by Tony Teora
There was static and no response. Ace tried again with the same result.
“Fuck, come on, we gotta catch up with an idiot. We need to do some more double time.”
“What’s goin’ on now?” asked Big Jimbo, getting tired of all the action. At six foot five and two hundred and forty pounds, all he wanted was to sit somewhere and shoot things, like a normal sniper. The job had turned into running double time, fighting spiders at close quarters, and now running damn double time again.
“I’ll explain later, but Tucker decided to take the rest of the team by himself into GEN-6.”
“Shit,” was all Big Jimbo could say. Big Jimbo swore that, when he got back, he was definitely taking some more time off to hunt fat goldwing duckens. Hell, Big Jimbo was about ready to retire early, and the money for this job would pay him well into his old age. What worried Jimbo was whether or not any of them would get back safely to enjoy such a retirement package. Up in the distance, some lights flashed. Jimbo hoped they were friendly and not something else he’d need to shoot in the dark passageway.
Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and planetoids.
As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. 1973 Icarus paper, Francis Crick (Nobel Prize Winner) and Leslie Orgel on belief DNA was manufactured and delivered to Earth.
7
_________
Inner Thoughts
Ace, Ivan, and Jimbo ran double time in the psychedelic metal tunnel, the lights flickering on and off as incandescent bulbs and electrical systems popped from a power fluctuation, creating a freaky night show of horrors. Then everything went black. Ace ordered the team to stop while he used his night vision ocular implants to scan up ahead. He saw Kiya and a man fighting. “Kiya’s in trouble. Use low-beam pan lights. I’m gonna sprint up—cover me.”
Ace kicked his enhanced biotechnonic legs into full gear. He approached Kiya and abruptly stopped about a meter away to inspect the situation. The fight was already over, with a body on the ground. Ace stared at a full-reverse karate kick that came swinging toward him but stopped in midair, just inches away his face. “That’s you, Ace—isn’t it?” asked Kiya lowering her leg but now holding her sidearm.
“Yes it is, Kiya,” said Ace, turning on a flashlight to show his face.
Kiya gave a warm smile. “That’s a spooky money shot. You rushed here in the dark to help me because you’re telepathic, aren’t you? You saw me, didn’t you?”
Ace laughed. “Yeah, I saw you, but it’s not because of telepathy. I’ve got ocular implants that can see in the dark.”
Ace flashed his light on the unconscious body. It was a scientist, but the body looked sickly. The skin was a greyish color, with blue blood vessels streaked all over the arms and face. The person also had bulging, unnatural black eyes. He looked like he was being transformed. “What the hell happened here?”
“As I caught up to Janice and Tucker, Janice screamed for help. I saw this man come up from the front. It looked like he was talking to them, but then he swung something at Janice. I saw him drop it on the ground up ahead. I think it’s a knife.” As she finished, Ivan and Jimbo came running up, both huffing and puffing for air.
Everyone carefully walked ahead. They found what looked like an advanced hypodermic needle. Ace picked it up. “Jesus Christ, that’s a big fuckin’ needle.” He inspected the instrument and noticed that the needle was really a device to cut into skin. It had a pea size hole at the end. “Wonder what this is for?”
Big Jimbo looked at it. “It sure as hell ain’t no turkey baster.”
“It almost looks like one, though, except it’s so medical-looking,” said Ace.
“Let me look at it,” said Kiya, inspecting the glass tube section. It had a special chamber that was filled with a green fluid. “I think this thing has some kind of temperature control, as if it was keeping something warm.”
“Or maybe alive,” said Ivan.
“Why do you say that?” asked Kiya.
“Look at floor over there. I see some of green liquid … and little green worm.”
Everyone looked over and saw the fluid and a strange green worm struggling, looking like it was suffocating. Ace walked over and squashed it. “No time to talk about bugs. Throw away the turkey baster. We’ve got to get to Janice and that moron Chip Tucker.”
“What about calling his comm?” asked Kiya.
