Reading between one line was pretty damn Zen. Perhaps he had misunderstood. Was the message even from Tyler?
Hell, yeah.
He had met Tyler Pope in dire circumstances, over the most kludged of all possible comm links, improvising around the lack of crypto gear on a then recently captured asteroid. NASA’s base on Earth’s newest moon hadn’t had any reason to stock such gear. Till it did. Till the Russian-backed terrorists had shown up. If the datasheet now so incongruously delivered to Marcus was crypto gear, I should never let you leave home without one of these made perfect sense. So did “Alice” and “Bob.” For a good half century, cryptographers explaining their arcane craft had used “Alice” as the party with a secret message to send and “Bob” as the party intended to somehow securely receive it.
Everything pointed, however obliquely, to some sort of encrypted communication headed his way, through this device. If so, he had misunderstood 1600. And well on his way to wearing a rut into the mooncrete floor, he came up with a theory.
With lunar days and nights each two Earth weeks long, time zones like back home would serve no useful purpose. So: everyone on the Moon lived by Zulu Time. For any purpose that did not demand the accuracy of an atomic clock, Zulu Time was Greenwich Mean Time.
But Tyler and CIA headquarters were in Virginia, not on the Moon. If 1600 referred to Eastern Time, five hours behind Zulu, he had almost three more hours to go. A person could go nuts in that time!
Three times Marcus started, and deleted, an email to Valerie. He was too keyed up to get the tone right, and he didn’t want to worry her. After the third attempt, he closed the email app and opened a digital picture album. He paged through shots of Valerie, Simon, and sometimes the three of them. Simon was a good-looking kid, something of a soccer fiend, a math whiz like his mom, and, like any teen, a handful. Somehow the boy grew an inch or two between photos.
And Val? She was smart, curious, spirited. Beautiful. Tall and sexy. She had, on the too rare occasions when she let down her hair and intensity, the most charming, impish smile. Most shots in this best-of-the-best collection showed Val as lithe as the day they had first met, but his favorite pic was the newest: the selfie-in-the-mirror with the world’s most adorable baby bump.
With a sigh, he dismissed the album. He dug through a junk drawer, muttering about spooks and the interminable wait making him paranoid, until he found, tangled among his collection of spare cables and cords, an ancient pair of wired earbuds.
Of course there was never a shortage of things to be done, and work would be a welcome distraction. Marcus refolded the mysterious datasheet, debating with himself whether to carry it with him or lock it in his quarters. Unlike Tyler, or whomever had sent him this datasheet, he trusted his coworkers, but—
In his hands, the datasheet trilled.
This time, once he reauthenticated, the datasheet offered up a vid window. In it, as if imaged from a handheld device held at arm’s length, Marcus saw a ruddy-faced man with sparse, close-cropped graying hair and a bristly mustache gone all white, seated in an unfamiliar anteroom. Horn-rimmed glasses perched midway down his nose, and he had on wired earbuds. Without the suit jacket, starched white shirt, and tie, he could have been anybody’s grandfather. In point of fact, he was a grandfather. Until a couple of years back, he had also been the CIA’s acknowledged Russia expert.
Taking a visual cue, Marcus switched to wired earbuds.
“Good man,” Tyler Pope began with a touch of Texas drawl. “I’d have looked pretty foolish showing up for this meeting if you hadn’t cracked the code. You by yourself up there?”
“Apart from my better judgment? Yeah.”
“Get it out of your system,” Tyler eventually responded. The three-second round-trip delay was not going to make conversation any easier. “Not a joking venue, or subject, and this isn’t the only issue on the woman’s plate.”
“Explaining nothing.” As if they had minds of their own, Marcus felt his hands clench. Not sure why he cared, he managed to keep his fists beneath the camera’s view. “You’re retired. I’m about as literally in the middle of nowhere as human beings have ever managed. So what the hell is going on, and what does it have to do with me?”
