Major Tom

"I can help," I said.

"They've scattered out in the streets," the general said. "You'd spend all of your time picking off individuals when we need you elsewhere."

"Besides," an undersecretary of…something said, "We're really only having to fight the ground war in Las Angeles. New York and Washington are doing fine."

One of the viruses I had created had forced every ship to move fifty miles east, so that if they collapsed, they'd only hit smaller towns instead of major metropolitan areas. It also stole command of the ships from them so that they were stuck in place.

That wasn't going to save everyone; some places had suburb cities surrounding them, and we'd lose tens of thousands of homes in some countries.

I'd been busy and hadn't had time to develop a program for each ship. As a result, some countries would be affected much worse than others.

America would likely fare the best; the Washington DC and New York destroyers were stuck over the ocean, and were already surrounded by Navy vessels who were destroying any of the aliens who came out.

"As much as I hate to say it, we need you for a more important mission," the President said.

I could feel his horror and regret through empathy and through telepathy; every American…no, every human life was painful to him.

He'd have been happy to let me slaughter aliens all day long, but he was afraid that the Harvester Mothership might have weapons the destroyers didn't. Even if it didn't, there were hints that there was a larger Harvester civilization out there.

One of the viruses I'd placed in their systems had shut off the force fields in the fighters, but that only worked in a patchy manner, since the fighters received computer updates in a scattered manner.

I'd spent the night hitting every set of force field capable fighters that I could across the world; nations' air forces had taken care of the ones that lost their force fields.

Another virus had given me a backdoor into their main computer network. It didn't appear that they'd discovered it yet.

A team of computer experts lead by David Levinson had been mining the alien networks for every piece of information they could get.

It was only a matter of time before the backdoor was discovered, and then it would presumably be closed.

Some of the things they had learned were concerning.

Their ships didn't have FTL radio, but once the message reached the larger civilization, they had wormhole creation capabilities, and would be here shortly afterward.

The fleet that had been sent here wasn't their strongest by a long shot. They tended to reserve those for civilizations with higher tech levels.

"We need you to destroy the mothership," President Whitmore said.

I frowned.

"I can survive in space for a short period," I said. "But it would take me ten or twelve jumps to get to the mothership, and I'm not sure what suffocating would do to me."

"NASA will provide you with a spacesuit," the General said. "You're tall enough to fit in one of the smaller men's suits, even if you are a little thin.

I'd be able to inventory it from around me so that it didn't get damaged too.

"The mothership is about the size of the face of the moon," I said, "And we haven't found anything other than the most basic of schematics for it. I doubt Bone Garden is going to cut it."

"We'll get you a nuke," the president said. "We have people separating warheads from the missiles so that they fit under your weight limit."

The general was less anxious about giving me the nuke than he had been the previous day. I'd done enough to save humanity, that he felt confident that I would do what was needed and not keep any nuclear weapons for myself.

The fact that the only way they could stop me was to kill the people who knew the codes probably played a part in that.

"Just tell me where to go," I said.

In my inventory I had several transponders taken from fallen fighters. I would have taken them from the Roswell ship, but I was afraid that the codes might have changed.

They gave me a set of pictures, and the locations on a map. I nodded, and a moment later, I blinked.

I appeared in the middle of an underground bunker.

Men immediately pointed weapons at me, but lowered them as they recognized me.

"If it's not her, we're in trouble," the leader said.

"Go ahead an arm them," I said when he started trying to tell me how to arm the weapons. "On a three-minute delay."

"It'll take longer than that to get them out of here!" the man said.

I touched one and inventoried it.

"I put them in null time when I do that," I said. "It only starts up again when I bring them back to the real world. Still, I'd like to have as much time as possible, so I'll be ready to assimilate them as soon as you are done."

After a telephone conversation with his superiors, we began.

"Each of these are 1.2 megaton bombs," the man was saying. "I'd suggest not being anywhere close when they go off, although you might do better in space."

I nodded.

I'd assimilated ten of them, and had ten to go. Even at that, I would need to place them strategically to ensure that the ship was destroyed. Its sheer size meant that we couldn't take anything for granted.

"You won't want to be affected by the radiation, and don't look at the blast; you'll go blind."

"I can regenerate," I said. "And I can grow extra eyes until I grow my eyes back."

He looked startled by that.

My bomb tinker specialty told me everything I needed to know about nuclear weapons, including the minimum safe distance to be away in space.

"But thanks for the warning," I said.

