Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  “That’s a relief,” he said, and saw the flicker of amusement in Buckley’s eyes. “Are we prepared for anything when the aliens arrive?”

  “You know we never discuss such matters, particularly not on an open channel,” Buckley reproved him. O'Dowd wondered if it really mattered; the internet had been buzzing for months about what defences could be constructed against the aliens, should it become necessary. If the aliens had launched a covert probe or two towards Earth, they might well have been able to read some of the transmissions directly from the source…

  “Of course,” O'Dowd said. He smiled as the Captain scowled at him. “On a final note, will I have the use of the main transmitter for relaying the signal back to Earth?”

  “Of course,” Buckley said. He grinned suddenly. “You will be reporting from the second lounge, but that won’t cause you any problems.”

  The unimportant lounge, O'Dowd thought coldly. It made a certain kind of sense; too much sense for him to believe that it was anything but a deliberate trick by someone. He had hoped to be recording how Samra and the others reacted, but instead he was spending time in the second lounge as the aliens came to a relative halt.

  “I would prefer to be in the first lounge,” he said, hiding his annoyance. Buckley grinned, not fooled for a moment. “I have a contract to report everything…”

  “And you will see everything,” Buckley assured him. The confidence in his voice was amusing; the Captain was more nervous than he let on. “Everything is being recorded anyway.”

  O'Dowd grinned; when some of the female researchers had discovered that, there had nearly been a mutiny before the crew had reassured them that the pickups in their cabins had been disconnected, although they would be reactivated once the aliens made contact. Even so, losing his chance to watch in person as history was made hurt…

  “Thank you,” he said. He forced his voice to show as much gratitude as possible, even though it was a lie and a half. “I’ll see what happens from the second lounge.”

  He watched as Buckley left before he started to dump his recordings back to Earth, ensuring that there would be a backup before he started the long task of updating the daily blog he was sending from the Neil Armstrong. Some of the details he had withheld could be used, later, for gaining interviews out of some of the researchers, other details had merely been three-day wonders, including one of the gay scientists sleeping with a female scientist and discovering that he rather liked it. That wasn’t so important these days; like so many other useless American laws, victimless crimes had gone the way of the dodo. Men and women experimented how they pleased…

  He caught a few hours’ sleep before making his way into the second lounge. It was practically facing the alien craft, although there was no hope of seeing anything through the viewport apart from stars, unless they came very close to the alien craft. The room was dominated by the view from one of the telescopes, which had started to pick out details on the alien craft; even with computer enhancement, it was hard to see more than a vague set of lights heading towards them.

  “The alien craft is emitting some basic radar,” someone muttered, over the intercom. Everything was being recorded; the aliens would presumably be interested in having a precise idea of where the human craft were as they glided towards one another. “It’s a low power scan, nothing particularly sophisticated…wait…they’ve hit us with a low-powered laser radar scan now…”

  O'Dowd sat back and waited. He had considered a muted commentary, but the billions of humans who were watching had cast their votes on the interactive entertainment network had voted against it; a reporter who defied their vote would almost certainly lose his job, no matter how unique he was when it came to being alone near a scoop. Any moment now, the alien craft would launch a shuttle, or open communications with the human ships…

  “We transmitted the basic welcoming call,” a voice said. Samra’s voice. O'Dowd wondered just what she was thinking, looking at the culmination of her career; in a sense, it was the culmination of his career as well. He wanted a soundtrack, some nice dramatic music created by a science-fiction fanatic; the eerie silence, broken only by faint whispers, was somehow ominous. “No response…”

  “We have some movement now,” someone said. O'Dowd didn’t recognise the voice. One of the crewmen, rather than the researchers, touches of alarm flickering thought the otherwise calm voice. “They’ve painted our hull with a very high-powered radar” – lights flickered, on cue – “some interference caused by the power levels…”

  On the screen, the alien craft seemed to burst with tiny stars of light…

  Chapter Twelve: First Conflict, Take One

  USS Neil Armstrong, Deep Space

  “Dear holy shit!”

  Captain Joe Buckley had seen simulations of space warfare before, but it still astonished him when the aliens opened fire, launching a spread of missiles towards the human fleet. For an instant, he remained rooted to his command chair as the alien missiles started their flight towards their targets, but snapped out of his shock as alien drives started to vanish with the same timing as their human counterpart designs. Without their drives, the missiles would be much harder to track; he had to act, and fast…

  They suckered us in close, Buckley thought. He had seen the possible implications of the alien manoeuvres long before anyone else, without really accepting the danger; deep down inside, he hadn’t believed that the aliens were hostile. The evidence was right in front of his eyes, a stream of missiles heading right towards his ship; the aliens had launched…unprovoked, they had fired on his ship!

  “Bring up the main active sensors, paint me those targets,” he snapped. There was no point in trying to hide; the aliens knew exactly where the Neil Armstrong was, and there was no way they could evade without using the fusion drive and revealing their position. More alien radar sources were flickering into existence, pinning his ships as surely as a collector might pin a butterfly on a display case. His orders allowed him to return fire if the aliens assaulted his fleet…and there was no question that the aliens had opened fire. “Point defence…come online!”

