The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (51 page)

“What are these?” she asked Carlson, running a gentle finger over the glossy black casings of both artifacts. They felt smooth and cool to the touch. “Where did they come from?”

Carlson’s eyes gleamed as he brought her up to speed. “The Navy confiscated these objects from an unidentified intruder they caught snooping aboard the
U.S.S. Enterprise
about a week ago, at Alameda Naval Base in San Francisco. The intruder was injured, and later disappeared from Mercy Hospital under mysterious circumstances, but he left these devices behind. Navy Intelligence wasted a few days trying to figure them out on their own,” he added with a derisive snort, “until somebody wised up and forwarded them on to us.”

Shannon nodded, absorbing every detail of Carlson’s explanation. The
Enterprise
was an aircraft carrier, she knew, but she still wasn’t sure why an interrupted espionage attempt had her boss so excited. “What sort of intruder?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

“A Russian, supposedly,” the old scientist stated. “Named Pavel Chekov, according to his ID, but the CIA has no record of any Pavel Chekov entering the country, and the Soviets have vociferously denied any knowledge of his existence.” Carlson sounded as though he had little reason to doubt the Russians’ claims of innocence. “Naturally, various paranoid types are still convinced that this ‘Chekov’ was
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nothing more than an unusually slippery communist spy, but I have my doubts.” He waved an outstretched hand over the unnamed objects on the counter. “If these devices are of Soviet invention, then the Reds are a lot farther ahead of us, technologically, than our friends in the Pentagon would like to think.” He grinned at Shannon, revealing a mischievous smile regrettably stained by years of cigarette smoking. “Fortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.”

She couldn’t believe he was actually implying what she thought he was getting at. “You don’t mean ... you really think that this “Chekov might have been ... ?” Even after all she had learned working on the project for the last couple years, she found it hard to say the words out loud.

“Not of this Earth? An extraterrestrial?” Carlson completed her sentence with a triumphant twinkle in his eye. “That’s exactly what I think.” He beamed at the unidentified objects like a kid who had just received the toys at the very top of his Christmas list. “As puzzling as they are, these artifacts bear a distinct resemblance to some of the equipment we salvaged at Roswell back in ’47.”

Shannon reacted with a sharp intake of breath. Until she’d come to work at Project F, about two years ago, she had always assumed that stories about UFOs and captured alien visitors were simply the stuff of tabloid headlines. Imagine her surprise when Doc Carlson informed her that he had personally met with and studied a party of sentient, extraterrestrial beings after an alien spacecraft crashed in New Mexico almost forty years ago. Although the unearthly creatures—who called themselves “Ferengi”—had escaped from captivity shortly thereafter, Dr. Jeffrey Carlson had devoted the rest of his career to studying everything he could find out about the aliens and their amazingly advanced technology.

“But surely,” she protested, still unable to accept the enormity of what her boss was saying, “the Russian that was captured, Chekov, did not look like a Ferengi?” According to classified photos taken in ’47, Earth’s previous visitors had resembled hairless trolls, with grotesquely oversized ears and rodent-like features. It was hard to imagine how even the most paranoid Navy Intelligence officer could mistake a Ferengi for a Soviet spy.

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“True,” Carlson conceded, “but you’re forgetting that the Roswell aliens, or at least one of them, were capable of changing their shape at will. I saw him do so with my own eyes, and so did Faith,” he added, referring to his wife, now a retired Army nurse. “Why couldn’t this Chekov actually have been a Ferengi in disguise?”

Good point,
Shannon thought, gradually adjusting to the idea. Once you accepted the existence of shapechanging aliens from outer space, something she had come to terms with many moons ago, then it was certainly possible that one of them might have been visiting California last week.
But why?
she wondered.
For what purpose?

She suddenly remembered a news report she had paid fleeting attention to a few days earlier, something about a prominent marine biologist who had vanished without a trace in San Francisco.
That would have been about the same time that this “Chekov” showed up at Alameda,
she realized.
Could there be a connection?
None of the woman’s friends or coworkers had been able to explain her abrupt disappearance, and the police admitted to being baffled. Perhaps—
What was her name again? Gillian something?
—really had been abducted by aliens?

