Proxima

by Chase Hildenbrand

  “No, this is a first. And the way he sounded, Ann—he seemed shook. My gut is telling me something big is going on.”

  “I hate your gut sometimes. It’s right more than I am. I’ll call the number and we can talk about whatever it is later. Love you.”

  “Love you, too. Bye.”

  The call ended, leaving her to her thoughts as she stood outside her father’s half-closed bedroom door. A department head conference call with the Secretary of Defense? Why? She led the small botany department with a total of two people. Technically that did make her a department head, but she could think of no reason she would need to be on a call with, say, the head of maintenance and sanitation. This must be big. And did this call concern the United States’ or the commission’s interest? Likely both, she considered.

  “What’s going on, honey?” Gary asked from inside his room.

  “I don’t know, Dad.” She came back inside and stood in the door frame. “I have to make a call in a few minutes then I’ll know more. I’ll fill you in if I can. On second thought, I’ll fill you in anyway. I don’t care much about classification.”

  “If they tell you to keep a secret, keep it secret. What if I blabbed about it on the net?”

  “Yes, you’re a regular Wikileaks.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. I’m going to go find a place to make the call. Somewhere with better reception. Might have to climb the damn mountain. Are you going to be alright?”

  “I’m fed and happy. I’ll probably be asleep as soon as you leave.”

  “Have a good nap.”

  While she didn’t have to climb a mountain, she did have to walk two hundred yards up the road before her signal improved enough for her to trust it wouldn’t drop out. She found a comfortable spot in the grass, sat down, and dialed the number. “This is Ann Caldwell, botany department. Present.”

  “Welcome, Ann,” Liam said. Of course Liam greeted her. He was probably the first one in the conference room. She only knew of herself and a handful of other department heads who were out of town. She guessed the room was packed by now, everyone waiting for Secretary Blake.

  Impressed they managed to fit everyone, Liam lost count how many crammed their way into the conference room. He sat at the head of the long table, but most stood along the edge. Thirty-six people in all gathered in a room with a ten person table in the center. Whispers circulated rumors ranging from an attack in Brazil to the STS cancelling the entire project. He could have told everyone to be quiet, to stop the speculation, but it was time to dial the number and get Blake to put the rumor mill to rest. He entered the digits into the datapad in front of him. A dark screen at the far end of the room lit up with the message: Connecting Blake, Todd. The people standing in front of the monitor quickly moved aside as the message was replaced with live video of the secretary sitting at his desk in Columbus.

  “Good afternoon, everyone. All present?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. The room grew quiet, all eyes on Blake.

  “Colleagues on the STS commission are making similar calls to the other campuses as we speak. You are all receiving this news simultaneously. Let me preface you with this: what you’re about to hear is classified. When we are ready, the news will be made public. For now, this remains between us. Is that understood?”

  Murmurs of agreement floated around the room. “Excellent. Seventeen hours ago, an observatory the commission has leased out of Chile picked up on something strange. We were called in immediately to investigate their findings. After observing for several hours, we can only conclude that their telescope discovered...a, well...a fleet. Three ships were spotted at the edge of our solar system near the heliopause. They seem to be heading in our direction.”

  Silence filled the room. One second passed. Two. Three. Then like an explosion most of the room erupted in shouts. Liam shot to his full height and screamed over everyone else. “Quiet! Everyone, shut up!” They did. Nervous glances crossed the room, but nobody talked. “Mr. Secretary. Are you positive? I’m sorry, but obviously this seems absurd.”

  “We are quite positive, Mr. Donovan. The shape of the objects suggest an intelligent design. Here’s an image so you can see for yourselves.” Blake pressed a few buttons off camera and a satellite image filled the monitor. Sure enough three long objects evenly spaced apart presented themselves on the screen. Each object matched the others from length, width, and overall shape. They most certainly were not rocks.

  More murmuring stirred through the crowd, but no shouting.

  Panicked and confused faces surrounded him. He stole a glance toward Percy who stared intently at nothing with a firm expression on his face. They were trained to stay under control, but even Liam was fighting back the urge to throw his hands up and walk out of the room.

  Between trying to find enough food and water for everyone, the blistering heat, extreme weather, and not to mention the occasional viral outbreak, humanity was already near the breaking point. Why not add an alien invasion to the mess?

  “Sir,” Liam began, “the STS fleet is over a year away from leaving Earth. How soon will those ships be here?”

  “We are still studying that, but our best guess as of now puts it at six months. Maybe less.”

  “Does the commission believe them to be hostile, sir?” Percy asked.

  “You must be the new head of security Liam told me about. Percy Alvarez, right? Well, Percy, we have experienced rising sea levels flooding our cities, a virus that nearly wiped us out, and a famine that tried to starve the rest. There are constant diseases running rampant, water shortages, wars, a falling birth rate, and mass suicides. Do I think they’re hostile? I think they’re here to put us out of our fucking misery.”

  “Do we have a plan?” asked The Hawking’s captain, Landon Jameson.

