The President looked at Tom Pearson, the CIA representative. “As you know, sir, we attempt to track the location of all of the world leaders,” he said. “There are apparently no plans for any of the major world leaders to vanish from sight in the next few weeks, although I should stress that such information is often hard to obtain. The more…paranoid a regime is, the more likely it is to keep the location of its leader secret, or keep moving him around to avoid being pinned down. We know that the KGB and their successor, the FSB, looked into the UFO mystery during and after the Cold War, but if they found a craft, we don’t know about it.”
“I see,” the President said. He’d cleaned house at the CIA after assuming the Presidency – he had never forgiven them for their failures in Iraq – but even he had to admit that intelligence work was never cut and dried. The United States hadn’t enjoyed real penetration of any of its major opponents during or even after the Cold War. The CIA’s reputation for leaks – which got sources killed – worked against it
“But Hubert is right,” he continued. “The last thing we need is the aliens approaching the Russians, or the Chinese, or anyone else.”
“They may approach us,” the Secretary of State warned. “If they knew that we had a crashed ship, they would demand that we shared our research with them, or else.”
“Or else what?” Wachter demanded. “There’s very little that they could do to us that wouldn’t rebound worse on themselves.”
“They might need the information if the aliens did turn out to be hostile,” Pearson pointed out, coldly. “We might need their help.”
“I doubt it,” Wachter said. “The entire massed force of Earth couldn’t mount an offensive beyond Low Earth Orbit, if that.”
“That’s something we will have to look at,” the President said. His voice was very cold. “What about our current defence deployments?”
Wachter looked down at his secure Blackberry. “We’re proceeding through the exercise now and using it as an excuse – along with terrorist threats – to make all kinds of military deployments,” he said. “We have fighter jets on patrol and ground-based surface-to-air missiles deployed at sensitive locations. The UFOs have not attempted to challenge them, Mr President, but no one expects that to last.”
He hesitated. “We need to brief in more people, yet every time we do that we make a leak more likely,” he warned. “We’re effectively operating with one hand behind our backs. I’ve passed orders along for local radar operators to take a closer look at transient contacts and dropped hints about stealth aircraft testing the defences, but our people are not prepared – not mentally – for possible hostile action.”
“Another good reason for me to meet with them,” the President said. He wouldn’t have admitted to the thrill of excitement he felt, not even to Wachter, yet the life of a President was a little like being in prison. There was nowhere for him to just be himself, even in the White House. He’d seen movies where the President fought hijackers who had hijacked Air Force One, or even flew a fighter plane against massive city-destroying UFOs…actually, that one hit a bit too close to home. “We want to avoid a confrontation if possible.”
“Yes, Mr President,” Wachter said. He looked down at his Blackberry. “We’ll officially announce that you will be visiting Camp David for talks with foreign ambassadors and allow the Press to go nuts speculating on who you’re seeing and why. We’ll fly you to Schriever Air Force Base in a more private aircraft and accommodate you in one of the officer’s quarters until the time of arrival. The base commander isn’t happy, but he does understand what’s at stake.”
The President nodded. “And then?”
“Their message says that they will pick you and one other up from the crash site, two days from now,” Wachter said. “I imagine that they’ll transport you to a secure location for the talks and then – I hope – return you intact. The analysts, however, have all kinds of worries…”
“I know,” the President said. The Secret Service – those who knew about the new threat and why the White House guard had suddenly been tripled – had thrown a collective fit at the mere thought of the President leaving an area they didn’t have under complete control. They got nervous every time the President left America, even to Britain or another state with reliable security; they had argued against the President going to an alien craft. “Some of them would obviously make great science-fiction movie writers.”
Wachter smiled dryly. The analysts had wondered about the President being implanted with a mind-controlling implant and sent back to order immediate surrender, or being replaced by an alien doppelganger, or being probed, or having his mind read by telepathic aliens, or…they’d come up with hundreds of scenarios, each one more unlikely and outrageous than the last. The analyst who’d come up with the scenario about the President being anally probed probably needed therapy.
“The risk needs to be accepted,” the President said, firmly. “Now…what might the aliens want?”
The analysts had gone through that as well. One line of thought was that the aliens were friendly and wanted to establish a covert line of communications before they revealed themselves to the entire world. Another was that the aliens were hostile and intended to demand immediate surrender before they started throwing asteroids. The only common ground between most of the different possibilities was that the aliens would demand their missing craft back – as the US had demanded the crashed F-117 back from the Serbs. No one was quite sure what the US should say in response.
“They might see returning the craft as a gesture of friendship and goodwill,” the Secretary of State said, “but that would deprive us of our chance to study their technology any further.”
“On the other hand, if they demand it back, we might have no choice but to comply,” Wachter countered. “What happens if they threaten to vaporise a city every day until we return the craft?”
