Alien hostiles, p.19
Alien Hostiles, page 19
“Skipper?” Walters called over the intercom from the RV’s driver’s cabin forward. “I’ve got something funny up here on the starlight. . . .”
Hunter unstrapped himself from his seat and carefully edged his way forward between the two lines of seated troopers. At the front of the passenger bay, a pressure door opened to admit him to the driver’s compartment. Walters had larger windows and a better view than the troops crowded in aft, though the darkness was still claustrophobic. A monitor screen on the forward console was showing a low-light image of the terrain ahead, a monotone of greens illuminated by the incidental surrounding light.
“Hey, Commander. Have a look at that.”
Walters pointed at the screen. The dunes ahead were reflecting a fair amount of Charlie light and appeared pale. There was an X-shaped splotch on the sand perhaps fifty meters ahead, so dark it looked black.
“I don’t think its vegetation, sir,” Walters told him. “It’s nothing at all like this dune-grass stuff nearby. Looks almost like what’s left of a big campfire.”
“Doesn’t look natural, Commander,” Colby observed from his seat at the comm center.
Hunter had told Walters and Colby both to be on the lookout for anything that might be artificial. He wasn’t certain this qualified, since a lightning strike could have started a small fire . . . but Colby was right: that black patch was sitting in the middle of brightly lit sand with nothing else similar to it in sight. “Let’s have a look,” he told Walters. “Not too close.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Are you picking up anything on your ears, Colby?”
“Not a damned thing, Skipper. Nothing artificial, anyway. There’s a hell of a waterfall roar coming from Charlie. They may not be able to use radio this close to a gas giant.”
The Predator RV edged up twenty meters from the blob and halted. Hunter, Moss, Grabiak, and Marlow stepped down the RV’s back ramp and made their way through soft sand toward the strange marking.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Moss said as they drew closer.
“God,” Grabiak said. He looked around, on high alert, his laser rifle up and ready.
Hunter said nothing.
He couldn’t.
“Is . . . is that human?” Moss said.
The dark shape on the sand was clearly a body, but it was difficult at first to identify the species. Doc Marlow knelt beside it. “Too tall to be a Gray,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. “Skin and feet are wrong for a Saurian. Jesus . . .”
“Looks like scavengers have been at it,” Hunter observed. He pointed at the peeled-open chest. Surprisingly, there was little blood.
“I doubt that, sir,” the medic said. “These . . . mutilations are way too neat and clean to be made by animals.”
“I don’t know, Doc,” Moss said. “Whoever did this was an animal!”
The face stared at the dark sky with eyeless sockets. The lower jaw was missing along with the tongue. The genitals had been removed, along with the internal organs. The body was human, despite the brutal mutilation. The legs were plantigrade rather than showing a Saurian’s birdlike digitigrade structure. The sand underneath the mangled corpse was stained dark with blood. What little blood they found obviously had dried long ago. Hunter searched carefully, but he saw nothing in the way of artifacts . . . no weapon, no boots, not even any shredded scraps of clothing.
Marlow indicated the rib cage. “Looks like whatever killed him broke open the sternum and ribs . . . kind of peeled them back. Could be scavengers, I suppose, but I really don’t think so.” He sounded doubtful.
“How do you know that?” Moss demanded.
“For one thing, the sternum is missing. And scavengers tend to drag parts away rather than peel them open like this. They’ll crush bones, but these look cleanly snapped.” He looked closer. “Correction. See those?” He pointed again at the butterflied ribs. “Cut marks. They used a knife . . . or really sharp claws. . . .”
Hunter was casting about nearby. “I think we have footprints,” he said. The sand was too soft to hold a shape, but something large had been stamping around among the dunes. “Could be what killed him. . . .”
“And this is disturbing. . . .” Marlow said, peering closer.
“What is it?” Hunter asked.
Marlow turned the body’s left wrist with a gloved finger. “See here? Two bones in the lower arm, radius and ulna. But right here, between them and up next to the wrist . . .”
Hunter could see immediately what had caught the medic’s attention. “That’s a deep wound.”
“It goes all the way through. Looks like both wrists.” He checked the feet. “Yeah, ankles, too.”
“Meaning?” Grabiak asked.
“I’m not entirely sure . . . but I think someone jammed a very sharp knife right through this guy’s wrists and ankles. All the way through and down into the sand. . . .”
“My God . . .” Hunter said softly.
“Yeah. Whoever killed this guy pinned him to the ground with knives.”
“You mean they crucified the son of a bitch?” Grabiak asked. “Crucified him without the cross?”
“Something like that.”
Hunter noticed that Marlow was now referring to the killer as whoever, not whatever. The evidence suggested that the man had been deliberately tortured and murdered by an intelligent attacker.
They left what remained of the corpse where they’d found it. They didn’t have time for a burial, and frankly there was no point in hauling it back to the ship with them. Hunter and Grabiak took a few photos with cell phones brought along for recording purposes, getting plenty of close-ups of cut marks and what looked like surgically precise slices. Marlow collected samples of blood and tissue, promising to do a DNA analysis when they got back to the Hillenkoetter, but there seemed to be little doubt now that there were humans on this world.
