Our sensors were powerful enough to penetrate ground but would only go so far through solid rock. I scanned the area leading into the flattened zone and took note of an anomaly leading away toward Area 51. I attempted to scan the other side of the zone but was greeted by the solid granite that formed the Tetons. I pinpointed the location where I believed the tunnel would have continued and set the Defender down beside it.
I looked at Bigg and asked if he had any ideas. He remarked that we could always just make our own tunnel. We could turn on the BHD and slowly drill our way to wherever we wanted.
It was genius. The Defender was powered up and I turned the nose down. Within five minutes I had a hollow detected on our scanners. I slowed our progress as we approached. We drilled to a location beside the hollow and then turned upright to continue.
As soon as the smallest of holes had broken through, I backed off the drilling. If there were survivors on the other side attempting to dig their way out, I did not want to bring them harm. I moved the Defender from side to side to hollow out an area large enough for us to walk around our ship when we set down.
I parked the Defender and opened the rear door. Bigg and I hurried out to the front of the ship and to the hole through to the tunnel. It was just big enough for us to squeeze through. The tunnel on the other side was in complete darkness. Bigg soon returned from the Defender with an emergency light.
I looked down the tunnel to the southwest and could see the large boulders that made up the blockage. We turned northeast and began walking along the tracks toward what we hoped was the chamber.
After a three-quarter-mile walk, we arrived at a large, closed door. We beat on the door but to no avail. After ten minutes of attempting to signal someone inside, we returned to the Defender. We powered up the BHD and began drilling in the direction of the tunnel door.
Ten minutes later, we broke through into the shuttle room. We left the Defender and boarded the elevator to the long hallway of doors. When the doors opened to a dimly lit hall, there were two Marines lying on the ground.
We quickly attempted to assist them, but it was evident they were dead. We raced down the hall to my great-uncle's office, but no one was there. We next entered into the chamber. Again there was only emergency lighting. There were bodies lying about everywhere. We continued to try to assist, but they were all dead. Walls had collapsed. Items had been overturned. The chamber had the look of having been through a tremendous earthquake.
I then told Bigg I was going to find Paige, and he turned immediately toward where his son Chris would normally be. I ran and ran fast toward Paige's lab. Bodies lay where they had been at the time of the attack. As I raced toward the lab, I came across the first live person.
He was on the ground, moaning and rocking slowly back and forth, with evidence of dried blood coming from his ears. The concussions from the gravity wave weapons must have been tremendous. I stopped to attempt to help the fallen man. He was incoherent... delirious... there was nothing further I could do. I once again sprinted in the direction of Paige's lab.
As I continued, there were more signs of life. Small groups of individuals were sitting on the ground or in chairs. As I approached one group, a lady in uniform waved frantically at me. I stopped to assist.
Just like the others, her eardrums had burst. But, she had her wits about her and was assisting others. She asked if the war was still ongoing. I grabbed the closest piece of paper and wrote that it was over, we had won, but at a high cost.
I then gestured that I had to go and continued my run to find Paige. When I entered the lab, her two assistants lay motionless. I then saw her, curled up in a ball holding her ears.
I rushed to her side and took solace in the fact that she was still breathing. I scooped her up in my arms and carried her back to my quarters. I lay her down on what was once the anti-grav mattress. It now had no power.
There was no one to call. No emergency help. Everyone in the chamber had been killed or knocked unconscious by the concussions. I wet a cloth and began to clean the dried blood from her ears. As I carefully wiped, she stirred and then opened her eyes.
She had a foggy gaze at first, but it soon turned into a smile. She was alive and she was going to make it. After half an hour of comforting my wife and informing her of the battle, I then went looking for Bigg. I found him in the reactor technician's lab holding a still-groggy Chris.
It was determined that we needed to access the comm center if we were going to get help. The breaker to the comm room had popped, just as with most of the chamber’s circuits. We hustled to the power room and began the process of restoring the power to the chamber one section at a time. As the power came on, we checked for fires before moving to the next section.
When the lights in the comm area came on, I left Bigg and rushed back. I logged into the first console that came up, but there were no comm paths to the outside of the chamber. Whatever lines had been there before had been severed.
I turned and ran back to Bigg just as the last of the breakers was restored. I told him to take his son to my chamber and watch over Paige. I was going to the surface for help. I then sprinted back to the Defender. I powered up the BHD and set a course for the west side of Jackson Hole, Wyoming... the closet town to the Tetons.
After twenty minutes of tunneling, I emerged into a field beside a small jewelry shop. The owners came out to see what the commotion was. When the rear door of the Defender opened, I was greeted by an old man with a shotgun. He demanded to know who I was. I told him of the results of the battle and of the secret chamber under the mountain. I then told of the condition of the soldiers and scientists trapped within.
