by Alex Irvine
Not always with the best results, he mused wryly.
At every step the designs had been assessed and improved. The new generation of fighters was fully able to achieve intra- and extra-orbital flight. The fuselage and wing design could withstand reentry temperatures at terminal speeds. The anti-gravity thrusters were built into gimbals with limited range because too many moving parts meant they didn’t hold together very well at high speed in thicker atmospheric conditions. That had been a problem in the first vacuum tests, so the new generation had impulse jets at various points along the hull that improved maneuverability in space, where wings didn’t do any good.
Weapons systems also featured the best of alien and human design. Dylan and the rest of the squad had practiced for hundreds of hours targeting air-to-air missiles and alien-derived energy cannons. He didn’t know if he’d ever have to fire either of them, but if the occasion ever arose, Dylan was confident that he had the training and skills to handle it.
After the press conference he’d flown from Washington, D.C. to Area 51, where he and the rest of the squadron were facing their last few hurdles before they could climb into their jets and be gone from the bounds of Earth. By tonight, Dylan Hiller would be on the Moon. That was something his father had never done.
His father’s “legacy”—the word was starting to get on his nerves, but there it was. It weighed on Dylan. He wasn’t even Steve Hiller’s biological son, but everyone assessed what he did by comparing it to what Steve might have done.
Dylan was grateful that Steve had come into his life, and his mother’s. He’d been good for them, and they’d been good for Steve. Family obligations had settled down the wilder cowboy aspects of his personality and centered him around what was really important in life.
That was one reason he’d demanded to take the prototype up in 2007—paradoxically, having people who cared about him made him more likely to risk his life on behalf of other people. Selfishly, Dylan wished he hadn’t done it, but at the same time he was proud of his dad, and he knew that if Steve hadn’t gone up in the prototype, somebody else’s spouse and children would be mourning.
Family life had taught Steve Hiller to be selfless, and Steve had taught that lesson to Dylan.
Leaving the briefing room where a senior ESD official had outlined the parameters of their flight—all for the sake of the assembled reporters—they took a long and photogenic stroll down the wide hallway. Then the photographers scampered ahead of them to catch them coming out of the hall into the main hangar… where nobody in Legacy Squadron had to fake their enthusiasm.
The hangar was filled with hundreds of hybrid fighters, lined up in rows that extended practically as far as the eye could see. Dylan sometimes thought the place was so big it must have its own weather.
The pilots gathered together for another photo op, with the rows of fighters forming their backdrop. Ranks of hybrid craft stretched off into the distance. As impressive as it was, though, Dylan could not wait until the public relations part was done so he could get back to what he did best.
Flying. That was all he wanted to do. Maybe Steve Hiller hadn’t been his biological dad, but he had passed on to Dylan a love for the air and the machines that speared through it.
One of the reporters got tired of following the herd and singled out Rain Lao, who Dylan thought had as interesting a history as he did.
“Captain Lao,” the man said, “China has been integral to the Earth Space Defense program. Anything you want to say to the folks back home?”
Dylan watched, wondering how Rain would handle the spotlight. He was used to the attention, but it gave some people problems. Rain was the young, beautiful daughter of a pilot who’d been killed in ’96 over Wuhan… making her the perfect media fodder. He didn’t know whether she’d had any preparation for this kind of questioning, other than the media relations meetings every member of Legacy Squadron had to attend.
Hearing the question, more reporters gathered around her, waiting for her response. Rain replied in what Dylan recognized as Chinese, and they all waited for their translators to speak.
“It’s a privilege to be a part of a squadron that symbolizes the unification of our world,” one of them said in English.
Another of the pack stayed focused on Dylan.
“Captain Hiller, how do you feel taking off out of a hangar named after your father?”
How do you think I feel? Dylan wanted to say, but he’d been better prepared than that. ESD had put him through drills about dealing with questions that struck an emotional nerve, and by this point it was pretty much routine. “I’m proud,” he said simply, “but it’s also bittersweet.” He might have said more, but his phone rang.
Not many people had his number, and they all knew he was in the middle of flight prep. That meant it was either a crisis, or his mother. Dylan glanced at his phone and winked at the assembled reporters.
“Saved by my mother.”
“He’s our mama’s boy,” Rain said, this time in English. The press gaggle laughed.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Dylan said, going along with the joke. He walked over to his fighter so he could get a little privacy, and answered the call. “You caught me just in time.”
“Hey,” his mother said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” Right away he could tell there was more to it than that. His mother was good at a lot of things, but hiding her feelings wasn’t one of them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Which meant something. A particular something.
“You watched it again, didn’t you?” She didn’t answer. “Why would you put yourself through that?”
Because she couldn’t help herself, was the answer. Dylan knew it and he knew his mother knew it. Neither of them was going to say it out loud, though, so instead Jasmine changed the subject.
“They put your picture with the president on the front page,” she said, her tone brightening. “My boy, making a name for himself.”
Dylan wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “You gonna be okay?” She got depressed sometimes and didn’t like to talk about it, but it was real, and he worried.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, like he’d known she would. They’d had this whole non-conversation before. “Just tell me you’ll be careful up there.”
“I will,” Dylan promised. Then he had to hang up because it was time to fly.
Around him, the other members of Legacy Squadron were climbing into their cockpits and running their preflight checks. Dylan did the same.
The new generation of fighters had optimized the interface between the human operator and the alien technology. Much of the aliens’ command and control software was designed along lines suitable for a collective consciousness. Studying and understanding that part of their tech had created an entire new department within the Area 51 complex, and they were just getting to the point of being able to use it efficiently.
An individual operator interacted with the flight systems differently than an element of a hive mind, and those differences weren’t always apparent until a human pilot tried to fly one of the hybrid planes. Twenty years of trial and error had gotten them finally to fully operational status… at the cost of more than a few lives.
Dylan deliberately changed his train of thought. Knowing his mother was still watching the footage of his dad’s last flight bothered him, but he couldn’t help her right then. He had a mission to execute.
He powered up the engines, feeling the thrum of the anti-gravity generators as they came online. The cockpit heads-up display lit up and everything looked exactly like it was supposed to. Dylan called it in, and got permission to take off. He eased the fighter out of the hangar, lifting it just a few feet off the ground as camera flashes popped all around. This was one huge advantage the new hybrids had over traditional thrust-and-lift designs. You could fly them slow if you had to. No need for long runways and the dangerous moments of takeoff and landing.
; Some of the reporters followed the planes right out through the hangar doors to the landing pad before ground crews chased them back to their designated viewing areas.
Once he was outside, Dylan amped the thrusters to about half-power and the fighter accelerated, smooth and strong, nose angled up at thirty degrees. When he hit a thousand feet, Dylan really unwound. Four gees pushed him back in his seat—“eyeballs in,” as the old test pilots had said. He broke the sound barrier a few seconds later, and a few minutes after that he was on the edge of space.
The fighter bumped just a little through jet stream-level turbulence, but there was another advantage of the anti-gravity propulsion system. When you weren’t relying on a controlled explosion and linear discharge of thrust, your plane was a lot more responsive to small adjustments in angular momentum. That translated into a much smoother ride in turbulent atmosphere.
Even the limited turbulence didn’t last long, because Dylan and the rest of Legacy Squadron were through the highest levels of the atmosphere less than ten minutes after taking off from Area 51. They flew in formation through near-Earth space, arcing away from their home planet toward the Moon.
This is it, Dylan thought. This is what I was born to do.
18
It was long after nightfall when David, Catherine, and Dikembe reached the upper portion of the city destroyer. They had been climbing for hours, and were miles above ground.
If they’d had to climb all the way from the ground, they never could have made it. Not a human being alive, David thought, could climb fifteen thousand vertical feet in a day, or even ten. Maybe ten, but if that person existed, his name wasn’t David Levinson. Thus it was a good thing that Dikembe had led them back up to the ridgeline between the destroyer and the road. There he’d loaded them into an ancient Sikorsky single-rotor helicopter that must have been left over from a colonial engagement in the 1960s.
Despite its dilapidated condition, it stayed in the air long enough to get the three of them across to the joint where the nearest landing petal bent to become nearly horizontal. Even with that head start, they’d had a long way to go before getting anywhere near the main hull of the ship. That was where Dikembe said the entry point was.
They could look out over miles of the surrounding savanna, with the lights of human settlements revealed as tiny pinpricks against the vast landscape. It was an amazing experience, David had to admit. Like climbing a mountain, only the mountain was made of an extraterrestrial alloy, and instead of a summit they were looking for a way into an alien ship. What would they find?
He privately worried that some of the aliens might still be alive inside, although he knew that was practically impossible. After President Whitmore had destroyed the mother ship twenty years ago, most of the aliens had died in the crashes of the other ships, and the rest were killed in the long series of ground battles that followed. Dikembe and his father had fought one of the most prolonged and bitter of those wars. If anyone had left aliens alive, it wasn’t going to be them.
Still, David was nervous. Ahead of him, Dikembe and Catherine nimbly jumped over a crevasse at the juncture of one of the enormous landing petals and the main body of the ship. David trailed behind. He was starting to feel some serious vertigo. He didn’t think he could just jump across that gap. He knew he would fall. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he could take another step.
“Come on, David,” Catherine called to him. “We don’t have all night.”
“This is not safe,” David said. “We should definitely be, um, tied to something.” Or back on the ground, he thought. What had he gotten himself into?
Dikembe waited as Catherine tried to help David work through his sudden paralyzing fear.
“You’re not going to fall,” she said. “Look, I’m right here. Dikembe’s right here. Get across this last little gap and we’re home free. See?” She pointed across the expanse of the city destroyer’s upper hull. There was an opening there, a broad doorway. Inside they would be safe, David thought.
