by Alma Boykin
“Message to the RSM, yes, ma’am.” In the normal world, lieutenants did not carry slips of paper to sergeants. Wales firmly believed that he’d left that normal world the day he reported to 58th Regiment’s headquarters two months ago.
As her assistant-cum-bodyguard went off on his errand, Rachel opened the back door to the lab, checked to make certain that the fume hood had vented where it was supposed to, and then cut through the gardens to one of the back doors that was not supposed to be there. The xenologist let herself in and limped past two office doors, then around a corner, and tapped on what looked rather like a broom closet.
“What?” an irritated voice demanded.
She opened the door just enough to poke her head in. “Major Sigurdsson, we have to shut the base down tonight.”
Thorsten Sigurdsson blinked pale blue eyes, but didn’t challenge her. “Vienna or London?”
“Neither. Geomagnetic storm with a double-wave, oriented south. It will probably take out most of the power grid and possibly affect unshielded electronics.”
The Icelander glanced over at his computer and an array of other electronica whirring away in the corner of the small, dark office. “Local grid or regional?”
“I’m putting five pounds on national, but the local may do better, assuming they’ve stocked up on transformers. Once burned et cetera.” Rachel added, “The solar meteo people recommend shutting down completely by midnight and disconnecting from the grid. And it will be the brightest aurora in several generations.”
“Mmpf.” For some reason, Icelanders and Norwegians never got excited about auroras, Rachel had noticed. “Can we just turn everything off, or do I need to pull the breakers?”
“Pull the breakers and unplug the power sources. I’ll bear the glad tidings to General Khan,” she offered, sweetening the bad news.
“Do that.” He made a shooing motion. Sigurdsson never said two words when a grunt would do, and Rachel backed out of the doorway, closing it with exaggerated care and tip-toeing back to the main hall. I wonder if the story is true that there was a troll in the woodpile a few generations ago? She mused as she strolled toward the regimental commander’s office.
The outer door stood partly open, and Rachel hesitated, listening for sounds of a problem. A loud clatter emerged, and she counted five before peering around the doorframe. Sergeant Pete Dale glared at the fax machine as it emitted another unhealthy clatter. She pulled the door open the rest of the way, as if she hadn’t noticed. “Good afternoon, Sergeant.”
“Ah, good afternoon, ma’am. Can I help you?”
“Yes, I need to either speak briefly with General Khan or to leave him a message, whichever is easiest.” Alas, the days of waltzing in and pestering her former subordinate had long passed, the alien sighed.
Dale glanced down at a readout on his desk and waved apologetically toward the telephone. “He seems to be on a secure call.” The Englishman picked up a pen and turned the page on the message binder, then raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“We have to power down the entire base tonight, with full shut-down completed by 2300 local time. Including the backup equipment. This is not an exercise, and we will probably be power-isolated for twenty-four hours at an absolute minimum, assuming we don’t lose our internal transformers as well.” The sergeant copied her words, then rotated the pad, slid a piece of extra-thick cardstock under the message, and offered her the pen. Rachel wrote down her authentication code, then signed the pad. The message would remain, but not the rest.
By the time she returned to the lab, Lt. Wales had almost finished cleaning the fume hood. “Thank you, Andrew,” Rachel said. “Any problems?”
“No ma’am. It’s easier than I thought it would be.” He gave the inside of the glass one last swipe with the rag, being extra careful around the corners.
The xenologist nodded, then somehow twisted herself around and got her entire head and shoulders into the hood so she could look for herself. Wales winced—just watching her made his neck and back hurt. She turned herself right way around and stood up. “Good work, Andrew. Since it’s only an hour left before supper, I’ll give you a choice. You can start the inventory of chemical cabinet two, you can watch me type up the report on our little test from this afternoon, or you can go get some fresh air and sunlight.”
“Sunlight! Ma’am,” he caught himself, ducking a little.
Rachel smiled at the young human. “Good choice—you’re dismissed. And remember to unplug and turn off everything electronic that you have, unless you want it reduced to a piece of sculpture by dawn.”
“Ma’am, what’s going to happen? Is there an equipment test of some sort?” He hadn’t heard anything, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d forgotten to tell him.
The scientist shook her head. “A massive electromagnetic storm is headed for Earth. Auroras as far south as North Africa, toasted power grids all over the globe, satellites knocked out of business, that sort of thing.”
“Oh. Thank you, ma’am.” He hurried out of the lab before she could change her mind.
A few minutes later, the lab door opened again and someone cleared their throat. “Shoo,” Rachel absentmindedly told the person, her attention focused on her computer. The man cleared his throat again, louder. “I said shoo, scat, go,” the xenologist repeated.
“I believe the proper form is, ‘shoo, sir’ or ‘shoo, Brigadier, sir’,” an amused tenor voice replied. Rachel almost knocked her chair over getting to her feet as Rahoul walked into the lab. “I understand that the base needs to shut down tonight?”
She nodded as she fished her PDA out of its pocket on her belt. After tapping the screen for a moment, she handed it to him. “Biggest storm in at least a century or so, I’d guess. It will take out the national power grid for a day at minimum, probably longer, along with frying a lot of electronic chips and motors if they’re not unplugged or heavily surge-protected. Like your office microwave, sir.”
