“Alamo, restrain the furniture!” I ordered. “I might be injured by it!”
Arms snaked out and pinned everything down. I pushed the ruined table out of the way and sat on the leather couch, which was now against the back wall of the bridge. It was smeared with peanut butter. I felt myself pressed back into the cushions. Was that the sensation of gee-forces? Could we be accelerating that fast? I hadn’t felt anything when moving over the Earth, so how fast were we going now?
I didn’t have any answers. I smelled the powerful odor of beer, it had gone everywhere, and I could feel the cool liquid sinking into my pants to touch my skin.
“Alamo? What the hell is going on?” I demanded.
“Command personnel must prepare for battle. What are your orders?”
Battle? “Alamo, put me on the public ship-to-ship channel. I want to hear what the other ships are broadcasting.”
Immediately, a chorus of confused voices filled the bridge. There were people chattering, some were screaming.
“What the hell is that?” asked Sandra, still pinned to the ceiling.
“Alamo, put Sandra in that armchair.”
She floated, red marks and purple bruises around her limbs, as the ship put her into the chair as I’d instructed.
“Do you know what the frigging hell is happening, Kyle?” Sandra asked.
“Not exactly, but I think we are flying up into space. And it’s happening to everyone who is part of this ‘fleet’.”
I heard Jack Crow’s voice, roaring for calm. He asked people to shut up and sound off, his people first. I had to admit, hearing a single commanding voice and having that voice give you something to do did help fight the panic everyone must be feeling. The screams stopped and people did as they were told.
After twenty or so people had sounded off, Crow called upon the rogues to report. Only twenty? So, Crow had padded his numbers, telling me he had thirty in his group. Still, there were only about another twenty rogues who called out afterward, including myself. That made up a total of about forty ships. That sounded low to me, the fleet was supposed to be over seven hundred ships strong. What were all those other ships doing? Were they still looking for ‘command personnel’? That meant, essentially, they were still down on Earth prowling around pulling people out of bed and killing them. I shuddered, remembering my own kids. I thought about asking the ship how my kids were doing, but stopped myself. What if it was bad news? What if one of them hadn’t made it? I would be distracted and I needed my mind operating right now. I tried to reach for a cold area of my mind, a place where emotions feared to tread. I needed to focus on this battle—whatever it was about, if any of us were going to survive the experience.
“By my count, some of you are either staying quiet, unable to communicate, or dead,” said Crow. “We’ll presume the latter.” He told them all to order their ships to secure everything they had brought onboard, which I had already done.
I hated the sensation of flying blind. Where were we? Where were these enemies we couldn’t even see? I realized the problem was undoubtedly due to different alien physiology. Whoever had built this ship, it now seemed clear to me, had no eyes. Or at least, vision was a secondary sense for them.
Crow was calling out more names repeatedly now. I got the idea very quickly that some people weren’t responding. What had happened to them? Were they already dead? Had they been crushed by their couches or had these enemies shot them down? What in the nine hells, exactly, were we supposed to do when we found these enemies? I had no idea how to operate this ship other than ordering it to pull things through the windows of my own house.
Sometimes, in a panic, things go very badly. Sometimes one’s mind is confused and shocked. Panic can bring out random, useless behavior. But I’ve never been that sort of person. When an emergency rears its ugly head, I’ve always gone cold inside, and my mind seems to operate faster, more accurately. Back when I’d been a reservist, before taking on a teaching job, I’d been an industrial automation specialist. One year, my occupation had gotten me into real trouble. Paid to build a computer system to control a chemical reactor that produced robine for an auto parts manufacturer, I’d done something wrong. I’d crossed two points in the reactor’s database. I recalled the moment vividly, as the plant went into emergency shutdown and my mind was jolted into high gear. I realized in an instant that I had made a mistake, and what the mistake was. Thousands of lines of code, and I’d made one critical error. My mind had gone cold then, too. I’d worked the reactor controls with great speed, fearing an exothermic reaction and a fire. In the end, there had been a big clean-up and some muttering about lawsuits, but no one had died.
The gee-forces pressing me into my wet leather couch increased. We were accelerating. We were heading up into the sky, toward I knew not what. Like a car crash, events seem to slow down and take on a hyper-real quality. Then I got an idea.
“Alamo, I want you to manipulate the forward wall of the bridge. I want you to shape it into the shape of objects outside the ship. I want to see—bumps on the wall, raised surfaces, for each friendly ship and enemy ship.”
It seemed to take a long time, but I’m sure it was no more than thirty seconds before the wall opposite us, the wall that had almost become our ceiling, changed. It came to resemble a silver blanket under which dozens of beetles crawled slowly, independently. As we watched, the beetle swarm converged closer together.
“Where the hell are we going?” asked Sandra, staring at the wall that had now become a metallic relief-map like a radar screen. “And which one is us?”
“Alamo, can you color friendly ships? Green or—gold?” I thought of the brassy color of Sandra’s pupils when she’d been blind. Could the ship have put metal in her? Liquid metal? I pushed away the thought. We could figure that out later.
The bumps changed color. They took on a reflective, lightly golden color, like melted tin. They reminded me of beads of solder stained with amber resin. All of them looked the same, however.
“Make the enemy a darker color. And show me physical objects like the Earth and the Moon—with a neutral gray.”
The wall shimmered and a large portion of the wall to the left became a curved surface.
“That must be the Earth. We’re leaving it behind,” said Sandra in a lost voice. “Why aren’t we floating?”
“We are accelerating so fast that it’s pressing us backward,” I said. “If we slow down and coast, we should start to float.”
“Hey, what’s that?” asked Sandra, pointing. “Something is moving toward us over on the far wall.”
We stared at the walls. Over to our right was a fist-sized, rust-red thing. The small golden swellings on the forward wall slowly left the crescent of Earth behind and slid toward the rust-colored thing. All the moving contacts were on a collision course.
“That must be the enemy our ship spoke of,” I said. “Look at it. Whatever it is, it looks a lot bigger than us.”
“Kyle?” asked Sandra after a quiet moment.
“What?”
“Any chance you can take me back home and let me off at your farm? I think I’ve changed my mind.”
-8-
It took a bit of shouting on the open channel, but I managed to describe to everyone the instructions to give to their ships to get a view of the outside world. Once they listened and obeyed, there were alarmed gasps.
“The Snapper is requesting a private channel,” said the ship.
“Okay, allow it.”
“Kyle? That was great work. Thanks a lot for that info. We can all see what we are up against now. Any more ideas on how to fight against this big red thing coming at us?”