Battleship

Stay out of trouble while I’m gone.

Hopper sobbed in the privacy of his quarters, and hated his brother for abandoning him.

The humans seek to help the others, plucking the survivors out of the water. Let them gather themselves together so they are a single target. That will allow the most efficient means of utilizing resources. The object is not to overwhelm them. The object is to prolong this engagement in order to fully determine what they are capable of doing when presented with various opportunities. Dead, they are of no use. Alive, they make interesting… experiments.

The jamming array continues to function within acceptable parameters.

The spheres have been dispatched.

Soon the transport vessel will be launched. It will depart underwater and only surface once it is beyond range of the human vessels.

All is well.

OAHU

Vera Lynch exited Interstate H-1 and guided her minivan onto Route 92, also known as the Nimitz Highway. She’d rather not have left her parents alone while they were watching all the news reports about the worldwide insanity, but she really didn’t have a choice. She had a PTA meeting that evening and, what with being the recording secretary, there was simply no way she could not be there.

The PTA. People around the globe are being hammered by debris from some shattered space station or whatever the hell they think it is, and we’re busy getting worked up about bake sales.

Still, the simple fact was that life goes on in all its massive trivialities, even if people a continent away are dying.

Her twin boys were in the back, buckled into their booster seats. Emmett, the older by ten minutes, was pushing against the restraining straps. Walsh, the younger, had fallen soundly asleep, which was something of a relief. It was always easier to handle the twins when one of them was unconscious. She was grateful for the fact that her father never tired of playing with the boys and he’d managed to wear Walsh out completely. Emmett, by contrast, seemed to be an endless fount of energy. I wish I had that much.

They drove past the Pearl Harbor shipyards. From where she was, she could see that the harbor was empty of vessels save for the docked Missouri and some utility boats. It made her wonder briefly how Walter’s ship was doing during the war games. Putting some of her random thoughts together, she suddenly worried that a piece of space debris might have fallen on the John Paul Jones. As quickly as she could, she dismissed the notion. If anyone was in a position to elude damage as a result of debris, it would be Walter. (Why do they call him “Beast” anyway? Stupid nickname. The sweetest man in the world.)

Certainly the John Paul Jones’s radar would detect any incoming objects long before they got there, and Walter’s engines would immediately steer the vessel to safety. The most they’d have to deal with would be a big splash when it came down.

“I really have to go,” Emmett piped up suddenly. He was holding a juice box and sucked on the straw, which produced a hollow sound to indicate that it was empty. “I mean, I might go in this juice box.”

“That’s nasty,” said Vera in her brisk, “we are not amused” voice—even though secretly she kind of was. “You’ll hold it.”

He fidgeted in his seat. “I’m gonna need a second juice box once I get started.”

She saw that traffic was slowing in front of her. Probably tourists clogging up the arteries because they were heading to the Missouri to check it out. Freaking tourists. She decided to exit off 92 and seek an alternate route through the surface streets.

That was when she perceived a distant, humming sound. She’d never heard anything quite like it before. It wasn’t the whistling sound of a bomb being dropped, something she’d never actually experienced but had certainly heard enough times in movies. Instead it sounded more concentrated, like a swarm of angry bees. But not even quite that. It was different, and disturbing, and it was getting louder.

She glanced around to make sure the windows were rolled up. If it was some sort of insects, she sure didn’t want the damned things in the van. As she guided the car under an overpass, Emmett suddenly shrieked, “Mom!” and pointed. Normally when Emmett felt the need to draw her attention to something, she never looked, because it meant taking her eyes off the highway and it was invariably something fairly inane, like a billboard announcing some new television program. But there was such confusion and fear in his voice that her head snapped around to see what he was indicating.

There were two bizarre metal spheres heading in their direction.

They were tearing down 92 right above them, smashing through the traffic as if it was nothing. They tore the tops off vans, knocked cars aside, and the air was alive with a combination of the humming of the spheres, the shrieking and wrenching of metal and the screams of the people.

One of the spheres angled downward and smashed into the overpass just as the minivan was about to drive under it. Vera screamed and slammed her foot on the gas, correctly intuiting that if she hit the brakes, the van would have skidded to a halt right under the overpass. The speed limit sign indicated that maximum speed in exiting should be twenty miles per hour. The minivan leaped to fifty, springing forward like a vaulting puma, and tore along the off-ramp just as the overpass blew apart from the impact of the sphere. Debris rained down—huge chunks of concrete—and one of them ricocheted off the rear of the van, surely creating a big dent but otherwise leaving them unscathed. The overpass collapsed and, to Vera’s horror, a Ford 4?4 tumbled with it. The last thing she saw was the terrified expression of the driver, an old man, visible through the windshield of his vehicle before more debris crashed down upon him and obliterated him from her sight.

Emmett was howling in fear, great wracking sobs seizing him and tears rolling down his face. “Ma! Ma! I peed my pants! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

“It’s all right, honey! It’s all right!”

“Don’t be mad!”

“I’m not mad, it’s all right!”

She kept shouting it over and over, like a mantra, as the van sped away from the site of the wreckage. For an instant she thought about jumping out, about trying to help, but all she cared about at that moment was getting her two sons away from the scene of devastation and death. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but at least I’m a good mother.

The van sped away in one direction while the metal spheres went in the other, obviously unconcerned with the damage they’d already done, and clearly prepared to do more. Emmett’s mortified howling continued and Vera kept saying soothing words to make it clear to him that she really didn’t give a damn that he’d lost bladder control. Truth to tell, she’d almost done so herself. But she didn’t feel that this was the time to share that particular piece of information.

Meanwhile Walsh the imperturbable snored peacefully, dreaming about his recent visit with grandpa.

There was an old Hawaiian legend about an angry and frustrated woman who complained about the brutality of her husband, whose cruelty was—by her description—as sharp as the edge of cutting bamboo. The eventual fate of the husband and wife were unknown. Perhaps he had tossed her into a volcano; perhaps she had stabbed him to death in his sleep with a spear fashioned of bamboo. Either way, her unhappiness had achieved a sort of immortality in the naming of Kaneohe Bay, since Kaneohe (or Kane’ohe, as it was more properly spelled) meant “bamboo man.”

One of the more notable residents of Kaneohe Bay was the Marine Corps Base (MCB) Hawaii. MCB Hawaii maintained key operations, training, and support facilities and provided services that were essential for the readiness and global projection of ground combat forces and aviation units, and the well-being, morale, and safety of military personnel, their families, and the civilian workforce. They managed installations and natural resources situated on a total of forty-five hundred acres throughout the island of Oahu, including Camp Smith, Marine Corps