Learning To Fly

by DeMaris, Charles

  “You manage an escape and pick off the ones you want. When the dust settles, a few escaped and they’ll never be caught. Just don’t take too many.”

  “You can fill me in on the details, but for now, where are we relocating the soldiers?”

  “You really have been out of the loop, haven’t you? The new facility is almost done, and it’s someplace they’ll never suspect, let alone find. Their telescopes can’t see it from Earth.”

  “I am out of the loop. I’ve been here a bit longer than you. Where is the place?”

  “It’s underground, on the dark side of this planet’s moon, and it’s hardly at capacity.”

  “There are already people there?”

  “Only a few thousand. There’s room for two million. It will be easier to deploy from there as well. Not as many prying eyes around there. We can be in hyperspace before they know anything’s going on.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll work on getting more people to our holding facility in Africa and you can let me know when the transports are here, and I can try your prison trick.”

  “Good deal. Now let’s get out of here before the woman gets back. I’m hungry. We can discuss things further over dinner. You know this place better than I do. Can you recommend someplace that wouldn’t be too disagreeable to a foreign palate?”

  Wilkins shut off the recording and let out a low whistle, followed by a few curses.

  “Well, that is certainly interesting. I wonder what it all means,” Franklin said.

  “They’re at war…somewhere,” Walter said, “and they’ve lost a lot of men, so now they’re coming here to kidnap soldiers for their war. Only thing we don’t know is where they’re sending them and how they get them to fight for them.”

  “How do you suppose we stop them?” Kendra asked.

  “We?” Walter asked.

  “Yes, we.”

  “What do you figure you could do?”

  “I don’t know. I can help somehow.”

  “Well, first thing someone can help with is making another copy of that audio.”

  “What are you going to do with that?” Wilkins asked.

  “Try to recruit help.”

  22

  Walter set the car down in front of his apartment and Franklin and Kendra got out and followed him toward the front door.

  “Man, that never gets old,” Franklin said.

  “I didn’t much care for it the last time it happened,” Kendra said.

  “That was different. It’s cool when Walter does it.”

  Walter unlocked the door and did a double take when he walked in. Sitting on the couch was a young attractive blonde, sipping a Coke and petting Otis.

  “Nice place you got here, but it’s not safe to stay,” she said.

  “Who are you and what are you doing…wait a minute…you look familiar.”

  “Hey, you’re the lady from the night…the one with the purse snatcher,” Franklin said.

  “You got me there, one and the same,” she replied.

  “How did you get in my apartment, and what are you doing here?”

  “It’s a long story, one best told somewhere else. How soon can you get packed?”

  “You mind telling me who you are?”

  “It’s not safe here. Mike’s been here and I don’t know what he’s left behind, and I don’t have time to search the place. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “I know how you got your powers. Get some things packed and let’s get out of here, and we can’t pick up and fly the car. That might draw unwanted attention.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “My place. You can follow me in that car you brought.”

  Ninety minutes later they pulled up in front of a run down looking farmhouse on a secluded lot in Seaman, Ohio.

  “This house looks like it’s been here a while,” Kendra said.

  “145 years to be exact,” the woman replied.

  “How long have you had it?” Walter asked.

  “145 years. Built it myself…well, I had some help.”

  “Wait…145 years ago?” Kendra asked, “You don’t look a day over 20.”

  “My people don’t age like you do.”

  “No kidding.”

  They took their things in the house, let Otis out in the back yard, and sat down in the living room, on furniture that was thankfully newer than the house.

  “The dog will be fine in the back yard. It’s fenced,” she said, setting a pitcher of lemonade and glasses down on the coffee table.

  “Okay, let’s start by telling us who you are and what’s going on,” Walter said.

  “Let me guess,” Franklin said, “We probably can’t pronounce your name.”

  “That is probably the case. You can call me Christy.”

  “This conversation is starting on familiar ground,” Walter said.

  “If you don’t trust me, I can understand. After your experience with Mike, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “Yeah, it’s all rather confusing, but after the conversation I recorded…” Franklin said.

  “What have you been doing here all those years?” Kendra asked.

  “Minding my own business and trying to live an uneventful life…and keeping my eye out for others who might be up to no good.”

  “Others like Mike and his friend?” Walter asked.

  “Exactly. They’re bad news. Let me guess. Mike gave you a story about the other man being the bad guy and how he’s here to stop him, and he probably gave you a bunch of vague information about his planet and his culture.”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “Well, I had a planet and a culture, until they showed up. Now whoever’s left there is enslaved and I can’t go back. They ruined their own planet centuries ago, so now they search the galaxy for other planets that have the resources they need and they simply take over, whether or not there are people there to get in their way. They just roll in and take what they need. In your case, it’s people. The cost to take over this planet would be too high, so they just take people and use them as soldiers in their other wars.”

