[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (21 page)

Also with Madeline’s guidance, Neal had spruced up his appearance. A briskly tailored suit from a low-price vendor in Florida made up for cut-rate materials and far from high-end workmanship with tight lines copied from more talented designers, and a crispness that can only come from being, literally, hot off the press.

It was this newer, shinier version of Neal that had spent the last hour at Laurie’s memorial service. He stood alone, Madeline being unable to face another mass so soon after James’, but at the wake afterward, Admiral Hamilton had taken the opportunity to introduce Neal to the president, his chief of staff, and several other notable persons. The import of being shown around by the powerful admiral was not lost on Neal, and he had shone with unusual charm and professionalism. Unusual for him, anyway, his efforts not lost on the admiral.

As the crowd started to disperse, General Pickler and Colonel Milton approached him.

“Neal, good to see you again, though I wish it weren’t under such circumstances.” said the general.

“Indeed, General, how are you?” Neal said, shaking first the general’s hand, then the colonel’s. Colonel Milton’s grasp was firm, and their eyes locked a moment. Neal found the man reassuring, knowing that they shared a mutual respect, though unclear if he deserved it from this auspicious man.

He did not share an equal measure of respect for the general, finding him somewhat bluff. But something about the colonel told Neal he was a man to be trusted, a friend, even, though not one to be gained easily. Yes, Barrett was high on the list of candidates he and Madeline had put together for bringing into their confidence.

“Listen, Danielson,” said the general, “this isn’t the place to talk shop, but I wanted to make sure you were getting prepped for the upcoming White House staff interviews. I saw the admiral showing you around, which is good, but you should know I have my name on your list of references. I don’t want you to make me look bad.”

“I will try my best not to show you up, General.” said Neal, surprising himself at how well he hid the facetiousness in his voice. The colonel’s eyes, though, betrayed the slightest smile. Apparently Neal still needed some work on his diplomacy.

“That said, the colonel here is quite the scientist as well, aren’t you?” continued the general, obliviously, “Unfortunately, we can’t nominate military men to the advisory positions. So the next best thing will be having him help you prep. I expect you’ll have availability while you’re here, right, Colonel?”

It was the colonel’s turn to mask his reaction, but his politicking was far more practiced than Neal’s. With perfect composure, he nodded firmly and said, “Of course, sir, plenty of time.”

“Good, good,” smiled the general, pleased with himself. “You can make an evening of it. Well, I’ll leave you two to discuss … all that, shall I?”

With that, General Pickler was shaking Neal’s hand again. Then he responded to the colonel’s precise salute with a tap of his hand against his forehead, and walked off.

The two men stood looking after him. Neal smiled, shaking his head as he said, “I imagine you can’t say this, so I’ll say it for the both of us. What a prick.”

The colonel looked down, biting his lower lip to stop smiling. “No, I probably wouldn’t have put it quite that way, no.”

“Listen, Colonel, if you had plans this evening, don’t feel the need to hang out with me, I’ve got plenty of prep work I can get on with.”

The colonel looked at him, trying to assess if the man was just being nice. Then he smiled to himself. No, one thing you could rely on from Neal, he would never say anything just to be nice.

But orders were not negotiable, and he also thought that in the end he could probably come up with a few useful pointers for the rough-hewn physicist. The colonel smiled, without humor. Seeing this, Neal nodded, smiled, and then looked away, acknowledging the futility of trying to get the colonel to ignore the general’s ‘request.’

Dinner it was.

* * *

At that moment, across the city, Madeline sat in a hotel room across town that she had gone halves on with Neal. Madeline was sitting on one of the two queen beds going through her notes.

They had both decided they would not use PCs for anything to do with their investigation. After all, word files could be easily hacked if the PC was ever linked to the net, even if the files were never actually e-mailed to anyone.

So she had revived to her note-taking techniques from university, making copious, denoted, bulleted, color-coded pages of scribble. She was now trying to categorize them into a file binder she had pilfered from the Institute.

