1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  “What about the intercept vector?” Olivera asked. “Can your engineer figure it out?”

  “He has,” Joon-Pah said, still watching the display, one of the muscles beneath the light fuzz on his cheek twitching when he saw the display spin the opposite direction, the image of the moon swinging through it as if it were a pendulum. “It is doable, though extremely risky. One degree off and both ships will be destroyed. But what course do you wish the ships to be launched on after collision?”

  “Ours needs to go out in the clear, somewhere outside lunar orbit. Theirs…” Olivera grinned, the face of a stalking wolf. “Somewhere a lot closer.”

  The engineer exchanged a long string of gabble with Joon-Pah, and his translation to Olivera and Julie was nearly as incomprehensible as the Heltan language, involving degrees and speeds and vectors and lots of math I didn’t have the education to understand. I’d been intent on serving as a Marine infantry officer and a degree in history had seemed the best way to go at the time…

  Even if I’d taken any high-level calculus courses, the way the Earth, moon and the enemy ship were twirling in a giant tornado of light thirty feet high at the center of the room would have been way too distracting for me to figure out any more than the fact they were talking about the ship’s course.

  This was, I decided, just a bit too much. I’d started the day on a once-in-a-million-lifetimes trip around the moon and now I was on an alien ship with a crew full of were-koalas, getting shot at by humans from another planet. I mean, I write this stuff and it was still more than I could have imagined. My stomach was clenching and I was starting to hyperventilate every time a blue flash went across the holographic image. I didn’t know how Julie was doing it, but then fighter pilots have always seemed like a different species to me.

  “Man, I hate this shit,” Jambo said, distracting me from the virtual rollercoaster above us.

  “What?” I asked. He seemed steady enough to me, but his fists were clenching and unclenching reflexively and his eyes kept darting back and forth between Julie and the display. “You mean the part where we’re on an alien ship in the middle of some kind of half-assed interstellar war or the part where all we get to do is watch someone else try to keep the Earth from getting blown up.”

  “Yeah, that part,” he agreed, the corner of his mouth turning up. “And I don’t even have a chew. Damned space suits.” He looked down and to my left and I realized I’d forgotten about Patel.

  He was still crouched on the floor, eyes wide, staring up at the holographic lightshow, teeth clenched.

  “Are you okay, Dr. Patel?” I asked him.

  Shaddick didn’t seem too happy about the situation either, but at least she was still on her feet. Maybe about to cry, but at least standing. Strawbridge was pale, her hands shaking, but keeping it together, if only just. Gatlin…he still watched everything with a keen eye, not showing the least bit of fear.

  “Oh, I’ll be fine,” Patel assured me, the quaver in his voice belying the reassurance of the words. “It’s all just a bit much to take in, you know?”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, offering a hand and pulling him to his feet.

  “Okay, I got the coordinates set,” Julie said, shooting a dirty look at the helm officer when he tried to lean over her shoulder and check. “Boosting now. Everyone hold on to something…I don’t know what the physical effects of this are going to be.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Patel murmured. “I should have stayed on the floor.”

  “The deck,” I corrected automatically and Jambo laughed, clapping me on the shoulder.

  “Still a Marine, huh, Andy?”

  “There are spare acceleration couches against the far bulkhead,” Joon-Pah told us. He touched a control on the arm of his command chair and half a dozen of the seats folded out of the bare bulkhead.

  Jambo and I ushered the others toward them, though Daniel Gatlin shrugged his arm away from my guiding hand and fell back into one of his own accord, immediately pulling the restraint webbing around him. The stuff was weird, not polymer or canvas, more like silk straight out of a worm’s ass, except it wasn’t sticky. When I tried to figure out a way to buckle it around Patel, it seemed to understand and fastened itself to another strand of the stuff on the other side of the chair.

  Jambo had Dr. Shaddick and Ms. Strawbridge secured, so I grabbed one of the seats myself. Just sitting down was a huge relief, as if the effort to keep myself upright in the face of all this had been an emotional drain. The restraints folded me into their spiderweb embrace and I watched the screen, hoping to hell they all knew what they were doing.

