by Ian Douglas
The lights had been joined by a third, and now all three appeared to be descending toward Homey Airport, slowly growing brighter.
“That we had help. A lot of it.”
A van drove up, stopping at the edge of the tarmac twenty yards away. Several men got out, wearing camouflage suits and carrying weapons. Flashlights stabbed and probed through the dark, but several of the men were wearing IR headgear.
There were plenty of stories about the “camo dudes” who appeared to provide security for the Groom Lake facility—and speculation that they weren’t military, but employees of a private contractor called Wackenhut. Hunter and Minkowski eased back into the deeper shadow at the corner of the barracks. Probably, the two SEALs had shown up on infrared scanners somewhere, and the camo dudes had been dispatched to pick them up.
But they weren’t about to make it easy for them.
It just wasn’t how SEALs operated.
Overhead, the brightest of the three stars had resolved itself into three bright, white lights with a larger red light glowing at the center.
The security people were spreading out, obviously searching for something. Hunter tapped Minkowski’s shoulder and nudged him back around the corner of the barracks. With one last glance up at the descending triangle, they slipped through the darkness to the barracks door and stepped inside.
The duty officer had his feet up on his desk, and was reading a new copy of Playboy. He pointedly ignored the two SEALs as they went back to their quarters.
The next morning, the twenty JSST operators stood in formation in Hangar One. The huge room was no longer empty. Sometime during the night, someone had rolled in a TR-3B and parked it under a blaze of spotlights. Armed guards—Army, this time, rather than Wackenhut rent-a-cops—stood around it, facing out.
Once again, they went through the ritual of roll call, then waited at parade rest as a gaggle of military VIPs and civilians came through and boarded the spacecraft. There were about fifty of them, including, Hunter noticed, several quite attractive women. What they might be doing headed for the Moon he had no idea. A number of men and women wore bright silver bodysuits, and Hunter wondered if they were the Nordics Benedict had told him about.
Time travelers from eleven thousand years in the future. What were they doing back here . . . slumming?
There was also, he saw, a Navy admiral, several captains, and a number of staff officers.
When the last of the VIPs were aboard, four men in pressure suits entered—presumably the TR-3B’s flight crew. Only then did an Air Force crew chief named Saunders tell Hunter that he could bring his people on board.
They filed up the ramp and into the belly of the black triangle. The interior had the look and feel of a wide-body commercial passenger jet, with three blocks of seats in a two-four-two configuration: two seats to port, two starboard, and four across the center with aisles at either side. At a guess, the craft could carry around one hundred people . . . perhaps more. There were no windows along the sides, but monitors set into the backs of each seat currently showed the interior of the hangar outside, where sliding doors were slowly opening to admit a torrent of bright desert sunlight.
The civilians and high-ranking officers were not in evidence; there must be an upper deck, Hunter thought, with more seating. The TR-3B would carry a hundred and fifty, maybe even more.
The military personnel took seats on the main deck, gathering in small clusters that reflected their backgrounds and units. That, Hunter thought, was going to be a problem. If 1-JSST was going to be an effective fighting force, he was going to have to find a way to break down those barriers and get them to think and act as a single unit and not as SEALs and Delta Force and Rangers and CIA.
And how the hell was he supposed to do that, when he barely had time to figure out what that team was supposed to do?
He knew his old men, of course. He knew them and trusted them, and they knew they could trust him. But the others . . .
The handful of civilians on the main deck appeared to be technicians, which suggested that the people on the upper deck were the high-ranking officers and the civilian elite. None of the Nordics was on the main deck, which was a pity. Hunter was hoping he could get a chance to talk with them.
“Where’d the rest of them go, Skipper?” Chief Brunelli asked.
“First class, Chief,” Hunter replied. “We’re in the economy seats.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice said over a cabin speaker. “This is your pilot speaking. We’re on a short hold until Kosmos 2525 goes below the horizon. Please stay in your seats. We will be taxiing out shortly.”
