SECTOR 64: Ambush (7 page)

Vic's heart skipped a beat as a loud explosion ripped him from his awed trance. As if belatedly reacting to his ejection handle pulls, the canopy's jettison bolts exploded. Victor squeezed his eyes shut and ducked his head, bracing for the anticipated rush of wind, but it never came. Opening his eyes, he watched the separated canopy float away as if it were in the zero gravity of space.

In spite of the slow-motion fall, Victor could feel the desert growing closer. "Time to get the hell out!" He actuated the seat-belt release, intent on a manual bailout. As soon as the harness unlatched, he felt an odd tugging sensation in his abdomen. Before he could react, Victor was yanked clear of the fighter. "Oh shit!" He flailed, belatedly grasping for a handhold. All senses screamed free-fall, but there was no wind, and the desert still wasn't rushing up.

The tugging sensation increased, pulling him across the narrow gap. In an adrenaline-induced temporal disconnect, he perceived the half-second crossing in slow motion. Bridging the gap, he watched the ship's incredible pulsing, multicolored, ring of lights pass less than two feet overhead. Reaching out, Victor's hand grazed the ethereal beams. For a fraction of a second, it felt like the center of the ship contained the mass of a black hole. Caught in its tremendous gravitational field, his hand slammed down like a metal rod to a magnet, but the instant it passed out of the light, the force evaporated. However, the gentle tugging sensation in his gut persisted.

Passing beyond the ring of lights, Vic flew under the strange ship. Like a hole in the sky, it loomed over and ahead of him, obscuring half the world. Its barely perceptible black mirror skin appeared to absorb almost all light that fell on its surface. Heart racing, he threw his hands up to absorb the imminent impact.

Just as Victor was about to hit, he heard tearing paper, and the skin in his path vaporized. He floated into the ship, and the skin resealed, plunging his weightless body into a silent mind-swallowing void.

Hyperventilating, he floated in darkness. His panicked mind raced as he tried to comprehend what was happening. Wide-eyed, Vic snapped his head left and right in a desperate search for visual clues.

Nothing.

Something touched the sole of his boot. Victor screamed. After a moment of panicked flailing, he realized it was the floor. Gravity was returning. A few seconds later, he crouched on a textured metallic surface. Still in complete darkness, Vic reached overhead. Finding no obstructions, he slowly stood.

"What a panty-waste," his mother chided through a mirthless laugh.

"Not now, Mother," Victor whispered. Looking down, he shook his head. Now that her pestering persona had setup camp in his thoughts, she'd not soon stop. In the deafening silence, his heart pounded like an express locomotive. "Pull it together," he whispered. Closing his eyes, Victor held his breath in a desperate attempt to rein in his terror. After a few seconds and with no further comments from his overbearing maternal mental hitchhiker, he exhaled. Feeling calmer, he extended his arms sideways and ahead, probing for a wall. After a moment, he realized he could see his hands as dark silhouettes against a dimly glowing background.

Facing away from the wall he'd passed through, Victor edged forward until his hands brushed against a surface. As he swept them left and right, the ivory glow intensified, revealing he'd passed into a small oval-shaped room. A gray floor formed the only flat surface.

"What the hell is th—?" The wall vaporized under his fingertips as a tearing paper sound echoed through the small space. Victor jumped and stumbled backward, not stopping until slamming his back into the outer skin.

Blinking and panting, he stared at the new opening. A six-foot section of the wall had dematerialized, creating a doorway leading deeper into the ship's interior. Beyond, impenetrable darkness swallowed the light from Victor's small room.

Standing, he studied the door and dark void beyond. As his eyes adjusted, he began to perceive soft light in the next chamber. It was much larger than his small oval-shaped room.

Inching forward, sure any moment a fanged alien would pop out and snatch his life, Victor worked his way to the opening where he froze, unsure how to proceed.

The disembodied voice of his widowed mother chastised, "Come on, pussy, grow some balls!"

The woman's nagging and berating began in earnest during Victor's eleventh year, following his father's untimely death. Every time she found her only child unworthy of the title: man of the family, she showered him with insults, belittling Vic in front of friends and family alike.

