“Follow it?” Nikitin asked quietly.
“Unless you’ve got a good idea,” Jack replied.
They crept out, making sure the coast was clear, then started off towards the source of the noise. They moved from one broken building to the next, using rubble piles for cover. It didn’t take them long to make it to the far end of the village, where another discovery awaited.
They crawled on their bellies to the top of one particularly large mound of debris and peeked over the edge, only to find one of the alien cuttlefish sitting motionless on the other side. Nikitin took a quick scan with his binoculars, then handed them to Jack who took his time studying the scene.
There was something going on in the space between the ship and the village, but Jack wasn’t sure what it was. The aliens had collected a pile of human bodies, which were watched over by a handful of the jackrabbit creatures, and another type of alien that couldn’t have been more different.
The new type reminded Jack of nothing so much as a bipedal rhinoceros, although the similarity only went so far. They were massive and walked fully upright on thick, tree-trunk legs, while their equally thick and muscular arms hung far out to the sides. Jack could just barely make out another, smaller set of arms closer to the middle of their torso, which they kept hidden away. What skin he could see was rough and grey, but most of it was hidden beneath an armor that glittered like the inside of a geode. Those armor plates extended to their long heads, where it ended in a sharp horn at the tip of their snout.
The rhino creatures had something even weirder on their backs. At first, Jack thought they might be backpacks or machines until he saw one move. It was twitching. He continued to stare in wonder, making sense of the shape little by little. It looked like a giant water strider, with its long legs clinging to the rhino’s back. He briefly wondered if the bug might be controlling the rhino, but there was no way to know.
“Whaddyu think?” Nikitin asked in a hushed voice.
“I dunno. Collecting them for food, maybe?” Jack was a little surprised at how detached he sounded. At how detached he felt. He couldn’t figure out where all his moral outrage and disgust had run off to. He felt as if the pile of bodies should affect him more.
“Maybe. I wouldn’t treat food that way. No one’s loading them onto the ship, either.”
That was true. The creatures didn’t show any real interest in the pile of corpses. It might as well have been a pile of scrap wood on a construction site. This wasn’t for show; it was just business.
Then Jack heard plaintive cries that were all too human, which grew louder until two rhinos emerged from the thick dust dragging a young woman by the arm. She was screaming at the top of her lungs and thrashing against their grip, but it was no use.
After another moment, a third kind of creature appeared behind them, floating in mid-air, swaying back and forth gently like seaweed in high-tide. This thing looked to be made of the same material as the ship, covered from head to toe in sharp bony outcroppings. Everything about it hinted at sea-life, even the glowing blue-green eye set off-centered on its head. It was like some kind of floating prawn/human hybrid with a mermaid’s tail, and six thin, waving arms.
The two rhinos dragged their captive to the pile of bodies, and Jack pieced together what was going on. Without thinking, he pulled the flare gun out with one hand, and lifted a flare from his pocket with the other. He cracked the breach and loaded it. His hands began to shake and he was sweating all over.
Leonid Nikitin’s hand pushed the gun back down. “We can’t save her, Jack.”
The woman screamed louder when she caught sight of the bodies. The sound pierced Jack’s ears. There had to be a way to stop this. Frantically, he looked all around, trying to find some weapon, some answer, but there was nothing. They were surrounded on all sides by the hollow corpse of a village, and the sounds of a doomed woman.
For the first time he could remember, he was ready to kill. His heart was thumping like the pistons of a locomotive, and he was ready to kill them all with his bare hands if he had to.
Before Jack could climb to his feet, Nikitin pinned him back down. It was effortless. He moved his head close to Jack, and so very near a whisper, he said, “There are only two ways this plays out. Either she dies alone, or we all die together. There is no third option, hero. I know you wanna save her. It’s what you do, but that just ain’t happening this time. There are other folks out there we can still help, though… people who need you, Jack, and I’m gonna make damn sure you survive long enough to save ‘em. You understand me?”
Jack struggled under Nikitin’s arm—so slobbering mad he couldn’t form words—but he couldn’t move a centimeter. He might as well have been pinned under a school bus. There was no escape, and so he watched with unblinking eyes. A rhino lifted the thrashing girl up and dangled her above the ground, and the floating prawn-man made a motion with one of its many arms. It was a command. In response, the rhino palmed her head in its mammoth hand and snapped her neck.
The screaming stopped.
Jack’s hot breath filled the oxygen mask and he grunted in anger. Down below, the rhino tossed her limp corpse onto the pile and walked away to join its companions. Business as usual. A passage opened on the outside of the ship, and all but one of the alien creatures walked in. A lone jackrabbit waited longer than the others, all the time staring at the pile of bodies, then it shook its head, sprinted up the ramp and was gone.
The fin surrounding the cuttlefish started to wave, and the clothes washer sound started. That noise filled the air as the ship lifted into the sky and disappeared.
Nikitin released his grip on Jack the moment the ship was away, and they both lay there in stunned silence. It took ten long minutes for the lone thought in Jack’s head to stop repeating, commanding him to kill them all. When he finally returned to his senses, he said one word. “Bastards.”
“Been a real bad afternoon, Jack.”
