The Black Ships (13 page)

Antioch, California

June 7
^th
, 2026

“I
s it all here?” Callum asked as Kevin opened the door. They had
bought the materials online using the names of relatives; not their own
relatives of course, but they must have been related to someone, or so Cal
liked to joke.

Kevin nodded. “It’s out in the garage; Gram
never goes out there.” He stepped out and locked the door behind him. The two
men walked around the corner of the house and up the driveway to the garage in
the backyard where Kevin took out a remote and opened the overhead door. Inside
sat paper sacks, some filled with iron oxide and some with aluminum. Both
metals had been purchased in powder form and were ready for mixing. Beside
those were sheets of rigid foam insulation and sacks of cement.

Cal nodded approvingly at the collected
material. “The magnesium?” he asked.

Kevin nodded over at the workbench. “Four
hundred strips.”

“Good.” Cal reached over to Kevin’s shirt
pocket and pushed the button on the remote through the fabric. The door started
to descend. “Let’s make some fireworks!”

The Hawaiian Islands

June 7
^th
, 2026

S
itting in the Blackhawk, Jan watched out the starboard door as the
central islands of Maui, Kaho’olawe, Lana’i and Moloka’i slipped past,
pretending to herself that she was enthralled by the beautiful scenery. Try as
she might, her mind kept coming back to Liam. Had he met someone else? Did he
have a family somewhere? Was she wasting time daydreaming about a renewed
future?

Her self-imposed torment continued for an
hour and a half until the pilot’s voice shook her out of her reverie. Her right
hand automatically reached up to touch the headset as he informed her that they
would be passing Waikiki beach in a couple of minutes on their approach to
Honolulu International. She leaned out the opening as far as her harness would
allow, straining to see the island of O’ahu.

It was the island that she had first landed
on when she’d come to work at the observatory but the visit had been nothing
more than a quick walk through the open-air terminal. Jan and her two
colleagues from the UN had been taken to an access door leading out onto the
tarmac where a civilian charter jet waited to ferry them to Hilo.

Now, as the island rolled by her open
loading door, she spotted something that looked like a very bad idea. She
clicked the intercom. “What is that volcano, the one with the buildings and
parking lots in it?”

“That’s Diamond Head,” the pilot answered.
“It’s a state park and it hasn’t erupted in over a hundred and fifty thousand
years, so you should be ok. The next thing you’ll see will be Waikiki.”

Jan watched the high-rises come into view.
Her hotel was down there in that jumble and she could see that, wherever it
was, it would be a short walk to the beach. After five months at the
observatory, she was finally getting a chance to come back and check out O’ahu.
She smiled to herself. She knew the only thing she was likely to check out was
the beach, and maybe a good book. Her meals would be room service or takeout as
it had been on her visits to Hilo; why spend all that time getting ready just
so you could sit in a restaurant by yourself?

Once on the ground at HIA, a civilian
pattern sedan with military plates took her from the tarmac, passing through a
heavily-guarded gate and dropped her at a small boutique hotel, two blocks from
the beach. After checking in, she changed quickly and followed the sound of the
waves. She found a good spot near the stone wall where palm trees cast a decent
shade and settled in. After a few moments of watching the crowds of sun
worshipers, she pulled out her reader and selected
Les Misérables
by
Victor Hugo.

Jan had been trying to keep her mind on the
saintly behavior of a bishop named Myriel but her thoughts kept drifting back
to Liam. She exited her first choice of novels and opened
The Count of Monte
Cristo
, hoping the faster pace of the second book would hold her attention.
She had just read of the arrival of the
Pharaon
in Marseilles and was
finally becoming interested in the story when she heard a commotion around her.
Looking up, she realized that people were pointing at a Blackhawk that hovered
just beyond the farthest swimmers, no more than ten feet from the surface of
the water.

Having just spent more than an hour in the
same type of aircraft, she had little fascination for the spectacle and was
turning her eyes to the screen when they were drawn back to the hovering
aircraft. A number of dark shapes seemed to drop into the Pacific before the
big Sikorsky clawed its way back into the sky.

“Search and Rescue training,” a man to her
right said diffidently, probably showing off his knowledge to the woman who sat
on his other side.

“Not bad work for a young man.” The woman
on Jan’s left smiled as she looked over. She was an older woman, wearing a
wide-brimmed hat and she gazed back out across the gently rolling ocean.
 “Jumping out of airplanes, swimming, saving lives…” She smiled to
herself. “My Henry was in the Coast Guard and I know he loved it, God rest his
soul, but he would never admit it to me!”

