11

The technicians clustered around Ben’s ship like nursing piglets.

Propulsion, navigation, weapons, life support, all the systems were still being finished even as the launch clock ticked over to T-minus 30 minutes. The smell of sweat and stale coffee filled the air in the cramped hangar. Ben and Rickert threaded their way through tangles of cable and around half a dozen workbenches with open laptops wired into the various ports on the black and gray spacecraft.

“You think this is going to work?” Rickert asked, dodging a shower of sparks.

“I’m getting a good signal on my scans, and all the completed systems are coming online. Once it gets up in the air, though? That I don’t know.”

Ben reached out to the dimpled surface of the machine, running his hands over the ridges and seams. The ship looked like a bubble perched on the open face of a flower. The cockpit was in the shiny silver sphere, while the petals that fanned out from the bubble were more crude-looking and mechanical. Like everything else in this effort, it was all foreign substance, an exotic recipe that the technicians had followed assiduously but blindly, mixing chemicals and molecules in combinations they’d never dreamed, using sub-atomic manufacturing processes they could barely understand. Would it work? Hell, they didn’t even know how it would work. Assuming it did function as planned, Ben knew he could operate it. But if that made him an expert, then any idiot capable of using a telephone qualified as a network engineer, Ben thought. This ship was a black box, and Ben and Rickert both knew they were still flying blind.

The two men walked around the ship. At the rear of the ship (or stern, as Ben’s Navy mind insisted), a small ramp extended from an opening in the hull. Inside, a simple chair was installed in a cockpit with no visible controls or displays. Rickert stopped, and Ben did too.

“You know, no one wants to send you up there. The tech guys still haven’t made much progress reverse-engineering your nanomachines. You’re the only version of you we have. You’re the protector. Of everything. Without the technology in your cells, we’re dead. If you die, we all die.”

“Technology won’t be enough,” Ben said. “It’s never enough.”

“The hell do you mean by that?”

“Did you know a distant relative of mine was a Comanche Indian? The Comanche were . . . interesting. They were barely a tribe at all for most of their history. Just a group of people hunting together. But when they got their hands on Spanish horses, everything changed. Almost overnight, that single technological leap made them the preeminent power on the frontier. They mastered it in a way no one else did. Sioux, Apache, none of them could match up to the Comanche, and they killed everyone in their path. They were truly savages, and, one-on-one, unstoppable.”

“I guess I never thought of horses as technology,” Rickert said.

“Technology is anything that makes you better at what you do,” Ben said with a shrug. “A stick or a cruise missile, it’s all the same.”

“So what stopped the Comanche and their new tech?”

Ben smiled. “The United States Army. Lots and lots of them. And the Americans eventually learned not to fight one-on-one.”

Ben continued to examine the spacecraft, occasionally holding his palm over a panel to get a readout on the specific component. “Of course, we need the technology. I just don’t know if it’s gonna be enough. I heard that we’re not giving other countries the full technical readout of the nanobots in my body, just the satellite blueprints. I think that’s a mistake. We need help.”

Rickert sighed. “Yeah, I know. Politics is alive and well, even at the end of the world. The president means well, or at least thinks he does. Showing too many of our cards might give someone else—the Chinese, maybe the Russians—a chance to figure out something we haven’t, and then try to get leverage on us. At least that’s the explanation I got.”

Ben rolled his eyes, which Rickert pretended not to see. After all, he was still active duty and Lockerman was still commander in chief.

“So right now, you’re all we’ve got,” Rickert continued. “So be careful. As tough as it sounds, we’re better off losing a city than losing you. You’re the only thing we can’t rebuild. If it comes down to making a stand or living to fight another day, we need you to do the smart thing.”

This had been weighing on Ben for some time. Before he’d been turned into an human/alien hybrid and thrust into this interstellar war, he’d had no intention of ever going back to war, even if his leg had healed completely. Then this upgraded body had thrust him into a new mission. At first it seemed like he’d able to fight alone, suffer alone. A one-man army. That had been a cruel joke, though. He might fight alone. But if he failed, he’d kill everyone. Charging up a hill alone just gave you a better view of the entire world below that was depending on you.