Shortly thereafter the sheriff arrived, and within hours the people of the town of Jackson Hole were working in unison to bring the chamber personnel to the surface for whatever assistance they could provide.
Paige and Chris were alive and would recover. It was well into the evening before word of David Brenner came. He was alive and well. He had gone to one of the other chambers to oversee bringing it online.
While I was thankful for the news that my great-uncle had come through unharmed, I then got the news about General Buck. He had not been so lucky. A large chunk of rock had fallen from the ceiling of the chamber onto the Battle Room. General Buck and many of our Battle Planners and Tacticians had been in its path.
The town of Jackson Hole continued to assist in the evacuation of the chamber. By the time the last of the survivors had been brought to the surface, thirty-six hours had passed. The scene at Jackson Hole had played out in many a suburb of the targeted cities. The estimated toll of human lives was quickly set at north of 180 million and climbing.
Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Denver, LA, San Diego, San Francisco, and Honolulu had been destroyed in the United States. For unknown reasons, the Washington, DC, area had been spared. I reasoned that perhaps it had been so heavily defended, that the raiders had chosen lesser targets.
Tokyo and Osaka had been crushed in Japan, Seoul in the Koreas, Beijing and Shanghai in China, Moscow in Russia, and Berlin, Paris, and London rounded out the other major cities hit. Along with those, various other military and industrial targets had been taken out.
As a world we had been badly injured, but not broken. There was still a bigger threat coming our way. By the best of counts, we had just over twenty-one months to recover and rebuild our defenses, this time in preparation for a far more powerful assault on our planet.
The nations of the world called a grand council that met in Brisbane, Australia, to determine our course of action. David Brenner presided over the members, and the work to be done was equally divided amongst every capable being and every country. All efforts were geared toward the coming war.
Foods were rationed, resources directed, and manufacturing built and manned with one goal in mind... to build as many Defenders and coil gun defenses as possible and to train the crews to man them.
It was a coordinat
ed effort like man had never seen. We were all brothers. We were all on the same side. We all had everything to gain and everything to lose. My days were long and were spent training crews. The same went for the other remaining Defender crewmen. Paige spent her time in a lab continuing to attempt to turn out entangled pairs for our comm systems.
Our time together was limited to a few hours per week. It was all we could spare from the duties we had been assigned. Bigg and Whip had found a moment to tie the knot. Pop trained his crew, had his two beers a week, and continued to grin endlessly.
Our world had drastically changed. There was little to no crime. There were no freeloaders milling about sucking on the tit of those who had. Entertainment was largely frozen in time, with no resources devoted to its continued existence. Everyone was busy on every day.
Everything and everyone had one purpose... the defense of our precious Earth. It had been more than seventy years since the Sodium Apocalypse. And we still had no idea of who our enemy really was or what they wanted. There had been no ambassadors, no envoys, no messages or communications of any kind since the apocalypse. The attacks and the aliens’ persistence were beyond reason. Who they were was beyond our reach.
This night I lay on my anti-grav mattress with Paige lying beside me. I stroke her hair as we gaze into each other’s eyes. In my heart I know exactly what it is that I toil for day in and day out. It's my wife... the woman I love. The woman I would fight and die for a thousand times over. She gave me purpose and reason and life.
The aliens could come down from the heavens and crush our cities. They could wipe us from the face of our precious Earth. But they would not take our spirit, our freedom, or our fight.
In twenty-one months we would know our fate. I wondered if man would continue to learn and grow and prosper. I wondered if we would overcome our foe and then reach out to the stars. I wondered if one day we would be at their doorstep... threatening their existence. I held my wife close as I closed my eyes. The assisted sleep from my reclamation suit came quickly.
~~~~~
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* * *
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SODIUM
(Vol. 4)
Gravity
Chapter 4.1
* * *
We were five days into our ten-day station just outside the heliosphere. It was absolutely the most boring duty station in all the USAC. The main alien fleet was still fourteen months away. Everyone on the planet was busy preparing our defenses for the incoming threat. We were busy twiddling our thumbs.
The assignment was fun for the first couple hours. Once you were over the thought of venturing outside the solar system and once you had looked around at the amazing views of the stars for a bit... the thrill was gone.
Our main attraction looked to be an asteroid of about thirty meters in width that was approaching us from the suspect region of Epsilon Eridani. The only curious thing about it was its speed... almost half the speed of light.
After calculations had been done, it was determined it was on a course that would take it near Earth. We had been given instruction to pull up alongside it and to blast it into tiny bits. Earth had enough problems with its reconstruction without having to worry about an asteroid strike. After five days of our uneventful assignment, we were glad to have the distraction.
The throttle was at full as we raced toward the incoming rocky threat. I waited until the last possible moment to do the now-classic flip maneuver in our Defender. The BHD (Black Hole Drive) continued its pull, first slowing us to a stop and then propelling us forward in an attempt to match the speed of the incoming asteroid. With our dual reactor setup, the acceleration would take us an hour and a half.
