Overture

by Mark Wandrey

  * * *

  Osgood spent the most terrifying 10 minutes of his life in a pile of human bodies on the floor of what had been a secondary operations trailer at the portal camp. When the first few gunshots went off, the two people who were guarding them (a man in street clothes and a woman dressed like a jogger) became extremely nervous. They alternately pointed their weapons at the scientists sitting and standing at the rear of the crowded space and at the door. As the level of gunfire escalated dramatically, the man shouted something unintelligible at the woman and then rushed out into the growing battle.

  Osgood felt annoyed after being rushed out of the dome, and those feelings progressed to disgust as they jammed him in with dozens of other people who were, like him, hostages. When the shooting started, he hoped someone would soon rescue him. Mere seconds later a bullet shot through the trailer, just over their heads, with a crack and a shower of plastic that changed his momentary elation to fear.

  “Get down you idiots!” the lone woman guarding them snarled. Osgood didn’t need to have it explained in detail. He clumsily slid off the chair he’d been sitting in, a preferred place proffered to him because of his status, and onto the cold floor. When they were all moving, the woman half turned and cracked the door open, the pistol she wielded held tightly in her right hand. A bullet blew half her head off and sprayed the interior of the trailer with blood, brains, and bone.

  There had been silence for a half second, while the dead woman stood as if nothing had happened, but then she fell as if in slow motion. Then the screaming began. What had been a slow, almost reluctant descent of people onto the floor, became a panicked, impromptu mosh pit of bodies. Osgood yelped in alarm as he found himself at the bottom of a stack of people, painfully crushed into the linoleum tiles. He felt something wet on one leg and didn’t know if it was blood from the dead cultist, or someone losing control of their bladder. Neither would have surprised him.

  Osgood couldn’t remember how long he spent at the bottom of the pile, but before long, people began to struggle for position. Some at the bottom (like him) tried to get clear so they could move or breathe. Others wanted to get further down. Then something hit him in the head, and he lost consciousness.

  When he woke up, he was on the floor with a medical team rapidly going over him. He tried for a few seconds to numbly push away the medic who was attempting to take his blood pressure. Another medic took his hand to stop him from interfering.

  “Do you know where you are?” a voice asked.

  “Earth?” he replied, and a couple people laughed. “Am I shot?”

  “No,” someone answered, “but you have a minor concussion.”

  “I want to sit up,” he said. There was some brief talk between several people, then hands reached under his back to help him sit up, and he got a view of his surroundings. He gasped, it looked like the inside of a butcher shop. There was blood everywhere, and most of the figures lying on the floor were not moving. “What happened?”

  One of the medics returned some of his instruments to his backpack and glanced around the room with a shake of his head before speaking.

  “During the battle, this trailer was apparently sprayed with gunfire several times. You’re lucky—we found you under several dead people.” For the first time Osgood looked down at himself and realized blood completely soaked his khaki pants and white lab coat. He suddenly felt worse.

  “How many dead?” The man shrugged, and that was worse than knowing a specific number. Two men dressed in body armor with rifles stood by the door, the letters NSA stitched in white on their vests. One of them spoke to him while keeping an eye out.

  “Almost a hundred dead cultists, less than half that many friendlies.”

  “I can live with those numbers,” the other agent said, to which the first one nodded. Osgood swallowed. These people were willing to accept 50 dead innocents.

  “What about the portal?” he asked.

  “The thing in the dome?” the first agent who’d spoken asked. “Far as I know, it’s fine.”

  “I need to see,” he said.

  “You’d better wait for the physician,” the medic said.

  “No,” Osgood insisted and began to struggle to his feet. Left with the choice of holding him down or helping him, the medics elected to help.

  * * *

  “Any idea who he was?” LTC Wilson asked. Private Lipstitch, their only medic, knelt in the dew-soaked grass and finished putting away his instruments. The body of the black man was still lying at the bottom of the dais steps where he’d come to rest after falling through the portal, eyes staring up at the night sky. The tiny greenish face of the moon SGT Simpson had named Romulus was almost below the trees now. It was nearly overhead when the dying man fell through.

  “Not a clue,” SGT Simpson said. She’d remained stunned and out of sorts since the incident. She’d told Wilson about what she’d witnessed of the few moments of battle back on Earth around the portal. The rest of their team, minus the explorer, Abbot, were standing nearby, watching. Wilson looked up at the portal which had remained quiet since the man fell through. They’d been due for another transfer of personnel and equipment. There was enough food for the time being, and the giant Komodo sloth creatures cooked up quite well. Still, he worried about subsisting on local food sources prior to more testing.

  “What do we do with the body?” the medic asked.

  “I have the feeling we’ll need a place to bury people,” Wilson said. “Unless they figure out how to get us home.” He looked around the clearing, past where they were well into constructing the third log building. They had a sizeable pile of cut logs nearby, harvested using a trio of battery-powered chainsaws. They had set up 20 solar panels in the center of the clearing, special ultra-light panels designed by NASA for use on Mars, and they used those to charge the bank of batteries which ran the settlement’s equipment. Well past the logs was the place where the trees they had brought grew. Ft. Eden was growing quickly, even with the small team he had and the near-constant harassment from the Komodo sloths.

