by Ian Douglas
“Or the dichlo rain,” Hunter put in. “So what’s the verdict, Doctor? Does your encyclopedia include this little gem?”
“No, Mark. I’ve passed the data on to Elanna and Vashnu to see what they make of it. Elanna is of the opinion that it may be an artificial life-form.”
“An artificial—Huh! Like a robot?”
“No. A biological entity created by another species.”
“What species?”
“We all would like to know the answer to that,” Carter said.
“At a guess, I’d say that we should talk to the Xaxki,” Hunter said. “They’re already established in this star system.”
“But the nomads use the insides of asteroids and comets,” Cohen pointed out. “They hollow them out and manufacture made-to-order habitats. I don’t think they bother with planets at all.”
“Maybe they’re afraid of competition in the same star system,” Smith suggested. “Their use of the Guardians suggests they’re somewhat nervous about other technic cultures right in their own backyard.”
“With most of the Xaxki jacked into virtual reality?” Hunter said. “Yeah, I’d be nervous about any nearby neighbors, too. When you’re not paying any attention to the world around you, it can sneak up and bite you.”
They gave the being a thorough physical examination, photographing it from every angle, but as they worked the body began literally to crumble in dust. Chunks of carapace came off in their hands, disintegrating before their eyes.
They weren’t going to be able to complete a full autopsy. “Maybe the oxygen in the atmosphere?” McClure suggested.
“Damfino,” Hunter said. “It’s turning into a hollow shell, and even the shell is just dissolving into dust. Maybe somebody doesn’t want us looking at them up close.”
It was a mystery that would have to wait for later. Hunter was needed elsewhere.
An argument had broken out in the main control room. Minkowski was squared off in front of the Saurian, who appeared to be blocking his access to a small closed door.
“What the hell is going on?” Hunter demanded.
“I went to check out that door, Commander, and lizard-face here had a conniption.”
It is a storeroom, the alien said in Hunter’s mind. Nothing more.
“What’s in there?” Hunter asked.
Stores. Food, water.
“Then you don’t mind if my master chief has a look, do you?”
The alien’s hands moved toward a device, a small flat box, strapped on its chest. It is not permitted.
Time slowed to a crawl.
Hunter was aware that he and the rest of his team were in serious danger. The box was some kind of weapon, he was sure of that. The three other Saurians scattered about the room likewise appeared as taut as coiled springs, their skinny hands touching identical boxes.
The Grays in the room had stopped working, frozen in place, and were silently watching.
What was it Benedict had said during the briefing at Wright-Patt? The Grays and Nordics were engaged in a war, a very, very old war, with the Saurians. There were rules about shooting at each other on or near Earth, but . . .
The Grays, at least the Grays here, on Serpo, appeared to be working for the Saurians, taking orders from them. Hunter had wondered about that briefly when he’d entered the dome, but dismissed the niggling worry; maybe their armistice or whatever it was extended here, as well.
But Hunter was as certain as he could be that something was being concealed from the humans. The Saurian so far had been unfailingly polite, but it was also guarded, secretive. And the way they’d split the platoons up before letting them come inside. . . .
Damn it, how were you supposed to read emotions in something that wasn’t even remotely human? He would hate to play poker with these guys.
Hunter glanced around and saw that at least two of his men were behind each of the three Saurians, weapons held—not threatening, exactly, but definitely at the ready.
Well done, Hunter thought. Slowly, he drew his Sunbeam Type 1 sidearm. “Master Chief Minkowski was performing a security check,” he said quietly. “It’s routine. We always want to know the lay of the land. Or building, in this case. I suggest that you let us see what’s in there.”
For a frozen span of seconds, human and Saurian stared at each other. The slit iris of the Saurian’s golden eyes expanded sharply, turning the eye black. The nostrils flared. The scaly, gray-green skin on its head and throat reddened slightly.
And then, reluctantly, it backed down, stepping aside.
“Thank you,” Hunter said, but the alien had already gathered the other three Saurians with a sharp gesture, and all four moved swiftly toward the airlock. Lieutenant Billingsly raised his weapon, but Hunter waved him down. “Let ’em go,” he said. “All of you, secure the compartment! Mink, Daly, Herrera, Brown—with me.”
The door, obviously designed for beings only about four feet tall, opened with a touch, revealing shallow steps leading down into darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
There is little chance that aliens from two separate societies anywhere in the Galaxy will be culturally close enough to really “get along.” This is something to ponder as you watch the famous cantina scene in Star Wars. Does this make sense, given the overwhelmingly likely situation that galactic civilizations differ in their level of evolutionary development by thousands or millions of years? Would you share drinks with a trilobite, an ourang-outang, or a saber-toothed tiger? Or would you just arrange to have a few specimens stuffed and carted off to the local museum?
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute
Date Unknown
For Hans Kammler, once an SS general of the Reich, powerful and respected, life had become an intolerable hell.
After the failed attempt on the US President’s life, he’d been taken by three humans to a remote spot in the woods somewhere in northwestern Virginia. He was fully aware of what was going on around him, but one of the Saurian entities was riding him for the entire trip, controlling his mind, controlling every action and movement, leaving him a helpless spectator.
