SODIUM Trilogy Part One

by Stephen Arseneault

  Hours upon hours had been logged in online gaming with his cyberfriends from around the globe. His father had been an engineer and had piqued David’s curiosity in cyberkinetics. He had dreamed of going to college and getting involved in programming robotics so he could one day dominate the world—the same dream that many a young man who had spent too much time gaming in cyberspace had probably had. What he hadn’t known at the time was that he might one day be headed down that very path.

  The coil gun project had stalled at the level of being able to poke a hole in a road sign. I was excited at the thought of having someone with us who had some computer savvy. My PC was several years old, but would have plenty of power to take on the delicate timing for the coil gun. I could handle connecting the electronics to the computer, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to make the computer control them. David did.

  He was consumed with the coil gun from the first day he saw it and, of course, with having the chance to get on a PC again. He had no online buddies to chat with or other worlds to conquer, but he now had a project he could really get his skull into.

  As it turned out, he was not much of a farmer and caused the girls some grief whenever he attempted to help with their tasks. Rachel was very patient with him, but Janie would lay into him whenever he was slowing progress or outright messing something up.

  He still lacked confidence around the girls because they seemed to always know what they were doing, and them having to tell him what to do at nearly every turn didn’t help. The coil gun was his escape. I would often have to force him to leave it be because we had issues to deal with in keeping our colony going.

  At one point, he became irate and yelled at me about how I wasn’t his father and he could do whatever he wanted. Had he acted that way to me twenty years earlier, I would have given him the beat-down of his life. I had once punched a guy because he had sneezed just as Renee and I had been walking past. The sneeze had given a little jolt to my manhood, and I wasn’t going to let anyone do that when she was around.

  Back then, I would have punched the man even if I had been by myself. But I was a much more patient person now and in no need of puffing up my chest over some kid’s temper tantrum. With a little understanding, I was able to calm him down without swinging a fist.

  It had been three months since David had joined us, and he was in need of a break from the project. So I decided we should take a trip over to the coast as a sort of surveillance run. There were multitudes of questions about the aliens I wanted answers to. What were they doing? How many of them were there? What did they look like? Did they ever come out of their ships? And a slew of other unknowns that needed settling.

  We packed heavy for the trip and decided to try for Daytona and a closer observation. We loaded Mike with the two four-wheelers and set out for the coast. David rode with me while Rachel and Janie once again took Bubba.

  I had been noticing a little gleam in David’s eye and a returning one in Rachel’s for several weeks. She had blossomed into quite the looker over the course of that first year, and I was a little worried about them being kids and being curious. David had so far been quite the gentleman, and Rachel a bit shy. I could only guess the only thing that kept them apart was that neither one had a clue as to what they were doing when it came to relationships. David had been a teen computer geek, and Rachel had not reached the age where she or most of her friends for that matter, were allowed to date.

  They were evidently experiencing a bit of those awkward teenage years, and I was quite happy for it. The last thing we all needed was for them to start testing the waters and get in trouble before they were able to handle the responsibilities the trouble brought with it. I hoped they would feel awkward for a long time yet.

  It took nearly three hours to reach Daytona. The roadways were in worse shape in the area, and the overgrowth was really taking hold. We found cover for the vehicles in what had once been a park about a mile from the beach.

  We unloaded the four-wheelers for the last mile and made our way out to the beach. As we approached A1A, we began to move quickly from cover to cover. We dismounted the four-wheelers and climbed up on a pile of debris to get a good look out to sea.

  A water ship was about a mile offshore, just as we had seen before. But this time we were directly inland from it. The ship was humongous and looked surreal floating just above the waves. The five smaller fighters circled close by it in a seemingly random pattern. I almost began to wonder why the fighters were there at all after they had destroyed everything else so completely. Perhaps they were just being cautious.

  We watched all day as the ship just sat there with the two big tubes in the water and its fighters buzzing around it like so many flies. We decided to make it an overnighter and set up a camo tent in some nearby brush, using the cover of a good-sized tree. We had plenty of food, water, and other supplies, and with it being late September, the temperature was tolerable enough that we could sleep outside without our precious air-conditioning back home.

  Just as the sun was about to set, the water ship began spewing a fog out of one side. It was green in tint, and after ten minutes, I noticed the small cloud was slowly drifting our way. I got a sudden chill when I realized that chlorine gas was greenish in color, and if we got caught up in that haze, we could die a painful, suffocating death.

  We gathered everything we could with haste and began our way back toward the vehicles, all along the way dodging from one piece of cover to the next. By the time we reached the trucks, the green fog was already coming ashore. We made our way back out of Daytona and back onto the road to our fortress.

  As we drove, I explained to David I thought the green fog might be chlorine gas. My guess at the time was they were taking in seawater, extracting the salt, separating the sodium from the chlorine, and then expelling the chlorine.

