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  It was a good question. Farel and Haugan didn’t seem surprised, like they’d thought the same thing. Mulne harrumphed, but they all stared at the man before them.

  ‘I’m not privy to all Global Net data, or...thoughts,’ he said. ‘But Global Net did not see the threat until landfall became unavoidable. At this juncture we believe the alien ships used jamming technology, or stealth technology, but it is too early to say.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jones, her voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘So you...whatever you serve, are literally just a talking head? A human mouth for an AI that made zero effort to predict, or warn, or prevent, this? Or one that is fallible to the point of negligence?’ She waved her hand at the screen. ‘You’re telling us with a straight face Global Net didn’t even know when these blimps were approaching? These aliens are so advanced they skirted all our defence and detection measures but managed to basically crash land most of those ships into our cities? We had five hours warning! We’ve been staring up at the skies for thousands of years. We’ve got dishes beyond the Kuiper Belt and satellites and telescopes and telemetry from hundreds of thousands of resources!?’

  It was a good question, and they all knew it.

  ‘And you’re asking us to trust Global Net, and you...on spec?’ Jones continued. No one interrupted her. She was in a fury now. The more she thought about it, the more the whole thing stank like the creatures slaughtering the entire planet were rumoured to smell.

  ‘You’re asking a hell of a lot,’ said Farel. ‘You and your boss. You want us to take you on faith now? Like a God, son?’ said Farel, following Jones’ thread easily enough.

  ‘Does it matter now?’ asked Mulne. ‘Break it down for the dunces in the class,’ he added, pointedly not looking at Jones as she scowled at him. ‘We know what we can do and what we can’t...’

  ‘Are you fucking listening? Are you even awake?’ Jones said. She couldn’t believe Mulne could so easily overlook Global Net’s huge, no, catastrophic, failure.

  ‘I am, Rear Admiral,’ said Mulne, his face turning red. ‘But do you suggest we scrap Global Net while we’re attempting to survive our very extinction? Should we not focus on what we can do right now? Sir,’ said Mulne, turning from Jones. ‘Do we know what the fuck they are?’

  ‘Unprecedented,’ replied the man in the plain suit swiftly, like Mulne’s question was a raft he might clutch in the dangerous rapids of Jones’ growing anger.

  ‘No shit,’ said Farel. ‘They’re aliens.’

  The suited man continued, hoping no one else shot him down, maybe. ‘There are no reliable predictive scenarios. We know little of the enemy. We see different units across the globe with remarkable diversity. We understand the only bipedal ones among them – those with the enlarged cranial features – are something akin to leaders. But we do not know how they communicate, nor their purpose. They are aggressive, determined. Seemingly similar in biological form to much of Earth’s sea life, but with mechanised augmentations.’

  ‘But an excursion? A scout force? An occupying army? Terraforming? Refueling on the way to a nicer planet, perhaps?’ said Haugan and laughed, though there was a hint of hysteria in his humour.

  ‘And we must consider what the repercussions of a slow reaction – do they gain a toehold for a greater force?’ This from Farel. ‘Inaction might be worse. Do they field greater weapons or force than we’ve already seen? Also, if this is an advanced force and are they communicating...’

  ‘To a larger force to come,’ Haugan finished.

  The man with the handset nodded, then paused again as the supercomputer routed more data through his mind, and he made that appear in the diagrams and graphs scrolling for their viewing.

  ‘Any scenario where we come out at all?’ said Farel.

  The man waited, then, sadly, and with the first hint of emotion from him, he shook his head. ‘None. Based on data available, the rate of escalation? We’re looking at small pockets of survivors and the end of the Wide Earth as we know it. It would be preferable to learn more, but should we wait longer to do so? Already we are looking at effective annihilation, to within 5 to 10% of the Earth’s current population, at the current rate of attrition, within two years. Action must be drastic.’

  Death, thought Jones, hating the man’s roundabout way of speaking, but hating the truth, too...he wasn’t lying about that, even if his protestations about fearing the awful truth rang hollow.

  ‘So we’re looking at the end of us, seems like,’ said Haugan.

