John Wilson - r i and leader of the cyborgs - is dead. His Antarctic base is destroyed and his monumental global schemes have died with him. Or so it seems.

  For nine years the world lives in peace, slowly licking its wounds and returning to 'normality'. But in the tenth the saucers return from nowhere. Vast mother ships appear over the White House in Washington, DC, over the Kremlin and over London. The machines have survived. Even without their father and leader, they have returned to claim their birthright. . .

  Humanity - unprepared and vulnerable - is brutal y enslaved, 1984 becomes reality as the cyborgs ruthlessly exploit their new slaves, and mankind is forced to retreat to its ghettos. Only two pockets of resistance remain: the original Antarctic base, where a few survivors work to repair cyborg technology in order to send one man and his unique abilities into the heart of the enemy. And Randy Gumshoe, 'Speed-Triber' and net-head, who will stop at nothing to avenge the humiliation of his race.

  But when victory becomes possible for this heroic group, the outcome is more unexpected than you can possibly imagine . . .

  PROJEKT SAUCER 5: RESURRECTION

  Also by W.A. Harbinson

  PROJEKT SAUCER I: INCEPTION

  PROJEKT SAUCER 2: PHOENIX

  PROJEKT SAUCER 3: GENESIS

  PROJEKT SAUCER 4: MILLENNIUM

  REVELATION

  THE CRYSTAL SKULLS

  OTHERWORLD

  EDEN

  RESURRECTION

  W-A- Harbinson

  PROJEKT SAUCER: BOOK FIVE

  Hodder & Stoughton

  Copyright © 1999 by W. A. Harbinson

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline PLC

  The right of W. A. Harbinson to be identified as

  the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  10 987654321

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

  any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

  nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other

  than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead

  is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available for the British Library ISBN 0340 71543X

  Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham Kent

  Hodder and Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline PLC

  338 Euston Road

  London NWI 3BH

  For Ken & Ann

  and for

  Ben & Marcos & Carina

  Acknowledgements

  This volume of the 'Projekt Saucer' series marks the completion of what is essentially a fully integrated novel of nearly 3,000 pages and approximately twenty years of work. Because a fifth volume was not envisaged for the series, a lengthy 'Author's Note', which detailed the factual background for the fiction, as well as an extensive bibliography, was included at the end of Projekt Saucer, Book 4: Millennium. While the 'Sources' included acknowledgements to all those who had helped me throughout the years of work on this epic undertaking, it would be remiss of me not to add my special thanks to a few without whom the project would never have been started in the first place or would not have been completed in its present state. Thanks, therefore, to:

  Alan Earney, who commissioned the original Genesis way back in 1978; Nick Austin, who stepped into the picture at that early stage & stuck with it for the next 20 years; Meg Davis, my agent at MBA, who never lost faith; Stirling and Jeanne Weave, for last minute research in Washington DC; and to Mickey Newbury, a superlative singer/songwriter, for his endless inspiration regarding matters he neither writes nor sings about.

  W. A. Harbinson Paris, France 5 January 1999

  31 December, ad 2000

  The invasion began at midnight. The first sightings were made at precisely that time, on 31 December in the year 2000, over Washington DC. But other sightings were then made at midnight, local time, over every state capital and major defence establishment in the United States of America. While no one was yet to know it, similar sightings would be made right around the globe, all at midnight local time,

  until the whole world was covered.

  The first lights appeared abruptly — and simultaneously — on the radar screens of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, Andrews AFB, Maryland, and Washington National Airport. The unidentified objects were flying at approximately 500 mph, but they suddenly accelerated to fantastically high speeds, left the area and returned almost immediately. Startled air traffic control tower operators and the aircrews of several airliners saw unidentified lights in the same locations that had been indicated by the radar.

  They were flying to and fro at incredible speeds, making theoretically impossible turns, stopping abruptly to hover magically in mid-air, and in general creating a spectacular light show in the night sky.

  Interceptor jets from Langley AFB were ordered out immediately to intercept the unidentifieds, but no sooner had they reached them than the lights blinked out and the blips disappeared from the radarscopes. The instant the jets left the area, the blips reappeared, in greater numbers than ever, and they had, by this time, moved into every sector covered by the radar, including the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the 'prohibited corridor' over the White House.

  More UFO reports came in from Langley AFB, where the operators were now describing the unidentified lights as 'rotating and giving off alternating colours'. Another interceptor jet was despatched from Langley and visually vectored to the lights by the tower operators. However, as the pilot approached the lights, they blinked out, in the pilot's words, 'as quickly as light bulbs being switched off. No sooner had this happened than the targets came back on the radarscopes at Washington National Airport. Again, interceptor jets were dispatched to locate them, but each time the aircraft were vectored in to the lights, the UFOs disappeared abruptly from the radarscopes and the pilots simultaneously reported that they had visually observed the lights blinking out.

  Within five minutes, those unidentified flying objects, now numbering in their hundreds, were spread out in a huge arc around Washington DC, from Herndale, Virginia to Andrews AFB, Maryland.