  I finally had a reason to let roll around in my head as to why they had come to this planet in the first place. They were here for the sodium. The reason they were in need of sodium was not as important as the knowledge of why they were here to begin with. David then told me that on several occasions, when he had been in Cocoa Beach, the air had become difficult to breathe and had burned his eyes and throat.

  I reasoned he was lucky the clouds had dissipated enough by the time they reached him, or he would have been dead. He said it was quite painful when it happened, and the effects lasted for weeks. Again, I told him he was lucky to be alive. It was funny, but I remember that incident was the first time since everything had happened that I really had felt happy to be alive.

  We were unable to reach home before sunset and were not brave enough to use headlights, so we pulled off the side of the road under some trees. We had managed a sufficient distance from the green cloud so I was no longer worried about its danger. We had camo covers we pulled over the trucks as extra disguise, and we then settled in for the night in our cabs. It had been a strange but interesting day.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  The next morning, we were back at our normal routines. We had raided several collapsed libraries in the previous months, and Rachel had been like a machine at reading and learning everything she could about farming. We reasoned animal husbandry and farming were two skill sets that would be increasingly valuable for any long-term survival of the colony. After only a little more than a year, her book knowledge probably rivaled that of someone who had been doing it all their life. And she was always eager to learn more.

  Janie had done some reading on animal care that had helped her also, but she didn’t have her sister’s patience to read for hours on end.

  David didn’t show the same commitment as the girls when it came to the tasks assigned to him. They were the more mundane construction or maintenance type of tasks, and he had no interest in them. He was instead still consumed by the coil gun, and increasingly with Rachel. To date, we had all gotten along quite well, but I knew I was at some point going to have to talk with David about pulling his weig
ht.

  I had decided to build a large, covered structure under the trees near the Kendalls’ former home. Basically, I wanted to raise a roof ten feet into the air. From above it would still look like the ground, but we’d be able to move around freely under the canopy. We would not only use it for storage but also as a cow pen and chicken coop that were not visible to Earth’s uninvited guests. This was David’s only assignment, and he had been dragging his feet.

  I had been over at the Haywards’ orchard picking oranges all morning when I returned to see David out in the field with Rachel rather than working on the ground-raising project. I placed the bags of oranges by the bunker door and made my way out to have a talk. With such a small group, we could not afford to be charitable to anyone who was capable. It was time he knew how I felt.

  As I approached, he jumped up and ran toward me excitedly. It threw me off from my intended scolding, and I instead let him talk. His news was that he had done it: his timing program for the coil gun was now operational. I had dialed the current available to him on the coils way down so he could use the gun without causing any major damage.

  He managed to punch a hole in the road sign with only a fraction of the power I had used before. The thought then occurred to me that if we could somehow scale this up, we might have a very formidable weapon on our hands. After returning to the bunker and discussing it with him for hours, I began to wonder.

  If we could really dial up the power, could the alien ships react to it fast enough with their concussion weapons? The speed of a projectile from this gun could potentially far exceed that of a normal bullet or missile. One thing was certain: if it wasn’t successful, we would find out quickly.

  For the rest of the day, we fiddled with the coil gun and talked about what might be. I had totally forgotten that I intended to give David a serious talking-to, and by the time it entered my mind again, I was still far too excited about our breakthrough to bring it up.

  With my unique coil design and David’s timing program, I estimated we should be able to deliver about 85 percent of the power input as power out in the form of projectile speed. A typical BB weighed in at about a third of a gram. Unfortunately, my estimates told me it would take a tremendous amount of power to send that BB at a speed that would reach a target at ten miles in a hundredth of a second. Anything less and I felt we risked being blocked.

  I determined that we should be able to scale the coils up sufficiently to deliver that power, but we now had a bigger problem of being able to supply the kind of wattage needed. With the ultra-capacitors I had, I could only supply about one-twentieth of the instant power of what my calculations showed. We now had a new problem to solve if we wanted our project to become a real weapon.

  It would take a fair amount of time to generate that power with our solar array. And it would take significantly more storage for that power than we currently had with the ultra-capacitors. So David and I would have to turn our attentions toward power generation and storage of some sort.

  The hybrid battery I had would provide about one-quarter of the energy we needed. We would have to seek more hybrid vehicles to achieve the total power storage required, and that would only provide us with one shot. Not a very effective weapon against a multitude of ships. But regardless, we had our next goal set for us, and we had nothing but time to achieve that goal.

  The following day, I set David back to work on his previous project. It was late October now, and our little garden was reaching its end of life for the year. The garden was our largest exposure from the air, and we weren’t sure how it would be possible to disguise it.

  We needed full sun to make anything grow, and other than allowing some of the weeds to fill in, we were stuck with it looking like it was being tended. It was hopefully a small enough target from the sky that it wouldn’t be noticed anyhow. Just as a precaution, we decided to make the borders irregular when we plowed it up for the following season.

