There was a stunned, angry silence after the video faded away. No one stretched, coughed, or shifted in their seats as they should have after such a long period of sitting still. I glanced at O’Leary, seeing the surprise and shock in my mind mirrored on her face. She still clenched my hand with a white-knuckled grip.
Slowly, like the sound of surf on a beach, a murmur arose from my fellow soldiers. Colonel Smith stood at the front of the room, watching the reaction of the men and women in front of him. I cocked my head to the side and studied him. He had made this presentation several times—to high ranking civilian officials, to officers in the armed services, and now, to us. He looked almost like a conductor, judging the moment to raise his baton. I realized that he was letting the tension and anger build in us until the moment was right for him to speak. His eyes locked with mine, each of us sharing a cold gaze.
Surprisingly, he inclined his head and nodded at me, acknowledging the fact that I knew what he was doing. I leaned back in my seat, my hand still held tightly by O’Leary.
“What is it, Michael?” Shannon asked from beside me. “How can you be so cool about this?”
I shrugged, leaning my head back against the back of the seat and closing my eyes. “This is being done for a purpose, Shannon. This isn’t just a FYI.”
She tapped my hand against the arm of my chair. “Look at me,” she said. I remained with my eyes closed. “Michael. Look at me. Please.”
I raised my head and looked at her. Tears were forming at the corner of her clear, green eyes. Her cheeks were flushed with emotion. “Why would they show this to us if it wasn’t to keep us informed?”
I motioned with my head toward Colonel Smith, who looked about ready to gather our attention. “He’s playing us like a piano, Shannon. I don’t resent it, certainly not given the circumstances, but it doesn’t mean I don’t recognize it.” I sighed. “I would almost prefer that they tell us this stuff straight-up in a briefing, rather than in a slickly produced montage of actual footage. There were so many cuts and dissolves in it that I couldn’t say for sure if they left something out. Can you?”
“No, but I—”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Colonel Smith said. “I trust that you’ve had enough time to digest what you’ve just seen.” The conversational buzz slowly died around us as we turned toward him. “I needn’t remind you that this is classified information. Had all of you not been on an extended tour of duty, and not likely to come into contact with our media, you would not have been shown any of this.”
There was something ominous in what he said. Certainly we were not going to see home anytime soon, and I knew that all of our outgoing transmissions were on a thirty second delay, subject to censorship, but I had never realized what a tight rein the Marines would keep on the information they gave us. I began to wonder if I really would see home again.
“So that was first contact. A survey ship, privately owned by two of our largest aerospace corporations, brutally attacked. If not for the courageous actions of Pilot Officer Samuels…”
There were several coughs and cleared throats at Colonel Smith’s choice of words.
”If not for his courageous actions,” Smith repeated, “two human members of the crew of Mojave Sunrise might have fallen into enemy hands.”
“That was twelve years ago. NASA representatives were present in the Earth-side control room for the mission. They immediately placed the whole facility under arrest. Within twenty minutes, agents from the FBI had secured the building, allowing no one to leave until high ranking military and civilian officials had been informed.”
We all knew the legal fallout that had occurred from that. The director of the FBI and the Attorney General had both been forced to resign as a result of their actions. In hindsight, no one could deny that the information had to be tightly controlled lest it stimulate a general panic across the entire globe, but someone had to take the fall for giving the orders to illegally detain so many men and women. It hadn’t stopped the resulting lawsuits, but it gave our government plausible deniability.
“We placed our armed services on their highest alert. Telescopes and radar devices used for astronomy and orbital traffic control were diverted to sweep the volume of space around Earth constantly, to provide as much warning as possible of an attack.”
The video sprang to life again, showing Earth spinning lazily on its axis with diamond-hard pinpoints of light indicating space stations, factories, and shipyards building the new generation of mass conversion ships for exploitation of the deep solar system.
“The government of the United States quickly informed the EU and China, providing them with carefully edited portions of the video footage you’ve just seen. The leaders of each country gathered the next day to discuss military preparations for extra-terrestrial invasion.
“The President made his historic ‘We Are Not Alone’ speech to a joint session of congress on December 1, 2065, a scant four days after the attack on the Mojave Sunrise. In the speech, President Hawthorne asked for broad cooperation from industrial and civilian resources.”
A video, featuring the famous visage of President Daniel Hawthorne, replaced the slowly spinning Earth. The final moments of the speech filled the room, his even, Southwest-accented tenor instantly recognizable.
