War

"I managed to get inside," I said. "Without being seen, unless it was by some technology I haven't noticed yet. I'm pretty sure that I can disable their main weapons using conventional missiles without destroying the entire ship."

"Did you get a better idea of how many aliens we're looking at?"

"I teleported to places without the aliens to get as good a look at as much of the ship as possible. My best estimate is that each of the destroyers contains a hundred thousand aliens. They've got battlesuits, but likely not enough for all of the aliens."

"So, we're looking at three hundred thousand aliens attacking on American soil."

"They've got staging areas with troop transports and enough room to load thousands pretty quickly," I said. "They can release fighters through those holes in the side, and they also have small energy weapons that look like they'd be able to down a fighter."

"Could you destroy their energy weapons quickly enough to force them into a ground assault?" the president asked.

"Maybe," I said. "If I was well prepared. That would still leave their fighters with force fields to gain air superiority."

"I've been speaking to all the world leaders that I can," President Whitmore said. "Telling them about the vulnerability in their weapon and the difficulty they'll have in taking advantage of it."

I nodded.

"This is David Levinson," he continued. "He says the aliens are using their satellites to coordinate their attack. It seems strange that they'd need that if they are telepathically connected."

"They've got a limited range," I said. "The mothership is hiding behind the moon, and it's too far away to communicate telepathically. Each of the destroyers has a weaker queen who can act as a hub for the smaller hive mind."

"So, kill the queens?" David said. He was a handsome, lanky man.

"The problem is in identifying them," I said. "It would take time, and by the time I killed one queen, the others would already be starting an attack."

I shook my head.

"I'm able to move faster than any human, but even I have my limits. I'm going to need time to target their weapons, and that's going to leave the cities I save for last vulnerable."

The doors opened, and we were looking at a state of the art, clean underground base.

President Whitmore's aide said, "Let me introduce you to Dr. Okun. He's been the head of research here for the last fifteen years."

Ignoring the president, Dr. Okun turned to me.

"You," he said. "Are you the young lady I've been told about? The superhero?"

"I've got powers," I said. I lifted Dr. Okun off his feet.

He grinned at me, delighted.

"I have so many questions! Where did you get your powers? Where do you come from? What is the power source for what you can do? A human body couldn't contain that kind of power."

He reminded me a little of Greg; he was as delighted as a child.

"I don't know, they just started appearing in my world thirty years ago. I come from another dimension, and I don't know what my power source is. I eat my Wheaties?"

"Dr. Okun," President Whitmore said. "If we spend all the time wondering just when our lives turned into a science fiction movie we'll be standing here when the aliens kill us all."

"I'm sorry," Dr. Okun said. "We don't get many visitors around here, and certainly not such… distinguished ones."

He gestured to us, and we followed him up a ramp. Giant doors opened in front of us.

They had an alien ship in a hanger. It looked a lot like the ships I'd seen in the hangar, but I could see that repairs had been inexpertly made to it over a period of time.

"We were never able to figure out their power sources, so there was only so much we could learn," the doctor said. "But over the last twenty-four hours, it has turned on by itself, and we've been able to do a lot more."

"I've got another body for you," I said. "This one is a lot fresher."

Dr. Okun looked excited.

He told a staffer to get a gurney, and I made the body appear on it.

"How old is this?" he asked.

"A few seconds," I said. "I've had it in stasis for a few hours."

"We've got methods to study bodies that we didn't have back then!" the doctor said. He gestured, and the body was quickly taken away.

"How did you interpret their code?" I asked David Levinson.

"It wasn't all that different from ours," he said, frowning. "I'd have thought it would have been in some kind of alien language, but maybe machine code is universal?"

"Actually, a lot of our programming code is derived from our studies of what little we could get from the ships computer using conventional power sources," Dr. Okun said. "It started with the military and spread out into the civilian sector."

"So, the aliens use a similar computer code to us," I said. I frowned.

Greg Vedar had once complained about getting a virus. I'd suspected he'd gotten it watching porn, but he'd insisted it was from downloading games.

I didn't know enough about computers other than the basics taught in programming class to know which was more likely.

"Do you have books on programming here?" I asked. "Hard copies, based on what you've discovered of the alien's computer languages?"

He nodded.

"We make hard copies of everything," he said. "In the case of catastrophic computer failure."

"Are they irreplaceable?" I asked.

"No," he said. "We make multiple copies of everything, ever since the plumbing disaster of 1953."

"I can learn from devouring books," I said. "It destroys them, but I learn instantly."

"You want to learn the aliens' computer language," Dr. Okun said.

"The right computer virus might make it impossible for them to use their force fields, or even for their fighters to launch," I said. "I could cripple the entire fleet in an instant, assuming I found the right virus."

"Do it," the president said. Turning to David Levinson, I asked, "How much time do we have left?"

"Six hours," he said.

