America One: War of the Worlds

by T I WADE

  “Locking on to three targets at 7 miles, firing” stated Saturn.

  “Target locked at 3 miles, firing” added Maggie.

  Only two tiny explosions grew into fireballs in front, but neither of the Jones were looking outside, they were concentrating on their radar screens.

  “Got one missed two, locking again at 5 miles,” added Saturn. She was quick, maybe a little too quick, thought Jonesy as he saw the remaining enemy ships quickly close on SB-II.

  “VIN, over horizon, orders please,” stated a new voice.

  “VIN, SB-II is heading to ground. Hit any bogeys directly behind him, now!” shouted Jonesy.

  VIN didn’t have time to respond as suddenly SB-II disappeared into a massive fireball. “Oh shit,” he stated and trained his three of the mother ship’s twelve lasers on the perpetrators behind the fireball.

  One by one the remaining five enemy were blown from the sky as everybody fired at whatever they could lock on to before someone else got it.

  By this time Michael and Penny Pitt had turned, and were heading back to the enemy base. They had 10 seconds before the door would open and Michael pushed SB-I to 100 percent power.

  Jonesy, his mind refusing to accept what he had just seen, pushed the flash from his mind, turned as hard as he could and headed back to help Michael.

  “SB-III to SB-I we are twenty miles behind you at 77,000 feet at full power,” stated Jonesy. His wife had gone quiet.

  “Three seconds to door opening turning in now, will attack directly from front,” stated Michael.

  Michael and Penny Pitt didn’t see the seven more Matt ships climb up over a high mountain 30-odd miles behind them, but Jonesy did.

  “Where are all these enemy ships coming from?” he thought aloud as he turned towards them. “VIN check your radar, seven new bogeys from nowhere.”

  “Thirty miles behind you Jonesy,” stated Mars as he also saw the enemy arrive out of nowhere on his radar screen.

  “I have new flight coordinates, maybe a second base exit, or even another base or something,” added VIN far above. “Laser crew lock onto seven new targets now! Fire at will!”

  A third group of seven enemy ships suddenly went vertical right behind the mountain Penny Pitt was heading for as the door opened, Penny’s camera and laser were already locked on it. They were less than ten miles from the door when the seven new Matt ships swooped over, down the side of the mountain and began firing at them from dead ahead. Michael saw that they were directly in-between them and the door as Penny took out her first enemy ship directly in front.

  “Coming in from your left,” stated Lunar in SB-V as Michael saw two more Matt ships destruct in massive blue explosions only three miles ahead of them.

  “Locked onto second Matt ship, firing,” stated Penny as their SB-I lurched ever so slightly.

  “Aim for the blue shield we need to blow it, three more bogeys exiting. I think we are hit,” Michael stated calmly as more Matt ships blew up a mile from his position, thanks to VIN and his crew. His ship buckled to and fro from the near explosions but he kept SB-I on track, he thought smiling with determination.

  Unbeknown to him his controls was damaged. Penny continued to fire at the blue shield inside the gaping mouth of the cavern, but Michel’s basic controls had suddenly locked. He couldn’t control SB-I anymore.

  “Michael pull up!” shouted Lunar as her co-pilot hit the first target exiting the cavern mouth forty miles behind the action.

  The two remaining enemy ships began to turn, and one disintegrated as the blue shield blew up behind it.

  Michael Pitt flew straight into the exiting blast from the open cavern at full power.

  The second explosion deep inside the cavern mouth added to the first, and exploding energy blew out of the open mouth of the mountain like a dragon breathing fire. It lit up the dark sky for miles around the cave, and caught the last of the three Matt ships trying to climb out of the way.

  “Mars, SB-IV, you have two Bogeys coming in from your Starboard beam, turn directly towards them,” shouted Jonesy as Maggie locked onto another bogey and blew it out of the sky.

  “I think we have one on our behind,” stated Maggie to Jonesy.

  “Hold on,” replied Jonesy and again went up into a full 360 degree vertical loop at full power.

