Alien hostiles, p.35
Alien Hostiles, page 35
Controlled remote viewing required some sort of coordinate system, usually a series of numbers on which she could focus. Now, though, she had no numbers.
But she had Hunter’s photograph of Gerri.
She held the photo up in her left hand and looked at it . . . looked past it . . . let her mind slide through, let her mind reach out.
For a long time, she held Gerri’s image in her mind, searching, waiting for that faint tickle from her subconscious that suggested a connection. She felt only . . . the emptiness of the Void.
But very slowly, the Void faded into a landscape, ocean and mountain seen from above. She saw a rugged coastline below, running east and west with the grid of an enormous city off to the east. She had the impression of minds, millions of minds there . . . a teeming hive of thought.
She’d been here before. For just a moment, she saw again a black night sky pierced by searchlights, heard the wail of sirens . . . before she jerked her awareness back from the past, concentrating on time now.
But that chilling sense of Los Angeles in 1942 lingered.
Her right hand, clutching a pencil, began moving over the tablet.
Downward . . . water . . . deep water . . .
Like Oumuamua again. Maybe that was why making the connection this time was easier. But . . . not water inside. Water outside . . .
She was in the water. Underwater . . .
Cold . . . pressure . . .
But not like Oumuamua. It was a difference of degree . . . cold water under pressure, but not as extreme as within Oumuamua.
Where was she?
Don’t analyze. Simply feel. . . .
Rocks. Mountains. A forest. Waving strands of something dark and rubbery. Seaweed? All submerged. Sunlight rippled and danced from a silver ceiling overhead, the water’s surface.
Deeper than that. Much deeper. Darker. The sunlight faded to black.
A rounded surface . . . a bubble . . . a dome atop a flat expanse.
No . . . seven bubbles . . . on a tabletop . . . one in the middle, six circling around the outside.
Her hand was sketching rapidly now. Not bubbles. Half bubbles. Domes . . . seven domes . . . light . . . dark . . . definite structures . . .
Her mind slipped inside.
Part of her mind wondered what any of this could possibly have to do with Gerri Galanis.
A person . . . a woman . . . the face of a woman sleeping . . .
Her tablet was covered now with rough sketches, interspersed with words, her scribbled observations. She sketched the woman . . . standing upright . . . enclosed . . . contained . . . submerged. . . .
Then, for a single, fleeting instant, her vision cleared and she saw Gerri, nude, suspended upright, encased in some sort of transparent tube filled with greenish liquid.
The shock, the sheer terror engendered by what Julia saw broke the contact.
Eventually, Hillenkoetter glided silently across the lunar surface, gentling into a vast, lava tube chamber on the side facing away from Earth, slipping through the kinetic fields that retained the underground base’s atmosphere.
Hunter made his way to the base BOQ—the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters—located beneath one of the cavern’s huge curved, near-vertical rock walls. He carried his valise.
Inside were Julia’s notes and sketches.
They honestly didn’t require much analysis or interpretation. The circular arrangement of seven domes was exactly like the Saurian command center on Daarish and at Zeta Retic.
The Saurians had Gerri, tucked away inside an acrylic cylinder, asleep . . . or partly so.
God in Heaven why?
The implications were startling.
If Gerri was a prisoner of the Saurians, it meant the Men in Black were working with them.
Or . . . no. Had she been abducted by the aliens themselves? A classic UFO abduction, but one where the human subject had not been returned? Men in Black had been following them before she’d been taken, but they might also have been Naval Intelligence.
He pushed the question aside.
Los Angeles. Julia’s sketches showed a rocky coastline near the city . . . presumably Los Angeles. The base she’d seen was a few miles off the Malibu coast.
He’d checked an atlas in Hillenkoetter’s library, then consulted a number of books and Internet websites featuring UFO lore. There was an area off Point Duma that was supposed to be a hotbed of UFO activity and USOs, Unidentified Submerged Objects. There was a peculiar oval plateau off the coast, right where the continental shelf plunged to a depth of two thousand feet. The undersea mesa was known to geologists by the almost laughably prosaic name of Sycamore Knoll.
There’d been speculation within the UFO community for years about an underwater alien base in this area . . . and when Google Earth had turned up an image of Sycamore Knoll, that speculation had skyrocketed.
Mainstream science had countered the wild theories almost at once. The structure was a geological anomaly, part of the seismic Duma upthrust. The so-called base was two thousand feet down and three miles across. Surely aliens didn’t need to build something so impossibly vast . . .
But Hunter had studied the computer images and wondered. That Sycamore Knoll was a natural anomaly was, he thought, undeniable. What made it anomalous was that curiously flat upper surface and that curiously oval shape of the mesa itself. He thought he saw here a different explanation, an underwater mountain leveled off by unimaginable technologies. The base of the mesa was at two thousand feet; the top was only four hundred feet down.
And Julia had seen the domes of a Saurian base atop a flat surface.
Yeah, that fit.
Now, how the hell was he supposed to reach it?
He looked up Captain Groton, who he thought might be sympathetic to him concerning Gerri’s plight. If there was an alien base offshore with human abductees, they had to be rescued. Was it possible, he wondered, to mount some sort of strike to get them out?