“He’s not responding. I tried calling you earlier, but it’s all jacked up. There’s no response from anyone in this tunnel.”
“That’s strange. I had my radio on. Try it again now.”
Ace clicked on his radio. There was no response “Fuck, something in this tunnel or base is jamming our radios.”
“We better just move ahead like you said earlier, Ace,” said Big Jimbo, looking through a night scope. “I see a door not too far from here, probably only thirty yards.”
“Let’s go,” said Ace, wondering what the hell Tucker was up to.
***
“My neck’s killing me,” said Janice.
Tucker pulled her into a room filled with computer console stations. It was barren except for a few flat screen consoles flashing “GEN-6 Security Alert” protocols.
“Relax, I don’t think you got hit that hard. Let me see.”
Tucker looked at the wound on the side of Janice’s neck. There seemed to be some type of entry point, a reddish, infected-looking hole. Tucker had never seen anything like that before. “You have a gash, but I don’t think it’s anything that’ll kill ya.”
“You’re a piece of shit. If you hadn’t pushed me into that man, I would never have gotten stabbed.”
“I got nervous in the dark. I wasn’t sure what was going on,” said Tucker, lying.
“Let’s call Ace,” said Janice.
“I tried twice. Our comm lines are down.”
“Let’s go back to the entry hatch to meet up. I wanna go back.”
“Look, if there’s one crazy man out there, there might be more. Let’s just stay here. Ace and the team will come through the same way. Sit down and get some rest. I want to log in and check a few things. I might need your help.”
Janice reluctantly agreed. Her neck felt hot, like there was some massive infection going on inside. What was worse was it felt like something was moving up her neck. But that was crazy, wasn’t it? As a biologist, Janice knew that people’s minds did strange things under pressure. She sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to not think about the throbbing, wiggling pain in her neck.
***
Ace and his small group made their way to the internal door. It was wide open.
“Wonder why it’s open?” asked Jimbo.
“To let out monsters,” said Ivan.
“Well, let’s just close it, just in case those spiders find a way to burrow through those rocks,” said Ace. “But first, let’s do a quick scan inside and make sure we don’t have any other bug-eye scientists looking for trouble.”
Ace walked through the door with his Uzi by his side. The inside area had another door which was also open, and beyond that was a lighted hallway. Ace walked back. “All looks clear. Close up the doors.”
Jimbo shut the first door while Ivan locked the second. Kiya pulled out and unraveled an e-paper map that had a layout of the facility. She tapped the corner of the paper to pull up and magnify the east entry point. “We’re here,” she said, pointing at the east gate door. “The healthy scientists are holed up in the northwest side. The problems are in the southeast.”
“That’s probably how that nut job got loose. He must have come through this hallway.” Ace pointed south.
“I agree,” said Kiya. “So we’ll want to go north, but according to intel, all the protective doors going north will be sealed shut.”
“That�
�s what we have Ivan for,” grinned Ace.
“But I wonder where Tucker went?” asked Big Jimbo.
“I hope he headed north, because going south or directly west has some issues,” said Ace.
“Issues like crazies or Alien EBE-C3s?” asked Jimbo, thinking of the bug-eye man he’d shot earlier.
“You got it, big guy. Let’s go together, but slowly. I don’t want any more surprises. Anyone have anything else to add?”
Kiya spoke. “Ace, I don’t want to freak anyone out, but I feel a strong presence of worms in this building. I also sense the EBE-C3s and some kind of dark entity.”
“This whole base is one dark project,” said Jimbo. “Those feelin’s are normal for a place like this.”
“No, I feel something worse. Something is going on now, but I can’t figure it out. I’ve never encountered such a strong internal image. Ace, do you sense anything? You’ve got a super strong telepathic sense, too.”
Ace wanted to admit that ever since the Alien EBE scout came by he’d been getting bad vibes. And the GEN-6 facility did cause some extra concern, but Ace knew these heightened levels of concern were natural. “Yeah, I got some real bad vibes ’bout this place, so we’re all gonna keep our cool and proceed carefully. Now, are we all ready to head out?”
