Defeat (8 page)

She tried using the computer’s
systems to make a connection, but with no success. She rooted into
the machine, entering her admin password, and tried pinging ip
addresses she knew, hoping to connect that way. Few people knew of
these methods any more. Most just accepted that network connections
were made automatically, and if they didn’t work right away,
someone would fix them and they would work soon.

Christina was dimly aware that
Zombie had returned and pulled up a spot of floor near her, his
back to a wall, his MP23 resting, but ready, in his lap. She didn’t
acknowledge him and he didn’t disturb her.

As she tried different commands,
waiting for results, occasionally looking up help on the ones she
seldom used, a separate thread ran through her mind of computer
users in the movies. They always typed incredibly fast, pinging
through screens too fast to even absorb any information from them.
Real life differed greatly. She typed, waited, typed, waited,
smacked her keyboard a few times in frustration, typed and waited
more.

“
Zombie, catch,”
she heard Shane say. She glanced at him and he had come into the
office area with an armful of red apples, throwing one to the
seated airman. Shane walked up to her and asked if she wanted
one.

She was suddenly
hungry.

The silo had food, but most of it
had been mres, or Meals, Ready to Eat. They were thirty years old
and they were no longer meals nor ready to eat. A few items were
salvageable, but most of the food had gone bad. Years of peace and
exploration of the Moon and Mars had left the military complacent.
After the reconstitution of the new Soviet Republic, they should
have gotten ready for something like this. They must have forgotten
how.

And no one could have expected
aliens. Despite evidence of billions of planets in just our galaxy
alone, no one seriously believed life existed anywhere except on
Earth. Life was too unlikely, the odds of it evolving on more than
one planet staggeringly impossible, that only the most ardent
dreamers accepted its possibility.

Now they were here.

She accepted two apples and
started eating, her eyes back to the screen, ignoring the two men
and their whispered conversation. The apple was waxy. The airman
must have gotten it out of the cafeteria, but she wiped part of it
off on her uniform shirt and kept working.

“
Could you get me
some water?” she asked, not looking away from what she was
doing.

“
Yes, ma’am,”
someone said and jumped up.

She couldn’t get a connection
anywhere. Servers were up in the building, and she could talk to
them, but they couldn’t get out to anywhere. A bottle of water
appeared next to her and she mumbled a thank you, and tried a few
more things. She took a drink. The water was cold, which was good,
and she drank more. Her fear had made her sweaty, and she needed
water.

Finishing the bottle, she set it
down.

“
Do you want
another one, Captain?”

She nodded and Shane set another
one next to her. She opened the bottle and took a sip. The cool
liquid helped her think.

Every server connected wirelessly,
through towers or on the secure satellite network, and none of them
could talk. She remembered some servers that were old, had been
decommissioned, but that might still have landlines. She needed to
turn them on.

“
We need to go to
the basement,” she said, turning in her chair.

The two men jumped up.

The three headed back out to the
stairs, moving almost as cautiously as before, but not as
nervously. They’d been in the building for almost an hour and there
was no evidence of any hostiles.

It took a while to find any
servers that were turned off. She started turning them all on, not
knowing which ones would actually boot and which ones were
completely fried. Fortunately the military was terrible about
getting rid of old equipment, and she eventually found quite a few
turned off servers still in the racks.

She pulled out her pad and noted
the ip addresses of all the ones she was turning on. It got
tiresome, and she handed her pad to Zombie, asking him to copy the
addresses down exactly.

While he did that, she found a
terminal that still worked, and she started pinging the restarted
servers. Most hadn’t booted; probably incompatible operating
systems, but some seemed to be coming up.

Zombie handed her the pad when he
was done, and she waited.

She could finally ping one of the
servers on the list, but it too only accessed the network
wirelessly.

She waited longer.

They felt another aftershock. The
three of them looked up and around at the ceiling, willing it to
stay up. Christina looked back down at her screen, irritated at her
primal fear. Any server room worth its salt in California was
designed to stand up to any old earthquake.

The fifth server she pinged seemed
to have a wired connection. It wasn’t connecting to anything, but
that could mean a router was turned off, or that it was connected
to a wireless router.

“
Which server
is...?” and she read off its address. Both men searched the racks
until Shane found it.

“
Stay with it in
case we lose track,” she said. He nodded. “Now, Zombinique, help me
find where this is wired to.”

“
Zombie,
ma’am.”

She smiled at him. “Sorry.
Zombie.”

“
No problem,
ma’am.” He grinned back at her.

They traced cables. Losing track,
they had to start over. Zombie pulled out a small roll of colored
duct tape and started tagging the cable as they went. It helped
immensely.

“
Where did you
get that from?” Christina asked him.

“
Duct tape is a
soldier’s best friend, ma’am. You can fix shoes and uniforms and
even loose magazines with it. I’d never be without
it.”

“
I didn’t know
that.”

“
Yes,
ma’am.”

They followed the cable to a
series of routers, all turned off. She turned them on, one by one,
and watched the flickering green lights.

“
Zombie, you stay
here and watch these. I’m going to try to see if any are working.
Just let me know if any of them turn any color other than
green.”

“
Yes,
ma’am.”

