Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  They were as ready as they were going to be.

  She peered at the nearest monitor. The image she had chosen to watch was a real-time image of the missiles hanging in space. She was going to have three staggered launches, one hundred each launch. If she hadn’t been so rushed, she would have moved the damn command center to a more sensible part of the ISS, and she would have waited until Earth sent her better equipment.

  But she had known when she took this job the need for haste, and she had known she would have to jury-rig things. She did receive permission, when this was all over, to develop a new command center on the ISS, and she did put in requisitions for new equipment. Unfortunately, none of the changes would come when she needed them.

  And she prayed that she wouldn’t need them later.

  This project had to work. She’d given her whole heart and soul to it.

  As she watched, the countdown started behind her. How many times had she listened to countdowns like this, getting ready to launch missiles—fire rockets, so that shuttles could go into orbit. Never before had she experienced it while she was in orbit, or while the missiles were in orbit.

  She had this horrible fear that some of the missiles wouldn’t make it out of Earth’s gravitational well. It was a fear she admitted to no one, although she did ground two Ukrainian missiles after examining them herself. They’d clearly been dug out of a silo that was built in the 1950s, and there was no way she would let them contaminate her project.

  Her project. She let out a sigh and stood up.

  “General?” one of the women said. “Everything all right?”

  “I can’t watch a launch on a monitor,” she said. It always made her feel as if she were out of the loop somehow. Of course she usually felt that way when she wasn’t hands-on. Command really wasn’t her thing, but she knew how to organize people and she had been promoted to this place. Sometimes she still longed for the days when she was the one with her hand on the joystick, in control of the plane rather than the entire project.

  She went to the nearest porthole. In this part of the ISS, the portholes were exactly that, large circles of thick, clear, scratched plastic that offered a distorted view into the blackness of space beyond.

  Still, she could see the missiles hanging out there in space, a safe distance away from the station, their cylindrical shapes ghosts against the darkness.

  “General, you can’t see clearly from there ”

  “I can look at the replay on the monitors and I’m not going to read the telemetry,” she said. “I trust you to let me know if anything is going wrong.”

  There was too much telemetry for one person to monitor anyway. Her staff had maxed itself out, with as much information as possible on all of the screens.

  She clasped her hands behind her back.

  The countdown continued.

  Flares of light appeared at the base of some of the missiles— the older ones going through several launching stages.

  Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart was pounding. They were actually going to do this. Goddammit. She had pulled it off. She had thought the task impossible when they assigned it to her.

  “Three,” the computerized voice droned behind her.

  “Two.”

  “One.”

  “Launch!” Banks said in her firmest voice.

  “Launch commencing,” the computer voice responded, and her staff murmured its acknowledgment of that.

  The blackness in front of her flared into brightness so blinding she had to resist looking away.

  One hundred missiles, launching at the same time.

  Fires burned beneath their bases and together they moved slowly, then quickly picked up speed away from the station, heading after a quick orbit around Earth into the vastness of space.

  Red and green comm trails danced in front of her eyes, remaining even when she closed them. She felt her heart pounding. She opened her eyes again, and saw bits of color remaining against the backdrop of space, but she wasn’t sure if that was another trick of her ocular nerves.

  “Report,” she said, turning around.

  As they had been trained, her assistants called out the information she needed.

  “Group One, green.”

  “Group Two, green.”

  The countdown continued through all twenty groups. Only four missiles had failed to fire, and she had expected that. They were the oldest missiles in this particular batch. There were more in the next wave of missiles, but she didn’t have time to have the oldest ones double- and triple-checked. There was no time at all, actually.

  Telemetry covered the screens before her. The warheads were alive, their codes already programmed in. Some of the missiles even carried old-fashioned warheads that detonated on impact, just in case the energy-draining shields of the alien ships affected all of the other missiles.

  Warheads.

  Nuclear missiles.

  She had never in her life thought she would be the one to give the codes to launch them.

  But then, she had always expected that, if they were launched, they’d be launched at other humans, at Earth.

  She went back to her porthole. The other missiles hung in their orbits, awaiting their launch sequence.

  She had two more waves of missiles to launch. Soon every warhead that human beings could get into orbit under short notice, every missile that even had a prayer of working, would be hurtling into space.

  She turned to her crew. “Prepare second launch countdown.” Then she turned back to stare out at the blackness of space.

  Earth’s greatest hope rested on her shoulders, and she had done all she could.

  She prayed that would be enough.

  June 15, 2018

  2:31 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  121 Days Until Second Harvest

  Food is sleep, Britt Archer thought to herself as she studied the cold pizzas in their greasy boxes that someone had left in the back of the lab. She had a choice of cold pepperoni, cold sausage and mushroom, cold vegetarian, and cold pineapple with anchovies. Of course, there were only a few pieces of the first three, and almost the entire pineapple and anchovies. Archer grimaced. If there was anything worse than a pineapple and anchovy pizza, it was a cold pineapple and anchovy pizza.

