by Alex Irvine
9
The United States Capitol building had been expanded and renovated countless times since George Washington had laid its cornerstone in 1793. Partially destroyed during the War of 1812, it had been completely rebuilt and expanded by 1829. Additional space doubled its size in the years surrounding the Civil War, which was also when the iconic dome was added. A gas explosion in 1898 led to more renovations and structural work. If you knew the inside of the Capitol, you could in a sense trace the growth of the United States as a nation… until the War of ’96.
The destruction of the Capitol had been a powerful psychological blow, and one of the first things President Whitmore did after defeating the alien invasion was begin the rebuilding process. Fragments of the original Capitol were saved and made part of a memorial museum. The entire grounds at that end of the National Mall were redesigned and rebuilt around his vision of a new Capitol, bigger and grander than the old, keeping the stately appearance of its predecessor but adding a new and modern strength. This was the building that commemorated the War of ’96, those who had died, and the resilience of those who had survived and triumphed.
In two days, it would be twenty years since that triumph, and preparations for the anniversary were in full swing. Workers on anti-gravity platforms were touching up the building, rushing to have it completed and ready for the celebration. All over Washington, D.C., people were gathering for parades and remembrances.
Inside a White House conference room, President Elizabeth Lanford was reading the speech she would deliver on that occasion. She always tried new speeches out on her team before reading them in public. Not every president did this, but she liked hearing how they sounded and seeing how actual human beings reacted to the rhythms and the phrasing.
“On this day, twenty years ago, President Whitmore passionately declared ‘We will not go quietly into the night,’” she began. “And we didn’t.”
She ran quickly through the rest of the introduction, outlining progress made in reconstruction and focusing on the beautiful new Capitol building and other landmark structures rebuilt across the country. Then she touched on the enormous undertaking of the Earth Space Defense initiative, with its outposts on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea, and others being planned. Her administration had faced some public concern about the amount of money it had spent on domestic reconstruction, instead of an accelerated ESD program, and one of Lanford’s goals for the speech was to make clear that she thought it was time to move on.
The people of the United States—and all of planet Earth—had poured their energy and resources into defense systems. In Lanford’s mind, they had reached the time when it was appropriate to rebalance that effort and divert some of those resources into reconstruction of the cities. It was a fine line to walk, and she needed to make sure the speech would inspire, reassure, and deflect criticism all at the same time.
“Make no mistake, the defense of our planet will remain a priority for this administration,” she said, coming to her conclusion, “but your voices have been heard. We’ve all sacrificed enough. The time has finally come to put the people first again.” With that Lanford shuffled her notes back together and looked to her aide and trusted speechwriter, Patricia Whitmore.
“Great speech, Patty.” It was true. Whitmore had grown up around politicians, and knew how to strike the right rhetorical tone. Her father had possessed the same gift, in his damn-the-torpedoes way. In Patty it was a bit more nuanced, but she still knew how to connect with people. Lanford was glad to have her on staff.
“Thank you, Madam President,” Patty said.
Then Secretary of Defense Reese Tanner, predictably, weighed in with his own concerns. “I have to disagree. It’s too premature to announce the defense cuts, and I would strongly advise you remind the people that you lost your entire family in ’96—”
No, Lanford thought. She would not do that. This wasn’t about her. It was about the world putting itself back together.
“Three billion people died, Tanner. Everyone lost someone.” She looked over the rest of the team, not wanting Tanner to feel singled out. He was surprisingly thin-skinned for someone who had spent his life in and around the military. “We’ve been living in fear for the last twenty years. It’s time to change the narrative. The people deserve a little good news. Let’s give it to them.”
One of her aides popped into the conference room.
“Madam, Captain Hiller has arrived.”
Excellent, Lanford thought. A perfect way to end the meeting before there was too much back and forth. She was going to give the speech, one way or another, and if the rest of the team didn’t have a chance to air their grievances beforehand, they would have to support it once it was given.
“Thank you,” she said, signaling that the meeting was concluded. “Send him in.”
The door opened again and Dylan Hiller walked in, looking quite dashing in his Air Force dress uniform. He didn’t have the swagger or boisterous humor for which his father had been known, but he did possess a quiet confidence that inspired other people to believe in him. It also didn’t hurt that he was quite handsome.
A perfect poster boy for the new ESD flight corps, he was also a genuinely good kid. The world could use a lot more like him. Lanford saw Patricia and Dylan share the kind of smile that only came from years of friendship… and possibly more. She knew they had a bit of a history, dating back to flight school, and she also knew that it was complicated. Stepson of a hero pilot, daughter of a hero president. It seemed like a match made in heaven.
But none of them were in heaven, were they?
Beyond Hiller, out in the hall, Lanford saw the painting President Whitmore had commissioned to commemorate the War of ’96. In that painting, fighter planes and alien craft swarmed the skies over a cityscape meant to represent the ideal of an American city. Towering glass and steel skyscrapers reflected the flash and glare of the aliens’ energy weapons. Missiles streaked through the sky and the upper parts of the painting were dotted with the fireballs of exploding alien craft.
