Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “As you were.” He approached the main display in at the bubble’s core. “Show me.”

  Cervera nodded to three technicians. Lights dimmed and the projector spun to life.

  “Jesus fuck.” Jennings knew his whisper wasn’t quite.

  The design was simple: a flattened-egg hub connected two rounded triangular nacelles. The slowly-rotating display indicated breaches in the hulls of both “wings” where molten rock had infiltrated the form. The wings had presumably once pointed to sharp tips, but both had been sheared away in asymmetrical impact. Rock had filled the vessel with earthen cancer.

  “How old?”

  “Preliminary estimates? Sixty, seventy million years.”

  Everything we know is wrong; everything we know isn’t.

  “I get the distinct impression you’ve been hiding something from me, Tony.”

  She hesitated. The command center filled with glances, cleared throats, busywork.

  “Tell me.”

  “David—It’s superblack. Need-to-know. We don’t—”

  “Override.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Override, before I lose my temper. Named orders?”

  “President Holmdel, but it’s deeper than that. It’s old.”

  “Let me guess…Truman? Eisenhower? Override superblack. Release. I assume we’re all friends here?”

  “They’re cleared.”

  Jennings smirked. “Phantom government strikes again. Am I really the Commander-in-Chief?”

  “David—”

  “We’ve got a UFO in our soil. That’s some serious Chariots of the Gods shit. I think that makes me need-to-know. Holmdel’s dead.”

  Cervera nodded and gestured toward the display’s touchpad. “Bloody up.”

  Jennings’ eyes drew to slits, the line of sight between their eyes unbroken as he placed his palm on the machine surface. “Do it.”

  “System, add user: Jennings, David Smith. President. Authorization: Cervera, Antonia. War Sec. Run: Holmdel Directive, re: Von Daniken, subsystems Peru, Bolivia: Nazca, Titicaca. Superblack release: mark.”

  Jennings gritted his teeth as the sampler scraped genetic confirmation from his palm.

  “Learn something new every day.”

  “David—”

  “Tell me.”

  You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you about Lago Titicaca, our HQ in La Paz, the three-chip whores just begging for a soldado americano quente’s company. Holmdel had been in office just six years when we found the pieces. After the annexation. Before the shit found the fan. Looking at that chamber under the mountain, I remembered. Why hadn’t we at least tried to piece the puzzle back together? I’ll tell you. Bodies. Dated to around sixty-five. Not age. Million years. Thousands of skeletons scattered throughout the lakebed, across the rocky plateau, between potato fields and Bolivia and Peru.

  It’s dry. Freezing. That helped us date and sequence the bones. A million bones, a thousand patterns, each clavicle, each femur, each rib not scavenged by the Pucara or the Tihuanaco for their war gowns, each bone systematically rewrote our history and dented my lifelong assumption that I, James Richter, was a descendant of the cradle of man. I knew then no such privilege; those patterns were in all of us, in each and every one of us.

  Imagine the impact: that ship who knows how fast, uncontrolled, damaged already, from what we saw in Wyoming. It left pieces across Uruguay, a few in Argentina, and the jackpot in Peru. Never found bigger pieces north. Guess we didn’t look hard enough. Or maybe shedding the pattern cache over Titicaca gave the ship just enough juice to try to escape. Didn’t make it. Welcome to America, ancient astronauts.

  I shouldn’t tell you—Guess it doesn’t really matter. The author will probably edit this out if he ever gets his shit together and finishes this, but remember Benton? She put the pieces back together. Not the ship, but the pieces of me, all of those convenient assumptions that’d been shattered by my time in Peru. How’s a man supposed to keep a secret like that? Hey everyone, guess what. Everything you thought you knew about where we came from was wrong. There’re people just like us out there, and sixty-fucking-five million years ago, they paid us a visit. Left behind enough survivors to start this.

  So the first time I saw the light, I was reasonably unreasonably afraid.

