CHAPTER 3 - S21
DATE POINT: DECEMBER 8th, 6 A.U. (AFTER UNIFICATION)
LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM, ABOARD THE UTRN SPECIAL DELIVERY, EARTH, ABOVE THE NEVADA DESERT.
CAPTAIN HENRY O’TOOLE
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Paul snored away loudly, which grated on Henry’s nerves. He finally got some relief when the gee forces from an abrupt turn snapped Paul awake. Henry watched as Paul pulled up a map and then nodded to himself. Ariana sat farther away and seemed to be looking for moments Henry wasn’t seemingly paying attention to steal glances at him. He couldn’t decide if the attention made him excited, or nervous, as Paul’s warnings rattled about in his head. He refocused himself as Paul broke the silence.
“Looks like we're approaching S21 now. Jessie go ahead and work with base ATC to clear us for landing.”
“Already done, boss, taking us in now.” Jessie replied, as on top of things as ever it seemed.
Henry switched camera feeds to the one giving the best ground view and his jaw dropped. Far below them, the Earth itself split open with a rumble as sand poured into a growing crack. Two camouflaged doors which matched the surrounding desert floor then lifted up and away from each other to reveal a dark chasm. A large landing platform slowly rose from the darkness below as Jesse expertly maneuvered the Special Delivery to hover over the platform.
“What in the actual fuck?” Henry said as he gawped at the sight.
“Oh dear, if this blows his gourd, I can’t wait to see how he reacts when he sees them.” Ariana said with a glimmer of mischief in her eye.
“Don’t mind her, I am sure you will see nothing down there other than what you already suspected to be true. All the really exciting stuff is well hidden away from prying eyes anyway. Plus, sister dear, one must remember that we are bound by multiple oaths of secrecy on just about everything that is down there.” Paul said with an edge to his voice. The ship shuddered for a second as it settled down onto its landing gear, and the lift began to lower them down below the surface. Lights switched on and bathed the massive elevator shaft in an amber glow as the huge doors sealed closed above them. Two massive gears turned inside a reinforced housing set into the back wall as they were lowered slowly and methodically down a flattened section of a huge cave wall.
“What is this place?” Henry asked with wonder as the cavern slowly came into full view.
This must have been an old aquifer, a natural cavern, or something.. hell this place must be at least a few klicks wide at least! Henry thought as his mind took in the spectacle. A small city lay before him. One made from both old and new styles of both prefabricated and permanent structures which filled the interior of the expansive space.
“This is S21, one of several similar black sites operated by the North American Union for the purposes of housing unique research and development projects away from those curious, and to maintain some semblance of sovereignty after ceding so much of that to the United Terran Republic and the Navy.”
“So, what you're really saying is this site is being kept as a secret from the Republic?! Are you all insane!?”
Paul stared at Henry for what seemed like forever before he spoke coolly.
“There are some secrets the United States died keeping. When the North American Union rose from the ashes of the post-invasion balkanized USA, the surviving defense contractors came forward to brief the new government. Eventually, with help from the NAUDF, sites such as these were born. After taking the brunt of the alien land invasion, the NAU government decided that it was wise to continue to keep these secrets once all the old levers of power were finally recovered. There are secrets down here we will kill to keep, as everything you learn down here risks upending our fragile global unity. That is a risk none can afford, so if you cannot handle keeping this secret I need to know right now so I can handle it appropriately.” Paul said with unflinching eye contact.
Henry found himself uncomfortably aware that every eye in the cabin was now locked on him. Ancient neural circuitry buzzed in his head, making it very clear just how dangerous his current predicament had become. Well, Henry, looks like you're a G-man now...
“You don’t have to worry about me breaking secrecy, especially given the stakes are the very survival of the human race. I don’t have anybody to spill secrets to anyhow.” Henry conceded the point, realizing just how deeply he was now trapped. The splitting of the world federal government was unacceptable when they had yet to even purge the last of their enemy from the solar system.
“We know, why do you think you were chosen? Your peppy personality?” Paul asked in a condescending tone.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Henry hissed.
