He hated waiting. But, he knew, it would be over soon.
November 10, 2018
4:19 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Second Harvest: First Day
The aliens were in Earth’s orbit and General Maddox no longer had time to read reports. So, even though more information kept pouring through Cross’s links, he had left his office. He was in Britt’s lab, sitting on a desk toward the back, trying to stay out of the way.
It was impossible to tell it was the middle of the night. The entire staff was there, working intently. Britt, her hair sticking up in spikes, was bent over a screen, discussing the telemetry with one of her assistants.
Cross managed a lot of information, both in his own career and for the Tenth Planet Project, but he had no idea how Britt did it. In this massive room, on hundreds of screens, not to mention the large wall screen at the base of the room, the scientists monitored the telemetry and images from a dozen different sources. And that didn’t count the space telescopes, which were sending their own information back to this lab.
From his vantage, Cross could see the video from two cameras that were tracking the missiles headed out of Earth’s orbit. The entire room had stopped working to watch the launch. The air had been tense with excitement and nerves. Once the missiles launched, however, everything went back to normal—heads bent over desks, conversations ceasing, the hum of machines and the occasional beep from a screen the only sounds in the room.
Sometimes someone would make a verbal report, but the amount of response it got made it sound as if that person had been talking to himself.
Cross also knew that a dozen orbiting satellites were tracking the alien ships as they swung into a wide orbit around Earth. The ships were using gravity to slow themselves down. Cross had watched the alien ships on one of the scopes for a little while, then realized that just seeing them increased the knot in his stomach, so he stopped.
Not that he could do anything anyway. He was just watching, as were most of the people in the lab. The Army had dozens of satellites of their own, as did other countries, but still Britt and her people were forwarding all their images to twenty different headquarters around the world, as well as to General Maddox’s headquarters.
Ever since the missiles flared away from Earth, the view Cross studied came from a camera attached to the International Space Station. General Gail Banks, a hard-as-nails military type, had captured his attention during his brief meeting with her months ago. He had been impressed with her then, and that feeling had grown the more he learned about her.
When he realized she had taken on a suicide mission to save the Earth, he had found his attention focused on her more and more. In some ways, he felt responsible for her. If he hadn’t discovered the tenth planet before it arrived, she wouldn’t be there now.
Of course, if he hadn’t found it then, the Earth wouldn’t be able to defend itself. He knew that. Understanding didn’t stop his interest in the general.
At the moment, the ISS camera was trained on the shuttle, the
Endeavor II.
Small thruster jets were shoving the shuttle away from the station, seemingly far, far too slowly.
“Five minutes and eight seconds until the alien ships are at the station in their current orbit. They’ll come up on it fast!”
Cross glanced over. Odette Roosevelt, one of Britt’s assistants, was apparently monitoring the shuttle as well. She was the one who had spoken.
Other scientists surreptitiously glanced at the live video coming to them from the ISS.
“They’re coming damn fast,” a scientist down front said.
Everyone was interested in Banks. Cross hadn’t realized it. Maybe they were all afraid that Banks and her crew would be the first casualties in this new battle.
He gripped the edge of the desk, watching the thrusters continue to ignite. He had no idea what the aliens would do when they reached the ISS. If the shuttle was still there, would they know it was a ship?
He hoped not.
Britt came up to him and leaned against the desk beside him. He felt the heat from her body. She glanced at him, looking tired and worried at the same time.
The aliens had a number of options when they reached the station. Cross just wasn’t sure which one they’d choose. He didn’t know if they would drain the power from the station or if they would attempt to destroy it.
And the shuttle, well, draining the power from the shuttle would destroy it as completely as blowing it up. The shuttle’s orbit would decay and it would fall into the atmosphere, burning up on reentry.
“They’ve got to make it,” Odette Roosevelt said.
Cross felt that way, too. It was as if whatever happened to the shuttle crew would set the tone for what happened on Earth. He knew that was silly and superstitious. He knew he would fight to save the Earth no matter what happened to Gail Banks.
But he wanted this one to be clean.
He wanted everyone to survive.
Britt took his hand.
He glanced at her. Her smile was sad.
They both knew that winning the war without casualties was going to be impossible.
And more than likely, General Gail Banks was going to be the first of millions.
November 10, 2018
9:23 Universal Time
Second Harvest: First Day
General Gail Banks had replaced the pilot at the controls of the
Endeavor II.
She was the best pilot she knew; she couldn’t bear to let anyone else handle the controls—not on such a delicate mission.
She sat in the pilot’s seat beside Sofia Razi, her copilot. The
Endeavor II'
s pilot, Captain Michael Thorne, was good. He had volunteered for this mission, but he didn’t have as many hours beneath him piloting a shuttle as Razi or Banks had.
He sat behind Banks at her request, careful to keep an eye on her work, but she had instructed him not to say anything until they were away from the ISS. She was going to break every rule of piloting as she got the shuttle away from the station—and if her piloting caused them to fail, well, then so be it.
At least she had tried.
Through the triple-edged plastic of the pilot’s windows she could see the ISS before her. She had fallen in love with that crazy jigsaw of a place. She would miss it—or, at least, she hoped she would miss it.
Right now, she was just trying to escape from it.
