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It heard.
It found the Mather gate location.
It brought the military . . . again.
So close.
Successful worker design in itself wasnt enough to get the job done. The Orbital changed tactics.
Batch fifteen worked perfectly. It dispersed near Parkersburgh, West Virginia, and produced six hostsall of which made it to the woods near South Bloomingville before hatching.
Batch sixteen fired only a few hours later, spreading over Glidden, Wisconsin.
Fifteen and sixteen hatched in record time, built their gates in record time. The Orbital activated the South Bloomingville gate as a decoy, drawing the human military.
The sonofab.i.t.c.h found both gates.
After all of these near hits, the Orbital had only two probes left. If those did not work, the entire mission was a failure.
It had to change strategy again.
The large explosion that destroyed the Marinesco gate demonstrated that humans could react quickly and with overwhelming force. Placing the gates in secluded areas had seemed like the best strategy at first, but it also allowed for ma.s.sive ordnance without much risk to local populations.
The workers also needed protection. They were designed to hatch out of hosts and then build, not fight. They could kill, but were far outmatched by the human forces responding to each gate. The workers needed defenders, something to occupy the human forces, fight them long enough for workers to activate the gates.
Since defenders would not build the gate, they did not need the template. That was good. That opened a new strategy. Because the new defender design didnt need a template, it could do something that the template-carrying embryos could notthe new design could reproduce.
The Orbital began modifying the next batch of seeds.
FUN WITH SNOWMOBILES
The Jewell family reunion was turning out to be a smas.h.i.+ng success, and Donald Jewell couldnt have been happier.
Granted, there werent that many Jewells left.
Ma and Pa Jewell had gone to that big snowmobile trail in the sky. Ma five years ago, Pa less than six months later. They left behind their three children: Mary, Bobby and Donald.