It’s July 1979 and Mike Hoban is sitting in the solitary armchair of his one-room apartment in North Finchley, London. At his feet, Jane Abraham, his girlfriend of three years, is working on a quilt she started just before Christmas. Mike is reading “The World According to Garp”, with a gentle smile on his face. It’s the post-exam, pre-head-for-home period familiar to any student.
They’d paid the rent to the end of the month from Mike’s wages as a barman, and Jane was putting off returning to her Canterbury family home.
“Is that good?” Jane asked without looking up.
“Very,” Mike replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.”
“At least it’s not Science Fiction,” said Jane with a disapproving expression. She was more of a Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy type, and she tried hard to elevate Mike from what she saw as his lazy literature. She loved him, but she realised they had firmly differing ideas of culture.
Jane was a medical student. Mike studied physics. They started dating at the university Labour Club and stayed together until the end of his three-year degree, but now it was time to part. At least temporarily. He was studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Lab, and she still had a few years of medical study. She was determined to make this last, though.
He laughed at a witty passage in his book, and Jane looked up, her scowl giving way to a warm smile of encouragement. Perhaps there was hope for him yet.
She looked out of their small window at the familiar view across London. The sky was a kind of azure rarely seen in the capital: cloudless, sun-soaked, and empty. Empty except for… She rose to her feet and pointed.
“M-Mike,” she whispered, “what the hell is THAT?”
Mike looked up from his book, followed her outstretched arm with his eyes, and saw a huge, dull-grey globe hanging stationary in the sky about a mile to the south.
“I have no idea.” He pulled the curtain to one side to get a better view. “A balloon maybe.”
The globe in the sky was still and featureless, but Mike knew it wasn’t a balloon. It only stayed like that for a couple of minutes, but they were the longest minutes of Mike’s life before it accelerated off to the South.
Before Mike could say anything, two Phantom jets came streaking across the sky from the Northeast.
“Wow, did you see those?” Mike said. “They’re USAF, not RAF.”
“The yanks?” Jane replied. “What are they doing chasing things across London?”
“I dunno.” Mike was visibly excited.
The next morning, they sat in Goldberg’s café on the High Road. Mike was still excited about the encounter. Jane less so.
“You realise we can’t talk about this to anyone,” she declared after letting him bubble incoherently for a few minutes. He looked perplexed.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m taking up a career in medicine. You’re going into research. It would destroy our reputations if anything about this gets out. You must promise me not to mention it to anyone.”
After some cajoling, Mike eventually agreed, and they did not mention the topic again.
Mike married Dr Jane Abraham, despite her parents’ disapproval. They lived happily for 20 years until she died from an incurable auto-immune disease. Mike never spoke of that day in July, until he retired, a Professor of physics at MIT, some quarter of a century later. That was when he was called to the UAP hearings before the Congressional Aeronautics Committee in 2023. His role as the sober debunker of wild theories about aliens secured him the spot.
He stood unsteadily; his knee had been giving him trouble for years. He cleared his voice and tapped the microphone before him.
“Mister Chairman, members of Congress,” he began, “I want to tell you the story of when I was an undergraduate in London. I am at a complete loss as to what I saw that day…”
“Everything has been going wrong for so long,” Eric thought, “I forget what normal looks like.”
He is in his garden on the last day of his occupancy. The bank forecloses tomorrow. His wife left after he lost his job, but that wasn’t what finished it for him. He looked at where his legs used to be. That was the car crash.
“Oh God,” he moaned. “I wish I could end this.”
“Okay,” said a strange voice, and everything around him froze.
For you to understand the god-damn enormity of my task means I have to explain it to you. I don’t want to because seconds count, but I will anyway.
It’s this: light travels very fast. In one second it will cross 186,282.40 miles. A photon leaving Earth will travel beyond the orbit of the moon in the time it takes to make two strides.
I’m Detective Inspector Andy Spence.
And I have to stop it.
It is twenty-four years, three months and sixteen days after First Contact Day and I’m drinking coffee while sitting behind my aged metal desk in London’s New Scotland Yard. I cleared some space by pushing one of several paper mountains to one side and put my mug down. An old plastic cup, its contents dried to a brown biscuit in its base, fell off the edge and skittered across my office floor. It joined several friends decorating the office landscape. This was because the domestic staff were on strike and I am always clear about demarcation. Civilians made me sick.
My partner, Detective Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney, strode towards me with that look on his face. He has a case and I am about to get involved. Again. I heaved a sigh and looked up.
“Boss”, he said as he waved a sheet of paper at me. “Look at this…”
“Let me see,” I said. I tried my best not to sound weary, but this time I may have failed. The memo was from Police Intelligence. They were monitoring a clutch of peacenik academics in Camden. Hard-wired bugs, you’ll understand, we don’t use radio any more. Not since Scrixn’s warning, anyway.
The memo was short and brutal. It said, “There is credible evidence Professor Dexter P. Arthur, a leading light in the Peace Costs Nothing group is discussing with fellow academics the possibility of pointing a comms laser at the Drar’ch fleet as they cross interstellar space in search of new civilisations to crush. They intend to broadcast a message of peace. The case requires termination.”
