The lieutenant—“Rodriguez,” Ben read from the tag on his chest—was surprised only for a moment and hid it well. Ben noticed the small video camera fixed to the airman’s helmet and sensed the radio signals flowing back to the helicopter’s communications gear and on up to a satellite stationed miles above. Would the facial recognition software be able to tag him despite his gray skin? Probably.
Rodriguez stepped aside and motioned Ben to the helicopter. Ben picked up his bundle and tucked it under his arm and started walking. Rodriguez grabbed his arm.
“What’s that, sir?”
“Two pistols and a severed arm.”
Rodriguez moved to grab the package, but stopped and glanced sideways toward his headset, pressing it against his ear with his free hand, obviously receiving instructions over the radio from the officer watching the video feed. He stepped back and waved toward the helicopter.
“Please get onboard, sir.”
Ben climbed in, and the airmen hopped on, too.
All three helicopters were back in the air within a minute of touching down.
Rodriguez handed Ben a computer tablet, sheathed in thick rubber to survive tough battlefield conditions. A jowly, tired, middle-aged face with a crew cut peered from the screen.
“Hello, sailor. I’m General Tom Rickert. Glad we found you.”
“General, I’ve got something you need to see.”
“Yeah, I think you do.”
4
“More tests?”
“No, no more tests, Lieutenant,” Rickert said as they walked down the hall, ignoring the fascinated stares from military and civilian personnel that were peeking out of their offices at the short, fat general and the tall, gray-skinned sailor. “Time to meet the big dogs.”
“Ah, meetings. That, I know how to handle. Not much training, but plenty of on-the-job experience. And you can call me Ben, because I’m going to call you Tom.”
“You’re the first SpecOps guy I’ve ever worked with. Are they all as insubordinate as you?”
Ben returned Rickert’s grin.
“Most people in your position would be wound up pretty tight, I’d think,” Ben said.
“Well, I’ve been drinking heavily.”
Ben sent over a larger grin, loosening up for the first time since before the crash.
“But seriously, a lot of these folks are still just trying to come to terms with what happened to you, what you represent,” Rickert continued. “I’ve been gaming out these sorts of scenarios for years. It’s still blowing my mind, though. Can’t imagine what the rest of them are going through, going from zero to sixty like this.”
“Well, they better get up to speed fast. There’s no time to give them the sugarcoated version.”
“Is there a sugarcoated version?”
“Sure. Still gonna taste like shit, though.”
“Yeah, I figured. Here we are.”
Rickert pressed his palm against a scanner next to a metal door. It slid open noiselessly, and Rickert walked in with Ben trailing behind.
The conference room was small, but packed. The 20-by-20 cell was blinding white, with a table in the middle and video cameras in all four upper corners. A mirror covered one wall, with three large LCD monitors hung on the others. A dozen men were crammed into the space, and a dozen gray, balding heads turned when Ben entered through the only door. Rickert waved Ben to an empty chair.
Rickert settled in his chair with a scrape and a clatter, leaning forward, elbows on the table. He didn’t share his colleagues’ exhaustion. He felt supercharged. His sleepy career had received an adrenaline injection, and he was hurtling through the days and nights with barely a chance to glance at the clock. He wasn’t even sure what day it was. No matter. It was “after,” and that’s all that mattered now. After first contact. He and his team had predicted, back before anyone had cared, that this moment, if it ever came, would be the next big pivot on human calendars. BC, AD, and now FC. Assuming humanity survived the first moments of this new era. He had to remind himself his job wasn’t over. It was just beginning.
Rickert plopped his tablet computer down on the conference room table, which lit up.
The table surface was an interactive touchscreen computer monitor. Rickert tapped a file on his tablet and twelve digital comets shot out from his tablet to the other machines resting on the table, delivering the meager data to the other scientists. He clicked a button on a small remote control to call the information up on the LCD screens around the room. Rickert thumbed the device with the casual assurance of a man who knew PowerPoint as thoroughly as the laces on his shoes.