  In short, they had Washington DC boxed in.

  Even as stunned workers in the White House, the Pentagon and other government buildings were pouring out onto the dark lawns to look up in disbelief at the many lights of various colours shooting to and fro, rising and falling vertically, making their impossible turns and hovering miraculously in the night sky and illuminating the wintry clouds, those same clouds began to boil and swirl, as if stirred by a giant spoon. Then something vast and terrifying took shape within them.

  At first it looked like another cloud, though unusually big and too dark, but gradually it materialized as something round and flat-bottomed, definitely physical and truly enormous. It was perhaps three hundred feet wide, flat at the bottom and dome-shaped on top, the dome rising to a third of the base width,

  roughly a couple of storeys high. At first it was all dark — a deeper darkness than the night — but then the darkness was illuminated as if from within, a magical glowing that brightened rapidly to form a whirlpool of dazzling, silvery-white light that temporarily blinded all those looking at it. The immense object emitted a bass humming noise, an infrasound, almost physical, and then that almost imperceptible pressure became disturbingly palpable as lights suddenly blazed all over the great craft, illuminating the ground far below with their constantly flashing, rapidly spinning rainbow brilliance.

  The UFO was an immense flying saucer.

  Still high in the sky, at least a few hundred feet above the White House, the saucer was spinning rapidly around its axis: a gyroscopically stabilized fuselage shaped as an enormous silvery-white dome. The rapid rotation of the circular outer wings, or rings, slowed down as the saucer descended. But an electromagnetic gravity-damping system was creating violent currents of air within a cylindrical zone

  the same width as the saucer, first flattening the grass on the lawns, then sucking up loose soil and gravel to make it swirl wildly, noisily, in the air as if caught in the eye of a hurricane.

  Those watching started to panic, the men bawling, the women sobbing, many fleeing blindly, a virtual stampede, while the drivers of automobiles crashed into one another, turning the formerly quiet roads around the White House, the Ellipse and Lafayette Square into bedlam. Other spectators were too stunned to move and merely stood frozen where they were, mesmerized or terrified, looking up in awe as the gigantic saucer, a mother ship, continued descending, its outer rings still rotating and limned with an eerie, oddly pulsating whitish glow caused by the ionization of the surrounding air. This glow darkened to a more normal metallic grey when the saucer was just above the steel roof of the White House. There it stopped its descent and instead hovered magically in the air, blotting out the stars and dwarfing the building below with its immensity.

  By now, disbelief and panic had also taken control of those

inside the White House and, across the Potomac River, in the Pentagon. The switchboards of both buildings were being inundated with calls, both official and unofficial, reporting that similar sightings were being made over most of the top-secret military establishments and Air Force bases of Virginia and Maryland, that pilots could not get their interceptor jets to start, and that aircraft already in flight, including commercial airliners, were malfunctioning and crashing.

  Already hundreds of lives had been lost.

  Even as these reports were coming in, radarscopes and switchboards also began to malfunction.

  Communication was rendered chaotic and, within minutes, virtually non-existent. Automobiles and other forms of transport were coughing into silence and troop trucks trying to leave the Pentagon were also grinding to a halt, leaving the soldiers inside them baffled and terrified. Ordered out of the trucks, they spread across the grounds of the Pentagon with their weapons at the ready, though they hardly knew what to do with them. When they looked up at that great object in the sky, a floating cathedral of repeatedly flashing, spinning, multicoloured lights, filling the sky across the Potomac, its only sound a bass humming that seemed almost palpable, most of them could scarcely believe their own eyes. A few even threw their weapons down and ran away.

  From the windows of the Oval Office in the west wing of the White House, above the unnaturally illuminated Rose Garden, the President of the United States also looked up — and was stunned by what he saw.

  'Oh, my God,' he whispered. 'They've come back!'

  With him in the Oval Office were the Vice President, two CIA agents and his personal bodyguard, Jack Benedict. As the latter — red-haired, grey-suited, normally fearless — frantically tried to contact the Pentagon, the CIA, Langley AFB — anyone — with a dead phone, the near-tactile bass humming sound faded away, the circular outer body of the great object above the White House stopped rotating and the swirling debris settled back down. Then the coloured lights flashing above blinked out one after the other, plunging the night back into moonlit shadow. Within seconds, however, those shadows were split by a thin column of light that burned down from the base of the flying saucer to the ground. As the base opened out like the lens of a giant camera, the column of light expanded until it was almost as wide as the saucer, nearly three hundred feet in diameter, forming a silvery-white pool on the Ellipse. An object emerged from the open base of the mother ship — another saucer-shaped craft — though this one was only fifty feet in diameter. With its outer body rotating rapidly, giving it a blurry, off-white, glowing outline, it floated down slowly, soundlessly, through the column of light, like an elevator in a brightly-lit shaft. While this smaller flying saucer was still making its slow descent, a similar craft emerged from the mother ship . . . then a third . . . and a fourth.

