War Angel: part thirteen

The waiting was beginning to get to Morrison. Earth had surrendered. The EAD had been ordered to stand down. Lives had most certainly been lost, both in space and on the ground. One of his own crew of students had tried to murder another, nearly succeeding in strangling the life out of him. And none of his crew was forthcoming about why the incident might have occurred.

Albert Morrison knew that Drake was trouble before he ever came onboard. The boy was connected, and that made him difficult to discipline on campus matters. His father had the ear of the administration office, which meant his poor behavior was overlooked far too often. Yet when Ben was assigned to the War Angel, Morrison had been pleasantly surprised to discover that he wasn’t a complete incompetent. He had a solid grasp of comm. technologies, and could at least make himself useful.

Sounder, a call sign that had grown on Morrison, had the makings of a decent EAD soldier.

Yet it was now clear that the rest of his young crew did not feel the same.

The sound of footsteps stirred Morrison from his reverie, and he swiveled his chair around to see Wilma walking onto the bridge. “Mr. Drake will survive, Captain, though he won’t be happy about it for a while.”

“How bad?”

She pulled out a biorecorder and examined Drake’s medical chart. “Cracked windpipe, but not broken. His voice will be iffy for a while, and his breathing will be painful. With proper equipment I could fix that and he’d be healed in a day. In our situation… call it two weeks.” Morrison grimaced. “Large bruises on the neck and throat, extending down into his chest area. I used the basic cellular stimulator we have onboard, and those should clear up in a day. Jaw has a hairline fracture, normally something I could fix and have healed within a day or two, but again in our current situation…”

He interrupted. “Bottom line?”

“Even with the cellular stimulator, it’ll be a few days before he can eat solid food.”

“He awake yet?”

She shook her head. “No. I put him under. Best thing to help the stimulator start working effectively.”

“I guess we should be thankful for sedatives, doctor.” He stopped. “Wait. Do we even have a large enough supply of sedatives for this sort of thing? Do we have large enough supplies of any sort of medicine? Holy hell.”

“Our supplies of medicines aren’t good, I can’t lie about that, Captain. We didn’t bring much as it was, thinking this was going to be a short trip and thinking we could get home reasonably quick if we needed to.” She set down the biorecorder. “The one thing we have going for us is the food supply. Sort of.”

“Explain, please.”

Wilma coughed into her hand. “We brought onboard some standard foodstuffs, enough for a couple of weeks. But we also have the hydroponic garden where Ms. Stinson did her preliminary work. Dozens of herbs and plants, stuff where we could conceivably begin growing food and soon. And as an added bonus, part of my background is in botanical chemistry.”

“Meaning?”

“I can make medicine,” she beamed. “In fact, I used a botanical sedative on both of our ‘patients’. I was bored a couple of days ago and used some sage to whip up a thujone-based sedative. Used to do it in college and sell it to students that had trouble sleeping. ‘Herbal cures’ always rakes in the bucks.”

Morrison allowed himself to laugh. “There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, doctor. I like it.”

“Mind you, I got caught and busted, but the EAD got wind of it and offered me a job after I graduated. Better than spending time behind bars, right?

The older officer nodded grimly. “I guess so. Keen perspective, doctor. Keen perspective.” He paused to take a breath. “Now: do you want to tell me what’s really going on between our student charges, and why this particular incident happened?”

Wilma straightened her posture and adjusted her uniform. “I wouldn’t know, Captain.”

Exasperated, he snapped at his fellow officer. “Is everyone on this boat going to spend the rest of their days lying to me?”

“It’s entirely possible, Captain.”

He gave her a flippant wave and spun back around in his chair. “Dismissed, doctor.”

Nothing in an officer’s training prepared a man for what Morrison knew he was facing. There no section in the manual for being exiled in the outer reaches of the solar system. No protocol for how to react to a planetary surrender. Should he prepare to fight? With only students? Should they run? Would it be cowardice?

One thing for certain: he could not admit to them that he had no idea what to do. He had to be strong, show leadership. These kids were relying on him to lead them.

