by Ian Douglas
“I find it easier to believe that than Nazis fled to Aldebaran!”
“A few years ago, some of our ships came under attack as they passed through the Aldebaran system,” Elanna told him. “We destroyed one of the attacking vessels, and what you’re looking at might be a part of the wreckage. The attackers might have been Saurians, or we may be looking at some sort of automated defense system. But discovering this raises a different possibility. Why do you think the Nazis might be interested in this star system?”
The question seemed to be a sharp change of topic. Hunter struggled to keep up. “Well, the Nazis had this really sick, twisted way of seeing things, thinking that anyone who wasn’t pure, one hundred percent Caucasian was subhuman. They killed millions of people who didn’t measure up to their standards of racial purity.”
“Of this we are aware.”
“They also were off on kind of a mystic bent. Weird, metaphysical ideas . . . like that the Aryans weren’t ordinary humans. The Aryans had come from someplace else, and tried to establish a civilization in northern Europe, but the subhumans kept mucking things up for them.”
“Hyperborea. A mythical land in the far north first imagined by the ancient Greeks.”
“Hyperborea, Thule—lots of names for it. But I read once that some of them thought that the Aryans had come from the stars.”
“Correct,” Elanna said quietly. “Specifically, from this star. There is a group located in Germany and Austria, the Tempelhofgesellschaft, or THG. They teach a rather heretical form of dualist Christianity, claiming that Jesus was an Aryan, and that the Jews and the god Jehovah are evil.”
“Gnosticism?”
“An extreme and twisted version, yes, blended with certain neo-Nazi beliefs. The Aryans, they claim, came to Earth from Aldebaran thousands of years ago and formed a colony in ancient Atlantis.”
“What is this thing the Nazis have for hideaways starting with the letter A?”
She looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”
“Argentina, Antarctica, Atlantis, and Aldebaran,” Hunter replied.
Elanna smiled. “I see. You forget ‘America.’”
“Huh?”
“The place where large numbers of former Nazis did settle, besides Argentina, was in the United States of America. Operation Paperclip.”
“God. You’re right.”
“In any case,” she continued, “the THG printed pamphlets claiming that the Aryans came from Aldebaran, and that this information had been revealed to them from ancient Sumerian manuscripts.”
“Was it?”
“Of course not. But their religion claims that a huge space fleet is on its way to Earth from that system. When it gets here, it will join with the Nazi flying saucers secretly based in Antarctica, and together they will take over the world.”
“All pure nonsense, right?”
“Impure nonsense, yes. Except . . .”
Hunter felt a small thrill of fear. “Except what?”
“The THG was promulgating their religious beliefs beginning in the 1990s. An earlier version of the THG was operating in the 1980s. This image of the German emblem out at Aldebaran, and the attacks on our ships . . . those occurred in 1976.”
“Coincidence?”
“Possibly. Or else time-traveling starships are involved.”
The realization hit Hunter like a blow to his stomach. “Die Glocke. . . .”
“We know The Nazi Bell crashed in Pennsylvania in 1965,” Elanna told him. “But other groups, other Nazi groups, just might have escaped to Aldebaran after the war. Or, the Saurians have an intertemporal network across many years and many star systems, and some of that information has leaked into Europe’s far-right community. Or—”
“Okay! I get it! I get it!” He held up his hand. “Once you throw time travel into the equation, all bets are off—anything is possible!”
“That statement is truer than you realize.”
“So how do we find out?” Cold realization shone through. “Ah. That’s why the JSST.”
“We are organizing an interstellar expedition, one built around the spaceship carrier Hillenkoetter. Some of us will be on board as advisors, but the expedition, code-named Excalibur, will be entirely Earth’s. You will travel to Aldebaran to find out who, or what, might be based there.”
“Space Nazis.”
“If you like—”
“I don’t like. We’ll still be up against some radically advanced military technology, right? I’m guessing they don’t just have Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts up there. Jesus—something that fired at some of your ships? So why can’t you guys go in and blow the shit out of them? It was your ships they shot up.”
Elanna hesitated for a long moment, as though wondering how much to tell Hunter. He had the distinct impression that there were things she was not supposed to say. By now, that was an attitude with which he was quite familiar.
At last, she closed her eyes. “Mark, can you imagine what a full-blown time war would be like? What it could do to Humankind?”
“A war in time?” He wrestled with the concept. “I don’t know. It would definitely be different tactically. You could send an attacking force in at a time and place before the other side knew you were coming, for one thing.”
“Among many other things. Imagine a struggle in which whole civilizations, whole worlds were—I think the word would be edited. Edited out of existence. Historical battles lost suddenly become battles won. Powerful leaders cease to exist. Important elections that end one way now end in another. Civilizations destined for greatness vanish before they ever get started. Asteroids smash into worlds before those civilizations ever arise. The fabric of space and time are twisted out of all recognition.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes, Mark. Ouch. So the reason we can’t fight is because, in our war with the Saurians, we are . . . constrained in certain ways. We don’t try to wipe them out of existence so that they don’t try to wipe us out of existence. You understand?”
