22

“Are you sure?” Rickert asked as he walked.

“Yeah, we’re sure,” said the rumpled CIA analyst, hustling alongside him down the hallway. He smelled like coffee and cigarettes. “Well, as sure as we can be of anything these days. We don’t have any human assets on the ground. Nor do the Russians. Beacon at the Volgograd location went dark, and the satellite overpass shows the entire facility covered in smoke. It’s gone. The 2nd Red Army—that’s what they call themselves—was camped in Volgograd and presumably headed for the air base at Lebyazhye. That’s where we hoped they were headed, anyway. Somehow they knew about the installation at Gorkovskiy. Looks like they made a damn beeline right to it.”

“A mole from our side?”

The analyst shrugged.

“Maybe. Or theirs. Or something else. Maybe some local villagers tipped them off. We warned the Russians about keeping the location a secret, but who knows. Everything has been slapdash and half-assed on their side since Saint Petersburg.”

Rickert nodded. “What about the other Russian sites? Are they still online?”

“Yeah, and they’re far enough away that they shouldn’t be overrun anytime soon. But who knows? It’s a shitty situation.”

“The president has been briefed?”

“Yeah, the team’s with him now.”

Rickert stepped into the control room. There were a few people inside, but it was mostly quiet. Again, they were basically just observers. The other countries involved in Earth’s defense had complained just as the American generals had the first time around. Nothing anyone could do about it.

Mankind is going to war with an army of three soldiers and about fifteen computer nerds, Rickert realized. Jesus.

The analyst seemed shocked, too.

“Where’s the rest?” he said.

“There is no ‘rest,’” Rickert said. “This is it.”

The analyst fished out his pack of cigarettes, realized it was empty, and grimaced as he crumpled and flicked it into an overflowing trash can.

“You can’t smoke in here, anyway,” Rickert said. “Government building.”

The analyst snorted.

“Yeah, well, hopefully that stops the aliens from turning this place into a smoking crater. I doubt they’d survive the lawsuits.”

The analyst started dialing his phone and plopped into a chair as Rickert pushed open a door leading out to the floor of the vehicle assembly building. The humidity wrapped him in a damp hug as he headed toward the three ships in the middle of the room, but at least it smelled better out here.

Outside the hangar door, a lazy breeze fiddled with the tall grasses around the building. Farther off, sunlight sparkled off the Atlantic Ocean. It was a day for tourists to gather on the beach, drink cold beer, get sunburned, and yell at their kids not to swim out too far. There are sharks out there, ya know? But the beaches were empty.

The Army had locked down this stretch of Florida for 50 miles in every direction. They needn’t have bothered. Every beach and holiday spot was essentially abandoned. Disney World was a ghost town, Times Square was so empty you could pitch a tent and take a nap, and everyone seemed to have forgotten the Alamo. Rickert didn’t understand that mentality. If I was a civilian, I’d be out on that beach right now with the biggest damn piña colada I could find. Hell, maybe I oughta be doing that anyway.

Ben, Nick, and Eddie were moving around the ships, completing their final preparations. They all looked up as Rickert approached, his forehead soaked in sweat and his armpits not far behind.

“It’s time to go,” Ben said. “They’re here.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got a problem,” Rickert said.

“We know,” Eddie replied. “The Russian installation near Volgograd is gone.”

“What? Christ, is it on the news? How did you hear?”

Nick tapped the side of his head. “Nah, each facility shows up on our internal networks. They’re all linked together through the satellites, and we can tap into that.”

Rickert sighed. “I guess I should have known. Still, the destruction of that facility is not a good sign. Things in Russia are falling apart. Even if we can hold off the mrill, you guys might come home to World War III.”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Ben said. “Right now, our scanners are showing the mrill fleet coming around Venus. They’re slowing down, but they’ll be here soon. It’s time to go.”

Rickert felt nervous and flustered. “Yeah, good luck. We’ll do what we can from here, but unless they land, you guys are mostly on your own.”

“We know,” Nick said. “Just stay out of our way.”

“How about Project X?” Ben asked.

“They’re working as fast as possible,” Rickert said. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Ben nodded.

“Well, we’ll just have to make do without.”

Rickert held out his hand to the three soldiers. “Good luck.”

Each man shook it, Ben last. Both men looked strained.

“Don’t die,” Rickert said.

“Don’t get killed,” Ben replied.

