Alien Agendas, page 14
“Sounds like black magic to me,” Wheaton said. He winked at Elanna.
“In a way, remote viewers accomplish the same thing with their minds,” Bennett pointed out. “The viewer is here . . . but she can look into a locked room on the other side of the planet.”
“Exactly,” Elanna agreed. “In fact, the best Solar Warden xenotech people are already studying the technology.”
Hunter looked at her in surprise. He was all too aware that the Talis didn’t like giving technology to twenty-first-century humans that was too far advanced, for fear of destroying their civilization. “And your people allowed that?”
“No,” she told him. She sounded unhappy about it. “Your government acquired it from a crashed Saurian time ship.”
“Roswell?” Hunter asked.
“No. Before that. Your people have been scavenging Saurian wrecks for a long time.”
“Where, then?”
She paused as though considering what she could tell them. “You call the event the ‘Battle of Los Angeles.’ Early in World War II, a time ship was seen in the skies over the city during the middle of the night and came under fire. A single large aerial vessel, which authorities claimed officially was a balloon, was undamaged by hours of concentrated antiaircraft fire. A smaller vessel, a Yoruzta-class ship launched from the first, was damaged and crashed in the waters southwest of Los Angeles, near the island of Catalina. A secret Navy recovery force managed to retrieve the ship almost intact and transport it to a secure facility at Emerald Bay on the north coast of the island.”
“Just in time for World War II?” Hunter wondered: If the United States had had teleportation technology in 1941, why hadn’t they used it in that conflict? The Normandy landings would have been infinitely easier if the invading forces could just . . . appear, deep in enemy territory. Or instead of losing hundreds of B-17s in bombing runs over Dusseldorf or Ploiesti, just teleport a few thousand tons of explosives directly into the enemy’s industrial plants or into the Führerbunker, for that matter.
“Your people didn’t have the technical or theoretical background to develop such devices,” Elanna told him. “Not then. And it was fortunate that the Malok didn’t simply give the technology to the Nazis. The recovered Dimensional Gate equipment remained in storage for two decades, first at Wright-Patterson, then at Groom Lake, until various reverse-engineering programs began to catch up with the technology. According to my sources, a crude prototype has only recently been developed by Section Six.”
Section Six was the rumored research and development bureau within Solar Warden, overseen directly by MJ-12. Almost nothing was known about it, and many claimed it was the Space Force equivalent of an urban legend. But Hunter reasoned that someone in the deep, dark background was working at developing recovered alien gadgetry and merging it into existing human technology. How else could you explain antigravity and interstellar travel in the early twenty-first century . . . or the existence of a secret Solar Warden fleet?
“You know . . . this little op to take back Mars,” Hunter said, “would have been made a whole lot easier if we’d had access to that.”
“I said ‘crude prototype,’” Elanna replied. “I doubt that you would want to trust the lives of yourself and your men to such an untested device.”
Hunter didn’t reply. He was wondering, though, how much of the story was concern for human lives, and how much was reluctance on the part of the Talis to release such powerful technology to primitives.
“So . . . what’s the setup?” Wheaton asked. “Do you need two gates, one at the sending end and one at the receiving end?”
“Most Malok devices can be used with a single gate, the transmitter. However, accuracy is better if two gates are linked. You don’t want to emerge inside a wall at the target.”
“I can see how that would be inconvenient,” Groton put in.
“To say the least. Not to mention catastrophically explosive as two solid bodies attempt to interphase with one another. One of the biggest issues with the technology is the problem created by conflicting motions and velocities.”
Bennett nodded understanding. “You mean things on one side of the gateway are moving in one direction, while on the other side—”
“Exactly,” Elanna told them. “Even if the two sites, transmitting and receiving, are both located on the surface of the same planet, two points at two different latitudes will be traveling at different speeds, do you see? And if those two points happen to be on different planets, the velocity differences are enormous. Having two gates makes linking the two sites so much simpler.”
