The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  Now the mrill had to either flee and regroup and let the guardians dig in further or press their numerical advantage and hope it was enough.

  Ben knew they would fight. It was what he would have done. He wondered how many other secrets the brin had locked away in his body. What other surprises would pop out when that dead alien race deemed it appropriate? God damn all of this.

  What’s that saying about gift horses and mouths? Eddie said in thought, his delight piercing Ben’s shadows.

  “The bad guys are flying blind now,” Eddie said out loud with a whoop. “We’re gonna play chess while these fools are playing checkers.”

  “You know how to play chess?” Nick chided.

  “You can’t see it, but I’m giving you the finger right now,” Eddie said. “Checkmate.”

  The first mrill ships were close to the cloud of mines, their confused sensors not registering the mines as anything more than random space debris. The antimatter bombs would only be in the center of the mrill force for a moment, though. If the ships accelerated or changed course, the bombs might not have enough time to gather the electromagnetic energy pulsing from the ships and detonate.

  The guns on the mrill drones unfolded from their fuselages. In the ­millisecond it took for their weapons to charge, the mines siphoned off a tiny fraction of that energy and detonated. Red antimatter slapped across the mrill fleet, dozens of ships destroyed instantly. Damaged fighters smoked and burned. Some of the wounds were fatal, and the burning spacecraft exploded like fireworks, green and yellow fireflies spiraling out into the darkness. The shrapnel was a secondary assault, raking more mrill crafts. The large command ships, traveling at the rear of the convoy, had avoided the mines, but were now pelted with chunks of the exploded ships ahead of them. They seemed to shrug off the smaller pieces, but one massive, spinning hunk of metal slammed directly into the main sphere on one of the command ships.

  A flame flickered briefly in the jagged crater and was then extinguished in the vacuum. The ship was crippled, and it drifted off slowly at an angle away from the battlespace. Secondary explosions from other damaged ships sent additional debris flying in every direction.

  The men shared a brief surge of hope. Maybe they could pull this off. They were still outnumbered thirty or forty to one, but they now knew the mrill could bleed. The trail of wreckage was a twisted road to victory, or at least the possibility of victory. Now the mrill fighters were closing in, but the men were within range of the satellites orbiting Earth. As the mrill powered up their guns, the three men did a tight loop back toward the attackers as a dozen satellites began tracking the enemy ships.

  Ben thought briefly of all the famous battlefields on the planet below: the muddy, rocky fields where cowards and heroes and everyone in between had crashed into each other, from Thermopylae to Gettysburg to Normandy. Once the bodies were piled high enough and the blood soaked deep enough, the ground was consecrated and hallowed. Whether driven by guilt or pride, if you piled enough dead in one spot, it forced people to remember. Those forests and fields were marked with bronze plaques set in stone, a clearing where you could assemble the survivors for a speech on green grass on a sunny day, visit with your children long after the survivors had died of old age.

  Not this time. This battle, perhaps the last battle, would be fought in a cold, empty void. Win or lose, there would be no commemoration here. Laser fire would vaporize the blood and bodies, gravity would carry off the remains, and the surviving machines would proceed to the next mission. Once this battle was over, there would be nothing left.

  Eddie, reading his thoughts, spoke out loud as everyone prepared to fire.

  “Maybe we won’t get a parade up here, but I’m going on a hell of a bender once we get back down there.”

  Across a thousand kilometers of emptiness, as sunrise poured over the edge of the Earth, the two armies opened fire. Bolts of neon energy filled the darkness, stabbing at their targets, while the ships danced and dodged the assaults. Ben, Nick, and Eddie hurled clusters of mines at the oncoming mrill ships while the satellites behind them tossed thunderbolts of ionized hydrogen. Ahead of them, the mrill ships dumped a wall of fire, hoping to simply overwhelm the defenders. The command ships held back while the fighters pressed in. The mrill were now avoiding the spots where the three men were dropping mines or trying to blast them apart from a distance. Some still slipped through and created mini sunrises of their own, destroying more ships.

