by Ian Douglas
The craft was large—at least twenty-five yards wide, and it was shaped like an equilateral triangle with slightly rounded tips. Three landing legs held it a couple of yards above the concrete flooring of the immense room, and there were several technicians working on, around, and under the ship’s body. Cables as thick as a man’s leg snaked across the floor and vanished into ports on the thing’s belly, while light spilled from an open hatch at the top of a long ramp. Three red lights glowed with sullen brilliance on the underside, one within each of the triangle’s corners. A larger light was nestled into a recession at the underside’s center, but it was not on at the moment. The hull had a matte finish, like black rubber. Hunter wondered why it wasn’t polished silver, like the disk he’d seen.
Benedict led them past the looming spacecraft, though Hunter was itching to go on board. “A good many years,” Benedict had said. How many years? How long had these things been flying?
“Some of you gentlemen might remember a flurry of UFO cases back in 1989, 1990, in Belgium, and out over the North Sea? Big black triangles like this one. That was us.”
At least twenty-five, then. Jesus.
There were other craft stored in that subterranean hangar.
On the southern edge of Wright-Patt, Hunter knew, was the National Museum of the US Air Force. Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Hunter had practically lived in the place when he was growing up. This hangar was like that . . . huge and open and filled with artifacts straight out of the history of flight. The biggest difference seemed to be that this museum was not open to the public . . . and the fact that it seemed to be devoted to alien spacecraft recovered from around the world.
The craft came in all shapes and sizes, though most were saucer shaped, with silvery hulls. Many were in fragments and might have been anything. Small tags on display stands identified each. The one labeled “Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947” had had its hemispherical undercarriage shredded into fragments, many of which were spread out on several nearby tables.
“I didn’t think you’d have these things on display,” Hunter said.
“They’re not, really. We keep them here so that our technicians and xenotech people have ready access to them. We’ve been collecting these things for decades, and we’re still learning from them. You’ve heard of Roswell, of course. . . .” He stopped, then gestured at a battered, burned, and rusty-brown-looking craft in one corner. It was an acorn shape, perhaps twelve feet wide and fifteen high.
“That’s from the Roswell crash, sir?” Minkowski asked.
“No. Roswell is over there. This one is a particularly interesting craft called Die Glocke—ʽThe Bell.’ It was being constructed in Nazi Germany at the end of the war, when it mysteriously vanished, along with an SS officer named Hans Kammler, who was heading the research team. We recovered it outside of a small town in Pennsylvania twenty years later.”
“Kecksburg!” Nielson exclaimed. “I read about that.”
Benedict nodded.
“What’s this writing around the base?” Brunelli asked. The swollen base of the craft showed a continuous line of angular markings—triangles and circles and straight lines and a wealth of other geometric figures crowded together one after another.
“Alien writing, of course. We’re still trying to decipher it.”
“So the Germans didn’t build it?” Taylor asked.
“They reconstructed it,” Benedict said. “We think it was from a crash they retrieved in Bavaria back in the late thirties. We also think they had some help in the reconstruction. Alien help.”
Hunter was doing some math in his head, and it didn’t add up. “You’re saying,” he said, “that the Nazis had time travel?”
“Yup. At least they managed to send this pod twenty years into the future, where it crashed a second time. We had an idea that it was coming, though, and we had a special response team ready to go in and pick it up.”
“Yeah, but time travel?” Minkowski said. “That’s wild-assed Hollywood stuff.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. You see, gentlemen, it turns out that if you have the technology to travel between the stars, you also have the ability to travel in time. Einstein pointed that out. Space and time are part of the same thing—what Einstein called ‘space-time.’ Bend and twist one, and you bend and twist the other. So, apparently, the Galaxy is brimming over with life and civilizations that have spread out to fill space . . . and time.”
