Dark Dragons (43 page)

“Where’s this image coming from?” General Taggart asked.

“It’s not coming from any of our transponders,” Captain
Connors answered.  “No piggy-back ID codes attached.”

“The aliens are broadcasting the visual, general,” Towsley
said.  “I think we’re watching enemy PSYOPS.  Every American TV station
is receiving this.”

“We’ve lost contact with the National Military Command
Center,” Captain Connors said.  There was a pause as she ran down a list
of D.C. area posts to check.  “All traffic coming out of the Pentagon has
ceased.  Nothing from Anacostia-Bolling or the Coast Guard Station there
either.  We’re still picking up traffic from Joint Base Andrews.”

“Get someone on the comm, captain,” General Taggart
said.  “I want an eyes-on assessment of what’s going on.”

“Attention Juliet Bravo Alfa, eight-four-four comm group,
this is NESSTC Red-David-Four, do you copy?”  Captain Connors waited five
seconds before repeating her broadcast after no response.

“This is Lieutenant Henson of 844th Communications Group, go
ahead Red-David-Four,” came a surprisingly cool voice from Joint Base Andrews.

“Lieutenant, we need current ISR on the D.C. area if you can
provide it, over.”

“Yeah, Red-David-Four, there’s some kind of translucent . .
. bubble . . . around the city.  The 113th Wing has already lost two
F-16’s that crashed into it, and we’re getting reports of a commercial airliner
impact, too.  Traffic is backed up on the highways.  Nothing is
getting in or coming out, over.”

“Do you have visual of an enemy spacecraft, over?”

“You mean the giant needle thing that just came down out of
the sky?  That’s a roger, Red-David-Four.  Our pilots say the tip of
it just pierced the bubble.  They’ve fired everything they have at it, but
not a scratch has been reported, over.”

“Please stay online with us, lieutenant, over,” Captain
Connors said.

“Roger that.”

Towsley had stopped listening to Lieutenant Henson a few
seconds ago because his attention had fixed on the alien’s live video
feed.  The image of the needle ship suspended above Washington D.C. had
been replaced by a crowd of bemused spectators standing around at an
interrupted baseball game at Nationals Park.  Some in the foreground were
running from the camera, or from whatever operated it, which appeared to be
flying smoothly above and through the perplexed crowd.  People began to
scream in the background.  Towsley’s heart beat harder, and he held back
the urge to shout at the screen and order the dazed people to start running.

Watch closely . . . watch
closely . . . watch closely. . . .

The scene kept changing as if there were several cameras
recording the chaos: people around the concession stands, the players on the
field, the people in the stands, in the parking lots.

“What the hell’s going on?” Taggart shouted.

He was answered on screen by the ghostly appearance of thick
blue dust which swirled into view from above the ballpark, and almost at once,
a great chorus of screams erupted across the stadium.  In the foreground,
the mysterious powder began to constrict and concentrate into fluid shapes
swirling through the air, pulling crazed people into the air, ripping and
shredding limbs, tearing heads off, gurgling screams rising and dying. 
The dust had become a living, breathing thing.

A few people in the COC cried out.  Towsley’s first
reaction was to laugh because this wanton, over-the-top bloodlust could not
possibly be real. 
Extraterrestrial CGI anyone?

The scene changed again.  A street Towsley recognized
in Georgetown.  The same carnage.  One man burst through his windshield
before a blue tendril of dust punched through his chest and blew his gore
across the hood.  Dozens of people were literally disintegrating and
exploding all over the street.  A dog barked in the background, then went
silent.

Towsley’s mental defenses were still active, shutting out
the hopefully fake horror from his sanity, but the remnants of chef salad in
his stomach were threatening to rise up his esophagus.  The more he
watched, the more his resolve began to wane. 
It’s not real, it’s not
real . . . oh God, please let it not be real. . . .

The steps to Capitol Hill.  Inside a family’s living
room. The E Wing of the Pentagon.  The National Mall.  Everywhere the
mysterious slaughter continued to shift from one scene to another, the cloud of
thick blue dust pulsating like ghosts rippling through the air, searching out
people running across parking lots, cowering in corners, and making futile last
stands in locked cars.  Towsley could not help but think of God’s
pestilent, first-born-killing cloud in
The Ten Commandments
, Charlton
Heston’s Moses saying, “Close the door Joshua and let death pass.”