  But she had to eat, because she certainly wasn’t going to sleep, not in the foreseeable future.

  She grabbed the last slice of pepperoni, and then took a slice of vegetarian for good measure. The three pots of coffee she’d made someone get from the nearest Starbucks were already gone. She’d used some French roast, finely ground, to make a pot in the lab’s machine, but it wasn’t the same. Besides, her nerves were jangled. She must have had enough caffeine to wire the entire Pentagon.

  The Pentagon. She snorted slightly. Maddox could have warned her. Archer had thought the two of them had the beginnings of a friendship. To get a phone call this afternoon from Jesse Killius was bad enough. Someone could have told her sooner that her entire staff, plus everyone else she could muster in all the different labs all over the country, would be working well into the night. It was common courtesy.

  But Archer was beginning to sense that courtesy and secrecy didn’t go well together at all. She hadn’t even felt comfortable enough to tell Leo what was going on when she had to cancel their dinner plans. She had to rely on the good allpurpose dodge, telling him that “something” had come up.

  Yes, something had come up. Twenty probes that she had known nothing about were suddenly sending back telemetry, and her people had to monitor all of it. Twenty probes, in addition to the other probes her staff was in charge of.

  Twenty secret probes. Where the hell had they come from?

  And who launched them?

  And from where?

  Dammit. She’d thought the entire world was working together. She didn’t understand the point of secrecy. Did the government think that the aliens had planted spies among the general populace? And if so, how had they hidden those silly tentacles?


  Archer shook her head slightly. She was getting punchy. She took a bite of pizza, thinking the pepperoni was fine cold, if a little greasy. Her stomach rumbled. She had no idea when she had last eaten.

  Special probes One through Twenty. She cursed each and every one of them for robbing her of her semidecent night’s sleep. And her dinner with Leo. How come she finally discovered a man who understood her and at that moment the world decided it was on its last legs? Was someone trying to tell her something?

  “Dr. Archer,” Odette Roosevelt, one of her best researchers, said. “Those special probes are sending us signals.”

  Archer shoved a bit more pizza into her mouth, set the plate down, grabbed a napkin, and wiped her face and fingers. She crossed to the nearest monitor.

  She’d had to give a speech tonight, too, the one she hated. Her staff all had high-level security clearance and it was because of days like this one. Her speech had been the usual song-and-dance about confidentiality, not speaking to the media on pain of death, and oh, yeah, no leaks. Nothing left this room without Archer’s say-so. And she received permission for that from above.

  Killius, who was the one to tell Archer that she and her staff had to spend the night together, did say that the information would be released to all the war rooms worldwide the following day.

  She slipped into the chair in front of the monitor, staring at the images that came from Probe One. With the punch of a button, she could switch to telemetry, but she wasn’t ready, not yet. She was frowning at the images, trying to make sense of them.

  Some sort of movement, something in space. But what?

  “Special Probe Number Two is now on-line,” Roosevelt was saying, and the screen before Archer split so that she saw two slightly different views of the same images. Space, yes, but a lot more than that The shapes were cylindrical, and they were moving.

  What the hell was this?

  “Probes Three, Four, and Five are coming onboard together,” said Tom Cavendish, one of her other assistants.

  The new images appeared on Archer’s monitor. She gasped, as the picture before her finally made sense. She was staring at rockets heading out of Earth’s orbit. Heading into space.

  A lot more than twenty of them.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  Then she felt a flare of anger. She had been part of the Tenth Planet Project from the beginning and no one had bothered to tell her of this? No one had bothered to tell Leo? This was what Maddox had been so secretive about. What the hell were they doing with rockets?

  “Dr. Archer,” Roosevelt said, her voice softer this time. “Do you see this?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “Probe Six is coming on-line,” Roosevelt said, in a more businesslike tone.

  Probe Six didn’t add much to the picture that Archer already had. She frowned. What was going on? Why launch so many probes and all at the same thing?

  “We have Probe Seven,” Cavendish said.

  Probe Seven’s view was of the top of one of the rockets. Archer felt a sudden chill. That couldn’t be right. She punched a few keys, magnifying the new image.

  “Jesus,” Roosevelt said softly. “Is that a warhead?”

  “What the hell is going on?” one of Archer’s other assistants said.

  “I guess we decided to take control of things,” Cavendish said.

  Archer’s mouth was dry. Take control was an understatement. “How many missiles do you think we have here?”

  “I’m guessing more than fifty,” Cavendish said.

  “Probe Eight is on-line,” said someone from the far comer of the room. Archer didn’t even try to identify the voice. She was still looking at the U.S. Government stamp on the side of that missile.

  “Those are nukes, aren’t they?” said Melissa Carter, Archer’s newest assistant.

  “Yeah,” Archer said. Nukes. Heading into space.

  She raised her head as if she could see through the ceiling, into the sky above. Then she stood, feeling more unsettled than she ever had in her life.

  Nukes.

