Cross likened it in his mind to the way humans lived two hundred years ago, when cross-country travel was time-consuming and difficult. Those who lived in extreme northern climates spent the short summers working fields, growing food, and preparing for the long winters.
That was what the aliens were doing.
Only this time they had encountered a serious disaster, similar to a spring drought, combined with summer wildfires that had ravaged not only the fields, but the homes of the farmers as well. If aliens did not have a successful harvest this time, they would not survive their long harsh winter. They would be destroyed.
They were fighting for everything. And when humans had everything at stake, they made mistakes.
Cross could only hope the aliens would.
That would be the basis of his final report to Maddox. That, and one other thing. Humans, when they were pushed to the very edge, when they knew they had to prevail or they would lose everything, became extremely dangerous creatures.
Maddox and the world leaders who were trying to fight these aliens had to get them to spend too much energy, had to prevent their harvest, and had to protect themselves against an even more frightening enemy than the one Earth had first encountered.
Because, Cross suspected, the aliens were as determined—perhaps even more determined—than the humans were.
Cross believed that humans, even after all they had been through, didn’t entirely understand the finality of this fight.
He also believed that the aliens knew that if they lost this fight, they would lose everything.
He was afraid that distinction would make all of the difference.
November 10, 2018
11:49 Universal Time
Second Harvest: First Day
General Gail Banks squeezed against the control panel in the newest section of the International Space Station. The remains of her crew—the best, most important members—were pressed around her, concentrating on their work inside the long, narrow control room.
In the last thirty days, she had transferred all of the ISS’s operations into this space. It had taken some work. Over the years, the ISS had scattered its operations throughout the various sections. So in addition to all the work the crew was doing for the fight against the tenth planet, Banks had had to siphon off some of her better programmers to make certain operations came out of one room.
That way, she at least had a chance of saving lives.
She had evacuated nonessential personnel to the surface yesterday. The eighteen remaining knew they were on a suicide mission. All of them had had the opportunity to leave and none of them had taken it.
Banks doubted she would have offered them the opportunity to leave if she thought any of them would. She needed them to launch the missiles. It was a job she couldn’t do alone.
She gazed at the small viewscreen above her. One hundred seventy-nine missiles were scattered across its surface like tiny black slashes against the universe. These missiles were not the hodgepodge she had had in the summer. Most of these had been built— quickly—for this mission.
And she hoped the aliens had no idea they were here.
There was no way of verifying what the aliens knew, of course, but the scientists on the surface said they saw no evidence of the aliens’ having the abilities that so many science fictional aliens did—of scanning through planets, of using instrumentation that read through solid rock. Earth was gambling on that, and gambling hard.
In the last month, Banks had moved the space station. She had sped up its orbit slightly so that when the aliens passed the moon coming toward Earth, it would be on the far side of the Earth.
Hidden.
The nuclear-tipped missiles were hidden near the ISS. She was going to launch them at the tenth planet.
She hoped that the ISS’s position would give them enough time to launch the missiles out of Earth’s gravity well and on their way before the aliens saw them. If the aliens saw them, they could suck the energy out of the missiles here, and the missiles would plunge uselessly to Earth.
The key was to get the missiles heading toward the tenth planet before the aliens even knew they existed.
Banks’s fingers moved across her control panel. This launching was much more difficult than the last. With the last, she had had the entire crew of the ISS. This time, she had barely what she needed.
She would have kept a few more, but this was all she could cram into a shuttle. Even though she knew their chances of getting off the ISS were slim, she was still going to try. The only people who achieved the impossible were the people who attempted the impossible.
The shuttle was standing by, waiting for her crew to finish their task and abandon the station.
The alien fleet was within the moon’s orbit and heading toward Earth.
The time was now, whether she was ready or not. And she was ready.
Everything was working smoothly. She’d even had time to double-check all systems.
“General,” Lief Anderssen said as he monitored the information before him. “Alien fleet is moving into orbit just as we had expected.”
Banks nodded. Anderssen was a slender, balding blond whose only task had been to monitor the alien fleet. He would continue to do so, but he would also help launch the missiles.
Although Banks didn’t say anything, she was relieved that the aliens were acting according to plan. The experts had been right. The aliens were extremely energy conscious, and they were coming in on the most direct and energy-efficient way to orbit the Earth.
“Two minutes and eighteen seconds to optimum launch window,” said Sofia Razi. Her dark head was bent over her console, and her body was contorted as she tried to fit into her small station. Razi was taller than most assigned to the ISS, but she was the very best officer Banks had ever worked with. Banks had juggled a lot of red tape to get Razi here.
Banks glanced out the small port at the stars beyond. The hope was that the rockets could be launched while the alien ships were dropping into orbit on the far side of Earth. The missiles would move around the planet, staying out of sight of the alien ships until they left Earth’s orbit, headed for a location in space where the tenth planet would be in sixteen days.
