AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6)

by T I WADE

  Lunar, tanned, sweaty, filthy and wearing an Aussie sunhat, a white tee-shirt, khaki shorts and boots, didn’t know whether to salute them back in her state of work clothes, but her quick eye looked both men over.

  As she gave them a half-hearted salute back, she noticed both men to be late twenties, dark and tanned like she was, and both were thin and tall, slightly taller than Mars Noble, maybe more like VIN Noble. They both were in the same flight overalls, had blue eyes and it looked like fair hair under their caps. They were also very handsome, and suddenly she realized how dirty she was, and how sweaty and dirty the rest of the crew were.

  “Nice to meet you guys. Sorry we look such a mess.”

  “No problem, Commander,” stated the really good-looking one, Mark. “We also have females in our group back in Canberra, and often we all have to get dirty together. You know? Assault course, runs, fitness training. I must admit you look far healthier than when we first saw you. If you remember, Flight Lieutenant Darwin and I flew in our Prime Minister on two of the three visits when you guys first arrived, Ma’am.” Lunar shook her head that she didn’t.

  “And may I add, Commander, what a pleasure it is to fly in one of your space shuttles,” added the other man standing next to her younger sister, and she now remembered seeing them together on the island during the last visit. “What we fly and what you astronauts fly is the difference between scrap metal and the latest F-23 stealth fighters we have. Anytime you and Captain Richmond want a few guys added to your ranks, we are ready, Ma’am,” he added, saluting again and smiling at Lunar at the same time.

  “Get out of uniform. There is work to do. And stop calling me Ma’am. Once you are out of uniform, call me Lunar. I must be five or six years younger than both of you,” replied Lunar, flustered over her predicament. “I’m sure you are not used to saluting higher-ranking officers far younger than you.”

  Penelope had a tour of the old Matt base with the others, once the crew had changed and cleaned up. She knew about the interests of Pluto Katherine, had no interest in the man who had taken her to the wedding, and was surprised to see her commander flustered for the first time ever. Something was going on here, and she thought that more Aussie pilots should be allowed onto the island. There was a large bunch of young and single girls after all, and these Australians seemed nice guys.

  “We now have a dozen strong hands to complete our mission,” stated Mars Noble over beers that night after it cooled down. “It will only be a few weeks before we can leave this place, even though it feels safe and very peaceful. Also, living with a bunch of female astronauts can certainly make a man grey-haired at a young age,” he joked as the beers went down.

  “More peaceful here than at our Canberra base,” added Mark Price.

  Both the men were still in awe at how these kids lived and at the amount of underground gold inside the cavern. What really interested them was that they were in an alien base. A real alien base with its own spaceship here on Earth, and what they had seen in there was far better than any museum.

  To Gary Darwin, the Astermine crew’s friendly faces were always happy, and he and Mark had spent an hour with the younger Captain Mars Noble on the first level. Mars seemed young enough to be their baby brother as he described what was in the cavern like an expert alien instructor. The alien cavern was as large as the largest hangar they had ever seen back home, and had blown them away when they had first entered.

  “You mean this ship, like the one above in that bubble on the surface, can still fly, and it flies on alcohol… Whiskey?” asked Mark Price, not believing what he was hearing. This was like a Hollywood movie.

  “Yep!” replied Mars.

  “Penelope, how do you fly them?” asked Gary. The three of them were down in the cavern with Mars and Penelope Pitt.

  “Telepathically,” replied Penelope. “Only the Matts, Mars here and his father can fly them. General Jones can as well, as they do have manual controls, but not anywhere as good as Mars. These spacecraft don’t have any instrument gauges at all, only rudder pedals and a joystick. Mars here is a natural alien pilot,” she joked.

  “How will we know if we can fly them?” Mark Price asked.

  “If you can open this door to the next level,” joked Mars, walking over and closing the open horizontal metal door down to the next level.

  “How do you mean? Open a steel door with our minds?” asked Gary Darwin, not believing what he was hearing.

