by Dan Henk
A PERMUTED PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-61868-467-7
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-466-0
Black Seas of Infinity copyright © 2015
by Daniel Henk
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Daniel Henk
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
To Monica Henk. My late wife who always believed in me.
Acknowledgments
Cover painting and interior illustrations by Dan Henk.
Editorial maestro Karl Monger.
Editor for Permuted Press Matthew Baugh
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
I A LITTLE BACKGROUND
II MY SHIP COMES IN
III MY TAXI DRIVER MOMENT
IV FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA
V HOT PURSUIT
VI AND NOW THE HARD PART
VII UNINVITED GUESTS
VIII A LITTLE SNAG IN THE PLAN
IX TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS
X THE FIRST TASTE OF SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
XI THE LONE STAR STATE
XII EVEN MORE OF THE GREAT STATE OF TEXAS
XIII THE BORDER CLOSES IN
XIV THE TROUBLES WITH ILLEGAL EMIGRATION
XV MEXICO
XVI NEITHER MOUNTAIN NOR RIVER NOR ALL THE KING’S MEN?
XVII GUERILLA’S IN THE MIST
XVIII FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
XIX THE PLOT THICKENS
XX WHAT THEY REALLY WANT
XXI DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
XXII LET’S TRY AGAIN
XXIII BACK WHERE I STARTED
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ILLUSTRATIONS
BURIED IN THE BUNKER
IN THE WOODS
THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE
THE KEY BRIDGE
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
GUERILLAS IN THE MIST
THE RUINS
LOST IN SPACE
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
PROLOGUE
The highway is black. Ebony asphalt made darker by a moonless night. A slight breeze wafts, but there are no signs of life. Trees surround me on all sides. Or maybe they are hills. Hard to tell in the twilight. I think it’s cold out. It’s autumn, and I register the temperature, but I no longer feel its effects.
My whole life I’ve had an agenda. Now that I’ve accomplished it, I don’t know how to start again. I need time to think, time to plan. Everything has been so hectic for so long. Fortunately, for now, much of the world is still wilderness. I can disappear? At least for a while.
I no longer feel a real kinship toward man. Not that I ever did, but now it’s even more striking. I still have to deal with him—he’s at the height of technology on this tiny planet, after all—I just have to figure out how. It’s not as though I can just waltz into some nearby metropolis and get a job. Not without a human face. I look down at my sleeve. It glistens, slick and black. The bloodstains? One more thing to take care of, although realistically, it’s the least of my problems.
CHAPTER I
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
In college, I majored in engineering, with a concentration in robotics. Not because I loved math or engineering, although I did well enough in them. I think what sparked my interest was my love of mythology and science fiction. I devoured everything from comic books and fantasy movies to incredible fiction and art. I always wanted to be immortal, like the heroes and gods I read about. I had the idea of building a robot body. It seems like such a delusional little kid’s fantasy now, but at the time I seriously debated how to transfer my essence into this lifeless machine. I tried to think it through scientifically. Would I, as a cold, electronic system, still experience human emotions and feelings? Would I retain whatever it was that made me a unique individual? I figured I would build it first and iron out the details later. I was that kid that took apart all the electronics in the house. I’d pull open the VCR and then try and figure out how it worked. I even did a ninth grade science project on mechanical prosthetics, thinking I was well on my way. A little more education, some trial-and- error experimentation, and I’d be set. I worked out charts on notebook paper, incorporating everything from parts I could get at Radio Shack to stuff straight out of the movies that I was sure would be invented any day now.
I didn’t think it mattered what I did to my body—smoke, drink, take drugs, whatever. The flesh was but a temporary shell, the best yet to come. Reality reared its ugly head in college, or maybe even earlier. I had rumblings, black thoughts that I tried to shut out with conscious assertions of optimism. But the hard facts eventually overwhelmed me. Technology was just not able to meet the expectations my imagination imposed on it. Besides, even if it could be advanced by leaps and bounds, given private, isolated research with the best of materials, who would fund it? Where was the commercial potential? Who, except for a few decrepit CEOs, really wanted to live forever?
I was floundering, searching for meaning, a goal in life, when the government hired me fresh out of college. They told me they wanted me to build “surveillance droids” for the military—to send into caves looking for militants and that kind of shit. That wasn’t the real reason they hired me, although it wasn’t apparent that first year. They had to check me out first. Then it all came crashing down, and I wasn’t floundering anymore. I was far too fascinated. They had hired me to investigate crashed alien spacecraft! How they thought a degree in robotics transferred to dissecting alien spacecraft is beyond me, but they gave me work, not to mention a new outlook on life. The pay wasn’t great, but that was beside the point because the access to extraterrestrial technology was all that mattered. I was in heaven, a boy lost in a toy store. If it were within my means, I probably would have paid them.
