Chapter Three: Dealing with the Domes

Flying defense had failed miserably, so it was time to see what Earth ground defenses could do against the frighteningly noisy but ethereally beautiful Lightning Domes. In the first hours, we had confirmed that only a Dome’s edges killed you directly. We also saw that the Domes were shedding ugly brown clouds of ozone vapor at a rapid rate, making the nearby air deadly.

Ozone is O3, three atoms of oxygen per molecule, where the oxygen you need to breathe is O2. Electrical discharge easily creates ozone from the air. It’s reactive with your body tissues. If you breathe too much for too long, your lungs get irritated and you die of chemical pneumonia. If you breathe lower concentrations for longer times your lungs are scarred and have to be regenerated to prevent asthma and other ailments.

So the “Alien Gas Attack!” some journaloggers proclaimed was real.

Fortunately, as I said above, there weren’t that many people still in metro areas, and even fewer in the 12 square kilometers or so under the Lightning Domes. Unfortunately, there were some, and we didn’t want to leave them there breathing ozone.

As Disastrex’s military people quickly learned (more about them below), the Domes proved surprisingly easy to penetrate: You just needed a Faraday cage—a covering of some conductive substance. The catch was that your covering had to be very conductive or it heated up rapidly and cooked you, and it had to be tight-fitting, because the Dome would generate heavy electricity if it had much more than 50 millimeters of free space. So you would get badly shocked driving through a Dome, unless you wore an aluminum fire protection suit and got only a mild shock. Over the next several hours our troops rescued a lot of people by transforming them into tinfoil mummies and driving them out in military vehicles or even just carrying them out.

Ozone is not only deadly to people, it’s deadly to infrastructure. The brown vapors were heavier than air, so they spread across streets and buildings and sank into sewers and basements. Ozone acts like super bleach, giving an oxygen atom to anything that will take it: Animal flesh from the dying rats, insects, abandoned pets, and a few unfortunate people; plant fibers such as clothing, paper, and wood, and for that matter plants; plastics of all kinds including paint; exposed iron and aluminum; … just about anything and everything. Many of the effects are unpredictable, but one is easy to predict, and deadly. Where electrical insulation rots, there will first be shorts and then fires, and ozone cooperates by making fire more intense.

(The good news about ozone is that it doesn’t stay harmful for long. If O3 isn’t broken down into O2 again by finding something to attack, it will break down anyway in less than an hour. What drifted away from the Domes wasn’t a major worry.)

So the first response Disastrex ordered was to shut down power to the affected city areas. This worked. We had drilled this, and only one or two emergency generators kicked in that weren’t supposed to, and those were shut down within minutes. The city centers were dark except for the eerie glow of the Lightning Domes themselves, and military ground forces were moving.

This time cooler heads were in charge. The ground forces first probed for weakness rather than launching massive strikes. It took the Tokyo group only a few hours to discover how to penetrate the Domes, and a few more for all three groups to commandeer enough fire protection suits for the rescuers and rescuees. Once some rudimentary communications were established through the Dome walls, the military started looking for the aliens themselves and for those who needed evacuation.

A lot of good people lost their lives in those searches. They hunted and they were hunted. We had a pretty good guess that the alien ships were at the center of the Domes, but it proved darn hard to confirm that.

The biggest problem was how fast the aliens were. From our trading contacts at the Altair Sphere we had learned that the Romeo-10s included two species from planets orbiting the same M-class star (like our Sun), both breathing essentially the same high-pressure non-oxygen mix, both collie size, with one four-limbed and bipedal and the other hexapedal, the latter suggesting insects—compact bodies with legs sprouting out. And now we found out that both were hellishly quick. The vids from the helmet cams were like those frustration-tolerance tests, where you’re Wile E. Coyote trying to chase down the Roadrunner. And the aliens seemed to be able to see around corners. Those few times it looked like we could get a bunch of troops into the same place as one and surprise it with overwhelming force, it acted as if it saw the attack coming and scooted off. Or worse, killed a few of us and then scooted off.

