Alien Agendas, page 8
“It’s not pneumatic,” Carter said. “It’s electromagnetic.”
“Okay, okay. EM. Can you zap all of this stuff to Kelsey for me?”
Frequently, researchers at S4 needed to send samples back and forth between there and Groom Lake, and EM delivery was faster and more secure than hauling it around by hand. The system superficially resembled the transfer tubes used by banks, but it used EM linear induction identical to the base’s maglev passenger tube cars, not compressed air. The tubes were less than a meter wide.
Minkowski had managed to smuggle the clothing and fake Glock into S4, obviously, but with the base now under a security alert he didn’t want to try smuggling it out.
“Glad to, Commander,” Carter told him.
“Thanks. I’ll catch you guys later.”
“Where are you off to, Mark?” McClure asked him.
“Security. To bail out Minkowski, of course. If he’s in trouble, it’s my fault.”
“Tuck in tight, chickies,” Lieutenant Commander Hank Boland called over the Starhawks’ tactical frequency. “Let’s show ’em how the Navy does it.”
Lieutenant David Duvall, “Double-D,” adjusted the trim on his F/S-49 Stingray space fighter with a microscopic nudge to the stick. Outside of atmosphere, of course, a fighter’s attitude didn’t count for shit. He could be hurtling along his flight path backward and it wouldn’t mean a thing, but the skipper wanted them looking sharp, so he carefully aligned his ship with the other three, flying in tight formation toward the rusty, cold, desert world ahead.
From just under a million kilometers out, the planet showed a small but distinct red-orange disk, the southern polar cap just visible to the naked eye.
Mars. Duvall had always wanted to go there ever since he’d been a kid. That had seemed less than likely in the early aughts, so he’d joined the Navy instead and become a fighter pilot, always with the slim possibility in mind that he might manage to leapfrog from there to the astronaut corps.
And somehow, against all expectations, it had worked . . . though not quite in the fashion he’d expected. He’d never made it to astronaut training, but he’d been asked to volunteer for Solar Warden.
That had been after his encounter with a real, live UFO, back when he’d been flying off the USS Nimitz in the Pacific off San Diego. He’d jumped at the chance, of course. What fighter jock wouldn’t? As a member of SFA-05, the Starhawks, he flew higher and he flew faster than he’d ever dreamed was possible. He’d been all the way out to the star Aldebaran, a distance of sixty-five light-years, which beat the 43,000-foot operational ceiling of an F/A-18 Super Hornet all hollow.
Hell, even a quick training jaunt to Mars was nothing by comparison.
“Hawk Three copies, Skipper,” Duvall said. “Tight formation.”
He glanced out his Stingray’s cockpit at Tamara Lasky’s Stingray, Hawk Four, just a hundred meters to starboard. She was flying as his wing this time. Like its namesake, the Stingray fighter was long and flat save for the dorsal swell along the spine that included the cockpit. Diamond-shaped in plan view, it was forty feet long from nose to tail, and painted a matte black that drank light and made the fighter difficult to see, even at this range. Lieutenant Commander Boland and his wing, Lieutenant Frank “Hobbie” Hobson, were port, high, and a bit ahead of them, range now half a kilometer, the pair invisible in the encircling night.
“How about it, Tammy?” he called to Lasky over the private channel. “You ever been to the Red Planet?”
“Once, Double-D,” she replied. “My first solo in a ’49. Dreary place.”
“You landed?”
“Oh no. Just a flyover. Looped around the night side and straight back to the Moon. But from the sky the surface looked like the Wyoming Badlands. Colorful rocks, impressive canyons, some sand dunes, that was about it.”
“You didn’t land at the base, then?”
“Base? That’s news to me.”
She must not have been cleared for that choice bit of scuttlebutt. He gave a mental shrug. She would be hearing the skipper’s clearance request in a moment, so there was no reason not to fill her in. Solar Warden’s obsession with secrecy could be bewildering at times.
“There are supposed to be, I don’t know, four or five of them at different places. I touched down at Ares Prime a couple of years ago. Several hundred people and a lot of aliens.”
“Aliens?” Lasky asked. “Or time-travelers?”
“Grays, lots of them . . . and a few Nordics.”
