by Terry Mixon
“Mrs. Bennett delivered this craft to him and told him that it had been recovered at the Mayan site. He claims it is far in advance of anything we have, and based on the parts I’ve seen, I tend to believe him. He also claims that it’s a thousand years old.”
Queen sighed. This wasn’t going to end well. “And you believed that kind of nonsense?”
Agent Cabot gave him a steady look in the rear view mirror. “Before you jump to the conclusion that I’ve lost my mind, I recommend you at least see it in person. You’re already here, after all.”
He couldn’t argue with that, so he only nodded.
The SUV made the trip to a nondescript industrial building in twenty minutes. There was no overt sign that the FBI had the place locked down, but he saw a few agents in cars on the street.
“I figured you might want to keep this quiet,” she said, “so I have everyone inside.”
That was certainly true. There were federal officers packed inside the building, including a heavily armed tactical team. There were no local police. Perhaps she didn’t trust them. Wisely so, most likely. This was Chicago.
She led them deeper into the facility, using a company badge to get through a number of security doors. They ended up in a wide bay with the skeleton of the supposed spacecraft.
He walked around it and tried to look past his doubts. It was very different in design from the lifters he’d seen in the briefings about the Yucatan Spaceport. For one, he saw no engines. And it didn’t seem designed to attach to a rocket.
“How does it move?” he asked.
The petite agent shrugged. “They think it manipulates the curvature of space.”
“Seriously? You realize how crazy that sounds, don’t you?”
“I do. Climb inside, Mister Secretary. They’ve stripped everything but the control consoles out. It’s on power from the facility, so it’s safe enough.”
He went up the short ramp someone had built for access and eyed the size of the cabin. Small, but sufficient for some cargo. The two acceleration couches sat in front of dark black panels.
Queen slipped into one and Cabot the other. She reached out and touched the screen and the controls came to life. So did the exterior monitors.
The layout was different from anything he’d seen before and the writing was gibberish. Still, that didn’t mean anything.
“How do we know this isn’t faked?” he asked. “This all seems within the realm of possibility, outlandish drives aside.”
“I asked that very question. It seems they just had a major breakthrough in exploring the ship’s computer. It has a bit of flight data from its last trip.”
She touched the controls and brought up a new screen. “This is about a twenty minute recording.”
The screens reconfigured when she tapped an icon. The wrap around “windows” looked out onto space. It also showed the Earth rotating serenely in front of them. One small section of the console displayed the inside of the control area. Not as it currently was, but as it supposedly had been.
It showed a man sitting on one of the couches, and the controls from over his shoulder. The man was blonde and dressed in a set of coveralls. He had a cut above one eye that didn’t seem fully staunched. He was…rumpled.
Queen watched him manipulate the controls. He seemed hesitant. As though he was unsure of what he was doing.
He muttered to himself. The sound coming from hidden speakers conveyed that clearly enough. Queen didn’t recognize the language, but he could tell cursing when he heard it.
The man guided the ship down toward Earth. Reentry was knuckle biting. At some point, the man made some mistake he couldn’t correct and the smooth descent became a crash. Not a fatal one, but one that left the ship in the jungle after a very hard landing.
The man seemed happy enough to have survived. A very reasonable viewpoint, Queen thought. He unstrapped himself and left the cockpit.
Outside, the jungle slowly came back to life after the intrusion. He was about to turn to agent Cabot when he spotted a man in the foliage. He looked primitive. Like an indigenous person. While Queen had no idea what a Mayan looked like, he could believe this man was one, based on his clothes.
The man from the ship stepped into view outside and appeared to be speaking to the native. The primitive man seemed quite impressed, because he threw himself flat on the ground. The video ceased shortly after that.
“See what I mean?” Cabot asked.
“That is also interesting, but it could be faked. With a lot of difficulty and expense, but it’s possible.”
She smiled. “I said that, too. So, I have one more chance to convince you.”
Cabot took him to a room that looked like it held the electrical service for the building. Large switches controlled the power from the city grid. Except they were all disconnected.
Instead, a large, cobbled together piece of equipment seemed to be providing the power. Its centerpiece was a glowing blue cube ten centimeters on a side.
“We’ve had our people verify this building really is cut off from the city grid. We shut down power for the area after searching the building for battery backups. There were some, but only for critical equipment. They couldn’t affect the whole facility. This cube is providing the power this entire complex needs. All of it.”
“And it came from the ship?”
“So Wagner claims. If this isn’t alien tech, I don’t know what is. Look, Mister Secretary, everything I’ve seen tells me this is real. Crazy, but real. If Area 51 really does deal with little green men, now is the time to call them in.”
He had to confess that the preponderance of evidence was on her side. This was insane, but inarguable. What was it the fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes said? Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a call to make. Then I want to speak to Doctor Wagner.”
