Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (4 page)

“Ivan. Do I need to reset the router or anything? Is it like normal Internet?”

“Power cycle,” Ivan said impatiently, pressing both hands to his headphones to muffle the noise.

“He means to turn it off and on,” Benjamin translated.

Cameron unplugged the device, plugged it back in, then waited. Green lights climbed its front. A page reloaded onscreen, and Cameron found himself looking at an image of an immature but populous city made of mostly perfect lines: simple houses and a few larger, impressive structures. The camera was high up. Near the middle there was …

“Guys. Look at this.”

“Quiet, Cameron!” Ivan hissed.

“Okay, Ivan,” Danika said. “You keep listening. We’ll look at the video showing us exactly what we want to know.”

Ivan turned. Charlie, Benjamin, Danika, and eventually Ivan clustered behind Cameron, now operating the small computer from his knees on the floor.

“The Internet’s back?”

“No,” Danika said. “I made this image in Photoshop.”

“Standard communications blackout,” Ivan said. “They cut us off during the attack, but — ”

“Oh, shut up, Ivan.”

Benjamin pointed at a round thing near the unharmed mansion (near the predictably unharmed blue pyramid) that seemed almost superimposed on the monitor. It looked like something burning inside a transparent glass sphere, hovering maybe fifty or a hundred feet in the air.

“What’s that?” Benjamin asked.

Ivan zoomed in on what looked like twisted, blackened metal sitting on the enormous sphere’s bottom.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“It has to be the bomber.”

“What did it hit?”

“I don’t think it
hit
anything. They must’ve surrounded it with a force field or something.”

“But the shuttles … ” Benjamin began.

“We’re clearly not entirely capable of understanding the complete defensive abilities of a race that is able to travel through space and occupy a planet,” Charlie said as if reading from an instruction manual.

“It was worth a shot,” Ivan said, as if that shot hadn’t just resulted in maybe fifteen or twenty deaths. The bomber’s pilot hadn’t taken that shot. It was also the fighter pilots and the people who’d fired Ivan’s modified rockets from mobile launchers nestled in the nearby hills. All the people Charlie had argued would pointlessly die, seeing as it would take more than a simple, guard-drawing distraction to launch a suicide attack on one of the occupation’s nine global capitals. But Ivan was a strategist first and a human second. The decision had been reduced to a simple equation: the probability that an attack on the city (instead of the mothership) would be successful versus a handful of soldiers’ lives. A cold thought, but if it worked, Ivan would have been saying
I told you so,
then toasting to the first chink in the Astrals’ armor.

“No, it wasn’t,” Charlie said.

“It’s made of
glass
, Charlie.” Ivan jabbed a finger at the gigantic blue pyramid dominating the city shot on the laptop’s screen. “It wasn’t unreasonable to think we could break something
made of glass.”

“First of all,” said Charlie, raising a finger as if preparing to tick off points of a forthcoming argument, “you’re
assuming
it’s made of glass. But what you don’t understand because you haven’t spent your life studying extraterrestrial visitation — or cultural and genetic interference — is that there’s no evidence of anything as fragile as
glass
being used in monolithic constructions in the past, and — ”

“This isn’t the past,” Ivan snapped.

“And,”
Charlie said, raising his voice in a rare display of emotion, knowing Ivan didn’t have a leg to stand on and eager to prove it, “given that their first monoliths this time were stone, simple logic assures us that if they’re not using stone now, it’s in favor of something stronger and
more
permanent, not less, and that despite what you may think, the pretty blue look of the Apex structure doesn’t mean it’s actually just an Apple Store, but is something important and
not
fragile.”

“You can’t assume — ”

“Thirdly,”
Charlie interrupted, ticking off a third point on his raised fingers, “you insist on giving them less credit than you’d give any human enemy. If the Apex is the site we think it is, and if it’s as important as we believe it to be, why would they leave it unguarded?”

“Because they’d be chasing shuttles!”

“Oh, come on, Ivan,” Danika said. “If you were defending your own flag, would you let the other team wave their arms to distract you, then send everyone after them and leave your base unguarded?”

“It’s easy to second-guess now.” Ivan crossed his arms. “But I’m the only one willing to — ”

“Okay, okay,” said Benjamin, straightening and raising his arms for order. “Mistakes have been made by all of us. As a
team
, because no matter whose idea this was — ” He looked at Ivan. “ — we
all
agreed to it.” He glared at Danika and Charlie in turn. “Like Ivan said, it was worth a shot.”

Benjamin sighed, possibly feeling the weight of those many deaths partially upon his shoulders. If this had worked, those deaths would have had meaning despite their sadness. But it hadn’t, and now the loss was so terribly worthless.

After a moment, Cameron said, “Do you still think the Apex is important?”

Benjamin seemed like he might waffle, so Charlie said, “Yes.”

Cameron looked over at the shaggy-bearded man.

“From the moment we saw they were interested in Vail,” Charlie said, again finding a coatrack’s emotion, “there was something that bugged us.” He looked at Benjamin meaningfully. His eyes ticked briefly toward Danika. Then he added,
“All
of us.”

“‘What makes Vail so special?’” Cameron recited what might as well have been the lab’s slogan for the last two and a half years.

“The other nine capitals all have something obviously alien about them,” Benjamin said. “All but Vail. There are pyramids, old cities, temples made of massive stones … but Vail has nothing at all that we know of. And the more research I do — the more we compare notes with our colleagues around the world — the more I worry that Vail might be special because it’s the resting place of something powerful, left behind from all their past visits. Something they don’t take when they leave, but that they need to access each time they return in order to force a — ” He made an uncertain gesture. “ — a
reset
, I guess.”

“What kind of thing?” Cameron asked.

“There are a few ways it’s been described, both directly and indirectly,” Benjamin said. “I call it Thor’s Hammer.”

