Alien hostiles, p.18
Alien Hostiles, page 18
He looked down the double line of armored troopers. Though Hunter’s background was the Navy SEALs, the 1-JSST drew recruits from every elite branch of the military services, and thankfully Hunter had been able to integrate them into a tightly functional team despite mutually alien traditions, conflicting backgrounds, and interservice rivalries.
He looked at Grabiak, sitting there with his eyes closed as though lost in some internal world of his own. Just getting them all to speak the same language . . .
Hunter was reminded of the old joke about how to tell the four branches of the military apart. Tell the Army to “secure that building,” and they’ll surround the structure with tanks, dig lots of ditches, and not allow anyone in or out until told otherwise.
Tell the Marines to “secure that building,” and they’ll storm the structure, eliminate any and all resistance, set up a secure perimeter with overlapping fields of fire, and allow no one to enter until relieved.
Tell the Navy to “secure that building,” and they’ll turn out the lights, close and lock all the doors, and post a fire watch.
And the Air Force? They’ll secure the building by taking out a thirty-year lease on the structure with an option to buy.
Hunter wondered what the joke might have to say about the US Space Force. Recently signed into existence by the President, the USSF was the first new uniformed armed service to be created since the Air Force in 1947. Technically, the 1-JSST was under the USSF command tree, though Hunter had not met any Space Force admin personnel as yet. The official word was that the Space Force was responsible for tracking satellites and monitoring space activities from the ground. No “space Marines,” no Buck Rogers, no military presence off the Earth.
Currently, the JSST reported directly to the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC. The USSF was too brand spanking new to handle the training, equipping, and deployment of real space combat forces, and the chances were most of their officers had never even heard of Solar Warden, much less of a deployment to Aldebaran. Though as the 1-JSST kept proving itself, Hunter knew they would eventually be folded into the Space Force.
So how would the Space Force secure that damned building?
An old movie quote arose in Hunter’s mind and made him smile: “Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. . . .”
Time dragged on. The hardest part was always the wait beforehand.
“Twenty minutes, Commander,” Duvall’s voice said through the wireless Bluetooth bud in Hunter’s ear. His words were still clipped and stiffly formal. “We’re applying slight deceleration and course adjustment to put us on the LZ.”
Hunter wondered again if the Saurians were monitoring their approach. If they were, they’d just given away the game. Incoming meteors did not change velocity all by themselves or change course like Oumuamua. . . .
Yet, he reassured himself the TR-3S was sheathed in stealth materials and shaped to absorb or scatter all incoming radiation, both laser and radar. The craft had the radar cross-section of a small bird right now, a rock smaller than a man’s fist. Nobody here but us rocks . . .
Odds were the highly evolved dinosaurs would never see them coming.
Certainly, they’d not seen the incoming comet or asteroid that had driven the dinosaurs extinct sixty-six million years ago, or, if they had, they’d not been able to do anything about it. Hunter hoped that it was the same this time around as well.
Julia Ashley lay on her bunk as her mind reached across the Void. She’d never been specifically trained to do this—no coordinates, no controls—but she knew it was at least possible. Back in the early days of Project Stargate, a remote viewer named Ingo Swan had targeted the planet Jupiter from Earth. He’d seen the giant planet girdled by rings, a totally unexpected result.
She could see the planet in her mind’s eye. Mostly rust-red, but with dark green patches. Blue seas. Swirls of white cloud. The glint of ice at the polar caps. The multihued glow of aurora. And beyond, the vast and looming bulk of a banded orange gas giant. She could see the rings, and suddenly, she thought of Ingo Swan.
She wasn’t following standard viewing protocol this time. No sheets of paper covered with notes or crude drawings. She was simply . . . observing. Projecting her mind by an act of will and looking at . . . everything.
She could taste her fear. Suppose there were things down there that were aware of her? That could see her in some spectral fashion? That might even be able to attack her somehow . . . ?