He suspected the humans around him were in the same state. Their eyes seemed glassy and lifeless, their movements automatic . . . like men in a dream or a hypnotic trance.
They’d reached the edge of an empty field at just past midnight, a dark place encircled by tangled woods and the shadowy loom of the Shenandoah Mountains. They got out of the car and they waited in the chilly March night until a single star overhead grew bright, then descended silently to Earth. The saucer, he noted, was like the ones he’d seen at Dulce—a silver flattened disk perhaps fifteen meters across, capable of hovering silently just above the ground. A hatch had opened and, his body responding to the unspoken commands of others, he’d walked up the hatch and into the light.
They’d taken him . . . someplace else.
An alien mind no longer occupied his head. He was free to look around, to move, at least within certain narrow limits. While he’d still been under their control, they’d put him in a glass tube, then released him as the container rapidly filled with greenish liquid. The terror he’d experienced as the liquid had poured in, rising inexorably up and over his mouth, his nose, his entire face—it had been like no other terror he’d ever faced. He’d held his breath for as long as he could, and then, his lungs bursting, he’d resigned himself to drowning and had taken a breath.
And, somehow, he’d lived.
He’d read about the recent development of something called total liquid ventilation, where a perfluorocarbon liquid saturated with oxygen replaced the air normally breathed by an organism, keeping it alive even when submerged. This, it seemed, was that same medical technology, but carried to a horrific extreme. All Kammler knew was that those first breaths he’d taken were agony.
And now, they had him in storage, perhaps awaiting the next time they had use for him. He was naked, his skin was wrinkled, he was cold, so cold, and ti
me for him dragged on seemingly forever. He didn’t need food; he suspected that they were putting nutrients into the liquid around him, that he was absorbing those nutrients through his skin.
The thing was, even stark terror, he found, became boring after a time. He wanted to die. He wondered if he was lapsing into insanity, but mostly he wanted to die.
He had no idea how long he’d been here. Normally, there was no light, but occasionally one of his captors—the bird-legged Saurian Eidechse—entered the compartment, and he would glimpse with horrifying clarity the rows upon rows of other tubes around him, each filled with green liquid, each holding a naked man or woman, each captive horribly alive and aware and struggling.
A literal Hell on Earth . . . except that Kammler had the feeling that he was no longer on Earth at all.
They clattered down narrow metal stairs, with Hunter in the lead. A light came on automatically. The basement chamber appeared to have been melted out of solid rock and was dimly lit, but Hunter felt the size of the open space beneath the alien dome. The place was huge.
And it was filled with six-foot cylinders of transparent glass or plastic arrayed in long, parallel rows, most filled with green liquid and a single nude human figure, a horror scene out of some cheap sci-fi movie or comic book. Row upon row of cylinders extended off into the distance, where they were lost in the gloom.
Many of the captives in those bottles appeared dead or unconscious, but a few, a horrifying few, were clearly awake and nightmarishly aware. Eyes stared, mouths gaped in silent supplication, fists pounded against transparencies in a dreamlike slow motion. Herrera gave an involuntary yelp as he took in the scene. “They’re drowning!”
“I don’t think so,” Hunter said. “Look at how they’re wired up. I think they’re breathing that stuff.”
“How?” Daly demanded.
“I’ve read about experiments using liquids saturated with oxygen,” he said. “The SEALs were looking into it a few years ago as a way to keep breathing at extreme depths. Let’s see if we can get them out. We might be able to get some hard intel from someone.”
“How many of them are there?” Randolph Brown asked.
“God knows,” Hunter said, peering down along the rows of tanks. “Hundreds.”
A dull boom sounded from overhead. The mysterious attackers outside were again bombarding the protective shield.
“Mink,” Hunter said. “Get back topside, and have them get in touch with the Big-H. We’re gonna need some support down here. Daly, gimme a hand here.”
They climbed and tugged and pulled and searched, but they could not find a way to open one of the containers, and now Hunter wasn’t sure doing so would be a good idea even if they could. They could easily end up killing the prisoners instead of rescuing them.
He tried using hand motions in front of a couple of the tanks to assure the captives that they would be back, but he wasn’t sure it registered. Then he led the others back up the stairs.
They would need help—from the Grays if possible, from the Saurians if necessary.
The Saurians were all gone, though, fled to one of the other domes. “Can any of you open those tanks down below?” he demanded.
A dozen Grays stood in front of him, looking back and forth at one another. He could sense their confusion, their lack of understanding. Explosions, dulled by the encircling defensive shield, sounded outside.
“Damn it, there are people down there!” His shout was loud enough to make several of the small beings take a step backward. “You will help us get them out!”
One of the Grays stepped front and center of the others. Commander, we cannot. Only the Malok have the codes.
“Then we’ll smash the tanks open!”
Which would result in the specimens’ deaths.
“They’re not specimens, damn it! They’re our people!”
The Gray appeared unmoved. It didn’t shrug physically, but Hunter could sense the gesture in its attitude. They are not ours. They belong to the Malok.
