Alien Secrets

by Ian Douglas

  And maybe, he thought, it would be best to die and end this bleak enslavement. The Saurians cared nothing about him save how he might be of use to them and their plans. They watched him continually. They visited him in his sleep. They filled his nightmares.

  It was 2:27.

  He comes.

  The crowd burst into excited commotion as police officers held them back. Men in civilian suits appeared, entering the cleared portion of the sidewalk. A tall man in a dark suit stepped out of the hotel, smiling, waving . . .

  My God! Kammler thought. It’s Reagan! His hand closed on the pistol grip, but he didn’t draw it. Not yet . . . not yet. . . .

  They led Reagan to the limousine, opening the rear door. Six shots split the afternoon air, six shots in less than two seconds. Men fell to the sidewalk. Men surged at the edge of the crowd, dragging someone down. Secret Service men shoved Reagan inside the limo and slammed the door. For a moment there was indescribable consternation . . . and then the car was speeding off.

  Kammler released the pistol. Who . . . who shot him?

  Another of our creatures. Its mind is twisted. Its erotomania led him to do something to impress the human he thinks he loves. We guided it here, provided the mental key.

  And why the President?

  Because it moves against us. It signs orders that will lead to war between your people and ours. Your president will die, and its replacement will have to start over in terms of understanding us, reacting to us.

  I don’t want to be part of this any longer! Please . . . please let me die!

  No. Not so long as you remain useful to us.

  “Hillenkoetter! Hillenkoetter!” Duvall called. “We have a large alien spacecraft—very large—coming straight for us! We’re transmitting images. We’re maneuvering . . .”

  Not that the mother ship could do a damned thing to help. TR-3R Alfa was currently over two light minutes sunward of the Hillenkoetter, which meant it would be over two minutes before Duvall’s frantic warning would be heard on board the Big-H. While both the Grays and the Talis had devices that let them communicate instantly across light-years, the technology was so poorly understood by humans that they’d not been adopted by Solar Warden. For now, at least, human communications were limited by the speed of light, something that could be damned inconvenient in a far-ranging space battle.

  Duvall had never felt so cutoff and alone.

  “What’s it doing, Bucky?”

  “Still coming, Double-D! Range . . . sixteen thousand kilometers! Speed . . . two hundred kilometers per second in approach! We’ll have intercept in 1.3 minutes. . . .”

  “Let’s just keep our distance, shall we?”

  The recon craft flipped end-for-end, piled on the g’s with a massive surge of deceleration, then began accelerating directly away from the oncoming vessel. The alien ship increased its speed, and kept coming.

  “Talk to me, Bucky,” Duvall said. “What the hell is it?”

  “Nothing we’ve encountered before, Boss. It’s vaguely egg shaped. Diameter of about five and a half kilometers. I’m reading a mass of . . . my God—two times ten to the twelve tons! That’s a small asteroid!”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Duvall said. “A civilization living in an asteroid belt, they’re going to use what’s handy to make what they need.”

  “Yeah, but spaceships? Out of big rocks?”

  “Transmit that data to the Big-H.”

  “Already done.”

  Time passed. TR-3R Alfa changed course in order to avoid taking the alien all the way back to Hillenkoetter. The asteroid, or whatever it was, changed course to intercept. When the recon ship increased its acceleration, so did the alien. Slowly, inexorably, the huge alien ship—almost three and a half miles long and three wide—continued to close the range. After fifteen minutes, the human vessel was pushing up against the speed of light, an impenetrable barrier. The Hillenkoetter and her escorts could use gravity to wrap local space around them and break the light barrier, but not a TR-3R. She simply did not have the power to play that kind of trick with space-time.

  The alien had the power, and some to spare. It continued to close.

  “Take us to battle stations,” Groton ordered.

  “Battle stations, aye!”

  An alarm sounded through the vast ship, accompanied by a canned voice intoning “Now battle stations, battle stations! All hands, man your battle stations . . .”

