Alex looked out of the window, and something shiny caught his eye. He tried craning his neck but could not see the whole of it. It was something metallic and lighted, in the western sky, just obscured by the railings of his window.
Alex climbed out of his bed, put on a shorts and a tee and walked out of his home, onto the portico to have a better look. It was still dark out there. There was chaos in the street, and people were running helter-skelter. Alex looked up at the Sun and saw a thin rim of light all around what should have been a full Sun.
It looked like a cloud on the Sun, but it looked peculiar for a cloud. He squinted his eyes to get a better look and it reminded him of the eclipse viewings during his childhood, where he peered through film paper at the Sun peeking through the obscuring disk of moon. However, it was no eclipse today. Nothing that he had heard of anyway. Many kids were pointing to a direction behind him and he turned around looking over the slanted roof of his house.
There was this large shiny, lighted, metallic thing in the sky! Alex was shocked for a moment. His mouth fell wide open as he gawked at the thing.
It was enormous, shaped like a huge metallic torch, with a rounded top and a pointed eccentric bottom and lights filtered out of its surface, through tiny windows in its façade. It hung there silently, like a behemoth, a leviathan still, in its observation. It looked ominous and distant, almost dislikable, just hanging up there in the sky, thick, dark cords billowing from under it, waiting silently, waiting for someone to activate it, to perhaps pounce on the hapless millions under it.
He turned to a rustling of leaves behind him and found Si standing by him, gazing at the rimmed Sun in the sky.
Alex pointed her gaze at the metal cone in the opposite direction and she gasped in bewilderment.
‘I guess your guests have arrived a tad early’ Alex murmured under his breath.
Sienna was still mesmerized at the spectacle, looking back from the metal cone to the Sun and back again. The dimensions on the metal cone must be huge, for it to appear as big as it did, from as far as it was.
And all that speculation about it being an intelligent comet? Blah…ET were definitely intelligent and how? It was beyond her wildest dreams. How could they have just sneaked up on them like that? It would have taken them a helluva acceleration to be here this early.
But they did not accelerate. They could vanish and reappear at a different point in space. That must be more convenient and faster than tearing and burning through space to reach us.
The sound of the phone ringing inside the house drew her attention and she went inside to answer it. Alex lingered in his porch, his eyes still riveted at the shining metal cone in the sky. His reverie was broken by the sound of gunshots in the distance. Chaos had broken out in the streets. Si came running outside, her military upbringing making her all too familiar with the sound of the gunshots.
‘Gunfire’ Alex muttered as he looked back at her emerging from the door. Sienna stopped and looked at the metal cone in the sky.
‘People may be shooting at that thing.’
Alex nodded his head. Yeah, that was a possibility. Or people may be hurting each other…looting, rioting. The things that people do to each other when opportunity comes knocking.
‘Who was on the phone?’ Alex asked Sienna.
‘NSA. Their vehicle is coming now to pick me up.’
Alex realized something and rushed inside the house. He switched on the TV and switched to ‘breaking news’ on CNN. He picked up the phone and dialed the mobile of Carrie, their elder daughter.
The news showed visuals of a metal inverted cone in the sky with the White House in the forefront. A news helicopter was beaming the pictures from the sky. It looked very much like the torch that hung in the skies above them, looking like a huge gleaming metal Olympic torch minus its flame. Similar sightings had been seen all over the States and from around the world, in fact over every major city across the world. Riots had started in Miami and in Vegas and there were reports of sporadic looting coming in from Jersey.
The phone clicked and Carrie’s excited voice filled Alex’s ears on this end ‘Dad, did you see the thing? Isn’t it like something? Amazing dad amazing!’ she went on rambling for a minute before Alex could wedge in a few words. It was not wise to ask them to come home and Alex asked them to stay put indoors, in their hostel rooms. Carrie disapproved of his dictates but grudgingly promised that she would obey.
Alex thought that he would have to make the trip to escort them back home. He did not want Si to leave home either, but knew she would go anyway.