By the time the missiles were detected by the alien fleet, it would be too late to both do a harvest and intercept the missiles. Banks’s hope was that the aliens would protect their home world instead of doing the harvest.
Some had argued that the aliens would never leave their planet unguarded, and that the missiles were a waste of time and resources. But others had argued strongly that the aliens were so energy conservative, and so focused on getting what they needed from Earth for the coming cold sleep, that every ship would be sent in the fleet to Earth, leaving the tenth planet unguarded.
That idea went against everything Banks had ever learned in the military. But the fundamental idea made sense, and as the president had said, it was worth the gamble.
So she and seventeen others were willing to give their lives for this crazy idea, just in case it stopped the coming attack.
“One minute.”
Banks moved her fingers along her console, monitoring the same information her staff was giving her. She had only one hands-on duty, and that would come last. The rest of her duties were all in making certain everything went according to plan.
The long narrow room was stuffy. The environmental controls had not been monitored in nearly twenty-four hours, and somewhere along the way, they had left their normal mark. Or perhaps it was just the tension in the room. The entire crew knew they probably wouldn’t make it off the ISS alive.
They had to make certain the missiles launched, and launched properly, or they would all die for nothing.
“Thirty seconds.”
She waited, not allowing herself to hold her breath.
On the screen the missiles were cold, dark streaks against the blackness of space.
“Time,” Razi finally said.
“L
aunch,” Banks ordered.
In the blackness of space 179 missiles, every rocket and warhead the human race could get into space in the short time allowed, fired.
Banks watched through the port. The blackness around their small section of the ISS vanished, burned away in the brightness of the large launch. Then she glanced at her viewscreen. The imagery she had just seen was repeated on a tiny scale.
Silence filled the control room. Banks held her breath.
Seconds ticked by.
“All fired,” Razi said. “All on course.”
“Yeah!” Anderssen cheered like a boy, but he was the only one.
They didn’t have time to gloat. Not if they wanted to live.
“Transfer all telemetry to ground stations,” Banks said.
“Transferred,” Razi said.
With one last look at the rockets firing, now just faint dots of light hovering like a group of fireflies over the edge of Earth below, she turned to her crew.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.
They had exactly eighteen minutes to abandon the station and drop the shuttle out of orbit before the alien spacecraft would be on top of them. If the aliens were true to form, they’d drain the energy from this place. If Banks and her crew stayed, they would die here. Their air would run out first or they’d freeze to death.
She wasn’t going to die that way.
None of them were.
Making sure everyone was ahead of her, she gave one quick glance around the control room, then reached down and keyed in one last command.
The computers would track the incoming alien ships. When they were almost close enough to drain the energy from the station, it would explode with enough hydrogen bombs to level half of Europe.
The ISS had become just another weapon in the many that Earth would be throwing at the aliens this time. But if the ISS took out even one alien ship, it would be worth it.
Quickly she headed behind her crew toward the shuttle. Twelve minutes to board, release from the station, and drop into the atmosphere. No one had ever done that in under an hour before.
But they would.
They had to.
They had no other choice except death.
5
November 10, 2018
2:37 a.m. Central Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
Kara sat on the ruined kitchen stool, the one crazed Denny Zefio had sliced with his pocketknife. The beautiful leather top had been pulled together with packer’s tape, but it wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be.
Nothing was.
Kara leaned her head against the living room wall. Half the boarders were in here, watching the screens. The other half were in their rooms, pretending to sleep. Kara’s mother was making the next day’s bread as if nothing were happening. The entire house smelled of yeast and dough.
Her mother’s solution to this entire crisis seemed to be a personality transformation. She was trying to be the perfect homemaker. Now that she didn’t have to report to work—no one had to go to nonessential jobs— she tried to make sure everyone was comfortable, and that was proving to be quite a task.
Especially when she didn’t trust most of them.
Her mother had removed all of the important, heir-loomy stuff and boxed it before the stool incident, even before she had found out that she would have strangers in her home as well as family. She had started packing away all the “good” stuff the day that Kara had arrived home from her trek downtown, the day her father said she shouldn’t refer to if she didn’t want to upset her mother.
Kara had thought her mother was too preoccupied with saving all the valuables to notice anything, though she had welcomed her home with a big hug and kiss, and had expressed a lot of worry.
But ever since, when Kara started to leave the house, her mother always demanded to know where she was going.
Her father said that was how her mother showed she cared. Kara would have liked a little less caring and a little more freedom, especially now that the house was stuffed like a square sausage.
It didn’t even look like her house anymore. Her family’s furniture had been pushed against the wall and covered with blankets to make more room. Other people—the “guests,” as her mother called them, as if they had been invited instead of mandated—had brought some furniture of their own, mostly comfortable chairs, although one elderly woman had brought a bed that could fold into half a hundred different positions and had to be plugged into the wall.
