Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (40 page)

It’d further increased Tiona’s respect for the crusty general that he’d insisted on being out there in the line of fire during the deployment of GSI’s projectiles, just like he’d been for his pet beam weapons. She felt a little ashamed that she wasn’t out there herself, however, Nolan had insisted that if one of them went, it had to be him. When, shortly after Nolan had put his foot down, Stoddard had said that he was going and that they weren’t, Tiona had guiltily acquiesced without complaint.

Stoddard’s voice said, “Permission to proceed Madam President?”

The president glanced around the room for a last-minute objection, then said, “Proceed.”

Tiona saw people’s eyes go to the big screen even though most of them had to realize that nothing would be happening for a while. Dr. Pasha, the virologist from the CDC was sitting next to Tiona. She leaned over to whisper, “There’s some kind of time delay again?”

Tiona nodded, “They’re over six light minutes from Earth, so it’ll be that long before General Stoddard actually gets the order. Then, he has the projectiles holding about 2,000 kilometers from the alien mothership. Once he gets the order, the disc attached to the first one will begin accelerating it at 0.7G. That’ll go on for another twelve minutes to get the projectile up to five kilometers per second.” She got a little bit of a distant look, “So, a total of about eighteen minutes until impact, then another six minutes for the imaging to get back to us here. Make it a total of twenty-four minutes.” She winked at Pasha, “You could go out for coffee and be back in plenty of time.” In fact, Tiona could see several people getting up and moving to the back of the room where refreshments were set up.

Pasha frowned, “Why such a low acceleration? I know your saucers can pull several Gs.”

Tiona shrugged, “Yeah, but this is only a one meter disc which runs best at about 1700 pounds of thrust. Since that hunk of steel it’s pushing masses a metric ton, 0.7 Gs is what it can do. Besides, that’s plenty.”

Looking curious, Pasha asked, “How does that speed compared to a cannon or rifle?”

“Cannons and rifles fire at about three quarters of a kilometer per second, so five kps is a lot more. Kinetic energy goes up as the square of the velocity, so velocity makes a
huge
difference. Our projectile will have the kinetic energy of about three tons of TNT.” Tiona shrugged, “It’s hard to imagine that their amazing materials technology could bounce something like that. Of course, if it just blows a little hole in their ship on the way through, it won’t deliver all that energy. We may have to adjust our strategy depending on what happens.”

“Thanks,” Pasha said with a little grin. “I think I’ll go for that coffee.”

Tiona grinned back, “Since they’re my company’s projectiles, I’d probably better stay here and look like I’m quivering in anticipation.”

As Pasha got up and went toward the back of the room, Tiona realized that she felt surprisingly relaxed. A little bad that they were about to wipe out the alien ship, but it was hard to feel remorse for the aliens after what they’d been doing. She thought she should be worried that something would go wrong in the attack on the aliens, after all something had certainly gone wrong with the beam weapon attack, but it just seemed like all the laws of physics were on the humans’ side this time. No mirrored coating was going to stop a metric ton of steel traveling at 11,000 miles per hour.

Nolan leaned close to her and said, “Want me to get you a cup of coffee?”

“Sure. And one of those little coffee cakes too please.”

After six minutes for the president’s message to get to Stoddard and six more for his to return, a message came back. In it Stoddard announced that they’d sent the projectile on its way. Multiple screens lit up, one showing the projectile departing and multiple others showing the alien ship from the different perspectives of Stoddard’s little fleet of camera discs.

Tiona sipped her coffee and nibbled her cake while thinking,
This is about as exciting as watching golf or soccer on TV.
Nothing
happening. Worse, there’s not even an announcer
trying
to make it
seem
interesting.

A counter popped up in the corners of the screens and started rolling down the last sixty seconds until impact. The room fell quiet as all eyes were drawn to the screen.

Someone in the room started counting down the last ten seconds and Tiona finally started to feel some tension. When he got to zero, the screen flickered. Tiona’s initial thought was that the impact had generated some kind of interference.

