*
Police Officer Laura Byrd was on the desk at Thetford Police station when the panicky calls started coming in. The job of Early Help Hub Officer was usually quiet in the small Norfolk town except for the occasional bit of trouble when the pubs were closing on a Friday or Saturday night. This particular evening was much more remarkable. The first caller was an elderly lady claiming the apocalypse was upon us and what were the police going to do about it. The lady’s pet cat was still outside somewhere and would be terrified by the huge dark angel sweeping overhead. Laura calmed the lady down and took notes of her wild claims before moving along to the next call that lit up on the phone.
The next call was introduced by the dispatcher from the Wymondham 999 emergency centre as another report of strange sightings in the skies over Thetford. This time it was from a man with a deeply assured Texan accent.
“I am calling to report a giant UFO moving south across Thetford,” said Don Griffiths from his mobile phone as he stared up into the delta of darkness moving slowly away to the south.
“Thank you sir, I am PCSO Laura Byrd. Can I have your full name, address and occupation please?”
“Sure, Donald Griffiths, 6 Elgin Way, Thetford. I work for the US Air Force.”
Laura recognised the address as a cul-de-sac of smart homes to the north of the town and the deep American tones matched the claimed occupation of the caller. Hard on the heels of the strange prior caller Laura was struck by a feeling of authenticity not only of this new caller but of the unfolding situation. “Please can you give me a description of the UFO, Mr Griffiths?” she asked politely.
“No time for long descriptions, Officer Byrd. You all need to get outside right now and check out the sky towards the London Road. It’s there right now and you need to see for yourself.”
“Please stay on the line, sir, I will get back to you when I have confirmed your report.”
“Be my guest, Officer, but you better hurry!”
Laura Byrd grabbed her coat and hustled out of the door calling to Sergeant Ray Brooks to follow. Ray started to call out from his desk asking what the fuss was about, but he could see Laura was energised and already half out of the door so he had to follow. The Norfolk Constabulary Public Service Office was set in lawns with the tree-lined river on the eastern boundary. The night was clear and there was little light pollution. It took Laura a couple of moments to orient herself towards the London Road leading south-east out of town then she saw the black V cutting a swathe through the stars, moving away from them in the town centre. She pointed towards Rakul’s starship as Sergeant Brooks pushed through the doors and fetched up next to her. They both stared into the skies, “Reports of a UFO, Sarge,” Laura said, still gaping after it.
“It’s enormous,” breathed Sergeant Ray Brooks.
“It’s very low, too, and not a sound,” Laura observed as the craft continued, unhurried, to become a flattened triangular shape, exiting into the murk of streetlights as a thick black line over the trees. Laura returned inside as she remembered the caller on the phone at the duty desk.
“Are you still there, Mr Griffiths?”
“Sure am, Officer Byrd, did you catch it?”
“Yes, we saw something large and low flying out of town towards the south.”
“That’s what I am talking about,” Don said. The craft had disappeared from his view too but he remained in his garden searching the skies for any other sightings.
“Does that shape mean anything to you?” Laura asked, hoping the American’s role might give insight into the nature of the craft.
“Afraid not, Officer,” Don replied, “it’s not one of ours and not one of anybody else’s I can think of. Firstly it’s the size of half a dozen jumbo jets, flying slow enough it should fall out the sky like a stone, and then it’s totally silent and featureless. It reminds me of a similar story out of the USA, near Phoenix I think, a couple of years ago.”
“Well, we certainly observed it too,” Laura confirmed, “though only from a distance. Did you get any photos?”
“Afraid not, Officer, too busy calling you to take photos as well, but you can call me back on this number for your enquiries. I am sure lots of others got good sightings and photos, it took a fair while to pass overhead.”
“Yes, let me answer the other calls and we will be in touch.” Officer Byrd ended the call and picked up the next caller, an overly excited member of the public who had witnessed the UFO from his hot tub in the garden, then injured himself rushing indoors to report the incident only to find the emergency lines busy to Thetford Police Station.