And their weaponry was impressive! Not only did they have speed and seeing around corners on their side, they also seemed to kill every human headed for the center of the Dome whether aliens were nearby or not, but we couldn’t figure out how. Our guys were good; our guys were careful; but now our guys were dead! Determining what caused “Silent Death” became a priority two item, right behind locating the alien ship and figuring out how to drive the aliens off.

Occasionally, though, somebody would surprise an alien and get a long shot off, but that didn’t happen nearly as often as we wanted and it never seemed to do them much harm anyway. Once there was what may have been a leg left behind, from what you could see in the vid, though that couldn’t be confirmed and the piece was never recovered.

For one thing, the first couple of weeks the aliens didn’t show up above ground that much. They seemed to be searching for something, down in the sewers and subways a lot, sometimes popping up out of them far outside their Dome shields. If they weren’t underground, they preferred skittering around through the halls of buildings, or the streets if they had to. They never spent much time in parks, in or along rivers, in open land generally, where we could more easily nail their spidery little asses. We discovered that big guns and artillery could hurt the little buggers when they stood still long enough for us to draw a bead on them. Maybe even kill them—but for the first weeks they always escaped back underground before we were sure of hitting them, and we never found a corpse afterward.

There was some call for nuking the city centers, but Mostromo held off. The constant ozone bath was running the property damage tally into the hundreds of billions, but the smallest “tactical” nuke would cause far more damage, and probably take out a few stored cultural treasures that the ozone would never get to. Anyway, we still hadn’t positively identified the location of the alien ships.

* * *

The first month after the Earth landings, the score was about the same as after the first days. Our ground forces inflicted some damage on a number of individual aliens, but couldn’t stop the mass of them from moving about at will. The aliens had been completely successful at keeping their ships out of sight. We suspected they’d moved them several times within the Lightning Domes, but it could have just been that their ECM was better than our penetration.

When the Belter fleet was due, a lot of people predicted it would make a difference. To our amazement at Disastrex … it did! Soon after our first ships came into orbit around the Moon, the two alien ships still in orbit and all three on earth buzzed off and the Domes disappeared. Unfortunately, as we soon determined, they were headed for the Moon and the Belter ships! If they had any sense—and Belters mostly did—they’d run, and some would get away.

But it would have been criminal not to take advantage of the diversion. The moment the ships lifted off, we were expanding our presence inside where the Domes had been, at first cautiously, and then when we encountered no resistance, as quickly as possible! We had to find out all we could before the aliens came back. I finally got permission to take my own civilian ass into New York City.

In the three hours it took me to get there, the aliens were halfway to the Moon. While I was being proofed against the ozone, I got briefed by the on-site incident commander, Col. Shillingford “call me Rosie” Roosevelt-DeFreitas.

Rosie told me, “We’ve located an alien landing point positively, probably the first. As we suspected, the shield generator was located under the New Empire State Building. The ship, however, was under the Big Apple Tower.”

“They appreciate Nouveau Art Deco, I guess.”

“That, or the tallest buildings for klicks and klicks around. What would you like to see?”

“Take me to the landing site. Searches are still going on, right?”

“Per your orders, every man and woman on the team is in the Dome area now. If I may say so, I fully agree with your ‘hunch’ that we have approximately 18 hours: 6 for the aliens to get to the moon, 6 for them to kick Belter arse, 6 for them to come back and continue where they left off. We want to find out as much about what they’ve done as we can.”

It took less than five minutes to fly to the Big Apple Tower over the ghostly Manhattan streets. I’d seen Manhattan at dawn on a Sunday, but this was even eerier—minimal trash and absolutely no loose papers to flap into a soldier’s line of sight. And everywhere the asphalt was covered with white dust. Winds had piled the dust into drifts, but everywhere had at least a thin coat.

