Nexus of Time

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Nexus of Time Page 7

by Mark Riverstone


  Mr. Nix is dismayed, "From those two items, the Greys should be able to deduce the items came from the same craft that departed the deep-sea colony before it exploded, and that only one of the Grey craft was at that bunker. Then conclude the only way we could acquire these craft before them, considering they are unaware those ships went back in time and we picked them up long ago, was that we were responsible for the colony's destruction, and we prepared to capture any escaping Grey craft. Which means they will believe we captured the other missing Grey craft. If they weren't searching for where we stored the other craft, after what they took from your bunker, they will now. We might be too late to warn the other three bunkers and the Barge that Greys are coming. That is, if the Greys haven't already found them."

  Nix stops. A low thumping approaches from the quiet distance.

  "That makes sense. Where does that leave our efforts?" asks Burt.

  "We still might be ok with using humans altered into hybrids to infiltrate as skin spawns. The final nuclear blast destroying the colony came from outside the sea base, so they might not suspect we were working on the inside. They just might think we discovered a way to track them. We'll continue with the hybrid program until they give us a reason to stop. Dr. Black's research might be our only recourse against them."

  The distant thumping leading a black military helicopter approaches fast. After it circles, the chopper lands on the flat spot near them. While the blades whip the grass and blow dust, the four of them are pulled on board by a helmeted soldier. Once on, the chopper lifts off and disappears into the sky.

  Where Eagles Fly

  Chapter 4

  Grey Mountain Bunker, Eagle Mountain, Texas.

  A quiet early evening on Eagle Peak. The low sun encroaching the horizon stretches shadows across the semi-arid land. Mountain shade drapes over smaller hills, cooling valleys and eastern mountain faces. The golden cast of the sun adds a rich color to the yucca trees, scrub bushes, dirt and rocks freckling the landscape. A distant roadway, barely visible, is void of traffic. A white Doppler radar on the mountain's peak reflects bright in the last remnants of sunlight. The house-style office near the tower is still of activity, with only a couple cars parked next to it.

  Uncloaking only meters from the radar is a small Grey craft identical to the one appearing at the Grey Valley Bunker in California. It releases a massive sonic burst. The shock wave tears the Doppler tower from the ground, rips the office from its foundation and fractures it into pieces, and lifts the cars from the ground, flinging them off the peak like leaves in the wind.

  The ship moves into the shaded valley near the peak. It works its way to a low point where the carved banks of dry runoff streams stripe the hillside like jagged rocky veins. Activating the sonic blast again, the ground beneath the ship vibrates and rumbles. Dust and dirt in a fifty-meter diameter blow out a crater beneath the ship, flowing up the sides of the valley, covering it with dust. Blown dirt makes its way up the mountainsides, flowing over the peaks into a dusty wind. The boulders and stone beneath the ship break apart and crumble into powder, creating a smooth deepening crater. Slow and steady, the ship lowers into the ground, the sonic blaster digging a cylindrical hole. Soon the ship disappears from view, yet the dust continues billowing up the hole and creating banks on the rim resembling a crater's edge.

  The ship's progress slows as it hits a hard rock stratum, but it doesn't stop. Pulverizing the hard rock, the dust shade turns black. A hundred meters down, the ship breaks into light gray concrete of an underground bunker ceiling, which gives way and collapses into an opening.

  The ship lowers into a bunker room the size of a hangar. To the side, a ship frame and hull resembling the ship the Greys are flying sits disassembled on an industrial rack. The hull has bent and torn spots, showing signs of sustaining a terrible crash. Six scientists in the room scramble. The bottom of the floating Grey craft descends and three Greys drop out, wearing silver one-piece suits with gloves and boots attached. A device connected to their backs runs up their spines and cups the back of their heads. As the Greys watch the scientist scurry, a silent beam flash shoot from the Greys' chest plates striking each scientist, searing through their bodies. Their death screams echo around the bunker as the beams blast off shoulders and legs, disintegrate heads, leaving every human dead before they can activate any alarms. The three Greys scan with their back devices, which expose the hidden panels in the walls and trap doors in the floor, including a very large one under the stripped Grey craft.

