by Peter David
“Hold it together, Raikes,” Hopper said sharply. “All of you.”
Raikes nodded in acknowledgment, but she was clearly not winding down anytime soon. The bottom line was that Hopper had every confidence that—when the moment arrived—Raikes would be all business and hyper-efficient. It was the waiting that could get to her. That could get to all of them.
“Can we hit this thing, please?” Raikes said to Nagata.
Nagata was the only one on the CIC who seemed immune to any sort of pressure. The man must have ice water in his veins. “We need to be sure of its speed,” said Nagata calmly. “Are we ready to fire missiles?”
“Raikes, do we have some Harpoons for the captain?” said Hopper.
Raikes smiled. Discussion of an impending opportunity to shoot at something always brightened her day. “Yes, sir, I’ve got some beauties.”
“Very well. Prepare to target; everyone in position.” Nagata checked the screen, although Hopper suspected it was purely pro forma. He probably had the image and position embedded in his mind. The stinger was definitely getting closer. Whether that meant that their own danger level was being ratcheted upward or that the aliens were presenting themselves as a better target pretty much stemmed from one’s worldview.
“Target ECHO 11,” said Nagata.
Raikes immediately threw herself into her work, entering the coordinates into the computer that controlled the ship’s store of RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles. It took her only seconds and then she announced, “Coordinates loaded, target impact twenty-one seconds. On your clock, Captain.” She paused and then added in a tone of forced casualness, “By the way, you know it’s not going to matter if they’re heading in this direction by accident or not. When we fire, they’ll know where we’re at.”
Hopper had known that. Still, Raikes saying it aloud brought it to stark reality. All eyes were upon him, including Nagata’s. It was his call. There was always the option that they could just sit tight, hope that the stinger cruised past them without being aware of their presence…
Then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the look on Stone’s face right before he was blown to hell. It was impossible to know which ship was the one coming near them, but it could well be that the same bastards that had murdered his brother were now within striking distance.
“Hit that son of a bitch,” said Hopper.
Raikes grinned wolfishly, although her voice was all business. “Roger that.”
From the foredeck missile battery, a huge plume of flame erupted from the missile tube. Raikes’s perfectly targeted Harpoon launched from the ship, arcing into the darkness in a blaze of light. A second followed a heartbeat later. Everyone in the CIC looked at the grid on the board, waiting to see the likelihood of their surviving the night.
On the port observation deck, Ord watched through binoculars with mounting concern as the John Paul Jones’s two missiles tore across the sky. He hadn’t had to hear Raikes’s comment down in the CIC; he knew perfectly well they were going all-in based upon readings from a series of buoys. “Like this will ever work,” he said under his breath. “Why don’t we just close our eyes and throw the missiles at them?”
He kept his eyes open, though, and watched carefully, counting down, listening to the roar of the missiles as they hurtled into the distance, a tiny light receding further and further.
Then he heard it.
A distant, hollow splash, followed by a second.
Oh, crap.
Hopper’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie. “Ord, anything?”
Keep it together. Keep it together. Be all business.
“Negative. It’s a miss.”
Then he saw the last thing he wanted to see under the circumstances: lights, glaring pale green in the distance, coming toward them. “Contact bearing 340. They’re following us…” Suddenly plumes of flame erupted in the night. “I think we’ve got a launch. Yeah… we’ve got incoming.”
We’re dead. We are so dead. D-E-A-D. God, Raikes is so hot. Dead dead dead.
“Twenty degrees hard starboard! All hands, brace for impact!” said Hopper.
As if they weren’t under attack, Nagata was focused on the board, studying the buoy transmissions. But none of that would matter if the enemy missiles struck home. Their only prayer now was that it really had all been happenstance that the stinger was heading in their direction. That the aliens didn’t really have any clue as to the location of the John Paul Jones. That they were likewise firing blind, and that their luck would be as poor as Nagata’s.
Might be seeing you again sooner than either of us would’ve liked, Stone…
They heard the whistle of the incoming missiles. Hopper closed his eyes, braced himself. Everyone else in the CIC did the same, save for Nagata, whose calm gaze never left the monitor.
Then the ship rocked violently, but there hadn’t been any impact. It was being caused by geysers of water blasting upward from the starboard side. Hopper’s eyes snapped open wide, astonished. Crackling over the walkie-talkie came Ord’s ecstatic voice: “That’s a miss! I love when they miss!” Then his tone changed back to its typical sense of impending doom. “Sir, they’re, uh… they’re getting closer. Close enough that we should, uh… are we planning on firing something, sir?”
Nagata studied the grid, thinking, seemingly impervious to the prospect of impending doom. “FOXTROT 24,” he said at last.
Raikes dialed up the coordinates. “FOXTROT 24,” she confirmed.
“Fire,” said Nagata.
Two more Harpoons exploded from their tubes. Raikes quickly loaded two more in anticipation of having to use them.
Seconds passed, and Hopper was certain that during that time not a single person exhaled.
