Final Assault (11 page)

All of the research was coming in now, of course. He had asked the Project members to report as they worked—and many of them had—but most of them kept working right to the deadline and beyond. The deadline was yesterday, but Cross’s links had been beeping all day with updates and changes and revised reports.

He had five assistants who were coordinating the process with him, but he was determined to do everything himself. He hadn’t forgotten what Maddox had said to him less than a month before.

She wanted him to see all the information so that he would have one of his famous hunches. She had actually given him a direct link to her office in case he got one during the battle.

He hadn’t had a hunch yet, only a bad case of eyestrain and a growing wish for a long night’s sleep. But he knew he wouldn’t sleep, probably not more than a few snatched hours here and there over the next week.

If the world made it through the next week.

But the world had survived so far, and sometimes he thought that was a small miracle. The president’s speech had been a major turning point. It had only occurred twenty-eight days ago, but it seemed as if that was years ago. Time stretched when a person was as busy as Cross had been.

The speech had accomplished a lot of things. It had stopped the worst of the rioting. In fact, in the U.S., all of the rioting had ended. Some countries hadn’t been able to contain theirs, though, and thousands of deaths had resulted worldwide. In several Third World nations, governments had toppled. Unlike times past, that had barely caused a ripple on the worldwide stage.

As Franklin had commanded, everyone was looking skyward. They weren’t going to worry about internal matters if they could avoid it.

Here in the States, people were following the rules, for the most part, honoring curfews and moving to safe zones. There were scuffles as more and more people crowded the major cities. But those who couldn’t abide crowded conditions had gone to the deserts.

Cross knew there were millions of people worldwide, maybe hundreds of millions, who were gambling that the aliens wouldn’t attack their little bit of unprotected land, but no one was paying much attention to them either. The attitude across the world seemed to be one that was expressed by a little British boy in a vid clip that had aired repeatedly in the last week:

Either come join the party or fend for yourself.

Not that living in the cities was a party right now. The overcrowding was phenomenal. Every city had different rules for dealing with it.

Washington’s were strict: a person with any unused bedrooms had to open his house to strangers; homeowners on an acre or more of land had to permit tents and temporary shelters on the lawn.

Cross’s home was overrun with people he barely knew—former students of Bradshaw’s, friends of Portia’s, and shirttail relatives he hadn’t seen for years. He’d locked off the basement and his bedroom where he had most of his personal papers, and spent most of his time here at the office, away from the hubbub in his old sanctuary.

When he needed a bed, he usually went to Britt’s. She had a one-bedroom apartment, and wasn’t under orders to share.

He usually didn’t see her at the apartment, though. She was spending as much time here at the lab as he was. Her lab had become the clearinghouse for all the telemetry coming in from the probes and telescopes as they tracked the alien fleet coming toward Earth. He went to her section of the building every day, secretly hoping to find out the aliens had turned back.

Of course, they hadn’t.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He needed more caffeine. He wondered if it would help calm his troubled stomach or if it would make things worse. If he had been keeping track of what he had been eating, he would have been fine, but he had been living Britt’s lifestyle lately—eat what you found; sleep when you could; survive on coffee if possible. He hadn’t even done that in college. It felt almost indecent now.

He stood and stretched, hearing bones in his spine crack. He had no idea how long he had been sitting. The last time he remembered going to a window had been yesterday. He had watched as the first dusting planes had flown over this section of D.C., raining Portia’s nanorescuers onto the city.

The dusting process had caused minor panics worldwide. Even though people had been warned, the dark nanorescuers falling from the sky looked so much like the dark cloud of alien nanoharvesters that many people fled in hysteria. When the little rescuers didn’t hurt anyone, people calmed down. But it showed Cross at least how volatile the world still was.

He had to admit he’d felt a bit of deja vu himself as he watched the tiny particles stream from the belly of the planes. He had watched the footage of the nanoharvesters just like everyone else, and the images of all that destruction had been burned into his brain.

Part of him wondered, as it had once before, if his deep reaction wasn’t an instinctual one. The aliens had been harvesting Earth for a long time. He wondered if an antipathy toward the aliens’ appearance and toward the nanoharvesters wasn’t, after all this time, hardwired into the human mind.

Those were questions for the future, when the tenth planet was streaming back to the cold dark part of its 2006-year orbit, when Cross and his team could evaluate every intriguing detail with no looming deadline.

But the deadline was swiftly approaching and he had a report to finish. He had to let Maddox—and through her, all the military leaders worldwide—know the important aspects of the alien character.

He looked longingly at the couch he had had some grad students carry into this office. The couch was the size of a twin bed and was softer than most mattresses. He’d been napping on it off and on for days now.

But he didn’t have time for a nap, not even a short one. He needed to finish this report. He left his stuffy office and its tempting couch and walked toward the cafeteria.

Britt had started calling it the mess because that was what it had become. Some of the government employees who staffed it had stopped coming to work, and those who remained—mostly single people whose families lived far away—could barely make a dent in the collection of coffee cups, dirty dishes, and stained pots.

Federal sanitation regulations had gone out the window over a month ago. No one cooked for the entire group anymore. Many of the researchers simply took what they could find. Others started up the industrial strength oven or lit a burner on the stove and found themselves cooking a meal for several hungry people enticed by the smell.