Don Griffiths ended his call and checked out the videos he had actually taken on his mobile phone before calling the local cops. He had the chevron shape clearly defined, moving against the stars. He had reasonably good video of the craft with some homes and trees peripherally. No detail was visible inside the shape, but its precise dimensions and speed could be easily calculated from the context. Don was pleased his family had been indoors as they still suffered anxiety from the prior episode when he was convinced they had been subjected to an alien abduction attempt. They had moved into town from their country farmhouse as a direct result of that encounter to have more people living closely around them. He had made his reports of that incident at the US air base and been debriefed by the local representative of a group he had not previously been aware of with the acronym AATIP, described to him as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The AATIP representative was a middle-ranking Pentagon officer called Earl Whitburn who had talked pretty openly about the large numbers of UFO and alien stories they had collected in the course of the past few years that the programme had been operating. Many of these incidents were observed near military bases or power plants. Don had been reassured that most incidents were one-off cases and that witnesses were seldom personally affected on more than one occasion.
Don pressed contacts on his phone and brought up Earl Whitburn’s personal phone number. He pressed message and typed ‘Did you get to see tonight’s UFO over Thetford? Looked to be 500 metres across, 100 metres deep flying around 1,000 feet at around 50 knots. Multiple witnesses.’ Don attached some photos and the video and pressed send.
Rakul glanced down into the small town of Thetford from his eyrie in the prow of his spacecraft. As he overflew the town centre he noted a few individuals bathed in light from neon signs watching their passage and pointing up towards him. This event was already one of the most witnessed UFO sightings ever on planet Earth and would exercise the local authorities as Rakul had planned. Such fine natural resources; so undeveloped, Rakul thought not for the first time since his arrival as he surveyed the rich farmland. Military intelligence analysts would later remark on the complete absence of sound of the passing craft and the lack of any reflected illumination on its fuselage. On the ground ahead there was a dark wedge in the streetlights striking into the centre of town where the rivers Ouse and Thet merged in parkland. Rakul steered into the centre axis of the triangle and engaged the cloaking systems gradually. The watchers left behind struggled to pick out the shape of the starship as it penetrated the darkness over the park and disappeared. Its final course appeared to be just east of south, which was of great interest to the investigators who descended on the town the following day.
Having established the deviation to the east in the minds of the watchers below, Rakul completed the cloak and turned west along the thread of the A11 main road and its dual line of head and tail lights, white and red beacons of quaint little wheeled vehicles flowing from and to the much brighter Cambridge city centre in the distance.
Military air traffic controllers at Royal Air Force Lakenheath were a mere five miles to the east but their screens showed no sign of the giant spaceship that had chosen to appear visually but was not showing in any way on their radar.
*
Rakul looked for a good place to settle
that would give him easy access to Cambridge and especially the Spargar headquarters in the manor house in Grantchester village. There was plenty of agricultural land to the south of the city where a considerable amount of fertile countryside lay fallow and unproductive. These people on Earth had so much luxury of food production they could afford to leave good land unused; unbelievable after experiencing life on Spargan where none but the highest caste had ever eaten naturally grown food. Pressure of space and population required the seas to be cultivated for algal biomass that was processed into fast foods of all colours and textures. These were promoted by clever advertising attuned to Spargar culture and latest fashions, which satisfied the taste of the population that knew no better. Here on Earth, Rakul was overflying large fields devoted to individual oil, root and cereal crops with spare capacity just wasting all around. There was no livestock farming in the vicinity but Rakul’s reports on planet Earth economics showed a wealth of good animal farming and only the slightest development of the bountiful seas as fish farms.
