by R. D. Brady
Three years ago he’d finally tracked down all the files Senator Billingsley had held over him. And then Martin had held a crowbar over the senator. The official report said car accident. Martin had taken a great deal of pleasure in smashing both the senator and his prized Bentley.
But all that was in the past. “We need to increase the pace of the A.L.I.V.E. Project.”
Robert raised an eyebrow. “Why? A.L.I.V.E. has been a success. And with the exception of Devon’s death, it has been a safe process. The world does not know what is happening and we are learning more each day. Martin, nothing’s going to happen.”
Martin narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t surprised by Robert’s response but he was disappointed—just as he had been for the last few years. Something had happened to Buckley. Maybe it was the grandkids he had been incessantly showing pictures of for the last few years, but he’d grown soft. He no longer viewed the alien threat as just that—a threat. He believed they could be simply observing.
Martin shook his head. The Robert Buckley who had brought him into the CIA would have laughed in the face of this Robert Buckley.
“Devon’s death proved that is not the case. The threat is real. That creature broke out quickly, before anyone had a chance to realize security was down. That’s smart—that’s intelligence. With that one situation we learned a great deal about the creature and its capabilities.”
Robert narrowed his eyes. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I suggest we allow to creatures to be who they are. We need to expand—”
“No.”
Martin paused, waiting for Robert to continue, but apparently he was done. “No?”
“The project is moving forward at a pace we are all comfortable with. When and if we decide the project needs to increase its pace, we will make that decision, not you, Martin. Remember, you’re not in charge.”
Inwardly, Martin seethed, but outwardly he remained as unflappable as ever. He stood. “Of course, Robert. I just thought I should bring it to your attention.”
“I’ll take it under advisement. Now go out and get some fresh air. You’re looking awfully pale.”
“Will do.” Martin turned and headed for the door.
“Oh, and Martin?”
Martin paused, his hand on the doorknob.
“Speak with Leonard on your way out about a new aide.”
“Of course.” Martin let himself out of the room. Leonard jumped to his feet, but Martin glared him back into his chair as he passed. Robert had lost his edge. There was a time when he was a man to be feared. But no longer. Now he was just a man in the way.
And Martin had always been very good at getting men out of his way.
Slipping his hand into his pocket, he wrapped his fingers around the small remote he’d used to release the creature at Lowry. Devon’s sacrifice would make the world a better place. Martin’s actions had actually been a gift to Devon and to the world. A picture of Buckley sitting at his desk filled his mind.
Perhaps Buckley needs a present as well.
Because apparently Martin was the only one who saw the true danger. And that meant he was the only one who could do something about it.
Chapter Six
One Month Later
The physical therapy room was silent. Alvie stood waiting at the starting line, his blue scrubs matching Maeve’s. Standing at just under four feet, he looked top heavy, his head disproportionately large for his slim build. His arms were also disproportionately long for his torso by a few inches and were extremely slim. His torso was pear shaped, coming almost to a point at his thin neck.
Weighing in at thirty-eight pounds, Maeve knew his thinness wasn’t the result of malnutrition, but design. His bones weighed a third of a human’s but were extremely strong. Alvie’s bones had fibers woven into them and the origin of the fibers was still unknown. In fact, his small build hid a reserve of strength and an agility that she still couldn’t quite understand but could appreciate.
“Ready?” Maeve called.
Alvie held up a hand, his four fingers in the air.
Thumb poised above the button on the stopwatch, she grinned. “Go.”
Alvie burst into motion. He sprinted toward the pommel horse and leapt over it with ease. As he ran for the cargo net, Maeve held her breath. The cargo net’s movement sometimes gave him trouble.
Alvie grabbed onto the net.
Maeve forced herself to keep her face neutral, aware of the cameras in the room. Come on, Alvie.
After one fumble, he started to move up with ease. Maeve had to keep herself from cheering and covered a smile she couldn’t contain behind a fake cough.
Alvie reached the end of the net twenty feet up and walked carefully along the beam at the top of the net, his balance perfect.
Reaching the end of the beam, Alvie knelt down and grabbed the rope. Lowering himself down, he ran over to the rings. He climbed the box in front and leapt up to grab hold of them. Then he swung with complete confidence across the series of rings, looking like a small Tarzan. Dropping to the ground, he ran to the track that surrounded the room and started on the last obstacle—two laps around the room measuring a half-mile.
Maeve moved next to the finish line. As soon as Alvie crossed, she clicked the button on the stopwatch and then grinned. “That was your best time yet.”
Alvie smiled and headed for his water bottle.
Maeve recorded the time on her laptop and then turned off the camera. She walked over to Alvie and hugged him. “You did great. We need to sign you up for American Ninja Warrior.”
He looked up expectantly, his small mouth turning up, and Maeve cursed herself for getting his hopes up. Jokes were something he didn’t always get, even with his high intellect. Maeve shook her head. “No, not seriously. But you would be great at it. Now, what do you want to do to reward yourself?”