“The question remains,” Groton said, “what the Saurians are doing with that gate. Are they using it to bring their soldiers to Mars from someplace else . . . from a transport ship, maybe? Or . . .” He let the question trail off.
“Or are they getting ready to use it to send troops to Earth,” Hunter said, completing the thought. “We know from the intel we gained at Aldebaran that they were planning on using their own, homegrown Nazi army to impose a new Reich on Earth.”
“A plan,” Wheaton pointed out, “that we managed to kick over.”
“Right. So now maybe they’re going to rely on their own people.” He grinned. “Humans are so unreliable.”
“I doubt that, Commander,” Elanna said. “As we’ve discussed, Saurian numbers remain extremely small compared with the population of Earth. They would much rather use expendable proxies. And Aldebaran wasn’t unique. They do have other worlds with captive human populations.”
“What worlds?” Hunter demanded. “Give us something to work with here.”
She shook her head. “I have no hard data. Sending you off to find such worlds on nothing but hearsay and rumor would be worse than useless.”
“In other words,” Hunter said, “we have to police our own backyard.”
“That’s part of it,” Elanna agreed. “Your culture must grow of its own accord, and not have everything handed to it.”
“Even when your own survival is at stake?” If Earth was openly taken over by the Saurians, the Talis might well be destroyed.
She didn’t reply to that, and Hunter always wondered how much twenty-first-century humans could really trust the Talis. He’d often heard that the Talis were humans from “ten thousand years in the future,” or thereabouts. He’d also heard other figures—eleven thousand, or even twelve thousand. He’d heard Elanna claim that her home base was in the 101st century . . . which would mean only eight thousand years into the future from the twenty-first.
So which was it? When was she from? And why was she so deliberately vague about it?
And if Elanna couldn’t be trusted to reveal such basic information about her own culture, what else might she be, to say the least, less than forthcoming about?
He became uncomfortably aware that Elanna was staring at him, staring through him, as though she were reading his mind.
Damn it, he thought. You have to admit that it’s damned suspicious! Why won’t you level with us?
And then he heard her voice answering in his mind. You know why, Commander. The less you know about us, the less the Malok can learn. And the less risk of violence done to this timeline. Or to ours.
He sighed. He’d been on this merry-go-round with her before.
“I think,” Groton said, almost as if he was hearing those thoughts himself, “we’re going to need to trust our Talisian offspring. You have to admit that they have a clearer idea of what’s going on than we do.”
“Yes,” Hunter agreed. “Because they deliberately keep us in the dark.”
The harsh bleat of an alarm startled them all. “What the hell . . . ?” Bennett said, looking around wildly.
“Captain to CIC,” Haines’s voice called over the intercom. “Captain to CIC . . .”
Groton touched a control on the desk. “Groton. What is it, Bill?”
“Sir! Intruders! Intruders in Secondary Engineering!”
“How the hell did they get on board?”
“Sir . . . they just appeared! Out of nowhere!”
“Shit,” Groton said. “Okay. On my way.” He looked at Hunter. “You’re with me.”
“Now we know,” Hunter said, rising, “what they were planning on using that gateway for.”
Lieutenant Commander Jeremy Winslow jumped back as a dazzling flash of light illuminated the secondary engineering deck and a water condenser exploded in molten fragments and a white cloud of steam. “Stay back, sir!” a battle-armored Marine yelled through his helmet speakers. “Stay under cover!”
“Screw that!” Winslow snapped back. “Let me have your sidearm!”
The Marine was cradling a bulky Starbeam laser rifle in his gauntleted hands, but a Sunbeam laser pistol was holstered at his thigh. The Marine hesitated, then snatched the pistol from its holster and tossed it to him. “The safety—” he started to say.
Winslow snapped the safety to off, then pressed the small, red charge button. “I know how to use it, Sergeant!”