  ‘Well,’ said Jones, huffing out air and taking a THC cigarette from a silver case, ‘Fuck it then.’ She offered her cigarettes around, and Haugan took one, and a light. Nobody objected. The flashing lights on the graphic before them were more important than any regulations at this point, or appearances.

  ‘We can hit these carriers with ICBM or MIRV?’ said Haugan.

  Jones smoked slowly, the words becoming distant, and let herself drift into supposition.

  ‘Even low yields, we’re looking at global catastrophe,’ said Farel. ‘Billions of people in the first strikes atop of the already unbearable human toll. Two billion now, at our most optimistic estimate. Followed by strikes on a scale sufficient to take out those blimps and their cargo? That’s world changing without the aliens. A different world, and three to four billion...we’d be looking at a 70% casualty margin in the first month. After? You know how that plays, even if the aliens all die. Apocalypse, Armageddon...it’s not a surprise, is it?’ Farel finished his short monologue with a sigh.

  ‘And if the aliens don’t all die,’ said Jones, ‘we will have just razed our cities and centres of population to the ground for nothing.’

  ‘Even if we’re talking billions dead already, we can’t,’ said Haugan. ‘It’s madness. We’re doing their job for them.’

  ‘We don’t know if will work,’ said the man in the suit. ‘Early reports indicated they land, spread, and keep moving. We don’t know how important these ships are. We centre the yield on the ships, data suggests it’s highly possible the invading forces are already spread too wide for a global nuclear solution to be effective.’

  ‘So...death or suicide, basically?’ said Haugan to the man in the suit.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man, after a slight pause. ‘Global Net has no way of determining the effects of secondary radiation on the enemy. That action might in fact result in us killing ourselves, and leaving behind Earth for whatever...these things are.’

  ‘Take their ships out and at least they have nowhere to go,’ said Stavius Mulne, like it was gospel.

  ‘Pardon me, Lieutenant General,’ said Jones. ‘Don’t we want them to go? Excuse me if I’m frank...but we’re getting fucking slaughtered.’ The THC cigarette was calming her, and she felt very forthright just then. Probably would have without the smoke. No sense in worrying about protocol, decorum, or even a person’s feeling when you were facing the end of your species, was there?

  Haugan laughed. ‘I agree with the Admiral,’ he said. ‘We have no right to do this. Not to innocent people.’

  ‘They’re already dead,’ said Mulne, his distaste at the swirling smoke evident.

  Jones felt like sticking her tongue out at the idiot. She settled on blowing her smoke in his direction.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree,’ said Farel. ‘But perhaps instead of global nuclear reaction, local. One hit. Escalate to global nuclear catastrophe atop this? Third base on a first date.’

  ‘It’s not a first date, Sam,’ said Kiyoko. ‘We’re already at fisting.’

  Mulne flushed, but Haugan laughed ‘til he turned red in the face.

  Even now, at the end of the humankind, you have to laugh, don’t you?

  A First Lt. rushed into the war room fast enough for the glass door to rattle in its frame.

  ‘Visuals!’ said the newcomer with such excitement she didn’t salute, or ask permission, and no one considered disciplining her, either.

  ‘Bring it up,’ Mulne told the man in the su
it.

  ‘Forces in the field?’ asked Haugan.

  ‘Fayetteville. 245th Armoured. Exploratory action, General.’

  ‘Well? Bring up concurrent battlefield cams, man,’ said Mulne. The 1st Lt. standing at the back of the room didn’t leave, and nobody seemed to care.

  Global Net’s mouthpiece brought up various available cams on the screen. As he did so, the assembled chiefs of the armed forces watched the feeds and read the accompanying stats.

  ‘It’s a massacre,’ said Haugan.

  ‘Force done anyway?’ asked Mulne, pointedly.

  ‘KES units are at 20% strength. Heavy units are still functional but losses are considerable...’

  20% strength meant 80% dead or disabled. A KES didn’t malfunction. They died. They were a vast step up from an infantryman, but they weren’t D-Guard.

  The man’s statement about the heavies – the D-Guards – being functional proved false in less than a minute as they watched camera after camera go dark. Feeds from the mobile command units watching the battle on site were fed through, too. Global Net sifted all data instantly.

