Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She shrugged. “You have enough on your plate, Doug. The anthrax thing is one of many my office has been dealing with since that damn planet appeared. My people are working harder than they’ve ever worked, and on more cases, from more areas, than ever before.”

  “What the hell do you think is going on?” he asked.

  She looked at him for a long moment, then turned her gaze pointedly on the reporters. “How long do you think we have?”

  He glanced at his watch. “We’re only fifteen minutes late at this point. No one’s left that office yet. They’re fine tuning. I think we’ve got five minutes at least.”

  “Yeah, and ball-buster Lopez hasn’t acquiesced yet,” Bernstein said. “What the hell is she thinking? The drapes have to be closed if they’re going to do a press conference in here at night. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t been closed since the Kennedy Administration.”

  Mickelson grinned. “I think I saw a photo of LBJ with them closed.”

  “Yeah, to keep the glare off all his television sets.”

  They both laughed, and Mickelson thought how rare it was to have someone else who knew the details of modern American history. He would wager they were the only two people in the room who knew that right where half the press corps was standing, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had had a console with three television sets built in, one for what was then every network.

  That good ole boy from Texas would certainly be surprised now. Hundreds, maybe thousands of channels, not counting all the video on the Web, and the low-wattage stations. Now there was so much noise, Mickelson was amazed anyone heard anything. He knew that Franklin’s press people spent most of the evening making certain that all the networks knew this was the most important speech in Franklin’s career— maybe in the world. Even then, Mickelson doubted if more than half would carry it, and those would have pundits dissecting everything instantly afterward.

  He was scheduled to appear on NBC and its subnetworks. He had no idea where Bernstein was supposed to lend her two cents.

  She led him out the door and into the office of Franklin’s private secretary. There was a crowd here, too, but none of them were reporters. More Cabinet members were here, waiting, and some of the deputy officials.

  “Okay.” Bernstein pulled him into a corner near a Remington statue of a cowboy on a horse, purchased during the Reagan administration. “You wanted to know what’s going on? Here’s what I think. I think people are terrified, and they don’t know how to express it. They’re also feeling helpless. We’ve had a huge rise in voluntary military recruitment. But that’s not helping like it usually does in war. This threat is an unknown, it comes from the sky, and it seems all-powerful.” “So the speech should help,” Mickelson said.

  “Oh, for sensible people, maybe,” Bernstein said. “But most people aren’t sensible, not in the way we want them to be. And those crazed groups out there are spreading the word that the aliens aren’t real. So when Franklin uses the ‘n’ word—”

  Even in this more private room she didn’t dare say nukes. Franklin had impressed on all of them the need for secrecy on this point. Mickelson had been avoiding discussing it all day.

  “—who are those crazies going to believe is being attacked? If they don’t believe aliens exist, there’s only one other answer.” “Some international target.”

  “Fuck, Doug, sometimes your job colors your vision,” Bernstein said. “No. We’re not talking rational folk here.”

  “Used to be,” he said softly, “the rational people were the ones who didn't believe in aliens.”

  She smiled grimly. “Well, times change. And our crazy friends aren’t going to be worrying about an international target. They’re going to be worrying about a local one. They know that we’ve been on their butts and so have the ATF, and the U.S. Marshals. They’re going to think this is some kind of code.”

  Mickelson still didn’t get it. “Yes, but you’re talking about a fringe element.”

  Color rose in her cheeks. “That’s what Franklin was saying. He’s so focused on the skies he’s forgetting about the homefront. He does this and I guarantee that cities’ll be burning in the morning.”

  Mickelson let out an exasperated sigh. “Why are you telling me this now? Why didn’t you bring it up at the Cabinet meeting?”

  “Because I’ve been talking to Franklin about it all week, and he didn’t want the dissent at the damn meeting. He says, and I quote, ‘What happens here doesn’t matter a rat’s ass if we don’t get rid of those aliens.’ ”

  Mickelson bit his lower lip. In his own way, Franklin was right. What happened in the next few months didn’t matter if the aliens returned. A lump formed in Mickelson’s stomach. His shoulders were so tight, it felt as if he’d snap every muscle in them simply by moving.

  “You agree with him, don’t you?” Bernstein said.

  Trapped. Mickelson glanced at the door. Some of the reporters were in position, but Lopez was still arguing over the drapes. What a weird stalling tactic that was.

  “Don’t you?” Bernstein asked.

  There was no way she was going to let him off the hook. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  “Damn,” Bernstein said. “He listens to you. I was hoping you could get him to call this off at the eleventh hour.”

  “Sorry, Tavi,” Mickelson said. “I think in this case, we’re on the right path.”

  He left her side, feeling more uncomfortable than he had in days. There were no good options anywhere. And now the missiles had been launched.

  He stepped back into the Oval Office just as Lopez closed the drapes. The reflection disappeared. She walked across the room, and let herself through one of the many doors. The CNN White House correspondent was shaking his head as if he hadn’t seen anything like that for a long time.

