Operation Crimson Storm. Robert Reginald
Taylor Coleridge
Mindon Min, 21 Bi-February, Mars Year ii
Novato, California, Planet Earth
After meeting Geoff and Alex the other day at Zee’s, and seeing the evidence of Geoff’s dinosaur egg, I didn’t know what to think. Shit, paleontologists have been tossing around ideas about the Great Dino Demise for as long as I can remember. Of course, everything changed when Luis and Walter Álvarez discovered that iridium was present in abundance in the K-T Boundary, where it shouldn’t have been.
K-T is a thin layer of fossilized clay demarcating the transition between the Cretaceous Period, the third and last act dominated by the dinosaurs, and the Tertiary Period, in which the mammals took over. No big animals of any kind survived the passage of that barrier. Iridium is a rare earth element relatively uncommon on Earth, but much more prevalent in meteorites. The Álvarezes (father and son) had postulated that a comet or asteroid roughly six miles in diameter hit the Earth circa sixty-five million bce. An appropriately sized and dated crater was later discovered on the Yucatán Peninsula in México.
Q.E.D.
But if Geoff’s find was real, then all bets were off. It meant the asteroid had possibly been nudged from its original orbit onto a collision course with Earth, and that the resulting nuclear winter had wiped out the dinos—and a good many other critters as well. But could the aliens actually have survived that long? It seemed a trifle improbable to me.
I put my eye back to the aperture of the ’scope, on the porch of my “Womb Tomb,” as I called it—my retreat from civilization.
“Mindon, I’m back!”
That was Puff Santiago, my current S.O. Her real name was Hazel or Maude or some other godawful thing like Porfiria, but she preferred Puff. What could I say? We’re all a little pseudonymous around here.
She’d run by Sargent’s Pepper Pot to pick up some din-din. I particularly liked a dish called the Eye of Flame, a stew of meat and vegetables that was so heavily seasoned with pepper and ginger and chili that it would leave you gasping for mercy—and for more, more, more. Pam the Pulchritudinous Proprietress was gracious enough to accommodate any reasonable culinary request.
So I abandoned my heavenly observations of the sky to observe the heavenly measurements of someone else.
“You see it again?” La Puff asked.
She was remarkably easy on the eyes, with long auburn hair and a plump body and a wry smile that would just make your heart jump in your throat. I always felt better when she was there. Maybe this was the one who would actually lead me down the road to the Proposition Palace. Maybe she should.
“Nah,” I said, “nothing.”
Just a few months earlier, there’d been an opposition of Earth and Mars, the first since the Martian invasion. That’s when the two planets reach their closest point to each other in their respective orbits. It happens once every twenty-six months between the red world and our blue one.
I’d been out there with all the rest of the amateur astronomers, night after night, looking for any signs of a new Martian invasion, but saw nothing—then!
But two days ago, just after my meeting with Alex, I noticed an isolated flash. It wasn’t reported on any of the usual web or news sites or even on CNN. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure if what I’d seen was real, it happened so quickly. A little tinge of red, that’s all it was. It could have been a reflection from a car’s brakes or something. It hadn’t been repeated.
“What do you think it was?” Puff asked, as we sat down to dinner.
“Don’t know. The more I think about it, the less certain I am.”
I heaped a ladle full of “Flame” onto a thick slice of the homemade organic wheat-berry bread that Pam had contributed to the package. One bite and I could already feel the endorphins hitting my bloodstream.
“Man, that’s good!” I said.
Puff couldn’t say anything at all.
“The problem is, it’s too late in the season for the Martians to be launching a second invasion fleet. The planets are rapidly drifting apart. So if it was an alien ship, and it’s not headed here, where’s it going?”
She raised her fork.
“Maybe they’ve got other bases nearby. Maybe there’s a Martian outpost in the Asteroid Belt.”
“Maybe lots of things,” I said, “but I don’t like any of them. I hate this waiting. I hate wondering what they’ll do next.”
“What would you do about it if you had the chance?”
That’s what I liked about Puff: she was never predictable.
“Me? Oh, I’d probably try communicating with them. What about you?” I asked.
She smiled sweetly while daintily popping a chili into her mouth.
“I’d bomb the bejesus out of them,” she said.
CHAPTER FOUR
UP YOUR ASTEROID!
Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air.
—Thomas Gray
Alex Smith, 12 Bi-July, Mars Year ii
Novato, California, Planet Earth
As usual, my wife was very supportive.
“Well, what the hell did you expect, Alex?” she asked. “You think they’re just going to drop everything at your say-so and pour hundreds of billions of dollars into a space defense system? It’s just not going to happen.”
“But….”
“I don’t care how convincing your evidence is, they’ll just want to study it some more. I do love you, Alex, but sometimes you’re the most impractical man on Planet Earth.”
I knew she was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier. The Bush III Administration had said that the Middle Eastern War had priority over any “possible” second invasion from Mars. After all, the Martians had been defeated, right? Man had proven his superiority once again. We were learning to adapt their technology, the experts said.
Balderdash! Man had been decisively squashed by the alien machines. The Martians had only died because of bacterial infection. Furthermore, we hadn’t been able to make any of the Martian devices work; we couldn’t replicate their bioengineering, hadn’t even come close. We didn’t understand any of it.
“They’re going to come back,” I said.
“You don’t know why they invaded us in the first place.” Becky waved her hands in frustration. “You don’t know squat about them, really. Nobody does. They may return—or they may not.
“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Mellie’ll be up soon, and I want to read some more of my book before she is.”
I raised an eyebrow.
She sighed heavily, and then very deliberately picked the volume up, displaying the garish cover to me: The Martian Mystique: What It Means and Why We Should Be Worried! by Madame Stavroula.
“Not her again,” I groaned. “She’s a charlatan, you know.”
“She has some very interesting things to say about the aliens,” Becky said. “Sure, some of it’s hokum, and some of it’s exaggerated; but she claims to have had visions of the Martian hives, and it rings true to me.”
“And she’s getting these, uh, visions from where? Come on, Becky, this is pretty rum stuff. I mean, hocus-pocus and all that. Hives? Like they’re bugs or something?”
“She says, and I quote, ‘The Martians are the surviving dominant life form of the Red Planet. When their world began to dry, when the waters finally receded for the