Overrun

by Michael Rusch

  Aboard the Hideaway, a two-man crew is inexplicably awakened from hypersleep with no communication or instructions from Earth. They learn that an unexpected fifty years has passed since the onset of their mission. With no knowledge that Plan Zero or the Dome War have occurred, the pilots struggle to decide what to do with the technology they possess, which they know could ultimately save the plight of the dying human race.

  President Ford launches a covert retrieval mission led by General Maxwell Tuttle. J.G.U and mercenary forces race to do the same. The quest to obtain the prized technology becomes a definite battle for victory in the war as well as a final determination of survival of the planet.

  Following the failed rescue attempt from Beuford’s shopping mall and the death of the Kirken family, General Maxwell Tuttle leads the retrieval mission into space. He is unable to contact the Hideaway crew for fear of revealing the ship’s location to the J.G.U. and separate mercenary forces also on the way.

  After fifty years of forced hypersleep, the Hideaway pilots wrestle with the shock of the erasure of their lives through their extended hibernation and debate the best course of action now to take. Fighting bitterly amongst themselves, they prepare to meet three unknown ships advancing upon them in space.

  With no acknowledgement or instruction from their government, they organize a full-scale hostile defense of the Hideaway cargo. Readying to forcibly retain possession of the Beam Cannon Hardware it was their mission to protect, they also debate their return to an unknown Earth as a means of escape.

  Neither is aware of the grand importance now placed on the outcome of their clash. They do not know their actions will ultimately decide the final existence of the war-ruined United States as well as the fate of the entire living world they float above.

  OVERRUN: Project Hideaway

  Science Dome 15 Command Center.

  Ten minutes prior to Death Wall ignition.

  "Veer left! Veer left, Ground 2!"

  A trail of fire blazed after two Bullet land fleet vehicles racing back towards Science Dome 15. A giant burst of flame gouged a hole twice the size of the two vehicles combined deep into the ground beneath the rear of the one furthest from reaching the landing bay. The blast rocketed its frame into the air and hungry flames devoured it before it hit the ground. The fiery debris rained across the path of the lead Bullet, causing its pilot to swerve into a path where a second J.G.U. rocket then ripped it into nothingness.

  The steel from the exploding vehicle seemed to shriek briefly before shredding into oblivion, and then no further sound came from the battle monitor.

  "As everyone has been notified, the security of Dome 15 has been compromised," the tall figure of Lt. Commander Dome Leader Steven Corrado loomed ominously at the head of the large meeting table. Taking a half step to his right, his large frame covered the large monitor screen that displayed the battle being waged on the sun-battered outside terrain.

  "A defense land fleet has been dispatched and are heavily engaged. They are only a few miles away." Corrado hit a button on the panel to his left, and the lights to the entirely white meeting room became slightly brighter. "We are here to address rumors and discuss possible scenarios and solutions as they relate to this dome attack and the security of Mission Hideaway."

  A series of explosions flashed from the monitor, and the dozen or so gathered members of the Hideaway science team looked again to the monitor screen to witness two more of the Bullet land fleet burst into flames. Their fiery destruction jabbed bright light across the still dimly lit room. A thin cloud of smoke hovered in the air from cigarettes clutched tightly by many of those present.

  "How far away are they?" Dr. Katie Rone, head of the Hideaway Pilot Research Program, questioned the speaker.

  "The command to light the Death Wall was given about five minutes ago," Lt. Commander Corrado answered her. "They're very close. And as I know I needn't remind anyone, the Death Wall has always been considered a last resort."

  The room fell deathly silent. Only a soft sound of explosions from the monitor and the quiet sucking from deep drags on cigarettes could be heard.

  "Do we wake them up?" Corrado questioned the group. "This is one of the most difficult decisions this facility has ever faced. I know that. But people…, we have to decide this fast."

  "Of course we wake them up," Rone answered him. "If the Death Wall is the last resort we have to bring them down now. While we have time."

  "There is no time," Dr. Robert Kobus, a member of her personal research team and the man seated directly to her left, answered curtly. “This decision should have been made many days ago. It should have been made when we first heard we were going to war. But now, the war has all too quickly come to us.”

  Rone tried, as she always did, to control the red-hot poker-through-the-eye emotion she always felt when offering her colleague Kobus any sort of debate. She had always considered him a bickering and argumentative man since the day he had come to work for her, someone that she never really liked very much and always wished each day that would leave the research team. Their views on how to interpret the Hideaway crew never seemed to agree.

  But the focus of their research was much too intriguing for either of them to ever leave the team. A ship sent up into space with every bit of technology ever created on the planet hidden onboard. Electronic files of further information were added since through quick unnoticeable bursts of coded transmissions on an almost continuing daily basis to the ship’s vast array of storage equipment. Two pilots ordered to hide the ship safely away from discovering radars and sensors, hidden from Earth on the far side of its moon. Once hidden, the pilots put themselves down into extended hypersleep with a mission of only to wait. They were to wait until called sometime called upon. That was fifty years ago. And what had become interesting to both Rone and Kobus both was that “sometime” had now become way too long.