  It wasn’t ‘tolerable’ loss. It was a rout.

  ‘Done,’ said Mulne.

  ‘Whatever the data says, that’s just cold data. Soldiers live. They’re ours, you callous shit,’ said Jones, tired of Mulne’s cavalier attitude to human life.

  ‘Look at the numbers!’ said Stavius Mulne, then, lowered his voice. ‘Look at the casualties, Admiral. The 245th is dead. Hit it now. Wait, and...’

  He pointed, and they looked, and followed Gunnery Sergeant Alante Brockner’ head cam and the aliens.

  ‘Oh...what is that?’ said Jones, seeing for the first time visual evidence confirming those reports coming in from across the A.U. Those bipedal creatures, with heads like crustaceans were on Brockner’s head cam. They spilled out from the ship amid a huge array of awful creations – sea monsters, almost, but with powerful weapons somehow grafted on.

  Those they thought of as the leaders of this invasion were stunning, though. Even through the head cams, they could see the laser fire from the weapons they wielded was startlingly bright, and they wore golden armour on their bodies. Their huge, curved and domed heads were like shells and Jones, watching, had the sense they were intelligent even though they boasted no feature at all.

  A shiver of horror ran up Jones’ spine as she stared at the sight of them.

  ‘Hit it,’ said Stavius. ‘Death save those he might, but hit it.’

  Jones couldn’t look away from the screens, but she was listening.

  ‘I can have sub-orbital airborne in thirty minutes,’ said Farel.

  ‘Wait,’ said Jones. Mulne moved to interrupt, but she growled – actually growled, like a feral dog – at him.

  It is the only sensible option right now. It’s not about one battalion, or one division...it’s the fate of the world.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘I can hit it in five.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Haugan. His expression was grim, and he patted her arm. She didn’t mind the gesture at all. She smiled sadly in return.

  They were about to strike and destroy their own territory. Their own men and women in the field would burn so they could know if anything could halt this catastrophe. Death, in exchange for a chance. A roll of fission-tipped dice.

  Rear Admiral Jones switched her PL-com to alternating frequency mode, and spoke for ten seconds to the A.U.S. Bohr, gave authorisation, and stubbed out her THC cigarette directly on the desk.

  11.

  Fat Boy Rain

  A.U.S. Bohr

  The Destroyer A.U.S. Bohr cut a huge swath through choppy Atlantic waters running full-engines from station near Grand Bahama toward the coast of Georgia. Seventy-five nautical miles from Savannah she launched an Interceptor small-yield thermonuclear weapon at Fayetteville, North Carolina.

  Minutes later, a forty-five kiloton explosion from a low atmospheric detonation flashed white. Then came the secondary flash. Wind stronger than a hurricane. Sonic thunder. Electric pulses dancing through the growing cloud and a nuclear storm front.

  The giant alien carrier ship and everything within nearly a two-mile radius was gone in an instant. It was always and would forever be something hard to comprehend; just how fast ground zero becomes the past. One second, and A.U. forces and any survivors inside that terrible circle were gone like they had never been, but for memories in distant loved ones minds. Physically, though? There was nothing left but ash, rising up to feed the pyrocumulus over the heart of the embattled state.

  *

  It was not to the only strike in the first week.

  Panic and days of despair were as heavy on the people of Earth as the blackened skies of war. Dirty clouds holding poisoned rain brought no relief from the fevered sweat of fear. That rain would bring secondary and tertiary cancers – deaths slower than those inflicted by the sea-creature aliens and their blank-faced, unfathomable masters – but not for most. Death was more immediate and the claws and tentacles and hideous weapons of the aliens did not cause cancers, they only obliterated.

  Defeat was what people spoke of in hushed voices in barns, or bypass tunnels, or underground hiding from the terror of aliens and Earth’s own nuclear rain in bunkers designed to sit out wars such as this, or intended to ride out a storm above.

  Weren’t they the same thing?

  That was the fateful moment when mankind believed without a doubt that they were done. Not a personal, close knowledge of one’s own death, but something huge; an approaching sky dark with doom drawing overhead. The moment the first nuclear weapons were used again the alien, but humans, too, humanity understood this wasn’t only the death of self.

