Outside Context Problem Sample

Christopher G. Nuttall

Cover Blurb for ROCP

When a UFO crashes near a top secret military base, the American Government realises that aliens have been spying on the human race for years.  But even as they rush to unlock the technological secrets in the alien craft, the aliens launched the first step in their plan to invade the Earth and enslave the human race.  With a giant mothership approaching the planet and the inhabitants promising peace and plenty, humanity must defeat an vastly superior foe with uncertain motives or lose its freedom forever.

On one side, a powerful alien force…

On the other side, a divided humanity…

The battle for Earth has begun.

Dear Reader

This is a free sample, nearly one fourth of the book.  I hope you like it.

As you will notice, this is book one of a trilogy.  Book two will be uploaded somewhere around February 2013, to coincide with the paperback publication of The Royal Sorceress.  Book three will be uploaded, if all goes to plan, in June 2013.  If you want to see it sooner, please drop me an email; I always love hearing from my readers.

As a matter of principle, all of my self-published electronic books are DRM-free.  If you don’t like Kindle format, just convert the files using Calibre or another conversion program.

A slightly embarrassing problem is that I wrote this book before NASA terminated the space shuttle program.  The handful of sections that feature a space shuttle are outdated.  I apologise for any confusion this may cause.

Finally, the team Outside Context Problem was devised by Iain M. Banks, one of the most inventive SF writers in the world today.  This book is dedicated to him and those who believed in my writing enough to help.

Thank you

Christopher G. Nuttall
Kota Kinabalu, 2012

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.  The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass...when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sail-less and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.”
-Iain M. Banks

Chapter One

Schriever Air Force Base, USA
Day 1

“All ready for another fun-filled evening in front of the box?”

Airman First Class Robin Lance rolled her eyes as she took her place in front of the radar screen.  Night duty, even at one of the most vital facilities in the Continental United States, was almost always boring, without even the prospect of a stealth aircraft trying to fly through their area of responsibility to look forward to.  She had learned to enjoy the times when a new and exotic aircraft would be put through its paces, when she would be charged with detecting it before it got into position to do harm to the base, but there wouldn’t be one tonight.  It would be just another boring evening, enlivened only by her ongoing project.

“Yes, dad,” she said, simply.  “I brought my homework to do when nothing was on TV.”

Technical Sergeant Dave Heidecker laughed.  Robin had worked under him for the last six months and he’d taught her a great deal, including some of the mysteries of USAF protocol, which she had regarded as a closed book.  Her interests lay in radar and some of the more exotic applications of passive sensors, not in standing up and saluting when someone with a higher rank talked down to her.  Heidecker understood her and that was all she needed to blossom into someone the USAF needed desperately.

“There’s nothing in the log book,” Heidecker confirmed, as she skimmed through the brief list.  A handful of civil aircraft had been tracked, along with a couple of fast jets from the nearby AFB, but nothing particularly special or important.  There were no warning notes about the equipment, nor any signs that the radar system might need urgent repairs, but she checked it anyway, just in case.  The systems were far more fragile than civilians tended to believe and Robin had no intention of allowing a faulty system to remain online any longer than absolutely necessary.  The Bill of 2017 authorised rapid replacement of any faulty system charged with defending America’s heartland.

Schriever Air Force Base handled most of the space-based military systems that had been launched into orbit by the United States.  As such, the 50th Space Wing – which was charged with overseeing the complex network of satellites, ground-based radar stations and other, highly-classified systems – was one of the most important units in the USAF, although most of the fast-jet pilots would have hotly disputed that claim.  Robin had no arguments with it.  The rapid detection and identification of anything that might be remotely hostile to the United States was critically important in a world where more and more rogue states were developing the technology required to launch ballistic missiles towards her country.  It didn’t help that most of the space-faring powers had encircled Earth with thousands of pieces of junk, from old rocket components to dead satellites, that presented the space-monitoring teams with a challenge.  A new contact could be anything from a glove lost by the ISS to an incoming enemy missile.

She looked down at the radar screen and sighed.  There was nothing exotic or even remotely interesting in her work at night, so she checked with Heidecker and brought up the radar data from the recent clash between Israel and Syria.  Her supervisors had been very keen that she – along with hundreds of other analysts – should study the data carefully, perhaps in the hope that a younger mind would see a way to determine new programs that would allow rapid target identification.  The Syrians had launched over thirty Scud missiles at Israel, but they’d loaded half of them with decoys and successfully tricked the Israelis into wasting some of their Patriot missiles on harmless duds.  A Scud could be had for less than a hundred thousand dollars; a Patriot cost well over a million dollars.  The balance of expenditure had fallen squarely against Israel and the USAF had no intention of allowing Iran, or any of their other possible foes who possessed Scud missiles, to do the same to them.  If the radar data could be used to separate the decoys from the real missiles, they could avoid wasting millions of dollars worth of irreplaceable missiles.  Congress would definitely approve.

There was no point in keeping her eyes on the main radar screen.  Even without Heidecker watching over her shoulder, and keeping one eye on his own console, the computers would alert her at once if anything entered the base’s air defence zone.  It was hard to keep radar operators at night from goofing off – their job was boring and often unrewarded – but as long as she could split her attention between her homework and the console, she was fine.  Others didn’t manage this nearly as well and were eventually streamlined into different units, or more rewarding positions.  Robin couldn’t understand why some people didn’t want to study radar with more interest.  She’d been fascinated ever since her father had introduced her to the concept.

She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glowing screen and smiled.  At nineteen years old, with long blonde hair, she looked more like a cheerleader than a radar specialist – indeed, she was ridiculously young for her rank.  It bothered her from time to time that she had to progress slowly, rather than rising to a level where she could set her own priorities and make the breakthroughs she knew were waiting to be made, but the USAF didn’t have that much flexibility in it.  It had already paid for an education well above the norm and…well, now she had to repay it with her service.  She didn’t mind most of the duties, but there were times when she just got exasperated.  

Or perhaps I’m being punished, she thought, wryly.  Seven months ago, just after her promotion, she’d been assigned to a mobile radar station during an exercise involving F-22 Raptors and a couple of highly-classified next generation stealth platforms.  Robin had seen the deployment of the stealth aircraft as a challenge and, rather than wait for them to start dropping bombs, had managed to link the various radar stations together and track the disparate aircraft, shooting several of them down.  The losses might have only been simulated – the USAF had never lost a Raptor in combat – but the embarrassment was real.  Robin had ignored most of the angry disputes at higher ranks, or the amused response from the Army or the Marines, yet she did wonder at some of the senior officers.  America might have the best equipment in the world – and the only known deployment of combat-capable stealth aircraft – but any opponent could adapt their own tactics to confront the stealth jets.  Surely it was better to have their flaws and disadvantages pointed out in an exercise, where no one died, than in a shooting war?

She bent her head over the radar traces from Israel and frowned.  There seemed to be little that could be used as a basis for determining which missiles were real and which were decoys, even in hindsight.  The decoys missiles might be impossible to separate from the real missiles - at least quickly enough to matter - even through Robin enjoyed the  challenge.  If it were possible…she was deeply immersed in her work when the console chimed an alert.

Robin sat up instantly, switching the display back to the live feed from the radars and other sensor systems surrounding the base.  A contact had flickered into existence on the display, approaching the base little faster than an Apache helicopter, although it was quite high in the sky.  A moment later, it flickered out of existence again and vanished.  Robin scowled and triggered a handful of analysis programs – including a pair she’d designed herself – in hopes that they would reveal more than she’d seen, but she wasn't hopeful.  The contact had just vanished.

Radar was a notoriously imprecise science; indeed, the reason the USAF put up with some degree of eccentric behaviour from Robin and her peers was that they had an instinctive understanding of radar.  Anything from another radar station to a flock of birds could trigger an alert, convincing operators that an attack was underway and combat jets should be launched to deal with the threat.  Robin had studied events back in the days after 9/11, when USAF jets had been launched to do battle with flocks of birds and transient atmospheric conditions, yet this contact had been amazingly solid.  Robin felt a tingle running down her spine.  Her instincts told her that something wasn't right.  A moment later, the contact flickered into existence again.

It was lower now, heading down towards the ground.  The radar beam washed over it again and allowed her to track its course and speed.  She knew what was happening before the computers confirmed it.  The mystery target – and it had to be real; a real solid contact – was going to crash.  The results were odd, but there was no doubt that something was clearly out there.  What was it?

“Sir,” she said slowly.  “We have a contact.”

Heidecker stepped forward and leaned over her shoulder, his face illuminated by the glowing light from the radar screen.  “What the hell is it?”

“Unknown,” Robin said, flatly.  There were ways to identify the type of aircraft from the exact radar returns, using them to map the hull, but the unknown aircraft didn’t seem to fit any known pattern.  “It’s crashing.”

The screen flickered again.  “It’s crashed.”

Heidecker grabbed for the secure telephone.  “Get me the Security Commander,” he snapped, as he picked it up.  “Whatever that thing is, it shouldn’t be here.”

***
Master Sergeant George Grosskopf hefted his M16 as the Humvee drove towards the crash site.  He could see a flickering white light in the distance, like burning magnesium, suggesting that the unknown aircraft had come down hard.  It hardly mattered.  His duty was to secure the crash site before fire and other emergency services teams arrived to complicate matters.  George’s five-man security team checked their weapons quickly.  If inquisitive reporters – or anyone else – tried to approach the site, they’d have to warn them off or take them into custody.

It wasn't something that sat well with him – there might be survivors in the mystery aircraft – but he understood the logic behind it.  No one should have been flying anywhere near the base without clearance and that meant that the mystery aircraft was being flown by reporters, terrorists…or, perhaps, it was a stealth USAF aircraft that no one had bothered to warn him was in the area.  If there were injured in the craft, they’d have to take their chances until the crash site was secured, particularly if they were reporters.  George had been briefed on some of the more idiotic stunts reporters had pulled to try and gain information they had no need to know and if a few of them had been killed, it could only improve the gene pool.  Personally, he doubted that any reporter would actually understand what they were seeing when they flew over the base, but that wasn't his concern.  He was charged with keeping the base secure…and, after several shooting incidents at American bases, he wouldn’t take any chances.  

The cool night air was growing warmer as the vehicle stopped, a safe distance from the crash site.  He felt an odd prickling on his skin as he jumped out of the Humvee and barked orders, motioning for three of his men to form up and advance behind him.  The fourth would remain behind and report if anything happened to them, although George doubted that anything would.  Neither terrorists nor reporters would offer any resistance after such a crash.

It occurred to him that it might be a Russian or Chinese aircraft – there had been rumours that both powers were deploying stealth aircraft capable of reaching the Continental United States – yet it seemed unlikely.  No one would fly a spy aircraft right into the heart of America’s radar defences – and the firepower that backed them up – unless they intended to start a war, but the world had been remarkably peaceful lately.  There were still brief bloody skirmishes against a hornet’s nest of terrorists and other scrum bags in the Middle East, and there were dozens of minor disputes all over the world, yet there was nothing worth risking an all-out war over, was there?  It was far more likely that the aircraft had been hijacked by terrorists intent on using it as a weapon when they lost control and crashed it into the ground.

The M16 felt reassuringly solid in his hands as his team advanced.  The flickering light seemed to be fading, along with the temperature.  The mystery aircraft had come down hard enough to be half-buried in the ground, yet he could see a trail of debris surrounding the wreckage.  There was something about the wreckage that sent a shiver down his spine.  He’d seen aircraft crash sites before and this was no different, yet there was something…not quite right.  He reached for his radio to call for reinforcements, and then halted his hand by sheer strength of will, cursing himself for allowing the crash site to spook him.

He looked down at one of the pieces of debris as he almost stumbled over it in the fading light.  It was a piece of silvery metal, completely beyond easy identification.  He reached out to touch it and was repelled by the heat; the ground was scorched all around where the mystery craft had crashed.  The feeling of danger kept rising within him and he waved his men back as he stepped forward.  For the first time, he looked down at the main body of the unknown aircraft…and stared.

Civilians always believed that aircraft that hit the ground exploded, or were destroyed completely, but George had seen enough crash sites to know that the main body of the aircraft often remained intact.  It depended on the size of the structure, and what had actually happened to make it crash, but it wasn't unknown for most of the body to survive.  The aircraft he was looking at was surprisingly intact – he could see crumpled hull metal and other, less visible, signs of damage – and it glowed, wrapped in a fading white light.  The feeling of danger only grew stronger.  Whatever the exact nature of the craft – he was starting to believe that it was something truly exotic, perhaps out of Area 51 or one of the more classified testing locations – it wasn't anything remotely mundane.

“Contact the base,” he said.  His voice came out in a throaty whisper and he coughed to clear his throat.  There was something about the scene that forced him to be quiet, as if something was watching them in the distance. “Tell them we need the emergency trucks out here now.”

The light vanished, as if someone had turned off a switch.  George could see the lights of the base, and the stars high overhead, but the mystery craft had gone completely dark.  His eyes hurt – from the curses he could hear behind him, he wasn’t the only one – and he squeezed them closed, remaining still to avoid stumbling over a piece of debris.  The temperature fell rapidly back to normal, leaving them shivering in the darkness.   He reached for the flashlight he carried and shone it onto the craft.  It looked, somehow, even more exotic in the sudden illumination, yet it was still dark.  The craft almost seemed to be absorbing the light.

“Sergeant,” one of his men said, from behind him, “what the hell is it?”

“I don’t know,” George admitted.  It hurt to admit ignorance, yet there was no choice.  He was tempted to fall back and wait for reinforcements, but there could be an injured or dying pilot somewhere within the craft.  If it was a USAF craft, the pilot had to be kept alive, if only so that he could report on his experience.  “Follow me.”

He stepped forward towards the craft, suddenly aware of a spicy scent that seemed to hang in the air.  Up close, he could feel a tingle in the air, like an approaching thunderstorm.  The largest gash in the hull was big enough to allow him to stick his head into the craft, so he unhooked his flashlight and leaned forward.  The scent grew stronger as he shone the light into the interior of the craft.

“Be careful, Sergeant,” someone said, from behind him.  The man who had secured air bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sounded spooked.  George would have chewed him out for it, were it not for the fact he felt the same way too.  There was something about the mystery craft that left an air of unreality hanging over their heads.  “Sergeant…”

George said nothing, shining his light around inside the craft.  The interior looked…odd, almost as if it hadn’t been designed with any concerns for comfort or even for functionality.  Great piles of equipment of unknown design lay where they’d fallen, or smashed against the hull.  The scent was almost overpoweringly strong and he found himself wishing for a gas mask, or even a MOPP suit.  In the darkness, he only caught vague glimpses of things, lurking just beyond reach of his light.  His imagination filled in the blanks…

And then he saw the bodies.

He had shied away from one possible origin for the craft, because it had been unbelievable.  The bodies showed that it wasn't unbelievable.  He wanted – desperately – to deny what he was seeing, but how could he?  The bodies weren't people wearing bad outfits, or the results of CGI created by technicians stoned out of their minds…they were real.

“Sergeant?”  A voice asked.  He hadn’t even realised that he’d almost fallen out of the craft in his shock.  His heartbeat was terrifyingly loud in his ears.  “Sergeant?”

“Contact the base,” he said.  There was no SOP for this!  He hadn’t spent most of his life watching science-fiction, or anything that might tell him how to proceed.  “Tell them…tell them that we need an NBC team here now.  We’ve got visitors.”

Chapter Two

Near Washington DC, USA
Day 2

Alex Midgard looked up blearily as the car turned into a wooded driveway and drove up towards a manor house in the distance.  He felt like he hadn’t slept for a week.  He’d been scheduled to take a few days off to attend to family matters, but his superiors had been explicit.  The Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division had been ordered to send a representative to a new team being formed by Executive Order and Alex – being the one who could be spared for anything unexpected – had been ordered to report to Washington, where he’d been picked up by a car.  He’d expected to be driven to the Pentagon, but as the driver had taken him further from Washington, it had become apparent that they were going to a more secret location.

The car stopped at a small guardhouse, carefully concealed within the trees, and the driver handed over a small sheet of paper.  The guard – he wasn't wearing a uniform, but Alex had no difficulty recognising him as a trained and experienced soldier – checked the paper quickly, glanced inside the car to ensure that Alex was the only passenger, and then waved them through.  Alex hadn’t realised he’d been sweating until the car passed onwards towards the house.  He’d been in too many places where a single error in the paperwork could lead to disaster.

He watched as the car swept by the front entrance – the house had probably been built by an internet millionaire; it had the standard complete lack of taste – and into the garage.  Someone had invested a great deal of money in upgrading the house afterwards, he realised, as the garage was quite obviously a secure environment.  The two guards standing at one end held M16s and watched carefully as the driver climbed out and opened Alex’s door, inviting him to exit.  He stood up, stretched, and nodded to the guards.  They didn’t smile back.

“This way, sir,” one said, and led Alex into a second room.  It was barely large enough to swing a cat.  His tone was bored, but Alex wasn't fooled.  The guard was on the alert.  “Place your fingers against the sensors.”

Alex nodded, recognising the scanner on the table.  He pressed his fingers down on it and saw the red flash of laser light as the scanner checked his fingerprints against the ones in the main directory.  The military and intelligence services tended to have tech two or three generations ahead of anything in the civilian world – at least in theory - but Alex knew that it wouldn’t be long until it was released to the public.  The banking sector, in particular, wanted to use it to combat identity theft, although Alex could see at least two ways to fool the scanner.  As technology advanced, the technology required to fool it advanced as well.  The Foreign Technology Division had a hand in developing most of it.

