Alien Agendas, page 7
He stopped himself and gave Elanna a sharp look. “So why are you telling me all of this? You Talis have been pretty tight with your behind-the-scenes info with us.”
“Not all of us are in agreement as to the best course of action in working with twenty-first-century humans,” she told him.
“Afraid of scaring us to death?”
“Not at all. Humans are remarkably resilient. It’s true that some do still fear causing a catastrophic social collapse of human civilization. Your economies, religions, even your willingness to pursue your own agendas regarding science, redressing social wrongs, improving the human condition . . . It would be a grievous wrong if your culture simply sat back, folded your hands, and said ‘Let the aliens do it.’ Such a dependency on older, more advanced cultures could cripple you, might even lead to your extinction as a species.”
“Which would eliminate you,” Hunter observed, “since we’re your ancestors.”
“Exactly. You people, your civilization, are assets to be cherished and protected, but not held back.”
“Like Star Trek’s noninterference directive. I’ll buy that. I’m not sure how I feel about being anyone’s asset, though.”
“I mean no offense, Mark. But humans of this era have become chess pieces in an unimaginably vast and far-reaching contest. The Malok would enslave you, and in so doing eliminate those humans in your future—us, and the free Grays. You are vital to their interests, and that’s the reason they’re at war with us . . . though they appear to be divided among themselves over what to do about you. As for us, your destruction or enslavement would be an existential threat to us. Of course, we will try to help you . . . if we can do so without affecting your development.”
Time travel was one hell of a bucket of worms. How did you help a past civilization without stunting its growth, making them become dependent on you? As he understood it—and that wasn’t very well—there were no such things as time-travel paradoxes, no grandfather paradoxes. Go back in time and kill your own grandfather, and you didn’t wink out, and therefore fail to go back and kill the guy . . . an endless loop of causal mayhem. No, quantum physics, as currently understood, said that by killing your grandfather, you would immediately find yourself in an entirely new universe, a new branch of reality in which you did not exist. The universe you’d come from, though, would still exist . . . as one of an infinity of parallel realities.
You just could never go home, could never return to your original reality again.
The Talis appeared to have a tightly shaped and guarded reality, and they’d been working for God alone knew how long to protect it. Something else nagged at Hunter. So long as Elanna was being chatty . . .
“What about the Grays?” he asked.
“What about them?”
“They’re from even farther in the future than you are. What . . . a million years?”
“A little more than that.”
“So far, most of the Grays I’ve seen have been working for the Saurians. Is that a reality you’re trying to change?”
“That is a difficult question to answer, Mark. Remember, there is no single Gray civilization. A million years from now, there are hundreds of thousands of offshoots of humanity, some so alien you would have difficulty recognizing them as anything related to you. Do you understand?”
“I suppose so.” He didn’t, not really, but he wanted to.
“Some branches have been . . . overtaken by the Saurians. Like the Saurians, they are Malok, a part of that culture. Others are free. Remember, the original abduction events were attempts by some Gray cultures to break a genetic bottleneck in your far future, to correct certain problems the Grays themselves created along the way by manipulating their own genome.”
“Those must’ve been catch-and-release.”
“If you like.”
“And the Saurians, with their long-term catch-and-keep programs?”
“The Malok, both Saurians and the Grays under their control, are determined to take back the Earth.” Elanna stared into Hunter’s eyes for a long moment, as though she were trying to make up her mind. Finally, she lifted her arm and touched Hunter’s forehead.
The thrill of her touch was sharp, tingling, and distinctly sexual in its intensity. For just a moment, he could see an unfolding scene: a montage of historical scenes. He could see workers building the Egyptian pyramids . . . shaven-headed Sumerians working in open-pit mines . . . a temple filled with humans on their knees before an enthroned Reptilian . . . and always, always, hanging in the skies overhead, the dark and sinister shapes of gigantic ships. . . .
Hunter heard Elanna’s voice in his head. For the Saurians, that means returning human civilization to what they were created for in the first place . . . docile slaves serving their needs.
The shock of that vision forced Hunter back a step. She’d said it! She’d finally said it!
“So the Saurians really did genetically engineer us,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because doing so would advance the Malok agenda,” she told him aloud.
“What? How?”
“How do you think many of your fellows would react to this . . . this revelation?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think they would believe it. Some would, I suppose. . . .”
“And you would have thousands of programmed disseminators of Malok conspiracies. Conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories . . . all united only by the mistrust of any authority, and the conviction that those who are not with us are against us.”
“You’re saying there would be a war between the two camps?”
“An unimaginable war, Mark, a horrific war, one pitting believers against nonbelievers; old religions against new religions and against one another; the poor seeking to better their lot against the rich seeking to keep them in their place; haves against have-nots; democratic nations against totalitarian states; liberals against conservatives . . . Who could win such a conflict?”
“The Malok,” Hunter said, reluctant, but seeing the truth. “The Saurians.”
“The Malok, standing amid the smoking ruin of a once proud and promising civilization, ruling over the handful of filthy, ignorant, broken survivors by sheer right of force.”
