The Copernicus Observatory hurtled around the Earth, completing each lap in just over an hour and a half. Phileas Fogg would have been positively green with envy. Under normal circumstances, the station’s suite of multi-wavelength active and passive scanners would be staring out away from the bright blue globe, penetrating into the depths of the darkness beyond, but this wasn’t a normal day.
Copernicus continued on at its dizzying pace, but the lights were out and the three technicians charged with babysitting it had forgotten all about the stars. Instead, they hung around in silence, together watching the fate of their planet while trying not to think too hard about their predicament.
The invasion had been carried out with frightening efficiency. Strange discs arrived from out of nowhere, jammed all frequencies, and then bashed everything in orbit apart. The only possible explanation for Copernicus’ survival was that the station was powered down during the attack. Whether the invaders thought it broken or had simply failed to notice it was up for debate. Either way, none of the three men aboard was in any hurry to flip the generators back on.
The next phase of the attack happened while Copernicus was on the other side of the world. The station came back around, streaking over Europe and then the Mideast, and as it approached Pakistan, the crew caught sight of twin mushroom clouds reaching high into the sky. Two objects had struck with unimaginable force, one in India and the other in China, leaving vast craters and dust clouds that swelled up and swallowed the entire continent.
After that, nothing could surprise the crew of Copernicus. The invaders torched the orbital launch centers which ringed the equator, removing any ability to mount an offensive in space, and then they bombarded population centers all around the globe. Their communication cut off, cities everywhere were hit completely unaware, with coastal regions receiving the brunt of the punishment. They erupted into short lived balls of blue flame that left nothing but charred ruins and the immolated bodies of the dead.
Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground. Then, with the ashes of empires still smouldering, the seven vessels made planetfall in Africa and South America.
The action was over by the eighth hour, and with the atmosphere recyclers turned off, the air inside of Copernicus Observatory was getting stale. All three crewmen were suited up but refused to don their helmets. Without radio communications, being sealed up would be too much like being alone, even though none of them had spoken in hours.
Sometime after it was over, Marco Esquivel broke the silence. “So,” he said, “are we slowly committing suicide or what?”
“What the hell?” Hopkins asked in dismay.
“I don’t know,” Jansen said, ignoring Hopkins as usual. “We can’t call for help. Doubt there’s anyone left to call if we could.”
“What about Midway or Tranquility? Ares? There’s gotta be someone somewhere. I mean, we survived. Someone else must have.” Hopkins was a frantic mess, just like any other day.
Marco put his hands behind his head like he was lying in a hammock on a Fijian beach. “I guess. The invaders came right to Earth, so those guys might still be alive. Radio is screwed, though.”
Janses nodded. “Won’t know for sure till we kick the power back on.”
“Wait wait wait,” Hopkins said, waving his hands about. “We can’t turn the power on. That’s the only reason they didn’t frag us in the first place.”
Jansen took a whiff of the air. He didn’t need any instruments to know that oxygen was running low. “No power, no oxygen generation. So there’s our choice: do we suffocate all slow like, or do we perish in a glorious ball of flame?”
Marco chuckled. “Pretty clear which way you’re leaning. Why not? Put me down for the blaze of glory, too.”
Hopkins crossed his arms in frustration. “Sons of bitches. Fine. Do whatever you want. I’ll see you in hell.”
Jansen drifted toward the control panel. “That’s the spirit, Hop. You got what the French call a joie de vivre, you know that?” His hands danced through the generator activation procedure, and the console beeped in approval. After another second, he could hear the station’s generators starting to cycle.
Hopkins had turned ghost white. Even whiter and sweatier than normal, in fact. “What do we do if they come for us?”
Jansen said, “Say cheese.”
“Die,” Marco offered. “I suppose if it makes you feel better, you could go outside and chuck a stapler at ‘em. Who knows… maybe they have a secret vulnerability to staples. You could be a hero.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m gonna give ‘em the finger,” Jansen said after some thought. “But not just any finger. I mean, this would be a historic flip-off. The finger of the ages. See, I wouldn’t just be giving them the finger on account of myself, but as a representative of humanity.”
Hopkins pouted. “I fucking hate you guys.”
“With good reason,” Jansen agreed as he looked out the window at the smoking ash heap that was his planet. “Bad news, though. We’re all you’ve got left.”
