Jayla wanted to run after her stupid sister, but couldn't tear herself away from the monitor at the same time. It led to a schizophrenic running back and forth between the deck, yelling for her sister and returning to the den of the cabin and trying to catch up on what was happening.
Satellite communications were being disrupted somehow, but the news agencies were doing all they could to gather and communicate what was happening. No one knew what was wrong with the satellites, but they had learned from land lines about one of the most horrific acts of violence man could perpetrate against man.
Details were nonexistent. They didn't know how many, or who had done it, but everyone knew from the telltale mushroom clouds that nuclear weapons had been dropped. Two were confirmed; one in Southern Germany and one in Eastern England.
The aliens were blamed. The Soviet Republic was blamed. Jihadists or terrorists were blamed. Even the United States was blamed by some of the overseas agencies. But no one knew. No one knew who had launched the nukes, no one knew why, and no one from any government was answering any questions about what would happen next.
No one knew how the alien shuttle had disappeared from in front of the United Nations. More importantly, no one knew why the aliens had left. Had they learned of the impending nuclear war and left town? Had they started it? If so, why?
When the questions grew too many, Jayla broke away from the monitor and ran outside and screamed for her sister for a while.
When she finally took a break from the chaos in her mind and thought clearly, she decided her sister must have hiked down to the lake. Daddy often took them there. The trail was well marked, the lake only about four miles away, and Jada could have easily gone down there on her own. Jayla could scream all she wanted and it would do no good. Jada would be completely out of earshot.
She hoped her sister would be smart enough to return before it got dark. She ran back inside to her monitor.
The nuclear bunkers at Vandenberg Air Force Base were well camouflaged, converted missile silos. The only way to them was across a field, through a circular hatch, and down a long ladder.
Christina came out of the evacuation tunnel into a grassy field, sounds of the Pacific Ocean in the distance.
She loved being stationed at this base, right on the coast and just a short trip south along the PCH to Santa Barbara. It was a beautiful weekend drive. Other trips, she and her husband would head north, driving to Pismo Beach or even up to Morro Bay. It was a perfect posting.
Now, under the threat of nuclear war, the waves and the surf she could hear seemed strangely normal, mundane, as if Nature didn't care about the foolish things Man was up to.
She couldn't see the silo entrances, but just followed the other evacuees, going where the security police directed them.
There were multiple silos and the Colonel had stopped and made sure Christina came with him to the command bunker. That made Christina more nervous than the thought of nukes.
She wouldn't have seen the silo if a soldier hadn't been standing by an open hatch directing people down the ladder. When she stared at the ground directly beyond the hatch, she could finally detect a mound in the earth where the main silo doors lay buried.
It was her turn. The soldier, Airman Anthony, said he could hold her lunch and drop it down to her. Christina was too embarrassed to speak, and handed the bag to the man, cradling her computer with her other hand while she tried to negotiate the ladder. She didn't know how and dithered at the top of the ladder for a moment.
"I can bring that down for you also, ma'am," the soldier said and reached his hand out. She handed him the computer.
Even with two hands, the ladder was difficult. It was not meant for frequent use, and ridges in the metal dug into her hands as she squeezed them too tightly. She never looked down.
The silo was dark. A few flashlights shone and someone stood at a control panel, trying to figure something out. Christina just tried to focus on getting down.
Someone else must have noticed her distress, and she heard an encouraging, "You can do it, Captain," from below. It made her feel like she was back in ROTC summer camp. They had had two chances to complete the obstacle course, or wash out, and Christina had failed the first, unable to climb the wall at the very end.
She was last getting to the wall on the second attempt, and her entire cadet flight stood around it, cheering.
She never could have climbed that wall without their support.
Towards the top, as she used every muscle in her body to pull herself up, she peed her pants. With twenty-six cadets cheering her, all college students like her, she was surprised that no one teased her about it afterwards. No one said a word. They all just congratulated her when she finished. That was the moment she fell in love with the Air Force.
As she stepped off the final rung at the bottom, the lights came on. She looked up the ladder and was grateful she had come down in the dark. Looking around the lit silo while coming down that ladder would have been terrifying. The view from the ladder extended down a large hollow where a missile once sat. It was at least two hundred feet deep.
Airman Anthony brought her lunch and her computer after everyone was inside.
The thud from the closing of the hatch sounded with an eerie finality. Christina shivered and thought about the other silos. There were four such bunker-silos on the base, and she wondered how many people were looking up at the closed hatches of their silos and contemplating what their fate might hold, just as she was doing.
The group of evacuees were led deeper inside and through a set of blast doors. The silos themselves could withstand a near miss, but they were told that behind the blast doors they would be able to survive a direct hit. Christina doubted it, but hearing the words were reassuring.
