by Jack Colrain
“No way to know,” the President echoed. “But we need to at least think, and feel, if we’re to decide upon a plan of action. What do you think they want with us? I mean, what else can that countdown really be counting down to?”
“A full-scale invasion,” Farris said immediately.
Carver shook her head. “Without violating the laws of physics, it would take centuries for them to travel here.”
Farris wasn’t dissuaded. “This must be a pathfinder ship that’s now awaiting the arrival of its main force.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. I don’t think it can be an invasion; it just doesn’t make sense.”
“In a human context, maybe, but they’re aliens, so their context wouldn’t make sense to us. You said that yourself,” Farris pointed out.
“Some things are universal. Besides, the messages show that they have a sense, an understanding, of our contextualization of things, and they’ve messaged us in our way of understanding. Which, by the way, shows another way in which they’re ahead of our game, another form of tactical superiority they have over us. They can work with our context, but we can’t yet work with theirs.”
The President raised a hand, then lowered it in a calming gesture. “All right, let’s contextualize what we can.”
“I’ve been consulting the manuals for the possibility of an extraterrestrial attack.” Carver tapped a green-covered book on the table in front of her. “Their first intention, at least, isn’t to wipe us out. They’ve already demonstrated their ability to conduct orbital bombardment. Our official estimates of the energy requirements indicate that around twenty-one-mile wide pieces of rock—far smaller if they’re as dense as the ones the Mozari already hit us with—would be more than sufficient to cause an ELE, an Extinction Level Event, that would remove ninety-nine percent of the life on the surface of the Earth, including us. So, as I said before, if they wanted to do that, they could easily have just done it. The messages suggest they want something from us. Or they want us for something.”
“Enslavement and occupation?” Davies suggested.
“One or both?” the President asked.
“Possibly,” Carver acknowledged. “You don’t train something you’re just going to wipe out. But you might train slaves. Whichever it is, I do think the training part is at the heart of whatever they’re after.”
Farris erupted. “Seven cities destroyed! Millions of people—”
“Stick!” Carver said crisply, snapping her fingers and startling everyone.
“What?” The President looked as surprised and astonished an everyone else in the room.
Carver paused a moment, holding up her index finger to prevent any interruptions. “Have you ever had a dog? Given it treats when it’s good, threatened it with a rolled-up newspaper when it craps on the carpet?” They all looked at each other. “It’s the carrot and stick approach. The carrot is the cargo pods with their contents. The stick is the eighty-meter-wide, nickel-iron meteorites.”
The President grunted. “I’ve never been a believer in being cowed by the stick. Makes a dog surly, and more likely to bite.” He stood. “So, how do we bite the Mozari?”
Carver sighed. There was, of course, only one possible answer, no matter what the Mozari thought, wanted, or said. “We train.”
St. Louis, MO.
Daniel was expecting the bus to drive him and the other young men and women out to some sort of camp in the sticks, with barracks buildings and tanks rumbling around dirt tracks between them. Instead, it drove smoothly into downtown St. Louis. After about twenty minutes, it pulled up in front of a tall and wide brownstone building that occupied almost a whole city block. In some ways, it resembled a gingerbread castle, with crenelated battlements at the top of it. Or maybe, Daniel decided, it was more of a gingerbread mountain, as the central peak of the roof and the battlements shone an icy white.
The driver opened the door of the bus, and a man in dark pants and a white shirt bedecked with Army insignia, who looked as if there was bison somewhere in his ancestry, stepped aboard. “Draftees,” he rumbled loudly, “debark here, and fall into line for MEPS processing.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what that would entail exactly, but, like the others on the bus, he stood up, grabbed his hand luggage, and stepped out. The bison on two legs waited only a moment once everybody was off before slapping the side of the bus, which started up and moved away. “Do none of you know what a line is?” he demanded. “Double-file, two abreast, and enter the building.”
