0820 Commander's Office, Tonopah Test Range Nevada.
There is an old saying in the military, 'When the advance is going real well....you are walking in to an ambush.'
Things had suddenly been going real well for Slammer, and it seemed inevitable that something would go wrong....and when you are an Air Force Colonel newly appointed to a major command job, it doesn't get much more wrong than when the Air Force Chief of Staff calling you personally to let you know that you've got a problem.
"Slammer, you've got a problem." Air Force Chiefs of Staff tended to be blunt, and Slammer realized the current incumbent was no exception.
"Good morning to you too, sir," he replied. Hell, two days ago S.Hip almost destroyed the world. It had given him a new perspective on things the people in the Pentagon viewed as a problem. With the right people working with you, you could do anything...and he was beginning to really like the hand he had been dealt when it came to personnel, at least now that he'd gotten rid of Schreiber and Blaukopf...although the whereabouts of the latter was causing him some concern. And apparently the concern was appropriate, for the next words out of the Chief of Staff's mouth were straight to the point.
"You've got some crazy doctor that works for you down at the Detachment...some German guy?"
"Two of them, sir,...Blaukopf and Schreiber. I had them arrested...taken off the site down to Nellis. They assaulted a young lady."
"Well one of them....this Scheisskopf guy....it turned out he was sort of a double agent...working with the Justice Department...some hush-hush FBI group left over from WWII, the 'Special Unit,' they call it."
"That's Blaukopf, sir.."
"Yeah, well don't bet on it. This guy apparently has been spreading the word to the Attorney General that this girl's an alien....she's not, is she?"
"Well, no...SHE'S not..."
"Oh shit, I don't like the tone of that..."
"I was in the middle of writing the report to you sir..."
"Well we don't have time for that. The AG has arranged a meeting with the President on this later today. Get in a jet and get to Andrews. I'll have a helicopter pick you up. You can brief me in person, then we'll get a plan together for what we are going to say and do at that meeting. So Slammer, just how many aliens ARE we talking about?"
Slammer really didn't know how to define S.Hip, or really if Max was even an alien, considering they were all derived from Antar colonists...or if Liz was still human..considering she was starting to manifest alien powers. "It's a little complicated, sir. Can I bring one of our scientists to help explain the situation?"
"Hell yeah, Slammer. The more the merrier. But grab a jet from Nellis and get going...the meeting's at 1800 Eastern time."
"Yes sir."
Ten seconds later Slammer was talking to the Weapons School Commander at Nellis. Ten seconds after that he had the promise of the use of an F-16D which a Nellis pilot would ferry up to Tonopah. Ten seconds after that, he was on the phone again.
"Peter....,you ever fly in a fighter plane?"
"No...no I haven't..."
"How would you like to fly in my backseat to Washington DC? We could see the sights...have a nice lunch...brief the Air Force Chief of Staff, then go talk to the President?"
"Well, I think I'd enjoy the airplane ride at least, Colonel. When do we leave?"
"About twenty minutes...give or take."
The military CAN move fast, when it wants to....
Discipline Malfunction (M/L Mature) [COMPLETE]
Moderators: Itzstacie, Forum Moderators
An F-16D has several advantages over a commercial jet when you want to get somewhere in a hurry. For one thing there was an afterburner takeoff to get up high and fast. They could really move out over the supersonic areas of the Nellis Range, and even after they slowed up to subsonic flight, to keep from breaking windows over most of the continent, they kept it up to near the Mach...about .97. Fuel wasn't that much of a problem, they rendezvoused with one tanker over northern Missouri, and were soon on final for Andrews Air Force Base where a helicopter picked them up and delivered them to the Pentagon heliport. Yeah, the military CAN move fast, when it sets it's mind to it.
It was 1630 local time when the helicopter sat them down at the Pentagon, and Slammer and Peter were quickly escorted through security to the office of the JCS where they were to brief both the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Deputy JCS Chairman, an Admiral. Peter had put the powerpoint presentation together on his notebook computer, in the back seat of the F-16 with input from Slammer. It took almost thirty minutes before the lights came on and Slammer asked if there were any questions.
The Air Force Chief of Staff shook his head, remembering only three weeks ago when he’d practically had to beg Slammer to take the Area 51 job. He had expected him to tighten things up there, and maybe start to give the taxpayer some return on their fifty years investment…but this?
“So Slammer,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff, “..it looks like in three weeks you’ve managed to almost destroy the planet, fire your two most senior scientists, make friends with a couple of over-sexed sixteen year olds…one of whom happens to have extraterrestrial origins, and…on your own initiative, OK rebuilding alien technology that…even broken, was capable of destroying most of the solar system..”
“I’m afraid so, sir….,” he replied.
The Deputy JCS Chairman started to chuckle first, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Peter and Slammer looked at each other curiously…, then the Deputy JCS Chairman shook his head. “I wish I could be there to see this, but it’s an Air Force show. But all three of you need to meet me for a beer when you get done…this is going to be fun, and I want to hear about it.”
The Attorney General was starting to get worried about this meeting with the President. The AG wasn't sure the meeting had EVER been a great idea, but when the senior Senior Executive Service guy in the department demanded something, you had to listen. AGs, like all political appointees, come and go in Washington DC, the average time in the office was less than three years for an Attorney General. And it was that way for most of the big agencies. The political appointees had the title, but the experience and most of the day to day operations were really run by the tenured civil service employees, and the FBI was no exception. Eichoff had been with the FBI since the sixties, back when that old transvestite Hoover kept files on everyone in the US.....even the then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. It was accepted as fact in the department that Eichoff knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, widely suspected Eichoff had put him under the ground himself. So when he'd demanded of the AG that a meeting be held with the President, to discuss some alien girl, the AG had gone along with it.
And it had been bad enough when the AG thought he just meant some undocumented visitor from south of the border, but when Eichoff had briefed him that it was an ....alien...alien....like bug-eyed monster alien..he'd almost crapped his pants.
And now this...the pentagon seemed like they wanted to make this their personal pissing contest, with the JCS chief sending the Air Force Chief of Staff over here to duke it out. This wasn't supposed to happen...hell what had the girl done? Violate some old Executive Order signed by FDR back when there'd been a war on, and they'd been worried about something called foo-fighters allying themselves with the Nazis?
And the political ramifications...hell, half the voters in the country were still fighting about Evolution....even after Stokes. All they needed now was for extraterrestrials to be thrown into the mix. And if the girl really wasn't human..what did that make her? A fuckin' endangered species, probably....and the PETA people would be all over the administration if he let anything happen to her.
Eichoff and this crazy special unit he’d authorized…it sure as hell would have been nice to know about THAT before this mess developed….they claimed that there were four of these aliens and wanted to lock them up…based on some stupid Executive Order left over from when they were interning Japanese-Americans….were Eichoff and these Special Unit guys still living in the Forties, or what?
If they declared these creatures humans, they’d have rights the same as anyone else. If they declared the four of them non-human…..hell, the Agriculture Department would probably have to start a captive breeding program of the damned things, just to comply with the endangered species act..like they had with the California condors.
The AG had a bad feeling about this right from the start, and as he saw the other people the military was requesting to be at the meeting, the Department of Energy, the House and Senate Minority and Majority Leaders…the feeling was getting nothing but worse.
‘For this I gave up an eight-figure salary and a job in Manhattan?’ he asked himself. ‘Shit, maybe the POTUS will just fire me, and I can go back to my old job. That’d be a relief.’
There were apparently reasons that AGs burned out fast. Days like this were definitely among them.
It was 1630 local time when the helicopter sat them down at the Pentagon, and Slammer and Peter were quickly escorted through security to the office of the JCS where they were to brief both the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Deputy JCS Chairman, an Admiral. Peter had put the powerpoint presentation together on his notebook computer, in the back seat of the F-16 with input from Slammer. It took almost thirty minutes before the lights came on and Slammer asked if there were any questions.
The Air Force Chief of Staff shook his head, remembering only three weeks ago when he’d practically had to beg Slammer to take the Area 51 job. He had expected him to tighten things up there, and maybe start to give the taxpayer some return on their fifty years investment…but this?
“So Slammer,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff, “..it looks like in three weeks you’ve managed to almost destroy the planet, fire your two most senior scientists, make friends with a couple of over-sexed sixteen year olds…one of whom happens to have extraterrestrial origins, and…on your own initiative, OK rebuilding alien technology that…even broken, was capable of destroying most of the solar system..”
“I’m afraid so, sir….,” he replied.
The Deputy JCS Chairman started to chuckle first, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Peter and Slammer looked at each other curiously…, then the Deputy JCS Chairman shook his head. “I wish I could be there to see this, but it’s an Air Force show. But all three of you need to meet me for a beer when you get done…this is going to be fun, and I want to hear about it.”
The Attorney General was starting to get worried about this meeting with the President. The AG wasn't sure the meeting had EVER been a great idea, but when the senior Senior Executive Service guy in the department demanded something, you had to listen. AGs, like all political appointees, come and go in Washington DC, the average time in the office was less than three years for an Attorney General. And it was that way for most of the big agencies. The political appointees had the title, but the experience and most of the day to day operations were really run by the tenured civil service employees, and the FBI was no exception. Eichoff had been with the FBI since the sixties, back when that old transvestite Hoover kept files on everyone in the US.....even the then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. It was accepted as fact in the department that Eichoff knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, widely suspected Eichoff had put him under the ground himself. So when he'd demanded of the AG that a meeting be held with the President, to discuss some alien girl, the AG had gone along with it.
And it had been bad enough when the AG thought he just meant some undocumented visitor from south of the border, but when Eichoff had briefed him that it was an ....alien...alien....like bug-eyed monster alien..he'd almost crapped his pants.
And now this...the pentagon seemed like they wanted to make this their personal pissing contest, with the JCS chief sending the Air Force Chief of Staff over here to duke it out. This wasn't supposed to happen...hell what had the girl done? Violate some old Executive Order signed by FDR back when there'd been a war on, and they'd been worried about something called foo-fighters allying themselves with the Nazis?
And the political ramifications...hell, half the voters in the country were still fighting about Evolution....even after Stokes. All they needed now was for extraterrestrials to be thrown into the mix. And if the girl really wasn't human..what did that make her? A fuckin' endangered species, probably....and the PETA people would be all over the administration if he let anything happen to her.
Eichoff and this crazy special unit he’d authorized…it sure as hell would have been nice to know about THAT before this mess developed….they claimed that there were four of these aliens and wanted to lock them up…based on some stupid Executive Order left over from when they were interning Japanese-Americans….were Eichoff and these Special Unit guys still living in the Forties, or what?
If they declared these creatures humans, they’d have rights the same as anyone else. If they declared the four of them non-human…..hell, the Agriculture Department would probably have to start a captive breeding program of the damned things, just to comply with the endangered species act..like they had with the California condors.
The AG had a bad feeling about this right from the start, and as he saw the other people the military was requesting to be at the meeting, the Department of Energy, the House and Senate Minority and Majority Leaders…the feeling was getting nothing but worse.
‘For this I gave up an eight-figure salary and a job in Manhattan?’ he asked himself. ‘Shit, maybe the POTUS will just fire me, and I can go back to my old job. That’d be a relief.’
There were apparently reasons that AGs burned out fast. Days like this were definitely among them.
1800 White House Briefing Room, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
Among the many problems of being a xenophobic zealot is that you tend to spend most of your time with people very much like yourself, and as a consequence, tend to have kind of a warped vision of reality. And so it was with Special FBI Deputy Director Eichoff.
Eichoff, Blaukopf, Schreiber, and the half dozen or so agents of the Special Unit constituted an inbred society intellectually, if you could dignify their ideas with that term. To Eichoff it seemed that this was going to be easy…he had the world’s pre-eminent expert on aliens in the person of Doctor Blaukopf, a handful of 1940s era Presidential Findings signed by FDR and Truman, and evidence that both the US Air Force and apparently the Nye Country Sheriff’s Office were conspiring, aided and abetted by the Nevada State Police, in both concealing a female-appearing alien from the Special Unit, as well as continuing to hold Doctor Schreiber and two Special Unit personnel somewhere in Nye County.