“That’s the full analysis,” Rickert said. “Well, as full as we’ve been able to do so far. Lt. Shepherd’s physiology is somewhat . . . resistant to our techniques, as most of you know.”
As Rickert walked through the details of the report, Ben remembered how his medical exams had seemed more slapstick than science.
Drawing blood, for example. Ben’s skin automatically stiffened and hardened against assaults, and the only way they’d been able to pierce it was with a modified pneumatic nail gun. The nurse, a combat vet, had been sweating with effort by the time it was done. No sooner had the needle been inserted, though, than the nanobots in Ben’s bloodstream had literally chewed it up and spit it out. The imaging tests hadn’t gone much better, with the alphabet soup of MRI, CT, PET, and other scans revealing only that Ben’s body was essentially impervious to everything from X-rays to gamma rays.
Roy Barnes, one of the techs, a jittery man with a comb-over like an ocean wave, became so frustrated that he cranked up the dial and bombarded Ben with enough radiation to cook a TV dinner, vicious curiosity overwhelming the hastily written testing guidelines. The nanobots in Ben’s body had simply reformulated into a variety of molecules such as boron carbide to act as radiation shields, with other ’bots repairing any cell or DNA damage caused by stray radiation that made it through the initial defense.
Rickert had watched on a computer monitor as Ben sat quietly in the testing chamber, a tight grin on his face as the sensors in his body tracked the rising dosage. When the massive lead door finally swung open with a rush of air as the pressure equalized, Ben had stepped through in a blink, before anyone could react, and planted a gray finger in Barnes’s chest.
“Try that again, buddy, and I’ll drag you in there with me.” The tech cowered and stammered as Ben walked back into the room.
The techs had also discovered that the nanorobots functioned as solar panels, resolving into silicon to become photovoltaic cells which turned light into energy. At one point, the lab techs had handed Ben a light bulb and he’d illuminated it with a thought and tiny surge of electricity. The lab guys, all with enough diplomas to wallpaper a skyscraper, had no clue how any of it worked.
But what they couldn’t understand, the scientists could measure.
At one point, they had Ben climb onto a treadmill. He sprinted for 30 minutes at almost 50 miles per hour. When they started to get bored, he held his breath and galloped for another 15 minutes at top speed before slowing down, as the trillions of nanobots in his bloodstream took over as hyper-efficient red blood cells, transporting oxygen far more effectively than his original biological cells.
His vertical leap was enough to catapult Ben over a basketball backboard, and he could bench-press a Buick. His hyper-vision and ability to slow his pulse to nearly zero made him a record-breaking sniper, plunking a three-inch target three miles away with an MK 15 rifle, and his immune system tossed aside everything from mustard gas to weaponized bird flu.
Ben wasn’t immortal. He did eventually have to come up for air, and the desert shootout three weeks earlier obviously meant he could be killed. Not easily. But it could be done.
Rickert glanced over at Ben, who was obviously bored. He was concerned that Ben didn’t seem to grasp just how important these meetings were. If nothing else, they gave people a familiar environment in which to grapple with this absurd, im
possible situation. Those sorts of lighthouses would be invaluable in the coming tempest.
The assembled scientists had already seen most of these reports, but they scanned through them again in the conference room. Rickert walked through, again, the details of the elusive radar signals and blinded satellites. Most of these men had been part of his original team, quietly tasked to prep for the unlikely event of an alien encounter. As jarring as the actual reality of it was, at least they’d been considering it intellectually for years. A few of the scientists in the room, though, had been drawn from unaffiliated research teams, and Rickert knew many of them were still unsure if this was some kind of joke or a grand psychological test. If Shepherd hates meeting with the scientists, just wait until we start briefing the politicians, he thought. For now, all the eggheads were quiet, bobbing their heads like bespectacled chickens as he ran down the latest test results.
