“If you want, but honestly, if you think it’s doable, and if it can save six million people, I say go for it.”
Bill looked around the room. Will, Neil, and I looked back at him. This was it. Four Bobs, deciding the fate of the balance of humanity. But no pressure.
*
“Slowly, dammit. You want to tear us apart?”
“Neil, please shut the hell up. Please and thanks.”
I could feel Neil’s glare, but I couldn’t spare the time to return it in kind. I was engaged in lowering a ten-kilometer-long, hundred-million-ton alien cargo vessel into Earth’s atmosphere, without destroying the vessel or part of the planet. Thirty-two mover plates surrounded the Bellerophon, the only thing between us and a very large crater.
“Two thousand meters,” Bill’s voice came from nowhere.
Nodding, I stopped my descent. I looked at the view from one of the attendant drones. The image was like a scene straight out of a movie. The ship pushed aside cumulus clouds as it settled through the atmosphere. As we came to a standstill, eddies and whirlpools of air created complex whorls and patterns.
“Station keeping, location one.”
“This will be the hardest one, because this is where you capture your atmosphere.”
I nodded. “If we survive this, everything else should be routine.”
“Nothing about this will ever be routine.” Neil grinned at me, and I took the time to grin back.
Neil controlled the cargo doors and directed the transports. A thousand transport vessels hovered off our bow, ready to begin collecting humanity as soon as we indicated readiness. Neil began, ever so slowly, to open the front and rear main doors. Air began to rush in, trying to fill a vacuum seventy-eight million cubic meters in size. The Bellerophon shook under the hurricane onslaught. Neil watched indicators, adjusting the door openings as large as he could safely allow. It still took thirty minutes to equalize pressure.
A quick status check, and Neil began opening cargo bay doors. We didn’t need to fill every bay—just enough bays to hold six million people.
I nodded to Will without comment. He returned a quick smile before pulling up his video connection to the transports. I noted in passing that he looked considerably less stressed. While we still weren’t exactly on summer break, the elimination of the need to decide who lived and who died couldn’t help but lift a huge burden off his shoulders.
Will gave the order to the squad leader, and the transports scattered to pick up every single human being on this part of the planet. The Bellerophon would have to make stops in ten different locations to get everyone.
It’s funny, though. Even with the hounds of hell almost literally baying at their heels, people still had to make a fuss. I remember being to concerts and sports events back in the day, and they were able to get tens of thousands of people into and out of stadiums quickly and with minimal hassle. In this case, they only had to get a thousand passengers at a time into each transport. Easy, right?
We lost sixteen people. Ten were trampled, four died from medical issues, and two were shot in confrontations with law enforcement. Wow.
“Sixteen people out of a million or so isn’t bad, Herschel,” Will said to me. “I’ve updated the other groups, so they’ll be ready to react better. But don’t let it rattle you, dude. You’re Top Gun, at the moment. Right Stuff. All that crap.” He grinned at me, and somehow I felt better. Or not as bad, anyway.
The real problems would come at the end. The first eight million would go into stasis pods, which made them very low-maintenance. But once the pods were full, people would be unloaded into the cargo bays in a zero-G environment, with no training and no preparation. Also no sanitary facilities. We’d found netting in the Bellerophon’s supplies, and we’d reconfigured the bays so that people weren’t just released into a huge cavern. But still, we expected interesting times.
The problem, of course, was that this was a last-minute decision. We had made no allowance for transporting active passengers. The plan mostly consisted of get them in, then bug out. After that, it got a bit vague. The goal was to get them out of range of the Others’ zappers. If we won, we could drop off our passengers at their homes. If we lost…well, no one really wanted to talk about that.
But for now, we would just worry about getting them loaded.
One small helpful detail was that the enclaves had been consolidating over the decades as they were moved closer to the equator. We no longer had to worry about the small, under-ten-thousand-population groups that abounded when Will first came back to Sol.
We had decided we would simply load each enclave into their own cargo bay. No point in subjecting people to multiple shake-ups. And tensions were high enough that violence between different groups wasn’t out of the question.
Although a fist fight in free-fall might be more amusing than anything.
A status window popped up, catching my attention. The transports had all cleared the entrance and were inside the axial corridor. Neil wordlessly gave me a thumbs-up and closed the main doors. They could unload the refugees into a bay while we moved to the next pickup location.
Twenty-one enclaves. Nine more stops, and we would have collected the entire human race, at least in Sol system, into one ship.
I directed the Bellerophon upwards. One down…
Battle Begins
Riker
April 2257
Sol
Bill looked in my direction. “Okay, they’ve shot their wad with the pulse. Activate the Jokers.”
I nodded, then sent an email to Hannibal, leader of the Jokers. The idea was simple. They started out several days away, accelerating toward the anticipated area of first contact. We’d tried to time it so that they would be out of range of the super-pulse, and therefore would be a total surprise when they came in. The downside was that they would have to be five light-hours away when the pulse was used.
As it happened, we’d timed it pretty close. They were slightly under five light-hours away, travelling at about 95% of C. So in just over five hours, the Others would be getting a large surprise.
A few seconds later, I received an acknowledgement and a strike time. We would all have to be out of the area for that. I set up an alarm to remind me.
Meanwhile, the first attack group had engaged the Others. Coming in at thirty degrees, just like last time, they sprayed the area with lasers, plasma spikes, particle weapons, busters, and bombs.
Bill looked over at me again. “Bomb group.”