The lights from the overhead controls were reflecting on her board. She had always noticed that inside the docking clamps at the ISS, light reflected oddly off the white station’s sides. Now the lights were distracting her, warning a part of her brain that she wasn’t following protocol.
She didn’t have time for protocol. She gave Razi several terse commands, and Razi’s nimble hands manipulated the thrusters. Banks handled the controls. She swung the nose of the shuttle away from the ISS. The steering thrusters gave her power, but not as much as she wanted.
These shuttles were not built for speed. They never had been. They were designed for cautious missions, created in the days when going to space was an expensive rarity.
What she wished for right now was a machine with the speed and finesse of a fighter plane.
Not that that would have been practical. Not in space. In space hurrying usually meant accidents and death.
Now, not hurrying meant death.
But the shuttle’s nose steering thrusters just weren’t powerful enough to do anything but nudge the shuttle’s large mass slowly sideways.
“One minute, thirty seconds,” Ground Control said.
Razi snorted through her nose. She had wanted to shut off the tinny male voice of Ground Control, which was counting down the minutes until the aliens would be flashing into the range of the ISS.
Banks wanted GC’s help. She needed it. She wanted to be in touch with a voice from the ground—and she wanted to
hear
how close the enemy was.
She knew they were too close.
The aliens were coming up so fast that there would be no visual sighting until the last few seconds. If the aliens acted true to form, they would suck the active energy out of the station and the shuttle. If she didn’t get the shuttle away from the station and into the correct position to hit the atmosphere by the time they did that, the shuttle would bum up on reentry.
So far, the aliens had been predictable. She hoped they would continue to be so. Otherwise, they’d probably blow the shuttle to pieces—and Banks could do nothing about it. No one had ever expected an attack from space, and, therefore, the shuttle had no weapons.
What she wouldn’t give for a weapon or two.
She made herself glance at the instrument panel and check the readings. Normal. So far so good, considering how hard she was pushing this giant hunk of a ship.
“One minute, fifteen seconds.” The voice from GC sounded very far away. Banks wanted to reach out and hang onto it, as if the voice alone could pull her down to Earth.
She looked at her instrument panel again, then at the white walls of the ISS moving as the shuttle eased away from it. What no one else on the shuttle knew was that the station had been rigged with atomic warheads, ready to blow when an alien ship got within range. It looked as if the explosion would happen in about one minute. That explosion would also destroy the shuttle if it was too close.
She had known this was a suicide mission, but dammit! she wasn’t ready to die.
Not yet.
The nose of the shuttle eased to the left so that it pointed beside the station and out over the curve of the Earth. The station was now out of direct line.
Barely, but enough.
“Starting main thrusters,” she said, her fingers running through the sequence faster than she had ever done it before. She had barely enough room to do this—according to protocol,
Endeavor II
was still too close to the station.
The force shoved her back into her seat as the thrusters kicked on.
“Forty-five seconds,” GC said, not commenting on her action.
She got the nose of the shuttle aimed at the horizon of the Earth. She could see the lights of the East Coast in darkness ahead of them.
“Still too high,” Razi said.
“Thirty seconds.” GC spoke as if the very words could make the shuttle move faster.
The thrust kept her shoved into her seat. Moving her fingers was difficult, but at least the motion felt familiar. Banks eased the nose of the shuttle down a little more toward the planet below.
“One kilometer from the station and accelerating,” Razi said.
“Fifteen seconds.” GC sounded like a damn computer. Was he as hyped up as she was? Or was he concentrating on the alien ships only, so that he wouldn’t have to know if the shuttle failed to get far enough away.
“Two kilometers,” Razi said. Her voice was flat, too.
Banks’s heart was pounding. It seemed as if everyone on the shuttle—her entire crew—could hear it.
“Three,” Razi said. This time, Banks heard a thread of hope.
She felt that same thread of hope. The farther they got away, the better.
“Four.”
They were almost outside the immediate blast radius. Banks did a quick glance at everything. They were in the best position she could have hoped for under the circumstances.
“Shutting down thrusters,” she said, as her fingers cut the interior back to weightlessness. Her body jumped against her safety harness. “No point in giving the aliens a flare to go by.”
As she said that a large number of black dots seemed to form off to their right and above their orbit.
“Shut your eyes and put your hands over them!” Banks shouted to all the passengers. “Now! Everyone, that’s an order. Atomic explosion!”
Then, seemingly instantly, their ship went black. Every instrument, every light shut down. The aliens had sucked the energy from the shuttle.
She had expected that, but it startled her nonetheless.
She ducked her head and covered her eyes, pressing her face into the soft fabric of her clothing. She hadn’t had time to put on a space suit, and suddenly she regretted it.
An instant later the International Space Station exploded in a blinding white light that Gail could see even with her eyes shut and pressed into her arm. It was as if someone had shined a bright, white light into the inside of her head.
“Clear,” she shouted, opening her eyes and trying to get them to adjust quickly.
Around her the shuttle’s systems were completely dead.
There was no sign of the alien ships. It was as if nothing had even happened. Unlike on Earth, an explosion in space has no sound or shock wave.
And best of all, the shuttle hadn’t gotten smashed by any debris—and it would have by now.
She let out a small sigh of relief. They had survived the explosion of the station.
She just hoped the alien ships hadn’t been so lucky.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to think. She had managed to get the shuttle into a reentry position, but she had no idea when reentry would happen.