“So we have some rough idea of his physical capabilities”—Rickert waved at Ben—“and it seems clear, based on Lt. Shepherd’s report of the message he intercepted, that we’re looking at some kind of imminent assault, agreed?”
The concept of an alien invasion still seemed ludicrous to Rickert, even though he’d spent a decade training for such an event. He couldn’t imagine how this sounded to the other scientists, much less the tiny handful of military brass and the president listening in. Ben’s gray skin would not be denied, though. It forced everyone in the room to acknowledge the impossible.
Rickert wondered, not for the first or last time, how the hell he’d ended up here.
He thought back to his recruitment for this role. When he and his peers had been suiting up to head to Afghanistan in late 2001, he’d been approached by a CIA spook and told he had been selected for a classified assignment. Rickert had assumed the dour, chain-smoking spy meant some kind of psy-ops mission, counter-intelligence against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It was almost 20 minutes into the briefing before he started to figure out what he was really being asked to do.
He was being tasked with planning for an alien invasion.
Not that anyone ever said that out loud. Hiding behind jargon saved everyone the embarrassment of actually saying the words “alien invasion.” He’d been ordered to “assemble a full-spectrum defensive and counter-offensive portfolio against a Type I to Type II Kardashev-scale opposing force.”
The Kardashev scale was a theoretical ranking of the levels of technological sophistication a civilization could reach. Type I meant you were using and storing at least some of the energy from your local star. Type II meant you had reached the ability to use and store all of your star’s energy. At Type III, you were harnessing the power of all the stars in your galaxy.
That certainly wasn’t in the Taliban’s wheelhouse. It had slowly dawned on Rickert that this assignment was about potential non-human opponents. It all seemed like a joke. But the assignment came with a promotion to brigadier general, and he got to pick his own team, so what the hell. A star on my shoulder to stare at the stars, was the joke he told to the few peers of his who had enough security clearance to hear it.
I guess the joke was on me, Rickert though as he forced himself to concentrate on the meeting at hand.
“The problem, obviously, is that we’re extremely limited in being able to access the technology embedded in the lieutenant,” Rickert said to the room of waiting faces. “We know what he can do, but we don’t understand how he can do it, or if there’s some larger, as-yet-untapped capability.”
Ben felt his boredom curdling into frustration and anger. This meeting just seemed to drag on and on, and yet they were avoiding all the important questions.
He suspected he was far more than just a battleship with legs. But as instinctively as he had acted and reacted in battle with the other creature, Ben sensed those impulses were actually commands from the alien weapon. He hadn’t been controlling events, he’d been controlled by them. The gun had been a key. It had opened a door into a dark room, and he wasn’t sure where the light switch was or if it even existed.
Perhaps the insect alien had intended to point him to the light switch. Perhaps Ben could find it himself, stumbling through the dark, arms outstretched. Or maybe he’d march straight into a stairwell and go tumbling down.
Ben was also worried that he didn’t have much time. The encounter in the desert had been merely a prelude. He was sure of that.
He interrupted Rickert’s laundry list of test results.
“Look, I’ll do the dog-and-pony show as long as necessary. But we’re on a schedule. I can feel it. Someone or something is coming . . . and soon.”
The mirror shimmered to life, doubling as a video screen. Everyone in the room turned to see the face of the president of the United States, Lawrence Lockerman, who’d been listening in silently. He’d been elected on a folksy vibe, but word had gotten around quickly after the election that he had plenty of hard-ass in him, as well. Ben noticed everyone in the conference room sat up a bit straighter, but he was too annoyed for deference. Besides, he was retired.
“And what would you suggest, Lieutenant?” the president asked without preamble, setting aside his briefing folder. “Lot of people around here think you’re some kind of Trojan horse, think we should quarantine you. Maybe stash you on the International Space Station. That’s not the way I’m leaning. I’ve seen your file. I know what you’ve been through, both in the last few weeks and in your previous career. I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. But I’m not hearing much in the way of actionable intelligence.”