"I'll need to make the best use of the time that I can," I said.

I saw men racing out of the room, presumably to get me my books. Nothing like the threat of genocide t light a fire under people's feet.

"I'll need a look at the fighter," I said. "While I'm waiting on the books."

Dr. Okun nodded.

"Let me show you," he began, but I'd already blinked over to the ship.

"My word," he said.

The fighters were a lot less complicated than the destroyers. They too were a combination of high tech and lower tech. Presumably; the lower tech was what the researchers had been able to comprehend.

Were the Harvesters stealing technology as well as planetary resources? It might be why their ships were a mishmash of older and new.

Or maybe they'd been flying so long that they upgraded their ships as they went, and there was no point in upgrading things that worked perfectly fine.

After all, for all the attempts to build a better mousetrap, we were still using the older type.

The hammer had been in existence since at least the middle ages, and maybe much further back.

"They don't have enough of an energy source to run their force fields," I said. "They depend on broadcast power. It's likely why the ship has started back up; it didn't have any power until a destroyer got close enough."

I suspected that the destroyers weren't entirely dependent on the mothership. It might be that the ships could maintain propulsion without the mothership's broadcast energy.

"Their technology is partially biological," I said.

I paused.

Did that meant that I could get some powers from their biosuits and from their ships? I'd have to try it and see, although their ships might be harder to quantify.

How many hit points would a ship that was hundreds of kilometers long have?

I must have gotten lost in studying the interior, because I was surprised by the arrival of a dozen men with dollies. Each Dolly contained four boxes of papers.

Did the paper have to be bound to be considered a skill book?

I blinked over to them, and opened a box.

NEW SKILL CREATED!

HARVESTER COMPUTING!

USE THE COMPUTING SKILL OF HARVESTER EARTH TO GO VIRAL!

EXPERT LEVEL!

It took less than a minute to devour all of the boxes, and my mind was spinning with information.

I already had some computing skills from several of my tinker abilities.

"Do you have internet access on base?" I asked.

Dr. Okun shook his head. "It's considered a security risk."

Nodding, I turned to the ship.

"I need to borrow your laptop," I told David Levinson.

He nodded.

"Don't check the browser history," he said.

"I know better," I said. "I'm fifteen years old and I'm from the far future world of 2011; it's only going to get worse."

It took me a moment to fashion an interface between the ship's computer and David's laptop. I made it out of some of the wires laying around, glass from my inventory reshaped and parts I ripped out of a 1993 Dodge dynasty I pulled from Inventory.

It wasn't one of the corpse cars; I figured that would make a bad impression on these people.

"They don't even have firewalls," I muttered as I stared at the screen. "No virus protection, nothing. That might just be because they consider these ships expendable, but it might be because of their hive minds."

A hive mind meant there was no place for porn in their world, and no malicious programmers trying to make lives worse.

Their unity would be their downfall.

I typed quickly; I had learned typing for computer class, and I suspected that I was typing four hundred words a minute. The computer wouldn't let me type any faster.

I should have taken Velocity's power. I'd assumed it would only give me running, but it might have let me tinker more quickly, and it certainly would have let me think faster, even if I couldn't affect the world much.

Still, I was done in an hour.

David had been looking over my shoulder the entire time, and he seemed to understand what I was doing.

"Those are nasty viruses," he said. "Some things I've never seen before."

"They're coming," I said. "I'm not sure what kind of firewalls they might have, so I'm throwing everything I can at them hoping something will stick."

"The most likely targets next will be Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Memphis," the general said. "We're putting a lot of trust in one girl."

"She had an alien body," President Whitmore said. "And you saw what I saw."

"I can't guarantee that anything I try will work," I admitted. "But I hope they'll at least give us a chance to fight back."

I stood up.

"We're giving military ordinance to a teenager," the General said.

"I'd give a baby the trigger to a nuclear weapon if it would save humanity," President Whitmore said.

The general nodded reluctantly.

"We've got the ordinance you requested outside," he said.

I touched him, inventoried him, and then I blinked to the entrance.

I brought him back, and then I began to examine the ordinance. I'd asked for warheads within my weight limits.

"This one is a dud," I said. I pointed to a couple of spots. "Poor maintenance."

He nodded grimly and I suspected that if the world survived, some maintenance engineers would be having a bad day.

I inventoried seventy warheads, setting the countdown on each of them for three minutes. I'd need the time to get to each of the ships and plant the explosives.

I wanted to damage the main weapons without destroying the ships.

Teleporting inside, I told the president I was leaving.

"Four hours isn't enough to evacuate millions of people," he said morosely.

"We've got four hours left," I said. "It's possible that they've moved their timeline up, and even if they hadn't, we need the time to explore other options."

Losing the cities was likely to affect the poor and disadvantaged more than the wealthy; they were often the ones without cars or the resources to get out in the case of a disaster.

