Oblivion (27 page)

That had gotten Cross out of bed, his head feeling like a melon that had just been split, and he had dressed with her, grabbed them both apples from the kitchen, and driven her to the lab.

Once there, he’d waited an hour before he asked to see the visuals, and he got a cold stare from all the scientists involved. This particular probe was sending the visuals back encoded along with all of the other information, and it would take a while to turn that code into actual pictures.

A while turned out to be hours.

Cross, who hated waiting around anyway, decided he was of no more use at the lab and went back to bed.

Alone.

He still had forgotten to set the alarm, and he had awakened a lot later than he had planned, grumpy, tired and out of sorts. At first he thought it was because of Britt’s defection in the middle of the night, and then he wondered if it was because he had so little to do with the important events at the moment.

And then he realized that neither was correct. He was worried about what the probes would find. Sometimes he was afraid they would locate huge cityscapes like the ones he had seen in science fiction films. Sometimes he was afraid they’d find that the creatures in the ships were only the beginning; that there’d be a greater, more diverse race—all of it threatening— on the planet’s surface.

And sometimes he was afraid they’d find nothing at all.

He wasn’t sure which he could deal with, but he knew, the closer the probes got, the closer they all came to gaining more information, the more uncomfortable he got.

The biologists working on the alien corpses hadn’t found much that was helpful. They knew so little about this creature that they didn’t even know if the specimens before them were young or old, and they were having a hell of a time finding gender characteristics. There didn’t seem to be any obvious kind.

The aliens were, at the moment, a dead end.

Britt finally looked up from her conversation, saw Cross, and smiled. He warmed. That smile made all his discomfort float away. Yeah, the others here might see him as an intruder, but they weren’t Britt, and it was her lab.

“Leo,” she said. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

He hadn’t told her about his fears. He hadn’t discussed them with anyone. He followed her toward a large console that had multiple monitors. They formed a circle, and she sat in the middle of them, and pulled a chair over for him.

“The planet is still on the far side of the sun, just outside of Venus’s orbit,” she said, “and it’s too far away for our scopes to pick anything up. The information we’re getting from the flyby has been relayed to the satellites, before it came here—the distances are amazing!—but we are getting information.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were bright with excitement, but he knew her well enough to know that the data streams were possibly what had excited her. He was past marveling at technology. He wanted to find a way to defeat those aliens, and he wanted a way to do it quickly.

He hoped that the nuclear weapons would do it. There was a chance, a pretty good chance, that they would. Three hundred of them pounding into this planet would end just about everything here with a nuclear winter.

A slight frown creased her forehead apparently at his lack of response.

“The sun,” she said as she turned back toward the screen, her tone slightly cooler, “is still creating some interference, so what we’re getting here is preliminary. But I thought I’d show you our first up-close-and-personal views of the tenth planet.”

She punched a few keys, and an image formed on the monitors. It formed slowly, like images used to in the early days of computers, unfolding as pieces of data were transformed into images.

Cross’s breath caught in his throat. This first image was a distant one, and it was familiar. It was a blackness, a round blackness, in space. It almost reminded him of the award-winning photos he saw of eclipses: a black hole in an active sky.

Nothing. His worst fears were coming true. He was going to see nothing.

He leaned over Britt’s shoulder, afraid that if he said anything it would reveal his disappointment. So he tried to show interest in other ways, by focusing on the image before him, by moving closer to it.

Britt punched a few more keys, and that image disappeared. Another appeared just as the first one had, scrolling up. This one showed the same blackness, only larger. Then another appeared and another, each as the probe got closer to the planet.

The final image was quite close, and it was just of blackness, with the hint of something glinting against an edge.

“It seems odd to me,” Britt said, “that this close to the sun, the planet looks black. It’s really there. It’s a solid mass. We’re getting other readings that show it does have a surface, and that there are some energy readings on the surface, but it’s almost as if there’s a shield in place that we can’t get beyond.” Cross pulled his chair closer to the screen. He was staring at that glint. It looked like an angle, a large angle. He put his finger on it. “Can you blow that up?”

She did. The image was larger, but grainy, and it told him nothing.

“What kind of shield could that be?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not even sure it is one. I have never seen anything like it. The other planets in this solar system don’t look like this. Nothing in our databases prepared us for this.”

Just like nothing had prepared them for the attack on the Earth, for the spaceships, and for the appearance of the aliens themselves.

Cross leaned back and templed his fingers. “The biologists are saying that these creatures emerged from an ocean, just like we did. Only they kept their tentacles and their eyestalks. They’ve found evidence that these creatures need water to survive, just like we do. I’m not an astronomer, but shouldn’t we see evidence of water on this surface somewhere?”

“If that is the surface,” Britt said. “We’re not picking up any readings of shielding, but then, their technology is so different from ours.”

“What if it’s not technology?” Cross asked. “What else could it be?”

“Nothing that would form life as we know it,” Britt said. “And these aliens have to be related to life as we know it. They build machines, they congregate in groups, they obviously communicate with one another. Life can’t form without water and light, at least not life that we understand.”

Cross sighed. He wasn’t sure he could deal with the frustration. “Are we going to have another flyby before one of those probes goes down to the planet’s surface?”

“One or two,” Britt said, “depending on how things work.”

