Rihanna Hollis passed out. Multiple times.
The astronauts aboard Destiny had warned her. They had warned her she wasn’t trained, she wasn’t in shape, and she wasn’t prepared for the forces experienced escaping Earth’s gravitational well.
She knew she had to go anyway.
Once Destiny achieved orbit, entering it on the far side of the Earth from the alien fleet, Rihanna thought things would be better. Until she began throwing up.
An astronaut in a bulky suit, not even having had time to take her own helmet off, pulled Rihanna’s off and put bags up, capturing globules of spittle and bile, pale yellow and lime green, floating out of her suit and out from under her helmet. Seeing her own vomit just made her want to do it again, and her stomach heaved uncontrollably.
The smell filled the passenger capsule.
“How’s our VIP doing?” she heard over the ship’s intercom.
“Not well. I’m gonna need some help.”
“We got about thirty minutes until we have a visual on ET. You better hurry up.”
A second astronaut, also still wearing his helmet, used a large trash bag to try to catch all the particulates. A third, without bulky gloves on, used a warm, moist towel to wash Rihanna’s face. Half of Destiny’s crew was simply cleaning her puke.
Rihanna felt helpless.
“Mommy, I feel sick,” followed by “I think I’m gonna throw up,” followed by that cough and that retch at one in the morning and every mother knew she wasn’t going to get any sleep that night, cleaning and soothing and aiding and making sure the child had a bowl or a bucket to throw up into should it happen again. The child always felt bad for making a mess, which tugged on heartstrings, but, weakened by illness, they never seemed to make it to a sink or a toilet.
Rihanna wondered how many times she’d cleaned up after her own, almost helpless children, the way these three highly trained mission specialists cleaned up after her now.
“Twenty-five minutes.”
“I think we got it all. How do you feel, Madam President?”
“I’m only Acting,” Rihanna barely replied. Nobody said anything. “I feel empty,” she sighed.
“Okay. Keep this bag in one hand at all times. If you feel like getting sick again, cover your mouth and your nose with it. In zero gee it sometimes comes out where it can.”
Gross. Why would anyone want to be an astronaut? Rihanna wondered.
She looked around the inside of the capsule a little. One of the most high tech spacecraft invented, Destiny was a miracle of simplicity in design. Smooth, white surfaces, embedded screens, everything voice controlled. And a chunk from her stomach stuck in the corner of one of the advanced displays. Rihanna didn’t say anything.
One of the three astronauts tending her secured a hose that looked a little like a shop vac while the other disposed of the trash bag and towels.
Rihanna simply tried to settle and get used to the sickening feeling of having her stomach in her throat and feeling like she was falling off an infinitely tall building. The female astronaut, her helmet now off, handed Rihanna a bottle.
“Water. Rinse your mouth out and spit in here.” She held up a second vacuum cleaner hose. Rihanna complied. It felt good to get the acidic taste out of her mouth. After rinsing, she swallowed a tiny bit of the liquid and handed the bottle back.
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Where’s the unauthorized launch?” the Lord Admiral’s Adjutant asked the Fleet Admiral.
“Here,” the Fleet Admiral replied, pointing out a location on a screen. It showed the alien planet and the relative location of his fleet. “They sent us a message, bouncing it off one of our own satellites.”
“Did you respond?”
“Yes.”
The Adjutant stared at the display, watching the alien vessel closing and looking at their own fleet.
“We’re not spread out enough. It’s a trap,” he exclaimed.
“What do you mean?”
“The transport ships are too close together. We should be occupying a larger orbit. They’re at serious risk.”
“Why?”
“The aliens have been using suicide attackers.”
“What’s a suicide attacker?” the Fleet Admiral asked.
An alien tactic that surprised even the Adjutant along with the rest of the Hrwang on the planet. He’d received a personal report, but official ones must not have trickled up to the Fleet Admiral yet. There’d only been two such attacks, and only one had been successful, but the idea that someone would blow themselves up to attack their enemy was so foreign, it was terrifying.
“These aliens. They attach bombs to themselves, then get close to us under false pretenses. Then they blow themselves up. There could be atomic weapons inside this ship.”
“That’s not possible.”
“We have to destroy it,” the Adjutant urged. “An atomic weapon the size of this vessel could destroy or cripple over half our fleet.”
