“Good luck, Walter!” Donlon called out over the platform.
“You too, Roger!” Walter called back, and then there was an audible beeping for a moment, the doors slammed shut, and the two trains started down the tracks.
24 — Taking Off
The X-22 raced over the desert at over 250 mph, the bottom of its rotor tubes missing the rocks by less than twenty feet at times. Turn stared out the window as New Mexico flew by at an unbelievable rate. First they’d passed by the Rio Grand Del Norte National Park and then the Carson National Forest. They skirted along Highway 111, but stayed high enough and far enough away that they weren’t noticed, not that anyone could see the black craft with no lights anyways. After that they’d turned north a bit, the better to skirt around the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. It was then that they’d dropped altitude, coming in down to almost touch the desert floor. It was that fast-moving terrain that Turn looked at, seated now in the back with the others, but he also listened as Captain Mark Richards, the Dutchman’s son, regaled them with his tales.
“…and that’s the fastest I’ve flown,” he said, just finishing up a story of a race between two planets that none of the men had ever heard of, but which didn’t prevent both Andy and Billy in the back from staring, mouths agape.
Turn frowned, shook his head at the two seated opposite him in the small back-seating area of the X-22, then turned back to look up at the Dutchman’s son sitting in the pilot’s seat… or at least that’s how he thought of Captain Richards, a man he didn’t really know, none of them knew. Biting his lip and firming his resolve, he cleared his throat.
“Sir,” he began, and Mark stopped fiddling with a few controls and turned his head about to look at him.
“Yes… question…?”
“Turn” he began, saying his name which he expected the seemingly-cocky and cock-sure young man to have forgotten already. “Well, sir, it’s just that what you said about the dates and the ships and… it just didn’t make sense.”
“What didn’t make sense?” Mark asked, his eyes narrowing slightly and his mouth tightening. Turn thought about shaking his head and laughing the whole thing off, but something told him Mark wouldn’t let him.
“You mentioned something about ‘their ships,’ and I just thought that from your tone you were implying something, oh, I don’t know… larger, than what we’d be thinking of when we think of UFO.”
Mark nodded and then smiled. “The first Gray motherships came over a three year period, from 1787 to 1789… right as the French Revolution was getting underway. They’d sent probe ships earlier — 1645 was the first recorded sighting from Europe — and this lasted until 1767. At the time it was just thought of as a mistake in the evolving science of telescopy, this moon appearing and then disappearing again — no one thought much of it.”
“But…” Turn said, sensing it was appropriate.
“But,” Mark nodded, “it wasn’t a moon, and those three moons that appeared in the late 1780s weren’t moons either. They kept coming, too — another mothership near Mercury in 1789, the Sun in 1859, and Mars in 1894. Besides that the moon of Pluto called Kerberos, or Vulcan now, is actually a mothership and has been there since the 1850s, although we haven’t officially ‘discovered’ it yet, that won’t happen until….”
“Until what, sir…”
“Never mind,” Mark said quickly and with a laugh, “now where was I? Oh yes… in 1878 an Andromedan an a Pleiadian mothership came in, ostensibly to monitor the Grays who’d been taking quite a bit of interest in our Sun at that time.” Mark trailed-off and stared-off into the distance before continuing, as if talking to himself. “It could also be that they were interested in the Reptilians, who first appeared in 1783 on the moon. They liked it enough that they came back in 1787 and set up their base their. Intrepid photographers were able to get shots of their ships in 1892, 1894, and 1912. After that they took greater pains to cloak themselves, seeing as our technology was ‘advancing,’ so to say.”
Mark look back over his shoulder at Turn, then broke out into a smile and laugh. “Here I am, talking to myself again… you really must excuse me.”
“It’s perfectly all right, it’s just… I think I have more questions than before I asked.”
“The good ones always do — now about what’s coming up,” he said with a smile, then turned back around even further this time, making sure both Andy and Billy were paying attention. They were. “What we’ve got coming up, boys, is some serious security measures, having to do with that sonic weaponry system the Grays have.”
“We were briefed on that,” Andy said.
“Good, then you know we have to disable it before the other teams can do anything, don’t you?”
Turn looked across at the two younger soldiers, and all three nodded.
“Good, because—”
WOOSH!
There was an amazing woosh of air and the X-22 shook about, so much so that Turn thought they’d been struck by something and were going down. A moment later a shimmering blackness appeared before them, blacker even than the surrounding night and desert floor.
“There she is,” Mark said to himself but loud enough for the others to hear, his teeth gritted but his mouth smiling, “right on schedule.”
25 — Drawing Near
“Five miles,” Aaron said, turning a few knobs and then looking over at Captain Moses Cochrane.
“Check,” the pilot of the Puma helicopter said, then swiveled his head a bit to shout back to the men in the rear, “maintaining our 5-mile distance from CAT-3 and about 100 miles out.”
“Hear that, boys?” Ronnie said with a laugh. “Just 100 more miles and we’ll be blastin’ aliens!”
Sergeant Jerry Carol and Corporal Jonny Wake didn’t look too thrilled at that prospect, but beside them Sergeant Paul Carson was all smiles.
“Yeah, real easy for you to be happy,” Sergeant Lewie Yates said from across the floor of the helicopter, “you’re one of the super soldiers — you got nothin’ to worry about.”
“You don’t either, not if you stay close to me,” Paul said.
“Everyone needs to stay close,” Eddie said, “at least until we get those HUB doors blown and those sonic weapons systems taken out.”
“And then what?” Johnny asked.
“Then we open up on ‘em with everything we got,” Stan said with a smile, though it was hard to see from under that bushy handlebar mustache of his.
“Well, you men will,” Stu said, his usual white professor’s jacket switched out for a set of Delta Force black, “Eddie, Ronnie and Stan will be trying to—”
“Contact!” Aaron shouted from the cockpit, his fist held up. “The X-22 just made contact!”
Captain Mark Richards gritted his teeth and pulled back on the controls of the X-22, thankful the three men in the back couldn’t see how close he’d just come to crashing into the UFO after it’d suddenly descended upon them. Now he was hovering just over it, closer than he had been to the desert floor, about ten feet. And up ahead was Dulce Base.
It’d been just another patch of blackness on an already black horizon, but then there was a shimmer and an open pair of blast doors were suddenly there before them, still about a mile off, but coming up fast, the yellow light spilling out into the darkness of the night as the holographic blanketing projectors were turned off and the base was revealed to the world, however fleeting it might be.