Jan smiled and returned to her book, hoping
her new companion would leave her in peace. She had just reached the reunion of
Edmond and Mercedes when she was interrupted again.

“Ooh my!” the older woman said with obvious
approval. “If I were just forty years younger…”

Jan couldn’t resist curiosity after a
statement like that, so she looked over at her neighbor and followed her gaze
to the man climbing up onto the low stone wall of an artificial tidal pool. He
paused to strap black swim fins and a mask onto a large waterproof bag before
he stood. He slung the bag over a shoulder and followed the low wall around to
the sand of the beach.

“If that’s Search and Rescue,” said the
woman to Jan’s right, “then I’m off to find a nice leaky boat!” The man sitting
with her pretended a sudden intense interest in the surfers, his ears a dark
red.

The man walking up the beach was tall and
lean with a subtle musculature. They weren’t the flamboyant muscles of a
bodybuilder but the hard, purpose-built muscles of a man who made a living in
harsh environments. Jan watched him with surprise. He had always been fit, but
he had never looked like this when they were students.

She felt a thrill of possessive pride as it
became clear that Liam was coming straight towards her - to the surprise of her
neighbors.
How did he find me that quickly?
She smiled at him as he
dropped his gear on the sand and dropped to recline at her feet, one arm
casually draped over the bag. “How did you find me in this crowd?” she asked as
her eyes took in the tracery of old scars on his skin.
We really did choose
different paths.

He flashed a charming grin. “I was headed
for HIA when I spotted you with the binocs.” He looked around the beach before
continuing. “The pilot was heading for Hickam after he got rid of me so he was
more than happy to drop me out there and save a stop.” He grew serious. “I’m
not intruding, am I? It’s just that it’s so bloody cold up there on that
mountain and my mates aren’t nearly so interesting once you’ve heard the same
old war stories for the hundredth time.”

Jan smiled and his grin came back
instantly. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I hear the Surfrider does the best
ribs you’ll ever taste!”

“Famished,” he said as they stood up. He
hefted his bag. “Do you have somewhere I can change first?”

The older lady turned her head to look
towards Diamond Head. Jan had seen the knowing smile that she was politely
concealing.

Antioch, California

June 7
^th
, 2026

K
evin finished dumping the last bag of powdered aluminum into the
cement mixer before walking over to the bench where Callum was working. He
watched in silence for a few moments as Cal test-fit the two hollow half
pyramids of rigid Styrofoam. “We’ll mix in carbon fiber to give added strength
to the concrete, in case the heat causes it to crack.” he explained to his
friend.

“Wouldn’t chicken wire have been cheaper?”
asked Kevin dubiously. “We have some left over from when Gram used to keep a
garden out back.”

Cal shook his head. “No, think about it,
Kev. This has to contain a reaction at five thousand degrees.” He looked over
at his co-conspirator. “Chicken wire can’t stand up to that kind of heat.” He
placed the inner half of the mold and tacked on the closers at the bottom and
sides.  It would produce a crude, semi-pyramidal shape with the top cut
off. When two halves were placed together, it would look exactly like a hollow
pyramid, with the capstone missing.

Callum had to refrain from snapping at
Kevin. It was easy to forget that he didn’t know the whole picture. None of his
cadre would know the full plan until the moment of implementation. That way,
Cal reduced the risk of rumors getting out. He trusted his people as far as he
could, but only a fool laid out a plan like this for all to see.

More importantly, he was aware that few of
his helpers would be likely to stand up under a police interrogation. He knew
that there was a very real risk of some of them being picked up by city police
for any number of infractions. Most of them had serious problems with
government authority and laws in general. That was what made them so easy to
recruit, but it also made them potential liabilities.

Though Kevin knew more than the others, he
still had no idea what the strange shapes were meant for. He shrugged and went
back to the cement mixer, tying a plastic sheet over the mouth before turning
it on.

As the noise filled the small garage,
Callum looked at his mold, wondering if there was a way to mass-produce the
shapes. He would need forty-eight pyramids, which meant ninety-six molds,
unless he could find a way to make five or six re-useable molds. He laughed
suddenly as the answer came to him, waving off Kevin’s inquiring look.

He had been working on construction sites
for years and had never really paid attention to the concrete form workers. He
realized, now that he gave it some thought, that they often employed re-usable
forms. In Callum’s mind, he could already see the forms he would use,
reinforced with two-by-two lumber and held shut with clamps. With some motor
oil as a releasing agent, they would be able to make several each night.

