Final Assault (4 page)

His mission sounded simple: harvest the third planet with no additional loss of life or ships. But Cicoi, who had tried to destroy most of the weapons the third planet had launched at Malmur, knew that the word “simple” no longer applied to the third planet.

If the Malmuria had followed tradition, Cicoi would have been recycled after his failure. He had allowed fifteen of the weapons through the defenses. They had exploded on Malmur’s surface, sending odd-shaped clouds into the atmosphere. Strange fires had burned on the ground, and ail Malmuria near the explosions had died.

Two pods and all their opening nestlings were gone.

An entire sleeping chamber, filled with thousands of unawakened Malmuria, had been vaporized.

Eight harvest ships were destroyed. Huge areas of the vast energy collectors that surrounded the planet had been mined.

And that was only the beginning of the destruction.

The nestlings in three other pods had wasted away and died of some horrible lingering sickness that the Malmuria had never seen before. Long ago, they had eliminated the need for traditional healers, and so they had no one besides the female caregivers to help the nestlings.

Some of the female caregivers had grown ill as well, and several of the older ones had died. Some of the brood females had laid deformed eggs into the pods. There was debate now as to whether or not those eggs should be recycled.

The strange clouds had dissipated into the atmosphere, and the radiation levels on Malmur had risen. No one had known how to fix that. And some of the farseeing males, the ones who specialized in preparing for the future, worried that the Malmuria hadn’t seen the results of all of the destruction yet.

All of this because Cicoi and his fleet had allowed fifteen weapons through. He shuddered to think what would have happened had he not stopped any of them. He believed, although he said nothing to anyone, that Malmur itself would have been destroyed.

As his fleet had returned to Malmur, he had planned to offer himself and his crew to the recycler. All failures went to the recycler where they were converted to energy and made into something more useful to their people. But the Elders had stopped him.

The great Commanders of the past had put themselves into the recyclers when they had failed to complete the First Harvest of this Pass. They had lost ships, something that had never happened before, and so they had destroyed themselves, without really training their replacements.

The Elders had argued that if Cicoi and his fellow Commanders did the same, the Malmuria would have no experienced leaders left. Cicoi privately thought that his experience was not the kind that the Malmuria wanted, but he had not argued with the Elders.

When the Elders had been living, breathing creatures, instead of the black spirits they were now, they had saved Malmur from certain destruction. Once, Cicoi knew, the Malmuria had fought among themselves. The Elders had been the ones who had united the planet.

They had found a way to release Malmur from its sun to save the entire race. They had sent Malmur into the depths of interstellar space until it found itself in a new orbit, around this new sun. They had devised the system of harvesting and darkness that had become the new order.

The Elders had roused themselves from the spirit rest to guide Malmur through this new crisis. An Elder flew on this warship. He was not visible at the moment. As Malmur got closer to the third planet and the plans were finalized, he was present less and less. Cicoi worried that the Elder was vanishing not because he had come to trust Cicoi—Cicoi believed the Elder would never completely trust him—but because the Elder’s own personal energy, whatever it was, was fading.

Cicoi hoped the Elders could hang on through this battle.

Even though Cicoi had been chosen to be Commander of this entire mission, he answered to the Elders. The Elders were the ones who had come up with the new plan. They were the ones who had insisted that the fleet consist of eighteen warships and ninety harvesters. Cicoi had argued that more harvesters were needed—no harvest had ever been done with as few as ninety ships—but the Elders had been adamant.

They had also insisted that the harvesters return one final time. The Malmuria would do a third harvesting pass, where in the past they had only done two.

All of this change made Cicoi’s tentacles flake. Never before, not in all of the Passes he’d lived through, had tradition been so thoroughly violated.

His Elder dismissed tradition, saying it had stifled growth on Malmur. Cicoi knew that sometimes the Elder did not understand how life worked now on Malmur. Gone were the days of continual sunshine and warmth and abundant energy. Gone was the luxury of time. From the moment the Malmuria woke from their long sleep, they were struggling to raise nestlings, fill pods, and provide enough food and energy to make it through the long darkness.

Never before had Cicoi seen his people suffer such defeats. Never before had he seen them respond with such passion and anger. He hadn’t believed that they would be able to make the eighteen warships functional in time, nor had he believed that the staff of those ships could be trained in this new method of flight, but it had happened.

It had happened, but it had cost a lot of energy. It had prevented thousands of sleepers from waking, and he knew that the brood females—the ones who were still healthy—would not be able to raise sufficient nestlings next pass.

Cicoi felt his eyestalks quiver every time he thought about the destroyed young lives.

The future of his people hung in the balance. It was up to him to save them. If he did, he would redeem himself.

There would still be hardship, of course. More hardship than they had ever experienced. But his people were more unified than they had been since the days of the Elders. And now his people knew they could accomplish more during their period of wakefulness than they had ever done in the past. That would help.

If everything went smoothly.

Three Passes instead of two meant everything had to go perfectly.

Cicoi turned his eyestalks toward the image of the third planet. Nothing had gone perfectly during this awakening. But he couldn’t let that defeat him, or he would lose everything.

Malmur had to survive.

October 12, 2018
7:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

29 Days Until Second Harvest

This conference room was as different from the original one as a conference room could be. The old conference room had had a cramped 1980s design. This one was modern, with shaded glass walls and a feeling of space, even though it was three levels underground.

