Ascent

by Thorby Rudbek

  Finally, when the passing of time made him feel sufficiently confident that death was not about to strike them down at any moment, he picked up his communication coder and contacted the second team, comprised of regular FBI operatives, awaiting his instructions in the similar, though slightly smaller truck that had set up the remotes just minutes before. “This is Ace. Go for data, High Trick, over.”

  “`Receiving you strength five, Ace. High Trick confirms go for data. Out.”

  Baynes leaned back, satisfied. Things had moved quickly, and on the whole, efficiently since he had been notified of the powerful microwave beam detected by two U.S. Air Force pilots just a few hours before. The arrangements with the Forces to pass the truly bizarre and inexplicable on to his group had worked very well in this case; perhaps this was partly because of the increased exposure his organization had received recently. In any case, once the Air Force had calculated the total energy projected up into space from the strange, castle-like structure in Redcliff, they had realized that it could not have been produced by any man-made system currently possessed by the United States of America. Perhaps their conclusion that, if they could not make it, no one else on Earth could, might be considered narrow-minded and typical of the superior attitude sometimes perceived and invariably disliked by other nations. In any case, Ed suspected that they were correct.

  Eight hundred seventy megawatt-hours, he mused. At a rate much higher than a nuclear generating station could achieve. And it’s so small! ...perhaps it’s like an iceberg, with most of the structure hidden beneath the surface; that would explain it.

  The records for the past few years were being checked to determine if satellite photography of the artefact would uncover any additional information on the process; the U.S. Air Force was still maintaining a “presence” high above the town – U2 spy planes – and were prepared to divert a surveillance satellite, in case something else happened or the process was repeated. Ed privately thought that the latter was unlikely; he could not conceive of a storage system capable of replenishing itself after such a huge energy loss in anything less than a week.

  “Remotes appear to be correctly deployed, sir. Auto feedback should optimize signal to “max.” in about ten seconds,” Leroy announced matter-of-factly.

  Judy and Eric looked over at the bank of monitors in anticipation, and moments later the fizz of static could be heard as the screens glowed into life, each one timed to activate two seconds after the previous unit to avoid any power surge problems. The images looked slightly grainy due to the light amplification automatically incorporated to clearly reproduce the scene, as it was illuminated only by the few stars visible through the patchy cloud cover, and the faint light from a street lamp about two hundred yards away. The “snow” faded rapidly away as the remotes and receivers adjusted automatically to tune out local interference, leaving a remarkably clear picture, far more informative than that provided by the truck’s exterior monitors which Ed and Eric had access to. Each one showed a black patch topped by a series of grey oblongs, something like part of an old, faded checkerboard. Citadel was being observed from six remotes, covering the black building from every angle; never before had such interest been shown in the strange structure. Never before had it been knowingly observed by the natives of Earth at all.

  “Big Eye 3 reporting through High Trick, sir,” Fraser adjusted his headphones slightly. “Another burst just started, same strength as the first one. Diameter of the beam at seventy thousand is about forty miles.”

  Ed looked at Leroy, his eyes widening with surprise. He thought for a minute or two, then turned to Judy. “Brisson, I want--”

  “--Excuse me, sir. It’s High Trick with some local data this time,” Fraser interrupted.

  “Let’s have it,” Ed decided quickly.

  “They report that town planning records for the structure do not exist; the plot is shown as being vacant. Also there is no record of utility connections or any other services as you might expect for a vacant plot, except there is a phone line.” Leroy sounded puzzled. “But although the phone appears to have been connected some time ago, some years by the way the computer records read – there is no record of the installation date, and those installation records have been kept since the ’seventies – there is no listing in the phone book and no record of any outgoing long distance calls, service calls or even any billing at all, in the past ten years, and the existence of the phone number is not recorded in the last printouts, made a couple of weeks ago; it must only have gotten into the computer since then. That’s all so far, sir.”

  Baynes leaned back against the wall, trying to come to grips with this latest piece of bizarre information, wondering if the aliens had infiltrated the computer records of the phone company, and maybe the government, too and, then he turned as he realized that Judy was still waiting for his instructions.

  “I guess you have all your equipment warmed up now, Brisson?”

  “Yes, sir. The road surface is coming in at eleven degrees. Air temperature is eight degrees and dropping. The high for the past twenty-four hours was fifteen.” She finished the “weather report” and looked at him expectantly once more.

  “Let’s start on the structure, then,” Ed urged.

  Judy activated the controls that swivelled her infrared detector towards Citadel, and waited a few seconds for the reading to stabilize. “Sir, indications are that the surface is at... three degrees!”

  “How could that be...?” Baynes pondered for a while. No one else spoke. “That surface is black, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I believe the stills from the Eagle showed, sir,” Leroy confirmed.

  “Mr. Fraser?” Ed turned to him. “Something that’s black should get pretty hot in the sunshine...” He spoke as if to himself.

  “Sir?” Leroy seemed to consider this, then: “Ah wouldn’t know much about that,” he drawled quietly.

