First Contact, page 4
After three years, they simply went away, ended in a moment of political insanity. She was twenty then, eager for a future. Suddenly, there was no more university, no more friends and teachers. No more dream of being an engineer.
No point in even being smart anymore. Academic knowledge no longer mattered; being tough and cautious did.
She learned about the tough part when she went home to her parents—except that home was lost, too. When it became clear that war was imminent, the university president sent them all home, and she stepped through the old doorway, luggage in hand, just in time to hear Dad’s voice coming from the family room: “That’s it. It’s started.…”
As for the mom and dad, they packed up their emotional tents and mentally stole away during that first terrible night, sometime after the television went dead. Their eldest, Lionel, had been foolish enough not to flee the draft the year before and was presumed dead. Their middle child, Denise, had been living with her husband and kids in D.C.—ground zero. Ma had kept going to the comm and punching up Denise’s number, staring into the blank screen and muttering to herself, even after all the news reports early that evening confirmed that Washington and three surrounding states had been blown off the map.
But the three of them—Ma, Dad, Lily—lived, and for a long time, she wished they hadn’t. They didn’t live in one of the directly nuked cities; they should have been so lucky. The house was left standing… but the growing radiation levels, carried on the wind, forced them to leave most everything behind. So they packed up the groundcar and roamed like nomads, with Dad’s old camping gear, looking for clean ground.
What they took with them was stolen, of course, by road thieves with guns. She wound up stealing a gun—something she had never, ever believed herself capable of—in order to protect her parents. She’d even shot a total of five men and one woman in that first awful year, wounding four and killing two—she, Lily, genteel college student, almost-engineer, who had wept upon learning from her biology professor that she would have to kill a mouse before dissecting it. The roads were deadly then, back before new communities started forming and learning how to protect themselves.
Just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, all the charging stations shut down, and the car ran out of juice within a month’s time. They’d had to abandon it and head out on foot, finally winding up at a horrifically crowded KOA campground. The latrines were vile beyond description—who had the heart to clean them anymore?—but there were good people there who helped look after her parents and provided protection against the road gangs.
The first night at the KOA, Ma’d laid down in the borrowed tent and said, Lily, I think I have cancer. And she’d showed her the lump.
Don’t worry, Ma, she’d said, and meant it. After all, it was only cancer, a disease they’d cured a half-century ago. No big deal. You go to the doctor, you get your shot, you come home. Checkup in a month.
Or so she’d thought. But the doctors who came through the KOA couldn’t carry with them every medicine ever invented, and what they did have ran out pretty fast. Find the medicine? All the pharmaceutical companies were in the big cities, which were now dust. The drug Ma needed should be available somewhere, but none of the doctors knew where, and so the next six months were a constant battle to get from town to town where supposedly a hospital was still in business…
But none of them ever were.
So Ma died of cancer, a disease you weren’t supposed to have to fear anymore; but now, you had to be afraid of everything again, even illnesses from medieval times. In the California deserts—all that was left of the state—people were dying from bubonic and pneumonic plague. Hell, you could die these days from an infected cut.
Soon after, her dad took to drink. No more pills to take the pain or the craving away, and Lily was too stunned herself to stop him. She let it go until the night he used her pistol to kill himself.
Life was numb for a long time after. For some odd reason, she kept existing—it certainly couldn’t be called living. And she kept moving from place to place, teaching herself along the way to scavenge and steal until she became expert at it.
Why she kept going, she couldn’t say—except that maybe she was looking for something. And she found it the night she met Zef.
She had finally headed far north, to Montana. It was safe, one of the cleanest places around, air- and water-wise, and she tried to tell herself the cold wouldn’t be that bad. (Hah!) All the warm places were either still sizzling from the nukes, stricken by plague or dysentery or typhoid or rabies (all diseases long forgotten before the war), or controlled by the new drug lords. She was tired of wandering and just wanted to rest.
She’d wandered into the local bar, the Crash & Burn—an old army tent, really, set with a few tables, a rickety bar, and an honest-to-God jukebox. Her intention was to make her need for shelter and her particular skill known to the locals, in hopes of working out a trade.
And she’d sat right down beside Zefram Cochrane. He was holding court in the bar, in one of his life-of-the-party moods, not yet drunk because it was still early. To say he charmed the socks off her was putting it mildly… but she was hardened after too many years on the road and not about to let him know how she felt. Within five minutes, he’d learned her name and trade and history—and propositioned her.
Not exactly in the way she’d expected. He had a get-rich-quick scheme, he’d told her, and she could be a part of it.
Yeah, right. Find another sucker, white boy.
No, no, he’d said; he had come here to Montana because of the old missile silos. There really was a use for them after all. If she really was as talented a… provider as she claimed, she could help. He was a physicist, working on a project. But he couldn’t talk about it there in the bar. Would she come to his place? There was something there he wanted to show her.
She’d laughed aloud at his blatant, clichéd attempt; he’d flushed crimson, as if suddenly realizing how it all sounded, but he had recovered his poise enough to turn to the bartender: Hey, Charlie, tell her I’m okay.