  Much of SB-III’s rapid forward speed had been drained off on their first attack when they had swept up from 5,000 feet to 50,000, but the maneuver still felt like having a brick in Jonesy’s stomach. The turn was so tight that the Matt ship, definitely a rookie behind him had just started following SB-III around in the vertical circle when Maggie blew it out of the sky.

  “Mom, Mars needs some help here” stated a scared sounding Saturn as Jonesy turned towards SB-IV.

  “I see four bogeys behind SB-IV,” stated Lunar.

  “I am locking on three at ten miles,” added Michael Price and as Maggie locked onto one, four explosions lit up the area behind Saturn’s tail.

  “All four enemy off your tail, son. Mars sharp turn to port, then vertical to America Two,” stated VIN as his crew searched for more enemy ships.

  Again the sky was empty of enemy aircraft, and three lonely shuttles headed up vertically into a higher, safe altitude.

  Like all space or air battles, it was over in minutes.

  The feelings of loss was felt once the high of battle was gone. Nobody talked for several minutes, and the three shuttles circled at 30,000 feet scanning their radars.

  “I think it is time to enter their tunnel,” suggested Mars Noble over a very silent intercom.

  “Good idea, son,” stated VIN from above. “Max you there?”

  Everybody knew the numbers. They’d all seen the two friendly blips disappear from the screens, and nobody had to say anything. VIN, being in battle often before, was much quicker to react than the other astronauts. Ryan, in the Bridge of America Two, and Kathy were not able to contain their shock and stared at their screens as if in a trance.

  “Max here,” as the reply.

  “Max suit up. Mars will meet you at the tunnel entrances. Take Vitalily and three more in new suits, take mining robot and hand lasers. It’s time to pay the Matts a visit. All astronauts, the commander is in shock. I’m taking over command of the mission. All shuttles to give aerial support to SB-IV, then return to mother ship once Mars Noble is dropped off at the tunnel entrances. You have about forty minutes to dawn.”

  The tunnel entrances were only a mile or so from the still-lit open flaming mouth of the mountain, and Saturn landed while the other two ships circled a few miles away. Mars was fast, He was already in the hatch when Max told VIN that they were suited up, getting supplies, and they should be at the tunnel entrances within 30 minutes.

  “Go Saturn, go,” ordered Mars as he reached the entrance a few minutes later. “You are in danger sitting there. I’m fine, get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone,” replied his wife.

  “Saturn Jones, takeoff,” ordered VIN. “Get out of there. That is an order. Mars will be fine. He has suit time to reach Mattville if need be.”

  Mars watched as a minute later SB-III came swooping over him as Saturn left the planet. She turned on her father’s orders and followed his shuttle out of view. Mars was now alone.

  Inside he cried. Allen and Jamie, and Michael and Penny were his friends. With Jonesy and Maggie and the OldGeners, they had taught him everything he knew, and he certainly did not think why they had to die. He sat down on a lump of gold, and cried like a baby, quiet sobs going through his spacesuit.

  Everybody on the intercom could hear him, and as the ground crew increased their speed getting to him, the five astronauts were all silent as they left planet Mars, and headed into the weak sunlight thousands of feet above.

  Chapter 17

  The Other Half of Mattville

  “You OK, buddy?” asked Max 35 minutes later handing Mars a hand laser. Vitalily handed him a remote suit charger unit. “Joey
and Pete, and the robot are on their way up on the train.”

  “I think so,” sniffed Mars.

  They waited saying nothing for twenty minutes until the light of the simple train appeared coming up the tunnel from Mattville.

  “Let’s go and see what’s left,” added Vitalily getting up off the lump of gold he was sitting on. “It sounded like SB-I did a pretty good job. Those Pitts sure make big explosions. To us in Mattville it felt like a massive earthquake.”

  “Michael and Penny have, or had a pretty good record of destroying things,” replied Mars still sniffing and getting off his lump of gold.

  Dawn was breaking and the light from the explosion had long disappeared as he followed the five crew members and the mining robot that walked down the short tunnel like a spider.