The draftees obeyed, and Daniel noted from a plaque next to the entrance that this was the Robert A. Young Federal Building. A security screening station was set up crossing the whole lobby, and the bison waited while the new arrivals took off their shoes and emptied their pockets before passing through the metal detectors. Bags were X-rayed, and they were then led up a flight of stairs to an open floorspace filled with reception desks. Office cubicles lined the walls, each containing a military officer in shirtsleeves and a couple of state-of-the-art laptops. Airport-style lockers were nested in groups at regular intervals.
“Welcome to MEPS,” the bison said. “Fall into lines by birth gender: male on the left, female on the right.” Daniel and the others did as they were told, and soon found themselves signing forms at a reception desk and then standing for mugshots in front of an automated digital camera. When it came time to be fingerprinted, Daniel tried hard not to let his nervousness show.
A receptionist took his documents, copied them, handed him a bunch of forms, then stuck an adhesive name badge on his shirt and set him to waiting with a group of others. After a half hour or so, the bison reappeared. “Everyone with a surname between Acaveda and McSweeney form a line at the door behind reception for physicals and vetting. Everybody else, form up here for ASVAB testing.”
Soon, Daniel found himself taken into a small office space where he was seated at a laptop. A bored-looking guy with glasses saw to it that everything was working fine as Daniel sat. “OK, Walker,” he said. “This is your ASVAB—Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test. I hope you’ve studied for this. Scoring high requires preparation, and you don’t want to have skipped the study.”
“I don’t?”
“This is your future. You want to get the most out of it, you need to be ready for it.”
“If I’d planned on a military career, I would have.”
“Oh… yeah.” The guy sighed. “The draft’s too new to have gotten used to people coming in who didn’t plan to come in. OK, there are nine sections. Four of them—Arithmetic Reasoning, Word Knowledge, Paragraph Comprehension, and Mathematics Knowledge—make up your AFQT result, and determine whether you qualify to be let in to the armed forces at all. Don’t worry, the limits got lowered when the draft came in.”
“I think I’m on pretty safe ground being able to read, write, and count.”
The guy grunted. “You’d be surprised.”
“I graduated from college.”
The guy raised his eyebrow. “That’s cool. Not that the bureaucracy cares, unfortunately.”
“What about the other sections?” Daniel asked.
“Those scores count towards how suitable you might be for MOS types.”
“MOS?”
“Military Occupational Specialties. There are bonus payrates for some, even under the draft.”
“I, uh, I was drafted with a specialty already. I’m supposed to go into the Military Police.”
The recruiter glanced at a file. “Yeah, you’re a cop, so that makes sense. Score 91 or better out of 99 and it’s done.”
The tests, all done on the computer, were pretty simple for Daniel—language comprehension, math, some science and engineering, and so on. There were different ranges of tests, but he was done in a couple of hours, at which point he was taken back to reception by a serviceman and given a hotel room key and a meal voucher. After another wait, for everyone else to complete the computerized tests,
he was allowed to gather his belongings, and the group of draftees was escorted by a different sergeant back outside to another bus.
This bus ferried them a couple of blocks to a clean and modern Marriott hotel. The sergeant accompanied them inside, saw them checked in, and then joined one of the Marriott’s duty managers to address them in a small conference room. “Feel free to enjoy yourselves for the rest of the day,” the sergeant said. “There are some basic ground rules, though. You must be in your room by twenty-two hundred hours. You don’t need to be asleep or have lights out, but it’s advisable, as reveille is oh-four-hundred. After breakfast, the bus will return you to the RAY Building for the rest of your MEPS procedures. I suggest you eat high-protein and hydrate a lot; trust me, you’ll regret it if you don’t. Do bring clean underwear; it’s all you’ll be wearing for most of the day. Men will be on floor five, women on floor six, and we will enforce this strictly. You can mix in the hotel’s public areas or in the games and rec room we’ve set up. Don’t drink alcohol, either, as it’ll mess up tomorrow’s tests if you do…”
The night at the hotel was pleasant enough. Daniel didn’t play videogames or mix much, but the food was good, and he settled down to watch TV at about eight. In the morning, he ate as the sergeant had advised, and he was ready and waiting when the bus came to return them to the MEPS center.