  Humanity fought, but a thing like a nation state dropping bombs on their own citizens? Any heart people might have had was stripped away right there.

  One week in, still with no understanding of the enemy, the numbers of the dead blossomed like those clouds which rose above the blasted or vaporised remains of alien ships across the globe. In Russia, a megaton explosion destroyed the storied city of Moscow. Constantinople, re-renamed, was gone forever when massive earthquakes resulting from heavy bombardment against a huge concentration of the aliens at the eastern-most point of the Mediterranean Sea killed nearly a million in seconds. The main island of Japan, Honshu, would be uninhabitable in a nuclear triangle from Osaka to Tokyo to Niigata for a hundred years.

  It wasn’t just nuclear options, either, but MOAB’s - Massive Ordinance Air Blasts – and thermobaric missiles from fighters screaming across smoking skies, or kinetic missiles from long-range platforms, or railguns that tore through those ships and deeper, through crust and mantle toward the Earth’s molten core.

  The armies of the world fought on, of course, but civilians took up what they could. This wasn’t something to leave to those in charge...those, nobody trusted any longer. The Global Net, in which so much trust had been placed, had failed the entire planet. Anger at Governments, civil unrest, might have torn countries apart but momentum for rage at humanity and leaders was hard to maintain when people were more concerned with the immediate threats tearing their loved ones apart.

  Whatever humanity had to fight with, they fought.

  Those giant interstellar carrier ships were destroyed right across the globe while the strange, sea-creature like invaders spread like ants pouring against a tide of boiling water. The gold-hued drop ships were of no import to the aliens at all, and their numbers were hardly diminished.

  Earth’s population dropped from nearly thirteen billion to just nine billion people; lower than the Earth’s population had been for over two centuries.

  *

  The Lieutenant Commander of the A.U.S. Bohr put his head in his hands, and confirmed the hit.

  What have we come to?

  ‘We just struck our own people,’ he said, but he didn’t know if anyone on the bridge was listening. Right then, with tears streaming down his face, he didn’t care. He thought
about his personal sidearm, in the locker in his bunk.

  I’m going to kill myself, he thought, and knew it was true. He’d never entertained any thought of suicide in his fifty-three years. He didn’t think about his wife, nor his grown children. His horror and disgust was absolute.

  I could have refused. I should have refused.

  He imagined stepping down from the bridge and returning to his cabin and shooting himself in the head, and that was only thought he could manage right then. The whole of reality seemed to shift away from him.

  I wish I was dead right now, he thought. I deserve it.

  He didn’t have long to think that.

  ‘Commander, Captain Chen on comms.’

  ‘Captain,’ said Lt. Commander Gill of the A.U.S. Bohr, a man who’d decided to die. His voice was gruff and cracked, full of tears he wasn’t ashamed of, but with the act of killing a whole city, and survivors, and their own army. That, he would carry ‘til he took his own life.

  But we don’t always get what we want, or even what we deserve.

  ‘Check your array, Lt. Commander,’ said the Captain Chen of the carrier A.U.S. Neilson, seventeen nautical miles north-north-east.

  He didn’t question Chen’s communication.

  I still have a job to do.

  ‘Chief Petty Officer Salvor,’ said Lt. Commander Gill. ‘Array? Report.’

  ‘Commander,’ said Salvor, tapped comms and relayed the message.

  A moment later, his second stood by Gill’s shoulder, staring at the cold data on the screen, with the latitude, longitude expected of their compliment of Barbarian-Class long submarine escort.

  ‘Sir. One of the subs...it’s gone?’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Gill, tears drying, but frowning so deeply and clenching his teeth so tight his face ached.

  More than one submarine seemed to be missing from the display showing their locations with the Bohr’s state of the art detection arrays, radar, light detection, long scan. There was no indication the boats had moved from their expected, previous coordinates. They were simply gone. It wasn’t that they’d disappeared from sensors, either. The Barbarian-Class subs did not run silent. Stealth submarines were an unnecessary expense for a world largely at peace. There were no battles anymore. The seas belonged to the Wide Earth.