But Eichoff had been in Washington DC for over forty years. As the Pentagon added people to the meeting…House and Senate Minority and Majority leaders, Eichoff sensed that the military was trying to make a fight of this…probably to try to interrogate the alien girl themselves. It wouldn’t work of course, the posse comitatus act specifically forbade the military from stepping in to civilian law enforcement, and the Presidential Findings clearly designated the Justice Department as the organization responsible for aliens, barring an actual war. Nonetheless, the military could be trouble. Eichoff decided to up the ante himself, asking for a representative from the EPA who had recently given a lecture on the Hazards of Invasive Species and was a member of the National Invasive Species Council. It would prove a disastrous mistake…but only one of several. But as the meeting started, Eichoff was reasonably confident that the President would order the Air Force to deliver the alien girl to them immediately, and the military would promptly comply. As I said, he had a somewhat warped vision of reality.
Things started to go wrong for Eichoff almost immediately, when the Attorney General stood up and said, “Mr. President…Deputy Director Eichoff requested that I arrange this meeting with you on a topic that he believes to be vitally important.” Any Washington DC insider listening to that introduction could only realize what had just happened…Eichoff had been pushed out on the stage, with no promise of support from the AG or the rest of the Justice Department….he was on his own.
“Mr. President..as you may be aware, the US has for some time been in possession of the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947. What you may be unaware of is that four pods containing alien lifeform embryos were removed from that wreckage soon after it was found and although we did capture the synthetic lifeform that removed them, we were never able to recover the embryos themselves.
Recently one of these lifeforms…now with the appearance of a teenage female human…attempted to activate a control device of the spacecraft wreckage, possibly to signal other spacecraft and prepare the way for an invasion of Earth. Fortunately at this time, we had the two pre-eminent alien researchers in the world…Doctors Hubertus Blaukopf and Kurt Schreiber present. They were able to subdue the alien…at great threat to themselves, I might add, and they attempted to restrain the creature for the protection of the United States…and for that Manner, all humanity, and to study it to continue their work of protecting our fatherland ..and all the world, ..against this menace from the stars.
Incredibly…THAT MAN,” he said, pointing at Slammer, “..ordered Doctor Blaukopf and Doctor Schreiber INCARCERATED and subsequently FREED this alien creature. At great personal risk to themselves, Doctor Schreiber and two personnel from an FBI Special Unit that has long been working to find and control the missing lifeforms…which have clearly now developed into near adulthood and could represent the greatest danger facing the world today, managed to AGAIN recapture the alien entity in the company of one of Colonel Randolph’s officers.
These three people, after recapturing the alien at great risk to themselves…were subsequently stopped at gunpoint by local authorities working with this man, and the alien was once again set free and returned to Tonopah Test Range where it is even NOW being protected by Colonel Randolph. In the meantime, the local District Attorney has asked for a huge bail which a local judge refuses to accept in the form of a federal check, stating that the federal debt is so great he will accept only silver, gold, or Silver Certificates…but not Federal Reserve Notes. The regional federal attorney has requested and been granted a writ of habeus corpus by the local Federal Magistrate, but we have been unable to have the Federal Marshall’s Office serve it because the two FBI Special Agents and Doctor Schreiber are apparently being transferred from one holding cell in the Nye County Sheriff’s Office to another, one step ahead of the Federal Marshal. Nye County, it would appear Mr. President, is larger than the combined total area of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware.
The Attorney General’s office is asking….no, demanding…, that you order the Air Force to give up this alien creature to us immediately in accordance with Presidential memos 44-234, 46-22, and 47-31, signed by your predecessors, so that this creature can be safely contained and studied.”
Among the many problems of being a xenophobic zealot is that you tend to spend most of your time with people very much like yourself, and as a consequence, tend to have kind of a warped vision of reality. And so it was with Special FBI Deputy Director Eichoff.
Eichoff, Blaukopf, Schreiber, and the half dozen or so agents of the Special Unit constituted an inbred society intellectually, if you could dignify their ideas with that term. To Eichoff it seemed that this was going to be easy…he had the world’s pre-eminent expert on aliens in the person of Doctor Blaukopf, a handful of 1940s era Presidential Findings signed by FDR and Truman, and evidence that both the US Air Force and apparently the Nye Country Sheriff’s Office were conspiring, aided and abetted by the Nevada State Police, in both concealing a female-appearing alien from the Special Unit, as well as continuing to hold Doctor Schreiber and two Special Unit personnel somewhere in Nye County.
But Eichoff had been in Washington DC for over forty years. As the Pentagon added people to the meeting…House and Senate Minority and Majority leaders, Eichoff sensed that the military was trying to make a fight of this…probably to try to interrogate the alien girl themselves. It wouldn’t work of course, the posse comitatus act specifically forbade the military from stepping in to civilian law enforcement, and the Presidential Findings clearly designated the Justice Department as the organization responsible for aliens, barring an actual war. Nonetheless, the military could be trouble. Eichoff decided to up the ante himself, asking for a representative from the EPA who had recently given a lecture on the Hazards of Invasive Species and was a member of the National Invasive Species Council. It would prove a disastrous mistake…but only one of several. But as the meeting started, Eichoff was reasonably confident that the President would order the Air Force to deliver the alien girl to them immediately, and the military would promptly comply. As I said, he had a somewhat warped vision of reality.
Things started to go wrong for Eichoff almost immediately, when the Attorney General stood up and said, “Mr. President…Deputy Director Eichoff requested that I arrange this meeting with you on a topic that he believes to be vitally important.” Any Washington DC insider listening to that introduction could only realize what had just happened…Eichoff had been pushed out on the stage, with no promise of support from the AG or the rest of the Justice Department….he was on his own.
“Mr. President..as you may be aware, the US has for some time been in possession of the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947. What you may be unaware of is that four pods containing alien lifeform embryos were removed from that wreckage soon after it was found and although we did capture the synthetic lifeform that removed them, we were never able to recover the embryos themselves.
Recently one of these lifeforms…now with the appearance of a teenage female human…attempted to activate a control device of the spacecraft wreckage, possibly to signal other spacecraft and prepare the way for an invasion of Earth. Fortunately at this time, we had the two pre-eminent alien researchers in the world…Doctors Hubertus Blaukopf and Kurt Schreiber present. They were able to subdue the alien…at great threat to themselves, I might add, and they attempted to restrain the creature for the protection of the United States…and for that Manner, all humanity, and to study it to continue their work of protecting our fatherland ..and all the world, ..against this menace from the stars.
Incredibly…THAT MAN,” he said, pointing at Slammer, “..ordered Doctor Blaukopf and Doctor Schreiber INCARCERATED and subsequently FREED this alien creature. At great personal risk to themselves, Doctor Schreiber and two personnel from an FBI Special Unit that has long been working to find and control the missing lifeforms…which have clearly now developed into near adulthood and could represent the greatest danger facing the world today, managed to AGAIN recapture the alien entity in the company of one of Colonel Randolph’s officers.
These three people, after recapturing the alien at great risk to themselves…were subsequently stopped at gunpoint by local authorities working with this man, and the alien was once again set free and returned to Tonopah Test Range where it is even NOW being protected by Colonel Randolph. In the meantime, the local District Attorney has asked for a huge bail which a local judge refuses to accept in the form of a federal check, stating that the federal debt is so great he will accept only silver, gold, or Silver Certificates…but not Federal Reserve Notes. The regional federal attorney has requested and been granted a writ of habeus corpus by the local Federal Magistrate, but we have been unable to have the Federal Marshall’s Office serve it because the two FBI Special Agents and Doctor Schreiber are apparently being transferred from one holding cell in the Nye County Sheriff’s Office to another, one step ahead of the Federal Marshal. Nye County, it would appear Mr. President, is larger than the combined total area of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware.
The Attorney General’s office is asking….no, demanding…, that you order the Air Force to give up this alien creature to us immediately in accordance with Presidential memos 44-234, 46-22, and 47-31, signed by your predecessors, so that this creature can be safely contained and studied.”
1810 White House Briefing Room, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
The President looked at the Chief of Staff of the Air Force…and the man seemed to take the hint.
“Mr. President, first of all I’d like to introduce you to Colonel Steven Randolph....the new commander at Area 51. As you’ll recall from out conversation six weeks ago…after the British Prime Minister had expressed his concern about safety and leadership at the site based upon his conversation with Stephen Hawking..”
Slammer found himself looking suddenly at Peter….who appeared to be nonchalantly scanning the ceiling in a distant corner of the room…
“…and we agreed at that time that something did need to be done. Even though “black projects” are off-budget, this detachment was consuming some rather impressive resources over the years…with little if anything to show for it. But of course the final clincher in getting new leadership was the safety issue, the reports that Site personnel were unsafe in their handling of material that had the potential for tremendous environmental damage, and as we have subsequently learned, global catastrophe. Now I’m not going to pretend that Slammer has miraculously fixed all that, decades of neglect can’t be fixed by anyone in a few short weeks, but I believe he has gone a long ways towards controlling the risks inherent in the debris that has been stored there…and that he is the right man to keep in place until the safety and security of the place has been assured. Moreover, after decades of little benefit from Area 51, they appear poised to make some real breakthroughs…things that will give us huge returns on the considerable investments this country has put in to that project over the course of the last half century.
But first, we need to set the record straight on a few misstatements made by Mr. Eichoff.”
Up on the screen went the picture of a ninth grade Liz Parker, being presented with a trophy for winning the regional Science Fair.
“That is the young lady we are talking about here. She was born Liz Parker…that’s her mother Nancy and father Jeff standing there behind her..”
The slides started to come fast and furious….
“That’s a copy of her birth certificate…faxed to us by the State of New Mexico. We also have copies of the birth certificates for her mother and father. The girl is no alien…at least, no more an alien than any of the rest of us. As to her actions at Tonopah Test Range…and they actions of Doctors Schreiber and Scheisskopf..”
“That’s BLAUkopf!” said Blaukopf.
“…well, I’d rather you get that information directly from someone who was there and witnessed it. I don’t believe you’ve met Doctor Peter Stanbeck..one of the senior scientists at Area 51.”
“Good evening, sir. First of all, I might as well admit to being the source of the warning. I’ve been working at Area 51 for many years, and I’m not getting any younger. For most of that time I’ve been trying to keep idiots from doing horribly destructive things with the awesome power of the technology of that downed spacecraft. And finally, a couple days ago…I failed. Dr. Blaukopf over there had apparently taken some…macabre souvenirs from the body of an alien crewmember that had been preserved…made them into gloves…and by touching a communication orb we were giving a seminar about…well he succeeded in activating a self-destruct device that was built in to the programming of…well…the sentient being that is the Ship.”
“Are you saying the wreckage is…alive?” asked the President.
“Apparently it has always been alive…but dormant. The crewmember whose hands the Doctor cut off…he had apparently died of vivisection….without anesthesia…in extreme pain. He had, at the end, gone completely crazy. He had been praying for death…hallucinating about activating the ship self-destruct program…designed to be used to stop the ship from being captured by hostile cultures that would threaten their homeworld. Apparently the being was so terrified…so much in pain…he was willing to destroy the world just to make his pain stop..”
“Excuse me!!?” interrupted the EPA man…. “Did you say, ‘destroy the world?’”
“Yes, and most of the solar system…well, all of it really I suppose. Eventually the outer planets also would have been pulled in to the black hole.”
The Department of Energy Rep was the next to interrupt…”A black hole?”
“Yes, a Kerr Ring Singularity, actually. Part of the Faster than Light Drive mechanism…used apparently to trigger the formation of wormholes on demand in deep space. It was one of three cylinders that have continued to be kept at the Area, since Doctor Blaukopf’s father cut into the fourth…causing a local fusion reaction that fortunately the cylinder itself was able to damp, rather than detonating with a 35 Megaton yield. Had it not damped itself the explosion would have no doubt destroyed the cylinder that contains the singularity…although of course not the singularity itself. That would, I suppose, make this last time the second time a Blaukopf almost destroyed the Solar System…..but then…I digress.
