Redemption: Area 51, #10

by Bob Mayer

  CYDONIA, MARS

  Nyx saw the results five minutes after they occurred. The incoming craft was tumbling without power, a hole through it. She shifted her attention to the mothership. The talon’s main armament didn’t have the power to reach that far; the reason she hadn’t tried to stop the other human spacecraft. Even if it was at full strength, a single talon couldn’t destroy a mothership.

  Nyx considered the options and settled on one that solved two problems, the talon and the mothership, at the same time. She shut down the talon’s armament, diverting all remaining power to the engines.

  EARTH ORBIT

  Kara dimly heard alarms screeching and her first thought was that they should be much louder because she had her helmet on and the speakers were right next to her ears. But the alarms were muted by a loud ringing that seemed to originate inside the top of her head.

  She opened her eyes. Her visor was cracked, a thin spider web of lines. That’s not good, she thought. She blinked, trying to focus, but it was hard to see. Her body was experiencing torque in a sickening way. The little she could see through the cracked visor were dark spots floating in front of her and at first she wondered if that were part of the concussion she’d just suffered and actually in her eyes, but then reminded herself they were beyond the visor.

  She looked down. The instrument panel was dark. She realized she was still holding the controls. The stick was mud in her hands, indicating the engines were dead. Her stomach heaved and she felt bile in her mouth. She swallowed it back down. The force of the craft yawing in an unnatural way was piling disorientation on top of concussion.

  Kara looked to her right. Marcus’s seat was empty. Then she remembered. She looked over her shoulder. The Nimue had been cored, a wide hole in the top of the hull coming out the bottom. Everything on the axis of the strike had been vaporized. What was left of Marcus was floating, the left half of his body gone, frozen blood droplets the dark spots.

  Kara stared at the remains, noting the organs and bones neatly cut. For some reason his vivisected brain fascinated her, the material pink and clean. She forced herself to look away.

  Her head was throbbing, never a good sign, particularly for her. She reached up with her gloved hand. The top right side of her helmet was indented, no longer smooth. But she had suit integrity. If she didn’t, she’d be dead.

  Looking out of the cockpit, Kara caught a glimpse as the talon began to move away. Unless it the Nimue moving away from it. There was no way to tell.

  With a shaking hand she unbuckled from her seat and floated to the hole in upper deck, her airline a tether. She stayed in the shadows, aware that someone on board the talon could be observing her derelict craft.

  As the talon disappeared from her vantage point, Kara pulled herself up, sticking her head out of the Nimue. The talon was heading toward the mothership. As the Nimue yawed, Earth came into view and Kara forgot her predicament for a moment.

  North America was below, the dark edge of night touching California, the rest of the country lit by civilization in the populated regions and bathed in darkness elsewhere. The east coast glittered from Boston all the way down to Washington D.C. At the very edge to the west, she could see the Pacific Ocean sparkling in the setting sun. Then she was twisted away from that view back to the base of the talon moving away.

  She vomited inside her helmet. All she could think of was how Marcus would have laughed at her for that rookie mistake.

  DREAMLAND, TEXAS

  Mr. Parrish had named Perdix’s remote launch post Dreamland after the call sign for the tower at Area 51 in a bit of dark humor. The Rio Grande angles to the west and south, on the other side a mountain range. Interstates 10 and 20 intersect thirty miles to the Northwest.

  The complex is in a valley set among desolate hills, north of Big Bend National Park, the least visited park in the continental United States. To the east are the Davis Mountains, named after Jefferson Davis. Besides the privacy, there were other factors that had determined the placement of the complex.

  She and her husband had known that Aspasia’s shadow had designated Chilicota Mountain, twenty-five miles away to the southwest, as a rally point for a party of his Guides in case of emergency. That emergency plan had been instigated recently during the last stages of the battle against the Airlia and their minions on Earth and Mrs. Parrish had watched from a distance as Aspasia’s Shadow had gathered his Guides onto his talon and taken off.