  “This was your idea, you know,” Jambo reminded me. “What do you think this is, Pirates of the Caribbean or something? Ramming speed in outer space?”

  I glanced over at him, ready to be pissed off, but he was grinning, treating it all like a joke the way he had when we’d been pinned down by mortar fire in Venezuela, my platoon and his half-team of operators trying to hide in the wreckage of a panaderia. A flight of V22s had saved our asses that day, but there wasn’t any cavalry to hope for this time.

  “Hey, Army boy,” I reminded him, “I’m just a jarhead sci-fi writer. It’s their fault for listening to me.”

  The enemy ship filed the display, larger with every second and then shrinking slightly and expanding again, like the cameras were having trouble zooming out fast enough to keep up with the intercept speed. I couldn’t see anything around it, not the Moon or the Earth or even much of the blackness of space. Just the smooth, shining silver surface, some material we probably hadn’t even imagined yet, strong enough for the hull of a starship.

  A fucking starship. I’m on a starship. If I die now, I can say I was on a starship.

  Well, I wouldn’t be saying it, because I’d be dead. But people would say it about me. If there was anyone left alive to say it.

  “Field intersect in three,” Julie droned, in full pilot mode, that tone they used even when enemy SAMs were closing and they were making their last transmission back to the carrier. “Two…now.”

  The Tevynian ship was a silver blur in the display, too close to focus on, and then something happened. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to shoot rubber bands at each other when we thought the teacher wasn’t watching. Sometimes, when I’d really want to get some range on the shot, I’d pull the rubber band back really far, so far it thinned out to half its normal width and I just knew it was about to snap. And a few times it had, the shorter end flopping onto the floor, the longer one smacking me in the face causing much more pain than it had been worth.

  In that instant, I felt just like the rubber band. The pain wasn’t physical, at least I don’t think it was. Mental, psychosomatic, those don’t seem to adequately explain the gut-punch feeling. It was almost psychic, spiritual even, and though it only endured for a fraction of a second, in that eyeblink of time I was in agony before it faded away as if it had never been.

  I heard someone scream and opened my eyes, not remembering that I’d closed them. The display was black, and I thought for a moment that the cameras were gone, burned away or shattered or something, until I saw a glimpse of stars and realized we were out in space, far from Earth or Lunar orbit.

  “How fast are we going?” I asked. My throat was dry for some reason. I don’t know who I was asking, since Julie wouldn’t be able to read the instruments to tell me, but Joon-Pah answered.

  “Twenty-three percent of the speed of light,” he said.

  “Holy mother of God,” Gatlin breathed. “And in less than a second…”

  “Turn us around, Nieves,” Olivera ordered Julie. “Get us headed back to orbit.”

  “Yeah, getting there,” she confirmed, the scowl on her face showing exactly how much she enjoyed him ordering her around.

  “What about the enemy?” Olivera asked Joon-Pah. “Did we see what happened to them?”

  “Yes. The ship’s telescopes picked it up just as we began to accelerate.” The Heltan tapped a
t something beside his left hand and the view on the display rolled back like a video reversing.

  It stopped on the out of focus lines of the Tevynian ship, and then it began to roll forward, a frame at a time, super-slow-mo. The monolith of silver metal streaked across the far-off blue sphere of the Earth, boosting impossibly fast, maybe thousands of gravities of acceleration but they wouldn’t be feeling it because it was a gravitational slingshot. Right up till they slammed into the surface of the Moon. I’m sure they felt that. Briefly.

  The spear of energy rising up from the blank white of the Moon would have made the Tsar Bomba fusion explosion seem tiny by comparison, stretching dozens of miles out above the Lunar surface before it expanded into a half-dome of light hundreds of miles across.

  “Beautiful,” Olivera said, laughing softly. “Well done, Nieves.”

  “I aim to please,” Julie said with the sort of smug self-satisfaction I expected from a fighter jock.

