by Michael Todd
Kemp stared at him for a moment. “In the spirit of full disclosure and the NDA which you signed on penalty of treason, I am here to inform you that this object was launched from deep space by aliens.”
He blinked. “Oh.” Was it possible to be both shocked and unsurprised at the same time? “Well, uh, then—”
Something crashed behind them and Chris jumped. His nerves were still raw from the incident outside. A few people passed by in the hall, and he thought he heard the familiar sound of buzzing wings followed by a muffled inhuman shriek.
“Christ, they’re bringing one of those things inside?”
“They have it under control,” Kemp replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. She cleared her throat and continued. “We don’t know where the Missile came from, but it contained a…payload which it would have delivered if it hadn’t been damaged en route, probably by a small asteroid. Between that and the gravity snag tech having gone live, we were lucky to have caught it.”
“What was the payload?” he asked. He already had an idea, and he hoped he was wrong.
“That’s the strange thing,” the lieutenant said. “It wasn’t explosive at all. When we brought it back for study, all it contained was the AG—Alien Goop, the official highly-scientific term for the glowing blue ectoplasm-type crap we found in there.”
“Gotcha,” Chris replied. If astronomers could refer to planetoids made of compacted rock fragments as rubble piles and come up with such imaginative terms as dark matter, he saw no reason why chemists and biologists couldn’t use alien goop and then reduce it to an abbreviation. Especially if they worked for the government. Uncle Sam loved abbreviations. “But what—”
“I’m getting to that,” Kemp said sharply. “They’ve tested it every way they can think of for the last five years. There were…casualties, at first. The stuff was never intended to be touched. But it has unheard-of properties for enhancing and even creating life. It allows biomatter to thrive even in the most inhospitable conditions.”
The scientist nodded. “Hence the jungle springing directly out of the sand out there.”
“Yes. The Goop doesn’t even need water to work. It seems to distill its own out of the atmosphere. The project started in Nevada before we moved it here to the Sahara.”
That was fitting, Chris thought. He could totally see one of the government nerds deciding to take the missile to Area Fifty-One, in part simply to fuck with the public. Anyone who screamed on the Internet that they studied an alien artifact there would simply be another in a long line of crazies who’d said the exact same thing for decades.
“But why would aliens send us supercharged fertilizer?” Against his better judgment, he was getting excited now.
Kemp’s facial expression deepened to an actual frown. “After the first round or two of testing, of seeing what the crap does…the brightest minds have all reached the same conclusion: Terraforming.” She lowered her voice. “If the Missile had worked as intended, it would have radically changed all life on the planet and transformed the whole surface of the earth. All land would have ended up as a jungle, and the oceans would resemble giant marshes or swamps. Whoever sent it must have an interest in that kind of environment. In any event, it is because of the goop’s growth-inducing properties that this base was created.”
“Do you, uh,” Chris interjected, “have anything to drink?”
The lieutenant glared at him. “No,” she flatly.
“Ah, too bad.” Now seemed like an excellent time for a double shot of whiskey. Or better yet, an Irish Coffee. There had to at least be coffee there somewhere. It was a government facility, for God’s sake. He’d ask later.
She continued. “During the last election cycle, the individual who is now President of the United States promised to do something about global hunger with climate change and overpopulation wreaking havoc on agriculture.”
Just as the experts predicted, Chris thought.
“So, here we are. Really, it was more of a scientific expedition than an agricultural project, but the hope was that the one would lead to another. We were able to secure a deal with the Tunisians, since our governments have gotten along well enough for some time.”
“Right,” said Chris. “Hollywood always seems to come here whenever they need a Tatooine-type landscape.”
The muscles around Emma Kemp’s jaw tightened and he could see her roll her tongue around her teeth. “Thank you, Dr. Lin, for your productive contributions to this discussion. Now shut up and let me continue this briefing that you practically begged me for.”
Dammit. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
“The idea was to see if the earth could be radically transformed—but under our careful control and stewardship. If everything had gone to plan, the potential for doing good would have been incalculable.”
“What happened?” Chris asked.
Kemp’s gaze became distant and she grimaced. She clenched her hand over her fist. “The Day of the Locust,” she said.
Chapter Four
Time was a precious commodity, so Lt. Dr. Kemp had opted to leave her office and continue the briefing “on the ground.” This also allowed her to give Chris a proper tour of the facility.
“April 2025. The missile is sighted emerging from the asteroid belt. NASA estimates correctly that they have about seven months before it hits us. They rush the gravity snag technology to completion.”
Other soldiers and scientists and bureaucrats crowded the narrow hallway as the pair navigated through the building. Chris was forced to stay behind Kemp in single-file. the lieutenant had produced one of those antenna-pointer things that telescoped from a small handheld piece and gestured at things as they progressed. She flicked it at a couple of deep-space photographs taken from a satellite. He couldn’t see much and there was no time to examine them in detail because Kemp was already moving on.
