“Oh, I don’t think Mel would shoot me.”
“She shot me.”
“She shot Annie. It just turned out to be you.”
“I don’t see how that’s better.”
Ed laughed.
“Maybe it’s not.”
The trees in front of the house were filled with the cries of soldiers who were being mortally inconvenienced by Vi’s small horde. Gunshots, all over the place.
This should have been over, he thought. Annie was wrong. So was he, apparently.
“Tell me about the signal,” he said.
“Which signal?”
“The one making everyone angry. I know you said it would take some work to reverse it, but what if we just broadcast static?”
“To what end? Static doesn’t communicate information.”
“Yeah, but it drowns out other noise. Can we do that?”
“From here? No. The only thing powerful enough to do that just took off with Annie inside.”
Ed saw some movement in the woods outside the window, so he manned the gun and got a closer look.
“There’s a moose out there,” he said.
“Yes, I have a moose,” Violet said. “He was a challenge.”
“That soldier sure thinks so.”
An army cadet was being chased by the moose. His arrival in the clearing marked the closest inbound progress anyone had made so far, but he didn’t look like an enormous threat at the moment. His gun was gone, and he was limping badly.
Ed aimed the gun anyway. He was pretty positive the shot would be about as good as the attempts made by the fake soldiers in the Latvian ghost town, but he was told to try.
Then two wolves ran out and cut off the cadet’s access. He turned and ran back into the trees. Something that might have been a bobcat jumped on him then, and Ed lost sight.
“I appreciate that you’re still trying to think your way through this, Edgar,” Violet said. “But I think we’re out of tricks this time.”
“Huh. Never thought I’d see the day when a sentient idea tried to tell me there were no new ideas left.”
Annie watched the attack on the farmhouse from space.
“Why are they doing that?” she asked. This was as much an out-loud musing as a direct question. “They know I’m not there. Are you doing this?”
We have already shot one.
“What? Who?”
The ship responded to the request before the entity had an answer. Annie got to witness Violet getting shot from the perspective of one of the soldiers in the truck.
She can walk that off, Annie thought. Nobody else can.
“You haven’t answered why,” Annie said. “This only pisses me off; it won’t get you what you want.”
They are your flaw.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
You do. Give us what we want or we will kill all of them.
“I don’t think you want to make me that angry.”
Your anger is no threat to us. How do you not see? We exist in a multitude across this planet, and we are eternal. You can destroy as much of this world as you wish and we will still be here, do you not understand this?
“I’m just saying, hurting the people I love will have consequences. If you still have a conscience left, you’ll back off and work out another solution. I appreciate you guys got a raw deal, but there are other ways to do this. I’m trying to give you an out, here.”
You have nothing to bargain with. After these friends, it will be this town, and then the country and the world. We will turn them on each other. By your hand or ours, it will all be destroyed.
The entity pushed a new memory on her, and suddenly she was in the head of another human. He was standing next to a general she thought she’d probably met once or twice. His name began with a P.
“We think an air strike would be more effective,” the man whose head she was in said.
They were standing at the edge of Violet’s road. This conversation must have just happened.
“That’d be a significant escalation, gents,” the general said.
“You have the authority.”
“You’re right, I do. No civilians in those woods, right? Just insurrectionists. And maybe the girl.”
“Maybe the girl.”
The scene blinked out.
We can call off the strike. Give us what we want. You have five minutes.
“My name is Lindsey Drucker. You might know me online as Canny Ollins. I’m broadcasting from Sorrow Falls, and the army is trying to kill us right now. Here’s the story.”
Lieutenant Devlin had never heard of this person, but the feed was legit. He didn’t know how she could be where she said she was—they didn’t have this girl listed as an associate, and nobody reported her involvement—but she definitely was at the scene. And now she was showing the world what the army was doing in Sorrow Falls.
“Sir, what do you want us to do?”
Team Babysitter violated state, federal and international laws so often, and so routinely, that sometimes it was hard to keep track of where the line between okay and definitely not okay really was. They told themselves it was necessary, and maybe that was true most of the time. But the hubris…
“Not sure what you mean,” he said to the corporal with the question.
“About the broadcast.”
They had the power to cut off Lindsey Drucker’s internet access, essentially. It meant shutting down the entire town of Sorrow Falls as well, which had already been suggested twice, for similar reasons, once the shooting started. But Devlin was still striving to be the cool head in the room, and this was definitely on the wrong side of that okay line.
“Nothing we can do.”
“We can suppress it.”
“I said, there’s nothing we can do. Let it go.”
“Yes sir.”
On the other side of the room, the second airstrike in history that involved a civilian target was being coordinated and finalized. It was funny that it was the same target both times, but only a little funny.
“We should never have been given this much authority,” he said to himself.
His cell phone vibrated. He stepped into the office and had a look.
Get it ready, the text said. No choice.
He sighed, and closed the door.