But then Stoddard’s raspy voice came over. “Son of a
bitch
!” he said.

The alien ship looked completely unchanged…

***

Tiona and Nolan were in the saucer, heading back to Raleigh to ask her dad what he thought had happened.

Viewing the attack on the mothership from all different angles showed the impactor appearing to travel right through the space where the alien ship was located. Every image had the same slight flicker in it. Looking at the video frame by frame it seemed that the flicker was because the alien ship actually disappeared for one to two frames. On some of the obliquely oriented video, a frame showed the impactor traveling beyond the mothership. Those frames were too blurred to tell for sure, but the impactor didn’t look damaged.

After a lot of fruitless discussion and speculation, the president had asked General Stoddard to send another impactor. This time they’d sent Nolan’s barrel-of-balls, detonating a bursting charge right before it hit.

Once again, there was a flicker in the image, but no evidence of any damage to the mothership.

Consternation had reigned in the meeting room. Some were of the opinion that we’d just gotten lucky in dealing with the daughter-ship and that technology capable of avoiding the impactors was only to be expected from star-striding aliens. Others were certain that the impactors had simply missed due to some glitch in Stoddard’s equipment.

There’d been a proposal to send some Special Forces guys out there to land on the mothership and plant explosives. The guy that had suggested it didn’t have any ideas for how they were going to get there without getting shot by the beam weapon.

Hearing the suggestion though, Stoddard had suggested loading a bunch of discs the size of the camera discs with high explosives and flying them very slowly into place. Since the aliens hadn’t shot at the camera discs as they slowly approached, he thought maybe explosives could be taken in that way.

The president authorized the explosive disc mission, even though none of the camera discs had actually gotten within a kilometer of the alien ship as of yet. Someone proposed sending in a camera disc to determine whether it was possible to actually get all the way in and touch the alien ship, but that was voted down on the principle that if the aliens only let a small disc slip in slowly once, it sure would be nice if that one had explosives on board.

Finally, Stoddard had proposed that in case nothing else worked, the president needed to release an enhanced radiation weapon to Stoddard’s team. The general proposed to send the bomb in behind a large container of water to absorb shots from the beam weapon until it got close enough to release its lethal sleet of neutrons.

While everyone was coming to grips with the dismaying results of the projectile runs and their growing concern that perhaps
nothing
was going to work, Cooper had come over to Tiona and quietly suggested that she check in with her dad. “Maybe he’ll understand what actually happened?”

Tiona had shrugged. Realizing that she wasn’t accomplishing anything at the White House, she took her leave.

Tiona did check in with her mother to see how Vaz had been doing. It was a relief to learn that Lisanne thought he’d been acting normally.

Normal for Vaz.

Now she and Nolan opened the door at the bottom of the stairs into the basement lab and looked around. Vaz was seated at one of his electronics benches with something that looked kind of like a large soccer ball sitting in front of him.

Tiona walked over, saying, “What’s that?”

“A pentagonal dodecahedron,” Vaz said without looking up.

Tiona gave a little laugh, “I can see its shape. But surely you’re not just creating geometric shapes down here, are you?”

“Um, no. It has a thruster disc in each surface so,” the disc suddenly rose into the air, “it’s completely maneuverable on all axes.” Vaz picked up a paper plane resting on the table next to him and the dodecahedron rose with it. Tiona realized that it was staying about a foot above the paper plane. Vaz pulled the plane back, the dodecahedron going with his hand, then he threw the plane. The plane promptly did a couple of loop-the-loops, twisted off to the side, stalled, and crashed. The dodecahedron precisely followed the plane in these maneuvers, staying a vertical twelve inches above it. After it crashed, the dodecahedron came to rest just above it where it lay on the floor.

“That’s… um… cool,” Tiona said. “What’s it for?”

Of course Vaz didn’t look at her. He sat, his eyes still focused on the dodecahedron. After a moment he said, “I don’t know. I just thought it would be cool to build.”

