by Alex Irvine
“This symbol comes up more than any other I’ve encountered,” she said. “Look at the similarities. How can you not see the relevance?”
The symbol in question was a circle with a sharp line cutting through it. She was right, they had seen it up in the ship, but David wasn’t a psychologist. He was more interested in hard data, and in actual machines.
“It’s not that I don’t see it,” he said as they kept walking. “I just feel like there are more pressing matters than analyzing, uh, doodles. You know, like a giant spaceship turning back on.”
He could tell that she was irritated by the word “doodles,” but as far as David was concerned, that’s what they were. Sure, people were affected by the alien presence in their minds. And sure, they tended to draw the same things, over and over. But that was standard obsessive behavior—a response to frightening or incomprehensible stimuli. It might not be related to the aliens at all. It might be an artifact of how the human brain processed the alien telepathy.
That’s what he’d said to her back at the xenology conference in Lisbon, and again in French Guiana. She’d been irritated then, too. Something had interrupted them. David couldn’t remember what, until the expression on Catherine’s face triggered the memory.
It was a pilot, the famous Chinese one. Rain Lao, that was her name. She and another pilot were flying around the Earth in a publicity stunt to raise support for Earth Space Defense’s research activities. The other pilot’s propulsion system failed as they were approaching reentry. Rather than leave him to die, Lao had pulled off something David wouldn’t have thought possible. She’d matched the falling fighter’s speed, nudged herself underneath it, and then decelerated slowly and smoothly enough that both aircraft survived reentry.
They had both crashed, somewhere in Montana, but since they both survived that had only added spice to the story. Legacy Squadron heroics, before Legacy Squadron was even put together.
Anyway, Catherine had been frowning at him in the same irritated—and, let’s face it, beguiling—way when the video feeds in the conference bar area had cut away to Lao’s daring rescue.
Shaking his head, David got himself refocused on the present as Collins came out to meet them from the front of Dikembe’s palace. The word was a little too grand, but “house” didn’t seem to quite do it justice.
It was a big, colonial-style structure, and more impressive now that Dikembe had personalized it with his own stylistic touches. Mostly those had to do with adding alien bones here and there for accents. David thought it was quite an intriguing look. The combination of the colonists’ architecture, the alien trophies, and the valiant son of a post-colonial warlord presiding over it all…
That made for quite a spectacle.
“Sir,” Collins said, his tone setting off alarms in David’s head. Normally the man was all but unflappable. If something was worrying him, it likely deserved David’s concern, as well. Before they’d made it all the way across the compound’s huge driveway, Collins let David know just how concerned he should be.
“We’ve lost contact with Rhea.”
“When? Why didn’t you call me?”
“You left your sat-phone in the jeep.”
Fair enough, David thought.
There could be a number of reasons for communications failure with Saturn’s moon. From Rhea Base, signals went to local satellites, which relayed signals via Mars to Earth. There was a lot of redundancy built into the system, because a lot could go wrong with signals traveling two billion kilometers in an environment filled with different kinds of electromagnetic radiation. Everything from cosmic rays to background dark-matter emanations to X-rays… David figured the best approach was to assume it was a local failure, and see if there was a workaround using the Saturn-based resources ESD had in place.
“Get me images from the satellites orbiting Saturn,” he said.
Collins looked even more worried. “They’re also offline.”
This got David’s full attention. Two points of failure in the system were much less likely than one. For both the base comm system and the satellite network to fail simultaneously, something massive must have gone wrong. Either that, or there was a problem with one of the other links in the communication chain—but Collins would have run that possibility down.
If he wasn’t saying it, it hadn’t happened.
“We have to notify the president,” David said. She wouldn’t want the distraction as she was gearing up for the twentieth anniversary celebration, but there was no other choice he could see.
“Already tried,” Collins said. “Tanner said they’ll get back to us after the press tour.”
“A press tour?” That pissed him off. Satellites were failing for unknown causes, at the most distant settlement human civilization had ever known. What could be more important than that? David had never thought Tanner was suited to his job, and now he was more certain than ever.
“It’s frustrating when someone doesn’t take your call, isn’t it?” Catherine remarked.
David shot her a look—this is not the time—and turned to Collins. “Bypass Tanner however you can, and get General Adams to reconfigure Hubble. We need eyes on Rhea.” He knew he could count on Adams, who was remarkably open-minded for a general. David’s experience with other high-ranking military officers was that they had shed their originality and creativity while learning the games of promotion and politics on their way up the ranks. Adams was different. He was a fine leader and willing to listen, even if he didn’t always understand the finer scientific points.
They entered Dikembe’s house and walked through the hall into a spacious foyer, where David’s team had set up workstations. They had everything they needed for field research—monitors, satellite transponders, portable laboratory equipment for basic analysis of any unfamiliar materials they might encounter, databases of previously known alien technology, and so forth.
