The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  Ben shifted in his seat and smiled. “Thanks, tower. Let’s kick the tires.”

  The techs and their equipment still were scattered around him on the ground of the massive hangar, although they had all been backed up 20 meters or so. But Ben wasn’t going out. He was going up. He flicked the retractable overhead doors open with a mental command. Once they’d rumbled open, Ben sent the ship slowly up into the air. The scaffolding around the ship slipped away, then the cavernous vehicle assembly building itself dropped out of sight, sending the craft into the clear, warm air of Cape Canaveral. To the east, the glittering sea beckoned.

  “Liberty-1, this is tower, looks like a beautiful day to fly. Godspeed, and good luck.”

  Ben took one last look around. The main launchpad a few hundred meters away buzzed with activity as workers prepped it for the next satellite launch. Everyone had to keep operating on the assumption the world wasn’t going to end today, that other battles were yet to be fought. Work also kept despair at bay; idle hands made for idle thoughts. There were sporadic riots and protests, from New York to Nairobi. New cults and conspiracies bloomed with the sunrise, and terrorist attacks were spreading in the chaos. Most things still held, though. Enough people still got up in the morning and went to work to keep the world turning. The lights were still on in most places. Businesses were generally open. Shelves were mostly stocked, and gas prices had surged, but not exploded. For now, fear was held in check.

  For some, this was the busiest they’d ever been. For those actively engaged in Earth’s defense, the frenzy of work simply didn’t leave any time for anxiety or despair. Indeed, for many of them, it was turning out to be a hell of a ride. The boundaries of technological possibility were being pushed back daily, thanks to the instructions and guidance from the brin, exposing new frontiers. For the scientists and engineers and programmers, it was like being present at the creation of a new universe.

  The petals of the ship fanned out, the complex geometric shapes on their downward-facing surfaces glowing a faint blue. The base of the ship, the ring of petals, began to spin, like an upside down helicopter. Ben scanned his display.

  Power output at 100 percent.

  He turned the ship on its side, the cockpit bubble rotating independently of the base to keep him sitting up.

  “Liberty-1, this is tower, what’s your readout.”

  “Tower, Liberty-1, I feel like I’m flying a magic carpet. Too bad you guys didn’t make this thing a convertible,” Ben said. He sensed this levity might be the last for a while.

  “Uh, copy that, Liberty-1, we’ll work that into the Mark 2,” the mission control team responded. “You’re clear for orientation maneuvers, and we’re looking at T-minus 15 minutes for orbital insertion. Go ahead and take it for a test drive.”

  During a normal NASA launch, flight control was turned over to mission control in Houston once the ship left the launch pad. But given the unusual circumstances, the senior staff at NASA had decided it was best to keep mission control in Florida, so they could keep direct visual contact with Ben as long as possible to closely monitor his test flight.

  Ben did a long, slow turn toward the sea and opened the throttle to one percent. Liberty-1 rocketed toward the turquoise water, the antigravity system minimizing the crush of acceleration inside the ship. His airspeed indicator flashed. Within three seconds, he was traveling at more than 500 nautical miles per hour. The spinning metallic petals left an intricate, woven contrail of blue ionized gas that extended about 50 feet behind the ship. Flight tests on a new fighter jet normally took years, if not decades. Ben had 15 minutes at the controls of a ship that was the first and only of its kind. But the biologic-to-digital link between his body and the ship made flying the alien spacecraft as natural as breathing. Ben sent the ship soaring and diving, cutting low enough to the surface of the ocean to draw plumes of water spray in the air, then screamed into the sky, slicing through the handful of clouds. He slipped past the sound barrier like a cat burglar, leaving not so much as a sonic whisper.

  “Engines and controls check, tower. Let’s go to weapons,” Ben said.

  “Roger, Liberty-1, the targets are up and you’re clear to engage.”

  Finding suitable dummy targets had been tough. Boats and airborne drones ended up being the best option, although everyone knew the mrill crafts were likely to be much faster and better armed. But there wasn’t time to prepare anything more, so this would have to do.