But what would the Ferengi want with a marine biologist?
Shannon had no idea. According to Carlson, the original Roswell aliens had arrived on Earth by accident, or so they had insisted. Why had they, or others like them, returned at last, after so many years? “Are you sure,” she asked Carlson, contemplating the newly arrived artifacts upon the counter, “that these are Ferengi technology?”

“I think so,” the doc said hesitantly. “There hasn’t really been time to examine them properly just yet, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about what we saw in ’47. After all, it’s been almost forty years now, and we’re still trying to figure out how Quark’s ship and his other gadgets worked, based on sketches and photographs taken at the time.” He smiled wanly. “Sometimes I feel like a caveman struggling to make sense of a microwave oven.”

Shannon knew how he felt. Much of her own work at the project involved the seemingly impossible task of trying to reverse-engineer the Ferengi’s spaceship with nothing to go on except forty-year-old notes and diagrams. She’s been at it for two years already, and success was
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nowhere in sight. Her slow progress frustrated Shannon, who had aspirations of being the first woman on Mars. Not even the
Challenger
disaster, earlier that year, had dampened her burning desire to make it into space; if anything, that tragic explosion had only heightened her determination to crack the puzzle of the long-departed Ferengi vessel.
Lord knows we need something better than the space shuttle if we’re ever going to seriously explore the cosmos
. ...

“And yet,” Carlson continued, rapping his knuckles against the steel-like plastic (or plastic-like steel), “I’d bet my scandalously inadequate pension that this is the same sort of stuff that Quark’s gear was made out of.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully as he regarded the objects in question. “The only thing that puzzles me, though, is that the design of these mechanisms strikes me as somehow less sophisticated than the apparatus we observed in ’47. It’s like their technology has regressed by a generation or so over the course of the last four decades, which is contrary to what you’d expect.”

Shannon gently lifted the pistol-like device from the counter, her hand fitting comfortably around the grip. It was surprisingly lightweight. “Well, you know what they say: they just don’t make them like they used to. Maybe that applies to extraterrestrial hardware as well.” An even more far-out explanation occurred to her. “Or, who knows, maybe there’s some sort of bizarre time-travel paradox at work here?
Back to the Future
and all that.”

She was joking, naturally, but Carlson appeared to give the idea serious consideration. “You know, Shannon, that might well be the case.” He watched her handle the alleged alien artifact. “Careful,” he warned her, “the Navy spycatchers felt confident that the device you’re holding is some kind of weapon, although so far no one’s been able to make it work.” His tone implied that maybe, where the U.S. military was concerned, this wasn’t such a bad thing. “Before his accident, Chekov himself is supposed to have suggested that his weapon had been damaged by radiation from the
Enterprise’s
nuclear reactor.” His gaze turned inward as he mulled over the possible implications of this claim. “You know, now that I think of it, Quark also had strong feelings about atomic energy. Maybe—”

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A series of racking coughs interrupted his fervid speculations. Shannon winced at the harsh, wet sounds coming from her mentor’s much-abused lungs, and she watched in pain and sympathy as the explosive convulsions caused the old man’s body to double over. Returning the “pistol” to the counter, she hurried over to help Carlson, snatching the cigarette from his palsied fingers with one deft motion, then guiding him over to a nearby stool where he could sit down.

It took a few moments, but the coughing jag eventually passed, and Carlson was able to catch his breath. “Sorry about that,” he apologized meekly. “I guess I’ve been working too hard.”

For the first time since returning to the lab, Shannon noticed that Carlson’s face looked gaunter and more drawn than usual. The heavy black rims of his bifocals only partially concealed the purple shadows beneath his aged eyes. “Let me guess, you’ve been going strong for hours now, haven’t you?”

