Alien Agendas, page 5
Someone banged on the office door. “What the hell happened?” Dr. Kresge, from the office next door, peeked into the room, an assistant crowding in behind. “You ladies alright?”
“We’re fine, Kres,” McClure told him, positioning herself so the newcomers couldn’t open the door farther and see the crater in the wall. “A little lab experiment, louder than we expected.”
“It sounded like a gunshot!”
“And we’re not allowed to carry weapons in this facility. I know. Everything is fine.”
Kresge looked unconvinced, but McClure shut the door on him.
“Why didn’t you show him?” Minkowski asked.
“Mark, I mean Commander Hunter, obviously didn’t want to share his find,” she said, “and he didn’t want anyone to know he was sending it to us. I think we keep it under wraps for now, until we can talk with him.”
“I agree,” Elanna said.
“Assuming,” Minkowski said, “he hasn’t been thrown into prison for stealing this stuff.”
He picked up the weapon again and examined it, thoughtful.
“I’m sorry, Commander,” the camo dude said. He handed back Hunter’s ID. “Your Crypto 20 has been revoked.”
“So how am I supposed to get in there, mister?” Hunter demanded. He was standing at the first security checkpoint inside S4, the highly classified facility south of the main base at Groom Lake. The place, buried inside a mountain, was where most of the research into UFOs and Solar Warden’s near-magical technologies actually took place. “I’m supposed to see someone here.”
“Sorry, sir. Your ID is only showing USAP clearance. You shouldn’t even have been able to board the tube.”
He tapped the security badge he wore. “This didn’t go off.” The color-coded badges would trigger an alarm if he wandered into the wrong-colored area.
“But you need TS Crypto 12 to be here. Above top secret.”
“Now listen here . . .”
“No, Commander. You listen. Your card reads as level USAP, which does not allow access to this facility. In fact, at that level you’re not even supposed to know about it! So the staff sergeant here is going to escort you back to the tube boarding station, and you’re going to have a quick ride back to Dreamland. You can check in with main security there, and maybe they will straighten things out.”
Hunter pointed at the landline phone on the guard’s desk. “Can I make a call?”
“No, you may not.” The watchdog almost smirked. “Now get the hell out of here, or I’ll have Staff Sergeant Hanson escort you all the way back to Area 51.” He jerked a thumb at a prominent notice posted on the wall next to him—a long list of security regulations ending with the ominous phrase “USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.” “I suggest that you comply.”
Hunter pocketed the ID, seething. He knew the MiBs back at Kelsey’s office wanted him to find that carry-on bag. Minkowski would have brought it here, to the xenotech labs several floors below this one, where both Dr. McClure and Elanna worked. He’d been given special clearance to board the underground maglev tube shuttle that connected S4 with Area 51 proper . . . but these clowns obviously hadn’t gotten the word.
In the clandestine and often twisted world of US military security, there technically were just six levels of clearance: restricted, confidential, secret, and top secret, plus two special classifications—special compartmented information and unacknowledged special access program, or USAP. That last one was a kind of placeholder for personnel still being cleared for higher levels. The Top Secret Crypto levels went up to at least twenty-eight; the President himself was only cleared to TS Crypto 17. Supposedly, there were even higher levels beyond Crypto 28, far up and away in the murky realms of Majic-12.
Hanson snapped to attention. “If you will come with me, sir?”
He glared at the camo dude. “I will be back.”
“Not without something better than USAP clearance, you won’t.”
Hanson escorted him into the tube car boarding chamber. The tunnel between here and the main facility was kept in vacuum, allowing for much faster accelerations than a mere subway, but that meant the boarding chamber had to maintain a vacuum seal to allow both boarding and exiting the car.
They had to wait for the car’s arrival.
“You’re military, Staff Sergeant. Marine?”
“Negative, sir.” But Hanson volunteered nothing. He was probably Delta or one of the other Army special forces. Hunter had little use for the G4S Security Solutions employees who handled most security functions on and around this base, even though most of them were ex-military themselves. So far as Hunter was concerned, they were civilian mercenaries, one step removed from hired thugs.