“I come to you tonight not as an American, a Catholic, or a man. I come to you without any sort of label to distinguish me from my brothers and sisters across the globe. I come to you as a human, beseeching you, my fellow humans, to gird yourselves for the coming days. We no longer have the luxury of strife or division amongst ourselves. It is time for us to shed the bonds of our racial childhood. Let us renew our ties as a unified race with a common purpose, forged in the crucible of conflict. Let us remember the lessons of our own troubled history, and carry forward our destiny to the stars. Let us use our ingenuity, our perseverance, and our hope to carry us through the dark days ahead to a final victory.”
President Hawthorne paused for a moment in the video, looking thoughtfully into the camera.
“I ask that a state of war be declared between the United States of America and the alien race our scientists are calling the ‘Rak’Lan.’” He looked down for a moment. “May God help us all,” he finished, and crossed himself.
Colonel Smith spoke, his voice harsh after the moving speech that all of us had heard repeated over and over again. “After nearly two months of mobilization, we had still not heard anything from the Rak’Lan. We had completed our third generation propulsion system before our second even saw wide-spread use. Our scientists had developed weapons systems based on rail gun technology. We had perfected the use of relativistic missile systems, firing projectiles to almost the speed of light from a body possessing zero acceleration.
“We were as ready as we could be with the technology we had. When the Rak’Lan failed to appear as we had predicted, mass demonstrations were staged across the globe, protesting the appropriation of resources and the collectivization of industries in the preparations for war. The governments of the USA, China, and the EU, riding a wave of popularity following Hawthorne’s speech, began to feel the pressure of their constituencies. The Rak’Lan became a joke amongst pundits and comedians. Conspiracy theorists speculated that the entire first contact story had been a fabrication.”
“Committees in the legislatures of major world powers began to demand satisfactory answers to questions regarding the military-industrial complex. Public opinion turned against the war preparations, with most of those polled convinced that it didn’t make ‘sense’ for the Rak’Lan to attack us. They were obviously from another star system, so experts in military logistics began to make the rounds of popular talk shows, saying how ludicrous it was to expect a supply chain to support an invasion across a minimum of four light years. A growing minority favored negotiation, thinking that mistakes had been made in the first contact. They felt that we could talk to the Rak’Lan as equals and potential allies, not as enemies.
“On April 14, 2066, orbital traffic control picked up a faint radar bounce from an incoming object. It was moving much faster than an asteroid or comet, and it was unquestionably headed directly for Earth.
“President Hawthorne gave the orders for our ship-mounted rail guns to engage the incoming object at maximum range. A barrage of projectiles, most of them less than a kilogram in mass, flew outward from Earth orbit, moving at nearly ten percent of the speed of light.
“As some of you may or may not know, a ship based weapon requires a ‘firing solution’ in order to accurately direct ordinance at incoming objects. This firing solution can be a simple match of position and acceleration, or it can be a complicated guessing game played between two AI’s as objects change both the magnitude and the direction of their vectors in an attempt to dodge or intercept.
“The computers guiding the rail guns were inadequate to the task of intercepting the incoming object, which began evasive maneuvers as it approached ten million kilometers. We all know the rest of the story.”
We certainly did. On April 14, 2066, a hollow asteroid encased in a ceramic shell designed to withstand atmospheric entry, fell with pinpoint accuracy on the San Francisco Bay area. In an instant, what had once been one of the most populous areas in the world and a seat to major innovators in information technology became a crater.
The impact triggered several Earthquakes in the surrounding areas, leveling towns as far away as Bakersfield. Twelve minutes after San Francisco was destroyed, another projectile entered the atmosphere and made a controlled fall onto the city of Shanghai with much the same result.
Our ships in orbit detected another two projectiles entering Earth space and managed to destroy them before they entered the atmosphere. It was estimated that 12 million people died in the initial impacts. The resulting earthquakes and breakdown in services killed another 10 million.
That was before the plague.
Shortly after the attacks, global authorities determined that the target areas were non-radioactive and scrambled rescue and relief efforts. Organizations ranging from the National Guard to the Red Cross entered the areas, in some cases in the midst of strong earthquakes. They worked on the outskirts of the impact, based on the theory that if there were any survivors, they would likely be far removed from the massive energy release.