When the compact little weapon showed a full ready charge, Winslow leaned around the corner of the primary coil housing, aiming the pistol in a two-handed Weaver grip. Back on Earth, before he’d volunteered for Solar Warden, he’d been a serious contender with the Navy’s pistol team, and had collected several Distinguished Pistol Shot badges. This thing felt more like a toy than a match-grade M1911A1, but he figured it had a right end and a wrong end, and all he had to do was point and shoot.
Twenty yards down the passageway, a Saurian stepped out of thin air.
It was one of the big ones. Saurians, Winslow knew, came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from a little smaller than a man to hulks like this one, eight feet tall and built like a pro-football lineman. Winslow aimed, not for the center of mass as he’d been taught, but for the thing’s crocodile-grinning face. It was wearing some sort of armor, like Kevlar, but the head was unprotected. He squeezed the trigger . . .
. . . too late! The Saurian warrior had seen him emerge from cover and ducked aside into the shadows. Even the big ones could be blindingly fast.
Damn!
But more Saurians were appearing every moment, materializing out of the air and moving forward, as if to make way for more at their backs. Winslow shifted aim, and caught one in the side of its head, burning through scales and flesh as the thing keened an unearthly shriek. Beside him, the Marine fired his laser rifle, and the pulse of coherent light nearly took a Saurian’s head off at the shoulders.
Winslow shot another one . . .
. . . and another . . .
. . . and suddenly his weapon cheeped in his hands, warning that the battery had been drained.
Something exploded inside Winslow’s head, a searing pain that left him blind and dizzy and paralyzed. He hit the deck, and he could hear the thud of approaching boots through ringing ears.
Someone grabbed the collar of his uniform, and he felt himself being dragged backward. He hit the low partition at the airtight hatch—that peculiarity of Naval ship design popularly known as a “knee-knocker” because you had to pick up your feet to step over it as you moved down the passageway. His unseen rescuer dragged him over, and he heard someone slam the hatch home and dog it.
“You’re gonna be okay, sir,” a helmet speaker said close by. “Corpsman!”
The paralysis was already wearing off with pins-and-needles sensations sweeping across his limbs. His sight was returning, too. He could make out hulking shadows hovering above him, cradling him, moving with him through the passageway.
“Where you hit, sir?” a new voice said in his ear. He thought it must be the corpsman . . . the Navy equivalent of combat medics serving with the Marines.
“I don’t . . . I don’t know. I think I was just stunned for a minute. . . .”
“Some minor burns on the side of your face,” the corpsman told him, turning his head. “You’re lucky, sir. I think fifty thousand volts or so just zapped past your head and missed you by a hair!”
Sounds of gunfire crashed from the other side of the airtight door.
“Let’s get back in there, people,” one of the Marines said. The armor helmet turned to face Winslow. “You stay out here, sir. We can handle this.”
Winslow was more than happy to agree. The Marines were part of the Hillenkoetter’s complement—not part of the JSST. Winslow watched them undog the hatch, open it, and when the movement didn’t draw fire, slip back into Secondary Engineering. God help them, he thought.
Winslow stood up, still feeling quite weak and a bit wobbly in the knees, and made his way to an intercom panel on a nearby bulkhead. “Engineering,” he called. “This is Winslow.”
“Engineering. Ramsey. Go ahead.”
Commander Thomas Ramsey was the ship’s CHENG, or chief engineering officer. He sounded rushed.
“Sir! Intruders are inside Secondary Engineering! Dozens of them! The Marines are in there trying to push them back.”
“They’re up here in Primary, too, Jerry. Just stay put and—”
The deck under Winslow’s feet lurched hard, and it seemed as though the entire ship rang like an enormous gong.
“Commander!” he yelled . . . and then a second explosion blasted the ship. The overhead lights flickered and went out . . . and so did Hillenkoetter’s artificial gravity.
“Oh, Christ!”
If both primary and secondary power had been shut down . . .
Warning! Warning! a woman’s voice intoned, the mechanical drone of a recording. Major hull breach. Atmospheric pressure dropping. Warning!