“That’s . . . incredible,” Hunter said. He took a closer look at The Bell. A hatch in the side was open—it looked like it had been pried open with brute force. Inside there were two wire-frame seats with canvas straps, one considerably larger than the other. “Two passengers?”
Benedict nodded. “Hans Kammler . . . and another.”
“What happened to them?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, Commander.”
Hunter nodded understanding, but privately suspected that Benedict didn’t know himself. The information would be more highly classified than USAP clearance, and might even be beyond Benedict’s reach.
“Sir . . .” Hunter began, then stopped. He wasn’t sure how to formulate the question.
“Go ahead. If I can tell you, I will.”
“Yes, sir. Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell people that we have time travelers from space . . . and have known about them for years? I mean, people have been seeing them since God knows when. The public knows. Why try to keep it hidden?”
“Good question, Commander, but one with a very complicated answer. Back in January of 1953, the Intelligence Advisory Committee commissioned the Robertson Panel, which looked into the problem of UFOs. Were they really alien? More, were they a threat? There’d been a nasty scare the previous July, when hundreds of unidentified targets were tracked in the skies above Washington DC. The Robertson Panel concluded that UFOs posed no immediate threat to the US, but did warn that public sightings might cause military communications networks to be overwhelmed. They also warned that full disclosure might have dire consequences. Religions might collapse, once people learned that these alien visitors had had a hand in creating Homo sapiens. The stock market might collapse, people might riot in the streets, or succumb to mass hysteria, people would lose faith in government. Basically, civilization itself might fall.”
“Orson Welles,” Hunter said. “War of the Worlds.”
“Precisely. So the panel suggested that the public not be told more, that the government push educational programs aimed at defusing the situation: discrediting people who claimed they saw them, trotting out skeptical experts to debunk sightings, that sort of thing. The whole issue was put under a very tight lid of not just secrecy, but compartmentalized secrecy. Even if you knew all about ‘A,’ if you didn’t have a serious need to know about ‘B,’ you didn’t hear about ‘B.’ Period.”
“Ha!” Nielson said. “I knew there was something fishy about all the official denials.”
“Weather balloons and swamp gas,” Taylor added. “Ri-i-i-i-ight. . . .”
“I still don’t see why things are still classified, though,” Hunter insisted. “I mean . . . in the 1950s, sure. We didn’t know if the Russians might be snooping with some sort of high-tech aircraft, or whatever. Better to keep stuff like that under wraps. But today? People are used to the idea of aliens and spaceships, and they’re mostly cool with it! Star Trek, and all of that. . . .”
“The Robertson Panel did recommend a slow process toward eventual disclosure. Certain government agencies were tasked with making certain that only pieces, only safe pieces, were released, a little at a time. There were some movies that came out in the ’80s designed to accustom the public to benevolent, odd-looking aliens, for instance. That was actually quite deliberate. More recently, you have documentary-style programs talking about ancient aliens possibly tinkering with the human genome. . . .”
“The guy with the hair,” Minkowski said.
“Among others. The point was
to gradually acclimate the public to the idea of aliens. In any case, it wasn’t just the notion that there were space-traveling aliens to worry about that was being suppressed. It was something far more deadly.”
“What would that be?” Hunter asked.
“The knowledge that many of those aliens—many, but not all—weren’t aliens at all.”
“Come again?”
“They are humans—time-traveling humans—humans from our own remote future.”
Chapter Five
These babies are huge, sir . . . enormous! Oh, God, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out there . . . lined up on the farside of the crater edge! They’re on the Moon watching us. . . .
Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon [attributed], 1969
20 July 1969
Frank Wheaton sat in the lounge just off the floor of Houston’s Mission Control Center, watching the grainy black-and-white images bearing the legend “Live from the Moon” on the monitor in the corner. A few hours before, the Eagle landing module of Apollo 11 had touched down on the lunar surface, and for the first time a human was about to walk on the face of another world.
