The Nexus Colony (36 page)

“Let’s go. We’re out of here,” one of Schwartz’s subordinates called down the ramp, barely audible above the din of the turbo-prop engines. Everyone else was already on board. The two men took one last look up the glacial slope before boarding. The hydraulic door whined, clamping shut like a giant steel jaw.

The LC-130 had already re-oriented its position onto the ski-drag trail, facing the direction for take-off. The engines revved into a high-pitched crescendo, and it was the most beautiful sound Ruger had heard in a very long time. They felt the subtle motion as the plane surged forward, straining and groaning against the resistance of the ice. They were only into the take-off roll a few short seconds when unexpectedly the engines were feathered back to an idle. Ruger looked at his friend Grimes and nervously snickered, remembering that Hilly hated so much to fly anyway in these airborne contraptions…

The plane came to a slow stop. It hadn’t even moved a hundred feet. Their hearts dropped as the five of them looked at one another, nervously laughing to fend off the growing terror.

In the stillness, no one spoke. A minute passed before they heard Schwartz’s voice. Ruger peeked through heavy eyelids. Schwartz was standing next to Abbott, a strange look on his face.

“Why aren’t we taking off?” Abbott asked, surprisingly calm-voiced.

“I think maybe you’d better come up front, Colonel,” Schwartz said, choking.

Ruger felt the fear rising again out of the pit of his stomach. Something was wrong. Ruger knew right then and there what it was, but desperately prayed that he was going to be wrong. They bolted out of their harnesses, hurried toward the flight deck behind Schwartz, crowding into the front of the plane jostling for position to peer out through the front Plexiglas window.

They
had returned. Ruger could see them off in the distance, strategically positioned at the extreme opposite end of the ski-drag where he had placed the flagpole marker which was no longer visible, presumably blown away by the force of the earlier katabatic winds.

They could see only two of them at the moment. But the rest were out there, somewhere. The dull gray disks were hovering only a few yards above the ski-drag trail in a tight formation, obstructing the LC-130’s take-off. That was why the pilot had pulled off on the throttles and they had rolled to a stop. Whether the aliens were testing if humans were willing to sacrifice a collision was a moot point now. The humans had backed off.

Both the pilot and co-pilot looked back at Lieutenant Commander Schwartz, helpless, waiting for him to give an order what to do which never came. Abbott clenched his fist in rage and pounded the back of the co-pilot’s chair. Schwartz looked at him imploringly.

“Oh my God! They’re coming at us!” the pilot exclaimed.

“Damn!” Abbott cursed loudly.

“What
are
those things?” the co-pilot muttered.

“I don’t know,” the pilot responded, “but I sure as hell have never seen anything like
that
before!”

“I saw one once,” the co-pilot replied nervously. “But not
this
close.”

“Sir?” the pilot inquired, turning again toward Schwartz. “What do you want me to do, sir? Come on. Talk to me.”

The two disks continued closing toward the aircraft, very slowly, very deliberately.

“
Jesus!
” someone exclaimed, pointing out the front of the plane at what everyone else was now witnessing.

In the distance beyond the two slowly approaching disks, suddenly two more had entered visual range from either side and were falling in behind in formation.

“Oh my God! That’s it! We’re all done!”

Two more appeared behind that. And then another two, until finally there were twelve of them once again. Two rows of six each. In the last few seconds, they had slowed and ceased movement, stacked up in a tight formation.

“
They’re going to attack!
” Schwartz screamed.

“Shit! Shit! We’re done!” the co-pilot cried out.

“Just hold it!” Abbott’s commanding voice suddenly bellowed above all the excitement. “Just everybody hold it!” he yelled again.

There was a moment’s pause as everyone looked at Abbott. Out front, the spacecraft remained halted. From this head-on view, it was now difficult to count them because they were directly behind each other in two rows.

“What are they going to do?” someone back in the crowd asked.

To everyone’s surprise, Abbott answered quite calmly, “Nothing.”