Ashley pushed the thought away and concentrated on the planet. She didn’t know what the mission’s objective was here, other than that there might be a colony of humans somewhere on the surface, a breakaway civilization founded by German Nazis eighty or more years ago.
And Reptilian Saurians, of course. She’d heard about those and was pretty sure she’d glimpsed one. Behind those terrifying reptile eyes, there was a cold, dark mind.
In her mind’s eye, she was flying above open ground.
There was vegetation. She was drifting above a kind of scrubby grassland, but the grass was red, brown, and orange. Flat-topped spreading trees grew as isolated sentinels, looking much like acacia trees on the African savanna, but with shaggy red and deep violet foliage casting dark pools of shadow. The sky was greenish, with the local star as a bloated, red-orange disk near the horizon.
There was animal life as well. She could see herds of stooped, hairless two-legged beasts, with down-curving tusks emerging from wrinkled, headless faces. They looked like nothing she’d ever seen on Earth.
She focused her thoughts on finding people . . . or at least on intelligence. She felt a gentle tug, a pull in that direction.
Across a range of low and sparsely wooded hill, the land turned rocky, then opened into dunes behind a red-purple sea. A naked man ran across hard-packed sand, stumbling, falling, picking himself up and continuing to run, throwing terrified glances back over his shoulder every dozen steps or so. His progress was hampered by patches of loose sand beneath his bare feet, and by the fact that his hands were bound behind him. He stumbled again.
Behind him, Julia saw a trio of the upright gray-brown beasts she’d seen earlier, but these carried riders. With a fear-laced shock of recognition, she saw that they were Saurians—five feet tall, slender, scaly, with elongated heads and mouths filled with teeth. She drew back, afraid they might sense her presence; though, their attention seemed wholly focused on their prey.
They were far swifter than the man, even on sand. One rode past him full tilt as he ran, brushing him aside, knocking him down. The others were on him in an instant. Julia flinched as the two closed in on the man. As they leaped from their mounts, they held wicked-looking knives, extremely slender and slightly curved, like glittering claws. Their attack felt staged, almost ritualistic as they neatly sliced the tendons behind both of the human’s knees, dropping him to the sand, rendering him helpless.
She could hear him screaming.
The third Saurian joined the others and the struggle was over in moments . . . though it took the human longer to die on that patch of bare sand.
Much longer.
He was still alive and shrieking as the Saurians crouched around him began to feed, and Julia, with the shrill horror of waking from a nightmare, broke mental contact.
The TR-3S hit atmosphere, traveling west at over twenty miles per second. As ionized plasma surrounded it, Duvall cut the speed back sharply, pulling up at the same time so that they were moving in a flat arc nearly parallel to the ground. Coming in close to the day-night terminator, the shuttle plunged into twilight, then darkness, slowing and descending deeper into night.
“Forty thousand,” Connors said, reading off the fast-dwindling altitude in meters. “Thirty . . . twenty-five . . . twenty thousand.”
The external temperature soared. Anyone watching from the ground would have seen the sudden blaze of a shooting star streaking overhead.
“Anything, Zack?” Duvall called out to the RIO. “We being painted?”
“Not a peep, Lieutenant. No radar, no lidar, nothing.”
“Then I think we caught ’em with their pants down.”
Carefully, he cut their speed further, adjusting the drive field to dissipate any sonic boom. If they were sleeping down there, there was no sense in waking them up. Going subsonic at last, he began looking around for a place to set down.
“Coastline just ahead, Lieutenant,” Connors said. He was staring at the screen image from the infrared camera, which showed water as black and land in shades of dark silver-gray. Patches of white light gleamed on the horizon, either a city or a large structure.
They came down in the water with a shock and a splash, swiftly submerging. Gravitic drives worked as well to propel craft under the water as they did in atmosphere or space. Duvall brought the shuttle left in pitch blackness, angling toward the shore and the half-glimpsed heat signature they’d seen on the horizon. A few minutes later, the craft’s instrumentation showed a shoaling bottom. He extended the landing gear and gently brought the craft to a halt.
