Final Assault (17 page)

She felt her heart jump, then tried to calm herself. No sense getting excited, not yet. But she wanted to kiss Leo Cross. He had told her the aliens would be predictable, and they were proving it, first by how they entered orbit, and now by separating into three units, just like before.

She glanced up. The holographic simulation had caught it as well. The ships were splitting up, heading to different parts of the Earth. One unit stopped over a fertile area of Vietnam and Laos. Another stopped over the Amazon—again!—and a third over a heavily wooded area of British Columbia, Canada.

She felt the muscles in her shoulders tighten as she waited, waited to see if the ships moved on.

They did not.

She let out a small breath of air. No cities. The ships weren’t stopping over the cities.

Cross had been right. The aliens needed food more than revenge.

Food and survival.

Predictable.

Maddox resisted the urge to pump her fist into the air. They hadn’t won yet. They really hadn’t even started.

She took a deep breath. She was in charge of this attack, thanks to her success against the aliens last spring.

She would make this work.

“All right,” Maddox said to Ward. “Let’s get this coordinated. We need to notify all the jets and small planes in the areas where the ships are coming down that they’re going to have to implement Plan Alpha. Make sure we have enough ships patrolling those areas.”

She said that last as a precaution. She had ordered more planes into the unpopulated areas, but she wasn’t sure if some of the foreign countries had carried out that order. She hoped they had, because those planes had to be in the air already, patrolling.

They wouldn’t do anything until after the aliens had dropped the harvesters and were coming back to pick them up. Then the planes would drop the adhesive bombs on top of the ships and get out of the area. When the ships climbed to the proper altitude, a lever inside the bomb would trigger and explode.

Simple, neat, and efficient.

All that Maddox could ask for.

“We’re going to lose a lot of countryside,” Ward said. “I still think we should drop one unit of nanorescuers to see if they really do defeat the harvesters.”

“They’ve worked in test after test. And we’re not going to tip our hands. Not when they’re so close,” Maddox said. Then she turned to him. “I gave you an order, mister.”

He saluted smartly, his face coloring. He had clearly been caught up in the what-ifs, just like she had. He turned and headed toward the senior staff, relaying her orders.

She gazed at the holographic replicas of the ships, forming like black storm clouds over their selected regions.

“Think you can steal from us and get away with it, you bastards?” she muttered. “You wait. You just wait and see what we have in store for you.”

November 10, 2018
9:41 Universal Time

Second Harvest: First Day

One problem at a time, General Gail Banks reminded herself as her fingers shook over the controls. The controls were useless, but she wanted to keep movement in her fingers. If they froze up on her, she wouldn’t be able to use them when she needed them.

Her skin was red and it ached. She wished she had taken that extra few minutes to put on a space suit. She was in her uniform, but it wouldn’t provide enough protection against the cold.

How long could a human survive in deep cold? If she remembered her biology correctly, a person could survive for quite a while—but not awake.

She would fall asleep long before the cold killed her.

The problem was that she didn’t dare fall asleep.

She could see her breath and her copilot’s, Sofia Razi’s, too. Behind them, Michael Thorne was breathing loudly. Banks could hear the panic in every breath. She was glad she was at the helm of this shuttle. Something in Thorne’s demeanor told her he wouldn’t have made it this far.

One problem at a time.

She had to stop thinking about the cold. The cold would cease to be an issue the moment they entered the atmosphere. In fact, then they’d have to worry about burning to death. Nothing about space was easy. Everything was extremes. It was what she loved about it.

She wondered how the rest of her crew was doing in the back. They were used to the extremes of space, as well. Most of them had been trained in hands-on flying—every astronaut still had to have flight training— but most of them hadn’t done it for a long time. And most of them hadn’t worked in conditions that required creativity, at least not since training school.

Banks didn’t want to think about how long it had been since she had had to improvise like this.

The
Endeavor II
shuddered as if it were hitting something hard. The frost on the windows instantly melted.

Banks felt her breath catch in her throat. They had just hit the very thin, upper edge of the atmosphere. And from the looks of the redness around them, they were going in.

Now it was time to face the next problem. Banks steadied herself. For the next few minutes she had to do the best flying of her life.

“Sure wish we had a way of knowing if the manual hydraulics were going to work,” Razi said.

Banks agreed. They would have to let the design of the shuttle carry them down and slow their momentum before the hydraulics would even work. Right now, the shuttle was like a falling meteor, hitting the atmosphere at a high rate of speed. At least it seemed as if they were coming in flat, which was helping.

The bright red and orange air smashing past the shuttle heated everything. The tiles on the underside of the shuttle were protecting them from the heat of the friction of reentry. But it wasn’t keeping the interior regulated in the normal way. The environmental controls were gone.

Banks felt sweat break out on her forehead, arms, and back. Pain shot through her numb fingers and toes, a sensation she hadn’t felt since her childhood when she had stayed outside too long in the cold, wet snow, and then plunged her feet into a hot bathtub. She kept moving her fingers, knowing she’d need them.

Razi’s face had grown red.

“We’re not going to make it through this,” Thorne said.

“Get in the back,” Banks said.

“The odds—”

“I don’t need to hear the odds or your pessimism. Get in the back.”

Thorne shot her a glance and didn’t move. “You’ll need me.”

“That’s more optimistic,” she said. “You can stay as long as you shut up.”