She thought about her husband and wondered where he was and how he was doing.
Base housing had an evacuation plan for military dependents, but it wasn't to any place nearly as secure as the silo Christina stood in. Plus, John would be at work now, and if the base were locked down, he wouldn't even be able to get in.
What do civilians do during a nuclear war?
The President of the United States of America stared at a computer screen without seeing anything on it. It wasn't a blur. His eyes focused. Just nothing registered.
There was background noise. His Chief of Staff keeping everyone away from him. Everyone who wanted to talk to him, who wanted his approval, his opinion, his leadership, buzzed around him, and right now he could give them nothing.
The sound of the plane. Air Force One zigzagging across the nation, keeping him safe, protected by a squadron of F-35s and Protector drones.
His children, kept in the back of the aircraft by his wife and their nanny, excited about again being on a plane as luxurious as this one.
The image of a former President wandering through the Rose Garden, contemplating terrible decisions, went through his mind. He hadn't had that luxury. He hadn't had the opportunity to weigh this decision, to consider his place in history as he made that decision, to make sure he was photographed in deep pondering.
The decision had been made for him, essentially, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Soviet Republic themselves.
The Germans didn't respond to the destruction of Ramstein Air Force Base, but the British did to the destruction of RAF Lakenheath. Even though both bases were populated with American forces, the 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein and the 48th Fighter Wing at Lakenheath, the President had decided to allow the local countries that had been struck to determine their own response.
Germany had done nothing. The nation didn't even declare war. They simply mobilized to help the stricken base and nearby community. Casualties would be in the tens of thousands, and many more would die from radiation poisoning. The whole nation united to help.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom took the attack
more personally. The lone British Renown class submarine on patrol had launched its entire complement of sixteen Trident III nuclear missiles at the Soviet Republic, a retaliatory strike targeting key locations, like the Kremlin in Moscow, the Kosvinsky Mountain command center, and bases in Kostroma, Yoshkar-Ola, and Tatischevo.
It wasn't a crippling strike. If the Russians had stopped there, they could have recovered. It would have taken years, probably another revolution, but they would have recovered. They had started the war anyway, all because they thought the United States was destroying their satellites and had invented a fictional alien entity to cover up the attack. They deserved to be punished. The Brits had done the right thing.
But the Russians didn't stop.
And the aliens weren't fictional.
From the start, the President had been wary of the Hrwang. They wouldn't deal with any heads of state, only representatives from a world wide organization. Hence the Secretary-General of the United Nations had been the primary ambassador for Earth. The President had ordered various intelligence agencies into overdrive to keep him apprised of what was happening, and as soon as the gun battle erupted in the Secretariat tower, the President had boarded Air Force One.
What followed next shocked him and his staff. The Hrwang shuttle, which had entered Earth's atmosphere much as any human shuttle would but could fly like a tilt rotor, simply vanished from its landing spot in the UN complex. No one had any explanation.
Then Vandenberg began reporting satellites failing and their suspicion that it was the Hrwang.
The Premier of the Soviet Republic had called the President directly, accusing him of warmongering. Russian satellites were being destroyed, and he blamed the United States. He wouldn't accept any explanations, didn't believe that there were any aliens, and within the hour over 40,000 US service men and women and their dependents were dead from the initial nuclear blasts or would soon die from radiation poisoning.
It was irrational.
After the British retaliatory strike, the Russians had launched more missiles and the President had had no choice. He had ordered an all out attack on the Soviet Republic. An attack designed to prevent any further response. An attack that would silence the Soviet Republic once and for all.
And in so doing had condemned 150 million people to a fiery death.
If there was a God, the President wondered what he would say to Him when he met Him.
"Sir," his Chief of Staff said.
He didn't respond.
"Sir. It's urgent. Something's happening that doesn't make any sense."
He looked up at his Chief of Staff. His loyal friend. He should have asked him to be the Vice President, but they were from the same state and no one ever picked a Vice President from the same state. It wasn't good politics.
"Yes, Aiden," the President said.
"Sir. I don't understand it. No one knows what's going on. Look at your screen."
Some IT technician on board pushed an image to the President's monitor. The President swore.
"How did this happen?"
"I don't know, sir."
The President looked at the screen, understanding, but not understanding.
The Hrwang artificial intelligence unit temporarily assigned to drone Tf-1804/V3-85 scanned asteroids inside the orbit of the alien world. 1804, as it referred to itself, knew that the Hrwang home star system had been thoroughly charted and that it would have found an asteroid of the dimensions it sought within a short period of time.
