The Genetic Imperative

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  “Sir, your face. Let me put this on that burn,” the tech said.

  The words ‘Burn Cream’ were written on the tube in large black letters. The General allowed his subordinate to tend his injury. It appeared his right cheek was badly sunburned, just below his right eye socket to the edge of his jaw. He felt the burn on the side of his neck and even the collarbone that was covered by his uniform. He gave the man a curt nod. It was difficult to allow, but he figured it to be a display of good leadership. He was a soldier among soldiers. He would have tended any of their wounds as well. It was about the small things. The man finished quickly and sat down to work without delay.

  The rest of the technicians were already settling back to their laptops. Communication was still up. The chatter seemed to pick up just about where it left off.

  “Well, this is a new scenario to cover up. Put your thinking caps on, gentlemen. It’s time to earn those above-top-secret, international tax dollars,” the senior technician stated matter-of-factly.

  “Good work, gentlemen. I’ll leave you to it,” the general said on his way out the door.

  There was a new heat to the desert that was like walking past an open oven. Only this oven was the entire desert over his left shoulder. The hovering object was still almost too bright to view directly, but he couldn’t help glance that way. The object turned from bright white to slightly blue. The blue hue crept in around the edges, but the center was still bright white. A fair amount of dust and sand was still settling. The air was streaked and hazy with it for at least half a kilometer.

  The trailer resembled like a building in a cartoon shanty town. A giant had twisted it by pinching either end with thumb and forefinger. The corner posts were bent so that the wall facing the object was concave while the rear wall was convex. The door was open because it couldn’t be closed and someone had placed a fan in the doorway. At least the power was still on.

  The General hauled himself through the doorway. The wooden stairs were missing and nowhere to be seen. He calmly and carefully replaced the fan when he stepped into the trailer and surveyed the scene. Papers littered the floor. Windows were blown out. Soldiers worked their consoles with bits of window frame and glass still on the desks beside them.

  Chase followed the direction of some bloody footprints across some of the papers and the carpet to a young woman with a scalp wound. She was being tended to by a colleague. She seemed impatient and tried to wave him away, but he was persistent. He finally managed to get a quick bandage on her, and they both hurried back to their posts. Chase found Major Spivey in an urgent huddle with a ranking soldier.

  The blown-out windows bothered him. It was a minor miracle there were no eye injuries, but there were some inevitable scalp wounds. Quite a few soldiers had bandages and band aids affixed to heads and faces. The team was too busy to notice the General, so he stood and waited while they did their work.

  The spacecraft out in the desert began to pulse and grew dimmer, but was still dazzling. Its heat came to them on a light breeze through the broken windows. Chase hoped it dimmed by sunset, or they’d have a lot of trouble explaining the glow in the desert. Luminosity like that could easily be seen from the nearest city and especially the highway which could not remain closed forever.

  Major Spivey finally noticed the General and turned. He was about to offer a salute, but the general made a gesture with his head telling him not to.

  “My team is OK. How is your staff?”

  “Thank you for asking, Major,” the General replied.

  The General took note of Major Spivey’s concern for staff. He wasn’t a callous man, but the Major’s focus on the intellectual often precluded his concern for the physical. The General often worried that this trait might get their soldiers killed. Today, Major Spivey expanded his focus, and that was good to see.

  “They are shaken but holding. Maybe we should all be in the bunkers next time,” the General said.

  Chase liked to have his staff separate from the main team during operations, especially incursions. Major Spivey needed the trailer for all his computers, communication equipment, and instruments. These events were a physics field day for him. He usually went AWOL for a week and holed up with the data. Chase gave him leave after the fact.

  The general liked to keep an eye on things without getting in the way of the people who did the heavy lifting. As an enlisted man, he always found Generals distracting, so he learned to keep a low profile. He decided that next time, it would be the bunkers. Spivey would have to find somewhere else to house his gear. The General didn’t want to see more injury.