  The job of the research team was to monitor and research past histories of the pilots. They were to think, rethink, and predict each pilot’s reactions to any and every set of stimuli that could be encountered while they were on the ship.

  Neither Rone nor Kobus had ever met the two men. They had inherited the project from a screening and implementation team now since retired. This previous team had selected these men from a choice of more than thirteen hundred candidates referred to the project for consideration.

  Despite not knowing them personally, through numerous lengthy discussions with her predecessors, some done through dissertations and coursework at the dome universities, Rone felt she had experienced the entire process firsthand. She considered herself connected with the men inside and out and able to gaze deep within their souls to comprehend the reason the field had been narrowed to just those two.

  Of anyone in the room, she was the foremost expert on the two men guarding the most important cargo ever to be shot off the planet in a ship.

  She had heard rumors of the project within the earliest years of her university enrollment, and they had drawn her…almost fanatically so. She was fascinated by the fact that these men had been left in hibernation and never wakened from terminal sleep. She was fascinated by the moral implications of the sin they continued to commit each day they did not bring these men back to Earth and was morbidly curious as to what would happen when or should these men ever awake.

  Rone spent years and three subsequent theses on the subject. More than ten years she spent with those that screened the men. She knew the personal histories of each man by heart. She had run and re-run their psychological evaluations and created and played out every scenario of their return to consciousness both in report form and in her head. She lived, breathed, and dreamt these men and always wondered, despite all her studies, what would really happen when their time finally came to awake.

  During the course of this all, she had acquired an extreme fondness for these two men, one that bordered on love. Impractical or unethical. Romantic or paternal. She was always never sure. What she did k
now was despite whatever their personal intentions for signing onto the project, she felt an emotion toward them based on their individualities and what they had gone up there to do.

  She feared that every day they were left up there, and now with the country at war and the dome under attack, there was the danger that their lights in the universe would some day be forever lost.

  These were the thoughts driving her in this conversation. She had always felt it would be her decision and hers alone as to when these men would finally be returned to Earth. This was the time, if any there could be, to finally bring these men back down.

  "These men have been in hypersleep for fifty years,” Kobus said to her. “That’s nothing to their bodies, but half a lifetime to those they knew around them. Lost to a prolonged hibernation to which they never agreed. They will come out of it thinking it’s been a few weeks or months that they slept. Natural human reaction has to be taken into account. They will be disconcerted, a feeling which will quickly be followed by fear," he said not addressing the room so much as he was trying to lecture her personally herself.

  “And then anger,” he paused and turned away from her to the others that listened. “It will come. Our control could become lost.”

  Kobus shared some of the same feelings as her own. However, not entirely so. Like her, he was morbidly fascinated at the prospect of these two men left alone to float possibly forever asleep in space. The personal connection, however, was never there. The prospects of their fates didn’t sway his compassion or emotion in either direction. And the fact that she was the expert, who had more authority and knowledge on this subject, to him was always up for debate.

  Rone turned her face away from the lieutenant commander to look over at him.

  "They're going to be really pissed," Kobus again ignored the rest of the room and spoke to her directly.

  Each year the project continued, Kobus had become squeamish of ever bringing the men back. He advocated leaving the ship up there indefinitely rather than risking the possibility of detection even from the minute signals required to bring it back online. He had also grown to fear the two men.

  This apprehension and his own personal research centered on only one of the pilots. Each day he spent working on it was another day he felt the decision made many years ago had been entirely wrong. This pilot was wrong. He was not the one the world should count on to keep the world and its secrets safe.

  Kobus never wanted to see the ship come down, not with this man alive and onboard.

  Kobus had gone so far as argue his case to her in court. After the ruling, there was an appellate proceeding. But on both occasions, in the presence of both governing tribunals, he was never able to completely convince her or those making the ruling of his fears. Rone wondered if Kobus’ inability to make the case for this man to ever be allowed awake on the Hideaway before dock was only due to fright of the world they existed in or if he just wasn’t entirely convinced himself.

  In either case, she had always been able to keep Kobus and his ideas down while still keeping the project in motion. Mission plans had never changed in all the years since it first went up.

  "I've researched both their psychological histories thoroughly. I've been closely monitoring their life-support and brain patterning. Nothing has been out of the ordinary," Rone argued to him. “There have been no complications going into or during their hibernation states. Normal flow and action of brain waves has always been intact. They were both given top psychological clearances when they went up.

  If these men were given the military clearance to be aware of and then safeguard one of the most important inventions the world has ever seen, then these same men are certainly capable of handling unforeseen contingencies and changes in mission plans. They are United States soldiers for God's sake, not members of a suicide watch group. They can handle this. This is what they were sent up there to do,” Rone finished.

