“Bob, it’s me,” I told him. “Cam Alvarez.”
“What the fuck are you doing landing here in town, Cam?” he demanded, not slowing down, though he did lower his gun.
“Bob, you need to evacuate the town,” I told him. “There’s enemy on the way, and I don’t know how long you have.”
“Enemy?” The portly man shook his head. “What enemy? You didn’t piss off the Tahni, did you?”
“Listen closely,” I sighed, about to launch into my briefing when another few dozen people, emboldened by the fact Bob had approached without dying, ran up as well.
“What the hell is happening, Bob?” one of them asked, and I finally lost my patience.
“Everyone, listen!” I barked, then continued quickly into the silence, projecting and enunciating every word. “We went to Hudson Bay to report back via their ComSat. The entire colony was destroyed and everyone was dead. This is the next system in line, and we have reason to believe the force in question is coming here and may arrive at any time.”
Frankly, it was a damned miracle they hadn’t already, and I had to believe it was because they weren’t in any particular hurry.
“Evacuate to where?” Bob asked, waving his hands, which wasn’t the safest thing to do since one of them held a pistol. “The other settlements are days away overland, and there’s not enough aircraft to get more than a handful enough of us to…”
“Bob,” I interrupted, grabbing his gun hand and pushing it downward. “Every single settlement on Hudson Bay was gone. You need to get people out of the city and into the forests. Maybe…” I searched my memory, “… Hauser Caverns? The caves out in the Marshall Hills? They need to be away from town, away from even the ranches and farmhouses, and you need to get the word out to everyone. Get warm clothes, food, water, and any tents or camping gear you can get your hands on and get going immediately.”
“You can’t be serious!” someone I couldn’t make out with my visor up yelled from the back of the pack. “You expect us to drop everything in the middle of the harvest just on your word and run out into the woods?”
“I’ll tell you what the fuck I expect!” I yelled back at whoever it was. “I expect most of you to ignore me. Then I expect a fleet of ships bigger than the biggest Fleet cruiser to descend into the atmosphere and start blowing the shit out of every single man-made structure on this planet. And after that, a bunch of creatures that look like a scorpion fucked a brahma bull are going to land here and comb through the wreckage and kill any survivors they find. I expect the population of this planet to go down by about ninety percent.”
Silence. Shock, probably, as what I said penetrated their outrage and disbelief. I grabbed Bob by the shoulder and made sure he was close enough to see my eyes in the light from the open belly ramp of the ship.
“Bob, you don’t have to believe me, but if I’m wrong, all you’ve lost is a few hours, maybe a couple days max of people being uncomfortable and embarrassed. If I’m right, and you don’t do anything, you’ll have killed all your friends and neighbors. You won’t go down in history as the biggest idiot in the world, but that’ll only be because there won’t be anyone left to write the history.”
The stocky man nodded, and if there wasn’t confidence in his eyes, there was at least honest fear.
“All right, Cam. I’ll spread the word, do what I can. I can’t promise everyone will listen.”
“Cam!” Vicky yelled from the top of the ramp, desperation tinging her voice. “Deke says his sensors are picking up anomalous gravitational and electromagnetic readings approaching from off the ecliptic! It’s gotta be the Unity!”
Desperation froze my blood and I staggered a step. I’d known it was coming, yet the reality of it still rocked me. Slugging my brain into gear again, I knew there was only one question I had to answer. Should we stay here on the ground and try to organize the citizenry into evacuating, or should we head for orbit and try to fight? Either way was likely suicide.
But suicide sitting on the ground waiting for some alien hive mind to burn me to a crisp like an ant under a kid’s magnifying glass seemed a hell of a lot worse than suicide shoving proton beams down their throats.
“We’re heading upstairs,” I told her, but paused on the ramp and turned back to Bob. “Spread the word and get out of town. You don’t have much time.”
None of us did.
“They’ve slowed down,” Deke said, fingers tapping the beat from the same century-old pop song he’d played over and over during the flight from Hudson Bay. “I guess they’re checking things out.”
“That sounds like the Unity,” I agreed. “Prolonging the agony so we all know we’re going to die and can’t do a damned thing about it.”
We were at the edge of minimum safe Transition distance from Hausos, the world a green and blue baseball over our port shoulder, her moon barely a dot against her half-lit curve. And the Unity were millions of kilometers farther out, nearly halfway to the next planet in the system. Not visible on the optical spectrum as anything more than the barest glint of sunlight off metal, but burning bright on thermal and showing all too much detail on the gravimetic sensors.
“There’s not enough of them,” Vicky observed, peering at the readout, frowning. “When they hit us at Waterline, there were hundreds of ships. This is barely forty… maybe forty-five?”
“Can’t tell for sure,” Deke admitted. “They’re too far away.”
“A scouting mission, maybe?” I guessed. “Feeling us out?”
“Or maybe just one part of a larger force they’ve spread out all through the Cluster,” Vicky suggested, and I really didn’t want to consider that.
“If that’s so, they could already be at Demeter.”
“If they are,” Deke said, “there’s nothing we can do about it. Shit, there ain’t a hell of a lot we can do about this.”
“We’ll be okay here though, won’t we?” Luke asked, voice tremulous. I looked back at him, guilt stabbing through my chest.
I’d kicked around the idea of leaving him with Bob or Grace and her family, but it came down to the fact that we couldn’t do anything to protect them and we might have been kicking him out of the frying pan and into the fire. Maybe Deke was right and we should have left him on Hudson Bay. Of course, if we died here, that would have meant leaving him to starve to death eventually. Maybe it came down to the reality that we were all going to die, and the only choice was fast or slow.
“Yeah, we’ll be fine, Luke,” I lied. “If things get bad, we can just Transition out of here, right, Deke?”
“Yeah, no problem at all,” Deke said, and though any adult would have picked up the sarcasm in his reply, I didn’t think Luke was sophisticated enough at twelve years old. “But why the hell are they still sitting out there? This makes no fucking sense.”
“Language,” Vicky warned him again, and Deke scowled.
“Yeah, that’s the worst thing that’s gonna happen to this kid, learning some new cuss words.” He waved the scolding off and jabbed a finger at the sensor screen where the Unity fleet approached at a glacial pace. “It’s gonna take them hours to get here, and from what you told me, they could make it in minutes. Maybe seconds. What are they waiting for?”
“Us,” I said, the realization as stomach-twisting as the free fall. “They know we called for help. That’s why they hit Hudson Bay. They want us to bring our forces to one place so they can take them all out at once.”
No sooner had the revelation hit me than the sensors lit up with the announcement of another anomalous reading heading into the system at hyperlight speeds. Just one this time, and we all knew exactly what it was.
“It’s the Ellen,” Vicky sighed, and not from relief. “She’s here.”
