by Jack Colrain
“They nuked us?” he asked the generals, admirals, and technicians filling the ultra-modern room. There were more than enough screens and high-tech consoles to keep dozens of tech geeks and strategists busy 24/7, but every eye was on the big display, and every ear glued to a phone or headset.
“NORAD doesn’t think so,” Air Force General Amanda Carver said at last, over the background chatter. She was a woman of average height, with close-cropped auburn hair, and wore US Space Command insignia. She’d never expected to be placed in charge of such a group, but it had been a dream come true for her, as her father had gone from being an Air Force fighter pilot to being an astronaut back in the 1980s. “Their best guess is a dense metallic impactor—nickel-iron—about 75 meters across, accelerated by artificial means to give an impact yield equivalent to a fifty-megaton nuke.”
“Jesus,” somebody muttered.
Carver nodded. “Jesus would probably understand it pretty well; in Biblical terms, they stoned us, not nuked us.”
Secretary Davies frowned. “But if they have the technology to travel however many light-years, why would they just… throw rocks? They must have firepower far beyond any nuke ever built.”
“Why bother?” Carver asked simply. “Technology can fail; control signals can be jammed. There’s not much you can do to interfere with a rock once it’s been thrown. If your rock is metallic enough, you can accelerate it to any speed you want with a magnetic rail—”
“Like a railgun?”
“Not just like,” an admiral said from across the floor. “Exactly, a railgun.”
General Carver nodded. “Make your rock fast enough, and shooting it down or deflecting it with missile defenses stops being an option—and the faster it goes, the higher the destructive yield on impact. And if your target doesn’t have any sort of missile defense, you don’t even need to accelerate it at all. Just let go of it from orbit on a trajectory that will take it where you want to hit, and let gravity do the work.”
An adjutant approached Secretary Davies with a phone. “Sir, it’s the President.”
“Yes, Jim,” Davies said into the phone. “I see...” He nodded thoughtfully, even though the man on the other end of the line couldn’t see it. “I think that’s our only real option, yes. Yes, I’ll get things moving on that here. Good luck.”
He handed the phone back to the adjutant as his expression caught the eye of everyone in the room. “The President has been in consultation with the leaders of various nations—China, Russia, Australia, our NATO allies—and all are agreed that...” He hesitated, as if trying to think of a gentler way to phrase what he had to say. “Whatever or whoever that thing is, or those in control of it, have committed an act of war upon this planet. We are agreed that a proportionate response is necessary.”
“For retaliation?” Carver asked. “Is that even possible?”
“Space Command’s job is to make it possible.”
Greenwich, CT.
Daniel West was, literally, on the edge of his seat in his parents’ large TV lounge, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Their TV was a lot bigger than the one in his New Haven apartment, but he wasn’t sure that was necessarily a good thing.
On the screen, a slightly distorted fish-eye lens image showed jagged black and gray shards and spikes on a slowly-rotating, slate-colored backdrop. It was impossible to tell whether any of the stuff was rock, or metal, or some other weird material. Daniel supposed that’s why they called it ‘alien’—he knew enough about Latin from his legal studies to know that the word meant ‘other.’ Maybe it was something other than rock or metal. There was a NASA copyright notice in one corner of the image. Daniel guessed they’d turned an imaging and photography satellite around to get a good look at the object that had destroyed Sydney.
There didn’t seem to be doors or windows, let alone laser cannons or engines. It didn’t look much different than the images sent back by probes that had landed on comets or asteroids.
A reporter had been giving a voice-over about what the news coverage was showing, but they didn’t have much to talk about, so he’d kept looping back to experts repeating that they had no idea, and callers demanding it be destroyed. Daniel had turned the sound off.
Now, however, a scroll had opened up at the bottom of the screen, reading, ‘US and Chinese missiles launched at object,’ and he grabbed for the remote to turn it back on.