  By now, the first fifty-foot saucer had almost descended to the lawns of the Ellipse. But instead of settling on the ground it hovered slightly above it, its outer body spinning rapidly, bobbing lightly like a cork in a pool of water, its eerie light illuminating the Zero Milestone while the currents of air caused by its rotation made the National Christmas Tree, a Colorado blue spruce, quiver violently and shed its leaves, though it did not topple over. Eventually, the outer body of the craft stopped spinning: its eerie, pulsating glow faded away, giving it a metallic, silvery-grey appearance, and then part of its base opened out, falling down at an angle, releasing a shaft of brilliant whitish light and forming a ramp that led down to the ground. The shadow of something large and inhuman fell over that ramp.

  A giant insect emerged.

  'What the hell . . . ?' Jack Benedict whispered, automatically feeling for the pistol holstered under his coat and then glancing sideways at the nation's Chief Executive. When he saw that the President was deep in shock, his own fear intensified.

  'It's all over,' the President said, his stunned gaze focused on that. . . thing down there, illuminated in the light beaming out of the smaller saucer as it made its way awkwardly down the ramp.

  It was not a living creature. It was, in fact, a robotic machine with a metallic body — twelve feet long, four feet thick, raised eight feet off the ground — guided by an insect-like head with a sealed snout for a mouth and two compound phototransistor eyes that resembled the headlights of a car. Various ultrasonic sensing devices, used to detect contact, pressure and slippage, protruded from its shiny black body. It also had four multidirectional robotic arms, each with two-fingered grippers like crabs' claws, and six hinged, fearsome-looking steel legs, resembling spider's legs, each possessing its own artificial nervous system and mounted on a large, square-shaped steel foot. The machine, which had a highly developed computerized intelligence, advanced across the Ellipse by using its left front, left rear and right middle legs as a stabilizing tripod while moving its remaining three legs, then reversing this procedure. It pounded the ground as it advanced to the north side, its robotic arms thrashing simultaneously, moving this way and that, its grippers uprooting and violently casting aside the National Christmas Tree before it moved on to the south lawn, approaching the central mansion of the White House. When it reached the columned and balconied south portico, stopped temporarily by the curved limestone wall of the Diplomatic Reception Room, laser lights shot suddenly out of its compound eyes — pencil-thin, pulsating, silvery-white beams filled with sparks, their output in the megawatt range — and a large section of the wall was blown apart, collapsing noisily in clouds of billowing dust.

  'They're coming in!' Jack Benedict exclaimed, automatically withdrawing his pistol from under his jacket, then glancing in an embarrassed, confused and fearful manner at the others, including the stunned President, not quite knowing what to do with his weapon, which clearly would be, in these circumstances, useless. 'What the hell do we do?'

  'We get the President out,' William Greenfield, the Vice President, replied sternly, his voice steady, even though he was wiping sweat from his furrowed brow.

  At that moment, however, even as other fifty-foot saucers were either gliding off in all directions or disgorging more six-legged robots, which also scattered to surround and invade the White House, their black bodies gleaming in the pyramid of light still beaming down from the mother ship, different creatures emerged from the nearest, still hovering fifty-foot saucers.

  'Oh, fuck!' Jack Benedict exclaimed. 'Cyborgs!'

  The cyborgs, though much smaller than the robotic monster insects, looked every bit as nightmarish.

  Less than five feet tall, they were half human, half machine, the result of decades of secret prosthetic experiments. Originally designed for work on the seabed and in outer space, they had partially

  collapsed lungs and artificial breathing systems; so their mouths and noses had been surgically removed and that area of the face covered, instead, with a paper-thin cybernetic metal mask that had the appearance of wrinkled grey skin. Some of the cyborgs still had human eyes, though these were uncommonly narrow and seemingly lifeless, while others had artificial compound eyes like those of a fly. In every case, the top of the skull had been surgically removed and replaced with a metallic stereotaxic skullcap embedded with minute electronic implants that controlled the cyborg's every function. The fearsome, inhuman appearance of the cyborgs was heightened by the fact that only a few of them still had their own hands: most of them had, instead, either two-digit or four-digit grippers similar to the steel claws of the robotic 'insects'. The 'palms' of these hands contained built-in small but immensely powerful laser weapons, producing megawatt beams that could stun, kill or demolish. The few cyborgs with ordinary hands carried holstered laser weapons that looked like silvery pistols. Every cyborg, no matter its individual characteristics, wore black coveralls and black leather boots.

  Silent and implacable, they emerged from the still hovering, gently bobbing fifty-foot saucers to spread out in all directions, following the huge robotic insects. Some uniformed marines — White House guards — opened fire on them with rifles and submachine guns, but the bullets merely ricocheted noisily off them, apparently doing them no harm, and they responded by raising their artificial hands or their weapons and firing back with pulsating, hissing, spark-filled laser beams. Caught in light flickering in the dangerous alpha-rhythm range, between eight and twelve cycles per second, and also struck by powerful, physically destructive infrasounds, the marines screamed in agony, went into violent convulsions, then dropped their weapons and collapsed, some dead, others temporarily paralysed.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51