by Bob Blink
Before anyone could reply, the President's red phone rang. All eyes in the room turned toward the phone, surprised under the circumstances that it would ring. There was no response appropriate other than answering it.
"Yes," the President said. He listened to the voice on the other end. "Interesting," he said. "Keep me informed." After a moment, then hung up softly.
"General Markham says the Air Force monitoring satellites have detected an enemy ship leaving orbit and heading in a direction that appears to be toward the asteroid. It is too soon to be certain, but it suggests they have decided to take some kind of action, but what can they hope to do with a single ship?"
"What kind of ship?" the Secretary asked.
"One of their larger ones," the President admitted, "but that is still tiny compared to the incoming rock."
"Could they tell where the ship came from?" General Easystone asked.
"Apparently is just appeared in the upper atmosphere, but the trajectory suggests that it came from the northern hemisphere somewhere, most likely near Russia or China."
"That says there is at least one other site," General Easystone stated.
"If they are going after the rock, maybe we should wait and see what they do before initiating any action against them," Hollister suggested. "We can have the bombs set to go, but hold off for the time being."
A glance around the room showed the others were in agreement.
Chapter 24
San Diego County
Mount Palomar Observatory
Eight hours left until impact!
Tony couldn't believe this was real. When he'd stared through the Celestron telescope on campus at a close encounter asteroid a few years ago he never seriously considered that one might actually strike his world. And now? Now they were about to go the way of the dinosaurs. It didn't matter what the official government releases said, or what was on the news, or even the more accurate predictions one could find on the Internet. This was his business, and he'd run the calculations himself. The incoming asteroid wasn't going to miss as the government was suggesting to everyone. It was going to hit almost dead on, striking the United States somewhere in Wyoming. As if the massive asteroid wasn't enough, hitting in that particular location was certain to trigger the long overdue super volcano in Yellowstone. The United States was toast. Most of the world as well, although the way people would die would vary greatly depending on how far away they lived and how far inland. Some will eventually wish they had perished easily in the initial strike.
There was really nowhere to go. They couldn't run far enough or fast enough to flee this beast. He and Gwen had reached peace with the fact. They had visited her family in Orange county and called his family back in Florida. They spent hours in bed together, making love and talking about might-have beens. Both had finally decided they didn't want to go out hiding inside. Gwen wanted to see the sky, and for some perverse reason Tony had wanted a close-up look at the chunk of rock that would result in their deaths. That wouldn't be possible on campus at the small observatory there. All campuses had become too dangerous as the infuriated crowds blamed academics for what social media warned were the last bleak hours of mankind. How the astronomers who had spotted the incoming threat somehow became ultimately responsible for it was a stretch of logic he couldn't follow. But buildings were being trashed, and students and professors alike assaulted and in a couple of cases killed outright.
Gwen no longer made a secret about her belief in carrying self protection. When they had gone out for food earlier, she had her trusty .45 in a belt holster under her light windbreaker. She'd acquired another handgun when they visited her parents, offering it to Tony so they'd both be armed, but he was completely unaware of how to use one, and felt uncomfortable and potentially dangerous with the heavy object in his hand. To her great disappointment, he'd turned it down, and it now sat useless in a drawer back in his apartment. If any shooting were to be done, she'd be the one that would have to do it.
They'd made the drive to Palomar, the observatory in the mountains owned and operated by Cal Tech. Normally time on the instrument would be scheduled and carefully controlled, but the lone astronomer, a Professor that Tony knew well enough, had welcomed them to his final night staring at the skies. The observatory was too far for the crazies, and in a location most of them would have struggled to locate. Both the 200 inch Hale telescope and the smaller 48 inch were tracking the incoming rock, the images from the larger of the magnificent instruments displayed on a large flat screen monitor near where the astronomer sat controlling the telescopes.
Gwen gasped when she saw the rock. Somehow the immensity came through even though it was an image with little to provide scale. Dark, but smooth and solid, it was close enough to the sun now that light was being reflected, showing the contoured surface that looked solid and unbreakable. It didn't have the ragged appearance of other space rocks Tony had studied, nor the accumulation of loose boulders scattered about the surface. This one looked polished and unbreakable. They could almost feel the mass rushing toward them.
"If not for the aliens, this would have missed us, wouldn't it?" Gwen asked softly as they stared at the screen.
"For a very long time, at least," the astronomer said. "It has a very unusual orbit, passing well out of the plane and a long elliptical path. We would have photographed it, and marveled at the size, and congratulated ourselves at our luck of having been just far enough out of its path once again.
"Then this is on the aliens also," she said with lips pressed tightly together.
Tony bent and stared through the smaller of the two scopes, looking directly at the incoming image. This one was set to view from the perspective of further away, and he could see the asteroid against the dark sky littered with stars. Somehow the changed perspective made it look less threatening.
"There are no longer any doubts," the professor said. "Nothing can turn this thing at this point. It is closing at incredible speed, faster than anything I've monitored before, and the orbits clearly intersect in just a few hours. Are you two planning to spend your last moments here on this cold mountain?"