He nodded his head. Razi stifled a grin. Banks pulled off her coat and stripped down to her T-shirt.

She longed to take off her shoes as well, but knew that wouldn’t be practical. Even her hair was suddenly wet with sweat.

She wished she had a clock so she would know how much longer this would last. Minutes seemed like an eternity in here. This was one problem she had no control over. She had to trust her ship. It was built sturdy enough to get them through without cooking the crew like lobsters in boiling water.

She raised her fingers away from the controls. Even the plastic surfaces were growing too hot to touch. Any more heat and everything inside would start melting. Her throat was so dry it hurt. She should have brought water up here, but she would bet that the water stored in the back was too hot to touch.

Finally, the reds outside the window started fading.

“We’re slowing down,” Razi said.

Banks could feel it, too. Son of a bitch! She laughed and heard a hysterical edge to her voice. “We did it.”

Thorne started cheering, and behind her, she heard other voices cheering as well.

“We did it,” Banks repeated.

Razi was grinning.

But they didn’t have much time to celebrate. They had made it through the friction of reentry. Now they had to land this thing.

The next problem.

Banks felt her giddiness ease. She looked at the control wheel in front of her. It had been installed in just this shuttle alone. She had specifically asked for
Endeavor II
when she heard the plans for the ISS, because she knew the
Endeavor II
had more manual equipment than any other shuttle.

Now she was glad she had seen that far ahead.

The wheel was a lot like the old steering wheels on planes. It controlled the manual hydraulic system that had been installed in the shuttle. If she turned the wheel to the right, it increased the pressure in certain hydraulic lines and the rudder went left, moving the glider slightly to the right.

Pull back on the wheel, ship up slightly. But the shuttles were never intended to be controlled in this way. In the test flights even the
Endeavor II
had worked only marginally. Just good enough, one of the engineers had said, to give the best damn pilots a chance to survive.

Well, she was one of the best damn pilots. And she was taking every chance she could.

She was going to flare the nose up slightly right before the
Endeavor
plowed into the ground.

Finding a landing strip was going to be impossible, simply because they didn’t have the computers to figure out how to plan the glide approach to it.

She put her hands on the wheel. It was still hot, like the interior of a car is after sitting in the sun on a blistering summer day. She had trouble bending her fingers, but she forced them, despite the pain.

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face.

“I need eyes,” she said.

“I got it,” Thorne said, but it was Razi who unbuckled and stood so that she could get a better sight line out of the front windows of the shuttle, past the nose. Thorne apparently didn’t move at all.

Slowly Banks eased the nose down to a more level glide angle.

The shuttle responded to her control like an old cow trying to be shoved into a barn. Slowly . .. slowly . ..

One problem at a time.

Sweat stung her eyes, and she brushed at it with her right shoulder. Thorne saw the problem and wiped her brow with a tissue.

“Thanks,” she said, marveling that such a small gesture could actually change her opinion of someone.

“We’re over the Atlantic,” Razi said. “The east coast of North America is straight ahead.”

Damn it all to hell, Banks thought. The United States was the worst place she could land. There were too many people. And she didn’t dare ditch in the ocean. The crew would never get out before the shuttle sank.

“Florida,” Banks said. “We can head there.”

“Or Texas,” Razi said. “Lots of flat lands there.”

“Not flat enough,” Banks said, suddenly knowing what she wanted to try. “I’m going to make a long pass down Florida’s Gulf Coast, then see if I can make a turn and bring the shuttle down on a straight beach.”

The copilot nodded. “Good thinking. We miss and the water’s warm and shallow.”

Banks nodded. “And flat.”

“It’s like having a runway and a backup runway.” Thorne sounded relieved.

He was premature. She still had half a hundred steps to go through before they got off this ship and walked on terra firma again.

She eased the shuttle into a banking turn south, the hydraulic rudders working smoothly for the moment. The shuttle might be heavy, but in the atmosphere, it was a decent glider. And extremely fast.

Banks could see that the sun hadn’t yet got to the eastern seaboard, which would help them. They could see the outline of the land, and also lights along the shoreline.

The minutes ticked by as they sped half the length of Florida. Banks guessed that they were at thirty thousand feet when Razi said, “Better make the final turn.”

Banks agreed, slowly easing the shuttle to the left. In front of her the dark Gulf of Mexico loomed. Then slowly the coast of western Florida came back into sight, and she straightened their path along the seemingly straight edge. She knew that beach and shoreline were far from straight, but it was the best they could do at this point. She could get it down, but from that point onward, it was going to be sheer luck that saved them.

Luck had been with them so far. She would help it along by keeping this beast as straight as she could.

“Coming up fast,” Razi said.

“Get buckled in,” Banks said, then shouted back to the rest of the crew, “Hold on tight! This is going to be rough!”

Ahead of her she could see the dark line that indicated small waves and black water lapping on the sands. Houses, roads, tiny towns were flashing by behind them as they came in at nearly 200 mph.

At what seemed like around a thousand feet, she pulled back on the wheel, pulling the nose up and aiming the shuttle just along the wave line. For a moment she thought she had acted too late as the ground and water rushed up at them. But then the nose of the shuttle came up slightly, blocking her view of what was ahead.

Holding the wheel as tight and as hard as she could, she waited, keeping the shuttle straight.

Her muscles strained and shook. The sweat pasted her T-shirt to her back. She had to remind herself not to hold her breath.