He was silent after that, and I finished inventorying.

"I don't know if anyone has told you this," the man said as they were readying the final bomb, "But thank you. I don't know what would have happened without you."

It had been a while since anyone had thanked me for anything. It was weirdly touching.

"You guys are the ones fighting without powers," I said. "Maybe if we all work together this will all work out."

When the final bomb was inventoried, I jumped to NASA.

The whole place was practically deserted; apparently most of the people there had evacuated, with essential scientists being sent to hardened installations.

However, I could sense some people down a hall, and so I blinked down the hall.

"Hello?" I asked.

Two people, a man and a woman looked up, startled.

"I'm here for a space suit?"

The woman stared at me for a moment, then said, "You're younger than we'd thought you'd be."

The man was an older man, and he was staring at me appraisingly.

"We can fit you with a medium," he said. "It's still going to be loose up top."

"I'm fifteen!"

"You've got thin shoulders compared to a man," he said, seemingly missing my point. "It's a problem a lot of women have. Most of the suits were made back when all the astronauts were men, and we haven't really caught up yet."

He was actually sincere. He was entirely focused on getting the space suit fitted.

"It'd take twelve hours to switch out the top," he said. "Fortunately, we have a suit that should fit you, if loosely."

"I don't need the undergarments to keep me cool," I said. "I can walk through fire unharmed, depending on how hot it is. A couple of hundred degrees won't bother me much."

"Fine," I said.

He frowned.

"Are you certain?" he asked.

"Do you have a blowtorch around?"

"Fine," he said.

Apparently, the skinsuit cost five million dollars.

From their minds I read that budget cuts during the last administration had phased out the extra small and small suits.

We spent the next forty-five minutes fitting me inside the space suit. The scientists spent much of that time trying to explain the functions of the suit to me; I paid attention even though my tinker skill gave me most of the information. The last thing I needed was to find out that pushing the red button would act like an ejection seat.

"I don't need a diaper," I said. "I don't urinate or defecate anymore."

"How long has it been?" the woman asked.

"Two months?"

"Since you used the bathroom?"

"It's not like I miss it really," I said. "I've been busy."

I did still sweat, but only rarely, and I'd wondered where the mass went. Of course, I'd eventually realized that I didn't actually have to eat, other than to heal, and so I only did so occasionally for pleasure.

"You don't find it hard to stand up?" the man asked ten minutes later. "The suit weighs two hundred and eighty pounds."

I shrugged.

I could actually feel the weight; it was five percent of what I could carry.

"It's not bad," I said.

It was loose around the shoulders.

As they slid the helmet onto my head, the outside sounds were muffled. If I'd had normal hearing, it would have been unnaturally silent.

When all checks were complete, and they deemed me ready to go, I made the suit disappear.

They gasped, and the look of dismay on their faces was inexplicably funny to me.

"That was a twelve-million-dollar spacesuit," the woman said, her face pale.

I gestured and the suit returned around me.

"I can put it in null time," I said. "The suit doesn't even have time to deflate. That way I'll only use it when I need it."

"It's not like the sixties," the woman said. "You aren't limited to thirty minutes worth of air."

"I'm more worried about the suit getting shredded when the aliens come after me," I said. "I can probably survive the trip back, but it's better safe than sorry."

They both went silent.

They'd been focused on their task, and they hadn't even been told what the spacesuit was for except that it would help in the war.

"If we get out of this, I could give you a design for a spacesuit that is more durable, cheaper, and easier to get in and out of."

"That's assuming there will be a NASA when this is all over," the man said glumly.

I looked at him surprised.

"Your world was just attacked by aliens," I said. "I'm pretty sure that when this is all over, you're going to have a new branch of the military…Space Force, Star Fleet, StarForce, whatever."

"That won't be NASA," he said.

"You'll be the guys trying to learn as much as possible about a hostile universe," I said. "I'd expect you'll have ten times the budget next year."

I brought several trash bags from my inventory and stepped into them, taping one to each leg with duct tape.

"You'll damage the suit," the man cried.

"It was this or spray paint it," I said. "You do the whole white thing because you want to find your astronauts. I don't want to be seen."

They watched quietly as I proceeded to cover myself in black trash bags. I ended up looking like a homeless alien, with a hood made out of trash bag.

I'd have preferred cloth, but the space suit was huge, and they didn't have parahuman size tailoring- Super Big and Tall. It would have taken too long to tailor something that would cover everything, and wearing a black tarp or something would be unwieldy.

