On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1)

by Jim Melanson

  She leaned over the table slightly and shook my hand. Her hand was warm, but very firm. I had no doubt in my mind this athletic, attractive, and pleasantly smiling, brown eyed woman in her 60’s, with beautiful platinum blond hair done up tightly, was an absolute bitch-on-wheels when she wanted to be. The fact that she was still in uniform in her 60’s made her someone who was obviously very special, and very important.

  We sat down and with no platitudes or small talk she said, “Mr. Lane, I’m here to give you an Article Five briefing.”

  “Article five?” I interrupted.

  “Yes, Article 5 of the Outer Space Treaty. I understand you are going to Mars in eighteen weeks. I’m here to advise you that if you go to Mars, you will be committing suicide.” She leaned forward and stared me straight in the eyes, “Now let me tell you why.”

  A shiver ran up my spine at that. I looked at Jayden and held up my drained styrofoam cup, “Boss, you got any hot-hot? I think I’m going to need it.” Jayden nodded. I looked at the General and asked, “Would you like some ma’am?” She nodded her head. Jayden stood and reached for her coffee cup. She smiled disarmingly, put her fingers on the rim of the cup she had been drinking from, and pushed it slowly across the table towards me. When I say she smiled, I mean that her lips curved up into what is physiologically defined as a smile, but there was no real smile behind her lips curving up. “One cream, no sugar. I’m sweet enough”. Hans almost choked on the last sip of his china coffee cup as she very surgically let everyone at the table know exactly who was in charge of this early morning tête-à-tête.

  I smiled and walked over to the Keurig with Jayden, holding her cup in my hand. We didn’t say anything as the individual Timmies K-Cups brewed for all of us. Jayden had brought out the good china for this early morning meeting. I could hear the General and Hans quietly talking about his favourite restaurants in the area, to fill the silence if nothing else. I added just the right amount of cream to my cup and the Generals cup, and walked back over to the table. Handing her coffee to her with a smile and a nod; a nod that acknowledged this meetings pecking order, I sat down across from her.

  I tried to come up with something pithy to say, but I decided this really wasn’t the time. I knew deep down inside that I was going to have to make an ally of this tough old bitch, and that I was going to have to do it fast. She was the type that would most likely appreciate an intelligent person who knew how to respect and follow a chain of command.

  I began the meeting-proper, “Thank you for your patience ma’am. I appreciate your travelling half way around the world to meet with us this morning, and I recognize the importance and urgency that such a meeting must bring with it. Shall we proceed?” Playing the dutiful and respectful peon had its advantages some time. We would see if this had been the right call on my part.

  She looked at me for a moment, sizing me up. She looked at Hans and Jayden. They had probably already had more than one mental dissection under her gaze already. By the look of the two of them, plus legal pads and folders on the table, it appeared they had already been there for hours.

  “I’m the second-in-command of the 88th Air Support Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. We are part of the United States Air Force Materials Command. Our cover is responsibility for the procurement and disbursement of all aircraft related materials for the United States Air Force. Our true purpose is the housing, investigation, and replication of alien flight technology. We build it and then we test it at Area 52 in Nevada.”

  “Area 52? Not area 51?” I grinned.

  She didn’t grin, “Area 52.”

  After a brief pause to let that sink in, after scanning our faces again, she continued, “This planet has been visited by aliens for thousands of years. The bulk of this visitation activity has been since the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the visitors are our friends. Some are not. There is one race in particular that we are in a state of détente with. That particular race, the Eridani, have made it clear that they will not appreciate any human presence on Mars, just as they will not appreciate any human presence on the Moon. If you go to Mars, they will probably kill you.”

  The look on Jayden and Hans face was predictable. I wanted to tell them to pick their chins up off the floor, but didn’t. I picked up my coffee cup, took a sip, and then looked squarely at the General again, “Please continue ma’am.”

  “Isn’t that enough?” she replied.