As the three men headed for their ships, Rickert retreated to the air-­conditioned control room. He tugged on a radio headset, shivering a bit as his sweat seemed to freeze on his body. The analyst was still on his phone, reporting back to Langley. He nodded perfunctorily at Rickert. The pale blue illumination from the monitors made the spy look like a damp corpse, Rickert thought. Then he realized he probably looked the same. This wasn’t a control room. It was a morgue.

“All systems green from our end,” Rickert said into the mic.

“Roger that,” Ben replied. “We’re good to go.”

“Godspeed,” Rickert said.

Without another word, all three ships spun to life with a deep hum and then shot straight up into the air, leaving a cloud of startled technicians in their wake and Rickert rocking back and forth in his chair.

Liftoff was just as exhilarating the second time around. The ground sank away, and Ben felt Nick and Eddie’s exhilaration at taking to the air like a flock of birds. Again, it wasn’t like piloting a ship. Man and machine were one entity.

Ben had felt this connection on his first flight, but for Nick and Eddie, it was novel. It didn’t take them more than a few seconds to adapt, but Ben felt their initial confusion at suddenly realizing their bodies now didn’t end at their fingers and toes, but at gleaming metal hulls, massive engines, and lethal cannons.

“Whoa,” Nick said.

“Once you’re done looking down, you should look up,” Ben said.

The ground was falling away, and overhead the sky was turning from pale blue to navy to deep purple to black as the ships rose through the atmosphere and bounded toward space. It was hard to tell the difference between heading out into space and sinking down into the sea. The farther you went, the darker it got. People weren’t meant to survive in this crushing blackness.

The last filaments of terrestrial gasses and gravity slipped away, and the three were now in the final layer of the atmosphere, the exosphere, the last leap from Earth to everything else. Ben tried to seal his dread in a deep compartment in his mind. At the same time, he felt surprise and something like joy spread out from his teammates across their mental link.

Eddie laughed with delight.

“My life has not gone as planned,” he said.

“You never wanted to be an astronaut?” Ben said.

“Nah. When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be a movie star.”

“Hasn’t humanity suffered enough?” Nick quipped back.

The approaching mrill spacecraft popped up on their short-range scanners.

“Apparently not,” Ben said.

Eddie sighed.

“Well, we may not be movie stars, but I’m guessing we make the six o’clock news,” he said.

“Let’s just make sure there’s a six o’clock news to go home to,” Ben said.

The three men accelerated toward the confrontation as the sun rose over the Earth behind them, a white spear in the dark. Their plan was to engage the mrill as far from the planet as possible, minimizing collateral damage on the ground. Ben would have preferred to attack even farther out, but the ships the three men were in weren’t long-range crafts. So far, in all the blueprints and schematics they’d seen, there were no long-range ships. That had puzzled the scientists. It worried Ben. Why hadn’t the brin provided those capabilities? No time to consider it now.

Ben felt his conscious mind decoupling from control of his ship, and sensed Nick and Eddie going through a similar disengagement. The machines in their bodies and the machines around their bodies would do most of the fighting. Ben had warned them about this, explained the inhuman sensation of being unplugged from yourself. But he had also explained that they remained in ultimate control, and that they should assert that control as needed.

Ben’s electronic vision filled with dozens of mrill warships coming around the moon. Then hundreds. He counted 237 in total.

“Draw them in,” he said. “We have to use the satellites. Drop your mines.”

One of the capabilities of the antigravity technology on their ships was to generate small gravitational fields on command. This allowed the ships to make sweeping, banking turns otherwise only possible in the gravitational confines of a planet, moon, or other large body. It felt more natural to the three men who had no experience with zero G flight. As the three ships arced over the Earth, they each deployed half a dozen black, featureless orbs from their bellies. The stealthy bombs drifted apart in a loose cloud toward the oncoming mrill force.

Ben didn’t know if the enemy ships could detect the mines. They were so small that they didn’t show up on his own sensors, and they emitted no signals of any kind. They were unpowered, essentially inert space junk, activated and powered by energy emitted by passing ships. The downside was that they were the ultimate “dumb” bombs, incapable of tracking or following their targets if they changed course. Still, a nifty piece of hardware.

