectly clear that the enemy would be coming very soon, and so this smaller fleet would launch now in a desperate gamble to stop them.

  Frank was on the observation deck of the Hannibal. The cruiser was almost completed and it served as the viewing platform for today’s launch. He was still slightly awed at meeting so many heads of state and even more bemused by their own reactions.

  He had no hope of keeping track of who ran which country but they all seemed to know who he was without introduction. The Prime Minister of Britain had cornered him on the wet tarmac as they were boarding a modified Osprey for the short trip up to the Hannibal. In full view of the media, he had pressed a vigorous handshake on the startled project manager before slapping him on the back and walking up the boarding ramp with him.

  Even here on the observation deck, the media presence ensured that Frank had a steady stream of ‘grip-and-grin’ photo ops. Though he had been hugely gratified at first, he soon tired of it and simply wanted a little privacy so he could watch the launch in peace. He floated over to the main window where a man gazed out at the largest project in history.

  The man turned at the approach and Frank realized that it was his own President (though Frank had voted for the Republican…). I would look like a jerk if I turned away now, he realized. I can hardly talk to the leader of every country while ignoring my own, and he does seem decent enough.

  “It seems like such a small force,” Parnell remarked, nodding at Frank, “when you consider how much hangs in the balance.” He looked back out the window.

  “Hopefully, the even smaller force up there,” Frank replied, pointing upwards to the tiny electronic warfare squadron, “will manage to give us a critical edge.”

  “Hopefully,” Parnell agreed fervently. “Ms. Willsen’s contribution may be viewed by history as the turning point in this crisis -- the idea that made victory a possibility. One of her ancestors was captured by pirates in the 17th century.” He said this last in a wondering tone.

  “Sir?” Frank was confused by the seeming non sequitur.

  “Captured in Reykjavik by North African pirate
s and dragged off to Algeria,” the president explained. “If Christian IV of Denmark hadn’t ransomed the poor man a decade later, Ms. Willsen wouldn’t have been around to save us.” He looked over at Frank. “History is always teetering on the head of a pin, Mr. Bender. It’s not a comforting revelation but it’s true, nonetheless.”

  “Speaking of pinheads,” Frank replied, “I hear you finally got your hands on McKinnon?”

  Parnell chuckled. “Another turning point that almost went the wrong way for us, but yes. He’s safely out of our hair.” He grew solemn. “It’s a shame about Chuck, he should have been here to see this moment…”

  Both men turned their heads to the window as a collective gasp rippled through the assembled dignitaries. The fleet’s engines were coming online.

  The fission fragmentation engines, developed for the ships by a Polish physicist named Stanislaw Grocholski, came to glowing life. The bright blue exhaust created short plumes as the fission fragments were magnetically channeled away from the reaction at incredibly high temperatures.

  A section of the window suddenly came to life, presenting an image of Admiral Towers directly between Frank and the American President. The two men abandoned their conversation and moved out of the way, giving the rest of the room a better view.

  “Madam Secretary, ladies and gentlemen,” the admiral began. “We stand ready for full burn.”

  “Godspeed, Admiral,” Jess responded, “and good hunting.” The exchange had been agreed upon beforehand. No flowery speeches, no allusions to an implacable foe, just a casual reference to victory. The crews of the fleet as well as the citizens of Earth needed to hear such confidence.

  The engines, coordinated for this event by the systems on the Ares, simultaneously came to full power and nineteen ships began their ponderous acceleration for Mars.

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” the President murmured quietly. From his cadence, it sounded like a quote, but Bender couldn’t place it.

  Frank felt an unexpected catch in his throat as the ships began to move against the backdrop of stars. I built those ships,  he thought. No matter what is built next year or even ten years from now, I built the fleet that will bring us either victory or defeat. He realized, if only from his sudden sense of relief, just how much pressure he had been working under. He had buried himself in the job with meetings, paperwork and travel, but the pressure had been there, all along.

  He might even sleep the whole night through tonight, rather than waking in the wee hours to obsess over some technical issue or cost overrun.

  But there was still pressure.

  This launch was far ahead of schedule and, rather than sending two carrier groups, each with ten escorts, they were sending one augmented carrier group with one extra cruiser and four extra frigates.

