Fragments

Everyone was staring at the sky. It was like the biggest fireworks show that everyone had ever seen.

I slipped inside the doorway behind the president, then blinked downstairs to face Dr. Okun.

My time limit was rapidly coming to a close.

I'd used bone garden on her, but she'd survived, presumably because she was larger and a lot tougher than the others. However, she was badly injured.

"I've got a Harvester Queen with a concussion," I said.

I brought her out of inventory and I shook her rapidly back and forth until her brain sloshed around inside her head. I'd heard of shaken baby syndrome, and assuming the queen's physiology was similar to the drones…

Her force field winked out, and she slumped forward.

TELEPATHY IS INCREASED 3 LEVELS!

YOU NOW HAVE A 50% CHANCE TO DOMINATE ANY ONE MIND WITHIN A 160 FOOT RADIUS, LESS ANY RESISTANCES THEY HAVE.

LEVEL 5

"Be careful," I said. "She can control minds through touch and she's got extra tentacles in her back that the drones don't have. She's stronger too."

I deliberately broke both her legs, keeping an eye on her current hit points.

I then blinked back to the entranceway, slipping discretely out into the area behind the president.

The President was still waiting patiently despite almost three minutes passing. Everyone was still enthralled by the fireworks.

I'd been wrong about the crowd. I could read it now. They were all military families from troops in Los Angeles, people who had loved ones fighting the ground war against the aliens.

Every one of them was worried, but they were all proud. Their son, their daughter, their father or mother, all of them were out there as the first line of defense in a war of annihilation.

It was a couple of minutes before everyone finally turned to listen to him again.

"Less than ten minutes ago, the largest of the alien ships was destroyed. We have crippled or destroyed the other ships, but the cost has been high. We may never know the numbers of our dead, and there are still people out there fighting to protect their friends, their neighbors, all of mankind."

He paused.

"We have evidence that this is only the first wave. We expect that in twenty years they will be back, more heavily armed and in greater numbers. We must be ready!"

He stared out at the people in the crowd, at the cameras, at me. Each of us felt as though he was speaking to us individually.

"We can't afford to be consumed by our petty differences any more. The enemy is coming. We will be united in our common interests."

There was something mesmerizing about how he spoke. My book learned political speaking skill told me that some of it was oratory tricks, but that most of it was pure magnetism.

"Perhaps it's fate that today is the fourth of July, and we are all fighting for our freedom…not from tyranny, oppression or persecution, but from annihilation. We are fighting four or right to live, to survive."

There wasn't a sound in the crowd. You could have heard a pin drop.

"Today we destroyed the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed. The fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday. It will be known as the day the world declared in one voice… we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on…we're going to survive! Today will be our Independence Day!"

The crowd cheered wildly, and I could feel the exhilaration. Everyone knew that there were battles still being fought, but the mood was jubilant.

This was a world that had defended itself, at least as far as everyone knew, and I intended to make it true. I couldn't be certain I'd still be here in twenty years, but I could give the people here a head start on their weapons.

I could lift objects into orbit, assuming that none of them was over four tons, and I could help them repair fighters, using pieces from other fighters, so they'd have a way of reaching space quickly themselves.

The President gestured for me to follow him.

"I assume the lightshow was from you?" he asked.

I nodded.

"In three days, we're likely going to have a problem with pieces falling to earth. I'll have to check that there aren't any that are too big, and I'll try to destroy those that that are before they reach the atmosphere so they'll burn up. However, I'm one person, and there's a limit on what I can do."

"I'll have the observatories keep an eye out for any pieces that are particularly big."

"Smaller than a car and it'll likely burn up, unless its some kind of super space metal," I said. "A piece the size of a house will hit with the force of the Hiroshima bomb."

He paled as we stepped through the doorways leading down.

"One the size of a twenty-story building would destroy a city the size of central Paris. A piece a half mile wide could destroy the state of Virginia, and lead to a mild nuclear winter from the ash thrown up. A piece the size of mount Everest would leave a hundred-mile crater, and would essentially be the end of humanity."

"Is that likely?" he asked.

"The ship was headed away from Earth," I said. "But it exploded, and so there will be some problems. The biggest problem will be that there are likely to be so many pieces that I'm going to have trouble seeing them all."

"You don't have some ability…?" he asked.

I shook my head.

He frowned.

"These things are spread out over three hundred miles, and they will likely spread out over an area of thousands of miles. I just don't have the visual acuity to see that or any abilities to detect the pieces. In the blackness of space, pieces are likely to be invisible. I'm going to need whatever people you have with telescopes to tell me where the largest pieces are."