“Would you be able to get a message to someone here in S4?”
“No, sir. I would not.”
So much for that idea. Security’s job was to act as a sort of buffer, keeping unauthorized personnel out of secure areas, and that extended to personal messages as well.
The tube car pulled up, visible through the thick windows of the boarding platform, and they waited while the docking coupler connected with the vehicle’s door and hissed into a firm seal. The door opened, and Hunter was swiftly on his way back to Area 51.
Hunter decided he would have to see about recruiting Hanson to the 1-JSST. Just-One took volunteers from a number of elite special forces across the US military community, and Hunter, as its operational commander, was always on the lookout for fresh meat.
Hanson appeared to be sharp and on the ball . . . and he would already have the necessary security clearances.
Hunter actually was not all that disappointed by security’s refusal to let him into S4. He would return to Security and try to get them to update the file on him in the base computer. The delay, meanwhile, would give McClure a bit more time to study the contents of his luggage.
And if he couldn’t get the computer reports changed . . . well . . . it wouldn’t be the first time the government’s left hand didn’t know what the right was doing.
“The thing about that is,” Minkowski said, gesturing toward the faux-Glock, “it’s way, way better than the laser sidearms they issue to us. If this kind of technology is available, why the hell don’t we have it?”
McClure and Elanna, as well as Joshua Norton and Simone Carter, were in the S4 xenotechnology lab, all members of the USSS Hillenkoetter’s science department. Dr. Simone Carter was head of biological sciences, while Dr. Norton was in charge of xenotechnology. They’d all shuttled down from the Big-H, now tucked away in her subselenian hangar bay on the lunar Farside, in order to study new technologies acquired during the recent mission to Aldebaran.
But Hunter had just provided them with a treasure trove.
“It’s happened before,” Elanna said. “How’s your history?”
“So-so . . .”
“You know the Battle of the Little Bighorn?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Most people nowadays call it Custer’s Last Stand. The native peoples called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Five companies of the US Seventh Cavalry were completely wiped out by ten times their number of Lakota and Cheyenne natives.”
“Okay . . .” He wondered where Elanna was going with this. Damn, those blue eyes were disturbing. . . .
“The Seventh Cavalry was armed with Springfield trapdoor rifles—single-shot breechloaders, standard-issue for the day. At least ten percent of the natives carried the very latest in repeating rifles—Winchesters and Henrys, especially. Something like two hundred of the Native Americans were actually far better armed than their opponents.”
McClure looked at her with surprise. “How the hell do you know all of that, Elanna?”
“Yeah,” Norton added. “You ain’t from around here. . . .”
“But you have to admit I do get around.”
Minkowski blinked. He’d heard rumors that the Talis were somehow force-fed volumes upon volumes of history, sociology, and politics before they traveled back into their past, turned into walking encyclopedias. If that were true, it still begged the crucial question of why? He didn’t see how working in the twenty-first century demanded an intimate knowledge of nineteenth-century breechloading rifles.
But her information did raise the next question.
“Okay. Why?” he asked. “If the US government had access to better weapons, why did they deploy their cavalry with obsolete equipment . . . ?”
“Because military procurement was an ass,” Carter said. “Still is, so far as I’m concerned.”
“Back in the day,” Elanna continued, “government procurers didn’t want to foster wastefulness, right? If you had a weapon that fires five or seven times between reloadings, you obviously are going to waste ammo . . . and they couldn’t have that, now, could they?”
“And you think something like that is why they issued us those crappy Type I Sunbeams?”
“That must be it,” Carter said. “I can’t speak for government purchasing agents in the eighteen hundreds, but I know there’s concern nowadays about power packs and expendables. The guys in charge also want weapons that us poor, dumb humans can repair in the field.” She indicated the Glock. “High technology requires sophisticated support and maintenance.”