  Bernstein entered and pointedly went to a different part of the room from Mickelson. What had she expected? Yeah, he and Franklin went way back, almost as far back as he and Cross did. Franklin and Mickelson were both Rhodes scholars, and were in Oxford at the same time. They’d been part of a small enclave of Americans—it wasn’t a popular time for Americans abroad—and they had stuck closer together than they would have if they had been going to graduate school in the States.

  But Franklin hadn’t chosen Mickelson just out of loyalty. He had chosen Mickelson to represent the US. abroad because he and Mickelson had similar views. Bernstein had been promoted from within the ranks. When the director’s job came open, she had been the natural choice for it. But Mickelson had been chosen from the outside, and he had done his best to serve both his country and his president.

  Which he was also doing now. Bernstein had presented her argument. Franklin had rejected it. End of story.

  At that thought, the door to the president’s study opened, and Franklin walked in, flanked by the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his press secretary. As Franklin approached the desk, lights went on all around him, illuminating that entire section of the Oval Office. Even the cracks in the ceiling were visible.

  Franklin took his chair, and the others joined the throng behind the cameras. If viewed only from the cameras’ undiscerning eye, it looked as if Franklin sat alone in front of windows hidden by lush blue drapes, an American flag and some lovely ferns in the background.

  “Can we have a camera test, Mr. President?” one of the reporters shouted.

  “We already did that,” Lopez said. “Let the president start.”

  The lump in Mickelson’s stomach grew heavier. All day, the discussions around the Oval Office had been about the speech. If human beings survived, this would be the signature speech of the Franklin presidency. Every adviser, every member of the president’s staff was conscious of the fact that they were making history here.

  And they were conscious of the fact that with each decision, they could be writing the end of history as well.

  Mickelson made himself take a deep breath.

  A TelePrompter had be
en set up in front of the camera, a bow to the fact that this version of the speech had been cobbled together at the last minute.

  Franklin stiffened his shoulders.

  His press secretary was looking at her watch. She would give him the signal to start from off-camera.

  Mickelson scanned for General Maddox. She was standing near the door that led into the president’s office. She was in full dress uniform and, for the first time since Mickelson had met her, she looked nervous.

  The press secretary’s finger came down, the red lights on top of all dozen handheld cameras came on, and Franklin was beginning the speech that would define him.

  “Good evening, my fellow Americans, and citizens of the world.”

  Franklin’s voice quivered just a little, and his eyes widened just slightly in surprise. He was nervous.

  Mickelson couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Franklin well and truly nervous.

  “I speak to you today not only as the president of the United States, but as the representative of many of the leaders and governments of this world, with full support from the United Nations.”

  Good start. Mickelson’s back stiffened. Now for the tough part.

  Franklin held up a piece of paper. “I hold in my hand a declaration of war against the inhabitants of the tenth planet.

  This declaration has been signed by all the major governments of the planet Earth. Last night, in a secret Security Council session at the United Nations, this declaration was presented as a resolution and passed unanimously. Later today, it will be formally approved by the general session.”

  Mickelson stole a glance at the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She had her hands folded in front of her. He’d helped her prep for last night’s debate, only to get a call from her later with the report that there had been none.

  The nations of the world were united on this. He should have mentioned that to Bernstein.

  Although he doubted she would have appreciated it.

  “At 6:05 Greenwich Mean Time today,” President Franklin was saying, “the combined nations of this planet launched a counterattack against the tenth planet from orbit. Over a period of one hour, three hundred and six nuclear-tipped warheads were launched on an intercept course with the tenth planet. A few more will be launched over the next few weeks, until the launch window closes our opportunity for such action.”

  Mickelson’s throat was dry. He wished he didn’t have to be here. He wanted to be in some Georgetown bar, near the university, listening to the seniors react to the speech. He had no idea how this was playing in Peoria, let alone Beijing.

  He hoped it was playing well, because there was no way to turn back from this course.

  The president paused for a few moments, then went on. “It will take the fastest of this massive first wave of missiles sixty-three days to reach an intercept point with the tenth planet as it comes around the sun and heads back toward our planet.”

  Franklin was looking pale in the bright light. He was talking about the largest nuclear attack ever made. And, bless him, he looked as disturbed by it as a leader in time of crisis could.

  Mickelson dry-swallowed. He resisted the urge to glance at Bernstein. Goddamn her. Why’d she have to come to him at the last minute? She had made him uncertain, and he couldn’t be, not with his own television appearances awaiting him after this. He had to sound like a positive member of the team, something he was usually very good at.

  Franklin lowered his voice to a confiding tone. “I know all of you watched what the inhabitants of the tenth planet did on their first attack against Earth. Many of you lost loved ones: parents, children, grandchildren. We all saw the damage these hideous weapons did. We were affected unevenly, but we were all affected. Earth is our home and it has been violated. We rise up now in self-defense.”

  Heartstrings. Mickelson nodded. Someone had had the good sense to use hot-button words like “home” and “violation.” Franklin had even skirted around the concept of motherhood. If this had been a strictly American speech, Mickelson wondered, would there have been a mention of apple pie, too?

