by Jack Colrain
General Carver and Secretary Davies came running into the C-In-C. “What’s going on?” Davies demanded.
“NORAD confirms, seven objects approaching the Eastern Seaboard at hypersonic velocities, and their track prohibits them having been launched by any—”
“That can only mean one thing,” Carver whispered. “The invasion.”
“Russian, Chinese, and European military channels are reporting objects in their airspace.”
“Shit!” one of the technicians exclaimed. “An eighth object just... appeared, in low orbit, following a similar course to the others approaching the continental US.” He looked up. “This wasn’t launched from here. It just... spawned out of nowhere, like in a video game.”
“Meteor impacts reported from Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City.”
“That clinches it; there’s no way that can be a coincidence.”
“The radar tracks are changing directions,” a technician said. “Look at this return, Sir. Over China. If we trace its course back, there’s a reduction in signal at this point. Southeast of Manila.”
“It dropped a bomb. One part fell into Luzon, while the other kept flying.”
“Shit, that’s a new tactic for the Mozari.”
Beijing Military Region Airspace, China.
The original vessel that had entered Earth’s atmosphere, and released the impactor that had splashed down in the Pacific, banked north as it descended, speeding over Jianxi Province and then Hubei. Once within striking range of the ground, it tilted towards a sprawling powerplant and began spitting small but solid darts—not unlike the ammunition for the XR-01 railgun, but only slightly larger.
Vehicles hit by the darts crumbled and bounced like tiny plastic toys hit by a nailgun. Fuel exploded while struck generators sparked and burst into flame. Chunks of masonry and concrete blew out of the turbine house’s walls, flying dozens of yards, while the roof collapsed into the panic and disaster within.
The attacking ship flew on, seeking other suitable targets.
“Reports are coming in from all military regions,” the controller at Zhangjiakou said into Hope’s earpiece. “Also civilian frequencies, TV, everything.”
“Is this an EMP effect?”
“Definitely not. We’re seeing bursts of increased power surges on all radio frequencies. An EMP would dampen it.”
“Power surges…” Hope thought for a moment. “A solar storm?”
“Maybe, but these are coming from multiple sources, and there’s no attendant particle density increase detected by our solar observatories. There are incoming objects. Seven, at least, on a descent from low orbit at high velocity.”
“American missiles?”
“No launches detected. They’re... wait. Their courses cannot have originated anywhere on the surface of the world.”
“You mean, not this world.”
The radar on Hope’s console indicated a ship over the horizon, fifty miles and closing—still out of reliable missile range, but not for long. She couldn’t help glancing in that direction, even though she knew it wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. She should have known her suit’s capabilities better. It seemed to be tapping into her onboard radar return, and, in her visor, there was suddenly a vastly magnified image: a tarantula-like alien vessel, fine lines along its surface pulsating with whatever energies powered it.
She had no idea what sort of sensors or defenses it might have, or whether its crew—if it had one, and wasn’t a UAV or piloted by some kind of AI—would be expecting a defensive operation in the air at this distance.
Without needing to look, she punched in the selection for a PL-21 long-range air-to-air missile on her weapons board. With a range of over sixty miles, it was well past being capable of targeting and reaching a craft at this distance. The PL-21 carried its own radar transceiver, but Hope switched in a data link from her J-20’s radar as she launched the weapon. Rather than waste the missile’s onboard battery or alert the target to its approach by having it home in by active radar from so far away, she would guide it in from out here until it was a few seconds from impact. If the enemy detected her radar and recognized it as coming from an airplane, she hoped they wouldn’t realize they were in range and in danger yet.
“Fox Three,” she warned the rest of the flight. The code meant they would understand her missile was in flight, and not to get in its way.
‘Hope...’
‘Not now, Daniel! … I’m sorry, that was a subconscious reaction.’
‘You’re busy.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I’m fighting.’
‘Me, too.’
‘I can’t be distracted. Flying and fighting. These things are so fast, nothing human could survive inside them. Tell your people: The attackers are unmanned.’
‘You sure?’
‘My suit is. My suit is giving me some sort of filtering effect on the targets. They don’t appear to contain occupants. My suit vision shows them as some kind of UAV drones.’
‘That makes sense; a UAV of whatever sort can pull off maneuvers that would squash an organic pilot. It makes sense that they’d be either remote-piloted or under AI control.’
‘Can you keep both us and other military forces up to date with this stuff?’
‘I think so.’
‘I know you’re thinking of making a pop-culture reference now. Please don’t.’
‘It wouldn’t feel right. We’re the ones all in this fight together.’
‘Understood.’
‘Daniel... This may be the last time I speak to you.’
‘I know.’
‘I love you. I wanted to say that to you at least once in my life.’
‘I love you.’
‘Don’t wish me luck. It would be tempting fate.’
‘Be safe. Tell me with your voice next time.’
‘Roger tha—’ There was a burst of surprise from her, that he could feel, and then suddenly nothing. No pain, no fear, no dread; just a sudden mental silence.
Hubei Military Region Airspace, China.
