Oblivion (4 page)

The gray dust was just a by-product.

The dust coated the windows as the copter bumped to a gentle landing. The pilot shut off the copter. He had warned them earlier to wait until the blades stopped whirring before leaving the copter—not for safety’s sake, but so that they wouldn’t get blinded by the swirling dust. Cross had been told that the ocean dampness had pasted a lot of it down, but not enough to keep the force of the copter winds from stirring it up.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” the pilot shouted as the blades slowed.

“You could say that.” Lowry Jamison sounded gruffer than usual, as if his throat was as tight as Cross’s.

“Saw you duck, Doc,” the pilot said to Cross.

“I knew it couldn’t get in here, but it still unnerved me.”

“It bothers all of us,” the pilot said. “I got this gig because I’m the only one who can land here safely. Everyone else blinks at the wrong time. Too many images of dissolving people, if you know what I mean.”

Cross did know. The images had been repeated so many times on television that the idea of having the black dust touch him made his skin crawl. Still, he was here to sift through it, to find, if he could, some of the nanomachines that he believed the aliens left behind.

“Dust’s settling,” the Army man said.

It was, but it seemed to be taking forever. The black stuff was so thin, so light that even when stuck together by moisture it floated up like carbon flakes from a burned building.

The remains of everything organic. Or, as one of the scientists in the Project had called it: the useless stuff, the waste. The organic material the aliens believed they couldn’t use.

Cross opened the copter door, disturbing more dust. His task would be more difficult than he had thought.

He climbed outside and stepped onto the clear patch. It was bigger up close than he had thought it would be. They had actually landed on what had once been a parking lot.

The smell of the sea, sharp, salty, and tangy, surprised him. Somehow he had thought the dust would have an odor all its own. If it did, he couldn’t smell it. The air was fresh, probably fresher than it would have been if Monterey were still here.

The thought made him sad.

He moved away from the copter and stared at the devastation around him. He had expected it to be completely flat, a level black surface as far as the eye could see. But it wasn’t. He could actually make out shapes: the steel reinforcements in old buildings; the concrete supports that stood, like columns, in the sea; the metal hulls of boats that had washed ashore. He could see, without much effort, the layout of the city, the Wharf, the harbor.

He could see what once had been.

That, actually, was his strength. Even though Cross had degrees in a number of areas, his specialty was archeology. He had been trained in using his imagination to determine, from the smallest of hints, what a culture—or a place—had been like.

It didn’t take much imagination here.

“Damn,” Jamison said. He had stepped out of the copter and stopped beside Cross. Cross didn’t know how long Jamison had been standing there.

“It’s going to be a needle in a haystack,” Cross said, turning the conversation immediately to business. He didn’t want to focus on what had been. If they did that, they might not be able to work.

“We knew it was going to be hard,” Jamison said. “I just didn’t imagine it would be like this.”

Cross hadn’t either. He had imagined stepping into the dust, using the device Jamison had designed, and searching for one of the nanomachines that he hoped had been left by the aliens. But he hadn’t imagined walking around metal bicycle frames and bronze fisherman statues.

“I guess we should start,” he said.

Jamison nodded. He handed Cross a thin wand with a large glass base. It looked like a combination of an old-fashioned metal detector and a vacuum cleaner designed to clean stairs. But it was much, much more than that. It had been invented to find machines too small to be seen by the human eye.

“I hope it works,” Jamison said.

“Me, too.” He had only used it once, and that had been in the R&D room at NanTech. The wands, as Jamison called them, were prototypes. In fact, Jamison and his team had modified an existing device that they hadn’t planned on selling.

Jamison’s team specialized in hiding nanotechnology, in making it completely undetectable to any modern machine. Jamison had told Cross that in confidence, assuming that Cross had the same high-level security clearance as most people who visited the R&D section of NanTech. Even though NanTech was a private firm, the bulk of its Secrecy Division, as Jamison playfully called it, was funded by the military.

The fear had been, before the aliens had come, that other countries would develop a series of nanoweapons, things that would destroy electrical systems. Yet the nanoweapons would be undetectable, and even if they were traced to the source, they would be impossible to find and remove.

Military intelligence had shown that no other country was close to developing anything like that, so after the initial wave of research on finding nanoweapons, the research shifted to making and hiding nanoweapons. Jamison’s division was split: half the division discovered ways to hide the weapons while the other half discovered ways of finding them.

So, after Cross got a chance to think about it, he went to NanTech for help. Finding the nanomachines—an actual nanomachine, not a fossilized one from a previous visit by these aliens—might provide a way to understand what they were fighting.

And better yet, fight back.

That was what Cross thought about the most. Stopping the next attack and fighting back. Humanity had to. There was no choice.

In spite of himself, Cross shuddered.

Cross knew that he and his team weren’t the only ones working on ways to fight the aliens. There were branches of military all over the world working on ways to stop the alien ships, but Cross and his team were focusing on stopping what the aliens dropped. The nanoharvesters.

Nonetheless, here in the field, Cross felt out of place. He wasn’t a hands-on technology guy, and he’d only recently learned about nanomachines. He was in Monterey because he knew what the nanomachines looked like, at least in fossilized form. He had been studying them since before the alien ships arrived. People like Jamison could study them as well, but they didn’t have quite as much experience as Cross did.

And, in fact, the one man who had more experience than Cross—his friend Edwin Bradshaw—was in Brazil with Portia Groopman, the genius of nanotechnology, using the same devices to try to find alien machines.

He hefted the wand Jamison had given him. It was light, so light that it felt as if he were holding a toy. Only the glass base gave it any weight at all.

