Bellum wandered out of the cockpit, clearly wanting to join the conversation.
“But,” Jason countered. “What about the law of unintended consequences? What if something goes wrong? What if the wall collapses? What if the fire spreads?”
“She's a class four reactor,” Lachlan replied. “The core is built on a gravity failsafe. If there's no power, the uranium rods sink back into their lead shell and the reaction is over. This isn't Fukushima or Three Mile Island. There's no chance of a meltdown.”
Jason didn't like it.
“Is this really necessary?”
“North Bend is a private nuclear power plant,” Lachlan replied. “They're answerable to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and no one else. It's the perfect cover for DARPA. The image of a glowing mushroom cloud billowing above a nuclear power plant will ensure there's no room to hide. They're going to have to open the gates to local fire crews, and that will allow us to drive straight through to the dome.”
As a reporter, April Stegmeyer added her perspective. “The media focus will cripple them. It will take weeks, maybe even months to convince the public the explosion was superficial and didn't damage any of the critical infrastructure.”
“Then after that,” Bellum added, “they're going to have to deal with every conspiracy nut in the country alleging that they're hiding the truth.”
“And they are,” Lachlan said. “Only the truth is more bizarre than anyone could ever imagine.”
“We'll leak the footage of our investigation,” Stegmeyer said. “Once we get inside that dome and get shots of you interacting with the craft, they'll have no way to hide. We're going to force their hand, force them to admit this to the public.”
“I hate to throw a wet towel over all this,” Jason said, resting his coffee spoon on the table in front of him. “But I don't know what you think I can do with this thing. I'm not even sure I believe you guys. Hell, for all I know, you're all crazy and this is some delusional group construct.”
No one answered him.
“No offense,” Jason added. “But look at this from my perspective. None of this makes any sense. Yesterday, I was just an average guy just trying to work his way through college. Today, you want me to believe I'm the key part of some international — no, interplanetary, or is it interstellar conspiracy?
“You're talking about committing a criminal act, a terrorist act! I don't see how you can justify this. Even if you're right and we get inside that dome and find a spacecraft from another star system, what the hell makes you think I can do anything about it?”
Jason looked around at Bellum, Stegmeyer and Lachlan. No one said what they were thinking, but he could see it in their eyes. They knew something he didn't, something they weren't prepared to tell him.
“I can't do this,” Jason said. “Listen, I've got family in Seattle. I'll head up there from Portland. I'll hitchhike back to New York. Or I'll call Mitch. He's always up for an insane road trip.”
“This isn't a game,” Lachlan said softly.
“You've got to tell him,” Stegmeyer added. Her voice was blunt, hinting of tragedy and heartache. Even before Bellum turned on the television mounted by the door to the cockpit, Jason understood the ominous tone of Stegmeyer's voice. Her few words resounded like the rumble of an oncoming storm. In that instant, he knew. His heart sank. Jason didn't know the particulars, but he understood enough to know something terrible had happened.
Lachlan nodded his consent and Bellum inserted a flash drive into the side of the TV.
The FBI agent picked up a remote and switched on the television. He scrolled through the stored memory, rewinding to a news broadcast they must have recorded earlier that morning. Lily rested her hand on Jason's knee.
Jason bit his lip.
“The manhunt continues,” a young, petite news reporter began. She was standing outside his apartment building, fighting to keep her blond hair from blowing in front of her face as she spoke. “Police have released photos of the suspects. They are considered armed and dangerous, and should not be approached by the public.”
Jason's driver's license photo appeared on the screen, along with equally bland and impersonal photos of Professor Lachlan and Lily.
“Investigators have told CNN that a large quantity of homemade C4 was recovered from a storage unit rented by one of the fugitives. It appears that there was some kind of falling out with co-conspirators Mitchell Jones and Helena Young that caused infighting among the terror cell members. During a heated argument that spilled out into the street, witnesses say that Jason Noh gunned down both Jones and Young. Jones died at the scene, while Young is undergoing surgery for a gunshot wound to the head.”
Bellum froze the image. A body was being wheeled away on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. The body had been zipped into a black bag, but scarlet blood ran down one of the aluminum legs of the stretcher.
“I'm sorry,” Lachlan said.
“Why?” Jason asked. His voice was barely audible over the hum of the jet engine. He ran his hands up through his hair, grabbing at the strands and pulling at the roots in anguish.
“Why them?” he asked again looking up at Lachlan with tears in his eyes. He held out his hands in a plea for mercy. “I don't understand. I thought you said they were working for those guys. Why would they kill them?”
“I'm sorry, son,” Bellum said, resting his hand on Jason's shoulder. “This is the major league. This goes beyond anything DARPA has ever done before. They won't hesitate to sacrifice anyone or anything to get what they need from you.”
“DARPA is sending a message,” Lachlan said softly. “That they're coming after us, and nothing will stand in their way.”
