Oblivion (3 page)

He was amazed the world had survived an alien attack. Thank God it looked as if humans had won when the aliens left, otherwise the world would be coming apart in riots. At the moment almost everyone on the planet thought humanity had chased off the aliens. Doug knew better.

So did President Franklin and about thirty other people around the nation. And maybe a few hundred more around the world. But that was going to change.

The aliens hadn’t been chased off—they were just following a plan. A plan that was going to bring them right back to Earth for a second attack as soon as their tenth-planet home got into position again.

And the fact that they were coming back had him even angrier. And scared at the same time. Not for himself, but for the millions and millions who would die in a second attack, not counting all the people who would die in the panic that would sweep the world the moment everyone knew the aliens were headed this way again.

Humanity, civilization as Mickelson knew it, wouldn’t survive a second round. It was that simple.

Mickelson heard President Franklin in the narrow corridor off the opposite side of the room, his braying Bronx accent impossible to miss. Thayer Franklin had a patrician name, but that was the only thing patrician about him. His father was distantly related to some of the best families in New England, but he’d married “down,” or so the pre-election news reports had said, to a woman from a blue-collar family who’d gotten a scholarship to Harvard. That marriage had lasted long enough to produce Franklin, and to prevent his spunky mother from finishing her Ivy League education. Franklin’s father refused to pay child support, and Cara Franklin went home to raise her child.

That was all in the official biography. What wasn’t, seemed incredibly clear to anyone who met the small, dark-eyed, clear-spoken mother of the president. She’d poured her ambition into him, and he’d responded. Sometimes, Mickelson thought, the entire success story was an elaborate way for Franklin to thumb his nose at his still-living, unrepentant deadbeat father.

Now Franklin was faced with the largest crisis to ever face a president. Mickelson hoped the man was up for it.

Mickelson leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Most of the time over the past few days, when he did that, either in bed or on a plane, he saw the images of the alien craft pouring the black clouds of nanomachines over people, buildings, entire towns. And those people screaming in pain as the machines ate them alive, from the outside inward.

It was the stuff of horror movies. Skin eaten, blood spurting everywhere.

Faces contorted in pain, covered in blood, skin gone.

Millions of dead.

Nightmares.

Nothing but nightmares.

“Napping on me, Doug?” President Franklin’s voice broke through the images of the attack as he closed the door to his inner office behind him.

“Hardly,” Doug said, opening his eyes to see the intense gaze of his friend. “Every time I try to sleep I see the attack again.”

Franklin dropped down into his normal chair, his back to his desk, and nodded. The exhaustion was clear around the man’s black eyes and wrinkled face. Franklin had grown tired looking over his first years in office, but this alien attack had added years to his face.

“So do I, Doug,” Franklin said. “And to be honest with you, it’s making me damn angry.”

“You and a lot of other people,” Doug said. He’d spent the last few days on emergency trips to meet with heads of states, calming people, letting them know something was going to be done. “But everyone feels so helpless, at least those who know about the aliens coming back again.”

“How many know?” Franklin asked.

Doug shook his head. “Not many at this point. Less than a couple hundred, but it won’t take long for others to start figuring it out.”

“And the rest of the world, those who don’t know?” Franklin asked. “How do you see them taking it?”

“Shock,” Doug said, used to having Franklin quiz him on common people’s reactions around the world. “Mourning the dead. And celebration that the aliens are gone and that we won.”

Franklin snorted. “We didn’t win. I’m not sure we even really bothered the bastards.”

Mickelson couldn’t agree more.

“Well,” Franklin said, his voice turning cold and low. “That’s not going to happen next time. We’re not going to just let them come here, take what they want, and kill our people.” Mickelson knew this wasn’t just another of Franklin’s speeches. He had known Franklin long enough to see when all the political screens and faces were gone and he was being the real Franklin. And this was one of those times.

But unless something major had changed in the last few hours while Mickelson had been on the plane home from Great Britain, there wasn’t any way to stop the aliens that he knew of.

“Oh,” Mickelson said, sighing and leaning back. “I wish it were that easy.”

Franklin pinned Mickelson with his stare, the anger clearly being held in check just below the surface. “I’ve seen enough death over the past week to last me a thousand lifetimes. Those bastards aren’t going to do it again.”

Mickelson sat forward and faced his president. “You have a way to stop them?”

“Damn right I do,” Franklin said. “We’re going to blow that damn planet of theirs right out of the system before they get another chance to hurt us.”

For a second Mickelson didn’t understand exactly what the president was telling him. The words seemed to make no sense.

“We’re going to attack them?” Mickelson said.

Franklin smiled, but there was no merriment behind the smile or in his eyes. “You bet your ass we’re going to,” President Franklin said. “And they’re not even going to know what hit them.”

April 24, 2018
8:10 a.m. Pacific Time

173 Days Until Second Harvest

Leo Cross clung to the edge of his seat, feeling the plastic bite into his fingers. His heart was pounding harder than usual. He’d been in a lot of helicopters and landed in a lot of strange places, but none of the landings had ever made him nervous before. It was the black dust that unnerved him. The black dust and the flat land where houses, businesses, and people should be.

He glanced around the copter. The pilot was concentrating on the path before them. His navigator, an Army man whose name Cross had already forgotten, watched with tight-lipped determination. Cross turned. Behind him, Lowry Jamison looked slightly queasy.

