Under Darkness (A Sci-Fi Thriller) (Scott Standalones Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  Reed gave the conn to Lieutenant Peterson, and they left the bridge together, heading down the stairs to CIC. The CIC was dark, as usual, to help sailors see the information on their screens. Reed walked straight over to McCown’s station. “Petty Officer,” he said. “What are conditions like out there?”

  “Temperature and pressure readings are within the normal range, sir,” McCown reported.

  “Interesting,” Reed replied while stroking his chin.

  Commander Morris noticed McCown stroking his chin, too. He frowned at that, but quickly dismissed it as irrelevant and forced himself to focus on the task at hand. “What’s the temperature?” Morris asked.

  “Just three degrees colder than expected, not the five that satellite data indicated.”

  “That’s still a difference,” Morris said.

  “Yes, sir, but meteorology is hardly a precise science. There could be a million reasons why this area of the ocean is colder.”

  Morris nodded. “Including an alien spaceship hovering overhead and blocking out three to five degrees worth of sunlight.”

  One of Reed’s eyebrows arched up as he turned to regard Morris. “It’s three degrees, Commander. Not ten or twenty.”

  “The difference could grow more pronounced as we sail deeper into the area. We need to report this to Admiral Harris.”

  “And we will,” Captain Reed replied. “But it could be caused by ocean currents or cloud cover, or a thousand other things. We shouldn’t feed into mass hysteria by suggesting darker possibilities. Next minute the Admiral will be ordering us to launch missiles into thin air to sound out your invisible spaceship. And even if you’re right, all that would do is start an interstellar war. No, I’m not going to jump at shadows, Commander, nor should you.” He scratched his cheek. McCown scratched his.

  Morris frowned. “Are you being insubordinate, Petty Officer?”

  “Sir?” McCown asked.

  “You keep copying the captain behind his back!”

  “I do?”

  Captain Reed turned to regard McCown. “Doing what?”

  “Just now. You scratched your cheek, and so did he. And before stroking his chin.”

  Captain Reed frowned, and then flashed an apologetic look at McCown. “Carry on, Petty Officer.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Reed led Morris away with an arm around his shoulders. “This is what I’m talking about,” he began in a soothing tone. “We’re all on edge, Morris, and being under an indefinite quarantine doesn’t help, but we need to be careful that we don’t allow it to affect our judgment. Bad judgment leads to bad choices, Commander.”

  “Aye, sir,” Morris replied, nodding. “And if the temperature readings do line up? What then?”

  “Whatever the readings are, I will report them to the admiral, but I’m certain that even in the heart of the anomalous region we’ll find temperatures are already on their way back up. It’s just a passing weather phenomenon. Not a cloaked spaceship.” Outside the CIC Captain Reed shut the door and turned to face Morris. “The reality is, they’re gone, Commander. They probably didn’t like what they found down here.” A smile curved his lips. “Maybe we didn’t taste as good as they thought we would.”

  Commander Morris grimaced. “I hope you’re right, sir.”

  “I am. You’ll see. A few weeks or months from now the quarantine will be lifted, and everything will go back to normal.”

  “But what if the CDC finds something?” Morris asked.

  Captain Reed snorted. “They won’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Logic, Morris. If they planned to infect us with something, why the hell would they make a small, underpopulated island their target? They’d start with a big city like New York, someplace where an infection couldn’t possibly be contained.”

  “Unless they’re not that smart; they could be just as bestial as they seem,” Morris replied.

  “Have you ever seen a lion build a spaceship, Morris?”

  “No, sir.”

  Captain Reed nodded and reached out to clasp one of Morris’s shoulders. “Exactly.”

  Some of the tension in Morris’s chest eased, and he blew out a breath.

  A small smile appeared on the captain’s lips. “You look relieved, Morris.”

  “I am, sir. All this time, I’ve been secretly preparing myself for the worst. It’s good to know there are other possibilities.”

  “Indeed there are, XO. Come.” The captain released his shoulder. “We’d better get back up to the bridge.”

