by Ian Douglas
The EBE was replaced by another photo. It was much like the Gray, but in some ways was markedly different. The face was more pinched, almost insect-like, and where the Gray had had a tiny, thin-lipped mouth, this one’s head seemed extended in a kind of blunt snout with a prominent mouth. The skin showed a suggestion of iridescent scales, and the creature seemed to be taller than the Gray, as well. The eyes were smaller, and they were golden, with vertically slit pupils, like a snake’s.
“And these,” Benedict said, “are the Saurians. Some call them ‘Reptilians’ or ‘Dracos.’ In the popular mythology they’re supposed to be from the constellation Draco, in the circumpolar skies of the northern hemisphere. That much is nonsense, of course. So very convenient to have reptilian aliens hailing from the constellation of ‘the dragon.’ Cute, right?
“But constellations are simple groupings of stars as seen from Earth, and the different stars of any given group are at wildly different distances from us and for the most part have nothing to do with one another. Unfortunately, that means we don’t know where these guys are from. But the stuff about Draco is almost certainly deliberate disinformation on their part.
“In any case, these are the bad guys. The Grays call them ‘Malok.’ They claim Earth belongs to them, and they’re working behind the scenes to make that so. Both the Nordics and the EBE Grays appear to be at war with them, though some kind of convention or diplomatic understanding keeps them from actively shooting at each other near our planet. That wasn’t always the case. Some descriptions of nuclear weapons in the Mahabharata date back several thousand years, and a famous woodcut of a UFO battle in the skies over Nuremberg from 1561 probably represents battles in that war. They’ve been fighting each other for a long time.
“Back in the early ’80s, President Reagan made the decision to face the aliens on their own terms. With help from both the Nordics and the EBEs, we began construction of a space fleet. For forty years or so, we’ve been pushing out into space, into the solar system, in order to confront the Saurians and demonstrate to them that we are not primitives, not push-overs, that we can stand up and fight for ourselves.
“And that, gentlemen, is why we’ve brought you here. We want each of you for what we’re calling the Interstellar Fleet Marine Force.” He grinned at them. “Welcome aboard!”
20 July 1969
Wheaton and Kammler continued watching the live transmissions from the Moon.
“Ah!” Wheaton said. “He’s coming down now!”
Armstrong had lowered a television camera on the outside of the lander moments before, and could be seen now descending the ladder with a curious, floating, step-by-step hopping movement in the low lunar gravity. He reached the bottom and paused for a moment. “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM pads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder down there. It’s very fine.”
Armstrong moved back off the lander.
He was on the surface.
“That’s one small step for man . . . one giant leap for mankind.”
Wheaton puzzled over the statement for a moment. The context sounded as though it should have been “one small step for a man . . .” but he hadn’t heard the “a.” There was a lot of static on the live feed, however, so maybe he’d just missed it.
For nine minutes, the two men watched Armstrong moving about on the lunar surface, watched him pick up a contingency sample of dust, then watched Colonel Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin come down the lander steps and join him.
“We’ve actually put people on the Moon,” Wheaton said, his voice soft, even reverential.
“Ja,” Kammler said. “But I’m not so sure we’ll be allowed to stay.”
They watched for minutes more, as Armstrong and Aldrin bounced around in the eerie slow motion of one-sixth Earth’s gravity. Half an hour after Armstrong had set foot on the surface, they unveiled a plaque attached to the lander’s leg.
Armstrong read the words engraved on it.
“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”
On the monitor, both astronauts had turned, as if to look at something off-screen. “Switching to medical channel,” a voice said from Mission Control. Wheaton leaned closer. The voice transmission appeared to have been cut off. A malfunction? Or else Armstrong wanted to say something that the entire listening world couldn’t, or shouldn’t hear. . . .
“What’s there?” the voice of Mission Control said. “Mission Control, calling Apollo 11. . . .”
He caught a long burst of static, then heard Armstrong’s voice on the secure channel.
“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. . . .”
“We copy,” Mission Control replied. “Tell us exactly what you see.”
“Two spacecraft, sir! They’re silver, reflecting the sunlight . . . and they’re big! Enormous! Forty . . . maybe fifty feet across . . .”
“So,” Wheaton asked the SS officer. “Friends of yours?”
“I do not know, Mr. Wheaton. It may be. Or it could be the others. The time travelers.”
“Well, it’s certainly a historic moment, our first step on the Moon. Makes sense that time travelers might be here to witness it?”
Kammler didn’t reply. His eyes were wide, however, and held a sudden expression of sheer, stark terror, eyes bugging out, mouth open.
And then the German collapsed.
“So . . . whatcha think, Skipper?” Brunelli asked. “Are we gonna join Battlestar Galactica?”
They were sitting together in a base cafeteria, a mess hall open to both officers and enlisted personnel. Supper was a choice of meatloaf or rather sad-looking fish. They’d been told in no uncertain terms that they would not be allowed off base; oaths and promises of prison hard-time if they broke them notwithstanding, the powers that were didn’t seem inclined to trust them.