The image rotated, just enough to include the curvature of Earth and a number of bright specks approaching the object. “We’re fortunate,” a female reporter was saying excitedly, “that NASA has a good view of the imminent impacts of the nuclear ICBMs launched by China and the US. NASA exo-geologists estimating the density and structure of the material from their satellite images believe that two or three impacts will shatter—”
The voice fell silent as a flash came from somewhere between the spikes protruding from the object’s surface. At the same time, one of the approaching specks flared up spectacularly, almost whiting-out the satellite’s camera. Then, another flash and another whiteout, and another, and another. Daniel winced, glancing away from the TV at the rapid flashing like camera flashes at a concert.
“Oh my god. The missiles—” the reporter’s voice cut off, and Daniel saw that the TV screen had gone to gray static. He picked up the remote and started flicking channels, but they were all the same: cable, streaming, everything. Dismayed, he reached for his cellphone to call for tech support, and he almost jumped out of his skin when the phone buzzed and shook just as his hand touched it.
It wasn’t Cody, or his dad, or anyone else he knew—not that he knew personally, anyway. It was the Presidential alert system, but the message on it was weird:
MOZARI, it read. The word just sat there, and Daniel couldn’t tell if it was a plea, an order, or just some new attempt at a buzzword from the government. It was on the TV screen, as well, now: MOZARI. Daniel leapt to his feet and ran to his laptop in the study. When it booted up, its screen reassuringly showed his usual desktop background and icons, but as soon as he opened a browser window, that reassurance blew away like smoke. There was no internet.
There was just MOZARI. He glanced back through the door to the lounge just in time to see the TV image change. It still showed just one word, but now the word was TRAINING. The same thing had happened on his cell and laptop. TRAINING, they now proclaimed. After a minute or so, the screens changed again, and to a new single word: NOW. This time, he kept watching until the word changed again, and this time it was to a phrase. WE ARE THE MOZARI.
Now the screens started to show multiple words at a time. First, WE ARE THE MOZARI, and then, TRAINING BEGINS NOW.
The two phrases alternated, flashing back and forth almost painfully on every medium Daniel could check—TV, email, texts, everything.
WE ARE THE MOZARI. TRAINING BEGINS NOW.
The Pentagon, VA.
General Amanda Carver had never heard a C-In-C go so silent. The screens said all anyone needed to know. “Every missile destroyed,” she whispered.
“If this is what they call training...” Secretary Davies said. “I’d hate to know what they’d call real.”
“Sirs,” a technician said in a quavering voice. “I think we might be about to find out.”
“NORAD reporting three inbound targets,” another technician chimed in. “No, wait, six targets, on ballistic arcs.”
Alarms began to sound. “That’s our early warning system,” Carver exclaimed.
“Three targets projected to impact on the continental United States,” someone was saying.
“Where?!” General Carver demanded. “We need to start evacuation protocols for—”
“USGS reports impacts in China,” another technician called.
“NORAD confirms,” another said. “Impacts at coordinates… Shenzhen. It’s the city of Shenzhen.”
“US impact projection confirmed. Three targets are on trajectory for Houston, Texas.”
“Get on
to our people there,” Carver snapped. “Begin evacuation procedures.”
“Impact reported. Houston has gone off the air.”
Carver fell silent and slumped into her chair. Signals came in from so many channels and phones and screens for another minute, and then there was a deafening silence. For a moment, the screens showed static, and then words appeared.
UNITE AND LIVE.
“Jesus,” Carver muttered, just before the words changed.
FIGHT AND DIE.
There was sobbing around the room, and prayers and muffled swearing. Then the systems came back on line. For a few hours, the C-In-C worked as best as its occupants could manage, given the scale of the attack that had just occurred. The Secretary of Defense managed to make a trip to meet with the President and the rest of the Cabinet while General Carver was able to plan out orders for Space Command, and have a conference call with senior staff in Strategic Command.
