by Alex Irvine
“I love you, Daddy,” she said, not knowing whether he could hear her. Her fingers itched on the firing stud at the end of the jet’s control stick—but that would be wasted. Her father’s life would be wasted, too, if she didn’t get out of there.
She banked away and accelerated out of the shield zone, following the rest of the pilots who had survived this far. The split second she cleared the shield area she heard David yelling.
“Now! Now! Activate!” And then he added, “Dad, get the kids to cover.”
Kids? Patricia wondered what kids were doing out there.
Behind her, the shield generators rumbled to life, and the dome spread over the empty desert landscape. Inside it hung the queen’s ship… and inside her ship was Thomas Whitmore.
* * *
David watched, holding his breath as the queen’s ship approached the shield perimeter. The ship hit the shield barrier, and the energy of the interaction crackled out in every direction.
“Come on,” David said under his breath. The shield wouldn’t last forever. “Do it, Tom. Do it.”
* * *
Whitmore turned on the tug’s lights. All of them. In the darkness he saw two enormous legs moving nearby, straight and hard like those of an insect. Then he saw the rest of the queen as the tug was slowly lifted up so that she and the ex-president were at last face to face.
Two malevolent black eyes rested behind a ridged, pointed snout that fanned back into a dark brown frill. Her claws also looked like those of an insect, and each was far larger than his entire body. Tendrils whipped in the darkness behind her.
She was huge, and yet, somehow, she didn’t seem as big as his nightmares.
“Recognize me? You’ve been in my head too long,” Whitmore said.
There was a jolt, and even the queen staggered a little. That was it. The ship must have collided with the shield’s perimeter—Levinson had activated it, and it had held. The rest was up to him. The queen looked away, as if receiving some kind of data from her ship, then back to Whitmore, and he took the chance to rub it in a little.
“That’s right,” he said, holding up his right hand. In that hand, he held the manual firing control for the fusion bombs. He thought he saw a look of understanding, and felt the wave of her rage in his brain. “On behalf of the planet Earth, happy Fourth of July!”
He hit the trigger.
* * *
The salt flats lit up with a blinding light. The fighters’ cockpit windows polarized to save the vision of their pilots, and so too did the exterior windows of Area 51.
David Levinson, who hadn’t been at all certain the shields would hold, ducked and covered, just like the boys of his generation had been taught—then looked up just as the roiling force of the explosions dissipated. A moment later the shield did, too.
“Son of a gun did it,” David said. Whitmore had sacrificed his life, but the plan had succeeded.
“Do we have confirmation, Levinson?” Adams said from the command center.
For once in his life, Levinson was willing to draw a conclusion before the data was all reported. The dust cloud inside the shield area was beginning to settle, but nothing could have survived that blast.
“I think it’s safe to say she’s a goner, Mr. President!” He heard cheers from the command center, and then cutting through them came Catherine’s voice.
“Sir, if she’s dead, then why are her fighters still attacking us?”
* * *
David turned to his father and wrapped him in an emotional embrace. The odds against this reunion were almost beyond calculating. He’d won the lottery surviving two alien invasions with his father still alive. This time in particular, it seemed to him a miracle that Julius had made it through the Gulf tsunami, and then managed to get all the way from Texas to Area 51 just in time… with a bunch of school kids.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Fans!” Julius answered brightly. “This is Sam, my navigator, her brothers, Felix and Bobby…” Julius introduced the rest of the kids and even the dog while the boy named Henry got out his phone and turned around so he could take a selfie with the queen’s destroyed ship in the background.
Then his expression went from smug to confused.
“Excuse me, mister,” he said. “Um, is that supposed to happen?”
David turned along with everyone else to see the alien queen, rising out of the churning plume of dust and smoke. She stood upright, two hundred feet tall, partially encased in a dull gray exoskeleton that actually seemed to merge with the bony brown carapace of her body. She towered hundreds of feet over the top of them, vaguely resembling a gargantuan praying mantis, the green outline of a shield flickering around her.
Suddenly Catherine’s question made sense.
“Shit, she has her own shield,” David said. It looked to be damaged, but had held enough for her to survive. Instead of celebrating, then, they had to finish the job—and the first order of business was to get these children out of her way. “Okay, back on the bus, kids. Everyone on the bus!”
They all scrambled back toward the bus. Daisy, the littlest of them, dawdled, looking around. “What about Ginger?”
“Really, the dog?” David sighed. “I guess we have to get the dog.” Scanning the area, he saw the tiny terrier barking at the queen. Daisy had already spotted her. She made a mad dash over, scooped up the barking Ginger, and sprinted back to jump on board while David argued with Julius over who should drive.
“Out of the seat, Dad!” David said, shoving his way in front of Julius. “If you drive then we might as well walk!”
“That’s what we’ve been saying all along,” Bobby grumbled.
The alien queen, each of her steps yielding a small earthquake, stomped out of the shield perimeter, crushing one of the flatbed trucks. As David got the bus started and moving, one of the campers cried out.
“Sir, it’s chasing us.”
“Maybe we should play dead, like when a bear attacks you,” another of them suggested.