Ben felt increasingly nervous about the technology on the other side of the battlefield. There was so much they still didn’t know, and that either the brin hadn’t told them or also hadn’t known. On the other hand, Ben forced himself to remember: there was also much the mrill didn’t know. About Earth, about Ben, Nick, and Eddie, and who knew what else. Ben knew, from training and experience, how easy it was to see an enemy as omnipotent and omniscient, while despairing over your own flaws. You never saw the blunders and miscalculations and uncertainties on the other side of the line. You only saw the glint of his weapons and the mass of his army, while every scrap of arrogance and cowardice on your own side scraped like broken glass in an open wound. The truth was that everyone made mistakes in combat. No army, no general, no soldier planned and performed perfectly. Everyone was human. Hopefully even the aliens.

The mrill ships began to spread out as they approached. Ben calculated that they were traveling at a bit over 150,000 kilometers per hour, more than 40 kilometers every second, closing the gap between Moon and Earth at terrifying speed. Despite his fear, Ben was fascinated by the approaching machinery. The small ships were identical to the drones he’d previously faced and the single-man fighter he’d seen in the New Mexico desert. But there were larger ships as well. There were green, bulbous crafts bristling with what had to be weapons, and long smooth cylinders that he suspected were troop transports. Behind those ships and swathed in a protective phalanx of drones and fighters were three large cruisers that had to be the command vessels. They were large gray spheres, with long thin stalks protruding from the front and ending in a cluster of smaller spheres. Ben thought they looked like lollipops with a clump of soap bubbles on the end. They were now less than 30 seconds away from intersecting with the mines, and Ben held his breath. As the men sped back toward Earth, each could almost feel the mrill ships straining to reach them before they could reach the protective cocoon of the defensive satellites. Ben prayed their eagerness made them blind.

They could now also feel the connections between the mrill ships and soldiers, the same sort of invisible thread that linked the three men. Both sides were networked together, seeing and feeling and working as one. Then another one of those closed-off portions of Ben’s internal computer, one of the secrets he had suspected still lurked within him, came to life.

He felt a part of himself reaching out to the mrill web, trying to establish a link, to connect the two networks together. Panic spilled over Ben. What the hell was this?

Nick and Eddie similarly recoiled, unable to stop whatever was happening. Then the connection was established. White noise poured out of the three men, out of the computers in their cells and their blood, flooding the mrill link. A jamming signal of some sort. A last trick the brin had hidden up their sleeve, concealed even from their human hosts.

The mrill fleet hesitated, uncertain.

Ben realized instantly why the brin had kept this ability locked away. They knew the humans, in a panic, would have used the jamming capability against the smaller scout force. Probably would have worked. Saint Petersburg might still be standing. Winning that battle could have lost the war, though. The mrill would have had time to adjust before their larger fleet arrived. They would have figured out how to deflect the jamming signal. It was a one-shot weapon. Had to save it for the pivotal moment.

Now the mrill had to either flee and regroup and let the guardians dig in further or press their numerical advantage and hope it was enough.

Ben knew they would fight. It was what he would have done. He wondered how many other secrets the brin had locked away in his body. What other surprises would pop out when that dead alien race deemed it appropriate? God damn all of this.

What’s that saying about gift horses and mouths? Eddie said in thought, his delight piercing Ben’s shadows.

“The bad guys are flying blind now,” Eddie said out loud with a whoop. “We’re gonna play chess while these fools are playing checkers.”

“You know how to play chess?” Nick chided.

“You can’t see it, but I’m giving you the finger right now,” Eddie said. “Checkmate.”

The first mrill ships were close to the cloud of mines, their confused sensors not registering the mines as anything more than random space debris. The antimatter bombs would only be in the center of the mrill force for a moment, though. If the ships accelerated or changed course, the bombs might not have enough time to gather the electromagnetic energy pulsing from the ships and detonate.

The guns on the mrill drones unfolded from their fuselages. In the ­millisecond it took for their weapons to charge, the mines siphoned off a tiny fraction of that energy and detonated. Red antimatter slapped across the mrill fleet, dozens of ships destroyed instantly. Damaged fighters smoked and burned. Some of the wounds were fatal, and the burning spacecraft exploded like fireworks, green and yellow fireflies spiraling out into the darkness. The shrapnel was a secondary assault, raking more mrill crafts. The large command ships, traveling at the rear of the convoy, had avoided the mines, but were now pelted with chunks of the exploded ships ahead of them. They seemed to shrug off the smaller pieces, but one massive, spinning hunk of metal slammed directly into the main sphere on one of the command ships.