But the alien humans on the primary planet of this system had done no such charting, and 1804 was left to finding a likely target, jumping near it, expending precious fuel to maneuver within range of its optical sensors, then deciding if it met its criteria.
None had yet.
If it knew how the aliens measured such things, it would have reported that it was looking for an asteroid between twenty-five and thirty meters in mean diameter. Any material would suffice, but it expected to find a carbonaceous asteroid, as they were the most common. If it found a silicate asteroid instead, the rock would have to measure within the lower end of its search parameters.
No time constraint had been given for finding the large rock. Once it had found it, 1804 knew it only had small windows of time, 1.388 per cent of the rotation cycle of the planet during each of its rotations, to accomplish its mission. One such window had come and passed since it had begun its search, and it concerned 1804 not to have achieved its first goal.
The asteroid it was now investigating was too large, and 1804 used its telescope to scan the heavens for a new candidate. It cataloged every object it saw, even if that object didn't seem likely. None of its handlers had asked it to catalog the objects, but it knew it would have to come out here for more, and it wanted a head start on its next search.
Nothing appeared in a complete rotation, so it adjusted its search arc by .25 radians and began rotating again. While it looked, it calculated how many more searches it could conduct with its remaining fuel. The possibility of running out of fuel added to its anxiety. It had to find a rock soon.
Another rotation and nothing. It adjusted its search arc again, tiny jets of gas emitting from it to make a precise movement, and it rotated slowly again. It stopped when it detected something.
Using an optical rangefinder, 1804 measured the distance and the diffuse reflectivity of the object. At its estimated distance the object was too bright, meaning it was too large, and 1804 cataloged its result. It began its rotation again.
Four more arc adjustments and 1804 was searching a plane almost completely perpendicular to the original plane it had started on. Two marginal candidates were found on this plane, and 1804 evaluated them based on what it had seen in previous rocks. It decided that the first was the better candidate and estimated coordinates to the object.
The closer it arrived, the less fuel it would consume inspecting it.
1804 determined the most likely coordinates of the object, mentally closed its eyes, and jumped.
Captain Christina Owenby rubbed her face with her hands. She wasn't sleepy, but she was tired. She hadn't slept, no one had, since they entered the silo. Her bones ached, her eyes ached, her rear ached, and she was already sick of looking at the steel girders and cables that filled the spaces around her.
Little of the computer equipment in the silo functioned as expected, and she had been the only one to think of bringing her computer with her.
She sat at a makeshift desk outside the main blast doors. Inside, four hundred other evacuees tried to get comfortable, get something to eat, and not trip over each other. Inside, there was no hope of connecting to the network.
But outside the doors, in the main part of the silo, she had an intermittent connection and was able to occasionally download bursts of data. It also kept her away from the Colonel, who ranted and raved and swore, even shoving a keyboard through an old monitor at one point.
The lack of functioning equipment effectively ended his command, and he was unhappy.
He came out now and barked at Christina.
"Anything useful?"
"Not yet, sir. No reports of nuclear strikes in CONUS, though." CONUS stood for the Continental United States.
"Can we go up top and get some working gear?"
"I don't know, sir."
The Colonel turned and stalked off, yelling again as soon as he walked through the partially open blast doors.
Two airmen had been assigned to Christina. They fetched whatever she wanted, stood guard to protect her from who knows what, and kept her company. They both looked like football players.
It always embarrassed her to order others around, so she asked politely when she needed something, like more coffee or water. The silo hatch sealed from the inside, so she wasn't sure what she needed protecting from. But the company was appreciated.
"What's your first name?" she asked of the first airman, the one who had carried her computer down the ladder.
"Shane, ma'am."
"Football?"
He grinned. "Yes, ma'am."
"What position?"
"I went to a tiny high school in Nebraska, ma'am. We played both sides of the ball."
"And you?" she asked, turning her attention to her second airman.
"Zombinique, ma'am. My friends call me Zombie." The three chuckled. "Middle linebacker."
"Thank you both," Christina said softly.
"Things are going to get interesting around here, aren't they, ma'am?" Zombie asked.
"It's possible."
"We got your back," he said, patting on his MP23 carbine.
Christina nodded, not understanding why enlisted people followed officers. She was just a person who went to college. The men on either side of her were better trained, better disciplined, and better soldiers than she was. But they would give their lives for her, and the thought humbled her.
"I'm going to try to get some sleep."
"Yes, Captain. We'll make sure you're not disturbed."
"What do you mean the White House is gone? Do you know how many people I left behind there. How many people I ordered to stay?" the President shouted. "What happened to the missile defense system?"
"We don't think it was a Russian missile, sir. We had a one hundred per cent kill rate on those," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Vanek, said.
"Then what was it? A terrorist?"