Two days ago Doctor Blaukopf did cause the Ship to come from dormancy up to a very low level of activity with the self-destruct order. The Ship tried to verify the order..but in its state of near total disassembly, was unable to do so. Not really being capable of forming an independent judgment based upon it’s own lack of knowledge, it accepted the coding of the dead First Officer and started to dilate the cylinder to expel the ring singularity. Here are some of the recordings taken by the security cameras of that event. I’m sure our distinguished colleague in the DOE can tell you the significance of the Hawking Radiation…and what would have certainly happened had this process continued for only a few more seconds..”
The DOE representative seemed to turn ashen as he looked at the videos that were playing on the large screen. The EPA rep looked back and forth from the screen to the DOE guy, afraid to imagine what sort of power could scare a nuclear physicist that badly.
“Several of us tried to interact with the communication device, the orb…, to stop this process. And while the Ship then realized its mistake…that not all people were as …inhuman…as Doctor Blaukopf. But the order had been accepted and there was no going back. The Ship initiated a countdown for destruction of this planet….you’ve now seen the videotape. At that point, Liz entered the picture. She saw what you see on the videotape…realized the implication…she’d quite a brilliant young lady intellectually…and she saw the orb glowing…participating in the countdown.
Now at this time you need a little bit more background on Liz…she had previously found a similar orb in Roswell New Mexico…the duplicate of ours. She and her boyfriend had been…well, sort of mesmerized by the orb…and perhaps each other as well. They wound up staying out until the early morning with it…getting in trouble with their parents. To avoid Liz being sent off to boarding school, the kids ran away taking the orb with them…eventually burying it in a forest in northern Arizona…they are probably retrieving it right now, actually. In any event, Liz went to the orb and when she made contact with it…she energized it…brought the Ship to a much higher level of awareness.
The Ship still couldn’t reverse the order…it lacked the authority. But the Ship has been self aware for five centuries and has the knowledge of a culture that has been civilized for many millennia. It went back through it’s own history….the history of the culture that created it….what it could see in the mind of Liz was our culture….and it….well, I rather suspect it cheated, actually, but it nonetheless found a way. You see, unlike some…the Ship was morally revolted at the prospect of being the instrument of a genocide,..so yes, I rather imagine it strained the rules to the maximum extent that its logic would allow, but it was successful.
First, the boy that Liz was dating…well, they’d run off to Las Vegas, lied about their ages and gotten married, so she was Liz Evans now. And Max Evans…well, he was adopted at age six, along with his sister, by a couple in Roswell New Mexico who had discovered them walking along a road. He never told his parents he and his sister…and another boy they later met in school, had walked away from the pods that had brought them to term from those embryos that had been kept in stasis for so long. But he told Liz..and she accepted him..more than that…she married him. And as convoluted as that story is, it was the only thing that would have worked.
The Ship went back and reclassified the embryos from cargo to passengers….used an ancient law that had been on the books unused for millennia to …well…to draft the young man, who wasn’t even there to have an opinion about the matter. That allowed the Ship to ignore the fact that the marriage license had been issued based upon forged documents….Captain’s apparently have some discretion in such matters. Since the girl was now legally married to an Antarean citizen…that’s the parent planet….for all of us, really, since we are a colony they are trying to establish contact with…to offer us membership in their federation,..in any event, that gave her the option of accepting Antarean citizenship through him…and Ship kind of tricked her into doing that…drafted her too making her First Officer, and then asked her if she would kindly reverse the order to…well…to destroy the world.”
”So that’s why we are all here….why we aren’t already just compacted garbage in a singularity…because that young girl loved the boy…married him…understood what was happening…did her best to help…and saved the world. It was shortly after that when Doctor Scheiber and Blaukopf there assaulted her with TASERs, injected her with drugs that have never been approved for human use….that was her reward for what she did.”
Actually, it went even further downhill after that for the Master Race crowd. The meeting lasted for three hours, but the turning point came long before that. Ironically, it was the Attorney General himself who sealed the fate of the issue. He tended to think in legal terms…but he had a wife and kids, and wanted them to survive.
“Look at this,” the Attorney General said, holding up the yellow legal pad, “Unless the aliens are considered human…well, the marriage isn’t valid. If the marriage is invalidated, the order she reversed…well…that wouldn’t be valid either. This Ship fellow….well, it would have to fulfill the order, wouldn’t it?”
Actually, Peter wasn’t at all sure that Ship WOULD fulfill the order…at least not without giving Max an opportunity to countermand it…but it seemed like a good time to just allow his face to have a worried look as he replied to the AG, “Well…..yes…I suppose so.”
In the end, The Department of Energy guy was ecstatic, as was the EPA rep. that within a decade they could look forward to clean, safe, non-polluting hydrogen fusion power fashioned after the cylinders of the Ship. The EPA guy got what he wanted….they were going to get the FTL drive off planet as soon as possible…likely about 15 years. The AG was going to make damn sure that the aliens had full rights as citizens….most especially the right to marry Liz. He offered to use his department resources to defend the kids, if their parents tried to annul the marriage, threatening to drag it to the Supreme Court….drag the case out for a decade or two if need-be. Peter figured that wouldn’t likely be necessary…age eighteen out to be long enough. He’d asked Ship what she wanted all the extra metal for..and Ship had told him. Peter rather expected Jeff and Nancy Parker and Philip and Diane Evans would be up to their waists in “small organics” by then, and more than happy about the whole situation.
Everyone decided that, considering the sensitivities of the various religions toward their individual creation myths, it would probably be a good idea to keep the Earth humans as colonists news..and even the existence of the aliens, a secret until the Ship was rebuilt and able to fulfill it’s mission completely. In the meantime, the government needed to give Max and Liz jobs that would keep them available for technical expertise and provide an education for them that would let the AG be able to make the case to the parents that they REALLY OUGHT to give the marriage a chance.
The President took the Air Force Chief of Staff aside and indicated that he thought Slammer had done a hell of a good job, since he’d already implemented everything they’d decided on, and that maybe Slammer’s name ought to be on the next promotion list that came up to the Hill. The Senate majority and minority leaders seconded that one.
In fact, the only ones who ended the night profoundly unhappy, were Eichoff and Blaukopf. They stormed off as soon as the meeting was over.
“This isn’t finished,” said Eichoff. “We still have the Facility…and our own manpower. If we can get those three aliens together…and anyone they might have….contaminated…we can exterminate them quickly…before they pollute our Race.”
“Yes, we need to get to the Facility…get weapons. We should leave tonight…”
1800 Arizona time, National Forest near Payson Nevada
The Air Force helicopter settled down into the National Forest. It took Liz and Max a few minutes to find where he had buried the orb…it was quickly retrieved. The helicopter crew flew to Payson Arizona, landed at the small airport there to check weather before returning to base.
Max and Liz walked in to the small town to get drinks for the helicopter crew. As she walked through the aisle of the small general store, Liz saw a familiar face…the clerk from the No-Tel Motel. She did her best to ignore him, but it had only been a couple of weeks, he obviously remembered them.
“Well, it’s the king and queen of the Quickee…,” he said.
When he woke up later, he told the police, it was like a golden flashbulb had gone off in the girl’s hand…and somehow he’d been knocked through the plate glass window. Nobody else had seen anything. He was jailed for malicious mischief and destruction of private property.
In the helicopter heading northwest, Liz was saying..
"Honest, Max....I'm not sure what happened. I didn't mean to do it..I don't think."
The President looked at the Chief of Staff of the Air Force…and the man seemed to take the hint.
“Mr. President, first of all I’d like to introduce you to Colonel Steven Randolph....the new commander at Area 51. As you’ll recall from out conversation six weeks ago…after the British Prime Minister had expressed his concern about safety and leadership at the site based upon his conversation with Stephen Hawking..”
Slammer found himself looking suddenly at Peter….who appeared to be nonchalantly scanning the ceiling in a distant corner of the room…
“…and we agreed at that time that something did need to be done. Even though “black projects” are off-budget, this detachment was consuming some rather impressive resources over the years…with little if anything to show for it. But of course the final clincher in getting new leadership was the safety issue, the reports that Site personnel were unsafe in their handling of material that had the potential for tremendous environmental damage, and as we have subsequently learned, global catastrophe. Now I’m not going to pretend that Slammer has miraculously fixed all that, decades of neglect can’t be fixed by anyone in a few short weeks, but I believe he has gone a long ways towards controlling the risks inherent in the debris that has been stored there…and that he is the right man to keep in place until the safety and security of the place has been assured. Moreover, after decades of little benefit from Area 51, they appear poised to make some real breakthroughs…things that will give us huge returns on the considerable investments this country has put in to that project over the course of the last half century.
But first, we need to set the record straight on a few misstatements made by Mr. Eichoff.”
Up on the screen went the picture of a ninth grade Liz Parker, being presented with a trophy for winning the regional Science Fair.
“That is the young lady we are talking about here. She was born Liz Parker…that’s her mother Nancy and father Jeff standing there behind her..”
The slides started to come fast and furious….
“That’s a copy of her birth certificate…faxed to us by the State of New Mexico. We also have copies of the birth certificates for her mother and father. The girl is no alien…at least, no more an alien than any of the rest of us. As to her actions at Tonopah Test Range…and they actions of Doctors Schreiber and Scheisskopf..”
“That’s BLAUkopf!” said Blaukopf.
“…well, I’d rather you get that information directly from someone who was there and witnessed it. I don’t believe you’ve met Doctor Peter Stanbeck..one of the senior scientists at Area 51.”
“Good evening, sir. First of all, I might as well admit to being the source of the warning. I’ve been working at Area 51 for many years, and I’m not getting any younger. For most of that time I’ve been trying to keep idiots from doing horribly destructive things with the awesome power of the technology of that downed spacecraft. And finally, a couple days ago…I failed. Dr. Blaukopf over there had apparently taken some…macabre souvenirs from the body of an alien crewmember that had been preserved…made them into gloves…and by touching a communication orb we were giving a seminar about…well he succeeded in activating a self-destruct device that was built in to the programming of…well…the sentient being that is the Ship.”
“Are you saying the wreckage is…alive?” asked the President.
“Apparently it has always been alive…but dormant. The crewmember whose hands the Doctor cut off…he had apparently died of vivisection….without anesthesia…in extreme pain. He had, at the end, gone completely crazy. He had been praying for death…hallucinating about activating the ship self-destruct program…designed to be used to stop the ship from being captured by hostile cultures that would threaten their homeworld. Apparently the being was so terrified…so much in pain…he was willing to destroy the world just to make his pain stop..”
“Excuse me!!?” interrupted the EPA man…. “Did you say, ‘destroy the world?’”
“Yes, and most of the solar system…well, all of it really I suppose. Eventually the outer planets also would have been pulled in to the black hole.”
The Department of Energy Rep was the next to interrupt…”A black hole?”
“Yes, a Kerr Ring Singularity, actually. Part of the Faster than Light Drive mechanism…used apparently to trigger the formation of wormholes on demand in deep space. It was one of three cylinders that have continued to be kept at the Area, since Doctor Blaukopf’s father cut into the fourth…causing a local fusion reaction that fortunately the cylinder itself was able to damp, rather than detonating with a 35 Megaton yield. Had it not damped itself the explosion would have no doubt destroyed the cylinder that contains the singularity…although of course not the singularity itself. That would, I suppose, make this last time the second time a Blaukopf almost destroyed the Solar System…..but then…I digress.
Two days ago Doctor Blaukopf did cause the Ship to come from dormancy up to a very low level of activity with the self-destruct order. The Ship tried to verify the order..but in its state of near total disassembly, was unable to do so. Not really being capable of forming an independent judgment based upon it’s own lack of knowledge, it accepted the coding of the dead First Officer and started to dilate the cylinder to expel the ring singularity. Here are some of the recordings taken by the security cameras of that event. I’m sure our distinguished colleague in the DOE can tell you the significance of the Hawking Radiation…and what would have certainly happened had this process continued for only a few more seconds..”
