She started recording video of the craft using her onboard camera. As soon as the camera started rolling, the craft darted past her at amazing speed, shooting over her head like she was standing still. Danitra consulted her instruments, but they showed nothing, so she started to turn her plane to pursue.
The craft reappeared, bursting into view and hovering directly over her head. She looked up through the cockpit’s clear roof and stared in amazement and concern. The craft was large enough to block out the sun completely, and as she watched, a hatch slid open on the craft’s underside.
“Aw, hell, no.”
She gunned the engine, but the plane didn’t move. In fact, it was caught, hovering in midair. Slowly, carefully, the ship above her positioned itself, and her F-22’s engine stopped. The oxygen mask strapped over her face went dead.
“Alpha Base, this is Alpha Blue. Do you copy?”
Static.
She pulled the mask off to keep it from smothering her, since it was no longer providing any air.
“Alpha Base, this is…” She shut off the non-functioning radio. “Fuck me. This is a UFO.”
She looked up and saw only darkness. Her jet was rising, moving smoothly upward into the belly of the craft. Danitra tried to fire using her onboard cannon, but the weapon failed to respond, and she got the same result when she tried to deploy the sidewinder missiles that her aircraft carried.
The plane was completely inside the other ship now. She grabbed her side arm and prepared to defend herself, although she had doubts that she would be able to do much damage. Whoever the beings were who owned and operated this craft, they were beyond her technology. The plane shifted forward, pulled by some invisible power, until it settled down onto the deck with barely a bump. The hatch closed, plunging her into darkness.
She waited, hearing only her own heartbeat in her ears. A line of tiny blue lights lit up on one side of her plane, and then another line on the other side. They were mere pinpricks of illumination in the shadows, not enough for her to see any details. She saw a black shape move in front of the lights on her left, and then a very human-like hand appeared, pressing a small metal disk onto the dome of her plane. A needle punched through the barrier and into the cockpit with her, and a yellow gas filled the space in less than a heartbeat. Danitra tried to activate the escape mechanism, but like all of her other controls, it wouldn’t respond. She couldn’t manually open the hatch, either, as if someone or something was physically holding it shut. Her lungs spasmed, and she coughed violently, unable to get any air. She hit the emergency release over and over, frantic, and as she slowly succumbed, an alien man stood and passively watched.
Lights. Cold metal. The feeling of motion.
She opened her eyes but couldn’t stop them from shutting again. Her lids seemed to weigh too much, and she couldn’t move them again. A hand touched her forehead, and she turned toward the touch, groggy.
A tenor voice, smooth and velvety, spoke. She couldn’t quite make out the words, but she felt safe.
Something pressed against the side of her neck, right above her jugular vein, and then everything went dark.
She woke to the blaring of her jet’s instrumentation, warning her about depleted oxygen levels. Danitra struggled back into full consciousness and stared straight ahead at the clear acrylic plastic covering the cockpit. A tiny pinprick hole in the canopy was allowing the plane to depressurize, but the altimeter told her that she was cruising at 7500 feet, which was low enough that she wouldn’t suffer any ill effects. A voice was blaring in her ear.
“Alpha Blue, this is Alpha Base. Come in.”
She fumbled with her mask. When she spoke, her tongue felt thick. Her head was pounding. “Go for Alpha Blue.”
“You’re late, Captain.”
It was the voice of her commander, Lieutenant Colonel David Shaw. He sounded worried, which she’d only heard in combat situations.
“Apologies, sir.”
Danitra checked her instrumentation. She had lost an hour’s worth of time, and the jet was on an approach path for the base.
“Sir…”
“Land the aircraft, Alpha Blue.”
“Yes, sir.”
She brought her jet in and landed on the tarmac, where she surrendered it to Patrice. A pair of officers she didn’t recognize barely waited for her to clear the cockpit before they clambered inside. Another officer, Major Tom Bartley, gestured toward a waiting car.
“You’re to report to medical immediately.”
Danitra nodded. She wasn’t going to complain. “Yes, sir.”
She got in the car and sat quietly while Bartley drove to the hospital on base. Once they were there, she made her way inside, where the medics were waiting for her. They promptly put her on a gurney and took her to an examination room, where she was bundled onto an exam bed and a nurse took her vital signs. They left her alone as quickly as they’d descended on her, and she closed her eyes against the vertigo and pain in her head.
She had seen something out there. She knew she had. And the hole in the cockpit was from the machine the alien had attached to it. She didn’t know what that yellow gas was, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Danitra swallowed hard, pushing aside her fear and frustration that she couldn’t place. Everything felt wrong.
A doctor came in, a chart in her hand.
“Hello, Captain Hallman. I’m Dr. Felipe.”
“Hello.”
“I’m told that you blacked out during your patrol.”
Danitra held still while Dr. Felipe shone a pen light into her eyes. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t really know what happened.”
