by Ian Douglas
Mercury astronaut Major Gordon Cooper
14 November 2004
The ocean thirty thousand feet below canted wildly, the surface interrupted by stray puffs of white cloud and a flash of sun glint. “Knight Six, Salty,” sounded in his helmet speaker. “Bogie now at angles two-five at ten o’clock, bearing one-eight-five, range seven-five miles, speed one-zero-five-niner.”
“Copy that, Salty. Coming left to three-zero-seven for intercept.”
Lieutenant Hank “Tank” Boland felt the surge of g-forces as he put his F/A-18F Super Hornet into a hard left bank. “I’m still negative on AESA.”
Boland was a member of VFA-154, the Black Knights, operating off the USS Nimitz 140 miles southwest of San Diego. Nimitz, nicknamed by those aboard her Old Salty—hence the call sign—was on routine maneuvers in anticipation of a deployment to the western Pacific. For two weeks, however, there’d been a flurry of UAP sightings—unidentified aerial phenomenon—over one particular patch of ocean. Bogies would appear out of nowhere at eighty thousand feet, descend straight down at high speed to twenty thousand feet, hover there for a while, then shoot back up to eighty thousand. One aviator who’d caught a glimpse of them said they were “bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball.”
And now, radar on both Salty and on the cruiser Princeton had picked up an incoming bogie while it was still over the deserts of northern Mexico, and Boland and his wingman, flying combat air patrol, had been deployed to check it out.
That was proving easier said than done, however. While they could see the bogie on radar back on board the Nimitz, Boland’s APG-79 AESA radar had yet to pick it up. Active electronically scanned array technology was brand-new, hot technology, and it should be reading the thing by now.
Boland wondered if he was being selectively jammed. How would someone do that?
“Damn it, Spinner. You getting anything back there?”
Lieutenant John Mason, “Spinner” to his squadron, was Boland’s rear-seater, the weapons system officer, the WSO or “whizzo.”
“Not a peep, Skipper,” Mason replied. “Maybe it’s busted.”
“Knight Four, this is Six,” he called.
“Six, Four. Go ahead.” His wingman was Lieutenant Roger Drummond, call sign “Jolly.” At the moment, he was two hundred feet off Boland’s right wing, matching his turn perfectly.
“You see anything, Jolly? My AESA’s blank.”
“Negative, Tank. I think Salty’s chasing spooks again.”
“Roger. Maintain three-zero-seven. We’ll let Salty vector us in.”
“The technology’s supposed to work, damn it.”
“Roger that. Going to SA.” Synthetic aperture radar gave higher spatial resolution on targets, and could be used to create three-dimensional images of the target.
“Still don’t see a thing, Tank.”
“ATFLIR engaged.” The Hornets’ advanced targeting forward looking infrared gear was mounted in the aircraft’s sensor and laser designator pod. On the screen on Boland’s console, clouds and sky showed as shades of gray, with dark indicating cooler, light showing warmer.
At ten miles out, the targets popped up on the Super Hornets’ radars, almost as if a switch had been thrown. There were six targets moving across the fighters’ noses from right to left.
“There’s a whole fleet of ’em!” Boland called. “Look on the AESA!”
“My gosh. They’re all going against the wind. The wind is 120 knots to the west.” His Super Hornet still in a turn, Boland’s ATFLIR locked on to one target, tracking it. Green brackets embraced the object, which was hot and therefore black on the ATFLIR’s black mode. He switched over to white mode, trying to get more detail, then back to black. He guessed the object was forty feet long, a lozenge or diamond shape. His radar showed the range as 4.1 nautical miles.
“Look at that thing, dude!” Drummond called.
“That’s not one of ours, is it?” Mason asked.
Boland felt the surge of adrenaline, the palpable excitement. His heart was hammering. Those things were unlike anything he’d ever seen. Whatever they were, wherever they came from, they were not from Earth. “Look at that thing!”
They were visible now to the naked eye, bright silver glinting in the sun, streaking in between the waves and the pair of Super Hornets.
