Sleeper Seven (20 page)

Jess, spitting out her mouthful of beer, laughed a long, violent, choking laugh while grabbing at napkins to wipe up Gavin, the bar, and herself.

"Jesus, look at me. I'm a mess," she commented between coughs.

"Yeah, you are. But one thing you're not is sketchy. I know you won't tell anyone anything. Remember when I downloaded a torrent of
This is 40,
and after watching it, you went online and bought a theatre ticket you didn't even use?"

"It was a good movie! And I wanted to support the director. I like him," she replied apologetically.

"Yeah, well you made me buy one too!"

"It's the right thing to do, Gavin," she added testily.

"See what I mean! Your logic's a little twisted there, but I know your heart's in the right place. Pretty much S.O.P. for you."

"I know, right? But anyway, I've gotta go further, I need to know more. It doesn't make any sense. I can't go through life with this. How could I live a normal life, knowing this?"

"You know I'll support you best I can, sugar-smacks. Whatever you need. For now, though, have another," he said, sliding over a fresh bottle while daintily retrieving the slobbered-on one for disposal.

They ended up talking, drinking, and eating well into the evening, discussing everything about her trip — except for the best parts. As they stumbled home, Jess looked up at the few stars they could see in the city sky — actually planets, mostly — and she wondered where that ship was now, and whom they would be buzzing next. She needed to know what was going on. This wasn't her prying into their business — they were inserting themselves into the business of private citizens, and
she
was a private citizen, so...it was her business now too, she rationalized. But she wasn't an ordinary private citizen. She could see more, hear more, discover more, than most everyone out there.

And she would, beginning that very night.

~ 45 ~

A
s she lay on her bed, she found she was exiting even before starting her procedure; being buzzed certainly didn't seem to hurt the process.
I wonder if they know this at the Center,
she thought,
I'll have to email them about it later, might help to bring in new business. Maybe set up a deal with the local wineries
. Once out, however, she was perfectly sober, and instantly horrified at the monstrous snoring noise emanating from her body. Ignoring it, she placed her focus and intent on the ship, and felt the familiar pull of the tunnel.

She arrived to find the ship dark and empty. Moving outside the structure of the ship was difficult, as she became stuck several times due to the density of the material, but she eventually found lower density pathways to squeeze through.

What she found outside astounded her. She was inside a large airplane hangar, similar to the ones in Nevada, but this one was packed like sardines with dozens of similar black triangles. They were parked with only a few inches of clearance edge to edge, and opposite eachother, such that the rows of triangles formed a herringbone pattern all the way to the end of the hangar — easily a half-mile. From there, two other rows returned with smaller versions of the ship: one hundred foot and twenty-five foot spans, as compared to the larger versions like hers which were closer to three hundred feet on a side.

Interestingly, she didn't see any examples of the tiny craft she piloted to North Korea; these were all the same type of equilateral triangular ships with the rounded-off corners. Also, Jess could see these ships were supported by tripod legs that extended from the bottom, unlike her craft, which had no built-in supports. The smaller ones here also appeared to be pilotless drones, as they didn't even have the width to contain a usable cockpit like her small craft did.

She was able to get a good look at the exterior of the ship, as the waning light of the day filtered through an array of dirt-covered windows near the top of the hangar wall. The ship's surface was a textured matte-black with no reflectivity; it seemed to absorb most of the light hitting it. Embedded into one rounded corner were two large horizontally-directed headlights, which reminded her of the bluish halogen lights on newer cars. The half-sphere indentations underneath each corner were perfectly smooth with no nozzles or hardware within; they simply looked like giant ten-foot diameter golf ball dimples. Recalling her first sighting of this ship in operation, these were the areas that held the spheres of white fire, so she assumed these were the thrusters.

Across the middle of the ship's underside was a larger circular indentation about forty feet across, but shallower — only six inches deep at the most. Running in all directions within this area were small, inch-deep channels that formed the Hieroglyphic or Aztec patterns she sighted from her craft, whether decorative or functional, she had no idea. Near the perimeter of this inner circle were three large rectangular openings from which the supports extended down at an angle. In the exact center of the circle, enclosed in a red-tinted glass and wire cage, hung a single Edison filament light bulb, which looked quite out of place considering the technology of the machine it was affixed to.

Jess moved up and over the ship to view the top, which was featureless, with the single exception of a large diameter dome, similar to the depression on the underside in that it rose to only a few inches at its highest point. As she examined it, a twinkle caught her eye. Moving in closer, she observed a light at the apex of the dome, but embedded underneath the surface — not protruding like the red one below. This light was clear, but had a rainbow of different color filters within a rotatable housing, allowing the color of the light to change dynamically. This close inspection led her to take a longer look at the surface of the ship. The flat black finish was arranged into tiles, each of which contained an array of minuscule dots or bumps, reminding her of something that she couldn't quite place.

Although amazed at the engineering of this machine, the overall impression she got from this extended examination was more than a little confounding. The relatively small space for the crew meant this wasn't some sort of cargo or troop transport vessel, and the lack of any weaponry she could see — unless the thing shot lasers — meant it wasn't a fighting vessel. All of it added up to one thing — this machine was for stealthy observation only; a reconnaissance ship.

What still made no sense to her was that a ship designed for stealth would have an array of extremely bright lights on it. Perhaps they were needed in certain situations where stealth was not required, or maybe they were even part and parcel of the stealthiness. If the lights could dynamically change color, then they could imitate the standard running lights of any aircraft. Then again, they could also demonstrate that this was not a ship of this world — if that was the intended goal.