Once she’d left the room, he called the secretary of the Army. “Chuck, Josh. I’m changing the status on Operation Golden Parachute. You are go to execute. Make it quiet if you can, but I want Clayton Rogers in custody as soon as possible.
“Try to avoid killing any civilians or starting a war with New Zealand, but don’t let either of those outcomes stop you. Make it happen.”
* * * * *
Clayton Rogers wiped his brow and rested his machete on his leg. This was more physically taxing than he’d expected. Of course, he’d never forged his way through the untraveled brush like this before, either.
Young Mick had provided a good example of how to do the task. His strokes seemed effortless. He rather reminded Clayton of the character in an old movie set in Australia. Mick was a young Crocodile Dundee.
Not that he would ever say that to him. This innate animosity with their neighbors across the Tasman Sea was almost reflexive. Odd, but he wasn’t going to be the one to offend. America was no stranger to regional issues. Who was he to judge?
“This has a right nice view,” Mick said when he crested the ridge. “It’s wide, too. Looks stable. You could build a very substantial getaway home up here.”
Clayton stopped beside him and took in the view. It was still early in the morning, so the sun was mostly behind them. The vista was indeed stunning. He’d proceed with building a place, no matter what they found here, he decided. He deserved a place to get away from it all.
Mick sent his men to search the ridge area for weak spots that were obvious enough to disqualify it. They’d clear the brush so that professionals could do a more thorough survey later.
Penny was off with the other team, looking into the area around the plateau. It made sense for the base entrance to be close to the landing area.
And he was convinced the flat slab of rock had once served that purpose. The stone bore some scars that didn’t look natural.
Unlike Mars, though, this entrance wasn’t in plain sight. Someone had wanted to be certain no one found it. Even
on an uninhabited island.
He’d viewed some of the footage from the Mars base. The people who’d built it were more than capable of hiding something like this in plain sight. And with the dead from the battle on Freedom Express, he had no doubt their concern for doing so had been correct.
Whatever had happened had been vicious and brutal. There was probably plenty of information on why the conflict had happened in the computers, once they could decipher the language.
It was academic at this point. Those people and their grievances had died a thousand years ago.
The time delay for communication with Jess was about six hours at this point. One way. And she couldn’t talk directly to Earth. At that range, there was no such thing as a tight beam. Everyone on the planet would know if she signaled them.
Wouldn’t that excite the SETI people?
So, any information from her came through Harry on Mars. He’d only just found out about the remnants of the pitched battle there. The images of the heavy-worlders and their weapons convinced him that they were the enemy these people on Earth feared.
Jess would reach her destination soon, whatever it was. Then he’d hear all about it late tonight. He hoped it was worth the long journey.
His sat phone rang. It was his assistant.
“Good morning,” Clayton said. “I hope you aren’t calling with more bad news. We haven’t seen any sign of trouble. Please, tell me that they haven’t come pestering Mister Durey.”
“I haven’t heard anything from that front,” his assistant said. “We just received some information from Mars that you need to see right now.”
His gut clenched. Something had gone wrong.
“Then tell me. Is Harry okay?” He was astonished at how level his voice sounded.
“He’s fine. All of them are. They found something unexpected and of critical importance. I’m not comfortable with saying what, even over an encrypted line. You need to return to Nauru at once.”
His man didn’t order him around as a rule, so this must be of critical importance.
“I’ll make arrangements to leave as quickly as I can. I want an encrypted file with the data in my inbox by the time I board the plane.”
Unlike encrypted phone communication, he was much more confident of the file encryption. The NSA might be able to crack a phone call. They’d be working decades to bypass his file security.
That would change once his people perfected the quantum entanglement phones they were working on. Using the effect that Albert Einstein dubbed “spooky action at a distance,” they’d be able to talk without any concern that others would even be able to detect the communication, much less listen in.
The entangled photons in the source and destination devices would change in exactly the same manner without any apparent information traveling between them. None they could detect, anyway.
It would also eliminate the time delay for long distance communication, they believed. There was no detectable time lost in the reaction of one photon to changes in the other, no matter how far away. It was instantaneous. No more light speed limitation to communications.
“The update is already in your inbox,” his assistant said. “Also, a US Navy destroyer has arrived in the Tasman Sea. I’d suggest you depart before it lands troops to look for you.”
“I’m sure the CIA already has people on the ground that are more than capable of inconveniencing me, if they find me. Stop being such a worrier. I’ll call you once we’re in the air.”
He disconnected and walked over to Mick. “Something has come up, I’m afraid. I need to return to Nauru right away.”
The young man didn’t turn his head. “Something is up here, too. That’s either the slowest plane ever or I’m looking at a drone.”
Clayton blinked in surprise. He stared in the direction the other man was looking and saw nothing.
“Are you sure?”
