Cheyenne was jolted awake by the ship's sirens. "All hands to stations, I repeat, all hands to stations," the intercom blared. Flashing red lights lit her quarters. Her kid's faces were illuminated in each flash. James Junior was a scrawny boy of nine with big eyes and dark hair, like his mother. Mackenzie, next to him in the photo, was eleven. She, too, was scrawny and had her mother's hair, but it was her father's eyes and wrinkled brow that looked out at Cheyenne. The timid smile was simply Mackenzie.
She had taped the photo there so they would be the first thing she saw when she awoke. Usually, it brought a smile to her face. Not today, the blaring of the sirens and the way the photo appeared and faded with each flash set Cheyenne's nerves on end.
She threw herself out of the bunk and turned on the light. It took her only a minute to climb into her uniform jumper and maybe twice that to shove her feet into her boots and lace them. Just long enough to wonder what was going on. The U.S.S. Cambridge was two days out to sea from Taiwan. It was too soon to see action, way too late to be running drills.
The ship lurched as the engines were cut. Cheyenne pushed herself up, wondering what that meant. They had been moving at full power towards the tiny island state since last night.
She pulled her dark shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail. She preferred to braid it, but there was no time now. Turning to her door she saw another picture of her kids. It was an old one, the kids were two years younger and James Senior was in the picture. She'd have bent the picture to eliminate him, but he was in the middle. She paused one second to look at it. Mackenzie had a suspicious look on her face, like she knew her parent's marriage was on the skids.
Cheyenne held two fingers to her lips and kissed them. She pressed it against the girl's cheek. "One more deployment, Honey. I promise," she said. Then she stabbed her finger at James Senior, hard enough to hurt. "Fuck you," she snarled, opened the door and dashed out into the hall.
Chief Petty Officer Cheyenne Walker shoved the thought of her family out of her mind as she barreled down the final staircase towards the main missile command. "What's the sit rep?" she barked as she grabbed her com rig.
Petty Officer Dan Oleson, her second in command, gave her a worried look. "We spotted a sub on sonar, ma'am," he said. "Chinese, nuclear."
"They are coming up hot," Jensen howled from his console station. "T minus five til they break surface, armed to fire."
"Talk to me, Kleppie," Cheyenne yelled across the command center.
"Aegis is online, ma'am," Seaman Karl Leipeweitz replied, his voice terse. "We have guidance systems but the firing array keeps locking up and shutting down." There was a groan around the room.
"So we can aim but not shoot, great," Dan joked.
Cheyenne exchanged a look with her second in command.
"Can the Others do anything?" he asked.
The Others. He meant the aliens, the ones that had shown up in earth's skies not five months ago. The aliens that called themselves the Consortium and were not aliens at all, but humans like us. Or mostly humans, Simian they said, from the same genetic line as humans. They had others, variations of human evolution that had died out on earth or never evolved here, Neanderthals and the Hanuman, an ape-like humanoid.
They claimed earth was theirs. They had terraformed this planet thousands of years ago, sent settlers, us, presumably, to settle in the name of their consortium. Earth was to be the base for their exploration into this galaxy, and forty some thousand years later, they were back to begin that exploration. What had happened to the Earth in those last forty thousand years, why we had no recollection of any of this, remained a mystery.
"I don't know," Cheyenne answered.
"T minus four minutes," Jensen called out.
"I'm going up," Cheyenne decided.
"Chey-" Petty officer Oleson stopped as he caught her look. He stiffened and saluted. "Officer Walker."
"You have the command center, Oleson." She turned and ran up the stairs, heading toward the deck. His reaction fueled her courage. That near breach in protocol - they might be friends off duty, they might be on first name basis even, but not in the missile command center. It wasn't that Cheyenne stood on protocol, it was what lay underneath. She was a woman. No matter how long she served alongside him, how hard she worked to be one of the men, his first impulse was to protect her, keep her from danger.