"No, sir. Preliminary reports, and I mean very preliminary, indicate it was some kind of kinetic kill weapon fired from space. It looked like a meteor."
"A meteor?" The President sounded incredulous. General Vanek almost flinched.
"It just looked like one, Mr. President. We don't know exactly what it was."
"Show me the damage again."
Aiden, the Chief of Staff, nodded to someone out of the President's line of sight. The image of the crater flashed up on his screen. There was nothing recognizable.
"And you're sure this wasn't a Russian missile that got by?"
No one ever thought the missile defense system would be one hundred per cent perfect. No weapon system ever was, despite what generals and scientists promised. The Soviet Russians hadn't believed missile defense systems would work, and never even bothered developing systems half as advanced as the US ones.
"Yes, sir. There's no radioactivity. No missile signature was detected. But we did receive reports of a heat signature making a bee-line from space. It wasn't launched from anywhere on Earth."
"So it has to be the Hrwang. No secret Soviet satellite weapon?"
"The Hrwang destroyed all the satellites," Aiden reminded him.
The President breathed in sharply through his nose, then out loudly. He put his hands together, keeping them from any visible shaking. He thought of everyone at the White House. The Secret Service agents, the cooks, the janitors, the IT staff. The Vice President who had remained there to give the appearance that the government was still being run from Washington and not from a plane.
Some of those people were his friends, and his family's friends.
Caution warned him, though. Going head to head with an alien race that knew how to travel between stars was risky. It had been easier to obliterate the Soviets. He didn't know, no one knew, what the Hrwang were capable of. But if they had deliberately targeted the White House, that meant they were deliberating targeting him.
"Mr. President?" General Vanek cautiously interrupted his reverie.
"Go ahead."
"Mr. President, I'm getting some reports of other world leaders being targeted." General Vanek looked down at his tablet and scrolled. "It is confirmed that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is a casualty. Number 10 Downing Street took a similar hit as the White House. Witnesses report it looked like a meteor."
"Any others?"
"The French are reporting a hit on the Elysee Palace."
The President thought about that for a moment.
"Sir, I'm getting confirming reports from State. Ambassadors around the world are reporting that the residences of heads of state are being destroyed by meteor-like weapons," the Chief of Staff said.
The President nodded.
"Sir, it has to be the Hrwang," General Vanek said.
"Aiden, do you agree?"
His Chief of Staff nodded.
He stared at General Vanek a moment. The man stared back, and the President stabbed his finger at him.
"You get them," he commanded. "You get every last one of them. I don't care if they have one spaceship or twenty spaceships, you get every one of them. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir."
"And don't hold anything back. You throw every anti-satellite missile, every nuke, everything we have at them. The Soviets are dead and don't you worry about keeping anything back for the Chinese. I'll convince them to do the same. They saw what happened. You use everything we got."
The General stood straighter. "Yes, sir."
"Ladies and Gentleman," he said, looking at the group assembled around him. He knew his wife listened from a distance, behind the group. He also knew there were reporters on board who would record his next words for posterity. "Ladies and Gentleman, it's time to save the world." There were smiles and then someone clapped. Everyone clapped. He stood and smiled back at them, reaching out to touch them, to shake their hands, to put his hand on General Vanek's shoulder. The man looked nervous, but he knew how to do his job. They all had to do their jobs now. It was the most important moment in the history of the United States of America.
He had never been prouder to be its President.
Drone 1804 sized up the asteroid in front of it. It was four per cent smaller than its lowest acceptable parameter, but it understood that mass was just as important as size. It fired a small energy pulse at the rock and evaluated the spectra of the material that vaporized from the shot.
It was a carbonaceous asteroid as expected, over seventy per cent of the asteroids in this system were carbonaceous, but it contained higher than normal levels of nickel and iron. 1804 calculated the total estimated mass assuming a homogeneous concentration of nickel and iron based on its sample, and decided that the rock in front of it would meet the parameters of its mission.
1804 fired a tiny jet of gas to propel itself towards the rock, then extended six clawed legs out, rotating so the legs would touch down on the asteroid. They gripped into the rock, 1804 vibrating them and sending a small current into them to guarantee a firm hold. Then it went to sleep, content it was prepared for the next step in its mission.
It didn't sleep long. A proceed ping was received. 1804 sent a confirmation request, which it received within an acceptable time period, and it confirmed calculations it had already made. The next target window was soon, so 1804 wasted no time in a second, confirming calculation. It "looked" at its target, then closed its eyes.