In his head, her unending denigration continued. "You pansy, if they wanted you dead, you'd be a crispy bug stain on the desert floor."

Goaded into action, he crouched and poked his head through the opening for a quick scan. Inside, he discovered a large circular room that appeared to span the entire width of the ship.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his heart skipped a beat. Three figures stood in the center of the large space. Victor was on their left. They weren't looking in his direction. Although, in the darkness he couldn't be sure.

Thinking of Neil Armstrong's famous words, he extended a trembling leg into the ship's main cabin.
One small step, my ass
.

Not comfortable with the thought of sneaking up behind unknown aliens, and unwilling to shout 'Here I am!' he turned left, planning to follow the curving exterior wall until the aliens acknowledged his presence.
Or eat me
.

Before Victor finished his third step along the curved surface, the entire wall—a full one-third of the ship's horizontal circumference—vanished. The view outside shocked him into momentary paralysis. Recognizable from any altitude, the brilliant lights of Las Vegas receded over a shrinking curved horizon. Looking down between his boots, Vic saw the black void of the Grand Canyon slide into view. Finding himself precariously balanced on a ledge miles above the surface, broke his paralysis. Launching backward, toward the middle of the ship, Victor landed gracelessly on his ass. He crab-walked a few feet farther before dawning realization froze him.

If the wall had vaporized, he'd have been sucked out. Vic didn't know their exact altitude, but he knew they were already well above an airliner's cruising level. Judging by Earth's curvature, they were gaining more altitude every second. Considering the contained pressure differential, he knew there must be something physical present. Either the wall had turned clear or a forcefield was in place.

Loath to let any gaff go unnoticed, his mother chimed in. "Sure, just sit there, pussy. I'm sure the big scary aliens are duly impressed."

Victor shook his head. He could practically hear the spittle flying from her pursed lips. Subvocalizing, he said, "Shut up, mother." Gathering himself and steadying his nerves, Lieutenant Croft stood and crept back to the wall. Looking down, he could see they had climbed above the atmosphere, reaching orbital velocity and altitude in the few moments it took him to clear the small room. Looking back to its opening, Victor recognized it as an airlock.

The acceleration must have been incredible, but he'd never felt the ship move. Somehow, this vessel's interior was disconnected from inertia. Thinking of how they'd pulled him into the ship, Vic realized the ship must also control gravity.

Looking over his right shoulder, he saw the three beings still hadn't acknowledged his presence. As far as Victor could tell, they hadn't even reacted to his graceless dismount of the imagined planetary-scale precipice. A walking thesaurus in the vernacular of her son's unending failures, his mother would've described that little foible as maladroit.

Shaking off the thought, he studied the figures. From his closer vantage point, he realized they were standing behind a console. Oriented toward the center of the wide clear wall, it was about four feet tall and topped with an angled curving glass. Like holograms in a science fiction flick, enigmatic three-dimensional multicolored figures floated over its surface.

In height and width, the three beings appeared to have the same proportions as a human. Each had two arms and two legs. However, Vic couldn't discern anything beyond that in the ship's dark interior.

The holograms seemed to respond to their manipulations, although it was impossible to tell what they were doing from this distance. He saw the center figure's shadowed head look beyond the control panel as if studying something outside.

Falling back to his original plan, Vic crept along the invisible wall—keeping a respectful distance from the miles-high ledge.

He divided his attention between the aliens on his right and the incredible panorama to his left. Below, cities formed beautiful pools of scintillating lights. As the ship continued eastward, their prevalence increased until there was more city than dark countryside. Then it abruptly ended. White light gave way to the zigzagging black boundary of a dark ocean. "Holy shit," Vic whispered. They were already passing over the Atlantic Ocean.

