‘Mass exodus,’ Vice Admiral O’Hara agreed. ‘People won’t want to face an alien invader anywhere but their own back garden. We would have to lock every city down to prevent a panicked rush for the surface.’
‘Most people have spent their lives on the orbital platforms,’ Coburn said.
‘Yes, but humanity has spent millions of years on earth,’ Hawker pressed. ‘You can’t breed that out of people in the space of a few generations. Believe me, if this comes to blows and they catch sight of our enemy, they’ll want to go home and not be blown to smithereens or frozen solid in deep space. And that brings us to another specter; if we don’t inform the people and the invasion occurs, we may have cost them their last chance to escape.’
Marshall sighed and looked at the polished black surface of the table before them. The table was partially transparent to allow people to see beneath it, a popular means of sensing the mood of those within the group. Twitching legs, fidgeting, tightly folded hands in laps were all indicators of stress and he was seeing a lot of it now. The JCOS and governors didn’t live and serve in a vacuum – all of them had families either planet side or in the colonies.
‘Have we heard from Endeavour or Defiance yet?’ Coburn asked.
‘Nothing,’ Marshall replied. ‘If they made it out they should be back soon with a report on what they found. Given that they didn’t contact us when in orbit around Ayleea, we can assume that they had to leave rapidly and must be beyond reach in super luminal cruise, or…’
Marshall didn’t complete his sentence but everybody knew what he had been about to say. A long moment of silence descended on the room before Hawker spoke.
‘We need a decision and a consensus on this. Either we ring the bell now, or we hold our silence and hope that Global Wire doesn’t spout something dangerously close to the truth in the next forty eight hours or so. Given what they’ve already achieved, I think that we should pre–empt the inevitable and go public as soon as possible.’
All eyes fixed upon Arianna Coburn, who was still responsible for how to handle civilian matters even though jurisdiction of the military had passed to the JCOS. Marshall did not envy her the decision: get it right, and she could save countless lives. Get it wrong, and she would probably be the subject of Global Wire’s withering coverage and a vote of no confidence in the senate, something which he knew that she ill deserved.
Coburn took a breath, composed herself and spoke.
‘Gentlemen, I will…’
A loud alarm blared across the room and echoed through the entire station, cutting her off as an announcement rang out.
‘Unidentified gravity well, zero point oh two planetary diameters, all stations battle status!’
Marshall was moving even before he realized it himself as he dashed to the observation ports and spotted immediately a rippling of stars against the Milky Way’s vast band barely five thousand meters away from Polaris Station.
‘Damn me, that’s close!’ Hawker uttered.
The entire JCOS and dignitaries rushed to the viewing ports as Marshall clenched his fists and hoped against hope that the incoming vessel was allied. If this was the start of the invasion, they were already doomed. He saw Titan already moving, turning to face the arrival as four Quick Reaction Alert Phantoms scrambled from her launch bays.
The rippling gravity well suddenly burst with light and Marshall squinted as from the fearsome glare burst the familiar shape of a CSS frigate. He heard the audible sigh of relief from the JCOS around him as they recognized the vessel, and then he felt his guts contract as he saw the trail of debris and damage streaming from the frigate’s stern.
Even before Marshall could speak, he heard a broadcast coming from Endeavour as her captain accessed the emergency channels.
‘All stations, execute Lazarus Protocol, effective immediately! Ayleea is gone and we barely escaped with our lives. They’re coming this way!’
***
XIV
New Washington
‘We’ve got a long way to go here and no way of knowing how to start.’
Kaylin Foxx stepped off the shuttle with Nathan right behind her, both of them switching on their gravity boots as they followed a line of passengers through the spaceport toward the terminal.
‘You know what we saw,’ Nathan said. ‘We can’t just keep it to ourselves.’
New Washington’s spaceport was located at her heart, as were those of all earth’s orbital stations. Without the benefit of good old fashioned centrifugal motion and with the fitting of gravitational plating far too expensive for such an old station, Nathan watched with customary amusement as people walked with their hair standing at odd angles, reaching out for items that had slipped from pockets and were spiraling up into the air to clatter against the hard light corridor around them that prevented such lost property from being ingested into the engines of shuttles.
‘I can’t just go into the CSS Headquarters and tell them we’ve got some kind of shape shifting thing wandering around either,’ Foxx whispered back, conscious of alerting people around them to the apparent danger. ‘The only person I could talk to about this is Admiral Marshall, and he’s not available right now.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Polaris Station,’ Foxx replied, ‘some kind of big meeting or other that can’t be interrupted. I already tried.’
Nathan showed his shield to the customs officers manning desks at the spaceport. Computers scanned both the shield and Nathan’s ID chip before the guards waved him through after Foxx.
‘You know what these things are,’ Nathan said as they hurried toward one of the elevator shafts that would take them down to the Beltway. ‘It’s the same thing that the fleet encountered last year, the same stuff you saw with Allen aboard Titan.’
‘I know,’ Foxx uttered. ‘But we can’t prove anything yet unless Doctor Schmidt can come up with something about the bodies themselves. We need proof, just as if this was a normal homicide investigation.’