  “That’s rather disturbing. How many have they taken from here?”

  “I don’t know, precisely. I’ve managed to stop a few, but there’s no way I can get into their holding facilities to rescue the ones who are already there. They put them in cryostasis until they’re needed, and while they’re out, they’re reprogrammed to fight. They wake them up, ship them out, and deploy them to the war zones. Most of the time, they’re discreet. If a craft is spotted, it’s listed as a UFO sighting and the people who report them are often written off as crazy.”

  “So all those crazy alien abduction stories?” Kendra asked.

  “A good number are true. Those are often the ones I manage to stop. I’ve gotten a few people out and returned them to their families. The smart ones just keep their mouths shut.”

  “What happened to your planet?” Kendra asked.

  “They rolled in with troop transports, after bombarding us from orbit for a month. We were not a warlike society, so we had no chance. We had weapons, of course, but not like them, and it was over almost before it started. They blockaded the planet, but I managed to slip out in one of their ships.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “One of their pilots wanted to have his way with me. He was drunk and sloppy. I knocked him on the head and took his ship. Other ships were headed back to the larger ships in orbit to pick up more material for the ground troops, and I just followed them off the surface. I slipped around one of the cruisers and jumped straight to hyperspace without even looking where I was headed.”

  “Did anyone else make it out?” Franklin asked.

  “I met a couple others here. I don’t know if any others escaped. One is living on a ranch in Colorado and another is in a fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. We keep in touch, but we have to be careful.”

  “Okay, a
bout the night we met, why were you acting so helpless when that thug took your purse?” Walter asked.

  “I guess I owe you an explanation. I saw you get zapped, so I had an idea what was going to happen. Mike was after me, he was drunk, and he missed me and hit you. The beam has different effects on your people than mine. I would have been killed if he had hit me, or incapacitated and turned into…what do you call it…a vegetable. When that man approached, I had an idea what he was up to, so I just stood there and made myself an easy target.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I needed to be sure. I had an idea what had happened to you. It’s happened before, but they managed to remove the person before it became public.”

  “How did they manage that?”

  “There is a device that can neutralize your powers. It doesn’t always work, but in the other cases the people weren’t affected as strongly as you were and they were able to be killed. You were the first one that developed the way you did, and after that, it was a simple case of them hitting the woman intentionally. After they couldn’t neutralize you, they figured keeping you busy with her would be the next best thing to keep you from messing with their operation.”

  “And it would have worked if she hadn’t messed with us,” Kendra said.

  “Pretty much. What were you doing anyway?”

  “Following Mike. We thought we were being discreet,” Franklin said.

  “Okay, here’s what we know so far. Mike pretty much lied to us and he’s actually working with this other dude,” Walter said, “He hit me with that bright light by accident and it gave me these crazy powers, but if he had hit you with the same thing it would have incapacitated you. That makes no sense.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense to me either, but our systems are different. I’m already a bit overpowered compared to the average human, so for some reason, the same thing that would take my powers away seems to affect you differently.”

  “How about this thing he gave me?” Walter said, holding up the cylinder Mike had given him, “He said it would transfer my powers to another, if the time comes I want to do that.”

  “It could work that way, but it’s never been tested. It might do you harm in the process. It would also most likely transfer the state of the other person to you. If the other person is sick, your powers could go to him and his sickness could go to you. It’s never been tried on humans before.”

  “Then why did he give it to me?”

  “He’s probably hoping you would incapacitate yourself, or maybe by the time it comes to that, his mission will be done and it won’t matter, anyway. Once they’ve taken enough people from your planet to win whatever conflict they’re currently engaging in, they might move on, and it won’t matter to him if he leaves a super powered person around here. Then again, if they plan to exploit your planet for the long term, it makes no sense to leave you with such a device.”

  “So what we know is that they’re abducting people from here to serve as soldiers in some war of conquest on some other planet that we don’t have a clue about, and that the only people that can stop them are in this room. Am I getting close?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Which means I have powers that were a complete mistake, but I should use those powers to save the world, except the world I’m saving isn’t even my own?”

  “If you look at it that way, but we never said anything about saving other worlds, only stopping them from exploiting yours.”

  “Seems if we can stop that, we can help the other one as well.”

  “Except you don’t even know where it is or how their war has progressed.”

  “Yeah, one step at a time,” Franklin said.

  “There’s only one major complication,” Christy said.

  “What’s that?” Kendra asked.

  “If they suspect we’re onto them and see us coming, they’ll activate everyone they have already, and if they have the suits close by, it could get quite interesting.”

  “What are the suits?” Walter asked.