Or was it really the first time? There were hints otherwise. And there were those strange-looking shapes and anomalies photographed from lunar orbit. Somebody had already been there, though the evidence was carefully being kept secret. The Russians? Aliens? An ancient human civilization? There was no telling.
Perhaps those two men up there on the Sea of Tranquility would be able to shed some light on that.
He turned to the other man in the lounge with him, a pale, skinny guy in a bad-fitting suit. “So how does it feel to be a part of history in the making, Hans?”
Hans Kammler—formerly SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler—shifted uncomfortably in his soft-cushioned chair. “I have not had much to do with this program,” he said in heavily accented English. He’d been working hard on learning the language since his arrival.
Wheaton waved aside the protest. “Nonsense. You’ve been advising us on the psychology and the attitude of the Saurians—what you call Eidechse—haven’t you? And if the aliens make contact with us while we’re on the Moon, you’re here to serve as a liaison. Believe me, we didn’t dare put our people up there without having an idea of what we could expect from our visitors.”
Despite his mild, even friendly tone with Kammler, Wheaton despised the man. The son of a bitch was an unrepentant Nazi, one of the worst, personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave laborers, an architect of Auschwitz, a monster in human form. Other German scientists, like von Braun, claimed they’d been forced to join the SS—and for whatever that was worth, were at least outwardly repentant—but Kammler had been proud of what he was and what he’d done.
Wheaton was a case officer with the CIA, and as such he’d been Kammler’s escort, his “keeper,” since that oddly shaped craft had come down in the woods outside of Kecksburg just three and a half years ago. Kammler had been folded in with the Paperclip personnel, the German scientists brought back to the US at the end of the war to help advance America’s missile program, but his role had been very different.
Thanks to Paperclip, the US had put up its first satellite in 1958, developed its first ICBM in 1959, and put Alan Shepard into space in 1961. The real star of Paperclip, of course, was Wernher von Braun, who’d run the Nazi V-2 missile program at Peenemünde. It was von Braun, more than any other single person, who was responsible for creating the massive Saturn V rocket that had just put two men on the face of the Moon.
But when they’d pulled Hans Kammler from The Bell in 1965, MJ-12 had decided that he would be an important asset in dealing with the aliens. According to Kammler’s story, Germany had made contact with them as far back as 1933 . . . and quite possibly earlier than that. They’d formed an alliance with them in 1939, after finding The Bell crashed in southern Germany and capturing its pilot. That pilot had established contact with its own people, and Hitler had signed a treaty with them not long after.
And with the aliens’ technological assistance, the Nazis had damned near won the war.
The six SEALs sat at their desks in a classroom, complete with blackboard and wooden floorboards. A poster on the wall had been pulled from the old television program The X-Files—a flying saucer above the trees, with the words I Want to Believe underneath in bold capitals.
It seemed odd to have such a pedestrian room buried deep within Wright-Patt’s Complex-1B. But after even a few days, Hunter was coming to expect strange was the norm here.
Five other men were there with them besides Major Benedict—two from the Army’s Delta Force, one Army Ranger, and two from the CIA’s SAD/SOG direct action group. Hunter was surprised by the latter. Lieutenant Dorschner and Captain Arch seemed tough, professional, and no-nonsense, but Hunter definitely had been getting the idea of late that the Central Intelligence Agency was a part of the problem—the “bad guys,” as Admiral Kelsey had put it.
SAD/SOG stood for Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group, with SOG being one of several groups under SAD. They were responsible for those covert military operations from which the US government wanted to distance itself. One of the most secretive of all US direct action groups, they were the action arm of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Hunter hoped that these two guys had been well vetted.
“Gentlemen,” Benedict said from the front of the room. “In the past day or two, you’ve learned that UFOs are real, that aliens are here, and that while some of these visitors are friendly, others decidedly are not. Today, you will learn about a program called Solar Warden, and about America’s secret space fleet.”
Benedict launched right in, starting with some broad strokes about what those in the room probably knew . . . or at least, thought they knew.