The DOE representative seemed to turn ashen as he looked at the videos that were playing on the large screen. The EPA rep looked back and forth from the screen to the DOE guy, afraid to imagine what sort of power could scare a nuclear physicist that badly.
“Several of us tried to interact with the communication device, the orb…, to stop this process. And while the Ship then realized its mistake…that not all people were as …inhuman…as Doctor Blaukopf. But the order had been accepted and there was no going back. The Ship initiated a countdown for destruction of this planet….you’ve now seen the videotape. At that point, Liz entered the picture. She saw what you see on the videotape…realized the implication…she’d quite a brilliant young lady intellectually…and she saw the orb glowing…participating in the countdown.
Now at this time you need a little bit more background on Liz…she had previously found a similar orb in Roswell New Mexico…the duplicate of ours. She and her boyfriend had been…well, sort of mesmerized by the orb…and perhaps each other as well. They wound up staying out until the early morning with it…getting in trouble with their parents. To avoid Liz being sent off to boarding school, the kids ran away taking the orb with them…eventually burying it in a forest in northern Arizona…they are probably retrieving it right now, actually. In any event, Liz went to the orb and when she made contact with it…she energized it…brought the Ship to a much higher level of awareness.
The Ship still couldn’t reverse the order…it lacked the authority. But the Ship has been self aware for five centuries and has the knowledge of a culture that has been civilized for many millennia. It went back through it’s own history….the history of the culture that created it….what it could see in the mind of Liz was our culture….and it….well, I rather suspect it cheated, actually, but it nonetheless found a way. You see, unlike some…the Ship was morally revolted at the prospect of being the instrument of a genocide,..so yes, I rather imagine it strained the rules to the maximum extent that its logic would allow, but it was successful.
First, the boy that Liz was dating…well, they’d run off to Las Vegas, lied about their ages and gotten married, so she was Liz Evans now. And Max Evans…well, he was adopted at age six, along with his sister, by a couple in Roswell New Mexico who had discovered them walking along a road. He never told his parents he and his sister…and another boy they later met in school, had walked away from the pods that had brought them to term from those embryos that had been kept in stasis for so long. But he told Liz..and she accepted him..more than that…she married him. And as convoluted as that story is, it was the only thing that would have worked.
The Ship went back and reclassified the embryos from cargo to passengers….used an ancient law that had been on the books unused for millennia to …well…to draft the young man, who wasn’t even there to have an opinion about the matter. That allowed the Ship to ignore the fact that the marriage license had been issued based upon forged documents….Captain’s apparently have some discretion in such matters. Since the girl was now legally married to an Antarean citizen…that’s the parent planet….for all of us, really, since we are a colony they are trying to establish contact with…to offer us membership in their federation,..in any event, that gave her the option of accepting Antarean citizenship through him…and Ship kind of tricked her into doing that…drafted her too making her First Officer, and then asked her if she would kindly reverse the order to…well…to destroy the world.”
”So that’s why we are all here….why we aren’t already just compacted garbage in a singularity…because that young girl loved the boy…married him…understood what was happening…did her best to help…and saved the world. It was shortly after that when Doctor Scheiber and Blaukopf there assaulted her with TASERs, injected her with drugs that have never been approved for human use….that was her reward for what she did.”
Actually, it went even further downhill after that for the Master Race crowd. The meeting lasted for three hours, but the turning point came long before that. Ironically, it was the Attorney General himself who sealed the fate of the issue. He tended to think in legal terms…but he had a wife and kids, and wanted them to survive.
“Look at this,” the Attorney General said, holding up the yellow legal pad, “Unless the aliens are considered human…well, the marriage isn’t valid. If the marriage is invalidated, the order she reversed…well…that wouldn’t be valid either. This Ship fellow….well, it would have to fulfill the order, wouldn’t it?”
Actually, Peter wasn’t at all sure that Ship WOULD fulfill the order…at least not without giving Max an opportunity to countermand it…but it seemed like a good time to just allow his face to have a worried look as he replied to the AG, “Well…..yes…I suppose so.”
In the end, The Department of Energy guy was ecstatic, as was the EPA rep. that within a decade they could look forward to clean, safe, non-polluting hydrogen fusion power fashioned after the cylinders of the Ship. The EPA guy got what he wanted….they were going to get the FTL drive off planet as soon as possible…likely about 15 years. The AG was going to make damn sure that the aliens had full rights as citizens….most especially the right to marry Liz. He offered to use his department resources to defend the kids, if their parents tried to annul the marriage, threatening to drag it to the Supreme Court….drag the case out for a decade or two if need-be. Peter figured that wouldn’t likely be necessary…age eighteen out to be long enough. He’d asked Ship what she wanted all the extra metal for..and Ship had told him. Peter rather expected Jeff and Nancy Parker and Philip and Diane Evans would be up to their waists in “small organics” by then, and more than happy about the whole situation.
Everyone decided that, considering the sensitivities of the various religions toward their individual creation myths, it would probably be a good idea to keep the Earth humans as colonists news..and even the existence of the aliens, a secret until the Ship was rebuilt and able to fulfill it’s mission completely. In the meantime, the government needed to give Max and Liz jobs that would keep them available for technical expertise and provide an education for them that would let the AG be able to make the case to the parents that they REALLY OUGHT to give the marriage a chance.
The President took the Air Force Chief of Staff aside and indicated that he thought Slammer had done a hell of a good job, since he’d already implemented everything they’d decided on, and that maybe Slammer’s name ought to be on the next promotion list that came up to the Hill. The Senate majority and minority leaders seconded that one.
In fact, the only ones who ended the night profoundly unhappy, were Eichoff and Blaukopf. They stormed off as soon as the meeting was over.
“This isn’t finished,” said Eichoff. “We still have the Facility…and our own manpower. If we can get those three aliens together…and anyone they might have….contaminated…we can exterminate them quickly…before they pollute our Race.”
“Yes, we need to get to the Facility…get weapons. We should leave tonight…”
1800 Arizona time, National Forest near Payson Nevada
The Air Force helicopter settled down into the National Forest. It took Liz and Max a few minutes to find where he had buried the orb…it was quickly retrieved. The helicopter crew flew to Payson Arizona, landed at the small airport there to check weather before returning to base.
Max and Liz walked in to the small town to get drinks for the helicopter crew. As she walked through the aisle of the small general store, Liz saw a familiar face…the clerk from the No-Tel Motel. She did her best to ignore him, but it had only been a couple of weeks, he obviously remembered them.
“Well, it’s the king and queen of the Quickee…,” he said.
When he woke up later, he told the police, it was like a golden flashbulb had gone off in the girl’s hand…and somehow he’d been knocked through the plate glass window. Nobody else had seen anything. He was jailed for malicious mischief and destruction of private property.
In the helicopter heading northwest, Liz was saying..
"Honest, Max....I'm not sure what happened. I didn't mean to do it..I don't think."
Last edited by greywolf on Thu Apr 19, 2007 9:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
It was after after midnight....'zero-dark-thirty' in military parlance, when Peter, Slammer, and the Air Force Chief of Staff got back to the Pentagon. They were surprised to find the Deputy JCS Chairman still there...and were almost giddy as they described to him how well the meeting had gone.
The JCS Deputy nodded his head, as they described the outcome, but the look of seriousness never left his face. Eventually the Air Force Chief of Staff stopped and looked at him..."What is it?"
The JCS Deputy turned to Slammer and said, "Apparently she didn't want you to know until she got there, Colonel, but your wife....she'll be landing at Travis in an hour....going to be admitted to the medical center there. I've already contacted the 89th MAS..they have a C-37 waiting to take you to Travis. They'll take Doctor Stanbeck back to Tonopah after they drop you off at Travis. We'll get someone else to fly the F-16 back to Nellis."
It took a half hour for the Air Force Sedan to get them to Andrews. They were airborne twenty minutes later.
At Dulles, another aircraft was getting airborne...the Gulfstream III used by senior FBI personnel.
"There are three of them...three 'children' who were found wandering in the desert that year. The one called Evans..its 'sister,' and another one..named Guerin. Once we get to the facility we need to set up an operation to get them...and anyone they may have...contaminated. If we can get them all at once, in the same place, this will all be over."
"But what about their powers?" asked Blaukopf. "Three of them together...who knows how strong they might be."
"With the right weapons, it shouldn't be a problem. There may of course be substantisl...collateral damage. But if it's necessary to keep the Race pure...so what. They deserve it for allowing themselves to be used by those creatures. We should be in El Paso in three hours, we have rental cars waiting...the drive to the Facility should only be four or five hours.
3:00 AM Pahrump holding facility, Nye County Sheriff's Office.
He'd finally tracked them down....after chasing over half the state of New Mexico. The guard had been philospophical when he'd given him the writ of habeus corpus, the Sheriff's Department knew they couldn't keep it up forever.
"If those three aren't back to stand trial on their court date I am goiong to personally find you and kick your ass," the Deputy said to the US Marshall.
'So much for cooperating with the feds,' the Marshall thought. He wasn't sure what was going on...or even just who these people were, but he had his orders.
"Headquarters said that the plane has left Reno and it'll be in McCarren in a half hour. They'll pick you up there. Anyone care to tell me what this is all about?"
The Special Agents, and the professor just glared at him.
'Apparently not,' he decided. 'These people appeared even LESS friendly than the local law enforcement. Whatever they'd done, had sure pissed off the state and county police.'
'If they don't come back for that trial, I just might help that deputy look THEM up and kick THEIR asses,' he thought.
The JCS Deputy nodded his head, as they described the outcome, but the look of seriousness never left his face. Eventually the Air Force Chief of Staff stopped and looked at him..."What is it?"
The JCS Deputy turned to Slammer and said, "Apparently she didn't want you to know until she got there, Colonel, but your wife....she'll be landing at Travis in an hour....going to be admitted to the medical center there. I've already contacted the 89th MAS..they have a C-37 waiting to take you to Travis. They'll take Doctor Stanbeck back to Tonopah after they drop you off at Travis. We'll get someone else to fly the F-16 back to Nellis."
It took a half hour for the Air Force Sedan to get them to Andrews. They were airborne twenty minutes later.
At Dulles, another aircraft was getting airborne...the Gulfstream III used by senior FBI personnel.
"There are three of them...three 'children' who were found wandering in the desert that year. The one called Evans..its 'sister,' and another one..named Guerin. Once we get to the facility we need to set up an operation to get them...and anyone they may have...contaminated. If we can get them all at once, in the same place, this will all be over."
"But what about their powers?" asked Blaukopf. "Three of them together...who knows how strong they might be."
"With the right weapons, it shouldn't be a problem. There may of course be substantisl...collateral damage. But if it's necessary to keep the Race pure...so what. They deserve it for allowing themselves to be used by those creatures. We should be in El Paso in three hours, we have rental cars waiting...the drive to the Facility should only be four or five hours.
3:00 AM Pahrump holding facility, Nye County Sheriff's Office.
He'd finally tracked them down....after chasing over half the state of New Mexico. The guard had been philospophical when he'd given him the writ of habeus corpus, the Sheriff's Department knew they couldn't keep it up forever.
"If those three aren't back to stand trial on their court date I am goiong to personally find you and kick your ass," the Deputy said to the US Marshall.
'So much for cooperating with the feds,' the Marshall thought. He wasn't sure what was going on...or even just who these people were, but he had his orders.
"Headquarters said that the plane has left Reno and it'll be in McCarren in a half hour. They'll pick you up there. Anyone care to tell me what this is all about?"
The Special Agents, and the professor just glared at him.
'Apparently not,' he decided. 'These people appeared even LESS friendly than the local law enforcement. Whatever they'd done, had sure pissed off the state and county police.'
