Published by Gecko Print Publishing (2018)
Copyright © 2018 by Martin McConnell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form – except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews – without the express written permission of its author or publisher.
Don’t be a pirate.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
“LOOK AT THEM,” JOHN SAID TO HIMSELF. “Just sitting in there wasting time. One of my best men, sitting in there like a couch potato, next to a squiddy goddamn alien.”
The human inhabitant of the tank, another soldier named Rick, was just sitting there. His flesh was solid white, his head titled downward, and he was staring at his folded legs on the miniature beach inside the room-sized aquarium. Black points protruded from his legs and dug into the sand. Matching thorns stuck out of his arms. A line of them poked out from his vertebrae. His movement into the glass tank had become something of a freak show around the base in the last twenty-four hours. Young scientists poked around, taking long stares inside between swiping and typing on their fancy tablets, or looking at bits of skin sample through their microscopes. All of them pretending to be busy, yet accomplishing nothing that would stop the threat, and nothing that would fix poor Rick.
For the soldiers, the tank had turned into a memorial. Go down to the R and D lab and see your buddy’s flesh pealing off his body so you can remember why we’re all here. It was a reminder of the cruel ingenuity that lead to disease-spreading snakes engineered by the extraterrestrial menace. The snakes themselves were believed to be part of an alien delivery system for their engineered virus. In many ways, it was the perfect delivery system, and by the look of Rick’s deformed body sitting patiently in a tank, ignoring the squid like monster only meters away, the disease was damn near complete. Nobody suspected a snakebite to carry a transmuting bug that turned humans into white zombies. The plan for this infection was still mostly speculation.
It wasn’t hard to find snake leggings in the little backwards towns that dotted the landscape around the underground base, secured in this desert hellhole just far enough away from curious redskins to avoid detection. Sooner or later those snakes would be migrating this direction from ground zero, and going outside at all was less of a good idea every day. The scientists needed to work faster. They needed to figure out what the purpose of this virus was and how to cure it. And the colonel needed to hurry up and order a strike team to the alien facility itself, an hour away by chopper.
John had been standing there for hours, and his former friend never once looked up. Whatever happened in St. Louis to reduce the effects of the initial outbreak wasn’t happening to Rick. The scientists said that the spines would fall off, and he would return to normal, but whatever was in that tank was anything but normal. White skin, black eyes, thorns. How much human was still trapped inside? How much soldier?
Someone knocked at the door. John wondered for a moment who in this encampment would bother to knock for anything. He turned to see one of the troops, Melissa from Delta Team, dressed properly in her black coveralls with the mission patch on her right arm and an M4 hanging from her neck by its three-point harness.
“Colonel says the helo is almost at the LZ. He wants you in the war room.”
“I bet he does.”
“How’s Rick?”
“How does he look?”
“Doctor Savage still thinks he’ll get better. She said they’re looking for a cure, but she didn’t seem very hopeful about finding one.”
“Doctor Savage,” he said, shaking his head.
He made for the door, passing the young dark-haired sharpshooter on his way out. His thoughts continued to attack via headache, and hearing that name again made it worse. She wasn’t even a doctor. Doc, the Alpha Team combat medic, could patch someone up three times faster, and he at least knew how to perform minor surgery. She was a yuppy little brat from the CDC with a fancy diploma. He no longer suspected her of poisoning Rick. By now everyone had seen the corpse of the snake. She could hardly have been the one that released it two hundred miles away. Rick was already sick by the time the team got back from the recon mission. Still, she wasn’t to be trusted. He wasn’t even sure she was an American.
He walked the hallway slowly. There was no great hurry. This whole mess would be over soon, once they destroyed the alien base. The hallway ended at a door which led through the common area, with the rec room on his left. A glance inside showed a couple of troops exercising. Most of the baby engineers and scientists gathered around one of the TVs while waiting to start their shift. They drank up every bit news report without questioning anything, even though the alien menace hadn’t yet made a public appearance. Gullible, worthless, oxygen thieves. For all their time, expenses and energy, they had produced nothing helpful. The fat one did figure out how to map the underground alien compound, but even he admitted that the layout could have been wrong, or some kind of trick played on his sensors.
At the corner of the common area was a narrow stairwell leading to the second level of the ant farm they called home. At the bottom, the passage turned sharply to the left. That area had only four rooms. The galley was the largest, where they ate wonderful freeze-dried sustenance, prepared by a handful of college drop-outs. How Colonel Ryan Crisp found and recruited them was still a mystery. The other rooms were the colonel’s living quarters, his personal office, and the command center for the base, which everyone called the war room.
When he entered, Crisp and Stark were in their usual spots, but for some reason the fat lead engineer was there as well, punching away on his laptop.
“Thought we already had all of your intel,” said John.
