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At that, Alayna stood up and joined the party. She positioned herself in front of Abe so that, instead of a view of the wall layout, he had a perfect view of her derriere.
Nice, Stoic.
“But I can’t see the wall, now,” Abe said aloud, accidentally.
But Alayna was already explaining the wall. By the time Abe stood himself up, she had said, “The bosses know where you are. This ‘bower,’” She paused. Abe stood behind her. When the fragrance of her hair came into his nose, he fought to resist putting his arms around her. She continued, “This ‘bower’ you talk about: well, it’s right there, if I’m not mistaken. See? Here’s our position right now, below this line.”
“I think you’re right,” said Lars and Perry Tuck, in unison. Lars continued, “What is that line, anyway? It goes around the entire mountain.”
Alayna answered, “It appears to be a naturally occurring bluff that crowns the mountain, but there is some question about that. No other mountain in existence has such a feature. Moreover, this mountain has the shape of a volcano—a dormant one—but it has all the geological hallmarks of belonging to the Rocky Mountains.”
“Geological hallmarks?” asked Abe.
Umezawa piped up, saying, “She means all the rocks are the same as they are on the other mountains, Abe.”
“That’s correct, Ume,” said Alayna. “Tectonic, not volcanic.”
“Huh,” said Lars. “And what about that bluff ring?”
“As for me, I call it a crown, but the bosses say I’m being a silly girl,” Alayna said. “They say it’s a rival technological power at work here.”
“Huh,” said Lars. “Is that why they’ve had such a hard time getting us for these past few weeks?”
“Few weeks?” said Meredith Donaldson.
“Few weeks?” said Perry Tuck. “Dude, Lars, we’ve been after Jim for a year.”
“A year?” said Alayna. “Why do you think the bosses have me here? You guys disappeared for a year.” Perry Tuck and Meredith Donaldson stared in disbelief.
“But look at that!” said Lars, pointing. “That’s February 15th, the day the airplane crashed. That can’t have been more than a few weeks ago. Maybe only two. What’s with all this other stuff?” He waved his hand down the line of calendar months.
“Yeah,” said Umezawa, “and look at the picture of the bower: that photograph was taken during the summer.”
“I’m very confused,” said Abe, peering over Alayna’s head.
Everyone started talking at once, pointing at paths they had taken as seen on the photographs, trying to decipher the markings on the calendar, each to another, following with their fingers the strings from pin to pin. Perry Tuck and Meredith Donaldson began to argue about their particular fully authoritative interpretations of the depicted data, Lars was uttering gutturals at every new bit of data he observed, and Umezawa was chattering away. James Thurgerson just laughed and laughed, understanding nothing.
Blake would love this, Stoic. This is an absolute dynamite conspiracy, right here in real life! So many twists, so many turns.
Finally, Alayna could take no more. She said, in a very loud voice, which thrilled Abe, “NOW YOU ALL JUST SHUT UP YOU ARE IN MY HOME!”
All hushed.
“Now, look here,” she said. “You all barged into my house, took me prisoner, and interrupted a perfectly ordered collection effort. And then you have the audacity to criticize my wall decorations!”
Another short silence followed, the men shuffled around, looked down at their feet, and then Umezawa giggled. “Nice hut!” he said.
Alayna giggled. The rest of them laughed, a bit nervously, saying manly things like, “Yeah,” and “Sorry.” James Thurgerson looked back and forth with a grin on his face.
“Now I will explain everything, okay?” Alayna said. “But you can’t ask any questions or do any talking until I’m finished.”
“And then we can ask questions?” asked Lars.
Alayna ignored him, and she began. “The pictorial section is set up in five parts. Here you see the cartographical section. It shows elevation and geographical features. This second section is the satellite view. Special relief features are available on it. The third section here is the landscape view from this location. The fourth section there is the landscape view from the side of the mountain where the first asset was lost.”
“The airplane crash?” Lars asked.
“I said no interruptions.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“I think she means me,” James Thurgerson said.
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“I said, no interruptions!” Alayna said, adding a little pepper to her words.
James Thurgerson grinned and gesticulated over his mouth that he was finished with his interruption.
Alayna continued: “These two here, the two side landscape views: they cause all the problems, but you gotta have them so you can chart movement around the mountain. You wouldn’t need both if this were a plateau or coastal plain.”