  As soon as Max reached the metal wall, he programed the spider to begin its laser in a circle on the vertical wall. Nobody cared if there was a blue shield on the other side or not.

  As the round circle of the wall lazily fell towards them twenty minutes later, they saw the telltale sign of a blue shield begin to protrude through the three-foot wide circle.

  “One more shield for us,” stated Max as he bent down and slowly entered the hole in the wall.

  With lasers at the ready, one by one the crew entered the enemy base. Max left the robot at the entrance, its job done. The crew couldn’t take the train either as the wall was not open where the tracks went in, and they would have to bend over and negotiate the five-foot high tunnel without it.

  The tall crew managed 500 yards before they rested. They rested where the black box of the shield was setup in a hole in the wall.

  Unlike the first tunnel Mars are went down, this one showed no signs of damage. The shield had prevented any explosion from getting into this area. It also meant they had another 500 yards to go.

  “This is real back breaking work,” stated Max as they reached to where they expected the tunnel to end. Instead, they found the end of the first shield blended up against a second shield, and slowly each of the crew passed through the double wall and rested.

  Five hundred yards later, they reached the second black box. This time they were happy to sit around the box and stretch their backs to loosen them up.

  “VIN to Max, how are you doing, over?”

  “Hopefully the enemy haven’t learned English yet,” replied Max into his helmet’s intercom. “We cut through the wall, are about a mile in, reached a second shield, and must be at worst halfway. Can you get shorter guys to do this next time?”

  “We don’t have very many short Tall People aboard,” replied VIN trying to make a joke.

  “Maybe get the girls to do this exploration thing. They are shorter than us,” replied Max.

  “Not us astronauts,” stated Maggie at close to six feet tall and heading over on SB-III’s first orbit. “Max, the large cavern door is still open, so there is zero atmospheric conditions in that part of their base, over.”

  “Copy that, thanks Maggie. Come on guys let get to the end of this shield,” and Max got up to continue the bent-over walk.

  They all had the new suits on which gave them four hours of suit time, and they reached the end of the tunnel 190 minutes into their timed allowance.

  The atmospheric readouts inside the blue shields were good. They could have taken off their helmets and breathed at any time, but they wanted to be ready in case they had to pass through an area which didn’t have air. At the end of the second blue shield they found that the next shield was missing.

  As they gently walked out of the protection of the shield, they could stand and they quickly saw that they were inside the cavern. The large cavern door was open several hundred feet in front of them.

  “Max to VIN, do you copy?”

  “Your voice has changed, more static, but you are still coming through clear enough to hear you, over,” replied VIN.

  “We are in the cavern. The door is open, the whole area around us is black and there are large puddles, or globules of melted gold everywhere. I think I can see piles of what must have been be three spacecraft up squashed against the rear wall. Three ships or something. They are about three feet high, and piles of totally black melted metal. SB-I is not here. I would assume that they died instantaneously and must have been vaporized, over.”

  “Any signs of life?” VIN asked.

  “We walked through two shields, still operational and with oxygen, so there is a power plant still working, I would assume below us. I see another blue shield on the opposite side of the hangar, or cavern. It looks like to me that the blast took out the shield, or shields inside the cavern, and did not destroy the others in the tunnels. I’m counting dozens of pieces of blue space splatted up against the walls, and even in the pools of melted gold, over."

  “I would assume that Penny didn’t hit the power supply on this hit,” replied VIN. “Last time, SB-I took out the cavern in Mattville, the blast was ten times bigger than what I saw from up here. Proceed forward, and with caution. Remember nobody can fire a laser through a shield wall, so you are totally safe inside the cavern, unless they have weapons we don’t know about.”

  Carefully, they inspected what was left of the piles of what had been spacecraft, and hundreds of pieces of blue Matt space suits. There wasn’t much left of the dark-stained pieces of space wear, but there seemed to be far more pieces of blue suits than for six pilots. Mars and Max agreed that at last a couple of dozen or more people died in the explosion when the blue shield in the cavern lost its atmosphere.

