by M. R. Forbes
Donovan didn't need to see it. He had seen too many of them already. The scouts were relatively small and oblong, their undersides bristling with sensor needles. They were one of the few things the aliens used that wasn't covered in the black, ridged armor that protected them so well.
He counted the seconds in his head. By the time he reached sixty, the scout had passed over them and continued, sweeping through the empty city. The Dread knew that they were out here somewhere. They had been searching for the fifth iteration of the Mexico rebel home base for nearly fifteen years without success.
Diaz reached the second sixty at the same time he did. She lowered her raised fist, and the team got back on their feet and into formation.
"Damn close," Donovan said. "Let's try to open our eyes next time."
"Screw you, Major," Diaz said, glancing back at him with a smile.
"Is that an invitation?"
"In your dreams."
He put his finger to his lips. She gave him a different finger.
"In my dreams, or yours?" he asked, smiling. He knew where he stood with Diaz. She was pretty, but she was also his best friend's sister. The banter was a tension release. Nothing more.
Donovan scanned the sky, double-checking for any more of the scouts. When he didn't spot any, he waved his team forward again.
"Let's keep it going, soldiers. Who wants to live forever, anyway?"
FOUR
The squad reached the top of the building, picking their way up an emergency stairwell and then over a pile of rubble to get there. As soon as they had moved into position, each member of the t-vault team unloaded their cargo and hooked it up with practiced precision. Their only light came from the nearly vanished sun and the rising stars, giving them the barest illumination. They quickly snapped together battery packs, signal amplifiers, trackers, and finally the twenty-foot tall transmission needle that would send the message out.
Donovan crouched next to the needle, pulling a dark green homespun bag from his back and untying the top. A small box sat inside, and he lifted it out and placed it next to the needle. Then he went back into the bag to remove a wire, which he connected to both the box and the whip.
"How long until the flyby?" Corporal George Cameron asked. He was the youngest of the group, fourteen years old. This was only his second time out.
Donovan put his hand on his wrist, feeling the time on a braille watch. They didn't dare risk using anything that emitted light out here. Once the needle was up, the only things they had to protect themselves were darkness, dampness, and stillness.
"Not too long now if the slipstream calculations were right," Donovan said.
He didn't know exactly how the ground force managed to coordinate with the space force. He knew there was something to slipstream patterns that made certain days and times more likely than others. That wasn't to say they hadn't crossed signals in the years since they started the information dumps, and he knew there were plenty of times that the space forces had passed by the Earth and his team had nothing to send. In fact, this was the first message he had delivered in nearly six months.
"Everything is online," Diaz said, running her fingers along a flat board on the ground in front of her.
"Ears are open?" Donovan asked, looking over to Private Gabriella Sanchez.
She was wearing a pair of headphones, and would be listening for the signal from the passing ship that it was receiving. It came in as a minor blip, a tiny anomaly in the normal static of celestial noise that took keen attention and hearing to catch.
She put her thumbs up to signal she was monitoring.
Donovan tapped the ground with his hand, signaling the rest of the team to spread out and watch for the enemy. It was the other reason t-vaulters went barefoot. Once the light was completely gone they would use vibration to communicate.
Donovan took a seat next to Sanchez, putting his back against the remains of a wall and tucking in his legs. There wasn't much to do once the needle was up and active, at least not until the package had been picked up and it was time to go home, or until they were spotted and they had to run.
Except they wouldn't be running this time. The squad didn't know it, but he had been ordered to hold position and get the transmission off no matter what. According to the Colonel, this was the most important message they had sent in nearly a dozen years. It was a message that was deemed worth the lives of the twenty men and women gathered in the burned out husk of a skyscraper, sitting in darkness and listening to the sky.
Donovan wasn't afraid of those orders. He was honored to be the one to take on the mission, and he knew his squad would be honored, too. Why hadn't he told them? Honor or not, knowing they had no options would get into their heads and change their approach. He needed them in top shape, as precise as always.
He was sitting in the same spot for close to an hour when Diaz slid down next to him, careful not to make any sounds that would distract Sanchez. She pushed her shoulder against him, smiling when he looked at her.
"Nice night," she mouthed.
"It's too hot," he replied.
Mexico had always been too hot for him, even though he had spent his entire adult life with the resistance here. He still had nightmares about the days spent on the run, when the Dread had discovered the Los Angeles base. He remembered holding his mother's hand, the look of fear in her eyes, along with the anger that burned there. He remembered the heat of the explosions behind them and the screams of the dying. He remembered his fear of the monsters that hunted them, large and black and spitting fury. That fear had transformed into anger as he had aged and learned that they weren't monsters at all. They breathed, they bled. They lived and died.
He wanted nothing more than to kill them. All of them.
"Are you okay?" Diaz asked.
Donovan hadn't realized he'd sank into those memories again. He blinked a few times to clear his head before nodding.
"Memories," he said.