  “TR-3R Alfa is being pursued by the alien, Captain,” the senior scanner officer reported. “We estimate the bogie will intercept Alfa now in . . . five minutes.”

  “Can we get there in time?”

  “We can, Captain. But . . .”

  “Say it.”

  “Sir, the bogie is over three miles long! The Big-H would be a dinghy by comparison!”

  “Talk to me, Vashnu,” he said to the tall time traveler standing beside him. “Who are these people?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but as I’ve explained already, the Talis have not explored this star system. From nearby stars it appears to be uninhabited. No intelligence-generated signals of any kind.”

  “Is it possible this alien ship is from some other system?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who do you know who builds starships out of five-kilometer asteroids?”

  “None close to here, Captain. There’s a race we call the Elajid who hollow out asteroids both to create habitats and for the construction of large starships, but their realm is nearly ten thousand light-years in toward the galactic core. We have no regular contact with them.”

  “Could they be exploring out this way?”

  “I cannot say, Captain. However, it seems unlikely. They have carved an empire for themselves roughly five hundred light-years across. They do not appear to know the secret of faster-than-light travel, however, and so they expand quite slowly.”

  Once more, the Talis seemed no help.

  “CAG!”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “I need the fighter wing spaceborne ASAP. What’s your status?”

  “First fighters are coming online now, Captain. They’ll be ready for launch in . . . two minutes.”

  “Ms. Briem? Execute Opplan Delta, please.”

  “Opplan Delta, aye, sir.”

  “Comm. Alert the escorts! Have them close with us.”

  “Belay those last orders, Captain.” It was the admiral, up on the flag bridge. “Keep Hillenkoetter well clear of that thing. We will deploy two of the escorts to probe the object.”

  Groton’s mouth compressed to a thin, hard line. He didn’t like having his orders superseded in front of the bridge crew; more importantly, though, he didn’t think the new order was the right one, not under the circumstances. As yet, they had no reason to think the alien craft was hostile, and only by taking the spacecraft carrier in close would they be able to establish contact.

  Contact might be successfully established by two of the cruisers, yes . . . but if the alien was hostile, chances were good the cruisers would not survive. In Groton’s opinion, the new order was a halfway measure, likely to be too little, too late.

  But he could not get into an argument with the commanding admiral, not in front of his people. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The Inman was directed to close to within a thousand kilometers of the giant alien vessel.

  “Tactical officer!”

  “Yes, sir.” Hillenkoetter’s tactical officer was Commander William James, the man in CIC who directly fought the ship under Groton’s orders. He was also the man who directed Major Powell and, through Powell, Lieutenant Commander Hunter’s JSST combat team.

  “Have Commander Hunter’s team prepare for tactical deployment.”

  “With what in mind, sir?”

  Groton actually wasn’t sure he had anything in mind. The situation was still both fuzzy and fluid. Hunter’s people might be useful in boarding that massive alien, though even thinking that seemed tantamount to suicide at the moment.
Or they might need to take up positions on the Hillenkoetter to repel an alien boarding operation. Or, or, or.

  “Damfino. Just have them ready to go!”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  He heard James giving the order.

  What would they do if the alien proved to be hostile? Groton didn’t have an answer to that. He had opplans, all carefully constructed to meet any given possibility, including an encounter with a large, hostile warship.

  But was this thing hostile? It was aggressive, certainly. But its pursuit of Alfa could be anything from simple curiosity to lining up an attack.

  If it was an attack, all Hillenkoetter and Inman would be able to do was run like hell.

  Battle stations! Now battle stations! All hands man your battle stations!

  Hunter pounded through the ship’s corridors at a dead run.

  Their assigned battle stations were amidships on Hillenkoetter’s flight deck. The reasoning was simple enough. Should they need to be deployed off-ship, to attack an enemy asset on the surface of a planet, for instance, their TR-3B shuttles were close at hand.

  On the other hand, any attacking enemy force would likely target the flight deck as the easiest way to board the giant carrier, and if they did, Hunter’s team would be there waiting for them.

