Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Of course,” Samra said. She wondered, briefly, just what couldn’t be said now, on Orbit One; had Buckley been given some classified instructions from the USSF? Even if he had, he wouldn’t have told her about them, would he? “I have some minor issues to raise with you as well…”

  “Excuse me,” a voice said, from behind her. Samra turned slightly to see Gavin Reynolds, one of the space technology experts; the tall man had only been introduced to her a week ago and she didn’t know him very well at all. He knew his material, she’d found out, but there were few records of what he had done when it came to turning his knowledge into practical work. For some reason, that bothered her; the Americans had to have had a reason for sending him on the welcome fleet.

  She dismissed her concerns. “Yes?”

  “The Ambassador would like to ask you a few questions,” Reynolds said, his voice droll. Samra rolled her eyes; Ambassador Giacometti wanted a photo opportunity of the two of them together, where he could take all the credit for her work and whatever credit there was when it came to talking to the aliens. “You might want to head out the door.”

  Razia Khan went through worse than this, Samra thought, remembering one of the heroines of the Islamic Reform Movement. Razia had defied the religious police in Saudi Arabia, hiding a recording device on her person; it had recorded her arrest, beating, and gang-rape at the hands of the religious police, a recording that had started a revolution. How can I do any less?

  “I’m coming,” she said. It wouldn’t be long now. “Captain, I’ll see you on the Neil Armstrong.”

  * * *

  An hour later, they were finally permitted to board the Neil Armstrong, walking into the zero-gravity section of Orbit One, and then into the zero-gravity section of the Neil Armstrong before entering the main habitat ring. It was surprisingly roomy; they'd had plenty of time to organise the sections of the spacecraft into workspaces, sleeping chambers and research laboratories. The bridge ship had been intended to carry a vast number of colonists, most of them in drug-induced hibernation; it could carry a hundred wide-awake crewmen and scientists with ease.

  “Now hear this,” the intercom buzzed. Samra recognised Commander Roberts’ voice and smiled; she liked the man. There was something about him that reminded her of her father. “We will be disengaging from Orbit One in twenty minutes; if you are not intending to fly with us, do not attempt to remain on the ship any longer.” There was a pause. “Director Hussein to the bridge, please.”

  Samra exchanged a puzzled look with O'Dowd, but followed the markers on the hull back into the zero-gravity section, and then into the crew-only section. The bridge itself had been marked as off-limits, but she didn’t worry about it; she imagined that Captain Buckley had his reasons for calling her to the bridge. The bridge – the nautical term had stuck despite the slightly ramshackle appearance of any spacecraft command centre – was smaller than she had expected for such a large ship; a handful of consoles, a handful of chairs, and four crewmen.

  “I confirm one minute to departure,” the helmsman said. “Hatches have been sealed.”

  “I thought that you would like to see this,” Buckley said, as he pointed Samra towards an unoccupied chair. She pulled herself down and buckled herself into the chair. “Mr. Reynolds assisted us in designing the craft and asked to observe as we departed.”

  Samra favoured the young man with a smile. “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

  “There’s less to see than you might think,” Buckley said as his helmsman began a short countdown. The spacecraft had no sci-fi viewscreen; the closest there was to any omnipresent display was the views from cameras mounted on the hull. There could be no viewport on the bridge; she’d been told that it was the best-protected section of the spacecraft. “Still, it is something…”

  “Release,” the helmsman said. Samra had half-expected a dull rumble running through the ship; there was nothing, but the ever-present thrumming of the fusion pile at the rear of the spacecraft. “We are free of Orbit One; I repeat, we are free of Orbit One.”

  “Begin reaction burn,” Buckley ordered. This time, Samra did feel something; a faint…sense of motion that rose and fell slightly as the reaction jets fired, nudging the Neil Armstrong away from Orbit One and pushing the massive ship into an exit orbit. It seemed to take forever; it seemed to happen very quickly. One of the cameras focused on Orbit One as it fell away in the distance, the spacecraft rising up towards the stars. “Reaction burn…terminate.”

  The sense of motion faded; she knew, intellectually, that the spacecraft was still moving, but her body insisted that there was no motion, none at all. Time passed; the spacecraft kept moving, heading away from Earth…and towards the aliens. She wondered if the aliens knew that she was coming, if they could see the human ships; they would definitely see them when the fusion drive was ignited.

  “I confirm that we have laser link-up with the other ships of the welcome fleet,” Commander Roberts said.

  “They are ready to join us when we go fusion.”

  Samra felt her breath catch in her throat; she had almost forgotten that there was more than one ship taking part in the mission. Standing orders had the aliens being forbidden to visit the other ships, just to hide the fact that humanity had launched an armed fleet at them, just in case. Samra couldn’t believe that the aliens had come all that way just to fight, but she hadn’t been charged with making the final decision; that decision had been made by politicians on Earth.

  “Good,” Buckley said. Samra met Reynolds’ eyes and saw just how excited he was; she shared something of his excitement, while Buckley and his crew were taking it in their stride. “Issue the standard warning, John.”

