Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  She stared down at the keyboard and considered. NORAD was equipped with quantum computers that were at least two generations ahead of civilian models, but even with the fantastic levels of computing power at her disposal, there seemed to be no way to speed up the process. Or perhaps there was. She knew when one alien spacecraft had visited Earth – the UFO that had crashed – and if there was anything odd on that day, it might signify a way of tracking the UFOs.

  “Run program,” she said, as she tapped the final key. It had taken nearly an hour to program in the search patterns. A general search would have revealed thousands of false trails – laid by civilian and military aircraft – yet tightening the search patterns too far would have risked ignoring vital information. It was a reverse of the standard search pattern, used to track aircraft back in time, and it was far more complex. She couldn’t afford to ignore any possible contacts. Tired, she stood up and staggered off towards the bathroom. She needed to splash water on her face and perhaps drink a lake of coffee.

  The program was still running when she finished washing her face and combed her hair, so she went down to the cafeteria to have a snack. The quality of food in Cheyenne Mountain was somewhat variable - Schriever Air Force Base had had better food – but at least it beat MRE packs. She took a plateful of eggs and bacon and found an empty table to sit at, ignoring the handful of young male officers who tried to draw her into conversation. She could make a radar system sit up and beg, but a social life had never held much interest for her. Besides, in her experience men wanted to talk about sport, guns and how great they were…and none of those were interesting. She had never met a man who was her intellectual equal.

  She finished the food, placed the dishes in the washing pile, and walked back to her study room. The program had finished, she was relieved to see – even quantum computers had their limits – and she poured herself a mug of black coffee before sitting down and studying the results. They were hardly a surprise. There were thousands of transient contacts that had appeared, disappeared, and never been seen again. One of them – she hoped – had to be the alien ship. It was quite possible that many of them were the alien ship. How fast could it travel?

  Her fingers danced over the keyboard, looking for patterns. She’d spent two days learning everything she could about UFOs and radar and she was attempting to duplicate a trick that a British UFO researcher had developed. He’d taken a UFO report and a set of radar contacts and put them together, revealing that something had crossed the British mainland at a speed of around Mach Nine. It was fast enough that Robin guessed that the whole thing had been written off. As far as she knew, there was nothing in the American or British military that could move at such a speed, with the possible exception of the space shuttle. The unknown craft remained a mystery.

  The patterns slowly developed in front of her. Robin’s talent wasn’t just operating radar – anyone could do that, with the right training - but in seeing patterns that few others could see. It wasn't easy and she found herself wondering if she was imagining things, but as she studied the pattern, it became clear that there was a succession of odd contacts, coming in from the East Coast and arcing over towards Schriever Air Force Base, where the craft had met its fate. Her fingers tapped in new commands, trying to refine the data. It looked as if the craft had registered and then…simply vanished. It was no wonder that the USAF hadn’t launched interceptors to challenge the mystery craft. No one had realised that it was a craft.

  Robin had seen radar data recovered from the Iraqis after Baghdad had fallen. The city had been hit heavily by F-117 stealth fighters – somehow, the degree of effort put into degrading the Iraqi air defence network had slipped out of the public mind – yet the Iraqis had achieved some level of detection. The aircraft had been briefly visible when they’d opened their bomb bays and released their weapons. A more alert radar team and properly calibrated air defence weapons might have cost the United States dearly. An F-117 was naturally stealthy. The alien craft – assuming she was actually looking at a real pattern – seemed to flicker between stealth mode and being visible. It made little sense to her, yet…

  She pulled up the data and, having refined her program, let it loose on the data from the last ten years. It took nearly an hour for the program to complete itself, but she didn’t waste the time. She had to define ways to actually achieve a more permanent contact, maybe even deny the aliens one of their tricks. When she looked at the data, she muttered a curse under her breath. It was impossible to be sure, yet it looked as if the aliens had been probing American defences for years. It could have been paranoia, she knew, yet she’d programmed the computers to be quite careful. There was an entire series of transient contacts that seemed to fit the evasive pattern.

  On impulse, she brought up the data from the rest of the world. Few people comprehended just how much coverage the United States and its allies had built up, sharing information through the wonders of secure computer networks. American, British, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Israeli, Australian and Japanese radar networks shared data on a daily basis, allowing them to peer far into China, Russia and other hostile nations. No aircraft could move over Iran or Venezuela without being detected and tracked. The other powers howled that it was another example of Western Imperialism, yet there was no way to prevent it. Radar pulses were no respecters of borders.

  She looked down and bit off another curse. The pattern suggested that all of the major powers had had their alien visitors, although some of those powers radar systems were more primitive than what America would deploy. Worse, the Deep Space Tracking System reported odd bursts of high-temperature emissions at the edge of space, bursts that corresponded with possible alien contacts. She almost couldn’t believe that no one had noticed the pattern sooner, yet it was easy to understand. Everyone had vague contacts and, if they weren't behaving like predicable aircraft, they tended to be ignored. It was a mistake that might have disastrous consequences.