Hopkins groaned for a very long time, so long that Jansen began to wonder if the man might be part whale. Hopkins certainly looked the part, with his big bald pasty white head. Maybe one of those melon headed whales, or a pilot whale. When Hopkin’s unnatural groan finally finished, Jansen looked back to the console and saw that the generator was running at full output. “In other news,” he said, “fiat lux.”
He hit ENGAGE and the lights came on, followed shortly afterward by a draft of sweet fresh air.
“Thank God,” Marco said. “It was starting to smell like a jock strap in here.”
Jansen smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Skipped my shower this morning. Hey Hop, why don’t you give the comms a try?”
The whale man swam over to the comm console. “Sure thing, Nils. So you can blame me when the aliens blow us away, right?”
“You’re catching on. Getting anything?”
“Gimme a second.” The whale-man slapped the console several times with his sweaty flipper. “Nope. Whole network’s static.”
Marco, still in his imaginary floating space hammock, laughed. “Alrighty. There might be someone to call, but we still can’t call them. That brings us back to slow suicide.”
“Real slow if you like. We’ve got supplies to last for a couple months. Maybe more if we’re stingy.”
“Christ. Do you have to be such nihilists?”
Jansen gave Hopkins a dry look. “Hey man, I don’t hear you coming up with any brilliant escape plan.” He didn’t want to die. Not at all. It just seemed like the only option. He realized that the lack of options might stem from his atrophied imagination, though. “Here’s an idea. Instead of whinging, why don’t you use the contents of that massive cranium and come up with some way out of this?”
Marco had floated all the way across the command center, where he reached out and knocked on one of the numerous control stations. The dull metal clank echoed through the chamber. “Copernicus is, like, the pride of the Foundation, right? We’re inside a shiny new multi-billion credit deep space scanning doo-hickey, and you’re telling me there’s no way to send an e-mail?”
“Waaaaait,” Hopkins said, dragging the word out while his brain spooled up. “I bet the active scanners can cut through the interference. We fire up the actives… the microwave laser or the infra-red, and use it to send Morse code or something.”
Jansen sighed. “It’s a maser, dumb ass. And not to rain on your parade, but I don’t know Morse code. Do you know Morse code, Marco?”
“Do I look like a boy scout to you?” Marco chuckled derisively and went on. “Screw that noise. Use the comm networking protocols to generate a packet stream, and pipe it through the maser. Instant output device.”
“You can do that?” Jansen asked. “I thought you were just a wrench monkey.”
“I took network programming in college, so… maybe? Probably not. Won’t know till I try, though. You think Hopkins can do the bullshit he said?”
Jansen looked over at the sweaty, quivering mass of flesh that was Larry Hopkins, and they all shrugged in unison. “Sure. Why not? We’re literate, college educated men. We have tech manuals. We’ve got more time than we can shake a stick at, and we don’t have any TV to distract us. I’m filled to knees with hope.”
Marco climbed into a chair. “Sarcastic bastard. So, what message do we send?”
“Survivors on Copernicus. Send help.” Hopkins said.
Marco looked skeptical. “Yeah. That’ll bring ‘em running. How about ‘Busty bikini models on Copernicus. Starved for love. Come quick and bring beer’?”
Jansen looked down at the generator panel, and the long list of systems waiting to be activated. None of them had a purpose anymore. He idly wondered how things might have turned out if Copernicus were a great big railgun instead. Then he read the word ‘telescope’ and an idea caught fire. “Nobody out there has any clue what went down. Not Midway. Not the Moon. Not Mars. Why don’t we point our big fat telescope at Earth, and show them what’s happening?”
“Not bad,” Marco said.
Hopkins nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I like it.”
Each of them floated silently in their own corner of the command center. They had a plan and a vague idea of how to accomplish it. The deadline was months away, and since they were all professional technicians, they wouldn’t bother to start for at least another week. Not as if anyone was left to fire them for laziness.
As he stared at the wounded Earth and started to zone-out again, one thing really burned Nils Jansen’s biscuits: Donovan and his nerds were tens of millions of kilometers away, completely ignorant of this whole catastrophe, and having the time of their lives. He’d had his suspicions before but now it was official… he made the wrong damn decision.
He hated when that happened.