When Cross had tested the device back at NanTech, Jamison had apologized for the glass. “It’s more tempered than bulletproof glass,” he had said, “but it does make the wand heavier than we want. We’ve just found that glass is the best substance for the base.”

Heavier. The wand wasn’t heavy at all. In fact, if it were any lighter, Cross might forget that he was holding anything.

Jamison clutched his wand as if it were a golf club and he were staring at the first tee on a complicated hole. With his other hand, he shaded his eyes.

“This stuff goes on forever,” he said. He sounded mournful.

Cross nodded.

“You know the odds against finding a single nanomachine?” Jamison asked.

In fact, Cross knew them exactly. “They’re not as slim as you might think,” he said. “Because there is a lot of ground that got covered, the aliens had to use billions and billions of those nanomachines. Even if they left one in a million behind, there should be hundreds of thousands of them scattered in this dust.”

“Machines smaller than a speck of dust.” Jamison sighed. “Just because we think they’re here doesn’t mean these wands will find them.”

Cross knew that. They’d had that discussion back at NanTech. “Why’re you getting pessimistic on me now, Lowry?” Jamison didn’t answer. He just stared at the blackness in front of them.

Cross understood. Over the years, he had stood on hundreds of sites of devastation—devastation that had ruined civilizations thousands of years before. He had sifted through the archaeological record, held black dust compressed by centuries, and wondered at it.

He had never faced it in real time, never thought what it meant—at least not in real terms—to the survivors.

Cross clapped Jamison on the back. “You’ve faced tough odds before.”

“Yeah,” Jamison said softly. “But I always knew someone would win the game.”

“You know that now,” Cross said.

Jamison looked at him, his broad face empty of all emotion, but his eyes were alive with something. Fear? Probably. Cross suspected that emotion was underneath all of their facades.

Fear and anger.

“Right now, we’re the underdogs,” Cross said. “And this is our Hail Mary pass. We’re going to fight back and win this.” Jamison smiled. “Your analogy sucks.”

Cross shrugged. “I’m not much of a football fan.”

“It shows.” Jamison pressed a small area at the tip of the wand, then pressed the base against the black dust. Dust swirled within the glass base, just like it would in a vacuum cleaner, and then it rose around Jamison. He coughed and shut off the wand.

His face was covered with dust.

“We need some kind of suit,” he said.

“Already thought of that.” Cross nodded toward the copter. The Army guy was there, holding a box. “You just got ahead of me a little. I didn’t expect you to turn that thing on so quickly.”

“Hey, if we’re going to go for the Hail Mary pass,” Jamison said, “we’ve got to move quickly.”

“Yes, we do,” Cross said. More than he wanted to admit. Because in one hundred and seventy-three days, the alien ships would be back. And if Earth didn’t find a way to fight them, the ships would again take what they wanted. Cross felt every second tick away, as if second by second, the blood was dripping from the body of humanity.

April 25, 2018
10:12 Universal Time

172 Days Until Second Harvest

Commander Cicoi stood on the balcony of Command Central, overlooking the valley below. Malmur was a beautiful planet—or it had been, in the times before. He had once been privileged to see the Stored Memories in the sacred vault, images of Malmur when it had its own sun, when it had life every day of every year.

Now the valley below him was just a cut in the dirt, with thousands of solar panels gathering the life-giving energy covering its slopes. There were suggestions of the past. The river that had once flowed through the valley left an impression time could not erase. Smooth stones covered that area under the panel, and a winding depression suggested where the river had once been.

If Cicoi brought down all but two of his eyestalks, he could almost see the water flowing, as it did in the Stored Memories. But try as he might, he could not imagine the greenery that had once surrounded the river, nor the creatures—long sacrificed—that (lew overhead or bathed within its depths.

It was said that the Malmuria began their existence in the once-fertile oceans of Malmur, oceans that, like the rivers, were long gone. The tentacles and eyestalks that were such an important part of their race once had different purposes within the water.

So said the Keepers of the Stored Memories, the only ones allowed to study the past for its own sake. Most Malmuria spent their brief time awake struggling for survival, procreating, repairing damage, and eating enough to make it through the next period of darkness.

Once, so said the Keepers, the Malmuria were a magnificent people. They had vast cities and miraculous technologies. They thrived on a healthy planet that orbited its own sun.

But a disaster struck, a disaster so horrible that none were allowed to speak of it, even now. The only way that the Malmuria survived was due to the wisdom of the Ancients. They foresaw the disaster in time to develop a way to survive it: they changed the entire planet into what it was now. And survive was what Malmur did.

Now the planet had a strange orbit in a different sun’s system. Malmur’s survival depended on a rigorous structure of harvesting that began early in the First Pass near the sun’s third planet, ceased as Malmur disappeared behind the sun, and continued when Malmur passed the third planet again on the way back out. Then Malmur was plunged into darkness, a darkness so long and terrible nothing could survive on the planet’s surface. The Malmuria themselves went into a cold sleep in specially designed units and were awakened only after the First determined it was time.

Cicoi did not know how the First knew it was time, but in each Pass that Cicoi had experienced, the First had awakened the population at the exact moment.

Cicoi had been among the early arisers for a hundred Passes now. He was considered one of the young leaders, someone who would come into his strengths a hundred Passes in the future.

He was not prepared to be a Commander now.

Cicoi’s upper tentacles rose and fell. His eyestalks floated around his face before he turned all of them to the valley below. He had to remember—it was important to remember— that once that valley had been great. And now it was no different from the rest of Malmur. Covered in black solar panels, dark and dusty and empty underneath the panels.