“Front gate, this is control, tactical team en route to your location. All lake personnel go to Alert 1 and lock down. Repeat, Alert 1 and lockdown…”
“Gordon-what should we do?”
”We wait here and tough it out, Miss Ashley.” As he spoke, Charles-the man with the prosthetic hand-walked into the room with several items clutched to his chest.
With his good hand he set an automatic pistol on Gordon’s lap, then shoved an identical one into Ashley’s hand. She dropped the book.
For his part, Charles carried an HK Mp5 machine pistol strapped around his shoulders with his good hand on the grip and his plastic hand balancing the barrel.
Ashley protested, “Gordon, Trevor took me target shooting a couple of times but I really don’t know how to-“
He grabbed the Glock from her hand, pulled the slide loading a round, and returned it to her. She stared at the pistol, dumbfound.
“Point and shoot. And remember to stay calm.”
A humming sound came through the walls from somewhere outside.
Gordon spoke to the growing noise, “Me, too? I’m flattered.”
He rolled to the doorway so as to see down the hall. Charles took station by the closed front door.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I can’t use my legs but the bastards still think I’m important enough to assassinate.”
“That-that makes you- happy?”
His answer came in the form of a big, nasty grin.
Brett Stanton stood at the base of one of the tall gantries that helped secure the Excalibur. His two assistants-the woman and the fat man-waited on his flanks while he consulted a third: a bearded black man wearing technician’s garb with a ‘supervisor’ badge.
Around them more technicians, mechanics, engineers, and security guards walked about, some boarding the caged elevators of the gantry and climbing up to the massive battleship and the super cargo carrier floating overhead.
The supervisor complained, “Mr. Stanton, I can do it but I’d feel a lot better if someone who was involved in the design phase was here to oversee the project. I mean, I hook up the wrong power conduit and that could cause the grav generators to repel.”
“Yes, yep, now I know, and that would start ripping things apart one expensive piece at a time. I’m working on getting Omar Nehru out here to take a gander at this stuff, but that’s not going to happen for a few hours. We don’t have a few hours.”
The woman at Stanton’s side gasped, “What the hell are those?”
Brett Stanton whipped his head around toward the east side of the base. There he saw a line of lights weaving around and over old buildings and hangers. The lights shined red and a sparkling blue that-for a brief instant-he thought quite beautiful.
Stanton yelled in a throaty voice, “Security breach!”
Someone on the gantry heard his holler and activated the general alarm. Klaxons sprung to life above, below, and onboard the Excalibur as well as the Hercules.
The lights kept coming from behind the buildings. A dozen-two dozen-three dozen-Stanton lost count as they swarmed from the airport perimeter onto the tarmac heading directly for their position.
“Get clear!” Brett shouted then grabbed hold of the woman and the fat man by their shoulders and shoved them toward the small cart they had used to traverse the airport grounds.
The fat man resisted and bolted for the perceived safety inside the scaffolds and fencing of the gantry. The woman obeyed and dropped a cluster of rolled blueprints as she scrambled for the cart.
Stanton heard the sound the attackers made: a hum gaining in volume like reactors going critical.
He stepped on the accelerator pedal and the cart moved away from the gantry making best-speed to escape the shadow of the floating behemoths for the sunlit open pavement of the runways.
“Hurry-hurry!” the woman screamed but it was too late. The line of red and blue spheres reached them-and missed.
The balls passed overhead like errant pitches. He felt a breeze as dozens of the things flew by but, at the same time, he also felt both heat and a discharge like static electricity from the things.
The swarm of attacking orbs continued above them like some kind of airborne stampede.
Then came the first explosion. Red balls hit the underside of the Hercules in a series of shots similar to artillery blasts.
The woman shouted the most obvious line Brett Stanton had heard in his life: “My God, they’re trying to take out the ships!”
A trio of the blue balls slammed into one of the temporary anti-grav generators affixed to the Hercules’ bottom. A storm of energy flashed like a hundred bolts of lightning and snaked across the bottom of the vessel like electronic worms digging into the belly of the ship.
What the hell are these things?
More red spheres-more blue-making for a combination of large explosions and electromagnetic bursts, most hitting the Hercules, a few hitting specific spots on the Excalibur.
Over the buzz of his golf cart as it sped away-over the hum of the attacking spheres-Brett heard another sound that made his heart skip a beat: a groan. A metallic groan. The sound of a gantry bearing more weight than originally intended.
“Hurry-hurry-oh, my god, hurry…” Stanton did not need her encouragement; that groan provided all the urgency required.
The red balls exploded one after another and apparently well-targeted. A line delivering aviation fuel to the Excalibur ruptured. The explosion followed the fuel hose down to the ground and obliterated a tanker truck as well as a dozen personnel within twenty yards.
A hull plate ripped from the Hercules’ body. As it dropped it careened into another support tower and cut through an elevator shaft. The car inside fell.
Another support tower moaned, only this time the sound did not stop.
Brett Stanton and his assistant reached the halfway point between the dry dock and his office building when the Hercules broke free of its moorings and listed to starboard, slipping sideways and raising its port side into the starboard side of the Excalibur from underneath. The impact of such heavy mass shoved the dreadnought and sent two supporting gantries tumbling like tinker toys. The sound of iron and metal falling into rubbish heaps produced a series of clings, clangs, and crashes that could be heard for miles. More explosions followed on the ground but the worst was yet to come.
Blasts from red orbs and electromagnetic pulses from blue ones destabilized fuel cells and ordnance catches. A line of yellow flames burst from the port side of the Excalibur ejecting equipment, bulkheads, and personnel.
The remaining gantries fell as the Excalibur dipped and pounded into the Earth below; ripping up pavement in a tidal wave of concrete and dirt. The super-strong SteelPlus hull bent and warped. A quarter-mile wide gash opened along the tilted flight deck; flash fires larger than city blocks erupted one after another; bolts of electricity- like lightning strikes-erupted and coated the entire superstructure in a volatile electromagnetic bath that lit the fuse of a powder-keg combination of aviation fuel, power cells, and ordnance.
The Excalibur, the Hercules, all the buildings, vehicles, and structures on the airport grounds; Brett Stanton and his passenger; the wild woodlands around the base; and the cluster of homes in a suburb five miles from the facility’s outer fence, were all consumed by a pressure wave larger than any man-made explosion short of a nuclear detonation.
The blast swept out in all directions via a wall of concussion. A mushroom-shaped cloud of blue and orange reached thousands of meters into the sky, the tremor rattled windows as far off as Akron, Ohio.
Shepherd stood outside the tent and took off his hat as if to bath in the sunlight.
The staging area at Riverfront Park buzzed with activity: trucks, tankers, and Humvees weaved through throngs of tents, temporary camps, and portable toilets. A line of raggedy soldiers stood at a water buffalo parked near a pile of industrial rubble. A handler encouraged along a group of Grenadiers. Four men half in and half out of dirty uniforms sat at a folding table playing cards and smoking. The whistle of a steam train came from just beyond