  Four heavily armed guards rush from a hallway, killed as they appear, their body armor useless. The three Greys hurry around the lifeless bunker. One Grey breaks off and goes into a storage room filled with artifacts and parts, and moves to a secure armored briefcase. Scanning the case reveals micro-transmitter chips inside vials enclosed within the case. The Grey pulls a small disc out of its suit and holds it over the case. Bursting through the case top, skin spawn micro-transmitter chips stick to the disc.

  A second Grey enters a specimen room with many Grey body parts and hybrid spawn parts frozen behind glass panels. Though a few parts look surgically separated, most appear torn or burned off, as if blown apart in an accident. Only one Grey head looks intact except for having singed skin and a missing eye.

  In another section by a vault, the third Grey approaches a sealed three-foot-thick steel door, which the Grey backpiece scans and reveals a room behind containing shelving and a large floor-mounted casing containing a solid cuboid. There doesn't appear to be any key, combination, or hidden panel nearby that opens the door. The Grey shoots from its chest plate at the center of the door. It disintegrates a foot-wide hole half way through the steel. The Grey shoot again, making a hole all the way through. Bending down, the Grey peeks into the hole. This room has Grey artifacts in racks and on shelves, but in the center of the room is a smooth one-foot by two-foot metal hyperrectangle cuboid. The cuboid has no seams, welds or bolts; a perfect solid block. It is inside a transparent pressurized case. The cuboid constantly shifts and slides as if on ice, but is regulated back to center by the case's internal pressure.

  Stepping back from the door, the Grey sticks a one-inch thick three-inch wide black triangle to the vault door. The Grey steps back. After a second, the triangle glows orange and breaks apart into hundreds of tiny nanobots glowing orange. The bots spread out over the surface and eat away the entire door, pulverizing the steel as they pass over it. When done, the nanobots leave an irregular five-foot circle before they burn out from orange to black, and stop.

  The Grey steps through the door into the vault. He walks to the casing containing the cuboid. His headgear scans the case, which illuminates the presence and flow of gas inside the chamber, and a hidden panel on the side of the case. The Grey opens the panel and scans it, activating the panel. Glitches and flashes on the panel occur while zeros and ones spool across the tiny view screen.

  After the visible gas siphons out though small vents in the case bottom, the top case panel opens. The Grey removes a small sack from his one-piece suit, made of the same material as the suit. Inside the case, the metal rectangle cuboid slides across the base and up the case's side wall, defying gravity. The Grey slips the sack over the cuboid as it slides out. It then seals the sack and leaves the room.

  As the three Greys leave, they place three trapezoid-shaped implosion ordinance devices around the bunker and set them. Return to a spot beneath the hovering ship, they stand upon a metallic disc on the floor. The disc lifts all three Greys off the ground and floats up to the ship, sealing with the hull. The Grey craft then levitates upward out the hole it burrowed into the ground.

  Surfacing at ground level, the ship continues to hover upward, floating above Eagle Mountain Peak. Multiple implosions go off underground, sucking the massive amounts of dirt and pulverized rock dust that collected on the valley walls back into the hole, filling it. When the implosion ceases, a deep crater at the base of the valley remains.

  The ship cloaks
and disappears.

  Swim with the Fish

  Chapter 5

  Grey Water Bunker, Carters Lake, Georgia.

  Dense woods with a thick green leaf canopy line the banks of a winding river where its long bends and fingering tributaries lead to Carters Lake. Birds and wildlife call and scurry as the sun disappears behind the horizon in a darkening sky. Ripple rings fleck the water's mirrored surface from fish snatching insects for their evening meal.

  In the middle of the widest part of the lake, a Grey craft decloaks and becomes visible moments before it pierces into the water at a steep angle, disappearing below the surface. The ship slows as it descends into darkness. Passing the depth of four hundred feet, the ship approaches the lake's bottom.

  As it reaches the murky below, the ship glides until it approaches a silt covered wedge of concrete, with water plants growing up in front of an opening in the tall side of the wedge, as wide as a two-lane road, and high as it is wide. The craft brushes against the plants as in enters the opening and heads into the angled shaft, fading in the darkness beneath the lake's bottom.

