by Trisha Telep
His breath hissed in between his clenched teeth.
“This isn’t slavery,” he snapped. “Thirty days. If at the end of that time you still wish to return, I swear we’ll find a way.”
“Deal.” I noticed that he hadn’t answered my question, but I had a possible road home. If the old man could be trusted to keep his word. “Tell me the rules.”
“Choose one or as many men as you please from those assembled within the limits of the oval, then enjoy yourself.”
Enjoy? Could I?
“My everlasting regret is that I can’t have you myself.” Carrollus had said that when he’d thought I couldn’t hear.
He’d kidnapped me.
If I had anyone to blame for this mess, it was he. I could use him. I straightened and smiled.
“You’ve chosen?”
“Sure,” I said. I spun and jabbed a finger at Trygg. “Him.”
The room held its collective breath while Carrollus rocked back on his heels, shock in the widening of his midnight-blue eyes.
I grinned, a careless, I-dare-you – and maybe slightly vengeful – grin at him.
Protest erupted from the testosterone line-up. Carrollus thundered for quiet, got it, then turned a baleful glare upon me.
“I am disqualified. You may not select me.”
“I just did.”
He shook his head. “No—”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your captain laid out the rules. I followed them, and now you refuse to abide by them? You’re already taken, is that it?”
“Yes.”
The way he pounced on the out I’d offered him made it obvious. He was lying.
I nodded. “I believe this invalidates our thirty-day agreement. I’m ready to go home, now.”
His expression shifted and my heart skidded into uneasy thudding.
He looked intrigued.
“He was not a part—” Grisham growled.
“‘Choose one or as many men as I please from those assembled within the limits of the oval’,” I quoted back to him. “Your rules. He’s in the oval.”
The old man scowled. “Then keep him. The agreement stands, with the caveat that you leave me no choice but—”
The lights dimmed.
Carrollus swore in his language. I thought I heard an audible alarm somewhere in the distance.
Men scrambled for stations. Several young women, also in uniform, burst through the door and raced for empty chairs.
The alarm died.
“Sir!” one of the women called.
“Enemy ships entering the solar system!” “Enemy ships?” I echoed. “I thought you were hiding from Earth.”
“We are,” Carrollus said, cold rage coloring his voice. “We were. Until now.”
I froze, awful awareness tripping my pulse into high gear. “You’re refugees, aren’t you? You thought you’d escaped. But you drew your enemy after you.”
Carrollus gripped my arms and pulled me around to face him. I shivered at the chemistry that bubbled through my system at the contact. “They want us,” he said. “Your world is in no danger.”
But I was, by simple virtue of being on board their ship. “How did I get here? A shuttle? Teleportation of some kind?”
Carrollus nodded at the last one.
“Is it working?”
“No time,” Grisham barked. “There are too many of you. Commander!”
Carrollus accessed a panel, studying the data that answered his summons.
Too many of us? What did Grisham mean? Too many people to evacuate to the safety of Earth, presumably.
“The sensor embedded in the New Horizons probe indicates a pair of Orseggan scouts inbound to our position. Weapon status?” Grisham thundered.
“Offline, sir,” a young officer replied.
My heart bumped against my ribs.
“Shields?”
“Offline, sir,” yet another officer answered.
“Interstellar drive?”
“Offline!”
I pressed shaking fingers against my temples.
The ship was defenseless.
“This is the second time today you’ve tried to get me killed,” I snapped at Carrollus.
“This was unanticipated!” Grisham protested.
My humorless smile felt icy. “Like an adverse reaction to a drug?”
Carrollus glanced up from his panel to pin me with a grim stare. “You have a right to be angry. I can’t change what’s happened. But we have time. They do not yet know we’re here.”
I frowned. “You have the time to bring weapons and shields online?”
“No. We were badly damaged at the end of the war. The Orseggans saw this ship escape,” he said, “but they clearly didn’t know where we’d gone.”
“They’ve been hunting for you since,” I finished for him. Any question of who was the good guy and who was the bad guy vanished from my head. My allegiance was dictated by the fact that I stood on the defenseless ship.
“Yes,” he said, looking back at the illegible data. “Now we need options, not distractions.”
Anger and shame burned me, but he was right. What did a high-school physics teacher have to offer aliens who’d mastered physics to the point that their space travel broke all the rules as I knew them?
Unless.
Data I’d picked up from the morning’s internet space-weather blog to present to my students flashed into my head. They would know this stuff already, right? Or was it too much to hope that space aliens would keep up on internet blogs?
“Do your enemy’s sensors work the way yours do?” I demanded, meeting Carrollus’s hard look. “You told me you thought Earth was more technologically advanced than it is because of the electrical interference at the poles.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Would the energized thermosphere obscure your enemy’s sensors, too?”
A light went on in his face. “The Orseggans? Yes.”
Grisham was already shaking his head. “It does us no good—”
“Solar-flare activity spiked a day and a half ago,” I said, as if the old man hadn’t spoken. “The aurora should be lighting up the northern half of the planet as we speak. Take the ship down under the Northern Lights. Blind the Orseggans with neon.”