'If they don't come back for that trial, I just might help that deputy look THEM up and kick THEIR asses,' he thought.
4:15 AM Nevada US District Court Chief Judge Roger Barrett's residence, Henderson Nevada.
One of the cornerstones of US government is an independent judiciary....but don't try to tell that to Judge Roger Barrett. He was fielding the third call in the last seven minutes. The first had been from the Nye County District Attorney....that had been bad enough. This one was from the OTHER Nevada Senator. He also was threatening to put a hold on Barrett's appointment to any higher judiciary position...and like most in the judiciary, Roger had aspirations of being on a Court of Appeals some day...and maybe even the Supreme Court. Those aspirations were in serious jeopardy, and he wasn't sure why. Somehow he had stepped on a political landmine over what had seemed a rather routine case of some local yokel Sheriff overstepping his authority.
"Well I don't give a rat's ass WHAT the Junior Deputy Federal Attorney for Las Vegas told you, Judge, the FACTS of the matter are that those three ran two young ladies off the road almost killing them, illegally imprisoned them, were apprehended in the act of transporting them without extradition paperwork..or even a warrant for their arrest....and you....YOU...go and sign a writ of habeus corpus to spring them? Did you know that one of them had already assaulted one of those young ladies previously? That he was only out of jail because someone pulled some strings to spring him? If those three don't show up for their trial date...well, you can kiss that Court of Appeals job goodbye."
As the sound of the senior Senator's phone being slammed in its cradle was still ringing in his ears, Barrett called a friend in the Justice Department in DC, taking advantage of the three hour time zone change to catch him just as he got to the office. The news wasn't good. The AG had just put out the word to arrest those three on federal kidnapping charges over the same incident he'd sprung them for. It was going to be a very very bad day.......
4:45 McCarran Airport, Las Vegas Nevada.
The pilot of the FBI Gulfstream had just completed the pre engine start checklist when his cellphone began ringing. It was the home office. That's how he got the news that the passengers he and the copilot were transporting were wanted for kidnapping...and a number of state charges.
'Well that was just perfect,' he thought. 'Five people on the aircraft, three of them armed...and they're the ones with the guns.' There was a hurried conversation with the copilot, followed by a nervous sounding message on the PA system;
"Uh...this is your Captain speaking....that is..I would have been your Captain, but the airplane isn't going anywhere...the uh...the turbine inlet temperature on the number two engine is way too high...it can't safely be flown without a major rebuild, and the number one engine just had an overspeed. Damn. we are all lucky the thing didn't just blow up....uh, the copilot and I will stay here and work the problem with maintenance, but it'll probably be a week or two. You might want to make other arrangements."
Both agents were irritated that their agency credit cards were refused. There had to be some monstrous foulup. Eventually Schreiber used his own Mastercard to get them three tickets to El Paso (economy) on Southwest. They would leave immediately for Phoenix, but have a four hour layover there.
0730 Tonopah Test Range Nevada
Liz had always been somewhat of an early riser and today was no different. The nanobots had been busy in the hangar, and a fine web of superconductive materiel connected every single part of the Ship to the two power cylinders and the FTL drive. The original orb was back in its place at the being-reconstructed avionics panel, it's twin in Liz's backpack.
"So it really wasn't this orb that made me act that way?"
"No Liz, I think that was just you. I've done several BIT checks on your orb...as well as an external diagnostic. All components of that orb are performing well within their design parameters. I'm afraid you are just....well, a horndog, in your idiom."
"Thanks a lot," said Liz, with a sarcastic little smile Still, when it came to Max...it was fun being a horndog.
"So what did you think of my ideas, Ship?"
"The concepts are fascinating Liz, well ahead of what was being done in Antar when i left fifty years ago. I believe that the healing arts there have been artificially stunted by the dependence on healers like Max. While they are excellent, there are limits to what they can do. Your ideas about combining nanorobotics and Molecular biology open whole new possibilities for not only the treatment of disease, but the maintenance of health. While my own mission programming is directed more towards astroexploration, the value of the concepts you suggest is readily apparent even to me."
It was almost two hours later that Peter Stanbeck walked in to the hangar, looking somewhat glum.
"Where's the commander? I need to tell him about some ideas Ship and I have. Also that I accidentally powerblasted someone yesterday. I didn't hurt him...not badly at least. I guess whatever they put in those TASERs, Max healing my bruise reversed."
"I'm afraid the commander won't be back for sometime, Liz. He has a ...personal..problem."
"What kind of problem is that?"
"Well Liz, that would be a problem that is..personal. Perhaps he will choose to share it with you, but I won't. Let's just say this isn't a very good time for him right now, and give the man his privacy, alright?"
Liz left to go find Laurie, thinking perhaps she might weasel the information out of her. But she'd barely left the hangar before the idea came to her. She took the orb out of her backpack and touched it.
*OK, Ship, what's going on with Slammer?*
*According to the Travis AFB California computer, he is staying in a room at the Transient Officers Building. Crosschecking with the David Grant Medical Center computer, it would appear that Major Sandi Randolph, his spouse, is a patient on the oncology service*
*What's her diagnosis, Ship?*
*Metastatic adenocarcinoma, First Officer, widely disseminated...terminal...*
One of the cornerstones of US government is an independent judiciary....but don't try to tell that to Judge Roger Barrett. He was fielding the third call in the last seven minutes. The first had been from the Nye County District Attorney....that had been bad enough. This one was from the OTHER Nevada Senator. He also was threatening to put a hold on Barrett's appointment to any higher judiciary position...and like most in the judiciary, Roger had aspirations of being on a Court of Appeals some day...and maybe even the Supreme Court. Those aspirations were in serious jeopardy, and he wasn't sure why. Somehow he had stepped on a political landmine over what had seemed a rather routine case of some local yokel Sheriff overstepping his authority.
"Well I don't give a rat's ass WHAT the Junior Deputy Federal Attorney for Las Vegas told you, Judge, the FACTS of the matter are that those three ran two young ladies off the road almost killing them, illegally imprisoned them, were apprehended in the act of transporting them without extradition paperwork..or even a warrant for their arrest....and you....YOU...go and sign a writ of habeus corpus to spring them? Did you know that one of them had already assaulted one of those young ladies previously? That he was only out of jail because someone pulled some strings to spring him? If those three don't show up for their trial date...well, you can kiss that Court of Appeals job goodbye."
As the sound of the senior Senator's phone being slammed in its cradle was still ringing in his ears, Barrett called a friend in the Justice Department in DC, taking advantage of the three hour time zone change to catch him just as he got to the office. The news wasn't good. The AG had just put out the word to arrest those three on federal kidnapping charges over the same incident he'd sprung them for. It was going to be a very very bad day.......
4:45 McCarran Airport, Las Vegas Nevada.
The pilot of the FBI Gulfstream had just completed the pre engine start checklist when his cellphone began ringing. It was the home office. That's how he got the news that the passengers he and the copilot were transporting were wanted for kidnapping...and a number of state charges.
'Well that was just perfect,' he thought. 'Five people on the aircraft, three of them armed...and they're the ones with the guns.' There was a hurried conversation with the copilot, followed by a nervous sounding message on the PA system;
"Uh...this is your Captain speaking....that is..I would have been your Captain, but the airplane isn't going anywhere...the uh...the turbine inlet temperature on the number two engine is way too high...it can't safely be flown without a major rebuild, and the number one engine just had an overspeed. Damn. we are all lucky the thing didn't just blow up....uh, the copilot and I will stay here and work the problem with maintenance, but it'll probably be a week or two. You might want to make other arrangements."
Both agents were irritated that their agency credit cards were refused. There had to be some monstrous foulup. Eventually Schreiber used his own Mastercard to get them three tickets to El Paso (economy) on Southwest. They would leave immediately for Phoenix, but have a four hour layover there.
0730 Tonopah Test Range Nevada
Liz had always been somewhat of an early riser and today was no different. The nanobots had been busy in the hangar, and a fine web of superconductive materiel connected every single part of the Ship to the two power cylinders and the FTL drive. The original orb was back in its place at the being-reconstructed avionics panel, it's twin in Liz's backpack.
"So it really wasn't this orb that made me act that way?"
"No Liz, I think that was just you. I've done several BIT checks on your orb...as well as an external diagnostic. All components of that orb are performing well within their design parameters. I'm afraid you are just....well, a horndog, in your idiom."
"Thanks a lot," said Liz, with a sarcastic little smile Still, when it came to Max...it was fun being a horndog.
"So what did you think of my ideas, Ship?"
"The concepts are fascinating Liz, well ahead of what was being done in Antar when i left fifty years ago. I believe that the healing arts there have been artificially stunted by the dependence on healers like Max. While they are excellent, there are limits to what they can do. Your ideas about combining nanorobotics and Molecular biology open whole new possibilities for not only the treatment of disease, but the maintenance of health. While my own mission programming is directed more towards astroexploration, the value of the concepts you suggest is readily apparent even to me."
It was almost two hours later that Peter Stanbeck walked in to the hangar, looking somewhat glum.
"Where's the commander? I need to tell him about some ideas Ship and I have. Also that I accidentally powerblasted someone yesterday. I didn't hurt him...not badly at least. I guess whatever they put in those TASERs, Max healing my bruise reversed."
"I'm afraid the commander won't be back for sometime, Liz. He has a ...personal..problem."
"What kind of problem is that?"
"Well Liz, that would be a problem that is..personal. Perhaps he will choose to share it with you, but I won't. Let's just say this isn't a very good time for him right now, and give the man his privacy, alright?"
Liz left to go find Laurie, thinking perhaps she might weasel the information out of her. But she'd barely left the hangar before the idea came to her. She took the orb out of her backpack and touched it.
*OK, Ship, what's going on with Slammer?*
*According to the Travis AFB California computer, he is staying in a room at the Transient Officers Building. Crosschecking with the David Grant Medical Center computer, it would appear that Major Sandi Randolph, his spouse, is a patient on the oncology service*
*What's her diagnosis, Ship?*
*Metastatic adenocarcinoma, First Officer, widely disseminated...terminal...*
7:30 AM 50 miles East of Phoenix on Interstate 10
The text mail had come to them while still airborne…call a certain number in New Mexico….collect. Schreiber had called Eichoff as soon as they landed, only to be told that there were warrants out for all three of them…and Blaukopf as well.
“But I don’t understand…,” Schreiber had said, “.. How can the President permit the alien girl to live?”
“It would appear that the girl is worse than an alien…a traitor, who has allowed herself…voluntarily….to be contaminated by one of them. But the plan is to have her…and the three other known aliens, all be in Roswell in two days,” Eichoff had said. “We attack them there…once they are destroyed, those in government will come to their senses…help us track down the missing one…and its protector. But first we must kill these.”
The FBI was watching for them to use their agency or personal credit cards, they knew. They gave their tickets to three people who were waiting to get on the overbooked aircraft, and silently left the airport. They pooled their cash…bought a $300 pickup truck, and began the long drive to Roswell New Mexico. It was fifty miles before the first tire went flat…and they discovered they had no spare.
2200 David Grant Medical Center Ward 4B (hematology-oncology)
The Charge Nurse stopped in as she went off shift. She had known Sandi for 10 years, they’d been Second Lieutenants together. Sandi had started to go downhill abruptly on the medevac enroute to Travis. They’d given her morphine…it was the pain from the metastases in the bone that was causing most of the problem. Once they’d got her admitted and on a PCA pump, the pain had been tolerable, but there was little else they could do.
They did manage a private room for her, and her husband had gotten there around 0300…and hadn’t left her side since that time. The Charge Nurse shook her head sadly, wishing there was something more that could be done. She’d been a bridesmaid at their wedding.
Slammer’s heart was breaking as he saw Sandi wince when she adjusted the bed. They’d been married for eight years…and two of those had been spent apart on remote tours …two years and three months, actually. But when he’d last seen her almost three months ago, she had been vibrant..so alive…a little unhappy about the remote, but already looking forward to seeing him in Hawaii at her mid-tour break. Two weeks ago, he’d have given anything to see her three months early…but not this way.