"Where would we go?" Gwen asked. "At least here we can watch it happen. Man's end point."
"What the hell?" Tony exclaimed, adjusting the focus of the smaller telescope as he stared off into distant space.
"What?" Gwen asked.
"There's something out there," Tony said, pulling his eye away from the eyepiece and glancing at the monitor displaying the image from the Hale telescope. "You can't see it on that one. The image is too close."
"Here," the professor said, and rotated another monitor into place and turned in on. In a moment the image that Tony had been looking at came into focus.
"There," he said, stabbing a finger at a speck of light off to one side of the on-coming mountain. "Whatever it was, it was tiny in comparison, but it appeared to be moving along with the asteroid.
"It's a ship," Gwen said, staring at the tiny spec.
"A ship?" the Professor said.
"Yeah, I think she's right," Tony said after a moment to get his own perspective right. They had looked carefully at the various photographs that had been taken on the moon and more recently at the small base in Australia that the aliens had set up. This looked vaguely like one of the larger ships they had seen in the photographs. It was hard to see clearly, as if something was distorting the image, but the general shape was right. He couldn't even hazard a guess at the size."
"So they are the ones who shot this asteroid at us," Gwen snapped angrily.
"No, I don't think that's it," Tony disagreed. "There would be no reason for them to be out there now. It's already on track to hit us."
"Then what?"
"Maybe they don't want their prize planet smashed by the thing," Tony said. "Maybe they can do something about it." He almost didn't dare to hope that there might be an out from what had seemed like certain death a few moments before.
"If that's the case, why
would they wait so long?" the professor asked.
"Don't know," Tony mumbled honestly, his eyes and attention more on the screen than listening to the conversations.
"Wow!" Gwen exclaimed, as some kind of bright flash erupted from the tiny image that was the ship and seemed to encircle the on-coming boulder. "They shot it with something."
The three of them watched, eager to see the asteroid vanish in a massive explosion, but that didn't happen.
"Whatever they did had no effect," Gwen said, clearly disappointed.
Tony couldn't help feeling a bit the same way.
"I'm not so certain," the professor said. "Look closely at the image."
It took a moment, but Tony suddenly could see what the professor meant. The asteroid was no longer one big solid rock. It looked a bit like a bunch of building blocks that were slowly tumbling apart.
"They sliced and diced it," Gwen said happily.
"That's not going to matter much," Tony said. "It's still the same mass, still on the same path. It'll just be a bunch of strikes scattered over the area rather than one big one."
"They're not done," the professor said.
They couldn't see what was being done, the action was too far, and whatever weapon that was being deployed was something that apparently didn't leave much sign of its deployment, but suddenly a couple of the blocks simply disappeared.
"Magic," Gwen said, delighted. "They are making it vanish.
"More likely busting it into dust," the professor said. "We'll have one remarkable sky show, but the dust won't be a real problem."
As they watched, more and more of the sliced chunks continued to vanish. Within fifteen minutes the asteroid appeared to have vanished. Then, a remarkably bright flash was observed on the monitor.
"They nuked the stuff left over," Tony guessed correctly. "I wonder how much of it they vaporized?"
"I'm betting the Earth's passage through the orbit intersection will cause little problem on the planet itself, although anything in orbit will face some serious trouble," the professor said. "I need to make a call. Excuse me, I'll be right back."
Gwen wrapped her arms around Tony as they continued to watch the monitor. The small speck that was the ship reappeared and started to move. Tony automatically locked the scope to the small image and had the position data stored. Maybe they could later figure out where it was going. It might help locate another base here on Earth. He felt a bit left out he wasn't part of that search seeing as he developed it originally, but realized there was nothing really for him to do. It was a computer programmer's job at this point.
Chapter 25
Washington, DC
Pentagon
"Damage estimates?" the Secretary of Defense asked.
They were gathered in the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
"Substantial," General Easystone admitted. "The asteroid was reduced to rubble as the telescopic images showed, but some of that rubble made it to the ground, somewhat like hail, but small rocks instead of ice. There were a number of deaths, and a great deal of cosmetic damage. Also, the finer dust that was the majority of what was left of the damned thing was a problem as well. That which hit the atmosphere burned up quickly in the colorful displays that most of the world watched. However, a great many satellites were destroyed by passing through the dust, given there was so much of it. Arrays and antennas, not to mention sensors and some actuators were simply destroyed. Pretty much every satellite that was on the wrong side of the planet when we passed through the dust storm is toast."
"The Chinese lost their space station from the same type of effect," Bud Hollister explained. "It basically was torn apart and over thirty of their astronauts were killed, either from the abrasive nature of the dust particles on their suits, or a lack of oxygen when their supplies ran out without anyone being able to get to them. The international space station was badly damaged, but survived, and with repairs will be fully operational within six months or so."
