Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Read online

  “Sergeant,” one of his men said, from behind him, “what the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know,” George admitted. It hurt to admit ignorance, yet there was no choice. He was tempted to fall back and wait for reinforcements, but there could be an injured or dying pilot somewhere within the craft. If it was a USAF craft, the pilot had to be kept alive, if only so that he could report on his experience. “Follow me.”

  He stepped forward towards the craft, suddenly aware of a spicy scent that seemed to hang in the air. Up close, he could feel a tingle in the air, like an approaching thunderstorm. The largest gash in the hull was big enough to allow him to stick his head into the craft, so he unhooked his flashlight and leaned forward. The scent grew stronger as he shone the light into the interior of the craft.

  “Be careful, Sergeant,” someone said, from behind him. The man who had secured air bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sounded spooked. George would have chewed him out for it, were it not for the fact he felt the same way too. There was something about the mystery craft that left an air of unreality hanging over their heads. “Sergeant…”

  George said nothing, shining his light around inside the craft. The interior looked…odd, almost as if it hadn’t been designed with any concerns for comfort or even for functionality. Great piles of equipment of unknown design lay where they’d fallen, or smashed against the hull. The scent was almost overpoweringly strong and he found himself wishing for a gas mask, or even a MOPP suit. In the darkness, he only caught vague glimpses of things, lurking just beyond reach of his light. His imagination filled in the blanks…

  And then he saw the bodies.

  He had shied away from one possible origin for the craft, because it had been unbelievable. The bodies showed that it wasn't unbelievable. He wanted – desperately – to deny what he was seeing, but how could he? The bodies weren't people wearing bad outfits, or the results of CGI created by technicians stoned out of their minds…they were real.

  “Sergeant?” A voice asked. He hadn’t even realised that he’d almost fallen out of the craft in his shock. His heartbeat was terrifyingly loud in his ears. “Sergeant?”

  “Contact the base,” he said. There was no SOP for this! He hadn’t spent most of his life watching science-fiction, or anything that might tell him how to proceed. “Tell them…tell them that we need an NBC team here now. We’ve got visitors.”

  Chapter Two

  Near Washington DC, USA

  Day 2

  Alex Midgard looked up blearily as the car turned into a wooded driveway and drove up towards a manor house in the distance. He felt like he hadn’t slept for a week. He’d been scheduled to take a few days off to attend to family matters, but his superiors had been explicit. The Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division had been ordered to send a representative to a new team being formed by Executive Order and Alex – being the one who could be spared for anything unexpected – had been ordered to report to Washington, where he’d been picked up by a car. He’d expected to be driven to the Pentagon, but as the driver had taken him further from Washington, it had become apparent that they were going to a more secret location.

  The car stopped at a small guardhouse, carefully concealed within the trees, and the driver handed over a small sheet of paper. The guard – he wasn't wearing a uniform, but Alex had no difficulty recognising him as a trained and experienced soldier – checked the paper quickly, glanced inside the car to ensure that Alex was the only passenger, and then waved them through. Alex hadn’t realised he’d been sweating until the car passed onwards towards the house. He’d been in too many places where a single error in the paperwork could lead to disaster.

  He watched as the car swept by the front entrance – the house had probably been built by an internet millionaire; it had the standard complete lack of taste – and into the garage. Someone had invested a great deal of money in upgrading the house afterwards, he realised, as the garage was quite obviously a secure environment. The two guards standing at one end held M16s and watched carefully as the driver climbed out and opened Alex’s door, inviting him to exit. He stood up, stretched, and nodded to the guards. They didn’t smile back.

  “This way, sir,” one said, and led Alex into a second room. It was barely large enough to swing a cat. His tone was bored, but Alex wasn't fooled. The guard was on the alert. “Place your fingers against the sensors.”

  Alex nodded, recognising the scanner on the table. He pressed his fingers down on it and saw the red flash of laser light as the scanner checked his fingerprints against the ones in the main directory. The military and intelligence services tended to have tech two or three generations ahead of anything in the civilian world – at least in theory - but Alex knew that it wouldn’t be long until it was released to the public. The banking sector, in particular, wanted to use it to combat identity theft, although Alex could see at least two ways to fool the scanner. As technology advanced, the technology required to fool it advanced as well. The Foreign Technology Division had a hand in developing most of it.

  The guard waved him through when the scanner cleared him and Alex found himself in another room. “Place your cell phone, PDA and anything else electronic in this box,” a second guard ordered. His voice was none the less alert. “Attempting to carry electronic devices into the secure compartments is punishable by a long spell in jail.”

  Alex nodded as he unloaded his pockets. He’d been in places where the security requirements were truly paranoid, although not without reason. His time on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had included time spent in compartments where no one left if they could avoid it, just to avoid going through the entry procedure again. It wasn't pleasant.

  “Done,” he said. He felt naked without his cell phone, or bleeper. It was unlikely that something would happen requiring his presence, but even so being without communications still bothered him. “Now what?”

