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Also by Bernard Wilkerson
The Worlds of the Dead series
Beaches of Brazil
Communion
Discovery
The Creation series
In the Beginning
The Hrwang Incursion
Book 1
Earth
Bernard Wilkerson
Copyright ? 2015 by Bernard Wilkerson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.
Requests for permission should be submitted to [email protected].
For information about the author, go to
www.bernardwilkerson.com
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover photo courtesy of NASA.
To Terry,
the Hero of the Battle of the Tenth of December
Episode 1
DEFEAT
1
Stanley Russell woke up, vaguely aware of someone shaking him. He rolled over, pulled his blanket up higher, and almost asked, "Just five more minutes, Mother," when the someone shook harder, tugged at his blanket, and hissed at him.
"Captain, you've got to wake up!"
Stanley rolled to face the someone and tried to open his eyes. A bright light behind the voice blinded him and he squeezed his eyes tighter shut. This wasn't fair. He had pulled a twenty hour shift while his ship took atmospheric samples over both the Martian poles and now he needed sleep.
"Captain!"
He recognized the voice now. The someone waking him up was Irina. Commander Samovitch, he corrected himself, as she often did when he tried to call her Irina, which annoyed him as much as she was annoying him now and led him to call her Irina more, just to annoy her back.
"Captain. Opportunity Base is reporting they've lost contact with Earth."
"Tell those idiots they're just out of line of sight, that's all."
He rolled back over, away from his Nigerian-Russian second-in-command's voice.
She grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard, her fingers digging like steel claws into him.
"Sir! They should have been able to contact Earth over two hours ago."
She pulled his shoulder as she shook him, and he rolled towards her and sat up carefully, making sure he didn't knock his head into the upper bunk. Spaceship captains in the movies got huge staterooms with attached lounges and lots of privacy. They probably got lots of sleep also.
She let go of him as he sat up, and he raised his arm, it would probably have a small bruise where her talons had dug into it, and shielded his eyes from the bright light.
"Sir, they want to speak with you immediately."
He groaned as he stood slowly and stretched. Stand up too quickly and you fling yourself to the ceiling; he'd done that a few times already. The Beagle rotated slowly as it orbited Mars, providing the illusion of minimal gravity, but you could hurt yourself all the same.
He steadied himself on the upper bunk, her bunk. He shared a cabin with this woman and he couldn't even call her by her first name? She rarely slept at the same time as him, while often pulling the same, long shifts as he did. He wondered how she did it. He needed more sleep than he was getting on this mission and he finally understood why officers drank so much coffee. You needed some kind of artificial stimulant to cope with so little rest.
"What do they want from us?" he asked. "To hold their hands and wipe their noses while they check their own equipment?"
"Their equipment is fine, sir. We already ran through diagnostics with them."
"Then it's just a solar flare."
"I don't think so, sir."
Something in Samovitch's voice bothered Stanley. He needed to wake up, to clear away the fog caused by too little sleep, and to figure out what was going on. He stretched and yawned. Maybe he should get some coffee.
He shook his head no at himself, then stretched his neck from side to side to cover up the motion. He wasn't sure he wanted to start that bad habit this late in life, and he certainly didn't want to be like every other officer.
He stretched again, his arms pushing against the ceiling of their cabin, his feet against the floor, and he heard several of his vertebrae cracking. Low gravity was terrible for your body.
"What's going on, Irina?" he asked, the fog in his head finally starting to clear.
"I don't know, sir. Spirit Base lost contact with Earth before they rotated out of the window. We haven't been able to establish contact with Earth either."
Irina's voice was steadied, measured, the perfect military tone, which bothered Stanley more. She didn't even correct him when he called her by her first name, which meant she had something more on her mind than trying to prove how military she could be to her civilian captain.
"That just proves it's a solar flare."
"No, sir. Ping is working."
Whenever communication across a network was having issues, the fall back was always to ping the server or device in question. Even if all other programs on a system were failing, if the system was up, it would respond to a ping. It was built into the basic operating instructions.
