Think of it as a hand – the hand of some immense intelligence that separated interstellar civilizations from each other until they were ready to take their equal place on the universal stage.
“… Linh?”
“Not all races are smart.”
“How does this Fold operate, anyway? You said it separates us from… the modern galaxy.”
“Incorrect – the modern universe.”
Harry swallowed, and he continued, “So does that mean… there are more people out there like you?” Again hope shone through his tone.
Linh paused, turned, and shook her head. “They won’t come to protect the Earth. It’s beyond the Fold, and therefore, beyond the Accords.”
“The Accords?”
“The only thing that keeps the modern universe peaceful. Or, at least, technically peaceful,” she said, emphasizing the word technically. “It does not apply to any planet beyond the Fold.”
“So no one’s going to come help us?”
Linh chose not to answer.
“What about you and all of these other alien residents of Earth, or whatever they are? Won’t their races come to protect them?”
“They won’t interfere beyond the Fold.”
“So we’re all screwed?” Harry asked, his fractured voice making it clear he was seconds from breaking down.
Linh still faced him. “I have a ship capable of punching out of the fold and making it back to ordinary space now the invaders have opened a gate. The invaders will not be able to follow us there. They can do what they want here, but out there, they’ll have to follow the Accords.”
Something finally struck Harry. “You’re talking about running away, aren’t you?”
Linh looked right into Harry’s eyes and nodded.
“But you… you have to stay and help. You know more about these invaders. You’ve got technology. You need to use it to help us,” Harry begged.
Linh wouldn’t stop looking at him. He was losing it, breaking down with all the finesse of an earthquake undermining a city. “The Earth is already lost. You do not possess technology sophisticated enough to take on an invasion squad like this. It doesn’t matter what other alien residents are on earth. I doubt they’ll have the power to take on an invasion force like this.”
“How do you know that?”
“I come from a race that does one specific thing. As I’ve already told you, my people used to be the heart of battlecruisers. We take battle data and use it to predict and react to outcomes. Think of us as light years beyond your most sophisticated supercomputers. We access a realm beyond facts and use that fluid understanding of causality and probability to optimize battle decisions. So yes – I know that the Earth has no hope,” she said, and though she tried to keep her voice even, on the word hope, it fractured.
At first, after Linh had crash-landed on Earth, it had taken her some time to adjust to humanity and its peculiar concepts. It inefficiently split reality into unnecessary arbitrary concepts that compromised the way people calculated and appreciated probabilities. It led to appalling long-term decisions and constrained the long-term capacity of this race.
But there was one concept Linh had found uniquely alluring. Hope.
Even as a being capable of predicting future occurrences from a seemingly incalculable number of data points, she appreciated that there were some things that could not be predicted. It wasn’t simply that there were some data points beyond her reach. It was that, at the heart of reality, indeterminism was built-in.
But it was a leap from understanding that there was an element of chance in every situation to wishing that element of chance would begin working in your favor. Which is precisely what hope was. It allowed the human mind to trick itself into thinking that things would get better.
Again Harry looked as if he’d fall apart. But just before he could crack completely, he looked right at Linh. “Thanks for the offer, but I won’t come. I’ll stay. I’ll do what I can. Because you’re wrong.”
She arched an eyebrow softly. “What do you mean I’m wrong?”
Digging deep from some unknown reserve, Harry stood taller, encouraged the strength back into his muscles, and faced Linh with renewed determination. “There’ll be a way.”
Linh didn’t need to ask him to clarify what he assumed there would be a way to. Redemption. Salvation for the human race.
She couldn’t agree. She went to turn away, but Harry got there first, heading back the way they’d come. “I’ll take the Jeep. Good luck getting beyond the Fold, or whatever you call it. If there’s anything – anything at all you can do once you’re beyond that – please do it. We don’t deserve to die.”
Linh stood there, and she stared.
She opened her mouth to reinforce to Harry once more that it was virtually statistically impossible that humanity would see itself through this invasion. But she saw something in Harry’s eyes, something that told her he didn’t care.
He nodded once, then started to walk back toward the car.
She opened her mouth to tell him to stop.
She pressed it closed.
Two sides of her were warring. The side that could appreciate there was no chance for humanity, yet the side that could appreciate hope was the only thing Harry had left now.
Her concern won out. She opened her mouth.
She stopped as her better side caught up with her.
Throughout the entire conversation – throughout the entire ride over here – the flow part of her mind had not been switched off. Her conclusion was still clear. It didn’t matter what each individual human did – the human race and Earth were still screwed. There simply didn’t exist the amount of power required to take on the invaders. And even if humanity could somehow scrounge the weapons to make a difference, they were too desperate. Most modern races had computational power that far outstripped anything humanity could comprehend. It would mean that the invaders would be capable of predicting every single move the humans would be able to think of. Under circumstances like that, all hope was was ignorance.