“MAD.”
“What?”
“MAD. Mutually assured destruction. It was the reasoning that drove the Cold War, the fact that both sides knew that if they tried to annihilate the other side with nuclear weapons, the other side would wipe them out, too. So lots of pseudo-wars were fought by proxy—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Grenada—but the big powers never pushed the buttons that would have wiped out everybody.”
“An excellent illustration. We and the Saurians fight our wars by proxies so that a major time war never occurs.”
“I thought we were you? Just more primitive. If you send us back in time to do your dirty work, isn’t that the same as you doing it yourselves?” He rubbed his forehead.
“The balance between the Saurians, humans, and Grays is more subtle, more precarious than you could possibly imagine, Commander. You are us, yes. But your culture is different, the way you think is different, even your biology is different. And if you attack the Saurians—or expatriate Nazis, for that matter—you will not immediately trigger a temporal apocalypse. Using you instead of acting ourselves creates a kind of buffer behind which we can work. You understand?”
“No. I don’t. If the bad guys edit us out, you get edited out, too. Right?”
“Which is why they won’t make the attempt, knowing that they cannot possibly destroy all of us . . . and they, therefore, would be edited out of existence, as well.” She hesitated again. “Tell me, Commander. How much do you know of the various treaties between humans of your time period, and the various alien groups?”
“I’ve got the basics. Eisenhower with the Grays, the Saurians with the Nazis.”
“Right. Besides helping them rebuild Die Glocke, they were also helping in other areas. There is much disinformation, fiction, and outright lies contaminating the field today, but at the end of the Second World War the Germans were within months of destroying New York City with a primitive nuclear device.”
Hunter whistled. “Didn’t kno
w that.”
Elanna nodded. “We also believe that some Nazis fled Earth entirely. Whether this was on their own primitive antigravity saucers, or whether they escaped in Saurian craft, is unknown. But Die Glocke was not the only ship to flee the Götterdämmerung of the Nazi Reich. The question is: Where might they have gone?”
“Aldebaran,” Hunter said, leaping to the obvious conclusion. “Looking for their Aryan homeland.”
“Precisely. And part of the problem is that many in your government in the 1950s believed that we, the ones you call ‘Nordics,’ were, in fact, escaped Nazis flying German saucers. That is not true, but there are still those in your government today who fear us because they assume some sort of connection with the Nazis. Old fears, like old habits, die hard.”
“If the idea that the Aryans came from Aldebaran came out of the 1990s,” Hunter said, following the disturbing thread of thought, “how did it get to the Nazis of 1945?”
“That,” Elanna said, “is why we suspect temporal contamination. Someone from recent times is in intertemporal communication with 1945.”
Hunter sighed. “This is way, way beyond me, Elanna. You’re telling me that some of the worst crackpot theories in history might be real. But you don’t know for sure.”
“Precisely.”
“And you somehow want me to fight them.”
“If it comes to that. More, though, I think you and your JSST may be instrumental in helping us unravel the truth.”
Navy commander Philip Wheaton never got tired of the sight.
He was standing with Vashnu on the main hangar deck of Darkside Base, looking up . . . and up . . . and up at the enormous, rounded prow of the USSS Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter hanging against the blaze of overhead lights far above his head. As long from stem to stern as a modern nuclear aircraft carrier in the oceangoing Navy, massing nearly a hundred thousand tons, the Big-H was the fourth of the eight huge mother ship spacecraft carriers in the Solar Warden fleet.
Dad, Wheaton thought, would have loved to see this.
Majik had long made a habit of recruiting the children of their employees whenever possible. It was so much easier to break the news to them—that a parent had worked for the secretive organization, that they’d known the fact of alien contact, of the reality of Solar Warden and the secret fleet. It made acceptance easier.
Wheaton’s father had been a CIA officer back in the ’60s and ’70s, and been sworn to secrecy about much of what he’d seen. He’d never said a word about any of it to his wife or two kids and had taken the secret to his grave when he’d died in 1982.
Phil Wheaton had been born in 1975, had joined the Navy in ’98, and become a naval intelligence officer in 2011. They’d approached him about becoming part of Solar Warden five years later.
He was still getting over the shock.
But things his dad had known about back in the ’60s had borne fruit in the ’70s. And the first of America’s top secret black space fleet had entered orbit in 1986. How MJ-12 had managed to keep a lid on the project all those years, with nothing reaching the general public but hints and rumors, was a mystery. Evidently, the government could keep a secret when it needed to. The Manhattan Project wasn’t just an outlier.
“So what are we waiting for?” he asked the tall, pale-skinned Nordic standing next to him.
“The military contingent,” Vashnu replied. He did not sound as though he entirely approved. “They are already at Darkside, going through orientation. They will arrive here in twenty-four hours.”
“You don’t like the military, do you, Vashnu?”
The time traveler made a face, the expression unreadable. “It’s not that I don’t like it,” he said. “I just question the wisdom of rushing your culture into the interstellar arena.”
“Oh, I think we’ll be able to hold our own.”
