Midnight Zone: a Cade Rearden Thriller

by JK Franks

  Cade studied the almost confusing mix of imagery; it was a scene of a lush tropical valley with a small river flowing past, yet all the plants appeared off. Also, the sky seemed somehow wrong. The colors were not of an Earth sky. What was most evident, though, was that there was an unmistakable image of a craft sitting along the water’s edge. Not an ancient watercraft, but something Cade could only relate to as a spacecraft…a flying saucer. He looked at the girl. She glanced at the artwork but then stared off into the distance. Her apparent disinterest in what she’d been so willing to kill for sent another stab of rage through Cade’s brain. He wanted to shove her to the ground, to stomp her into some semblance of atonement for the tragedy she’d caused. Still, he, too, had been a captive, a prisoner for doing the same awful job she had. How had he been treated? The human portion of his soul forbade him from doing more to the one calling herself Steiger.

  Absently, Cade looked back at the picture, ignoring the words that Alan was saying. It was so intricate and involved; he felt that if he stared at a single spot it might tell an entire story. The more he looked, the more details seemed to emerge.

  “You notice how the colors are…well, off?” Alan said. “That’s not due to the paint fading. In fact, it’s not paint at all, but something chemically done to the rock itself. No idea what, but it’s so freaking old. Also, look at this.” Alan took his SmartCom and held it up so the main camera faced a seemingly blank spot on the image. He then triggered it to start zooming in slowly. Cade watched in amazement as more and different images and scenes unfolded as the camera zoomed in smaller and smaller. “Yeah, some of it is at the very microscopic level. And the symbols, Dee says they don’t match any recorded language. A few are kinda similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, like that one there could almost be an Eye of Horus, but most have never been recorded anywhere before.”

  Cade was amazed, but he had to keep reminding himself they were not the first humans to see this place other than the ones who painted it. Others, probably military scientists, had been here. Someone in the government, maybe many governments, knew. That triggered a thought. “Dee, are there any sensors, cameras, or other detection devices in this cavern?” If this was the equivalent of an international version of Area 51, there almost certainly was a security system.

  “None that I am detecting, Nomad. They may not be active if they are here.”

  That made sense to him. The place seemed long forgotten. Maybe it was truly off limits to everyone now. Still, someone knew, someone sent Steiger after them. Maybe they rely on active instead of passive security.

  “Alan, can you capture all this in the next few hours? We’ll need to head out to the LZ to meet our ride.”

  “No way, Cap. Not at a level to give us anything more than the largest image. I already asked my Dee to calculate the time needed just for the pictures we can see from here. She guessed at least thirty days.” He took a few steps back from the UFO image. “Something else you need to see down here on this one.”

  Cade pulled the increasingly less willing Schatten with him to the side of Alan. He heard an involuntary gasp from his captive and saw she was staring at a painting of…something, what turned out to be some sort of monster, maybe a dinosaur. A longish head that seemed to end abruptly in an angry mouth with a crown of writhing tentacles. Several larger tentacles sprouted from what could have been tiny wings, or maybe fins. The secondary tentacles were larger and ending in a sort of curved claw. An eerie blue light seemed to emanate from the animal’s belly. The artist had done an excellent job of capturing the terrifying nature of the beast. In the scene, it was chasing some smaller aquatic animal that looked from the front a bit like a scaly pig with fins with a rear section more like an otter. The sea monster looked like something straight out of a nightmare. “You recognize this? You’ve seen this picture before?” he asked Steiger. He had to admit something about the image was familiar. Perhaps a movie monster or something.

  The girl shook her head but kept staring at the picture. Her mouth formed silent words. His Dee gave a probable translation in text, “Der Saraph.” Unlike the others in the carved rock space, this scene had her full attention.

  Alan pointed to a series of small recesses nearby. “Can’t figure out what these were for. Several of the scenes with plants or animals have these cutouts alongside. Anyway, several more like these.”

  “Alan, will you get a close-up image of that creature?”

  That was Doris, actually. Cade had barely heard from her since leaving Georgia.