Kosmos 2525 was a recently launched Russian satellite, the “Kosmos” designation indicating that it was defense related, and therefore probably a spy satellite. It made sense, Hunter supposed, that the people in charge of this program wouldn’t want the Russians, or anyone else, watching a TR-3B launch.
A couple of minutes later, the transport began moving forward through the hangar doors and into the dazzling Nevada sun.
Hunter found that a touch-screen pad beside his monitor could be used to shift cameras, showing the view from either side of the spacecraft, or looking directly astern.
He found one camera angle from outside the ship, and it startled him. The landing gear was up. The TR-3B was floating a few feet above the tarmac, moving with such precision and grace that he couldn’t even feel it.
Until that moment, Hunter realized, he had not really believed in antigravity, even though he’d heard the term used frequently.
The ship reached a point on the main runway outside the hangar, paused for a moment, then lifted smoothly and silently straight up into the sky.
Not only antigravity, but inertial control, as well. However we achieved it, it’s damn impressive. The desert dropped away in the aft camera to be replaced almost immediately by the blue haze of atmosphere hugging the land, then by the curve of the Earth’s horizon and the empty black of space. They must have accelerated at hundreds of gravities to move so fast in so brief a time.
And he’d felt absolutely nothing.
One of the distinguishing points of UFOs over the decades had been their ability to maneuver at impossible speeds and make impossible turns, turns that would have pulped any human pilot. Evidently, humans now knew how to banish certain inconvenient physical laws.
“My God but we’re moving!” Minkowski said at Hunter’s left side. “Sir . . . what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”
“At a guess, Mink: the future.”
Earth was now a complete sphere in the rear-facing camera views, and dwindling moment by moment. From here, the planet was nearly full, with the dawn terminator visible far out over the Pacific. Hunter could see the intricate filigree of brilliant white clouds, the deep blue of ocean, the dark brown and green of continents, an impossibly beautiful jewel set in heaven.
With some reluctance, he switched to the forward view and got his first clear view of the Moon. It was in its first quarter, a slender crescent, though reflected earthlight dimly revealed the darkened part of the surface. The sunlit sliver was a brilliant, dazzling white, and he could see individual craters and maria with unparalleled detail and clarity.
The speed of their approach was nothing short of breathtaking. Lunar missions of the late ’60s and early ’70s had taken about three days to travel from low Earth orbit to the lunar surface. The TR-3B was making the same voyage in something less than twenty minutes. There still was no sensation of movement or acceleration . . . and there was no zero-gravity either. Hunter decided that that made sense; if you could turn gravity off, you must be able to make it to order, as well.
When the hell had they figured out how to manage that trick? There’d been rumors for years, of course . . . about antigravity, about unlimited free power pulled from empty space itself . . . all of those technological dreams from the pages of science fiction, but kept secret.
Was it possible that Big Oil was suppressing research into free energy? Hunt
er doubted that—“Big Oil” was a fiction, a monolithic union among cutthroat competitors who would be way better off if they found a way to offer unlimited power . . . not for free, perhaps, but at a fraction of the cost of petroleum.
But it did leave him wondering.
The lit portion of the Moon’s surface was dwindling, becoming a narrower and narrower crescent. A few moments later, and the Moon’s face was completely dark except for the faint, blue-gray illumination of earthlight. And then sunlight began gleaming from the opposite horizon. The transport, Hunter realized, was traveling around the Moon, coming in toward the farside.
And the Moon now was so large that he knew they were only minutes away from landing.
Chapter Eight
We cannot take the credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped [by] the people of other worlds.
Dr. Hermann J. Oberth [attributed], 1974
6 October 1970
“What is your name?”
The creature sealed in the glass-walled room did not respond.
Dr. Bruce McClure sighed, leaning back in his chair. The alien had been in their custody for . . . what? Five years, now? Sometimes it was talkative enough, but lately it had become . . . sullen. Less responsive. Resentful, perhaps.