The Secretary of State nodded. The President had worked hard to reform the State Department, clearing away the debris of years of neglect and the result was a revitalised department serving the country. The State Department’s analysts were capable, but those who had been briefed on the crashed ship knew that the human race had only limited means of taking the war to space. It was far more likely that the aliens would stomp on humanity as hard as possible.
“We’d have to give up the ship,” he said, finally. “What other choice would we have?”
The President said nothing. There was something to be said for standing up to an opponent and daring him to do his worst, but not when the entire human race was at stake. It was often said that the President was the most powerful man on Earth, yet how powerful was he compared to the aliens? A race that could step between stars wouldn’t be impressed by the pitiful human space force, such as it was.
“None,” he said, finally. “General, you have my authorisation to bring in other planning teams and get them working on what kind of hardware we can deploy to even the odds as much as possible. We’ll keep the lid on as much as possible, but it’s probably time we started looking at emergency measures. This problem is not going to go away.”
***
No one would have believed that Pepper Reid was a fully-trained bodyguard. She looked about eighteen years old, wearing a very short skirt and a tight shirt, with long red hair that she’d tied back in a ponytail. The men who tried to hit on her each night in bars would have been astonished – and intimidated – to know that she’d gone through some of the most fearsome training the United States could provide, before being transferred to the Secret Service and being assigned to the Presidential Protective Detail. It was one of the most important – if not the most important – bodyguard positions in the world – and she took it seriously. It helped that no one on the outside took her seriously.
A Secret Service agent was generally assumed to look rather like the Men in Black; black suits, black tie, black jacket, white shirt and dark sunglasses. It was true that some members of the Presiden
t’s protective detail were so obvious – to deter nervous assassins – but others were less than obvious. Pepper – whose friends and fellow agents called Pepper Pot – had arrested several would-be assassins over the last year, who hadn’t realised that the cheerleader slipping closer to them was far deadlier than they could ever have hoped to be. It was in one of those encounters that she’d lost her eye.
She’d feared that would put an end to her career, but her superiors had recommended her to DARPA for a highly-classified experiment. Her right eye was replaced by an artificial eye that not only worked almost as well as the real one – although it did itch at times, which the doctors assured her was psychosomatic– but also recorded everything she saw for later download. It had its disadvantages – it was something she could never quite tell a succession of boyfriends – yet if she saw a threat, she could instantly transmit an image back to the office, before moving to intercept before it became lethal, or even noticeable. The Secret Service preferred to keep attempts on the President’s life quiet. It was meant to discourage others from trying.
“Pepper, come in,” her superior said. Pepper had been on one of her off-days – the Secret Service didn’t keep anything as mundane as a weekend – and had been surprised to have been called into the office. “I have a special task for you.”
He leaned forward. For the first time, Pepper saw the dark circles under his eyes, signifying lack of sleep. She’d been trained to watch for hundreds of telltales on faces – from hints that a boy was cheating on her to a suicide bomber nerving himself to hit the trigger and detonate the bomb – and her superior looked worried. It wasn't a cringing fear, but something more fundamental, the look of a man who worried that he wouldn’t be believed.
“It’s also highly classified,” he continued. “I can’t tell you about it until you agree to take on the mission. I should warn you that…it will be dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anything else you’ve ever done for us. If you decline, it won’t be held against you and it won’t even be on your record.”
“You don’t have to insult me,” Pepper said. She wanted to joke, but there was something about his attitude that quelled her attempts at humour. She’d faced the prospect of putting her body between the President and a bullet before and had come to terms with it. It wasn't as if she’d been drafted into the Secret Service against her will. “It sounds interesting.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” her superior said. “Will you take on the mission?”
“Yes,” Pepper said, without hesitation. “What do you want me to do?”
“Sit down and listen carefully,” her superior said. Pepper did as he said and listened with growing disbelief as her superior outlined alien contact – and a crashed alien ship – and a message inviting the President to meet with extraterrestrials. It was beyond belief, yet she watched her superior carefully and there was no doubt that he believed it. “The aliens have invited the President and one other onboard their craft. We need you to be that other.”
Pepper felt her head spin. It crossed her mind that it could be a hoax or a test, but if that were the case, it was a bizarre one. She’d been tested many times since she’d qualified, yet all of those tests had revolved around mundane threats and possibilities. Aliens hadn’t even been mentioned, apart from late-night movies with the other trainees. No one had seriously considered the possibility that the President would have to visit an alien ship, almost alone.
“One agent won’t be enough to protect him,” she said, finally. She would have preferred a full team, or even a Company of Marines. “Can’t we…?”
“Apparently not,” her superior said. “We also need you to record everything that happens on that ship.”
“You just want me for my body,” Pepper said. It was a weak joke, but she needed to let the tension flow out, somehow. “What about weapons and more…obvious equipment?”
“We’ve prepared a briefing for you,” her superior said. He stood up and held out his hand. “Good luck, Pepper. Don’t fuck up.”
