by Jack Colrain
“You and Daniel grew up as close as any two brothers I’ve seen,” Nathan said. “What else should I do but keep you and Chloe safe? And if Jill does try something, you’ll definitely be safer here.”
Later, Daniel returned from picking up groceries to find his mother looking worried. “Something happened?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said quietly. “He said earlier that he was going home to collect any mail. He went, came back... and ten minutes later, I heard his car peel out as if he was on a drag strip. It’s not like him.”
Daniel frowned. If there’d been something unpleasant in the mail, it most likely would have been from Jill or her attorney, but surely Cody would have come to him about that? So, it wasn’t about that, he supposed. “Did he get a phone call, maybe?”
“I didn’t hear anything. It’s not like him, as far as I can tell, though you know him better, of course.”
“No, you’re right, it’s not like him.” He resisted a frown and forced a benign expression onto his face. “I’m sure he’s OK. I’ll see if I can find him and get to the bottom of things. How’s Chloe’s gardening education going?”
“Quite well, though she mostly watched the strawberries for that moment when they’re just ripened.” Maria gave a little chuckle. “I’d best make sure she’s not over-watering them.” Daniel laughed, and watched as she disappeared back out into the garden. When she was gone, he furrowed his brow and went into the study. Cody had collected his mail, perhaps seen something in it that upset him, and then taken off. If he had opened it here, he either would have dropped the envelope into the waste paper bin in the study, or Daniel’s parents sure as hell would have, assuming it hadn’t gone with his friend.
Daniel knelt by the waste paper bin and sifted through the contents. It didn’t take long to find a torn-open envelope, upon which was a Selective Service mark. Immediately, he knew what had happened, and his heart plummeted far down past his stomach. “That’s not fair,” he muttered.
Cody Walker was in the first cop bar that Daniel checked, not far from Bruce Place. His friend was slumped at the bar, nursing a bourbon the size of a hipster’s coffee. “I hope you weren’t planning on driving home,” Daniel said, sliding onto the next stool.
“Maybe I’ll take that freight car to Canada.”
“There’s an SUV with a driver available. It’s more comfortable, and Canada’s always an option.” Cody turned the glass around with his fingertips. “You look like you’re at a funeral.”
“As family separations go, I may as well be.”
“Separations? You’re not missing the psycho ex, surely?” Daniel knew that wasn’t the case, of course.
“That I always did, Wild. But, no.” He slapped a folded piece of card on the bar top. “My number came up.”
Daniel pulled the ripped envelope from his own pocket. “The draft lottery.”
“That’s the one.” Cody knocked back the shot he’d been holding. “So, I’ll lose Chloe anyway. After all we went through up in Boston.”
“Wait, the draft can’t force you to go and leave a child unsupervised—”
“Well, it can, if I’m reading the deferment categories right. I don’t see one for being a single parent who kidnapped his daughter back from a religious cult.”
“They’re not going to drag you away from your daughter,” Daniel argued. “Even if there isn’t a general rule on parents, there are appeals procedures even during a wartime draft. Dad and I will have a look at the relevant laws, OK?”
“I checked it out. There’s an appeals procedure, but it takes 90 days, and I have to report to a MEPS within ten days.”
“A what?”
“Military Entrants Processing Station.” Cody beckoned the barkeep for another shot, and one for Daniel, who politely refused. “You do espresso?” he asked the barkeep. The guy turned to a machine and began producing one.
Cody sighed. “I give them a date and time, and the Army sends me an e-ticket for a commercial carrier to St. Louis. From there, a bus takes a bunch of us to Fort Leonard Wood, and my law enforcement career path switches from trying to make detective to being re-purposed as an MP. And God only knows when I see Chloe again.” He froze on that thought, blood draining from his face. “Jesus, if I’m drafted, they could give sole custody to—”
“Not gonna happen,” Daniel said quickly. “Not when she violated custody terms, and not when the draft is equal opportunity now.” He grabbed Cody by the shoulders, locking eyes with him. “We are not going to let you lose Chloe.” He held Cody’s gaze until he was sure Cody knew he was serious, and knew he was right, and then let himself smile to help bring him back down. “Besides, she may like Canada.”
St. Louis, MO.
The flight had been pretty uneventful—the cabin not too crowded, the seat not uncomfortable—and Daniel West had had the sense to bring along a paperback the size of a breeze-block to pass the time on the three-hour journey. He hadn’t interacted with them, but a couple of other passengers had the look of draftees heading to their inductions, and they were occasionally taking their documents out of their envelopes to double and triple-check that they had everything they needed.
When the plane landed at Lambert International, his restless legs stopped twitching. It would be just his luck, he thought, to have an old college friend walk past randomly and recognize him, or for an airline employee to have somehow gotten tipped off that he was doing something that just wasn’t supposed to be done. Daniel kept his legs to a brisk and purposeful walk, following the signs to the restrooms. Once in a cubicle, he emptied his pockets of his driver’s license, passport, and credit card, which he now cut up. Everything he’d needed for travel with the name Daniel West on it went into a paper bag, and then into a trash bin. Then he took a thick envelope from his travel satchel and transferred Cody’s draft papers, birth certificate, social security card, and so on, putting them in the appropriate pockets.
