Earth, Antarctica

Gary’s Factory

T-Minus 4 days to Willis’s Impact

Gary sat in front of the main display in his new Ready Room. The central hologram showed the feed from the drones aboard Gaia’s Saber before they had all been destroyed. An alien with a corkscrewing body made of black armor plates and a face of red light had wrapped itself around the ship. It had to be bigger than several tall buildings to do that, and Gary had winced as the Saber had be destroyed and its drones consumed in the following explosion.

He’d tried to stay in direct contact with Anya through the menu, but for the first time since he’d used it, the comms had been interrupted. It had happened as soon as Anya and Renn had descended to the surface of Willis, beneath that menacing red aura that surrounded the asteroid.

He’d zoomed in with some back-up recon drones that were still thousands of miles away, but their visibility had been limited.All he knew from his readouts was that all of the digger rockets had failed, and the asteroid was still in one piece.

Gary had never suffered flashbacks or PTSD like some of the other marines he’d known from the war had. He’d been lucky. He’d had Mary, and she had been his rock, until she’d need him to be hers, and then she hadn’t been anything. Another cancer statistic. Her death, the senseless of it, had made him flashback to the war. It had made him think of staring at some stupid kid who thought he was dying for his country realize he was dying for a bureaucrat’s mistake.

Take the hill, abandon the hill, push the line forward, now fall back. So many dead for nothing. It wasn’t like the movies. It wasn’t heroic. It was a waste, made even stupider for how easy it could have been avoided.

Gary had seen the numbers for the escort mission. A single host, let alone two, exponentially increased the odds of not just one, but several rockets getting through to an ideal depth and detonating their payloads.

It should have worked.

At the very least, even if Anya and that French prick Renn had died, it would have been for something. It would have meant they succeeded. It might have been worth it.

But the numbers had been for naught. And so had Anya and Renn going out there to die alone in space on a hellrock crawling with monsters.

Gary slammed one heavy fist down on the table in front of him.

“Dumb fucking kid,” he muttered. The Ready Room was empty and there was nobody to hear him. Everybody was busy with their own tasks. He’d automated everything, but he had wanted to know, more than anything, the second that things happened. If the asteroid was in fragments or whole, it would change what he needed to build.

He stared at the rock, floating in the darkness, that hateful red light swirling around it.

And then there was a flash on the far side of it. A glittering, golden dome appeared, as large as a city, and then firestorms of orange and gold and white swirled across the surface of Willis. The light within them grew brighter, and then a blinding flash of light streaked across the asteroid. It fractured the rock so it looked as though white lightning were spreading across a gray storm cloud, and then the asteroid shattered. It exploded into countless pieces and then those pieces broke again.

The exception was a single, still enormous chunk that was encased in red light as it flew away. Gary saw it still maintained the heading as the original asteroid, right towards Earth.

“I’ll be damned,” Gary said. He continued to stare at the screen, to look for any signs of life or movement, but there was nothing to be seen. “You did good, Anya. Damn good. Computer, maintain surveillance on that area. If you see any movement or lifesigns, let me know.”

“Affirmative. Currently, drone instruments are experiencing difficulty with information gathering due to excessive energy in the area. The fragment of asteroid Willis is also emitting an unknown form of energy that is causing disruptions,” a cool, gender-neutral voice said over the speakers of the Ready Room.

“All right. Gather what data you can, process it, and keep a drone focused on Anya’s last known location. If a single rock moves I want to know about it,” Gary said, then brought up his menu. It still showed that Anya and Renn were alive, but neither was answering his calls. He supposed it could be a lingering effect of whatever that red light had been, which was distressing. If that light could mess with their menus, they would all be in big trouble. Still, Anya had found a way to fight while standing within it, so it couldn’t be all bad.

“Gary: Rachel Park has awakened. She is requesting either your presence or Samaira Upadhyay’s,” the computer said.

“Tell her I’m on my way,” Gary said, and stepped into the nearest transport tube that would zip him away to the infirmary. He tried not to think about Anya, and focus on all the work he still had to do instead.

