The Noah Satellite

by Allan E Petersen

“I’ve been assigned an important mission.”

  Surprised, Pia responded,

  “Me too.”

  It didn’t take a genius to realize both had been called to duty. Stopping at the office door, each paused to catch their breath. It would not do for them to run in huffing and puffing.

  With both standing practically at attention in front of her desk, Maria tried to stifle a smile. She liked to see enthusiasm for a project in her crew but what Helga was exhibiting was practically over and above mere exuberance. She explained the mission to Helga first. Although it was to be an easy and simple mission, Maria kept that from her, simply relating what was to be expected of her. As if Helga’s head was spring loaded, she was nodding up and down at every instruction.

  Pointing to a corner of the office, Maria said,

  “For the sake of a secret Intel mission I think it best if the assignment is done under the cover of darkness. On that desk are hi-tech high resolution night vision goggles along with other items I think you might need for the mission.”

  Both walked over and inspected various requirements of the trade. The night vision googles looked like a pair of large sunglasses. Maria said,

  “When they are put on, an alien technology automatically starts recording but not transmitting what you are seeing.”

  When Helga tried a pair on, Pia laughed and said,

  “Ha, with those big black eyes you look like a Great Gray alien.”

  Not pleased at the comparison, they were quickly removed and put back on the table.

  While Helga was going through the supply bags, Maria called Pia back to her desk. She explained her fear of contaminating the isolated people with diseases they were not immune to and so said,

  “Go to the supply building and pack two quarantine suits.”

  Pia countered the request with,

  “They are white and glossy, easily reflecting light. Plus they are awkward. In my laboratory in Spain I have developed an aerosol spray blocking all contagious deceases. We can easily wear something black and with the spray prevent such infections.”

  Quick to understand the simplicity and ease of such an application Maria said,

  “Fine, you are the genius of such things. On your way to Siberia stop by and pick that up.”

  Maria did a good job of prepping them for the mission, what to look out for and what was expected from them. The most important warning was to heed the onboard D-wing computer warnings and only approach at ground level, or at least only a few feet off the ground and under the protective dome.

  “When exploring the village under the dome gathering Intel and DNA samples, because it is a language unrelated to any other in the world I want you to look around and see if there is such a thing as a children’s book with words and pictures. Those elementary books are usually a simpler language and the pictures relate to the text making translation easier.”

  And then,

  “Do what you have to do, but get ready to leave in a few hours.”

  Chapter 46

  When Helga entered the hangar, Pia was already there and talking to Henrik. The attraction between those two, although they tried to keep a low profile was blatantly clear to pretty well everybody in the House. As the pilot, Helga was not immune to the tediousness of the pre-trip and craft inspection. Like everybody else, there were papers to sign. After loading supplies, both prepared to climb into the vehicle. It was no surprise for Helga to see Pia get a hug and good-bye kiss from a very concerned Henrik. He, like Santo also did not like ‘simple missions’. As Helga piloted the D-wing high into the atmosphere, he stood on the ground waving good-bye.

  At a specific height, Helga entered coordinates for their laboratory in Spain. While flying together for the first time, it was an exciting time for both. Although they knew much about each other from meetings and gatherings, they really never knew personal things about each other. Now on their way across Europe, Pia was more interested in keeping the conversation away from her relationship with Henrik and so mostly asked Helga questions about her and Waldorf. How did they meet, how long have they been together and such.

  At one point Helga mentioned that she once had long flowing black hair but was now cut to what she thought to be a short and sassy look.

  “Why did you cut it?”

  “Oh, it was easier to maintain and besides, Waldorf liked it better.”

  Although Pia was pretty well convinced that she would never cut her hair just for the pleasure of a man, she said,

  “Well, I think it looks good on you.”

  Then an unintended insult snuck forward,

  “I think for a woman your age you look beautiful.”

  Although Helga tried very hard, it was difficult to accept it as a compliment.

  A few minutes later the D-wing automatically programed for descent and entered stealth mode. Nearly invisible, it gently settled on the ‘H’ of the laboratory roof. As if waiting for them to arrive, Helga saw an elderly woman standing off to the side. Concerned, she asked Pia,

  “She will see us. Please tell me she is one of ours.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s my boss Zely Rivas. I called earlier and asked her to have my quarantine spray ready.”

  When the camouflaged D-wing cockpit opened, Zely got the impression she was seeing two women sitting in mid-air from the waist up. Not a stranger to House of the Nazarene technology, she approached on Pia’s side and handed the aerosol canister to her. She said,

  “So, Waldorf was telling me the truth this time. I had the distinct feeling that he was lying to me when saying you were on a mission for a few more days.”

  Because Helga didn’t know anything about that, confusion flashed across her face.

  Helga and Zely Rivas had never met, so what Zely said next was not intended as an insult although it certainly felt that way.

