The Filter Trap (28 page)

Bolton wasn’t satisfied. “But they moved us to their solar system. Why not bring Enceladus or Titan over here instead of the Earth? They’ve got way more water than we do, and no pesky natives to protest. Not to mention, if they’re so concerned about replacing their own polluted water, why use
our
polluted water?”

Kam took his chance to say something useful. “You’re right, Senator. It doesn’t make sense for them to move us. That’s another bullet for our list of why it wasn’t them that moved the Earth to this solar system. After all, why not move us to a closer orbit if that was the case? Rather, we suggest that these are opportunists, using the Event—whether they had foreknowledge or not—to support their own agenda, which may differ quite a bit from our ‘moving company’s.’”

Pith pumped his fist. “If their agenda is to steal our water after the biggest natural disaster in history, whether they caused it or not, they’re going to find it harder than they think.”

“We only know water is a necessary part of their operation, which is another clue to their vulnerabilities,” Jill noted.

“Have we sent a bombing run since they started their walkabout?” a senator asked.

“We’ve been debating,” the president said. “If anything, it’ll be a dry run for a ground assault. Or, God forbid, fighting in our cities. I’m holding off on General Pith’s Operation Cold Flash as long as I can, but the other presidents and prime ministers are chomping at the bit for a ground troop assault.”

The president removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Colonel Franks, half of the pilots on alert right now are from Hickam. I want you commanding any raids we do.”

The Air Force general in the room started to say something, but the president stopped him.

“General, I need direct experience now more than medals and time served. I’ll get my tactical advice from you, but those are the colonel’s pilots up there and he knows how they’ll perform, how close they’ll get, and how many will turn tail if I ask them to kamikaze.”

Most in the room gasped at the thought.

“I’ll order every last pilot to fly straight into those bastards before I authorize nuclear war. It’s your jobs to give me better options.”

“Trident missiles?” Pith asked.

The general from the Navy nodded. “We stationed an
Ohio-class
, the Wyoming, off the coast by the Mexican border after we heard about the coup.”

“Would they see it coming if we launched from there?” the president asked.

“A Trident from a hundred miles off shore, shooting at Mach 3 towards America?” the Navy general replied rhetorically. “Probably not, but I recommend moving her farther south after the launch anyway.”

“Do it,” the president said, tapping his fist on the table and beginning to stand up. “Let’s see if they bleed.”

“Chaplain said it’s the end of the world,” she heard one of them whisper.

“You men scared?” she asked, her lips turning into a pert smile behind the scar. “Speak freely.”

“Fuck that!” the youngest private replied, cradling his rifle like a newborn as he sat on the exposed concrete of an abandoned building’s facade. “Bring ‘em to us, we’ll light ‘em up real good.”

“Brig-gen,” another private cautiously asked, “you ain’t scared?”

She stepped closer to them, almost out of the shadows of the smashed building, stopping short of exposing her face above the nose. All the privates saw was the scar running from her chin to her left nostril and dancing in the middle when she spoke.

“Fear is good, it focuses the senses. I need to rid you of cowardice, so you don’t crawl into a foxhole when I say
advance
.”

She walked completely out, standing on the broad lip of what was once a courtyard in front of an office complex on Wilshire Boulevard. The sharp noon sun nipped at her pores, drawing beads of sweat that she let run. Nearly eight thousand troops under her command milled in front of the tsunami-felled high-rise.

She snapped her fingers. A private thrust a loudspeaker forward.

“All of you may think you know what’s coming. I’m sure you heard stories on the way here. I know my own battalion,
The Professionals
—,
” a third of the troops at hearing their own battalion called out wooted in reply, “
—
heard all about the enemy. Which is to say they didn’t hear much of anything truthful.

“You’ve heard we’re up against gods. I’m here to tell you it isn’t true. These things eat and shit and breathe. They bleed like us and can die like us, so you needn’t be afraid. Your generals, your officers, and your president are all behind you, prepared to use everything at our disposal to defeat the enemy.”

Her eyes wandered the sea of green and gray combat fatigues filling what used to be a wide city street in Los Angeles. The tsunami and earthquakes had turned the city upside down, literally in some cases. It occurred to her that her former home may be in worse shape than Bosnia or Kosovo. Even Haiti looked more promising after its earthquake than the shaken-out ruin of Los Angeles’ former world-class metropolis. The city was deserted, save for the tens of thousands of troops shipped in for the alien blockade and survivor searches.

The famous Hollywood sign had vanished, its remaining exposed struts on the mountain overlooked wreckage of homes built on stilts that washed away into the basin. Beach homes that anchored the wealth of California up and down the coast were replaced by water and sand blown miles inland. After cliffsides running along Pacific Coast Highway gave in, a strange new beachfront ran southeast from the palisades at the foot of Westwood and Cheviot Hills.