Seeing that painting must hold particular significance for young Dylan Hiller, Lanford reflected. After all, among the fighter jets represented was surely the one Steve Hiller had flown. It was both an honor and a burden to have a stepfather who had become a legend. Everyone knew about Hiller’s heroics during the War of ’96, while his untimely death in 2007 told the story of a man who wouldn’t let risk pass to another, when he could assume it himself.
Dylan could never equal that, and Lanford hoped he wouldn’t try. He had his own path to carve, his own greatness to achieve.
“Captain Hiller. I can’t tell you how proud we are to have you flying our flag up there,” she said. Some of her staff had already left, but Reese Tanner was talking to one of his undersecretaries—and, Lanford suspected, waiting to greet the young rising-star pilot.
“It’s an honor, Madam President,” Hiller said.
“Your father was a great man,” Lanford said. She decided to throw Tanner his bone. “You know the Secretary of Defense.”
Dylan nodded. “Sir.”
“And I don’t have to introduce the two of you,” Lanford said, indicating Patricia.
Another aide appeared. “Ma’am, let’s get you touched up for the photo.”
While the makeup artist worked, Lanford watched Patricia and Dylan together. They hugged and then held each other at arms’ length.
“Moving up in the world,” Dylan said.
“Says America’s knight in shining armor.” Patricia smiled at him.
“You’re the one who’s back in the White House.”
“As an employee, I don’t have the same benefits as I did when I lived here,” she said, looking around as if she was seeing the rooms the way she had when she was a little girl, her father was still president… and her mother was still alive.
“How did they let us get away with everything we did?” Dylan wondered.
“Because my dad was commander-in-chief,” P
atricia answered, her tone of voice leaving no doubt that she was adding an unspoken Duh.
Dylan grinned. “That probably had something to do with it.”
Once Lanford had been made camera-ready, her aide approached Dylan. “We’re ready for you, Captain.” Dylan nodded to Patricia and started to walk away.
“Dylan,” she called after him, “be nice to Jake when you see him.”
He didn’t answer, but Lanford could see that her words had landed. Lanford didn’t know who Jake was, but there was clearly some sort of vexed history there. The dramas of the young. She put it out of her mind as the young man approached her and became Captain Hiller again, standing at her side as flashes popped and their images went out all over the world. If she was going to make her new program work, and begin to emphasize reconstruction and normalization over military spending, she would need all the photo ops she could get. Particularly with young, handsome, and famous military officers. It was a cynical point of view, but that was politics.
While she smiled for the cameras, Lanford still kept an ear out for the conversations around the room. One of the things politics had taught her was that people would speak as if she wasn’t there, if they didn’t think she were paying attention—and that listening to what was happening with her back turned was a vital skill. So it was that she could appear fully present for the photographers, even joking with some of them about making sure they got her good side, while at the same time hearing another of her aides approaching Patricia.
“Ms. Whitmore, it’s Agent Travis—he says it’s urgent.”
10
Once Jake got the tug into the shuttle bay, he and Charlie looked at each other and took a deep breath. For once in his life, Charlie seemed to be at a loss for words. They’d done something actually heroic, Jake thought. That felt pretty good. Maybe he didn’t have to fly a fighter jet to be a hero. He punched in the final system shutdown commands, and they headed for the ramp.
When they got down onto the floor of the bay, they took a walk around the tug to see how she’d fared. Jake had worked some ships hard before, but never anything close to this. The engines were smoking, they could see that right away. The anti-gravity generators in the engine housing tended to give off a lot of waste heat when they were pushed, and in this case they’d given off enough to start little fires in the circuitry and insulation.
Looking at the smoke, Jake realized how close they’d come to engine failure. That would have been lights out, pure and simple. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
Coming around to the front of the tug, the damage was even more obvious. The hull was dented and gouged from the impact with the cannon. All of the landing lights and other surface electronics were either shorted out or damaged in other ways. One of the crane arms—now legs again, because the tug was resting on the splayed claws—was bent so badly there wouldn’t be any way to repair it. The other looked to be in better shape, but would still need some time in the shop before it could lift anything heavier than a sandwich. The tug sat crooked and beat up, kind of forlorn, but Jake was proud of it. He’d asked a lot of it, and it had come through with flying colors, all things considered.
“Shit… don’t turn around,” Charlie said all of a sudden. “Lao’s coming in hot, and he’s got that look.”
Jake didn’t want to turn around. Maybe if he kept looking at the tug, Lao would just be a bad dream that went away. Ha. No, it was better to face the music, he thought, and he slowly pivoted as Lao’s footsteps got closer.
Charlie was right. He was hot. Hot enough that when he started screaming, it wasn’t even English. Jake knew perfectly well that Commander Lao spoke English. Also French, in addition to a couple of different dialects of Chinese, but he was so mad right now that he had reverted to his native language. Probably because he could swear more efficiently, Jake figured.
Nobody ever learns to swear right in a second language.
Trailing Chinese invective, Lao stalked back and forth across the bay as the other tug pilots gathered to watch the show. Lao didn’t go off very often, but when he did it tended to be quite a spectacle. Jake glanced over at Charlie.
