The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  Ben shook his head, trying to whip the invading memories from his brain. No time for the past. Focus on now. Too much at stake.

  No one else gets hurt. He had the power now to save everyone.

  He looked away from the rolling planet below and out to the stars. Half a dozen communication and several more combat satellites were outlined in white and green. All the combat satellites were online, with every reactor showing 90 percent power output or better. In the distance, the crescent moon gave a Cheshire grin. Beyond that pockmarked ball, a few dozen mrill ships, outlined in red, were coming in, advancing under the indifferent gaze of a billion stars. They had cut into the solar system behind the sun, then navigated to arrive at Earth from behind the moon. According to the readout, these first ships were light reconnaissance and warfare drones with preprogrammed orders. Plenty of firepower, though, for an unprepared planet.

  The brin research had said the mrill wouldn’t attempt to bombard Earth with conventional weapons like antimatter bombs or asteroids or nuclear missiles. The goal, after all, was colonization. Hard to live on a molten, radioactive rock. Besides, the mrill liked to think of themselves as clever. During a ground battle with the brin for control of a minor city, the mrill had broken through the brin line, leaving hundreds of dead soldiers in their wake. Then the advance had ground to a halt, as the mrill had seemed to lose the initiative, digging in when they should have been advancing. With time to regroup, the brin had bombarded the mrill all night with heavy artillery, antimatter shells exploding in purple flame up and down their trenches. By morning, the mrill had retreated and withdrawn to their camps. The brin collected their dead, gathering their mangled bodies for ritual cremation. Six hours later, the corpses had been collected and gathered in a storage facility near the brin command center.

  That’s when the mrill had detonated the 143 bombs their engineers had buried in the bodies of the dead brin, vaporizing the command center and the two thousand or so soldiers resting nearby. The mrill then marched into the city without firing another shot, executing every survivor. It was a tactic that would never work again, but the mrill didn’t care. The point had been made.

  The sensors in Ben’s ship couldn’t detect what weapons the mrill scouts carried, but the brin had guessed (and Hawthorne had agreed) that a swarm of invisible nanobots was the most likely. Instead of indiscriminately melting every living thing on Earth, as the mrill had done with the brin, these tiny invaders would likely be programmed to rain down on major cities, then quietly devour any humans they fell upon. It was a weaponized version of the machines running through Ben’s body. Scientists had speculated that, if the nanoclouds were successfully dispersed, they could probably eat their way through most of the human race in just about two weeks. When they were done multiplying and consuming, the nanobots would most likely shut down as the mrill fleet arrived to an empty planet, inert dust that would disappear in the wind. No muss, no fuss, no mess.

  “Liberty-1, this is tower, what are you seeing?”

  “We’ve got what looks like thirty-six bandits coming in behind the moon, just as we thought. Weapons scan inconclusive, so I’m assuming nanobot payload, with possible additional hardware. Range to targets is 49,000 kilometers and closing at a rate of 279,000 kilometers per hour. I don’t think they’ve seen me yet. Battle satellites still in passive mode to avoid detection, but it’s going to get lively in a minute.”

  Ben sent his ship blazing past the International Space Station, which had also been outfitted with a bristling array of weaponry, and on toward the moon. A skeleton crew was still on the ISS, the minimum human contingent needed to keep the station aloft. The drones could now see Ben’s ship and began to slow, less than 20,000 kilometers from Earth. Both groups were still too far apart to attack each other with their ship-based guns. The battle satellites were much more powerful, though, and the mrill robot ships had yet to realize that Earth had its fists up.

  Ben mentally selected the nearest satellite, orbiting a few hundred kilometers above South Africa, and it unfurled like a spider. Red lights winked on at the tips of its antennas as the hydrogen ionization chamber spooled up. This would be the first time any of these weapons would be fired in space. The brass was worried test shots would tip their hand to the mrill, not to mention terrify any humans who spotted the incandescent beams. In fact, even the remote test fire in Arizona had not gone unnoticed. A high school rocket team had set up camp not far from the Phoenix Aerospace base and was shooting video of their launch prep when the stream of fire had exploded into the sky. The video was crystal clear, at least until the sonic boom startled the cameraman, who dropped his phone. Before the feds even knew the video existed, it had three million views on YouTube.

  Ben watched the ionization readout on his display quickly climb to 100 percent. Detecting the threat, the mrill drones began to scatter. Ben selected the nearest ship some 7,000 kilometers away, and the satellite, Pincer-7, rotated slightly. A surveillance satellite trained on the incoming ships pinged his display as a canister about the size of a football burst from an open panel on the mrill ship and streaked toward Earth. The video beamed directly to Ben’s eyes was also transmitted down to the teams on the ground. Ben knew Rickert was seeing the same thing he was, but he had to make sure.

  “Incoming projectile from mrill drone,” Ben said, a little louder than he’d intended.

  “Roger, Liberty-1, you are cleared to engage at your discretion.”