The two men were quiet for a moment. Ben continued to examine his ship, but sensed Rickert’s gaze on him.

“I read your file, you know,” the general said.

“My DD 214?”

“No, not your discharge papers. Well, yes, those too. But your personal file.”

“What personal file?”

“Almost as soon as this thing got rolling, the president had the FBI do a full background check on you.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Rickert said, shaking his head. He gestured around the buzzing facility. “I’m sure there’s an FBI file on me now, too, and everyone else on this insane project.”

Ben drew back a bit, folding his arms.

“So what did mine say? Document all my speeding tickets and late library books?”

“Yes, actually, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. Your childhood. Your father.”

“Doesn’t seem relevant. That was a long time ago.”

“Really? How could it not be relevant? Don’t you—”

A technician scurried in, interrupting them without hesitation.

“Lt. Shepherd? We’re ready for the preflight checklist.”

Ben was grateful for the intrusion, cutting off the conversation Rickert had tried to start. The past was like an anvil crushing Ben’s chest. The weight of the past and the weight of the future.

Ben nodded, and the technician stepped back. Rickert stuck his hand out. Ben shook it and tried to look confident, but the worry was etched on Rickert’s face, permanent and impervious. Ben didn’t know what else to say. Finally, Rickert gestured awkwardly to the ship, and Ben stepped up the ramp. The door melted back into the exterior with a sound like a small stream.

As the ramp closed, the interior of the ship filled with a soft glow and the constant chatter of data running across his vision thinned as the ship’s systems asserted themselves. Ben ducked through the short passageway to the cockpit, scanning three-dimensional schematics popping up before his eyes that provided readouts on the ship’s various systems. He settled into the black chair, pushing Rickert’s concerns out of his mind. None of that mattered. Hadn’t mattered in a long time. The squishy material molded to the thin, tight-fitting black flight suit covering his body, and when he laid his arms on the armrests, the leather-like material oozed around his frame.

It wasn’t quite a full cocoon, but his body was all but merged with the seat. Dozens of microscopic sensors pierced his arms and the back of his head, creating a direct, physical link between the ship and his body and mind. It was just like the first fight in the desert. Machine and man merged into one weapon. With a mental command, Ben turned the silver cockpit bubble transparent from the inside, so he could see the cluster of technicians unplugging and packing up. Across the viewing screen, a map of the defensive satellites rotated into place. Ben zoomed out, and confirmed the mrill drones were still approaching from beyond the sun.

A technician walked up to the outside of the cockpit bubble, looking into the smooth sphere. He pressed his headset against his ear.

“Lt. Shepherd, we’re ready to test your primary ignition system. Are you locked in?”

Ben nodded, then remembered the tech couldn’t see him.

“Uh, yeah, affirmative, I’m good to test.”

The notion of “testing” was mostly a farce, Ben thought. None of the equipment in the ship was actually testable by the computers and sensors at ground control. Ben was the tester . . . or the crash-test dummy. The techs could read the output, but they had no way of initializing or deactivating any of the onboard systems. If something went wrong, no one on the ground would know it until the ship exploded . . . or worse.

But protocol demanded testing. Checklists must be checked.

With a thought, Ben powered up the antigravity generator. It wasn’t an actual propulsion system but rather generated antigravitons: particles that repelled the gravity-generating force of gravitons. At least, that’s how the scientists thought the antigravity system worked. Rickert had pointed out that gravitons were merely theoretical, and perhaps even impossible in Einstein’s framework of general relativity. And yet, when the antigravity drive was engaged, the ship floated like a leaf in the wind. Even though the craft weighed well over 50,000 pounds, with the antigrav engaged, a strong breeze was enough to nudge it forward.

The actual propulsion system was what the techs called a magnetoplasmadynamic, or MPD, thruster. Ben barely grasped the physics, but he’d been assured that the ionized lithium gas system, powered by a miniaturized 100-megawatt nuclear reactor, was revolutionary. It would change the world if they could save it first.

