Mozari Arrival

by Jack Colrain

  The ship wasn’t entirely unlike the space shuttles that everyone on the squad had seen growing up. It was white, with stubby delta signs, and two short tailfins canted out at a forty-five-degree angle to either side rather than one vertical one. It was also a little smaller and had some surface features that Daniel figured had to do with launching down a maglev rail. The biggest difference was that it lacked the huge, bell-shaped engine exhausts of the shuttle, having a slanted boarding hatch instead, though there were indented maneuvering thrusters all around the fuselage.

  “She’s faster than the old space shuttle,” Horowitz told them, “and more energy efficient. It used to take three days to reach the moon, back when the Apollo astronauts did the trip. Test numbers show the Avenger will do it in about eighteen hours.”

  “Actually,” Carver went on, “most of the planning for this system and the facility started years ago. NASA looked at it back in the ’90s; called it StarTram. There was another attempt to get it started in 2010, and a couple of different companies got involved in different iterations of it.”

  “I guess we couldn’t afford it?” Daniel asked.

  “Actually, we probably could have,” Horowitz responded, “but there were some drag factors.”

  “Lobbyists?”

  “Corporate rivalries and backhanders were one, for sure. Location was always the bigger problem, though.”

  “Location, location, location? They say it’s important.”

  Carver chuckled. “The issue we had was that StarTram needed a vastly long launch rail—you’ll have seen that when you were flying in—on the equator, launching towards the east, with the end of the rail six thousand feet up a mountain. Problem is, the only places you can get the mountain at the eastern end of a long enough launch rail are in jungles, rainforest.”

  “So, environmental concerns got in the way?”

  “Damn tree-huggers,” Kinsella quipped.

  Daniel shrugged. “Surely, since the Mozari are threatening us with an extinction crisis anyway—”

  Horowitz took up the story again. “Environmental factors were the killer back in the nineties, yeah, but not because of protestors. Rainforest is called that for a reason: rain. The launch rail really needs a dry area.”

  “Hence here, with desert, on the far side of those hills.”

  “But no six-thousand-foot mountains that way. They’re behind us.”

  “Exactly. But, that’s where the Mozari tech came in and made the Avenger possible.” Horowitz led the group up several flights of steel stairs to an observation platform and pointed to a spot about a mile away along the maglev rail. The maglev rail wasn’t just invisible because of the glare—it sank into a tunnel as the land began to rise above it.

  “Wait,” Beswick said, “doesn’t it have to go upwards?”

  “Sure. But there’s a life hack for that. A hundred-and-seventy-kilometer-long launch rail would actually hug enough of the curvature of Earth that with the nanotechnology from the Mozari pods, we managed to use the nanotechnology to put in a straight line, which has the twin advantages of being mostly underground, and then, thanks to being under the level of the outermost curvature of Earth, emerges from the surface at the right angle, with six thousand meters of non-sloping slope.”

  In the evening, Hammond’s Hardcases found themselves in Mission Control. The room resembled a smaller version of Houston’s Ground Control, of roughly one-third the size, and they were all watching images of the Mozari ship’s surface, taken by spy satellites and fly-bys. Horowitz and the SEALs were particularly interested in the details blown up on the huge screen.

  Daniel pointed to an oval indentation on the surface of the Mozari ship, which the scientists and Colonel Horowitz agreed was probably some kind of launch door for the meteors that had bombarded the Earth a year earlier, almost to the day. They had studied images of many other confusing and, to some of the scientists, fascinating, features taken by a Chinese lunar orbiter, but of them all this was the most promising one. “This port will be our primary destination. Your objective will be to either get that door opened and obtain ingress that way, or effect entry through it by other means.”

  “Do we know where you’re going once aboard?” Horowitz asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not. The Librarian has given us a schematic, but I don’t trust it. Why send us the details on how to sabotage their own ship?”

  Horowitz shrugged. “Maybe there’s a rebel faction on board. Politics.”

