Barrett took a deep breath, and decided to give it to the young man as straight as possible: “The chances are that we won’t be able to save everyone. And I’ll be frank, even if we actually manage to launch a trillion dollars of our country’s military hardware into space and our attack is successful, then our own government will probably be more willing to go after us than they are John Hunt’s seven deadly friends.
“But for what it is worth, don’t forget that one of those plane-lifting bad-asses is on our side,” he smiled and the captain laughed momentarily, meeting the colonel’s eyes and nodding, “and Jack, our friend Lieutenant Hunt has something they don’t; he knows who they are, but they don’t have any idea who he really is. As long as that is true, and as long as our efforts stay secret, we have a chance. I believe that. Really I do.”
Speech made, his tone changed back from patrician to officer. He lowered his arm and he said to the young man, “In the end, we have a mission, Captain Toranssen, and though difficult, our objective is clear. Are you with us?”
The captain saw the question in the colonel’s eyes and filled with determination. The call to arms seared through his veins. This was not just a mission; it was the most important thing any of them would ever be part of. As the captain filled with determination, the colonel saw in the young man’s taught frame and set face that he would, indeed, give his last drop of blood to stop the coming storm.
With all the gravity Jack could deliver, he met his mentor’s stare and said with the very meat of his soul, “Please do not mistake my reticence about our odds as reticence about the necessity of our mission, sir. I am absolutely with you, to the end. Believe it, sir. Do not doubt that for a second. The odds may be against us but so be it. Me whining about it won’t improve things one iota. I am here, and I will fight these bastards to the end.”
They looked at each other a moment then both turned to look back out at the evening sky. Jack smiled a bit and then decided to add a little addendum to his last sentence, “… preferably theirs.”
Barrett laughed a little and then shook his head. Good man, he thought, and nodded. Yes, the kind of man you wanted in a situation like this. Barrett took a deep breath. It was surprising how therapeutic it was to talk about it all, even if all they did was come to the same grim conclusion.
He wasn’t sure which cliché applied more: ‘a problem shared’ or ‘misery loves company,’ but either way he did feel less despondent than he usually did these days. He thought about his team. They didn’t have much, but what they had was good. In the end they were probably all royally screwed, but with a bit of luck they would at least make the bastards hurt before it all ended.
Emotional moment over, he coughed a little and they both decided it was time to move on, “Now then, Captain, why don’t we see what Martin and his new team are up to?”
Jack nodded, opening the door, “Very good, sir.”
* * *
“What we have here, Colonel,” said Martin Sobleski inside the lab hangar, “is a deuterium fluoride laser, which I have to say is pretty damn cool. It goes some way to duplicating the type of missile defense system that we think the Chinese are developing.”
Neither the colonel nor the captain nor Dr. Sobleski made eye contact with each other as the doctor cursorily mentioned their cover story for the project. In truth, the colonel did not really need a cover story at this stage. Being one of the primary military research facilities in the world, Hanscom Air Field had several lasers on site that they could use to run their tests and more than enough expertise in that field to fill a conference room.
But if Dr. Sobleski was going to consult with all the field experts he wanted to, he needed a classified project code to work with in order to secure the scientists’ silence. It was either have a code or tell yet more people the real reason for their research, which they had decided to avoid unless absolutely necessary.
In truth, the project code the colonel was using referred to an upgraded GPS-based missile guidance system he was supposed to be testing. But the various civilian scientists Dr. Sobleski was consulting with didn’t know that. They just knew that any disclosures they made about their work here would be covered by the same threat of a lifetime behind bars that came with all highly classified work. Assuming none of them were spies, this should stop them from chatting about what went on in the lab to anyone, even other base personnel.
At some point, no doubt, the team was going to have to actually work on the GPS project whose budget the colonel was burning, but the senior officer would string it out for as long as possible.
“So,” continued Martin excitedly, “my colleagues here have set us up with a pretty potent device.” The laser the man was poring over looked like a medium-sized spotlight, about fifty centimeters across and a meter deep.
It was mounted on a motorized rotating frame designed to point the big device at airborne targets. This was because the lethal device was in fact a beta test of a now obsolete missile defense system. At the request of Martin and the colonel, it had been revived for this test, though, and it was now pointing across the room at a series of sheets of metal mounted on a twenty-inch-thick concrete block.
“OK, gentlemen, it’s time we started our control test. Colonel, those sheets represent a rough approximation of the military grade steel that a missile defense laser would have to penetrate or buckle to render one of our munitions inoperable. Now, we know that as of now, our missiles carry enough shielding to protect them from low-level laser attack. But apparently the Chinese are looking into ways of increasing the power/heat output of their systems and our job is to make sure our missiles stay one step ahead of them.”
“Sounds good, Doctor. So what are your initial thoughts about how to increase the shielding’s resistance?” asked the colonel, playing along with Martin’s charade. He knew that they really only needed the laser so that they could design and then test the mounting of the new armor plating they would need. They already knew the primary method they would use for buffering the missiles against the satellites’ scything laser. All they really needed to do was design the shape of the plates they would need and then supply that to Madeline. The real benefit would come when she then used the resonance manipulator to morph a wide array of raw materials into the plates with the same properties as the superconducting alloys the alien satellites were coated in. The task would then fall back on the team to take these plates and get them installed on enough of the GBMD missiles to make them able to penetrate the satellites’ defenses.
Either way, though, they needed a control so they could track the way the missile components that were behind the shielding plates would react to the onslaught. Today they would conduct that control test.