Only the elaborate TV setup remained the same, and now all the screens were on all the time. After a few days, her father had found headphones for each screen, and unless everyone in the living room had agreed on a station, the viewer was required to wear them.
Her father had become what Kara privately called Ruler of the House. He set forth rules like proclamations, threatening anyone who didn’t comply with eviction. And everyone knew he would do it, too. He had evicted crazy Denny Zefio and his family—and when they had appealed the decision to the local FEMA office, her father had gone into full lawyer mode, bringing in other members of the household as witnesses as to why the Zefios were too dangerous to be sheltered with “normal” people.
Kara didn’t think any of these people were normal.
Her cousins from Beloit had insisted on bringing their two dachshunds, both of which were puppies and neither of which were trained. Her grandparents, from Joliet, had brought her grandmother’s entire spoon collection and wanted to display it on the kitchen wall— her mother had agreed, probably hoping the ugly thing would be stolen. Her father’s best friend from grade school had brought his third wife and her four children, none of whom got along.
And those were the people that Kara had known before all this began. The strangers were living up to that name, as well.
The house was big, so they were required to take in several families. And that didn’t count the people who had pitched tents on the lawn. Her mother’s roses were forever ruined, or so she said. Her father just rolled his eyes; he, like Kara, knew there was a good chance that the roses wouldn’t bloom again anyway.
The strangers included Barb, the elderly woman; crazy Denny and his family; their replacements, the Nelsons; and the Hendricksons, whose son, Connor, was just a little too cute to be ignored.
Kara now shared her room with her cousins Eve and Michelle, and could barely stand to go in there. It smelled of cheap perfume most of the time, and there was no longer a floor to walk on. Mostly, she had to step over piles of clothes—some of which were hers, because Eve had no notion of asking before she put something on.
Kara had complained to her father just once, and he had looked at her with that measuring gaze he sometimes had. If you can think of something better, he had said, do it. Otherwise, why don't you look at all the other houses around here? Everyone’s going through the same thing.
Not quite everyone.
Old Mr. McMasters down the street got busted for charging his “guests” for everything from parking to food. He was told to stop or move out of his own house.
The Stanhopes had gotten some kind of exemption, claiming too many family members, but Kara had never seen anyone but the two of them. For a while, she had thought they were going to get away with it, but as the neighborhood caught on, more and more of the tent people moved into the Stanhopes’ yard. They may have had the inside of the house all to themselves, but they couldn’t cross the yard anymore. And they didn’t get city-sponsored rations because they couldn’t provide evidence of boarders.
The food was turning out to be more important than anyone thought. Kara’s mother and Barb spent a lot of their time online, filling out the forms that gave them permission for their rations. Barb was training the others to fill out the paper forms, as well. She was afraid that the power would go out, and then there would be no computers at all.
Kara couldn’t imagine a world like that. She couldn’t imagine a world without electricity, even thoug
h she’d been through one outage, in that awful blizzard of’15. Nothing had worked then, and she had been afraid she was going to die.
Only she hadn’t known then how fear really felt.
She did now.
The aliens were supposed to come back tonight. She had tried to go to bed, but there was no sleeping, not with Michelle’s snoring, and Eve’s whimpering bad dreams. Kara had lain on her back in her bed—at least she still had her bed—arms folded behind her head, and stared at the ceiling, wishing she could see through it to the sky.
She knew, she just knew, the aliens were going to try to destroy Chicago. And she had a hunch they’d miss and hit Lake Forest. She and her family had had too much luck already. Yeah, they had lost the other set of cousins out west, but they hadn’t really been touched otherwise. Even the president’s declaration that only areas within a twenty-mile radius of a major city center would be protected hadn’t affected them in the way she had thought. Lake Forest was theoretically outside the protection zone, but since half of that zone was Lake Michigan, the FEMA people and the city governments decided to spread their safety zones north along the lakefront.
People south of the city were screaming discrimination, but they didn’t have any recourse. They had to move north. There wasn’t time to sue or to fight anything in the courts.
Or, as Kara’s father said, they could just stay home and take their chances.
Almost no one wanted to do that.
So they were all coming north. Kara’s once quiet neighborhood was a sea of tents and cars and strangers. There was no place to have privacy anymore. She couldn’t go to her room and she couldn’t go outside. Even if she went to the park, she would find tents filled with people, most of whom were snarling at each other because they never got a moment’s peace.
And things got even tenser yesterday when the planes flew over. They dropped grayish black stuff from the skies and everyone got scared, as if the aliens had come with planes instead of big huge spaceships.
Kara had pretended not to be scared—she’d heard the warnings that this was going to happen, same as everyone else—but her heart pounded hard all the same.
Final Assault Page 9