He had almost a month before they would be
needed, so time wouldn’t be a problem.

Over the Pacific

June 19
^th
, 2026

M
ärti was exhausted. He rarely traveled long distances and, when he
did, he invariably remained awake for the entire duration. Now, two hours into
the flight out of Los Angeles and almost twenty hours since leaving Zurich, he
found his mind coming back to the conversation at the Swiss Guard barracks in
the Vatican. The looming presence of aliens in the solar system had been
hanging over Humanity for months now.

What are they doing out there?
 Märti wondered in a purgatorial state of almost-sleep.
Why
settle on a planet with very little atmosphere when they could come straight
here? Maybe God really did send them and he’s giving us time to accept that.
He stared at the LCD screen in front of him, not really seeing the English
language mini-series that he had selected. Between Zurich and Amsterdam, he had
enjoyed the first episode, showing the training of Marines for the fight in the
Pacific during the Second World War.

On the way to Los Angeles, he had watched
the same men in Australia and then in combat against the Japanese but his
coffee was wearing off and his thoughts continued to wander back to his own
struggle. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that young Lukas had
been on to something.

When colonial forces arrived, they tended
to do so with overwhelming technological superiority. The mere fact of arrival
was usually possible because of that technical difference. The European
explorers had landed in North America more than once.
The Norse settled on
Newfoundland five centuries before the birth of Columbus,
 Märti
mused.
Their technological advantage was less pronounced and they were few
in numbers, so the local natives drove them off.

His eyes had been drooping but they flew
wide open, staring heedlessly at scenes of landing craft hitting the beach of
some Pacific island.
What would have happened if the locals had welcomed the
Norse when they were so weak in numbers?
Märti knew he had just put his
finger on what was bothering him.
The, what did the Norse call them –
Skraelings, might have learned the secrets of iron.
He felt the hairs on
his arms standing on end as he worked through the implications.

The knowledge of iron would have
diffused its way to the mainland and spread like wildfire across the entire
continent and down into Central and South America. Larger groups such as the
Iroquois Confederacy, who were already accomplished farmers, would have been
able to dramatically increase their output.
Märti
was wide awake now.
With a surplus of food, they might have had a
Renaissance era of their own. North America was rich in resources. Who could
say what the European explorers might have faced when they arrived after five
centuries of divergent technological development?

Märti felt certain that the continual
raiding and warfare between the tribes would likely have driven technological
development. Bone armor would have given way to metal, clubs to maces and
swords. Gunpowder was not so certain but he knew that bow and arrow technology
would have been refined in its place and all military historians knew that a
good bowman was worth five musketeers in any battle.

The range, accuracy and rate of fire of a
proper war bow was vastly superior to that of any musket. The only reason
muskets became popular in combat was the fact that you could train a man to use
a musket in a few days while it took a lifetime of practice to be an effective
archer.

In his mind’s eye, Märti could see the
famous encounters between Europeans and the Confederacy re-played under the new
scenario. A much larger and more powerful Confederacy may have been surprised
by the belching smoke of cannon and musket, but would have had iron armor to
protect them from some of the small arms fire and would have quickly come to
recognize the superiority of their own bows.

He imagined their warriors, known for
originating the same guerrilla tactics that American revolutionaries had used
to defeat the British, quietly boarding and over-running enemy ships at anchor
or ambushing enemy forces on land. They would have eventually found willing
prisoners who could catch them up on technologies such as guns and sailing
vessels.

The modern countries of the Americas may
never have existed if the Norse had managed to get along better with their new
neighbors,
Märti thought as the small LCD screen
showed a sweeping panorama of the captured beach before pulling back to show
the massive invasion fleet.
What would happen if we were to learn from these
aliens rather than fight them?

Could we be avoiding a weak colonization
force now, only to fall prey to a much more powerful enemy in the near future?
He closed his eyes. “
Did God put me here to stop us from
fighting?”
He didn’t consider himself to be particularly devout, but then,
neither did his brother and he was serving at the Vatican. Having been raised
in a Catholic family, it seemed as much a part of him as the color of his eyes.

He got up and looked at the line for the
first class washroom, seeing two of his fellow officers waiting. Looking to the
back, past the men of his company, he could see a much longer line and so he
shrugged mentally and headed to the front, resisting the urge to pull rank on
the two lieutenants.