  Daniel thought for a moment, but couldn’t bring himself to believe that, either. The world wasn’t that fair.

  The Avenger would be fueled by morning. Although launched by a maglev rail, it needed fuel for its maneuvering thrusters once in space. Meanwhile, a USAF twidget was showing it off like a used car dealer. “We’ve fitted your vehicle with two varieties of weaponized nanotechnology based on the nanite construction blocks from the Mozari pods.”

  Daniel got the idea and cut off the twidget before he could go on. “If these things are so hot to break stuff down and use it to build, it’s probably a no-brainer that you can just stop at the breaking-down stage and skip the building part, yeah. Been there, done that.”

  “The Avenger is also fitted with ten modified AIM-120-D AMRAAM missiles. We’ve removed the fins, since there’s no need for them in space, and replaced the payload with a nano-block that will disperse and begin disassembling matter on impact. If you need to blow a hole in the Mozari’s door from a distance, they’ll be your best chance. They’re contained in the internal bays from a couple of F-22 Raptors.”

  Kinsella looked them over. “How are they launched? Railgun?”

  “Sorry. We managed to make two of your railguns work with the shuttle in case of emergency, but the AIM-120s won’t fit them, so they still go by solid-rocket propellant.”

  “Detectable, and probably destructible by the point-defense systems.”

  “Yeah, so they’re for last-resort use, if nothing else works. Our recommendation is that, if you succeed in approaching their hull, you use these.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Much the same thing, except instead of nano-torpedoes, they’re... nano-charges, call them. They’ll adhere to anything and can be triggered by remote or timer. They’re programmed to burrow through whatever surface they’re attached to, in a pattern wide enough that half a dozen will make a hole wide enough for your shuttle to steer easily, and up to ten meters deep. We’ve assigned you two dozen. That should get you in even if their hull is forty meters thick, which we doubt. Any spares can be used as demolition charges if it comes to destroying the ship.”

  “Icarus Control, this is Avenger. All systems here are green. Do we have a go, no-go for launch?” Horowitz was the calmest person on board. Everybody else was still terrified, or tired out by the utra-intensive astronaut training they had received over the past few days.

  “Avenger, stand by.”

  “Standing by.”

  “Generator online. Launch pulse available in thirty seconds.”

  “Acceleration system is a go for launch.”

  “Launch track is clear.”

  “Launch pulse twenty seconds and counting.”

  “Avenger, prepare to throttle up.”

  Daniel wasn’t sure why a projectile launched from a maglev track would need a throttle on board, since it had no engines, but he decided that was why they had Colonel Horowitz on board. He was the expert, and Daniel kept his mouth shut rather than bother him with questions now.

  “Avenger copies,” Horowitz replied, pressing buttons.

  Daniel remained glad that none of the others had yet shown any sign of a connection with him via the suits as he shared with Hope. He wouldn’t want any of them knowing that he’d never been this nervous. Scared, sure; everybody was scared under fire, or when someone they loved seemed to be in danger, but the prospect of sitting on top of a giant bomb to be shot into space—or, in this case, sitting in an arrow to be shot into space by an elec
trical discharge more powerful than who knew how many lightning bolts—was just too close to dying a painful death for nothing.

  Would it hurt to be instantly crushed into Jell-O?

  Suddenly, his heart was pounding not against his chest, but against his spine, and he could feel his teeth pressing against each other. He realized that they were moving just as his vision started to blur. The acceleration was slow, not instant, but that just meant he recognized how much stress his body was under. His limbs already felt like they were made of solid lead or gold, and it was becoming hard to breathe because his rib cage just didn’t want to expand against the pressure it was heading into.

  Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, there was a tilt backwards, and he had his answer about whether being crushed would hurt. He’d never experienced such pain before. The display above him read 25G, and the briefing documents had told him that no astronaut launched by conventional means would have survived more than about 7 or 10 G.

