Hearts and Minds

by Dayton Ward

  “We wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, would we? However, rest assured that you’re being transferred to a community very similar to this one. Our hope is to make your stay with us as comfortable as possible.”

  Heffron snorted. “I’m partial to Maui.” When that drew no response from Davison, she added, “Let me guess, more questions? What’s left to ask? Haven’t you already pulled everything you want out of me?”

  Her initial interview sessions with Gerald Markham and other Majestic 12 agents had been straightforward, but her interrogators had quickly lost patience with her unwillingness to answer far too many of their questions. In particular, Markham and the others had been focused on learning about her relationships with supposed extraterrestrials. Heffron had been surprised to learn the extent of the information MJ-12 possessed on this topic, especially her past interactions with the enigmatic individuals who had revealed their presence to her and her predecessor, General Daniel Wheeler. Like Wheeler, who had passed away almost twenty years ago following his retirement from the Air Force, Heffron had known very little about the true identities of Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln. Upon her first meeting with them while still serving under General Wheeler, both Seven and Lincoln had assured her that they were human, though Heffron always suspected there was more to the older man than met the eye. She had pondered that point on numerous occasions over the years, wondering whether the “organization” Seven and Lincoln claimed to represent really were extraterrestrial in origin, as Seven had claimed. Such questions were never answered, but even the limited demonstrations of advanced technology her mysterious “friends” had employed continued to fuel such theories.

  As years passed, Seven and Lincoln reduced the frequency of their often-unannounced visits, and Heffron eventually learned that others had assumed their responsibilities. Natalie Koroma and Jonathan McAllister along with another, a reserved man she only knew as Mestral—all humans so far as she could tell—would drop in on her at irregular and infrequent intervals, usually at her home in Falls Church, Virginia, and well away from the prying eyes of Majestic 12 and its various subordinate organization. The tips they provided her with respect to alien activity on Earth were limited and always accurate to the finest detail, sufficient for Heffron to deploy forces to deal with the situation they presented. She knew this restrained imparting of information was for her own benefit and protection, but that did not lessen her frustration while wondering what other secrets these “agents” possessed, and how else they might be able to help not only the United States but the entire world to defend itself against alien invasion. What else did they know? How long had they and their predecessors been carrying out their work, toiling behind the scenes of history? What other acts, subtle or overt, had they committed while supposedly holding to their mission to aid humanity in its progress toward improving civilization here on Earth?

  Heffron had tried and failed to answer those questions, but her incarceration under the watchful eye of Gerald Markham and the interrogations to which she had been subjected had proven that her mysterious benefactors were correct to insulate her. With the assistance of various pharmaceuticals—some of which may well have been extraterrestrial in origin thanks to technology and other items plundered from those alien spacecraft recovered over the decades of Majestic 12’s existence—Markham and his people had extracted from her everything she knew of Gary Seven and those other agents. Even with her early attempts at cooperating with Markham and the later, drug-enhanced interview sessions, she had not been forced to betray them too deeply. Beyond their names and the fact that they seemed to possess advanced technology and a wisdom about Earth and humanity that almost certainly had been augmented by an otherworldly perspective, Heffron knew almost nothing about them. Markham had found the servo once given to her by Roberta Lincoln and ordered it disassembled for study, but so far as Heffron knew the senior Majestic official had been unsuccessful at unlocking the device’s secrets. He wanted more information, much more, but she was unable to provide it, and Markham had been forced into a sort of waiting game, hoping that the agents might see fit to attempt locating Heffron.

  “Director Markham did not share with me his reasons for wanting you moved,” said Davison. “Surely you understand the necessity for security.”

  Heffron rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” Gesturing to herself and her robe, she said, “I’m going to change now. Tell one of your spies to tear himself away from his monitors and get me some coffee.” Given her prolonged incarceration, she had given up the notion of enjoying much in the way of privacy, and at her age she had abandoned any pretense of modesty. Her one exception had been her bathroom, from which she had pried the concealed cameras and microphones and left them on her small dining table for Davison to find. After the third such demonstration, the doctor had promised the devices would not be replaced, and so far as she could tell he had held to his word.