  Ben and his team held back, not advancing too deep into the mrill swarm, letting long-range cannons on the satellites do their work. Swoop in and out, but don’t linger. A mrill bolt scraped across the edge of Ben’s ship, cutting a crease through the fuselage, and he felt it like a knife cutting across his own skin. Warning messages popped up in his vision, and he scanned the damage report. Nothing major, but the mrill were closing in.

  You okay, boss? A mental ping from Nick.

  Just a flesh wound.

  His bigger concern was that the mrill seemed to be herding themselves away from the satellites. Ben fired a burst from his cannons, sensing the explosion rather than seeing it as he maneuvered to avoid another ship coming in from behind. Staccato blasts of green skimmed past his cockpit, missing by no more than a dozen feet. Nick obliterated the chasing ship with a brief blast, but was then chased off himself. Ships seemed to be corkscrewing in random directions; the cumulative effect was to send Ben and his team banking deeper into space each time, a bit closer to the main fleet and out of reach of the satellites.

  Stay tight, Ben flashed. Don’t let them push us too far out.

  Keeping close to Earth, though, was like fighting in a school of fish. The mrill were everywhere. The mines were useless now, as everyone was too close and missiles were too slow. The satellites were firing at their maximum rate, picking off the disjointed invaders, but the mrill were now turning their attention to those devices.

  One exploded, then another. The mrill were down to about fifty fighters. The drones were effective but predictable and relatively easy to target. But there were so many of them, too many of them, and the three men, despite their best efforts, found themselves edging farther from the remaining satellites.

  Another satellite exploded. Several troop transports zoomed into the opening, preparing to stab at the planet below.

  Ben was about to order his team to chase the troop ship when Rickert spoke over his secure radio.

  “Bad news and good news, gentlemen. Bad first. Mrill reinforcements are here. Looks like this was just the first wave. You’ve got about a dozen of those larger ships incoming, surrounded by a few hundred drones. Enemy fighters coming your way. And there’s something even bigger coming in behind them. Possibly a command ship?”

  “I hope the good news is really goddamn good,” Eddie said as he downed two more mrill drones and swerved around three more, letting Nick pick them off. “Is Nick finally getting his fucking season pass to Disneyland?”

  “Better,” Rickert said. “Project X inbound.”

  Nick laughed. “And hey, the sun’s coming up. It’s gonna be a good day.”

  Ben glanced over to the horizon and caught a glimpse of the sun spilling again over the edge of the planet. Beneath the brilliant white light racing across the Atlantic Ocean, two dozen silver drones, reinforcements, were darting up through the atmosphere.

  “The cavalry is here,” Nick said.

  “I didn’t think the team was going to be able to pull it off,” Ben said. “Much obliged, General. And say thanks to Bert for me.”

  “Will do, and good luck.”

  Ben was about to respond when another volley of enemy fire lanced past his ship, several of them grazing the surface and causing the craft to shudder before stabilizing. Again, he felt the damage as his own pain. A satellite hovering over Africa blasted two of Ben’s pursuers. Several mrill drones broke off to attack the offending satellite.

  Now the human drones were here. As they came into range, the internal computers
inside the three men took over their navigation and targeting. While the drones had been outfitted with basic guidance systems and could be remote-controlled from the ground, those connections were primitive compared to the computers embedded in their bodies. Ben sensed that his team’s jamming signal was still active, keeping the mrill from working in coordination. They were still lethal, but were forced to rely on basic, crude tactics in the absence of their wireless link. The drone battle was lopsided in terms of numbers but evenly matched in terms of results, as the humans and their drones outmaneuvered their alien foes. Fire filled the sky as enemy ships ruptured and spilled open.

  The second wave of mrill fighters poured in. There were so many of them that they simply couldn’t attack all at once without being caught in their own crossfire.

  “They’re heading for Earth. The transports are heading for Earth,” Eddie said.

  “Take them out,” Ben shot back. “We can’t let them get on the ground. I’ll cover you.”