The guard waved him through when the scanner cleared him and Alex found himself in another room.  “Place your cell phone, PDA and anything else electronic in this box,” a second guard ordered.  His voice was none the less alert.  “Attempting to carry electronic devices into the secure compartments is punishable by a long spell in jail.”

Alex nodded as he unloaded his pockets.  He’d been in places where the security requirements were truly paranoid, although not without reason.  His time on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had included time spent in compartments where no one left if they could avoid it, just to avoid going through the entry procedure again.  It wasn't pleasant.

“Done,” he said.  He felt naked without his cell phone, or bleeper.  It was unlikely that something would happen requiring his presence, but even so being without communications still bothered him.  “Now what?”

The guard stood up and waved a magnetic wand over his clothing, before waving him through another door.  Alex stepped through and was confronted by an older man wearing a grey suit.  His hair was shading to grey and he walked as if he was bent over, carrying some horrible weight.  Alex had seen similar looks from men who’d been behind enemy lines in the war on terror, or scientists who’d researched chemical or biological weapons; he wondered, vaguely, what his new friend’s story was.  It could be anything.

“Alex Midgard, I presume,” the man said.  It wasn't a question.  “If you would like to follow me…?”

There were no signs inside the building, nothing that a spy could use to find his way around.  That wasn't uncommon in secret bases, although Alex did tend to think that they overdid it.  A spy who penetrated the heart of such a base would find it easier to get around than an outsider might think, unless the base was very small and everyone knew who was permitted within the confines of the base.  People tended to assume that anyone inside had already been cleared by the guards.  Alex looked from side to side as he was led through a set of interlocking corridors, but saw nothing of great interest.  The interior designer had gone for boring, rather than anything more spectacular.  That, too, was fairly typical of secret bases.

They stepped into a small conference room and Alex was waved to a seat.  The conference room was nothing more than a table, with a jug of water and a handful of glasses, surrounded by five other people.  They looked up as he entered and some of them smiled, but most of them looked tired and nervous.  Alex guessed that they’d been summoned on very short notice as well and started to realise that something was definitely up.  No one would have summoned them at such short notice for anything other than a real emergency.  Their emergency drills were always pre-planned to avoid causing disruption to schedules.

“Please be seated,” the grey man said.  “My name is Tony Jones, special advisor to the President.”  He paused to allow that to sink in.  “You have all been summoned here to serve on…ah, a task force investigating a new situation.  You will be expected to spend at least a month in lockdown at a classified location, perhaps longer, and full security requirements will be observed.  Anyone who discloses information relating to this…ah, project will be charged with breach of official security and spend the rest of their lives in Leavenworth.  If you’ll read the documents and release forms in front of you…”

Alex looked down at the small folder.  He’d seen release documents before.  “If you want to leave now, you may do so,” Jones concluded.  “If not, sign the documents and pass them over here.”

There was no point, Alex knew, in asking questions.  They wouldn’t be told anything else until they signed their lives – at least for a month – away.  He skimmed the document quickly, just in case, but there were no real surprises.  The signer agreed to complete nondisclosure without prior permission, which could be obtained from the White House.  That meant Cabinet-level, if not the President himself.  A month on a secure base didn’t have to be boring.  Besides, it was now clear that his superiors had  handpicked him for the task.

He signed with a flourish and passed the paper over to Jones.

“Thank you all,” Jones said, when they had all signed.  There had been no questions.  “I will make introductions first.  Ben Santini, military adviser; Alex Midgard, USAF Foreign Technology Division; Jane Hatchery, medical researcher; Neil Frandsen, advanced propulsion specialist; Gayle Madison, communications and cultural specialist – and, finally, Steve Taylor, Intelligence Analyst.  Welcome to this safe house.”

He sighed.  “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll be blunt,” he continued.  He sounded, Alex realised, like a man who didn’t believe what he was saying.  “Last night, a…structured craft of unknown origin crashed outside Schriever Air Force Base.”

It was Gayle who spoke first.  “This is a joke, right?”

Oddly, her words seemed to give Jones courage.  “No,” he said, grimly.  “The crash site was secured by the base security team, who made the preliminary assessment of the craft.  They found bodies that were…ah, not human.  They found bodies from at least two alien races present within the craft.”

Alex went numb with shock.  He’d believed in UFOs ever since he was a kid, believed in them to the point that he’d joined the USAF and found himself streamlined into the Foreign Technology Division, yet somewhere along the way he’d lost the sense of wonder.  The USAF collected UFO reports without quite knowing what to do with them, because most UFOs were actually misidentifications or secret military aircraft.  Alex – granted a security clearance that civilian UFO researchers didn’t know existed – had succeeded in identifying most ‘unknown’ UFOs as being civilian sightings of classified military aircraft.  The wonder had faded away…but there were still some reports that he hadn’t been able to identify at all.

The Foreign Technology Division had taken an interest, of course.  If the UFOs were real, someone was flying them over American territory – and that was a hostile act.  If they were Chinese or Russian spy planes, or even something from a more…exotic origin, they had to be identified.  They had been delighted to pass the job to Alex, who had actually wanted to do it; most Foreign Technology Division researchers regarded UFO research as the kiss of death to their careers.  Alex hadn’t cared.  All he cared about was solving the mystery.

Jones stood up and tapped a remote control, activating an overhead projector.  “The…ah, alien craft was detected on radar as it fell out of the sky,” he said.  “It did not show up before it ran into trouble – as yet, we don’t know why – and the radar operator scrambled a recovery team.  An NBC team cleaned the crash site after the craft was moved to a nearby location, where it was transported to a classified location.  The news was passed rapidly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and from him to the President, who was woken in the middle of the night.  He wrote out an executive order authorising the creation of a tiger team to examine the wreckage of the craft and what it means for us.”

“It means that aliens have been watching us,” Alex said.  He was familiar with some of the installations at Schriever Air Force Base.  There weren't many places that were more secret – or important.  “Sir…what does the public know?”

“Nothing, as yet,” Jones said, shortly.  “We believe that the crash was reported as a light aircraft crash – we’ve registered it as such – and…well, that’s not important enough to attract attention.  We suspect that some news will start leaking out sooner rather than later – we can’t put the entire base into lockdown – but the President has ordered a complete news blackout until we can get to grips with the situation.”

“They’re not friendly,” Santini said.  He was a tall man, with dark hair and powerful muscles, who would have been handsome, were it not for the scar covering his right cheek.  His voice was gruff and no-nonsense.  “If they’re sneaking around near one of our most vital facilities, they’re not being friendly at all.  We need to start making preparations for an invasion.”

Jones looked, if possible, even paler.  “We don’t know that they’re coming to invade,” he pointed out.  “They might be friendly.”

“If they were friendly,” Santini argued, “then why don’t they land in front of the White House, or the Kremlin, or in London, or somewhere that isn’t of vital military importance?”

“The White House is closed airspace,” Alex said.  He’d wondered about that himself.  “If they flew into Washington, they’d have fighter jets on their tail before they could land and meet the President.  The last thing they might want is to be shot down by paranoid defenders.”

“Then they could contact us and arrange a meeting directly,” Santini countered.  “I really don’t like the implications of them sneaking around one of our bases – and particularly not that one.”  He looked over at Jones.  “What sort of precautions are we taking, sir?”

“The President has ordered a low-level alert over most of our airbases and other defence installations,” Jones said.  “We were preparing for the annual exercise in any case, so we have an excuse to make all kinds of military manoeuvres without attracting much attention from the press.  We’ll intermix it with reports that the CIA has picked up warnings about another terrorist plot and use that to justify putting various bases on a combat footing.  In the long term…”

He shook his head.  “That’s for you people to advise,” he concluded.  “We don’t know what we’re facing.”

Alex looked down at his hands.  “We need to tell everyone,” he said, slowly.  “We need to warn them about the aliens.”

“That would cause a panic,” Jones said.  “The President is very keen to avoid a panic.”

“Speaking for myself,” Neil Frandsen added, “keeping the crashed ship a secret could only be beneficial to us.  A craft capable of interstellar travel…if we could reverse-engineer it and put them into production ourselves, what couldn’t we do?”

“He has a point,” Santini said.  “If the aliens don’t know we have the craft…”

Alex shook his head.  “If we lost a JSF from one of our carriers over Iran, would we conclude that the craft was smashed to pieces and the pilot was dead, or would we attempt to rescue the pilot – or at least confirm his death?”

He leaned forward.  “The aliens already know that they’ve lost a craft,” he said.  “The presence of one craft implies others – others still out there in alien hands.  As I see it, assuming the aliens are hostile, they’ve just lost their cloak of secrecy.  That gives them only a handful of choices.  They can back off, they can make contact with us, they can continue with their original plan – whatever it was – or they can attack at once.  The first attack wave might be on its way to Earth now.

“And there are political implications,” he added.  “What will happen if the news gets out that the President ordered this clear and present danger concealed from the public – and the rest of the world?”

“Let the President worry about that,” Jones advised, dryly.  “If you wish to argue for full disclosure, I will take a note to the President about it.  For the moment, however, the President’s decision stands.”

“There is another issue,” Jane Hatchery said.  “I’ve seen movies suggesting that we could catch alien diseases from the release of alien biological matter into our atmosphere.  I know that scientifically it’s unlikely, but what precautions have been taken to prevent mass infection?”

Jones looked oddly relieved to get that question.  “The NBC team used flamethrowers and…sanitised the remains of the crash site,” he said.  “It’s true that some alien biological material might have escaped, but we don’t think that it will pose a threat.  Once the alien bodies have been examined, we should be able to make a more informed judgement.”

He scowled.  “For the moment, everyone who had contact with the alien craft has gone into a biological warfare quarantine ward as a precaution,” he added.  “I hope that you can clear them soon, Doctor.  We need to know if the aliens are capable of tolerating our atmosphere…”

“To see if Earth is any use to them,” Alex said.

“Exactly,” Jones agreed.  He clicked the remote control and displayed an image of the alien craft.  The scale on the display suggested that it wasn't much bigger than a small luxury jet.  It was definitely larger than a fighter jet, yet smaller than a massive C-5 Galaxy or another heavy transport.  “Now, this craft…”

***
The remainder of the day had passed slowly.  Alex had expected that they would be transported to the research site at once, but the military had a hundred and one briefings to give them first.  There was no plan to deal with alien contact – or, at least, no overall plan; Alex had suggested developing one, but his superiors had nixed the idea – and it was starting to look as if someone was making it up as he went along.  There was little for Alex to argue with – whoever was doing it had clearly thought about the implications – yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in a race against time.  After the briefings had concluded, he found himself wandering the house until he found himself in an observatory, looking up at the stars.

They had been a disappointment to the small boy who had dreamed of alien life.  Mars and Venus were barren of life, the space program had stalled after Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon and most of the people who claimed to have seen aliens were lying or deluded or drunk.  There were no alien spacecraft concealed in hidden bases, no massive City Destroyers hanging over Earth’s cities, no tiny grey aliens abducting humans from their beds and performing medical experiments on them.  Alex had investigated a handful of such claims and concluded, in all cases, that the witnesses were unreliable.  It wasn't a case of the witnesses lying – not intentionally – but a case of hypnotic regression being rather untrustworthy.  There were so many details of alien abductions in the public sphere that almost anyone could invent a scenario in their heads and – quite unwittingly – mislead the hypnotist.  

And now…and now, aliens were real.

He looked up at the darkening sky, with stars starting to appear high above, and wondered.  There had always been a number of UFO reports that had never been explained.  Could they have been real alien spacecraft?  It crossed his mind to wonder if it was all an exercise, but that seemed impossible.  No one would waste so much effort on a handful of people from disparate organisations.  No, it had to be real.

For the first time in his life, Alex Midgard looked up at the stars and felt fear.

Chapter Three

Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 3

The shaking of the helicopter throbbed through his entire body, but Alex managed to doze as the small team proceeded towards their base of operations.  Anticipation had made it hard to sleep, but he had long since mastered the trick of sleeping whenever he had a chance to catch some rest.  The blacked-out helicopter’s interior was boring and none of them could concentrate on their books, or small entertainment devices.  They’d have to abandon those when they arrived – it wasn't unknown for intelligence agencies to adapt a common MP3 player as a surveillance and recording device – and Alex was too keyed up to relax into a book.  Sleep was the only recourse.

“Two minutes,” Jones said, consulting a small terminal.  The team hadn’t been told precisely where they were going, although they had been told that it was somewhere isolated, just in case there was a biological threat from the crashed alien ship.  Alex had read enough position papers to guess that there might be a nuke emplaced in their destination to sterilize the entire area if something nasty did pop out of the alien bodies, an insight he hadn’t shared with the others.  It would only have upset them.

The helicopter touched down with a final shudder and shut down its engines.  The absence of the dull roar was almost disconcerting, despite the anticipation welling up within him.  For the first time in his life – in all of human history, unless some of the people who claimed to have encountered aliens had been telling the truth – humanity was going to come face-to-face with intelligent beings from another world.  He, Alex Midgard, was going to see an alien.  His legs felt unsteady after the long trip as he pulled himself to his feet, wincing at the bright sunlight burning in through the opening hatch.  The pair of soldiers outside waved the team out into the heat.  It looked as if they were somewhere in the desert.

New Mexico would be traditional, he thought wryly, as he looked around.  The base was tiny compared to some of the massive USAF bases he had served on throughout his career.  There was a pair of massive hangars, a small barracks…and little else, apart from a surprisingly long runway.  The whole area had a faintly desolate look, as if it had been abandoned for several years or perhaps placed on maintenance.  Alex had been in the air force long enough to know that there were dozens of bases scattered around the country that had never been decommissioned or sold to the highest bidder, places that could be reactivated with a few months notice.  Several of them had been reactivated after 9/11, but others had been kept on the sidelines.  What they could see of their new home – at least for the next month – might be only the tip of the iceberg.

“This way, sir,” one of the soldiers said.  Alex studied the uniform and frowned to himself.  He didn’t know much about the minutia of the Army, but it struck him that the soldier was an odd combination of careless and very careful.  His uniform looked as if he hadn’t bothered to change, his cheeks were unshaven…yet he held himself like a front-line combat soldier.  Alex guessed that the soldiers were actually a crack Special Forces unit assigned to the base and ordered to pretend that they were a reservist unit; he wondered, vaguely, if they knew what they were protecting.

The air was hot enough that stepping into the hangar was something of a relief.  He looked around, expecting to see a crashed UFO right in front of him, but the massive hangar was empty, although there were marks on the ground suggesting that something heavy had been dragged into the building.  The soldiers led them right towards a small cubicle set into one wall and opened the door, revealing an elevator large enough to take the entire group.  It was a barren chamber and Alex was glad when the doors opened again, revealing a man wearing a USAF Colonel’s uniform.

“Welcome to Area 52,” the officer said.  “My name is Colonel William Fields, commander of this base.  We have a short security briefing to attend and then I’ll take you to see the big discovery.”

Alex smiled to himself.  He’d thought that Jones had been joking when he’d announced – deadpan – that they weren't going to Area 51, on the grounds that Area 51 was a paranoid fantasy created to hide the existence of another base, Area 52.  The entire team had had enough briefings to last them for years, but there was no avoiding it.  The military machine, at least in Alex’s experience, preferred to repeat things time and time again, just to make sure that they were understood.

The briefing room turned out to be a small conference room.  It looked surprisingly primitive, as if it had been built back in the fifties and never redesigned since then.  A handful of computers, looking out of place, stood against one wall; another held a drinks cabinet and a water cooler.  A third wall held a set of plans, presumably of the base itself.  There was a faintly musty smell in the air, despite the efforts of a pair of air conditioners, suggesting that the base had only recently been reactivated.  Alex suspected – looking at Fields – that the Colonel had either been given charge of the base as a way of keeping him away from anything important, or that he was a reservist assigned to the base, at least in theory.  It must have been a shock to discover that his base had suddenly become the most important place on the planet.

“Please be seated,” Fields said.  He nodded to Jones.  “This base, recently re-designated as Area 52, was built back in the 1960s to serve as a secondary base for U2 and Blackbird flights over the Soviet Union.  It never actually served in such a role and was transformed into a small training facility in the eighties, before being placed on maintenance following the end of the Cold War.  9/11 saw the base being temporary reactivated to serve as an emergency biological warfare centre.  It would have been used as a place to hold infected personnel and – hopefully – find a cure.  The base, again, has never actually served in such a role and was re-deactivated two years ago.”

He looked around the table.  “You’ve all been briefed on security requirements, and should have been stripped of any electronic devices that can be used to communicate, so I’ll keep this brief,” he continued.  “You are here for a month, unless you receive special permission to exit early.  You are not to go to Level 0 – ground level – without prior permission from Mr Jones or myself.  You have clearance to visit anywhere on Levels 1 to 6; please bear in mind that Level 7 is off-limits at all times.”

Jane broke the brief silence.  “What’s on Level 7?”

“Various things concerning the safety of the base,” Fields said, curtly.  “Only authorised staff members are allowed to visit Level 7.”

He pointed towards the plans on the wall.  “I advise you to study them carefully,” he said.  “Level 1 is the underground hangar; your…object of study is there.  Level 2 consists of mainly biological research laboratories.  Parts of Level 2 are sealed off, requiring special permission to enter, but you’ll get a briefing on that later.  Levels 3 and 4 are research laboratories, Level 5 is living quarters and Level 6 holds the command centre and other essentials.  You’ll pick it up very quickly so I won’t go into more detail.

