Alien agendas, p.28
Alien Agendas, page 28
“I suppose so,” Hunter said. “We’re kind of working in parallel here, though he does outrank me. But he’s the one responsible for the ship, just as CAG Macmillan is in charge of the aerospace wing. Winchester is in command of the whole task force, and that does include me and my people. The JSST doesn’t belong to me. I can’t just hare off on my own. . . .”
“And the lives of those people at Malibu don’t count?”
Hunter made a sour face. “Are the people at Malibu worth the risk of all-out war with the Lizards? Suppose we take out their base. Will they start taking out our cities? Worse . . . will they break their informal agreement with the Talis and maybe do something nasty to our timeline? Change our history so we’re no longer a threat? I gather that could happen.”
“I’ve never really understood this stuff about a time war,” Ashley admitted.
“I’m not sure I do either. In a way, the past is already set, right? If we go back in time and change something, we spawn a whole new parallel universe with new situations dictated by that change. Our old universe is still there, but we’re stuck in the new one. At least . . . that’s my understanding of it.”
“But aren’t we changing the Talisian future every time we do something here in the present? Our present is their past . . . and it must be just as set for them.”
“Absolutely right. And that’s where my understanding kind of leaves the building. But I get the impression that the Lizards have been making small, incremental changes all along . . . and their long-term plan is to rewrite our future. The Talis are working to stop any changes that rewrite their present, somewhen up in our future.”
“None of which explains why the Saurians should be allowed to get away with mass kidnappings.”
“The problem is that we don’t know how far we can push them. Push too hard, and they decide we’re too much trouble and just step on us. And they could, too. Probably without raising a sweat.”
“I didn’t know reptiles can sweat.”
Hunter smiled. “You know what I mean.”
Ashley was thoughtful for a long moment. “I’m wondering, Mark . . .”
“What?”
“Dr. Bennett and I have been working for a while on a different problem, one that involves time travel and changing the future.”
“What problem is that?”
She drew a deep breath. “Shag Harbour.”
“That crashed alien spaceship?”
“The . . . the people on board are called the Zshaj. That’s what the Talis call them, anyway. They’re . . . they’re stuck in my mind. I can’t get away from them. They want me to help.”
Hunter looked alarmed. “What . . . they’re in your head?”
She shook her head. “Not like that. Not like they’re controlling me or anything. But the memory won’t go away. Sometimes, like in my dreams, it seems like they’re still talking to me, even though I’m not trancing out.”
“And what are they saying?”
“‘Help us.’”
“So what do you want to do about it?”
“I’ve been talking to Dr. Bennett. I think I have him convinced to act. See . . . the Zshaj are trapped inside their time ship submerged at the bottom of Shag Harbour in Nova Scotia. That means they’re separated from the rest of the time-space continuum, right? If they all die down there . . . or if we rescue them, it doesn’t matter to the rest of the timeline.”
“Well . . . it might,” Hunter said. “If, say, they were here to invade the Earth and they got shot down, that might pose a bit of a problem for us if we showed up and rescued them.”
“They are not here to hurt us, Mark,” Ashley said, stubborn. “We rescue them, they go home, and we never see them again.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Trust me. I know. . . .”
Hunter shook his head. “Either way, Julia . . . even if it doesn’t affect us, whether they go home or die on Earth, that’s going to affect the future of their world. Do they have families?”
“Of course they do.” She glared at him for a moment. “Just like you have Geri Galanis. If you manage to rescue her, won’t you be changing her future?”
Hunter winced. “Ouch. Touché.”
“Dr. Bennett has been talking to your Captain Groton, trying to convince him. If he does, I think the idea will be to use the Hillenkoetter to go back to 1967.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. Make direct contact? Maybe call in other Zshaj ships to help? Or maybe we can help them repair their vessel. I think I could get a lot more information if I was there in their time.”
“Groton and Winchester are going to need a lot of convincing. Elanna, too.”
She hesitated, building up the nerve to ask. “If you’ll help me, Mark, then I’ll help you.”
“You’ll help me save my people, if I help you save your aliens?”
“Something like that.”
Slowly, Hunter nodded. “I’m not sure I can offer any real help,” he said. “But I’ll sure as hell try. I do think I might have an idea. . . .”
In the end, the Saurians on the upper decks of Ares Prime’s doughnut surrendered. They had little choice in the matter, since the humans now controlled the base’s life support system and power, and they held the ultimate hole card in their willingness to depressurize the remaining sealed compartments and kill the surviving Malok.
Groton had been concerned about taking on board an unknown number of Saurian prisoners; those things were known to be able to control human minds at close range, and their technologies extended to nanotech and other powerful magics that might well be impossible to detect or counter. The Saurians themselves had offered Groton a deal: permit them to escape, and Ares Prime would be left to the humans.
“What I don’t understand is how we keep them from sending an army through that transport gate in the basement. They could just walk right in and take over the doughnut again the minute we’re gone,” Groton told Hunter in his office aft of the CIC.
