I shook my head. “Howard seemed to know.”
Ruth moaned.
Whatever had happened up above, us survivors were unlikely to learn.
I stared at what was left of my hand as darkness shrunk my field of vision like I was entering a tunnel. Light and consciousness disappeared.
The next thing I heard was birds chirping.
Twenty-Five
Watery sunlight bathed me.
Thok-thok-thok.
Above me drifted orange emergency helicopters, and, silently, Jeeb.
“How you doing, sir?” An upside-down face peered at me through the face shield of Eternad infantry armor, but this armor was yellow-and-orange-striped, emergency gear. Eternads heat, cool, insulate, and absorb shock as well as they stop bullets.
“What happened?”
Chirp-chirp-chirp.
The gurney on which I lay had a wheel that squeaked as the armored medic pushed it. The smell and crackle of fires pressed around me.
“Nobody knows, sir.” He waved a gauntleted hand. “We hear Canaveral’s the only place that got hit.”
I levered myself up on one elbow. The Canaveral main gate parking lot flickered with the lights of jumbled emergency vehicles and sizzled with the static of firefighter-net radios. Beyond the lot, though, the whole complex was gone. A smoking, black crater a hundred feet deep, littered with bursts of fire, remained.
“We got out of that?”
“Ms. Tway’s GPS beeper showed her still alive. She’s Cabinet-level. They get priority in emergencies, sir. So she was the first target we went after. Rappelled down an elevator shaft and there you all were. You were in the right place at the right time.”
In the distance, a woman wept. He paused. “Sorry. I guess that’s not true.”
“There was a lady with a baby?”
“Cuts, contusions. They’re around here someplace.”
“Tway?”
The medic shook his head. “Not gonna make it. Internal injuries. Blood loss. But she’s in the same ambulance we’re headed for.”
The medic jacked my gurney into the ambulance, next to Ruth’s. They had sawed off the table leg but the stub made a tent out of the bloodstained sheet that covered her belly.
The medic asked Ruth, “Ma’am, hate to bother you, but we found this down in the sub-basement, near where we found you. It’s got a locator beacon on it, with your ID code. So we figured it must be important. The data’s still retrievable.”
The medic held up the stenobot that had recorded my demotion and all my transgressions. It was smoke-blackened and bent. “What should we do with it, ma’am?”
The medic held my future in his hands.
Ruth lolled her head toward me, her eyes glazed. “That? It’s nothing. Back a truck over it, then pitch it back in the crater.”
She paused, squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. “And get General Wander, here, to a plane. The world will figure out that it needs him. Somewhere.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The medic fingered his audiophone.
An Electruk squealed to a stop behind us and firebots unfolded their legs and dropped from its flanks to the asphalt, like waking crimson spiders.
Ruth shivered. I pushed myself up on an elbow, reached across with my good hand, and covered her bare shoulder with a sheet.
Jeeb climbed Ruth’s gurney and perched on the silver rail at her feet, backlit by fires. His circuits whined.
Ruth smiled at Jeeb, then pointed past him at the firebots, her hand scarcely raised above her chest. “It’s their destiny to put out this fire, Jason. Yours, too.”
Braap. Braap.
A firebot test-fired its water cannon. A gust blew droplets from the pulses back through the ambulance’s open doors, across Jeeb.
Ruth said, “Thanks. Jason, remember how I told you that if you don’t—”
“Don’t talk. Relax.”
She set her jaw. “If you don’t want to see it in the Post, don’t say it?”
“I’ll remember.”
“No. Forget that. Always say it.” She coughed again and a blood thread trickled from her nostril. I wiped it away.
“Rest. You’re tired.”
“Jason, don’t ever get tired of being right.” She closed her eyes.
The medic checked the read on her vitals, then disconnected the monitor and pulled the sheet over Ruth Klein-Tway’s head.
Jeeb’s whine rose to a wail. Firebot overspray trickled from his optic sensors and ran down his ventral plating. Or he wept. That was impossible, of course.