I’d encountered a few conspiracy theories, and they all seemed to center on some secret, shadowy government agenda to breed a master race. That would have been far cooler than the truth. The real scoop, in a sense trumping all the conspiracy theories, was that the government was incompetent. Imagine how it would be if the DMV ran everything. Now imagine there were several DMVs, all suspicious of one another and playing manipulative games to camouflage their mundane objectives. It reminded me of some overwritten science fiction plot from the ’80s, filled with all the drama, strange characters, petty intrigues, and other crazy bullshit that keeps most things from being accomplished in a timely fashion.
As peons in the military complex we were in way over our heads. We were unable to comprehend even the basics of lift and drag, much less the tools that countered or engaged it. And the funny thing is we were the experts! I couldn’t imagine what the government’s grand scheme was. Protect us from attack? Enhance our current understanding of technology? Build the ultimate weapon? I’m not sure there even was a plan. Maybe just having something unexplained was reason enough to create a new agency, demand a budget, and pretend to investigate. The military was involved, at least the air force and army anyway, but they always performed low level grunt work, like guarding facilities, securing crash sites. The NSA signed our checks, but beyond that, who knew? I don’t even think most figureheads knew what we were doing. Or if someone high up—for example, the president—knew, he had no idea what to do with it. We were the black sheep, the necessary embarrassment. We kept toiling away, trying to figure out what these visitors wanted
, why they were coming to what for them must be some backwater planet populated by ignorant natives.
It was impossible to decipher all the barely legible clues. We found several races, each with different languages, and there appeared to be several planets involved. Or they might have all been from the same planet, one with different races, languages, and technologies. Perhaps they were here for observation. It certainly wasn’t about warfare. If they had wanted to wipe us out, they could have done so easily.
The one cliché aspect of the whole “men in black” thing that did prove true was the high level of secrecy. Everyone was under constant surveillance. Our only real friends were one another, if you could call our fucked up working relationships friendships. Everyone was overly nice on the surface, but an undercurrent of tension and suspicion tugged at the corners. And sometimes people vanished. No one really talked about it. We all seemed to assume, or at least I did, that they must have screwed up. Or fucked with the wrong person. Not to mention, whoever disappeared seemed to be acting strangely, all nervous and guarded, right beforehand. At least that was most of the time. Sometimes a perfectly average co-worker simply stopped showing up for work. It didn’t happen that often, but often enough to keep tensions ratcheted. There was a kind of unspoken code of silence. You didn’t know, you didn’t want to know, and you really hoped you wouldn’t be next.
It seemed we answered to imbeciles—square-faced men with high ranks and no brains. One of them might nod and grunt as if he understood your theories and discoveries, but you knew you were talking to a brick wall. It was frustrating. If they couldn’t understand what you did for them, why did they continue to pay you? How long could you go on feeding them horseshit until they pulled the plug on the operation? Or even worse, made you disappear?
Despite the air of tension, the one big advantage the program offered was the fact no one believed in it. Over the years a few scientists left, and some went to the media. Those who did were shunned and labeled as crackpots. A few even came back. Eventually many of them, both those on the outside and those who returned, “mysteriously” disappeared.
If there’s one thing the government is good at it’s making people disappear. The individuals involved might not know the reason, but it doesn’t matter. Someone was just following orders. Anyone anywhere in the US can be tracked, and it’s only getting easier to do.
Most of the labs were eventually shut down. Our department’s popularity waxed and waned, often surging with the advent of a new administration more concerned with social issues than some scientific dead end that never seemed to produce results. Many of the installations became abandoned relics. They continued to be heavily guarded, however, despite the fact they were seldom used.
We reacted to alien technology like cavemen encountering an automobile. We could make some of it work, understand how some of it operated, but we couldn’t put it all together. We could start the car, in a very rudimentary sense, but not build it or even come close to getting our heads around what we were dealing with.
I remember hearing about some scientists who managed to engage what they assumed was a thruster. In the end they managed to destroy the entire compound, themselves along with it. It simply imploded—a bubble of energy, a brilliant flash, and a multilevel complex and a hundred men were instantly reduced to a smooth crater surrounded by a parking lot full of cars. We had no earthly idea what we were doing. It was too exotic, the technology too advanced. We faced one further disadvantage: it wasn’t designed for human use.
The focus on UFOs was cyclical. With every new crash came a burst of activity. Soldiers would be deployed, scientists amassed, and an intense study of the newly found objects would commence. Then followed the debates, the competing theories that could be neither proved nor disproved, and finally a general loss of interest. Things would return to normal, a new item numbered and categorized and filed away in a dusty old warehouse. Parties moved on. Scientific focus shifted.