  For many years, I had been a YouTube conspiracy video junkie. I loved watching all that fakery. People went to so much trouble to make fantasy look real. There was the popular Rendleshem Forest incident, Skinny-Bob, underground bases, a supposed alien war at Dulce, New Mexico; and these were only the tip of a massive iceberg of internet litter. It had always been entertaining, but nothing more. Until now. What she was telling me was that some of those videos might have had some truth sprinkled into them. I was a bit shocked at that but wasn’t overwhelmed, especially after my own alien abduction as a six year old child. I smiled briefly, and leaned forward putting my forearms on the table. “No ma’am, it most certainly is not enough ma’am. You’ve called me in here out of a dead sleep to tell me all my plans and dreams are bust because some aliens exist, of which we do not yet have any proof. You then expect me to toss my hands up in the air and say, Oh, my. That’s that then. I guess we’re not going.” I paused a moment. I knew speaking to her like this was risky. I leaned a bit more forward, “This is compounded with the fact that we know that NASA has moved beyond just the planning stages of a manned mission to Mars, and so have the Russians, the Chinese; and if rumour is correct, then the French have aspirations of going to space as well, Mars in particular. Having a private corporation put a man on Mars first, with no political or military affiliation, will be a sty-in-the-eye for everyone planning on going there. It would be to the benefit of everyone, including the United States Air Force, if I did not go. So forgive me ma’am if I humbly suggest that no, that certainly is not enough. You’re going to have to do better than that. I wasn’t chosen for this proof of concept mission because I was a low down, yellow bellied, weak willed, knock kneed, lily-livered, scaredy-cat, panty waist,” then after a brief pause I finished with a punctuating “Ma’am”, and then sat up ram-rod straight in my chair.

  She continued to size me up with her eyes and I could see she was making decisions in her head. I thought Jayden was going to have a coronary, and Hans looked like he wished he had chosen another line of work. Finally, she pursed her lips and nodded once. “What I’m about to tell you is above top secret. I’m going to share some things with you that even our President doesn’t know. This information is so protected, that what I reveal to you cannot be revealed to anyone outside of this room. If you speak, whisper, pillow talk, or even hint of this information, you will disappear and your body will not be found; and yes, I have both the ability and the authority to make that happen.” I could tell she wasn’t being melodramatic. She was simply stating a fact.

  The General turned to the other two and said, “Mr. Lane has to hear what I have to say. You two do not. However, given your pivotal positions in this endeavour I will permit you to be part of this briefing. The choice of whether you remain for this briefing is up to you. However, if you do choose to stay, you stay for the whole thing. Of course,” that smile that wasn’t a smile appeared on her face again, “you will be subject to the same caveat and addendum that Mr. Lane is subject to.”

  Jayden and Hans looked at each other, and then they looked at me. I shrugged and made a ‘what the hell are you thinking, of course you’re going to stay’ face. I said, “Guys, come on, stay.” They both nodded and indicated to Lieutenant General Rosewood they would stay for the briefing. She reached down beside her and lifted her black briefcase to the table. There was a keypad on it, and she entered a nine digit sequence of numbers. The briefcase unlocked, she lifted the top and I saw inside the rim what looked like not-so-small explosive charges of C4. I was glad she entered the right sequ
ence of numbers. The Lieutenant General took out a beige folder with red bold writing ‘EYES ONLY - ULTRA’ and ‘AQUARIUS’ printed on it. She also took a small black box 2.5 centimetres thick and 7.5 by 5 centimetres. It had a green light, white light, and red light on it. The red light was on. She touched two fingers against unmarked spots on the box, and the white light came on. She sat it on the table and said, “Something from our friends to make the meeting more secure”.

  Folding her hands in front of her, she began the most interesting diatribe I’ve ever heard with a question. “Have you heard of a UFO crashing at Roswell in 1947?”

  “Ma’am,” I nodded my head.