  Ben dove down toward the ocean surface, a dozen boats ranging in size from canoes to decommissioned cargo vessels popping up on his heads-up display. He scanned each target with the sensors embedded in the ship—now wired directly to his body. Faster than thought, he fired, blasting the ships apart in a mix of fire and steam.

  Ben gained altitude, searching for the drones and balloons while dialing back the power output of the guns. Again, he tore through them effortlessly, anticipating each evasive maneuver as every shot found its mark.

  In the control room, Rickert clutched an empty soda can as he watched Ben’s flight on a monitor, spinning and rolling the can in his sweaty hands,

  From a purely technical standpoint, it was a breathtaking performance playing out on the massive screens suspended on the wall above the control room. Rickert had never seen anything other than a hummingbird accelerate and maneuver like Liberty-1. He and his team had once envisioned something like this. They’d gamed out endless scenarios for what first contact with an alien intelligence might look like. Some had been peaceful, others less so. Most of the peaceful encounters had been straightforward. Any species that had the technology to reach Earth was necessarily more advanced, and if they were willing to be polite, then the only rational response was to be polite in return. Not everyone would be rational, of course, but that’s why you wanted trained professionals handling that first encounter.

  The scenarios involving hostile encounters were what kept everyone up at night. Most of them ended with lots of dead people. The only survivable scenarios for humanity involved some kind of third-party assistance, just as had occurred with the brin. If the mrill had shown up alone, mankind’s fate would already be written.

  The problem was that Rickert’s team could only offer so much advice. In the case of a hostile encounter without outside aide, the scenario was always a loss. Eventually, Rickert and his team had suggested two courses of action to mitigate a worst-case scenario. The first was to digitally archive every human record—every scrap of DNA, every history book, every work of art—store it on dozens of automated spacecrafts, and launch them in every direction at the first sign of alien contact. Even if every last person on Earth was killed, at least a record of mankind had a chance to survive. Perhaps another, more peaceful alien civilization would one day intercept one of the ships and have advance warning of an impending attack and maybe even revive humanity via cloning.

  The other recommended course was to begin colonizing Mars and the rest of the solar system as quickly as possible. Give mankind a place to retreat to, if need be. And accelerate the development of the technology that might one day allow a realistic defense of Earth.

  All leadership saw was a line item in the defense budget that would start in the billions and likely climb into the trillions. The reports were filed and forgotten.

  Rickert didn’t blame them. He hadn’t really believed any of this would ever happen. It had been an intellectual exercise, the ultimate dorm room bull session. He’d shrugged and gone back to work. Still, he was a bit pleased that his team had even predicted that something like the ship Ben was now flying would be required to even the odds against an invader—not that he nor anyone else had any idea how to build it.

  And even if Lockheed or Boeing or the Chinese or anybody else could have created such a marvel, without the brin antigrav technology, any normal human pilot would have been pummeled into a slushy bag of splintered bones and battered brains after the first 30 g-force turn. Ben’s body and mind had been remade, reinforced, and were
married to a machine that danced like a heavily armed angel on the head of a pin. This was pretty much the best of all the worst-case scenarios. Even so, Rickert was a nervous wreck. Ben was literally their only hope against a far better equipped invader. In truth, Ben and his fighter were at best a delaying force.

  If they could fend off the first wave of mrill, just long enough for mankind to build and equip an army of nano-powered warriors and ships, then humanity might just stand a chance.

  If not, Rickert feared, every last person on the Earth would be dead before spring.

  He barely noticed the excited chatter around him as the engineers and scientists drank in the data from Ben’s first test flight. He had been right that the technology wouldn’t be enough. Wars in the end always came down to people, and Rickert was still worried about that.

  The old general pulled out his phone and opened the file with Ben’s FBI background check, scrolling through it with flicks of his thumb. Like Rickert had said, it wasn’t the military service history or Ben’s personal life as an adult that bothered him. Back when Ben was eleven, he and his dad had gone out on their small fishing boat off the coast of Washington state to catch some skipjack and yellowfin tuna. They were supposed to return after three days. Instead, their boat had disappeared for two weeks after getting punched by a massive typhoon that had spun up out of nowhere. When another fishing vessel finally stumbled on the crippled Constance, Ben was the only person aboard. Eventually the investigators had determined that his father, William, had been swept out to sea by a particularly fierce wave that had nearly capsized the ship. It had taken days to get this story out of the nearly catatonic boy, though, and the report acknowledged that no one knew for sure how long Ben had been floating alone on the sea.