Morrison felt a sudden surge of energy. This was the opportunity he had been denied for his entire career, and he would prove himself. Once and for all, he would prove himself. Filled with confidence, he surged out of his chair and stormed off of the bridge. “Time to go inspire my troops.”

As he exited, the EAD hyperfrequency channel hummed to life and began beeping an alert. Someone out there wanted to talk to the War Angel, but they were going to have to leave a message.

War Angel: part twelve

In the medlab, Wilma Gray slipped an oxygen mask over Ben Drake’s face and began taking inventory of his condition. He was breathing, albeit slowly, but from initial assessment it didn’t appear as though Kate had cracked his windpipe. It would be bruised from the constriction for a while, of that she was certain. All things being equal, though, she thought he was lucky.

“A boy just nearly died of strangulation, and I’m calling him lucky?” she suddenly thought. “I guess in the scheme of things,” she paused, realizing that what she was thinking would have been considered absurd no more than an hour ago, “half dead and free beats alive and under the heels of an oppressor.”

Gray went back to work on Ben, checking his blood pressure, heart rate, and lung sound. His pupils were sluggish and only somewhat responsive, and for a moment she lamented her lack of proper equipment. She needed a proper neuroscanner, one that could penetrate Drake’s brain to examine individual blood vessels. “I need one like the one I have back at home, dammit,” she spoke aloud.

Then the thought came crashing at her again, the one she had been holding back and trying not to voice for fear it would overwhelm her.

“There is no more home to go back to.”

Swallowing her anguish, she picked up another diagnostic tool and went back to work on making sure Drake survived.

Sarah and Gina deposited the limp, unconscious body of Kate onto her bed. The two stared at Kate for a moment, wondering what precisely to say about Stinson’s attempt to murder Ben. Coming up empty, Sarah reached down and moved the covers around the young woman’s body so that she was under them.

“I don’t want her to wake up and be cold,” Sarah said.

Gina tilted her head at Sarah. “She’ll probably be locked in here for a while. Seems like a decent comfort.”

“I’m not even sure this bucket even has a brig. Back then, unless you were a raving psychopath, no one was worried about locking up a fellow Earther. And prisoners were not taken. Not by ships like this, at least.”

“Who knows, Sarah? Maybe we’re living under those rules again right now. And whatever Kate is, she isn’t a psychopath.” Gina shrugged her shoulders. “At least she isn’t by my definition.”

Sarah turned slowly and headed towards the door. Gina followed a few steps behind, checking over her shoulder to make sure that Kate was still passed out. Outside, Sarah activated the comm. and hailed the bridge. “Captain? F.A. is safely in her quarters.”

The comm. crackled to life in response. “Acknowledged. Sealing her quarters now.”

Hearing the electromagnetic seals clank into place, Sarah and Gina began a slow walk towards the dining mess.

“I never ate,” Gina said.

“Starving, too.”

Gina’s face contorted for a moment, as though she was feeling great pain. “Ah, shit. Dammit dammit dammit dammit,” she said, burying her face in her hands and stopping in the middle of the corridor.

“What’s on your mind, Hime?”

Sarah noticed a tear rolling gently down Gina’s cheek. “I know I shouldn’t feel this way, I know I shouldn’t. I mean, shit, I discovered evidence of an alien invasion right under my feet, I rang the alarm for Armageddon way too late and the world, our world is basically gone.”

Putting her arm around Gina, Sarah pulled her close. “And there isn’t a single bit of that which isn’t absolutely horrific. You have every right to feel the way you feel.”

Gina’s head popped up, and she stared coldly forward. “Oh, it isn’t that at all, Sarah. I can’t even come close to comprehending that stuff right now, and if I did, I think I’d start screaming and maybe never be able to stop.”

“Then what’s bugging you?”

“I feel,” she swallowed, “a raging sense of jealousy. What Kate did… the end of the world came, and she acted and did something that was important to her and that meant something to her. I wish I had her courage.”

