Alien hostiles, p.12
Alien Hostiles, page 12
She jolted awake, sweat soaked and shaking.
What the hell had she just seen?
“We’d like you to tell us more, Ms. Ashley,” Admiral Winchester said. He spoke gently, but there was an edge to his voice suggesting frustration . . . or fear.
Hunter had been called to the interrogation by Captain Groton just a few moments before. Hargreaves along with Doctors McClure, Brody, and Carter and Elanna were also present, gathered around the big table. Julia Ashley sat at the far end of the table next to Hargreaves, her hands clasped out in front of her, knuckles white, tendons hard.
“I—I don’t know what else I can tell you, sir.”
“Captain Groton tells me you, ah, picked up on quite a lot inside Oumuamua,” Winchester went on.
“It was all there in my report,” the young woman said.
“Admiral,” Hargreaves said, “she has been over all of this. I don’t see what—”
“If you please, Dr. Hargreaves,” Winchester said. “We need to know everything this young lady knows, and we need to know how she knows it. Now allow us to continue with our questioning or I’ll have a Marine remove you from the compartment.”
Hargreaves clamped his mouth shut, but Hunter saw the anger in his eyes. This wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
“It’s okay, Dr. Hargreaves,” Ashley said. “I’d like to know what’s going on as well.”
“There’s nothing to know, Julia,” Hargreaves said. “You saw into Oumuamua. You reported on what you saw. End of story.”
Winchester glared at the man, but let that small defiance pass.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about your . . . ah . . . talents?”
“I’m still learning about them, sir. I . . . had a dream a little earlier. . . .”
Hargreaves looked as though he was going to stop her, but he managed to remain silent.
“A dream?” the admiral asked.
Ashley nodded, and began recalling her odd, confusing dream.
“When I looked at the newspaper,” she said, concluding the story, “it said the Los Angeles Times . . . and the date was February of 1942.”
“That sounds familiar,” Hunter said. Where had he read about that? Something about the “Battle of Los Angeles . . .”
Or was that a movie he’d read about somewhere? Something by Spielberg, maybe? He wasn’t sure.
“The Battle of Los Angeles occurred a few weeks after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,” Elanna said. “At the time, it was assumed that the Japanese had launched an air raid on the city. The Japanese reported later that they’d had no assets in the area at that time, though one of their submarines had shelled the city of Ellwood two days earlier. Antiaircraft batteries around the city fired over 1,400 rounds at unidentified targets.”
Hunter smiled. Leave it to the damned time-traveling Talis to know more about American history than anyone else in the room, able to pluck facts and figures seemingly out of thin air. Had they actually been there, observing?
“The official government explanation,” Elanna went on, “was that a loose weather balloon had been misidentified as an aircraft, and once the antiaircraft barrage was underway, people were mistaking clouds and explosions for the enemy. Official sources later called the incident a case of ‘war nerves.’”
“Okay . . . assuming all of that is true,” Brody said, “why was this young lady dreaming about it?”
“That had nothing to do with remote viewing,” Hargreaves said.
“I’m not sure you can say that,” Carter said. “Julia’s dream, as she related it to us, was extremely specific, including a date that matches the original incident. I don’t know that much about ESP, but it sounds to me like the detail in her dream makes it special . . . like she really was seeing something happening almost eighty years ago.”
“Can remote viewing be used to see the past, Dr. Hargreaves?” Winchester asked.
“No,” Hargreaves snapped. “Remote viewers are given coordinates of a distant place or object, and they focus on that. Since there are no coordinates for Los Angeles in 1942, none that I could give her, at any rate, she could not possibly have viewed them.”
“Perhaps,” Brody said, “we’re dealing with something else. How is extrasensory perception supposed to work, anyway?”
“I think I see a possibility,” Captain Groton chimed in.
“Enlighten us, Captain,” Winchester told him. “Please.”
“Pretty simple, really. Einstein showed us that space and time are just two different facets of the same stuff . . . what he called space-time. And we know that the faster-than-light drive our Talis friends gave us work to move us both in space and in time. In fact, traveling faster-than-light is the same as traveling in space; you can’t have one without the other.”
“You’re saying the time dimension doesn’t matter,” Brody said.
“Not really, Doctor, no.”
“You know,” Carter said, “mystics and sages have been saying for centuries that there’s no space or time, that it’s all one. Maybe Julia just tapped into that . . . that oneness.”
“But why?” Hunter asked. “Was it just random, her tapping into that false alarm over wartime Los Angeles?”
“There is more to the story,” Elanna said. “The reports of a Japanese attack were dismissed . . . publicly. But numerous witnesses claim to have seen something that was not an aircraft—and not a balloon—over the city that night. The so-called air raid began with a radar sighting off over the ocean moving too quickly and from the wrong direction to be a weather balloon. The object—or objects—appear to have hovered over the city for some time without taking damage from the bombardment.”
“Seems unlikely for a balloon,” Hunter observed.
