Invasion Read online

  “Didn’t know you were religious, General,” the aide-de-camp said. This bothered the General because the last exchange she’d had with the head of the Russian military, just before he, and everyone with him, had been obliterated, had consisted of her asking him the same question.

  “I think a lot of people are converting at the moment,” General Clark said.

  She, with everyone else in the Raven Rock Emergency Command and Control Center, were watching video feeds from the west coast of the United States as the Swarm Battle Core approached high over the Pacific. As it passed overhead it brought eclipse to a large swath of Earth’s surface. She idly wondered how it was affecting the tides. It had already destroyed every Russian ICBM as it passed over EurAsia, negating the plan she’d conjured up with her Russian counterpart to nuke the Core. That triggered one of those strange thoughts that often pop up at the most inappropriate time.

  “Did you know that the Ukrainian word for Wormwood is chornobyl?” Clark murmured. “I find that odd.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” her aide asked.

  “So many strange coincidences,” Clark said. “But maybe everything is connected at a level we can’t consciously perceive? Maybe we share some sort of genetic memory?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “I think this is bigger than we know,” she murmured. “What was it Turcotte called the Swarm? The Ancient Enemy?”

  Several of the center staff were praying. Others were desperately trying to get an outside line, to say last goodbyes.

  But no one had deserted. Clark felt a moment’s pride at the discipline.

  “Status of the boomers?” she asked her aide as she watched the Core’s inevitable approach.

  “Pacific and Atlantic running silent and deep.”

  “Do we know if the Core has fired on any of the Pacific subs yet?”

  “We have no contact.”

  “Seventh Fleet?” Clark asked.

  “The Reagan and all other ships have gone dark.”

  “Hawaii?” Clark asked.

  “Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam is—“ her aide paused, trying to find a way to speak the unspeakable—“gone. Along with Schofield Barracks and Marine Base Kaneohe.”

  Clark asked: “Silos?”

  “Launches have been aborted, blast doors closed. Authorization has been disseminated to LCC commanders to fire at their discretion.”

  “Air Force?”

  “They’ve got everything airborne to engage potential alien dropships. Same as the Navy and Marines. All field forces are deployed for combat.”

  She tried to think if there was anything else to throw at this invading entity.

  “Ma’am,” someone called out. “The President is on the line.”

  General Clark waved that off.

  “Space Command is reporting all satellites the Core has passed are no longer functional,” another subordinate reported. “GPS no longer works.”

  More trivia in the face of doom.

  “Space Command said that the mothership that launched from Area 51 has, well, disappeared.”

  That drew her focus. “Destroyed?”

  “No, ma’am. Just vanished.”

  Clark nodded. “Good. Turcotte got those people away. Good. Then there is still hope for mankind.”

  The Core was over the west coast.

  EARTH ORBIT

  The mothership had been there one moment, gone the next, as it shifted into FTLT.

  Turcotte was momentarily shocked at the abrupt disappearance. Then experienced a brief relief that some sliver of humanity had escaped washed through him.

  That sliver evaporated as multiple particle beams flashed past, firing at the spot where the mothership had just occupied. His muscles tightened as he expected his ship to be blasted when the Core shifted aim.

  But nothing. The Core resumed firing downward toward the planet.

  Turcotte relaxed his shoulders as much as he could. Perhaps the Fynbar was as ‘invisible’ to the Core as it had been to the Airlia systems?

  Turcotte gasped as pain spiked through his brain, originating from the base of his skull to right between his eyes. For a moment he thought the craft had been hit and he’d been struck by shrapnel. He reached up and felt the back of his head, his forehead. No blood. No obvious wound. Nothing. But the pain remained, pulsing. A live wire vibrating through center of his brain.

  The implant!

  It was a quarter inch diameter ball in the back of his brain, just above the stem that had only recently discovered via MRI when he’d been prepared for fitting of his TASC-suit. There was also a microscopic line extending from it running to his cerebrum. But what it did? The doctors had not been able to tell him. And then Lisa Duncan, in her farewell note to him confessed that she believed she’d implanted it, although she had no conscious memory of the act.

  Turcotte took a deep breath while he closed his eyes, waiting for some sort of image to develop, a message, anything.

  But there was only throbbing pain.

  What was the implant doing?

  Why had it activated for the first time?

  What was it supposed to do?

  Turcotte opened his eyes and realized that during that brief period, the Battle Core had continued to approach and was barely one hundred miles away. It was rapidly coming toward him. He grabbed the controls and turned the Fynbar toward Earth.

  This war was far from over.

  THE FIRST DAY: THE CLEARING

  THE ASIAN SUBCONTINENT

  The Fifth Indo-Pakistan War was also the last.

  On 18 May 1974, India detonated its first atomic weapon, dubbed Smiling Buddha. The Pakistani prime minister responded by swearing that every Pakistani would prefer to have a nuclear weapon in kind, even if they had to eat grass. Pakistan achieved that a decade later. The two countries conducted a nuclear arms race, conveniently ignoring, or perhaps because of, their proximity to each other.

  Both countries established national holidays to celebrate their entry into the brotherhood of nuclear-armed countries.