  “Over there,” Wilson said and pointed. “Pick an area clear of stumps and plant him there. Make sure it is far enough from the shallow well we dug on the other side of the portal.” He looked up at the men waiting nearby, who all nodded somberly. The team assembled an improvised stretcher to move the corpse.

  With obvious effort, the sergeant tore her gaze away from the blood-soaked grass and looked up at the colonel who was watching the portal.

  “What do we do if they don’t reestablish contact?” she asked.

  “Survive,” he said. A second later, the portal sprang to life.

  * * *

  “We’re fine over here,” Osgood said through the laser relay. “A lot of people died.”

  “We know,” Wilson said, talking through a headset left on the laser communicator. “A man fell through after being shot. Black guy in street clothes.”

  “Did he survive?” Osgood asked. Wilson shook his head.

  “No. SGT Simpson found him, and he died almost immediately. Our medic says he took three bullets. We’re burying him right now. Do you know his name?”

  “Yes,” Osgood said. “Victor Smith. He was the leader of the group that attacked us.”

  “Crazy, then?”

  “More like misguided,” Osgood said. “We’re going to put the pieces back together and try to recommence operations tomorrow.” The portal timed out and shut down, leaving Wilson standing under the alien stars. The portal didn’t come back on again, so he replaced the headset and turned away.

  “What now?” SGT Simpson asked.

  “I’m going to go tell the burial detail what their charge’s name is and see if we can put together a simple marker. Tomorrow, we pick up where we left off.” Above, Romulus fell below the trees.

  * * *

  At NASA’s Cape Canaveral launch center, the thunderous roar of a rocket broke the quiet of the April evening. Millions of pounds of thrust hurtled t
he huge rocket into the night sky. Because of the late hour, many of the residents of Cocoa Beach and many soldiers at Patrick AFB looked up in surprise. NASA usually publicized the Cape’s launch schedules, even the classified ones, well in advance, and there was heavy attendance at these events by officials and the public. An unscheduled launch hadn’t happened since the days before the Mercury program.

  As the roar of the launch broke across the countryside, those familiar with such events went outdoors and remarked on the difference. The rocket was huge. No one had seen anything like it since the days of Apollo with its titanic Saturn V boosters. This vehicle had a central booster built around a tank, similar to what the now-retired space shuttle used, and it included a pair of solid rocket boosters on the outside. It was the space launch system, or SLS, which had yet to fly.

  The glowing contrails climbed into the sky and disappeared over the horizon, leaving those who witnessed the event searching the internet in vain or staring in wonder. Barely 10 minutes later, another SLS booster roared into the night sky. Hundreds of phones recorded the event, which was all over the news by the next morning. NASA remained completely silent, going so far as to stop all press at the gate.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  April 26

  Mindy sat in the little workspace they’d provided her with and fumed. After her first meeting with Skinner last night, they’d issued her an ID and took her to a hotel where she’d gotten some sleep. At seven that morning, an agent pounding on the door woke her up. He told her she had 30 minutes to be ready to leave. She’d hurried through a shower and dressed in time to again hear pounding on her door. A different agent checked her new ID before leading her down the hall. The agent escorted her and a group of others down to the lobby, gave them a sack breakfast (bagel, cream cheese, and bottle of water), and marched them to the park.

  Everywhere on the street were signs of the previous day’s battles. Chips from concrete, broken windows, scorch marks, and obvious blood stains were but a few indications of what transpired. They were a desultory bunch as they moved through the war zone and into the park.

  She got a view of the portal dome as they took everyone to a brand new, portable trailer, full of computer workstations, and ordered them inside. As they entered, someone checked their IDs, then the supervisor inside showed her to one of the workstations. There was a card waiting with her name on it.

  Mindy, welcome to the project. Please pick up where you left off. I’ve included more direct observations from the other side. We’ll talk soon when I have time. L. Skinner

  “What about direct access?” she mumbled as she read her ID information off the card and logged into the system. The network was government-maintained with a high degree of security. The system immediately prompted her to create a new password. Once inside, she found an entire drive dedicated to her research, with all her old materials duplicated and ready. She’d already noticed that she had two of the biggest monitors in the trailer.

  She spent the morning trying to concentrate and failing. Her email account allowed only internal communications, so she sent a message to Leo asking how long it would be before they granted her direct access to the portal. “Soon,” was all he replied.

  Just when she was wondering if someone was going to feed them, another NSA agent came in and escorted them to a portable military-style mess hall. He waited patiently by the door while they ate. It was the first chance she had to speak to any of the others sharing her workspace.

  “I’m Mindy,” she said to a girl sitting next to her.

  “Sarah,” the woman replied and shook Mindy’s hand. “Are you in logistics, too?”

