“To the Moon, Alice!” was terribly formatted for mobile screens (and Campos didn’t have a clue what the title referred to), but this guy Goldberg had a sense of humor that a lot of science blogs didn’t. So he squinted at his phone’s four-inch screen beneath the cold light, zooming and rotating as much as possible to make the latest post readable.
Campos scanned through the entry on satellite jobs with interest, half thinking of applying. Goldberg was right. This was weird.
Campos manually copied and pasted the link into his Twitter app (he figured Goldberg probably didn’t know Twitter from a Twizzler) and fired it off to his own small band of followers.
A rumble. He looked up. The bus was here. He turned his screen off with a thumb press and dug deep in his pocket for change.
President Lockerman looked down at the front page of the business section of the LA Times. It wasn’t a huge article, modest placement, but there was enough info there for smart people to start asking questions. Some of them had already started. Lockerman sighed and looked around the room at his assembled advisers.
“Gentlemen, we’re gonna have to pick up the pace. I don’t think we have much time before this all blows open.”
8
The hulking V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft thumped from the Arizona sky down toward the landing pad of Phoenix Aerospace. Ben looked out the window at the swirl of sand kicked up by the twin rotors that had flipped from horizontal flight mode to vertical takeoff-and-landing mode. Dusty hills and small mountains ringed the desert valley. The city some 10 miles away was an artificial oasis in this wasteland, willed into existence and maintained only with constant labor. A green island in an ocean of sand.
It wouldn’t take long for the desert to swallow all of this if mankind disappeared. Within a year or two, it would be mostly dunes. Within a decade, there’d be no sign humans had ever set foot there. Technology had enabled people to carve out this spot. Technology might now wipe it out.
All the sweat that had been poured out in the sand would evaporate in an instant.
“I love Phoenix,” Rickert yelled over the cacophony. “Great golf courses.”
Rickert had leaned over to speak to Ben, but it was merely habit. The roar of the engines made it impossible to hear except through a microphone and headset. Well, impossible for Rickert, anyway. Ben’s internal computers filtered out the rumble of the Rolls-Royce engines so he could monitor any and all chatter on the alien frequencies bathing the planet. For now, all was quiet. But he knew it wouldn’t last.
“I’ll probably retire out here someday. Hot as hell, but like they say, it’s a dry heat. You rake your sand, check your shoes for scorpions, and, you know, it’s nice. You a golfer?”
Ben chuckled in spite of himself and relaxed a bit.
“No, sir, can’t say that I am. Guess I never could figure out which striped shirt should go with my checkered pants.”
Rickert grinned, and the Osprey touched down with a clunk.
The rear loading ramp descended with an electric whine, and the two soldiers walked into the desert furnace. On the tarmac, some 50 feet away, a pair of rumpled executives stood hunched over, sweating and clutching their ties against the swirling wind. Seeing Ben and Rickert, they started to approach, then looked at the rotors and stopped. Even though the blades were some 20 feet above the ground, the instinctual fear was strong enough that even trained pilots regularly hunched their shoulders.
Reaching the pair of Phoenix Aerospace managers, Rickert extended his hand and motioned toward the main building, a long, brown structure that blended in with the environment, indicating that they should all start walking. The execs were frozen, though, gawking at Ben’s silver skin that almost glowed in the blazing sun.
“Appreciate you meeting us on such short notice, gentlemen,” Rickert said. “As you can see, we’re here with some unusual news. We understand you guys are the best there is, so we want to get your input as soon as possible on this project.”
“Of . . . of course,” one of the managers finally stammered, southern drawl unmistakable even in his agitation. “I’m Montgomery Winterton, CEO here at Phoenix—Monty is fine—and this is Bill Hemming, my chief operating officer. We, uh, I’d be happy to give you a little tour . . .”
“Later, perhaps,” Rickert yelled as the V-22’s engines spooled up again for takeoff. He finally persuaded the execs to start walking as the aircraft rose back into the air, ascending a few hundred feet, and then flying off as the rotors tilted back down into their horizontal flight position. It would come back to retrieve them later, but the harried crew had three other assignments before then.