Even though Elanna was no longer touching him, Hunter could see a city blasted into utter desolation, with skyscrapers broken and burned and thrusting up through mounds of rubble, a Saurian in gleaming combat armor standing on a fallen statue over cowed and naked worshippers crouching in the street, over animals. . . .
“My God.” Hunter had to take a few deep breaths as the vision faded. “I guess I understand why you people held that stuff back,” he told her.
“It is difficult to know how best to move forward,” she said. “As you already know, the Saurians subverted the German people, enabling the Nazis to take over, helped the Nazis with advanced technology. I and some of my fellows attempted to influence that tragedy, to stop them. We failed.”
“The Nazis were stopped,” Hunter told her. “I’d say you succeeded.”
“The Nazis, the Italian Fascisti, and Imperial Japan all were destroyed, yes . . . but human civilization as a whole remained strong,” she said. “Despite widespread destruction across the planet, the Americas and most other places remained untouched.
“For the next forty-five years, East and West were poised to annihilate one another. We came very close, agonizingly close, to losing the entire game in your so-called Cold War. Somehow, we managed to block a number of Malok attempts to initiate a nuclear war. Somehow you survived . . . and we guided you in the creation of a true space navy, one that will help you stand up for yourselves against the Saurian threat.
“Remember, it is absolutely imperative for the Malok to utterly crush modern human civilization, to bring it to its knees.”
“Why? Wouldn’t they want to incorporate what we have into their infrastructure?”
“Your people,” Elanna reminded him, “number in the billions. The Malok number a tiny fraction of that. They know they cannot win a straight-up, out-and-out war with Humankind. So they will do what they can to get you to kill one another; to reduce your industrial output to nothing; to wreck your economic, scientific, and academic foundations; to leave the survivors broken, dispirited, and starving . . . to the point where surrendering to slavery is the only option.”
“I guess I understand.” He sighed. “Maybe I understand too much. So why did you tell me? I know you people are usually real careful about telling us too much.”
Again, she reached for his face. This time, though, there were no nightmare visions. Elanna gently stroked his cheek, touched his ear, smoothed his hair, and Hunter felt himself, just for a moment, teetering on the brink of allurement.
“Because I know we can trust you, Mark. We trust you not to share this with others in a way that would undermine your people’s confidence in themselves. We trust you not to carelessly reveal information that would advance the Malok agenda.
“And we trust you to be one of our . . . assets, a very important asset, to make certain that the Malok vision is never realized.”
Hunter didn’t know why she’d chosen him . . . but in that moment he knew he would have died for her. It wasn’t sexual desire, it wasn’t simple respect, it wasn’t anything he could put a name to.
The closest he could come to naming what he felt in that moment was pure awe. . . .
Chapter Five
Chemtrails: Since the early 1980s, the government has been covertly putting various chemicals into the atmosphere, dispersing them by means of commercial jet exhausts, dubbed “chemtrails.” These chemicals may be intended to increase planet Earth’s albedo in order to secretly combat global warming, or, alternatively and more likely, they may be used to control the minds of the population below.
Popular conspiracy theory,
1980s onward
The Present
Viktor Albrecht stepped from the time ship and out onto the grass. It was dark, but the lights of Berlin painted a pale orange glow across the northern sky. They’d set down in a clearing in the forest, and he could hear the keek and peep of insects in the undergrowth.
Someone was supposed to meet him.
The Zeitschiff glowed behind him, its energy fields slowly dissipating. The craft looked nothing like Die Glocke, the bell-shaped time ship laboriously reconstructed by German technicians from a recovered crash in Bavaria back before the war. This Zeitschiff was more modern, more alien, a gleaming metallic disk ten meters across, a craft given to the Reich by the Eidechse for research purposes. The Lizards, evidently, didn’t trust this more modern technology in human hands; even Die Glocke, he knew, would have an alien pilot when it made its maiden flight into the future.
Bitter, Albrecht wondered if Eidechse help for the Reich’s war efforts had been worth anything at all. They’d provided some technical advances, certainly . . . and the promise of many, many more—antipodal bombers, a single bomb that could obliterate an entire city.
And the time ships, of course. But other than depositing him here in this dark forest near an impossible city, he hadn’t seen much concrete aid from the mysterious aliens.
Step away from the ship, a voice said, speaking in his mind.
“Eh? What?”
We have appeared on the enemy’s radar, the voice continued. Step away from the ship while we move ourselves out of phase.
Albrecht stepped back, moving a few meters across the clearing. The light from the time ship dimmed, brightened, pulsed . . . and then the entire disk-shaped ship faded, becoming first translucent, then transparent, the black tangle of vegetation beyond clearly visible through its hull. The illusion wasn’t perfect, but, still, how did they do that?
Invisibility!
What the Reich could have done with that one trick. . . .
A screeching thunder sounded from behind, then boomed directly overhead. Startled, Albrecht looked up in time to glimpse two aircraft flying over the forest at very nearly treetop height.