Through a couple of blurry drops of blood on the camera
lens, a reflection in a shop window revealed one of the alien video cameras——a
metallic, flying sphere the size of a soccer ball——before it flew off and
zeroed in on a half-naked, bloodied woman still alive among the severed dead
laying on the sidewalk, twitching and gagging, police sirens in the background.

Someone in the Air-Defense pit vomited.

“Turn that fucking thing off!” Towsley screamed. “Turn it
off!”

Someone mercifully flipped a switch, and the top screen went
dark.

Towsley had no spit to wet the inside of his dry
mouth.  His fingers were trembling.  The recon data still coming in
from Medusa Stare meant nothing to him.  NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in
Florida apparently had been blown to hell a few moments ago by a one hundred
kiloton laser blast from orbit, but Towsley was too dazed to give a shit.

“I want confirmation from any of our assets in the D.C.
area,” General Taggart murmured over the COC radio net.  “This is the time
to keep your heads level, people.  Humans have been hacking and cleaving
themselves on the battlefield for thousands of years, and what we saw was just
another version of it.  So suck it up and do your jobs.  Captain
Connors, I want anyone you have on your List of Posts who can give us immediate
ISR on Washington.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Connors replied curtly. 
“Lieutenant Henson, you still with us?”

“Roger, that Red-David-Four.”

“What’s the status on your area?”

“The One-Thirteenth says the force field around Washington
D.C. is gone, and I can see that giant needle out my window.  It’s going
back up in the air.”

*

Juan Vasquez pulled out all of his dresser drawers and threw
every article of clothing into his suitcase, not caring what old clothes he
took, as long as they still fit.  He stuffed the suitcase full, locked it,
and flew down the stairs to throw it in the car.

“Dad?” Vanessa called from the back porch.  “Mom wants
you.  She’s in the back yard.”

Juan set the suitcase on the couch and went into the
kitchen.  “What is it?”

“Juan!” his wife shouted from outside.  “Get out here!”

He stepped outside into the warm California sunlight, and
followed his wife’s gaze skyward.  The sky was breathing with strange
lights.  Long blue streaks of incandescence rose from all horizons. 
Yellow and orange phosphorescent smears of light pulsated in the south and
slowly evaporated.  Then a blue star rose from the north while four yellow
pinpoints approached it.  When the blue star flared brighter, the smaller
lights died out.

Juan went inside to get his binoculars and returned a minute
later.

“It’s the end of the world!”

Juan looked to see his elderly neighbor, shotgun in hand,
standing next to his pool in his bathrobe.  His wife stood on the back
porch, while their dog howled at the sky.

“It’s the end of the world,” he repeated. “H. G.
‘Fucking’
Wells!”

“Shut up, Bernard!” his wife cried.

The sky looked like a drug-induced meteor shower.  Streaks
were crisscrossing from horizon-to-horizon.  Another blotch of light
flared and died to the east.  A pair of blue bulbs rose from the west,
both spewing long sparkling threads of sapphire light at the ground hundreds of
miles away.  A bright flash lit the sky to the south where one of the
beams had touched.

“What was that? his wife asked.

“The navy base in San Diego probably.”  He pointed his
binoculars skyward and swept the heavens for a ghost light.

He spotted one of the blue comets coming down from the north
and focused his glasses on it.  The object continued south, accelerating
quickly.  He could see something black surrounding the light.  It
seemed to be wedge-shaped, but he could pick out no detail.

“All right, let’s go,” he said finally. “Vanessa, you have
your stuff packed?”

“Not yet.  I got one more bag.”

“Hurry up.”

Vanessa disappeared into the house.

A newscaster’s voice on his neighbor’s radio came on the
air, and Juan listened in. “This is Charles Reed, KFGH-AM radio, broadcasting
on generator back-up.  The alien spacecraft have attacked naval and Air
Force bases worldwide, and all military forces are on alert.  People are
asked to stay in their homes.”

Juan let a sarcastic grin cross his face and looked out at
the nearby Foothill Freeway to see most of Southern California had disregarded
that civil ordinance.  Thick traffic jammed every freeway out of
town.  L.A.’s mayor had ordered the city’s citizens to evacuate.