Lily unfastened her seatbelt. She sat forward on the edge of her seat, taking his hand. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. He knew what she was thinking. A soft squeeze told him all he needed to know. She hated this, he was sure of it. She was grieving with him.
Jason's head spun with the knowledge that his closest friends were dead, had been murdered because of him. Would he ever wake from this nightmare? He felt sick. Vertigo swept over him. He felt as if he were standing at the edge of a skyscraper, leaning over. A tingling sensation ran through his hands and feet. He wanted to get up, to get out of the plane, to be anywhere else. Sitting there trembling, he flexed his muscles trying to shake off the anguish washing over him.
Lily stroked his hand gently. She must have felt him shaking. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her downturned mouth. She too felt the grief that had been omitted from the sterile news report.
A thin, black bag hid the heartache on that stretcher.
Hearing the tone of her voice, the reporter could have been talking about a lost puppy or an approaching storm, but not an entire life, Jason thought. He wanted to shout at the screen, to cry out for compassion.
Bellum turned off the television. The screen went black, but in his mind, Jason could still see the lumpy outline of Mitchell's body being wheeled away.
Tears rolled down his cheeks.
“I'm sorry,” Lachlan said, crouching down beside him and looking him in the eye. “You don't deserve this. You don't deserve any of this. You're caught up in something that's bigger than any of us.”
The professor got back to his feet. He was staring absentmindedly at his mutilated right hand. He seemed to be flexing three phantom fingers. The scarred stubs on his hand twitched and moved.
“They're afraid,” he added. “They've covered this up for decades now. The longer this goes on, the deeper the hole they dig for themselves. They're entrenched. They think they're protecting humanity.”
Jason wiped the tears from his cheeks, surprised by his trembling hands.
“In their minds,” Lachlan continued, “they think there's danger in this knowledge getting out. They're fighting to maintain the status quo while they try to figure out what the hell to do next. They're afraid one of these UFOs will materialize in Washington D.C. and the
y'll be defenseless. They're afraid of panic if the public finds out. DARPA is convinced this is a threat to our national security.”
“And you?” Jason asked, looking at his mentor with a heavy heart.
“I've always believed in you.” Lachlan spoke softly, adding, “You may not have been aware of me, but I've always been there in the background, fighting for you, and for what I believe is in your best interests.”
Jason watched as the old man swallowed hard before continuing.
“I never wanted it to come to this. I didn't want to endanger you, but I had no choice.”
“We're all in this together,” Stegmeyer added.
“We're doing this because we believe there's another way,” Lachlan said. “We believe the public will embrace this knowledge. We don't think there's anything to fear from the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe.”
Jason nodded.
Stegmeyer said, “They hold all but one of the cards in this deck.”
“You're our ace in the hole,” Bellum added.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” Lachlan said, placing a thick folder on the table in front of Jason. “This is everything we know. You're welcome to look at everything.”
Lachlan signaled with his head and both Stegmeyer and Bellum followed him to the cockpit, leaving Jason and Lily sitting at the table.
Bellum sat down in the cockpit while Lachlan and Stegmeyer stood beside the door talking. They chatted softly with each other, but their conversation sounded forced, as though neither felt at ease. They were being polite, giving him some distance.
Jason stared at the folder.
“I'll go too,” Lily said.
“No,” Jason replied softly, opening the folder and looking at the first page. “Please, don't.”
Lily leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, smiling, “OK, then let me get you a fresh cup of coffee.”
“That would be nice. Thanks.”
Within minutes, Jason was engrossed.
Time seemed to come to a standstill.
Lily handed him a pad and pen. Jason arranged the photos across the table, shifting them around and linking them together. Photos were laid out on the floor, but not randomly. He was looking for patterns.
In among the formulas he saw the occasional word hastily scratched into the surface of the dark craft.
As he looked through the photos, he realized a number of terms had been repeated, so he tallied them. But whoever had taken the photos had been concerned with the formulas, catching only passing glimpses of whatever had been written elsewhere. It was stupid, Jason thought. He wanted to see everything written on the UFO, not just the scientific notations.
The writing was in English. That alone should have caught the attention of whoever took these pictures, he thought. They should have been trying to record everything, but they seemed to be interested only by the calculations, with some of the formulas being photographed several times from a variety of angles.
You're Damned x 14
Doomed x 3
Forsaken x 2
Pointless x 8
Death or Dead x 7
Cursed x 12
Fate x 4
Inescapable x 3
“What do you think this means?” Lachlan asked. He had returned from the cockpit some time ago. Stegmeyer was seated across from Jason, but he hadn't even noticed her sit down. He was startled by the professor's voice. He had lost track of time. The Learjet was beginning its descent. Jason glanced at his coffee. A thin film of milk had left a skin on the surface. Touching the cup, he felt how cold the drink was and resisted the temptation to take a sip.
“I think you've missed the real story here,” Jason said to Lachlan. “The formulas only paint part of the picture. Look at these words. Why are they here? What's their purpose?”