  The only consolation was the presence of the electronic warfare squadron. Hopefully, they would survive long enough to send their vital signal and, hopefully, that signal would throw the enemy into confusion.

  Hopefully – because Earth was now left with no defensive force. Knowing that the enemy would launch their own attack within months, it had been decided that a fight around Mars with an augmented carrier group was preferable to a fight in Earth orbit where the enemy could land ground troops. Even a defeat at Mars should buy Humanity enough time to scrape together a defensive force for Earth.

  Frank would be very busy in the months to come building that defensive force. He could feel the weight settling back onto his soul again.

   

  Mars Intercept Course

  UNS Ares

  February 5th, 2028

  Mike coasted down out of the room that sat at right angles to the main command deck and into the combat information center, nodding an acknowledgement to the captain on duty. Though his own action station, known as the hole, was in the strange opening in the middle of the ceiling, this large area contained the communications section and he was being given a last chance to talk to his cousin before the fleets went into a communications blackout. 

  The Ares, along with the other ships, had been equipped with a pared-down version of the laser communications system that the ships of the electronic warfare squadron carried. At this distance from Mars, there was no chance of the enemy intercepting the uni-directional signals.

  Mike was filthy and had a three-week growth of beard. For the last few weeks, the bridge crew and the analysis cell, accessed by a hatch through the floor, had been quarantined at their action stations. An outbreak had struck the Ares one week out of Earth perihelion and most movement throughout the ship had been severely curtailed. The spread had been checked by the end of the second week but by that time almost half the crew had fallen sick. The ship’s medical facilities were set up for combat injuries and were woefully inadequate to deal with an outbreak of infectious disease.

  By the end of the fourth week, it had become clear that the disease had a fifty-percent mortality rate. It had spread mostly in the areas associated with the hangar deck and a quarter of the ground crew and more than half of the ship’s infantry had been infected. The projected losses were depressing, especially so in a fleet that couldn’t hope to replenish its numbers. By some miracle, the Ares was the only ship in the fleet affected by the outbreak.

  Admirals Gao and Towers had spent hours on the communications system discussing the problem. They had decided to wait another three weeks to ensure that the plague had run its course and then transfer every available infantryman and marine from the frigates of the fleet to the Ares. They would have one week to train with their new comrades before the fleet hit the thin Martian atmosphere. No communications were allowed with Earth, as it carried the possibility of warning the enemy of their approach. Nobody knew what might await them when they returned home.

  “Sir, you have five minutes allotted,” the signals officer, a lieutenant from the French navy, explained to Mike as he arrested his motion via a bungee strap on what passed for a ceiling. “We start the blackout in one hour - twenty minutes before our flight profiles separate.”

  Mike used the handgrips to position himself on a chair mounted in front of a terminal and strapped himself in. The monitor in front of him showed a series of gray buttons with ship’s names in them. He felt a catch in his throat as he saw the one green button labeled UNS Willsen. He touched the button and the screen was replaced by the face of a young sailor. “This is Major Mike Willsen calling Major Michelle Willsen.”

  Not for the first time, he was glad of the brevet ranks that Colonel McCutcheon had arranged for them. It made life on a military vessel more bearable and it also lit fires under people who might otherwise be inclined to question a civilian specialist. Having the same name as the young sailor’s ship might have also been a factor because his eyes widened a little as he acknowledged. “Yes sir, the major is standing by, wait one.” The screen went blank and Mike thought he had been cut off, but then the screen blinked on again and Mickey was there.

  “Pretty good transmission, huh Mike?” Mickey asked. “Even for the low-rent version we put on the Ares it’s almost HD. What’s with the crew-cut?”

  “Micks, we don’t have a lot of time,” Mike warned, glancing at the timer. It was down to four minutes. “Stay safe out there. Your folks would never forgive me if you didn’t make it home.” What do you say to your cousin before going into combat?

  “If anything, I probably have the safer job,” she replied. “We bounce off the edge of the atmosphere and make it look like an accident, then we turn around and use our engines to slow down. We’ll be so far out of range, and so quickly, they won’t even worry about us. They’ll just assume we screwed up on navigation.” She paused. “I’m kind of worried about what you guys are going to be doing. It sounds completely insane.”