After nearly a day at work, the relief workers began to complain of restlessness and short tempers. The frustration of finding so many dead was apparently taking its toll. Oddly, many of the workers were able to work far beyond the limits of human endurance. Global media attempted to immortalize them as heroes, saying that the situation made them superhuman, but medical professionals observing the relief efforts began to believe that there was something wrong.
By the third day, fights among the rescue workers were common. At first, this was attributed to short tempers and a lack of sleep. The first people to rush into the deadliest areas were by nature the most competitive ones. The drive and desire to be the first to find a living, breathing person seemed to overwhelm many. By the end of the third day, however, the rescue workers were killing one another with whatever was available. Scenes of riots became commonplace, with men and women crushing each other with rubble and digging tools.
Reacting quickly, the United States put a quick quarantine around the area, staffing it with soldiers from the recent mobilization. They were given orders to stand their posts in CBW gear and to shoot any person who tried to break out of quarantine. News crews trapped in the quarantine zone continued to relay footage as long as they stayed sane, but by the seventh day after the attack, the only images from within the quarantine zone were provided by satellite and UAV.
Scientists at the CDC quickly analyzed the culprit. A virus that was contained in sealed ceramic beads, designed to shatter in the terrific release of energy on impact had been encased in the asteroid. The beads were scattered across most of the blast zone and in the area immediately around it. The beads were about the size of a small marble or a mothball, unremarkable and decidedly un-extraterrestrial.
The virus was a brilliant piece of biological engineering. Designed to play the human brain like an accordion, the virus boosted the production of adrenaline and released the chemicals which controlled aggression and paranoia. The virus harnessed the human body’s machinery to transform the host into a raving, homicidal lunatic. Keyed to human metabolism, the virus was designed to destroy itself on the tenth day after its first replication. By maintaining a tight quarantine, the United States had managed to stop the plague from becoming an epidemic.
China, on the other hand, failed to heed the warnings of the United States. Unable to maintain an effective quarantine, the plague kept spreading outward from the epicenter at Shanghai. In desperation, they used tactical nuclear weapons to halt the advance of both the plague and the plague carriers. Governments around the world condemned the Chinese use of nuclear weapons against their own citizenry, but no one could argue with the results. China, too, had contained the plague.
Those in the world who had declared the Rak’Lan a fabrication of governments across the globe were proven wrong by two weeks of hell. Humankind was now wholly at war.
Colonel Smith continued to speak as the horrific images of the plague assailed us. Most of us had seen some of the less graphic images that had been paraded through newscasts. These were gruesome—men and women assaulted each other with the tools intended for saving lives. A montage of video, running nearly one minute, showed almost one death per second. Workers wearing Red Cross arm bands where killing those in National Guard uniforms, men in the same squad were killing each other. One particularly repulsive video showed a lone soldier furtively butchering a rotting human corpse and shoving scraps of raw flesh into his mouth. Another image that was burned indelibly into my brain was that of a young woman swinging a pick at a fallen comrade, laughing as the sharp end of the tool ran crimson with blood.
I had been an eight year old when the attacks had happened. I could still remember my mom ushering me out of our living room during the evening news. I also remember that the internet news feeds were heavily censored by my parents over the next several weeks. School had been cancelled for several days while our race digested the horrors that had been visited upon it. I had been so full of questions, but my father refused to speak to me about it, and my mother would just hold me and cry silently. I never really understood. I had trained to answer the Rak’Lan for these atrocities, but I had never really known what an impact that this must have had on the lives of my parents. They had lived through the horror first-hand.
I turned my attention back to Colonel Smith as he began to speak again. “If anyone had any doubts remaining, they kept them quiet. Our military immediately recognized the need for bolstered defenses. Two asteroids were captured and installed above and below the plane of the ecliptic, held stationary over the North and South Poles by careful calculations. Mass drivers were installed, controlled by some of the most complicated artificial intelligences ever devised by man.”
“Fire control schemes for our rapidly expanding space-borne navy became more sophisticated, with our reaction time and detection limits being limited only by the speed of light. Over the next several years, we engaged in skirmishes with Rak’Lan ships attempting to push into the asteroid belt. Most of the time, we were lucky to fight them to a draw, but our tactics and technology improved with each engagement. Slowly, we began to drive them outward, securing forward bases on the asteroids Ceres, Juno, and Pallas.”
