The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  The two agents who had gone ahead should be waiting there with Hawthorne and a small flight crew. Lockerman wasn’t sure if they’d have a fighter jet escort. From the scattered info he’d been able to gather in the last 20 minutes, the mrill fleet was now encircling the globe. The nation’s entire defense was likely engaged, if not already defeated. The mountain continued to vibrate from the aerial attack. He was waiting for the full implosion of the mountain from the nuclear self-destruct charges.

  Lockerman looked up.

  “Khalaf should’ve blown the place by now.”

  Khalaf huddled in his small, sweltering alcove, watching on his display as the tram inched to the marker for minimum safe distance. The motionless air was so thick he felt like he nearly had to swallow it rather than breathe it. The mrill were finishing off the last of the military guardians out in the passageway, their dying screams quickly cut off. That wasn’t Khalaf’s assignment, and he ignored the sounds as best he could. They didn’t last long. The mrill then tried blasting their way through the clogged tram tunnel. The explosive charges had sealed that route, though. Even for the mrill, digging out that tunnel would be nearly impossible. That meant Khalaf was also trapped down here. No matter what happened, he was never leaving this place. He tried to ignore that thought as well.

  The mrill had apparently recognized the futility of any excavation and stormed into the conference room outside Khalaf’s alcove. He watched them on his screen moving through the room, not speaking. Even if they had been talking, there were no speakers in here. Nothing that could generate a sound, even accidentally. The young major was a bit disappointed he wouldn’t get to hear an actual alien language, and then amused at his disappointment. As an intelligence analyst earlier in his career, he’d spent a decade translating Farsi, Pashto, Persian, and Arabic intercepts. He’d been seventeen when his parents brought him and his sister out of Baghdad in late 2004. He’d become an American citizen, then an American soldier. He’d seen what the tyrants and terrorists were like back home. His new country wasn’t perfect. But demons stalked his homeland, corrupting his faith. A gift for language became his weapon against them.

  Ten years mastering tongues and dialects, detecting and deciphering the most minute vocal inflections and intonations, learning to distinguish one voice from another through a static hiss beamed from the other side of the world. A career of service built on sound. And now here he was, about to do his final duty in the quietest room he’d ever been in. It was almost funny.

  There were no wireless receivers or transmitters in this room, no electromagnetic clues to lead the mrill to his location. The handful of cables running to the monitor and the trigger were insulated with multiple layers of metal mesh and plastic to smother the low-level magnetic and electrostatic fields that all electrical wires emitted. They ran deep into the rock before branching up and out to the various surveillance systems and ultimately to the nuclear explosives carved into the mountain. The room had no air conditioning, and only a small duct leading to a corner of the larger comms room adjacent to the main conference room. The little room was invisible to any human sensor equipment. It was also sauna-level hot. Sweat ran in rivers down Khalaf’s body. He tried to move as little as possible, but had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve to keep his vision clear.

  The frenzy of mrill activity in the room outside suddenly stopped. Khalaf looked down at the monitor. Ten more seconds before the president’s tram would be outside the blast zone. A dozen or more energy blasts tore the steel door open, knocking him out of his seat and slamming him against the steel wall, crunching his outstretched right arm. He looked down and a chunk of splintered bone was poking through the skin. Didn’t hurt much, adrenaline already pumping through his body. He looked up to see three mrill clawing their way through the jagged opening.

  Khalaf pulled himself to his knees, nearly slipping in his own blood.

  The president wouldn’t be clear for another three seconds according to the screen. Khalaf prayed it was close enough. He prayed he’d done enough.

  One of the aliens grabbed his leg, and he turned the key.

  The terminus came into Lockerman’s view just as a thunderclap ripped apart the world. The train, the tunnel, the track, and the mountain were shredded like eggshells in a blender. Sparks and shards of metal and plastic exploded through the small cabin, and the only reason the president and his bodyguard weren’t impaled on the jagged wreckage at the front of the capsule was because the capsule, too, was hurled forward toward the small pin of light Lockerman had spotted a moment ago. The light winked out, and then the tram was crushed under rocks and dust and Lockerman had only a fragment of time to think that his own light was about to go out, too. Then, everything was just . . . soft darkness.