  “We cancel construction on ships six through eight. We transfer those crews to ships three through five. One and two of course are both in space. The Christensen will have its assembly finished in just a few weeks. We will have five ships in our fleet. I know that is a serious time crunch, especially for you guys. I get it. You were the fifth ship to get started so naturally you’re the furthest behind, not including six through eight. Liam, I need an estimate on what you need for your ship to be space worthy and assembled in five to six months. That is your first priority. You may have to skip some of the fancier bells and whistles, but so be it. When the construction is finished on STS three, the crew will move to the warehouse most in need. We’ll have crews working around the clock. In six months five ships will depart. That's your goal.”

  “We'll make it happen,” Liam said.

  “What about defense? Assuming they are hostile,” Jameson said.

  “More concrete plans will come into place over time, but my first thought is to launch a full assault on them from the planet to draw their attention away from your escape.”

  “What if they're here to help?” asked a woman named Kelsey Hamrick, the lone linguist on the ship's crew. Her job would be to help communicate with any potential alien life on Proxima.

  “Communication will be attempted, Mrs. Hamrick. But if we are unable to successfully communicate we will be left with no choice but to strike first. There is too much at risk.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelsey said.

  “With your permission Mr. Secretary, I would like to examine the possibility of arming our ships. We need to be ready if they come after us or we will be defenseless,” Liam said.

  “Is it possible to retrofit the ships for weaponry?”

  Liam looked to his chief engineer, Brian Whitt. “I will look into it. It might be ugly, but I think it can be done. I’ll need a list of what weapons you will need and where you want them installed.”

  “Don't forget each ship will be carrying dozens of Z56 fighter crafts that will already be armed to the teeth so you won’t be completely defenseless. Miss Sizemore, our pilots need to brush up on their combat training,” Blake said.

  “
They will, sir. We have the best pilots straight out of the Air Force. We couldn't ask for better,” responded Commander Debra Sizemore.

  “Also, once you escape, you will be under strict orders to not send any signals of any kind back to Earth. We don’t know their technology, but it’s a safe bet they can intercept and track a signal back to its source,” Blake said.

  “When will you tell the public?” Liam asked.

  “Soon. We expected a certain level of panic to set in with the general population after the lottery, which will need to be moved up now that I think about it. With this news, though—the public will lose their shit. We have to play the odds that a civilian telescope won’t see what we did. When our timetable is more certain, we will draft an announcement.

  “I’ll leave you all to it. I’m sure you have much to do. This isn’t the hand we were expecting, but it’s what we’ve been dealt. We’ve come together and conquered so many challenges over the past century. This is just one more. Let’s get to work.”

  Blake ended the connection and voices erupted around the room. A few broke down to tears. Others leaning against the walls slid down to sit on the floor, heads in hands. Everyone else yelled over each other. Liam let them talk. His mind was thinking ahead—five days from now, ten, a hundred. Somehow he had to get his ship space worthy months sooner than expected. Could it be done? He ran through it in his head and decided on: maybe. If they worked hard enough and long enough with crew members brought in from other facilities, it may just be possible.

  He needed to talk this out with someone, Ann in particular. Checking the conference call line he saw that she had already hung up. So instead he gave a head nod to Percy motioning toward the hallway. They both left the chaotic room to the scared and confused within. Stepping into the hallway and shutting the door behind them, he instructed Percy to follow and he led him to an empty room thirty feet down the hall where they could have privacy.

  “What. The. Fuck?” Percy asked, shutting the door behind him.

  “My thoughts exactly. Aliens? My God, Percy, when this goes public...we were expecting riots before just from folks not getting selected in the lottery, but this? It will be ten times worse.”

  “Yeah, riots, sure. But, aliens? The timing of this is unbelievable. Here we are, on the verge of going extinct, and they come knocking. What’s that tell you?”

  “They’ve been watching us. Fifteen minutes ago I thought maybe we might find some alien plant-life or simple life forms on Proxima. But now we’re being told that intelligent alien life exists and has been observing us, just waiting for us to be at our weakest so they could come in and take us out.”

  “That’s what I would do. Watch your enemy, strike when they’re down. They must know about the STS commission and our plan to relocate humans. So they’re coming to stop us.”

  Liam considered a moment. He rubbed a hand on the back of his bald head, thinking. “If they know about our ships, if they know about the commission, then—”

  “They know that we know about them. Maybe.”

  “They know. I would almost guarantee it. Who knows how long they’ve been hiding out there before we just so happened to spot them? And Blake is an idiot if he thinks this can stay quiet from the press for long. How many amateurs with telescopes are watching us assemble our ships? How many keep an eye on Proxima? This will come out, sooner than he’d like.”

  “You’re right. Shit.” Percy took a seat behind an empty desk, leaned back to look at the ceiling. “Fuck. Liam, I have to tell you something.”

  “If you tell me you’re secretly an alien wearing human skin I’m going to shoot you in the face.”

  “Not an alien, but there is a secret and you might still want to shoot me in the face.”

  Chapter 4

  PERCY WAS RIGHT, he did want to shoot him in the face. Instead he pinned his old friend down on the ground, his knee grinding into Percy’s lower back. “So, let me get this straight. You’re part of the same group of nut jobs that blew up my building?!”

