Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  They went on as if they had a deadline, an important one. Mickelson wondered if they knew something he didn’t. “You’re quiet, Doug,” Franklin said.

  “Yeah,” Mickelson said. “One too many diplomatic dinners, I guess.”

  Franklin raised his eyebrows slightly. “Is it that, or something more profound?”

  Bernstein was staring at him. O’Grady was studying his hands. Lopez was watching Franklin.

  “We keep acting as if we expect the other shoe to drop,” Mickelson said. “I guess I’m wondering when it will.” O’Grady shook his head. “I think we’re not used to the time between action and result.”

  “Huh?” Lopez said.

  Franklin also looked confused, but Mickelson got it. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose we’d always assumed if we’d launched nuclear missiles, we’d know what got hit and when within the hour. We’d know if we’d wiped out our enemy, or if we had simply made things worse. But this time, we’re waiting weeks.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Lopez said softly.

  “It’s turning Bernstein into a Cassandra,” O’Grady said. “And—”

  “Watch it,” Bernstein said. “Cassandra was right.”

  “Tavi,” the president warned.

  “I’ll stop,” she said. “Although I shouldn’t.”

  Franklin sighed. “We are spinning our wheels. It doesn’t feel right to work on domestic problems, and there seems to be little foreign work we can do. I guess you’re right, Shamus. We’re waiting, and none of us are very good at that.”

  “I’d like the wait to be over,” Mickelson said.

  “Me, too,” Lopez said.

  Franklin looked at both of them. “I only want the wait to end if we get the result we want,” he said.

  “You think there’s a realistic chance we won’t?” O’Grady asked, sounding a bit surprised.

  “I’d be a fool if I counted on anything,” Franklin said. “As bizarre as this is, we’re fighting a war here ”

  Mickelson’s heart was pounding. He hadn’t heard Franklin this pessimistic since the initial attack.

  “I trust you have backup plans,” Bernstein said.

  Mickelson knew of some of them. He was surprised she didn’t. Then he realized that, with her dire and incorrect warnings, and the domestic focus of her job, she probably had no need to know.

  “Oh, we have plans,” Franklin said. “But if this is the first volley in a protracted struggle, we’re in trouble.”

  Then, as if realizing that he was being too pessimistic, he stood, and put his hands on the table. “I’m glad you all came,” he said. “We’re ending now so that Doug can finish taking off his tie.”

  This time, Mickelson’s hand flew to the knot. Franklin gave him a wicked grin and walked out of the room. The others stood too.

  “You think he’s scared?” Bernstein asked.

  Mickelson thought for a moment. He assumed everyone was scared. They’d be fools not to be.

  “I don’t think that’s an issue,” he said. “He’s doing his job, and that’s all that matters.”

  “I guess.” She looked at the open door, the one Franklin had disappeared through. “For the record, the reason I’m focusing on the domestic problem is I believe this nuke thing is going to work.”

  Mickelson gave her a sharp glance.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been studying nuclear scenarios my entire career,” she said. “No planet can comfortably survive three hundred nuclear explosions on its surface. No planet.”

  Her words buoyed his mood. It surprised him, that she wasn’t as pessimistic as he had thought. He smiled, really smiled, for the first time in weeks.

  “You know,” he said, “I’d never thought of it that way. You’re exactly right.”

  And he left, knowing that, for the first time since the destruction of the California coast, he was going to get a good night’s sleep.

  10

  August 12, 2018

  12:51 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  94 Days Until Second Harvest

  Vivian Hartlein fixed the strap on her vest where it bit into her side. The vest weighed almost thirty pounds and made it hard for her to breathe. And climbing the steps up into the Capitol Building had been slow. With the extra weight she felt like an old woman.

  Over the vest she wore a long raincoat, even though there had been no rain forecast. She knew no one would pay her no mind. With the raincoat and the slow walk, she looked like a crazy old lady, not the leader of a group doing its best to bring down a godless government.

  The warm afternoon sun beat on her, the vest heavy, as she climbed the long set of stairs toward the Capitol Building. The images of her daughter kept her going. Cheryl and them grandbabies, turned to black dust.

  One foot at a time, one step at a time, she climbed until she was close to the security checkpoint. She didn’t plan to try to get past them deluded guards. With so much explosive strapped to her, she knew she had no chance of getting through, no matter how she looked.

  She stopped and rested, pretending to stare at the view behind her. The day was almost cool for August, and she was thankful the humidity was low. She wasn’t sure she could have climbed those stairs on a really hot summer day. Not with this much weight on her.

  Since the president had declared war on them made-up aliens, she’d lost more and more of her people. No matter how much proof she had, no matter how much talking she did, they slowly stopped listening to her. The government poisoned their minds. They saw all the media stuff as proof. Slowly they started to believe that the aliens was real, that they was coming back.

  It don’t matter what’s goin 'on with our government, Jake’d said to her that last day. He’d been her last soldier, the one she’d thought she could count on, her rock when her husband Dale didn’t come back from California. Right now, we got to ignore what’s going on here because them aliens'll be back.