Humans and something else . . . someone else that hunted them.
“Yes,” Ashley told Hargreaves. “I’m certain it was a human.”
She described in detail what she’d seen in her remote session. She was trembling inside, though somehow, she managed to keep her voice steady.
“Hmph,” Hargreaves said. “Damn it, I thought I told you to quit stressing yourself! Carter is going to have a fit!”
“I’m okay,” she told him. “Just . . . just a little shaken.” Nothing I can’t handle, she told herself with more conviction than she felt.
“And you think what you saw was in the area where the recon team landed?”
“I’m pretty sure of it,” she said. “That’s what I was focused on going in . . . checking the area where our people were going to land. I was using the landing coordinates from the premission brief.”
Hargreaves looked at the notes she’d handed him. “Yeah . . . but there’s a problem. It’s nighttime in the area where they landed. You say you saw this in daylight?”
Ashley nodded.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. The timing is all wrong. It probably was a waking dream triggered by you being stressed out.”
You son of a bitch, she thought, furious, but she replied with a shrug. “Maybe . . . but we do know that remote viewing can take place across time as well as space, at least to some extent.”
And I was standing there on the streets of Los Angeles eighty years ago. . . .
As the RV jounced and clattered over rocky ground, Hunter studied the digital photos. It was obvious that the body was human, though a DNA analysis would be needed to confirm that. It raised some major issues, however. Up until now, Hunter had been taking the idea of a German colony at Aldebaran with a very large chunk of sodium chloride. How the hell would Nazis have gotten all the way out here?
He was quite familiar with the endless conspiracy theories about the Nazis’ escape during the final days of the war. There was a town in northwestern Argentina, a village called Bariloche, that had hidden hundreds of ex-Nazis after the war and where many townspeople were fairly certain that Adolf Hitler had lived for years. There were wilder theories about a hidden, underground base in Neuschwabenland in Antarctica, where Hitler and other fugitives from Germany had planned to start a fourth Reich.
For Hunter, that was a bit of a stretch; however, German interest in the region was well documented and at least two U-boats, the U-530 and the U-977, were known to have made it to Argentina and, just possibly, down to Antarctica, possibly with fleeing Nazi leaders and stolen gold on board.
Yet, Nazis escaping on board faster-than-light flying saucers to Aldebaran? That just defied all common sense. Why Aldebaran, for starters? How would they have known there was a habitable world here?
It might be possible if they had help. . . .
But one badly mangled body in the sand did not prove the existence of a German colony. Though, taken together with that Talis image of a Nazi Balkenkreuz adrift in space, the idea became a little more plausible.
Still, they now had to face squarely the reality that there were humans on Daarish.
And there were Saurians as well. Were the two groups working together? During the Second World War, Saurians had been covertly helping the Nazis; Die Glocke—“The Bell”—that had crashed in Pennsylvania in 1965 had carried a German officer and a Saurian pilot. But Hunter had seen for himself that underground chamber on Zeta Reticuli, with hundreds of human captives held in suspension inside transparent tubes. If he’d not seen it for himself, Hunter would have laughed at the idea of a B-movie cliché. The Saurians might work with specific human groups when it suited them, but they had their own agenda and they did not appear to have human interests in mind.
Elanna, the Talis liaison, had told him the Malok were actively seeking to overturn human civilization, but quietly behind the scenes. They’d been carrying out a covert invasion of Earth for decades, perhaps longer.
What was the situation here? Was a human colony descended from Nazi fugitives here under their protection? Working with them? Or . . .
Hunter had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew who the creatures were who’d nailed that man to the ground and cut him apart.
He’d heard stories of the cattle mutilation phenomenon, a kind of torture that had spread worldwide since the 1960s. Cattle, horses, and a long list of other animals, both domestic and wild, had been found dead usually with the same list of horrific mutilations: eyes, ears, jaws, tongues, lymph nodes, genitals, and rectum all removed, with little or no bleeding. Sometimes the heart, a lung, or parts of the digestive system would have been removed. Arteries were sealed, as if by laser; the surgical cuts tended to be clean and precise, as if by laser or a very sharp scalpel.
Hunter had never heard of a human being found like that, but he very much wanted to talk to Elanna again.
Damn it, he wanted some answers out of that reticent and stuck-up Talis asshole.
Restless, Hunter unstrapped and made his way forward again. “Still nothing but static, Skipper,” Colby told him as he stuck his head into the driver’s compartment.
“Right. Walters? How’s it looking?”
“We were cruising right along, Commander. Covered the first five miles in ten minutes. But we’re really slogging now.”
As if to emphasize the point, the RV jolted and jounced over some fair-sized rocks, forcing Hunter to grab an overhead handhold to stay upright.
“Rough ground.”
“And then some. How close do you want to try to get?”
Hunter thought about it. “I don’t want to be seen if we can possibly avoid it. I’d say we find someplace to park about three miles out, then hike the rest of the way.”
“Sounds reasonable, sir. It’d be nice if they’d worked out invisibility for these ATVs, though.”