  Roberts took the intercom. “Now hear this,” he said. “Fusion burn will commence in five minutes; please ensure that you assume fusion position and do not move until the all clear is sounded.”

  Samra checked her seat out of habit; she would be safe. Some of the faster ships had to have people in water baths, just to prevent them from suffering damage caused by heavy acceleration; the constant-burn ships, in particular, could be very dangerous under the wrong circumstances. The Neil Armstrong wasn't a constant-burn ship; it would be slower, but much safer.

  “Trigger the fusion drive,” Buckley ordered. This time, Samra felt it instantly; a pressure that pushed against her body, a cold dispassionate force of nature that chilled her more than any contact with a heavy male body, or the time when she had been trapped under her own wardrobe. The heavy thrumming in the hull increased; she knew that if the aliens were watching, the welcome fleet had just highlighted its own position for them to track…and project their course to rendezvous with the alien fleet.

  Reynolds glanced across at her from his seat. “We’re on our way,” he said. Annoyingly, the high boost didn’t seem to have any effect on him at all; Samra almost envied the colonists who spent their entire trip in a stupor. They would never know what was happening until they were woken up at the far end. “Thank you for this chance.”

  Samra could have kissed him at that moment. “Thank you, too,” she said. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

  Chapter Ten: While the World Waits…

  Camp Macintyre, Near Virginia Beach, USA

  “Captain Christopher Fardell reporting, sir,” Fardell said, as the door to the general’s office hissed open. The invitation – which no sane officer would dare refuse – to meet with the general had surprised him; most generals didn't seem to know that anyone below the rank of colonel existed under normal circumstances.

  The news of the aliens had surprised everyone, but Fardell found it irritating on more than a personal level; the entire armoured combat suit unit had been pulled back to the States at short notice, rather than completing the task of destroying the remains of the Wrecker force in the Exclusion Zone. Hunting smart Wreckers – the stupid ones didn’t last past the time they sent a betraying signal to attract a
n orbital KEW – was a hard task, but it was also challenging; Fardell had been quite looking forward to it after discovering the slaves. Whatever cause of the week had motivated the Wreckers, it clearly hadn’t included peace and freedom for everyone. America had lost most of her remaining racism during the long Wrecker War; the reminder that not everyone shared American values had stung.

  The unit had been given a week’s leave, but then they’d only taken part in garrison duty, something that Fardell privately detested, a role fit only for the National Guard. The Battlesuit Regiments were designed for rapid mobile firepower, not standing in one place and waiting for the enemy to attack, or holding down a region that might have become rebellious if troop numbers were pulled down sharply. It did have the advantage that no one was shooting at him and his men – American citizens generally didn’t consider their own soldiers an army of occupation – but it was boring.

  General William Denny looked up at him and returned his salute. “At ease, Captain,” he said. Fardell relaxed very slightly; he still had no idea why he’d been called to face the General. Short of some hideous breach of regulations, and he knew that he had committed none, nor had any of the men under his command, he found it hard to imagine why the General would want to talk to him in person. It wasn’t as if there was anything special about him. “How are your men holding up?”

  The US Army encouraged honest reporting; it was one of the edges it held over non-western armies. “They’re pissed off at being taken from Africa,” Fardell reported. “There’s been no word on just what we found in the base, but everyone saw the women and everyone wants to get stuck into the bastards and give them hell, sir.”

  Denny’s lips twitched. “There was little choice,” he said, as close to an apology that Fardell knew he was likely to get. “We may be overreacting to the aliens, or we may not have considered anything reassembling just how dangerous the aliens might be to us; in many ways, we’ve become overconfident over the last fifty years.”

  Fardell said nothing, but there was a certain amount of truth in the statement; the civilised world – meaning the Great Powers – had never had to take on an equal opponent since the final Arab-Israeli spat, a year before the Caliphate Movement led to the establishment of the Caliphate and the Treaty of Jordan. The Wreckers could sometimes be dangerous – New York had proven that, as had Marseilles and Stalingrad – but they didn’t pose a threat on such a scale. How could they when their only real weapon was random terror?

  “But that’s an issue for another time,” Denny said. “You may be interested to note that we recovered several dozen storage mediums from the Wrecker base, most of them packed full of pornography--” Fardell laughed; a century after the Internet had really taken off, porn was still the number one content “--and some of the videos hiding real information. Most of it was written as vaguely as possible, for obvious reasons, but we did manage to use it to track down some of the Wreckers’ supporters in America and Europe. The death sentences were passed last month.”

  Which didn’t, Fardell knew, mean that they had been executed by now. The suspects, their guilt confirmed by lie detectors and drugs, would be kept in a very secure location and interrogated until they gave up everything they knew about the organisation they had supported, maybe even played a role in directing. Once they had been drained of information, they would be shot and their bodies broken up for organ recycling. Publicly, they had been dead since the sentences had been passed; no one would bother to raise the issue once their guilt had been proven.

