by Ian Douglas
Dr. Wernher von Braun, first director of NASA, 1959
10 February 1971
Hans Kammler was having a bad night, one made surreal by dark and twisted dreams.
He was no stranger to nightmares. Sometimes, and more and more often of late, his victims rose from the earth and hemmed him in, gibbering and moaning, ghosts with pallid faces and empty eyes and wearing the rags of concentration camp inmates.
And why am I persecuted? he demanded of an unhearing, uncaring cosmos. We all took part in what happened. We all followed orders. Von Braun personally handpicked the prisoners who would be assigned to Mittelwerk! My God, more inmates from the Mittelbau-Dora camp died building von Braun’s V-2s than were killed in all of the attacks by all of those rockets in the entire war! But von Braun, the star of Paperclip, was a fucking hero . . .
Kammler heard voices, but for once they were not the tortured, screaming and groaning voices of his victims. Voices in his head:
Is that him?
It is him. I taste his mind.
Who was that? Where were they? What did they want?
Kammler opened his eyes, awake now, but somehow unable to move. He was in his bedroom, in his suburban home on the northern outskirts of Houston. Apollo 14 had returned from the lunar Fra Mauro Highlands only yesterday, and Kammler had been out celebrating with some of the Houston engineers. Too much to drink. He must be hallucinating. . . .
Traci, the woman he’d hired for the night, still lay beside him, nude, breathing gently, sound asleep.
Where were the voices coming from?
He was convinced now that this was no alcohol-induced hallucination. He was aware of every detail of his room, with a clarity that was frighteningly immediate and real.
Terror deepened, fear upon nightmare fear. Light spilled from the wall opposite his bed, light and a kind of open doorway within which spindly, moving, shadowy figures were visible—alien figures, like the creature that had brought him twenty years forward in time.
He screamed—or tried to. He couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t blink for God’s sake—and the nightmare beings were all around him, reaching for him, lifting him, carrying him toward that Hell’s gate of light.
“Help me!” he shrieked.
But no sound came out, Traci slept on, oblivious, and the Eidechse creatures effortlessly carried him into the light.
Hunter was furious.
There was an old, old military saying: hurry up and wait. Operation Excalibur was demonstrating the concept in spades.
Over the next four days, more military personnel arrived, joining the 1-JSST at the secret lunar base. The delay meant that his people could have had time to practice with their weapons. The project was even more screwed up than he’d first imagined.
Haines was no help. According to regs, the ship’s executive officer was the immediate person in charge of the ship’s internal operations, personnel, and personnel problems . . . and he waved aside Hunter’s request for training time. “Technically, Commander,” he said, “you people are not ship’s crew. You’re supernumeraries, which means Captain Groton is the man to talk to.”
“He’s not here, sir.”
“I know. Find something useful for your men to do until he comes aboard. You are in charge of the JSST, not me.”
“Can I set up a test range outside the base? Let the men practice with their suits and weapons?”
“No, Commander. I’ll tell you right now that Captain Mallory will not run the risk of having people dying out there.” Mallory was the commanding officer of Darkside Base.
Something useful, huh?
Hunter had requisitioned a large auditorium on the base and had his unit assemble there. With the new arrivals from Earth, 1-JSST now consisted of forty-one men and seven women, for a total of forty-eight.
He’d counted his people off in groups of three, had them sit together and . . . talk. Just talk. Talk about themselves, about past missions, about family, about whatever they wanted, really. After an hour, everyone switched partners.
The point was to have every person in the JSST get to know everyone else. If they were going to be a combat team, they would have to trust one another to a degree completely beyond the comprehension of civilians. Hunter left his group—Arch and an Army Ranger named Patterson—to get to know one another while he circulated among the other groups, nudging things along, asking pertinent questions, and generally trying to keep things moving.
It wasn’t easy. “Why the fucking bull session, Commander?” a grizzled Delta Force operator named Salvatore demanded. “Someone’s been reading too much psychobabble!”
“Fuckin’ A,” another Ranger said. “You don’t start trusting other people because they fuckin’ told you their life story.”
“If you’re going into a firefight, mister,” Hunter said quietly, “I would think that you’d want to know the guys to either side of you.”
“I don’t like talking about old operations,” Dorschner said. “Classified stuff. Deep black.”
Hunter knew how Dorschner felt. SEALs weren’t supposed to talk about their missions or operating history either. He also knew it went deeper than that. All of them had seen and done things they didn’t like to think about, and talking about it just dredged up the pain and bad memories.
“If you can’t talk about your ops, talk about other stuff. Salvatore—you have a family?”
“Got a girlfriend. . . .”
“Then tell them about how an asshole like you landed a girl.”
The others laughed, and Hunter nodded. Salvatore brought up a good point, and Hunter doubted that any person in that room was married. The selection process had been designed to weed out people with family responsibilities at home, because they would be gone a long time.
