by Greg Keyes
“Like us?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You and me, Charlie. Any of us—but nothing good will come from running away. Understand?”
“I think so,” Charlie said.
“Come on,” Jake said, “let’s go back. We have school tomorrow.”
He took Charlie back to the shelter, and then went to the front desk. Ms. Lu was still there, looking tired.
“What is it, Jake?” she said.
“That new kid,” he said. “Charlie.”
“What about him?” she said.
“He can stay in my room.”
She raised her eyebrows and put down the magazine she was reading.
“Jake, you’ve already got four in your room,” she said. “That’s capacity.”
“He’s little,” Jake said. “He can sleep on the floor. Or I can.”
She looked hard at him for a moment. Then her lips twitched in a small reluctant smile.
“If you get your roommates to sign on, we’ll give it a try,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “They’ll sign on.”
9
JUNE
As the light of early dawn stole across the desert, David rolled his bike out through the front door of his house, a house that two years before hadn’t been there. It was by most standards a small house, although compared to the one he had grown up in, and especially his apartment in Manhattan, it seemed almost obnoxiously large.
Still, he approved of it. Although government built, it was constructed of something that at least resembled adobe and seemed at home in the Southwest. The nearly flat roof was covered in solar panels, so when he made his toast and eggs he had the pleasure of knowing he wasn’t burning fossils.
Of course, there were fifty houses around it that were nearly identical, all situated on streets and avenues named for American states—his was on Pennsylvania Avenue. He’d had his pick, and had chosen it because it was at the edge of the development, with a backyard that blended seamlessly into the desert.
The houses weren’t the only thing new about the region around what had once been called Area 51. When it went from being a covert facility to the now famous Center for Alien Technology, the research facilities had been vastly expanded, which meant many thousands more employees, many of whom worked mining the nearby alien wreck for raw materials and technology. The government had built housing and some facilities for the newcomers, but something else had happened.
Outside of the military boundaries of the base, a town had grown up. Displaced entrepreneurs from everywhere came to set up shop, building restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, bars, bowling alleys, daycare, schools and all of the other support structures of a small town. Almost daily some new shop opened, and just this year they’d held their first election for mayor and aldermen. Their first order of business had been to choose a name for the place, which no one seemed to agree upon.
All of this, of course, was several miles from where the actual work went on, and that included the base housing. In case something went kablooey. Which unfortunately wasn’t that unlikely.
Still, it gave him a nice, long bike commute each morning to get his thoughts together.
* * *
Two hours later, David watched as the techs clustered around the device, doing last-minute checks on the hydraulics, the electrical connections, the coolant levels, and forty-nine other persnickety items of business.
“We, uh, ready this time?” he asked Singh.
Singh was twenty-something, the brightest in her class at his old Alma Mater, M.I.T. Her nose was a little crooked due to—as she put it—“an unfortunate cricket mishap.”
“They say the sixth time is the charm,” Singh replied.
“Who says that?” David asked. “I’ve never heard anyone say that.”
The last of the technicians left the chamber, and David was left with an unobstructed view. There was no disguising what it was—despite its sleek, high-tech lines, the device screamed “cannon” just as loudly as anything that ever armed a man o’ war. It was in a transparent polycrete chamber a hundred feet below the observation and control deck, aimed down a tunnel five miles long and a hundred yards in diameter which—when it wasn’t being used as a firing range—could double as a gigantic wind tunnel.
David heard the lab’s outer door cycle.
“Who is that?” he asked Singh, without looking back.
“It’s Director Strain, sir,” she said.
“It must be my birthday,” David murmured, sotto voce.
“And Vice-President Bell,” she added.
“And Hanukkah and Christmas,” he said. Then he turned and put on a smile.
Director Strain’s middle years were visible in his receding hairline and a comfortable paunch. That along with his round, jowly face and Midwestern politeness made him seem pleasant and avuncular. David had been working under him for two years now, and knew Strain was neither.
“Director,” he said, shaking hands. “Mr. Vice-President. What an honor. Congratulations on the election.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Your endorsement was much appreciated.”
But entirely unnecessary, David thought. Whitmore had convinced General Grey to run for president, with Bell grudgingly continuing on as vice-president. Seen as Whitmore’s natural heir, Grey had bested former Secretary of Defense Nimziki in a landslide. What David didn’t tell Bell was that he’d nearly skipped standing on the stage along with Grey during the campaign. Not because of the general, but due to his worries about Bell. No one questioned the need to spend a huge chunk of the budget on military research and development, David least of all. Nevertheless, Whitmore had insisted on—and usually got—programs to help those Americans being left behind, and on investing in the infrastructure of the future.
They needed scientists and engineers more than ever, and yet fewer kids were getting the education they needed to fill those jobs. More and more, applicants for those positions were coming from overseas.