The house made for a strange working environment. It was a museum of stuffed animals, preserved because Umbutu the Elder had been a devoted hunter. David found the activity incomprehensible and repellent, but he understood that it was popular. A sort of throne stood against one wall, under the watchful eyes of a giant portrait showing Dikembe’s father with his sons.
“At least your father spared the elephants,” David said, taking in the collection. It occurred to him then that Umbutu might well have hunted elephants. The compound was large enough that it could have a separate building just for stuffed elephants and other large animals.
He put it out of his mind.
They had to understand what was going on with the powered-up destroyer, and also with Rhea Base. Were they related? Correlation didn’t necessarily imply causation, of course. To assume so was to commit an elementary fallacy. To reject the possibility out of hand, however, was to be blind to the fact that coincidence existed. They didn’t know enough to say either way, and wouldn’t until they had a solid idea of what had happened on Rhea.
Catherine approached David and held up her tablet again. This time it displayed another variation of the circle image, painted on a barn.
“The Roswell crash in ’47,” she said. “The farmer who made contact drew the same circle. And every time I interview one of my patients who had physical or mental contact with the aliens and show them this, they express one feeling, one emotion.”
“Fear,” Dikembe said.
They all turned to him as he went on.
“And I don’t think it’s a circle. The night the ship turned on, I experienced the strongest vision I’ve ever had.”
David knew some of Dikembe’s story. He’d returned from England during the War of ’96, arriving in time to take part in his father’s ground battle against the aliens who had emerged from the destroyer that now loomed a few miles distant. Then his father’s madness had taken over and Dikembe had nearly died in a prison cell of some kind. The son had experienced prolonged and overwhelming visions during his imprisonment, and one of the reasons D
avid was here instead of back in Washington—or at Area 51—was that he wanted to know what Dikembe might have learned.
He didn’t believe Catherine’s thesis that all humans kept open a psychic link to the aliens after contact, but it was obvious to anyone with eyes that the aliens’ telepathic intrusion left some kind of lingering effect. Dikembe might be able to shed some light on it.
Quite a bit of light, as it turned out.
Dikembe led them through a set of massive oak doors into his study. It was more opulent than David would have expected from a man of Dikembe’s demeanor. Perhaps he hadn’t redecorated after his father’s death. The furniture was leather and expensive, the rugs handwoven, the other furnishings of the highest quality. The room made David want to sit down and study something. He wondered if they could move his workstation in here.
Scattered on every surface, and pinned to the walls between pricey oil paintings, were sketches of the circle.
“And I drew this,” Dikembe said, guiding them to the middle of the room. As if set up for display, a more intricate and detailed version of the circle symbol was there on a table.
Catherine started taking pictures of it.
“I’ve never seen it drawn like this,” she said, in a tone David knew well. This was what scientists sounded like when they first saw something that blew up one hypothesis, and gave a tantalizing glimpse of a much more interesting one.
On the bookshelves, David noticed three of Catherine’s books. So Dikembe was a kindred spirit. Also a well-read man, at least in this area. Or maybe not just this area—next to that shelf was a framed diploma from Oxford University.
“An Oxford man,” David said. On the wall near the diploma hung numerous images of alien symbols with translations underneath. French, Swahili, Lingala, Kikongo, all the common languages of the region. “Incredible,” he said. “You’ve deciphered more of their language than we have.”
“The residual connection,” Dikembe said. Catherine glanced up. David refused to look at her. Just because Dikembe believed her… “They were hunting us,” he went on. “We had to learn how to hunt them.”
And so you did, David thought.
22
General Adams got the armor-piercing message from Levinson’s assistant, asking for the Hubble reorientation, and almost fired back an angry reply.
He wanted to point out that if Levinson was here, instead of in the Congo of all places—or the Republic of Umbutu, if the U.N. had recognized it as such—he could do it himself.
Then he decided that wouldn’t do any good. The priority had to be finding out what had happened to Rhea Base, and reestablishing contact with the Russian commander there. Despite his initial grumbling about the Russians’ punctuality, Adams knew Commander Belyaev and believed him to be a fine officer and a reliable partner in Earth Space Defense.
He felt the same way about the French and Chinese garrisons on Mars and the Moon. One thing their cooperative work had taught him was that international partnerships could succeed if the right people were involved. That was part of ESD’s mission from the very beginning. President Whitmore had laid it out in his famous speech during the War of ’96, and it was still true today.
What it meant was that if Belyaev wasn’t communicating, something had gone wrong. It was one thing to be late for a scheduled report. Being incommunicado for a full twenty-four hours—more at this point—was something completely different. And much more worrisome.
Adams returned to the command center and found Ritter, who was consulting with staff officers.
“Anything from Hubble?”
Ritter walked over to a dedicated monitor.
“We’re uploading the image now.”
On the monitor, an image slowly resolved itself as the computer compiled the data feed from the Hubble telescope. When it was finished rendering, Adams stared at it for a long moment, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“When did this happen?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Ritter replied. “Should I up the alert level?”
Damn right, Adams thought. “Let’s go to Orange until we know more.”
“General,” a staff officer called from the other side of the command center. “Air Force One has landed.”
