Shadows of shadows passing. Shadows on the flickering white limestone of a cave’s wall.
You were there, weren’t you? Can’t you remember?
[Ray La Montagne \\ I Still Care For You]
C1.8
Two of the police department’s rescue divers stood in knee deep water just a few meters from the steep stone steps closest to the St Francis Yacht Club’s main parking lot, waiting for Callahan and Bullitt – and their instructor – to suit up. They looked tired, almost bored, and probably because they knew the afternoon was going to turn into yet another one of Homicide’s wild goose chases.
And by now there had been hundreds of sightings of the glistening black ‘sea monster’ – ever since word of the two gruesome homicides had hit the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, with dozens more fresh sightings coming in almost every day since publication. There were now overloaded excursion boats taking madras-clad tourists on Monster Hunts around Fisherman’s Wharf, and The National Enquirer had posted ‘rewards’ for anyone getting a clear photograph of the beast. After almost two weeks not a single verified sighting had been officially recorded, and the two police divers were looking forward to another unpleasant afternoon in the chilly water.
Bullitt was still fiddling with his regulator, fixing it to his 80 pound tank incorrectly before he remembered the correct way. Callahan looked on and shook his head, then lugged his gear down to the water’s edge. Harry thought the five-eighths neoprene wetsuit felt stiff as a board as he waded into waist deep water, and once his tank and vest were secured he knelt a little and pulled his fins on, only then walking into deeper water. Once Bullitt waded out to join Callahan, they walked over to their instructor and talked over the dive plan one more time.
“Okay,” Dave Mackay said, “we’re going to surface swim on snorkels out to the end of the breakwater. That’s about 700 yards but we’re at slack tide so it shouldn’t be too hard…”
“What exactly are we looking for,” Dan O’Malley, the lead police diver asked.
“You read the reports,” Callahan grumbled. “A glowing green ball – or a fucking sea monster,” he added, after spitting out some raw sea water.
The group slipped their masks over their faces and cleared their snorkels then turned and, side by side, swam out into the marina’s lone fairway and on towards the tip of the long stone breakwater.
And no one saw a thing.
The group stopped and gathered around Mackay once they arrived at the point. “Okay, the bottom drops off rapidly from here, so let’s head down to the bottom and we’ll use 80 degrees as our primary compass heading.”
“How far we going?” O’Malley asked.
“It’s about 700 yards to the East Marina. We’ll surface there and compare tank pressures; hopefully we’ll have enough to check out the warehouse pilings.”
“Oh, crap,” Bullitt’s eyes rolled as he mumbled, “that sounds just fuckin’ great.”
“Are there sharks out here?” Callahan asked.
O’Malley just shook his head at that one, and he had to look away.
“Oh, not too many,” Mackay said, but every now and then Great Whites and Blues come in on the tide.”
Bullitt looked down and growled “What the fuckin’ hell am I doing out here,” before he put his regulator in his mouth and followed Callahan and Mackay down into the gloomy gray-black water. At eight feet they passed through the first gentle thermocline and the water temperature dropped suddenly from 62 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit; and twenty feet the temp dropped another four degrees and Frank remembered to piss in his wetsuit. The warmth from his urine passed along to the torso, warming him for a few minutes, but after a minute passed his pee had been pushed completely out of his wetsuit as he swam along, and the chilly water surrounded him again. At thirty feet it was so dark they needed flashlights, and visibility couldn’t have been more than twenty feet in any direction, but the water was colder still.
A motorboat buzzed by overhead, and Bullitt was sure he could make out the deep thrumming sound of a large diesel motor, the type that powered huge, ocean going freighters.
At 52 feet they came to the mud and sand bottom and, after double checking compass headings the group swam off to the east – side-by-side again but now about ten feet apart.
Bullitt saw something metallic ahead and aimed his flashlight at a discarded can of Pennzoil motor oil and he almost laughed out loud…because why wouldn’t a Pennzoil Monster need quart every now and then…
…but then that feeling returned…
‘This is wrong. You shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Turn back.’
The words kept repeating and repeating. Then the words changed, became more emphatic.
“You should turn back – now. You don’t belong here.”
But these words didn’t form and come from inside his mind. He heard them.
Bullitt stopped and looked off to his left – into deeper water, and then he realized that Harry and the others were gathered next to him.
Mackay picked up his dive slate and scribbled out a note: “Did you hear that?”
Bullitt nodded and fingered the ‘Okay’ sign by bringing his thumb and index finger together; Callahan and the police divers did too. Bullitt pointed at his ears, then off into the darkness to their north. His meaning was clear: ‘The voice is over there.’
Mackay reluctantly nodded agreement; the two police divers looked unsure of themselves but nodded. Mackay picked up his pressure gauge and then had everyone hold up their gauge so he could verify readings, then the group took off, swimming along the bottom into deeper, darker, and much colder water to their north.
The same thrumming sound grew deeper and Bullitt sensed it was coming nearer, and when he looked up he saw the huge silhouette of an outbound freighter heading for the Golden Gate, its single cavitating screw leaving a raucous swishing sound as it passed – and he also noted the arcing silhouette of a large shark following along behind the freighter, perhaps hoping for some scraps of food from the ship’s galley.
He checked his depth gauge again and found they were approaching 70 feet, and his tank pressure was down to fifteen hundred pounds – and he knew at this depth the pressure would start to fall rapidly. He wished he could pee again because the layer of water in his wetsuit was getting cooler the deeper they went, but he shook it off and kicked onward…
…until just ahead Frank saw a faint cobalt blue glow…
Mackay and O’Malley stopped, then Callahan and the other diver did as well.
But Bullitt did not.
He kept swimming towards the glow so Callahan followed, then the other three fell in behind Callahan.
The source of the glow wasn’t far away now, though Bullitt was the first to see what made the water glow.
From about fifty feet away he could just make out the top half of a large blue sphere, and as he swam closer he saw that the structure was half buried in the muddy bottom.
From thirty feet away he could tell that the sphere was completely translucent.
When he swam closer he saw movement inside the sphere. Closer still and he could make out individual figures moving about, almost as if they too were floating in a liquid medium.
He felt someone by his side and turned to see Harry’s wide-eyed astonishment – then he felt Mackay’s growing trepidation…
…and then one of the creatures inside the sphere noticed the divers…
…it swam – or flew – or glided – across to the curved wall of the sphere…
…and Callahan could see it’s pale blue body was birdlike, almost completely covered in feathers, and it’s face was owl-like, with massive amber eyes staring into his own…
…then several more of the creatures came to the edge of the orb; some were blue-feathered, others green, but only one was pinkish-feathered – and this pink one, androgynously female, pushed aside the others as ‘she’ came to the wall of the sphere and looked at Bullitt for a moment – before her eyes shifted and settled on Callahan’s…
…then she turned and motioned at one of the others…
…and in the next instant the group was standing in the knee deep waters adjacent to the yacht club…
…and Callahan could see Devlin and Jimmy, the boy who had responded to Devlin’s screams, and the first to be murdered by the creature; then Callahan realized that Devlin was screaming at him as he walked out of the water with Frank and the other divers…
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he thought. ‘What is she screaming at?’
And when she realized her mistake she stood watching the divers walk out of the black water, and Jimmy walked back to the parking lot to wait for his ride home and instinctively Callahan and Bullitt knew the impossible had happened. This was the scene as it had been almost a month before, only now there had been a different outcome.
“It was wrong,” Bullitt whispered, suddenly remembering what the pink creature had said to him. “It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”
“What are you talking about?” Callahan said, now staring at the girl up on the sidewalk.
“Harry? What are we doing out here?”
“I have no idea,” Callahan sighed. He took off his gear and stopped once when he tried to remember what day it was, then he walked up to the girl under the street light because he couldn’t stop staring at her.
Oh, so many shadows. Shadows within shadows dancing. Was Plato’s cave ever really real?
[Hypnogaja \\ Looking Glass]
C4
In a strange twist of fate, Denton Ripley read Nostromo’s orders before the message ever reached the Nostromo, and Ellen – and he’d never felt more helpless in his life.
The order, decoded as Special Order 937, had been intercepted by his COMMs team, and the message had been directed to the ore processing tug Nostromo that was currently en route from Thedus to Sparta. The Company had just activated a distress beacon on LV-426, a planet near the tugs current projected course, but after reading through the dispatch Ripley now knew that the tug’s crew – explicitly deemed expendable in the instructions sent to the tug’s Science Officer – was being sent to collect specimens of the organism.
And with that knowledge now in hand, Denton Ripley was confronting the single most devastating decision he’d ever faced.
He knew how the organism gestated, and how it would spread inside the confines of a ship, so if the Nostromo’s crew was considered expendable the immediate reason was that the crew would used as incubators. His daughter Ellen’s fate, in other words, had been dictated in that message. She had been deemed expendable when he had refused to submit to the Co-Dominium, so he too had, in effect, sealed her fate.
But after reading the orders he knew the tug had also being redirected to take an Earth return trajectory, so the tug would not carry the organism to Sparta. That meant the Company planned on releasing the organism in the caverns currently housing Earth’s surviving population – and he was duty-bound to protect those lives, to prevent the deaths of the remaining population within the United States.
But even so the final, and the most devastating blow of all – was the psychic scar that would result from abandoning his daughter to the fates. For though he now possessed the means to use the Tall White’s FTL drive to jump directly to this planet, this LV-426, he could not alter the effects of relativistic time travel. He could jump to the planet in minutes, yet years would transpire before his arrival in real time. Whatever rescue mission he could mount would arrive years too late to prevent transmission of the organism, while at the same time his sworn duty was to protect the remaining citizens of the United States, and on the Earth. So, simply put, he knew the outcome of any utilitarian calculus meant he would have to remain in Earth orbit, but deep in his gut he wanted to ignore that most obvious conclusion and try to save his daughter.
Yet he knew he couldn’t. The physics of relativity prevented any other outcome.
And if the laws of physics prevented action, the implicit laws behind the oath he had sworn also prevented any other course of action.
So he had been fighting with himself for hours, trying to see a way clear of his dilemma, but he always arrived at the same conclusion. The “right” decision. Even if it was the wrong decision, personally.
But once the decision had been made he also had to decide whether to tell Judy, his wife, about the Special Order – and the most likely outcomes of its implementation. If he told her the whole truth then she too would be haunted by his choice for the rest of her life; as it was now, only he had to shoulder this particular burden on his own. Was such deception the humane choice, or was deception ever truly allowed in marriage…?
And in his gut he knew the answer to that question, too.
He’d have to tell her.
The blue light on his COMMs panel started blinking, and the blue light meant that the Lars Jansen avatar had something important to tell him. Ripley leaned forward and swiped the reply button on his screen and the usual ghostly swirl began to take shape onscreen – as Jansen’s form slowly consolidated and took shape in there – and Denton drummed his fingers on the duraplast desktop while he waited for this extra little bit of melodrama to play out.
“Admiral? I’m sorry, but you look distraught. Are you concerned about your daughter?”
“I am, yes.”
“I understand. This is called a Double Bind, is it not?”
“Yes. But I was thinking Catch-22 might be more appropriate.”
The avatar paused while it retrieved the necessary information, then ‘Lars’ spoke again. “The reference directs to a novel by Joseph Heller, an anti-war novel from the 1960s?”
“That’s the one. What’s on your mind, Lars?”
“Two items, Admiral. The most pressing is an indication that the Spartan fleet is mobilizing. As they are utilizing sub-light travel between multiple Jump Points we should expect their arrival within six weeks.”
“Noted.”
“Shall I pass this information on to Admiral Davis?”
“No. We’ll have all the captains over to discuss the implications and work up a plan of action. What’s the other item?”
“Do you recall the directed energy weapon deployed inside the Sun during our initial departure from Earth?”
“Yes, of course,” Ripley sighed, remembering that it was on that day that the real Lars Jansen had passed away, drowning in his own vomit.
“I have found strong indications that this weapon has been deployed on at least two other occasions in this system, and both times involving the Earth.”
“What?” Ripley snarled, sitting up abruptly in his chair. “What were the impacts?”
“The first use I have detected was in 2030, and the impact was quite simple. The weapon was deployed directly under the Cascadia subduction zone, triggering the eruptions of Mounts Baker, Rainier, St Helens, Hood, and Shasta. These eruptions…”
“…triggered the first impacts of the current Ice Age,” Ripley sighed.
“Exactly so, yes. The weapon was deployed again, and from the evidence I have uncovered it would appear to have happened almost immediately after our combined fleets left the solar system…”
“And that triggered additional eruptions, I take it?”
“Yes, Admiral, along the ring of fire in both the Southwest and Northwest Pacific.”
Ripley shook his head. “So, as soon as the Hyperion Battle Group departed for the Mintaka system, and our battle group was out of the way, too.”
“Yes, Admiral. When the Earth would be defenseless.”
“So,” Ripley said, thinking out loud, “there were three events in total. One at Earth almost a hundred years ago, then the hit on our Sun, then again on Earth, and this one right after our departure. Lars, did anyone on Earth have the capability to do this a hundred years ago?”
“Without a deeper understanding of the weapon, Admiral, such conjecture is meaningless.”
Ripley nodded. “Okay. First things first. Who benefitted most as a result of the first deployment?”
“Private space launching entities, primarily the Weyland Group, as it was then known, as well as SpaceX and Blue Origin.”
“Anyone else?”
“The BAPists cult would have to be seen as the prime beneficiaries over the long term.”
“Lars, can you find any evidence that there were BAPists within the Weyland interests a hundred years ago?”
“There is both direct and indirect evidence to support that conclusion.”
“Does it appear that interests within the original Weyland Group made efforts to conceal such associations?”
“Yes, Admiral. That is what I meant by indirect evidence.”
“So. Indirect evidence versus guilt by association. That’s not firm enough, Lars. I need something that ties the BAPists to the use of this weapon…”
“Records from the period in question, from the era before the first eruptions, is limited by accessibility issues, Admiral. It is possible that more records could be within the caverns below, but that is unknown.”
“So, it’s time to go down and initiate contact. God…I hate to imagine what those poor souls have been through.”
“Yessir. I have been able to locate multiple possible access points, Admiral. Survivors in North America have deployed ingenious elevator-like air processing ducts, so as the depth of the ice increases the air ducts increase in height.” Lars put several images on screen. “There also appear to be structures near these ducts used by, I assume, maintenance teams. It would seem logical that our ground teams approach the survivors through these access portals.” More images appeared, and Ripley studied them one by one, then he scrolled through them a few times before speaking.
