“I don’t think I like where this is going,” Maddox said.
Cross nodded. He didn’t like it either, but that didn’t change what he suspected was going to happen. He continued to explain his process. “You noted the changes,” he said. “So did I. But there was something else that was different. This time, the aliens have eighty-six hours to harvest before they have to return to the tenth planet.”
“Five hours longer than last time,” she said softly. “Yes,” he said. “This time, their first attack took only eighteen hours. They waited eighteen hours between the first and second attacks.”
Maddox looked at him, a frown line between her brows.
“If they pick up their nanoharvesters eighteen hours from when they started this second attack, they would have saved almost eighteen hours.”
“Plus those extra five hours,” Maddox said. “Goddamn it. They’re coming back for a third round, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Cross said.
“And these first two times we were lucky. They didn’t go after the cities.”
“That’s right,” Cross said.
“You think they’ll do it this time?”
He shrugged. He’d been asking himself that very question and not getting any real answers. “We’ve hurt them time and time again. They don’t have as many ships as they did. Maybe they need the third round just to get enough food to survive ”
“Or?”
“They’re using weapons on us, General,” Cross said. “We’re not the only ones who believe we’re at war.”
“I hate your hunches,” she said. “But I’m damned glad you get them.”
And then her image winked off.
Cross leaned back in the chair and caught his breath. He had relayed the information. He had done what he could.
But somehow, it didn’t feel like he had done enough.
November 12, 2018
1:24 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Second Harvest: Third Day
Clarissa Maddox had spent the last five hours preparing her planes, her people, and the diplomats for a possible third attack. For the first time in her career, she was happy to have diplomats around her. They got to tell the foreign governments the news she’d been repeating since she got off the phone with Leo Cross.
No one had taken it well.
Not even she had, if truth be told. Those damn aliens were making her extremely angry, and she had to figure out a way to make them pay for what they were doing.
She hadn’t figured it all out yet. But she would. Cross wasn’t the only person who had hunches.
She paced her small office beside the war room. She couldn’t look at the holographic map of Earth at the moment, not with its gray spaces—from the aliens’ April attack—and the black spaces that marked the damage they had done this time. The world looked like a patchwork quilt that someone had stained. And she took each damaged area very personally.
The problem was that Cross had been right. The aliens had left, taking their little nanoharvesters with them, and they had left after eighteen hours, just as he predicted. Which meant that the rest of his scenario was probably right, as well.
She didn’t like it, but she would have to fight it, somehow. She just wasn’t sure how.
No one knew how to get close to those death-ray spaceships the aliens had. And who knew they had those? Not even Leo Cross. He had been as surprised as she had.
Not that she could have done anything about them even if she had known.
Except save hundreds of human lives.
She had just under seventeen hours until those alien bastards came back, seventeen hours to come up with a plan before they damaged even more of the Earth’s surface.
Seventeen hours.
Seemed like she had no time at all.
She couldn’t even figure out where they were going to attack. Cross couldn’t figure it either. Her own people couldn’t tell if the aliens had enough food and supplies now or if this next run was to make up for all the damage that had been done.
She hoped that was what was going to happen, but she wasn’t counting on anything.
Except the nanorescuers. She prayed to every god she could think of and some she probably couldn’t that Portia Groopman’s little invention worked as well
outside
the lab as it did inside. Because chances were at least one population center would get hit this time.
And then Maddox froze. The nanorescuers. They hooked into the alien harvesters. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a way to use that against the aliens.
She hit the space on her screen that got her a direct link with Leo Cross.
November 12, 2018
2:54 p.m. Central Standard Time
Second Harvest: Third Day
The house still didn’t feel like her home. The furniture was rearranged, and there were gaping holes where other people’s furniture had been. The hardwood floors were filthy, and the remotes were stained with soda and grease.
Kara’s room still smelled like cheap perfume, even though her cousins were gone. And the back bedroom—the one that her mother was going to make into an office one day—reeked of dog pee. Apparently no one had let the puppies out for the last two days because they were afraid the dogs would die in the aliens’ attack.
But the aliens had come and gone, and it was over. It was really and truly over.
All that was left, as her mother had said, was the cleanup.
And the repairs. Kara was supposed to be going through the house to see what was missing, what needed rearranging, and what needed their immediate attention. The dog pee certainly did, although she had no idea how to fix that. The basement was a mess, too. It had been trashed by the Nelsons, who apparently weren’t as nice as they had seemed.
Only Barb was left. Barb and the Hendricksons, who didn’t want to start the drive back home until the following day. Kara wished they would leave. She really couldn’t face Connor again. Even if her mother said he—as a teenage boy—would be able to eat all the food she had cooked.
The kitchen looked like the holiday season was already upon them. Her mother had sent off their friends, relatives, and live-ins with a lot of baked goods and loaves of bread. So that they had something to eat when they got home, she had said, as if she had planned all of this.
Maybe she had, but Kara had never known her mother to be that optimistic.
She went into the new wing of the house, the one her father had added when he got promoted to senior partner at his law firm. Her grandparents had stayed here. Her parents called this wing the guest apartment, and it was sort of that, with its own little sitting room, the nice bedroom, and the really big bathroom.