Fate could be so unkind…it was just a few days ago that the world nearly ended…they were saved by…a miracle, really….only to lose her like this. For he WAS going to lose her…the doctor had made that perfectly clear. Perhaps in a few days…a couple weeks at the outside, but lose her he would. Sure, they’d give her chemotherapy…but it was only palliative…trying to control the pain as the cancer ate through her very bones.
“Slammer, you look terrible…” she said through cracked lips. “When did you last get any sleep?”
“You don’t look so hot yourself, angel….and it was about thirty-six hours ago….”
“Go back to the Q…get some rest…I promise I’ll still be around when you come back.”
“No…I think I’ll stay here. I just like to look at you..”
“Slammer, you are out on your feet….please…just a few hours. Then you can come back.”
He looked at her..knowing she was right…but she looked so small, in the nest of wires and pumps and IV tubing. He would have given anything just to be able to take her pain from her…just for an hour…but he couldn’t.
“Slammer…please. I’m just going to take a nap. You take one too, Come back in the morning…we can talk then.”
“I’ll be back in four hours, tops,” he said, kissing her tenderly. He didn’t call the base taxi…walking slowly back to the Transient Officers Quarters, his mind replaying every memory he had of those eight glorious years, the tears trickling down his cheeks unashamedly.
2330 Travis AFB, Fairfield California.
The small C-12 aircraft came over the Sierra Nevadas and descended on the localizer for runway 21 right. The small aircraft landed easily but continued its taxi to the ‘hot cargo’ area, an area separated from the rest of the flightline where explosive or highly classified cargo is segregated from the other aircraft. Two figures got out, and began the long walk to the Medical Center two miles away.
0030 David Grant Medical Center Ward 4B (hematology-oncology)
Sandi was pretty sure the morphine was making her head fuzzy…she had thought it was the middle of the night. But as she saw the candy-striper push the bookcart into the room, the young male volunteer at her side, she figured it had to be nearer to noon.
“Would you like to have a book?” the young girl asked.
“I’m sorry, with the medicine I’m on, my eyes are kind of blurry. I don’t think I can even read right now.”
“Well,” said the candy-striper, “If you like, I could read you a book. This one actually is one of my favorites.”
“Why that would be lovely…go ahead, dear,” said Sandi
The young girl picked up the book, and opened it to the very first page. In the quiet of the night, in the privacy of the one small room, she began to read.
“September 23rd. Journal entry one. I'm Liz Parker and five days ago I died. After that, things got really weird.... “
The text mail had come to them while still airborne…call a certain number in New Mexico….collect. Schreiber had called Eichoff as soon as they landed, only to be told that there were warrants out for all three of them…and Blaukopf as well.
“But I don’t understand…,” Schreiber had said, “.. How can the President permit the alien girl to live?”
“It would appear that the girl is worse than an alien…a traitor, who has allowed herself…voluntarily….to be contaminated by one of them. But the plan is to have her…and the three other known aliens, all be in Roswell in two days,” Eichoff had said. “We attack them there…once they are destroyed, those in government will come to their senses…help us track down the missing one…and its protector. But first we must kill these.”
The FBI was watching for them to use their agency or personal credit cards, they knew. They gave their tickets to three people who were waiting to get on the overbooked aircraft, and silently left the airport. They pooled their cash…bought a $300 pickup truck, and began the long drive to Roswell New Mexico. It was fifty miles before the first tire went flat…and they discovered they had no spare.
2200 David Grant Medical Center Ward 4B (hematology-oncology)
The Charge Nurse stopped in as she went off shift. She had known Sandi for 10 years, they’d been Second Lieutenants together. Sandi had started to go downhill abruptly on the medevac enroute to Travis. They’d given her morphine…it was the pain from the metastases in the bone that was causing most of the problem. Once they’d got her admitted and on a PCA pump, the pain had been tolerable, but there was little else they could do.
They did manage a private room for her, and her husband had gotten there around 0300…and hadn’t left her side since that time. The Charge Nurse shook her head sadly, wishing there was something more that could be done. She’d been a bridesmaid at their wedding.
Slammer’s heart was breaking as he saw Sandi wince when she adjusted the bed. They’d been married for eight years…and two of those had been spent apart on remote tours …two years and three months, actually. But when he’d last seen her almost three months ago, she had been vibrant..so alive…a little unhappy about the remote, but already looking forward to seeing him in Hawaii at her mid-tour break. Two weeks ago, he’d have given anything to see her three months early…but not this way.
Fate could be so unkind…it was just a few days ago that the world nearly ended…they were saved by…a miracle, really….only to lose her like this. For he WAS going to lose her…the doctor had made that perfectly clear. Perhaps in a few days…a couple weeks at the outside, but lose her he would. Sure, they’d give her chemotherapy…but it was only palliative…trying to control the pain as the cancer ate through her very bones.
“Slammer, you look terrible…” she said through cracked lips. “When did you last get any sleep?”
“You don’t look so hot yourself, angel….and it was about thirty-six hours ago….”
“Go back to the Q…get some rest…I promise I’ll still be around when you come back.”
“No…I think I’ll stay here. I just like to look at you..”
“Slammer, you are out on your feet….please…just a few hours. Then you can come back.”
He looked at her..knowing she was right…but she looked so small, in the nest of wires and pumps and IV tubing. He would have given anything just to be able to take her pain from her…just for an hour…but he couldn’t.
“Slammer…please. I’m just going to take a nap. You take one too, Come back in the morning…we can talk then.”
“I’ll be back in four hours, tops,” he said, kissing her tenderly. He didn’t call the base taxi…walking slowly back to the Transient Officers Quarters, his mind replaying every memory he had of those eight glorious years, the tears trickling down his cheeks unashamedly.
2330 Travis AFB, Fairfield California.
The small C-12 aircraft came over the Sierra Nevadas and descended on the localizer for runway 21 right. The small aircraft landed easily but continued its taxi to the ‘hot cargo’ area, an area separated from the rest of the flightline where explosive or highly classified cargo is segregated from the other aircraft. Two figures got out, and began the long walk to the Medical Center two miles away.
0030 David Grant Medical Center Ward 4B (hematology-oncology)
Sandi was pretty sure the morphine was making her head fuzzy…she had thought it was the middle of the night. But as she saw the candy-striper push the bookcart into the room, the young male volunteer at her side, she figured it had to be nearer to noon.
“Would you like to have a book?” the young girl asked.
“I’m sorry, with the medicine I’m on, my eyes are kind of blurry. I don’t think I can even read right now.”
“Well,” said the candy-striper, “If you like, I could read you a book. This one actually is one of my favorites.”
“Why that would be lovely…go ahead, dear,” said Sandi
The young girl picked up the book, and opened it to the very first page. In the quiet of the night, in the privacy of the one small room, she began to read.
“September 23rd. Journal entry one. I'm Liz Parker and five days ago I died. After that, things got really weird.... “
0300 Medical on-call room, David Grant Medical Center, Travis AFB CA
When you are an intern, you get used to nurses calling to wake you up at three in the morning requesting a variety of telephone orders for the inpatients…usually for pain or sleeping medication, but this one was a first for young Dr. Flaherty.
“She wants a pass?”
“Her husband is here…he’s staying in the Q…she wants a pass to go see him.”
Ray Flaherty was about to unload on the nurse….then he remembered the patient from morning rounds. Older than him, but way too young…and too attractive to have terminal cancer. ‘What the hell,’ he thought, ‘..she probably doesn’t have that much time left..’
“OK I guess. Convert her IV to a heparin lock…make sure it’s wrapped well so she doesn’t hurt herself. I’ll sign all the paperwork when I make morning rounds. Oh, and tell her…if the pain gets too bad, give base taxi a call, and they’ll bring her back to go back on the PCA pump.”
“Yes doctor. Thank you.”
0330 Access road to the hot cargo area, runway 21 right, Travis AFB CA
Security Specialist Airman First Class Mike Boucher had been briefed at guard mount that the C-12 in the hot cargo area was highly classified, had its own security personnel, and that they were to stay away from it. Nonetheless, when he saw the two teenagers going down the access road toward it, he moved rapidly to intercept them. If he, one of the base security police, wasn’t supposed to be there, then two kids who looked to be about sixteen damn sure shouldn’t be there.
Boucher decided to teach them a lesson, sneaking toward them using a shipping container and a large forklift for cover. ‘When I jump out at those two, I bet they’ll pee their pants,’ he told himself. As he gathered himself to spring an arm came out of the darkness and grabbed him around the mouth, silencing him, while the other hand brought the dull back of a Kabar knife up to his throat, gently sawing to show him what could have happened. As he felt urine slowly trickle down his leg, Boucher heard a voice whisper in his ear….
“Might want to not forget that the stalker can be stalked too, kid,” said Sandman. The Kabar went back in its sheath and a security badge was produced with escort privileges. “Those two are with me..”
As the young airman went back to his locker for a fresh uniform, Sandman smiled. ‘Now if I’d REALLY been mean…I’d have let that young troop scare Liz. After what happened to the guy in Arizona, THAT would have been worth seeing.’
He checked the area one more time before joining Liz, Max, and Laurie DelGado in the aircraft. Moments later, the door was secured, the engines were started, and the C-12 lifted off for Tonopah Test Range.
0345 Transient Officers Quarters, Travis AFB CA
Slammer had tossed and turned in the bed for five hours, sleeping perhaps 40 minutes in that time. Finally he’d given up and gotten dressed, planning on returning to the medical center to her side. He was heading for the door when the knock came. His heart almost stopped.
He opened the door half expecting to find the chaplain and the mortuary affairs officer. He was wrong.
"Sandi…what are you doing out of bed…what are you doing here?” He was taken aback by the look in her eyes….sort of a predatory look….the kind Liz Evans had when she looked at Max…
“Well Slammer, I was paid a little visit by a couple of your troops….I think they may have made a major security violation telling me some of the things that they did…..but if you’ll let them off with a warning this time…..well, I could probably make it worth your while…”
0400 Onboard a C-12 approaching the California-Nevada state line.
Liz touched the orb and connected to Ship.
*So how does it look to the nanorobots that we put in her IV?*
*It would appear, First Officer, that the Captain shrank the tumor mass enough to get her out of trouble, but didn’t use enough power to leave handprints, according to plan. The nanorobots have deployed throughout the Majors body. They will gradually finish off the remaining cancer cells over the next two weeks, so it will look like she has gone into remission from her chemotherapy. Essentially, she is now cured. The hunter-killer nanorobots will detect and eliminate any new cancers before they can present a problem.*
*That’s great, Ship. Thank you so much for creating the specially modified nanorobots.*
*My pleasure, First Officer. Oh, based upon the scans I did on yourself and Lieutenant Delgado, I noticed a further abnormality in the major…significant fibrosis in her Fallopian tubes. I had the hunter-killer nanos use their lasers to correct this*
*Uh….Ship…they’ve probably never used the patch or the pill or anything, because she was infertile. She won’t be now. We probably need to let her know that before she is discharged from the hospital...otherwise they might both get a big surprise.*
*Oops*
When you are an intern, you get used to nurses calling to wake you up at three in the morning requesting a variety of telephone orders for the inpatients…usually for pain or sleeping medication, but this one was a first for young Dr. Flaherty.
“She wants a pass?”
“Her husband is here…he’s staying in the Q…she wants a pass to go see him.”
Ray Flaherty was about to unload on the nurse….then he remembered the patient from morning rounds. Older than him, but way too young…and too attractive to have terminal cancer. ‘What the hell,’ he thought, ‘..she probably doesn’t have that much time left..’
“OK I guess. Convert her IV to a heparin lock…make sure it’s wrapped well so she doesn’t hurt herself. I’ll sign all the paperwork when I make morning rounds. Oh, and tell her…if the pain gets too bad, give base taxi a call, and they’ll bring her back to go back on the PCA pump.”
“Yes doctor. Thank you.”