  “Fuck me,” Jambo breathed, eyes still locked on the explosion. “No one’s gonna miss that. Cat’s out of the bag now.”

  He was right about that. A blast that big would be seen by half the world and on the internet in seconds.

  “Everyone already knew about the aliens,” Strawbridge protested, a weak objection in a tiny voice.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, sinking back in the seat, both with a profound relief we weren’t going to die and an the understanding that nothing would ever be the same. “And now they’re going to know about the war.” I caught her eye, offering sympathy. “I hope you’re good at your job, ma’am. Something tells me we’re going to be needing shitloads of diplomacy.”

  Chapter Six

  “Well, this is a huge fucking mess and there ain’t no two ways about it.”

  I had my differences with the President, but one thing I always appreciated about him was his way of cutting through the bullshit and getting to the point. I never expected to be witness to it in person, and particularly not seated at the long, narrow table of the infamous White House situation room, flanked by generals and cabinet-level secretaries and watched over by steely-eyed Secret Service agents.

  They’d replaced some of the flat screens with holographic projectors a couple years ago, which I’d been all agog over when I’d first seen footage of it. It didn’t seem so damn impressive now that I’d seen the inside of an alien starship. The ship, which we’d learned was called Truthseeker, floated in one of the projection tanks, silhouetted against the familiar blues and greens of Earth. I wondered if one of our geosynchronous birds had taken the shot or if we’d launched a special satellite just to observe the ship.

  President Crenshaw ran a hand through his short-cut brown hair and eyed his National Security Advisor balefully.

  “Tommy, you really think we should do this? Get ourselves involved in an alien war, for God’s sake? It sounds insane.”

  “I don’t know that we have any choice, sir.” Thomas Caldwell was a squat, broad-bodied troll of a man with a boxer’s nose and the square jaw of a cartoon superhero. He’d been a Marine colonel before he’d gotten into the political end of things, so I had a soft spot for him. “The Helta are here and…” He frowned across the table at Delia Strawbridge, who looked very different in a business suit instead of a space suit. “Is it Helta? Heltans?

  “As near as we can tell, sir,” she said, “one is a Heltan, more than one are Helta.”

  Caldwell nodded curtly.

  “The Helta are here, asking for help,” he continued, “and if we tell them no, the Europeans, or the Chinese, or the Russians will tell them yes and we’ll find ourselves a third-world country in a matter of months.” He grimaced. “Or part of someone else’s empire, more likely.”

  “That is alarmist nonsense!” Kristy DuPont exploded, apparently unable to contain herself despite the scowl her interruption earned from the President. The Secretary of State didn’t bother to apologize, half-rising from her seat, leaning over the table, her white Dior jacket bunching up at the shoulders. “We should consult with the UN, build a consensus to deal with these aliens! My God, isn’t the very existence of aliens, the fact they’ve come to us, a signal that we should put aside our petty differences and come together as one species to step into a new universe in peace? The Helta’s enemies are humans, surely they would negotiate with other humans! We should offer to act as go-betweens…”

  “And maybe that will be possible, Kristy,” Crenshaw cut her off, impatience evident. “But what is not possible is for us to ignore human nature. You’ve seen up close how belligerent China has become, particularly in the wake of their economic downturn and the Korean reunification. They’d do anything to regain their status, both economically and politically, but they don’t have the capital to do it. Do you think for one second Chairman Xiang wouldn’t throw a quarter of a billion Chinese soldiers into a fire in another star system in exchange for total domination of Earth?”

  “We can deal with Xiang if we have a united front!” DuPont insisted, but Caldwell’s laugh drowned her out, the barking of a pit bull.

  “Sure, we’ll deal with the Chinese after they’re armed with alien death rays. How would we do that, Kristy? Sanctions? When he’s about to get fusion reactors and automated fabrication plants that can make whatever he wants out of raw materials? Nukes? Because if Xiang has force fields and lasers, I don’t know nukes even could deter him, if we were desperate enough to go that route.”

