Damage Control - ARC

by Mary Jeddore Blakney

  4

  the fumble

  When the call finally came, Chegg Jaigg was on a ladder pruning his kitchen ceiling.

  Being a keev wasn’t always as glamorous as it looked from the outside. Sure, there were a lot of people who respected and even admired Chegg, but they relied on him as well. Their lives—and worse, their careers—were in his hands.

  And now there was this mess. Some wannabe spy from the Alien Command had blown his cover and potentially ruined the whole Sandfruit Planet project.

  It wasn’t the spy’s fault, probably. The Alien Command had a reputation for sloppy training of their supposedly-covert data collectors. And to top it all off, they had promoted the kid too soon.

  But none of that could be helped now. The damage was already set in motion. At this stage in a civilization’s development, uncontrolled contact with aliens could cause devastating panic.

  And then there was the question of microbes. Zuke wasn’t the only alien life form that had been traipsing around in that Sandfruit woman’s kitchen. Technically, the Medical Command should have already had a presence on Earth by now. Every day they waited, the chances of an epidemic increased.

  But the medical issues were not Chegg’s job to worry about. Chegg was the commander of the Counter-Intelligence force responsible for preventing the loss of sensitive information to the Aberikekk-speaking population of Earth.

  The question before the Committee was whether to accelerate the Sandfruit mission or cancel it. Delaying contact until everything was ready for a proper first contact would almost certainly mean giant death tolls on Earth from disease, as Chuzekk microbes spread around a planet where they didn’t belong. But premature contact would probably cause panic, and panic would cause war. It always did.

  In the end, the question came down to an economic one: whether the trade benefits of having contact with Earth would likely outweigh the costs of military and medical intervention.

  When Chegg felt his Personal Device vibrate on his hip, he slipped the pruning shears into his pocket and opened it. “Yes!” he barked.

  “They decided to accelerate the project,” said the image of his boss on the tiny screen. “You will depart in twelve days.”

  It was a short conversation. He waited until the Kirove had terminated the call before closing his own Personal Device and hooking it back on his uniform. “That was the Kirove,” he said to his daughter. “We’re being deployed.”

  “Good!” Jett replied. “Bring me back a monkey.” She was so close he could have touched her, but he could barely see her. Her face was hidden in the lush foliage.

  “I don’t know if I can take a monkey,” he said. “It depends on a lot of things. The planet may not have enough monkeys. In that case, I’d have to leave them all. It’s time to come down now. Hold on with your hands and let your body hang down like we practiced. I won’t let you fall.”

  He would have liked to call his wife first, but he didn’t have time for sentimentality. She was half a world away, studying how seaweed prices affected population trends. There was nothing she could do, except call the rest of the children to let them know. He called the twelve zirodes—captains—who worked for him directly, and then his wife, and then his car.

  “I have to leave, my girl,” he said to Jett, touching her nose with the middle knuckle of his left index finger. The spines of her head were starting to grow in. He wondered how sharp they’d be the next time he saw her, how tall and wise she’d be.

  “But you have twelve days.”

  He squatted to bring his face to her level and looked her in the eyes. “I have twelve days to get the whole ship and crew ready. I have to go to the ship now and start.”

  Together they walked to the pool and slipped in. The water, like the air, was warm and rich with plant life. Jett found her little sibling—the legless, genderless tadpole who would one day become a bipedal child like herself—and placed him gently in his transport case. Chegg picked up the case and they both climbed out of the pool and walked out of the tangle of carefully interwoven trees that made up their home, out into the sunshine where Chegg’s car waited.

  The baby didn’t have to stay in the carrying case long. Chegg carefully transferred him to the tank in the back of the car and set the case on the floor in front of it.

  Jett gave her little sibling a rub on his smooth, soft head, turned her nose up for one more touch from her father’s knuckle and watched him go. He knew she didn’t want to stay, but she was fourteen now and had school in the afternoons.

