Final Assault (18 page)

Time stretched.

The impact seemed to take forever.

Out the side window, lights flashed past faster than she wanted to imagine.

Then suddenly she was smashed forward against her safety harness.

Scrapes, and squeals, and shattering, thundering crashes echoed around her.

The screaming of metal against sand made goose bumps rise on her flesh.

She clung to the wheel with all of her strength, focusing on holding the shuttle straight. It had to stay straight, but it was like controlling a herd of elephants with her bare hands.

Then for an instant the shuttle seemed to stop.

And in that instant, she knew what had happened. The shuttle had skipped like a flat stone over water.

Skipped as it had been designed to do in the upper atmosphere.

But this wasn’t the upper atmosphere. This was hard water and beach they had just skipped back into the air on.

“Shit!” she shouted.

She fought to hold the wheel in a position she thought was straight.

Fought to keep the nose straight down the beach.

Then she saw the lights of beach homes flash past her window. She had lost. The shuttle wasn’t straight at all. She fought the wheel, fought and fought—

As it turned out, there was nothing she could have done.

The shuttle’s wing caught the sand, twisting the shuttle around and flipping it like a spinning top down the dark beach.

The spinning tore the shuttle apart, scattering tiles and parts as it tumbled down the beach at over two hundred miles per hour.

Everyone inside was killed instantly, the force of the impact ripping them apart and splattering them around the cabin.

Two miles later the last small intact section of the shuttle cabin finally exploded on impact into a concrete beach wall.

There were only a few witnesses to the final moments of the shuttle as almost everyone who lived along that stretch of Gulf beach had evacuated the area for Orlando.

November 10, 2018
6:55 a.m. Central Standard Time

Second Harvest: First Day

Kara Willis’s back hurt. She was sitting on the ruined stool again, but the curve of the leather seat pushed the stool away from the wall just enough so that she couldn’t lean back comfortably. She had been on the stool most of the night.

The Hendricksons had fallen asleep on the couch, and her mother hadn’t let her wake them. Mr. Nelson sat in her father’s La-Z-Boy, and Barb was rocking in her mother’s rocker. Her mother was still in the kitchen, working frantically. She had refused to come into the living room to see what was happening. Instead, she was cooking as if there would be no tomorrow.

The phrase made Kara shudder. That was what they had been facing all along. No tomorrow. That was why she and half the household had stayed up all night.

Her father had wandered in and out of the room as the night progressed, stopping long enough to stare at the television, and then shaking his head and walking away. He didn’t like to be out of control any more than her mother did. And he hated what this had reduced them to—not the family so much as humanity itself.

He felt that human beings had stopped living while this threat was going on. They were just surviving, he had said, and that made them little more than animals. Kara had asked about the people leading the countries, the people who were fighting the aliens, and he had said they were surviving, too, just on a different level.

His attitude was so dark, so negative, that she didn’t really want to be near him. And fortunately it was fairly easy to stay away while there were so many people in the house.

She had been watching the various channels for several hours now. When the harvesters finally fell over places she had never cared about, Vietnam and Laos, and one place she had only visited, British Columbia, she felt a mixture of relief and terror. Relief that nothing was landing on Chicago, and terror that something would.

There were no nanorescuers in those wild places, so she wasn’t going to find out if the “protection” worked. Not yet anyway. And the newscasters were promising that the humans would attack the aliens when they came back to pick up their harvesters. That wasn’t going to be for twelve hours or more—full dark.

The sun was just beginning to rise here. Kara could see pinkness on the horizon through the living room picture window. She pushed herself off the stool and went to the door.

“Where’re you going, honey?” her mother asked.

Kara didn’t answer. She stepped outside, leaving the door open, and stared at the east.

The sunrise was pink and orange, with some dark red mixed in. What was that old saying?
Red in the morning, sailors take warning.
There was red here.

She took a deep breath. A lot of her neighbors were still outside, some of them asleep in their lawn chairs, blankets covering them. Most of the tents were zipped closed, and she couldn’t see the occupants.

She was the only one watching the sunrise. Even though it might be the last sunrise they ever see.

Her mother had told her not to be so pessimistic. Pessimism, her mother said, never got them anywhere. Yet it had been her mother who had sobbed so badly when she heard the aliens were returning, her mother who couldn’t watch the vids now, her mother who was trying to cook enough food to feed an army, maybe with the thought that, after today, they might never get a chance to eat again.

Kara shuddered. It was cold and damp. A November morning. That threat of snow she had felt the night before was still in the air, but there were no clouds, at least not yet. Something about the chill told her that winter was here. She usually hated winter.

She wanted to see this one.

Those people on the shuttle wouldn’t. Mr. Nelson had turned up the sound on one of the screens when the vid reporter was talking about the shuttle crew. They’d gotten off the International Space Station, blown it up and taken some aliens with it, survived the reentry into the atmosphere, and missed the landing on the beach. Up until that moment, the commentators were calling the crew’s survival a miracle and a sign.

After that, they had shut up.

But Kara was wondering if it was a sign. A sign that everything would go really well until the last minute, and then no one on Earth would know what hit them.

After all, the aliens didn’t need humans. They needed trees and plants and stuff, from what she’d been hearing. They needed to take stuff from the Earth so that they could live. Like farmers, only the aliens didn’t grow anything. The ultimate hunter-gatherers, her father had called them.

