The Mothership (29 page)

“That’s warp drive!” Timer said. “Isn’t
it?”

“What’s warp drive? How does it work?” Dr
McInness asked. “An inflationary drive would have the ship remain stationary
inside a bubble of local flat space. The crew wouldn’t experience acceleration,
because the ship doesn’t move, and there’d be no relativistic mass effects, no
time dilation, no problems trying to go faster than the speed of light.
Spacetime would contract in front of the flat space bubble, and expand behind
it. The idea is the bubble surfs on an expanding wave of spacetime, potentially
travelling many times the speed of light, even though the ship itself never
moves.”

“Space surfing!” Timer said. “I like the
sound of that!”

Dr McInness smiled. “Einstein’s equations
work for this model, but we’d need to generate huge quantities of energy and
have a good supply of exotic matter to make it work, neither of which we have.
Then we’d have to figure out how to generate the flat space bubble itself. It’s
really way beyond us at the moment, but may not be beyond civilizations many
thousands of years ahead us.”

“These guys up ahead must have figured it out,
because they’re here,” Vamp said. “They can explain it to you, then you can
explain it to us.”

They couldn’t see the scientist’s face in
the dark, but it beamed with hope. She’d hit upon his deepest desire.

The drop ship
approached in silence.

The Tindal Air Force Base air traffic
control radars failed to detect its approach, as did the air defense missile
batteries guarding the airfield. Even top secret radars able to see stealth
aircraft failed to detect the rectangular vehicle as it streaked toward the
base at mach eight. The multiple radar signals were completely absorbed by the
vehicle’s perfectly nonreflective hull, which was optimized to avoid detection
systems far more advanced than radar.

The drop ship raced above the eucalypts
toward the long runway as it completed its tactical analysis. Crude chemical
explosives were stored in multiple locations, but it was the concentration of
enriched U-235 that had drawn it to the area. While primitive nuclear
explosions lacked the focused destructive power of modern quantum weapons, they
nevertheless posed a threat that could not be ignored. Near the fissile
material, the drop ship identified more than two hundred craft capable of
flight. The primitive machines relied on air flowing over curved surfaces to
generate lift, rather than the far more effective propulsion field technology
it used. Unable to determine their role, the drop ship assumed these flimsy
craft were mere decoys, designed to camouflage a genuine threat it could not
detect. This conclusion agreed with the Command Nexus’ current assessment that
the inhabitants were conducting deception operations with primitive technology,
although what advantage they hoped to gain from such efforts was unclear.

The drop ship passed over the perimeter
fence at 4.13 AM, decelerating in a fraction of a second to a complete stop. A
hundred meters away, a four-man Royal Australian Air Force air field defense
squad looked up in amazement. The vehicle’s approach velocity had been so high,
and its deceleration so rapid, it seemed as if a brilliant ball of white light
had simply appeared out of nowhere just inside the south east perimeter fence.

The squad leader fumbled frantically with
his radio. “Foxtrot Four to Tower! There’s something in the air, inside the
fence. Can you see it?”

“It’s probably the moon,” a bored control
tower officer replied.

“It’s not the bloody moon!” the corporal
yelled back as his three companions dived onto the ground, covering the object
with their rifles.

“What does it look like?”

“A ball of light,” the corporal replied,
unaware that the drop ship’s spherical propulsion field was causing the
surrounding air to glow, hiding its rectangular shape against the night sky.
“It’s about twenty meters across.”

The air traffic controller sighed
skeptically. “Mate, there’s nothing on radar.”

“Screw the radar, you idiot, look out the
bloody window!”

By the time the air traffic controller had
walked to the tower window, the corporal had taken up position alongside his
three companions. The squad held their fire as the spherical light had made no
hostile move, while fifty meters away, the operators of a rapier missile
struggled unsuccessfully to get a radar lock. On the far side of the runway, an
American patriot battery couldn’t get a lock either, so they fired by line of
sight, hoping for in-flight acquisition. The missile got halfway to the target,
then its rocket motor inexplicably cut out and it nosed into the ground and
exploded.

Finally, the control tower woke up. Sirens
began wailing across the base as startled Australian and American crews raced
to their Super Hornets, Lightning IIs and Raptors dispersed through the
hardstands east of the runway. Each hardstand was covered by a wide curved
metal roof and flanked by revetments to shield the parked aircraft from bomb
blasts. Not far from the complex of hardstands, army crews ran to Tiger and
Apache attack helicopters. Gradually, turbines began to whine and rotors began
to turn, but it was all too slow.

The drop ship’s rear hull dilated and a
heavily armored battloid floated out, unseen inside the brilliant light of the
propulsion field. Once clear of the drop ship, the battloid floated on its two
anti-g sleds down through the glowing sphere toward the ground. To the troops
defending the runway, the sphere of light above the battloid vanished, only to
instantly reappear five hundred meters away. No one guessed it was a burst of
hyper acceleration followed immediately by an equally powerful burst of hyper deceleration.
A few moments later, a second battloid emerged from the ball of light, then the
drop ship disappeared again. It climbed to geosynchronous orbit, where it
parked safely out of range of ground based weapons, and began feeding the two
battloids’ real time orbital intelligence.

The battloids floated towards the dispersed
aircraft, and the men trying to get them aloft, while the drop ship jammed the
base’s communications and continuously scanned a circular zone ten kilometers
across. Over the next few billionths of a second, the two machines on the
ground and the drop ship high above confirmed priorities, allocated
responsibilities and agreed tactics, then they opened fire.