“Well . . . Admiral Winchester is bringing in some of the Marines with the squadron to take charge of the base,” Hunter reassured him. “We can alert them on what to watch for . . . set up a 24/7 guard in the base engineering section, that sort of thing. The fact that there is very little air in the doughnut’s basement means the enemy would need an airlock on the other end if they wished to jump through.”
Groton nodded. “That should be adequate. At least until we restore pressure throughout the Ares Prime facility.”
“By which time, we’ll have the teleport apparatus dismantled,” Hunter said. “I imagine our xenotech people will want to examine that stuff thoroughly and see how it’s put together.” Hunter hesitated a moment, then added, “If I may, Captain, I have a new proposal I’d like to discuss.”
“Not a plan to attack the Malibu undersea base.”
“No, sir. Dr. Bennett and Miss Ashley have already been talking to you about this one. Shag Harbour . . .”
“Ah. Our Talisian allies have already made it clear that intervening in that . . . incident would be a bad idea.”
“Did they outright forbid it, sir?”
“Not in so many words. . . .”
“I suggest we bring Elanna in here and discuss it with her. It’s my contention that if Earth is still a sovereign world . . . if humans are still acknowledged to be masters of their own world and their own destiny . . . then it’s really up to us to decide what we will do, what guidance we shall accept, what we will tolerate.”
“That, Commander,” Groton said carefully, “is an extremely dangerous stance for Humankind . . . wouldn’t you agree?”
“Perhaps. But I submit that interceding on behalf of these stranded aliens in our past will not be changing history in any way. According to our records, the object that crashed in Shag Harbour in 1967 was joined by another craft underwater.”
“Excuse me. How do we know this?”
“Both the Canadians and our own Navy had ships in the area soon after the event,” Hunter explained. “They watched what happened with sonar. According to those records, the two unknown craft remained together for a time, then moved off together before they were lost. All military records, including those sonar scans, were immediately classified, of course.”
“Of course.” Groton considered this. “So tell me, Commander . . . why would we want to get involved in the first place?”
“Sir, if humans are a sovereign species, in charge of our own affairs, then we have a right to decide for ourselves if and when we’re going to contact other species, if and when we’re going to establish diplomatic relations with them.”
“We already have treaties with some of them . . . with the Saurians and with some of the Malok Grays.”
“Of which the Malok have been . . . let’s say . . . taking outrageous advantage. If we establish peaceful relations with other species who happen to be visiting our planet, humanity will be in a much better position to assert its rights as an independent species, one able to chart its own course.” Hunter spread his hands, imploring. “Sir, we can’t let the Talis do our thinking for us. We can’t let them make decisions for us. And we damn sure can’t let the Lizards run our planet!”
“The Talis are human, and in a better position to make decisions than we are.” Groton smiled, which Hunter took for a good sign. At least Groton hadn’t thrown him out on his ear.
“Sir, what they’re afraid of is that we’re going to screw up their timeline, their history, okay? This operation we’re proposing will prove that we can keep events isolated in space and in time and preserve their timeline as well as our own.”
Groton leaned back in his chair and considered Hunter’s words carefully. “Actually, Commander . . . I’m inclined to agree with you.”
“You are?” Hunter sounded startled, and Groton chuckled.
“You make some good arguments. For a long time I’ve been concerned that the Talis are using the US Space Force as a kind of mercenary unit, doing their dirty work. Remember Aldebaran?”
“How can I forget?” Hillenkoetter’s task force had been deployed to investigate a kind of Saurian concentration camp on a planet called Daarish. The Talis, unwilling to get their hands dirty, had nudged the human force into taking the place down . . . without getting involved themselves.
“What you propose would go a long way toward establishing ourselves as an independent galactic civilization in our own right. But . . .”
“But?”
“You have to admit that the Talis have a better perspective on things than we do,” Groton said. “They know how it all works. They know what they’re doing when it comes to time travel. They know how everything is supposed to turn out in the end, while we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
“Which is why Shag Harbour is a good place for us to start taking our first steps on our own. As long as we’re not caught by those Navy ships, we’ll simply leave them with a mystery which is already documented in history. And we’ll make some new friends.”
Groton sighed. “You make it all sound so easy, Mark.”
“Isn’t it?”
“First and foremost . . . you know as well as I do that the military does not set policy. The civilians are in charge.
“Second, the stakes in this game you’re proposing are astronomically high. If we screw this up, it’s not just our independence we’re gambling. It’s existential, understand? The Lizards get pissed enough . . . and humanity, past, present, and future gets wiped off the map!”
“Sir, that’s why I’m suggesting we look at intervening at Shag Harbour. We should be able to stay completely out of sight.”
“The operative word in that sentence, Commander, is should. ” Groton thought about it for a moment more. “Tell you what, Commander. I’ll discuss the idea with Elanna, and see if she’ll pass it up with her recommendation to LOC . . . maybe to MJ-12. We’ve got to have their blessing on this before we move.”
“I understand, Captain.” He wondered if Elanna would go along with the idea . . . and if she would be able to convince the higher-ups at Luna and on Earth. The problem was that the Space Force would still be working under Talisian control. Hunter wanted to see the human defenses being overseen by twenty-first-century humans, not people from the far-off future.