The truth was that I wasn't sure that Far Strike was going to enough against half mile chunks of metal, even with Phantom Weapon.

Worse, if there was a seven-mile-wide chunk of metal heading for Earth, it would take the force of ten million Hiroshima sized bombs to destroy. I doubted I could level Far Strike up to that level in three days. If it were as far away as Pluto, I could have pushed it as hard as my puny four-ton strength would let me, and that tiniest of motions would propagate over time to make it miss the Earth.

If I found pieces of the hull large enough that I couldn't destroy them, then I'd have to spend my time making tinkertech bombs that could.

I'd need to go without sleep for three days, which was unusual even for me.

"The more time I have at the task, the better things are going to be," I said.

The ship had been more than three hundred miles wide; the rubble would spread outward in a cone. By the time they reached the Earth, they would have spread out to cover the entire planet.

He nodded, and I blinked away.

My first task was to level up Vacuum resistance. Blinking back to the place where the explosion had been, I floated there.

VACUUM RESISTANCE HAS LEVELED UP TO LEVEL 4.

COLD RESISTANCE HAS LEVELED UP BY 1%!

YOU HAVE THE BREATHLESS CONDITION.

Back where I had been, the space debris was already far past me. A quick calculation based on the size of the explosion and the time I had been gone suggested that the debris had already moved five hundred miles in the ten minutes I'd been gone.

I moved forward what I thought was five hundred miles; it was hard to estimate in space. I still couldn't see the dull metal of the hull; it wasn't until I saw the stars vanishing and then reappearing that I realized that the debris was ahead of me.

Blinking ahead, I realized that the debris was moving forward at a relatively sedate 3000 miles an hour. It would speed up as it was affected by Earth's gravity well, before slowing down when it hit the atmosphere, turning into a massive fireball.

VACUUM RESISTANCE HAS REACHED LEVEL 5!

+1% TO COLD RESISTANCE.

Teleporting ahead, I realized that I wouldn't be able to keep up with them in space, given my limited speed. They were going three times as fast as I could.

What I could do was change my frame of reference.

I'd teleported ahead of them, and I waited until a piece the size of a small building zoomed toward me.

Blinking on board, I used spider climb to attach myself to the piece of metal. I felt myself snap forward as my speed went from 0 to 3000 mph in the space of a millisecond.

-15 HP!

+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE.

The sheer whiplash would have killed any normal human. More likely it would have ripped their arm off, as that was what I was attached to the hull fragment by.

Instead, I stood up and tried to assess the other hull fragments around me. They were already separated by ten miles and were hard to see. It was only going to get worse the closer to earth we got.

I pulled a cell phone out of my inventory and I snapped a quick picture. I removed it to inventory as quickly as I could, hoping that the radiation and extremes of temperature hadn't already damaged it beyond repair.

Well, it was a Nazi phone anyway.

According to what I could see, the chunk of metal beneath me had 36,000 hit points, plus an indeterminate amount of damage reduction.

VACCUM RESISTANCE HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 6!

+1% COLD RESISTANCE!

BREATHLESS CONDITION HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 2!

I could feel it now, a slight need for air. I ignored it.

I'd have to hit the rock with a hundred far strikes, assuming it wasn't so tough that it still had damage resistance after phantom weapon reduced it.

If I had to do that with every large chunk, would it be worth it, or was my time better spent categorizing the chunks that were still up here?

I needed to see how many were up here, and that would never happen as long as I was in the dark. I needed to create a light so bright that it illuminated everything for hundreds of miles, and that would take a flare the likes of which the world had never seen.

While the flare was active, I needed some devices to plant on the fragments, focusing on the dangerous ones. It'd be best if they provided illumination on their own, but fragments could spin and I didn't want to miss any.

VACCUM RESISTANCE HAS RISEN TO LEVEL SEVEN!

+1% TO COLD RESISTANCE.

BREATHLESS HAS REACHED LEVEL 3!

Now I could seriously feel the need to breathe, and so I blinked back to Area 51.

I took a deep breath of air, and a doctor touched my shoulder. He hissed as his hand was damaged by the cold. I absently healed him as I said, "I need two hundred pre-1983 televisions, seventeen blenders, thirteen microwave ovens, and six hundred computers made before 1990…and two tons of phosphorous."

Apparently, the government had entire warehouses filled with things like that, and within the hour I had everything I needed.

It took me almost two hours to finish my attachable flares, and it required all of the rest of the glass I had inventoried.

A moment after I finished the last one, I was up in space again.

The fragments had moved another six thousand miles in the time that I had been gone. I managed to find the same fragment I'd latched onto the last time, and I set my first flare.

