"So what is the full extent of these weapons’ capabilities?”
Whittenhouse shrugged. “It’s really limitless. You fire out a large enough singularity and it will swallow anything. Even an entire planet.”
"An entire planet! What the fuck!" Admiral McLean exclaimed. "How in the hell are we supposed to defend against something like this?"
“Once a singularity has been released, there’s nothing we can do. We could only destroy the weapon firing them.”
“You mean those jellyfish things floating around everywhere?” Diaz said. "Are those the weapons or are they something else, like the actual aliens?"
Paulson squirmed in his chair. He’d seen the creatures on the holos, horrible things, just floating in the air.
"Preliminary data shows those things are generating the black hole singularities," Whittenhouse said. "The energy signatures match. As to whether they are the actual aliens, the masterminds behind the invasion, I don't know."
"We're expecting more data from the field operatives we're still in contact with." Paulson said. "One of them will hopefully be able to answer some of our questions."
Paulson thought specifically of Mattie and wondered if he was still alive and still playing for team humanity.
“Everything we fired at them was stopped by their shields,” General Craig said. “And we don’t have anything left anyway. Then there are these new nanobots. They’re also impervious to our weapons.”
They’d spent decades developing the EM pulse weapons, and now they were completely useless. Paulson felt beyond frustrated.
“We’d have to figure out some way to tear down the shields and then break through any armor those things have,” Jeff said. “But I think we need to step back and look at the bigger picture here, people. We are talking about a highly advanced alien invasion force capable of interstellar travel. Even if we went back in time a hundred years, we probably wouldn’t be able to devise a defense against their weapons.”
Diaz turned to Paulson.
Claire sat beside him, quiet as well. He’d had to convince Diaz to even allow her in the meeting after her last actions. Diaz didn’t like insubordination, but he was also shrewd and knew that some level of disobedience was healthy. In Claire’s case it had actually saved millions of lives as people fled the cities before the nanobots and jelly fish things arrived.
“We have the means to go back much farther than a hundred years,” Paulson said as all eyes turned to him. He took the time to meet the astonished gazes of everyone in the room.
“One of the reasons that I wanted the base to be built here in Iraq is the geographic ease of access to our distant past. We are in the first cradle of civilization, near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Any explorers and researchers sent back have easy access to a treasure trove of human civilizations from the ancient Greeks to the Roman Empire.”
“So what? Do you plan on sending a message back to Julius Caesar telling him to prepare for an alien invasion in two thousand years?” Admiral McLean said, sarcasm clear in his voice.
Several people snorted in derision. Paulson glared at McLean. He was a fantastic admiral, but his negativity and skepticism were grating.
General Schumacher, a former Rhodes scholar and brilliant military historian, leaned forward.
“I think the vice president is on to something. We’ve seen throughout our history the defeat and utter annihilation of primitive societies when they meet a technologically superior civilization—the Incas meeting the Spaniards for the first time, for example. Always the less advanced civilization is destroyed, even if they have vastly superior numbers. We’re in the same situation against this alien force.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” Diaz said. “You’re saying that the Incas could’ve defeated the Spanish or at least held their own if they’d had similar weapons and technology.”
“But how are we going to get access to and figure out how the alien technology even works?” Secretary Calhoun asked.
“I think this tech is far too advanced for us even now,” Jeff Madison said. “We’ve been studying the nanobots for decades, and we still don’t know how they work. It would be like giving the Inca a surface-to-air missile and saying study that and build a hundred more of them to destroy the Spanish. They wouldn’t even have the basic math and engineering skills to understand how to do it, much less the knowledge of how to refine the metals to create the parts.”
“So what do we do then?” Calhoun asked. “How can we learn something like this without decades and decades of trial and error? We’d need to have research labs set up in the past dedicated to the task, and we have no idea how long it would take.”
Everyone just sat and eyed each other in silence. Finally Whittenhouse cleared his throat.
“We need a technological flashpoint,” he said.
“What is that?” Diaz asked.
“Quite simply it’s a point in the advancement of a civilization where things change and advance exponentially. It’s a profound discovery that creates an explosion of new innovations and moves a society forward in astounding ways. In our own history such tech flashpoints would be things like the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, the invention of the wheel, the design of the first alphabet and writing system, and the invention of gunpowder. The list goes on and on. We know all of these flashpoints in our history, but we don’t know when they occurred in the alien’s history.”
“So what?” Admiral McLean asked. “Are you proposing we go ask these alien invaders, who want to exterminate us, when they first learned how to use fire?”
“Of course not; we need something more recent,” Whittenhouse said. “I would say the advent of spaceflight. If we can find out when the aliens first were able to leave their planet and travel to their moon or another planet in their solar system, we then have the basis for knowing how much more advanced they are than us.”
“And how the hell are we supposed to get that kind of intel?” Calhoun asked.
“I think we already have the answer to that.” Claire said.
She projected a holo of Raphael and the cocker spaniel robotic unit.