“In my case, retirement didn’t stick. In your case, well, you’ll want to be involved. Trust me. With luck, you’ll have answers soon enough.” He made a noise that was half chuckle, half phlegmy cough. “After which you’ll have more questions.
“I called you after getting our five-minute warning. Of course, that could mean five minutes, could mean an hour.”
“Give me something, man. A topic. Why the Agency is interested in me again. Whoever it is I’m about to meet.”
Tyler frowned. “I told you who.”
“No, you told me when. And unless you’re somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, you didn’t even get that right.”
“I told you 1600. If I could have given a time, I would have, but it’s out of my hands.”
1600 was not a time. Marcus was just beginning to suspect the sort of trouble he was somehow in when a tall, middle-aged, African American man leaned into the camera’s peripheral vision.
He said, “The president will see you both now.”
* * *
The president could spare Marcus and Tyler only a few minutes of her time. It was long enough to emphasize that the discovery was, beyond important, epochal. That vital security interests of the nation were at issue, at forefront, at stake. That every reasonable resource would be made available to Marcus. That the coming endeavor was a top priority for her; she trusted and expected it would be so for him.
But what had been discovered? What endeavor? What had Marcus to do with any of this? Those questions remained unaddressed even as the president, citing the demands of more urgent, though not more important, matters, brought their session to a close.
And so Marcus—none the wiser than before the call, but with his curiosity raised to a fever pitch—found himself digitally ushered from the Oval Office.
Chapter 4
“What I’m about to tell you can’t go anywhere outside this room,” Marcus said. His living room, that was. The CIA datasheet, among its hidden features (he now knew), swept for bugs; his quarters did not seem to have any. The device jammed whatever bugs it might have overlooked. It pushed antinoise through his surround-sound speakers to stymie eavesdroppers. That last feature, Tyler had assured him, would defeat anyone attempting to listen in via Icarus’s ubiquitous mics. “I need your word.”
Across the room, his two visitors exchanged skeptical looks.
Marcus waited until, finally, Brad Morton nodded. Brad was a big man, a former college linebacker. The salt-of-the-earth type, with a kind word and a pat on the back for everyone he met, and on most every occasion. Also, a damned good friend.
“I keep confidences for a living,” Donna Rousseau said. The base paramedic was a just-the-facts sort. She was damned good at her job, excusably (if on occasion annoyingly) a bit cocky. Donna had a square face and a strong jaw, and her ice-blue eyes were penetrating. Wiry in build, of not quite average height, standing beside Brad she seemed tiny. “Is this different?”
You have no idea, Marcus thought. “I need you both,” he began, “to join me on a road trip.”
Brad leaned against the wall. “That’s anticlimactic after the big buildup.”
“An 1800-mile road trip,” Marcus added. Road trips weren’t measured in kilometers. They just weren’t.
Brad did not even blink. “You bring the beer, Boss.”
“I shouldn’t be off-base that long,” Donna said, “but you know that, just as you know it can’t be a secret when we three set out to … wherever. Put that aside and look at us: two engineers and a paramedic. Your not-so-little road trip has nothing to do with astronomy or the observatory. How about you cut to the chase?”
“Yo
u need to see something.” Tapping the CIA datasheet, Marcus started playback of one of the encrypted files Tyler had uploaded. “Highlights of a vid shot two days ago on Nearside. From a prospecting bot following hints of iridium, of all exotic things.”
Across stark moonscape, through long shadows, their point of view crept toward two impressive stone slabs leaning one against the other. In the niche beneath the rocks, where rays of the setting Sun managed to sneak through, hints of orange peeked out of the dust. He had watched this vid, over and over and over, and still he was in awe.
Donna leaned closer.
“Just wait,” Marcus said. “By the way, I’m told that mound we’re seeing is about two and a half meters long.”
A manipulator arm entered their view, the robotic limb slowing to a crawl as Marcus adjusted the playback rate. For a breathtaking few seconds, through a gold-tinged visor, they saw—someone. A mummy. Eyes like an owl in a squarish head. Three nostrils, and no hint of a nose. Rank upon rank of needlelike teeth within the lipless slash of a mouth. Hints of scales.
