path to conquest (6 page)

It had surprised Lydia only slightly to learn that Diana’s father had himself died under mysterious circumstances, ending a marital union that had been unusually long-lasting in Visitor society. Naturally, rumors had made the rounds in the Leader’s court. It could have been Diana’s mother who’d killed him, but Tiirac had certainly made enough enemies on his own to dilute suspicions aimed at his mate. In the end it didn’t really matter, and the case had never been solved.

But Diana’s family history had made it abundantly clear to Lydia that she was dealing with an unusual breed when it came to her commander. It was a matter of pride to Lydia that her own background was a military one. Her parents’ coupling had been purely for reproductive purposes, and she’d enrolled in the fleet academy at the earliest possible age. She’d risen to her prominent rank not by scheming like Diana, but by hard work, intelligence, and devotion to the cause of the homeworld.

Serving under Diana and other officers like her had taught Lydia some unwanted lessons, the most important of which was that honor was of low priority in the upper echelons of the Great Leader’s new army. Simply in order to protect herself and live through the swirl of intrigue surrounding this ill-starred expedition to Earth, she’d had to adapt. She held one central conviction like a sturdy shield—one day one of Diana’s schemes would backfire and she would be destroyed.
I’ll be ready,
Lydia thought. . . .

“Are you ready?”

Diana’s sharp voice intruded on the daydream. Lydia turned to face the commander, squaring her shoulders, her stance challenging Diana’s authority. “Yes. All ships report ready for Project Icewind.”

A cold smile crossed Diana’s lips. “Good.” She sat in the command seat at the center of the bridge and surveyed the crew at their stations around her. “Tie in to Icewind commanders,” she ordered.

Lydia’s fingers tapped out a sequence on the communications panel and the main viewscreen split into six parts. In each portion a face appeared, six officers awaiting Diana’s word. Under each, Visitor characters indicated the commander’s name and the location of his or her ship—Sergei, Soviet Union, a heavy black mustache drooping around his mouth; Ingmar, Sweden, with blond hair and pale features; Rathma, the swarthy female over India; Shogira, over Japan, his unmasked reptilian face smiling faintly; Haji, also without a human mask, above Iran; and Margaret, over Canada, a frown creasing her oval face. Diana thought briefly of the effort Supreme Commander John had put into creating human appearances and names to match the ethnic characteristics of the countries where the Mother Ships were to be stationed when they’d first arrived at the planet. All that, despite her urging that the invasion be swift and overwhelming, without wasting time on grand strategies of deception.

But John and the others had overruled her. They’d done it their way, and failed miserably. That realization had given her a little extra pleasure when she’d killed John.
No wonder we failed,
she thought now.
We had idiots in charge.

“Project icewind,” she began, addressing the six attentive faces on her screen, “is the single most important offensive measure of our renewed campaign to conquer Earth. You’ve each been chosen to take part because you’ve proven yourselves as able commanders with good crews. The devices installed aboard your ships are top secret—-no other vessels in the fleet know about Project Icewind. And they
won’t
know about it unless it’s successful. If Icewind fails and I can prove that crew error is the cause, you and your responsible crew members will be executed at my command. Is that clear?”

Diana paused while the six officers saluted in response. “But I’m sure none of you will have to face those dire consequences. At the end of this communication, you will leave your current orbit posts and take up assigned positions locked into your Icewind control terminals. I will be constantly monitoring all of you. Bungling will be detected immediately—and noted. So don’t try to cover up any mistakes. Simply correct them. Treachery will be punished rather quickly. Very well. Project Icewind begins . . .
now."

The six commanders saluted again and quickly turned to their own bridge crews. Satisfaction played into Diana’s expression. It still intoxicated her to watch inferiors jump to carry out her orders. She touched a toggle switch on her console, and the images on the screen changed from interior views of bridges to exterior shots of the six Mother Ships turning and lumbering away from their usual patrol positions. Their destinations were preordained, programmed into their Icewind software, making the giant starships puppets dancing to Diana’s whim.