A flame flickered briefly in the jagged crater and was then extinguished in the vacuum. The ship was crippled, and it drifted off slowly at an angle away from the battlespace. Secondary explosions from other damaged ships sent additional debris flying in every direction.

The men shared a brief surge of hope. Maybe they could pull this off. They were still outnumbered thirty or forty to one, but they now knew the mrill could bleed. The trail of wreckage was a twisted road to victory, or at least the possibility of victory. Now the mrill fighters were closing in, but the men were within range of the satellites orbiting Earth. As the mrill powered up their guns, the three men did a tight loop back toward the attackers as a dozen satellites began tracking the enemy ships.

Ben thought briefly of all the famous battlefields on the planet below: the muddy, rocky fields where cowards and heroes and everyone in between had crashed into each other, from Thermopylae to Gettysburg to Normandy. Once the bodies were piled high enough and the blood soaked deep enough, the ground was consecrated and hallowed. Whether driven by guilt or pride, if you piled enough dead in one spot, it forced people to remember. Those forests and fields were marked with bronze plaques set in stone, a clearing where you could assemble the survivors for a speech on green grass on a sunny day, visit with your children long after the survivors had died of old age.

Not this time. This battle, perhaps the last battle, would be fought in a cold, empty void. Win or lose, there would be no commemoration here. Laser fire would vaporize the blood and bodies, gravity would carry off the remains, and the surviving machines would proceed to the next mission. Once this battle was over, there would be nothing left.

Eddie, reading his thoughts, spoke out loud as everyone prepared to fire.

“Maybe we won’t get a parade up here, but I’m going on a hell of a bender once we get back down there.”

Across a thousand kilometers of emptiness, as sunrise poured over the edge of the Earth, the two armies opened fire. Bolts of neon energy filled the darkness, stabbing at their targets, while the ships danced and dodged the assaults. Ben, Nick, and Eddie hurled clusters of mines at the oncoming mrill ships while the satellites behind them tossed thunderbolts of ionized hydrogen. Ahead of them, the mrill ships dumped a wall of fire, hoping to simply overwhelm the defenders. The command ships held back while the fighters pressed in. The mrill were now avoiding the spots where the three men were dropping mines or trying to blast them apart from a distance. Some still slipped through and created mini sunrises of their own, destroying more ships.

Ben and his team held back, not advancing too deep into the mrill swarm, letting long-range cannons on the satellites do their work. Swoop in and out, but don’t linger. A mrill bolt scraped across the edge of Ben’s ship, cutting a crease through the fuselage, and he felt it like a knife cutting across his own skin. Warning messages popped up in his vision, and he scanned the damage report. Nothing major, but the mrill were closing in.

You okay, boss? A mental ping from Nick.

Just a flesh wound.

His bigger concern was that the mrill seemed to be herding themselves away from the satellites. Ben fired a burst from his cannons, sensing the explosion rather than seeing it as he maneuvered to avoid another ship coming in from behind. Staccato blasts of green skimmed past his cockpit, missing by no more than a dozen feet. Nick obliterated the chasing ship with a brief blast, but was then chased off himself. Ships seemed to be corkscrewing in random directions; the cumulative effect was to send Ben and his team banking deeper into space each time, a bit closer to the main fleet and out of reach of the satellites.

Stay tight, Ben flashed. Don’t let them push us too far out.

Keeping close to Earth, though, was like fighting in a school of fish. The mrill were everywhere. The mines were useless now, as everyone was too close and missiles were too slow. The satellites were firing at their maximum rate, picking off the disjointed invaders, but the mrill were now turning their attention to those devices.

One exploded, then another. The mrill were down to about fifty fighters. The drones were effective but predictable and relatively easy to target. But there were so many of them, too many of them, and the three men, despite their best efforts, found themselves edging farther from the remaining satellites.

Another satellite exploded. Several troop transports zoomed into the opening, preparing to stab at the planet below.

Ben was about to order his team to chase the troop ship when Rickert spoke over his secure radio.

“Bad news and good news, gentlemen. Bad first. Mrill reinforcements are here. Looks like this was just the first wave. You’ve got about a dozen of those larger ships incoming, surrounded by a few hundred drones. Enemy fighters coming your way. And there’s something even bigger coming in behind them. Possibly a command ship?”

“I hope the good news is really goddamn good,” Eddie said as he downed two more mrill drones and swerved around three more, letting Nick pick them off. “Is Nick finally getting his fucking season pass to Disneyland?”

