Unlike the pristine bleak of the outside, the interior of Research Building A was filled
with people. Most of the occupants wore white lab coats, which was fitting. The
place was set up like a huge laboratory. Level upon level of laboratory space.
Craig had already seen most of the floors thanks to a brisk tour provided by his uncle.
He saw equipment he could not identify, technology he could hardly fathom.
Uncle Reese introduced him to many staff members. Scientists, engineers, technicians. Some
spoke accented English. Others not at all, but their research was
comprehensible to anyone trained in the arcane language of advanced science.
Finally, Craig was taken to an office at the very top floor. There, he met Dr.
Jason Ling, an experimental physicist on leave from a prestigious American
university, and Gretchen Hecht, a PhD mechanical engineer from Germany. A third
person, Dr. Alowole Adu, a materials specialist from Nigeria, was too engrossed
in the mathematical equations filling his laptop screen to acknowledge the new
arrivals.
“As you’ve undoubtedly guessed, we are no longer in the opera house,” Uncle Reese
announced, most understatedly.
Craig’s deadpan expression said, ‘no kidding.’
“We are not even on Earth. We are on a planet called Sirius, which is orbiting a star
called Sirius B. In fact, we are in a triple star system. That explains the
outside brightness, due to the fact that there’s more than one sun…”
Craig held up a hand to slow the data stream. “Wait a minute, this is…now hold on…we’re
not on Earth? How…I don’t get it…”
Craig walked to a tinted window, gazed out upon a desert landscape that extended as
far in all directions as he could make out. He could not accuse anyone of lying
because the evidence of his unearthly surroundings lay sprawled before his very
eyes. And if he could not accept the truth of that parched vista, all he has to
do was look up. “Ok. I won’t dispute my senses. So, the logical question to ask
in a situation like this is, how did we get here?”
“Worm hole,” replied Dr. Ling. “We created an artificial wormhole to bridge the gap
between worlds.”
An occasional reader of Scientific American, Craig was familiar enough with the
concept of wormholes. “You’re telling me that we developed technology to generate
a wormhole, to build all of this on another planet?”
“If by ‘we’ you mean the U.S. government, no, we didn’t do this alone,” clarified Uncle
Reese. "This is a worldwide effort. A very secret effort.”
Craig lifted a brow. “I’m all ears.”
Uncle Reese explained. The more he explained, the more effort it took for Craig to grasp
the reality of it.
It began in 1948, nearly eighty years earlier. A UFO crash-landed in Nevada. It’s a cliched
belief that when UFOs nosedive in the middle of nowhere, they’re usually
piloted by little green or gray large headed aliens who perish in the crash and
their bodies are transported to some ultra secret Area 51 type facility to be
autopsied.
First responders, poring over the crash site, would find no dead bodies inside the UFO.
The vehicle was a car sized probe. What investigators discovered inside the
probe, however, not only confirmed the craft’s extraterrestrial origins; it
scared the hell out of them. The investigators came across some kind of
fold-out video screen that self-activated, displaying the face of an alien. The
creature wasn’t the stereotypical green or gray skinned large headed alien.
It—perhaps it was a he or a she—looked like a cross between a ferret and a
toad. But its looks were irrelevant. The alien referred to itself as a Piron
who hailed from a far off planet of the same name.
Seven thousand Earth years ago, Piron was attacked and all life extinguished from its
surface by an aggressive species called the Uit. The Piron did not go down
without a fight. A few Piron survived the genocidal onslaught to launch hit and
run attacks against Uit ships. Eventually, Piron resistance was crushed, but
not before they gathered volumes of information about their enemy. It remained
a mystery to the Piron why the Uit were so hell bent on exterminating
intelligent life wherever they found it. But the Piron knew plenty about Uit
technology and methods of war. Drawing upon their much diminished tech base,
the Piron built numerous probes, downloaded all of their Uit data into these
machines and sent them into space toward any civilizations in the many paths of
the Uit’s advance.