Colonel Ryan Crisp shook his head and glanced up at John. “Just stand by, and monitor your team. They need all the help they can get. We need to coordinate what they’re seeing with Jacob’s map.” Crisp reflected on the recent friction between the two men. Word of it had spread to the whole base. The colonel couldn’t take back what happened two years ago, when John was left stranded in Africa after a failed mission. Nor could he snap his fingers and magically cure Rick. There was no way to please the guy at this point.
This mission had a similar gloomy outcome. Attacking the alien menace on their own turf seemed like suicide, but their operations on Earth had to be stopped. Too bad John wasn’t able to control his own emotions well enough to see that. In any case, the colonel knew that buried underneath that hard shell was a disciplined soldier, and he cared for his teammates in the field.
“Colonel?” came an innocent voice from behind him. He turned as she leaned to the side around John’s broad shoulders, her golden ponytail dangling.
“This really isn’t the time, Reyes.”
“It’s important, sir.”
He stood up. This wasn’t going to be good news. Time was getting short on her interrogation, and she had been resorting to more dire methods of extracting information. “Fine, in the passageway.”
He closed the door as he exited. Her eyes appeared somewhat fierce and commanding.
“I noticed—”
“Keep your voice low,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir. We pulled the alien out of the tank to get another blood sample for Savage’s lab. She wants more and more.”
“She’s trying to figure out the virus. So what?”
“So.” Jennifer Reyes looked both ways, even though the hallway ended to her left. “Rick responded when she stuc
k the alien. I saw it plain as day.”
“He what?” Colonel Crisp’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean responded?”
“He lookup up. He looked angry.”
“Angry? That you took blood from a squiddy?”
“I can’t explain it, sir, but my theory is that the virus has done something to corrupt his mind. I think I know why the alien isn’t responding to our interrogation attempts. It’s not hiding anything purposefully. It doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have to. The virus relays coordinated communication between them. The aliens that is. They probably act as some kind of collective mind, rather than individuals. That’s why we can’t break the squid, even when I physically, you know, break it. Like mashing one of the tentacle fingers in a vice. It feels pain and fear, but there’s nothing else in its head. No intel to be had.”
Colonel Crisp glanced back at the door.
“The alien responded too. It usually just lays there when we take blood. It might flash a color, but this time it started squirming.”
“That means that it’s stupid?”
“It means that the virus has changed Rick in such a way that the two of them can communicate directly, but they’ve been turned into zombies, designed to be controlled by something else. The squiddies might not even be the actual aliens, just prisoners from a previous invasion on another world.”
He glared into her eyes. “Who else knows about this theory of yours?”
“I think I’m the only one who saw Rick move. Nobody knows. I thought—”
“Go back to your lab. Once the ground mission is completed, I’ll come by, and we’ll talk about it. Don’t say a word to anyone, not even Nicole. I need a complete picture of what you’re talking about and my mind is at the alien base right now.”
“See if they can catch more live ones. I have tests ready and waiting to prove my theory.”
“Having them come back without holes in them is the first priority. But I’ll see what I can do.”
He shot back through the door and slopped into his chair. “Where are they?”
“Coming up on the entrance coordinates,” said Stark, the communications and logistics representative that never seemed to leave the war room.
“Little love affair you got going on out there?” asked John.
The colonel’s muscles tensed. “It behooves you to pay attention to the mission at hand. Pull up your map overlay, Jacob.”
The chubby kid hammered some keys, and the extra monitor he brought with him displayed the subterranean map compiled from ground radar during the last mission. The four men stared at the new display, showing the helicopter drop ship as a blip.
“Okay. Can we track them once they enter?”
The radio interrupted with helicopter rotors as background noise. “Command, this is Nighthawk One. We’ve sighted what looks like an entrance. There’s a flat spot on the landscape, right where the coordinates indicated.”
“Drop the team and blow the hatch,” said the colonel. “And don’t miss.”
“Not a problem sir.” The rocket packs under the wings of the Mi-25 had a new targeting system installed, much better than the salvaged Russian equipment.
“Each of them has a new beacon that we can track from our regular passive radar,” said Jacob Swan. “It disrupts the signal from the towers and—”
“I don’t need to know how it works. A yes or no is fine.”
“Yeah. I can track them. They’ll appear as red dots on the display.”
“How many levels is the base?”
“Just one that we saw.”
A glance into Swan’s eyes showed that he was biting his tongue, as suggested, about his theory that the underground sonar information seemed too easy to collect, and this whole base they discovered could just be a decoy or a trap, planted by the aliens.
“Team Bravo to Command. We’re on the ground.”
“Watch for snakes,” said John.
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel mic-ed up. “Nighthawk One, once you’re clear. Go weapons hot, and open that door.”
He turned to Stark. “Anything on radar? We going to have a surprise visit from an Apache task force?”
“Nothing on radar, sir.”
“This is Nighthawk One. Rockets away. Doors are open. I’m out of here.”
“We should have put Alpha Team on this,” said the colonel.