Sienna was ready in twenty minutes and a black military DMX van was at their door in thirty. Sienna collected the work she was doing the previous night, packed a duffel bag with some essentials, planted a quick kiss on Alex’s lips, asked him to be in constant touch with her and then she left. Alex saw the van disappear around the corner and then stood there, on the road, his gaze alternating between the alien vessel and the disc obscuring the Sun.
Sienna would probably be safe at the White House. He had to go get his daughters. He had a bad feeling about all of this. It was as if the enemy had caught them with their pants down. It was an ambush; and if it was an ambush, he shuddered to think what was to follow. The size and the enormity of this deployment had danger written all over it. Vessels parked over populated cities across the world. This was not a friendly greeting. It had the mark of aggression written all over. There were a hundred other ways to announce their arrival, to make contact with the leadership before spreading panic like this. This smacked of their confidence, their arrogance and their intent to initiate conflict, and to conquer and subjugate.
Maybe the aliens had different rules of engagement and different conventions of greeting, but deep down, Alex knew that this was neither.
***
Si had been ushered to the situation room in White House and she sat amongst many similar faces from her NSA meetings. The Military and the Air Force were ready. They had issued perfunctory warnings on loud speakers, to the alien crafts, about air space violations but had got no response from them. Air Force jets had been scrambled and they had formed a cordon around each of the crafts. Images from these jets showed a dual discoid configuration of these crafts, with a long metal nose dipping down from what appeared to be its bow. Radar study of the crafts had revealed little. They were huge metal bodies and radar only detected their central bulk, the peripheries invisible to radar. The disc covering the sun appeared to be a huge ship, shaped almost like a half-sphere. The rounded surface faced us and the obverse side appeared ragged, with broad spikes and serrations projecting out of that surface. This ship had positioned itself such that it covered the Sun completely from us, causing the eclipse on Earth. It was huge, bordering on gargantuan in its dimensions, roughly two-thirds the size of the moon and that much further away than the lunar orbit to achieve the eclipse effect it was having.
While the military tried to make sense of the crafts on Earth, there was a lot happening on Europa too. Lt. Carter took up the stage and put out his star-charts yet again.
‘There is a lot of disturbance around Europa’ the chart showed a hazy mist surrounding the outline of Europa. Si had seen a similar mist developing above the cryovolcanoes of Enceladus. Carter changed to a magnified image of Europa and pointed to tiny light points around Europa,
‘These single light pixels possibly indicate a similar deployment of crafts around Europa’, he then pointed to a bigger orb to the left of the image, which Si had missed in her excitement,
‘And this is perhaps the mother ship, the bigger half of the disc around our Sun here, it’s one half smooth and the other ragged, conforming possibly to the ragged side of our orb here, both put together could form a complete sphere.’
Sienna marveled at the resolution of that image yet again and wondered where they were getting that clarity from. She should have been a military snob rather than wasting her career with NASA.
‘What do you th
ink is happening here?’ General Marshall was back in the meeting today.
‘Possibly an attack but that would just be my guess as I have no facts to support it.’
General Marshall rolled his eyes up and said
‘I think we will have you back when you have more facts Lieutenant.’
Sienna thought that Carter’s intuition was correct. It looked very much like an attack on Europa and if that were correct, there was one to soon rain upon Earth too.
***
The first attack came in the afternoon that day; a couple of hours after the meeting in the Situation room. The attack had taken place in Philly. The news crews stationed near the alien ship had managed to record the entire spectacle of the carnage. This particular alien ship had parked itself over the University of Pennsylvania, right over the Perelman School of Medicine. The ship, which had been stationary since that morning, had suddenly started moving in the sky. It had tilted itself at an angle and then accompanied by a deafening roar, its midsection had opened up, to reveal a gleam of light from within. That was followed by several rounded pods jetting out of the ship. Hundreds of students had gathered on the college lawns, taking in the spectacle of that morning.