She wasn’t about to tell this stranger about a UFO sighting. She had come too far and worked too hard to throw away her career that easily. She knew what would happen if she dared to open her mouth about something like that: endless psych referrals and a quick discharge.
Dr. Felipe stepped back and studied her face. “Hmm. I don’t see anything here, but let’s just get a CT scan to make sure there’s nothing going on in your brain that we need to worry about.”
She was going to make a smart-ass comment, but it was labored and lame so she dropped it. Danitra was surprised by how incredibly fatigued she felt. Instead, she only said, “Okay.”
The doctor smiled. “Okay, then. Hold tight for a minute.”
She left, and Danitra sat listlessly on the exam table. A few minutes later, there was a soft knock on the door, and then Lt. Col. Shaw came in. His eyes were narrowed, but he didn’t look entirely hostile. He looked more like a man with a huge problem that he didn’t quite know how to solve.
She was pretty sure she knew what that problem was.
“What did you see out there, Hallman?” he asked. “You radioed in that you had a bogey. What did you see?”
There was a tone in his voice that made her wary, so she shrugged and lied. “Nothing, sir. When I came to, I saw that there was a hole in my canopy. I don’t know what caused it. The cabin depressurized and I lost consciousness. The oxygen depletion might have made me hallucinate.”
“So you didn’t see anything?”
Their eyes met. She knew what he wanted her to say, and he was practically pleading with her silently to say it.
“No, sir. Just a flare or a trick of the light.”
Shaw looked endlessly relieved. “Of course. That makes perfect sense.” He nodded. “Right. So we’ll have that canopy looked at to see what happened.”
He was floundering for plausible deniability, so she supplied it. “Parts wear out, sir. Those planes get put through a lot of G-forces. Maybe it was just a weakness in the material that finally wore out.”
Shaw nodded. “I agree. Well… get rested up and back into flying shape, pilot.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked much less tense now than he had when he came in. She could imagine him walking out and meeting with the Men in Black, telling them that she didn’t need to be debriefed or disappeared.
Sh
e wondered what she had caught on camera.
The CT scan failed to show any reasons for concern, so she was released with orders to rest for 48 hours as a precaution. Danitra lived in base housing, staying in one half of a duplex not far from the airfield, and she was happy to return to her little house. Her head was still aching, probably from nearly being suffocated, and she just wanted to go to bed.
She took her hair down out of its regulation bun and let it loose. Her scalp itched badly, and she wondered if there had been something in that yellow gas that disagreed with her skin. Even though she wanted nothing more than to sleep, she took a shower instead, washing away whatever residue might have been left.
Danitra dried off, still thinking about the UFO she knew she’d seen. Every time her neighbor’s kid knocked into the wall, which happened pretty much every five minutes, her first thought was that someone was at her door, ready to take her away. If the Men in Black looked like Will Smith, that would be fine, but she somehow doubted that would be the case. She really didn’t want to meet any government agents today.
There was a sore spot in the middle of her, and with the help of a compact and the mirror on the wall, she got a good look. There was a tiny scab there, almost like a pimple, but irregular in size. It was almost triangular in shape, and when she moved, she felt like something was under her skin. The little wound, or whatever it was, sat between her shoulder blades, just above the level of the chest strap on her bra.
She would probably regret this later, but Danitra managed to reach back and touch the bump with her fingertip. There was definitely something hard there, and she was reminded instantly of the microchips that vets used on dogs and cats. A flash of panic ripped through her, and she sat down on the edge of the tub. The neighbor’s kid banged into the wall again, and she jumped.
“Get it together, girl,” she coached herself. It would be better if she just accepted her own fiction about hallucinating, but she couldn’t.
She had been abducted.
It took some doing, and cost her some time and a little bit of blood, but she managed to dig the chip out of her back with her fingernail. It had been a bit like taking out a sliver, and now that it had been worked free, she examined it.
It was silver, shaped like a grain of rice, and she could see tiny markings around the edges. She expected numbers or some kind of code, but there were only three little symbols, things she’d never seen before.
She didn’t know what to do with it. She couldn’t show it to anybody she knew. She certainly wasn’t going to give it to her commanding officer. Danitra decided to save it until she knew her next step. She got a shot glass from her kitchen and filled it with rubbing alcohol, then dumped the little chip inside. It floated in the middle of the liquid, not sinking all the way and not rising to the top. Confounded and trying her best not to freak out, she put the glass in the medicine cabinet.
Her bedroom was dark and her pillow was calling. Danitra wrapped her hair in a silk scarf and went to bed for some much-needed sleep.
When she finally rose in the morning, she felt even more tired than she had the night before. Her bed was a disaster, with the covers kicked off the mattress and in a confused jumble at her feet. The silk scarf she had worn to bed was completely missing, and she felt achy in all of her limbs, like she had run a marathon.
Her mouth was dry and tasted like something out of a bilge tank, so she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. In the mirror, her face looked pale and ashy, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She thought the morning couldn’t get any worse until she opened the medicine cabinet to grab some ibuprofen and found that the shot glass, and the chip it contained, were gone.