  Inside the sub-lake Grey Water Bunker, alerts sound off when the craft brushes against the plants, which are synthetic camouflaged motion triggers.

  A scientist yells, "A large moving object triggered the sensors at the aquatic entrance. The computer is rendering an image."

  On a monitor, a three-dimensional wireframe image forms outlining the shape of the Grey craft.

  "Doctor, it appears to be the exact size and shape of the Grey craft stored here!"

  "Are you sure?"

  "Without a doubt."

  "Activate artifact scuttling. Send the four security and three lab technicians armed to the moon pool. The two of us need to ensure artifact destruction."

  Above a stripped Grey craft in the main hangar room, a large section of meter-thick solid ceiling lowers, connected to a massive hydraulic press. The press crushes the ship into a flat mat of metal. In the artifact storage room, the ceiling lowers. The shelving and artifacts crush beneath it. In a vault which stores various Grey artifacts, including a shiny solid metal hyperrectangle cuboid resembling the one taken from the Eagle Peak Grey Mountain Bunker, a hydraulic press lowers from the ceiling smashing everything. The door to a room filled with mummified partial torso sections of Greys and hybrid skin spawns automatically seals, then flames shoot from the ceiling in blow torch streams, igniting and incinerating the specimens.

  At the end of a tall wide loading corridor, two huge doors seal off the moon pool room. Water line pipes run along the ceiling, rising out from the moon pool into the bunker. Seven armed men run through the corridor, four in military garb and three wearing lab coats. As the men reach the metal doors, the doors become soft and floppy, sagging and curling back toward the hinges. Behind the sagging doors next to the moon pool stand three Greys in a row, each wearing a piece of equipment that attaches to their backs, runs up their spines, and cups the back of their heads. A scan emanates from this equipment washing over the armed men.

  All seven of the armed men fire their weapons. The Greys' equipment head section releases a thin metal layer that encases the Greys' entire heads in a thin smooth seamless alloy helmet, with no visible visor. Two of the Greys duck to the side behind the large pipes. The middle Grey stumbles, struck multiple times by bullets. The bullets hit his one-piece suit but are unable to pierce the fabric. While the bullets fired at the Grey's head ricochet off the helmet, the Grey falls backwards to the ground.

  The other two Greys remain hidden behind the pipes as workers fire on them. On the inside of the Grey helmets in front of their eyes appear a visual image of the corridor. The two standing Greys step out from behind the pipes, into the hail of gunfire. Bullets reflect off the helmets. Bullets strike their suits, not piercing, but knocking them around. Not enough to keep the Greys from blasting pulses from their chest plates, cutting each armed man into pieces, leaving parts and pools of blood where the men once stood.

  The Grey laying on the floor sits up with difficulty, as the three face each other, having a telepathic conversation. Two Greys turn and continue into the bunker, while the floor seated Grey stays behind. The seated Grey retracts the alloy helmet into the headpiece attached to its back, revealing a bleeding wound on the back of its head. While the Grey sits on the edge of the moon pool, its wound reduces bleeding as the lacerated contusion slowly seals itself closed. The bruise fades.

  Entering the main hangar room, the other two Greys see one of their ship's frames crushed flat beneath the massive vertical hydraulic press. The remaining two scientists are turning large wall valves which cause water to spray from ceiling high wall reservoirs, flooding the bunker.

  The Greys blast the two scientists dead. Rushing to the valves, the Greys turn them but the water does not stop flowing. They then scramble about the bunker, scanning as they go. One goes to the archive storage room and sees the massive three-foot-thick hydraulic press firm against the floor. A scan from the helmet reveals mechanisms in the ceiling which the scan activates. The press lifts from the floor to the ceiling, then stops. It scans the storage room, but the crushed artifacts on the floor make one smashed object indistinguishable from another. The Grey removes a disc from his suit and holds it out. Inside the crushed armored case beneath layers of metal crushed atop it, six Grey micro-transmitter chips vibrate, but cannot penetrate the materials. Unable to extract the chips from the crushed mess, the Grey leaves the room holding the disc.

