Second Contact [Alien Nation #2] (#Wattys2019)

Prologue

Grace Saraki put her head in her hands and sighed, resting her elbows on top of the papers spread out on the desk. It was almost impossible to imagine that the tiny room that passed for the command centre of her little resistance group had been her bedroom only a couple of months ago. The long shadows on the wall and on the closed curtains flickered as the candles stuttered.

One year. That was how much peace she'd got between her knee injury ending her military career and the appearance of these...things. And now she found herself the leader of this small but eager band of civilians, determined to protect their tower block from E.T.

At least once a day, she tried to convince herself that this was all an elaborate nightmare. Sometimes, it nearly worked.

"Um. Ma'am?" said a timid voice from in front of her.

Grace sighed again, staring through her fingers at Monika Kochonowska, the woman she had appointed as supply officer. "Monika, I told you, you don't have to call me 'ma'am.' We're not a real army. 'Grace' is fine."

"Oh. Right, yes. Sorry, ma—Grace. So like I was saying, we might have to start turning away refugees soon, um, because we might not be able to feed them."

Grace let her hands fall to the table. "Are you sure?" She knew for a fact that their main supply room (previously known as her living room) was stacked to the ceiling with cans of soup, tinned vegetables, dried fruit, and anything else they'd managed to scavenge from the pantries of Alderley Tower and the abandoned shops and houses in the city beyond.

"Yes. Well, it depends. We're not re-stocking our supplies fast enough. If we find more, we won't need to turn anyone away."

"And how likely are we to find more supplies?"

Monika shifted from foot to foot, arms folded tightly over her chest. "I'm not sure. None of my scavenger groups have had any luck yet, and my husband can't get hold of the people who supply our shop. I think they might be –"

"All right," Grace interrupted, before Monika could finish that thought. Despair would spread through the tower like a virus. London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester—the aliens had flattened the hearts of countless cities, destroying the country's infrastructure and plunging the population into anarchy. There was no reason to believe other countries hadn't received the same treatment. All they could do was drift from one day to the next, be glad they weren't one of the millions (billions?) lying dead, and hope that one day soon, someone would work out what the hell they were supposed to do.

And underneath her preoccupation with making it to the next day and bringing as many of her people with her as she could, Grace's soldier's brain was working overtime.

Reducing the hearts of Earth's cities to rubble hadn't been enough. Every morning she woke up to the black shadow in the sky blocking out the sun, and the aliens had shown no sign of leaving so far.

So what the hell were they waiting for?

She stood up and went out into the supply room, Monika close on her heels. With her hands on her hips, Grace surveyed their supplies; they wouldn't be running out of canned tuna any time soon, at least. Briefly, she wondered if any of the scavengers had come across any tinned peaches. They had always been her favourite. "You have three more days to find something," she decided finally. "After that, we're going to have to start turning refugees away, unless they can be useful to us somehow."

Monika sighed. "Yes, I was afraid you'd say that."

"Believe me, it's the last thing I want."

"I'll pass the word along." Monika turned to leave, then stopped in her tracks. "I was just wondering, have you had any success with the..."

Grace raised her eyebrows. "The device?"

Monika nodded, staring with wide blue eyes at a smooth object, the size of a rugby ball, covered in a sheet on a coffee table in the corner of the room. "Do you think it's from them? Just having it there makes me nervous."

"Whatever it is, it's dead. For all I know it's just a piece of junk." She'd spent many quiet evenings when no-one was around trying to break into it, take it apart to find out how it worked. Even though she'd been an IT specialist in the military, she'd never seen anything quite like it.

"But it was hovering when the scavenger found it."

"I don't discuss plans in front of it, if that's what you're worried about." Though she'd never admit it to anyone, Grace made sure the thing stayed near the window so she could throw it out if it so much as beeped at her wrong. Still, something told her she might regret getting rid of it, so there it stayed, hidden from unauthorised eyes.

Someone knocked frantically at the door and Monika jumped, hands flying to her chest.

"Come in," Grace called.

Instantly the door flew open and Rhys Nicholson, the man she'd put in charge of the resistance's communications with the outside world, stumbled in, short of breath and his pale face shining with sweat. "Grace," he panted. He was a plump man who'd managed a small call centre in the City before the destruction, but he looked as if he'd just run a marathon.

The hair on the back of her neck prickled. "Rhys? What's going on?"

"I can't find...I lost..."

"Deep breaths, Rhys," Monika said gently, putting her hand on his back.

Rhys gasped a little then straightened, adjusting his wire-framed glasses. "Grace, I've lost the GPS tracker we gave to Alex's scavenger group. It's gone. Disappeared."

Grace swore. "You're sure there's no interference? No malfunction?"

"If it's a malfunction then it's a bloody weird one. They just flew out of range, faster than anything I've ever seen. They're gone. Vanished."

Grace swore again, turning away from the others so they wouldn't see the horror on their leader's face.

A whole scavenging group, vanished. She didn't want to believe it, but she was literally looking at an alien spaceship from the window of a completely unremarkable flat in fucking Hackney, for God's sake. The world she had known before, the world of clear skies, of dull routines, and of a simple universe, were long gone.

Anything was possible.