Then the vid resumed normal speed. Suit, face, everything crumbled, imploded, dissolved into a collapsing cloud of dust.
“Aliens,” Donna said.
“Aliens,” Marcus agreed. “And, it would appear, ancient aliens. We’re going to go check things out.”
* * *
Brad was, as always, practical. “1800 miles. 3000 klicks. I presume ‘road trip’ is metaphorical. Which shuttle would you like prepped?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Donna said. “I realize Daedalus is in the middle of nowhere on the backside of the Moon. Still, the discovery of intelligent aliens seems like the sort of news we would have gotten even here—if it were on the news. Hence, this is all being kept under wraps, and I have to ask, how is that even possible? And why is it a secret? And given that it is, why tell us? Why involve us? Who else would be going?”
Fair questions, Marcus had to agree. He had asked much the same of Tyler, too. “I need to change that ‘would’ to will. Then there’s the question you’ve been too polite to ask: how and why I got this news.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing that, too,” Brad allowed with a grin.
Marcus smiled back. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to know. I’m stunned and excited and honored to be involved. But it’s not that simple.”
“Go figure,” Donna said.
“First, let’s dispense with the secrecy aspects,” Marcus said. “The guy who stumbled upon this, the prospector teleoperating the bot from Dirtside, is ex-military. Out of caution, not talking to anyone else, not even the corporation from which he rents his bot, he checked in with his old platoon leader.” Though this Ethan had taken the time first to file a mining claim. After finding iridium in high concentrations? Marcus did not fault the man. “Only that guy wasn’t a lieutenant anymore, but a major in Army intel.”
“At which point the whole thing became classified,” Brad said. “Big surprise. But that makes me more curious. Why us?”
The way Tyler told it, the report had raced up the chain at Army Intelligence and Security Command, then to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and from there to the director of national intelligence. And to his boss, the president herself.
Donna, who had planted herself on Marcus’s sofa, got up to pace. “Did you see that being, creature, entity, whatever you care to call it? No way is it native to the Moon, because nothing that ever lived is. And unless I slept through a whole slew of biology classes, nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. Our dusty friend, wherever he, she, or it called home, must have come a long way. That suggests tech well beyond ours.”
“Traces of that tech may still be here on the Moon,” Marcus said. “And that’s why this discovery is classified. Because it matters who gets such technology, if any of it remains out there to be found.”
Brad said, “Still not amounting to an answer to why us. I, for one, don’t have a security clearance, or ever wanted one.”
“None of us have.” It had to be just nerves, but Marcus realized he was starving. He started grubbing around in his pantry for something, anything, ready to eat. Stale pretzels were the best he could do. He emptied the half-full bag into a bowl, carried the bowl to the living room. “But neither would we be up here without a thorough background check. Not after ….”
Donna grimaced. “Not after Resetter space tourists hijacked Powersat One and turned its downlink microwave beam into a WMD. But you’d know a great deal more about that than I.”
The bit of pretzel in Marcus’s mouth suddenly tasted like ashes.
* * *
He had been on-orbit when PS-1 fell into eco-terrorist hands. As far as the public knew, he had evacuated with the rest of the workers, and an autopilot glitch had splashed down his reentry pod many miles from the rest. Just as, as far as the world knew, an undisclosed fail-safe had later taken the hijacked solar-power satellite offline, allowing a Special Forces squad flown up on a shuttle to retake control. Just as, the public was assured, the terrorists, all conveniently killed during the operation, were alone to blame for thousands dead worldwide and gigabucks in power-generation facilities fried on the ground. And just as, with energy prices soaring, everyone was expected to believe Russia and her petro allies had altruistically opened wide the oil spigots.
Fairy tales, all of it.
