Between the view of the surface through the canopy's HUD and the plastic-wrap-bubble systems on her monitors, Snow watched the progress of the evacuation. She was ready to jump in as required, but so far, the choke point was not of tug jumper availability but evacuee availability from the two jump sites. The evacuation was going steady for now. But the volunteers thus far consisted of those trusting and/or frightened people eager to escape. SoChar in the north, and Mourataar in the south, were the first cities being evacuated. The plan called for keeping each city’s citizens together in the same bubble. It would reduce the future chaos of reuniting families and communities. And it would presumably increase morale to be amongst one's own citizens while waiting through what would certainly be a long process.
Most people were not eager, however. They were naturally reluctant to put blind trust in the earthlings. People were disappearing with a gust of wind and a crack of thunder. It was quite impressive. But where were they going? Was it safe? Fun? In theory, Snow approved of Max's idea of transparency, that the people should be told what was happening. But in practice she wondered what they would think if they were fully aware of the process. That they would be teleported to space then packed in a big ball like grocery store meat. Who would volunteer for that? No one. Not before it was too late. Perhaps, when a giant rock began heating the atmosphere on its way to smashing their city, a lot of minds would be changed then. First, they would change their opinion of the evacuation process, then they would change into ash.
But perhaps the ugliness of the truth would convince them that the earthlings were being honest. They certainly couldn't feel then, like they were being up sold on the situation.
She opened a channel. “Okay Max, broadcast it. Let ‘em know what is happening.” If they chose to stay and die, it would at least be their own choice.
“Will do,” Max said. He didn't say, “I think you are doing the right thing.” Even though, or perhaps because, she knew he was thinking it.
She was passing close over Mourataar in her tight, nearly polar orbit that crossed directly over each of the two current evacuation sites. The southern skies were clear, giving an unobstructed view of the wide southern continent. Unobstructed except a relatively small cloud building directly over the city. “Did you see the cloud over Mourataar?”
“Nope. I am nowhere near there,” Max said.
“Come to think of it, there was a small cloud over SoChar as well…” Snow said. “I think we might be changing the weather.”
Chapter 41
The Dee-Dub folded into geosynchronous orbit above SoChar. Linda focused their cameras on the city increasing it to maximum magnification. There was indeed a cloud forming over SoChar.
“There is indeed a cloud forming over SoChar,” Max said.
“Is that going to be a problem for my operation?” Snow asked, her tone light in a partially successful attempt to hide her concern. But her question was serious.
Max added a channel to the call. “How's the weather down there, Commander Carrack?” He asked.
“A bit stormy…” said Carrack. There was a bit of a shout in his voice as though it was noisy down there. “I assume you already knew that.”
Max wondered how bad this weather would get. Were they going to be stopped by their own self-made weather problems?
“It's not too bad. A bit breezy,” said Carrack. “The pressure has dropped, and it's turbulent after each jump, but calms down quickly enough. I've had reports of a few small twisters, but they power down almost as soon as they start.”
“Twisters?” Snow said. There was annoyance in her voice at the at the inconsiderate nature of Mother Grailliyn.
Max barely noticed. The scene on the monitor changed, drawing his attention. Something appeared in the camera's field of view. Something big. Moving rapidly towards the planet.
“New impactor,” Max said into the radio. He opened his mouth to speak again.
“SoChar,” Linda said, answering his question.
Aimed right at SoChar.
“There's a ship following it,” Linda said.
Chapter 42
People were going to die. Ferris had started the chain of events leading to panic. He announced the news of an impactor to the crowd of onlookers, which up until then had been all they were, onlookers. The volunteers had nearly dried up. But it was Carrack himself who made it worse. In attempting to silence Ferris he only managed to add weight to Ferris' words. If Carrack had wanted panic, he could not have engineered it better.
People were going to die. Probably they had already started dying, trampled in the crowd. Soon, more would die on the perimeter when the tug jumper began cleaving bodies along the edge of the jump sphere. A few more would die when they were swept up in the torrent of air that rushed to fill the vacuum. He could stop the ships.
But he wouldn't. The only thing he would ask of the tug pilots was for them to cycle in faster. Because whatever he thought of the panic and the death it would cause, when the impactor arrived, everyone left in the city would be dead anyway. Today, panic would save more lives than it would cost.
“Clear the perimeter!” Carrack shouted from his Roughshod, his voice was amplified and cast about the area through the mic as well as by drones high above the jump site perimeter.
The people did not clear the perimeter. A few androids struggled to push and pull people back. But there were nowhere near enough of them.
“Is it clear?” The question came from the tug pilot.
“Jump,” Carrack said to the pilot.
The small ship folded in, appearing in the fenced area. “It is not clear,” said the pilot.
Carrack opened his mouth to give the order to jump, but it caught in his throat. He swallowed. He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Jump now, Margret.”
“I can't jump, it's not clear,” Margret said, “it's not clear. People will be hurt or killed.”
“People are going to die for every second you don't jump Margret,” Carrack said evenly.
“I…I can't do it,” she said, “I can't cut up all those people.”
