Jamie couldn't say she'd ever shared her dad's enthusiasm for fringe subjects, despite his inundating her with them from an early age - or perhaps because of that – but now, making a quick detour back to Phobos to check on the alleged "monolith," curiosity about what she might find was eating her up. She figured she could justify the trip under the heading of searching for signs of an alien presence.
The monolith wasn't hard to find: a roughly triangular block of rock projecting from a flat, fairly featureless area. It was about the size of a large building, maybe seventy or eighty meters across and three or four times that height, and it actually looked like a building. She drifted up and touched its surface, which was mostly smooth, though pitted in many areas. It wasn't clearly artificial like the moon's "Cathedral," but it didn't look exactly natural, either. The material wasn't nearly as tough as the Cathedral or the Object's. It seemed to be simply stone. She wasn't sure what to make of it.
Next, at long last, she descended on Mars. Mars was more colorful than she'd imagined. Red, blue, and white in various shades, with an occasional splash of green, yellow, and purple. From two miles up, some of the features – mountains and desert sands – would've been at home in Nevada, but that impression was soon dashed by a crazy quilt of unearthly geographic features: craters in all sizes and shapes, spectacular lone mountains jutting to impossible heights, tangled shapes like massive growths of lichen, long, spidery columns stretching across the sands, fuzzy shapes that could've been forests. No sign of the famous Martian "Face."
Only when Jamie zoomed in on the ground did strange things start cropping up. The surface was teeming with apparent anomalies: metallic objects, sharp-angled shapes, a geodesic sphere in one crater, structures that appeared to be large building complexes, a cylinder or pipe curving up out of sand...and pyramids, lots of pyramids. Descending to near ground-level, she could make out the joints between the rocks, just as you could in any rock or brick wall.
"Are you seeing this?" she asked NASA or whoever was watching as she maneuvered the communication array's camera along with her. "Yes, we copy," came the reply after the several second delay. "Please continue the search, but with an emphasis on more modern artifacts." No identification or image accompanied the message. Didn't sound like either Walt or Reyansh. Maybe their security clearance didn't go this high?
You've been lying to us.
Copy that.
Jamie smiled. At least whoever was there had a sense of humor. She ascended a mile or so and resumed her scanning. There was almost too much to look at. Mars was starting to strike her as a fossil and an artifact dumping ground: gear-shaped devices, triangular objects, fossilized skeletons, rectangular doorways dug into the sides of cliffs, and remnants of what appeared to be machines. She might overlook one or two anomalies – might doubt what looked like a gear or doorway or skeleton if they were isolated exceptions – but they were more the rule than exceptions. A cornucopia of anomalies!
She set down next to an apparent building forged into the top of a rock outcropping. Despite Mars' supposed near-vacuum atmosphere, she could hear her footsteps crunching in the gravel and the swish-swish of her clothing. Hearing sound after two days of silence was music to her ears. A pleasant side-note to the mysteries unfolding before her eyes. Taking a breath caused a slight tingling in her lungs.
She knocked down the building's front door, which instead of dropping cleanly shattered into chunks. Mortar? Adobe? Obviously, not the same technology responsible for the Object or the moon structures. Enough sunlight entered to mostly illuminate a large room with a stone floor and walls adorned with carvings and painted figures in various states of crumbling and fading.
The figures on the wall appeared human. They were extremely light-skinned and bald, with a stretched out slimness that might've either reflected reality or the artists' tastes. Their garb – what there was of it – struck her as vaguely Egyptian. Or maybe Greek. Women were often braless, sometimes nude, while the men invariably wore colorful short skirts. One striking individual wore a full dress composed of green and golden vines and a wreath of flowers on his head. Their king...or queen?
Animals paraded among them: four-legged beasts with heavy matted fur that reminded her of mini-musk oxen, though with dog-like heads; small, carapace-covered creatures that resembled armadillos, and tall, four-legged, sharp-toothed animals that could've been the offspring of a camel and an alligator. Jamie smiled with wonder.
Our ancestors? Her dad and his conspiracy-crazed friends sometimes speculated along those lines. Perhaps the greatest shock of all was that they weren't all as crazy as she'd always believed.
An ancient, humanoid civilization...but how ancient? Had they evolved and left the planet or become extinct? Had some of them journeyed to Earth? The artwork suggested a primitive people, but what if it portrayed their past? Mars was an archeologist's wet dream.
Jamie wanted to press on through the entire building complex, but she had to draw the line somewhere. She'd already been rummaging for a few hours through wreckage of what probably had been a worldwide civilization. It was time to get back to work. Or at least a pretense of working.
Jamie typed a page describing what she'd seen in the briefest possible terms. She assumed that the higher levels of NASA and the U.S. Government already knew that a civilization had existed here. The land rovers hardly could've missed this much evidence. But they'd never been as up close and personal to this world as she had. There had to be reams of scientists who would happily risk life and limb to be up here rooting around in this giant graveyard of a lost people. They could do only so much remotely.
