Invaders: The Chronowarp

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Sergei was getting ready to kill me.”

  “What does that prove to you?”

  “He didn’t want you—or anyone else for that matter—to talk to me. That doesn’t seem to hold for a Ukrainian Mafia man. If he were a gangster, Sergei would have wanted to use me as a bargaining chip. Why did you people missile my Hummer, anyway? That was a big risk of my life.”

  “It was my decision,” Jenna said flatly. “I thought you would survive the blast. No one else agreed, but I had the authority, and it turned out I was correct.”

  I stared at her. It finally dawned on me that she was a ruthless operative. I’d also guessed the death of her friends or associates in the chinooks had further embittered her against me.

  My scrutiny and possible surprise at her bloodthirstiness didn’t seem to bother her in the least. I filed that away. It would be good to remember.

  “You may have a point regarding Sergei,” Jenna conceded. “But if he didn’t belong to the Ukrainian Mafia, who was he?”

  “I’m beginning to think Sergei Gromyko was an alien or an alien-sponsored agent,” I said.

  “That’s preposterous,” Jenna said. “If he were an alien—”

  “Or alien-sponsored,” I said, interrupting. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Given either of those possibilities, he wouldn’t have needed you to give them—”

  “Look,” I said, interrupting her once more. “The missiles taking out the chinooks shows us they operate with brutal efficiency. What I want to know is where the Ukrainian Mafia got that kind of hardware.”

  “Haven’t you been listening? They’re connected to the Ukrainian regime struggling to maintain power. The alien technology is a godsend for the government. Smuggling missiles into America wouldn’t be that difficult for them, especially with the alien space-planes.”

  “I don’t know. The missiles seemed better than ordinary. They also used high surveillance skills against you.”

  “In many ways, the mafia members are like you,” Jenna said. “They stumbled onto alien technology. That catapulted them into the big league.”

  I didn’t care for her slur against me. The Ukrainians were nothing like me. Maybe that’s why I said, “Sergei bragged about moles in the CAU.”

  Jenna straightened abruptly.

  “I assure you, there are no moles in the CAU,” she said.

  “Yeah? How did Sergei know about me then?”

  Jenna didn’t have an answer for that. The wheels seemed to be turning in her brain, though. Finally, she said, “Let’s say you’re right. Suppose Sergei or the Ukrainians are connected with aliens. Why would aliens care about you?”

  I thought about that, snapping my fingers after a moment. “Aliens wouldn’t care about me particularly. They would want exactly what you do. The Guard ship.”

  Jenna looked at me a little longer before shaking her head. “That’s just what we need, more aliens. We’re still trying to figure out what happened in Greenland.”

  I groaned as I tried to sit up.

  “You are gravely injured,” the doctor said. “You cannot get up.”

  “Don’t you get it, doc?” I said. “I’m a wunderkind. I can heal like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I read about your quick healing in your bio,” Jenna said. “That’s why I thought you might survive the Hellfire missile. When exactly did the aliens change you?”

  Her brief on me wasn’t as full as they’d like. I struggled up to rest on my elbows. Then, I pushed myself to a sitting position, swinging my feet off the cot and onto the floor.

  “He cannot do this,” the doctor told Jenna.

  I shoved myself to my feet. I felt woozy and almost vomited, but ended up staggering to a window. We were high up in the jet stream. I saw water below, an ocean.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “We’re heading for the Northern Shore of Alaska,” Jenna said.

  “What for?”

  “We’ve spotted the Guard ship,” she said.

  “So?” I asked.

  “It appears to be approaching something we’ve never seen before.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”

  Jenna exchanged glances with the doctor. He shrugged.

  I yawned and turned to the window, staring outside again. I spied a break in the clouds and thought I could see whitecaps way down there.

  I yawned once more, and I thought I heard the doctor say, “It should be soon.”

  I realized they must have laced one or more of those bars with a knockout drug. Why didn’t they want me awake?

  My knees weakened. I staggered back to the cot. “You guys are bastards,” I whispered. “You’re using me. What’s in the Arctic anyway?”

  Neither of them answered. A few moments later, I closed my eyes…

  -9-

  I woke up being hauled onto a tarmac in some frozen wasteland. The wind howled. I found my legs and began stumbling along as we departed the helicopter. It had twin blades, but it wasn’t a chinook. It was sleek and ultra-modern looking.

  This felt too much like Greenland all over again. Instead of Unguls, this time CAU agents had kidnapped me.

  I spied some strange looking metal domes nearby, saw endless snow, heard and saw howling white-streaked gusts. Jenna was wearing a big parka with a fur-lined hood—so was I, for that matter. The two guards were also wearing parkas and hoods. The doctor remained on the helicopter.

  Jenna climbed into a waiting snow-cat. I followed her into the back seats. The two security men climbed in front. Soon enough, the cat started up with a diesel roar and lurched forward. The tracks clanked and clattered. We left the helicopter, the runway and the metal domes, descending a long icy bank.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  It was warm in here, if a little cramped. Despite the snow-cat’s bulk and weight, it kept lurching and swaying in the howling wind.

  “We’ve arrived on the ice,” the driver said.

