Alien Hostiles, page 5
“If they’re afraid of what we might do,” MJ-11 said, “maybe they should stop provoking us!”
“Maybe they would,” Twelve said, “if we grew backbones. The Hillenkoetter just might be a rallying point for us. We don’t know exactly what they’ll encounter at Aldebaran, but we know the reptiles are involved and that there’s bound to be a confrontation. If we stand up for ourselves, don’t let them push us around, maybe we’ll find we can renegotiate the Eisenhower Treaty. At the very least, we’ll be able to tell Chancellor Merkle privately that the THG doesn’t have . . . any off-world support.”
“Assuming,” Seven said, frowning, “that the Hillenkoetter returns at all.”
“Well, yes,” MJ-3 said. “There is that. But it behooves us to give the Big-H all the support we possibly can.
“So . . . a vote. Hillenkoetter proceeds with Operation Excalibur, aye or nay.”
The ayes had it, four to two.
“Speaking of aye,” MJ-3 said, “next up on the agenda is 1I/2017 U1, or ‘ol’ one-eye’ as the astronomers are calling the damned thing. Do we order the Big-H to stop and have a look on the way out?”
And the debate, acrimonious at times, resumed.
Chapter Three
“Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been bodies and materials recovered. There has been a certain amount of reverse engineering that has allowed some of these craft, or some components, to be duplicated. And there is some group of people that may or may not be associated with the government at this point that have this knowledge.”
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, 1996
25 February 1942
Tell me, General, about this Ahnenerbe you represent.
“Eh . . . what?” Kemperer lowered his binoculars and looked again at the creature standing by his side.
The Ahnenerbe. We know you are a part of this. Tell us about it. It is military?
“Not really, no. It is a . . . a research institute. It is under the control of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, and many of its members are SS, but it serves the Reich in a scientific capacity, not primarily military.” He shrugged . . . and wondered if the alien understood the gesture. “We serve the Führer and the Reich, and there often is little distinction between military and civilian in such organizations as ours.”
You are SS, then?
Self-consciously, Kemperer brushed the cluster of three oak leaves on his collar gorget. “I am. Gruppenführer. The equivalent of a major general in other services.”
So you lead the Ahnenerbe as a military command.
“I lead one division of the Ahnenerbe. We are an elite, hand-picked group, primarily of the SS, but including several scientists, who have been studying . . .”
Yes?
“Studying your ships.” Kemperer swallowed, his heart pounding now. He was on very dangerous grounds, here. Did the alien know that the Reich had recovered not one, but several of their spacecraft, and had been studying them in secret?
Don’t worry, General, it said, evidently picking up on the stab of fear and the thought accompanying it. We know you have been attempting to reverse engineer several crashed ships. Our people have been aiding your efforts, in fact.
Kemperer allowed himself to relax . . . at least a little. The Ahnenerbe had been instrumental in recovering several wrecked alien spacecraft, including one taken from the Italians. He had been there, in fact, in 1933 when the first crash had been recovered in Bavaria.
He’d not realized that the strange, scaly little aliens had been actively helping German scientists figure out how the things worked.
What I want to know is what the Ahnenerbe believes. Why does it exist? Does it shape the character of your Nazi ideology? Most importantly, does it shape your understanding of . . . us?
“The word translates to something like ‘Ancestral Heritage,’” Kemperer said. “We, the German people, are descended from a race of pure and unsullied humans, yellow-haired, blue-eyed. We have reason to believe that they came from the stars, possibly from the star called Aldebaran. They colonized a large island in the Western Ocean which we know as ‘Atlantis.’ When that island sank beneath the waves, our people spread out over much of the planet, carrying our ancient culture with them. We were the first to develop writing, to develop art, to forge a proud and golden civilization. The Ahnenerbe was formed to find archeological evidence of this ancient race, our ancient heritage.”
And you believe this?