So far, according to the alien’s precise data, 234 species received the Piron’s
warning. 214 of those species were exterminated. 20 managed to fight the Uit to
a standstill. The remainder achieved the remarkable feat of actually defeating
the Uit militarily. But there remained countless Uit ships plying the
never-ending darkness, searching for life to erase from existence. A group of
those ships were less than a year from Earth.
Craig snatched a few seconds to absorb what his uncle just told him. Anyone else
would have been shaking in his shoes. But Craig was not anyone else. He was a
trained operative.
“I want to see this alien’s video transmission for myself. I assume you have a copy.”
Uncle Reese looked amusedly taken aback. “A copy? We have the original.” He deferred to Dr.
Hecht.
Craig followed the engineer into a smaller room with a table upon which sat the
fold-out video screen described by Uncle Reese. The fold-out’s design was all
fluid angles, glazed with an iridescent coating of amber. The device’s
non-human origin was immediately obvious to Craig. The fold-out roughly
resembled a laptop, except it had no keypad.
Dr. Hecht waved a hand in front of the screen and stepped back as an alien image
materialized. “We have been trying to
figure out what makes this thing tick for decades.”
Craig was not interested in the mechanics of the hardware. The alien face staring back at
him from the device’s small screen fascinated him.
A ferret and a toad. Apt description.
The Piron spoke in perfect unaccented American English. Well, the alien itself was not
speaking English. Its puckered mouth hardly looked flexible enough to form
human words in any language. Some kind of translation program conveyed the
Piron’s speech.
“I’ll, um, leave you in solitude,” Dr. Hecht whispered, retreating quietly from the room.
Craig was not even aware of the engineer’s departure. He was too immersed in the video
recording of an actual alien from another planet.
An hour later, he emerged from the room.
Uncle Reese approached his nephew. “Quite a bit to take in, isn’t it?”
“To say the least.” Craig was subdued about the matter. It wasn’t everyday a person
received news that his planet was targeted for extermination by a pitiless,
genocidal alien species. “Why am I here? And why is this base so far from
home?”
“You are at Ground Zero,” replied Uncle Reese. “We’re hoping that this base will divert the
Uit’s attention from Earth. And if we’re exceptionally skilled and
exceptionally lucky, we will have fooled the Uit into thinking that the planet
we are currently on is Earth.”
Craig’s jaw went slack. “And how do you propose to do that, given all the radio emissions
emanating from Earth that screams our existence to the rest of the universe?
And if the Uit do attack this planet as planned, what makes you think they
won’t make a beeline for Earth afterwards?”
“Our projections, based on the data provided by the Piron, leans heavily in favor of
the Uit not heading toward Earth after they have completed their mission here,”
stated Dr. Hecht. “You see the Uit would have been alerted to the existence of
advanced life in this part of the galaxy at about the time of Christ, which is
when they would have dispatched world-killing ships in our direction. Twelve
years ago, the United States, in concert with twenty-seven nations, established
a satellite network around Earth. The satellites are designed to block all
outgoing emissions from Earth, making us invisible to the universe.” Dr. Hecht
adopted a preening tone. “My father had a significant role to play in the
research that led to the development of those satellites.”
Before Craig could offer his congratulations, Dr. Ling chimed in. “You’re wondering how
we’re going to attract the Uit to this location? Here’s how.” Ling directed Craig’s
attention to a flatscreen next to Dr. Adu’s station. He grabbed a remote and
pointed it at the flatscreen. A picture of a huge white satellite dish appeared
on the screen. “That’s a transceiver array,” he said, sounding infinitely
proud. “We’ve got hundreds of them scattered across the planet, broadcasting
radio emissions. Outside of the paltry few inhabitants staffing this base, the
population of this world is zero. Yet, those transceivers, combined, are
emitting enough signals to fool any extraterrestrial into assuming that this is
a heavily populated planet with a thriving tech base.”