  Ben fired the satellite. The inner chamber of Pincer-7 glowed with a scarlet fury for a fraction of a second, then the molten beam scorched the vacuum and obliterated the drone in another fraction of a second. The ship disintegrated in a puff of flame, the shrapnel vaporized. As the satellite oriented to the next ship, Ben accelerated his ship to intercept the tumbling canister. Two more mrill drones ejected gray canisters and sent them hurtling toward the blue planet. Ben opened fire with his short-range cannons, green droplets of energy annihilating the ejected canisters while the red beams from the satellite targeted the mrill ships. The mrill drones responded with their own short-range weaponry, staccato blasts of blue that skittered through the dark, like poisonous centipedes.

  Ben piloted his ship through the swarm. His conscious mind was, again, largely irrelevant, an observer and, if necessary, an arbiter. A big-picture guy. But for this ship-to-ship network, it was simply too slow to handle most of the decision making. So while his body dodged and parried with the mrill drones, Ben let his mind operate the defensive satellites. He picked his targets deliberately, aiming for the closet mrill ships, those preparing to dumping their genocidal payload on Earth. Red beams carved through the empty space, incinerating the mrill ships like paper airplanes gliding through the path of a flamethrower. Six, seven, eight mrill ships were torn apart. Nine, ten. But they kept coming, and now they were fanning out around the globe, probing for holes in the safety net, like wolves encircling a flock, making it harder for Ben to track and destroy each ship. There were huge gaps over portions of Asia and Europe, the result of too little time to build the necessary satellites.

  The battle migrated above the Earth, from North to South America, across the Atlantic and up the west coast of Africa, then down the Middle East and across India. The main cannon on the International Space Station stabbed out into the vacuum, then a second time and a third. The drones measured the threat and attacked, swarming the ISS from every direction. The short-range defensive weapons on the station fired, straining to repel the assault. Ben maneuvered closer to assist, but another handful of drones chased him off. He struggled to fight through the diversion, but even as he chopped through the drones, another group cut through the space station’s defensive barrage. The cannons scattered across the gantries continued to fire, picking off mrill drones as fast as they could. There were just too many of them. One drone raked the massive solar panels on the port side while another blasted the Zvezda Service Module, which contained the station’s life support systems. The pressurized compart
ment burst, spraying out metal, plastic, and oxygen.

  “No!” Ben screamed, straining in his seat even as he blasted another drone.

  The loss of Zvezda was an eventual death sentence for the three-man crew of Expedition 37, unless they were able to escape back to Earth in the Soyuz return ship. Huddled in the Tranquility module to keep the station operational and combat-ready, the three crewmembers, two American and one Chinese, had at most 30 minutes to live. The mrill had no intention of granting them even that long.

  As Ben destroyed the last drone that had chased him off and turned to speed back to the ISS, a pair of mrill ships skimmed over the crippled space station and ejected a pair of glowing orbs that zoomed toward the structure. With his enhanced vision, Ben could see the faces of the three men peering out through the panoramic cupola viewing platform. They were bathed in the orange glow of the pulsing orbs. Ben fired as he turned, straining to intercept the incoming artillery, knowing he was already too late. The two glowing spheres clamped onto the metallic structure and exploded.

  The ISS was transformed into superheated plasma in an instant, briefly as bright as the sun, but slowly enough that Ben’s new eyes captured it all and burned the image into his brain.

  A millisecond later the shock wave arrived, traveling at 12,000 miles per second. It was just enough time, just barely, for the spinning petals of Ben’s ship to fold around his cockpit and lock in place, forming a protective cocoon. Then the blast enveloped the ship and ejected it away from Earth, toward the moon. Even with the antigravity technology, Ben was whipped about, his head slamming against his seat as various bits of electronics fizzled and sparked. His display shimmered and flickered as the spinning of the ship caused the sun, moon, and Earth to careen across his vision like a spinning top. Gamma radiation splattered over the ship, but a layer of tungsten in the cockpit and the boron carbide nano-shielding in Ben’s body protected him from the vast majority of the damage. The rest could be repaired. Earth would be less lucky, Ben knew.

  Even this miniaturized supernova would dump enough gamma rays on the exposed side of the planet to hurt a lot of people, maybe even kill them through short-term burns or long-term cancer. But the mrill didn’t want to sear the Earth and turn it into a radioactive, roasted rock. If they had wanted that, they would have simply carpet-bombed the planet and left. These munitions were a show of force. Or, rather, a bit of chest-thumping. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. It was effective.

  As his ship lurched off into the dark, kicking away from Earth like a pool ball scattered by the opening break, Ben’s body felt frozen, immobile, useless. Even out here, in the black absence of gravity, he felt the weight of his responsibility, his guilt, pressing on his chest. He’d met the space station crew a few weeks ago, before their launch. The two Americans—Jeff Schweitzer and Greg Dent—were former Air Force pilots, while the Chinese crewman—Zhang Wei—had served as a nuclear engineer aboard China’s first nuclear submarine. They were fighters and thinkers, and they knew they were volunteering for what was likely a one-way trip. Ben had thought of them as his personal responsibility, the only other people directly engaged in this first battle with the mrill, but without the benefit of his hyper-tuned physiology.