“So time-traveling humans, then.”
“I still think of them as alien. They don’t think like we do, y’know?”
“Temporalist.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You’re prejudiced against people from a different time period than you.”
“I’m prejudiced against know-it-alls who try to tell me what to do.”
“And you joined the Navy . . . ?”
Duvall chuckled. “Belay that, Tammy. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Okay, listen up, Starhawks,” Boland’s voice cut in over the tac channel. “Time to check in with Ares Station.”
“Tell ’em Double-D and Tammy say ‘hi.’”
“Ares Station, Ares Station,” Boland called. “This is Starhawk Flight Sierra on approach vector one, requesting clearance for a loop-and-scoot, over.”
There was no reply. After a moment, Boland tried again.
“Ares Station, Ares Station, Starhawk Sierra. Do you copy, over?”
Duvall strained to hear a response but heard only the empty EM static of Sol and Jupiter and empty space.
Flight Sierra was a routine training run. Hobson and Lasky were both raw newbies, only recently arrived on board the Hillenkoetter as replacements for the Starhawks. The entire squadron had been all but wiped out at Aldebaran, and Solar Warden Command had been scrambling to make up the losses. Boland and Duvall were the old hands now, the only ’Hawk survivors, but pilots always were looking for the chance to put in hours and stay in practice between missions. The four of them had left Hillenkoetter in her Farside subselenian cavern on the Moon just two hours before, topping out at 37,500 kilometers per second en route. As they approached Mars, they’d slowed steadily to what amounted to a crawl for interplanetary gravcraft—roughly one thousand kilometers per second. Their flight plan called for them to reduce speed a great deal more—down to about two and a half kps—to allow the planet to sling them around its mass in the “loop” part of their flight.
At a thousand kps, it would take another thirteen minutes to reach the planet.
“Ares Station, Ares Station, Starhawk Sierra. Do you copy, over?”
Ten minutes.
“What do you think the problem is?” Lasky asked over the private channel.
“Damfino,” Duvall replied. “I suppose their comm suite could be down. Dust storms play hob with the electronics.”
“That must be it . . .”
“Ares Station, Ares Station, Starhawk Sierra. Please respond, over.”
Eight minutes.
Boland, Duvall thought, must be feeling like he was trapped in a box. Radioing back to the Moon base for instructions wasn’t in the cards right now, because at their current alignments, Earth and Mars were fifteen light minutes apart. By the time a call reached the Hillenkoetter, and an answer had returned, thirty minutes would have passed, and Starhawk Sierra would already be around the far turn and headed back to the barn—fighter slang for their home base.
Mars was already quite a bit larger now, as wide as a full Moon seen from Earth. Two tiny stars were caught now in ID reticules on Duvall’s heads-up display, identified by his computer as Deimos and Phobos, the planet’s two tiny moons.
He was worried now. He’d always wondered . . . what, really, had happened to Phobos 2?
The Russian probe had been launched in 1988 and had functioned nominally until it was in orbit around the planet, returning thirty-seven high-resolution photos of the tiny moon Phobos.
Then suddenly it had stopped working. The final three frames of imagery showed . . . something, a shadow . . . a lenticular shape . . . something closing with the spacecraft.
Duvall had always assumed the probe had simply died; Russian Mars probes, back in those days, had possessed an uncanny habit of doing that. But now, knowing that the spacecraft of other civilizations operated almost as a matter of routine throughout the Solar System, he began to wonder what it was that had silenced Phobos 2 . . . and whether the same thing had happened to the human outposts on Mars.
“Starhawk Sierra, Starhawk Sierra, Ares Station on emergency channel one-niner . . .”
The voice was weak and static-blasted.
“Ares Station, this is Starhawk Sierra. Go ahead! Over.”
“Wave off, Starhawk, wave off! Snakes inside the perimeter . . . repeat, snakes inside the perimeter. Do not attempt—”
And the transmission went dead.
Duvall’s computer marked a spot on the Martian disk ahead with a brilliant ruby pinpoint, a red star growing brighter . . . brighter . . . then fading. The data feed next to it said only that there’d been a release of energy at that spot . . . a small matter of some 5 x 1013 joules. That was a fraction less than the fifteen-kiloton weapon that had leveled Hiroshima.