"Get out of my way!" she barked at a pair of oncoming crewmen. They jumped at her voice and scurried to comply. They were each carrying a box of god knows what and she pushed past them fast enough to send at least one box flying. She didn't pause to see what it was or apologize. Whatever the hell they were doing, it wasn't as important as getting the main gun array up and running. Not with a Chinese nuclear submarine coming to surface a mere hundred and fifty yards off their port bow with an armed nuclear missile.
"Officer Walker," the captain's voice spoke in her headset.
"Captain Lannister, sir," she replied. "Can the Others do anything?"
"The Consortium? They say they are coming, Walker, whether they can make it in time, they don't know."
"Great, just great," she muttered.
"Your situation?"
"Aegis is up. Tracking is up. Gun array is not. I am going to the deck now, see what I can do, sir."
"We need that array up," he barked.
"I know, sir," she said. "I am on my way. Sir? Do the Others know where the Chinese are aiming that missile?"
"Taipan."
Cheyenne groaned. She had managed to miss the first war with the Others, the one against America, and she had been on her way to missing this second one against China as well, until now.
She reached the final flight of stairs and broke out onto the deck. A steel grey day was dawning. The wind blew out of the north and there were white caps on the waves. A few sailors ran here and there on one mission or another, but the lions share of crew had been ordered below.
She couldn't understand why the Chinese had tried to defy the Consortium, after the war with America. If you could even call that two week fiasco a war. You'd think that would have been lesson enough.
America had called it a peace keeping mission, sending in a large force to stop yet another civil war in Syria. Captain Ganaka of the Consortium base ship called it military ambition. They used low flying orbital hoppers and advanced laser technology to sabotage our vehicles. And then some unknown stun technology to disable and disarm our troops. They captured our entire force with less than a half dozen casualties on either side.
Then, to add insult to injury, they did exactly what we were trying to do. They sent in a peacekeeping force. They used the same technology to disable both the Syrian Army and the rebel forces.
The war should have ended in three, four days tops. That's all it took for them to pacify most of Syria. Then someone had brought nukes into the equation. The president claimed it wasn't us, and Cheyenne tended to believe him. Even Ganaka said as much, the missile had come from somewhere in southern Eurasia and could have been Russia or China. At any rate some nuclear power had the bright idea that you could put a missile into low orbit and hit one of their ships.
Nukes had made them real mad. Over the next two weeks, "hoppers" small fast Consortium ships were dropping out of orbit everywhere. They sabotaged, captured or destroyed the vast majority of the nuclear weapons on the planet in that short time. They took several bases on the mainland United States, Russia, China and elsewhere. Military air bases were sabotaged all around the globe and the ships came and went so fast, no one could stop them.
It was over as fast as it began. The Others took our nukes and then abandoned our bases. They left America a present. They occupied Peterson Air Base for three days, dismantling our Strategic Missile Command center. Then huge transport vessels began to land. When day four dawned, we discovered, instead of the land invasion we expected, they had left - after returning every soldier they had captured in Syria, shaken but unharmed.
As that first action wrapped up, the Consortium announced that a new leader was coming, a member of the most advanced race in the Consortium, the Vatari. Her name, Princess Sarasvat, evoke awed among them. Princess, they claimed, was a family honorific and she was not nobility in any human sense of the word. She was an overseer, a high level bureaucrat. However, she had a long career in the civil service and was a renown diplomat. They acted as though her mere presence in this galaxy meant an end to any hostilities. An uneasy truce had been settled between America and the Consortium, awaiting the arrival of their new leader.
Two weeks ago, watching the arrival of the princess on the ancient TV screen in the ship's mess hall, Cheyenne had willed herself to believe. She certainly looked the part of a princess, a tall thin woman, made taller by a thick mane of snow white hair. She stepped out of her ship bedecked in a long gown and rich jewels. A brilliant blue teardrop gem stone on her forehead offset the olive tan complexion of her skin. She was flanked on four sides by Kurgara, ceremonial female warriors. Behind them came an entourage of diplomats and servants. Sarasvat and her entourage had taken up the entire top floor of a lavish hotel a few blocks from the U. N. Headquarters in New York.
