Final Assault Read Free

junk-heap, die defending that beautiful blue ball below, and she was proud that she was going to die this way.
    She had always hoped that she would die in battle. She had expected to die in some border skirmish, directing troops for the U.S. But she wasn’t going to die in some minor war. She was going to die in the greatest battle in this planet’s history, the battle that would determine if the planet had a history, the battle that would determine if there would be someone left to remember the history.
    She knew nothing about the aliens, except that they had attacked the Earth for no reason, and that they were difficult to destroy. In their position, she would be angry—a general of a dominant power who had lost an unexpected battle and been attacked on the home front. But she didn’t know if these creatures felt anger.
    She didn’t know if they felt anything at all.
    For the first time in human memory, the enemy was a cipher, something impossible to understand. And, surprisingly, she wished she had the power to understand them. Then she could predict their actions. She wasn’t sure if they were coming back to repeat the same attack they had made before, or if they were going to do something different. If she had an understanding of them, an emotional reading of them, she would know how anger would affect the attack, how their customs dictated how they would fight.
    This lack of understanding was the only thing that worried her. It was the biggest variable in a very large equation. She could only guess at their reactions. When they had first attacked Earth, they had seemed surprised that humans had retaliated. The successful destruction of some of the alien ships seemed to anger them. Their second attack focused on population centers, though the first hadn’t.
    It had seemed as if they were retaliating. But Banks knew better than to second-guess the enemy. Perhaps the population centers had always been their chosen targets for the follow-up attack.
    She wasn’t going to play emotional gambles or emotional bluffs this time. She was fighting an interplanetary war, and she was going to do it by the book. No psychological analysis, no attempts to throw off the enemy. Instead, she was going to fight the best, hardest fight of her life.
    And if she had her way, the beautiful ball below her was going to win it.
    October 12, 2018
6:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
    29 Days Until Second Harvest
    Leo Cross’s hands were tight on the steering wheel of his car. For the first time in months, he hadn’t used the vehicle’s automatic navigation system. There were simply too many variables, and he hadn’t known how to program them in.
    He glanced at the passenger seat. Edwin Bradshaw leaned against the door. He looked pale and nervous. Bradshaw had just turned sixty-one, and even though he took good care of himself, Cross worried about his health. The stresses and strains of the last year had clearly etched themselves on Bradshaw’s face. The last of his hair had gone gray and the webbing of fine lines around his eyes had grown deeper.
    Cross was almost two decades younger, but he felt the changes in his own body. A man couldn’t survive on adrenaline and four hours of sleep a night forever— not at his age, and certainly not at Bradshaw’s. That was a game for younger men. But it was something that Cross no longer had a choice about.
    He eased the car over the speed bumps in the parking lot on the Johns Hopkins campus. The buildings in front of him looked like normal university buildings, but inside one hid the main lab for the Space Telescope Science Institute. He pulled into a reserved parking space and put the car in park.
    “Beep Britt, will you?” he asked.
    Bradshaw nodded as Cross got out of the car. The fall air was warm and smelled faintly of smoke. Not the kind of smoke he used to smell as a kid—that nice, fall smell of burning leaves—but something darker and more ominous, something he didn’t really want to