Everyone had them. There wasn't a free human alive that couldn't relate to loss or death or destruction. It didn't matter that the invasion had happened three generations earlier. The stories lived on; the videos and images lived on, the resistance lived on. In a lot of ways, humankind had grown strong in their failure and their weakness. That they were still fighting was a testament to that.
"Matteo's birthday is next week," Diaz said. "Did you get him anything?"
Donovan shook his head. "I tried to carve a baseball bat from an old tree branch. I spent three weeks on it. Maybe I'll tell him it's a wizard's staff instead."
Diaz shook, laughing silently. "He hates that fantasy stuff."
"I know."
"Hey, do you think Gibbons likes me?"
Donovan glanced over at her, and then looked out across the darkness for the Corporal. He was crouched at the edge of the wall, peering out into the night and watching for the enemy. He was one of the biggest men in the squad, over six feet tall and heavy with muscle even though he was only eighteen. The same age as Diaz.
"You like Gibbons?" he said.
She shrugged. "He's kind of cute, in a brutish way."
"It's not like there's a lot to choose from, is there?" Donovan asked.
She stuck her tongue out at him. "He's not that bad."
"He's a good soldier. And yes, I think he likes you."
Sanchez reached out and tapped Donovan on the arm, giving him a thumbs up.
The messenger had arrived.
He tapped a code into the ground to alert the others. They tapped their feet back in return, acknowledging the message. Diaz worked the control board, sending more power from the fuel cell to the needle to increase the signal output.
Donovan felt his watch. The pilot was later than expected but within the calculated time. He had no idea how the scientists were able to track the slipstreams so well, but he was glad they were. The less time they had to sit out here-
The thought was interrupted as a flash lit the sky and Gibbons fell backward, a smoking hole in his ch
est that cast an eerie light on the rest of the squad.
They had been spotted.
FIVE
A soft vibration against Gabriel's arm woke him from his sleep. He evacuated into the tube connected to his flight suit, and then opened his mouth and found the smaller tube that would allow him to drink. His throat was always parched after sleeping in the cockpit, his limbs always stiff. He tapped his control pad a few times, and the vibrations spread to the rest of his appendages, getting the blood flowing again.
He checked his mission clock. The currents were slow today. Eleven hours.
He was almost there.
He tapped the control pad again while clearing his throat.
"Captain Gabriel St. Martin mission recording sixty-eight. Successful join with the slipstream. Time to arrival, eleven hours fourteen minutes. Preparing for departure. Engines online. Weapons system-" He paused to turn it on. Not that it mattered. Everyone knew they had nothing that could pierce the armor of the Dread defenses. "Weapons system active. All systems nominal."
The recording was standard operating procedure. From now until he re-entered the slipstream, everything he did would be saved for review upon his return to Calawan.
He leaned forward and flipped a few switches on the dashboard. A small screen lit up in front of him, giving him a map of the solar system. The stream would drop him near Earth's moon. It was dangerously close, but they were under orders to conserve fuel whenever possible. While the stations had hydrogen converters, the growing population and expansion of the colony required that more and more of it be diverted to keeping people alive. Gabriel could only imagine if Theodore were still lucid. He could picture his father storming into a council meeting and cursing up a storm about chopping the dicks off the resistance so that Joe and Mary Scientist could make another mouth to feed.
Not that they didn't want mouths to feed. The remains of free human civilization was in a constant, delicate balance. Too few heads and their life support systems wouldn't have enough hands to maintain them, the excavation equipment that fueled their expansion would have no one to drive it, and the military wouldn't have enough soldiers to prepare to fight a war that might never come. Too many heads and they would starve.
Children had been and still were a priority, though there was less desperation now than there was thirty years ago. Not all of the eggs that had been carried off Earth with the fleeing colony ship had ever been fertilized and implanted into a surrogate. Gabriel had been lucky because of who his father was, and even then he had been left to wait his turn. Theodore St. Martin hadn't wanted a son until he was older so that he could stretch his family's involvement in the resistance for as long as it took.
Gabriel drew in a breath. Held. Released. He took in another. He was nearing the end of his slipstream route, and in less than a minute the QPG would deactivate and the ion thrusters would kick on. He would have eight minutes to blast across the upper Earth atmosphere and listen for a transmission from the freedom fighters on the ground before rejoining the slipstream on the other side.
All he had to do was avoid the Dread defenses.
As long as it took. Gabriel often wondered how long that would be. Fifty years had passed. They had been sending ships back to Earth for the last twenty-seven of those. At first, they had done little more than take pictures and record video which was used to monitor the enemy's build-up on the planet. It hadn't been as dangerous then because the Dread didn't care that much about the initial sorties. They weren't worried about the one that got away, not when they had defeated everything the governments of the world had to throw at them without losing a single ship.