As much as he probably smarted at Hunter’s joke, if there was one thing military people always loved to discuss—at endless length and in mind-numbing detail—it was women. Salvatore started talking about Cindy, back in Arlington, and before long Hunter seemed to be forgotten as they shared the details, some more salacious than others, of women both in and out of the sack. Hunter used the same technique to kick-start several other groups, and before long laughter and cries of “aww, yeah” were sounding from all over the auditorium.
The women on the team seemed more interested in hobbies, places they’d been, things they’d done. They talked about ex-lovers, and were also a lot more heavily into “yes, but how do you feel about that” than were the guys.
All this talk made Hunter think about Gerri.
Damn . . .
There was one crisis when a Delta master sergeant named Coulter admitted to being gay, and Chief Brunelli declared he was not going into combat with “a damned fag watching his ass” . . . an unfortunate choice of words. When half a dozen men—and several women—came rather heatedly to Coulter’s defense and shouted Brunelli down, Hunter knew they were starting to bond (and he’d talk to Brunelli privately to make sure that he wasn’t going to be a problem).
He had them fall in and began taking them through some calisthenics, happy with the early connections being made. Emotionally, these people were getting to know each other, and that was important to create esprit de corps.
But how the hell was he supposed to forge them into a solid combat unit?
Part of his problem had to do with personnel organization. As a SEAL, Hunter was used to a basic combat unit—the sixteen-man SEAL platoon. Other services, though, had different platoon makeups. The Army tended to have infantry rifle platoons consisting of thirty-nine men. Marines had forty-three.
He was in charge, though, and that had to be for a reason, so Hunter decided to stick with what he knew and divide the unit into three sixteen-man platoons, each broken into two sections, and with two commissioned officers and a senior noncom—a master chief or a master sergeant. Two officers, Arch and Billingsly, would run his two other platoons. He brought a third lieutenant—Navy lieutenant Carl Bader—into Al
fa, where he would serve as Hunter’s personal staff, leaving him free to watch over the entire unit.
Why in all the hells of Hell Week had they not hashed this out back on Earth? Hunter felt like he was reinventing the wheel—that persons unknown higher up the totem pole had simply dropped a disparate collection of people into a box and shaken well. It didn’t work that way, damn it. The whole point of boot camp—aside from the basic one of breaking raw civilians down and turning them into soldiers or sailors—was to get them to function together as a team. For Navy SEALs, boot camp was nothing compared to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—BUD/S—which was twenty-four weeks of hell followed by a twenty-six week SEAL qualification program, all of which was designed to weed out the ones who didn’t shape up, give the rest the tools they would need in combat, and teach them to work together.
The sad part was, Hunter thought, that in the long run, the only way to forge these forty-eight people together would be putting them into the fire of combat.
And he fully expected to lose some people along the way.
But he continued hammering at them, forcing them to get to know one another, giving them calisthenic routines that forced them to work together, making them become a team despite their best efforts. Some of his people bitched and grumbled about not doing things the right way—meaning the way they were used to.
But by the next day, he thought he detected a whiff of improved morale, and a bit more snap and shine when they fell into ranks.
“Commander Hunter?”
Hunter was in a base lounge going over the personnel records of some of his people when a middle-aged woman came up behind him. He stood, turning. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Dr. Rebecca McClure.” She extended a hand. In her other hand she was carrying a small black tablet. “Remember me? From the shuttle? I’m going to be the senior xenobiologist on this expedition.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He grinned at her. “Mark Hunter. I kill people and break things for a living. Or maybe it’s ‘kill things and break people.’ I always get that part confused.”
“So I’ve heard. Can we talk?”
He gestured at a seat. “Please.”
He was glad she’d turned up. Except for some noise from Elanna about Aldebaran no one had told him a thing about this mission. If he was going to be riding shotgun, he needed to know more about what they were going to be facing.
“I need to find out what you know about the aliens we’re going to be working with, Commander,” she said. “The aliens . . . and the time travelers.”
He frowned. “I’ve met one of the time travelers. She gave me a briefing on . . . well, a lot of stuff. About history, and the perils of time travel, mostly.”
“That would be Four-twenty-five eight-twelve Elanna,” she said.
“That’s her full name?”
“The Talis—that’s what they call themselves, by the way, not ‘Nordics’—the Talis use numbers the way certain Welsh military units did, to distinguish among a very large number of soldiers in the same regiment named ‘Jones’ or ‘Williams.’”
“Makes sense. I don’t think the Welsh do that anymore, though.”
“I honestly don’t know if the Welsh even have a military anymore.”
He smiled.
“What do you think of her?” she asked.
“She doesn’t look much like the proverbial ‘little green man.’ She’s not little, she’s not green, and she most certainly is not a man.”
“Come on. Be serious.”
“She seems competent. For someone who came here from the year 13,000 AD, she seems to know us pretty well.”
“We’re actually not sure of their exact epoch,” McClure told him. “Eleven thousand years is just a guess.”
“They don’t talk much about themselves.”
McClure smiled. “No. They don’t. I think they’re afraid of contaminating the time line.”
“We talked about how bad a time war would be,” Hunter said. “And I gather we’re being dragged into the middle of things with the idea of preventing a war from going . . . temporal? As opposed to ‘nuclear’?”