  The primary reason for the location was that a hundred miles north, above I-10, was the launch platform for Amazon’s space program, Blue Origin. It was an efficient mask for activities at Dreamland, including their successful test launches. While it was impossible to hide such a complex with one hundred percent assurance, key bribes in strategic places had insured secrecy.

  One of those bribes had come in the form of an 85 million dollar ‘grant’ to the US Government to build the Very Long Base Array (VLBA). This system consists of ten radio telescopes spread out in remote locations, which, when working in synch, make up the world’s largest for listening to very long baseline interferometry. In essence, an antenna with a baseline of 8,611 kilometers, searching on certain bandwidths into interstellar space.

  One of the dishes was not far away, on the other side of the Davis Mountains, near Fort Davis, and, naturally, Mrs. Parrish had a direct link into the system.

  Given the new development regarding the Nimue and the talon, Mrs. Parrish was checking the matrixes on her flexpad as the SUV carrying her and Maria drove through a massive vault door into a wide tunnel bored into the side of a mountain. The truck sped along the tunnel, screeching to a halt outside Dreamland Control.

  Mrs. Parrish disembarked and walked quickly, most unusual for her, into Control, putting aside the flexpad and studying the large display screen on the far wall. Maria and George took position to her left rear as she took the command seat.

  “What is the talon doing?” she demanded.

  “We have the projected trajectory,” the head controller answered. A line shot from a red dot, past the mothership, continuing an orbit around the Earth and then outward into the Solar System. “It looks like a slingshot maneuver to increase acceleration using Earth’s gravity. Most likely to head to Mars.”

  Mrs. Parrish lifted her flexpad and opened an outside line. “Do you see Major Turcotte? Whoever is controlling it from Mars is bringing it back to them.”

  EARTH ORBIT

  Kara buckled back into her seat. In addition to the cracked visor, which could give way at any second, she had tendrils and blobs of vomit floating about inside her helmet. Thankfully she’d refrained from eating for six hours prior to the launch so the amount wasn’t a threat, but getting a drop of stomach acid in the eye was amazingly painful.

  She slammed a gloved fist into the dead instrument panel. She had nothing. No way to communicate with either the Niviane’s crew on the mothership or back to Dreamland Control.

  An alarm buzzed in her helmet. The heads up display projected on the inner curve of her vision shield indicated her oxygen supply from the ship was no longer a live feed. Her training kicked in and she automatically switched over to the emergency suit supply.

  15:00 in large red letters appeared on the display and her wristpad.

  AIRSPACE, COLORADO

  “This one of your projections?” Turcotte asked. He could see what was displayed on Mrs. Parrish’s large board in a box in the lower right corner of the flexpad.

  “It was a slight possibility,” Mrs. Parrish said. “We believe the talon is on a slingshot trajectory. It will use the Earth’s gravitational well to gain enough acceleration to break orbit since its power level appears very low.”

  “Strap in,” he ordered Yakov.

  As the Russian slid into the co-pilot’s depression, Turcotte turned the Fynbar toward space.

  “What can we do to stop a talon?” Yakov asked. “We have no weapons. And the talon’s weapon does work.”

  Turcotte ignored Yak
ov’s common sense. “Mrs. Parrish?”

  “Yes, Major?”

  “Order your crew to go deeper into the mothership and find the most secure place to occupy in order to survive an attack.”

  “How can you stop the talon?”

  “I’m going to rescue your crew,” Turcotte said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Yakov making a gesture to indicate the small amount of space they had.

  “The crew is not a factor at the moment,” Mrs. Parrish said, which caused Turcotte and Yakov to exchange a glance. “And I don’t think the talon can do anything to the mothership. Nor does it look like it will.”

  “That’s if it continues at the exact same speed and course,” Turcotte said.

  “Why would it change?” Mrs. Parrish asked.

  “Are you going to evacuate your crew?” Turcotte asked.