Jamison was a big man—a former college quarterback who would have gone on to play pro ball if it weren’t for his heroics in the Rose Bowl several years back. He’d twisted his knee with six minutes remaining. The coach had wanted him out, but the second-string quarterback had already been sidelined with a rotator cuff injury before the game. The third-string was a freshman who’d never played in the regular season. Jamison finished out the game, running fifteen yards to set up a field goal, and giving his team the three points they needed to win. Unfortunately, he’d torn cartilage in the knee, and never played ball again.

Unfortunately for Jamison. Fortunately for the rest of the world. For Jamison had a diabolical mind, and once he could no longer use it toward a career in football, he turned his attention to physics. He worked for NanTech, same as Portia Groopman, another member of Cross’s team. Unlike Portia, Jamison didn’t work on nanotechnology per se, but on ways to make nanotechnology impossible to detect.

Right now, however, he didn’t look like a man who knew how to hide things already too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. He looked like a man who thought the helicopter was going to crash.

Cross had flown with Jamison before. Jamison was not afraid of flying, or even of helicopters. He had the same reaction to this trip the rest of them did.

The thing was, they were prepared. They knew what they were going to face. And they had had warning as the copter brought them in from the north. They were following the coastline, looking at the ocean dash against rocks. They flew low enough that Cross could see homes built on the mountainside, cars parked in the driveways, toys in the yards. As they passed Santa Cruz, he watched the cars crawl on the highways beside the tacky tourist traps. There were more Army vehicles on the roads than he had ever seen before. Humvees, trucks— all green, all moving swiftly. Things looked normal here, but he doubted they were. He doubted things were normal anywhere in the world anymore.

The copter turned slightly, following the coastline inward as they entered Monterey Bay. The pilot, unable to talk because of the thrum of the engine and the
whap-whap-whap
of the blades above them, turned, tapped Cross on the shoulder, and pointed. Cross leaned forward in his chair and saw—

For a moment, he didn’t know how to describe it. He had flown this way before, once in a low-flying private plane, and he still remembered it: all the seaside towns nestled against the bay, the sailing ships, the bright, blue ocean. There were the remains of canneries, some of them unable to be torn down because John Steinbeck had written about them in the 1930s, and piers that went out into that sparkling water. The communities, from the air, seemed to blend into one another, and he remembered thinking how lovely they were, how perfect, how typically American West Coast. The kinds of places where people always wanted to live but never could.

Many of the communities remained. Around the curve of the coastline, he saw Castroville, Marina, and then—

A shadow across the land.

The peninsula that provided the home for the city of Monterey was still there, but instead of one of the most beautiful cities in California, there was blackness, rubble, and nothing else. No pier, no ships.

No people.

That was when Cross gripped his seat. He was glad for the noise, the constant roar that copters still made, when all other motorized vehicles were built quieter and quieter. He wasn’t sure what sound he made as he saw the destruction approach, but he knew it wasn’t good. Perhaps he moaned. Perhaps he swore. Perhaps he simply gasped.

All he knew was that a knot had formed in his throat. Swallowing was hard, and so was breathing. His throat was so tight, and his emotions so close to the surface, that he feared a deep breath would make him lose what fragile control he had.

The blackness covered the coastline as far as his eye could see.

The copter was slowing down as it came in for its landing. Cross’s grip on the seat grew tighter. He had seen the dust, studied the dust, even held bits of it in various labs back in Washington, D.C. The television stations had shown images of the destruction for the past ten days. Cross had seen satellite images, still photographs, infrared images, and all sorts of spectral analyses. But nothing had prepared him for being here, in person, seeing the destruction up close.

Perhaps he had been too busy to let it sink in before now. Yes, he had watched as the alien ships released the clouds of black dust over six large regions worldwide. The first attack had occurred in the Amazon, Central America, and in central Africa. He and Brittany Archer, the head of the Space Telescope Science Institute—a beautiful woman who had miraculously become his lover through all of this—had watched the attack in the media room of his D.C. home.

They had felt helpless, even though they had been involved with the Tenth Planet Project from the beginning. In fact, it was Cross who had put the world scientists—and ultimately, the world leaders—on alert that something would cause worldwide devastation sometime that year. He had seen the same result in the archaeological record every 2,006 years, and had known it was coming. At first, however, he hadn’t known what or from where.

The copter headed toward a white space in the middle of all that blackness. The military had cleared off a section of land on the Monterey peninsula, probably where the Wharf used to be. He didn’t know how they had gotten rid of the black dust—whether they had scraped it off into the sea or whether they had scooped it up and saved it for later study. But as the copter approached, he could see the white patch like a ray of light in the middle of a very, very dark night.

He let out a small sigh. Monterey hadn’t been destroyed until the second attack. The world governments had united, mostly through the United States, and had fought the aliens as best they could. A number of lucky shots in the Amazon had destroyed alien ships.

The aliens had retaliated by targeting highly populated areas: South Vietnam, central France, and this part of California. The images had been even more horrifying than the first time. Cross had sat alone in his media room, staring at people who were trying to escape: some on foot, others by car. The traffic had been backed up for miles, and most of those people hadn’t escaped in time.

The copter hovered over the ground. Its propeller blades whipped the nearby black dust into the air. Cross ducked as the dust hit the plastic windshields, although he had been reassured that it was harmless. It had been through test after test.

In fact, he had already suspected it was harmless. It had been his friend, Edwin Bradshaw, who had discovered the little nanomachines that the aliens sent down. Portia Groopman, NanTech’s twenty-year-old whiz kid, had determined that the nanomachines had two functions: collecting and storing organic material.

That was why bits of metal rose from the dust like dinosaur skeletons, why the concrete foundations of buildings remained. Only the organic material had been destroyed.