  Rickert turned the phone off and stuck it in his pocket. It would have to wait. Whatever was going to happen in the next few minutes or hours was literally beyond his control.

  Commander Miles Bennett, a veteran astronaut, was capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, on this mission, the person in charge of talking directly with the spacecraft. Rickert leaned over and tapped Bennett on the shoulder. “Commander, request to temporarily assume CAPCOM?”

  “Of course, sir. Transferring comms to your headset,” Bennett said. A green light lit up on Rickert’s headset, alerting everyone in the room that he was now acting CAPCOM.

  “Liberty-1, this is tower. We’re showing a 100 percent kill count, and green lights across the board.”

  Ben smiled. “General Rickert? Who let you on the mic, sir?”

  “Uh, affirmative, Liberty-1, I figured some adult supervision was in order. How are you feeling, lieutenant? Everything seem to be in working order?”

  Ben ran through his diagnostic programs once more in the blink of an eye and verified everything looked solid. “Roger, tower, I’m showing all clear.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m asking. How do you feel? How does the ship feel? We’re about to send you on a solo hike into uncharted territory and I want to know if your walking boots fit.”

  Ben looked down through his feet, the vacation-perfect blue-green water slipping by at Mach 4. All was quiet inside the ship. He took a deep breath and looked up to the cerulean sky.

  “I’m all laced up, sir.”

  Rickert felt the room around him go still, but kept his gaze fixed on the screen showing the ship, mankind’s ungainly salvation. “All right then, sailor, let’s go light a fire.”

  Ben nodded and, with a thought, sent Liberty-1-1 rocketing into the heavens, knowing that hell waited on the other side.

  12

  In an apartment building in Washington, DC, Arturo Vargas gathered his wife and two children around him and tapped an app on his smartphone. The TV was off, the lights were dark, the computer shut down. He could hear convoys of police and National Guard cars and armored vehicles rolling down his street every few minutes, but their lights were off and sirens quiet. There had been an initial surge of hoarding, but all the stores and shops had asked their customers to buy only what they needed. It was a polite request, and most had complied. Still, there was definitely a lot less bottled water on the shelves than normal. Vargas had turned off the lights and lamps because it seemed safer that way, for some reason, and the glow of the phone’s screen filled the room.

  “. . . and if you’re just joining us, we’re in the midst of one of the most bizarre battlefield broadcasts any of us can remember. Within literally minutes we’re expecting the first engagement in what governments around the world are insisting is an extraterrestrial invasion.”

  The normally unflappable newsman couldn’t quite keep the excitement and fear out of his voice. Vargas held his son and daughter a little tighter, but they were too young to understand what was going on, He wasn’t sure he understood what was going on. It was happening so fast: the president’s speech, all the soldiers in the streets, now these spaceships supposedly flying overheard, somewhere above the planet. It felt like a dream . . . or a nightmare.

  “But even as we’ve seen extraordinary preparations on behalf of the largest militaries and defense companies around the world, there has been little to no independent verification of the threat,” the newscaster continued. “We literally do not know what is coming, and yet at any minute we expect to see something happening in the skies overhead. We’re . . . we’re, ah, getting no official video feed from any branch of the United States government, or from any other government on Earth, for that matter, but, true to its word, the federal government has not imposed martial law on the various research and amateur observatories around the country.”

  The newsman was visibly tense, hands curled in loose fists around sheets of paper, almost crumpling them into balls. Vargas had to admit he respected the guy for gutting it out, though. Some of the other stations had gone off the air entirely.

  “So, on the right side of your screen, you’re seeing a rotating live feed from some of the most powerful terrestrial telescopes. We don’t know where the first shots will be fired. The anonymous pilot we’ve all heard about will be responding and reacting based on what he discovers. In the meantime, all we can do is watch and wait. With so much information being withheld, or perhaps unknown even to our leaders, the best we have is educated guesses on what we face and how we’ll fight it.”