  “They don’t have the fuel to evacuate,” Mrs. Parrish said. “And there is no need. The most likely possibility is a slingshot back to Mars. Obviously, the surviving Airlia want the talon. It’s their only chance to escape.”

  “It doesn’t have faster-than-light capability,” Turcotte said to Mrs. Parrish. “It would be a long, slow escape.” But still, it would be an escape, he thought. He shut down the transmit on the flexpad and looked over at Yakov. “What do you think?”

  “No idea,” Yakov said. “What do you believe is going to happen?”

  Turcotte glanced at the display in the lower right of the flexpad. The talon had already halved the eight hundred kilometer gap between it and the mothership. The projected path did go past, looping around Earth.

  “Whoever is controlling it,” Turcotte said, “destroyed the incoming ship attempting to board. It could have fired up the talon any time and tried to get it back to Mars. That means the Airlia didn’t see a need to have it. So.”

  “’So’?” Yakov repeated.

  The Fynbar was in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, heading toward the mothership.

  “So,” Turcotte said, “the Airlia don’t want it and plan on doing something else.” He tapped the transmit button. “Mrs. Parrish. The talon is going to ram the mothership.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mrs. Parrish said. “It could only do limited damage. Even if it hit the hull breach, the mothership already took the best a ruby sphere and nuclear weapons could do. Why would—“

  She fell silent and Turcotte knew she either understood or someone on her team was giving her the new possibility.

  “Will the talon have enough velocity and mass to shift the mothership’s orbit if it crashes into it?” Turcotte asked. “Drop it into Earth’s gravity well?”

  “Wait,” Mrs. Parrish sounded distracted. “Wait. We’re getting a change in trajectory.”

  Turcotte looked down. The red line was adjusting, ever so slightly. To a direct intersect with the mothership, confirming his fear.

  Mrs. Parrish’s voice: “We’ve calculated that at this new velocity and angle, a collision between the two craft will indeed push the mothership out of a stable orbit into a decay. A swift decay. The mothership will come into the atmosphere fast. While the variables of whether some of it will burn up—“

  Turcotte interrupted. “It’s designed to travel faster than light. It won’t burn up.”

  “You are right of course,” Mrs. Parrish said. “It will come down and crash intact. The impact will be tremendous. We can’t determine where the impact point will be at the moment. My people are working on it.”

  Turcotte remembered the mothership crash into Mons Olympus, wiping out the large Airlia array and putting a massive crater in the side of the largest mountain in the Solar System. “It’ll be devastating.”

  “We’ve spotted the Fynbar heading for orbit,” Mrs. Parrish said. “What do you plan on doing, Major?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll do something.”

  “Heroic but stupid,” Mrs. Parrish said. “This was projected as a possibility. A minor one, but I prepare for all possibilities. I will deal with this.”

  Turcotte looked over at Yakov. The Russian shrugged.

  The Fynbar was outside the atmosphere. Turcotte checked the display, fixing the mothership and the talon. He headed in that direction.

  DREAMLAND, TEXAS

  Mrs. Parrish was sitting in a chair worthy of the bridge of the Enterprise, set in the rear center of the Control Center and on a dais. She had a flexpad built into each arm of the chair. She tapped the right one.

  “Wardenclyffe?”

  A woman responded instantly. “Here.”

  “Are you tracking the talon?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Do you have an impact point if the mothership comes down?” Mrs. Parrish asked.

  “Too many variables for a precise location, but it appears it will be Western Europe or the Eastern Atlantic Ocean. Either place will cause devastation, either by direct impact or resulting tsunami.”

  “Inform me when you are powered up and have a lock on target.”

  WARDENCLYFFE, SHOREHAM, NEW YORK

  In 1901, Nikola Tesla, with the backing of one of the richest men in the world, J.P. Morgan, purchased two hundred acres of a potato farm owned by James Warden on the north shore of Long Island.

  The stated purpose was to establish a wireless telegraph base capable of reaching across the Atlantic, with future plans to extend that network around the world. That, of course, was not the real purpose. Also, J.P. Morgan was just the public front for the predecessors of Mr. and Mrs. Parrish.

