Nebula

by Howard Marsh

  Abraham Billingsley was leading the reception committee. He traveled from Nebula Prime to greet them, and he seemed very pleased with the report that Brad had sent prior to leaving Mars. “Good work, Brad. I’m happy that our earlier wrinkles with the robots have been ironed out. From what you say, we’re now in the wait mode.”

  “Thanks B,” Brad replied, shaking Billingsley’s hand. “We didn’t expect you to come here just to meet us, but we appreciate it. Everything’s in good shape. The three robots are activated, and we just need to wait for Robby to receive the alien request to approach. We’ll receive it here too, and we’ll also get a message from Robby on our own link, so we’ll know when the time comes. We’re ready.”

  “OK,” Billingsley continued. “But I didn’t come here just to greet you. We now need to get down to finalizing the rest of the plan. I want you to get together with Colonel Haverford as soon as you can, so that the two of you can work out the options for using our fleet if things come to that, as I expect they might.”

  Brad and Billingsley then went off to the side to discuss this further, leaving Harry, Ludmila, Judith, and Doug wondering about what this business with the rest of the plan was all about. They hadn’t been briefed on anything involving the Nebula fleet and weren’t even aware of very much about it, other than a reasonably large number of ships did exist and that at least some of them were armed.

  They decided to go to the cafeteria near the arrival/departure area rather than just stand around waiting for Brad and Billingsley to finish their chat. They’d have to get Brad to tell them what it was all about and how come they’d been kept in the dark.

  A few minutes later, Brad found them in the cafeteria, having various sorts of refreshments to suit their tastes. He got himself a cup of coffee and a donut and then settled into a seat at their table.

  Ludmila asked the question that was on all their minds. She tended to be a bit blunt and to the point. “What’s with this plan to use the fleet Brad? Is there something that you and B have been hiding from us?”

  “We’re not hiding anything from you, we just haven’t told you everything yet. We didn’t want you to be distracted from your primary work by worrying about other things. Now that we’ve got Mars all set up, I can explain everything else, but we need to go into one of the secure rooms to talk. First let’s relax a bit. It’s been a tough day.”

  “I’m not sure that we want to relax just now,” Harry chimed in. “I for one have had enough of being kept in the dark, right from the first. If there’s something else that you’ve been withholding, let’s get it out now.”

  The others mumbled their concurrence, so Brad relented, at least a bit. “OK, but I need to inform the rest of the AFO team too. It’s best to tell all of you at the same time. Can you wait an hour or so for them to get here? I can have Milo fly them right over.”

  “I guess that sounds fair,” Harry said. “But we’re serious. We want to know what you and B and Colonel Haverford, whoever he is, have in mind for some other operation while we’re stuck on Mars, surrounded by a bunch of aliens and who knows what else.”

  “All right, just keep calm. I’ll go call Milo and have him bring them here. Meanwhile, why don’t you just relax for a bit? I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  Brad got up and left to call Milo, and the others sat and waited for him to return. They were too keyed up to relax. The day had been stressful, and they were just starting to unwind when the news of some plan to use the fleet hit them. Now they were just anxious to know what it was all about and how it would affect them when they were hanging out to dry on Mars.

  Brad returned in about five minutes and said that the others would be here in about half an hour. He’d already reserved one of the secure conference rooms and had the security office do a thorough sweep of the room. Whatever it was that he was going to talk about seemed to be above the clearance levels of at least some people at Nebula Two, and that was strange. Everyone here and at the other two bases was cleared to Level-4.

  *

  All eight members of Brad’s AFO team sat silently at the conference table as Brad and another man entered the room. Brad introduced him as Colonel Brendan Haverford, commander of Nebula’s fleet.

  Haverford looked like a military man, about the same height and build as Brad, but with facial lines that suggested that he frowned more often than he smiled. He was dressed in a military style uniform, but nothing like any that Harry or the others had seen before. The uniform was gray and reminded Harry of some of the pictures of Confederate officers from the American Civil War. On his shoulder epaulettes, he wore four gold colored stripes, obviously symbolic of his rank. He nodded to the team and then took a seat next to Brad at the head of the table.

  “OK,” Brad began. “What you will hear now is still within Level-4; that’s the highest level of formal security clearance. But we also control information by strict need to know when we get into the details of the operation plan. Normally, access is given only to military personnel and to senior civilians like Billingsley, Seduro, and Giovanis. Until now, you didn’t need to be cleared for anything beyond the AFO operation on Mars. But since you are members of the AFO team, your status as civilians is superseded by the military nature of your involvement, so the senior leadership – mainly Billingsley and Seduro – have authorized us to brief you on the entire operations plan. Everything that you hear now is very sensitive. Don’t discuss it with anyone who you don’t know for certain is also briefed into the plan. If you are unsure, don’t say anything until you check with me. Understood?”

