53
"Where's my chopper?" Dr. Stephenson's voice crackled with annoyance.
"Sorry, sir. It was in the hanger for maintenance. A replacement is on its way now."
"I don't care if it's missing a blade. Get me a chopper here in the next thirty minutes or find yourself another job. Are you understanding me?"
"Yes, sir." The deputy director's secretary swept from his office, her face pinched and drawn.
Stephenson turned his attention back to the information streaming into his laptop. Unbelievable. After all these years, they had finally found the Second Ship. That damn Admiral Riles had ended up doing him the biggest favor he could imagine, and all because of the search for his rogue agents.
It was unfortunate that the search team that had stumbled across it had been a herd of local yokels with an AP reporter in tow. By now, they had climbed all over the thing. Oh well, the military was en-route to take control of that entire canyon, starting with the impact cavern. By this time tomorrow, that whole area would be under his direct control, a massive extension of Rho Division.
Stephenson picked up his cell phone and dialed.
"Major Adams." The voice on the other end was crisp with military efficiency.
"Major, this is Dr. Stephenson. What's your situation?"
"We have secured the cavern and escorted all the civilians back to the top of the canyon. I have a platoon of MPs establishing local security, but until we get a larger unit in here, we'll only be able to keep everyone back a few hundred meters."
"That'll be fine. I am going to be flying out there in the next half hour. Make sure you have someone up on the rim to clear a spot for my chopper to land."
"That won't be a problem, sir."
Stephenson flipped the phone closed and leaned back in his chair. Elizabeth might like to play the part of the abused secretary, but she was damn efficient. Whatever it took, she would have that chopper here on schedule. Then he'd get his first look at the starship that shot down his Rho Ship.
But first he had a call to make. Even he couldn't keep the president waiting forever.
Halfway through his call with the president, Elizabeth signaled that his helicopter had arrived, something that annoyed him even further, since he couldn’t get the damn politician to shut up. Surely, the president had some other schmuck on his staff who could brief him on this situation. As it was, Stephenson didn’t have much information to give.
By the time the deputy director’s helicopter settled down atop the finger of land above the starship crash site, Dr. Stephenson was having difficulty maintaining his traditional cool demeanor. He felt like a kid again, almost like he had on that day thirty years ago beneath Groom Lake, when he had been the one to open the Rho Ship.
As he stepped out of the aircraft into the gusts kicked up by the whirling rotor, Major Adams stepped forward to meet him.
“Follow me, sir.”
Stephenson didn’t like the major, but he admired the man’s efficiency. No fawning small talk about how he enjoyed his flight. Adams was strictly business. He knew what Stephenson wanted and wasn’t going to waste any time accomplishing the mission.
The top of the mesa was quickly becoming a madhouse. Several of the search parties had now converged on the area, so that the number of locals now surpassed the number of FBI agents. And the FBI appeared none too pleased that the military had taken control of the site.
A reporter yelled after Stephenson, but he ignored the man. Overhead, two news choppers circled, one of them a traffic copter from Santa Fe. The military needed to get some more reinforcements in here fast or they were going to have a hard time keeping all the press away, much less the horde of curious people that must be heading this way as fast as they could rent horses, mountain bikes, or even private helicopters.
The canyon slope was steep and shale covered, but within fifteen minutes, Dr. Stephenson found himself at the entrance to the gaping hole in the side of the canyon. The military police had thrown up a generator, which belched smoke and echoed loudly out into the canyon as it pumped current through the cables that led into the cavern. Just inside the entrance, a bank of flood lamps illuminated the cave in garish brightness, the edges of the craft casting stark, motionless shadows against the back wall.
The starship drew him forward. Its sides were smooth and rounded, a circular ellipsoid, as opposed to the cigar shape of the craft that sat within his high bay back at Rho Division. The walls and ceiling of the cave showed clear evidence of the force of the impact with which this ship had come down, yet the starship’s skin showed no sign of trauma.
Dr. Stephenson’s gaze swept the dust-covered floor of the cave. Shit. The whole thing was covered with fresh footprints. He could just imagine the search team that found it jumping up and down, running here and there, whooping, hollering, and acting like the pack of idiots they were.
Ducking under a spot where the edge of the starship wedged against the wall, Stephenson made his way to where an MP stood beside a stepladder. Accepting the flashlight offered by the MP, the deputy director paused, sweeping the beam upward.
A smooth hole had been cut through the craft’s outer hull, extending upward through multiple decks and out the top side. As impressed as he had been with the damage done to the Rho Ship, it was now clear which had more power. This ship had been penetrated in a way that implied that this section of hull had been disintegrated, although Dr. Stephenson doubted that was the case. As he examined the smooth contours of the hole’s lower edge, his confidence in his guess about the physics that produced it grew.
Disintegration had nothing to do with what had happened here. A section of the ship had been transported elsewhere, as if a wormhole had torn the space-time fabric at that location. It had to be an instantaneous, bounded singularity, otherwise the effects on the rest of the ship, and on the earth for that matter, would have been catastrophic.
Climbing upward, Dr. Stephenson moved through the craft with a precision born of refined purpose. Unlike the alien ship back at Rho Division, this one appeared to be completely powered down, not particularly surprising given the way it had been punctured. And although the military people had erected stepladders to allow access to each deck, large sections of the ship were closed off.
As he completed his tour, the deputy director shook his head in amazement. Each step of his inspection had increased the awe he felt, not for this ship, but for the technology of the Rho Ship. Although it had been brought down in the fight, it had survived with its power source at least partially intact, whereas this ship had died. It was no wonder. Everywhere he looked on this ship, smooth-flowing artistic lines gave ample evidence of wasteful inefficiency. While there was plenty of investigation to be done here, it was the type of work he could delegate to underlings.
As he turned to climb back down the ladders, a smile creased Dr. Stephenson’s thin lips. Unless something far more interesting turned up here, he would keep his attention focused on his work on the third alien technology.