Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles)

by Rob Buckman

  “Gentlemen, I’d just like to say a few words before I leave,” he said softly in the growing silence. Gradually the talk faded so they could all hear. Scott didn’t raise his voice, or he would have let his anger get the better of him.

  “Now that your children are safe, I can tell you the rest of the information we have discovered.” Now the outrage would really start.

  “It has come to our attention that one or more of you are in contact with the aliens.” Voices of outrage exploded around him, charges and countercharges flew back and forth as they yelled at him and each other. Scott stood unmoved, waiting for the clamor to die down. At last it did, and he continued.

  “Over the past few months, we have gathered evidence of a conspiracy to not only kill me, but also give the aliens sufficient information to destroy our fleet.” Shock and outrage crossed many faces; some just stood in stunned disbelief.

  “They have also given the aliens the location of all critical installations and much more.” He stopped, letting that sink in. “That flow of information will stop as of now, as will any further attempts on my life, or the lives of my people.” A slight smile crossed his face, but anyone thinking it was of pleasure was mistaken.

  “To ensure this, your children are now hostage, and will remain hostage until we locate and identify which of you is responsible for these acts.” Protests exploded across the room.

  “Your children will be cared for in every way possible, but, as of now, each of them will be placed on different ships of the fleet, and in critical locations throughout our facilities.” This time they really started screaming, surging forward toward him.

  The ripping-cloth sound of a needle rifle discharging into the ceiling stopped them, and one look at the armed security people lined up again the wall held them in place.

  “I would suggest you find out who the traitors are and turn them over to us, with the evidence, and the names or identities of the spies they planted. That is, if you ever wish to see your children alive again.” They were already looking at one another, and he could see the wheels turning.

  “I should warn you, we do have methods of learning the truth, so please don’t think we will be fooled by manufactured evidence, or mere speculation.” That would have immediately occurred to several of them.

  “Remember, where we came from, this sort of thing was an everyday occurrence, and although you are politicians and used to intrigue, you have no idea how forceful we can be at finding the truth.” He waited for the expected outburst.

  The storm of insults and threats washed back and forth. “You can’t get away with this, we’ll tell the world what you are, and what you have done,” came from one of them. Another said, “You can’t fight eight billion people! If necessary, we will call jihad against you!”

  “We don’t have to fight eight billion, just you,” Scott said, resolute. “If you call jihad, we would have to show them your little secret downstairs, and the fact that one or more of you has been selling their children to the aliens.” The councilman who’d threatened to start a holy war looked uncomfortable and stepped back.

  “Remember, the health and safety of your children depends on you, and you alone. If we lose another ship, you lose one or more of your children. If the aliens raid a facility, the same thing.” With that he turned and walked out, the team following him. They quickly moved to the roof and the shuttle, finding it almost full, with the addition of fifteen terrified kids, all about fourteen to fifteen years of age.

  * * * * * *

  Arriving back at Alpha base he immediately dived back into work, reading up on the interrogation of the aliens. It wasn’t easy reading, and much of it he had to read between the lines. The alien race they were fighting, or so one prisoner claimed, was the most powerful one in the universe, and they had been raiding other planets for food for a long time to feed their growing population and their war machine. The only other race they had encountered that came close to them in technology and strength was known as the Chatar-Rey but they couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell the interrogator anything else about them. Scott had the impression that there was another race behind the lizards, who called themselves the rulers of the universe, or Oki, but there were only vague references to them and a lot of fear.

  There was no name given for this other race, but a note by Doc Chase said that an acute fear response was produced in other prisoners at any mention of this shadow race, yet he could gain no more information. There were references to some of the other star systems the lizard aliens raided, but little description. An in-depth analysis and translation of the star charts from the alien navigational computer gave a clearer picture of the extent of the plundering, which included most of this arm of the Milky Way. Scott whistled to himself on reading that, trying to imagine the scope of the operation. Just how many aliens were they feeding? A lot, by the scope of the operation. Right now, it was impossible to guess how many. He read until late in the evening, when Kat came in to see him.

  “We managed to get all the kids settled, but it was a battle. Some of those boys just wouldn’t listen to reason. One of them even mouthed off to Pam, and boy did he get a surprise.”

  “What happened?”

  “She hauled him over her knee and whaled the tar out of his backside with a hairbrush. He became very polite after that.”

  “Ouch! I can just bet he did,” Scott said, wincing at the thought. “So what’s the story on the page you ended up attached to?”

