Defeat (6 page)

But the Russians didn’t
stop.

And the aliens weren’t
fictional.

From the start, the President had
been wary of the Hrwang. They wouldn’t deal with any heads of
state, only representatives from a world wide organization. Hence
the Secretary-General of the United Nations had been the primary
ambassador for Earth. The President had ordered various
intelligence agencies into overdrive to keep him apprised of what
was happening, and as soon as the gun battle erupted in the
Secretariat tower, the President had boarded Air Force
One.

What followed next shocked him and
his staff. The Hrwang shuttle, which had entered Earth’s atmosphere
much as any human shuttle would but could fly like a tilt rotor,
simply vanished from its landing spot in the UN complex. No one had
any explanation.

Then Vandenberg began reporting
satellites failing and their suspicion that it was the
Hrwang.

The Premier of the Soviet Republic
had called the President directly, accusing him of warmongering.
Russian satellites were being destroyed, and he blamed the United
States. He wouldn’t accept any explanations, didn’t believe that
there were any aliens, and within the hour over 40,000 US service
men and women and their dependents were dead from the initial
nuclear blasts or would soon die from radiation
poisoning.

It was irrational.

After the British retaliatory
strike, the Russians had launched more missiles and the President
had had no choice. He had ordered an all out attack on the Soviet
Republic. An attack designed to prevent any further response. An
attack that would silence the Soviet Republic once and for
all.

And in so doing had condemned 150
million people to a fiery death.

If there was a God, the President
wondered what he would say to Him when he met Him.

“
Sir,” his Chief
of Staff said.

He didn’t respond.

“
Sir. It’s
urgent. Something’s happening that doesn’t make any
sense.”

He looked up at his Chief of
Staff. His loyal friend. He should have asked him to be the Vice
President, but they were from the same state and no one ever picked
a Vice President from the same state. It wasn’t good
politics.

“
Yes, Aiden,” the
President said.

“
Sir. I don’t
understand it. No one knows what’s going on. Look at your
screen.”

Some IT technician on board pushed
an image to the President’s monitor. The President
swore.

“
How did this
happen?”

“
I don’t know,
sir.”

The President looked at the
screen, understanding, but not understanding.

The Hrwang artificial intelligence
unit temporarily assigned to drone Tf-1804/V3-85 scanned asteroids
inside the orbit of the alien world. 1804, as it referred to
itself, knew that the Hrwang home star system had been thoroughly
charted and that it would have found an asteroid of the dimensions
it sought within a short period of time.

But the alien humans on the
primary planet of this system had done no such charting, and 1804
was left to finding a likely target, jumping near it, expending
precious fuel to maneuver within range of its optical sensors, then
deciding if it met its criteria.

None had yet.

If it knew how the aliens measured
such things, it would have reported that it was looking for an
asteroid between twenty-five and thirty meters in mean diameter.
Any material would suffice, but it expected to find a carbonaceous
asteroid, as they were the most common. If it found a silicate
asteroid instead, the rock would have to measure within the lower
end of its search parameters.

No time constraint had been given
for finding the large rock. Once it had found it, 1804 knew it only
had small windows of time, 1.388 per cent of the rotation cycle of
the planet during each of its rotations, to accomplish its mission.
One such window had come and passed since it had begun its search,
and it concerned 1804 not to have achieved its first
goal.

The asteroid it was now
investigating was too large, and 1804 used its telescope to scan
the heavens for a new candidate. It cataloged every object it saw,
even if that object didn’t seem likely. None of its handlers had
asked it to catalog the objects, but it knew it would have to come
out here for more, and it wanted a head start on its next
search.

Nothing appeared in a complete
rotation, so it adjusted its search arc by .25 radians and began
rotating again. While it looked, it calculated how many more
searches it could conduct with its remaining fuel. The possibility
of running out of fuel added to its anxiety. It had to find a rock
soon.

Another rotation and nothing. It
adjusted its search arc again, tiny jets of gas emitting from it to
make a precise movement, and it rotated slowly again. It stopped
when it detected something.

Using an optical rangefinder, 1804
measured the distance and the diffuse reflectivity of the object.
At its estimated distance the object was too bright, meaning it was
too large, and 1804 cataloged its result. It began its rotation
again.

Four more arc adjustments and 1804
was searching a plane almost completely perpendicular to the
original plane it had started on. Two marginal candidates were
found on this plane, and 1804 evaluated them based on what it had
seen in previous rocks. It decided that the first was the better
candidate and estimated coordinates to the object.

The closer it arrived, the less
fuel it would consume inspecting it.

1804 determined the most likely
coordinates of the object, mentally closed its eyes, and
jumped.

Captain Christina Owenby rubbed
her face with her hands. She wasn’t sleepy, but she was tired. She
hadn’t slept, no one had, since they entered the silo. Her bones
ached, her eyes ached, her rear ached, and she was already sick of
looking at the steel girders and cables that filled the spaces
around her.

Little of the computer equipment
in the silo functioned as expected, and she had been the only one
to think of bringing her computer with her.