  “Breakfast is already on the way,” he replied. “It will be here when you’re ready.”

  “Stop it. You’re spoiling me.” Leaving the sarcastic remark to hang in the air between them, Heffron began moving toward her bedroom, but stopped at the sound of the chime connected to her cottage’s front door.

  Davison smiled. “The staff is ahead of schedule, it seems.”

  Stepping toward the entrance, the doctor pressed a control on the keypad set into the wall just to the door’s left, and the door itself slid aside to reveal two people. A man and a woman, each dressed in nondescript gray suits. Whereas the woman’s white dress shirt was open at the collar, her companion wore a tie along with a gray fedora. It took Heffron an extra second to recognize the new arrivals, but then she remembered that she only knew of one person who wore such a hat.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Who are you?” asked Davison, his expression turning to one of suspicion. Instead of responding, the woman held up what appeared to be a silver pen, which emitted a muted electronic tone as she aimed its pointed end toward the doctor. Before Davison could say anything else, the pen released another odd, metallic snapping sound and his body went rigid.

  “You’re tired,” said Natalie Koroma, still holding her servo. “You should sit on the couch and take a nap.”

  “A nap,” repeated Davison as he turned and walked to the room’s far side, and Heffron watched as he stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes.

  Koroma’s companion, Mestral, stepped through the open doorway, extending his hand. “Director Heffron, it is time for you to leave this place.” Despite the composed demeanor that she remembered from their prior meetings, Heffron still heard a slight hint of urgency in the strange man’s voice.

  “Sounds good to me,” replied Heffron. “I wondered if you might come looking for me. I guess I should’ve expected it.”

  Mestral replied, “Ascertaining your precise location proved most difficult. Your former associates’ efforts at concealing your movements were quite exceptional.”

  “We figure they have to be onto us,” added Koroma. “At least somewhat.”

  Heffron said, “They know your names, and the fact that you visit me on occasion and you may have some advanced tech at your disposal. I’m sorry I gave them that much.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” replied Koroma, her attention divided between Heffron and scanning the area outside the cottage. “We’ve withheld a lot of information from you for your own protection, but you’re about to get the full story, after we get you out of here.”

  Glancing down at her robe and pajamas, Heffron asked, “Do I have time to—”

  “No,” snapped Koroma, holding up her servo. “I disabled the surveillance devices covering your cottage, but it won’t take them long to figure out something’s up.”

  Before Heffron could protest, any response she might offer faded as an alarm began blaring somewhere nearby, accompanied by shouts that already seemed to be very close and getting closer.

  Koroma grunted in annoyance. “Like I said.”<
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  Mestral nodded. “It would be prudent at this juncture to make a hasty exit.”

  Despite being worried that she might die in her pajamas, Heffron decided that it was preferable to remaining here for one second longer than necessary. “Then let’s get moving. How do we get out of here?”

  “We’ve got it covered,” said Koroma, smiling as she once more held up her servo.

  • • •

  Master Chief Petty Officer Ross Bullock was the first through the open door, the muzzle of his Glock pistol leading the way as he entered the cottage. Sidestepping to his right as he crossed the threshold, he swept the room in a practiced, left-to-right fashion that allowed him to sight down the pistol’s barrel and search for threats. To his left, he saw Petty Officer Jeni Frontera, dressed like him in a black utility uniform with accompanying tactical vest, mimicking his movements as she covered the room’s other side. The only sign of habitation inside the cottage was the prone form of Doctor William Davison, who lay snoring on the sofa positioned against the room’s far wall.

  “Clear,” he said.

  Frontera was still aiming her Glock at the bedroom. “Look at this!”