“Early November. To everyone’s surprise, the gravity snag works properly. The missile is immediately taken to Nevada under heavy secrecy.” They turned a corner and passed an open office where a uniformed man attempted to juggle calls from two separate cell phones and a teleconference.
“Late November. Three years of testing begin at the Groom Lake facility near Nellis Air Force Range.” Kemp slowed and pointed at a couple photographs of a base in a mountainous desert area.
“Area Fifty-One,” Chris said with a huge grin. “Hah! I knew it.”
“Don’t use that stupid-ass name,” Kemp grunted. “During the initial experimentation, a crew of about twenty people were…eaten by the AG. It reacted with astonishing speed and volatility when they introduced a sample of pollen spores and it quickly got out of control. Since then, we’ve handled it about the same way we’d handle plutonium. Airlocked doors, white suits and helmets, the works.”
This anecdote drove the gravity of the situation home. Chris was still in low-level shock over it all. Alien technology, and perhaps alien life-forms, on Earth. And what exactly did she mean about the Goop “reacting?”
“October 2028. The frontrunner in the presidential election promises, upon victory, to initiate an anti-hunger program using ‘new technology,’ even though he doesn’t yet know about the AG. The scientists working on the program see the writing on the wall and shift focus to the goop’s agricultural properties now that testing has begun to bear fruit.”
She flicked her pointer toward some diagrams showing a cross-section of soil and crops. They included an illustration of a bright blue substance.
“Following the expected victory, the new President is briefed on the AG and greenlights the proposed Tunisia project within his first two weeks in office. Construction of experimental bio-domes begins here in the Sahara as early as February 2029. The project is placed under the supervision of Dr. Geraldine Marie, an idealist who’d worked for the EPA on global warming scenarios and how they’d affect worldwide food resources.”
They came then to a door marked LAB. Kemp opened the door with a keycard and m
otioned Chris to follow.
The inside looked somewhat like a bizarre mixture of a college chemistry classroom and an Army infirmary. Not the greatest conditions, but the base seemed to have been assembled hastily. About a dozen whitecoats were hard at work. The guard posted beside the door saluted Kemp. “At ease,” she said.
It occurred to Chris that she must be the project leader. He was pretty sure some other guy was in command of the base overall, but she must be in charge of the scientific element. That meant he’d work directly under her. The prospect left him with mixed feelings.
They soldiered on. Kemp whipped the pointer like a riding crop and he shuddered at the dirty thoughts that passed through his head. Fortunately, Kemp didn’t give him the opportunity to keep them there.
“As a security precaution,” she went on, “Wall One was constructed around the bio-domes, about three miles out.”
They passed a glass cage containing a large sample of the earthly kind of locusts. They leapt at the barrier and climbed toward the ceiling in search of a way to escape their enclosure. The demon-locusts in the Zoo… Chris had begun to assume they were entirely alien, but what if the AG had simply mutated a common terrestrial insect?
“My guess is that the bio-domes correspond to what is now the Zoo?” Chris said.
“Correct,” Kemp replied. “This is a particularly barren tract of land even by Saharan standards, so it was the perfect environment for the project. We could strictly control what biomass the AG had access to. Until, that is, the Day of the Locust.” She pointed at the grasshopper cage. Then she moved on toward a large airlocked door.
“Uh,” Chris stammered, suddenly nervous, “are we, uhh…”
“We won’t enter the Restricted Area,” she answered. “There’s no time to suit up. We’re actually heading back outside.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t much better.
At the rear of the lab they came to a dark and narrow hallway leading toward what Chris supposed was an exit.
“All this chaos,” Kemp explained as they tramped onward, “has resulted from a stroke of the worst luck imaginable.”
That was one way of putting it.
“Barely three weeks ago, a severe sandstorm came out of nowhere.” She placed the tip of her pointer against her opposite palm, collapsed the stick, and returned it to her pocket. “The intense wind erosion actually shattered one of the domes. Furthermore, it disturbed a rare sub-breed of Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, which had been in hibernation. About once every thousand years, it seems, those things emerge and form swarms of, frankly, biblical proportions. We’re talking entire miles of sky blotted out by them. They effectively formed their own weather system. Aside from our issues, they also devastated crops all across North Africa and might reach southern Europe.”
“Damn,” Chris said. He’d heard of locust swarms, of course, but not like that. Then again, he’d never done much research on African fauna.
“Another famine may be the least of our worries. Before our people had time to react, tens of thousands of the fucking things had invaded the test site and contaminated the experiment. Recall what I said about how the Goop reacts to biomass… It was a disaster, a total goddamn fiasco. The original base and all its personnel are now lost.”
He nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
The lieutenant turned without responding and used her keycard to open the door. They were greeted by a dusty breeze and brownish-orange sunlight. And noise, of course. Lots and lots of noise.
They stepped out, and Kemp doubled over, coughing.
“Are you okay?” Chris moved to her side to see if she had choked on something, although that didn’t make much sense.
“Dust,” she gasped as she regained control.
“Where are we going now?” he asked, hoping they wouldn’t go anywhere near the captured creatures’ little doghouse again.