  “I’m afraid Tommy’s right,” Crenshaw told her. “Perhaps we can attempt negotiation with these Tavvy…Tevvy…” It was his turn to appeal to Strawbridge and I could tell by the wrinkling of the muscles beside her eyes that the woman was trying hard not to roll them in frustration.

  “Tevynians, sir.”

  “With them, yes,” Crenshaw nodded. “But that is after we make the agreement with the Helta. We can survive without their technology, but we can’t and won’t survive if the Chinese or, God forbid, the Russians get their hands on it.” He sucked in a breath, settling back in his chair, his one natural eye thoughtful. “The thing that concerns me is whether we can believe the Helta. All we have is their word that any of this is true.”

  “Sir, if I may,” Colonel Olivera broke in. At Crenshaw’s nod he went on. “We don’t have to take their word for all of it. We have independent confirmation of what happened with both ships. Now, anything’s possible and we could entertain some idea where the second ship was remotely piloted, but the Helta couldn’t have known that Mr. Clanton here….” He inclined his head toward me and I felt my ears get hot as I flushed at the attention. “…would come up with the idea of striking one of their drive fields with another. It would have taken some mighty fancy last-minute footwork to fake that. And to what end?” Olivera had seemed a bit cowed by the presence of the Commander in Chief and all the brass at first, but he was warming up now, doing that whole hard-charging colonel-in-a-briefing thing. “If they wanted harm us, they could have just destroyed us. They could send an asteroid from the belt hurtling into the planet and there isn’t a damned thing we could do about it. If they wanted something we had, they could take it.”

  “Except our willing help,” DuPont reminded him, her nose wrinkling, either at the idea of getting involved with the Helta or of talking to the Space Force colonel.

  Caldwell addressed her as if she were some particularly rare strain of idiot, a sentiment with which I could sympathize.

  “Our willing help?” he repeated. “Do you think they’re vampires and can’t set foot on the planet unless we invite them in?”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. I tried to turn it into a cough, but it was enough to get Crenshaw’s attention. I tried not to cower beneath it. He was just a fucking Navy Squidward when it came right down to it.

  “What about you, Mr. Clanton?” the President of the United States asked me.

  The fucking President of the fucking United fucking States! Holy shit!

  And then,

  Why am I more nervous
about talking to the President than I was to meet aliens?

  “Pardon me, sir,” I said, managing not to squeak. “But what about me what?”

  Crenshaw grinned through his close-cropped beard.

  “You’re a science fiction writer,” he reminded me. “I’ve watched your show,” he added and I resisted the urge to tell him how sorry I was. “You and others like you have imagined these sorts of scenarios for decades now…over a century. Do you think the aliens are telling the truth?”

  I very nearly blurted out the first thing that came into my head, the way I usually did, but I forced myself to shut up and consider the question carefully. This was, quite literally, the fate of the world we were talking about.

  “Mr. President,” I said, “the aliens are either telling us the whole truth or it’s the most elaborate con in the history of the world. There’s no way anything like the Helta evolved naturally, and unless we’re just totally wrong about everything when it comes to how evolution works, their genes came from Earth. That means for this to be some kind of con, whoever was running it had to have come to Earth and gotten DNA and then created enough of these bear-things to crew a starship, and God alone knows how long that would take or to what end they’d do it. Like Colonel Olivera says, if they mean us harm, there isn’t a damn thing we could do to stop them.”

  Crenshaw turned to Dr. Shaddick, who, if anything, seemed more nervous than I was to be here. It was chilly in the Situation Room, but she was already sweating through her makeup.

  “And we’re sure,” he asked her, “that these things actually do have DNA from Earth?”

  “They have DNA, period, sir,” Shaddick told him. “DNA evolved on Earth. For it to be anywhere else means it had to have come from here.”

  “I thought there were some theories about comets seeding the universe or something?” Crenshaw said, forehead wrinkling in thought. “Carrying DNA all over the galaxy?”

  “The panspermia hypothesis,” I supplied. “But the idea was that the comets or space dust or whatever carried RNA. DNA evolved from RNA on Earth, wherever the RNA came from.”