Jeannie Holmes - The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance

I grinned, a careless, I-dare-you – and maybe slightly vengeful – grin at him.

Protest erupted from the testosterone line-up. Carrollus thundered for quiet, got it, then turned a baleful glare upon me.

“I am disqualified. You may not select me.”

“I just did.”

He shook his head. “No—”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your captain laid out the rules. I followed them, and now you refuse to abide by them? You’re already taken, is that it?”

“Yes.”

The way he pounced on the out I’d offered him made it obvious. He was lying.

I nodded. “I believe this invalidates our thirty-day agreement. I’m ready to go home, now.”

His expression shifted and my heart skidded into uneasy thudding.

He looked intrigued.

“He was not a part—” Grisham growled.

“‘Choose one or as many men as I please from those assembled within the limits of the oval’,” I quoted back to him. “Your rules. He’s in the oval.”

The old man scowled. “Then keep him. The agreement stands, with the caveat that you leave me no choice but—”

The lights dimmed.

Carrollus swore in his language. I thought I heard an audible alarm somewhere in the distance.

Men scrambled for stations. Several young women, also in uniform, burst through the door and raced for empty chairs.

The alarm died.

“Sir!” one of the women called.

“Enemy ships entering the solar system!” “Enemy ships?” I echoed. “I thought you were hiding from Earth.”

“We are,” Carrollus said, cold rage coloring his voice. “We were . Until now.”

I froze, awful awareness tripping my pulse into high gear. “You’re refugees, aren’t you? You thought you’d escaped. But you drew your enemy after you.”

Carrollus gripped my arms and pulled me around to face him. I shivered at the chemistry that bubbled through my system at the contact. “They want us,” he said. “Your world is in no danger.”

But I was, by simple virtue of being on board their ship. “How did I get here? A shuttle? Teleportation of some kind?”

Carrollus nodded at the last one.

“Is it working?”

“No time,” Grisham barked. “There are too many of you. Commander!”

Carrollus accessed a panel, studying the data that answered his summons.

Too many of us? What did Grisham mean? Too many people to evacuate to the safety of Earth, presumably.

“The sensor embedded in the New Horizons probe indicates a pair of Orseggan scouts inbound to our position. Weapon status?” Grisham thundered.

“Offline, sir,” a young officer replied.

My heart bumped against my ribs.

“Shields?”

“Offline, sir,” yet another officer answered.

“Interstellar drive?”

“Offline!”

I pressed shaking fingers against my temples.

The ship was defenseless.

“This is the second time today you’ve tried to get me killed,” I snapped at Carrollus.

“This was unanticipated!” Grisham protested.

My humorless smile felt icy. “Like an adverse reaction to a drug?”

Carrollus glanced up from his panel to pin me with a grim stare. “You have a right to be angry. I can’t change what’s happened. But we have time. They do not yet know we’re here.”

I frowned. “You have the time to bring weapons and shields online?”

“No. We were badly damaged at the end of the war. The Orseggans saw this ship escape,” he said, “but they clearly didn’t know where we’d gone.”

“They’ve been hunting for you since,” I finished for him. Any question of who was the good guy and who was the bad guy vanished from my head. My allegiance was dictated by the fact that I stood on the defenseless ship.

“Yes,” he said, looking back at the illegible data. “Now we need options, not distractions.”

Anger and shame burned me, but he was right. What did a high-school physics teacher have to offer aliens who’d mastered physics to the point that their space travel broke all the rules as I knew them?

Unless.

Data I’d picked up from the morning’s internet space-weather blog to present to my students flashed into my head. They would know this stuff already, right? Or was it too much to hope that space aliens would keep up on internet blogs?

“Do your enemy’s sensors work the way yours do?” I demanded, meeting Carrollus’s hard look. “You told me you thought Earth was more technologically advanced than it is because of the electrical interference at the poles.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Would the energized thermosphere obscure your enemy’s sensors, too?”

A light went on in his face. “The Orseggans? Yes.”

Grisham was already shaking his head. “It does us no good—”

“Solar-flare activity spiked a day and a half ago,” I said, as if the old man hadn’t spoken. “The aurora should be lighting up the northern half of the planet as we speak. Take the ship down under the Northern Lights. Blind the Orseggans with neon.”

“Do you think we haven’t already considered and discarded the option as unworkable? Exposing us to the people of your planet will not get you sent home,” Grisham snarled at me.

“You’re smarter than I am. You have interstellar space travel. But this isn’t about any one earthly phenomenon protecting your ship. This is my planet. Maybe you’ve studied it, but it’s clear you don’t understand it or the people who live on it,” I retorted.

I turned to Carrollus. “Can you land this thing?”

“We can,” he rumbled, striding down the stairs to the center of the oval. He gestured at me to join him and brought up a three-dimensional hologram of Earth. “It isn’t a trivial task, and if I read you right, you mean to complicate it further. Give me details.”

As I descended to the pit floor, nerves fluttered in my stomach. I wobbled down the steps in my heels.

“You’ll be seen. The US military doesn’t like being blindsided. The phased array systems are going to spot us. I know of a few in Alaska, but if this solar storm packs the punch the data suggests it does, their communications systems will be useless. The danger will come from spotting stations south of the storm.”

“Beale?” Carrollus guessed, naming an Air Force base in California. “They’ll scramble fighters.”

“F-15s out of Elmendorf if they can get a call through,” I agreed. “If they can’t, they’ll move south until someone hears them. The fighters will get coordinates for first point of contact and a vector for our trajectory. Then they’ll fly into the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of night, in the middle of one of the hottest solar storms to hit in two decades.”

Carrollus flashed a grin at me that nearly stopped my heart.

“Meaning they’ll be deaf and blind.”

“Their navigation systems will go Tango Uniform,” I agreed.

Amusement and anticipation lit Trygg’s blue eyes. Okay. So he not only knew the names and locations of military bases, he understood my reference to TU. Clearly, he’d spent time inside the US military. What did that mean?

“Their communications will be dead, too,” I said. “Without radar or GCI to talk them in, they’ll have no hope of vectoring on the ship.”

“We’ll have to leave the planet surface before the atmospheric disturbance dissipates,” he said.

“The minute we’re on the ground,” I added, “you’ll have to power down the ship’s systems.”

“Are you mad?” Grisham barked, stomping down the stairs. “We’ll have no oxygen generators!”

“We have hours of air without them,” Carrollus answered before he glanced at me. “You propose we run silent?”