Hunter gave a grim chuckle. “I don’t know of anything guaranteed to grab the bad guys’ attention faster than going invisible,” he said.
Engineers had learned that by bending space tightly and selectively around the ship, they could bend light around the ship as well, effectively rendering it both invisible and invulnerable to weapons. The downside was that the various star-faring civilizations that used electrogravitics could sense when nearby space was being bent.
“A guy can dream, right?” Walters said.
Hunter peered over Walters’s shoulder at the instrument panel. “Any problems with navigation?”
“Nah. Turns out Charlie is hanging in the sky just ten degrees to the right of our heading.”
“‘. . . and a star to steer her by.’”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. As long as you don’t get us lost.”
“Compasses work fine, sir. We also have the aurora to guide us north.”
“So I see.”
Daarish’s aurorae flared and rippled above the horizon ahead, stretching from northwest to northeast. Daarish evidently had a large molten core, probably kept that way by its slightly eccentric orbit around the gas giant. The rotating iron core produced powerful magnetic fields, and those, in turn, captured particulate radiation from Charlie and channeled it down to the poles. The planetary scientists had warned Hunter not to go near either pole during the premission briefing. To do so risked being fried by the incoming radiation.
No wonder the city or whatever it was up ahead had been built within ten degrees of the equator.
Between the aurora light and the soft glow from Charlie, the night was largely replaced by a twilight that was almost bright enough to read by. The Predator RV began winding among steep-sided valleys and rugged terrain looking like the badlands back home. The land was rising swiftly, now, and their progress slowed further still.
After another thirty minutes, Walters announced that they were three or four miles from their objective and Hunter clapped him on the shoulder. “Right, Sarge. Find a place to pull over and let us out. We’ll walk it from here.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“I want you to stay with the RV. When we come back, we’ll fire off a transponder query, then home in on you. Be ready to roll when we get here.”
“Abso-damn-lutely, Skipper. I’ll be here.”
Moments later, twelve men and three women filed down the RV’s ramp. Their Mk. VII armor was painted black, which made them tough to see in the dim light. Hunter called them off into three five-man squads. He would take Moss, Colby, Taylor, and Nielson. Minkowski would take Daly, Herrera, Nicholson, and Briggs while Grabiak would bring up the rear with Dumont, Alvarez, Pauly, and Marlow. Two of the three squads would approach the objective from two different directions, while the third, Grabiak’s, would come up behind in reserve, able to swing left or right to support either of the other two units.
As they prepared to move out, something made Hunter look up. Three bright stars were moving together in formation, traveling swiftly toward the north, toward the JSST team’s objective.
Saucers.
Hunter wondered if they could see the tiny human army below as they passed overhead.
Chapter Thirteen
“There’s a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman, and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.”
President John F. Kennedy, 15 November 1963
Seven days before JFK’s assassination in Dallas
18 March 1942
“I take it, then, that you are with the Vril Gesellschaft,” Kemperer said. “Like Maria Orsic.”
“I am.”
“Where is Maria, anyway? We haven’t heard anything from her in some time.”
The girl drew herself up straighter. “You might recall, General, that the Führer outlawed all occult and secret groups in Germany not long after he came to power. The Vril Project was taken over by Himmler.”
“Such . . . power needs to be in competent hands.”
“Meaning that ours are incompetent?”
“No. No, I just . . .”
She smiled at his awkwardness. “Never mind, General. We have . . . moved on. The Sumi have been working closely with us, with the Gesellschaft, for eight years, now. Very soon, now, they will be taking us to a new home. A home among the stars . . .”
Kemperer wasn’t sure he believed this, but he decided to play along. “Interesting. So what do you want from me?”
“Our . . . visitors are here to help us, General. To help the Reich. And they need someone familiar with the workings of the Ahnenerbe to be certain the Haunebu and certain other projects are . . . let’s just say . . . ‘in competent hands.’”
“Meaning ours are not?”
“Meaning they’re a million years ahead of us, General, and we should listen to what they have to say.”
The Present Day
As they climbed, the team had noticed a glow in the sky above the hills ahead, one harsher than the light of the auroras or of Charlie. They also noticed that the vegetation was changing, the purple-red reeds giving way to quite terrestrial-looking grasses and shrubs.
Did that mean they were approaching a human colony, an area where plants from Earth had taken hold and displaced the native flora? Marlow took some samples to be studied later.
An hour after leaving the RV, Hunter and his squad picked their way to the top of a sere and rugged ridge, keeping flat on their bellies to avoid being spotted against the sky. Hunter wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see on the north side of the slope—the map and the flyby images showed very little in the way of detail—but he hadn’t expected . . .
. . . this.
A steep-sided pit hundreds of feet deep and several miles wide teemed with activity. This was the source of the harsh glow they’d noticed behind the ridgeline. Powerful lights covered a small fraction of the entire pit in high-intensity illumination near the base of the terraced slope. Below, dozens of alien-looking construction machines nosed around on the crater floor, digging up the floor and loading loose rock into waiting tracked carriers. Twenty one-man flying platforms drifted above the workers, apparently supervising the work.