Marcus had joined in—hell, he had concocted—the crazy, desperate, but in the end successful foray to disable the powersat. Four of them had made the flight from the orbital construction base. Terrorists killed Dino Agnelli. Thad Stankiewicz turned out to be a terrorist, or at least a Russian mole. When Thad’s attempt to stymie the raid failed, rather than be taken prisoner he had killed himself. Marcus and Savannah Morgan, the lone survivors of the raid, were sworn to secrecy faster than a rescue shuttle could return them to Earth.
Many a sleepless night, he wondered what, beyond cheap oil, the Russians had conceded to keep their part in the fiasco undisclosed. And what thoughts of revenge the Russians nursed. And how much it mattered that Great Power chess, rather than any interest in astronomy, sustained the president’s support for Daedalus Base. Construction of the observatory justified a big American presence on the Moon, just as the Russians, with even greater hypocrisy, operated their helium strip mine on Farside. With or without a supply of He-3, Russian researchers remained, from all Marcus had read, a good twenty years away from a practical fusion reactor—as practical fusion had been two decades into the future going back to the fifties.
* * *
“You still with us, Boss?” Brad prompted. “You went all quiet.”
“PS-1?” Marcus said. “Yeah, I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” That was all he had shared, or intended to share, with either of them. Or, for that matter, with anyone on the Moon. “It earned me a debrief session with the CIA. It’s why my name came up as the person at Daedalus to contact.”
“So the pope works for the CIA?” Brad asked.
“Something like that.” Marcus said.
Donna cleared her throat. “None of which explains why they’d contact Daedalus in the first place. Let me guess. It’s because we’re an all-American installation. Too many Russians and Chinese and others at Aitken. Too hard there to keep mounting an expedition secret. Just like sending experts up from Earth might draw unwelcome attention.”
Marcus nodded.
“Confirming aliens would affect everything,” Donna said, “and everybody. No one asked me, but keeping this from the public seems wrong. Make that, paranoid. Still, secrecy, however misplaced, is why Daedalus Base, and why you. It doesn’t explain”—and she gestured back and forth between herself and Brad—“why us?”
“You, for your biological knowledge—”
“Which supposes we find any aliens, and they don’t fall apart at a hard stare.” She grimaced. “And that anything about Earth bi
ology even applies to them.”
“For your biological knowledge,” Marcus repeated. “Brad, to keep our gear up and running. Me, because the Agency knows me.” And because, though Marcus was not the type to say it of himself, he was a damned good systems engineer. A generalist. When you had no way to know what you might find, a generalist was apt to come in handy.
“Including myself,” Donna said, “we make one sorry excuse for a first-contact team, or exo-archeologists, or whatever the hell they expect us to be. No offense.”
“None taken.” Marcus patted the CIA datasheet. “Despite appearances, this is no run-of-the-mill computer. There’s a reason this device was couriered to me. We’ll have ultrasecure communications to all manner of people whom the Agency is discreetly lining up, experts in every specialty from archeology to zoology. We’ll be their eyes and hands.”
Donna’s nostrils flared. “How flattering.”
“You know,” Brad said, grinning, “I kind of like seeing myself as Indiana Jones. But as you have me pegged for more mundane tasks, Boss, I’ll get back to practicalities. Which shuttle will we be taking? What supplies, instruments, whatever, do you have in mind we bring?”
“No shuttle,” Marcus said. “And that is for reasons of practicality. We don’t know how long we’ll have reason to stay, or how big an area we’ll need to search. And”—the argument that had convinced Tyler—“flying straight there might draw unwanted attention to the spot. We’ll drive, stopping often along the way to survey. When we stop, anyone watching”—and half a dozen countries had sensor platforms orbiting the Moon—“will see us drilling test bores and assaying mineral samples.”
Brad considered that for a while. “So, I guess we leave right away?”
“Surveying, or the appearance of it, anyway, in the dark? That doesn’t sound credible. No, we’ll wait for sunup.”
Déjà Doomed Page 3