“We are under a full lockdown protocol here, so please bear in mind that every email you send will be read by Mr Jones or myself before it is allowed out of the buffer,” he added.  “There are no facilities for making telephone or video calls to anyone.  If you have questions about any messages you want to send, run them past us and we’ll let you know.  The President’s orders were quite explicit.”

Alex listened thoughtfully.  Fields had been a good choice on the part of the President, or whoever had chosen him for the role.  He wouldn’t allow anyone to break the security regulations and, knowing what he was sitting on, Alex couldn’t blame him.  Most governmental secrets were boring, or only interesting to specialists, but a crashed alien spacecraft would be of interest to the entire world.  He hoped that the security teams deployed defending the base had MANPAD units or other weapons, just in case the aliens attempted to recover their crashed ship.  Did the aliens know where the human race had hidden their prize?

“Thank you, Colonel,” Jones said.  He grinned nervously at his team.  “I think that we’re ready to see the crashed ship now.”

“Of course,” Fields said.  “If you’d like to follow me…?”

Alex couldn’t have been kept away by wild buffaloes, or even armed guards.  Fields led them through a set of bland corridors, without even a handful of children’s pictures to brighten up the place, and into a small room.  A pair of soldiers stood there and watched as Fields used a small ID Card to open a heavy door and allow them into the underground hangar.  The light streaming out was blinding, but Alex couldn’t have turned his gaze away if he had tried.  The alien craft held his attention and refused to let go.

Part of his mind whispered about how the entire hangar deck was an elevator, and how the crashed UFO had been lowered into the underground base, but he barely heard it.  The alien craft dominated the entire room.  Just looking at it sent chills running down his spine, a sense of…unreality that refused to fade.  If he’d seen it, even without the prior briefings, he would have known that it wasn't human.  The proportions were subtly wrong.  Alex had seen fighter jets produced by a dozen different countries and they had all had some things in common, but the technology and design philosophy of the alien craft was completely different.  The USAF had been trying to produce flying saucers – a team the USAF had come to detest back in the fifties – for years, yet they had never succeeded.  The alien designers unquestionably had.

It wasn't a standard flying saucer, or a black triangle.  Alex was almost relieved.  Either of those two types would have meant that people he had dismissed as kooks had been telling the truth all along.  The alien craft was a massive silvery almond, with a tiny pair of stubby wings at the rear of the craft.  It was slightly smaller than a Lear jet, yet somehow it looked larger, as if it loomed in his eyes.  He hadn’t realised that he was stepping forward until he looked up at the craft, feeling suddenly very mortal compared to the alien craft.  Alex had never felt the same way when he had seen any human-built craft.  It was unquestionably alien.

“My God,” he said, barely aware that he was speaking aloud.  “What happened to it?”

The underside of the craft was badly mangled.  The crash had clearly been violent, yet somehow the damage wasn't as great as he had feared.  Alex had seen a hundred fanciful pictures depicting crashed UFOs being recovered by soldiers, but most of them had been patently absurd.  There was something almost noble about the alien craft, yet it had fallen from the heavens and come crashing down to Earth.  It belonged in space, he realised.  It had no place on the ground.  Up close, there was a weird taste in the air surrounding the craft, a hint of something beyond comprehension.  No one who saw the craft in person could doubt its origins.

He reached up to touch the hull and was surprised when his fingers skittered over the craft’s hull without touching it.  He recoiled from the feeling, yet pushed his fingers firmly against the hull until he felt warm metal.  How, he wondered, could it still be warm after two days?  Was it still powered, or was it somehow radiating heat – or radiation?  Was it a nuclear powered craft?

“We checked it for radiation as well as other surprises,” Fields said, when Alex asked.  The entire team was pouring over the hull, yet no one seemed to want to break the spell and step into the craft.  Who knew what the interior held?  “It doesn’t have more than the standard background radiation, which is rather interesting.”

“You’re telling me,” Neil Frandsen said.  “If it’s been in space, it should have been exposed to radiation from the sun, if nothing else.  We had to watch astronauts carefully for exposure to solar flares and other surprises.”

Alex watched as he stepped up to the gash in the hull and peered inside.  “Wow,” he said, simply.  “Come and take a look at this.”

The interior of the alien craft was…odd.  The sense of unreality only grew stronger as Alex pulled himself into the craft, peering around him with interest.  A strange light pulsed from the walls, illuminating the interior and throwing everything into sharp relief.  There were no chairs, or nothing he recognised as a chair, but dozens of strange machines built into the hull.  The most advanced fighter jet the USAF could produce was a modular creation, but the alien ship seemed to be all one item, everything somehow melded together perfectly.  Alex felt a wave of envy as Frandsen led the way towards the prow of the vessel, pushing aside a broken tissue of metal that threatened to block his path.

“This must be the control cabin,” he said, slowly.  “Alex, what do you make of that?”

The cockpit – or so Alex thought of it – looked like a fanciful image of a spacecraft cockpit from a child’s science-fiction book.  There were two chairs set up at the front of the ship, with chalk markers to show where the bodies had been before they had been removed, yet there was little else.  The control panels – or so he assumed they were – looked dark and silent.  The craft might still be illuminated, yet there was no other sign of life, as far as he could see.  He had to remind himself that might well mean nothing when alien technology was involved.  The craft might have an AI onboard that was carefully preparing its escape from confinement.  It was as good as any other theory.

“It’s strange,” he said, finally.  It wasn't that he didn’t trust Frandsen, but he didn’t want to say too much either, not when all of his impressions were so confused.  He felt his legs wobbling and hastened to scramble out towards the gash in the hull.  He needed a quiet sit down and a cup of very black coffee.  The sheer presence of the craft was so overwhelming that he started to wonder if he was imagining things.

He lowered himself out of the gash and felt nothing but relief when his feet touched the metal hangar deck.  It might have been primitive, yet it was human.  The others seemed to have had similar reactions, although Frandsen didn’t seem deterred by anything.  The chance to examine technology that had originated on another world was a dream come true for him.  For Alex, and most of the rest of the team, it was a possible threat.  How could humanity defend itself against a race that could cross light years effortlessly, when humanity could not even return to the moon?

“There was a considerable amount of debris collected at the crash site,” Fields was saying.  Alex barely heard him through the sound of blood rushing through his ears.  His own heartbeat was almost deafeningly loud.  “We’ve moved most of it to the research labs on the lower levels.  The bodies have been placed in Level 2 and are currently awaiting inspection.”

Alex felt dizzy again.  He wanted to see the alien bodies, to see how closely they matched the aliens humans had been reporting ever since the 1950s, but at the same time he wanted to collapse.  He wanted nothing more than sleep or a chance to collect his thoughts and work out what it all meant.  The presence of the alien craft preyed on his mind, disturbing him.  Something fundamental had changed in the way he viewed the universe.  The existence of alien life was now a chilling reality.

“Leave the bodies for the moment,” Frandsen said, firmly.  He was looking over at Jones.  “I must say, sir, that I won't make many discoveries on my own.  I’ll have to form a research team from my labs – hell, raid the Skunk Works and Phantom Works – and get them over here with a shitload of equipment.  Most of them will have security clearance already and those that don’t can be cleared.  I can get a list for you if you can get it expedited…”

“Get me the list,” Jones said.  He seemed to be half in shock.  It might have been the effect of the alien craft, or it might have been the discovery that Frandsen couldn’t take one look at the craft and solve all of its mysteries.  Alex had no illusions about the magnitude of the task ahead.  The aliens might be bound by the same laws of science that bound the human race, but their tech was so fundamentally different that unlocking any of it might take years.  “I’ll see about getting as many as possible cleared to come here.”

He looked down at the deck, well away from the alien craft.  “I think that we should all take a rest now,” he added.  He had to be suffering from the same cultural shock that was affecting Alex, or the remainder of the team.  “The Colonel can show us our rooms and we’ll continue the tour later.”

No one argued.  They were all wrapped up in their private thoughts.

Chapter Four

Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 3

The room was small, with a single bunk bed, a set of cupboards and a washbasin.  It was completely without character, apart from the two bags of clothes that someone had dumped at the end of the bed.  Alex didn’t have to look at them to know that they would be in his size, if not in his style.  The security requirements might verge on the far side of paranoid, yet they had to be honoured.  The base’s security personnel would have obtained clothing for him just to prevent him from bringing his own clothes into the base.  It seemed absurd…until one remembered how many devices could be concealed within one’s clothing.  Sometimes, there was no such thing as too few precautions.

He sat down on the bed – it was hard and lumpy, barely used – and felt himself starting to shake.  The alien craft had made a huge impact on his mind.  He wanted desperately to deny that it was real, yet he couldn’t lie to himself.  The alien craft was real, which meant that the aliens were real, which meant that the world had changed overnight.  He had always imagined that if he ever encountered real aliens, he would have faced them with calm dignity befitting a representative from his planet, but instead he wanted to curl up on the bed and push the world away.  The cultural shock had almost brought him to his knees.  What would it do to the remaining population of Planet Earth?

It was galling to admit it, but Jones had been right.  There would be panic in the streets if the alien presence became public, yet it wouldn’t be long before it did become public.  Jones might have been committed to enforcing the President’s decree of no disclosure – keeping the entire project under wraps and completely black – but Alex suspected that the final decision didn’t rest with him, or even the President himself.  There was a second factor here – the aliens themselves – and they might decide to take it public at any moment.  How could the President stop them from contacting Earth and demanding the return of their craft?

Alex had been barely out of preschool when an F-117 had been shot down over Kosovo.  The United States had rescued the pilot and demanded the return of the stealth aircraft, but not before the Russians had taken a careful look at the craft’s technology.  The aliens might demand that the United States return their craft or else…and, with their technology, the ‘or else’ was likely to be formidable.  Alex had read a hundred different versions of the aliens invading Earth and knew how effective control of the high orbitals could be.  A single asteroid could push the entire human race on the road to extermination.  They could pick their targets and bombard the planet at will.  If they demanded surrender, there might be no choice but to run up the white flag and bend over for them.  The Earth’s ability to wage war in space was very limited.  They’d have to hope that the aliens took one look and died laughing.

He checked the cabinets and found nothing, not even a candy bar left behind by the previous occupant, if there had been a previous occupant.  It was easy to believe that his room had never been touched until the base had suddenly found itself hosting a crashed alien spacecraft.  It had that musty air that seemed to hang in most of the base.  Area 52 – or whatever it had originally been designated – had been asleep for too long.  Alex pulled himself to his feet, checked the set of base plans on the tiny desk, and headed out of his room towards the common room.  There might be some coffee there.

The common room looked more like a ready room for pilots on a more average USAF base, although it lacked any pin-ups from later than 1970.  Alex had never heard of some of the women whose images were hanging from the wall, but he had to smile at how demur they were, compared to the outright pornography of his own era.  There was a large coffeepot in one corner, a set of comfortable chairs, and a modern-looking television mounted on the wall.  He wandered over to the coffeepot and checked it, before pouring himself a cup.  It was hot and very black, shocking him back to himself.  The daze that had fallen over him since he had seen the crashed ship faded away.

He picked up the remote control and flicked on the television, wondering what might be showing.  He flicked through a set of movies – he hadn’t liked them much when he’d seen them the first time – and a pair of pornographic movies from one of the pornographic satellite channels.  He was tempted to watch, but flicked instead to CNN, where a newsman was talking about the death of a well-known pop star.  Alex watched without much interest.  An old girlfriend of his had loved the star to the point where she sometimes pretended that she was sleeping with him, but Alex had rapidly learned to loathe him.  The death of the pop star – a result of drug abuse – left him cold.

“…Gathered outside the graveyard to bid their idol goodbye,” the newsman said.  Alex remembered joking with his friends about how they could tell when a newsman was lying – when their lips moved.  “The death of Eddie has been a tragedy for music lovers across the nation, who have joined together to wish Eddie a safe passage to the worlds beyond…”

“Most of the musicians play some kind of music,” Alex muttered, taking another sip of coffee.  He clicked the channel and moved over to Fox News.  “And now…?”

“Senator Harrington today said that he felt that the President’s reform campaign had gone too far and that he would oppose further reforms wherever necessary,” the newswoman said.  Unlike the CNN newsman, she was remarkably sexy, with long blond hair and open shirt.  “Harrington refers, of course, to the controversial reform program for schools across America proposed by President Chalk.  The White House has refused to comment.”

Alex rolled his eyes as the news rolled on.  There were more riots in Gaza, an energy crisis in Europe, more protests and demonstrations in the United States, threats of new taxes or reforms to older tax laws, economic disruptions caused by a recent default on the part of a Third World borrower, the campaign to select a new Secretary-General for the UN had bogged down…it was all so normal.  It was all so…typical.  Even the humorous report at the end – about a rabbit that had somehow managed to injure a man with a switchblade – was standard.  The world had changed and no one had even noticed!

“This coffee is foul,” Jones said, from behind him.  Alex refused to give him the satisfaction of jumping.  “Do you mind if I make a new pot?”

“Suit yourself,” Alex said, glancing down at his watch before remembering that he’d left his watch behind in Washington.  The clock on the wall suggested that he had been staring at the television for over thirty minutes.  “Look at the news!”

Jones frowned.  “There shouldn’t be anything about the…ah, crashed ship in it,” he said, shortly.  “What’s happening in the world today that compares to what we’re doing here?”

“Nothing,” Alex said.  He changed the channel again and found a baseball game underway.  “The entire world has changed and no one has even noticed!”

“That’s not a bad thing,” Jones said.  He finished cleaning the pot and poured more water and coffee into the machine.  “The longer we have to come to grips with what we’re dealing with, the easier it will be to convince the public that we know what we’re doing.”

“We don’t know what we’re doing,” Alex said, after a little while.  “What happens when the aliens declare themselves in public?”

“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” Jones said.  He poured himself a cup of coffee, added a surprising amount of milk, and leaned over to pick up the sugar.  “What do you think will happen when Joe and Jane Public hear about the alien craft?”

He answered his own question.  “Panic, Alex,” he said.  “They will panic.  You saw how we reacted to the craft and we had time to brace ourselves.  The public…will remember all those moments from science-fiction – the White House getting blown to bits, the massive robot shutting down the world, tripods slicing their way through a Victorian army, giant centaurs marching through Washington – and will go completely mad.  We need time to prepare.”

Alex shook his head.  “I don’t think we’ll have time to prepare,” he said, glumly.  “We should get the panic over with now.”

“The President disagrees,” Jones said, mildly.  “And, seeing that he’s the President, what he says goes.”  He took another sip of his coffee and smiled in appreciation.  “Would you want to tell the public that aliens have been flying through our atmosphere for years – perhaps decades – and the only reason we even found out about it was when one of the craft suffered an accident and crashed, right in front of the most sensitive spot in the entire country?”

He shrugged.  “We need to give them some hope of a solution before we take it public,” he said.  “The fact that we are completely naked before them will not go down well with the public, let alone the rest of the world.”

Alex looked down into the dregs at the bottom of his cup.  “I take your point,” he said, unwillingly.  “As long as we’re preparing for trouble…”

“Oh, we’re preparing,” Jones assured him.  “I don’t know how much good it will do, but we’re preparing.”

Alex changed the subject.  “I’ve been looking at UFO reports ever since the Foreign Technology Division anointed me Spooky and charged me with collecting and analysing them,” he said.  “If even a tiny handful of those reports were real alien spacecraft, the aliens have been here for decades – and, if some of the abduction reports are to be believed, have been committing acts of war against us.”

He remembered, bitterly, the frustration when he couldn’t solve a mystery – and the delight when he could.  The vast majority of UFO cases were easy to crack and his clearance, allowing him access to classified files, made it easier to locate UFO reports that were caused by classified USAF aircraft.  The civilian researchers might follow up their own line of enquiry, yet lacking that access meant that they lacked Alex’s insight.  The vast majority of their ‘unidentified’ reports had been identified.  Alex had come to believe that if he had been allowed to share his findings with civilian groups, the vast majority of UFO cases could be cleared.  It was, like so many other things, Not Allowed.  The military preferred to have UFO researchers looking at the skies rather than into secret military hangars.

“Acts of war,” Jones repeated.  “Do you believe the reports?”

Alex hesitated.  “The early reports – people like George Adamski – were mainly nonsense,” he said.  “Their reports of what there was in space – they claimed cities on the Moon or Venus – were disproved by our own space program, although it is possible that the aliens lied to them.  They rarely stood up well to serious researchers and most of them have been forgotten now.  The later brood – the abducted humans – claimed that they’d been taken by the aliens and used for medical research.  There were plenty of similarities between the different reports and…well, most of the victims went through a great deal of trauma…”

He shook his head.  “But hypnosis is unreliable,” he continued.  “Anyone who studied the issue – like me, or even an avid watcher of The X-Files – would know enough to construct a scenario that would seem convincing, without having any actual basis in reality.  It’s quite possible that the abduction experiences are the mind’s attempt to cover up childhood sexual abuse or worse and sorting out the real cases from the downright absurd is impossible.  I haven’t had much direct experience, but I do keep tabs on what the civilians are doing and they’re getting nowhere.”

Jones frowned.  “No direct proof?”