A knock at the door told her that Neal had probably forgotten his room key again, so she stood, straightening her T-shirt, then stopped as it opened from the outside.

It was not Neal. She looked at the stranger, confused, and then her sharp, blue eyes started to widen in fear and panic as she focused on the deep, black eyes staring back at her.

* * *

It had been a fun evening. Surprisingly so. Neal and the colonel had decided to go and grab some dinner together, and the officer had taken Neal to one of his favorite seafood restaurants from one of his three stints at the Pentagon.

They had spent most of the night talking about the job opportunity, but the conversation had frequently veered to stories from the past, with some especially entertaining gossip about the various people working at the array, as seen from both sides of the proverbial fence.

They had both enjoyed the evening more than they would have expected, and Neal had been surprised when, after the third beer came, Colonel Milton had asked Neal to call him Barrett. He had then laughed when the request was followed immediately by another that he only use his first name in private. Which left Neal with the correct impression that, while the colonel was warming to him, he was still very far from trusting Neal to make such judgment calls on his own.

A superfluity of beer and laughter aside, they had nonetheless wrapped things up fairly early, the colonel needing to get to bed for an early meeting, and Neal wanting to get back to Madeline, who had not answered an earlier call inviting her to join them.

The colonel dropped Neal at his hotel in his rental car around 10:30. Leaving Neal rifling through his pockets for a room key, which was, predictably, on the bedside table in his room.

Arriving at the door he knocked twice and waited. There was a moment’s pause then a muffled scrambling on the other side. Neal’s left eyebrow went up in curiosity about the fuss, then the room door opened suddenly and he was greeted by a very frantic, bleary-eyed Madeline, grabbing him and dragging him bodily into the room.

“Whoa,” he said, laughing somewhat nervously, “what the hell is going on?”

She pushed him down onto the bed and then stepped back, glancing quickly at the bathroom before saying, “Neal, something has happened.”

He was suddenly concerned, he went to stand up but her look and outstretched hands indicated he should stay seated, almost saying, ‘‘wait, give me a second, this will all make sense in a second.’

“We’ve had a visitor.” she said, and he stared at her. “Neal, I know who wrote the letters.” His stare turned into a glare and he was about to speak but before he could say anything the bathroom door opened …

… and out stepped Agent John Hunt of the British Royal Navy.

Standing in front of Neal, John offered his hand. Instinctively Neal recoiled from the man, his deep black eyes ringing alarm bells in his mind.

John paused, his hand still outstretched, and looked Neal in the eye. “Neal, I know this is going to be hard for you to understand. It certainly took some time for Madeline to come to terms with what I have come here to say.

“I had hoped to explain this to you both at the same time, but unfortunately I have to leave soon. I can only hope that you can trust me when I say that I am your friend. In fact, I am more than that. I am, without doubt, your only hope.”

Neal stared at him, then at Madeline, who was holding out two sheets of paper. One of them Neal instantly recognized as the first of the mysterious letters he had found waiting for him when he had returned home to Arizona. The second was on the hotel’s stationary, but as he looked at it, he saw the same handwriting, in fact the same exact words, as the other one: a perfect replica.

She said to Neal, her eyes imploring him to believe her, “Neal, I didn’t show him these, after he came into the room he started to write this, as a way of showing me that I could trust him.” Neal took the sheet, the writing was identical, disturbingly so.

“I must say again, I don’t have much time.” continued John as Neal examined the sheets, “I hope by now that you have figured out that you are being watched. Well so am I. I am one of them, Neal, I arrived in one of the capsules you discovered. Mine landed near the Outer Hebrides, and since then I made my way to the south of England and joined the Royal Navy using a false identity created since my arrival by the machines that accompanied me. In the last three months I have graduated officer training school and been assigned as a junior lieutenant on the new Type 47 Destroyer, the HMS
Dauntless
.