  “Things haven’t exactly been sane for a couple of years now,” Mike said quietly. He smiled, a little embarrassed at his tone. “Sorry, haven’t seen Keira
for a while but it looks like she’s going to pull through.”

  Mickey gasped. “We haven’t been given a lot of information over here; I had no idea she caught the plague.” Her shoulders relaxed a bit. “Thank God she’s OK. You must have been going out of your mind.”

  “What about you?” Mike leaned in. “What’s the story with you and Rob?”

  “Rob?” She sat back a bit, frowning. “We just work together. I don’t think he sees me that way, Mike.” She seemed genuinely surprised that Mike had even brought it up.

  “But you see him that way?” For some reason, the military was like an incubator for relationships. Must be the constant contact and the danger, Mike thought. Either you end up hating each other or you wind up planning weddings.

  She shrugged. “I suppose I could, under the right circumstances,” she said, qualifying her admission. “He’s smart; looks good in a uniform.” She grimaced at her cousin. “Mike, we’re just coworkers with a shared interest in building gadgets.”

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Mike began with the standard disclaimer used by all who spill closely-guarded secrets. “Wes told me that his nickname is The Monk. The last girl he showed an interest in was three years ago. He doesn’t date just for the fun of it, so when he meets someone he likes, he has no idea of how to move things along.”

  Mike paused for a moment. I’ve already started; I might as well finish. “Evidently, it was some kind of major miracle that he ever got around to asking her out but they dated for a couple of months before she got arrested for holding up a bank in Mexico. Rob drove down to Ensenada and broke it off with her after she was convicted.”

  “Mike, this is all very interesting,” she sighed and leaned on her hand. “Why are you telling me all this right now?”

  “Because I’ve seen how he looks at you when he thinks nobody is watching him,” Mike answered. “Nothing creepy or anything but it’s pretty obvious that he finds you attractive. I wasn’t sure at first but that briefing you did on the alien system left me with no doubt.” He looked around the CIC before going on. “Mickey, he’s known you for months now so it’s more than just a physical thing. I figured you should know. Who knows what might happen a month from now, and besides,”  he leaned in as close as possible to the screen before continuing in a low voice, “you wouldn’t want to look back on this and regret missing out on all that zero G has to offer.” Ten seconds left on the clock.

  Mickey tilted her head and frowned at her cousin. Suddenly, his words made sense and her eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “Eww, Mike!” She considered for a second. “Wait, does that mean that you guys…” The signal cut off as the timer ran out. Mike reached up to the scar on top of his scalp where he had struck a bulkhead. One of the ship’s medical staff had shaved his head before stitching his wound and it was a scar that Mike would always remember fondly.

  Twenty minutes later, the massive array of Grocholski Fission-Fragmentation engines went quiet. The fleet had reached its programmed speed. Any faster and they would be unable to remain in orbit on their arrival. Within the hour, they would turn those engines toward Mars and begin to decelerate until they reached the edge of the engagement zone. Once they reached that line, they’d be pointing their main armaments forward again.

  The huge reactors took up most of the rear quarter of the vessel and Mike had forgotten how much they contributed to the background noise. It suddenly felt like a ghost ship.

  I suppose there are a few thousand ghosts on board thanks to the plague. Mike sat strapped to his chair, sipping water from a plastic bladder. Three more weeks of quarantine for Keira. He smiled at his screen.  I wonder what’s going to happen over on the Willsen now that she knows about Rob.

   

  Transfer Orbit Aphelion

  150,000 km outside of Mars Orbit

  March 12th, 2028

  “They’re moving to intercept,” a young lieutenant announced.

  Mickey looked over at the wall display, seeing that two of the six triangular ships had broken off from the main group and were moving out of orbit to meet the small incoming squadron. Shadows drifting across a rising sun. Oddly, the risk of imminent death only made the spectacle even more beautiful. The display indicated that their present course and speed would bring them across the squadron’s path ten minutes too late.

  “Their current vector presumes a braking evolution on our part,” the young officer continued. “By the time they realize their mistake, we should be well clear of them.”

  “Reading massive electromagnetic signatures from both ships,” Lieutenant Commander Kelvin called out from the sensor coordination cell. “Profile is consistent with rail gun mechanisms, but we see no turrets.”

