Allan whispered, “Thank you,” but Pith didn’t seem to notice.
“C’mon professor, you’re needed.” Pith said the last word like a bug had crawled into his mouth.
“Don’t you have anybody else you can harass?”
“I wish. You were on the president’s list, not mine. You liberal types are a dime a dozen at MIT, problem is MIT’s still under water.”
“You sound truly heartbroken.”
“Mr. Sands, I took an oath to protect every last citizen of this country with my life! Even bleeding heart professors that vote bleeding heart presidents to be my boss. But I have the same rights to complain about it you do.”
“Sorry, General, I’m just so tired, can’t you come back later?”
“We’re all tired. Soldiers up top have to sleep with one eye open and one finger on the trigger. But I suppose I was trained to handle times like this; you weren’t. I’ll try and remember that. I can’t come back later though-need your eyes on something right now.”
“Just let me get dressed and I’ll take a look.”
Pith turned his eyes away from Allan’s flab hastily disappearing under a base-issued gray shirt. “By the way, Doctor, I’ve some information that might put some pep back in your step, or at least help you sleep at night.”
Pith licked his lips. He liked to see broken hearts mend, even bleeding ones. “Your wife and kids are here.”
“What!” Allan leaped up at attention, belt still unbuckled.
“Thought that might wake you up. Yeah, they’re fine. They’re asleep right now. Let’s get this done before they wake up, then you can go see ‘em.”
“Thank you. Yes, of course.”
Allan’s mind riveted with another jolt of adrenaline. He’d do anything Pith asked if it meant seeing his family. He could see the finish line. He buckled his belt. “Okay, what do you need?”
Pith looked up at a dark spot in the corner of the ceiling. “Not here.”
“What? Are they watching me?”
“Can’t be helped, you’re a civilian in the most secure military complex in the world. These rooms aren’t usually used for storing friendlies.”
Allan shuddered at what that meant. This had to be one of the CIA’s famous black sites. How many dead terrorists haunted his bunk? He stifled his curiosity and anger, reminding himself he was one more interrogation away from seeing his family.
He came to the door and motioned for Pith to lead on, suddenly realizing how much he might have in common with the former occupants. Were they lying to him too, promises about family reunions only used for motivation in a never ending con-game? At least they didn’t torture him, although wasn’t sleep deprivation a form of that?
They walked briskly down the dim lodging corridor, looking even more like a prison after the Pith’s admission of the former inhabitants. After making a few turns in the underground maze they came to a room with two armed guards. The guards saluted Pith, went inside the room, and emerged again. “Room secure, sir.”
Pith saluted back but said nothing. He ushered Allan inside, where there were a few steel chairs sitting at a noticeably bruised table in front of an obvious two-way mirror. Allan had always thought of the roundabouts in the war room as interrogations, but now he was in a real interrogation room. Also unlike the other rooms, his fellow scientists, and Pith’s coworkers, were missing. Allan began to realize, despite his outward pomp, that Pith not only needed him for something, but needed him to keep very quiet about it.
Allan’s thoughts broadcast involuntarily from his gentle face.
Pith rolled his eyes. “Yes, you’re my ‘special’ consultant this morning, and I’ll make life real hard for you if you spill any of this to your buddies—or mine—before I’m good and ready.”
“Right.”
“Good.” Pith took out a tablet and handed it to Allan. “I got the infrared shots you requested. Nobody else has seen these yet and I need your take so I don’t waltz in front of the president with nothing I can prove.”
Allan studied the photos on the device while Pith kept complaining.
“You know how hard it was to reroute and pilot a Global Hawk to Mojave? Most of the drones in the air crashed in the Event, before they could switch over from GPS. The boys in blue have been very stingy with ‘em since they haven’t worked out all the kinks of driving on a pure inertial navigation system. That’s why all those other stills were from U2s; plop a kid in the cockpit and he goes up, navigates with his eyes, and comes back. No engineers or satellites required. You know, I twisted a lot of wrists to get you these pictures, so if you can’t tell me something—”
“Of course!” Allan exclaimed. “That’s what they’re doing.”