“Jacob,” Carrack said. He spoke an authorization code phrase. “Jump that ship to its destination. Now.”
The ship jumped. There was thunder. There was wind. There was an energetic chorus of screams and shouts as rows of bodies, both whole and partial, were roughly dragged into the jump site circle by the short violent winds.
The next wave of evacuees rushed in with seemingly little concern for the injured. Most of them probably hadn't seen what had happened. But Carrack imagined it would have made little difference if they had understood the situation.
When the circle had filled, he called in another tug. Then another. Then another. He would continue calling in the tugs until the sky began to brighten.
Then he would call in more.
Chapter 43
The space rock was pretty big. Tiny in comparison to the impactor, but still it massed many tons. As important as its mass, in this case more important than its mass, was its extra-orbital velocity which exceeded that required to maintain its current orbit. After a jump, it would still be moving very, very fast relative to the new orbit around the planet when they arrived. Whether it would be moving fast enough is something they would soon find out.
The impactor was over a hundred meters at its widest, a detail Max did not think was a coincidence. It meant they could not attempt to jump the impactor away from its target. But+ they might be able to knock it off course, into the sea.
“All set,” Linda said.
Max pressed the big button. He preferred to do things manually when possible, though all of his best ideas required Linda's hands-off piloting technique.
The ship folded through space and appeared just behind the space rock. Immediately Max knew something was off. Linda hadn't done her hands-off thing, then the rock was far, far away, and getting farther every moment.
“Too small,” she said. “It was a lot brighter than I predicted. I thought it was b
igger. It won't be enough.”
“Well, let’s look for another one then. A bigger one,” Max said.
“It's already too late. There won't be anything in the system moving fast enough now to make the difference,” Linda said.
Max racked his brain, there had to be something. They couldn't just sit here and let SoChar get flattened.
“It won't work, boss,” Linda said, literally reading his mind and filtering through all the half-assed ideas streaming through it. “It's just too late.”
Despair threatened to overwhelm him. Instead he channeled it into rage. A new idea struck him. Revenge. They might not save SoChar. But perhaps they could make that GE ship pay. Jam a rock up its tailpipe and out the other side. Maybe mash it into the impactor…
“Oh! Boss, that plan has merit. Let’s do that plan!” Linda said.
Chapter 44
They had six bolts to place in all. What Chaplin called bolts where bundles of steel rods, meant to adhere the bedrock of SoChar to the concrete walls of the ship. They all helped as much as they could, though Chaplin did most of the work. Quin was shocked at the weight of the rods. Each was roughly the size of their makeshift lance, but weighed easily twice as much. More than twice as much. He'd never felt anything like it.
The installation was so quick that most of the time was taken up moving from one location to the other. Chaplin cut the holes alone, with the access doors closed. When that was done, they all took part, ferrying the rods up to the hole. Then the hole was injected with an expanding epoxy and the deed was done.
All told, the whole operation took a scant few hours from strapped in pods to a fully anchored ship. The tired group dragged their feet up the last few flights of stairs, but in the end they managed it and stumbled into the small living space at the top of the ship where they collapsed in a heap on the paired bunks and chairs. Quin lay on his bunk for some time, recovering from the long ordeal. He was roused by Cailin turning on the TV. Only then did Quin remember that he needed to let the commander know they were finished. He struggled to his feet and moved over to the radio on the wall.
“Duty crew Quin to Commander Carrack,” he said into the mic.
The response was immediate. “What's your status, Quin.” The commander’s voice was strained. Tight.
“We've finished. The ship is ready—”
“My God,” the commander said. “Listen to me, Quin. You stay on board. Ignore what I said before. Keep everyone on board! And open all the doors!”
“Ah… yes, sir,” Quin said. But the commander was already gone.
The volume on the TV was up. There was commotion in the city. That wasn't new. It was all commotion all the time there now.
“Quin look! Jayleen…” Cailin was dragging on Jayleen's arm, trying to get her to look at the TV.
Quin stepped over to see the screen. It was split into multiple windows. There was no commentary, only footage. In one window there was a close up of the park jump circle. Quin easily picked out the commander standing in his Roughshod. The circle though was in real chaos. People crowded the perimeter more closely than during the first jump disaster. Another window showed the city from further up and away. A third window showed nothing but sky. But soon that was no longer true. There was a bright point in the sky. As they watched, the point got brighter and brighter. Then a voice came on. “Spare now a thought for the people of SoChar as they make their passage to the next realm of existence.”
“The commander says to stay on the ship,” Quin said.
Chapter 45
“Ready?” Max asked.
“Ready!” Linda said.
Max hammered the big red button. A moment later they were ahead of the brighter-than-expected-but-ultimately-too-small space rock again. Three seconds ahead. When those three seconds had passed, the rock had slipped up beside them and the ship jumped again.
It unfolded precisely on target. The rock carried on its trajectory. A trajectory that would carry it right through the alien Egg ship, mashing it into a bulge on the impactor. In a blink, the rock hurled away from the Dee-Dub. Max had already been crossing his fingers, which was good, since everything had happened far too quickly for him to spontaneously add any luck in the moment. The rock passed through the space of the alien ship.
