“I was thinking of houses,” Ripstiggr said.
“Um … proper houses?”
“Whatever humans like.” He glanced in the direction of her pointing arm. His bio-antennas thrashed, shaking water droplets onto her angry, upturned face. “It’s as if someone already destroyed all civilization on this planet.”
Hannah stared at him.
“I remember when we first got here, I thought we would be giving away high-density batteries and things. It turns out what these people need most is a roof over their heads.”
She could have kissed him. But it was too late. Her gaze flicked back to the clouds. Helicopters could be just as bad news as jet fighters.
Gurlp spoke in her head. “Shiplord. I am on bridge. Sensor blimp can see approaching aircraft.”
The sensor blimp was the last of the Lightbringer’s dirigibles. Filled with hydrogen gas, it floated high over the ship, a dot beneath the low-hanging clouds. Its sensors, impervious to bad weather, would supposedly detect incoming missiles in time for Gurlp to disable them with the HERF.
“They are three. Low-flying, rotary-wing type of craft called UH-60 Black Hawks.”
“Shit,” Hannah whispered.
“Want me to prep HERF pulse?”
That and the comms maser were the Lightbringer’s last lines of defence. The HERF mast had snapped off in the crash-landing. The setup they’d jury-rigged a few days ago consisted of several feed horns mounted on top of the Lightbringer, which could be aimed separately or in concert. Hannah liked the HERF concept. She liked the idea of a bloodless war that only killed electronics. On the other hand, killing the electronics of a modern helicopter in mid-air would also kill its crew, just like her anti-satellite HERF pulses had inadvertently killed the astronauts on the space stations. There was no such thing as a bloodless war.
“Prep the pulse,” she said to Gurlp, hating everything, and herself most of all.
The lights strung up throughout the tent city dimmed as Gurlp diverted power to the HERF generator.
“In range in five seconds,” Gurlp said. “Five … four …”
Hannah still couldn’t see the Black Hawks, on account of the clouds. But Gurlp’s countdown told her they were close. The new HERF setup had a very limited range, since it was running off the Hairsplitter’s comparatively puny reactor.
“Three … two …
The helicopters dropped out of the clouds, right on top of the Lightbringer.
“Ranging in,” Gurlp said.
“Don’t shoot, Gurlp,” Ripstiggr said calmly. “They would have fired on us by now if they were going to.”
Hannah glanced at him. “Hold your fire, Gurlp,” she confirmed, doubting him, doubting herself.
One by one, the Black Hawks settled out of the sky and landed on the scar, a couple of hundred meters behind the Dealbreaker. The process took long enough for Hannah’s fears to return at crippling strength. She was glad she’d gotten to talk to Skyler before she died. At least one survivor of the SoD would survive to tell their story after she was gone. Of course, the rriksti on the moon probably would not long outlive the rriksti here. As an American, Hannah knew that there was nothing more dangerous than a maddened US of A, even if it had been reduced to a floating patchwork nation of submarines and aircraft carriers.
And Black Hawks.
Rotor wash sent debris flurrying across the ground. Men disembarked from the helicopters, jogging beneath the still-spinning rotors.
“That looks right,” Ripstiggr said.
“What?”
Most of the newcomers walked with the rigid posture she associated with the military. But some were stumbling. They had their hands tied or cuffed in front of them.
“I talked to these guys earlier,” Ripstiggr said.
“You what?”
“But I’m not sure which of them is my contact. Do any of them look Russian to you?”
One man from each helicopter unfurled a flag. They walked ahead of the others, waving them in slow sweeping arcs.
Cold with shock, Hannah said, “Yes. That’s a Russian flag.” She pointed to the second one “That’s the Israeli flag. I don’t know what the other one is.” A red, white, and black tricolor.
“You people have too many countries,” Ripstiggr said.
“If you’d given us another fifty years or so, we, too, might have whittled it down to one victorious superpower and one defeated one,” Hannah said.
