Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I don’t think they’re expecting another attack,” Nikara said. “At least not right away. They’d be acting a whole lot different if they were ”

  Still, thinking about patrols put Danny back on alert. If the patrols could see him from far away, he should be able to see them, too. He made himself look away from the black dust covering everything and instead focused on the roads.

  The army used the roads closest to the destruction. They had also built a few roads through it—long winding paths where the black dust had somehow been cleared out. Danny remembered his mother telling him about that, and how she didn’t approve of the army sending the dust back in the air where it might do damage again.

  He scanned those roads and saw nothing. But on the concrete roads at the edge, he saw vehicles moving like ants going back to their hill. Nikara had said that the patrols were very regular—no one, apparently, wanted to go back into the dust, but the government insisted it be guarded.

  Nikara was looking in the same direction Danny was. “You know,” Nikara said as he squinted at the roads, “they’ve been riding through this stuff. It’s got to be safe.”

  Danny shuddered. He was getting cold on this roof. “Maybe they wear special suits or something.”

  “I’ve seen them,” Nikara said. “The first few days they wore masks, but they haven’t worn anything since.”

  Danny looked down. The dust on the other side of the house glistened, just a little. He had never seen blackness glisten before. It seemed almost evil.

  “Maybe they’ll get sick later,” Danny said.

  “They would have done tests,” Nikara said.

  “My mother says you should never put too much trust in the government. Some people even say the government is the cause of all this.”

  Nikara sighed. “The aliens did this. I’m going. That’s what we came for.”

  “I thought we came to see it up close.”

  “You can’t see it up close without getting in it.” Nikara snorted. “Anybody knows that.”

  Danny didn’t agree, but he knew better than to argue with Nikara when he was in this kind of mood. Nikara half slid, half walked to the edge of the roof.

  “Think it’s too far to jump?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Danny said. He hadn’t left the peak, hoping that would discourage Nikara.

  “If I hang off the gutter, I won’t drop so far,” Nikara said. “If you break your leg and those things start eating you,” Danny said, “I’m not coming to get you.”

  Nikara looked at him over his shoulder. “I didn’t think you would.”

  Danny didn’t know how Nikara meant that. Did he mean Danny was a coward? Or that it was a sensible thing not to rescue someone who was dissolving?

  Nikara gripped the gutter and swung his legs off the roof. Danny’s stomach tightened. All he could see were Nikara’s brown hands clinging to the rusty metal.

  Danny made his way across the roof. He reached the edge just as Nikara let go.

  A cloud of dust rose around him, and Danny felt a cry leave his throat. Not Nikara, too. Danny wanted to close his eyes, so that he wouldn’t see a friend die, but he couldn’t look away.

  He was breathing shallowly, waiting for the dust to settle, hoping he’d see Nikara in one piece. Danny realized he had lied; if Nikara was injured, Danny would do everything he could, short of jumping in the dust himself, to get Nikara back on the roof.

  Finally the dust stopped swirling. Nikara was standing very still. His face, his clothes, his hair were covered in black dust. But his eyes were his own. And they were twinkling.

  “It’s like feathers!” Nikara said. “It tickles.”

  Danny frowned. He thought the stuff would be stiff and bristly, like rust flakes. He didn’t expect it to be soft.

  “Come on down,” Nikara said.

  Danny put his hands on the gutter as he had seen Nikara do. The metal was cold against Danny’s skin. He was about to swing over, to join Nikara, but something stopped him.

  “Come on/” Nikara said.

  Danny looked at the dust. Some of it was still swirling near Nikara’s feet. Every time Nikara moved, the dust would move, too. Then Danny let his gaze wander from Nikara to the house foundations. One of those was Cort’s. No one had said what the black stuff was. Some of it had come from those ships, yes, but some of it had to have the remains of buildings in it.

  When Danny’s great-uncle Milton died, he’d been cremated, and Danny’s mom, as the only surviving relative, got the ashes. She couldn’t decide whether to keep them or scatter them, so for a few weeks, Danny, Nikara, and Cort would open the urn and look inside.

