Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (30 page)

Mitchell Conner was normally a patient man. You didn’t get to his position in the Confederation without being exactly that after all. That said, he was running well past his last nerve and the obstructionism he was used to in his everyday life had no place on a world under siege.

“Stop,” he said flatly, one hand up to the screen that the speaker was looking down from. “Unless the ramifications are somehow
worse
than giant alien insects eating our entire planet out from under us, I’m far from certain that I
care
what they are. What I need to know is simple. Can you fire a transitional weapon from inside an atmosphere?”

“In theory . . . yes,” the man admitted finally. “However, this deep in a gravity well, I can’t say how we can possibly target . . .”

“Then shoot from the hip, by God!” Conner snarled. “I don’t care if you have to build the mother of all shotguns to make this happen, just
make it happen!
”

He took a deep breath in the stunned silence that followed his explosion and sighed.

“Doctor . . . we are besieged. Unless we clear our skies of these
things,
all the fighting in the universe won’t save us here on the ground. Just build the weapon. Build as many of them as you can. I have factories turning out shells at an obscene rate already . . . give me something to shoot them out of.”

The man swallowed, but nodded jerkily. “Yes Mr. President.”

Conner turned to the closest Secret Service agent as the screen flickered off. “Find someone we can trust to ride herd on them and get them over there as quickly as you can.”

“Yes Mr. President,” the agent said before leaving.

Normally Conner wasn’t one to use his protection detail as glorified errand boys, but right now his secretaries were all busy, as were his advisors. Given where they were, about the only people who didn’t have every waking moment taken up in pursuit of their primary skill set were, in fact, his detail. He rather suspected that the risk of assassination had gone down massively over the last few hours, and would probably drop more over the coming days.

Assuming we survive them, I suppose
.

There wasn’t much the agents could do to throw themselves between him and the alien drones, he supposed, so for now he was the one who had to find a way to protect them, and everyone else on the planet, and come hell or high water he was going to do just that.

Across the world the situation was descending into chaos as the first twelve hours after the alien assault came to an end. Despite near constant bombardment from above, the cities of Beijing and New Delhi still stood and still housed more human beings than any other place on the planet.

In the first few hours the casualty rate of first-responder units was beyond obscene. Hundreds of police died in each city, along with thousands of civilians, before the first military units could arrive.

Those arrivals were, almost without exception, far too lightly equipped for the task at hand, but they’d been trained to combat the Confederation. They thus threw themselves enthusiastically into the defense of their homelands with all the fervor they would have mustered if their foe had worn Confederate blue instead of alien red.

As the clock moved on, more and more units arrived at each of the drop points worldwide, some just hammering the areas infected with high explosives and deep-penetration bunker busters. In other places a more tactful approach was taken: Heavily armed special operations units stationed in Japan, Germany, and the Middle East were dropped into major cities across the globe with weapons intended to take out Block and Confederate heavy armor. Cities became war zones unlike anything the Earth had ever seen.

In twelve hours, over fourteen million people had died, as many or more from collateral damage as from the Drasin weapons.

Many nations saw the numbers for collateral damages and considered it a fair trade. Many did not.

Military forces worldwide, after twelve hours, were just beginning to approach full mobilization. In nations like those that made up the Confederate states, this meant that more and more of the National Guard were ready to respond internally, but the bulk of their real fighting prowess was still stationed overseas. So, ironically, Confederate soldiers were more often deployed to protect nations that were not their own.

For the soldiers, this was a source of agonizing frustration as they clamored for news from home but found quickly that even when communications were open, no one really knew anything of value. Another irony: In many places that had long detested the presence of the Confederate soldiers, they were now seen as true saviors as they deployed into combat areas, rescuing people they had only just a few days previously been watching with suspicious eyes.

The world political map was shifting and, in perhaps the ultimate irony, those who were normally the first to spot and counter trends like this were now so preoccupied that they didn’t have even the slightest of hints that it was happening.

Gaia looked over her world, a world that had birthed her and that she had walked for as long as she had memories to recall. She’d never felt pain in all the time she’d existed, not personally, not with such clarity
.

“It was different,” she decided, “feeling the echo of another’s pain
.”

The Drasin were abominations, unlike anything she’d ever felt in her very long existence
.

Gaia could recall the sensation of nuclear devices annihilating thousands. She could remember the exquisite burn of mountains of rock slamming down from space, and she knew both the searing heat of droughts and the freezing cold of glacier shaped death . . . but these, these things were completely alien
.

She could sense them, as she did every other living thing on the planet . . . everything that interacted with her, the Earth’s, magnetic field, in fact. They didn’t register as . . . thinking creatures, however
.

Humans had a pattern to them, a way of thinking that superseded language. You could tell a human just by that pattern and nothing else. Surprisingly, the pattern was very similar for other species on
the planet as well. Cetaceans were close, as were several other species both aquatic and terrestrial. She’d decided long ago that the pattern she could sense was as close to the definition of sentience as she was likely to come, for the time being
.

Drasin, however, read more like some bastard version of arachnids
.

It seemed trite, even to her, to call them spiders, but the more she thought about it, spiders probably got their bad reputation from the Drasin. Humans were almost biologically wired to feel revulsion to creatures like spiders, yet there had never seemed to be a real reason for that wiring
.

Gaia now supposed she knew the reason
.

Their thought patterns only partially resembled arachnids, however. The rest was something familiar, something she had seen before, but she couldn’t quite place the memory
.

The itch was going to drive her mad, if the damned infestation of Drasin didn’t end her and everything she’d ever known first
.

Gaia cast her thoughts back to New York, and in an instant she was there
.

She formed her mental image near where Eric Weston was kneeling on a rooftop, firing down into a group of Drasin that had been happily munching on a couple of battle tanks, and stood with him for a moment
.

“You need to finish this battle quickly, Captain,” the entity thought, looking past her subject to the city beyond. “We have real work left to do.”

She stepped off the edge of the building and vanished into the ether, leaving the subject of her attention to his battle. He paused only briefly, glancing around as if he had heard something in the distance, then continued the fight
.

In space, surrounding the blue-green planet, a veritable horde of ships had slowly gathered.

Few times in history had this many Drasin been located in the same star system, and each time it had happened things had not gone well for the star system in question. This time, with hundreds of ships slowly converging on the world known to the locals as the Earth, the Drasin had a rather complex problem to deal with.