Earthfall: Retribution Read Free

haven’t attacked us and our Mothership yet that they aren’t going to. We need to start planning our next move. We know from the TV coverage of the Mothership fleet’s arrival that there were ships above other cities around the world, but we don’t even know for sure how many were sent here to Britain. We need to know much more about the enemy’s strength if we’re going to take the fight to them. I know that we’ve all been focused on Stirling and the Servant’s efforts to wake the Sleepers, but it may be that the only way to actually do that is to elim­inate the Voidborn completely.’
    ‘The Servant has no ideas, I assume?’ Will asked.
    ‘No, her memory begins with the moment we first saw her on the bridge of the Mothership,’ Sam said, ‘and she has no connection to the Voidborn consciousness any more.’
    ‘Fortunately,’ Adam said, ‘because you know that’s going to be a two-way street and I don’t want to be around if she ever has a change of heart about helping us.’
    ‘So we need to go look, then,’ Jay said. ‘Let’s face it, another Mothership floating above Britain isn’t going to be that hard to spot.’
    ‘I agree,’ Rachel said with a nod. ‘I’m tired of sitting around waiting for the Voidborn to make the next move. We’ve barely ventured beyond the outskirts of London since this all began. We have no idea what might be happening in the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.’
    ‘So how do we do this?’ Anne asked. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Jay, but, big as that thing is,’ she gestured upwards to the ship floating unseen above them, ‘we can’t just set off wandering randomly looking for another one. We need some clue to where we should look.’
    ‘I believe I can help with that,’ Stirling said, stepping from the shadows at the other end of the room. No one had seen him come in.
    ‘I hate it when he does that,’ Jay whispered to Rachel.
    ‘I still have some printouts of telemetry data from tracking stations that were monitoring the Voidborn vessels during their final approach to Earth,’ Stirling continued, walking slowly towards them. ‘It only gives us limited local sub-orbital trajectory data, but that should be enough to let us make some educated guesses as to where some of the other Motherships went. At the very least it should help narrow the search.’
    ‘Sounds good,’ Sam said. ‘How long will it take to crunch the numbers?’
    ‘A couple of hours,’ Stirling replied. ‘I’m afraid my orbital dynamics may be a little rusty.’
    ‘We could get the Servant to process the data,’ Will said. ‘Might be faster.’
    ‘I’m quite capable of performing the calculations myself, thank you, William,’ Stirling replied.
    ‘Of course, Doctor Stirling,’ Will said sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’
    They had all experienced the more abrasive side of the doctor’s temper at one time or another, and their recent victory over the Voidborn seemed to have done little to improve his mood.
    ‘Once we have an approximate location we can scan more effectively for Voidborn signals and hopefully pinpoint their precise coordinates,’ Stirling continued. ‘I will discuss the necessary modifications to the Mothership’s equipment with the Servant.’
    With that he turned and walked out of the room.
    ‘So what are we going to do when we find out where the other Motherships are?’ Jay asked Sam quietly as the others sat around chatting with one another.
    ‘Good question,’ Sam said with a sigh. ‘It’s important that we keep everyone occupied with planning this operation until Stirling and the Servant have more of an idea about what’s causing the problems with the Sleepers. What we don’t want right now is everyone starting to think about what it might mean if we can’t ever wake them.’
    ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ Jay said, glancing over at their friends. ‘We’ve all been thinking for weeks that this was our big chance, that maybe