“Indeed. After several hours, the object reportedly moved away toward the south. There were reports that it flew out over the ocean near an island called Catalina . . . and either crashed or submerged beneath the water. Army and Navy teams were dispatched to look for wreckage, but if anything was found it was kept a closely guarded secret.”
“Wait a minute,” Groton said. “Are you saying that we recovered extraterrestrial wreckage during the war? Not just afterward at Roswell?”
“There is evidence to that effect, Captain, yes. Discoveries made from the study of that wreckage helped the United States develop nuclear weapons.”
“Was this your people?” Winchester asked. “The Talis?”
“Probably not. We believe the Saurians may be implicated in this.”
Hunter felt an inner jolt at those words. It was all interrelated, all of it, a Gordian knot of impossibly tangled complexities. The Saurians, time travelers from the remote past, had helped the US develop the atomic bomb, information that was then covered up by the government. Other time travelers, humans from the future who were concerned that twentieth-century humans might eradicate all life on Earth, had intervened to ensure human survival—both in the 1950s and in the remote future.
And Roswell had not been the first recovered alien spaceship.
“Why did the Saurians help us?” Winchester wanted to know. “What the hell did they have to gain from interfering?”
“As we have explained,” Elanna said, “there is a long-running state of conflict between the Malok and the various branches of future humanity, the Talis and most Grays. Neither side can directly attack the other, for fear of triggering a temporal war that might result in nonexistence for both.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Winchester said. “We’ve been briefed on all that. So why are the Saurians helping twentieth-century Americans?”
“So that those Americans would themselves trigger a world war that would end all human existence and leave Earth available for Saurian reconquest.”
Reconquest . . .
Hunter knew what the Talis liaison meant. The Saurians were originally from Earth, had evolved on Earth during the late Cretaceous and still thought of the planet as their own.
And they were determined to take it back from these upstart apes that had come along after the end of Saurian civilization.
Something occurred to him, a memory.
“Wait a sec, Elanna,” Hunter said. “Didn’t you tell us once that the Saurians, these Malok, might have tinkered with human DNA to create us in the first place?”
“I did,” she said. “We do not know the details, however, and the idea itself is not certain. But it seems likely.”
“So why can’t they go back in time and stop themselves from creating us? Why all the mucking about with proxies and interfering in our wars?”
“Because a great many of them are inextricably wrapped up in human history.” Elanna looked thoughtful. “Do you understand the concept of the quantum metaverse?”
“You’re talking about the many-worlds hypothesis?” Brody asked.
“More or less . . . though that concept is somewhat simplistic. But one way of looking at time travel into the past is to realize that changing a given timeline in fact generates a new timeline, in effect creating a new universe.”
“The solution to the grandfather paradox,” Brody said, nodding. “They used to say time travel was impossible because the traveler could go back in time and kill his own grandfather . . . but if he did so, he would cease to exist . . . and the grandfather would live. A paradox.”
“Correct,” Elanna said. “The traveler in fact would create a new timeline by killing his grandfather, generating a new, grandfatherless universe . . . and the traveler would be unable to return to the timeline from which he came. If the Malok did indeed interfere in human evolution, that interference took place across many tens of thousands of years. If they went back and stopped that project, they would find themselves cut off in another universe where humans never evolved. They may need humans as slaves. Or they may identify so strongly with their fellows that such isolation is unthinkable.”
“If they want us for slaves,” Winchester said, “they’d better lay off trying to get us to nuke ourselves into extinction!”
“There would be survivors after a nuclear war,” Elanna said, “but their potential to generate a space-faring civilization such as ours would be gone. Besides, they have many thousands of your people . . . I think your expression would be ‘on ice.’”
“Like on Serpo,” Hunter said. “Humans abducted and kept in bottles.”
“Humans to be enslaved,” Elanna said, “but with their potential as a viable future, technic civilization gone. The Talis and the Grays would be gone as well. As you might imagine, we are . . . anxious to avoid that particular timeline.”
“This is giving me a headache,” Brody said. “If time travel isn’t impossible, it damned sure ought to be!”
“Sadly, Dr. Brody,” Elanna told him, “the possibility of using time travel as a weapon does exist. And the Malok are persistent and they are patient. They have already made significant inroads toward acquiring considerable political power on Earth, and if they are successful, they will eliminate all of Humankind and save a handful as slaves under their control.”
“You’ve told us that the Saurians helped the Germans before and during World War II,” Hunter pointed out. “What were they playing at here? They help the Germans develop weapons like the Bell-thing you told us about that crashed in Kecksburg . . . but then turn around and help America develop the atomic bomb. Who was supposed to come out on top?”
“The Malok care nothing for human ideology,” Elanna explained. “Nazi Germany, communist Russia, a democratic United States, it really doesn’t matter who wins. Both the Germans and the Americans were working on developing an atomic bomb during the war. The German efforts were hampered by supply problems and by sabotage by some German scientists working on the project, so you Americans won the war. As you might guess, they helped the Russians, too. However, since their plan failed, they had to employ other tactics.”
“What other tactics?” Winchester asked.