  He shuddered and glanced at Bernstein. That cynical thought was courtesy of her.

  Or was it? Maybe it was his own way of distancing himself from the emotional content of Franklin’s speech. Mickelson had vacationed on the California coast. He’d been down the Amazon, and he’d even been to the places in Africa that had been destroyed. He hadn’t lost friends or family, but he had lost places and in some ways that was just as bad. Maybe worse. Because humans believed places outlasted everything. In Europe, cities existed for a thousand years. In Asia and the Middle East, several thousand.

  And the aliens had destroyed that feeling of security, the fact that some things lasted through time.

  Mickelson took a deep breath. Calm. He had to remain calm.

  “We cannot allow a second such attack to occur as the tenth planet comes past us again,” Franklin was saying. He had raised his voice again. He was speaking with force, no longer the friend and confidant, but the world leader. “All of the governments of the world have been working together, and will continue to do so, to fight the aliens on all fronts. The strike today was just the first. There will be more.”

  More. Jesus. A part of Mickelson had hoped that this one attack would be enough.

  Franklin was looking directly at the camera. He looked more confident than he had when he began this speech. His tone was firm again.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it came from the heart.

  Mickelson braced himself.

  “This is an historic day,” Franklin said. “It is the first time the entire planet has gone to war against a common enemy. I had never imagined such a day, but it has arrived. We did not ask for this war. We do not want it. But be assured, we shall win.”

  Franklin continued to stare at the cameras. Then the red lights above them went out. Mickelson started with surprise. No traditional ending. No “thank you and good night.” Just a declaration of power.

  The reporters weren’t even shouting questions. They looked stunned. Franklin stood, walked to the study, and closed the door behind him.

  The Oval Office was incredibly quiet, considering how many people were in it.

  Mickelson gathered himself. He had to go to the press room so that he could be the third wheel on some NBC panel talk show. He had to move.

  But he didn’t want to. Even though the president was gone, the air was still fraught with import.

  We’ve finally done it, he thought. We’ve finally declared war.

  Against an enemy they didn’t know. An enemy they didn’t understand. An enemy they’d never really seen.

  Franklin had spoken with confidence about their chances. Mickelson wasn’t sure if that confidence was real or not. But he knew that, for the first time since the tenth planet had started destroying sections of the Earth thousands of years ago, Earth finally had a realistic chance of fighting back.

  And maybe, just maybe, they could win this.

  Section Three

  FINAL

  COUNTDOWN

  9

  August 1, 2018

  10:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  101 Days Until Second Harvest

  As Leo Cross pushed open the double doors leading into Britt’s main lab, he felt like an outsider about to enter a closed town. He took a deep breath, trying to overcome the feeling, but he couldn’t really shake it.

  Even though Britt had gotten him a permanent pass into the building a month ago—the day after the president had given his famous “We Are at War” speech—Cross still didn’t know anyone but Britt by name. He wasn’t consulted by the other scientists and he was constantly treated as “the boyfriend.”

  It was a new experience for him. All his life, he had been the center of attention, he had been the one that others had looked to, he had been the one with other people hanging on his arm.

  Right now, he wasn’t really hanging on Britt’s—he was doin
g work—he just wasn’t getting results. He spent a lot of time in his office, and in his workroom at home, studying information from all the different groups working on the various aspects of the Tenth Planet Project.

  Movement seemed so damn slow. Slowness had never bothered him in the past, but now it did. Everyone was looking at the missiles as the things that would save the Earth, but Cross wasn’t by nature an optimist. Nor was he a pessimist. He quantified things, hypothesized from information presented to him, and waited for results.

  But with the missiles, he couldn’t do that.

  He threaded his way through the desks and computers and scientists hunched over them, studying telemetry or turning the streams of raw data into visuals. Britt had placed a large screen in the center of the room—a flat screen that had images on both sides. Right now it was running numbers, and no one was looking at it. At other times he had been in the lab, it had been showing images from various probes, sometimes the best or the prettiest. And a few times, late at night, it showed those images that could, when someone connected the dots with a white line, be made to look like something else—usually something juvenile and extremely funny.

  A few of the scientists had looked up as Cross entered, but no one greeted him. Sometimes when he showed up, they looked at him as if he were the enemy. He took Britt away, when the rest of them had to remain, and he had a hunch they saw that as unfair somehow.

  Britt was standing between two of her assistants, one hand on each desk, having an earnest conversation. He stayed well back, knowing better than to interrupt her work.

  She had gotten thinner in the last few months, and the lack of sleep had hollowed out her face. The prettiness that had so appealed to him when they first met was lost to stress and burnout. She was still attractive, but she wasn’t fresh faced, wasn’t the energetic woman he had fallen in love with. He was beginning to worry how much more of this she could take, but he didn’t know how much of his worry was coming from his love for her and how much of it was actually based on some intangible that he could see but not define.