  Holmdel superblacked the whole affair. Non-disclosure agreements all around, not that they could’ve done anything about it, not really, not to a man whose parents were dead and whose gee eff had been briefed on the surfaces before they’d even pulled out. I don’t think she believed it. Maths don’t care about evolution beyond its opposition to creationism.

  The point is, no one could explain it, so they buried it and buried our eyescatch under penalty of death. Big threat. I was born dead. No paperwork necessary.

  The way I see it, the bird dumped half its cargo over Titicaca after starting to bring them back. That’s the bodies. Imagine the biggest cemetery you’ve ever seen, but in this boneyard, the people were just thrown on the ground. No bodies at Diablo; I think they didn’t have time, or the damage was too severe to do that wing. Just dumped one wing, that coned-out ball with the human-shaped depressions in the walls. Some survived. If they hadn’t, we’d all be talking Kiswahili. Si jambo.

  Jennings had Holmdel and his administration disappeared after the Populace coup. Buried under buried under buried. And after most of the southern hemisphere got glassed in the Quebec War (oops!), there goes a little thing called plausible deniability. Deniable plausibility? Not that he needed to know, but maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe the last centuries of my life wouldn’t have been spent thousands of years in the future, trying to fix this fucking mess. Guess I could take the blame, but why bother? Purpose be.

  The point is, there’s more to this story than you’ll ever know.

  “The agent in charge—”

  “James Richter.”

  “What?” A ghost rattled chains in Jennings’ attic. “Richter? From—”

  “He was on your list to disappear,” Cervera paused, “but we took him off.”

  “Any other undeletes I should know about?”

  “A few. David, we just couldn’t—”

  “I understand.” He didn’t. “We’re bringing him in?”

  “Called him up. He’s in transit. I’m sure he’ll jump at the chance to puzzle a few more pieces together.”

  A nobody chimed in. “Sirs, the entry team is prepped and ready.”

  “Nothing’s alive in there…?”

  “Nothing on scope. Just one big flickering power source in the vessel’s core.”

  “Reactor?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bomb?”

  “…Could be.”

  “Send them in. We have visual?” Jennings sat on the edge of an empty chair.

  “Eyelines installed. Ready to roll.”

  “Tell them to go, then.”

  Assault Force A was hardly fit for assault, hardly a force, but they were completely qualified for the “A” position, a group of men and women impressed into Milicom after being particularly good convicts, patients, and ne’er do wells with nowhere else to go.

  They weren’t issued guns.

  Moore Chavez rubbed his eyes with gloved fingers, for a moment obscuring both the signal from Eyeline-17-A and the two teardrop prison tattoos a man he’d later raped and shivved had needled into his upper cheeks. He added that murder one artist to the tally he kept on his right thumb.

  A romantic at heart, Chavez thought the rock seemingly growing from the metal hallway around him was beautiful. He held his spotlight like a gun, so far outside his conception of reality now than any reassuring contact with metal helped his feet move.

  A lattice of passages, he followed the other members of A down what appeared to be a main shaft, his rubber soles grasping for purchase on the canted floor. Whoever had designed this bunker had a bad eye for level lines. Maybe it was art.

  Up a
head, the hallway ended at a swingdoor. He thought it’d be the end of the line, but he saw that douche Monagan successfully pull the door’s halves apart. Someone had left it unlocked for them.

  He watched Monagan take a few steps forward, his light back and forth, before he tumbled and disappeared, his shout of surprise interrupting the mortuary silence of the expedition.

  People ran. A few more fell.

  By the time Chavez got to the front, people had stopped falling, instead stood out on a landing within the chamber. The talking stopped even more.

  “What’s the—Jesus.” He crossed himself.

  The double-dozen spotlights swished around the chamber in near-solid lines. Even at the bottom of the room, the three men and one woman who had fallen were sitting up, their lights arcing forth and back across the expanse.

  They’d fallen off the landing and slid harmlessly down a big metal bowl, slight depressions in its surface. Above, the room’s ceiling was that same bowl, mirrored. They were inside a gigantic sphere, or “spear,” as Chavez would have pronounced it.