0330 Access road to the hot cargo area, runway 21 right, Travis AFB CA
Security Specialist Airman First Class Mike Boucher had been briefed at guard mount that the C-12 in the hot cargo area was highly classified, had its own security personnel, and that they were to stay away from it. Nonetheless, when he saw the two teenagers going down the access road toward it, he moved rapidly to intercept them. If he, one of the base security police, wasn’t supposed to be there, then two kids who looked to be about sixteen damn sure shouldn’t be there.
Boucher decided to teach them a lesson, sneaking toward them using a shipping container and a large forklift for cover. ‘When I jump out at those two, I bet they’ll pee their pants,’ he told himself. As he gathered himself to spring an arm came out of the darkness and grabbed him around the mouth, silencing him, while the other hand brought the dull back of a Kabar knife up to his throat, gently sawing to show him what could have happened. As he felt urine slowly trickle down his leg, Boucher heard a voice whisper in his ear….
“Might want to not forget that the stalker can be stalked too, kid,” said Sandman. The Kabar went back in its sheath and a security badge was produced with escort privileges. “Those two are with me..”
As the young airman went back to his locker for a fresh uniform, Sandman smiled. ‘Now if I’d REALLY been mean…I’d have let that young troop scare Liz. After what happened to the guy in Arizona, THAT would have been worth seeing.’
He checked the area one more time before joining Liz, Max, and Laurie DelGado in the aircraft. Moments later, the door was secured, the engines were started, and the C-12 lifted off for Tonopah Test Range.
0345 Transient Officers Quarters, Travis AFB CA
Slammer had tossed and turned in the bed for five hours, sleeping perhaps 40 minutes in that time. Finally he’d given up and gotten dressed, planning on returning to the medical center to her side. He was heading for the door when the knock came. His heart almost stopped.
He opened the door half expecting to find the chaplain and the mortuary affairs officer. He was wrong.
"Sandi…what are you doing out of bed…what are you doing here?” He was taken aback by the look in her eyes….sort of a predatory look….the kind Liz Evans had when she looked at Max…
“Well Slammer, I was paid a little visit by a couple of your troops….I think they may have made a major security violation telling me some of the things that they did…..but if you’ll let them off with a warning this time…..well, I could probably make it worth your while…”
0400 Onboard a C-12 approaching the California-Nevada state line.
Liz touched the orb and connected to Ship.
*So how does it look to the nanorobots that we put in her IV?*
*It would appear, First Officer, that the Captain shrank the tumor mass enough to get her out of trouble, but didn’t use enough power to leave handprints, according to plan. The nanorobots have deployed throughout the Majors body. They will gradually finish off the remaining cancer cells over the next two weeks, so it will look like she has gone into remission from her chemotherapy. Essentially, she is now cured. The hunter-killer nanorobots will detect and eliminate any new cancers before they can present a problem.*
*That’s great, Ship. Thank you so much for creating the specially modified nanorobots.*
*My pleasure, First Officer. Oh, based upon the scans I did on yourself and Lieutenant Delgado, I noticed a further abnormality in the major…significant fibrosis in her Fallopian tubes. I had the hunter-killer nanos use their lasers to correct this*
*Uh….Ship…they’ve probably never used the patch or the pill or anything, because she was infertile. She won’t be now. We probably need to let her know that before she is discharged from the hospital...otherwise they might both get a big surprise.*
*Oops*
Last edited by greywolf on Sat Apr 28, 2007 8:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
2 PM Chaves County Sheriff’s Office, Roswell New Mexico
“So that’s the deal?” asked Angela Robinson, “Two Air Force Officers are coming here tomorrow to talk to the parents….The Air Force needs to check the situation out before they’ll return the kids?”
Actually, Jim Valenti was worried about more than that. He was pretty sure he knew that Max….and Isabel, weren’t really from around here, and he strongly suspected that might be the case with Michael as well. But the kids lives since social services had put them up for adoption…and fostering, well, they were an open book. The Evans kids had been good kids, no real troubles of any kind until Max and Michael had been involved in the Crashdown shooting, and Jim was fairly certain that Max’s actions then were anything but hostile. While Michael had gotten in his fair share of trouble, given the insanity of the Department of Social Services in actually fostering him with old Hank Guerin, he’d turned out alright.
And you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand when an Air Force outfit in Nevada…that didn’t appear on any organizational charts, was sending people to talk to you…well, Area 51 certainly came to mind. Still, the young Captain he’d talked to had sounded friendly enough, as did the young Lieutenant who said she’d be coming with him. They had to at least hear what they had to say.
“According to them it’s not so much a matter of returning the kids or not, they consider the two to be emancipated minors, they’d like to resolve the issue of Max and Liz’s marital status.”
“You mean an annulment?”
“Well that’s what I thought, but when I mentioned that possibility to the Lieutenant…a Miss Delgado, I thought she was going to jump through the phone at me…said she thought their commander would hide the kids until they were eighteen if there was any question of that.”
“That the guy you were talking to?”
“Yeah, his wife apparently has a medical problem, he’s helping her convalesce evidently, or he’d be here himself. The Captain’s the Executive Officer and the Lieutenant…well, I got the impression she was a friend of Liz, wanted to see if she couldn’t get both sets of parents to give the kids a chance to make the marriage work. What sort of worries me is that the damn thing just sounds so improbable. How could two teenagers become so important to the US Air Force that they’d go to all this much effort?”
In point of fact, Jim was afraid he knew…..afraid the Air Force had somehow found out about Max, and what this meeting really was going to be was a trap to get Isabel and Michael. Still, it would have looked even more suspicious to refuse the meeting, and they were scheduled to meet with the parents tomorrow anyway.
3:00 PM The facility, twenty-four miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico
“The word I’m getting through my sources at Justice is that they’ll be here in two days,” said Eichoff. “A couple of officers are coming from Tonopah tomorrow to break the news to the parents….if that goes alright, they’ll bring the male…and the little traitorous bitch that has allowed herself to be defiled by him, back for a ‘family reunion.’ They’ll all be there then, and that’s when we’ll strike. I want everyone in the Unit, all sixteen people, hitting them simultaneously. We have fourteen people here now, plus myself and Dr. Blaukopf. Doctor Schreiber will be arriving tomorrow morning…then everyone will be here.”
“But what happens after that?” asked Blaukopf. There will still be one embryo missing…and the creature that was captured those two years.”
“We’ll find them. The Unit won’t go away…I hid the appropriation for it deep in the Justice budget. No one will ever find it.”
“I still can’t believe that no one would notice $60 million a year,” said Blaukopf.
“The US budget is $2 Trillion and they cut deals on it and add pork to it all the way up to the final vote. The Congress usually gets it about 2 hours before they vote on it. Each hard copy weighs 44 pounds…nobody ever reads the damn thing. The money is safe…they’ll never find it, I promise. The problem is going to be keeping you and Schreiber and the two agents with him from being arrested. Fortunately, we can just make new ID for you, just as we do for people in the witness protection program. Once we have killed the last female alien…well, then we can go public and we will get the acclamation we deserve for saving the Race.”
“So when will Schreiber and the others get here?”
“They are apparently having some problem with the truck. It probably won’t be until mid-morning. In the meantime, we will be on our highest security until we have killed the three aliens…and that turncoat girl. No one comes in, no one goes out, unless you know them by sight.”
10:25 AM Twenty miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico.
It had been a miserable trip for Schreiber….they’d had three flat tires, and had to replace the radiator. But they were now on the home stretch. As they turned off on the dirt road to the facility they saw the heavily loaded flatbed truck waiting by the side of the road. Apparently some long distance trucker had chosen that place to take a nap. As they passed the truck Schreiber looked at the driver…and became instantly puzzled. He’d seen that face somewhere.
But Shreiber’s thoughts were distracted by a sudden “BAMM” as one of the new tires had a blowout, and he lost trak of his thoughts as the driver wrestled the vehicle safely to the side of the road. As they got out, the flatbed truck started up and pulled over to pass them. Schreiber was curious, there was nothing down that road except the facility. He looked again at the driver, trying to place him…without any luck. Then he heard the driver say the fateful words…
“Damn, this isn’t a blowout. It looks like something melted right through the tire…like we were hit by a LASER or something.”
‘The alien in the old films…the one they captured for two years…the one that...escaped...’
Schreiber looked again at the driver in terror….and saw his own face looking back. Quickly he grabbed his cellphone…but the battery was long dead. He grabbed the other phones…they were too.
10:31 AM The facility, twenty-four miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico
The gate guard called the main building. “I just passed Doctor Schreiber through…damn, that’s a big truck.”
“The pickup truck?” asked Eichoff.
“Pickup hell, it’s a huge flatbed. He says the others are coming in the pickup behind him.”
Eichoff, Blaukopf, and most of the unit went out to meet the incoming truck with Doctor Schreiber. Blaukopf waved to his longtime friend as he drove up…only to see him start to laugh insanely…only when it was too late…when he saw the dead man’s switch…when he saw Schreiber’s face turn into the face of Ed Harding…only then did he realize just what was about to happen. He shouted, “Shoot him…he’s an alien…” But of course, by then it was…too late.
Four miles away, Doctor Schreiber and the two remaining agents were knocked to the ground by the force of the explosion…their eardrums rupturing from the overpressure.
3:30 PM Small Conference Room Chaves County Sheriff’s Office, Roswell New Mexico
The four parents were waiting anxiously for the weekly update briefing from Sheriff Valenti and his staff. All four were grim-faced, Jeff Parker shaking his head.
“Even today, ….four weeks later, …I just don’t understand what went wrong?”
“I don’t know what went wrong either, Jeff,” said Diane Evans. “But looking back, I know exactly when it started to go wrong.”
The other three looked at her, their expressions urging her to continue.
“The whole purpose….the whole plan that morning, was to separate them, because we all believed they were getting too close, too quickly, and that neither was really experienced enough socially to make a meaningful commitment to each other….”
“Yes, Diane….?” Said Nancy Parker.
“Well, when they came in the door after being out all night ...you remember we wanted to be there as a group to intimidate them…to make them understand we were united in our efforts to get them to break it off before they went too far….”
“That was the plan…and I still think it was a good plan, Diane,” said Jeff Parker.
“I thought so too until I saw….they came in the door together and started to separate…but when they saw us sitting there looking at them….they moved back together and their hands enfolded…..I think somehow WE drove them together.”
“So that’s the deal?” asked Angela Robinson, “Two Air Force Officers are coming here tomorrow to talk to the parents….The Air Force needs to check the situation out before they’ll return the kids?”
Actually, Jim Valenti was worried about more than that. He was pretty sure he knew that Max….and Isabel, weren’t really from around here, and he strongly suspected that might be the case with Michael as well. But the kids lives since social services had put them up for adoption…and fostering, well, they were an open book. The Evans kids had been good kids, no real troubles of any kind until Max and Michael had been involved in the Crashdown shooting, and Jim was fairly certain that Max’s actions then were anything but hostile. While Michael had gotten in his fair share of trouble, given the insanity of the Department of Social Services in actually fostering him with old Hank Guerin, he’d turned out alright.
And you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand when an Air Force outfit in Nevada…that didn’t appear on any organizational charts, was sending people to talk to you…well, Area 51 certainly came to mind. Still, the young Captain he’d talked to had sounded friendly enough, as did the young Lieutenant who said she’d be coming with him. They had to at least hear what they had to say.
“According to them it’s not so much a matter of returning the kids or not, they consider the two to be emancipated minors, they’d like to resolve the issue of Max and Liz’s marital status.”
“You mean an annulment?”
“Well that’s what I thought, but when I mentioned that possibility to the Lieutenant…a Miss Delgado, I thought she was going to jump through the phone at me…said she thought their commander would hide the kids until they were eighteen if there was any question of that.”
“That the guy you were talking to?”