Something was just not right about it though. Jess knew the government already had hi-res satellite tracking, as well as high altitude recon planes, not to mention the standard stealth fighters that could do most anything these ships could do. Perhaps not with the finesse of this advanced ship, but still, there seemed to be no compelling reason to spend the billions of dollars that must have been invested to design, build, and test these things for the incremental value in recon. It seemed like a project the cold war mentality would generate, like the moon mission, where money was no object. In the relative safety of the post cold-war era, however, it just couldn't be justified in her mind.

What also couldn't be justified was the use of these things against an unknowing populace. That is what galled her. And she knew from Kal and Len that they were perfectly willing to run smear campaigns to discredit those trying to bring the truth forward. She wouldn't just carefully document the machinery and methods of use and try to raise awareness — there were probably people out there already doing this, to little effect. The majority of the population had no idea these things existed. It was like the Bigfoot she saw — nobody will believe in it until there is a body on a table somewhere. Jess realized she had to put the body on the table, so to speak. She had to provide incontrovertible evidence of these machines that were being actively used to harass innocent citizens, without a warrant — or any clear oversight whatsoever. So that's what she would do, she decided. She would take one.

Re-entering the ship, she moved towards one of the four consoles, the one with the UFO picture in the corner. Watching the pilots previously, she knew the ship was operated fully through these touch screen panels, so she attempted to manifest just the tip of a finger to operate it. Feeling it coalesce, she stabbed at the screen, causing it to spring to life. By varying the density, she found she didn't need to manifest any physical matter in order to operate the panel; there was some inherent property to the touchscreen design where just the hint of energy registered as a touch, and so she found it easy to manipulate.

The panel had four sections, with no text labels, only pictures. One section contained a triad of circles which she assumed was the three engines. Another showed a rotating 3D profile of the ship surrounded by some kind of force-field, which she surmised must be like the slipstream feature in her smaller craft. A third section had different options for camouflage, with pictures of day and night scenes, a box containing a picker for different types of conventional aircraft, and an icon of a muted speaker. A fourth section held various icons related to navigation or other miscellaneous options. Each section had sliders below it indicating the currently chosen degree of operation. Touching a section would bring her into a more detailed view of that component with both main and fine tuning controls.

When she felt comfortable with the layout, she attempted to bring the engines online. The familiar dull roar of the thrusters, similar to a jet engine, permeated the hangar. Switching panels, she increased the noise-cancellation effect on the stealth panel, and though this resulted in a considerable decrease in volume, it didn't abate the noise entirely. As the ship was still firmly on the ground, she raised the engines even further, to forty percent. When this had no effect, Jess tried to recall any exterior straps or tie-downs that she might have missed, and punching through the various panels, searched for something like an anchor icon, but found nothing.

Knowing she had little time, she abandoned her search and simply raised the engines higher, to seventy percent. Although the craft began to shudder, it still wasn't enough to lift even one support away from the hangar floor. Racking her brain, she couldn't understand what was holding back this advanced craft. Then she remembered the ring.

Navigating to that screen, she found the ring was fully disabled. Raising the power to maximum, the loud hum instantly drowned out the engine noise as the material liquified and spun up. With a jolt, the ship shot upwards, smashing an enormous hole through the roof of the hangar before Jess could regain control.

Rising at a dizzying speed, the ship began to vacillate wildly as the ground dropped away below. She remembered the action of the other pilot on re-entry, and stabilized the ship by enabling the slipstream-like feature. This calmed the ship's jostling, but had the side effect of facilitating an even faster ascent.

Flipping back over to the thruster console, she lowered the output to ten percent, slowing the climb. Looking up, however, she was confronted once again by a blanket of pinpoint starlights against the blackness of space: the ship had traveled twenty miles straight up in a matter of seconds. While stabilizing all of the systems, Jess began to experiment. Teaching herself how to manage the engines independently to initiate lateral movement, she glided the ship back down through the atmosphere in wide arcs, like a giant leaf falling from the night sky. With the ring online, maneuverability of the massive ship felt effortless. Bringing it all the way down to the treetops, she hovered and pulled up the navigation screen; the ship was currently in a rural area over southwestern Ohio, outside of a small town called Oxford. Watching the headlights of a distant car on the lonely country road below, she paused to consider what she wanted to accomplish.

She wasn't
stealing
the ship necessarily. They would get it back — she was sure of that — but she needed to make a statement. Not a wimpy couple-second drive-by like they do, but a
real
statement. She thought of bringing it back home to Chicago and landing it next to the Bean sculpture in Millennium Park. Fitting, yes, but at this time of night it might be hard for her to see the ground, and she was concerned about the physical safety of the people below her. Mental safety, not so much — she was going to freak the hell out of a whole bunch of folks — but she didn't want to squish anybody in the process. Then she thought:
Wrigley Field
. The Cubs were hosting a night game, and she could drop it smack dab in the middle of the brightly lit field, with only a few people to worry about scurrying out of the way. It was perfect.

~ 46 ~

I
t took Jess twenty minutes to navigate her way north by northwest over the fields of Indiana, and she narrowly missed hitting several giant white turbines as she zipped through a massive wind farm. Approaching Chicago from the east, over the darkness of Lake Michigan, she enabled maximum noise cancellation. Descending to a few hundred feet, she silently glided the ship over Lake Shore Drive, just clearing the tops of the century-old condo buildings that lined it. Although the visual camo was disabled, the ship was naturally so dark that she didn't notice any obvious observers.

Maneuvering the external cameras, she visually guided the ship slowly towards the lights of Wrigley. Slowing to ten miles per hour, she dropped even lower as the field came into view. A sea of blue caps appeared through the bottom viewing panels as she drifted over the rooftop bleachers across the street from the field. A cheer suddenly exploded from the crowd as the Cubs put three runners on base, and they all stood high-fiving each other, ready to see a Grand Slam.