“Salvage crews pored over the wreckage of our engagements as we began to achieve limited victories. A whole new method of thinking emerged from the study of Rak’Lan artifacts in the fields of physics, materials science, and computer science. The lead time between a concept for a new system and its implementation was reduced to weeks as engineers and scientists constantly analyzed new data, applied it, and then turned to still further refinements. In some cases, the first time a new concept was tested was in combat.”
The video showed what we had come to recognize as a modern ship-of-the-line. “In the past two years, we have slowly introduced the Raptor class of capital ship into the fight. Based in part on salvaged Rak’Lan technology, Raptorclass ships mount a broadside of twenty missile tubes, two forward mounted and two aft mounted rail guns, a point defense missile system consisting of particle beams and old-style miniguns, and mine-laying capability. The standard crew complement is only sixty men and women, with a Marine detachment of fifty-two. There are two assault boats and two fighters in an aft facing launch bay. The last two missile tubes on each broadside can be outfitted with troop capsules, capable of launching marines in hardened vacuum gear toward enemy ships or space stations where the use of assault boats is not feasible.”
Shannon and I exchanged a look. We had heard rumors in training that this was the case, but to our knowledge, this method of troop delivery was purely theoretical. Were there Marine units out there that had willingly stepped into those capsules to be launched across the emptiness to board a Rak’Lan ship?
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us up to date. I will say that both our Navy and our Marine corps is largely inexperienced and unproven, although that is changing rapidly. I won’t damage your morale by mentioning casualty figures,” there was a general half-hearted chuckle, “but I will say that they have drastically improved over the last two years. Many of you will be serving as NCOs in the new Raptor class vessels as they patrol the inner solar system against Rak’Lan incursions.”
He turned off the video and stood at ease in front of us. “I’ll take questions if anyone has them.”
There was silence for a moment before a woman on the other side of the room tentatively raised her hand. At a nod from Colonel Smith, she cleared her throat. “Where do the Rak’Lan come from?”
It was an excellent question. Most experts speculated that they came from the nearest G-type star, Alpha Centauri, at just over four light years away. Our own deep space telescopes had verified there was at least one planet in the inner system of that star that was in the hypothetical “life zone.” However, no one really knew for sure.
Smith looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I’m not at liberty to say,” he replied.
There was an angry murmur from the crowd around me. “Why not?” The woman persisted. “It’s not as if I’m going to be able to run home and tell anyone. Even if you have a guess, it would shed some light on the subject.”
Smith turned his cold gaze on the first few rows of the auditorium where the officers were sitting. I could see several shrugs from my angle. One of them, belonging to a general that was obviously Smith’s superior officer, nodded at him. “We have evidence,” he began, “of two separate task forces. One of them originates from the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri A, the other from Tau Ceti. They are unquestionably of the same race, so we may be looking at a multi-system empire.” A murmur arose. We might be facing the resources of not one, but two star systems.
Another hand was raised in the row in front of us. Smith nodded in our direction. “Do the Rak’Lan possess some means of faster than light travel?”
“We’re not sure. Their in-system weaponry is certainly limited to the Einstein wall, but we have no idea of their out-system capability. Our scientists and engineers are carefully sorting through the impressive amount of wreckage we’ve recently accumulated in securing the Jovian system, so we may have some insight soon.”
“Why are the Rak’Lan here?” another voice called from behind us.
Smith shrugged. “No one knows. Conquest? Resources? Since the evidence shows they originate from two separate systems, they may be trying to consolidate our system into their empire.”
“What was our immediate response to the destruction of the Mojave Sunrise?”
“Nearly four hours after the attack, a message was sent across the entire EM band demanding that the Rak’Lan declare their intentions. There was no military response until our first ship-to-ship engagement, which was after San Francisco and Shanghai were destroyed.”
I stood.
Smith looked at me intently. I let the whispers die around the auditorium, trying to ensure that most everyone was looking at me when I asked my question. “What aren’t you showing us, Colonel Smith? Sure, we’ve seen more than the general public, but what else is there?”
Smith chuckled wryly. “You should be a lawyer, Sergeant—”
“Collins,” I interrupted as he squinted to read my name tag.
“Why of course, Sergeant Collins, we’re showing you everything you need to know.” He turned away from us and began to pack his things. “I think that’s enough questions for the evening.” He nodded to his commanding officer and left the stage.
Sergeant Abrams stood at the front of the auditorium. “Dis-missed!” he yelled, before leaving quickly. It seemed that we weren’t the only ones who were disturbed by what we had seen.