“They’ll be fine,” said John. “Long as you keep your mad scientists away from them.”
“Not going to ease up on Savage are you?”
“Not till she finds a cure.”
Some of the chatter over the com line caught the colonel’s attention. “Did you guys feel that drizzle? Wish it would decide if it was going to rain or not. Shit or get off the pot, clouds.”
“I see stars,” said another voice from the strike team. “There’s no clouds tonight.”
The colonel and Stark stared at each other. “Pull up the weather report,” said the Colonel.
“Clear skies,” said Stark. “The pilots are briefed on that information before the mission.”
The radio continued, “Command, this is team lead. There’s something in the pit. I can see it from here. Looks like reflections, over.”
“Any alien threats?” asked John.
“Negative, sir. Nothing moves.”
“Send your scouts forward to check it out, and hang back.”
“Shit,” said Jacob Swan, the chubby engineer monitoring the computer map.
“What do you mean shit?” asked the colonel.
He sputtered out the words so fast that they made no sense. “That’s. Rain. Reflections.”
“What?”
“Water. That’s why the walls of the base were so easy to see on the radar map. The whole thing was flooded when we fired off the explosive sondes. Maybe it’s flooded all the time.”
“Are you sure?”
The radio answered. “Sir, there’s water in the pit.”
“Cricket,” said the team leader’s voice. “What does that even mean?”
“It means the base is flooded. What’s that?”
“Shit, evac now!”
“Run goddamn it!”
The colonel slammed on the radio button. “Nighthawk One, get back to the LZ and give them air support.”
“Already on the way,” responded the pilot.
“Fuck,” barked the team leader’s voice. “Sir, cricket just went down. Turret fire. We need—”
“Nighthawk One hovering. Shots fired from ground turrets. I’m gonna take ‘em out.”
John’s hands pressed against his forehead. “Nice intel, Moron.” He slapped Jacob across the side of the head. “You just killed eight good people. How the fuck does it feel?”
“Command, we’re under fire,” said the pilot. “And I’m out of rockets.”
“Jacob,” said the colonel. “Where are our guys? Swan!”
“The locator beacons aren’t moving,” replied the engineer. “They’re—life support signals—they aren’t.” His hands and fingers were frozen, and his mouth seized.
“Control, forces are coming out of the ground,” said the pilot. “Can’t identify. I’m bugging out.”
The colonel jumped as the door behind him slammed hard. John was gone. His numb hand reached for the button. “Nighthawk One, return to base.”
“Ain’t gotta tell me twice. What about the troops?”
“Their gone. Return to base. We’ll turn you around if we need to.”
“Sir,” said Stark. “Probably a bad time, but we have incoming. Intermittent signals near the ground.”
“Apaches?”
“Or alien scouts. I can’t identify.”
“Nighthawk One, you’ve got company.” He turned to the kid monitoring the radar. “Stark. Launch the other two birds.”
“Yes sir.”
Jacob Swan stared at his terminal like a statue.
“You alright?”
No answer. Not even a twitch.
A fog came over the colonel’s mind, this was something the base was not going to be able to take in stride. Almost half of their ground forces wiped out because of a failure to identify an important piece of subterranean mapping. Adding this failure to a zombie team leader who wrecked the compound trying to escape a few days ago meant a mess in the morale department.
“Those other Hinds are equipped with sidewinders?”
“Yes sir,” said Stark. “Fitted for an aerial engagement.”
“Okay, tell them any hint of resistance, they’re to open fire. Human or alien.”
“Yes sir.”
He got up and left the room. He didn’t need to be there for the rest. The pilots knew what they were doing, and the whole base knew how critical it was to keep Operation Raindrop a secret. That meant taking down any suspicious aircraft, even US military helicopters when they interfered.
He played back the past weeks in his head. Losing troops did that to him. It all started with fairy tales on the news about a rash of strange abductions, and an equally strange virus infecting the victims. Then a bunch of major cities were bombed around the world, and the usual terror groups were blamed for it. He knew it was all bullshit, but he wasn’t sure what the connection was until two suits showed up on his doorstep, interrupting his early retirement.
The man who ordered the visit was the same guy that bounced him out of the Army. He was hired not so much to return to active status, but to recruit a fighting force through illegal means, which he was quite good at given his past life as a black-ops colonel. He built a whole damned underground command center, ordered illegal arms and helicopters, and put together a strike team. He recruited young people from MIT and the CDC by giving them false paperwork and telling them that their country needed them. The truth of the city attacks was worse than the conspiracy nuts hoped.
An alien war ended in a week, and the average citizen knew nothing about it. They bombed major population centers, and had the ability to disappear off the scope in low orbit before military forces could fire back. The aliens made a deal. Don’t attack their ships, and they will leave human cities alone, at least for the moment. The general refused to leave it at that, and bled a secret military bank account to supply funding for Operation Raindrop. That was where the government sponsorship ended.
Alien Agenda Page 1