. . . then the USSS Hillenkoetter was in very serious trouble indeed.
Chapter Ten
US Concentration Camps: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been secretly building concentration camps on US soil in preparation for the imposition of martial law and genocide. Executive orders are already on the books giving the government the right to detain, arrest, and incarcerate individuals without due process.
Conspiracy theory,
United States, 1980s
“You can’t be serious!”
“On the contrary, Herr Oberst, I am completely serious. You were chosen by Heinrich Himmler himself to become the new Führer.”
“Won’t the old one have something to say about that?”
“I doubt it. He committed suicide a few days after you left.”
“The Reichsführer-SS? He would never betray the Führer!”
“He did. He’d made his plans, told Hitler that he would never leave his side . . . and then fled the holocaust of Berlin. He tried to open negotiations with the Americans and the British through a Swedish consulate, telling them that Hitler would soon be dead, and that he was the provisional leader of Germany. He was denounced by his own people, captured, and finally killed himself while being interrogated.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because you should know. So that you can take command here.”
“What I know, Mein Herr, is that we all were betrayed by the Eidechse. They promised us weapons, they promised us victory . . . and they allowed us to go down in fire and blood!”
“And all of that, Herr Oberst, was precisely according to plan. . . .”
Lieutenant Roger Caidin, flying CAP with SFA-07, was less than a kilometer from the Hillenkoetter’s starboard side when the ship went on full alert.
“What the hell is going on, Dodge?” his rear-seater asked, using Caidin’s handle. “Sounds like they’re up against it!”
“I wouldn’t be a bit—”
And then the magnetic shielding covering the flight deck entrance failed, multiple sets of backups failed, and the ship’s atmosphere exploded into space.
Explosive decompression created a short-lived hurricane wind rapidly dissipating into vacuum. It caught Caidin’s Stingray and flipped him into an uncontrolled roll, coupled with a savage yaw to port.
“Hang on, Pops!” he yelled at his RIO, whose handle came from him being the oldest student in his flight school class—all of thirty-one.
“Hanging!” Pops, Lieutenant Jeff Greer, yelled back. There wasn’t anything else the radar intercept officer could do . . . except, perhaps, pray. Stars and the ponderous cliffside of the Hillenkoetter swung past the cockpit, and Caidin felt the heavy drag of centrifugal force.
Caidin nudged his controls enough to stabilize the craft, stopping both the roll and the yaw. By the time he had his ship back under control, they were drifting through a debris field of equipment, papers, and detritus sucked out of the Big-H and flung into space. An ordnance forklift, a Hellfire missile still strapped in its grabs, sailed past the cockpit.
And corpses. He saw two, a man and a woman, air-wing maintenance personnel to judge by their green vests, tumbling through space nearby, arms and legs flailing, mouths wide open in silent screams. God . . . they were still alive . . . though they wouldn’t be for long.
And there was not a damned thing Caidin could do to help them.
“God, Lieutenant!” Greer said from the rear seat. “What happened?”
“The pressure screens blew,” he replied, voice tight. “Obviously.”
The magnetokinetic induction screens across the broad opening leading in to Hillenkoetter’s flight deck had failed. Damn it, that wasn’t supposed to happen! When he’d first reported aboard the Big-H he’d learned there were multiple fail-safes, guaranteeing that even if the ship’s power went down there were backup generators in place to take up the load. Without those screens, however, Hillenkoetter was wide open to space, her atmosphere spilling explosively into hard vacuum. Automatic pressure doors throughout the ship should close when a pressure drop was detected, but that wouldn’t help the personnel working on the exposed flight deck.
Another body pirouetted past his fighter, a brown shirt this time, eyes wide open and blood frozen across the face. He tried desperately to think of a way to help, but there was nothing, nothing he could do. He was sealed inside his fighter, and even if he could open the pressure-locked canopy in vacuum, there was no room inside the cockpit for a passenger.