A second drone bomber had appeared en route for the coast according to her plane’s radar.
The Exo-suit-enhanced image of it in her visor zoomed and expanded even though it was still seventy miles distant, and that was a disorienting experience. Hope jinked her plane through the fading smoke trail left by the falling ship and switched to afterburners for a few seconds, setting off to intercept the second target. The steady repetition of the signal from the weapons system was a point of focus and purpose, however, and one which demanded most of her concentration. The faint haze that hovered over the impact sites around Beijing’s international airport like a fur stole slipped past to the right as she prepped a second PL-21 missile for target acquisition. With a quick glance to check that everything on the weapons panel was fully functional, Hope let her suit give her the information that provided her with an edge over both the other members of her flight and, if she was lucky, the alien ship.
She just hoped it wouldn’t accidentally give her the unasked-for strength to rip the control joystick out of its console.
Ahead, several brighter specks of light flickered in the rosy morning sky to the east; flashes of explosions from AMRAAM missiles that didn’t make it to the target, and perhaps from something aboard the alien vessel, returning fire.
The drone ship spun around its own axis and accelerated towards Hope’s flight without having decelerated at any point. If there had been any organic pilots aboard, they would have been pureed.
Something flickered on the drone, and Hope suddenly felt her hand slapping the control stick almost without her own volition. Trusting that the Exo-suit knew what she needed, she went with it, pushing the stick harder, and flipping the J-20 onto its wingtip a heartbeat before the enemy drone flashed past the underside of the plane—closer than its own wheels would have been if she had extended the landing gear. It would have taken the wing off if she hadn’t reacted with the speed that only the suit
gave her.
She looped the J-20, but the drone ship was onto her now, and it kept weaving so she couldn’t get a lock. She needed to think outside the box, she knew. The way Daniel would.
By now, she was almost alongside it, and that gave her an idea. She remembered something she had once read in a history book. She pushed the afterburners to their limit to keep up with the enemy drone, and she started to dip her port wing towards its starboard side. Her wingtip dipped lower than the edge of the drone and, at that moment, she jinked the tiniest bit to port, then rolled back the other way. Her plane’s wingtip caught the drone under an edge and flipped it.
Its drives warbled and whined, and it tumbled away, getting more and more unstable as it tried harder and harder to right itself. All the way until it exploded against a bridge far below.
Hope had no time to celebrate, however—the wingtip she had used for the maneuver had sheared off, and now her J-20 was becoming unstable…
Trans-lunar Orbit
“Can we abort the mission, and rendezvous with a unit on the ground?” Evans asked.
Horowitz barked a laugh. “Not a chance.”
“But, Sir—”
“We can’t turn this ship around.”
“I know the mission’s important, but that Mozari ship isn’t likely to be going anywhere soon—”
“It may well not. But it doesn’t matter anyway, as I wasn’t talking about orders or ethics. We are not physically able to abort this flight,” Horowitz clarified. “We launched by maglev, not rocket. We don’t carry enough fuel for making extra excursions. If we come off this ballistic path and don’t make our gravitational slingshot around the moon, not only will we not match velocities with the Mozari ship so we can have a chance of docking with it, but we won’t manage to get anywhere else, either. We’ll float on forever—or at least the ship will, until it gets drawn into a gravitational field, but we’ll have asphyxiated long before that when life support runs out.”
“Long story short,” Daniel supplied, “we’re not going back.”
Lunar Orbit
“Anybody says ‘That’s no moon,’” Daniel said, “I’ll kill you myself.” The Mozari ship ahead of the Avenger was vast, and made of some dense rocky material that was almost darkness itself. The Avenger approached the Mozari ship cautiously, Jessica Evans poring over the radar and other sensory systems as they went. “Radar imagery shows that the hatchway is only about ten inches thick, though there’s... stuff, layered in behind that.”
“Stuff?” Daniel asked.
“Cables, electronics, insulation, that kind of thing. At least, that’s the closest equivalent I can call it to describe it.”
“Not a problem to cut through?”
“Depends how much power or energy they’ve got running through it all.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to get a zillion-volt jolt,” Bailey said.
“It’s not the volts you have to worry about,” Beswick said helpfully. “It’s the amps. Or, in the case of an alien power system... Who knows? Could be heat, radiation, anything.”
“Well, it’s between us and them,” Daniel said, “so we haven’t much choice. But with any luck, the limpet nano-charges will take them out along with the hull plating itself.”
Evans coughed slightly. “I’ve been thinking about that, and this is going to sound crazy, but... Why don’t we just knock?”
Everybody looked at her in disbelief.
“How do you mean, knock?” Bailey asked.
“The nanites we have and they have are all the same, right?”
Daniel thought about it. “Basically, yeah. Maybe a chemical difference based on where they were made, or from what raw materials, but otherwise...”
“Otherwise, they use the same operating system, which our techies have learned some of. Enough to program the nano-blocks for simple tasks. We can communicate with them, and tell them what to make, so...”
