The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  They finally figure it out. They infiltrate the mrill’s communication network. The planet is mostly dead rock now, scorched beyond use in all but a few pockets, and the mrill must seek out a new home with inhabitants easier to subdue. Robotic probes have discovered another blue planet on the edge of the galaxy. It will take nearly a year to get there, even using star drives, but it is ripe for the plucking, populated by creatures even younger than the brin. Once affairs are concluded on this barren desert, the fleet will depart. The brin scientists record all this and present it to their leaders.

  The brin leaders surrender. There is no time to reverse-engineer the mrill technology and regroup. This war is lost. The mrill silence their guns and fly down to the scarred planet for final negotiations. All surviving brin are ordered to assemble in the capital city, some 100,000 weary soldiers out of more than a billion that once thrived. They will all kneel. But first, they bury their newest bomb in the ancient catacombs under the plaza where the ceremony will take place. The mrill wear magnificent, superfluous, golden armor. It shines in the sun.

  The bomb explodes, a second sun, melting the spectacular armor, its wearers and all in attendance. The brin are extinguished.

  All but one. In the fire and smoke and confusion, a single ship launches from the opposite side of the exhausted planet and twinkles into hyperspace. The technology accesses the universe as a ball of tangled string. Instead of moving down the length of the string, a ship can hop to different points where the string touches and overlaps. Travel is not instantaneous, but it makes otherwise impossible travel distances merely inconvenient.

  The jump is immediately noticed by the mrill, who surmise the ship’s intent.

  They dispatch a pursuer.

  The video ended. The lights came back on. All the scientists sat in stunned silence. Ben looked around. Rickert was lost in thought. On the video screen, President Lockerman rubbed his forehead. No one spoke.

  Ben thought of the friends he had, the friends he lost, and the friends he sent to their deaths. Just ghosts now. Shades that lingered, not angry, but simply lost. Ben thought maybe they wanted his blessing, an affirmation that they’d done enough for him, that they’d done right. He wasn’t sure. Had he done right? Had he made the right calls? The question pulled him into ever-tighter knots.

  He retreated further into his past. He thought of his childhood on the shores of the Pacific, and his father, the fisherman, in a red boat, motoring west at dawn, returning at shimmering dusk. When storms came through, Ben had waited by the radio, out on the pier, for the silhouette of the ship, named Constance, to rumble into view. As he’d gotten older, Ben had started accompanying the old man out to sea. Out into the storms. If you were lucky, you came home with the sun at your back. That fiery image pulled him to another world, the burnt planet and its inhabitants’ dying hope for Earth, a planet they would never see. Ben had become a hermit in the desert, fleeing all death but his own. War had a will of its own, galloping across the galaxy to the end of the Earth. It would happily kill everyone. Or Ben sensed he could handpick a few sacrifices to placate the horseman. Save many souls at the cost of his own. He could feel that choice being prepared for him.

  If there was a hell, Ben figured, it was a noose he had to endlessly drape around the necks of those who trusted him the most. So be it. He accepted his destiny.

  He leaned in.

  “We better get to work.”

  5

  President Lockerman slumped back into his chair in the Treaty Room of the White House and looked around the tired faces of his civilian and military advisers.

  He generally preferred working in this office; less dramatic and more comfortable for quiet thought than the Oval Office. It didn’t feel comfortable now. It felt only cramped and old, a tomb for a world that didn’t yet know that it was already dead. This isn’t what I campaigned on. This isn’t what I was elected for. He recognized the futility and petulance of the Let this cup pass my lips sentiment even as he thought it, and forced it down, slightly ashamed. Lockerman shrugged off his despair and sat up.

  “Miranda, what do you think?”

  Eight heads swiveled to face Miranda Hawthorne, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, who was fiddling with her glasses.

  Hawthorne had a fistful of degrees in everything from aerospace engineering to biomechanical engineering to theoretical mathematics to computer science from Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. She had fifteen patents to her name and had launched two successful startup companies focused on cloud technology and internet security that had netted her nearly a billion dollars. She was by far the richest person in the room—not that you could tell it from her jeans and ratty sneakers.

