Alien hostiles, p.32
Alien Hostiles, page 32
“Yeah, well, that’s not up to us. Let’s hightail it back to the ship.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper. Music to my ears.”
And the Stingray pivoted again in space and gently accelerated.
As soon as the Hillenkoetter had fired, Groton had ordered the big ship to be brought to a near halt. She was drifting in close to the glowing nebula, now, flanked by the Blake and the Carlucci, which were providing protection for the carrier from any Tic Tacs that might slip through.
“Treb Alfa is on her way up,” the comm officer announced. “They have . . . they say they have passengers on board.”
Groton sighed. Winchester scowled.
“Somehow I don’t think Commander Hunter has learned his lesson,” Winchester said. “They won’t be happy about this back on Earth.”
“Bravo and Charlie Platoons are boarding their shuttles now at the aerospace port, sir,” the comm officer continued. “They report the objective destroyed, and that they’ll be dusting off in another ten minutes.”
“Very well. Alert the landing bay. Have a Marine squad on hand to welcome the ‘passengers.’ I don’t want any incidents.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir? I have an additional message coming in from Commander Hunter.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Sir, he requests . . . uh . . . requests strongly that we convene an immediate debriefing, and that we make sure the Talis liaison is there as well. He says we’re all going to want to hear what she has to say.”
Groton exchanged a glance with Winchester. “Very well. And maybe he’ll explain to us why he’s bringing back a bunch of locals when he was explicitly ordered not to.”
Hunter led the young woman into the briefing room. Winchester and Groton both were sitting at the table across from Elanna. Wheaton was there as well as Doctors Brody, McClure, Vanover, and several other expedition scientists.
The big monitor dominating one bulkhead showed the glowing cloud around the Kalaika spacecraft, or what was left of it. The fighter battle around that cloud had ended, the alien spacecraft scattered and fled. Hillenkoetter’s fighter squadrons remained on guard, however, providing a defensive cordon around Hillenkoetter and her escorts.
As they entered, the rescued woman was still wearing a dusty uniform and a towel around her head. Hunter noted Elanna’s startled expression.
“This,” he told them, watching her, “is someone we found down there inside a bottle. I thought you all would like to meet her.”
“Sigrun!” Elanna bolted up out of her chair, her expression was a fast-cycling mix of shock, fear, and sheer joy. “Sigrun, is that . . . could that be you?”
“Hello, Maria,” Sigrun replied. “It’s . . . been a long time.”
“Maria?” Winchester said. “What happened to Elanna?”
“Sigrun,” Elanna said softly, “is an old friend.” She looked at Sigrun. “I never thought I’d see you again!”
Sigrun glared at Elanna, her jaw tightening.
“I tried, Sigrun,” Elanna said after a moment. Hunter had the impression that Sigrun had been thinking at Elanna very, very hard. “I really did. But even time travel can take . . . time. . . .”
“I think we’d all like to know what the hell is going on, Elanna,” Winchester told her.
“And who is ‘Maria,’” Groton wanted to know.
“Maria Orsic,” Elanna said, settling back into her chair with a look of resignation and sorrow. “Sigrun and I were members of a . . . of a group in Europe several decades ago. We were called the Vrilerinnen . . . the women of the Vril Society. The Nazis were receiving extremely dangerous technologies from the Saurians. We were trying to control the process.”
Elanna began explaining, weaving a story that sounded like a random mixture of myth, science, and magic. Sorting one from the others was going to take time, time and a lot of questions.
Maria Orsic, Elanna told them, had been born in Vienna in 1895 or, at least that was what the official histories now read. Elanna, time traveling from the Talis culture had inserted herself into the past, creating false records and documents to provide herself with a cover. She’d been a psychic medium in the early twentieth century, and eventually rose to the leadership of the Vril Society, an occult and metaphysical group in Germany beginning in the 1920s.
