The Takeover, page 7
“Playing capture the alien,” Kaley said happily. “Josh makes a great alien—he’s so ugh-ly.” That earned her more tickles, enough to send her into renewed paroxysms of squealing. “I thought you were the alien,” Josh said. “You certainly sound like one.” “I thought you were the alien,” laughed Kaley, “and you were chasing me.”
“Whoever’s the alien, take it outside, now, before you break something.” Cynthia pointed imperiously towards the door.
“Maybe she’s the alien,” Kaley whispered.
“I heard that,” said Cynthia.
“I think you were supposed to,” said Josh. “Fine, fine, we’re going. Must—obey—overlord,” he said to Kaley as they made their way out. She burst out laughing and started walking like an automaton.
“Dinner’s in half an hour,” Cynthia reminded them. “Where’s Ashley?”
“Where do you think?” Kaley answered, rolling her eyes Ashley-style. “In her room, as always, talking with one of her boyfriends.” She said it with such disdain, Josh and Cynthia traded a little smile.
“Okay,” Cynthia said. “Your overlord commands you to be back in half an hour. Make it so.”
“That’s Jean Luc Picard,” said Josh, “not an overlord.”
“Yeah, Mom,” chided Kaley. “An overlord would say something different, like, “Resistance is futile.”
“Resistance is futile if you’re not back here in time for dinner.”
Woof stopped chasing after the kids and came back inside, staring up at her and wagging his tail. He barked once, alarm clock that he was. It was time for his dinner, and he knew it. She poured dog food into his bowl and set it down.
Now, what to make for the rest of the family? She opened the fridge and stared inside, trying to figure out what to make with half her ingredients missing due to all the shortages at the store.
Interlude: Jump 2
September 20
On September 20th every dome around the world jumped for a second time, doubling in size, transforming from the size of an apartment to the size of a large house. Each had a diameter of some 60 feet, encapsulating about 3,000 square feet of land. Worldwide that only amounted to about 500 square miles all told—roughly the size of Los Angeles—but the fact that the “plots” were scattered all over the place made it annoying to humans, who weren’t used to having anyone but themselves decide where things should or shouldn’t go. Man, it seemed, no longer had complete dominion over the Earth: land was being set aside by others for their own arcane purposes.
With ten days having passed between the hatch and the first jump, and another ten days between the first jump and the second, it was becoming apparent the domes were synchronized in some fashion. Every ten days came another jump. It wasn’t quite like clockwork, but it was close enough—which meant the world could begin to anticipate another “growth spurt” on or around September 30th.
This awareness galvanized people into action. Anyone anywhere near a jump zone began moving whatever possessions they could out of their homes just as fast as they could: furniture, clothes, scrapbooks, electronics, jewelry. Whole houses were emptied in frantic fashion in a matter of days. U-Hauls and moving vans became impossible to rent, and storage facilities deemed safe in terms of their location quadrupled their monthly rates and still had a waiting list a mile long.
Those who couldn’t rent a storage unit had little choice but to impose on family and friends. They jammed their cherished belongings into other people’s attics and garages, filled driveways to overflowing with overloaded vehicles, and crowded into guest bedrooms “just for the night” (the standard phrase). Nerves frayed to the breaking point as distant relatives pushed the boundaries of kinship like never before.
Life was changing fast, and people were just trying to keep up. The next jump already felt inevitable.
Chapter 8
September 20 – Oval Office
So how many push-pins do we need in that map of ours?” asked the President.
“Too many,” replied Cohen. “We estimate something on the order of 298,000 domes here in the U.S.”
The President sighed. “That’s a whole lot of pins. Less than Gil’s back-of-the-napkin estimate, but not by much.”
“Yes sir. His estimate was annoyingly accurate.” Lametti remained silent, but Cohen thought he looked smug.
“What’s the global count?”
“We’re far less certain about that. Our best guess is between four and five million.”
“Jesus! That many!”
“The good news is, some are in the middle of nowhere: places like Antarctica, the Sahara, Siberia, the Eurasian Steppes, and the Outback.”
“Did some poor schmuck actually go out there and count all of them?”
“No sir, these are statistical estimates based on satellite data.”
The President paced for awhile without speaking. “Gil, you’re awfully quiet. What do you make of all this?”
Lametti had been looking pensively out the window, but now he turned his attention towards the President. “The more I think about it, Mark, the more I think this is a land grab, plain and simple. These domes—each time they double in size, they’re gobbling up land. Maybe not all that much so far, but if they keep doubling in size the way they’ve been doing, things could get ugly fast.”
“Ugly how?”
“Rioting in the streets ugly. I think we can guess at this point what the ultimate goal of these aliens must be.”
“And what’s that?”
Lametti shrugged. “The takeover of the planet.”
“All of it?”
He shrugged again, palms open wide. “Who knows? Maybe. Or at least a sizable chunk of it.”
The President shook his head and resumed pacing around the Oval Office, looking deeply perturbed. “So what can we do about it?”
