27

Eddie pulverized a mrill ship with a barrage from his cannon and the white-hot debris sprayed another mrill ship unfortunate enough to cross its path at that moment.

“Two for the price of one,” Eddie whooped.

“Easy there, Walmart shoppers,” Nick replied. “We’ve still got plenty of crazy deals inbound.”

They were holding the mrill at a standstill. They were plugging the gap over DC whenever dropships or fighters tried to sneak through, and the other satellites and ground installations were holding up. Russia so far was equally protected. The mrill had apparently not counted on the extent of the human defensive systems as they repeatedly plunged toward the planet, only to be destroyed by a barrage of intersecting energy beams. They were still buzzing like a swarm of enraged bees, but were now holding back for the most part, out of range, only sending in the occasional attacker to probe Earth’s defenses.

“I don’t like it,” Nick said. “It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

The mrill ships were weaving in what looked like a random formation. Eddie could sense Nick’s tension across their telepathic link. The mesmerizing movement was almost hypnotic. Eddie wasn’t sure what to do. Charge? Just as he was about to wade in, the mrill ships spat out clusters of what looked like small gray rocks. The enemy still couldn’t communicate with each other thanks to the jamming signal, but apparently this was something they’d planned in advance. Nick and Eddie scanned the projectiles. Each nondescript lump was a delivery vehicle for the same sort of voracious nanomachines that had devoured Saint Petersburg. Only instead of one such warhead, Nick and Eddie were facing about fifty.

“Shit, they’re too small for the satellites. They don’t see them,” Nick said.

“Can we take them out individually?” Eddie asked.

“Take them out and hold off the other ships? I don’t know.” Nick shot back. “I think we have to fight fire with fire. Time to let old painless out of the bag.”

Nick could sense Eddie’s fierce grin.

“Mind if I do the honors?” he asked.

“By all means,” Nick said. “I’ve got your six.”

Eddie toggled open the missile bay on his ship, an addition that had not been part of the original brin specifications. He’d argued that they might need some brute force eventually, and the engineers had eventually worked out a way to make that happen. Inside the belly of his ship, a missile pod rotated out and Eddie fired off a modified, nuclear-tipped BGM-109A Tomahawk missile. The cruise missile’s solid-fuel rocket booster kicked in and the weapon streaked through the void toward the projectiles. Even moving at roughly 1,000 kilometers per hour, the missile seemed to be barely inching across the 200-kilometer gap between defenders and attackers. The mrill could see the slow-moving missile, and their attack ships and larger cruisers maneuvered into position to fire their energy weapons at it before it could reach their wall of nano bombs. Just as they unloaded, though, just as the cascade of antimatter and ion streams spread out across the heavens, Eddie activated the crude cut drive on the missile and said a silent prayer.

His Saint Michael the Archangel pendant clinked softly as he banked hard to dodge the wayward mrill bolts. The medallion was nicked and scratched. It had been dragged over and through mountains, deserts, and oceans. It had been bloodied, dirtied, and banged up on almost every continent on Earth.

The pendant had been a gift from Father Kowalski, the parish priest at St. Gabriel’s Church in Prairie du Chien, the small Wisconsin town nestled along the Mississippi River on the Iowa border where Eddie had grown up. He’d been an altar boy at the old limestone and stained-glass church, which dated to 1839. “Almost as old as I am,” the priest liked to say with a cackle to every first-time parishioner.

The tour of duty as altar boy definitely hadn’t been Eddie’s idea. His parents had “volunteered” him to the crusty padre his senior year after a schoolyard fight over a winking girl named Maria. The other boy, Frank Mintner, ended up spitting out a cracked, bloody tooth and Eddie was packed off to find God. Eddie had shown up on a Saturday in late September at the doorway of the double-towered church. It was unseasonably hot, and the face that greeted him when the door opened had been equally grumpy, if considerably more wrinkled. The first thing Father Kowalski had made the kid do was mop the church floor. It was cool and dark inside the building, the illuminated windows and exposed ceiling trusses giving an air not of gloom, but of serenity. Eddie hadn’t really grasped those concepts at the time. It was just a quiet, soothing place, and his anger started to seep away.