Nathan watched as they waited in line for a free elevator, and as he scanned the crowd around him he began to realize just how much danger they were in.
‘It could be anybody,’ he said finally. ‘They could be right behind us and we’d never know it.’
Foxx winced but said nothing, obviously every bit as uncomfortable with the knowledge as Nathan was.
Nathan looked up and saw through the oval hard light portals above his head the dizzying sight of one of New Washington’s tremendous arms reaching away from them toward the immense circular expanse of the city’s circumference, five kilometers away. Nathan could see the tips of city spires reaching up from the streets on the far side of the Rim, all of it cast against the earth’s vast surface hundreds of kilometers below. As he watched, he saw a shooting star streak across the atmosphere far below.
‘How could it have travelled to the surface?’ he asked Foxx as they boarded the elevator.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied softly. ‘All we can be sure of is that it can move with impunity through our security sensors.’
Nathan saw the elevator doors close and braced himself. With no gravity at the rotating station’s heart, the spaceport at its center had adopted an arbitrary “deck” and “ceiling” orientated with an equally arbitrary up and down based on the cardinal points of a compass. Thus, North Four was located “above” the spaceport. Before the elevator started moving, it was required to rotate a hundred eighty degrees to prevent the increasing gravity landing the occupants on their heads as they travelled toward the Belt.
Outside, Nathan saw the rotating station’s exterior begin to rotate on a further axis as the elevator flipped slowly over and began to move, now appearing to descend away from the spaceport as earth’s location rolled over their heads and settled on the opposite side of the view. As the position of the earth changed, Nathan saw another shooting star zip across the blackness of space and burn up in a brief but bright trail of light.
He stared at where the li
ght had vanished for a moment.
‘Damn, what if they didn’t slip through customs after all?’
Foxx looked at Nathan sharply and he realized that he had spoken out loud, several of the elevator’s occupants looking at him in confusion. Nathan ducked his head and spoke softly to Foxx.
‘I’ve seen three shooting stars in one day.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘What if they’re landing here all the time?’ he went on. ‘What if they got to earth first and then came up here?’
Nathan saw a tremor in Foxx’s eyes, a realization of something so horrific that she could barely admit it to herself.
‘ID chips,’ she said softly.
Nathan nodded. ‘The victim on the south side didn’t have their chip, and neither did Freck. If whatever did this to them was using the chip to slip through customs and other security checks, they could be anywhere.’
Foxx’s skin seemed to turn pale as she looked around them at the other people in the elevator and she knew that there would be no easy way to identify a shape shifter from an ordinary citizen. Most were ordinary residents or visitors to New Washington, dressed in the popular styles of their age group: those over eighty favored the restrained two piece suit with molded boots, fold over jacket and short, center parted glossed hair. Teenagers wore shabby, loose attire emblazoned with various anarchic logos that matched their hair, which tended to be metallic or to change color every few minutes. Mothers with children, businessmen staring into the middle distance, their focus on their ocular implants as they read the latest financial reports, elderly folk engrossed in their memories, youths carefully shielding illegal bio enhancements from the two detectives.
‘We’ve got to get this to Captain Forrester, right now,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t care what happens after that, we just gotta let them know.’
The elevator doors hissed open and the crowd poured out in a busy little flood as Foxx stepped out and keyed her priority signal communicator. Even in North Four’s so called “Black Box”, where illegal disruptors attempted to hinder police communications, Foxx was able to get a faint link to the precinct.
To their surprise, it was Forrester who opened the link even before Foxx had made the connection.
‘Both of you, get back here right away,’ Forrester ordered. ‘Doctor Schmidt is here and we need to talk.’
‘You got something on the autopsy?’ Nathan asked.
‘Yeah,’ came the reply, ‘and man am I glad it stayed on lock down. Get here, fast!’
*
Nathan and Foxx walked into the precinct as fast as they could, a squad cruiser having picked them up from the elevator terminal and rushed them to the building. Nathan pushed his way through a rowdy crowd of prisoners clogging the “cattle pen”, restrained somewhat by the hard light bars keeping them in place.
Foxx followed and they hurried upstairs to Forrester’s office. The Captain came out and walked with them, his big frame taking up half the corridor as he spoke.
‘Schmidt’s figured something out about the remains and you’re not going to like it.’
Nathan wanted desperately to say something about what he and Foxx had figured out, but Captain Forrester had not been privy to the bizarre battle fought by CSS Titan some months before or the prison outbreak on Tethys Gaol that had occurred at the same time. CSS had forbidden anybody who had been involved from discussing the events with anybody else, although Schmidt had been present at the encounter with the shape shifting mass that had infiltrated Titan.
Foxx led the way into the coroner’s office, which was attached to the precinct building, within which stood Doctor Schmidt inside a hard light cubicle with the remains of Erin, Vasquez and Allen alongside him. The doctor looked up and smiled.
‘Ah, Detective Ironhead. Just in time.’
Nathan ignored Schmidt’s jovial mockery. ‘What have you got for us?’