They waited side by side in the rain. As the men from the Black Hawks drew nearer, she placed the tricolor. That was the flag of Egypt. She remembered what the BBC guys had said: … a lousy little airfield in Egypt under joint American and Russian command.
The flag-bearers halted, their flags now bedraggled and sticking to the poles.
Three uniformed men strode forward, with four handcuffed prisoners shambling between them.
“Greetings.” The man who spoke had a face like an overcooked roast, and so many medals on his chest that it was a wonder he didn’t overbalance. He directed his words to the tall, imposing alien, not to the dishevelled woman wearing a t-shirt as a dress. “I am Yegor Ostrovsky, representing the Russian Federation.”
“I am Ayelet Levy.” The ‘man’ on the right was actually a woman, although she could probably have arm-wrestled Ostrovsky to a draw. She looked straight into Hannah’s eyes. “I am the deputy defense minister of Israel.”
“And I am Abdul Maksoud, spokesman for the President of Egypt,” the other man said.
Hannah couldn’t stop staring at Levy. Two women. Two Jews. Were they on the same side, or not?
“And who are these guys?” she said, gesturing to the handcuffed men. Their faces were bloody and bruised. Looked like they’d been beaten up, even though the oldest had to be near 70.
They all wore American uniform.
Ripstiggr was speaking with Ostrovsky. His contact. He used his field radio to project the deep, purring voice that she heard in her head. It was weird to hear it with her ears, too, in stereo. “Congratulations, General, on the destruction of the USS John F. Kennedy.”
“It was a very difficult operation,” Ostrovsky said gravely. “However, your positional observations were of help.”
The Russians had sunk the freaking USS JFK!
No wonder Ripstiggr had been so calm while they were talking to Iristigut. He’d probably been in touch with the Russians for a while already, setting this up. He might not know what a sea was, but he knew exactly how to manipulate tech-hungry human beings.
Torn between relief and guilt, Hannah said, “Are these guys survivors from the JFK?”
Ostrovsky finally deigned to look at her. “Sadly, there were no survivors. These are the commander, chief of staff, and senior deputy commanders of AFRICOM.”
The commander started to speak. The Egyptian diplomat hit him in the face, just like a rriksti would have done.
“Let him talk!” Hannah cried.
The commander spoke to the air somewhere beyond her head. “We have come in the hope that we can develop a friendship with the Darkside nation of Imf. Although you come from another planet, it is possible that we have many things in common.”
When Hannah formulated her new policy of let’s all get along, this was the kind of thing she would have hoped for.
But she’d never wanted it to be a memorized speech from the mouth of a prisoner.
CHAPTER 13
It took Kuldeep Srivastava a day and a half to get home after the failed snatch operation, even though the Cheyenne Mountain Complex was just two states over. The problem wasn’t the roads. It was the traffic. Kuldeep spoke to some of the refugees. They said the squids had hit the Hoover Dam. Kuldeep hadn’t heard anything about that. The Great American Bug-Out, Round II, had taken on a momentum of its own. Shots crackled through the crisp mountain air, as unremarkable these days as horns honking.
Outside of Denver, he checked in with HQ. They were back to using shortwave radios, like in the olden days. That’s
when he learned the USS John F. Kennedy had gone down with all hands.
The emergency meetings were still going on when he reached the NORAD complex under Cheyenne Mountain. Not even an alien invasion could break the US government’s addiction to meetings. Unwashed and sleep-deprived, Kuldeep crept into the Situation Room. The Secretary of Defense and his coterie of generals cursed the squids in one breath and the Russians in the next. Nineteeth-century presidents stared disapprovingly down from the walls. The 46th President of the United States brooded over a vending-machine coffee. They still had plenty of essentials: cans and 100-year shelf-life freeze-dried shit.
Kuldeep pulled a folding chair up behind the president. He didn’t mention the Zieglers. He had already reported his failure to capture them, and after the JFK’s sinking, no one cared anymore. “Do we know what happened?”
