by Ian Douglas
He was afraid that if he pushed too hard, the woman would go right over the edge.
“It’s okay, honey,” Carter said, speaking from the laptop on a nearby desk. “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want. It would help if you can answer some questions, but it’s up to you whether or not you do so. You understand? You have a choice.”
Judi swallowed, then nodded. “I . . . I was in my bedroom . . . asleep. I woke up to find these . . . these things in the bedroom with me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. They . . . they floated me up off the bed, and I floated . . . I floated. . . .”
“Go ahead, Judi,” Carter said softly.
“I know you won’t believe it, but they floated me through the wall! They took me to this kind of big shiny room. It was round. Lots of gleaming metal. They . . . they took my nightgown, and put me onto a kind of metal examination table. I still couldn’t move!”
Hunter had heard of stories like this, but never believed them. This sort of thing couldn’t happen in real life, could it? And the US government couldn’t possibly agree to let this sort of thing happen to its citizens.
Yet he was living it, wasn’t he? It was very, very real.
“They shoved something up inside me, hard. It hurt. The tallest one of them put his hand on my head, and the pain went away . . .”
“When was this, Judi?” Hunter asked. “What was the date?”
“It was 2012,” she said. “Sometime in July . . .”
“Twenty-twelve! My God!” Hunter was thunderstruck. Had this woman been a prisoner for all these years?
“They talked to me after the . . . the exam,” she said. “I would hear their questions in my head, and they seemed to be able to read the answers as they surfaced. They found out I was living alone . . . my parents were dead . . . my boyfriend had dumped me. . . .”
“You were alone,” Carter said from the laptop.
“Yeah. I didn’t have anybody. And they said they were going to keep me for a while.”
“Why?” Hunter asked. “What did they want you for?”
“I’m not sure. But once, one of them kind of explained. I was in that . . . that horrible bottle, but he was standing outside and I could hear his thoughts, y’know? According to him, they’ve run into a kind of genetic bottleneck, was what he called it. Way up in the future. And genetic material taken from humans today is helping them straighten things out, to fix themselves. He actually thanked me for my contribution. . . .”
“Hey, Skipper?” It was Minkowski at the door. “Incoming call from Big-H.”
“On my way.” He looked at Carter’s image on the laptop screen. “You want to keep talking with her?”
“I would, Commander. Thank you.”
He looked at Bader. “See that she’s well taken care of. And do whatever Dr. Carter tells you to, got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good man.”
The radio call was from Groton. “Hello, Commander. You’re not going to like this.”
Now what? “Lay it on me, Captain.”
“You’re to stand down. Direct orders from the admiral. He doesn’t want you provoking the locals.”
Hunter was stunned. “Sir, we’re engaged in combat now with the Saurians in addition to the hostiles outside! We can’t just break it off! I have people out there—”
“I’m . . . getting some static on the channel, Commander,” Groton told him.
Hunter hesitated. The channel was clear and open, no static. Then he realized what Groton was doing.
“Sir, you’re breaking up. I’m not reading you.”
“Strike Force, Strike Force . . . I’m not reading you.”
Hunter cut the channel.
Stand down? Now? What the hell were they playing at?
Hunter turned away and went to get his gear.
Chapter Twenty
Die Glocke awoke
The Great Ones in the null.
Song: “Die Glocke” Versvs,
The Monolith Deathcult, 2017
The Xaxki Dreamer swam through endless vistas of radiance and joy. It had no name, not as humans would understand the concept. It knew who and what it was, and its companions, by the hundreds of billions, could touch its mind directly and know it as a distinct and particular identity.
It was also very, very old, and had already been a distinct entity for millions upon tens of millions of years. For most of that incomprehensible expanse of time, it had been here within the virtual reality of the Xaxki Harmony. And when the Instrumentality pulled it out of its deep bliss, it was furious. The feelings of absolute and total pleasure drained away, leaving a bleak emptiness impossible to describe, impossible to comprehend.