  Lockerman thought Hawthorne was not only the smartest person he had ever met, but probably the smartest he ever would meet . . . and she knew it. Talking to her was like talking to the bastard child of Einstein and a YouTube video comments section. The benefit of “fuck you” money, Lockerman thought.

  It hadn’t helped when she’d realized early in his administration that her position was largely ceremonial. Science advisers spent a lot more time judging high school science fairs than making policy. He knew she’d been thinking of quitting. Not anymore. For the last few weeks, she’d been in almost every meeting he’d been in, usually no more than a chair or two away. She was the only person who actually seemed to be enjoying this.

  “Seriously? Y’all still don’t get it?” Hawthorne said as she slid her black-framed glasses on. Seeing the distressed look on the president’s face, she waved her hands in a semi-apologetic manner.

  “Okay, look. Has anyone here heard of the Great Filter? The Fermi Paradox? The Drake Equation?”

  Blank stares. Lockerman knew better than to guess, and the rest of the attendees took their lead from him.

  “Okay, here, look.”

  She flipped open her notebook, clicked her pen, and started scribbling out an equation. The generals and other staff exchanged glances.

  “Don’t worry, guys. It’s really not that complicated. Here.”

  Lockerman glanced at the sheet of paper she slid in front of him.

  N=R*fpneflfifcL

  “I don’t even know how to say that out loud,” he said. “Give us the abbreviated version.”

  She tapped the tip of the pen on the notebook and glanced up at the ceiling. Lockerman could tell she was trying to bite down on the obscenity dangling on the tip of her tongue. She finally gathered herself.

  “That’s the Drake Equation. It’s a way of thinking about how many intelligent alien civilizations we should find in our galaxy, based on factors like rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with habitable planets, the likelihood of those planets to result in the formation of life, and so on. It’s not a law of nature or even a testable hypothesis, really.”

  Hawthorne slid the piece of paper back and forth on the table between her hands, spun it absently, and rocked a bit in her chair. Lockerman wondered if her one-time investors had found her manic habits as annoying as his old generals did.

  “But under some reasonable estimates, we would expect something like 100,000 advanced civilizations in our galaxy alone. And many of those should have been around for millions or even billions of years. Our solar system is pretty young, after all. Lots of old-fart solar systems banging around. Again, just an estimate, but not totally insane. Follow?”

  “I . . .”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Yeah, it’s full of variables that are more like wild-ass guesses, but still, good enough for government work, right? Anyway, the point is, unless life is literally unique to our planet, it should have occurred on lots of planets.”

  She looked around the room as if to confirm everyone was following, but plunged on before anyone could interrupt.

  “But that raises another question: If intelligent aliens are out there in such huge numbers, why haven’t we seen any evidence of them, before now? Where is everyone? That’s the F
ermi Paradox. Still with me?”

  “Is this going somewhere useful, Miranda?” Lockerman said, rubbing his forehead. He noticed that Hawthorne’s pulled-back red hair, with a blue-dyed streak on one side, was held in place with a simple rubber band. Whatever she spent her fortune on, it wasn’t clothing and accessories.

  She blinked, visibly swallowing her annoyance at the interruption.

  “Useful? This is the only useful thing worth talking about right now. Anyway, Fermi Paradox. Where are all the aliens? There have been a few suggested explanations. Maybe all the intelligent aliens avoid humans because we’re too stupid and not worth their time. Or we’re like a nature preserve. Don’t harass the primitives.”

  She grinned wolfishly at the room, heedless of the faces as stony as Easter Island statues.

  “Or maybe life is plentiful, but intelligent civilizations are not. Maybe lots of planets are teeming with simple life, just pond scum and worms, or even moderately advanced civilizations like ours. Those are the happy possibilities.”

  She stopped spinning her notebook, as if it had suddenly gotten too heavy to move.