  They ain't no aliens, she’d said.

  He’d looked at her sadlike. They is, Vivian, he’d said. And right now, it s our planet that we gotta defend. When the aliens is gone, we'll go after the government. But not till then. Can't you see that?

  She tried to see what they all saw. But it was lies. All lies. So clear that she wondered why she was the only one that saw it. She’d removed the log from her own eye, but she couldn’t seem to get the mote from her neighbor’s, even though the Bible promised she could. She was righteous, and sometimes the righteous had to stand alone.

  Above her the Capitol dome towered into the sky, a symbol of all the lies. All the murdering lies.

  The death would just continue if truth didn’t break through.

  She had left messages, long letters and tapes, telling everyone the truth.

  The truth would set them free. She just had to shock them into seeing it.

  Her death, her strike against the very heart of the government, would rally those who’d strayed. They’d use her death to keep the fight going until the truth prevailed.

  Her hands were shaking as she eased them into the pockets of the raincoat. In the left pocket was a picture of her daughter and her grandchildren. It was the only picture Vivian had of all of them.

  She pulled it out and stared at it. With her right hand she grasped the trigger to the explosives. There was enough to blow a two-story hole in the side of the Capitol. And she would never feel a thing.

  By the time the first siren wailed, she’d be in heaven, holding her grandbabies, and hugging her little girl.

  With one more look at their picture, she turned and moved directly to the security checkpoint leading into the building.

  The man in uniform smiled at her.

  She smiled back—and pushed the trigger in her pocket.

  August 12,2018

  1:01 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  94 Days Until Second Harvest

  Leo Cross sat in the hard lab chair, General Maddox beside him. It felt strange to see the general, in her uniform with her
perfect posture, sitting in Portia Groopman’s lab at NanTech. The stuffed animals, the scattered equipment, the expensive machinery, combined with General Maddox’s presence, made this seem like they were three adults sitting in the bedroom of an incredibly rich, incredibly spoiled teenage girl.

  Albeit one who had amazing talents.

  Portia, her eyes bearing the same shadows as everyone else’s, no longer looked so young. There were strain lines around her mouth, and an older look on her face.

  Edwin Bradshaw—who had been trying to make certain that in addition to all the work she did, she got sleep and food—was standing toward the back of the room, arms crossed. Jeremy Lantine and Yukio Brown stood beside him, mimicking his posture. Both of them seemed somewhat nervous, even more so when they saw General Maddox.

  The general was here on Cross’s invitation. Portia had said she had found a way to stop the alien nanoharvesters, and Cross wanted to make sure the government knew about it. He didn’t want to invite any of the science advisers. He felt that, if Portia was right, this would fall under the purview of the military. No one was better for the job than General Maddox.

  After all, she was the one who had helped Cross get the harvesters to NanTech in the first place—through such a circuitous route.

  The entire group was staring at the screen in front of them. On it, several alien nanoharvesters, blown up to one hundred times life-sized, were being attacked by the nanomachines Portia had designed. She had shown her five guests several different experiments. The first with one nanoharvester and one nanorescuer, as Portia was calling them. The nanorescuer had scuttled across the screen and landed on top of the nanoharvester. Then she had shown the same experiment with two, and so on, but these experiments were controlled. Each nanoharvester was lined up with a nanorescuer. Then she had run a series of experiments showing the harvesters already dissolving bits of grain. The nanorescuers still shut down the harvesters.

  Those experiments were impressive, but this last one was the important one.

  In it, she had placed a bunch of nanoharvesters on her slide and now had just finished putting an uncounted number of nanorescuers beside them in a large group.

  Then she leaned back to watch.

  The nanorescuers separated from their pack and each went toward a different nanoharvester. When they reached the harvesters, the rescuers attacked one by getting on top of it and shutting it down.

  When Bradshaw had first described this to Cross, he had said it had reminded him of insect sex, and now Cross agreed. But he wished that Bradshaw hadn’t put that image in his head.

  There were fewer rescuers than harvesters though, and once the individual rescuers had “killed” their harvester, they didn’t move on. The other harvesters were untouched, and presumably remained alive.

  Portia shut off the monitor. “And there you have it,” she said. “The strengths and weaknesses of the nanorescuers.” Maddox leaned forward. “This is quite impressive,” she said, and Portia smiled. “I never thought we’d be able to neutralize those things.”

  “And neutralize them once they’re activated,” Cross said. “You’re amazing, Portia.”

  “Don’t compliment her too much,” Lantine said, “she might expect a raise.”

  “For this,” Maddox said, “she should own the company. If our first method of attacking those aliens fails, then this one will certainly save us all. Congratulations, Ms. Groopman.” Portia was grinning like Cross had never seen her do. She seemed to enjoy the compliment from Maddox more than from anyone else.

  “You did see the problem, though,” Portia said.

  Maddox nodded. “I am less concerned about it than I probably should be. I’m still stunned that you’ve found a way to stop these hideous things.”

  “Obviously,” Cross said, “we’re going to have one rescuer for each harvester. What kind of money are we talking about here?”