As cutting-edge as the ship was, though, Ben knew it was deficient in numerous ways. It was not the peak of brin technology. The problem was that mankind simply lacked the manufacturing capabilities to take advantage of the most cutting-edge designs in the brin portfolio. They’d had to dumb it down for the primitive apes they were trying to save, Ben thought. Hawthorne, President Lockerman’s science adviser, had explained to Ben at one point that the problem was like asking a nineteenth-century watchmaker to build a smartphone.

“A watchmaker was one of the smartest engineers on the planet at the time,” she’d said. “If you crammed him in a time machine, brought him into the present, and sat him down for a crash course in modern microelectronics, physics, radio, and all the other stuff that goes into a smartphone in the early twenty-first century, he’d get the basic concepts in a few days. But then kick his butt back to 1823 or whenever, and tell him to make you an iPhone, and he’d be totally lost.”

Understanding a concept was vastly different from being able to put it to use. To do that, to put a functioning phone on a store shelf, you needed a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing plant. A series of them, for the processor, the screen, the memory chips, the cellular radio, and so on. Not to mention a wireless network to connect the phone to the internet, which was an industry unto itself. Money was only half the equation. Time was the other. Modern factories were the result of decades of labor, stretching from Henry Ford into the era of robotics. Technology was never created in a vacuum.

Ben thought he understood the dilemma better than Hawthorne realized. After all, his body had become exactly that sort of mysterious machine. SEAL training—hell, all military training—was iterative. You started with the basics: running, lifting, swimming, shooting. From there you graduated to more complex mapping, planning, infiltration, and so on. There was no eureka, no epiphany. Making a soldier was no different than making a computer. Or making art, for that matter, he thought. A marble sculpture was the result of a million tiny strokes, not a single hammer blow. Now everything was moving faster than it should have. Mankind was being thrust forward into the future on a rocket. Or a time machine.

Ben wondered if it was healthy for a civilization to lunge forward like this, fumbling with toys and tools it hadn’t earned. Well, that would be a dilemma for the sociologists, assuming any survived.

Ben activated the antigravity field and the ship hummed.

Ben mentally toggled his mic back on. “Tower, this is Liberty-1, antigrav engaged, all systems reading nominal.”

“Copy that, Liberty-1. Best we can tell, you’re in the green. You’re a go for maneuvers.”

Ben shifted in his seat and smiled. “Thanks, tower. Let’s kick the tires.”

The techs and their equipment still were scattered around him on the ground of the massive hangar, although they had all been backed up 20 meters or so. But Ben wasn’t going out. He was going up. He flicked the retractable overhead doors open with a mental command. Once they’d rumbled open, Ben sent the ship slowly up into the air. The scaffolding around the ship slipped away, then the cavernous vehicle assembly building itself dropped out of sight, sending the craft into the clear, warm air of Cape Canaveral. To the east, the glittering sea beckoned.

“Liberty-1, this is tower, looks like a beautiful day to fly. Godspeed, and good luck.”

Ben took one last look around. The main launchpad a few hundred meters away buzzed with activity as workers prepped it for the next satellite launch. Everyone had to keep operating on the assumption the world wasn’t going to end today, that other battles were yet to be fought. Work also kept despair at bay; idle hands made for idle thoughts. There were sporadic riots and protests, from New York to Nairobi. New cults and conspiracies bloomed with the sunrise, and terrorist attacks were spreading in the chaos. Most things still held, though. Enough people still got up in the morning and went to work to keep the world turning. The lights were still on in most places. Businesses were generally open. Shelves were mostly stocked, and gas prices had surged, but not exploded. For now, fear was held in check.

For some, this was the busiest they’d ever been. For those actively engaged in Earth’s defense, the frenzy of work simply didn’t leave any time for anxiety or despair. Indeed, for many of them, it was turning out to be a hell of a ride. The boundaries of technological possibility were being pushed back daily, thanks to the instructions and guidance from the brin, exposing new frontiers. For the scientists and engineers and programmers, it was like being present at the creation of a new universe.

The petals of the ship fanned out, the complex geometric shapes on their downward-facing surfaces glowing a faint blue. The base of the ship, the ring of petals, began to spin, like an upside down helicopter. Ben scanned his display.