  “That man is a dreadful old goat. You keep an eye on him.”

  Helga seemed pleased to slam the canopy shut in her face. As the D-wing set a course for Siberia, Pia was glad to see that lies can at times become true. She really was on a mission for the House of the Nazarene. After a few minutes of silence, Helga hissed,

  “That boss of yours is certainly a scary old hag isn’t she.”

  Pia laughed and said,

  “You don’t want to be near her when she gets mad.”

  Chapter 47

  Now hovering high above the mysterious Siberian Triangle, Helga programed for a visual of the strange invisible dome that terminated electronic devices causing disastrous results to planes and pretty well anything coming into range. Both were astonished at its enormity. Looking at the screen, Pia whistled and said,

  “So that’s what a thousand square miles of barren and frozen land looks like.”

  Helga added,

  “No wonder it is called the land of the dead.”

  Staying well clear of the restriction, Helga piloted to the edge and lowered to the ground. Apparently Presha Bhat was right. Her hovering satellite indicated that the electronic disruptor field did not touch the ground. Pia looked at the gap between energy shield and ground and asked,

  “That’s only about four feet. Do you really think we can squeeze in there?”

  The Siberian landscape was endless miles of tundra, trees and swamp. Why anybody would risk entering on foot teetered on insanity. However, perhaps such was the purpose of this location. Isolation and danger seemed to be a great deterrent for explorers and hunters. Hovering inches off the ground they faced a forest of trees so dense that the D-wing penetration seemed unlikely. Helga programed for contact avoidance and said,

  “We will find out in a minute. If we can’t, the avoidance program will stop us.”

  She then looked to a concerned Pia and said,

  “Hang onto your hat, here we go.”

  Because of the separate onboard gravity system, sitting in the D-wing had always been a comfort no matter the G Forces exerted on the outside shell. Even if it turned upside down, ever
ybody always sat comfortably inside and oblivious to the outside gravity. It was for this reason that neither felt the G force of the D-wing suddenly entering the forest at the speed of a bullet. The speed and zig-zag of the avoidance radar program caused such a blur outside that all Pia saw was what looked like one massive tree trunk zooming by. Nervous, she turned to Helga and asked,

  “Do we have to go so fast?”

  “No, but the village is far in there. If I took control to avoid the trees, it would take us too long to get there. Best we let the computers do their job.”

  Wanting to take her eyes off what she considered a reckless speed through a dense forest, more aptly to take her mind from a crash, Pia lowered her gaze to the computer screen. The race through the forest was reminiscent of a video game played by a teenager hyped up on coffee and junk food. There was not much room between the limits of the mysterious shield just inches above them and the ground. She was not aware of how nervous she sounded when saying,

  “Not much room here huh?”

  Knowing that if the Siberian Shield so much as touched them their computers would die and so would they, Helga tried not to return the anxiety.

  “We have to trust the computers.”

  After a few minutes, the D-wing, although still going fast, slowed down to what both considered a comfortable speed. Helga said,

  “We must be getting close.”

  Only then did Pia start breathing again. It was now possible to see trees and ground without the blur. As it skimmed just off the ground, Pia looked out the canopy window and said,

  “Wow, all I see is a dark scary forest and swamp. Why would anybody want to live here?”

  Helga agreed and added,

  “There is no indication of animal life or even birds. It’s like a ghost forest.”

  They had now slowed to a crawl, an indication they had reached their destination.

  Suddenly everything went from a dark gloomy and very scary forest to bright and sunny. To both their eyes it was as sudden and painful as turning on a light in the middle of the night. After a few blinks and a shake of their heads, they realized that they were at the edge of the bleak forest and high on a hill looking down into a green valley. After scanning the area, Helga realized how wrong the estimation of the village was. It was massive and sandwiched between a small mountain at the far end looking more like a giant mound and pastureland with farms and barns in front of them.

  Before it got dark, Helga wanted to get a closer look at the village and so programmed for manual control. She looked to Pia and said,

  “Let’s go have a look.”

  Suddenly Pia grew concerned saying,

  “But we have to inoculate ourselves first.”

  As the D-wing slowly drifted down the hill and across pasture land to the edge of the village Helga explained,

  “No, we are not leaving the vehicle, just sneaking around for a look.”

  In the field were horses, cows and sheep. Chickens seemed to be free range running about everywhere. Helga thought they might have time-looped into the past. That is until she saw modern day machinery in the fields, tractors, harvesters and barns with massive silos. It was a confliction of modern and old.

  If she thought they had somehow gone back in time, such impossibility was enforced when looking at the village. Most of the houses had thatched roofs looking very much like a village that King Author’s Knights might have ridden through on horseback. Some of the streets in the middle of the village were cobble stone but along the perimeter they were simply dirt packed. As Pia looked at a village synonymous with a fairy tale, she was prompted to say,

  “What a strange village.”