  He ran a hand down the switches positioned on the seat of his command chair, unlocking the firing sequences for the point defence lasers, high-powered weapons that could sweep an alien missile out of space…assuming they could find the target. The alien missiles were smaller than human-standard designs…and, if they followed comparable lines of thought, they would have altered course very slightly with the aid of gas jets. It had to be done carefully – even a nuke was small beans on an interstellar scale – but they might just be able to get a missile in close to his ship.

  “Point defence online,” Commander Roberts said. No human mind could handle the speeds required; whatever he had said to that damned reporter, the closing distance between the alien warships and his fleet was close enough for a high-boost missile to cross within minutes at most. “Firing sequence has activated; targeting has already begun.”

  Buckley took a long breath. “Clear the other ships to open fire at will, aimed at the missiles,” he snapped. The fight was almost futile, but there were always options. It was unlikely he could extract the Neil Armstrong, but perhaps he could put enough of a fight to let a few of the others escape. He had to make a decision quickly; did he dare open fire on the alien craft directly – something that he had been ordered to avoid, although circumstances allowed it now– or did he dare risk leaving the aliens in position to continue to fire on the human ships? The choice was an easy one; if he took a bite out of the aliens, the Earth might have a chance. “Find me some bloody targets!”

  The alien formation had dissolved into a mass of radar noise and confusion; the targeting computers were having problems locating any alien target, but some of them were almost impossible to hide. Buckley cursed the decision not to arm his ships with nukes; the politicians had made his position much harder by preventing him from destroying any of the massive alien craft with a single blow. The ali
en drive system was still a mystery, but if it could be damaged, it might blow up and take the ship with it…

  “I have some targets,” the coordination officer snapped. One thing the fleet had practiced religiously was coordinating their weapons; surprisingly – at least to non-spacers – almost all of the equipment was compatible, with only a handful of program fixes and desperate improvisation. Buckley had considered it a political mistake before trying to get the fleet to work together; without the standardisation program, the humans would have been willing, but the machinery would have been very weak indeed. “Enemy warships locked on…sir?”

  Buckley took a long breath. “Order all ships,” he said. “Fire at will.”

  Neil Armstrong hadn’t been intended as a warship; the USSF had only fitted a handful of missile ranks to the ship’s hull, although the complement of lasers for point defence had been increased to the point where it had caused protests from the contact team – who, Buckley thought darkly, were probably praying for the despised military to get them out of the mess. The scientists who did know something about spaceflight would know that their chances of escape were slim, even if they had the help of Stellar Star of the Spaceways…and as she only existed on the silver screen, that was unlikely. The ship shook slightly as the missiles launched; the aliens painted the hull again with a radar sweep, tracking the missiles as their drives faded…

  The screen flickered for a long moment.

  “That was the Chairman Mao,” Commander Roberts said. “Dear God, that was a nuke…”

  Buckley felt sick. The Chairman Mao had been a small frigate, with a crew of ten; he’d met the Captain and had enjoyed his company. Captain Li and his crew would only now exist as free-floating atoms; no spacecraft could stand up to a nuclear blast at such close range. EMP wasn’t so much of a problem with modern shielding, but the sheer force of a nuclear blast was terrifying; the only safe defence was to be somewhere else.

  “The aliens are launching a second set of missiles and…I think they’re launching smaller craft,” Commander Roberts said. His hands were flying over his console. “Sir, we have incoming…”

  We’re dead, Buckley thought, morbidly. The bridge ship might be the second-largest class of spacecraft that Earth had built, but it couldn’t hope to stand up to a nuke. Sharon…I hope that…

  Neil Armstrong rang like a bell; the lights flickered, faded, and dimmed before emergency power took over, revealing a status display that was covered in red warning lights. Buckley opened his eyes, not really aware that he had closed them a moment before impact, to look around. His crew looked equally stunned.

  His mind raced. Why the hell aren’t we dead?

  “We took a major hit, somewhere along the fusion tube,” Commander Roberts reported. Buckley realised that seven of his crewmen in engineering were almost certainly dead; without the fusion tube, the Neil Armstrong was more or less stranded. The aliens had punched out any hope they might have of escaping the disaster; the shortages in power would mean that they couldn’t hope even to cover themselves against further alien attacks once the laser cannons exhausted their onboard power packs. “Captain, we’re adrift…”

  “They want the ship intact,” Buckley realised. The fleet was taking a pounding, but the Neil Armstrong, the ship that had been attempting to communicate with the aliens, had been somehow disabled, rather than destroyed outright. “What the hell did they hit us with?”

  “Judging from the telemetry, they slammed a hard KEW-style missile through the hull, rather than anything explosive,” Commander Roberts said. The screen flickered again and faded; Buckley realised that any hope he had of coordinating the battle was fading along with it. “The internal sensors have failed completely in that section; I think it’s completely gone.”