Sarah took Gina’s hands in hers and locked eyes with the distraught girl. “Believe me, I understand. We’ve all three wanted to do what Kate did to Ben. God knows, if I had the balls, I’d have made sure he had an airlock accident a long time ago.”

“So when push comes to shove with Captain Morrison?”

“We have Kate’s back,” Sarah answered. “All the way. The old rules? They just don’t apply anymore.”

“The old rules don’t apply anymore,” Richard explained to Jack. “There have always been strict regulations about scanning, whether it’s the frequencies you use, or in using non-EAD objects for amplifying your signal. It was always about avoiding disrupting communications, both civilian and military, and about territorial rights.”

“So in other words, who gives a damn anymore?”

“Precisely.” Richard removed the front panel from the ship’s main comm. controls. “Gotta figure that terrestrial satellites are either downed or at least jammed. No media broadcasts except for what the Omegans are sending out.”

“In both prior invasions, they hijacked the planetary emergency broadcast system.”

Park nodded eagerly. “Which is the most powerful radio signal Earth produces, even more so than the EAD’s hyperfrequencies. Those are more directional in nature anyway. But radio…”

“The universe itself produces radio waves naturally.” Jack began to understand where his shipmate was coming from. “So radio is really sort of innocuous. It’s God’s background noise.”

The engineer was pleased to see that he had gotten his idea across. “So if we piggyback our scanning onto the planetary emergency broadcast frequency, the Omegans will pay no attention to it. It’s just part of the background noise of the universe bouncing back at them.”

Jack applauded. “I like it. What kind of help do you need from me?”

Richard shrugged. “Well, I think I know what I’m doing, but I’ve never tried this before. And I’ve definitely never worked on comm. systems before. So what I need from you is…”

“What? Spit it out, man.”

“Well, there’s a chance I may electrocute myself here, so if you could make sure to kill the power so I don’t die…”

Jack rubbed his temples slowly, wondering not for the first time what his great-grandfather would have done if his resistance cell was saddled with a Richard Park.

War Angel: part eleven

2142- In Orbit Around Pluto

The War Angel crew sat in silent shock on the bridge, as comm. traffic flared back to life through a single channel.

“To all ships, this is EAD Command. You are hereby ordered to stand down on authority of EUG. Conditions of surrender are now in effect.” The haunting message was repeating over and over on the superfrequencies.

“Conditions of surrender are now in effect.”

Morrison began to pace around the bridge. The eight of them were a long way from home, a home once again under the boot heels of the Omegans. An invasion that they could have warned Earth about had they arrived in Pluto’s orbit only one day sooner, because they would have seen its launch. The question now was what to do.

Fighting was out of the question, Richard thought. Orders were clear: stand down. There had obviously been severe casualties already, or the signal would not have gone out. Hide and survive another day. It made good sense. And this ship could pull it off. It was tough enough now to go extra-solar, leave the system for good.

“Maybe,” he let his mind wander, “we would find someone else out there, someone that hates the Omegans as much or even more than us, and they could help us.”

It was a happy idea. One of the last Richard would have for a while.

Fight. Take back what was theirs. Kate’s thoughts were a jumble of rage and hatred and shame. Rage at the return of the Omegans, especially after the agreement of 2110 in which they had promised not to return. Hatred. Hatred for a race that lived only to conquer, and hatred for herself and her comrades on the ship. The Omegans had left Pluto perhaps only a day before the War Angel had arrived. A day earlier, and the Earth crew would have spotted the aliens’ departure vector and warned home about the impending attack. Shame. Her emotions had completely overcome her logic and she was unable to find anything resembling a peaceful center. Her chi had gone blood red, all of her lessons and work completely gone out of the airlock as far as she was concerned.

“I have completely lost control,” she admitted to herself, anguished. “I have no idea what to do or how to act.”

Therefore, she took action.

Walking briskly across the bridge to the comm. station, Kate stopped and towered over Ben. Startled from his own inner turmoil, he looked up slowly, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the lights on the ceiling. “What, Kate?”

