The Black Knight (2 page)

‘You will come with us,’ the officer ordered, his men arrayed behind him with their rifles held at port arms. ‘All of this material is now confiscated.’

Tesla’s eyes widened and he took a pace toward the officer.

‘But we have just made an important discovery, one that could change the world and…’

A dozen rifles lifted to point at Tesla and stopped him in his tracks.

The officer moved to stand in front of the scientist, one hand resting on the butt of his holstered pistol.

‘It’s not a request, Mister Tesla.’

***

II

Cheyenne Mountain Complex,

Colorado Springs

Present Day

‘It’s no big deal, okay?’

Sergeant Jenny Duvall twirled a pen in the fingers of one hand as she flashed a winning smile at Corporal Hank Fuller.

‘I went last time,’ Fuller complained.

Duvall, still smiling, shrugged. ‘Fair’s fair, okay? You snooze, you lose. I won three hands in a row so it’s your turn.’

Fuller sighed and tossed a handful of cards down onto his work station, which like Duvall’s was arrayed with four monitors, a keyboard and three phones. A desk between their stations served as a useful space for playing poker during the small hours when they were the only staff on duty.

‘Coffee?’ he asked as he got to his feet.

‘What else?’ Duvall grinned as she tossed her pen down onto her work station and crossed her booted feet at the ankle as she propped them up against the desk. Even wearing drab fatigues she looked good, her long brown hair in a pony-tail.

Fuller turned and walked out of the Watch Station, leaving Duvall to revel in the silence and reflect on the fact that she was seated in perhaps the safest place on Earth.

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex military installation and nuclear bunker was located in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, which hosted the activities of several tenant units. The complex was built beneath two thousand feet of granite, its fifteen three-story buildings protected from earthquakes or explosions by a system of giant springs and flexible pipe connectors. The complex was the only high altitude Department of Defense facility certified to be able to sustain an electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear detonation. Protected by a twenty five ton blast door and designed to withstand a thirty megaton nuclear blast within two kilometers of the site, a network of blast valves with unique filters to capture airborne chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear contaminants ensured that in the event of a thermonuclear war, nobody at Cheyenne Mountain would perish in the exchange and supplies of food, water and power would sustain the base for months and perhaps years in the wake of any such attack. Still, she none the less wondered why the hell the US government had chosen to build the facility way out in Colorado.

Duvall, an Air Force staff officer, was in charge of liaising with the nearby Peterson Air Force Base, where the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) headquarters were located. The center for the United States Space Command and NORAD monitored through a world-wide system the air space of Canada and the United States for unidentified missiles, satellites and foreign aircraft.

The military complex in which she sat, far below ground, included many units of NORAD; the U.S. Space Command, Aerospace Defense Command (ADCOM), Air Force Systems Command, Air Weather Service and Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) were all represented. Everything that orbited the earth, including deep space debris, was monitored by the country’s Space Command Surveillance Center using Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) technology. Information gathered from around the world was processed by computers and displayed on maps of North America and the globe. National and military leaders were notified of missile attacks, whether incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles or short-range tactical missiles, into North American air space or in conflict areas, such as the countries involved in or impacted by the Gulf Wars. Defense Support Programs, early warning and satellite systems at NORAD and Space Command were operated via the communication links from Peterson Air Force Base that she monitored. The DSP satellites used infrared sensors to detect heat emitted from missiles and booster plumes, and were now fine-tuned to gather information about even short-range missiles. Information was then fed to world-wide operations centers and agencies.

At least that was the official line, but Duvall and other operators knew that far more went on behind the scenes at Cheyenne Mountain. With the decline of the Cold War and the reduced threat of a concerted nuclear exchange, Cheyenne Mountain’s role had changed gradually to become dominated by both the monitoring of near-earth orbital debris and also of monitoring signals coming from the wider cosmos.

Although Duvall was not prone to conspiracy theories, she did know that from time to time suited men who wore no insignia moved through the base with complete authority. Inevitably nick-named the
Men in Black
, they showed up at unusual times and seemed to operate mostly from the Watch Station’s Signals Intelligence Office, which had recently developed links to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Whatever the hell they were looking at, they kept it well under wraps from junior officers like Duvall.

Despite the perceived glamor of the role and the exotic location, Cheyenne Mountain seemed to Duvall to be a base in decline. Its staff numbers had been slashed over the years to a fraction of their former number, the base seemingly a Cold War relic consigned to mundane debris observation and…

A small, insistent beeping noise broke Duvall from her reverie and she glanced at one of the signals screens before her. Arrayed across the walls of the Command Center, the screens showed a variety of images including maps of the Earth’s surface reminiscent of those seen at Cape Canaveral, that depicted the orbital trajectories of whatever objects Duvall cared to select at her station.

However, she had not selected any objects and in an instant her eyes settled on a single transmission spike. It took her mind only a moment to assimilate three salient points of information from the track.

It did not belong to the United States as it bore no transponder code.

It did not belong to any other nation as it bore no identification code.

It was in space, as its velocity was being recorded as close to seventeen thousand miles per hour, placing it in low Earth orbit.

Duvall lowered her boots from the edge of her desk and leaned forward as she peered at the contact. It was tracking an unusual near-polar orbit, rather than the equatorial orbits favored by most satellites and space vehicles.

The sound of Fuller’s voice broke through her thoughts. ‘The machine’s bust again, decaf’ only and…’

‘We’ve got an infiltration signal.’

Fuller chuckled, more than used to the pranks played by bored operators on their colleagues. ‘Yeah sure, maybe E.T’s got some coffee we can borrow?’

Duvall did not reply to him as she scanned the data stream on her screen.