  The guard stood up and waved a magnetic wand over his clothing, before waving him through another door. Alex stepped through and was confronted by an older man wearing a grey suit. His hair was shading to grey and he walked as if he was bent over, carrying some horrible weight. Alex had seen similar looks from men who’d been behind enemy lines in the war on terror, or scientists who’d researched chemical or biological weapons; he wondered, vaguely, what his new friend’s story was. It could be anything.

  “Alex Midgard, I presume,” the man said. It wasn't a question. “If you would like to follow me…?”

  There were no signs inside the building, nothing that a spy could use to find his way around. That wasn't uncommon in secret bases, although Alex did tend to think that they overdid it. A spy who penetrated the heart of such a base would find it easier to get around than an outsider might think, unless the base was very small and everyone knew who was permitted within the confines of the base. People tended to assume that anyone inside had already been cleared by the guards. Alex looked from side to side as he was led through a set of interlocking corridors, but saw nothing of great interest. The interior designer had gone for boring, rather than anything more spectacular. That, too, was fairly typical of secret bases.

  They stepped into a small conference room and Alex was waved to a seat. The conference room was nothing more than a table, with a jug of water and a handful of glasses, surrounded by five other people. They looked up as he entered and some of them smiled, but most of them looked tired and nervous. Alex guessed that they’d been summoned on very short notice as well and started to realise that something was definitely up. No one would have summoned them at such short notice for anything other than a real emergency. Their emergency drills were always pre-planned to avoid causing disruption to schedules.

  “Please be seated,” the grey man said. “My name is Tony Jones, special advisor to the President.” He paused to allow that to sink in. “You have all been summoned here to serve on…ah, a task force investigating a new situation. You will be expected to spend at least a month in lockdown at a cla
ssified location, perhaps longer, and full security requirements will be observed. Anyone who discloses information relating to this…ah, project will be charged with breach of official security and spend the rest of their lives in Leavenworth. If you’ll read the documents and release forms in front of you…”

  Alex looked down at the small folder. He’d seen release documents before. “If you want to leave now, you may do so,” Jones concluded. “If not, sign the documents and pass them over here.”

  There was no point, Alex knew, in asking questions. They wouldn’t be told anything else until they signed their lives – at least for a month – away. He skimmed the document quickly, just in case, but there were no real surprises. The signer agreed to complete nondisclosure without prior permission, which could be obtained from the White House. That meant Cabinet-level, if not the President himself. A month on a secure base didn’t have to be boring. Besides, it was now clear that his superiors had handpicked him for the task.

  He signed with a flourish and passed the paper over to Jones.

  “Thank you all,” Jones said, when they had all signed. There had been no questions. “I will make introductions first. Ben Santini, military adviser; Alex Midgard, USAF Foreign Technology Division; Jane Hatchery, medical researcher; Neil Frandsen, advanced propulsion specialist; Gayle Madison, communications and cultural specialist – and, finally, Steve Taylor, Intelligence Analyst. Welcome to this safe house.”

  He sighed. “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll be blunt,” he continued. He sounded, Alex realised, like a man who didn’t believe what he was saying. “Last night, a…structured craft of unknown origin crashed outside Schriever Air Force Base.”

  It was Gayle who spoke first. “This is a joke, right?”

  Oddly, her words seemed to give Jones courage. “No,” he said, grimly. “The crash site was secured by the base security team, who made the preliminary assessment of the craft. They found bodies that were…ah, not human. They found bodies from at least two alien races present within the craft.”

  Alex went numb with shock. He’d believed in UFOs ever since he was a kid, believed in them to the point that he’d joined the USAF and found himself streamlined into the Foreign Technology Division, yet somewhere along the way he’d lost the sense of wonder. The USAF collected UFO reports without quite knowing what to do with them, because most UFOs were actually misidentifications or secret military aircraft. Alex – granted a security clearance that civilian UFO researchers didn’t know existed – had succeeded in identifying most ‘unknown’ UFOs as being civilian sightings of classified military aircraft. The wonder had faded away…but there were still some reports that he hadn’t been able to identify at all.

  The Foreign Technology Division had taken an interest, of course. If the UFOs were real, someone was flying them over American territory – and that was a hostile act. If they were Chinese or Russian spy planes, or even something from a more…exotic origin, they had to be identified. They had been delighted to pass the job to Alex, who had actually wanted to do it; most Foreign Technology Division researchers regarded UFO research as the kiss of death to their careers. Alex hadn’t cared. All he cared about was solving the mystery.

  Jones stood up and tapped a remote control, activating an overhead projector. “The…ah, alien craft was detected on radar as it fell out of the sky,” he said. “It did not show up before it ran into trouble – as yet, we don’t know why – and the radar operator scrambled a recovery team. An NBC team cleaned the crash site after the craft was moved to a nearby location, where it was transported to a classified location. The news was passed rapidly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and from him to the President, who was woken in the middle of the night. He wrote out an executive order authorising the creation of a tiger team to examine the wreckage of the craft and what it means for us.”

