Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow (27 page)

Removing his hands from his sweater pockets, Carlson now held a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter. “I
appreciate your efforts, Major. Please keep me informed of your progress.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Fellini cast glances to Wainwright and Marshall before adding, “If you’ll excuse me, I should get back to the search area.”

Once the major departed and the door closed behind him, Wainwright said, “There was no way he or his men could’ve known what they’d be up against.”

“I agree,” Carlson said. “I think we may need to invest more time and resources into enhancing the training of our security forces, if we’re going to ask them to be ready for events like this one.”

The door at the room’s opposite end opened to admit Mestral. He wore a suit similar to Wainwright’s, dark gray jacket and trousers with matching tie over a white shirt, with a fedora completing the ensemble. After Marshall had verified that the room’s primary entrance was locked, Mestral removed his hat, his hair now mussed just enough to expose the tips of his pointed ears.

“Good morning, Professor,” Mestral offered as he took a seat at the table. “It is good to see you again.”

Smiling, Carlson replied, “Same to you, son. Jim tells me he sent you to have a look at whatever’s left of the probe. What did you figure out?”

“There was very little worth examining,” Mestral said, clasping his hands before him, “and nothing with identifying markings remains, but the materials used in its construction are definitely of Vulcan origin. My people sent the probe.”

Marshall asked, “An unmanned version, this time?”

“Yes,” Mestral replied. “It is reasonable to theorize that my people have altered their surveillance methods in response to the incident involving my vessel in Carbon Creek,
Pennsylvania. They may have determined that the risk of discovery should such another ship be lost in similar fashion is too great. Based on my scans of the remaining debris, I believe the probe carried sufficient sensors and other recording devices that would have allowed it to transmit a comprehensive package of data back to my home planet for study by the Vulcan Science Academy.”

“If only everybody who’s sending ships and probes to study us were as nice about it as the Vulcans have been,” Wainwright said. Since its inception in the fall of 1947, Majestic 12—with the occasional assistance of Project Blue Book and its predecessors—had encountered no less than a dozen such vessels or unmanned craft, their construction and materials suggesting only a few of them had the same points of origin. A great deal of curiosity seemed to be aimed from the cosmos toward Earth, but only the Vulcans, in the form of Mestral, had been up front about their motives.

“Was it Vulcans who came looking for it?” Carlson asked between puffs of his dwindling cigarette.

“No,” Wainwright said, before Mestral could respond, and held up the folder he had been safeguarding. “It definitely wasn’t Vulcans.” As his three companions moved closer, he opened the folder and arranged on the table six color photographs, each of them taken as though the person holding the camera had been perched somewhere high above a floor, aiming downward at an angle. The first image depicted what Wainwright now knew was the Vulcan probe, in its former resting place inside Warehouse 13B, with an unidentified man in Air Force fatigues standing before it. Another picture showed two Air Force officers wearing standard duty uniforms, both brandishing .45 caliber pistols, and a third photo showed the two running in different
directions. The next set of three pictures showed the male officer fighting with another woman, this one also dressed in green fatigues, with the woman kicking the man in the chest, and the man suddenly gone, replaced by a dark figure. This was the picture Wainwright wanted everyone to see. “Does this guy look familiar?” he asked, tapping the dark figure shown in the photo.

“A Certoss,” Mestral said.

“Give the man from outer space a prize,” Wainwright replied. “Looks like our friends are back.” Moving aside that picture, Wainwright slid back the one with the other, unidentified woman. “Whoever she is, she was fighting the Certoss, which likely means she’s not one of them. If that’s the case, then who the
hell
is she?”

Carlson, leaning over Marshall’s shoulder, shook his head as he reached past her to stub out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray. “She’s not part of the project. I don’t recognize her.”

“Could she be part of another group?” Marshall asked. “Separate from ours?”

“No,” Carlson answered. “There are no separate groups outside the ones we’ve established. You may not be familiar with everyone connected to the project, Allison, but I certainly am.”