  “Yep, that’s right. Our friend Martin Brusk could have his small jet, Ryan’s old Gulfstream, flying telepathically if he knew how. I don’t understand why I can, but it seems to be in our blood. All the Matts we have saved, my father, Dr. Nancy back on the island, and I are Rh Neg, Rhesus Negative.”

  “So am I,” stated Gary Darwin.

  “That’s right, Gary, you and I both have the same blood type,” added Mark Price. “Back home where I come from in Queensland, several old Aborigines I met call it monkey blood.”

  “I heard the same thing; monkey blood,” replied Gary. “Mars, if that’s all we need, I’m ready to fly.”

  “Me too,” added Mark excitedly. Mars was impressed, but they had to open the door first.

  They both tried, and neither could move the horizontal door down to the next level.

  Even Penelope was surprised when Mars concentrated on the door for a full minute and slowly, as if on hydraulic arms, the door began to open.

  “Ouch!” stated Mark. “You are giving me a headache. What is that clicking noise?”

  “I’m also getting a noise in my head,” added Gary. “It’s like getting an electrical shock.” Mars’ concentration was broken and Penelope, who had received no pain in her head, rushed forward to stop the heavy door from slamming shut.

  “Wow!” said Gary, shaking his head from side to side. “I’m sure I heard you clicking or swearing at that door to open, Mars.”

  “Me too, but it was like faint radio crackle,” added Mark. Mars nodded.

  “That’s how it starts, guys. Matt Ruler Roo, married to Joanne Dithers, and his mother Tow made me work for an hour a day to better my skills at telepathy. After much practice, we had silent conversations between us, and none of the Tall People knew that we were actually communicating with each other.”

  “Tall people?” questioned Gary.

  “That’s what the Matts call us. They struggle to get over 5 feet tall,” replied Mars. He knew that the pilots could have been introduced to Roo back on the island.

  They moved down to the second level, and both Aussies mentioned that each level of the cavern was nearly as big as a rugby field. Mars Noble didn’t know the size of a rugby field; he hadn’t even seen a real football field, only old football games on fields from 2015 backwards on the screens on Mars.

  The third level with all the gold was an added shock to the newbies. They had seen a pile of gold chests in the camp, but that amount paled compared to what was down here. This treasure, Gary mentioned, was real Indiana Jones treasure, and Mars nodded. He had watched that film series over a dozen times.

  The air was fresh and smelled clean as they climbed back up to look the alien spacecraft over, each hauling up a small chest to the upper level.

  The craft had been powered up on the last visit by Commander Joot years earlier. Mars telepathically opened the small door to the forward cockpit in the underside skin as he would have done on the same ship above ground. Again the two Aussies were shocked. They both tried to close the hatch on Mars’ command but couldn’t.

  Mars opened and closed the forward and two aft hatches several times in Matt, a language the other two didn’t speak, showing off. The two forward hatches were the pilot seats. Both Aussies squeezed into the small pilot spaces when he allowed them to enter, and then he closed them inside the spaceship.

  The third hatch was the cargo or passenger compartment. The pilots could crawl through to the cargo area one at a time once the backs of the pilot seats were flattened. Once the pilot seats were f
lattened, the whole pilot area became a crawl-through space.

  Once they had checked over the few controls, he showed the pilots how to think with him, both staring at him.

  “Gary, can you hear me? Mark, can you hear me?” He thought hard in English this time and said the sentences a few times. He got a babbled response from Gary. “Gary, tell Mark to lower his seat, then he can crawl through to the rear compartment.” Again it took several tries before he saw Gary’s mouth work as he verbally told Mark an order. Mars “thought” the seat backs down and the two pilots crawled through to the rear compartment. This area was the size of a decent-sized room in a house, over twenty feet long, several feet wide and of course five feet high.

  Mars received another gabbled response from Gary and thought he heard a second voice. When he opened the underside cargo door, both pilots fell out onto the cavern floor.

  “I’ve seen more controls on a glider or sail plane,” laughed Mark.

