Final Assault (20 page)

November 11, 2018
5:19 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

Second Harvest: Second Day

Clarissa Maddox had allowed herself one undignified squeal of excitement when the first alien ship exploded. Her chief of staff, Paul Ward, had looked at her as if she had suddenly shouted obscenities in Mandarin Chinese. She was usually much more restrained than that.

But he seemed to be the only one who noticed her slip. The professional soldiers in the rest of the war room were jumping out of their seats, high-fiving each other, and screaming with excitement. She had done nothing to quell their enthusiasm. Her people needed a bit of joy after all that had happened.

The death of Gail Banks a few hours earlier had made the room one of the most somber places Maddox had ever been in her life. She was pleased to see her people celebrating again.

The problem was it had taken nearly fifteen minutes to settle them down again, and fifteen minutes was too long. Yes, they had won a significant victory over the enemy ships. The battle was won, but she knew that winning battles did not always mean winning wars.

The aliens still had seventy-eight ships, and they were coming back for a second run.

This time, she didn’t have surprise on her side.

She knew that would cost her something. She just wasn’t sure what.

She stared at the holographic Earth in the center of the room and watched the dark alien ships, which had remained separated into three groups, in their new positions. They had devastated the areas they had covered before. She had no doubt they would do the same thing again.

This time, the ships were harvesting different areas than the first attack. The fir3t group was in the Amazon, finishing off the last remaining section of the rainforest. Maddox hated watching this. Who knew how many species would disappear, how many important plants would die, how many people too primitive to know what was happening would disappear as well.

If only she had had more time to prepare.

If only.

The next group of ships was attacking Central Africa, several hundred miles south of the Sahara, into the Congo and the richest parts of the continent.

More species lost.

More lives lost.

And the third and final group of ships hovered over northern Minnesota and Canada, covering an area from the Superior National Forest into Ontario. They seemed to be avoiding Lake Superior and concentrating on the land.

Rich, rich farmland.

Maddox was just waiting for the right moment, when the alien crafts got low enough to pick up their deadly harvesters, low enough to be attacked.

On the screens to her left, commentators were babbling. Scenes of destruction flashed on the screens, followed by repeated footage of alien ships exploding.

Last night’s victories.

Maddox wanted some more today.

“General, the first alien ships are moving into position.”

Maddox nodded, studied the information coming across her own screens. All over the world, planes were waiting for her order.

Finally she gave it.

On the screens to her right, she got visuals from several of the planes in Minnesota. Her staff were giving her verbal updates. Hundreds upon hundreds of planes were in the air.

Then one of the lieutenants said, “What the hell?”

Maddox frowned. On the screens she saw only a black shape. She pressed the visual on the desk before her, froze the shape and reduced it in size until she was sure.

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.

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.”