“This thing isn’t actually a laser like the Type I,” Norton said. “It must have a very potent energy cell inside the grip. It probably releases a bolt of directed electricity, several thousand volts’ worth, instead of coherent light.”
“I was wondering about that,” Minkowski said. “It made a hell of a loud crack when it went off. Lasers don’t usually do that.”
“You heard the thunderclap associated with a bolt of lightning, yes.”
“Well . . . shit. We’re expected to fight with those, those toys—junk that doesn’t have nearly the same impact downrange. Just four shots, and they need to be reloaded! How does that even compare to this thing?”
“We haven’t tested that yet,” Norton replied.
“Saurian power cells are extremely high-density,” Elanna said. “They’re good for forty or fifty shots before they need their cells swapped out.”
“Damn it, it’s not right!”
“You’ll have to take that up with the people in charge of the program, Master Chief,” McClure said. “Assuming they’ll listen to you, of course. Like they say, beggars can’t be choosers.”
“The JSST are not—”
He was interrupted by a squeal from a speaker on one wall. “Attention, attention,” an authoritarian voice declared. “Master Chief Arnold Minkowski, please report to S4 Security. Master Chief Arnold Minkowski, report to S4 Security, immediately.”
“What did you do now, Master Chief?” McClure asked with a sharply raised eyebrow.
“I just said it isn’t right! Were they listening? Okay . . . I’d better go see what they want.”
But he was pretty sure he knew the answer to that.
Hunter walked into a large aircraft hangar back at the main Groom Lake facility. It wasn’t the first time he’d been stuck on a red-tape merry-go-round, but he was swiftly becoming fed up. The JSST was lined up in ranks doing morning calisthenics—T-shirts, shorts, and military-issue running shoes. Lieutenant Billingsly, the unit’s XO, was leading them in jumping jacks, the stomp-stomp-stomp of forty men and women jumping in unison echoing through the enormous, empty structure.
The JSST’s personnel roster currently stood at 120, but two-thirds were still on board Hillenkoetter, out on the far side of the Moon. Passes to take a shuttle back to Earth, especially passes to visit Earth and go off-base, were damned hard to come by. Hunter was beginning to wish he’d elected to stay on board. His attempts to find Geri so far had been nothing but trouble.
Billingsly saw Hunter standing off to one side and signaled for Sergeant Aliya Moss to break ranks and come forward to take over the calisthenics. At least, Hunter thought, the men will have something nicer to look at than Billingsly’s long face. The unit’s executive officer joined Hunter. “What’s up, boss?”
“Need you to do me a favor, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s go over there.”
He led Billingsly to a private corner. “You scheduled to go twelve-plus anytime this morning?”
“Going twelve-plus” meant entering any passageway or office in the complex restricted to TS Crypto 12 or higher . . . the most secret sanctum sanctorum within a facility already so secret.
“Negative, Commander.” Hunter heard the question behind the statement.
“I’d like to borrow your ID for about an hour.”
Billingsly’s eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “So . . . you’re looking at . . . what? Ten years and ten thousand dollars?” That was the basic penalty for violating their various secrecy oaths.
“This is not an order, Jim,” Hunter replied. He explained what had happened when he’d tried to get into S4. “I need to see Doc McClure and Elanna. I do not want to call them, because all calls in this place are monitored.” Personal cell phones were prohibited here, of course, and every landline call was recorded. “I could ask you to deliver a message . . . but that means getting you involved. Deeply involved. I don’t want to do that.”
“And you don’t want to tell me what this is all about. . . .”
“Let’s just say that I’m already in it up to my neck, okay? If I go under I don’t want to drag you with me.”
Billingsly considered this.
“If you’d rather go in my place,” Hunter added, “I have no problem telling you everything. But . . . take it from me, you’d really be better off not knowing.”
“No problem, Skipper.” He pulled out his ID card. “You need the badge, too?”
“No,” Hunter replied, removing his card and handing it to him in exchange. “Those still work. But I need this to get past the computer scan at the checkpoints.”