“Afraid time is very short, and we’ve got a lot of ground we need to cover. Some of it will be hard for you to hear.”
As they entered the main building past a pair of broad-shouldered security guards armed with automatic rifles, Winterton and Hemming exchanged sideways glances and swiped their entry badges on scanners on the doors. The guards stole glances, too.
Ben intercepted the brief short-range wireless signal from the badge scanner and absently decoded the data stream and stored it away. The doors opened with a whoosh and the four men stepped inside as the roar of the V-22 finally disappeared.
Inside, the group walked down a hallway, more badged doors, to an executive conference room on the second floor. The conference room had a massive window on the south wall overlooking the landing pad outside and an even larger window on the north wall looking down on the first floor where the research and development lab sat in the middle of the complex. In fact, the ground floor was actually a subterranean floor, dug down into the sand and rock. Even though the building appeared from the outside to be only two floors tall, the R&D lab actually was four floors deep. It kept the facility a bit cooler and minimized vibrations for the delicate work.
Technicians and engineers were bent over workbenches littered with laptops, microscopes, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and other tools and measuring equipment. In the middle of the floor sat a half-finished minivan-sized satellite, its guts splayed out. Teams of workers swarmed the machine.
As the visitors stared quietly down into the teeming space, Winterton took a deep breath and tried to regain his composure.
“Before we start, I guess you’d like to see what your first billion dollars has bought you. We’re three weeks in, and I’ve never worked on a schedule like this before. It’s insane. After 9/11, I thought I learned what ‘rush job’ meant. But this is something else.”
Winterton looked over at Hemming, who was still gaping at Ben. The two execs had rehearsed their presentation as a tag-team, but the CEO realized he was going to have to fly this mission solo.
“You know, I had a little speech planned, where I was going to ask what the hell this is all about. But I think you’re gonna tell me anyway, so let’s skip the speech and have a drink, eh?”
Winterton pulled a small drink cart from beside his desk, pulled the cap from a bottle of whiskey, and poured four glasses. The gray-skinned guy smiled.
“Sir, I appreciate the hospitality and the curiosity. My name’s Ben Shepherd. And that looks and smells like exceptional liquor. The general here will have to pass, I’m sure, as these are working hours for him. But technically, I’m retired. So don’t mind if I do.”
Ben shot the single-malt back with a snap, but Winterton could see that he held the liquid in his mouth a moment to savor the flavor. So he isn’t a total barbarian.
Ben set the glass down. Rickert had indeed passed on the drink.
“It’s pretty straightforward, really,” Ben said. “An alien invasion is coming, and I’m the closest thing we have to Paul Revere. If we don’t get this equipment online in a few months, we’re all going to die.”
Everyone went quiet. Winterton took a sip from his glass.
“So this is the part where I call BS, and you convince me. So convince me.” Ben nodded and disappeared, leaving his clothes hanging in midair around
his now-invisible body. Winterton dropped his glass. The invisible man struck like a cobra—an empty sleeve where an arm should have been darting out and seizing the glass before it could strike the ground. The glass floated in the air, and was then deposited on the table.
“Well, that’s a sight.”
“I planned a speech, as well,” Ben said, his disembodied voice floating out from somewhere above his empty collar. “I think you’ll want to hear mine.”
Twenty minutes later, Winterton stood up from his desk and walked over to the window looking down on the manufacturing floor. “So we’ve got maybe a few weeks before the first wave arrives, huh? You know, I served in the first Gulf War. Desert Storm. Marine Corps, 1st Marine Division, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, and we drove right into Kuwait City.”
His gaze never left the activity in the R&D lab, like ants frantically repairing their hill that a child had poked with a stick.
“Supposedly it was a cakewalk, and I guess in retrospect it was. But we all thought it was the end of the world, and even as a first lieutenant, I about near soiled myself during our first combat encounter. Other guys actually did. You know what that’s like?”
