The Takeover, page 2
“No, sir, not a peep,” replied his Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. Cohen was the opposite of what one might expect of a military leader: bald, rotund, and short. The medals and insignias on his uniform looked in danger of popping off at any moment.
“Then why does everyone seem to think alien creatures are going to pop out of them at any minute?”
“Beats me, sir. You know how the press is these days. Once a story gets rolling, there’s no stopping it.”
“Anything…up there…that we can’t account for?” The President’s eyes wandered up towards the heavens.
“No, sir. We’re getting plenty of calls from amateurs and professionals alike, and we’re following up on every lead, no matter how outlandish, but so far nothing. We’re also transmitting signals, as per your request—but if there’s anyone or anything out there, they’re not responding.”
“So, we can’t communicate with them, and they—if there is a they—aren’t communicating with us.”
“That about sums it up, sir.”
The President turned to Gil Lametti, his Chief of Staff. Lametti was also in his sixties, with thinning white hair and wire-rimmed glasses and the kind of grandfatherly face you couldn’t help but trust. He was also one of Mark Gardner’s oldest friends. “What should we be doing that we’re not doing, Gil?”
“I’ve already told you, Mark,” Lametti said bluntly. “We should take a page from Europe’s playbook and dump those eggs into the ocean just as fast as we can.”
“I’m on board with that, Gil, you know I am. It’s Congress that’s the holdup.” The President hated Congress and Congress hated him. It was a hallmark of his administration.
Lametti shrugged. “You asked. Europe’s been at it for a week now.”
“How far have they gotten?”
“Not very,” admitted Lametti. “The scale of the undertaking is enormous. We’re talking thousands upon thousands of ovates scattered all across Europe. So far only a couple hundred have been dug up, loaded onto transports, and transferred to barges for burial at sea.”
“That’s not very many.”
“Agreed, but it’s better than nothing. They’re focusing on their biggest cities first, removing ovates from metropolitan areas like London, Paris, and Berlin. Smaller towns and cities are frankly on their own.”
“What about Russia? What’s their take on all this?”
“Oh, you know Russia, always daring to be different. They’re calling it a typical overreaction from the West and opting to leave the ovates in place. They’re saying people have jumped to the wrong conclusion—that there’s absolutely no proof anything is living inside these ovates.”
“They might just be right about that.”
“No argument. But leaving them in place is risky, and lately their president has been spouting this theory that the ovates are some kind of homegrown pestilence due to the planet being under such constant stress.”
“What? Like a bad case of acne? I don’t buy that.”
“Me either.”
“And what about China? Are they still blaming us for all this?”
“Of course they are. They claim we got careless—that one of our weaponized biolabs unleashed this plague on the world, and now it’s spreading through some sort of airborne mechanism.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I know, but it’s accepted as gospel by most Chinese because that’s what they’re being told by their media. Of course, we’ve denied it ad nauseam. Even if we wanted to create something like this, which obviously we don’t, it’s well beyond our abilities. These ovates have otherworldly origins, that much seems clear.”
The President sighed. “So much for world unity in the face of an alien invasion.”
Bill Cohen, Secretary of Defense, scoffed. “Like that was ever going to happen.”
The President reflected for a moment. “All right, then, Congress be damned. Let’s get started dumping as many of those ovates as we can into the sea. We’ll focus first on the ones closest to the White House, the Capitol Building, and Wall Street. Even if we can’t move all of them, we can at least make a beginning. What resources are we going to need, Gil?”
“All the heavy earth-moving equipment we can get our hands on,” Lametti replied. “Bulldozers, excavators, backhoes, cranes, dump trucks. We’re already at three tons per ovate, and by next week it could be four.”
“Can you run with that?”
Gil nodded, scribbling a line in the notepad he always kept at hand.
“And Bill, let’s get the ball rolling on bringing our troops back home. Our country is under attack, and we need them here, not halfway around the world.”
“All of them, sir?”
“All of them.”
“Yes sir, if you say so, sir,” Cohen said. He sounded more than a little dubious about this decision, but it was the President’s call.
“And I want to talk to NASA. Not tomorrow: tonight. I need to know what progress, if any, is being made on the scientific front. Gil, can you set that up with my secretary?”
Gil nodded and made another note.
“Okay, then, let’s get moving, boys,” the President said, clapping his hands together like a football coach. “I’m counting on you two to make this all come together.”
The Gil & Bill team nodded their assent. It looked like it was going to be another long night.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Dr. Rachel Cavanaugh adjusted her glasses nervously as she videoconferenced with the President of the United States for the first time. As the first woman Director of JPL, she was used to being underestimated. Could she really be a woman and understand rocket science? Well, of course she could, but they didn’t always know that. She wondered if the President would be one of the ones who didn’t know that.
“So what progress have you made so far with regard to the ovate in your lab?” the President asked.
“Unfortunately, very little, Mr. President. Our instruments go haywire every time they get anywhere near the ovate. Picture a compass needle spinning crazily near a powerful magnet, and that’s about what we’ve got going on here. We’ve run every kind of test imaginable across the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum, but so far we’ve been unable to decipher what’s inside.”
