The Invasion Begins

by Thomas DePrima

  “Now, the cyborgs know that the men and women on this base stopped using open communications when the invasion began. We want them to believe that we no longer care if they can hear us because we’re on our way to end their lives. We want them to believe that I’m sending three thousand Marines to crush them out of existence. We’re depending on you to sell that story. Plant the idea in your own minds that you control a thousand Marines rather than a platoon, and talk and act accordingly. We wouldn’t have first lieutenants commanding a battalion, so for the duration of this— war game— , your Marine captain is now a colonel, your first lieutenants are now lieutenant colonels, and second lieutenants are now majors.

  “Commander Carver will now take over the briefing. She’ll give you your specific assignments and outline the attack plan.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The plan called for the only Marine Company aboard the Ares to divide into three platoons and immediately deploy to the three confinement locations to support the weary Marines there. Each platoon was divided into four squads so two squads could proceed to each barricade position while the other squads waited in reserve. Communications between the barricades and the Ares began when the three platoons all reached their assigned locations. The weary Marines at the six locations had cause to smile for the first time in days. The Marines manning the barricades were told to activate their com systems because the brigade would begin their attack soon and it was no longer necessary to prevent the cyborgs from overhearing com chatter since the cyborgs would all be dead very soon.

  Communications between the confinement areas and the ship intensified considerably after that. The Ares notified the locations that the remainder of the three-thousand-Marine brigade was expected to deploy in two to three hours. The brigade would divide into three battalions and storm the Denubbewa at each confinement location with instructions to cut every last cyborg to pieces. The Marines at the barricades were ordered to begin disassembling the barricades so the arriving Marines could plow through when they arrived.

  The Marines at the barricades didn’t know it was all a bluff and began dismantling the fortifications with gusto.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  ~ April 18th, 2292 ~

  “Admiral,” Jenetta heard her aide say via the intercom channel on her desk viewpad, “Admiral Holt is calling. He’s says it’s top priority.”

  Jenetta tapped a spot on her viewpad and said, “I’ll take it.”

  After tapping another spot, the large wall monitor facing her desk illuminated with the image of Brian Holt.

  “Jen, the Denubbewa are gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Just gone. We noticed that no cyborgs had popped up out of the rubbish for over an hour, so I sent a CPS-16 in to see what was going on. They reported that there’s not a single living cyborg anywhere in the floating mountains of scrap— at least none that are moving. There are innumerous bodies and pieces of bodies.”

  “How did you accomplish that, Brian?”

  “Darned if I know. They’re just— gone.”

  “There must be a reason. They wouldn’t have just left. Do you think they learned we were going to blow those rings of scrap into smaller pieces soon?”

  “They couldn’t have learned that. I’ve given no orders to prepare or even told anyone of our plans. It has to be something else.”

  “So all the work of rebuilding the destroyed warships has stopped?”

  “All of it, Jen. According to the skipper of the CPS-16, there’s not a sign of Denubbewa activity anywhere. The 16 made three complete passes around Lorense-Four. They entered every single scrap pile, slowing down when they came to the warships the cyborgs had been trying to rebuild, and they had their cameras running the entire time. Our experts have verified that there’s not a single cyborg moving anywhere in those piles.”

  “But why, Brian? Why now?”

  “We may never know. But I’m not complaining.”

  “I don’t like mysteries like this. We have to figure out why they’ve left. They must have hatched a new plan. We have to learn what they’re up to now.”

  “I have no idea where to start, but maybe Roger will have some ideas.”

  “I’m going to call an executive meeting for tomorrow morning to discuss this new development. Make that a closed executive meeting in my office. Perhaps someone will have an idea.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am pleased, Brian. But I also begin to worry when unexpected events like this occur without some perceived causality. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Command, this is Charlie-One. They’re gone. The cyborgs at the barricades in the corridor have retreated into the Gate room. The monitors in the Gate rooms show them getting into the Gate booths and disappearing.”

  “Command, this is Able-One. They’re gone from this Gate room location as well.”

  “Baker-One confirming that the cyborgs have all disappeared from our containment area and Gate room also. All we have left are hundreds of cyborg corpses and thousands of pieces of mechanical body parts covering the deck of the corridor between the barricades.”

  “Attention, this is Major Tarnel. The senior officer at each containment location will assign a fire team to the Gate room. Their job will be to watch the Gate and see that that no cyborg returns to the room. No single member of that fire team may leave the room until a replacement has arrived, and the fire team as a whole will not leave until a full replacement fire team has arrived to take the team’s place. All other Marines will remain in the containment area until a plan has been prepared to begin an exhaustive search of this entire base to locate any possible cyborg stragglers. Clear the barricades and pile up the cyborg bodies. If you suspect that a cyborg isn’t dead, fry the brain module in its chest with your laser rifle. New orders will be transmitted shortly. Tarnel out.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Congratulations, Eliza,” Captain Gavin said, “your plan was inspired, and it worked even better than I expected.”