The last thing she wanted, when she had been awake for twenty-seven of the worst hours in Earth’s history, was to hear the newest words that came from the NORAD comms operator: “New contacts separating from the main object.” Carver felt a void open in her gut, as if she were going to be sick. “How many?” she asked wearily.
The reply sounded incredulous. “Twenty-four object returns, random trajectories.”
Carver gritted her teeth so as not to be sick. She could hear someone failing on that score somewhere behind her. “More cities... How many millions...?”
The NORAD comms tech frowned, and said, “No cities. They’re tumbling, much harder to track.”
“Meteors?”
“Radar returns suggest low mass, approximately two metric tons each, size estimated to three meters... hollow.”
Hollow? If they were hollow, what might be inside them? “Track them. Get every service branch on this—anything with radar, anything with magneto-metrics, satellite imagery—whatever these things are, be they canisters, or pods of some kind, or just pieces of debris, we have to find them.”
“And we won’t be the only ones looking,” the Secretary of Defense said, coming back into the room. “These are going to be the highest value recoveries with which our military has ever been tasked. However unreal all this may seem today.”
“Trust me, Mr. Secretary,” Carver said grimly, nodding to the big strategic information screens all around. “This is more real than any of us have ever seen before.”
“And may God have mercy on our souls?” the Secretary asked.
Carver snorted. “I guess that depends on whether it’s one of our gods or one of theirs that’s at work today.”
Two
Greenwich, CT.
The May sky was bright and blue over Connecticut, but the last of the early spring frosts had long since gone, and Maria West had decided it was about time to plant the infant tomato plants she’d bought a few days earlier. Daniel concurred; he’d been helping her out with gardening for as long as he could remember, and it had become a normal part of his life as he’d grown up. These days, two months after the Mozari had appeared in orbit and destroyed Sydney, it was a touchstone to the old normality of the world.
Maria was almost as tall as her son, and although she’d turned fifty at the beginning of the year, she had very little gray in her hair, and was as fit and healthy as most thirty-somethings Daniel knew. By contrast, Nathan West, Daniel’s father, looked pretty much like any TV show’s idea of a middle-aged financier; a little overweight, his hair graying but not falling out—which gave Daniel hope for his own future—and with a piercing gaze.
Nathan had chosen his land wisely when he’d bought the house, selecting a large 1930s property enclosed at the end of a long driveway by a very sturdy and ornamental six-foot-high trellis-type fence. This backed onto a hundred and ten acres of meadow land on the outskirts of the city, all of it surrounded and divided into fields by lower fences. Originally, Nathan had considered the land an investment upon which he could build other properties to sell or rent, but in the end his wife’s attraction to walking the dogs and growing produce in a little section of countryside—probably going back to the fact that she had grown up on a farm in Spain—meant that he had only built one smaller house which was a short walk from his own. Originally, the second house had been the residence of the gardener and groundskeeper and her family, but they’d reluctantly left the Wests’ employment to be with their more elderly relatives on the West Coast after M-Day, the day the Mozari had destroyed Sydney.
The West family had been sad to see them go but couldn’t blame them. This was definitely a time to look after family. Nathan had given them a generous severance bonus and made sure they knew that, if ever they needed it, he would give them any assistance possible.
Their departure meant the family spent longer hours looking after their land, but they were all fit and healthy enough to not be too concerned, and it had always been a hobby anyway. They simply enjoyed working their land. Maria probably enjoyed it the most, Daniel thought, because of her rural upbringing. His father seemed to view the matter more professionally. He would pontificate, given half a chance, on how people needed to think about producing their own food because, he was sure, they were facing the worst global disruption of civilization in history since the Mozari had arrived in orbit two months ago. He had even written an article about it for the Greenwich Magazine.
The gardeners’ house hadn’t remained empty, however. The housekeeper, Mrs. Gordon, and her husband were both nearing seventy years of age, and they’d been only too grateful to move in to a new home that meant she no longer needed to pay rent nor take a long bus ride to travel between work and home. Their son, Mick, was an ex-sailor who had been Nathan’s driver for years.