  No wonder this had been a secret.

  Not from the aliens, but from humans.

  She thought about the destruction she and Cross had watched less than a month ago, the black dust, the melting people, the screaming. She’d even dreamed about it—or more accurately, had nightmares about it. She had vowed that she would do everything within her power to prevent that from happening again.

  Her power didn’t include nukes, but human power did. Humans had the ability to defend themselves, and some of those ways were uncomfortable to say the least.

  She was feeling ambivalent about this, and she at least understood it. Imagine if this had been announced. The peaceniks would have been protesting, and those nutcases who had blown up the IRS building in Memphis, along with their friends all over the country, would have been calling this a big government conspiracy and using it as a way of rallying their sick programs.

  They were getting enough help as more and more people started figuring out that the tenth planet was going to have to pass Earth again.

  No. The secrecy had been right. And it was her job, at least for the time being, to keep that secrecy until someone else told the world.

  “Probe Nine on-line,” Cavendish said.

  “Probe Ten right behind it,” Roosevelt said.

  Archer swung her chair forward, divided her monitor among all the views, and also brought in the telemetry.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  June 15, 2018

  12:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  121 Days Until Second Harvest

  The curtains were closed in the Oval Office, the thin sheers not enough to stop the light from the cameras from reflecting in the bay windows. Grace Lopez, the president’s chief of staff, was standing behind the antique partner’s desk, arguing with the White House correspondent for CNN. He wanted to close the blue curtains, and she wasn’t going to allow it.

  Grace Lopez was a short, round woman with curly gray hair, and a manner that reminded Mickelson of his second grade teacher—a woman who had terrified him throughout his grade school years. If Grace Lopez wanted something done, then someone had better do it.

  But the lights were a problem, and President Franklin had been insistent: he wanted to make his speech from this room. The television reporters were suggesting the Map Room or even the Press Room, but Lopez was having none of it.

  She would have to compromise, though. Even Mickelson knew that no vid reporter worth his salt would record in a room with that kind of reflection.

  He turned his back on the argument and watched the White House press corps prepare for the big speech. The pundits had been guessing all evening about what the president would talk about. Fortunately Franklin hadn’t announced that he was even giving a speech until dinnertime, or the punditry would have gone on for days.

  Mickelson’s palms were wet. He was wearing what he privately called his duck suit—the next step down from a tuxedo. It was an Armani suit, black, with a stylish long coat, and matching trousers. He wore a round-collar shirt to follow the modem style, and he felt as if he were choking. But at some point in the evening, he would go in front of cameras himself. The president had spent the entire day briefing his Cabinet. He planned to send them out, like troops, to mount a verbal assault defending his chosen plan of action.

  General Maddox and the other Joint Chiefs were still in the president’s study, going over last minute details with the president and his press secretary. Which was why Lopez was doing battle with CNN.

  Other Cabinet members were scattered about the south end of the room. The secretary of agriculture was pretending to be interested in the musty books that lined the bookshelves, while the secretary of defense stood silently, her hands clasped before her as if she were waiting to be graded on her posture. Mickelson wondered if he looked as uncomfortable as she did.

  “I don’t like this.” Tavi Bernstei
n, director of the FBI, stopped beside Mickelson. She was a slight woman who wore her dark hair in a conservative knot at the back of her neck. She, too, wore a long waistcoat, but instead of pants, she had on a knee-length skirt that showed off surprisingly good legs. Mickelson had once considered dating her, until he listened to her resume during her confirmation hearings. The woman had been a special agent in undercover work for half of her career, and the other half she had run, with an iron fist, some of the most elite units in the agency. She was smart, and tough, and she intimidated him more than anyone else he had ever met.

  “You don’t like the speech?” Mickelson asked. They were keeping their voices low, so low that it was almost impossible to hear each other. But with this many members of the press around, it was always better to be cautious. In fact, Mickelson noted, they were both keeping an eye out for the errant boom mike or passing reporter.

  “I haven’t seen the final draft of the speech,” Bernstein said. “But I spent all of yesterday arguing that he shouldn’t make it at all.”

  “People have a right to know—” Mickelson started, but Bernstein waved an impatient jewel-covered hand.

  “Spare me the liberal bullshit,” she said. “We’re at war. And it’s time we acknowledge it. This country is a powder-keg, and no one outside my department seems to understand that. Everyone else is looking skyward.”

  “That’s where the danger is coming from,” Mickelson said. “Not for a few more months. Right now, we’re running triple the number of hate crimes and conspiracy arrests. We got a tip, fortunately, that led us to a huge supply of anthrax just outside Denver last week. And so far we’ve managed to stop five more bombings like Memphis.”

  Mickelson turned his head so that he could see her face. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Don’t look so serious,” she said through her teeth, then smiled, obviously for the benefit of all the reporters in the room. “And don’t look so surprised. We’re not broadcasting any of this, except to a handful of folks.”

  “Not even Cabinet members?”