“See the big hill west of here? It’s going to be over it in a minute. I saw a slow moving dot and thought it was a bird, but it’s going in a straight line.” He handed Clayton his binoculars. “I looked all around so it wouldn’t freak out the people manning it, just in case they already found us.”
Clayton made a show of looking in a few different directions before he looked at the area Mick was staring at. It still took him a minute to find the drone.
And drone it was. Painted to look like a cloud, the damned thing was almost invisible, but once he was on it, he could follow it fairly easily. It had its camera pointed in their direction, too.
“It’s the US Military,” he said. “That means we can expect company very shortly.”
Mick nodded as Clayton handed the binoculars back. “I figured that already. You might want to get Miss Penny in hand and scoot.”
Clayton nodded. “Let’s find her and get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was late when Nathan found what he was looking for. After nine in the evening. It got dark fast out in the ass end of nowhere. Without the extra lights, he wouldn’t have been able to see his hand in front of his face.
The area where the ground penetrating radar had indicated there might be something was a large hill. One overgrown with trees and vines. Perhaps the idiot that had sold him the land had wanted to grow grapes.
Good luck with that.
They used a portable radar unit to look at the crown of the hill. It told him there was a hollow area to the north side. Once he knew where to look, he found a suspicious slab of rock. It looked native, but it was deep under an overhang.
It took Nathan half an hour of searching to find the hidden dimple where the key went. It turned out to be a good thing he hadn’t sent the key to his mother after all.
His phone rang. Mother. She really knew how to ruin a moment. Still, now he could brag.
“Good news, Mother. I found the entrance to the base.”
“The FBI raided the lab with the ship. They have everything.”
The news hit him like a falling boulder. “Shit! How did they find it? You said it wasn’t even connected to you.”
“I don’t know!” She sounded anguished. “The bastards know everything, or they soon will. Now they’ll never stop looking for us.”
“Or they’ll go after Father with everything they have,” he said. “We don’t have any more than that ship. Or so they think. Please tell me that the scientists scrubbed the data. And had the courier arrived yet?”
“He hadn’t arrived yet. Call him back. As for the computers, my man on the inside dumped the computers when they rushed the facility.
“That won’t slow them down too much. They have the scientists themselves to question. Still, they won’t know about your base. I hope to God it’s worth something, because we won’t have a pot to piss in soon enough.”
He considered the time. “You’ll land later tonight. By then I should have something on this facility. I know you have your personal fortune spread out under any number of fake names, so we’ll survive. If we can grasp this tech, we can use it to force the US to back down. If China finds out about it, they’ll give the US a black eye.”
“While I have no objection to the US being humiliated, there’s no way they’d leave us alone. We need to find a way to keep them back. I’ll keep thinking on it. You explore the base.”
“Consider it done.”
Nathan slipped the key into the dimple he’d found. It clicked into place and the slab of rock slowly ground its way back into the hill and then whisked to the side.
The stone was obviously only a façade. The backside was metal.
The room beyond the door was small. It led into a short hall with what looked like an elevator door. Then his adrenalin spiked as he saw a weapon above the door, pointed right at him.
* * * * *
Harry backed out of the strange new area and figured out how to close down the connection. Then they got their suits on and called for backup. If something went south, Harry wanted a full team read
y to pull them back to safety.
His idea of a fully prepared incursion team was one in suits, fully armed, and carrying enough supplies to survive if they got cut off. That entailed moving a lot of air, food, and water into the strange compartment before they left it.
Thankfully, they had a forklift to get it all inside in one trip.
Sandra and his Liberty team led the way inside. Some of the scientists followed.
“I wonder how long this contraption can stay open,” Sandra said. “If we keep it activated, it might run out of juice and leave us stuck.”
“It would be nice to be able to activate it from this side,” Harry agreed. He examined the wall beside the transport arch. There were controls, similar to the ones on the forklift. It showed a different sequence of numbers. He carefully wrote them down, not a simple task in his thick gloves.
“Take the forklift back to Mars. If I can’t open this in five minutes, use it to come get us.”
Sandra gave him a jaunty salute and backed the forklift into the misty room back on Mars. The tremendous difference in temperature between the two locations was causing a fog as the water in the air condensed.
Once the connection broke and the wall went back to being just a wall, he entered the numeric code he’d written down, but nothing happened. It took several attempts to figure out which button was the one to enter the change.
The arch came back to life and opened what his science types were guessing was some kind of quantum tunnel to the destination.
Only it wasn’t the cargo chamber on Mars.
The arch led out onto a pristine beach. A wave of fog engulfed them as the wind pushed a lot of moisture into the room. He could still see the suns in the sky, though. Both of them.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said.
Harry stepped out onto the beach and looked around. Other than the double suns sitting bear one another, it could’ve been a beach on Earth. The portal opened out of a stone ridge and what looked like a patio to the left.
