Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  He cleared his throat. “The quartermaster will see to transporting your unit and your suits, complete with all the equipment you might need, to the base without exciting attention,” he concluded. “I don’t think that anyone would betray you--” Fardell nodded; ever since a handful of reporters had been shot for reporting military secrets, security had become much tighter “--but, just in case, you will operate under covert protocols. Good luck.”

  Fardell saluted. “Understood, sir,” he said. “We’ll report in once we reach the operating base.”

  * * *

  The massive skyscraper reached nearly a thousand meters into the sky, holding for a brief period – before New York built an even bigger skyscraper, which had coped with the nuclear blast surprisingly well – the record for tallest skyscraper in America. There were taller ones in Japan, Europe and even other cities in America, but Virginia Beach was proud of its monument. The Fulsome Building had been the first to be partially constructed with materials from orbit.

  At the moment, a month before the aliens would arrive at Earth, it was almost half-empty.

  “I wasn't able to sell a real policy today,” Carola Eichwurzel grumbled, as she entered the small flat she shared with her fiancé. Carola – a young blonde girl of Swedish descent, whose parents had immigrated to America to escape the chaos of the European civil unrest – worked for one of the largest insurance companies in America. “At this rate, there are going to be more lay-offs and maybe even a collapse.”

  Markus Wilhelm nodded from his chair as he tested the telescope. It had belonged to his brother, who had loaned it to him when he had emigrated to the moon as one of the long-term colonists of an American colony; he had enjoyed looking at Orbit One and the other habitats in Earth orbit over the last few years. One of the handful of perks residents of the Fulsome Building had was access to the roof; Wilhelm had used it as a base for observations.

  “The aliens have everyone scared,” he said. He couldn’t understand it; why would the aliens come God alone knew how many light years to start a fight? It made no sense; Wilhelm might not have had the fancy degrees in space travel that his brother had – his own expertise lay in economics – but he did understand the basics. The aliens had placed a great deal of effort into crossing from one star to another; the Message Bearer project, operating on a much smaller scale, had been awesomely expensive. He dreaded to think of what would happen if they had tried to build a hundred starships at once. “What did your boss say?”

  Carola gave him her patented look of death. “He said – and I quote – that unless we learnt what the aliens were doing, damage caused by alien attack would not be considered a viable reason to claim damages, unquote,” she said. “Everyone wants to be insured against alien attack, but it’s the one thing that we are not allowed to even offer a policy on, just like an act of God.”

  She paced over to him and placed her hand on his shoulder. “And we cannot prevent people from cashing in some of their current portfolios because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the case,” she continued. The case had been a political nightmare; facing public pressure to reform the insurance companies, Congress had passed laws that nearly made it impossible to function. Insurance was a gamble at the best of times, but the mega-deaths caused by various Wrecker attacks had sent prices soaring into the stratosphere. This would have been good news for companies…except few people could afford to pay the premiums. The ruling that, if a policy was disallowed, the claimant could recover the premiums had very nearly been the final kick in the teeth. “I’ve been sworn at and shouted at and cursed at all day…”

  “Poor baby,” Wilhelm said. He pulled her down and gave her a kiss. “Don’t worry, love; it’ll all be over in a month.”

  “Yes,” Carola said, slowly. Her eyes darkened slightly. “Are you sure about that?”

  Wilhelm lifted an eyebrow.

  “There are an awful lot of people heading out of the city and deeper into the country,” Carola said. “Half of the employees at my company have already given their notice of intending to take the week the aliens arrive as holiday; it’s quite likely that we will all get at least a few days’ holiday and everyone is talking about heading out to stay with their family, or something. Don’t you think that we should be heading out as well?”

  “It’s not that much of a risk,” Wilhelm said, inspecting the telescope carefully before pointing it at her breasts. She snorted and pushed it away gently. “We can watch what happens from the roof with this baby and record it all, before selling it for big bucks.”

  Carola watched as he carefully cleaned one of the lenses. “Would you like a moment alone with Miss Telescope?” she asked. Wilhelm rolled his eyes at her teasing. “Are you sure that it’s safe?”

  “They didn’t come hundreds of light years to start a fight,” Wilhelm said. “Besides, the news from the refugee camps is pretty bad…and it’s only going to get worse. Even if the aliens are hostile, we have several military bases nearby to protect us, and anyway…where would we go? My family lives in Chicago, yours in Atlanta…and there’s no way that we can find accommodation somewhere under these circumstances. We could head out and buy some camping equipment, if we can find some, but again, where would we go?”

  He watched the interplay of emotions on Carola’s face. He understood her concern, but where could they go even if they had to run? They didn’t have a vehicle of their own – private vehicles were rare in the city – and even if they obtained one, where could they go? Besides, he wanted to see the aliens arrive from the roof, whatever happened. He would have sold his soul for a place on the welcome fleet, but what did he have to bring to the gathering of scientific talent?

  “I hope you’re right,” Carola said finally. She sniffed the air. “Is that goulash I smell?”

  Wilhelm nodded. “Come on, love,” he said. He’d prepared the meal hours ago, leaving it to cook slowly; he normally cooked during the weekdays. “It’ll all have blown over in a month or two.”

