Alien Storm

by Don Viecelli

  Luckily, the command compartment the aliens were in was not damaged and they were not in danger of losing cabin pressure or their atmosphere. They breathed oxygen and nitrogen similar to Earth’s atmosphere, only in different proportions and at heavier pressure. They required more nitrogen than oxygen due to evolution on their warmer planet. They could breathe the air on Earth, but it would be similar to humans breathing less oxygen at high altitudes, which would cause certain problems if they could not adjust slowly to the changes. The air situation was not their primary concern, however, and the captain had to make some quick decisions as he ran from the window to the command center and took over control of the spacecraft. The magnetized field beam on the astronaut had to be shut off immediately.

  Some of the control mechanisms could be activated by the crew’s brain waves that were enhanced by tiny implants in their brains. Other mechanisms could be activated by an external disk they carrier around their necks. It all depended on how far away they were from the computer intelligence system. The captain had complete access to all intelligence control systems aboard the spacecraft and he was the most experienced member of the crew. He had been in many serious situations before and had always found a way out without losing a single crewmember. The crew expected him to find a way out of this trouble as well. They followed his commands without question.

  The seriousness of the damage was not lost on the captain. Assessment please! the captain demanded. His intelligence systems and crewmembers began reporting every damaged subsystem and relaying assessments and options available to him. He quickly realized he would have to take his ship down to the planet’s surface in order to make repairs. He had very little time in which to do this since the main ion propulsion system was severely damaged.

  He asked the chief navigator to plot a course down to the planet’s surface. They needed a spot in a remote region with good ground foliage to hide their spacecraft while they made repairs. This was communicated silently to the navigator and the captain could sense her fear. He tried to make her feel more at ease with his thoughts. She was young and this was the first serious situation she has been in during her space travels. The chief navigator picked a spot on Earth and entered the flight path coordinates. The spacecraft quickly left the space station and began its descent. A small stream of gas and liquids flowed out one of the holes in the craft as they departed and left a frozen trail behind them. The real damage was further inside the engine compartment and only the captain and chief engineer knew how serious it really was.

  The captain sent out a distress signal to their mother ship. He transmitted damage reports and current plans to land on this planet for repairs. If anything happened to the craft on the way down to the planet’s surface, the mother ship would be made aware of the problems and try to rescue the crew as soon as it could. There had been only a handful of situations where any Tularians were killed or marooned on a distant planet. This occasionally caused complications with the occupants of the planets depending on their level of development and this had to be dealt with. The aliens rarely interfered with the affairs of the local inhabitants. It was a universal rule learned through the ages by trial and error.

  There were no plans on this visit to identify themselves to the inhabitants of Earth. It was not time according to their social experts. However, the recent discoveries of the sun’s solar activities on this journey may move the timeline up some once they had time to analyze all the data. Either way, unexpected events always seem to interfere with the best of plans.

  The damaged spacecraft was becoming increasingly more difficult to control on its descent through the upper atmosphere. The captain was busy monitoring the controls and rate of descent. The chief engineer was checking all the damage reports and trying to route controls around the damaged subsystems. The chief navigator was monitoring the flight path and trying to pick a landing spot on the planet’s surface. The chief scientist and medical officer was preparing for the worst.

  The good news, the captain thought out loud to the crew, was it was getting dark outside and their chances of being detected by the human radar systems were still very low. Their spacecraft was completely invisible to human radar systems as long as the anti-gravitational fields and magnetic shields around their spacecraft were still operating. On board, the aliens felt no gravitational changes inside the craft. The internal gravity was kept in a constant state by continuously adjusting to the outside gravitation and centrifugal forces. There was no need to rotate their spacecraft to produce artificial gravity. The physics of gravity were solved many centuries ago.

  Halfway down through the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the captain began to lose control of the spacecraft. The ion drive engines were losing power. It looked like one of the metal fragments had punctured the coolant lines in the space drive compartment. This was a very serious situation and the captain urgently requested the chief engineer to find a way to reduce the heat buildup in the core drive. The chief engineer immediately acknowledged the request, was already aware of the problem and was trying desperately to correct it. The Tularians were fighting for their lives as the spacecraft plunged through the atmosphere to a mere twenty-five miles above the U.S. coastline.

  The flight path they were on was headed straight for a remote region of the country known on Earth as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This region was one of the largest areas of undeveloped wildernesses in the Midwest that bordered along the shores of Lake Superior. It was called the Porcupine Mountains, so named by the native Ojibwa Indians for the chain of wooded mountains reminded them of the woodland porcupine. It was 92 square miles in size with mountain rivers, scenic waterfalls, rugged shore line, dark forests of virgin hemlock, pines and hardwoods, no roads, and most of all, very few human inhabitants. It was perfect cover for the Tularian’s needs.

  The spacecraft was within a hundred miles of their destination when all the warning alarms in their small control compartment harmonized into one clear message. The space drive was overheating and would explode in a matter of seconds. The crew was frantic. The captain tried to shut down the drive, but it was too late. Two of the coolant lines to the drive had been severed and there was no way to stop the drive from overheating in time. Just as the captain shut down the drive and prepared for a free-flight landing attempt, the drive exploded spewing flames behind them and severing the back half of the spacecraft into two pieces.