Danitra froze. Either she had imagined the entire chip and finding it in her back, or someone had broken into her house while she was sleeping. Neither was a very comforting option. She checked her back in the mirror, and there was no sore or scab from her impromptu self-dechipping. She stared at her smooth, undisturbed skin in mute consternation.
She really had been imagining it all. The chip and the UFO… they really were the result of whatever had happened to her head when she’d lost consciousness. Either that, or she was finally going crazy.
Before she killed herself, Danitra’s mother had gone insane. She’d spend hours locked in the attic of their house in Taos with a rifle in her lap, hours when she’d force Danitra to hide with her in the stifling heat. She went on at length about aliens and UFOs and how they were coming to take them both, or kill them both, depending on the day. As the years went on, she became more and more delusional, full of conspiracy theories and convinced that every bright light in the sky was an alien ship. Finally, when Danitra was seven, she’d hanged herself in the garage for her daughter to find.
She’d always feared going down that same twisted road. It was part of why she’d gone into the military - the regimented life would keep her on the straight and narrow, she thought, and protect her from the worst of her mother’s insanity. She didn’t know if those sorts of delusions were hereditary or not, so she watched herself for signs all the time. Now those signs had come, and she didn’t know what to do.
Her Aunt Kitty - Catherine Hallman, her father’s aunt - had raised her after her mother’s death, and until last year, Danitra could turn to her with her fears. Aunt Kitty was gone now, and she had nobody who understood her fear of going crazy.
And now she was seeing UFOs, too.
She tried to spend the day resting, as the doctors had told her to do. She would be much happier if she could return to duty, where things made sense. She resisted the urge to go running, since she wasn’t supposed to pursue any physical training, and wandered aimlessly around her house. Danitra waited for the phone ring, expecting to be ordered back for debriefing, but the call never came. Instead she found herself watching direct-to-cable action movies in her USAF sweats until she fell asleep on the couch.
After hours of sleep, a flickering light pricked her awake, and she reached for the remote. The light remained even after she turned off the TV, and she sat up, concerned. Brilliant light streamed in through every window, flooding her living room with blue-white illumination. She heard a droning sound that made the glass panes rattle, and her head, still aching from the day before, pounded as if it was being destroyed from the inside. She gripped the sides of her skull and rose from the couch.
She went to the window to try to see what was happening, but before she reached it, a black shadow passed by, silhouetted through the drawn curtain. She ran to her gun locker and grabbed a pistol.
The door opened, and the shape of a tall man filled the opening, backlit by the brilliant glow behind him to the point where he was featureless. Whoever he was, he was a big target, and she didn’t intend to miss. She fired, aiming for his chest.
The world stopped moving at regular speed. Everything slowed down until she was watching the bullet as it crossed the room. She could make out the spin of the projectile as it flew, and she was filled with a surreal feeling of detachment. The bullet struck the invader in the chest but fell away, harmless.
Someone grabbed her from behind, and before she could react, something cold pressed against her neck, and she was out.
Chapter 2
She woke slowly, wincing at the worst pounding headache she’d ever had. Her body felt heavy, and even though her eyes were closed, Danitra could tell that the room she was in was far too bright.
“Your pain will pass in time,” said a man. His voice was deep and thick like honey, and she could tell from the sound that he was standing beside her. “Breathe deeply.”
Danitra opened her eyes. She was lying on a medical bed, still in her sweats, with a clear plastic tent covering her like a hazmat drape. The man beside her was dark-skinned, with close-cropped black hair and a straight nose. His generous mouth was soft, and his body looked muscular and fit. He was clad in a black jumpsuit that fit him closely, and in other circumstances, she would have found him attractive. Everythin
g about him looked human, except for his eyes. They had no pupils and no irises, and they were glowing an unearthly shade of electric blue.
She had never expected an alien to be so beautiful.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“Breathe deeply. Then we’ll talk.”
He had a strange accent, almost English, almost French. She wondered where he had learned to speak her language.
Another alien came into the room. He looked much like the first, but he was slightly taller, his nose somewhat wider, and his glowing eyes were green. He spoke to the first alien, and she almost understood what they were saying. Their language was made of round vowels, hums and clicks, and it was strangely beautiful. The first replied to him, and the newcomer went to a wall that was equipped with closed compartments. He retrieved something and put it in his ear, then adjusted it. It was like watching her Aunt Kitty turn down her hearing aid.
When he was satisfied with his ear piece, he walked toward her.
“How do you feel?” he asked. His voice wasn’t as deep as his companion’s, but it was just as smooth.
Her voice was scratchy when she replied. “I want out of here.”
She started to sit up, but her head swam so fiercely that she had to lie down again. She would have face-planted into the tent if she’d continued to sit up, anyway.
“Breathe deeply,” the first alien coached her again.
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