“Oh, I get it,” said Umezawa. “It’s like Kerbil Space Program, where the objective always shows up on the wrong side of Kerbin and you’re confused because it’s a globe and it rotates toward you. Or away from you, depending on your trajectory.”
Everyone stared at Umezawa.
“What?” he said. “I love that game. Doesn’t anyone else like doing the math for apoapsis and periapsis while you’re waiting for mom to finish making dinner?”
“No interruptions!” everyone said in unison.
“Oh, oh yeah…”
“The problem is,” Alayna said, “you have to turn the mountain around in your head between each photo to see how the charting works, like whenever someone walks from one side of the mountain and back. And finally, this fifth section, which I don’t think is very helpful, but it’s very pretty, is the bird’s eye view, an aerial photograph taken a few miles out just above the mountain peak’s elevation.”
No interruptions, Stoic, but yes, it is very beautiful; she’s right: our mountain home is lovely.
“Each line originates on the calendar. The calendar is the key; not the locations. The calendar. On this particular February 15th was the airplane crash. At that moment, they lost the first asset. Yes, Jim, that refers to you.”
James Thurgerson put his hands up by his face and mugged for the party.
“On February 16, the second assassination attempt was made. That’s right, the second assassination attempt; the first was the plane crash itself. The pilots botched it and made it into their own funeral, and, apparently, a funeral for a bunch of handlers and financiers. They weren’t happy. They located Jim’s signal, and guessed that he would be returning to the airplane wreckage for supplies. Unfortunately, they underestimated him, and he destroyed that helicopter and its crew. The pilot’s skull had two bullet holes in it: one right between the eyes and one exit—what?”
Alayna had noticed Lars, Umezawa, and James Thurgerson exchanging glances and grimaces. James Thurgerson said, “Interruption?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said.
“I wasn’t there: Lars brought that copter down.”
“But they spent thousands of rounds! For Jim to survive that kind of firepower is one thing; how did you civilians manage?”
“Uh…it’s hard to explain,” said Umezawa. “We have had some superpowers distributed to us. One of them is Stop Small Projectiles.”
“Huh,” said Alayna.
There is a lot to tell, isn’t there, Stoic. You weren’t asleep that long, after all. And just listen to Ume! He does indeed have a brain!
Alayna returned to the calendar. “So, you see here, the black line connects to the cartographical view, section one, right?” Everyone nodded. “So, after I connected the calendar notation to the cartographical section, from there, I distributed white lines—strings, but I call them lines. Plain old yarn from Walmart—I distributed white lines to each picture section.” She pointed toward a lower peak visible on the landscape view. “For example, this red line connects from that point, Contact A and B, or, the plane wreckage area (white line from Section One to Section Four), to this point, Terminus Two, where that mission failed. In other words, that’s where they found the helicopter wreckage.”
The men nodded their heads, following along.
Are you really following along, Stoic?
“Now, back to the calendar, in very small printing, you’ll see notations starting ‘DS’ which is for ‘Drone Sortie.’ They sent out dozens of these beginning February 17, surveilling and signaling, but Asset A had completely disappeared from their sight. Jimbo, you’re a real Houdini.”
“Houdini escaped from impossible situations; he didn’t disappear,” said Meredith Donaldson. Alayna shot his him a hot glare. “Oh, yeah, sorry…”
“After a few months, you’ll see that DSs grew few in number, and then there’s RecB. While it was still below freezing up here, so, March 17, they recovered the corpses from the airplane crash site.” Alayna looked at James Thurgerson. “Lots of bullet holes, Jimbo.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m pretty proud of those.”
My, how he pirouetted and sauteed while the airplane pitched and crumpled!
“But none in the pilots.”
“I was hoping they would bring the plane to a better landing,” said James Thurgerson. “I had my designs to put holes in them as well, but they didn’t need any after they…uh…failed.” Meredith Donaldson laughed.
“All right then, continuing on,” said Alayna. “I interrupted myself that time. I had my own questions, see. So, here we are, with the occasional DS trying to ascertain the whereabouts of Asset A or any remainder of Asset A for recovery, especially after the snow melted, and then they gave up. Here, at July 15, they removed the airplane.”
The party murmured, trying to suppress excitement.
