Final Assault
Page 13
“Get in the back,” Banks said.
“The odds—”
“I don’t need to hear the odds or your pessimism. Get in the back.”
Thorne shot her a glance and didn’t move. “You’ll need me.”
“That’s more optimistic,” she said. “You can stay as long as you shut up.”
He nodded his head. Razi stifled a grin. Banks pulled off her coat and stripped down to her T-shirt.
She longed to take off her shoes as well, but knew that wouldn’t be practical. Even her hair was suddenly wet with sweat.
She wished she had a clock so she would know how much longer this would last. Minutes seemed like an eternity in here. This was one problem she had no control over. She had to trust her ship. It was built sturdy enough to get them through without cooking the crew like lobsters in boiling water.
She raised her fingers away from the controls. Even the plastic surfaces were growing too hot to touch. Any more heat and everything inside would start melting. Her throat was so dry it hurt. She should have brought water up here, but she would bet that the water stored in the back was too hot to touch.
Finally, the reds outside the window started fading.
“We’re slowing down,” Razi said.
Banks could feel it, too. Son of a bitch! She laughed and heard a hysterical edge to her voice. “We did it.”
Thorne started cheering, and behind her, she heard other voices cheering as well.
“We did it,” Banks repeated.
Razi was grinning.
But they didn’t have much time to celebrate. They had made it through the friction of reentry. Now they had to land this thing.
The next problem.
Banks felt her giddiness ease. She looked at the control wheel in front of her. It had been installed in just this shuttle alone. She had specifically asked for Endeavor II when she heard the plans for the ISS, because she knew the Endeavor II had more manual equipment than any other shuttle.
Now she was glad she had seen that far ahead.
The wheel was a lot like the old steering wheels on planes. It controlled the manual hydraulic system that had been installed in the shuttle. If she turned the wheel to the right, it increased the pressure in certain hydraulic lines and the rudder went left, moving the glider slightly to the right.
Pull back on the wheel, ship up slightly. But the shuttles were never intended to be controlled in this way. In the test flights even the Endeavor II had worked only marginally. Just good enough, one of the engineers had said, to give the best damn pilots a chance to survive.
Well, she was one of the best damn pilots. And she was taking every chance she could.
She was going to flare the nose up slightly right before the Endeavor plowed into the ground.
Finding a landing strip was going to be impossible, simply because they didn’t have the computers to figure out how to plan the glide approach to it.
She put her hands on the wheel. It was still hot, like the interior of a car is after sitting in the sun on a blistering summer day. She had trouble bending her fingers, but she forced them, despite the pain.
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face.
“I need eyes,” she said.
“I got it,” Thorne said, but it was Razi who unbuckled and stood so that she could get a better sight line out of the front windows of the shuttle, past the nose. Thorne apparently didn’t move at all.
Slowly Banks eased the nose down to a more level glide angle.
The shuttle responded to her control like an old cow trying to be shoved into a barn. Slowly . .. slowly . ..
One problem at a time.
Sweat stung her eyes, and she brushed at it with her right shoulder. Thorne saw the problem and wiped her brow with a tissue.
“Thanks,” she said, marveling that such a small gesture could actually change her opinion of someone.
“We’re over the Atlantic,” Razi said. “The east coast of North America is straight ahead.”
Damn it all to hell, Banks thought. The United States was the worst place she could land. There were too many people. And she didn’t dare ditch in the ocean. The crew would never get out before the shuttle sank.
“Florida,” Banks said. “We can head there.”
“Or Texas,” Razi said. “Lots of flat lands there.”
“Not flat enough,” Banks said, suddenly knowing what she wanted to try. “I’m going to make a long pass down Florida’s Gulf Coast, then see if I can make a turn and bring the shuttle down on a straight beach.”
The copilot nodded. “Good thinking. We miss and the water’s warm and shallow.”
Banks nodded. “And flat.”
“It’s like having a runway and a backup runway.” Thorne sounded relieved.
He was premature. She still had half a hundred steps to go through before they got off this ship and walked on terra firma again.
She eased the shuttle into a banking turn south, the hydraulic rudders working smoothly for the moment. The shuttle might be heavy, but in the atmosphere, it was a decent glider. And extremely fast.
Banks could see that the sun hadn’t yet got to the eastern seaboard, which would help them. They could see the outline of the land, and also lights along the shoreline.
The minutes ticked by as they sped half the length of Florida. Banks guessed that they were at thirty thousand feet when Razi said, “Better make the final turn.”
Banks agreed, slowly easing the shuttle to the left. In front of her the dark Gulf of Mexico loomed. Then slowly the coast of western Florida came back into sight, and she straightened their path along the seemingly straight edge. She knew that beach and shoreline were far from straight, but it was the best they could do at this point. She could get it down, but from that point onward, it was going to be sheer luck that saved them.
Luck had been with them so far. She would help it along by keeping this beast as straight as she could.