“Tactical,” Diana barked.

Lydia waited insolently for a moment, then punched up a flat global map of Earth, a green grid overlaying it like a monstrous planetary fence. Six spots of light moved across the map. They represented the Mother Ships as they changed location, and each spot was a different color.

They were all moving toward a solid red line shaped into an S-curve that snaked over the northernmost stretch of the earth’s surface—over Scandinavia, Siberia, the Arctic Circle, Canada. As Diana watched, her eyes intent, the Visitor vessels converged with the curved graph line. One by one the indicator spots slid into place, each setting off a tinted flare like a tiny supernova on the map grid. Once in position, each spot continued flashing at a lower level of brilliance.

Finally all six were on the S-line, and they pulsed in unison. Diana leaned forward. “Engage Icewind generators.”

On the tactical screen the indicator spots brightened one at a time and held that intensity. When all six had done so, Lydia turned to the commander. “All generators engaged, Diana. All telemetry monitors operating, all systems read nominal.” “Very good, Lydia.”

“Exactly what effect will Project Icewind have?”

Diana half smiled. “The humans have an adage about curiosity, my dear. They say it killed the cat.”

The blond officer stiffened. “This has nothing to do with curiosity. You’ve kept me in the dark through the entire planning of this project, in spite of the fact that my security staff should know everything going on in this fleet.” Diana’s eyes sparked with anger. “Don’t forget who the superior officer is, Commander. You and your security staff know only what I
want
you to know.”

“Need I remind you that I’m also second in command? If anything happens to you, I’ll need to know all classified data, including your precious Project Icewind.”

Diana abruptly stood. “Report to my quarters in ten minutes and you’ll be briefed.” Tossing her mane of dark hair over her shoulder, she turned and left the bridge.

* * *

“Sit down,” said Diana as Lydia came into her cabin. Diana slipped a small cassette into her desk-top computer and the screen played back a full-color simulation of what seemed to be cloud patterns above the continent of North America. The brown-and-green land mass was clear at first. As they watched, roiling white clouds began to form in the Arctic region and massed in angry swirls, marching down and across the continent. After a few seconds, they covered all of North America. But instead of continuing out to sea past the East Coast, the clouds kept churning over land. Smaller storm patterns formed on the coast and drew moisture in from the Atlantic, injecting it into the growing main disturbance. Then the tape ended.

Lydia sat on the edge of the desk, her arms crossed. “And what was all that?”

“That, darling, is what Project Icewind will do. Right now the generators on those six starships are producing magnetic fields that are already altering the upper atmospheric wind currents of Earth. Specifically over North America.”

“For what purpose?”

“It will take a few days, but very soon the weather pattern over this continent will change rather abruptly from late summer to midwinter.”

Lydia’s large eyes narrowed. “Just what is this supposed to accomplish, even presuming what you say is possible?” “Oh, it’s possible. You can be assured of that. What will it accomplish? It’s part of a much larger plan. ...”

“What plan?”

“My, but you’re full of questions, Lydia. That’s all I think you need to know at this point.”

“You seem to be overlooking something,” Lydia hissed. “Cold weather is what makes the red dust effective against us. Are you sure this Project Icewind of yours won’t get out of control and cool off areas of the planet that haven’t ever had winter before? If that happens, you’ll be giving the red dust the chance to spread.”

“I’m the scientist,” Diana flared. “You’re delving into things you know nothing about. Leave advanced concepts to me. As a matter of fact, Icewind is merely the first stage in a strategy that will bring
more
of the planet under my control, not less. Computer modeling gives us every reason to believe that after we freeze the humans with early winter and make them use up more of their precious oil and gas reserves just to avoid mass death and starvation, we’ll be able to heat up the planet’s overall climate. In case you haven’t grasped the significance of that, it will render the red dust harmless in more areas.”

Lydia shook her head in astonishment. “If you change the climatic balance of Earth, you’re courting total disaster. You could cause floods on the coasts. You could turn croplands and forests into deserts. You could destroy vast numbers of animals and humans
—our food supply
—and dry up the planet’s water—the same kind of changes that turned the homeworld into a wasteland.”