  The Earth was beautiful; azure wreathed in white, with highlights of gold and green, curving large in the viewport, but still somehow tiny and insignificant against the infinite blackness all around it.

  “It’s beautiful,” Kinsella whispered.

  “And never gets old,” Colonel Horowitz said quietly. “No matter how many times you see it, when you get the chance to see it for yourself with your own eyes, I mean. Maybe not in pictures. But, yeah, every single time I see it, I almost can’t believe it. It’s almost too much to be real.”

  The Hardcases all nodded in their own ways, and Daniel wished that Hope was there with them. She would have loved this, and she deserved to be there with the rest of them, not stuck on Earth doing meaningless flying exercises over Beijing, or whatever it was Chinese pilots did there. They had thought to each other since they’d parted, perhaps once a week or so, but this would have been special. “I’m never going to forget this,” he told himself. ‘Are you there?’ he thought to her. ‘Can you hear me?’ There was no response, and he wondered what time it was in Beijing anyway.

  “You won’t,” Horowitz said. “No one ever does. I don’t think anyone human ever could. Half the people who see it say they can’t doubt the existence of God’s design anymore. The other half feel it proves the world is so much more than religious limits allow. Both of them expressing the same feeling in opposite ways.”

  “Well, let’s not have a punch-up about it in here,” Daniel said. “Wouldn’t seem appropriate somehow.”

  “Yeah,” Kinsella agreed, “we don’t want to fight before we try to board and storm a starship full of alien invaders.”

  “It’s an eighteen-hour flight,” Horowitz reminded them. “Take your time and enjoy what we’re fighting for, and what it means—” He broke off as a bizarre sound came through both the speakers aboard the Avenger and all of their comms earpieces. The lighting flashed and dimmed for a second or two. “What the hell?” He pushed his way back into the flight deck and strapped himself in.

  “Buckle up,” Daniel ordered, “just in case. And check your gear—” That sound came again, the lights brightening for a second. Everyone in the Avenger grimaced as the weird pops and crackles came through their comms for a third time. Daniel couldn’t help glancing around at the interior furnishings of the cabin, looking for a hole or a fire, or something. The Avenger was built partly from experimental alien technology, after all, and this was, in essence, her proving flight. “Is that a problem with the ship?” he called out.

  “Not a clue,” Horowitz yelled back. “Not yet, anyway. I’m not registering any alarms in any of the Avenger’s systems.”

  “Maybe the alarm’s faulty,” Kinsella suggested. She had the decency to look sheepish as Daniel glared at her. Even if it was, it couldn’t be ignored.

  Daniel tried to think of what he knew of space travel from popular science books and documentaries. “Maybe some sort of cosmic ray shit?” he suggested.

  “No,” Evans said, from where she had been looking at the communications relay. “It was some sort of interruption to every electronic and radio frequency.”

  That was something Daniel could understand, though the understanding chilled him to the pit of his stomach. “EMP blast? From a nuke?”

  “That would have cut all our systems out,” Horowitz replied. “This is more like getting power surges or something.”

  Jess Evans looked up. “Radio frequency surges? Could be solar weather, I suppose, except... it looks like they’re coming from multiple sources... between us and Earth.”

  “Between us and Earth?” Daniel echoed. “Satellites?”

  “Maybe.” Evans sounded doubtful. “It’s definitely coming from Earth orbit. Maybe even the upper atmosphere.”

  Daniel didn’t like the idea of there being some weirdness on this day of all days; it was too coincidental for him to believe in. “Either way... Have you heard of anything like that before?”

  Colonel Horowitz looked around at them. “Thunderheads sometimes discharge into the upper atmosphere above them, but at this distance, these effects? Impossible.”

  They fell silent for a moment, and Daniel knew they were all thinking the exact same thing. “Shit.” He unbuckled himself and turned around so that he could see out of the thick viewport behind his seat. The Earth had receded to the size of a basketball held at arm’s length, and it was still a truly spiritual sight to behold, but it wasn’t what immediately snatched his attention.