It lit up with almost nuclear levels of light, except that this would be continuous, and it would last for hours. People would be able to see it in the night sky, but they wouldn't be blinded because of the distance.

VACUUM RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED TO LEVEL SEVEN.

NEW POWER CREATED!

BLINDNESS RESISTANCE- 10% PER LEVEL AGAINST EFFECTS CAUSING BLINDNESS. LEVEL ONE.

For a moment I could see nothing because the light was so bright. Only my regeneration allowed me to recover from the bright light as quickly as I did.

When my vision cleared, I stared.

There were thousands of fragments. Most were less than the size of a car, and would probably burn up in the atmosphere. However, there were dozens larger than that.

One had to be at least a mile across.

Fuck.

Now that I was moving at a speed relative to the others, it was easy to set the beacons on the large objects. There were seventy-two in total, some bigger than the others.

The piece a mile wide worried me the most. Even if I cracked it in two, the two pieces remaining would still probably kill everyone.

A 20-megaton bomb wasn't going to do the trick. I could probably use far strike to bore a hole in it large enough that it could contain the blast, but it would simply eject out the bore hole.

The piece was only two hundred feet thick, which gave it a mass of around 2 billion tons, assuming a mass similar to iron. For a moment, I considered using the nuke as a rocket to thrust the largest piece to the side.

Doing the calculations in my head was difficult, even with my tinker skill. It wouldn't be enough.

However, it might be a start.

I blinked onto the largest piece, and I tried to calculate the one angle that would cause a near miss through the top of the Earth's atmosphere.

My placement of the hole wouldn't be perfect; it couldn't be without scientific instrumentation or a power.

Summoning my eyes, I used phantom weapon to turn them into massive rocket launchers. It wouldn't affect the output of the weapons created, but it looked cool an didn't hurt anything.

Eight arcane eyes blasted out with far strikes, all at the same time. Without any resistances, it should have done 2400 hp in a second.

Even with phantom weapon, I was only doing 240 hp a second. I was burning through a foot of the metal every second. Within a minute, I'd burned through sixty feet.

FAR STRIKE HAS LEVELED UP!

YOU NOW DO 340 HIT POINTS PER ROUND.

LEVEL 17.

Over the next minute, I burned through 64 feet of metal. I'd burned through 124 feet in two minutes.

I felt my chest burning, even as my Vacuum resistance leveled up. Eventually, it reached 100%, and I suddenly felt no need to breath.

At this rate, less any power ups, I could cut through the whole structure in a couple of hours. Then I could cut through the remaining pieces in half and half again, but it would take a long time- and there were still seventy-two other potential bombs out there.

Thirty minutes later, far strike had reached level 20, and I was in the center of the structure, and I spent some more time hollowing out a chamber inside large enough to put the bomb in.

I released the bomb from my inventory, and I quickly blinked out. The bomb had been about to explode before, and…

The explosion didn't look very impressive. Without an atmosphere, and hidden beneath a half mile of rock, the main thing that I saw was the whole structure shuddering, and a shift in its angle.

It wouldn't be enough, but I had some ideas.

I couldn't add momentum at will, but I could subtract it. I blinked to a resting place ten miles ahead. As the pieces flew toward me at three thousand miles an hour, I blinked to one and inventoried it.

I was limited to pieces smaller than car size, but I picked up as many as I could.

We were still close enough to the original explosion that some of the larger pieces were still flying parallel to the large piece.

Once I'd gathered sixty pieces, mostly around three feet on a side, I grabbed a larger piece and was yanked along, moving at the same rate as the other pieces.

There was a piece the size of an apartment building between me and the big piece. I began bombarding it, releasing the pieces I'd collected, but now with them moving three thousand miles an hour in the direction that I chose.

Each strike pushed the building almost imperceptibly. Eventually, it began moving toward the larger piece.

It would shatter against the larger fragment, and it would move the larger piece just a fraction of an inch. That fraction of an inch would expand as it traveled at a slightly new angle over two hundred fifty thousand miles.

I then repeated the process with the next largest item.

Two hours later, I'd worked my way through a dozen pieces. Some of the larger pieces had broken down to the point that I could use them as ammunition to push other items.

I'd have to check with the scientists to see if it was going to be enough. If it wasn't, I needed to know so that I could build a bomb.

I couldn't build a disintegration bomb, not like Bakuda had, but there were bombs I could build that would move the biggest piece farther, or possibly even destroy it. However, I knew exactly how long that would take.

If I spent my time on that, there would be no time to deal with the other forty larger pieces. They were on the wrong side of the largest piece, and were too large to inventory, so there was nothing I could do except destroy them.