“Why do you call me out and into the shadow world?” it demanded. “You have no right.”
“The Instrumentality of the Xaxki has every right,” a voice replied. “We are the Gods of Dreaming.”
“But why me? I was building worlds!”
“Long ago, you faced an alien presence, a primitive alien presence, within Reality,” the voice told it. “Aliens have again entered our local Reality, and we need your experience in dealing with them.”
A mental shrug, the Xaxki equivalent of a casual dismissal. “Destroy them.”
“That may well prove to be the best course of action. But we need to communicate with them on a deeper level than is possible for us, to ferret out their role in the Great Game. You have the necessary experience.”
“I was building worlds!”
“And so shall you again. But we must send your mind to meet these intruders lest they pose a threat to all the Dreamers.”
The Dreamer considered this. Reality—the universe within which the Xaxki had evolved billions of years ago—was no match at all for the mental and emotional paradise of the Dreaming generated by the vast array of highly intelligent AIs that ringed the system, a literal paradise within which the Dreamers wiled away through the eons. There’d always been the slender chance, however, that other beings, other intelligences might arrive unnoticed by the Dreamers and wreak untold destruction. Those who had created the Dreaming Harmony, however, had planned for that possibility, creating the Guardians . . . and the option of waking a few Dreamers when the threat was grave.
The Guardians were artificial life-forms created to monitor the Reality surrounding this system, but important decisions still had to be left to the organic Xaxki.
Grumbling at its loss of pure ecstasy, the Dreamer adjusted its intake of sensory data, in effect reconnecting with its own physical body.
The Dreamer awoke.
When Hunter and his commandos broke into Dome Four, they found a firefight already in process. They emerged through the door behind a tight knot of Saurians and cut them down, as Master Sergeant Layton shouted at his team to cease fire in order to avoid scoring an own goal. Friendly fire, as the old military saying put it, isn’t.
Hunter pivoted, laser pistol in both hands, as he tracked and killed a running Saurian.
For a long couple of seconds, everything was chaos, noise, and confusion. “Down, Commander!” Staff Sergeant Ann Seton yelled as she opened up on another Saurian a few feet behind him.
He didn’t turn to look as he cut down another alien. “Thanks, Staff Sergeant!”
“Anytime, Skipper!”
Both of them kept firing.
But then something yawned open to Hunter’s right. He wasn’t sure at first what it was. It looked like a pucker in space, a place where light was being sharply bent, distorting the wall and struggling shapes beyond. It flickered, swelled, then stabilized into a hole hanging in the air, a foot above the deck and stretching five feet across. A sharp wind kicked up as the atmosphere inside the dome began streaming into the opening.
“What the hell?”
Somehow, the aliens had managed to create a gateway of some sort, a portal leading into darkness. Grays and Saurians alike were scrambling for the opening. Hunter could see small shapes moving
on the other side and began firing into the apparition. Oddly, when he took several steps to the side, the hole still retained its original appearance, that of a perfect circle of darkness. In fact, it appeared the same no matter what the angle of his point of view, a spherical hole, rather than a flat two-dimensional opening.
Something, he decided, was very wrong with local space.
Several Saurians and their Gray allies were cut down in the mad dash for the portal, but at least a dozen leaped through and vanished. Master Sergeant Coulter looked like he was about to follow them through. “Belay that, Coulter!”
And in the next instant, the hole in space winked out.
For a few seconds, the combat team stood there, weapons raised, gaping at the spot where the hole had been. With the wind cut off, it had suddenly become very quiet.
“What the hell just happened?” Minkowski demanded.
“Some kind of extradimensional shortcut,” Hunter said. Saying the words didn’t mean he understood them. Saurian technology, it seemed, still held a number of surprises for humans.
Half a dozen of the little Grays were still in the dome, huddled in small groups, their huge eyes blinking slowly. Were they slaves? he wondered. He was beginning to think of them as worker drones, biological automatons used by the Saurians to do the dirty work.