  “What?” I said. Despite the storm, there was enough dim light to see the endless expanse. It was flat like an Arctic prairie. “This is the pack ice?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Jenna said. “We have a rendezvous to make.”

  The pack ice was the frozen sheet over the Arctic Ocean. It wasn’t winter anymore. So, I wasn’t sure why they were so confident the pack ice off the Alaskan North Shore could hold a heavy snow-cat like ours. I imagined the pack ice would be strong enough near the North Pole, but we were a long way from there.

  I sat back thinking about Jenna’s “rendezvous” answer. There were too many oddities here. I was still having trouble over her decision to blow up the Hummer, willing to bank on me surviving the destruction.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on,” I said. “Are you really Americans?”

  She snorted. It was the first thing approaching laughter I’d heard from her. “What else would I be?”

  “Alien or alien-sponsored,” I said.

  One of the guards gave her a glance over his shoulder.

  That made me even more suspicious.

  She looked out a window and started speaking. “I suppose we’ve studied you in detail, but no one has really given much thought to what it’s been like for you.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What you’ve been through,” she said. “You’re highly suspicious. Yet, for the past six months, you’ve lived…recklessly. You used the teleportation device for your own fancies. You traveled all over the place, little realizing you were creating rumors wherever you went.”

  “Okay. I get it. You’re part of the Galactic Guard. You’re angry. Is that what’s going on?”

  Jenna regarded me with genuine surprise. “I suppose that would have to be a possibility in your mind. Why would we have an underground facility in Utah then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m exactly what I told you. I’m a field agent for the CAU. Do you have any idea how much money the government
has spent on us? Do you realize the effort that has gone into trying to track down the Guard ship?”

  I shrugged.

  “This is a game changer,” she said. “Instead of coming to the government and…selling the ship, I suppose…you’ve cruised around the world. You’ve acted like a tourist with a new boat. That’s unconscionable on your part. Where’s your patriotism?”

  “I saved the planet,” I said.

  “Aliens dropped hell-burners on us. They used orbital rods.” Jenna waved her hands. “You’ve kept spacefaring technology to yourself as if the Guard ship is your toy.”

  If she was a Galactic Guard agent, she had a convincing act.

  “If you’re really CAU, how come I’m not under drugged interrogation?” I asked.

  “We thought about it. It’s probably what we should be doing. But the others may have made a mistake.”

  “What others?”

  “The Neanderthal and the Homo habilis,” she said.

  “Kazz and Philemon,” I said automatically.

  “We’ve spotted them. The government has gone to tremendous expense and effort to recalibrate and upgrade the U.S. Oceanic Sensor Net. Through it, we spotted the Guard ship again. That helped us see something no one ever noticed before.”

  “How about telling me what that is?”

  “I’ll let the tactical officer explain the situation to you.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She grew silent.

  I frowned, still not really understanding what was going on. I sat back and kept my eye on the two guards. Neither spoke. They watched the pack ice as if they were worried about it. The cat kept trundling along. According to the electronic compass, we were heading due north.

  If we’d left the Alaskan North Shore, we were traveling on the pack ice exactly as they’d said. The helicopter must have traveled damn fast to get here from Nevada before I’d woken up. Why hadn’t the helicopter continued over the pack ice? Why use this slow-moving snow-cat?

  The next few hours provided the reason. The wind rose to hurricane levels. The cab swayed crazily. Finally, the driver had to turn into the howling storm. At last, Jenna ordered him to stop.

  “Are we going to camp out here?” I asked.

  “We’ll freeze to death if we do that,” the driver said.

  “Can you navigate in this storm?” Jenna asked him.

  “What’s to navigate?” he asked. “We have the compass and the GPS satellite beaming us data.”

  She checked her watch. “Yes. Keep going.”

  The cat revved and lurched forward. For the next five hours, we traveled through a hell-storm. If that wasn’t bad enough, the pack ice wasn’t flat like a skating rink. It had humps in places, humps we had to climb. One hump almost proved too high.

  As the wind shrieked around us, the cat leaned crazily to the left. The driver shouted. We all piled to the right, throwing our weight there as if this was a sailing boat in a strong wind.

  I leaned hard against Jenna. I had to remind myself that Debby was on the Guard ship. Debby was my girlfriend. Yeah, we’d had a few weeks of constant arguing, but that didn’t mean I should fool around. Maybe we could still work things out.

  The cat plunged down from the high hump and back onto flatter terrain.

  “You can get off me now,” Field Agent Jones said through clenched teeth.

  I slid back onto my side without a word. I peered outside into the stormy darkness, seeing white flakes bat against my window. We had almost zero visibility by this point.

  “How far out are we?” I asked.

  Before I could answer, the cat trembled. The driver slammed on the brakes, bringing us to a lurching halt. I banged against the seat in front of me.

  “What is it?” Jenna asked, a tinge of fear in her voice.

  At that point, the ice around us cracked and splintered. The Arctic Ocean was under that ice. Chunks of ice explosively tumbled through the air past us. A crack outside widened and lengthened as it came for us.

