Authors: A. L. Lorentz
“So we’re still running blind?” Lee asked.
“That’s right, Lieutenant. I think your rescues might know more about what’s happening than anyone here. From the radio communication I received, these two wiz-kids are more important than a nuke. If the looting escalates outside the base, we’re to protect these two with our lives. Whatever they know is more important than you, me or the thirsty people of Yuba City.”
“All other priorities rescinded,” Lee whispered with contempt.
“Yes,” he answered, without acknowledging the cryptic allusion. “They’ve put a lot of effort into building a transport scheme for these two after what we learned yesterday.”
“What happened?” Allan asked.
The young man raised a finger to quiet him.
“In due time, Doctor. I don’t need any more demotivators on this base, so chatter about what’s going on off the base stops here on the tarmac, got it? The easiest way to prevent security leaks is not to share information in the first place. You’re not getting any information to spill until I see you on your way tomorrow morning. If I have even one AWOL, it’s going to be your fault.” He pointed at Lee.
She glared back, tension mounting between them.
“Hierarchy be damned, Lieutenant, but we all have to do our best to make sure this country doesn’t fall apart. The world is looking to us for leadership. You and your squad represent that ideal. Earlier today that meant a fiery rescue. Tonight that means taking orders, even from a
kid
like me. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Lee answered and her crew followed suit, now with salutes.
The young man swiveled his hips and came to within a nose of Allan.
“I’m sworn to protect you, but that can just as easily be accomplished by slamming you two in the brig for the night if I think you’re going to talk. Do you understand?”
Allan nodded and nervously sputtered, “Yes . . . sir.”
The man snapped a smile back on his face, winked at him and turned. “Good.”
He motioned for them to follow.
“Let’s see you to your accommodations then, shall we?”
Allan, the last to arrive at a preordained room barely larger than a janitor’s closet, was surprised the young man in charge came into the small space with him. He shut the door behind them and put his hand on Allan’s shoulder.
“Doctor Sands, I have good news for you that I didn’t want to share with the group. Your wife and two children are safe.”
“Are they here?”
“No.”
The man turned to leave.
“Wait,” Allan pleaded. “Where are they? How do you know this? When can I see them?”
The man turned back around and pressed his hand into Allan’s chest forcefully.
“When I asked you if you could keep a secret,
this
is what I meant. I can’t answer your questions and I’m breaking about fifty security protocols to even tell you.” He paused and let his stance soften just a bit. “I’ve got two little girls in Oklahoma right now, so I know what you’re going through. The only thing keeping me going at this point is the hope that they’re okay. As a father myself, I thought you had a right to know, but I’m not prone to favors, so don’t push it. You want to know more, keep asking other people, because
I
never told you. Got it?”
Allan looked down. It should have been good news, but it left him more confused than ever. It wasn’t the first time they told him his family was “fine” or “safe,” but where was the proof? Why couldn’t he see them? When the door shut on the windowless room he felt more like a prisoner than ever.
The bunk might have been the hardest bed Allan had ever slept on, making him wonder how bad the brig could be. Strange jet noises zoomed closer and farther all night, as if he slept the night in an airport lounge. However, after all he’d been through, even jet engines couldn’t keep him awake long.
Allan dreamed of a darkness full of energy. Traveling through a void, his mind flew through time and space far from his body. Symbols and sounds, distinct from the high frequency of the jets outside, swam around him. A message remained just out of grasp. A vast intelligence, frustrated with his primitive senses, tried to convey something. At first Allan imagined he dreamt of the singularity, interfacing with a wise computer.
However, the symbols, vibrations, and emotions spoke from a place of deep memory, a well of experience too broad for his simian brain to grasp. Points of light in an endless room frustrated him. Surrounded by an unknown star field, Allan searched with futile exasperation for familiar constellations.
“No.” he heard, and realized he experienced the word not in his visual or auditory cortexes, but somewhere deeper. He felt it, as a child might experience the temporary emotional rejection of a parent.
“Who are you?” he asked the stars, using the freedom of a dream turned lucid.
“We are,” a comforting feeling came.
A voice, the primitive production of mammalian vocal chords, shattered the stars.
“Doctor Sands!”
The presence Allan communed with vanished.
A young airman opened the door of Allan’s diminutive room. “Your briefing will commence in a few minutes. Breakfast will be provided. Please dress and I’ll escort you.”
Allan took a chair at the back of the briefing room. Some of the chairs had little desks attached, like a college classroom. Jill already sat in one, playing with one of the model F-16s on sticks indicating they were in a pilot briefing room. She sported a new neon yellow cast on her wrist, already signed by a soldier who must have taken a liking to her. Allan didn’t want to know.
“What a night, huh?” she said, eyes drooping.
“Did you have crazy dreams too?” Allan asked.
“I barely had any dreams at all. But I did learn something very interesting hanging out in the cafeteria this morning. I gave up on sleep around five and went to get a cup of coffee. I don’t know who the guys at the table next to me thought I was, but they didn’t seem to have the same restrictions on talking that we’re under.”
“Someone tried to talk to me last night, too. I think.”
“What? They weren’t talking to me, I just overheard. What are you talking about? Someone came to your room?”
“No. I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t sleep well either. So what did you overhear?”
“One of the soldiers just rescued a group of survivors in Boston.” She raised an eyebrow.
“So?”
“Who do you-no, who do
we
know in Boston?”
“I don’t—” Allan’s shoulders dropped. “Really? Of all the people. God, who’s next, your high school prom date?”
“If he’s on the president’s list, too.”