  A nasty thought occurred to her and she did what she should have done in the first place. Six days had passed since the alien spacecraft had crashed – what had happened since then? The radar data, newly collected and collated, formed in front of her and a frightening pattern emerged. A handful of new unidentified contacts had been detected at Schriever Air Force Base – her former home – and others had been detected towards Washington. She wished that UFO reports were sent to Colorado Springs – it would have been interesting to compare them with her radar reports – but there was no time. She had to kick this upstairs to her new superior officer. It changed everything.

  She picked up the phone and dialled a number from memory. It was oddly primitive technology in a place that had once been called the Crystal Palace, but anyone with the right equipment could hack into a wireless conversation, or even tamper with it. The landline might be primitive, yet it was much harder for hostile powers to intercept and tap, even though the alien capabilities were completely unknown. For all she knew, they could read over her shoulder as she scrolled through the data on the computer screen.

  “General?” She asked. “I think you’d better get down here. There’s something that you should see.”

  ***

  General Gary Wachter was a short burly man with a shaven head, although Robin privately conceded that he had a really nice smile. He actually reminded her of her grandfather before he passed away. He might have been an Army General, an officer in the 3rd Infantry Division as well as a training officer before accepting the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Robin knew better than to underestimate him. He was far from stupid. One of her former USAF commanding officers had once told her that while the Russians or the Chinese were the air force’s opponents, the Army, the Navy and the Marines were its enemies, competitors for a shrinking budget doled out each year by the Government. Robin didn’t care as long as she got to work on her radars, but she did wonder if the General would listen to her. She was only a junior officer, after all.

/>   The General had been appointed supervisor of the whole operation by the President, something that made him one of the most powerful men in the country, with authority to call on assets from all of the different departments and forces. Those in the know conceded that it was vitally important that everyone worked together, but privately feared that their departments would wind up being slighted or pushed out of the way. The internal politics had already turned violent and metaphorical blood was on the walls, but Robin had heard that the President had made it clear that anyone who wasted time would find themselves on the bench, or sent to the most isolated posting he could find. There was no time to play politics with an alien force probing Earth.

  “Don’t worry about the formalities,” Wachter said. Robin had had problems saluting him, let alone trying to remember what kind of protocol applied to a General. She had never worried about the formalities before and her former superiors had made exceptions for her. “Just tell me what you’ve got.”

  Robin was uncomfortably aware of just how thin her evidence was, but she stumbled through the explanation, uncomfortably aware of Wachter’s eyes on her. It wasn't a sexual interest, but something more fundamental; he was judging her and her competence. Stung, she outlined the basics and then started detailing the problems, treating him to a highly-technical report that covered all of the contacts, ending with the current transient contacts. Wachter just listened.

  “I see,” he said, finally. Robin wasn't sure that he did. Most people’s eyes started to glaze over as she outlined the technical issues. “Tell me one thing. Are you sure that the contacts are real?”

  Robin hesitated. “I think that most of them are,” she admitted, finally. “I’ve actually excluded transient contacts that don’t reappear, or don’t seem to follow a pattern. There might be many more contacts that…don’t appear on my lists, or far fewer. I don’t think that the data can be refined any further without a careful look at the craft.”

  Wachter nodded. “And no one is responding to this?”

  “The data shows that most of the contacts are keeping well away from the aircraft we have on CAP,” she said. The USAF had kept several dozen aircraft in the air for the next week, in position to respond to any serious threats, yet the pilots didn’t know what they might be facing. It made Robin uncomfortable. There were three Sentry aircraft in the air and she knew some of their crews personally. They might run into trouble that they were mentally unprepared to handle. “All of the contacts are very vague, sir. I don’t blame the pilots for not responding to them.”

  “I do,” Wachter snapped. “I’ll see to it that they’re ordered to respond to any contact, no matter how flimsy.”

  Robin said nothing. The alien craft, if some of the data were to be believed, would have no difficulty breaking contact with even the fastest aircraft in the USAF’s arsenal. No one knew if they carried weapons, or if they would stand and fight instead, but with so many contacts, most of them had to be false positives. It defied belief that thousands of UFOs were probing American airspace.

  “And they’re watching Schriever,” Wachter continued. “Do you think that they are looking for their missing craft?”

  “I think so,” Robin said, slowly. She hadn’t been emotionally aware of it until he’d spoken, but now a shiver ran down her back. “They may well know where it went down, even if they don’t know why. Most of the new contacts are hovering over Colorado and watching us. The others seem to be skimming over the entire country and further away, north to Canada and south to Mexico.”