There was nothing wrong with that in and of itself. The world was united and at peace in a way that no one in the last century—or any period in human history—could have dreamed of. But he worried about a two-tiered system developing. Bell was in favor of cutting money to education, not increasing it.
Bell approached the glass and peered down.
“So that’s it?” he said.
“Well,” David said. “It’s a prototype, of course.”
“I thought it would be bigger, given what it has cost.”
“Well, eventually it will be bigger,” David said. “Much bigger, but at this point it’s wiser to keep them small.”
Bell looked a little puzzled.
“How big is it?” he asked.
“It’s, ah, a bit less than a meter long. About a yard.”
“So is it actually useful as a weapon?” Bell asked.
“Sure,” David said. “I wouldn’t want to be standing in front of it.”
“But could it take down one of their vessels?”
“Well, no. No, of course not,” David said.
“I see,” Bell said in a disapproving tone. “Well. Let’s see it in action, then.”
“Actually,” David said, “this isn’t a good time.”
“What does that mean?” the director asked. “You said it was ready to test.”
“Yes. To test. Run some current through it, see what the oscillation rate is so we can calibrate it a little more finely…”
“Can it or can it not be fired?” Bell said.
David took a deep breath.
“Theoretically we can certainly try to fire it,” he said.
“Then do so,” the director said.
There was a long moment of silence.
“Okay,” David said reluctantly. “Dr. Singh, let’s warm her up.”
Singh went to the panel and started the checklist. The cannon reoriented slightly and began to glow an actinic blue. Then a green haze appeared around the weapon.<
br />
“What’s that?” Bell asked.
“Energy shield,” David said. “Just a precaution.”
“What’s the target?” Bell asked.
“A chunk of the hull from the wreck up there,” David said. “Also behind an energy shield, about a hundred meters that-a-way.”
“Ready,” Singh said.
“Hang on,” David said. He grabbed flash visors and handed one to each person in the room. “Better put these on,” he said.
When everyone was outfitted, Singh started the final sequence.
David’s visor darkened as a beam suddenly appeared, painting the cavernous tunnel in a blue-green radiance. He realized that he was holding his breath, and let it go. Maybe Singh was right, and the sixth-time business was really a thing.
The beam pulsed more brightly, faded a little, then swelled brighter still.
“Okay,” David said. “Great test. Let’s shut ’er down.”
Before Singh could touch the controls, there was a sudden burst of light, and his flash visor went opaque.
“What the hell!” Bell yelped.
David cautiously cracked his visor, then pulled it off.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Bell pulled his visor off too.
“You call that okay?” he said.
The cannon was gone, and the polycrete cube that had housed it was shattered.
“That went pretty well, I think,” David opined.
“It blew up,” Bell said.
“Yes, that’s one way of assessing the situation,” David admitted.
“Is there another?”
David went to the console. “Let’s replay the video feed from the target end,” he said.
They moved to a screen and watched as the beam struck a chunk of destroyer encased in a green field. The field held for about three seconds, and then the target disintegrated.
“So it works,” Bell said. “For one shot.”
“That’s why we don’t make them bigger,” David said. “Or just power up the big ones we found in the ship. The explosion you just witnessed packs just about as much punch as the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If it wasn’t for the containment field, we’d all be airborne particles right now.”
Bell looked at the director.
“Is this true?” he asked.
“Yes,” Strain said.
“See, making the cannon is easy,” David said. “The same goes for most of their technology. We have a bunch of it sitting on top of us, and plenty more around the globe. We can harvest it—we can even grow it—but we haven’t yet learned to duplicate it.”
“What do you mean, ‘grow it’?”
“Well—their technology isn’t built out of bits and widgets. It grows, organically, like a plant, and the grown technology that powers everything—we still don’t have a real handle on that. Their power source doesn’t seem to generate or store energy so much as conduct it using some sort of subatomic oscillation. It’s almost like they opened tiny wormholes through which to conduct the power. And that might in turn be linked to their telepathic communication. Most of their technology won’t work unless they have two power-data streams, a result of their hive-think, most likely. Add to that the fact that everything about their tech is quasi-biological, which we also can’t really replicate.”
“English, if you don’t mind,” Bell said.
“Ah—fine. So the human nervous system has an electrical component, yes? Like a computer. Yet after decades of building better and faster computers, we’re still not sure we can ever build a computer that acts like a brain. Or build prosthetic limbs that can be tied directly into the human nervous system and take commands from the brain…”
Bell stared at him impatiently.
“We’re standard, they’re metric,” David said. “Times about a zillion. What we’re building is necessarily a hybrid of us and them. As you can see, there are some problems we haven’t completely solved.”
“Can you solve them?” Bell asked.
“Sure, given time,” David said.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Bell said. “How much time do we have?”