“Of course I’ve seen the reports,” I told Rosie. “So that dust is the inorganic ash from disintegrated asphalt?”

“Yes, sir. The ozone has had time to pull out the organics, and any elemental carbon, in the top layer through the whole city. The dust protects the layers below it a bit, but each storm that blows through moves it around.”

There were other signs of ozone destruction. Window panes rocked at our passage because the seals holding them were gone. Cars, busses, trucks of all sizes were thickly rusted hulks without tires or interiors.

“How safe are the buildings?” If that info had been reported, it hadn’t stuck for me.

“It varies. A lot of wood structures have collapsed already. Concrete holds up the best. Alloys and composites vary by the alloy or composite.”

I shook my head. “The property loss … and the months or years to recover.”

“We can congratulate ourselves that there’s been no major fire. … We’re here, sir.”

The deeper we went below street level, the milder the ozone damage—the ozone was getting all used up before it got that deep. At the bottom of the Big Apple Tower we found a “nest” no bigger than a hotel ballroom. My data-grab told me that in Shanghai and Tokyo, similar nests were also being found.

“They’ve been doing a lot of digging,” Rosie told me. “Lots of places, but not very deep. No one has yet figured out what they’ve been looking for. And your science wallahs are as good at their jobs as my team are at theirs.”

I made a blanket broadcast to all three metros. “All right, people. While they were here, we had a hard time getting to them. If they come back, I want that to be a lot easier. While we’ve got the ground, if you haven’t got something else to be doing, be looking for new ways into these hives.”

Searching for a new way in was a pretty good idea in its own right, but the serendipitous result was brilliant. “The Wasp” turned out to be the key to Silent Death. A Corporal Adamu found a heavily ECM’d dead drone the size of an Earth insect lying in a dead-end corridor of the Tokyo Moon Tree skyscraper. It took almost another two weeks for the Disastrex “science wallahs” to realize what he’d found. It packed only a single shot, but that shot was enough to consistently drop a single armored human. Knowing what to look for, our forays into alien territory became a lot safer and that meant we could cause them more grief.

There was also a grimmer development. For all the past days our people had been bringing out dead bodies as they found them, for identification and appropriate disposition—a few overlooked civilians at first, later just our own casualties. They decomposed, but the ozone kept them from smelling much. We’d seen an anomaly on a couple before, but during those few concentrated hours of canvassing, we found a group of ten dead troops with that same anomaly: Neat circles of scalp removed, “like in the Indian Wars” the soldier said who called me to look. “In the North American Old West, I mean.” She was a Sergeant Potosí.

“This needs some more research,” I said grimly, standing over them.

“No difficulty,” the sergeant assured me. “I’ll get a high-capacity vehicle in and we’ll haul them out for autopsy, see if we can learn something besides that they lost their hair.” Her voice sounded as emotionless and efficient as her words, but I thought there was a little green under her dark skin. I’m pretty sure there was under mine.

“As long as it’s not personnel-intensive,” I said. “What we most need right now is more information to fight off these monsters, not providing closure to mourning relatives or fulfilling the ‘no comrade left behind’ thing. Fortunately, we’ve got at least a few more hours.” Three hours before, the aliens had trashed the Belter ships in an engagement that had lasted longer than expected, because of some dazzling maneuvering on the humans’ part. Then they’d dallied, first to shoot up those installations on the Moon that had dared join in the fight, then to slag them, and then, so far as anyone could tell, to carve their initials into the slag.

Soon after I’d left the sergeant to her task, we got word that the aliens had disappeared from Moon orbit. “They’re headed back!” I yelled in a blanket broadcast. “Get the observer posts set up and everyone back to regular patrols in 4 hours!”

By 5 hours later, the Domes were back up. This time we were better prepared. And we had a lot more material about the aliens that we could analyze. For one thing, it would let us set better parameters about when and if nukes should be authorized.