Defeat (10 page)

“
Copy,
Eagle.”

“
Don’t hold back,
Cap Three. Unload and get out of there. Help is on the
way.”

“
Roger,
that.”

They signed off and Vincent eased
back on the throttle, cutting the afterburner off. He and Travers
began a ten mile diameter circle, waiting for the alien bogey to
get into range.

“
How you doing
Lieutenant?” he asked on their private channel.

“
Ready to kick
some ET you know what,” the farm boy replied. Vincent
chuckled.

“
Copy
that.”

Vincent thought about the twists
and turns and fates of life. He had come from a wealthy family. His
grandparents immigrated from India and seemed to know how to make
money without even trying. Vincent had the best education, worked
hard, had private tutors, and had barely made the cut to be
nominated to the Academy. Once there, he excelled in everything,
excelled in pilot training, and still barely made the cut to fly
the nation’s top fighter aircraft.

Lieutenant Travers, a farm boy
from Iowa, practically fell off a tractor into the cockpit of the
F-35. ROTC, a rare pilot slot due to a disqualifying condition of
another candidate, middle of the class in pilot training, and yet
here he was, flying wingman to Vincent. Strange world.

“
What altitude do
you have on ET, Lieutenant?”

“
Passing through
65,000 and falling like a ton of bricks.”

“
Copy that. Same
here.” Vincent thought for a second. At the rate of closing they
wouldn’t have long. Then he remembered an old Israeli trick.
“Follow me,” he ordered his wingman.

Vincent swung out of their lazy
circle, going past where he thought the bogey would cross the
50,000 foot altitude mark, then making a tight curve to come at
them sideways. No aircraft could fire sideways, and they would have
a longer window to take a shot. A rear shot was always best, but if
this craft was coming in as fast as a shuttle, no fighter could
ever hope to keep up with it.

Lieutenant Travers chuckled on
their private channel.

“
They do teach
you senior officers a thing or two, don’t they,
sir?”

He’d figured out what they were
doing.

“
Watch and learn,
farm boy,” Vincent replied.

The alien craft appeared, falling
at speeds faster than any missile could go, the fireball around it
dissipating as it slowed in the heavier atmosphere.

“
Fire a spread.
We’ll never get lock,” he ordered, and began firing missiles into
the expected path of the enemy craft. He fired his gatling gun
also, hoping that perhaps even one shell might hit the enemy out of
dumb luck. He couldn’t fire for long, but at those speeds, the
force of even one shell would tear the enemy craft
apart.

He saw his wingman do the
same.

He didn’t breathe as he waited. It
was only seconds, their aircraft closing at over 500 miles per
hour, missiles streaking towards a spot in front of the enemy at
over 1,500 miles per hour, the alien craft still descending at more
than 5,000 miles per hour. Something was going to hit something, or
else they were all just going to fly past each other.

He fired his gatling gun in
bursts, conserving ammunition and hoping to get the best spread of
shells for the spacecraft to fly into.

Just as he thought the enemy had
closed to the point that he would know if they had missed or hit,
the descending spacecraft disappeared.

“
What the...?” he
heard over the radio.

“
Eagle, this is
Cap Three. Bogey has vanished. Repeat, bogey has
vanished.”

“
Negative, Cap
Three. We read it right on top of you.”

“
We don’t see it,
Eagle. I’m out of ammo.”

“
Get out of there
Cap Three. It’s right on top of you.”

“
Military power,”
Vincent ordered, shoving his throttle all the way forward and
flipping the switch that dumped raw fuel into the exhaust, causing
the afterburner effect that made jets fly much faster than they
should be able. Maintenance crews hated afterburner as it robbed
engines of flight hours, requiring them to be replaced at more
frequent intervals. Pilots loved it. The pure power. The knowledge
that speed was life, and with afterburner they could get out of any
kind of trouble.

He never saw Lieutenant Travers’
plane break up, but his hair stood on end suddenly, the air coming
into his mask smelled like ozone, and small balls of electricity
climbed down the metal framework of his cockpit, some breaking
free, floating for a moment, then going to ground, others shorting
out equipment, causing more sparks to fly.

His flight panel caught fire and
training took over. He straightened in his seat, leaned his head
back, and reached down and grabbed the yellow rip cords. He took a
breath and pulled.

The igniter for the explosives
that were supposed to blow his canopy away shorted, damaged by the
electrical balls that filled Major Vincent Jai-Singh’s cockpit, and
Vincent was thrust into the reinforced glass by the ejection rocket
attached to the base of his seat. He died instantly. His plane died
with him.

The President of the United
States, his wife, his Chief of Staff, and his top general, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched the battle display
incredulously. The Hrwang craft darted around his fleet of
aircraft, destroying them like a kid swatting flies.

“
They’re so
advanced,” his wife whispered.

“
It’s like
throwing spears at a tank,” the General said.

“
Shut it off. I
want my children with me,” the President ordered. The General moved
forward in the plane, to another display watched by others. The
children’s nanny brought his children to him and his wife, and they
pulled their little ones up onto their laps.

“
I’m sorry,
Aiden,” he said to his Chief of Staff. The man had tears in his
eyes, and he shook his head, moving to pull the nanny away and
leave the President alone with his family. The nanny collapsed on
the floor, sobbing.

“
It’s okay. She
loves the kids, too.”

The nanny stood and joined the
President and his family in a group hug. They smelled ozone and
felt the plane drop altitude, their stomachs feeling disengaged
from the rest of their bodies.

