Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (10 page)

Christopher nodded.

They were turning around to head back when something prickled at the back of Trevor’s head. “Captain Jons.”

The big man turned.

“My father wanted me to check in with you anyway.”

Jons looked ready to roll his tired eyes. “What about?”

“One of the officers was mentioning problems with surveillance feeds,” Trevor lied. Christopher looked over, confused.

Jons’s eyes scrunched down. He looked perplexed then seemed to maybe recall something barely worth mentioning — a minor distraction that had taken a back seat to the current chaos. Which was expected because Trevor hadn’t heard anything about surveillance from his father at all, and had been anticipating a no.

Instead, Jons said, “Yeah. We did have a glitch. But it was just this morning. Like, a minute before those fucking things swarmed the station. How did you even hear about it?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Trevor puffed his chest. “Just get it fixed, okay?”

“Sure,” said Jons, mystified. And ordinarily, Trevor would have been mystified too, except that one of the images forced into his mind by the passing Reptar had looked an awful lot like an alien mind might see Terrence: dark sunglasses looking like deep eye pits, his head surrounded by a wide halo of giant black hair.

The Reptars had been to see Terrence today — and if Trevor could trust the feeling behind the impression, they didn’t quite believe whatever he’d told them.

Disturbing camera feeds to bury the truth sounded
exactly
like the kind of thing Terrence might do after being questioned by Astrals — Terrence, whom Trevor had been suspecting for months, was up to something.

“Which feed has been glitchy?” Trevor tried turning the question into an afterthought.

“Northeast, at the border.” The captain pointed, and Trevor knew what was coming — what Terrence had been trying to hide from prying eyes.

“Near the church,” he added.

C
HAPTER
11

“Here.”

Benjamin looked up. Charlie was above him, having made his delivery of important information with all of Charlie’s trademark tact. The bug-eyed scientist was standing beside him, his hand still planted on the colorful printouts he’d slapped onto Benjamin’s desk, his brown-gray beard a tidy mess. His bespectacled eyes were meeting Benjamin’s as if in accusation.

“You run these by Ivan?” Benjamin asked.

Charlie shook his head. “Ivan would try to find nukes if he were smart enough to understand what you said — and didn’t say — about Thor’s Hammer. There are plenty of nukes left out there even after Black Monday, and if anyone knows how to launch them, it’s a guy like Ivan.”

“You don’t like him, do you, Charlie?”

“This used to be a place of research and knowledge, not war.”

Benjamin shrugged. Through the office window, on the main laboratory floor, Danika was watching them. Benjamin gave her a slight nod, telling her it was okay to come over and see what they were discussing — but as Charlie had indicated, not to inform Ivan. Between the three of them, “don’t tell Ivan” was the default.

“It’s still a place of research,” Benjamin said.

Charlie sat like a mannequin, or possibly someone whose bones had been replaced by rods. “I don’t want Ivan seeing those maps.”

Danika arrived. She closed the office door behind her, intuiting the room’s mood.

“What maps?”

“Charlie got these off of GeoSurvey.” Benjamin tapped the stack of documents. “Topological, but also seismics and a handful of others.”

Danika picked up the stack and leafed through the maps. All were of Heaven’s Veil and the surrounding mountains where Meyer Dempsey’s Axis Mundi had once stood.

“Who don’t you want to see them? Ivan?”

Benjamin nodded.

“Are they what I think they are?”

“You see what they are.”

Danika looked at Charlie, annoyed. “I meant, are they
for
what I think they’re for?”

“Maybe you could propose what you think they’re for instead of playing guessing games?”

“Shut up, Charlie.”

“Some scientist you are.”

“Shut
up
, Charlie!”

“Yes,
Danika,” Benjamin said, eyes on Charlie. “I wanted them so we could get an idea what’s underground at Heaven’s Veil. And as you indicated, we don’t have Ivan here because — ”

“Because he’ll nuke the mountain.”

“Right.”

Benjamin had already sifted through a similar set of maps and was reasonably sure of what he’d see. But he’d wanted to be thorough. And per the typical scientific investigation, thorough meant boring. Movies made it look like science was filled with the flash and dazzle of discovery, but Benjamin had been doing this for his entire life, usually with Charlie by his side. Most of the time was spent eliminating dead ends and verifying things they already knew rather than finding new information. It was like searching for your car keys by checking everywhere in the world you were sure you
couldn’t
have left them, just to be sure.

Not surprisingly, the new maps were as unhelpful as the previous ones.

“There’s nothing here,” Danika said.

Benjamin nodded. Across from him in the chair, seeming snug in his discomfort, Charlie did and said nothing.

“Right,” Benjamin answered. “Because why would anyone do more than the most rudimentary survey on an area with nothing special about it? You can find all sorts of sonic soundings and blast analysis on the world’s buried cities, but who scopes a random mountain? A mountain in the middle of a bunch of hoity-toity real estate?” Benjamin set the maps on the desk. “So we’re still at zero.”

“But you’re sure it’s there. A buried temple or something,” said Danika.

“Of course I’m not
sure
. Charlie, are
you
sure that Thor’s Hammer is hidden at Vail?”

“I have neither confirmed nor rejected a single null hypothesis.”

Benjamin gestured at Charlie as if his eloquent answer said it all. “But they’re digging. You know they’re digging.”

“The footage Terrence’s people sent us shows excavated soil and rocks leaving the Apex.”

“But does that mean they’re looking for Thor’s Hammer?”

“What else would they be looking for?”

“Point of consideration though,” said Charlie. “This is the race that built the pyramids. Not the new ones. The old ones. Are we really to believe they need to get in there with shovels and hunt around like nineteenth century coal miners?”