  “There aren’t any, apart from directional flight and turn controls,” added Gary. “I see what you mean about telepathically flying one of these babies. The cockpits are really cramped, but I want to learn, Mars, really want to learn!”

  “Me too,” added Mark. “Bloody glad I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, mate.”

  “A fair dinkum piece of metal to fly, though, Mars!” continued Gary excitedly, and Mars realized that he might have to learn another language.

  “Not bad for a 10,000-year-old spaceship, guys?” he asked before carrying his small chest up the last set of stairs, leaving the two pilots with their mouths hanging open.

  It took a week of hard work, sweating 8 to 10 hours a day, to make a dent in the mass of yellow chests. All twelve healthy members of the team carried the chests up. The girls brought up the smaller chests while the stronger men hauled up the larger ones. The largest Commander chests took two men to get them up the stairs, and Bob and Johnny Walls spent the week moving the chests up to the surface in the earthmover’s front bucket.

  During the second week, Pluto Katherine and Dr. Walls began smelting the gold and turning it into ingots.

  The blue skies never clouded over, the sun was always hot and the crew darkened as the days passed.

  In the third week, they had emptied the first of the three lines of shelves. It was time for a few days off, so instead of carrying gold, the crew helped make ingots and drank cold beer in the shade of the tents.

  The food, water and beer supplies were diminishing rapidly. It was time for a resupply, so Mars took his Matt craft down to the supply depot, also giving Gary his first flight.

  Over the three-week period, Mars, Gary and Mark had worked hard on their mental skills. It took thought, concentration and hours of trying. During the third week Mars and Gary Darwin could communicate, but Mark Price was still struggling to “say” something. It was frustrating for him, as he was the more senior pilot of the two with a hundred or so more hours of flight time than Gary.

  Gary and Mars had begun to communicate. First with one word, then two, and as the thoughts became clearer, three words. Mark was still a faint gabble to the other two, but he didn’t give up.

  Also, in the first three weeks, everyone could see a growing relationship between Gary and Pluto Katherine. It was a sort of romantic comedy being played out by two youngsters in the middle of nowhere. They tried to hide their interest in each other until one day Lunar just told her sister to get on with it.

  To the older generation, like Dr. Walls, Bob, Beth and Monica, who all smiled at the young antics, they saw through Lunar’s remarks to her sister as trying to hide her own growing interest in Mark Price. They were a more serious couple, their ages were closer, and both walked around the work day discussing space, command, and what Lunar’s father had been like as a commander. Neither of the two young men were told where Ryan was or that he would be asleep for another decade.

  Also, after the three weeks of gold-carrying, Lunar, with Mars’ acceptance as Head of Security, drafted an imail to Prime Minister Soames. In the message, it stated that the first amount of gold would be available on the island in 48 hours, two tons, and that they needed more supplies of ethanol, food, water, and beer. The total was about two tons of supplies they were prepared to pay for, delivered to the island.

  She got a reply an hour later saying that the Prime Minister was glad that her trust of his country was growing, the supplies would be on their way within a day, and he was looking forward to the first shipment of gold.

  Mars readied the Matt craft to travel back to the island with just over two tons of gold and an excited Gary as co-pilot. Lunar was becoming softer towards the two newbies. They had worked hard, were strong and seemed trustworthy.

  The craft still in the underground cavern would be launched once the gold extraction was completed. Then, the hole in the sand could be widened and the cavern roof door opened somehow. Increasing the hole size was a large task that would take several days of moving thousands of tons of sand, as the cavern roof opening was twenty times the area of the door they were using.

  Gary learned to wear and use a spacesuit, and was fitted into one of the three large spacesuits on site. He wouldn’t need a helmet, as the shield wasn’t a danger once the craft was closed and sealed.

  “Activating shield, warming thrusters,” stated Mars telepathically in English to a squashed Gary behind him. Gary was getting better at communications, but was still shocked as the shield grew around them.

  The shield had been deactivated by Mars before they could use the ship. He had to wear a helmet to deactivate it. Afterward Gary had helped him off with the helmet.