He wondered whether his mother had found Cody in the toolshed yet, and supposed it depended on whether Cody had yet woken up from the amount of alcohol Daniel had poured down his throat. If he was still asleep, he wouldn’t have made his presence known.
Daniel doubted he would get very far with his deception—he was pretty sure service personnel got fingerprinted as a matter of course, so they could be identified if killed, and when they checked his fingerprints, they’d find his DUI arrest records and true identity—but at least Cody would have that much more time to either use his cop contacts to get new ID for himself and Chloe, or to go to Canada after all. Wasn’t that the traditional thing to do when trying to avoid a draft?
Hell, the military might not even arrest Daniel when they found out, if they were desperate enough for warm bodies. Joining the Army hadn’t ever been the career he’d had in mind, and he doubted that his presence there would help much, but if it meant Chloe and Cody had each other, then it would be worth whatever the military did to him. He had already lost one sibling, when she was Chloe’s age, and anything was worth avoiding another loss like that.
Seven
The Pentagon, VA.
Three months before, when General Carver had last visited, for a budgetary appropriations meeting, the corridors of the Pentagon bustled with activity. Today, there were far fewer people around, perhaps a quarter of its usual working population. Carver wasn’t surprised; since the orbital bombardments had come down, every country with the ability to try had been moving their command and control centers to locations under mountains, and telling themselves that such locations offered at least some chance of surviving a meteor impact. Carver doubted anywhere could survive being at ground zero for such an impact, and she’d comprehensively studied the numbers supplied by scientists.
Such hardened locations were never really about surviving direct hits from asteroids, she reminded herself. They were about surviving nearby shock and blast damage from nuclear ground-strikes and air-bursts. Those, after all, were things that could be tested
in real-world conditions, whether at White Sands back in the 1940s, or underground in North Korea in more recent years. No terrestrial power could create a genuine test of an asteroid impact.
For now, higher-rated MVPs—most valuable personnel—were busy moving out to those new locations and setting them up. Carver had the rank and clearance to go where she liked but had decided that she would be better off holding court at familiar command centers where everything was still hooked up and known to work. It was a risk she was willing to take for smoother progress in her duties. If she felt the need for a thicker roof in case the sky should fall, she knew she could always head back to the upgraded and refurbished Cheyenne Mountain complex, which was Space Command’s alternate command center and more protected than the Peterson AFB headquarters.
In truth, she would have preferred to hold this conference at Peterson, but so many of the people who were awaiting her were civil servants and other DC-based government types that it was easier to have them commute down to the Pentagon than all the way to Colorado Springs.
When she reached the secure conference room, even she had to show her pass, though the two guards on the door were members of her staff and she knew both of them personally. She would have reprimanded them if they hadn’t checked her, and they knew that.
Inside the conference room, a couple dozen people, most with visitor badges from other agencies, were seated around a large table while uniformed aides de camp bustled around with briefing papers and the like. Carver nodded to Secretary of Defense Davies and greeted the President with a firm handshake. “Good to see you, Amanda,” the President said. He was a silver-haired ex-Marine, and kept himself interested in military matters, so most of the staff officers got on well with him.
“Likewise, Sir. If you’re ready, I’m sure we’re all prepared to engage with the issue at hand.”
“Excellent. We’ll get to you next. Not everybody’s here yet, but anybody who’s late can read the minutes.” He stood and cleared his throat for attention while Carver stepped aside and stood at parade rest behind him, her hands behind her back, to watch the big screen that was mounted on one wall.
On the screen was an aerial view of a team of US soldiers setting up a perimeter around a tubular canister half-buried in the earth. “As you may have seen in headlines in the spring,” Secretary Davies was saying, “shortly after the destruction of the cities they attacked, the Mozari launched two dozen objects towards Earth on an apparently random trajectory. Thankfully, all of these cargo pods have been recovered and accounted for. The US has ten, China three, and various other countries have one or more. Not all of the countries who have them are necessarily friendly or allied countries, but they are at least all sovereign nations who want to keep a tight lid on them.”
The President said, “The news media called them the Mozari Pods, and pods aren’t a bad name for them. They were in fact cargo containers, designed and built to survive an atmospheric re-entry without damaging the contents inside. Since that point, all of the G20 governments, and several other allied nations, have formed a development association covering what we need to know and do about the Mozari, both to live in a post-contact age, and to deal with the existential threat they pose.”
The President paused. “As some of you here probably already know, there was a third communication from the Mozari—” A ripple of surprise went through those who hadn’t been aware, though the uniformed attendants all remained admirably stone-faced. Allowing a moment for the room to process what he’d said, the President continued, “A communication to myself, the Russian and Chinese premiers, the British PM, and various others, including the command and control centers at Space Command and NORAD.” He glanced at Carver. “Amanda?”
