by Nick M Lloyd
Sam couldn’t answer. The impact had caused her muscles to tense – trying to stabilise her sideways movement – and it had sent a jolt of pain through her.
Shit!
Taking a deep breath to help contain the pain, Sam looked again and considered her options. The man with the kid in the car pulled out into the road, clipping the parked car in front of him. Moments later, he was gone.
Sam pushed on, swerving to avoid a pair of teenage kids who were also heading for a car under orders from their parents. This family also had bags – which must have been prepacked for such an eventuality – with them.
Sam couldn’t move quickly enough, and was hit in the face with a duffle bag carried by the teenage son.
‘Sorry, I didn’t see you.’
People never do …
The pavement was clearly not a good option, and Sam looked to see if she could use any of the road. Unfortunately, it had become a demolition derby racetrack. Staying on the pavement, Sam picked her way through crowds of crying children and screaming parents as they clambered into cars and drove off.
In the near distance the blaring of a car horn preceded a screech of tyres and a sickening crash. Sam turned the corner just in time to see a man climb out of his car, take one look at the crumpled front end, kick the front left wheel, and then run – leaving his car blocking one lane of the road.
The car that had been hit appeared relatively mobile. Sam watched the driver – a mother – scream at her children in the back seat whilst executing a nine-point turn to free her car from the crash.
Behind the abandoned stationary car, the road – one of the main roads leading north out of east London – was now gridlocked.
Fuck!
Sam did a double-take. It had taken the drivers of the trapped cars all of five seconds to grasp the situation.
Now, cars flooded onto the pavements to get around the road blockage.
Pedestrians scattered and Sam knew she couldn’t risk it. Many cars had decided to stay on the pavement to make up time.
She looked at her phone.
One bar …
Looking around, Sam saw she was close to a large block of council housing. She wheeled herself through the gate and into the lee of a big industrial waste bin.
Footsteps coming from the stairwell drew her attention.
Two Indian ladies in saris emerged, each pulling a suitcase, and hobbled past.
‘What’s happening?’ called Sam.
One lady, seeing Sam, let go of her bag and rushed over. ‘Darling, the alien craft is leaking radiation. You must come with us.’
The lady took hold of the handles on Sam’s wheelchair.
Radiation?
Sam started to feel itchy all over.
The Indian lady, although trying to be helpful, had the same issues as Sam had on the pavements. There were simply too many people.
‘Leave me,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll be okay. I have friends nearby.’
The first lady looked like she would refuse, but her friend pulled her away. ‘We should go.’
With a final apologetic look, both women disappeared into the heaving crowd.
Sam exhaled and, swinging her wheelchair back around, headed back for the council estate on the basis that she wouldn’t get trampled or run over there.
Fuck.
‘Sam!’
Tim?
It was Charlie, with a look of severe worry on his face.
Looking at her, whilst consulting his phone, Charlie made his way through the crowd. ‘Sam!’
‘Hi Charlie,’ said Sam, not wanting to give any impression of the fear that had been building. ‘I’m just getting some milk for tonight’s dinner.’
An enormous man wearing military fatigues appeared at Charlie’s side. Spanish-looking and severe, he bent down and picked Sam effortlessly out of her wheelchair.
‘The radiation isn’t too bad,’ said Charlie, looking intently at Sam. ‘But the crowds don’t know that. How’s your back?’
The relief that washed through Sam – she hadn’t been looking forward to getting radiation sickness – even stopped her from making a caustic comment about being permanently physically impaired. ‘Fine, thanks.’
Again, Charlie scanned Sam with his eyes. ‘Okay.’
‘You weren’t due for an hour or so,’ said Sam as she was carried by the six-and-a-half-foot commando while Charlie pushed her empty wheelchair.
‘Lucky for you I came early,’ said Charlie, his earlier fearful expression now replaced by his serene ‘meditation’ face.
‘Are we safe? Do I need to take iodine pills?’ asked Sam.
Charlie shook his head. ‘This is low-level gamma radiation. Only three or four times the normal background radiation here. It’s basically the same as going on holiday to Cornwall.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, iodine is for a totally different type of radiation poisoning.’
‘So, what’s happening?’
‘From what I can see,’ said Charlie, consulting his phone as they walked, ‘a few of the first wave of A-Gravs are behaving similarly – very low-level leakage.’
Sam looked around. The crowds were still behaving as if Armageddon was arriving. She checked her own phone. News was flooding in about leakages all over the world. A spokesman for the United States’ Senate said it was in closed session discussing potential military reprisals. The story went on to say that most Americans felt that Earth should never have allowed the Ankor to make orbit.
What choice did we have?
Sam clicked another link. Charlie was right: the radiation level by Kirkmail was similar to the natural levels in Cornwall.
Unless you were really close.
‘I guess people are worried that something worse is coming,’ she said, as they turned up the street that led to her flat.
The soldier carried Sam into the lift and into her flat. Then, after putting her down at the kitchen table, he left. She remembered herself and said, ‘Thank you’ as the door closed behind him.