  30

  Arturo Vargas peeked out the damaged front door of his apartment building near the corner of N Street and Vermont Avenue in Washington, DC. The crazy sounds—explosions and roaring helicopters and buzzing spaceships and screaming and the thump-thump of machine guns—were getting closer and he had decided it was time to get his family out. He cursed himself for having ignored the evacuation requests and convincing his wife to stay. None of it had seemed real. He’d hunkered down to watch the news, and now the news had come to him.

  There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger on the street outside their apartment, although the mishmash of cars jammed and crashed at every angle made it hard to see very far. And smoke was starting to drift through their neighborhood from the north.

  “Is Mrs. Salinas coming?” he hissed at his wife, Nona, who hovered over their two young children, Miguel and Esmeralda.

  The old woman was a nuisance, always yelling at his kids to pipe down. Her hearing was apparently her only bodily function that hadn’t broken down over the four years they’d shared a building. Vargas had lugged oxygen tanks, a wheelchair, a motorized hospital bed, and other equipment up her stairs at various times. She was as surly as a Teamster whenever Vargas finished these sweaty expeditions, complaining that he’d banged the wall too many times. Who was gonna clean those scuff marks? Vargas patiently assured her he’d do it, and tried to keep his mumbled curses to a minimum after she retreated back into her apartment.

  “I tried. She says it’s safer here. She says that’s what you told her yesterday.”

  “I know. But I was wrong. Did you tell her that?”

  “Yes, but she won’t budge.”

  He opened his mouth to yell up the stairway to the second floor where the old woman lived. Just then an explosion, the closest yet, ripped through the night. The children screamed.

  “Jesus, that sounded like just the next block over,” he said to his wife. “If she’s not coming, we can’t wait. Go!”

  They’d mapped out a zigzagging route to the White House, trying to stay on the side streets. That would be safer, right? His brother, a congressional aide, had said on the phone 20 minutes ago (before the lines went dead) that there was apparently a civilian evacuation zone there, with buses ferrying people out of the city. Better than trying to make it on their own. He and his wife had hastily scribbled out their route on a pair of paper maps, along with backup meeting spots, in case they got separated. Each of their cell phones was fully charged, but neither could get a signal. The cell towers were either destroyed or simply overwhelmed with traffic. Probably both.

  One last look around, and he led his family out in a tight cluster. The thick smoke was getting closer, like a giant gray worm swallowing the block. They were no more than 20 feet down the street when a high-pitched, almost hysterical voice called out.

  “Arturo! Wait! Take me with you. Arturoooooo!” The wail pierced even the battlefield din that was rapidly approaching.

  He looked back and Mrs. Salinas was leaning out her second-floor window, oxygen tubes dangling around her neck. Even at the short distance, she was clouded in haze. He was tempted to turn away and keep moving, but his wife looked at him with pleading eyes.

  He tur
ned with a sigh and yelled, “Okay, Mrs. Salinas, hold on, I’m . . .”

  The building erupted outward, as if kicked in by a giant. The fireball swallowed Mrs. Salinas, and the shockwave knocked the Vargas family backward and drove them into the ground. Arturo cried out as his shoulder slammed into the edge of the concrete curb. He staggered to his feet, clutching his arm, and looked for his family. They had been blown into a thick hedge and seemed scratched and dirty but otherwise unharmed. He rushed over and knelt down to check on the kids, who were looking around, stunned.

  Arturo was about to speak when his wife went rigid, looking back at the smoldering wreckage of their apartment building. He turned around just in time to see an armor-plated robot with red glowing eyes stomp through the rubble. It looked up and down the street, raising its rifle the moment it spotted the battered family. Arturo, overwhelmed, could do no more than raise his one good arm to try to shield his children. He knew it was pointless and cursed himself again for having waited so long to leave.

