They had been a disappointment to the small boy who had dreamed of alien life. Mars and Venus were barren of life, the space program had stalled after Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon and most of the people who claimed to have seen aliens were lying or deluded or drunk. There were no alien spacecraft concealed in hidden bases, no massive City Destroyers hanging over Earth’s cities, no tiny grey aliens abducting humans from their beds and performing medical experiments on them. Alex had investigated a handful of such claims and concluded, in all cases, that the witnesses were unreliable. It wasn't a case of the witnesses lying – not intentionally – but a case of hypnotic regression being rather untrustworthy. There were so many details of alien abductions in the public sphere that almost anyone could invent a scenario in their heads and – quite unwittingly – mislead the hypnotist.
And now…and now, aliens were real.
He looked up at the darkening sky, with stars starting to appear high above, and wondered. There had always been a number of UFO reports that had never been explained. Could they have been real alien spacecraft? It crossed his mind to wonder if it was all an exercise, but that seemed impossible. No one would waste so much effort on a handful of people from disparate organisations. No, it had to be real.
For the first time in his life, Alex Midgard looked up at the stars and felt fear.
Chapter Three
Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 3
The shaking of the helicopter throbbed through his entire body, but Alex managed to doze as the small team proceeded towards their base of operations. Anticipation had made it hard to sleep, but he had long since mastered the trick of sleeping whenever he had a chance to catch some rest. The blacked-out helicopter’s interior was boring and none of them could concentrate on their books, or small entertainment devices. They’d have to abandon those when they arrived – it wasn't unknown for intelligence agencies to adapt a common MP3 player as a surveillance and recording device – and Alex was too keyed up to relax into a book. Sleep was the only recourse.
“Two minutes,” Jones said, consulting a small terminal. The team hadn’t been told precisely where they were going, although they had been told that it was somewhere isolated, just in case there was a biological threat from the crashed alien ship. Alex had read enough position papers to guess that there might be a nuke emplaced in their destination to sterilize the entire area if something nasty did pop out of the alien bodies, an insight he hadn’t shared with the others. It would only have upset them.
The helicopter touched down with a final shudder and shut down its engines. The absence of the dull roar was almost disconcerting, despite the anticipation welling up within him. For the first time in his life – in all of human history, unless some of the people who claimed to have encountered aliens had been telling the truth – humanity was going to come face-to-face with intelligent beings from another world. He, Alex Midgard, was going to see an alien. His legs felt unsteady after the long trip as he pulled himself to his feet, wincing at the bright sunlight burning in through the opening hatch. The pair of soldiers outside waved the team out into the heat. It looked as if they were somewhere in the desert.
New Mexico would be traditional, he thought wryly, as he looked around. The base was tiny compared to some of the massive USAF bases he had served on throughout his career. There was a pair of massive hangars, a small barracks…and little else, apart from a surprisingly long runway. The whole area had a faintly desolate look, as if it had been abandoned for several years or perhaps placed on maintenance. Alex had been in the air force long enough to know that there were dozens of bases scattered around the country that had never been decommissioned or sold to the highest bidder, places that could be reactivated with a few months notice. Several of them had been reactivated after 9/11, but others had been kept on the sidelines. What they could see of their new home – at least for the next month – might be only the tip of the iceberg.
“This way, sir,” one of the soldiers said. Alex studied the uniform and frowned to himself. He didn’t know much about the minutia of the Army, but it struck him that the soldier was an odd combination of careless and very careful. His uniform looked as if he hadn’t bothered to change, his cheeks were unshaven…yet he held himself like a front-line combat soldier. Alex guessed that the soldiers were actually a crack Special Forces unit assigned to the base and ordered to pretend that they were a reservist unit; he wondered, vaguely, if they knew what they were protecting.
The air was hot enough that stepping into the hangar was something of a relief. He looked around, expecting to see a crashed UFO right in front of him, but the massive hangar was empty, although there were marks on the ground suggesting that something heavy had been dragged into the building. The soldiers led them right towards a small cubicle set into one wall and opened the door, revealing an elevator large enough to take the entire group. It was a barren chamber and Alex was glad when the doors opened again, revealing a man wearing a USAF Colonel’s uniform.
“Welcome to Area 52,” the officer said. “My name is Colonel William Fields, commander of this base. We have a short security briefing to attend and then I’ll take you to see the big discovery.”
Alex smiled to himself. He’d thought that Jones had been joking when he’d announced – deadpan – that they weren't going to Area 51, on the grounds that Area 51 was a paranoid fantasy created to hide the existence of another base, Area 52. The entire team had had enough briefings to last them for years, but there was no avoiding it. The military machine, at least in Alex’s experience, preferred to repeat things time and time again, just to make sure that they were understood.
The briefing room turned out to be a small conference room. It looked surprisingly primitive, as if it had been built back in the fifties and never redesigned since then. A handful of computers, looking out of place, stood against one wall; another held a drinks cabinet and a water cooler. A third wall held a set of plans, presumably of the base itself. There was a faintly musty smell in the air, despite the efforts of a pair of air conditioners, suggesting that the base had only recently been reactivated. Alex suspected – looking at Fields – that the Colonel had either been given charge of the base as a way of keeping him away from anything important, or that he was a reservist assigned to the base, at least in theory. It must have been a shock to discover that his base had suddenly become the most important place on the planet.