These pods had zoomed down on a horde of undergraduates on the U-Penn gardens and had fired indiscriminately with some kind of laser weapons, instantly mowing down seven of the students. The attack had been brutal and there was immediate and sheer pandemonium on the streets. The whole sordid affair had lasted a mere seven minutes and then the pods returned to the ship, leaving thirty-nine people dead on the lawns and the streets of U-Penn.
CNN had picked up on the carnage mid-way and had beamed most of it live. In the White House, there was an instant panic-induced frenzy all around. Sienna looked out of the window and saw the behemoth ship standing still in the sky behind the White House. It had not moved yet. But what they had just seen on TV was a demonstration of what it was capable of. There was a mad rush in the corridors of White House and the Secret Service rushed into all the rooms to urge an immediate evacuation of the White House premises. The President was escorted out of her office and the rest were asked to assemble on the helipad in the White House premises for evacuation. They were informed that they would be leaving within ten minutes.
The second attack was reported within half an hour of the first one, this time on lake revelers on the Holland State Park in Michigan. The torch shaped ship opened up in the middle and the first alien harvester had glided out of the ship. It was a huge floating platform shaped ship, which glided gently over the mass of spectators on a sand-strip by the lake. These spectators largely consisted of tourists and some local people who had been drawn to witness the massive ship that had appeared over the horizon, out of the blue, all of a sudden that morning.
The harvester had positioned itself over the spectators. Some had fled and some had just curiously looked on. The harvester had shot the first rounds towards the periphery of the mass of people under it, instinctively herding them into the center, directly under it. Then it had almost instantaneously, drawn long sinuous black fibrous tentacles from beneath itself that had swooped down and had grabbed on to the mass of the people under it. These alien tentacles had giant barbs, hooks and pincers at its ends and many under the harvester were impaled through and through before being scooped up into the alien harvester. There was pandemonium on the lakeside and when it all ended, a good five minutes later, seventeen had died and close to thirty people had been clawed up into the harvester, which had receded into the big floating torch-ship thereafter. The local law enforcement officers had been present and they had fired with their weapons on the harvester and on the ship, to no avail. The bullets had had no impact on either the harvester or the ship. Tiny beams of light shot out of the harvester, and very precisely struck down the bullets aimed at it.
Sienna heard about the second attack and then turned to see the ship hovering above them. It had still not shown any signs of activity. A large gathering of people scurried along on the roads and gardens outside with phones glued to their ears, watching the thing in the sky intermittently, while rushing to get to their near and dear ones and rushing to get as far away from the thing in the sky as possible. Police cars were on the road, urging people to get back to their houses and to stay indoors.
The POTUS had been moved to a secure location. Sienna and a few others were still holed in the anteroom adjacent to the lawns. They walked intermittently to the lawn and gawked at the silent leviathan in the sky. The TV constantly blared updates about fresh attacks from all over the US. Vegas strip, Universal studios, Disneyland and the Niagara were all hit one by one.
Sienna picked up her phone and dialed home. Alex picked up the call after the first ring.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Yeah! What about you?’
‘They are planning an evac for us ASAP. Dunno where. How are the girls?’
‘They are fine. Nothing has happened there. I have asked them to be indoors. Shall I come and get you?’
‘No. Stay put indoors. These things are attacking people outdoors. Peculiarly, no attacks outside of US yet. The guys at SIDC have uncovered something weird. There is a similar deployment around Europa, the moon around Jupiter. Possibly Europa’s under attack too.’
Alex turned his head to the TV. Sienna was right. Only US targets were being hit. None in any other country in the world. There was no news about Europa though.
‘No Europa on news. What’s happening up there? Bastards. Why only the US?’
‘Europa is a Jovian moon, which has a huge ocean world under its outer crust. It is geologically active and it has long been suspected to be harboring life in its oceans. I think our suspicions were correct all along. Our attackers have split up and attacked the only two worlds with life in our Solar system. As for why only the US, I have no answer for that. We could not get any communications on. They started attacking us before we could set up any form of communication with them. Totally unprovoked.’