“Do you think we haven’t already considered and discarded the option as unworkable? Exposing us to the people of your planet will not get you sent home,” Grisham snarled at me.
“You’re smarter than I am. You have interstellar space travel. But this isn’t about any one earthly phenomenon protecting your ship. This is my planet. Maybe you’ve studied it, but it’s clear you don’t understand it or the people who live on it,” I retorted.
I turned to Carrollus. “Can you land this thing?”
“We can,” he rumbled, striding down the stairs to the center of the oval. He gestured at me to join him and brought up a three-dimensional hologram of Earth. “It isn’t a trivial task, and if I read you right, you mean to complicate it further. Give me details.”
As I descended to the pit floor, nerves fluttered in my stomach. I wobbled down the steps in my heels. “You’ll be seen. The US military doesn’t like being blindsided. The phased array systems are going to spot us. I know of a few in Alaska, but if this solar storm packs the punch the data suggests it does, their communications systems will be useless. The danger will come from spotting stations south of the storm.”
“Beale?” Carrollus guessed, naming an Air Force base in California. “They’ll scramble fighters.”
“F-15s out of Elmendorf if they can get a call through,” I agreed. “If they can’t, they’ll move south until someone hears them. The fighters will get coordinates for first point of contact and a vector for our trajectory. Then they’ll fly into the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of night, in the middle of one of the hottest solar storms to hit in two decades.”
Carrollus flashed a grin at me that nearly stopped my heart.
“M
eaning they’ll be deaf and blind.”
“Their navigation systems will go Tango Uniform,” I agreed.
Amusement and anticipation lit Trygg’s blue eyes. Okay. So he not only knew the names and locations of military bases, he understood my reference to TU. Clearly, he’d spent time inside the US military. What did that mean?
“Their communications will be dead, too,” I said. “Without radar or GCI to talk them in, they’ll have no hope of vectoring on the ship.”
“We’ll have to leave the planet surface before the atmospheric disturbance dissipates,” he said.
“The minute we’re on the ground,” I added, “you’ll have to power down the ship’s systems.”
“Are you mad?” Grisham barked, stomping down the stairs. “We’ll have no oxygen generators!”
“We have hours of air without them,” Carrollus answered before he glanced at me. “You propose we run silent?”
“To hide the ship from ground observation, we have to look like part of the landscape. That means no heat signature and no engine vibration,” I said. “Come into atmosphere mimicking a meteor. Leave behind some space rocks for the government types to find after the fact. You’ll get written up in a document so classified not even the president will see it. The official news story will say ‘meteorite’. To avoid casual observation, we’ll look for a wind storm. Preferably, a really strong one. We want blowing snow that will cool and coat the surface of the ship.”
“Physical camouflage?” Trygg said, his tone dubious.
“We call it hiding in plain sight.”
“It’s a recipe for genocide,” Grisham huffed.
Carrollus spun on his captain and snapped, “We have no shields, no weapons, and no other, viable ideas, sir. Ms Selkirk is trying to offer us the opportunity to finally stop running.”
Is that what I was doing?
“As Ms Selkirk has so charmingly reminded us,” Grisham retorted, “we drugged and kidnapped her. What makes you think she’s remotely interested in helping us?”
I stared at him. “One: do you really think I blame every man, woman and child on this ship? Two: I can’t help but notice that if I sit on my ass doing nothing to help, it gets vaporized, too!”
“Finlay, what else?” Carrollus prompted.
I turned my attention to him. “Do you have a topographical map?”
A lieutenant with spiky brown hair and green eyes manned the table’s controls. “Lieutenant Vran, ma’am. And yes. We do.”
The map appeared.
“Can you make this section bigger?” I asked.
Carrollus reached past me and expanded the map where I’d indicated.
I hoped no one detected the tremor in my hand as I gestured at the image suspended above the black table. “This is an aerial topography map of the region where I propose you put down.”
Captain and commander came closer, peering at the lines and colors hovering in the air before them.
“Alaska,” Carrollus said.
Pointing out a broad swathe of the interior of the state, I said, “We’d aim for this region. Low population density, violent winter storms, intractable wilderness. There’s one added element in our favor. Lieutenant? Do you have access to magnetic anomaly data? I’ll also need current weather conditions for this region.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The map lit up with color.
“Alaska aligns low population density with high-intensity magnetic fields at the mountainous regions best able to hide the ship. It makes landing trickier, because the magnetic disturbance will wreak havoc with shipboard instruments.”
“Our technology doesn’t rely on magnetic fields,” Carrollus replied.
“Good,” I said. “Earth-based technology does. Our navigational instruments are impacted by both magnetic anomalies and by the electrical noise produced by a strong aurora event.”
He nodded.
I pointed to a mountain range on the map. “Right here, we have both things going on at once. That’ll make life tough for anyone trying to navigate there, except us. Weather reports indicate winds in the region blowing snow and ice in excess of twenty-five miles per hour. That’s not as strong as I would like, but given the snow-pack reports, we should find the blowing snow adequate to our needs.”
