by Howard Marsh
Once the water had emptied from the landing area, another huge door slid open. This door was at floor level, about twenty meters below the entry door. The ship rose about one meter from the floor and moved through it, into a very large chamber that had two other spacecraft like theirs and several strange looking tracked vehicles sitting near the walls. The ship moved toward one end of the chamber and stopped about six meters from the wall. Then the door opened and the ladder extended back to the ground. It was obviously time to disembark, or de-plane, or whatever they called it.
Standing near the ladder were three men, one of whom looked distinguished enough to be the Abraham Billingsley that Brad had mentioned. He was dressed in a dark blue business suit, with a red bow tie and a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. Harry was surprised, and a bit amused, at the formality, and he recalled that Brad had said that Billingsley was a bit of an aristocrat. He certainly did stand out from the others who looked like members of either the ground crew or the security detail assigned to Billingsley and were dressed much more modestly.
Brad took the lead toward the three of them, motioning Harry to follow. Milo apparently wasn’t going to disembark.
“Good morning B,” Brad said as they approached. “I’d like to introduce our famous new recruit, Harry Ambrose. It took quite a bit to – shall we say – encourage him to join us, but here he is. And I think that he may even be starting to enjoy being here, but I’ll let him comment on that. So Harry, meet Director Billingsley.”
“Hello Harry. Please call me B. Everyone else does. You’ll find that we’re pretty informal down here. And no need for the director or professor titles. Only the military seem to keep up the antiquated class distinctions. Sort of an ego trip, eh Colonel?”
Brad let that pass. It was obvious that the two of them did this sort of back and forth banter all the time, and Brad was content to let B have the last word.
Before Harry could speak, Billingsley continued, “So, now I suspect that you might enjoy a tour through Nebula Prime and then a briefing on the things that we are doing and why we need your help.”
They began to walk toward one of the doors at the end of the landing area. It slid open as they approached, and Harry could see what looked like a long hallway with doors on each side and a large room at the end. It reminded him of a hotel corridor leading to the reception area, with guest rooms along the sides.
“These are some of our living quarters,” Billingsley said as they walked along the corridor. “As you know by now, all of our Level-4 personnel live in either Prime, Two, or Ops. These are like small towns, with all the creature comforts that we can provide, given the unique situation that we live in. We have several nuclear power stations in each of the three, so we can provide air, water, light, and the other necessities. We can even grow a good bit of the food that we need, so we could live on our own for a long period if necessary, maybe up to a year or two.”
When they reached the large room, Harry could see that it was in the form of a hexagon, with identical doors on each of the walls.
“All of our undersea structures are designed with hexagonal symmetry. Our mathematicians convinced the architects that this was a good way to build, and no one has the nerve to argue with our mathematicians. The hub, as we call it, is where we are now. There are six branches, as you can see. All of them have either living quarters or offices along the walls and a large functional area at the ends. You arrived at the transportation area, which is the largest since it has to accommodate our spacecraft and our undersea vehicles. A few of them were parked near where you disembarked. The other five are central cores for meeting spaces and work spaces. You’ll get a chance to see them while you’re here or at other times when you visit.
“Now let’s go to the conference room where we can fill you in on what we are really up to and where you fit into all of this. We went to a lot of trouble, and I suppose caused you a lot of pain, to get you here, so you’re probably curious about it, eh?”
Harry nodded but said nothing. He was torn between still being angry and starting to accept the fact that this might not be so bad after all. He just followed along as Billingsley walked toward one of the halls, toward a moderate size chamber at the end.
“Right, so here we are at the core of our main meeting area. This is a small core, no need for a lot of space like in the transportation area. It just connects to the six conference areas that are through the five doors. It also serves as a place where we can take breaks during long meetings.”
They went through one of the doors, and entered a large room that continued the hexagonal design and that was obviously a conference room. It contained a conference table at one end, a large number of chairs arranged in the normal fashion, facing the conference table. A large screen display was on the wall behind the conference table, and a speaker’s lectern was to the right. Billingsley motioned Harry to a seat at the table.
“So,” Billingsley began. “Let’s get down to the business of the war that we’re in. Would you like a cup of coffee or some water before we begin?”
“No thanks,” Harry replied, finally breaking his silence.
“Right, so we’ll let the good colonel start.”
Brad remained seated as he launched into his briefing, first explaining the source of the information regarding the alien force, its strength and potential strategy for the attack.