When he had finished nearly two hours after he started, had cleaned and emptied his bucket and stowed his mop in the closet in the small sacristy behind the altar, Eddie had found the priest looking down on him quietly from the choir loft at the back of the church. The old man disappeared, and Eddie heard his heavy feet clumping down the stairs.

“Got another job for you,” he growled when he emerged from the small stairway.

Before Eddie could fire off a retort, the priest tossed a silver key to the boy.

“You want me to wash your car?” Eddie said.

“Not quite.”

Eddie followed the priest out to a small garage behind the rectory. Father Kowalski lifted up the rusty, squeaking door, and Eddie expected to see a small, drab hatchback. Instead, a gleaming blue convertible ’67 Mustang crouched in the space. It was so clean and polished it almost glowed.

“I wash it myself,” the priest said, watching Eddie closely. “What I need, according to my eye doctor, is a driver. Think you can handle that?”

Thirty minutes later they were doing 75 down Highway 18, heading west, crossing the river, wind whipping Eddie’s thick mop of hair and the priest’s gray fringe, both of them laughing and cackling.

Several months later, the day after his high school graduation, Eddie came to see the old man for the last time, not sure what to say even as he knocked on the door of his small rectory. He shuffled his feet as he heard the heavy footsteps approaching the door. Kowalski opened the door and looked Eddie over. Eddie didn’t know what to say, but the old man seemed to have been preparing for this moment.

“Don’t go applying to the seminary. They’ll kick your trouble-making keister out before you’ve had time to unpack your underwear. Anyway, I believe the Lord has a different purpose for you. I don’t know what that is, but I have something to help guide you on the journey.”

The priest handed him a small black cardboard box. Eddie opened it, spotted the chain, and assumed it was a pendant of Saint Gabriel the Archangel, the namesake of the parish. God’s messenger. He flipped the medallion over and was surprised to see Saint Michael the Archangel. God’s warrior.

“Probably the closest thing to sacrilege an old coot like me can get up to,” said Father Kowalski, his eyes gleaming beneath his bushy brows. “But this fellow seemed more appropriate for a boisterous soul like yours. Go do something useful with all that energy. Okay, get out of here, and don’t forget your rosary, you hooligan. I’ll be seeing your parents here on Sunday.”

Years later, sweating through his SEAL training, Eddie realized Father Kowalski must have seen deeper into Eddie’s soul than he ever had. He’d recognized an unusual spirit who needed both rigid structure and wild freedom to thrive. The old man, who had passed away before Eddie enlisted, probably wouldn’t have been surprised at all by the young man’s career.

Although I’d bet 50 bucks he didn’t see this chapter coming. An enemy energy beam sizzled past his cockpit.

Eddie wondered briefly if the mrill or the brin had any kind of religion; if any of the creatures out there were flying with their own pendants tucked next to their skin, beseeching their gods for victory.

Pray harder. The command floated through Eddie’s mind, a message from Nick, who had sensed Eddie’s memories as if they were his own. And ask Him to keep an eye on that missile.

Bert Goldberg, the rotund engineer with the perpetually sweaty brow, had made it clear that the missile was going to be far from a precision machine. He and his team had rigged up what they were pretty sure was a functional equivalent of the star drives the mrill and brin used to jump across interstellar distances without being shackled by the propulsion constraints of traditional physics.

“The problem with traveling at speeds higher than five or six percent of the speed of light,” Goldberg had said, ignoring Eddie’s befuddled look, “is that your mass starts to increase to an unmanageable level.”

He cupped his hands together and then pulled them apart slowly, like a balloon being inflated.