Those stories about the government recovering crashed flying saucers—true. Many of them, at any rate. Stories about US scientists reverse engineering alien technology—also true. Some of it. And newly emerged stories of a secret US space program, complete with antigravity starships that would make Captain Kirk envious—very true indeed.
There was also a ton of disinformation mixed in with the truth, however, not to mention so-called fake news and outright hoaxes, scams, and lies. That made understanding the situation harder than Hunter had expected.
In 2002, a British sysadmin and hacker named Gary McKinnon had carried out what US officials called “the biggest military computer hack of all time.” He’d been looking, he’d claimed, for evidence of antigravity, free energy, and a UFO cover-up . . . and, evidently, he’d found all three. Among the data lifted from ninety-seven NASA and DOD computers, along with photos, had been lists of ship names, fleet transfers, and “nonterrestrial officers.”
According to McKinnon, the United States had been operating a secret space fleet since 1980, and there were some wide-eyed stories of covert bases on the Moon and Mars, and even of journeys to other star systems.
Ultimately, he was caught and someone pulled the plug. Had he been extradited to the United States, he would have faced seventy years in prison, but extradition was blocked by the British government, and, ultimately, all charges were dropped.
“A lot of what McKinnon claimed is not true,” Benedict told them. “The fact of the matter is that he probably didn’t know what he was looking at. But the leak was serious, and the government has been scrambling to close things up again.
“But the truth is, we do have a secret fleet, we do have regular access to space, and we do have a base on the farside of the Moon. We also, for the record, have a secret treaty with the aliens we call the Ebens—that’s EBE Grays.”
“EBE” stood for “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities,” and it was the cumbersome tag put on the diminutive aliens found in the wreckage of the craft at Roswell. In popular speculation, they were simply called the “Grays,” but Benedict warned them that there were several similar species out there with va
stly different agendas.
“There are probably tens of thousands of intelligent species scattered throughout our Galaxy,” Benedict told them, pressing a hidden control that flipped the central section of the blackboard over, revealing a projection screen. “Three are regular visitors to Earth, and maintain outposts either on or near our planet. Lights!”
The room lights dimmed, and Hunter realized that there were others nearby watching them. Surveillance of the student group, he thought, was probably continuous.
He was starting to get used to the idea, and that worried him.
On the screen was the projected photograph in high-definition of a man and a woman, apparently completely human, both attractively so. They wore silvery close-fitting suits; the woman had long hair so blond it was white, the man light brown; the one distinctive feature of both were eyes that seemed to Hunter to be slightly larger than typical of humans.
“We call these the ‘Nordics,’” Benedict told them. “They’re not actually aliens. They’re from Earth, but from about eleven thousand years in the future. They offered us a treaty in 1954, but President Eisenhower refused it. They were responsible for various contact reports from the ’50s, in which they told a number of people that our atomic testing was a threat to the Galaxy and we had to give up our nukes.
“Now obviously, we could blow the shit out of our planet and it wouldn’t have the least effect on Mars, to say nothing of the worlds around other stars. But it turns out they were right about the nuclear threat. They’re time travelers. If we destroy ourselves, they cease to exist. Poof! They were—they are—understandably worried about that.”
The Nordics were replaced by another image—the familiar shape of an alien Gray. Spindly, delicate, with an enormous head and large, black eyes, they were the creatures Hunter had always thought of as the archetypical alien visitor.
“The EBE Grays, as I said, were the pilots of the Roswell craft. They’re probably the most common of our various alien visitors. They showed up at Holloman Air Force Base in 1955 and they did sign a treaty with Eisenhower, one in which they said they would give us technological help in exchange for permission to abduct some of our citizens. Much later we realized it was a devil’s bargain. In their eyes, we’re not much more than cattle. Our best information suggests they’re from a star system called Zeta Reticuli, about forty light-years from Earth.”