“Keep talking.”
Allan smirked and put his fingers on one of the U2 images, taken on a sunny day. He ran his fingers up from one of the slender, black stacks emerging from the alien facility in the desert.
“You can tell a lot more about the Sun by looking at it in infrared and ultraviolet than with sunglasses, General.”
“Cut the bullshit, Sands. I got about ninety minutes before NORAD and everybody else puts their peepers on these. Why are you pointing at clouds?”
“Well, you can’t actually ‘see’ them, but you can see the effect of what I’m pointing at.” Allan zoomed in on the photo. “Look here, above the complex, at what look like heat waves.”
Allan pulled up an infrared image from the Global Hawk. “The complex is absorbing the heat. This confirms my earlier postulate that the black nanite material is an incredibly efficient endothermic energy source.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning those ‘heat waves’ in the clouds aren’t heat at all. They’ve got a space elevator.”
“An invisible space elevator? If they have cloaking technology why show us their ugly faces but hide an elevator?”
Allan pointed at a wavering spot where a few clouds dipped down for a bit and back up. “I don’t think they’re hiding it at all. The heat wave lines on the visible spectrum photos are the light that did escape the elevator crisscrossing back into the sensor and making that slight change in the image.”
“Oh, yes, now I see. DARPA was working on this. An invisibility cloak, bending the light around the material.”
“Not bending light, but absorbing it. The elevator would be visible up-close, it’s just so small that you can’t see it from far away, even with your best cameras. The strand could be only a few atoms thick, possibly invisible to the human eye without a magnifying glass.”
“Well that’s an interesting theory, but I need more to go on than that. They still just look like lens smears or heat waves to me.”
Allan brought back up another infrared shot and zoomed in.
Many dark lines, only a few pixels wide, extended from the top of the black complex into the sky and beyond, out of the view of the picture.
“Water red-shifts the further it gets from solid. To our eyes it goes from glassy to clear, but in infrared, it shows up as varying wavelengths with the clouds darker, or redder, than the liquid.”
Allan waited a moment to see if Pith understood.
“Mother of God! They’re shooting the water into space.”
“I suspect they’re using thousands, maybe millions, of atom-thin pieces of that black stuff and pulling the water up, maintaining it with surface tension somehow.”
“Professor, I know you’re all proud of your deductions, but you forgot something. Water freezes before you get too high up. Remember the ice flakes on your last plane ride?”
“Not a problem for these guys. Clearly this material the strings are made of can absorb heat, so it stands to reason it could have exothermic properties as well, and if they’re doing their little operation in the daylight, it gets a lot hotter again once they get out of the mesosphere.
“But that’s not the problem. About a hundred miles up they’ll have to start bottling it or it might turn into gas when the pressure
drops too low. In fact, maybe that’s their plan all along. Once water turns to a gas in a vacuum, it cools off into ice again. At that point capturing it would be easy, especially in such small individual amounts. Frankly, it’s brilliant. Instead of using tons of energy they just use air pressure to pull it up and then use surface tension to keep it going until the problem solves itself.”
Pith looked at him with a questioning scowl.
“General, remember what happens when you put your finger over the top of a straw in a glass of water and lift it up? The water stays in the straw until you let go. That’s the pressure working. If you’ve ever siphoned gas you know how the water keeps flowing. And the reason bugs can skate on water is why it doesn’t dissipate-surface tension! All they need to do to keep the surface tension is keep the water heated or cooled to a liquid state.”
“Won’t that take them forever?”
“At pharmaceutical rates, there are about 100,000 drops in a gallon. A million strands could move ten gallons a second, 600 gallons a minute, 3,600 gallons an hour, 86,400 gallons a day—”
“I get it, I was wrong! It’s a lot of fuckin’ water.”
“Maybe. But it’s not fast enough to steal and send home. America alone must use tens of billions of gallons every day; they’d need hundreds of thousands of their little ships.”
