President Jackson stared at the CNN broadcast, surrounded by his national security team. General Smith’s tense voice sounded through the encrypted satellite speakerphone.
“Mr. President. We are out of time.”
Looking around the room, meeting the eyes of each member of his staff, each head nodding in affirmation, the president swallowed, then spoke with reluctant authority.
“General Smith, I authorize you to immediately implement Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Bravo.”
“Mr. President, I read back. General Smith, I authorize you to immediately implement Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Bravo.”
“Confirmed.”
“Roger, Mr. President. Smith out.”
Raising his eyes once again to the television screen, President Jackson spoke again, his voice barely rising above a whisper.
“God help us all.”
General Raymond Smith swiveled his chair and nodded to the only other person in the command and control bunker beneath Ramstein Air Base, just outside Kaiserslautern, Germany: Major Bob Glendale.
“You heard the president’s authorization?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Open your envelope.”
As Bob reached for the envelope on the workstation in front of him, General Smith turned to face front, picked up a knife, and slit open his own brown manila envelope, spilling the contents onto his own workstation.
He glanced at the checklist, but he knew it by heart. This wasn’t Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Alpha. This was Bravo. That meant there would be no warning to the poor bastards inside the ATLAS cavern. The president had just given the nuke-it-now order.
Picking up the cylindrical red key with the #1 tag dangling from it, the general glanced over at Major Glendale, who had his own key in hand.
“Insert keys.”
The major inserted his key in the console as General Smith mirrored his action.
“Activate on my mark. Mark.”
As the keys turned in unison, a bright green LED lit up on the panel in front of General Smith. Flipping up the red trigger guard, General Smith took a single deep breath, pushing from his mind the thought of the innocents soon to die. Then he thumbed the toggle switch to DETONATE.
Watching the imagery from a dozen separate worm fibers, Raul rubbed his hands in anticipation. Despite the heady stew of arrayed forces that had long been destined for this moment—an alien armada, Dr. Stephenson, three Altreian ship mutants, and the combined intellectual might of the Earth’s best and brightest—only Raul had put it all together.
Here, floating in his own fortress of solitude, he could feel the power bubbling up through his neural net, the awesome force of God’s will. Right now, at this singular moment, there was only one archangel, and Raul was it. Not God’s son as he’d earlier believed, but his mighty right hand. His entire life had been in preparation for this.
Raul had checked and rechecked his preparations. After all, he’d only get one chance at this, and the tolerances were very tight. If he hadn’t had complete access to the alien invasion plan right within his starship’s archive, what he was going to do would have been impossible. But he had the gateway synchronization codes and the stasis field modulation codes from the original plan. And since Stephenson was intent on bringing the aliens through the gateway, he was going to have to match those codes.
The image of Dr. Stephenson calmly strolling through Raul’s stasis field formed in his mind. Yeah, Raul had enjoyed a front-row seat at a demo of just what someone with knowledge of the stasis field modulation codes could accomplish. He just hoped Stephenson got to try that little number again.
It wasn’t just Stephenson that was going to get a little surprise. The Kasari Collective had done this thousands of times on worlds across the galaxy. But they hadn’t counted on their world ship being shot down on Earth, hadn’t anticipated Dr. Stephenson’s crazy plan to force world governments to build the gateway by creating a micro black hole.
That’s what made the tolerances so tight. Stephenson was counting on a brief delay before he applied the gateway synchronization codes after creating the wormhole, just enough time to use a second stasis field to push the anomaly into deep space before locking down the other end of the gateway. It wouldn’t do to have the alien Wehrmacht charge right into a blossoming black hole.
Raul didn’t particularly want to be sitting on an ex-planet either. That meant he couldn’t just sync the Rho Ship’s own wormhole generation engine with Stephenson’s gateway. So he had to let the initial stages of Dr. Stephenson’s operation go as planned, before he made his play. And so did Heather and the Smythe twins. It was why they had to be on-site. Glorious.
Back when Raul had first gained complete access to the rebooted Rho Ship’s computers and discovered that no living thing could survive a one-ended wormhole transit, he’d wondered why the Kasari hadn’t just sent their robotic world ship through and then utilized it to form the far end of the gateway. After all, each ship had its own wormhole generation engines.
The problem was that, while the world ships could generate their own transit wormholes and could even establish a temporary link to a full-sized Kasari gateway, they couldn’t produce one of the size and stability capable of transporting a Kasari invasion force and its equipment. And while their population seduction technique didn’t always work, the Kasari had never experienced a failure, once a gateway had gone active. Until today.
As Raul watched the worm fiber imagery play out in his head, a slow grin crept across his face, his artificial eye firmly locked onto the feed of a black-garbed security guard.
“Hello, Heather.”
Weapons specialist Inga Hedstrom cradled the M25 counter-defilade target engagement rifle in the crook of her left arm as she scanned the ATLAS cavern. All the guards carried the M25, although they were only allowed to load the same goober nonlethal rounds that had been used to capture Heather and the Smythes in Bolivia. The thinking was that if anyone freaked out on G-Day, they could freeze him in place without running the possibility of damaging critical equipment. But today she had substituted high-explosive air burst rounds for the goobers.
Nodding to her Spanish teammate on the metal walkway twenty feet up and to her left, she let her visions take her.
Mark and Jennifer were in the cavern, going about their assigned duties, taking no notice of her. Today they all carried the Bandolier Ship headsets, wearing them around their necks, hers hidden beneath the black uniform’s collar. Just one more precaution among the many they had taken. Heather just hoped they would be enough.
The countdown to anomaly capture was progressing normally, Dr. Stephenson on his perch at the primary command console, high above the rest of the scientists and technicians manning the ATACC workstations around the gateway’s base.
“Approaching final countdown to anomaly capture.” The announcement was replaced by the final countdown. “Initiating anomaly capture.”
The anomaly containment device came apart, its parts crashing to the floor less than fifty meters from where she stood. Heather tensed. The culmination of all their planning was seconds away, and just like Mark and Jen, she was ready.
The blaring alarm gave way to an even louder PA announcement.
“Initiate procedure to swap primary and secondary stasis field generator controls. Dr. Trotsky, override the con from your position. Now!”
As Jennifer shoved the unconscious Trotsky aside and took over at the secondary control console, Heather saw Mark rip away the metal panel covering the electronics powering the primary stasis field. Mark had less than a minute to restore power to the primary field generator in order for it to pick up the secondary stasis field generator’s initial mission, which was as important as Jennifer’s taking control of the anomaly with the secondary stasis field.
As she watched the anomaly pulse energy into the containment field, equations cascaded through Heather’s mind. The handoff from the primary to the secondary field generator had been expertly handled, but matter had leaked in, sending the anomaly into a death spiral. Until the primary stasis field regained power to seal the portal, Stephenson couldn’t activate the wormhole device. If Mark was late by even a few seconds, none of this was going to matter.
“Primary stasis field power back online!”
A cheer went up from the ATACC as Dr. Stephenson shifted at his console.
“Immediate wormhole generation commencing.”
No time for a countdown. Just enough to create the wormhole and validate the far end’s space-time coordinates; then Jennifer would modulate the secondary stasis field to allow it to pass the anomaly through the primary and out into deep space. Then Jen would use the secondary field to destroy the gateway before Stephenson could open it up to the invaders.
Heather refined her calculations. Five minutes and seventeen seconds until the growing event horizon spilled out of the containment field and swept everyone to his or her ultimate destiny. If everything went according to plan, they should have two minutes to spare.
If everything went according to plan.