The new beach, not of sand, but billions of scraps of wood, steel, glass, and far too many human bones, would never host tourists. The bones stood out, gleaming white and baking in the sun. The flesh had been stripped either by the force of the water or by the starving birds and coyotes that came down from the mountains after the storm. The skeletons stayed where they were for now, reminders to the troops to do their duty, lest the entire world become a boneyard like this.

“Remember what you’ve seen, not what you’ve heard. San Francisco burned. Riots tore Las Vegas, Dallas, Mesa, and other southwestern cities as they scrambled to restore infrastructure. Here in the City of Angels you must walk past the bodies of those who’ve perished, millions of Americans who won’t know about the battle to come. Think of the billions who desperately need us to stop these bastards from taking our cities, our countries, our planet!”

The brigadier general thought of a movie she’d seen decades ago with a speech by a president made on an airfield tarmac about fighting invading aliens. That battle was cut and dry, good vs. evil. This was far too gray. The troops didn’t know, but she’d seen the reports: the aliens had yet to stage an offensive. All confirmed KIAs were from soldiers and civilians who’d gotten in the way. It didn’t mean the aliens wouldn’t, or couldn’t commit to an assault on the natives, but first strikes were always risky. So many wars had been fought needlessly over the ease of using a trigger instead of a tongue. But she didn’t get to be a brigadier general by questioning authority.

“The enemy makes runs over Los Angeles every thirty-two hours with a group of ships that fly to the Pacific and steal millions of gallons. They need
our
water. We’re not going to let them have it. This planet is ours!”

She raised her fist to the sky; the troops raised their rifles and shouted.

“Find your captains, they all have service orders. The next water run is less than two hours away. Survivor rescues are on hold until the enemy engagement ceases. You should all be ready to fight to the death, for if we lose this fight, there may be worse in store for those that remain.”

On that somber reminder, she stepped back into the shadow and walked back to her command room. The soldiers all stalked off into their own companies.

Two young privates that had been closest to the brigadier general walked across the ruined boulevard and up the steps into a former shopping mall, now a staging area for their battalion. The movie theaters were the rally point for organizing the companies. The man and woman hupped the dead theater escalators to the second floor, looking for auditorium six, where their infantry company would receive what may be the final orders of their lives. Some of the last to arrive, the privates took seats at the back, kept dim by the generator-fed lights focused on the stage.

“Familiar face up there, eh Leto?” the female private asked her companion.

“Boy, Petey sure looks angry,” he replied. “Bet he wishes BrigGen let him stay in San Francisco.”

“Gotta suck to be promoted just in time to lead a suicide mission.”

“Amanda, is there anything that
hasn’t
sucked since the Event? I heard you almost bit it in Boston
and
New York saving some egghead. They shut down Iraqi Freedom just in time to plop us in the middle of this shit.”

“Just in time, Leto?” Private Silversun choked back a laugh.

Private Leto wasn’t amused. “Clearly you aren’t an AM radio relay listener. The Mad Texan says this is all part of the plan. The New World Order planned this all along. Another false flag. First it was terrorists to keep us scared, then a ‘threat from beyond.’ We’re hearing a lot about aliens, but I ain’t seen one yet, have you?”

“Leto, I talked to that
egghead
, Kam Douglass. He didn’t need to see the aliens to be convinced. They didn’t blow up the Moon: they moved the entire planet. You think the ‘New World Order’ can orchestrate that shit from the Bohemian Grove? Move an entire planet to a new orbit? Try to point out the Big Dipper tonight for me. Or the Little Dipper, Aquarius, Virgo, anything!”

“The Mad Texan says they’re covering up the sky with contrails, making us all angry.
That’s
why there’s riots. The tsunamis are from some new super-weapon they tested out in the ocean.”

“Then where’s the
fucking Moon
, Ledesma? I see plenty of stars at night, but no moon. Not since Christmas Eve. And all this for what? Subterfuge to control us? Fuck, we’re already in the Marines, we gave up any control over our lives when we signed up, you know that. I suppose the Texan wants you to buy more gold?”

“With all the banks closed, gold is the only thing you can buy anything with,” Leto pointed out with sincerity.

Amanda began to mock Leto. “Then, Mr. Conspiracy Theory, why don’t you question why the Texan is trying to sell it to you? Maybe he’s
part
of all this, hmmmm?”

Leto looked at her, deadpan, hurt his comrade-in-arms dismissed him so easily.

She rolled her eyes. “You won’t believe it until you see an alien with your own eyes, will you?” Her voice dropped an octave. “I hope for your sake you get to
live
with your delusions, cuz if they caused the Event, you ain’t gonna live through a close encounter.”