“Wait a moment, young lady,” Brody said, interrupting. “You expect us to believe that you are over a century old? Or is it time travel again, jumping around the twentieth century but not staying in any one year long enough to age?”
“Doctor, I was using time travel, yes, but tell me. Just how old do you think I am?”
Brody frowned. “You look . . . I don’t know, thirty?”
She gave him a sad smile. “Thank you for the compliment, but I’m closer to twelve hundred. Understand, in the 101st century, genetic prothesis and augmentation, together with genetic rejuvenation techniques have considerably extended the human life span.”
“My God,” Becky McClure said. “How long do you people live?”
Elanna looked at her for a long moment before saying, simply, “Long.”
“So you were running the Vril Society,” Hunter said. “And working to . . . what? Help the Nazis?”
“The Vril Gesellschaft, yes,” Elanna said. “And, yes, we helped the Nazis. At least at first.”
“My God,” Vanover said, shocked. “Why?”
“We call the technique nijere,” she said, sidestepping the question. “It means ‘nudging.’”
She went on to explain that the Nazis had made contact with the Malok during the 1930s. They’d recovered several crashed spacecraft and were learning the secrets of antigravity and the nearly inexhaustible wonder of vacuum energy.
The Talis were not at first aware of just what the Nazi regime represented. History, as seen through the myopia of deep time, could be blurred and distorted. In the 101st century, Humankind—the Talis—had forgotten all about the Nazis, the Jewish Holocaust, and the conflagration of World War II, minutiae, to them, lost in the depths of time.
In the remote past, Talis agents learned that the Saurian enemy was threatening the entire human timeline, helping the Nazis develop advanced spacecraft and weapons, guiding them to world conquest. “Maria” and others had applied nijere to counter Saurian efforts in central Europe.
“It didn’t work,” she told them sadly. “Not entirely. We were able to redirect German interests somewhat, by encouraging them to pursue goods and technologies offered to them by the Malok. We felt that the effort would redirect German energies in less destructive directions.”
“The Nazis were the single greatest evil unleashed upon mankind in the twentieth century,” Groton told her. “Jesus . . . how the hell could you have missed that?”
“Try understanding, truly understanding a culture, a people, a political movement ten thousand years in your past,” she told him. “Gobekli Tepi?”
Hunter had heard the name—a mysterious archeological site in southeastern Turkey. Enormous monoliths, richly carved, imposing, completely buried and utterly impossible as the product of the Neolithic hunter-gatherers of the time. A site deliberately buried after many generations of ritual use, and no one knew why or where the people who’d built the place lived, where they’d come from, what their culture was like . . .
You could lose a hell of a lot in ten thousand years.
“We did learn,” Elanna said. “Eventually. In the 1950s we became concerned, deeply concerned, about your fascination with primitive nuclear weapons. We realized that if you actually used them, a full-scale nuclear exchange—humanity might well become extinct. And so, as a result, would we.”
“We humans can be pretty reckless,” Brody put in. “Gotta be careful with who obtains those nuke codes.”
“Exactly. We can’t afford to lose you. But as our agents dug deeper, trying to understand your attitudes toward atomic warfare, we learned the full history of World War II. Of Japanese militarism. Of Hiroshima. And of Hitler and the Nazis.”
“Maria Orsic” had worked through the Vril Society to defang the Nazi viper, but with painfully limited success. Embedded in Germany during the 1930s and ’40s, she was informed of the true nature of the Malok-twisted regime by fellow time agents from the 1950s, but at that point there was little that she could do. She explained how the Talis could not simply go back in time and reset everything; they could not, for instance, assassinate Lance Corporal Hitler on the Western Front in 1918, not without grave risk to the principal timeline, or the danger of open time war with the Saurians.
Together, she, Sigrun, and several other of the Vrilerinnen had infiltrated the Malok infrastructure on Earth, posing as gifted psychics helping the occult-fascinated Germans make contact with the Reptilian enemy. The Saurians were assisting the Germans in the creation of an extrasolar colony at Aldebaran, a terraformed world called Paradies.
