The Black Ships (21 page)

Red Flag Mineral Co.

Sixty
Meter Observatory

Mauna
Kea, Hawaii

March 15
^th
, 2027

“H
ow much do you have?” Mike jumped as Colonel McCutcheon’s voice
suddenly appeared at his left shoulder. Though he’d sent Wes to get him, he
hadn’t heard his approach because of the earphones.

“We have five transmissions over a
forty-minute period.” Mike took his eyes from the screen and turned to face the
officer. “Then everything just went dead. We probably moved out of alignment
with the signal. It’s a laser based transmission so you have to be within the
path to receive it.” He shrugged with a grin that threatened to split his head
in half. “We got seriously lucky.”

“Laser,” the Colonel said with a tone of
disbelief. “I thought atmospherics would keep a signal from getting off the
planet or was this a ship-to-ship transmission?” There were two of the massive
ships in orbit around Mars.

“Neither,” Mike got out of his chair and
walked over to one of the whiteboards that stood on frames around the central
working area. He picked up a marker and drew two circles, one on the lower left
corner and one slightly above and to the right. “Earth,” he said, drawing an
‘E’ in the center of the lower circle. “Mars.” He drew a corresponding ‘M’ as
an excited Sgt Davis returned with the rest of the team. 

“These are the ships.” He sketched in a
couple of wedges. “Not to scale, of course.” He engaged in a theatrical pause,
the kind that gave an audience time to laugh. Nobody cracked a smile and he
cleared his throat nervously and turned back to the board. “Tough room,” he
muttered under his breath.
This will win them over,
he thought as he
drew a circle in the top right hand of the board and a line leading past Mars
to Earth. He put the characters ‘HW?’ in the circle. “This,” he said, stabbing
the circle with the marker, “is the origin of the signals.”

The team stared at him in shock. Jan was
the first to speak. “Mike, are you telling us that this signal is coming from
their home world?”

“Either that or from an invasion fleet
bound for Earth.” McCutcheon’s statement brought the alarmed gazes of all but
one of the team members.

“You’re both right,” Mike said. “But, more
accurately, I believe that Jan’s option is the most likely.” He drew a cone on
the board. “This is an exaggeration of the beam but it gets the point across.
As the light from their communications laser travels to its destination, it
spreads out. Now they seem to have a way to make a far more coherent beam than
we can, but it still spreads and we can measure that effect pretty accurately
with the ‘60’. We should also be able to notice if the source is getting any
closer.”

He turned from the board to face the group.
“A fleet would most likely be travelling pretty damn fast but we didn’t see any
evidence of that during the forty minutes we were recording the signal.” He
smiled, feeling like he was back in front of a class at Cal Tech. “Anyone want
to guess at the significance of that little nugget?”

Hal Tudor’s eyes lit up. “You can tell us
exactly where to find their home world, can’t you?”

Mike nodded, his head-splitting grin making
a return appearance. “Direction and distance, but wait,” he said in his best TV
announcer voice. “There’s more!”  Quizzical frowns greeted his latest
attempt at humor.
You’re losing the crowd again numbskull, just let them
hear it.
He walked over to the table where McCutcheon had startled him and
pulled the headphone jack out of the laptop. The speakers turned on automatically,
spilling a strange warbling sound that continued to change in pitch and
frequency.

“That’s the transmission?” Jan asked as she
stepped nearer. “Some sort of data stream?”

“Yep.” Mike sat in his chair and angled to
face the audience. “And every now and then it stops and someone…”

Jan came to a halt and everyone felt a
tingling sensation dance across their skin. A voice was speaking. It carried on
for a few moments and then another data burst followed. “Spooky, huh?” Mike was
grinning at them, seeing his own original reactions mirrored in their faces. “I
was listening to that when the boss nearly scared me out of my shorts.”

“It almost sounds human,” Jan said quietly.

“It is human.” Everyone turned to look at
Corporal Rob Farquhar who had arrived with the Colonel when the military had
taken over the site. He looked troubled. “I can recognize a couple of words but
not nearly enough to have any clue what it means.”

Mike had originally been surprised at the
easy-going relationship between the intelligence officer and his operators but
the informal atmosphere gave the men room to use their own initiative. They
often contributed to meetings and their contributions were rarely wrong. This
particular offering, however, seemed a little hard to believe.

“You shittin’ us, Rob?” McCutcheon frowned
at his NCO for a few seconds before his features showed a sudden understanding.
“Your Mom?”

Rob nodded slowly, still troubled by the
implications. “My Mom is Hopi,” he explained to the group. “I speak that
language, but this is something different. It’s almost as if they borrowed a
few words of Hopi, maybe a few words of Zuni – I need to hear more.”

“Zuni?” Jan asked. “I’ve heard of the Hopi;
are the Zuni another tribe?”

Rob nodded again. “A lot of people think
the Pueblo tribes can trace their roots back to the  great Anasazi
civilization.”

“I’ve heard of the Anasazi,” Jan
brightened. “They left all those magnificent ruins behind, right?” She frowned
in alarm and took a step towards Farquhar. “Rob? What is it?”

Rob’s face was deathly pale and McCutcheon
grabbed a swivel chair and eased his corporal into it. “This just makes too
much sense. It changes everything I thought I knew.” He leaned back and stared
at the ceiling. “Anasazi wasn’t the name my ancestors used; nobody knows what
name they gave themselves. It was a word used by the Navajo whenever discussing
them.” He looked at his colonel. “It means ‘Ancient Enemy’.”