  Major Spivey shook his head. “Maybe, but this is unprecedented. There has never been the need.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “Well, I think the bright light out there is the remainder of the photon envelope. Normally that is dissipated during exit from the corona. It came in so fast that essentially, it’s still in translation.

  We are seeing the translation media or, at least, evidence of it. From our perspective, the ship itself is probably still at the origin point, or possibly somewhere in between. We will be able to tell soon. The blink drive is shut down, of course, that’s obvious because, ah, North America is not on fire.”

  The general just raised his eyebrows and whistled. The major continued.

  “Rads are quite a bit above normal, mostly X-rays, but still relatively safe. It will be a few hours until the craft is safe to approach. It turned the desert to glass in about a hundred-meter radius. No contact yet from the passengers.

  Deniability is at an all-time low. Reports are coming in from the Arctic Circle through Canada and about one-quarter of North America and spreading fast. People think it’s a meteor and well, they’re kind of right. Reports of daylight aurora all along the trajectory. That’s going to be the hardest to explain away. I can’t even explain that right now so . . .

  The most accurate reports are being intercepted and diverted now. We should have a cover story emerging here in a little while. We’re really winging it on this one. The good news is that it was moving way too fast. I can’t imagine an instrument that could have snapped a good picture of the craft itself. Whatever images are out there will just look like blurry streaks of light.”

  The General nodded his head, outwardly displaying calm confidence while inside reeling from the fact that the group had a colossal clusterfuck on their hands. The General didn’t want to undermine his Major with the comment, but it was precisely the things they couldn’t imagine that would bite them in the collective ass.

  This single incident could give them more exposure than all the hundreds of scheduled incursions combined. And in the next staff meeting, this event would indeed be moved from the ‘incursion’ to the ‘incident’ column. This was shaping up to be a very hard day. Ray better have a good reason for pulling this stunt, the General thought. On the other hand, he hoped the reason wasn’t good. Either way, this visit meant trouble quite literally on a galactic scale.

  “Well, your team is on it, Major. This is what we train for,” the General said, making sure he was loud enough to have the proper impact.

  “Please relieve parts of your group as you see fit. We will be here awhile, so start duty rotation. Carry on.”

  Back inside the bunker, his men appeared ragged already. That’s why the General wheeled in a fresh cooler of drinks. He’d seen several coolers tucked under the trailer and helped himself to this one. Things were too intense. The soldiers needed to relax, and they were making themselves crazy going over the same information. The General needed their highest efficiency for the next steps, so he decided to break the tension before driving them hard to the task.

  “OK!” the general said, throwing open the door. “Take five. Grab some cold drinks. You fuckers look rode hard and hung wet. Soft drinks here.”

  Nobody moved. The General flushed.

  “God damn it! I said take five and grab a drink!” The General shouted. “You just faced the dea
dly unknown; now you’re too shy to have a soft drink in front of a general? You want me to leave?”

  “Thank you, General Breslin,” the ranking officer, a Lieutenant, broke the silence.

  The Lieutenant motioned his men to the cooler. Chase studied him and noted that he had his men go first. A good leader, Chase thought. The General let them settle into their drinks, and he assessed them. Some chose water, others sugary sodas. The General indulged in a randomly selected orange soda. The sting from the sunburn, or flash burn, or photon envelope, whatever the hell stung him, asserted itself further. It was a safe bet they were in for a few more surprises.

  The day wore on into the evening. The spacecraft still glowed, but they were all grateful for the greatly diminished light. The team estimated the light should not be detectable with the naked eye beyond this section of the range. If witnessed, the light would resemble floodlights from some regular nighttime operation. Of more concern was the fact that there was still no contact from within the craft. There was some indication that communication was happening between the ship and the sun and an area of the solar system in the neighborhood of Venus. Spivey determined by detecting unusual x-ray emissions from the craft beyond the initial flood of those rays earlier in the day.

