Final Assault (2 page)

She crossed to the other side and started up the stairs so that she could catch a train home—or at least back in the direction she had come—but another CTA employee, a man with lined features, a man who looked as old as her father, put his hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry,” he said. “This line’s closed.”

“I’ve got to go home,” she said.

He shook his head. “There won’t be any trains on this track all night. Maybe not even tomorrow.”

She glanced over her shoulder. The tall buildings of downtown were only a few blocks away. “Where’s the next nearest station?”

He looked down at her and seemed to see her for the first time. People were flowing around them, walking down more steps to the street level. Another gunshot echoed, this time even closer, followed by the sound of breaking glass.

“You’d have to walk,” he said. “And I can’t guarantee that any of the other trains will be running.”

She felt panic surge through her, panic she had been controlling until now. “Why not?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “The entire city’s gone nuts. I don’t think it’s safe to be on the streets. Where are your parents? Maybe they should come get you.” She wasn’t even sure that her parents knew she was gone. They probably thought she was cowering in her room. “I’ll walk,” she said. “Just point me in the right direction.”

“Look.” He put a hand on her arm. “I have a booth upstairs. You can wait there until your parents come. It’ll be safer.”

She would have taken him up on that a year ago. Maybe even six months ago, when the aliens first attacked. She had still believed then that, despite the disaster, life would continue.

Now she was sure she was going to die. It was just a question of when.

She shrugged herself out of his grasp. “I’ll be all right,” she said, and hurried down the stairs. He called after her, but she ignored him. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. As she stepped onto the street, she saw a group of men push a car over. It looked like someone was still inside it.

More glass broke, and people carrying boxes ran past her.

The smoke wasn’t as thick here, but the air smelled funny—of sweat and piss and something else, something that made the hair on the back of her neck rise. Maybe that was what fear smelled like?

Men sat on the curbs, head in hands, just like her mother had done.

Women watched from windows as children and teenagers ran wild in the street.

No one was making any effort to stop the mayhem.

No one really seemed to notice except her.

And part of her wanted to join in. It seemed logical somehow. Why wait for the aliens? What did they want anyway? To destroy the Earth. Why not destroy it before they did, make sure there was nothing left for them to touch?

Because when the aliens had come the first time, they had sent down a cloud of blackness that had eaten through everything—including people. She had seen those scenes of people being devoured alive. Her father had tried to steer her away from the TV, but she had seen it anyway. And then they had learned that her cousin Barbara—her skinny, obnoxious, giggly cousin—had died in the last attack.

Melted, eaten alive, just like everyone else.

And it had looked so painful.

Kara didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die that way.

Behind her something banged so loud that she felt the ground shudder. She turned around. Another car had overturned, this one the size of her family’s sedan. Kids her own age were jumping on it, screaming at the person inside as if they blamed him.

Maybe they should blame him. Maybe they should blame all the grown-ups. After all, they had lied. Every one of them, from the president on down, had lied. They had said, when we bombed the tenth planet, that the Earth had won.

And it hadn’t. It hadn’t at all.

Now the aliens were coming back, probably angrier and meaner. Maybe they would be like the creatures in those bad SF flat movies her teacher had shown in history class, the ones that showed all the paranoia of the last century. Those aliens had always gotten stronger after they were bombed.

Kara shuddered. She pressed herself against the cold brick wall of a nearby building and watched the destruction around her. She couldn’t walk from here, and she didn’t want to go back to the El.

She didn’t really want to go home either.

There was nothing left for her. She had a month left to live—the whole world had a month left to live—and she was only seventeen years old.

Her dad had been right. It wasn’t fair. She deserved a future.

The president promised that the Earth would defend itself and survive, but that was a lie, too.

She sank down onto the filthy sidewalk. No matter what she did tonight, it would make no difference thirty days from now.

Thirty days from now, she would be dead, and there would be no one around to notice, no one to remember her, and no one to care.

October 11, 2018
19:13 Universal Time

30 Days Until Second Harvest

General Gail Banks never grew tired of the view from orbit. Spread out below her the whites, browns, blues of Earth seemed intense and alive. From this distance, her home seemed so small and vulnerable. Hard to believe there were nearly ten billion lives on it, all of them important, all of them connected.

And all of them in her care.

She touched the round frame of the portal in her tiny office on the International Space Station. In the last few months, this place had also become home to her. A cobbled-together home, filled with quirky, competent people, all as determined as she was to save that beautiful blue ball below her.

She had coordinated the missile attack on the tenth planet from this station. She had been pleased that they had managed to arm and send over three hundred missiles at the tenth planet.

The aliens had destroyed most of the missiles, but at least fifteen had gotten through.

Her readings here had shown that the damage to the tenth planet had been severe. She had also known that the aliens hadn’t been obliterated, even though the word on the vid news and the Net among the civilians was that Earth had “won” the war.

Earth had won a battle, and that was all.

She had spent the last few months making certain that Earth would be able to defend herself in the coming battle.

She wanted Earth to win the war—and she knew now she had a month to make it happen.

She leaned her forehead against the cool plastic wall. If any of her subordinates saw her, they would be shocked. To them, General Gail Banks was coldly professional, heartless and probably soulless, a woman who demanded not just perfection, but complete dedication to the task at hand.