Albrecht had seen German jet-fighter aircraft, which had first become operational the previous summer, in 1944, but these looked nothing like the Me 262. They were delta-winged, and possessed tiny canards forward, beneath canopies set almost as far forward as it was possible to go. Instead of the twin engine pods slung beneath the wings, these were powered by single engines in their tails. Orange flame stabbed from behind both aircraft. They looked sleeker, heavier, more powerful than the Me 262 . . . or any other aircraft Albrecht knew of native to the Earth. He caught a glimpse of a black cross outlined in white on the side—a Teutonic Knights’ iron cross rather than the Balkenkreuz usually emblazoned on Nazi aircraft.
And then they were gone, vanished in thunder beyond the trees.
“Was zum Teufel waren das!?” he exclaimed. But there was no answer in his mind, and when he looked down from the sky, the time ship was gone. Thinking it might have made itself completely invisible, he stumbled forward, hand outstretched, searching . . . but the craft truly was gone.
“Typhoon,” someone said behind him. Albrecht spun, and saw a lean, bent, almost wizened man wearing strangely cut civilian clothing. He looked ancient; he must be . . . what? In his nineties? There was something about his eyes . . . as if they weren’t quite focused on Albrecht, but on something else, something indescribably more distant.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Eurofighter Typhoons,” the man said. “Hunting for the Zeitschiff. They’ll never find it, of course. . . .” He broke into harsh, cackling laughter.
“Who are you?”
The man stopped laughing, and appeared to think about this for a moment, as though he wasn’t quite sure of the answer. At last, though, he drew himself up straighter. “Kammler,” he said. “SS Obergruppenführer Hans . . . Hans Kammler. SS Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Hans Kammler.”
Shock rocked Albrecht. He snapped to attention. “Herr General!”
“Ja . . . ja . . . But that was a very, very long time ago. . . .”
“I’m glad to hear you trust me,” Hunter said, shaking his head. “But I don’t see what that has to do with telling me all this stuff. I’d think that it all was strictly need-to-know.”
“But it is need-to-know, Mark. You need to know it.”
“Why?”
“We want the JSST to carry out a mission for us. A very special, highly secret mission. One of which even your MJ-12 will be unaware.”
“What? I thought Majic-12 was running this whole Solar Warden thing.”
“We have had reason to suspect for some time that MJ-12 is not operating in Humankind’s best interests. Saurian operatives may be using telepathic influence to shape their decisions.”
That shook Hunter. They couldn’t trust their own command structure?
Don’t trust the government. . . .
As he thought about it, however, he realized that the idea made sense in a nightmarish way. MJ-12, the above-top-secret coterie of defense, scientific, and intelligence executives who had first conceived of reverse-engineering crashed alien spacecraft to create a space navy, would have been a key target of enemy operatives from the outset. It would have taken the Malok years to penetrate the tangled layers of security, but eventually they’d find a way in.
“What chance is there, then?”
“That is, as yet, unknown, Mark.”
I thought you people were supposed to know the future, Hunter thought. That, of course, was unfair. As time-travelers changed events in their past, they created new continua and picking your way through all the interlocking decision trees was not as simple as might be suggested by a history text. Elanna’s people were in the business of preventing the Saurians from wiping them out of existence by changing Hunter’s present. Hunter and the JSST, while they wanted to help the Talis, were primarily there to stop the Saurians and their allies from destroying or enslaving the human species.
The intricacies of intertemporal warfare could give you one hell of a headache.
“So what’s the mission, Elanna?”
“Later.”
At that moment, McClure, Carter, and Norton emerged from the far corner of the lab. “Are we interrupting you two?” Norton asked. His smirk suggested he thought Hunter and Elanna had been engaged in other activities than discussing the Saurian threat.
Hunter ignored the jibe. “What did you learn? Anything?”
“We got a lot of images,” McClure told him, “including electron microscopy scans. We also ran some of these under an XRF gun to read the chemistry.”
“‘XRF’?”
“X-ray fluorescence,” Carter told him. “It uses X-rays to cause the elements within a sample to fluoresce. The process tells us what it’s made of.”
Hunter had heard of that. “So what did you find out?”
“Not as much as we’d like to,” McClure told him. “Lots of microelectronic circuitry . . . quite possibly nanotech.”
Norton nodded. “Gold, silver, niobium, tantalum, and some weird-ass alloys that I’d love to pick apart. Quite possibly superconducting.”
“Communications, tracking . . . and there’s some stuff we can’t begin to identify,” Carter added.
“Elanna thinks it’s for camouflage, maybe bending light around the wearer,” McClure put in.
“That is certainly a part of it,” Elanna added. “It might also phase-shift the wearer enough to allow limited dimensional translation.”
Hunter decided he was going to need to continue his conversation with Elanna.
“Are you sure we can’t hang on to this stuff a little longer?” Carter asked him.
“Very sure, Doctor. At least two careers depend on getting these back to Admiral Kelsey.” He started packing the stolen articles of clothing and the weapon into the carry-on bag. “Dr. Carter . . . do you still have a pneumatic mail tube running between S4 and Dreamland?”