Earth had a ring of satellites dedicated to communication with the twin bases on Mars, Opportunity and Spirit, named after two of the most famous Mars exploration craft, and Beagle used the same system to talk to mission control. If they were able to ping the satellite system, they should also be able to talk to someone behind the system.
Unless it was just a glitch.
Talking to someone over two hundred million kilometers away, the present distance between Mars and Earth, wasn't as simple as some might believe. Things could get in the way. Solar flares, the Moon, Phobos or Deimos, a bad storm on Earth, or a janitor unplugging a key server. It had happened before. Communication would probably be restored in a few hours.
"Alright, let's see what's going on," Stanley sighed.
Everyone was being Nervous Nellies, but with good reason, he supposed. Irina confirmed, a hint of concern in her military voice, that she had the same worries, the same fears, the same nightmares as everyone else on or over Mars had had for the past two months.
"It could be the Hrwang, sir."
"Is something wrong, Captain?"
Captain Christina Owenby could feel the Colonel looking over her shoulder, could feel his presence causing her thoughts to spiral out of control, could almost feel his fingers binding her tongue, his hands choking her throat, constricting her voice, making her completely unable to talk.
Her husband kept telling her to relax. Colonels were people too, he told her all the time.
"Well?"
"Sorry, sir," she stammered. She took a breath. Ponies and beaches, right? Go to a happy place. Just tell the man what he wanted to hear.
"It's probably nothing," she said, then regretted it. If it was nothing, why was the commander of the 614th Air and Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a distinguished unit with over sixty years of operational history, standing behind her and registering his reaction to her obvious stress? She flipped a set of screens onto a larger monitor so he could see and she wouldn't have to turn to look at him.
"Google Operations is complaining that the signal from this satellite stopped suddenl
y."
She pointed out a tiny dot amid the myriad dots on the tracking screen.
"So?" the Colonel asked.
So? So? She couldn't speak.
She hated this part. The follow up questions. Always wanting to know every detail, as if she hadn't considered those details, hadn't thought about everything. That was her job, and she did it well. She thought about the details and figured everything out first, then told someone else who would bring it to the Colonel.
She hadn't gathered enough information yet on the problem she was investigating, hadn't figured out what, if anything, was going on, but it didn't look good and the Colonel must have seen her stress, must have noticed her flipping through screens, mapping positions and orbits, must have seen her spill her tiny styrofoam cup of coffee, only a little of the brown liquid remaining, and not bother to clean it up.
She shifted her weight in her chair, her ever increasing weight that was going to force her out of the military and into a civilian life, albeit one that would probably pay a lot better, and Christina took another deep breath.
"It's the third one, sir."
"Third one, what?"
"The third," she stuttered the words. "The third commercial satellite that's gone down in the past ten minutes."
The Colonel was quiet. Waiting for more. She felt stupid, unable to say what she was thinking, worried that she was worried over nothing, worried that if she said the wrong thing or voiced concerns that were inappropriate, her career would be over. As if it wasn't over anyway. The stupid PT test didn't care how smart you were.
She took another deep breath and just said it. Who cares, anyway? It's just a career.
"They were all near the Hrwang vessel."
She'd said it. She, Captain Christina Owenby, United States Air Force, satellite tracker extraordinaire, had just blamed a potentially coincidental series of glitches on the bogeyman in the room. Her hand knocked the tipped over styrofoam cup on her desk, pushing it in a semicircle, as she pointed out the general region of space where the satellites were glitching and where the big red dot of the Hrwang ship was located. Despite the fact that the Hrwang seemed to be friendly, they were still represented in red on her screen. It had just been a choice.
"NROL-273 is not responding, sir," came a male voice behind her. He sounded confident and firm, his voice always professional in times of urgency or crisis. She hated sergeants.
"Bring up NROL-273 on your display," the Colonel said.