Time travel, Stoic. We’ve been traveling in time!
“On July 16, A-Team Alpha was established right here, and A-Team Bravo was established several miles away, just beyond LoS—Line of Sight—to this location—”
“A stands for Assassination,” explained Perry Tuck. “Oh, oops. Sorry…sorry…”
“Yes, assassination teams Alpha and Bravo were placed here as a surveillance net because they determined the geography of the mountain would funnel Asset A to this general area. Only two smalls teams were thus assigned because they did not believe Asset A was still on the mountain, as no signal ping registered a hit, nor any CW command brought ascertainable results.”
Is she talking military talk? Or is this paramilitary? Is this bureaucrat-ese? How is she so smart?
“Six months later, here, on February 16th, a year after Asset A was lost, they lost Assets B, C, and D. Both A-Team redoubts were destroyed by boulders, with every member of A-Team Bravo killed, and A-Eigenbroetler was also killed by a boulder.”
Alayna spun around and stared into Abe’s eyes, her own amber eyes bright with a searing heat. “Assassin Little Lone Wolf, my half-sister, if you must know.”
She held his eyes until he could no longer endure. He looked up and over her, glancing at James Thurgerson, who was grinning at him, making a vulgar gesture involving a stiff index finger running in and out of a circle he formed with the index finger and thumb of his other hand. The other men looked away from Abe, and down.
Alayna wheeled away from Abe, resuming her explanation of the timeline and photography. “On February 17, the bosses dispatched me, whereupon I discovered the whereabouts of Asset C, collected his remains, and delivered him to the bosses. Since then, I was stationed here alone, to make observations, collecting any and all data, especially any kind of radio or energy radiation or anomaly I might…uh…observe.
“For almost a year, A-Team Charlie did reconnaissance on the mountain, scouring its entirety, reporting occasionally to me, whereupon I relayed it via radio to the bosses. At this point they and we were trying to coordinate. They were willing for me to collect the assets alive or dead, but the bosses preferred—well, they insisted on my collecting you alive. And now I have. Sort-of. Welcome to my home.
“On February 14, A-Team Charlie established the trap you just encountered. As you can see, that encounter occurred on February 16. I will venture to say they did not know civilians were involved. Naturally, I was made to report my finding Abe to the bosses. I do not know whether they shared that information with Royhahn.”
Oh! Royhahn, the Chinese-Canadian partnership! That’s the entity she keeps calling “they.” So who are “we” and “the bosses”? Better not interrupt with a question, Stoic: she might cook your insides with those eyes.
“In any case, they were guessing, and they were right, that the assets had gained the technological ability to adapt to the mountain wilderness, perhaps by establishing a base of operations within a cave with a hidden entrance—but they were confused by the presence of that ‘bower.’ It was visible via aerial photography, as you can clearly see, but no drone ever discovered it, nor did anyone on foot make a visual of it. They saw the impression of pathways leading around the mountain to its location, but there was no ‘bower,’ only a grove.
“At any rate, the point is that they had guessed correctly that, for some reason illogical, probably related to firmware maintenance updating, assets were compelled to come out of hiding on or around each February 16. And that’s that. Here we are. Any questions?”
There was a rolling up of silence, like silence rolls up after distant lightning, followed by the unleashing of a storm, and the entire party burst into conversation. Abe overheard snippets of every kind of idea, including things like, food supplies, science fiction, physics, radioactivity, government conspiracies, weather, surveillance technology, politics, holidays, and even sports seasons. Abe himself managed to blurt out, “Two whole years! That’s unbelievable!”
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Finally, Lars spoke above the rest of them so that they listened: “Man alive, Blake is going to love all this. And you know what he’ll say? He’ll say, ‘See? This is why conspiracies are all basically fantasy: too many people are involved for it to stay a conspiracy for very long because they start fighting over the thing, and it always turns out no one really knows what they’re doing.’ That’s what he’ll say.”
“Well, at least we know how to get off the mountain,” said Meredith Donaldson. “We just need to signal or fetch the others, and we can all go home.”
Immediately after that declaration, a new discussion broke out, which quickly descended into a heated argument among Perry Tuck, Meredith Donaldson, James Thurgerson, and Alayna.
Abe stood and observed the ruckus in wonder. How can one scientific program yield such a variety in outcomes?
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