“This one’s a good one,” Daniel said to his mom, holding up a young plant to the sunlight and squinting at the leaves. “Plenty of silver on it.” Maria looked for herself, observing the fine downy silver hairs on the green surface of the leaves. Daniel knew from experience that the best tomato plants had that silver sheen.
“Definitely silver hairs on that one,” she agreed, handing the little plastic pot back to him and pointing to a spot of turned-over earth near a decorative trellis. “I think there would be a good spot.” Daniel knelt as directed, tipping the plant gently into his hand, readying it to go into the socket that his mother had just knelt to dig out with her trowel. “We’ll lay this crop of tomatoes here, so we can hitch garden canes to the trellis as they grow. Keep them nice and safe from any breezes.”
Daniel nodded, barely noticing a faint knocking from somewhere within the house. “When we’re done here, I’ll go and get the compost bags from the back of the pickup.”
“Good. We’ll need them pretty soon.”
The French doors at the back of the house opened, and Mrs. Gordon stepped out and made her way stiffly through the rose garden to where Daniel and Maria had stood up to greet her. “There’s a man at the door,” Mrs. Gordon said without preamble, “to see Dan.”
“Me?” Daniel couldn’t help being surprised. Cody would just have come on in, and Mrs. Gordon would have been able to at least identify most of his other friends. “Who is it?”
“A postman. Hopefully, not a disgruntled one, but he didn’t have a gun. Just some envelopes. And a form.”
Daniel and Maria exchanged glances. She looked as pale as he felt. “OK,” Daniel said. He nodded to his mother. “This won’t take long.” Then he followed Mrs. Gordon back into the house and through to the front hallway. Although there were a couple of chairs for visitors, the walnut-skinned guy in the USPS uniform remained standing. He looked surprisingly old for a postal worker, but was still in solid shape, with iron-gray hair cut short enough to kill its natural curl.
He extended a hand. “Daniel West?”
“I’m Dan West.” He shook the man’s hand, finding the grip surprisingly strong. Clearly, this guy had kept in shape, and probably wrestled bears or alligators in his younger days, Daniel thought, ha
lf-seriously. Between the stance, grip, and posture, and the way he wore the uniform like it was tailored, and not just hung on for work, the guy had military veteran written all over him. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, if you’ve been watching the news, I guess you probably have some idea.” He offered a faint smile.
“The draft registration?”
The guy nodded sympathetically. “Your Selective Service registration expired last birthday, but now that the President has instituted a degree of martial law... registration is being expanded to cover up to age forty-five instead of twenty-five. Selective Service have gotten us—I mean, the USPS—to help make sure that everybody between the old cut-off age and the new one is still registered. Or re-registered.” His expression took a sad turn. “Women, too, which is a big change from my draft...”
“You were drafted?”
“First time, yeah. I re-upped voluntarily, mind you, back in the day.”
“I did see the news, but...” Voices on TV said a lot, but rarely seemed to say anything that affected Daniel personally. He felt a little dizzy, as if he was dreaming, or as if he was waking up from a dream in which he’d been a final-year law student with ambitions for the Bar and a federal attorney’s office. One of the two realities must be true. “I’d have thought there would be contact by text or email, or—”
“Like the government’s going to trust that stuff when there’s an enemy up there who can take over all our communications when they want, or flatten cities in India and Pakistan the moment their governments so much as say the W word to each other.” He shook his head. “No, son, face to face contact is where it’s at. Filling in forms in pen and ink, so that hopefully the data can be kept un-hacked by whatever those Mozari are.”
“Unless they’re capable of posing as humans and getting postal jobs?” Daniel suggested, maybe half-seriously.
The guy shrugged. “Who knows? If they are, I’m not one; but if I was one, I’d say I wasn’t, so I guess you got to just go with it.”