Behind Jeeb, firebots marched into the flames, turrets swiveling. They were doing what they were destined for, hunting the roots of this hell, digging for some way to make it stop.
I squeezed my gurney’s rail until it shook. I didn’t know yet what had just happened. But I was going to find out.
Twenty-Six
The next morning I was one of forty senior officers who climbed down from a bus, duffels in hand, like a trainee platoon, at the rusty-doored mouth to a tunnel mouth dug into old Cheyenne Mountain, above Colorado Springs.
The Alternate National Military Command Center had officially been at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska for years. But ALNMICC was now a target. A target like the Pentagon or the Kremlin, obvious and indefensible against whatever had destroyed Canaveral. So Cheyenne Mountain had become the alternate to the alternate.
To give you an idea how old the Cheyenne Mountain complex was, it was built to command American air defenses against Communist nuclear bomber fleets screaming in on America over the North Pole.
Since the Geneva Anti-Terrorism Compact, Cheyenne Mountain had deteriorated. A civilian led us into the mountain. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and scuffed lace-ups. A janitor, really. He led us through an open blast door as thick as a tail-standing bus, hung on barrel-sized hinges that had not budged in years, based on their dust coating. Not, I supposed, since the Russians figured out that after a half century of communism in the world’s biggest country, Denmark had a bigger gross national product than they did.
We double-timed four hundred yards into the mountain, descending a rock-walled tunnel, our steps echoing in chill, dead air. Theater-grade officers hustling like trainees. It looked like the Fun Run at a West Point reunion.
My hand throbbed and the loss of even the few ounces that two fingers weighed unbalanced me. There was something mentally unbalancing about amputation, too. It would have been more traumatizing if they hadn’t shot me up. The medics had implanted a Loc-Anest dispenser in my hand subcutaneously and in a duffel pocket I carried a bottle of pills that hit like bombs and were about as big.
I was lucid enough to have absorbed the bare bones of what we knew. It took no crystal ball to guess that just as Earth was starting to get back to normal, the slimy little animated zucchinis had sucker-punched us again.
Initial briefing was in an auditorium swollen with the flat smell of mildew and the nose-prick of disinfectant. Like the rest of Cheyenne Mountain, the old barn got demothballed when the Slug War had started. Then, in the finest military tradition of digging holes, then filling them up again, Cheyenne Mountain got remothballed when we won. Now we were scurrying to spruce the place up again.
Brace briefed from a podium on a low stage. Howard sat to Brace’s right, a Chipboard on his lap.
Brace’s eyes had sunk into a pale face. The impregnable defense of the planet, his impregnable defense, had failed. His command had been wiped out after having failed to fire a return shot. But he had no ship left to go down with.
His podium sat left of a flatscreen that filled the wall behind the stage. He cleared his throat, the lights dimmed like in an old film theater, and shuffling and coughing died as fast as a swatted fly.
Brace began, “Yesterday, at 1605 hours Zulu, UNSF remote-sensing pickets deployed in geosynchronous orbit detected an incursion into intra-lunar space by a presumed-hostile object.”
The wall lit with a still image of space. Stars salted blac
kness. At the screen’s center glowed a slim red streak. Brace turned toward the screen and stirred a circle around the streak with his green laser pointer.
“How many hits beside Canaveral?” I asked.
Brace faced back toward us. “Just the one.”
“Interceptor Command couldn’t stop just one Projectile?” The general who spoke rolled his eyes. His lapel brass was Air Defense Artillery. They spent their careers in air-conditioned bunkers, following manuals to the letter.
Brace’s head snapped back like he’d been slapped. “This wasn’t a Projectile. Not as we know them. It was too fast to catch and too small to hit.”
“Nuclear?”
Brace shook his head. “Usual Pseudocephalopod methodology. Solid object moving at high speed to destroy by application of kinetic energy.”
The ADA general said, “Projectiles during the Blitz came in at thirty thousand miles per hour. That was plenty fast. But by the end of the Blitz we were knocking them down. The Slugs are still just throwing rocks at us and you can’t stop them?”