Which was fine with Hunter. He didn’t trust them.
“At this point, Chief, I’m not sure what options we have. I think we know too much.”
“Yeah,” Colby said. “We get out of line . . .” He drew his finger sharply across his throat. “Ssschk!”
“Shit, man,” Taylor said. “They gotta let us go sometime.”
“Yeah,” Nielson agreed. “At least they could let us go on liberty.”
“You guys mind if I join you?” a soft voice asked.
It was John Dorschner, one of the SAD/SOG men, standing beside their table with a tray in his hands.
“Help yourself, Lieutenant,” Hunter said, gesturing at an empty chair. “It’s a free country. At least for the most part.”
Dorschner sank into the offered seat.
Hunter studied the man closely. He was in his thirties, rugged looking, and dressed in nondescript camo battle dress, with no rank insignia and no unit patches. If he didn’t trust this secret space fleet, he trusted anyone connected with the CIA less.
But Dorschner might have information they could use.
“How long have you been in this dog and pony show?” Hunter asked.
“Three weeks. They’ve had me on ice while they rounded up more personnel.”
“Where were you stationed before that?”
Dorschner’s hard, gray eyes flicked up to look at Hunter, then at Brunelli and the others.
“I was stationed at Bragg,” he said carefully. “But I was in the field when they pulled me in.”
“Yeah?” Minkowski said. “Where was that, sir?”
“Can’t say.”
Hunter nodded. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was the headquarters for USSOCOM, the US Special Operations Command. Technically, there was considerable tension between USSOCOM and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, but most of the turf-wa
r squabbles were confined to the political heads of the agencies in question. The actual operators worked smoothly together, and probably shared personnel from time to time. It had been a joint SAD/USSOCOM operation that had found and captured Osama bin Laden, for example.
If Dorschner had been at Bragg, he’d probably been teamed with USSOCOM elements for a special—and highly secret—op. And Dorschner was right not to talk about it, even with the six SEALs gathered at the table.
“Where you from, Lieutenant?” Hunter asked him.
Dorschner hesitated, as though thoroughly studying the question for possible booby traps. “Oklahoma,” he said at last. “Little town just outside Tulsa.”
A country boy, then. Middle America and the wide-open spaces. Probably red-state conservative politically. Probably religious.
And probably as mistrustful of big government as Hunter was right now.
“How about you?”
“Dayton,” Hunter said.
“Yeah?” Dorschner said, a mumble around a forkful of meatloaf. “This is a homecoming for you, huh?”
“Not so far. Liberty ashore’s been canceled.”
“Liberty ashore? Oh, you mean a twenty-four-hour pass.”
“That’s right,” Minkowski said. “And the floor is a deck, the wall is a bulkhead, and the bathroom is the head.”
“Cut the guy some slack, Master Chief,” Hunter said. “He doesn’t live in our world.”
“What world do you spooks live in?” Brunelli asked.
“The real one. The floor is a floor . . . and I do not talk shop, okay?”
“Fair enough, Lieutenant,” Hunter said. “We’re just looking for some common ground, okay? They’re folding us together into some kind of combat team, right?” He waved a hand, taking in the SEALs to his left and right. “We’re a team. We’ve been together for a long time, and we’ve been in some tight spots together. We know we can count on one another, no matter what. If you’re part of our team, we need to know you a little better, is all.”
Dorschner considered this. “Yes, sir.” The emphasis on the word made it something just shy of an insult. “I imagine we’ll sort all of that out in training.”
“Training,” Minkowski said. “Right. When is that supposed to start, anyway?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Dorschner said, “bright and early, at zero-dark-thirty.”
Frederick Groton walked into the elevator and spoke the level he wanted. “Sub-five.” Speech-recognition software both took him to his floor and provided yet another security check. Not everyone working in S4 had clearance to the deeper levels.
Like its more famous neighbor, Area 51, Section 4 was home to some closely guarded secrets. A little information had slipped out with the Bob Lazar leaks back in 1989, but the damage had been contained and Lazar had been discredited, meaning there was much less scrutiny here than on Area 51. Built into the side of the Papoose Mountains fifteen miles south of the Area 51 runways, S4 was the primary research facility for the investigation of extraterrestrials and their technology.
The door slid open, and he stepped into the room known as Deep Blue.
As at Wright-Patt’s Blue Room, there were alien spacecraft here. The various alien species visiting Earth, Groton reflected, had been terribly careless with their ships, which crashed with disconcerting frequency. The earliest known crash in US history had actually taken place in Aurora, Texas, back in 1897; the first recovery of a downed saucer had been in 1941, at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Witnesses had seen alien bodies and been sworn to secrecy by the military. That saucer now was spread out in pieces in Deep Blue, and technicians continued to disassemble it and glean data from the wreckage decades later. The Cape Girardeau crash had been particularly useful in studies of gravitomagnetics, one of several alien applications of antigravity.
