Final Assault Read Free Page B

the next battle against the aliens. Bradshaw made sure that she ate regularly, and he actually goaded her into an occasional night’s sleep. He threatened to rent her an apartment when all of this was over—even though, Cross knew, Portia Groopman was worth enough that she could buy a city block.
    Bradshaw believed that there was still time for the niceties of life. Perhaps it was his perspective as the older member of the team. Perhaps it had always been his way. Or perhaps he had learned it during the years when all of his work had been discredited, before Cross proved that Bradshaw had built the foundation for the discoveries that Cross eventually made. Discoveries that led to the discovery of the tenth planet.
    Now Bradshaw was supervising a group of graduate students who were delving into the archaeological record to see if there was a time when the tenth planet hadn’t come to Earth.
    Cross had discovered the tenth planet using the combined fields of archaeology and astronomy—essentially using the record buried in the Earth to learn the history of the universe. He had found a “soot layer” that repeated every 2006 years, and in trying to understand it, had realized that it had come from space. That soot layer, which he had now seen in real time in California, had been the first and best sign of a long history of repeated occurrences.
    The tenth planet had an elliptical 2006-year orbit around the Sun. For all but a year of that orbit, the planet was in the cold and dark. Life did not form in such conditions, and Cross and the other scientists speculated that once upon a time, the tenth planet revolved around a different sun, in a more standard, Earth-like orbit.
    Something had changed, had brought the tenth planet to this sun and led the inhabitants of that planet to use Earth as its food source. They visited Earth twice each orbit, first as their planet passed Earth’s orbit on the way in toward the sun, then again as it passed Earth’s orbit on the way out into the cold of deep space. Each time the aliens dropped nanomachines on areas of the Earth to harvest organic material. The nanomachines left behind a black ash that eventually compressed into the soot layer.
    The aliens never denuded Earth—they apparently understood the need to keep things growing—but they had never been attacked before either. Cross had gotten the idea that the archaeological record might carry more information than he thought, so he’d assigned Bradshaw some of the best archaeological minds on the university level and sent them out to study the past again.
    The point was to see when the tenth planet had first arrived in this solar system. Cross wasn’t sure yet what that information would gain him, but he had learned a long time ago that his hunches were worth following.
    Britt climbed in the passenger seat, Cross in the driver’s seat. He put the car in reverse and backed out. Britt braced herself with a hand on the dash. Her knuckles were white and he wasn’t even out of the parking lot yet.
    “I could reprogram the autopilot,” she said again. “While you’re driving.”
    Cross wasn’t going to argue with her—and he wasn’t going to let her touch the navigation system while the car was in motion. They still had a lot of driving to do, and he knew that the unrest would get worse the closer they got to downtown Washington.
    Ever since some nut had blown up the main entry to the Capitol, that building, with its blackened center, had become a rallying point for other crazies. The rioting had been worse there.
    The meeting for the Tenth Planet Project had been moved from its location near the Capitol, but they hadn’t gone too far. Most of the major members of the Project worked in that area, and these days they didn’t have time to travel large distances.
    Britt let go of the dash and let her right hand hover over the navigation system. Cross took her fingers in his own. “We have more important things to worry