The ship started a slow rotation. Originally oriented backward, its clear wall had been facing west. Still traveling east, the vessel turned through north. As it slowly rotated to face the oncoming eastern horizon, a carmine sun peeked from behind Earth's curved surface. A thin red beam sliced from right to left across the cabin's dark interior. Rising through the layers of the atmosphere, the orb changed from red to orange and then to yellow. As the vessel continued its clockwise eastern rotation, the sun painted a sweeping mural of shifting colors across the room's left wall.

Having reached the front center, Victor took a deep breath and turned to face the beings. Silhouetted against the eastern horizon's glow, he stood between their apparent control console and the clear wall, feeling naked, exposed. However, the ship hadn't finished its rotation. His hosts remained dark voids in the room's brightening interior. Behind him, the sun continued along its horizontal arc, its brightening rays slowly banishing the ship's internal shadows. Marching inexorably across the ship's interior, the sun's light finally fell across the trio.

Victor froze, unable to comprehend what he saw.

"This doesn't make sense." Confusion morphed into anger. He screamed, "What the hell is going on here?"

Unresponsive, the three perfectly normal human beings simply stared back.

"What are you doing? You nearly kill me and my wingman, you crash my fighter, and scare the
shit
out of me. What the
fuck
?"

Silent and expressionless, they continued to stare at Victor.

He looked around. "Where'd this ship come from, anyway?"

Infuriatingly, they just stared back, mild humor the only detectable emotion.

Finally, the center one answered in a heavily accented language. Victor didn't understand the words. They sounded like Afrikaner, but all wrong.

"What?" he asked.

The apparent leader held up his right index finger in a hold-on gesture. His other hand moved back to the strange looking panel.

A rotating, three-dimensional green hologram of a human brain emerged from its surface. Rising above the control panel, it hovered between them. Victor looked from the hologram to the man with a questioning look. To his surprise, the holographic brain mimicked his head's movements. Thinking it might be a coincidence, Vic turned his head left and right. The green brain did the same.

A vertical stack of holographic cubes streamed through the air to the left of the brain. Each block had a different color and a unique symbol. No longer worried the ship's occupants might be toothy aliens with a taste for human flesh, Victor stepped in for a closer look. He thought the symbols on the boxes might be part of some arcane computer language.

The center man apparently found what he was looking for. He made a gesture, and the cascading cubes rolled to a quick stop. Reaching into the hologram, he tapped a virtual box. To Victor's surprise, the cube moved as if it had mass. As it slid out of the column, a new cube, identical in color and symbol to the one now in the leader's hand, coalesced out of thin air, filling the vacated slot. Raising it to eye level, the man looked at Victor through the semitransparent purple cube and grinned. The holographic brain swelled to the size of a beach ball. Winking at Victor, the man tossed the cube into it.

Forming concentric rings, small waves radiated from the point of impact, like water disturbed by a falling rock. An oilcan popping sound rang out as the cube breached the surface.

Dizzying vertigo buckled Victor's knees. He fell backward. Something resembling a lounge chair rose from the floor and caught him. He sat unmoving, disoriented by a strange tingling sensation. It felt like something was tickling his brain. As the impression passed, he shook his head.

Victor looked up at the three men staring down on him. Before he could ask them what had happened, the leader spoke again.

***

"Before I could say anything, he spoke again." Victor said. The enigmatic smirk returned. "And, I understood him perfectly."

Confused, Jake closed his gaping mouth. "What do you mean? Was he speaking English?"

"No, he was still speaking in that strange language."

"And, you could understand him?"

"Yep."

Maddeningly, Vic didn't elaborate. He just sat there grinning.

Jake grew impatient. "What? What did he say?"

After a theatric pause, Lieutenant Croft continued. "He said, 'Welcome home, brother.'"

"This is where it gets interesting," a new voice said from the doorway.

Jake turned to see a wiry middle-aged Air Force brigadier general enter the room.

All three men scrambled to their feet and snapped to attention in response to the sudden appearance of a very senior Air Force officer.

The officer chuckled. "At ease, gentlemen."

Relaxing from rigid attention, Jake turned and read the general's name tag: TANNEHILL. It was the uttered name that had ended his interrogation. Looking at Richard, Jake cocked an eyebrow. "And, the plot thickens."