McClure couldn’t blame it. Five years in captivity, prevented from communicating with its own kind.
Except no one was certain whether it really was isolated from other Saurians. They communicated among themselves—as they did with humans—telepathically. There were Saurian bases here on Earth; their ships were frequently in the skies over Southern Nevada. The Faraday cage enclosing the pseudoreptilian being was supposed to cut off its ability to communicate outside of the base, but no one knew for sure if it worked.
Suppose it was in regular communication with others of its kind?
“What is your name?”
Perhaps, he thought, it was just that it was getting tired of the same questions, asked over and over again. Who are you; where do you come from; why are you here; what do you want. It was standard interrogation practice, designed to catch a subject in lies, to wear him down, to trip him up.
But the subject this time was an alien being with an alien psychology, and God alone knew what alien motivations.
It also seemed possessed of an inhumanly deep patience—which, of course, made sense, seeing how it wasn’t human.
Occasionally, he would vary the questions, attempting to catch the subject by surprise. “Were your people the ones who ordered us off the Moon?”
The thing’s head turned, and its enormous golden eyes widened slightly at that, the pupils contracting to stark slits. Perhaps he’d touched something in the creature’s psyche.
“Was it you?”
Not us.
The thought arose in McClure’s mind, clear, but low voiced, almost a hiss.
“Who was it?”
Others.
It had been five months since Apollo 13 had safely returned to Earth after its hair-raising near-disaster en route to the Moon, and just one month since NASA had announced that the Apollo program would be shut down. Apollo 14 would still be launched in January, as planned. Three more missions would be sent after that, but there would be no Apollo 18, 19, or 20.
There were a few within the NASA hierarchy, those few who knew about the aliens, who knew about what Armstrong and Aldrin had seen in the Sea of Tranquility fourteen months before, and McClure was one of them. NASA would tell the public that the program was being canceled because of budget cuts and dwindling public interest, but the public certainly had been enthralled by the drama of bringing the crippled Apollo 13 back to Earth. No “loss of public interest” there.
And if they knew about the real reason, he was pretty sure interest would have gone through the roof.
There were hints that the Apollo 13 disaster had not been due to faulty wiring. McClure wasn’t sure, but judging from the list of questions he’d been given for the interrogation of the reptilian alien, he suspected that Apollo 13 might well have been a second, more explicit warning.
By “others,” the alien probably meant the Grays. The two species—Saurians and Grays—were eerily similar in many respects, but wildly different in others. Reportedly, the Grays were behind the repeated and persistent abduction of human beings, purportedly because they were interested in the human genome, or, alternatively, because they were interested in creating human-Gray hybrids, a new species.
Bruce McClure was a biologist. Xenobiology was a bit out of his line, of course, but he understood the processes of evolution and the mechanics of DNA—at least insofar as they were understood by human science in 1970.
And there was something very, very wrong about claims that the Grays were interested simply in the biology of human reproduction—and even more wrong in the idea that they were secretly creating alien-human hybrids.
Ssarsk.
“What? Did you say something?”
You may call me Ssarsk.
“Welcome to Darkside Base,” the pilot told them over the intercom. Gravity appeared to drain away as they cut the ship’s power. “Be careful how you move. It will take you a while to adjust to one-sixth G.”
Hunter unstrapped and stood, flexing his knees a bit to get a feel for the lesser gravity of the lunar surface. He felt . . . buoyant was the only word to describe it. Like he could kick off in a standing broad jump and touch down twenty feet away.
He’d seen very little of the base as the TR-3B had landed. Someone up in the control room had switched off several cameras during the final approach. But he’d glimpsed enough to see a barren landscape blasted with light, which put paid to the idea of a dark side. He knew that the Moon always kept one face to the Earth . . . and that that face right now was in darkness. That meant the farside, the side facing away from Earth, was currently in daylight. Dark side was an obsolete reference from the old days of lunar exploration, when absolutely nothing was known about the side of the Moon perpetually turned away from the Earth.
