Empty Casket Conspiracy (Terran Patrol Book 1)

by Lewis Dually

  Albright sat back in his chair. “Let’s hope none. Speaking of prisoners, I don’t give a rat’s ass about capturing the Black! That’s the PDA’s request, not the Navy. We’ve studied a few of their corpses and know how to kill them. That’s all we need at this point, a live specimen would just stir up a big brouhaha over what to do with them. What the Navy wants is the radio! We stand on the precipice of man’s journey into the cosmos but we can’t launch without that radio system. The Mars terraforming project will take two hundred years to produce a livable surface. Earth can’t wait that long. Planetary overcrowding and food shortages are already critical. Another two hundred years would be devastating and will lead to war of some kind I guarantee it. We’ve got to have subspace communication if we expect to find new ground to colonize so forget about capturing the Black, just get the radio. Any more questions?”

  “Yes. Tell me about DOCTOR SHAW.”

  Albright made a face like he had a toothache. “That was the other thing I wanted to talk about. Shaw is a…. well, let’s just say he’s not a team player. He holds back information and he thinks he’s a lot smarter than everybody else. You look out for him. You’re already on his bad side and I get the feeling he’ll try to undermine your authority at every step.”

  “I got the same feeling. If he gives me too much crap I’ll drop him on a mining outpost and give you a heads up.”

  Albright busted out in a belly laugh. “You do that! I’d love to see the look on his face. Take a picture.”

  Albright pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and asked, “Do you mind?”

  I responded by pulling my snuff can out and asked, “Do you?”

  “Not at all, go ahead. There are some cups by the coffee maker.”

  I retrieved a blue plastic cup and sat back down as Albright rolled his cigar in the flame and puffed a couple times. Then he said, “Dr. Shaw is going with you as a PDA advisor but he is not SWAFS immune. He doesn’t blackout like most people but he will have some minor paralyses. It only affects his arms and legs and usually wears off in an hour or so. He will have a personal medic with him in case it’s worse than that. I didn’t want him out there under those circumstances but Sec Nav insisted. They think his knowledge of the Black is crucial to this mission. I’m not convinced. If he becomes a problem dump him. I’ll take full responsibility for it. And be sure to take that picture for me.”

  I spit a shot of tobacco juice in my cup and said “Yes Sir.”

  I left Albright’s office just in time to catch Walters coming back from the records room.

  “I got missing persons reports and ship’s cargo manifests from records and I pulled a file dump from the port master.” Walters said.

  “Excellent! We’ll look at them on the shuttle. Are you ready to fly?”

  “Yes Sir. I sent your duffle to the shuttle along with my own and I have a transport waiting to take us to the pad. I also have my own personnel file for you to review and the ship’s rosters for the Dawn Rising and the Shasta.”

  I was starting to like having an aide.

  The two of us climbed in an auto car and I held my breath as the cars computer drove us to the jump pad where we boarded a Marine Jump Master. Unlike the auto car the Jumpmaster actually had a pilot and I breathed a sigh of relief as we walked up the cargo ramp and into the purely functional interior. Devoid of modern comforts or aesthetically pleasing designs it made me feel right at home. The steel deck plates were lined with L-shank tie downs and the walls were covered with yellow cargo straps pulled taut between their slip rings. There was a single line of fold down seats on the port side wall and we both planted ourselves next to Commander Sprite who was making good use of free time. I’d seen Marines fall asleep fifteen seconds after latching there safety belts and apparently Seals got the same training. As Sprite snoozed we started browsing through the thick stack of missing person’s reports that Walters had secured from records.

  “Let me see your file.” I said to Walters. She pulled a brown multi pocket file folder out of the briefcase she was lugging and handed it over. I unwound the tie down cord and flipped through several pages.

  “You’re from Mt Carmel, NC….and your…..twenty three years old. You have a Masters in Military Law and a Bachelor’s in Applied Science….and a class S pilot’s license. How can you be only twenty three and have all of that?” I asked.

