"I honestly don't know what's going on," he admitted at last. "But to tell you the truth, I'm not looking forward to finding out."
* * * * *
As Richard Mathieson stared down the long corridor to the communications center, he felt as though he stood upon a threshold looking down a tunnel into the future.
"We'll be late," Sasha said and pulled him with her; the automated walkway activated, shuttling them quickly towards the doorway. For the first time in over three years, Sasha and Richard had left together in the morning, after making sure that Moira went to school and leaving Erin with Madeleine Brasseau, a close friend of theirs that Sasha had known before she met Richard.
Inside the communications center, Zhdanov waited for the pair to show up. Setting down a cup of tea, he stood, rubbing hard at his eyes as if by doing so he could clear away the fatigue that lined them. He had been awake for days on stimulants.
"I'm glad to see the both of you," he said, looking up as they approached, then paused to down the rest of his tea. He gestured for each of them to take a seat in the empty operator's chairs before continuing.
"Since I'm going to make a big request of you on behalf of the Earth Security Force, I felt it necessary to discuss matters with you personally. You know, there are going to be a lot of changes around here." Zhdanov gestured with a sweep of his arms. "I have already had to make a few myself," he added regretfully. For a moment, his eyes glazed over with nostalgia, then suddenly they sharpened back to the present reality.
"Ah well, that's enough of that." Zhdanov said, dismissing his recollections in his usual decisive manner. "We can't allow any personal tears to get in the way under the circumstances.
"Simply put, the UESF has decided to convert this scientific base into a military complex." He continued. "It's really quite necessary—this is one of the largest scientific bases on Earth, and we don't know how much time we have before the other vessel decides to follow the first here—indeed how many more are coming. We already have everything we need to convert the base, not only raw materials but in terms of human resources. And since most of the base is below ground, we have a clear advantage that the UESF feels we must make use of." Richard and Sasha nodded, listening carefully for the punch line.
"The current plan is to graduate most of the cadets here and induct them into the engineering development programs or into armed service, retaining most of them as officers here until the new bases are completed. The training staff will be relegated to elevated positions in the military hierarchy, and our scientists will undertake the task of creating weapons for our defense.
"You two have established yourselves as two of the prime candidates for the alpha centauri mission, yet each of you has other areas of expertise which we feel are useful, considering the current situation. Richard, you helped to engineer engines for the Titan and Ceres space shuttles, and Sasha, you have an excellent reputation of being one of the finest astrodynamic physics professors on Earth.
"We are considering establishing a school for cadets once the government makes it known to the public that the Earth is in peril. I would like to invite the both of you to be a part of an informal committee that will develop this school. If you agree, we would appreciate it if you would pass on your knowledge by teaching a few classes once the school opens.
"I have been charged with giving both of you your post assignments. Each of you has been made a Captain in our new divisions. Sounds strange, doesn't it?" He gave a short laugh. "Military titles still sound so archaic to me.”
A timer on his desk sounded a faint call just then, and Zhdanov seemed to liven up again.
"That will be all, you may go," he said more loudly, watching as the pair disappeared behind the closing shutter-like doors of the upper level of the communications room.
"Whoever would have thought that humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial life would begin this way?" he mused aloud, then frowned.
Cameron, that old crackpot, had been right as usual.
* * * * *
Elsewhere in the UESRC, Dr. Saira Knightwood was heading to the restricted access Saturn Laboratory of her colleague, Dr. Alastair Cameron. After sounding a bell outside the door, she waited impatiently a few moments. When no one answered the door, she decided to forsake politeness and raised her hand to the identity scanning access panel, then entered when the door slid open.
Five young scientists were gathered around an assortment of experiments.
"Some welcome," Knightwood muttered under her breath, wondering in consternation where the devil Cameron was. As if in answer to her unvoiced question, the old man appeared from his storage room wielding a processor of some kind.
"How are things progressing?" Knightwood interrupted loudly. Cameron looked up in confusion and blinked several times before handing over the test tube to one of the young scientists. He half-stumbled, half-shuffled over to Knightwood's side before removing his goggles, yet his gaze remained fixed in the direction of the experiment that was taking place.
"Ah, Knightwood, my dear," he said, as though he knew she had been there all along. "We're testing a casing right now with corrosive chemicals. It seems to be holding up pretty well. The last word I heard from Dr. Foster was that it's still preventing radiation leakage with near perfect efficiency, but we'll have to keep running that experiment for another day to be sure. Anyway, all things considered, I'd say we have a winner." Cameron sighed and returned to his experiment.
Knightwood stood a moment longer watching the assembly before heading off to the communications room to meet Zhdanov. She found him gazing out over the lower level, teacup in hand, his eyes distant.
"Ahem," she coughed to get his attention.
"Oh, hello." Only Zhdanov's head turned around to glance at the doorway. Knightwood took his acknowledgment as an invitation and pulled up beside him.
"You'd rather be with Cameron, wouldn't you?" She asked, hoping that her choice of question would animate him. He seemed in the doldrums, but she imagined that he was only exhausted considering the amount of work he'd been putting in recently. Goodness knows, though, they'd all been putting in overtime!