He grinned and pointed at the computer. Maeve groaned good-naturedly. “Fine. As soon as we’re finished, you can look at some puppy pictures. Let me—”
Alvie stepped away from her and let out a shriek, falling to the ground. Maeve dropped to her knees as Alvie shook, almost as if he was having a seizure. “Alvie!”
He stopped shaking but stared straight ahead, drool slipping from the corner of his mouth. She gathered him into her arms, wiping his mouth. She checked his pulse, which was racing, and she knew it wasn’t from the obstacle course. His heart rate always returned to normal mere seconds after completing any physical task.
“Alvie, look at me. Look at me, Alvie.”
He stared straight ahead.
She put her hand on his cheek. “Please, Alvie.”
He didn’t change his expression, but a single tear slipped from the corner of his eye. She wiped it away, keeping her hand on his cheek and turning his head gently so she could look into his eyes. “Alvie.”
He blinked and his breath stuttered. He held his hand over hers and sadness washed over her. She pulled him into her chest and held him tight. “What’s wrong, Alvie?”
Of course, he didn’t respond. He had no vocal chords and couldn’t speak. And later she’d try to get him to type out what had happened, but he never shared what caused these episodes. And they were happening more and more often, although never as extreme as this.
She glanced over to where the camera sat, the green light off, and thanked god she had turned it off. So far she had kept these incidents out of her reports. Until she knew why they were happening, she couldn’t let anyone else know. But she was running out of time because they were happening with greater frequency. And soon someone was going to see.
And if she didn’t have an answer, they would replace her with someone who did.
Chapter Seven
Five levels under Edwards Air Force Base, California
Martin walked down the hall, his footsteps echoing through the empty space. Ahead, a light glowed from underneath the one door in the hall. It was the meeting room for the Majestic 12. The Majestic 12 had been c
reated by executive order by President Harry S. Truman after the Roswell crash and a rash of UFO sightings. The committee was composed of scientists, military and intelligence agents whose sole focus was preparing the United States to defend against the alien threat.
Technically, the committee had been decommissioned only a few years after its inception. But the real power in government, the one that didn’t require election every few years and didn’t need to answer to the public, decided the committee was too critical to disband and had moved it into the shadows.
Martin had been affiliated with the program for over thirty years. Robert had brought him in, setting Martin up to be his replacement on the committee back when Robert had a spine and some vision. Martin was supposed to replace him when he either retired or died. After their last conversation, Martin had decided that thirty years was long enough to wait for Robert to decide to take either option. So a week ago, he had helped him choose.
Martin opened the door and stepped in. It was in this very room that Martin had attended his first MJ-12 meeting. Martin didn’t give in to nostalgia very often, but when he had decided to call this meeting, he thought it only fitting that he attend his first meeting as a full-fledged member in the same room he’d learned of the committee’s existence.
Twenty-two sets of eyes followed Martin’s progress to the other side of the room as he took the one remaining chair at the round table as the twelfth member of the committee. The other eleven members sat in a ring behind each of the members they would one day replace. Each member was a power broker within their own sphere: the NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, the State Department, each branch of the military, and scientists from the top programs and labs across the country. And Martin, of course, represented the CIA.
Barbara Freely of the NSA stood. “The committee recognizes Martin Drummond as a member, replacing Robert Buckley. We are sorry for your loss, Martin.”
Martin nodded. “Thank you.”
“Funny,” Albert Brenner of the FBI said from the other side of the table, “I knew Robert Buckley for nearly forty years. Played golf with him once a month for the last twenty, and he never mentioned a word about having a heart condition.”
Martin eyed him across the table. “Not all medical conditions are known, I suppose.”
Albert narrowed his blue eyes. He was a redhead who still retained his football build from his college days and the freckles from his youth. “Is that so? It seems you also lost your aide not that long ago. Quite a bit of death seems to be following you around these days.”
“It’s a dangerous world.” Martin held Albert’s gaze for just a moment longer than necessary. “But the incident at Lowry only highlights what Robert and I have been discussing over the last few years—these experiments cannot continue to be performed the way they are. Too many people are placed at risk. They all need to be moved to a more secure location.”
“They’ve never been located in one location,” Michelle Danner of the State Department said.
“But that was never intentional, was it?” Martin asked. “At one point, almost everything was located in Nevada. Before those idiots irradiated the whole area.”
“Is that true?” Brenner asked.
Martin looked at Dr. Harry Nagin. Of Japanese descent, Nagin’s specialty was, among other things, the deleterious effect of the US’s history of nuclear testing. Nagin nodded. “Yes. One of the tests over at the Nevada testing site was too strong and too close to 51. It irradiated the base, shuttering it for years.”
While the world at large may have forgotten the testing that happened in Nevada, the Majestic 12 had not. From 1945 to 1992, over one thousand bombs had been detonated, a majority of them in the western part of the United States. Over two hundred of them had been exploded in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space.