“Does that look like a bear, stupid?” a third kid said.
He heard Catherine’s voice then, coming from the monitor he still carried.
“We’re detecting movement, David.”
Driving like a maniac, with the kids bouncing around in the back, David swerved to avoid one of the queen’s legs. She moved incredibly fast, especially compared to a secondhand summer-camp school bus.
“Yup! Lots of movement!” he agreed, stomping on the gas and hoping they could somehow avoid being crushed before they got close enough to Area 51 for Adams to bring the destroyer cannon to bear.
Adams chimed in over the comm. “David, six minutes to Earth’s core breach.”
The bus roared across the salt flats. Whitmore’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain, David thought. The queen was damaged, she was wounded. They just had to find a way to finish her off.
In the next six minutes.
46
The interior of the isolation chamber was filled with a holographic constellation of schematic drawings, star charts, blueprints for machinery beyond human comprehension. It spilled out of the sphere faster than any of them could keep up, but Okun knew what some of it signified, and he knew that with these revelations, humankind stood on the brink of a new golden age.
“Do you have any idea what this means?” he said, to the room at large.
“Not really,” Isaacs admitted.
Okun moved from image to image, wanting to touch them, feeling the knowledge start to pour into his head and open up spaces of comprehension he had never imagined he’d be able to find.
“This is going to catapult our civilization forward by thousands of years. Our understanding of space-time, physics, fusion energy, wormholes…”
“Calm down, honey,” Isaacs said, and he sounded worried.
“I don’t want to calm down!” Okun cried out. This was the greatest thing that could ever have happened to him. Who could be calm at a time like this?
/> * * *
Outside, Area 51 was a war zone. The alien fighters were focused on the destroyer cannon, and with little aerial support, the ground crews couldn’t defend it for long. A final salvo from swooping fighters destroyed the turret mount, sending the cannon itself toppling straight into the outside wall of the prison wing.
The impact crushed half of the wing. It shattered the interior walls, and the bay window looking from the prison monitoring station into the cell blocks themselves. Alien prisoners spilled out of their destroyed cells.
“Command!” one of the panicking techs shouted into the comm. “We have a breach!”
“How bad?” Adams asked.
The tech looked into the shattered rubble. It was crawling with aliens. “At least two dozen, sir.”
“Under no circumstances can they see the sphere,” Adams commanded. “Do whatever it takes!”
One of the prison techs went to a weapons locker while the other shut and locked the doors to the isolation chamber. Inside the chamber, Okun watched the sphere turn itself off and settle to the ground.
“That can’t be good,” he said.
The two frightened prison techs aimed their blasters toward the broken windows. They couldn’t see the aliens anymore, only hear the echoing sound of their shrieks.
“Did you hear that?” the first one said. It sounded to him like they were getting closer, but he couldn’t tell from what direction.
“We need backup down here! Now!” the other shouted into the comm.
* * *
Patricia kept a constant stream of fire focused on the queen, but her shields were still holding up. The school bus was going to be a flattened wreck in seconds.
“All pilots, target the queen,” she said. “Unload everything you’ve got!” They did so, and their combined power staggered the huge extraterrestrial, starting to overload her shield. It was wearing down under the constant barrage, but she recovered and kept after the bus.
* * *
Inside, all of the kids were staring out of the back windows, watching her get closer and closer. Nothing was stopping her. They were quiet, realizing that this wasn’t an adventure anymore. Their lives were actually on the line.
The queen recovered from the latest fighter barrage and gathered herself. Then she leapt into the air, vaulting over the bus.
“That thing just jumped into the air!” Henry shouted.
David couldn’t quite hear him. “What did he just say?”
“Something about jumping!” Julius shouted.
David turned to ask Henry to repeat himself just as the queen landed a few yards in front of the bus with an earth-shaking impact. David swerved so hard that for a second he thought the bus was going to tip over—but after going up on two wheels it righted itself, and he kept going.
Overhead, alien fighters arrived to defend the queen, forcing the human fighters to break off their attack and defend themselves. Knowing she was taking her life in her hands with all the hostiles around, Patricia made one last direct run at the towering creature, hitting her with everything the hybrid fighter had. The shield flickered, absorbing the worst of the damage—but then it fizzled and sputtered out.
“Her shields are down!” Patricia shouted. Alien energy beams crackled past her, but she stayed focused on the primary target. “Open fire!” Banking hard, she hit the queen with another staccato burst of fire, but she’d come in too low. The queen leaped up and, with a swipe of one arm, tore off part of her fighter’s tail. Patricia started to spin in a tight descent, unable to see her surroundings through all the smoke from aerial explosions.
Then the ground was coming up fast—she knew that, but she had to time her ejection just right or she would shoot toward the ground, probably get her chute tangled in the plane, and be smeared all over the desert. Not her preferred outcome.
She struggled to get her plane under control, before determining that it wasn’t possible, and trying to gauge the pattern of her crazy spin. She thought she had it.
No time to make sure.
She pulled the eject lever, and was blown free of the crashing jet.
* * *
Floyd saw Dikembe react to something he heard over the base radio, and when Dikembe took off for the inside of the base, Floyd followed.