“Commander Hunter?” he called over the intercom. “We’re down in about twenty foot of water. Bottom is solid. There’s a structural target of some sort at three-one-seven, range roughly ten miles. No sign of a hot LZ.”
“Very good, Lieutenant. Thanks for the ride.”
“It’s not like I had a choice, or did I, sir?”
He was still angry at the way Hunter had manipulated him.
“You had a choice, Lieutenant,” Hunter replied. “And I have to say you made a good one.”
“Sir.”
Chapter Twelve
“It is my personal judgment that, when the war is won, and peace is again restored, there will come a time when surplus funds may be available to pursue a program devoted to understanding non-terrestrial science and its technology which is still greatly undiscovered. I have had private discussions with Dr. Bush on this subject and the advice of several eminent scientists who believe the United States should take every advantage of such wonders that have come to us.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 27 February 1944
18 March 1942
“Vril? I’ve never heard of it,” Kemperer lied.
“Come now,” the young woman said, her voice mocking. “You are part of the SS inner circle . . . a member of the Ahnenerbe. You must know of the Society for Truth! And of the Vril Society?”
Kemperer almost said, “Oh, that Vril,” but managed to stop himself. He had no wish to appear stupid in front of this fantastically gorgeous creature. “That’s just a myth,” he said instead. He waved a hand dismissively. “The invention of an English writer.”
“Bulwer-Lytton, yes. But the fact that he first gave name to a cosmic principle in a work of fiction scarcely diminishes the idea.”
Kemperer shook his head. Bulwer-Lytton had written a book in 1871 called The Coming Race. Kemperer had read it in translation. The novel was terribly cheesy stuff, actually; all about an underground race of godlike beings called the Vril-ya, and their use of a magical energy for acts both of creation and destruction. Various occult and mystical groups had picked up on the “Vril” of the story and promoted it to fit their own narratives. According to Bulwer-Lytton himself, his Vril was nothing more than electricity as it might be revealed within the technology of a far-future science.
“The fact that he wrote about it does not make it real, Fräulein.” Kemperer wondered how old this girl was. She was certainly a young adult, maybe in her late twenties . . . but she carried herself with the maturity of someone three times her age. How old was she, anyway?
“My . . . my mentor first made telepathic contact with the Sumi over two decades ago,” she said. “It was they who transmitted to her the plans and specifications for the Vril-ships . . . what you and the Ahnenerbe refer to as the Haunebu.”
“Your mentor?”
“You may have heard of her,” Sigrun said. “Maria Orsic?”
“Ah . . .”
It all came together for Kemperer in that moment. Maria Orsic was well-known both to the SS and to the Ahnenerbe. A famous medium, she had created the Vril Gesellschaft, an all-female group of talented mediums, all exceptionally striking, all wearing unfashionably long hair which they claimed acted as antennae to pick up telepathic messages from elsewhere. Early designs for interplanetary flying machines had been passed up the line to Nazi scientists, who’d been working on the Haunebu design for several years. In brief, Orsic claimed that the Sumi or “White Gods” from a planet circling the star Aldebaran had come to Earth long ago, had created the civilization of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia and had possibly colonized doomed Atlantis as well. According to the lore, they were the first Aryans, and from the Aryans came modern Germans.
The Ahnenerbe had of course investigated those stories, and there were some who believed them . . . like Himmler himself. Kemperer doubted that things were quite that cut-and-dried, however. The Vril Gesellschaft was known for its mildly scandalous habit of going outside on starlit nights and lying in a circle on the ground, stark naked, their long hair spread out around them, and channeling messages from the stars. Kemperer was a realist. The Ahnenerbe’s ongoing search for the origins of the Aryan race had to be solidly grounded in scientific principles, not the fantasies of young nudist women with vivid imaginations.