“Are any of them going to go closer?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Maybe that will give us more information.” He looked at her. The excitement in her eyes had dimmed a little. “Unless I’m missing something.”

“Just the fact that we’re close, Leo.” Her voice was low so that the other team members couldn’t hear her. “We’re actually looking at the planet itself, getting readings from it. That’s a good thing.”

“Intellectually I know that,” he said. “I guess I’m just impatient.”

“So am I.” She patted his hand. “But the only way we’re going to learn anything is to keep studying.”

He grinned. “You sound like my old professors. They hated it when I leapt over weeks of experimentation with an accurate hunch. They always made me prove it.”

“And that’s why you went to archaeology instead of the hard sciences, isn’t it?” she asked. “Because hunches are valued there.”

His gaze met hers. She knew him too well already. He leaned in, and kissed her, then he rested his forehead against hers.

“Can I buy you lunch?” he asked. “You look like you’re wasting away.”

And then he caught his breath. He turned toward the screen, but the image on it was the first one.

“What?” Britt asked.

“Let me see that close-up again,” he said.

She punched keys, and the final image appeared, its small glint taunting him from the corner.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“This planet is on a long elliptical orbit,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“And that means, for long periods of time, it’s in the cold darkness of space, no light, no nothing. And the temperatures on the surface would be incredibly cold, right?”

Britt frowned. “Yeah.”

“But the biologists are saying that these creatures started out like we did. So their planet should have an ocean at least, and oceans don’t happen on incredibly cold planets. They are ice, if they exist at all. Life doesn’t emerge from the ice into the primordial goo.”

“I guess,” Britt said, sounding even more confused. “Something changed for these creatures,” he said. “Something major, and they were technologically advanced enough to deal with it.”

“Maybe they have incredibly short life spans,” Britt said. “Maybe they only exist during their time around the sun.” Cross shook his head. That didn’t feel right. Or did it? Creatures with incredibly short life spans spent those lives gathering food, and reproducing. It wasn’t conducive to making tools or industrialization, but he was basing this on an Earth model. What if, for the aliens, time went faster?

There was no way he could know that, no way he could prove it. But a shiver had run down his back.

“You have a hunch,” she said.

He nodded. He didn’t like it, but it made complete sense, no matter what was going on for those aliens.

“Britt,” he said. “We’re their food source.”

“I know they harvest nutrients, but—”

“No, listen to me,” he said. “What if they had some kind of technological disaster that destroyed their planet? What if something they made created that blackness? What if enough of them survived? Why would any creature go to such great lengths to create spaceships and nanoharvesters if this were something they didn’t really need?”

“What are you saying?” Britt asked.

“I’m saying that I’ll wager we are the key to their survival. Not humans. Earth.”

She looked at him. There was something sad in her eyes. “I don’t want to know that if it’s true, Leo.”

“Why not?” he asked. “It explains so much.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does. But it also means that in the end, it’s us against them, and whoever wins the conflict is the only one who survives.”

Cross nodded. He stood. “Yeah,” he said. “It means that. It also means that they’re not going to be deterred by half measures. If I’m right, they’re going to keep coming until they have nothing left.”

“Then I hope you’re not right, Leo,” Britt said.

But he didn’t really pay much attention. He had to tell Maddox his theory, and he had to prepare her. She wouldn’t like the lack of evidence, but he’d learned enough about her over the last few months to know that she would hear him on some level. She would continue to prepare for the worst.

Britt was exactly right. The Earth was in a fight to the death. And only the strongest, most creative species would survive.

August 1, 2018
19:31 Universal Time

101 Days Until Second Harvest

Cicoi wrapped his upper tentacles around his workstation inside the Command Building of the South. He hadn’t been able to go back to Command Central, not since the Elders had shown themselves. He preferred to work here.

The warships were coming along, but his workers were getting tired. He had them on rapid rotations, with little pod time, but that wouldn’t work forever. The strain was beginning to show on his people; the extra work had become a burden. He wished he could awaken more of the sleepers, but he didn’t dare. They hadn’t gathered enough food on the last Pass to make awakening others possible.

The plans for the next Pass were shaping up well. He and his assistants had been going over the maps of the third planet, looking for the most fertile areas. That was old habit; the Elders wanted him to take as much as possible. But he didn’t want to send the harvesters down to an area that was inferior to some other area. Even though the Elders wanted him to pluck the planet bare, he knew—and they knew—that they only had resources enough to harvest a large part, but not all, of the planet.

The Elder had been lurking all day. Something was bothering him, but he was saying nothing. Cicoi was actually grateful for that. He was getting tired of having the Elder constantly in his head.

“Commander.” His Second was standing before him, all eyestalks extended, eyes facing forward in a circle, the position of respect.

“What?” Cicoi asked, not pointing a single eyestalk toward his Second. He had specifically asked not to be disturbed. How much time would pass before someone understood that when Cicoi asked not to be disturbed it meant to leave him alone?

“The creatures from the third planet have sent something hurtling our way.”

“Another probe?” Cicoi asked, trying to keep the exasperation from his voice. The probes had led to a huge argument with the Elders. Cicoi and the other Commanders had agreed that sending a ship out to gather energy from the probes would waste more energy in fuel than they would receive. The Elders weren’t so worried about the probes’ energy as they were about the information they would send back to the third planet.