Feeling bad that she’d put him on the spot for something that would’ve embarrassed her, Tiona said, “Well, if it isn’t good for anything else, it’d be an incredibly cool toy.” Now she worried she might have embarrassed him even more by implying that he’d been building a toy. Though, from her knowledge of him, she’d be surprised if something like that embarrassed him.

Vaz didn’t say anything, continuing to keep his eyes on the dodecahedron.

After a moment, Tiona said, “We’re hoping to get your help.”

Vaz still didn’t say anything, but Tiona thought maybe he tensed up a little bit.

“You’ve already been a huge help by providing that translation program. We were able to destroy the alien’s daughter-ship where it had landed on a Pacific island by bringing down an asteroid on it. We’re pretty sure that the heat of the impact sterilized any of the bio-weapons they might have created there.” She paused, wondering if Vaz would ask a question or make a comment, but he didn’t. She continued, “The president used your translation program to try to talk to the aliens, but they just ignored her. Now we’ve decided we have to destroy the mothership before it returns to their own solar system. By being able to read what they’ve said, we can tell they think our solar system would be a good place to move their excess people. We want to keep the mothership from going back and getting reinforcements.”

Because he hadn’t said anything, Tiona started to get a panicked feeling that her dad had withdrawn again. She reviewed the conversation in her mind, and realized she hadn’t actually posed any questions yet, so perhaps he didn’t feel a need to respond.

Though she had to admit that he seldom felt compelled to respond even when people
did
pose questions.

She continued, “The military outfitted a saucer with a big beam weapon, probably a laser, and tried to destroy the mothership with it. However, all it did was burn off an outer layer of paint, exposing a mirror-like reflective surface underneath the paint that bounced the beam away.” She paused for a moment in case Vaz might comment, but when he didn’t, she continued, “We’ve also accelerated some impactors at the mothership. They weighed a metric ton and we accelerated them up to five kps, but something happens and they don’t hit. It’s like the mothership disappears right before they arrive.”

Vaz stood suddenly, turned and walked over to his computing area where all the big screens were. Sounding as interested in this as he ever did about anything, he said almost eagerly, “Can you show me video?”

“Sure,” Tiona said, telling her AI to throw the videos up on his big screens.

Vaz went back and forth through the moment when impact should have occurred, looking at all the different video angles and studying it frame by frame as if fascinated. Finally, he settled back in his chair and said, “It’s too bad you don’t have higher frame rate video.”

Trying to keep her voice calm and even, Tiona said, “Yeah. Do you know what happened? Why they missed?”

“Huh?” he said, as if he didn’t understand what she was asking.

“Why didn’t the impactors hit the alien ship?” Tiona said, trying not to express frustration in her tone of voice even though she wasn’t sure he’d recognize what such a tone meant.

“Oh.” Watching him from the side she could see him blink a couple of times, “They activated their wormhole field.”

Tiona stared at him, then glanced at the screen, “I thought,” she said slowly, “that they had to be deep in a gravity well to activate a wormhole.”

“They have to be deep in a gravity well to be able to pass
through
the wormhole at reasonable energy expenditures. They can open the wormhole and move into the opening a small distance without going through.”

Feeling like her thoughts were in a blender, Tiona said, “So you’re saying they left our universe and moved into the wormhole a little ways while the projectile was going past, then came back to our universe?”

Vaz frowned, “No, the wormhole and both ends of it are
all
in our universe, so they’d never have left our universe. They just moved a little ways up the slope into the wormhole. Way out there, so far from a major gravity well, they can’t possibly get high enough into the wormhole to drop down the other side.” He gave one of his micro shrugs, “So, eventually they slide back down to our side again. Well, ‘eventually’ is probably only a few milliseconds.” He glanced a little toward her, though of course not up to her eyes, then said, “If they were
deep
in a gravity well, the slope wouldn’t be so steep and the saddle wouldn’t be so high.
Then
they’d be able to get across to the other side without massive energy expenditures.”