  Another problem for General Breslin were the persistent and increasingly aggressive messages from the base commander, General Kirkpatrick. The Unit still had not released the range to normal operations and Chase simply didn’t have time to address Kirkpatrick’s concerns. He and his team were frantic in their efforts to shape this unprecedented event into something that would look to the world like an unusual, non-extraterrestrial event. The going was tough in that regard. By ten-o’clock the next morning, Kirkpatrick’s messages became too much to ignore. Breslin took three security soldiers from his Unit to meet Kirkpatrick on base.

  General Kirkpatrick was extremely angry. His coveted Army Command of the White Sands Missile Range was taken from him for the second day by some cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Not only that but their fuckup out in the desert seemed to be caused by a solar flare. Whatever classified device they claimed to be working with was somehow taken out by a little unexpected sunshine. Now the media was crawling all over his office asking whether the satellite crash at White Sands truly was a satellite or whether it was some secret missile or aircraft test. Rumors were everywhere. His office never released any information about any satellite crash or anything else. Some yahoos were even asking about UFOs. The last thing General Fitzpatrick needed was a bunch of hippie new age dingbats camping out in the desert waiting for little green men. General Kirkpatrick explained all to that geriatric Marine, who stood staring and squinty-eyed on his office carpet.

  Kirkpatrick demanded that General Breslin come to his office immediately to discuss the matter. The Army General couldn’t go to see Breslin because his own base was being secured by Breslin’s men. Members of base security had weapons brandished at them when they tried to deliver Kirkpatrick’s request directly to Breslin as ordered. The final straw that broke the camel’s back was when Breslin had the audacity to come to his office with three fully armed security guards wearing black uniforms and black insignia that nobody on base could recognize. The shouting started when General Breslin informed him in an even tone that the security was protocol for his Unit and his operation. Breslin had the audacity to apologize for General Kirkpatrick’s “inconvenience.” This was as if being essentially stripped of command was a trivial thing.

  After a solid three minutes of his ranting, Kirkpatrick’s voice faded away in General Breslin’s ears. Sergeant Nichols was worried. General Breslin was vaguely aware of that worried expression as his blood rushed warmly up his neck and into his face and forehead. His body was perfectly still, but he felt like a human thermometer. In fact, this is precisely what sergeant Nichols saw him to be; a human thermometer. As the blood was boiling up in into General Breslin’s head, turning him the color of a new bruise from the neck up. A corresponding amount of blood drained from Nichols' face. He understood that his own deep brown skin was, as he grandmother used to phrase it, “looking ashy.”

  Nichols had seen many deals go sideways in very bad ways from his formative years on the violent streets of Southeast Washington, D.C., through his three tours of duty with the Army Military Police in Afghanistan (once) and Iraq (twice.) He’d seen truly tough men and wild dogs lose it in ways most people wouldn’t dream possible. Sergeant Nichols realized that General Breslin was a badass. Nichols was more than qualified to recognize a badass. This man was about to lose it, and may God help anyone in the line of fire. It wasn’t the authority he wielded that made the General so formidable, but the signs of uncharted potential in the man’s eyes. As Nichols stood there as a mute witness, and he could almost taste the pending badness.

  From General Breslin’s perspective, rising anger rendered the world as a too-bright place filled with objects that had glowing white halos. The General’s new world was filled with a high-pitched whine that may or may not have been another man’s voice. Nichols glanced at the other two Unit security soldiers who were flanking the door. “Be ready,” his eyes said. Kirkpatrick may have cited those men in umbrage during the early salvos of a rant that was growing less coherent with every word. Nichols wasn’t sure. He was too busy calculating the angles and waiting for the obligatory order that would most likely violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Nichols made a small twitching motion with his head. His subordinates inched closer to Kirkpatrick. It was coming.

  “Bag and cuff the General,” came the low grumble of an order delivered through grinding teeth.

