The signal was clear. He was already familiar with the bursts of energy produced by the sun, by the Aurora Borealis and the currents generated by the Earth itself, but this was none of those. Nikola looked up across the laboratory to the window, outside which soared the tower from which he had driven truly monstrous surges of energy into the atmosphere, and inside the laboratory he possessed instruments so sensitive that he could detect electromagnetic disturbances anywhere within a thousand miles of the laboratory. The entire experiment had been designed by Nikola with one true aim in mind: to make the first attempt at communicating with another civilization, to speak for the first time with beings inhabiting another world.
He had not expected to be the one doing the listening.
While in Colorado Springs he had been researching transmitters, receivers, additional smaller resonance transformers and tuned electrical circuits. He had become interested in the effects of the electrical waves that the Colorado Springs’ lightning storms would create within the Earth itself and had discovered evidence of terrestrial stationary waves. In a moment of inspiration, he’d had the idea of sending these extremely low frequency waves into the Earth and as the waves bounced back, he would add a boost to create the resonance rise and charge the earth with electricity.
It had been then that he had detected the strange signals coming not from the Earth but from somewhere beyond it, from space itself. Nikola stared down at the data before him, at the rhythmic flow of signals far too orderly and consistent to be the result of anything in nature.
‘What are you?’ he whispered to himself.
‘Nikola? Have you ever seen anything like this?’
Scherff was no expert like Nikola when it came to interpreting signals data, but he had learned enough in the years he had spent at Tesla’s side to at least understand what he was looking at.
‘Where is it coming from?’ Czito asked.
Tesla’s eyes shone as he worked with pencil and ruler, reflecting the flickering electrical lights in bright halos as he stood up and pointed to the ceiling.
‘I have plotted an orbit of seventy nine degrees off the equator, an apogee of just over one thousand miles and a perigee of perhaps a hundred and fifty miles,’ he said, and then his expression became somber. ‘The object is orbiting our planet once every one hundred and four minutes.’
George Scherff slowly looked up from the data into Tesla’s eyes.
‘Orbit? You’re telling me that this signal is coming from space?’
Tesla nodded. ‘It’s coming from space, George. It doesn’t belong to us. It did not come from this planet.’
‘Then what do we do about it?’ Czito asked.
Tesla was about to reply when he heard galloping horses approaching the laboratory. For a moment he thought that perhaps the spooked horses that had bolted from the nearby stables had returned, but then he heard voices and the sounds of booted men dismounting. Before he could speak, the door to the laboratory burst open and armed soldiers flooded into the building.
Tesla knew that they could not have travelled from Colorado Springs so soon after the energy burst. They must have been waiting much closer by.
‘Nikola Tesla?!’ their officer demanded, his expression brooking no argument as he looked directly into Tesla’s eyes, already knowing the answer.
‘Yes?’
‘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
‘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.