“When these survivors went underground…is there…damn, how do we approach them, Lars? If they were forced underground by the BAPists, wouldn’t they consider anyone trying to contact them to be hostile, too?”
“I can only speculate, Admiral.”
Ripley steepled his fingers on his chest as he leaned back in his chair. “Any evidence these different cavern groups are communicating with one another?”
“Of course!” Lars shouted. “How did I miss that. Look at this image, Admiral…”
“That’s a radio antenna, Lars,” Ripley said as new images flooded his screen. “Actually, no, this image here shows a rather complex antenna farm. Short-wave and long-wave antennas here, and I see both UHF and ULF antennas here, early twentieth-century stuff, but…”
“Admiral, I have no information on ULF…”
“Look under submarine communication protocols…”
“The only files I can access are incomplete, Admiral, and in any event, our fleet no longer monitors these frequencies as there are no longer any working submarines.”
Ripley leaned forward and flipped a switch on his desktop panel. “COMMs? Ripley here.”
“Aye, sir?”
“Pull up what you can on early 21st century radio protocols, including UHF and ULF frequencies, and start scanning for signals on those bands. Record whatever you pick up. Center your efforts around Kentucky, New Mexico, and South Dakota.”
“Aye, sir. Uh, Admiral, we could deploy a geo-synchronous buoy to monitor these regions while we’re over other parts of the planet.”
“Okay, COMMs, but let’s not advertise what we’re up to. Launch stealth satellites when you can.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Why stealth satellites, Admiral?” Lars asked.
“No reason to let Antarctic Traffic Control know what we’re up to.”
“Wouldn’t they be scanning for such traffic too, Admiral?”
“Maybe, but I’m not sure why they would be now, but see if you can identify any likely satellites, Lars. It’ll look like an orbiting antenna farm.”
“Admiral, there are currently more than nineteen thousand objects remaining in orbit.”
“Good. That ought to keep you busy for a few minutes.”
“I have identified two possible satellites so far, sir.”
“Lars, you are an incorrigible showoff; you know that, right?”
+++++
Neal Davis from Enterprise and Dean Farrell from Stavridis studied the images on the wall mounted monitor for several minutes, then they turned to Ripley.
“You’re sure ATC is monitoring them?” Davis said.
And Ripley nodded. “Continuously. We identified two originally, but then we backtracked, looking for similar satellites over other known cave systems on the Eurasian landmass. Once we located the satellites we were able to locate isolated pockets of survivors in France, Germany, Russia, and China. As more data came in we pinpointed more facilities in Israel and South Africa, then several in the Himalayas. In all we now have identified fourteen large cavern systems that are currently exhibiting extensive signs of life.”
Farrell shook his head and looked away. “Dear God,” he mumbled as he walked to the viewport. “I wonder how many people made it inside?”
Admiral Davis looked at Ripley, trying to gauge his mood. “How do you want to handle this, Denton?” Though technically both one star flag officers, Denton was the senior officer and therefore ranked Davis, but they’d been friends for yours.
“Technically, our primary obligation is to the survivors in caves located in US territory, but that won’t suffice in the current situation. Cast aside our moral duties for a moment and consider that the next Einstein might be residing in Chinese cave, or a German…hell, it doesn’t matter where…”
“What matters is who we choose to take with us,” Farrell sighed.
“Exactly,” Ripley added.
“But we can’t just swoop down and take all the smart people,” Davis said. “Believe it or not, if this planet ur-Pak has identified is indeed viable, we’ll need armies of builders, not…”
“Point taken,” Farrell nodded, “but how are these groups of survivors going to take it when we come in and decide to take their most able people?”
“We’ve also got to keep in mind that we have about five weeks to pull this off,” Ripley added. “We have no real intel on the Co-Dominium’s ships or the state of their weaponry, and I’d hate to get sucker-punched by them…”
“That’s simple enough,” Davis sighed. “Agamemnon and Stavridis are the smallest ships we have, but that also have the Maser. We’ve completed two on Enterprise and the Connie is about a week away from completing their first…”
“Enterprise can’t stay behind, Neal,” Ripley stated matter of factly. “She can carry more survivors than any other ship in the fleet, and if the survivors run into a hostile environment on this new world…”
“Constellation can handle anything that comes up,” Davis countered.
“You have an air wing. You have troop transports to carry colonists down to the surface. Connie has two little shuttles, so…you were saying?”
Davis looked away, nodding. “Two ships against an armada? Denton, there’s no way you’ll make it out of earth orbit…”
Farrell looked at Ripley, his shoulders sagging: “That weapon? The particle beam they fired into Earth and the Sun? Could that be used against us?”
Denton nodded. “Dean, until we know who has that weapon, or even where it’s located, none of us is safe. My guess is they’ll try to deploy it against us, because in theory it will blow right through our Langston Fields. If they take us out and we fail to destroy the weapon, I’m not sure moving any colonies not sanctioned by this Co-Dominium will ever be safe.”
“Has ur-Pak communicated this information to his people?”
Ripley nodded. “Yeah, but once again relativity will be working against us. By the time his message reaches their home worlds this will ancient history to you and me.” Ripley looked at his two best friends and shrugged. “This is going to be our fight, and ours alone. Neal? I want you to get together with your sociologists and physicists and work out a good means of contacting the survivors down there, then work out how to distribute those people amongst the fleet.”
“Right,” Davis nodded.
“Dean? I want you to fly a CAP,” referring to the concept of a Combat Air Patrol as first deployed over US Navy carriers, “ and probably out around Venus. You’ll be in a good position to see their fleet as individual ships Jump into the system.”
“What about you, Denton?” Davis asked. “You have a plan?”
“Oh hell, Neal, you know me. I always have a plan, but first things first. I want to go down and see these caves, maybe talk to their leaders…”
The rest of the fleet’s captains arrived and there were more discussions about the logistics of moving survivors up to the waiting ships, but Dean Farrell excused himself and returned to Stavridis, and a few minutes later the OOD informed Ripley that Stavridis had departed for Venus and he grinned knowingly. It was just like Farrell to think the problem through and arrive at the most sound conclusion. The fleet was vulnerable now, so he would move to protect it.
He watched the men and women of his fleet mingle and talk, and he noted the blue light on his desktop was still illuminated so at least he knew Lars was listening in, then he switched feeds and watched Stavridis powering away from the fleet before he turned to Judy.
Now she too was worried to death about Ellen, but there was nothing he could do but be there for her. Still, her first reaction had been bitter: “We should have never left her with Stanton,” was her first reaction, but then again Judy was pregnant again and this wasn’t a mistake either would likely repeat.
“Are you going to go down to the surface?” she asked.
“I’m thinking about it.” Denton said, just as Admiral Davis walked over.
“It’s an unnecessary risk, Denton,” she said, looking from her husband to Davis. “In fact, no flag officer should go down there – because we have no idea what kind of diseases we might run into after those people have been in caves.”
“What do you recommend?” Davis asked.
“Send some medics with a company of Marines, and maybe one of the diplomats. Let them go make contact, but don’t allow any of them on our ships until we know we can handle the medical issues.”
Denton looked at Davis and nodded. “Makes sense. What do you think, Neal?”
“I concur.”
Judy nodded. “Each cave could present different pathogens, so just because one’s clear doesn’t mean they all will be.”
“What about genetic adaptation?” Davis asked. “Like…mutations?”
“They probably haven’t been down there long enough,” Judy said, looking away as she imagined the horrifying conditions the survivors were dealing with. “God, I can’t imagine what they’ve been through. The sanitation issues alone must be overwhelming.”
“Well,” Davis sighed, “we should know soon enough. Denton? You have diplomats onboard, right?”
“Singular. One gal from the State Department. Betsy Hollister. You want me to send for her?”
“Yup. She can go back to Enterprise with me. You want me to take a Middie?”
“Let me think about that for a minute.”
The lighting in the conference room went from white to red, and as alarms started going off all over the ship Ripley dove for his desk and hit the flashing red light.
“Ripley here. Sit-Rep?”
“Several objects just jumped in-system, Admiral. No IFF, and well, there’s no identification at all?”
“Did they come in through the Alderson Point?”
“No, sir. They appear to be FTL equipped ships, Admiral, and they appear to be – uh, wait one…”
And in the next instant his screen flickered and went dark, then all power throughout the ship went dark. Agamemnon’s 1G acceleration stopped and zero gravity conditions returned; Ripley felt himself floating free of the deck and not knowing what else else to do he pulled himself over to the viewport, instinctively wanting to see what was happening…
“What the hell is that?” Ripley heard someone say as he held out his hands to stop his flight across the conference room.
“What do you see? Where?” Ripley asked.
“There, sir…”
Ripley looked down towards deep space and his eyes squinted. “What is that?” he whispered a moment later.
About all Ripley was sure of was that the blue sphere didn’t belong to the Tall Whites or the Co-Dominium. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but after fifteen years in space he’d never seen anything like it. Anywhere.
But a moment later he was pretty sure the sphere was coming closer.
Then the red, battery powered lights flickered and came on; Ripley’s desktop rebooted and lights started flashing, demanding his immediate attention so he pushed off and floated back to his chair.
Then the usual computer generated warning came through the intercom: “Acceleration warning! All personnel prepare for 1G acceleration!”
“Everybody grab a seat,” Judy Ripley shouted, “now!”
Gravity returned as the engines flared and came online. Normal lighting returned. A million alarms were still sounding throughout the ship.
“Admiral, COMMs here. We have an incoming message. I’m not sure, but it seems to be coming from the first object.”
“Judy? Neal? Gather round, would you? Okay COMMs, put it through.”
His screen flickered and stabilized, and a moment later a middle aged man appeared. Dressed in a top coat as if he was cold, the man was wearing odd little eyeglasses and Ripley was certain he’d seen the man before.
“Hello there,” the man said genially. “What branch of the service are you in?”
“Excuse me?” Ripley said. The man grinned and once again Ripley knew he’d seen the man before returned.
“Are you Army, sir, or Navy?” the man said.
“Admiral Denton Ripley, sir. United States Naval Space Force.”
“Navy! Excellent! So, you’re an Annapolis man?”
“Yessir?”
“Excellent! Perhaps we can share a few wild tales while we’re here.”
“Excuse me, sir, but could I know your name?”
“Me?” the man said with a playful shrug. “Oh, why the hell not? My name is Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, what the devil are you doing here?”
(c)2023 adrian leverkuhn | abw | fiction, every word of it
Questions upon questions. Layers of deception, time after time. What is real, and what is illusion – if not consciousness itself?
[King Crimson \\ Epitaph]
C 1.7
They were sitting in The Shadows, which turned out to be Frank’s favorite place to grab dinner, looking at the fog roll in; Callahan watched Alcatraz disappear inside the gray mist as the evening turned blue and lights sprinkled like fireflies danced along the hills above Berkeley. Frank had gone to make a call and suddenly alone, Callahan felt lost inside blue mists of his own.
Who were her parents? And who was Peter Weyland? Besides a psychiatrist who could, apparently, summon the nurses of a psychiatric ward almost at will and deploy them in the care of a woman half his age. And as far as Callahan could tell, at least so far, Weyland had no obvious romantic interest in Devlin at all. So, what was it? What compelled the man to look after the girl?
But…was he really looking after her?
Hadn’t Sanderson, the nurse, as much as implied that Haldol, a powerful anti-psychotic medication, was being used to control Devlin? That Devlin didn’t really suffer from hallucinations? That she wasn’t schizophrenic?
And then she’d said this black creature, whatever it was, was trying to protect Devlin?
Bullitt returned to their table and sat heavily, leaning back and rubbing the bridge of his nose just as their waitress arrived with two steins of Paulaner Weissbier, thin slices of orange floating above cold, thin heads. Bullitt nodded and then just looked at the various reflections cast within the amber liquid…
“Harry…it just doesn’t make sense. None of it. Sanderson implied she’d seen this thing. Two people from the yacht club saw the same damn animal, too. And all four from this morning’s incident described the same goddamn thing. An eight foot tall Creature from the Black Lagoon covered in Pennzoil, its eyes dripping with malice. And then this Sanderson says the fucker is protecting Miss Weyland, who really isn’t a Weyland at all.”
“When none of your assumptions make sense, it’s time to go back and question your assumptions.”
Bullitt shook his head. “In this business, Harry, assumptions are toxic. What we need is a cold, hard fact. Like who is this Weyland character…really? And who is Devlin Aubuchon? And we need a timeline, from the time she left the yacht club up to this morning. We need to know exactly where she was at all times. We need to know where this shrink was. We need to know who he gets from his ward to come and work at that house, and their schedules. I want to know who pays them; hell, I want to know how much they get paid, not just by who. I want to know which one of those nurses has been working the last week or so…” Bullitt sighed, his mind drifting again. “Ya know, at all three sightings of this Pennzoil monster…” Bullitt drifted off again, then he shook himself back to the moment: “…during each three, Weyland wasn’t around, was he?”
Callahan nodded. “Yeah?”
“So…maybe Weyland is ducking out of sight and putting on some kind of wetsuit…”
“Frank, are you saying you think Weyland has some kind of electric lance that can vaporize people?”
Bullitt picked up his stein and gulped down the beer – drinking the half liter in one long pull – before he looked over the rim of the stein at Callahan: “Until we can prove he doesn’t, we have to consider the possibility. But possibilities aren’t facts, either. Or are they, Harry?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Frank?”
Bullitt shrugged, looked at a gray ship heading towards the Golden Gate, a Navy hospital ship slipping noiselessly through the fog between Yerba Buena Island and the Embarcadero, probably on her way back to Vietnam to pick up more broken lives. “Did you know the piano player?” Bullitt asked, suddenly changing course.
“Furman? No, never heard him play.”
“You ever hear anything about him – at all?”
“No. But then again, I don’t spend a lot of time in those places.”
Bullitt nodded. “We have to dig around some, find out if there’s a link between Furman and Devlin.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Well, think about it, Harry. Sanderson said she thinks this thing, this Pennzoil Monster, is trying to protect Devlin. Okay, protect her…from what? And why is this thing involved – if the doc is supposed to be her guardian?”
“Well, what if he’s not…?”
“Not what? Protecting her?”