  Stepping toward her while raising his pistol to where she was pointing, Bullock saw a fading ring of bright blue haze framed in the doorway leading to the other room. Only then did he notice a faint tingling sensation on his exposed skin.

  “Feel that?” He held up his left arm, which was bare to the elbow thanks to his uniform top’s rolled sleeves.

  “Yeah,” replied Frontera. A moment later, she frowned. “It’s gone now.”

  Bullock gestured with his pistol toward the bedroom. “So’s that blue mist, or whatever the hell it was.” Stepping closer, he pointed his Glock’s muzzle through the open doorway, checking the room beyond but finding no one. Only the unmade bed offered any immediate evidence that anyone had been living here.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  Frontera had already pulled her tactical radio from one of the clips on her vest’s shoulder harness. “This is Frontera. Lock down the entire community. We’ve got a runaway.”

  “We’re not going to find her,” said Bullock. “She’s already long gone.”

  “That’s impossible,” replied his partner as she returned the radio to its clip on her vest. “Where the hell could she have gone? And you’re saying she got past Madsen and Cooley out there?”

  She hooked her thumb over her shoulder, pointing back the way they had come, indicating where she and Bullock had found Petty Officers Daniel Madsen and John Cooley, both unconscious—more like sleeping, just like Doctor Davison—and sitting propped against a pair of oak trees in the garden less than a hundred feet from here.

  “No,” said Bullock. “She definitely had help.”

  Scowling, Frontera regarded him with open skepticism. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

  “A lot.”

  As senior enlisted member of the community’s military security detachment, Bullock was briefed into numerous aspects of their assignment here, more so than his subordinates, including Jeni Frontera. Much like the organization to which he was attached, and the senior leadership of the organization overseeing this facility, information was subject to numerous levels of compartmentalization and distributed on a strict need-to-know basis. As a relatively junior member of the security contingent, Frontera was given only the details of this facility and its occupants that were required for her to carry out her duties, which largely were limited to guarding and overseeing the community’s high-value occupants.

  “Come on, Ross,” said Frontera, and Bullock noted her growing annoyance. “What the hell is going on? I mean, I knew Heffron was an important person, which is why she was here, but nobody’s supposed to know she’s here.” Her eyes widened, as though a sudden thought had just occurred to her. “You think this was an inside job?”

  Bullock holstered his Glock. “No, but it was definitely someone who knows what they’re doing.” Despite possessing more information than his partner about Director Kirsten Heffron and the reasons for her stay here, there still were some things he did not know with respect to their distinguished guest. “All I was told is that people would be looking for her, and that they weren’t garden-variety spies or even special ops assets. Whoever they are, they’ve got some serious backing and resources, and they’d stop at nothing to find Heffron.” He gestured around the room before nodding toward Davison. “Looks like the bosses weren’t kidding.”

  “But how?” asked Frontera. “This place isn’t even on the map. Any map.”

  Bullock grunted in agreement. The top-secret, high-security asset community or “H-SAC,” in Majestic 12 parlance, occupied a small, unnamed island in the Pacific, hundreds of miles from the nearest cluster of human habitation. Access to the island was via ship or helicopter and the occasional small plane that was all the facility’s short, narrow landing strip could accommodate. Relentlessly patrolled and guarded, and blanketed by a full suite of state-of-the art surveillance and anti-intrusion systems, the island should have been impenetrable.

  And yet, someone had walked right into this cottage and spirited away the community’s most valuable resident. Whoever had found and apparently taken Kirsten Heffron, they were way ahead of even the most advanced spy tech on the planet, to be able to find this facility and target a specific individual for extraction.

  Well, maybe not walked.

  The thought echoed in Bullock’s mind as his gaze fell once more upon the doorway leading from the bedroom, and he considered the blue mist or haze he had seen there moments before. Were Heffron’s rescuers sporting some sort of very advanced technology? Could it be alien in origin? Perhaps her liberators were aliens. It’s not as though the possibility were out of left field, after all. Seven years attached to Majestic’s military security forces had taught Bullock that much.