Here, though, in the privacy of her small cubicle, she allowed herself to feel the disappointment that had been welling inside her ever since she had seen the video of the alien ships being launched from the strange dark planet.

The ships were visible only as bright flares against the planet’s black surface. All of the telescopes had recorded the images, and she had received them on a scrambled channel. Flares, like fireflies against a moonless night sky. Impossible for her to tell exactly how many there were, but she knew there would be enough to destroy much of Earth.

If she failed to stop some of them.

She wouldn’t fail.

She stood up straight and sighed, looking at Earth again. The cool blue oceans, the clouds thin as gauze, the browns and greens of the land. From the International Space Station, Earth itself seemed like little more than an island, a small oasis in the vast ocean of the universe.

Those aliens would have to come through her: General Gail Banks, the heartless soulless perfectionist who loved the Earth more than she loved her country, perhaps more than she loved herself. Perhaps her troops saw that. Perhaps that was why no one had transferred, even when they learned as much as they could about the mission.

They believed that with her leadership, they would get the job done.

If she survived the battle against the aliens, it would be because of a miracle, some unexpected miracle that no one could have predicted. She was going to die in this plastic junk-heap, die defending that beautiful blue ball below, and she was proud that she was going to die this way.

She had always hoped that she would die in battle. She had expected to die in some border skirmish, directing troops for the U.S. But she wasn’t going to die in some minor war. She was going to die in the greatest battle in this planet’s history, the battle that would determine if the planet
had
a history, the battle that would determine if there would be someone left to remember the history.

She knew nothing about the aliens, except that they had attacked the Earth for no reason, and that they were difficult to destroy. In their position, she would be angry—a general of a dominant power who had lost an unexpected battle and been attacked on the home front. But she didn’t know if these creatures felt anger.

She didn’t know if they felt anything at all.

For the first time in human memory, the enemy was a cipher, something impossible to understand. And, surprisingly, she wished she had the power to understand them. Then she could predict their actions. She wasn’t sure if they were coming back to repeat the same attack they had made before, or if they were going to do something different. If she had an understanding of them, an emotional reading of them, she would know how anger would affect the attack, how their customs dictated how they would fight.

This lack of understanding was the only thing that worried her. It was the biggest variable in a very large equation. She could only guess at their reactions. When they had first attacked Earth, they had seemed surprised that humans had retaliated. The successful destruction of some of the alien ships seemed to anger them. Their second attack focused on population centers, though the first hadn’t.

It had seemed as if they were retaliating. But Banks knew better than to second-guess the enemy. Perhaps the population centers had always been their chosen targets for the follow-up attack.

She wasn’t going to play emotional gambles or emotional bluffs this time. She was fighting an interplanetary war, and she was going to do it by the book. No psychological analysis, no attempts to throw off the enemy. Instead, she was going to fight the best, hardest fight of her life.

And if she had her way, the beautiful ball below her was going to win it.

October 12, 2018
6:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

29 Days Until Second Harvest

Leo Cross’s hands were tight on the steering wheel of his car. For the first time in months, he hadn’t used the vehicle’s automatic navigation system. There were simply too many variables, and he hadn’t known how to program them in.

He glanced at the passenger seat. Edwin Bradshaw leaned against the door. He looked pale and nervous. Bradshaw had just turned sixty-one, and even though he took good care of himself, Cross worried about his health. The stresses and strains of the last year had clearly etched themselves on Bradshaw’s face. The last of his hair had gone gray and the webbing of fine lines around his eyes had grown deeper.

Cross was almost two decades younger, but he felt the changes in his own body. A man couldn’t survive on adrenaline and four hours of sleep a night forever— not at his age, and certainly not at Bradshaw’s. That was a game for younger men. But it was something that Cross no longer had a choice about.

He eased the car over the speed bumps in the parking lot on the Johns Hopkins campus. The buildings in front of him looked like normal university buildings, but inside one hid the main lab for the Space Telescope Science Institute. He pulled into a reserved parking space and put the car in park.

“Beep Britt, will you?” he asked.

Bradshaw nodded as Cross got out of the car. The fall air was warm and smelled faintly of smoke. Not the kind of smoke he used to smell as a kid—that nice, fall smell of burning leaves—but something darker and more ominous, something he didn’t really want to identify.

He went to the main doors as Brittany Archer came out.

She was thin—too thin now—and tall. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore no makeup. Her clothing was baggy. Her shirt fell off her shoulder, revealing one of the five tattoos she had gotten as a teenager and now regretted. She simply hadn’t had the time, or so she claimed, to have them removed.

She was the head of the Institute and a member of the Tenth Planet Project, just like he was. She was also his lover. Their relationship was one of the few good things to have come out of the last year.

She smiled when she saw him and he felt himself smile back. No matter what happened, Britt could always draw a smile from him.

“How bad are the roads?” she asked.

“I shut off the autopilot,” Cross said.

She grimaced at him. She had reprogrammed his car’s autopilot just last month when she had gotten frustrated with his driving. “I could fix it for you.”

He shook his head. “We don’t have time.”

“I can do it as we drive.”

“Britt,” he said softly, “don’t you know what’s going on out here?”