  "These are not unforeseen changes in mission plans," a younger male voice came softly but with authority from the far end of the briefing table.

  Heads turned towards the man that spoke. Rone could barely see the outlines of his face through the thick haze of smoke shrouding the room. She thought it was Korcheck, Christopher Korcheck, a member of the beam cannon technical group. Only when a burst of air from the overhead ventilating fans cleared the air a bit was she finally sure.

  Korcheck was one of the top scientists anywhere in the collection of the United States domes. He grew up a child prodigy, an individual whose genius many thought immeasurable. Some said it simply couldn’t be described.

  Korcheck was a young, eccentric, and driven scientist who spent years working in the tunneled caves below the dome. A man who declared on national news at the age of ten that he would use his knowledge, a great gift given to him from God, to one day save the world. The footage was carried on almost every news agency for many years that followed.

  Korcheck worked with the beam cannon scientists. He studied their designs, examined the flaws, conducted his own experiments into the technology, and helped the engineers just make it through. He had discovered new means of storing and utilizing power. He created atom chips and power control devices that were always smaller than anyone else had ever dreamed of in design.

  He refined the space necessary to make the Beam Cannon Hardware usable. Through his own ambition, he made it possible for the beam cannons to work. Once constructed, the technology he refined now stored on the floating Hideaway and within the deep underground of Science Dome 15 would be able to completely encompass the globe with an artificial atmosphere. Not limited patches that would only be able to save and protect a preordained few.

  Once a few more things worked into place, it would be possible to implement the technology completely. With this done, the disease and division that ravaged the planet would one day be forever removed.

  "We need to think about what we are going to do," Korcheck continued. "We're going to pull these men from hibernation, a procedure that is in itself disconcerting and stressful to the physical and mental system, and tell them the world is at war. Not only that, their family is dead, because we decided to leave them up there in hibernation rather than bring them back down at the specified time.

  If we do this, we have to completely follow through. We cannot bring them out and order them to just sit up there and await the possibility of discovery by a hostile force. I think that's a little more than you can expect from anybody.”

  We need to wake them up and bring them immediately back," Rone agreed with him.

  At that moment, the lights dimmed, the coffee mugs on the table rattled, and the walls surrounding them seemed to shudder. Electronic voices rattled off status reports in the outside corridors, and the flashes of red alarm lights spilled into the room.

  "It may soon not be up to us to decide," Kobus said grimly. "Since I joined the pilot research team five years ago, a few things of note have given me great cause to concern and make me extremely apt to disagree. Particularly in regards into Major Jeff Barnes, co-pilot of the Hideaway.

  Rone lowered her eyes and wrung her hands under the table while Kobus continued.

  “With each and every psychological discussion of Barnes that has come up, there has always been a small threat that seems to repeatedly surface. It’s small, very small. But it’s there. It’s been there and overlooked each and every time, because of this man’s intelligence.”

  Rone brought her hands above the table and tried not to ball them into fists.

  “Barnes is a genius. A very good man to have on any crew. But not on a mission like this. Signs of paranoia have always been present. Small miniscule signs, many times overlooked because of his overcompensation of intelligence and wealth of technical skill. But I tell you, this is a threat. His actions in situations of pressure have always caused the scientists working on his research small amounts of concern. And it’s for this very reason we cannot let this be the man to bring the Hideaway down. He cannot be
allowed the risk.

  Given the step-ups in security clearances and the initiation of the Vulture Program since they went up, it is in my opinion he would not have been cleared for this mission if the selection process had been made at a later date. He is only a pilot, gifted in technical intelligence like all of us. He is not a Vulture soldier as none of us are. Neither of them are.

  We have to take that into consideration. We cannot make the mistake of assuming that both or even one of them is going to act rationally. Especially after they figure out the extreme status of this situation as Dr. Korcheck has just pointed out."

  The lights in the briefing room dimmed again. Everything around the group echoed the groan of tortured steal.

  "We also have to take into consideration that we are under attack," Rone shot back. "The security of this dome and its scientific facilities are threatened. If we don't at least bring them out of hibernation now, they could be up there forever."

  "Since I have joined this team, both myself and a large amount of my colleagues have been second-guessing the ability of Major Jeffrey Barnes to handle such a command. We have even gone so far as to recommend that this man’s hibernation simply be terminated."

  "You've been what?" Rone turned on him in disbelief. "How dare you make these recommendations and accusations without my consultation! How dare you go behind my back…”

  "It has never been withheld from your knowledge! We have submitted numerous reports to the dome governing bodies!" Kobus shouted back. "You do know that! We don't think he can do it! And that is why we have to keep them down!"

  Another explosion flashed across the monitor. At the same time, the entire room tilted slightly to one side. Drinks splashed across the floor, and sparks spit from swinging lights. A female scientist in the back of the room toppled sideways from her chair. Two men next to her hurried to help her regain her seat. The sound of rushing footsteps pounded just outside the doorway.