  On any other occasion, Chegg would have felt a surge of pride when the small transport pod drew close to his ship. There came a moment—hazardously disorienting to student pilots—when the giant mobile space station seemed to become the whole world, as if it were a planet in its own right. In reality, it was only about the size of a decent asteroid. If it had been a natural heavenly body, it would have been one of those insignificant rocks at the edge of some solar system. But for a ship, its immensity wasn't easy for even a veteran Chuzekk keev to fully grasp.

  But this trip was different. The instant the feeds from the exterior cameras began to fill up with vast expanses of hull, all Chegg felt was a tightness in his gut. With an effort, he pushed the fear aside and focused on his first task: a meeting with his surveillance zirode.

  With all the usual flourishing movements and body decorations of a water man, Zirode Luak Zeeg didn't’give most people the impression of a formidable soldier. Chegg figured he used that fact to his advantage, and probably even played it up a little. Today, his claws were an iridescent purple, but his head was left unpainted. He must have gotten ready in a hurry.

  "We can't win this one," said Luak after the customary arm grasp. "We have met the cucumber, as my grandmother would say."

  Chegg sighed. "I had twelve dozen people spend a week running probability models. Every last one ended badly for us. There'snot even any precedent for it. Chuzekks simply don't fail like this."

  Luak tilted his head and wiggled his shiny claws in the air. "Which model ended with the least damage to our regional image? Maybe that's the one we need to use, together with a great diplomatic campaign."

  Chegg bared his teeth and hissed. "No," he said. "I don't intend to lose. I'm working on a different kind of plan."

  5

  descent

  The instant Thaddeus Frenck saw the Kremlin building show up on the TV screen, he pulled out a twenty and threw it on the bar beside his Heineken. "Sorry," he said to a passing busgirl. "I got some place I have to be." And he grabbed his camera bag and ran out to the street.

  "LaGuardia," he told the driver, when he'd finally found a cab. He closed the car door, scrolled through his phone contacts and hit the 'dial' button.

  "LaGuardia Airport?" the driver asked. He was using his mirror to look at Thaddeus instead of watching for a chance to pull into traffic.

  "Yeah, LaGuardia Airport. I've got a real time crunch here, sorry."

  "Got it," the driver said and adjusted his mirror.

  He'd been asleep when it had started. His ex-wife, of all people, had called him at 3:00 a.m. and screamed in his ear. Actually, that part wasn't so unusual. He'd already hung up by the time her words had sunk into his sleepy brain: "Turn on the TV!"

  Suddenly fully alert, he'd grabbed the remote from his nightstand and jabbed a button. The 60-inch flatscreen on the wall was already split up and tuned to CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox News and the Russian website Gazeta.ru. This time, they'd all carried the same footage, supposedly live but nowhere near synchronous.

  He'd been relieved to see that all the fuss was coming out of Beijing. It wasn't a local scoop he'd missed.

  When he'd seen what the story was, he'd laughed and called his ex a stupid bitch and jabbed the remote again. It was an old hoax, and a dumb one, too, but it was just the sort of thing she'd fall for. He'd been asleep again in under a minute.

  But in the morning, Beijing was still celebrating.

  "You
sure you want to be flying?" the cabbie asked. "They might come here."

  "Yeah," said Thaddeus. "They might."

  When he got to Washington they had the National Mall barricaded off. He got in with his press pass and set up his gear: a smart little director's chair, a down sleeping bag on a folding cot, a stash of cigarettes and self-heating cans of soup and coffee, and of course the camera on its tripod.

  Twelve hours later, the mall looked very different. Military personnel and equipment were everywhere, a brass band in Marine uniforms was tuning up, a crew scrambled to set up a speaker's platform, and a small, dappled grey blob grew in the sky directly overhead. Thaddeus had turned his camera on every hour, two minutes before the hour, all night, because in both Beijing and Moscow the first appearance had happened exactly on the hour. And sure enough, at 7:00 a.m. to the very second, his camera had captured the very instant the fuzzy grey image appeared.