Power output at 100 percent.

He turned the ship on its side, the cockpit bubble rotating independently of the base to keep him sitting up.

“Liberty-1, this is tower, what’s your readout.”

“Tower, Liberty-1, I feel like I’m flying a magic carpet. Too bad you guys didn’t make this thing a convertible,” Ben said. He sensed this levity might be the last for a while.

“Uh, copy that, Liberty-1, we’ll work that into the Mark 2,” the mission control team responded. “You’re clear for orientation maneuvers, and we’re looking at T-minus 15 minutes for orbital insertion. Go ahead and take it for a test drive.”

During a normal NASA launch, flight control was turned over to mission control in Houston once the ship left the launch pad. But given the unusual circumstances, the senior staff at NASA had decided it was best to keep mission control in Florida, so they could keep direct visual contact with Ben as long as possible to closely monitor his test flight.

Ben did a long, slow turn toward the sea and opened the throttle to one percent. Liberty-1 rocketed toward the turquoise water, the antigravity system minimizing the crush of acceleration inside the ship. His airspeed indicator flashed. Within three seconds, he was traveling at more than 500 nautical miles per hour. The spinning metallic petals left an intricate, woven contrail of blue ionized gas that extended about 50 feet behind the ship. Flight tests on a new fighter jet normally took years, if not decades. Ben had 15 minutes at the controls of a ship that was the first and only of its kind. But the biologic-to-digital link between his body and the ship made flying the alien spacecraft as natural as breathing. Ben sent the ship soaring and diving, cutting low enough to the surface of the ocean to draw plumes of water spray in the air, then screamed into the sky, slicing through the handful of clouds. He slipped past the sound barrier like a cat burglar, leaving not so much as a sonic whisper.

“Engines and controls check, tower. Let’s go to weapons,” Ben said.

“Roger, Liberty-1, the targets are up and you’re clear to engage.”

Finding suitable dummy targets had been tough. Boats and airborne drones ended up being the best option, although everyone knew the mrill crafts were likely to be much faster and better armed. But there wasn’t time to prepare anything more, so this would have to do.

Ben dove down toward the ocean surface, a dozen boats ranging in size from canoes to decommissioned cargo vessels popping up on his heads-up display. He scanned each target with the sensors embedded in the ship—now wired directly to his body. Faster than thought, he fired, blasting the ships apart in a mix of fire and steam.

Ben gained altitude, searching for the drones and balloons while dialing back the power output of the guns. Again, he tore through them effortlessly, anticipating each evasive maneuver as every shot found its mark.

In the control room, Rickert clutched an empty soda can as he watched Ben’s flight on a monitor, spinning and rolling the can in his sweaty hands,

From a purely technical standpoint, it was a breathtaking performance playing out on the massive screens suspended on the wall above the control room. Rickert had never seen anything other than a hummingbird accelerate and maneuver like Liberty-1. He and his team had once envisioned something like this. They’d gamed out endless scenarios for what first contact with an alien intelligence might look like. Some had been peaceful, others less so. Most of the peaceful encounters had been straightforward. Any species that had the technology to reach Earth was necessarily more advanced, and if they were willing to be polite, then the only rational response was to be polite in return. Not everyone would be rational, of course, but that’s why you wanted trained professionals handling that first encounter.

The scenarios involving hostile encounters were what kept everyone up at night. Most of them ended with lots of dead people. The only survivable scenarios for humanity involved some kind of third-party assistance, just as had occurred with the brin. If the mrill had shown up alone, mankind’s fate would already be written.

The problem was that Rickert’s team could only offer so much advice. In the case of a hostile encounter without outside aide, the scenario was always a loss. Eventually, Rickert and his team had suggested two courses of action to mitigate a worst-case scenario. The first was to digitally archive every human record—every scrap of DNA, every history book, every work of art—store it on dozens of automated spacecrafts, and launch them in every direction at the first sign of alien contact. Even if every last person on Earth was killed, at least a record of mankind had a chance to survive. Perhaps another, more peaceful alien civilization would one day intercept one of the ships and have advance warning of an impending attack and maybe even revive humanity via cloning.