Christina's hands had already been flying across her keyboard, and just as she got the top secret spy satellite's orbital path up, she accidentally flipped her screen down. She felt, rather than heard, the Colonel take his own deep breath behind her.
She got the screen back up on the big monitor and pointed out the location of NROL-273. She couldn't speak, but it was obvious.
"Get this up on the big monitor," he said.
It is on the big monitor, Christina thought, then realized he wanted it up on the big big monitor, the one that stood at the front of the room. The one that everyone could see and track. She felt the sweat pooling in her armpits and on her palms.
"Yessir," she squeaked.
"And mark the last known locations in yellow."
She toggled a color on the screen, and it became even more obvious how close the four silent satellites were to the Hrwang location. A few more keystrokes and she took over the main monitor at the front of the room, her screen displayed up there.
"Hey," someone complained, then looked around. He saw the Colonel standing behind her and didn't say anything else.
"Sergeant Celedina," the Colonel called, and a dark haired, female NCO four chairs down from Christina looked up. "Get a report from Captain Owenby. Put everything in it she tells you and get it up to headquarters ASAP. You have three minutes."
"Yessir," the NCO barked and moved her chair behind her neighbor's, scooting it to get next to Christina's.
"Good work," the Colonel muttered and Christina turned to look at him, but he was no longer looking at her. He was already on the move, heading to where the confident, male sergeant sat, the one who had reported the silent spy satellite. She looked around and Sergeant Celedina had reached her, laptop in hand. Christina began explaining what she had found. It was a little bit easier to talk to a sergeant than a colonel, but not by much.
Eva Gilliam crossed her legs, changing from left over right to right over left, and the eyes of every boy in front of her followed their motion. It was what she expected. She was wearing the dress. The dress that hinted at everything but revealed nothing except her beautifully tanned legs from the knees down. It was her favorite recruiting tool.
She had the boys from Utah firmly in her grasp. They sat arrayed in a semicircle in front of her and hung on every word, every motion, every movement of her dress, and Eva knew they were already fantasizing about becoming super spies and claiming her as their personal Bond girl.
The Agency loved the boys from Utah, and the soon to graduate college seniors in front of her demonstrated why. Eager to please, loyal to God and country, and honest to a fault, the group of boys, most of whom had lived in foreign countries for extended periods of time and spoke the languages of those nations fluently, would be excellent candidates. Most wouldn't last longer than a year or two, the looser morals of the hardened agents eventually wearing them down or chasing them away, but the Utah boys looked good on paper.
Eva, nominally from Utah herself, could always get into these college fairs, and every preening, over-confident, spy wannabe sought her out and tried to impress her. She explained the entrance exam requirements patiently, turning some away, and giving the rest a chance to ask questions, although she already knew what they would ask. It was what they always asked.
"What's life as an agent like?"
They all wanted her to describe scenes from a movie, but this was the part where she told them the truth. It wasn't all fun and games, but a real job. Most enrollees would end up as analysts, particularly those with superior foreign language skills, but analysts were important. Every enrollee would go through the same training, the top candidates culled out for field work, while the rest of the graduates would receive other assignments.
But then she emphasized how important the work of the Agency was. To protect their country and to keep their families safe, and this always struck the boys. They would grow serious, some would tell her they'd have to pray about it, but all of them would download enrollment applications to their phones. Eva had one of the highest rates of completion of downloaded applications, and so her boss continually sent her into the field to recruit. She wished she could do something more, but told herself recruiting was important also, and of the group in front of her, one or two would make it. And who knows? Maybe one of them would save the world some day.
She reflected on why she had joined. It wasn't to save the world.
She enjoyed the freedom and the trust placed in her by the government. Plus, it had given her an excuse to get away from squabbling parents who never recovered from their divorce. The Agency always gave her an excuse to stay away at holidays.
But being at college had accomplished much the same. It was more than that.
The military impressed Eva but not many women served in special forces. The Agency promised more challenge, more opportunity, and more adventure than she thought she could get from the military. She enjoyed taking on difficult challenges and succeeding, even excelling. The training she received suited her, she enjoyed it, and she thought she always performed well.