  How right she was.

  Staying above the rooftops and hidden from view in stealth mode, Helga slowly piloted toward the center of the village where there was a concentration of people milling about. She wanted to have a look at who lived here. While looking at a crowd of people near the open market, Pia was surprised and certainly glad that they were humans, at least by appearance. It was only on closer scrutiny that the observation hinged on bizarre.

  They were human, but like the confliction of old and new in the farmland, such was the case here as well. Her shock stemmed from what they were wearing. Even Helga was prompted to say,

  “That’s odd huh?”

  In the crowd, a few of the men, maybe five or six were wearing tattered pilot suits like those worn when flying jets. Helga recognized the insignia of the Imperial Russian Air Service, a squadron active during the First World War. The perplexity twirling though her head was how they got here and why were they walking around the village as if they belonged. She voiced a thought but the slow way it came out indicated that she was not sure.

  “I think that maybe during the First World War maybe they entered the so-called Siberian Triangle and got caught in it. Perhaps they are prisoners of this secret place.”

  Pia disagreed and said,

  “They don’t look or act like prisoners.”

  Inches above the rooftops, the D-wing turned and scanned the rest of the crowd and other peculiarities were presented. Judging by their clothing and appearance, some were ancient Mongolians and Slavic. She was sure that she saw a Scandinavian man and woman wearing the attire of Vikings and walking about looking at a tray of farm produce for sale. Pia summed it up into a neat package saying,

  “It’s certainly a confusion of time and a hodgepodge of genetics isn’t it?”

  Helga was so struck by the strange gene pool that she could only nod her compliance.

  Pia was the first to notice it. Although they were in stealth mod, some members of the menagerie down below occasionally glanced up in their direction. She was sure that they were looking right at her. An old Japanese man pointed right at them and said something to the crowd who turned to see what the mystery was. Helga was quick to duck the D-wing behind the roof and zip back to the shelter of the forest. On their way across the field, Pia asked,

  “You recorded all this right?”

  “You bet your sweet Auntie May I did.”

  Although she did not have a sweet Auntie May, she took the strange reply as a ‘yes’.

  Chapter 48

  While waiting in the forest for the cover of darkness, there was a conversation about the oddity of the village. Helga contributed,

  “According to what Maria told me, this isolated village has been here for thousands of years. Although that might be true, the village is not big enough to sustain a small population over such a long time span by its own genetics.”

  Just to make sure she understood what was said, Pia asked,

  “You are referring to inbreeding right?”

  “Yes, these diverse people, or different genetics is probably a breeding stock. Maybe that’s how whoever has lived here for thousands of years have been able to sustain their population, capturing and keeping everybody trapped by the energy field.”

  Again, Pia voiced what she thought she noticed down in the village marketplace.

  “They didn’t act unhappy or like prisoners.”

  When darkness fell over the village, Helga looked to Pia and said,

  “Shall we get on with the mission?”

  Because it was too long of a walk across the farmland to the village, it was decided to fly down and hide the D-wing somewhere in the shadows of the barns. After a short search for such a location, Helga thought the perfect place would be behind a barn closest to the outskirts. Under cover of both camouflage and darkness she piloted to it.

  Landing close to a bale of hay, they prepared to comply with the mission objective. Both understood that Maria would be as befuddled over the bio-diversity of the human DNA as they were when seeing such a varied population. Helga understood that the reason for recovery of written material was to compare it to the language found on the Black Knight. With this diverse culture of humans, Helga knew Maria would be disappointed. There were no aliens here.

  Before opening the canopy, Pia got
on with the procedure of inoculating against spreading germs among the pristine population. From her supply bag she pulled out what looked like a thin one piece outfit of a black synthetic material. In the small confines of the cockpit it was a comedy of struggling, twisting and contorting but finally both were covered from head to toe in black. After putting on surgical masks, the rest of the procedure needed to take place outside. Deeming that it was safe to open the canopy both jumped out and stood beside it. After hours confined to a cramped space, they took a minute to stretch out the kinks.

  Pia reached back into the cockpit and pulled out the aerosol spray. She said,

  “Put the night lenses on first.”

  Although it was a dark night, putting them on turned everything into a time that could have been a bright afternoon. She sprayed Helga all over and then indicated for her to do the same to her. Taking a step back to look at Helga, Pia pointed and laughed. Knowing that she was not wearing her Sunday best, Helga became indignant and asked,

  “What? Is something showing?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that with the anti-virus spray on the black outfit and the big dark night vision glasses, you look like an alien with no mouth.”

  The House of the Nazarene law about sending the D-wing high into the clouds to await a return signal obviously was not possible in this case. She was not willing to send it into the so-called dome of the Siberian Triangle and have it somehow captured like those diverse people. Though still in stealth mode and hard to see in the dark, they nevertheless covered it with hay from the nearby hay pile.