Ian Douglas - Alien Secrets

“Yes, sir.”

“RM1 Ralph Colby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“… and TM1 Frank Nielson.”

“Yessir.”

“Okay. You men have received USAP clearance levels, and I have been directed to show you what is popularly known as ‘the Blue Room.’ I will remind you that all of you have signed security paperwork in which you’ve promised not to divulge anything that you see here … right?”

A chorus of “yessirs” sounded from the Navy personnel.

“You breathe a word about any of this and you’ll be out on your ears so fast your heads will spin. You’ll lose your pensions, your reputations, and even your identities, so no one will believe a thing you say. And then you’ll spend a minimum of twenty years in Portsmouth for violating the Secrets Act. You all hear me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Just so that’s clear.”

Benedict then ushered them down a series of halls, through various twists and turns, with stops at each of an additional five security checkpoints. During the journey, the six men were scanned for metal, photographed, fingerprinted, had their retinas examined, and gave voice prints. Finally, they took an elevator down; Hunter couldn’t begin to guess how far down, but it was quite a way. The descent took almost a full minute.

The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and Hunter and the other SEALs stepped into another passageway with another checkpoint. Here they had their palms scanned and their retinas checked again, before a massive steel door hissed open …

… and Hunter wondered just how far down the rabbit hole they’d gone.

“TIME TRAVEL,” Dr. Lawrence Brody said with an air of utter dismissal, “is bunk.”

“Physics says that, does it?” Navy captain Frederick Groton said.

“Exactly. Where would causality be if we could zip back in time and kill our own grandfathers?”

Brody and Groton were in the mess hall of a facility so secret that the government had only recently even admitted that the place existed—despite ample evidence from satellite photos and the unwinking gaze of Google Earth. Area 51 was very, very real. And actively being used.

“My understanding,” Groton said slowly, “is that if we changed history somehow, we would simply move over to an alternate time line, one where we had never been born. No paradox. The universe—the multiverse, I should say—would never allow that.”

“An entire universe—hundreds of billions of galaxies, quintillions of stars, worlds and civilizations without number, all of it identical to this one, down to the smallest detail except for my existence—created in an instant just because I shot dear old Gramps before my father was conceived? The universe is wasteful, Captain, but not that wasteful. It certainly doesn’t create an entire universe around the absence of one man.”

“That, as I understand it, is the basic theory behind the many-universe concept.”

“Captain … do you have a degree in astrophysics? In cosmology? In quantum dynamics?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I do—all three! And I’m telling you that quantum theory does not support so absurd a statement about the nature of the cosmos. How do you summon an entire universe out of nothing? Where does all that matter come from in the blink of an eye? Where is the energy , man?”

“I believe the idea,” Groton said, “is that this other universe already exists. That, in fact, every universe that could possibly exist does exist—including one where your grandfather was regrettably killed as a young man. Not an infinite number, certainly, but a very, very, very large number of them. Rather than creating a new universe, a better way to say it might be that you simply step from one reality to another.”

“Yes, Captain, I know . You needn’t lecture me on cosmology.”

“That was not my intent, Doctor. But I am telling you that time travel is possible. We know it to be true because we’ve done it.”

“Bullshit! Where’s your proof?”

Groton melodramatically patted his white uniform jacket. “Damn. I must have left it in my other coat.”

“Very funny.”

A woman approached the table, holding a tray of food. “Hello, Captain,” she said. “May I join you?”

“Of course!” He rose, gesturing to a chair, and Brody managed to get to his feet a moment later. The woman was, simply put, impossibly gorgeous. There was no other word for it. Brody was fifty-five years old, but his hormones were kicking in with all the force and red-faced stammer of a sixteen-year-old adolescent boy. The woman was tall and slender with large and startlingly blue eyes; long silver hair, though her face looked like she was only in her twenties; and a silver jumper or suit of some sort that Brody was prepared to swear was spray painted onto her body.

“ Please sit, gentlemen,” this vision told them.

“Elanna,” Groton said, “this is Dr. Brody, our professor of astrophysics on the Big-H . Dr. Brody? Elanna.”

“A pleasure, Doctor.” She extended one slender hand.

Somehow, Brody managed to take the hand, and felt her give it a squeeze.

“We were just discussing time travel, Elanna,” Groton said. “Dr. Brody was explaining to me why time travel is impossible.”

She laughed. “ Really? Do tell me!”

Brody’s face burned. He had the distinct feeling that both of them were making fun of him. “Well, according to current theory …” he began.

“Don’t even go there, Professor,” Groton told Brody. “You’ll lose.”

“What do you mean?” He couldn’t look away from the silvery beauty sitting next to him.

“Doctor …” Groton said, and then he hesitated. There was so much Brody still didn’t know, and it was entirely possible that some of it he would never know, never accept , if only because his brain was too old and inflexible to wrap itself around some of this stuff. “Dr. Brody,” he tried again. “You’ve been through indoctrination. You know the truth, or a large part of it. You’ve seen some things that, for most people, would be very hard to believe.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen the Grays—”

“Yes, yes! Horrible things! What’s your point?”

“Elanna here is …” He paused, trying to find the right way to explain it. He settled on, “A kind of alien. Alien to us, at any rate.”

“But she’s human!”

“Indeed. I’m as human as you are, Doctor,” the woman said. She smiled, and Brody felt the rush of hormones once more.

“Elanna,” Groton continued, “ is human, but she’s from the future. She’s from roughly eleven thousand years in the future, in fact.”

“My God!” And the shock jolted him backward and knocked him out of his chair.

“A SPACESHIP !” Taylor said with an edge of sheer reverence in his voice. “A fucking alien spaceship !”

“Actually,” Benedict said, “it’s one of ours.”

Hunter gave Benedict a sharp look. “So we do have advanced spacecraft?”

“For a good many years, Commander, yes. That is a TR-3B, and it’s one reason we no longer have a space shuttle.”

The craft was large—at least twenty-five yards wide, and it was shaped like an equilateral triangle with slightly rounded tips. Three landing legs held it a couple of yards above the concrete flooring of the immense room, and there were several technicians working on, around, and under the ship’s body. Cables as thick as a man’s leg snaked across the floor and vanished into ports on the thing’s belly, while light spilled from an open hatch at the top of a long ramp. Three red lights glowed with sullen brilliance on the underside, one within each of the triangle’s corners. A larger light was nestled into a recession at the underside’s center, but it was not on at the moment. The hull had a matte finish, like black rubber. Hunter wondered why it wasn’t polished silver, like the disk he’d seen.