Lachlan picked up one of the images, the word “Condemned“ was visible on the edge of the picture, with only the lower half of the last three letters in the frame.
“What do you think it means?” asked Jason.
“I don't know,” Lachlan replied.
“If you're right, and this is a craft of extraterrestrial origin, then a number of questions spring to mind. Where's the pilot? Where's the crew? Why is the craft covered in scientific formulae and English notation?”
“I'm not sure,” Lachlan said. “DARPA are playing a long game with this thing. Rather than being invasive, they've gone for passive investigation, using sonics, x-rays, spectrographic analysis, even going so far as to build a massive scanner in place. They're convinced the alien technology is recoverable, but it's so advanced, so far beyond anything we can achieve they're scared of breaking things without realizing it. Imagine Socrates examining an iPad and you get an idea of what they're dealing with.”
“Do they have any thoughts on why the craft was defaced? Or who could have done this?” Jason asked.
“No,” Lachlan replied. “But some of those etchings are tens of thousands of years old.”
“That's impossible!” Jason said. “The English language is barely a thousand years old. How can they ...”
Jason's voice trailed off. He could see the knowing half smile on Lachlan's face.
“Time travel,” he said.
“Precisely,” Lachlan replied. “And on a scale that is unimaginable to us. We're not talking a few decades or even a century or a millennia. This craft traverses tens of thousands of years in the blink of an eye. Now can you see why they're willing to kill to keep this secret?”
“So,” Jason continued. “It's not so much a question of where this craft has been up till now, but when.”
Lachlan broke into a full smile, adding, “English may only be a thousand years old, but given what we're witnessing with the stability of existing languages on the Internet, radical changes are going to be the exception. Languages will continue to evolve, but they won't drift and languish as they once did. English could last in pretty much its current form for the next ten thousand years!”
“And me?” Jason asked. “Does that mean I'm from the future?”
Lachlan couldn't keep the smile from his face. He tried to, but he was clearly excited. He restrained himself, saying, “That's one theory, my theory.”
“But why send a child back in time?” Jason asked. “What happened to the craft? What caused it to crash?”
“I don't know.”
They were three simple words, but they were not the words Jason wanted to hear.
“We've struggled with this for decades,” Lachlan continued.
Jason saw Vacili's camera was running, catching their impromptu conversation in electronic format.
“There's a problem with your theory,” Jason said, gesturing at the camera. “If this craft is from the future, they'd know. They'd see this recording and could replay this conversation. They'd know something went wrong. They'd be able to reconstruct what was about to happen from their perspective, but what had already happened from ours. This should have never happened.”
“Unless?” Lachlan said.
“Unless somehow that knowledge is lost. But that's fatalistic. It implies all our efforts are in vain, that everything we do becomes buried in time.”
Stegmeyer piped up, saying, “Now you see why we're flying a bird into that power station? We need this to register on their radar.”
“But you don't understand,” Jason said. “If the developers of this craft haven't already seen that recording you're making right now, they never will.”
“We could be wrong,” Lachlan offered.
“We could,” Jason conceded. “But then, what other explanation is there?”
“The future isn't fixed,” Lachlan said. “Neither is the past. From our perspective, the past looks settled, but it's not. Time is like a river. Water flows from the hills to the sea, but even a river is not a closed system. There's evaporation, condensation and precipitation constantly renewing the river. In the same way, time looks like a closed system to us, but it's not
. Quantum probability waves move backwards in time changing the outcomes in the double-slit experiment. It's a gross oversimplification to see time as fixed.”
Jason was quiet. He tapped the photos in front of him, thinking carefully before speaking.
“These equations,” he said. “They're not related to time travel. They're field strength calculations. They're looking at the consequences of time travel, the causal relationships between matter and energy. Whoever wrote these wasn't trying to figure out how to travel in time, they were trying to figure out the effect time travel would have on multidimensional space.”
A voice came over the intercom. “We'll be landing in approximately five minutes.”
Jason looked out the window. They were flying along a valley, dipping below the lush, green hills on either side. They touched down and came to a stop in sight of a sign that read: Welcome to Portland, Oregon — Alis volat propriis — She flies with her own wings.
Chapter 15: Flight
Being airborne had never felt better to Lee. Even in the darkness above a hostile country, he felt at home in the cockpit of a helicopter.
Sun-Hee's brother looked scared senseless. The whites of his eyes were evident as he yelled over the sound of the rotor blades.
“You are heading toward Pyongyang!”
“I can explain,” Lee replied, struggling to be heard over the sound of the helicopter. “Look for some headphones in the back and we can talk.”
Once they were well clear of the camp, Lee took the helicopter up a couple of hundred feet so he could get a feel for the lay of the land.
Broken clouds drifted across the sky. Patches of moonlight revealed dark shadows where the hills below gave way to gullies and valleys. Occasionally, a small village or a farm appeared. Lee adjusted his course, heading north-northeast in the general direction of Pyongyang.
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