Wall

Theme: Wall

"This is genius!" she said. "You can see through walls with it!"

I read stories to Audrey sometimes. She could read Braille, but she said it was difficult to maintain the pace of the story that way. And I didn't mind at all. I loved spending time with her. Her favourite painter, she had told me, was Edward Hopper. She said she didn't have to be able to see his work to know that he was her favourite. He just was. I don't know any other eight year old who had a favourite artist, let alone a blind eight year old.

"See through walls! It is genius, isn't it? Isn't it?" She insisted.
"I suppose it is. I just never thought about windows that way."

Motherland (Prologue)

Written for Joe Haldeman's class. First few pages of a novel.

Motherland

Prologue

The last ship passed through the Arch, bringing the total up to twenty-four. The fleet arranged itself into a phalanx seemingly of its own accord as it entered the alien system. No signals, electromagnetic or otherwise were exchanged. There was no way anyone could’ve said that they were there. The ships were completely invisible to most of the electromagnetic spectrum, possibly the first machine in the universe to achieve that, though you could never quite tell what technology a world was hiding. Building the fleet had exhausted the world’s known reserves of Rhodium. Maximilian Waters cringed at the thought. What a terrible waste of such an extraordinary material. But now was not the time to think of such things. It was not becoming of one of the 24 to cast aspersions on the operation at this critical junction. One moment of hesitation and all the months of training that they had undergone would all be for naught.

Twenty four of the brightest young women and men in the world had been assembled at the Military High Command exactly two years ago. For 24 months they had trained together. 24 months of waking together, training all day and sleeping together had bound them into a seamless unit. It was required, of course, for this operation. There would be no communication between the ships. No encryption was secure, and they could not risk the enemy catching wind of the smallest detail of their movements. Not before the operation, not during it. Hopefully there would not be an after. Hopefully, the Military High Command knew what they were doing. A lot was resting on the war plans of men and women who had never been in one or trained for it.

Max gave his head a hard shake. He needed his head to be clear for this. The fleet was almost at the gas giant’s orbit now. Thankfully, it was on the opposite side of their sun right now. Not that it would have mattered if it hadn’t. Nothing could’ve detected them save for very fine precision cosmic ray detectors checking the flux at every point in the sky. Hopefully they didn’t have too many of those installed on any off-planet sites. Planets were a problem, you could install all kinds of surveillance devices on them. But technology hadn’t advanced enough yet to build megastructures capable of supporting the same kind of devices.

They were past the gas giant’s orbit now, and fast approaching the Asteroid Belt. This is where the first alarms would go off.  187.. 188.. 189.. the phalanx rose above the invariable plane and diverged. The mission was going to be tough enough without having to dodge rocks as well. It all depended on how prepared they were for this attack. There was no way the puny 24 ship fleet of Terra could take on the mighty Earth armada. Larger fleets had tried and failed -fleets that had sieged Sol’s system for decades in the hope of gaining access to the mineral rich moons of the system. Terra didn’t have that luxury. These 24 ships were all they had. This was a do-or-die mission.

The first pulse came out of nowhere and bounced off Max’s ship, leaving it unharmed. But the game was up. There was doubtless a receiver somewhere behind him which would complain to its controllers about a signal it didn’t get. Shields would be going up on Earth just about now, and their various destroyers being deployed. 2 minutes. That’s all the time they had. 2 minutes in which to destroy Earth, the capital of the world, the cradle of civilization. The fate of two worlds rested in the hands of Max Waters and his comrades.
238.. 239.. 240.. It was time. Max Waters turned his boosters on, and dove.