“Maybe it’s delicate,” Danika suggested.

“Maybe there’s interference or something,” Benjamin said. “Maybe they’re working blind.”

Charlie slapped a hand on the table. “Oh, come on.
Humans
can set up explosives and observe the echoes to see what’s down there. These beings travel through space in ships that defy conventional physics. We can’t even imagine how what they do is possible — or why, when they can fly so fast, they took so much time to arrive in the first place. I have a hard time believing that if they want to find something under Vail, they can’t just look through that mountain as if it were glass.”

“Maybe they know where it is but need time or precision to reach it.”

Benjamin ignored Danika and spoke to Charlie. “Come on, Charlie. You of all people know you can’t make an assumption like that. We’ve seen extensive evidence of a doomsday weapon throughout the historical records, and those are just the records that survived. The Library of Alexandria, when it burned, surely contained a lot of documents detailing what humanity knew then but will never know now. Even without more evidence of a Thor’s Hammer, what we have is clear enough. The pattern’s been the same forever: They come, they build, maybe they teach. There’s a brief period of maturity, sufficient that later cultures don’t understand how the growth could even be possible. Then, all at once, there’s a reset. Those advanced cultures — Egyptians, Mayans, and on and on — vanish, leaving a handful of dumb ancestors who grow up able to do none of the things the old cultures could.” He raised a hand and ticked off points. “Not just the megaliths, but monuments like the Nazca lines, Sanskrit texts describing Vimanas and other obviously flying craft, the writings in the Zohar of the manna machine, the list goes on. Maybe past visitors have just wiped memories and destroyed records to erase all this knowledge instead of invoking a mass extinction, but then why do we sometimes hear the Ark of the Covenant described as if it were a radiation weapon?”

“Your point?” Charlie said.

Benjamin tapped around on his computer, displaying images of blue faux-glass monoliths in the nine worldwide capitals.

“They
come
. They
build
.” He tapped the under-construction megastructures, all similar to the Heaven’s Veil Apex. “And based on some of the new tech blips coming from the cities, sufficient that we can get them, I’d say they’re
teaching
. But what’s next? Maybe there’s nothing under Vail, fine. But we can’t just dismiss the possibility because it seems unlikely based on, ‘Well, they’d just use The Force to get at it if something was there.’ Every one of these eight other spots, investigators have already known there’s been alien contact.
Every one
of the modern capitals other than Vail is a place we know they’ve visited before. So doesn’t it make sense — not as proof, but as a reason to not give up and say it probably isn’t so — that there might be something at Vail, too?”

“Giant spaceships,” Charlie emphasized. “
Psychic
giant spaceships. And this is how they conduct business. They build a pyramid then dig for gold like humans.”

“Excuse me,” Danika said, raising a hand.

“Yes. Danika has the floor.” Benjamin gestured for Charlie’s benefit.

“I said, what if they
do
know exactly where it is, right there under Vail, but can’t just ‘use The Force’ because it needs to be carefully excavated?”

“Like nineteenth century coal miners,” Charlie said.

“Like intelligent beings who know to be careful when unearthing an ancient weapon,” Danika retorted.

“That’s another thing,” Charlie said. “They can incinerate us no problem, but for some reason they need a doomsday device to finish us off. And they don’t just
require the device;
they
leave the device behind for thousands of years
instead of taking it with them.”

“You
know
there’s evidence of a shift in the Earth’s axis after each incursion. Maybe it’s something that’s necessarily planet based.”

“Now who’s grasping instead of using the scientific method?”

Danika sat on the edge of Benjamin’s desk, her always-thin patience snapping. “Okay, Charlie. So you don’t want to keep scoping GeoSurvey for maps to help us find what’s
obviously
not there. You don’t think we should have sent Cameron. You — ”

“I didn’t say we shouldn’t have sent Cameron. I also didn’t say we shouldn’t keep looking. I’m just saying it seems unlikely.”

“Well, then, duly noted. Charlie doesn’t have an alternative plan. He just wants to bitch about the plan we
do
have while the rest of us go about our business.”

Benjamin waved his hands, asking for peace.

Danika and Charlie stopped bickering, both turning to find his eyes.

“Look, none of this changes our plans. Maybe there’s nothing to the Thor’s Hammer theory, but it definitely seems possible, and we can’t just reject it on circumstance. It’s
also
still possible they’re really here to understand us and have no ill intentions. But I have trouble believing the benevolent-visitors angle these days.”

“Considering they keep killing humans and herding them into what are essentially internment camps,” Charlie said.

“Maybe they just have really bad people skills,” Danika offered. “Get it?”

“Regardless, it’s all just guesswork because we don’t have enough information. The best we can do is to — ”

Danika cut him off.

“Information is the problem. It really
is
just guesswork. The Internet’s back up, but so what? It’s clearly being controlled. I can’t raise half the sites I need, and we’re definitely being filtered from the Middle East and Asia, maybe Europe. I get the distinct impression that even what we’re getting from Central America is being … I don’t know … altered somehow? There’s just no way to parse fact from fiction.”

“We know they’re interfering,” Charlie said as if rehashing an exhausted topic. “Censoring, blocking IPs, actively changing what’s out there. It’s almost random. That’s what makes it so hard to work around. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

“Well,” said Benjamin, “then maybe I should tell you about something else I discussed with Cameron.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. This part had always been controversial, which is why he’d waited to mention it — until
after
the ship had already sailed.

Danika said, “What,” but it wasn’t a question.

“Something I sent with him. Something we need handled, no matter what.”

Danika’s dark-blue eyes regarded his. “What are you saying, Benjamin?”