She finished cleaning her arm and walked out of her shack. Rick was speaking to everyone at the fire pit. She walked up to it and listened.
Rick was addressing the remaining camp members. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to stay at the camp they had built much longer. They’d have to leave soon. Maybe even that night. “Listen up,” he said. “The bunker base is close. We have new information thanks to our new guests. I know our usual routine is to take down the base we’ve built, but I don’t think we should do that. I think we should leave now, on foot. Our vehicles are slow in these woods. They’re of little help. If we leave now, we should be at the base of StarPeak Mountain within the next few days. It won’t be easy. But we’re almost there. We’re almost at the bunker.”
The camp members gave a brief cheer. Sandra shrugged. The man who’d risked her son’s life was no one to trust. He was related to the man who’d killed her husband. She didn’t care what he said about some truth about the Olympus Mons mission. She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t trust Rick Frost. She’d follow him. She’d stay with him. But only because these woods had proven themselves to be dangerous. Bobby, Claire and herself would have to travel with the camp until they got to Starpeak. It’s just what they would have to do.
They’d be leaving in the morning.
Chapter 27
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Felix Sarsgaard looked at his fishing line. He had reeled in a large white sock. It was an epic struggle. It took more than half an hour. He thought it was going to be a marlin. The sock must have been caught on something. Seaweed, a tire, a box, who knows what? He’d exhausted a lot of energy in that struggle. It was a waste of time. He pulled the sock from the hook. It wasn’t even a nice sock. It had a hole in the big toe.
“Fucking shit!”
He threw the sock back into the Gulf of Mexico. It sunk as it hit the water. He didn’t watch it disappear in the water. He went back inside his yacht to check on his computer. He walked across his yacht’s pristine wooden floorboards. They were starting to show their age. Years of wear and tear would do that. As he walked into the cabin of the yacht, he threw his fishing rod onto his bed, sat at his desk and started up his computer.
He’d been stuck on his yacht since the invasion began. Like every other survivor, it hadn’t been easy. He taught himself how to live on very little. The yacht wasn’t big. When the invasion started, all he had aboard the boat was a cupboard full of canned goods and a fridge packed with bottled water and alcohol. How he’d lasted this long, surprised even him. He should have run out of supplies a few years ago, but Felix was smart. He engineered his way out of problems as they arose. Running out of fresh water? No problem, all he had to do was reroute some of the power from the ship’s generator to desalinate the ocean water. No food? He taught himself how to fish. But these fixes were bandaids. The ships generator was running out of power and their weren’t a lot of fish in the Gulf’s waters. The last fish he caught was a couple days ago. He’d need to return to the mainland soon. The prospect of living off something other than fish and water made his mouth water. He dreamed about cheeseburgers and french fries.
It was getting close to the fifth anniversary of the invasion. He hadn’t set foot on mainland America in five years. He hadn’t set foot on any type of land for five years. The entire time he’d spent on the boat was spent out in the middle of the Gulf, far from the motherships. Their ominous floating shapes could be seen in the distance. As the computer was starting up, he looked out the cabin’s window. There was a thin sliver of land in the distance and, floating above it, tiny black shapes. They were the motherships. They were still there. Humanity was still fucked.
Felix was lucky when the invasion began. He was at the right place at the right time. Had he been in his office in Silicon Valley, he would have been dead. Instead, he was off the coast of Florida fishing. He was getting a little R&R after a gruelling twenty-four hour negotiation with the US government to license his technology for new voting booths. It was a dreadful negotiation. It wasn’t going his way. It wasn’t easy being the richest man in the world. He thought the time spent away would recharge his batteries, get him ready for the final business quarter of the year. Instead, the time away saved his life. Getting emails and calls from loved ones those first few months was difficult. He did his best to help them out anyway he could. But he was stuck on the boat. He thought about returning to the mainland, but it looked like hell. The fires along the coast didn’t stop burning that first year. When communication signals broke down and he lost all contact with his family and friends, he thought about killing himself. But that wasn’t like him. He didn’t give up.
Felix was the founder and CEO of BlueStar. His company had contracts with every major government around the globe. BlueStar’s primary focus was communication tech. Without BlueStar’s tech, governments around the globe wouldn’t have a satellite in the sky. They supplied the rockets that took the satellites into orbit, built the CPUs inside the satellites, and even provided the software that encrypted the satellite messages. BlueStar was the wealthiest company in the world because of it. It made Felix very rich. But it hadn’t always been that way.