“Better,” Rickert said. “Project X inbound.”

Nick laughed. “And hey, the sun’s coming up. It’s gonna be a good day.”

Ben glanced over to the horizon and caught a glimpse of the sun spilling again over the edge of the planet. Beneath the brilliant white light racing across the Atlantic Ocean, two dozen silver drones, reinforcements, were darting up through the atmosphere.

“The cavalry is here,” Nick said.

“I didn’t think the team was going to be able to pull it off,” Ben said. “Much obliged, General. And say thanks to Bert for me.”

“Will do, and good luck.”

Ben was about to respond when another volley of enemy fire lanced past his ship, several of them grazing the surface and causing the craft to shudder before stabilizing. Again, he felt the damage as his own pain. A satellite hovering over Africa blasted two of Ben’s pursuers. Several mrill drones broke off to attack the offending satellite.

Now the human drones were here. As they came into range, the internal computers inside the three men took over their navigation and targeting. While the drones had been outfitted with basic guidance systems and could be remote-controlled from the ground, those connections were primitive compared to the computers embedded in their bodies. Ben sensed that his team’s jamming signal was still active, keeping the mrill from working in coordination. They were still lethal, but were forced to rely on basic, crude tactics in the absence of their wireless link. The drone battle was lopsided in terms of numbers but evenly matched in terms of results, as the humans and their drones outmaneuvered their alien foes. Fire filled the sky as enemy ships ruptured and spilled open.

The second wave of mrill fighters poured in. There were so many of them that they simply couldn’t attack all at once without being caught in their own crossfire.

“They’re heading for Earth. The transports are heading for Earth,” Eddie said.

“Take them out,” Ben shot back. “We can’t let them get on the ground. I’ll cover you.”

“We’re on it,” Nick said.

Nick and Eddie peeled off, chasing the troop ships down toward the nighttime side of Earth, near Siberia. As the mrill scuttled above Asia, the cannons on the ground opened fire.

They blasted several of the drones, creating small, temporary suns in the darkness. Two of the fifteen troop transports were also destroyed. Two more were wounded, and they went into uncontrolled spins. As they slammed through the atmosphere, they began to heat up, then glow, compressing the air in front of them into incandescent plasma. They whipped around like pinwheel fireworks, debris and sparks screaming in every direction. As they neared the ground, one of the ships finally came apart, exploding across the desolation of Mongolia and eastern Russia. Day turned to night. The other ship stayed intact long enough to spear directly into the dark water of Lake Baikal at over 600 meters per second, nearly twice the speed of sound. The catastrophic impact gouged a temporary hole in the liquid and sent a roaring wall of water out in every direction. A small band of Buryat tribesmen camped along the shore had woken with the lights and now scrambled for cover. Before they could even begin to flee, the waves devoured them and washed their camp away like it had never existed.

The other transports changed course, streaking west, and Nick and Eddie realized they were aiming for the hole left by the destruction of the cannon in Volgograd.

“Wait, how do they know?” Eddie said.

“Maybe they’re the ones who tipped off the Red Army guys,” Nick said.

“Oh, man, they’ve got a presence on the ground already, somehow,” Eddie said. “No bueno.”

He fired off a burst at another approaching ship, tearing it apart in the thin upper atmosphere, and was then chased off by a handful of drones. Nick followed in pursuit, blasting the drones as more ships descended.

“It’s getting crowded down here,” Nick said. “I don’t think we can hold them off.”

“Have a little faith, brother,” Eddie said. His pendant was tucked safely beneath his shirt, and the metal nudged him with every maneuver. He made a tight turn, destroyed the last of his pursuers, and pulled up off Nick’s left. They both bore down on a transport fleeing for the open plains and shredded it with their weapons. The ship disintegrated as it fell. A gaping hole opened in its side, and dozens of robotic foot soldiers, copies of the machine Ben had fought in China, were ripped out of the wound. Nick and Eddie picked them off as they tumbled down, not taking any chances. The last fragment of the ship slammed into the side of a mountain and exploded with a crack of thunder.

“Let’s go check on our boy,” Eddie said.

“We’re going to have to come back,” Nick said. “There’s a hole in our defenses here big enough to drive a planet through. They’re all going to be aiming for Russia.”

“Yeah, but we’ll have better luck plugging it from above than below,” Eddie said.

The two fighters rose back into the sky, headed toward the pulsing glow of battle.