“At this point it’s impossible to say,” David replied.
“Why?” Bell demanded. “We have their technology, we have thousands of them in captivity—yet we still have no clue as to where they’re from or how long it took them to get here.”
“No,” David said. “And the really important question isn’t where they’re from. The real question is how they got here.”
“I don’t follow,” Bell said.
“The universe has a speed limit,” David said. “It’s 186,282 miles per second. The speed of light. So even if you can travel that fast, it would take a little over four years to get from here to the nearest star. Odds are they weren’t going anything like that fast, based on what we’ve seen of their drive capabilities. The mother ship was a quarter the size of our moon, a world unto itself. They might have traveled centuries, even millennia to get here, with whole generations being born, living, dying in the ship. If the distress call was limited to the speed of light, it could take centuries or more to reach them, thousands of years for them to answer it.”
“I sense an ‘or,’” Bell said.
“Or—there’s always an ‘or’—they have some way of breaking the speed limit, or at least going around it. In which case they could show up tomorrow.”
Bell took that in for a moment.
“Assume they’re going to be here tomorrow,” he said. “Speaking of which—I’d like to see them.”
“Them?” David said.
“The prisoners.”
“Ah,” David said. “That them.”
* * *
“Each one has its own cell?” Bell asked.
“We initially thought it would help prevent them from taking collective action,” Director Strain said. “We had some worries that keeping them in groups might allow them to somehow unite and amplify their telepathic powers. As it turns out, we might not have bothered. After they lost the ground war they became—quiescent. They haven’t tried to escape or struggle in any way.”
“Why keep them in their exoskeletons? As I understand it, without them they’re not much of a threat—physically anyway.”
“I would love to strip them down,” Strain said, “but they can’t survive long without their suits.”
“You can’t recreate the conditions on their ships?”
“As far as we can tell, after a certain stage of maturity, they’re almost always in their exoskeletons,” the director explained. “All we know for sure is that if we take them off, they eventually die.”
“Why?” Bell asked.
David glanced at the monitors, which showed cell after cell of essentially motionless aliens.
“We don’t know that either,” David said. “I have a few ideas—”
“I don’t want ideas,” Bell said. “I want facts. Accomplishments. I want weapons that will blow anything that comes our way out of the sky.”
“Yeah,” David said. “It’s just that, you know, facts and accomplishments usually start out as ideas. Kind of the way it works.”
Bell’s only reply was a nasty look.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said. Then he turned and walked away.
10
APRIL
2004
Jake was underneath a ’92 Honda Civic when the boss called his name. He slid out, wiping his oily hands on his coveralls. The radio was blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and it was a little hard to hear.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
His boss was named Sam Franklin, but everyone called him “Frank.” He was a big man, with a complexion almost as dark as the oil that streaked it. He was old enough to be Jake’s grandfather, but the years hadn’t slowed him down much, if at all. Jake doubted he could beat the old man in any form of physical contest.
“That’s enough for today, Jake,” Frank said. “You’ve hit the wall on you
r hours this week.”
“I don’t mind,” Jake said. “I could use the money.”
“We all could,” Frank replied. “I’d like to give you more, but you’re still in school, and there are laws about how much time you can spend on the clock—and before you say anything, let me tell you, you damn sure ain’t quitting school.”
“No, sir,” he said. “I’m not planning on it.” But he reflected that he might not have a choice—he’d failed the STEP academy entrance exam. He had one more shot at it, and then that dream was over. Then he might need the skills he’d picked up working in the garage, although he’d started the job for other reasons.
The orphanage was running in the red, and funds from the government were short. What funds there were had to be directed at the younger kids, so if you were seventeen and wanted new clothes more than once a year, you found a job. In his case, he was buying for two, because Charlie wasn’t old enough for real work yet. It also cost money to get the study materials he needed for the entrance exams.
Then there was the car.
“Is it okay if I tinker with the Mustang?” he asked.
“Sure,” Frank said. “That’s on your own time. Just so we’re clear, though—you’ve got a way to go before you pay that off.”
“I understand,” Jake said, “but when I do pay it off, I intend to be able to drive it out of here.”
“Fair enough,” Frank said. “So long as we’re on the same page.”
Jake worked another hour, tinkering with the Mustang, then washed up. He picked up a couple of burritos on the way back to the orphanage, and when he got to the room, he found it empty. So he settled in to do his homework, munching on the burrito.
Charlie came in a few minutes later, carrying something in a large paper bag.
“You’ve got a green chili special over on the table,” he told Charlie.
“Cool,” Charlie said. “I’m starving, and I heard dinner tonight was mystery meat casserole again. Last time I had the bubbles for two days.”
“I remember,” Jake said. “The bathroom was toxic. Hence the burritos.” He nodded at the bag. “Whatcha got there?”