He started BlueStar when he was a teenager living in a lower-middle class suburb just outside of Chicago. He was always good at math and computers and had a knack for taking things apart and then putting them back together. And it was this that got him in trouble with the feds. It’s also what allowed him to start BlueStar. When he was sixteen he noticed a flaw in his schools security system. As a prank, he hacked into it and sent a memo from the principal’s email address to every board member in the schoolboard. The memo made it look like the principal was a Russian spy. At the time, he thought it was hilarious. When the school principal was being hauled off by the FBI he decided to come forward. He couldn’t see that happen. The joke had gone too far. He came forward and told the feds what he did. What surprised him was the fact that he didn’t get suspended or arrested. They exchanged his freedom for insight into how he did it. How did this young kid from Chicago hack into the school boards ‘impenetrable’ network? His schoolboard had hired a computer security company that had links to the government to manage their network security. The same company had also provided the security services for the FBI, the CIA, NASA and just about every major government department in the country. Felix said he’d tell them how he did it if they gave him ten million dollars. He was a young, cocky kid from middleclass parents. He didn’t think it would hurt to ask for some money. It didn’t. The government needed to plug the security holes in their system and ten million was a small price to pay for peace of mind. They paid him the money and Felix started his empire. He was sixteen years old and knew nothing about how to run a company but he had a vision and he worked his ass off. The first thing he did was hire some coders and with their help he developed a new, super secure communication language for satellite tech. The government bought that tech off him. They paid him ten billion dollars. He was nineteen years old and on top of the world. The media called him the next Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs rolled into one. Felix didn’t mind that, but he would have preferred it if they didn’t compare him to anything or anyone. He wanted to be the next Felix Sarsgaard, that’s it.
But none of that mattered now. His massive fortune wasn’t going to solve any of his current problems. He’d been stuck on a yacht for five years.
His computer finished loading up. It was starting to show its age. The salt in the air from the water didn’t help. It’s internals were corroding. He opened up a file called: Signal.
For the last several years, he’d been accessing the nano-satellites BlueStar still had orbiting Earth. They, for some reason, had gone undetected by the alien ships. They weren’t destroyed. It most likely had to do with the fact that they used a special frequency that was still in prototype. He wished he would have rolled out more of the nano-satellites before the invasion. Then he’d have more eyes in the
sky. All he had were three. They were the same three that, before the invasion, he’d given access to SpaceForce. They had used them to monitor the alien ships as they were entering our atmosphere. But SpaceForce Mission Control was now destroyed. The computers that Felix had given them access to were now a pile of ash. Once he confirmed that, he took access back and had been using them since. He reprogrammed the satellites and gave them a new mission.
Their new mission: send out distress signals to nearby stars. Part of him knew it was foolish. Scientists had been sending signals to other stars for over one hundred years and they found nothing. But it was the only thing he could think of. He was the genius who redefined communication on the planet, if anyone was going to connect us with strangers from another world, it might be him.
The signals would take years to reach the closest star. The first batch of signals would be reaching Alpha Centauri any day now. It would take years for him to receive a signal back. It was going to be a long process. But he had to try it. The alien ships were too plentiful and powerful for any human tech to make a difference.
He pulled up the star map on his computer and recalibrated the three satellites in the sky to aim at a star system six light years away. The star system had four planets in the goldilocks zone. He sent the signal, sat back in his chair and sighed. Fuck. This was slow tedious work. In the five years he’d been out here, he’d only sent seven hundred signals. There were billions of stars in the the milky way galaxy. He was hoping that one of his meagre, slow signals would be fortunate to hit an advanced alien civilization light years away. The odds weren’t in his favor.
He got up and opened the small mini fridge in the yacht. It was empty save for the bottles of water he’d stored in it. He grabbed one and opened it up. As the cool water slid down his throat, he heard his computer beeping.
He walked back over to it. The signal he had sent had failed. “What the hell?” He sat down at his computer. He sent the signal again.
A couple minutes later, he got the same error message: ‘Message Failed.’
This didn’t make sense. He checked the diagnostics on his satellites. They were good. Everything was operational. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
Chapter 28
“Where is this goddamned bunker?” Rick muttered to himself.
He was frustrated. They’d been travelling for a few days. People from the camp were tired and hungry and Rick couldn’t help but notice that Sandra gave him a dirty look every time she got the chance. He didn’t mind it. He thought it was funny. It wasn’t the first time a woman hated Rick with all her passion. It wouldn’t be his last.
Finding the SpaceForce bunker was now made more difficult by the fact that they had to look for it at night. They were pretty sure they’d pinpointed the mountain that was located between the Cepheus and Cygnus constellations, but they weren’t one hundred percent sure. This was a mountain range. There were mountains in all directions. Plus, all they had was a general idea of where the bunker was, not a specific location. Without that, they were still guessing.
The sun was setting and the first stars began to peak through the dark blue of the sky. The Rocky Mountains stood like large black behemoths, surrounding Rick and the other survivors on all sides.
Rick got up from his sleeping bag with his backpack in hand. He threw it on and took a swig from his water bottle. Wiping his mouth, he called out to the other survivors. “All right, listen up,” he said. “We’ve got a long walk ahead again tonight. Remember to keep your eyes peeled for any light on the mountains, any signs of a bunker. We’re going to make our way to that mountain there.” Rick pointed to the mountain. “We’re going to walk around it, as much as we can. That’s where we think the bunker is. We think that is Starpeak.”
