Alien Affairs

The Russians were arrogant and self-assured, the Brits were already on board, the French tentative, the Italians boastful, the Chinese would not take her call. Carrie and her small team encountered every conceivable response during their calls to the embassies. Director Turnbull fought a running battle with the president who was still insisting that the aliens be unmolested. With her free ear Carrie heard, “You have a duty to defend this country from threats foreign and domestic, and now alien... Being kinder and gentler is not going to keep us from getting neutered... So fire me.”

Admiral Alexander and General Matranga put their phones on vibrate and let all calls go to voice mail. Georgia Turnbull said to the room, “I’ll be out of a job tomorrow, but until I’m forcibly removed I intend to defy the son of a bitch. NASA is backing me but the director expects to get fired too. We have to worry about NORAD. Will they stand down if the president orders them to?”

Matranga said, “Probably.”

“Until I hear an order directly from the Commander in Chief,” Alexander said, “the Navy will fire at will.”

Turnbull said, “We’ve got to make sure NORAD is with us. NASA needs to be in constant communication with them.” She called her man at NASA again. At the end of the call, she said, “Okay, the Director of NASA and the general on duty at NORAD will remain in constant telephone contact. That may let him dodge a stand down order.”

“There is one more thing we can try,” Matranga said. “We can crash the Dragon into one of them and detonate the remaining warheads at the same time.”

“What the hell,” Turnbull said. “If we succeed that’s one less to worry about. I’ll tell NASA.”

“Now, that’s gotta be a cool video,” Eddy said.

It was indeed a cool video as the capsule plunged into the featureless silver maw of the saucer until all four quadrants went to static. The director remained on the line with NASA. All eyes in the bullpen were fixed on her as she listened to what NASA had to report. She said, “Okay,” and ended the call. To the room she said, “There was some movement in the orbit due to the inertia of the impact, but the damned ship is still there.”

The Twilight Zone sounded muffled from Carrie’s pocket. She tapped then swiped the screen and said, “Come, Deshler.”

“Come, Carrie Player, you spilled my tea.”

“We will spill more than that if you come any closer.”

“Ours is a risky adventure. We will take the chance.”

“Look, we know that you are not invincible. We have four frozen bodies to prove it.”

“Do not judge us all by those fools. We have since all attended remedial flight school.”

“Deshler, I can tell that you are a reasonable creature. Why do you insist on going through with this?”

“There is nothing we can do but obey. Going.”

“Going.”

Twelve eyes fixed on Carrie. “He says all we did was spill his tea.”

Eddy laughed and sprayed a mouthful of coffee.

The director gave him her infamous glare. “Any hint of when they’re coming?”

“No, but it must be soon. Why would they wait?”

“Maybe you’re getting to him.”

“He doesn’t give me a reason to think so.”

Carrie’s phone rang with its default tone. She looked at the caller ID. “It’s a feed from the Very Large Array.” She listened to the internecine message and said at the end, “They’re coming.”

Paul switched the monitor to the NASA satellite tracker. With no point of reference Carrie could not tell that the three ships were descending, but inside she knew they were. The thought of not seeing her daughter for four years flashed through her mind, and both fear and rage swelled within her. She angrily stabbed at Deshler’s icon on her phone. The call went to voice mail. “You bastard,” she said softly.

The admiral, the general and the director were all on their phones leaving Carrie and her little staff staring uncomprehendingly at the monitor. If F16’s and Aegis missiles were closing with the alien ships they could not know it, they could only wait to learn the outcome. Paul reached for a mouse and hovered the cursor over one of the saucer icons. A small window opened. It said 25.252525 km. Paul stabbed at his calculator and said, “80,000 feet, there’s plenty of atmosphere at that altitude.”

Carrie said, “This is it, then. We’re fucked.”

“They’re over the Indian Ocean, Easter Island and South Georgia,” Paul said. “They couldn’t have picked more remote places.”

Admiral Alexander ended his call. “We’ve attempted to engage them in all three locations but they’re probably too far from our assets. The Indian Ocean is our best shot. We launched BMD’s and scrambled fighters, but we’ve got no kill reports.”

Paul did another mouse-over and said, “They’re already above the atmosphere again.”

“Then it’s done. Our only hope now is to figure out where they put the aerosols for the second phase,” Carrie said.

“You’ll have to sweet talk that information out of your little buddy,” Turnbull said.

“Hell. He’s not going to tell me that.”

“Don’t underestimate your powers. He said you were persuasive.”

Carrie went into her office and closed the door. She laid her phone on the desk and stared at it. Sometime later she called Deshler.

“Come, Carrie Player.”

“Come, Deshler, you little gray bastard, you really did it.”

“We had no choice but to fulfill our duty.”

“When will you plant the time release units?”

“Very soon. We must make plans to evade your defenses and your listening to our communications complicates that. I must admit you are a worthy adversary, Carrie Player.”

“I don’t know why we have to be adversaries, Deshler. We are no threat to you.”

“Not now, but the day would have come that your belligerent species would develop deep space capabilities. It would be irresponsible for us to allow that.”