A short clip had been leaked to the media that first day. One of the hotel staff had cornered one of her personal servants, an effeminate young man, in the corridor and asked him what their arrival meant for us on Earth. He had answered in an enigmatic smile and a rush of their high melodious language. The translator collar around his neck and had said in English, "your descendants will look back on this day and say 'here began our golden age.'" That clip had become emblematic somehow, of everyone's hopes and fear about the Others.
Cheyenne reached the control panel of the array. She banged it open and stared within. "T minus 2 minutes," Jensen's voice said in her ear.
Two weeks ago, Cheyenne had felt hope. For two weeks this princess had talked to the U. N., endlessly. But getting every nation in the world to agree to anything, was a fools errand. Sarasvat had seen that, turning instead to individual diplomacy with America, Europe and Africa.
Meanwhile, the Chinese decided to use the distraction to make a play for the island of Taiwan, which they claimed as their own, years of independence not withstanding. They had planned overnight aerial bombardments and the landing of ground troops in the morning. They had hoped to act quick and catch everyone flat footed.
They had almost succeeded. The Consortium had spotted suspicious activity late yesterday afternoon and uncovered the pending invasion. They immediately informed America and Europe. America had always defended Taiwan's right to exist and the conflict had thrown us and the Consortium into a temporary alliance of sorts. We would help them fight the Chinese off, if need be.
Up until about ten minutes ago, the Chinese weren't having any better luck than America had had against the Consortium. Bombers rolled out onto the runaways and then stopped, vital components overheated by precision laser strikes from low orbit. Several Chinese troop carriers were adrift in the narrow sea between Taiwan and the mainland, propellers cut or engines sabotaged.
America was scrambling to get it's navy into the strait, to back up Taiwan and the Consortium. Cheyenne's ship had been heading for Japan as the final leg of it's pacific tour. Now they had changed course and were scrambling towards Taiwan.
"Walker, I need you on a private line," the captain's voice said in her ear piece.
"Roger, sir," she replied and hit a button on her radio. She stared into the control panel as she listened. Her ship, the Cambridge, was a Burke Class Destroyer. It was more than thirty years old and the whole line should have been retired, except for budget cuts that prevented new warships from being commissioned. Like most of the crew, Cheyenne loved the old ship. But keeping the systems up and operational on an aging destroyer was an increasingly difficult job.
"Walker?" the captain said.
"I am here, sir."
"We have a situation, Walker. The Consortium -"
"Can't get here in time, sir?"
"It's more than that. They have ships in orbit nearby but they say the missile has to be stopped on its upward trajectory. They can take it out at the apex, but we are so close to Taiwan already, it will just rain radiation down over the entire island. We have to knock it out on the way up."
"On the way up, sir?"
"Ten, fifteen miles, tops. Do you understand what that means, Walker?"
"It's what we signed up for, sir," she replied.
"That's what I told them," the captain replied, his voice terse but proud. "It's been an honor, Walker."
"Thank you, sir. You too, sir." she switched to the other line. "Kleppie," she barked.
"Yes, ma'am," he replied.
"You got tracking still?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Lock on to your target." Out of the corner of her eye she could see the Chinese sub, a hundred and fifty yards off port.
"We still don't have the firing array up, ma'am," he replied.
"It's not gonna happen," she said. There wasn't time to run even the most basic diagnostics. She started the manual override sequence instead. "Just give me the word, I'll fire manually from here. At ten miles out."
"Ten miles? You can't be on deck. That's a nuclear missile," Oleson's voice broke in.
Like a few feet of metal is going to save you? Out loud she said, "It's us or Taipan. It's what we signed up for."
There was a pause and then, "Yes, ma'am."
The missile hissed out of the sub and shot for the sky. Kleppie started counting in her ear piece, "firing in five, four..."
She looked up. She thought of her kids, her daughter Mackenzie and her son James. Both with her mom back in the States. One flip of the switch and she would never see them again.
"Three, Two..."
Then she thought of Taipan. She'd only been there once, but she remembered the bustling streets. Streets filled with children. Children that deserved to live.
"And firing," Kleppie said.
Cheyenne flipped the switch. The array opened up, the noise deafening her. It was followed by a moment of silence, a flash of light and that was the last she knew.