“The Wall,” she replied. “I need to do a quick inspection and it will be good for you to have a better idea of our defensive capabilities.”
Was she trying to make him feel better? That didn’t seem much in character for her.
On the way toward Wall Two, they encountered a tall soldier in desert fatigues with a reddish crew cut, round hazel eyes, and knife-edged cheekbones. He stopped and saluted Lt. Kemp. She returned it.
“Dr. Lin,” she said back over her shoulder, “this is Sergeant Erik Wallace, one of our best. He’s mine.”
That was an interesting way to put it. Chris extended a hand but the man had simply nodded and already moved on. The scientist started to notice a pattern. It seemed that Kemp and her sergeant both were the stoic, professional type. Chris had met a few of those. This man wasn’t likely to go out of his way to be an asshole—the way the prick with the chin had earlier—but he probably wasn’t someone to mess around with either.
“Here,” Kemp indicated as they approached a simple scaffolding-style metal staircase that rose along the outside of the Wall.
This section stood directly between the base and the Zoo. It was almost completed and looked solid enough, although construction had scarcely begun on other sections. They’d passed over the complete other side of the ring in the chopper. The base commander must have had three or four different crews working in different places at the same time, perhaps to help them keep watch on the Zoo from multiple angles as they walled it off from the rest of the planet.
The lieutenant ascended the stairs and Chris followed. There were two long flights as the Wall was a good thirty feet tall.
“Our defenses are working reasonably well so far,” she went on, “but the creatures keep overcoming and adapting. They learn much faster than you’d expect for organisms mostly based on simple insects, and they might actually be mutating at unheard-of rates.”
“That’s where I come in, I guess,” he mused.
“Yes. Somewhat.” They arrived at a walkway set about three-and-a-half feet below the actual top of the wall. It reminded him of a medieval battlement in an old fantasy movies. Appropriately enough, it was patrolled by armed men. A few makeshift turrets had been assembled, with heavy machine guns, tank-grade flamethrowers, and even what looked like anti-aircraft missiles.
“Those flyers,” said Kemp, “like the one that attacked your gunship and which you shot down practically right over top of the base—” Her tone almost suggested that she somehow blamed Chris for this. “They did not exist a week ago. The first of the mutant locusts mostly hopped and glided. They only evolved the ability for true flight within the last few days.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I have tried to explain to you exactly how it is, in fact, possible,” she growled.
Chris shook his head. “I’m sorry. But…it’s like everything I know as a biologist is now stood on its head and turned inside out. Definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, major mutations that take place during the single lifetime of an organism, the potential to revolutionize land reclamation and reverse desertification… It’s difficult to accept it all.” The Zoo was real enough, though. He saw it now with his own eyes. It loomed on the horizon, reflecting the dwindling sunlight in jade-colored rays but increasingly shrouded in gloomy green shadows.
“We don’t have a choice of whether or not to accept it. It’s real and we have to deal with it. Now.” Blossoms of fire flared in the distance as the fighters maintained their vigils. “On the Day of the Locust, we went from a pristine experiment to this mess in a matter of hours. Things change by the day. It keeps on spreading. The creatures in the Zoo seem to have some ability to sow it on new ground, like bees spreading pollen. Unless we can adapt faster than it can, we could potentially be in a lot of trouble. And by ‘we,’ I mean the human species.”
For a moment, they stood in silence and studied the alien jungle as the sun began to set.
“I understand,” Chris finally said. “What do you need from me?”
Kemp drew a deep breath. “Weeks of fighting
this thing, and nothing we do seems to kill it. We can shoot down the locusts and burn or poison some of the plant life, yes, but we can’t kill off the whole mass unless perhaps we resort to something drastic like an air strike. Then we’d risk losing the—” She cut herself short, cleared her throat, and started again. “The fruits of our labors,” she finished. Was there something else she wasn’t telling him?
“Well,” he said, “I suppose I could advise the lab crew on—”
“Part of the problem,” she resumed as if he hadn’t spoken, “is that we don’t have all our own information.” The lieutenant had stayed true to form in cutting off Chris’ offer. “Dr. Marie and all her staff were killed on the Day of the Locust, and we lost the majority of their data. She didn’t trust our cloud servers to be secure against hacking by foreign powers and kept most of her stuff offline. We tried sending people in, but they failed. No team has penetrated deeply enough into the Zoo to retrieve Dr. Marie’s files. Until tomorrow.” She set her jaw tightly and looked him square in the face.
He was confused once again. “So, what exactly am I doing here? I mean, it’s not like you called me because you need me to personally kick these things’ asses, is it? I’ve got a blue belt in Hapkido, but against these giant death-bugs—”
“It wasn’t my idea,” said Kemp. “I was dead set against it, in fact.”
Chris frowned.
“Nothing personal,” she continued. “I reviewed your file after the order came down, and it’s impressive. I almost wish we’d had you working on this project from the start. However, your presence now—in my opinion— is redundant.”