She reinforced that conclusion as she turned from Harry and continued through the jungle.
And yet, no matter what she did, she could not stop his last words from echoing through her head.
Once she left the Fold, she should do everything she could to help humanity.…
But how much would it take to save this condemned race, and how much was she willing to give?
There were countless examples of races like humanity across the universe. Planets that had been invaded and cultures that had been lost.
No single race had more right to live than any other. If you wanted to live, you had to prove your right through might.
And today, humanity would be able to prove nothing.
With that cold conclusion flowing through her, Linh walked on.
Chapter 13
Amal
There was only so much Amal could do to keep the men and women around him focused. Their world was literally falling apart around them.
A Cartaxian strike ship had arrived over London, bursting out of a massive dark cloud bank in the middle of the morning.
But civilization hadn’t crumbled yet. The Cartaxians hadn’t attacked in full, no doubt still concentrating their forces on assassinating alien residents of Earth so when the invasion began in full, it wouldn’t be interrupted.
But there was a difference between bridges and buildings and houses and roads crumbling, and minds going first. It is often at the point where hope turns into utter desperation that battles are lost.
Amal could not touch the minds of everyone throughout England and push their fractured psyches past desperation to the point of action. But he could affect the group right in front of him.
And he did.
Of all the soldiers lining the streets, preparing their defenses behind hastily made barricades, parked troop transports, and Metropolitan police squad cars, those within Amal’s vicinity were the calmest.
They did not keep their heads back and stare at the massive underbelly of the Cartaxian strike vessel. They were poised for what would happen next.
And what would happen next would be an all-out battle for the city.
Amal had gleaned a lot when he’d invaded the mind of the Cartaxian. He’d picked up snippets of the plan to come. For some reason, the Cartaxians had no intention of leveling London and other key capitals around the world. They wanted the cities whole.
And yet, they would still require them subdued.
So rather than launch a blitzkrieg-style attack from their strike ships, and completely obliterate London in a few seconds, the Cartaxians had planned a ground assault.
There was only so much Amal could do. He was a Centauri, but there was only one of him.
Though his race was strong and steady in battle, it wasn’t their true place. They were better off behind the lines, guiding and calming troops, connecting minds when the constant assault of battle threatened to make individuals out of groups. For that is a concept that the Centauri’s understood better than most.
Battles are rarely won by individuals. They are won by armies that can fight together, that can maximize their ability to operate as a singular unit and not a disparate collection of parts.
But there is only so much that connection can forge. Without raw firepower, Amal knew that the taking of London was only a matter of time.
And that matter of time was now.
Just before the underbelly of the strike ship opened, Amal felt it. He momentarily connected with the ship full of bloodthirsty Cartaxians above. He saw flashes of their greed for war, of their thirst for the consumption of others. And all of it was directed down into the city like a funnel getting ready to suck a puddle dry.
Amal reached forward and locked a hand on the shoulder of the soldier in front of him.
He connected to the woman’s mind, and through her, to the minds of the rest of the unit.
And he held them together with the hands of his consciousness as the massive hatch of the strike vessel opened.
There was no sound, neither the grating of metal or the hiss of depressurized air.
The Cartaxians had already instituted a sound-dampening field over the city, correctly ascertaining that humans would become disoriented if they couldn’t hear the sounds around them.
It made the sight of the strike vessel opening like a black flower reaching toward the sun surreal. It would be dreamlike for the humans, possessing the quality of an image not a circumstance.
But as Amal maintained his connection to the troops and police around him, he pushed them past that point of abstraction and back into the real world. He held them together as the first glimpses of Cartaxian armored units became visible through the hatch.
Dawn was finally breaking over London, and here and there, scant rays of sunlight managed to push past the tumultuous clouds. They glimmered off the Cartaxian warriors above. Then the first wave jumped.
Amal would hold on as long as he could.
But how long he could hold on was no longer dependent on him.
To get through this, he would require either an act of God, or an act of chance, but he could rely on neither.
Chapter 14
Hena
They were getting ready to attack.
The 10 Cartaxian strike ships distributed at key points around the globe were minutes from initiating land attacks.
Not air attacks. For some reason, the strike vessels were not getting ready to deploy their far superior air capabilities on the human population of Earth. Instead, Hena could practically hear the bellies of the strike ships bursting with Cartaxian warriors getting ready for a full-scale land assault.
Which made no sense at all. If the Cartaxians were here to take down humanity and claim this resource-rich world for themselves, they would value swiftness above everything else.
But if they were opting for a ground attack, that meant one thing. They couldn’t afford the large-scale, imprecise damage that would come from high-yield air attacks.