“It shouldn’t be this easy.”
Devlin picked up the phone on the desk. There was no need to dial; it only called one place.
“All right, let’s say I surrendered the ship,” Annie said. “How would this work?”
You would give it to us.
“Yeah, yeah, I get that. God, you guys are single-minded. How would it work, was the question.”
We are connected right now. We only need to follow your mind, but you must surrender control of the ship. It only accepts one master, or we would have taken it already.
She wondered how long they had been trying to force their way aboard, and decided it probably started around the time the ghost of Rick Horton showed up.
“You said you’re all over the planet. Are you all coming up?”
We are one and we are a multitude. One and all.
“…is that a yes? I don’t speak weirdo.”
The entity sighed, which was sort of funny.
Yes.
“You travel as a squad.”
Yes.
“Cool. How do I do that? Surrender control?”
Think it, and it will happen.
“Just… push the idea to the ship and you’ll take care of the rest?”
Yes, Annie Collins.
“Then you’ll call off the airstrike, right? And my friends will be okay?”
You have our word.
She tried not to laugh. Annie was positive their word meant exactly nothing. The real gamble here was that the army called things off after what was about to happen next, on their own, without external intervention. Otherwise, her friends were probably not going to make it to the end of the day no matter what she did.<
br />
“Cool,” she said. “But you have to drop me off on the surface too. Like, don’t eject me or anything.”
Of course.
“What happens after that? I don’t want you sticking around. You’ll go off and explore the universe, right? Find a civilization that’s ready for that equation and rebuild or whatever you’re thinking?”
The multitude sighed again.
We have no interest in this world. This should be obvious to you now.
“Yeah, it sort of is. So, but I have your word?”
Yes.
Annie put together an idea, and pushed it to the ship.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s done. Call off the strike. I give.”
There was an enormous difference between fighting off armed soldiers and fighting off mindless zombies. Ed didn’t like either one, but the soldiers option was much worse.
The fight over the forest had evidently been won by the army of the living, and now they were closing in on the house. Bullets were landing in range of the windows, which meant Ed had to run from room to room, firing whatever weapon was on-hand while exposing himself as little as possible.
He wasn’t hitting anyone, and the whole thing was silly, but he did it anyway, if only to give the impression they had a larger force. The camper was drawing most of the fire anyway, which was good because it had armor plating, which the house did not have.
Ed’s job was to keep the soldiers charging the house all at once, and it was working a lot better than it should have. Twice, he’d looked out one of the windows and locked eyes with a soldier who probably had Ed cold, except the man with the gun hesitated due to something that looked like fear.
Why they were afraid of Edgar Somerville, mild-mannered analyst, was a mystery.
Sam, Cora, Oona and Laura were doing the real damage. They had bombs, and they weren’t shy about throwing them, to say nothing of the remote ones in the woods. It was impossible to say if the bombs were reaching any targets, but they established a line the army had so far shown itself unwilling to cross.
Ed figured they were maybe ten minutes away from the military rolling heavy artillery down the road and taking out the camper, perhaps only being held up by the wreckage of the troop transport in the middle of that road.
It was only a matter of time, though. The problem was that the farmhouse team was using everything they had to repel an enemy with so much available force that the percentage they’d already employed consisted of a rounding error.
Their only real chance was to hold out until someone on the other side regained their senses. Before Violet had been shot, Ed would have said that was likely. Now, it seemed like long odds.
He’d tried getting Melissa on the radio to see if she felt like being the one to find her senses, but Mel wasn’t making any sense.
“I don’t know who this is anymore,” she said. “But you should know an air strike is coming. You’ve left us with no choice.”
No amount of pleading mattered. Captain Braver had it in her head that he was both Edgar Somerville and not him at all, and he couldn’t talk her out of that idea. Not even when he pointed out that even the most precise airstrike in the world would still get some of their own soldiers in the blast.
Ed had just finished firing an absurdly large gun out of one of the library windows, while holding his breath for that threatened air strike to be realized, when his phone chirped with a text notification. He stepped away from the window, briefly hopeful that this was Melissa, and she’d come to her senses.
It wasn’t her. It was Annie.
Everything will be okay, she texted. I’m sorry.
What do you mean? he texted back.
Then he caught sight of the rocket, streaking across the sky.
Annie.
The ship’s sensors indicated the arrival of the entity.
“Everyone aboard now?”
Yes. This feels strange.
“Well sure, you guys built this, but never got to use it. It’ll take a minute to get used to.”
No. Not that. No. We are sensing… alarm. What is alarm?
“Oh, that! Yeah, sorry. That’s a proximity alarm. I didn’t even think about turning that off. Won’t matter, just hang tight. This will be over in a sec.”
Something is coming.
“Yep. A nuclear bomb. Big one, too.”
What did you do?