C
HAPTER
5

Sometime after the commotion died down and her father assured everyone that the threat of danger was an exaggeration, Lila caught a glimpse of motion outside her window. She stood and walked over in time to see two of the round silver shuttles flank the now-mostly extinguished sphere of fire and tether it with energy beams. Moving much more slowly than shuttles normally moved, as if afraid to drop the thing, the ships towed the big plane’s remains inside its capsule. Where they’d dispose of the behemoth, Lila didn’t know or care. Probably in the outlands, beyond the city perimeter.

After the ships were gone, Lila watched the sky. Once upon a time, the air had been filled with vapor trails from commercial airliners. Then for a while, there had been motherships and shuttles. Now there were both. Aliens had colonized the globe, but that didn’t mean people had stopped needing to travel. It was almost possible to believe this was all the new normal.

Lila’s eyes flitted to trees and mountains. Rifts of smoke in the distance had gone, but she still didn’t like to be here, in her room on the second floor of this large civilian target. She’d also never really grown comfortable
here
in general: below her father, at the head of the occupation’s human wing. Dad said the Astrals had good intentions despite all that had happened, and that mankind’s insistence on violence had made bloodshed necessary. Everyone would understand in time, he insisted, and see that this had all been for the best.

But Lila had her doubts. Even though she merely lived in the giant house near the heart of a North American capital, she still felt like her life was lived on the wrong side. Cameron was out there somewhere, and Piper would have been with him if the mothership hadn’t brought her home. Cameron was against all of this, and Piper would have been, too. Maybe she was anyway. Lila had heard Piper and her father fighting plenty, always making up inevitably. And like Lila, Piper’s love of the viceroy seemed to go hand-in-hand with fear of his changes.

Lila sighed, turning away. She tried to settle her wandering thoughts. The strike had unnerved her. Rebels had attacked many times in the past but hadn’t bothered for years. Black Monday’s assault had silenced mostly everyone. But earlier rebel attacks had focused on the ships, and this was the first to feel personal. Now it seemed like they were after Lila’s family — traitors that they were.

The door opened. A familiar face peeked through the gap.

“Can I come in?” Christopher asked.

Lila heard his actual question:
Is Raj in there?

It wasn’t the kind of thing he could ask outright because if Raj
was
there, he’d easily read Christopher’s subtext. And while Lila was pretty sure Raj assumed Lila was habitually unfaithful (he wasn’t stupid, after all), he didn’t know for sure, and didn’t know the culprit was Christopher. She’d deflected that idea before they’d moved here, when she’d allied with Raj and complained about their old bunker mate. But so much had changed since then. Mostly
Raj
.

“Yeah, come on in.”

Christopher pushed the door open but hesitated at the threshold. Lila’s room was enormous, like all the mansion’s many bedrooms. She had rooms within rooms — an enormous suite easily as large as the starter house she’d one day dreamed of having with Raj, back when he’d been the sweet, shy boy she’d fallen in love with.

“Come in,” Lila repeated, now beckoning.

“What about Clara?”

“She’s asleep.”

“Asleep? I thought she was done taking naps.” Christopher came inside, careful to leave the door ajar. The only thing worse than Raj walking in to find Christopher in Lila’s room would be Raj walking in to find Christopher in Lila’s room
with the door closed for privacy
. It seemed likely, in a Raj/Christopher conflict, that Meyer would take Lila’s wishes into consideration, but it wasn’t worth the risk if they could avoid it. Ironically, their new life was like their old one in that Meyer’s public image was everything. If there were magazines, Meyer Dempsey would still grace their covers. And to Meyer and his public image, his granddaughter’s father probably belonged in the picture more than the captain of the unnecessary human guards. If it came down to choosing, Lila was sure Christopher would find himself out of a job at best. She didn’t want to consider the less appealing possibilities.

“She got really tired after the recent … excitement,” Lila said.

“She saw it happen? You didn’t take her into the basement?”

“She doesn’t need to see things to get excited about them, Chris.”

Christopher bobbed his head as if to indicate a fair point. But he didn’t like to discuss Clara’s differences from a normal child any more than Lila, and they seemed to have mutually decided to ignore the topic and hope it would go away. Only Meyer treated Clara as truly special, but it was because of her pedigree as new royalty, not anything more troubling.

Christopher sat in Lila’s chair. She sat on the bed, squeaking the springs.

Christopher glanced through the open door, into the hallway.

“Where is Raj anyway?”

“I think he’s up on the fourth floor, in the network center. He wanted to go off with Trevor to talk to the cops, but Dad said that’s more your job, and that Trevor could handle it fine on his own. That went over well, seeing as Raj technically outranks you in the guard.”

“He’s gotta see it wasn’t really necessary to send him on an errand like that.”

“Is
anything
my dad gives Raj to do necessary?”

“Fourth floor, huh?” Christopher looked up, knowing that only a staircase separated Raj from his cheating wife. “How long will he be gone, and how well do you think they can hear up there?” Christopher looked down at the bed.

Lila smiled, despite knowing Christopher wasn’t joking, even though he should have been with Raj so close. “Not today. I’m beat up.”

“Maybe I can help you relax.”

“Not today.” She reached out to soften the rebuke and briefly held Christopher’s hand.

“So. Trevor,” said Christopher. “Stepping up as the big man.”

“Like father, like son. He’ll be declaring himself lieutenant viceroy if I don’t keep him in line.”

“Is there such a thing?”

Lila rolled her eyes, giving Christopher an
I could give a shit
look.

“They told us to tighten security around the house, too,” said Christopher. “But not
how
to tighten things up — probably because we’re not the security force that actually makes any difference. But … the police? What, they’re going to add beat cops to keep F-14s from attacking again?”