Craig studied the screen for a moment, genuinely impressed. “Ok. Let me get this
straight. With Earth protected by this emissions blackout, the Uit are going to
come here, instead, thinking this
planet is Earth. But how are you going to address the next, biggest problem? I
mean, it’s one thing to use transceivers to masquerade as a populated,
technologically advanced world. But how are you going to fool the Uit when they
take a look at us up close and discover that nothing is here?”
“But that’s exactly what we are counting on,” said Dr. Hecht with a mad scientist grin
lighting up her translucently pale face. “The Uit are not going to take a close
look at us. They are going to attack first. Their ships will launch kinetically-driven
projectiles, each one a forth of a mile in diameter. Those projectiles will
impact this planet, generating such destruction as to make the catastrophe that
wiped out the dinosaurs seem like a brushfire in comparison.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s in the Piron’s data,” answered Uncle Reese. “The Uit changed how they waged war.
They became seriously stretched the farther out their fleets expanded. They
didn’t have enough people to, um, man their ships, so they built robot ships to
extend their operations into more remote parts of the galaxy. A robot task
force will attack a world, destroying every living thing. However, attached to
every task force is a ship with Uit observers on board. Observers inspect the
target world in the aftermath of the robot attack to verify the absence of
life. If the observers detect survivors, they send the robot ships back in to
finish the job.”
“That’s what you expect to happen here,” said Craig. “The robot ships will burn this
planet and these observers you mentioned are not going to find life afterward,
because there was never any life to begin with.”
“Well, no life beyond the single cell variety,” Dr. Hecht qualified with another
hair-raising grin. “But certainly the Uit observers will be left with a very
visible impression that their attack was a resounding success.”
Craig fixed his uncle with a suspicious look. “Devilishly clever plan, Uncle Reese. Why do
I get this irrepressible feeling that you came up with it?”
Uncle Reese’s expression was pure innocence wrapped in a silken shawl of virtue. “Any
ideas I submitted on how to confront the Uit were but a handful among many.”
“But you were given leadership over this project for a reason.”
“Well, up until fifteen years ago, the project’s research concentrated on constructing
weapons powerful enough to repel a Uit vessel. While we were successful in
devising a few highly penetrative directed energy beams, the planners came to
the sobering conclusion that at our current state of technological development,
it would take centuries for Earth to attain the capability to combat an
invasion from space.” Uncle Reese shrugged. “So, I threw out a little suggestion
which some top level people were not too keen on. They called it outlandish.
Other top-level people liked it and pulled strings to set it in motion. In the
end, even the most hard line skeptic had come around to the conclusion that it
would be more feasible, given our military weakness, to misdirect the invaders as opposed to trying to confront them. As a
result, here we are.”
Craig was hardly fooled by his uncle’s slump shouldered display of humility. The man was
a former national security advisor, current head of the blackest agency in the
U.S. government. A ‘little suggestion’ from an individual of Uncle Reese’s
credentials damn near carried the weight
of policy.
“Your role in this operation, Craig, is the most important,” Uncle Reese stressed.
“What exactly is my role, which, by the way, I haven’t volunteered for?”
Uncle Reese arched a brow. “I don’t understand.”
Craig struggled to contain the exasperation rising inside him. “Come on, Uncle Reese,
don’t play ignorant. You shanghaied me.”
Uncle Reese drew back with a look of surprise so convincing it almost had Craig regretting
his harsh words. “Shanghaied you? That’s a terrible accusation. No one forced
you to get on that copter, so I assumed you volunteered.” Uncle Reese glanced
at his watch. “Oh. I have an appointment in a half-hour. Better get back to
Earth. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll return in a few hours to brief you.”
Uncle Reese rushed away, leaving his calculating nephew to wonder if laws on Earth,
prohibiting the killing of a relative, applied offworld.
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