Howard stepped to the podium and leaned in to the mike. “The Projectiles that hit us during the Blitz moved at the speed they did so they could maneuver, hit their targets. This one appears to have homed in on a microburst signal.”
The Football. All those Footballs, scattered across Ganymede so we couldn’t miss them. “A goddamn Trojan Horse?” I spit it out into the silence.
Howard nodded. “We only brought back one, by fortuitous coincidence.”
Coincidence my ass. Howard would have filled up Excalibur with Footballs like it was an Easter basket if I’d let him wander around Ganymede picking them up. The Slugs seemed to know human traits like curiosity like the backs of their hands. Except Slugs had no hands.
Howard continued. “As the general said, Blitz Projectiles moved at thirty thousand miles per hour. That’s eight miles per second. Four times faster than a Scramjet cruises.”
Somebody whistled.
Howard ran his laser pointer along the red track of whatever had smeared Canaveral. “Our best estimate is that when this object began to leave this visible track, due to atmospheric friction, it was moving at one hundred thousand miles per second. Too fast for our technology to record a visible image, much less intercept it.”
The Air Defense general shook his head. “That has to be wrong. That’s more than half the speed of light. The Rocket Equation—”
“We believe the Pseudocephalopod has bypassed the Rocket Equation.”
I raised my hand. “Howard, in English?”
He nodded. “Any reaction-based propulsion system, a rocket for practical purposes, can ultimately reach a speed no greater than twice its nozzle-exhaust velocity. You’ll recall that Tsilkovsky postulated this in 1903.”
“Who could ever forget?”
“A chemical-fuel rocket like the old space shuttle blew out at less than three miles per second. The fastest it could ever have gone would have been six miles per second. Worse, top speed is proportional to the natural logarithm of the percentage of mass left after the fuel’s gone.”
I rolled my eyes.
Howard scowled. “For heaven’s sake, Jason! It’s only rocket science!”
He tapped his pointer on his palm and stared at the ceiling. “In other words, according to the Rocket Equation, a rocket that’s 99.9 percent fuel—you could strap a fuel tank as big as the moon to the space shuttle—would take a thousand years to travel one light-year. The fastest propulsion systems we’ve conceived, even theoretically, are antimatter-fueled rockets and nuclear-fusion Scramjets. They could perhaps, if they accelerated long enough, attain half the velocity this object did. So, inferentially, this was no rocket. Besides, the configuration of current Pseudocephalopod vessels shows no trace of conventional rocket exhausts.”
“How do you know? You said you couldn’t see this object. That it moved too fast.”
Howard nodded. “That’s true. We couldn’t. But the rest of the fleet’s moving slower.”
Somebody whispered, “Fleet?”
Twenty-Seven
The screen beside Howard dissolved into a new picture. Howard said, “Visible-light optical image from the early days of the Blitz. The Shanghai Projectile, as photographed from Palomar Observatory.”
The object was too familiar, an iridescent-blue egg, whorled like a snail shell. A Projectile, the Slug War’s primary strategic weapon. As huge as flying football stadiums, Projectiles had vaporized Earth cities like extinction-event meteors and the impact dust they exploded into the stratosphere plunged us toward a new ice age within months. Projectiles had killed my mother and sixty million more human beings. I shuddered at the sight.
Howard said, “Destructive power is a function of kinetic energy. At thirty thousand miles per hour, objects this huge obliterated whole cities. But kinetic energy is one-half its mass times the square of its velocity.”
I looked around. Brace was nodding. Equations were tidy. They always gave the same answer if you plugged in the same values. They never left you scrambling around in the dark. Brace, I guessed, loved equations.
Howard continued. “If you plug in half the speed of light for velocity, give or take, then, depending on the density of yesterday’s object, yesterday’s object may have been no bigger than a refrigerator. A thrown medicine ball may knock you down. But a bullet will kill you.”