“I’m not sure there’s much we can do. But I’d say we need to get as aggressive as we can. Ramp up the military’s involvement. Station troops outside each dome—or at least the ones inside our major cities. Call up the National Guard and station them in those same cities to keep the peace once things go crazy—and they will go crazy. And most important of all—bomb one of these domes to kingdom come to see if we can’t destroy it once and for all.”
“Kingdom come. I assume you mean nuclear.”
“Yes. Honestly I can’t think of a response that would be too extreme at this point. This is an invasion, pure and simple, and we need to treat it as one. Just because we can’t see the enemy with our own eyes doesn’t mean we’re not under attack. We need to respond with maximum military force while we still can.”
“Hear, hear,” cried Bill Cohen.
“You’ll get no argument from me,” said the President. “General McMillan has been pushing for the same thing. Let’s try bunker busters first, then we’ll go nuclear.”
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
Stealth Bomber pilot Lionel Lawson had never flown a mission quite like this one before. For one thing, the target was located right here in the US of A, and for another, the payload was massively heavy.
Two 30,000-pound GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrators—more commonly known as bunker busters—were stored in the B-2’s bomb bay. The plane felt sluggish compared to what he was used to.
These bunker busters were right at the top of the Air Force’s ordnance scale. They were six times heavier than any other deep-penetrating bunker buster and held the title of world’s biggest non-nuclear bomb. Lawson thought if any type of conventional payload was going to destroy a dome, it would be this one.
Problem was, the Air Force only had a small stockpile of them. Each one cost nearly four million dollars to produce, and there weren’t nearly enough to address the hundreds of thousands of targets in America alone. Then again, most of the domes were located in populated areas, so dropping a bunker buster on top of them probably wasn’t in the cards anyway.
But if even one dome could be destroyed, it would prove an important point. It would mean the domes were vulnerable to human attack. So far no other military options had worked. It was time to bring out the really big guns.
Lawson’s mission was to drop both bunker busters on a dome located way out in the middle of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. You couldn’t ask for a more desirable target for a test of this sort. It was such a remote and restricted location that there were no concerns about collateral damage. The bunker busters were designed to penetrate hardened targets, or targets buried deep underground, delivering a high explosive payload. Based on what the military had seen so far, no target was more hardened than these domes.
Lawson was just about in range now. “Target acquired,” he said into his headset. “Launching payload one.” The bomb bay doors opened and the first bunker buster was released. Moments later the second followed. Both were precision-guided so there was no question of missing the target here.
Moments later the first bomb hit. The explosion was spectacular. Fast on its heels came the second, and the amount of dirt and debris cast into the air was so great that Lawson couldn’t see a thing at the target sight.
He listened from his cockpit while mission control stared at their screens waiting for the smoke and debris to clear.
Eventually the smoke thinned out enough that they could see…nothing!
Nothing but a huge crater where the dome had been.
Success! Cheers went up from mission control. Lawson sighed with relief. Finally something had worked. The domes weren’t indestructible after all, which meant they had a chance.
“Hang on. Mission Control here.”
The voice sounded subdued.
“Due east of the target area. A quarter click away. It’s the ovate, with the force field still surrounding it. We can see all of it—the whole sphere. Resting on top of the sands. Looks to be intact. Target not destroyed…only relocated.”
Shit.
Situation Room, Washington D.C.
“So the bunker busters were a bust,” sighed the President. He was sitting in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House monitoring the White Sands mission. The usual suspects were with him in attendance, sitting around the conference table, cabinet members and military brass alike.
He’d just witnessed two bunker busters create an enormous and quite expensive hole in the ground. It had been enough to blow the ovate about a tenth of a mile away, which, given how heavy it was, was impressive. But follow-up reconnaissance had confirmed that the ovate with its surrounding force field remained intact, partially sunken now, like a golf ball sitting in a sand trap.
Bill Cohen swore. “We have to go nuclear on these suckers.”
“Agreed,” said the President. “If we were to do that, how exactly would we go about it?”
Cohen had his answer ready. “Use the same dome out at White Sands, or another one like it in some remote corner of the country. Plant a nuclear weapon just outside of it and wait for the dome to swallow it up on the next jump. Then, once the weapon is on the inside, detonate it and see what happens.”
“Detonate it how? Remotely?”
Cohen shook his head. “The signal might not reach through the dome wall. Better to put a timer on the weapon and have someone set it off from the inside, then make their escape. We already know the dome is designed to let people out.”
“Why not just bomb it from the outside and be done with it?”
”If we detonate it inside the force field,” replied Cohen, “then the full force of the explosion will be directed onto the ovate itself. That gives us our best chance of destroying both the ovate and the force field.”
The President nodded. “Okay, Bill, you’re in charge. Make it happen.”
September 25 – Nellis AFB, Las Vegas, Nevada
Truth be told, General McMillan hadn’t felt this alive since the war in Afghanistan. Not that he would ever admit it to anyone, but he was glad for the invasion. “Peace in our time” was a pipedream, what with these alien domes scattered all over the place, and McMillan couldn’t have been happier about it.