The moon bases suffered as well. Anything that was exposed got the same type of treatment. Antennas, solar arrays, instruments and communications arrays were mostly destroyed. With no protective atmosphere all of the gear there was exposed. Fortunately no personnel were lost.
"So, basically, we got off easily," Secretary Billings summarized.
"Pretty much," General Easystone agreed. "We were looking at the elimination of the human race and most everything on the planet, and we received instead some inconvenient damage."
"It's somewhat ironic that the aliens that are the source of all our problems were the ones who saved us," Dr. Allen pointed out.
"Saved the planet, I think," Hollister said. "They didn't want to see the Earth damaged by that thing any more than we did."
"True, but it gives us another chance," the Secretary said.
"It's more than a bit humbling," Air Force General Markham added. "They've obviously done something like this before. They were fully prepared and had all the tools right at hand. It didn't even look difficult for them. One ship! One ship was all they sent, and less than an hour after they went to work the damned rock was powder. Think of the power they control, and the technology. We are primitives in comparison. We couldn't have even gotten there, let alone taken any meaningful action."
"Our experts are saying that last blast that cleared out a great deal of the dust and small remains was some kind of anti-matter weapon, not a nuclear bomb as some people were theorizing. It doesn't look like we'd stand any kind of a chance against them."
General Easystone, shook his head minutely, but didn't speak. He hadn't seen anything yet that suggested the aliens were immune to nukes, although there might be some serious problems delivering them in a meaningful way.
"Has anyone established where the ship came from?" Bud Hollister asked.
General Markham shook his head. "Beyond that it didn't come from the base we are watching in Australia, we know almost nothing. It is still believed that it came from somewhere in the northern hemisphere, but there isn't enough tracking data to hazard a meaningful guess. We also were unable to spot it returning, so we aren't even sure what happened to it. Maybe it activated some kind of higher order space drive and is on its way home, wherever that is, to report this incident."
"So we are back to just one extinction scenario, the one where they gradually kill us off and steal our planet," Secretary Billings said. "Has any progress been made on an analysis of the fields around the station we found in the Outback?"
Dr. Allen nodded. "The residual fields are not at all similar to those we encountered on the moon, which explains why no one was having any luck finding the base. Not only are the sites different, and scaled very differently, the magnetic signature is just as dissimilar, which might suggest a very different function of the bases on Earth."
"That doesn't make sense," General Easystone objected. "Both the moon and Earth are being forcibly moved, so it would seem like the bases need to be doing the same kind of thing. What bothers me is that the scaling seems reversed. I would have expected the base on the Earth to have been the larger facility."
"Unless they wanted the bases here better hidden, and maybe made up for scale with number," the Secretary of Defense suggested.
"Whatever the reason, we have a very small and intense local magnetic field," Dr. Allen said. "It would be easy to miss. At least it isn't something that one would expect to see. So if we can find more like this we will know we have something of interest."
"The NSA people are focusing on areas with low population densities. Isolated areas like the spot where we found the base in Australia. Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of territory to examine. It will take time. The isolation of the magnetic fields, especially on such a fine grid, takes a lot of computational power. It would be faster if we could delegate areas between ourselves and both Russia and China."
"Maybe they just have a pair of bases here on Earth," the Secretary suggested. "The one in Australia we know about and a sec
ond one exactly opposite on the far side of the globe. Where would that put it?"
"Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean," Hollister replied.
"Okay, so much for my brilliant insights. Let's get that call set up and get some help on this. Meanwhile, we have eyes on the alien facility in Australia, so if they do anything we should know about it right away."
It didn't take that long to set up the call. Both the Russians and the Chinese had been communicated with after the asteroid had been demolished by the aliens, and the representatives of the three nations had discussed the matter briefly, agreeing to talk again once the Earth had passed through the debris field of the former threat. This would be the first contact since that time.
When it was believed that the asteroid was going to impact Earth, the intention had been to inform both countries of the findings in Australia, but once the asteroid had been destroyed and that threat eliminated, a decision was made to hold back until after passing the orbit intersection point to focus on that discovery. Those two nations hadn't had the visibility of the alien ship taking apart the asteroid, and had been very interested in the video that had been forwarded to them. Now the US team could also inform their counterparts of the difference in the magnetic fields that were now being sought.
It took a short time to bring all sides current with the impacts each had sustained as a result of the passing through the intersection point. Russia was currently out of contact with their base on the moon, something they hoped would be re-established in a matter of hours once the redundant gear could be brought out of stores and set up.
"You knew this before and didn't tell us?" the Chinese General asked angrily. "I thought we were sharing all information."
"At first we weren't certain what we had. It was a somewhat wild story from an old Outback Aborigine. Once we established we had a real location, the anticipated impact was mere hours away, and we were uncertain if it was wise to distract people with the information at that time. It seemed somewhat like an unimportant distraction at that point. By the time we'd decided to pass along what we found in case we were completely wiped out, the alien's actions consumed our attention. Poor decisions, I admit."