The other recommended course was to begin colonizing Mars and the rest of the solar system as quickly as possible. Give mankind a place to retreat to, if need be. And accelerate the development of the technology that might one day allow a realistic defense of Earth.

All leadership saw was a line item in the defense budget that would start in the billions and likely climb into the trillions. The reports were filed and forgotten.

Rickert didn’t blame them. He hadn’t really believed any of this would ever happen. It had been an intellectual exercise, the ultimate dorm room bull session. He’d shrugged and gone back to work. Still, he was a bit pleased that his team had even predicted that something like the ship Ben was now flying would be required to even the odds against an invader—not that he nor anyone else had any idea how to build it.

And even if Lockheed or Boeing or the Chinese or anybody else could have created such a marvel, without the brin antigrav technology, any normal human pilot would have been pummeled into a slushy bag of splintered bones and battered brains after the first 30 g-force turn. Ben’s body and mind had been remade, reinforced, and were married to a machine that danced like a heavily armed angel on the head of a pin. This was pretty much the best of all the worst-case scenarios. Even so, Rickert was a nervous wreck. Ben was literally their only hope against a far better equipped invader. In truth, Ben and his fighter were at best a delaying force.

If they could fend off the first wave of mrill, just long enough for mankind to build and equip an army of nano-powered warriors and ships, then humanity might just stand a chance.

If not, Rickert feared, every last person on the Earth would be dead before spring.

He barely noticed the excited chatter around him as the engineers and scientists drank in the data from Ben’s first test flight. He had been right that the technology wouldn’t be enough. Wars in the end always came down to people, and Rickert was still worried about that.

The old general pulled out his phone and opened the file with Ben’s FBI background check, scrolling through it with flicks of his thumb. Like Rickert had said, it wasn’t the military service history or Ben’s personal life as an adult that bothered him. Back when Ben was eleven, he and his dad had gone out on their small fishing boat off the coast of Washington state to catch some skipjack and yellowfin tuna. They were supposed to return after three days. Instead, their boat had disappeared for two weeks after getting punched by a massive typhoon that had spun up out of nowhere. When another fishing vessel finally stumbled on the crippled Constance, Ben was the only person aboard. Eventually the investigators had determined that his father, William, had been swept out to sea by a particularly fierce wave that had nearly capsized the ship. It had taken days to get this story out of the nearly catatonic boy, though, and the report acknowledged that no one knew for sure how long Ben had been floating alone on the sea.

Rickert turned the phone off and stuck it in his pocket. It would have to wait. Whatever was going to happen in the next few minutes or hours was literally beyond his control.

Commander Miles Bennett, a veteran astronaut, was capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, on this mission, the person in charge of talking directly with the spacecraft. Rickert leaned over and tapped Bennett on the shoulder. “Commander, request to temporarily assume CAPCOM?”

“Of course, sir. Transferring comms to your headset,” Bennett said. A green light lit up on Rickert’s headset, alerting everyone in the room that he was now acting CAPCOM.

“Liberty-1, this is tower. We’re showing a 100 percent kill count, and green lights across the board.”

Ben smiled. “General Rickert? Who let you on the mic, sir?”

“Uh, affirmative, Liberty-1, I figured some adult supervision was in order. How are you feeling, lieutenant? Everything seem to be in working order?”

Ben ran through his diagnostic programs once more in the blink of an eye and verified everything looked solid. “Roger, tower, I’m showing all clear.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. How do you feel? How does the ship feel? We’re about to send you on a solo hike into uncharted territory and I want to know if your walking boots fit.”

Ben looked down through his feet, the vacation-perfect blue-green water slipping by at Mach 4. All was quiet inside the ship. He took a deep breath and looked up to the cerulean sky.

“I’m all laced up, sir.”

Rickert felt the room around him go still, but kept his gaze fixed on the screen showing the ship, mankind’s ungainly salvation. “All right then, sailor, let’s go light a fire.”

Ben nodded and, with a thought, sent Liberty-1-1 rocketing into the heavens, knowing that hell waited on the other side.