people out of bed and killing them. I shuddered, remembering my own kids. I thought about asking the ship how my kids were doing, but stopped myself. What if it was bad news? What if one of them hadn’t made it? I would be distracted and I needed my mind operating right now. I tried to reach for a cold area of my mind, a place where emotions feared to tread. I needed to focus on this battle — whatever it was about, if any of us were going to survive the experience.
“By my count, some of you are either staying quiet, unable to communicate, or dead,” said Crow. “We’ll presume the latter.” He told them all to order their ships to secure everything they had brought onboard, which I had already done.
I hated the sensation of flying blind. Where were we? Where were these enemies we couldn’t even see? I realized the problem was undoubtedly due to different alien physiology. Whoever had built this ship, it now seemed clear to me, had no eyes. Or at least, vision was a secondary sense for them.
Crow was calling out more names repeatedly now. I got the idea very quickly that some people weren’t responding. What had happened to them? Were they already dead? Had they been crushed by their couches or had these enemies shot them down? What in the nine hells, exactly, were we supposed to do when we found these enemies? I had no idea how to operate this ship other than ordering it to pull things through the windows of my own house.
Sometimes, in a panic, things go very badly. Sometimes one’s mind is confused and shocked. Panic can bring out random, useless behavior. But I’ve never been that sort of person. When an emergency rears its ugly head, I’ve always gone cold inside, and my mind seems to operate faster, more accurately. Back when I’d been a reservist, before taking on a teaching job, I’d been an industrial automation specialist. One year, my occupation had gotten me into real trouble. Paid to build a computer system to control a chemical reactor that produced robine for an auto parts manufacturer, I’d done something wrong. I’d crossed two points in the reactor’s database. I recalled the moment vividly, as the plant went into emergency shutdown and my mind was jolted into high gear. I realized in an instant that I had made a mistake, and what the mistake was. Thousands of lines of code, and I’d made one critical error. My mind had gone cold then, too. I’d worked the reactor controls with great speed, fearing an exothermic reaction and a fire. In the end, there had been a big clean-up and some muttering about lawsuits, but no one had died.
The gee-forces pressing me into my wet leather couch increased. We were accelerating. We were heading up into the sky, toward I knew not what. Like a car crash, events seem to slow down and take on a hyper-real quality. Then I got an idea.
“Alamo, I want you to manipulate the forward wall of the bridge. I want you to shape it into the shape of objects outside the ship. I want to see- bumps on the wall, raised surfaces, for each friendly ship and enemy ship.”
It seemed to take a long time, but I’m sure it was no more than thirty seconds before the wall opposite us, the wall that had almost become our ceiling, changed. It came to resemble a silver blanket under which dozens of beetles crawled slowly, independently. As we watched, the beetle swarm converged closer together.
“Where the hell are we going?” asked Sandra, staring at the wall that had now become a metallic relief- map like a radar screen. “And which one is us?”
“Alamo, can you color friendly ships? Green or-gold?” I thought of the brassy color of Sandra’s pupils when she’d been blind. Could the ship have put metal in her? Liquid metal? I pushed away the thought. We could figure that out later.
The bumps changed color. They took on a reflective, lightly golden color, like melted tin. They reminded me of beads of solder stained with amber resin. All of them looked the same, however.
“Make the enemy a darker color. And show me physical objects like the Earth and the Moon-with a neutral gray.”
The wall shimmered and a large portion of the wall to the left became a curved surface.
“That must be the Earth. We’re leaving it behind,” said Sandra in a lost voice. “Why aren’t we floating?”
“We are accelerating so fast that it’s pressing us backward,” I said. “If we slow down and coast, we should start to float.”
“Hey, what’s that?” asked Sandra, pointing. “Something is moving toward us over on the far wall.”
We stared at the walls. Over to our right was a fist-sized, rust-red thing. The small golden swellings on the forward wall slowly left the crescent of Earth behind and slid toward the rust-colored thing. All the moving contacts were on a collision course.
“That must be the enemy our ship spoke of,” I said. “Look at it. Whatever it is, it looks a lot bigger than us.”
“Kyle?” asked Sandra after a quiet moment.
“What?”
“Any chance you can take me back home and let me off at your farm? I think I’ve changed my mind.”
8
It took a bit of shouting on the open channel, but I managed to describe to everyone the instructions to give to their ships to get a view of the outside world. Once they listened and obeyed, there were alarmed gasps.
“The Snapper is requesting a private channel,” said the ship.
“Okay, allow it.”
“Kyle? That was great work. Thanks a lot for that info. We can all see what we are up against now. Any more ideas on how to fight against this big red thing coming at us?”
The enemy ship, if that’s what it was, had almost reached the corner of the room and come onto the same forward wall with our rash of smaller, metallic bumps. To the far left of the forward wall was the slate-gray raised disk that represented the Earth.
“I was about to ask you the same thing, Jack.”
“Well, maybe the ships know what to do. They are all clustering up and heading at it in a swarm. Maybe they’ll fire in automatic defense or something.”
“I’ll let you know if I figure anything else out,” I said.
Before I could tell the Alamo to break the connection, Crow added a few quick sentences. “My offer still stands, Kyle. And I’m upping the rank. I want you as a Lieutenant.”
“Very generous, Jack. But can we just get through the next hour alive, first?”
“Absolutely. Keep in touch.”
He broke the connection. I pondered the screen.
“Alamo? Can we fire weapons at the incoming enemy ship?”
“The enemy is out of range.”
“How long until it is in range?”
“Unknown.”
Bullshit, I thought.
“Alamo, if we maintain our current course, velocity and acceleration and the enemy does the same, how long do we have before we are in range?”
“Eight minutes.”
“Alamo, when I ask for predictive estimates in the future, use the current sensor data to make the calculation. Exactitude is not required.”
“Program options set.”
I smiled tightly. It was like working with an old computer, one that used a command line interface. You had to be precise in your instructions or you got errors. You had to do things in the proper order, but you could customize your interface with shortcuts. I quickly stopped congratulating myself. I had to remember I was talking to this machine, not typing on a keyboard, and it was far more advanced than anything I’d ever worked with.
“Alamo, as each minute passes until we are in range, give me a report, a countdown of minutes.”
“Enemy in range in seven minutes,” said the Alamo.