“Two stuffed toys?”
“On the surface, yes, but much more than that. These two robotic devices were built as reconnaissance units. We had no idea what their purpose was before now, but I think, with a ninety-five point two percent probability, that it’s safe to say they were designed to gather information on these alien invaders.”
“But why were they built like toys? Do the aliens like to play with stuffed toys?” McLean asked.
Paulson scowled at McLean and held out his hand, gesturing for the admiral to temper his sarcasm a bit. He wasn’t helping anything with those types of comments.
“I don’t have enough data yet to formulate an opinion why they were built in this form,” Claire said without emotion.
Diaz cleared his throat.
“So here’s what we have to do to save humanity. We need to create and build one of these highly advanced recon units. Then get it into the alien camp or ship or jellyfish—whatever the hell they live in. Then it needs to be able to magically understand the alien language in hopes that it might overhear a conversation one of them is casually having about the history of their civilization. Then they just need to randomly mention the date of their first space flight.”
Diaz rolled his eyes skyward, just like everyone else around the table, and threw his hands up. Paulson felt the same way and pressed his hand to his forehead, trying to knead the stress from it.
“We’ll also need to translate whatever measure of time they use into Earth time,” Whittenhouse said sheepishly.
“Right. Is everyone following this?” Diaz said. “This is what we are left with? This is about the kookiest, most idiotic plan I’ve ever heard.”
“We already know one of the recon units succeeded in its mission,” Paulson said.
“Why, because it told Colonel Tedrow when it tried to c
ontrol his mind as a boy?” McLean said, banging on the table. “You do remember that thing taking control of a naval destroyer and sinking it, don’t you, Mr. Vice President? I had friends on that ship. How can we trust anything it said?”
Paulson didn’t have an answer.
“Okay, okay, if we are able to get this information—perhaps it’s recorded in the alien computer system, a way to help them remember their past—then what do we do with it?” Diaz asked.
“We use that technology flashpoint as the basis for our jump into the past,” Whittenhouse said.
Diaz shook his head before dropping it into his hands and groaning. “What? I still don’t understand.”
“If we find out, for example, that the aliens developed space flight three hundred years ago, then we look at our own history,” Whittenhouse said, standing now, like he was giving a lecture.
“The first manned rocket circled the earth in 1961. For us to be on a parallel development course with the aliens, it would mean that that event, our first manned spaceflight, would have to occur in our history in the year 1661.”
“So how do we move up such an event?” Paulson asked.
Whittenhouse shrugged, but said, “We jump back to that time and provide those people in our history with the technology and knowledge to accomplish the task.”
Everyone sat silently thinking. Paulson was beginning to grasp the concept behind the possibility. It could very well work. Hell, right now it was all they had.
General Schumacher’s face brightened, as though a light bulb went off in his head, then he said, “We would essentially be accelerating our own technological advancement to the level of the aliens’ present day. Then we would be able to meet the creatures as equals. We could defend ourselves.”
McLean rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “There are so many different ways that this mission could fail, I can’t even list them all.”
“More information is needed to determine the potential success of this mission.” Claire said dispassionately.
Paulson needed to get this group behind the idea. There was a lot they needed to do to turn it into a viable plan.
“If we do nothing, then the human race ceases to exist,” he said.
The room fell silent. Diaz stood.
“Gentlemen, I say we go for it. The odds makers wouldn’t have given me a snowball’s chance in hell—a poor Hispanic kid from the barrio of Little Havana rising to the office of President of the United States—and yet I stand before you today. Let’s set up teams and start preparing for this mission. I have a feeling we don’t have a lot of time.”
Paulson knew they had a nearly impossible task ahead of them, but he’d made it his life’s work to accomplish impossible tasks, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to quit now.
The only question now was how far back in time would they need to go—to the dawn of civilization or even further?
Part Three
The Long Jump
Chapter 29
10:00 p.m. Local Time, January 15, 2038
Interstate 25 North on the Outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico
Holly watched the desert landscape zoom by as they sped to Albuquerque. She was in the passenger seat, Evangelista was driving, and Chen, Mattie, Jing Wei, and Charles were in the back seat. Even though they'd left the alien ship behind them, they were all still haunted by its presence and the destruction it had wrought. Holly suspected it'd gone off to hit another target, a large city, or another military base perhaps.
Mattie had managed to find a motorcycle and catch up to them after the attack on the base. What he described was horrific and unbelievable. Everything just erased, not even the ashes of burned-out buildings to indicate that a base—thousands of people—had been there. Holly thought it sounded like some sort of singularity black hole weapon—a theoretical possibility that scientists on Earth had only just begun to explore.
Holly had seen what Mattie called the Portuguese man o’ wars floating off in the distance and the gigantic walking cylinder sucking in the dead nanobots and ejecting them out of the cone in its top. That parade of alien freaks had gone east, and Evangelista was driving north. Yet Holly knew it was just a matter of time before a swarm found them.