But then . . . it was all a matter of perspective, wasn’t it? Shag Harbour could become existential for the Talis as well as for the present-day world; if the humans of the twenty-first century were wiped out, the Talis, too, would become extinct.
Groton touched a switch on the intercom unit on his desk. “Mr. Toland? Get me Elanna.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Shall I leave, sir?”
“No. Stay.” He grinned. “If the answer is no, maybe you’ll take it better from her than me.”
425812 Elanna leaned over the still figure in the bunk in sick bay. She rarely intervened directly in cases like this; twenty-first-century human medicine was generally sufficient to treat the wounded brought back to Hillenkoetter.
This one, however, was special, and required her immediate and personal attention.
“Hold on to me, Lieutenant,” she whispered in the man’s mind. “Don’t leave me.”
She heard only a broken, grasping sob as his answer. Duvall’s brain had been starved of oxygen for too long. She wasn’t certain she could bring back the mind.
But she did have one clear image, a memory burned into Duvall’s awareness during that last desperate battle above the Martian surface. Shock had etched the memory in perfect clarity . . . though she doubted that Duvall was now consciously aware of it.
Deliberately, Duvall had hurled his Stingray into a Malok fighter. He’d watched the alien saucer break into pieces as he blasted through its gravitic field.
He’d watched as the Malok pilot had been kicked free of his ship, mouth open, eyes open, screaming as he fell through the bare wisp of atmosphere.
The image she watched in Duvall’s mind rocked her. Unexpectedly, the enemy pilot was not Saurian, was not Malok Gray.
He was human, a human of the current epoch.
Like some Grays, abducted humans had been enlisted to the Malok cause.
Chapter Twenty
Project Pegasus: Since the 1960s, teleportation chambers operated by DARPA and the CIA have allowed instantaneous travel between Earth and Mars, where covert bases were established for the purpose of acclimatizing Earthlings to Martian conditions, and for accustoming the humanoid Martian inhabitants to the terrestrial presence. NASA, meantime, has kept the actual surface conditions on Mars secret from the general public. While thinner than on Earth, the Martian atmosphere is as thick as that in the Peruvian Altiplano, and breathable without special gear.
As well, time travel has allowed the CIA to enlist teenagers for training programs, after which they are assigned duties at the Martian bases. They serve for twenty years, then have their memories erased all the way back to the moment they were first contacted. Simultaneously, their bodies are physically regressed, and they are sent back in time twenty years to resume their lives at the exact spacetime coordinates where they first were abducted. This project was exposed only because the memory erasures didn’t always hold, and some people were able to recover the lost memories of a twenty-year tour of duty on Mars.
One of the whistleblowers who wrote about Project Pegasus reported that in the early 1980s he met a nineteen-year-old named Barry Soetoro twice on Mars—aka Barack Obama, the future President of the United States. Reportedly Soetero’s mother, CIA officer Ann Dunham, was there as well.
Both the Pentagon and the White House have denied that President Obama ever teleported to Mars.
But then, of course they would deny it.
Allegations of whistleblowers Andrew Basiago and William Stillings, 2012
“Were it up to me,” the reptile’s voice whispered in his skull, “I would eliminate you now. You are not as tractable as most of your fellows.”
They were standing in the middle of an empty field east of Berlin, under a star-filled night sky. Albrecht could not answer the Eidechse. He could not do anything but listen to the creature, and feel the rising sick horror within his soul.
“On Daarish, we had a game we enjoyed,” the creature told him. It was no longer inside his head—not exactly—though its voice was. Physically, the Eidechse stood next to him, holding him mute and motionless by sheer force of mind.
“In German, the game was called Jagd. ‘The hunt.’ You, I believe, would make excellent prey, struggling and fighting to the last.
“Unfortunately, that is not the quality I need in a puppet. You were a superb choice: an actual officer from the war, with knowledge and experience difficult to find now, seventy years later. My fellows have decided that you are simply too valuable to . . . waste on mere sport.” Albrecht sensed the Saurian at his side watching him, one clawed, three-fingered hand tightly gripping his upper arm. There was no way to escape it . . . no way to engage his own, deeply suppressed will.
In the sky above the southern horizon, a bright light appeared . . . and grew brighter. At first, Albrecht thought that he might be seeing the landing lights of a small aircraft, but moment by moment, as the object became more luminous, he began to realize that he was watching one of the Eidechse ships.
“We are taking you to . . . a place, one of our bases on this planet. There we shall find ways to make you more tractable, more amenable to our will.”
Silently, the flat, dome-topped saucer hovered above the field, hesitating, then grounded. Albrecht felt the Eidechse grip his arm tighter, felt its mind move within his skull. Step by stumbling step, the Saurian forced him toward the ship.
The flight was brief, a matter of just moments as the craft flashed across the night-shrouded landscape into daylight, then maneuvered toward the surface of the ocean. He felt no shock at all as the saucer penetrated the waves.
But he felt quickening terror as they dropped into abyssal darkness.