“It’s rotating!” Drummond said.
Both Super Hornets continued trying to track the objects, but they were already past the Navy aircraft and inside the radius of their turn, flashing past them at a range of just half a mile.
“My God, those things are fast! I read . . . I read Mach three . . . three-five . . . and accelerating!”
“And bang!” Mason said. “They’re gone!”
“What the hell were those things?”
“Damfino. Salt, Knight Six. Did you get all that?”
“We copied, Knight Six. Divert to Waypoint Charlie Echo.”
The rendezvous point, a few miles from the Princeton, already had traffic in it—another of the games-playing UAPs. As Boland and Drummond approached, it vanished from sight . . . whether at high velocity or by teleportation, Boland could not tell.
“Copy,” the Nimitz CIC told him after he’d reported what he’d seen. “You guys come on back to the barn.”
“Roger that, Salt. CAP-one, RTB.”
And Boland was damned glad to be returning to base. The UAPs—alien, ultrahigh performance, completely beyond the capabilities of the most modern fighter jet in the fleet—had weirded him out.
Still, during his debriefing later, he admitted that he would have loved to fly one of those things.
The JSST crouched among a scattering of house-sized boulders, sheltering from the fierce wind. Their suit heaters were working well, but the icy rain carried with it a psychological cold that no environmental unit could hold at bay.
“I thought it was too freakin’ cold to rain here!” Lieutenant Dorschner complained.
“It’s not water,” Hunter told him. “Dichloromethane. The stuff stays liquid down to minus ninety-six, ninety-seven Celsius. And right now the temp’s only minus twenty-nine.”
“Huh,” Nielson said. “A balmy summer’s morning . . .”
Hunter had zapped a full environmental report back to the ship for their analyses, but he wasn’t sure what the results he was getting back might mean. The atmosphere here was a vicious soup of nitrogen, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, with trace amounts of chlorine, ethane, and hydrogen cyanide. There was plenty of ice on the ground—probably water ice, but Hunter wasn’t sure of that—and orange glops of slime that the lab back on the Hillenkoetter said were most likely tholins—organic molecules, the precursors of life. The lab had called the surface “prebiotic.” Dichloromethane seemed to play the part of liquid water in this environment . . . though, according to the information sent down from the ship, “dichlo,” as it was known within the chemical industry, was a volatile solvent that attacked many organic compounds. The stuff was used back home as a degreaser and a paint stripper, for God’s sake.
“Hell of a place for life to evolve,” Hunter had told them. “Any bugs in this mess might want to rethink things.”
“What now, Skipper?” Colby asked.
“Did we get all three platoons inside this oversize goldfish bowl?”
“Everyone but Pennell and Crocker,” Grabiak told him.
Hunter tried to remember the men behind the names. Pennell was a Marine, while Crocker had been Airborne. But he’d not had the opportunity to get to know them as people. . . .
Both had been Bravo Platoon. Both, according to Grabiak, had remained outside the force field dome to lay down covering fire as the rest of their unit had scrambled for cover. The field had gone up . . . and the two men, trapped outside, had been overrun by a swarm of angry, heavily armored Volkswagens.
“How’s Brunelli?” he asked.
“We need to get him somewhere where we can peel him out of his suit.” HM1 Vincent Marlow was Navy, but he
’d been attached to the Marines—FMS—when he’d been tapped for the JSST. He was one of two “docs” attached to the unit, and Hunter was damned glad to have them both.
Brunelli was lying on the icy ground on his back, his suit ripped open at the stomach and smeared with bright red blood. Marlow had put a pressure dressing over the wound, but Hunter knew enough field medicine to realize the man was in serious trouble. The poisonous atmosphere, at a higher pressure than the pressure inside their suits, would be forcing its way into the breach in his suit.
Coulter hovered nearby, the anguish on his features not quite hidden by his helmet visor. “Is he gonna be okay, Doc?”