Her fantasy though, unlike the fantasies of the boys in front of her, was a posting to Athens or Rome, Marseille or Barcelona, any place along the Mediterranean. Such postings proved few and far between though, and she settled for the occasional trip to a California beach.
Her phone buzzed and she looked at it and it was just
a number. But the number made her go cold inside.
She faked a smile and waved her phone at the boys. "I have to run," she said. "You can download the application forms off the web." She normally pushed the forms from her phone to theirs, which allowed the Agency to track who had recruited whom, among other things, but the number on her phone changed everything.
"Spy stuff?" someone asked and a few of the boys chuckled nervously.
Eva broadened her smile and nodded, trying not to run out of the conference center where the career fair was being held. She couldn't see anything around her, and almost knocked over a display on her way out, catching it out of reflex and not thought, and handing it back to the presenter standing next to it without saying anything.
Or perhaps she had said she was sorry. She wasn't sure. The number on her phone consumed her thoughts, tied up all the threads that processed around in her brain, and she could focus on nothing else but what that number meant.
Just a meaningless series of digits to anyone else, including anyone else from the Agency, but to Eva they were a specific set of instructions. Instructions she had never received before, but had reviewed in her head every time she went into the field, and now she processed all those reviews, all those plans, so she would know exactly what to do and when to do it.
She found her rental car and got in, planning out how close she could take it to her destination and where she would have to ditch it so no one could trace her location from the car.
This is crazy, she thought in a moment of clarity. What does it mean?
She shrugged and backed out of her parking space. The mission is what mattered. And her mission was to follow the instructions the number on the phone implied.
Get to a safe house. Now.
"Jayla, why are you watching news?"
Jayla looked up at her younger sister, then back at the monitor. She ran through a million thoughts, trying to process what was happening.
"Jayla!"
She looked back up. Jada stood in the entryway to the den, already changed into hiking shorts, hiking boots, carrying Dad's hiking staff, and wearing a ridiculous hat.
"I'm ready," she said.
Jayla shook her head. "Give me a minute."
"No."
Younger sisters could be so annoying.
"Look. The alien ship just disappeared. I mean, it was right there in front of the United Nations, and it just disappeared. They have it on video."
"Magic trick."
"It's on a lot of videos. And phones. Look."
Jayla flipped the monitor to multi-screen, and scrolled through a variety of uploaded videos. Scenes of the Hrwang shuttle simply vanishing were the first hits on most sites.
"Can you explain that?" she asked her younger sister.
"Who cares?"
"They're aliens, Jada. This happened over ten hours ago. We've been completely cut off driving up here. We should've listened to the radio."
"Do you know what kind of hick music these people listen to? No way."
Jada had repeated several times that drives up to the cabin were supposed to be accompanied by open windows, arms and legs hanging out of them, and loud, thumping, modern music. Jayla had finally given in, then had enjoyed the long drive up the mountains to her father's cabin. It was a beautiful summer day.
"Besides," Jada added, "up at Daddy's cabin, we're supposed to be cut off. It's called being in Nature."
The cabin was well stocked with non-perishable foods. They had brought the perishables, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, and other items, up with them, filling their four wheel drive SUV. Daddy had insisted they bring enough for two weeks minimum, and they probably had enough food for four. They were physically cut off from the rest of the world now, and completely self-sufficient for at least a month.
Was that Daddy's plan the whole time?
Wolfgang Riebe knew the three Americans in his German Alpine hiking club called him the Nazi and he didn't care. Today was too good of a day to let idiots bother him.
Wolfgang wasn't old enough to have known any Nazis, but his grandfather had always told him that his father, Wolfgang's great grandfather, had been part of the resistance, and Wolfgang had always been proud of that. Until he studied history at the University. There he learned that most Germans claimed to have resisted the Nazis in some form or another, and that most of those claims were false.