  Kirouac chuckled from the front of the truck, where he had moved to look at several small flat screens mounted there as part of his security system, screens which gave him views of the outside of the truck as seen from the remotes deployed up and down the street, and duplicate views of the deserted street, as available to his leader on the screens at the back of the truck.

  “I have to report an error in my observation, sir,” Judy announced, sounding somehow offended with herself, and consequentially having missed the jocular interplay between her colleagues entirely. “The main body of the structure, the part that doesn’t show up except as a silhouette on the monitors, is at three degrees as I said. But the parts on the top, the, ah, battlements, are at temperatures ranging from nine to twelve degrees.” She looked down at the floor. “I should have spotted the difference at the start, sir.”

  “That’s ok, Ju– Brisson,” Ed stopped himself just in time. I don’t suppose she’d appreciate being talked down to by anyone but herself. “Just start the active sensing, but don’t rush it.” Baynes winced as he saw the hurt expression flash momentarily across her face. He sat in silence, aware of her wounded feelings and the awkward atmosphere, but unable to think of anything that would heal her injured psyche or relieve the tension in the air.

  “Another report from High Trick, sir,” Leroy announced a little while later.

  Ed turned to Leroy with a sense of relief. She’ll recover her ego if I leave her be.

  “Let’s all hear it.”

  “School records were destroyed along with the building when the Redcliff School burned to the ground just twenty-four hours ago, but the Principal insists that they have a student registered as living in this structure. Apparently, Mr. Stranberg – he’s the Principal,” Leroy explained hastily, “has been concerned about her since she came to him with a letter she had written requesting permission to attend the school, starting in the final grade, and he had given permission without a second thought – something that he cannot explain doing. He became concerned enough that he had taken her file home to review it, the afternoon befo
re the fire.”

  All eyes turned to watch Fraser, realizing that some major point was about to be revealed.

  “She said she was seventeen, but Mr. Stranberg, he says she’s probably only fourteen or fifteen. Anyway, she registered her address as ‘Citadel, twenty-seven Daniel Street, Redcliff’. Houses in Redcliff are numbered one, five, nine, and so on, which would leave the number twenty-seven unused. That, combined with his doubts concerning her age, was enough to persuade this “Stranberg” to come ’round to the address on Daniel Street when he had finished talking with the fire chief at the remains of the school. Sure enough, between the houses numbered twenty-five and twenty nine there was a building of sorts, though by Stranberg’s account it was a pretty weird one.

  “Accordingly, in the afternoon (that’s just a few hours ago) Stranberg returned in the company of an “officer of the law” to Citadel on Daniel Street, to the structure we are monitoring, on the pretext that he needed to see this girl’s father or her guardian about some form that needed to be filled out. Apparently he didn’t see either individual or get the form signed, but says he was satisfied that nothing was wrong at the time.” Leroy paused to let the next bit stand out. “Now he says he can’t understand why he left without seeing anyone except the girl. He also says that he now thinks that the structure couldn’t really be her house, as he could see that there were no windows on the street side of Citadel and from close up the structure looked derelict. He even tapped on it, and said it sounded like solid rock.”

  “What’s this student’s name?”

  “Sorry I didn’t mention that. She’s called “Karen Amer”,” Leroy continued. “She’s about five-five with very long, platinum blonde hair and a pale complexion.” He passed his boss a few sheets of paper that were slightly curled from the facsimile machine. “Here’s the letter she wrote. Amazing handwriting, more like a fancy laser-printer font, but if you look carefully, you can see the characters that are repeated are not exactly the same.”

  Ed smiled slightly at the description of Karen’s appearance.

  “It shouldn’t be too difficult to spot her in a crowd.” He glanced at the papers, then put them on his “pending” pile and sat back for a moment, comparing this mysterious girl with his favourite niece, who had recently turned fourteen. Not much like Amber, except that they are both girls… I think. He turned back to Judy. “What have you got so far, Brisson?”

  “I’ve tried u-v, infrared and ultrasonic beams at the lowest possible levels.” She looked baffled. “Total absorption, sir. I can detect nothing. I’d like to try the lasers now, with your permission, sir.”

  “Why not? Mind you, if this Citadel has a monitoring system half as advanced as its shell, it must already know we are here.”

  “There has been no change in any of the characteristics since I began monitoring, sir,” Judy commented, insinuating that perhaps they had not yet been detected.

  “Maybe so, but it could be that they might not want to give us any indication of their discovery of our surveillance!” Ed cautioned.

  Judy thought about this for a moment, then nodded her head in understanding.

  “Big Eye 4 reports that the microwave beam has just finished,” Leroy announced. “Total duration was thirty three minutes seventeen seconds.”

  That makes the total energy emitted more like one point three gigawatt-hours, Baynes calculated roughly. The first pulse was only tracked for about twenty minutes, he mused silently. The sheer raw power frightened him, and he had to make a conscious effort to put it out of his mind before he could concentrate on planning his next move.