As she had expected, Zhdanov turned his attention to her. He looked into her bright, dark eyes, envying her unwavering natural energy, unaware that many others had done the same with regard to him.
"I just don't think that I can be the military organizer that the Security Force expects me to become." He gestured to the commotion below, sounding tired.
"Oh come on, now..."
"I'm just a scientist at heart, Saira." He continued, trying to explain his inner turmoil, but he touched only the surface and came out sounding sentimental. "I would rather be working with Cameron," he sighed. “The crusty old crab.” He added.
“You're more suited to giving orders than I am.” He declared. “I don't want this position of power I've been given. Oh, I don't mind leading other scientists or committing myself to something—I just don't like telling other people what they have to do. I really can’t do it anymore."
Something had really ruffled Zhdanov's feathers. Knightwood knew him too well to doubt it. She wondered why he skirted the real issue—she had seen him in action before—and she wondered why he seemed so deflated. Could it be following certain orders that Zhdanov couldn't swallow?
"I have my bad days,” she laughed. “Today, for instance. You should have seen the looks on the faces of all the operators when I told them they were going to be transferred in three months. Some of them have been here for years."
"Cameron thought something like this would happen as soon as the first alien ship got here, you know." Zhdanov shrugged. "I didn't want to believe him."
"Neither did I." Knightwood admitted.
"Saira, I hate all of this secrecy—" Zhdanov said suddenly and looked away.
"What secrecy?" Knightwood press
ed him, in a slight state of shock.
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “You know what, I found out from one of the representatives that the United Earth Government has been considering taking defensive measures for some time, even before we heard from Pluto." He said, changing the subject. "They must have felt that there was some kind of threat despite the footage they gave us of the alien ship's destruction. They've been preparing a secret fleet of Sky Hawk fighter squadrons in the Ural Mountains near the Ural Base Science Center—and some on this continent north of Statue City."
"No," Knightwood whispered in protest, unable to speak louder. This was the first she'd heard of this news, and it was a little much to take this early in the morning.
"It's true." Zhdanov nodded emphatically. "The UESRC has received more than three hundred completed craft. We still don't know how useful they will be—the planes were designed using the blueprints of our single-person craft."
"How did they keep it all secret from us?" Knightwood wondered.
"The representative only said that they didn't want to alarm the public, or us.”
“Typical.”
“They said that it was only a precautionary measure, and that if the Pluto Base had not been destroyed, they would have told us once the fleets were finished so that we might begin to train our pilots—" Zhdanov was cut off by one of the communications operators below.
"Dr. Zhdanov," the voice called on the video monitor. Zhdanov and Knightwood immediately headed down the open-air elevator.
"What is it?" Knightwood asked as they hurried to the communications console at the front of the cavernous room.
"Oh, Knightwood, we didn't know you were here. Well—we have received confirmation that two small vessels are heading on a direct course for Earth from the Pluto orbit." The copper-haired youth who had called them informed her. "Gabriel is asking how they should defend themselves, and Cummings wants to know if they should evacuate as quickly as possible."
"Tell our people to get back down here if they can." Knightwood ordered, but she felt a chill descend upon her, rapidly plunging down to her toes. Not again. It's too soon.
"Ma'am? Shouldn't we notify the Security Council representative first and get permission to—" The young operator suggested.
"We haven't got the time," Zhdanov explained, mildly annoyed that he was wasting it in explanation. "They can't defend themselves up there—our single ships weren't built to fly in outer space, and the shuttles can't protect— look, the station has no defenses of its own, and it won't last a minute if they target it. Just get our people out of there. If they're smart, the regulars will follow. They should know that they won't be any use to us—to stay would be a vain sacrifice. If Gabriel isn't hit, then we can go back and outfit it for proper defense later."
"I'll relay your message to Cummings," the operator turned around and patched in a video signal.
"Call the council and see if they have detected the small enemy vessels, and if they have, ask them what they're planning on doing about them." Zhdanov had turned to address the adjacent unoccupied operator. If only we'd had missiles ready, we might have been able to blow them out of the sky, he thought, though such regrets were pointless now.
"In the meantime, send a message to Dawe and see if he can organize our new Sky Hawk fighter squadrons as we discussed." Zhdanov said to the other operator. "Those Pegasus Recon escort pilots we had that day—Mathieson, Gurney, Blair—tell them to be prepared to move out our new Falcon fighters as soon as we have their estimated arrival point." Zhdanov ordered, feeling every inch a phony, then turned a weary glance to Knightwood.
"I hope the Ural Base is more prepared than we are," Knightwood said; Zhdanov only nodded.
Chapter Nine
Ten hours of waiting had been enough to push Richard's nerves to the limit. As he stood up in the cockpit, the overhead hatch open above him, he was glad for the momentary chance to stretch his legs while waiting for his plane to be refueled.
Once his squadron finished refueling they would be heading out again, west this time, to engage the enemy whenever and wherever it landed. Sasha's team was still somewhere over the northern Atlantic Ocean, while Gurney's unit had gone to the Pacific, where they would be refueled at the Hawaiian Sector Observatory.