  “There were two ships that crashed that night, during an electrical storm. They were flying in close formation when ionization between the crafts hulls and a very large nearby lightning bolt caused their flight control systems to operate erratically, and then fail completely. One crashed north-west of Roswell, closer to Corona, in New Mexico. The other one made it further away, and crashed in the mountains near Datil, New Mexico. This was in 1947. That night, nine aliens died in those crashes. The tenth one, a mechanic of all things, survived.” She opened the folder, took out a black and white 8x10, and placed it on the table in front of us.

  The three of us leaned forward and looked at a bald, smooth headed creature that had a lot of human characteristics to its face. Damn it, I thought silently, Skinny-Bob IS real! Its eyes were a lot bigger, and more almond-shaped than oval. The bald head looked a bit bigger than you would expect, but the cranium looked very similar to a human cranium. The creature had a long neck that attached the head to a short body. The head was slightly disproportionate to its body, but then again, it probably thought we had really small heads given how big humans are in comparison. The creature’s legs were short like the body, but it had very long arms, and four long fingers with, like humans, opposable thumbs. The creature was standing by two human men in American military uniform. It was shaking one of the men’s hands. The alien was only a little over four feet tall. It wore human clothes; they appeared to be a two piece warm-up suit, circa 1940, a couple sizes too large.

  “His official designation was EBE-1 but we just called him Bob. He lived for another five years, passing away from, as far as the doctors of the day could tell, natural causes. This alien was an Eben. The Eben are a 10,000 year old civilization that come from a planet called Sapro that is close to 40 Light Years from Earth in the Zeta Reticuli system, in the Cygnus arm of the Milky Way.” Given the brief but interesting astronomical training all the candidates had received, that actually meant something to me. “Through that lone survivor, we developed a relationship with the Eben, and eventually an exchange program: exchanging technology and personnel. They have helped us understand our place in the Milky Way, and what other friends and foes are out there.” She pulled another 8x10 black and white picture from the folder and put it in front of us. I snapped back from this one a little too fast. This one I knew.

  “There is a star system,” she continued, “not that far from Earth, only ten light years away, called Epsilon Eridani. There is a race of aliens from that star system; we simply call them the Eridani. This image is one of their intelligentsia cast that you would know from popular culture. This one in particular is from a race called the Vesna.” She pronounced it, vesh-nah. She let the image sink in.

  The queasy feeling in my stomach was coming back. “I don’t have a picture of an Eridani Master, the Voiya they are called, but they are the masterminds responsible for human abductions and the cow mutilations you read about in the tabloids. We stop the more serious events from making it to print, but its good disinformation to let the occasional ET story appear next to Bat-Boy or the latest Elvis sighting.” Again, the smile that was not a smile.

  Hans touched my arm, “Are you okay?” he inquired? I had gone pale white.

  I wiped my mouth with a shaking hand, and sighed deeply. I nodded my head. You have to understand, I’m a very composed and unflappable person. I take stress, misadventure, and crisis in stride. When disaster strikes and some people run around doing Chicken Little impressions, I’m the one standing there stroking my chin and saying, Hmmmm, isn’t that interesting. It had often been noted in the program training how unflappable I was. In fact, I’m the only person to ever fall asleep during the three day sleep deprivation test. I tell you this, so you will understand the full impact of this picture lying before me. Hans told me later my complexion had gone ashen, sweat formed in beads on my forehead, and my hands were both shaking. I looked up, and the General was looking at me dead pan. “We know,” she said. “January 9th, 1973.” I had never known for sure if it was a real memory or a nightmare. What she just said was a confirmation; it was like a kick in the balls. How could she know? I was five years old during that terrifying night, the night that was locked away in my subconscious until it all came flooding back to me when I was in my thirties. If she had known, could she have stopped it? Could they, the U.S. Air Force, have stopped it? Did they let it happen to me? The nauseating fear started to be replaced by a quite different feeling.

  She pulled that second picture back, and put it back in the folder. She resumed speaking while I got up to refill my coffee cup with my still shaking hands.

  “We had formed a tepid relationship with the Eridani, but it was against the advice of the Eben. The Eben and the Eridani are bitter enemies which is odd, because the Eben genetic experiments are responsible for the existence of the Eridani to begin with.”

