Once the show was over, Whitmore settled into his cockpit. Strapping on his helmet as the canopy lowered over him, he got on the radio and spoke with the war room.
“Grey, do you read me?”
“Roger, Eagle One, loud and clear. Stand by, sir.” The edge in Grey’s voice told the pilots listening in that something was wrong. A minute later, the general returned with the ugly news. “Eagle One, our primary target has shifted course. We’re watching the radar right now.”
“Which way is it heading?” The president assumed it was moving out of range and all the preparations he had ordered were about to be proved futile.
“I think our little secret is out. The ship is moving east by southeast and traveling at a pretty fair clip. They’re headed right for us, sir. Estimated time of arrival is thirty-two minutes.”
Whitmore’s plan had been to take his thrown-together squadron into the air and put them through their paces, giving them some desperately needed practice time. Now that part of the plan would have to be scrubbed. Aware that the other pilots were listening in, he tried to put a positive spin on this development. ‘That means we’ll have the home court advantage. Let’s get up in the air and stake out our territory.”
Then he switched over to the private channel Grey had opened for him. “Will, do you read?”
“Go ahead, Eagle One.”
“Put the word out for reinforcements. Get us any help you can. We’re going to need it.”
*
David was collapsed against the back of his seat, his eyes a pair of loose marbles rolling free in their sockets. Between moans, he appeared to be chanting to himself. Either that, or he was about to woof his cookies.
Steve finally took pity on his passenger and straightened the craft out. It was an amazing machine, lightning fast and superbly maneuverable at the same time. It cornered like a dream and seemed to have some sort of gyroscope built into the system so that it came out of any maneuver, no matter how reckless, as steady as a rock. This was no wobbly goblin.
“You still with me?”
David, green in the face, nodded sheepishly.
As the ship began leaving earth’s atmosphere, the blue sky darkened to violet, then faded to black. The pilot’s mouth dropped open in awe, then blossomed into an ear-to-ear grin. As the last layers of the outer atmosphere brushed past, the attacker suddenly accelerated, liberated. High above the earth, in the eternal night illuminated by the eternally blinding sun, the attacker plunged upward, deeper into the blanket of stars around them. For Steve, it was a moment of wonder and boyish magic, a promise fulfilled at last.
“I’ve waited a long time for this.”
Quietly now, they continued to plummet upward, the sun on one side, the moon on the other. Ahead of them the vast blank wall of space receded to infinity. Steve, joyriding, forgot for a moment what they’d come for. David fought down the stomach acids churning inside him and kept a careful watch on the life-support monitors installed on the floor. He saw something that made him certain he was losing consciousness. The monitors were strapped to the floor with thick strips of woven nylon, heavy-duty seat belt ribbon. One of them seemed to come to life as David watched it, lifting into the air like a tentacle arm.
“Feel it? Zero gravity, baby. We’re here!”
Steve had some experience with weightlessness. He’d once finagled an invitation to ride in the cargo compartment of a B-52 flying parabolas through the sky. The plane came to the top of its climb, then began to dive at a carefully calculated angle, producing a simulation of zero gravity which allowed the passengers to float through the air for two or three minutes at a time. For Steve, it was a welcome recognition of a familiar moment. Not so for David. If he had imagined his breakfast worming its way back toward his esophagus before, now he felt it for real.
“Of course,” he burbled, “weightlessness. I should’ve thought of that.”
David turned to look out the window, focusing on the moon. Although on earth the moon was a slim toenail shape at this time of month, from David’s angle it looked almost full. They were seeing what only a handful of humans had ever seen with their own eyes, the moon’s dark side. But what really caught their attention was something no human had ever seen: a black orb lurking in the distance, one-fourth the size of the moon. The mother ship, its smooth surface illuminated by the sun, glinted back at them malevolently. A pair of monstrous prongs, hanging off what looked to be the bottom of the ship like a pair of saber-tooth fangs, curving hungrily through space.
“Thar she blows,” David said, coming out of his queasiness. “Head straight for it.”
Steve did exactly that. It had been less than five minutes since they’d torn free of the earth’s atmosphere and less time still since they’d escaped her gravity. There was no way for them to know, no reference point or speedometer to tell them, that they’d been accelerating the whole time. But as Steve retargeted the ship with a flick of his finger, they were both impressed by the incredible speed at which they rocketed toward the moon. The size of the lunar satellite grew inside the frame of the windows until it seemed to David that they were getting just a little too close.
“You know how to slow this thing down, right?” he asked nonchalantly, trying not to step on Steve’s toes.
“Uh-oh,” Steve said, suddenly worried.
“Uh-oh? That doesn’t sound good,” David said, now able to study the individual craters. “What’s wrong?”
“Something’s happening. Ship’s not responding.”
David checked his laptop computer. For the first time since the clamps released the ship, David seemed thrilled to be aboard.
“I knew it!” He looked at Steve. “Well, at least I thought it. The way you described the inside of the city destroyer, I thought there must be a tractor beam organizing the flight, a computer-driven air traffic control mechanism. They’re bringing us in.” David went back to working on the keyboard.