  “We’re on it,” Nick said.

  Nick and Eddie peeled off, chasing the troop ships down toward the nighttime side of Earth, near Siberia. As the mrill scuttled above Asia, the cannons on the ground opened fire.

  They blasted several of the drones, creating small, temporary suns in the darkness. Two of the fifteen troop transports were also destroyed. Two more were wounded, and they went into uncontrolled spins. As they slammed through the atmosphere, they began to heat up, then glow, compressing the air in front of them into incandescent plasma. They whipped around like pinwheel fireworks, debris and sparks screaming in every direction. As they neared the ground, one of the ships finally came apart, exploding across the desolation of Mongolia and eastern Russia. Day turned to night. The other ship stayed intact long enough to spear directly into the dark water of Lake Baikal at over 600 meters per second, nearly twice the speed of sound. The catastrophic impact gouged a temporary hole in the liquid and sent a roaring wall of water out in every direction. A small band of Buryat tribesmen camped along the shore had woken with the lights and now scrambled for cover. Before they could even begin to flee, the waves devoured them and washed their camp away like it had never existed.

  The other transports changed course, streaking west, and Nick and Eddie realized they were aiming for the hole left by the destruction of the cannon in Volgograd.

  “Wait, how do they know?” Eddie said.

  “Maybe they’re the ones who tipped off the Red Army guys,” Nick said.

  “Oh, man, they’ve got a presence on the ground already, somehow,” Eddie said. “No bueno.”

  He fired off a burst at another approaching ship, tearing it apart in the thin upper atmosphere, and was then chased off by a handful of drones. Nick followed in pursuit, blasting the drones as more ships descended.

  “It’s getting crowded down here,” Nick said. “I don’t think we can hold them off.”

  “Have a little faith, brother,” Eddie said. His pendant was tucked safely beneath his shirt, and the metal nudged him with every maneuver. He made a tight turn, destroyed the last of his pursuers, and pulled up off Nick’s left. They both bore down on a transport fleeing for the open plains and shredded it with their weapons. The ship disintegrated as it fell. A gaping hole opened in its side, and dozens of robotic foot soldiers, copies of the machine Ben had fought in China, were ripped out of the wound. Nick and Eddie picked them off as they tumbled down, not taking any chances. The last fragment of the ship slammed into the side of a mountain and exploded with a crack of thunder.

  “Let’s go check on our boy,” Eddie said.

  “We’re going to have to come back,” Nick said. “There’s a hole in our defenses here big enough to drive a planet through. They’re all going to be aiming for Russia.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll have better luck plugging it from above than below,” Eddie said.

  The two fighters rose back into the sky, headed toward the pulsing glow of battle.

  23

  “What am I looking at here?” Lockerman asked.

  “Mr. President, the Russian perimeter is barely holding up. The loss of the installation at Volgograd created a small gap in our defensive shield, and the mrill are attempting to exploit it. As you know, we have almost no control over the defensive satellites. They are either automated or controlled by Lieutenant Shepherd and his men. Any attempt to reposition them would take hours and probably take them out of the fight for the duration.”

  “Can our drones handle the extra load?”

  The technician chewed his lip as he studied the numbers on his monitor.

  “Maybe. We’re not sure.”

  Lockerman hated it here in the Cheyenne Mountain facility—the cramped rooms and stale air were the least of it. The most oppressive element was simply the millions of tons of rock and dirt piled above. You could almost taste the crushing weight suspended above and all around. He hadn’t seen natural sunlight in three days. He thought of the stories of Victorian-era aristocrats who were buried with a string leading up to a bell at their grave markers, so that if they had accidentally been buried alive, they could ring the bell and summon someone with a shovel. Probably bullshit. But down here, he could see the appeal. The only problem was that there was no one to call for help if he got smothered alive in this pile. The Secret Service and all his staff had nixed the idea of staying mobile in Air Force One, and no other facility in the US was hardened like the NORAD headquarters. The mountain had been outfitted with brin cannons, but it would only be used in case of a direct attack, to keep the mrill from targeting it as part of their general assault. So the president had gone underground. And this portion of the facility was buried even further underground than the main command room.