“No,” Alex said.  “A UFO researcher in England suggested – quite seriously – using Special Forces to watch the houses of known victims to see what happened, if anything.  Researchers have placed cameras in their houses, but they always record the victims turning them off before an abduction, or they simply fail.”  He snorted.  “There was even a weird case of an abduction that was supposed to have been witnessed by the then-Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

“And it never became public?”  Jones asked.  “No one ever followed up on it?”

“Hundreds of researchers tried to follow up on it,” Alex confirmed.  “They got nowhere.”

He poured himself another cup of coffee.  “Neil wants to get some other technical personnel involved,” he said.  “I want to make enquiries with my correspondents, see if there are any UFOs being reported over Colorado – or here, for that matter.  I’m supposed to get copies of all UFO reports made to the USAF – that’s hundreds every month – and an increase might show us if the aliens are hunting for their lost craft.”

“Smart,” Jones said.  “We can have the reports forwarded to you here.”

Alex barely heard him.  “We get a handful of odd reports every year,” he said.  “Some radar locks that show, briefly, a solid object.  Sightings made by pilots and other trained personnel.  We even scrambled fighters more than once to challenge objects that vanished before we could catch them.  I could account for some of them being stealth aircraft or experimental designs, but not all of them.  How long have the aliens been here?”

Jones considered it.  “When did the UFO craze start?”

Alex laughed.  “There were reports of flying airships – the Great Airship Scare – in the late 1890s,” he said.  “There were bizarre reports from the First and Second World Wars.  During the Cold War, we had reports of Ghost Rockets over Scandinavia – those were later explained as being Russian experimental missiles – and the first people claiming to have been contacted by aliens.  And then we had the abductions and increasingly complex reports of crop circles, cattle mutilation and UFOs that killed or injured people…”

“Point taken,” Jones said.  “They might have been watching us for years.”

“It doesn’t help that for every serious UFO researcher, there are at least ten kooks and crazy bastards who think that we’re covering up UFOs from Roswell and hundreds of other UFO crash sites,” Alex continued.  “Every now and then, someone out to make a quick buck will produce a book or documentary claiming to expose government secrets regarding UFOs.  The Day After Roswell was a pack of lies from start to finish, claiming that the Earth has been at war with aliens since before Roswell…and that all of the vital advances made in science came from technology recovered after that so-called UFO crashed.  My more…public counterparts are deluged with crazies convinced that we have dead aliens on ice somewhere and…”

Jones laughed.  “Do we have dead aliens in the Pentagon?”

“Not as far as I know,” Alex said.  “I looked into Roswell when I took the job – no one tried to prevent me from studying the crash – and discovered that it was nothing more than a high-altitude aerial balloon.  It doesn’t stop people trying to make money from UFOs – Roswell has a UFO festival every year – and it doesn’t convince the nuts that we’re not covering up anything, apart from our own secret projects.  Hell, sir, some of my superiors prefer people thinking about UFOs.  It keeps them from wondering just what wonders we might have hidden away at Groom Lake and other places.”

“Area 51,” Jones confirmed.  “Do we have dead aliens there?”

Alex opened his mouth to rebut the suggestion, and then realised that he was being teased.  He’d been to Groom Lake AFB several times in his career, but he hadn’t been allowed into some of the more secret parts of the complex, even with his clearance.  The President himself wouldn’t be allowed access, unless there was some compelling reason to allow him entrance, and everyone who worked permanently at the base ended up being watched for the rest of their lives.  If there were dead aliens there, no one had shown him…

And there was little point in a cover-up.  The reports of a UFO crash at Roswell faltered on that alone.  Why would anyone keep it secret for over seventy years?  The alien threat wouldn’t have gone away, or been forgotten about in that time.  It would have altered the course of history itself.

“No,” he said, finally.  He stood up and switched off the television.  “Shall we go see the aliens?”

Jones nodded.  “Neil has decided to remain with the craft and plan out how it is going to be dissected,” he said.  “The others are trying to snatch some rest before coming face-to-face with real aliens.  Seeing the craft for the first time…”

“Culture shock,” Alex said.  He frowned as something occurred to him.  “You know, back when Cortez was invading Mexico, there were people who claimed that the Mexicans couldn’t actually see his ships.  They were so far beyond their life experience that they couldn’t grasp their existence.  Aliens are part of our culture, but what if…?”

“We’d recognise an alien mothership if we saw it,” Jones said.  His voice was doubtful.  “Wouldn’t we?”

“I wish I knew,” Alex said.  “For all we know, the aliens are hanging right over our heads, or are based on the moon…which might be a colossal alien spacecraft itself.  Neil Armstrong was supposed to have seen UFOs on the moon…”

“I think you get paid too much,” Jones said.  He put down his coffee cup with a thump.  “Come on.  Let’s go wake up the others.”

Chapter Five

Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 3

It was a more subdued group that assembled on Level 2, facing an intimidating sign that warned of BIOLOGICAL HAZARD and detailed, in extraordinary terms, the level of precautions that even casual visitors needed to take.  It was a heavy door, capable of standing off an antitank missile – or so Colonel Fields claimed – and its mere presence underlined the dangers of biological warfare.  Alex had read accounts of how the Russians had accidentally released dozens of different viruses into the local area while developing their biological warfare program.  It still rankled with him – and hundreds of other Western analysts – that despite promising otherwise, the Russians had continued their biological warfare program, a program that might well be capable of exterminating the human race.  It was no wonder that intelligence agencies spent sleepless nights worrying about terrorists gaining access to Russian biological weapons.  Fanatics willing to die wouldn’t hesitate to unleash a plague that even Stalin would have balked at deploying.

Alex had never been in a biological lab before, but the outline was familiar enough.  There was an external-internal area for casual visitors, where they could observe the procedures without having to don heavy biological protection suits and other precautions, and an internal area that was sealed up tighter than a spaceship in orbit.  There were no frills inside the viewing compartments, no coffeepots or other signs of human life.  It was as cold and sterile as the grave.  Ominous notices on the wall warned of other possible dangers and promised dire retribution to anyone who attempted to pass through the airlocks without permission.  Alex took heed.  He’d seen enough movies about biological warfare to know that none of the warnings were exaggerated.

“We don’t have the bodies in any of the public examination rooms,” Colonel Fields said, somewhat regretfully.  “The NBC team that brought them here placed them in the storage room until we brought in a team of qualified experts.  We’ll have to suit up and go into the sealed area.”

Alex heard Santini groan, but he didn’t understand why until they stepped into a dressing room.  It reminded him of a swimming pool changing area, except that it was clearly intended for both sexes…and there were more ominous notices on the wall, warning him to ensure that he had gone to the toilet before donning the protective outfit.  Smaller notices warned him to report any cuts or damages to the outfit at once, reminding him that the sterile environment could be compromised quite easily.  Alex remembered the Russian scientist who had accidentally infected himself with one of the nastier viruses and shivered.  An accident could wipe out the entire team.

He kept his back turned as he donned the suit, feeling odd as he pulled it over his suit.  It felt as if he should be naked – it was already feeling uncomfortably hot – but Colonel Fields was pulling it over his own uniform.  He checked his pockets, but apart from a single picture of his ex-girlfriend, there was nothing that could have torn a hole in the suit.  The ominous warning signs insisted that he check twice, so he obeyed.  There was no point in taking chances.

“Let me check the suits,” Jane Hatchery said.  Alex had barely heard from her before now – she hadn’t seemed very interested in the crashed ship once she had recovered from the culture shock – but now she was definitely taking an interest.  Like the others, she was looking at her own personal holy grail – the chance to examine creatures that had been born on another world.  NASA might have claimed to have found traces of life on Mars or in a meteor – and scientists had speculated for years that there was life under the ice on the gas giant moons – yet no one had seen a real alien, until now.  Alex had seen footage that claimed to be from Roswell, but he’d dismissed it.  It couldn’t have been real.

The suit was growing more uncomfortable by the minute – it was far too hot already and he felt sweat trickling down his back – but he ignored the sensation as Colonel Fields opened the airlock, waving them into a darkened room illuminated by dim red light.  The airlock swung closed behind them with an ominous thud, leaving them in the darkness.  A moment later, there was a flash of brilliant light, a shower of liquid from high above, and then a hiss as air was pumped through the chamber.

“Please be patient,” Fields said.  His voice sounded odd through his own mask.  “This is the sterilisation process.  The light should have killed any germs on the suits.”

Alex waited as patiently as he could, feeling the suit shifting around him as the process was slowly completed, until finally the second airlock door swung open.  The room beyond looked just like a hospital operating room, apart from the dim red light beaming down from high above.  Alex blinked as his eyes struggled to grow accustomed to it, wondering why they hadn’t used normal light.  It was probably intended to help keep certain forms of life alive – bright light could kill some viruses – but it added an ominously unsettling air to the room.  It reminded him of some of the odder alien abduction accounts.  There were people who believed that the UFOs were operated by the government for carrying out secret medical experiments on American citizens.

Fields stepped around an operating table, nodding towards where the bullet-proof glass separating the sealed compartments from the observation compartments had to be – Alex couldn’t see out of the chamber in the gloom – and led them towards a second hatch set into the wall.  He keyed a console on one side of the hatch and it hissed open, revealing a second darkened chamber beyond.  There were a handful of small surgical beds, like Alex would find in a standard hospital and several machines with purposes that he could only guess at, but it wasn't them that held his attention.  He found himself staring at the half-seen bodies lying on the beds before Fields waved them closer.  The sense of unreality welled up again as he stepped forwards.  The aliens were real.

He couldn’t have sworn as to how he was so certain.  The aliens were humanoid, yet he’d seen more alien humanoid aliens in countless science-fiction films.  It was their very…lack of real strangeness that convinced him that they were real, a faint sense that he was looking at something out of this world.  Memories surfaced within his mind.  He’d been nine years old on a rocky beach playing in a pool when one of the rocks had moved.  In the moments between seeing the rock move and realising that he was looking at a giant crab, he’d had the sense of something truly alien.  It had brought out the arachnophobia in him.  Somehow, he felt the same way about the aliens.  They were convincing in a way that science-fiction aliens were not.

“This is EBE1,” Fields said, slowly.  The Colonel sounded awed, but he’d had a day to get used to the idea of aliens.  Alex couldn’t have spoken for the world.  The sense of something utterly alien was overpowering.  “That’s Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.  One of the NBC team gave them that designation.”

“Smart,” Jane Hatchery said.  She had managed to hang on to her professionalism; indeed, she sounded as if she couldn’t wait to whip out a scalpel and start dissecting the alien.  “I’ll want those team members for the research program here.”

Alex barely heard her.  He was staring at EBE1.

He’d expected little grey aliens.  The Greys had been so predominate among alien encounters and abduction reports that it seemed inconceivable that there was not even the slightest connection with reality.  The Greys had entered popular culture; there were religions devoted to them, entire groups of people claiming to have been abducted and anally probed by them…hell, insurance firms were even offering to insure people against being abducted by them!  EBE1 was smaller than the average human, but it wasn't grey.  Even in the dim red light, it was apparent that it had a light yellow skin tone.  It was very far from human.

It was thin, almost like a starving teenager, wearing a silvery one-piece suit that covered most of its body.  Its head was massive, out of proportion to the rest of its body, with two very dark eyes and a tiny mouth.  It seemed to lack both a nose and ears, or hair.   He leaned closer, staring into sightless eyes, and shivered.  The eyes were disturbing even in a dead alien.  What would a live one look like in person?  His eyes fell to the creature’s hands and he frowned.  They were long and thin, perfect for manipulating even the most complex machinery, yet there was something disturbing about them too.  He remembered ET and realised why he saw the alien as disturbing.  It might have passed for a friendly alien in bad light…

They could be the Greys, he thought, and shivered again.  He knew far too well how unreliable hypnotic regression actually was.  The victims of alien abductions might have accidentally misled the researchers, or drawn images from popular culture, or perhaps they’d seen the aliens onboard their ships, in bad light.  They might have seen them as grey, rather than pale yellow – there was something strange about their skin tone as well – and reported them as such.  If abductions were real, what else might be real too?

He wanted to touch the alien, yet somehow he couldn’t bring himself to lay a finger on the dead body.  It was almost like trying to touch a spider.  He’d seen people who’d picked up live spiders and other unpleasant creatures, even allowed them to run around on their bodies, but Alex had never been able to do anything like that.  There was something in his mind preventing him from touching the alien.  It was just too different to be tolerated.

“They were carrying a handful of odd tools and other devices,” Fields said, in response to a question from Jane.  “We sterilised them and put them in one of the lower levels for later analysis.  We haven’t attempted to undress them or anything beyond the damage already inflicted on their clothing by the crash.  We decided we’d wait for the experts before proceeding.  However…”

He led them over to a second table.  “This is EBE4,” he added.  “As you can see, it appears to be a different species entirely.”

Alex had heard that before, from Jones, and had tended to discount it.  There had been dozens of different aliens reported by humans ever since the UFO craze had begun, but he suspected that most of them were hoaxes or misidentifications.  How could the Earth be visited by blonde blue-eyed Nordic aliens, small savage beasts and high-minded angelic entities, to say nothing of the enigmatic Greys, all at the same time?  There couldn’t be so many cultures so close to Earth, could there?  SETI had never picked up an alien signal – or at least it had never picked up anything that could be proved to be an alien signal – and if there were so many races nearby, Alex tended to regard that as unbelievable.  Conspiracy theorists had claimed that the Government was controlling SETI and using it to cover up alien transmissions, but Alex knew better.  It was far more likely that there was only one race near Earth, if there were any at all.

The second entity put the lie to that thought.  It was massive, well over six feet tall, and even dead, it looked daunting.  It was humanoid, but had massive muscular arms and legs, as well as a face that seemed to be half-bone.  Merely looking at the alien’s face made him feel sick – it looked as if half the flesh had been melted off the face, revealing white bone – yet he was sure that was natural for the alien.  It was injured – its legs looked badly damaged – but Alex had the odd impression that the alien wasn't suffering.  He found himself wondering if it was really dead and nearly stepped backwards before he caught himself.  It had to be dead.

Its eyes were small and piggish, set within the bone.  It had no hair – like the first alien – but there were hints of shell or bone on the back of its head.  It reminded him of the crab he’d remembered earlier and the shell that protected its innards; the alien seemed to be covered in natural armour.  Its hands were rough, large enough to crush his head in a single squeeze.  He hadn’t seen anything like that outside a handful of very tough soldiers who’d spent years building their bodies up into peak condition.  The alien had sharp fingernails and tattoos on the back of its hands.  There was no way to know why it wore those.  He looked back at the first alien and frowned.  EBE1 had no fingernails at all.

“My God,” Gayle said.  She sounded terrified.  “I wouldn’t want to meet that up a dark alley.”

“There are nastier things wearing human forms up some dark places,” Santini said.  He didn’t seem so daunted by the alien, but then, he was one of the toughest soldiers in the world.  Alex wondered if he was already sizing the alien up as a potential enemy.  It was hard to imagine EBE1 posing a threat, but far too easy to see EBE4 being armed and dangerous.  it could have stepped out of an alien invasion movie.  All it was lacking was a heavy energy weapon .  “For all we know, the creature is a pacifist.”

“A carnivore,” Jane said, dispassionately.  “Unless it comes from a completely different evolutionary path to humanity, it evolved to rend and tear its meat, just like us.  Humans have teeth evolved to eat meat and vegetables, but this alien has only fangs.  I wonder what it eats normally.”

“Us, perhaps,” Gayle said.  She still sounded nervous.  “Wasn't there a movie about alien cannibals invading the Earth?”

Alex could have named five off the top of his head, but he had other concerns.  “How many different types of alien were on the crashed ship?”

“Two,” Jones answered.  He’d taken one look at EBE4 and retreated to the corner.  Alex didn’t envy him.  He was the one who would have to brief the President.  Somehow, he suspected that the alien would make a bigger impact on anyone who saw him in person.  “There were three of the first type and two like…”

He waved a hand at EBE4.  “There were two like that one,” he said, catching himself.  His voice sounded more than a little shaky.  “That proves that two different alien races are probing the Earth.”

“Maybe not,” Jane said.  “For all we know, one of them is male and the other is female.”

“They’re so different,” Santini pointed out.  “How can they be from the same race?”

It was Gayle who answered, her voice flat and dispassionate.  “On average, men are generally stronger and faster than women,” she said.  “When pregnant, women rapidly become less capable of looking after themselves, or defending themselves against attack.  A woman goes through a rapid series of changes after she reaches maturity, but a man does not.  Primitive societies tended to form communities that kept women protected as they would bear the next set of young, which they then justified with religion and other such outdated crap.  The aliens may have something comparable to that in their biological heritage.”

“Leave that for the moment,” Jones said.  “Doctor Hatchery, how long would it take you to confirm that there is no biohazard?”

“I’m not sure,” Jane admitted, finally.  “I can run through the standard tests, which would at least allow us to be reasonably certain that there is no danger, but these are aliens and they may have unexpected surprises within their bodies.”

“I can give you one right now,” Steve Taylor said.  They all turned to look at him, his face hidden behind the mask.  “What killed them?”

“The crash, of course,” Fields said, puzzled.  “The Base Security Team didn’t shoot them down as they emerged from their craft.”

Alex saw what Taylor was driving at.  “The bodies are too intact,” he said.  “They crashed, but they should have been able to walk away from it.  Instead, they all died.”

