by C. J. Odle
“Both,” General O’Shea insisted. “I want a full squadron of fighter jets up there. I’ll pull in SAMs and antiair artillery too.”
The secretary of state rolled his eyes. “Over a civilian area? Perhaps you’d like to throw in a cruise missile or two? Maybe a nuke?”
General O’Shea leaned his not inconsiderable frame forward over the war room’s table. “If that’s what it takes. People are going to die anyway if this thing gets to do whatever it’s up there to do. We have to stop it, and if that means civilian casualties, it’s just the price we have to pay.”
They argued for another minute or two, but everyone knew which way this was going. General O’Shea was glowering at everyone, and no time remained for anything more subtle.
“Scramble the jets,” he ordered.
“It seems we are being followed,” Vega sent as they reached position over the west of the city. The alien flicked a finger and a wide screen rose up from the command console to show the shimmer of the approaching aircraft behind them. Vega’s pod was more or less stationary by now, and Jake knew the terrestrial planes would never have caught up if the alien craft had been moving with its normal speed. The fighter jets bristled with weaponry, and there was a darker shape in their midst. The strange angles of a stealth bomber lurked in the middle, hinting at armaments too powerful for the jets on each flank to carry.
“They’re going to try to attack again?” Jake asked.
“It is possible,” Vega sent back. “Your commanders may view this as war with our species.”
“And you don’t?” Sarah asked.
“War is not something our species engage in,” Vega explained. “We do not perpetrate violence on one another, or on the universe around us.”
“And this doesn’t count?” Jake asked.
“This is not war,” Vega insisted. “It is simply carrying out the Supreme’s verdict. There will be no violence involved, as you understand it. No pain or cruelty.”
Jake could easily have argued. The difference… was, well, so tiny it didn’t really exist except as a justification. He might have pointed that out, if he’d felt his words would have any chance of stopping what was about to happen.
The US military was doing its utmost to prevent the impending disaster. In addition to the fighter jets closing in rapidly on the pod, the console screen began to show vehicles massing on the ground below, rolling down the streets to maneuver into a position to attack.
“They’re going to attempt to destroy us,” Jake said aloud with a mixture of fear and hope. He didn’t want to be reduced to a smear in the air and die there with Sarah, but this would surely be far better than the rest of humanity perishing.
“Jake, we should be doing something,” Sarah said. “We can’t let this happen.”
Jake shook his head. “What can we do? Overpower Vega?”
“That is not permissible,” Vega sent, and even though Jake was physically much bigger than the short alien, and Vega’s species supposedly knew nothing about violence, he suspected it had a way to stop a sudden lunge for the controls.
“We must to do something,” Sarah insisted. “We have to try!”
“There isn’t anything,” Jake replied aloud. “Look at what happened the last time we interfered. We only made things worse.”
“I don’t think we can make things worse now,” Sarah pointed out. “Please, Jake!”
Jake felt at a loss. They’d tried. They’d failed. In failing, they’d contributed to the very situation humanity now faced.
“We can’t stop it,” Jake said. “There is nothing we can do.”
Sarah grabbed his hands, making him look her in the eye. “Jake, yes, we made a mistake interfering in the trial, but the mistake was cheating. But this is different, and others shouldn’t have to pay for what we did.”
Jake slumped back into his seat, struggling to overcome his sense of powerlessness. Meanwhile, the combined might of the military advanced on the pod, little by little. When he turned around to look through the clear glass-like material of the pod’s elongated dome, some of the fighters were close enough to make out the fat missiles attached to their sides. The planes flew in formation, shifting their positions slightly as they closed in.
“Please turn back,” Vega sent, and Jake felt the pod transmitting the alien’s message into the communication systems of the military aircraft. “There is nothing you can do here. Your weapons will not be permitted to engage to succeed.”
The crackle of a radio came through into the pod. “This is Captain Luke Hanson of the United States Air Force. You are ordered to turn around and return to your main craft.”
“I will not turn back,” Vega sent. “And if you attack, it will prove dangerous for all of you.”
“We aren’t afraid to die, if it will save our own kind.”
That might have sounded like bravado, but the pilot’s voice carried a note of quiet certainty. Did he know what he was getting into? He had to, didn’t he? The pilots would have seen the footage of their colleagues disappearing in the desert near the main craft. From their perspective, this must be a suicide mission, but they were doing it anyway.
Doing it anyway. A foreign concept for Jake. Almost the opposite of what he’d built his career upon as a lawyer. He went the extra mile for his clients only if a win was possible. If he couldn’t win, he did nothing.
The pod hung over the city but obviously wouldn’t remain idle forever. They’d come here for a reason. So had the fighter jets, but they didn’t attack yet. Instead, they circled like sharks around their prey, escorting the pod and cutting it off at the same time. They had clearly been told to hold back for now, perhaps in the slim hope of not needing to fire, a miracle where everything worked out without aggressive action. Or perhaps their superiors were just worried about the superior technology of the aliens.
