Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-two

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 11:34 a.m.

We heard sounds and moved to a new hiding spot. The sounds were probably deer sneaking away from hunters, but we weren’t taking chances. I found a ravine that angled down into a little natural tunnel worn by rain runoff. It was ten feet long, with easy egress from either end. We could see and hear anyone coming, but in the dense shadows we were invisible.

So, we hunkered down to wait. I knew that help had to be on its way. Maybe the Coast Guard, definitely my guys from the DMS. All we had to do was not be seen and not get our brains scrambled by those freaky microwave pistols.

As the minutes dragged by, I used the time to gather as much intel as I could. They say that knowledge is power, and that’s true enough, but knowledge is often a shield as well.

“Okay,” I said, “now tell me how your father got access to the Black Book.”

Junie tucked her legs under her and smoothed her skirt. In the shadows she was a specter, her pale skin painted a misty blue, her eyes dark and bottomless.

“My father was a brilliant physicist and engineer,” she said. “He’d filed half a dozen patents during his first eighteen months at MIT. He won prizes in so many different areas of science. The Rolls-Royce Science Prize, the UNESCO Science Prize, the Bunsen Prize, the Sten von Friesen’s prize, he even spent two years as part of a team in Austria and won the Erich Schmid Prize. He was so smart that he was unhappy with it. He hated it. He was depressed a lot of the time because everything he tried was too easy. There are people like that, you know, genius freaks who almost fit in with the rest of the world, but can’t really. Maybe there was some Asperger’s there. Maybe some autism, but it was never diagnosed. If he’d come along a half generation later they might have caught it.” She shook her head. “The thing is, genius of that level gets noticed. He partnered with another young scientist for one of the DARPA challenges. The participants were given three pieces of a machine but no other information. No idea what kind of machine the parts belonged to or even if they belonged to the same machine. The challenge was to develop a way for those parts to work in harmony. Most of the entrants were part of the robotics crowd, and Dad was always into task-oriented robotics. Well, no surprise, but he won the challenge and was awarded a huge research grant and DARPA hired him for their robotics lab.”

“So he worked for the military?”

She frowned. “Not exactly. His paychecks came from DARPA, but he never worked in their lab in Arlington. Instead he was brought into a separate lab nearby. The thing is, none of the DARPA people he’d met at the challenge were there except one of the judges, and that person was Howard Shelton of Shelton Aeronautics. He’s a major defense contractor. His family’s always done contract work for the government. Jets now, planes of every kind going back to World War I, and before that they made cannons and special guns.”

“Shelton … he’s on your list of possible M3 members.”

“He’s pretty high on my list, I suppose. He was the one who recruited Dad for the special DARPA group. I’m not sure if that means he’s in M3 or is one of the people profiting from their research. A lot of people are, there’s a trickle down among the superwealthy industrialists, especially those tied to the Department of Defense.”

“What happened once your dad was in that group?”

“I don’t know everything,” she said. “I was little and even though he started telling me things later on, he never told me everything. He didn’t have time. From what I’ve pieced together, they kept Dad on some noncritical projects at first. Stuff that was challenging and interesting, but nothing that was tied to anything from the crashed vehicles. That came later, after they knew they could trust him.”

“Could they trust him?”

“For years, sure. He was very loyal to them at first. For most of the time, really,” she said. “Because Dad was very patriotic. He had his idealistic side, but he was always a bit more of a hawk than a dove. Dad’s grandfather died in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. His father was career military and had been wounded twice in Vietnam. Dad never served, but he had a lot of respect for those who did and he wanted to help create the kinds of technologies that would keep American soldiers safe. He worked on tactical armor and antiarmor programs, infrared sensing for space-based surveillance, high-energy laser technology for space-based missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, advanced aircraft, and defense applications of advanced computing, and he did some of the earliest work on predators and other drones. He created some of the parts for the MARCbot, the Multifunction Agile Remote Control Robot, used to disable IEDs. Stuff like that.”

“Good man,” I said. “I know people who didn’t die because those robots cleared IEDs off the road.”

“He was a good man,” she agreed. “A very good man. He wanted to do good things. They kept moving him from one project to another, and for a while he was frustrated by that because he never got to follow anything to completion. But then he realized that they were bringing him into projects that had stalled because the developers had hit a dead end or a limit in known science. Dad was the X factor that would take these projects in new directions or help them jump right over a design block. That was his gift. He was a developmental intuitive.”

I could see the shape of it. A scientist like that would be a shot of adrenaline to any project. DARPA, like most other R and D groups, has more failed projects than successful ones. That’s the nature of speculative science. Sometimes you don’t know until you try, and you can blow through a lot of cash and a lot of research time on projects that sound good until they hit an immovable snag. A man who can come in and think through or over or around the problem would be worth his weight in gold. Actually, considering the price tag on some of these things, he’d be worth a hell of a lot more than that.

Junie explained how her father was coaxed inch by inch away from DARPA and into the more covert world of M3. They played on his patriotism—and perhaps his naïveté—so that he believed he was part of a think tank that was the last bastion between a safe America and the collapse of democracy in the face of enemies both foreign and domestic. It was a very good sales pitch, and it bought her father’s total loyalty.