He had the perfect enemy to fight, too: a non-human one that every American agreed had to be stopped. Of course, he couldn’t see that enemy, but he was sure as hell they were out there somewhere, watching all the fun from a distance. No doubt they were laughing their heads off (if they even had heads) as the humans ran around with their hair on fire trying to destroy the domes.
It was genius, really. If nothing else, the domes served as an enormous distraction. Who could think about an actual alien invasion when domes kept popping up everywhere across the face of the Earth? McMillan snorted: the planet had developed a bad case of acne and that was all anyone could think about.
As for himself, he felt quite sure these domes were the equivalent of advance bases. The enemy would use them as beachheads for their coming invasion. Once the domes got big enough, he expected to see aliens drop out of the skies and occupy them. Then the real fun would begin. He had always relished a good fight, and this one was gonna be a doozy.
But for now his mission was simple: get a nuclear bomb into a dome in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Piece of cake. The bombs were already out here at Nellis Air Force Base, just north of Las Vegas. Nellis was one of two Air Force nuclear weapons depots in the U.S. (the other being Kirtland in New Mexico). The nukes were stored in a remote section of the Nellis complex known as Area 2, so all he had to do was pick one out from the existing stockpile and have it transported to the dome.
Technically speaking, it was experts from the 896th Munitions Squadron at Nellis who would be choosing which exact bomb to pick. They had all sorts of things to say about what type of nuclear device to use, how to transport it, what buttons not to push, blah blah blah. They liked to talk even more than he did.
Area 2 had more than eight hundred gravity bombs removed from retired B-52 bombers, plus another six hundred surplus cruise missile warheads, so they weren’t exactly starved for choice. As far as McMillan was concerned, they were all the “right bombs,” since they were all nuclear weapons. Whichever one they picked, it was going to make one helluva boom. And since the dome was still only the size of your average house, one thermonuclear device planted inside it should vaporize it, oh, about ten million times over.
In the end the experts selected the B83, one of the most powerful nuclear freefall weapons in the U.S. arsenal. With a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons, it was eighty times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Frankly, McMillan was of the opinion that if that didn’t work, they were shit out of luck.
The stockpile at Nellis contained fully operational bombs kept in cold storage that were available in minutes. They weren’t connected to delivery systems, but that wasn’t an issue in this case. All they had to do was load one up onto the back of a specially designed truck and ship it out. The Munitions Squadron took care of all the details, so all McMillan had to do was stand around and look important.
Normally the transport of a nuclear weapon would have required all sorts of special permits and licenses, but they were in a hurry and had the blessing of the President of the United States himself to speed things along, so they didn’t have to wait for the middle of the night, or escort vehicles, or security details, or anything like that. They just up and went.
Which was how General McMillan liked it: down and dirty. This was his kind of mission, and he was having a ball.
Interlude: Jump 3
September 30
Right on schedule, the domes jumped for a third time. Most of the jumps happened in the wee hours of the night. Some unfortunate parents awoke to discover their children or pets had just been swallowed up by a dome, with themselves on one side and their loved ones on the other. Coaxing terrified children, let alone dogs or cats, to pass through an electric wall of energy spelled the end of sleep for the remainder of that night for any such family.
Each dome was now roughly the size of your average Walgreens and the height of a three-story building. Their alien soap-bubble appearance looked out of place no matter what their surroundings. Most considered them a pox on the face of the Earth, but a few artist-types found glimmers of beauty too surreal to ignore.
One photographer captured the Eiffel Tower at sunrise with one of its legs enclosed by a dome and its pinnacle soaring high above—an image that quickly went viral. Another image depicted the Great Pyramid of Giza dominating a dome in a way that seemed to suggest humans couldn’t help but triumph in the long run. At the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, onlookers remarked on a dome that was “almost cute” as it nestled near one of the arch’s two enormous legs. And at the Grand Canyon, spectators marveled at an ovate perched near the very edge of the canyon with its force field extending out over the abyss, forming a shimmering sphere in the air.
Each dome now encompassed a quarter acre of land. For those keeping track, that represented about 2,000 square miles of land now out of commission worldwide—roughly the size of Delaware. That was still a pittance compared to the Earth’s total land mass of some 57 million square miles (not counting land under the oceans), but the domes were annoyingly spread out and took up more psychological space than they did actual space. They were like noxious weeds invading a well-tended garden that refused to be uprooted no matter how vigorously people pulled.
Chapter 9
September 30 – Situation Room, Washington D.C.
Yessir, the dome gobbled up that nuke just like we thought it would,” General McMillan announced to the President. “You just say the word and we’ll have ourselves one hell of a going-away party for that ovate out yonder.”
The President was once again in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. It was cramped and stuffy in there, and he always felt like he was too far away from the television monitors to see as clearly as he would have liked, but protocol demanded that he sit at the head of the conference table and pretend to be happy about it. “All right, General,” he replied. “Let’s get this show on the road. And let’s hope for all our sakes the dome is destroyed this time around.”