  Chapter 40

  Corporal Gibson peered into the egg-shaped alien capsule, watching as engineers in yellow hazmat suits bumbled around inside. Ever since that final Crawler had somehow blasted off in a pod last night, efforts to study and guard the alien landing craft had kicked into high gear. Gibson didn’t have a high enough rank to know why, but he could guess. If the capsules could be used to return to the alien ship, then they could be used to locate it and maybe even to destroy it.

  But Gibson wasn’t optimistic about their chances of figuring it out. He’d seen more knobs and dials on an old analog radio than there were on those pods.

  A thundercloud rumbled overhead, drawing Gibson’s gaze away. “Looks like rain,” he said. As if summoned by his words, fat droplets came splatting down to the muddy crater where he stood with his team.

  Private Dekker threw his head back and spread his arms to the sky as if waiting for aliens to beam him up.

  “Hands on your weapon, Deks,” Gibson said.

  “Sure thing, Corporal.”

  Gibson turned back to the pod just in time to see a crooked flash of lightning crack open the sky right in front of him, dazzling his eyes. A split second later, a titanic peal of thunder shook the ground.

  “Shit! Any closer and I’d have to paint on my eyebrows!” Dekker said.

  Gibson frowned. Blinking spots from his eyes, he stared at the metal pod in the crater. Sitting at about 15 feet tall, and having blasted out all the trees in the immediate vicinity, that pod was a lightning rod. Feeling the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, Gibson started forward.

  “Hey!” he said, calling out to the engineers poking around inside. One of them looked up and cupped a hand to their ear. “We need to clear the area until the storm passes! That pod is probably conductive!”

  The man in the hazmat suit shook his head as if he couldn’t hear—or maybe in disagreement. They probably thought their suits would protect them if lightning struck. Gibson cast about, searching for Sergeant Rathers. He was in charge of security for the site, so it was his call. Gibson spied him standing on the rim of the crater, watching a nearby road with binoculars. A white pickup truck was rumbling along it.

  Gibson jogged up the side of the crater to reach him. “Sergeant,” he said. “I think we need to clear the site.”

  Rathers lowered his binoculars. “And why do you think that, Corporal?”

  Gibson explained his reasoning. “If lightning strikes that pod, it could ignite whatever fuel it has left.”

  “Does it look big enough to use chemical rockets, Gibson? If the engineers aren’t worried, then I don’t think we should be either. Orders are to work around the clock on this. That means rain or shine.”

  “Copy.” Gibson sighed. He was about to head back down to join the rest of his team when he noticed that they were standing at the top of the crater, too—just over the rim and down the other side, actually. They were keeping their distance after that lightning strike. Smart, Gibson thought.

  Another flash of light dazzled his eyes, and this time he heard a deafening roar through the thunder. A plume of bright blue fire leapt a hundred feet into the air. The shockwave hit a split second later; a blinding wave of superheated air picked Gibson up and tossed him down the hill. He rolled to the bottom, fetching up against a tree. Bits of debris and clods of dirt rained down, hammering the grass flat.

  Sergeant Rathers lay face down some five feet away
with a branch as thick as Gibson’s arm sticking out of his back.

  “Sergeant!” Gibson called, his own voice sounding distant to his ringing ears. Rathers didn’t even twitch. As his hearing cleared, Gibson heard that roaring sound from before, followed by a loud boom. He twisted toward the sound to see the egg-shaped lander trailing a dazzling blue engine glow and streaking across the sky at a sixty-degree angle, heading due North.

  A large black bird pin-wheeled away from it, expanding as it swooped toward the ground. But it wasn’t a bird. It had arms and legs. Gibson shivered. It was one of the engineers who’d been inside the pod, his mustard-yellow hazmat suit charred black.

  Gibson pushed off the ground with one arm to see Dekker, Clarke, and Kelly cutting a path through the long grass to reach him.

  “Clarke!” Gibson roared. “The sergeant’s down!”