“There have been cases of pilots crashing their aircraft and surviving,” Taylor agreed.  “There have been…incidents where pilots have been killed in crashes without apparent damage, but mostly the damage is obvious.  Why were the aliens killed if their craft survived surprisingly intact?”

“I don’t know,” Jones admitted.  He looked over at Jane.  “Make finding out what killed them your second priority, but concentrate on the biohazard threat.  It would be nice to know if we can avoid nuking this base to avoid a disease outbreak.”

“Understood,” Jane said, shortly.  She looked down at the body, already dissecting it in her mind’s eye.  “I’ll start work as soon as the NBC team is brought into the complex.”

“They’re on Level 4,” Fields said.

“A thought,” Alex said.  “Do we want to dissect the aliens?”

Jones gave him a puzzled look.  “How else do you intend to learn about them?”

“If one of our pilots was dissected, we’d be furious,” Alex said.  The American Public would go apeshit, although the response to beheaded hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan had been muted.  “What happens if the aliens take offence at our decision to cut open their friends and peer inside their bodies?”

“Point,” Jane agreed.  “I’ll stick to non-intrusive techniques at first, and then reconsider once we reach the limits of what they can teach us.”

“Don’t forget to stick a probe up its ass,” Santini added.  Alex couldn’t help himself.  He giggled, feeling the tension being slowly released.  “We have not yet reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us.”

“Shut up,” Jane said, not unkindly.

Chapter Six

Colorado Springs, USA
Day 6

Robin Lance was in heaven, or at least what she considered heaven, although she did know that many of her fellow teens would have considered being shut up in a military base to be a foretaste of hell.  It was true that some women in the US Military had had bad experiences, but it was also true that offenders were punished harshly and most female servicewomen had no better or worse experiences than their male counterparts.  She might have been in lockdown – which was a fancy term for being kept in confinement until her superiors decided what to do with her – but she’d been granted access to all of the radar data collected by the massive network surrounding the United States – and charged with detecting any further alien intrusions.  It was a task she took seriously.  The UFO had somehow slipped right through the electronic fence and even Robin, who paid as little attention as possible to current affairs, found that ominous.  She had a nasty suspicion that the only reason it had been detected was because its drive system had failed.

Colorado Springs – the famous NORAD – had been largely deactivated following the end of the Cold War, only to be reactivated from time to time to serve as a command and control facility for various American operations.  The President might no longer fly to NORAD in case of a nuclear war – the massive complex was too well known and almost certainly on the list of targets for a mass offensive – but it still served an important role.  It was also the ideal place to store a handful of personnel who’d seen too much and who also needed to work on the mountains of radar data collected and stored under the mountain.  Robin had been impressed with the massive computers and had examined the records carefully.  Every radar record the United States – and some of its allies – had made for the last fifteen years had been stored.

One of the problems with UFO investigations – one of her briefing officers had told her – was that radar tapes had been routinely wiped, overwritten or destroyed.  In the days before computers had become capable of storing so much data, there was simply too much information to be stored for long, not when the tapes were so expensive.  The conspiracy theorists – he’d told her with a wink – had sweated blood over the thousands of tapes that had gone missing, unaware that they were routinely rewritten or destroyed.  After 9/11, the USAF had started to store data for much longer periods, although even with modern computers, there was a massive backlog for researchers to sort through.  Without modern computers, Robin knew, it would have been completely impossible.

The problem was that radar tended to be an inexact science.  It was quite easy to get an inaccurate reading if the radar beam passed through transient atmospheric conditions, or even flights of birds or weather balloons.  The USAF joked about the kids who’d launched balloons into the air and triggered off a major security alert, but Robin no longer saw the funny side.  A transient contact, one that appeared and then disappeared, might just be written off, rather than being investigated.  The problem was that there were so many transient contacts on the records that, if all of them were assumed to be alien spacecraft, literally billions of UFOs had visited the Earth.  Robin knew that the simplest explanation – that the contacts were actually random weather conditions or flights of birds – was far more likely, but she couldn’t rule out a single contact.  Going through all of the contacts would take years.

She stared down at the keyboard and considered.  NORAD was equipped with quantum computers that were at least two generations ahead of civilian models, but even with the fantastic levels of computing power at her disposal, there seemed to be no way to speed up the process.  Or perhaps there was.  She knew when one alien spacecraft had visited Earth – the UFO that had crashed – and if there was anything odd on that day, it might signify a way of tracking the UFOs.

“Run program,” she said, as she tapped the final key.  It had taken nearly an hour to program in the search patterns.  A general search would have revealed thousands of false trails – laid by civilian and military aircraft – yet tightening the search patterns too far would have risked ignoring vital information.  It was a reverse of the standard search pattern, used to track aircraft back in time, and it was far more complex.  She couldn’t afford to ignore any possible contacts.  Tired, she stood up and staggered off towards the bathroom.  She needed to splash water on her face and perhaps drink a lake of coffee.

The program was still running when she finished washing her face and combed her hair, so she went down to the cafeteria to have a snack.  The quality of food in Cheyenne Mountain was somewhat variable - Schriever Air Force Base had had better food – but at least it beat MRE packs.  She took a plateful of eggs and bacon and found an empty table to sit at, ignoring the handful of young male officers who tried to draw her into conversation.  She could make a radar system sit up and beg, but a social life had never held much interest for her.  Besides, in her experience men wanted to talk about sport, guns and how great they were…and none of those were interesting.  She had never met a man who was her intellectual equal.

She finished the food, placed the dishes in the washing pile, and walked back to her study room.  The program had finished, she was relieved to see – even quantum computers had their limits – and she poured herself a mug of black coffee before sitting down and studying the results.  They were hardly a surprise.  There were thousands of transient contacts that had appeared, disappeared, and never been seen again.  One of them – she hoped – had to be the alien ship.  It was quite possible that many of them were the alien ship.  How fast could it travel?

Her fingers danced over the keyboard, looking for patterns.  She’d spent two days learning everything she could about UFOs and radar and she was attempting to duplicate a trick that a British UFO researcher had developed.  He’d taken a UFO report and a set of radar contacts and put them together, revealing that something had crossed the British mainland at a speed of around Mach Nine.  It was fast enough that Robin guessed that the whole thing had been written off.  As far as she knew, there was nothing in the American or British military that could move at such a speed, with the possible exception of the space shuttle.  The unknown craft remained a mystery.

The patterns slowly developed in front of her.  Robin’s talent wasn’t just operating radar – anyone could do that, with the right training - but in seeing patterns that few others could see.  It wasn't easy and she found herself wondering if she was imagining things, but as she studied the pattern, it became clear that there was a succession of odd contacts, coming in from the East Coast and arcing over towards Schriever Air Force Base, where the craft had met its fate.  Her fingers tapped in new commands, trying to refine the data.  It looked as if the craft had registered and then…simply vanished.  It was no wonder that the USAF hadn’t launched interceptors to challenge the mystery craft.  No one had realised that it was a craft.

Robin had seen radar data recovered from the Iraqis after Baghdad had fallen.  The city had been hit heavily by F-117 stealth fighters – somehow, the degree of effort put into degrading the Iraqi air defence network had slipped out of the public mind – yet the Iraqis had achieved some level of detection.  The aircraft had been briefly visible when they’d opened their bomb bays and released their weapons.  A more alert radar team and properly calibrated air defence weapons might have cost the United States dearly.  An F-117 was naturally stealthy.  The alien craft – assuming she was actually looking at a real pattern – seemed to flicker between stealth mode and being visible.  It made little sense to her, yet…

She pulled up the data and, having refined her program, let it loose on the data from the last ten years.  It took nearly an hour for the program to complete itself, but she didn’t waste the time.  She had to define ways to actually achieve a more permanent contact, maybe even deny the aliens one of their tricks.  When she looked at the data, she muttered a curse under her breath.  It was impossible to be sure, yet it looked as if the aliens had been probing American defences for years.  It could have been paranoia, she knew, yet she’d programmed the computers to be quite careful.  There was an entire series of transient contacts that seemed to fit the evasive pattern.

On impulse, she brought up the data from the rest of the world.  Few people comprehended just how much coverage the United States and its allies had built up, sharing information through the wonders of secure computer networks.  American, British, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Israeli, Australian and Japanese radar networks shared data on a daily basis, allowing them to peer far into China, Russia and other hostile nations.  No aircraft could move over Iran or Venezuela without being detected and tracked.  The other powers howled that it was another example of Western Imperialism, yet there was no way to prevent it.  Radar pulses were no respecters of borders.

She looked down and bit off another curse.  The pattern suggested that all of the major powers had had their alien visitors, although some of those powers radar systems were more primitive than what America would deploy.  Worse, the Deep Space Tracking System reported odd bursts of high-temperature emissions at the edge of space, bursts that corresponded with possible alien contacts.  She almost couldn’t believe that no one had noticed the pattern sooner, yet it was easy to understand.  Everyone had vague contacts and, if they weren't behaving like predicable aircraft, they tended to be ignored.  It was a mistake that might have disastrous consequences.

A nasty thought occurred to her and she did what she should have done in the first place.  Six days had passed since the alien spacecraft had crashed – what had happened since then?  The radar data, newly collected and collated, formed in front of her and a frightening pattern emerged.  A handful of new unidentified contacts had been detected at Schriever Air Force Base – her former home – and others had been detected towards Washington.  She wished that UFO reports were sent to Colorado Springs – it would have been interesting to compare them with her radar reports – but there was no time.  She had to kick this upstairs to her new superior officer.  It changed everything.

She picked up the phone and dialled a number from memory.  It was oddly primitive technology in a place that had once been called the Crystal Palace, but anyone with the right equipment could hack into a wireless conversation, or even tamper with it.  The landline might be primitive, yet it was much harder for hostile powers to intercept and tap, even though the alien capabilities were completely unknown.  For all she knew, they could read over her shoulder as she scrolled through the data on the computer screen.

“General?”  She asked.  “I think you’d better get down here.  There’s something that you should see.”

***
General Gary Wachter was a short burly man with a shaven head, although Robin privately conceded that he had a really nice smile.  He actually reminded her of her grandfather before he passed away.  He might have been an Army General, an officer in the 3rd Infantry Division as well as a training officer before accepting the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Robin knew better than to underestimate him.  He was far from stupid.  One of her former USAF commanding officers had once told her that while the Russians or the Chinese were the air force’s opponents, the Army, the Navy and the Marines were its enemies, competitors for a shrinking budget doled out each year by the Government.  Robin didn’t care as long as she got to work on her radars, but she did wonder if the General would listen to her.  She was only a junior officer, after all.

The General had been appointed supervisor of the whole operation by the President, something that made him one of the most powerful men in the country, with authority to call on assets from all of the different departments and forces.  Those in the know conceded that it was vitally important that everyone worked together, but privately feared that their departments would wind up being slighted or pushed out of the way.  The internal politics had already turned violent and metaphorical blood was on the walls, but Robin had heard that the President had made it clear that anyone who wasted time would find themselves on the bench, or sent to the most isolated posting he could find.  There was no time to play politics with an alien force probing Earth.

“Don’t worry about the formalities,” Wachter said.  Robin had had problems saluting him, let alone trying to remember what kind of protocol applied to a General.  She had never worried about the formalities before and her former superiors had made exceptions for her.  “Just tell me what you’ve got.”

Robin was uncomfortably aware of just how thin her evidence was, but she stumbled through the explanation, uncomfortably aware of Wachter’s eyes on her.  It wasn't a sexual interest, but something more fundamental; he was judging her and her competence.  Stung, she outlined the basics and then started detailing the problems, treating him to a highly-technical report that covered all of the contacts, ending with the current transient contacts.  Wachter just listened.

“I see,” he said, finally.  Robin wasn't sure that he did.  Most people’s eyes started to glaze over as she outlined the technical issues.  “Tell me one thing.  Are you sure that the contacts are real?”

Robin hesitated.  “I think that most of them are,” she admitted, finally.  “I’ve actually excluded transient contacts that don’t reappear, or don’t seem to follow a pattern.  There might be many more contacts that…don’t appear on my lists, or far fewer.  I don’t think that the data can be refined any further without a careful look at the craft.”

Wachter nodded.  “And no one is responding to this?”

“The data shows that most of the contacts are keeping well away from the aircraft we have on CAP,” she said.  The USAF had kept several dozen aircraft in the air for the next week, in position to respond to any serious threats, yet the pilots didn’t know what they might be facing.  It made Robin uncomfortable.  There were three Sentry aircraft in the air and she knew some of their crews personally.  They might run into trouble that they were mentally unprepared to handle.  “All of the contacts are very vague, sir.  I don’t blame the pilots for not responding to them.”

“I do,” Wachter snapped.  “I’ll see to it that they’re ordered to respond to any contact, no matter how flimsy.”

Robin said nothing.  The alien craft, if some of the data were to be believed, would have no difficulty breaking contact with even the fastest aircraft in the USAF’s arsenal.  No one knew if they carried weapons, or if they would stand and fight instead, but with so many contacts, most of them had to be false positives.  It defied belief that thousands of UFOs were probing American airspace.

“And they’re watching Schriever,” Wachter continued.  “Do you think that they are looking for their missing craft?”

“I think so,” Robin said, slowly.  She hadn’t been emotionally aware of it until he’d spoken, but now a shiver ran down her back.  “They may well know where it went down, even if they don’t know why.  Most of the new contacts are hovering over Colorado and watching us.  The others seem to be skimming over the entire country and further away, north to Canada and south to Mexico.”

“So they don’t know where the craft is now,” Wachter mused.  Robin said nothing.  She didn’t know where the craft was either, although she suspected that it had been taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.  The headquarters of the Air Force Materiel Command was also the home base of the 445th Airlift Wing of the Air Force Reserve Command, which flew the C-5 Galaxy heavy transport.  They could have taken the crashed ship anywhere from there.  “That’s good news, I suppose.”

He cleared his throat.  “Can you work out a way to refine the contacts and actually track them permanently?”

“Perhaps,” Robin said.  “It won’t be easy.  We could track stealth aircraft by setting up a network of AWACS and ground-based stations, even tying in civilian and commercial stations, but the evidence suggests that the alien craft are…odd.  There are times when they’re stealthy and times when they’re detectable.”

“Work out an operations plan,” the General ordered.  Under normal circumstances, someone as lowly as Robin would never have been asked to draw up an operations plan, but this was far from normal.  “Once you have it, send it to me and I’ll see to it that it gets implemented.  The exercise we’re preparing – we were preparing – will give us cover for all kinds of military moves, without having to tell people what they might be encountering.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed his own words.  “Yes, sir,” Robin said.  “It would help if I had access to the reports from the study team.”

“You’ll get them,” Wachter promised.  He grinned at her.  “I’ll speak to the President about it this evening.  I’m sure that he will have no objection.  Keep up the good work.”

Chapter Seven

Area 52, Nevada, USA
Day 9

The conference room on the base looked a little more comfortable after a week, although that might have had something to do with the fact that the teams working to reactivate the base had finally had a chance to clean it out and redecorate.  A set of coffeepots – the base couldn’t have operated without coffee on demand – dominated one wall, while the other two were covered with plasma screens and an image of the crashed alien ship.  It had been taken before it had been transported away from the crash site and, somehow, had an impact beyond the obvious.  Alex knew that teams had scoured the crash site of everything even remotely useful, but he did wonder if the crash site would show signs of what had happened, even to an unsuspecting eye.

He scowled down at the table, seeing his reflection scowling back at him, as the other prime team members came in.  Part of him felt as if he had been sidelined – the teams looking into the craft itself and the dead alien bodies had brought in additional manpower from all over the black community – but the remainder of him was grateful for the chance to think.  He could contribute almost nothing useful to the study of the crashed ship and bodies, even though he liked to think that he would have great insights.  He’d spent most of the week gathering UFO reports, comparing them to the odd radar traces discovered by Cheyenne Mountain, and reading through science-fiction at an astonishing clip.  Every old alien invasion book had to be re-read, looking for insights that could be used in their current situation, and even though some of them hadn’t aged well, it was still fascinating – and depressing.  The hard science-fiction novels suggested that humanity would be curb-stomped by an advanced alien enemy.

Jones had suggested, after looking at the pile of books that had been delivered by Amazon to one of the USAF bases that served as a clearinghouse for mail, recruiting science-fiction authors to assist in drawing up contingency plans.  He’d been so pleased with the idea that Alex hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had beaten him to it, never mind the authors who’d written themselves into their books.  It wasn't a bad idea and he’d been drawing up a list of possible authors, yet only a handful already had any form of security clearance and – with the project so highly classified – it would take months to clear people who had never been through even a standard security vetting.  Alex would have felt better about it if he’d thought that they had time, but the UFOs being picked up over Colorado suggested that time was in short supply.  The aliens were hunting for their missing craft.

Alex had given considerable thought to what the aliens would do next, for a handful of American bases were well-known in UFO lore.  Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was supposed to house alien craft in Hangar 18 – it didn’t – and there were a handful of others that were name-checked more than once.  The aliens might attack an airbase to recover their craft, yet they had to know that the odds of hitting the right base were fairly low – there had been no radar traces near Area 52.  The base’s defences had been augmented by a handful of Special Forces personnel with handheld antiaircraft weapons, but Alex rather doubted that they could stand off an alien attack.  He’d insisted that they store data outside the base, just in case the base was destroyed by the aliens, or the experiments with the alien craft, yet the security requirements were getting in the way.  It was hampering exploration of the alien craft, let alone the overall situation.  The aliens weren't going to go away just because the vast majority of humanity didn’t even know they existed.