‘Orbit is seventy nine degrees off the equator, apogee is one thousand seven hundred and twenty eight kilometres, perigee two hundred eighteen kilometres. Orbital period is one hundred and four minutes and thirty seconds.’

Fuller glanced at the main screen, saw the track, and dumped the coffee as he slammed down into his seat and slipped a pair of headphones over his ears.

‘We’ve got a primary return,’ he said as he saw the same track on his own screens. ‘Records confirm it’s not one of ours and it’s not a catalogued piece of debris.’

‘I’ve got data,’ Duvall replied, ‘object is approximately twenty four meters in length, approximately six metres in width. Data calculations estimate a mass of fifteen tons.’

Fuller glanced up at the screen. ‘Damn that’s big, real big.’

Duvall nodded as she held her own earphones to her head, squinting as she sought to determine what she was listening to.

‘I’ve got audio,’ she whispered, almost so quietly that Fuller didn’t hear.

‘You’ve got what?’

Duvall nodded to herself more confidently as she listened.

‘I’ve got audio,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve got a signal. It’s coming from the track.’

Fuller stared at her for a long moment and then looked up at the screens.

‘What the hell is it?’ he uttered.

Duvall reached out for her phone as she set her monitors to record every detail of the track. Without a transponder, identification and with signals being emitted or perhaps even received by the object, she wasn’t about to put her career on the line by taking a chance that it was just an iron-rich meteorite captured by Earth’s gravitational field that
just
happened
to be deflecting satellite signals across the atmosphere.

She picked up the receiver and dialed a single number. The line connected immediately and she spoke clearly, trying to keep the nervous edge out of her voice.

‘Primary Orbital Contact, signals confirmed, initiate Orion Shield. Repeat, initiate Orion Shield.’

Beside her, she heard Fuller curse beneath his breath.

Orion Sheild
was the code name for the United States’ missile defense system administered by the Missile Defense Agency. The major component was Ground-Based Midcourse Defense consisting of ground-based interceptor missiles and radar in the United States in Alaska, designed to intercept incoming warheads in space. Duvall knew that some GBI missiles were located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and could be supported by mid-course SM-3 interceptors fired from Navy ships, the Missile Defense Agency having some thirty operational GBIs. Those weapons would be augmented by the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Systems located on US Navy warships and designed to pick out incoming ballistic missiles in flight at high altitude, thus preserving the safety of the continental United States.

‘Roger, Orion Sheild initiated, stand by.’

Duvall set the phone line to stand by as she heard boots running down the corridor leading to the Command Center and a low, mournful wailing siren as the entire base was alerted to the possibility that the United States was about to come under a nuclear attack.

Duvall prepared for the conversations that would follow: the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the line, conference calling as the President was awoken and informed of the crisis. She knew that they would be talking to her long before her boss was on site, and that as a communications specialist she was the most qualified person in the under-staffed base to conduct the assessment of the threat.

Then, just as she felt herself ready to conduct the assessment and as dozens of staff flooded into the Command Center, everything changed.

‘It’s not a missile,’ Fuller said.

‘How do you know?!’ Duvall demanded, tension in her voice.

Fuller looked across at her. ‘Because it just changed direction.’

Duvall looked up in shock at the main screen and saw the object’s orbital track change by a few degrees.

‘What the hell…?’

Fuller picked up his phone. ‘We’re not under attack,’ he said to her, ‘and I don’t know what the hell that thing is.’

Duvall switched her headphones from internal to broadcast and then filtered the feed through to the Command Center’s speakers. Above the rush of conversation a sudden sound of regularly paced beeps and growls echoed across the room and the conversation shuddered to a halt as every person in the building listened intently.

Duvall, along with everybody else in the Command Center, had been trained to recognize the countless signals emitted by both Earth-based installations and those from distant supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and quasars that blazed their high-energy emissions across billions of light years of intergalactic space.

What they were hearing now was none of those things.

The signal echoed around them like the chanting of monks drifting in haunting melody through the halls of some ancient abbey, both tuneful and yet without structure but for the rhythmic beacon accompanying it. Like a song from the depths of prehistory, something about it sounded familiar to Duvall, and she could see from the expressions of those around her that the rest of the team felt the same.

‘It’s like music,’ Fuller finally managed to say, his jaw hanging open in shock.

Duvall recovered her senses and turned to the deck officer.

‘Get a linguistics team down here as fast as you can, and open a channel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We may have initiated first contact!’

As the team scattered to perform their duties, Duvalls’ own words echoed in her ears.
First contact
, the first verifiable signal from an alien species sent from an alien craft in orbit around the planet. She didn’t have long to dwell on the gravity of the subject as Fuller spoke from beside her.

‘Its orbital velocity is decaying,’ he said, his features stricken and his skin pale as he stared at her. ‘Whatever it is, it’s coming down.’

***

III

Logan Circle,

Washington DC

The sound of incessant banging reverberated through the apartment and jerked Ethan Warner out of his slumber, dreams of helicopter blades and blazing guns vanishing as he opened his eyes and saw the feint light of pre-dawn glowing lethargically through the blinds of his bedroom window.

Ethan sat upright, unsure of whether he had actually heard something, and moments later he leaped out of his bed as he heard the front door of his apartment suddenly open despite the three sets of locks securing it in place. One hand reached for the Beretta M9 pistol he kept under his pillow and he whirled as two figures appeared to fill the bedroom doorway in the dull morning light.

‘Ethan Warner? Defense Intelligence Agency.’

The brief, clipped tones imparted the information necessary for Ethan not to open fire on the armed intruders even as behind them another figure appeared in the doorway and hit the lights. Ethan squinted as he stood naked in front of the intruders, shielding his eyes with one hand as he stared at a tall woman with long auburn hair who smirked as she looked him up and down appraisingly.