  He seems to finally be hitting his stride, Vargas thought. Maybe sticking to a routine during times of stress wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “To shed some light on these questions, we’re joined by Dr. Melvin Lewis, who holds a PhD in molecular biology from Stanford University with a focus in astrobiology, and Dr. Anusha Chandrasekhar, professor of astrophysics at Princeton. Both guests are at home with their families and are joining us via video call. Dr. Lewis, first to you. Given what has been disclosed publicly and assuming it’s all true, what is your assessment of the enemy force we’re encountering tonight?”

  “Well, Carl, again, assuming we have accurate data, we now can make several educated guesses. First, if the mrill race truly is looking at Earth for colonization purposes, then that’s a small piece of good news.”

  “In what way?”

  “If Earth is a hospitable environment for them, if our planet has a suitable atmosphere, gravity, and so forth, then their biology must be similar to our own. Probably carbon-based, likely requiring oxygen in some form, with their bodies likely composed substantially or largely of water. And more basically, if they need a place to live, then they must also be susceptible to injury and death in ways with which humans are familiar. They can be killed.”

  “I . . . hadn’t thought about that.”

  “Of course. The bad news is that, if they can travel across the galaxy to Earth, then obviously they’re much more advanced technologically than we are. They might have found ways to reduce or eliminate their biological weaknesses. In other words, they’re going to be very hard to kill.”

  “And, uh, Dr. Chandrasekhar, that brings us to your area of expertise. What level of techn
ology are we facing here?”

  “It is all speculation at this point and, frankly, I still am reluctant to believe this story of extraterrestrial attack. What evidence have we been given? None. Nevertheless, if this is all true, I will not mince words. Mankind will almost certainly lose.”

  “Ah, uh, what, uh, on what do you base that?”

  “The ability to travel between the stars in just weeks or months is a technology that is at least hundreds of years out of our reach. With an unlimited budget, we could not make a spaceship with human passengers that would reach even the nearest star in less than a thousand years using existing technology. And yet, this is the enemy we are supposedly facing. It would be like a Roman legion facing tanks and missiles. That’s not a battle, it’s a massacre.”

  The scientist’s bluntness seemed to be melting down the façade the newscaster had briefly been able to construct.

  “But, but, we’ve been told that the retired US military officer who received the alien injection . . .”

  “Yes, we have one man. Facing an entire army. The odds are terribly long. Now, I must say goodbye. If this is real, I want to spend my last moments with my family.”

  “Uh, it appears we’ve lost Dr. Chandrasekhar and . . . wait, we’re seeing some activity on the video feed from an observatory on the Canary Islands. Wow, look at that. Oh . . . oh my God.”

  Vargas pulled his family in tight.

  13

  Liberty-1 lunged at the upper atmosphere through the almost imperceptible tug of gravity. Ben focused on the tracking data displayed across the transparent cockpit, glowing outlines of major landmarks and skymarks flitting across his vision. Even with his super-focused senses, he still found a moment to marvel at the fact that he was now an astronaut, slipping from Earth’s grasp. Not bad for a kid who couldn’t even fly a kite, he thought.

  Hundreds of miles below, the Pacific Northwest rolled into view; the deep blue ocean topped with cotton candy clouds off the emerald coast. With enough distance, it all looked calm, serene, even motionless. The only danger was up here. That wasn’t true, though. It was an illusion. The illusion of distance. Down on the surface, the wind and water could grab you in an instant, pull you under, and smother you. Ben tried to shove the thoughts aside, but the alien technology in his body couldn’t help with that. While his eyes fed him the tranquil scene from out here in space, his mind shoved jagged fragments of memory at him. The boat. The storm. An arm clutching the gunwale, fingers digging into the old, scarred wood, the rest of the body invisible over the side. A child pulling on the arm. Straining. Crying out and begging, the sounds lost in the locomotive roar of the wind. Rain like a machine gun. The boat sliding and rising on the waves. Cracks of lightning at turns distant and immediate.