What could Jake do? Probably nothing. He’d proved he couldn’t just expect to solve things, but maybe there was a difference between arrogantly expecting to be in control and trying to help others with no thought of your own safety.
He looked toward Vega. He knew something about how it thought and reacted. Long fingers worked the three levers of the command console as it monitored the images of the military craft on the vertical screen. Maybe he could use his connection to the universal consciousness to distract the alien for long enough to grab the levers. That would crash the pod, though, and while Jake felt prepared to give up his life to stop this, he couldn’t risk Sarah’s.
No, he needed another way, and quickly, because now Vega was pressing the multicolored crystals buttons of the console.
Vega made the last few gestures in the launch sequence and hesitated before touching the final button. It didn’t want to have to do this, but the results of the trial were absolute. It had tried to argue its case for humanity’s survival, but if it now rejected the verdict, then its species might as well descend into the same conflict and warmongering as humanity. It needed to accept its role in undoing the damage of this Startoucher project, even if it didn’t agree with the method of adjustment.
Vega sensed Jake and Sarah’s attention as it pressed the last button and pulsed in the command. It could feel the complexity of their emotions flowing out, including betrayal. Vega regretted the impossibility of persuading them, but the lack of time didn’t help. The alien stepped back from the controls.
The device was the width of a hand when it rose from the console, crystalline and with a multitude of facets to form an almost perfect sphere. It glowed from within with the power of cosmic plasma, so concentrated, it began to warp the space inside the pod. Sound accompanied it, like a chord composed of the thrumming of an entire consciousness. The sound extended impossibly, neither building nor fading but continuing, as fresh seconds later as in the instant it had begun.
“What is that?” Jake asked.
“It is the crystal sphere,” Vega replied. “This is the device that will free humanity from its physical existence. The
sphere will latch on to the specific biometric signature of your species and leave all other forms of life unaffected. It will act as a bridge to the universal consciousness.”
The sphere hung in the air in front of Vega, then plunged toward the floor of the pod, passing through it as if it weren’t there. The sphere floated down through the atmosphere, slower than the pull of gravity would have dictated. Almost languidly. It glowed as it dropped, and the pod’s monitors picked up the burst of chatter from the aircraft stalking them, decoding it almost instantly despite the humans’ cryptographic efforts.
“The alien craft has deployed some kind of device. No, sir, it’s not dropping fast enough to be a bomb; we’re not sure what it is. Should we engage?”
Vega wasn’t worried about the humans trying to destroy the sphere. Nothing short of a concentrated burst of dark matter would eliminate it now, and the humans clearly didn’t possess such advanced technology. They could do nothing to stop or even slow the sphere as it continued to fall.
It descended until it was half as high as a passenger plane might have flown and then stopped, spinning in place as it hovered, the glow from the plasma within intensifying with every rotation. The sphere grew as it spun, not so much expanding as unfolding, facet by facet. After a few seconds, it became the size of a human, then of the pod Vega sat in. It grew bigger still, becoming the size of a small building, then something that could have swallowed a football field. Its rotation slowed as it increased in size, until finally it hung like a crystal version of the terrestrial sun high above the city.
It glowed brightly as it pulsed concentric waves of light. The darkness over the city gave way to a strange, vibrating daylight as the sphere shone down. People who had retreated into their houses stepped back outside to shield their eyes and gaze at the sky. The sphere turned, emitting an even brighter light, but it wasn’t the only kind of energy it expelled. Psychic power flooded down, washing over the population as surely as the false dawn. It hit people, and everywhere it touched, the changes started.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
More and more people began to stare upward, irresistibly drawn by the siren sounds and brilliant white light, trying to comprehend what was happening. A few ran, realizing this must be part of whatever plan the aliens had to get rid of their species, although they didn’t know where to escape to. Before long, most of city stood transfixed as the light poured down on them, marveling at the power of the technology being deployed and at the transformation of the darkness into a fierce artificial daylight.
They’d felt something similar in the touch of the Supreme, but where the experience after the trial had been a feather brush of connection with the universal consciousness, this was a sledgehammer, slamming into them unstoppably while the celestial ringing of the sphere grew ever louder in the air.
The intense waves passed through buildings, through cement, metal, and deep into the earth, no terrestrial element capable of halting the flow. People fell to the ground in the hundreds, the thousands. They were blissfully unaware as they hit the floor, collapsing as though the strings of a puppet had suddenly been cut, while the trance induced by the sphere’s energies subsumed their minds. Visions flooded into them, filling each individual with scenes from their lives. A musician in the middle of a guitar solo saw images of the parents who’d walked away when he was a child. A judge saw the faces of everyone he’d sentenced. Adults became children again and danced innocently in the landscapes of their childhood. Children were mostly asleep but found themselves swept into dreams more vivid than waking life.
Everyone dreamed. Their dreams began with images from their own lives, fragments remembered, or half remembered, or only ever imagined. Gradually, though, these dreams started to fuse together into something bigger, purer, an ongoing bliss stretching into infinity. Everyone surrendered to this bliss, saturated with the celestial music of the crystal sphere, and, one by one, they were released. Their physical bodies remained on the ground as their beings flowed up into the sphere, as surely as the light poured down.