  “Mechanized suits. The person sits inside it and controls it through a neural interface. The suits are impervious to most weapons short of rocket launchers. There are two ways they are controlled. Either the operator controls it himself, when it’s a trained soldier fighting of his own accord, or remotely in the case of kidnapped soldiers which would be the case here.”

  “Remotely?”

  “Yes, They are organized in units similar to your military organization here, and there are controllers, usually aboard a ship in orbit, or sometimes in a hardened facility on the planet surface, who can control entire units at a time, or sometimes individual soldiers. They are very efficient. They’ve been using this model for over a hundred years, since their conquests were using up too many of their own men and they started taking people from other planets.”

  “All this information is good, but if it comes to a fight, we don’t really want to kill our own people. Is there a way to disable them without killing the occupants?”

  “You could disable the suits by inflicting enough damage, or by cutting the signal. With some of the older models, you could target a small receiver on the back of the neck area and that would short it out temporarily, but that is extremely difficult. The other option is to find out where the controllers are and take them out, but that involves taking out their orbital ship or whatever bunker they’re holed up in.”

  “Something you’re forgetting,” Kendra said, “If they’re staging people from here for an assault somewhere else, we have to stop them before they leave, so it might not be that kind of fight.”

  “You have a point,” Christy said, “We will need to get some intel on their facilities and come up with an assault plan.”

  “Yeah, and one of those is on the freaking moon,” Franklin said, “How do you suppose we recon that?”

  “Leave that up to me. I can get us there, but I’ll need help.”

  Franklin’s face lit up with a grin from ear to ear. “Going to the moon? Count me in.”

  23

  Catherine Mixon was in a foul mood. She was back in her office underneath the warehouse, dressing down two of her men who stood mute before her with heads hanging.

  “How in the hell did those two kids get out of here under both your noses, with their car no less?”

  No response from either of them.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? You were both here, the kids were locked in this room, and now they’re gone, along with their car, and you don’t have a clue how they got out? You know what I normally do to incompetent people like you?”

  “Sorry boss. I went to take a piss, and they were gone.”

  “You went to take a piss, and in that time they took their car and just exited the premises? Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “I…I…don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? It’s rather clear you don’t know much of anything,” she said, pulling out her pistol and pointing it at the man’s chest, “But why do I bother with the gun? I could take you out with a flick of my finger. How would you like that? Saves the ammo.”

  “Sorry…won’t happen again…I promise.”

  “You’re right, because you won’t get another chance for it to happen.”

  “Catherine, my dear, there will be no need to punish him for something that isn’t his fault,” Jack said, entering the room.

  “Isn’t his fault? He had one job, and he failed.”

  “Dismiss him, we need to talk.”

  Mixon dismissed the two men with a wave of her hand and sat down.

  “Suppose you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Don’t worry about the kids. Everything is going according to plan.”

  “Plan? Whose plan?”

  “We will bring you up to speed in due time. We needed to spread some information, and those kids will do nicely when they report back to Walter.”

  “You had me nab them just for that?”

/>   “Pretty much, and it worked just as we planned.”

  “Would you care to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss everything with you now. Just keep up what you’re doing and if I need any more favors, I’ll let you know.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to. I might see you in a day or two.”

  Mike drove out of the city until he came to a secluded spot, double checked that nobody could see him, and pushed two buttons in his car. The first button deactivated the holographic projection that made it look like a car in the first place, and the other sealed the vehicle and activated the life support system. The steering wheel folded away and was replaced by a flight stick and a set of touch screen panels. He pulled up the navigation panel, selected Earth’s moon, and fired up the engines. A quick check of his scanners showed no aircraft within visual range, so he lifted off the ground, tilted his nose upward, and hit the throttle. The small spacecraft shot into the sky with hardly a sound and when he cleared the atmosphere, he activated another engine that propelled him to a speed only possible in space. The course he had set took into account satellite orbits in order to avoid being seen. Constant monitoring of his screens showed that he hadn’t been spotted, and within an hour, he was in low orbit over the moon, heading for the dark side.

  The entrance wasn’t easily seen from orbit and were it not for the lock his navigation system had, he would have missed it. He flew down into a large crater and when he got fifty feet off the surface, a door opened and he flew into a large air lock. He stayed in a hover until the door closed behind him and a few seconds later a green light on his panel told him the lock was pressurized and he was clear to enter the facility. A door in front of him opened, and he flew in, found a marked landing area, and set down.

  He exited his ship and took a corridor toward the control room for the facility. Through an observation window, he could see a room filled with cylindrical pods, stacked several high and going as far as he could see. He noticed that every one of them had a green light on one end, indicating that it was occupied. He wasn’t sure how many there were, but it had to number in the thousands. At the end of the corridor, he took an elevator up to the control room and entered.