Half an hour later, they were in the air again. His team had only managed to put one hundred miles between themselves and the base when they received a message from the communications center. Mathieson patched in the video link and waited for Zhdanov's instructions, projecting more composure than he felt.
"The enemy has just penetrated our ionosphere above zone ten, sector two, Statue City." Zhdanov informed them. "All squadrons proceed to that area immediately." Richard cut out the signal and led his squadron, turning southeast and heading towards the North American coastline.
Two hours later his team reached Statue City, guided by Zhdanov's continuing updated information. Two squadrons had been near enough to arrive almost as soon as the enemy planes appeared, yet most were still on the way. Sasha's unit, he discovered, was expected to arrive within the hour.
The destruction was apparent from the moment they descended beneath the heavy cloud cover of early evening. Beneath the canopy, the waning light was replaced by the harsh glare of city lights blinking on and off like twinkling stars. A great billowing waft of smoke curled its way heavenward from the rent in the transparent dome that contained the city; random explosions and fires broke out below like tiny red fireflies.
Richard glanced at his radar screen, horrified to see a swarm of moving targets, where as many as one thousand enemy ships zigzagged around one hundred slower planes positively identified as the remnants of squadrons 2, 13, and 27 from the UESRC.
"Form up in phalanx attack formation," Captain Mathieson announced quietly, but his voice belied the anxiety he felt. He wasn't sure that he could operate an armed Falcon fighter, even one that used the same controls as the firefighter single engine planes he had often flown to protect the rural zones. But as soon as he gave the order, his unit plunged through the artificial opening and joined in the madness below.
Throughout the battle, Richard kept having to convince himself that it was real. He found it absurd that his only experience with moving targets had been shooting nets over injured animals to be brought into the UESRC for treatment, that his only experience with disaster had been shooting extinguishing missiles at fires that had broken out in the forested zones.
In Statue City, fires now consumed the trees along every avenue and in the nature parks, and broken overhead transport highways had crashed to the roofs of buildings and onto the now empty pedestrian walkways when they were hit by enemy fire or the explosions of downed planes.
And always there were the enemy fighters—left, right, at every turn they met him at ground level and high above the city buildings. His laserfire bounced off the surface of the enemy planes until he hit the tail of one near the engine and ignited an exploding fireball.
Using the same method he managed to down four of them in half an hour, but the majority he was lucky to dodge as best he could. From what he could tell beneath the blur of motion that surrounded them, they were exquisitely streamlined and composed of high-density seamless alloy, dark grey-blue with a silvery sheen. He caught his breath the first moment he saw one slow to turn a corner, and he found for a moment that he could not fire.
The air sizzled with highly efficient enemy laserfire; blue light beams of searing energy melted holes in the metallic surfaces of the city buildings. Oddly enough, Captain Mathieson noticed, it appeared that the alien planes were just as intent upon destroying the buildings and killing the civilians within as they were upon annihilating the defense squadrons; indeed, as he observed more carefully, the latter objective appeared to be only a secondary objective, necessary in order to accomplish the first. He ventured to guess that the alien planes even a
voided the defense squadrons, almost regarding them as little more than a trifling annoyance.
At that moment, Richard received a video communication, and his wife's image appeared on the videoscreen. He waited for her to speak to him a moment or so before he realized that she was not directly communicating with him but merely transmitting a message to all of the squadrons that her unit had arrived.
Elsewhere, Sasha put her years of practice flying to the test, regretting that she had given up flight training nearly three years before. Ten minutes of continuous dodging passed, and she was running low on ammunition rounds, yet she had only managed to shoot one plane down. She could see her side dying all around her; they were pitifully outnumbered. This sight rankled her venomously, but it made her want to get even more.
"Now I've got you!" she cried, releasing a few slugs at the rear end of a plane that had paused to finish off a building. The building had begun to burn inside out as the flammable materials within were ignited by a sudden gust of blue energy. The accurate laser beam had penetrated the building, leaving a tiny hole in the roof, but the structure took only moments to collapse.
Sasha watched with satisfaction as the enemy exploded into metal fragments. Too bad your engine fuel is flammable in our atmosphere, she mused. Tough luck!
She had her sights set on another plane but soon realized that it was going to get away as it abruptly changed direction and climbed skyward. Like an enraged lioness cheated of her prize, she whizzed her plane around, searching for another victim, but to her utter disappointment found the enemy all following one another, rising from the devastated city in great swarms, like bees charging up through the fractured canopy of the dome that contained the city and off into the darkness of the evening sky.
Signaling Captain Mathieson and the UESRC over her videocom, she was greeted by the effete face of her husband and the sober gaze of Zhdanov.
"Where did they go?" she asked, at once self-consciously aware that she must have appeared quite charged-up from the looks she was receiving.
"Our satellite shows that the enemy fighters are now aboard their small transport vessels." Zhdanov began. Three or four minutes passed in silence before he spoke again. "They have left our atmosphere and appear to be heading for the Mars area. We are awaiting confirmation from our Mars Aries base."