“Couple of problems with that,” Groton had told him. They were in a park in the middle of the LOC compound, an expanse created because the base designers felt that humans needed to see a bit of green now and again. If you squinted and ignored the surrounding gray rock walls, you could almost imagine yourself in a city park back home.
Almost. The one-sixth gravity and the rock ceiling overhead instead of blue sky were the giveaways.
“Solar Warden is not in business of rescuing damsels in distress,” Groton said, “not even when they’re the girlfriends of loose-cannon Navy commanders.”
Hunter opened his mouth to protest. He’d deliberately been keeping this about all Saurian captives, not just Gerri.
“That’s one,” Groton said, interrupting Hunter’s attempted interruption. “Two . . . according to people I’ve talked with, you’re convinced that the Men in Black abducted her, right?” He held up a hand, anticipating Hunter’s protest. “I know, I know. Admiral Kelsey and I had a long talk about you, and I know how you nearly assaulted a government agent in the admiral’s office. Now, we know the Men in Black are human agents for various intelligence services working for MJ-12, right? I don’t think MJ-12 is working for the Saurians and if they were I don’t think they’d be agreeable to mounting a rescue effort for someone they kidnapped in the first place.”
Hunter sagged back in the park bench. He had to admit that Groton was right.
“Three,” Groton went on, relentless, “I don’t think MJ-12 or the Navy would invest in something so risky with intel provided by something as sketchy and as controversial as remote viewing.
“Four . . . and this is a big one. Off-planet is different. Here on Earth, we have, along with the Talis, a kind of tacit noninterference pact with the Saurians. They do abduct our citizens with distressing regularity, which is bad . . . but worse is the fact that there’s not a damned thing we can do about it short of bringing in the Solar Warden fleet and starting a war, and that would almost certainly wreck the planet. The Talis would not agree to something like that.”
“The Talis,” Hunter said with a bitter edge to his voice, “have been playing both sides. They were helping the Nazis, for God’s sake!”
“Yes, I know. Evidently, they had their reasons. You want to take that up with them? Be my guest.
“And five . . .” He sighed. “And five, no one’s going to be going back to Earth for a while. Not on liberty, not for resupply, and certainly not to rescue girlfriends in distress.”
“Huh? Why?”
Groton gave him a sharp look. “Haven’t you been following the news up from Earth, Commander?”
Hunter shook his head. “Not really. I’ve been wrapped up in . . . this. In trying to find out where Gerri is.”
“Earth,” Groton said, “has been hit by a viral pandemic. They’re through the worst of it now, but for months, the activity on the planet has pretty much ground to a halt. Businesses closed, economies collapsed, people ordered to stay at home in order to stop the spread of this thing. It’s pretty grim. . . .”
“Good God!”
Groton laid out the bare bones of the situation. A virus, a coronavirus, which meant it was related both to SARS and the common cold, had exploded out of China last year. Though not as deadly as the flu epidemic of 1918, millions had been infected and hundreds of thousands had died, and it wasn’t over yet. The virus was called SARS-CoV-2; it caused a severe respiratory disease, COVID19—shorthand for Corona Virus Disease 2019. According to reports, a vaccine was coming out of Pittsburgh, and several drugs were being tested to attack the virus directly, but it would take time to clear the hurdles before they could reach the public.
“One of the US Navy’s surface carriers, the Theodore Roosevelt, was taken out of action, forced to dock at Guam with a hundred sailors coming down with the disease. Her skipper was relieved of command.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Well, seems he wrote a letter that somehow was leaked on its way up the chain of command. The Pentagon was not amused.”
“If it made them look bad, well, then, there you are. Still sounds like a case of shooting the messenger.”
“There’s more,” Groton said after a moment. “What I’m about to tell you is highly classified of course.”
“Okay.”
“Some of the MJ-12 people are now suggesting that the virus was genetically manufactured.”
“A bioweapon?”
“That’s right.”
“Manufactured by who?”
“Not by humans, obviously. Not without a means of protecting whoever created it.”
“The Saurians . . .”
“Now, understand,” Groton said. “The likelihood remains that this outbreak was a natural mutation, that it started out in bats—which carry lots of different coronaviruses—and probably entered the human population through a wet market in China. That’s the official story, and it sounds good. It’s logical. But . . . just consider the possibility. . . .”
Hunter was considering it and as he did so he felt the stirrings of terror deep within. It was, he thought, the unknown that made it worse . . . the unknown of the Saurians, the unknown of this pandemic.
“Wait. How deadly is this thing?”
“Like I said, not as bad as the flu in 1918. Not as virulent as Ebola or the plague. But bad enough.”
“If it’s not as deadly as Ebola, it’s not much of a bioweapon. Ebola is . . . what? Fifty percent mortality?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s the death rate for this COVID thing?”
“Hard to say. Lots of people show mild symptoms and are never reported, which makes the death rate appear higher than it is. So . . . maybe three percent? Maybe? But if the Saurians did cause this, we think they didn’t want a high death rate. They wanted to cause panic.”
“A terror attack?”