  Of the four previous wars, only one occurred after both countries were nuclear equipped, and that one, in 1999, had been limited in scope. Perhaps because of those very weapons.

  But World War III broke something fundamental in the concept of mutually assured destruction. To be fair, neither country was the first to use nuclear weapons in WWIII. The United States earned that privilege trying to stop North Korea after it unleashed biological agents on South Korea and then Taiwan trying to stop a Chinese invasion during the confusion of overthrowing the Airlia.

  On the Asian subcontinent these two true nuclear powers engaged in an all out exchange. Mutually assured destruction became exactly that. It would be difficult to determine which country launched first, because the exchange in both directions happened so fast and so completely.

  Mumbai, Karachi, Calcutta, Lahore, Delhi, and all of the other major metropolitan areas in both countries were struck with atomic bombs. Some multiple times. The targeting was focused on death, not military advantage. Command and control quickly disappeared and the war devolved into a nuclear free for all until there were no more weapons to launch.

  The conventional fighting along the border was inconsequential in the face of the nuclear devastation. The countries each military was fighting to defend no longer existed.

  Worse than the initial blasts, firestorms began consuming all the major cities that had been hit. Tens of millions died in the initial blasts. They were the lucky ones. The storms grew in intensity, producing hurricane force winds. People on the periphery were sucked into the cauldron. The firestorms of Dresden and Tokyo in the World War II were campfires by comparison.

  Of more significance to the rest of the world, massive plumes of smoke were rising miles into the atmosphere as millions of tons of ash were produced. Only the largest volcanic eruption that scientists had speculated, the Deccan Traps, which coincidentally lay in India, over 60 million years ago, ha
d produced more. That was also the event that some scientists widely believed had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  The cloud of smoke and ash was hitting the upper atmosphere and carried by winds would spread around the world in the coming months, blocking out the rays of the suns.

  Few humans cared as the Core was the more immediate threat.

  PRIVATE ISLAND, PUGET SOUND

  Nosferatu led Nekhbet from the helicopter toward the surface entrance of the underground mansion. They might have been twins, given each was tall, thin, and had pale skin. They were bundled up in long cloaks and hoods against the scant sunlight and wore wrap-around sunglasses that hid their red-pupiled eyes.

  “But I don’t understand,” Nekhbet complained. “Why have you done this?”

  Nosferatu tapped his temple. “Sadly, I do not think the Swarm are that much different than you or I, my love.”

  “You speak in riddles.”

  “I know,” Nosferatu said. “And it frustrates you. Let us go inside.”

  “But what about the Swarm?”

  “Yes, yes,” Nosferatu said. “There is still that slight problem.”

  “’Slight’?” Nekhbet laughed, a bit manically. “You have a talent for understatement my dear.”

  “You trust me, do you not?” Nosferatu asked as he held her hand.

  “I’ve trusted you for thousands of years,” Nekhbet said. “In the darkness, in the depths of despair, I’ve trusted you. Why should I stop now, just because the world is about to end?”

  “Good,” Nosferatu said.

  The Core had passed overhead, weapons firing numerous times to the west, taking out Naval Base Kitsap, home for the Pacific Trident submarine fleet. Then to the east and south of Seattle—Joint Base Lewis-McChord no longer existed along with the Air Force and Army units stationed there. The sounds of detonations had echoed flatly across Puget Sound. Numerous boats dotted the water as people fled the land in the belief the ocean might hold some sort of refuge.

  “Will they be safe on the water?” Nekhbet asked as she paused at the entrance to Vampyr’s mansion.

  Nosferatu shrugged. “I doubt it. The stories I heard as a boy in the Roads of Rostau say the Swarm consumes all. Of course, some of them were tales designed to frighten a child. But often there is truth in such stories.”

  Nosferatu and Nekhbet were half-breeds, the result of Airlia ‘gods’ mating with human slaves thousands of years ago in pre-history Egypt. The myth of vampires came from them and their brethren, such as Vampyr, but they were the last of the Eldest remaining after intense internecine fighting.

  “Why didn’t we stop the planes?” Nekhbet asked. “Stop the Danse?”

  “Does it matter now?” Nosferatu said. He indicated the boats and beyond, Seattle. “They’re all doomed regardless. And there is a perverse logic to the Myrddin plan. The humans have been destroying the planet. Now it’s being done for them.”

  “Sometimes I do not understand you, my dear.”

  Nosferatu turned to her. “Leahy had already abandoned us. She knew our mission was useless once she learned the Core was inbound. The Danse was a victim of events. No longer important.”

  “She betrayed us.”

  “No,” Nosferatu said. “She abandoned us. There is a slight difference, although the result appears the same. Come.”

  They went through the grand entrance. Past a large mural depicting the Giza Plateau during the time of their birth, the First Age of Egypt when the alien Airlia ruled men. This was after the destruction of the Airlia base at Atlantis during the Airlia Civil War. Fifty-five hundred years before the age of the Pharaoh Khufu who would build the Great Pyramid. The time when both of them were born.

  They entered a vault deep beneath the house. The large door had a hole burned in it and was open. Inside were ten tactical nuclear devices on a table and a launch console for ICBMs in silos hidden around this island, in the middle of Puget Sound.