  A tower was constructed, rising 187 feet high. Less obvious was that it also went 120 feet into the ground. Those are public facts.

  TESLA’S LAB, WARDENCLYFFE

  Not so public was that the tower was not designed as a telegraph station.

  It was designed to be a weapon.

  On 30 June 1908 it was fired.

  In 1917 the original tower was demolished and sold for scrap, although the underground portion was left intact.

  In the early 21st century, a society dedicated to the ‘preservation’ of Tesla’s legacy, using the foundation that was still in place, built what they claimed was a mock-up of the original tower.

  The society, naturally, was a front for the Parrish’s. They didn’t build a mock-up, they rebuilt the Tesla cannon, based on his original design and improved with current technology.

  It was midnight on the east coast of the United States. The night sky was lit up as the tower crackled with power, sparks flying off the large hemisphere on top. In the building that had held Tesla’s original office and labs, a half-dozen technicians ran through their system checks.

  “Sound off,” the scientist in charge ordered. She stood behind all of them, a flexpad in hand.

  Each subsystem tech reported their status, all green and ready.

  “Do we have a lock on target?” she asked.

  “Tracking,” the targeting tech said, intently watching his screen. “Tracking. Locked!”

  The scientist tapped her flexpad.

  EARTH ORBIT

  “Maybe we can nudge the talon off course,” Turcotte said to Yakov, not quite a question, not quite a realistic suggestion either given the relative masses.

  The talon was one hundred kilometers ahead of them and one hundred and fifty kilometers from the mothership.

  “We should save the crew on the mothership,” Yakov said. They were closing quickly on the talon.

  “We won’t have enough time,” Turcotte said. “I’m going to ram the talon. Maybe—“ he was cut off as a bright flash of light shot up from the planet and struck the talon.

  For a moment it seemed as if there was no effect, the powerful blast absorbed by the talon’s hull, but two seconds later a second blast, then a third and a fourth in quick succession hit the Airlia warship.

  The lean, claw-shaped craft crumbled inward, midway between base and tip.

  But it was still moving.

  Four more blasts and the talon exploded into hundreds of pie
ces, the impacts sending the debris spinning and twirling away from Earth.

  WARDENCLYFFE, SHOREHAM, NEW YORK

  “Target destroyed,” Professor Leahy announced to both the technicians in the Tesla building and to Mrs. Parrish over the flexpad. “Power down.”

  Spontaneous clapping and cheering erupted from the men and women manning the controls. Except for Leahy. She was scrolling through the Strategy, watching the lines reforming, adjusting, and new nodes branching.

  She glanced over her shoulder. She didn’t like the man who stood ten feet away, in the shadows. He’d been one of those waiting by the generators at Fort Bragg. While two of his men had stun gunned Kincaid and Quinn, he’d snatched her, clamping a gag over her mouth, dragging her away.

  The explosion occurred just seconds later, a bit too soon, and Leahy suffered the burn on her forearm while the man’s face was singed, his eyebrows burnt away.

  It didn’t seem to bother him. He was clad in black fatigues and body armor, an automatic weapon dangling from a sling. He was Asian, slight of build, and intensely watched everything. He’d flown her here from North Carolina without saying a single word and not responding to any of her questions.

  Leahy was split on whether he was here to guard her or to make sure she did Mrs. Parrish’s bidding. Or, there was, of course, a third possibility.

  CROSSING TERMINATION SHOCK

  Termination Shock is another boundary around the Solar System, where solar wind particles have slowed below the speed of sound. These particles, plasma, are compressed as they decelerate from approximately a million miles an hour to under a thousand miles per hour and eventually stop further out in the heliosphere. It lies between 75 and 80 AU.

  The Core and its surrounding warships were slowing.

  The plaque had been examined. Having encountered numerous species of varying degrees of intelligence and technical prowess, the Swarm made some sense of what was represented in two dimensions.