“What happened is I took the advice of these gentlemen,” President Flaherty said, “and three thousand boys and girls of the US Navy paid with their lives.”
The generals stiffened momentarily, but kept on talking. The president was a middle-aged, balding black man with a paunch. He looked like a cuddly teddy-bear. Some people made the mistake of thinking his folksy manner was for real.
“The Russkies have taken Abu Suweir. Our troops in the ME are leaderless. Our conventional military response has failed.”
The generals disagreed with this assessment, loudly. Kuldeep bristled at their disrespect.
“I do not have a military background,” President Flaherty said. “I am aware of my limitations in that arena, and I value your expertise. But I do not see the value of throwing more troops and materiel into what is now a two-front war. We can beat the squids. We can beat the Russkies. We cannot beat them both at once.”
Kuldeep nodded. In fact, he had previously argued for doing exactly what the Russians had done yesterday—stab their alliance partners in the back and hand them over to the squids. The SecDef, a hooknosed vet with a white quiff, like the American eagle in man’s form, had overruled him. We do not need to negotiate with the squids, he’d said. We will eliminate them with precision strikes. This had been music to the ears of a president who had already seen too much killing. So the ‘precision’ bombing campaign had begun, with the intent of scaring the locals away before the planned F-35 strike on the Lightbringer.
And now it had failed, although of course, the SecDef and his gang weren’t admitting it.
As they spitballed strategies, Kuldeep balanced his laptop on his knees and accessed the surveillance cameras in the residential areas of the complex. He checked on his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. President Flaherty had authorized a rescue operation just for the Srivastavas after the squids bombed the Salem, NJ power plant. He had Kuldeep’s undying loyalty for that alone.
Flaherty spoke into a lull in the discussion. “Forget it,” he said. “Y’all ain’t fucking listening. Y’all ain’t using your fucking eyes.” Flaherty occasionally deployed street locutions for shock value. It always worked on this gang. They faced him, mutinous but attentive. “Conventional tactics will only result in further losses of blood and treasure. So all that shit you are discussing is off the table. Now I know some of you are thinking about the Tridents. But I am telling you right now, I will not authorize a nuclear strike on the Congo.”
Kuldeep let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Thank God this man was leading the country on this day.
SecDef said, “I understand your reluctance, sir, given your background …”
“Now what exactly do you mean by that?”
SecDef could not say out loud what he was obviously thinking, that the Congo was only populated by black folks, and Flaherty was protecting them because he was black, too. He changed it to, “With your background in the intelligence community—”
“You ain’t making no sense. I will not drop a nuclear bomb on unknown thousands of human beings, human beings, who’ve done nothing wrong. And anyone in this room who thinks that would be acceptable should take a good hard look at their own humanity.” The president stared at SecDef, who flushed.
“If nuclear escalation was ever justified, that time is now,” SecDef grated. “After everything the squids have done to us—”
“I’ll tell you what they have not done. They have not dropped nukes on us. I am not gonna be the one who provokes them into an escalation that could end all life on Earth.”
“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this self-defeating bullshit.” SecDef stood and left the room. Kuldeep got busy tracking him on the surveillance cameras. He suspected the man only had a few more hours to live. That’s what happens when you cross the former director of the NXC.
With the tension in the room at breaking point, Flaherty segued into a fiery speech about fighting them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and on the streets. The truth was that they had lost the battle for the Lightbringer, and their new war aim was simply to defend the United States. But Flaherty dressed it up so expertly in Churchillian glamor that he got even the generals applauding. Kuldeep breathed a sigh of relief. This gave them more time to pursue an acceptable outcome via covert means.
The meeting broke up at last, leaving Kuldeep alone with the president. He said, “Arecibo?”
“Yeah, you can go ahead and put that into motion. But our top priority going forward is Europe.”
“Europe?”
“Sure. If the squids want to conquer the planet, they’ve got to start somewhere. Europe’s closest. I want all our networks around the Mediterranean activated, funded, and reporting on anything that looks like alien influence or alien technology. I’m gonna send you over there to knock on doors, too.”