“Well . . . if I end up in the brig, come see me once in a while, okay?”
“It won’t come to that. If anyone challenges you on it, tell them I gave you a very specific order. I’ll back you on that. That might get you a security review, but I’m the one they’ll be coming after.”
At least, that was Hunter’s hope. What they were doing was so far above and beyond the strict rules of military security that The System might well decide to eliminate them both. But Hunter also felt a binding connection with both McClure and Elanna, along with any of the other scientists who might have been roped into this thing.
“Thanks, Lieutenant.” He slipped the card into his wallet. “I’ll look you up in a bit to return it.”
“Sure . . . if you’re not in the brig.” But he grinned as he said it.
Hunter knew his team possessed a camaraderie worthy of the Navy SEALs.
The being known as Charaach despised humans, detested them with a cold-blooded fury belying the fact that the circulatory fluid flowing through her veins was hot. Her particular faction of the Ve’hrech’na, a phrase shortened to Vach, the People, saw little point in keeping the creatures alive. Some wanted to maintain a breeding population as a food source, but Charaach disliked both the taste and smell. They were swarming vermin, overrunning the world of the Vach, fouling their nests, polluting everything they touched, threatening to render the entire planet uninhabitable by either Vach or human. How the Kagag faction of her people could even consider working with the ugly, semi-sentient mammals was completely beyond her.
She knew that humans called her species Saurian or Reptilian. In turn, she called them Ghech, which denoted a foul-smelling lump of excrement. Charaach—with the “ch” pronounced like the guttural “ch” in Bach, a human composer—was not a personal name as humans understood it. It meant something like “Truthful Lies,” and was a description of her place in the Few’s order.
Truthful Lies missed her home . . . her real home lost now in the distant past. She and her fellows called themselves Ve’hrech’na—roughly “We Surviving Few.”
At times, though, she wondered if survival was worth it.
She floated at the center of the Place of Viewing, surrounded by virtual displays showing feeds from a dozen different surface locales. A riot was underway in the Ghech hive called Berlin . . . large numbers of the mammals launching themselves at one another with rocks and clubs and water cannons. Over the past years, the Vach had been encouraging such behavior, amplifying the natural Ghech tendencies toward xenophobia and paranoia. Larger and larger numbers of homeless migrants from the south had been crowding into Berlin and its sister hives, seeking work, seeking government subsidies for healthcare and the needs of basic living, until the local social infrastructure tottered on the brink of destruction.
The recent pandemic, though not created by the Vach, had certainly been used by them to foment crisis upon crisis. Charaach worked in the Vach propaganda bureau, disseminating what the humans would have called “fake news,” quite literally “truthful lies”: that the new vaccines were tainted, that they would only be given to the wealthy, or that the entire pandemic was a hoax, created by rich humans who wanted to gain supreme control over the entire, faction-riddled planet. Individual Ghech believed whatever paranoid fantasies spoke to them best, echoed what they heard endlessly, bringing the planet closer and closer to collapse.
Charaach would have been just as happy to have released a real killer plague, a genegineered disease with 100 percent lethality that would eliminate the filthy, swarming mammals entirely. She’d been overruled by the Ve’hrech’na Council, however. The Kagag, along with the allied Grushek and Nivgheer factions of the Few, insisted that humans would have a place in the new world once the Vach assumed full, outward control of the planet. Even the Rareek wanted the humans kept around as food animals and for entertainment. But that made things very difficult for the planners who were trying to engineer a takeover.
There were barely two hundred thousand of the Ve’hrech’na in this epoch, two hundred thousand against well over seven billion of the loathsome Ghech. Were the Vach to emerge from their hiding places across this world and elsewhere in this star system, they would find themselves outnumbered by tens of thousands to one. Worse, the locals had an unpleasant propensity for deploying primitive nuclear weapons. No one on the Council had any illusions about the Ghech attacking with primitive atomics should the Vach threaten them overtly.