Someone had just nuked the Martian surface.
“Snakes?” Lasky asked. “What did he mean by snakes?”
Obviously, she wasn’t all the way up to speed on the world of Solar Warden.
“Saurians,” Boland replied. “Sounds like the Lizards came in and took over.”
“What do we do, Skipper?” Hobson asked. “Was he telling us to back off?”
“We’re committed to the pass, Hobbie,” Boland replied, his voice grim. “Stick to the flight plan.”
“I’ve got bandits, Skipper,” Duvall announced. He couldn’t see them optically, of course, but he could see three blips on his forward radar, small ships coming up from the planet’s surface.
Coming up fast.
“Copy Hawk Three. I see them.”
“And me without my one-twenties,” Duvall said.
Stingrays were designed to carry standard AIM-120 AMRAAMs as warloads, the same air-to-air missiles currently mounted on Super Hornets and other blue-water Navy aircraft. However, this had been a routine training flight, and enemy contact had not been expected. AMRAAMs were expensive—$400,000 a pop—and Lunar Operations Command had limited numbers of them available for the Solar Warden navy. Stingrays also mounted XM93 hellpods with integral 800-kilowatt lasers but these had also been removed for this flight. Some idiot thought the rookies might accidentally discharge their weapons—a bad idea while they were still on board the Big-H.
Duvall was wishing he could swap seats with that guy right now. He’d show him a fucking accidental discharge or two. . . .
“Shit,” Hobson called. “Are we gonna hit?”
“Way too much empty space for that,” Boland told him.
A forty-meter Stingray was an insignificant speck in the vastness of the Void. Still, if the bogies tried a close intercept . . .
For this training flight, none of the twin-seat Stingrays was carrying a back-seater, a RIO, or radar intercept officer. Duvall suddenly feared that they would soon be missing their help in tracking targets.
“Okay . . . here’s what we do,” Boland went on. “On my mark, we boost, boost hard until we get behind them. Then we decelerate to ten kps for our flyby. That’ll still be slow enough to let Mars bend our trajectories, and we can correct them to get back on course for Earth on the other side. We’ll shoot a planet-grazer pass, and let the fireball mask us. Once we’re clear and lined up, we run like hell, full boost, and yell our heads off for help. Maybe we can get the Big-H out of her barn long enough to give us a hand, or get an assist from the Inman or the McCone. Everybody on the same page?”
“Hawk Four copies.”
“Yessir!” Hobson sounded scared.
“We’re with you, Skipper,” Duvall added, rounding off the recital. “Just give the word.”
He wondered, though, if this maneuver could possibly work. Everything, everything depended now on the enemy ships’ technological provenance, their “TP.”
No time to think about that. He concentrated on inputting simple commands into his computer. The chances of a head-on collision might be remote, but the Stingray’s computer should be able to make last-instant corrections, if need be, to avoid a deliberate impact.
“Okay . . . stand by. Accelerate on my mark in three . . . two . . . one . . . hit it!”
Stingrays used one of the new Aerojet Rocketdyne antigravity propulsion systems, which meant the pilot was essentially weightless even under extreme acceleration. The only evidence of that acceleration was the rapid growth of the Martian disk ahead, and the sudden appearance of the three hostile spacecraft coming at them from dead ahead.
He didn’t have time to react. His Stingray was closing with the hostiles at speeds in excess of 1,000 kps, and he had only the very briefest glimpse of something flat and lenticular and big directly in his path.
White light flared to his right, impossibly brilliant, brighter than the sun. . . .
Once the flash passed, he found himself still accelerating toward Mars, with the three bogies somewhere behind him.
Where the hell had that light come from? It had been brief, as brief as the passage with the hostiles. A chill ran down his spine as he looked at his screen and saw the radar data.
Tammy Lasky’s Stingray must have collided with one of the bogies.
Fragments of the alien ship would have continued traveling out and away from the planet, carrying their original momentum once they were no longer in the grip of an inertia-canceling field. Tammy’s fighter, the debris from the collision, would have continued on her original course toward the planet, moving at a thousand kilometers per second. “Hawk One, Hawk Three!” he called. “Hawk Four . . . Hawk Four is destroyed!”