The government retained a core group of scientists that studied the remains, but overall interest would wane and the extras would be reassigned. I was one of the ones they kept on. The rest weren’t coming up with the answers needed to advance their careers, so they went on to other projects. Little did they know the government wouldn’t let them advance beyond that. It was a dead end, a no man’s land from which you never came back. You couldn’t have someone knowledgeable, intelligent, and in a position of authority. They would be too hard to erase if they spoke out or acted up. But that isn’t why I stayed. I stayed because I was fascinated. This was my childhood fantasy come to life. More than that, I saw its far-reaching potential. Finally, here was the technology to grant me all my dreams. I just had to figure it out—maybe not even how it worked, but at least how to use it, or at least enough of it to build me another body, one that wouldn’t age and decay. Far-fetched, yes, but this was the best shot I had. I would be long dead before our technology caught up with what I wanted, if it ever did. Besides, human regimes and agencies seemed pedestrian compared to this stuff. How could squabbling governments preoccupied with oil prices, trade embargoes, and other fare ever come close to rivaling something this phenomenal? This unknown and intriguing?
CHAPTER II
MY SHIP COMES IN
I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We were using old World War II buildings, buried way back in the woods among the pine trees and supposedly long since abandoned to the ravages of time. A new shipment arrived unpretentiously, as if it were just another workday. I think it came from Nevada. It was an entire ship. It was smallish, mostly intact, and it obviously had come from a mother ship. Elliptical in shape, the surface flat and contoured, it was made of long strips of overlapping tiles. A single cylindrical tube projected from the center and blossomed into a complex latticework of window-like structures. We figured it was some sort of survey craft with weaponry potential. The aircraft was waiting for us in the warehouse hangar when I came in at 08:00. I slowly sipped my coffee, sensing that my whole world was about to change. This was it, the discovery I had always hoped for, but never thought would arrive. The energy in the air was electrifying. I could actually feel the skin on my fingers tingling. Outwardly I was calm, but inside I was jumping for joy. We donned full-body protective suits, broke out the handheld radiation scanners, and wandered inside.
What we encountered was magical—another world. The floor was as smooth as polished bone, and it curved up at the edges, meeting the contoured walls in a gentle slope. The blackened walls were a different texture, metallic, knotted and crisscrossed with cables and support beams that seemed to be melted into the walls beyond. They zigzagged up and onto the ceiling, continuing in a smooth arc as they descended the opposite side. Just past a short tunnel the passage opened up into a circular central chamber, where miniature rock formations jutted out of the floor. Most were topped by a central depression harboring small, glistening mounds that we suspected functioned as buttons. Behind each console was a metallic chair whose design seemed based on some strange new organic geometry. Evidently, there had been a struggle inside. The bodies were tossed haphazardly about, like large, lifeless insects. There were five in total, the pale green skin of their faces glistening above chalk-white jumpsuit collars. Their eyelids were closed over small, beady eyes, the wrinkled faces interrupted by two nose holes and a sliver of a mouth. The one lying closest to the far door bore an injury to its skull, possibly incurred in transit to Earth. An area on the back of its head was caved in, and greenish-yellow pus was seeping out. For a reason I could not name, I doubted the crash of the ship had caused it. I could feel the small hairs on my body standing up. This was as exciting as it was terrifying. Stepping over the body, I proceeded down the hall, which came to an abrupt end at a tunnel in the floor. I surmised that when the ship was functional there was some force that lowered you safely down the hole. Further exploration would require rappelling gear, not to mention a firearm, just in case whatever had killed that alien was lurking som
ewhere in the depths of the ship. I walked back out and down the ramp.
I was checking the supplies out of the storage room when one of the officers asked me what I was doing. Annoyed, I explained briefly, and he suggested that perhaps I needed an armed escort. I didn’t think so, but it was easier to agree than try and dissuade him.
Armed with rappelling gear, a Maglite, and two military sidekicks, I reentered the craft. Three scientists were bent over alien bodies while a fourth prodded the sunken bumps on one of the pedestals. They looked so wrong, like animals pushing their snouts against some structures they couldn’t possibly understand. I walked past them, tied a climbing rope around the protrusion closest to the hall, and wandered to the hole. I ran the rope around my waist and gripped it with one hand. Holding the Maglite in the other hand, I started my descent. The flashlight beam pierced the blackness, a hazy mist disrupting its flow with layers of smoke and slowly drifting particles. I plunged a few more feet and glimpsed a polished floor. Touching down, I looked up, the faces of the soldiers barely visible through the fog. Untying the rope around my waist, I let it fall and turned to face forward. In front of me rose what appeared to be a short walkway leading to a looming abyss. I pulled out my 9mm and advanced, a dark entrance materializing through the mist on my right. I turned, the fluorescence revealing two cylinders jutting out of the wall. They resembled coffins and were strangely textured, one of them covered by a thick pane. The other one had no lid. To the right were a few more mesas. I could see nothing in the open casket, just a man-size space. I shone the light on the other and was so shocked I nearly bolted. Inside was a humanoid form. The face appeared featureless, a barren landscape of curves and bumps, resembling a half-finished mask. The only recognizable features were two closed eyeholes. I slowly ran the light along the length of the body. It was smooth and matte black and buried behind an opaque layer of dirty glass. A shiver ran up my spine.