“He knows we don’t understand Chinese, right?”
Lao stopped in front of Jake and Charlie, looking like he was debating whether to have them shot out of an airlock, or kill them himself. Jake thought he might as well start to make his case.
“Sir, there was a malfunction—”
“You almost got us all killed!”
Okay, Jake thought. But is anyone going to mention the power fluctuation and the way the clamps didn’t shut right? Anyone? “Yeah,” he said, “but then I saved everyone, so I was kinda hoping for a high five—”
Suddenly Lao got in Jake’s face, close enough that if he hadn’t been the base’s commanding officer—and if it wouldn’t have caused an international incident—Jake would have decked him.
“You don’t get credit for cleaning up your own mess,” Lao snapped. “And you destroyed my tug!” he added with a flourish, pointing at the damage.
“That? That’s just cosmetic,” Jake said, as much for the benefit of the other assembled pilots as anything else. One of the engine mounts chose that moment to fall off and hit the floor with a resounding clang.
Jake looked over at it, then back at Lao.
“He can fix that,” he said, nodding over at Charlie.
Charlie must have been feeling guilty, because he tried to cut in.
“Actually, sir, I’m th—”
“I lost my focus,” Jake said, putting on his serious in-the-principal’s-office face. “It won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t,” Lao said. “You’re grounded until further notice.” He held Jake’s gaze a moment longer, then stalked off in a huff.
“Grounded as in I can’t leave my room?” Jake called after him. “Or as in I can’t fly?”
“Jesus, Morrison,” one of the other tug pilots said. “Screwin’ up really seems to be your thing!”
Not for the first time, Jake wondered how stories from flight school had followed him all the way to the Moon. He also wondered if there would be any punishment if he jumped the guy and pounded him with a piece of the broken-off engine housing.
Whatever, he thought, and he just started walking. Charlie went with him.
“You didn’t have to take the fall,” Charlie said as they left the bay.
“He already hates me,” Jake said. “Why break tradition?” He didn’t have to add that taking heat for Charlie was also tradition. It dated back to when they’d both been at the orphanage together, and Jake figured that it would continue as long as they knew each other. Friendships were like that. If you couldn’t dive under the bus for a friend, then what kind of person were you?
He thought again about the strange burst of interference. It had thrown the tug’s navigational controls offline for a critical moment, and clearly it had done a number on the base’s electronics, as well. That’s why the clamps had jammed. So why wasn’t anybody talking about it?
Why the rush to blame him and Charlie?
Jake shrugged. Such was life. Everybody needed someone to blame when things didn’t go right, especially when nobody really knew what the hell was going on. In the command center right then, there probably was an engineer diagnosing the problem and tracking the source of whatever electromagnetic burst had caused the shorts. Then he or she would write up a report and file it, and Lao would read it, and at that point everyone would know that the real cause of the accident had nothing to do with Jake or Charlie.
But by then, it would be way too late to say it. The story was already set. And anyway, Lao wasn’t really the type to apologize.
11
Dikembe Umbutu didn’t waste any time getting David and Catherine closer to the alien destroyer. In two pickup trucks, the group drove down the back of the ridge and then underneath the giant ship, passing one of the landing petals. By itself that petal was larger than any structure
human beings had ever built.
The scale of the whole ship was hard to assimilate. David found that every time he looked at it he had to remind himself that it flew, that it wasn’t a fixed monument or a feature of the land. That’s how big it was. The human brain had trouble putting it in the same category as the ships human beings had created, defaulting to the idea that it was a thing made by natural processes, rather than by sentient beings.
He had asked Dikembe about Floyd Rosenberg. Dikembe had shrugged, like it was beneath him to consider the whereabouts of whining accountants. Collins, pursuing his own lines of inquiry, found out from their United Nations escorts that Rosenberg was back at the border checkpoint. He was described as irritating and stubborn, which Collins took to mean he was unharmed.
The pickups stopped and they all got out. David looked up at the underbelly of the ship, miles above. The cavernous space housing the energy-beam generator loomed directly over his head. David remembered seeing what those beams had done to cities all over the world. The largest cities on Earth, collections of millions of human lives, together with their cultural legacies, their art and history… This ship, he knew, was responsible for Dakar, Abidjan, and Kinshasa. Three of Africa’s great cities, three centers of the Francophone world.
The destroyer had probably been on its way to Cairo when Tom Whitmore brought down the mother ship. That was an educated guess on David’s part, but it made sense. It certainly had been traveling northeast from Kinshasa. Cairo, by far the largest city in the world to survive the War of ’96, lay in that direction. Where else would it have been going?
Billions of people dead. Irreparable losses to human culture. Given another week, the aliens would have reduced human civilization to the hunter-gatherer level again. The entire planet dealt with post-traumatic stress.
Astonishing, he thought, taking in the spectacle of the ship from the darkness cast by its shadow. Even twenty years later, digging in the ruins of ships like this one, humankind was just beginning to scratch the surface of the vast technological knowledge that created the destroyers and brought them across the spaces between the stars. What if the aliens had put that to work building something other than engines of war? The universe might have been so different.