Her right arm flashed quickly, catching Drake with a right cross to his jaw, staggering him and nearly knocking him out of his seat. Before he could gather himself, her hands were around his throat and constricting. Ben began trying to pry her arms off of him, and the rest of the crew raced to try and pull her away, but she was locked in and no one had the strength or willpower to break her hold on his throat.

Sarah tugged as hard on Kate’s right arm as she could, gaining no ground in stopping her shipmate, and as she did, she noticed something that terrified her. Kate had begun to smile.

A blissful, peaceful smile.

“Kate, stop!” Sarah pleaded as she and the others tried to save Drake’s life. He had begun to go limp, his eyes starting to roll back into his head.

Stinson turned slowly to look at Sarah as she felt her hands beginning to finalize what she had set out to do. “Don’t you understand, Sarah? I feel better now.”

The pinprick she suddenly felt in her left arm didn’t feel quite so nice. Whipping her head around, she saw Wilma holding an empty syringe. Her nostrils flared, her arms releasing from Ben’s throat and she lunged at Dr. Gray. Fortunately for Wilma, she came up short, passing out on the deck thanks to the sedative injection.

“What,” Captain Morrison said, “the hell was that?” The students said nothing, each one eyeing the floor quietly. Morrison fumed. “Really? No one wants to explain why one of you just tried to murder the other?” Silence reigned for a moment that felt longer than it actually was.

Jack coughed lightly into his fist. “Sir. No sir, Captain.”

Morrison slammed his fist into a console. “I should run every last one of your asses out of here for this crap.” He paused. “If there is an EAD to run you out of anymore.” Morrison spun around on his heels and began pacing again.

Wilma realized she needed to defuse the situation before it escalated. “Captain?” He paused his movements and locked eyes with her. “When the world comes to an end, do you want to go out with unfinished business or with a clean slate?”

“A clean slate,” he nodded. He looked at the two students laying unconscious on his bridge and thought for a moment about what Gray had said. Suddenly he understood that there was a bit more to the dynamic on this ship than he had realized when it left Earth. “Wilma… Dr. Gray. You had better get Mr. Drake to the medlab.” Turning his gaze, he added “Ms. Matto, Ms. Almond, get Ms. Stinson to her quarters. When you do, notify me, and I’ll lock her in.”

The room was deathly still. “What are you waiting for, people? You have your orders! Move!”

Jack and Richard remained, waiting and wondering. Morrison paced a bit more, then finally eased himself down into the Captain’s chair. “You two,” he gestured at the duo, “I have work for you.”

“Yes sir?” Richard asked.

The elder officer felt the heavy burden of command. “I want you two to start working on finding us an optimal spot where we can scan Earthspace from here. How many Omegan ships are there? Can we see what sort of damage has been done to planetary defenses on the first strike? Is there any part of our infrastructure still intact so we can find others like us?”

Jack and Richard gave a nod of understanding and began walking off the bridge. “Oh, and gentlemen?”

“Aye Captain?”

“Best speed. We need to know precisely what we’re dealing with, and soon.”

War Angel: part ten

From the Journal of Steven Keys- July 12, 2018

The last eight days have been a haze of smoke and panic, and every time I’ve tried to sit here and write in this thing, I’ve come up empty. How do you describe, with any sense of perspective, the deaths of over 100 million people?

That meteor storm sliced a path across the globe, and there was nothing to stop it. Some countries got fighters into the air and tried to blast the rocks out of the sky, and some sent missiles. Many cities were spared, millions of lives saved. But the ones that weren’t so lucky?

Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nanjing, Delhi, Tehran, Tel-Aviv, Madrid, Istanbul, Budapest, Kiev, Rome. Population: gone. Most vaporized into atoms by the energy released at impact. After impact: earthquakes, especially on the west coast here. The entire California coastline in ruins, San Francisco and Oakland reduced to rubble under water. China with the same problem, and India as well. Water supplies contaminated, animal life destroyed. Eco-systems obliterated.