  He drank cold coffee, bought a breakfast sandwich from a vendor who must have had one hell of a security clearance, and watched history unfold. The brass band played "God Bless America" and left, the platform grew into a hulking mess of plywood and hardware before blossoming into something Presidential. Tanks and rocket-launchers and even a row of Revolutionary-War-era cannons rolled in and lined up in pretty rows attended by people in sharp haircuts, braided ribbons and enough brass buttons to make an extra flugelhorn for the band.

  "They look ridiculous, if you ask me," he mumbled to his camera.

  By 7:30, the fuzzy thing in the sky had become a cluster of twelve disks, and by 8:00 you could see with the naked eye that they were not really disks but 12-sided objects. By 10:00, they filled the sky, and by 11:00, only the central one could be seen from where Thaddeus sat on his director's chair.

  An Army platoon marched in and took up residence only a couple of yards from him, in dress uniforms and shiny shoes and hats that Thaddeus figured must have been designed to kill the enemy with laughter. Their weapons looked out of place with the dressy clothes: 36 rifles, as near as he could see, and a portable anti-tank rocket launcher.

  The President showed up, but Thaddeus couldn't get a clear view, so he had to give up and let another photographer handle it.

  He checked his main camera and adjusted the angle again. The object above had long ago grown too large to fit in the frame, so he'd chosen a feature based on what he'd seen from Beijing and was filming that. If his hunch was right, that feature was a hatch, and if he was lucky, that hatch would eventually open.

  The Corporal holding the rocket launcher didn't look like he was feeling lucky. Maybe it was just that the launcher was heavy, but there seemed to be more to it than that. The young man looked scared.

  Thaddeus grabbed a second camera from his bag, secured it to one of the auxiliary mounts on the tripod, and discreetly turned it on the Corporal, whose nametag identified him as COLEMAN. A moment later its feed was streaming live to the major networks along with the feed from his main camera. Technicians at the studios would decide which feed to pull from—either of Thaddeus’s or someone else's—at any given moment.

  The Corporal's fear wasn't all that unusual, Thaddeus knew. Millions of Americans were probably spending this historic morning hanging their heads over toilets and trash cans and storm drains. Emergency rooms were doubtless overflowing with patients suffering from everything from heart attacks to hives. Thaddeus shook his head. He would never understand the Human propensity for irrational fear.

  If this had been the first landing, he would have understood. If this landing had shown any signs of being different from the other two, he would have understood then, too. But so far at least, what was happening here in Washington was exactly the same as what had happened in Beijing and Moscow.

  It had all started when a blurry object had appeared in the sky directly over the city. Over time it had come close enough to come into focus as twelve separate objects. More time, and the objects had proven to be so mind-bogglingly huge that only the central one could be seen from any point in the city.

  If the pattern continued—and Thaddeus would be very surprised if it didn't—the huge object would eventually stop descending. A hatch would open on its vast, smooth belly and twelve large ships would emerge and hover in the same formation as the first twelve objects.

  Out of the central ship would come something surprisingly similar to one of NASA's old space shuttles. This 'shuttle' would land, and a man or woman who looked a little bit like a crocodile would step out and address the crowd in excellent, but accented, English.

  And Thaddeus was lucky enough to be here, right in the middle of the most important event in American history since the Corn Goddess had created the first Humans, or however that story went. He supposed he ought to put a little more effort into keeping his mythology straight, but there was always something in the present to occupy his mind, so he never got around to it.

  Events continued to unfold exactly as they had in Beijing and Moscow, but that didn't seem to calm Corporal Coleman any. He passed the rocket launcher to his neighbor, a Private DiBenedetto, and stood there steadily turning greener. By the time the 'space shuttle' emerged from its ship, Corporal Coleman had the launcher again, and had changed from green to an unnatural white. Thaddeus wondered how he could manage to keep holding the thing when he seemed on the verge of passing out. From the size of it, it must have been heavy.