“We told you previously that we are able to translate a bit of the alien language. That was an understatement. We’ve had so much time to study their messages and data files, and we’ve applied so much computer power to the job that we’ve been able to translate everything that was recorded, even their idiomatic expressions. We translated the files in all three UFOs that crashed on Earth, and we were able to tap into the storage on several of the robots that they left on Mars, and that gave us additional files of all the message traffic. Fortunately they used storage devices intended to survive crashes, like our black boxes on airliners, so we got a lot of information dating from when they first left their own planet until they crashed here. We know quite a bit about what they can do, how they think, and when they’re likely to arrive and begin their attack. Here’s the situation from their perspective.” He then used a combination of displays and discussion to outline the likely alien courses of action.
“When the aliens realized what was going to happen to their planet, they started on an enormous project to build a fleet that could evacuate most of their population. They had several decades to do that, but it still meant that all the effort would be on the large transport ships, so their military arm was generally ignored. But it’s still very impressive, especially when compared with the military fleet Nebula had been able to build so far. According to the records found in the UFO, the alien fleet consisted of several hundred thousand huge transports, four battleships, fifteen heavy cruisers, twelve light cruisers, one hundred sixty five fighters, thirty eight small reconnaissance ships of the type that crashed in Roswell, and several hundred robotic ships of varying sizes and capabilities, most with some amount of armament. The displays showed photos and diagrams of each type of ship, with a list of crew size, weapons, maximum speed, and other details. They also had additional warships in various stages of construction and repair, so their fleet may be a bit more powerful now than it was when the UFOs crashed here. But we don’t think that they would have had time to do much of this repair and construction.”
Brad started into the war planning by reiterating what Giovanis had said earlier about the difference in passage of time for the alien fleet and the defenders on Earth. “This is an important point, and it’s a crucial part of our planning. Since they’ll probably hurry back here at maximum speed, about 99.999% the speed of light, their local time would slow down to nearly zero, and that would hamper their ability to plan or to adapt to changes that take place on Earth. It also prevents them from having time to complete construction and repair on the ships that were not yet operational. This gives us
a big military advantage. We know that they’re coming; we have a pretty good understanding of the size and strength of their fleet; and we also have a lot of time to prepare for their arrival.”
Relativistic time dilation was clearly an important part of the reasoning on how and when the aliens would be able to invade and how Nebula could respond. The aliens would have limited ability to coordinate the invasion with their exploratory team on Earth even if it was still operating, and they’d have very little time to adapt based on information that the team could send unless they slowed down to prevent the relativistic time dilation. And if they did that, they would take many more years to get here. They really had no good choices, and Nebula definitely had an advantage because of the time and distance factors.
This all made sense to Harry, and he started to see the consistency in everything that he’d been told and shown since Walt first approached him. He also was now much more aware of the importance of Nebula’s mission and was starting to feel less angry with them and more aligned with their interests, and even excused their strong-arm methods. If this were all true, as it seemed it was, they would be justified in doing almost anything to assure success. But he still wondered if they made a mistake when they detached themselves from the nations that might have been able to help.
Brad continued, showing pictures of the bases that were being built on Mars and Titan as he spoke. Some of the pictures were extracted from data stored in the alien spaceships. They went from the early reconnaissance when the ships were several light years away from Earth and extended to the pictures taken in 1947. That’s when all the records stopped due to the crash. But there also were more recent pictures that were taken by Nebula when human reconnaissance ships visited the sites on Mars and Titan. The robots building the bases were semi-autonomous, and most of them were still going about their business. But without alien direction, they were mainly finishing up on tasks that had already been given to them or they were maintaining the structures and equipment that had already been constructed. A couple of them had even shut down due to mechanical problems and were waiting for the aliens to return to fix what went wrong, and one of them had run out of power. All the alien machines, including robots and spacecraft, were powered by gravity-induced nuclear fusion. They could operate for a very long time on their initial fuel charges and could scavenge hydrogen and other light elements from space or from local materials to continually refuel. But even these power sources had definite limits. Nothing could go on forever.
“One of the things that we have to do is take control of those robots and prepare a surprise for the invaders when they arrive. That’s why we need you, Harry. We need to be able to link with them from our own ship so that we can finish construction, and we’ll also use the robots to help us when the alien ships do arrive. We’ve solved the technical problems about 80%, but there’s still a lot to be done so that we can control the robots with high precision and very covertly while the aliens are also there. We can’t rely on a manual interface. It would be too slow and imprecise, so we need you to help with the brain-to-machine link. We’re starting with what the aliens already invented, but we need to adapt it to be used by us and we need operators who can quickly learn to use the capability. You’ll be able to read up on all of this, but now let’s look at the battle plans, both theirs and ours. You’ll also have help from Yuri and Ludmila. They’ve already been working on some of the hard problems. But let’s save that for later. First, let’s look at what we think the aliens will do.”