  “Yeah, sure.” Alan picked up the BallCam and began scanning the image in even higher resolution than his phone.

  “Interested in sea monsters on alien worlds now, Doris?” Cade asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “You guys need to get back here; we have some new developments.”

  51

  Cade rubbed the wound on the back of his neck, the dressing had sealed it, numbed the pain, and was already beginning to stitch together with the old skin to seal the deep cut. The Shadow watched him with eyes that seemed dead. “I’m going to take care of your wound, okay?” he said.

  She shrugged but continued to stare. They were sitting on the small ledge, just outside the entrance to the cavern. Alan was inside packing up the gear, although he had made a drone rig for the BallCam that was going to stay here and keep scanning the images. Dee would program it to fly out of the small entrance and out to sea once it was done.

  The girl winced as Cade rolled up the bit of thick tunic and removed the blood-clotting bandage. Alan had done an initial treatment on her, deciding that she wouldn’t die. Cade glanced up into Steiger’s eyes, just catching a look before she glanced away. “I’m going to take a guess here. You’ve never failed on a mission before, have you?” She made no sound but stiffened slightly at the remark. He could feel the strength radiating off of her. She was small, dainty even, but in that compact shell was so much energy and, he was pretty sure, so much hate. “What are you mad at?” he asked as he sprayed the wound treatment over the fiery red line. Instantly, the cut disappeared beneath the numbing layer of liquid bandage. “It’s not directed at us, I know that. You wanted to kill us…did kill us,” he corrected. “That was not the rage I feel in you, though. That was business. The anger is something much deeper, much more primal.”

  Judah was nearby, already restacking the stones and camouflage to re-hide the opening. “Why are you wasting your time, Captain? She’s a trained killer, she has no soul.”

  “I’m a trained killer, too, Judah, but I do have a soul…probably several of them.” The Aussie had been as reliable as anyone Cade had ever worked with. He’d recovered the girl’s battle kit down in the ravines and brought it all back. He had taken out the thicker polar-rated parka, which Steiger now wore. Also in the bag, was a satellite phone which Doris was even now attempting to access. In addition, an impressive assortment of knives, poison, and perhaps the most unique makeup kit Cade had ever seen. Cade, like every Ranger, had learned how to apply face paint to help hide the lines of the face and blend in with surroundings. People found it strange that they carried a makeup bag on nearly every mission. You learned quickly the shit could save your life. Cade gently touched the now sealed wound. “That better?”

  The girl glanced down, clearly confused at the spray and at the man’s kindness. Failure meant death. Even in her training, to fail at an exercise always meant pain, punishment, and yes…even death to many. She gave a slow nod, “Thank you.”

  “You’re confused, you think I’m tricking you.” He turned around putting his back to her, then peeled his Battlesuit down off his shoulders. She stared at a back covered with wounds and deep ugly scars. “I was captured for doing my job. It didn’t go well.” He paused, then added, ”For them or me. Steiger, we are in an ugly business, and while I’m not an assassin, I’ve known some. We called them snipers. Pretty much the same in my book. They were killers. That didn’t mean they enjoyed it—that didn’t mean they were bad peop
le. They simply had a job to do.” Coming to a bit of an understanding of the conflicting emotions raging inside, he added, “I’m willing to make that same assumption about you. You are an enemy combatant and will be treated fairly, even better, if you choose to cooperate with us. You can start by telling us about that image. What does that creature mean to you?”

  Her eyes never left his face, but she nodded slowly. The difference was, she did enjoy what she did. Still, the man had every reason to kill her, at least make her suffer for killing his man. This captain had been angry, but now he was forcing himself to not be. He’d even covered her when the cold of outside made her shiver. Yes, he was unlike any foe she had yet faced. She shook her head, she had failed, yes. But she could not tell him about the creature.

