Final Assault by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

the military leaders worldwide—know the important aspects of the alien character.
    He looked longingly at the couch he had had some grad students carry into this office. The couch was the size of a twin bed and was softer than most mattresses. He’d been napping on it off and on for days now.
    But he didn’t have time for a nap, not even a short one. He needed to finish this report. He left his stuffy office and its tempting couch and walked toward the cafeteria.
    Britt had started calling it the mess because that was what it had become. Some of the government employees who staffed it had stopped coming to work, and those who remained—mostly single people whose families lived far away—could barely make a dent in the collection of coffee cups, dirty dishes, and stained pots.
    Federal sanitation regulations had gone out the window over a month ago. No one cooked for the entire group anymore. Many of the researchers simply took what they could find. Others started up the industrial strength oven or lit a burner on the stove and found themselves cooking a meal for several hungry people enticed by the smell.
    The kitchen workers did try to keep the basics in stock—fresh bread, milk, some juices and fruits—but it was getting harder as the aliens’ arrival got nearer. Food supplies were not moving across the nation by truck anymore. Whatever food was in a city was all that the city had. By government order, restaurants were now being used as soup kitchens to feed the growing populations.
    Life as Cross had known it for the first forty-some years of his existence had vanished. In its place was a brave new world that he hadn’t had time to explore, let alone understand.
    The mess smelled of that badly cooked hamburger, onions, and chocolate chip cookies. One of the telescope scientists baked cookies every night to relax, or so she said. Britt theorized that the scientist did it because no one else was making sweets and in times of crisis, people craved sweets.
    Cross knew that he did.
    He grabbed one of the cookies and stared at the pile of dirty dishes sitting in gray water in one of the stainless steel sinks. Then he rolled up his sleeves and plunged his hands into the cold, greasy water.
    He needed to do something besides stare at computer screens. Physical movement cleared his mind. Before all of this, he played racquetball, but he didn’t have time for much right now. He needed to be as close to his office as possible, so that when he was ready to go back to the actual writing of the report, he could just wander there.
    He pulled the dishes out of the greasy water and stacked them on the big stainless steel counter beside the sink. Once he got them out, he pulled the plug and cleaned out the sink before running fresh, hot water into it. Then he proceeded to do all the dishes by hand.
    The biggest frustration he had was that no one had been able to crack the aliens’ language. Experts from all over the world had been struggling with the bits of language that seemed to be written inside the downed ships. The original Tenth Planet Project was using linguists from all over the world, but in the last month, Cross had brought in several other experts: cryptologists, computer programmers, and mathematicians were the largest group, but he also brought in some music theorists and archaeologists who specialized in the ancient worlds.
    When Maddox had questioned bringing in more experts, he had told her that some scientists, from the popular Carl Sagan of the last century to most of the astronomers and biologists working today, had theorized that mathematics was the universal language, and rather than let the linguists struggle with this alone, he would let others look at it from various perspectives. Musical patterns, cryptology, and ancient dialects might provide the key as easily as discovering a “word” that both cultures had in common.
    So far, none of his experts had found anything, and Cross wasn’t really