Forever Until Tomorrow (War Eternal Book 5) (2 page)

"Thank you," he says, as Reggie releases him and goes back to his chair. He returns to the same position. Eyes straight. Hands clasped. Not another word.

He's shaken. His heart is racing. Twenty years and nothing like this has ever happened before. Something is different, but he doesn't know what. He hopes that it's part of God's plan.

"I'll see you soon, Reggie," he says, grabbing the back of his chair and slowly pushing it in. He starts walking away, heading across the cafeteria and waving away the nurses who had come running as he fell, too late to do anything but crowd him as he tries to leave.

"No, Father," he hears Reggie say behind him. "You won't."

20 years earlier...

"Halley Station, this is Hawthorne. Do you copy?"

Nigel lifted his head away from the communicator strapped to his chest, returning his attention to the mess strewn across the ice below. His heart was thumping, his mind still trying to make sense of exactly what it was he and his partner were looking at.

"You think it was a satellite?" Adel Hawthorne asked. She had the binoculars, and she was scanning the debris field with them.

"You can see better than I can," Nigel replied. His voice was shaky, his nerves and excitement at odds with one another. How did his wife stay so calm?

"There's hardly any smoke," Adel said. "Do you remember when the TOPOL satellite came down? It was on fire for hours, and smoldering for days after."

Nigel lowered his head again. "Halley Station, this is Hawthorne. Do you copy?"

There was no reply.

"Maybe the antenna came loose again," Adel suggested. She pushed herself to her feet, adjusting her thermal suit so that it sat straight on her waifish frame, and then jogged back to their snowmobile a few dozen yards behind.

A large antenna whip was sticking up from the rear of it, and she grabbed it and tightened it in its base.
 

"Try now," she shouted back.

Nigel spoke into the small black device one more time. "Halley Station, this is Hawthorne. Do you copy?"

A second of static, and then a voice finally replied. "We hear you, Nigel," the lead scientist, Doctor Charles Abbott, said. "What do you see?"

Nigel opened his mouth but didn't speak. He wasn't sure what to say. Of course, his team had heard and felt the crash. It had registered a 3.4 on their seismographs, and woken everyone up with the noise and shaking. An asteroid, most of them had decided, once they had overcome the initial shock.

"It isn't an asteroid, sir," Nigel said. "It's a ship of some kind. We're still a couple of kilometers away, but from here it looks like it was quite large. A military satellite perhaps."

"If a military satellite just crashed in our backyard, you can be sure we'll be hearing about it shortly. What about the other teams?"

Adel had returned to his side, and had heard the question. She lifted the binoculars, spinning in a circle with them.
 

"No sign of - wait. No. There's a cat incoming. I'm trying to make out the flag."

"It has to be the Canadians," Nigel said. "They're the only ones due south close enough to get here already."

He heard Charles sigh into the comm. "It figures. With the force of that impact, I bet the entire world knows something came down here."

"I just hope it isn't an American satellite. They're impossible when it comes to recovering what they think belongs to them."

"I've got another team on the horizon," Adel said. "I think everyone's coming to take a look." She lowered the binoculars. "We should head down there, get a peek before the others arrive and spoil it."

"We don't have jurisdiction," Nigel replied.

"Neither do they." Adel waved at the mist of snow rising in the distance, churned up by the snowcat's treads. "Do you want to be the one who misses out?"

Nigel smiled. That was why he loved his wife. She forced his regularly cautious self to be a little more free-spirited.

"Let's go," he said.

They ran back to their ride, starting it up and heading along the outer edge of the crater. Adel kept her eyes on the other teams and on the debris, searching for a place to explore while Nigel tried to find a path down.

"Oh, Nigel," she said a moment later. "I wish you could see this."

He spied a ridge in the crater that he knew the snowmobile could handle and changed direction to head toward it. "I'll be seeing it soon enough."

"Nigel." Adel paused. Her voice suddenly sounded nervous. He wasn't used to that, it caused him to ease off on the throttle.

"What is it?" he asked, concerned.

She didn't speak.

"Addie?" he said.

"Hit the throttle, Nigel," Adel said. "However fast you think you can get down into the crater, do it faster."

"What?"
 

"Just go."

Nigel knew better than to question. He accelerated again, sending the vehicle scooting forward and then down the ridge. The ride was rough, and he tightened his legs against the sides to hold on while Adel gripped his chest. He couldn't help but smile, feeling a sense of exhilaration at the sudden race, even if he had no idea what he was racing toward.

The snowmobile jostled and shook, each shift in the terrain affecting it differently, some of them threatening to throw them off the edge and plummet into the crater. Nigel handled the controls expertly, keeping them from tumbling and steering them further into the depths.
 

They were a minute into the descent when Adel tapped his shoulder.
 

"There," she said, her hand going out ahead of his face and pointing into the distance.
 

He saw now that they were at the trailing edge of the crash site, near the impact point but still a distance away from where the main body of the satellite had come to rest. He knew how most of the research camps on the continent were grouped, and that their spot would leave them further away from that point.

That was the reason for the race. Adel wanted to get there first, and if he could make it happen, he would.