“Yeah. Then what do we do?”
“Not much we can do unless he’s holding her against her will, but we’d have a helluva time proving that if she’s even only slightly off her rocker…”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with her when we were out on his boat…”
“Which means what, Harry?”
“That the meds he uses to keep her knocked out had flushed out of her system. Which means he let them…”
Frank nodded. “Makes sense. So, let’s proceed on the assumption that Weyland is a bad actor. Where does that lead us?”
Harry shook his head. “I’m not sure that matters, Frank.”
“Okay – tell me…what does matter?”
“That thing. The thing you call the Pennzoil Monster. Which can’t be a monster. You know it and I know it, too. As silly as it sounded at first, Frank, I think you’re onto something. What if that creature is really just someone in a wetsuit wearing some kind of costume…”
“With a lance that vaporizes people? Harry…”
“Why not?”
“Okay, so we ask around, see if it’s even possible to build that kind of thing – but that leads to the next fork in the road.”
“Which is?” Callahan asked.
“What if it’s not possible, Harry? And what if we can’t find a wetsuit or costume?”
Callahan shrugged. “Then that means there’s an eight foot tall creature out there in the bay utilizing very advanced weaponry.”
Bullitt sighed as he shook off the possibility. “No…something doesn’t feel right, Harry. We’re missing something basic.”
“You ever done any Scuba diving?”
Bullitt Looked at Callahan then slowly shook his head. “No, and I don’t want to learn, either.”
“You can swim, can’t you? I mean, you passed the physical agility test to get into the academy, right?”
Bullitt nodded, but Harry could see it was an evasive maneuver designed to stall for time.
“So,” Harry added, “we need to check and see if our assumptions are provable, right? There’s only one way we can do that, Frank. We have to go down there and take a look around for evidence of this…thing…”
“You know how to dive?”
“A little. I’m not certified, but I know the basics.”
Bullitt looked out at the black water and a shiver ran up his spine. “So? How do we do that?”
“Get an instructor, take a few lessons and then have him take us out…to take a look around.”
Still staring at the water, Bullitt sighed and his head lowered fractionally. “So cold,” he whispered. “So cold out there…”
Now Bullitt’s face was old and gray, almost sickly, and Callahan was suddenly concerned for his friend. “You okay, Frank?”
But Bullitt looked up at Callahan again, slowly shaking his head as he did. “No, Harry. Something is very, very wrong. I’m telling you…we’ve missed something…”
+++++
The nurse ran from Devlin’s room, calling out for Dr. Weyland as she stumbled and reached out for a wall to stop her fall.
Weyland came out of his study with a little black bag in hand.
“Come quick,” the nurse shrieked hysterically. “It’s happening again!”
Weyland sprinted past the confounded woman – wondering why it was so hard to administer a shot…
But when he entered Devlin’s room he shuddered to a stop, and with his mouth hanging open he suddenly understood what the trouble was…
…because as he looked at her, Devlin was slowly fading in and out of view…
…and then he realized she was inside a shimmering sphere, translucent – yet vaguely blue…
…and suddenly he felt an icy cold mist flooding into her room, and the mist smelled of the sea, the deep sea…
And when he reached out for her the sphere reacted violently and the next thing he knew he had flown across the room and slammed into a wall…
…and when he came to, Weyland knew that Devlin was gone.
And soon, even the memory of her would be gone, so he grabbed a notepad and started writing.
+++++
Down there in the mist in a place few know, an Old Man pushes aside the curtains of time and watches as the girl disappears. He watches and then looks down because he knows he has been betrayed.
But it is too soon to be angry, and there is still time to set things right.
He feels it then. That presence. He looks around and through the mist, not sure what to expect this time, but he knows it is out there, waiting.
+++++
A tall, slim man wearing a ragged old hoodie watches the Old Man from the shadows, and he is smiling at the frustration he sees.
Oh, Harry, what have you gotten yourself into this time? Time for tea?
[Gerry Rafferty \\ Baker Street]
C1.6
Callahan jogged from his apartment to the Central Division homicide bureau on Bryant Street at least three times a week, getting there early enough to put in fifteen minutes in the weight room before taking a quick shower in the locker room. Once dressed he usually walked up the stairs to the main Homicide Bureau offices before picking up a cup of coffee and flopping down at his desk to catch his breath, and after half a cup he would usually walk over to his ‘mail box’ and pick up copies of incident reports from Patrol he’d been assigned. With those in hand he would then drop by Captain Bennett’s office to pick up any assignments from him, then he’d spend a few hours reading through the incident reports from the shifts before to see if follow-up investigations were warranted.
But not this morning.
By the time he’d made it to the coffee pot he saw Bennett standing in the doorway to his office – and he was just waiting for him. “Good morning, Captain…”
“My office. Now,” Bennett growled, his jowls pulsing in scarlet waves.
Callahan sighed and took a pass on the coffee – for now – then he trudged into Bennett’s office but came up short. Al Bressler and DiGiorgio were already in the room, as were Captain McKay – and Frank Bullitt.
“Shut the door, Callahan,” Bennett grumbled as the Old Man made his way to his desk.
Callahan’s eyes swept the room, his mind anxiously trying to get a read on the mood, but even Bullitt looked as confused as Callahan now felt.
“Alright,” Bennett said as he picked up a blue incident report form from his desk, “as you know, Harry and DiGiorgio had a weird one a few nights ago, but he and I were doing some followup last night down at the scene and we, both Harry and myself, saw something…well, something of interest. But before we get to that, Lieutenant Briggs called me at four this morning to let me know there’d been another incident. The victim was a piano player working at one of the jazz joints down near the wharf. He and some friends walked down to look at the fishing boats after the place closed, and something came out of the water and hit this guy with something, well, with something that literally blew his body apart. Like Harry’s case a few nights ago, there was nothing left but blood and body fluids, no bone, no sinew, no nothing, and now we have five witnesses that describe the same thing. Black, slimy body, described as looking like wet snake’s skin, vaguely human in shape but much taller, like seven or eight feet tall, and when it fled the scene all five witnesses saw a large green area of what looked like glowing gas, green glowing gas, under the fishing boats down there. Divers couldn’t find anything.”
Bennett paused and looked around the room.
“You said the victim was a pianist?” Callahan asked.
“That’s right.”
“My reporting person is a pianist,” Callahan said.
“Coincidence?” Bennett wondered out loud.
Frank Bullitt cleared his throat: “No such thing as a coincidence in a homicide investigation, Captain. It’s a lead.”
Bennett nodded then turned and looked at Harry. “You play the piano, right?”
“I, uh, yeah, I play a little.”
Bennett nodded. “Okay, I want you and Bullitt on the case from last night, so Harry, get Frank up to speed on your original incident report and include yesterday’s events, then you’d better head out and get your witness interviews knocked out. I’m still not sure what we’re dealing with here, and I’m still not sure if we’re dealing with a human or some kind of marine life, but we need some answers in order to develop some kind of protective strategy. DiGiorgio? I want you to take Gonzales and a crime scene artist and talk with last night’s witnesses, get some idea of what this thing looks like, then take your sketches up to Steinhart and see if any of the biologists up there can help us figure this thing out.”
DiGiorgio nodded. “Right. Anyone know where Chico is?”
“Weight room,” Callahan said. “He doesn’t come in ’til ten, so he’ll be down there now.”
Bullitt and Callahan walked out of Bennett’s office and went to Harry’s desk, but both stopped off at the coffee pot on the way. “What happened yesterday?” Bullitt asked as they sat at Harry’s desk, nursing hot cups of coffee. “Bennett looks pretty miffed.”
Callahan recounted their day out on the water, all of it, finishing up with spotting the head and torso of this black creature in the water by the marina.
“You’re kidding, right? You sayin’ you two really saw this thing?”
“We both did…yeah. About a hundred, hundred and fifty feet away. Shiny and with amber eyes. Big eyes…” Callahan said, his voice almost trancelike as his mind drifted back to the moment he’d felt those amber eyes.
“So, what’s up with you and this girl? Devlin, is it?”
“Yeah, and nothing’s up.”
Bullitt looked at Callahan, his eyes looking for an opening – as if he was peeling through layers of deceit, pushing past the dangling webs of his momentary diversions. “Bennett said she’s on some kind of heavy psych meds. Know what’s going on with her?”
“No,” Callahan said, suddenly on the defensive.
“Seems like basic stuff, Callahan, so I’m wondering why you’re protecting her…?”
“Am I?”
Bullitt shook his head. “Any other witnesses last night?”
“Yeah. An old guy out taking a walk stopped and stared at the thing, too – but then it was like he just faded into the fog.”
“How thick was it last night?”
“I’d say I could see things that were maybe a hundred yards away, like to Broderick Street.”
“Which way did the old guy walk when he left?”
“West on Mason…I think…” Callahan whispered.
“So, towards the trees?”
“Yeah.”
“What was he wearing?”
Callahan closed his eyes and drifted on those other currents… “Cape – wool. Loden green. Gray corduroy slacks. One of those funky hats. Bavarian, like with the bristles on one side…”
“Did he have a beard?”
“Yeah. White, medium long. Bushy white eyebrows. Not tall. Maybe five-eight and two hundred pounds. And he was walking with a cane…”
“Limping?”
“No. But he did the damndest thing, Frank. I caught it out the side of my eye, but he swung the cane in a circle above his head then brought the tip down – and I mean hard – on the sidewalk. And then it started to thunder, like way out past the bridge.”
“Thunder? You’re saying you think he, like what? He summoned the thunder?”
“I know it sounds nutty, Frank, but that’s what I saw.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I know, I know, it sounds weird…”
“It sounds as nutty as a fuckin’ fruitcake, Slick,” Bullitt sighed. “So, you got the number for this girl…at her house?”
“Yeah. Maybe you ought to call her.”
“Ya think?” Bullitt looked at Callahan and tried not to think the worst. Callahan had only recently been assigned to the bureau after testing high on the exam, and he obviously didn’t have any reported history of mental illness, but this crap was over the top. The only thing that mattered right now was that Bennett had seen this thing in the water, but Bennett didn’t see the old man and the cane – but did that matter. “Gimme the number,” Bullitt growled. “I want to get to the bottom of this – first thing.”
Though Bullitt only talked with the nurse looking after Devlin that morning, he scheduled an appointment to talk with her at noon, so he took Callahan in tow and went to the original crime scene by the yacht club, then they walked along the sidewalk where Callahan had seen the old man – and sure enough, Bullitt found evidence of two fresh strikes in the old concrete, and right where Callahan had indicated they’d be.
“Looks like a fresh metal strike,” Bullitt sighed, checking the area for similar markings.
He found none.
But Weyland’s house turned out to be, literally, just a few yards away.
They crossed Marina and walked up Baker Street until they came to the doctor’s home, a three-story Spanish colonial, replete with red tile roof and a freshly painted, light gray stucco exterior. Bullitt walked up to the door – and a housekeeper opened the heavy oak door before he had a chance to ring the bell.
“I’m sorry sir, but Miss Devlin is having a bad morning,” the old woman said, apparently very nervous and speaking as if she was reading from a well rehearsed script, “and her nurse asked me to convey her regrets.”
Bullitt, standing with his legs apart and a hand covering his mouth simply nodded. “Ask her to come to the door, please. I’d like to speak to her.” The housekeeper hesitated, then the flustered housekeeper curtsied before she closed the door and scurried off in a huff, disappearing inside the house and leaving the two detectives standing alone in clouds of confusion. “Baker Street,” Bullitt whispered. “Where the hell do I know that from?”
“You ever read Sherlock Holmes when you were a kid?”
“Of course! That’s it! Did you read that stuff too?”
“I think maybe I read a couple of them,” Callahan said with a self-deprecating shrug.
“What was the name of that club where he and Watson hung out?”
“You mean that gentleman’s club?” Callahan mused. “The Diogenes Club, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
The door opened just then and a nurse stood there looking seriously put-out and angry. “What do you want?” she asked brusquely, her steel-gray eyes leveled like lances ready to do battle.
“I’m Detective Bullitt. Did I speak with you earlier?”
“No. I took over at eleven. What’s this all about?”
“We need to speak to Miss Weyland…”
“There isn’t a Miss Weyland here,” the nurse said.
“What?” Callahan barked. “Devlin? But I’ve been here with her before.”
“Oh, you mean Miss Aubuchon? Devlin Aubuchon?”
“I thought Dr. Weyland…”
“The doctor is Miss Aubuchon’s guardian.”
“Her guardian?” Callahan sighed, now very confused. “Where is her family?”
“I don’t know anything about her background, and you’ll excuse me, but are you with the police, too?” she said, her eyes now boring into Callahan’s.
So Harry reached into his coat pocket and produced his badge, and that seemed to satisfy the beast – for now. “We were out sailing together yesterday,” he added, “and a few questions have come up since. We were hoping to clear them up with her this morning,” Callahan continued, now smiling as politely as he could.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, warming a little to Callahan’s sudden contrition, “but she’s not really up to seeing visitors right now…”
“She was two hours ago,” Bullitt growled. “What happened since then?”
“I’m afraid I really don’t know. When I read the morning notes it only said that Miss Aubuchon had a bad night and a worse morning and that Dr. Weyland had ordered an increase in her Haldol. She’s out like a light right now.”
“Haldol?” Callahan said.
“Standard treatment for cases like hers,” the nurse said.
“Schizophrenia, you mean?”
The nurse nodded, but then she looked away suddenly and now Callahan thought the woman was concealing something, or trying to, anyway. “I take it you can’t really talk about these things,” Callahan said.
“She’ll tell us whatever we need to know,” Bullitt growled menacingly – now really getting into the whole ‘Good-Cop–Bad-Cop’ schtick. “But you know what? Let’s cuff her and take her downtown, run her through a polygraph.”
“Frank, take a hike,” Callahan snarled – and then he turned to face the now very cowed nurse. “Do you think we could go inside and talk…just you and me?”
Bullitt grumbled as he walked away from the house, really laying it on thick as he kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe I should get a search warrant first, huh?”
Now the grateful nurse nodded at Callahan and let him in, and he could see she was visibly shaken by Frank’s antics. “What did you say her last name is?”
“Aubuchon.”
“And what’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Page. Page Sanderson.”
“Miss Aubuchon isn’t really schizophrenic, is she, Page?”