Groton sighed, leaning back on the bench. “Imagine the political situation in Germany and eastern Europe over the past few years. The political and social systems strained to the limit by refugees coming out of Syria and elsewhere. Right-wing groups on the rise. Borders being closed. Left and right polarized, at each other’s throats, and with immigration policy usually at the heart of it.
“Now into this charmingly noxious stew comes a highly infectious disease, airborne, not as deadly as the Black Death but still scary enough to put whole countries into lockdown. Death rates are higher for the refugees, who are often crowded together in tent cities with poor healthcare. They begin trying to force their way through closed borders. All across Europe and Asia totalitarian governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to tighten controls both on immigrants and on the local population. Dissidents being rounded up. Activists disappearing. Democracies collapsing. Dictatorships becoming even more oppressive. You get the picture?”
“All too well.”
“Now here’s the really scary part. Add to all of that the sudden arrival of a Kalaika-class transport. It becomes Humankind’s first official contact with extraterrestrials. The general population doesn’t know a thing about Solar Warden or the aliens we’ve already had interactions with . . . the Oumuamuans, the Xaxki at Zeta Retic. This looks like the aliens have finally shown up. They start dropping off hundreds of Haunebu, bringing down a hundred thousand neo-Nazi troops. Even if they aren’t that well trained it would shake all of Europe, all of the world to its core. At the very least we would have rioting in the streets of a dozen European cities. Governments falling. Right-wing strongmen coming to power. Martial law. Half of the planet takes up arms to repel the invaders. The other half welcomes them with open arms. . . .”
“Sheesh. Sounds to me like we dodged a hell of a bullet.”
Groton nodded. “By stopping the Saurians at Aldebaran, we stopped what very well might have been the collapse of human civilization. We thought the Saurians might have something more in reserve, and it looks like this was it. But we’re not out of the woods yet . . . not by ten thousand long, cold light-years.”
Hunter leaned back, eyes closed. He was a Navy SEAL, highly trained, supremely competent, not given to flights of fancy, rarely subject to more mundane fears. But this was so far beyond anything he’d ever encountered . . . worse than the interior of the Oumuamuan ship, worse than the assault on Daarish. The sheer not knowing threatened to paralyze him.
And in the end, Hunter returned to his quarters knowing that there would be no raid on the undersea Saurian base . . . not yet, anyway. If the COVID virus got loose inside the moon base where none of the residents had immunity to it, it would be devastating, and LOC simply could not take the chance.
For the time being, the Solar Warden secret space program was restricted to off-planet facilities.
And Hunter felt like he was isolated, in limbo, unable to go back to Earth, unable to help Gerri, and perhaps worst of all unable to be with his real family at distant Aldebaran.
All that was left for him was the Solar Warden strike force, and a load of fresh recruits who’d been brought up to LOC before the COVID virus had hit Earth.
He would not allow himself to be paralyzed. He would begin throwing himself into the job of training and organizing them.
There simply was no other choice, not for him.
So much more to do. He would begin campaigning up and down the chain of command for improved weapon technology. They’d captured Malok saucers mounting those X-ray weapons. If the Talis didn’t like twenty-first-century humans picking up toys like that, they could shove it. And there had to be a way of improving the JSST’s personal weapons as well, the Sunbeam laser pistols and the Starbeam rifles. Sending men into combat with a high-tech enemy with such limited firepower was criminal.
He had the feeling that the 1-JSST would be vital to humanity’s interests in the weeks and months to come. He wanted to see it properly equipped.
And if the damned grandkids didn’t like it, they could get off their sorry Talis asses and find a better solution. This was a war, damn it, and Hunter had never cared for the idea of fighting a war with one hand tied behind his back.
Hunter’s ongoing frustration with the situation, together with that terrible fear of the unknown, both were boiling into a deep and terrible rage.
Epilogue
The members of MJ-12 no longer met in secret underground bunkers. The chance of infection from the COVID virus was simply too high. Instead, they used highly encrypted satellite links to connect their computers through a secure DARPA version of Skype. It was an unsatisfactory way of doing business, to be sure, but the men of Magic-12 were older, most of them, and the death rates for their age group were considerably higher than for the general population.
The irony was not lost on them. Twelve of the most powerful men on the planet, forced to hide indoors from a miserable virus, unable to meet with the others in person, unable to meet with subordinates, unable even to shake hands with others for fear of a particle just one micrometer across, a particle technically not even alive.
“Gentlemen,” MJ-5 said. “We have had a breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?” MJ-3 demanded. “Something to kill this pesky bug?”
“No. A physics breakthrough, at Lawrence Livermore. It will allow us to bypass Solar Warden completely. We won’t need to depend on the ships.”
“I hope you’ll be able to explain that adequately to the bean counters,” MJ-6 said. “Solar Warden cost . . . how much? Trillions, certainly.”
“Five is getting a bit ahead of himself,” MJ-1 said. “We won’t be mothballing the fleet for a long time to come. But what they’ve come up with is impressive.”
“So what is it?” Six asked.
“You’re all familiar with the Saurian extradimensional abilities. They can instantly teleport from place to place, hide in a pocket dimension invisible to humans, even, we think, access parallel universes.”