  They had been exposed, like gunners in the ball turrets on the bellies of World War II–era bombers, dependent on the pilot to guide them through the flak and bring them home safe. And he had failed them. There weren’t even any bodies to bury. He knew he would remember his failure, carry it like a cross, as long as he lived.

  A panicked thought hit him even as his battle sense tried to shove these debilitating obsessions away. With these new nanomachines patrolling his body for disease and injury, just how long would he live if he didn’t die in combat? A hundred years? Two hundred? Forever? It would be the universe’s cruelest joke to make him immortal, powerful beyond human imagination, just so he could watch helplessly as everyone else died in agony.

  For a moment, Ben considered letting his guard slip, letting the mrill drones finish their work and turn him to so many particles of heated vapor, to mingle in the dark with the atoms of those he’d already let down. The only thing that stopped him was the knowledge that, if he did, the result would only be more death, the death of all mankind. No.

  Anger brought clarity. He felt the rage coursing through his veins as clearly as he had felt the initial nanobot injection on that cold New Mexico night. The anger overcame and transformed him, fresh armor and new will. His ship wasn’t out of control, it just needed his guidance.

  He found his bearings, found his targets, and fired.

  The dozen or so remaining drones blew apart like piles of straw in a tornado, and he almost didn’t notice how he screamed with triumph after each successful shot.

  Ben dipped down closer to the planet to avoid intersecting a spray of antimatter fire, and a faint glow of heat enveloped Liberty-1 as it dipped down into the atmosphere, compressing the thin air, then thundering back out. The final handful of mrill ships broke off into two groups. Four of the ships accelerated toward Earth for a bombing run, while the rest converged on Ben. Ben zapped two of the attackers with satellite fire, then accelerated to maximum speed to catch up with the bombers, who were spreading out to drop their ordnance on different locations across the planet.

  He destroyed two of the bombers, but the final two attack ships were closing on him from behind. Ben swiveled his craft around, now flying backward. He shredded his pursuers and their wreckage sank down toward the Indian Ocean. Only two bombers remained, both still armed with their nano payloads. The two mrill ships had finally identified the holes in the defensive grid and had split up to attack Europe and Asia.

  I can make it. I can stop them. I can do this.

  He repeated it like a mantra, a prayer. The ship hummed as he opened the throttle to the max, screaming down toward the planet. Warning lights flashed as he reentered the atmosphere with a rattling thud, but he shut them down with a thought. He was closing on the Asian attacker.

  The drone spun and spat fire as Ben chased it from above. He dodged the first few shots, but one finally found its mark and tore through one of the petals on the propulsion system. The ship shuddered and started to veer off course before he was able to redirect power and stabilize. Ben poured everything he had at the enemy, his own ship starting to tear itself apart in an effort to destroy its quarry. His vessel rattled with every shot, green light like St. Elmo’s fire enveloping man and machine. His targeting systems had been damaged, and his shots were missing and slamming down toward the surface of the planet. He could only hope they weren’t hitting anyone below.

  The mrill drone bobbed and weaved, popping diversionary flares and floating mines that exploded as Ben narrowed the distance between the two ships. Shrapnel pinged off the cockpit bubble, and Ben had to divert some of his computational power to targeting and shooting the explosive mines before they punched through his ship.

  He had to finish this quickly, within seconds. The other bomber was still out there. The drone he was pursuing was now beelining for Shanghai and its 23-million-plus residents. Ben pulled closer, and the flares and mines dwindled, then stopped. Empty. Ben honed in for a final shot when the drone’s canister bay opened. He retargeted his guns for the canister but, at that moment, a final mine popped out of the back of the drone. Clever machine, Ben had time to think as he squeezed off a round.

  The canister was vaporized, but the mine exploded before he had time to turn his weapon to the drone. The blast ripped apart the sky and sent Ben’s already damaged ship into a momentary tailspin. Warning lights and alarms flashed and screamed as he struggled to regain control. Sparks and fire and smoke began to fill the cockpit. Even as he spun through the air, he could see the drone he’d been pursuing reach Shanghai and open fire on the skyline. Ben brought his ship back under control and wrenched it back across the sky to chase down the mrill drone. There was a deep crack in his cockpit bubble, but it didn’t seem to be spreading.
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  The drone had seemingly decided that even if it couldn’t kill the entire population of Earth, it would take out as many of its inhabitants as it could. Tracer fire from defensive installations around the city illuminated the night, not that guns dependent on slow human computers had a chance to keep up. They couldn’t see the way Ben could see, not with his speed and precision. The drone was now darting between buildings, down through the streets. The kill would have to happen close, like a knife to the gut. So be it. Ben accelerated and his radio crackled to life.

  “Ben! Stop! Disengage! The other drone is making its bombing run still armed with its nano weapon!” he heard Rickert shout. “I repeat, disengage! Let the Chinese handle this one!”

  “No, sir, they can’t keep up with it,” Ben snapped back. “Half the city will be destroyed before they can bring it down.”

  The desperation in Rickert’s voice was unmistakable over the crystal-clear connection.

  “No, dammit. There’s no time! You have to let this one go and . . .”

  Ben snapped off the radio link with a mental command. There was time. There had to be time.