  The three of them picked up the pace.

  Dekker grabbed Gibson’s hand and pulled him to his feet, while Clarke and Kelly ran on to the sergeant’s side.

  “He’s dead, Corporal,” Clarke announced.

  “Shit,” Gibson muttered. “On me. We need to check the area for survivors.” He led the way up to the rim of the crater to find the ground steaming and blasted smooth. There was no sign of the engineers except for one smoking boot.

  “No one lived through that,” Clarke said.

  “Spooner is going to lose his shit,” Dekker said.

  Gibson looked back up to the sky, squinting and holding up a hand to shield his eyes against the glare of the landing pod’s thrusters. “They didn’t die for nothing,” he said. “Now we know how they work.”

  “With lightning?” Kelly asked.

  “Not exactly,” Gibson said. “Lightning hit the pod, and the electrical surge must have triggered the thrusters.”

  “Like jump-starting a car,” Dekker put in.

  “Yeah.” Gibson frowned. He doubted it was that simple, but the engineers studying the other pods could probably do something with that info.

  “Where do you think it’s headed?” Dekker asked.

  “Back to their ship, where else?” Gibson replied. “Some kind of autopilot.”

  “I thought their ship was gone,” Kelly put in.

  The pod zipped behind a cloud and disappeared. Gibson waited long seconds for it to return, listening to raindrops hissing on the super-heated ground like water in a frying pan, but the dazzling blue plume of the pod’s thrusters never reappeared.

  “Must have run out of fuel,” Dekker mused.

  “That, or it disappeared inside their carrier,” Gibson replied, bringing his gaze back down to regard the others with a grave expression. “We’d better get back to base and report. With any luck, someone had eyes on that pod and command already knows where that carrier ship is hiding.”

  “What makes you so sure they’re hiding?” Dekker asked. “Maybe they jumped to the next star system, and the pods are set to follow. That would explain why they haven’t tried to land more of them.”

  “For all our sakes, I hope you’re right, Deks,” Gibson replied.

  Part 3 - Havoc

  Chapter 41

  —Three Months Later—

  Ashley Carter sat at a long table, created by pushing four smaller ones together in the CDC center’s mess hall. Seated with her were seven other senior physicians, and the director, Dr. Dean Coben. They’d all gathered here at the director’s request to discuss the elephant in the room—or in the tent, in this case.

  More than thirteen weeks had passed since the Crawlers had arrived, and almost as much time since the CDC had begun looking for signs of infectious agents, and so far, no one had come up with anything. All of the so-called infected remained asymptomatic, and the aliens themselves were long gone. Apart from the sixty dead ones and the four live ones at the missile testing facility at Barking Sands on the west side of the island, there was no sign of the Crawlers anywhere, and no one had any clue about why they’d come.

  Efforts to study the Crawlers were being conducted by an agency that Ashley had never even heard of—the AATIP, which stood for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. They were also the ones who’d handled recovery and relocation of the thirty remaining landing pods to the same facility at Barking Sands. All of it was being kept out of the public eye, much to the outrage of the public and the media. The alien assets on the island were the reason for the mountain of political pressure now sitting on Director Coben’s shoulders. A week ago Washington had given him an ultimatum: find evidence of an infectious agent, or lift the quarantine.

  Anyone with half a brain could figure out why: they were anxious to get the alien tech to a more secure facility before some other country came along and tried to steal it out from under their noses. Worries of a second Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack played on an endless loop across every news channel, but this time everyone expected the attack to come from China, since they were the ones with a fleet massing to challenge the US Navy in the Pacific.

  “Can anyone here give me a reason to maintain the quarantine?” Director Coben asked.

  None of the other doctors spoke, so Ashley filled the silence. “Just because people are asymptomatic, doesn’t mean we should let down our guard. There’s plenty of viruses on Earth that have longer incubation periods than three months.”