“Well,” Kemperer said after an awkward moment. “You know Maria Orsic? That would explain the hair . . .”
The Present Day
The members of the recon team donned their helmets and filed up the rear ramp into the depths of the waiting Predator. Its tie-downs freed, the vehicle rolled aft into the cargo bay airlock, then waited in darkness as the door was sealed and water poured inside. Once the chamber was filled, the outer hatch lowered to the seabed, and the RV trundled out into the alien sea.
The ARVX Predator was completely sealed with its own internal life support and was propelled by fuel cell–powered electric motors mounted inside its wheel hubs, and so could operate in poisonous atmospheres, hard vacuum, or, as this time, underwater. Directed by radio from the TR-3S, tech sergeant Walters steered the vehicle through rapidly shoaling water, until it burst into the air in an explosion of white spray.
The rear ramp came down and the passengers spilled out, taking up positions in a broad, defensive perimeter. If they’d been observed, any nearby hostiles might be expected to launch an attack . . . but the alien night was silent and empty. A golden-red glow dominated the eastern sky above a deep violet sea, with the immense crescent of the gas giant Charlie hanging in the northeast. The rings, viewed almost edge on, were a brilliant razor’s slice across that crescent, looking like an arrow about to be fired from a titanic cosmic bow toward a point just below the eastern horizon.
The gas giant provided light enough for the team to go to work. Hunter supervised the placement of a small radio transponder that would trigger when the team returned and broadcast a coded signal. The storm of radio noise from Charlie would block longer-range communications, but the transponder signal would be strong enough to guide them through the last few kilometers of unknown terrain to the TR-3S’s submerged hiding place here, just off the beach. The TR-3S had already extended a radio mast above the surface perhaps a hundred yards off the coast, which would listen for the transponder signal, and for radio signals from the team.
Hunter flexed his knees, experimenting. Daarish’s surface gravity was just a third of Earth’s. That might be to their advantage. The temperature, he noted, was in the eighties and humid enough that Hunter was glad of his environmental suit. This far out from the local sun the temp should have been well below zero. Something else, something unknown, was at play.
A volcano on the southern horizon suggested that tidal stresses with Charlie might be behind the anomalous temperatures.
His NVGs provided plenty of illumination. Even as a crescent Charlie flooded the alien landscape in light, beneath the eerily shifting green haze of the aurorae.
“Mount up,” Hunter ordered. “Let’s check out the lay of the land.”
RM1 Ralph Colby, squeezed into a jump seat with Walters in the driver’s cabin, scanned the radio frequencies, listening for . . . anything, anything at all besides the storm of noise from Charlie. So far they appeared to be all alone . . . which was great news so far as Hunter was concerned.
The Predator’s big soft tires took them up and over the line of sand dunes behind the coast. According to data transmitted from the Starhawk flyby and confirmed by the TR-3S, they’d come down, as planned, on the eastern shore of the land mass now designated as “Madagascar,” at roughly ten degrees south just a few miles from the single large contact believed to be an alien city. Duvall, Hunter thought, had been bang on target.
They rolled across the dunes, headed northwest. Hunter could see little through the narrow windows of the RV’s passenger compartment. The light outside was predawn dim and was expected to remain so for another ten hours.
The moon Daarish circled Charlie once in seven days. It was tidally locked to the gas giant, meaning it always presented the same face to its primary; here, Charlie would seem always to hang just above the northeastern horizon. Daarish was turning in relation to its sun, however. As it orbited Charlie, it would experience three and a half days of daylight followed by three and a half days of night. They’d come down just behind the morning terminator, meaning it was gradually growing lighter . . . but Aldebaran would not rise above the horizon for another ten hours at least. In the meantime, between the gradually lightening sky and the glow from Charlie, the landscape was mostly lost in a deep twilight gloom. The sky was a dark purple, with only a few stars showing. The landscape itself was mostly lost in shadows.