There had even been a plan in 1958 to bomb the far side of the moon—Project A119. Ostensibly the detonation was justified by saying it would answer questions about planetary astronomy, but everyone in the know knew that the real impetus behind the detonation was to demonstrate America’s might to the world. Luckily that plan had been squashed.
Idiots, Martin growled as the history of America’s stupidity rolled through his mind. Why not just send out an invitation to the rest of the universe that didn’t know we were here to come on by?
Because the United States’ unrestrained testing of nuclear weapons did not concern the Majestic 12 from a strictly environmental or even physical standpoint. One could say their greatest interest extended from a more galactic viewpoint. In the early 1950s, the committee had come to the conclusion that it was the setting off of the first atomic bomb that had increased alien interest in Earth, and the continued testing beyond that had kept their interest here.
After the first bomb was dropped, the number of sightings exploded. The MJ-12 believed it was the human race’s violence or potential for violence that intrigued our interstellar neighbors. There had however been a number of valid sightings prior to the foo fighters. In 1897, an alien craft was rumored to have crashed in Aurora, Texas. The good people of Aurora found the alien pilot and gave him a Christian burial, albeit in an unmarked grave. One of the factors that lent the incident a high sheen of plausibility were the reports of something flying in the air over Aurora a year prior to the crash, which was also twenty years before the Wright brothers first took flight.
The violence of the second World War may have been the factor that first attracted galactic interest. Alien craft were first sighted in November 1944 in World War II Germany. They were called foo fighters by allied fighters. Fast maneuvers, glowing but also non-threatening, they appeared multiple times over the theatre of operations in Europe, and documented sightings by military personnel went back to 1941. But those sighting were only the tip of the iceberg.
And with this increased activity, there inevitably were crashes. A few cases had been made public—Roswell, Kecksburg, Ontario. But the disinformation campaign had done an incredible job of throwing a blanket of doubt over any reports. The public remained largely unaware of the alien activity over their heads. And the alien subjects in the government’s custody.
Everyone in the room was well aware of that history, so Martin knew there was no need to reiterate it. There was a need, however, to change how they presently conducted their research.
“Regardless, now the risk is too great,” said Martin. “The subjects must be moved. The risk of human life is one factor, but exposure is another. All these bases are less secure than Area 51. There is simply no safer base in the United States.”
Barbara shook her head. “Martin, you’ve shadowed this committee long enough to know that this proposal of yours is moving too fast. You just got here. We need to think through all the logistics. We act with cool logic, not rash impetuousness.”
Martin scanned the room, meeting each of the members’ gazes before speaking. “With all due respect, the world has changed radically since I first joined this group. Now everyone has a cellphone with a camera, from the highest level officer on a base down to every member of the janitorial staff. It is only a matter of time before someone takes a picture of something they shouldn’t. And that is not the only security issue. They are stepping up their game. We need to as well."
"They have made no aggressive moves," Barbara said.
Martin's tone was incredulous. "No aggressive moves? What about Phobos 2?"
"That has never been definitively proven," Barbara countered.
Martin shook his head. And this right here was the problem. Unless proof came in the form of a written confession from an alien race, this body did not believe the evidence. Phobos 2 was about as cut and dry as it got.
In 1988, two Russian probes were sent to investigate the moon of Phobos as it revolved around Saturn. For years, there had been rumors that Phobos was an artificial moon created by an intelligent alien species. The Russians were the first to get close. Phobos 1 orbited the moon without an issue.
But Phobos 2 was not so lucky. It failed as soon as it came in line with the moon. Some say it was destroyed. But regardless, right before it went offline it sent back a photo of a large cylindrical object between the probe and the surface of Saturn before it went dark.
But even that wasn't enough proof for these people, Martin thought derisively. He turned to a small dark haired woman sitting to his left. "But we have more tangible proof of their intent. Isn’t that right, Dr. Park?”
Each head turned to Dr. Amelia Park from Harvard. Dr. Park rarely spoke at meetings but when she did, it was always critical information. “It’s not just one alien race that is abducting our people,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Barbara asked.
Dr. Park looked coolly around the room, her dark eyes devoid of emotion, her voice full of confidence but not arrogance. “Genuine abductions fall into two categories—those where an individual’s body is taken to a ship and those where only their mind travels.”
“Their mind? Are you kidding?” Albert said.
Dr. Park frowned. “Of course I’m not kidding.”
“Ignore him, Amelia,” Barbara said. “Continue.”
“The contradictory categories suggest that at least one race is able to telepathically link with its victims and dole out the same treatment—medical experimentation, interaction, and so on, but the victims never physically leave the Earth.”
“But isn’t that just a hallucination? Or a dream?” Michelle Danner of Homeland asked.
Dr. Park shook her head. “No. The victims demonstrate the same signs of post-traumatic stress and in some cases, even evidence of a medical procedure.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Colonel Juarez of the Joint Chiefs said.
Park shook her head, her face troubled. “I don’t either. All I know is that it is. Whoever is abducting them is much more advanced than we are. Much more.”