Thank you, Commander Shepherd, for your report. If you are able, we would appreciate if you could spend the next 24 – 48 hours surveying this world with a special eye for signs of civilization.
Can I ask who I'm speaking to?
Of course. Sorry about the mystery. My name is Jerome Whitehead. I serve on an above top secret advisory group concerned with the study of extraterrestrial civilizations and the ramifications of their existence for our world.
Jerome Whitehead. The astrophysicist famous for his award-winning science series, When Infinity Begins. Sort of a cross between Albert Einstein and Rod Serling. The spooky voice announcing the end of time at the conclusion of the final episode still rang eerily in her ears. Ten years had passed since then, and she hadn't heard much about him in the interim. She'd assumed he was living a quiet life out of the limelight.
It's an honor to meet you, Mr. Whitehead. I'll never forget watching your series.
Please call me Jerome. It's an honor to meet you as well, Jamie.
You said civilizations? Plural?
Yes. I'd rather not get into that now. I would be happy to discuss it with you in a more private setting later. Suffice it to say for now that we know of several extraterrestrial civilizations, but despite rumors to the contrary, we have no relationship with any of them.
Okay. I will definitely take you up on that discussion.
I look forward to it. But for now, I hope you will be content exploring wonders that no human being has ever seen until now.
But you knew about them, didn't you?
Yes, but the details are scant. We're very much looking forward to filling in some of those details, though it's understood that this is not the main objective of your mission.
Speaking with the great Jerome Whitehead. This day or night – it got confusing when she could move between daytime and nighttime with one brief thought – just got stranger and stranger. She felt odd and a little guilty that her life could be filled with so much wonder and beauty while at home the world teetered on the edge of anarchy and faced a possible alien invasion.
Jamie rose back into the upper Martian atmosphere, such as it was, to seek out her next research target. She was flying over the north pole when the stars directly before her disappeared. She slowed. And stared. A haunting sense of déjà vu crept over her. Something as black as space itself was blocking h
er path. Something huge.
By tracing the visible stars she was gradually able to discern the shape. She had no doubt what the shape would be long before the trace was complete. It was difficult to judge distance, but if it was a few miles away it might've been a mile or two in length; if it was further out it could be as large as the state of California. In any case, it was monstrously big, and a thousand times creepier and more ominous in person.
Hello, Mothra.
Fear was a clanging bell in her head. An alarm that vibrated through her but offered no clear course of action. She needed a long few moments to mute the alarm bell and start thinking about what to do next. Nothing came to her but the obvious: move the communication array around until the cameras faced the giant craft. She activated the cameras and unfolded the keyboard. "Are you getting this?" she typed.
The inevitable transmission delay seemed to last an eternity. When the reply arrived, the words captured all the gravitas that had been building in the silence:
GET AWAY FROM THE COMMUNICATION ARRAY!
Giant circular lights along the spacecraft's wings lit up like miniature suns. The logic behind the communiqué clicked in Jamie's head. She moved – not with an urgency that matched the message, but still fast enough for the communication assembly to recede into invisibility in an eye-blink and for "Mothra" to shrink to about half its former size.
Of course, NASA had been right to warn her away, considering the probable fate of the satellites, but it still felt like an overreaction. She could've just as easily have whisked the array along with her –
Jamie abruptly noticed the pitch black bat-like shape floating silently beside her. Crap! She whirled to face it, her body vibrating like a sledgehammer-struck bell – her new substitute for adrenaline and goose bumps. The craft was about the size of a single prop airplane, unless she was underestimating the distance. The thing seemed almost on top of her.
With considerable effort Jamie stilled her impulse to either strike out or flee. Should she wait until the craft showed aggressive intent before attacking? If she waited, might it kill or capture her? If she attacked, she could, as President Morgan said, start a war. A war without any predictable result.
The other possibility is that I could destroy the threat right now before it can strike Earth.
It came down to how much they trusted the Object and its warning. If she trusted it completely, this was her enemy – the enemy of humanity. But what were the odds she could defeat it? She had the disturbing sense that whoever had created the Object had also created Mothra. No solid reason – they just seemed to be on the same technological level.
If they are, what guarantee did they have that the powers bestowed by the Object were enough?
But it was all pointless guessing. The only way to know was to test herself against them.
Jamie moved off roughly in the direction from which she'd come, thinking she'd try to get back to the communication array, see if it was still there or functional. The bat-shaped craft paced her so exactly that she didn't notice a lag-time in its response. She pushed her speed a bit, and the craft stayed right there. She wouldn't have thought she was moving at all if she didn't know better.
Jamie willed the craft to slow. It did – and she gained some separation. But then a light started to shine within it, and Jamie felt it opposing her telekinetic force. Okay. She upped her force. The craft slowed again, falling further behind. Its inner glow intensified. So did its resistive force. It was still falling behind, but barely. How far should she take this?
Another bat-winged craft appeared on her left. She didn't see it approach; it was just there. Jamie dove straight down full-tilt. Mars rose on her left and Phobos rolled in straight overhead. In a matter of seconds she figured she was traveling 1/2 million MPH and change, if past measurements meant anything.