Everyone nodded and then followed Ace. He proceeded on a northward path. According to the e-paper map, they had three security doors coming up, each spaced about a third of a mile apart. What concerned Ace weren’t the security doors, but the rooms that were blacked out on the e-paper. They were listed as confidential, security level C-10, and had no information available. Ace knew that when he got to those areas, he’d find out what was really going on with the research facility.
As Ace walked, he felt eyes were watching him, inspecting him and the team, like rats in a maze. It raised the hair on his arm in a cold, prickly way, as if some kind of cold ghostly presence was now walking by his side. Something real bad was going on. Ace could feel it. His head spoke to him, telling him they should go back to the ship and just blow up this God-forsaken facility. Something else told him to continue, and that inner fire was stronger than the icy fear of the unknown. So he and the team moved ahead.
Ace looked at his comm; the Aurora was still gone. They would need her to get back home. Hope they make it back to Kabbalah, prayed Ace. He knew Captain Karr was the best of the best captains, but if they were fighting the Grey EBE-C3s—well, that fight might be over before it even started. It was like a normal human taking on Ace. The other person never knew what hit him until it was too late.
***
On board the Aurora, Captain Karr soberly looked over to his stocky weapons officer, Lt. Commander John Mach. The situation didn’t look good. The alien craft was quickly approaching.
“Commander—are the shields back to full?”
The alien craft had appeared out of nowhere and blasted the Aurora with a heavy electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Why it hadn’t used something stronger made no sense. A high-powered laser or nuclear missile could have caused some real damage—maybe even the complete destruction of the Aurora, since the shields had been on minimal strength. Regardless of this, the original electromagnetic pulse blast had knocked out a lot of systems. Some were critical, and the Aurora was using backups while repairs were under way.
Mach looked at the magnetospheric flux intensity. “Captain, our shields are almost at full, but that mother ship can probably tear them apart with one or two more hits. They’ll be in range in less than ten minutes at current speed, and we can’t go any faster without risking a containment field breach.” Even a fully equipped war ship like the Aurora had no real chance against the more advanced technology. That was why they were on full war alert and had fled into a wormhole.
Mach reviewed the alien ship’s configuration from a classified database that stated the ship was an EBE-C3 mother ship, one never seen by mankind. He wondered why the hell it was in the database if mankind had never lived to talk about an encounter with the EBE-C3 mother ship. The short encounters at Earth colonies ended up as nothing more than the alien mother ship scorching all human life like one removes termites in a home. How’d Earth Command get the specs? It must have been from the smaller, friendly Greys. But those questions were not important now, so Mach read on.
The specs said a mother ship had the ability to travel via a space-time warp engine. It shrank space and ran in some kind of exotic time bubble, something that the Aurora couldn’t do. The Aurora’s only mode of travel was the warping of space around a wormhole, and although effective, the EBE-C3 Greys used a different, yet similar technology. It was virtually impossible to outrun a Grey ship because they could just appear out of nowhere, and at any time, in normal space.
But once a ship was in a wormhole space, like the Aurora was, they had no choice but to follow with that same method, for if they tried using the space-time warp engine in a wormhole, they’d be blown to bits by the particle instability that created anti-matter in the wormhole. In any case, even at the slower wormhole travel, the Greys were approaching, and despite the fact that the Aurora now had its shields up full, Mach knew that shield protection against this monstrous ship was minimal at best.
“Bring the laser cannons, nukes, rail guns online,” said Karr. “Have our fighters get ready to launch.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Captain Karr knew that there’d never been an encounter with a C3 mother ship where anyone was around to talk about it. He had been briefed about the Grey C3s before leaving Earth. He was the only one on the ship completely briefed, as an encounter was partially suspected, given a ten percent chance by the war analysts. The analysts didn’t know shit, so Karr hoped their report was also wrong. It said the C3s were cold, super-intelligent, super-lethal, and hell-bent on exterminating mankind. The report said the friendlier, smaller Greys, were their ancient cousins, but these larger versions were a super-evil, malevolent race. Not a species to trust.