The alien had disturbing eyes . . . black, vertically slit pupils on an eyeball of mottled gold. That eye was utterly inhuman and should not have been able to convey any emotion identifiable by humans.
And yet, Kemperer could sense the . . . the amusement residing there as the being studied him. It was laughing at him. . . .
Kemperer drew himself up a little straighter. “I do,” he said. “It is the truth, and the Ahnenerbe is there to uncover that truth and display it to the world.”
Human, the being thought at him, you have a very great deal to learn.
The Present Day
Hunter found he needed to relearn the skill of walking in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, especially after retrieving his gear, which now weighed a lot less but still carried the same mass as it had on Earth. He’d been on the Moon twice, and both times only briefly, once on the way out to Zeta Retic, and once on the way back. He wished he could have some downtime at some point so that he could explore the Farside base.
The base was officially known as Lunar Operations Command, but in casual conversation everyone simply called it “Farside” and let it go at that. Some called it “Dark Side Base,” but that was both sloppy slang and a misnomer. The dark side of the Moon was the hemisphere then in night; during a new moon as seen from Earth, the far side was in dazzling daylight, a day that lasted for two full weeks.
Several hundred humans worked here at any given time . . . and scuttlebutt had it that both future humans and true aliens were here as well.
LOC Farside had been constructed within a sealed-off lava tube. There were thousands of them scattered around the Moon, some of them miles long and thousands of feet wide, and Farside’s builders had taken advantage of a big one located beneath the surface of the side of the Moon facing away from Earth. The cavern was brilliantly lit, with dozens of large habitation cylinders and broad, smooth walkways of poured regocrete—a kind of concrete created from the powdery regolith that covered the lunar surface. Down here, there were no extremes of temperature as there were with the two-week day-night cycles up above, and the inhabitants were well protected from both solar and cosmic radiation.
The main reason for the base rested on a regocrete pad just a few hundred yards ahead of Hunter—the titanic, blunt-ended cigar named USSS Hillenkoetter.
The flagship of Solar Warden was a bit longer than the biggest Earthside aircraft carriers and massed roughly half as much. Her spacious hangar deck was accessed through a flat, rectangular hatchway amidships; it was open at the moment and spilling white light from within, as antigravity cargo shuttles drifted into her interior.
“Commander Hunter!” a familiar voice called from behind him. “Welcome back to the looney bin!”
Hunter turned. Lieutenant James Billingsly, Hunter’s XO on the JSST, saluted him. He returned the salute, then grinned. “Thank you, Jim. How are things up here in the caves?”
“Getting squared away, sir. We have about a half complement on board.”
“Some more came up on the shuttle with me, either coming in off liberty, or assigned as replacements. Sounds like we’ll be heading out again pretty quick.”
“Yes, sir. Captain Groton wants to see both of us topside, ASAP.”
He hefted the satchel in his hand. “Can I stow my gear first?”
“Yessir . . . but the sooner, the better. The skipper did not sound happy.”
Hunter clambered his way up through the Hillenkoetter’s forward boarding hatch. Commander William Haines met him on the quarterdeck, where he saluted aft, then saluted Haines, the officer of the deck. “Permission to come aboard, sir.”
Haines returned the salute. “Granted.” Then he grinned. “Welcome aboard, Commander. Captain Groton wants—”
“To see me, yes, I know.”
“Briefing lounge, aft of the bridge.”
“Right.”
Hunter and Billingsly arrived at the briefing lounge by way of Hunter’s cabin, one level below. Captain Groton was seated on the semicircular couch that dominated the sunken central area of the lounge. The projection screen at his back showed deep space, with clotted stars and nebulae.
“Ah, Hunter,” Groton said as they walked in. “Welcome aboard. And Lieutenant Billingsly, is it? Good to see you both.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s . . . good to be back.”
In fact, Hunter wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about being back at all. His first trip out on the Big-H had been an ongoing scramble to catch up, learning about the often bizarre, seemingly science-fictional world of Solar Warden and struggling to stay afloat in a sea of contradictory orders and weirdly alien concepts.
