The powder, which up close was more gray than black, covered everything. The whole area had been sprayed several times, and no one could walk across the street without leaving footprints.
After the second spraying, Kara had gone outside and crouched, trying to see the nanorescuers up close. She had seen the video of the rescuers eating the alien machines. That had impressed her dad, but she hadn’t understood how there would be enough rescuers. How had the government known how many rescuers to make? Had they counted all the ones the aliens had sent down before? Kara couldn’t imagine how they would have been able to do that: the aliens had sucked most of them back up again.
So she figured the government was guessing, and if they guessed wrong, everyone would die.
But she didn’t say anything about her suspicions to anyone, not her father, not her stupid cousins, not even Barb who seemed—despite her folding bed—like one of the most sensible people in the house. Kara had just crouched and tried to study the rescuers, and she hadn’t really seen a thing.
They didn’t even move. She had at least expected them to move. But they lay like sand on the pavement, shifting only when a wind blew them around.
Now, on the screens, commentators were talking nervously about the aliens’ return. Some were showing simulated views from orbit—none of the stations had any way of filming above the Earth. All of their equipment had been confiscated for use by the governments, something that relieved Kara, but seemed to be annoying the commentators.
And the Nelsons and the Hendricksons—except for Connor—had been trying to find out what was going on all day. Connor was in his room, which used to be the guest room, pretending to sleep. No one who was sensible would sleep tonight.
The world might end tonight. How could you sleep through it?
Kara pushed away from the wall and jumped off the stool. All these people were too close. She wondered where her father was. Probably in his study, since the Nelsons, who slept there, were out here. He hated that anyone had use of his study, but he didn’t say anything. He believed everyone had to do his duty and not complain.
Well, Kara wasn’t complaining either, except to herself. She grabbed her coat off the rack and opened the door.
“Who’s that?” her mother shouted from the kitchen, but no one answered her. Kara quietly closed the door behind her and stepped onto the porch.
The air was cold and crystal clear. It felt like snow, and looked, with the nanorescuers on the ground, as if it already had. Kara looked up, but saw only light in the night sky. There were too many artificial lights in the Chicago area to allow her to see the stars.
Then she stepped off the porch and onto the sidewalk. The tents were zipped up for the night. She felt sorry for the people inside. The tents, even with their built in thermal units, had to be cold and cramped. Her father had said that, if she really looked, she could see people who were worse off than they were.
She hadn’t really realized that all she had to do was look outside her front door.
The street wasn’t empty, though, as she had been expecting. Some of her neighbors had pulled their lawn chairs out of winter storage and placed them on the asphalt. Others were standing nearby, hands buried in their armpits as they tried to keep warm.
Everyone was looking up, and no one was saying anything.
That was why she hadn’t noticed all the people at first. It was so very quiet. The dozens of people in the street should have been making some kind of noise.
But she wasn’t either. She couldn’t even bring herself to say hello to them. The cold air made her feel as if she were encased in a sheet of ice, separating her from the world.
She went to the curb and looked up again. Still no stars. She wouldn’t be able to see the alien ship until it was right overhead. And then it would be too late.
Maybe she would see it as a darkness, a flat darkness, above her. Maybe it would block out the lights of the city or reflect the streetlights from below.
Or maybe it would be nothing at all, as silent as the people around her, and barely visible.
She had only her imagination as her guide on this. Her imagination and all that news footage she had seen last spring.
She shuddered, and drew her coat in closer. Mrs. Lauderdale from across the street had a blanket wrapped around her, and she wore a knit cap on her gray hair. She was leaning back in her deck chair, her mouth slightly open, as if she were trying to catch candy being tossed from a balcony.
Why did Mrs. Lauderdale think she was safer out here? If those alien harvesters fell from the sky right now, they would land in her mouth and chew her up from the inside out—rescuers or no rescuers. The rescuers attacked the harvesters after they landed, jumped on them like bugs, and sucked all the energy out of them. They couldn’t do that to any harvester inside someone.
Kara shuddered and glanced at her house. The roof was darker, coated with a light dusting of the grayish rescuers. They would stop anything that landed on the house. They would protect the people inside.
The people outside were taking an awful chance. They had to know it. Why weren’t they acting on it?
Why wasn’t she?
She shuddered one more time and went back up the sidewalk. Better to be inside with her snoring cousins or the annoying Nelsons than it was to be out here, where the harvesters could touch her before the rescuers could help.
Her father would probably say that she was being foolish. But her father—one of the most sensible people she’d ever known—was inside.
Kara went inside, too, walking past the vid screens with their useless information to the kitchen where her mother was making the final loaf of bread.
The flour, spread on the counter, looked like bleached nanorescuers.
“Do we still have sugar, Mom?” Kara asked.
Her mother looked up, a dot of flour on her nose. “I think so.”
“Can we make something with it? Something good?”
Her mother smiled. It was a tired, yet understanding smile. “I don’t see why not,” her mother said.
