Declan looked with interest at the thing thrust into his hand by Harvey. It looked like some unholy mating of binoculars with a cage of straps designed to go around someone’s head. “So…these are night vision goggles?”
The big, bald man nodded. “Yeah. Put ‘em on.”
Declan did so with a bit of hesitation, leaving the eyepiece proper sitting on his forehead. It was starting to feel like he was becoming some kind of half-assed soldier…much like their target. And that, in turn, made him feel a little churn in his guts. After all, Tocco had much more experience with this shit.
But then again, they held the element of surprise.
Declan’s musings were cut short as a nearby door opened and Javier and Vincente strolled in. The latter’s nose was almost back to normal, with just a little bandage applied across it to show that it had once been injured.
Javier’s eyes lit up at the gear laid out on the table in the room’s center. “Shit, Harvey! You came through!”
Harvey’s response was typically laconic. “Yeah.” He handed the two of them night vision goggles just like Declan’s. “Put these on.” He glanced over at Declan. “And actually put them over your eyes.”
Declan hurriedly yanked the cumbersome equipment down to its proper position. His vision instantly turned into nothing but black. “Um…”
He felt one of his hands get gripped by Harvey. For once, the giant man sounded kind and professorial as he steered Declan’s fingers up towards the goggles. “Okay, feel this button? That turns it on. These buttons here zoom in and out, and this wheel over here lets you focus.”
Declan followed along as best he could, but of course once he turned the thing on the display in his eyes became blinding.
Meanwhile, the Venegas brothers were in the midst of their own instruction, and now proudly wore goggles just like Declan.
“So what now?” asked Vincente.
Harvey didn’t smile, he just nodded. “Now we get used to using them.” He walked over and flipped off the room’s only light. “Try not to smack into each other for at least an hour, and I’ll call it good.”
__________
Chao looked up in surprise as a blue-suited, black-haired man slid into the seat across from her. “Chao Me Chu?” he asked, in a very casual manner that belied the intensity behind his posture.
“Who’s asking?” she responded, with narrowed eyes that got across the unspoken additional message of who the fuck are you?
“George Mudrak, Special Agent, FBI,” he responded in a smooth manner as he flipped out his wallet in an equally smooth fashion. “You need to come with me right away. I assure you that you are not under arrest, we just need to get you somewhere else ASAP. It’s urgent.”
Chao’s brain seized up for a moment, before her normal irritability reasserted itself. She glanced down at the official-looking ID card displayed within that wallet, then looked back up at George. The guy wasn’t just flashing it at her, which was a positive. But there was one big negative which she had to educate him on.
“Here’s the problem, Special Agent,” she said with a casual air she did not feel. “I’m just a tech weenie lodged deep within the bowels of NASA. I have lived a virtuous life, and therefore I have no clue whatsoever what an authentic FBI identification badge, or card, or whatever you call it, looks like. So now you have a choice. Either you try and drag me out of here, in public, while I make quite a vocal scene...” Here Chao flicked her eyes around the well-populated coffee shop that they were both currently ensconced within. “…or you tell me what in the nine merry hells is going on.”
George’s warm hazel eyes narrowed and became much stonier. “Ms. Chu, I honestly can’t. I have no idea why I was sent to collect you. All I was told was that, if you protested, then I was to tell you…’Blake said Uranus’.”
Chao’s proverbial hackles collapsed as her eyes widened. “Oh. It’s about…that. Did they tell you what it means?”
“No. All I know is the destination where I have to take you to. Beyond that I don’t know a thing.” George held up a hand as she drew in a breath. “No. Please, ma’am, don’t say another word. Believe me when I say that I don’t want to know anything. I have learned that the hard way.” The agent then clasped his hands together. “All I want is for me to get you to where you need to go. If you know what that particular phrase means, then I hope you know the significance of it.” His eyes rose up from gazing at the table-top to meet hers. “So…do you?”