Slightly miffed, Steve asked him, “So when were you planning on telling me about this?”
David looked across the cabin. “Oops.”
*
“We have visual.”
Long before the city destroyer was within range of Area 51, its hulking fifteen-mile wide frame was seen cruising above the horizon. The president and the thirty F-15s had ascended to a height of 30,000 feet, high above the approaching warship and the tangle of amateur pilots who were having trouble maintaining their formations. He had three civilian pilots with him who had never flown a war plane before. They were doing remarkably well. Whitmore had them practice using their sighting devices. On these older planes, the HUD gave neither a “God’s eye view” of the battle nor a “dream world” display, functions which came standard on later models. To locate the enemy, Whitmore’s team, called Eagle squadron, would have to rely on the technicians in the war room and plenty of old-fashioned looking around.
“Basically, boys, we’re gonna keep our eyes open,” Whitmore announced, then asked Grey, “any word yet on that delivery?”
“Negative.” Whitmore could just about see his scowl over the radio. “Do not engage until we’ve confirmed delivery of the package.”
At least a dozen voices came over the radio at once. “Roger!” the pilots acknowledged the order.
“And keep this damn frequency clear!” Grey barked. He turned and watched the radar screen.
In order to avoid crashing into one another, they’d organized themselves into four main groups, flying laps around the desert. Grey watched them merry-go-rounding across the radar screen, then said to Connie and Major Mitchell in disgust, “This whole operation is the damnedest harebrained thing I’ve ever seen.”
Pulling the major aside, Connie asked about something that had been troubling her for a while. “What if that thing, the ship, gets here before David can plant the virus?”
Mitchell was concentrating on coordinating his part of the battle. He figured Connie was putting two and two together and beginning to worry abo
ut her own life. There wasn’t time for that now. “We’re pretty deep underground here. It should give us some protection.”
Connie read him instantly. “It’s not us I’m worried about. It’s all those people outside.”
Mitchell remembered what had happened to NORAD and knew Area 51’s defenses were flimsy in comparison. If the city destroyer moving toward them fired its big gun, it wouldn’t matter if the refugees were up top or down in the labs—everyone would die together. Still, he knew moving the people belowground would offer them a slightly better chance of surviving.
He pulled one of his men off his tracking assignment and appointed him supervisor. Without a word of explanation, he grabbed Connie by the arm and they dashed out of the room.
*
The mother ship was the size of a small planet sliced cleanly in half along its equator. The shimmering half dome was protected by a smooth exterior shell over most of its surface, except where it seemed to have been cut away to expose long swathes of a ruddy black surface beneath. The flatness of the underside was interrupted by bulging projections fifteen miles in diameter. They were the domes of city destroyers, identical to the ones attacking the earth. There were at least one hundred of them still locked on to the underbelly of the mother ship like leeches. Thirty-six empty rings showed where the giant warships which were attacking the earth had once docked. Hanging dramatically off the side of the craft was a pair of tusklike projections. Glossy white and at least a hundred miles tall, these enigmatic structures arched through space like a mammoth set of cobra fangs.
The ship was pulled toward one of the dark, rugged strips that lay between sections of the steel blue armor covering ninety percent of the ship’s exterior. Drawn closer, the bulk of the mother ship overwhelmed the view from their attacker’s windows, until Steve and David could see nothing except the black surface directly in front of them. In contrast to the view from a thousand miles away, a close look at this part of the ship revealed it to be surprisingly primitive. Beneath the thin blue shell, the ship’s surface was composed of a material as wavy and jagged as recently cooled lava, like mile after mile of barren Neolithic stone.
A huge triangular portal, one of several earth’s recon satellite photos had failed to detect, had been cut through the dense walls. A pale blue light leaked from within the craft. As David and Steve approached this gigantic three-sided entrance tunnel, they noticed dozens of attackers like theirs sitting idly in space. Made to look microscopically small by comparison to the megalith behind them, these attackers were washing in and out of the opening as gently as if riding the tide of an invisible ocean.
The inside of the darkened tunnel put them in a dramatically different environment. The walls and ceiling were covered with sheets of ceramic-like tile that had turned a rusty brown. At sporadic intervals, shafts of light shot out of the walls and into the passageway like solid columns. As they flew past one of them, it seemed to be some kind of holographic torch, the artificial image of an artificial light source, which nevertheless provided just enough illumination to let them see where they were going. The steep walls plunging to a V-shape below them were connected by a series of massive structures crisscrossing the tunnel. Like the barnacle-encrusted strut wires of a sunken galleon, these structural supports were overgrown with irregular, organic bulges. Light seeped out of pinhole windows on these massive cables, indication, perhaps, that there was life inside of them. Although their stingray was moving at over 300 miles per hour, the enormous size of the passageway and the cablelike structures gave them the sensation of drifting slowly along, deep underwater.