I considered myself a good pilot. I scored well on my qualifying tests. And I was an ace in the Defender simulators back in Chamber 2 under the Adirondacks in upstate New York. I would use those skills to slide up in front of the asteroid and then move off to the right side, where we could blast it with our coil guns. My offensive specialist, Randy, had an itchy trigger finger.
His name was Thurmon Campbell, but we called him Randy because he was always flirting with the ladies. I found him a bit obnoxious, but he seemed to have a knack for attracting their attention. As we pulled up in front of the asteroid, Randy was already hatching plans about how he was going to be telling the ladies of his heroics in saving the planet.
I could have not cared less about what he told them so long as he got the job done. As a gunner he was a worthwhile addition to my crew. He preferred manual controls over the computer assist, and his scoring in the simulations had shown him to be skilled at it.
I prompted Raven and Tork for status from their stations before making the outbound maneuver. Raven (Janet Plumb) was our defensive specialist. Her jet-black hair had given her the obvious name. Tork (Derrick Kennedy) was our engineer. He was a quiet sort of guy that spent his time tinkering with the ship’s systems. The automation on board governed most of what went on with those systems, but Tork liked staying on top of it anyway. The way I looked at it, if he was happy, I was happy.
I took us to within five kilometers of the asteroid before banking hard left. At two kilometers out I would do another flip, allowing Randy to take his shot at glory. Just for kicks, I put my controls on manual in order to make Randy work hard for his shot. If I could coax a miss, it would give me ribbing ammunition for whenever he got mouthy. He got mouthy a lot.
We quickly slid out to two kilometers, and I flipped the ship around. We were completely unprepared for what lay directly behind the asteroid. It was a long line of alien fighters!
Raven's console quickly lit up with a count of 315. They had been using the asteroid to approach Earth under cover. Randy redirected his first shots at the lead fighter just as I made another flip and went to full throttle.
The fighters broke rank and came hard at us. Raven directed our grav-shield to the rear of the ship while Randy began the launch of four Drillers. Our newest Drillers consisted of one BHD ring with a new field generator that allowed the Driller to change directions much faster. They could now almost match the turns of the alien fighters.
New algorithms in the Drillers’ programming offered an added benefit. The Driller would fly around chasing after a target, and when it caught its prey, the black hole of the BHD ring would cut into the target vessel just like a drill.
The new algorithms would now direct the Driller to stop and turn once inside a ship. The old weapon would attempt to turn a ship into Swiss cheese by cutting through it, exiting, and then cutting through again. This new model would try to gut whatever it came in contact with from the inside out. It was an untested weapon, but the Tacticians assured us it would be more destructive than the original. Randy had four Drillers flying moments after our surprise meeting.
The fighters fired immediate shots, which took our shields to 65 percent with the first hit and 85 percent with the second. The fighters gained as our BHD began to accelerate. The next shot took the shields to 112 percent, taking out all five of our BHD rings. We were suddenly dead in space.
The final shot had sent us spinning but had not knocked our active skin offline. When the rings collapsed, the active skin shut down the sensors and covered the remaining portions of the front of the Defender. Our propulsion was gone, but as a consequence, with the active skin, our ship was now invisible to the alien sens
ors. We were blind to what was happening just outside, but the enemy could not see us either.
The computer gave its best estimate of our position and orientation, but without a drive, those parameters were largely useless. We were floating in deep space with no way home. It was just over a day’s travel at light speed to get back to Earth. We weren't going anywhere. But we had to warn Command of the approaching horde of alien fighters. Earth had barely begun its recovery from their prior attack.
It had been three months since the combined USAC and world forces had defeated the alien carrier. It had been a hard-fought battle, with more than 200 million citizens dead when the final counts of casualties were in. So far as we knew, the alien casualties had been zero, as their ships were all autonomous. Twenty of the world’s largest cities along with numerous other military and industrial targets had been largely wiped out.
For me, I had lost a favorite cousin in Atlanta. Liz and I had been best friends growing up on my grandfather's farm in east Alabama. When my aunt and uncle moved away, I was devastated to see Liz go.
It was that separation that had hardened me and sent me down the path from being a tomboy to being a Defender pilot for the USAC. For a while we had kept in close contact digitally, but that soon faded as we made our way into high school and into the inevitable friendships that developed from there.
The aliens had taken my cousin from me along with my aunt and uncle when Atlanta had been destroyed. This was my first encounter with the enemy, and I had a score to settle. But, I now had no way of doing it.
We waited twenty minutes for the fighters to pass before attempting to activate a communications sensor. I had taken the time to complete a brief of our encounter and of what was coming Earth's way. The briefing, coupled with a complete recording from each of our sensors, was compressed and ready to send when the comm came online.
SODIUM Trilogy Part One Page 43
