“Annie could surrender the ship,” Dobbs said.
Everyone looked at him.
“I didn’t mean it was what we should do, but it’s one of the options, isn’t it?”
“They can’t have the ship,” Annie said. “And at this point I don’t think they’ll let me live even if I do hand it over. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but it feels like that’s where we are right now. Besides, it isn’t the military who would get the ship. Not really. It would be this alien race. I like that idea even less.”
“All right,” Ed said. “We can’t stay, we can’t run away, we can’t surrender and we can’t go back in time and make it so none of the past forty-eight hours happened.” He looked at Violet. “Right?”
“No, we can’t do that,” Violet confirmed.
“I could just leave,” Annie said.
“What?” Lindsey said. “No.”
Ed was nodding.
“Yeah,” he said. “I hate the suggestion, but that makes sense. The ship is already here. If you take yourself out of the equation for a little while, it would reset the board. We could surrender before anyone else gets hurt. Violet can use the time to figure out how to change their signal. Even if it takes a month or two for the change to have an impact, nobody can get to you if you’re in the ship.”
“I’d run out of food, but I could always come down and get a pizza or something. And the bathroom… I mean, it sucks but it’s a plan, right?”
She looked around the table, and got blank stares and nods in return.
“Unless someone has a better one?”
Annie was outside ten minutes later, having left the others at the table to discuss the logistics of surrendering, including someone having to break that news to Oona and Laura. They were probably expecting her to say goodbye before leaving. She wasn’t so sure that was going to happen.
A plan was forming in her mind; the kind of plan she didn’t feel comfortable sharing, because everyone inside would try to talk her out of it. Also, if the aliens worked the way she thought they did, the fewer people aware of the plan, the better. It might not succeed otherwise.
The spaceship was waiting for her on the lawn. It had burned a ring in the grass when it landed, and she could tell without getting any closer that its surface was already cool to the touch.
Rick stood next to it.
Annie hopped off the porch and walked up to the ship, and let the ghost continue to look put out by not being noticed.
“It’s always down to you and me, isn’t it?” she said, to the ship.
“And me,” Rick said.
Annie smiled.
“I’m ignoring you, because you’re not really Rick.”
“True. I’m not really that thing either.”
“Interesting point.”
“You think about it, I’m a little of both of you.”
“Then let’s not think about it.”
She put her hand out and touched the side of the ship. It was something hundreds of people had tried to do, back when it seemed like a harmless, abandoned hunk of tech. That was also back when the whole thing seemed sort of funny, when the ship that did nothing got its own movie, and souvenir shops, and tourists.
For a while, Annie got the attention that used to go to the ship, and that was sort of cool too, although they never got around to making a movie about her. (In fairness, she never authorized one.) Then it stopped being cool, and got a little annoying.
Now it was awful.
But she could touch the ship whenever she wanted, which was nice.
“I’m sorry you died, Rick Horton,” she said.
“Aww, thanks. Wasn’t your fault.”
“I know, but it feels like it was.”
“I dunno, I think I was kind of an ass.”
She laughed.
“Yeah. But I could have tried to understand why you were an ass. Maybe I could have done something about it.”
“Can’t help that kinda thing. But hey; this was nice. I’m glad we did this.”
Ed came out onto the porch. Annie turned her head at the sound of the screen door closing and when she turned back, Rick was gone.
“Hey,” Ed said. “You’re not leaving without goodbyes, are you?”
I was trying to, Annie thought.
“Wouldn’t be the first time, right?” she said.
The situation felt like a replay of the last time she’d fled this farmhouse to go confront an alien on her own. She was about to do the same thing now, but that was a part of the plan still simmering in the back of her mind.
“True. But you don’t have your bike anymore.”
“Oh, I do. It’s chained up in the house. The ship is way cooler, though.”
“Sure is.”
“And the bike can’t get me into orbit,” Annie said. “Hey so… this makes sense, right, Ed? I feel like I’m leaving you guys exposed.”
“You are, a little. But I think if you stay, the odds of all of us dying go up. I can talk our way out of it if you’re gone. Plus, inside the ship is the safest place in the… well, in or above the world.”
“True. But only for me.”
She pushed an idea into the ship, and a hatch opened next to her.
“Too bad this isn’t bigger, huh?” she said. “I could take everyone with me.”
“Next time,” he said. “And hey, don’t go too far, we still need you around. You have an idea to finish.”
“I’ll stick to lower orbit. Promise.”
Try and stay alive as long as you can, she thought. This is going to get tricky.
Davis and Williams were just about the oddest people Melissa had ever met. They paused in all the wrong places and had a habit of staring overlong at people in way that was profoundly unnerving. Despite that, they clearly had the general’s ear.
“We should consider a bombing run,” Davis said.
“It would eliminate the human threats, and the ship would remain unharmed,” Williams agreed.
Williams said this in a way which implied he was perhaps not himself human.
“We believe they have at least one hostage,” Melissa said. “Collins’s Secret Service agent is in there, and we don’t know if she’s willing.”