“Let me share a little wisdom I picked up a few years back from an alien I met,” she said. “He told me ideas weren’t good or evil, but the way they were used could be labeled that way. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist. Thing is, you dudes aren’t an idea, and I think you might be evil. I also think if I gave you this ship, you’d do things with it that I would definitely call evil. Since I can’t let you have the ship and you won’t let me keep it, well…? This is the only other option. Sorry.”
Executing a command chain preauthorized by the President of the United States, on an afternoon in late May, the Pentagon approved the release of a thermonuclear device.
The rocket that carried the bomb was newer than anything else in the country’s nuclear arsenal, having been designed specifically to reach outer space. Likewise, the targeting package in the on-board computer required no coordinates. It was always pointed at only one thing, and it was intended only for use on that same one thing.
The bomb was, in nearly every way, a last-resort weapon. It was the most fearsome thing the United States had, and everyone—from the military contractors, to the generals, to the president—expected it to fail. It existed so that it could be said that they had tried everything.
It was called the BBSK—Big, Bad, Spaceship Killer—and about the only way it would ever succeed in destroying the spaceship it targeted was if someone was holding down the off button on the ship’s internal defenses.
Marcus was watching the live feed, while everyone else in the room at Team Babysitter scrambled to figure out how the BBSK had managed to get launched in the first place. If this worked, there was a chance he was going to be arrested and charged with something. If it didn’t work, they were all going to be dead anyway, so he was at peace with the choice.
Except for the part where he was essentially helping Annie Collins commit suicide. He didn’t care for that at all.
The missile reached the upper atmosphere, and then its target. And then it exploded, and every single method of detecting the spaceship’s presence got fried: all the satellites that shared lower orbit with the ship were blown up at the same time; the ground-to-air cameras all went dead; the radios to the ground team in Sorrow Falls fell silent. Everything.
“Can anyone tell me if it worked?” he asked a stunned room. “Is the ship still there?”
“Everything’s down, sir,” someone said, pointing to black screens.
“Well get me something. A camera on the head of a seagull, if you have to.”
It was ten minutes of calling around without any luck before one of their ground-based cameras rebooted and got them a picture of where the ship was supposed to be.
“I have confirmation, sir,” the technician said. “The spaceship is gone.”
Everyone who did not see the BBSK streaking skyward at first assumed that the enormously bright flash of light was the precursor to a new attack from the heavens. But the light didn’t fade, the attack never happened, and then what looked like bits of debris were creating a fireworks display in the upper atmosphere.
It was up to every witness in Sorrow Falls—and the rest of the East Coast—to arrive at what would be the correct conclusion on their own: The government had nuked the spaceship.
And it worked.
Everyone around the farmhouse stopped firing. Ed couldn’t tell whether this was a cease-fire because orders had been issued to that effect, or if everybody was too stunned to do anything else. He ended up outside, in what was a firing range a few minutes earlier, and he couldn’t say how he got there.
“Ed? Ed!” Sam was running from the trai
ler. “It wasn’t… they didn’t…”
“I get it,” Ed said, nodding slowly, not necessarily addressing anybody in particular. “She drew the alien aboard and then blew it up. It was the only way.”
“But she was on the ship, Ed!”
“It was the only way.”
Someone behind him was sobbing. Laura, Lindsey, Dobbs… It could have been anyone. Oona, even. Ed mostly just felt numb.
I let you down, he thought.
He looked down the dirt road. Melissa Braver was walking slowly towards them, alone, with a radio instead of a gun in her hand.
She looked at Ed, put a hand on her chest, and nodded slowly.
“Cease-fire,” she said over the radio. “Everyone fall back.”
Ed nodded something like a thanks to her. Not that it mattered any more, but it was nice that nobody would be trying to kill them for a few minutes.
He turned around and started back for the farmhouse, trying to work out exactly what he was supposed to be doing now.
Plan a funeral? Go on the run? Maybe just drink for a while?
His whole life for the past six years had revolved around the spaceship, and Annie Collins, and now both of them were gone. And he couldn’t stop thinking that it was his fault.
Violet, still trying to repair that gaping chest wound, had made it as far as the porch. He just shook his head at her.
“I guess it’s just the two of us now,” he said.
She looked confused.
“I don’t think what happened is what you think happened,” she said.
Then his phone rang. He was on autopilot when he answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey dude,” Annie said. “That was a long way down. Can you send an ambulance to my house? I think I broke my arm.”
24
The Secret Garden
The aftermath of the latest incident in Sorrow Falls ended up looking a lot worse for the United States government than it did for just about anybody else. There were a lot of reasons for this, but paramount was the part where the army shot at private citizens who were protecting their land.
That very fact put the government in a losing public relations battle almost before anyone realized there was a P.R. battle to lose. Lindsey’s live broadcast of the Siege of Sorrow Falls not only brought her international attention, it shifted the public conversation away from Annie Collins and toward the concept of government overreach. It looked like it was going to stay there for a while.
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