  There were gray flakes—soft gray flakes because Danny had touched them—mixed with bits of bone. And that’s what this black dust and the rubble reminded him of. Ashes, with a bit of bone.

  Bile rose in his throat, and he had to swallow hard to keep it down.

  “Danny,” Nikara said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  But Danny couldn’t swing himself off the roof. Not and land in ashes. Cort’s ashes. One of his closest friends, forever reduced to dust and bone.

  “You go,” Danny said.

  Nikara made a small sound of disgust and slogged through the blackness toward Cort’s house. A cloud rose in his wake. Danny watched as the ashes mixed with ashes, and the dust with dust.

  And right at that moment he knew that the aliens had to pay for what they had done to Cort and everyone else.

  Danny didn’t know how. But he knew they had to pay. Cort and everyone else mixed with this gray dust that spread out before him couldn’t rest until they did.

  1

  April 23, 2018

  7:50 p.m. Eastern Time

  174 Days Until Second Harvest

  The Oval Office smelled musty. That was always the first thing Secretary of State Doug Mickelson noticed about the place. Then he noted the large blue area rug with the emblem of the United States in the center, the antique partner’s desk beneath the large windows where President Franklin did most of his work, and the white couches nearest the door. The room’s oval shape wasn’t that obtrusive—the first time he’d been invited here, Mickelson had thought it would be—but the relatively low ceiling and the comfortable furniture kept it from feeling like a mausoleum, as so much of the White House did.

  Still, all the years the building had stood in the District’s damp heat in the days before air-conditioning had taken their toll. There was a general mustiness about the whole building, something an army of cleaning people couldn’t seem to tame. Once, when Mickelson mentioned that the faint pervasive hint of mold played hell on his allergies, his best friend, scientist Leo Cross, had suggested using nanotechnology to clean it out. Mickelson had thought it a good idea at the time. Now, thanks to the alien attack, he understood how nanotechnology worked—had actually seen it in action—and he would rather live with the mold.

  He dropped his tall, muscled frame onto the couch, almost tempted to put his feet up. He couldn’t remember being so worn out and so angry at the same time. Since the attack he’d had almost no sleep, and had wanted to punch a dozen people, even though he was known for his calmness under diplomatic fire. He was just boiling mad that the aliens had so easily destroyed so much of his home, his country, his planet.

  He was amazed the world had survived an alien attack. Thank God it looked as if humans had won when the aliens left, otherwise the world would be coming apart in riots. At the moment almost everyone on the planet thought humanity had chased off the aliens. Doug knew better.

  So did President Franklin and about thirty other people around the nation. And maybe a few hundred more around the world. But that was going to change.

  The aliens hadn’t been chased off—they were just following a plan. A plan that was going to bring them right back to Earth for a second attack as soon as their tenth-planet home got into position again.

  And the fact that they were coming back had him even angrier. And scared a
t the same time. Not for himself, but for the millions and millions who would die in a second attack, not counting all the people who would die in the panic that would sweep the world the moment everyone knew the aliens were headed this way again.

  Humanity, civilization as Mickelson knew it, wouldn’t survive a second round. It was that simple.

  Mickelson heard President Franklin in the narrow corridor off the opposite side of the room, his braying Bronx accent impossible to miss. Thayer Franklin had a patrician name, but that was the only thing patrician about him. His father was distantly related to some of the best families in New England, but he’d married “down,” or so the pre-election news reports had said, to a woman from a blue-collar family who’d gotten a scholarship to Harvard. That marriage had lasted long enough to produce Franklin, and to prevent his spunky mother from finishing her Ivy League education. Franklin’s father refused to pay child support, and Cara Franklin went home to raise her child.

  That was all in the official biography. What wasn’t, seemed incredibly clear to anyone who met the small, dark-eyed, clear-spoken mother of the president. She’d poured her ambition into him, and he’d responded. Sometimes, Mickelson thought, the entire success story was an elaborate way for Franklin to thumb his nose at his still-living, unrepentant deadbeat father.