“Well, that is just one life, isn’t it?” Davis said.
“I, um…” she shot a glance at Cal Perlmutter, who didn’t look at all concerned. He wasn’t behaving much like himself around these two.
“That’s fine,” she continued, “but the ship can protect all of them as easily as it protects itself. We’ll just piss them off if we try that.”
“Then we will try a larger bomb,” Davis said.
Melissa laughed.
“Oh, come on, where have you guys been? We tried that three years ago, don’t you—”
“Captain Braver,” Melissa’s radio squawked. “Captain Melissa Braver.”
“Hang on, guys,” Melissa said. She opened the channel. “This is Braver.”
“Melissa, it’s Ed Somerville.”
“Hi Ed, where are you?”
“I think you know.”
“Would this be a good time to say you’re in a ton of trouble?”
“As I recall, I was never under arrest, so no, I don’t think I am. I just wanted to let you know Annie isn’t here anymore. You can stand down.”
There was a gasp from behind her. She turned in time to see the spaceship rocketing skyward.
“Ed, we know she can pilot that thing remotely. We’re going to have to search the whole area anyway.”
“Understood.”
“Also, it looks like you have some undead wildlife out here. Someone’s going to have to put them on a leash if this is going to go smoothly.”
There was a pause. Maybe he was talking to the zombie lord or something.
Probably Annie. She’s controlling the monsters and she’s still there.
“That’s not going to be easy to do, I guess,” he said.
“Is that so.”
The interior of the ship looked different than the last time Annie was inside it. That was entirely her doing. She’d been thinking about taking the ship out for a ride almost every day since she first sent it into orbit, which was just an obvious thing. If you have a spaceship of your own, eventually you’ve gotta take that ship into space and go exploring.
It was like having a boat you never took on the water, or a racecar that stayed in the garage. It just wasn’t the way things were supposed to be.
She never did take it into space, because of another analogy that came to mind: It was like having a bomb without ever seeing what happened when it went off. Plus, everyone would probably lose their minds if she took the ship out of orbit one day just to tool around in it.
Thoughts of eventually taking flight in the ship led to ideas about a new interior design. So, when she climbed in, she discovered a proper seat, with a seatbelt, a steering wheel, and a screen that gave her the same view she’d have if the entire ship were made out of transparent glass.
There were no pedals or knobs and only two buttons on the steering wheel. This was so she could shoot at things. (The screen came with crosshairs when she needed it.) This wasn’t to use on anybody. She harbored a second fantasy, whereby she’d take Shippie into space and shoot down an asteroid heading toward Earth. The idea was profoundly influenced by certain first-person videogame scenarios and likely had no real-world application, but that was how she ended up with buttons on the steering wheel.
All of it was unnecessary. The wheel especially so, not to mention how ironic it was: Annie was a terrible driver. But she could pilot the thing while inside it the same way she had done remotely. The wheel just made it more fun.
There had been other things requiring a lot of thought and planning, that she was happy to have put the work in for already. A good life-support system was one. Another was figuring out what rate of acceleration a human being could tolerate. The ship wasn’t really intended to be used by an intelligence contained in a physical body. If she let it take her into space at the same rate as it had a couple of years earlier, she’d be dead from the g-forces before they got out of the atmosphere.
Anyway, it all worked. She pushed the idea of traveling into space to the ship, and off they went. It was breathtaking, disorienting, and a little terrifying, because for the most part it felt like she was just being carried skyward with nothing around her.
At about halfway, she had to shut off the screen, because she was going to throw up. The trip was smooth, but she wasn’t exactly a trained astronaut.
And then she was in space. The ship settled into the same geosynchronous orbit as before, only this time it was over her friends instead of her.
She unhooked the seatbelt and floated around for a few minutes. It was fun, but probably not as fun as it could have been; the inside of the ship wasn’t really all that large. Then her stomach started to do flip-flops again, so she belted back in.
“Shippie, can you simulate Earth gravity?” she asked. The vocalization wasn’t necessary, but she preferred it anyway. All she was really doing was formalizing the idea.
The answer was silent, but affirmative. She had gravity again, so she didn’t have to think up an idea for what to do if she vomited in zero G. She put the screen up again, and then she was surrounded by space, and looking at the surface of the planet.
It felt like she was falling, and again she almost threw up. In a way, she was falling, just not toward the surface. Being in orbit essentially meant always falling, but missing, the planet. There was a bit more physics involved in staying fixed above Western Massachusetts, but thankfully the ship did all that math for her.
The ship had certain daily routines it went through. She was aware of them, because for the most part these were subroutines she’d asked it to perform. One of those was checking in with the satellite relays.
It always amazed Annie that nobody ever asked her how the ship could possibly know so much about what was happening on the other side of the planet. She had to issue that threat to everyone, back at the beginning, to make sure they left her alone. The implication of the threat was that the ship, in orbit over the East Coast of the United States, could listen in on things happening in places like China and Russia, even though those countries had a planet between them and the spaceship.