  “Hold on to your hat. It’s not a boy, it’s a girl.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “He is a she pretending to be a he,” Kat explained.

  “Right … I think?”

  “His, excuse me, her parents are more liberal than the rest of society, but they soon learned that you couldn’t win. As a girl, she was condemned to spend the rest of her life as a virtual slave. They thought a job at the World Council headquarters was the perfect place to hide her, except for one thing they didn’t know.”

  “I hate to ask, so tell me.”

  “The pages are …”

  “Used as boy toys,” he finished for her. Kat nodded.

  “For the past year he, she had been living with the fear of discovery, and only by luck has she been able to stay out of anyone’s reach.”

  “Well she, or he, whichever he wants to be, is safe here.”

  “I placed her with Pam, and God help anyone who tries to come close, or try to hurt that kid.”

  “Any other surprises?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “We’d better start a training campaign to try to reeducate those kids, or we’re going to be looking at a larger problem later on,” Scott said, thinking aloud.

  “I’ve already talked to Doc Chase and the education center about it, and they’re working on it. Can we go to bed now, please?” she asked with an impish grin. Scott smiled, knowing she didn’t have sleep in mind.

  * * * * * *

  A week went by without any major problems with the new arrivals, but on the following Monday Pete came into Scott’s office with an intense expression on his face, and held up a vid chip.

  “I want you to look at this and tell me what you think,” he said, feeding the data chip into the player. The end wall lit up, and Scott saw an amusement park of some kind. Some of the rides he recognized, some he didn’t, but apart from that it looked no different from any other carnival he’d been to.

  “So?” he asked in puzzlement.

  “Wait,” Pete said, holding his hand up. The camera panned around to show a roller coaster ride that looked like a DNA molecule, with cars screaming around the track at incredible speed. The camera locked onto one particular car as it corkscrewed through a series of turns, then vanished into a tunnel, then emerged and continued down the track. At that point, Pete paused the playback.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes, a roller coaster car vanis
hing into a tunnel, so what?”

  “Look again!” Pete said in exasperation, and punched the control to start the sequence again. Scott watched intently, but even so, he almost missed it.

  “Run that one more time,” he said, and Pete did, this time in slow motion.

  “Good god, how did they do that?” he asked, seeing a different car come out of the tunnel from the one going in.

  “That’s what caught the cameraman’s eye, so he climbed aboard and took this.” Pete hit the controls again, repositioning the head at the beginning of another sequence.

  This one showed the start of the ride, and for a while Scott got dizzy trying to figure out which way was up. Then the tunnel came roaring toward them and they plunged into darkness, emerging a moment later, but there was no indication of what happened. The camera panned left and right to show the surrounding countryside as the car went through another group of loops and twists, finally coming to rest at the station.

  “So it doesn’t tell us how it was done,” Scott commented, starting to lose interest. It was a neat trick, but nothing else. Pete said nothing, so Scott looked up at him, seeing a smirk on his face. “All right wise guy, tell how they did it.”

  “The marine who came across this on the newfax swears it’s real. You go in one part of the park, and come out of the tunnel at the other end five miles away,” he said.

  “Five miles! For Christ sake, what were those guys drinking over there?” he said, but the look on Pete’s face said this wasn’t a joke. “You’re telling me these guys made a video of a roller coaster and traveled five miles just by passing through that … tunnel?”

  “That’s right,” he said. Scott sat there, stunned, the different possibilities running through his mind.

  “I hope you’ve done something to check this out,” he said at last.

  “You bet I have. I’ve got three two-man teams over there searching for it now. I’ll have them check out the ride to see if it’s a fake. If it’s not, I’ll have that tunnel right here.”

  “Find out who invented it as well, and if he’s alive, I want his ass right here.”

  “Ten-four, skipper, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And Pete, good work, very good work. Made sure that the discoverers get a suitable reward, and my personal thanks.” Pete acknowledged his request, and took off out the door.

  Scott sat there for a time, doodling on a pad and writing down different ways this effect could be used, but this all depended on what the effect was, how it worked, and if they could duplicate the device. Questions upon questions were piling up, one on top of the other— with no end in sight. It seemed that no matter how much he delegated to others, within a short period of time he was up to his neck in more questions that needed answering. He felt tired and drained, and every time his thoughts drifted to what he’d seen inside the alien ship, the more tired he became.