Finally, she found her voice, not even noticing his staring. “I…I do.” Chao looked around to make sure that their little scene wasn’t under scrutiny by anyone nearby. She reached forward and picked up her coffee cup, then drained it in one gulp. “Well then, Special Agent. I assume there’s a car for getting us where we need to go? Some flavor of an ominous black SUV?”
Now that they were both on the same page, Agent Mudrak relaxed. “Of course. Chevrolet claims the color is some bullshit thing called Dusky Gray, but yeah. For all intents and purposes, it’s black.”
“Good, because at the moment I’m stuck with public transport. NASA pays all right, but rent in the DC area is insane.”
George let forth a genuine laugh, and with that the atmosphere between them became much less stormy. “Oh hell, you don’t need to tell me that. Fortunately, I do by a weird coincidence happen to have access to a Dusky Gray company car.”
“I’ll bet you do.” Chao smiled, now feeling as if she and the agent had come to an agreement. “Soooo…if I come with you, do we get to use the siren and the flashy lights?”
“Hmm. Officially, that’s only to be used in case of emergency. But, unoffically?” George’s eyes sparkled as he smiled for the first time. “It’s been quite a while. Why not?”
__________
Declan’s shins had been given quite the workout, what with banging into various tables and chairs and whatnot while blundering about in the dark. But both he and the Venegas brothers now seemed to be competent in maneuvering with night vision goggles on…or, least competent enough to gain Harvey’s grudging favor.
Now came the fun part, where they got to look over the guns.
Harvey handed out a shotgun to Javier, who took it with obvious glee. Declan received a semiauto rifle, which he accepted with aplomb. Distantly, he wondered if after this whole mess was over he’d be able to keep it. Vincente, on the other hand, was only gifted a pistol. This did not pass without protest.
“Aw, man,” whined Vincente. “Why is this all I get?”
Harvey, to his credit, did not reply because you’re a fucking idiot. “Because we need someone who can deal with any close-in threat.”
The skinny man perked up. “Ah, cool!” He began brandishing his newly-acquired weapon about, making Declan flinch as its muzzle swept across him.
Harvey gently pushed the pistol down. “Later.”
“Later?” Vincente’s eyes were puzzled, then relaxed as Harvey unrolled a topographic map onto the table in the room’s center.
“Our target is here.” Harvey’s finger jabbed at a point on the map already marked with a marker dot. “The road to it runs along here, so I’m guessing the driveway connects the two this way.” He motioned at an invisible line connecting the dot with the roadway.
“So that’s the way we go get ‘em?” asked Javier.
Harvey paused, and Declan could feel the big man’s desire to snap at his boss for being such a fucking idiot. Instead, he shrugged. “We could. But that’s the most obvious approach. If this guy’s such a super-duper-whateverthefuck soldier, he’ll have planned for that. So we go in the back way.”
Harvey’s thick finger traced around to very near where they’d had the initial run-in which had triggered this whole affair. “We can get an SUV in here. Then we hike it for awhile down to here…” The finger continued its tracing, towards the marker dot. “…it’ll be a bit of a hike, maybe forty, fifty minutes. Now, I don’t know what we’ll find inside that house. But we’ll have night vision goggles and superior firepower. If we bust in all unexpectedly, we should be able to take him.”
__________
Chao discreetly glanced around the table. Everybody in her little ‘cabal’ was here. Blake in particular looked like he wanted the floor to open and swallow him up. Special Agent Mudrak stood next to the double-doors leading to this bland-looking conference room with an imperturbable air. In spite of her nondescript surroundings, she was worried. This particular room was at least ten or fifteen stories below ground-level…if she’d counted correctly. There weren’t exactly big neon signs indicating where the hell she was. Somewhere deep in the earth underneath Maryland, that was all she could say for certain.