The craft were still there. She could only see them in the on and off flashes of stars as their speeding shapes eclipsed them. Switching directions had little effect. They seemed to be closing the distance, but it was hard to tell – like having a dance partner in pitch black darkness. But they clearly weren't having any trouble seeing her.
Circular lights sprang up along their wings. A force like grappling hooks latched onto her chest and legs. It was if a large parachute had just opened. The drag was the greatest force she'd encountered as an augment – more powerful than Thomas Mayes' Nazi henchman or even the combined telekinetic force of Rodriquez' people.
That's it. They'd committed the first hostile act. It's on.
Jamie struck back with all her strength at the nearest craft. The craft split apart, shedding wings and careening off past her. She gathered her energy, preparing to strike the second ship – but its lights flicked off and she lost sight of it.
Jamie used the power she'd stored up to launch herself back to Earth - a spur-of-the-instant tactic she'd never tried before. Judging from the swift retreat of Mars she guessed she'd achieved in seconds a speed that far exceeded her previous record. Would it be enough to escape?
Given that her full power had been barely enough to break apart a single small alien craft, escape seemed the best option. Maybe she could do something against the mother ship – possibly break through the ship's hull and attack those inside – but she didn't like the odds. And that kind of assault seemed like overkill. The craft had apparently attempted to capture, not kill, her.
She aimed herself at Earth, whose blue pinprick in space had already become a tiny blue marble.
Chapter 21
"IF ANYONE EVER DESERVED an after-work drink, it would be you," said Zachary. He raised his bottle of Guinness Dark and she tapped it with her frosty glass of Pina Colada.
Her daylong debriefing had begun at eight that morning, a scant two hours after return to Earth and DARE Headquarters, and had lasted on and off until mid-evening. Much of it had taken place in the White House's Situation Room with the now-familiar staff members, including Defense Secretary Paul Walker and Vice President Peggy Arnold, along with DARE Secretary Bridger and the famous representative of the Interplanetary Advisory Group, Jerome Whitehead. Also in attendance was Zane Bachman, Ultimate Solutions founder and perennial advisor to presidents, looking as though he was freshly returned from an African safari in his rumpled khakis. Zach had attended the meetings "as an honored guest," in his own sardonic words.
After being questioned for most of the morning and afternoon, it was Jamie's turn for some answers, and she spent several hours alone behind closed doors with Jerome Whitehead.
"We believe we've cataloged eight different extraterrestrial civilizations," Jerome Whitehead told her. "Eight different kinds of observed technology, with possible question marks on two of them, which may be evolved versions of the same civilizations. Two we've identified from signal broadcasts only. The others from observations here and in space.
"Regrettably, as I wrote to you earlier, the U.S. and other governments are not in communication with alien species, to say nothing of enjoying a cooperative relationship with some of them. The unvarnished reality is that these civilizations have demonstrated no interest whatsoever in establishing contact with us. They show up periodically to study us – usually from a distance, but sometimes employing a more, shall we say, 'hands-on' approach."
"What kind of evidence do you base your classifications on?" Jamie had asked, the slight skepticism in her voice a leftover from years listening to and debating with her father on the subject.
"Primarily photographic and testimony-based, but on rare occasion an alien craft will experience a malfunction, and we've recovered three thus far. To this point, however, they've proven remarkably intransigent as regards yielding their secrets. I am not authorized to reveal anything further on that topic, but suffice it to say that we've discovered that it's virtually impossible to analyze a technology – to say nothing about utilizing it – without possessing semi-comparable technology ourselves. In some rare instances the technology is, with some stretching, within our
grasp. The great majority of cases, however, our theoretical knowledge and technical expertise prove inadequate. The Object is a classic case of that. Our discovery of its hidden message was made possible only by it providing us with a key."
"But no alien race has shown an interest in harming us?"
Dr. Whitehead removed his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth, looking suddenly tired and all of his seventy-three years.
"No," he said. "They appear very enlightened on that score. Or perhaps they see nothing to gain. The classic alien invasion scenario is wildly improbable if not simply silly. What would we have to offer a race hundreds if not thousands of years our technological superior? It's simply a projection of our own primitive martial instincts. So it's hardly surprising to me that no extraterrestrial race has shown any interest in that."
He replaced his glasses and gave Jamie a bleak stare. "Until now."
Zachary shook his head when she told him about their conversation. "I don't know. I see more curiosity than anything else in the way they responded to you. When you tried to run, they tried to reel you in."
"Rope me like a stray calf as they do in North Dakota." Jamie shot him a sparse smile. "But you're right. If it wasn't for the Object's message, I wouldn't think what they did was particularly hostile."
"Maybe the message isn't true, or we aren't understanding it right?" Zach eyed her over his beer. "As Dr. Whitehead said, what would such an advanced race want with us?"
"Then what was the purpose of the Object?"
"Without knowing who sent it or what their motivation was, I'm not sure we can truly answer that. Perhaps it wasn't some noble urge to help us but rather a move to sabotage an alien expedition for political or other purposes."
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