He was okay, Charlie had said, as had a couple of other people there who’d overheard, including a sweetfaced older woman. Against her better judgment, she had gone with him, but she’d kept one hand on the gun in her jacket. And before she knew it, she was sitting cross-legged across from him on the cold dirt floor of his hut, listening to him explain that he needed certain mechanical parts.
To build something, she interjected. It wasn’t a question; after all, from where she sat she could see a large section of what looked like an air shuttle console propped against a short, rusting metal cabinet, atop which lay a pile of roughly sketched blueprints.
Yes, he admitted. A spaceship.
She leapt up. And she would have walked right out and never looked back except that Zef jumped up, too, and gently caught her hand.
Damn it, Lily, help me, he said. I can’t do this alone. Here, let me show you.
Those words could never have stopped her, but his eyes did. There was something breath-taking, fiery in them—something she hadn’t seen in so many years that at first she didn’t recognize it, but it caught and mesmerized her all the same.
Hope.
He’d named his ship the Phoenix.
Let me show you, he repeated, then grabbed a handful of blueprints off the cabinet, spread them out on the ground, and knelt before them. He spoke swiftly, happily, of how the nuclear core contained in an old warhead could be harnessed for something he called a “warp engine,” and he traced in the dirt some mathematical equations to prove it. She knew then that he really was what he claimed to be—a physicist. One, because he rattled on with blithe confidence that she would understand everything he said; after all, it was simple and obvious to him. Two, because she actually did understand much of what he told her, and it made frighteningly good sense.
Warp drive. Back at the university, they had called it hyperspace, and it was only a hypothesis, an intangible dream: light-years reduced to a day’s travel, the stars no longer impossibly distant. But even then, there were rumors that a breakthrough was coming soon, that a handful of elite scientists had devoted themselves to finding a practical way to implement it.
And if there were other beings out there…
Please, God, don’t let them be bad guys. Let them bring help.
I have a deal with some Indonesians, Zef finally said. They see the potential and know it’ll take some time. But they’re willing to pay millions.
Indonesia, huh? She had paused and rubbed her freezing arms. Is it warm there?
So for the next few years, they played a little game with each other: he pretended to be nothing more than a hard-bitten entrepreneur desperate to strike it rich, while she pretended to be nothing more than a hardbitten thief hungry for a piece of the action. They were in it strictly for the money, because the war and its subsequent hell had taught them that dreams and futures were made to be shattered. Idealism was for fools, as were feelings. Or so she reminded herself everytime she dragged him from the Crash & Burn and tucked him into his own bed when he was too drunk to find his way home, or kept watch over him everytime a minor setback on the project plunged him into a depression so deep he threatened suicide.
Affection had nothing to do with it, she told herself. She was merely taking care of her investment.
In the future…
* * *
Beside her, Zef grunted, bringing her back into the present—to the frozen mud and biting air. She shivered and rubbed her arms as she had done so long ago, then stared up at the star-littered night sky, wondering. Would it really happen? Would they be up there making history tomorrow as the first two people to travel using warp drive?
And would the Indonesians really pay them all that money? She stared dreamily up at the glittering darkness, allowing herself for the first time to consider success. What would it be like, to have a solidly constructed house with real running water and her own charging station and car? To pay a farmer to grow anything she wanted? To indulge in the shameless luxury of feeding a pet dog?
Her gaze grew unfocused—but not enough to miss a fantastically swift-moving disc of light amid the stars, one that seemed to grow nearer as she watched. She touched Zef’s arm. “What the hell is that?”
He glanced up, squinting hard to keep from seeing double. “That, my dear, is the Constellation Leo.”
“No, that,” Lily insisted, pointing. She tried to calm herself, to keep her breathing steady so that her heart would not race, but this was no falling star, and all satellites had long ago been blown back to Earth.
Take it easy, girl. You’re being childish. Maybe somebody in Indonesia launched a new satellite. Or maybe that’s just one weird freaking meteor.
Then Zef lifted his face toward the sky and finally saw it. She glanced sideways at him, praying he would shake his head, smile, and dismiss her fear with a scientific explanation.
Instead, his faint, inebriated grin vanished; his face hardened, then slackened into that disbelieving, stunned expression Ma had worn when the newscaster announced the total destruction of Washington, D.C. The sight had instantly sobered him, and as she glanced back up at the sky, she saw two bright streaks emerge from the shining disc—and a half-second later, heard the distant thunder.
For half a heartbeat’s pause, both of them stood frozen with fearful puzzlement, trying to understand.…
The drab world around Lily vanished, replaced by a yellow-white burst of blinding brilliance, as if she had stepped inside a star. A screaming roar accompanied the light, rattling her teeth, her bones, searing her ears with such pristine agony that she knew the drums had ruptured; her skin pricked and tingled as if reacting to a nearby lightning bolt.
She jumped—or was she hurled?—toward a small berm at the path’s edge. For a second or two, she knew nothing but blindness, deafness. Slowly, her vision began to return, each blink clearing away a bit more afterimage; her ears still rang shrilly, but she could hear the sound of other nearby blasts ripping through the settlement. Beneath her belly, the cold, muddy ground shuddered continuously.