Alex couldn’t agree any more,
‘This was a war from the beginning. These bastards have been hostile from the very beginning. I had an inkling of that today morning, when I saw their deployment across the world. I have charted it on a map. They are equidistant from each other, like a well spread out network, possibly for communications between themselves, but also possibly for efficiency during aerial warfare. Why don’t we hit them now?’
Sienna knew Alex would not be sitting idle. She replied ‘I think a counter-attack is coming soon, anytime now. POTUS has gone to a safe location. Maybe we will be shifted there too, to some kind of a war or situation room.’
‘Um..hmm. Take care Si.’
‘I’ll be fine. You take care. Hope the girls remain safe.’
‘They are fine. I have asked them to be indoors. None of the buildings have yet been attacked. That seems to be the general advisory being displayed on TV now – to stay indoors. Will keep you posted. Take care and keep calling.’
An officer was by Sienna’s side, indicating her to move on to the White House grounds. Their transport was ready. Two Chinook helicopters had just landed on the heli-turf on the White House lawns and Sienna and others were escorted to the copters. Everyone was nervously and furtively glancing at the towering and menacing ship parked in the sky, silhouetting the White House.
There was a sudden loud noise from the direction of the alien ship when Sienna stepped foot on the copter ladder. She turned towards the ship and saw it turn on its axis, suspended in the sky. It emanated a loud grating noise in the sky and everyone in her group turned towards the ship, horror writ large on their faces. There was a mini scuttle to get on to the copter and Sienna was pushed inside in the melee.
The rotor blades whirred into life soon after that and Sienna closed her eyes as the helicopter rose into the sky. She was seating next to a window and she looked out, seeing the alien ship’s mid-section open up, a beam of light filtering out of its midsection. The ship
had turned towards them and the open midsection seemed to directly point in their direction.
The Chinook helicopter wobbled for balance and Sienna held on to the armrests, her eyes riveted at the alien ship slowly turning towards them. The second Chinook was airborne too and both the copters headed out, away from the ship.
The blast came seconds later. Both the helicopters were flying side by side, one a little lower than the other. Sienna saw a brief flash of light from the ship and almost immediately heard a giant explosion near her. Their helicopter shook violently and they saw the other Chinook go down in flames broken in two, cut like butter-cake, right down its middle.
Almost an instant later, the second explosion shook their helicopter. Their copter was hit somewhere near the rear and it lost balance, nose-diving towards the ground. There was panic in the cabin and everyone screamed for their dear lives. Sienna clutched her bag close to her and thought about Alex and her daughters as the copter went down.
Unknown to Sienna, a squadron of F-22s probably saved her life.
As their copter was going down, the pilot struggling at the controls to steady it, a squadron of F-22s arrived at the scene, headed straight for the alien ship. They formed a V-formation on their approach to the ship and as they neared the ship, they spread out in a tactical formation surrounding the ship. They fired the first round of missiles at the alien ship and that drew its attention away from the diving helicopters.
The missiles, however were struck down with impunity about three hundred meters from the ship, roughly the same distance where the bullets had been intercepted earlier. There was a second round of a more intense missile attack with the same result. The alien ship seemed to have an excellent interception system, managing to precisely strike the tiniest of approaching targets.
A third round of missile strikes met with a similar fate.
Then, it was their turn. The alien pods exited the open midsection of the torch-ship, maneuvering their way around the F-22 air rounds. The alien pods fired their laser rounds and each round lit up the sky in a brilliant flare, before very precisely slamming into the airborne F-22s, blasting them to smithereens. It was an unequal engagement, the F-22s fighting against machines that beat them hands down, both in maneuverability and in firepower. The cold cloudy sky was suddenly ablaze with flames and smoke erupting from exploding F-22s, which were dropping off the sky like dead flies while the alien ship stood there like a behemoth, untouched and unscathed, surrounded by smoke clouds billowing from exploding F-22s all around it.
Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2) Page 4