  The driver threw the cat into reverse. The ice crack followed us as fast as we could back up. It looked as if we were about to take a dunk in the freezing Arctic Ocean.

  -10-

  The snow-cat’s treads churned like crazy as the crack raced toward us. Great splintering sounds added to our misery. The crack went under a tread, tipping us in that direction—

  The driver put the pedal to the metal. The treads churned, flinging snow and ice, and we lurched backward as the machine humped up and down.

  All four of us were panting, each gripping something with white-knuckled intensity.

  The driver took his foot off the gas pedal.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “Keep going.”

  He shook his head. “We should be all right now,” he said in a winded voice.

  I moved up to a half-crouch in the back of the cab so I could look out the front windshield better. The crack in the ice no longer seemed to be growing.

  At that point, the driver flipped a switch. Powerful headlamps washed into the blizzard. It showed a large broken watery area…and a black metal structure. The thing had simply grown up out of the ice—

  “Oh,” I said, finally getting it. “That’s a submarine.”

  The driver grinned back at me. “What did you think was happening?”

  I shook my head. The submarine must have been under the pack ice. It had surfaced, breaking through and nearly tossing us into the drink.

  “You almost drove into it,” Jenna accused the driver.

  “No,” the driver said. “They almost smashed up and hit us.” He reached forward and tapped a box. “This is dead. When did that happen?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Jenna said. “If that’s the submarine—”

  “Roger,” the driver said. He turned to the other guard. “Let’s grab our gear.”

  They pulled up their hoods and put on huge gloves. Then, they opened their doors to the howling blizzard, slid outside and shut the doors behind them.

  “We’re heading underwater?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” Jenna said. “Do you have any objections to that?”

  “You do know the Guard ship can run rings around any submarine, right?”

  “This isn’t just any submarine.”

  “Pfft,” I said. “That won’t matter against the Guard ship.”

  She stared at me. “That’s one of the reasons you’re coming along. You can brief the others on the Guard ship’s capabilities.”

  “There’s something else going on here,” I said. “We’re not just trying to play tag with the Guard ship, are we?”

  “How astute of you,” she said. “They’re ready. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t have a choice about this. So, I shut up, put up my hood, put on my mittens and opened the door. A blast of Arctic wind blew icy particles against my face. Yup. This was Greenland all over again, but instead of being on land, I was crunching across freaking pack ice. I did not like the feeling. I expected the ice to open up and swallow me at any moment.

  The guards carried equipment, heading toward the dark object ahead. I followed them, with open water on either side.

  The ice groaned several times. I stopped once.

  “Keeping going!” Jenna shouted from behind, the bitter wind snatching at her words.

  The guards made it to the others from the submarine. The others were wearing black garments with reflective strips on their shoulders and heads.

  This didn’t seem to be one of the nuclear missile subs, one of the giants of the deep. It seemed smaller, and narrower, too, I thought.

  A man gave me a hand. I climbed into the conning tower, or the sail, as I learned later. Soon, I climbed down a ladder into welcome warmth. It was a tight fit, but not a squeezing one.

  Soon enough, I was walking on a deck, following a black-clad man, who followed the guards, who were still carrying the gear from the cat. Our own little parade.

  I was led to a tiny cabin that I
had to share with the two guards. I gathered that no one wanted to leave me by myself.

  Before I could get comfortable, klaxons began to ring, the submarine lurched and I had the feeling we were headed down into the Arctic Ocean.

  I knew what the Guard ship could do. I dearly hoped Kazz and Philemon didn’t discover the submarine tracking them. And if they did find that out, I hoped they didn’t realize I was on the submarine. It would be the easiest thing in the world for the Guard ship to blow this sub to smithereens.

  This was insanity. What did the people of CAU think they could accomplish? Clearly, they had balls, and I admired that. I didn’t like the idea of their bravado getting me killed underwater, though.

  The idea that the CAU and this sub could help get me back aboard the Guard ship crossed my mind only momentarily before I immediately dismissed it.

  I lay in a bunk, closed my eyes and went to sleep almost right away. I think my body was still healing from the exploding Hummer.

  I remember dreaming. In the dream, I ran and ran. Then, I woke up to the sound of what had to be emergency klaxons ringing throughout the submarine.

  -11-

  There was a loud rap on my hatch. Jenna opened it immediately and stuck her head in.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I whipped back my covers. I was naked underneath. I almost always slept that way.

  Jenna’s eyes goggled in surprise. She blushed and pulled her head out, shutting the hatch afterward.

  Chuckling to myself, I got up, pulled on my clothes and shoes and stepped through the hatch.

  Jenna stared at me and seemed about to rebuke me. I raised an eyebrow. She muttered darkly and jerked her head in the direction I should go. Dutifully, I followed her swaying behind.

  She was wearing her one-piece again, and I approved. This lady could walk. I’d have voted for her in a Miss America Contest. Her hair cascaded behind her. It looked and smelled as if she’d washed it since we’d come aboard.

  I quickly reminded myself about Debby. We would make up after this last fight, presuming I ever saw her again. I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about never seeing Debby again, never setting foot on the Guard ship. I found that I missed Rax and his pontificating ways.