Moving forward to get a better view, Abbott motioned for the pilot to stand-by. The formation had still been a good quarter mile off only seconds ago, but in the next instant, at a speed that was so incredible the human mind was incapable of comprehending, the twelve alien spacecraft had changed position. In the span of that time, the disks moved in closer to the LC-130…
blink…blink…blink…
peeling off each row of the formation one at a time and re-positioning themselves to the right and to the left of the ski-drag trail. It had resembled a string of blinking lights that someone had switched off and on.

“
What are they doing? Oh my God!
” the co-pilot shouted.

“I’ll tell you what they’re doing,” Abbott bellowed for everyone to hear. “They’re telling us to take off!”

“
What?
” Schwartz responded.

“
Do it! Do it now!
” Abbott commanded. He turned, slapping the pilot on the back to get his attention. “Throttle up and fly us the hell out of here.
Now!
”

“They’re going to kill us,” Schwartz responded absently.

“Listen to me, you idiot!” Abbott exclaimed, gritting his teeth. He put his face near to Schwartz, speaking in a slow, deliberate tone of voice for everyone to hear. “If we were to be terminated, it would have been done by now! You understand?”

Schwartz still gaped, dumfounded.

The pilot froze, his hands clenching tightly to the throttle arms. Abbott reached and grabbed the pilot by the collar, screaming into his face. “Do you hear me? They’re telling us to go! They’re letting us fly out of here. Now throttle up those fucking engines and get this plane out of here
now
!”

Before anyone knew what was happening, the pilot had throttled the controls full forward. The LC-130 lurched, and a moment later was hurdling down the ski-drag picking up speed, bouncing and groaning as it hit the mounds of recently formed ice, the alien craft zipping by as they hovered stationary along the runway.

The floor of the flight deck rumbled beneath their feet, each man in the crowded compartment fumbling to grasp for something to hold onto.

“Eighty knots,” Abbott heard the co-pilot calling out the ground speed, and several moments later calling out again, “One twenty.”

Just before the aircraft reached the end of the ski-drag runway, the pilot called out, “Rotate,” pulling back on the yoke controls, rotating the flaps, the aerodynamic thrust and lift propelling the bulky machine into the air. They felt the earth falling away beneath their feet as the vibration suddenly ceased, replaced by a new feeling through their senses as the massive aircraft, now airborne, climbed steeply into the charcoal gray sky ahead.

Sweat beaded on the faces of both pilot and co-pilot despite the sudden chill that had permeated throughout the flight deck brought on by the rapid change in altitude and pressurization. Their ears began popping, and it took several seconds for everyone to “valsalva” and adjust themselves to the changing air pressure.

No one had spoken a word since the moment of takeoff. The minutes passed. The plane now passed through the fifteen thousand feet altitude mark, and it was almost as if some psychological boundary had been reached, as the men on the flight deck began stirring, subconsciously marking the magic altitude as the benchmark by which they had escaped the menacing entities. But it was not to be. It began again.

The pilot had just begun banking slowly toward the next leg of the flight path route that would return them to McMurdo when things started getting wild all over again. This time, there were fifteen humans whose presence had been pre-arranged to bear witness to the most incredible event to take place on the Antarctic continent since the cataclysmic occurrence that, millennia ago, had buried
The Land
beneath a sea of eternal ice. For the aliens were now about to destroy their ancient colony, and they were going to see to it that these human intruders would testify to the power of their mastery over the human species.

The pilot was the first to notice that something had suddenly gone awry. The aircraft instrumentation began going crazy. He grabbed the yoke, but it stiffened in his hands when he tried to pull the plane back onto its heading, having stayed visually focused on the mountain range ahead. But the control yoke did not respond. It wouldn’t even move. The plane kept banking along the same elliptical curve, moving toward a heading that along the arc could take their flight path back toward the Mulock Glacier.

“What the hell…” the pilot cursed under his breath as he fought the yoke.

The co-pilot looked at him, stifled.

“She’s not responding,” he said, then gestured to the co-pilot, “Take her!”

The co-pilot instantly grabbed the control yoke at his position. He yanked on the handles. “She’s not responding here, either!” he called frantically.

“What the shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It’s jammed or something.”