“Do you think so? The Galaxy is brimming over with life, with civilizations, with minds as far beyond yours as your minds are beyond that of an insect. With civilizations older than you can imagine, and some of those are darkly paranoid, jealous of those younger, less-developed species that might attempt to supplant them in a few million years. More, each species that has developed interstellar travel has, almost by definition, developed time travel as well, and those teeming empires and federations and communities of intellects span eons as well as light-years. I represent a human offshoot eleven thousand years beyond yours, and I can tell you that we do not ‘hold our own.’ Every new contact, every new step into the darkness, becomes an existential threat as we face challenges and conflicts which you, Philip, cannot even imagine.”
Wheaton opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. Vashnu was right. Wheaton had only the thinnest understanding of the field tentatively known as exospaciotemporal politics, or EST, and knew better than to challenge the Nordic about things that Vashnu understood, and he did not.
“Okay,” Wheaton said. “It’s a big scary universe and we’ll have to watch our step. But we know we survive, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t think you understand the niceties of intertemporal interaction,” Vashnu said. “Our current time line is intact, yes. But it has also suffered innumerable changes—minor changes, to be sure, but history is constantly being rewritten.”
“I’m not aware of any changes.”
“Of course not. Everything changes, including your books, your records, and your memories. Even so, there are gaps, discontinuities. Things that don’t match up perfectly. Your Charles Fort made a career of collecting reports of strange things that didn’t fit. People who vanished without a trace. People who appeared, with no clue as to their origin. Have you ever wondered why you’ve failed to find a single solid piece of evidence for the existence of the primate you call Bigfoot?”
“Because it’s not real.”
“You’re so sure? Thousands of credible witnesses have encountered it all over the world. However, no body has ever been found, no skeleton, no artifact. Why? Because there are alternate versions of Earth, parallel time lines, where Homo sapiens never appeared, or he died out and the world was inherited by the large, hairy hominids you know as Gigantopithecus. But sometimes, worlds leak, one into another. They overlap for brief periods, and in such an overlap two English schoolteachers on vacation in France in the year 1901 find themselves in the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles in 1789.”
“That happened?”
“Their names were Moberly and Jourdain. It happened.”
“I’ll watch my step next time I visit France.” Vashnu didn’t laugh. Okay . . . “So why did your people help us? The time line must be threadbare by now.”
“We are members, as you must know, of a galactic conclave. You might call it a federation, a cooperative similar to your United Nations. Such decisions are made by many species, each with their own agenda, their own reasoning. Some of my own people, government leaders, feared what would happen if you destroyed yourselves in the twentieth century. They were able to convince the others.” He shook his head, a decidedly human gesture. “We do not always make wise choices.”
“Well, we’ll do our best not to let you down. Let’s go on board, shall we?”
An elevator carried them up to a boarding tube area, and they crossed over into the Hillenkoetter.
Roscoe Hillenkoetter was the very first director of the CIA, and he’d been deeply involved in the secret goings-on surrounding the recovery of a crashed ship at Roswell, and the subsequent creation of MJ-12. He was also one of the first twelve members of that committee. Somehow it was fitting that one of the space-going carriers of America’s secret space fleet be named for him.
They entered on the quarterdeck, a symbolic space traditionally reserved for ceremonial receptions and formal coming-aboard rituals. Wheaton, in uniform, saluted the flag mounted on an aft bulkhead, then saluted the quarterdeck as he stepped aboard. “Permission to come aboard.”
A painfully young Navy lieutenant, the officer of t
he deck, returned the salute. “Permission granted. Welcome aboard, sir.”
“Is either the admiral or the captain aboard yet?” he asked.
“No, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “But Commander Haines is the senior watch officer, and he’s on the bridge. You can report to him there.”
“Thank you, son.” He glanced left and right, momentarily disoriented. “Which way?”
“I’ll take you, Philip,” Vashnu told him.
Hillenkoetter’s bridge was buried deep within the vessel, and actually consisted of three interconnected areas on the O-4 level. The flag bridge was aft and highest, the place where the admiral could command the battle group. The ship’s bridge was in the middle, while forward and below was the CIC, the combat information center. The compartments all were quite spacious, but the clutter of large monitors, electrical conduits, workstations, and padded swivel seats for perhaps eighty people made it feel cramped and crowded. A Navy commander in short-sleeve whites was on the bridge, leaning over a tangle of wiring with two enlisted technicians. “Yank it if you have to,” he was saying. “We’ll order a replacement from Supply.”
“Commander Haines?”
The man straightened and turned. “What?”
Wheaton saluted. “Commander Wheaton, reporting aboard.”
“As what?”
“I’m your new S2.”
Haines nodded. “Bill Haines, XO. You’ll be forward, in CIC. Office below on the first deck. Quarters below and aft, third deck.”
“Thank you.”
“Damn it, Parker! Not that one! The other one!” Haines vanished back into the tangle of wires and circuit boards.
Wheaton exchanged glances with Vashnu.
Maybe the time traveler was right. Maybe twenty-first-century humans weren’t ready for interstellar space.
Chapter Ten
We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter.