by Alex Irvine
There was grim silence among the pilots. Everyone knew what David meant. Whoever flew the tug was going on a suicide mission.
“I know we’re asking you for the ultimate sacrifice,” he continued, “but you’re the only pilots we have left. We need a volunteer.”
“I’ll do it,” someone said from behind Adams and David.
* * *
The voice was commanding. They turned, and at first David did not recognize Tom Whitmore. He was in a flight suit and had shaved his beard, combed his hair… he was a lot closer to the president David had known in 1996, than the haunted wreck David first heard about in 2015.
“Dad,” Patricia said from the group of pilots. “What are you doing?”
“Patty—”
“Sir, he’s in no shape to fly,” she said to Adams. “This mission is too important. We can’t have him compromise it.” She sounded desperate.
He’s in a tough spot, David thought. It seemed as if Adams didn’t necessarily agree with Patricia’s assessment. He could also see, however, that the newly minted president was loath to send his predecessor on a suicide mission.
“Patty, please,” Tom Whitmore said. “There are a lot of reasons why I’m the best choice for this. You’re all going to have to pick up the pieces when this is over. This is my part.”
He looked to General—President Adams. The man nodded respectfully. Then Whitmore walked away, and Patricia turned to Agent Travis, who appeared to be waiting for her instructions. They had a routine worked out for when Whitmore did something neither of them wanted him to do.
“Travis, under no circumstance is he to get in that ship,” Patricia said. “Understood?”
Ordinarily the Secret Service agent would have just nodded, but given the circumstances, he had a question.
“Who’s going to replace him?”
“I will,” Patricia said.
Judging from Travis’s expression, it wasn’t at all what he—or David, for that matter—had wanted to hear.
* * *
They were almost there. Jake and Dylan led the group of pilots now, and they were very close to the spot where the columns broadened out into the bases of the landing platforms.
“Good thing we’re not scared of heights,” Jake said.
“I don’t know many pilots who are,” Dylan observed, and Jake couldn’t pass up the chance.
“I’ve been told I have a real altitude problem.”
Dylan just looked at him. “You shouldn’t do that joke again.”
“You didn’t think that worked? It’s funny on a few levels,” Jake said, and he would have explained, but right then Charlie popped his head over the nearby ledge.
“Jake!”
Hearing his name and suddenly seeing Charlie nearly made Jake jump over the ledge.
“God! That’s a hell of a time to scare a guy!” Then as Charlie made his apologies, Jake changed his approach. “It’s good to see you,” he said.
“Good to see you, too,” Charlie replied. He nodded to Dylan and the others.
“I didn’t think you made it,” Jake said.
Charlie seemed offended. “Why not?”
“No, it’s just… you know. You haven’t flown a fighter in a while and…” Jake remembered an old saying. So old, in fact, that he had no idea where it came from, but he had always taken it as a guiding principle. When you’re in a hole, stop digging. “You’re alive,” he said to Charlie. “That’s what counts.”
“Enough with the reunion,” Rain snapped from a low spot in a nearby ledge, where she was watching more alien fighters take off. “They’re gonna hear us.”
“More of us made it,” Charlie said happily. Jake thought he knew what Charlie meant, but he couldn’t believe it.
She didn’t actually agree to go out with him, did she?
“You’re still talking loud,” she told him.
Charlie quieted right down. “Right.”
Jake and the rest of the pilots climbed over and scurried toward Rain, keeping themselves as low as possible. Above them was a control station. Only a few alien fighters remained. They needed those fighters.
“So what now?” Charlie asked. “Go in guns blazing?”
“Whatever we do, we gotta move now, or there won’t be any fighters left,” Dylan pointed out. So Jake figured the time had come for decisive action. He stood up and started walking toward the control station.
“What are you doing?” Charlie said.
“Just get to those fighters, and don’t leave me hanging,” Jake said, then he snorted back a laugh. When he got away from the ledge and out in the open where the aliens in the control station could see him, he started waving his arms and yelling.
“Excuse me! Over here!” It took a little while, but the aliens finally spotted him. They shrieked in fury. “There you go!” Jake shouted, still waving. “Hi, how are you?”
On the other side of the platform, he saw Charlie, Rain, and Dylan make a mad dash for the fighters. They climbed aboard.
Time for the grand finale, he thought. “I usually don’t hold a grudge,” he shouted, keeping a smile on his face, “but you killed my parents, so I think I’ll make an exception for you!” And with that, he unzipped his flight suit—not easy, but Jake had practice—and let fly in full view of the alien control station.
* * *
From the alien fighter Rain and Charlie had chosen, both of them stared in astonishment.
“Is he…?” Rain couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.
“Just marking his territory,” Charlie said. He settled into the gunner’s seat and touched the handles. Holographic targeting screens activated. “We’re in business!” he crowed. “Their interface hasn’t changed.”
* * *
Huge doors hissed open at the base of the control station. A platoon of aliens appeared, blazing away at Jake. He sprinted along the flight deck and took cover, thinking maybe he had overplayed his hand, like, fatally.
All of a sudden an alien fighter swooped down and blew the attacking aliens to hell. He looked up and saw Rain piloting, with Charlie shooting. Perfect. Maybe this was going to work after all.