She went back to the terminal.
Ping to the server worked, and it appeared to have a connection to
the outside world. At least, to something off base. The terminal
couldn’t give her much information, but her computer upstairs
should work.

“
We should be in
business, boys. Let’s go back up.”

Shane led the way this time, his
MP23 drawn, but the trip up the stairs was uneventful.

Christina sat back at her computer
and muttered, “As long as nothing has changed, this should work.”
She cracked her knuckles and started typing.

This time she, after connecting to
the landline server, had limited access to a military network. The
Air Force had published several alerts, with instructions for both
combatant and non-combatant military. The nuclear war with the
Soviet Republic appeared to be over, with the republic mostly
destroyed. China, angered by the radioactive fallout crossing its
borders, had declared war on the United States, but the US hadn’t
responded.

No nukes had reached the United
States from either country, but then, and she had to read this part
twice to be sure, the aliens, the Hrwang, had begun dropping
asteroids from space on Earth.

These attacks were as devastating
as nuclear missiles, and military and government facilities were
being targeted. All nonessential personnel were to abandon their
bases and reform at designated rally points. A long list of such
locations was attached.

Combat units were to follow their
plans for total war.

After explaining all of this to
her airmen, Christina asked, “What do we do now?”

Zombie didn’t hesitate. “We
evacuate. Head to the rally point.”

“
There’s not much
good we can do sitting in that silo, ma’am,” Shane
added.

“
I had wanted to
gather up some equipment so we could help track things from the
silo, but I don’t know how to get the hardwired connection all the
way out there. And if we’re going to evacuate
anyway...”

The two men didn’t say anything.
Christina felt the weight of being an officer on her shoulders.
This was her decision.

Actually it wasn’t, she realized.
It was the Colonel’s. They needed to bring this report back to him.
That lifted the burden off her and she knew what to do.

“
Alright,” she
said, “Let’s get this back to the Colonel.”

“
Yes, ma’am,” the
two airmen said simultaneously and stood.

They went back up the stairs as
cautiously as they had come down them, just in case. Who knew how
aliens would fight? Who knew what looters might show up? The
building felt less eerie now that they had been in it a while, but
it was still strange because it was so empty.

There was a smell in the lobby on
the main level that hadn’t been there before. Christina looked at
the men with her, but they shrugged their shoulders. She sniffed.
Rotten eggs and salty fish.

“
Gas leak?” she
suggested.

“
If so, we’d
better get out of here without making any sparks,” Shane
replied.

“
Good
idea.”

Shane opened one of the front
doors carefully, then stopped in the door frame. Christina walked
up behind him and looked past. There was water receding from the
street, leaving seaweed and a few fish behind. One flopped in death
throes at the edge of the sidewalk in front of them.

The image couldn’t process in
Christina’s mind. It simply didn’t mean anything to her. So she
ignored it. They had to get their report to the Colonel. That was
all that mattered. Some part of her mind also knew she wanted to
find her husband, but if her unit evacuated to their rally point,
she would probably be farther away from him than she was now. She
didn’t like that thought, but knew she would evacuate with them.
She had sworn an oath to defend her country when she had been
commissioned, and she would honor that oath. Her husband would want
her to honor it also. She would just have to find him after they
finished this war.

Depressed, but resolved, she told
her airmen, “Forget the fish. Let’s just get out of
here.”

“
Yes, ma’am,”
Zombie said eagerly from behind her. He opened another door and
moved through it, holding it open for Christina. Shane still seemed
frozen in his doorway.

Christina followed Zombie out onto
the sidewalk. The smell was stronger outside the building than it
had been inside. She wished she knew what it meant. There were dead
fish up and down the street and seaweed everywhere. The sidewalks
and streets were still stained with having been recently wet, as if
it had been raining.

She looked back at Shane, still
frozen in the doorway.

“
Airman! Move
out!” she ordered, using the command voice she had been taught in
ROTC summer camp. She hadn’t used it since then, except
occasionally to tease her husband.

It worked. The authority in her
voice shook Airman Anthony out of his paralysis.

“
Yes, ma’am.” He
stepped out of the doorway, letting the door close gently behind
himself. He followed them as they walked down the street towards
the interior gate they had come through, back towards the silos.
The three sidestepped seaweed and dead fish. The airmen also kept
their MP23s at the ready.

As they approached the gate,
Christina became aware of a sound. It was a dull, distant roar,
almost as if the ocean had become much louder suddenly. It was a
sound she would hear when she and her husband took long walks along
the beach.

The others heard it also, and when
they walked past the last building and into the open area before
the gate, they all three looked towards the coast.

The monster they saw was more
frightening than any monster or alien Christina could have
imagined. Suddenly the seaweed, the fish, and the receding water
made sense.

Often, before a tsunami, water
pushes forward ahead of the wave, then recedes as it is pulled back
into the main wave. Vandenberg Air Force Base sat on the coast, but
would have been too far back for any normal tsunami to have pushed
water onto it.

But the tsunami wave they looked
at now was no normal tsunami, should such a thing exist. She
thought of the Air Force communique, that the aliens had been
dropping asteroids on the Earth. Had they dropped one into the
ocean? A huge one?