If Kara was those aliens, and she knew that humans could kick her butt, she’d do everything she could to destroy humans and leave Earth intact.

She hoped the governments and the military had thought of that and were guarding against it. Because there was a part of Kara that believed all this talk about one more harvest after this one, only one more, was wrong.

She didn’t know where the feeling came from. Her father would say it came from her fear.

Maybe he was right. After all, the Earth was a pretty big place. Even if the aliens came back again and again, they might not try to destroy Chicago. She had a really good chance of surviving.

“Kara, you’re letting in the cold!” Her mother’s voice floated from inside.

Kara sighed and looked at the sunrise one last time. It was beautiful. Would it still be that beautiful if there were no people left to enjoy it?

It was a question she’d never know the answer to, no matter what happened.

All she knew was that she wanted to see another sunrise. Thousands of sunrises. All the sunrises that she, as a seventeen-year-old girl, was entitled to.

Those aliens didn’t have the right to take that away.

November 10, 2018
11:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

Second Harvest: First Day

All day and all night. Cross had managed to catch a two-hour nap on his couch midmorning, after Britt threatened to conk him with a chair and put him out herself. He’d agreed to take the nap as long as she took one, too, and they’d both agreed not to take one at the same time because he would have wagered neither of them would have slept.

Not that holding Britt for two hours would have been bad, but they needed the rest. They had to be on their toes for the next part of this whole attack.

Now Cross was sitting on the corner of the desk where, almost twenty-four hours earlier, he had watched as the shuttle left the ISS. The loss of Banks and her crew had shaken him more than he wanted to admit. He blamed his reaction on lack of sleep, but he actually thought that he had felt so strongly because they had been so heroic, and they had come so close.

It hadn’t been fair, but nothing about the tenth planet had been fair. He thought it monstrously unfair that he understood why the aliens were coming here. If only they were truly evil, inexplicable things who had attacked the Earth for no reason. But Cross understood their need to harvest the Earth’s riches. If he were in their situation, he would have tried to find a solution, any solution, no matter what the cost.

Just as they had.

And until now, they had probably thought the humans one more primitive race on a primitive world. A lot had changed in two thousand years.

“My God,” someone said.

Cross blinked. He’d almost been asleep on the corner of the desk, lost in his reverie. Before him, the telemetry continued to pour onto the screens, and the visuals didn’t look a lot different.

Everyone in the room, though, was looking at Odette Roosevelt. She had her hand over her mouth. Britt was hurrying to her side.

“What is it?” Britt asked.

“They’re coming back for their harvesters,” Roosevelt said.

Cross stood. Everyone else around him was standing, too, trying to see, on the small television monitors, the battle that they’d all be waiting for.

But Cross shoved his way forward. “Are you sure?” he asked.

Roosevelt nodded.

“They’re early,” he said to Britt. She frowned at him, not understanding why he was so concerned.

He kissed her on the cheek and headed back to his own office, muttering to himself the whole way. During the first harvest, the aliens had left the harvesters on the ground for more than twenty-three hours. This time they had cut that time short by five hours.

Why?

He pulled open his office door, stepped over the pile of cups and paper plates that were spilling out of his garbage can, and climbed behind his desk.

This wasn’t right. The aliens were supposed to be predictable. And this wasn’t.

Something was wrong.

He had to find out what that was as fast as he could. He had a hunch there was not a lot of time left.

November 10, 2018
8:14 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

Second Harvest: First Day

Finn Broderick held the controls of the Gulfstream 4 and marveled at the fact that he was doing this. Once upon a time, he’d been a commuter pilot, bringing people in and out of the Alaskan wilderness. A glam job, he’d thought when he lived in Florida. A nasty tough job, he’d learned when he got here, and one he’d been doing for nearly fifteen years. Doing, and doing well.

He just never expected to do it in a war.

His copilot, Wyatt Crowfield, was a native Alaskan who thought this whole thing was an adventure. He was a lean man who didn’t speak much. He let his scars speak for him. His entire face had been lacerated by a momma grizzly when he’d been twelve. He had barely survived. The fact that he had survived made him something of a legend in these parts—and somehow got him a lot of women.

Finn had no idea what the women saw in that mutilated face, but they saw something. Wyatt never wanted for a midnight companion.

And he certainly wouldn’t if tonight’s work went as planned.

Finn was circling at just under ten thousand feet. His jet was empty—no passengers sitting in those plush, expensive seats. The only customer on this flight was one bomb strapped below his cockpit, and it wasn’t even a paying customer. Although he never hoped a job would go as well as this one.

They’d been circling for an hour now inland from Juneau. The bowl where Juneau sat looked like home to him. On the other side of the coastal mountain range where he was circling, British Columbia loomed. But not the British Columbia he had known for the last fifteen years. A place that was now as unfamiliar as the moon.

The aliens’ harvesters had turned that lush forest land into a sea of black dust. Until the light faded, he could see the dust from his cockpit. Now he thought he imagined it, a thin line in the darkness, a line that was even blacker than anything around him.

The aliens weren’t expected to return yet, but dozens and dozens of planes were in the air nearby, all different, all equipped with a bomb—a very powerful focused charge—ready to drop on the alien ships. Even more planes would take to the air when the expected time arrived. He hoped by then to have returned to Juneau, refueled, and gotten back in the air.

“She-it,” Wyatt said, the word half a whistle.