And those of us that were fortunate enough to avoid an impact? Who knows precisely when we’ll see the sun again? The amount of dust and debris in the atmosphere is frightening. We’ve been told to wear a mask at all times. “Don’t walk outside without protection,” they broadcast all over the news. “Harmful particulates. Radiation. Blah blah blah.” One of the guys here at this survivor camp in Flagstaff said something that freaked out Nadine to the point where she won’t leave the building. “Breathing the air right now would be tantamount to cannibalism. How much burned human flesh and bone is floating in the air? Brother,” he paused, “You don’t want to know.”

I do not want to know.

But through all of it, I have held on to hope. Hope that we can recover. Hope that our world can rebuild from the worst catastrophe in human history. Without hope, you have nothing.

I have been kidding myself. I know this now. Today was, I suppose, the thing we have all been fearing, the one thing we were all terrified would turn out to be true.

Must have been three or four days ago, we were watching one of the cable news nets and their “round-the-clock” coverage, and they had a guy standing in front of the world map, the strike locations marked in bright red behind him. He was discussing the path that the meteor storm had taken, and how stunned that scientists and observers across the world were about the course adjustments they seemed to make as they approached Earth’s gravity well. Pressed by one of the anchors, the reporter admitted that no one could understand it when it happened, but that things were becoming clearer as the days passed. He declined to say more, saying further speculation would be “inappropriate”. It didn’t seem weird or out of place at that moment; anyone that watches the news gets used to hearing double-talk, whether it’s from politicians or from reporters.

As they continued on, I got up to stretch and get away from the continued bleakness washing across the screen. I never knew how much I would crave stupid movies and TV. I’ve always prided myself on being a pretty highbrow guy. Listen to NPR, go see all the arthouse movies, read classy novels and historical narratives. Frankly, I’ve always been a snob, and I know it. I think that’s why I chose linguistics as my profession; only the best and brightest need apply. It’s a very pure form of academia. But at that moment, surrounded by thoughts and images of death, I found myself craving to watch The Three Stooges. Dumb slapstick comedy, friends slapping each other around and falling down for maximum effect. Food fights.

God, would that be awesome. Throwing a pie at someone. Something I would never consider on even my worst day before suddenly sounds like the most wonderful activity ever. That’s what the end of the world means, I guess.

Anyway, I was wandering around the complex, pondering putting on my mask and stepping outside, when I heard a couple of the Army guys that had drawn detail at the center having a quiet conversation, and unusual for me, I decided to try and eavesdrop. I didn’t get much out of it, but they were clearly discussing a recent briefing on the meteors and their aftermath, and what stuck out to me most was one saying something about the meteors being such a frightening “surgical strike”.

I put that aside for the rest of the day, but when I woke the next morning, it was in the front of my mind.

That afternoon, I went to the library area of the complex and pulled up a map of the strikes. Fifteen cities, almost all contained within one small section of the globe, between 30-45 degrees north of the equator. Yet there had been no reports of rocks landing in the Pacific Ocean that day, no tidal waves or tsunamis. They struck the American southwest then skipped all the way across a vast ocean. Many other meteors had been shot down that day, but all within that same area. Something was just weird about that. Something… not right.

Feeling like I couldn’t let it go, I went and found Cannibalism Guy, or as I soon learned, “Ed.” He was a research scientist that had been working in San Diego. A bunch of his buddies had joined him on a party drive to Vegas, and they were on their way home when the storm hit. The other guys had already taken off to go home to their families, but Ed had nowhere else to go at this point, a feeling I understood quite well. I asked Ed to join me in the library, and pulled out the map to ask him if what I was seeing seemed correct, and he surprised me by taking it a step further.

“It’s the million dollar question, man,” he said. “How did this happen? How did it sneak up on us, when that storm was supposed to miss us with ease?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Some sort of unexplained anomaly? Cosmic malfeasance? But that doesn’t explain the strike pattern. Or why it missed the Pacific.”

He nodded grimly. “Which lays out the next question: so what else could have caused it?”