  “I finished high school at fifteen and started university. Then I tested for SWAFS immunity when I was eighteen. After that I got on an accelerated program for the Navy Officer Training Corp. My father and uncle are retired Navy so that’s where I went.”

  She was making me feel dumb, and old. She was half my age and three times as smart, on paper anyway. All I had was an Associate of Business Management from Tennessee Tech and sixteen weeks at the Cadet Officer Training school. It took me another six months to get my flight certification. I read on.

  “You’ve been assigned to Admiral Albright for eighteen months as his aide?”

  “Yes Sir.” she replied. “I learned a lot there but I wanted to see some action. I joined the Navy because I wanted space duty, not office work in Houston. I asked Admiral Albright for a transfer to the United Earth One space station but he said I could do better and assigned me to you. I’m glad he did. What we’re about to do sounds exciting.”

  “Exciting and dangerous.” I said. “OK, let’s look at those missing person reports.”

  By the time we made the forty minute trip to Groom Lake I had noticed a pattern. All the empty caskets came back to Houston. On the other hand, the occupied caskets and cargo containers went all over. Whichever jump pad was closest to the deceased final destination, but the empty caskets went to Houston. Interesting! The Jump Master landed and we headed for the opening cargo ramp. After eighteen years in the Navy I had learned that walking down a cargo ramp was a heck of a lot easier than climbing down that dinky ladder from the man door. Dr. Shaw, on the other hand, used the ladder. Apparently he hadn’t learned. Stepping out into the glaring Nevada sun, Walters exclaimed. “Geeze, how hot is it?”

  Houston was still in the middle of a cold snap when we left. There wasn’t nothing cool about this place.

  “Did you bring my suntan lotion?” I jokingly asked.

  Walters surprised me with a quick “Yes Sir. It’s in the small pocket of your duffle, SPF thirty.” I was joking but she wasn’t.

  We were met by a twelve man troop carrier and I was glad to see it was air-conditioned. Dr. Shaw climbed in the cab with the driver and we got in the back. Albright was right, he wasn’t a team player.

  “I bet he’s an only child.” I said without thinking.

  Spite looked over at me “What?”

  Before I could say never mind, Walters added “He’s the youngest of four but there’s sixteen years between him and his closest sibling.”

  I looked at her somewhat surprised.

  “I looked up his file before we left.” she said, “I figured you’d like to know as much as you can about him. I don’t think he likes you Sir.”

  “You’re gonna be a real asset.” I said with a grin.

  The troop carrier dropped us at the admin office where we went through a security check, signed nondisclosure documents and took a twenty minute site safety class. We were then issued visitor badges, led back to the transport and taken to the north end of the base to a hanger designated 16 Alpha. Two armed guards checked our badges and then unlocked the door.

  “It’s not a saucer!” Walters proclaimed.

  “No, it’s not.” Dr. Shaw replied. “The Grey have ships that are saucer shaped but the Black use ships that are more conventional.”

  “How many crew do you think this thing held?” I asked.

  “There are five crew quarters with two bunks each and two quarters with single bunks so twelve total. There is a galley and exercise room and what we think is a game room. There’s even a library. We found a surprise in the cargo bay, a vintage 2016 Dodge Hellcat.”
/>   “What color?” I asked, and then realized what a dumb question it was.

  Dr. Shaw looked bewildered as he replied. “Red?”

  “Did you run the vin numbers to see if it was connected to any missing person?” I asked.

  “Yes we did and no it’s not as far as we can tell. Peru isn’t a treasure trove of records so we can’t be sure. Let’s go inside.”

  We walked up the open cargo ramp and into a well-lit corridor. I didn’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. If I didn’t know better, I would think we were on a well healed holiday cruiser. The rooms had furniture that looked comfortable; chairs, tables, even a sofa. I walked into one of the crew quarters and was astonished. There were pictures on the wall.