Charlie fussed over her for a few moments.
‘I’m fine,’ said Sam, switching on the television.
The prime minister’s sombre face gazed out from the screen. He began to speak.
‘I have just come from a further meeting of the COBRA committee. We continue to monitor the situation closely. The Secretary of State for Defence has informed me that across the globe, less than one percent of all A-Gravs have shown radioactive emissions. One of these is at Kirkmail, where there is an ongoing minor gamma radiation leak; in response, we have increased the exclusion zone around Kirkmail to one mile. We do not believe that there has been any emission of radiation at Birmingham. However, as a precautionary measure, we have introduced a similar exclusion zone at this site also. The Health Secretary and the security agencies wish me to stress that the increased levels of radiation pose no risk to the general public outside of the exclusion zones.’
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Later that evening
Sam couldn’t sleep. She was wired – shaken, if she allowed herself to admit it.
Easing herself onto her side, she looked across at Charlie. He was fast asleep.
New bandages?
No.
Charlie was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt but, on closer inspection, it was just an old bandage visible on his left wrist.
The open curtains admitted enough moonlight for Sam to investigate. She shuffled over and looked more closely. There hadn’t been any new bandages over the last week – but she’d seen three in the preceding month.
One of the recurring thoughts she’d had – based partly on her imagination, and partly on Charlie’s over-attention to her own injuries – was that he could be self-harming.
Could be …
Of course, anyone could be.
Gingerly she reached out, thinking to pull his sleeve back a little.
What the fuck?
Sam fingers touched something hard under the bandage. It felt like a metal stud.
A piercing?
In the half-darkness it wasn’t easy, but Sam took hold of the edge of the bandage, intending to pull it back an inch.
Charlie murmured in his sleep and rolled over, taking his arm out of reach.
It was a stud of some type.
Noticing the ache in her side, Sam rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
An hour later, no closer to sleep, she decided to get up.
She edged over to the side of the bed.
‘Sam …’ Charlie whispered in the semi-darkness.
‘Yes,’ said Sam.
‘Take a pill,’ said Charlie. ‘You need to sleep.’
Sam tried to avoid taking sleeping pills, they made her … drowsy. She chuckled to herself. The fact was they made her sluggish for five hours after she woke up, but Charlie was probably right. She reached into her bedside table.
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Sam’s Flat, Monday 22nd April
Waking up, Sam – drowsy as expected – looked over to find it was ten o’clock and Charlie had gone.
Reviewing what she remembered from the night before, she found it difficult to distinguish between reality and dreams. After taking the sleeping pill, she certainly remembered Charlie stroking her hair and whispering sweet nothings about how perfect she was – a bit weird, but it had definitely happened.
The second part was hazier. The theme was similar, but it involved Tim – not unheard of, but not usual, and also purely a figment of her imagination.
Sam rolled onto her side and started her morning stretches.
A hastily scribbled note lay on Charlie’s pillow. He’d been summoned back to Anglesey and would see her on Tuesday.
Finishing her flexibility exercises, she hobbled through to the kitchen, switching on her laptop as she passed the living room table.
Moments after the laptop had warmed up, it displayed a new Ankor broadcast that had arrived a few hours earlier.
GRB location
52:13:07 based off Polaris
212 Light Years
Impact in 151 days
CHAPTER 17
Southern England, Monday 22nd April
In a helicopter heading back to the base at Porton Down, Martel reviewed the weekend’s activity. Whilst the A-Gravs had started to drop and be installed, Martel had argued with the prime minister for a far larger exclusion zone around each site. His suggestion had been refused due to the significant additional impact on policing – area having a square relationship to distance – and the prime minister’s concern that it could be seen as fearmongering.
In the face of political expediency, Martel had lost the argument.
Next time we may not be so lucky …
Shaking his head, Martel moved on and looked at the information concerning the GRB location. There was a blue supergiant star at the given coordinates. Assuming it collapsed as other supernovae did, then a major flood of gamma radiation could be on its way to Earth.
Even if the most ferocious intensity of the burst lasted only a few minutes, the energy involved would kill everything that was unshielded. There would be little long-term benefit in being on the lee side of the Earth – facing away from the blast – as the ozone layer would be stripped away, leaving Earth to be sterilised by cosmic rays from the Sun.
After a handful of years, only a few tens of thousands of hardy, and well-prepared, humans would survive.
The scenario was plausible. Well-regarded scientists had linked a similar cosmic event with a mass extinction on Earth five hundred million years ago. This could be the next big one – and it made completing the shield humanity’s number one priority.
Assuming the Ankor are not lying.
Relative to Earth time, of course, the event that had created this terrifying threat had already happened … two hundred years ago. The Ankor claimed to have witnessed it and then travelled faster than light ahead of the blast to help humanity prepare.
There was no way to verify either claim. The soonest that scientists on Earth could independently verify the supernova would be about three weeks before the actual gamma ray impact, when light indicating imminent collapse of the star’s core reached Earth.