“
I’m so sorry,
Maddie,” the President whispered to his wife. “I only brought you
aboard to keep you safe. I wanted you safe.” He started
crying.

Someone screamed as the plane
lurched again, dropping faster than the converted 787 could
descend.

“
It’s okay, it’s
okay, it’s okay,” his wife repeated, holding him and kissing him
and their children.

They never felt the
impact.

Air Force One crashed south of the
Alaskan Brooks Range, more than a hundred miles away from the Yukon
river. There were no survivors. The plane fell in a part of Central
Alaska so remote that nothing but caribou and elk would see the
wreckage for decades.

5

Wolfgang Riebe knelt next to the
cot his wife lay on. He had just finished pouring the water he had
boiled with a tiny dash of salt, then allowed to cool to room
temperature, into her IV bag. The doctor told him there were no
more supplies, and that was the only way he could keep her
hydrated.

Leah, the Swiss hiker who hadn’t
left Wolfgang’s side since they returned from the dragon rock, sat
on his wife’s other side, dabbing her forehead with a wet
washcloth. She had been amazing, helping Wolfgang take care of his
wife and daughter when only minimal medical help was available.
Once Wolfgang’s family had been categorized as fatal cases of
radiation poisoning, the limited medical resources were redirected
away from them to individuals who might survive.

Wolfgang’s daughter died the day
after.

His wife hung on, her pain abated
by morphine, but that would run out soon and Wolfgang didn’t know
if he wanted his wife to die to spare her the suffering, or to hang
on, and by some miracle, survive.

He prayed like he had never prayed
before.

When he first found his family in
a makeshift hospital, he laid his hands on their heads and
administered a priesthood blessing, as he had been taught to do,
trusting God’s will. But when his daughter died, when he saw all
the death around him, he couldn’t begin to understand what God’s
will was.

The American soldiers in his
hiking group stopped by to check on him once. They told him of
reports about the nuclear war with Russia and the one sided war
with the aliens. Nuclear missiles, anti-satellite missiles, even
bombs loaded on conventional rockets, had all been sent towards the
alien spacecraft, and none of it had done a thing. The aliens then
began dropping meteors all over the Earth. There was nothing the
military could do but disperse. Any concentration of man or
material was struck by meteors. They had no defense.

As they spoke, Wolfgang sensed the
tragedy. The Earth had fought its first interstellar war, and it
had lost.

Had this been God’s
will?

Wolfgang took care of his wife
because he didn’t know what else to do.

Stanley Russell
fled the command cockpit yet again, it was becoming a habit,
leaving Commander Samovitch and Lieutenant Commander Purcella
behind to stew. There had been no contact with Earth for over a
week, and the two were panicking.

He had to admit, he had also grown
concerned when ping stopped working. Ping always worked as long as
an operating system ran on a server somewhere. Now it
wasn’t.

Purcella could communicate with
the three unmanned resupply vehicles on their way to Mars, they had
automated responses that reported status and position, but he
couldn’t contact anyone on Earth or the Moon, even using the
resupply vehicles as relays.

And now Irina wanted to do the one
thing Stanley didn’t want to do.

That woman irritated him. He
wished he could fire her, but there would be none of that. She had
been appointed second-in-command by the United Nations Space
Agency, or UNSA, just as he had been appointed
commander.

He had been
UNSA’s second choice, a little known fact that Stanley worried
would come to light. The first choice, Lieutenant Commander Spencer
Grant, had been the model astronaut and military officer, and he
would have known instinctively what to do in the situation Stanley
found himself in now. The man would have been promoted years early
to Captain, skipping a rank, and would have served the
Beagle
well.

Only he had been caught with the
young, trophy wife of one of the members of the UNSA selection
committee. Grant had retired quietly afterwards.

Which left them with Stanley. He
had achieved his position as second in consideration based on his
academic record and several key friends at the Space Agency, but
the selection committee still debated for a week, even evaluating
other candidates and going as far as bringing several in for
interviews. The delay, and obvious lack of trust on the part of the
committee, angered Stanley, but he had kept his mouth shut. It was
always wise to agree with the committee, acknowledging their need
to ensure the right commander for the mission.

And it had worked.

He was selected by a vote of five
to four, had been ‘requested’ to take Irina Samovitch, a naval
officer, as his second-in-command, and two years later he kissed
his wife goodbye, roared up into space on a shuttle, and took over
his spacecraft.

Six months to Mars, six months on
station, and then an eight month return voyage because Mars would
be farther away from Earth on the return leg than it had been when
they were outbound.

It was a long time to put up with
Irina and her lack of confidence, which mirrored that of some of
the committee members.

In his frustration, Stanley found
himself angling down a side passageway, the one that led to
atmospheric chemistry. It was the only lab down that passageway,
the rest of the area used for storage, and since only one crew
member worked in that lab, it was an often empty
passageway.

He had told himself he wouldn’t
visit her any more like this. But when Irina was too much, he
needed a break.

He knocked on
the door to the lab and Sherry, the
Beagle’s
lone chemist, looked up at
him, turning away from the laptop on her workbench. He smiled at
her.

The chemist was an odd duck, by
most standards. On Earth, she normally worked from home, analyzing
data on computers much more powerful than any company would provide
her, and she was used to working in her pajamas. She told the crew
once she had even shown up for work in pajamas, not even thinking
about changing, showering, or doing her hair. Her work was more
important than such aesthetics.