  Several hours later, an exhausted Judah climbed into his modified Hummer. The MARs-1transport had been nearly buried in a snow drift blown in by the winds. He’d left his friends as they boarded the sleek, black plane that had skied to a stop on the ice field. The same stretch the scientists had disappeared from so many years earlier. He didn’t know much about the Americans, but he liked them, they were straight shooters. But he knew where his home was, even though the captain had made some not so subtle inquiries about joining them. He was too old for that; his whole life had been an adventure. Now he was tired, almost ready to go back home to Port Douglas in Queensland.

  He shook he head, laughing at his own joke. He couldn’t go home; he could never go back home. Never see the idyllic harbor full of sailboats on a summer day. He’d done well hiding out down here, staying off the radar, and that was all he wanted, just to stay out of the line of sight. Plus, the Yanks had given him back his vehicles. Free, no refund or anything. The other one would be waiting for him at the camp. Before they left, Cade asked if he was going to tell anybody what he saw. Honestly, Judah had not seen much, nor had he wanted to. He knew others had seen this place, at least some of it. Even more were aware of its existence. Bad shit tended to happen to those people. They wound up dead or disappeared. He had no real desire for either of those.

  Also, he wanted to get as far away from that girl as possible. Judah couldn’t understand why they kept her alive, much less conscious. Rearden had said so she could help carry McTee back to the ice field. Whatever the reason, he hadn’t liked being around her. She was so fucking scary. He'd never seen anybody like her. She was more than an assassin. She was terrifying. She was simply a killer. You could see it in her eyes. A damage that ran to her core. Some kind of ancient hatred that must reach to the very depths of her soul…if she still possessed one. Somehow, he knew she was a biological machine driven to kill, programmed basically like a weapon of war. She, and probably others like her, were the reason the hole in the ice had stayed a myth for so long. He would do nothing to change that.

  Ninety minutes later, aboard the Nighthawk jet heading back toward The Cove, an injured, weary, and very pissed-off Cade was not responding well to his initial incident debriefing. “What's a fucking Saraph? I just don't get it, Doris. Tell me.”

  “Cade, Saraphim are the highest order of the hierarchy of angels. A six-winged divine being only below God in several religions.”

  “So, now we are battling God and demons, Doris…come on! That was no angel, it had no wings. Maybe it was a cryptid or something, you know, a throwback to the time of dinosaurs.” Cade was impressed he even knew the word for unusual creatures that were thought to be extinct biological anomalies. Then he realized it was probably because of ReLoad.

  “Cade, historically, the Saraphs have been a bit badass. These are not chubby flying babies with harps and cupid bows. They are terrifying and said to use purifying fire as one of their weapons to cleanse evil.

  “Okay, but it's not an angel, no wings…it's a painting of a fucking sea monster. It's a goddamn dragon, or dinosaur, or something. Something out of some freak’s Cthulian fucking nightmare. "Besides, what does this have to do with anything today? And why did it scare the shit out of her?”

  Cade was on the Nighthawk alongside Alan. The other two members of the team, Alexandria and Alias, sat farther back. Maratelli had been flown back for treatment several days earlier, and McTee’s body was stowed in the cargo hold.

  It had been difficult leaving the mountaintop, not just due to the injured and the transporting of Tee’s body. Just knowing all that was up there. Alan even thought he might have found an access to another passage as time was running out. Thankfully, the data was still coming in from the remarkable little BallCam, and thanks to its nearly unlimited Pica power supply, it would for as long as needed.

  Steiger was sedated and shackled to the built-in receptacles along a cushioned bench. Cade had made her help carry the body of the man she killed through the snaking warren of crevasses and ravines along the ice valley’s floor. The drones had mapped all of them during the time they’d been inside, and it cut the trip time by two-thirds. Still, it had been a struggle for all of them. More than once, he saw the assassin seem to be crying. He didn’t want to feel any measure of sympathy for her, but he sensed the brokenness within the tiny warrior. Perhaps that could have been the path he went down had he not enlisted. He stared at the sleeping figure, almost forgetting that Doris was speaking in his ear.

  “Okay, we've done the research. We now know that the rock making up that mountain top is a truly ancient piece of the Earth's crust.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a mountain.”