  Commander Carver, Commander Kalborne, and Captain Gavin were sitting in his office after listening to all the reports.

  “Thank you, sir. It worked better than even I expected. It actually worked too well.”

  “Yes, congratulations, Commander,” Kalborne said. “Uh, too well?”

  “I hoped we could plant enough indecision in their minds that they would leave, but I expected a bit more resistance. I fear now that it might not have been my plan that worked so well.”

  “Explain,” Gavin said.

  “Well, sir, they left without even firing a shot at our Marines as we fortified the positions in the corridors.”

  “They believed they were about to be overrun by a brigade of Marines,” Kalborne said.

  “Perhaps,” Eliza said. “And perhaps not.”

  “What makes you doubt their motivation?” Gavin asked.

  “It’s simply that they were able to clear out so quickly. It seems like they were already leaving before we began sending our phony communication messages.”

  “We should be able to verify that easily enough,” Gavin said. Tapping a point on his viewpad, he said, “Com, I want to review the records from the cameras in the three Gate rooms where the Denubbewa made their stand. Begin with the time one hour before our company of Marines first left this ship and include a timestamp on the images. Send that to my office system so I have control over the playback. Gavin out.

  “Okay, Eliza, we’ll have that in a few minutes. While we wait, tell us what you suspect. I know you well enough to know there must be something other than the rapidity of the departure on your mind.”

  “Uh, yes, sir. I realize this wasn’t intentional or avoidable, but I suspect we’ve allowed the Denubbewa to learn information we’ve wanted to keep secret. I suspect that the new information was responsible for them beginning to leave long before our little gambit began.”

  “You
have our full attention,” Gavin said, “Continue. What new information?”

  “Well, sir, when the Alamo needed to leave the base to contact us and was prevented from doing do because the Denubbewa had gotten control of the port’s doors, they built a double envelope and left the base without needing to have the door open.”

  “Oh, good Lord!” Kalborne said. “This is my fault?”

  “No, Commander. As I said, it wasn’t intentional or even avoidable. You had to get a ship out of the base to contact us so we could locate you and come help. This is not a criticism of your actions.”

  “So you’re saying,” Gavin asserted, “that when the Alamo initiated the double envelope process, the Denubbewa were watching.”

  “It’s merely a speculation, sir, but to the eyes of anyone or anything that happened to be watching a port monitor, the ship would have seemed to simply disappear. So that was evidence we had special capabilities the Denubbewa had previously been unaware of. And when the Alamo returned, then left again and we arrived, I imagine the Denubbewa couldn’t report that information back to their command fast enough. So, from having heard after our arrival here that the Denubbewa were arriving in the booths every several minutes, we know there’s a lag in the transfer time that prevents them from amassing troops as quickly as we originally believed. And, therefore, it should take just as long to evacuate. Ipso facto, the cyborgs must have begun leaving before we even began our operation.”

  Captain Gavin’s viewpad beeped once to indicate that his requested information was ready. He activated the large monitor on the wall facing his desk and began to play the file. The timestamp showed that the images started one hour before the company of Marines left the Ares. Gavin pressed a contact point on the viewpad and an image of a Gate room appeared. As they watched, three cyborgs arrived every several minutes. The arrivals then left the Personnel CJ Gate and joined others in the Gate room, packing themselves in as tightly as possible.

  “It’s like I said,” Kalborne noted, “the cyborgs seemed to be bringing as many as possible in and massing for an attack.”

  “It appears that way,” Gavin said.

  The trio of officers continued to watch as cyborgs arrived exactly three minutes and forty-one seconds following the previous arrivals. Seventeen minutes and thirty-six seconds into the process, a cyborg entered the room and walked to the Personnel CJ Gate where he pressed several touch spots on the outside display panel. When the cyborg turned around for several seconds, the three Space Command officers were able to see that it had three blue dots on its forehead, indicating that it was a mid-level supervisor cyborg.

  Two minutes and eighteen seconds later, the booth beeped several times. The cyborg with the blue dots on its forehead entered the Personnel CJ Gate and pressed several contact points on the interior display panel to enter data. A second later, the booth flashed and the cyborg was gone.

  Seven minutes and three seconds passed without any arrivals. Then a single cyborg appeared in the booth. He stepped out and stood as still as a statue for a few seconds. Only one blue dot was visible on his forehead. He stepped aside to allow three of the cyborgs who had arrived last to reenter the Personnel CJ Gate. One of them touched the display panel inside the booth and waited. Seconds later, the three cyborgs disappeared in a flash of light. Three more cyborgs then entered the Personnel CJ Gate and likewise disappeared after three minutes and forty-one seconds. Then, every three minutes and forty-one seconds, three more cyborgs left the Gate room via the booth.