The nurse shook her head and looked away. “No sir, I don’t think she is; in fact, there’re times when I think she’s being drugged. Like maybe to keep her quiet.”
“You work for Dr. Weyland?”
“I work up on the wards. Dr. Weyland sends us down here on our days off.”
“So a lot of people are involved in her care? Are you the only one who thinks…”
“Look, some really weird stuff goes on here, alright? With her. I mean stuff that makes your hair stand on end…”
“Can you tell me…”
“Look. No way, man…”
“Have you ever…when you were with her…seen an owl? A white owl?”
Sanderson stepped back and now she really looked upset. “You’ve seen it, too?”
“It? The owl?”
“It’s not an owl.”
“I saw an owl, then I saw her eyes had changed to…”
“Amber,” Sanderson sighed. “Yeah, and you better not be around her when that happens.”
“What happens…if you are?”
Sanderson looked terrified now, and she was shaking hard. “You…believe me…you don’t want to be around her when that happens.”
“I was. I got sick, I think I passed out.”
“Is that it?”
“What have you experienced…when it happens?”
“I really can’t begin to describe it…”
“Have you…did you see a strange animal? Like shiny black?”
Sanderson nodded. “Oh yeah. I have…most of us have…”
“Do you get a sense that this thing knows her?”
Another nod. “It’s the thing that’s really protecting her, Mr Callahan.”
“Does the doctor know about this thing?”
Again she nodded. “He isn’t what you think he is,” she whispered, “so if I was…look, you be very careful what you say around him.”
“Are you saying the doctor isn’t who I think he is? What does that mean?”
They heard someone walking through the house. Heavy footsteps, like a man walking on tile.
“You need to leave now. Right now,” she said as she pushed him towards the door.
“Okay, I’m going. Thanks,” Callahan just managed to say before the door slammed shut. He turned and walked down to the sidewalk, then pulled the microphone out of his coat pocket and brought it to his lips. “Did you get all that, Frank?”
Bullitt pulled up in Cathy’s pale yellow Porsche and pulled the plastic earpiece from his right ear. “Yeah. Took notes, too. But you know what? I think I need a drink…”
“Hell, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” Callahan said as Bullitt drove away from the house on Baker Street. Neither saw the white owl overhead, ducking in and out of the clouds as they drove back to the bureau.
Yeah, yeah, I told you it was going to get weird. And what…you didn’t believe me? Well, let’s go down that road a little more and see what else is out there – just waiting in the shadows.
[Thompson Twins \\ Hold Me Now]
C1.5
Callahan looked up and saw Peter Weyland was now at the wheel and with a start he realized he was laying down – and that his head was in Devlin’s lap; Captain Bennett was sitting nearby, looking at Callahan with frank concern in his eyes.
“You okay, Sport?” Bennett asked when he saw Callahan’s eyes were open.
“What happened?” Harry replied, squinting at the sudden sunlight.
Then he felt Dev’s fingers running through his hair and he moved his head tentatively, saw she was looking at him, smiling and without a care in the world showing in her bright eyes. “You lost your breakfast over the rail,” she sighed, “then you slipped and hit your head.”
“You’re going to have a little knot on your forehead,” Dr. Weyland advised professionally, and with an offhand grin, “but otherwise I think you’ll live.”
Callahan rolled his eyes and tried to sit up but immediately thought better of it and moaned as his head began pounding.
“You might want to take it slow for a half hour or so,” Weyland added.
Callahan nodded and then realized the wind had died down and that they were sailing along slowly, the boat not leaning at all now, so he took a deep breath and just let go again – and a moment later he felt himself falling asleep…
“Hey! Sleepyhead!” he heard his mother say, “You ready for some lunch?”
He opened his eyes again and now his head was resting on a folded up jacket and then he saw Devlin was coming up from down below with a plate full of sandwiches, so he pulled himself up and rubbed his eyes then tried to remember where he was and why he was on a boat…
“Harry,” Sam Bennett said, “always has a big appetite. You need a hand there, Miss Weyland?”
Callahan looked around, saw the boat was apparently at anchor and a couple hundred yards away kids were frolicking on a rocky beach and a couple of other sailboats were anchored nearby. The air was still and smelled of the sea at low tide, and for a moment he thought the air almost smelled of iodine and he shook his head as Sam helped get the cockpit table set up and ready for them. Devlin handed over the sandwiches then disappeared below again, surfacing a moment later with a pitcher of iced tea that had big juicy slices of peach floating in lazy circles around the rim, then a little tumbler was thrust into Callahan’s hand.
Weyland came up the companionway a moment later and handed Callahan a couple of Tylenol tablets and as he drank the tea Callahan thought it the most amazing thing he’d ever had. So simple…just a peach or two and it felt like he was drinking the nectar of the Gods…
Then a sliced turkey sandwich with a simple slathering of mayonnaise and a little cracked pepper, and a nice thick slice of summer’s finest treat, the beefsteak tomato, freshly sliced so the bread remained light and airy and full of goodness. Callahan took a few bites then leaned back and let the sun wash over his face and he couldn’t remember feeling so good – ever. Neither could he remember ever being so totally confused.
‘There was an owl back there. A white owl. I saw it. I watched it watching me and I was not imagining it.’
His detective’s mind raced to find an explanation where none could possibly exist, but that didn’t stop his reaching beyond the obvious. He looked around the back of the boat, back where he had been kneeling and retching and where he had seen the owl, then he remembered seeing the owl’s eyes were also Devlin’s…but that just couldn’t be…
He looked at her now and no, her blue-green eyes were still those of a human being and certainly not the huge amber orbs he’d seen in that blinking instant – which he had to admit was reassuring – but that fact wasn’t exactly comforting, either…given present circumstances.
“Where are we?” Callahan asked.
“North side of Angel Island,” Weyland said, watching Callahan closely now, “on a mooring ball in Ayala Cove. How’re you feeling now?”
“Foggy.”
“We’ll give it another hour. You should be up to snuff by then.”
Sam was plowing through his sandwich and enjoying every bite. “Where on earth did you find these tomatoes?” he asked. “They taste exactly like a summer afternoon!”
“Oh, once a week or so,” Weyland began, smiling now as he talked, “we drive down Highway One and check out the farm-stands set up by the roadside. This time of year the tomatoes are coming in and we found some good ones last weekend.”
“I’ll say,” Bennett said. “Do you get out here on the bay very often?”
Weyland nodded between bites. “Try to. Of course this is the time of year for it.”
Callahan wasn’t paying attention to this chatter; he was looking at Devlin, still trying to make sense of the morning when he saw a little white feather flutter off the aft deck and fall into the pale, grey-green water below them in the shallow little cove – and he watched as it landed on the mottled surface and drifted on idle currents into the maelstrom of a dream he didn’t quite understand. Yet.
+++++
They sailed to Sausalito as a cooling fog rolled in through the Golden Gate, and smartly dressed dock-boys helped them tie-off to the guest pier at the Sausalito Yacht Club, then the four of them walked over to The Spinnaker restaurant as the day’s sunbeams and cool breezes gave way to scudding clouds creeping in over the low coastal foothills. Shadows fell away to the blues and grays of evening and the sudden enveloping warmth inside the restaurant felt soothing, like a respite from the changes they had endured that day. Glasses clinking, women batting their eyes at passing men, men staring at passing legs – everything as it should be…just another night in the land of plenty.
Weyland recommended a few things on the menu and drinks appeared, then plates of fresh seafood in a bewildering display of excess that Callahan simply couldn’t relate to. Was Weyland, he wondered, trying to assert the fact of his obvious wealth to a couple of poor cops, or was he simply a generous soul. But more than anything else, by the time dinner was over Callahan was left to wonder what this day had been all about…because Weyland had planned it all out, right down to their dinner reservations.
Weyland had put Harry back to work after lunch, stood beside him while they navigated around Angel Island before circling back and sailing up Richardson Bay, all eyes focused on the depth gauge as they closed on the old cream-colored Victorian house that now served as an Audubon Society preserve. Weyland was a patient teacher but for the life of him Callahan couldn’t understand what all this instruction was about.
And neither could Sam Bennett, but by the time Weyland’s foggy excursion came to a wet, soggyend back at the St Francis Yacht Club, he felt more than certain that both he and Callahan had been taken for a ride.
+++++
Weyland decided to head back into the club for a late evening libation, but he thanked Harry for being such a good sport. “Maybe you’ll catch the bug!” he said cheerfully.
“Oh? What bug is that?”
“Sailing, of course. And anytime you’d like to go out please let Devlin know and we’ll try to lay something on! You’re an able student and I enjoyed my day tremendously.”
Callahan nodded and smiled. “I did too, sir. Very much, and thanks.”
Bennett smiled and watched this exchange carefully – if only because Devlin remained well back and kept to the periphery now…as in out of sight, out of mind…but Bennett was certain the girl had, against all odds, fallen in love with Callahan. And that did not bode well, for anyone. But Sam caught the goodbyes and remembered where he was, so he added a cheerful: “I did as well, Doctor. Thank you for a memorable day.”
“You’re most welcome, Captain. I hope to see you both soon,” he said, now looking at Devlin. “Perhaps now would be a good time to take Captain Bennett and Callahan down to where all this happened,” he said to her before adding: “I’ll probably be late so let yourself in. I won’t see you ‘til morning.”
She nodded then walked up to Harry and took his hand. “C’mon, let’s go before it gets too cold.”
Bennett fell in behind Callahan and the girl and he could feel Harry’s dis-ease at the girl’s suddenly aggressive possessiveness. As they walked along she pulled a reluctant Callahan closer and closer, and Bennett wondered why Harry was going along with her overt display of affection…
Streetlights were coming on now, and lines of glowing orbs stretched out in the gathering fog as Harry and Devlin talked about what she thought the ‘creature’ was; she had no idea but when Callahan suggested squids and octopi she just shrugged and gathered herself up against the growing chill. Sam listened intently – but he also watched her body language, looking for signs of reluctance or deceit. Or insincerity.
And he saw nothing of the sort. Not even ambivalence. Yet he could feel her fear as they approached the spot where the boy had been eviscerated.
There was still ample evidence something terrible had gone down on that beach; there were still deep maroon splotches on the sand where neither time nor tide had lingered long enough to wash away the quiet detritus of death. The water was calm now, very calm, and if not for the glowing orbs reflected on the inky black surface there would have been no way to see any difference between this water and crude oil.
And then an Old Man wearing a cape and walking with the aid a walking stick approached, and while the old fella tipped his hat as he passed he said not a word. Sam watched the old man for a moment, as the old man approached Mason Street, and when he stopped suddenly and looked out over the water Sam turned and looked too.
And he saw something out there. Almost like a man but tall and slimy-black, black with latent malice – and the thing suddenly turned and was staring at Devlin.
“Callahan?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you see that?”
Callahan turned and looked at Sam, then followed his eyes. “What the hell is that, Captain?”
“That’s it,” Devlin whispered. “That’s what got Jimmy…”
Bennett reached for the Colt 1911 in the shoulder holster under his left arm and pulled it free…
…and at the same time the Old Man slammed the silver tip of his cane down onto the sidewalk…
…and the creature slipped under the inky surface and disappeared, just as thunder rumbled somewhere out beyond the Golden Gate.
And when Bennett turned to find the old man he found that he too was gone.
Standing next to a streetlight not at all far from where Bennett, Callahan, and Devlin stood, a tall, thin man stood watching. He coughed once then lit a cigarette before he disappeared in a passing shadow.
Things aren’t always what they seem deep inside the memory warehouse, but you knew that already. Didn’t you?
[Spirit \\ Nature’s Way]
Right…off we go.
C1.4
The water in the yacht club’s marina looked to be about the same color as the sky, a deep cerulean blue and with not a cloud visible anywhere Callahan looked. There were, however, whitecaps all over the bay and a crisp 25 to 30 knot wind was funneling in through the Golden Gate. Looking at the bay, the few sailors out there seemed, as far as he could tell, to have their hands full. Callahan and Bennett looked at one another with their eyes wide open now, and both now seriously regretted popping by Bennett’s favorite diner for pancakes and eggs before heading down to the marina.
Callahan saw Dev Weyland standing up on the front of a sleek looking sailboat, and when their eyes met she waved at them.
“Wow,” Bennett smirked, “now I know why you’ve taken such an interest in the case. Sheesh, Harry, she’s a knockout!”
And Callahan had to admit that right now, standing out there in the sun and the wind she looked as pretty as any woman he’d ever seen. Her long chestnut hair was streaming in the breeze, and only a blind man could have ignored her smile – let alone her shapely legs; Callahan returned her wave and tried to match the excitement he felt in her smile, but then he remembered her drugged out shuffle the day before and realized this had to be one of her good days.
“Just be careful, Captain. Her father said he’d ‘have her ready’ for the day, so I assume that means well medicated.”
“Did he tell you what her condition is? Or what she’s taking?”
“No sir, but he did say she hallucinates, so I guess that implies schizophrenia…?”
Bennett shrugged. “Usually, but not always.”
Peter Weyland was waiting for them at the head of the pier, and after he opened the locked gate he walked ahead of Callahan and Bennett out to his boat – hardly acknowledging their presence as he stared at the sky. He guided them along a narrow finger pier that divided two slips, and simply pointed at the boxy little steps used to gain access to the deck of his boat.
“My-my, but that’s just a beautiful boat,” Bennett said. “Are those teak decks?”
And once the beauty of his ‘yacht’ had been recognized – and acknowledged – Weyland’s demeanor changed in an instant. Now his face registered pleasure and pride, and Callahan noted a subversive little smirk of satisfaction on Weyland’s face as he led them into the boat’s cockpit. “Yes, teak,” he finally said, as if he’d had to think about the matter. “I think it’s Burmese teak, however the yacht itself was built in Finland. Devlin? You ready?”
“Yes, Papa,” Devlin said, still smiling at Callahan.
“Callahan, if you wouldn’t mind taking the wheel for a moment…?”
“What?” Callahan cringed. “Me?”
“Yes, you! Are you deaf, or are you simply afraid?”
Callahan had never sailed anything larger than a battleship in the bathtub of his parent’s house in Potrero Hills, but now he hopped behind the wheel and stared at Weyland as he stepped forward and removed a dock line from it’s cleat on the pier.
“Okay Dev, cast off now! Callahan, see the lever on the right side of the binnacle?”
“The – what?”