  Gary heard Mars telepathically as clearly when was Mars wearing his helmet as when he wasn’t. The 2.1 tons of gold, the extra to pay for the supplies, was on two steel pallets brought up from the supply depot below and placed in the cargo hold. Both men were quite surprised how small the gold amount was. The cargo hold was virtually empty but would be fuller with fresh supplies on the return journey.

  “Engaging thought, Gary. I will be thinking in Matt for takeoff,” Gary heard, and suddenly the Matt language was ringing through his brain, a language he was also beginning to learn just to fly this spacecraft.

  Mars had reckoned that it would take both Aussies at least a year to be able to fly this ship. Not only did they need to communicate with it, they had to learn the correct language to communicate the orders to the ship.

  Pluto Katherine waved as she saw the bubble begin to float off the sand. The takeoff was completely silent outside the shield, and Mark excitedly told Lunar, standing next to him, that these craft were as stealthy as any craft could ever be in the future.

  “Wait until we make them totally invisible to the naked eye. Now that would be real stealth,” she replied smiling as the craft rose skywards.

  Inside, Gary really wanted to say something, but he had been told not to disturb Mars. He watched as, without any sense of actual movement, the crater formed far below them. At an incredible speed the crater grew smaller until it was just a dot on the creamy sandy surface below them.

  “Ok, I can think in English again for a few seconds,” he heard Mars in his brain between hundreds of clicks from someone or something else. “I needed 99 percent thrust, as we are fully loaded. We are currently heading through 50,000 feet and aiming for 150,000. That will take another 2 minutes. The craft is giving me verbal height and speed. How, I don’t know, but it has some sort of computer that speaks out all I need to know. I picture the destination in my mind. This ship has landed there several times before and it will make itself stationary directly above its landing zone. It will descend once I give it permission. Flight time to the island, one hour.”

  Gary shook his head. It was like being in a science fiction movie. He had played the sci-fi game “Eve” for several years when he was a rookie in the flight academy, a decade earlier, and this weird unreal type of flight reminded him of the old game he used to love—until real flying took its place
, of course.

  An hour to Australia? When he had flown the Prime Minister over to the Sahara Desert, it had been a twelve-hour flight. Even in an F-23 Stealth, the flying time on afterburner would be over two hours. And it would use up all its fuel in 13 minutes on afterburner anyway.

  How fast could we fly this stretch, Mars? You know, at full throttle, he thought.

  “Gee, I don’t know, but with 500 gallons of fuel, and the shield, I reckon on five, ten, fifteen minutes at the most. I’m flying slowly in case our cargo wants to move around. Remember there is no vacuum inside the cargo hold, and we do feel the gravitational forces around us in here. I do feel a massive difference in atmospheric flight. Everything seems a bit more sluggish. Did you get all of what I said?”

  “Yes, everything. Wow! Five minutes. Mars, you have to show me that speed sometime. That must be Mach 100 or even more!” Gary thought back, and Mars went back to Matt and the craft accelerated. Gary was shocked at the speed this bird could do, as well as what Earth looked like at 150,000 feet altitude. The highest he had ever reached was 70,000 feet.

  Much of Australia came into view below them. A group of spectators grew as they closed, and Mars put her down gently in the exact spot he had taken off from. He laughed when he saw the little robot head out to tow them in. It quickly realized that this was one of the craft that didn’t have tires as it bumped into the shield, bounced off, and like a dog licking its wounds headed back to its hideaway.

  Mars closed down the shield and waved at the girls and four male faces he didn’t recognize watching him through the cockpit glass. He mentality “thought” the floor of his cockpit to open, and then Gary’s.

  To the Aussies watching, they were shocked to see one of their own climb out of the rear seat wearing most of what looked like a spacesuit.

  “Remember, Gary, everything you have seen is top secret. You say one word to your pals and you will be flying Earth machines for the rest of your life,” Mars thought, and Gary looked at him. “Confirm that you heard what I thought, please.”