Despite having been in a coma for several days, Rachel “Chell” Park looked none the worse for wear. A bit confused, disoriented, and sleepy, but otherwise fine. Several medical bots attended to her and scanned her as Gary passed her her third cup of cold water. She’d been kept well fed and hydrated while she had been recovering, but she said she was still thirsty enough to drain a water cooler on her own.

“Okay…geez. That’s a lot of…wow,” Chell said as Gary finished filling her in on what had happened since Omega died. The assault wave, Willis, Anya and Renn, and just now, the explosion. He’d sent texts to everybody as well, so it was common knowledge by the time he finished catching Chell up.

“Yeah, you can miss a lot in a few days,” Gary nodded.

“And Anya is…?” Chell asked.

“MIA,” Gary said. When Chell blinked at him he added, “Missing in Action. Menu says she’s still alive, along with Renn but I don’t trust it at the moment.”

“Ah,” Chell nodded. “So what now?”

“Now we finish preparing for what will hopefully just be some mopping up. That chunk of Willis that’s still barreling toward us isn’t any joke. It’s about as big as half of Texas, and it’ll still wipe out every damn thing on this rock, even without the millions of killer aliens riding on top of it. But Anya and Renn gave us a better chance than ever. They cut their numbers down from over six million to just above two million, and reduced Willis to something even conventional, old-school Earth armaments might have a chance of taking out.”

“So…we’re good?” Chell asked and sipped her water. She made an “Aaaah,” sound as one of the medical droids opened her mouth open gently and depressed her tongue.

“Not hardly. The asteroid alone would be a cakewalk, but it’s back up by some kind of red light. Computer doesn’t know what it is, except it plays hell with scanners and even cut off the menu signal. And the aliens on it are likely the strongest ones they had, to survive everything Anya and Renn and I threw at them. And we’ve got just a little over four days before it smacks our planet and ends it all,” Gary said.

“So no, not good,” Chell said. Gary saw the young Korean-American woman swallow, saw her hands gripping the empty cup of water tight enough to make her knuckles white while her hands trembled. “What can I do?”

Gary smiled at her, impressed. “Well you should probably rest a bit more.”

“No, I can rest later. We’ve only got four days, and now that Renn is out in space somewhere, or dead, I’m the planet’s most powerful psychic. The aliens could try psychic stuff again, and you’ll need me. So…what can I do?”

“You’ll wanna check with MacDougal, first. But if I had to guess, they’re gonna want you wherever the estimated point of impact will be, or where the highest concentration of aliens is gonna show. You okay with that?” Gary asked.

“Absolutely not,” Chell replied and gave a trembling laugh. “I’m gonna pee myself just thinking about it. But if Anya can go to space with that weirdo Renn, and if everybody else can do their best, I can too.”

Gary nodded. “Well, get some proper food in you while I talk to MacDougal, and then we’ll get you on your way.”

He left Chell alone to eat her first solid meal in days under the gentle observation of the medical droids. He entered his private quarters and sat at his large desk. His room was simple, utilitarian, and surprisingly small. His bed was a single mattress set into an alcove, and bathroom just large enough for a shower, toilet and sink, a food replicator, and a huge desk in front of a display window that looked out onto the main factory floor.

Once he was at his desk, he pressed a few buttons and brought up his non-host contact list. MacDougal was at the top, and he tapped her name and waited as a large display window appeared. It beeped a few times and then MacDougal’s face appeared, the Oval Office behind her.

“Hendricks. Please tell me you have good news,” she said.

“I do,” Gary replied and filled her in.

“It’s still almost the size of Texas?” MacDougal asked.

“I swear to all that’s holy if you’re about to complain I will…” Gary started to say.

“No need for threats, Hendricks,” MacDougal replied. “I thought your digger rockets would’ve atomized the entire thing.”

“It wasn’t my rockets that did it. It was Anya. Well, I’m assuming it was her,” Gary said. “All my rockets had been destroyed and the explosion looked like her shiny gold fire.”

“You’re telling me she destroyed an asteroid the size of Australia? Alone? No help from you?”

“Well she had Renn with her. It could’ve been a joint effort. But no, they didn’t use anything I gave them to blow up Willis like that.”