She’d been in touch with Jeff using a special high-level military com-channel that only they had access too. Most of the orbital satellites had been knocked out and the main com-lines were down, as was Stream access. She told Jeff everything that had happened, and Mattie said that he'd briefed Paulson before joining them. Jeff couldn’t tell her much out of fear that the com-lines might be compromised, just that they were safe for now and that most of the military had been destroyed.
Holly told the others about Chronos Two in Iraq, and they decided they should make a go for it. It could very well be the safest place in the whole world right now. That meant they needed to find a jet at the nearest airport—Sunport International in Albuquerque. So they’d been driving for the last two hours at speeds over one hundred miles per hour to get there. Holly hoped the place hadn’t been wiped out. They’d all been silent for the last thirty minutes or so, probably in shock from what had happened. Holly startled when Mattie spoke.
“I linked with them.”
“What?” Chen asked, jostled awake from his nap against the window.
“It was too much data to take in at first, but I’ve been trying to sort through it over the last couple of hours and make sense of it.”
Holly turned around. Mattie had been fully restored back to the way he was when she’d first seen him—young, lean, muscular, and in the prime of health. It was a far cry from the weak and shriveled old man he’d been a few hours ago.
“They want to colonize Earth and have known about us for a while now. There are far fewer planets than we thought that can support life, so Earth is extremely valuable to them. They look at us, humans, as an infestation, just as we would look at a hill of ants. They want to exterminate us.”
“So they don’t see us as a threat at all,” Evangelista grumbled. “We could use that to our advantage.”
“From what I’ve seen, we don’t stand a chance,” Holly said.
“But we defeated their first wave,” Evangelista said defiantly, stepping on the gas and accelerating, passing a car. “Given another chance we can defeat these new . . . things.”
They’d passed dozens of cars along the way, most going the opposite direction, likely fleeing the nearby cities, trying to spread out to the countryside, become more difficult targets. Jeff told her about the neural signal Claire had sent out over the com-links. Holly didn’t approve of Claire’s methods, but she did get the job done.
Mattie pushed back against the seat, drawing Holly’s attention again.
“That first attack wave was based upon probe data of Earth’s defenses from decades ago and extrapolated to the present day. I can’t be sure, but the aliens were slightly surprised by our new and advanced defenses, but not deterred in the least. Those other weapons they deployed are even more capable of getting the job done.”
“What do they look like, the aliens?” Holly asked.
“I only saw bits and pieces, so I can’t say exactly, but . . . they seemed big, and they’d merged with technology in some bizarre way.”
“Of course they wouldn’t be the little childlike aliens we saw in that classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Chen said smugly.
“Or giant-headed skinny things that run around naked,” Evangelista added.
“Well, whatever they look like, I certainly don’t want to meet them anytime soon,” Holly said. “How much farther to the airport?”
“Another five minutes,” Evangelista said.
Holly looked back at Jing Wei and Charles. Neither had spoken during the entire trip. They just stared out the window, holding hands, Jing resting her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“What do you two think about all this?” Holly asked Jing Wei.
“We never had a chance,” Jin
g said dispassionately, still staring out the window.
“These creatures can travel between stars,” Charles added. “We can’t even put a colony on the moon. We are apes compared to them.”
“Angry violent apes can still carry clubs and bash in the heads of aliens,” Evangelista retorted.
“Not if the aliens have ray guns,” Mattie said.
“Enough of this guessing about the aliens,” Chen said, jumping in angrily. “I want to know why you betrayed us, Jing.”
Jing glared coldly at Chen.
“I only wanted to save my husband. I received the information on his death and I acted. I saved his life simply by keeping him at work an hour longer than normal. Just one hour, and he is here with me today. No car wreck, no death. Don’t tell me any of you wouldn’t do the same for a loved one.”
Holly knew she would.
“So the stability of the timeline meant nothing to you?” Chen asked. “What if an entire family had died in place of your husband on that highway? How would you feel then?”
“Well, that didn’t happen, did it? We have no idea what will happen when the timeline changes. Life could be improved, or it could be worsened, or nothing at all could happen. I acted on what I knew.”
Jing squeezed Charles’s hand, and he hugged her tight.
“What about the meeting with the Chinese operative?” Mattie asked.
“Ha!” Jing laughed. “Some operative! If government intelligence operatives ever climbed out of their comfortable virtual reality chairs and into the real world, they would know what a joke that was. You’re obviously talking about my cousin, Sebastian, who can’t even speak Chinese and has never set foot on the continent. My mother asked me to look out for him after his parents died. Sebastian is a high-functioning autistic. I hired a caregiver to look out for his basic needs since Charles and I both work such long hours. Sebastian may not be able to do many things normal people can, but apparently, according to some government putz, he’s an expert at data manipulation.”
Jing shook her head and rolled her eyes. Charles hugged her again.
NanoSwarm: Extermination Day Book Two Page 24
