Tina and Charlotte were watching television from their apartment just outside the Army base in Huntsville. Alice and John were on base, where they had been assigned since the President’s speech that warned the world of the alien threat. Tina’s brother Carl had decided to move in with their dad.
Since the President’s speech Tina and Charlotte had been glued to the television — as had most of the world — trying to learn any and everything they could about the alien threat. The news media had used military analysts, scientists, and, most effectively, science fiction writers for possible speculation about the aliens.
The program Tina and Charlotte were watching was nothing more than the millionth reiteration of things that had already been discussed to death. But then—
The screen abruptly went black. A few moments later a local news anchorwoman, looking flustered, sat down at a desk.
“We seem to be having technical difficulties with our satellite system,” the woman said, blinking rapidly and then looking off to the side. “We’ll be using the ground links to the Emergency Broadcast System to update you. Stay tuned to this station for further word on the alien invasion…”
“Let’s go, girls,” Alice yelled at the two teenagers to hurry into the Humvee.
“Ma’am, we really need to get back to the base ASAP,” Master Sergeant Cady urged her.
“Roger that, Thomas. Girls! Now!” she yelled as Tina and Charlotte rushed out the door of the apartment and Tina started back up the stairs as if she had forgotten something but then she thought better of it, adjusted her backpack, and continued into the vehicle.
The base was buzzing with excitement and there were convoys of military vehicles on every roadway. Helicopters were buzzing in and out overhead as Cady drove Alice and the teens to the shelter on the Redstone Arsenal.
The shelters were built back during the Cold War but since then had been used as storage facilities for explosives and chemicals. When the news of the threat of an alien invasion was released, every old Cold War fallout shelter and civil defense location across the country was refurbished and brought back online as part of the shelter system for the populace. The shelter system on the military base was assigned to the personnel involved with the local contingents of Neighborhood Watch and Asymmetric Soldier and their families.
Alice, the girls, and Sergeant Cady met John Fisher in one of the makeshift control rooms for the ISR data analysis team. The room was an obvious afterthought to the shelter. The walls were 2x4 construction with cheap paneling and had been added to the large empty bunker by simply bolting the stud sill-plate to the concrete. The walls went eight feet or so high, then were open to the higher ceiling of the shelter. The makeshift control room had laptops strewn all around it on small tables and there was a bird’s nest of cabling and wires running around the room. Four large flat-panel displays were mounted on two of the walls and cables draped from beneath each of the panels to a rack of servers and tele-communications equipment in the corner of the room. This rack seemed to be the nexus of the disarray of cabling.
John Fisher and Alan Davis were staring at the large screens discussing the scrolling numbers and characters as if they could decipher it.
Charlotte hugged her father.
“Daddy, what’s going on?”
“I’m glad you made it, darling. I owe Alice and Cady one. It looks like the aliens have decided it’s time to move to Earth.” John clicked a touchpad a few times and an image of Earth popped up on one of the flat screens. “You see these circular and elliptical lines here all around the planet?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, that is where we used to have satellites. As far as our space debris monitoring radars can tell, none of them are there. On the other hand, this…” he clicked a few more times on the touchpad, “is what the radars are picking up.” A cloud of blips filled the region around the planet.
“What does it mean?” Tina looked at her mother.
Alice shrugged.
“Dunno.”