He pushed the throttle even harder, growing reckless in his pursuit of her desires. The only time he came out of his cautious shell was when Adel was involved. It was the only reason they had wound up together in the first place. He was the nervous, shy scientist. She was the beautiful, intelligent one who always seemed out of place among the geeks and nerds. She had noticed him because he took the chance to make himself noticeable.
 

He had been taking the same chances since.

The snowmobile shuddered as they reached the bottom of the crater and shifted onto more level ground. Nigel looked ahead, his breath catching in his throat when he saw the massive, torn piece of what he was certain was too big to be any satellite or anything human-made for that matter. It reached high into the sky, the top surely rising above the crater, a long, rounded tube that had been snapped in half, the rear end dripping with slagged metal and wires and piping.
 

"I don't believe it," he said, just loud enough for Adel to hear.

"I don't believe it either, lovey," she replied. "But there it is, and it's bloody brilliant. We need to get there ahead of the others."

Nigel tried to add more throttle. "She's maxed out," he said. "We can't go any faster.'

Adel raised the binoculars again, searching the sides of the crater for the other teams.
 

"I think we can make it," she said.
 

Nigel thought so, too. They had surely been the first to respond.

Three tense minutes passed. The debris grew larger ahead of them, looming up and towering over them like someone had dropped a skyscraper in the middle of the Arctic. And in a sense, someone had.
 

"Every country on Earth is going to want a piece of this," Nigel said.
 

"And we're going to be there first in representation of the United Kingdom," Adel replied. "We'll be heroes."

The thought made Nigel more excited. He never imaged he would be a hero, especially with their shared passion for the cold and the ice. They loved what they did, but it certainly wasn't a high profile position or even a low profile position for that matter. It took a certain type of person to live in the real down under.

He looked ahead at the ship, his heart racing; his every thought and breath focused on reaching it ahead of all the others. It would be a testament to his love and devotion, both to Adel and to science. It was more than he ever could have dreamed of.

He didn't notice the red spot of light that appeared on his chest, just to the left of the communicator.
 

He didn't even feel the bullet as it punctured his thermal suit and sank deep into his heart.

He didn't have to watch the snowmobile spin wildly out of control, throwing Adel into the side of the ice before crushing her against it.

He was dead before he ever saw the team of soldiers perched at the edge of the crater, crouched ahead of a VTOL jet that had delivered them from a small base at the tip of South Africa.
 

Something else had been set in motion the moment the massive object had appeared in space out of nowhere, the trajectory calculated and the team dispatched.

War.

Eternal.

20 years earlier...

"Looks like we're late," Captain Ivers said, speaking into the mic affixed to the front of his tactical helmet. He put his hand on the front of it, wiping away a smudge with his glove.
 

"Better late than never," his second in command, Warrant Officer Esposito, replied. "Who do you think owns that VTOL down there?"

Ivers squinted as he looked down at the edge of the crater, still a few klicks out but approaching in a hurry. He could see the wreckage of the ship out of the corner of his eye, and he forced himself to resist the urge to stare. He was special forces, Green Beret. He wasn't supposed to be impressed by anything when there was a mission to complete.

"No markings," he said. "Could be anyone. More important: how the hell did they get here before us?"

"I bet it was the Soviets, sir," Sergeant Cohn said, drawing a laugh from the rest of the team.

Ivers laughed too, using it to hide his true concern. They had been dispatched within ten minutes of the UFOs appearance, the landing spot quickly calculated by people much smarter than he was. Their Interceptor was based on the latest scramjet tech, capable of hitting Mach 10. It had delivered them from the base in Australia to the site in no time.

Or so he had thought.

Whoever had beat them to the location, they couldn't have been far off to beat them there in a VTOL. Military installations in Antarctica were supposed to be illegal.

He snapped out of his head and reached down, unbuckling his belt and standing. "Get ready for the drop," he said.

"Yes, sir," his team replied.

He made his way toward the back, passing through one of the plane's inserted modular units and grabbing a heavy rifle and a drop-jet from the exposed rack. The rest of Alpha did the same as they filed in behind him.
 

"Coming up in two, Captain," the pilot of their transport, Lieutenant Davis, said.

"Roger. We're moving into position now." He slipped the drop-jet onto the back of his armor, clicking the locks into place with practiced ease. He grabbed the control stick and pulled it forward, quickly running the pack through standard operational checks. That done, he continued to the rear of the craft, dropping the cap over the rear access panel and keying in the code to open the tail while the rest of his squad finished gearing up.

"It's going to be a bit nippy out there, ladies and gents," he said.

"I can feel my nipples freezing already," Cohn said.
 

"And my balls," Sergeant Olson said.

"Keep your balls to yourself, Ollie," Esposito joked.
 

"Yes, sir."

"Twenty seconds," Davis said.
 

"Roger." Ivers shivered slightly as some of the freezing air began filtering into the rear of the plane. It was damn cold. He hit a button on his left wrist, activating the armor's internal heating system. There was no way to jet-drop onto the coldest continent without it. That done, he moved to the edge of the ramp and looked down, again trying to stay focused. The crash site had passed below them, and he could see the top of the wreckage in every detail. It was a starship, that much was for sure, and since humans hadn't made it, it had to be extra-terrestrial. Aliens.