Everyone nodded. Well, almost everyone. Sandra stared at Rick as he spoke. He saw it from the corner of his eye. He gave her a smile when he was done. He knew that would get under her skin. It did.
He didn’t want to think about why she was so angry with him. He felt it had something to do with his telling Bobby to run in front of the tank during the attack from the hostiles. But what was he supposed to do. If he hadn’t told Bobby to do that, he wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to the tank to lodge the dynamite stick in its treads. It was necessary. And if Sandra didn’t think so, then she was being stubborn and ignorant. He didn’t have time for that. She already hated him because she blamed his father for her husband’s death. This didn’t change things that much.
If there was one thing that was making their lives more difficult since leaving their camp, it was the snow. It had been such a long winter that it was the last thing Rick wanted to see. But the closer they got to the mountain’s base, the more snow began to fall.
“Alright,” he said. “Weather is going to get bad tonight. Let’s get a move on.”
The camp members followed Rick through the dark woods of the forest. Each one kept their eyes peeled for any signs of hostiles or of a bunker. As they made their way, a light snow began to fall and a cold wind blew through the trees. Rick covered his face and pulled over the hood from his jacket. But he needed something else to warm him up. “Hey, Dirk, you got any moonshine left?”
Dirk ran up to Rick. “Sure bet, brother.”
He pulled out a small metal flask from his jacket. “Here’s the ticket.”
Rick grabbed the drink before Dirk could unscrew the top.
“Thanks,” he said, unscrewing it and taking a swig. He handed the flask back to Dirk.
“So you think we’re going to find the bunker tonight?” Dirk asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Some of the others are getting tired. Life was good back at the camp. We could have stayed there for a few more days. Hell, I could’ve salvaged that tank. Maybe put it back together or something. Patched a couple holes in the camp’s walls with it’s chassis. Plus, if another hostile group finds us. We’ll be done for.”
Rick didn’t want to hear this. The group was always complaining. There was always something that could be better. He knew that. “Tell them,” he said, “that if we don’t find the bunker tonight, we’ll break for a few days. But we’re not stopping our search. We’ve come too far. We’re close. You know as well as I do that we couldn’t have stayed at the camp. That group of hostiles almost took us out with that tank. If they come back, we wouldn’t have had a chance. Our odds are better out here.”
Dirk understood. He nodded his head and joined the others. Every one was walking in single file. It seemed like the closer they got to the mountain, the harder and thicker the snow fell. They walked like that for three hours. Rick couldn’t tell if they were getting close to the mountain, everything looked dark. He could barely make out the trunks of the trees as they passed them. He could barely see the stars. Every now and then, they’d peak through the thick clouds dropping snow. The mountain they walked toward stood between Cepheus and Cygnus. He looked up at them and down at his map. It was difficult to see at night, but he had a small flashlight on the strap of his backpack. He looked at the map. The mountain they were walking toward wasn’t on it. That was strange. He looked back at the mountain, but spotted something in the corner of his eye. A light. A red light. Fire? “Any one see that?” he shouted out.
“Yes,” said Patricia. “I saw the glow of a flame. Over there.”
The entire group turned to the direction she was pointing at. There was nothing. Only darkness.
“Are you sure?” Rick said.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Tuck, Dirk, Manuel, you come with me.” They’d need to investigate this. They couldn’t risk being tracked. If there were hostile scouts out in the forest, then they’d need to find them and take them out.
Bobby stepped forward. “Let me come to. You don’t know what that is. If it’s a hostile, you’ll need my bow. You don’t want to attract any attention out here.”
Rick considered it for a second. The boy was right. They’d
taken extra precautions to be quiet since they left the camp. If whatever Patricia saw wasn’t friendly, they may be in trouble. He was about to say “yes” to Bobby, but then he saw Sandra’s face. He couldn’t. She didn’t trust him. This woman was going to cost the camp. He sighed. “Stay here,” he said. “I don’t want to upset your mother.”
Bobby turned to his mother. She said nothing. The young boy was upset.
Rick, Tuck, Manuel and Dirk walked toward where Patricia spotted the flame. They took long and careful steps in the thick snow. The only sound came from it crunching below their feet.
“Over there,” Tuck said.
The gruff old man pointed at a burned out torch lying on the ground. The four men ran up to it. Tuck picked it up.
“What do you think?” Manuel said.
Rick looked around. He didn’t like these woods. He didn’t like the darkness. He felt like they were being watched. They needed to get to the base of the mountain as quickly as they could. They were sitting ducks out here.
“We should head back,” said Manuel.
“No,” said Rick. “We need to find out who this torch belongs to.”
Suddenly, an arrow flew out of the woods. It missed Rick. It lodged itself into a nearby tree. “Get down,” he said.
The four men dropped to the ground.
“What the fuck?” Dirk said. “Hostiles?”
“What do you think?” Rick responded. “Stay low. Find a hiding spot and wait for them to come out in the open”
Two more arrows whizzed by.
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