Final Assault

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  It was an alien craft, sleeker and darker than any of the others.

  “What the hell is this thing?” she snapped.

  “I don’t know', sir,” someone said.

  “Then find out!”

  And as she spoke, the dark ship opened fire on the planes, disintegrating them instantly.

  Maddox glanced from screen to screen. The alien ships seemed to be protecting their harvesting ships at all three locations. Plane after plane was being shot from the sky.

  “Maybe we should return fire?” one of the adjuncts asked.

  “With what?” she snapped. “These are corporate jets and private planes and—ah, hell!”

  And they were all dying before they could release their bombs.

  “Call a retreat!” she said.

  Her staff turned to her. She had vowed not to retreat before these aliens again. Her staff knew it. But she saw no choice. Most of those pilots were civilians and they were being slaughtered.

  “Call the goddamn retreat!” she snapped.

  And the word went out.

  The planes retreated.

  And the aliens were probably gloating.

  “That son-of-a-bitch Cross said they’d conserve energy. That didn’t seem like conservation to me.” She was muttering as she touched the screen before her, getting updates.

  “Actually, sir,” Ward said, “it is. If you consider the ships to be a resource as well.”

  She shot him a look that she hoped would silence him for the rest of his life, then she sank into her chair.

  The alien harvester ships were lowering to the proper altitude and retrieving their cloud of black dust.

  She thought of how her family always went to the Superior National Forest in summer, and then drove around the lake to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The nanoharvesters had fallen to Earth and ruined the place where she had once played as a child.

  She clenched a fist and pounded it on the screen, causing all the images to jump or freeze.

  This time the damned aliens had the benefit of surprise. She hadn’t expected them to recover so quickly.

  She had underestimated them.

  And she couldn’t get close to them, not with those weapons ships still hovering.

  She had to think of something else.

  At least this was the last attack.

  At least they hadn’t touched the cities.

  There were small miracles here.

  But not the miracles she wanted.

  9

  November 11, 2018

  6:30 p.m. Central Standard Time

  Second Harvest: Second Day

  Kara got off the stool and walked toward the television screens. All the vid announcers were saying the same thing. The last attack had started, and the aliens had picked their targets.

  The Amazon.

  Africa.

  And a state-and-a-half away from her. Close, but not close enough. She had known they were coming to the Midwest. She just hadn’t expected it to be the upper Midwest and Canada.

  She hoped that the folks in International Falls and Thunder Bay had evacuated like they were supposed to. She hoped they all got away safely.

  She rested her hands on the back of the couch, not caring about the look she got from the Hendricksons.

  So she was invading their personal space. They were invading her home.

  Her mother had finally come out of the kitchen, a towel in her hands. She had flour on her cheek and a streak of chocolate near her upper lip. Her eyes were red-rimmed, just like they had been in the middle of the night when Kara had left her to return to the stool.

  Some vid reporters were near the site. They were filming from the ground. A few were in helicopters, and Kara could hear tinny voices in the background, telling them they were in protected airspace.

  “Idiots,” her father said from behind her. “We don’t need this on tape. We need to destroy those ships. That’s the first priority.”

  “I think they have to be up there anyway,” Mrs. Nelson said. “So they may as well film.”

  “At least we know what’s going on.” Barb was standing near the kitchen door. Kara had thought she had gone to bed long ago.

  And Connor Hendrickson staggered out of his room, his long hair sticking up. He had actually been asleep. She glared at him. Yeah, he was good-looking, but what kind of guy slept when the world was about to be destroyed. “We’re okay then?” he asked.

  “They missed us, son,” his father said.

  “Cool.” Connor stuck his hands in the pocket of his robe and frowned at the screens. “Then what’s that?” An explosion occurred off to one side. Then another and another. There was screaming into the mikes. Mr. Nelson turned the sound up so loud Kara could hardly stand it.

  “Shit!” her father said. “Those are our planes!”

  “What’s happening?” Barb asked, coming deeper into the room.

  “People are dying,” Kara’s mother said, twisting the towel in her hands. “Oh, God.”

  She wandered back into the kitchen as if she couldn’t stand what she was seeing. Kara couldn’t either. Plane after plane was disappearing until, finally, the vids were cutting off.

  Strained announcers were appearing on the screen again, and Kara leaned against the couch.

  She had never felt so many conflicting emotions in her life. She was happy her home had been spared and relieved that she was going to live, and horrified, just horrified, that she had watched more people die.

  Unlike her mother, she couldn’t pull herself away from the screen. Those people had died defending the rest of the world. She had to know what took them out.

  She was terrified that it was the aliens, that they had a new plan.

  But she didn’t say anything.

  No sense in making everyone in the room feel worse.

  November 12, 2018

  7:46 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Second Harvest: Third Day

  Leo Cross pushed his chair away from his desk and watched the video monitor before him. The word “holding..” kept scrolling on the phone link. He knew he was holding, and he wasn’t happy about it.