Unless there were still aliens.
He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. There was no climbing back down, not at this point. He had to go forward so they could get inside. And to go forward, he had to—
With one lunging step, he cleared the gap and got his balance on the far side. Catherine caught his arm.
“Okay,” she said. “See, I knew you could do it.”
If only she’d been that encouraging when they were lovers, David thought. But that was unfair. Just his nervousness talking.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
* * *
It was another hour or so, once they’d made their way into the ship’s interior, before they reached the cavernous command center of the vessel. David had been inside several of the crashed destroyers, and he still had vivid memories of the trip he’d taken with Steve Hiller up to the mother ship in 1996. So he knew the way.
When they got to the command center, however, seeing it alive, powered up and waiting for orders, he had chills. And not the good kind. This was a great opportunity for scientific discovery, but he also had a bad feeling that when he learned the reason for the ship being powered up, he wasn’t going to like it very much.
All around them, lights oscillated in complex patterns. A background hum of released energy filled the air. David walked up to a console and examined the displays. What he saw there both exhilarated and frightened him. Exhilarated because it confirmed something he had been wondering about for twenty years. Frightened because that confirmation meant that maybe the War of ’96 hadn’t been the final word in human–alien interactions.
“My God,” he said. “It’s the same pattern. The distress call came from this ship.”
Dikembe and Catherine peered at him as if he was speaking another language, and he was familiar with that look. He got it a lot, particularly when he let his mind run, and the free associations came out of his mouth like a conversation he was having with himself. He stopped long enough to explain.
“When we destroyed the mother ship twenty years ago,” he said, “we detected a burst in the X-band frequency, directed toward deep space.”
“A distress call,” Dikembe suggested.
Right, David thought. Coming from this ship. One of the few that had not been damaged in its fall from flight, or destroyed by Earth’s forces after David’s virus had crippled the alien fleet’s defensive shielding. A distress call, yes.
But what had it said? What was it saying, even now?
Relying on his knowledge of the aliens’ information structures, David tapped in a command, getting access to the communications log. A holographic image was spawned above the display, a huge sweeping image of the solar system, with the planets animated and rendered in precise detail. He, Catherine, and Dikembe watched as Earth spun past them, complete with continents and oceans and the swirling white of cloud patterns. David wondered whether he was seeing the Earth’s weather as it had been twenty years ago, or whether he could match these cloud patterns to weather service data from today.
It was entirely possible that the destroyer’s systems, upon awakening, had once again made contact with Earth’s satellite network, just as the invaders had twenty years before. Another detail of the animated image also gave him pause. Earth was rendered not as a solid globe, but as a translucent sphere. Below the surface of blues and greens, the Earth’s core appeared a brilliant, pulsating red.
There’s a reason for that, he thought. Nothing the aliens do is accidental. He thought of the hole in the ground, miles below their feet, and wondered again what the aliens had really been after when they started drilling the shaft.
“And it looks like someone picked up the phone and answered,” Catherine said.
David nodded. It did indeed look like that. This ship had sent its distress call and then shut down. Only an answering signal would have powered it back up, which meant that the aliens were still out there. They were still communicating with their ships acro
ss whatever immensity of space separated Earth from their home system.
Which meant in turn that David had some phone calls to make. And the people on the other end of those calls probably weren’t going to like what they heard.
PART TWO
JULY 3
19
It was bright and early on the morning of July 3 when Dylan Hiller and the rest of Legacy Squadron made their approach to the Moon. The flight from Earth had gone flawlessly—not a single hitch. The new fighters were beautiful machines, handling equally well in atmosphere or vacuum.
Along the way they’d done a quick series of flight tests to get final data on performance and maneuverability. Everything checked out as close to perfect as human engineering could make it. The Moon loomed in front of Dylan as he led the squadron into their orbital insertion and landing protocol. He radioed ahead to the Moon Base, knowing Commander Lao would be on edge awaiting the fighters’ arrival.
Lao had his entire career wrapped up in the lunar outpost and its role in ESD’s planetary relay system. If Dylan knew the man, the hangars and facilities would be spotless and ready for whatever the squadron needed. Not only was he an excellent leader—if a bit stiff—he had a keen sense of the fact that he represented China and its people to the world.
“This is Legacy Squadron,” Dylan announced. “We’re on final approach. Requesting permission to land.”
“Permission granted,” Lao answered immediately—just as Dylan had expected. He’d probably been standing next to his communications console for the last hour, awaiting the call. “Welcome,” Lao added almost as an afterthought. He struggled with the niceties of diplomacy.
Dylan led the squadron into a loop around the base, just so the photographers and the base crew could get a good look at the fighters. He was proud of how they looked, and he wanted his people to know their work was appreciated. Taking the long way around was his way of saying hello.