The Fleet Admiral looked like he didn’t want to believe the Adjutant’s words, didn’t want to believe that anyone could be insane enough to carry out such an attack.
“We heard human voices. Alien humans, but human voices. No human would sacrifice themselves in this manner.”
“These ones do.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know it. When the crisis is over, you can confirm it with the Lord Admiral. He will ratify my actions.”
The Fleet Admiral shook his head and looked at the screen again.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Am I going to talk to them in person? Or over the intercom? I’d prefer face to face.” Rihanna asked.
“We don’t know yet, Madam President. When you’re ready, we’ll head up to the Command Section. If the Hrwang will conference with us face to face, we’ll be prepared.”
“I’m probably going to need to go aboard their ship. I need to speak with them. We have to end this war.” Rihanna had to save the world. The whole time during the planning of this mission, she had told herself it had to be her. She would save the world. She would negotiate a truce, a ceasefire, something, with these aliens. Someone had to. They would recognize her as the leader of the strongest nation on the Earth, or at least what had been the strongest nation before the aliens attacked.
She thought about the video she had given to the returned Captain of the Beagle. He may have been an alien toady, but he was human, and once he watched that video, he’d understand the true nature of his masters and he would have to do something.
But doubt filled her.
She had to assume she was on her own. And she had to try.
“I’m ready,” she said weakly. Time to start saving things.
The Fleet Admiral watched the screen, watched the alien ship close, with a measure of his own doubt. He had only been Admiral a couple of weeks. What if he lost half his fleet?
Yet the Lord Admiral had declared the fighting over. The meteor bombardment had silenced the planet’s ability to strike at the Hrwang fleet, or so the Lord Admiral had declared.
However the aliens had just managed to launch a large craft despite this fact.
Just because one side stopped fighting out of mercy for its attackers didn’t mean the other side had to stop fighting. If these aliens were sufficiently insane that they killed themselves simply to wound an opponent, then none of them could be trusted until they were completely disarmed and incapable of fighting.
No soldier wanted to fight unnecessarily, but protecting his ships and his fleet was more important than showing undeserved trust to aliens, human beings so strange they were capable of incomprehensible acts.
“If you are wrong, you accept full responsibility for the claims you have just made,” he said.
The Lord Admiral’s Adjutant nodded.
The Flee
t Admiral nodded at one of his officers, who left, knowing what needed to be done.
“Five minutes, Madam President.” Destiny’s commander spoke directly to her now, not over an intercom. The man looked at her respectfully. That always surprised Rihanna.
Before the Hrwang attack, she had simply been another government bureaucrat in the eyes of men like this commander. Another cog in a wheel that got in the way of space funding, not knowing that if it hadn’t been for people like her, there would have been no funding at all, instead of the limited monies she’d helped procure. Someone, somewhere, always wanted every penny of every dollar available to the government. It took significant force of will to get an agenda supported.
But they still hadn’t respected her.
Now that she bore the title of supreme bureaucrat, a position so far removed from actual decision making that it had become as much figurehead as real, others respected her. Showed deference to her. Rihanna couldn’t understand it.
Maybe people simply didn’t understand how things worked.
She did understand the power of the Presidency, however, even if she didn’t understand why that power existed, which is why she knew she had to be the one to visit the Hrwang over her husband’s objections.
She hoped the aliens saw things the same way.
Destiny shuddered.
“What was that?” her commander barked.
Rihanna felt an increase in weightlessness, which even she knew wasn’t possible. It felt like she accelerated in the wrong direction. She grabbed the back of the commander’s seat to hold on and looked out the front view screen and everything appeared wrong. Earth loomed large in the screen, continents and oceans and clouds growing larger and closer. What had happened?
The commander swore. Others swore. Commands were yelled, countermanded, then reissued. The crew tried desperately to maneuver Destiny, to reestablish orbit, but the experimental spacecraft faced only one fate. Burning and breaking up during uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
“How did this happen?” someone cried, but no one answered. Rihanna wept in the increasing heat in the capsule, not for the men and women who sought in vain to recover from an unrecoverable catastrophe, not for the Earth that filled the view screen and still needed saving, and not even for herself.
She wept for the two little children who clung to their father and cried for their mother who had let her head get too big when someone had given her an important sounding title.
She wept for her babies as Destiny tore herself apart.
A Hrwang drone watched its handiwork, then returned to its command ship to report.
67
Ambush Page 6