“Got it.” Kuldeep paused. “SecDef?”
“I’ll take care of him,” Flaherty said. “You go and pack for Europe. Pack light. It’s warm in Italy this time of year.”
Kuldeep headed for the door, laptop under his arm. He heard the president say, “‘After everything the squids have done to us …’”
Kuldeep turned back. “What’s that, sir?”
“Nothing. You go ahead, Kul.”
As Kuldeep threaded between the scattered chairs, the echoes carried another mutter to him: “Bullshit.” The president was slouched at the Vietnam-vintage table, talking to his paper cup of cold coffee. “Most of all of this we did to ourselves.”
And he started to laugh.
Kuldeep closed the door on the eerie sound of a man laughing to himself, on and on, alone in a room under a mountain.
CHAPTER 14
Six months after the rriksti came to the moon, much had changed. But the changes were hard to spot.
From outside, you’d never know the bunker was there.
Rubble camouflaged the slightly convex roof. Same blinding white as the sunlit lunar rock around it. There used to be an impact crater in this spot, two klicks sunwards from Shackleton Crater’s rim. Now it had vanished. All you could see was the Cloudeater, parked on the surface, seemingly abandoned.
A skein of power cables ran from the rriksti shuttle and disappeared into the ground.
A dark hole gaped at one side of the bunker. Two short-hop lifters stood near the entrance. These were ore transports, built to service CELL’s refinery in the Procellum KREEP terrane. They looked like the Apollo lunar lander after the return module went home. Platforms on four legs. Titchy pilot’s cabin on top, off-center. Honking great engine bell underneath. Now they also transported LOX and H2O to the bunker from the oxygen refinery and the waterworks on the crater rim.
CELLies in orange Starliners swarmed around the lifters, unloading heavy cylinders of LOX and plastic sacks of water.
Skyler drove his rover out of the midnight-black hole in the ground. He got out, wrestled one of the LOX cylinders into the rover, balanced a sack of water on top. The CELLies did not help with the awkward task. In fact they passive-aggressively jostled him.
He got back into the rover and drove away.
*
Alexei kissed his wife goodbye. It was a long, loving kiss, which lasted until one of the babies fluttered into Nene’s hair. She squealed, broke away, retrieved the infant rriksti in cupped hands. Its laughter tinkled in Alexei’s head like the notes of a music box he’d had as a child.
He caught the baby and bounced it on a spread palm. “Are you Ithrilip or Zhenya?”
“Ithrilip has black hair. Zhenya has black-brown hair,” Nene said severely. The distinction, obvious to rriksti eyes, was invisible to Alexei. None the wiser, he kissed the baby on its tiny snub-nose. It cooed at 1010 KHz.
“Look after your mother for me.”
He navigated the obstacle course of baby stuff on the floor of their apartment. It was about the size of his parents’ kitchen when they lived in Volgograd. One room for eating, sleeping, dreaming, working, love-making, and private discussions of private fears. Yes, private. The blue-green paint on the walls blocked radio-frequency signals. That alone made this one of the best apartments in the bunker. Nene had insisted on it.
“Be careful,” she said, at the door.
“There’s no danger at all,” Alexei said. “I’ll be back in time for supper.” He kissed her again and went out.
Yet despite his assurances, a pulse of nervousness started up in his gut as he walked through the bunker. He donned his EVA suit in the changing room behind the airlock, no longer thinking about his family, thinking only about what he had to do to protect them.
He hesitated in front of the gun safe. Built into the wall, it had a combination lock and a biometric lock. Alexei was one of only eight people who could open it. Of those eight, he was the only human. It was a heavy responsibility and had to be used wisely. He reached out to the palm reader … and drew back.
He’d do this the right way, or not at all.
Banks of lockers, ripped from the old CELL habs, filled the changing room. Giles came around the end of them. “Where are you going?”
“For a walk,” Alexei said.
“Do you want company?”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 10