“And the more force you apply to try to continue accelerating, the greater your mass becomes, requiring more force, and eventually you get stuck in this loop. Then, before you know it, you’re using more energy than is contained in the entire galaxy just to accelerate by the smallest amount. And even if you could somehow get a ship moving at the speed of light, that doesn’t do you much good in a universe where stars are dozens or hundreds of light years away. Then you’ve got the relativistic effects of time dilation, where events for the lightspeed traveler would seem to occur at normal rates, but much more time would have passed for everyone else.”

Eddie had made a “hurry up” spinning motion with his index finger.

“Okay, look, never mind. Just remember that lightspeed travel is bunk for anything but visible light and radio waves. If you’re going to be traveling long distances, you need something else. That’s what the cut drive does. Even our best eggheads aren’t sure how it works, but it probably opens some type of artificial wormhole . . . a tunnel between two different points in space.” Goldberg made two circles with the thumb and index finger on each of his hands, holding them a foot apart and then bringing them together. “And you pass through instantly from your point of origin to your destination. It’s really cool. Captain Kirk never had something this bad-ass. Unfortunately, we don’t have a very good handle yet on how to pinpoint the arrival location.”

Goldberg had sighed and looked at the circle he’d formed with his right hand, still suspended in the air. “We can get within shouting distance. But if you fire off this missile with a programmed arrival portal . . . well, you’re looking at about a 75 percent confidence level that it will pop out within 50 miles of your intended target. Probably good enough for government work.”

Out in space, Eddie held his breath as the missile disappeared and prayed again that 50 miles was close enough. For the briefest of moments, the missile’s electronic signature disappeared from Eddie’s internal sensors. What the hell is actually inside that wormhole—

The thought wasn’t even fully formed before the missile reappeared on his scanners, barely two miles from the oncoming cluster of nano warheads. The proximity detectors on the mrill bombs sensed the missile and dispersed their cargo to consume it, but it was already too late. Eddie gave the mental command to detonate, and the encrypted signal traveled across the gap in an instant. The missile became a star. A perfectly symmetrical sphere of light bloomed outward, completely unlike the mushroom cloud Eddie associated with nuclear explosions from every video they’d ever seen, as the lack of gravity and ground resistance sent the fury of light and energy in every direction at once. The nano devices were consumed in fire, obliterated before the mrill had time to attempt any kind of evasion. The mrill fighters and drop ships frantically accelerated away from the growing fireball, but almost half were incinerated.

“Yeah, welcome to the barbecue,” Nick said. “Hope you bastards like your meat well done.”

The remaining mrill pulled back, waiting, widely dispersed against a second such attack. Nick and Eddie waited too, not sure what to expect next. The mrill were out of range of all their weapons but the cut-equipped nukes.

Nick prepared to fire his nuke—he and Eddie only had one each—but Eddie stopped him with a mental request. They’d lost the element of surprise, and the mrill were spread far enough apart that a single nuke couldn’t take them all out. If they fired another barrage of nano warheads, Eddie wasn’t sure they could take them all out individually. They might need that last nuke. And the mrill weren’t retreating. They seemed to be regrouping, preparing . . . but for what? Nick thought.

Something else. Something we haven’t seen yet, Eddie replied.

Then a cut portal opened—a portal that seemed as big as the moon, directly behind the remnants of the mrill fleet. It seemed to be full of all colors and none, a brilliant darkness spinning in every direction. At the other end of this vortex, at the other end of the galaxy, they could see a planet and a ship. The planet was a dusty green. The ship was immense and soon blotted out the planet as it moved through the opening. The ship was far larger than all the other mrill vessels combined, easily a kilometer tall and just as wide. The main structure was rectangular and at the stern, four massive arms branched out perpendicularly—forming a cross. Jagged structures pointed forward from each arm of the cross, running parallel to the ship. The furious dance of color and darkness undulated across its surface briefly. Then it was through. The doorway closed and the ship opened up, vomiting thousands of mrill attack ships that streamed toward the two men and their depleted forces.

Well, crap.