Ben nodded.
“Yep, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t get a bit weak in the bowels during their first firefight.”
“No kidding. Never saw so much damn puke,” Winterton added. “Turned out, it was just a couple terrified Iraqi regulars popping off with AK-47s from behind a blown-up tank. But hell, we thought it was the entire Republican Guard coming to chew us up, and we dropped enough ordnance on those two poor bastards that I’m surprised we didn’t strike oil.”
Winterton refilled his glass without breaking stride. He raised an eyebrow at Ben, who waved no.
“Point is, we were trained marines, with solid intel and overwhelming firepower, and we still acted like a bunch of high school football players walking into an NFL stadium for the first time. Now, you get over that first reaction pretty quick, but it takes a lot of training and some really bloody experience.”
He sipped his glass, then shrugged and slugged the whole thing and set the empty glass back on the cart.
“So now here we are, and we’re about to put everyone on Earth into the fight, from used car salesmen to proctologists, against a bunch of aliens with enough guns to turn our whole planet into a crater, and you’re banking on anything other than total panic and chaos? How exactly do you think you’re going to keep this from turning into a gigantic clusterfuck?”
Rickert spoke up.
“Maybe we can’t. It’s gonna be a hell of a situation, no doubt. But believe it or not, we do have some contingency plans on the shelf for events like this. And that’s where you come in. We have to know: Can you build these machines in time?”
Winterton rubbed his forehead and turned to Hemming, who had been silent throughout the conversation. He finally seemed to be regathering his wits, though.
“Bill, you’re the operations guru. What do you think?”
“Well, uh, you see, between fabrication and software development, we’re, uh, looking at least, maybe, around 40,000, maybe 50,000 man hours, and then if you calculate . . .”
“But can it be done?” Rickert asked, with an edge of impatience.
Hemming, swallowed, looked around, and then found his courage.
“Well, yes. Just barely. But yes.”
Rickert gave a tight grin.
“Good. Now let’s go downstairs and we’ll see if the lieutenant here can’t take your prototype for a little test drive.”
Ben, Rickert, Winterton, and Hemming first passed through an outer airlock where a tornado of wind whipped off any loose grains of sand, dirt, hairs, or flakes of skin. Once the whirlwind had subsided, the next door slid open to a dressing room, where a dozen “bunny suits” hung on the wall. Rickert moved to grab one from a hook, but Winterton waved him off.
“Don’t need ’em,” he said. “Standard protocol normally, but the blueprints on this project made it clear that the hardware tolerances are high enough that basic compressed air decontamination is all that’s needed. Freaked my staff out something fierce for the first week or so, but they’re able to work a lot faster. Maybe even fast enough to get this thing built on schedule.”
Rickert raised an eyebrow and glanced at Ben for confirmation, who shrugged.
For all the data he now carried within his expanded brain, for much of it he was only a middleman. He could no more understand or analyze the information stored inside him than a hard drive could understand the programs stored on its magnetic discs. Ben could, however, control and analyze his own body in stunning ways. He thought back to his two-man battle in the desert that had seemed to play on fast forward. Most of that had happened on autopilot. The source code was walled off. Waiting for a trigger, maybe. Even the data Ben could access wasn’t always usable to him. The files were there and he could spit them out on command. If he had to actually assemble any of the machinery, though, he would be nearly useless.
He had begun to suspect that the brin had deliberately crippled his capabilities, giving him, in many cases, data but not knowledge. His concern over these roadblocks had only grown in the last few weeks. He hadn’t told Rickert or anyone else, though. After all, what could they do? They were all at the mercy of an extinct alien race.
The technicians didn’t even glance up when Winterton and his entourage walked in, the door sliding open and shut with a whoosh of air. The boss was normally down here several times a day, often carrying a tablet with a readout of technical specifications and progress reports. No one knew how to activate any of the machinery they were building or even what it really did, but the materials and construction blueprints were atomically precise. If the hourly readout deviated at all, Winterton was down on the floor, pushing everyone back on track. It was like building the Transcontinental Railroad with blindfolds on.