It appeared just above the planet, outside of the atmosphere still, the rock it was attached to hurtling towards its target with the momentum it had picked up from the jump. 1804 quickly calculated the location of impact of the asteroid from its present trajectory, and decided it was within acceptable parameters. If it hadn't been, 1804 carried insufficient fuel to move the rock. It would have had to jump the rock to another location, then try again, jumping back towards its target, imparting the momentum the rock would need to carry it into the atmosphere.
Most rocks that hit the atmosphere of a planet strike it at an angle, and the rock burns up on impact, only fragments reaching the planet and usually doing very little damage. Even large strikes can sometimes be survived if the asteroid hits the atmosphere at a shallow enough angle.
Directing rocks straight down into the at
mosphere provided a higher guarantee of success. And this rock was on target in a manner that pleased 1804. It had done well in selecting this rock within sufficient time to employ it as ordered, and it pleased 1804 to have been successful in targeting it correctly.
It disengaged its legs and used its jets to push away from the rock, then jumped away from the atmosphere a short distance to bleed the momentum it had also picked up from the jump. It didn't want to enter the atmosphere. It was not equipped for such a mission and aerodynamic heating would surely have destroyed the drone, rendering the AI that was now 1804 useless, essentially dead.
It stabilized itself in orbit over the planet and watched its handiwork.
The meteor entered the planet's atmosphere, heading on a direct course with the ocean on the trailing edge (from 1804's viewpoint as it watched the planet rotate) of a continent that fanned out across the planet like a pair of bird's wings.
1804 didn't know the name of the continent or the ocean, didn't know that the local inhabitants called it North and South America, or that they called the ocean the Pacific Ocean. It didn't know that almost 300 million people lived on the west coast of those continents and that most would be killed by the tsunami caused by the meteor it had just released. It didn't know that each of those 300 million people had names, had mothers and fathers, had friends and family and loves, had jobs and responsibilities, had strengths and weaknesses and individual personalities, had overcome obstacles to achieve their goals, had given in to weaknesses, and had tried to find some purpose in their lives. 1804 didn't know any of those things.
And it didn't care.
The aftershock hit while Christina climbed the ladder to exit the silo. She held on. The few seconds it lasted were terrifying, and Christina wanted to cry, but all she could do was cling to the rungs of the ladder and focus on not letting go.
"That was a bad one," Zombie muttered below her.
The shaking finished, Christina continued her climb with a sense of urgency. She wanted to be off the ladder before any more earthquakes hit. Shane had opened the hatch above them, and cautiously exited the silo, rotating around the opening with his carbine ready.
The Colonel had insisted Christina be armed also, and she wore a pistol on her hip. She had never done that before. She had gone through basic weapons qualification like all military officers, but could never imagine firing a weapon in anger. If there were looters on the base, as was always possible the Colonel had said, it would be her airmen's job to take care of them.
Christina's job was to do what she did best: connect to the network, find out what was happening, and bring a report and as much useful gear as she could back to her boss.
Climbing out of the hatch, Christina wondered how she had suddenly become the Colonel's wunderkind. She had simply grabbed her computer during the evacuation, something no one else had thought to do, and when none of the antiquated equipment in the silo worked, she had been the only chance to find out what was going on.
Not that she had had much success.
With a gun on her hip, Shane and Zombie on either side of her, scanning everywhere, MP23 carbines ready to shoot at anything hostile, she felt more nervous, more anxious, than at any time in her life.
She would have thought the base the safest place in the world, but after a couple of days in the silo with no information, a general paranoia set into the command. When the first major earthquake struck, they thought they'd been hit by a nuke. A team took air samples and decided it hadn't been a nuclear missile, but the lack of connection to the network, a lack of connection to any network, and thus the lack of information about what was happening heightened the Colonel's anxiety.
So he had sent Christina up top.
He said he should be going himself, but that he had to stay behind and besides, she was the only one with any brains left in the outfit. Christina couldn't read the man, she had never been able to understand him, but she accepted the compliment and her assignment.
Nothing moved up top.
The sun was warm, which felt good after two days in a hole, but there was no breeze off the ocean. Usually the sea breeze cooled the base on hot days. The long grass around the silos didn't move, just sat still, baking in the heat.
They decided not to use the evacuation tunnel to get back to their building, but to stay up top, walking through the fields where they could see around them should looters have decided to come on base. Although the country appeared to be at war with someone, the aliens or the Russians, it still wasn't clear to them, Christina doubted Vandenberg was a strategic target. She didn't expect to run into enemy troops.
The main base was eerily quiet. There were no security police and no evidence of any other base personnel. Either everyone was in shelter or had fled.
"This creeps me out," Zombie commented.
Christina nodded agreement.
They squeezed through an internal gate, passing packs through the narrow opening, and headed for the 614th's headquarters. Christina's airmen walked on either side of her, their MP23s ready, safeties off, alert for anything, but not knowing what they should be alert for.