  A hurry-up cart came up behind him—a flatbed wagon with a central handrail and six flight-suited men on board. In a vessel as large as the Big-H, electric people-movers like this one were a necessity. One of the riders reached out, and Hunter swung himself up and onto the cart, which never even slowed.

  Hunter found the idea of boarding an alien spacecraft amusing and just a bit ironic. However, SEALs were extensively trained in what was known in the business as VBSS—visit, board, search, and seizure. There were times in modern warfare when it was necessary to board an enemy vessel—in antidrug operations, for example, or when combating piracy or terrorism at sea. SEALs also were trained in CQB, or close quarters battle, and were therefore well qualified to engage in combat within the tight confines of a ship. But the idea of forty-eight people assaulting a spacecraft, however—particularly one as large or larger than the ponderous Hillenkoetter—seemed both ludicrous and suicidal.

  In the weeks since he’d first arrived on the Moon, Hunter had been thinking about this issue a lot, trying to make plans for any eventuality . . . even though he’d been given no clear guidelines on what those eventualities might be. Benedict had told them that they might be deployed to a planet’s surface, but he’d said little about what they were supposed to do there. Forty-eight men and women would not be a useful force for invading a planet—especially one with a population, like Earth, of billions. If the target was something like that shield generator in Return of the Jedi, well . . . maybe. But only if the emplacement was badly undermanned and the sentries were looking the other way.

  Hunter had once told Dr. Brody that he didn’t care for SF, and for the most part that was true. He had seen that movie, though, which, quite frankly, he thought of as a comedy. The idea of Stone Age teddy bears with rocks and logs taking on a mechanized military unit armed with lasers was a real howler. In fact, movies like Return of the Jedi were the main reason he didn’t care for the genre.

  As for repelling boarders, well, the 1-JSST might serve as a security team, but the unit would be all but lost within the miles of corridors and passageways and compartments that made up the habitable portions of the carrier.

  He arrived on the flight deck to find some members of the JSST filing in past a Marine gunnery sergeant who was passing out Starbeam laser weapons. Others were scrambling to get into their Seven-SAS rigs, closing up glove and helmet seals, donning heavy backpacks with the power sources for their weapons. Nielson was looking around wildly saying, “Anybody seen my gloves?”

  They’d practiced getting into their suits plenty of times over the past weeks, of course, but somehow the reality of that damned alarm blaring from the overhead speakers was transforming what should have been an orderly evolution to a scene of pure chaos.

  Abruptly, though, the battle stations alarm cut off. “Listen up, people!” Hunter shouted into the sudden silence. “Get yourselves squared away! Get your suits on, get your weapon, and fall in on that line over there! By platoons in an orderly and military manner!”

  Nielson, he was glad to see, had found a pair of gloves and was quickly sealing them in place. “Now for the fun part, people,” Hunter said, raising his voice to be heard by the entire group. “We wait!”

  That got him a chuckle.

  He accepted a suit from a quartermaster chief, squeezed into it, and took a heavy laser weapon from the gunny, who was grinning at him. “What are you laughing at, Gunny?”

  “Just remembering my first day at Camp Lejeune, sir. Happy times . . .”

  The reference to the Marines’ boot camp facility in North Carolina steadied Hunter, and he grinned back. “Thanks, Gunny.” He hefted the laser. “Hoo-yah!”

  “Ooh-rah!” the gunnery sergeant replied, using the Marines’ traditional war cry to answer the SEALs’ battle call. Each military service had their own. In the Army or the US Air Force it would have been hooah, while Airborne troops shouted boo-yah. It was a simple and long-used technique designed to build morale and a sense of unity. It was said that in ancient Greece, Athenian warriors had gone into battle screaming “alala,” supposedly an imitation of an owl, the bird of their patron goddess Athena.

  Whatever the source, the exchange focused him.

  It also inspired him.