  “No,” Mindy said, “astronomer.” Sarah looked confused and shook her head.

  “The rest of us are logistics types,” Sarah explained. “We were all working in office spaces in midtown before the attack happened. I understand everyone was moved here afterward.”

  “What do you do exactly?” Mindy asked, playing dumb. She’d worked for years as a customs broker; she probably knew more about logistics than Sarah.

  “We coordinate everything needed to keep the camp operating,” Sarah explained. “This morning we received a bunch of orders to start moving stuff from warehouses all over the region.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Weird stuff,” Sarah said, “not the kind of stuff we’ve moved before. Eric had a requisition for an ultralight airplane, of all things.”

  Mindy pretended to listen and chat while they spent an hour eating. Afterward, another agent took them back to their trailer. She noticed their escort was a different person every time. Security was crazy high, and she had to show her ID at every step. Back at her desk, she began reviewing images of the star field on the other side of the portal, but kept thinking about what Sarah had said, knowing what it likely meant.

  * * *

  “We tried to tell you that launching Excalibur would cause a shit storm in the media,” one of the men said. The room was small and crudely constructed. It consisted of a four-sided concrete bunker lined on two sides with high-definition plasma screens, a service area and restroom on one side, and the exit on the other. Outside was a hallway that contained another dozen rooms just like it, a quarter of a mile under Washington DC.

  On one screen, a figure looked at the man sitting in the room. State of the art software known as “Occlumency,” only available to government contractors and the software firm that developed it, made his features impossible to determine and likewise record. The NSA bought the company that created the software, deemed the entirety of its research top secret, and kept its products from reaching the public. The man in the room knew who had spoken though, just as he knew the identity of the other three men and one woman looking at him through cameras. He also knew his own image was unreadable, courtesy of Occlumency.

  “Of course,” he said and made a dismissive gesture. “But the only way to maintain containment for even a few more days was to try.”

  “So, it can’t work?” the woman asked. The man shrugged before speaking.

  “Skinner tells me it’s even odds. He quoted a lot of headache-inducing numbers on the speed of the object, potential mass, yada, yada, yada.” Four heads bobbed. “We need to continue preparations.” Everyone agreed.

  Nine miles away in Langley VA, a group of men sat in a similar bunker and watched the same conversation. It was slightly distorted, the result of their own version of Occlumency un-scrambling the coded algorithms and recreating the images. It wasn’t known at the NSA, but the company which created Occlumency was an FBI front charged with developing the software with an air of public normalcy. They’d been in the process of concocting a story to explain the company’s going out of business when the NSA stepped in and did it all for them. It saved quite a few million dollars, not that those sorts of off-the-books operations counted if the dollars involved weren’t in the billions.

  The people on the screens finished and severed their connections. Sophisticated interception protocols kicked in and made certain there were no traces of the untraceable calls being traced. The three men turned to face each other.

  “The lead from that astronomer girl out of Seattle proved valuable,” one man said. The other two nodded.

  “We knew that as soon as NASA started moving those boosters in place,” one of them said.

  “The HRT leader’s debriefing confirms the last piece,” the third said. “It is a portal to some other planet. His camera left no doubt.” Prior to watching the live conference with the NSA/CIA, they’d watched the interview with the commander of the HRT unit that had done the jump into Central Park. He’d been less than happy not to know what was going on, especially after five of his men died and another lost a leg because of a .50 caliber machine gun.

  The low-light, infrared cameras the HRT carried recorded incredible footage of someone shooting the cult leader and his falling though the portal, instantly appearing in a forest somewhere else.
FBI analysts had reviewed those frames and spotted two species of trees that didn’t exist on Earth. In fact, nothing like them had for millions of years.

  “There are 11 other portals all over the planet,” the first to speak said. “They must be an escape route. The impact of that asteroid is going to be much worse than NASA says. Much, much worse, or I’m a teenage school girl.”

  “Of course, NASA is lying,” the last of them said. “Dr. Leo Skinner is running the operation in Central Park. Their people swept in immediately, once they realized what it was.”

  “But when did it change from analysis to cover-up and planned appropriation?” another asked. None of them knew. “We have to consider that this might go all the way to the top.”

  “My people in the White House say POTUS is clueless.” One of the others whistled low and slow.

  “What’s the plan?” the one who whistled eventually asked.

  “Observe and move assets into place?” the first to speak asked. They looked around at each other, and eventually they all agreed. “Let’s bring the HRT leader into the loop. The fewer people who know, the less chance things will get out of hand.” Again, they all agreed.

  * * *

  “Alright, quiet down!” the detective captain barked. Slowly the room settled, and the conversation fell away. “The chief tasked me with briefing you on what you probably already know.”

  “Like the chief knows shit,” someone mumbled, and laughter rippled through the room.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the captain snapped, and everyone became silent again. “Last night, a team of FBI HRT parachuted into the park. Along with federal agents, they neutralized all the cultists.”

  “How many are in custody?” someone asked. The captain looked annoyed, but answered.