Lockerman leaned forward in his chair, like he was trying to crawl into the conference room through the TV screen.
“Now we’ve got your statement that you intercepted a last-second transmission saying more are on the way. What do we do? Even if we knew an entire alien armada was bearing down on us, what the hell do we do about it? Outfit some dinky satellites with a few nuclear missiles? Whatever technology we’re facing will be so advanced I suspect our best weapons would be like throwing stones at a tank. So, again, what do we do?”
“Goddammit, I don’t know!” Ben snapped.
He slapped his gray palm down on the computer table, which burst to life around his hand. Everyone else scooted their chairs back fast enough to leave skid marks in the linoleum. Even the president flinched.
Ben kept his palm on the table, and he watched as formulas and schematics and documents tumbled virtually out of his hand and spilled out across the surface of the tabletop computer. The files at first scattered haphazardly, but soon began to organize themselves into stacks and columns. Neat animated piles of data poured forth. What looked like images of circuits and spaceships and mathematical proofs arced across the touchscreen, blueprints, and instruction manuals.
Everyone leaned forward again.
At last, the avalanche of information came to a halt, the files moved to the background, and the table and the three screens in the room went black, then filled with stars. The lights in the room shut themselves off. The stars began to slide up the screens along the wall, as if the table were the canopy of a cockpit on a ship zooming straight down. Everyone in the room fought off a brief but intense bout of vertigo as the video accelerated, becoming a virtual reality display that sucked them into the scene. They weren’t watching a video. They were living inside it.
A map of the Milky Way. Zoom in not far from the galactic center, a journey of 10,000 light years in a blink. A planet, like Earth but not Earth, orbiting a yellow star, like the Sun but not the Sun.
Volcanoes and magma, then cooling over a billion years, as land masses emerge, yielding oceans and mountains and ice.
Down to the surface, through the ocean, at the floor. Microscopic, simple organisms milling about. Flash forward, the organisms get larger and more bizarre, with teeth and claws.
Another 100 million years, and an explosion of plant and animal diversity, life everywhere.
Another billion years or so, and the first lobster
-like creatures are venturing onto land, scuttling through rocks and tiny grasses.
A billion more, and the lobster creatures have morphed again, into what look like giant armored beetles and ants and scorpions and other arthropods armed with clubs and horns and fangs.
Earthquakes and meteors and ice ages take their toll. The giants die off, but a race of smaller grasshopper-like creatures begins to spread, gifted with unusually large brains and claws that have developed long, articulated fingers with each “hand” sporting multiple thumb-like appendages. These creatures eventually call themselves brin.
Fire, iron, cities, and flight. The planet is wrapped in a cocoon of digital information. A new age.
Then fair-looking visitors arrive in gleaming ships.
At first, these travelers, called mrill, bring tools and knowledge.
Then many more shiny ships arrive, with news of catastrophe on their home planet. The ambassadors are stranded, shipwrecked, on one of the few habitable islands in the black galactic ocean. The friendship withers, replaced by suspicion and resentment. The visitors retreat into their cruisers and battleships high above the planet’s surface to think and plan. The brin build bunkers and fighter craft. Negotiations are over before they begin. Missiles and energy blasts and asteroids are hurled from above.
The defenders are numerous, studious, and desperate. The mrill, though, have kept some secrets back, some weapons in reserve. When the brin decline to surrender, when they refuse the terms and slaughter the emissaries, the mrill respond with swarms of nano death, tiny robots sprayed in the clouds that rain down and devour plants, animals, buildings, women, and children. The mrill program the nano invaders to spare the strongest warriors. The weakest are consumed in agony; cities and families disintegrate in puddles and dust. The strongest can only watch, powerless to repel this final assault as their world turns to ash. They beg for mercy.
In secret, brin scientists race to decode the nanotechnology. Billions are dead, destroyed. As a race, they’re finished. Their best hope is slavery.
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 5