  Gavin shifted to a different Gate room and watched a similar event take place with respect to arrivals and departures. The only difference was that no supervisor cyborg entered the room and traveled via the Gate. Apparently, the cyborgs all received instructions to leave after the one cyborg had arrived through the Gate where the supervisor left.

  “It appears your theory was correct, Eliza,” Gavin said. “They were already leaving before we began our little show of force.”

  “I wish I wasn’t correct.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Commander Kalborne said.

  “Stop that, Kalborne,” Gavin said. “It wasn’t your fault. If you hadn’t sent the Alamo out to contact us, we’d still be hunting for this new base light-years from here. We can deal with this. It was bound to happen sooner or later. And they don’t really know what happened. They only saw our ships disappear. They don’t know it’s part of our incredible light-speed travel capability or even that we can travel almost thirty times faster than they can.”

  “Learning even a small amount about the phase shift means they’ll have a new mission,” Eliza said. “They’ll want to learn how we did what we did. The one advantage I can see in all this is that they’ll probably suspend all invasion plans while they try to discover our out-of-phase secrets. It might give us a bit more time to prepare for them before they initiate a massive invasion of ships and cyborgs. The downside is that they’re going to be working on ways to detect our presence when we’re out of phase. If they manage that, they’ll know when we’re surveilling them and when we begin our bombing runs on their ships.”

  “At this moment in time,” Gavin said, “I’m grateful for a bit of a respite. We need to get these bases secured and occupied by our forces. We need to learn every square centimeter of the base layout, how everything operates, where to go first to find the cause when something stops working, and how to prevent deliberate sabotage.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Whadda ya think?” PFC Rayan Purdis asked the Marine on his right, Cpl. Petrice Whilobby.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “About that,” he said, pointing with his chin as they sat on the deck against the wall across from the Gate they were guarding.

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “I’d like to attach a detonator to a chunk of Corplastizine and toss it in.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I wouldn’t really do it. I’m only thinking how great it would feel.”

  “You’d destroy the opportunity of a lifetime in order to feel good for a moment?”

  “Opportunity of a lifetime? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you know what that is?”

  “Yeah, it’s some sort of an entry portal for Denubbewa cyborgs.”

  “Wrong! It’s a gateway to the universe.”

  “What universe?”

  “There’s only one universe, numb-nuts.”

  “Uh, yeah, I know that. I thought you were talking, uh, figuratively. Like with different universes for the Denubbewa, the Terrans and the other G.A. species. Whadda ya mean by gateway?”

  “Just imagine for a second that you could travel anywhere in the entire universe in an instant.” She snapped her fingers in emphasis.

  “Impossible.”

  “Not with that booth because that’s exactly what it lets you do. That’s what ‘gateway’ means.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I overheard a couple of officers talking about it. They said Space Command still has no idea where the Denubbewa come from. They could even be coming from another galaxy. Can you imagine? You step into a booth like that one in another galaxy and a few seconds later you step out here.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Then where do you think those cyborgs came from? And how did they leave here?”

  “I don’t know! And that bothers me.”

  “Is your family from Earth?”

  “No. We’re from Sebastian. My great, great, great, great, grandparents emigrated from Earth after they were married.”

  “How long did it take them to get to Sebastian?”

  “My dad once told me they spent four years in a spaceship for the trip.”

  “Four years. Do you know how long it would take now in a GSC transport ship?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “About four days.”

  “Yeah, well, the ships are a lot faster now.”

  “Do you know how long it would take
to get to Sebastian from here, right now?”

  “Uh, in a GSC ship, about three months, I guess.”

  “How would you like to step into that booth and be home on Sebastian in fifteen seconds?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “But traveling from Earth to Sebastian in four days is possible?”

  “Well, yeah. We know that’s possible.”

  “So is traveling from here to Sebastian in fifteen seconds, if you use that booth.”

  “Really? Fifteen seconds? Wow. I could go home when I get liberty instead of just getting drunk.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “Uh, do you know how to work it?”

  “Me? Hell, no.”

  “Who do you think does?”

  “Well, I’d wager a year’s pay that the XO could figure it out, if she had the time.”

  “Commander Carver is super smart. If anyone can do it, she can.”

  “If she had the time. But in the GSC, XOs work harder than anyone else aboard ship. The captain has the most responsibility, has to make all the tough calls, and takes the heat whenever anything goes wrong, but the XO’s work duties never end.”

  “Who else then?”

  “Maybe a few of the engineering officers. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They’ll never let us use it. I sure would love to go home though. I haven’t seen Earth since I completed basic training eight years ago.”