Jake felt it happening. With the connection the aliens had stabilized in him, he couldn’t help but feel it. He sensed the intense bands of psychic energy emanating from the sphere, much stronger below the sphere than above, yet he knew if they hadn’t been protected by the shields of the pod, he and Sarah would still have been swept up in its power.
“Vega,” he pulsed, “you have to stop this.”
He felt people yielding to the sphere and their connection intensifying second by second. If he reached out and relaxed, he could see some of the visions overwhelming people, with promises of something brighter and better and just… more. All tantalizingly out of reach, all there if they just went with the vision into the crystal sphere…
“You’re killing them,” Jake spoke aloud. “I don’t care what you’re pretending to call it, or how painless you think it is. You’re killing them.”
He could feel tears in his eyes as he sensed the lives below start to wink out. One by one, they went from bright, vibrant engagement with the visions consuming them to being consumed. They were pulled into the sphere, and in the space where their life force had been, only emptiness remained. Each separate dot of individual life became a void. The dots then formed clusters, spread to become holes, turned into overwhelming blankness.
“Their energy will live on,” Vega sent. “Joined to the universal stream, they will—”
“That doesn’t matter, and you know it!” Sarah shouted. “There are children down there, Vega. Children. You’ve deployed a weapon that is now killing a whole city full of people.”
“And soon it will release the rest of humanity to the universal consciousness,” Vega sent. “That is its purpose.”
The alien wasn’t listening, didn’t understand, or didn’t care. But Jake refused to give up. He had to find a way to stop it. Below, the sphere began to drift toward the city center. From this height it seemed slow, but its speed was deceptive given how much of the ground beneath it covered. It floated along, and destruction flowed in its wake.
“They’re killing civilians!” the lead pilot’s voice declared over his radio, loud and clear in the closed atmosphere of the pod. “Don’t know how this thing works, but up here we’re all feeling rather strange…”
Another voice joined it. “Team leader, all fire units, you have permission to engage with all available armaments. I say again, smoke those alien scum.”
Jake flinched at the order, if only because he and Sarah were right there in the middle of the pod along with Vega. Vega seemed as quietly confident as ever, making small gestures to control the craft as it continued to oversee the destruction wrought by the immense crystal sphere.
Munitions burst forth at them and to the sphere, from the steady hail of tracer bullets to the larger flashes of missile engines firing. There were bursts of dust and flame below as tanks and antiaircraft launchers fired their weapons. There was even the dull buzz of a drone flying straight at the pod.
None of it got close. Vega flicked its fingers across the controls, and the pod darted back and forth across wide sections of the sky, attacking weapons with defenses that flashed out in bursts of high energy. Bullets clattered off the side of the pod, flaring into dust where they struck. Missiles flamed out of existence, burned up by high-intensity lasers or tricked into premature detonation.
“They also seem to be trying a computer assault,” Vega sent, “but the code is inorganic.”
Jake started out of his seat then, thinking he could wrestle Vega away from the controls for long enough to shut all this down. At least he might be able to lower the defenses of the pod to allow one of the missiles to hit them or give the virus a chance to work.
Vega gestured, and Jake’s seat reshaped itself, now with a metallic band across his lap to hold him firmly in place. “I’m sorry, Jake, but I can’t allow you to interfere.” More shells burst around them. “And I can’t allow this aggression toward us to continue.”
<
br /> “Wait!” Jake insisted, shouting the word and sending it simultaneously. “You can’t just make them disappear. It isn’t right.”
“Even though they will soon be released by the crystal sphere?” Vega pointed out. “Even if I spare them now, they are in the area covered by the sphere’s effects.”
The alien’s hands flashed over the levers and crystal buttons of the console again as another barrage of munitions came their way. The missiles disappeared and exploded and then Vega went on the counterattack.
Beams of unseen energy burst outward, targeting tanks and artillery, seizing their mechanisms with the power of an EMP and forcing crews to abandon stations in order to get clear of whatever might follow. What did follow were the planes tumbling from the sky as the beams destroyed the pilots’ ability to control them. The occupants ejected one by one, spinning up into the sky, then floating down in slow spirals. The approaching drone exploded, which demonstrated exactly how easily Vega could have exploded the rest.
But the alien hadn’t, and that meant something.
“You know killing people is wrong,” Jake pulsed, “regardless of what’s happening, regardless of the provocation. If you didn’t, you would have just made the planes and their pilots disappear.”
“Your species doesn’t believe in war or violence,” Sarah reminded Vega. “Not for any reason. You told us, remember?” She clutched her turquoise pendant and her face was streaked with tears.
“Of course I remember,” Vega pulsed. The alien paused at the controls, then sent back with a vengeance the computer virus the NSA tried to infect them with. “But the releasing is different.”
“It’s the same thing,” Jake insisted. “You’ve unleashed a weapon, and instead of shooting a few pilots out of the sky, it’s slaughtering the civilians below. How is that different?”
Vega shook its head. “You will not convince me.”