  Now Franklin was faced with the largest crisis to ever face a president. Mickelson hoped the man was up for it.

  Mickelson leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Most of the time over the past few days, when he did that, either in bed or on a plane, he saw the images of the alien craft pouring the black clouds of nanomachines over people, buildings, entire towns. And those people screaming in pain as the machines ate them alive, from the outside inward.

  It was the stuff of horror movies. Skin eaten, blood spurting everywhere.

  Faces contorted in pain, covered in blood, skin gone.

  Millions of dead.

  Nightmares.

  Nothing but nightmares.

  “Napping on me, Doug?” President Franklin’s voice broke through the images of the attack as he closed the door to his inner office behind him.

  “Hardly,” Doug said, opening his eyes to see the intense gaze of his friend. “Every time I try to sleep I see the attack again.”

  Franklin dropped down into his normal chair, his back to his desk, and nodded. The exhaustion was clear around the man’s black eyes and wrinkled face. Franklin had grown tired looking over his first years in office, but this alien attack had added years to his face.

  “So do I, Doug,” Franklin said. “And to be honest with you, it’s making me damn angry.”

  “You and a lot of other people,” Doug said. He’d spent the last few days on emergency trips to meet with heads of states, calming people, letting them know something was going to be done. “But everyone feels so helpless, at least those who know about the aliens coming back again.”

  “How many know?” Franklin asked.

  Doug shook his head. “Not many at this point. Less than a couple hundred, but it won’t take long for others to start figuring it out.”

  “And the rest of the world, those who don’t know?” Franklin asked. “How do you see them taking it?”

  “Shock,” Doug said, used to having Franklin quiz him on common people’s reactions around the world. “Mourning the dead. And celebration that the aliens are gone and that we won.”

  Franklin snorted. “We didn’t win. I’m not sure we even really bothered the bastards.”

  Mickelson couldn’t agree more.

  “Well,” Franklin said, his voice turning cold and low. “That’s not going to happen next time. We’re not going to just let them come here, take what they want, and kill our people.” Mickelson knew this wasn’t just another of Franklin’s speeches. He had known Franklin long enough to see when all the political screens and faces were gone and he was being the real Franklin. And this was one of those times.

  But unless something major had changed in the last few hours while Mickelson had been on the plane home from Great Britain, there wasn’t any way to stop the aliens that he knew of.

  “Oh,” Mickelson said, sighing and leaning back. “I wish it were that easy.”

  Franklin pinned Mickelson with his stare, the anger clearly being held in check just below the surface. “I’ve seen enough death over the past week to last me a thousand lifetimes. Those bastards aren’t going to do it again.”

  Mickelson sat forward and faced his president. “You have a way to stop them?”

  “Damn right I do,” Franklin said. “We’re going to blow that damn planet of theirs right out of the system before they get another chance to hurt us.”

  For a second Mickelson didn’t understand exactly what the president was telling him. The words seemed to make no sense.

  “We’re going to attack them?” Mickelson said.

  Franklin smiled, but there was no merriment behind the smile or in his eyes. “You bet your ass we’re going to,” President Franklin said. “And they’re not even going to know what hit them.”

  April 24, 2018

  8:10 a.m. Pacific Time

  173 Days Until Second Harvest

  Leo Cross clung to the edge of his seat, feeling the plastic bite into his fingers. His heart was pounding harder than usual. He’d been in a lot of helicopters and landed in a lot of strange places, but none of the landings had ever made him nervous before. It was the black dust that unnerved him. The black dust and the flat land where houses, businesses, and people should be.

  He glanced around the copter. The pilot was concentrating on the path before them. His navigator, an Army man whose name Cross had already forgotten, watched with tight-lipped determination. Cross turned. Behind him, Lowry Jamison looked slightly queasy.