  “Liam, please, let me explain!” Percy struggled under his weight, but couldn’t budge.

  “Shut up! I’m calling security.” He used one hand to reach into his pocket searching for his cell.

  “No! You can’t call them unless you want us both dead.”

  Phone in hand, he paused. Pieces clicked together in his mind. “Of course. That’s how the explosive got in. Our guards work for you.”

  “Let me up and I will tell you everything you want to know. We’re still friends, Liam.”

  “You run, I break your neck. Got it?”

  “Fine.”

  He hesitated, then decided to give Percy one chance. He took the seat Percy was evicted from moments ago when he threw him to the floor, while Percy struggled to sit upright. He leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees.

  “Talk,” he snarled.

  “Some of the guards who worked here during the attack also worked with me, not for me. I’m not some terrorist mastermind. The organization I work for views the STS commission as the terrorists, actually.”

  “You’re insane. How are we the bad guys here?”

  “We call ourselves the WWLO. The World Will Live On. I know, the name needs work. We believe that with the right scientific minds at work, we can save the world. We can save Earth! Twenty years have been wasted while our best minds focused elsewhere. They gave up on our own planet instead of solving our problems.”

  “So you think if we had never decided to form the commission, never decided to leave Earth, that things would be better? Half a million have died of starvation so far this year. Things are not looking up.”

  “Now they’re not! Because we’ve wasted time looking to the stars chasing some science-fiction dream of living on other planets. Can you imagine what we could have accomplished if our best and brightest had their focus here, where it belongs?”

  “I can. We would have lost twenty years of progress getting our asses off this death trap. The UN said 2175—the last year for us. ”

  Percy shook his head. “A prediction, nothing more. It was just a study, it wasn’t set in stone. It should have rallied us to save ourselves with new innovations. Instead we built rockets hoping to find somewhere to land them where we can start over. Proxima is a crapshoot, we all know it. There’s no telling what’s there. If it’s uninhabitable, then what? We just roam the galaxy forever? What kind of existence is that?”

  “Better than whatever kind of existence we can expect down here in fifty years,” Liam replied angrily. “The few of us who might still be alive will be struggling every day to find one drop of clean water, or one area of soil to farm, or animals to hunt. They will be desperate primitive scavengers. A few years after that and they’ll all be gone.”

  “Do you think that would be the case if our scientists were focused here?”

  “Yes, I do. What do you think they were doing throughout the twenty-first century? Nobody solved it then, nobody could solve it now.”

  “You’re speaking as if it’s fact. It’s not. Scientific breakthroughs can happen overnight. One experiment takes a fortunate turn and our problems are solved. We can still solve them, Liam. It’s not too late to give up on mother Earth. Not yet.”

  “It is. What’s your organization planning?”

  Percy looked up at him, locking eyes. “To stop you. To stop the campuses from launching their ships. If we can keep the ships here, we keep the scientists here. If we can do that, then maybe they’ll be forced to save everyone else.”

  “They’ve only attacked one other campus and that was in India over a year ago. Why? What are you waiting for?”

  “We’re not that large of a group. We stopped India, yes. But we kind of lucked into that one. Long story. For months after, we tried to plan how we could spread to the other sites. We would need people in Russia, Egypt, France, Brazil, Australia, and of course two cities here in America. We had to regroup, there just wasn’t enough of us to stop them a
ll, especially the ones that were further along like The Christensen in Dallas and The Linwood in Russia.

  “We came to the realization we just didn’t have the resources to stop all seven of the remaining ships. Instead we decided to focus our energy on ships five, six, and seven. India obviously was ship eight, but we already got to that one. Focusing on those three ships, the ones with the most work left to do, would give us enough time to at least destroy half of the STS fleet. Governments would be forced to take us and our concerns seriously.”

  “So, why are you telling me this? Why come clean?”

  “Because fifteen minutes ago the game changed and I don’t know what to do about it. This morning I firmly believed that our scientists could figure out how to save Earth and if that met a few explosions and, yes, some loss of life, then so be it if we could end up saving the two billion people left. But now? If these aliens are indeed hostile, then evacuating the planet may be the better of two bad options. Truth is we don’t know their intentions. Are they coming to wipe us out, enslave us? Save us?”

  “You know I’m going to have to have you arrested, right? Damn it, Percy!” He stood and paced around the small office. Fuming at his friend, he felt betrayed and imagined putting his fist through Percy’s face—his head smashing into the drywall behind it. His hands clenched tight, unclenched, clenched again. Full of anger he lifted the chair and tossed it across the room, crashing it into the far wall.

  “Liam—”

  “Don’t talk! Fuck, you put me in a bad position. I vouched for you to the commission. Hell, Foster even offered his support to bring you on. You’re a terrorist and I walked you and your buddies right through the front door. I’ll lose my job for this. That means I lose my spot on the ship. I’ll lose Ann...fuck. She’ll want to stay behind with me. No way will I let that happen.”

  “I’m sorry about that. Truly.” Percy lifted himself off the floor, groaning from the pain shooting through his back, to look directly at him. “But it doesn’t have to come to that.”