“The wheel? Pull it back towards you about an inch, until you feel the boat moving back a little.”
Pulling the lever back, he soon realized, put the motor “into reverse” – and pulling the lever further back made the boat go faster…in reverse – so Callahan looked around and made sure the boat was backing out of the slip in a reasonably straight line…and then it hit him. This was a test. Weyland was testing him, watching how he responded to an unexpected challenge, so he took a deep breath and let his instincts take over.
‘Okay…there’s only one way out of here and after I back out of this slip I’ve got to turn right, which means the back of the boat has to go left…’ He turned the wheel to the left and right and settled on left and he felt the boat slowly back out to the left.
“Okay, now move the lever to the middle and just let her coast along for a moment. Right. Good. Now, slip the lever forward about an inch and feel what happens.”
“Got it,” Callahan said, though in truth he still didn’t have the slightest idea what he was doing.
“Okay, straighten out the wheel and look where you’re going…and keep right in the middle of the channel here…”
Callahan straightened up and looked ahead, trying to guesstimate the width of the channel, and then he saw an instrument that was showing their depth. “This gauge says seven feet…is that right?”
Weyland nodded. “A little more to the left for about fifty feet, then come right just a little.”
Callahan’s gut was churning now, but the feeling was indescribable. He looked ahead then checked the expression on Weyland’s face then checked their depth on the gauge. “Still showing seven feet…okay, 6.9…6.8…”
“Okay, start a gentle turn to the right, and add a little power. See the knot meter?”
Callahan found it. “Got it!”
“Accelerate to 5 knots, but not a bit faster.”
“Right!”
But now it was Bennetts turn to watch – and he couldn’t help but think that this psychiatrist was playing Callahan like a fiddle. Not simply testing him, but judging his usefulness – and Bennett had been around his type in the Navy long enough to know where this usually led. Bennett wouldn’t have cared one way or another, but Callahan was investigating a homicide, or a potential homicide, and watching the way Weyland was twisting Callahan’s perception, knocking him off balance, was making his old ‘cop on the beat’ instincts sing like a canary.
“Alright…good,” Weyland called out. “Straight ahead another fifty yards then a hard left, and don’t let her get away from you when we clear the breakwater!”
By this point Callahan could see where the water was deeper just by looking at the colors off to the left. Shallower water was lighter colored, almost sand colored in places, while the deeper water in the basin was a little greener – yet as he turned hard to the left the water ahead turned blueish-green, then a deeper blue, and the depth gauge quickly dropped from ten feet down to 15, then 25 feet.
Then they cleared the breakwater off to their left and that unobstructed wind funneling through the Golden Gate slammed into boat, and Callahan felt a new pressure through the wheel – and as the boat began to slide off to the right he countered with left input on the wheel…
“Okay Harry…see the left tower on the Golden Gate? Head right for that, and keep her pointed exactly at that tower…”
Callahan turned the wheel and he watched as Dev and her father raised the sail on the mast, and it began flailing about like it wanted to beat itself to death…
“Okay Harry, turn a little to the right…”
And as quickly the sail turned rock hard…
Then father and daughter raised the sail up front.
And now it felt to Callahan like he was riding on the back of a caged beast that had just been released from its shackles, and not only did the boat take off like a rocket it was now leaning over so far that water was rushing along right by the edge of the deck…
Then Weyland was by his side, first shutting down the engine then trimming the sails bit by bit…
“See Angel Island over there?” Weyland said, pointing past Alcatraz Island. “The right side, that’s Point Blunt…steer right for that.”
Callahan noted the boat wasn’t leaning over quite so much now, but as Weyland fiddled with the sails their speed began to creep up, hitting 7 knots within a few hundred yards then stretching for 8 knots…and Callahan could feel it then…the boat was no longer a simple machine…it was more like a wild creature running free at a dead gallop and everything around him was literally humming as their speed increased.
A gust slammed into them and the boat leaned hard to the right, the right edge of the deck disappeared under water for a moment – until Dev let out one of the lines – and then the boat straightened up a little…but now their speed was edging over 8 knots and heading towards 9 and the sudden sensation of building speed was exhilarating…no, Callahan thought, it was beyond exhilarating, beyond anything he’d ever experienced before…it was almost like flying, only…better…
And then Dev was standing beside him, leaning into his shoulder again…
“I feel like we’re flying,” Callahan said into her ear…
“I know…sometimes you can almost feel what a gull must feel out here…”
Callahan noticed a freighter coming out from under the Bay Bridge, and then another coming through the Golden Gate, and he started judging his own speed while he tried to guess how fast the freighters were closing…and suddenly little alarm bells started going off in his mind – because to his unpracticed eye it looked like all three vessels were going to arrive at the same point out there near Alcatraz – at the same time.
But Callahan also saw that Weyland was looking at the two freighters and performing the same calculation – and Weyland didn’t seem the least bit fazed.
Another gust slammed into the boat and this time Weyland looked at Callahan and smiled. “A little starboard…uh…to the right now, Harry.”
And Callahan could feel an immediate difference. When a gust hit and the boat leaned way over, turning away from the gust lessened its impact and the boat sailed more upright, so as the gust passed he turned back to the left and the boat started to lean again, and it felt like they were going faster, too. And no one had adjusted the sails. ‘Interesting,’ Callahan said to himself. ‘What happens if I turn more to the left?’
The boat instantly leaned even more, the edge of the deck slipping into the water again, so he backed off and steered right…and the boat leveled the more he turned…
“You’re starting to feel it now, aren’t you?” Devlin whispered, still holding onto Harry.
“Yeah. You know, in some ways it feels like a Huey…”
“A what?”
“A helicopter.”
“Vietnam?” she asked.
“Yup.”
Her grip tightened on his arm and she seemed to pull herself even closer to his side, almost like she wanted to meld with him. “I’m sorry you had to go through that…oh…my God…”
“What?” Callahan said, suddenly aware of a galvanic impulse ripping through his body. “What’s wrong?”
“Falling…falling…you’re falling and I see a white snake…and there’s fire everywhere…”
Callahan cringed under the weight of sudden recall. To getting his Huey shot up and crashing in the swampy marshlands just outside the perimeter at C-Med during the Ten Offensive, and he could see the white python closing on the shattered windshield and feel the machine gun fire ripping through the engine compartment…
“Harry? You still with us?” Sam Bennett said.
And in the next instant he was back on the bay behind the wheel of a sailboat standing next to a girl he didn’t recognize and he felt the concussive blast of mortar rounds zeroing in on his position then the womp-womp-womp of another Huey circling low overhead and he felt plastic shattering on the overhead panel as more machine gun rounds slammed into his Huey and now he was spinning spinning spinning in some kind of pale vortex…
“Harry?” Bennett barked.
And then Callahan turned from the wheel and leaned over the aft rail, heaving his guts out into the grey-green water of the swamp and the white snake was suddenly gone…
…and as he looked up he saw a huge white owl perched on the rail by the side of his head, its amber eyes staring into his innermost being…
And then Devlin was beside him, holding onto him, and after a moment she leaned close again and whispered in his ear: “You didn’t see that coming, did you?”
He shook off the flaming remnants of the Huey and the glistening white python from his mind, then he looked for the owl but it was gone now too, gone and as suddenly forgotten – so he turned and looked at Devlin, and as he looked into the owl’s eyes again she started laughing.
“I’m not sure,” he sighed as he looked over the dispatch he’d just received from COMMs. “A planet called Thedus, but it’s not in our database, so of course it’s not on our star charts, either. She’s been working on a bulk ore carrier…”
“A…what? You’re kidding!”
Then the blue light on the admiral’s intercom panel blinked rapidly – meaning that the Lars Jansen avatar was ready and waiting to talk – so Ripley hit the ‘ENABLE’ button and watched the boy’s mesmerizing blue-swirling form take shape on his desktop monitor…until it finally snapped into sharp focus.
“Ah, Admiral Ripley, I’m glad to see Judith is with you. I have new information that concerns you both.”
“You look happy, Lars. What have you been up to?”
“Walking on a beach, I think. But there are times when it is hard to discern.”
“Uh-huh. No sand between the toes? And how many girls were with you this time?”
“I think I’ve moved beyond that phase of life, Admiral. I was walking with a…I do believe it was an otter. Yes, it was a sea otter, and he was telling me all kinds of things.”
“A talking sea otter. Lars? You doin’ okay in there? I mean, I know this all came as a surprise…”
“Oh, yes, I understand, Admiral, and thanks for asking. I appreciate your concern, but yes, I am most happy in here. I was always an awkward sort, if you know what I mean, but so many of us are. Now if I want companionship all I have to do is think about it and there it is. Talk about instant gratification!”
“Have you met any others like yourself?”
Lars seemed reluctant to talk about that right now. “It is hard to be sure, Admiral,” he finally said.
Ripley smiled. “I’ve had that problem myself, I think,” Ripley sighed. “So, you have news?”
“Yes, Admiral. I have found something of immediate importance. A video file left by Admiral Stanton. I found it on a drive located in an IT nexus in Armstrong City, I believe it was originally recorded on a personal storage device left by the Admiral Stanton before his…well, you’ll understand after you watch the recording.”
“Is it a personal message, Lars?”
“Some of the information is of a personal nature, sir, but most concerns the immediate situation we are now facing. The information is self-explanatory, sir, though I would say that many parts will need to be viewed by all the other captains in the fleet.”
“Okay, I’m putting you on the large screen.”
“Ah, Judith,” Lars said amiably after he popped up on a large, wall-mounted display. “Nice to see you again.”
“Hello,” she replied uneasily, still not sure what to make of the dead boy’s memories roaming free throughout the ship’s various computer systems. “Nice to see you, too.”
Lars noted her reticence as he pulled up the file. “I would recommend that you remain seated, both of you. Some of the material is – a little graphic.”
“I see,” Denton said. “Okay, start playback.”
A dark blue USNSF seal popped up on a pale blue background, then a recording date of 15 November, 2122 appeared, followed by a Top Secret classification and encryption warning, and that the material in this file was ‘TSC-Eyes Only’ and encoded to the Flag Officer(s) in charge of Agamemnon and/or the Enterprise Battle Group; a moment later Admiral Stanton’s steely-eyed visage appeared onscreen.
He was shuffling note cards but then looked up suddenly, and his eyes looked care-worn and anxious: “Denton, things aren’t going well here at the moment, but I’ve covered that in an earlier recording; there have been some positive developments recently, so I hope you find those files before you see this one. First things first. I’ve enrolled Ellen at the Merchant Marine Academy high school in Musk City, and I sent Walter with her. She’s about to finish her first term and I hear she’s doing well. I’ve done my best to shield her from events here, but I may not have been entirely successful on that front; more on that in a minute.”
Stanton flipped to the next page in his notes before continuing:
“Meteorological conditions on Earth have deteriorated rapidly – and much more quickly than anticipated, with the almost perpetual cloud cover resulting in over 700 inches of new snow in Washington DC, and 1400 inches in Boston last winter. The permanent ice line has now moved as far south as Raleigh-Durham to St Louis to Denver to Sacramento, and the icepack is growing exponentially now so we expect total ice coverage with the decade.”
Another page turned:
“All civilian governments on Earth are collapsing rapidly, and about the only thing that matters now is launch capacity. We’ve converted all warship construction to the manufacture of colony ships, and existing shuttles are running people up to these ships as quickly as they can be serviced and turned around. Still, with current projections it looks like we’ll be lucky to get a half billion people off world before ice completely encapsulates the arable surface, and I guess I don’t need to tell you but that will be that.”
Another page:
“Top Secret stuff here. Unknown how many people made it, but at least three large caverns in North America were converted into underground cities. Looks like there are in Kentucky, South Dakota, and New Mexico. I have no idea how successful these efforts have been, but if you get a chance you might look them over and see if you can lend a hand.”
The next page seemed troublesome to Stanton, and he stopped and sighed a few times before continuing:
“The Space Force has ceased to be. Simply shut down. The Naval Space Force is, well, I hate to say it but whatever remains of your fleet will constitute the remainder of the USNSF fleet, and with this file I am hereby transferring command of the NSF to, I assume, Admiral Denton Ripley – or his duly registered successor, if Ripley is no longer in command. There is no longer any civilian command and control network presiding over the NSF, neither is there any legitimate military organization with any right to command the NSF. Your only assigned duties are the protection of Earth and whatever might remain of the United States of America; if those entities no longer exist then as a practical matter it would be my recommendation that you take the fleet to a new world and start over. Do not get involved with this new civilian government…these BAPists. Denton, take my word for it…they are going to be real trouble.”
Stanton paused and looked up into the camera.
“Denton, of course I’ll never know how all this turned out, but I can’t help but wonder about what happened out there? Now, about Ellen…”
Then there came banging on the door behind Stanton, and his mood changed.
“Well, it looks like the BAPists have found me again,” he sighed. “The NSF tried cooperating with them, but in the end it’s my belief that these people are the common enemies of humanity. They make no bones about it, Denton. They plan to enslave us all in the service of some kind of pagan spiritualism that, well, frankly, I don’t understand. I can’t tell you how to deal with them but I’ve tried to resist…”
And at that point the door behind Stanton was blown open by some sort of explosive device and Stanton could be seen reaching for something on his desk, but then he disappeared in a hail of machine-gun fire and the file simply stopped at that point – and Lars came back on the main screen.
“From my reconstruction, Admiral, it appears he was closing the file when agents of the crown broke down the door. I did find the notes he was referring to and about the only thing he wasn’t able to convey to you was that an apparent alliance between the BAPists and the Weyland Corporation might not have been a recent event.”
“Meaning what?”
“That the BAPists within the Company may have been calling the shots for a long time, potentially for decades.”
“Of course…but that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I mean, it looks, by that point, anyway, like the Company controlled almost 90 percent of the shuttle capacity, so the BAPists inside the Company would have been in THE perfect place to make sure that only their adherents and supporters made it off world, and so only their supporters would make it to one of these new worlds.”
“So that’s why there haven’t been any popular uprisings against this new monarchy,” Judy sighed.
“Yes,” Lars added. “They entombed their opposition on the planet, so how could there be?”
“So, Lars,” Denton said, looking at the blue avatar on his screen, “have we been scanning areas near those caverns in North America?”