  “Could be a traverse, mounted inside the vessel,” suggested one of his analysts.

  “Waste of space,” countered the officer. “They probably don’t use turret mounts because they would get in the way of docking with the mother ship but that won’t mean they want to use up major real estate to swing a gun inside the hull.” He thought for a moment, then nodded to himself. “I think they have to swing the entire ship around to bring those guns to bear.”

  As if in answer, brilliant plumes of plasma erupted from the bows of the two alien ships as the projectiles exited the barrels. Two pencil-thin lines seared their way across the black nothing of space as the ionized gasses trailed the incoming masses. Mickey felt a moment of terror as she realized that they were coming under fire. In a matter of seconds, she and everyone on this ship could be blasted out into the unforgiving darkness.

  “Projectiles are in a direct line with the ships’ axes,” the operator confirmed. “Looks like you called it, sir.”

  The lieutenant commander leaned over the operator’s shoulder. “Based on the spike we saw just before they fired, it looks like they need a few minutes to recharge,” he said, looking up at Captain Logan. “They thought we’d be slowing down and fired at where we should have been if we were going to slip straight into orbit,” he added. “We can’t count on them making the same mistake again. “They’ll get off another volley about a minute before we hit atmo.”

  “Very well,” the captain said calmly as he activated his headset, opening a radio channel to the other two ships. It allowed ship-to-ship coordination by encrypted burst transmissions. “Echo Whiskey Squadron, this is Commodore Logan. All vessels weapons free; good hunting, out.” He deactivated the headset as he turned to the fire control cell. “Start shooting,” he growled. “I don’t care if you have a solution or not; just start sending metal their way. We might not get a chance to use our guns again.”

  Though modified to carry the communications gear, the three ships of the EW Squadron were still frigates and the frigates were originally designed for one purpose - to pour fire on the enemy. The Willsen still carried fifty five guns of varying size, ranging from 30 mm Gatling guns to 155mm smoothbores.

  Mickey felt a low rumble through the ship as the turret mounts rotated to bear on a point near the enemy ships. At this speed, they had to trail their targets in order to have any chance of impacting them. The fire control team used some of the most powerful computers Earth could provide in calculating the outbound trajectories. Just like the army used ENIAC for the same thing in the forties, she realized,  except it wasn’t done in real time.

  A drum-beat of distant explosions began to sound throughout the ship. Though the turrets were soundproofed, some sound always found its way into the ship and the shock of the recoil was partially translated throughout the vessel’s bulkheads. A constant buzz came from the twenty Gatling guns as they spit out a hail of 30 mm depleted uranium rounds. It sounded like a swarm of giant hornets had infested the ship. Though nobody had any idea whether the outgoing ordinance would have an effect on the enemy, it made the crew feel better to be firing back.

  “One-minute countdown to atmospheric entry on my mark.” A navigation officer held up his hand as he watched the screen. “Mark.??
? A sixty-second timer appeared on every screen throughout the ship.

  Mickey reached out and dragged the timer up to the top right corner of her touch screen before tightening her restraints for the fifth time in seven minutes. She double-checked the transmitter diagnostics and tried not to think about what was coming.

  “Electromagnetic spike,” the sensor operator yelled.

  “Fire control, all Vulcans to fire directly at the enemy vessels. Disable the trailing calculation, NOW,” the captain’s grim face brooked no argument from fire control and they adjusted accordingly, despite their blank looks. “Seal bulkheads and brace for impact,” he announced calmly over the intercom.

  “Thirty seconds to atmo,” the navigation officer announced, sounding like he was talking about nothing more important than a minor dip in the NASDAQ.

  Who the hell would be crazy enough to want a job like this? Mickey’s eyes were riveted to the display showing the alien ships. A rash of reddish orange dimples started appearing around them.

  “Looks like energy shielding. None of our rounds are penetrating,” the sensor officer commented. “Now the question is, can they fire while they have shielding active?” His answer came almost immediately as the rounds started impacting the ships directly. Clouds of plasma erupted from the enemy bows yet again and everyone held their breath.

  “For what we are about to receive…” muttered the communications officer to Mickey’s right.

  There was a brilliant flash just over five hundred kilometers from the Willsen and the fire control officer looked at the captain with an admiring shake of his head. “Quick thinking, Sir. The incoming projectile must have impacted a round from one of our Vulcans.”