“That’s disappointing, Dr. Cavanaugh. We really need that information.”
“I know, sir, but unfortunately the ovate’s shell is impenetrable. We can’t bore through it, we can’t shatter it, we can’t force it open, and we can’t see inside it. We’ve tried every possible kind of materials test you can imagine, but suffice it to say our equipment shatters before the shell does. It’s almost as if the ovate is resistant to being probed.”
“Resistant. That makes it sound sentient.”
“I wouldn’t say sentient, sir. Designed would be a better word. Designed to be impenetrable. To us, I mean.”
“Everyone keeps calling them eggs. So are they eggs or aren’t they?”
“Well, sir, we don’t call them eggs. Virtually no one in the scientific community does. It’s only an egg in the sense that it has an outer shell that appears to be incubating something inside. But what’s going to ‘hatch’ out of it is anyone’s guess.”
The President looked frustrated. “Egg, incubation, hatch—these are all words used to describe a chick about to be born. Dr. Cavanaugh, tell me plainly, is there or isn’t there life inside these things?”
“It’s extremely unlikely, Mr. President. I’d say the ovate is a construct, not a biological life form.”
The President’s shoulders seemed to relax just a little. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it? Not a living entity. That’s a good thing, right? Millions of alien babies running around seems like just about the worst possible scenario I can imagine. What would we do with all of them? Adopt them? Exterminate them? I don’t want to be the one to have to make that call.”
“I can’t blame you, sir. But even if they’re not life forms, I wouldn‘t underestimate the danger they may pose to us. Their energy levels are, quite literally, off the charts…you might even say out of this world. I’m, uh, not sure if I can say this to a sitting President or not, but these things frankly scare the shit out of me.”
Chapter 3
September 1 – Goodland, Kansas
Ken Stubbs had years of experience operating a combine harvester, but never in his life had he had to detour around so many obstacles. Six enormous ovates lay half-buried in his fields, hidden by tall stalks of wheat. He’d had to plant red flags atop poles to mark them. His cut lines, usually as true as if they’d been drawn with a straight-edge, bent like an old coat hanger as he worked his way around first one ovate and then another.
He was ruminating on his exceptionally bad luck (none of his neighbors had even one ovate) when he spied what looked like a shimmering up ahead. It looked like heat waves rising from asphalt on a hot summer’s day. He knew one of the ovates was right up ahead, so he turned off the harvester and waited for the motor to grumble to a stop.
It felt almost too quiet as he opened the door and stood on the top rung of the ladder leading down from the harvester’s cockpit. Usually he could hear a few birds chirping, but the only sound at the moment was the rustling of the wheat stalks as they rubbed against one another in the breeze.
He clambered down with some effort (his beer belly made everything harder—he should really do something about that), then stood there for a moment wondering if it was wise on his part to approach any closer. He took a few hesitant steps forward, then a few more, then he was parting the few remaining stalks of wheat that stood between him and the ovate and watching it…
What, hatch?
That must be it.
Well, golly. This was all anyone had been able to talk about for weeks now, and here he was with a front-row seat—not that he was sure he wanted one.
The ovate was half-sunk in the ground. Its top half formed a dome approximately six feet in diameter and two feet high (with the other two feet being underground). For weeks now it had been growing bigger and heavier, but the changes he was seeing now were even more dramatic. From what he could tell, the ovate seemed to be melting.
It looked sizzling-hot to the touch, if one were stupid enough to touch it. Waves of heat were rising up from it like a charcoal grill someone had forgotten to turn off. The stalks of wheat nearest it were beginning to smoke rather alarmingly, and the red flag atop its pole looked like it might catch fire at any moment.
“That can’t be good,” Ken murmured aloud.
What else wasn’t good was the ovate’s appearance. Instead of looking lustrous like an opal, cracks were beginning to show all over its surface. Ken’s mind jumped to a ceramic pot his wife Marie had once cherished as a family heirloom. It had been knocked off the table (Ken blamed the dog) and had shattered into dozens of pieces. He’d painstakingly glued it back together, but it had never looked the same. That was what the shell looked like now, to his mind’s eye, with its myriad cracks running every which way.
The cracks widened even as he watched, energy radiating through them with an almost blinding intensity. The shell blackened rapidly, thin layers flaking off like burnt onion skin.
The red flag caught fire and started to burn. It fluttered in the breeze like a warning sign. The stalks of wheat in the immediate vicinity began to smolder.
“Holy smokes,” Ken whispered. He knew he should get out of there now but found it impossible to leave. It was like watching a snake slough off its dead skin to reveal the shiny new creature underneath.
The blackened layers of skin were piling up all around the egg now, mixing with the smoldering wheat and creating a steaming mess of goo that looked altogether unpleasant.
Somehow the egg transfixed him: he couldn’t take his eyes off it as it finished its miraculous transformation into something wholly new.
In a matter of seconds the last smoking remnants of shell flaked off, falling to the ground like some awful afterbirth—and then the ovate, the actual ovate inside the shell, lay bare before him.
It looked naked, translucent, and disturbingly otherworldly. It was almost too bright to stare at, but stare he did, feasting his eyes on its unearthly brilliance.