Diana steepled her fingers. “Poor, poor Lydia. You have such a limited vision of the universe. Creatures like you can’t see beyond their fears, can’t imagine the great ideas that change worlds and make us strong enough to conquer
any
world we set our sights on.”

“We have our different perspectives all right. I prefer my own,” Lydia answered, standing tall. “And in my view, you’re perverting your precious science and turning it into a dangerous weapon that could blow up in all our faces.”

“Science is simply another tool,” said Diana. “There’s no point to science at all if we can’t use it to bend nature to
our
needs. That’s our destiny. And if you try to get in the way, you’ll be courting your
own
destruction.
That
I can promise you.”

A summer of rationed water had turned the lush green grass of Yankee Stadium to a prickly brown thatch, and the rich soil of the infield crescent had become hard and dusty. As he sat in a box seat just behind the Yankee dugout, Peter Forsythe knew how much the head groundskeeper, Ray Lally, must be suffering. Ray had always prided himself on the sterling condition of the stadium’s playing field. And Ray’s crew worked like hell to keep it that way. The old ball park, with its white concrete shell and electric-blue seats, was one of the last holdouts—no artificial turf for Alex Garr. When he’d purchased the team, Garr had sworn before a roomful of Big Apple sportswriters that the smell of fresh green grass would never be replaced by the sterile odor of plastic carpet, not while
he
was alive and in charge.

Garr was dead now, killed in the climactic airport battle on the day the first Visitor invasion was finally beaten back. Garr had died a hero in Pete’s arms on that bloody airstrip on Long Island. But the grass remained. Dry and scruffy perhaps, but hanging on.
Kind of like the rest of us,
Pete thought.

He hunched his shoulders and wished he’d worn more than a lined windbreaker. The wind whipping the flags in center field was sharp and biting, and the sun had barely shown itself for the past week.

Pete glanced back at the stands. There were at most a couple . of thousand people scattered through the field-level boxes, far lower than the number at most of the games played during the past makeshift season. And most of the fans here today were evidently less optimistic than Pete had been about the weather—or more attentive. They wore winter coats and hats, and huddled together under blankets, drinking hot coffee and soup from thermos bottles.
Looks more like a football crowd,
Pete mused.

Like too many everyday happenings, major league baseball had been suspended when the aliens reinvaded. But there was still a need for diversions in areas that hadn’t fallen under Visitor tyranny. Oh, television and radio were still on the air. Hut with Southern California—and Hollywood—in a real war zone, no new entertainment shows were being produced for I V except for a few programs done in New York and Canada. For the most part, it was an endless sea of reruns.

The same was true of the choice in movie houses. Theater marquees announced Special Encore Showings and scheduled Robert Redford festivals or similar groupings of old movies by particular actors or directors. But no matter what the glitzy label, it still came to the same thing—reruns.

Live theater had fared somewhat better. In fact, both on and off Broadway, New York found itself the beneficiary of a stage renaissance of sorts. With the flood of refugees coursing into New York City, there were even more unemployed actors than normal in the area. Producers recognized that and, sensing the need for entertainment, mounted smaller-scale lower-cost productions of shows both old and new. Ticket prices were cut to the bone, too, enabling even the displaced and unemployed to see a play once in a while. The most indigent were allowed in for free at least once a month by order of Mayor Alison Stein.

Pete had never been much of a theater goer in the old days, but he’d been to a half-dozen shows himself in the last month.

And baseball had forged ahead as best it could. War did not discriminate. Even millionaire ballplayers had been forced to flee from the Sunbelt states overrun by the Visitors. When they’d arrived in northern cities, they’d been welcomed by their colleagues from the local teams, and the players found there was still a demand for the relaxing pace of America’s national pastime. Informal pick-up games in local parks had evolved into a sort of semipro league, playing in the big ball parks that otherwise stood dormant. Spectators were allowed in for fifty cents or a dollar. The gate proceeds were divided among those players in the game that day.