  The general stood up. “You may have been reading the various papers on how we can insert some of our soldiers though a high-speed descent from orbit,” he said. Fardell nodded; the concept was hardly new, but it was very much a case of a white elephant. He had no doubt that it could work, but where on Earth could they send orbital transports that they couldn’t insert them though cheaper means, such as stealth helicopters or parachute drops? “The planners believe that the aliens might use such a means to insert their soldiers on the ground, once they have taken control of the high orbitals and used them against us.”

  Fardell scowled. The troop movements might make some sense under those conditions; if the aliens were hostile and they did manage to take control of LEO, they could pick off any large force that was moving across the ground, like rolling down an interstate. They could sink ships from orbit, pick off aircraft with laser weapons; who knew what else they could think of that humanity couldn’t even imagine…?

  “You look like a man with a question,” Denny said. “What do you want to say?”

  Fardell kept his face blank. “Do we know that the aliens are hostile?”

  “If we knew for certain, we would be panicking a lot more,” Denny said wryly. “What we do know is that in two weeks, the welcome fleet will intercept the alien fleet…and then? The aliens may open communications; the analysts believe that that is what they will do. Or…they may open fire on the fleet. Or…they may just head through the fleet and carry onwards towards Earth. If that happens…”

  He paused. “We have to assume that the aliens are just like us; maybe not intentionally hostile, but willing to take advantage of weakness,” he said. “If they don’t make contact with the welcome fleet, we will have to assume that they are hostile and if that happens, we dare not let them into LEO without a fight. I don’t like this, Captain, and neither do the analysts, but if they try to enter LEO without convincing us of their good intentions, we’re going to open fire.”

  Fardell felt his blood run cold.

  “But it may not come to that,” Denny said. “And, besides, it’s way above your pay grade. Your unit has been assigned to a particularly important mission.”

  He tapped the massive map of America, ranging from the Canadian border to what had once been Argentina, and then looked up at Fardell. “Your unit has had experience in almost all manner of American terrain and, if worse comes to the worst, you have operated with units from the British Commonwealth, the Europeans and the Russians. That makes youan asset.”

  “They don’t call it the British Commonwealth, sir,” Fardell said. It was a fairly common American mistake. “The British may think of it that way, but the Canadians, South Africans and Indians resent being called the British Commonwealth; the entire system has much more in common with the pre-federal America than it has with Europe or even ourselves. It’s a union of equals.”

  “Thank you,” the General said, dryly. Fardell said nothing. Correcting a General wasn’t always a smart career move. “Regardless, the aliens have forced us to make some…less than optimal decisions. One of them is that we are forced to spread out our regular forces to support the National Guard, which in turn is garrisoning the United States in hopes of providing a rapid response to any alien incursion. Your unit, Fardell, will be assigned to providing rapid support and firepower to National Guard units, serving as a reserve and reconnaissance force. When – if – the aliens land in America, you will move up to support the Guard or engage the enemy, depending on the exact situation.”

  He grinned. “Given that America is not the centre of the universe, it is equally possible that the aliens might land elsewhere,” he continued. “If they land in Canada or Brazil, the locals may request our support; in that case, your unit will be earmarked for a rapid transit to Canada. If they land in the Exclusion Zones, you may be transported back there and asked to provide intelligence on just what they’re doing there.”

  Fardell frowned. “Do we have any idea at all where the aliens might land?”

  “None,” Denny said. His hand ran over the map briefly. “We don’t have the slightest fucking clue. They may come down right in the middle of the United States; we have a contingency plan to handle that when – if – it happens. They may come down in Panama; if that happens, we may have real problems evicting them…assuming they can defeat the heavy defences we placed there when we annexed the region. They may come down in Europe or Russia or China; if that happens, we may be dep
endent upon the locals dealing with the aliens for us. There are just too many imponderables.”

  He shrugged. “But, again, that is hardly an issue. Your role is fairly simple.”

  Fardell smiled; it was good to know just what his superiors were thinking – assuming they were thinking at all; many front-line soldiers would have doubted that – but at the same time it was sometimes pointless. As Denny had pointed out, issues of strategy were well above his pay grade; his job was merely to carry the orders out or die trying.

  “We have established a small base here--” his hand tapped the map near Fredericksburg “--with support units here, here and here. You may have noticed that the base is camouflaged and we have actually been unable to locate it from orbit – knowing, of course, that there was something there to be located. Your unit will be based there and, hopefully, will escape being noticed by the aliens if they have hostile intentions. Once the aliens show their intentions, then we can decide how we are to use you and your unit.”

  “And, of course, we can visit the beach at Virginia Beach with them,” Fardell said dryly. “They might like the water…”

  Denny gave him an ‘I am not amused’ look.

  “Or they might like Africa,” he said. “I could just imagine some politician selling them the Exclusion Zone, complete with Wreckers and bio-collapse, in exchange for whatever technology the aliens have. It might be a bargain and a solution to the Wrecker problem into the bargain.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fardell said dutifully. He kept his private thoughts to himself. “Are the Wreckers going to become involved with the aliens?”

  “I don’t know,” Denny said. For an instant, he looked like an old man; Fardell wondered if any of the generals from a hundred years ago had felt the same way when the Twin Towers had fallen, when they discovered that the rules of warfare had suddenly changed. “All I know is that we have our duty…”