Why did they wait two hundred years before coming?
Martel had no ready answer for that. The best theory that Captain Whaller and he could come up with, other than an Ankor fabrication, was that the Ankor had decided that humanity would pull together best if under pressure – tenuous, but just about plausible.
Whaller had added that it was reasonable to think that, if the Ankor did have some goal concerning minimising cultural pollution or minimising the amount of technology humanity could ‘steal’ by observation, then they would keep interaction timeframes as short as possible.
Hopefully, they’ve included some contingency time …
Irrespective of why the Ankor had waited, humanity’s experts agreed that any independent proof of the supernova would arrive long after Earth would have been forced to send the plutonium – if they decided to comply with the Ankor’s instructions.
Plutonium.
It was certainly a word to instil fear.
Martel looked at the two handwritten notes the prime minister had given him. One was from MacKenzie to the prime minister.
Joshua
I have been asked by our Ankor partners to plan a plutonium payload by the fourth launch, mid-May. I confirm that SpaceOp’s two satellite arrays are being used by the Ankor for analysis of Earth’s key data. It is critical we allow them to continue.
Francis MacKenzie
The second note was one the prime minister had personally transcribed from a message he’d received directly from the Ankor.
Plutonium delivery is mandatory. The shield will be built by self-replicating robots. Plutonium will provide the power. We have insufficient power ourselves.
Martel digested the second message. It was hard to fathom. The Ankor had showed themselves capable of travelling at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. They also were able to utilise some type of faster-than-light travel. These had to be hugely energy intensive. How could it be they needed energy from Earth to build the shield?
As for the part about ‘self-replicating’, Martel’s training as the MOD’s expert in space warfare meant he had a decent understanding of spacecraft theory. John von Neumann, a Hungarian- American mathematician, had theorised about colonising space by creating an exploratory probe that would fly to a planet, create copies of itself, send those copies off … each copy would find a planet, create a copy of itself … etc.
Exponential proliferation …
Martel looked out of the window as the English countryside passed under him. Of course, he could construct any number of semi-plausible reasons why the Ankor might be behaving as they were.
Unfortunately, the critical timeline in each case meant that humanity had to comply with the Ankor before the truth could be verified.
Not that the Americans were making similar noises. The attitude from the US military was wary and mildly rebellious and, if the media was to be believed, that attitude ran all the way through the US population. Some American students had tried bouncing a visible light laser off the Ankor craft. Within moments, the power to the entire college campus had been cut off, and had remained off for twelve hours.
‘Arriving now, sir,’ said the pilot.
Porton Down.
Time to review countermeasures.
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The Porton Down war room had been set up on the assumption that the UK was being deceived. It was filled with electronics and Martel knew the Ankor would be watching every move they made.
However, much of it was deliberate misdirection, because further down, under the emergency response room, was a hardened electronic-free room just like the one in Whitehall. It was there that Martel discussed the real plans with Captain Whaller and the rest of the team.
‘What’s the latest from here?’ Martel asked of Whaller, who led the physical countermea
sure team.
‘The United Nations have just made their own statement,’ said Whaller.
The General Assembly of the United Nations
‘We remind all members of the United Nations that it is now an offence, as stated in binding resolution ES-15/2, to tamper with the A-Grav units in any way. Failure of any member nation to adhere will incur sanctions and suspension from the General Assembly.’
‘What’s new from the PM?’ asked Whaller.
‘The home secretary has assured him that the Kirkmail A-Grav unit was not tampered with,’ said Martel.
Whaller nodded. ‘All countries are explicitly denying tampering, except the Americans. They haven’t said anything.’
‘I think the Americans are still pretty pissed off about the Security Council being closed down.’
‘They weren’t the only ones to lose influence,’ said Whaller.
‘They lost more than most,’ said Martel.
Over the last week it had been the CNSA that had taken a lead on many aspects of the response. All of its pronouncements had been performed in front of a pair of flags: United Nations and People’s Republic of China.
‘How’s countermeasure development going?’ asked Martel.
‘All our problems stem from a lack of delivery options. We have nuclear, chemical, and biological measures available. However, we have no way of force delivering any weapon into the Ankor’s main craft.’
It was possible that with enough collaboration the Americans, or Russians, or Chinese, could adapt a nuclear weapon for a high Earth orbit rocket, but it felt unlikely they could coordinate in secret. Of course, the Americans had Lincoln, a possible delivery option with sufficient modifications, but they weren’t really talking to anyone.
‘Our best hope remains the rockets that Francis MacKenzie will be sending up,’ said Whaller. ‘What’s the latest from SpaceOp?’
‘Lieutenant Briars has produced detailed maps of the Assembly Zone,’ said Martel. ‘We know the process. However, there’s no guarantee the rockets will go anywhere near the Ankor craft itself. The shield materials may be dumped in a lower orbit, ready for the self-replicating machines to work on.’