They had converted the walk-in closet into another bedroom for Barb, and they had used the storage room as a place for her father’s friends to sleep. Someone had left a radio on in that room, and the futon the kids had been sleeping on had disappeared with them.
This room smelled like pee, too, and Kara suspected it wasn’t dog pee.
She shivered just a little and was about to leave when something about the radio announcer’s voice caught her attention.
...
repeat: the alien attacks have not ended. Stay in the cities. No one has issued an all clear yet. Stay where you are.
Then the announcer’s voice lowered as he continued.
We have received reports that the roads leading out of Chicago are clogged. Traffic is at a standstill on 90, 94, 290, 294
...
He was giving the interstate names because most people were unfamiliar with the road systems here. Her father had explained that to Kara last month, when all the people poured in.
She felt a shiver run down her spine.
It wasn’t over yet. This announcement was for real.
She ran through the sitting area and out the main door of the wing. The yard was empty. Plastic cups blew across it in the winter breeze. There were flat spots on the grass where the tents used to be.
All those people. People who had stayed with her. People she had gotten to know. They could die. Because they had left early.
She put her hands to her face. She would even miss those silly dogs.
If only she had heard this announcement earlier. If only they hadn’t been so eager to return home.
If only.
She would have to tell her parents and warn the Hendricksons. And then they should try to reach her cousins and grandparents on their personal links, see if they could find a way back to the house. She wondered if anyone knew how to reach the Nelsons. She doubted it.
A buzzing above her made her look up, her heart in her throat. For a moment, she had been afraid the aliens were above her, but it wasn’t them.
It was a small plane flying overhead, gray dust pouring out of it, the gray dust drifting and disappearing into the air.
November 12, 2018
4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Second Harvest: Third Day
Leo Cross had never dialed so many numbers and talked with so many people simultaneously. His office felt hot and crowded, even though he was the only person in it. All the screens were on, most of them blank now, and his desk unit hummed.
Adrenaline had kept him moving for the last two hours. Adrenaline and concern that the aliens had one more trick up their many tentacled sleeves.
If they even wore sleeves.
He had spoken to every nanotechnology expert he could find. The only one who had been able to help him was, of course, Portia Groopman. She’d immediately seen the problem and searched for the solution. The others wanted to check and cross-check.
All Portia wanted was a chance to spend the night at Britt’s apartment with her cats. Portia had been doing that a lot lately. Cross had a sense the girl was very lonely.
He hoped he would have a chance to help her meet some people her age, and find an apartment, and do all the things she had never had an opportunity to do.
But he wouldn’t get that chance unless he succeeded now.
And he thought he could. He had the general’s answer. He just had to let her know.
He pressed the screen in front of him, and turned away from the pop-up vid unit, not wanting to see the process as the phone described its every act. A holdover from the first computerized phones that Cross hadn’t realized was so annoying, not until he saw it on the large screen.
The same man answered, and before Cross could say a word, the man put him on hold.
This time Cross glanced at the screen. It read “transferring ...” He grinned. Apparently he had even more credibility with Maddox’s staff now.
In less than a minute, Maddox appeared on the vid screen. This time she wasn’t flattened or distorted. She was talking to him from an office. The walls behind her were black and he recognized the material. It was the same material that had been in the conference room where the final Tenth Planet Project meeting had been held.
“I have an answer for you,” he said.
“Excellent.” She leaned forward, waiting.
“Before I give it, I want to make sure—”
“Cross, we need it quickly.”
“General,” he said, “If we weren’t communicating before, I’ll be giving you the wrong information. Let me tell you what I thought you suggested so that we have no confusion.”
“You should have checked that before,” she said. “I’ve been playing telephone with the most esoteric minds in the world. I want to make sure this stuff didn’t get scrambled along the way.”
“All right,” she said. “Fire.”
He nodded and said, “After the aliens drop their next harvesters, you want to roll projectile cannons into the areas. When the alien ships return for the harvesters and have their underbellies open, you want to fire into the ships.”
“That’s right,” the general said. “Similar to how we attacked them with our planes in April, only these are a type of rail gun.”
“Catapults,” Cross said, holding his breath. That had been the term he had used with the nanotechnologists. “In a word,” the general said.
Cross had understood the problem completely. They couldn’t fly planes near the ships, but if they could get under them, they could fire the same altitude-detonating bombs that the planes had dropped. It would be one last parting shot.
When the general had first called him, she had asked for ways of protecting weapons among the harvesters. Cross had had to pry all of this other information out of her.
Now he was glad he had.
He had asked his advisers how to protect the catapults—the rail guns. And they had answered him. Portia in more detail than the others.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s your answer. The nanorescuers would protect the rail guns if a number of things were done. First, the guns need metal wheels. Second, spray the rescuers onto every nook and cranny of the rail guns, and continue spraying as the machines are moved through the alien harvesters.”
“Got it,” Maddox said. Then she grinned. “You want me to repeat your instructions?”
“Only if you didn’t understand them.”
“Oh, I understand them,” she said. “And they’re actually something we can do. Thanks.”
She cut the connection. He had no doubt she would spend the next fourteen hours staging rail guns and tanks of nanorescuers around the world, ready to move instantly if alien ships picked an area close. After the aliens picked their locations, she would have less than eighteen hours to move the guns into positions inside the attack areas.