“Saddle up, Kee,” I said rising to my feet and taking a last gulp of coffee. I reached into my desk, pulled out my Glock 17, checked the clip and pocketed two more clips just in case. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Boss,” he acknowledged and patted his belt holster. He favoured the smaller Walther PPK/S. It was safer to carry, but that long pull of the trigger to cock the mechanism cost seconds. Survival often depended on seconds. I scowled but left my displeasure for a future discussion.
We left the building by the roof exit, crossing a darkened London with speed. The Professor’s home and laboratory were around the back of Camden Market, just four miles away. We made it in six minutes, landing on a second-floor balcony without any noise. I glanced up and saw light escaping from a misplaced blackout curtain and signalled Kieron to position himself in front of the window. He rose without hesitation, his A-grav-plate glowing a faint violet as he did so, and I entered the building via the balcony doors.
The room was cluttered with plush furniture, books in piles like sentries guarding a twin pedestal walnut desk, a single Anglepoise lamp and a heavy wooden pipe jutting up like craggy rocks in a sea of paper. It smelled of old tobacco and older body sweat, like an end of the line brothel in a cheap part of town. The incongruity of it set my OCD on edge, or maybe that was the stomach acid from swallowing my coffee too quickly.
Tiptoeing across the room, I found the door was ajar and I could hear voices coming from the floor above. They were dull and indistinct, but my cop’s instinct told me they would very soon get real clear, so I pulled the door further and looked around the hallway. There was no-one around, so I made my mind up to take the plunge right there and then.
Creeping out of the study, I activated my AGP and scaled the stairs without causing an alerting creak. The Glock was in my hand now and my breathing was low, even though my heart was beating faster than a trapped fly’s wings on a hot summer afternoon.
“Do we have enough battery yet?” said a low voice. I recognised it as the Professor from a lecture of his I attended some five years ago. The incongruity of his West Country burr castigating the authorities in a London academic setting stuck with me.
“Yesh,” came the reply. The second voice shocked me. It was Scrixn, the alien who came to warn us about the Drar’ch, a race of self-replicating machines, whose sole purpose was to find intelligent biological life and destroy it. “You may proscheed, Professher.”
I kicked the door open and opened fire. The alien flew backwards as three slugs hit him in his broad, scaly forehead and the Professor whirled around clutching a device that looked like a spring-loaded clamp, its jaws wide and two wires trailing from the handle.
“Inspector,” he said in a nonchalant voice. He raised his hands as I pointed my gun at him.
“Drop the device, Professor,” I commanded him. I shook the gun at him for emphasis. “Drop it now.”
He smiled and let go of the clamp, the jaws closed and sparked. A table-top laser hummed, the blackout curtains parted and he laughed.
I shot him in the face and as he fell to the floor, still smiling, I emptied my clip into the laser’s casing. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, but the hum continued to rise. In desperation, I dived for the clamp and prised its jaws apart as the laser fired a thin red beam through the open window. I was too late. Seconds too late. The laser beam only lasted a few seconds before it exhausted its batteries and cut off. But it was a few seconds too long for humanity.
I looked through the window to see if I could catch it streaking through the night sky, but saw instead the hulking figure of Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney hanging there, a blank expression on his lifeless face, his AGP still glowing, and a small smoking hole bored into his front armour. I reached out and pulled him close, swivelling his carcass around. There was no hole in the rear.
Epilogue: Ten Years Later
Optical telescopes all over the Earth watched as the billion-strong fleet of Drar’ch proceeded on its murderous procession away from Sol, ever deeper into space. Away from us. We had survived, but only by seconds.
We never found out why Scrixn acted so duplicitously. The current theory is he got us to cut back on technological development just to weaken us, but that’s just a guess. Embedded in his brain was a lot of circuitry, but it will be a long time before the brainboxes can work out what it does, especially as my handiwork had done a lot of rewiring. They will piece it together though. One day. Of that, I am pretty sure. Then maybe we can get some payback for all those races the Drar’ch have wiped out.
For now, I was content to do my shifts, break in my new partner and go home to nurse a bottle of Scotland’s finest. Today was a day of celebration though and I was stuck in the Yard, nicking terrorists, organised criminals, and shuffling paper.
Once again, I was sitting at my desk, a mug of java in my fist, watching cable-TV through the wide-open entrance to my office as scientists played videos of the armada retreating into the ether. They looked like a rash of white dots across the black – too small to get any clear definition even with the best telescopes we had. Maybe if the satellites were still operational, we could have gained a clearer picture, but the risk was too great. For now, the earth would remain in the dark, a lifeless blue marble to outside eyes.
I stood up and walked out of my office as the broadcast came to an end and the politicians took over. There wasn’t much to say, it was a relief more than a victory, but we came close to annihilation and but for the unfortunate positioning of Mulrooney, we would be preparing for an invasion instead of toasting our good fortune. I was going to toast it anyway, so I raised my mug and said, “To life.”
The shift was silent up to that point as they watched the retreating armada, but to a man, woman and robot they turned and raised their mugs to me and in a ragged chorus, echoed my words.
I raised my mug again in acknowledgement, but also in a toast to Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney. He came a magnificent second, but the rest of us won and the thing the aliens don’t realise is we don’t get mad, we get even and payback is coming. One day.