Pith scoffed. “I surmised as much. Taking water from another planet to replace your own would be incredibly inefficient. Sounds like the plot of too many bad movies.”
“I didn’t know you were into sci-fi, General.”
“Now that some of it’s become science—fact I’ve had to acquaint myself. However, I was helped by a clue you didn’t see yet.” Pith took the tablet and rifled through file folders, bringing up a new set of images.
“What do you make of this, hot shot?”
“These are satellite photos,” Allan whispered. “But the Wenchang satellite won’t make another pass in that area for another few days.”
“That’s right, the Chinese satellite won’t.”
“You launched your own satellite? NASA is back up?”
“Nope, private enterprise. NASA would take three years under normal circumstances to get this shit kicked up there. Thank God for eminent domain and eccentric billionaires with hard-ons for Mars. So, tell me what’s going on here. What’s . . . that?”
Pith smashed his index finger into a string of white dots in an arc, getting dimmer as they receded into a star field.
“I don’t know, you have to give me more. Coordinates, the change in positions over time—something! This just looks like bright stars, but they’re in a formation so I’m guessing not. Last time I saw this it was the mother ships on their way here.”
“Okay, try these on,” Pith said as he pulled out printouts. “I don’t know what any of this is, but from the way the guy at the computer was looking at it and breathing hard I figured you would.”
Pith finally sat down, taking one of the metal chairs beside Allan. He put a hand on Allan’s back as he scoured the new information, printouts of trajectory plots, heat grading, density projections, velocity, information only available from a sophisticated satellite; the holy grail for science in the Earth’s time of need.
“Take your time, professor.” Pith checked his watch. “I’ve still got another hour.”
“You’ve kept so much from us!” Allan said, trying to quell outrage.
“You three were always on a need-to-know basis. I think you can get more out of this than the other two. Try and be grateful your old pal General Pith is showing you now.”
“This is a solar system orbital map! You had me advise the president on guesses, speculation on crumbs we salvaged from Mauna Kea. How long have you been sitting on this?”
“Don’t get too worked up, Sandy. We’ve only had eyes in the sky—er—space for six hours, you had everything we could give you before that testimony. However, I doubt anyone else was going to show you this for a while.”
Allan was unsure how to respond at first.
Pith sighed. “You know in my day when someone did you a favor you’d—”
“Thank you,” Allan blurted to get it over with.
Allan tried to speed read, but there was too much to read even in a few hours. The data was muddy; amateur calculations splayed out in graphs mixed with raw data, numbers and codes that were just as alien to Allan as those things in the desert.
Someone on the Pith’s staff, someone young and without an advanced degree, had been up late and Allan suspected Pith hadn’t been happy with the results. Allan had to focus in on the important parts to perform any better. He wanted in the loop, now that he knew there was one. Allan realized the Pith’s earlier sharing had been merely a test, a gateway to the real treasure that was downloading from the satellite while everyone else in the complex was snoring.
Allan quickly found evidence for this conclusion. “This trajectory plot shows these dots were released from the area of the mother ship’s geosynchronous orbit. You already knew they were shooting water up, you just didn’t know how. So what do you need from me?”
“We know they’re shooting ice out into space. But for what?”
“General, do you still have the original photos, the ones when the ships were turning?”
Pith shuffled to the bottom of the folder and pulled them out. Allan grabbed them.
“It’s their fuel. That’s why these looked like comets at first. They’re NSWRs. I never thought I’d see this.”
“I’ve heard a lot of that lately,” Pith said. “What’s an NSWR?”
“Nuclear Salt Water Rocket, a theoretical rocket that Zubs designed for a possible Mars mission before Congress cut NASA’s funding. Holy shit, are you going to let Jill see this?”
“Jill? What’s she got to do with this?”
“She knew Zub—er, Doctor Zubnir.”
“Your professorial circle-jerks are truly fascinating, Doctor, but the aliens are already here. Unless Jill has ‘Zubs’ on speed-dial I don’t think showing her this will do much good.”