“Nothing, other than your whole family died one by one getting you out of New York and into the hands of the National Guard after the enemy first made landfall. You have always kept to yourself, and you joined the Navy the moment the opportunity arose. You don’t have a girlfriend, hell, you don’t even have a dog waiting for you back home. You are a classic minimal security risk, and an expendable one at that. Why do you think we are all going on this mission? Every single one of us is just like you.” Paul said, sweeping his hands across the cabin.
“We are all war orphans who signed up for the cause at first opportunity. Well... in that, Ariana and I are a bit different, but the details there are also classified.” Paul finished.
There was a certain solemn solidarity he now felt with this crew that hadn’t been there before. What a shame such solidarity had been born from being from a class of people which the brass viewed as expendable soldiers.
“You manipulative little weasel…. Fuck. Fine. Are you going to tell me what the actual mission is now?” Henry asked He hoped perhaps the evasive intelligence officer would speak plainly, though he doubted there would be any more success this time than any of the others he had tried.
“Nope, I promise by the time we leave S21, everything will make a lot more sense. That being said, real talk, if you breathe even one hint as to you being anything other than a trustworthy tow the party line professional down there? They won't even have to order me to put a stop to the leak before it happens, that's if you're lucky. Am I clear?” Paul once more delivered the threat with direct eye contact.
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“Crystal.” The ground under their feet shuddered as the great lift finally settled onto the floor of the massive cavern. Inside were dozens of buildings and hangars as well as several raised tramways that linked the different corners of the underground base. Henry walked down the gangplank with Paul and Ariana in tow as the crew busied themselves with the post flight checklist. Off to the side was a smaller, human sized elevator with two guards who stared intently at the trio leaving the ship.
“Stop right there you three! We need to verify your identities before we can proceed.” One man produced a cell phone looking device that he used to scan each person’s face and eyes while the other produced a palm hand scanner that also pricked at his hand, likely drawing DNA to sample. Henry flexed his hand until the sting went away. While they were being tested, the elevator doors opened to reveal two people in lab coats with a third armed guard. One of them was a frazzle haired and dark-skinned young woman with an infectious smile stepped forward and spoke first.
“Lieutenant Karst, Sergeant Silva, good to see you again! Ah, and hello there... you must be Captain Henry O’Toole, I have great hopes for you as to being the man we need for our project. You see, the nature of our work down here has made it... increasingly difficult to find quality candidates. To find someone with practical experience in commanding a modern naval warship? Impossible! Certainly not without giving the Navy more of a whiff of our operations down here than we are ready to share. I thought we were in real trouble after Commander Alvarez turned down command of the expedition. But here you are, against all odds, ready to save the day.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage. May I have the pleasure of getting your name?” Henry put his hand forward in greeting just for her to blush and take it enthusiastically.
“My, your manners. I do think we picked well, don’t you Alphonse? My name is Dr. Chantal Washington, and I am absolutely charmed to make your acquaintance. I designed the weapon system that helps make your new ship so unique, and when we get to my workshop I'll gladly give you the run down!”
The woman was almost impossibly giddy about her job, which helped put Henry at ease in a strange way he couldn't yet fully understand. If nothing else, he found her enthusiasm to be the first genuinely positive thing he had experienced since he had been picked up by Paul nearly a week ago. Henry decided that he quite liked her already, though he had to remind himself to stop grinning like an idiot. The other person that had come out of the elevator then stepped forward with a serious look on their face.
“Oui, oui, charmed, I am sure. My name is Doctor Alphonse Rousseau, theoretical physicist, and conceptual researcher. Can we please hurry this along? I have many important matters to attend to. We must, as they say, make haste.” Henry could see that this doctor would likely take a little more effort to win over, especially if Henry wanted to get him to speak more candidly. If someone didn’t start giving him some straight answers soon, he felt as if his head would explode.
“Believe me, doctor, I would love nothing more than to speed things up, I have a lot of questions about the nature of the mission, the ship, the crew, everything. Though, that can wait until after your presentation as well, correct? I'm sure you have plenty of fascinating projects that demand your attention.” Henry felt like he had a good read on Alphonse already, so he hoped that subtly playing to his ego would help. Gotta be careful there. If I lay it on too thick, he'll see right through me.