  The explosion rocked the crew compartment. Two of the Tularians, the chief flight engineer and the chief medical officer who were not restrained in their chairs, were thrown in every direction with the loss of their artificial gravity fields and were knocked unconscious. The captain and chief navigator were still conscious and fully aware of what was happening. The captain sent out a final distress signal and tried to maneuver what was left of the spacecraft for a hard landing in the forest below, but to no avail. They were freefalling the final distance to the planet. Impact was a few seconds away.

  The captain instinctively clutched the small round disk hanging from his neck. It was a few inches in diameter, silver in color with no visible controls of any kind. He had carried this disk on or near his body his whole life. It had been given to him by his father and had been passed down from generation to generation. Every Tularian carried one very similar to the captain’s, each with a family symbol etched on top. It contained the memories of his ancestors and would capture his memories at the moment of his death. The Tularians were a very spiritual race and had learned many of the secrets of life and death. They could record the very moment of death, when the body died and released the life force, what humans call the soul. In that very moment, the electrical energy of the mind was captured by the memory disk. As long as the disk was within a short distance of the owner upon death, every thought and memory would be instantly recorded by the disk to be passed on to the next generation. It was sacred to the Tularians. It was more precious than anything else in the universe.

  The Tularians would try to recover their
bodies and the disks at almost any cost, for not only was it necessary in their ceremonies, it would illuminate all that occurred during this tragedy and pass on any new knowledge not recorded by the ship’s intelligence system. The captain knew this and resigned himself to his fate. He was not afraid of death, for it held the key to something greater, only disappointed he could not save his crew. He looked at the chief navigator who was trying to be brave and communicated an apology, I’m sorry. She acknowledged the captain and held her memory disk in her hand. It began to glow in a soft blue hue. She was transferring a final thought for her family. A moment later the spacecraft plunged into the forest, tearing the trees apart in its path and breaking into smaller pieces upon impact. The memory disks are virtually indestructible. They survived the crash and were scattered among the burning debris on the ground with the bodies.

  Chapter 4

  Houston Space Center:

  The first digital pictures of the unidentified object taken by Commander Julian Bonario aboard the ISS appeared on the PC monitor screen of Lee Chen, Communication and Tracking Officer (CATO) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston at approximately 9:00 p.m. CDST. The pictures followed a period of intermittent radio communications with Major Kim Parker on the ISS. The solar flares magnetic storm was intensifying, which made radio communications with the ISS nearly impossible for the past one and a-half hours. Some of the satellite links were also down and mission control in Houston knew the ISS had sustained some damage to its solar array systems and to its communications equipment. The extent of the damage to the ISS was still being investigated. It was easier to rely on video mail messages that could be saved and forwarded in data packets on the satellite links in between magnetic storm bursts. At first, Lee Chen could not understand what Major Parker was trying to tell mission control until the first UFO pictures and report arrived. Then things became interesting.

  Lee quickly forwarded the images and report to the Flight Director on duty. A quick, intense discussion followed. It was Lee Chen who made the connection to the earlier report of an unidentified object approaching the ISS sent by the Trajectory Operations Officer. They all thought it was a computer operating system error at the time. Now, it was instantly clear to all of them that this information had to be passed up the chain of command, all the way to the top.

  * * * *

  Lieutenant General, Kent ‘Kick Ass’ Anderson, Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations, U.S. Air Force, was sitting at his desk late in the evening at the Pentagon headquarters building in Washington, DC. General Anderson was 5 feet, 10 inches tall with a stocky, bulldog build, balding head and dark blue eyes. He was working when the phone rang. The telephone number on the caller ID screen was familiar. It was his boss. He pushed the hands-free button.

  “Hello, Sam,” General Anderson said. General Sam Walton was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) and a good friend of over thirty years in the military. They both climbed up the ranks together in the Air Force. The CJCS was rarely in a good mood when he called this late at night.

  “Hello, Kent. I’ve got some urgent business for you to handle. It came directly from Harry Patterson (the Secretary of Defense). I just got off the phone with him. It seems our NASA boys have run into a big problem.”

  “What is it?” Kent asked, not really wanting to know. He had enough of his own problems to fix without getting involved with NASA’s problems.

  “You might find this hard to believe, Kent, but NASA thinks they forced down a UFO this evening. They even have pictures of the damn thing. I’m forwarding them over to you now. Take a look at the pictures and listen to the video-message we received from NASA Flight Control in Houston. It’s pretty interesting. We also got a report from the U.S. Space Command radar defense team. It’s got the President’s eye. We need to get on top of this thing quick and find out everything we can before 0700. Harry and I have to brief the President at 0730. Call me back in an hour after you study the reports. You need to set up a crash investigation team and keep the details secret. We don’t want the public to know what really happened, at least not yet. We’ll need a cover story.”