“As we were sailing toward the Panama Canal to join the Pacific fleet for exercises I engineered an accident on board, knowing that the captain would be forced to put in at the nearest allied naval shipyard. After we had done just that, I used further misdirection to make my way here to see you.

“The AI above me tracks my every move and communicates it to the others, just as their movements are communicated to me. So I had to fool my monitoring system into believing that I was still on board, pretending to sleep between my shifts. The monitoring satellites believe that the person that left the ship and drove here was one of my roommates, a belief I have compounded by mildly drugging him and leaving him in my bunk, and by using his credit card and ID to get here.”

Neal stared flabbergasted, fighting multiple instincts battling in his head, not the least of which incredulity. On the surface he barely managed a nod, deciding that whether he believed this man or not, he still had to listen and keep track of what he was saying in order to decide what to do next.

John took Neal’s nod as an indication that Neal was following him, even if he didn’t trust him yet, and went on, “So I have until my roommate is scheduled to go back on shift before I have to be back to wake him up. Otherwise the duty officer will go looking for him, find him in his room, instead of ashore, log this, and instantaneously the AI will know something is wrong. That gives me four hours, fifty-two minutes until I have to be back on board, and it takes around three hours, twenty minutes to get back. So all that to say we don’t have much time, so I will now ask whether you believe me or need more drastic proof of my credentials.”

Neal had never been averse to more proof on the best of days, and he had never had to deal with anything so extreme as this before. So, his fear momentarily forgotten, and his mind engaged, he stood, rising to face the black-eyed stranger. John was several inches taller than Neal, his square jaw and boyish good looks serving as an incongruous frame for his piercing eyes.

“Will it take long to prove this further?” asked Neal.

“That depends,” said John, and Neal quirked his eyebrow in a question, to which John replied, “on how open-minded you truly are.”

“We managed to figure out that some kind of alien vessel had landed here before you ever showed up, so I think I can handle it.” said Neal defiantly.

John nodded, “Very well.” He looked directly at the scientist, holding his stare without the slightest hint of a blink. Neal waited for John to say something, then noticed something change in the expression of the stranger.

As Neal watched, the tall officer’s left eye seemed to rotate slightly in its socket, then, to Neal’s shock and not insignificant dismay, its pupil rolled down, the white of the eye following it like a falling screen. From behind it a black lens slowly emerged, as black as the fake pupil that had covered it until a moment before. Perhaps even more alarming than the emerging lens was the network of microscopic pins and discs that were unfolding around it. As the lens slid out about half an inch from its socket, a series of smaller supporting structures took their place alongside, the whole thing looking like a microscope surrounded by a hundred needles pointing out from the man’s eye.

Neal faltered, wanting to run from the vicious looking aberration, but unable to take his eyes from this fascinating device. His broken, meek voice stuttered into the silence, “I, wha … I … err. Are those … are those … communications or …”

“Weapons.” finished the Agent, “The central lens is just as it seems, the method by which I see, both in the standard visual range, and in what you would call infrared, ultraviolet, and several other bands that I will explain more some other time. Normally it is recessed behind the cover that duplicates the look of your human eyes, pressed against its ‘pupil.’

“The needles around it are what we call a Tactical Contact Weapons Complement. Though small and relatively impotent compared to our more conventional weapons systems, I think you would be surprised at its punch.”

With that, John stepped to the right, focused on the bedclothes, and a hazy beam materialized between his eye and the ruffled sheets. Neal and Madeline both stepped back as a spot instantly blackened and sparked into flame where it touched. John, on the other hand, was already moving toward it. The buzzing in the air stopped as John discontinued the beam’s attack, grabbed the blanket and smothered the small but bright flame that had sparked to life in the bed’s center.

The cleaning lady would later find a hole neatly punched through the sheet and the top of the mattress. She would report that the occupants had been smoking and partying in the room, a story which would fit with the other damage she would find …

“I can also affect electronic equipment, jam radar and radio signals, and create what we call a sonic punch.” With that, he appeared to brace himself and turned toward the brown nondescript armchair in the corner.