“Hey! Where are you going!?”
Dikembe didn’t answer. Floyd figured it out soon enough, though, when both of them got to the isolation chamber. It was sealed shut. Dikembe stabbed the intercom button.
“Open the door!”
“Your backup’s here!” Floyd added.
Through the window they saw the chamber open from the other side… the side facing the prison monitoring station. Smoke poured through, and within the smoke they saw an alien, dropping the lifeless prison tech it had used to key its entry.
The creature spotted the sphere as Okun and Isaacs turned and froze in terror. Floyd felt the pulse of a telepathic message flash through his brain. It didn’t hurt him, but Okun was much more vulnerable to them.
He seized his head and doubled over in agony.
* * *
Out on the salt flats, the queen stopped. Then she turned, breaking off her pursuit of the school bus and lumbering fast toward Area 51.
“She’s headed your way!” David called into the radio. What was going on? What had she heard? This wasn’t good. If she’d somehow learned of the real sphere…
He hauled the school bus around and headed after her, the roles of cat and mouse suddenly reversed.
“And why are we following her?” Julius demanded, right up next to the driver’s seat.
“Stay behind the yellow line, Dad!” David snapped.
* * *
Patricia made it safely to the ground, but was stuck in her ejection seat. Abruptly the queen made a turn straight toward her. Wrestling with the damaged flight harness she kept fighting, even though the alien’s immense feet were stomping closer and closer…
She wasn’t going to make it.
Then out of nowhere an alien fighter shot into view, peppering the queen with cannon fire and knocking her off balance. The step that would have crushed Patricia to jelly instead smashed down just a few feet away, and then the queen was gone past her.
The alien fighter looped and darted around the queen, blasting away at her damaged shield. Then there was another one, also firing. The shield still flickered, stopping some of their fire but not all of it. Smaller explosions blossomed along her biomechanical suit. Still she kept coming.
How was this possible? Why were the extraterrestrials firing on their own queen? Could they rebel against her? Or had Levinson figured out some way to get control of some of them? Did it have something to do with the sphere?
A lot of questions, and no answers. Patricia wasn’t going to get any answers, either, as long as she was trapped in the ejection seat. She returned to working the buckles, looking back and forth between them and the battle.
Suddenly the fighters careened out of control.
* * *
The alien message had momentarily crippled Dikembe as well. When he recovered, he turned to Floyd.
“She’s coming.”
* * *
Inside the isolation chamber, Okun and Isaacs saw two aliens with blasters come up to the glass. They raised the blasters, and Okun took Isaacs’ hand, resigned to his fate.
He was happy, in a way, that at least he had awakened in time that if they were going to die, they could die together.
The aliens opened fire, shattering the glass as Okun and Isaacs dove for cover.
* * *
Outside in the corridor, Floyd couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but knew it was bad. It was time for action. It was time for Floyd Rosenberg to prove he was more than a bean counter, more than an observer while everyone else hogged all the heroic glory.
“Out of the way!” he shouted, and even though Dikembe didn’t move Floyd blasted the control panel. The door opened and Floyd unleashed a barrage from
the blaster, shooting his way in with barely any idea of what he was shooting at. Blaster fire pocked the walls and blew out computer monitors, filling the room with smoke.
As it started to settle, Floyd looked around. All the aliens in the room were dead. He couldn’t believe it! He’d actually cowboyed his way into a rescue, and shot all the bad guys! Dikembe walked up behind him.
“I told you I’d figure it out,” Floyd said, maybe a little smugly.
Then he was jerked off balance as an alien tentacle snaked around his legs and pulled him to the side. He screamed, losing his blaster and flailing around, trying to get a grip on the smooth floor—but Dikembe was there, machete blades flashing out to sever the tentacle and then stab the life out of the wounded alien.
After that, it was really quiet for a moment. Dikembe studied him carefully.
“You talk too much,” he said.
* * *
Okun poked his head up from behind a research console.
“Baby, we’re saved!” he said.
Isaacs’ answer was a low agonized groan. Okun rushed over to him and saw that an alien blast had torn though his chest. He knelt beside Isaacs.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said firmly.
Isaacs reached up to touch Okun’s face. “I love you so much,” he said, his voice weak. Shock was already setting in.
“Hey. We’ll get you to sick bay and fix you up,” Okun said. It was a bad wound, but the Whitmore Hospital was the best. They could help. He had to believe that.
“It’s too late,” Isaacs said. “Just… stay with me.”
Okun shook his head. “Don’t say that.” It couldn’t be true. He couldn’t have just awakened only to have Milton die on him. No.
“It’s okay,” Isaacs said.
What, Okun thought. What was okay? “Who’s gonna water my orchids? Who’s gonna comb my hair? Who’s gonna remind me to put pants on?”
Isaacs smiled through his agony.
“You always made me laugh,” he said, his voice fading. “I’m so happy you’re back.” Then his eyes fluttered closed and he died in Okun’s arms. All Okun could do was watch him go, and think of the twenty years that the aliens had taken from them before they had returned to take Isaacs forever.