Blake sat next to her, wringing his hands and staring at the table. From the few words she’d exchanged with him he’d been scooped up by Mudrak not long before the agent went and collected her. Doctors Newman and Hironaka also looked concerned, but much less so than Blake. Stan Ryan, on the other hand, looked as if he was about to fall asleep. That alone made Chao feel better. If he didn’t feel in danger, then chances were that she wasn’t either.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The double doors to the room burst open and a squat, bald, barrel-chested man strode in. He wore a crisply-pressed, blue-black uniform with the expected fruit salad splayed all over the left side of his chest. Four bronze-colored stars on each of his coat’s shoulders stood out starkly in the fluorescent lighting from overhead, and his demeanor was that of one who never, ever, took shit from anyone.
The five people seated around the table rose in sheer habit; the incoming general waved them back to their seats with a grim smile.
“Have a seat, people,” said the newcomer. “None of y’all are in the chain of command, so no need for salutes or any of that.”
Just as Chao started to take her seat again, the general pointed at her. “You. You’re the one who put this together, right?”
“S..Sir?” she squeaked, standing upright again. “Sorry, is that the right term of address?”
He smiled, and somehow the expression reminded her of her grandfather. “It is. Suppose y’all should know who I am. General Levant de Vries, US Space Force. I’m a member of the JCS…aw, shoot. Half of ya probably don’t know what that means. ‘JCS’ is Joint Chiefs of Staff. That means I report directly to the President. And before I go in front of her with…what y’all are claiming, I need to know how solid this is.”
Special Agent Mudrak cleared his throat and raised his hand. “Um…sir? I should go. With respect, I haven’t been cleared for…whatever this is”
General de Vries cut him off with a wave of one hand. “I say you’re cleared for this, and that’s good enough. I read your file, Special Agent. It’s one of the reasons I had you collect this young lady.” He waved in a polite-yet-definite way towards Chao.
The FBI agent, for his part, seemed ready to bolt out the door. “But…”
The general clasped his hands behind his back and stared at Agent Mudrak. “I’m gonna need a lot of help in all this, son. Please.”
In response George held out his palms. “All right, sir.”
His acquiescence pleased the General. “Good! Now then, Ms. Chao…forgive me, is that the correct address?”
“Ms. Chao is fine,” she replied.
“Very well, Ms. Chao. Walk me through the whole thing again.” General de Vries winked at her. “Just make sure you use small words.” He pointed a thumb up at the stars upon his epaulets. “Don’t let these ornaments fool ya, sometimes I can get kinda confused.”
She looked down. There was no laptop anywhere in sight, no screen, her brain froze up as she saw absolutely nothing like a Powerpoint presentation…
Newman cleared his throat and shoved a sheaf of papers over towards her. Chao accepted them with a rueful yet thankful smile. A quick fan-through showed that these were printouts of the very same presentation she’d made to Newman and the others only a week ago. Thus emboldened, she set about explaining the results to her new audience of one, fanning the sheets out in front of the general one by one.
As she did so, Chao felt her equilibrium return. She could do this, even though she was facing someone who could probably make her simply disappear with little to no effort. “It started with these images from the Webb…”
Chao went through it all from the beginning, making sure to throw in lots of cautionary phrases like ‘if we’re correct’ and ‘assuming our assumptions are proper’ and such.
“…so you see, sir, this is why we’re concerned. This can’t be an instrumental artifact, and if it’s a natural phenomenon it’s one we can’t explain.”
General de Vries shifted his gaze over towards Stanley Ryan. “Well, Stan? Any holes in this young lady’s argument?”
The director of NASA shrugged. “None that I can find. You see why I brought this to you, Levy,”
The military man turned his eyes to the ceiling. “All right. So, if this analysis is correct then…something popped into existence near Uranus while emitting a burst of gamma-rays, then continued to glow in the near-infrared for a while afterwards. But then it vanished again. Maybe they have extendable radiator panels? Or they ducked behind a random nearby snowball.”