“Coming up fast,” Razi said.
“Get buckled in,” Banks said, then shouted back to the rest of the crew, “Hold on tight! This is going to be rough!”
Ahead of her she could see the dark line that indicated small waves and black water lapping on the sands. Houses, roads, tiny towns were flashing by behind them as they came in at nearly 200 mph.
At what seemed like around a thousand feet, she pulled back on the wheel, pulling the nose up and aiming the shuttle just along the wave line. For a moment she thought she had acted too late as the ground and water rushed up at them. But then the nose of the shuttle came up slightly, blocking her view of what was ahead.
Holding the wheel as tight and as hard as she could, she waited, keeping the shuttle straight.
Her muscles strained and shook. The sweat pasted her T-shirt to her back. She had to remind herself not to hold her breath.
Time stretched.
The impact seemed to take forever.
Out the side window, lights flashed past faster than she wanted to imagine.
Then suddenly she was smashed forward against her safety harness.
Scrapes, and squeals, and shattering, thundering crashes echoed around her.
The screaming of metal against sand made goose bumps rise on her flesh.
She clung to the wheel with all of her strength, focusing on holding the shuttle straight. It had to stay straight, but it was like controlling a herd of elephants with her bare hands.
Then for an instant the shuttle seemed to stop.
And in that instant, she knew what had happened. The shuttle had skipped like a flat stone over water.
Skipped as it had been designed to do in the upper atmosphere.
But this wasn’t the upper atmosphere. This was hard water and beach they had just skipped back into the air on.
“Shit!” she shouted.
She fought to hold the wheel in a position she thought was straight.
Fought to keep the nose straight down the beach.
T
hen she saw the lights of beach homes flash past her window. She had lost. The shuttle wasn’t straight at all. She fought the wheel, fought and fought—
As it turned out, there was nothing she could have done.
The shuttle’s wing caught the sand, twisting the shuttle around and flipping it like a spinning top down the dark beach.
The spinning tore the shuttle apart, scattering tiles and parts as it tumbled down the beach at over two hundred miles per hour.
Everyone inside was killed instantly, the force of the impact ripping them apart and splattering them around the cabin.
Two miles later the last small intact section of the shuttle cabin finally exploded on impact into a concrete beach wall.
There were only a few witnesses to the final moments of the shuttle as almost everyone who lived along that stretch of Gulf beach had evacuated the area for Orlando.
November 10, 2018
6:55 a.m. Central Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
Kara Willis’s back hurt. She was sitting on the ruined stool again, but the curve of the leather seat pushed the stool away from the wall just enough so that she couldn’t lean back comfortably. She had been on the stool most of the night.
The Hendricksons had fallen asleep on the couch, and her mother hadn’t let her wake them. Mr. Nelson sat in her father’s La-Z-Boy, and Barb was rocking in her mother’s rocker. Her mother was still in the kitchen, working frantically. She had refused to come into the living room to see what was happening. Instead, she was cooking as if there would be no tomorrow.
The phrase made Kara shudder. That was what they had been facing all along. No tomorrow. That was why she and half the household had stayed up all night.
Her father had wandered in and out of the room as the night progressed, stopping long enough to stare at the television, and then shaking his head and walking away. He didn’t like to be out of control any more than her mother did. And he hated what this had reduced them to—not the family so much as humanity itself.
He felt that human beings had stopped living while this threat was going on. They were just surviving, he had said, and that made them little more than animals. Kara had asked about the people leading the countries, the people who were fighting the aliens, and he had said they were surviving, too, just on a different level.
His attitude was so dark, so negative, that she didn’t really want to be near him. And fortunately it was fairly easy to stay away while there were so many people in the house.
She had been watching the various channels for several hours now. When the harvesters finally fell over places she had never cared about, Vietnam and Laos, and one place she had only visited, British Columbia, she felt a mixture of relief and terror. Relief that nothing was landing on Chicago, and terror that something would.
There were no nanorescuers in those wild places, so she wasn’t going to find out if the “protection” worked. Not yet anyway. And the newscasters were promising that the humans would attack the aliens when they came back to pick up their harvesters. That wasn’t going to be for twelve hours or more—full dark.
The sun was just beginning to rise here. Kara could see pinkness on the horizon through the living room picture window. She pushed herself off the stool and went to the door.
“Where’re you going, honey?” her mother asked.
Kara didn’t answer. She stepped outside, leaving the door open, and stared at the east.
The sunrise was pink and orange, with some dark red mixed in. What was that old saying? Red in the morning, sailors take warning. There was red here.
She took a deep breath. A lot of her neighbors were still outside, some of them asleep in their lawn chairs, blankets covering them. Most of the tents were zipped closed, and she couldn’t see the occupants.
She was the only one watching the sunrise. Even though it might be the last sunrise they ever see.