Wainwright moved the photograph closer to him. “So, who’s she working for?” He tapped the woman’s image. “She’s going toe to toe with this Certoss. Does that mean she’s not really human, either?”

“A plausible hypothesis,” Mestral said, “but it is impossible to arrive at such a conclusion with the available evidence.”

“Where did these pictures come from, anyway?” Marshall asked.

Sighing, Wainwright began gathering the photos. “Here’s
the part that’s going to stick in your craws.” From the folder, he produced a slip of paper containing a short, handwritten note. Holding it up with a bit of dramatic flair, he read aloud, “Mister Wainwright: I think I can help you, if you’ll let me. Name the time and place.” He looked up from the paper and frowned. “And it’s signed Cal Sutherland.”

“Sutherland?” Marshall repeated, her expression one of shock. “That tabloid reporter? Are you kidding?”

Wainwright nodded. “One and the same.” For Carlson’s benefit, he added, “You remember this guy, right? Writes for that UFO magazine we talked about a few years ago. He’s got fans all over the country, and a lot of his stuff is pretty good. He manages to get interviews out of people even after we’ve visited them and asked them to keep things quiet, and some of the photos he runs are as good as if not better than ones we’ve gotten ourselves.”

“We think he has somebody inside the project,” Marshall said, “feeding him information. We’ve tried to smoke out his contacts, but we’ve never had any luck. Whoever’s talking to him is pretty good at covering their tracks.”

Carlson smiled. “I should think so. It’s me.”

The simple, blunt statement took a few extra seconds to register, but when it did, Wainwright found himself stumbling over whatever he was about to say, which now was forgotten. “What?” he managed to stammer out. “
You’re
his inside man?”

Marshall leaned forward in her chair, her face a mask of disbelief. “Holy hell.”

“Intriguing,” Mestral offered.

Carlson’s smile widened. “I have to say, giving him such salacious information has improved his magazine by leaps and bounds over the years.”

Wainwright closed his eyes and shook his head, as though the action might force away what had to be a delusion he was suffering. When he opened his eyes and Carlson still stood before him, he scowled. “Why in God’s name would you . . . ?”

“Because even though he’s a civilian,” Carlson said, “Sutherland’s a natural for this kind of work. Do you know how many leads you’ve followed that resulted from something he stumbled across? You didn’t know that, of course, because that information was withheld from you, but I’ve had my eye on him for several years now.”

“We know!” Marshall said. “You sent us out to California to throw him off our scent, remember? To see if he had anything that might be damaging.”

“I had to make it look like we were trying to deal with him the same way we deal with anyone who gets too close to our activities,” Carlson replied. “If I treated him any differently, other MJ-12 committee members would’ve gotten suspicious.”

“He almost shot me!” Wainwright snapped.

Carlson held out his hands. “All right, I’ll admit
that
part was unexpected. Look, Sutherland can go places we can’t go and do things we can’t do without getting all tangled up in yet another knot of red tape. Blue Book doesn’t have the backing in Congress it once did. They want to shut the whole thing down. The project’s public face is a laughingstock. Unless that turns around, we’ll have to let it fade away and continue our work in secret, and that will be harder to do if we don’t have a legitimate investigation effort that people can see.”

“It’d be nice to get a little support from the brass,” Wainwright said, “instead of playing this game where we look like idiots.” The initial efforts by Project Blue Book’s previous
director, Major Friend, to revitalize its serious investigative activities had enjoyed some success, but he had been hampered by a lack of funding and support. Meanwhile, Majestic 12 and its ancillary units continued their work without interruption, often taking from Blue Book the responsibility for checking out reports of sightings and other odd activities around the country where there was a high probability of making a legitimate discovery and recovery. Several of the officers and other support personnel originally assigned to Blue Book, Wainwright and Marshall in particular, also had been absorbed into the Majestic 12 hierarchy. On paper, Blue Book numbered fewer than a dozen personnel, and its mandate was to debunk as many sightings as possible. This tended to leave Friend and the project with little more than witnesses and reports that were refuted with little difficulty, and in turn this had brought about a growing cynicism that most if not all UFO sightings were hoaxes.