  “The unhappy possibility is maybe there aren’t many advanced civs bouncing from solar system to solar system because something wipes them out before they can make that leap.”

  “You’re saying that most moderately advanced species go extinct before they can graduate to a level of technological sophistication that would allow them to guard against their own extinction?” asked General David Winston, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Exactly! He gets it!”

  Lockerman suspected she would have high-fived the gnarled soldier if he’d been sitting next to her.

  “This idea is called the Great Filter. Again, not a law of nature, but an idea. There’s something that shuts down alien civilizations before they get to the level where we’d see evidence of them all over the galaxy, such as radio signals. Now, the Great Filter is a scary concept when you think about it. Asteroids, gamma ray bursts, nuclear war, all these things could be the sort of endgame that squashes most civilizations before they get smart enough to prevent them. Or maybe there are civilizations that have made that leap but, once they do, they guard that privilege jealously.”

  “This is my tree house. No one else allowed in. You’re talking about the mrill,” Lockerman said.

  “Yup. Maybe the Great Filter isn’t some natural cataclysm or act of suicide. It’s other alien civilizations, chopping down potential competitors. It’s the mrill. Every time a prairie dog pokes its head up out of the ground, down comes the hawk. And we’re the prairie dog.”

  The room went quiet.

  Hawthorne sighed, exasperated, and flopped her hands in the air, sending the Drake Equation skimming across the polished oak.

  “Don’t you see, though? We have an ace in the hole. The brin. That’s our safe passage through the Great Filter. Well, not safe. But it’s a passage. We have to do what they suggest.”

  “So you think we should really start building all that machinery, all that stuff in the blueprints we just saw from the brin? That’s a hell of a lot of blind faith, Miranda. I’m just not sure.”

  “Faith? What’s that line about faith, from the Bible? ‘The evidence of things not seen?’ I think we’ve got the opposite of that. Plenty of evidence that I can see. You don’t really think this guy Shepherd is some Chinese plot, do you?” Hawthorne glanced around the room, her tone a mix of amusement and disbelief.

  Winston spoke up again.

  “I think we’re agreed on that front. But who’s to say he’s not some kind of trap, a Trojan horse? We build all this stuff, and it turns out it’s a bomb of some kind, or some other weapon the . . . the mrill are using to kill us from a distance.”

  Lockerman realized the general was still struggling to acknowledge that they were talking about aliens. He could feel Hawthorne’s contempt for the military man’s denial, but Lockerman sympathized. He was what he’d been trained to be. They all were.

  “Oh, come on,” Hawthorne said. “If the mrill are advanced enough to fly here from across the galaxy, they’re advanced enough to kill us without breaking a sweat. There’s no reason to try and trick us. Would you devise some fiendish subterfuge, General, if your opponent was a herd of cattle and you had a fleet of stealth bombers and guided missiles at your command? Why bother?”

  Lockerman sipped his coffee and leaned back. “But why us? Why pick a fight at all? Yeah, their homeworld is dead, and they want some place to crash, but why here? Even if we’re a minor nuisance, why risk any kind of confrontation with us when they could pick any uninhabited planet in the galaxy? What’s so special about Earth?”

  Hawthorne took her glasses off again, working the stems in her hand. She thought for a moment.

  “That’s an interesting question. Not really relevant to the immediate situation, but interesting. Maybe medium-sized planets with liquid water, rocky landmasses, and oxygen-rich atmospheres at a pleasant distance from a stable star are rarer than we realize. Maybe there are multiple Great Filters, and the first one is just hitting the lottery with a planet like ours. This may be as good as it gets. ”

  Air Force General Tim Linton verbalized the dark thought that had been bubbling in Lockerman’s mind.

  “Even with Lt. Shepherd, we’re in a hell of a jam here, aren’t we? He’s got some good tech, but we’re outgunned here.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Hawthorne said without hesitation. “I’d put the odds of a global holocaust, extinction of the human species, at something like . . . 75 percent. Maybe a smidge higher.”