  The barrel of the robot’s rifle began to light up when a blur of something rushed in from Arturo’s left. The robot paused and swiveled its rifle to track the object. Suddenly the blur was a man—well, it looked like a man—rolling in a somersault and coming up with a weapon, still moving.

  The robot and man fired at the same time. The beam from the robot’s rifle snapped through the air and vaporized a dusty red Chevy Impala and the corner of a florist shop. Arturo gaped as brilliant rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, tulips, and roses sprayed out of Fanny’s Flowers through the gray smoke. The moving man’s blast was more accurate. The left half of the robot was fried away. It hopped for a moment on its one remaining leg and then fell over. The man was nowhere to be seen. The machine sat up and raised its rifle again and strafed the street. The staccato yellow beam cut through the building in a horizontal line toward Arturo and his family, still huddled near the mangled bushes. At the last moment, the blur leaped from the top of the building behind Arturo. He only knew that was what had happened because the robot looked up and tried to raise its rifle. Before it could, a single explosive round burrowed into the robot’s chest and exploded, transforming the machine into a ticker tape parade of glittering metal shards.

  The blurred man landed lightly on his feet, no longer a blur. Arturo staggered to his feet, wiping dirt and sweat from his face, holding his damaged arm against his side. The man’s gray skin glistened in the firelight.

  “You folks okay?”

  Arturo struggled to speak, just nodding.

  Esmeralda, only eight years old, was the first to speak.

  “Are you the one on the news? The Army man?”

  The man laughed.

  “I guess so. But I’m a lieutenant. In the Navy. You all seem to be in one piece, from what I can tell. Your baby is fine, too, ma’am,” he said, pointing at Nona’s flat belly.

  Now Arturo found his voice and turned to his wife.

  “What? You’re . . . what?”

  The gray-skinned man laughed again. His skin seemed to match the tone of this now drab and pulverized world. His laugh, though, filled the air and somehow seemed stronger than the gloom.

  “I’ll leave you folks to sort this out. But I very strongly suggest moving south as fast you can. That one”—the gray man pointed to small crater where the last remnants of the robot were scattered—“was a bit ahead of the rest of the mrill force, but more are coming. I’ve got to get back. And you need to get out of here.”

  Without another word, the man became a blur again and disappeared back into the storm of smoke and fire.

  Arturo pulled his son to his feet and looked at his wife. He tried to think of something to say, then just wrapped her in a hug. She squeezed back for a moment, then broke the embrace.

  “I love you. But we’ve got to go. Now.”

  He nodded and got his family moving.

  “You know,” he said as they hustled off, “I forgot to thank him.”

  “I bet you aren’t the only one,” his wife said.

  As they walked off, Arturo scooped up a white carnation that had somehow emerged unscathed from the flower shop. He tucked it behind his daughter’s ear. She smiled, and they kept moving.

  31

  The bombs from the B-2s had been more effective than Ben had dared to hope. The heavy explosives had fallen like a storm, overwhelming the mrill attempts to blast them out of the sky. The bombs had taken out thirty-four of the mrill infantry and robots, leaving eleven of them still fighting. Plenty lethal, but no longer overwhelming. After destroying the robot on Vermont Street, Ben had instructed his small squad of marines to fall back and rejoin the main defenses at the space cannon, rearmed with grenades and missiles, and regroup on the south side of McPherson Square on K Street. This was a winnable fight, but the only way the American forces could prevail was by firing and falling back. Any toe-to-toe skirmish was an instant slaughter. Even the guerilla tactics resulted in heavy losses, but it was at least a manageable strategy. And Ben had also instructed the marines, once they reached the command center, to relay the coordinates of McPherson to the USS Anzio, a guided missile cruiser parked in the Chesapeake Bay. One more combined aerial and ground attack might be enough to finish this off.

  Ben’s internal communications systems lit up, pinged simultaneously by Nick and Rickert. He fired three quick blasts and sprinted from behind the jumble of mangled concrete and rebar to the smoking wreckage of a carved-out tank.