  “How do we know it’s a UFO?” Kent asked, very skeptical of the whole thing.

  “It’s in the military report,” Sam replied. “Some of our radar defense guys picked up its trail on the way down. Looks like it crashed in Northern Michigan. They’re getting ready to send some helicopters out of Duluth Air Force Base to investigate. Give the local officer in the report a call. He’s been told to secure the whole area and report to you on everything he finds.”

  “All right, Sam,” Kent said, starting to get the picture. “I’ll get right on it. How serious is this thing?”

  “It could be damn serious. Could have all kinds of repercussions if it’s alien and word gets out. Let’s see what Duluth finds and let me know as soon as you hear. I’ll be in the Secretary’s office in the morning. Come see us at 0615.” The general hung up.

  Just like Sam, Kent thought as he cleared the phone line. No time for explanations. Just hurry up and do it. The general expected results quickly without any excuses. “I guess that’s why he called me,” Kent said out loud to himself. “I get the job done.” Kent turned to his computer on the desk behind him facing the window. It was dark outside with only the lights on in the parking lot below for a view. He clicked on his video-mail and saw the file with the video-message. He said “Open, NASA ISS Report.” The file opened with a picture of the UFO clearly visible in space with the ISS solar array panels partially visible above it and the Earth off in the distance below. Some sort of spotlight was aimed at the camera, which caused the front part of the UFO to be hidden from the glare. Even so, Kent knew this was not a picture of any known spacecraft built on Earth. It was too big and the shape of the thing was impossible to fly.

  Kent looked at the digital pictures of the spacecraft and listened to the video-message report given by Commander Julian Bonario on board the ISS. It wasn’t easy to believe, but the commander had several pictures of the spacecraft he says he took with the MMU camera. It could all be verified if need be. If what the Commander was saying was true, then he was a lucky man, and the pictures of the damage done to the spacecraft by the solar panel power generator explosion was proof enough. The last image showed that the spacecraft was clearly in trouble and heading towards Earth.

  Then Kent opened and read the U.S. Space Command radar defense report. It was in text format with pictures of the radar images included in the body of the text. The radar screens showed one object flying very fast and low in the atmosphere before it exploded into three pieces. They pinpointed the approximate location on the ground where the pieces landed. It was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in some of the most rugged territory in the country. There were no roads near the crash site according to the map of the area. It was going to take special equipment and men to find the crash site, investigate the scene and secure it. Then they were going to have to transport all the debris out of the area to a secure air force hangar for assembly and study. “Just great”, he muttered out loud. “This could take weeks to wrap up. Better get started.” He reached for the phone. He knew just the man to handle this investigation.

  * * * *

  Colonel Dave Hampton was on deck of his thirty-two foot sailboat named “Sea Oats” anchored just offshore on the Intracoastal Waterway near Carolina Beach, NC, south of Wilmington, NC and east of the Cape Fear River. Dave was six feet, one inch tall with short brown hair and brown eyes. He was lean, muscular, weighted around 195 pounds and was well tanned. He was wearing shorts, a light colored tee shirt and a baseball hat. Dave was on vacation. He drove down from Washington, D.C. last Friday night and expected to stay through the next weekend before heading back to the Pentagon. He took a deep breath and looked at the stars above. It was a clear, warm night on the waterway. Every once in a while, another sailboat or motor craft would pass close by looking for a port or cove to stay for the night. You could take the IC
W all the way up or down the eastern seacoast if you wanted. He had done that twice already. This time, he just planned to sail for a week in the local warm Atlantic waters and visit friends he knew in the area.

  Dave missed his kids. He and his former wife, Pam, had divorced two years ago. They were still on friendly terms. She took the three kids back home to Indiana to be close to her parents. His oldest boy just finished his first year of high school and he planned to drive out to visit them next week. It would be nice to see them all again. It was hard to keep in touch with everyone with all the traveling he did on his job. That was one of the reasons for the divorce. He worked too hard for the Air Force. At least, he had been rewarded for the effort. He was recently promoted to colonel at age 41 and he was the best crash investigator around. He had just completed a National Guard airplane crash investigation in Georgia and was due for some time off. So he took it. It was great to be on the water again, as far away from the pressures of the job as he could get. He opened another can of beer and looked up at the night sky.

  At first, Dave couldn’t understand why the sky was getting lighter. It was 10:15 p.m. and there wasn’t any moon out. Then the colors appeared. They looked like dancing pillars of light. First red, then green and then yellow. The night sky seemed to be on fire. The colors were spectacular. It took a couple of seconds before he realized what he was seeing. It was the Northern Lights. He had seen them years ago when he was stationed in North Dakota. This was an unexpected pleasure. You normally don’t see the lights this far south of the northern latitudes. Something big must be happening up there, he thought to himself. He took a sip of his beer and just watched the lights dance in the night sky. Then his phone rang below deck. It was a curse he had to live with. He was on call for work emergencies only. He hoped he could resolve it quickly. He found the phone below deck and pushed the talk button. “Hello, Dave here.”