It had been a depressing day.
But today was beautiful.
Steep terrain, a warm sun with an occasional cool breeze, large trees, interesting rock formations, and the odd castle ruin combined to make the perfect hike, and everyone in his club had shown up. The renovation of the castle restaurant at the top of the mountain had finally been completed and everyone looked forward to an invigorating hike with a fine lunch in the middle.
Some, especially the Americans, grumbled because of his quick pace, but a quick pace did not make a man a Nazi, did it? What had made men become Nazis and do such things? he wondered for the millionth time. He knew he should simply let it go. He wasn't that man despite what they called him.
He wondered why they grumbled anyway. They were soldiers of some sort. Shouldn't they be fit?
He had selected a hike that took the long way around to the castle ruins at the top, rather than the short, little more than five kilometer hike most tourists took. A tram to the top still existed, and he imagined all the old or overweight tourists taking that route, getting the view for nothing but a few hours time and a few euros. His club would earn their mountaintop lunch and view. Even the American soldiers.
The rock at the top of the mountain, and thus the castle that stood there, had been named, supposedly, after a dragon that slept in caves they now passed. He signaled a water break, both to allow some of the slower hikers to catch up and to get a better view of the caves. He put his day pack down and climbed up some rocks to see them. Several followed him, including the shy Swiss girl who hardly spoke German even though she had lived in 'Slautern for almost a year. At least she was a strong hiker if not a strong communicator.
The caves weren't much, just tiny holes in the rocks. Only one was large enough to enter. Wolfgang was disappointed and quickly ready to move on, to get to the top of the mountain. He told those that had followed him that they should get going if they wanted a good table for lunch and, after some chuckles, they followed him out.
The three American soldiers were huddled together over their cell phones when Wolfgang and the others rejoined the main group, and it annoyed him that they couldn't put the stupid things away for a few hours to enjoy nature.
"Let's go," he bellowed, first in German, then in English, but the Americans didn't move. Other set off, and he moved towards the three.
"We must go," he said in English. His accent was not too heavy; when one grew up near Kaiserslautern and the massive air base nearby, one learned English, but the group of Americans either didn't understand him or weren't paying him attention.
"It's time," he said, pointing after the others who had already left. "We must hike." The Swiss girl stood nearby, watching him, and he felt a need to show his authority in front of her. "Now," he added.
"We've been ordered back to the base," one of the Americans said in Wolfgang's general direction. Well, if they had to leave, at least they had driven to the train station in a separate vehicle. No one would have to go back with them.
"Fine," Wolfgang said. "You will miss good food."
They ignored him.
He looked at the Swiss girl, her name was Leah, and she looked back at him and gave him a half shrug and a half smile. The rest of the trip would be better without the Americans and their grumbling anyway. He smiled back at Leah.
He turned back to the Americans to wish them a farewell and perhaps to give them one more opportunity to change their minds, when
a harsh, staccato tone began coming from their phones. His phone, on silent and tucked safely deep in his pack which he had left on the side of the trail, began making the same noise. So did Leah's.
"Take cover," one of the Americans said calmly. "That's the take cover signal."
Take cover? From what? He went to his pack to dig his phone out but one of the Americans grabbed his shoulder to stop him.
"We must take cover. Now," the man insisted. He pointed to the cave big enough to enter.
Wolfgang shook his head as he shouldered his pack.
"It is small," he said.
"It's better than nothing."
The Americans headed towards the cave and Leah looked at him nervously.
"Go with them," he said, pointing to the soldiers. She didn't move. "I must get the others. I'll join you quickly." The harsh tones from their phones irritated him, grating his nerves. "Hurry."
She nodded, a tear forming in her eye, and she reached out and touched his arm. He nodded at her.
"It will be okay," he said, keeping his German simple. "Just a silly American war exercise." She nodded and he wasn't sure she completely understood, but she followed the Americans into the cave.