  “Keep your tests to the lowest useful power levels, just to play it safe,” he cautioned Judy. “If the giant is sleeping, let’s try not to wake him up.”

  She nodded and turned back to her control panel without a smile. Ed watched her for a few moments; the glint of amusement in his eyes didn’t show on his lips. He turned back to his papers, not noticing that Eric was observing him, too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No unity before action - Idahnian

  Enid Schroder awoke with a start. She lifted her head and looked around in the darkness, trying to see what had disturbed her, but the silence was deafening. Something almost inaudible must have lifted her out of her fragile slumber; she slept very lightly since her husband had died. Henry certainly hadn’t been much of a companion to her, especially in the last few years, and she knew that there had been very little love between them, even at the start. She had admitted to herself a few years back that she had chosen him mostly as a part of her rebellion against her parents, but his absence made the small house that they had lived in since soon after she ran away from home seem bigger and strangely unfamiliar to her. She got up with a sigh and pulled her dressing gown around her shoulders, intending to walk the short distance to Richard’s room, just to reassure herself that at least someone familiar was in the house.

  He must have gotten home by now, it’s… 5 am! Enid had walked across to check the clock in the kitchen, and then she went back into the narrow hallway and turned left. She slowly took the nine paces that invariably brought her to the second bedroom, only to discover that Richard’s door was still open. She stepped quietly into the room, knowing already what she would see. Sure enough, the bed was roughly made, just as it had looked at lunch time, when it had brought a wry smile to her face and a significant sense of comfort, for it had seemed at that point to be a symbol of the end of her terrible loneliness. I know he’ll be off to college in a few months so I’ll not have his company for long, but you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines…

  At supper time it had brought frustration and a vague sense of uneasiness, and finally at midnight, she had given up waiting for him to return and had gone to bed, trying to remind herself that young people sometimes stayed out late, much as she had, so many years before when she was still living with her parents and her younger brother, Richard’s father.

  She stood indecisively in the dark for a moment, contemplating what might have happened to this son of Martin, who was so new to Redcliff and had so recently miraculously recovered from a coma, then she walked back into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Already she was beginning to feel that acting in the stead of Richard’s parents might not be quite as easy as she had rather glibly assumed it would be.

  ***

  A little later, Ed and his team were discussing the latest news from their agent posted at the police station, one of High Trick’s roving operatives; they had the luxury to talk about things, as the surveillance equipment was not detecting or displaying any changes that would otherwise have needed to be analyzed.

  “A Richard Fletcher arrived in town from Boston on last Saturday. He came to live with his aunt, Enid Schroder,” Ed summarized for his team. They listened attentively as he drew the pertinent facts out of the information he had just received over his communication coder.

  “It seems he was orphaned about a year ago in a car accident, when he was seventeen, and spent most of the past year in a coma. About two months ago he came out of it quite suddenly, and then almost miraculously fully recovered his mobility, until he was well enough to be released from the hospital. As soon as he got out he immediately moved here. On Monday, just two days after he got here, he spent his lunch hour with a certain Karen Amer. According to town gossip, they got on like old friends. Just minutes ago, Richard was reported missing by his aunt. He went out quite early yesterday morning, after a neighbour told him about the school burning down, and failed to return home last night.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” began Judy, a puzzled frown on her face. “I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but everything I have discovered with my equipment, and even from the aircraft photos, indicates that this Citadel has been here for a long time. According to the thermal signature, the ground around the structure hasn’t been disturbed for years, but now...” she trailed off, uncertainly.

  “Now things are moving quickly,” Ed finished for her.<
br />
  “Yes, it doesn’t fit the pattern,” Judy complained.

  “So let’s see if we can discover what caused the change in the timing,” Ed suggested. “I wish we could examine that damaged fighter; we would be able to determine the mode of attack; if it was an attack.”

  “What about this Boston business, Mr. Baynes?” began the Marine. “What significance could that have?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed began, privately pleased that the latest addition to his group was starting to make a contribution. I was gambling on him turning out to be more than the stereotypical ‘Rambo’- figure. “But according to Mrs. Schroder, this ‘Richard’ confirmed that he was coming to Redcliff on the eleventh of September.” He paused to emphasize the new point. “That’s the same day that Karen registered at the school.” Baynes looked around at each of his staff in turn, but no one seemed to want to comment. He got up and walked back to the computer on his desk near the back of the truck and began to record his speculations.

  In the silence that followed, the possibilities started to blossom in the minds of each member of the team like the first flowers of spring on a hot April day. Was Richard supposed to have come earlier, but the car accident delayed him? Or was the supposed coma a cover for some other scheme? The school’s destruction seemed too unusual to be a coincidence; what did the two suspects have to gain by destroying it, if indeed they were responsible? Why did Karen come out of seclusion and register at the school in the first place? Had Karen been here for just a short while, did she come from out of state, out of country, out of …?

  After a few minutes, Leroy got up from his communications console and walked over to Judy’s panel, all the while glancing back frequently at the bank of TV monitors. He leaned over her and waited until he had caught her attention, then patted her on the shoulder.