Leo Cross had a feeling that this conference room was one he normally would have never seen. The building was unmarked, like the previous building, and a woman in black wearing a security tag had met them at the door. Then he, Britt, and Bradshaw had gone through an elaborate security process that included passing through a high-level scanner and some lasers, as well as the latest airport screening equipment.

The woman had also had them all place their hands on a print scanner, and a cool sexless digitized voice had identified them. That procedure itself took almost fifteen minutes. When it was completed, a different woman, also wearing black, met them on the other side of the security barrier. She was the one who led them through a series of corridors to an elevator that dropped them three levels in the space of a heartbeat. The elevator opened onto the conference room. They saw nothing else of the building.

Cross knew that spread out below the entire city were tunnels and secure facilities designed for the president, members of Congress, and other top government officials so that they could keep the government operating during an attack on D.C. As a boy, he had toured the old underground facilities—the ones that had been built during the Cold War—with his parents. The government still acted as if that old series of tunnels was all that remained of such lavish and outdated fears.

But Cross’s friend, Doug Mickelson, had once commented that the government would be stupid not to plan for any contingency. This building, with its elaborate security procedures and its ultramodern design, made it clear to Cross that the paranoia of those first underground security tunnels had never gone away.

He only hoped that this place was sturdy enough to withstand attack from the aliens’ nanomachines. It wasn’t new enough to have been designed and built after the first alien attack.

This building was a good mile away from the last one. It was also farther away from the traditional seats of power, but he had a feeling that General Maddox had chosen this place for reasons besides that. It would be easy for her to get to—she had even less time than the rest of them—and it probably had satellite hookups built into those glass walls.

“Yuck,” Britt said as the elevator doors closed, and the elevator left, taking their guide with it. “No windows.”

Bradshaw looked at her with surprise. “You don’t have windows in your lab.”

She grinned at him. “Who needs windows there when you can see the entire universe?”

“She’s got you there,” Cross said. He stepped deeper into the room. The air was climate controlled to a somewhat cool sixty-eight degrees. It smelled recycled, so he bet it was on its own system. Someone had laid out fresh pastries, and several kinds of coffee rested on a table against the far wall.

There were small groupings of furniture, easy chairs mixed with end tables, in case people wanted to split up and have private discussions. But the rest of the conference room was dominated by the table.

Cross walked over to it and ran his fingers across it. The surface was the same shaded glass that covered the walls. The chairs surrounding it were large, comfortable, and expensive. They were also the kind that, without prompting from their occupant, fitted themselves to the occupant’s body shape.

And to think Cross had been worried about this neighborhood when he had driven into it. Some of the rioting was less than a block away. As he had turned into the parking garage, a military squadron had run past, bodies moving in unison, weapons clutched in the ready position.

He hadn’t realized until he came down here that the presence of troops here had probably been very necessary. At least his car—which had gone through several security beams on its way to the assigned parking spot—would be safe.

As was he. He was probably safer here than he had ever been in his life.

“What is this place?” Britt asked.

“It’s probably better not to ask.” Bradshaw glanced at Cross, who nodded once. Bradshaw got the same sense of this place that Cross had.

The elevator doors purred open and three more people got out. Robert Shane, who headed the president’s Special Committee on Space Sciences, walked directly toward the pastries. He had clearly been here before. He was one of the cooler heads on the Project, and Cross had been relieved to have him at the meetings more than once.

“Mmmm”, Shane said as he picked up a heavily frosted cinnamon roll. “Still warm.”

This time Britt looked startled. No bakeries were open—no stores were open, not since the rioting had begun. The entire city was under martial law, like cities all over the world, and when the disturbances began, sensible people stopped going to their day jobs. That was why the streets had been mostly empty of other drivers, other cars. The only people outside right now were the looters and rioters, and people with a mission, like the members of the Tenth Planet Project.

Yolanda Hayes, the president’s science adviser, examined the room the same way Cross had. Her dark eyes took in the glass, the modern furniture, the specialized table.

Jesse Killius, the head of NASA, did the same.

Cross looked at Shane again. If the women had never seen this room before, and they outranked Shane, then he had seen it for some other project.

Long ago, Cross had learned that Shane had a high ranking in the Air Force. Perhaps he had seen this place in connection with his military work, not his relationship with the president.

For some reason that thought sent shivers through Cross.

“They are warm!” Britt said.

Cross turned. She was standing beside Shane, a blueberry muffin in hand.

“How’d they manage that?” she asked.

“Probably baked special for us,” Shane said, grabbing a paper plate. “And I, for one, am not going to let them go to waste.”

Baked special on the premises somewhere. Cross walked to the pastry table, saw some petit fours, which he usually despised, as well as cookies of all shapes and sizes, the huge cinnamon rolls—frosting melting off of them—and the muffins.

He grabbed a muffin and poured himself some of the regular coffee that someone had already brewed. Britt had wandered over to the major coffee-making equipment and was surveying it. When she had her choice, he knew she always made a cappuccino.

Yolanda Hayes ran her fingers across the glass table just like Cross had done. Then she sat in a chair on the left center, and squeaked, looking down at her seat.

“This chair just grabbed me!” she said.

“They’re made to do that,” Cross said. “Very expensive. You’re supposed to be more comfortable now.”

“I don’t know.” Hayes’s dark skin had flushed rose. “I’m thinking that I may sue this chair for sexual harassment.”