“No shit.”
Dusk was swiftly turning to night. “But tomorrow’s another day.”
Another day like this, Jack thought. He was close to calm again, but his chest was still shaking. “That’s what they say. Let’s get the others and bring ‘em back here. There’s still plenty of shelter. We grab some shut-eye, and hunt for supplies in the morning. Something tells me there aren’t any survivors, and the bastards won’t be back any time soon.”
They waited another minute there atop the rubble pile, collected their thoughts, then climbed back down and headed off toward the stream.
Chapter 13:
Eye in the Sky
The Copernicus Observatory hurtled around the Earth, completing each lap in just over an hour and a half. Phileas Fogg would have been positively green with envy. Under normal circumstances, the station’s suite of multi-wavelength active and passive scanners would be staring out away from the bright blue globe, penetrating into the depths of the darkness beyond, but this wasn’t a normal day.
Copernicus continued on at its dizzying pace, but the lights were out and the three technicians charged with babysitting it had forgotten all about the stars. Instead, they hung around in silence, together watching the fate of their planet while trying not to think too hard about their predicament.
The invasion had been carried out with frightening efficiency. Strange discs arrived from out of nowhere, jammed all frequencies, and then bashed everything in orbit apart. The only possible explanation for Copernicus’ survival was that the station was powered down during the attack. Whether the invaders thought it broken or had simply failed to notice it was up for debate. Either way, none of the three men aboard was in any hurry to flip the generators back on.
The next phase of the attack happened while Copernicus was on the other side of the world. The station came back around, streaking over Europe and then the Mideast, and as it approached Pakistan, the crew caught sight of twin mushroom clouds reaching high into the sky. Two objects had struck with unimaginable force, one in India
and the other in China, leaving vast craters and dust clouds that swelled up and swallowed the entire continent.
After that, nothing could surprise the crew of Copernicus. The invaders torched the orbital launch centers which ringed the equator, removing any ability to mount an offensive in space, and then they bombarded population centers all around the globe. Their communication cut off, cities everywhere were hit completely unaware, with coastal regions receiving the brunt of the punishment. They erupted into short lived balls of blue flame that left nothing but charred ruins and the immolated bodies of the dead.
Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground. Then, with the ashes of empires still smouldering, the seven vessels made planetfall in Africa and South America.
The action was over by the eighth hour, and with the atmosphere recyclers turned off, the air inside of Copernicus Observatory was getting stale. All three crewmen were suited up but refused to don their helmets. Without radio communications, being sealed up would be too much like being alone, even though none of them had spoken in hours.
Sometime after it was over, Marco Esquivel broke the silence. “So,” he said, “are we slowly committing suicide or what?”
“What the hell?” Hopkins asked in dismay.
“I don’t know,” Jansen said, ignoring Hopkins as usual. “We can’t call for help. Doubt there’s anyone left to call if we could.”
“What about Midway or Tranquility? Ares? There’s gotta be someone somewhere. I mean, we survived. Someone else must have.” Hopkins was a frantic mess, just like any other day.
Marco put his hands behind his head like he was lying in a hammock on a Fijian beach. “I guess. The invaders came right to Earth, so those guys might still be alive. Radio is screwed, though.”
Janses nodded. “Won’t know for sure till we kick the power back on.”
“Wait wait wait,” Hopkins said, waving his hands about. “We can’t turn the power on. That’s the only reason they didn’t frag us in the first place.”
Jansen took a whiff of the air. He didn’t need any instruments to know that oxygen was running low. “No power, no oxygen generation. So there’s our choice: do we suffocate all slow like, or do we perish in a glorious ball of flame?”
Marco chuckled. “Pretty clear which way you’re leaning. Why not? Put me down for the blaze of glory, too.”
Hopkins crossed his arms in frustration. “Sons of bitches. Fine. Do whatever you want. I’ll see you in hell.”
Jansen drifted toward the control panel. “That’s the spirit, Hop. You got what the French call a joie de vivre, you know that?” His hands danced through the generator activation procedure, and the console beeped in approval. After another second, he could hear the station’s generators starting to cycle.
Hopkins had turned ghost white. Even whiter and sweatier than normal, in fact. “What do we do if they come for us?”
Jansen said, “Say cheese.”
“Die,” Marco offered. “I suppose if it makes you feel better, you could go outside and chuck a stapler at ‘em. Who knows… maybe they have a secret vulnerability to staples. You could be a hero.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m gonna give ‘em the finger,” Jansen said after some thought. “But not just any finger. I mean, this would be a historic flip-off. The finger of the ages. See, I wouldn’t just be giving them the finger on account of myself, but as a representative of humanity.”
Hopkins pouted. “I fucking hate you guys.”
“With good reason,” Jansen agreed as he looked out the window at the smoking ash heap that was his planet. “Bad news, though. We’re all you’ve got left.”
Hopkins groaned for a very long time, so long that Jansen began to wonder if the man might be part whale. Hopkins certainly looked the part, with his big bald pasty white head. Maybe one of those melon headed whales, or a pilot whale. When Hopkin’s unnatural groan finally finished, Jansen looked back to the console and saw that the generator was running at full output. “In other news,” he said, “fiat lux.”