“Round those characters up,” Hunter said, pointing. “Mink, take a couple of guys and search the rest of the dome. Make sure no Saurians are still here.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Two more men had been killed in the firefight: a Delta Force sergeant named Solomonsson and Captain Alan Arch. Hunter knelt beside the SAD/SOG operator, killed by a head shot. The energy beam had left very little above the man’s neck. “What happened?”
“Don’t know, sir,” Layton said. “Everything was copacetic, and then the damned Saurs started shooting. Captain Arch was the first one hit.”
Hunter got to his feet. “Okay. Layton? You’ve got Charlie Platoon.”
“Yes, sir. Uh . . . what are your plans, sir?”
“Get the hell off this ice-ball rock and figure out how to take a few hundred civilians with us.” He looked across the room at the huddle of Grays standing under Grabiak’s watchful eye. “Which of you is the leader?” he demanded.
The Grays looked back and forth at one another, as if uncertain—or maybe they just didn’t understand.
“One of you is the leader!” Hunter shouted. “If not, pick someone!”
Hesitantly, one of the Grays stepped forward. It was a little taller than the others, and Hunter wondered if rank among these remote descendants of humanity was simply a matter of literal stature.
“Come with me, skinhead,” Hunter ordered. “I have some questions for you.” He just hoped that he would get some answers that he could use.
Lieutenant Duvall was still shaken by his experience inside the alien ship or world or whatever it had been. He and Bucky had not been mistreated in any way, but the monstrous worms had kept them isolated in a small compartment for what seemed like hours, though the actual elapsed time likely had been no more than minutes.
And then, without ceremony, they’d magically found themselves back on the TR-3R being catapulted into space.
He’d come away from the encounter feeling . . . small. Very small. The K’kurix, the Guardians—he’d not learned their name for themselves until his return to the Hillenkoetter—were so completely outside the human ken that the two species might never understand one another. Their casual space-bending technology made them seem like giants; the inaccessibility of their emotions, for humans, made them seem more like forces of nature, implacable, unstoppable, and beyond the reach of merely human reason.
Perhaps his biggest problem, he decided, was his inability to shift mental gears. For years, “little green men” had been the staple of gags and cartoons about alien visitors to Earth. They were flat and two-dimensional cartoonish beings that were completely human save for size, skin color, and the occasional presence of antennae.
Then he’d found out about the Grays and the somewhat similar Saurs, as the other pilots called them. They were weird, yeah, and even the discovery that the Grays were remote descendants of humanity couldn’t mask that sense that they were somehow beyond human understanding.
But they still looked human—or humanlike. He could relate to them as intelligent beings, even if their thought processes were somewhere out in left field.
But the Xaxki . . .
From what nightmare had they crawled into the real world? They didn’t fit into any part of the UFO mythology with which he was familiar—poison-breathing slugs half the length of a city bus.
God in heaven!
“Bucky? How you doin’?”
He and Lieutenant Bucknell hadn’t taken part in the raid on the surface facility. They’d still been in Hillenkoetter’s sick bay, getting checked out after their brief imprisonment on the Xaxki planetoid. Released with clean bills of health, they were in one of the ship’s crew lounges. A wall screen showed the dark world they were calling Serpo hanging below, beneath the icy light of two suns.
“Hey, Double-D,” she said, looking up from the sofa. Her voice sounded flat, emotionless . . .
“You okay?”
“Still . . . trying to process what we saw. Those . . . those things were horrible.”
She shuddered, and Duvall sat down next to her. The two of them were . . . close, in a comrades-in-arms way. They’d flirted—anyplace, anytime, baby!—but it had never been more serious than that. There was nothing flirtatious or sexual about the way he slipped his arm around her shoulders and drew her close.
“They got to me, too,” he told her. “Especially when we started seeing things . . .”