Chapter Nine
Schriever Air Force Base, USA
Day 11
The day was bright and clear, but Robin didn’t notice, shut up in the base’s main radar room. A handful of security-cleared personnel had joined her in the base, but the vast majority of the base’s personnel had been warned to stay in their barracks, or redeployed on short notice to other bases. Robin didn’t particularly care about the security problem – she had always seen such issues as getting in the way of her main job – but it had also caused a staffing shortage. The base – and the two AWACS orbiting the base at a distance of ten kilometres – had only limited numbers of cleared personnel.
She smiled to herself as she checked the network she’d established to track the alien craft when it arrived. The addition of other specialists – including some working in exotic areas such as gravity-wave detection – had added a whole series of other sensors to the radar network, including infrared and gravimetric sensors. When Robin had checked with NSA – or, rather, the General had checked with them after they’d tried to stonewall a mere junior officer – they’d reluctantly confirmed that their orbiting satellites had briefly tracked strange heat patterns near where the alien craft had entered the atmosphere. One of Robin’s superiors had pointed out that the craft should be red hot from entering the atmosphere – and trailing sonic booms all over the country as they moved at hypersonic velocities – and she was at a loss to account for their absence. The best that anyone had been able to establish was that the alien craft somehow moved without disturbing the air, or somehow baffled the sonic boom before it could spread. Civilians thought of a sonic boom as a once-off event, but they trailed behind any supersonic aircraft…apart from the UFOs. It didn’t quite make sense.
Robin had been given access to all the data from the crashed ship – apart from a single piece of data; its current location – and she’d used it to enhance her tracking programs, linking in with the Deep Space Tracking System and the US Space Defence Operations Centre, which handled all ABM systems. The handful in the know at those centres had been horrified at the thought of alien craft – or any kind of craft – slipping through the detection network and had worked to enhance their own systems. In theory, they could have tracked an object the size of a golf ball orbiting the Earth – and had done so, on occasion, when debris had been released from the International Space Station – but in practice, the UFOs were clearly hard to detect. They emitted almost nothing in the way of radiation and seemed to move completely silently. The only sign of their existence were odd radar traces and heat bursts as they entered the atmosphere.
And one of them was coming to pick up the President.
It was an opportunity too good to be missed, Robin knew. The sheer vagueness of most of the radar data was frustrating, if not actively misleading. She thought that she had tracked UFOs moving at speeds in excess of Mach Nine, but she knew all too well that she could have mistaken a natural event for an alien craft, or seen two echoes instead of one. The chance to take readings when there was a genuine craft in the air was too good to pass up, even though her superiors had talked at some length about the possible implications. They had effectively asked the President to come alone – a single bodyguard wouldn’t be much help if the aliens had bad intentions – and that, her superiors had said, didn’t imply friendly motives.
Robin didn’t care. She rarely gave any thought to politics, although she’d voted Republican because the Democratic Candidate had pledged to cut the military budget, which would have included scrapping new toys the USAF needed – now more than ever. If the President was willing to take the risk of stepping onboard an alien craft, she was sure that he had considered all of the possible dangers – and decided that the risk was worth it. She would have given anything – even her brand-new brevet promotion to Second Lieutenant – to go with him. The chance to ask the aliens about their drive and propulsion systems – and how they spoofed American radar sys
tems – would have been worth any risk.
Her console chimed and she peered down at it. A single target had appeared out of nowhere in the midst of United States Space Surveillance Network’s area of responsibility. She wasn't used to thinking in such terms, but the target had appeared high over the base, diving into the atmosphere. It seemed to shimmer in and out of existence as it flew lower, slowing somehow despite following a direct flight path, yet she saw the burst of heat as it entered the atmosphere. She keyed a command into her console as the unknown craft passed out of the Space Surveillance Network’s ken, and down into the domain of her enhanced radar network. The base had to be alerted before she did anything else.
She dimly heard the klaxons warning of the arrival of the alien craft though her concentration. The craft didn’t seem to be perfectly solid. It crossed her mind that it could be phasing in and out of reality, but she couldn’t even begin to think of what kind of tech would be required to do that. Some radar stations reported a solid contact while others seemed unable to even begin tracking the craft. She combined the radar sensors with the gravimetric detectors and hit pay dirt. The craft could be tracked through its odd gravity-wave emissions. It was impossible to be sure, but it seemed likely that the alien drives used focused gravity as a means of propulsion, allowing them to reach impossible speeds. It might even account for the absence of a sonic boom…no, that didn’t explain it. It had to be something more complicated.
“Robin?” Technical Sergeant Dave Heidecker asked. He hadn’t been promoted, but he didn’t hold it against her. He’d once told her that higher rank was boring. The number of USAF senior officers with grey hair ahead of their time was shocking, or so he had claimed. Robin didn’t care either way. “What do you have?”
“Visitors,” she said. The shock of seeing an alien craft swept over her, along with an insane urge to giggle. “We have visitors.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Page 8