Then the first transmission had come. Until then, the resistance in space had no idea there was a resistance on the ground. Somehow, small pockets of people around the world had managed to stay hidden from the aliens and to find shelter and food. The initial communications had been simple and straightforward messages about who they were and what they were doing. Later transmissions had described the situation on Earth.
It wasn't good, and time hadn't made it any better. The ground-based resistance was shrinking. The messages were fewer and further between, as the forces either had nothing new to report or were unable to find a safe place to set up a transmit needle.
As long as it took. Gabriel wanted to believe he would live that long. He wanted to believe his father would live that long, and fulfill the promise he had made all of those years ago.
The truth was, they had lost everything in the initial attack. It was only stubborn determination that kept them going despite every bit of evidence and logic pointing to their eventual demise.
Gabriel held onto hope because hope was the only thing he had.
It was the only thing any of them had.
SIX
"Departing slipstream," Gabriel said for the sake of the recording. "Firing ion thrusters."
The starfighter shook like it was entering the atmosphere as the QPG brought him back in phase with realspace and his main control thrusters began to fire. Gabriel held the stick steady, lifting the secondary visor from his helmet and putting his attention forward.
The craft shuddered one last time and he was back out into space, the moon a large mass ahead of him and the Earth barely visible beyond.
"Here we go," he said, shifting his free hand from the control pad to a smaller stick that would handle the vectoring thrusters. One eye landed on the fuel monitor. Every move he made would have to be measured against his power supply.
He increased the thrust, angling the fighter to swing around the moon, using its limited gravity to help boost his acceleration.
It had taken him almost a dozen sorties before he had grown accustomed to what humankind's home planet looked like now, compared to what he had been shown in videos and pictures salvaged in the colony ship's datacenter. While the general size and shape and color remained the same blue marble as it had always been, it was the change in the surface features that was the most striking.
There was a time before the Dread had come when the dark side of the planet would be lit with the glow of cities, lines of illumination that spread through small areas and left the rest of the land in darkness. The light side would reveal itself in spreads of green or brown or gray, where sister cities rose into the atmosphere, the tallest being almost six kilometers in height.
The wasted remains of those cities were still visible. On the light side, their majestic silver forms had been reduced to dark black splotches that on closer inspection revealed heaps of slag and broken concrete and glass. The surrounding countryside was also obliterated, transformed from forest or grassland to barren stone and dust.
On the dark side, there was nothing. No light, and no indication that a civilization had ever existed there at all. There was so much emptiness. So much death and destruction hidden yet hinted at in that space. Even now, it caused Gabriel to feel a chill.
The alien construction was more centralized, though there were smaller outposts positioned in strategic locations around the globe. An endless array of networked tunnels, towers, and spires occupied the bulk of the land within the planet's tropical zone, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The structures were dark, no more than black spots in the day that made it seem as if a colony of giant ants had settled itself across most of Africa and the northern part of South America. At night, they too were lit with a glow, though it took on a more blueish hue and was dimmer than anything humans had created.
The aliens' orbital defenses were a blockade that hung between Gabriel and the ruined Earth. They hadn't always been there. They had started to appear only after the resistance had made their first successful broadcast, and the NEA's flyby had been rewarded with a choppy recording of a man known only as David revealing the first of the aliens' secrets.
The reason why they had come.
Those defenses materialized as small satellites that surrounded the planet, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. They were roun
d and ridged, coated in the same dark carapace as everything the aliens made, the damned armor that none of humankind's weapons were able to pierce. Not even nuclear warheads had broken through the material, detonating directly against it and leaving nothing but a minor wound. It was the one and only reason they had lost the planet. How do you defeat something that you can't hurt?
It would never stop them from trying.
Those satellites came to life as Gabriel drew closer, their sensor arrays picking up the arrival of his starfighter. Small thrusters hidden beneath the carapace began to fire, turning the satellites toward him, while their plasma cannons extended from cover like a turtle poking its head out of its shell.
"I have been targeted by the enemy," Gabriel said calmly. Every mission started with the satellites firing at him. His skill and experience would get him past this first line of defense. "Taking evasive maneuvers."
His hands worked the two sticks with practiced ease. Gabriel kept an eye on his power reserves while adjusting to take a more chaotic path. The satellites changed their position to line up the plasma cannons and opened fire on him.
Gabriel switched up his vectors, bouncing and dancing as he drew ever closer to the defenses. The fighter was armed with a heavy ion pulse cannon, but there was no point in trying to use it. The beam weapon would strike the armor without a hint of damage made, and it would use up too much of his precious fuel.
Instead, Gabriel scanned the field of satellites for an opening. He found it a moment later, a gap in the defenses that would allow him through. He spun the fighter in a tight rotation while creating a bit of wobble in the flight path with the vectoring thrusters. It was enough to keep the enemy's targeting computers from getting a solid lock, and their shots scattered around him.
He was centimeters from death with every blast yet he remained completely calm. He had done this so many times. He had survived so many times. Luck was important, sure, but so was skill.