  “I count six remains of suits in the flattened and burnt out piles of spaceship metal,” stated Vitalily.

  “VIN, tell Jonesy that he can count off another three enemy ships on his tally. I bet knows how many we have hit,” suggested Max.”

  “Twenty-two. We went through the video and sound recordings of hits, and I’ll check with him when he comes back round,” VIN replied.

  The crew looked hard and studied every particle inside the cavern while keeping careful eyes on the blue shields either side.

  Max and Vitalily inspected the blue shield on the other side. It was also extended into a five-foot high tunnel about twenty feet long. They couldn’t see through the other side, but there was light, and the inside of the blue shield was empty.

  Max turned his gaze to look at the evidence in the cavern itself. The blast must have blown out everything except the three heavy spacecraft, as the cavern was totally clean of dust or debris, as if somebody had swept it. There was not one piece of evidence that SB-I had ever flown into the cavern. Apart from the torn pieces of suits splattered on the blackened walls and roof, and dozens of tons of melted piles of gold on the floor by the walls, the cavern was clean and empty.

  “Remember Max, Commander Fob was inside SB-I with Michael and Penny,” stated VIN.

  “Well he isn’t anymore,” Max replied “there is not one shred of evidence that our ship was in here. That blast must have blown everything other than those three ships out the door.”

  Just before their suit time ran out, they reached the open cavern door. They were about a hundred feet above the flat surface of the dusty red planet outside, and Mars noticed a panel at the edge of the opening that looked like it controlled the door. It was not blinking, but glowed a very dull red so he pushed it, and the massive door a hundred feet wide and twenty feet high began to silently close downwards from above his head.

  Not expecting the door to still work, Max relayed to VIN that the door was working, and VIN ordered them to return to the safe shield area to recharge their suits and rest.

  They rested, unscrewing their helmets as the small suit chargers gave their suits a recharge. It would take two hours, and the latest chargers each had two full chargers inside them.

  The air inside the blue shield smelt like it had in all the other Matt bases, old and stale, and their voices were slightly higher pitched with the extra helium.

  “What do you think, Mars?” asked Max as the
y ate an Australian chocolate bar, and drank a pouch of high energy liquid.

  “Their bases are all much the same, except that extra tunnel on the other side,” replied Mars. “I’m sure they have a lower level in this base. The spaceship exit cavern in Mattville was lower than the rest of the base. I think this one is the other way around since we are a hundred feet above the Martian surface.”

  “The doors to the underground level must have been closed, and SB-I’s attack did not reach the power plants as it did in Mattville?” Max replied.

  “Well, Mattville had two separate survival power systems,” added Max. “Maybe this side of the base was a second cavern for the ships. It seems the same size, but SB-I didn’t destroy the main power plant, so it must be below this level. Also Jonesy mentioned that there could even be a third part of this base as all the enemy spacecraft couldn’t have exited from here. Now we’ve seen the size of this cavern, I tend to agree with him.”

  “Then what is over there on the other side?” asked Vitalily.

  “Globe room and command center, I expect” replied Mars. “Maybe another hangar, or cavern full of spaceships.

  While the men had their helmets off, they didn’t have intercom contact with VIN who had gone over the horizon anyway. There was currently nobody to talk to outside the base, so they discussed their next moves among themselves.

  “The shields will have protected anybody not standing inside the cavern,” stated Max.

  “There must be Matts alive on the other side, as well as behind any protective door we find in the base. We are going to have to go through this whole base before we can make it safe,” added Mars. “I remember the separate hangar on DX2017. The door was hidden, my father couldn’t find it, but when he was shown it by Commander Joot he had to walk down a long tunnel to get to it. I bet all these bases are connected, and we are going to have to find a door to where the rest of their ships are parked.”

  “If we find an unused black box shield, we could fill this cavern again, pump air into it and then bring in the shuttles. The door doesn’t seem damaged,” suggested Vitalily.