  The lights flickered and then went out. The darkness wasn’t quite absolute, but close to it. However, both had much greater night vision capability than ordinary humans. Nosferatu reached out and took Nekhbet’s hand. He led her to the rear of the vault. “Naturally, Vampyr left a sleep tube here. For when he wished time to pass.”

  “Just one?” Nekhbet asked.

  Nosferatu slid aside a panel that had appeared to be part of the rear vault wall but was actually a false wall inside the vault. “Just one.” A single, coffin-like object was inside.

  “It will be a tight fit for us,” she said. “But it is better than being alone. I was alone for too long.”

  “I am sorry about that, my love.” Nosferatu climbed into the tube.

  Nekhbet paused. “How long will we sleep? How long until it will be safe?”

  “I don’t know about safety,” Nosferatu said. “But we will sleep for seven days.”

  “Why seven?”

  “It took the human’s God only seven days to make the world. I think the Swarm will unmake it in that time.”

  “And after seven days?”

  “Then we shall see the results.”

  Nekhbet climbed in. She lay on top of her lover. “Am I too heavy?”

  “Never.”

  AIRSPACE, AREA 51

  Turcotte flew over Area 51, or what remained of it. Blasted buildings and desert was all that remained of the exterior base.

  More importantly, for Turcotte, there was no sign of Colonels Mickell or Rennie. The area appeared empty except for thousands of bodies. Turcotte knew it was likely the two officers were among those bodies along with the civilians who’d rushed Hangar Two in a vain attempt to get on board the mothership.

  He stopped to hover 10,000 feet above the base. The Core was to the east, moving away. Every few seconds particle beams flickered earthward from various points on the surface of the Core, killing and destroying.

  Turcotte closed his eyes and leaned forward, pressing his hands against his head in a vain attempt to stop the pulsing emanating from the implant.

  One thing for certain. The arrival of the Core had activated it, which indicated a troubling connection.

  Despite the pain, Turcotte tried to think, to plan. He’d acted instinctively in his refusal to dock with the mothership. Practically he’d known there hadn’t been time to open a cargo bay and for him to land. He knew there was something more to that decision, a deeper, fierce opposition to retreating, to not run before a threat. It was a trait he’d exhibited his entire life, but now it might have doomed him.

  The mothership with his friends and the Chosen had gotten away. That was the key. The human race, at least from Earth, now existed elsewhere. Wherever the mothership had jumped to.

  But now? He’d come here, hoping against reason, to link up with his fellow soldiers.

  The radio spewed fragments, mostly civilians, desperately pleading for rescue. The world’s military was devastated. People were calling for help, but who could help when the entire world was being attacked?

  Turcotte opened his eyes and watched the Core. What was next? Nyx, the Airlia they’d rescued from the Cydonia Base, had said that the Swarm ‘reaped’ what she called Scale, intelligent life, whenever it encountered it. That sounded much worse than simply killing. However, as near as he could tell, only military targets had been struck. The Swarm was saving most of the world’s population.

  A yellow light began flickering on the control console.

  Turcotte took the ka from around his neck and inserted it in an opening in the console. A series of images appeared, one of them a silhouette of the Fynbar. He tapped on that. An array of options in image form. “Space ship flying for dummies,” he muttered as he began to work his way through the images, trying to find something that matched the console. That didn’t take long.

  He touched the image of the light.

  Low fuel.

  Turcotte had to laugh. He was going to run out of gas, when he didn’t even know what kind of fuel the Fynbar used or even how
the engines worked. Definitely not gas. Probably not anything easily available on Earth. And like any car, how much more time did he have before that light went red and he dropped out of the sky like a rock?

  He descended next to Hangar One. The large doors were blasted and twisted, the result of World War III, not the Swarm. He edged the Fynbar inside. Set it down and powered it off, conserving whatever fuel was left.

  For what?

  THE FACILITY

  The thousands of HD displays lining the roof of the Facility went dark, plunging the interior into darkness.

  The excited voices of hundreds of children, 1,524 to be exact, fell quiet as a single adult voice cut through the blackness.

  “’Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart’.”

  The voices subsided.

  The voice began to repeat the prayer and the children joined in.

  “’Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart’.

  Trouble no one about his religion.

  Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.

  Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

  Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.

  Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide’.”

  Ten-foot high poles, evenly spaced around the floor of the Facility flickered alive with green light.

  The old man leading the prayer held up a hand and they fell silent. He was an old Native American. His bald scalp was covered with intricate, faded tattoos. He leaned on a cane with the other hand. “You see? We have light.”

  The children in the Facility had originally been ‘purged’ from this place over the course of several years as being ‘unfit’, designated ‘Metabols’ and only recently returned when the Chosen were taken to Area 51 and put on board the mothership as the ‘future’ of mankind.

  If the Chosen were the future, what were the Metabols?

  The Facility is a cavern six miles across at the base and a mile high at the apex. In the center is a small town, including parks, schools, barracks and a narrow stream running through the entirety. The streets are wide, lined with trees, and paved with bricks. Above the town, the now dark dome roof normally mimicked the sky above via the HDTV displays.