Perfect timing, Adams thought. Aliens going crazy in their cells, this—event—on Saturn, and now the president had arrived. He didn’t have enough attention to devote to all these problems at once. “Send that image to Levinson,” he ordered Ritter. “Make sure he sees it, and make sure he contacts me immediately.”
Then he went to meet the commander-in-chief.
* * *
Jake was still grounded, but as it turned out he wasn’t excused from repair duty. That was fine. It gave him something to do other than mull over everything that had gone wrong in the last day. He was working on the tug, pulling off damaged plating to get a better look at the burned-out circuitry inside, while Charlie avoided doing any actual work by telling Jake what to do.
“You have to remove the subsonic inlets if you want to reconfigure the thermalized plasma cartridges,” he was saying. Jake couldn’t follow the torrent of jargon, and Charlie knew this, but that never stopped him from talking. In fact, nothing ever stopped Charlie from talking.
“Oh my God,” he said abruptly, interrupting his lecture. “There she is. It’s happening. The chemical reaction, the pheromones… all the blood in my body is rushing to my head.”
Ah, the Rain Lao infatuation, Jake thought. The only thing Charlie was better at than aerospace engineering was falling in love with unattainable women. “You sure it’s rushing to your head?”
“I’m gonna introduce myself,” Charlie said, taking off without another look at the tug.
“Sure,” Jake said. “I got this. Even though I didn’t understand anything you just said.” As if to underscore this, a shower of sparks flared in the damaged engine housing. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted. He turned to complain, but broke it off because Charlie was making his move.
He sidled up to Rain Lao while she supervised a crew of technicians. They were rolling out a large Chinese flag next to her fighter.
“You must be the pilot China sent,” Charlie said.
She tossed him a classic side-eyed glance.
“Did the giant flag give it away?”
“There’s that,” Charlie said, taking it in stride, “and the fact that I heard you speak Chinese to some of the crew. Anyway, I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink, and maybe fall in love?”
Now she gave him a more appraising look. Jake admired Charlie’s gumption. He never got anywhere with his peculiar approach, but that never stopped him from trying.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?” Rain asked.
Before Charlie could answer, the lights in the hangar dimmed, flickered, and then went out, leaving only emergency lighting. Pilots and ground crew alike looked up at the ceiling, then around the space, waiting for them to come back on.
Jake looked from Charlie and Rain back to the tug’s battered and disassembled engine housing. This was the last straw.
“Can someone please pay the electric bill already?” he griped.
23
Like the rest of the new generation of military aircraft, Air Force One had been heavily modified with alien technology. Now it was powered by massive anti-gravity thrusters, taking the place of the traditional turbine engines.
It sat cooling down on the tarmac of Area 51 as President Lanford and Secretary Tanner led a group of journalists toward the command center.
“Now that our Orbital Defense System is fully operational, we can initiate Phase Two of the Space Defense Program,” she said, following the schedule she’d rehearsed with her team over the past few days. She had to strike a balance between giving the public useful information and steering clear of classified data. Tanner hadn’t wanted her to say anything, but Lanford believed in erring on the side of transparency. “On the left are the destroyer cannons that wil
l be ready for deployment across the solar system over the next ten years.”
Sensing an opening, a reporter jumped in without even looking at the rows of weapons.
“So you’re not exactly delivering on your promise to scale back on this program.”
“The money’s already been spent by my predecessors,” Lanford said smoothly, “but now that the bulk of the infrastructure is in place, we can finally start spending elsewhere.” Camera crews angled around to get pictures and video of the president against the backdrop of the cannons. While she continued her conversation with the press, General Adams approached Tanner and drew him aside.
“We need to cut the tour short,” he said.
“I’m sure it can wait,” Tanner said, annoyed that Adams had maneuvered him out of the pictures. Adams didn’t have time to deal with his love for the spotlight, though. The news from Saturn was much more important, and if he couldn’t get to the president directly, he was for damn certain going to make sure he got the information to her cabinet.
“I’m telling you, it can’t,” he said, and started toward the command center with a reluctant Tanner in tow.
* * *
David Levinson was hard at work trying to figure out exactly what Dikembe had learned from his study of the alien language. According to the warlord, the circle represented “fear.” As he considered the ramifications of that, Collins rushed into the room waving a tablet.
“Sir, this just came in.”
David glanced up, then took the tablet from Collins and looked closely at the image it displayed. It was Saturn. He could tell that much. The color, the striations on the surface—or what passed for a surface on a gas giant—those matched, but where he’d expected to see Saturn’s majestic ring system, and the dozens of moons and moonlets that orbited with it in a complicated gravitational dance…
All he saw was debris. The rings were torn into wisps of their former selves, scattered in long strands over thousands of miles of space—maybe millions of miles in some cases. David immediately tried to reverse-engineer what he saw, understand the process that had caused it, and he quickly understood that not only were the rings deformed, but some of the moons were gone. Or if not gone, definitely not where they were supposed to be.