  Maddox had promised him that he would be able to get through when he had a hunch—and this one was a doozy. He’d just gotten off the line with three different physicists. And they all confirmed what he had suspected.

  This time, the aliens had a total of eighty-six hours before their best launch window forced them to return to the tenth planet. That was five hours longer than they had in April.

  Cross thought about hanging up and dialing again. He’d done that twice, the last time shouting at the military officer who had answered the phone. The man who had informed him that “General Maddox was in the middle of something right now.”

  “I know that, goddammit,” Cross had said. “Tell her Leo Cross has a hunch.”

  “Sir, I can’t—”

  “Tell her. I’m with the Tenth Planet Project. She knows who I am.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “I’m the person who discovered the planet in the first place,” Cross had snapped. “Now get her.”

  “Yes, sir,” he’d said, and put Cross on hold. Cross hadn’t called anyone from a large-screen video phone in years. He had forgotten how much more annoying it was to be put on hold when the word kept scrolling in front of him. When it scrolled on his wrist’puter, he didn’t even notice.

  This wasn’t going to work. Dammit. He didn’t have time to drive across town, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to find her. And damn Maddox for not giving him her personal line. She could have put him on hold as easily as that insufferable ass—

  Then Cross sat up. The word “holding..” had disappeared, replaced with “transferring..”. The ubiquitous ellipsis were almost as annoying as the scrolled words.

  But the fact that he was being transferred had gotten his attention.

  “Leo?” Maddox’s face filled the screen. She looked flattened, distorted, and tired. He knew
from the image that she was looking at her own ’puter.

  “I think we need a secure line,” he said.

  “This is secure,” she said.

  “You might want to be alone.”

  She sighed and vanished from his view. He got a wrist’s eye view of the room, upside down desks and screens and scurrying people.

  Then they were in a hallway.

  “Make it quick,” she said. “I’m in the middle of a crisis.”

  “I know,” he said. “My news is going to make it worse instead of better.”

  She didn’t look surprised. “You said you had a hunch.” “I want to give you the thought process, so that you can see where I got this information.”

  She almost said no. He could see it in her face. Then she must have remembered how his other hunches worked, how unbelievable they had sounded without the explanation of how he had gotten there.

  “This better be important,” she said.

  “Trust me, General,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t.”

  She nodded.

  He took a deep breath and plunged in. “All right. Here’s how it goes. I told you the aliens were predictable.”

  “And you were wrong.” She snarled the sentence. She blamed him, then, for the deaths.

  “I still think they are. I think they’re telling us—not intentionally—their plans through the changes they’re making.”

  “You’ve got my attention,” Maddox said.

  “Last April,” Cross said, “the aliens hit three different areas on their first attack. They left the harvesters on the planet’s surface for almost twenty-four hours, then picked them up and retreated into orbit for another twenty-four hours. When they came back to harvest three more areas, it was just over twenty-four hours later. All in all, over four days, the aliens had been in orbit and harvesting just slightly over eighty hours. In that first attack, they had taken exactly half of what they had on their previous visits to Earth every 2006 years. That’s how we knew they were coming back. That and the way their planet’s orbit worked.”

  “I don’t think I like where this is going,” Maddox said.

  Cross nodded. He didn’t like it either, but that didn’t change what he suspected was going to happen. He continued to explain his process. “You noted the changes,” he said. “So did I. But there was something else that was different. This time, the aliens have eighty-six hours to harvest before they have to return to the tenth planet.”

  “Five hours longer than last time,” she said softly. “Yes,” he said. “This time, their first attack took only eighteen hours. They waited eighteen hours between the first and second attacks.”

  Maddox looked at him, a frown line between her brows.

  “If they pick up their nanoharvesters eighteen hours from when they started this second attack, they would have saved almost eighteen hours.”

  “Plus those extra five hours,” Maddox said. “Goddamn it. They’re coming back for a third round, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Cross said.

  “And these first two times we were lucky. They didn’t go after the cities.”

  “That’s right,” Cross said.

  “You think they’ll do it this time?”

  He shrugged. He’d been asking himself that very question and not getting any real answers. “We’ve hurt them time and time again. They don’t have as many ships as they did. Maybe they need the third round just to get enough food to survive ”

  “Or?”

  “They’re using weapons on us, General,” Cross said. “We’re not the only ones who believe we’re at war.”

  “I hate your hunches,” she said. “But I’m damned glad you get them.”

  And then her image winked off.

  Cross leaned back in the chair and caught his breath. He had relayed the information. He had done what he could.

  But somehow, it didn’t feel like he had done enough.

  November 12, 2018

  1:24 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Second Harvest: Third Day

  Clarissa Maddox had spent the last five hours preparing her planes, her people, and the diplomats for a possible third attack. For the first time in her career, she was happy to have diplomats around her. They got to tell the foreign governments the news she’d been repeating since she got off the phone with Leo Cross.