She nodded and turned to switch on a huge flat-screen on the wall behind the President. In digits two feet high, a sequence of numbers was displayed: 271:14:52:21, and then the 21 clicked over to 20 and then 19...
“What the hell,” one of the suited men exclaimed—someone from FEMA, if Carver remembered rightly.
“It’s a countdown,” the CIA’s Deputy Director told him.
“Dammit, I can see that!”
Carver stepped forward slightly and said, “This first appeared almost immediately after the ‘unite and live’ message. Right away, we checked the cellphone networks, TV channels, and internet.” It had been the first time Carver, or anyone else in the C-In-C that day, had regretted that phones had to be left in storage outside of the secure command center. “This was directed at the nuclear club.”
“Quite a meaningful audience,” said the President, “I think you’ll all agree.”
There was a murmur around the room before Carver continued. “What we needed to know is, what is this a countdown to? A nuclear attack? More meteors? If we were dealing with human opposition, I’d say probably not an attack: why warn us and give away their advantage? Unless it was the countdown to a hostile response to an unanswered ultimatum, and they wanted to intimidate us into seeing things their way.”
“Maybe another country got the ultimatum signal?” Davies suggested. “Russia, China... If they’re keeping it quiet...”
Carver shook her head. “These Mozari seem capable of narrowing down their specific audience. They didn’t broadcast the countdown to the public communications systems, so I don’t think they’d be likely to send a separate communication somewhere narrower—not if it was needed to understand this one—but that’s why I said ‘if we were dealing with humans.’ We’ve no reason to assume their thought processes, logic, or motivations will match ours.”
The mahogany-skinned General Farris, an Army General, frowned. “Logic would suggest a hostile action at the expiration of the countdown. Maybe they want it to intimidate us, or maybe it’s a cultural thing, like honor, or that their god demands it.”
Carver looked at the screen again. The Mozari messages were short but concise, and they followed each other closely. “‘Unite and live, fight and die,’” she said aloud. The others in the room looked at her expectantly. “‘Your training begins now,’ and then there’s this countdown...”
Farris nodded. “They’re clearly threatening us; ‘fight and die’ is a pretty simple message.”
“Is it?” Carver shook her head. “Fight who and die?”
“Them, obviously. They destroyed Houston and Shenzhen for us trying to attack them.”
“Yes, they did. But what about Islamabad and New Delhi?”
“Well...” Farris hesitated.
Amanda answered her own question. “They were destroyed after starting to fight each other, not the Mozari ship. They didn’t unite, so they didn’t live.”
Secretary Davies nodded slowly. “I think I see what you mean.”
Carver was relieved that they were starting to get it. It had taken her some moments to be sure herself. As sure as she could be, anyway. “Then the ‘unite and live, fight and die’ message was followed by the training one. ‘Your training begins now.’ Which is probably what we’re supposed to unite in doing.”
“What do they mean by training?” the President asked. “They haven’t sent demands or instructions; there’s no indication as to how they mean to train us.”
“If they mean to train us,” Davies said. “Maybe they mean this is the opportunity for us to train.”
“Train what? Train how? Has anyone tried making contact and asking?”
“Several agencies across the globe have, with no response. They’re not interested in conversation, it seems.”
The President grunted. “It seems to me that it would be difficult to give training to someone you don’t talk to. Yet, the countdown is presumably the training period?” the President asked.
Carver shrugged. “It makes sense to us, but they’re not us, so... who knows?”
“Maybe it’s not an instruction,” Farris pointed out, “but an observation, or acknowledgement. We have to train as a response to such a change in our lives anyway; they’ve been observing
us, so they must have figured out that we’ll do that.”
Carver nodded thoughtfully. “The messages have been on our communications systems, in our languages, and targeted to groups of specific relevance. Which means they’ve studied and analyzed us and are capable of conveying messages using our concepts and senses. That suggests they have the ability to understand what we’ll do, more than we understand what they’ll do.”
The President looked back at the screen. “So, if the countdown is to show us the duration of the training course, whether it be ours or theirs, then what happens at the end of training?”
“A test, or a graduation or advancement, perhaps?” Farris suggested, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Davies looked apologetic. “I can’t really see it being a ‘welcome to the Federation’ kind of deal, Amanda, can you?”
“In my head, I can. In my heart and gut... No, I can’t,” she admitted. “You don’t train for the sake of spending time training; you train for a purpose, a mission, or a set of conditions you’re about to enter. Whatever happens at the end of the countdown, I think it’ll change those things for us. And that’s regardless of whether they’re training us for something, or we’re training ourselves.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” the President replied.
“It isn’t meant to be. If you want reassurance, all I can offer you is that, with their technology, it could have been worse.”
“Worse?!” Farris exclaimed.
Carver straightened her jacket. “They have orbital superiority, superior firepower, the ability to use our most secure channels as they please, and the element of surprise. If they wanted to simply conquer the planet and enslave us, they could have done it already. If they wanted to send us back to the stone age, they could have done it already. If they wanted to wipe out everything on Earth bigger than a cockroach, they could have done it already. But they haven’t, which means they want something else. And we’ve no way to know what that might be.”