“We sabotaged the German development of a crude atomic bomb,” she told them, “by subtly influencing Werner Heisenberg and other German scientists working on the project. We blocked their attempt to build something called the antipodal bomber, or Silbervogel, a manned, rocket-propelled glider that could have reached New York City. That was just one of several schemes they developed for their Amerikabomber project, and we successfully interfered with all of them. We blocked their work on a proposed manned orbital space station, one mounting what they called the Sonnengewehr, a solar mirror that would have reduced allied cities all around the world to heaps of smoldering ash.”
“So you’re heroes,” Winchester said. He sounded bitter, dismissive. “Hurray. You allowed tens of millions of people to die so—”
“So that hundreds of billions, even trillions, would live!” she replied, angry. “You have an appallingly short-sighted, oblivious lack of understanding of the nature of history. The flow of time and the interwoven web of historical events are not matters over which you can wave a magic wand and command ‘Make it so!’”
“Perhaps the question is why the Saurians were helping the Germans in the first place,” Hunter interjected.
“Simple enough,” Sigrun put in. “They are opportunists, and they prefer to work from the shadows. If they could create an army of humans under a government obedient to them, they could use that to control the entire planet, to dominate the planet’s civilizations.”
“They still seek to do that,” Orsic said. “Their Projekt Rückkehr seeks to use human soldiers to dominate parts of the European Union. Through them, they can either control the planet, or get various planetary factions at one another’s throats—a global war which only they would win.”
“That still seems far-fetched to me,” Brody said. “I don’t care how big an expatriate German army landing in Europe might be. All of the nations of the world would join in to fight it.” He shook his head. “None of it makes sense.”
“Trust us when we say, Doctor, that the Saurians always have plans within plans. There may be other aspects of Project Return, deeper levels, of which we are still ignorant.”
“Then get your Talis friends in the future to tell you what happens!” Groton said, exasperated.
“Believe me when I say we do not want to go down that path.
“And let’s not forget the possibility of starting a time war,” Orsic added. “If you beat the Saurians without our help, there is less chance of a temporal truncation.”
He was beginning to get a feeling for what the Talis faced, and how delicately balanced their existence was.
Orsic went on to explain how she and the other Vrilerinnen had become convinced that something was wrong out at the Aldebaran colony. No one on Earth had heard anything from them, and an SS general named Kemperer who’d traveled on board a Saurian ship to Aldebaran to report on the situation had never returned. Eventually she’d sent Sigrun as well.
“I never forgave myself, Sigrun,” Orsic said. “I should have gone myself . . . but by then I was working under direct orders from Prime.”
“Prime?” Winchester asked.
“Prime Center. Our base in the 101st century. Our headquarters, if you will. They ordered me to leave Germany and to return home.”
“And I,” Sigrun said, “went to Aldebaran and ended up in a bottle.” She gave Orsic a hard look, then softened. “I . . . don’t blame you, Maria. Not really. I know you did what you had to do.”
“We believe,” Orsic told the others, “that the Saurians turned Paradies into a training center and labor camp dedicated to Project Return. It’s taken them over seven decades to grow enough human soldiers, train them, and create the equipment with which to arm them and transport them. They must be very close by now to launching their invasion.”
“Well, earlier today we set them back a peg,” Hunter told them. “A hundred troops isn’t enough to conquer a planet, obviously, but we also destroyed their command center and their aerospace facilities.” He gestured at the nebula on the monitor. “Looks like the fleet has been doing its part up here, too.”
“There will be other Kalaika-class vessels,” Sigrun pointed out. “Coming from their base at Laidat. Perhaps many of them. And I would imagine that the Rückkehr army is still largely intact.”
“It is,” Hunter conceded. “They were all headed for the hills last we saw of them, but there were a lot of the bastards. And it won’t take long for them to regroup.”