“Gee, Admiral, I thought you’d never ask…”
+++++
Ellen Ripley was confused and suddenly felt very off balance; this was the first time in her life that this particular Walter unit hadn’t been by her side, and she realized that she now felt quite lost without him. He’d been with her almost from the moment of her birth, he’d acted as her first teacher even before she started school, been there for all her birthdays and Christmases, and while she felt it might not be completely accurate to say she had feelings for Walter, she did regard him as something much more than a simple fixture that passed into and out of her life. While he, or it, wasn’t exactly the parental figure that Admiral Stanton had been, Walter had represented the pure, nonstop continuity that so much of human flourishing depends on, and now she felt that as an acute stab in the back.
Sitting on the bridge now, maneuvering the Nostromo into docking formation with the massive ore processing ship, she tried to concentrate on the readouts on the main docking display but found she was having trouble with even the most basic adjustments to the ship’s velocity vectors.
And now she was sure that Captain Dallas was noticing her distracted state of mind.
“Ripley? You got a handle on that drift?”
“Ripley, watch your rate of closure!”
“Ripley! Roll rate! Now!”
Then Mother spoke up: “Captain, I think I ought to intervene now.”
“Ripley!” Dallas shouted. “Ship’s control to automatic!”
Ellen flipped the switch and buried her face in her hands. Lambert smelled blood in the water and smiled. Kane looked up and shrugged. Dallas stormed off – but not before letting slip a long string of expletives.
And so the Nostromo maneuvered under the refinery ship and in short order the docking clamps joined the two ships, and with that done Ripley loaded the first waypoint into the current NAV computer and hit the ‘EXECUTE’ button. A thousand feet behind the bridge three drives flared, and the Nostromo started the first leg of her long journey to Sparta…
“Ripley!” Dallas’s voice cried out over the intercom. “Report to the wardroom, on the double!”
“Oh, great,” she muttered as she popped clear of her harness and walked aft – and past a gloating Lambert – to the crew’s mess, passing her cabin on the way and wanting to duck inside to avoid the inevitable tongue-lashing she knew she’d earned.
“Coffee?” Dallas said as she came in and sat at the round table beside the galley.
She shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest and waited.
“What’s our departure clearance look like? Any inbound traffic?”
She shook her head. “No, we’re clear all the way to the outer rim.”
“No new Outie activity in the sector?”
“Nothing reported.”
Dallas sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Parker says the ship is ready for sleep, but that means keeping Mother on ‘auto’ for the duration, and you know how I feel about being on autopilot cruising through a system. Any system.”
“Yessir?”
“It would mean an extra ten days out of the chamber, but we have more than enough food to stand a two-man watch all the way out to the rim. You mind staying up?”
“No, not at all. I’ve got some correspondence to get through, and some studying to do.”
“So, how are you feeling about Walter?”
“I’m not really sure yet, Captain. Lonely one minute, like I’ve lost a friend, then I remember he’s a synthetic and wonder if my emotions have been misplaced all these years, which only…”
“Yeah, I can see that becoming a feedback loop. You get any sleep last night?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I can’t leave Lambert out with you, so what about me? You feel comfortable enough with that?”
“Comfortable enough? What’s that mean, Captain?”
“Oh, you know. The whole man-woman thing, being alone with me for an extended period. That kind of comfortable.”
“Yeah, I’m comfortable.”
“Yeah? Well, okay. Let’s have dinner then we can put everyone else in their slow-cooker. You know, maybe read ‘em a bedside story before we tuck ‘em in.”
Ripley shook her head. “You’re twisted, you know that?”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Kiddo.”
+++++
He’d decided on showing the Stanton recording to Davis and Farrell first – so he could gauge their reaction first more than for any other reason – but also because he didn’t want to precipitate a war within the fleet. Judy asked to stay in the room while he played Stanton’s message – and his murder – again, and he’d reluctantly agreed. He knew he could count on her for moral support if nothing else, but he didn’t want to edit out the personal bits and pieces and open himself up to charges of manipulating the data.
And as the recording came to its grisly conclusion Ripley found himself watching Neal and Dean and their reaction when the machine guns opened up.
“Goddamn it to Hell,” Davis growled under his breath – just before he turned away and wiped away a tear or two.
Farrell’s reaction was almost the exact opposite. “I’m surprised they let him get any kind of message off to us, no matter how it might be delivered,” Stavridis’s captain said. “Technically, that was a mistake on someone’s part…unless it wasn’t…?”
“Meaning?” Ripley said, his voice flat and gruff.
“Unless someone wanted him to get off a warning to us,” Farrell added.
“Then why cut him off in mid-sentence,” Admiral Davis sighed. He and Stanton had become friends after Davis had served on the admiral’s staff for a year, so the murder had hit him hard.
Dean Farrell simply shrugged. “What about the caverns? Any signs of life?”
Ripley nodded. “At all three of the big ones. Fairly big heat blooms near the last charted entry points, and an initial analysis points to reactors of some kind being constantly in use.”
“But if there are survivors aren’t they, well, wouldn’t they now be entombed under the ice?”
Again Ripley just nodded. “Sure, but these survivors would also have unlimited water and the machinery needed to punch boreholes through the ice, so they’d have air as well as water. With enough lead time we can assume they set up hydroponic gardens and even factories to make the bare necessities, so assuming those are all true, from there the question their existence poses to us is quite simple. We need to ascertain the number of survivors down there, and we need to come up with a plan to get as many of them off world as we can.”
“Denton, we have to be careful not to put the cart before the horse here,” Farrell sighed.
And Neal Davis nodded in agreement. “Admiral, we really need some place to take these people, assuming they want to leave, and we need someway to move them…”
“And you know what?” Ripley said, grinning. “It just so happens we know someone who can help us with both of these problems.”
“Oh yeah?” Farrell said mockingly. “Like who?”
Ripley punched the intercom button and waited, then – after Louise Brennan appeared onscreen – he smiled and nodded. “Why don’t you and your boyfriend come on in, and let’s see what you two came up with…”
(c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple
Okay, let’s head back to the streets of San Francisco for a look around the memory warehouse with Harry & Co. Yes, yes, this one has 88 keys everywhere you look, so go slow and enjoy the sights. San Fran is always nice this time of year…
[Blue Jays \\ I Dreamed Last Night]
A short one today, so grab a cup of cardamom tea and take a minute to settle in.
1.3
“You come in early,” Captain Sam Bennett said to Callahan as he walked into the Homicide Bureau and over to the coffee pot, “or were you here all night?”
Callahan stifled a yawn and nodded. “All night. Got called in around 0100, got a weird one down at the marina?”
“Weird? What happens down there that isn’t weird?”
Callahan shook his head as he watched Bennett pour his coffee. “Girl walking from the yacht club to her house saw a black thing and screamed…”
“A black thing?” Bennett grumbled sarcastically. “Now that is weird…”
“…but then this thing comes for her, and then a couple of workers from the yacht club hear her scream and run over to see what’s goin’ down and the black thing turns and it just obliterates one of ‘em. The other guy gets the girl back up to the parking lot and then calls us. Divers went in looking but they couldn’t find anything…”
“No body?” Bennett asked, his curiosity now piqued.
“No body, and I mean nothing.” Callahan shook his head as he recalled the bloody sand. “One of the divers said he saw something like a big green bubble, but…”
“Oh come on. What is this – some kind of April Fool’s Day bullshit? Like maybe the diver farted in his wetsuit and a big green bubble…”
But Callahan shook his head. “I saw it too, Captain. So did DiGiorgio.”
“A big green bubble? You saw a big green bubble – and that’s our prime suspect in your homicide case?”
“We saw a greenish glow underwater, but as soon as the divers went in to investigate the thing just moved off into deep water…”
Bennett looked up from his coffee when he heard that. “Possible submarine?”
“Maybe, but it would have to be pretty goddamn small to operate in that water. The depth around there is in the ten to fifteen feet range – at low tide – which it was.”
“You said the victim was obliterated? Anyone hear a weapon discharged?”
“No, and that’s weird too, Captain. There was blood everywhere, even on the woman’s legs, and a huge blood trail led down to the water, but there was nothing solid. No bone, no tissue residue, and the divers couldn’t find anything in the water so I had the Crime Scene people get as much of a sample as they could, just in case…”
“In case of what, Callahan? What kind of case are you calling this, because the DA sure isn’t going to call this one a homicide.”
“Sir?”
“Well, hell, Callahan, from what little you’ve told me this could have been some kind of goddamn sea creature, maybe an octopus or a squid of some kind, but it sure doesn’t sound like one human being killed another.”
Callahan shrugged. “Unless it was someone dressed up in some kind of costume…”
“That disappeared in a glowing green submarine? Seriously? That was more likely some sort of bioluminescence…”
“So what do you want me to do with this, with my report?”
“How did patrol sign off on it?”
“Signal One – homicide – according to their shift sergeant, but I assume the first watch lieutenant approved that.”
“Hell, Briggs ought to know better than that,” Bennett growled, putting his coffee on his desk before he turned and looked out his window – at the mass of humanity walking in and out of the jail complex. “Well, hell. You’d better go over to Steinhart, over to the Academy of Sciences, and see if anyone has any idea what kind of animal could have done this. Then you’d better go talk to that girl, the one who first saw this creature. See if she can help us get this investigation pointed in the right direction.”
“Okay.”
“Before you do anything else, head on home and get a few hours of rack time, and then…ahem…don’t forget to drag a razor over that furry thing growing on your neck.”
Callahan grinned. “Aye-aye, Skipper!”
“And don’t call me skipper!” Bennett shouted as his newest detective walked out of the bureau.
+++++
Callahan knocked on the glass door and waited; a few minutes later a young woman who appeared to be a nurse of some sort came to the door and opened it. “Yes?” the nurse said expectantly. “Can I help you?”
“Inspector Callahan, San Francisco Police. I need to speak to Miss Weyland, please.”
The nurse looked uncertain, as if she simply didn’t know how to respond to a cop at the door, but she nodded her head slowly then simply pulled the door to and disappeared down a marble-tiled hallway that led into the depths of the large, very upscale house.
“Swell,” Callahan growled as he watched her walk off, but he just stood there, waiting. A minute or so passed and then an elegantly dressed white-haired man came down the same marbled hallway, and the man came directly to the door and opened it wide.
“You’re with the Police Department?” the man asked.
And Callahan nodded. “Callahan. Homicide. I’m going to need to speak further with Miss Weyland. Are you her father?”
“Would this be about last night?” the man said, a little evasively.
“Yessir.”
“I see. Well, perhaps you weren’t aware, but Devlin, Miss Weyland, is unwell and has been most of her life. She hallucinates, she sees things that aren’t really there, so is it possible that she hallucinated the events of last night, Mr. Callahan?”
“No sir. There were other witnesses.”
“I see. I didn’t know that. I came here earlier this morning and had to sedate her – as I thought she had hallucinated these events, but you’re telling me they actually happened?”
“Yessir. Excuse me, but are you a physician?”
“Yes. I’m the head of psychiatry up at St Francis General.”
“I don’t know what you’ve been told, Doctor, but a man from the yacht club was – well, for want of a better word, he was vaporized – and directly in front of Miss Weyland – and another employee of the club witnessed these events. Two other employees located a little further from the scene observed some of this as it happened, as well,” Callahan replied, cataloguing the physician’s appearance as they faced off, filing away the details in his mind – just in case: white buttoned down shirt, laundered, heavy starch; an Hermes necktie, tannish gold with a small riding crop motif; black slacks, pressed, Gucci belt, Gucci loafers; hair on the medium long side, whitish-blond, kept clean and combed, parted on the left; eyes hazel, with contact lenses; watch, Rolex Submariner; no wedding band or other jewelry.
The physician still seemed unconvinced as he spoke now: “She said something about a large black creature taking one of the employees into the water, then something green, a green glow, taking them away. She really wasn’t all that coherent, Mr. Callahan, so I’m not sure if that’s exactly what she observed or not.”
“You said she hallucinates, Doctor? Is she psychotic or schizophrenic, something like that?”
“Something like that,” the physician repeated casually, offhandedly, as if that diagnosis was out of bounds for this discussion.
“Do you think I could talk with her?”
“As I said, Mr. Callahan, she’s heavily sedated.”
“Is she conscious?”
“Yes. Yes, she is.”
“Then I’d like to speak with her. Now, please, if that’s at all possible.”
“Do you have a warrant, Officer?”
“Do I need one, sir?”
“Well, you see, though I also happen to be Dev’s father, I am also her guardian, so I have a direct say in the matter.”
Callahan nodded. “I see. Does she play the piano?”
“Yes. She’s quite good, actually. Why do you ask?”
“We had a moment out there, sir. Something almost personal, and it had to do with playing the piano.”
“Do you play?” the physician asked quietly, almost kindly.
Callahan nodded. “She asked if I played Debussy, and when I replied Gershwin she said that was even better.”
“Indeed. She didn’t mention that.” The physician stood aside and held the door open. “My name is Peter, by the way. Peter Weyland. Won’t you come in?”
A little off balance now, Callahan smiled at the change that had come over Weyland as they walked into the house; he could see into the living room from the foyer and his eyes went to a massive concert grand in the far corner of the room. Next to a corner that seemed to be all glass, the Steinway was bathed in pure light – and Callahan had never seen a more seductively majestic setting to sit and play in his life – but when he turned to face Weyland he found that the physician had disappeared.
But a moment later he came back, only now with his daughter in hand.
She was hardly recognizable, he thought when he saw her now. Hunched over and with her face sallow and gray, the young woman he’d seen last night was gone now, subsumed by and inside the confines of the world her medications granted. Her slippered feet shuffled along unsteadily and her auburn hair was an unkempt nest that seemed wildly out of place inside this house.
And then she saw Callahan standing in the foyer.
And then she stood straighter in an instant and her face brightened as color returned, and when she smiled at Callahan he felt the strength of her in his bones. Suddenly and quite unbidden, she walked up to him and she held his eyes in her own and the house came alive with strange magic inside the suddenly slower passage of time. And then, after she came to Callahan she reached out and took his hands again, but this time she clasped them together inside her own, then brought them to the side of her face.
“Gershwin?” she whispered to him, her voice weak but taking strength from him.
“Yes. He’s always been my favorite.”
“Show me.”
“What? Now?”
“Please?”