“Yeah, his wife apparently has a medical problem, he’s helping her convalesce evidently, or he’d be here himself. The Captain’s the Executive Officer and the Lieutenant…well, I got the impression she was a friend of Liz, wanted to see if she couldn’t get both sets of parents to give the kids a chance to make the marriage work. What sort of worries me is that the damn thing just sounds so improbable. How could two teenagers become so important to the US Air Force that they’d go to all this much effort?”
In point of fact, Jim was afraid he knew…..afraid the Air Force had somehow found out about Max, and what this meeting really was going to be was a trap to get Isabel and Michael. Still, it would have looked even more suspicious to refuse the meeting, and they were scheduled to meet with the parents tomorrow anyway.
3:00 PM The facility, twenty-four miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico
“The word I’m getting through my sources at Justice is that they’ll be here in two days,” said Eichoff. “A couple of officers are coming from Tonopah tomorrow to break the news to the parents….if that goes alright, they’ll bring the male…and the little traitorous bitch that has allowed herself to be defiled by him, back for a ‘family reunion.’ They’ll all be there then, and that’s when we’ll strike. I want everyone in the Unit, all sixteen people, hitting them simultaneously. We have fourteen people here now, plus myself and Dr. Blaukopf. Doctor Schreiber will be arriving tomorrow morning…then everyone will be here.”
“But what happens after that?” asked Blaukopf. There will still be one embryo missing…and the creature that was captured those two years.”
“We’ll find them. The Unit won’t go away…I hid the appropriation for it deep in the Justice budget. No one will ever find it.”
“I still can’t believe that no one would notice $60 million a year,” said Blaukopf.
“The US budget is $2 Trillion and they cut deals on it and add pork to it all the way up to the final vote. The Congress usually gets it about 2 hours before they vote on it. Each hard copy weighs 44 pounds…nobody ever reads the damn thing. The money is safe…they’ll never find it, I promise. The problem is going to be keeping you and Schreiber and the two agents with him from being arrested. Fortunately, we can just make new ID for you, just as we do for people in the witness protection program. Once we have killed the last female alien…well, then we can go public and we will get the acclamation we deserve for saving the Race.”
“So when will Schreiber and the others get here?”
“They are apparently having some problem with the truck. It probably won’t be until mid-morning. In the meantime, we will be on our highest security until we have killed the three aliens…and that turncoat girl. No one comes in, no one goes out, unless you know them by sight.”
10:25 AM Twenty miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico.
It had been a miserable trip for Schreiber….they’d had three flat tires, and had to replace the radiator. But they were now on the home stretch. As they turned off on the dirt road to the facility they saw the heavily loaded flatbed truck waiting by the side of the road. Apparently some long distance trucker had chosen that place to take a nap. As they passed the truck Schreiber looked at the driver…and became instantly puzzled. He’d seen that face somewhere.
But Shreiber’s thoughts were distracted by a sudden “BAMM” as one of the new tires had a blowout, and he lost trak of his thoughts as the driver wrestled the vehicle safely to the side of the road. As they got out, the flatbed truck started up and pulled over to pass them. Schreiber was curious, there was nothing down that road except the facility. He looked again at the driver, trying to place him…without any luck. Then he heard the driver say the fateful words…
“Damn, this isn’t a blowout. It looks like something melted right through the tire…like we were hit by a LASER or something.”
‘The alien in the old films…the one they captured for two years…the one that...escaped...’
Schreiber looked again at the driver in terror….and saw his own face looking back. Quickly he grabbed his cellphone…but the battery was long dead. He grabbed the other phones…they were too.
10:31 AM The facility, twenty-four miles northeast of Roswell New Mexico
The gate guard called the main building. “I just passed Doctor Schreiber through…damn, that’s a big truck.”
“The pickup truck?” asked Eichoff.
“Pickup hell, it’s a huge flatbed. He says the others are coming in the pickup behind him.”
Eichoff, Blaukopf, and most of the unit went out to meet the incoming truck with Doctor Schreiber. Blaukopf waved to his longtime friend as he drove up…only to see him start to laugh insanely…only when it was too late…when he saw the dead man’s switch…when he saw Schreiber’s face turn into the face of Ed Harding…only then did he realize just what was about to happen. He shouted, “Shoot him…he’s an alien…” But of course, by then it was…too late.
Four miles away, Doctor Schreiber and the two remaining agents were knocked to the ground by the force of the explosion…their eardrums rupturing from the overpressure.
3:30 PM Small Conference Room Chaves County Sheriff’s Office, Roswell New Mexico
The four parents were waiting anxiously for the weekly update briefing from Sheriff Valenti and his staff. All four were grim-faced, Jeff Parker shaking his head.
“Even today, ….four weeks later, …I just don’t understand what went wrong?”
“I don’t know what went wrong either, Jeff,” said Diane Evans. “But looking back, I know exactly when it started to go wrong.”
The other three looked at her, their expressions urging her to continue.
“The whole purpose….the whole plan that morning, was to separate them, because we all believed they were getting too close, too quickly, and that neither was really experienced enough socially to make a meaningful commitment to each other….”
“Yes, Diane….?” Said Nancy Parker.
“Well, when they came in the door after being out all night ...you remember we wanted to be there as a group to intimidate them…to make them understand we were united in our efforts to get them to break it off before they went too far….”
“That was the plan…and I still think it was a good plan, Diane,” said Jeff Parker.
“I thought so too until I saw….they came in the door together and started to separate…but when they saw us sitting there looking at them….they moved back together and their hands enfolded…..I think somehow WE drove them together.”
It had already been a long day for Jim Valenti. The explosion this morning had consumed a lot of his time.
The old base had been believed to be deserted, but responding personnel had quickly discovered that a lot of ordnance had been stored there..automatic weapons...mortars...anti-tank weapons. It had appeared that this was some sort of terrorist hideout and had been for years. They'd also found some drug labs...synthetic derivatives of something called scopolamine according to the lab people. Because of the illegal weapons...apparently pilfered from military arsenals, and the drug involvement, it appeared that the BATF and DEA guys were going to fight over who had jurisdiction...which was OK with Jim Valenti, even the property itself was still federally owned.
The only local involvement appeared to have been...well, they'd found the VIN number on what little was left of the engine block of the truck...traced it back to the uncle of the young lady that Kyle was dating. It had been hard telling her, but she'd taken it well. Apparently the man had been a POW according to Tess...really had never been right after that. She didn't seem surprised that he'd wind up with a group like that. The Evans' had been kind enough to take her in when Isabel had told them about the situation. They'd work it out with Social Services later. Whatever happened at this meeting, Jim was pretty sure they wouldn't be needing to keep Max's room for him.
He'd never told Angela about his suspicions about Max and Isabel so she'd been kind of taken by surprise when they had been told about the xeno-technology stuff after they'd signed the non-disclosure agreements. She still hadn't been able to figure out why Max would be hired as a "Special Consultant" by the Air Force, but the young Captain and Lieutenant had seen his lack of surprise and once Angela had left to meet theparents had asked him if he knew.
He'd told them he'd suspected...and suspected that this meeting might be a trap. They'd smiled ..and told him that Max thought he probably knew...and that he wouldn't trust them. So they told him the whole story...the ring singularity...the meeting with the President...even the trip to Travis to treat the Commander's wife. They'd all agreed that it would be up to the kids to break the news to their folks..but Captain Hawthorne had warned him they intended to take Max andLiz back with them tomorrow...to hide them out until Liz was eighteen...unless the parents agreed to the marriage. Jim had said he doubted that would be a problem...although he wasn't altogether sure about the Parkers. In fact, he wasn't altogether sure how he'd feel if he had a daughter who was married to an alien...or was apparently in the process of becoming one.
As he brought them in to the small conference room, he saw that Angela was already there with the four parents.
"Jeff...Nancy...Phil....Diane, ..uh..this is Captain Jim Hawthorne and Lieutenant Laurie DelGado from the US Air Force. They are here in an official capacity, but they are also friends of Max and Liz. They'd like to talk to you about maybe bringing the kids back here for a visit..."
Four stunned parents sat at the table...happier than they'd been in the last four weeks, as the two started to talk.
"Actually, we haven't known Liz and Max all that long,..it just sort of seems that way. Things seem to move kind of fast around those two..." said Jim Hawthorne.
"Yeah, they sure don't let you get bored much," agreed Laurie.
"Where are they?" asked Diane.
"Are they alright?" asked Nancy.
"When can we see them...?" asked Phil and Jeff near simultaneously.
"Well," said Jim...".let me say first of all that they are alright..they're doing just fine, really. I don't know that I've ever met two people that were happier together...although I hope to give them a run for their money with Lieutenant DelGado shortly...Liz has agreed to be Matron of Honor, and Max is going to be our Best Man."
"but before we can tell you much more," said Laurie, "..we sort of need for you to read and sign these non-disclosure agreements I'm handing out to each of you..."
The old base had been believed to be deserted, but responding personnel had quickly discovered that a lot of ordnance had been stored there..automatic weapons...mortars...anti-tank weapons. It had appeared that this was some sort of terrorist hideout and had been for years. They'd also found some drug labs...synthetic derivatives of something called scopolamine according to the lab people. Because of the illegal weapons...apparently pilfered from military arsenals, and the drug involvement, it appeared that the BATF and DEA guys were going to fight over who had jurisdiction...which was OK with Jim Valenti, even the property itself was still federally owned.
The only local involvement appeared to have been...well, they'd found the VIN number on what little was left of the engine block of the truck...traced it back to the uncle of the young lady that Kyle was dating. It had been hard telling her, but she'd taken it well. Apparently the man had been a POW according to Tess...really had never been right after that. She didn't seem surprised that he'd wind up with a group like that. The Evans' had been kind enough to take her in when Isabel had told them about the situation. They'd work it out with Social Services later. Whatever happened at this meeting, Jim was pretty sure they wouldn't be needing to keep Max's room for him.
He'd never told Angela about his suspicions about Max and Isabel so she'd been kind of taken by surprise when they had been told about the xeno-technology stuff after they'd signed the non-disclosure agreements. She still hadn't been able to figure out why Max would be hired as a "Special Consultant" by the Air Force, but the young Captain and Lieutenant had seen his lack of surprise and once Angela had left to meet theparents had asked him if he knew.
He'd told them he'd suspected...and suspected that this meeting might be a trap. They'd smiled ..and told him that Max thought he probably knew...and that he wouldn't trust them. So they told him the whole story...the ring singularity...the meeting with the President...even the trip to Travis to treat the Commander's wife. They'd all agreed that it would be up to the kids to break the news to their folks..but Captain Hawthorne had warned him they intended to take Max andLiz back with them tomorrow...to hide them out until Liz was eighteen...unless the parents agreed to the marriage. Jim had said he doubted that would be a problem...although he wasn't altogether sure about the Parkers. In fact, he wasn't altogether sure how he'd feel if he had a daughter who was married to an alien...or was apparently in the process of becoming one.
As he brought them in to the small conference room, he saw that Angela was already there with the four parents.
"Jeff...Nancy...Phil....Diane, ..uh..this is Captain Jim Hawthorne and Lieutenant Laurie DelGado from the US Air Force. They are here in an official capacity, but they are also friends of Max and Liz. They'd like to talk to you about maybe bringing the kids back here for a visit..."
Four stunned parents sat at the table...happier than they'd been in the last four weeks, as the two started to talk.
"Actually, we haven't known Liz and Max all that long,..it just sort of seems that way. Things seem to move kind of fast around those two..." said Jim Hawthorne.
"Yeah, they sure don't let you get bored much," agreed Laurie.
"Where are they?" asked Diane.
"Are they alright?" asked Nancy.
"When can we see them...?" asked Phil and Jeff near simultaneously.
"Well," said Jim...".let me say first of all that they are alright..they're doing just fine, really. I don't know that I've ever met two people that were happier together...although I hope to give them a run for their money with Lieutenant DelGado shortly...Liz has agreed to be Matron of Honor, and Max is going to be our Best Man."
"but before we can tell you much more," said Laurie, "..we sort of need for you to read and sign these non-disclosure agreements I'm handing out to each of you..."