  “It means that aliens have been watching us,” Alex said. He was familiar with some of the installations at Schriever Air Force Base. There weren't many places that were more secret – or important. “Sir…what does the public know?”

  “Nothing, as yet,” Jones said, shortly. “We believe that the crash was reported as a light aircraft crash – we’ve registered it as such – and…well, that’s not important enough to attract attention. We suspect that some news will start leaking out sooner rather than later – we can’t put the entire base into lockdown – but the President has ordered a complete news blackout until we can get to grips with the situation.”

  “They’re not friendly,” Santini said. He was a tall man, with dark hair and powerful muscles, who would have been handsome, were it not for the scar covering his right cheek. His voice was gruff and no-nonsense. “If they’re sneaking around near one of our most vital facilities, they’re not being friendly at all. We need to start making preparations for an invasion.”

  Jones looked, if possible, even paler. “We don’t know that they’re coming to invade,” he pointed out. “They might be friendly.”

  “If they were friendly,” Santini argued, “then why don’t they land in front of the White House, or the Kremlin, or in London, or somewhere that isn’t of vital military importance?”

  “The White House is closed airspace,” Alex said. He’d wondered about that himself. “If they flew into Washington, they’d have fighter jets on their tail before they could land and meet the President. The last thing they might want is to be shot down by paranoid defenders.”

  “Then they could contact us and arrange a meeting directly,” Santini countered. “I really don’t like the implications of them sneaking around one of our bases – and particularly not that one.” He looked over at Jones. “What sort of precautions are we taking, sir?”

  “The President has ordered a low-level alert over most of our airbases and other defence installations,” Jones said. “We were preparing for the annual exercise in any case, so we have an excuse to make all kinds of military manoeuvres without attracting much attention from the press. We’ll intermix it with reports that the CIA has picked up warnings about another terrorist plot and use that to justify putting various bases on a combat footing. In the long term…”

  He shook his head. “That’s for you people to advise,” he concluded. “We don’t know what we’re facing.”

  Alex looked down at his hands. “We need to tell everyone,” he said, slowly. “We need to warn them about the aliens.”

  “That would cause a panic,” Jones said. “The President is very keen to avoid a panic.”

  “Speaking for myself,” Neil Frandsen added, “keeping the crashed ship a secret could only be beneficial to us. A craft capable of interstellar travel…if we could reverse-engineer it and put them into production ourselves, what couldn’t we do?”

  “He has a point,” Santini said. “If the aliens don’t know we have the craft…”

  Alex shook his head. “If we lost a JSF from one of our carriers over Iran, would we conclude that the craft was smashed to pieces and the pilot was dead, or would we attempt to rescue the pilot – or at least confirm his death?”

  He leaned forward. “The aliens already know that they’ve lost a craft,” he said. “The presence of one craft implies others – others still out there in alien hands. As I see it, assuming the aliens are hostile, they’ve just lost their cloak of secrecy. That gives them only a handful of choices. They can back off, they can make contact with us, they can continue with their original plan – whatever it was – or they can attack at once. The first attack wave might be on its way to Earth now.

  “And there are political implications,” he added. “What will happen if the news gets out that the President ordered this clear and present danger concealed from the public – and the rest of the world?”

  “Let the President worry about that,” Jones advised, dryly. “If you wish to argue for full disclosure, I will take a note to the President about it. For the moment, however, the President’s decision stands.”

  “T
here is another issue,” Jane Hatchery said. “I’ve seen movies suggesting that we could catch alien diseases from the release of alien biological matter into our atmosphere. I know that scientifically it’s unlikely, but what precautions have been taken to prevent mass infection?”

  Jones looked oddly relieved to get that question. “The NBC team used flamethrowers and…sanitised the remains of the crash site,” he said. “It’s true that some alien biological material might have escaped, but we don’t think that it will pose a threat. Once the alien bodies have been examined, we should be able to make a more informed judgement.”

  He scowled. “For the moment, everyone who had contact with the alien craft has gone into a biological warfare quarantine ward as a precaution,” he added. “I hope that you can clear them soon, Doctor. We need to know if the aliens are capable of tolerating our atmosphere…”

  “To see if Earth is any use to them,” Alex said.

  “Exactly,” Jones agreed. He clicked the remote control and displayed an image of the alien craft. The scale on the display suggested that it wasn't much bigger than a small luxury jet. It was definitely larger than a fighter jet, yet smaller than a massive C-5 Galaxy or another heavy transport. “Now, this craft…”

  ***

  The remainder of the day had passed slowly. Alex had expected that they would be transported to the research site at once, but the military had a hundred and one briefings to give them first. There was no plan to deal with alien contact – or, at least, no overall plan; Alex had suggested developing one, but his superiors had nixed the idea – and it was starting to look as if someone was making it up as he went along. There was little for Alex to argue with – whoever was doing it had clearly thought about the implications – yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in a race against time. After the briefings had concluded, he found himself wandering the house until he found himself in an observatory, looking up at the stars.