So Harry walked over to the Steinway and after he got comfortable he began fingering an extremely simplified rendition of Summertime, but just a few bars…then he blew into an explosive phrasing of the Rhapsody…a real window-rattling romp…before he settled into the oppressively languid Second Prelude, playing through to the end – then he turned and looked her in the eye: “And what would your music tell me?” he asked, wondering what she might choose to tell the story of the moment.
And after she sat beside him she addressed the keyboard and closed her eyes before she drifted in Schwarzwald’s Second – but just as she meandered into the second bar he stopped her.
“Please,” he whispered, “anything but that.”
“Why?”
“She’s – my mother.”
“What?”
“Imogen,” he struggled to say, “is my mother.”
“Callahan,” she sighed. “Oh yes, I remember reading about her now. What was it like? To grow up with that music all around you?”
His mind drifted to the green house between Monterrey and Carmel, to the avocado trees and blackberry brambles – and the storms that came when she played… “I’m not sure I could find the words,” he started to say, but then he looked away. “It was…our life was very complicated.”
“So, that’s where Gershwin comes from. Point–counterpoint, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess maybe it’s obvious now, but I’ve always been an open book. Just like Gershwin is an open book.”
“I doubt that very much,” she whispered, then she leaned into him, placed the side of her face on his shoulder in a way that felt a little too familiar. And yet oh-so-strangely familiar.
Then, perhaps out of guilt Callahan looked around the massive living room for her father, but he had simply left the room and now not even the nurse was present. “Would you mind telling me about the medications you’re taking?” he asked.
“I would if I knew what they are. Why?”
“Your father? He doesn’t tell you?”
She shook her head. “No. But I’m not really interested.”
“What are the side effects?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was wondering, do they keep you from playing?”
“Oh. Sometimes. I think more than anything else they make me sleepy, and then I can’t concentrate. And sometimes my fingers feel heavy, like they’re made of lead.”
“I can’t imagine what that must feel like,” he said. “To be cut off from something so elemental.”
“You do understand, don’t you?” she whispered, now rubbing up against his shoulder – and to him it felt like in a very feline gesture of acceptance, so much so that he almost expected her to start purring.
“I think I would feel lost without music, but I wouldn’t want to presume…”
“You don’t have to.”
“Inspector Callahan?” Doctor Weyland said as he came back into the room. “Have you been able to talk about last night’s trouble?”
Callahan pulled away from Devlin and stood. “No sir. This isn’t going how I expected.”
“I dare say. Perhaps you should come by in the morning. I’ll have Devlin up and ready to go by nine.”
Callahan knew a dismissal when he heard one, so he nodded and sighed before he turned to her again. “Perhaps, if you feel up to it in the morning we could walk down to the water, or maybe over to the yacht club. It might stir your memory…”
“Better yet, Callahan,” her father said, “why don’t you come out with us. We were planning on a day out on the water, so when the tide turns at eleven why don’t you count on spending the afternoon with us?”
Callahan nodded. “If it’s still alright with you, I would like to come by at nine – and I’ll need to come with another detective.”
“Yes. That’s probably best.”
Harry could feel her disappointment – but worse still, he was sure she could feel his own. Something wasn’t right about all this, and he knew it. If word of his behavior today got back to Captain Bennett, his career in homicide would be over.
Yet he drove back to the bureau trying to understand what had just happened to him. Inrushing feelings for a girl he didn’t know, overwhelming dendritic impulses flowing from notes in a score to a hazy shade of memory he hardly recognized as his own. What was she doing to him – if not casting a spell…?
He turned on Bryant then turned hard onto Harriet Street, then into the lot and he sat there for a few minutes, watched Charlie McCoy pulling his radar gun from a saddlebag as he talked to Captain McKay. He shook his head at the thought then wondered how his old friend managed to keep riding and working Traffic now that he’d turned 50.
“And what the fuck are you gonna do when you turn 50?” he asked the eyes in the rearview mirror.
Callahan tried to shake off the sudden funk; he got out of the puke green Ford and crossed the street and walked into the main lobby, flashed his badge and was buzzed into the bowels of the building, then rode up to the fourth floor in silence. Bennett was in his office working on another stomach ulcer, while Frank DiGiorgio and Carl Stanton were at their desks pounding away on ancient gray Underwood typewriters.
“Callahan!” Bennett growled, his voice rattling the windows. “What the hell have you been up to?”
“Steinhart, then at the Weyland residence – talking to that witness.”
“Find out anything at the aquarium?”
“No, nothing. Everyone there was all wound up about some kind of pre-historic fish someone found in Africa. A coelacanth, I think they called it. Ugly fucker, too.”
“Uh-huh. A Doctor Weyland called, wanted to know if you could interview his daughter tomorrow – on some fucking boat. You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on with that?”
“The girl, the witness, is apparently schizophrenic and was heavily sedated. The doctor, her father, thought I might have better luck talking to her in the morning.”
“Uh-huh,” Bennett said, not at all pleased. “So let me get this straight. You wanna go sailing tomorrow? On the taxpayers’ dime? With this dame?”
Callahan shrugged. “I have plenty of OT, Captain. You wanna call it comp-time?”
“Not if you are interviewing a witness in an official capacity. I mean, I assume this will be official, right?”
“Yessir.”
“Take Carl with you. He looks like he probably owns a pair of boat shoes…”
“Ah, c’mon, Captain,” DiGiorgio chimed in, “can’t I go?”
“You?” Bennett sneered. “Shit. If you stepped on a fuckin’ sailboat the fucker would tip-over.”
“Hey, fuck you very much, Skipper,” DiGiorgio replied, grinning.
“And the horse you rode in on, Fatso,” Bennett grumbled. “And don’t call me skipper!”
“Right – Skipper!”
“Stanton!” Bennett growled. “You free tomorrow?”
“No sir. Court, 0800.”
“Fuck. Well Callahan, looks like you’re taking me sailing tomorrow. Pick me up here at 0700 and we’ll go get breakfast.”
Harry nodded, then he looked away and sighed, because it suddenly looked like tomorrow was going to be a very long day.
(c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple
Next part of the Ripley story. A little longer arc today, so plenty of time for tea.
[The Animals \\ We Gotta Get Out Of This Place]
So, here were go…
C 2
Once the Walter in Antarctic Traffic Control had linked and cross loaded files with all the other Walters and Gordons in the Enterprise Battle Group, Denton Ripley now had access to the pure, unfiltered historical record of the last thirty years, or the relative time Agamemnon and the Enterprise Battle Group had been away. More importantly, Lars Jansen now had complete access to all the computers on Gateway Alpha and on the Moon. After Ripley had gone over the rough outlines with Lars and Gordon, he knew it was time to get all the ships’ captains together for a council of war.
Including the tankers and Agamemnon, the Enterprise Battle Group numbered 34 ships, and this number included the Enterprise, an immense assault carrier, the heavy cruisers Wainwright and Saratoga, the Kearsarge – a Mohican class troop carrier outfitted with an air wing of her own – six tankers and with the balance of the fleet comprised of frigates like the Stavridis and Darwin. But Ina Balin had almost finished building a second X-ray Maser on Stavridis, and this latest version incorporated the moving mirror design developed by Pak’s engineers. Ripley was going to send her to Enterprise as soon as she finished on Stavridis.
Stavridis’s skipper, Dean Farrell, had been with Ripley’s first task force on the Hyperion mission, and like Ripley he was an Annapolis grad. Unlike Ripley, Farrell had studied history and philosophy at the Academy and had always been considered an intellectual; he was also fiercely loyal – to Admiral Stanton, to Denton Ripley, and to the United States Navy, and pretty much in that order, too. Like all Navy captains, Farrell had a deep interest in engineering, but he’d enjoyed developing camaraderie even as an XO, and under Farrell, Stavridis was soon considered one of the happiest ships in the fleet.
So Ripley wasn’t at all surprised when Farrell showed up a half hour before the Admiral’s council of war – carrying a pile of books.
“What on earth do you have there?” Denton smiled as Dean walked into the Admiral’s in-port conference room.
“Homework,” Farrell smiled back.
“Oh?”
“Denton, I have a Gordon onboard, so I think I know what this is all about.”
“So, what’s this stuff for?”
“Background,” Farrell said. “In case anyone’s interested.”
Neal Davis from the Enterprise was the next to come into the room, and he too looked troubled – but so did each and every skipper as the group piled into Ripley’s suddenly far too small conference room. When everyone was seated, Ripley’s yeoman Joan Carson distributed drinks and snacks, then Ripley called the meeting to order.
“Does anyone here not have access to the Walter Downloads?” he asked as all eyes centered on him.
But then a few hands shot up.
Ripley nodded. “Okay, here’s a quick summary of what’s happened while we were away. As all of you are well aware, what passed as a few months for us – because of the amount of time we traveled at faster than light speeds, well, almost thirty years passed here on Earth, and a lot has happened while we were away.”
He paused and looked around the room, measuring the dour mood.
“The United States of America is no more. For that matter, the old nation states we were all familiar with are now all gone, and the planet is now entirely encased in ice. There is a continuing human presence at McMurdo, but the ice is increasing in thickness, on average, at a rate of 30 centimeters per annum.
“Approximately seven hundred million people were evacuated from the planet’s surface over a fifteen year period, and yes, that means more than eight billion souls are entombed down there in the ice.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“About 28 years ago a Company survey ship located and charted a planet that’s now called Sparta, and a BAPist cult managed to get the upper hand, politically speaking, on that planet, and they established a monarchy…”
A hand shot up. “A what?”
Ripley turned to Captain Farrell: “Dean, you want to take this one?”
“Sure. I’m sure most of you remember basic 21st century history, the economic collapse of 2008 and the Obama period that followed. This of course spurred on the revisionist nationalism of the Trump period, but it wasn’t until a few years later that one of the key philosophers of the Trump period was finally uncovered. This man billed himself as The Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, and it turned out that this BAP had a number of acolytes in the Trump White House. BAP was a devotee of Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher that lay at the heart of Naziism, and BAP carried the idea of the so-called übermensch, or superman, into the 21st century. Here’s his manifesto, by the way, if anyone is interested,” Farrell said, holding up a copy of BAP’s book, Bronze Age Mindset. “This edition was published in 2018, by the way, and BAP was, like Nietzsche, like Hitler, and like Ayn Rand, dividing humanity into two groups: the men who accomplish great things and all the rest, which he referred to as subhuman slaves, and that’s putting it charitably.
“I’m sure that you all remember that after the tectonic events in the Pacific Northwest, when Rainier and Hood and Shasta erupted and the North American plate shifted, the resulting climate shifts brought on the current ice age, but looking over the Walter Downloads it appears that BAPists had by the mid-21st century almost completely infiltrated the remnants of state governments in the western US. There are indications that the space agencies in the US and EU were compromised as well, and that many of their members were well placed within the Weyland Corporation. It now appears that these BAPists decapitated the federal government’s response to the threat of encroaching ice, and that they may have executed key members of the Senate and Council…”
“And that,” Ripley said, “makes this King Leonidas our common enemy.”
“But…does it, really?” Neal Davis said. “I mean, Denton, let’s think this thing through. The United States no longer exists. There is, literally, no admiralty. No Council, not even a Senate. As the armed force of a democratically elected people that reports to a civilian command authority, we literally, well, we’re stateless and so have no legitimate purpose. This Leonidas may not be our elected leader, but he is, apparently, the leader of what’s left of the human race, so let’s face facts. We could go in tomorrow and wipe Sparta off the map, but in the end we’d only be hastening the end of mankind…”
Denton smiled – because this is exactly what he’d wanted to happen: a spirited discussion of the options facing the fleet – because somehow he was going to have to build a solid consensus among his skippers before any action could be taken, and he’d need everyone’s support.
“Well,” Dean Farrell replied, “let’s look at the problem another way. Leonidas wasn’t elected, he was selected, and probably by a group of corporate sponsors, so his leadership is anything but legitimate – in a democratic sense, at least as far as we’re concerned. And there have already been revolts on New Chicago and on Asia, so there are already strains in the system with this sort of leadership. Also, this new empire has limited resource processing ability and an almost primitive war fighting capability…”
“For now, you mean,” someone said.
“Yes,” Farrell said, “precisely. In ten years they may be armed to the teeth and ready to take us on, but right now it appears they are comparatively weak and we hold a real strategic advantage.”
“This Leonidas has corporate patrons, and these patrons run all eleven planets in this new alliance, and Weyland is the biggest of these. That said, the Company is probably well armed with the organism.”
“But that’s a ground force, and besides,” Farrell said, “employing the organism all but dooms the targeted group, be it one of our ships or a planet. That’s a Doomsday Weapon, pure and simple.”
Denton Ripley nodded. “Mutually assured destruction. But how the hell do they expect to use it against us?”
+++++
Thedus had been discovered a few years after a Company probe transiting the Coalsack sectors had run an automated scan of the planet as it passed. When the results of the scan were transmitted to New Sparta, the Company dispatched an assay team to the planet to confirm the results of this first incomplete scan; when the results were confirmed several colony ships loaded with construction engineers and miners were sent to begin constructing the infrastructure necessary for large scale mineral extraction. Habitation modules under large pressure domes were the first things built, then the first ore processing modules were shuttled down to the planet’s surface. Crushing ferrous oxide under high pressure released oxygen – which was then further processed and stored to provide breathable air inside the domes, and not long after that milestone was passed facilities to distill liquor and to provide testicular release followed, and five years later more than nine thousand people called Thedus home. When a second brothel was built the miners knew they’d finally hit the big time.
And as it was a small planet, one that would be resource depleted within fifty years, the Company had decided against terraforming or building long term settlements there. More a planetoid than a planet like Earth, or even Mercury, Thedus had less than one-twentieth the gravity of Sparta – and while that made walking problematic it did make it economical to load minerals on the planet’s surface and then boost the payload into a low orbit. Because of these significant cost savings, miners working on Thedus were very well paid indeed, and productivity had remained high since Day One.
Sir Ian Tarkanian was the current governor general, and he “positively loathed” his latest posting. A sharp, lean man with hungry eyes, Sir Ian had made a small fortune transporting wealthy refugees from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa up to orbiting colony ships, and ever since he’d lived the life of a wealthy sybarite wherever he happened to land. Accepting his peerage had come with the proviso that he take the offered assignment on Thedus and remain there for at least two years; now he was counting down the days until he could hop on one of his ships and return to Sparta. That he would be called Sir Ian, or Governor Tarkanian for the rest of his life, was only the very sweet icing on a very large cake he would happily call all his own.