  At 6,000 rounds per minute the twenty Vulcans that had visibility on the target had been able to put a deadly haze of more than 100,000 depleted uranium rounds between them and the enemy. Designed as a close-in weapon system for use against incoming missiles, it was a miracle that they had proven effective against the higher-velocity round from the enemy rail-gun. The two projectiles had met at a combined speed of almost twenty thousand kilometers per hour and little more than vapor remained. Unlike their radar-aimed cousins on Earth ships, these guns had been used to throw out a random defensive screen and it had worked - this time.

  “The Morse has been hit,” the sensor coordinator announced. “It looks like she’s been completely broken up: we read nothing larger than a few meters across.” Logan clenched his fists but said nothing.

  One hit and the Morse disintegrates? Mickey shivered. Why exactly did I insist on coming along for this? Name one ship after me and I get delusions of grandeur…

  The counter on her screen reached zero and she looked expectantly around the room. Nothing seemed to be happening. She was just about to remark on it when a slight moan ran through the ship. Another followed and then a series of almost imperceptible shudders. The disturbances began to grow and Mickey soon felt as though she was sitting in the back of a pickup as it drove over a rough track. The screens showing the enemy ships went blank.

  “We’re blind for the next five minutes until we bounce back out,” Lieutenant Commander Kelvin, the intelligence officer, announced. He nodded to one of his men and the main screen showed a replay of the enemy ships during the brief shield-drop. The results were unmistakable, without their powerful shields the enemy ships were horribly vulnerable.

  “Mix of kinetic and HE,” the officer said with relish, looking over at Logan. “The 155mm uranium tears open a hole and the high explosive rounds rip out their guts once they make it inside. Contact was drifting off station as we lost visual and there is no evidence of an electromagnetic buildup.” He crossed himself as he stared up at the screen. “I think we crippled her.”

  “And the other ship?” Logan asked quietly.

  “Can’t say,” Kelvin answered simply. “They could be lining up a shot on us right now while we’re blind.”

  “Or they could be turning to face the other sixteen ships that are still on their way.” Logan sounded confident in his assessment. “We may be blind but they aren’t and they have to know by now that our current speed and trajectory will fling us out of the atmosphere on the other side of the planet and leave us out of the fight for now.”

  “I figure the chances are roughly even, but that means they might get one more shot at us.” Kelvin shrugged. “Good thing we still have two ships.”

  “You know, I think the galley switched from grounds to crystals last week,” the captain mused. A few of the bridge crew chuckled. “Miracle of modern science,” he went on. “I hear the UN spent millions to develop a zero-G coffee maker and what does Bob do? He gives up coffee.”

  The chuckles grew as Kelvin smiled and played along. “You might be happy drinking out of a colostomy bag but I’ll wait till we get home, thanks.”

  Mickey thought they had completely lost their minds but then she looked at the faces in the CIC. Men and women whose faces had shown fear a moment ago were now smiling at the ridiculous banter of the two officers. It was completely out of character for them but they were putting on this show to take the crew’s minds off the even chance of gruesome death. She marveled at the kind of officer that could come up with something like that, knowing he may never see his children again.

  “Coming back out,” announced the nav officer.

  “Very well,” Logan answered, triggering his headset. “All hands, stand by for maneuvering.”

  The turbulence trailed off and suddenly the screens came back to life as the Willsen lifted her bow out of the plasma flare.

  “Where is the contact?” Logan asked calmly.

  “Out of sight behind the planet.” Kelvin was hovering over his operator’s shoulder. “Looks like we’re on our own for the moment. The Bell went a bit deeper into the atmosphere than us but she should bounce out any minute.”

  “Very well. Helm, bring us about and set the engines to full military thrust.” He touched his headset. “All hands, set condition two throughout the ship. Brace for maneuvering.” The maneuvering thrusters fired and he lurched against his restraints as he looked over at Mickey. “Well, Major, in another fifteen minutes, the spotlight shifts to you. I hope this works.”

  You’re not the only one,  she thought as she checked the diagnostics again. She felt a flutter in her stomach. Because of you, they built this squadron and now the crew of the Morse will never see their families again. She forced herself to snap out of it. If this works, sixteen other crews have a much better chance of making it home.