The sergeant had been right about the underwear, too. The emotionless mechanism of being passed around and looked over like a piece of meat on the way to a supermarket wasn’t the surprise; he’d figured the drill sergeants, clerks, medics, and others would be checking so many people that there wouldn’t be much time—or inclination—for friendly interaction with them. The surprise was the hours of standing in lines in drafty corridors and sitting on hard plastic chairs, naked some of the time, and only in undershorts and socks the rest of the time. They had all stowed their shoes and outer clothing in lockers before being moved from one medical test to another: vision tests, hearing tests, general fitness tests, dental checks… and with every type of fluid sample being taken and analyzed along the way. At each stage, boxes were checked off on the forms he was carrying before he was finally allowed to get dressed again for lunch. Some of the recruits were allowed to choose which service branch’s representative office to go into and apply to, but Daniel was directed to the Military Police recruiter since he was still carrying Cody Walker’s draft papers, and the Army wanted Cody’s police experience.
At the end of the day, he was surprisingly tired and happy to return to the Marriott again. The next morning, he stepped onto another waiting bus at 04:30, but this time his journey was longer.
Fort Leonard Wood, MO.
Daniel stepped off the bus and into a damp, early Summer morning. A couple dozen other young men and women, of various ethnicities and states of fitness, milled around nearby. Between him and a low gatehouse building that looked like a typical drive-thru—except in that the roof was a verdigris shade of green—were three other buses and a similar number of debarking passengers from each.
Daniel had assumed he would immediately be screamed at by drill sergeants demanding push-ups and then urged mercilessly through an assault course, maybe with a beating or two somewhere in between. Instead, the new arrivals were met by more white-shirted personnel yelling at them to form two lines—one of men and one of women—and then marched into Grant Hall, the school assembly-like entrance area for the 43rd Adjutant General Reception Battalion. They went through a security check again, their documents were taken, and they were photographed again.
“Form up!” a sergeant half the size of the bison managed to bark out twice as loudly. “Four lines, at attention! Stretch your right hand to the person beside you and maintain arm’s length.” Once they had shuffled into position, a lieutenant came out and nodded to the sergeant.
“First things first,” he said. “Welcome to the 43rd AG Reception Battalion.”
He then briefed the group, to Daniel’s surprise, on Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention. Next, he looked them over and read out a list of prohibited items, such as drugs and alcohol. “There will be a one-hour amnesty for contraband items; you can toss them in the trash or hand them in for disposal with no fear of repercussions. During this hour, you can also call home if you want to let somebody know you arrived here safely.”
Daniel was sorely tempted, but he knew better. While it would be good to let his parents know that he was safe, he figured they knew him well enough to have worked out what had happened by now, and the last thing he wanted to do was give them or Cody an opportunity to reveal the truth to the authorities.
Like everyone else, Daniel was next sent to the fort’s barber and had his hair cut very short, and then issued both fatigues and service uniforms. Finally, a drill sergeant greeted his group with a certain amount of vicious pleasure. “Fresh meat! Excellent. Right, then. Ladies and germs, your new quarters await on the far side of the base, and it’s a nice day for a jog, so let’s see how quickly we can get there.” He and a couple of assistants hustled them along; this was more fitted to Daniel’s expectations. Fifteen agonizing minutes later, they were trying hard to shove their gear into the single wardrobe that each had been assigned in the six-person dorm, Daniel’s being one of many on this floor of one of the men’s buildings.