“How’s the Just One?”
Hunter winced. The 1-JSST was called the “Just One” within the ranks, a term referring to alien monstrosities snacking on potato chips. “Bet you can’t eat Just One,” was how an advertising campaign had put it. It was very strictly an in-joke among JSST personnel. How the hell had Groton heard the term?
And was he aware of the sick joke behind it?
“The 1-JSST is ready to roll, Captain. We’ve brought in replacements to make up for our losses at Zeta Retic. We’ve been continuing with training. We’ve been sending you reports right along. . . .”
“I’ve been following them. But I wanted to hear about it from you.”
“That’s primarily the responsibility of my XO,” Hunter said. He’d been kept in the loop over the past several months, but a lot of his time had been applied elsewhere.
Gerri. . . .
“Morale?”
Hunter looked at Billingsly. “Lieutenant?”
“Overall, pretty fair, sir,” Billingsly said. “There are a lot of gripes about the weaponry.”
“Such as?”
“The beamers aren’t worth shit.” He hesitated. “Sir.”
Hunter nodded in agreement. He’d heard the complaints as well. The Sunbeam Type 1 Mod 3 was a 20-megawatt pulse laser with a grip-mounted battery good for just four shots. Four shots. In a firefight, that was nothing.
“Four shots are better than nothing, I suppose,” Hunter added, “but only just barely. Most of our people want something with a bigger magazine. A 9-millimeter slug-thrower . . . even an old-style .45.”
“I thought you guys had a pliss-mounted unit that extended that.”
A pliss, or PLSS, was a portable life-support system worn as a backpack on armor and part of the JSST’s space suits.
“Sure. We can get maybe twenty-five shots with that,” Billingsly said. “But there are times when we’re not wearing suits. Like in the firefight on board the Big-H. Four shots just don’t cut it.”
“Our . . . allies are not keen on giving us more powerful weapons,” Groton said.
“And they want us to help them fight the reptiles?” Hunter said. “I thought they were supposed to be smart?”
“They’re still human,” Groton told them, shaking his head. “So you gotta make allowances. What else?”
“The Starbeam isn’t much better,” Billingsly said.
“Depending on the output setting, you get anywhere between four and fifty shots, but when you crank it up to high yield for a decent bang, well, again, four shots just isn’t worth crap. And at the fifty-shot setting, you can almost light a cigarette.”
That was an exaggeration for effect, but not very much of one. While the JSST had made the weapons work on Zeta Retic, they weren’t effective for serious combat. He suspected that the yields were deliberately set low to avoid puncturing the pressure hull of a starship with a missed shot or an accidental discharge.
“Recommendations?”
“The weapons are fine,” Hunter told him. “What we need is decent battery technology.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Groton said. He pulled a smartphone out of a uniform pocket and finger pecked a note. “No promises, though. I’ve been going round and round with the Nordics on this, and I haven’t been able to talk to the Grays at all.”
“If we’re going to be Janissaries, some sort of private guards, for these guys,” Hunter said, “they’re going to have to give us decent support. At least technical support.”
“I agree, Commander,” Groton said. “I ran into a reference the other day of a flying saucer attacking humans with what sounds like an X-ray laser.”
“Hostiles!”
“Yup. Korean War.” He went on to give a brief rundown of the PFC Walls incident.
“North Korea again,” Hunter said. “Interesting.”
“I don’t think it’s related to your escapade there, Commander. This happened back in the fifties.”
Hunter had actually been recruited into the JSST as a Navy SEAL on a mission in North Korea, a mission interrupted by the arrival of a flying saucer. Later, after Zeta Retic, he’d found himself on board that same saucer, going back in time to witness its mission above a North Korean nuclear test site.
“No, sir, but I’m getting a little sick of North Korea. That madman seems determined to get us into a nuclear shooting war, and our future selves have been getting nervous.”
