An air-shattering alarm started—blatt blatt blatt—and went on and on. Three blasts, repeated every five seconds.
New America was attacking.
CHAPTER 2
Zack tore out of the conference room, running at top speed to the south airlock. He was keying in the code when Toni puffed into the tiny space.
“Zack! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
“Back to Enclave. To be with Susan and Caitlin.”
“You know that’s against orders and anyway they’re safe!”
“Not if the attack is nuclear.” Nuclear bombs were the only thing that could destroy an energy dome. That had first been demonstrated in DC eight years ago. And New York. And so many other places.
Zack said, “Then I want to die with my family.”
“That’s stupid! Dead is dead!”
Zack punched in the last of the manual code and touched the pad for his finger chip to register. Nothing happened.
“Damn! Jenner has us in lockdown!”
“Of course he does. Zack—”
He pounded his fist against the wall, which of course did nothing except make him feel stupid. Toni said, “Come with me to Observation.”
“I’m staying right here until the all clear.”
“All right. We know what an attack looks like anyway.” Toni dusted off a bench in the esuit room, plopped herself down on half of it, and said, “You’re behaving like an idiot.”
“I know.” He sat beside her. But Caitlin was scared of the sirens; she screamed whenever they started. Zack couldn’t communicate with Susan because each dome incorporated something like a Faraday cage. No electromagnetic radiation in, and none out. It was one of the things that made life here so complicated.
At the observation deck on the top of Lab Dome, the opaque bluish shimmer of the dome became a clear shimmer. Colonel Jenner had his command post at the top of Enclave Dome. But Toni was right—Zack knew what an attack by New America looked like. Warheads carried by drones would be exploding near and even against the domes, on which they would have no effect whatsoever. Birds would fly up from trees; animals would flee in terror. Fires might start in the forest, but probably not, because it had rained hard just last night. Heat-seeking drones would look for any targets outside the domes: soldiers, scientists, advance-warning equipment. Esuits used the same basic principle as the energy domes, but the suits were far more vulnerable. The basic principle had taken Terran scientists over twenty-five years to understand and duplicate. Before the Collapse, the military had had only two years to construct the first domes, including Monterey Base, as well as a large supply of esuits. It was well that they had the suits, which somehow let in pure, breathable air but filtered out everything else, because there might never be any more.
“I just wish,” Zack said to Toni, “that the bastards would run out of either missiles or drones.”
“They might. Someday. They can’t have an infinite supply. It’s not like anybody can make more.”
“How long has this been?”
“Five minutes. Down, boy. We’re here at least another hour.”
A little less than an hour later, the airlock door began opening from the outside.
Zack and Toni sprang from the bench. The alarm was still blatting. Had the enemy somehow obtained the airlock code? Was Enclave Dome invaded?
A soldier entered, an esuit over his uniform. Not one of the survivors, then. Private Somebody—Zack paid as little attention to the military as possible. The soldier said, “Dr. McKay?”
“Yes. What is—”
“Come with me, please. Colonel Jenner has requested your presence.”
“Me? What happened? Is Enclave safe? Is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A closer look, and Zack realized how young the soldier was. Eyes open wide, color high, a seedpod ready to burst with information.
“What is it, Private?”
The soldier said, “A ship is coming in. A spaceship. From that other planet. It’s here.”
Stunned silence. Then Toni said, “Well. A zebra, after all.”
Jason, in his command post at the top of Enclave Dome, had received news of the attack from his master sergeant, who received it from the perimeter patrol, who received it from Lieutenant Li at the signal station.
Signaler was the most dangerous position in this transformed warfare. Domes that could not be penetrated by electromagnetic radiation meant that advance-warning equipment must be hidden somewhere outside, and so must the two soldiers who manned the station at all times. The station was equipped with radar and the ability to transmit to orbit. If the station detected incoming, the signalers contacted by earplant the soldiers on constant patrol outside the domes, who then had to go inside to sound the alert. All this limited the intel coming from the outside as well as making communication with HQ in Texas clumsy, but there was no way around it.
Since the war began eight years ago, Jason had lost three signalers. Information Tech Specialist Amanda Stevens and Private Luis Almadero had died when a New America missile hit the previous signal station, before the new one was built beneath a hill. Private John Unger, unwisely giving in to boredom, had gone exploring in his esuit and been killed by a cougar. Now Jason staffed the signaling station with a trusted J Squad officer in addition to the IT specialist.
Even at the new station, the early-warning equipment remained outside. No way around that. This was not NORAD, or what NORAD had once been.
Everything about running Monterey Base was complicated. The domes could be constructed only to a given size, with three airlocks above ground and one in the underground annex, which also had a predetermined size. Any deviation from this blueprint and the entire energy-based structure simply disintegrated. No physicists knew why. They might have learned if the Collapse hadn’t come, but it did, and Jason spent hours each day maneuvering around the limitations of the structures that had saved all their lives. First from the bird plague, and then from New America.
It used to be that the signal station received news from orbiting satellites, both military and civilian. But over time, the satellites had failed. No maintenance, no orbital adjustments, no personnel. The US Army was down to one functional comsat. New America also controlled a comsat, and so far neither side had figured out how either to destroy the other’s or to hack its encryption.
“Sir,” Master Sergeant Hillson said over the blatting alarm, “message from Lieutenant Li at the signal station.”
“Go on,” Jason said. Hillson, a thirty-year lifer whom Jason would have trusted with his command if necessary, always spoke slowly, sometimes with pauses between his words. This was not, Jason had learned long ago, because Hillson didn’t know what he thought. The sergeant paused because he was reluctant to let words go. Dragged up dirt poor in some God-forsaken corner of the Ozarks, his instinct was to hold on to everything as long as he could, even words. But his statements, when they finally emerged, were always true. Always.
“Sir, the station has received direct contact from a spaceship.”
Jason said sharply, “The Stremlenie?” No one knew what had happened to the Russian ship.
“No, sir. Lieutenant says the ship claims to be American, coming from World. Calling itself the Return.”
Jason stared. For a long moment, Hillson’s words refused to form themselves into coherent thought. They jumped around randomly, pixels on a deranged screen.
The American ship Friendship had departed Earth twenty-eight years ago. Its mission had been to establish trade relations with the human-aliens who had arrived on Earth ten years earlier, warned Earth about the spore cloud, deceived everyone, and abruptly departed. The Friendship and its twenty-one passengers, including the grandmother that Jason had finished mourning decades ago, had never been heard from again. Perhaps the Russian ship, which had launched shortly afterward, had destroyed the Friendship. Perhaps the alien star drive on both ships had failed. Perhaps World, that unknown planet, had decided to keep the ships and kill the Terrans. After the Collapse, no one on Earth had cared. Only survival mattered.