“What happened to trying to kickstart a revolution against their Lizard overlords?” Groton asked.
“We didn’t have the time to explore that,” Hunter conceded. “We did bring back some human prisoners we can talk to . . .” He looked at Orsic. “Including one named Kemperer, by the way. He could be related to your General Kemperer. A son or grandson, maybe.”
“So what do we do about this place?” Groton asked.
“To start with, we have several hundred humans stored in bottles in the basement, like Sigrun, here. I don’t know what the Saurians were doing with them, but they’re there and I’ll be damned if we’re going to leave them to the tender mercies of the Saurians.
“Second, we have an enormous force of enslaved people working an open-pit mine. I think they’d be delighted at the chance to get back at the Lizards. And finally, we have the German troops we scattered. They can’t be all that happy with the Lizards at this point, especially now that they’ve lost their ride to Earth.”
Groton smiled. “You sound like you have an idea, Commander.”
“I do, Captain. Just promise me you won’t chuck me overboard when you hear it. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“We’ve got those [ETs] who are more psychic than us and those who are less psychic than us. In each of these categories, we’ve got [ETs] friendly to us and unfriendly to us. The unfriendly non-psychic ones tend not to come here. They don’t like us and they don’t want to be around us. The non-psychic friendly ones come here for trade. The psychic friendly ones actually want to help us develop our abilities and become stronger at it. And the unfriendly psychic ones want us wiped off the planet. They want us dead, period, no questions asked.
Leonard “Lyn” Buchanan, Former operative in military psychic and remote viewing programs, 2019
11 March 1945
“I want you to deliver this message at once by the usual channels,” Orsic said. She handed a neatly folded paper to the beautiful long-haired woman in front of her. “Go ahead and read it, Fran. It’s for everyone in the Society.”
Franziska Oettingen, one of Maria’s original Vrilerinnen, opened the folded paper and read it. She looked up in surprise. “You . . . you’re leaving us?”
Orsic nodded. “I’ve been called . . . home. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“Called . . . by the Sumi?”
Orsic thought how best to answer. Franziska was not Talis. She was a twentieth-century human, the niece to one of the Vril Society’s early supporters, and actually disowned by her family when she joined the group in 1931. Since then, she’d proven herself invaluable time and time again.
The “Sumi” had been a carefully contrived myth, a name based on Sumerian to convince the Nazi hierarchy that the Gesellschaft was in contact with ancient, otherworldly ancestors of the Aryans. The name “Vril,” taken from a nineteenth-century novel, was supposed to be the ancient Sumerian “Vri-Il,” meaning “Like God.”
“Called by the people who sent me here, Franziska. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you. The . . . beings whom the Führer calls ‘supermen’ have betrayed him, betrayed the Reich. We won’t hear from them again.”
She felt the pang of loss. It had seemed vital at the time to see up close what was going on at Paradies, but Sigrun must have died at the hands of the Malok. Maria Orsic so desperately wished it could have been her.
She doubted now that she ever would be able to forgive herself.
Those not of the Talis had never been told the lie—that the Sumi were a myth, that their extraterrestrial contacts were Reptilian aliens actively helping the Reich, subverting it, turning it . . . dark.
Darker, far darker, than any of them had imagined at the beginning. How could they have been so blind?
Nazi Germany now was close to utter collapse, thank the gods. Allied forces were closing in from both the east and west, and in the end, the final Götterdämmerungi could not be much longer in coming. It was time for the Vril Gesellschaft to disband, for its members to escape while they still could. The Talis would escape into time; the others . . .
They would just have to take their chances. Orsic hoped that it wasn’t too late.
The note she’d handed Franziska ended with the words “Niemand bleipt hier.”
“No one stays here.”
The Present Day
Lieutenant Duvall checked the line-up on the target. Range now five light minutes . . . velocity nine-tenths c . . . Everything was on track.
“How’s the package, Marv?” he called to his back-seater.
“Everything copacetic, boss. We’re good.”