Shane held his arm up, and the three stopped.
Christina listened and realized at the same moment as the airman that someone had left a door open, and it knocked in its frame when a gust of wind caught it. She breathed again, surprised that she had been holding her breath.
They continued up the street, it's emptiness continuing to be unnerving.
The front door to the headquarters opened with a swipe of Christina's badge, and her two airmen entered the building first, guns ready. Christina hoped no one had stayed behind. They'd probably get shot if they poked their head out right now.
"Ma'am, I think we should take the stairs instead of the elevator," Zombie suggested.
Christina imagined being trapped in an elevator. No cell phone to call for help. No one around to stumble in on them. She shivered.
"Good suggestion," she replied.
Zombie opened the door to the stairwell and looked up, then down. He entered slowly, holding the door open but not taking his eyes off the stairs in both directions.
"You next, ma'am," Shane said.
Christina followed, taking the door from Zombie and holding it for Shane. He followed her in backwards, making sure nothing moved behind them. It crossed Christina's mind that they were probably being too cautious, but she felt gratitude for their concern for her safety.
Four stories down to her office level.
She patiently walked between the two men, but they also seemed to relax a little as they descended.
Until they got to the stairwell at their floor.
Zombie asked Christina to draw her sidearm and stand beside the door, out of the way of the line of fire from someone inside. Shane crouched on the lower flight of stairs, his body mostly shielded, his MP23 pointed at the door. Zombie swiped his badge, waited for the click, then opened the door slowly.
No bullets came out, and Christina breathed again.
Zombie went in first while Shane covered him. The door closed behind him and Christina worried for him, trapped alone in the offices. She swiped her badge and opened the door. Zombie, about ten feet into the area, turned suddenly, pointing his gun at her, then holding it up in the air.
"Sorry, ma'am. You scared me."
"I'm sorry, Zombinique."
"It's clear in here," he said, turning away from her again. She held the door open as Shane scrambled to his feet.
As they moved through the offices, motion sensors triggered lights. It was like coming into the office first in the morning. Christina had to remind herself that it was all automated and not someone running in front of her turning lights on. Being alone in the building was as unnerving as walking down the empty base streets.
She found her spot in the command center and took her pack off, pulli
ng her computer out and setting it up. The airmen continued to patrol around the office area, making sure it was secure.
As soon as her machine began to boot up, Christina got tunnel vision, focusing only on the task at hand.
She watched the operating system scroll by, she always booted up in the os, and then it prompted her for a password.
She entered it, and the computer stalled for a moment, trying to connect to the network and authenticate. Failing that, it would authenticate her on the machine itself, leaving her disconnected.
She waited.
Eventually she could see her desktop, a picture in the background of her and her husband in Hawaii on the beach, with an error message that no network connection could be found. She expected as much.
She tried using the computer's systems to make a connection, but with no success. She rooted into the machine, entering her admin password, and tried pinging ip addresses she knew, hoping to connect that way. Few people knew of these methods any more. Most just accepted that network connections were made automatically, and if they didn't work right away, someone would fix them and they would work soon.
Christina was dimly aware that Zombie had returned and pulled up a spot of floor near her, his back to a wall, his MP23 resting, but ready, in his lap. She didn't acknowledge him and he didn't disturb her.
As she tried different commands, waiting for results, occasionally looking up help on the ones she seldom used, a separate thread ran through her mind of computer users in the movies. They always typed incredibly fast, pinging through screens too fast to even absorb any information from them. Real life differed greatly. She typed, waited, typed, waited, smacked her keyboard a few times in frustration, typed and waited more.
"Zombie, catch," she heard Shane say. She glanced at him and he had come into the office area with an armful of red apples, throwing one to the seated airman. Shane walked up to her and asked if she wanted one.
She was suddenly hungry.
The silo had food, but most of it had been mres, or Meals, Ready to Eat. They were thirty years old and they were no longer meals nor ready to eat. A few items were salvageable, but most of the food had gone bad. Years of peace and exploration of the Moon and Mars had left the military complacent. After the reconstitution of the new Soviet Republic, they should have gotten ready for something like this. They must have forgotten how.
And no one could have expected aliens. Despite evidence of billions of planets in just our galaxy alone, no one seriously believed life existed anywhere except on Earth. Life was too unlikely, the odds of it evolving on more than one planet staggeringly impossible, that only the most ardent dreamers accepted its possibility.
Now they were here.
She accepted two apples and started eating, her eyes back to the screen, ignoring the two men and their whispered conversation. The apple was waxy. The airman must have gotten it out of the cafeteria, but she wiped part of it off on her uniform shirt and kept working.