Wolfgang caught up to the others quickly and convinced them to return to the tiny cave. As they followed him, they heard air raid sirens from the nearby town. Fear gripped Wolfgang. This was not a drill.
One of the Americans sat at the entrance to the cave trying to speak with someone on his cell phone. He was yelling at the phone, then stopped when he saw Wolfgang with the others. He waved them inside.
"I'm not sure how much time we have," he said in English.
"Until what?" asked one of the other members of the club whose English was better than Wolfgang's.
The American shook his head and pointed up in the air at the sound of the sirens.
"Your guess is as good as mine."
The hiking club huddled into the cave. Leah looked up at Wolfgang expectantly, but he moved to sit next to two men, thinking about his wife back in 'Slautern. He wanted to comfort the girl, but it seemed wrong. She would have to seek comfort elsewhere.
The American suddenly swore, startling Wolfgang. The man seemed to throw his phone, then himself, diving into the middle of the cave.
Another American yelled, "Cover your eyes!" and Wolfgang obediently buried his face in his arms. He sensed a bright flash of light and there was a scream. No noise accompanied the light. The explosion, or whatever had caused it, seemed distant; they were almost forty-five minutes by auto from Kaiserslautern, a city never called by it's real name. It was known as 'Slautern by the local Germans and K-town by the American soldiers from the nearby Air Force base. Wolfgang feared what had caused the bright light and worried about his home, his family.
When the bright light faded, he looked up at the American who had thrown himself into the cave, who now knelt over his phone as if his life depended on it.
"No signal," the man cursed but kept jabbing at the screen.
"Nuclear?" Wolfgang asked timidly, afraid, terrified of the answer. He didn't want to frighten any of the others, but he had to know.
"I don't know. Maybe," the American responded, not looking at him, still focused on his phone.
No one said anything, but several cried now. They all watched the American jabbing at his phone.
"What comes next, sir? A blast wave?" one of the other Americans asked. Wolfgang barely understood their English.
"How am I supposed to know? Do I look like a nuclear physicist?" the central American replied gruffly.
The woman with good English translated rapidly into German for the others and one of the other hikers explained to her that if it was a small, tactical nuclear device targeting Ramstein, the name of the Air Force base outside Wolfgang's hometown, then they were too far away to be affected by the blast wave. If it was bigger, they might feel something within a few minutes. She translated into English for the Americans.
"Then we stay here for at least ten more minutes," the American in charge said. The woman translated and the hiker who seemed to know what he was talking about nodded his head in agreement.
Ten minutes.
Every second seemed like agony to Wolfgang. When he was hiking in nature, hours were not long enough and he always had to return home too soon. But when he was hungry and food took three minutes to cook, every second ticking off on the microwave oven clock seemed endless. Now was worse. Did his family survive the blast? Would there be radiation? Which way was the wind blowing? Would it blow the fallout away from 'Slautern, or towards it? Why would someone drop a nuclear bomb? Would he ever see his wife and daughter again? Would he wish he had been close enough to the blast to have been killed instantly rather than surviving a nuclear war and dealing with the consequences, living like the characters in hundreds of science fiction and horror movies?
Lost in fear, he felt someone grab his arm and he looked to his side to see the Swiss girl, Leah, squeeze up next to him. Tears streaked her dusty face and she looked like a little child. He put his arm around her and pulled her to him tightly with both his arms. She sobbed into his chest.
Another unanswerable question occurred to Wolfgang. Had the aliens been responsible for this? If so, why had they carried nuclear bombs all they way from their home to Earth? And why would they target Ramstein? How would they even know of its existence?
He thought about the beautiful mountains and forests surrounding the cave they huddled in. He had hiked through most of them, becoming a hiking guide for a small remuneration from the club members who paid dues that hardly covered his transportation costs but gave him an excuse to claim business expenses. He loved his forest, and now it would be ruined, contaminated by man's destructive stupidity. Or an alien's stupidity.
Why couldn't the aliens have shown up during someone else's lifetime?
2
Defeat Page 1