What were they after?
Though the Accords prevented Hena from getting involved in the fight, they did not prevent her from observing. There was nothing to say that she could not use her skills to transport across the globe and keep track of those 10 strike vessels.
She’d already warped to the point above the South China Sea where the gate was opening.
It was smaller than she would’ve suspected. Obviously the Cartaxians had only been able to break the Fold with a small force. But what was a small force to her was an unmanageable force to the humans. The difference between one strike ship and ten to them was irrelevant.
But to her, it was a curiosity, one confounded by the Cartaxian’s apparent unwillingness to launch a swift air attack.
“What are you after?” she found herself muttering under her breath once more as she hovered above the western United States.
There was a strike vessel appearing from a cloud 100 kilometers away.
She doubted, considering the relative lack of sophistication of the ship, that it would be able to detect her. Or perhaps every single Cartaxian ship had now primed their sensors to pick up the unique bio readings of a Peacekeeper.
If she chose to, she could mask her signal. If she chose to, she could mask her signal from even the most sophisticated of scanners.
But there was a difference between observing and hiding.
For now, she hovered there, her blue light form still covering her body.
She paused for several more seconds, watching the spectacle that was the ship pushing from the cloud bed it was embedded within.
She could tell that the attack was minutes from beginning. Seconds, in fact. A second before the ship began to descend, its massive belly orienting toward New York, she felt the ship’s apparently invisible thrusters alter direction.
She shifted back.
She brought her fingers in. They curled, one by one, pressing hard against her palm, energy coalescing as they contracted.
But just before she could form a light sword, she relaxed her hands.
She knew what was at stake.
Earth was one planet. Within the universe, there were innumerable. She would not risk her race to save this world, when her race could save so many others.
Did she agree with the Accords?
No.
Could she afford to break them?
No.
So Hena pushed a hand to the side and opened another gate.
She lingered.
Her fingers threatened to curl in once more.
But then her better judgment won out, and she transported.
She would observe. Every atrocity. Every death. And she would remember this civilization, even if no one else was alive to do the same.
Chapter 15
Kim
The invasion was about to begin. He didn’t need the heat signatures being picked up off the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea to tell that.
It was in the air.
This sense of anticipation, almost as if Planet Earth itself was taking a breath before the first onslaught.
Kim was downtown. Though the government had done their best to evacuate people, there was nowhere to put them. And perhaps they could appreciate that there was nowhere safe.
Not anymore.
The strike vessel above the city had now completely pulled free from the cloud around it, and its black, sleek belly hung low over the city, right above the Han River.
Kim understood the sanity of sending armored units in for covert assassinations. He did not understand why the Cartaxians would bother initiating a land assault.
Unless they were after something.
What?
He didn’t have the time or luxury to question.
The hatch to the belly of the vessel began to open. The soldiers lined up on both sides of the riverbank wouldn’t be able to hear it.
Kim could. The Cartaxians could use a
ll of the sound-dampening fields they wanted, but now his endoskeleton was back up and running, they’d need a dampening field 10 times as strong to prevent him from picking up the grate of metal as the hull plating moved seamlessly into the sides of the ship.
“This is it, ha?” he commented to himself, finally pocketing his phone.
He was currently standing on one of the pylons underneath Hangang Bridge, his shoulder pressed into the concrete beside him, one foot hooked over the other.
Now he stood straight, clapped his hands together, and stretched. His muscles didn’t creak, and neither did his endoskeleton.
Kim didn’t know how many other alien residents of Earth would be out there in Seoul, but statistics dictated that he couldn’t have been the only one to survive the first attack.
So it was time to buy humanity a chance.
He’d already stashed the chunks of the Cartaxian armor. But before that, he’d taken detailed structural scans and sent them to every security agency around the world.
Kim cracked his shoulders once more, shifted his chin to the side, and watched as lines of Cartaxian soldiers readied just beyond the opening hatch.
Just as the sun glimmered off their armor, Kim patched his endoskeleton into his phone and used it to connect to any remaining cellular signals the Cartaxians hadn’t jammed. He also used it to patch himself into the same radiofrequency the soldiers on the ground were using.
“Right, let’s do this.” Kim pressed a hand into the base of the pylon and pushed forward.
Above him, the first wave of Cartaxian warriors dropped down. There were only about 100, but that was technically 100 too many for humanity.
But humanity wasn’t alone.
As Kim pressed off, he intercepted military radio traffic and started handing out orders.
He fully expected the humans to ignore him – until they saw what he could do.
Technically Kim could fly with his endoskeleton – but it was a stupid waste of energy.
He didn’t need to, anyway. He pushed off the pylon with enough force to send him jolting high into the sky.
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