The monitors now showed the interior of a cavernous, underground chamber, so presumably they’d drifted in through some sort of large barn door. A pair of enclosed walkways, one above the other, were extending from one of the cavern’s walls and attaching themselves to the side of the spacecraft, just like the mobile boarding tunnels used in conventional airports. These, though, had the look of pressurized docking tubes. They wouldn’t need to suit up to deplane.
Darkside Base, it turned out, was entirely constructed inside a gigantic lava tube, a basaltic cave formed when the outer surface of a lava flow had hardened, eons ago, while the molten interior had continued to flow and eventually drained away. It made sense; the rock protected the base from both extremes of temperature and the harsh flux of solar and cosmic radiation outside. As he walked through the debarkation tube and glanced through the windows lining it, he saw whole cliffs gleaming in the base’s lights, entire walls and hillsides covered with ice.
That made sense, too. He’d read of the discovery of ice at the Moon’s south pole, buried at the bottoms of craters never touched by the sun. Comets, which were mostly frozen water, would have delivered their payloads to the Moon as clouds of hot vapor, which then would have frozen solid anywhere where the sun couldn’t reach. Over billions of years, these lava tubes must have built up an ocean’s worth of ice.
“Son of a bitch!” Nielson said, standing up and testing the bounce of his knees. The grin on his face made him look like a kid on his birthday. “Looks like they were right about the hollow Moon!”
“What the hell are you talking about, Niels?” Hunter demanded.
“I read about it. See, at the end of Apollo 11, before they headed back to Earth, they sent the lunar ascent stage crashing into the Moon’s surface, so they could record the shock waves with the seismographs they left on the surface, right? And the scientists said the whole Moon ‘rang like a bell’ for an hour afterward. So the idea is . . .
the Moon must actually be hollow, and that means it was artificially constructed, probably as a spaceship millions of years ago!”
“Nielson, you moron,” Minkowski said, rolling his eyes. “You’ve been reading too many weird-ass conspiracy theories.”
One of the civilians from the upper deck was filing past through an aisle between the seats, and she’d apparently heard Nielson’s enthusiastic comments. She laughed. “‘Ringing like a bell,’ soldier, doesn’t mean the Moon is hollow.”
“Not ‘soldier,’ ma’am,” Nielson said. He sounded a touch insulted. “I’m Navy, all the way!”
He’d not, Hunter noticed, said “Navy SEAL.” SEALs were careful about saying much, if anything, about their service to outsiders.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “Sailor, then. But the fact that seismic waves kept bouncing around inside the Moon like the ringing of a bell just meant the Moon is solid all the way through. No molten core to absorb the waves.”
“But this book I read—”
“Get it through your head, Niels,” Hunter said gently. “Not everything you read is true.”
“Aw, shit, Skipper!” Minkowski said, grinning. “Next thing you’ll tell us is that what I read on the Internet isn’t true either.”
“Positively shocking!” the woman said, grinning, and then she turned and filed out.
Hunter wondered who she was.
A few minutes later, as Hunter stepped off the boarding tube into a bright, clean internal lounge, they were met by an alien.
Or, rather, by a time traveler. She was human, so far as Hunter could tell, and achingly beautiful. Her somewhat larger-than-life eyes gave her an exoticism that enhanced her attractiveness. Unlike the others Hunter had seen clad in tight-fitting silver, she was wearing dark blue coveralls that still did nothing to hide her figure. She was accompanied by a more ordinary-looking human, an older man in green Army fatigues and a first lieutenant’s bars.
“Welcome to the Moon, gentlemen,” she told the JSST after they fell into ranks. “My name is Elanna, and I will be . . . think of me as your official guide here. I understand that your departure from Earth was a bit sudden, and so I’m sure you all have a lot of questions. We’ll do our best to answer them. First, however, Lieutenant Pierce, here, will take you to your new quarters and get you settled in. We operate here by Greenwich mean, so the current time is 0715 Zulu. Commander Hunter? Will you come with me, please?”