Rakul selected a rural area twenty miles south of Cambridge to disengage the five craft that had combined for the journey to Earth as the giant Spargar chevron craft. The commanders of the four wing craft that had attached to Rakul’s central command ship returned to their control stations prior to separation while stationary at 500 feet. The wings popped off in two sections on both sides and the five resulting craft descended slowly to their allocated landing sites in quiet scrubland that was unlikely to be disturbed by local farm traffic in the short time they would need to be based here. Each craft extended supporting legs down to the ground so the craft stood ten feet above ground level. This reduced disturbance on the ground and allowed the ecosystem beneath the resting Spargar craft to continue as normal.
A pair of tawny owls perched in the low boughs of an aged oak tree swivelled their heads in all directions in the attempt to get sight of whatever was disturbing the night air of their favourite hunting ground. The pair of owls were fretful as their nesting site was a hole in the trunk of the oak and it was essential they maintained joint protection of the bustling pair of owlets within. The male owl let forth a series of ghostly hoots, seeking any kind of response to the disturbance. No return hoots were forthcoming and the tawny owl pair chatted to each other in an exchange of nervous kew-wicks. The male owl dropped from their perch and flared out his wings to patrol low over the scrubland. He flew in complete silence around their territory and discovered additional, yet invisible, tree trunks that were only detectable by their buffeting of the air flow across his feathers. Knocked askance in flight, he returned flustered to his perch, preening the wings that were thankfully short and manoeuvrable in their adaptation for flight in the cramped space of the woodland.
Rakul monitored his selected landing site for life forms and the walls of his vessel highlighted any significant life form capable of movement. The pair of owls was the largest life sign in the immediate vicinity, with no human beings detected within a few miles across large fields to isolated farmhouses. Rakul magnified the image of the owl pair. They were clearly highly developed aerial nocturnal hunters and they appeared to be staring knowingly directly at Rakul with big black eyes in flat round faces. Their beaks seemed proportionally small but purposefully pointed and capable. Rakul admired the purity of their design and saw something of himself in their singularity of purpose.
Once his small fleet were safely landed and had turned to settling down for some food and rest, Rakul turned to contact the existing Spargar agents in their manor house in Grantchester village. Rakul affected a brusque manner as he summoned the most senior agent there to communicate.
Tatsu received the expected call on the screen resembling an earthly tablet in the comfortable lounge of the Grantchester house. Tatsu had perforce moved to Cambridge to handle the United Kingdom operations on the recent disappearance of Haruka with their Omeyn MuneMei. She had been instructed to sit tight until Rakul’s recovery force arrived to run operations. Tatsu was a Zarnha agent of highest caste and hugely capable. She had spent many years on Earth infiltrating Evrisoft Corporation very successfully but now, here she was, her close colleague and leader missing and she was forced to move from California to England to manage the mess. Her natural calm competence was in danger of being overwhelmed by anxiety and frustration in anticipation of the arrival of Rakul. She believed that she and her team would have been capable of recovering the missing Omeyn, Haruka and the Spargar force, but she had to accept that the Conclave of the Omeyns had taken the exceptional course of summoning a Rakul to take over.
Rakul stared at the display where Tatsu perched uncomfortably, regarding him levelly and reluctant to break eye contact. “My battle group has arrived and successfully camped close by… ” he said.
Rakul had stopped speaking. Tatsu was uncertain whether this was an invitation to reply. As the silence continued, Tatsu said, “We are aware of this. There is already a disturbance in the local authorities because of your overflight of the Thetford abduction site.”
“This was intentional,” Rakul broke in. Tatsu flicked long strands of raven hair behind her left ear in displacement activity at his interruption. “I will require a list of all your suspects of the abduction crime to be brought in for questioning. That means all local and Gayan suspects and I will sample any possible earthly witnesses from the abduction area where you failed to protect your Omeyn.” Rakul eased back and continued to stare at Tatsu’s discomfort. She understood that he was establishing his authority while emphasising their local failure but this did not make it any less irritating.
“We had anticipated such requests and will deliver these reports immediately,” Tatsu replied. “Will you wish to meet with us here or on board your ship?”