  “So that’s what they look like.” Commander Spite mussed. “Kind of Neanderthal…ish. What’s with the black eyes?”

  I looked at the pictures. “They look like they have built in sun glasses. Maybe their sun is extra bright. They could pass for human if they wore sunglasses to hide those eyes.”

  “Actually their sun is probably much darker than ours.” Shaw explained. “The large black eye is designed to absorb maximum light. They probably see in the dark and wear sunglasses in the day to protect their eyes.”

  Walters nudged my arm. “Check this out. Is this an Alien planet? It’s beautiful!”

  The picture she was looking at was a panoramic view of an open meadow with snowcapped mountains in the distance. On one side of the meadow there were trees, I think. They were obviously not Earth trees. The sky was bright orange and there were no clouds. Except for the tree things and the orange sky it looked a lot like Wyoming.

  “Why did you leave all this stuff in here?” I asked Shaw. “I would think you’d have taken it out to study.”

  “We left this room intact to get a better perspective of their lives on board but we emptied the other rooms and sent the stuff to our archives. Come up to the bridge with me.”

  We followed Shaw to the bridge and found it to be much smaller than I expected. Two pilot seats set side by side with a one piece window wrapping all the way around. It gave the pilots a 210 degree view around the front of the ship. On each side of each seat there was a roller style control pad. The one thing that jumped out at me was the heads up displays in front of the pilots’ seats. In the lower left corner of the unit was an ID tag: GRUMMAN AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES model 1779D. It was the same unit the Dawn Rising used!

  CHAPTER 4: The Junkyard Dog.

  In fact, the entire command console was built with Earth technology. The only thing that looked Alien was the lettering. Even more surprising was that the Dawn Rising was eighteen years old and most of her bridge systems were more advanced than these.

  Noticing two gaping holes on the control panel I pointed to them and asked, “That’s where the Coms and Nav systems were?”

  “Coms were in the left rack,” Shaw pointed “The coaxial lines run from there to the forward array. The upper cabinet was for the Nav system controller.”

  I started to reach in my pocket for a pouch of snuff but thought better of it as I asked, “If this bridge is built with mostly Earth technology then what about the rest of the ship?”

  “About eighty percent Earth and twenty percent Alien.” Shaw replied. “The hull and superstructure are built with an Alien alloy. We were able to recreate it. It’s not some unknown metal, just a different process of refining and forging. The interior is almost totally Earth, or from Earth would be a better way of putting it. The engines are a combination of Earth and Alien parts but they are the same basic design that we use, a little more fine-tuned maybe. We tuned the engines on the Constellation to match these and we think we’ll get about twenty six, maybe twenty seven percent increased thrust out of them. The only thing that’s totally alien is the reactor.”

  “Twenty seven percent increase sounds like more than a little.” I leaned back on the cabin wall and looked at Shaw. “Other than better engine tuning it seems to me these guys aren’t all that advanced. What kind of weapons system does it have?”

  “None.” Shaw replied, “But that doesn’t tell us much. We think this is just a cargo transport. Most of our cargo transports don’t have weapons either.”

  “Yes,” I said “but our cargo transports don’t operate in enemy space.”

  Shaw motioned to the door. “Let’s go check out the engineering, down to the left.”

  I turned to leave and realized we were alone. Walters and Sprite must have found our conversation a little boring. We found them again in the engine room. Walters was standing on top of a stainless steel pipe about four feet off the deck. She was examining what appeared to be an electron injector assembly. Sprite was standing behind her with his arms in the ready to catch position.

  “Careful now.” He cautioned. She ignored him and pulled herself up to the next pipe.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Sir, this is a very crudely built injector assembly. I think its hand made.” She said as she ran a finger over one of the pipe joints. Her applied science degree was earning its keep.

  “We think so too.” Shaw agreed. “In fact, we think a lot of this ship is hand made. Our best guess is that they crashed one ship and salvaged parts from it. They used those parts and a lot of our own parts to build this one. The only thing that’s totally alien is the reactor and they took the fuel cells out when they abandoned ship.”