  Chapter Eleven: Transit

  USS Neil Armstrong, Deep Space

  The curious thing, Samra found, was that the voyage was boring. Once the fleet had departed Earth and settled onto a course that the helmsman swore would allow the aliens to match speeds with them and come to rest, relative to the human craft, there was actually very little to do. The telescopes mounted on the human spacecraft probed the alien starships, but there was only a bit more information available past what had already been determined by the huge telescopes orbiting Earth and the Moon.

  “They’re basically advanced versions of this ship,” Gavin Reynolds said, one evening. Samra liked his company enough to spend some time with him; he was neither dreadfully earnest about alien contact, nor apparently concerned with getting into her pants. He was younger than most of the professionals on the spacecraft, young enough to be one of the crewmen; if he hadn’t lost an eye at some point, he would have made a fairly handsome movie star. She’d wondered how he had lost his eye – it had been replaced with a very good, but limited prosthetic eye – but he had refused to tell her, beyond the fact that it had been very embarrassing. “Some of them, however, are clearly not rotating.”

  “They could be generating gravity themselves,” Samra said, as she moved her pawn forward. Playing games, chess and a half-dozen other games, was the main form of entertainment, although some of the scientists had paired off and were spending time together in their cabins. Spencer O'Dowd had found himself a cabin where he could edit his footage to his heart’s content; his daily broadcast to Earth kept everyone on the planet interested in what was going on. “Wouldn’t that solve the problem?”

  “Not unless they kept their drives going all the time,” Reynolds said. He moved a knight into an attacking position and waited for her response. “If they have some antigravity or gravity-generating system, they wouldn’t have to dick around with fusion drives, just like we do.”

  Samra smiled and took his rook. “Do you have any insights a
s to how they are designed?”

  Reynolds shrugged. “They’re not showing us anything special,” he said. “It is odd to have ships that size that don’t have any compartments at all with gravity, but it is quite possible that they just don’t have the same urge to generate gravity that we do. We humans hate the discipline that used to be enforced when someone had spent more than a month or so in zero-gravity, but maybe the aliens are logical enough to avoid the need for enforcing such provisions.”

  Samra considered his point before nodding. Humans tended to suffer if they spent too long in zero-gravity, and then returned to Earth, but now such ill-effects could be counter-acted by drugs and tailored gene treatments. Most Rockrat children were born with such treatments already inserted into their bodies; it was much rarer on Earth, not least because of the bad reputation such modification had gained when bioweapons had been unleashed in Africa. Even after AIDS and cancer and many other human ills had been cured by such treatments, and the human immune system been boosted to eradicate many more diseases, such research was frowned upon and only conducted in space habitats.

  “There are, however, some interesting points,” he continued.

  Samra withdrew her hand from her queen and looked up at him.

  “The aliens have been making some minor course changes over the past few days, enough so that when we encounter them, the closing speed will be much reduced…particularly for the larger ships. Unless they make some additional changes in the few days before we meet them, the aliens will have spilt into two groups; one that will meet us and the other that will hang back. I cannot help but notice that all of the ships with gravity are holding back…”

  Samra lifted an eyebrow. “What does that suggest to you?”

  “I’m not actually sure,” Reynolds said. “Most of this is literally theoretical to me, but it strikes me that the bigger ships – the ones that could carry hundreds of thousands of occupants – are all hanging back. It could be an ominous sign.”

  “They wouldn’t have come all this way to start a fight,” Samra said. The phase had been repeated so often on the internet that it had gotten into common usage. “Why would they have?”

  Reynolds picked his king up and held it in front of her. “This is the weakest piece on the board, and yet it must be protected. It cannot become a queen; it cannot move more than one square at a time, but it must be protected because without it the game is lost. If those spinning alien craft are carrying their…well, their mates and children, they will be very concerned with protecting them.”

  Samra’s eyes narrowed. “What do you think the aliens are doing?”

  “I think they’re ensuring that their armed ships meet ours first,” Reynolds said. He moved a pawn forward and threatened Samra’s remaining knight. “I just wish that we had been able to talk to them before we launched this fleet, because if they are hostile, we are committed to fighting them at very close range, space-wise.”

  Samra said nothing. The welcome fleet had officially discarded most of the IAU’s regulations on alien contact, which had been written with an eye to covering some bureaucratic committee’s collective ass, and had been transmitting several attempts to talk to the aliens each day. They’d sent messages in every human language, they’d sent mathematical lines of data that should have been instantly comprehendible to anyone with a basic knowledge of science, they’d sent messages that contained images, even limited translation software…and the aliens had said nothing. The only sign they were even aware of the welcome fleet was their movements; as Reynolds had said, the aliens were preparing to meet them.

  Captain Buckley said more or less the same thing when she met him for dinner later that day. The Neil Armstrong had benefited from one advantage of the reduced crew; more room for food and other supplies. The water might have been recycled from things that were best not thought about, while the algae vats were still buzzing away providing material that was nutritious and almost, but somehow not quite, inedible. She’d been told by Buckley that some spacers had committed suicide rather than live on algae-based food; while no one starved on an asteroid or the moon, eating anything worthwhile required some actual money. While the food supplies lasted, the contact team would have plenty to eat.

