“Our Navy is completely useless against them. Once that light closes around a planet …seals around the planet, we’re cut off. We can’t send messages in, and no messages come out. We’re working under the assumption that everyone on the planet is dead.
“The aliens don’t have ships, so we can’t put up a blockade. We can’t engage their land troops from space because the light shields them from us. Who knows what field tactics they use.”
“And there’s no way to send a landing force in to investigate?” I asked.
Brocius laughed. “Like I told you before, once they sleeve the planet, we’re cut off. Nothing gets in or out of that ion curtain.” Brocius’s frustration showed. He snarled these words, then repeated them softly. “We even tried sending in a self-broadcasting ship. We programmed it to broadcast in under the curtain.”
“Did it make it?” I asked.
Brocius fixed me with a patronizing grin. “You tell me. We never heard back.”
I stared at the monitor. It showed a planet encased in that gleaming light. “So it’s possible that people are alive down there. For all you know, they won the battle, and they just can’t send a signal out.”
“It seems a little more likely that they are all dead, don’t you think?” Brocius asked. “We don’t know anything except that as soon as the light spreads over one planet, the aliens move on to the next.”
The image on the monitor panned out to a view of the Scutum-Crux Arm. This was not a photographic record shot by a satellite, like the one of Little Man. This time the screen showed a computer simulation in which entire solar systems turned dark red when they were invaded. The simulation looked a lot like a demonstration of a circulatory system with blood running through previously empty veins. The map showed the steady and unalterable progress of the invasion. On the bottom of the screen, a small window ticked off dates as the red tide covered the galaxy. It took twenty days for the invasion to reach Terraneau, the capital of the Scutum-Crux Arm, and there the simulation stopped.
“Part of the Scutum-Crux Fleet was orbiting Terraneau when the Broadcast Network went down, it’s been there ever since. We lifted a scientist from the planet before it was cut off. Without the Network, we couldn’t evacuate the planet.”
“Why haven’t you restored the Network?” I asked.
“It’s too late now,” Brocius said. “By the time we detected the invasion, it was too late.”
He paused, brightened slightly, and added, “Of course, Scutum-Crux is Confederate Arms territory. Even if the Network were up, we might not have activated it in their territory.” Scutum-Crux was among the first arms to declare independence from the Unified Authority.
“Terraneau went just like every other battle—the light field closed the planet. After that, your guess is as good as mine,” Brocius said. “The battleships were useless.”
On the screen, the simulation ticked off two days with no movement, then the red portion of the galaxy began expanding. The blood-colored stream entered the Cygnus Arm, spreading slowly into the Norma Arm, then Perseus.
“Even if we could evacuate people, we just plain don’t have anyplace to relocate them. I suppose we have time to bring a few million refugees to Earth, but it’s just a matter of time.”
The computer started its countdown anew. By day two hundred, the entire Scutum-Crux Arm was flooded with red, and Norma, Cygnus, and Perseus were looking pretty damn crimson.
“I don’t suppose we’ve been able to contact them to negotiate,” I said.
“We did negotiate with them, and rather successfully, too. That’s the problem. Our negotiator was the late Senator Morgan Atkins.”
The simulation resumed, only now it seemed to gain momentum. The calendar on the bottom of the screen did not accelerate, but the spreading of reddened territory did. Over the next fifty days, all of Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus turned red. The Galactic Eye, the star-rich vortex of the galaxy, turned red in a matter of twenty days.
“That cannot be,” I said.
Brocius paused the simulation.
“The Galactic Eye …there are a billion stars in that part of the galaxy.”
“They move fast, the bastards,” Brocius said. “The real problems are just beginning. Check the date.”
The calendar at the bottom of the screen said October 23, 2514—just six weeks ago.
“We always know exactly where they are going to attack next, Harris. It’s a straight march. Strategy has nothing to do with this campaign.”
I looked at the map of the galaxy on the monitor and saw what he meant. The aliens had landed on the far end of the galaxy and were working their way straight across. “They might as well phone their plans in to us in advance,” I said.
“They have,” Brocius said. “The map you are looking at was taken from a signal they transmitted on Earth.”
“They gave us this map?” I asked. “What about the calendar?”
“We added that,” Brocius said. “We synchronized their attack to our calendar system. So far, it’s been a perfect match.” With this, he tapped the monitor, and the simulation continued up to December 18, 2514.
“That was yesterday,” I said as I watched the red area marking invaded territory flood into the Orion Arm. “They sent this?”
“They’re still sending it,” Brocius said. “They transmit it on a continuous signal on several of our military frequencies.”
“How often do they update it?” I asked.
“They don’t. This is what they have been sending for over a year now. They told us exactly what they planned to do from the start, and they’ve gone and done it. The only explanation we can come up with is that they don’t really care about killing humans; what they’re really after is capturing planets.”
The simulation started again. The days ticked by quickly. On March 15, the red area expanded to include the inner section of the Orion Arm, that part of the galaxy where Earth was located.
“Three months?” I asked.
“They’re coming, Harris. God help us, they’re coming.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Have you ever heard of a planet called New Copenhagen?” Admiral Brocius asked. He looked old and broken-down. For as long as I had known Brocius, he had been a chubby old man with high corners on his hairline and a double chin. Time and stress had taken a toll. Over the last year he had grown a decade older, and he had the look of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very little time. His mouth and eyes looked too big for his face, giving him a hungry, startled look. His hairline started higher on his head than I remembered.
“Sounds familiar,” I said, remembering that I had recently heard someone mention the planet without recalling who or why.
Brocius crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, the smirk on his face giving him an expression of mild disgust. “Been following the latest movie-star gossip, have you?”
That tipped the scales in my memory. Christina had mentioned New Copenhagen when she asked me about Ava Gardner. Now that I remembered where I heard the name, I didn’t want to admit it. “Movie-star gossip?” I asked, trying to sound as innocent as I could.
Brocius didn’t bite. “Yes, well, the planet is of strategic value now. It will be the aliens’ last stop before they land on Earth.” He tapped a stylus to the computer screen, and the image closed in on the Orion Arm. Along the arm, flags stood out marking solar systems with inhabited planets. Toward the inner curve of the Orion Arm, already covered in red, was the location of Olympus Kri. I once knew a woman from that planet. Perhaps “knew” was the right word; if everything I had heard this evening was correct, that girl might already be dead.
The map showed three inches of star-strewn space between Olympus Kri and Earth—each inch representing ten thousand light-years. The space around Olympus Kri was outlined in red. So were most of the other solar systems with inhabited planets along the way. But the red tide stopped just shy of one flagged solar system. “The Woden System?” I asked.