Marlow spread his arms, a shrug unhampered by his suit. “Depends on how quick we can evac him. I can’t do much for him here.”
“Do what you can, Marlow,” Hunter said. “Where’s that alien?”
Here, Lieutenant Commander.
The creature’s thoughts arose unbidden in Hunter’s mind. He turned to face the being, unsure whether it was worse trying to relate to that blankly opaque visor, or to the enormous dark eyes he knew were watching him from behind it.
“It’s just ‘Commander,’” he said. “If you’re wearing a suit, there must be a sealed habitat or something here—some place where we won’t be both poisoned and frozen.”
Of course, Commander. The settlement is this way, at the top of this hill.
Hunter saw other Grays making their way down the slope. Some took up obviously defensive positions among the rocks. Others began leading the 1-JSST personnel up the hill.
“Mink!” Hunter called. “Grab some guys and bring that along.”
“That” was one of the dead attackers that had made it inside the force field perimeter. Hunter wanted to have a look at one, and see just what it was they were facing.
Overhead, a portion of the invisible dome turned suddenly black as a violent flash lit the night. A laser, Hunter decided. Kinetic shields could stop solid matter—bullets, missiles, even particle beams—but they were transparent, so light passed right through. Evidently, something about the alien field detected the high-energy flux of an incoming laser beam and blocked it by turning part of the field opaque.
Pretty handy.
The “settlement” was a collection of six large, geodesic domes snuggled down into the icy terrain at the very top of the hill. The Grays requested that Hunter’s men split up, with each sixteen-man platoon going to a different dome.
He initially balked at the idea of being apart, but the Gray made a convincing argument.
The airlock facilities are limited, Commander, the Gray told him. It will be quicker this way.
Inside the largest, central dome was a big, round room, dimly lit, and with the look of a control center, filled with screens and consoles. Once Alfa Platoon had cycled through the large airlock and removed their helmets, they were met by dozens of the diminutive, black-eyed beings. They reminded Hunter of well-behaved children as they crowded around, curious.
Hunter was startled by their eyes. He’d been used to the idea of Grays with enormous, black, and completely featureless eyes—slanted slightly and reflective—but the Grays in this room had what looked like human eyes, larger than a modern human’s, to be sure, but they had whites and an iris and a pupil. Was this a different species of Gray? he wondered.
One of the entities there was a Saurian, not a Gray. It was noticeably taller than the others, taller even than Hunter, scaly, stooped, and with a decidedly reptilian look to the eyes and jaws. Welcome to Velat, it said within his mind, its mental voice sharper, more intense than the Gray’s.
“We need a place to take care of a wounded man,” Hunter said, ignoring the polite greeting.
Of course. We have medical facilities. This way.
Marlow and a couple of Marines carried Brunelli into another room, brightly lit and aseptically clean. Coulter tried to follow them in.
“We’ll wait out here, Coulter,” Hunter told him.
“Yes, sir.” He sounded reluctant.
“That was well done, bringing him inside the perimeter like that.”
Coulter gave a listless shrug. “I’m not sure it counted for anything, sir.”
“He has a chance, okay? If you’d left him out there he would be dead now . . . no chance at all.”
In the next several hours, Hunter learned a great deal about the Velat community. More, perhaps, than he actually wanted to hear.
We learned about this world through your own culture’s imaginings, Commander, the tall Reptilian told him. You’ve heard of “Serpo”? Of something called “Operation Serpo”?
Hunter nodded. “A little.”
A fascinating story, Commander. A brilliant human woman takes memories recovered from another woman through hypnosis and creates a coherent map of local space. Another story . . . emerges, citing the map’s information and describing a kind of exchange program between your people and ours. We had previously visited the star system you call Zeta Reticuli, but encountered no sign of any native intelligence. The stories were . . . a surprise. There was the possibility that there had been transtemporal leakage, from the future to the past. If that was true, it was vital that we establish a presence here, a colony, to avoid the danger of paradox.