“Kamran Douglass is on the president’s list? Hey, at least
somebody
is giving him attention now,” Allan snidely remarked.
Jill shifted and crossed her arms. “Can we make a truce or something? I won’t chide you about little blondie back in Pasadena if you don’t say anything about Doctor Douglass. Deal?”
“He wasn’t a doctor the last time I saw him, couldn’t even pick a new thesis advisor after you left him high and dry.”
“I’m glad you’ve stopped snooping on my boyfriends. Grow up, Allan. You left me, remember? Thanks for reminding me why.”
“Fine,” Allan relented and rolled his eyes. “Deal. I suppose they’re planning a little reunion for the three of us soon. I can’t imagine how
he
feels about it. Maybe that’s what this briefing is for. If they needed him then we might be dealing with more than a slide down a wormhole. And after last night . . .”
“You said that before. What happened last night?”
“Morning, Docs!” Lee came through the door next, leading the bubbas.
“Sleep well?” LARS asked.
“No,” and “yes” they answered simultaneously, sharing a look of apprehension with each other.
Nana smiled. “Now
I’m
wonderin’ what happened with you two last night.” He put his face between the two scientists as Lee and LARS picked up cups of coffee from a table on the far side of the room. “Looking pretty tired, Sands. You two patch up things like good old times last night?”
Their jaws dropped. “How did you?”
Nana put his finger to his lips. “Don’t let my casual demeanor fool you. There are no dumb pilots. The BA in psychology is one of the most popular majors at West Point, believe it or not. I had you two pegged right away. Airing your dirty laundry back at Coit didn’t hide much either.”
Nana leaned even closer. “I know you’re sensitive about it.” He pantomimed twisting his lips together and throwing away the key as he straightened back up and initiated chatter with Lee and LARS about their mission briefing.
The young man from the night before came out of another door behind a large chalkboard at the front of the room. He no longer looked so young in the harsh light of the morning, gray hairs hiding at close-cropped temples and wrinkles creeping across his forehead.
“Sorry it ain’t a continental breakfast,” he said. “In St. Louis they’re killing each other over canned corn so feel lucky you get toast.”
“Don’t keep us in suspense, sir,” Nana prodded. “Yesterday you said we’d get to go home, but we don’t need a mission briefing for that. What’s the catch?”
The man crossed his arms and lowered his eyes at Jill and Allan.
“As you know, Capcom and Central Command are all based in Cheyenne now. The information we get out here in the boonies is slim to none, only what they need to get through to us to coordinate what’s left of the field-ready forces. Cheyenne Mountain has access to basically any radio signal that will bounce around the Earth. They’ve got land lines buried so deep and so widely connected that a direct nuclear hit wouldn’t wipe out their network.
“Though most of the civilian world is cut off, and even our military satellites are gone, the big radios are still going, and they’re sending back some interesting things. The big dishes at Green Bank found some very strange radio signals that do not appear to be generated terrestrially.”
Jill clasped and rubbed her hands together gingerly. The man glanced at her disapprovingly before continuing.
“Some of our folks believe these signals are our own radio waves bouncing back. Doc Tarmor here is the world’s specialist in determining that. Although I’m not sure how you become the best at never finding what you’re looking for, hopefully today she finds more of the same. You’ll be getting on that C-40 outside and heading to the Big Island so she can confirm this information as terrestrially generated or advise if it is of extraterrestrial origin.”
The word spooked all of them. They’d danced around the prospect of the Event being the machinations of extraterrestrials, but by the end of the day they might have some concrete evidence. None of them looked forward to what that confirmation might mean, not even Jill, who’d looked in vain for it her entire life.
“I know you’re down one bubba, but you’re all we got right now. The docs are catching a Chinook from Pearl to Mauna Kea with you. It seems the president thinks they’ll find the answers up there.”
“Any questions?”
“I’m sorry, why are we going to the Big Island?” asked LARS. “We’re stationed at Hickam, shouldn’t we split up from there?”
The man looked sternly at her. “Hickam is underwater, Lieutenant. You think I’m sending you to Kilauea Camp for R&R? Look around you. We’re running on generators and minimum staff because anyone worth a damn is being used elsewhere. This is just a jumping point to get important people where they need to go. You are being
permitted
to accompany these two,” he pointed at each scientist in turn, “because I don’t have enough power, enough food, or enough patience to keep you on my base. You’re going to the Big Island because it’s easier than scrounging up another group to get the doctors up there. You’ll protect these two with your lives, as you’ve proven you already can.”
He waited a moment before adding “Is that all? . . . Dismissed!”
The man stormed out of the room ahead of the rest of them, who were in no hurry to follow.
“I mean I know we’re talking about aliens and shit these days, but what was up his butt?” Nana asked.
“Maybe they probed him,” LARS snickered, but Lee grabbed her arm.
“I talked to an NCO last night. The major’s entire squadron was called to assist San Francisco ahead of the tsunami. When they tried to evacuate, some of the choppers had too many people hanging on and couldn’t pull up high enough. They lost half the squad and those that made it back gassed up and shipped the evacuees further inland to a refugee camp at Peterson in Colorado.”
“Damn,” LARS emoted. “Lost his entire command overnight.”
“Good news is, we’re going back to Edwards first. In style.”
LARS and Nana perked up. “We get our birds back?”
“That’s right. This time we can babysit from the cockpit, least until we get home.”
“It’ll be good to have a 20mm in my pocket again,” Nana said.
“So what’s at Mauna Kea, anyway?” LARS asked the scientists.