“The United States Navy and Air Force, according to a
Pentagon spokesman, have already been attacking the alien spacecraft.  At
this moment, there are no reports of any results.”

*

Vanessa threw her suitcase on the bed and sat down. 
The RV was quiet.  Cool and dark.  She put her head in her
hands.  The alien voice had scared the shit out of her and everyone. 
Her little brother Sammy had come screaming down the stairs into her
arms.  He was the only boy within hugging distance, so he had to
suffice.  She had tried calling Todd after that, but he did not answer his
cell.  Apparently, Marcus had not been heard from in three days. 
Maybe he was too distraught to talk to her right now.

Vanessa felt the RV rebound, heard the floor in the kitchen
creak.  “Sammy, dad told you not to bring your TV, it’s too heavy.” 
Her little brother, who had a smart aleck retort to everything she said, did
not reply.  Odd.  Vanessa looked up.

A black leathery abomination stood in the RV’s kitchen,
creepy yellow eyes staring back at her through helmeted goggles, a metallic
sphere hovering behind it.  A scream built up quickly in her lungs, but
she did not have time to release it.  Her lungs turned to lead when she
felt her body lifted upward and propelled forward by an unseen force toward the
thing in the kitchen.  A warm hand closed over her mouth, and the fingers
nearly wrapped around her head.  The other hand seized her left thigh.

We have you now, hatchling.

When its voice sounded in her brain, Vanessa finally
screamed.

*

“CINCPAC HQ has indicated a substantial number of enemy
bandits have just wiped out the Chinese naval base at Qingdao and half its
surface fleet there,” the comm officer said.

Captain Stephen Page, commanding officer of the
Ticonderoga
-class
cruiser
U.S.S. Cape St. George
, fished a menthol cigarette out of his
front pocket and lit it with a Bic, still fuming from their failed
anti-asteroid attack.  “Well, it’s nice to see that E.T. is being broad
based with his combat ops.”

“Sir, HQ says this same group of enemy bandits is heading
for our position.  Current distance, nine-four-zero miles.  Altitude,
forty miles.  Speed, eleven-hundred knots.  Bearing two-four-zero.”

Page turned to his radar officers at their stations.
“Anything yet?”

“No, sir.  Still scoping two-four-zero.”

The
Cape St. George’
s AN/SPS-49 air search radar had
a range of 250 nautical miles and an altitude of 150,000 feet.  Basic
geometry figured at forty miles altitude, the alien ships should be spotted
soon coming over the southwest horizon.

Page turned his ear and listened to the incoming
transmissions from the
Abraham Lincoln
’s four E-2C Hawkeye early-warning
radar planes.  Three of the carrier’s four strike fighter squadrons of
F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets were up there too, thirty-six in all on Combat
Air Patrol.

“Hawkeye contacts, count seven-two!” the chief radar
operator said, escalating the tension in the CIC.  “Bearing
two-three-six.  Range seven-four-four.  Heading zero-four-zero.”

“India-Tango Blue!” Page said to the radioman, signaling for
Carrier Strike Group Nine to launch SAMs.

*

Twelve seconds after launch, the second boost phases kicked
in and the SAMs went to MACH three.  Eight seconds later, the third and
final boost phases thrust the ScramHawks into a hydrogen-fueled MACH seven
attack.  The Aegis guidance computers had them on a course of two-two-nine. 
The ScramHawks’s onboard guidance would take over when the telescopic seeker
cameras spotted the alien bandits.

For the second time that day, however, something invisible
began knocking the missiles out of the sky.

“What the hell is happening?” Page shouted at the AN/SPS-49
radar screen in frustration.  The ScramHawks were disappearing off the
scopes——again.

A frantic voice came in from one of the strike fighter
squadrons.  “Coach Base, this is Easy Rider!  I have visual on a
single bogey!  It’s black . . !  It looks like . . . like a
dragon!  Heads up, the bandit’s engaging——!” Page heard the turbofan
engines of Easy Rider’s F/A-18 Super Hornet roar to full power over the radio
before the signal crackled and died.

“Coach Base, this is Hawkeye Three,” came the voice from the
southern E-2C.  “All three strike squadrons are off my screens! 
They’re all gone!  Count one contact approaching your position! 
Repeat, one contact!  Range——” The transmission abruptly ended just as
Easy Rider’s had.