  One of the many problems of creating a combat unit out of so many disparate military forces—Navy, Marine, Army, Air Force—was the fact that they used so many different battle cries. Those war cries had been deliberately chosen to make them distinct and different from all the others—no Navy SEAL would want to be associated with the Army, for God’s sake—and that made forging these men and women into a single unit that much more difficult.

  That needed to change. “Right, people. We may be told off as boarders. We may have to defend this ship against boarders. Let me hear you yell like pirates!”

  “Arrrr!” they shouted in ragged unison.

  “Together!” Hunter yelled. “Let me hear your war cry!”

  “ARRRR!”

  It was a small thing . . . but it was a beginning.

  Groton had clattered down the steel steps into the CIC pit just below the bridge to get a better look at the tactical situation. On James’s big screen, a green icon represented the recon vessel, while a red one showed the bogie. Blocks of alphanumerics flickered and scrolled to either side. God . . . the bogie, he saw, was as massive as a small asteroid. Carruthers had been right to keep the Hillenkoetter back.

  But that mountain was closing on the TR-3R fast.

  New data appeared on-screen. “The bogie just fired on our recon ship,” James announced, his voice maddeningly calm.

  “What was it?”

  “Unknown, Captain. Some kind of EM beam, I think. The TR-3R shows all power down: gravitics, shields, everything. They just went off-line.”

  And in the next few seconds, the red blip touched the green . . . and the green vanished from the screen.

  “Jesus. Tell the Inman to keep her distance. They’re not going to have any effect on that.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The cruiser had moved in close to the alien and was awaiting orders.

  Groton opened an intercom channel. “Admiral? Orders?”

  “We wait, Captain. We wait . . .”

  Captain Janice Makilroy leaned forward in her command seat, studying the cliff face of solid rock ahead. Even at a range of one thousand kilometers, the alien vessel loomed enormous and threatening, a small mountain of nickel-iron. Under magnification, tiny installations could be seen scattered randomly across the surface, like the lights of small towns. Were those weapons emplacements? she wondered. Or did the crew of this alien leviathan ride their spacecraft on the outside?

  The mountai
n floated off the cruiser’s bow, a whale to Inman’s minnow.

  “Order from the Big-H, Captain!” her comm officer called. “We’re to pull back from the alien. Keep our distance.”

  “Yes, I think that would be an excellent idea,” she said. “Helm! Maneuvering! Come to two-niner-five. Get us away from that monster!”

  “Course two-niner-five and accelerate. Aye, aye, Captain!”

  Black rock slid across her viewscreen as the ship pivoted, then accelerated.

  The Inman was roughly comparable in size to a US Navy guided-missile cruiser of the Ticonderoga class—eight thousand tons and 175 meters long. Highly automated, as were all vessels within the Solar Warden program, she had a crew of just thirty-two officers and 115 enlisted personnel. The size of the crew didn’t matter, though—Makilroy took her responsibilities for the men and women under her command very seriously indeed.

  There was a dazzling flash from the viewscreens . . .

  . . . followed by complete and absolute darkness.

  Dave Duvall looked out into darkness.

  All electrical systems on board the recon vessel were dead. He had no lights, no radar, and no way even to analyze the atmosphere outside . . . if, indeed, they weren’t now in hard vacuum. All he knew with any certainty was that the alien mountain had fired some sort of beam—probably an intense electromagnetic pulse—that had rendered them completely helpless.

  Then it had drawn them in, swallowed them whole, and they’d come to rest . . . here.

  There was gravity, at least. It felt like less than 1 g, though he couldn’t be sure. But with other details, like atmospheric pressure and external temperature, he remained—literally—in the dark. He couldn’t even talk to Bucky. The TR-3R’s intercom system was down with everything else.

  Well, they could have killed us easily enough, he thought. We’re alive, so they must want to talk to us. Or at least find out what we are.

  The craft’s instrumentation came on with a faint whine, and his instruments lit up. “Okay, Boss,” Bucky told him over a now live intercom circuit. “I wired in some batteries. It won’t last very long, but it’ll give us life support for a little while.”