Suddenly there was the distant sound of explosion, and if they had been up on deck, they would have seen an abrupt and brilliant burst of light upon the horizon. Ord’s voice came screaming over the walkie-talkie, “Holy shit! Hit! Big hit!” But the celebration was short-lived as, seconds later, Ord shouted, “Sir, they’re coming from both directions!!”
“All engines, full stop! Countermeasures!” Hopper immediately ordered.
Instantly the CWIS was employed, and again it was a waiting game to see if the anti-missile system did what it was supposed to do.
It did, but, again, only partly.
The ship rocked, and this time there was no mistaking it was as a result of impact. But Hopper knew immediately that they had averted catastrophe. The CWIS had managed to intercept at least some of the missiles, but apparently not all. They had sustained some damage; now it was a matter of determining just how much. He grabbed the 1MC—the shipboard public address system—and called out, “Damage report!”
It was Beast who responded first. “Sealing the aft magazine. We’ll stay afloat.” Seconds later other sections of the ship were reporting in, stating that there was no damage.
Okay. That’s a relief.
“Captain Nagata, we seem to have multiple targets. Care to do something about that?”
“Hai.”
“I take that as a ‘yes.’”
Nagata nodded. A moment of mutual respect passed between them. Then it was back to business. Nagata carefully tracked the second stinger. “Target… INDIA 37,” said Nagata.
“INDIA 37,” Raikes repeated. “One more time.”
Ord watched with growing enthusiasm and blossoming hope as another Harpoon missile leaped into the night sky, an avenging angel carrying considerable firepower. It streaked through the air, zeroing in on the alien.
The stinger tried to leap out of the way, but the missile caught the port pontoon, ripping through it and sending the ship tumbling back onto the water. It landed with a hellacious splash. The stinger listed in the water, and Ord could hear the engines misfiring, sputtering. It attempted to bound to the right but landed heavily, like a crippled bird.
“That’s a hit,” he said. “She’s dead in the water, about fifty yards to the right of where you hit
her.”
Seconds later another missile launched from the deck of the John Paul Jones. The stinger apparently saw it coming, because it tried to launch one of its own missiles directly at it, hoping to counter it. It failed to do so. The white cylinder tumbled out of the launcher rather than being propelled, and slid into the water. The firing mechanism had obviously been damaged and the stinger was a dead duck.
Except it wasn’t. There was a surge of the waves, as if the ocean itself had a bet on the aliens and was trying to prolong the action, that pushed the stinger to one side. An instant later the Harpoon hit the water and sank uselessly beneath the waves.
“Miss. That’s a miss. You’re 10 degrees right,” said Ord.
In the CIC, Hopper nodded at the new information, making his own adjustments to the trajectory. “Second coordinates, ROMEO 36.” He nodded toward Raikes and said, “Have a nice day.”
Raikes, with a missile ready to go, fired.
Ord watched the third missile track launch. He followed its trajectory, murmuring, “Please, please, come on, please,” the entire time as the missile streaked through the air.
This time when it hit the stinger, there was no doubt. The alien vessel erupted in flame, blown apart by the power of the Harpoon. Even more, the second vessel got caught up in the backlash of the inferno and went up as well. Flames blasted upward like a volcano eruption, and cheers rang from all over the deck. “Hit! Sink! Big hit! Big sink!” Ord shouted into the walkie-talkie, doing an exuberant dance that would have gotten him roundly lampooned by anyone else in the crew under ordinary circumstances. But these were far from ordinary, and all that resulted was several others joined him in his terpsichorean celebration. Through the still-open walkie-talkie, he could hear the sounds of jubilation coming from the CIC as well.
Then he glanced at his watch and he was filled with considerably less joy. The night had fled and the sun would soon be rising. Once there was full visibility, the playing field would be level once more.
And he wasn’t convinced, when that happened, they’d be around to see another sunset.
SADDLE RIDGE
“What the hell are they doing?”
Sam had spoken so softly that Cal, who was right next to her, could barely hear her. But her exact wording wasn’t necessary; he was able to infer it from context.
The three humans were concealed in the tall, overgrown grass high on a hill that surrounded the Beacon International Project building. They’d gotten there by slithering along on their bellies, moving a foot at a time, stopping, waiting to make sure there was no reaction and then moving again.
Sam supposed it was entirely possible they could have made the approach in the accompaniment of a brass band and it wouldn’t have garnered any attention. The aliens seemed far too involved in their work: walking around, engaged in various tasks, none of which Sam understood. She saw, though, that there appeared to be two different types of them, perhaps arranged along some manner of caste system. There was one who appeared to be in charge: the commander. He was taller, his armor a different color from others, who were broader and mostly involved in doing the serious grunt work.
Watching their movements, Cal whispered, “They’re connecting what I think are the power cells that are going to be required to boost the transmission. They’re wiring everything to the satellite dishes.”
“Then that,” Mick said, “is where we’re going to shut this whole thing down.”
He crawled forward toward the edge of the hill where the drop-off would take them down toward the building. He brought his shotgun up to bear, aiming it squarely at one of the shorter aliens. Sam was right beside him, and then they were brought up short when they heard loud breathing behind them.
They turned and saw that Cal Zapata hadn’t budged. Instead he was busy hyperventilating—or at least very close to doing so.
Mick looked scornfully at him, clearly in no mood to deal with a faint-of-heart scientist. He met Sam’s gaze, and she quickly shook her head, silently imploring him to hold up. She didn’t see any choice; they needed to peel Cal off the metaphorical ceiling before they could proceed any further, as he was crucial to their overall plans of contacting Hopper’s ship. Mick looked like he desperately wanted to ignore her, but then—with clear reluctance and a poisonous glare at Cal—he lowered the shotgun.
They remained where they were as another transport passed overhead, lights glaring. It didn’t illuminate their hiding place, fortunately, thanks to an overhanging tree that obscured their presence from overhead. Must be bringing another power cell, she thought grimly.
The workroom that was the destination of the three humans was visible from their vantage point, so that was something, at least. But it might as well have been on Mars—or even whatever planet these creatures hailed from—for all that they were going to be able to get near it… at least for as long as Cal was proving himself to be completely useless.
The scientist clutched at his chest, trying to steady himself. She prayed he didn’t have a heart attack. That was the last thing they needed. They wouldn’t be able to seek help for him and would probably have to leave him to his fate. Except she wasn’t at all convinced they could possibly do what needed to be done without his scientific acumen. Some part of her was appalled she was measuring the worth of a man’s life purely in terms of how it was useful to her, but ultimately she knew she didn’t have a choice. At this point all that mattered was the mission.
“I’m sorry, but there is no way I’m going down there,” Cal finally managed to say. “I do not possess that particular courage.”
Sam was determined to talk him into it. There was an entire litany of things she could say. She could tell him that the world was literally counting on them, even though no one knew their names. She could tell him that she was positive he had vast stores of inner determination that could be tapped, enabling him to rise to the occasion. She could remind him that, since it was his project that had brought these creatures here, it was his responsibility to jump into the middle of this thing with both feet. To clean up the mess he and his scientist friends had made. She could even remind him that if he showed timidity now, then in the long term his life wasn’t going to matter, since—if they failed to interrupt or, better yet, terminate the aliens’ message home—the planet would be overrun and he likely wouldn’t have a long term or a life. So if he wanted a chance of survival, he needed to pull it together right now.
Before she could articulate any of that, however, Mick said between gritted teeth, “You’re going to acquire that particular courage right now, or I’m going to break my steel leg off in your ass.”
Cal absorbed this new information. “Acquiring courage,” he said briskly, as if he were downloading it off the Internet.
Sam realized that out-and-out threatening the guy hadn’t occurred to her. I’ve just got to broaden my repertoire of techniques for dealing with stubborn people.
They started moving down toward the workstation.
Their stealth served them well. They covered the distance to the simple, square building in a fairly short amount of time, or at least in as short a time as possible when one was crawling on one’s stomach, propelling oneself via elbows. Sam had to think she would never freak out about snakes again, considering they had to live like this all the time.
They froze at one point, when one of the bulky aliens walked by. It stopped and stood there for a moment, seemingly inspecting the air. Sam wondered if it had somehow caught wind of them, and perhaps was even about to open fire. But then, seemingly satisfied that it was alone, it went on about its business. It was all she could do not to breathe a sigh of relief, which would most certainly have been audible. Once the alien was gone, Cal and Sam got to their feet, remaining hunched over as if that would do them the slightest bit of good, and ran quickly to the side door of the darkened structure. Mick remained where he was, keeping his weapon at the ready. If this thing turned into a firefight, he was definitely prepared for it. Sam ev
en wondered briefly if he was hoping it would turn out that way, because these monsters had destroyed a military base and she was sure that Mick was itching for some payback.
Once inside, Sam continued to stay crouched, keeping an eye on things. She saw Mick propped on his elbows, shotgun at the ready. Cal was rooting around in the work area, which more or less took up the entirety of the building. They didn’t dare turn on any lights since that would unquestionably catch the attention of the aliens. Instead Cal was employing a flashlight that they’d taken from the Jeep, but was doing so as judiciously as possible. He kept low to the floor, making sure not to get anywhere near a window that would allow the light to be seen from outside.
And then, as she peered around the corner, she saw the taller alien, the one she took to be the commander, slowly striding their way.
Reflexively she sucked in air sharply between her teeth. The alien didn’t hear her, but Cal did, and he froze where he was, near stacks of equipment. Even in the darkness she could see the panic in his eyes. She frantically gestured for him to keep his mouth shut.
The alien stopped a few feet away and slowly removed its helmet, accompanied by a hissing of air. She saw the creature’s hideous, inhuman face and bit down on her lower lip not to let out a loud screech. There was no reason for her to be startled at this point. She knew what she was dealing with. Freaking out upon seeing it so close up wasn’t going to help matters in the slightest.
It brought some manner of narrow tube to its mouth, closed its eyes and then lit the tube with a blue flame.
Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Of all the things that these creatures and humanity could have in common, that’s where we overlap? On cancer sticks? Really?
Cal had stopped what he was doing so that he could peer out the nearest window as carefully as possible. When he saw what was happening, he scuttled over to Sam and said, practically in her ear, “I do not wanna die from secondhand alien smoke.”