  We had managed to salvage a freezer and now had a good stockpile of food stashed for our short winter season. I had dug a small pond, which we had stocked with bass we had caught from the lake. We had been fattening them with food scraps from our garden, and the fish were flourishing. I kept the pond somewhat clean by pumping some of the spring water into it daily.

  David had managed to make good progress on our undercover city. I could now walk from the bunker to within fifty feet of the garden without ever being exposed. We had all the salvage materials we needed from the surrounding areas, and the structure had turned out to be fairly solid.

  Perhaps David was one of those people who were good at having one goal at a time and needed to take that goal from beginning to completion before starting something new. I had known others who were simply terrible when asked to multiplexing the working of several tasks at once, so much so they became easily agitated and did a poor job of each. David was evidently one of those single-processor individuals, so I would need to pick tasks for him accordingly.

  With the first phase of our undercover city completed, it was decided another surveillance trip was in order. I was curious if the invaders were still maintaining status quo with their sodium harvesting. We had been hurried off by the chlorine the last time out, so we had gathered very little intel on the size and capabilities of their fleet, or of their tactics, or mission. And we were all in need of an adventure to break the monotony of the daily routine.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  On our prior excursions, we had not seen a need for a camera, but now that we were in the reconnaissance business, we felt a nice digital camera with a quality zoom lens might come in handy. We would be able to load any images onto the PC in the bunker for further evaluation and discussion. So before our next trip to the beach began, we would be scavenging for a camera.

  On our trips into Orlando, we had passed a demolished hobby shop or two, but had never bothered to explore the remains. We arrived at the first store about 9:00 a.m. It only took five minutes to know there was nothing to be had from it, so we moved on to the next one.

  As David and the girls poked around in the rubble, peeling back roofing material, I remembered a nice hobby shop had been just about a half mile away. I alerted the team I was going for a quick look and told them to come looking for me if I was not back within the hour. We had strict rules against separation, but since we had not seen anyone or anything other than the alien ships offshore for months, I took it on myself to break the rule and go.

  I pulled up to the hobby shop in Mike and began my inspection of the property. With my eyes constantly scanning at the rubble, I didn’t notice the unknown visitor slipping up behind me. My firearm was strapped to my hip, but it did me no good if I wasn't watching.

  I first learned of the visitor when I felt a heavy blow to the back of my skull. I fell to my knees as the pain shot down through my neck. What had happened? Aliens? The girls and David—were they alright, or...? That was the last question I got to before blacking out with the next blow.

  I awoke five minutes later only to find myself disarmed and tied up with duct tape. A scrappy-looking bearded fellow with frizzly hair stood in front of me with a big grin on his face. He started in with the questions of what I was doing there and why I was in his city, and if there were any others with me.

  I wasn't about to rat out my family, so I told him I was just scavenging. The man started waving a red handkerchief in the air. A minute later, another fellow pulled up on a dirt bike with saddlebags hung all over it. It was loaded with booty. He was a short, round man with a pig-like nose and the same frizzly hair.

  I asked what they were doing there, which only brought a backhand to my face. Not only was it none of my business, but I was in no position to be asking any questions. As the pig-faced man began his interrogation, the bearded guy left to retrieve his own motorbike.

  His bike was also loaded with saddlebags and had a boom box of sorts strapped to the back. When he pulled up, he turned it on and had blaring heavy me
tal playing. It fit right in with the two men in their tank tops, tattoos, piercings, jeans, and boots. The bearded man pulled out a bottle of whiskey and took what was the biggest swig I had ever seen anyone take at one time. Some of the booty was hanging out of one of the saddlebags, and it looked to be gold chains and pieces of jewelry.

  For the life of me, I couldn't reason why these two miscreants were pilfering jewelry. What possible use could it have? Was there a larger settlement nearby? Real civilization perhaps? These two certainly didn't bring civilization to mind, but I reasoned they must have come from somewhere.

  After each had downed a few big swigs of the whiskey, I could see it was having an effect on their manner. Their tone would go from laughing at my demise to threatening me with death. So I began my usual over-analysis of the situation and tormented myself for not having paid attention to my surroundings. The scenarios running through my head of what they might do to the others had my stomach in knots.

  I then remembered I had told David and the girls to come looking for me if I wasn't back within the hour. Were they going to walk right into the situation, not knowing what was happening? Would they see me trapped and not come at all? The more alcohol my captors consumed, the shorter I imagined my time remaining alive was. The pirates were in complete control, and I was powerless to act.

  At that moment, I heard a shot fired and a young man's voice commanding the two to lay down their weapons. Then a second voice came from the left side barking the same order, and then a third from the right. David and the girls had managed to sneak up on the drunks and outflank them. The pig-faced man was the first to slowly turn his head and assess the situation. After looking from side to side, he let out a roaring laugh and slapped his buddy on the shoulder.