  Thaddeus carefully kept the shuttle in the main camera's frame as it landed, but left the other one focused on Corporal Coleman. Over the years, he'd learned that the Human side of a story was sometimes just as important as the actual events.

  At four seconds past 11:57 a.m. the shuttle door opened and, true to the pattern, a single figure began to step out.

  And Corporal Coleman fired.

  A blast of flame shot out behind him as the rocket came out of its launching tube and zoomed into the sky.

  The visitor from the shuttle stepped onto the grass, glanced at the celebratory projectile, then settled his gaze on the president and began to walk toward him.

  The rocket flew directly over the visitor, turned and shot straight down, erupting in a fireball that engulfed the shuttle.

  When the flames were finally extinguished, the visitor's charred corpse was spread in small pieces across the blast zone.

  6

  spin

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a dozen other officials watched the landing from the safety of a bunker deep in the Pentagon. On the opposite wall, feeds from over 20 news cameras played on large monitors while technicians chose which views to send to the networks at any given moment.

  Right now, gamma camera was included, and Major General Elton Chang was not entirely comfortable with that. It was a typical Frenck shot. Frenck was a good photographer, but he was a cynic, and he always managed to find a way to make an op ed piece out of any news story. This time he had his lens aimed at a kid named Coleman who seemed to have an alien phobia. Either that or the flu.

  There were three different angles on the president and four on the alien landing craft. Echo cam was the fallback: if the president picked his nose, if a breeze blew somebody's skirt too high, one of the techs would hit the escape key and the networks would get a shot of the children from Mrs. Gardner's third grade class, instead. None of them was wearing a skirt, and they could pick their noses without losing the next election.

  Fire shot out behind Coleman as his weapon deployed. "Switch to echo!" Chang ordered. His voice mingled with several others, their words identical to his.

  On large and small screens all over the world, 18 adorable eight-year-olds fidgeted in the chilly air, while twenty people in the belly of the Pentagon watched the inevitable.

  The chairman, Rear Admiral Devon Amos, broke the breathless silence. "ET struck first, and you will do whatever is necessary to make that fact clear in the feed. Is that understood?"

  There was a chorus of affirmations from the techs.

  "Admiral, the president—"
>
  Secretary of Defense Shawna Mackin didn't get four words out before Louis Ember, the liaison from the Federal Reserve Board, cut her off. "The president will be MADE to understand!"

  Mackin shot him a look but kept her mouth shut.

  When Coleman fired the rocket, the president was walking across the speakers' platform toward the visitor. Secret Service agents stormed the platform immediately, and by the time the weapon hit its target, they had the president locked in a very ordinary-looking silver-brown sedan with Maryland plates, tinted windows, hidden armor plating and a long list of special features.

  One minute later, the car was safely away from the Mall, which now could only be described as a battlefield, or more accurately, a massacre. The aliens had the position of advantage.

  After five minutes, the Secret Service agent in the front seat turned around. "I'm afraid I have bad news, Mr. President. The Pentagon's been hit."

  "Christ! How bad is it?"

  "There's nothing left of it, sir."

  7

  shooting pains

  Brooks Massilon braced himself on the edge of the shower with his left arm, wincing. He inched his way down to the lever that worked the tub stopper, and with his right hand yanked it up and turned on the hot-water faucet. Another day of work missed. 2:00 and just now able to walk, barely. Walking was good, but thinking was even better. His head was starting to clear now.

  It felt like someone was squeezing his head in a vice while jolts of electricity darted at random through his body. He limped out of the bathroom with the faucet running, grabbed his basketball shorts from the back of his bedroom door and returned.

  It wasn’t easy, but he got into the tub. His skin turned nearly scarlet, but he was used to that. It wouldn’t burn him. And it wouldn’t feel like it was burning him unless he believed it would. He sighed as the intense heat began to soften the painful tension in his muscles.