And together they hauled out her great-grand-mother’s baking book, and looked for something good. Something sinful. Something that would make them feel as if the world weren’t going to end today.
November 10, 2018
4:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
Doug Mickelson paced the length of the Map Room and silently cursed the fact there was only one window. That window overlooked an outdoor walkway that, if memory served him right, was built over 150 years before to ease the flow of visitors out of the White House.
There was no flow of visitors into or out of the White House these days. The White House had been declared off limits to the general public, not that Mickelson could believe anyone would want to tour the place. The tensions in the nation, in the entire world, were so high that people were thinking only of survival, not of their nation’s history.
He had his hands clasped. He did so to prevent his fingers from finding the edge of the curtain and pulling it back. He was in the Map Room, with the president and six other trusted friends and advisers, precisely because it had one window and could be easily guarded.
The president was seen as the center of the entire worldwide defense against the aliens. Because he had made the rallying speeches, he was the focal point, and because there were still a handful of crazies who believed that the aliens’ return was just a plot, created by the government, the Secret Service and the FBI believed the president had to take as many precautions as possible.
Mickelson believed it, too. He was just feeling claustrophobic. Tonight he wanted to be outside, looking at the sky.
The president was restless, too. He was standing in front of the fireplace, warming his hands over it as if he had a permanent chill. Beside him stood Shamus O’Grady, the president’s national security adviser, and on the other side was Tavi Bernstein, head of the FBI.
Grace Lopez, the chief of staf
f, sat in one of the antique, upholstered chairs. Carlton Hagen, one of the president’s personal aides, sat beside Lopez, and the first lady, who had served as Franklin’s closest adviser from the moment of their marriage, stood near the embroidered fire screen.
Patrick Aldrich, the press secretary, had been going in and out, attempting to control the flow of information, trying to prevent an international panic.
Someone—Mickelson didn’t know who, but he suspected it was someone on Cross’s Tenth Planet team— had predicted the aliens’ return down to the second. Cross, whom Mickelson had been friends with since childhood, had sworn that the aliens would be predictable, and so far they had been. According to the last report the president had gotten, the aliens were going to arrive in Earth’s orbit exactly at the moment they had been predicted to.
Which was right about now.
Mickelson moved away from the window and walked the length of the room again. He was still concerned with history. He had thought it appropriate that they were here—the Map Room had been the situation room for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his staff in World War II. They had sealed off the room, not allowed entrance from anywhere except the corridor— not even from the diplomatic reception room next door—and posted a guard in that corridor.
Mickelson had noted the historic parallels to Franklin—two presidents with the name Franklin, two wars on which the survival of the world depended, and the use of this room as a central place from which it was all staged. Only now they had electronic equipment against the far wall, enough communications devices to keep the entire world informed five times over, and several large screens that were currently shut off.
Franklin had grinned at Mickelson when he’d mentioned the parallels. “The White House is old enough now, Doug, that we can find parallels for anything.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Well, you chose to see a great war being fought from this room. I see a room filled with personal defeats. This was the place where President William Jefferson Clinton gave the famous August seventeenth speech that nearly brought down his presidency.”
“You don’t think your presidency will end here,” Mickelson had said, shocked.
Franklin’s grin had faded. “I don’t think so. I think the truth of this room is that it is being used as it was intended to be used, as a way station, a place to relax outside of the function of the diplomacy that was usually going on next door.”
“There is no diplomacy tonight.”
“War is diplomacy of a different sort.”
“I was raised to believe that war was the failure of diplomacy.”
Franklin had nodded. “It is. How can you have diplomacy with a group whose culture you do not understand and whose language you have never heard?” And that was when Franklin had turned to the fire. The first lady, a slender silver-haired woman who had given up her place as CEO of a major corporation to accompany her husband to the White House, had looked at Mickelson then. In her intelligent brown eyes, Mickelson saw both reproach and understanding.
Now she had her right hand on her husband’s back. “Thayer,” she said softly, “this room is not comfortable. Perhaps we should do as the Joint Chiefs asked and use the war room in the basement.”
The basement was a euphemistic term for the bunkers that had been built below the White House. The first set had been built during the Cold War of the previous century. The current set, shown to the president and his cabinet on their first day in office, was the fourth incarnation of the same plan. Only this one had been modernized during the presidency of Franklin’s predecessor. The bunkers actually made Mickelson feel as if he had stepped into the middle of someone’s paranoid fantasies.
In addition to all the working rooms, from conference rooms to offices to situation rooms complete with their own electrical grid, there were apartments for the various governmental officials and their spouses, several kitchens—stocked with enough food to last years—and a defensive system that should withstand any kind of bombardment save total destruction of the Earth itself.
Mickelson hated the bunkers worse than he hated being in the Map Room. To go to the basement seemed to him as if they were conceding that the aliens were going to win the war.