Allan grumbled, supposing he should enjoy Jill missing out, but his enmity towards her had softened since they started unraveling the truth about the Event together. He’d rather share these moments with her than lord it over her. She, as did Kam, appreciated this in a way Ariel never could. An intimacy of the mind, and Allan was cheating on them with Pith of all people, a real tea party patriot that would probably rather go shoot guns off the mountaintop with Ariel and her father than study satellite photos. To prove Allan’s point, Pith emphasized his ruthlessness again.
“Sands, are you listening to me?” Pith snapped his fingers in front of Allan’s face. “Wake up! The silent treatment won’t convince me to show this to Jill. Tarmor doesn’t have a family; she can still try to lie to me. You won’t. So the aliens have some kind of salt water propellant. We hopefully have the rest of our lives to figure out the how. Right now I need you to tell me why they’re shooting more of it off into space.”
Allan parsed the data for a few minutes, looking for something.
“Our colorful new friends will be leaving soon.”
“I like what I’m hearing so far, keep going, son.”
Dear God, Pith said it with the same twang as Ariel’s father, and it made his spine twitch the same way.
“If my estimation is right, and these orbital maps are correct, they’re sending the ice out to orbit between the Earth and the next planet on an interior solar orbit to us. They’re setting up refueling stations for their trip to that jungle planet with the repeating signals.
“We were just a pit stop with some annoying locals.”
Chapter 6
A cloud of black smoke rose high into the air a few blocks behind the group.
“That fucking kid!” Leto whispered and shook his head. “I told him not to go back for her, but he had to try and be a hero. Now they’re both dead and we’re down a rifle.”
“Quiet Leto. All of you, get
frosty!” Pete warned them, gripping his rifle tighter. “That explosion didn’t look like any artillery I’ve ever seen.”
“But we didn’t hear them coming,” Amanda said. “The other aliens buzzed from a mile out.”
“Keep going to the evac unless there’s something in front of us to shoot at.” Pete waved them all in front of him as he scanned the rising smoke a few blocks away.
The privates walked on looking wildly side to side. Leto felt the hair on his arm stand up before he heard Pete say “Oh shit” under his breath. Reflexively Leto pointed his rifle in the air and squeezed.
“Take cover!” Pete shouted as Leto’s bullets dropped off the truck-sized black delta fifteen feet above, the coating absorbing the impact with no apparent effect. As the rounds pattered on the grass, the delta stopped and began to slowly lower.
“Did you see that?” Ben asked in amazement. “The bullets just . . . stopped, and fell.”
Pete shushed Ben and waved them into an adjacent home.
They bustled to the front window and peered out, sticking rifles out and tipping their helmets down. A few large thumps came from the side of the house where the privates had just been.
“Ground troops?” Ben whispered, squinting to see the strange figures outside.
“I counted three,” Amanda said.
Leto grinned, moving his rifle scope to his eye and pointing it at the door. “Advantage Marines—”
The living room wall blasted in and threw them into the opposite wall. Leto, his rifle lost somewhere in the dizzied drywall and wood chunks coating everything, coughed and scrambled up the stairs to a balcony, the railing destroyed in the blast. It was their ambush in Ramadi all over again.
Amanda found Ben nearby. Half his face sagged like he’d had a stroke, but a bloody brick and matching imprint suggested a shattered cheekbone. “He’s unconscious. Man down!” she screamed and grabbed her tiny med-kit, taping padding to Ben’s face. “Major!” she screamed, but Pete didn’t answer. He was busy furiously unlodging himself from bricks and drywall.
Three stocky figures, silhouetted in shafts of sunlight and escaping dust from the explosion, entered the dark room through the hole where the living room wall had been. None were more than four and a quarter feet tall, but what they lacked in height they made up for in bulk. Each lumbered through the gap with wide appendages on all fours, but stood tall on two after breaching the hole.
The Filter Trap Page 28