  “Genetic experiments?” Hans said out loud. He was shaking his head. “Cloning?”

  The General looked at him for a moment without acknowledgement and then continued, “The Eridani and our human liaison team saw a great number of things quite differently, and while we tried to work together for a while, our visits to the Moon did not make them happy. They didn’t want to share that base of operations.”

  Hans and Jayden both did a double take and in unison said interrogatively, “Share?”

  Nodding, she continued, “Eventually, we started to lose patience with the Eridani and the Lectra, another race we’ve had dealings with. In 1978 a brief but defining war broke out in one of several underground bases at Dulce, New Mexico. Forty-four of our scientists were killed, along with a handful of the Special Forces there to police the facility. When I say killed, I mean most were shot with pulse-energy weaponry, but a few of them were physically torn to pieces.” She pulled two more black and white 8x10s out of the folder, and put them on the table. Back in my chair I leaned forward to look with the others. One picture showed a hallway covered in what could only be blood and viscera. Blood stained white lab coats, and some military clothing were jumbled in with the bits and bobs that had once been living humans. From the looks on what was left of the faces of the two corpses that were merely dismembered, they died slowly.

  The General continued, “Eridani weapons cause a human body to internally come to a boiling point, instantly, and then explode. The others, well, the Lectra like to use their claws.” I think only John Carpenter or Quentin Tarentino could have come up with the gruesomeness depicted in that image. The second picture showed two Special Forces members holding up what was obviously a dead “grey” alien, one of these Eridani, specifically the Vesna, which are more employees of the Eridani, than Eridani proper. Part of its skull was missing from a bullet blast, and it had two large calibre bullet holes in its body.”

  “Only two of the roughly twenty Eridani contingent were killed. The dozen Lectra escaped unharmed. Since then, we have broken off all formal relations with the Eridani, though we do keep some back-channel lines of communication open. They are untrustworthy, violent, and don’t really have any positive qualities. They see humans as chattel; and have no regard for our wants or needs. They tolerate us, and not very well at that. The Lectra, well, they’re another story, and I’m not going to tell you anything about them other than they have no interest in Mars.” She had no pictures of the Lectra, but t
he dismembered bodies in the photos on the table said enough.

  “After this battle at the Dulce underground base, the Eridani have steadfastly warned us not to return to the Moon. The fact that the Corporation plans to send a colony team to Mars is known to them”, Jayden was pale white by this point. “They have told us that you will be most extremely unwelcome. Oddly enough, they didn’t come right out and say they would kill you, like they have in the past about us returning to the Moon; however, we all think that is what they mean. It has been our experience that the Eridani are very precise in what they mean through being very precise in what they say. Sometimes things just get lost in translation.”

  Thankfully, she put the pictures back in the folder. They were like a train wreck, you didn’t want to see them, but you couldn’t look away.

  “The Eben pulled back from formal relations with us in 1985. They are a peaceful, compassionate, and caring race. They are the friendliest beings you would ever meet, even friendlier than Canadians”, she looked right at me. “The Eben said that there was too much Eridani activity on Earth for their comfort level. Despite their pacifist mentality, they urged us to kill and destroy the Eridani at every opportunity; or else the Eridani would do it to us.”

  “So Mr. Lane, if you go to Mars, it is likely you will be killed before you land, or when you land. Hell, they might even preemptively just blow your ship to bits on the way there. If you go to Mars, we are confident that there is a high probability that it’s going to be a suicide mission.”

  She looked like she wanted to say more, but she was playing her cards close to her chest. Jayden let out a long-held sigh, and Hans was rubbing his jaw and thinking. They both looked at me. The confirmation of the existence of the “greys”, the Vesna, had thrown me for a loop; yet, I had recovered rapidly. As far as the rest of it was concerned, I wasn’t fazed by any of it. I walk with God, and I don’t fear death because I know of the eternal reward that awaits me. That doesn’t mean I go looking for ways to claim it early. The risks I take are calculated. I looked at Jayden and Hans, smiled and sipped my coffee.