Daniel realized where Evans was going with this. “Could we tell a door made of them to open?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here, so the worst that could happen is that nothing happens, the nanites just don’t obey, and the door stays closed.”
Daniel shrugged. “It’s worth a try. They wanted us trained, so let’s show that we’ve learned something.”
Horowitz brought the Avenger in gently, slowing the ship with the reaction control thrusters and nudging it towards the Mozari hull. The progress was painfully, frustratingly slow—or seemed that way even though Daniel knew both ships were moving at thousands of miles per hour. After what seemed like days, but was probably around fifteen minutes, Hammond’s Hardcases felt a slight but distinct bump.
“OK, I’m not sure I understand how,” Horowitz said, “but there’s an air seal against the boarding hatch.”
“Nanites, I guess,” Evans said. “If their technology is all based on it, then it makes sense that they’d use something like the nanite construction blocks to open and close portals.”
“But since they know we’ve got them,” Dieter Hulsmann said, “wouldn’t they block or limit our use of them? They must have some countermeasure.”
“They probably do, but... They’re the ones who sent the nanites to us, so they must have had some reason to do that,” Daniel pointed out. “Which means that if they haven’t used a countermeasure, then maybe they don’t just know we’re here, but actually want us here.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Kinsella said.
“Why would they want us here? Experimental subjects?”
Beswick groaned. “I’ve had enough anal probing for one lifetime, thanks.”
“They have the technology to have snatched people before—and maybe did before they showed themselves and started bombing. I mean, they knew our frequencies, our languages, our culture... They must have learned that from contact at some point—” Evans guessed.
“Don’t give me that ancient astronaut crap so early in the morning,” Kinsella groaned. “You don’t have the hair for it.”
“Time to go,” Daniel said firmly. “Our zone of action is inside.”
The nano-blocks worked perfectly. A neat, circular line of the Mozari hatch turned to dust and fell in, confirming the presence of artificial gravity of some kind. Daniel wanted to be first in, and immediately ducked through the hatch, followed by the others in pairs, each offering cover for the others, should any opposition appear.
Daniel’s suit felt tighter than normal, and he knew it was because the nanites were making an airtight skin around him, as well as around every member of the team. The suits’ hoods had flowed over their faces, keeping them safe from the vacuum, while portable tanks on their backs provided up to four hours of air (according to Horowitz) if there proved not to be a breathable atmosphere. Otherwise, their weapons and tools were much the same as those they’d used in Boston.
They were in a sort of mechanical ventricle, with power cables in place of veins, and a curving walkway that bent upwards above them, quite dizzyingly. Daniel watched, resisting the urge to recite prayers that he didn’t really believe in while Bailey attached a small device to a smaller nano-block and triggered it. The block began to sink into the wall, and on the smartphone-like device, Daniel could see a display of the chemicals and gases that were being found on the other side of the wall. It flashed green, confirming, to Daniel’s surprise, that the device had detected typical Earth-like gases in a breathable combination.
“Switch off your air tanks, Hardcases. The air is fresh.” He breathed in the Mozari ship’s air and wished he’d picked a different word. It was breathable, health-wise, but it stank, and he couldn’t even compare the smell to anything else; it was too alien.
A noise began somewhere deep within the ship, and at once flowing black ovoids, like ink floating in zero-g, shot towards Daniel and his unit. Daniel opened fire instantly, but the railgun bolts simply passed through the things as if they weren’t there. Then the ovoids spat
fire back, in the form of railgun bolts… from no railgun.
Everyone dove for cover while Palmer hurled a grenade. It went off between the ovoids, slightly disrupting them, but they held together. Daniel had seen enough to get the measure of them, though. “Nanites,” he called. “They’re nanite blobs.”
More bolts blew sparks from the interior surfaces around him.
“What kills nanites?” Bailey shouted.
“Maybe those,” Rausch said, pointing. Several shark-like forms, each with three equidistant fins of equal length, shot into the chamber from an opening valve. They shot railgun bolts.
Daniel raised his XR-01 and started snapping off bursts. “Find cover!” To his surprise, though, these drones weren’t bulletproof, and one exploded almost instantly. Kinsella and Bailey started picking off the others while Palmer threw out a hand towards the ovoid nano-bubbles. The nanites in his suit arm burst forward, frothing around one of the ovoids. It started to bubble and fly apart before pulling itself painfully out of existence.
Unlike Daniel’s arm at the Mozari church, Palmer’s sleeve didn’t return. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Push forward,” Daniel called crisply, as the second ovoid retreated.
The other drones remained, and Rausch screamed as a bolt from one pinned his ankle to the floor. The two Navy SEALs gave him covering fire while his Exo-suit pushed the bolt back out and began to repair the foot.
The Hardcases moved forward, deeper into the ship. In many ways, it wasn’t just like a videogame level, but too like a videogame level. Every instinct he had, even as they engaged another set of drones, told him something was not right about this set-up.
Bailey voiced it first. “Where the hell are they? The Mozari, I mean.”
“Search me, Superman,” Buapueak said.
“I don’t like it. Something just ain’t right.”