Franklin turned to his wife, but as he was about to answer, his beeper went off. Mickelson stiffened. He knew what that meant—they all knew what it meant— but Franklin checked his wrist’puter anyway.
“The aliens have entered Earth’s orbit,” he said.
For a moment, everyone in the room froze. Mickelson knew that if he lived through this attack, he would remember that sentence forever. And the somber tone Franklin used to express it.
O’Grady turned on the screens. Most of them showed the video pictures from the telescopes. One hundred eight alien ships, looking like black shadows against the Earth. One hundred eight, all with the capability to destroy everything.
“Have those ships seen the missiles yet?” Franklin asked.
No one answered. Everyone in the room knew as much as he did.
“Have they?”
“Sir, there’s no way of telling from here,” said Grace Lopez. She hadn’t moved from her chair.
“Then someone go find out!” Franklin snapped.
O’Grady headed toward the door. He glanced one last time at the screens as he did so, as if he saw his own death depicted there. And then he disappeared into the corridor.
Mickelson gripped his hands tightly together. The missiles had left Earth’s orbit, and in a few minutes, the alien ships would see them. If the aliens didn’t take the bait and go after the missiles, the missiles would hit the tenth planet in sixteen days.
Sixteen days for one attack. This was the slowest moving war in Earth’s entire history.
O’Grady returned a moment later. Yolanda Hayes, the science adviser, was with him.
Mickelson was startled at her appearance. He hadn’t seen Hayes since the night he introduced her to Leo Cross, about a year ago. Then she had been stylish, made-up, and manicured, her hair cut in the latest style. Now, she wore no makeup at all, her nails were ragged, and her dress was rumpled. Her hair needed a cut, as well.
It wasn’t that she seemed depressed. Just distracted.
“Mr. President,” she said.
“Yolanda.” Franklin hadn’t turned his attention from the screens. “Do those ships know about the missiles?” “Not yet, sir,” she said. “They will shortly. They can’t quite see them yet. We don’t know if they have the right equipment to detect them without a visual.” Mickelson bit his lower lip. If they had already detected the missiles, then they weren’t responding. Having the missiles hit the tenth planet wasn’t the defense they were all hoping for.
Those ships had to leave Earth’s orbit.
All of them, preferably.
“I got word that General Banks and her crew got off the International Space Station,” Hayes said. “They’re on the Endeavor II”.
Franklin nodded. Mickelson took a deep breath and held it for just a moment. Banks and her crew had done a fantastic job launching the missiles. All of the senior White House staff had been notified of this suicide mission. No one expected Banks or the crew to get off the ISS. The fact that they had managed it was nothing short of a miracle.
But, he knew, they needed more than one miracle to get them to Earth in one piece.
“Where is the Endeavor II?” Franklin asked.
“At last report,” Hayes said, “still attached to the ISS. But the fact that the crew is in the shuttle means that it’ll leave any minute now. It probably already has.” Mickelson hoped so. They were running out of time. He glanced at the screens. The shadow ships seemed darker somehow. More ominous.
He couldn’t concentrate on Banks and her crew. He had to think about the rest of the world. If those ships didn’t follow the missiles, then the first part of the plan had failed.
“I hope to hell this works,” Franklin said. “How soon will we know if they tak
e the bait?”
“They’ll have to respond within the hour, sir,” Hayes said. “And once they commit ships to chasing the missiles, those ships will not be able to return to Earth.”
“Once they commit?” Franklin said. “You’re that certain that they will?”
“Yessir,” Hayes said without missing a beat.
Mickelson remembered the meeting where this plan was drawn up. Franklin had asked the same question then. But, like Mickelson, he had probably thought that the aliens would see the missiles and then follow them immediately. Neither of them had expected this delay.
“The laws of physics are on our side, sir,” Hayes said.
“I’m glad something is,” Franklin muttered.
Mickelson’s ’puter vibrated against his wrist. He looked down, saw that he had an important call, and pressed a button to transfer it to his personal pocket phone so that the entire room didn’t have to hear the whole conversation.
He took the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, turned his back on the group, and answered. One of his most trusted deputies gave him the quick code. Mickelson thanked him and hung up.
Franklin was still clarifying details with Hayes.
“Excuse me, sir,” Mickelson said. “That was my European team. The last of the major cities have been protected.”
“That was too close for comfort,” Franklin said. “Someone want to tell me again why Europe was the last to be covered?”
“It was the second run,” Mickelson said, and then wished he hadn’t. Franklin knew that. He was just getting edgy and wanted someone to take it out on.
“It was too close,” Franklin said. “It’s all been too close. Finishing our cities six hours ago was too close.”
“The factories are still running at full capacity, sir,” Hayes said. “We’re going to cover as much as we can even with the aliens overhead. We’re not going to stop unless they stop us.”
“I know that, Yolanda,” Franklin said. “I just want some movement. That’s all. I want those aliens to leave orbit. And I want it now.”
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