MacDougal frowned and rubbed at her chin. “Fine. We’ll think about that later. How’s Lunar Base Alpha?”

“85% complete, and should be up and running by tomorrow,” Gary said.

“And the outer defenses?”

“Fully online. Willis, or what remains of it, will get there late tomorrow. It’ll get to the moon a little over a day after that, and by then it’ll be toast.”

“And if it’s not…”

“Then it really ain’t worth thinking about, is it?” Gary asked. MacDougal sighed.

“No, I suppose not.”

“Anya and Renn did the best they could. They’ve given us a phenomenal chance. I’m not going to waste it.”

“Nor I. I have to make some statements to the public. Amateur star-gazers have noticed something’s up, literally and figuratively, and the word is starting to spread online, and the story that we’re bulding a moon research base isn’t really flying anymore since it looks like a huge cannon. I’ll have my hands full with PR for the next thirty-six hours, but I trust you’ll cooperate with the other representatives?”

“I’ll do what I think is best to blow that hellrock out of the sky,” Gary said.

“Good enough for me,” MacDougal said and hung up.

Gary had taken the lessons he’d learned from outfitting Gaia’s Saber, as well as his own ideas on space vessels he’d been toying with, and created a simple interplanetary transport. He’d had his factory make several cargo ships capable of transporting raw materials up to the moon for Lunar Alpha. He’d have liked to have had time to send them to Saturn or other planets in the solar system to mine their vast, untapped resources, but he’d have to settle for strip mining Antarctica and any other place on Earth given their limited time.

He’d deployed drones to the bottoms of the oceans and other remote places, but it was all very limited. They’d have just enough for this invasion and then to set up some other basics. After that, the Earth was going to start looking like Swiss Cheese. The materials from the RAC store helped, as they were essentially created out of nothing, but Gary’s RAC funds were low. He’d spent most of them kick-starting the new factory. With as many aliens as were arriving, he knew that if he survived, he’d have a fortune in RAC after.

Gizmo, his AI, had told him that while he would be capped at level 100, his RAC gain would not face any such restrictions. Presumably he could fly up into space right now where all his missiles had killed the aliens and collect their datastreams and the associated menu rewards for killing them but…

That would have to wait. It would takes days to make a round-trip, and as much as he wanted to go personally check on Anya, and as helpful as the RAC would be right now, he just didn’t have the time. And for some reason, time-manipulation skills of any kind simply were not present in the menu.

So for now, he had to do things the old fashioned way and dig for his materials and ship them away.

One of the cargo ships was almost finished loading. Construction drones that resembled crabs hauled their heavy loads into the ship and then hurried out to collect more. Gary would simply hitch a ride on one of the ships to personally check on Lunar Base Alpha, lend his own direct assistance to the construction, and speed it along.

He was just stepping onto the ship when he heard footsteps behind him and saw Chell hurrying forward, a gaggle of medical drones hurrying after her.

“I wanna…I wanna…” Chell said as she huffed for breath. Clearly the girl hadn’t put any points into physical conditioning of any sort. Well, that and the whole being knocked out for a few days from an alien psychic attack.

“You wanna what? I’m going to moon to build stuff,” Gary said. “Not much need for a psychic there.”

“No, that’s perfect, actually,” Chell said. “I used my points I got from helping with the fight with Alpha in London. I’m still not as strong as Renn, and I can’t sense anything here, but if I can get higher, away from all the psychic noise on Earth, I might be able to contact him. If he’s still alive.”

“Really?” Gary asked and Chell nodded. “Good enough for me. Can’t hurt, at any rate. I’m guessing you’ve never been to the moon before?”

Chell laughed and said, “No, can’t say that I have.”

“Well come aboard. We’ll bring a med droid just in case. It’ll only take a couple hours to get there and we’ll see what you can do,” Gary said and helped the young woman aboard, then directed her to a small seating area near the cockpit.

If Chell could sense Renn, and he was alive, then Maybe Anya was too. And if they both were, then…Gary didn’t follow that optimistic thread for too far. In his experience, the universe bent toward the worst alternatives. He’d seen it enough to know. For now, he just had to focus on the practical problems. Get to the moon, finish the defenses, and then…

Then they would see.