  He connected Eddie, Nick, and Rickert to a joint audio session over his internal network.

  “Hey team. How we doing?” Ben asked.

  “The mrill just sent in more than 2,000 additional ships and they’ve got one big-ass mother of a ship parked in orbit,” Nick said.

  “The mrill somehow discovered Cheyenne Mountain and attacked it, and we’ve lost contact with the president,” Rickert said.

  Ben sagged against the scorched tank. He accessed Nick’s visual feed and watched remotely as Nick and Eddie hopped and dodged and fired, while the defensive satellites, ground-based cannons, and human drones fired at an almost continuous rate against the incoming swarm. The defenders were outnumbered 100 to 1, and it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

  Ben didn’t need to see through Rickert’s eyes to feel his despair.

  “Did the defensive nukes detonate? Are the mrill inside the mountain, or did the explosion simply knock out our comms?” Ben asked.

  “It looks like the nukes were detonated, but there’s no sign of the president’s escape plane. We’re sending a team in from Peterson Air Force Base, but who knows if they’ll be able to make it in, given the reinforcements the mrill just put in orbit. The rest of the government has gone dark. No one wants to communicate electronically for fear of giving away their position. The VP is holed up in California, and we’ve got the rest of the cabinet scattered at different sites. The SecDef was with the president, though, so his status is also unknown. We don’t really have a functional government right now. I . . . hold on, getting a call on my secure line.”

  Ben felt his brief hope flickering out, a candle thrust into a tornado. Two fireballs bloomed on the horizon to the east, and Ben knew before the sound wave hit that it was the Anzio being destroyed by the mrill drones. With their numbers, the mrill didn’t even need to engage with Nick and Eddie in orbit. Just leave enough drones up there to keep them busy and send the rest down to the surface to wipe out the other defenses. Despair curled its clammy fingers around Ben’s mind and stepped on his chest as he wondered who was now in charge of the American government, and how soon they would start lobbing nukes at everything that moved in the sky. At least a dozen people had the launch codes. Someone would undoubtedly come up for air just long enough to use them. Nukes wouldn’t win the war. All they’d do was kill a lot of people. But the brass would get desperate as defeat loomed, and the end felt very near. A squirming, plummeting sense of panic twisted his gut. He was eleven again, helpless in the heavi
ng storm, his grip slipping no matter how hard he held on.

  Two mrill drop ships whooshed down about a block away and vomited out two squads of robot infantry. Ben looked up and could see mrill drone fighters and drop ships now crisscrossing the sky and, farther up, the blink and pop of the battle above the planet. A squadron of F-22 fighter jets were screaming in from Andrews Air Force Base, but Ben wanted to call them off. The moment they engaged the mrill, they were dead.

  Rickert came back on.

  “You guys will want to hear this.”

  Ben was surprised to hear the voice of Ying Lai, the Chinese doctor who had overseen the initial nanobot transfusions.

  “I have good news,” she said. “The Chinese government has completed its first drone fleet based on the specifications from the brin your team provided, and they are being launched as we speak.”

  “Yeah?” Eddie said without much hope in his voice. “Well, we’re looking at nearly 2,000 mrill ships up here, but I guess if you’ve got a couple drones, send ’em our way. We’ll delay the inevitable as long as possible.”

  “We have 543 drones inbound to your position,” Ying said.

  There was silence for a moment, then Eddie chortled and whooped.

  “Well, damn, let’s do this.”

  “How the hell did you have time to build 543 drones?” Rickert asked.

  “All of our major consumer electronics assembly plants shut down when the global economy stopped,” Ying said. “We had 400,000 workers with nothing to do. We provided the brin blueprints, retooled the assembly lines, and put them back to work. It was efficient.”

  “I bet,” Ben said.

  “The technology was quite challenging, but the concepts were straightforward. There was . . . considerable debate over whether to enable the machines to be remote-controlled by you and your team, Lt. Shepherd. But I was able to prevail, saying that it was necessary to enable this functionality to ensure our survival.”