“I cannot divulge much about that,” Elanna said. “To do so might change history and put all of us in a different timeline. Suffice to say that the Saurian Malok are deeply entrenched within several nation-states on Earth and directing events in such a way as to guarantee the collapse of your civilization.”
“So terrestrial civilization collapses,” Hunter said, “and we get knocked back into the Dark Ages even without a nuclear war, is that it? And the Lizards step in and take over.”
“Again, I cannot say too much about things that still lie in your future.”
But Hunter saw the agreement in her large and expressive eyes. Had the Saurians managed to sow the seeds for planetary collapse already, working behind the scenes and in secret? He thought about the spiraling insanity of human politics back on Earth right now—nations, in particular the US and Great Britain, split between radically competing ideologies, between left and right, liberal and conservative, socialist and capitalist. The political polarization all but paralyzing the US government today had been going on for a long time, but had really taken off after . . . what?
How about the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Maybe the Malok had stepped up their secretive political interference after the USSR had collapsed economically and ended the Cold War.
And there were so many other, larger conflicts beyond the borders of the United States. Chinese expansionism, the resurgence of a Russian dictatorship, religious fanatics, terrorism . . . maybe they all were being nudged along by Saurian intervention.
And perhaps most terrifying of all was the realization that those damn Lizards had been there all along, hiding in the shadows, guiding Humankind into endless cycles of war, turmoil, greed, exploitation, and collapse.
No wonder the Talis were helping . . . even if that help was far more conditional than he could have hoped.
One thing was certain in all of this.
They had to win this thing.
Chapter Eight
“Non-terrestrial know-how in atomic energy must be used in perfecting super weapons of war to effect the complete defeat of Germany and Japan.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 27 February 1944
28 February 1942
Colonel Caldwell stood on the widow’s walk surrounding the top of the Point Fermin Lighthouse, talking with the lighthouse keeper. The structure didn’t look like a traditional lighthouse, but was more of a classic Victorian dwelling, white-painted with gray trim, and with a square, thirty-foot tower rising from the center of the roof. Atop the tower, surrounded by the railed walkway, was the lantern housing. The structure, he’d been told, had been constructed in 1874, and had stood here on Point Fermin ever since. The light had been extinguished after Pearl Harbor by authorities fearing it would guide Japanese aircraft to the city to the north.
It was three days after what the papers were now calling “the Battle of Los Angeles.” The city was still jittery, the military still on alert. The all-clear had sounded at around 0730 on the morning of the twenty-fifth, but many throughout LA were still convinced that the Japanese might be coming ashore at any moment. Both civilians and the military were still trying to assess what happened . . . what really happened. Over 1400 rounds of artillery had been expended that night, people had been killed by falling bits of shrapnel and spent rounds. The military was being blamed for a cover-up; people had claimed seeing hundreds of enemy aircraft, which didn’t seem possible. There’d been reports of Japanese planes shot down during the battle. One was supposed to have crashed at a major intersection in downtown Hollywood . . . though nothing had been found.
And there’d been a report of something passing over the coast and crashing into the ocean.
Caldwell had arrived at the light shortly after 9:00 a.m. After parking the car, he’d checked out of the motor pool and climbed the stairs to the top of the light both for a better view and to talk with Michael Crowell, a weather-beaten character of about seventy years of age, and the current light keeper.
“And you say it crashed?” he asked Crowell after introductions.
“Yup. Right there it was, too.” He pointed. “Halfway between here an’ Catalina.”
Caldwell raised his binoculars and studied the horizon. The waters were dark blue, and Catalina was a gray-green smudge against the cold morning sky twenty miles to the south.
“Was it an aircraft?”
“It were in the air, right?”
“I mean, was it a Japanese aircraft? Could you see any details?”
“It was big and it was round,” the old man told him. He shrugged. “It was still pretty dark, but there was enough predawn glow for me to see it well enough. I’d heard all the gunfire and hullabaloo off to the north, an’ come out to see what was goin’ on. It passed right overhead, just there, and I was watching it through my binoculars, see? I could see it glowing kind of pale orange. And it moved out over the ocean and then hit the water with a huge burst of spray, like a broaching whale.”
So the thing had come down in the ocean. The antiaircraft fire must have brought it down after all! Caldwell felt a thrill of anticipation at that. The wreckage would be out there, lying at the bottom. It should be easy enough to send a boat out, maybe with hardhat divers, and see what was down there.
Assuming that this wasn’t another wild tale of Japanese planes coming down in the middle of Hollywood.
He was still more than half convinced that what he’d seen had been some sort of Japanese aerial weapon, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it might have been. Not a balloon . . . not a conventional aircraft . . . but something wholly different.
He would recommend putting together a team to go out there and quietly poke around.
Caldwell had the growing, uncomfortable feeling that he’d run into something like this before, just eleven months ago. . . .
The Present Day
Three weeks later, the Hillenkoetter and her escorts decelerated into the Aldebaran star system. The ship crossed sixty-five light-years close to the speed of light to reach Aldebaran, while traveling backward in time far enough to cancel much of that lag. As Groton had noted before, starships could travel faster-than-light only by traveling backward in time.