  Alan shook his head. He’d been listening in, also curious as to what she’d found. “No, actually, mountains are often very young rock. They get worn down relatively quickly in geologic time scales. They're really not that many places around the planet like this. A few spots up in Canada have been dated back to over four billion years, and that’s almost as old as Earth itself. Some in Scotland, a few in Africa, lots in Australia. But most of the planet’s crust tends to only stay above ground for a limited number of years, say a billion years or so. And, yeah, billion-year-old dirt is old, but in the scale of the universe, not so much. In geologic terms, most of our planet is still a youngster.”

  “The rock samples near the cave with the images were at least 3.5 billion years old,” said Doris.

  “What the hell would that mean? No humans were around 2 billion years ago, that was…” Alan thought briefly. “That was even before dinosaurs.”

  Doris went on, “Yes, it was. And that's what's troubling. That is not to say the image was that old. We have no reliable way of dating that image. Not yet, at least. But what we can date is the chamber.”

  “It wasn’t natural?” Alan asked.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean it wasn’t natural?” Cade asked. “It wasn't like erosion or a gas pocket when the lava formed or something?”

  “No, that area isn’t geologically active like that. This is basically classic metamorphic rock, that was pushed to the surface, billions of years ago. That chamber was excavated. It was literally hewn out of the raw stone.”

  Cade thought for a minute, waiting for Ace to try and put the pieces together. What the fuck? He started to speak, but stopped, several times. “Okay, Doris, the cavern was carved out of the stone on this three billion-year-old mountain top, which I suppose three billion years ago wasn't even a mountain, it probably could have been beachfront property back then. But how old is the chamber?”

  “Based on the preliminary samples, we would have to date it at just under 2 billion years old.”

  He let that thought hang in the air. Looking at Alan, the boy seemed just as confused. That sentence contained a lot of information that neither seemed capable of processing. That almost unimaginable timescale, a timescale that predated any life on Earth, not just intelligent life. “So that means that whoever or whatever carved that chamber and left those images…

  they weren’t human, were they, Doris? They were aliens.”

  52

  “It is a genuine possibility, Cade,” Doris answered.


  “Aliens…more aliens, ancient aliens.”

  “It would seem unlikely that an advanced alien species would resort to a very human style artwork to communicate,” Doris continued. “Especially if it was that long before your human’s ancestors had crawled out of their burrows. I think any conclusion at this point is likely to be premature and incorrect. Whoever the artist was, they've seen some sort of alien planet and alien life. I think that's a natural conclusion. It's at least the direction I'm leaning.”

  “What are your thoughts, big guy?” Cade asked, looking over at Alan.

  “I don’t know, that wasn’t what I was thinking we would find back there…not sure what I expected, but not artwork.”

  Cade nodded. He made eye contact with Alex a few rows back. She nodded politely but sat with her hands in her lap. As the team’s medic, she had checked all of them and the prisoner when they boarded. Then she’d filled him in on Maratelli’s condition and offered some polite and even humorous words about McTee. Cade still had to deal with the loss, he knew that. He just wasn’t good at that; he was really hoping Gus or one of the others might take over for that. His own body felt like it might shut down at any moment. The hike out of the valley, the cold, his injuries, all seemed to have taken a toll. He needed rest and knew he was no longer mission capable. The anger, the sadness, and now the confusion over what they had found—it was all just too much.

  He sighed, “Alan, I owe you my life. Thank you doesn’t really fucking cut it but…thank you.”

  Alan started to speak, but Cade stopped him. “I know what you’re going to say, but you’re wrong. It was not what anyone would have done, it wasn’t just the first thing you thought of. It was brave, it was smart, and it was heroic. We…I have to stop thinking of you guys as kids. I’ve seen how quick your minds are but also how capable you are in so many other ways. I’m sure your mom wouldn’t approve of your actions, but I sure as hell do.” He pulled the young man over in a tight hug and Cade saw the tears in the boy’s eyes. His were flowing as well.