Jones tapped the table for attention.  “Good morning,” he said.  He looked surprisingly clean and well-pressed for a man who’d spent the last week on a military base - and he’d somehow dug up a suit from the base’s stores.  Alex, who wore a basic USAF uniform, wanted to hate him for it.  It was as if he was drawing a line between the civilian and military worlds.  “As you will have heard, the radar contacts over Colorado and the surrounding states have only intensified; although so far there have been no successful interceptions.  A handful of aircraft have been routed to challenge the mystery craft, but they have always declined contact and vanished.  We do not, however, have much time.  I will therefore waive the formalities and get right down to business.”

Alex rolled his eyes as Jones continued.  They didn’t have time for even a handful of formalities.  “We need information as quickly as possible,” Jones added.  “Neil, please would you tell us what you have discovered so far.”

Neil Frandsen looked annoyed at having been dragged away from the hangar deck – he’d set up a camp bed there just so that he could remain near the alien craft – but he managed to keep his voice level.  The forty engineers, researchers and scientists who had been brought into the project tended to have different opinions about the alien craft.  Some wanted to remain near it at all times, others could barely wait to get away from it, back to their homes and the comfortable familiar worlds they knew.  A scientist had almost collapsed and had had to be transferred to another base, where he remained in lockdown and under observation.  It might have been the culture shock, or it might have been something more serious.  No one knew for sure.

“It would be easier to tell you what we don’t know about it,” Frandsen said, carefully.  “As I warned you at the beginning, there is no way that we can give you a timetable for when and how we will unlock the secrets of the alien ship.  We have made several interesting discoveries, yet we have also discovered hundreds of new questions and mysteries.  We may not succeed in unlocking all of the craft’s secrets for a very long time.”

He leaned backwards and continued in a bored monotone.  “The pieces of debris have been analysed carefully,” he said.  “The tests revealed a mixture of four different metal alloys, including two that we have been unable to identify.  The interesting point is that the craft’s hull appeared to be incredibly conductive, yet also surprisingly strong.  It may have been held together by the craft’s power source – hence the glow emitting from the craft – but as yet no one has been able to prove or disprove it.  The important news from a military point of view is that while the hull is strong, it should be unable to withstand a missile hit, or cannon fire.  If we could track them, we could hit them, and if we could hit them, we could bring them down.”

“Good,” Santini said, shortly.  “Have you unlocked the secret of their radar-avoidance technology?”

“Not really,” Frandsen said.  He looked over at Jones.  “We have been unable to determine how the craft flew, but some of the researchers from the Advanced Propulsion Research Centre believe that the craft had a limited reactionless drive field that would have given it astonishing speed and manoeuvrability.  One of the functions of such a drive field might have been to absorb radar energy – and other kinds of energy – but there is no way to know for sure until we actually manage to duplicate the drive.  That could take years.

“On the other hand, the hull does absorb low levels of energy,” he added, “so it’s quite possible that radar pulses are simply absorbed directly into the hull.  That’s actually old news, as far as the stealth community is concerned; stealth coatings have been around for years.  There are ways to track such aircraft, but without knowing more about how the alien vessels operate, it might be difficult.”

“Very difficult,” Santini agreed.  “I was on the mission into Saudi Arabia three years ago.  We just flew past their defences without impediment, as if they couldn’t see us at all.”

“Which is what we might be facing ourselves,” Jones confirmed.  “What about the remainder of the craft?  Do you know why it crashed?”

“No,” Frandsen admitted, reluctantly.  “The rear area of the craft is almost completely inexplicable, for the moment.  We’ve been probing it very gently, but parts of it appear to be fused, or perhaps that’s actually its normal configuration.  The bottom line is that we have no idea exactly what the craft did to fly, although we have dozens of possible theories.  As for why it crashed…”

He scowled.  “It looks as if they suffered a major drive failure,” he concluded.  “That’s not actually uncommon for us.  An aircraft launched from a USAF base might suffer any one of hundreds of possible equipment failures that would force it to return to base without actually engaging the enemy or completing its mission.”

“I don’t know about you,” Alex said, into the silence, “but I find that rather reassuring.”

Frandsen nodded.  “The interesting part is that their computers may be semi-compatible with some of our own advanced systems,” he added.  He held up a hand to forestall a series of astonished protests.  “I’m not talking about them coming equipped with USB ports and Windows Whatever, but a certain…shared understanding of how computers work.  It may take years to learn how to hack into their computers, but the specialists I’ve had brought in are confident that eventually we will be able to extract data from their records.  Understanding it, of course, might be difficult.”

Gayle Madison nodded.  “I’ve been studying the alien markings on the craft,” she put in.  “They’re completely beyond our understanding at the moment.  It is quite possible that we will never decipher the data without their assistance, willing or otherwise.”

Jones nodded.  “I take it that the craft can’t actually fly?”

“I don’t think we’ll be flying it up to the mothership to upload a computer virus,” Santini said, with an evil grin.  “Is the craft actually dead?”

“We don’t know,” Frandsen admitted.  “There are very definitely traces of power left within its systems.  It may be absorbing power from the surrounding area.  However, if it is broadcasting for rescue, we have been unable to pick it up.  It shouldn’t be able to get a signal out using any tech we’re familiar with, but if it can generate a steam of neutrinos, for example…”

Alex nodded in understanding.  Neutrinos went through almost anything.  The hangar was surrounded by all kinds of jamming equipment, but they couldn’t stop a neutrino emission or something so fantastic that it was beyond even the imagination of science-fiction writers.  The only sign that the craft wasn’t screaming for help was that none of the UFOs had visited Area 52, as far as they knew.  The aliens might have adjusted their stealth systems to remain hidden as they scouted out their target.  It wasn't a pleasant thought.

“I’ll forward your report to the President,” Jones said, finally.  “That leads us directly to the aliens themselves.  Jane?”

Jane looked tired, but happy.  Like Frandsen, she had been spending most of her time in her department, although she hadn’t been sleeping with the aliens.  The regulations forbade sleep within the biological containment area and insisted on everyone rotating out every few hours, just so fatigue wouldn’t lead to a tragedy.

“My team has been studying the five alien bodies carefully, although we have limited ourselves to mainly non-intrusive probes until we know how the aliens treat their dead,” she said, carefully.  “The first priority was to ensure that there was no biological threat from the alien bodies – they might be friendly, but their bacteria might have other ideas – and we carried out every test in the manual, as well as several we made up specially.  As far as we can determine, there is no biological hazard at all.  I’ve kept the bodies under heavy isolation and I certainly do not advise throwing open the airlocks and inviting in the entire world, but I feel that the danger is minimal, if it exists at all.”

Jones frowned.  “Are you certain of that?”

“The aliens have a completely different biology to us,” Jane said, firmly.  “It is highly unlikely that any of their diseases could make the jump into humanity, or vice versa.  There are some disease – Bird Flu, for example – that move between species, but they all came from Earth.  The aliens did not.”

“So much for any War of the Worlds scenarios we might have been hoping for,” Santini said.  “Can they live on Earth without protection?”

“I believe so,” Jane said.  “Their blood carries definite traces of oxygen, suggesting that they are oxygen-breathers.  I won’t know for sure until I have a live one to examine, but I believe that they won’t have any problems spending time on Earth, or living permanently on the planet.  Their bacteria and fungi – to say nothing of higher life forms – could probably find a niche here.”

She picked up the remote control and flashed an image of EBE1 onto the display.  “The first really interesting thing about the aliens is that they are definitely from the same planet,” she said.  “Their biology may be different from humanity, yet EBE1 and EBE4 share too many common points to come from two different planets.  They’re also all male, I believe.  We have been unable to locate any wombs or egg sacs, while we have come up with good candidates for testicles and other male organs.  The second really interesting thing about them is that their brains appear to be liquid.”

“That’s impossible,” Gayle said.  “They can’t have liquid brains.”

Jane’s face darkened.  “That was my thought as well, when we x-rayed their skulls,” she said.  “It took several attempts before we realised that the aliens all had tiny implants buried within their skulls and we suspect that those implants killed them.  The bodies, as I mentioned days ago, were suspiciously intact, yet they were dead.  I believe that the aliens committed suicide to avoid being captured – or were killed by their superiors.  The implications are…disturbing.”

“They didn’t want live aliens to fall into our hands,” Alex said.  Jane was right.  The implications were very disturbing.  It didn’t suggest a friendly motive for visiting the planet.  “Why didn’t they destroy the bodies completely?”

“Unknown,” Jane said, flatly.  It hadn’t been a fair question.  How could she have known the answer?  “The first subgroup of aliens is smaller and weaker than the second, yet it definitely possesses a greater degree of manual skill and very manipulative fingers.  There were a handful of other implants embedded within their bodies, but without surgery I am unable to remove them or speculate on their purpose.  I have teams trying to construct computer models of how the aliens might move, yet without a live one…well, such procedures can only go so far.

“The second type of alien is…odder,” she continued.  “It is definitely stronger and probably faster than the first type, with natural armour growing out of its skin.  There are sacs of chemicals within its body, near the bloodstream, with an uncertain purpose.  There are no implants at all apart from the one embedded in their skulls.  It has tattoos and markings that the first type of alien lacks.  We don’t know why.”

She hesitated.  “It’s odd, but…when I was younger, I used to design monsters for fantasy games to put myself through Med School,” she said.  “If I’d been designing a monster to serve in the ranks of the Dark Lord, I might have come up with something like the second group of aliens.  Their strength and endurance might be well above the norm for their race; hell, they might well have been designed to serve as soldiers.  I’m not sure I like the implications of that either.”

Santini frowned.  “Designed?”  He asked.  “How?”

“People have been talking about using genetic engineering to produce soldiers with superhuman attributes for years,” Jane said.  “None of the various research programs ever got very far - public opinion was always very strongly against it – and mostly it flopped.  The aliens, on the other hand, might have engineered themselves a warrior caste, or perhaps it evolved naturally.  The two groups of aliens definitely come from the same stock.”

Jones looked stunned.  “It sounds crazy,” he muttered.  “Why would anyone do that?”

“Better soldiers,” Santini said.  “To think what I had to go through to earn my wings…”

“It’s not unknown in nature,” Jane added.  “There are dozens of different breeds of dog, yet they’re all the same species and they can crossbreed.  I find it hard to imagine an advanced race that exists like that, but there’s no reason why one cannot develop somewhere else.”

“I see,” Jones said, finally.  He sounded oddly rattled.  “Do you have anything else to add?”

“It’s all in my report,” Jane said.  “We cannot say much more until we dissect one of the aliens to see how it all goes together, but…”

“We still don’t know how they treat their dead,” Alex reminded her.  “The last thing we want to do is give unintentional offence.”

“They crashed outside one of the most secure areas in the United States,” Santini pointed out.  “They’re watching us even now.  They have either evolved or designed a warrior caste.  I think we’re far beyond worrying about giving unintentional offence.”

Jones was about to reply when Colonel Fields entered, without knocking, and passed him a PDA.  “Shit,” he said, reading the message.  Alex had a premonition of disaster before Jones could say anything else.  Had the aliens finally commenced the invasion?  “Everything has changed.”

He looked up, into Alex’s eyes.  “We just picked up a message from the aliens,” he said.  His voice was stunned, disbelieving.  “They’re asking for a meeting.  They want to meet with the President himself.”

Chapter Eight

Washington DC, USA
Day 9

“There is not going to be any debate about this,” President Andrew Chalk said.  “I’m going.”

He stood at one end of the Oval Office, facing his inner circle.  Only a handful of his Cabinet even knew about the crashed alien ship, let alone the UFO reports and the message from the stars.  His inner circle all knew and had been briefed, including his Vice President, who was in a secret command post.  If something happened to Washington, the President had decided on his first day in office, it wouldn’t be allowed to break the command-and-control links that bound the US Military together.

Andrew Chalk had gone into the Army during the Clinton years and had rapidly been promoted until he reached Colonel, within the famed 3rd Infantry Division.  He’d taken part in the march to Baghdad and developed a reputation as a tough, but fair commanding officer.  He’d had his doubts about the aftermath of the invasion from the start and, following Washington’s reluctance to realise that the United States was caught up in a counter-insurgency campaign, he’d resigned from the army and gone into politics.  He’d appealed to both right and left – the right because he had genuine military experience and was also a moderate; the left because he’d resigned in protest against Rumsfield – and his campaign had been planned with military precision.  He’d crushed the challengers for the Republican nomination – his main challenger had largely been running on the grounds that he wasn’t the incumbent – and then defeated the Democrats to become President.  His bluff, no-nonsense manner had won him friends and allies in disillusioned politicians and citizens, although the cliques in Washington opposed him at every turn.  They suspected, quite rightly, that President Chalk intended to restore honesty and openness to the Federal Government.

“This is not something we can pass on to an Ambassador or a Special Representative,” he added, knowing that his Cabinet wasn't convinced.  He’d chosen most of them partly on the grounds that they wouldn’t hesitate to tell him if they thought that he was wrong.  The worst problem politicians had was being surrounded by people who told them what they wanted to hear.  “This can only be handled by the President himself.  The buck stops here.”

There was a long silence.  “Mr President,” General Gary Wachter said finally, “this is not beyond debate.”

The President frowned.  General Gary Wachter had been his commanding officer several times, to the delight of some media personages who talked about the General being the power behind the throne, or perhaps being abused in revenge for putting the President through hell as a junior officer.  They couldn’t have been more wrong.  The President trusted Wachter completely and expected him to be as honest as he had been as a younger officer, supervising a new and very inexperienced officer.

“We don’t know anything about them,” the General continued.  “They might be sincere about wanting to talk to you, but what happens if they kill you, or simply keep you onboard their ship?”

“That would be an act of war,” the President pointed out.  “Jacob” – Vice President Jacob Thornton – “becomes President and we’re at war with an alien race.”

“But we’d also be hamstrung,” Wachter insisted.  “What happens if they keep you for longer than a day, or maybe two days?  We’d have to cover for your absence.  The strategic defence systems require authorisation directly from the President to fire.  This wouldn’t be a case of you being assassinated, or suffering a major heart attack, but a case when no one knows what the fuck is going on.  The risks are too high, Andy.”

“The risks of not going are also too high,” the President said.  “They lost a craft near one of our most vital military bases.  I can’t help but agree with the analysts who find that ominous.  If there’s a chance that we can open relationships with them, in light of the latest demonstration of their capabilities, then we have to take it.  We’re naked and almost defenceless against a foe that controls the high orbitals.”

They shared a grim look.  The alien message had been inserted – somehow – into the Majestic Satellite Communications Network, a highly-classified system used for top secret discussions between the President, the Pentagon and the commanders in the field.  It was so secret that no one outside the Federal Government was supposed to know about it and, indeed, most of the Government didn’t know about its existence.  The aliens had not only uploaded a message into the network, but they’d encrypted it using one of the latest American encryption protocols, generated by a quantum computer.  The President wasn't blind to the significance of the gesture.  The aliens had not only shown that they knew who to approach for a meeting, but that they could hack into American secure communications, the most secure in the world, at will.  The entire secure communications network could no longer be trusted.

“There is another issue,” Hubert Dotson said.  The Secretary of State looked grim, but intensely focused.  “How do we know that we’re the only nation to have a crashed ship, or to have been approached by the aliens?”

The President looked at Tom Pearson, the CIA representative.  “As you know, sir, we attempt to track the location of all of the world leaders,” he said.  “There are apparently no plans for any of the major world leaders to vanish from sight in the next few weeks, although I should stress that such information is often hard to obtain.  The more…paranoid a regime is, the more likely it is to keep the location of its leader secret, or keep moving him around to avoid being pinned down.  We know that the KGB and their successor, the FSB, looked into the UFO mystery during and after the Cold War, but if they found a craft, we don’t know about it.”

“I see,” the President said.  He’d cleaned house at the CIA after assuming the Presidency – he had never forgiven them for their failures in Iraq – but even he had to admit that intelligence work was never cut and dried.  The United States hadn’t enjoyed real penetration of any of its major opponents during or even after the Cold War.  The CIA’s reputation for leaks – which got sources killed – worked against it

“But Hubert is right,” he continued.  “The last thing we need is the aliens approaching the Russians, or the Chinese, or anyone else.”

“They may approach us,” the Secretary of State warned.  “If they knew that we had a crashed ship, they would demand that we shared our research with them, or else.”

“Or else what?”  Wachter demanded.  “There’s very little that they could do to us that wouldn’t rebound worse on themselves.”

“They might need the information if the aliens did turn out to be hostile,” Pearson pointed out, coldly.  “We might need their help.”

“I doubt it,” Wachter said.  “The entire massed force of Earth couldn’t mount an offensive beyond Low Earth Orbit, if that.”

“That’s something we will have to look at,” the President said.  His voice was very cold.  “What about our current defence deployments?”

Wachter looked down at his secure Blackberry.  “We’re proceeding through the exercise now and using it as an excuse – along with terrorist threats – to make all kinds of military deployments,” he said.  “We have fighter jets on patrol and ground-based surface-to-air missiles deployed at sensitive locations.  The UFOs have not attempted to challenge them, Mr President, but no one expects that to last.”

He hesitated.  “We need to brief in more people, yet every time we do that we make a leak more likely,” he warned.  “We’re effectively operating with one hand behind our backs.  I’ve passed orders along for local radar operators to take a closer look at transient contacts and dropped hints about stealth aircraft testing the defences, but our people are not prepared – not mentally – for possible hostile action.”