“Hey, beautiful,” Groton called as he walked up behind a young woman standing by a table covered by small technological bits and pieces. A laptop next to her was displaying complicated electrical schematics. “What’s cooking?”
Dr. Ellen Michaels turned and arched an eyebrow at him. “Your balls will be cooking if you keep up with that chauvinist bullshit. And where the hell have you been? Rudy has been screaming his head off at me all morning, looking for you.”
“I was checking up on Dr. Brody. He’s in the base dispensary, recovering. They say he’s fine, just a slight concussion. I guess he had a bit of a . . . shock.”
“You and that Elanna bitch did kind of run over him with a bus. What the hell were you two thinking?”
“I thought he could take it. And the CAG wanted him brought into the fold as fast as possible.”
CAG stood for Command Authority Group, and it represented the tier of officers and high-ranking officials immediately under the fabled committee known as MJ-12. Groton had to suppress an interior wince each time he heard the term. He’d served for a time on aircraft carriers, the oceangoing kind, where the CAG was something quite different. The Solar Warden carriers had CAGs—the original kind—as well.
“Brody is a fossilized old fart,” Michaels said, “who couldn’t wrap his brain around an internal combustion engine, much less antigravity.”
“His problem was with time travel, actually.”
“Worse yet. Temporal displacement is pure magic and therefore impossible, so far as he’s concerned. Tell him magic is real and he’ll have a conniption. Or faint.”
“C’mon, it wasn’t so bad, Ell. He fell out of his chair and bumped his head, is all.”
“Sounds like a real asset. And why is he being ‘brought into the fold,’ as you put it?”
“CAG wants to put him on Big-H for Excalibur. He’s probably the best astrophysicist we have right now.”
“You do know, Fred, that the more people in the fold, the harder it will be to keep things under wraps.”
“Hurray. I would love seeing Full Disclosure!”
“Okay, me, too,” she conceded, “but speeding the process is a great way to terminate a promising career.”
“Or a way to advance it. It doesn’t matter,” he said, staving off more arguments, “it’s already done. So, anything interesting here?”
“Not really. We pretty much have gravitomagnetics down solid. Enough so that we’re starting to leak it deliberately to outsiders.”
He nodded. “I saw the papers out of the ESA. They’ve reported measuring the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field. When was that?”
“March of 2006,” she said. “They’ve made some new advances since.”
“While we sail to the stars on fleet carriers.”
She shrugged. “It’s a step in the right direction.” She shook her head. “But we’re not going to get much more out of poking through debris. We’ll need double-A sistance if we’re going to take this any further.”
The phrase was a humorous in-house code phrase at S4. It stood for “alien assistance.”
“That,” Groton said carefully, “could be difficult. Not to mention risky.”
She smiled sweetly. “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Super Chicken!”
Groton grinned and nodded. He’d never seen the late-’60s cartoon show, but the quote was a long-running gag between him and Ellen.
He’d just never imagined that the silly line could hit so close to home.
Chapter Six
They (The Disclosure Project) are some very credible, relied-upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there’s antigravity, there’s free energy, and it’s extraterrestrial in origin and [they’ve] captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it.
Gary McKinnon, British hacker, 2001
20 February 1955
Air Force One descended from a cloudless sky to touch down gently on the runway at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. It was almost exactly one year since his unsettling meeting with humanoid aliens at Muroc; now, he’d been told, a different group of aliens wanted to meet with him . . . and this time they weren’t de
manding that the United States relinquish its nuclear weaponry in exchange for technology.
What this group wanted was worse. Far worse.
“The pilot has ordered the tower to switch off their radar, Mr. President,” his aide told him. Eisenhower nodded. That had been according to the protocol worked out with the aliens by radio a week ago.
“And there they are, Mr. President,” Sherman Adams said from a window seat on the opposite side of the aisle. “Right on time!”
“Then I’d better get out there,” Eisenhower said. Adams opened his mouth to speak, and Eisenhower put up his hand. “Can it, Sherm! I met them last time, I’ll meet with them this time. Alone. Those were the stipulations.”
Three disks had appeared in the skies over Holloman. One had touched down just two hundred feet from Air Force One’s exit ladder. The other two hung suspended in the sky, perhaps keeping watch. These craft were different from the others he’d seen at Muroc, larger, thicker, rounder on top and bottom. Well, this was supposed to be a different race, right? Once again, the President of the United States made the long and lonely walk across the tarmac to meet with visitors from God knew where.
One of the aliens was waiting for him at the top of the disk’s extended ramp, and Eisenhower suppressed the jolt of revulsion. He’d seen these aliens before; they were identical to the occupants of the craft that had come down in Roswell—large heads with enormous black eyes. He’d seen the bodies in a storage freezer at Wright Airfield a few months ago. At the entryway to the spaceship, he touched fingertips with the creature, and felt its thoughts in his head.