The plane continued to bank to the left until, completely unexpected, it reached the approximate heading toward the glacier and magically tapered off. Both pilot and co-pilot sat back in their seats horrified as the control yoke, as if by some magic hand, steered the plane into position along the heading. The yoke moved forward, and the plane began a slow descent.

Frantic, the pilot grabbed the control yoke and pulled back with all his might trying desperately to level off the aircraft, but to no avail. The plane was definitely under control of some sort, but not by them.

“
I don't fucking believe this
!” the pilot exclaimed, releasing the yoke and holding his hands in the air. By this time, everyone had crowded back onto the flight deck watching things unfold. The aircraft leveled off at nine thousand feet.

“What’s going on here?” Schwartz said, casting an imploring glance at Abbott. “Jesus…they’re going to kill us off after all, aren’t they?”

“No,” Abbott responded, forcing his way forward to take position behind the pilot. “They’re not.”

“
Look!
” someone shouted, and to everyone’s horror the now familiar
blink…blink…blink…
brought the twelve alien disks to within close proximity of the lumbering aircraft. They were flying in a staggered formation of six each, two rows directly ahead of the aircraft. It was almost as if they were towing the plane through the gray sky.

No longer left to control their fate, the men on-board the LC-130 Hercules could do little else other than to transmit their frantic MAYDAY calls over the international emergency frequency. But in the end, in the weeks and months to come, the analysis of the U. S. Government would correctly interpret the act as a pre-ordained part of a much more complicated agenda. This was just one more piece of the million part puzzle. The men on this plane had only been fulfilling their role. It was very simple what that role would be. They were to watch.

What happened in the span of the next fifteen minutes was mostly beyond the comprehension of one single human mind. But collectively, they were all able to later reconstruct the catastrophic event that took place on the Mulock Glacier.

Nine thousand feet beneath them, the plane, still under control by the alien entities, banked along a continuous orbital loop safely outside the range of ground zero and the destructive residual effects of the total annihilation of what must have been an immense extraterrestrial complex hidden beneath thousands of years of ice accumulation.

If each man on board the LC-130 had thought prior to that moment that their worst nightmare was yet to come, it would have been grossly understated. The mother ship, the size of which was beyond human imagination, suddenly appeared out of nowhere at the same altitude, hovering threateningly above the Mulock Glacier. Its enormity filled the sky, and collectively, these men would not be able to precisely relate its monstrous dimensions.

The orbital path circling the Mulock Glacier over the area of what would later be understood to have been the perimeter of the alien complex was ringed by the twelve accompanying saucer disks. They were spaced evenly apart like the cardinal points on a clock, the whiteness glowing with extreme intensity.

The LC-130 continued to bank along an arc outside of the ringed disks in a perfect circular pattern. The air movement at this altitude was as placid as the ice below it. But the calmness was not to last, as the great vortex that would be created by the momentous melting of the glacial ice would produce an atmospheric disturbance so violent that all of the men on board the aircraft felt for certain that this was the end to which the aliens had brought them.

An enormously wide beam of dark green light projected downward from the belly of the behemoth mother ship, and it bathed the surface of the glacier spanning an area that encompassed what they judged to be at least three miles wide. All later agreed it covered the area which included not only the crevasse, but the encampment and runway as well. The Antarctic glacial moraine was suddenly transformed from a white panoramic landscape into a bubbling cauldron, the sight of which no man had ever witnessed before.

The power of the green beam, a destructive force so awesome that the human mind could not even conceive of its power, almost instantly vaporized the ice sheet penetrating all the way down to what presumably was the rocky earth upon which the alien complex had been built. One man on board would later describe it…
as if you poured a glass of water into a frying pan burning with hot grease on the stove.

A mushroom cloud of steam exploded upward into the still atmosphere creating an enormous whirlwind that immediately sucked everything off the ground along with it. It shot skyward like a volcanic eruption, everything that was below instantly vaporizing what had moments ago been all the complex molecules that for millions of years lay dormant as the basic construct of the earth in this place. In a brief few seconds of time, all that had been this portion of the Mulock Glacier—including the ancient alien complex below that had been preserved in secret for tens of thousands of years—simply no longer existed.