Oblivion (24 page)

Suddenly science had become the key to everything. And humans had to work together to solve scientific puzzles that five years ago they hadn’t even known existed.

More scientists were linked now than ever. More information was being shared than ever before. For the first time in its existence, the Earth was united in a common goal.

June 15, 2018
6:02 Universal Time

121 Days Until Second Harvest

The command center inside the International Space Station was a pile of ancient computers held together by buckets and bolts. Every time Gail Banks entered it, she half expected to see a pan beneath the so-called ceiling, collecting water drippings, like the house of her childhood. Badly constructed roof, walls that were falling apart, and parts that never should have been glued together. The station was like that, and as more and more modules were built on, no one thought to move the command center. Occasionally one of the countries that worked on the station sent up new computer equipment and it was cobbled onto the rest. The result was a hacker’s paradise, which made a by-the-book woman like Banks want to pull her hair out.

Especially at a time like this.

She needed to launch three hundred missiles, and she only had enough equipment in the command center to handle a hundred at a time. She was relying on the shuttles to provide backup. Fortunately, though, her ISS team was a prepared group of hackers, and they had managed to jury-rig something. She wasn’t happy with it, but it would do.

Her staff was scattered at the various posts. They were top-notch, well trained and ready. She’d already briefed the backup shuttle pilots and the mission control folks back home.

They were as ready as they were going to be.

She peered at the nearest monitor. The image she had chosen to watch was a real-time image of the missiles hanging in space. She was going to have three staggered launches, one hundred each launch. If she hadn’t been so rushed, she would have moved the damn command center to a more sensible part of the ISS, and she would have waited until Earth sent her better equipment.

But she had known when she took this job the need for haste, and she had known she would have to jury-rig things. She did receive permission, when this was all over, to develop a new command center on the ISS, and she did put in requisitions for new equipment. Unfortunately, none of the changes would come when she needed them.

And she prayed that she wouldn’t need them later.

This project had to work. She’d given her whole heart and soul to it.

As she watched, the countdown started behind her. How many times had she listened to countdowns like this, getting ready to launch missiles—fire rockets, so that shuttles could go into orbit. Never before had she experienced it while she was in orbit, or while the missiles were in orbit.

She had this horrible fear that some of the missiles wouldn’t make it out of Earth’s gravitational well. It was a fear she admitted to no one, although she did ground two Ukrainian missiles after examining them herself. They’d clearly been dug out of a silo that was built in the 1950s, and there was no way she would let them contaminate her project.

Her project. She let out a sigh and stood up.

“General?” one of the women said. “Everything all right?”

“I can’t watch a launch on a monitor,” she said. It always made her feel as if she were out of the loop somehow. Of course she usually felt that way when she wasn’t hands-on. Command really wasn’t her thing, but she knew how to organize people and she had been promoted to this place. Sometimes she still longed for the days when she was the one with her hand on the joystick, in control of the plane rather than the entire project.

She went to the nearest porthole. In this part of the ISS, the portholes were exactly that, large circles of thick, clear, scratched plastic that offered a distorted view into the blackness of space beyond.

Still, she could see the missiles hanging out there in space, a safe distance away from the station, their cylindrical shapes ghosts against the darkness.

“General, you can’t see clearly from there ”

“I can look at the replay on the monitors and I’m not going to read the telemetry,” she said. “I trust you to let me know if anything is going wrong.”

There was too much telemetry for one person to monitor anyway. Her staff had maxed itself out, with as much information as possible on all of the screens.

She clasped her hands behind her back.

The countdown continued.

Flares of light appeared at the base of some of the missiles— the older ones going through several launching stages.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart was pounding. They were actually going to do this. Goddammit. She had pulled it off. She had thought the task impossible when they assigned it to her.

“Three,” the computerized voice droned behind her.

“Two.”

“One.”

“Launch!” Banks said in her firmest voice.

“Launch commencing,” the computer voice responded, and her staff murmured its acknowledgment of that.

The blackness in front of her flared into brightness so blinding she had to resist looking away.

One hundred missiles, launching at the same time.

Fires burned beneath their bases and together they moved slowly, then quickly picked up speed away from the station, heading after a quick orbit around Earth into the vastness of space.

Red and green comm trails danced in front of her eyes, remaining even when she closed them. She felt her heart pounding. She opened her eyes again, and saw bits of color remaining against the backdrop of space, but she wasn’t sure if that was another trick of her ocular nerves.

“Report,” she said, turning around.

As they had been trained, her assistants called out the information she needed.

“Group One, green.”

“Group Two, green.”

The countdown continued through all twenty groups. Only four missiles had failed to fire, and she had expected that. They were the oldest missiles in this particular batch. There were more in the next wave of missiles, but she didn’t have time to have the oldest ones double- and triple-checked. There was no time at all, actually.

Telemetry covered the screens before her. The warheads were alive, their codes already programmed in. Some of the missiles even carried old-fashioned warheads that detonated on impact, just in case the energy-draining shields of the alien ships affected all of the other missiles.

Warheads.

Nuclear missiles.

She had never in her life thought she would be the one to give the codes to launch them.

But then, she had always expected that, if they were launched, they’d be launched at other humans, at Earth.

She went back to her porthole. The other missiles hung in their orbits, awaiting their launch sequence.