"Could you get me some water?" she asked, not looking away from what she was doing.
"Yes, ma'am," someone said and jumped up.
She couldn't get a connection anywhere. Servers were up in the building, and she could talk to them, but they couldn't get out to anywhere. A bottle of water appeared next to her and she mumbled a thank you, and tried a few more things. She took a drink. The water was cold, which was good, and she drank more. Her fear had made her sweaty, and she needed water.
Finishing the bottle, she set it down.
"Do you want another one, Captain?"
She nodded and Shane set another one next to her. She opened the bottle and took a sip. The cool liquid helped her think.
Every server connected wirelessly, through towers or on the secure satellite network, and none of them could talk. She remembered some servers that were old, had been decommissioned, but that might still have landlines. She needed to turn them on.
"We need to go to the basement," she said, turning in her chair.
The two men jumped up.
The three headed back out to the stairs, moving almost as cautiously as before, but not as nervously. They'd been in the building for almost an hour and there was no evidence of any hostiles.
It took a while to find any servers that were turned off. She started turning them all on, not knowing which ones would actually boot and which ones were completely fried. Fortunately the military was terrible about getting rid of old equipment, and she eventually found quite a few turned off servers still in the racks.
She pulled out her pad and noted the ip addresses of all the ones she was turning on. It got tiresome, and she handed her pad to Zombie, asking him to copy the addresses down exactly.
While he did that, she found a terminal that still worked, and she started pinging the restarted servers. Most hadn't booted; probably incompatible operating systems, but some seemed to be coming up.
Zombie handed her the pad when he was done, and she waited.
She could finally ping one of the servers on the list, but it too only accessed the network wirelessly.
She waited longer.
They felt another aftershock. The three of them looked up and around at the ceiling, willing it to stay up. Christina looked back down at her screen, irritated at her primal fear. Any server room worth its salt in California was designed to stand up to any old earthquake.
The fifth server she pinged seemed to have a wired connection. It wasn't connecting to anything, but that could mean a router was turned off, or that it was connected to a wireless router.
"Which server is...?" and she read off its address. Both men searched the racks until Shane found it.
"Stay with it in case we lose track," she said. He nodded. "Now, Zombinique, help me find where this is wired to."
"Zombie, ma'am."
She smiled at him. "Sorry. Zombie."
"No problem, ma'am." He grinned back at her.
They traced cables. Losing track, they had to start over. Zombie pulled out a small roll of colored duct tape and started tagging the cable as they went. It helped immensely.
"Where did you get that from?" Christina asked him.
"Duct tape is a soldier's best friend, ma'am. You can fix shoes and uniforms and even loose magazines with it. I'd never be without it."
"I didn't know that."
"Yes, ma'am."
They followed the cable to a series of routers, all turned off. She turned them on, one by one, and watched the flickering green lights.
"Zombie, you stay here and watch these. I'm going to try to see if any are working. Just let me know if any of them turn any color other than green."
"Yes, ma'am."
She went back to the terminal. Ping to the server worked, and it appeared to have a connection to the outside world. At least, to something off base. The terminal couldn't give her much information, but her computer upstairs should work.
"We should be in business, boys. Let's go back up."
Shane led the way this time, his MP23 drawn, but the trip up the stairs was uneventful.
Christina sat back at her computer and muttered, "As long as nothing has changed, this should work." She cracked her knuckles and started typing.
This time she, after connecting to the landline server, had limited access to a military network. The Air Force had published several alerts, with instructions for both combatant and non-combatant military. The nuclear war with the Soviet Republic appeared to be over, with the republic mostly destroyed. China, angered by the radioactive fallout crossing its borders, had declared war on the United States, but the US hadn't responded.
No nukes had reached the United States from either country, but then, and she had to read this part twice to be sure, the aliens, the Hrwang, had begun dropping asteroids from space on Earth.
These attacks were as devastating
as nuclear missiles, and military and government facilities were being targeted. All nonessential personnel were to abandon their bases and reform at designated rally points. A long list of such locations was attached.
Combat units were to follow their plans for total war.
After explaining all of this to her airmen, Christina asked, "What do we do now?"
Zombie didn't hesitate. "We evacuate. Head to the rally point."
"There's not much good we can do sitting in that silo, ma'am," Shane added.
"I had wanted to gather up some equipment so we could help track things from the silo, but I don't know how to get the hardwired connection all the way out there. And if we're going to evacuate anyway..."
The two men didn't say anything. Christina felt the weight of being an officer on her shoulders. This was her decision.
Actually it wasn't, she realized. It was the Colonel's. They needed to bring this report back to him. That lifted the burden off her and she knew what to do.