Before they could say anything, I blinked up into the sky over Houston.

A moment later I was on the other side of the planet, in the skies over the remains of Shanghai. The Chinese were already combing through the wreckage, doubtlessly looking for technology they could use against other countries.

It had been four in the afternoon in Houston. It was five in the morning here, and the moon was handing low in the sky. I focused, and blinked as high as I could.

I barely dodged as a piece of space debris the size of my fist came flying toward my head. Everything up here was flying at almost seven thousand miles an hour.

At a few hundred miles above Earth, it would have been seventeen thousand miles an hour, and I certainly would have been hit.

By all logic, I should have been able to use my nine hundred mile an hour flight to accelerate to much greater speeds, but I was limited to that speed. I suspected that if I had already been moving- say by leaving a space shuttle moving at seventeen thousand miles an hour, I could have added the speed to that velocity, but I'd never get faster on my own.

I stared up at the moon.

It took me a moment to realize that I was actually in space. The other times I'd been focused on fighting, and I hadn't really taken any time to take in the view.

The Earth was beautiful.

I'd seen pictures online, but it didn't really convey what it was like to see it in person. It was awe inspiring, but it reminded me what I was fighting for too.

This was the world the Harvesters wanted to turn into rubble. It was blooming with life, more than even my homeworld, because it didn't have black ugly spaces where Behemoth had ensured no life would ever grow.

I couldn't hear anything other than the sound of my own breathing, and if I held my breath, everything was completely silent other than the hum of life support. There was no heartbeat thundering in my ears, and this was the first time I'd really noticed it.

Once I leveled up vacuum and cold resistance, I suspected that I'd spend a lot of time up here, just floating and reflecting.

For some reason, a song my father had liked came to mind.

Well, unlike Major Tom, I meant to come home.

I had a job to do.

I wanted to keep this world from becoming a hellhole like my homeworld, and that meant that I needed to get back to work.

I began blinking.

Over and over again I blinked. It took ten blinks and then more to move around the planet.

I stopped and floated, staring at the mothership.

It was so large that it seemed to go on forever. I couldn't see where it ended, at least from this angle, and it looked like the Earth had a second moon behind the moon.

If they were smart, they'd have retracted their force field so that I couldn't cling to the surface, but that depended on whether they'd noticed me on the outside of their ship.

What would happen if I tried to teleport into a solid force field that covered at least two dimensions?

They had a cordon of fighters moving in and out; I wasn't sure what they were doing, and I supposed that it didn't matter. The important thing was that they were able to enter the force field in order to get into the ship.

The ship transponders in my inventory were there to allow access to through the force field. I hadn't flown a spaceship up there because I would have assumed that a hive mind would know that a ship was a decoy the moment it came within range of the mother.

They hadn't even bothered to give the ships individual call signs because ultimately in their world it didn't matter. All of the ships were interchangeable, and no one cared what happened to any individual.

I removed the transponder from my inventory.

I was still wearing the garbage bags, and so the only way they'd see me is when I moved in between them and the stars, blocking out the light.

However, I was considerably smaller than any of their fighters, and hopefully they weren't looking for something as small as me, even if the aliens had killed had transmitted my image.

I blinked to the edge of the force field, the place where I saw some of the space rocks bouncing away from. I switched on the transponder. I'd powered it with a car battery that wouldn't last long in the cold of space. It only had to work for a moment, though.

I was through!

I blinked to the side of the ship, landing on the surface. I put the transponder back into inventory, and then I began sending my eyes through the hull.

I doubted that any systems of importance would be near the hull; there was no reason to take that kind of risk, not here.

I had my empathy turned off; there was too much risk that a telepathic species might tune into my frequency and be alerted to the fact that I was there.

What I needed was to find the power generator, and put a nuclear bomb there. That would create a chain reaction, at least if the mother ship was anything like the destroyers.

Still, it was possible that they had more redundancy here than they did in the assault vessels. After all, the majority of their population was here. This ship was staffed by the miners who would dig into the crust of the planet. It had the scientists who would sift through the remains of human civilization to see if we had anything they could use.

They'd been technologically stagnant for centuries according to what I'd read on the computers.

Well, this was going to be the last time they'd do that, at least this branch.

I felt a vibration on the hull of the ship beneath me.

A half dozen aliens in combat space suits were coming toward me, their feet sticking to the hull magnetically.

I'd been discovered.