  At the center of the room, exact center, hung a dull gray orb. Free-floating. Just sitting there in the air. The four fallen soon realized there was nothing attached to that ball, and they tried to climb up the bowl’s slick sides, lest it fall on them.

  “Fuck,” Moore Chavez said to no one.

  “Fuck,” David Smith Jennings said to Antonia Cervera.

  “Are we seeing this right?” She turned to an engineer running the playback. “Is that thing floating?”

  “I—I don’t know, sir.” He zoomed. “Looks like—”

  The screens became white.

  Moore Chavez quickly yanked the melting communications band from his head, tried to slap out a dozen burning holes on his uniform. His eyes stung from the blackened, smoldering plastic. He found himself on his ass, slammed up against the back of the railing rim.

  The room was brighter. He realized that the new illumination was coming from the nearest unsteady light at the chamber’s center, the floating ball of whatever the fuck.

  He grappled with his own disoriented body and crawled to the edge of the walkway, looked down into the bowl. The four members of Assault A at the bowl’s bottom weren’t moving. Others around him were. More moaning and confused cries than moving.

  “Hey,” he barely whispered down the bowl, but still it felt too loud. “You guys alright?”

  He’d never forget the look on the woman’s face at the bottom of the chamber. Her mouth hung open and his beam revealed a wet line of spittle looping out. Her eyes were gray, and he wondered how he could possibly know from that distance, but

  the floating ball flashed again, not as brightly, or maybe it was and he’d adjusted, but Chavez thought he saw a passageway open directly across the expanse, a passageway exactly like the one he’d used to enter the chamber. With the flash came a great tendril of energy that lashed out, down that passage. At the same time, the four people at the bottom of the bowl began to fly up. He didn’t believe it, but they did, flew up, flew through the floating ball of purest white light, a thin stream of their constituent parts splashing out the other side, guided down that passage, and then he died as he was pulled in and through and

  “Assault A, come in.” The command center was a fury of chatter. “Assault A, report.”

  “Eyelines are dead, sir.” The engineer watched the last of the head-mounted cams blink out.

  What the array of cameras had displayed after the initial white had been confusing at best: twenty-four displays suddenly savagely displaced as twenty-four people were knocked back. Eyeline-04A lolled as if its carrier’s neck had been broken, but the image focused briefly on the center of the room, giving the assembly a brief glimpse at the floating orb, a swirling, building illumination, and then white nothing.

  “Send in Assault B, god damn it!” Cervera had a way of barking orders that any dog would have envied.

  “Tony, we—”

  Jennings hated it when she narrowed her eyes at him, so she did. “We need to know what’s going on down there.”

  “So we just keep sending in more troops? What happens when we run out?”

  “You’re safe, Mr. President. Send in Assault B.” She repeated her command, and her underlings communicated wordlessly with nods and tappings. New eyelines snapped into life on the display. “Fancy up and filter that last transmission. And someone get me some fucking physicals! Are we in any danger here?”

  “Physicals run, sir.” Another nameless engineer stuttered out from his panel. “Normal across the board—radiological, chemical—”

  “Any change, you tell me.” Cervera had a way of gripping any situation and steeling herself. “Status, Assault B?”

  “B ready, sir.”

  “Insert. Get this to Richter.”

  Somewhere above the planet flying roughly over Nebraska on a wedge of composite and titanium, James Richter responded to the chime. He removed his link from his wallet; his heart jumped a little at the incoming superblack icon.

  He was the only passenger in the compartment, indeed, on that flight, so he slid the link into his seat’s display. He exhaled slowly, his eyes closed. He cleared his throat and opened his eyes to the second-long burst of data that flashed from the panel.

  He gasped, his hand reaching instinctively to his heart as his latticed mindwork began to puzzle over and assemble probabilities and contexts. He thought the name Holmdel for the first time in one year and seven months, really devoted thought to Titicaca for the first time in three years and eight months. He’d learned to bury.