Carlson shrugged dismissively. The flip side of his enormous enthusiasm for his work, Shannon knew, was that he often pushed himself too hard. “More or less,” he admitted, “but can you blame me? This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Brand-new evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence! I couldn’t take a break now if I wanted to.”

He looked excited and worn-out at the same time. Shannon decided it was time to take a hard line; she cared too much for the sweet old scientist to let him trash his health like this. “Look, if you won’t go home and get a good night’s sleep, which is what you really need, then you should at least nap for a couple hours in your office. That’s what I set up that cot for in the first place.”

“If I wanted a nurse, I could have just stayed home with my wife,” Carlson grumbled. He reached for his cigarette, but Shannon determinedly ground the noxious cancer stick into the bowl of a convenient ceramic crucible. “Dammit, I’ve been waiting forty years for another look at Ferengi technology.”

“Then a few more hours won’t make any difference,” Shannon insisted. Adamant, she helped her exhausted boss back onto his feet and led him out of the lab toward his office a short walk away, in an adjoining block of compartments assigned to their project. Carlson
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muttered darkly the whole time, but reluctantly bowed to the inevitable. Deep down inside, the young woman suspected, her ingenious mentor knew she was right.

After making sure that Carlson had indeed stretched out on the portable cot that Shannon had installed in his office months ago, Shannon turned off all the lamps in his room, then slipped quietly out of the book-lined compartment. She lingered in the hall outside the door for several minutes, to make sure that Carlson was indeed taking it easy, and not sneaking up to work at his computer. Then her own curiosity won out, and she tiptoed back toward the main lab to take a closer look at the mysterious curios that had so intrigued her boss.

A tinted glass door sealed the lab off from the office area. Shannon was sure she remembered switching off the lights when she left the lab, but now she was surprised to see an eerie blue glow coming from the other side of the door. A wisp of sapphire mist seeped into the hall from beneath the door.
What the hell?
she thought. She sniffed the air, momentarily afraid that a discarded cigarette had accidentally started a fire in the lab, but she couldn’t smell anything burning. Whatever that odorless blue vapor was, it wasn’t smoke.

Instantly on guard, she crept closer to the closed lab entrance. Peering through the translucent glass, she glimpsed the silhouette of a humanoid figure moving across the lab.
An intruder
—
at Area 51?
That hardly seemed possible, unless maybe Chekov himself had somehow dropped by to reclaim his property. Who knew how Ferengi came and went? Could it be that a genuine space alien was only a few yards away?

On impulse, Shannon threw open the door and switched on the lights, surprising the intruder. The high-intensity white lights exposed a thoroughly human-looking woman caught in the act of searching the supply drawers beneath the metal counter. Tanned and blond, the woman looked to be in her late thirties, and wore a baggy, dark green sweater and black spandex leggings. A stylish woven tote bag hung over her shoulder, and there was nothing alien at all about her wide-eyed expression of surprise and chagrin; she looked as sheepishly guilty as an underage teen caught sneaking into an R-rated movie.
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That’s no Ferengi,
Shannon guessed intuitively,
and no “Pavel” either, not unless the aliens can change sex as well as shape.

The stranger’s hand still rested on the handle of a partially opened drawer, while her other hand gripped the black, rectangular “radio” captured from Chekov. The remaining artifact, the one that resembled a handgun, still rested on the polished steel counter, just beyond the intruder’s reach.

Thinking quickly, Shannon rushed forward and snatched up the suspected weapon. “Don’t move!” she warned the older woman, aiming what she hoped was the business end of the “pistol” at the stranger.
Boy, am I going to feel stupid,
she thought,
if I’ve got this thing pointed the wrong way!

“Hold on! Let’s not get carried away!” the other woman whispered urgently, without a trace of anything resembling a Russian accent. Her own arm jerked up suddenly, pointing the “radio” at Shannon. “You stay where you are, too!”

The young engineer wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that the mystery woman looked and acted so convincingly human. “That’s no weapon,” Shannon challenged the nameless intruder, nodding her head at the boxy, black instrument in the other woman’s hand.