  The eight of them nodded their agreement, and Brad motioned for Haverford to take the floor.

  He began with a large screen projection that showed drawings of spacecraft of various sizes, most of them organized to the right hand side and colored red and the rest on the left and colored green. The red ones were not only more numerous; they also included ships that were much larger than anything on the green side and they had four giant ships that appeared to be almost spherical rather than the oblate spheroid shape common to all the others on both sides. Haverford explained that these four were probably battleships and that Nebula knew little about their armaments but assumed that they were far deadlier than even the heavy cruisers.

  “This is what we call the order of battle for our engagement with the enemy. It’s how Nebula’s battle fleet stacks up against what we believe they will have when they arrive. But they also had some other ships at various stages of construction and repair, so their fleet could be a bit larger if they completed any of the work after the last update of the records that we were able to get from the ships that crashed here and the robots on Mars and Titan. It’s obvious which is which; theirs is red and ours green.” He paused to let them look at the fleets and take it all in.

  “You’ll have time to study each of the ships in more detail. We have a good bit of information on them from the alien data bases. You can see that we would be outnumbered and outgunned if we had to face them in direct combat. That’s why your part of the plan is important and also why we need to keep our own capabilities hidden and to use them only for diversions or surprise attacks. OK so far?”

  No one had any questions, so Haverford continued. “You’re familiar with your part of the plan that gets them to use the biological weapons and contaminate their fleet. If this works, most of the aliens will be dead or seriously ill, and their military force will be mostly out of commission or totally disabled by the diseases that you developed. We’d then use our fleet to clean up what’s left of the warships. We can deal with the transports once that’s done since they’d be pretty defenseless. The Nebula high command still hasn’t decided if we should just destroy all of them or let the survivors depart and try to find another place to settle. But that’s not our problem. If this part of the plan works, we’ll have won regardless of what we do in the end game.

  “The part of the plan that you don’t already know about deals with contingencies where
we need to take some direct action against the aliens. It’s possible that they won’t choose to take the biological weapon containers back to the fleet or that they’ll somehow prevent our pathogens from spreading through their population. Their warships may also be isolated from the general population, and their crews may not be affected. And we can’t forget about the robot ships. They certainly won’t be affected, and there are hundreds of them. We expect that they would be ineffective in battle without alien control to give them specific orders, but we can’t be certain about that. So here’s what we’ve determined is our best course of action to deal with these uncertainties.”

  He then projected another large screen display that showed a logical tree structure with specific decision points and branches. At the top was a box labeled “biological warfare operation.” Several lines branched out from under it. One was labeled “success” and it extended to another box labeled “cleanup operation.” That was the end of that branch. It was obviously the operation on Mars and the assumed success and transition to the cleanup operations that Haverford had mentioned.

  Three other lines covered the possibilities that the primary course of action was not successful. One of these was labeled “failure to infect the alien battle forces,” and another was labeled “rejection of the biological option.” The third was labeled “immediate direct attack.” Those apparently were the possibilities that were being considered. Other boxes were at the ends of these three lines, and more lines extended from them to more boxes, and on and on. But none of the others were labeled, so it was clear that Haverford wanted to focus just on those three for now.

  Harry and the others could see what each of them meant without further explanation. Haverford had already mentioned the first two, and the third was also pretty obvious. The aliens might just decide to launch a direct attack on Earth, maybe without even stopping on Mars.

  Brad interjected at this point. “We know that it’s possible for them to come charging into the solar system with guns blazing, and that would put us in a very bad position, but we don’t think that’s likely. An immediate direct attack would still probably be preceded by a message to any sentries that may still be active and then by a visit to Mars when our sentry sends a reply. They probably know by now, or at least suspect, that their explorers may have left for some reason or may have met with some disaster, but they also know that the sentries and worker robots could survive on their own for a long time and may even have continued to follow instructions to prepare for the invasion. They’ll almost certainly try to make contact and at least see what’s been prepared, so our operation on Mars could be important even if they don’t take our pathogens back to the fleet. We may also be able to do something to reorient them toward the biological course of action if they arrive with plans to do something else. Our ability to control Robby and the two workers could be used to get them to change their minds. But we can’t know what will actually happen, so we need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to steer things to our advantage. That’s why we’ll be on Mars and why we’ll need to be prepared to handle anything that comes up.”

  Haverford continued. “Our fleet is preparing to respond to a number of situations. We have a big advantage that they don’t know our strength, and they also don’t know that we are very aware of them and have been preparing for them. If it does look like they’re choosing something other than a biological attack, we might convince them that we’re stronger than we actually are.

  “One option that’s detailed in one of the unlabeled boxes is to send a small battle force out on what seem to be maneuvers, presumably unaware that the aliens are nearby. When they see our ships and recognize that they’re pretty equivalent to their own, it could give them second thoughts about a direct attack, so they might change plans and revert to the biological course of action. After all, the biological course of action is pretty well spelled out in the records stored in the robots on Mars, and all the preparations are already in place.