  “Money isn’t the issue so much as time is,” Brown said. “And resources,” said Lantine.

  “Resources?” Maddox asked. “We’re talking about things a fraction the size of a flea. How much resources can it take?” “It’s not size that matters, General,” Cross said. “It’s our ability to make enough. Am I right, Portia?”

  She nodded. “There’s a few labs in this country that have the capability of building these things. A few more in Britain, some in France and Germany and Japan. I’m not sure about the other countries. Even though nanotechnology has come into its own in the last few years, we haven’t been mass producing much of anything. It’s not like we can take someone off the street and have him assemble pieces of a nanorescuer. It takes some specialized skills.”

  “Oh,” Maddox said.

  “However,” Bradshaw said. “I have some ideas.”

  Maddox turned to him.

  “Science schools like MIT and Cal Tech have entire nanotechnology divisions. They have postdoc students whom we can hire, and other students whom we can train.”

  “There are many universities with some excellent nanotechnology researchers,” Brown said. “We just have to grab them and their best students now.”

  “And then do this worldwide,” Portia said. “We need each country to have enough of these things so that they’re prepared.”

  Maddox nodded. “That’s the real problem, isn’t it?” she said. “We have no idea what is enough.”

  “Well, actually,” Bradshaw said, “we can get a fairly good estimate if we do some basic math.”

  “If they attack in the same numbers as before.” Portia looked at Bradshaw and Cross had the sense this was the continuation of another discussion from long ago. “If they attack in larger numbers, we’re in trouble.”

  Cross studied the now empty monitor. He was remembering the black dust, the videos of the blackness falling from the sky, the people screaming—

  “We have one more problem,” he said. “We have to be able to launch these rescuers before the harvesters do much damage.”

  “That does present a problem,” Maddox said.

  “No,” Brown said. “Launching won’t help us at all. These nanoharvesters destroy too much too fast.”

  Cross was afraid of that. He felt all the muscles in his shoulder tighten. They hadn’t created something that was too little too late, had they?

  “So what do we do?” Maddox asked.

  “We dust.” Portia spoke quietly.

  Maddox looked at her with a perplexed expression. “Dust?” “You know, like crop dusting. We spray the areas we think will be affected with the rescuers. We give people rescuers to carry on themselves, and then we hope we’re right.”

  “My God, Ms. Groopman, Maddox said. “Do you know what kind of scale you’re suggesting?”

  Portia smiled. “I know it’s a much grander scale than I usually work on,” she said, “but, yes, General Maddox, I do.” Cross leaned back. One step forward and two steps back. If resources had been a problem before, they were a disaster now. There was no way he could see anyone manufacturing close to enough rescuers by the time the tenth planet returned.

  If the aliens were still alive.

  But there were still four days before the missiles were scheduled to hit the tenth planet.

  “I hope those nukes work,” Maddox said. “Because the amount of work this plan will take is something I’m having trouble imagining.”

  “We can do it,” Bradshaw said.

  Maddox turned toward him. “I appreciate optimism, Dr. Bradshaw, as long as it’s well founded.”

  “I think it is,” Bradshaw said. “We just have to take things one step at a time.”

  At that moment a young-looking man with blond hair came running into the room. He flicked on a television sitting on a table against the back wall, then turned to them, his face red, his eyes wide. “I think you’re going to want to see this.”

  On the screen was a scene Cross had hoped he would never live to see. Smoke was pouring out of a huge hole in the side of the Capitol Building. Under
the picture were the words Capitol Bombed.

  As if fighting the aliens wasn’t enough, they still had to fight each other.

  August 12, 2018

  14:52 Universal Time

  90 Days Until Second Harvest

  The warship worked better than Cicoi could have imagined. He stood at his command post, his upper tentacles resting on the controls, his lower tentacles wrapped around the circle, and his eyestalks extended. He had practiced enough that he did not get dizzy despite the long amounts of time he had to stand in this position.

  His staff was scattered along its various positions, some of them clinging uncomfortably to their posts. Those members he had to make a note of because they had not trained as he had requested. He would not be able to use them in the upcoming missions to the third planet.

  “Commander,” his Second said. “We are approaching the first cylinder.”

  Cicoi waved a single tentacle, initiating visuals. He saw tentacles rise and fall in surprise all around the command center. The images of space surrounded them, except for an ugly projectile heading in their direction.

  “Can we tell what it is?” he asked.

  “It is not a probe,” his Second said. “It has many functions, but there is a concentration of materials in the tip that seem—•” “Forgive me, Commander,” said his Third, “but the materials when combined could explode.”

  “Explode?” Cicoi felt himself float slightly. He tightened his grip on the circle. So the Elder had been right. This was a weapon. “Harvest the energy from this cylinder, and instruct the other ships to do the same. Then send a message to the fleets led by the Center and North informing them of this.” “We will expend more energy in the message,” his Tenth warned, “than we will receive from the cylinder.”

  “I know,” Cicoi said.

  He watched as his staff performed their functions. His Second stopped suddenly, his upper tentacles tangling.