That had been the worst part of the encounter. Bucknell had begun seeing images in her mind, but within a second or two Duvall was seeing them, too, myriad . . . shapes that were incomprehensible to the human inner eye. It was like a dream where you know you’re seeing someone or something, but you can’t make out what that person or thing is, what they look like. These were markers of a sort for something that could not be seen, and that made them all the more frightening.
At the same time, both humans had had the inescapable feeling that they were being minutely and intensely studied by minds cool and calculating, by minds utterly lacking any recognizable emotion, minds bent on agendas unimaginably intricate and vast.
It was like, Duvall imagined, being closely examined by gods, millions of gods, millions upon millions of godlike minds.
Neither of them could move during that inspection, but then, as if a light switch had been flicked off, the mentalities around them were gone and they were back in the cockpit of their TR-3R, accelerating into space.
Duvall didn’t think he would ever be able to shake that feeling of dread and of microbial insignificance, of being spread out helpless beneath the cold gaze of entities utterly divorced from human emotions. None less than Dr. Carter, Hillenkoetter’s senior shrink, as he thought of her, had interviewed him after his return. He’d told her what he imagined she would want to hear. He didn’t want to be taken off flight status.
“I don’t know about you, Bucky, but I need to log some hours. How about you?”
“Where? Doing what?”
“Schuller told me they lost two Stingrays in the strike on the planet.”
“Who?”
“Bobbo Selby . . . and the skipper.”
“No! Are they . . . ?”
“Don’t know. But it won’t hurt to go poke around and see.”
“But all aerospace craft have been restricted to the Big-H!”
“I know. But I think the bastards are gonna leave our people down there.” Duvall tried to contain the surge of anger he felt at that. You never, ever left someone behind.
Never.
And leaving people to face nightmare horrors like the inhabitants of those ring fragments made the betrayal infinitely worse.
�
�We’re not going to get clearance,” Bucknell said. “You know that, right?”
He grinned at her. “There are ways around that. You with me?”
Her jaw set in a determined scowl. “Fuckin’ A. Let’s go!”
Groton slumped in his command chair, glowering. That old “you’re breaking up” trick would not fool anyone for long. There was an audio transcript of all radio communications, and any command authority could check and hear for themselves that there’d been no comm interference. This was the first time he’d ever heard of both parties playing the same game. Hunter had been quick on the uptake, and would do whatever he needed to do down there.
But what might happen once Carruthers checked up on them was anybody’s guess.
The chances were good, though, that the incident would end in a court martial.
“Captain!” Hillenkoetter’s combat officer called from his console.
“What is it?”
“We have a ship leaving the Hillenkoetter without authorization!”
“What ship?”
“TR-3R Delta, sir. We don’t know who the pilot is.”
“Are you in touch with them?”
“No, sir. We’re trying, but no radio contact.”
Groton slumped farther. Someone else who didn’t like the orders.
A military organization works, can only work, through total and complete obedience to orders. The American military was not as absolute with this as it could be. Individual soldiers, sailors, and aviators were encouraged to think for themselves, and to question any order that could be considered illegal.
But that didn’t mean they were allowed to hare off on their own, refusing orders with which they disagreed. Questioning orders was definitely not considered to be a positive career move.
He supported Carruthers in the hope for a peaceful resolution to this.
But that hope was growing thinner by the minute, and he would not sit by and watch his people sacrificed out of blind desire for appeasement.
Sneaking the TR-3R off the flight line on Hillenkoetter’s flight deck and through the kinetic field had been simpler than he’d imagined. The kinetic fields were controlled by computer—they had to be for the precise timing required—and it had been a simple matter to shift control of the computer to his own console. Then he’d gotten things rolling by asking PryFly for permission to move the spacecraft to the number three elevator to take it down a deck for maintenance. The routine request had been granted, but he’d taken a hard turn to port en route, requested passage directly from the computer, and slipped through the field in a sudden, intense burst of escaping atmosphere. The shields slammed shut directly astern as the TR-3R cleared the deck, and Duvall turned the transport toward the looming planet below.