  No one had taken it well.

  Not even she had, if truth be told. Those damn aliens were making her extremely angry, and she had to figure out a way to make them pay for what they were doing.

  She hadn’t figured it all out yet. But she would. Cross wasn’t the only person who had hunches.

  She paced her small office beside the war room. She couldn’t look at the holographic map of Earth at the moment, not with its gray spaces—from the aliens’ April attack—and the black spaces that marked the damage they had done this time. The world looked like a patchwork quilt that someone had stained. And she took each damaged area very personally.

  The problem was that Cross had been right. The aliens had left, taking their little nanoharvesters with them, and they had left after eighteen hours, just as he predicted. Which meant that the rest of his scenario was probably right, as well.

  She didn’t like it, but she would have to fight it, somehow. She just wasn’t sure how.

  No one knew how to get close to those death-ray spaceships the aliens had. And who knew they had those? Not even Leo Cross. He had been as surprised as she had.

  Not that she could have done anything about them even if she had known.

  Except save hundreds of human lives.

  She had just under seventeen hours until those alien bastards came back, seventeen hours to come up with a plan before they damaged even more of the Earth’s surface.

  Seventeen hours.

  Seemed like she had no time at all.

  She couldn’t even figure out where they were going to attack. Cross couldn’t figure it either. Her own people couldn’t tell if the aliens had enough food and supplies now or if this next run was to make up for all the damage that had been done.

  She hoped that was what was going to happen, but she wasn’t counting on anything.

  Except the nanorescuers. She prayed to every god she could think of and some she probably couldn’t that Portia Groopman’s little invention worked as well outside the lab as it did inside. Because chances were at least one population center would get hit this time.

  And then Maddox froze. The nanorescuers. They hooked into the alien harvesters. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a way to use that against the aliens.

  She hit the space on her screen that got her a direct link with Leo Cross.

  10

  November 12, 2018

  2:54 p.m. Central Standard Time

  Second Harvest: Third Day

  The house still didn’t feel like her home. The furniture was rearranged, and there were gaping holes where other people’s furniture had been. The hardwood floors were filthy, and the remotes were stained with soda and grease.

  Kara’s room still smelled like cheap perfume, even though her cousins were gone. And the back bedroom—the one that her mother was going to make into an office one day—reeked of dog pee. Apparently no one had let the puppies out for the last two days because they were afraid the dogs would die in the aliens’ attack.

  But the aliens had come and gone, and it was over. It was really and truly over.

  All that was left, as her mother had said, was the cleanup.

  And the repairs. Kara was supposed to be going through the house to see what was missing, what needed rearranging, and what needed their immediate attention. The dog pee certainly did, although she had no idea how to fix that. The basement was a mess, too. It had been trashed by the Nelsons, who apparently weren’t as nice as they had seemed.

  Only Barb was left. Barb and the Hendricksons, who didn’t want to start the drive back home until the following day. Kara wished they would lea
ve. She really couldn’t face Connor again. Even if her mother said he—as a teenage boy—would be able to eat all the food she had cooked.

  The kitchen looked like the holiday season was already upon them. Her mother had sent off their friends, relatives, and live-ins with a lot of baked goods and loaves of bread. So that they had something to eat when they got home, she had said, as if she had planned all of this.

  Maybe she had, but Kara had never known her mother to be that optimistic.

  She went into the new wing of the house, the one her father had added when he got promoted to senior partner at his law firm. Her grandparents had stayed here. Her parents called this wing the guest apartment, and it was sort of that, with its own little sitting room, the nice bedroom, and the really big bathroom.

  They had converted the walk-in closet into another bedroom for Barb, and they had used the storage room as a place for her father’s friends to sleep. Someone had left a radio on in that room, and the futon the kids had been sleeping on had disappeared with them.

  This room smelled like pee, too, and Kara suspected it wasn’t dog pee.

  She shivered just a little and was about to leave when something about the radio announcer’s voice caught her attention.

  ... repeat: the alien attacks have not ended. Stay in the cities. No one has issued an all clear yet. Stay where you are. Then the announcer’s voice lowered as he continued. We have received reports that the roads leading out of Chicago are clogged. Traffic is at a standstill on 90, 94, 290, 294 ...

  He was giving the interstate names because most people were unfamiliar with the road systems here. Her father had explained that to Kara last month, when all the people poured in.

  She felt a shiver run down her spine.

  It wasn’t over yet. This announcement was for real.

  She ran through the sitting area and out the main door of the wing. The yard was empty. Plastic cups blew across it in the winter breeze. There were flat spots on the grass where the tents used to be.

  All those people. People who had stayed with her. People she had gotten to know. They could die. Because they had left early.

  She put her hands to her face. She would even miss those silly dogs.