  Jamison was a big man—a former college quarterback who would have gone on to play pro ball if it weren’t for his heroics in the Rose Bowl several years back. He’d twisted his knee with six minutes remaining. The coach had wanted him out, but the second-string quarterback had already been sidelined with a rotator cuff injury before the game. The third-string was a freshman who’d never played in the regular season. Jamison finished out the game, running fifteen yards to set up a field goal, and giving his team the three points they needed to win. Unfortunately, he’d torn cartilage in the knee, and never played ball again.

  Unfortunately for Jamison. Fortunately for the rest of the world. For Jamison had a diabolical mind, and once he could no longer use it toward a career in football, he turned his attention to physics. He worked for NanTech, same as Portia Groopman, another member of Cross’s team. Unlike Portia, Jamison didn’t work on nanotechnology per se, but on ways to make nanotechnology impossible to detect.

  Right now, however, he didn’t look like a man who knew how to hide things already too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. He looked like a man who thought the helicopter was going to crash.

  Cross had flown with Jamison before. Jamison was not afraid of flying, or even of helicopters. He had the same reaction to this trip the rest of them did.

  The thing was, they were prepared. They knew what they were going to face. And they had had warning as the copter brought them in from the north. They were following the coastline, looking at the ocean dash against rocks. They flew low enough that Cross could see homes built on the mountainside, cars parked in the driveways, toys in the yards. As they passed Santa Cruz, he watched the cars crawl on the highways beside the tacky tourist traps. There were more Army vehicles on the roads than he had ever seen before. Humvees, trucks— all green, all moving swiftly. Things looked normal here, but he doubted they were. He doubted things were normal anywhere in the world anymore.

  The copter turned slightly, following the coastline inward as they entered Monterey Bay. The pilot, unable to talk because of the thrum of the engine and the whap-whap-whap of the blades above them, turned, tapped Cross on the shoulder, and pointed. Cross leaned forward in his chair and saw—


  For a moment, he didn’t know how to describe it. He had flown this way before, once in a low-flying private plane, and he still remembered it: all the seaside towns nestled against the bay, the sailing ships, the bright, blue ocean. There were the remains of canneries, some of them unable to be torn down because John Steinbeck had written about them in the 1930s, and piers that went out into that sparkling water. The communities, from the air, seemed to blend into one another, and he remembered thinking how lovely they were, how perfect, how typically American West Coast. The kinds of places where people always wanted to live but never could.

  Many of the communities remained. Around the curve of the coastline, he saw Castroville, Marina, and then—

  A shadow across the land.

  The peninsula that provided the home for the city of Monterey was still there, but instead of one of the most beautiful cities in California, there was blackness, rubble, and nothing else. No pier, no ships.

  No people.

  That was when Cross gripped his seat. He was glad for the noise, the constant roar that copters still made, when all other motorized vehicles were built quieter and quieter. He wasn’t sure what sound he made as he saw the destruction approach, but he knew it wasn’t good. Perhaps he moaned. Perhaps he swore. Perhaps he simply gasped.

  All he knew was that a knot had formed in his throat. Swallowing was hard, and so was breathing. His throat was so tight, and his emotions so close to the surface, that he feared a deep breath would make him lose what fragile control he had.

  The blackness covered the coastline as far as his eye could see.

  The copter was slowing down as it came in for its landing. Cross’s grip on the seat grew tighter. He had seen the dust, studied the dust, even held bits of it in various labs back in Washington, D.C. The television stations had shown images of the destruction for the past ten days. Cross had seen satellite images, still photographs, infrared images, and all sorts of spectral analyses. But nothing had prepared him for being here, in person, seeing the destruction up close.

  Perhaps he had been too busy to let it sink in before now. Yes, he had watched as the alien ships released the clouds of black dust over six large regions worldwide. The first attack had occurred in the Amazon, Central America, and in central Africa. He and Brittany Archer, the head of the Space Telescope Science Institute—a beautiful woman who had miraculously become his lover through all of this—had watched the attack in the media room of his D.C. home.