Max felt a moment of elation. The alien was no longer there.
Then it was back, flicking away only long enough to dodge the space rock.
“Damn it,” Max said.
The rock impacted the impactor mashing off a great chuck of material that had previously bulged from its side.
“Was that enough?”
“Still too big boss.”
“Barf,” Max didn't say. Though he did feel like barfing.
A pair of beams shot past the Dee-Dub, missing by centimeters. Only the random changes in velocity had saved them. A series of emergency jumps saved them from the next few bursts.
Thinking quickly, Max formed a tactic, riffing off Linda's E-Jumps. Linda pulled the thought from his mind and soon they were swapping between drives to jump every second, sending a volley of blasts towards the alien Egg ship between each jump.
After six such jump cycles, the alien Egg ceased firing, though Linda kept up the tactic. The tactic only worked by changing position faster than the Egg could find them and kill them. If the Dee-Dub stopped moving Max and Linda would only know the alien had started firing again when the Dee-Dub exploded.
After ten cycles, the alien ship began changing its position, preserving its energy shield. Max cheered the stalemate.
When the Egg moved away, at its characteristic, I've-got-somewhere-to-be velocity, Max cheered again. They had driven it from the field. His joy faded immediately. The impactor had entered the atmosphere. It was still heading straight towards SoChar, and it was still too big for the jump sphere.
“Ah, boss?” Linda said with a worrying tone, “I got a faint signal just then. I thought it was nothing… but It came from the vicinity of Welcome bubble alpha…”
Another one of the traitor's transmitters, it had to be. This time hidden on the sleep array.
“Max to Snow. Incoming!” Max said into the radio, then to Linda, “We've got to get over there. Now!”
“Yes, Boss. But—”
Max's angry look said, “But what?”
“But our window just opened…”
Their window had just opened. Meaning the atmosphere had burnt off the crust of the impactor enough to possibly save SoChar. But to do so meant leaving Snow to deal with the alien Egg. And all she had to fight it with was that slow, flimsy Tug Jumper.
“Supreme Commander Snow White. You hold that thing off as long as you can,” Max said into his radio. To Linda he said, “Take us to the impactor.”
Chapter 46
“We'll hold em' off alright,” Snow said, aware that her mouth was writing a check that her ass could not cash.
The aliens could not have chosen for themselves a better time to show up. It was exactly Snow's worst-case scenario. The Welcome bubble was full up with a load of SoCharians, and they had expanded, as was usual on arrival, spreading out into the bubble as the Grailliyn atmosphere pushed out on the bubble, stretching it. The evacuees were spread out much wider than the one-hundred-meter sphere they arrived in. The travel bubble ring was open, and they were starting to move towards it, but their only option for a quick exit was to sacrifice some large number of Grailliyn's in order to save the rest. Snow keyed her mic to give the command. Then paused. She didn't have to make that decision just yet.
“Margret, get Longissima out of here. Put it behind something big, somewhere out of line of sight. It's leaking traitor signals again,” Snow said.
“On it,” Margret said, relief in her voice. No sooner had she spoken the words than the Longissima folded away.
“Alright you two,” Snow said, to the two tugs piloted by AIs that were still with her, Shawna and Douglas. “Cozy up to those bubbles and be ready to jump at my command or, you k
now, as necessary. Snow checked her log and confirmed her command codes were up to date. There would be no time for banter when she gave the awful command to abandon anyone left in the Welcome bubble to a painful and frightening death. She then ordered Terrance to cozy their own tug up to the first of two guardian asteroids.
The alien announced its presence with a volley of energy blasts, punching holes in the Welcome bubble. Atmosphere began spewing from the holes. Positioning valves placed evenly around the bubble, opened as well spewing out more atmosphere, in an attempt to maintain the sphere's position.
“Do it big T,” Snow said.
Their tug jumped, carrying the asteroid with them, and placing it between the alien attacker and the travel bubble. Six seconds and two jumps later, the second asteroid was positioned, protecting the sleep-gas ring which connected the two bubbles. By then there were several more holes in the Welcome bubble.
“Stay behind the barrier you two,” Snow said, though she could see now that the two AIs were already adjusting their position.
The quickest way now for the Egg to find a clear line of fire was to close the distance until it could maneuver around the asteroid shield, assuming it continued in its curious refusal to use its own jump drive. But the Egg didn't stop blasting as it rushed in, and more holes appeared through the exposed edges of the Welcome bubble. The bubble was already shrinking, and the new holes accelerated the process, drawing the frightened Grailliyn's closer to each other. It wouldn't be long before the atmosphere was too thin for survival. Already they would be getting lightheaded. The sleep gas ring closed as the pressure of the Welcome bubble dropped below that of the Sleep bubble.
“Get the Sleep bubble out of here,” Snow said. Time was up for transferring the evacuees into the Sleep bubble.
It took a few seconds to disconnect the two, then Douglas folded away with the Sleep Bubble.
Snow maneuvered the tug up along the side of the asteroid, just enough to peek out at the alien Egg. It was close. Too close.
Starship Invasion (Lost Colony Uprising Book 2) Page 28