“Some sort of experimental weapon, maybe, that drew the rocks down to Earth maybe?” It wasn’t brilliant, but it was all I had.

Ed laughed. “A magnet beam?” He paused. “Ah- a tractor beam. You must like your sci-fi.”

“In my youth.”

“The problem with that is: who could do it? And who benefits?”

I had thought that one out. “Russia only had one hit, and could maybe pull it off. China shot down all of the rocks headed its way but one.”

Ed shook his head. “Then the primary target should have been the U.S. But the east coast was spared completely. That’s not the way to take us out.”

“What if it was religiously based? Rome and Tel-Aviv are gone. Two of the largest faiths in the world are in shambles. And the news said Tibet was saved by a missile shot.”

“The world has spent a great deal of time over the past twenty years blaming things on radical Islam. But no one in that area of the world even comes close to having the level of technology to redirect a meteor and send it towards a target.

I threw up my hands in defeat. “So who on Earth does have the capability to harness a meteor shower and send it at terrestrial targets?”

“On Earth?” Ed gave me a hard stare. “No one.”

For the rest of the day, I rattled around our conversation in my head. Nadine, bless her, didn’t even notice.

I wish I knew what to do or say to her through all this. The initial shock that morning in the Canyon, I thought that would wear off. But she’s become increasingly more numb as the days wear on. Her parents and siblings were in Phoenix, and as much as she had been praying that they had taken a holiday weekend in their cabin here in Flagstaff, a quick journey over there showed that no one had set foot there in a couple of months. They had been home, and they were gone.

In normal circumstances, I think maybe her faith would have carried her through. She was raised Catholic, though she got away from the church in her teens. Her parents had stayed in the faith, however, so when she went to see the priest the center had brought in, I think she had hopes of being comforted by her folks’ fate.

That didn’t quite work out, though. The poor bastard that the Army brought in was just as shell-shocked as everyone else. Rome, Vatican City- they were now just memories. And a world in which God had allowed this to happen was one he didn’t understand or comprehend. Nadine walked out of that chapel even more confused and pained than when she went in.

There might not be any atheists in foxholes, but it turns out there might be some in vestments when the world comes screeching to an end.

So I don’t quite know how to help ‘dine. She does her best to act normal when she’s with me (as I do when I’m around her) but her profound sense of shock is so overwhelming that I’m not certain she’ll every really be Nadine again.

Of course, I’m not certain how many of us will ever be ourselves again, especially in light of today’s events.

I didn’t tell her about my chat with Ed, trying to figure out exactly how this had happened, perhaps because I was in denial about what Ed had really been trying to tell me. Some things are just better off taken at face value, and that’s where I left our examination of the meteors’ paths. Of course, the shitty thing about denial is that it eventually comes back to bite you.

We were sitting at dinner this evening, enjoying the harsh lights of the complex commissary, when we heard a bloodcurdling scream erupt from the hallway. Everyone turned around quickly and saw one of the older women that was staying in the center run by in tears, a couple of her friends following. Before folks could turn around and get re-settled, one of the friends came back to the room and walked in. He was shaking and pale, tears streaming down his face. “Folks… I think you’d better get down to the TV room. You’re going to need to see… this.”

He walked back out, going in the direction of the screamer, and amidst a lot of murmuring, most of us made our way towards the TV to see what had set her off. Nadine and I walked in together, and what we saw stunned us both into silent horror. The news was showing the skyline over Washington, D.C., Peking, Moscow, and more. And across that skyline were ships. Big, brutal-looking ships, hovering in the air, menacing the ground. If you looked closely, you could see some of the ships opening up, and smaller craft dropped out, buzzing the skies like ironclad gnats.

In short order, we were informed that they had made contact with Earth’s governments within the past day. They called themselves the Omegans. They were here to take what they wanted, they demanded our complete surrender, and it we defied them… well, they had already killed 100 million people. More wouldn’t bother them in the slightest.

Nadine grabbed and squeezed my hand with all her might and collapsed into my arms. Ed slid up next to me and repeated what he had said before. “On Earth? No one.”