He then projected another set of charts that were reconstructed from data stored in the crashed spacecraft and in the robotic systems on Mars and Titan. The alien planning was laid out very clearly. Brad explained that they had been considering three possible courses of action at the time that the records stopped.
The first was to engage in direct force-on-force battle using their plasma and x-ray weapons. The reports from the team on Earth, prior to the crash, indicated that our capabilities were far less than theirs, so they would probably be able to win that type of war in at most ten or twenty years, even though they didn’t have the massive force that they would like for a major force-on-force battle against and entire planet’s defenders. The planners in the fleet also must have realized that something had gone wrong with their team when the messages stopped, so they had to expect the technology might have been compromised, or even worse, that a powerful enemy awaited them. They would expect that Earth’s defenses might now include ships and weapons as good as theirs, and they could lose the fight and risk their entire fleet. Nebula’s military planners were preparing for this type of battle, but they gave it very low probability.
Their second course of action was to use their nuclear weapons to destroy most human life and infrastructure on Earth. Then they could conduct the cleanup missions with their normal weapons. One downside was that a massive, global nuclear strike would make Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. The aliens could tolerate that since they could simply travel away and back at relativistic speeds so the thousands of years on Earth would be only a few decades to them. But it was reasoned that they also were probably very tired of traveling in space, without a home world of their own, and their impatience would probably argue against the nuclear option. They also knew that if Earth’s defenders possessed advanced technology, it could prove difficult to penetrate the defenses and get the nuclear weapons onto Earth. Even if they used robotic ships as nuclear torpedoes, the Earth’s defenders would be able to intercept them if they had weapons similar to the plasma or x-ray weapons. And they must also have been concerned that their entire fleet could be in danger if the battleships engaged an Earth force in a massive nuclear exchange. Nebula’s military planners thought that this course of action was slightly more probable than a direct force-on-force engagement, and they were preparing for it, but they also didn’t think that this would be what the invaders would choose.
The third course of action was a biological attack, using viruses or some other agent that had been tailored to the human genome. It was very clear that this was high on their list since their team on Earth had been doing extensive collection and analysis of biological data. The records even showed that the base on Mars already had a facility intended for developing and testing various sorts of biological agents.
“It’s pretty clear that a biological attack will most likely be their preferred course of action,” Brad concluded, as he turned off the projection on the screen. “We don’t have any specific information to make us 100% certain, but we have very high confidence in this conclusion based on thorough evaluation of all their options and also based on the focus of the work that the reconnaissance team was doing here on Earth and on Mars and Titan. It’s clear that shortly after the discovery of Earth, the team’s mission changed from its original search for a suitable planet to the next stage, preparation for invasion. This must have been a preplanned set of procedures for autonomous adaptation of the mission based on what a reconnaissance team discovers. The time delays for coordinating over such huge distances would necessitate preplanned procedures like that.
“The exploratory team was definitely refocusing its efforts on supporting an invasion before they met with their accident, and their main focus was on human biology and preparation of biological warfare production on Mars. Their final messages back to their fleet said as much, so we expect the aliens to send a team to their facilities on Mars to see what’s there for the biological attack.”
“Let’s take a bit of a break,” Billingsley suggested. “This is a good point to stretch our legs a bit before we get to our own battle plan.”
“So, Harry, what do you think of our project now?” Brad inquired as they went back to the meeting area core for some refreshments. “I assume that you’re beginning to have a change of heart over your recruitment.”
“I admit that my understanding of the project helps a lot, but I’m still not happy about the way that you coerced me into joining. If you told me mo
re about what was involved, I’d probably have come along willingly.”
“Well, that’s all in the past. We tend to be a bit aggressive at getting our way, but you can see what’s at stake. And we have to be careful about giving information to anyone who isn’t totally committed. In fact, Walter is one of the few people on the outside, other than the senior directors, who know everything about the project. OK, let’s get back to work.”
The next topic was the defense plan. They’d been working on it for more than ten years, changing things as they made advances in exploiting the alien technology. The current plan relied heavily on using the robots on Mars and Titan and the facilities that the robots had built there.
Billingsley excused himself. “I have some other things to attend to, so I’ll leave you in Brad’s hands. He’s the expert in the war planning anyway. I’ll see you later.” And he departed the room and let Brad continue.
“Our defense plan is a pretty simple one,” Brad began. “Those tend to be the things that work best. The simpler the better. If you’re familiar with Sun Tzu’s writings on warfare, you’ll know that a battle is usually won or lost before either side takes the field. Understanding both your own capabilities and the enemy’s and planning to make the best use of available leverage are what determines the outcome. So, we’ve been planning and replanning as we learn more and are able to do more.