The tunnel ended and the tiny ship reached the source of the pale blue light. They entered the central chamber of the mother ship. It was like swimming through milky blue water on a densely foggy day. For several moments, neither Steve nor David could see anything at all. It wasn’t until the first of the towers came into view that they realized the soupy atmosphere was limiting visibility to twenty miles or so. The towers were knobby, bulging structures rising through the fog like endless sections of rope tied into thick knots. They were built in piles, like dripping candle wax that grows eventually into a spire. Along the outsides of these towers were clearly defined pathways, access roads perhaps, for repairs. The dizzying height of these towers, disappearing out of sight both above and beyond, made the humans feel like guppies who had wandered into a shark tank.
As they neared the center of the mother ship, they came across something stranger still, what looked like a tip of a screw hanging above a round platform. This circular platform was a level field approximately fifty miles across and fell away steeply on all sides. As the men were drawn closer, they were treated to a horrifying image of several thousand aliens marching in phalanxes towards the edges of the platform. The area was some sort of parade ground and the creatures appeared to be loading themselves into the long boxy ships that were docked around the platform’s edges. An invisible energy shield protected them from the vacuum of space.
“What the hell is that?” David wondered, physically repulsed.
“Looks like they’re preparing the invasion,” Steve answered with a lump in his throat. For the first time in a long while, he felt himself getting scared.
Their attacker was lifted higher, up toward the massive structure hanging directly above the alien parade ground, what had looked like a screw tip from a distance. Like an inverted mountain peak, this structure spread from a sharp point up to a massive base. It was built in thousands of layers or stories, each one containing numerous large windows that showed a brighter source of light behind them. Near each window, stiff beams extending a short distance into the inner space of the central chamber held two or three of the stingray attackers. This was their central docking point, and the nerve center of the entire alien civilization.
David carefully noted that, just as Okun had predicted, the attackers were moored to their host ship by a set of clamps that closed over the rigid fin running along the top of each stingray. The circuit terminals ended in a fingerlike flange, allowing the small ships to connect directly to the computer-compatible command system of the mother. Dangling off the wall beside each of the million windows on the conical tower was a limp tube. As the humans drew closer, they could see that the tubes were made of a transparent material that resembled nothing so much as a very large intestine. Apparently they could be controlled to reach out from the wall and attach themselves to the bottom of the ships, sealing over the hatch to allow the pilots to enter the tower, providing a passageway into the main ship, shielding those who used them from the vacuum of space.
“This isn’t gonna work,” Steve said, drawing David’s attention to the large window they were approaching. “They’ll be able to see us before we can do anything.” Indeed, through the large plate windows, several aliens were visible inside a well-lit space that appeared to be a control booth. The distance between them was shrinking rapidly.
“Not to worry,” David assured him, “this ship comes fully equipped. Reclining bucket seats, AM/FM oscilloscope and,” he pressed a button on the console, “power windows!”
Instantly, a set of heavy blast shields began rising along the windows, blocking the aliens’ view, but also sealing Steve and David inside. Flying blind the last few hundred feet, they felt the ship lurch violently to a stop, then heard the powerful clamps locking themselves onto the fin overhead. The only lights in the claustrophobic cabin came from the ever-blinking instrument panel and the sickly greenish glow rising from the screen of David’s laptop.
“This is getting a little too spooky,” Steve whispered.
David didn’t hear. He was too deep in concentration, watching the changes flash across his computer screen. The moment the clamps locked them in place, the movements on the screen, which showed the status of the protective shield, reversed their direction. That told David that they were connected to the source. He switched over to another screen, which flashed the words “Negotiating with Host.” He held hi
s breath as the signal analyzer program sorted through the billions of possibilities. Then, much sooner than he expected, the machine beeped and displayed a new message, “Connecting to Host.”
“We’re in! I can’t believe it, but we’re in!”
“Great, now what?” Steve was less than thrilled about sitting in the creepy box surrounded by a hive of aliens. When David returned to working on his computer without answering his question, the pilot unbuckled his seat belt and moved to the entry hatch, ready to plant his boot into the mouth of the first alien who stuck his head inside.
“Okay,” David said more to himself than to his companion, “I’m uploading the virus.”
Outside the ship, the lights on a small black box welded to the bottom of their attacker blinked on and off, distinguishing it from the thousands of other ships parked around them.
*
A technician pulled his headphones off and turned away from his console to face General Grey. “He’s uploading the virus.”
Grey’s scowl suddenly disappeared, temporarily replaced by a look of astonishment. He wasn’t expecting any part of this lamebrain plan to work. Then, just as quickly, the furrowed brows and downturned corners of his mouth returned as he picked up a handheld microphone and sent his voice into the sky. “Eagle One, do you read?”
“Affirmative,” Whitmore answered, “loud and clear.”
“The package is being delivered. Stand by to engage.”
Although Grey’s furious reprimands had taught the rookie pilots to stay off the airwaves, he imagined their shouts of joy when they heard the news. Even the president could not hide how he felt when he acknowledged the message. “Roger,” he said excitedly, “we are standing by to attack!”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 27
