Читать книгу Operation Crimson Storm - Robert Reginald - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

UP YOUR ASTEROID!

Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air.

—Thomas Gray

Alex Smith, 12 Bi-July, Mars Year ii

Novato, California, Planet Earth

As usual, my wife was very supportive.

“Well, what the hell did you expect, Alex?” she asked. “You think they’re just going to drop everything at your say-so and pour hundreds of billions of dollars into a space defense system? It’s just not going to happen.”

“But….”

“I don’t care how convincing your evidence is, they’ll just want to study it some more. I do love you, Alex, but sometimes you’re the most impractical man on Planet Earth.”

I knew she was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier. The Bush III Administration had said that the Middle Eastern War had priority over any “possible” second invasion from Mars. After all, the Martians had been defeated, right? Man had proven his superiority once again. We were learning to adapt their technology, the experts said.

Balderdash! Man had been decisively squashed by the alien machines. The Martians had only died because of bacterial infection. Furthermore, we hadn’t been able to make any of the Martian devices work; we couldn’t replicate their bioengineering, hadn’t even come close. We didn’t understand any of it.

“They’re going to come back,” I said.

“You don’t know why they invaded us in the first place.” Becky waved her hands in frustration. “You don’t know squat about them, really. Nobody does. They may return—or they may not.

“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Mellie’ll be up soon, and I want to read some more of my book before she is.”

I raised an eyebrow.

She sighed heavily, and then very deliberately picked the volume up, displaying the garish cover to me: The Martian Mystique: What It Means and Why We Should Be Worried! by Madame Stavroula.

“Not her again,” I groaned. “She’s a charlatan, you know.”

“She has some very interesting things to say about the aliens,” Becky said. “Sure, some of it’s hokum, and some of it’s exaggerated; but she claims to have had visions of the Martian hives, and it rings true to me.”

“And she’s getting these, uh, visions from where? Come on, Becky, this is pretty rum stuff. I mean, hocus-pocus and all that. Hives? Like they’re bugs or something?”

“She says, and I quote, ‘The Martians are the surviving dominant life form of the Red Planet. When their world began to dry, when the waters finally receded for the last time, the Martians took their civilization underground, preserving those species that they needed to maintain themselves. In their hideaways they built their salt and fresh water cisterns and living spaces and gardens and laboratories, and for a billion years or more, they have worked to develop their culture, their defensive capabilities, and their art’.”

“Art?” I just laughed and shook my head. “And what does our dear Madame S. have to say about the war?”

“She says they’re not inherently an aggressive species, but they were attacked by another off-world race many millions of years ago, and nearly wiped out. They just barely managed to survive by finally destroying their enemy. This has made them paranoid about any perceived incursions on their own world. Our probes, Madame Stavroula says, were perceived as an attack on Mars, and so they responded in kind. The expedition they sent was intended as much to gather information as to measure the level of the threat we represented.”

“That’s why they killed millions of human beings?”

“They don’t know anything about that. She says they never had any communication with their fleet after they made landfall. All they know is that the expedition never responded to their messages. Therefore, they assume that we killed them all, and that we have a greater technology than they do. Madame Stavroula says they will now take all appropriate measures to insure their safety.”

“Well, at least she agrees that the aliens are still a threat,” I said, laughing.

Then the phone rang. It was Min.

“Hey, man, turn on CNN right away!”

“What?”

“Right away, turn it on!”

“What is it, Alex?” Becky asked.

I grabbed the remote and clicked on the news.

“Reports are coming in,” the newscaster said, “of a massive tsunami sweeping the coasts of Africa and South America.”

“God, another earthquake,” Becky said, “those poor people.”

“No, man,” Mindon yelled over the phone, “it’s not an earthquake, it’s the Martians!”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember the dino egg?” Mindon asked. “I’ll bet you dollars to donuts they’ve lobbed one of those damned things at Earth.”

“It’s too soon, Mindon,” I said. “The last opposition was months ago, and the two planets have been moving away from each other ever since. Couldn’t be an asteroid.”

“Think, man! It takes a long time to move something like a meteor around, even if it already crosses Mars’s and Earth’s orbits. Too much mass. It’d take years to nudge it just right, depending on what kind of engine you had and how close the thing would get to Earth naturally. This wasn’t started months ago. They probably got it moving right after the war. And this was just a small rock.”

The news on the TV was more serious now.

“According to Henry Newbolt in our London office, all communication with the Falkland Islands has been lost. The island of Aladore has been obliterated from the map. Survivors are reporting one-hundred-foot waves striking some of the major coastal cities of South America.

“And this just in! We have reports of a massive explosion, maybe an atom bomb, in the southern Atlantic Ocean.”

“It was a meteor, I tell you.” Then I hung up.

Eventually, Mindon and Puff came over, and we sat there all through the rest of the afternoon and early evening glued to the TV set, watching the damage and casualty reports continue to mount. No one knew what’d caused the event. Pictures began to come in of the devastated cities.

“It’s the invasion all over again,” I said. “I keep thinking about the War of Two Worlds.”

The phone rang. Becky answered it, and then looked at me strangely, holding the instrument in her right hand.

“It’s someone from the National Security Council,” she said. “They want to talk to you, Alex.”