She sat at a makeshift desk
outside the main blast doors. Inside, four hundred other evacuees
tried to get comfortable, get something to eat, and not trip over
each other. Inside, there was no hope of connecting to the
network.

But outside the doors, in the main
part of the silo, she had an intermittent connection and was able
to occasionally download bursts of data. It also kept her away from
the Colonel, who ranted and raved and swore, even shoving a
keyboard through an old monitor at one point.

The lack of functioning equipment
effectively ended his command, and he was unhappy.

He came out now and barked at
Christina.

“
Anything
useful?”

“
Not yet, sir. No
reports of nuclear strikes in CONUS, though.” CONUS stood for the
Continental United States.

“
Can we go up top
and get some working gear?”

“
I don’t know,
sir.”

The Colonel turned and stalked
off, yelling again as soon as he walked through the partially open
blast doors.

Two airmen had been assigned to
Christina. They fetched whatever she wanted, stood guard to protect
her from who knows what, and kept her company. They both looked
like football players.

It always embarrassed her to order
others around, so she asked politely when she needed something,
like more coffee or water. The silo hatch sealed from the inside,
so she wasn’t sure what she needed protecting from. But the company
was appreciated.

“
What’s your
first name?” she asked of the first airman, the one who had carried
her computer down the ladder.

“
Shane,
ma’am.”

“
Football?”

He grinned. “Yes,
ma’am.”

“
What
position?”

“
I went to a tiny
high school in Nebraska, ma’am. We played both sides of the
ball.”

“
And you?” she
asked, turning her attention to her second
airman.

“
Zombinique,
ma’am. My friends call me Zombie.” The three chuckled. “Middle
linebacker.”

“
Thank you both,”
Christina said softly.

“
Things are going
to get interesting around here, aren’t they, ma’am?” Zombie
asked.

“
It’s
possible.”

“
We got your
back,” he said, patting on his MP23 carbine.

Christina nodded, not
understanding why enlisted people followed officers. She was just a
person who went to college. The men on either side of her were
better trained, better disciplined, and better soldiers than she
was. But they would give their lives for her, and the thought
humbled her.

“
I’m going to try
to get some sleep.”

“
Yes, Captain.
We’ll make sure you’re not disturbed.”

“
What do you mean the White House is gone? Do you know how
many people I left behind there. How many people I
ordered
to stay?” the
President shouted. “What happened to the missile defense
system?”

“
We don’t think
it was a Russian missile, sir. We had a one hundred per cent kill
rate on those,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Vanek, said.

“
Then what was
it? A terrorist?”

“
No, sir.
Preliminary reports, and I mean very preliminary, indicate it was
some kind of kinetic kill weapon fired from space. It looked like a
meteor.”

“
A meteor?” The
President sounded incredulous. General Vanek almost
flinched.

“
It just looked
like one, Mr. President. We don’t know exactly what it
was.”

“
Show me the
damage again.”

Aiden, the Chief of Staff, nodded
to someone out of the President’s line of sight. The image of the
crater flashed up on his screen. There was nothing
recognizable.

“
And you’re sure
this wasn’t a Russian missile that got by?”

No one ever thought the missile
defense system would be one hundred per cent perfect. No weapon
system ever was, despite what generals and scientists promised. The
Soviet Russians hadn’t believed missile defense systems would work,
and never even bothered developing systems half as advanced as the
US ones.

“
Yes, sir.
There’s no radioactivity. No missile signature was detected. But we
did receive reports of a heat signature making a bee-line from
space. It wasn’t launched from anywhere on
Earth.”

“
So it has to be
the Hrwang. No secret Soviet satellite weapon?”

“
The Hrwang
destroyed all the satellites,” Aiden reminded
him.

The President breathed in sharply
through his nose, then out loudly. He put his hands together,
keeping them from any visible shaking. He thought of everyone at
the White House. The Secret Service agents, the cooks, the
janitors, the IT staff. The Vice President who had remained there
to give the appearance that the government was still being run from
Washington and not from a plane.

Some of those people were his
friends, and his family’s friends.

Caution warned him, though. Going
head to head with an alien race that knew how to travel between
stars was risky. It had been easier to obliterate the Soviets. He
didn’t know, no one knew, what the Hrwang were capable of. But if
they had deliberately targeted the White House, that meant they
were deliberating targeting him.

“
Mr. President?”
General Vanek cautiously interrupted his reverie.

“
Go
ahead.”

“
Mr. President,
I’m getting some reports of other world leaders being targeted.”
General Vanek looked down at his tablet and scrolled. “It is
confirmed that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is a casualty.
Number 10 Downing Street took a similar hit as the White House.
Witnesses report it looked like a meteor.”

“
Any
others?”

“
The French are
reporting a hit on the Elysee Palace.”

The President thought about that
for a moment.

“
Sir, I’m getting
confirming reports from State. Ambassadors around the world are
reporting that the residences of heads of state are being destroyed
by meteor-like weapons,” the Chief of Staff said.

The President nodded.

“
Sir, it has to
be the Hrwang,” General Vanek said.