The captain peered over her shoulder at the map.
“If anyone sees us coming in, they’ll think we’re a meteor coming down in the wilderness. No one will wander into the worst of the magnetic anomalies at night. Most humans won’t willingly venture into a strong magnetic vortex at any time. Something about intense magnetic fields induces dizziness, nausea and skewed perception. I may be affected, even aboard this ship. Once the ship is on the ground, chances we’ll be seen are low.”
“Vortices?” Grisham echoed, disdain in his tone.
“You’ve seen some of the New-Age claims regarding them, I take it,” I said. “Whether magnetic phenomena are at the root of the New-Age vortex mythos, I cannot say, but I can say that magnetic phenomena were of significant interest to the US military at one time.”
The captain studied me, calculation in the narrowing of his eyes. “How do you know?”
“My father was a physicist with the Air Force. He specialized in magnetic fields. He used non-classified data to spark my interest in science.”
“The military wanted magnetic weapons?”
“Shielding,” I countered. “Magnetic fields can make something close look far away, distort an object’s true size, thus throwing off targeting. I’m suggesting using naturally occurring magnetic fields to our advantage.”
Grisham looked skeptical, but he nodded.
“When you take off all hell will break loose,” I went on. “The military will see the ship, and they will scramble jets again. You’ll want out of atmosphere as quickly as possible, and you may need to take up position behind something of size to avoid having all of Earth’s telescopes pointed at you. Assuming you choose to remain in this solar system.”
“If this works,” Carrollus said, “this solar system will be the safest place for us.”
“Not for much longer,” I replied. “With the current speed of scientific advancement on Earth, you won’t be able to hide indefinitely. When our measurements become accurate enough to detect your mass influencing the orbit of nearby bodies, you’ll have real problems.”
“We have to survive the Orseggans, first,” Carrollus said.
“Agreed,” Grisham weighed in. “Analysis.”
“Without shields or weapons,” Carrollus said, “our options are run or hide. If we leave the solar system, the Orseggans have a shot at picking up an exhaust trail. We’d abandon hundreds of our people planetside, not to mention destroying years of intelligence work spent infiltrating native governments.”
Interesting. They’d put agents on Earth? Surely I could use that as a bargaining chip. Somehow.
“Chances we could bring weapons online before the Orseggans reach sensor range?” Grisham demanded.
Carrollus shook his head. “The real question is whether we can destroy the scouts before they detect us. This crew hasn’t faced battle. The lack of experience both with weapon systems and combat tactics gives us very low chances of ambushing and destroying them before the Orseggans fire off a distress call.”
Grisham grunted. “Thereby confirming our existence and our location.”
“Hiding is our best option.”
“What if the Orseggans decide to investigate the aurora, see if they can punch through?” I prompted, wanting all the contingencies on the table.
Lieutenant Vran answered. “If we go dark, as you’re suggesting, and if the hull has cooled in the wind and snow, we will look like part of the landscape at best. At worst, we’ll resemble one of the military installations dotting the region, assuming the Orseggans would risk detection and destruction by pressing into the atmosphere for a closer look.”
“Destruction?” I echoed.
“An F-15’s paylo
ad would penetrate the scouts’ hulls,” Carrollus explained. “Scouts are built for speed, not combat.”
“If they come poke you with a stick, they’ll have the US Air Force swarming them in short order,” I mused. Uneasiness gnawed at the inside of my breastbone. Making my species aware of aliens in the solar system could be a disaster. Chaos and panic would result. We’d made and distributed too many science-fiction movies in the past several decades to hope humankind would welcome men and women from Mars with open arms.
“Sir?” Carrollus turned on the captain.
Grisham sighed. “If we fail, it will mean the end of our kind. And the deaths of people we’ve taken into our protection.”
Reaction rippled around the command center. Even I felt it.
I began to understand. They’d already lost. Big time. “Genocide”, Grisham had said. Did that mean they were the last surviving members of their kind?
I imagined I could see the cost of everything they’d given up in order to survive defined by the lines of sorrow carved into their faces. Sadness surged within me as if in answer. I’d buried my folks. These people had likely lost wives, husbands and children. If I looked around the room, how many other faces would mirror my wounds?
“Commander,” Grisham said as he tore his gaze from mine. “Take us in.”
“Yes, sir!”
Carrollus issued orders in the language I didn’t recognize. The lieutenant at the table bent over the console, packing and sending all pertinent data to the rest of the command crew.
Grisham mounted the steps to his post, where he sat and keyed in commands on his panel. “Ms Selkirk, join me. We don’t have the time to secure you in quarters before we hit atmosphere.”
He nodded at a seat beside his. I strode up the steps and sat down.
He pressed a colorless button on the arm of my chair. Webbing that seemed to have a life of its own snaked up over my lap and around my torso. Trepidation shot through me, but when the animate seat belt stopped moving, I wasn’t pinned as I’d feared. I could still move and I could still breathe. I noted he wore one just like it. That was vaguely comforting.
From the vibration rattling up my spine, I gathered the engines were already firing, already breaking orbit.