He shook himself as if released from a spell and began stumbling backwards.
But the ovate was quicker than he was. In the blink of an eye it flashed.
And just like that, Ken found himself inside a dome of energy of some sort looking out.
Shit shit shit.
The physical ovate was still there, right where it had been before, but now it radiated a shield of energy—a force field of some kind. The shield shimmered. What the purpose of such a small force field could be he had no idea—but he knew he didn’t like being on the inside of it, no, not one little bit.
The force field was dome-shaped and maybe sixteen feet in diameter. The top of the dome wasn’t much taller than he was, maybe seven feet high at its apex. Good thing he’d been crouching down when it trapped him, or it might have cut his head right off! He continued crouching, terrified of touching that shimmering field. The dome’s walls tapered down all around him like a physical dome’s would, except these walls pulsed with energy.
He was trapped inside what amounted to an electrified yurt. Suddenly he felt very much afraid he might die in here. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, but maybe that was just the fear talking. It didn’t help that the red marker flag he had planted was still flickering with tiny tongues of flame inside the dome he was now in, or that smoke was still rising from the smoldering mess of blackened goo at the base of the ovate.
He could scarcely look at the egg it was so bright. He hoped he wasn’t getting exposed to massive doses of radiation.
First things first. He reached for the flag pole and stamped out the fluttering flames with his boot. He considered stamping out the smoldering mess of goo at the base of the ovate but wisely thought better of it. Instead he dropped to all fours and moved as far away from the physical ovate as he could get, careful to watch his head where the dome curved lower. He wanted to stay low to avoid the worst of the smoke—although, now that he was paying attention, he could see that the smoke was rising straight up and out of the dome instead of accumulating inside.
Well, that was good. At least he wasn’t going to asphyxiate to death.
He took some deep breaths and tried to calm himself. Panic wasn’t going to help here.
The dome was transparent, sort of like a soap bubble. He could see out of it, but things looked distorted on the outside. The wheat field, for instance, looked all warped and wavy. It was like looking at your own legs in a swimming pool and seeing them all ripply and disconnected from the rest of your body. Soap-bubble colors swirled and whirled and slid up and down the dome walls, coruscating with an iridescent quality. Those walls looked beautiful but deadly.
He edged closer towards the center of the dome, still on his knees. He wasn’t sure which frightened him more, the radiating ovate or the shimmering walls, but he was already beginning to feel claustrophobic.
From what he could tell, the walls of the dome continued straight into the ground. He was already surmising that the force field was actually a sphere, with its other half hidden beneath the surface. If the earth was disturbed in any way by the sudden appearance of a force field cutting through it, it showed no signs of being bothered in the least. But one thing was clear: he couldn’t dig himself out of this mess.
Ken knew it was ridiculous to yell for help, stuck as he was in the middle of a Kansas wheat field, but he yelled anyway. The dome seemed to dampen his voice. He pulled out his cell phone and took a look. Not surprisingly, there was no signal. That was often true even without a dome of energy surrounding him. His farm was remote, but sometimes he got a weak signal from a cell tower out near I-70.
Face it: he was on his own. No one would miss him for hours and hours yet. It was harvest season, and that meant Ken often worked late into the evening, sometimes until eight or nine at night. His wife Marie wouldn’t even bat an eye at his absence until after nine-thirty or ten, assuming she hadn’t already gone to bed by then.
Which meant he could be in here all night.
He sat down on the ground and tried to zone out for awhile. It didn’t look like anything was going to happen anytime soon, so he might as well take a breather.
As he was sitting there, Ken realized to his surprise that he wasn’t alone. A tiny field mouse was looking around with a startled expression on its face.
So he had company after all. The mouse was near one of the curved walls. It seemed unharmed, but its senses were on high alert.
The mouse sniffed at the air as it stood on its hind legs. Ken watched, fascinated, waiting to see what would happen next. He figured he’d let the mouse go first.
Of course the mouse, being a mouse, took its own sweet time about it. But eventually it must have decided it was safe and got back to the business of foraging.
The mouse inched closer and closer to the curved wall. Any minute now, Ken expected to see it get zapped and keel over dead. Roast mouse. At least he wouldn’t starve. But to his astonishment and endless relief (not so much for the mouse’s sake as for his own), he watched the mouse pass right through the dome wall unharmed.
The mouse actually stopped for a few seconds halfway in and halfway out of the dome wall, its body effectively cut in two by the force field. It didn’t seem to mind a bit. Then the mouse scampered the rest of the way out and stood there, as if to say, “See? I’m fine! Nothing to worry about here!”
Okay, Ken thought. Well, that’s something. That’s a very big something. He might just get out of this alive after all. Whatever the dome’s purpose, it apparently wasn’t designed to kill hapless idiots like himself.
Ken picked up a stalk of wheat and touched its tip to the inside of the dome wall. The stalk passed right through. As he drew it back, he half-expected to see the stalk shear off, but it remained intact. He threw the stalk to the ground and picked up a clod of dirt. Tossing it at the dome wall, he watched it, too, pass right through.