“Precisely, now let’s move along into the elevator, Dr. Washington’s lab awaits, mine is elsewhere, but that we can cover shortly. Now, Henry, how much do you know about faster than light travel?” Dr Rousseau asked.
“Beyond the fact that the aliens have some unknown form of it, and that it's rumored Joshua Warden escaped the solar system using their same method? Only that we haven’t yet cracked it ourselves. I was under the impression that, even in the best case scenario, we are decades if not centuries away from achieving FTL by any realistic method.”
Truth be told, Henry had spent some time researching the possibilities one by one, but they all seemed to take insane amounts of energy that just weren’t possible with even their best fission reactor tech. Dr. Rousseau simply smirked as he ushered the group into the elevator.
“Very well, so you have a laymen’s view on the matter. There are three primary means by which we believe it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light. The first means is via wormholes, but those require the ability to create and manipulate black holes and we simply are not there yet. We have a theoretical framework for how we can get there using null matter physics, but we would need working fusion power with a huge amount of net surplus energy, or we would need to tap into a large percentage of the word’s existing power supply all at once. Obviously that method is dead in the water for now.”
They had begun actively plunging down floors until the elevator dinged and opened to level 31. Henry began to get a sense of just how massive the whole facility truly was, as he realized they had fifty floors worth of buttons on this elevator alone. Just what had the NAU been up to? The doctor interrupted Henry’s train of thought when he continued after a breath and a pause.
“The next is the warp drive, which works to shorten the distance between two points by warping the geometry of spacetime itself. It basically collapses spacetime in front of the bubble and expands it behind, allowing the ship to in effect travel faster than the speed of light without actually moving at all. The more power you can pump into it, the greater the effect. We actually use a very low energy, low efficiency form of this in the Telekinetic drive, which gave us some clues as to how to bring the energy efficiency of the actual warp drive even closer to feasibility.” Dr Rousseau paused to drink some water before he continued. “The problem is, once a ship activates a true warp field, it is trapped within with no good way to actually break the warp field from the inside that we know of. We are playing with the technology, and we are planning to test a mobile, LFTR powered prototype warp gate that will operate in pairs. The design would activate a bubble on one end then capture and collapse the bubble on the other end with ships traveling at low warp in between, but there is a lot of testing to do there still.”
Henry stared at the doctor with his eyes wide open in shock. “I had no idea we were that close to a breakthrough!” The doctor simply waved him off.
“We are a year at best away from our first small scale test of the concepts involved here in the solar system. Even then, we will have to pre-position the end gate in a target system before we can send even a probe through the home gate. If the gates do work, however, they will form a huge logistical advantage for us, opening the galaxy to expansion, and they will make it easy to keep forward operating fleets and outposts supplied at regular intervals and to provide reinforcements quickly should the gate itself comes under attack. Nonetheless, even if our designs work exactly as intended, we are still years away from implementation in any sort of way that could directly affect the war effort. “
Henry took in the information as they walked the labyrinthine halls, getting even more excited for the reveal that he was sure was coming.
“So, doctor, you mentioned three methods that you have identified as feasible for us. Are you telling me that we have cracked the enemy FTL method?”
A smile lit up the doctor’s features before he spoke again.
“Thanks to the assistance of certain…. Assets shall I say, we managed to capture much of the research notes from the Quan-Tech industries black site at Ceres from which Joshua Warden and his tech team first cracked the enemy FTL system while they still had their space infrastructure head-start over the rest of the divided Earth. They did purge most of their data before he left, but we were able to recover enough that we have found some success, in conjunction with the tech we recovered from the ship that we destroyed over Manhattan.”
They had arrived at a pair of double doors which Dr. Rousseau barged straight through. He led them into an enormous workshop with rapid prototyping tools and machines lining the walls as well as a central hologram table. This time Dr. Washington spoke up.
“Welcome to My laboratory! Are you ready to meet your new ship?” Chantal said, positively brimming with excitement. Henry suddenly found himself feeling very good about the direction his new mission seemed to be heading.
Sounds like I'm finally going to be getting some real answers. Henry thought with a growing smile. I can't wait.