The kitchen workers did try to keep the basics in stock—fresh bread, milk, some juices and fruits—but it was getting harder as the aliens’ arrival got nearer. Food supplies were not moving across the nation by truck anymore. Whatever food was in a city was all that the city had. By government order, restaurants were now being used as soup kitchens to feed the growing populations.

Life as Cross had known it for the first forty-some years of his existence had vanished. In its place was a brave new world that he hadn’t had time to explore, let alone understand.

The mess smelled of that badly cooked hamburger, onions, and chocolate chip cookies. One of the telescope scientists baked cookies every night to relax, or so she said. Britt theorized that the scientist did it because no one else was making sweets and in times of crisis, people craved sweets.

Cross knew that he did.

He grabbed one of the cookies and stared at the pile of dirty dishes sitting in gray water in one of the stainless steel sinks. Then he rolled up his sleeves and plunged his hands into the cold, greasy water.

He needed to do something besides stare at computer screens. Physical movement cleared his mind. Before all of this, he played racquetball, but he didn’t have time for much right now. He needed to be as close to his office as possible, so that when he was ready to go back to the actual writing of the report, he could just wander there.

He pulled the dishes out of the greasy water and stacked them on the big stainless steel counter beside the sink. Once he got them out, he pulled the plug and cleaned out the sink before running fresh, hot water into it. Then he proceeded to do all the dishes by hand.

The biggest frustration he had was that no one had been able to crack the aliens’ language. Experts from all over the world had been struggling with the bits of language that seemed to be written inside the downed ships. The original Tenth Planet Project was using linguists from all over the world, but in the last month, Cross had brought in several other experts: cryptologists, computer programmers, and mathematicians were the largest group, but he also brought in some music theorists and archaeologists who specialized in the ancient worlds.

When Maddox had questioned bringing in more experts, he had told her that some scientists, from the popular Carl Sagan of the last century to most of the astronomers and biologists working today, had theorized that mathematics was the universal language, and rather than let the linguists struggle with this alone, he would let others look at it from various perspectives. Musical patterns, cryptology, and ancient dialects might provide the key as easily as discovering a “word” that both cultures had in common.

So far, none of his experts had found anything, and Cross wasn’t really surprised by that. Just frustrated.

Terribly frustrated.

He had made it through a mound of plates before he had to let the water out again. His hands were chapped and slime-covered. He washed them off, then bent over and tried to figure out how to work the large industrial-strength-sized dishwasher.

The problem—and it was one he had told no one— was that he wasn’t certain the squiggles they had found in the alien ship were a written language. They might have been symbols that designated how the controls worked, for example, the way that international symbols worked—like the one of a person in a wheelchair that indicated handicapped access. If that was the case, he knew, even with his limited education in this area, that none of his people would crack a code. They would be baffled by this until the end of time.

He cleared the dishes out of the washer and began to stack the greasy pots and pans inside.

The other problem that he had was that he had no real sense of the aliens’ culture. He knew a lot about them, given that he hadn’t even known that aliens existed a year ago, but he didn’t know as much as he wanted to.

He had already told Maddox a lot about the aliens, but he would formalize what he knew into the report. Some of what he had received from the other members of the Project would help in the attack. Some of it might become useful later on, in ways that Cross wasn’t sure of yet.

What he did know was this: the aliens had a hierarchical society. The command center of their ships was laid out so that one creature rose above the rest. That creature had the best view of the others, and the most information on his console—based primarily on size of the unit.

He also knew that these creatures were extremely intelligent and that for hundreds of thousands of years their culture was significantly more advanced than that of humans. He suspected that they were startled to have humans attack them in space—as startled as humans would be to learn that ants had developed space travel.

That advantage was lost though; the aliens now knew that they were fighting a more advanced race than the ones they had seen two thousand years ago.

The aliens had a knowledge of tactics. The fact that they did not harvest the same area each time told him that they understood the value of planning. Several of his biologists theorized from the way the aliens changed their method of attack in the last real battle that they also had an understanding of emotions.

Retaliation, or so he was told, was not an intellectual concept. Its initial basis lay in emotion. Retaliation came from anger, and an escalated response was designed to subdue a lesser force.

Humans had not been subdued. Therefore, some of the biologists theorized, the aliens would try harder to put humans in their places and out of the way.

Cross closed the dishwasher door and started it. It whirred to life with a force that startled him. There were still countless dishes around him. But he had no interest in them any longer.

He was beginning to get a handle on his report.

But Cross knew, because he saw all of the information, and because he, too, had been studying the aliens, that what was most important to the aliens wasn’t revenge or subduing Earth.

It was survival.

Everything about the aliens showed that they had to conserve. They had developed a way to survive even after they had lost their original sun. It required them to suffer long periods of darkness and, the experts hypothesized, a cold sleep that lasted centuries. It was a brilliant solution for the aliens, but it imposed strict limitations on them.

He ticked off the limitations in his mind.

—They had only a small amount of time in which to harvest all the food and energy they needed for two thousand years.

—If they could still reproduce, they had to do so in the short span of time they were near the sun.

—If they had to build or repair new things, they had to do so within that same short period of time.

Cross likened it in his mind to the way humans lived two hundred years ago, when cross-country travel was time-consuming and difficult. Those who lived in extreme northern climates spent the short summers working fields, growing food, and preparing for the long winters.