  If it’s true—

  It couldn’t be true.

  But if it is—

  He put his link back in his pocket and attempted to will the wedge forward to Wyoming.

  “You what?”

  Jennings at least attempted a look of the guilt he genuinely felt. Cervera just met Richter’s gaze and threw it back unused.

  “We’ve sent more teams in.”

  “How many?”

  Without hesitation: “Five. We’re gaining valuable new data with each attempt.”

  Richter just scoffed in disbelief. “Don’t we have robots for insertions in threat zones? You know, threat zones inside of alien fucking vessels buried underneath mountains? Little tank-tracked numbers, with instruments and cameras and weapons? Or did I just make that up?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean—We have robots.” An engineer, listening in, turned from his console, surprised at his own volunteering of an opinion in the charged atmosphere of the command center. “But Secretary—”

  “We thought it best to get a first-hand look.” A gofer handed Cervera another glass. She scanned it and threw it onto the growing pile.

  “The Holmdel Directive specifically states—”

  “There wasn’t any indication that the chamber was—”

  “You didn’t think the big floating ball at the center might have been a threat?”

  Neither Cervera nor Jennings had any response.

  “No more.” Richter shook his head and waved his glass to black. “Shut it down. We’re not risking any more lives for something we can’t—”

  “You don’t have the authority,” Jennings said quietly.

  “The Directive hands final authority over any encounter scenario to the agent in—”

  “Holmdel’s dead.”

  Richter considered the possibility of his own disappearance if he didn’t tone down.

  “Then at least slow down. Send machines into the chamber. Get a better idea of what that thing is before wasting any more people.” Richter tipped a glass from the table. It displayed the torn, bleeding pile of what had been Assault B. “Take your time with this. The vessel’s been buried for sixty-five million—”

  “We don’t have the time.”

  “You’re afraid of War Four breaking out? Neighbors to the north?”

  “How did you—”

  “Everyone knows. They’re up to something. And y
ou want this alien technology—whatever it is—as a weapon. Then fucking research it first. Don’t just throw men at it.”

  “And women.”

  “And women.” Richter scanned through more images of bodies bent, twisted, pulped. “All I’m saying is slow down. We spent years going over every square inch of Titicaca. Give me a blueprint.”

  A holoprint image of the buried vessel sparked to life on the main display. Richter walked to it, studied it.

  “This area,” he pointed to the starboard nacelle, “is missing something. See the difference?”

  Jennings and Cervera blanked.

  “A smaller sphere. Not the floating one in the central chamber in the connecting hub. Note the conduits running through the twist points, the nacelle sockets.” Reynald poked the holo, which smudged and rebounded. “That floating ball is directly between two similar chambers, one on each wing of the vessel. One of those connected chambers has a spherical slug of metal secured inside. The other’s empty.”

  “Not following.”

  “We found what I suspect are pieces of that missing ball spread throughout South America. That thing shattered as it was ejected before impact. The ship is on a straight-line trajectory from the Titicaca site, and fragments of that shattered ball have been found from Uruguay to Peru.” He slaved a hemisphere map from his personal link.

  “Why didn’t I fucking know this?” Jennings barely contained a lethal frustration.

  “You didn’t need to know this.” Richter swiped a red line across the floating map, connecting the dots between Uruguay and Wyoming. “And I didn’t much feel like volunteering any information after you put me on your kill list.”

  “Listen, James. All I knew was that you were close to Holmdel. After the Populace—”

  “If you want my help, I’ll need to choose my own team.”

  Cervera shook a no. “I don’t think—”

  “My own team.”

  “We can’t just bring in anyone you want…”

  Richter glared. “Cosmotech has a math egg named Hope Benton. Bring her in. And no more of these,” he wagged the autopsy glass before them, “third estate types. Guinea pigs. Send in the robots, and then we’ll talk about sending people in again.”