West Point , New York

April 24
^th
, 2027

S
am walked into the commandant’s office with a tablet in his hand.
The president was sitting in a leather club chair opposite the commandant
having a coffee and he looked a question at his chief of staff. “Mr. President,
I think you should take a look at this.”

“If you gentlemen need some privacy, I need
to go check on the assembly anyway.” Brigadier General Hill rose from his
chair. In twenty minutes, the president would be addressing the cadets and
staff of the academy. The US would be deploying almost a quarter of a million
troops in the coming months as part of the Stability Assistance Program. SAP
deployments were drawing troops from more than twenty nations and they were
intended to augment the police forces of countries where unrest was threatening
to shut down the governments.

Announcements regarding troop deployments
tended to happen in front of military audiences. Withdrawals were more likely
to be announced in the press room at the Whitehouse. It was the generally
accepted way of things and now was no time to start experimenting.

Sam handed the tablet over as the door
closed behind Hill. The president put his glasses on and began to scroll
through the images and text. “How big was it?”

“Big enough that we had to destroy the
entire site just to get it out.” He sat down in the chair vacated by Hill and,
after a moment’s consideration, appropriated the cup of coffee that Hill had
been drinking. “We buried a couple thousand pounds of C4 throughout the area
and simulated a tremor, so the geologists will confirm our cover story for us.”
He sighed and balanced the mug in his lap.

“All traces have been eliminated from the
site?”

Sam nodded. “It just looks like a cave now.
The money to rebuild the whole thing has been appropriated and channeled
through a couple of NPO’s, so most of the damage will be undone.”

Parnell set down his empty mug. “Why has
this never been found before now? That site has had archeologists crawling all
over it for decades.”

“People tend to point their ground
penetrating radars at the ground, not at the back wall of cave cities. We
saturated the place with GPR after our team translated the intercept.” The
voice portions of the alien transmission had been handed over to a team of
Pueblo elders and linguists who had been set up at the growing center on Mauna
Kea. They had cobbled together a translation and the results were chilling.

By now, most of the people on Earth
harbored no doubts; the aliens were hostile. The new information, however,
proved that they had been to Earth before. An ancient outpost had been caught
off-guard by the humans they’d been sent to scout. Isolated and few in number,
they had been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers and all killed.

The bodies had been piled inside their
ship, which had been placed at the back of a deep cleft in a cliff face. The
victorious humans had then closed off the opening and built a small collection
of buildings to house the warriors chosen to guard it. In time it had grown
into a small city of homes and shops built under the overhang of the cliff.

The aliens had mentioned the massacre and
it was clear that they wanted to come back and do a proper job this time. They
were building up forces on Mars rather than transporting them across the light
years in no small part because the standing military they
did
have
seemed to be tied up on internal security operations. In just over a year, they
would be launching ships to establish orbital superiority. The revelation had
been shocking, but it also brought hope. The intercept was dumb luck and humans
were only just barely capable of deciphering it. The enemy had transmitted the
entire stream in the open. They placed far too much faith in encryption and it
would end up costing them dearly if humans could develop an understanding of
their computer systems from the structure of the data that had been
transmitted.

“So the ship is off to Area 51?” Parnell
raised a conspiratorial eyebrow. It rankled him that he had never been able to
get a straight answer about the place.

Sam shook his head. “Far as I know, they
only do defense testing there. The ship is on its way to join the wreckage from
Roswell. This will be the first time they get to study an intact ship, though
it’s obviously made by a different civilization.” He grinned.

He’s managed to find out where that is,
Parnell realized.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
“Different
civilization?” He frowned at his old friend. “Just how many races have been
coming here?”

“Dunno,” said Sam before taking another
drink. “General consensus is that the Roswell bunch were just biologists but I
figure they were doing a nature show.”

“Alright, but where does all this fancy
equipment get sent if not Area 51?”

Sam’s grin came back. He had managed to
find out what none of his predecessors had ever learned. “What’s the one place
where regular shipments and airtight security are completely unnoticeable? What
place has become a synonym for ‘secure’?” There was a pause as Parnell looked
blankly at Sam. “Alright, here’s a hint - Kentucky.”

“No,” Parnell blurted, grinning. “Fort
Knox?” A slow nod. “I suppose there hasn’t been a lot of gold there in a hell
of a long time…” He handed the tablet back to Sam and got up from the chair.
“Do we share this with the UN?” he asked as he put on his jacket.

“Absolutely.”

“Why absolutely?”

“This is just an orbital ship. If we want a
share of the big prize, we need to play nice.” Sam shrugged. “If the UN force
manages to seize one of the enemy starships, we don’t want to be left out in
the cold when they figure out how their systems work.” He turned off the tablet
and they headed for the door. “Anyway, Mary tells me that the alien engine is
based on existing theory, we just hadn’t managed to come up with a working
model yet. With some reverse engineering, we can have a hybridized engine on
some modified VU-22’s within a few months. So we can start moving personnel and
lighter equipment into orbit before year’s end.”

Parnell stopped with his hand on the door.
“So we can stop building those damn drop capsules?” He was referring to large
coffin-like capsules that were intended to put individual troops on the ground
quickly to seize strategic points. Nobody had much faith in the design, least
of all the troops who were expected to use them.

Sam nodded. “We can use them to land troops
on Mars and we should be able to jam any radar-guided weapons. I get the
feeling the enemy hasn't fought many major wars lately, just counter-insurgency
against some of their own worlds.”

“Let’s go tell some bright-faced youngsters
that we’re sending a few hundred thousand troops to force our fellow humans
back to work.” He opened the door and walked out into the hall, his protective
detail falling in as they emerged.

“I hope Jack worded it a little better than
that,” Sam muttered as they  headed for the assembly hall.