   

  Emergency Shelter

  Tharsis Region, Mars

  March 12th, 2028

  Jennifer Grayson looked up at the ceiling of the shelter. The deep rumbling sound was getting louder. “Gus, what’s going on out there?”

  Commander Gus Hayes was still the leader of the expedition even though it had been reduced to only seven colonists. He had suited up at the first hint of the strange noise and he cautiously approached the tunnel entrance with his sidearm in his right hand. The 9mm automatic had been modified to remove the trigger guard and Gus didn’t trust it not to shoot his foot off, or other body parts that he valued more highly than a foot.

  He leaned up against the mouth of the tunnel and peered out, he saw no ground vehicles or tracks so he looked up. His right hand lowered, the pistol now pointing at his foot as he stood and stepped out of the tunnel mouth, staring up into the night sky in amazement. Over a dozen red streaks were thundering across the sky. No meteors for two years and now this? Suddenly, every muscle in his body stirred with adrenaline and he felt like yelling in triumph.

  Those are ships, using the atmosphere to bleed off velocity. The aliens didn’t need to do that; they can stop on a dime. Those have to be human ships! He started to put the gun away before stopping with a grimace and slowly releasing the hammer. It’s not my foot that’s going to get shot off.  Holstering the weapon, he pulled out a camera. “Jen, put the monitor on Wi-Fi; you
gotta see this.” He pointed the camera and framed the shot.

  Jennifer switched the screen to pick up the feed and stood in front of it with the other colonists, staring at it in silence for several seconds. “Gus, what is that?”

  “It’s a fleet. They’re aero-braking in the atmosphere, maybe thirty or forty clicks up,” he sounded jubilant. “I’d bet you a day’s water that they came from home. They’re coming in hot and using the atmosphere for deceleration so they can get into action without a long slow approach. Folks, we’re going home!” The central room of the shelter broke out into cheers and crying.

  Dan, the miner who had been at Vinland for a visit when the attack came, threw his arms around Jennifer and lifted her off the ground, spinning them both around in a clumsy arc. She finally gave up her disbelief and laughed.

   

  Periapses Raising Burn

  Mars

  March 12th, 2028

  “We’re out,” announced the navigation officer.

  “Where’s that contact?” Admiral Towers demanded calmly.

  “Looks like she stayed behind to guard her crippled sister, though she took some damage herself when she fired on the Cú Chulainn,” the sensor officer replied.

  “Thrusters coming online,” reported the helm operator. “Beginning fleet-wide raising burn in twenty seconds.

  The Cú Chulainn, though still with them for the moment, would not join them in orbit. The heavy cruiser had taken a hit to the stern and had lost almost a quarter of her mass in the resulting explosion. She still drifted with the fleet but would soon skip out of orbit and drift out past the remaining two ships of the EW Squadron. The Yangtze had suffered a much worse fate.

  The smaller frigate had been completely destroyed, much like the Morse, and her debris had burned up in the atmosphere as it kept pace with the fleet.

  There was a commotion in the hole and McCutcheon poked his head around the corner from below. “What’s going on in there, Wes?”

  “Come look at this, sir,” Sgt. Davis pointed at Cpl. Alexander’s monitor. “Andy figured out the short round. The Willsen disabled fire correction on the close-in weapons system and just fired almost straight at the target.”

  McCutcheon looked at the vectors displayed on the screen. “So a ten-dollar hunk of metal saved a frigate from destruction,” he sounded as if he didn’t believe his own words. He looked down to where Towers sat strapped to his chair. “Sir,” he called.

  The admiral looked up from the operators and screens in front of him, craning his neck to look up into the analysis cell. “Anything we can use, Colonel?”

  “A couple of things, Sir,” McCutcheon drifted down to float in front of the fleet commander. “They can’t take a crap without dropping their pants - if they want to shoot at us, they drop shields and take severe damage. They also didn’t seem to have a fighter complement aboard but they may still be on the planet’s surface. Their planned launch date was still a few weeks out.”

  He glanced back up into the cell before continuing. “The Willsen got lucky,” he said. “She put a hail of 30 mm depleted uranium rounds in the path of the incoming projectile and one of them impacted. We can do the same when we go into combat but I think we have a problem. The enemy might not fire on us.”