Her mother had told her not to be so pessimistic. Pessimism, her mother said, never got them anywhere. Yet it had been her mother who had sobbed so badly when she heard the aliens were returning, her mother who couldn’t watch the vids now, her mother who was trying to cook enough food to feed an army, maybe with the thought that, after today, they might never get a chance to eat again.
Kara shuddered. It was cold and damp. A November morning. That threat of snow she had felt the night before was still in the air, but there were no clouds, at least not yet. Something about the chill told her that winter was here. She usually hated winter.
She wanted to see this one.
Those people on the shuttle wouldn’t. Mr. Nelson had turned up the sound on one of the screens when the vid reporter was talking about the shuttle crew. They’d gotten off the International Space Station, blown it up and taken some aliens with it, survived the reentry into the atmosphere, and missed the landing on the beach. Up until that moment, the commentators were calling the crew’s survival a miracle and a sign.
After that, they had shut up.
But Kara was wondering if it was a sign. A sign that everything would go really well until the last minute, and then no one on Earth would know what hit them.
After all, the aliens didn’t need humans. They needed trees and plants and stuff, from what she’d been hearing. They needed to take stuff from the Earth so that they could live. Like farmers, only the aliens didn’t grow anything. The ultimate hunter-gatherers, her father had called them.
If Kara was those aliens, and she knew that humans could kick her butt, she’d do everything she could to destroy humans and leave Earth intact.
She hoped the governments and the military had thought of that and were guarding against it. Because there was a part of Kara that believed all this talk about one more harvest after this one, only one more, was wrong.
She didn’t know where the feeling came from. Her father would say it came from her fear.
Maybe he was right. After all, the Earth was a pretty big place. Even if the aliens came back again and again, they might not try to destroy Chicago. She had a really good chance of surviving.
“Kara, you’re letting in the cold!” Her mother’s voice floated from inside.
Kara sighed and looked at the sunrise one last time. It was beautiful. Would it still be that beautiful if there were no people left to enjoy it?
It was a question she’d never know the answer to, no matter what happened.
All she knew was that she wanted to see another sunrise. Thousands of sunrises. All the sunrises that she, as a seventeen-year-old girl, was entitled to.
Those aliens didn’t have the right to take that away.
November 10, 2018
11:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
All day and all night. Cross had managed to catch a two-hour nap on his couch midmorning, after Britt threatened to conk him with a chair and put him out herself. He’d agreed to take the nap as long as she took one, too, and they’d both agreed not to take one at the same time because he would have wagered neither of them would have slept.
Not that holding Britt for two hours would have been bad, but they needed the rest. They had to be on their toes for the next part of this whole attack.
Now Cross was sitting on the corner of the desk where, almost twenty-four hours earlier, he had watched as the shuttle left the ISS. The loss of Banks and her crew had shaken him more than he wanted to admit. He blamed his reaction on lack of sleep, but he actually thought that he had felt so strongly because they had been so heroic, and they had come so close.
It hadn’t been fair, but nothing about the tenth planet had been fair. He thought it monstrously unfair that he understood why the aliens were coming here. If only they were truly evil, inexplicable things who had attacked the Earth for no reason. But Cross understood their need to harvest the Earth’s riches. If he were in their situation, he would have tried to find a solution, any solution, no matter what the cost.
Just as they had.
“My God,” someone said.
Cross blinked. He’d almost been asleep on the corner of the desk, lost in his reverie. Before him, the telemetry continued to pour onto the screens, and the visuals didn’t look a lot different.
Everyone in the room, though, was looking at Odette Roosevelt. She had her hand over her mouth. Britt was hurrying to her side.
“What is it?” Britt asked.
“They’re coming back for their harvesters,” Roosevelt said.
Cross stood. Everyone else around him was standing, too, trying to see, on the small television monitors, the battle that they’d all be waiting for.
But Cross shoved his way forward. “Are you sure?” he asked.
Roosevelt nodded.
“They’re early,” he said to Britt. She frowned at him, not understanding why he was so concerned.
He kissed her on the cheek and headed back to his own office, muttering to himself the whole way. During the first harvest, the aliens had left the harvesters on the ground for more than twenty-three hours. This time they had cut that time short by five hours.
Why?
He pulled open his office door, stepped over the pile of cups and paper plates that were spilling out of his garbage can, and climbed behind his desk.
This wasn’t right. The aliens were supposed to be predictable. And this wasn’t.
Something was wrong.
He had to find out what that was as fast as he could. He had a hunch there was not a lot of time left.
Section Three
THE FINAL SHOT
8
November 10, 2018
8:14 p.m. Pacific Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
Finn Broderick held the controls of the Gulfstream 4 and marveled at the fact that he was doing this. Once upon a time, he’d been a commuter pilot, bringing people in and out of the Alaskan wilderness. A glam job, he’d thought when he lived in Florida. A nasty tough job, he’d learned when he got here, and one he’d been doing for nearly fifteen years. Doing, and doing well.