The drill sergeant checked each of their paperwork and, when he reached Daniel, said, “Military Police OSUT, Walker?” Daniel had no idea what an OSUT was, but he nodded anyway. “Then I guess we have the pleasure of your company for the next ten days.” He handed Daniel a small blue book from a box he’d been carrying. “The Blue Book is your friend, Walker. Study it. It’ll prep you with basic Army knowledge you’re obviously lacking, The Soldiers Creed, rank structure, a shit-ton of stuff you need to be learning.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not your goddamned butler. Think you can do twenty push-ups, smart mouth?”
It had been another long and tiring day, and Daniel ended up feeling grateful for the lights-out order at 10 PM. He hadn’t been sure he’d sleep with so many other people snoring in the room, but, as it turned out, he fell into the realm of Morpheus the instant his ear touched the pillow.
Waking up was harder, even with the assistance of the drill sergeant yelling “Get your lazy ass out of my damn bunk room!” and two MPs grabbing him by the arms and shoving him bodily at the closet so he could get dressed in Army issue sweats. But once he and the others were dressed, one of the MPs shone a flashlight in his face and then checked it against a picture in a folder. “This is the one.”
The clock above the door showed that it wasn’t even 4 AM yet, and the other guys in the room were looking on in soporific confusion. “Get back to sleep, FNGs,” the drill sergeant growled at them. “Reveille’s in fifteen minutes, and you’ll need every second.”
The MPs half-escorted and half-dragged Daniel out of the dorm building and shoved him in the back of their Jeep, then drove off. They took him to the Reception Battalion’s central building, where he had arrived yesterday, and escorted him through it to the base commander’s office, where an angry-looking major with bags under his eyes and the look of a rival lawyer was waiting. His name tag read ‘Huntley.’ Daniel stood opposite him, beside a chair, and the major indicated he should sit. The MP escort retreated back into the empty anteroom where the major’s secretary would be during a working day.
“Well, what shall we do with you, Mr. West?” Daniel froze. He’d been expecting to be addressed by his own name sooner or later, but not quite like this. “Cat got your tongue?” The major snorted. “Let’s try it this way: Daniel Elijah West, father Nathan West, mother Maria West, no spouse or ex-spouse named Jill or anything else, no daughter named Chloe, and all of your law enforcement experience has been on the receiving end of public drunkenness charges. Feel free to stop me when I hit an inaccuracy.”
Daniel tried to think of a way to protest, but he was too tired, and, in any case, it was very obviou
s that he had no defense; they knew who he was, and probably knew why. “No, sir. None of that is inaccurate.”
Major Huntley sat back, eyeing him hawkishly. “You’re not denying falsifying your documentation during the MEPS process.”
“I can’t really, can I?”
“No. It may surprise you to learn this, Mr. West, but we do have the means, motive, and opportunity to background-check our recruits. Your fingerprints and photographs are on file, as are Cody Walker’s. Whom, by the way, we will doubtless be investigating along with you.”
“He didn’t know anything about this! I stole his papers—”
“Not my department. I don’t give a shit. But you should know that if he faces investigation, it will be your actions at fault.” He shook his head. “A hick-town draftee cop scoring 98 out of a possible 99... That’s pretty unlikely in itself.”
Daniel only wished he had thought to answer some of the ASVAB questions incorrectly. Maybe if he had proved too dumb for service.... But it was too late, and what was done was done. “I just wanted to—”
“What we want and what happens are often not the same.” Huntley glanced at his laptop. “So, you’re not an illegal alien—” he hesitated, “immigrant, looking to scam some rights and benefits from service, your parents weren’t illegals who made up false papers to make you think you were a legal citizen, and you didn’t falsify your identity to avoid being drafted, so... Why are you here?”
“So that Cody could stay with his daughter. He’s been my best friend since grade school, and it just wouldn’t be right for the two of them to be separated so soon after his daughter was saved from the Mozari-worshipers.”
“Noble. Dumb as a box of rocks, but noble. And it’s not really going to help either of them. You see, West, we have a couple of potential problems here. You could be a member of one of those new Mozari-worshiping churches yourself, looking to infiltrate the services that are sworn to protect you against threats such as them.”