“Hmmm. So we will be in the dark for a few hours?” He studied the diagram on the little screen, then looked up, frowning. “What about the satellites?”
“Aside from the moon, plan on losing all of them, at least for a few hours.”
Rahoul thought about the information as he handed the PDA back. “Have you heard anything from Major de Alba?”
“Not since an hour or so ago, sir.”
The South Asian officer ran a hand over his hair. “Plan on going on alert by 2200. The astronomers reported some debris that might be entering the atmosphere today or tomorrow, probably northern hemisphere but they were not certain. And no electronics?”
Rachel rubbed under her blind eye. “Assume none unless they are very, very heavily shielded. I suspect the worst thing will be massive static electricity problems for the portable gear, but this isn’t my specialty. And no radio or GPS, nothing that uses the ionosphere or satellites.”
“Good practice in case we ever have an EMP to deal with,” he noted. “In fact, it’s about time we drilled for that, anyway. Oh, and what did you turn up from the materials you were testing?”
The xenologist sighed as she flopped into her chair. “You might want to sit, sir.” He sat in the spare seat. “There were extraterrestrial components in the ‘generator’ you captured.”
“You knew that earlier,” Rahoul reminded her.
“Yes, but this was material that can’t have been captured or discovered, because it begins to degrade rapidly two of your weeks after manufacture. The composition suggests that the components had been delivered within three or four days of your finding the thing, unless someone went to the trouble of putting them inside a stasis box and no humans have that technology. I’m sorry, Rahoul.”
He stared over her head, absorbing the news. “Damn. And the Army still has no idea where the excess funds came from. And we’re effectively blind and deaf tonight.” He stood up, motioning for her to stay seated. “We’re on alert after 2200, Commander Na Gael.” With that Rahoul stalked o
ut of the lab, leaving his advisor to her work. Instead, she reached for the phone and started dialing the chief of xenology in Vienna. She’d call Joschka and warn him after she finished her official duties.
The auroras rendered night-vision equipment superfluous. Curtains of green, turquoise, and crimson danced and wove across the entire breadth of the sky, hiding all but the brightest of stars and planets. Rachel took an old blanket and parked herself out on the sward, to the west of the headquarters building, where she had an unobstructed view of the northern sky. She’d needed the better part of two hours to turn off, disconnect, shield, and otherwise power-down the lab and her quarters. It was generally assumed that the base’s having a separate power system from the main public grid would protect the lab from any outside interference, if de Alba and Sigurdsson had thrown every necessary breaker and switch, but Rachel hadn’t survived this long by assuming. Her PDA voice-com device and portable supercomputer sat inside the Dark Hart. The ship served as a Faraday cage, deflecting energy and absorbing some of it.
Rachel watched the veils of light sweep and dance, letting herself drift and just taking in the show, waving away the occasional mosquito. The universe could be such a beautiful place sometimes, even if the beauty carried danger with it. She could hear people moving not too far away, and then a few “Ooh, that’s amazing!” sort of observations. But most of the watching troopers stayed quiet, awestruck or just unwilling to sound foolish.
Then a collective gasp arose as a huge fireball ripped through the sky directly overhead. Rachel ducked, rolling onto her belly as she tracked the meteorite. Except the item slowed as it streaked past, travelling from the southern sky toward the north. The Wanderer clapped her hands over her ear-holes and started counting under her breath. “One polypeptide, two polypeptide, three polypeptide . . .” she recited, reaching eight before the boom echoed through the night. She waited for a second boom, the sound of impact. Wonder how good blankets are against shock waves—probably not very. Shockwave? Hello, shockwave, where are you? But there was no sound, sight, or pressure wave of a meteorite impact.
Instead, General Khan spoke from over her shoulder. “Something just landed, didn’t it?”
“I suspect so, sir, but it will be several hours before we can use our vehicles or equipment.” That was both part of the drill and a concession to the highly distracted drivers on the road. She rolled back over so she could see him.
“What about your ship’s gear?”
She shook her head. “I’m not breaking the Laws, sir. What we can do is see if Sergeant Lee tracked it manually, or if someone else did.”
Sergeant Lee had not tracked the fireball, much to Rachel’s surprise. But Sergeant Roxleigh had. Khan sent Rachel into the building to get maps, since she had the best night vision, and she returned with one of the corporals in tow, both carrying a dozen or so rolls of paper. “I grabbed most of northern Britain, up the edge of the Highlands.”
As they spread out the smallest scale map that she’d grabbed, Khan brushed her hand, initiating a mental contact. «Can you ask Logres for help?»
Rachel turned enough to give him a dumbfounded look. «Are you out of your mind, Rahoul? Ye gads. No. Not only can I not, Logres would probably hurt me severely for asking. What month is this?»
«It’s May. What does—oh.» He terminated the contact before she could catch his chagrin. Instead he focused on the maps. Someone cracked open a chemical light stick and a yellowy-green glow lit the paper. “Sergeant Roxleigh, what do you have?”