  Kirkpatrick finally stopped shouting. Nichols didn’t have time to suss out whether Kirkpatrick was angry or shocked beyond words at the order before the black bag was slipped over his head and his arms were being wrenched behind his back and cuffed. A single second just wasn’t enough time to interpret the man’s internal motivation for that sudden silence. Unit security was trained for speed and efficiency, not speculation.

  Breslin moved over to Nichols and peeled up the tab on one of the utility pockets of the security officer’s many-pocketed vest. He deftly slipped out the tranquilizer epi-pen and popped off its cap with his thumb. A savage jab to Kirkpatrick’s shoulder brought the violent struggling and muffled sounds of terror to an instant halt. The guards caught the general by his cuffed arms as he fell forward. Breslin took the time to check the unconscious man’s pulse with his index and middle fingers against the carotid artery.

  “Well, he took the tranq OK. Pulse is strong and even. Haven’t decided whether I’m disappointed with that or not. But hey, let’s get this asshole out to the desert and show him a flying saucer, shall we?” the General said.

  Tranquilizers were a substantial portion of the security team’s standard load-out. Unstable elements of an incursion scene needed to be dealt with quickly and humanely. They were a risky tool, though. People had widely variable reactions to powerful, fast-acting sedatives.

  “Get my jeep,” The General ordered.

  Sergeant Nichols thought it was very cool that the old General still called Humvees ‘jeeps.’ Old school all the way, Nichols thought as he flicked his index finger at Corporal Burns, who instantly bolted from the room to comply. The compact, broad-shouldered, Nichols stifled a wild, panic-laugh as he burst through Kirkpatrick’s private office doors and into the reception area.

  Corporal Mackey strolled out behind him with the General Kirkpatrick slung over his shoulder just as casually as someone might walk to kitchen duty with a sack of potatoes. The large, blond, farm-boy of a man stared straight ahead pretending that he did things like this every single day. In truth, he was also in near-panic mode. He was involved in the kidnapping of a brigadier Army General. This couldn’t be good for his career. Corporal Burns had already disappeared down the hallway on his way to fetch transport. General Breslin brought up the rear. There was no resistance. Nobody said a damn word. People stopped in the hallways
and stared.

  A base commander was being trundled out of his command unconscious; his hands cuffed behind his back and a black bag over his head. The whole show was met with nothing more than a few shocked faces and mostly raised eyebrows. General Breslin took this as cosmic sanction and confirmation of his hunch that General Kirkpatrick was indeed an asshole. He plied the halls, shoulders back, chin up and with supreme confidence in his decision.

  “Careful now Nichols, the man’s already a reviled jackass, let’s not compound his chronic injury with simple bruises,” the general said, as engaged in the awkward work of installing an unconscious man into a Humvee.

  Nichols marveled at the General’s erudition of the insane and the profane. He thought the man a mad genius. The corporals still were too shocked to laugh, but Nichols allowed himself a wry smile.

  “Don’t look so gloomy boys. You don’t have to wear real name tags, and your post gives you the right to shoot a general for the mission if you have to. Don’t get any ideas, though, your asses still belong to me,” the General said, as he slammed the Humvee door. “Drive! Let’s go!”

  The ride out to the landing site took about forty minutes and crossed nearly fifty kilometers of desert. The site was hidden from line-of-sight surveillance by rolling dunes. The range was vast. Kirkpatrick began to stir about halfway through. He began to protest, and Breslin removed a cigar tube from his inside breast pocket and pressed it firmly behind Kirkpatrick’s ear. He held it there, and Kirkpatrick grew suddenly silent.

  “Just sit there, shut up and listen up. I’m giving you more than your fair share of my time to show you why I need your base. You are about to see some things that you’re not going to understand, and I honestly do not give a fuck. I don’t expect you to get it because you’re a dumb son-of-a-bitch. Your job is to accept what you see. That’s all I need from you.