“Or they did both, General,” said Dr. Newman. “No matter how advanced they are, they still must obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They’ll need to shed their waste heat.”
The General smiled grimly. “Assuming, of course, that this is truly a real signal and not us just us making much ado about nothing.”
Chao cleared her throat and shuffled through her notes. “I, um, sir, I have all of our calculations here…”
He held up a palm. “Relax, kid. You’ve sold me. What do we do next?”
His question was directed at her, and so Chao reacted without so much as a glance at her co-conspirators. “We need more data, sir. We need every input from anything looking outward from our planet or from wherever. With enough data, maybe we can bag this sneaky so-and-so and figure out where they are now.”
“That should be somewhat easy, right?” asked De Vries with deceptive calm. “As Dr. Newman said, they will be emitting in the infrared. Probably closer to the near infrared, so any detectors we use don’t need to be as fancy and supercooled.”
Chao now realized the general was a lot smarter than he’d let on. “Yes, sir. That’s why I said we need more data. They could have a method for redirecting infrared radiation, but that only works if we assume they know we’re watching and that we’re confined to this planet. In a way, our hypothetical aliens are lucky. Even a few decades from now, we’d have enough observatories scattered around the solar system combined with powerful enough software to detect them automatically.”
The General’s face became set in a grimace. “That’s a maybe, but only a maybe. For the moment, even with expert systems flagging things we’re stuck with actual people looking at images. And as much as I agree with your interpretation, there’s nothing here that we can call rock-solid. At least, nothing that would convince the vast majority of our fellow humans.”
Director Ryan snorted. “Not to mention the members of our illustrious Congress. That would require a UFO to park itself in front of the Capitol building and have the aliens come dancing out in a fu…friggin’ conga line.”
Chao smiled quietly at the resulting mental image.
Dr. Newman cleared his throat. “Even if we had less ambiguous data, what would people make of it? People burn cities when their sports teams don’t win! What will they do when we say ‘Hey, there might or might not be an alien ship lurking around our solar system?’ They’d fookin’ burn everything.”
“Nobody’s going to know,” said General De Vries with implacable finality. “At least, not until we have a better handle on the true situation. Everyone here is hereby read into this program…whatever we wind up calling it. Hang on.”
To her surprise he reached into his coat and pulled out a very ordinary-looking smartphone. After a few key presses he held it up to his ear. “Hey, Naidine? Lev here. Need a new code name, what’s next on the list?” He blinked in surprise as he got his answer. “Huh, really? All right. Thanks.”
He tucked the phone back in his lapel with a shrug. “So, then. Y’all are now considered read into this here program with the sparkly-new code-name of GIDEON SUNSHINE.”
“That name seems appropriate,” said Blake. It was the first words he’d said since the General entered.
They all looked at him in surprise, and he shrunk back in his chair. “Hey, I went to Sunday School, okay? Gideon had his people hide their torches in jars, and then smashed them to suddenly shine light on their enemies to confuse and scare ‘em. Kinda like what we want to do with our hypothetical, um, aliens, right?”
General De Vries stared stone-faced at the young man for a moment, then smiled. “Exactly. That’s why I was surprised. We don’t like to have code names with too much relation to the program in question. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long term. Either we’re all being idiots and this data all gets stored in a basement somewhere for the next twenty years….or we’re not and this will blow up beyond anyone’s comprehension much sooner.”
Chao raised a hesitant hand in the resulting silence. “Sir…are we being kept here? With respect, I have family. I’m sure we all do. They’ll want to know we’re okay.” She was worried most about her mother. If her Mæ̀ found out that she was held someplace without her consent, there would soon be a tiny Thai-woman-shaped hole smashed right through this whole damned facility.
The General leaned back in his chair. “You’re not under arrest, if that’s what you’re worried about. But yes, we do want you to stay here for the moment. We have people on-site who’ve done this kind of thing before. They’ll put you in contact with whomever you need to. Plus we’ll come up with a plausible cover story you can tell ‘em.”