  The detailed report on the possible size of the alien empire also made him feel uneasy. With that many resources to draw on, it wouldn’t be long before they’d send in a major task force to stomp on his little parade. The analogy of fighting an octopus at the bottom of the sea and midnight was true, except he felt as if he was fighting a whole herd of them, never really defeating any one. Last night, another one swam out of the darkness when it became apparent that Kat was pregnant again. The old Shakespeare quote about a man with a family became a hostage to fate crossed his mind, but he couldn’t dwell on that. He had a job to do, and nothing could stand in the way, not if the human race was to survive.

  One of the last items in the interrogation report still sent a shiver up his spine—during the interrogation, it became clear that any race that became a threat to the aliens was immediately exterminated, its planet wiped clean of all life. No matter. They would throw everything against them, and do whatever it took to ensure this ended, no matter what the cost. To them, it was a matter of survival, for they knew that if any race became strong enough to defeat them, they would be destroyed. When the president made the deal, he had indeed opened Pandora’s box, for all of them. In a moment of pure clarity, Scott saw down through time, and realized there was no end, and no way to ever close the box again.

  Being a small self-contained unit, it didn’t take an act of congress, or six months of meetings, to get anything done. Within a day of hitting the ground his command team had organized the scout groups: two old-timers, and one new recruit. One of the old-timers was a female who agreed to dress up in the ridiculous smothering outfit females of this world were required to wear. There was some resistance to the makeup of the team, but as Pete pointed out, “our girls,” all trained marines, might spot something their male partners might overlook. Where and what they would look at was up to them, since Scott strong-armed special passes out of President Westwood that permitted the teams to go anywhere they wanted, and to use the public transport systems without question.

  Even so, it was going to be tough, what with the restrictions that females had to be escorted by a male family member at all times. That meant if they had to go somewhere, where only men were permitted, they’d have to stash the women in a hotel room until they got back. The females said that was okay with them, since that would give them time to catalogue the data and transmit it back to base.

  All knew that time was of the essence, so the hastily assembled teams went off to different parts of the world in marine shuttlecraft, rather than wait for the local shuttle to arrive. Scott went on an inspection tour with Brock, mainly to assess their weapons production and ship construction. Everywhere they went they found feverish activity, since everyone now connected with the program understood the time constraint they were under, but Scott wasn’t happy and it showed.

  “Even with three half-assed shipbuilding yards, we can’t keep this up Scott,” Brock said at last, echoing his own thoughts.

  “You too?”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing as you.”

  Scott blew out his cheeks. “I’m wondering now if fighting the aliens as soon as we did was a mistake. We weren’t ready, and now we’re playing catchup.”

  “It’s not as if we had much choice after they attacked us in New Zealand, is it?”

  “True,” Scott admitted. “Since someone in that fucking world council is in contact with these assholes, and told them who and where we were.” He thumped the bulkhead with the side of his fist, frustrated and worried, not that he’d ever admit it.

  Commanding officers were supposed to be stoic and aloof, of course, but deep down he was afraid. Afraid of losing everything he cared about, afraid of failing to protect his new country. He hadn’t been able to protect the United States against a nuclear attack, which he’d sworn to do. Was history about to repeat itself? At the start of World War II, neither the USA nor Great Britain was prepared for war, America even less so than the UK. On top of that, Great Britain lost much of its military equipment on the ignominious retreat at Dunkirk. Each country had a navy that blunted any immediate attack on the mainland, but Pearl Harbor and Scarpa Flow showed that neither was safe from a sneak attack. Here they were just as vulnerable from high orbit. A few dozen rocks from space could smash them back to the Stone Age, and they had little or no defense against it. Their shield would only stand up to so much bombardment before it collapsed. Why the aliens hadn’t thought of that, instead of a direct attack on his base, was an unknown. England had fielded the Spitfire and the Hurricane against the might of the German air force, while America had fielded her new carrier fleet against the Japanese, first holding them at bay, then taking the fight to the enemy. They needed something similar.

  What scared him most was the aliens’ unknown war-fighting capacity. How fast could the aliens’ production facilities produce ships to replace those they’d lost, and how fast could they train new personnel? It had to be far beyond Earth’s limited capacity. They needed the game changer before the next incursion, or they might not be so lucky next time. In the end, he wandered over to Doc Chase
’s office and did a little arm-twisting to get him to cough up a bottle of his moonshine. They sat sipping and chatting for a while until Scott fell silent. Chase looked at him a moment.