All the workers quietly prayed someone else was about to get his ass chewed out. They didn’t bother to glance at the other visitors. Whoever else the boss had brought down would just be the latest in a procession of suits and uniforms demanding to inspect the product—whatever the product was. It was a satellite, everyone knew that. No one could figure out much more than that, though. It seemed to be a telescope or measuring device of some kind, with its array of sensors and probes. The processor at the heart of the machine was apparently a quantum computer, which in theory could crunch numbers far faster than any traditional digital computer. But no one on Earth had ever designed or built a quantum computer that did anything useful. They were science projects . . . until now.
Assuming this one did do anything useful. There was no “on” button. Like the sword in the stone, everyone in the building had taken turns, fiddling with hardware and software to unlock this mystery, to no avail. Not that they had a lot of time for tinkering, as the schedule demanded round-the-clock labor. Some of the staff had taken to sleeping in conference rooms and most hadn’t shaved in days. The delivery pizza was usually lukewarm at best when it arrived, thanks to security and airlock delays. Everyone was grumpy as hell, heads down on their projects.
Winterton steered the group to a small cluster of engineers huddled over a workbench covered in laptops and other equipment. The handful of workers at this station were clustered around one portly comrade, who was rocking back and forth on his heels as he lectured the team.
“. . . no, dammit, we can’t ask them to reprogram the actuator module. It’s all connected. If we swap out the software now, they tell me that every component must be reprogrammed. And for what? Because we missed our spec by a millimeter? Nope, we need to do it again and do it right. Plus . . .”
Winterton laid a hand on the excitable engineer’s shoulder.
“Heya, Bert. How we doing?”
Goldberg turned his head.
“Oh, hi Mr. Winterton, fine, sir. Just working through some hiccups. We’ve got most of the software routines running to code, but just
need to fine-tune the tracking programs and debug some of the targeting systems. Unfortunately, we’ve hit a snag with the actuators, but once we get the kinks worked out, we’ll, uh, holy hell . . .” He trailed off, spotting Ben and his silver skin for the first time.
“Yeah, that,” Winterton said. “We’re going to talk about him in a minute. Right now, though, I need to know where the prototype stands. Are we a go for phase one testing?”
Goldberg swallowed a couple times and the other workers remained quiet. Winterton made a rolling motion with his finger. C’mon, spit it out.
“Yes, we’re a go. But again, we still don’t have any kind of control module or data uplink. We’ve got a car with no key to put in the ignition. Now, I had some thoughts about the initialization . . .”
Ben glanced over at the prototype satellite and, again, his vision flooded with data and he knew what to do. Every piece of electronics on the nearly finished satellite burst to life, and dozens of robotic limbs began flexing and retracting and extending as Ben established a wireless link to the machine. The workers in the room stumbled back in nearly synchronized shock.
A high-pitched whine soon rose over the roar of confusion and excitement. As the machine whirred and rotated and various parts locked into place, the whine became a scream and a bulb of red light blossomed on the tips of the various metallic stalks reaching up toward the roof.
Ben reached out mentally to the controls for the retractable roof, pinging a signal to the receiver on the wall, using the key card access code he’d intercepted and decrypted on the way into the building. The control panel blinked from red to green. The aluminum slats folded back like a geisha’s fan, exposing the cerulean heaven above. The air in the room began to shimmer, then vibrate, as the sound waves splashed back and forth. The engineers, scientists, executives, soldiers, and guards cupped their ears, nearly deafened and paralyzed by the tidal wave of sound and fury. Only Ben stood still, undisturbed, awash in supersonic streams of data and diagnostics. Inside the machine, hydrogen gas was ionized, adding electrons to each atom of the gas. Negatively charged ions flooded an ion acceleration chamber.
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 8