  The screen changed yet again. “Hit,” Commander Roberts snapped. Buckley wondered, for a moment of self-delusion, if there was a chance, but knew that it was illusion. The human fleet had launched nearly a hundred missiles; if one hit was the best they had been able to do, it suggested that the aliens were winning. He glanced at the readouts to see if there was any clue as to how that hit had destroyed an entire ship, but there was nothing; the best guess was that the missile had struck something explosive and triggered an explosion. “We got one of them…”

  “Send the signal; tactical command has devolved,” Buckley snapped. The fusion tube had been knocked out, which meant that the Neil Armstrong was on the verge of losing all power, which would mean that everyone on the ship was doomed to freeze or die in any number of other interesting ways. The ship would drift forever, unless the aliens came to recover the wreck, or a Rockrat came by to exercise salvage rights. “The remaining ships” – there were only three, he saw numbly – “are to retreat as fast as possible.”

  He didn’t have any illusions as to their chance at escape, but if the aliens had any sense of mercy in their…well, whatever they used for bodies, they might allow the remaining ships to make an escape, rather than wasting effort killing them. The cold-blooded ambush made him wonder if he was facing a fleet of computers, rather than living and breathing intelligent creatures, but there was no real reason why computers and robots would want gravity on their ships. Metal bones wouldn’t decay…

  He remembered Gavin Reynolds briefly and wondered what had happened to the cyborg. In theory, that section of the ship was still intact, but internal sensors were failing right across the board and the entire crew might be dead, apart from the seven men on the bridge. The cyborg might have survived because of his enhancements, but it would be a lonely life…for as long as he lasted. How long could a cyborg last in space anyway?

  “Captain, I think we have a second problem,” Commander Roberts said. Buckley almost laughed, and then gazed at the radar screen; five new shapes had appeared, boosting towards the stranded human starship. Four of them were moving too fast to be crewed – unless the aliens can take higher gravity than we can – and were almost fast enough to be missiles, the fifth was holding back and cruising along at a steady unhurried speed. The radar was failing also, but it picked up a handful of other craft, heading out from the alien fleet towards the Neil Armstrong.

  “They’re going to board us,” Buckley said. The fleet had a handful of personal weapons, but bridge ships weren’t safe places to fire heavy weapons; rocket-propelled bullets would be lethal if they hit the wrong component. Rockrats used Tasers and other non-lethal weapons, but Buckley suspected that they would be almost useless against the aliens; Tasers couldn’t hurt a human in powered battle armour, after all. “Gentlemen, it has been an honour to serve with you.”

  His priorities had fallen to carrying out his final duty, ensuring that the aliens recovered nothing useful from the wreck of the Neil Armstrong. Triggering an automatic wipe of the databanks on board the spacecraft was easy; destroying the entire ship physically was much harder. He snapped at Roberts to confirm his identity as well…and then the power failed completely. Emergency lights glimmered in the darkness, but he knew then that he had failed. There was no way he could destroy the ship now…

  “Try to make contact with any of the remaining ships,” he ordered the communications officer, who carried an advanced personal terminal as part of his duties. The communications officer shook his head; either though alien jamming, or though simple lack of range, the other ships weren’t responding. Roberts was pushing at the consoles, trying to raise even a spark of power, but there seemed to be nothing left, but the emergency lighting…

  “Nothing, sir,” he reported. A new noise echoed through the ship, a screeching wave of pain and torment from an entity the crew had believed to possess a soul and even a mind of its own; their ship – Buckley’s ship – was dying around him. The tearing noise only grew louder, and then he heard the unmistakable noise of air streaming out of the hull. “Sir…”

  The crew all wore standard shipsuits; all they had to do was pull up their hoods and check their personal air supplies. They all knew the air woul
dn’t last very long; for all the advances in compressing air, they had only half an hour of air at most. The general feeling had been that if there was no help by then, they were dead anyway; Buckley’s first drill sergeant had made that very clear.

  “If you are not within range of support equipment,” he’d thundered, “spend your last moments reminding God of all the good things you’ve done in your life, because you fucking won’t get out of it without His direct intervention!”

  He lifted his weapon, only to hear the noise grow louder…and then the command compartment broke open around them, spilling them into space. He saw, vaguely, strange alien shapes and the bright light of a gas flare as the hull tore open…and then something exploded, blasting him into merciful darkness and silence.

  * * *

  Spencer O'Dowd had stared, unable to believe his eyes, as the alien ship lit up like the fourth of July; the false colouration of the computer-generated confusing him long enough to miss just what was going on. His mind gibbered, unable to understand, as the alien missiles vanished from the display…and the sounds of panic from the others convinced him that the missiles hadn’t been destroyed. He’d been briefed on countless science-fiction first contacts that had ended in violence, but how many of them had started with the aliens simply opening fire at first encounter?

  “They fired on us,” he shouted, breaking right into the live feed. It occurred to him that the live feed directly back to Earth might have already been broken, but he had – somehow – to tell the world what had happened to the Neil Armstrong. “We have to get out of here!”