The first battloid blasted the patriot
battery that had attacked the drop ship, turning it into a blazing inferno. On
the battloid’s flank, the RAAF air field defense squad opened up with their
assault rifles. Their bullets flashed uselessly against the battloid’s shields
while alerting the machine to the presence of their feeble kinetic weapons. The
battloid knew one of its kind had been destroyed hours before, and such weapons
had played a part, so it reordered its targeting priorities to ensure all
kinetic weapons would be rapidly eliminated. A moment later, the four soldiers vanished
in a wall of fire. Before one of its weapon arms had finished annihilating the
air field guards, another reduced the rapier missile battery to a burning ruin.
The deadly black machine then advanced, its weapon arms spewing streams of
super heated plasma across the taxi ways, incinerating the fighters in their
hardstands, and detonating the bombs slung beneath their wings. Flaming
shrapnel from exploding fighters cut flight and ground crews to pieces and flew
high into the air, only to rain destruction upon nearby aircraft and buildings.

Half a kilometer away, an apache climbed
into the air and raked the second battloid its with thirty millimeter chain
gun. The battloid’s shields flashed, then one of its weapon arms popped up
above its overlapping shields and fired at the Apache. The gunship exploded,
then crashed onto the concrete apron, its spinning rotors carving a bloody
swath of destruction through nearby ground crew and choppers alike. The
battloid blasted the other helicopters with all of its weapons simultaneously,
igniting fuel tanks and rockets and scattering dead and burning bodies around
the blazing hulks.

With the aircraft annihilated, the
battloids approached the buildings and bunkers that housed the base’s equipment
and weapon stockpiles. Air field defense personnel ran for cover, firing small
arms, rifles and machine guns, while weapon arms laced the air, effortlessly
cutting them down. A squad of US Marines managed to launch a shoulder fired
javelin missile, but the battloid shot the missile out of the air, then the
marines vanished in a sea of flame. The battloids swept on through the fires,
gliding over charred corpses and incinerating the buildings with their eight
weapon arms, determined to leave nothing standing. Bombs and missiles stored in
underground bunkers were hit by blasts that tore through the concrete and steel
protecting them like paper. The explosions sent massive black plumes into the
sky, carving deep craters in the earth and scattering debris across the runway.

A US air force general who carried a
briefcase chained to his wrist, and a colonel holding a small tool set, ran to
an isolated building surrounded by army trenches and razor wire. The building
stood alone, beyond the end of the runway, far away from the operational areas
of the base. The soldiers guarding it knew the officers by sight, but still
took a moment to glance at their IDs. Once past the checkpoint, the officers
ran inside, slamming the door behind them, partly to conceal what they were
doing, partly to block out the heat that was already radiating from the furious
inferno consuming the eastern side of the runway. They ran to the first of
thirty nuclear-tipped missiles, neatly stored on carriages ready for transport
out to strike aircraft that no longer existed. The weapons had been brought in
at tree top level from the south the day before, after having undergone a rapid
deployment from their storage facility in the US.

The colonel began unscrewing a panel on the
side of the first missile, while the general keyed open the security locks on
his brief case. There’d been no Presidential order, no agreement of
governments, but they had a standing instruction not to allow these weapons to
fall into enemy hands. The general pulled out a red folder, glanced at the
serial number on the side of the missile, then looked up its arming code.

The sounds of explosions and the chatter of
automatic fire grew louder as the battloids approached and regular and special
forces fought vainly against an enemy they could not match.

“Got it,” the colonel said, as he pulled
the panel clear of the missile. He was sweating as much from fear as from the
rising heat, but he was determined to carry out this last order.

The building shook from the shock waves of
nearby explosions then a burst of searing yellow energy punched through a metal
wall, flashed across the storage facility and tore through the opposite wall.
The general winced at the heat, but didn’t waste time looking up. Instead, he
read out the arming code in as clear and methodical a voice as he could muster,
while the colonel typed the long series of numbers and letters into the control
panel. When the colonel finished, a red light activated forming the word ARMED.

“Set the timer to zero seconds,” the
general said.

The colonel quickly carried out the order.
“Done.”

“Let’s see how these sons of bitches like
fifty kilotons!” the general said, knowing he was about to die.

Together, they reached for the fire button,
their last act. Before their fingers touched the control, the building was
sliced apart by super heated particles, killing them both instantly and
shattering the nuclear missiles. Radioactive material from thirty exposed cores
scattered across the floor as the roof collapsed. The building was soon
engulfed in a fire storm so hot, steel supports burned like paper.

Seven minutes after the drop ship had
appeared, the two battloids ceased firing. The base and its aircraft had been
destroyed and its small arsenal of nuclear weapons neutralized.

There were no survivors.

* * * *

“Emergency action
message incoming,” Master Chief Joe Paxton, the chief of the watch, declared as
the printer kicked to life.

Captain Bourke, commander of the nuclear
powered cruise missile submarine
USS Michigan
, watched the coded message
print out. He stood in the sub’s nerve center, surrounded by crewman seated at
their consoles, aware something strange was happening topside. The
Michigan
had been on alert ever since they’d been ordered to make a high speed run
across the Java Sea, through the Sunda Strait into the seas north of Australia.
There’d been no explanation, yet the urgency and secrecy of the directive had
been clear. The boat was now at its highest state of readiness, although the
skipper was still unsure if this was a drill, or something more serious.

When the chief retrieved the EAM from the
printer, the skipper glanced at Commander Thompson. Keeping his voice relaxed
to mask his tension, he said. “Break out the code book, XO.”

“Aye sir,” the boat’s executive officer
said, turning to the stainless steel safe that contained the boats most secret
documents.