“Another good reason for me to meet with them,” the President said.  He wouldn’t have admitted to the thrill of excitement he felt, not even to Wachter, yet the life of a President was a little like being in prison.  There was nowhere for him to just be himself, even in the White House.  He’d seen movies where the President fought hijackers who had hijacked Air Force One, or even flew a fighter plane against massive city-destroying UFOs…actually, that one hit a bit too close to home.  “We want to avoid a confrontation if possible.”

“Yes, Mr President,” Wachter said.  He looked down at his Blackberry.  “We’ll officially announce that you will be visiting Camp David for talks with foreign ambassadors and allow the Press to go nuts speculating on who you’re seeing and why.  We’ll fly you to Schriever Air Force Base in a more private aircraft and accommodate you in one of the officer’s quarters until the time of arrival.  The base commander isn’t happy, but he does understand what’s at stake.”

The President nodded.  “And then?”

“Their message says that they will pick you and one other up from the crash site, two days from now,” Wachter said.  “I imagine that they’ll transport you to a secure location for the talks and then – I hope – return you intact.  The analysts, however, have all kinds of worries…”

“I know,” the President said.  The Secret Service – those who knew about the new threat and why the White House guard had suddenly been tripled – had thrown a collective fit at the mere thought of the President leaving an area they didn’t have under complete control.  They got nervous every time the President left America, even to Britain or another state with reliable security; they had argued against the President going to an alien craft.  “Some of them would obviously make great science-fiction movie writers.”

Wachter smiled dryly.  The analysts had wondered about the President being implanted with a mind-controlling implant and sent back to order immediate surrender, or being replaced by an alien doppelganger, or being probed, or having his mind read by telepathic aliens, or…they’d come up with hundreds of scenarios, each one more unlikely and outrageous than the last.  The analyst who’d come up with the scenario about the President being anally probed probably needed therapy.

“The risk needs to be accepted,” the President said, firmly.  “Now…what might the aliens want?”

The analysts had gone through that as well.  One line of thought was that the aliens were friendly and wanted to establish a covert line of communications before they revealed themselves to the entire world.  Another was that the aliens were hostile and intended to demand immediate surrender before they started throwing asteroids.  The only common ground between most of the different possibilities was that the aliens would demand their missing craft back – as the US had demanded the crashed F-117 back from the Serbs.  No one was quite sure what the US should say in response.

“They might see returning the craft as a gesture of friendship and goodwill,” the Secretary of State said, “but that would deprive us of our chance to study their technology any further.”

“On the other hand, if they demand it back, we might have no choice but to comply,” Wachter countered.  “What happens if they threaten to vaporise a city every day until we return the craft?”

The Secretary of State nodded.  The President had worked hard to reform the State Department, clearing away the debris of years of neglect and the result was a revitalised department serving the country.  The State Department’s analysts were capable, but those who had been briefed on the crashed ship knew that the human race had only limited means of taking the war to space.  It was far more likely that the aliens would stomp on humanity as hard as possible.

“We’d have to give up the ship,” he said, finally.  “What other choice would we have?”

The President said nothing.  There was something to be said for standing up to an opponent and daring him to do his worst, but not when the entire human race was at stake.  It was often said that the President was the most powerful man on Earth, yet how powerful was he compared to the aliens?  A race that could step between stars wouldn’t be impressed by the pitiful human space force, such as it was.

“None,” he said, finally.  “General, you have my authorisation to bring in other planning teams and get them working on what kind of hardware we can deploy to even the odds as much as possible.  We’ll keep the lid on as much as possible, but it’s probably time we started looking at emergency measures.  This problem is not going to go away.”

***
No one would have believed that Pepper Reid was a fully-trained bodyguard.  She looked about eighteen years old, wearing a very short skirt and a tight shirt, with long red hair that she’d tied back in a ponytail.  The men who tried to hit on her each night in bars would have been astonished – and intimidated – to know that she’d gone through some of the most fearsome training the United States could provide, before being transferred to the Secret Service and being assigned to the Presidential Protective Detail.  It was one of the most important – if not the most important – bodyguard positions in the world – and she took it seriously.  It helped that no one on the outside took her seriously.

A Secret Service agent was generally assumed to look rather like the Men in Black; black suits, black tie, black jacket, white shirt and dark sunglasses.  It was true that some members of the President’s protective detail were so obvious – to deter nervous assassins – but others were less than obvious.  Pepper – whose friends and fellow agents called Pepper Pot – had arrested several would-be assassins over the last year, who hadn’t realised that the cheerleader slipping closer to them was far deadlier than they could ever have hoped to be.  It was in one of those encounters that she’d lost her eye.

She’d feared that would put an end to her career, but her superiors had recommended her to DARPA for a highly-classified experiment.  Her right eye was replaced by an artificial eye that not only worked almost as well as the real one – although it did itch at times, which the doctors assured her was psychosomatic– but also recorded everything she saw for later download.  It had its disadvantages – it was something she could never quite tell a succession of boyfriends – yet if she saw a threat, she could instantly transmit an image back to the office, before moving to intercept before it became lethal, or even noticeable.  The Secret Service preferred to keep attempts on the President’s life quiet.  It was meant to discourage others from trying.

“Pepper, come in,” her superior said.  Pepper had been on one of her off-days – the Secret Service didn’t keep anything as mundane as a weekend – and had been surprised to have been called into the office.  “I have a special task for you.”

He leaned forward.  For the first time, Pepper saw the dark circles under his eyes, signifying lack of sleep.  She’d been trained to watch for hundreds of telltales on faces – from hints that a boy was cheating on her to a suicide bomber nerving himself to hit the trigger and detonate the bomb – and her superior looked worried.  It wasn't a cringing fear, but something more fundamental, the look of a man who worried that he wouldn’t be believed.

“It’s also highly classified,” he continued.  “I can’t tell you about it until you agree to take on the mission.  I should warn you that…it will be dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anything else you’ve ever done for us.  If you decline, it won’t be held against you and it won’t even be on your record.”

“You don’t have to insult me,” Pepper said.  She wanted to joke, but there was something about his attitude that quelled her attempts at humour.  She’d faced the prospect of putting her body between the President and a bullet before and had come to terms with it.  It wasn't as if she’d been drafted into the Secret Service against her will.  “It sounds interesting.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” her superior said.  “Will you take on the mission?”

“Yes,” Pepper said, without hesitation.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Sit down and listen carefully,” her superior said.  Pepper did as he said and listened with growing disbelief as her superior outlined alien contact – and a crashed alien ship – and a message inviting the President to meet with extraterrestrials.  It was beyond belief, yet she watched her superior carefully and there was no doubt that he believed it.  “The aliens have invited the President and one other onboard their craft.  We need you to be that other.”

Pepper felt her head spin.  It crossed her mind that it could be a hoax or a test, but if that were the case, it was a bizarre one.  She’d been tested many times since she’d qualified, yet all of those tests had revolved around mundane threats and possibilities.  Aliens hadn’t even been mentioned, apart from late-night movies with the other trainees.  No one had seriously considered the possibility that the President would have to visit an alien ship, almost alone.

“One agent won’t be enough to protect him,” she said, finally.  She would have preferred a full team, or even a Company of Marines.  “Can’t we…?”

“Apparently not,” her superior said.  “We also need you to record everything that happens on that ship.”

“You just want me for my body,” Pepper said.  It was a weak joke, but she needed to let the tension flow out, somehow.  “What about weapons and more…obvious equipment?”

“We’ve prepared a briefing for you,” her superior said.  He stood up and held out his hand.  “Good luck, Pepper.  Don’t fuck up.”

Chapter Nine

Schriever Air Force Base, USA
Day 11

The day was bright and clear, but Robin didn’t notice, shut up in the base’s main radar room.  A handful of security-cleared personnel had joined her in the base, but the vast majority of the base’s personnel had been warned to stay in their barracks, or redeployed on short notice to other bases.  Robin didn’t particularly care about the security problem – she had always seen such issues as getting in the way of her main job – but it had also caused a staffing shortage.  The base – and the two AWACS orbiting the base at a distance of ten kilometres – had only limited numbers of cleared personnel.

She smiled to herself as she checked the network she’d established to track the alien craft when it arrived.  The addition of other specialists – including some working in exotic areas such as gravity-wave detection – had added a whole series of other sensors to the radar network, including infrared and gravimetric sensors.  When Robin had checked with NSA – or, rather, the General had checked with them after they’d tried to stonewall a mere junior officer – they’d reluctantly confirmed that their orbiting satellites had briefly tracked strange heat patterns near where the alien craft had entered the atmosphere.  One of Robin’s superiors had pointed out that the craft should be red hot from entering the atmosphere – and trailing sonic booms all over the country as they moved at hypersonic velocities – and she was at a loss to account for their absence.  The best that anyone had been able to establish was that the alien craft somehow moved without disturbing the air, or somehow baffled the sonic boom before it could spread.  Civilians thought of a sonic boom as a once-off event, but they trailed behind any supersonic aircraft…apart from the UFOs.  It didn’t quite make sense.

Robin had been given access to all the data from the crashed ship – apart from a single piece of data; its current location – and she’d used it to enhance her tracking programs, linking in with the Deep Space Tracking System and the US Space Defence Operations Centre, which handled all ABM systems.  The handful in the know at those centres had been horrified at the thought of alien craft – or any kind of craft – slipping through the detection network and had worked to enhance their own systems.  In theory, they could have tracked an object the size of a golf ball orbiting the Earth – and had done so, on occasion, when debris had been released from the International Space Station – but in practice, the UFOs were clearly hard to detect.  They emitted almost nothing in the way of radiation and seemed to move completely silently.  The only sign of their existence were odd radar traces and heat bursts as they entered the atmosphere.

And one of them was coming to pick up the President.

It was an opportunity too good to be missed, Robin knew.  The sheer vagueness of most of the radar data was frustrating, if not actively misleading.  She thought that she had tracked UFOs moving at speeds in excess of Mach Nine, but she knew all too well that she could have mistaken a natural event for an alien craft, or seen two echoes instead of one.  The chance to take readings when there was a genuine craft in the air was too good to pass up, even though her superiors had talked at some length about the possible implications.  They had effectively asked the President to come alone – a single bodyguard wouldn’t be much help if the aliens had bad intentions – and that, her superiors had said, didn’t imply friendly motives.

Robin didn’t care.  She rarely gave any thought to politics, although she’d voted Republican because the Democratic Candidate had pledged to cut the military budget, which would have included scrapping new toys the USAF needed – now more than ever.  If the President was willing to take the risk of stepping onboard an alien craft, she was sure that he had considered all of the possible dangers – and decided that the risk was worth it.  She would have given anything – even her brand-new brevet promotion to Second Lieutenant – to go with him.  The chance to ask the aliens about their drive and propulsion systems – and how they spoofed American radar systems – would have been worth any risk.

Her console chimed and she peered down at it.  A single target had appeared out of nowhere in the midst of United States Space Surveillance Network’s area of responsibility.  She wasn't used to thinking in such terms, but the target had appeared high over the base, diving into the atmosphere.  It seemed to shimmer in and out of existence as it flew lower, slowing somehow despite following a direct flight path, yet she saw the burst of heat as it entered the atmosphere.  She keyed a command into her console as the unknown craft passed out of the Space Surveillance Network’s ken, and down into the domain of her enhanced radar network.  The base had to be alerted before she did anything else.

She dimly heard the klaxons warning of the arrival of the alien craft though her concentration.  The craft didn’t seem to be perfectly solid.  It crossed her mind that it could be phasing in and out of reality, but she couldn’t even begin to think of what kind of tech would be required to do that.  Some radar stations reported a solid contact while others seemed unable to even begin tracking the craft.  She combined the radar sensors with the gravimetric detectors and hit pay dirt.  The craft could be tracked through its odd gravity-wave emissions.  It was impossible to be sure, but it seemed likely that the alien drives used focused gravity as a means of propulsion, allowing them to reach impossible speeds.  It might even account for the absence of a sonic boom…no, that didn’t explain it.  It had to be something more complicated.

“Robin?”  Technical Sergeant Dave Heidecker asked.  He hadn’t been promoted, but he didn’t hold it against her.  He’d once told her that higher rank was boring.  The number of USAF senior officers with grey hair ahead of their time was shocking, or so he had claimed.  Robin didn’t care either way.  “What do you have?”

“Visitors,” she said.  The shock of seeing an alien craft swept over her, along with an insane urge to giggle.  “We have visitors.”

The craft should have slammed into the ground hard enough to create tremors on the Richter Scale.  Instead, it was slowing down, coming to a hover high over the base, before it started to lower itself the rest of the way.  Robin had no idea what kind of technology could do that, not even an advanced helicopter. The sheer power the aliens were showing off was overwhelming.  Robin regarded it as a challenge, rather than something to intimidate her, yet even she was not unmoved.  The aliens were making a show of strength.

“They’re about to land,” she said, turning her eyes to the live feed from the base’s security cameras.  Whatever happened, the entire event would be recorded and studied for years to come.  “Landing…now.”

***
Master Sergeant George Grosskopf hadn’t been happy since he’d been first on the scene when the alien craft crashed.  The day had become nightmarish, first in trying to cobble together a plan to get the alien craft somewhere well away from the base – the base commander had ended up combining plans to deal with a terrorist NBC strike with plans to pick up crashed Russian satellite debris – and then in spending a week in a quarantine unit at the nearby NBC centre.  The doctors had poked and prodded at him and his men every day, trying to determine if they’d been infected by any alien viruses…and, just incidentally, keeping them firmly out of the public eye.  The days had been unpleasant and the nights had been worse.  All of his men, George included, had had nightmares about the crashed ship and its crew.  The culture shock had nearly torn them apart.

George remembered spending time staring at the television and trying to come to terms with the way the world had changed.  Returning to the base after the doctors had finally conceded that the security team were probably uninfected with anything apart from boredom had been a surreal experience.  Those in the know had kept their mouths firmly shut.  Those who were not privy to anything beyond rumours had carried on their normal lives with a blindness that stunned George, even though he knew that they didn’t know what had happened.  Who cared about the death of a well-known pop star when aliens had been discovered?  Who cared about who was fucking who when the world might be on the brink of interstellar war?  He’d hoped that he would be assigned to protect the crashed ship, wherever it had gone – the possibility that the aliens might attack the base to recover their craft had not gone unheeded – but instead the base commander had assigned him to overhauling the defences.  A dozen new antiaircraft missile batteries had been assigned to the base; along with additional handheld weapons that might add some extra punch if the aliens came back.  He’d prepared as best as he could, yet…

He unhooked his binoculars and peered into the air.  The alien craft was supposed to be on final approach, yet he could see nothing, apart from the clear blue sky.  The movies had had massive alien ships descending on military bases – he’d watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind when he’d been a kid – but there was no reason to believe that the aliens would send an entire mothership, or a City Destroyer.  The thought made him scowl.  They’d watched Independence Day two days after they’d been returned to duty and one of his men had put a foot through the television screen, raving about aliens and monsters.  Rumour central had had a field day with that one.

His radio crackled.  “It’s coming down towards the crash site,” the dispatcher said.  “Do you have visual contact?”

George tilted his binoculars.  The guards were stationed near the crash site, but not right on top of it.  It gave his men chills to be too close to it, although no one had any idea why.  Men in NBC suits had gone through the entire area with metal detectors and recovered everything they could, including several hundred bullets from a life-fire security drill the base had conducted years ago.  They’d used flamethrowers to clear the remains of the crash site – and put an end to any possible biohazard – yet…no one wanted to go too near it.  It made no sense to him.

“No, sir,” he growled.  He paused as something caught his eye.  There was a shiny speck in the distance, falling rapidly towards them at a colossal speed.  “Correction; I have one craft…”

The alien craft rapidly took on shape and form.  It wasn't the silvery almond of the first craft, but something different, a silvery egg-shaped craft barely larger than a van.  It seemed to glow with a pearly light, but there was no sound, apart from a very faint bass humming.  George had expected a noisy aircraft – the noise of a helicopter squadron had to be heard to be believed – yet the alien craft was almost soundless.  It seemed almost to suck up the sound waves and absorb them.

He keyed his radio, linking to two of his men, who carried cameras and other recording gear.  “Make sure you get damn good shots,” he ordered.  There were hundreds of cameras deployed, from the most modern NSA-designed digital cameras to old-style chemical cameras from the past, just in case the alien craft’s emissions screwed with the more modern systems.  “Check weapons; keep them on safety until I authorise otherwise.”

The question of arming his men had been hotly debated.  One of his superiors had wanted the men to go out entirely unarmed, without rifles, pistols or grenades.  Another had wanted them to go out armed to the teeth, adding Stinger missiles and Abrams tanks to their arsenal.  They’d compromised by issuing standard weapons – and keeping substantial forces in reserve on the base itself – and ordering all weapons to be kept safe unless the shit hit the fan.  A rogue shot that killed an alien, or even damaged their craft, might start a war.  Looking at the alien craft, hanging almost effortlessly in the air, George understood their point.  A war with a race that could do that might well be lost very quickly.

“My God,” he heard someone say, behind him.  “It’s beautiful.”