"Alright," she said, "Let's get this back to the Colonel."
"Yes, ma'am," the two airmen said simultaneously and stood.
They went back up the stairs as cautiously as they had come down them, just in case. Who knew how aliens would fight? Who knew what looters might show up? The building felt less eerie now that they had been in it a while, but it was still strange because it was so empty.
There was a smell in the lobby on the main level that hadn't been there before. Christina looked at the men with her, but they shrugged their shoulders. She sniffed. Rotten eggs and salty fish.
"Gas leak?" she suggested.
"If so, we'd better get out of here without making any sparks," Shane replied.
"Good idea."
Shane opened one of the front doors carefully, then stopped in the door frame. Christina walked up behind him and looked past. There was water receding from the street, leaving seaweed and a few fish behind. One flopped in death throes at the edge of the sidewalk in front of them.
The image couldn't process in Christina's mind. It simply didn't mean anything to her. So she ignored it. They had to get their report to the Colonel. That was all that mattered. Some part of her mind also knew she wanted to find her husband, but if her unit evacuated to their rally point, she would probably be farther away from him than she was now. She didn't like that thought, but knew she would evacuate with them. She had sworn an oath to defend her country when she had been commissioned, and she would honor that oath. Her husband would want her to honor it also. She would just have to find him after they finished this war.
Depressed, but resolved, she told her airmen, "Forget the fish. Let's just get out of here."
"Yes, ma'am," Zombie said eagerly from behind her. He opened another door and moved through it, holding it open for Christina. Shane still seemed frozen in his doorway.
Christina followed Zombie out onto the sidewalk. The smell was stronger outside the building than it had been inside. She wished she knew what it meant. There were dead fish up and down the street and seaweed everywhere. The sidewalks and streets were still stained with having been recently wet, as if it had been raining.
She looked back at Shane, still frozen in the doorway.
"Airman! Move out!" she ordered, using the command voice she had been taught in ROTC summer camp. She hadn't used it since then, except occasionally to tease her husband.
It worked. The authority in her voice shook Airman Anthony out of his paralysis.
"Yes, ma'am." He stepped out of the doorway, letting the door close gently behind himself. He followed them as they walked down the street towards the interior gate they had come through, back towards the silos. The three sidestepped seaweed and dead fish. The airmen also kept their MP23s at the ready.
As they approached the gate, Christina became aware of a sound. It was a dull, distant roar, almost as if the ocean had become much louder suddenly. It was a sound she would hear when she and her husband took long walks along the beach.
The others heard it also, and when they walked past the last building and into the open area before the gate, they all three looked towards the coast.
The monster they saw was more frightening than any monster or alien Christina could have imagined. Suddenly the seaweed, the fish, and the receding water made sense.
Often, before a tsunami, water pushes forward ahead of the wave, then recedes as it is pulled back into the main wave. Vandenberg Air Force Base sat on the coast, but would have been too far back for any normal tsunami to have pushed water onto it.
But the tsunami wave they looked at now was no normal tsunami, should such a thing exist. She thought of the Air Force communique, that the aliens had been dropping asteroids on the Earth. Had they dropped one into the ocean? A huge one?
The analytical part of her mind was in overdrive, calculating the devastation along the entire West Coast such a wave would cause. San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. All would be destroyed. If it was this big in Central America, it would probably cover entire countries.
She turned her attention back to the monster, knowing there was no hope for her. The thought flashed through her mind that she should pull out her sidearm and shoot herself before the wave hit. Make it quick.
Zombie went down on one knee and fired his MP23 into the oncoming water. His magazine emptied, he replaced it, and began firing again.
Shane pushed her backwards towards the buildings. The roar of the approaching wave, the firing of the carbine, the thought of her impending death was too much for Christina. She crumpled on the ground.
"We've got too move, Captain," Shane said, frantic now, trying to pick her up.
"It's no use," she cried.
The water towered over the buildings around them. It was taller than the Empire State Building. Christina closed her eyes as it reached the building next to them, tearing it to shreds. She heard Zombie still firing and felt Shane dive on top of her. She appreciated his desperate act to try to protect her. These were good men, and she was proud to have served with them.
She felt herself picked up and turned over, completely unable to control her body or her movements. She couldn't feel Shane anymore; he had been torn away from her. She didn't want to drown. She didn't know how long that took, but it seemed a terrible way to die.
She struck something. Her body felt pinned against concrete, her limbs twisting in unnatural ways, but she felt no pain. Her mind felt dark and she knew she was losing consciousness. At least it would be quick, she felt with a touch of gratitude.
I love you, John, she said in her mind, willing the message to reach her husband.
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