  “So they don’t know where the craft is now,” Wachter mused. Robin said nothing. She didn’t know where the craft was either, although she suspected that it had been taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The headquarters of the Air Force Materiel Command was also the home base of the 445th Airlift Wing of the Air Force Reserve Command, which flew the C-5 Galaxy heavy transport. They could have taken the crashed ship anywhere from there. “That’s good news, I suppose.”

  He cleared his throat. “Can you work out a way to refine the contacts and actually track them permanently?”

  “Perhaps,” Robin said. “It won’t be easy. We could track stealth aircraft by setting up a network of AWACS and ground-based stations, even tying in civilian and commercial stations, but the evidence suggests that the alien craft are…odd. There are times when they’re stealthy and times when they’re detectable.”

  “Work out an operations plan,” the General ordered. Under normal circumstances, someone as lowly as Robin would never have been asked to draw up an operations plan, but this was far from normal. “Once you have it, send it to me and I’ll see to it that it gets implemented. The exercise we’re preparing – we were preparing – will give us cover for all kinds of military moves, without having to tell people what they might be encountering.”

  He didn’t sound as if he believed his own words. “Yes, sir,” Robin said. “It would help if I had access to the reports from the study team.”

  “You’ll get them,” Wachter promised. He grinned at her. “I’ll speak to the President about it this evening. I’m sure that he will have no objection. Keep up the good work.”

  Chapter Seven

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 9

  The conference room on the base looked a little more comfortable after a week, although that might have had something to do with the fact that the teams working to reactivate the base had finally had a chance to clean it out and redecorate. A set of coffeepots – the base couldn’t have operated without coffee on demand – dominated one wall, while the other two were covered with plasma screens and an image of the crashed alien ship. It had been taken before it had been transported away from the crash site and, somehow, had an impact beyond the obvious. Alex knew that teams had scoured the crash site of everything even remotely useful, but he did wonder if the crash site would show signs of what had happened, even to an unsuspecting eye.

  He scowled down at the table, seeing his reflection scowling back at him, as the other prime team members came in. Part of him felt as if he had been sidelined – the teams looking into the craft itself and the dead alien bodies had brought in additional manpower from all over the black community – but the remainder of him was grateful for the chance to think. He could contribute almost nothing useful to the study of the crashed ship and bodies, even though he liked to think that he would have great insights. He’d spent most of the week gathering UFO reports, comparing them to the odd radar traces discovered by Cheyenne Mountain, and reading through science-fiction at an astonishing clip. Every old alien invasion book had to be re-read, looking for insights that could be used in their current situation, and even though some of them hadn’t aged well, it was still fascinating – and depressing. The hard science-fiction novels suggested that humanity would be curb-stomped by an advanced alien enemy.

  Jones had suggested, after looking at the pile of books that had been delivered by Amazon to one of the USAF bases that served as a clearinghouse for mail, recruiting science-fiction authors to assist in drawing up contingency plans. He’d been so pleased with the idea that Alex hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had beaten him to it, never mind the authors who’d written themselves into their books. It wasn't a bad idea and he’d been drawing up a list of possible authors, yet only a handful already had any form of security clearance and – with the project so highly classified – it would take months to clear people who had never been through even a standard security vetting. Alex would have felt better about it if he’d thought that they had time, but the UFOs being picked up over Colorado suggested that time was in short supply. The aliens were hunting for their missing craft.

  Alex had given considerable thought to what the aliens would do next, for a handful of American bases were well-known in UFO lore. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was supposed to house alien craft in Hangar 18 – it didn’t – and there were a handful of others that were name-checked more than once
. The aliens might attack an airbase to recover their craft, yet they had to know that the odds of hitting the right base were fairly low – there had been no radar traces near Area 52. The base’s defences had been augmented by a handful of Special Forces personnel with handheld antiaircraft weapons, but Alex rather doubted that they could stand off an alien attack. He’d insisted that they store data outside the base, just in case the base was destroyed by the aliens, or the experiments with the alien craft, yet the security requirements were getting in the way. It was hampering exploration of the alien craft, let alone the overall situation. The aliens weren't going to go away just because the vast majority of humanity didn’t even know they existed.

  Jones tapped the table for attention. “Good morning,” he said. He looked surprisingly clean and well-pressed for a man who’d spent the last week on a military base - and he’d somehow dug up a suit from the base’s stores. Alex, who wore a basic USAF uniform, wanted to hate him for it. It was as if he was drawing a line between the civilian and military worlds. “As you will have heard, the radar contacts over Colorado and the surrounding states have only intensified; although so far there have been no successful interceptions. A handful of aircraft have been routed to challenge the mystery craft, but they have always declined contact and vanished. We do not, however, have much time. I will therefore waive the formalities and get right down to business.”