Martin continued his explanation, “Well, Colonel, for now, we have the standard missile shielding attached to that block. We are going to introduce various reflective and heat resistant materials to it and test their effectiveness, but first we need a point of comparison.” The doctor smiled like a kid. “In other words, Colonel, we need to measure, very accurately, how long it takes this deuterium fluoride laser to utterly destroy these armor plates here.”
With that, he walked around the back of a big a protective glass shield, highly polarized and armored to protect them from the coming test. As they all put on darkened goggles, the scientists began to initiate the laser. It warmed up slowly, taking about thirty seconds to come to life and warm the long, thin gas tube that would stimulate the light emission, the very thing that made a laser a laser.
At a beep, the machine innocently notified the team that it was ready, like an oven saying it had reached the selected temperature. Flicking a switch, the machine thrummed to life, then suddenly a tight green beam bisected the room. The beam lanced into the metal on the concrete block. For about two seconds it stayed still, seemingly pinned by the light, then it buckled sharply with an audible twang. After that nothing happened for about ten more seconds, and then there was another, louder snap like an axe hitting the side of a ship. They felt it through their feet, and a moment later the concrete block behind the plating started to smoke.
The laser was deactivated, its cooling fans whirring, and with a confirming wave from Martin, various scientists began to emerge from behind the shield to check the powerful device. The colonel followed Martin over to the test block and they examined the damage. The smoke had been the concrete burning once the layered shielding had been completely penetrated.
“Dr. Sobleski,” said the colonel in a whisper, “how does this laser compare to the specifications that John gave us for the satellites’ defenses?”
Martin looked at the general and frowned a moment. Then he replied, also in a whisper, but one that belied the gravity of his response, “The best way I can think of to describe it would be to tell you that this deuterium fluoride laser compares to the power we face above us in roughly the same way a CD player’s laser compares to our deuterium friend here.”
The colonel stared at him.
“If you want an equally scary comparison,” said Martin, as excited as he was disturbed by his own words, “according to John Hunt, each of our Agent friends have a laser almost as powerful as this deuterium beast built into their left eyes. More than amazing even than the size factor, the implications that statement has for the kind of power sources they must have inside them are phenomenal.”
The scientist’s eyes widened at his own statement as he thought about the Agent’s technological prowess, and then he got back to examining the burn marks on the plating and the scale of the buckling. With the detachment of a scientist, he was able to find the whole concept of the invasion fascinating. That was his objective point of view. But when he lay in bed at night and thought about his one-year-old nephew, or his widowed mother, about them being slaughtered by the alien army that even now hurtled toward Earth, Martin Sobleski shivered with the same fear and anger that haunted the rest of the team.
As always, New York was busy and vibrant. The city was one of the busiest places in America, on Earth even, and Times Square was one of the busiest places in the city. In the weeks since his arrival, Agent Shahim Al Khazar had taken to walking through the bustling crowds in this mecca of commercialism. Having spent his first months on Earth mired in one of its most unforgiving and brutal regions, this was a stark comparison. His original mission had been clear: infiltrate the ranks of the insurgent army that occupied the mountains that covered northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now that mission had taken a sharp detour, but the end goal remained clear. Shahim needed to move this mission forward, balancing carefully a need to expedite his return to the Kush mountains without being too successful and accelerating destabilization before the rest of the team, and the Armada, were ready to sweep in.
So his missions now refocused on the United States, and the range of potential targets his brief had laid out for him.
One of his proposed missions was to build and deploy a dirty bomb in New York. Both he and the Council had been appalled at the thought of deliberately releasing a radioactive device in any place, not for ethical reasons, but environmental ones. But Shahim’s superiors in Al Qaeda had insisted that it remain on the list of options.
A Pakistani businessman visited him each week. He was a genuine businessman, with genuine interests in New York and very real financial interests and holdings. But everything about the man was, in fact, a cover. Despite the man’s own high ideals about his role in Al Qaeda, and his limited understanding of the true ramifications of the agenda his associates were pursuing, he was really no more than a donkey, ferrying information and money to Shahim for the length of his stay in the US.
His choice of targets was simple and unimaginative, and in truth, he suspected that his superiors were really shopping for another miracle. They were still unclear on how he had managed to successfully complete his mission in Islamabad, and they were trying to see if the man was just lucky.
With various attacks on New York’s financial and commercial centers on the terrorists’ Christmas list, he had found that he had cause to spend lots of time walking around the city, which his tortured machine-bound personality found surprisingly relaxing.
The curse of a machine memory was the ability to recall, at any time, in perfect color, even the most painful of events. And he had found himself reliving the death of the prime minister’s sobbing family many times over the months since it had happened.
He was not sleeping. True, he did not need to, his machine brain did not need to rest or recuperate. But the effect on his psyche of being awake for weeks at a time was disorienting. He noted the passage of time not in days but in the weeks between visits from the businessman that was his only ‘friend.’
A week ago a stranger had called him a ‘rag-head’ when he was getting off the subway at his stop in Queens.
In a microsecond his arm had flashed out with all his might, flaring toward the man’s face. At the last moment he had relented, withdrawing the bulk of his might from the blow and stopping it from crushing the man’s face into the back of his skull. The softened punch still connected though, snapping the man’s nose and sending him reeling backward into a wall.
He had stepped up to him and pinned him to the wall with a single vice-like hand and whispered, “If you ever say that to one of my brethren again, I will find you, and I will rip your very soul from your stinking guts. Then I will find everyone you know, everyone you love, and they will all die slowly at my hands. Do you understand me, you disgusting piece of shit?”
The man had nodded frantically, tears streaming down his face. As soon as his neck had been released, he had fled. It had been a phenomenally foolish thing to do, and Shahim had erased the twenty seconds from his reports to the hub satellites, stopping it from being transmitted to his colleagues.