She had two more waves of missiles to launch. Soon every warhead that human beings could get into orbit under short notice, every missile that even had a prayer of working, would be hurtling into space.

She turned to her crew. “Prepare second launch countdown.” Then she turned back to stare out at the blackness of space.

Earth’s greatest hope rested on her shoulders, and she had done all she could.

She prayed that would be enough.

June 15, 2018
2:31 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

121 Days Until Second Harvest

Food is sleep,
Britt Archer thought to herself as she studied the cold pizzas in their greasy boxes that someone had left in the back of the lab. She had a choice of cold pepperoni, cold sausage and mushroom, cold vegetarian, and cold pineapple with anchovies. Of course, there were only a few pieces of the first three, and almost the entire pineapple and anchovies. Archer grimaced. If there was anything worse than a pineapple and anchovy pizza, it was a cold pineapple and anchovy pizza.

But she had to eat, because she certainly wasn’t going to sleep, not in the foreseeable future.

She grabbed the last slice of pepperoni, and then took a slice of vegetarian for good measure. The three pots of coffee she’d made someone get from the nearest Starbucks were already gone. She’d used some French roast, finely ground, to make a pot in the lab’s machine, but it wasn’t the same. Besides, her nerves were jangled. She must have had enough caffeine to wire the entire Pentagon.

The Pentagon. She snorted slightly. Maddox could have warned her. Archer had thought the two of them had the beginnings of a friendship. To get a phone call this afternoon from Jesse Killius was bad enough. Someone could have told her sooner that her entire staff, plus everyone else she could muster in all the different labs all over the country, would be working well into the night. It was common courtesy.

But Archer was beginning to sense that courtesy and secrecy didn’t go well together at all. She hadn’t even felt comfortable enough to tell Leo what was going on when she had to cancel their dinner plans. She had to rely on the good allpurpose dodge, telling him that “something” had come up.

Yes, something had come up. Twenty probes that she had known nothing about were suddenly sending back telemetry, and her people had to monitor all of it. Twenty probes, in addition to the other probes her staff was in charge of.

Twenty
secret
probes. Where the hell had they come from?

And who launched them?

And from where?

Dammit. She’d thought the entire world was working together. She didn’t understand the point of secrecy. Did the government think that the aliens had planted spies among the general populace? And if so, how had they hidden those silly tentacles?

Archer shook her head slightly. She was getting punchy. She took a bite of pizza, thinking the pepperoni was fine cold, if a little greasy. Her stomach rumbled. She had no idea when she had last eaten.

Special probes One through Twenty. She cursed each and every one of them for robbing her of her semidecent night’s sleep. And her dinner with Leo. How come she finally discovered a man who understood her and at that moment the world decided it was on its last legs? Was someone trying to tell her something?

“Dr. Archer,” Odette Roosevelt, one of her best researchers, said. “Those special probes are sending us signals.”

Archer shoved a bit more pizza into her mouth, set the plate down, grabbed a napkin, and wiped her face and fingers. She crossed to the nearest monitor.

She’d had to give a speech tonight, too, the one she hated. Her staff all had high-level security clearance and it was because of days like this one. Her speech had been the usual song-and-dance about confidentiality, not speaking to the media on pain of death, and oh, yeah, no leaks. Nothing left this room without Archer’s say-so. And she received permission for that from above.

Killius, who was the one to tell Archer that she and her staff had to spend the night together, did say that the information would be released to all the war rooms worldwide the following day.

She slipped into the chair in front of the monitor, staring at the images that came from Probe One. With the punch of a button, she could switch to telemetry, but she wasn’t ready, not yet. She was frowning at the images, trying to make sense of them.

Some sort of movement, something in space. But what?

“Special Probe Number Two is now on-line,” Roosevelt was saying, and the screen before Archer split so that she saw two slightly different views of the same images. Space, yes, but a lot more than that The shapes were cylindrical, and they were moving.

What the hell was this?

“Probes Three, Four, and Five are coming onboard together,” said Tom Cavendish, one of her other assistants.

The new images appeared on Archer’s monitor. She gasped, as the picture before her finally made sense. She was staring at rockets heading out of Earth’s orbit. Heading into space.

A lot more than twenty of them.

“My God,” she whispered.

Then she felt a flare of anger. She had been part of the Tenth Planet Project from the beginning and no one had bothered to tell her of this? No one had bothered to tell Leo? This was what Maddox had been so secretive about. What the hell were they doing with rockets?

“Dr. Archer,” Roosevelt said, her voice softer this time. “Do you see this?”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“Probe Six is coming on-line,” Roosevelt said, in a more businesslike tone.

Probe Six didn’t add much to the picture that Archer already had. She frowned. What was going on? Why launch so many probes and all at the same thing?

“We have Probe Seven,” Cavendish said.

Probe Seven’s view was of the top of one of the rockets. Archer felt a sudden chill. That couldn’t be right. She punched a few keys, magnifying the new image.

“Jesus,” Roosevelt said softly. “Is that a warhead?”

“What the hell is going on?” one of Archer’s other assistants said.

“I guess we decided to take control of things,” Cavendish said.

Archer’s mouth was dry. Take control was an understatement. “How many missiles do you think we have here?”