  Towers worked that over for a moment before nodding. “The only way we can hurt them is if we already have a hail of ordinance heading their way when they drop their shields. That means we need to fire continuously and we don’t have an unlimited supply of ammunition.”

  “Fifteen minutes to contact,” the navigation officer announced.

  “If the signal doesn’t shut them down -” McCutcheon began.

  “If the signal doesn’t shut them down, Colonel, we have a tough morning ahead of us,” Towers replied simply.

   

  UNS Willsen

  Home world transmission axis

  March 12th, 2028

  "We have incoming signals,” a lieutenant sitting next to Mickey announced.

  Mickey ran the signal through the emulator. She and Rob had assembled two systems on each of the three ships, one primary and one back up. The primary system on the Willsen sat in a compartment just behind her. Rob, promoted to the army rank of second lieutenant, was at the backup unit, two hundred feet forward in the secondary command center.

  “We have the beacon from their home world,” she announced, sliding the window over and concentrating on the signal from Mars. “Looks like we have an automated acknowledgement from the mother ship.” She opened a new window, studying the screen as the translated code slid by. “Same architecture as their firmware update.” She grinned over at Logan. “Time to shove a jalapeño up their tailpipes.”

  The captain nodded. “It’s your show now, Major,” he declared  with a note of finality. “Helm, slave your controls to the major’s terminal.”

  “Helm, aye. Controls are now in the hands of the EW officer.” The young helm officer hunched forward in his seat, watching the screen like a hawk, not fully trusting Mickey to steer his ship.

  This is nuts, the full weight of responsibility suddenly made itself felt as Mickey designated the center of the heavily diffused beam from home world. How they had managed to keep a beam coherent over such an incredible distance was beyond her experience, but that was a question to ask after the fight.

  The thrusters began to push the heavy ship into the center of the path so that the transmission they were about to send wouldn’t arouse suspicion. If it came from even a few degrees off axis, the whole thing might fall apart, as the alien system might reject the signal.

  Though she had understood the importance of her role aboard the Willsen, it was only now that the full impact had begun to sink in. If she failed, if her coding was faulty, if the aliens figured out why they had overshot, the people of Earth might fall into slavery or worse. Programming work done in leisure back on Mauna Kea might carry the one small flaw that would undo everything they had planned for.

  There was no time to recheck now. Even a short delay might give the enemy time to think. Sooner or later, someone aboard those ships would realize that the Willsen was positioning herself directly in the middle of the transmission path from Home world.

  They were only seconds away from optimal positioning and she forced herself to take a calming breath. We’ve done everything that can be done, she told herself. Forget about nerves. If I’m about to fail humanity, then it’s because of something that I’ve already screwed up. There’s no making it worse now. The braking thrusters were firing. The orange circle on her screen turned bright green. Just do your job.

  She reached out and touched the send button in the upper right corner of her interface. “Signal sent.” She sat there, staring at the screen, feeling as though she had no body.

  “Fleet is coming into range of the enemy,” announced the sensor officer.

  Coming to Grips

  UNS Ares

  Mars Orbit

  March 12th, 2028

  Mike looked at the screen. “Wes, that ship looks like it’s still moving.”

  Sgt. Davis nodded. “At least one still in the fight, the other three aren’t turning to face us, though.” He frowned. "The captain of that ship may have figured out our little trick in time to save himself but not in time to save the rest?”

  “One moving, sir,” McCutcheon called down to Towers. “Designating live vessel as Zulu Alpha Three.” The first two designations had gone to the two ships that they had passed on their way into orbit. Zulu Alpha One had destroyed the Yangtze and crippled the Cú Chulainn. Zulu Alpha Two was crippled and drifting into the planet’s gravity well.

  The admiral activated his headset. “Fleet wide,” he ordered curtly and paused for a few seconds. “Flag to all vessels, weapons free; concentrate fire on target Zulu Alpha Three. All ships, be advised that boarding operations are commencing. Adjust firing solutions as directed by  Ares fire control. Flag out.” He turned to the operations officer. “
Launch the boarding craft for all stationary targets.”

  The drumbeat of heavy guns reverberated through the CIC.