Having grown disgusted with the entire affair, Friend had requested reassignment and was replaced the previous month by a new officer, Major Hector Quintanilla. By all accounts, Blue Book’s new director seemed content not to disrupt the project’s current status quo, a situation that chafed Wainwright. In his eyes, it was a mistake to discount Blue Book’s usefulness. Political backing was waning, and with that went any sort of true commitment to funding or resources. Beyond the people in this room, Wainwright could count the number of supporters for the entire effort on his hands, with fingers to spare.

Marshall asked, “We’re just supposed to let this guy do his thing? You’re going to keep feeding him intel?”

“For now, yes,” Carlson replied, pulling another cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lighting it. “He may prove
useful, one day. We certainly haven’t been able to find the Certoss agents. Given what’s at stake, we need all the help we can get.”

Mestral added, “There is logic to the professor’s actions. Cultivating an asset of Sutherland’s apparent talent could prove beneficial.”

Nodding, Wainwright was forced to offer grudging agreement. Despite a hunt that had lasted more than five years, they still were no closer to finding and apprehending the Certoss aliens, let alone preventing them from carrying out their plan to destroy Earth at some future point. There was no way to know how they might accomplish such a goal, but both Mestral and Carlson seemed convinced that it would entail the United States and Russia somehow being duped into another war—a conflict that almost certainly would involve nuclear weapons. Was that possible? Wainwright’s mind boggled at the horrific possibilities. Were the Certoss capable of pulling off such a spectacular, disastrous ploy?

Not a theory I want to see tested
.

TWENTY-TWO

U.S.S. Enterprise

Earth Year 2268

“Colonel Abrenn, surely there must be some way to resolve this situation peacefully to everyone’s satisfaction.”

Sitting in the command chair, Kirk stared at the image of the Tandaran ship commander on the
Enterprise
bridge’s main viewscreen, noting the colonel’s tight-lipped expression. That same expression was mirrored on the faces of those subordinates who happened to be captured on-screen.

Fun at parties, I’m guessing.

“
Captain Kirk,
” Abrenn said, his voice low and controlled, “
we now are close enough for our scanners to register the presence of the Certoss vessel in your docking bay. We also detect ten Certoss life-forms aboard your ship. The class of craft you have taken into your custody supports a maximum of nine persons, so I must now ask you to explain this mysterious tenth individual
.”

At the science station, Spock turned his chair in Kirk’s direction. “Interesting, that they are so familiar with the operational parameters of Certoss vessels.”

“
It’s not a matter of interest, Captain,
” Abrenn countered. “
It is the duty of the Tandaran Defense Directorate to be versed in the capabilities of all potential enemies
.”

Kirk rose from his chair, moving to stand before the helm
and navigation console. “Colonel, we’ve been over this. The Certoss pose no threat to Tandar Prime, and you and I both know why that’s the case. Minister Ocherab and her crew haven’t shown the slightest indication that they’re anything but what they say they are: a peaceful people.” He strode closer to the screen, his gaze hardening as he focused on Abrenn. “In another
time,
that might not have been true, but rest assured you have nothing to fear in the
here and now
.”

Abrenn scowled, his eyes locking on Kirk as though trying to bore through him. “
It seems you do possess some understanding of our concerns. Then perhaps you can explain to me why one of the Certoss exhibits a temporal phase variation that suggests she has traveled here from another time period. A similar disparity appears to exist in two other life-forms aboard your ship, Captain: a human and a Vulcan. I find that interesting, to say the least
.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Colonel,” Kirk said, though he cast a glance in Spock’s direction only to see that his first officer already had returned to his console, no doubt performing some kind of information retrieval from the ship’s computer memory banks. “Perhaps you could explain what you mean?”

Abrenn said nothing for several seconds, to the point that the silence was becoming awkward, before replying, “
I have neither the time nor the inclination to play such games, Captain. Suffice it to say that we are well aware you are harboring three time travelers. Surrender them, and the crew of the Certoss vessel
.”