As if it had wanted the humans to get a good look, the alien craft slowly lowered itself towards the ground, the pearly white glow slowly fading to a more sickly yellow.  It threw the area into odd relief, casting odd shadows around the craft, before it faded, revealing a silvery hull.  Three legs seemed to grow out of the underside of the craft, spreading out to form a tripod, before it lowered itself the rest of the way and came down exactly where the previous craft had crashed.  If there had been any doubt about the aliens knowing what had happened to their missing craft, George reflected, that settled it.  The aliens knew exactly what had happened to it.

A low hum seemed to echo in the air for a long moment as the craft opened a hatch, the flowing metal somehow parting to allow light to shine out onto the ground.  George had half-expected to see a spindly grey figure standing there against the light, but nothing emerged from the craft.  Instead, a ramp grew out of the side of the craft and reached down towards the ground.  Its arrival completed, the craft just stopped – and waited.

George’s mouth was dry and he had to swallow twice before he could talk.  “Sir,” he said, keying his radio, “I think it’s waiting for SOLDIER BOY” – the code name for the President – “now.”

“Understood,” the reply came back.  The dispatcher sounded even more nervous than George, even though he was safe in a bunker back at the base.  “Hold position and wait.”

George looked up at the alien craft.  Now that it had landed, it seemed to extrude an air of glowing perfection, as if it was beyond anything humanity had even dreamed of creating.  An F-22 was a piece of junk compared to the alien craft, the overworked and overused heavy transports little more than barges from ancient canals…there was something chillingly inhuman about its perfection.  The aliens might have grown the craft rather than built it.  It looked almost natural, and yet…the situation was so strange that it was almost beyond comprehension.  The USAF had been wise, he decided, to charge George with greeting the alien craft.  Someone who hadn’t seen one of the craft before, and the alien bodies, would have become a gibbering wreck.

His radio buzzed.  “The principles are on their way,” it said.  “Stand by.”

***
Pepper had been horrified when she’d heard the truth about where she was going, even though she had to admit that she was definitely qualified for the task.  Quite apart from her artificial eye, she had had considerable experience in operating in other cultures, even as a Secret Service Agent.  She’d served the President in Japan, India and Saudi Arabia, wearing a mixture of native clothes for each event.  The Saudi one had been particularly revealing.  Who would have thought that you could conceal a huge arsenal under a burka?

But aliens?  She had no illusions about her task.  If the aliens wanted to hurt the President, or brainwash him, or something so alien that humans couldn’t comprehend it, there would be nothing she could do about it.  She’d finally elected to wear a standard black suit and carry a handful of weapons, some obvious and some not, but she knew better than to think that she could protect the President.  Her mission might suddenly become one of killing a handful of aliens before she was killed herself, if they could be killed, or simply being killed before she even knew she was under attack.  She’d seen images of the aliens from the crashed ship and the warriors – if they were warriors – looked nasty customers.  She wouldn’t want to meet one of them up a dark alley.

“Come on,” the President said.  Unlike her, he seemed completely calm.  It was easy to believe that he’d been a decorated soldier in his time.  “Let’s go, shall we?”

Pepper took the lead as they walked out of the armoured vehicle towards the UFO.  It dominated the surrounding area, even though it was tiny, smaller than a tank or the other crashed ship.  Its entrance gaped invitingly, leading them on, but she wanted to run and hide.  She had faced her own fear hundreds of times before, yet this was something different, something unworldly.  It would have been easy to believe that it was all a trap, that the aliens were hostile, that it was merely the first shot in a war…

And yet, what would it gain them?  The President had transferred his powers to the Vice President before travelling to the meeting.  There would be no delay in America’s response to any alien attack, although Pepper had no illusions.  A race that could build the craft ahead of her would smash its way through the USAF with ease.

She stepped onto the ramp and felt it move slightly beneath her feet.  It was hard to walk up towards the hatch, but the thought of all those watching eyes propelled her forward.  The alien craft…she was right in front of it!  There was a faint haze of heat around the craft, but not enough to prevent her from stepping through the hatch.  A moment later, the President followed her.

Behind them, the hatch melted closed.

Chapter Ten

The Alien Mothership
Day 11

The President had pushed the thought of the cameras out of his mind.  He knew – from long experience – that thinking about the cameras was what led to pratfalls and worse on television.  For some politicians, including several who had insulted the voters by accident, it had been the end of their careers.  Instead, he was concentrating on the mind-numbing series of briefings he had had to hear before he boarded the alien craft, including hundreds of different possible outcomes.  Some of them – actually, most of them – had been stolen from the unpaid imagination of countless science-fiction writers, but they all agreed on one point.  The aliens wanted something.  They had gone to considerable trouble to get the President to talk to them and no one would have put forward that kind of effort without some expectation of reward.

He’d seen briefing papers that suggested everything from a demand for immediate surrender to an attempt to rent the remainder of the solar system, or perhaps somewhere in the middle.  There were too many possibilities and, despite the number of briefings he’d absorbed, he knew he would have to play it by ear.  Oddly, he felt rather less nervous than he had the day before America invaded Iraq, although that might have had something to do with the sheer unreality of the scene.  The aliens might have wanted the President so they could talk to the man making the decisions, the man who led his country, but they probably wouldn’t kill him.  That would be an act of war.

The interior of the alien craft was rather disappointing, perhaps more mundane than he had been expecting.  It was a perfectly circular compartment, barely large enough for two people to sit in reasonable comfort, ringed by a sofa.  The President sensed rather than saw the hatch closing behind him and sat down on one side of the sofa, motioning for Pepper to take the other side. There was no sign of a pilot and he doubted that there was room for one in the remaining unseen compartments of the craft, suggesting that it was operating on remote control.  A faint shudder ran through the entire craft and then the hull started to go transparent, revealing that they were already far above the base and climbing steadily upwards.  There was no sense of acceleration, nor was there any sense of how the craft was powered, but the President had never been in anything that moved so fast.  Perhaps the Space Shuttle or one of the advanced fighter jets could match the alien craft’s acceleration, yet there were only two shuttles left in existence, and both of them required months of preparation before they could fly.  The aliens were doing it casually.  The sheer level of power that implied was terrifying.

He leaned back against the clear hull and watched as the blue sky faded to darkness, all the stars shimmering into existence, staring down at the tiny alien craft.  They weren't twinkling at him, which puzzled him at first until he realised that there was no longer any atmosphere to cause the appearance of twinkling.  The stars burned coldly in the vacuum of space, leaving him to wonder which one had given birth to the aliens.  The Deep Space Tracking Network would attempt to follow the ship carrying the President and his sole bodyguard, but the President had no illusions.  Wherever the aliens were taking them, they would be beyond all hope of rescue.  It was equally unlikely that they would be able to avenge their deaths.

Earth itself seemed to shine in the distance, a blue-green globe hanging in space.  It was easy to see why so many astronauts became religious, or embraced environmental causes; from space, there was no sign of the wars and conflicts that plagued the human race.  Nothing human could be seen on the surface of the planet – there were no lights, no aircraft, no hints that humanity existed down there – and the image had a purity that contrasted oddly with the reality.  A thousand years ago, Earth wouldn’t have signalled the existence of an intelligent life form to the stars, but now…had the aliens found them by homing in on Earth’s radio transmissions?

“There are no satellites,” Pepper said.  She sounded more than a little dazed; truthfully, the President felt dazed as well.  “Mr President…”

The President followed her gaze and saw the Moon as the alien craft swept past it.  It had taken the Apollo astronauts three days to reach the moon, but the alien craft had done it in…he looked down at his watch, timing the entire journey, and realised that it had done it in barely three minutes.  He looked back at Earth, now a tiny blue-green sphere in the distance, and felt cold.  They were further away from the planet than any human had ever been before.  

To boldly go where no one has gone before, part of his mind whispered, reminding him of a handful of Star Trek episodes he’d watched as a teenager.  There had been a girl he'd known who’d been into the series and made him watch it with her before she would put out…that had been years ago and he couldn’t even remember her name.  Captain Kirk and his successors had had their starships, with technology they understood, but it bore no relationship to reality.  The truth was that he was on an alien craft under alien control and no longer had any control over his own fate.  His survival was completely dependent on the aliens.

A massive fist clenched in his chest and he found himself gasping.  The sensation ended as quickly as it had begun, but the after-effects left him feeling weak and fragile.  He looked up towards Pepper and realised that she was suffering as well, her normally bright face pale and wan.  Her green eyes met his for a moment in shared understanding.  Whatever the aliens had done to them, it had affected them both.

He looked past her and almost swore.  Where Earth had been, there was nothing, but cold stars glowing in space.  The aliens, it seemed, possessed some kind of FTL drive, kicking them out far beyond Earth.  He looked around, wondering if they were in another star system, but the naked eye revealed nothing, not even a hint of another planet.  Instead, they were rushing towards a dark shape, which rapidly took on shape and form, a colossal cylinder floating in space.  It was so large – he estimated that it was over a hundred miles long, even though he had nothing to use to deduce its exact size – that it was beyond his comprehension.  It swelled until it dominated the sky, glittering with ominous lights, and it was still growing!  It was almost a relief when the craft’s hull darkened and cut off their view of the outside universe.  The President knew, intellectually, that the aliens wouldn’t want to crash them into their massive ship, but it had been hard to convince himself of that.  The hindbrain had been screaming at him.

The gravity field seemed to twist, drawing his attention back to the deck.  It hadn’t even occurred to him to question the gravity field, yet they hadn’t been floating in zero-gravity, or smashed to a pulp by the force of the heavy acceleration.  It was evident that the aliens could generate and control gravity at will, which provided a possible explanation for how their craft operated.  A race that could control gravity would have no difficulty getting out of the planet’s gravity well and expanding across the universe.

There was a brief final tremor running through the craft, and then the hatch melted open, allowing a warm gust of air to flow into the ship.  The President had been told, in the briefings, that there was no biohazard – but all that really meant was that there was no known danger.  The alien atmosphere might be poisonous, or it might carry germs and bacteria, or the wrong levels of oxygen and nitrogen…he was breathing it!  He braced himself for sudden suffocation, but instead there was only a vague taste of something spicy, right on the tip of his tongue.  He gathered himself, shot Pepper a reassuring look, and stepped up to the hatch.  The alien mothership waited for them.

Their craft had come to rest in the middle of a vast shuttlebay, or perhaps it was a flight deck, although the President mentally compared it to a hangar on an aircraft carrier.  There were hundreds of other craft, parked in neat rows, in the hangar, following several different designs.  One of them was clearly the same design as the craft that had crashed eleven days ago and he hoped that Pepper had the presence of mind to record it.  The people studying the crashed ship would find the recordings interesting and perhaps useful.  He looked straight down the ramp and almost stopped dead.  Two aliens were standing at the bottom, waiting for them.

He’d seen the images of the two types of aliens who had died when their ship crashed – although there were several unanswered questions about why they had died – and had thought he was prepared to meet either of them.  The aliens facing him now were a third type of alien, leaving him wondering how many different types of alien there were.  How many different forms of intelligent life could evolve on a single planet?

The aliens stood tall, taller than him, although not by much.  They were painfully thin, with very skinny bodies and long, inhuman fingers.  Their heads were featureless, apart from two massive black eyes and a tiny mouth, almost as if it were no longer needed.  They looked remarkably fragile – the President half-feared that if he shook their hands, he would pull their arms right out of their sockets – yet they both had a quiet air of competence, and authority.  It reminded him of something, but it took him a minute to place it; the aliens were born to their authority.  He reminded himself that he was dealing with aliens.   His impressions might be completely wrong, yet they refused to fade from his mind.

He reached the bottom of the ramp and halted.  The aliens seemed completely unmoving, as if they lacked nervous tics or involuntary movements.  The President knew from his own military experience that remaining completely still was hard for anyone without proper training, yet the aliens seemed to remain still naturally.  It was impossible to shake the air of…unreality that had settled over him, yet he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was looking at aliens.  They were no hoax, no man dressed in an alien suit, but real aliens.  It was almost like looking at a snake poised to strike.

One of the aliens stepped forward quickly, almost jerkily.  “Mr President,” he said.  The voice was very…human, warm and welcoming.  It didn’t suit the vaguely sinister body at all.  “Thank you for accepting our invitation.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” the President said, gravely.  The sense of being completely out of his depth was only growing stronger.  Normally, before he met another world leader, there would be briefings on protocols and discussions between junior staff – who could be disowned if necessary – before the world leaders actually met.  “It was a remarkable trip.”

The second alien stepped forward.  “We speak for those on this vessel,” he said.  The President decided to assume that they were both male until there was evidence that suggested otherwise.  There were no breasts – or, for that matter, signs that either of them had a penis.  “We wish to welcome you onboard.”

“Thank you,” the President said, again.  His mind was racing.  What role did the aliens play in their society?  Were they elected leaders, dictators, representatives…or what?  He had to remind himself – again – that aliens might not play by human rules and that the rules he knew might not apply to the aliens.

“We wish, also, to show you around our vessel to assist you in understand our nature,” the first alien said.  The double act was confusing.  Which one of them was the senior, or were they equals?  What protocols did they use?  In Japan, the senior man would often say nothing and allow the juniors to handle the negotiations.  In the Middle East, nothing important would be done until the negotiators had chatted about trivia such as the weather and the health of their families.  “We believe that you will find it interesting.”

The President and Pepper exchanged glances, but there was really no choice.  The aliens led them from compartment to compartment, showing hundreds of spacecraft webbed up within the bowels of the mothership, to strange machines that seemed to bear little resemblance to anything humanity had ever built.  There were vast gardens that grew food for the aliens, massive chambers that housed hundreds of aliens and even what the President suspected was alien entertainment.  The tour seemed focused on the military aspects of the ship more and more – they looked in at another hangar deck containing hundreds of tiny craft – and he started to understand.  In their own quiet way, the aliens were making a very clear threat.  

He found himself beginning to lose track of how far they’d travelled, or even where they were within the ship.  The sight of its exterior hull had suggested that it was massive, yet the interior was so confusing.  They could not have found their way back to their craft if they’d fled the aliens, and even if they had, what then?  They were completely at the mercy of the aliens.  Will Smith had flown an alien ship out of the mothership and escaped, but he’d had the greatest ally of all – a patriotic scriptwriter.

“This is the Medical Bay,” one of the aliens said.  They were effectively identical, so similar that the President had lost track of which was which.  They hadn’t even shared their names.  “The medical science on this vessel is far superior to that on your planet.”

It was another frustratingly vague comment.  The aliens spoke only in generalities, never specifics.  The President had asked probing questions, only to hear them deflected with vague answers, or a promise that all would be explained in time.

“Using this equipment, we could prolong your life for many hundreds of years,” the alien added.  “We could wipe out the diseases that affect your kind.  We could ensure that the standard of living on your planet is vastly improved.”

The President asked a sharp question.  “How long have you been watching us?”

“Long enough,” one of the aliens said.  It was – again – a very vague answer.  The President wasn’t blind to the underlying threat, either.  Their advanced medical science could be used, just as easily, to create a biological weapon to wipe out all life on Earth.  The President had read enough scenarios about what terrorists could do if they accomplished their aim of creating a real biological WMD and the aliens, with their technology, could spread it far further.  “Your race is of interest to us.”

The President leaned forward.  “Why?”

“Because you are there,” the alien said.  They walked down another long corridor and into a massive room, housing hundreds of the warrior-aliens.  They ignored the humans and their companions, running through something the President had no difficulty in recognising as a weapons drill.  They had looked bad enough as dead bodies, but living…they looked formidable.  They were far stronger than humans and seemed to move quicker.

One of the aliens seemed to slip closer to the President.  “They are preparing for all eventualities,” he said.  “They expect everything and nothing.”

“Everything and nothing?”  The President asked.  “Are you expecting a war?”

“We expect everything,” the alien replied.  They seemed to share a long glance.  “Follow us.”

The President glanced back at Pepper as she brought up the rear.  Her eyes were wide and staring, glancing around from side to side as she tried to capture everything.  The President felt a moment of sympathy for her; he could talk to the aliens, but she could do nothing, but record it all.  He reached out and squeezed her hand gently, before winking at her.  Whatever else happened, they’d have a record to show the folks back home, where it could be analysed carefully.  Perhaps the aliens wouldn’t be so intimidating after all.

They reached a small chamber, illuminated only by a soft green light.  A single alien sat in the centre of the room, staring down at nothing.  He looked up as they entered, dark eyes peering at the humans.  The alien looked…old, somehow.  The other two aliens gave off no sense of age, but this one seemed centuries old.  The President remembered the comment about extending the human lifespan and wondered if the aliens had such tech for themselves.  Why wouldn’t they attempt to develop life-extending tech that worked for them?

“Welcome onboard our vessel,” the alien said.  His voice was whispery, feather-light.  One thin, utterly inhuman hand waved the President and Pepper to a chair.  “I am Ethos.  I speak for those onboard this ship.  We wish to have converse with you, Mr President.”

The sense of age only grew stronger as the President took the seat.  The other two aliens had smooth skin, but Ethos – the President suspected that it was an assumed name, chosen deliberately for the impression it would make on the humans – was wrinkled.  The massive dark eyes looked dimmer.  They were, the President realised, completely lidless.  The aliens slept – if they slept at all – with their eyes open.

“We must talk openly, you and I,” Ethos whispered.  “We must discuss facts bluntly.  We must share without fear.  We must talk freely.  No offence must be taken.  We will be open with you.  We ask that you do the same.”

“I understand,” the President said.  He risked a direct question.  “What do you want?”

The answer was immediate.  “We want your planet.”