At least, that’s what the smaller Greys told Earth Command. It was the reason that Kabbalah was chosen for the research on the C3s. It was supposed to be the farthest planet from the home worlds of the Grey C3s. How in the hell they figured out its location was a mystery. Captain Karr knew the situation had few good outcomes. “Commander, initiate preparations for Operation White Out.”
“Shit,” blurted out the commander. “Ah, sorry, sir. Yes, sir, I’ll set the codes. Let me know when you want to enter them.”
Operation White Out was a ship’s suicide pill. It would set a self-destruct that was completely irreversible. Once initiated, it would blow up the ship. The only variable that could be set was the time of destruction, and that had a maximum time configuration of one hour. Captain Karr knew that the Grey C3s were capable of strong, telepathic mind control, and he couldn’t let them take control of the Aurora. The C3 Greys had acquired this ability over millions of years of evolution. It was how they controlled other primate-like societies all over the galaxy, including the smaller Greys.
Once they got close enough, there’d be all kinds of telepathic probes, and once that happened, no one knew who would succumb and who would not. Most of the ship might end up in some alien-controlled trance, giving the ship and its information away to the C3 Greys. Time could be warped in parts of the ship while the aliens did their inspection. All kinds of unknown alien shit could hit the magno-flux transducers. It was why all the research on Kabbalah was compartmentalized and why the base was so far away. If someone didn’t know what was going on, they couldn’t pass it to the Greys. Destroying the whole ship had to be a main option; once the alien ship got within a ten-mile range, Karr would light the match. It’d be a three-second auto-destruct once he and Mach put in the codes. Little time for the tall Grey men to do much other than kiss their boney behinds good-bye. The anti-matter explosion would wipe out anyone in the warp tunnel.
Captain Karr tapped his comm unit. “Psych team? This is the captain. Give me the duty officer.”
Almost immediately, an answer arrived. “Lieutenant Goldberg, sir.”
“Can you get me Swann? I want to talk to him now.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll get him,” said Goldberg, frowning.
Lieutenant Goldberg hung up his comm and walked over to a specially shielded room, one of twenty on the ship, called the Dream Catcher. It was disconnected from the rest of the ship and had only battery lights and an internal air processor. This was the strangest room on the Aurora, and it was Goldberg’s job to take care of its strange occupant, Lieutenant James Swann, the son of the infamous physicist, Dr. James Swann, Sr.
Swann was a small, five-foot-two, fragile-looking man with long brown hair. Goldberg hated going to visit Swann. Swann could read people’s minds and always knew how he felt, and that bothered him. Who the hell wanted to be with someone who knew your inner thoughts? He hated thinking that Swann could read his most private inner thoughts. He tried to regain his composure and hit door comm, the only way to communicate to Swann. “This is Lieutenant Goldberg. May we speak?” he asked.
An annoyed response came back through the door’s comm. “Please tell the captain that I’ll join him in five minutes and that he should avoid any aggressive action with the Greys. None at all. Also, you need to relax, asshole. I don’t give a shit about your boring private thoughts. I got more important shit to worry about. Swann out.”
Fucker, thought Goldberg as left. He used the ship’s comm and told the captain the news.
Once you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.
—Lyndon B. Johnson
8
_________
Enemy’s Enemy
Ace, Ivan, Jimbo, and Kiya made it up to the first security door. It hung open with mangled metal and smoking wires from what looked like a recent explosion. Ace cautiously led the team through and into a lab full of computers flashing red warning lights and messages. At the end of the room, in the corner, were two industrial, gas-like tanks. As Ace walked around the tanks, he looked into another room through a thick, protective glass. Tucker was in the room and excitedly typing away on a terminal. Janice sat reclined in a nearby chair, her eyes closed as if passed out or sleeping.