Final Assault by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch Read Free Book Online Page B

that we feel compassion. We’re doing it to try to second-guess how they will attack us.”
    Maddox folded her hands together. Portia was watching him over the head of the small dog. Britt was squeezing her cappuccino cup so hard her knuckles were white.
    “I believe, and this is just my belief, that these aliens believe this is a fight to the death.” Cross glanced at the other screens. Heads were nodding at tables all over the world. “I think they are fighting for their own survival and we’re fighting for ours. They’re not going to come in, retaliate, and leave. They have to harvest food from this planet, or their species will die. That means that they’ll have to defeat us, at least by their game plan. I think this next fight will be extremely difficult.” The Egyptian bowed his head once. “If you put it that way,” he said, “I will agree with you. I would like to hear less psychoanalysis, however, and more about ways that we can physically defeat them.”
    “Well,” Maddox said before Cross could speak again, “let me tell you what I can of the military plans.”
    What she could? Cross glanced at her. She was a smart woman, one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She chose her words with great care. Obviously, she felt she couldn’t share all of the plans. And now he was wondering why. But he knew better than to challenge her in front of their international peers.
    “We have come up with a method of attacking the alien ships,” Maddox said.
    Cross held his breath. No one had told him this and, judging from the surprised looks around the table, no one had told anyone on the U.S. part of the Tenth Planet Project.
    “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Yolanda Hayes asked.
    “1 wasn’t at liberty to,” Maddox said. She smiled. Apparently the silence hadn’t bothered her. “Let me explain what we’re going to do.”
    Her smile grew and she rubbed her hands together. Obviously this part of the plan pleased her. “All of you remember the first attack. Nothing electronic can get through the aliens’ dampening fields. They have some kind of equipment that steals the energy from anything within a certain radius.”
    Most of that, Cross knew, was for the members who hadn’t been in the Project during the first attack. The aliens’ dampening fields had been part of the problem from the very beginning and the subject of many meetings.
    “We have figured out a way around this. We are going to have planes fly above the dampening fields. As the alien ships approach the ground so that they can release the nanoharvesters, we will drop bombs on the ships from above.”
    Maddox had all of their attention now. Cross’s stomach was in knots and he didn’t quite know why.
    “Government scientists who have been working on parts of the alien ships have found a material that will stick to the hulls. We are going to use bombs that will stick and do no immediate harm. Instead of having an electrical timer, these bombs will have a simple altitude pressure switch that requires no electronics at all. When the alien ships rise to a certain altitude, the switch will trigger and the bombs will blow. We believe that enough bombs, dropped on the ships, will destroy the ships.”
    “But the harvesters will already have been released,” Killius said.
    Maddox nodded. She seemed almost annoyed that the first response was a negative one. Cross had to admit he was stunned by the news and was searching, in his own mind, to find a hole in the idea. Because Maddox had kept this secret from them? Or because he was trying to be a good scientist, skeptical to the end? He wasn’t sure.
    “We should be able to use ground launchers to send these bombs into the air as well,” Maddox said.
    Cross had a horrible image of apes hurling mudballs at tanks. He tried to shake it off.
    “We have given this technology to all of the world governments,” Maddox was saying, “and they are rapidly arming themselves. Between