“I saw it, Double-D. God in heaven . . .”
On his radar screen, one alien ship had fragmented—the one that had collided with Tammy. Another, hanging back, appeared to be in trouble . . . and Duvall thought from its position that it might have caught some high-velocity fragments of Tammy’s fighter, sprayed into its path like the pellets of a shotgun blast.
Good! Serves the bastards right!
He was numb. Though Tammy had joined the squadron only two weeks before, the two of them had found time to enjoy some close camaraderie. They’d spent three delightful nights together—two of them in all-night bull sessions discussing Solar Warden and the alien threat to Earth, and one enjoying some spectacular low-G gymnastics in bed. He couldn’t say he’d loved her . . . but she’d been a good friend and a fun companion.
And now she was gone. . . .
Ahead, a mass of tiny, bright pinpoints of light scattered across the face of Mars. It took Duvall a moment to recognize what he was seeing . . . fragments from Tammy’s fighter vaporizing in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Behind them, the one surviving hostile was decelerating now, as the three remaining Stingrays continued to boost. They hit the atmosphere with a shock that felt like a solid wall, with ionized atmosphere blazing around them, turning them into three bright, shooting stars streaking across the dark Martian sky. Duvall gritted his teeth as the vibration rattled him to the bones, threatening to rip his Stingray into burning fragments in a sudden blaze of atmospheric friction. The air pressure was a tiny fraction of Earth’s, at this altitude very nearly a hard vacuum, but hitting it that fast was like hitting the ocean . . . or a brick wall.
Then they whipped past the planet, cutting their acceleration and slowing sharply as they did so. Duvall had a brief glimpse of the surface sixty kilometers below, blurred by speed . . . then whipped away as they passed the terminator and circled over the planet’s night side.
Punching clear of the atmosphere they began accelerating once more, as Duvall scanned the sky around them for any sign of the remaining alien spacecraft. Had it followed them around the planet? Pulled back to see what the Stingrays were going to do? Or stopped instantly and taken up a new position in front of them?
Technological provenance . . .
Jokes about toilet paper aside, TP was a vital consideration in Solar Warden’s efforts against both hostile aliens and reptilian time-travelers. Visitors from off-world came from an enormous variety of civilizations, both in the future and, in the case of the Saurians, from a high-tech Earth in the remote past. As writer Arthur C. Clarke had famously said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Just how magical was a function of the culture’s provenance in time and the age of its culture. The Talis were from about ten thousand years in Earth’s future, which was bad enough. The Grays were from over a million years ahead, and there was a bewildering variety of subspecies from countless different times and cultures and origins. The Saurians were technically from the past . . . but they were in conflict with the Talis far into the future, and possessed a technological civilization that might well span hundreds of millions of years.
Those ships, presumably, had been Saurian. They might be fairly close to current human technology—no more than a few hundred years more advanced. Or they could be pure, Clarke-ian magic.
Duvall saw no sign of the alien.
“Mayday, mayday, this is Starhawk Flight calling Luna Operations Command.” Boland’s voice over the radio was calm and measured, but possessed an unmistakable sense of urgency. “We are on a direct vector, Mars to Earth, with hostiles in pursuit.”
Boland went on to give rapid-fire details of what had just happened . . . the distress call from Mars warning them off, the appearance of three probable Saurian warships, the destruction of Hawk Four. They were still well over twelve light minutes from Earth, so the conversation was strictly one-sided. It would take long minutes for Boland’s words to crawl all the way to LOC, and longer still for any response.
The question, of course, was whether there would be any help coming at all. The political situation, the balance between present-day humans and the Saurians, was highly debatable. Technically, the Lizards were currently at war with the Talis, but it was a highly limited form of warfare given that it was a war across time as well as space. There’d been a number of skirmishes recently in which Solar Warden ships had taken part—at Zeta Reticuli and at Aldebaran—but nothing as blatant as a full-blown, lasers-blazing Saurian attack on Earth. Scuttlebutt held that the Talis didn’t want to risk all-out war since defeat might well result in the extinction of Homo sapiens. Why the Saurians were holding back was less clear, but since they claimed that Earth by right belonged to them, perhaps they simply didn’t want to damage the merchandise.