The name made Hunter hesitate, and then he remembered. Benedict had used that name, and said that it was the Grays’ term for the reptilian entities.
“They don’t belong to anyone but themselves!”
Yes? But what of the treaty? Signed by your president?
“What about returning them alive and unharmed? That was part of the deal, right? If you can’t let them go, find me someone who can.”
The Malok have the codes. Speak with them.
There was no budging the little creature. Hunter had wondered at times about the premise that the Grays were, in fact, the descendants of humans in a remote futurity, an idea he simply found too fantastic to believe without more proof than he’d seen so far. After all, an alien being might have evolved along a broadly human design with two arms and two legs, right? But they also possessed an unyielding stubbornness that seemed all too human in both its scope and its rigidity.
With the Grays’ help, they were able to open a communications channel with the Saurians, who’d taken shelter in a dome half a kilometer away. Hunter stared into the golden reptilian eyes of the outsize Saurian leader and for the first time heard it actually speak, rather than transmit telepathically.
“We will not help you, human,” the being said in English, its voice breathy, filled with hisses and disconcerting clicks. “The things in the capsules belong to us.”
“Humans do not belong to anyone. In keeping them here, you are in violation of the Eisenhower treaty. You were supposed to let them go, remember?” It was a weak jab, Hunter knew, but it was all he had.
“What are treaties to us?” The creature seemed . . . amused. “A human concept of no interest to The Surviving Few.”
Was that what they called themselves? Interesting.
“We can, however, agree to cooperate with you to some extent, if you drive off the nomad attackers.” As if to punctuate the statement, a deep-throated boom rumbled through the dome from outside.
Hunter scowled. Treaties and negotiated agreements with alien representatives were definitely way above his pay grade, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of choice right now. Hillenkoetter and the fleet were in orbit, not here and as an active part of the equation.
“I’m going to hold you to that, you son of a bitch,” Hunter said. And he signaled for a Gray, seated at the console in front of him, to cut the connection.
Lieutenant Commander Hank Boland completed his walk-around, his final visual inspection of his fighter before launch. He’d come a long way since piloting a Super Hornet off the Nimitz.
Light-years, in fact.
On a conventional jet aircraft, you looked at the exposed parts that might cause trouble—the fan blades of the intakes, the landing gear, the venturis, the flaps. The F/S-49 Stingray had visible landing gear while parked on the Hillenkoetter’s flight deck, but little else on display for inspection. The space fighter had been built by Northrop Grumman very much along the lines of their X-47B, a demonstration unmanned combat air vehicle, or UCAV—a test drone designed for carrier operations. Diamond shaped, with no vertical stabilizer and no wings, the spacecraft of course relied on alien technology to fly. The flattened craft was just forty feet long—roughly as long as the original X-47B. But the dorsal air intake had been heavily modified, and now housed the cockpit. Weapons bays along the ventral surface carried a variety of space-to-space or space-to-ground missiles.
And a hellpod.
Boland’s walk-around included opening a small panel and jacking in with a handheld meter. All spacecraft systems read go—life support, drives, maneuvering, computer, weapons, all online and powered up.
He was good to go.
Around him, other members of his squadron were checking out their own craft and climbing into their cockpits. SFA-05, the Starhawks, was the United States’ fifth designated space fighter squadron. He looked at the line of twelve Stingrays and wondered—not for the first time—if the UAP he’d chased southwest of San Diego back in ’0
4 had been one of these. They certainly had the same lozenge shape, and about the same dimensions.
He remembered telling his debriefing officer after the encounter that he wanted to fly one of those things; a year later, he’d been offered the chance to participate in a highly secret program, and ended up at Area 51. There, he’d first met the F/S-49 Stingray, along with a small fleet of other unconventional craft, reverse engineered from crashed alien spaceships and, in some cases, built with direct help from the aliens. Years later, with thousands of hours in the cockpit, he was the squadron commander of SFA-05—the letters stood for “Space Fighter, Attack.”
And his squadron had just been assigned to the Hillenkoetter.
With his crew chief’s help, he climbed the narrow ladder and squeezed down into the cockpit. It was a tight fit. The old naval aviator’s joke about “strapping on your airplane” was almost literally true. Once in the embrace of the formfitting seat, he began going over the preflight checklist. No red lights—everything was green.
“Big-H, Hawk One,” he called. “Ready to taxi.”
“Copy, Hawk One. Taxi runway one-alfa to cat four.”
Hillenkoetter’s flight deck was enormous, but it was crowded with fighters and auxiliary spacecraft. The “runways” were narrow taxiways leading to the flight bay launch area, which was divided up by hundred-foot rails set into the deck directly in front of the broad access port opening onto space. That part still freaked him a bit; the flight deck’s internal atmosphere was held in by the paired magnetokinetic induction screens. Switching both fields off, even if for only an instant, seemed to him like an act of insanity.
His fighter rolled up to the catapult, where deck crew in full vac gear hooked his Stingray up to the railgun catapult. He waited there for a moment, staring through the cockpit screen into the star field of open space.