  Standing outside a vault door with an irregular shaped five-foot opening pulverized out of the door, the Grey looks at the hydraulic press inside that has crushed everything against the floor. The Grey's scan activates the hydraulic press's mechanisms in the ceiling, causing the press to lift. Everything is flat except the solid cuboid, identical to the one recovered in the Grey Mountain Bunker. It sticks to the base of the press as it moves upward. The cuboid has been pressed, causing the sides to bubble outward, but showing no signs of stress cracks or seams, remaining smooth and unblemished. The press's lifting stops halfway as the other Grey appears. They both enter the room and turn their helmets up to look at the cuboid. One tries to pull the cuboid off the metal, able to make it slide around the surface, but unable to pull it away as if magnetized to the metal press. The other Grey holds the disc in its hand beneath the cuboid. The cuboid moves away from the base of the press and descends towards the disc until attaching to it. Once connected to the disc, the other Grey removes a sack from its suit and slips the cuboid and disc into the sack.

  The water level in the main bunker room has become over a meter and a half deep. The Greys step into the water of the main room. With helmets on, they sink into the water and swim along the flooded loading corridor to the moon pool room. The Grey not holding the sack taps the shoulder of the third Grey sitting on the edge of the moon pool under water wearing its helmet. The third Grey becomes active, and places three trapezoid implosion devices on the wall pipes. Together, the three Greys swim down into the flooded moon pool opening and beneath the Grey craft in the water. The bottom of the craft opens, the Grey swim up into it, and the opening closes.

  The craft rotates one hundred and eighty degrees on point, then heads back out the aquatic passageway. Rapidly accelerating, the craft propels out the concrete wedge opening at the bottom of the lake, races to the surface, and rockets out of the water into the sky. The moment the Grey ship cloaks, an underwater implosion sucks a massive amount of water downward, creating a crater of air in the center of the lake that the surrounding water rushes into, collides, then splashes outward, causing the lake's surface to ripple and chop with large waves.

  The Final of Four

  Chapter 6

  Grey Dome Bunker, Armstrong Air and Space Museum, Wapakoneta Ohio.

  Patrons eat a diner dinner at a nearby Flapjack Shack next to the Vacation Inn, while a few cars trickle into the parking lot from the nearby highway exit, finding lodging and food before night takes over. Behind
the diner is a mounted decommissioned jet fighter and a sign for the Armstrong Air and Space Museum, closed during these after hours.

  The long museum driveway cuts through a large open field leading to a museum complex mostly underground. Both the main and side doors enter the small dirt hill covering the complex. Only angled concrete walls and a half-moon shaped dome protrude from the ground. From a sky view above the complex, the complex's geometric design resembles the simplified side view of a Grey craft behind the Moon.

  A quiet hiss whir gets louder by the side museum entrance near an open field. Appearing from nothing, a Grey craft uncloaks. It releases an electromagnetic shock pulse wave, causing power and lights for a mile to shut off and go black. Automobiles on the nearby highway and streets drift to a stop, their batteries drained and engines stalling.

  Three Greys drop from an opening in the base of the hovering craft, landing on the grass with amazing agility. Within seconds, the Grey craft cloaks again. The three Greys on the ground disappear into a rear utility stairwell to the museum.

  Inside, the side entrance doors bend and sag, then the three Greys enter. There is no light, so the Greys use their infrared vision to navigate, their scanners flickering over the displays. They pass the lunar lander in a display case, along a wall with cardboard cutouts of the greatest space captains in television and movie history, and a slogan reading "join the future of space exploration." Strangely, the building is abandoned, not a security guard or person in sight.

  They move into the domed planetarium, through the theater seating to a rear hidden door reading 'authorized personnel only'. Pushing through the door, they descend stairs below the dome, led by their scanners. Utility pipes and electrical conduits line the passage. Reaching a utility ladder to a lower hallway, the Greys jump down instead of climbing, and continue through a hallway to an elevator with an 'out of order' sign taped to it. Their scanners detect a hidden panel in the wall, and an empty shaft behind the closed elevator doors. One Grey pulls open the elevator door exposing the empty shaft with cables that drop into the darkness. The Greys climb headfirst down the elevator shaft along the supporting girders.

 

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