His eyes fixed them all in turn. “Don’t worry, you’re not prisoners. You’re assets. We’ve got some of the best and brightest in the entire world in this one room. So do me a favor and see if you can bag this bastard.”
__________
Matt woke at dusk and blearily scrubbed at his eyes. He rose off of his bed and took a few moments to collect himself. He figured his pursuers would try to come at night, so he’d gone ahead and fucked his sleep schedule to hell and gone so that he’d be fully awake if they came.
He lurched his way into the kitchen to make some coffee. As he waited for his machine to dispense its holy brew, he pondered how he would try to ambush himself. It was unlikely they’d come at him right up his driveway…well, unless they were truly idiots.
But something told him they weren’t idiots. Well, not all idiots. That big, shaven-headed dude gave off the vibes of someone who’d done shit like this before.
So, okay, assume at least the big guy wasn’t an idiot. But maybe not quite as experienced. So they’d try to go in the back way. Which meant hiking in from the nearest parking spot to his house’s rear.
His coffee machine let out a happy little ping to let him know it was done. He blinked, poured himself a hefty mug, and sauntered off to figure out where he’d stashed some maps of the surrounding area.
__________
Chao leaned back in a pleasant, well-lit cubicle. She laced her hands behind her head as she pondered the ceiling. In spite of her very subterranean surroundings she was, for the moment, content. She’d gotten a chance to talk to her Mæ̀, assure her that things were okay but that she might be out of contact for awhile because of a promotion. The latter was enough to assuage her mother’s fears, and even caused a rare expression of joy.
So that was the most important thing taken care of. The second most-important thing was that she had literally an entire trillion-dollar military-industrial complex at her beck and call. Whatever she needed, she could get. General de Vries had impressed on her (and the rest of GIDEON SUNSHINE) that they had to track this supposed alien craft, hopefully before it decided to start pummeling her planet with thermonuclear warheads or worse. Therefore, their directive was to find the damn thing…if it existed, of course.
And that pummeling assumed they were hostile, of course.
Chao rubbed her forehead as she pondered the latter. Why wouldn’t they just send a ‘hello’ message? Some prime numbers, a few mathematical equations would be enough to get the ball rolling. Just the fact that they’d shown themselves would be a big step up in terms of trust.
Unless…
“Unless they’re afraid of us,” she murmured. No, that was silly. They had an interstellar spaceship, a level of tech which made anything on Earth look like stone knives. But then again…
“Maybe it’s only them who are here,” she said, more loudly. “One ship versus an entire planet? Yeah, I’d be cautious as well.”
She leaned forward towards her computer. No other anomalies had popped up on any sensors, anywhere, in the past few days. But then she realized there was one emission they hadn’t scanned for.
Gravity.
__________
“So this is the drill, my lovelies,” said Captain Sadaf to her assembled crew. They all floated in the wardroom of the Rithro, in various positions. Somehow the ship had made it to the stable point trailing the human’s moon without being detected. Well, without being detected as far as they knew. Nadash hadn’t picked up anything on the broadcasted signals from these ‘humans’, and at this point had even worked out a rudimentary translation matrix. Sadaf could only hope that it was sufficient to get across both their desperate situation and non-hostile intentions.
“I am not splitting us up,” Sadaf continued. “We’re all going down in one landing craft together to conduct our, um, ‘involuntary interview’.”
Takh raised his upper left arm. “Captain? Isn’t that a little risky?”
She gave her species’ version of a graveyard laugh. “We are well beyond the realm of ‘risky’, my friend. Not to mention we’ll need everyone’s insight in real time as things transpire.” She sighed. “And yes, I will set it up to detonate both the Rithro and the landing craft if things go really wrong.”
Kifa rose up on her multiple legs, her deep black eyes shining with determination. “Well, we’ll just have to make sure things don’t go wrong then, won’t we?”