Brace asked, “You’re saying the Slugs expected us to pick up this lure? Like dumb animals?”
Howard nodded. “We expect mice to take cheese in traps.”
“We’re smarter than mice!”
“So we thought.”
At the turn of the century, we thought we were too smart to let nineteen fanatics with box cutters bring down the biggest buildings in New York. Hindsight was perfect. However we got there, we were in a war, now. This debate was pointless. I raised my hand. “You said there were Slug ships?”
Howard pressed his remote. A second object’s picture faded in as he said, “Scales are equalized.”
Alongside the Shanghai Projectile, and about the same size, floated another Slug-blue vessel. Howard said, “This image was gathered by telescopic sensors aboard a picket satellite.”
My hand throbbed beneath its dressing. I bit back nausea.
The new Slug vessel was as enormous as the old Projectile, but different. Humans are used to balance in our machines. Our machines echo the bilateral and radial symmetry of animal life on Earth. This blue-black monstrosity bulged unevenly, covered in overlapping plates, like a tumorous cockroach. From one tapered end—I thought of it as the front end—protruded six armlike crescents, from the rear and from one side pointed two cones, like thorns or stingers.
A similar vessel was visible behind the first one, tiny in the distance. An odd thing about the new photo was that, unlike the older, no stars were visible in the background.
Howard’s pointer slashed across the objects like a fencer’s foil. “We believe these to be war-fighting vessels for space combat. Fighters, if you will. Albeit enormous ones. The forward six-arm array we don’t understand. The United Nations universal phonetic designator for this model is ‘Firewitch.’ We identify variants Alpha and Bravo, distinguished by the number of forward arms. This six-arm model is the Alpha. A Firewitch Bravo deploys eight arms.”
I sighed. If the military got rid of the people who did nothing but think up acronyms and abbreviations for stuff, the Pentagon could have been cut down to the Quadragon. UN phonetic designation just continued last century’s NATO system. Fighters got two-syllable names starting with “F.”
I asked Howard, “Where are these ships now?”
“Between Earth and Mars.”
Someone let out a breath.
“How many?”
“There seem to be two escorts deployed forward at any one time. But we estimate the total is one hundred twenty-one Firewitches.”
“Escorts? Escorting what?”
Howard ran his pointer tip around
the screen’s edge. “This.”
The Shanghai Projectile faded offscreen and a new image replaced it. Howard said, “This is a pullback image taken at the same time as the close-up.”
Another bulbous Slug ship floated on the screen like a blue-black watermelon grown by the Mad Hatter. Two watermelon seeds drifted in front of it. I squinted at the seeds, which had tiny whiskers growing from their front ends. They were the two gigantic Firewitches. The Slug ship behind them was so gargantuan that it had blocked out space in the prior picture.
Some officer muttered, “It’s not a big ship. It’s a small planet!”
Howard said, “We believe the Firewitches escort this big bertha. A transport. United Nations phonetic designator ‘Troll.’”
“What does this Troll transport?”
Howard tapped the pointer against his palm and cocked his head. “My hunch is troops.”
No one spoke.
“It’s an invasion fleet. At present inbound speed and course, and presuming the ability to decelerate at G-forces commensurate with those observed as these Firewitches altered their course, the invasion fleet will reach Earth in twenty-two days.”
More silence.
I raised my hand. “Why invade us? The Slugs haven’t come within three hundred million miles of us before.”
Howard shrugged. “Best reason in the universe. Their last plan failed. Time for a change.”
The ADA general asked, “How did the fast-mover that hit Canaveral affect our defense capability?”
Brace stepped to the podium and Howard sat back down. “Space Force is developing launch points at Vandenburg in California and at Lop Nor in China. We were moving to deploy an orbital operations platform and a hunter-killer satellite umbrella.” Brace paused to clear his throat, then blinked. “However, at the moment, and for the next twenty-two days or longer, every war fighting vehicle on Earth capable of reaching low Earth orbit is scrap metal at the bottom of the Canaveral crater. Our defense capability is zero.”
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