His office, by any standard but especially so for Thedus, was garishly decorated in a red velveteen velcro material trimmed with ornately shaped solid gold trim – the gold freshly mined and processed from the vast deposits beneath Tarkanian’s feet. And while the Company took the biggest percentage of the haul and the Crown the second biggest, the sitting governor also took a decent percentage of all the minerals, ores, and precious metals extracted from the planet, and which would in the two years of his posting see Tarkanian move up the list from modestly wealthy to the obscenely rich. As such, his far-flung commercial enterprises also ensured he was dialed into all the comings and goings within the imperial aristocracy, and it was said that he knew who was in and who was most definitely on the outs long before anyone else on Sparta.
And this morning Sir Ian was reading through his dispatches from the regional capital on New Caledonia before his first appointment of the day, with this Ripley woman from one of the tugs. Reading through her dossier was like reading the summary of a condemned man, or woman, as was the case here; her parents were celebrated U.S. Naval officers that had been among the last to matriculate from the old Naval Academy on Earth, but they had disappeared during the course of the disastrous Mintaka expedition and had not been heard from since – until a month ago, that is. For the entire USNSF Enterprise Battle Group had instantly – and mysteriously – appeared in Earth orbit and been contacted by a disbelieving Antarctic Traffic Control. And that was when the shit had well and truly hit the imperial fan.
Yet of more immediate interest to Tarkanian, in that one instant the entire balance of power within the empire had seismically shifted into unknown territory, and he had been looking for a way to exploit the sudden appearance of this fleet.
Because there simply weren’t any ships like the Enterprise or the Constellation in the new Imperial Navy. Even the frigates Stavridis and Darwin were more powerful than anything built in recent decades, and this was the simple, unintended consequence of the so-called Peace Dividend declared by Leonidas after the final collapse of the Russian-Chinese alliance. “All threat of war is hereby abolished!” the King had merrily decreed, and so centuries of military tradition and war fighting capability had withered and died in the span of a single generation, and with it all threats to Leonidas’s continued reign.
And yet here was this girl, in effect raised by the last four star Admiral of that Navy and without any knowledge of the whereabouts of her real parents, and now he was going to get to break the news to her. Her parents were alive! She was to return to Earth immediately by the fastest available means! It was all very breathless and amusing, and he was almost looking forward to delivering some good news for a change – when Thomas Dolby floated into his office without so much as a knock on his Duraplast door.
“When is Ripley scheduled to meet with you?” Dolby growled as he floated across the room, finally sitting across from Tarkanian – and then putting his feet up on Sir Ian’s desk.
Doing his level best not to look supremely put out by this unwanted intrusion, Sir Ian looked at the CIAs local head-of-station and shook his head. “0800, I seem to recall.”
“She’s not to be told anything about her parents, and she is not to return Earth or the Gateway under any circumstances,” Dolby sighed. “Am I being clear? She’s not being sent back to Earth to meet up with dear old Mom and Dad. Got that?”
“And why the devil not, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Because the Company wants it that way,” Dolby said, handing over a dispatch. “You’re to confer her adjustment in rank to Chief Warrant Officer, effective on the date noted, and mention that comes with a quarter point increase in shares for this flight – and that is all you are to tell her at this time.”
“And, that’s it?” Sir Ian grumbled. “But all that blather is normally transmitted internally, isn’t it?”
Dolby shrugged. “What the Company wants, the…”
“…the Company gets. Yes, yes, so I keep hearing. Any idea what this is all about?”
“No, not entirely, but I suspect it has something to do with her parents.”
“Obviously,” Sir Ian said. “But what the devil could they have done?”
“My guess is they’ve refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Leonidas, and that makes the situation a real problem.”
Tarkanian nodded in complete understanding. From what he remembered reading a few years ago, the Enterprise Battle Group was immensely powerful and could lay waste to entire planets, and the thought of an old school U.S. Navy admiral showing up in orbit over New Sparta with that fleet had to be keeping the imperial court up at night – because there was nothing at all in the new “Navy” capable of stopping Ripley and his fleet. If the admiral were to refuse to cede the disappearance of the old United States of America, and if they were to attempt to…
“Ah yes, I see the problem,” Tarkanian sighed.
“Do you? Well then, good, that’s excellent.”
Sir Ian nodded. The one thing that might sway Admiral Ripley could very well be to throw his daughter’s future into the mix. To, in effect, hold her hostage? Obviously the intel services would have to use the Company to pull off something like that, and he wondered what Dolby had come up with?
+++++
There were currently three Tesotek 2100-B bulk ore carriers on Thedus, and as the captain of the Nostromo looked at the dispatcher’s display he sighed, then turned away in anger when he realized only one had been – partially – loaded. Time was money and this screw-up, Arthur Dallas knew, was going to cost the Company some real money. Though the ore separators would continue to process the bulk ore during the flight back to Sparta, tight construction deadlines on the imperial planet meant that a late arrival would slow progress on any number of major construction projects nearing completion, as a late ore arrival meant unnecessary delays in steel and aluminum production – and these types of delays always rippled downstream into further production bottlenecks and even more delays. Still, because Sparta was such a pristine, not to a mention gorgeous world, the Crown had long since decreed that the home of the imperial aristocracy would not suffer the same fate as Earth, and that meant ores would not be extracted from within Sparta, and to this day only the barest minimum hydro-carbon emissions were permitted. Turning these ores into steel beams and aluminum sheathing were considered within this framework, for the time being, anyway, but these ore ships carried an even more precious cargo.
Because in addition to the iron ores and bauxite carried in the massive storage domes, more than 110 tons of refined gold and and 35 tons of palladium had already been secured inside Nostromo’s internal cargo bays, and the Crown desperately needed these precious metals to pay for the massive infrastructure projects already in progress – both on Sparta and on the eleven settled worlds of the Co-Dominium.
Thomas Kane, Nostromo’s XO, pulled himself into the dispatch office wearing his habitually dour face, his eyes studying the latest ore download rates and departure estimates as he floated over to Captain Dallas. “Call it thirty hours to finish the load-out, and then two more hours to pressurize the reactor and dock with the refinery module,” Kane said.
Dallas knew it was almost impossible to maneuver into position and secure the docking clamps to a Tesotek in less than four hours, and he’d already guesstimated the time needed to finish loading the four domes with raw ore, so he wondered what Kane was up to. “We have any passengers this trip?”
“No, not this time,” Kane said. These bulk ore runs were slow, but passage could be booked on the cheap – and with no questions asked – because the crew usually pocketed the proceeds from these off-the-book transits.
“Any crew changes?”
“No. Lambert is still on NAV, Walter on Science, Ripley has the stick and it looks like we’re stuck with Parker and Brett again down in Engineering. Oh, in case you haven’t heard yet, Ripley’s promotion to CWO just came through, so she can officially handle all flight deck duties now.”
“Wow, that fast? Well, three more runs and she can sit for the Commissioned Officer’s Exam, then she’ll be gunning for your job…”
“You still gonna retire from the merchant marines?”
“Yup. This is my last trash run, Tom. I’ll be flying passengers between Sparta and New Chicago by this time next year.”
“Oh? Did your orders come through?”
Dallas held up a hand-held screen and pointed to an entry. “Final interview a week after we finish unloading.”
“Hey, congratulations! About time!”
“Thanks, Tom. Four more round trips and then you can sit for the exam, right?”
“You got that right. No more hyper sleep for me.” Big bulk haulers like Nostromo were simply too massive to generate Langston Fields, so they relied on a constant 1.1G acceleration to get up to near light speed, then at the halfway point flipped and applied a 1.1G braking thrust until reaching Sparta. If the ship ran into trouble, Earth was near the halfway point and the old Lunar Gateway was their alternate.
Joan Lambert floated in and Dallas immediately looked at the navigator’s fingernails – because she was constantly chewing on them, often to the point where they were a bleeding mess wrapped in gauze. The woman was perpetually nervous and, generally speaking, suspicious to the point of paranoia. Ripley was the only one onboard that seemed to get along with her, too, leaving Dallas to conclude that Lambert had been through a few bad relationships with men. Then again, he’d heard rumors that Lambert and Parker had a sex-type-thing of their own going on, so who knows, maybe he was wrong about her.
“Any surprises on our route this time, Joan?” Dallas said to Lambert as she hovered nearby – doing his best to ignore the little bits of fingernail under her perpetually scowling lower lip.
“Possible comet as we approach the Terran Oort Cloud. Nothing else listed,” she said – just before she began chewing on a thumb nail.
Dallas shook his head and looked away. “Oh, by the way, Ripley’s Chief Warrant Officer rating came through, just in case that comes up.”
Lambert nodded but she looked away, too. She’d been passed over for CWO two times already, which meant she was trapped now, that she’d spend the rest of her time with the Company as a navigator. Her only way up the ladder would be to dump flight status and go teach at the old merchant marine academy on Mars, something she had been considering for a while. Still, she’d need a few more trips to be considered for a ground-side teaching assignment, and she was already coming up on thirty years old. “That was quick,” Lambert finally said. “How long before we head out to the ship?”
Dallas looked at Kane again. “You want to take Ellen and go make sure the food-paks werereloaded correctly this time?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Dallas nodded and then turned to Lambert. “We’d better go out and make sure Mother has the mission parameters sequenced correctly, and that her fuel calculations tally with yours.”
“Now?” Lambert asked.
“Yeah, now; unless you’ve got something better to do?”
“I’ll have to go download the files – and format a new drive,” she said, exasperated by having been asked to do her job.
“Okay,” Dallas said, suddenly tired of trying to work around Lambert’s incomprehensible moods. “Why don’t you bring out a hard copy, too. Just in case I want to look over the route.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, Lambert nodded brusquely and pushed off. “See you up at the ramp,” she said before she disappeared down the access way that led to the NAV Center.
“Where’s Ripley?” Kane asked Dallas, shaking his head at Lambert when she finally drifted out of sight.
“Still in the BOQ with that goddamn cat; at least she was a half hour ago.”
“You want anything special this trip?”
“No, not really. Whatever the kitchen comes up with is fine by me.”
“We all liked that green stuff last trip out of here. Tasted kind of like spinach.”
Dallas shrugged and turned to his personal correspondence; Kane took the hint and turned to push off and make his way out to the BOQ, or the Bachelor Officer Quarters – relishing the pure freedom of zero-G up here in the orbital base station – while it lasted.
+++++
The Nostromo was a Lockheed Martin CM-88B Bison, an M-class interplanetary tug powered by one ChiCo contained fission pile reactor and two Westinghouse fusion plants. Power in a vacuum was provided by four large Rolls-Royce ion drives, while the command module was designed to detach for flight into known atmospheric conditions using either a scramjet or two high bypass turbofan engines. She was larger in all aspects than the ocean liners of the early 20th century, and could generate enough power to supply the needs of a small city. That such a huge machine could be handled by a crew of seven was a testament to the power of the computer that, in truth, really ran the ship.
And for almost 20 years, the MU/TH/UR-5500 class computer had handled these routine duties, but M-class interplanetary tugs had recently switched over to the larger -6000 series. With six ten-terabyte cores, ‘Mother’ could handle the most complex astro-navigational chores with ease, and she interfaced with the computers servicing each of the ore processing towers, dispatching maintenance drones to all areas of the two ships.
Because both Walter and Gordon units could interface directly with Mother, though perhaps more a matter of economics, most ships were assigned synthetics as science officers. Their energy requirements were minuscule compared to human needs and, with the exception of the disastrous David model introduced in 2080s, synthetics subdued, quasi-human AI driven emotional reactions made them ideally suited to the conditions encountered during long-duration interplanetary voyages.
Dallas and Ripley were on the bridge entering waypoints into the ship’s INS, a new, state-of-the-art Thales Inertial Navigation System, while Lambert entered the same data – manually – into Mother’s NavDat terminal. Done this way, Mother could independently crosscheck that waypoints had been correctly entered before departure, as well as monitor the progress of the ship during the voyage. Making major course corrections during transit had to be approved by a bridge officers, and on this trip that meant either Dallas, Kane, or Ripley had to sign off on such changes.
Dennis Parker, the ship’s engineer, and his assistant, Sam Brett, had already double checked hull integrity as well as the the three docking clamp mechanisms that would be used to secure the refinery complex to Nostromo, and they were off to see that all provisions were up to date in the ship’s lifeboat, the same Narcissus-class lifeboat affixed to all CM-88 tugs. This meant ensuring the oxygen scrubbers and food-paks were all replenished and up-to-date, and that thehyper sleep chambers on the main deck were correctly pre-loaded with occupant information and their current flight profile.
Tom Kane, as the ship’s executive officer, was responsible for double checking Parker’s work, and more often than not he found maddening errors and glaring deficiencies, and while he’d long wanted Parker tossed out of the merchant marine, Parker, and to a degree his useless assistant Sam Brett, were protected by the powerful Spacer’s Union, so getting him fired would literally take an act of the crown, which meant it would never happen. Making his rounds behind Parker and Brett this morning he’d already found eight major errors in their pre-load settings, and he was only half way through his pre-takeoff checklist!
Ripley and Lambert had double checked the INS entries and now Ripley was waiting for the final load-out report so she could enter the cargo’s mass. With that information entered she could calculate the fuel requirements for the voyage as well as the fuel needed to enter a parking orbit around Sparta. Dallas would have to sign off on those calculations, and only then would the final flight profile be sent on to Mother for crosscheck and approval.
“Forty five minutes to cargo launch,” ground control said over the radio.
“We still need the numbers!” Ripley replied caustically.
“Right. Sending now,” a too young voice said over the circuit.
Ripley shook her head. Labor shortages were a fact of life in the Co-Dominium, and probably would remain that way for a hundred years, or so they’d been told. With more than ninety percent of the Earth’s population lost, automation had become more important than ever, but there were still too many things that required human intervention and judgement. Still, she’d been stunned to see a twelve year old girl working approach control in the tower on Thedus.
And as she entered the cargo weights and performed balance calculations she noticed a short, squat-necked man walking onto the bridge. He appeared to be in his 40s, if his close-cropped steel gray hair was any indication, and his facial expression seemed guarded, his eyes furtive, almost evasive.
The stranger walked over to Captain Dallas and handed him his orders.
His name was Ash, and he would be replacing the ship’s Walter for the duration of the voyage.
this chapter (c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple
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