“I will interview you on the matter at your location,” Rakul replied. “Local people that may be witnesses I will bring to be questioned here as a matter of course. We will need to be most circumspect with our Gayan enemies, if you even know all their identities?” Rakul raised an eyebrow quizzically. Tatsu remained expressionless a moment. “No matter,” Rakul broke the pause. “We will flush them out as necessary.”
“Naturally, your Highness,” Tatsu replied with a deferential nod and lowered eyelashes.
Despite his affectations, Rakul was touched by Tatsu’s brave approach and her appealing physical form. She lacked the strength and physique of the tawny women of Jarlanka he favoured so much but he acknowledged the attraction of her slim form and flowing blue-black hair.“I will arrange to visit you as soon as we are settled here. You have your instructions and we must conclude action plans at our meeting. Time is of the essence; your Omeyn is undoubtedly in great distress!”
“Quite so, I will expect your call and make preparations,” Tatsu replied and broke the connection. She was affected and almost trembling. She was annoyed her body was lacking the control she would have liked to display and her heightened emotionality had led to an elevated pulse rate that flushed her face and neck. She was certain that Rakul would have been monitoring her for these signs and he would have taken pleasure in seeing these obvious results of his probing.
*
Tom Pritchard was driving his wife Mavis in their old mustard-coloured estate car. Recently retired, the couple could indulge their pastime of birdwatching and exploring the local Cambridgeshire countryside. They did not consider themselves ‘twitchers’ as they did not travel the length and breadth of the country to spot every foreign bird that blew in. They preferred to watch and record the behaviour of the indigenous birdlife, especially the more exciting predators, the hawks and owls. Tom pulled their car into a country road lay-by alongside a tubular steel five-bar gate leading to a large field across mildly undulating fields newly flowering with a first flush of yellow oilseed rape.
Tom opened the tailgate as Mavis waited to extract their equipment from the flatbed. They both wore olive and green drab waterproof outdoor wear. Not camouf
lage gear exactly, which would have been too military for their tastes, but certainly capable of blending into the hedgerows and with lots of useful pockets. They reached into the car, withdrawing cameras, binoculars and manuals and stuffing them into these pockets. They did not approve of the oilseed rape crop: an overwintering variety that was starting to flower early after vernalisation. They considered it to be a new-fangled crop, not the traditional grain they would have preferred. As such they ignored the cheery lemon-yellow profusion of flowers that spread like foam across the enormous field.
The couple had visited this location many times before; the clip top to the gate gave access to an ancient right of way that ran around the interior edge of the field to fallow land in the far corner at the top of a mild slope. There were some trees and light scrub visible in the waste ground beyond the field that was their target for birdwatching.
“Mavis, have you got my binoculars, I can’t find them anywhere?” Tom muttered as he rooted in the canvas bags in the load bay of the car.
“Oh I think I picked them up instead of mine, here they are, dear,” Mavis replied.
“Yours are here, Mavis, look,” Tom countered holding Mavis’s clearly different binoculars out for inspection.
“Thank you, dear. Can you bring the flask of tea and the sandwiches?”
“Of course, don’t forget your journal and camera. You know you won’t remember everything if you can’t record it when we get there.”
“Yes, dear.” Mavis pushed journals, identification charts and equipment into the large pockets of her jacket and trousers. They both wore stout boots in waterproof brown canvas with elaborately cleft plastic soles for grip in the wet.
Tom strapped a tripod to his back and a knapsack with food and drink layered on top of that. They had checked the weather forecast before leaving and the filmy cloud of an otherwise bright late spring day was pleasingly adhering to the Met Office weather forecast. Tom craned his neck to check the weather above and harrumphed in acknowledgement that the weather and his outdoor gear were in sound accord. He unclipped the gate from its post and swung it outwards to admit Mavis first then he passed through, closing the gate behind him with a clack as the clip sprang back into its setting. They set off round the field in the sound knowledge that their right of way was enshrined in the Blue Book of the Ramblers’ Association, whatever the farmer may think of their access to his field.
Edge of Revelation Page 13