Schmidt saw the tension in their faces and he dropped the act.
‘Poor Erin here was not disemboweled of her internal organs out of malice,’ he informed them. ‘She was effectively cloned.’
Nathan decided that Forrester’s presence was no longer an issue: this whole thing was too important now.
‘We know,’ he replied. ‘And we think we know how they got here.’
Forrester blinked as he looked at them both. ‘They? Something I’m missin’ here?’
Kaylin Foxx replied.
‘Some months ago, when you asked us to look into the case of a former prison officer convicted of homicide and sent to Tethys Gaol, something else happened up there that resulted in the CSS flagship Titan almost being overrun by an alien entity, some kind of shape shifting biological form.’
Forrester stared at them all for a long moment. ‘You’re tuggin’ my tool.’
‘I can assure you that she is not,’ Schmidt replied, Erin’s remains visible through the doctor’s ephemeral holographic form. ‘Titan was indeed subject to an attempt by a species of alien to infiltrate and infect, if that’s the correct term, the human race. Fortunately, we were able to devise a means of combatting the attack and it was repelled. Sadly it would appear that our efforts to prevent the species from infiltrating our population were ultimately in vain.’
Forrester stared at Erin’s remains and seemed to Nathan to be trying not to run from the room.
‘You’re telling me that we made first contact with something and that nobody got told about it?’
‘The CSS deemed it too sensitive to report to the people,’ Nathan replied. ‘We were all sworn to secrecy and I’m inclined to agree with their decision. However, now we’re seeing these homicides and I think that they’re connected with what Kaylin and her team encountered aboard Titan.’
‘It wasn’t pretty,’ Vasquez said. ‘Damned near took out an entire platoon of Marines.’
Forrester rubbed his temples with both hands, pinched the corners of his eyes with his finger and thumb before he replied.
‘This is way above my pay grade,’ he said finally. ‘You say that CSS has a veto on you talking about this? Great, stop talkin’ to me and take this to CSS planet side.’
‘I’m afraid that we cannot just pass this off to CSS,’ Doctor Schmidt said. ‘It’s too late for that.’
‘What do you mean it’s too late?’ Nathan asked.
‘I have conducted an in depth study of the remains of Erin here, and I can report that the crystals left behind in her body are not just sodium chloride or common salt. Encased within the crystals I have found organisms that I would identify as similar, if not identical, to those discovered aboard Titan last year.’
Nathan stopped and stared at Schmidt and for a moment it seemed as though all of the air had been sucked from the room. Nobody said anything, leaving the doctor to say the words that they had all dreaded hearing for months now.
‘Earth has already been invaded, we just didn’t know it.’
Nathan didn’t wait for anybody to speak. Instead, he turned and dashed from the room.
***
XV
Polaris Station
‘Get Endeavour’s crew disembarked and into quarantine for debrief!’
Admiral Marshall strode down the ramp of the shuttle and out into one of Polaris Station’s massive landing bays, endless polished black deck panels and gray walls lined with white lights and flashing warning beacons. Long ranks of Phantom fighters and Intruder long range recon’ spacecraft were parked inside the bay, which was well illuminated and filled with technicians working to prepare them for battle.
‘We’ve already isolated the crew,’ the lieutenant who had met him replied.
‘I want to talk to Captain Travis immediately.’
‘He’s in the sick bay, also in isolation.’
A phalanx of armed CSS soldiers walked behind Marshall as he headed for the shuttle docking bays and the sick bay. Endeavour’s entire crew would be debriefed at length but right now Marshall was in a damned hurry. Captain Travis Ha
rper represented the only officer who had witnessed from a command perspective whatever had happened on Ayleea, and Marshall needed answers if he was to define a strategic defense of the Sol System against whatever the hell was heading their way.
Through large hard light portholes running the length of a long corridor near the landing bay he could see Endeavour hove to in a position well clear of the station as a stream of shuttle craft ferried the crew back to Polaris Station. As was standard procedure, all military crews underwent a decontamination process and medical check before being released, those checks performed exclusively by Holo sapien doctors to prevent undetected infections crossing into the civilian population.
Marshall reached the sick bay and entered to see small groups of Endeavour’s personnel sitting inside hard light contamination chambers as the doctors worked. Again, standard procedure dictated that the officers were separated from other ranks and the captain was contained in a private room to allow for immediate debrief by senior personnel. Marshall strode into the holding room and ordered the Marine guards to hold station outside.
The holding room was in fact little more than a storage closet with a temporary hard light cubicle erected inside to hold the captain. Travis Harper stood as he saw Marshall walk in, clearly relieved to see someone he knew.
‘Frank,’ he greeted Marshall with a brief smile, all pretense of rank and protocol ignored, ‘you’ve got to move fast.’
‘Tell me, everything,’ Marshall said as the hard light door shimmered closed and turned opaque behind him, blocking all light and sound from outside.
‘Fortitude is lost,’ Harper replied, ‘and so is Ayleea. Their entire fleet, or what looked like most of it, has been destroyed along with all orbital platforms. The entire planet’s burning.’
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