  Lockerman looked over at Goldman, his national security adviser, and gestured at the large monitors in the center of the room pouring out video and other data of the battle above.

  “How are we doing, Jeff?”

  “Well, not horribly, all things considered. Lieutenant Shepherd and his men, plus the drones, seem to be fighting the mrill to more or less a standstill. The troop ships keep trying to break through, but so far our defenses are holding.”

  “The surface-to-air lasers are doing their jobs? And yes, I know they’re not really lasers.”

  “Yes, sir. They seem to be. The gap in the Russian net is a problem, but the drones seem to be filling it for now. I don’t think the mrill expected that.”

  “Are the mrill responsible for the Russian cannon being destroyed? How would they have done that?”

  “We just don’t know, Mr. President,” Goldman said. “We don’t have any hard data. It’s difficult to see how they could have been responsible. But who knows. We’re getting almost no communication from the Russian government.”

  Lockerman had ordered troops, tanks, and gunships around all of the American cannons, and as many of the overseas installations as possible. The European sites were pretty well locked down. The governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria, and Egypt were doing their best, with varying levels of support from US Special Forces and the Marine Corps. He didn’t know how helpful they would be—they were spread thinner than anyone preferred—but at least they gave him eyes and ears on the ground. The Chinese, Australians, and Japanese were on their own, but Lockerman felt comfortable that they could handle their own security. Well, as comfortable as he felt about anything these days.

  “Jeff, do you think it’s weird that they haven’t even tried to communicate with us? No demands, no terms, no ‘Take me to your leader’ stuff?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. President. General Rickert and his team gamed out some scenarios, and most of the hostile scenarios followed almost exactly what we’re seeing. No point in negotiating an extermination. The signal guys at the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office haven’t detected any attempt to communicate. Lieutenant Shepherd and his team haven’t reported anything, either.”

&nbs
p; Lockerman grunted. “Yeah, I guess they’ve made their intentions pretty clear.”

  “True, Mr. President. Given the initial encounters Lieutenant Shepherd had, I see no reason to think that the mrill are anything but hostile. Even so . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d really like to talk to them, Mr. President. We have almost no sense of their psychology, or if that word is even appropriate. We’re fighting purely on the basis of hardware and tactics. But we don’t have a clue what their true weak points are, what pressures or incentives they might respond to, how we might deceive or delay them. We might hold them off here, for now, but we have no idea if they’ll consider that a setback, a defeat, or merely time to plot their next move.”

  Lockerman thought about that for a moment.

  “We do know something about them, though,” he said. “They don’t negotiate.”

  “Perhaps,” Goldman replied. “Or maybe they do and we’re completely misinterpreting the signs. But if this truly is a colonization mission, then there’s probably not much to negotiate about. It’s a zero-sum game.”

  “We’re just fishing in the dark here, aren’t we?”

  Goldman had no reply, and they turned back to the monitors.

  24

  Ben blasted two more mrill drones apart as he dodged three on his tail. Scattered energy blasts crisscrossed the darkness, a constantly shifting 3D maze that only his internal computers could navigate. His human brain saw only a maelstrom.

  The troop ships had pulled back after their failed initial charges. They were now gathered about 60,000 kilometers above Earth, waiting, as the drones continued to probe for openings. The three men and their own drone army were holding their own, backed up by the defensive satellites. Most of the action continued to be over Russia, as the mrill charged repeatedly at the gap left by the destruction of the ground cannon. They were probing other areas as well. The twenty-two remaining human drones were engaging the thirty or so mrill drones around the world. As Earth rotated to dip the American hemisphere into night, a fiery battle raged overhead. Ben suspected anyone on the ground with even a modest telescope or pair of binoculars was getting a hell of a show. So far, though, Ben and his team had been able to keep the fight up in the skies.