Some yards distant, Zef scrambled on his hands and knees away from a great smoking crater—all that remained of several nearby Quonset huts and tents. There had been people in them, a couple of families—maybe twenty-five, thirty victims inside; some of those glowing cinders, Lily realized, sickened, were bits of bone. This wasn’t a nuke; this was something newer, deadlier.
She pushed herself up, dashed out into the street, and pulled Zef to his feet; the two of them dove again for cover while more dazzling streaks of light rained down from the heavens. In a fleeting millisecond of quiet, Zef sighed beside her. “After all these years…” He rolled his eyes skyward—and in them, Lily saw reflected the blazing bolts… and the death of all dreams.
“You think it’s the ECON?” she shouted in his ear, her own voice sounding distant, muffled. It was the only thing that made sense: the Eastern Coalition must have somehow recovered, rebuilt, and were determined to wipe out what small pieces of North-, Central-, and South-Am remained. She almost sobbed with pure rage at the cruelty of it all.
“They couldn’t have waited another day…?” Zef said, his expression one of irony and defeat. Abruptly, he jerked to his feet and pulled her up with him, then ran, dragging her into the exposed street.
Toward the Crash & Burn.
Lily pulled free. “We’ve gotta get to the Phoenix!”
She ran toward the silo at top speed, without a glance back at him. At first, he followed—one step, then two—then abruptly stopped, and in the growing distance between them, she heard his voice, both sorrowful and hard. “To hell with the Phoenix.”
For an instant, she was tempted to join him—to go get blindingly drunk and die numbed—but another thought occurred. What did it matter if she was doing something risky, unsafe? The whole freaking world had gone insane again, and there was no point in postponing death. Better to die trying…
Even so, the Phoenix was probably ashes again, and would never rise.…
* * *
The Enterprise had finally stopped shaking as if trying to tear herself apart; Jean-Luc Picard leaned forward in his chair and saw, with unutterable relief, that the Earth on the viewscreen was most definitely blue, beneath a slight grayish haze. He turned toward his second-in-command, who gazed at the viewscreen, then the bridge itself and let out a small but audible sigh.
“Report,” Picard requested of him.
Riker glanced down at his console. “Shields are down. Long-range sensors are offline.… Main power’s holding.”
Despite his operative emotion chip, Data had already reoriented himself and offered, in a composed voice: “According to our astrometric readings, we are in the mid-twenty-first century. From the radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere, I would estimate we have arrived approximately ten years after the Third World War.”
“Makes sense,” Riker said quietly, with a grim upward glance at the captain. “Most of the major cities were destroyed; only a few governments left. Six hundred million dead. No resistance.”
“Captain!” Worf interrupted, in an alarmed baritone.
Picard looked up at the screen to see the Borg sphere firing a rapid volley of photon blasts down at one particular target on the unprotected planet. “Quantum torpedoes! Fire!”
The Klingon complied at once. Within two seconds, a burst of five torpedoes struck the small sphere, each penetrating its bland gray surface. The craft had been unshielded, Picard realized, since the Borg had anticipated no spaceborne enemies in this era. As he watched, the sphere’s interior began to glow, to flash, from a series of internal explosions.
In a blessed beat, the metal hull glowed white and seemed to expand slightly, then burst into a million whirling fragments.
The deck beneath Picard rocked briefly from the shockwave that followed. He permitted himself a single exhalation of relief before demanding, “They were firing at the surface. Where?”
Riker rose and moved to a distant console. After fingering a combination of controls, he consulted the brightly colored image on his screen. “Western hemisphere, North American continent.” The image shifted, and he frowned at it in fleeting puzzlement before adding, “Looks like some sort of missile complex in central Montana.”
“Missile complex,” Picard half whispered. The location triggered a mental alarm. Something of crucial import had occurred at a missile complex in Montana in this century, something submerged in his memory that was struggling to rise.…
He wheeled toward the android. “The date. Data, I need to know the exact date.”
A brief pause as Data consulted his readout. “The date is April sixth, 2063.”
Picard and Riker exchanged a swift look that spoke of mutual horror and triumph.
“April sixth,” Will said. “That’s one day before first contact.”
“That’s what they came here to do,” Picard said, rising. “Stop first contact.”
“If that’s true,” Crusher stated grimly, “then the missile complex must be where Zefram Cochrane is building his warp ship.”
Picard addressed Riker again. “How much damage did they do?”
“Can’t tell.” Riker shook his head at the console. “Long-range sensors are still offline.”
Picard wasted no time in making his decision. “We have to go down there, find out what happened,” he told his crew. “Data, Beverly, you’re with me. Number One, have a security team meet me in transporter room three. Twenty-first-century civilian clothes. You have the bridge.”
* * *
The blasts had stopped by the time Lily made it to the stairs leading down to the silo. The entire area surrounding it was gouged with smoking craters that smelled of ozone. There had to be some damage down there, Lily decided, but thank God, it wasn’t a direct hit.
But an eerie realization, not the electrical static lingering in the air, lifted the hair on her arms: this particular area had been hit harder than any other she’d passed on her run through the encampment—almost as if someone’d aimed at it intentionally.