Unfortunately, we had not counted on the presence of the Xaxki . . . or of their K’kurix instruments.
How, Hunter wondered, had that ridiculous Serpo story caused the threat of a paradox? He could not see the connection. It amused him, though, that the Saurians might be as bemused by human UFO mythology as was Hunter.
“So where did the Xaxki come from?” Hunter asked, curious. “Not from Zeta Retic. The system is too young.”
We suspect that the Xaxki are . . . our name for them might translate in your language as “nomads.” They move from system to system, sometimes across tens of thousands of light-years, and colonize planetoid belts and cometary halos. They prefer younger star systems still rich with protoplanetary debris.
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Then where do those armored critters outside your defenses come into it? Are they working for these nomads?”
We do not recognize them. They attacked this facility without warning, twenty local days ago.
“Then it’s about time we found out about them. I don’t like having to kill total strangers. And I like it even less when total strangers try to kill me.”
They opened another sterile room with a touch to the door’s center. Hunter then stood by as Minkowski and four other guys dragged in the carcass of one of the attackers. “Okay—Mink, Daly—organize our people and do a security sweep. I don’t entirely trust our big-headed little friends.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.”
Hunter then had cameras set up surrounding the center of the room, and opened up a two-way visual link with McClure and several other scientists on board the Hillenkoetter.
“I’m not sure how this is going to work,” McClure told him. “I’ve never done a dissection by remote control before!”
“The main thing, Doctor, is to get enough information that you can look for it on that Talis iPad-encyclopedia of yours. There’s got to be a record of these critters somewhere. And maybe we can use that to figure out where they’re from and why they’re attacking this planet.”
“You say the Grays don’t know them?”
“That’s what they say. Why? You don’t trust their word?”
She sighed. “First off, Commander—be careful what you say. This is an unsecured channel, okay? But second, the Grays have been around for a long time. They have probably visited a large part of our Galaxy and explored at least a million years of galactic history. Space and time, you see? If they never met these beings at any point within a million years, I’d like to know why.”
“Well, let’s have a closer look, shall we?”
“Okay. Let’s see if that carapace is artificial . . .”
Over the course of the next half hour, Hunter dissected the creature, guided b
y Becky McClure and one of her assistants, a young civilian tech named Cohen, both ensconced in CIC Ops and watching Hunter’s every move through the cameras. Simone Carter, representing the ship’s xenopsych department, had joined them, along with another civilian, Franklin Smith, a xenoculturalist. Everyone was excited about the chance to see an alien, a new alien, up close and personal.
The alien, McClure told him, strongly reminded her of a group of arthropods on Earth called isopods—particularly the land-dwelling forms called pill bugs or wood lice found under rocks or logs, small crustaceans that could roll themselves into an armored ball when threatened. The entire dorsal surface was covered by dark gray overlapping articulated plates. On a close inspection, these proved to be part of the organism and not, as Hunter had at first thought, some sort of defensive armored suit. There were seven pairs of jointed legs, larger and more muscular toward the rear, thinner and more dexterous toward the front. Apparently the being could choose to stand almost upright, or hunch down on all fourteens. A complicated mask fit tightly over what Hunter, for lack of a better word, decided to call the “face.” Jointed mouthparts like smaller versions of the upper legs surrounded left and right mandibles, while six tiny, beady black eyes peeked out from beneath the forward lip of the dorsal armor. There was no air tank or PLSS. Instead, the mask included a complicated package of pumps, intakes, and pressurizers apparently designed for extracting or separating gasses from the surrounding atmosphere.
“What I find fascinating,” McClure said over the video link, “is that this creature is already adapted to the local conditions. From what we can see of that mask from here, I’d guess that it pulls methane out of the atmosphere and pressurizes it. Its native atmosphere may be 10 or 15 percent methane, while Serpo’s—sorry, Velat’s—air has less than 2 percent methane. Alternatively, this being may metabolize hydrogen and excrete methane. Either way, it obviously doesn’t need any protection from the cold.”