“I’ve heard the same thing. I don’t buy it. Bring us in and we’ll just make things worse.”
“That’s what I thought.” He spread his hands. “So . . . what can I tell you? I really don’t know much about any of them.”
“Do any of us? But . . . look. I’ll be up-front with you, Commander. You said a moment ago . . . what was it you do for a living? ‘Kill people and break stuff’?”
“An old joke. I think the Marines started it.”
“But it’s not a joke, Commander. We—we’re going clear out of our solar system, out to exoplanets humans have never seen before. We know from the Talis that the Galaxy is filled with alien civilizations. I want to know that you and your people aren’t going to shoot first . . . and maybe not ask any questions at all.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, ma’am, I’m not sure what we’re going to do, because I still don’t know why we’re here. They’ve told us damned precious little.”
“Ah, the wonderful cloak of secrecy. We’re not even allowed to talk to ourselves.”
“And yet here we are.”
“True.” She looked around, but no one seemed to be paying them any attention.
Hunter went on. “The secrecy is one thing. But they also just rounded us up, threw us together, and shipped us to the Moon without even letting us practice with the new toys they showed us. Right now I’m trying to knead forty-some people into a cohesive unit. I’ve got Navy SEALs, US Marines, Army SpecOps people . . . for all I know there’re a couple of Coast Guard guys in there. Or worse.” He looked around, and then, with a dramatic whisper, said, “Air Force!”
She laughed at the casual demonstration of interservice rivalry. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine, Commander. But seriously, can your men be trusted not to shoot something just because it looks like your worst nightmare?”
He studied her for a long moment. “Doctor, I don’t have an answer for you. These men are highly trained, elite, the very best our military has to offer. They won’t go off half-cocked. But I can’t tell you how they’ll perform in any given situation until I actually see them perform in the field. Hell, I can’t tell you how I’m going to react. But we train ’em pretty good back on Earth, so I think we’ll be able to handle it.”
She looked at him for a moment, then took the iPad she was carrying and turned it on. Several swipes and key touches later, she turned it so that Hunter could see.
Talk about nightmares . . .
At first, Hunter couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Was it alive? He had the impression of a tangle of wires and small parts, all black and dripping with oil . . . or perhaps it was slime. Then the thing moved . . . and something eerily like a human eye opened in the middle of it, looking into the camera. “What the fuck?”
“The Talis call it an Ecopleh. It’s highly intelligent. It’s from a planet—a gas-giant moon, actually—but it’s a world you’ve never heard of somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius. When it speaks, it sounds beautiful, like the twittering of nightingales.”
“I wouldn’t know a nightingale twitter if it jumped me in an alley.”
“I need to know that if one of these jumped you or your men in an alley, you wouldn’t just shoot it. The Ecopleh are highly civilized and, well, I suppose you could call them pacifists. They don’t kill other beings, no matter what the provocation.”
“I guess whether or not I shoot depends on whether or not it was trying to kill me. If it’s as peaceful as you say, then we should be good. Are you saying we’re going to be meeting these . . . things?”
“Not likely. We won’t be going out that way.” She shut off the iPad and set it down. “But it’s one example, among many, many others of what is out there . . . and it’s almost all new to us. The Talis will help us get oriented, I guess you would say, but they won’t be with us all the
time.”
Hunter nodded at the iPad. “Where’d you get that video, anyway?”
“The Talis have the equivalent of our Internet. We call it ‘the Encyclopedia Galactica’ because it has so much information about other worlds and species and civilizations. We’ve only just begun to convert the data for our operating systems, and study it.”
“You have any more?”
“A couple of hundred, maybe.”
“It occurs to me, Dr. McClure, that some desensitization might help.”
“Desensitization?”
“If my people got to look at a few hundred different aliens, they might be less likely to open fire the minute they encounter something really bizarre. Let me see a few more. . . .”
She opened another video for him. This one looked like a long, rippling ribbon floating deep within dark water, colored red-pink and translucent enough that Hunter could see internal organs. It appeared to be self-luminous, though Hunter couldn’t see where the light was coming from on its body. Three black dots on the end facing the camera might be eyes; a spray of nearly transparent tendrils emerging from behind the head were for manipulation. It looked gossamer delicate, and inexpressibly beautiful.
“A Naakap,” McClure told him. “One of my favorites. Purely abyssal; they live within ocean depths that would crush you or me to a pulp. They communicate by means of incredibly intricate dance—”
“Where are they from?”
“Again, you’ve never heard of it. A planet out near the galactic rim, I’m told. Their world is much like Pluto in our solar system: frigidly cold—minus four hundred degrees, on the surface—but radioactives deep within the core provide enough heat to keep a deep, liquid water ocean from freezing solid.”
Hunter stared at the being for several moments. “I’d love to meet one someday.”
“You can’t. They went extinct about three hundred million years ago.”
“Extinct? But someone made this video! Someone was there.”
“Of course. Time travel, remember? But I doubt that we’ll be allowed to travel so far into the past.”