  “One of the things I will not risk is the ship, more than necessary,” he said. “The alien movements prove nothing more than a certain sense of prudence on the part of the aliens, but it is worrying. Have you thought about what we should do when the aliens come to match velocities?”

  Samra had considered it; the contact team had discussed it endlessly. The limited information on the aliens proved nothing, although Reynolds had pointed out that standard-gee, for them, was slightly more than Earth-standard; their ships were rotating at a rate that would produce such a gravity field. One possibility was that the aliens would want to board the Neil Armstrong; a second possibility was that they would want to invite the humans on board one of their ships. Buckley had made one point very clear; the aliens would not get to board any of the other ships until their credentials had been firmly established.

  “It depends if they open communications with us,” she said. They’d signalled the aliens using lasers, for direct untappable ship-to-ship communications; no response. “They may signal us to come on board, or they may want to send a shuttle over to the Neil Armstrong, which will be at the front of our formation.”

  Buckley grinned. “What happens if they just stare at us?”

  “Then we have to push the issue and make contact with them,” Samra said. She was reassured by the alien manoeuvres, even if Reynolds and the military officers were concerned; the aliens weren't going to blast past them and head towards Earth. It had been her nightmare; whatever Buckley did, there was no way that the Neil Armstrong could get back to Earth until a week after the projected arrival time for the aliens. That would have been embarrassing. “We can send a single small unarmed shuttle out to see how the aliens respond.”

  “Perhaps,” Buckley said. They finished their dinner in silence. “I just think that everyone is assuming too much about the aliens.”

  Samra said nothing.

  * * *

  Although he would never have admitted it, Spencer O'Dowd was becoming more than a little bored on the voyage…and just a little jealous. He hadn’t seriously considered Samra to be his girlfriend, or anything like that, but she spent little time with him now that she had gotten what she wanted -- a place on the welcome fleet. The others didn’t want to spend much time with him either; any hope that he would have been seen as a group publicist had either faded or been drained by some of the delegates. Ambassador Rudolph Giacometti, in particular, expected O'Dowd to serve as a de facto Press Secretary; never mind that O'Dowd worked for a particular media company, which would give him the sack if he shared information more widely than his contract allowed. The other media companies might have access to his recordings, but it was O'Dowd who would have the inside track…and the time needed to ensure that he got all of the scoops.

  As the days passed, he found himself pushed more to the side than ever. He had nothing in common with most of the scientists, and he lacked the credentials to be anything other than an interfering reporter to the crew of the Neil Armstrong…and he wasn't one of the ones favoured with permission to enter the control section. The only person who paid attention to him was Giacometti, who was endlessly promoting his own career as Global Ambassador, something the political briefs suggested would never last. How could it? Once contact with the aliens was established, the Great Powers would start dickering with them individually to ensure that they got something out of it, just to prevent any other power from gaining an advantage. Giacometti, who could not be said to be representing any of the Great Powers, would be pushed to the side as soon as possible…

  O'Dowd found that a more attractive thought every day.

  “The alien ships are clearly preparing to meet with us,” Captain Buckley said, on the final day. O'Dowd had watched as the flight
paths of the alien craft became clearer and clearer; the alien fleet was clearly splitting up, although both sections were continuing on course towards Earth. Some early fears from the asteroid civilisations that the aliens intended to send a section into the asteroids had proven groundless, although the aliens could still change course. Their smaller ships were clearly capable of constant-boost, unsurprising given their drive technology. “I trust that you will be watching from one of the main lounges?”

  O'Dowd nodded. Captain Buckley had been reluctant to be interviewed; only very heavy pressure from American journalist associations had forced him to be interviewed. It was a tricky issue; if O'Dowd asked the wrong question, O'Dowd could be sent to jail – or worse – for broadcasting the answer. America had seen too many leaks from reporters to tolerate such costly behaviour.

  “I hope so,” he said. He glanced at his watch out of habit; it was seven hours until the two fleets would be at rest relative to one another. The humans and the aliens might never have spoken, but their spacecraft spoke the same language; making the rendezvous would be easy. “Is there any chance that we can collide with the alien ships?”

  Captain Buckley didn’t laugh, much to O'Dowd’s private relief; the question had been submitted from his editor, back on Earth. “Not unless we were both trying to crash into each other, and even then, it would be difficult,” Buckley assured him. “On a cosmic scale, the largest of the alien ships isn’t even a mote in God’s eye; even at closest approach, we will be passing within thousands of kilometres of the alien ships. It’s the same as the endless questions about hitting an asteroid; not damn likely unless someone is trying really hard.”

  It wasn’t a diplomatic answer, but O'Dowd appreciated it more than the vague answers given by pilots for the various tourist operations out in the belt. Few people on the ground appreciated the sheer size of the asteroid belt’s area of space; asteroids, even the largest, were tiny on a cosmic scale. The entire Earth-based fleet of spacecraft could fly between them with room for a Death Star or two…without even coming close to an asteroid. Rockrats spent years amidst the belt; they hunted asteroids and even they spent most of their time travelling between them.