“Is it not enough that you have decimated our population? We will not be able to advance space technology with such diminished numbers. If we do not become extinct, it will be millennia before we recover.”

“Millennia are nothing to the cosmos. We owe responsibility to eternity.”

“Oh, bullshit. You call yourself responsible when you tinker with an arboreal primate, make us what we are, then use your superior technology to cruelly destroy us? I would say you are a race of genocidal monsters. You are the threat to the cosmos, not us.”

“Do not excite yourself, Carrie Player. No one has been destroyed. You simply will cease to procreate.”

“That is even more cruel than incinerating us. Why do you not come down here and fight like a man?”

“In your sense of the word I am not a man.”

“That is right. Therefore you are quite able to go fuck yourself.”

“That is a highly unsatisfying occupation.”

Carrie was clinching her fists and felt her jaws flare. “I do not think we will be talking again, Deshler. Going.”

“That will make me sad, Carrie Player. Going.”

She waited, shaking slightly, for the emailed audio of the call to arrive, translated it, and distributed it, before going back to the bullpen.

Jan said, “Look at this.” She pointed at the satellite tracker. All three ships were in close proximity five-hundred miles over the North Atlantic.

Carrie stared at the display for a few seconds. “They’re having a face-to-face meeting so I can’t hear what they’re saying when they decide where to put their aerosols.”

“Think about that,” Jan said. “To them you’re the most powerful person on earth.”

“Lot of good it does. Where did everybody go?”

“The director is on her way to Cape Canaveral. The other two went back to the Pentagon.”

“So the director didn’t get canned?”

“Not yet. She decided to go to Florida to watch NASA try to pinpoint where they land and to stay as far as possible from the White House. Paul and Eddy went to the canteen.”

“I’m going home. Call me if anything happens.”

Carrie was surprised to find that it was late afternoon. The dark clouds were breaking in the west and the low sun’s rays slanted beneath the ominous canopy. During the crawl across the Potomac The Twilight Zone theme played from her phone. She ignored it. At home she fixed some cottage cheese and tomato wedges and poured a glass of wine before turning the television to Fox News. A reporter on the White House lawn told of a rash of UFO sightings.

“They’re not unidentified anymore, asshole,” she thought.

According to the reporter jets scrambled from McDill AFB, Florida, Colorado Springs, Waddington RAF, Lincolnshire and American fighters from Ramstein Air Base in Germany. He claimed that Russian jets fired on a saucer shaped craft over Minsk and Saudi jets chased one across the Empty Quarter.

Carrie decided to call her boss. “Hello, Carrie, any news from your boyfriend?” Georgia Turnbull said.

“Nothing new. Are you at the Cape yet?”

“No, still in the air.”

“According to the news the little bastards are playing hide-and-seek all over the globe.”

“Oh.”

“It looks like they are dragging red herrings around to make it impossible to guess where they hide the aerosols.”

“Or else they are planting a whole bunch of them.”

“Well, that’s possible, but I didn’t get a sense of that. When they entered the atmosphere and apparently released their gas, it was very quick—not like they released a lot of devices in a lot of different places.”

“That’s true but we can’t really guess how they intend to do it, can we? Any chance Deshler will tell you?”

“We’re not speaking at the moment.”

“Oh, dear, don’t tell me you had a spat.”

“I told him what he could do with his sexual appendages.”

“Carrie, dear, that might not be in our best interest.”

“I know. I’ll patch things up soon, but he needs to get the cold shoulder for a little while.”

“Oh, you kids. I’ll call you when I hear what NASA has to say.”

Carrie left the TV muted and called her daughter. The response was expected. “You cannot leave Mount Weather until the virus is gone from the atmosphere,” Carrie said after listening to Sherrie’s opening salvo.

“What am I going to do down here for four years?”

“Get pregnant.”

“I can’t believe you said that. What happened to the mom who said she’d put me in a convent if I ever got pregnant?”

“That mom and seven billion other people just got exposed to a virus that makes us sterile. The game has changed. You need to reproduce.”

“So now I’m a baby-making machine in an underground prison?”

“Pretty much. What is it like there?”

“It’s posh as hell.”

“It was made for the government. What do you expect?”

“Do you think keeping a few hundred of us down here is really going to save the world?”

Carrie hesitated. “No, but we have to try.”

“What happened with your space chum?”

“We’re not seeing eye to eye anymore.”

“That reminds me, I had a call from dad.”

“What did he say?”

“He doesn’t believe any of it. He thinks you’re nuts.”

“He always thought that.”

“Are you nuts? Is this whole thing a bad joke?”

“No, honey, it’s really happening.” Carrie heard her child start to cry. “I’ll call again soon. Keep your chin up and find a husband.”

Sobbing and laughing at the same time, Sherrie asked, “You want me to find a husband first or get pregnant?”

“It no longer really matters.”

Later in the evening Director Turnbull called Carrie. “It looks like your red herring theory is right. They’re darting from orbit to the surface a couple times an hour and all over the world. We’re making a list of all the landing sites but it’s going to take years to search all of them.”

“Any chance we can shoot them down?”

“I just spoke to Matranga. He says they’re just too fast.”