“Please be seated,” Fields said. He nodded to Jones. “This base, recently re-designated as Area 52, was built back in the 1960s to serve as a secondary base for U2 and Blackbird flights over the Soviet Union. It never actually served in such a role and was transformed into a small training facility in the eighties, before being placed on maintenance following the end of the Cold War. 9/11 saw the base being temporary reactivated to serve as an emergency biological warfare centre. It would have been used as a place to hold infected personnel and – hopefully – find a cure. The base, again, has never actually served in such a role and was re-deactivated two years ago.”
He looked around the table. “You’ve all been briefed on security requirements, and should have been stripped of any electronic devices that can be used to communicate, so I’ll keep this brief,” he continued. “You are here for a month, unless you receive special permission to exit early. You are not to go to Level 0 – ground level – without prior permission from Mr Jones or myself. You have clearance to visit anywhere on Levels 1 to 6; please bear in mind that Level 7 is off-limits at all times.”
Jane broke the brief silence. “What’s on Level 7?”
“Various things concerning the safety of the base,” Fields said, curtly. “Only authorised staff members are allowed to visit Level 7.”
He pointed towards the plans on the wall. “I advise you to study them carefully,” he said. “Level 1 is the underground hangar; your…object of study is there. Level 2 consists of mainly biological research laboratories. Parts of Level 2 are sealed off, requir
ing special permission to enter, but you’ll get a briefing on that later. Levels 3 and 4 are research laboratories, Level 5 is living quarters and Level 6 holds the command centre and other essentials. You’ll pick it up very quickly so I won’t go into more detail.
“We are under a full lockdown protocol here, so please bear in mind that every email you send will be read by Mr Jones or myself before it is allowed out of the buffer,” he added. “There are no facilities for making telephone or video calls to anyone. If you have questions about any messages you want to send, run them past us and we’ll let you know. The President’s orders were quite explicit.”
Alex listened thoughtfully. Fields had been a good choice on the part of the President, or whoever had chosen him for the role. He wouldn’t allow anyone to break the security regulations and, knowing what he was sitting on, Alex couldn’t blame him. Most governmental secrets were boring, or only interesting to specialists, but a crashed alien spacecraft would be of interest to the entire world. He hoped that the security teams deployed defending the base had MANPAD units or other weapons, just in case the aliens attempted to recover their crashed ship. Did the aliens know where the human race had hidden their prize?
“Thank you, Colonel,” Jones said. He grinned nervously at his team. “I think that we’re ready to see the crashed ship now.”
“Of course,” Fields said. “If you’d like to follow me…?”
Alex couldn’t have been kept away by wild buffaloes, or even armed guards. Fields led them through a set of bland corridors, without even a handful of children’s pictures to brighten up the place, and into a small room. A pair of soldiers stood there and watched as Fields used a small ID Card to open a heavy door and allow them into the underground hangar. The light streaming out was blinding, but Alex couldn’t have turned his gaze away if he had tried. The alien craft held his attention and refused to let go.
Part of his mind whispered about how the entire hangar deck was an elevator, and how the crashed UFO had been lowered into the underground base, but he barely heard it. The alien craft dominated the entire room. Just looking at it sent chills running down his spine, a sense of…unreality that refused to fade. If he’d seen it, even without the prior briefings, he would have known that it wasn't human. The proportions were subtly wrong. Alex had seen fighter jets produced by a dozen different countries and they had all had some things in common, but the technology and design philosophy of the alien craft was completely different. The USAF had been trying to produce flying saucers – a team the USAF had come to detest back in the fifties – for years, yet they had never succeeded. The alien designers unquestionably had.
It wasn't a standard flying saucer, or a black triangle. Alex was almost relieved. Either of those two types would have meant that people he had dismissed as kooks had been telling the truth all along. The alien craft was a massive silvery almond, with a tiny pair of stubby wings at the rear of the craft. It was slightly smaller than a Lear jet, yet somehow it looked larger, as if it loomed in his eyes. He hadn’t realised that he was stepping forward until he looked up at the craft, feeling suddenly very mortal compared to the alien craft. Alex had never felt the same way when he had seen any human-built craft. It was unquestionably alien.
“My God,” he said, barely aware that he was speaking aloud. “What happened to it?”
The underside of the craft was badly mangled. The crash had clearly been violent, yet somehow the damage wasn't as great as he had feared. Alex had seen a hundred fanciful pictures depicting crashed UFOs being recovered by soldiers, but most of them had been patently absurd. There was something almost noble about the alien craft, yet it had fallen from the heavens and come crashing down to Earth. It belonged in space, he realised. It had no place on the ground. Up close, there was a weird taste in the air surrounding the craft, a hint of something beyond comprehension. No one who saw the craft in person could doubt its origins.