They probably thought it could listen through the planet, and maybe that wasn’t an insane conclusion. Maybe it could. She never asked it to. Instead, she had it create, and then drop, a dozen satellite radar relays. Each one was about the size of a grapefruit, and had exactly enough tech to maintain a steady orbit and to eavesdrop.
The relay network collected all sorts of information, stored it locally in the relays and then uploaded it occasionally to the main ship. She was pretty proud of herself for having designed the whole thing, back when she was sixteen and still figuring everything out. Maybe the smartest thing she did, though, was decide not to tell anyone about it.
She still hadn’t. Those little globes of alien tech were too small and too non-reflective to be detected from the surface. The only way to discover one was to accidentally bump into it while already in space.
This was the system that must have detected the threat to Annie. It was supposed to alert her to manifest threats of the immediate-bodily-harm variety. It probably didn’t know what to do with an everybody hates you now assault.
According to the ship’s health check, the relays were all still in place and functioning properly. She called the nearest one over. It fired its tiny rocket and headed towards the ship.
She’d never seen one of them with the naked eye before. It was adorable.
“We have some work to do, buddy,” she said to the tiny drone. “Shippie, I want to talk to some aliens, but not without protection.”
“What do you mean, she ran away?” Oona shouted.
Ed had just finished telling Mel that they were more or less surrendering, now that Annie was gone. Not everyone was a hundred percent on board with that.
“You saw the ship take off, what did you think was happening?” he asked.
“I thought she was gonna use that thing to take care of the army!”
“That won’t be necessary now.”
“So you say.”
“I don’t trust them either,” Laura said.
They were all on the porch, having gathered in the wake of the ship’s departure.
“I know the captain who’s running this exercise,” Ed said. “She can be reasoned with.”
“I kind of agree with them, Ed,” Sam said. “I’m not so sure anyone out there is in their right minds right now. They were shooting at the townspeople, remember? Now they’re facing… what, violent undead animals and an armed zombie in a suit? Pretty sure nobody’s going to mind if we end up dead. Annie was the only one with enough firepower to keep them cowed.”
Ed was stunned, because if there was one person—other than himself—who could be relied upon to give the military the benefit of the doubt, it was Sam. However, Sam was also the guy who put a bullet in someone’s head when the man looked at him funny. Either Sam had changed with the times, or the world had.
“Well what do you want to do, fight them to the death? We’ll lose that fight.”
“I don’t know that at all, mister government,” Oona said.
Ed turned to Violet.
“Are you sure you can’t call off the animals?”
“This isn’t like last time. I gave them all their own programs, and they’ve been in defensive mode since the perimeter was breached. They understand friend and foe, and that’s all. I can do it, but I have to get to my capsule first, and it’s a day’s hike away.”
“What about… what do you call it, swapping minds? You could swap with Susan and work on it right away. She’s already there.”
“I can, but if I leave this body right now, it will die, and then I’ll still be a day away. I can do that if you insis
t.”
“Hey, what about the media?” Lindsey said.
“You wanna livestream a government siege?” Oona asked. “I’m game for that.”
Ed grimaced. Oona and Laura were already prepared to be martyrs for whatever cause wandered into their path.
“Look, if we all want to live, surrender is the best chance we have,” Ed said. “We do want to all live through the day, right?”
“Not if we’re in prison, nossir,” Oona said.
“I do,” Dobbs said.
“Great. Dobbs wants to live. I do too. I’ll go talk to them.”
“I’ll go with you,” Violet said. “The animals won’t view you as a threat, but any soldier will be seen that way. If they see me, I may be able to keep them from attacking the road.”
“All right. But go take a shower. The less you look like you just dug yourself out of the back yard, the better this will go.”
Lieutenant Devlin was pretty sure everyone on Team Babysitter had gone insane except for him.
For starters, there was the incursion into Sorrow Falls, an action he was nearly positive wasn’t legal. He knew what the party line was, but to his knowledge nobody actually checked to see if the army still carried the jurisdictional authority everyone was pretending it still had there. In his recollection, the suspension of posse comitatus had to be renewed every so often, so if the date of renewal had come and gone—and he was pretty sure it had—then the army shouldn’t be there.
But dicey legal issues were only a small part of the problem. The soldiers in the field seemed to think the town was now populated by actual monsters. Not metaphorical ones. Real nightmare creatures from whatever hell one opts to believe in. (Devlin was a Christian and believed in the standard version, but to each his or her own.) This was obviously preposterous, but everybody, from the technicians he shared a room with to the captain on the scene, agreed that this was absolutely, definitely no-doubt-about-it happening.
In the town itself, this made for a lot of unwise discharges of service weapons, and that was not playing at all well in the media. There were some outspoken news personalities who sided with the army on this, but there was also a lot of amateur reporting leaking out of the town and into social media, and the military didn’t look good in any of it. They would need public opinion to be in their favor after all of this, and that wasn’t going to happen if someone ended up dead, on camera. But Devlin appeared to be the only one even considering this angle.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 34