  Sprite looked at Shaw and asked, “Where did they get our parts from? Can you track serial numbers back to missing ships?”

  “We tried that. The parts were never built into a ship. Everything on this ship that comes from Earth was sold as a replacement part and shipped to Cusco, Peru. They were paid for with wire transfers from a bank in Cusco and were picked up by a man named Juan. We tried tracking down Juan but came up empty. The bank account was in his name and was opened in March of 2055 with a single deposit of thirty six pounds and seven ounces of gold.”

  “Wow!” Sprite exclaimed. “These Aliens are well financed!”

  I stared at Shaw for a moment and then said, “Show me the reactor.”

  He was right. It was definitely alien. Still, I could see some similarities to our own design.

  “Do we know what was used in the fuel cells?” I asked Shaw. “This looks similar to our GUT reactors”.

  “That’s because it is a GUT reactor and it looks exactly like the reactor on the Dawn Rising. Part of your refit was a new reactor based on this design.”

  My head jerked around to face Shaw. “Say that again?”

  “We installed a copy of this reactor in the Dawn Rising along with two new engines. The reactor produces seven thousand megawatts. That reactor combined with your new engines gives you a top speed of about point nine two and it will reduce your warp bubble by seventy five percent.”

  At that revelation Walters gave out a slight whistle but Sprite looked a little confused. He said, “I understand the more power more speed part but how does a smaller warp bubble help?”

  Shaw was about to answer him but I interrupted. “You put an experimental reactor on my ship just days before we leave on a top secret mission and you’re just now telling me about it. That pisses me off! Who authorized this?”

  Shaw went on the defensive. “Don’t look at me. I wanted to put it on the Constellation but Admiral Albright…..”

  “Albright!”

  “He decided you would need the speed on this mission.” Shaw shot back. “It’s not untested, they’ve been running jump trials for two weeks. It works great, no problems. And the new weapons system needs the extra power as well. It’s a win win.”

  “Well,” I said, “I forget she’s not my ship. She belongs to the Navy but I still don’t like it. Did you know about this?” I asked Walters.

  “Yes Sir, I didn’t realize it would be an issue. I’m sorry.”

  “Any time you monkey around with a sailor’s ship it’s an issue. Remember that.”

  Spri
te broke in, “Are you done yet? I’d like to know about this warp bubble deal.”

  “Yes, I’m done.” I said. “Walters, explain the warp bubble deal to the commander.”

  Walters looked happy to change the subject as she turned to Sprite and explained. “When you enter a warp bubble you don’t start going the speed of light. You keep going the same speed as you were outside the bubble. If you’re traveling at half-light speed, or point five as we call it, and your warp bubble is one light year long, it will take two years to cross it. That’s two years you have to keep generating a warp field, a lot of power usage and a lot of spent fuel. If you decrease the size of the warp bubble by half or, in this case, down to half a light year then it will only take you one year to cross it. Half the speed of light equals half a light year in one year’s time.”

  “O…..K?” Sprite replied as he looked at Walters with a dumbfounded expression on his face.

  “Think of it as a bridge.” I said, “You’re not going faster, the bridge is just shorter. The extra power pulls the two sides of the bubble closer together and shortens the distance across it. You exit the bridge sooner but you still covered the same distance. It’s not really a bubble either, it’s more like a wave and the bridge connects the tops of the waves. The deeper the valley between the waves the more distance you cover while skipping along the tops of the waves. If I’d been in charge of describing and naming the process it would have been a lot simpler to understand but I wasn’t asked for my input on it.”

  Sprite chuckled. “Yeah I bet. Ok, now I got it.”

  We all stood there looking at each other for a moment and then Shaw asked, “Any more questions?”

  “I can’t think of anything.” I said, “Let’s go.” We started back up the corridor and as we entered the cargo bay I came up with another question. “You said this ship crashed, any idea why?”