He hit ENGAGE and the lights came on, followed shortly afterward by a draft of sweet fresh air.
“Thank God,” Marco said. “It was starting to smell like a jock strap in here.”
Jansen smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Skipped my shower this morning. Hey Hop, why don’t you give the comms a try?”
The whale man swam over to the comm console. “Sure thing, Nils. So you can blame me when the aliens blow us away, right?”
“You’re catching on. Getting anything?”
“Gimme a second.” The whale-man slapped the console several times with his sweaty flipper. “Nope. Whole network’s static.”
Marco, still in his imaginary floating space hammock, laughed. “Alrighty. There might be someone to call, but we still can’t call them. That brings us back to slow suicide.”
“Real slow if you like. We’ve got supplies to last for a couple months. Maybe more if we’re stingy.”
“Christ. Do you have to be such nihilists?”
Jansen gave Hopkins a dry look. “Hey man, I don’t hear you coming up with any brilliant escape plan.” He didn’t want to die. Not at all. It just seemed like the only option. He realized that the lack of options might stem from his atrophied imagination, though. “Here’s an idea. Instead of whinging, why don’t you use the contents of that massive cranium and come up with some way out of this?”
Marco had floated all the way across the command center, where he reached out and knocked on one of the numerous control stations. The dull metal clank echoed through the chamber. “Copernicus is, like, the pride of the Foundation, right? We’re inside a shiny new multi-billion credit deep space scanning doo-hickey, and you’re telling me there’s no way to send an e-mail?”
“Waaaaait,” Hopkins said, dragging the word out while his brain spooled up. “I bet the active scanners can cut through the interference. We fire up the actives… the microwave laser or the infra-red, and use it to send Morse code or something.”
Jansen sighed. “It’s a maser, dumb ass. And not to rain on your parade, but I don’t know Morse code. Do you know Morse code, Marco?”
“Do I look like a boy scout to you?” Marco chuckled derisively and went on. “Screw that noise. Use the comm networking protocols to generate a packet stream, and pipe it through the maser. Instant output device.”
“You can do that?” Jansen asked. “I thought you were just a wrench monkey.”
“I took network programming in college, so… maybe? Probably not. Won’t know till I try, though. You think Hopkins can do the bullshit he said?”
Jansen looked over at the sweaty, quivering mass of flesh that was Larry Hopkins, and they all shrugged in unison. “Sure. Why not? We’re literate, college educated men. We have tech manuals. We’ve got more time than we can shake a stick at, and we don’t have any TV to distract us. I’m filled to knees with hope.”
Marco climbed into a chair. “Sarcastic bastard. So, what message do we send?”
“Survivors on Copernicus. Send help.” Hopkins said.
Marco looked skeptical. “Yeah. That’ll bring ‘em running. How about ‘Busty bikini models on Copernicus. Starved for love. Come quick and bring beer’?”
Jansen looked down at the generator panel, and the long list of systems waiting to be activated. None of them had a purpose anymore. He idly wondered how things might have turned out if Copernicus were a great big railgun instead. Then he read the word ‘telescope’ and an idea caught fire. “Nobody out there has any clue what went down. Not Midway. Not the Moon. Not Mars. Why don’t we point our big fat telescope at Earth, and show them what’s happening?”
“Not bad,” Marco said.
Hopkins nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I like it.”
Each of them floated silently in their own corner of the command center. They had a plan and a vague idea of how to accomplish it. The deadline was months away, and since they were al
l professional technicians, they wouldn’t bother to start for at least another week. Not as if anyone was left to fire them for laziness.
As he stared at the wounded Earth and started to zone-out again, one thing really burned Nils Jansen’s biscuits: Donovan and his nerds were tens of millions of kilometers away, completely ignorant of this whole catastrophe, and having the time of their lives. He’d had his suspicions before but now it was official… he made the wrong damn decision.
He hated when that happened.
Chapter 14:
Valentine
The members of the Shackleton Expedition were having the time of their lives. It didn’t take them long to master Zebra-One’s unique method of transportation, and soon they were flitting about and mapping the ship’s internals faster than they ever could have dreamed. There was a specific approach that proved most effective: an explorer pictured the entire vessel in their mind then focused down to their intended destination, and the ship took care of the rest. Once a person had been to a location, though, all they needed do was picture it again and off they went. The system was learning.
A third of the group were especially talented, able to pick up the process in under a minute, and were then able to get around effortlessly. Most of the rest could navigate the ship after a half-hour of practice, and a few needed a couple hours, but precisely two simply couldn’t get any response at all. One of them was the cantankerous Professor Caldwell, and the other a young miner named Terrel. Both tried well into the second day under mounting frustration, but the ship wouldn’t take them anywhere. Zebra-One otherwise reacted to them normally, providing light and displaying the electrical pattern when they touched the walls, but they were both eventually forced, rather embarrassingly, to travel with someone else who could operate the transit system.
Doctor St. Martin latched onto both men and became their permanent tour guide in return for a chance to study them in detail. She very badly wanted to understand how the transit system and its psychic interface worked, and she believed that the two men’s inability to use it might hold part of the answer.
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