  “Like I said: serious backing and resources.” Reaching into the pocket of his uniform top, he extracted a mobile phone and selected a preprogrammed number from its directory. His call was answered on the first ring.

  “Control,” said a male voice. “What’s your status?”

  “The asset is gone,” replied Bullock. “I think it’s them, sir; the ones you told us about. They found her.”

  13

  Sralanya

  2386

  “For the safety and security of all our people, we are forced to answer these unprovoked actions against our planet. We cannot tolerate interlopers or invaders from other worlds, including yours.”

  The video was grainy, shifting and jumping almost with every word, and the three figures displayed on the wall-mounted monitor were blurry and indistinct, but Picard had little doubt that he was looking at a trio of humans. A male and a female positioned side by side in high-backed seats within the cramped confines of what could be a spacecraft’s cockpit. Behind them was a third, a male situated at a ninety-degree angle from his companions. The restricted space was packed with consoles and other instruments, and Picard could only speculate as to their functions. As for the people, all three wore a form of pressure or space suit, though the image’s poor quality left Picard room for doubt. Still, there was something familiar about the clothing. He recalled what he knew of manned space missions from Earth’s late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and decided the suits worn by these individuals could be similar.

  None of that helped him begin to make sense of what he was seeing.

  “These people actually piloted your ship here from Earth?” Picard asked the question while keeping his attention fixed on the monitor. The image on it had been paused, offering him only a slightly less distorted look at the three people. They were human, he decided, or at least humanoid.

  What the hell is this about?

  “You heard the message for yourself, Captain,” said Presider Hilonu, who had stood in silence as Picard watched the video and listened to the broadcast, which had been delivered in several Eart
h languages. “There also was a version rendered in the primary language of my people and the native tongue of the crew who originally piloted the craft. There were some deviations and gaps in the message, likely owing to the primitive nature of the translation method, but the meaning was quite clear, as was their origin, Captain.” Hilonu indicated the monitor with one hand. “They were human, just like you.”

  Unable to tear his eyes from the screen, Picard asked, “How old is this footage?”

  “It has existed since well before my birth, Captain, as well as that of my parents, their parents, and their parents before them. According to our historical records and based on our ability to translate how we compute the passage of time compared to your own units of measure, the ship returned to Sralanya approximately three hundred and twenty of your years ago.”

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Picard finally forced himself to turn from the monitor so that he could face the Eizand leader. “Presider Hilonu, I promise you that I have no idea what this is about or how this possibly could have happened. Three hundred and twenty years ago, my people were standing on the verge of a devastating conflict that would decimate significant portions of our planet. Hundreds of millions of people would die in that war, and our civilization would approach the brink of collapse. Only through an unlikely act of extraordinary courage and no small amount of luck were we handed a lifeline, which we used to pull ourselves back from that precipice. Our ability to travel beyond the confines of our own solar system was in its infancy, and would not improve until years after we learned that life truly did exist on worlds other than our own. At that time, we simply did not possess the means or technology to travel from my planet to yours.”

  Naturally, Picard chose not to mention that he had seen the aftereffects of the Third World War and the damage to the planet of his birth with his own eyes, thanks to the Enterprise’s being forced to follow a Borg sphere back through time after an attack on Earth more than a decade ago. That incident had resulted in the starship emerging from a temporal rift in the mid-twenty-first century, nearly ten years after the end of the global conflict that had brought humankind to its knees, and only hours before the legendary Zefram Cochrane made his historic first warp-powered space flight. Preventing that achievement would have ensured Earth’s isolation from the rest of the galaxy, rather than prompting the initial formal meeting between humans and Vulcans in 2063 and ushering in a new age of technological advancement and cultural enlightenment. Instead, the Borg would have assimilated the entire planet and its war-weary population, forever consigning them to the living death—and hell—that was assimilation into the Borg Collective. It had fallen to Picard and his crew to secure humanity’s future, and its destiny.