He reached up to touch the hull and was surprised when his fingers skittered over the craft’s hull without touching it. He recoiled from the feeling, yet pushed his fingers firmly against the hull until he felt warm metal. How, he wondered, could it still be warm after two days? Was it still powered, or was it somehow radiating heat – or radiation? Was it a nuclear powered craft?
“We checked it for radiation as well as other surprises,” Fields said, when Alex asked. The entire team was pouring over the hull, yet no one seemed to want to break the spell and step into the craft. Who knew what the interior held? “It doesn’t have more than the standard background radiation, which is rather interesting.”
“You’re telling me,” Neil Frandsen said. “If it’s been in space, it should have been exposed to radiation from the sun, if nothing else. We had to watch astronauts carefully for exposure to solar flares and other surprises.”
Alex watched as he stepped up to the gash in the hull and peered inside. “Wow,” he said, simply. “Come and take a look at this.”
The interior of the alien craft was…odd. The sense of unreality only grew stronger as Alex pulled himself into the craft, peering around him with interest. A strange light pulsed from the walls, illuminating the interior and throwing everything into sharp relief. There were no chairs, or nothing he recognised as a chair, but dozens of strange machines built into the hull. The most advanced fighter jet the USAF could produce was a modular creation, but the alien ship seemed to be all one item, everything somehow melded together perfectly. Alex felt a wave of envy as Frandsen led the way towards the prow of the vessel, pushing aside a broken tissue of metal that threatened to block his path.
“This must be the control cabin,” he said, slowly. “Alex, what do you make of that?”
The cockpit – or so Alex thought of it – looked like a fanciful image of a spacecraft cockpit from a child’s science-fiction book. There were two chairs set up at the front of the ship, with chalk markers to show where the bodies had been before they had been removed, yet there was little else. The control panels – or so he assumed they were – looked dark and silent. The craft might still be illuminated, yet there was no other sign of life, as far as he could see. He had to remind himself that might well mean nothing when alien technology was involved. The craft might have an AI onboard that was carefully preparing its escape from confinement. It was as good as any other theory.
“It’s strange,” he said, finally. It wasn't that he didn’t trust Frandsen, but he didn’t want to say too much either, not when all of his impressions were so confused. He felt his legs wobbling and hastened to scramble out towards the gash in the hull. He needed a quiet sit down and a cup of very black coffee. The sheer presence of the craft was so overwhelming that he started to wonder if he was imagining things.
He lowered himself out of the gash and felt nothing but relief when his feet touched the metal hangar deck. It might have been primitive, yet it was human. The others seemed to have had similar reactions, although Frandsen didn’t seem deterred by anything. The chance to examine technology that had originated on another world was a dream come true for him. For Alex, and most of the rest of the team, it was a possible threat. How could humanity defend itself against a race that could cross light years effortlessly, when humanity could not even return to the moon?
“There was a considerable amount of debris collected at the crash site,” Fields was saying. Alex barely heard him through the sound of blood rushing through his ears. His own heartbeat was almost deafeningly loud. “We’ve moved most of it to the research labs on the lower levels. The bodies have been placed in Level 2 and are currently awaiting inspection.”
Alex felt dizzy again. He wanted to see the alien bodies, to see how closely they matched the aliens humans had been reporting ever since the 1950s, but at the same time he wanted to collapse. He wanted nothing more than sleep or a chance to collect his thoughts and work out what it all meant. The presence of the alien craft preyed on his mind, disturbing him. Something fundamental had changed in the way he viewed the
universe. The existence of alien life was now a chilling reality.
“Leave the bodies for the moment,” Frandsen said, firmly. He was looking over at Jones. “I must say, sir, that I won't make many discoveries on my own. I’ll have to form a research team from my labs – hell, raid the Skunk Works and Phantom Works – and get them over here with a shitload of equipment. Most of them will have security clearance already and those that don’t can be cleared. I can get a list for you if you can get it expedited…”
“Get me the list,” Jones said. He seemed to be half in shock. It might have been the effect of the alien craft, or it might have been the discovery that Frandsen couldn’t take one look at the craft and solve all of its mysteries. Alex had no illusions about the magnitude of the task ahead. The aliens might be bound by the same laws of science that bound the human race, but their tech was so fundamentally different that unlocking any of it might take years. “I’ll see about getting as many as possible cleared to come here.”
He looked down at the deck, well away from the alien craft. “I think that we should all take a rest now,” he added. He had to be suffering from the same cultural shock that was affecting Alex, or the remainder of the team. “The Colonel can show us our rooms and we’ll continue the tour later.”
No one argued. They were all wrapped up in their private thoughts.
Chapter Four
Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 3
The room was small, with a single bunk bed, a set of cupboards and a washbasin. It was completely without character, apart from the two bags of clothes that someone had dumped at the end of the bed. Alex didn’t have to look at them to know that they would be in his size, if not in his style. The security requirements might verge on the far side of paranoid, yet they had to be honoured. The base’s security personnel would have obtained clothing for him just to prevent him from bringing his own clothes into the base. It seemed absurd…until one remembered how many devices could be concealed within one’s clothing. Sometimes, there was no such thing as too few precautions.
Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Page 3