The Marine troop transports kept coming and coming.
The Harkness situation would soon be under control.
5:30 A.M.
The sun rose over Sawyer Air Force Base.
The eight men in black stood at the main gate to the electrified fence. One went into the small booth beside the gate and pushed the dead body of a soldier out of his chair. The man leaned over and pushed a button. The gate quietly slid open on concealed bearings.
The men strode through the open gate. The man in the guardhouse remained behind. He took the fatigues off the dead guard and put them on. It was a tight fit, but it would have to do.
No one was going into or out of Sawyer Air Force Base.
Around 5:45 A.M. a Michigan state trooper spotted Ray Shore’s pickup truck on the shoulder of U.S. Route 41, several miles from Sawyer, on the southbound lane from Marquette.
After calling in the truck’s description and license plate number, the trooper got out of his cruiser and went to investigate.
He could see the silhouette of the driver in the front seat as he approached from the rear. He drew his weapon, walked slowly up to the driver’s side window, tapped on the glass.
“Sir, please open your window.”
Silence… He knew what he would find already. The driver was too slumped over in his seat to be anything but dead.
Weapon still drawn, the trooper opened the unlocked driver’s door and felt Ray Shore’s neck for signs of life. He immediately pulled his hand back. The flesh was cold. Very cold.
Ray’s eyelids were closed. Suspicious, the trooper reached in and opened Ray’s left eye. A pupil-less, impossibly gray eye stared lifelessly back at him.
Styx…
The trooper walked slowly back to his vehicle, unsure of how to describe what he had just seen to the dispatcher. If this were true… He picked up his radio.
“Dispatch? You read me?”
“That’s an affirmative. Go ahead.”
“You’d better contact Milicom. They’ll want to see this.”
Magdalene.
Dreams of cold water and gray skies and little little bathing suits that Mum disapproved of and hands-on boys whom Da disapproved of and warm cozy nights of fireplaces and rainstorms and none of the terror that her later teenage years had descended into. None of the terror at all.
She snapped awake at the gentle nudge of an alarm. Where? When?
Trapped beneath an ocean, energy fading…
She sensed three vessels floating above her at the surface of the water, and she also sensed when a fourth vessel emerged from one of the three and began a descent to her.
They had found her after all.
Barbarians at the gate.
Magdalene prepared to greet them.
Mariana Trench, 200 miles from Guam.
The tiny submersible XJ disembarked from his fathership, the Jonah. Within the submarine, two sailors reclined at their controls, preparing for the twenty-five thousand-foot drop into the Trench. They both wore bulky pressure suits to prevent their bodies’ implosion from the weight of countless billions of gallons of ocean water.
“XJ to Jonah. Prep completed. We’re ready for the dive. Drop us, Jonah.”
“Affirmative, XJ. Happy trails.”
The two docking clamps that held the XJ to the Jonah’s docking arm released, and the sub was free.
The XJ plummeted into the void, the frigid, black water, pulled by the weight of twenty tons of ballast. External lights flickered to life.
The pilots of the XJ, even in their advanced pressure suits, still felt some discomfort. Ear pain, eye pain as their eyes struggled to focus with compressed lenses.
At twenty thousand feet below sea level the XJ began to vent ballast to slow its descent. The external lights brightened, and sensors and cameras began to roll.
The Geiger counters revealed a surprising lack of radiation in the impact area.
Five hundred feet to the ocean floor.
She saw their annoyingly bright lights and felt them vent the ballast. She had been found.
She was sorry the she would have to have to eliminate them. They had done nothing to her, except discover her precious hiding place. She could not allow them to alert others to her presence at the ocean floor.
Hidden servomechanisms opened weapons hatches.
“Jonah, are you picking this up?”
“Affirmative, XJ. Remain on reconnaissance vector.”
Below them, resting on the floor of the trench, was not a meteor, not a nuclear submarine, not a crashed derelict spacestation.
Below them rested an unidentified object. A spaceship. A big one.
The XJ’s searchlights and cameras revealed a huge, matte black vessel. It was without a doubt not from the ocean, a foreign country, or even Earth. It was alien.
The vessel’s top surface laid below the XJ, stretching away into the utter darkness of the Trench. It was intact, almost beautiful in its symmetry, but it was obvious that it had not had a controlled landing. The hull was scarred and covered with small surface dents. The vessel lay placidly at the bottom of this gouge in the planet. It reflected no light at all. It was as if light were pulled into its hull and not released. The vessel was shaped as two halves, joined together by a central hub. It was beautiful; it was terrifying.
“Jonah, this is scary shit. Requesting permission to—.” He stopped speaking abruptly.
Movement.
A small panel slid open on the surface of the vessel. Something glinted within.
“XJ? Please respond.”
“Jonah, I—”
Heat. A fierce beam of white light lashed out of the hub of the vessel and sliced the XJ in half. Both pilots died instantly as the boiling water ate through their pressure suits’ valves and twenty-five thousand vertical feet of ocean pressure crushed them.
The light swept back and forth until the XJ was no more. The primary threat taken care of, the light intensified and focused upward, upward, to the surface of the ocean. It cut the three surface vessels apart, and in a hail of searing white radiance and steamy, evaporated ocean water, it ended the lives of hundreds of humans. Caught off- guard, there was no time for anyone to escape the burning hot, sinking ships. None of the ships had been able to send a distress signal, much less any information about the vessel at the ocean floor.
Magdalene was safe.
For now.
Sawyer AFB had been practically empty, except for a skeleton crew of security personnel that had been quickly, efficiently, and quietly dispatched by the men in black.
The man who sat in the dead soldier’s chair in the guardhouse next to the main gate sat up suddenly, stiffly, alerted to movement from the corner of his eye.
A car was coming down the path to the gate, a dark blue armored sedan, with a silver insignia on the driver’s door.
It was a Milicom vehicle.
It rolled up to the booth. The driver wore the standard Milicom dress uniform. There were three passengers, two grunts and a brass.
The driver’s side window rolled down.
“Official Milicom business, soldier. Clearance code tri-delta. This is urgent.”
The large man in the booth made no move to open the gate. He looked into the car coolly. He saw that the