One of the aliens, wounded but alive, began crawling toward its weapon. Jake couldn’t help himself. He’d heard stories about how Steve Hiller had knocked one of them out with a single punch, out in the desert. He wanted in on that legend, man. So he ran up, took a crow hop to reset his weight, and clocked the alien with the heaviest right hook he had ever delivered.
The alien’s head snapped around…
Then it snapped back to peer malevolently at Jake as with one of its tentacles it picked up the weapon it had dropped.
Bad idea, he realized. Have to work on my boxing technique. Except if he died, it wouldn’t matter. The alien leveled its weapon—and a laser blast from Charlie vaporized its head.
“Now would be a good time to run, Jake!” Charlie offered. Jake ran like hell toward the fighter Dylan had already boarded. He climbed in and headed straight for the gunner’s seat, as Dylan watched, surprised.
“You don’t want to fly?”
“Hell, no,” Jake said. “I want to shoot.”
“Any time, gentlemen!” Rain called from her fighter as it circled overhead. The other surviving pilots held formation behind her.
Dylan lifted off and followed the others toward the distant daylight, just as an onslaught of enemy fighters showed up in pursuit.
43
David waited to climb one of the heavy military trucks known to soldiers back in the day as a deuce-and-a-half, referring to their weight of two-and-a-half tons. A crane lowered one of the base’s shield generators onto the truck’s flatbed.
“David!” Catherine called to him, pulling up in a jeep. Wasn’t she from Paris? He didn’t even know she had a driver’s license.
“Oh, hey,” he said, trying to sound casual. Then Catherine completely disarmed him by being sincere.
“I just wanted to wish you good luck.”<
br />
“You, too,” he said, “and thanks for standing up for me back there.” It already seemed like ages ago, but the time could still be counted in hours. It had meant a lot to him that she would go to bat for him, even though she clearly still held a grudge about the failure of their brief romance.
“I meant every word,” Catherine said, in a way that struck David as especially French. It also made him reconsider. Maybe things hadn’t quite failed after all.
“For whatever it’s worth,” he said after a moment, “you’re the only woman I’ve been with since Connie died, and I regret that I didn’t take the time to see what could have been.” It felt important to say it out loud, especially if they were all going to die soon.
Catherine smiled up at him. “I don’t know what to say.”
David smiled back. “That’s a first,” he said, and with a wink he got onto the truck and drove off into the salt flats, with the old city destroyer looming over the truck as it disappeared into the heat-shimmering distance.
* * *
Jake had his fun blasting away at the pursuing alien fighters while Dylan hauled ass to get them out of the ship. The giant tunnel through which they were flying was turning darker. They’d become separated from the rest of the group, and Charlie started shouting over the comm.
“Big closing doors! Big closing doors! Jake, where are you?”
“We’re on our way! Rain, how long do we have?”
“Thirty seconds, max,” she said over the sound of energy weapons and crashing alien pursuers.
“No, Rain, stop! Stop! Bank left!” Charlie screamed.
“We have to go!” she said.
“We’re not leaving anybody else behind. Nobody else dies today! You with me?”
She was. She pulled their fighter around and headed back for Jake and Dylan.
“It’s getting dicey up here,” Jake commented. He kept firing, but they were far outnumbered.
“Rain, get out of here,” Dylan said.
“Respectfully, sir, no way in hell,” Charlie replied.
“Lieutenant Miller, that’s an order!” Enemy fighters clogged the tunnel behind them, laying down a maze of fire that Dylan was barely able to avoid. They weren’t going to make it. Jake decided he might as well do that air-clearing thing he’d been considering a little while back.
“If we don’t make it,” he said, “I just want you to know I’m really sorry for almost killing you during training.”
“If we don’t make it out of here, I just want you to know I’m not at all sorry for hitting you in the face,” Dylan shot back.
Jake cracked a smile—and then out of nowhere came Rain’s fighter, with Charlie blasting away at the aliens.
“Way to go, Charlie!” Jake yelled.
“If we live through this, I’m demoting you both!” Dylan added, but he was grinning as he said it. They gunned their fighters toward the closing doors.
“Fair enough!” Charlie responded. Cannon impacts rocked Jake and Dylan’s fighter as they bore down on the closing doors.
“Hold onto your seat, buddy!” Dylan said, and for a moment it was just like old times, hot-dogging fighters through places where fighters weren’t meant to go.
Then they were out, rocketing through the closing hangar bay doors less than a second before they clanged shut. Trapped on the inside, pursuing alien fighters smashed themselves to molten wreckage. Sitting in the turret control seat, Jake wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Jake, come in! Jake?” Charlie sounded worried. He and Rain had sprinted far ahead with the rest of the stolen fighters.
“You miss me?” Jake said as Dylan got them closer. He could see Charlie in the other cockpit, lighting up as he confirmed that they’d made it. “I told you, you’d get lonely without me.”
Charlie laughed.
“All right, aviators,” Dylan said. “Let’s turn and burn. Clock’s ticking.”
They accelerated west as a group, trying to put as much distance as they could between their little formation and the pursuit they all knew would be coming.
