Cervera nodded to three technicians. Lights dimmed and the projector spun to life.
“Jesus fuck.” Jennings knew his whisper wasn’t quite.
The design was simple: a flattened-egg hub connected two rounded triangular nacelles. The slowly-rotating display indicated breaches in the hulls of both “wings” where molten rock had infiltrated the form. The wings had presumably once pointed to sharp tips, but both had been sheared away in asymmetrical impact. Rock had filled the vessel with earthen cancer.
“How old?”
“Preliminary estimates? Sixty, seventy million years.”
“I get the distinct impression you’ve been hiding something from me, Tony.”
She hesitated. The command center filled with glances, cleared throats, busywork.
“Tell me.”
“David—It’s superblack. Need-to-know. We don’t—”
“Override.”
“I can’t—”
“Override, before I lose my temper. Named orders?”
“President Holmdel, but it’s deeper than that. It’s old.”
“Let me guess…Truman? Eisenhower? Override superblack. Release. I assume we’re all friends here?”
“They’re cleared.”
Jennings smirked. “Phantom government strikes again. Am I really the Commander-in-Chief?”
“David—”
“We’ve got a UFO in our soil. That’s some serious
Cervera nodded and gestured toward the display’s touchpad. “Bloody up.”
Jennings’ eyes drew to slits, the line of sight between their eyes unbroken as he placed his palm on the machine surface. “Do it.”
“System, add user: Jennings, David Smith. President. Authorization: Cervera, Antonia. War Sec. Run: Holmdel Directive, re: Von Daniken, subsystems Peru, Bolivia: Nazca, Titicaca. Superblack release: mark.”
Jennings gritted his teeth as the sampler scraped genetic confirmation from his palm.
“Learn something new every day.”
“David—”
“Tell me.”
You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you about Lago Titicaca, our HQ in La Paz, the three-chip whores just begging for a
It’s dry. Freezing. That helped us date and sequence the bones. A million bones, a thousand patterns, each clavicle, each femur, each rib not scavenged by the Pucara or the Tihuanaco for their war gowns, each bone systematically rewrote our history and dented my lifelong assumption that I, James Richter, was a descendant of the cradle of man. I knew then no such privilege; those patterns were in all of us, in each and every one of us.
Imagine the impact: that ship who knows how fast, uncontrolled, damaged already, from what we saw in Wyoming. It left pieces across Uruguay, a few in Argentina, and the jackpot in Peru. Never found bigger pieces north. Guess we didn’t look hard enough. Or maybe shedding the pattern cache over Titicaca gave the ship just enough juice to try to escape. Didn’t make it. Welcome to America, ancient astronauts.
I shouldn’t tell you—Guess it doesn’t really matter. The author will probably edit this out if he ever gets his shit together and finishes this, but remember Benton? She put the pieces back together. Not the ship, but the pieces of me, all of those convenient assumptions that’d been shattered by my time in Peru. How’s a man supposed to keep a secret like that? Hey everyone, guess what. Everything you thought you knew about where we came from was wrong. There’re people just like us out there, and sixty-fucking-five million years ago, they paid us a visit. Left behind enough survivors to start this.
So the first time I saw the light, I was reasonably unreasonably afraid.
Holmdel superblacked the whole affair. Non-disclosure agreements all around, not that they could’ve done anything about it, not really, not to a man whose parents were dead and whose gee eff had been briefed on the surfaces before they’d even pulled out. I don’t think she believed it. Maths don’t care about evolution beyond its opposition to creationism.
The point is, no one could explain it, so they buried it and buried our eyescatch under penalty of death. Big threat. I was born dead. No paperwork necessary.
The way I see it, the bird dumped half its cargo over Titicaca after starting to bring them back. That’s the bodies. Imagine the biggest cemetery you’ve ever seen, but in this boneyard, the people were just thrown on the ground. No bodies at Diablo; I think they didn’t have time, or the damage was too severe to do that wing. Just dumped one wing, that coned-out ball with the human-shaped depressions in the walls. Some survived. If they hadn’t, we’d all be talking Kiswahili.
Jennings had Holmdel and his administration disappeared after the Populace coup. Buried under buried under buried. And after most of the southern hemisphere got glassed in the Quebec War (oops!), there goes a little thing called plausible deniability. Deniable plausibility? Not that he needed to know, but maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe the last centuries of my life wouldn’t have been spent thousands of years in the future, trying to fix this fucking mess. Guess I could take the blame, but why bother? Purpose be.
The point is, there’s more to this story than you’ll ever know.
“The agent in charge—”
“James Richter.”
“What?” A ghost rattled chains in Jennings’ attic. “Richter? From—”
“He was on your list to disappear,” Cervera paused, “but we took him off.”
“Any other undeletes I should know about?”
“A few. David, we just couldn’t—”
“I understand.” He didn’t. “We’re bringing him in?”
“Called him up. He’s in transit. I’m sure he’ll jump at the chance to puzzle a few more pieces together.”
A nobody chimed in. “Sirs, the entry team is prepped and ready.”
“Nothing’s alive in there…?”
“Nothing on scope. Just one big flickering power source in the vessel’s core.”
“Reactor?”
“Maybe.”
“Bomb?”
“…Could be.”
“Send them in. We have visual?” Jennings sat on the edge of an empty chair.
“Eyelines installed. Ready to roll.”
“Tell them to go, then.”
Assault Force A was hardly fit for assault, hardly a force, but they were completely qualified for the “A” position, a group of men and women impressed into Milicom after being particularly good convicts, patients, and ne’er do wells with nowhere else to go.
They weren’t issued guns.
Moore Chavez rubbed his eyes with gloved fingers, for a moment obscuring both the signal from Eyeline-17-A and the two teardrop prison tattoos a man he’d later raped and shivved had needled into his upper cheeks. He added that murder one artist to the tally he kept on his right thumb.
A romantic at heart, Chavez thought the rock seemingly growing from the metal hallway around him was