It couldn't be helped as much as I didn't like it.

Appearing in Washington DC, I blinked to the ship's underside, and then I blinked inside once my eyes told me things were clear.

They'd given me pictures of all thirty-two locations, and I had them in my inventory.

Setting the bomb, I also took the opportunity to download the viruses, using my jury-rigged device.

I blinked to New York, to Los Angeles, to Paris and London and Berlin. I'd made my way through most of Europe, but there had been delays because there were often aliens where I needed to be.

My three minutes was up, and I blinked back to Washington. There was fire coming from the underside of the ship, and the ship was listing to the side.

I'd used one virus to cause the ship to list to the side, and it seemed to be working.

There were seven ships I hadn't had time to attack, mostly in Asia, Africa and the Soviet Union.

I blinked to Japan, and I found Tokyo in flames. I grimaced and I blinked inside the ship. With the city destroyed, I had no reason not to cause a chain reaction that would destroy the ship.

"Bone garden," I said.

With the aliens dead, I set the charges.

I repeated the act in Moscow, Shanghai, New Delhi, Thebes, some African city that no longer existed in my world and Seoul.

All of those ships were destroyed.

Ironically, that meant that these countries would do better than the others. They'd each lost major cities, but their losses would stop.

The United States and Europe were about to engage in a ground war.

The aliens were already scrambling for their fighters. If they were like humans, I could have killed all their pilots and that would have been it. However, with them being interchangeable, the only way was to destroy the chips themselves.

"Bone garden," I said.

The aliens nearest me turned to bone, and that helped to block the corridors. It wouldn't last forever; they'd soon find a way around it.

"PHANTOM WEAPON-FAR STRIKE!" I said.

Without their force fields, the ships weren't that robust. I blinked downward, reaching inside for a biological part of the ship.

WIND RIDING IS UPGRADED TO TRUE FLIGHT!

YOU CAN NOW FLY IN SPACE INSTEAD OF BLINKING EVERYWHERE!

YOU HAVE GAINED FIVE LEVELS OF FLIGHT!

YOU CAN NOW FLY 960 MPH!

LEVEL 11!

PLANAR AFFINITY HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 2!

+20% TO ATTEMPTS TO RETURN TO HARVESTER EARTH.

I grinned.

The flight might not increase my travel speed much, but it was possible that if I could increase Armored Skin more, I might be able to become one hell of a missile.

It'd help in worlds where I didn't know where things were, too.

I released some of the missiles into the fighter bay, destroying as many of the ships as I could.

I repeated the effort in New York and Las Angeles.

Paris and London got the same treatment, but by the time I reached Berlin, I discovered that the ships were already in the air, and they were destroying the German air force.

"Bone Garden," I said.

The ships dropped out of the sky. I'd excluded the German fighters that I could see, but I saw one fighter drop; I'd missed him.

"Bone Garden," I said as I reached the next city.

Blink.

Bone garden.

Blink.

Bone Garden.

Blink.

I dropped fighter after fighter, but they kept coming, and I couldn't focus on any one spot too much, knowing that there were twenty-five other places that were suffering.

They were killing pilots everywhere, and where there weren't enough pilots, the ships were trying to destroy buildings.

I needed to upgrade bone garden.

Blinking back to Washington DC, I saw that the ship had veered far enough to the side.

Bone garden, bone garden, bone garden, bone garden.

I blinked and flashed throughout the ship, killing as many of the aliens as I could in a single go.

A hundred times I went, and Bone Garden leveled up a level, to level 10 and a thousand-foot diameter circle.

I blinked to New York, and I did the same. Bone garden gained another level, to level 11.

In Los Angeles, I gained another level, but I also managed to catch the sub-queen in my radius.

I blinked to her, touching her.

YOUR TOUCH TELEPATHY HAS LEVELED UP!

YOU NOW HAVE TELEPATHY AT 20 FOOT RADIUS. YOUR TELEPATHY DOUBLES IN RANGE EVERY LEVEL. YOU HAVE A 20% CHANCE TO CONTROL MINDS, LESS ANY RESISTANCES.

That was useful.

I flashed through the ships in Europe, killing as many as I could. By the end of four hours, cities were burning everywhere, but I'd leveled Bone Garden up fifteen levels.

I now had a circle 2500 feet in diameter that I could kill with. At level 25 it did 750 points to opponents with bones.

I was becoming an Endbringer in truth, but the cost of that was millions of dead.

Of course, if I hadn't interfered, the cost would have been billions.

There were alien troops on the ground throughout much of Europe, and some of the Asian cities that I had managed to save.

I'd destroyed the American troop transports.

Russia had used nuclear weapons on the ships that I'd stopped from blasting two of their cities.

Had I saved China for last because of negative thoughts of the CUI? I couldn't be sure.

What I did know was that it was July 3rd​, and the world was at war.