  A murmur ran through the room, almost a rumble. Lockerman grimaced like a man gripped with a stomach bug who had just spotted a RESTROOMS—30 MILES sign.

  “Hey, cheer up. Could be a lot worse,” she added. “All in all, we’ve been pretty lucky. If this had happened fifty years ago, there’s no way we could build all the stuff in Shepherd’s blueprints. That said, I hope Congress has their check-writing hands limbered up. This is gonna get spendy.”

  This was the first piece of good news—well, manageable news—the president had heard all day. He was a lot more familiar with budget battles than space battles. He clicked open his own pen and pulled over Hawthorne’s wayward sheet of paper.

  “Hit me.”

  “Well, Mr. President,” she said, her eyes going unfocused as she seemed to start doing calculations in her head, “we’ve got a hell of a lot of defensive satellites to build. Normally, you can put together a bird in about 18 months or so, at about $500 million a pop. We can probably push that timeframe down to a about month if we really haul ass. But, you know, like they say in IT: fast, cheap, reliable. Pick two. We need fast and reliable, so better start pumping out those treasury notes.”

  Lockerman scribbled furiously, then sipped his coffee and made a face at the cold liquid, pushing the cup away.

  “We need fifty satellites, and I think we need to get them up as fast as we can build them. Who knows how long it will take the mrill to get their invasion ready. And to get these things in orbit quickly, you’ll probably want several more launch facilities than what we’ve got today, maybe a dozen.”

  Hawthorne drummed her fingers on the table.

  “I’d guess $100 billion for that part of the project alone, maybe more.”

  “Hell, Miranda, we spend more than that every year on interest payments on the national debt alone,” Lockerman said, not looking up as he jotted down the figures.

  “Yeah, and great job on that,” she replied without looking back down.

  Lockerman could sense the room getting annoyed at her tone, but he let it slide. Everyone’s ego would have to wait.

  “But this is just stage one,” she continued. “Assume the satellites work, and repel the initial nano assault. Next, the mrill will send troops, or more likely drones, perhaps with control ships in orbit. I’ll defer to General Winston on the shooting stuff.”

  “Mr. President, I think Ms. Haw
thorne is correct on this,” Winston said with a nod. “The science is above my head, but tactically, it’s pretty straightforward. I’d guess they’ll look to first cut off the chain of command of the global militaries of any size, and some kind of aerial bombardment with drones or manned vehicles makes sense. It’s what we’d do. So that means they’ll be targeting us, China, Russia, England, France, Japan, Germany, India, maybe a few others. But that raises another issue, sir.”

  “What’s that, General?” Lockerman said, swallowing a sigh.

  “Do we tell those countries, sir? Do we tell the world?”

  Now Lockerman did sigh.

  Hawthorne spoke up again, almost bouncing in her seat.

  “Precisely! You won’t be able to keep this secret for long. The satellite construction will be hard enough to keep a lid on. Then if you start building antiaircraft guns, sorry, antispacecraft guns and other defenses on the ground everywhere, the cat is gonna be out of the bag in about three seconds. And we’re going to have to bring in most, if not all, of the other governments.”

  The president slowly rotated the piece of paper on the table with his fingertips. The numbers and equations and dollar figures filled the page, and seemed to turn to gibberish as Lockerman swiveled the paper upside down, then become legible again as he returned the sheet to its original orientation. Around and around. Sense to nonsense and back.

  “We’re going to need help from a lot of people to pull this off,” he finally said. “We at least have to start putting feelers out there. At some point, this has to be a global effort. A lot of people are going to think we’re full of shit. That we’re making this up to hide some other agenda.”

  “That doesn’t even go into the cost of building that second line of defense,” Hawthorne interjected.

  “And what’s the ballpark on that, Miranda?”

  “I don’t know. A trillion, maybe?”

  Lockerman was quiet this time as he wrote then number down, then circled it, then underlined it. He started to write again, then set the pen down. Skull and crossbones was probably pushing it.