Her point made any further conspiracy commentary from Leto moot. The privates straightened their backs and prepared to hear the inevitable as the major tested the stage mic.

Major Pete Thompson tried to conceal his anxiety as he prepared to speak to the room full of young faces. He’d seen the two young privates at the back come in and recognized them instantly. He wished his former peers had been sent for riot duty in the Midwest; he wasn’t eager to send them off to die on his first commanding mission. Though, if it was as bad as he’d heard, he wouldn’t be alive either to feel guilty.

Still, the brass could have at least sent him to command
strangers
, not that any of them would still be so by the end of the coming battle. War has a way of making fast friends, just in time to say goodbye too soon. The worst part was stifling a feeling of inadequacy. Amanda Silversun already earned a Meritorious Service medal for her work saving lives in Boston and New York, yet remained a private. He knew she’d also served with the other private, Leto Ledesma, in Operation Enduring Freedom. Pete went through basic with both of them, but earned his promotion by skipping Iraq for officer training and then coordinating rescues in San Francisco after the Event. He swallowed his reluctance to command and cleared his throat.

Pete clapped his hands twice and the dull roar of the nervous chatter in the theater subsided. He looked at a few of the women in the front, noting how proud they looked to be here, defending their country along with their brothers. Though there had been much debate in and outside the military about allowing women to serve in direct combat, Pete found inspiration in it. Those women fought harder to get here than the bigger men next to them, and he wagered their inner strength might make them more dependable when the time came.

Smaller bodies might even be an asset in close combat in a razed city. You want to provide the enemy with smaller targets in a shootout, as long as they carried the same guns to battle. Nobody knew exactly what they’d face out there, so maybe mental toughness would make the difference. Maybe nothing would.

“Listen up!” The room was nearly silent already anyway, but Pete needed to establish dominance and respect early. Nobody should call him
Petey
ever again after this!

“I was a friend to some of you and a stranger to most. As of today I’m neither. I know two weeks ago some of you were breaking bread with me as equals, but the Corps has seen fit to make me a major, and that means you’re all under my command. Respect that and I’ll respect you.

“For those of you who consider me a stranger: Hello, my name is Major Pete Thompson. I was born in Boston and raised in San Francisco, thus my love of giant red socks.” Pete pulled up his pants leg to reveal a high red sock, not military issue, but scuttling petty rules is an old wartime privilege; nobody checked for contraband in the Higgins boats at Normandy. The anxious privates, on the cusp of a battle perhaps more deadly and more important than D-Day, were more than happy to chuckle a bit before getting to the gritty mission details.

“Good, now that pleasantries are out of the way . . .” Pete signaled a private in the projection booth. The room darkened and a hastily-prepared digital slideshow began on the theater’s giant screen. Pete described several photographs and tactical outlines as they flipped by. He detailed what the enemy looked like, their weapons and ships capabilities, spy plane photographs of the landing sites, water collection, and disintegrated animals in China, Canada, and Australia.

Pete detailed the plan of attack for Operation Cold Flash, which would be mirrored worldwide: surround the ships as they flew through the Wilshire corridor for a surprise first-strike offensive. A cache of Stinger missiles and heavy artillery had been chopper-dropped in and waited along the street with instructions to expend every piece of ammunition necessary.

The primary goal was to block the water-stealing ships from the ocean, to ground the visitors and see how they fought when separated from the mother ship in the Mojave; a test of their vulnerability and battle tactics before ordering an all-out assault on the giant desert compound. Pete suspected the mission was set up to fail; otherwise, the brass would learn nothing useful. But he couldn’t let his troops guess it.

He pressed his clicker again, letting a single slide remain for a few seconds without speaking. It was hard to tell what it was until the major zoomed in. What at first looked like more dead animals next to a lake were dead monks. Hundreds of them had made a quest to Ayakum Lake, forty miles north of the Tibetan border. All that remained were burnt yellow robes and charred bones.

“We don’t know what the monks were doing there. Perhaps it was a small showing of resistance to China. They were likely unaware that the aliens had landed in XinJiang. We can suppose they showed no resistance. This hasn’t circulated far, even inside the armed forces, but the president authorized us to show you this for a bit of motivation.

“I’ve heard the chatter as much as you: ‘what if they’re peaceful? They haven’t killed anybody yet.’ Well now we can quell the rumors that they ‘came in peace’ and all the KIAs so far were ‘misunderstandings.’ You’ve seen the bodies for yourselves. Not since our grandparents fought the Nazis have we seen such indiscriminate and inhumane actions. We need to teach them what it means to be human!”