“Finally,” she said, “they brought him a piece of equipment that he could not identify. They said that it was a component to a large device, but that’s all they’d tell him about it. They called it a ‘D-type component.’ They said it was another test, like the DARPA challenge. They wanted him to figure out what it was and what it did. They let him work on the problem part of every day for months. Then he figured out what it did. It was a switch. That was all, just a switch, but clearly no one had ever figured that out before because it didn’t look like a switch. It didn’t resemble something whose design intention was to function as a switch. When Dad figured out what it was, everyone got very excited. They threw a party for Dad, they gave him a huge raise and better benefits. He became like a rock star at the lab.”

“This D-type component,” I said, “what was it?”

She cocked her head. “It’s what you think it was.”

“From an alien ship?”

She nodded. “The next day, when Dad came into work, the head of the lab brought him into his office and made him sign a whole stack of papers. Nondisclosure agreements and other documents, including one that essentially said that he waived his constitutional rights while working on what they called ‘the Project.’”

“Yeah, I’ve seen crap like that,” I said. “Some of the DoD bases require that for people working on the stealth aircraft program. Not a fan of that. Mind you, I’m okay with punishing someone for revealing secrets, but I’ve never been a fan of anything that actually strips away your legal rights. That’s a slippery slope.”

“Dad signed it, though. At the time he was happy to do it. And … once all the papers were sealed, that’s when they showed him the Majestic Black Book.”

“Ah,” I said. “We get to the point before I die of old age.”

She punched me lightly on the arm. “If I don’t tell this in order then some parts of it won’t make sense.”

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender.

“The Black Book has a list of all of the parts recovered from crashes. The most important part of that inventory is the list and exact descriptions of the ten D-type components that make up the Device. That’s with a capital ‘D.’ Those ten D-type components are the stabilizer, the red generator, the green generator, the clock, the interface, the mother board, the master circuit, the slave circuit, the iridium heart, and the central switch. When President Truman authorized Majestic Twelve and Majestic Three, the initial goal was to rebuild the alien craft from Roswell. That was an immediate failure because the ship was too badly damaged. So, M3 began researching other crashes around the world, and when it began clear early on that there have been many crashes, Truman directed M3 to obtain as many D-type components as possible in order to cobble together one complete craft.”

“If there were so many crashes, that should have been easy.”

“No, Joe,” said Junie, “it’s very complicated and for a couple of very good reasons. First, the Device is the engine of the craft, and most of the crashes were the result of some kind of engine failure. We don’t know why, but in a number of cases the engines blew up. The ten D-type components that form the Device are held together with what my father called ‘charismatic magnetism.’”

“What the hell’s that?”

“It’s part of the science my father was studying. When certain D-type components are brought into close proximity, they would begin to pull on each other in way that simulated magnetism. Align the parts in approximately the right way and that pull allows them to self-assemble.”

“Um … okay.”

“However, when a Device fails or a crash occurs, the components reverse their polarity and fly apart. If the crashing ship hits sand, foliage, or soft dirt, the flying pieces might be recovered intact. But if they hit something harder, then most or all the components could be damaged.”

“I think I see part of the problem. M3 has been trying to build a flying saucer with potentially faulty parts.”

“That, and they don’t have all the D-type components. Ever since Roswell, M3 has been able to recover six complete and undamaged components from various crashes, but they never had the other four—the stabilizer, the interface, the slave circuit, and the green generator. Other countries have been working on this, too. There are groups like M3 in Great Britain, Israel, Germany, Brazil, North Korea, China, and Russia. Most of these projects are far behind M3’s Project. Brazil only has one part, a green generator. Israel and North Korea each have three parts, the Brits have five. Same with China and Russia. At least, that was the last count my source heard, and that was a couple of years ago.”

I knew that I had to have a long talk with Church. How the hell could something this big be going on without the DMS being aware of it? Either Church and MindReader were a lot less efficient than I believed, or there was something hinky going on. Neither option made me want to sing Disney songs.

“In 1952, when it became clear that they might not be able to assemble a Device made from original D-type components, President Truman allotted a huge amount of money for M3 to begin a research program to synthesize the missing parts. The intention was to combine these parts with the genuine D-type components to create a complete and working Device. M3 refers to this hybrid machine as a Truman Engine.”

“How close are they to pulling this off?”

“I don’t know. Close, I think. One of the last things my dad told me was that there have been some recent breakthroughs, but that was a few years ago, before he was killed.”

“But they must have had some success. I know for a fact that we have some radical engine designs in the works for the next generation of fighters and—”

“You’re thinking about it the wrong way, Joe. You’re thinking that this is about building a fast jet or stealthier jet, but the Device is more than just an engine. A lot more. From experiments they’ve tried where things have gone disastrously wrong, they know that there is an almost unlimited potential for power in those D-type components. You think they don’t know that fossil fuel is going to run out? Coal and natural gas aren’t the long-term answer. Nuclear has a million problems. And the technology for solar and wind power is not really as close as politicians make it. We’re hurtling toward a power crisis unlike anything we’ve ever faced. Unless we want to see ourselves plunged into a new and very literal Dark Age, we have to find a new and inexhaustible source of clean power. And, Joe—this is about power. The first nation to control that kind of power will become the greatest superpower the world has ever seen.” She touched her fingers to my chest. “Because unlimited energy like this can also be used for weapons. And nobody—no nation or group of nations—will be able to defend themselves against that kind of power. Whoever can solve the riddle of the Device will be able to conquer the whole world—and nothing and no one can stop them.”