“North and west of us, I’d say, sir. Probably this area, sir?” A dark hand spread out over the land just north of the Border, near the Cheviot Hills.
“Commander?”
“There’s a park there, isn’t there?” Someone riffled through the map sheets and pulled out three, spreading them on the top of a table that someone else had already dragged out into the grass. “Yes, here we go. Unless we hear otherwise tomorrow? Today?”
Someone with a wind-up watch called “Today, ma’am.”
“Thank you. Later today, then I’d suggest going that direction. We should have enough sensor data by this afternoon to narrow the hunt down.”
Major de Alba shook her head. “I don’t believe that we will, ma’am. This storm will likely take out all cell transmission systems, some of the landline phone systems, and probably half of the satellites. And then you have to establish contact with whoever has the remaining satellites. And with the power grid out, we’re going to be very low priority in terms of accessing whatever is still functioning.”
Rahoul stood, arms folded, and watched the shimmering colors that flowed over the sky. “Excellent point, major.” He thought through his options, considering what to do. “Commander, are you certain that the meteors we saw were artificial?”
A tall shadow had appeared at Rachel’s shoulder and whispered something into the top of her head. She turned slightly so she could see the figure and whispered back. He replied, and Rachel put a hand over her good eye, shaking her head as she did. “Yes. I am now ninety-nine percent certain that they were artificial.”
“Why so certain?”
Rachel looked up over her shoulder at Sgt. Lee, who answered, “Because I saw one slow, pivot, and change direction, sir. It looked metallic and lozenge-shaped, like a torpedo or an Aussie-rules football.”
By now Lt. Wales had joined the group clustered around the maps, after remembering rather belatedly that he was supposed to be keeping an eye on the xenologist rather than gawking at the amazing aurora.
Rahoul nodded, once more looking at the sky. “Right. Once it is safe to do so, and assuming that our vehicles start, Col. Selassie and Maj. Sigurdsson will go north with their groups. Take half the scouts. Commander Na Gael, go with them. And be ready to bypass all cities, both for traffic and for security. Commander, is there any way that you can get visual confirmation of the landing site without having to crawl through every valley on the Border?”
Wales thought that the xenologist looked very much like the Cheshire Cat as her smile spread wide enough to be seen in the darkness. “Oh yes, sir. I have a favor I can call in, if the weather remains clear. Primitive technology has some advantages to it.”
The general started to speak, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to know.
By 0700 the first vehicles rolled north, taking one third of the headquarters troops toward the Border. Commander Na Gael, despite pointing out that the Marlow coup’s ignition system was too primitive to have been affected by any stray bit of electricity, rode in the command vehicle. However, she did manage to persuade an exceedingly reluctant Col. Selassie to let her and Lt. Wales walk onto the small airfield rather than bringing the entire convoy. “I do not want to scare Spots out of his mind,” Na Gael insisted. “An attack of his PTS will not help anyone.”
As Wales opened the gate for her, he asked Rachel, “Ma’am, is Spots the airport security manager?”
“No. The safety pilot. There he is, over there, by the yellow plane. And stay well back, Lieutenant, I do not want to spook him.”
The junior officer studied the man in question. He thought ‘Spots’ wore some kind of mask, until he realized that it was discoloration from chemical burns or something of the sort. Rachel glanced at her escort and hissed under her breath, “He’s one of ours, Lieutenant, invalided out. Don’t stare, please.” Louder she called, “Hullo Spots! How’s life?”
“Fair to partly cloudy, Brownie. Babysitting?”
She laughed a little. “Nah. Someone thinks I might get into mischief without an escort.”
“Like flying under bridges? Not that I know a thing ‘bout that sort of business, mind,” the man said, taking off a broad-brimmed hat to reveal more burns and a receding gray hairline. “You want to prop or shall I?”
“I’ll hold brakes, you prop. You know Phoebe better than I do,” the xenologist said. “Andrew, there’s no room for you, so you’d best go wait over on the bench there. We shan’t be too
long.” She handed him her cane, then limped across the lush grass to the waiting pilot.
Before he could protest, she’d hoisted herself into the small metal and fabric plane, belting herself in and pulling a soft leather helmet over her head. Spots pulled two blocks of wood out from in front of the plane’s wheels, then walked in front of the craft. He called, “Brakes?”
“Brakes,” came the reply, as Spots pushed on the airscrew, apparently making sure the plane wouldn’t roll. “Primer?”
Rachel did something in the cockpit. “Two shots.”
“Throttle?”
“Idle.”
“Ignition?”
“Cold.”
Spots turned the gleaming wooden airscrew once, then called, “Contact.”
“Contact!”
The man snapped the propeller down, and the engine started. As soon as he hurried around the wing and climbed into the little plane, Rachel began taxiing, waving farewell to her befuddled assistant. Wales watched the yellow aircraft trundle out to the edge of a grassy meadow. The engine revved twice, and then the plane took off, turning north, toward the border. Wales turned and went back, sitting heavily on the bench beside the hangar. How was he going to explain all this to Col. Selassie? He listened to the silvery chorus of birdsong and the occasional thunking ring of a cowbell as he waited for his charge to return, yawning a little as he fought off a nap.