  “The AFO team could keep us informed of any changes in plans since you will have direct connections into the alien message traffic that reaches the robots. If they keep to their usual procedures, everything will get to the robots and go into storage, so we should be able to read all the mail. You might also be able to do things to nudge them in the right direction. Any questions?”

  Harry was the first to reply. “So far you haven’t told us much beyond what we already knew. So what were the big secrets?”

  Haverford bristled a bit, not being used to criticism this direct, but he replied very calmly. “Right, so far nothing big, but there’s more. In order for any actions by our fleet to look to the aliens like it’s on behalf of a world government, we have to make sure that the nations don’t react in some way that gives it away. Imagine what would happen if we all of a sudden launch ten or twenty UFOs from our ocean bases. It would set off a major panic and they might even try to shoot us down. You need to understand that if we’re launching a diversionary operation like the maneuvers that I mentioned, we’d need to do that without obviously trying to avoid detection. That wouldn’t seem normal to any aliens who were observing activities on Earth. So we need to make sure that the nations don’t take any drastic measures.”

  “Well, that seems like a tall order,” Nigel commented. “I can’t imagine any of the world powers just sitting by when a bunch of UFOs leap from the ocean and go zooming off into space. They might not fire on you but they’d sure stir up a lot of commotion in their own militaries.”

  “You’re correct,” Haverford replied. “We’re not that naïve. We’ve planted our own agents within government circles, some directly in the government bureaucracies and at very high positions and others in some of the trusted organizations that advise the chiefs of state and senior legislators. This is the very sensitive part of the plan. If we need to send our warships out before the enemy is totally debilitated by disease, we’ll need to explain everything to the national leaders before doing anything, and we’ll need to be prepared to take control of government operations, especially the military commands, if the national leaders don’t cooperate. It’s important that we are able to keep things on Earth looking normal when our ships take off for whatever diversionary operation is needed. Nebula has everything in place to do whatever is necessary, including a plan to seize control of global communications and other key functions in the governments. All of this is detailed in those unlabeled boxes.”

  He stopped at this point and waited for any questions or comments, but none were offered. So he turned the floor back to Brad for any words that he might want to add.

  Brad pointed to the large screen display. “You’ll want to familiarize yourselves with the rest of the details in the overall plan,” he said. “We just covered the top level, those first three boxes at level two in the tree. As Colonel Haverford said, there’s much more detail spelled out in the boxes, but you’ll have to go to the full plan itself to work through them. In most cases, there’s something that our team on Mars will have to do, either to provide intelligence or to take some sort of action. So spend the next few days learning more about all the contingencies and options. Then we can talk some more about our role.”

  “One more question,” Harry said as Brad finished. “Are we now going to be part of the military organization? Will we have ranks and all of that stuff? Are we going to have to fight the aliens directly on Mars?”

  Brad grinned as he replied. “Harry, that was three questions, not one. But here are your answers. You will not be drafted into our army. You’ll remain civilians under my command, as you’ve been from the start. Yuri will become my second in command, but he’ll also continue to be a civilian. You can wear whatever you want. If you like the kind of uniform that Brendan is wearing, we can get some for you, but it’s your choice. I expect that you’ll just want to wear what you usually do. As for combat on Mars, I have to admit that it’s a possibility, a distant one, but a possibility nevertheless. We’re primarily a fo
rward intelligence team, but you already saw that we have a well-stocked arms locker at the forward ops base, and I’ve already encouraged you to become proficient with them. When we first discussed this, I tried to imply that it was mainly for recreation and just to get you used to using the weapons. Now you can see that it’s more important that you do become proficient, at least to some degree. If the main plan does branch off to one of those other three lines, we may find that we need to do more than just monitor and try to steer things through our control of Robby and the other two.”

  Gladys had the next question. “It’s always been pretty clear to us that Nebula has a military arm beyond just the AFO, but we never had the whole picture. This fleet that you’re describing is pretty big, even if it isn’t as big as the alien fleet, and is it the total force or is there something more? What does Nebula’s military organization look like? Is there an org chart? Who are the generals and admirals?”

  Brad replied again. “It’s not as big and bureaucratic as the national military establishments. We have a single mission and are purpose-built for it and only for it. There’s the fleet and the AFO. That’s it for our armed force itself. Brendan commands the fleet, and I command AFO. We report directly to Billingsley, and he reports to Seduro and the Nebula Board of Directors. There are no generals or admirals. Brendan has officers under him, and his fleet is organized into task groups of various sizes and types, but I’m the only military officer in our chain of command. We’re lean and mean, not to say that Brendan’s fleet is fat and happy. They’re pretty lean too, and they may have to go up against a very big opponent. If it comes to that, it will be David against Goliath again, and we hope with the same outcome.”