  “Granted,” Director Coben replied, nodding. “But by now we should have found some sign of alien cells. We’ve tested everything we can think of, and still come up empty-handed.” Coben began shaking his head, and Ashley saw several other doctors doing the same. “It’s time to admit we’re jumping at shadows,” he added.

  Ashley frowned, her eyes scanning the others around the table, feeling unnerved, but unable to put her finger on the reason.

  “We need more time. One more week.”

  “We were given one more week a week ago,” the director replied. He steepled his hands on the table and leaned toward her, his brown eyes hard, crow’s feet pinching together. “It’s time to call it. Let’s take the vote.”

  Three other doctors steepled their hands on the table, and Ashley frowned, a distant memory trickling to the fore. She recalled the girl from the resort telling her about synchronized behavior. At the time Ashley had dismissed it, but now...

  “By a show of hands, how many believe we should lift the quarantine?”

  The director raised his hand at the same time as the other three who’d been steepling their hands and shaking their heads with him. The other three appeared to hesitate, then two of them raised their hands. Ashley kept both of hers in her lap, watching the director and his three copy-cats with narrowed eyes.

  Coben lowered his hand, and the other three did, too. “Let the record show seven out of nine in favor of ending the quarantine.”

  Ashley couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This went beyond ordinary coincidence or unconscious mimicry. But even if it was a symptom, how was it possible? The center was isolated, and all of them were trained to take strict precautions. They’d observed every protocol. Could it be that the center had been compromised without them knowing it? And if so, by what? All the test samples had been clean.

  “It’s settled then,” Director Coben said, shuffling the test result papers in front of him to slip them back into a blue folder.

  “Wait,” Ashley said.

  All eyes turned to her.

  “I just thought of something else we could try.”

  “And that is?” Director Coben asked.

  Ashley hesitated, scrambling to think of something. She hadn’t actually thought of anything, but she had to buy time somehow. “It’s a long shot, but maybe if we take new samples from the contaminated individuals and test them again, we might find something.”

  Director Coben scowled. Ashley’s eyes skipped around the table. More than just the three copy-cats were scowling with him. “What do you think you’ll find this time?”

  “Some of our samples are more than ninety days old,” A
shley said. “Alien cells might take longer to divide than human ones. Maybe we were looking too soon.”

  “We have more recent ones, too,” Director Coben pointed out. “As I recall we gathered fresh samples from a subset of the contact group just a week ago for that exact reason.”

  “True, but as you say, it was only a subset.”

  “We selected the subjects at random, Carter, and there isn’t enough time left to re-test the whole group.”

  “Not the whole group,” Ashley insisted. “Just a few outliers.”

  “You have someone in mind?” the director asked.

  Thinking back to Beth Steele’s account of synchronized behavior at the Koa Kai, Ashley nodded. “I do.”

  “Then get it done. You have until midday tomorrow. If you still haven’t found anything by then, I’m pulling the plug.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ashley said, nodding quickly. “I’ll work around the clock if I need to.”

  “That’s your prerogative, Doctor.” The director’s gaze roved around the table. “Meanwhile, I want everyone else to start packing. If Doctor Carter doesn’t find anything, we’re all going to be on the first flight out of here. Meeting adjourned.”

  Heads bobbed, and Ashley’s colleagues traded eager smiles as they pushed out their chairs and stood up from the table. As far as any of them were concerned, the job was done, and the outcome was as good as it could be.

  Ashley studied them all carefully, especially the director and his three mimics, but they all stood up at separate times, their behavior once again appropriately staggered. She frowned and massaged her temples to knead away an encroaching headache. Maybe she was just imagining things.

  As she stood up and pushed out her chair, Ashley heard the director’s radio chirp, followed by, “Director, this is Corporal Lee, I have a Mr. Donald Hale here at the fence asking to speak with Doctor Carter. Over.”

  Director Coben grabbed the radio and said, “Coben here. Turn him away. This is a restricted area.”

  “Hold on, Director,” Ashley said. “I know him.”

  Coben’s brow furrowed curiously. “You asked him to come?”