* * *
“We’re up and running, sir,” the radio officer called in from a nearby mountaintop when the radar truck was in position and online. “Twelve minutes until Earth’s core is breached.”
“Good,” Adams said. He looked over to the door as Lieutenant Ritter stepped in front of Catherine Marceaux, stopping her from entering the command center.
“I’m sorry, this is a restricted area,” Ritter said.
Adams called him off. “Stand down. She can stay.” Marceaux knew as much about the aliens’ language as anyone else. If she was good enough for Levinson, she was good enough for Adams.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” she said as she came to stand next to him. He couldn’t get used to hearing that. He’d never had any particular political ambition, and certainly had never imagined being president. He viewed it as a temporary situation until they reestablished contact with Cheyenne Mountain and found out whether or not President Lanford was still alive.
If anyone lived that long, he added mentally as the monstrous radar bogey of the queen’s ship appeared on the screen, surrounded by a galaxy of smaller bogeys. It looked like she’d brought every ship she had left, separating her own craft from the main body of the plasma-drilling ship.
“They’re coming in fast,” he said, and he radioed Levinson. “David, we’ve got a real shit storm coming our way, and not a lot of time to prepare.”
* * *
From the lead truck in a convoy speeding across the desert with the shield generators, David answered.
“Give me numbers, Mr. President.”
“Twelve minutes, if we’re lucky.”
“So no time for a lunch break, huh?” David notified the other trucks that it was time to put the plan into action, and see if it was going to work. “Take your positions.”
The trucks moved apart and arranged themselves in a picket line across the desert, encircling the spot where they were planning to ambush and trap the alien queen.
* * *
Back in the command center Adams hailed a weapons technician who was installing targeting software for the one destroyer cannon on the base they had managed to get functional before the queen arrived.
“What’s the status report?”
“We’re still configuring it,” the tech answered.
“Get it done! Without it we don’t stand a chance.”
Outside, a crew of technicians climbed over the cannon, rushing to get it ready. Fanned out around them, ground troops readied defensive positions, manning smaller mounted cannons while officers handed out alien blasters to anyone with two hands and two eyes.
Including Floyd Rosenberg, who had dressed for the occasion in a suit of fatigues he’d found in a locker room near the barracks.
“This is way cooler than a machete,” he said as he hefted the blaster. With a deafening bang it fired in his hands, destroying a nearby Humvee. Rosenberg flinched away and then raised one hand. God, they were loud! “Sorry! Sorry!” he called to the nearby soldiers, who had taken cover and were now emerging with wary looks on their faces. “My bad. I’ll pay for that.”
Actually, he really hoped he wouldn’t have to, but he had to say something. “That was definitely my fault,” he announced to no one in particular, mostly just hoping someone would take a picture of him with the awesome alien blaster.
* * *
Adams was making his own preparations. Ritter had found shortwave gear in one of the old sections of the complex, and Adams tuned it to a common frequency for a final speech that he felt obligated to give. He took a microphone from a waiting aide.
“Am I on?”
The aide nodded and Lieutenant Ritter confirmed. “Yes, sir.”
He took a deep breath and started to speak.
“What we do in the next twelve minutes will either define the human race, or finish it,” he said. “I’ve been told that people around the world are tuning i
nto this channel on their shortwave radios. To those of you listening: No matter your nationality, color, or creed, I ask that all of you pray for us. No matter what our differences, we are all one people. Whatever happens, succeed or fail, we will face it together, standing as one.”
He clicked off. That was all there was to say.
* * *
“Damn right.”
In the tech room aboard the Alison, a hung-over Captain McQuaide nodded at the radio.
* * *
Julius roared across the salt flats toward Area 51. They were getting close. They were going to make it. Once he and David were back together, everything would be all right again. He knew it.
Some of the campers had found his book and were quizzing him about the story.
“It says you got to fly on Air Force One,” Kevin said, and Julius started to answer.
Dennis interrupted him. “You meet the president?”
Before Julius could answer, Henry butted in.
“My father says that your son never went to space and it’s a conspiracy.”
“Is that right?” Julius said. How dare they say that about my David? “You know what? Your father is a putz!”
Henry looked confused, like he didn’t know what a putz was and couldn’t decide how offended he should be. Suddenly a high-pitched hum reached all of them, getting louder. It seemed to be coming from the horizon behind them, but when he looked in the rearview mirror, he couldn’t see what might be causing it.
“Do you hear that?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” Julius said, still irritated about the conspiracy comment. “Kid’s making fun of me.”
“No, that sound,” she insisted, and at that moment a wave of alien fighter craft screamed overhead.
“Oh, boy,” Julius said. They must be heading for Area 51. “Hold onto your seats!”
Then the huge shadow of another ship passed over. It was smaller than the city destroyers from the last war, but still maybe a mile in diameter. As it glided overhead, darkness fell inside the bus. They were sitting ducks, Julius thought. If just one of those fighters turned back…
But none of them did. The giant ship and its escort moved on. Julius wished he could tell David, but his phone hadn’t survived the tidal wave, and none of the kids’ phones were working. Maybe the satellites were down. In any case, they would be at Area 51 soon.