“Which explains, I think, why they haven’t been giving us top-drawer weapons. By all reports, the Grays have some incredible weapons technology. They just won’t let us play with it.”
“Monkeys playing with machine guns,” Hunter said, grim. He’d had this conversation before. “I know.”
“We may have one interesting new gimmick coming along,” Groton said. “I don’t know whether it’ll be good or bad, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Ever hear of the Stargate Project?”
“Yeah . . . no, wait. That was a TV program, right?”
“Different Stargate. Project Stargate took place in the seventies and on up through the present. Remote viewing?”
“Oh, yeah,” Billingsly said. “That’s when the CIA was using psychics as spies, right?”
“Almost right. It was an Army project which began in the seventies at Fort Meade. Various people had a hand in it, including the DoD and the CIA. Remote viewing is where they would give a guy a target, a set of coordinates, and he would make drawings of what he ‘saw’ there. One psychic spy supposedly reported what he saw inside the reactor room at a secret Soviet nuclear base at Semipalatinsk.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Hunter said. “But I thought the program was canceled.”
“It was . . . officially. In 1995. But some sources claimed the results had been so accurate they moved it underground as a black op, and it’s still going today.” Groton shrugged. “One CIA review said the results were vague and often wrong. People inside the program claimed better than sixty-five percent accuracy, sometimes much better. Ninety percent plus. Who do you want to believe?”
“So what do psychic spies have to do with us?” Hunter wanted to know.
“We have a team of them coming aboard later today,” Groton told them. “Two viewers and their control. They’re going to help us with our first mission.”
“Aldebaran?”
Groton frowned. “Actually, no. They’re still debating the issue, I gather, but the Pentagon wants to tack on an extra for us, a little side trip.”
“God damn it!” Hunter said, angry. “A secondary mission? Sir, that’s what got us—got me—into trouble last time!” So far as Hunter was concerned, Operation Excalibur had been scuttled by tacking on another mission ahead of it—an exploratory probe of the star Zeta Reticuli.
“I know, I know,” Groton said. “Believe me I know! I don’t like it any better than you.”
“Sir, when are they going to cotton to the fact that piling on missions just fucks up everything! Haven’t these guys heard of KISS?”
“Keep it simple, stupid, I know,” Groton said. “But if it’s any consolation, Eye-One is supposed to be a piece of cake.”
“That,” Hunter said, “is what they always say! What the hell is ‘Eye-One’?”
“You’ve heard of Oumuamua?”
“That was the asteroid that zipped through our solar system a couple of years ago?”
“The first-ever asteroid detected from interstellar space,” Groton said, nodding. “In 2017. The astronomers designated it as I1/2017 U1 . . . the eye-one referring to the first interstellar object. They named it in Hawaiian, a word meaning something like ‘Messenger Who Arrives First From a Far Distance.’ And some are calling it ‘ol’ one-eye.’”
“Easier to say than ‘Oumuamua.’ That’s a mouthful,” Hunter said.
“Isn’t it, though? Anyway, it’s kind of captured public attention because it was such an odd shape . . . long and thin, like a cigar.”
“Like the Big-H!” Billingsly exclaimed.
“Exactly. A little shorter than the Hillenkoetter, actually, but only a couple of hundred meters thick and maybe fifty meters tall. Even some astronomers were arguing the shape seemed like an alien artifact, not natural. Someone pointed out that a ship designed to travel through interstellar space would be shaped like that to reduce friction with the interstellar medium—gas and dust. We listened to the thing for radio transmissions but didn’t pick anything up. Its orbit proved it came in out of interstellar space, that it wasn’t part of our solar system at all. And there was one other weird thing.”
“What’s that?” Hunter asked.
“It was accelerating as it came in toward the Sun, like any other inert object falling under the effect of gravity, but after it whipped around and started back out . . . it didn’t begin slowing down like it should have. It sped up.”
“Kind of gives you a clue, right?” Billingsly said.