  Behind the Avenger, something was happening in low Earth orbit. Flashes fell upon themselves like bubbles in glass suddenly collapsing in on themselves. Where a flash imploded, suddenly there was a speeding object. These imploding flashes flickered across the globe, over China and Japan, and Russia, Europe, and the Atlantic. At first, there were only one or two, but in the course of a minute or two there were four, then eight, and then a couple dozen.

  To his own surprise, this was a sight that Daniel West had seen before. Perhaps not with his own, biological eyes, but with his consciousness, and it had stayed in his memory ever since the vision shown to him by the Librarian.

  He wondered whether she—it—had known that he would someday view the real thing from here in space, and given him a premonition of the sight, but the wondering didn’t last long. He knew in his heart that the worlds he had seen in the Library were long-dead, and none had continents that matched the geography of Earth.

  “Gresian...” he whispered.

  “What?” Evans asked in a disbelieving tone.

  “This is one of the things—almost exactly the same—that the Library showed me when I asked it what ‘Gresian’ meant.”

  “You said it meant... destruction, obliteration.”

  “This is what I saw,” Daniel said. “Armageddon.”

  Thirty-Two

  Zhangjiakou Airbase, Hebei, China.

  Captain Ying Xi-Huang of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force scrambled up the boarding ladder and dropped into the cockpit of her Chengdu J-20. The world’s first operational fifth-generation stealth fighter, it was an honor and a privilege to fly it.

  The only downside was that she had no idea whether she really would ever see Daniel West again.

  On the dispersal area, her two wingmen, Zhao and Tzen, were getting into their J-20s and beginning pre-flight checks. She looked up at the sky and realized that something felt strange. Perhaps it was Daniel, but perhaps it was something else; something looking for her.

  Shivering, she pulled her canopy closed and began pre-flight operations.

  A sudden and strange electronic crackle made her wince, and then she heard the other pilots in her wing, and the controllers back at Zhangjiakou, wanting to know what the hell was going on. Then there were more crackles.

  “Was that some sort of EMP effect?” one of the other pilots asked.

  “We’re not sure,” ground control replied.

  “Some kind of weapon?”

  “We don’t know—”

  Trans-lunar Orbit />
  The first arachnid-shaped vessel peeled off, swooping across the Pacific Ocean. The huge, four-petalled aft-section, however, kept on going, hustling through the atmosphere at a steep angle. The edges of the petals began to glow with the heat of friction against the air as they closed. With the air resistance pushing against and trapped within the closing petals, the whole thing flipped round. A minute or so later, the air pressure under it made a dent in the water surface below for a few seconds before it hit. The cratering out of water thus briefly created went rushing outwards, smashing several container ships aside as if they were Skittles. It plunged into the depths without much more resistance than the air had offered, and smashed into the ocean floor with an impact registered on seismographs the world over.

  The petal-forms from the next two spiderlike vessels did the same thing, flipping round into metallic, rocky dum-dum bullets in the shape of hundred-meter-long aerodynamic teardrops. The first slammed into Luzon Island, north of Manila in the Philippines, flattening and burning dozens of square miles of jungle, and killing seven thousand people. The second put a half-a-kilometer-wide crater in what until then had been the Bien Hoa suburb of Ho Chi Minh City, reducing everything within a five-mile radius to ruins and setting fires that, fueled by an easterly wind, swept into the streets of the city itself, killing thousands more.

  The Pentagon, VA.

  Alarms blared in the situation room underneath the Pentagon. “Radar reports several objects on a ballistic trajectory,” a technician shouted out.

  “ICBMs?” his supervisor asked.

  “No launches detected.”

  “Get the President and the Football moving.”

  “But the countdown, dammit! There are still three months—”

  “Then they lied! Or we misread it, or it meant some fucking thing else!”