Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (19 page)

Buttons uncurled himself, grunted and stood up by his chair. “I mentioned Symbol K a moment ago. That is a language that was pieced together over 35 years of studying wreckage from the handful of occasions when unidentified objects made hard landings on Earth.” He indicated his ever-present laptop. “My computer is designed around Symbol K, using it as an OS and as a data resource. There are only two people in the world who are, for want of a better word, fluent. I’m one of them. I have been part of teams that were brought in to reverse engineer artifacts from assorted incidents, and there have been very few success stories. Certainly nothing like what we have seen today.”

“I’ve got two things to say.” Charlie raised her hand, waited for eyes to turn to her, and continued. “Are they coming back? I’d like to follow that with a general WHAT THE FUCK?!”

“That is part of why I called this meeting. We need to know what is happening, and we absolutely need to pray to whomever,” he pointed toward the ceiling with some enthusiasm, “is up there that we can disrupt their operations before they become a larger threat.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got an ace up your sleeve and can tell us how to find out what the hell is going on?” I may have sounded a tad harsh, but I was dancing a thin line of serious fear and existential angst.

Omura looked at me, grimaced, and ran his fingers through his buzz-cut hair.

“No. Unless my superiors know something that they’re not telling me, I’ve got no data other than the images we have from before the craft fired and the evidence that the weapon was either charged particle or plasma in nature,” he said, with a certain suggestion of impatience. “I’d kill for some telemetry, but I’ll bet you this thing is so stealth that none of the radar sites in the area picked up anything larger than a pigeon.”

“We have CCTV cameras all over this area. I imagine some of them will have useful footage and time stamps,” Buttons reminded us.

“I have a rough calculation on the size of the craft.” Baj spoke without looking up from the touch screen at his fingertips. The image on the wall rotated slightly, zoomed in, and then zoomed back out. Three other images popped up from other cameras. “I have images from the security cameras you mentioned. Some of them caught the vehicle entering our airspace. Based on what I am seeing, it does not appear to be circular, but rather slightly oblong. The approximate length of the vehicle is 10 meters, with a width of 8.5 meters. As we do not have an accurate profile view I cannot estimate how tall it might be.”

“It’s not a circle, it has a nasty gun, and sounds like something huge screaming. Oh, and it might not be a UFO. That’s better than knowing nothing. Fuck.” Charlie massaged her head. I made a note to myself that she sounds more like her brother when she’s frustrated than at any other time.

Jayashri stood up, smoothed out the lab coat that she was wearing, and addressed us. “They have brought the remains to the lab. I am going over to do as much of a post-mortem as I am able. I do not think that I can add anything to this discussion. Omura, do you mind?”

“Not at all, Dr. Sharma. Any information you can put together would be helpful. Major Kenney, you might want to go with Dr. Sharma. Your battlefield expertise may come in handy, from a technical perspective.”

The Major nodded to Jaya, and they left the room.

Shoei heaved a gigantic sigh, and flopped into the chair beside me as soon as the door closed. “Now that he’s out of here, does anyone have any ideas that you were holding back?”

“The noise it made when it stopped was too small for a sonic boom, and at the wrong end of acceleration,” Shawn pantomimed a plane breaking the sound barrier. “It whistled and then made a pop when it arrived. Shoei, is there any film of this thing arriving, or did it just appear?”

“Good call, Shawn. It took 4 frames to come into focus, and these cameras run at a full 24 frames a second. You get 3 frames of gray misty object and then one of a more solid shape and then BAM; it’s there.”

“That is way too fast for an object to travel, but I bet you that the pop noise was air displacement. If it were a manned craft the pilot would be jelly on arrival. Horrible g-forces and all.” Shawn managed to surprise all of us, once again, because his big redneck exterior belied the serious brain he flashed us every so often.

“Buttons, do we have any responses from NORAD, Andrews AFB or anyone?” Shoei massaged his eyes with the palms of his hands and I could feel the stress oozing off him.

Buttons unrolled himself a little more, tapped at his keyboard, and shook his head. “Andrews and NORAD haven’t replied. Reagan National Airport and Dulles International reported system glitches.”

“Shit.” Omura rattled off a long string of something in Japanese that I didn’t understand after his declaration of feces.

“What was that pile of Japanese?” I had to ask.

“Oh, I was complaining at my parents for having given birth to me and cursing my ancestors all the way back to the Edo Period.”

All I really could do was nod my head in acknowledgement.

“I think that craft materialized, rather than flew in a more conventional way. After all, it arrived, completed its mission and departed again within the space of one second.” The rest of us stared at Bajali as though he’d sprouted Technicolor spandex wings.

“Baj, aircraft do not fade into and then out of existence,” Matt commented from the far right corner of the room.

“From what we know of current technology, you are absolutely correct.” He stood up and walked toward the wall screen and began rearranging the images that it displayed. “Yet, if we look at these images, it is very clear that this craft,” he said, trying to gesture with his hands in a way that illustrated his point, “did not travel here in a conventional way.”

Omura threw his hands up.

“Moving on, we know we have an opponent that is capable of striking us from a distance with unusual destructive devices. Great. We’re going to stop right there and get some other brains looking into the issue. We need to know who they are and where they come from more than we need to analyze the technology. As of now, no one strays from hard cover unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. I don’t want any more fatalities if they can be prevented.”

“So, what are we going to do besides stay indoors?” Shawn asked, stretching his shoulders with an audible pop.

“Buttons is going to contact our superiors and get their boys to do the theoretical work and track our new friends. I need to talk to Baj and Frank about some other things that are coming our way from Higher Up. You and everyone else need to go about your business… but keep your heads down. In fact, Shawn, you broadcast the warning to everyone. I’m putting you on cat herding detail.” He looked over at Matt and said, “You keep an eye on the children. Stay locked and loaded.”

“No problem. I’ll get Nate and Ramos on it as well.” Matt took hold of Shawn’s shirt, as if to indicate that there really wasn’t a choice in the matter. “If that works for you, we’ll go get the party started.”

I saw Omura nod. Matt nodded back and gently led our resident mechanical genius from the room. Within seconds, the only people left in the room were Omura, Baj, Buttons, Charlie and me. It didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling for some reason.

“Bernie, would you do me a favor?” Omura asked, rubbing his eyes.

Baj and I shared surprised expressions because we had never heard Omura use his first name. Even Buttons raised an eyebrow at his personal handler, but there was no way to know if it was surprise or some other feeling behind it.

“I need a cup of coffee or I’m going to die. Would you go over to the cafeteria and grab me the biggest fucking cup they have?”

“I will do that and try not to be turned into a lump of charcoal in the same breath.” He stood up and left, leaving behind the typical contrail of strange vibes in his wake.

Shoei continued to rub his eyes, and for a split second I wish I had a way to help him feel better. I suppose I hadn’t considered that our situation was stressful for him, and I knew that I didn’t know anything about the life he had to leave behind when we gave him our little community door prize. For all I knew he had a wife and kids somewhere out there.

Then again, being the handler of someone like Buttons might be tough enough to stress out the Dalai Lama.

“Is it coffee, or do you just need to get laid in a bad way?” It came out of my mouth before I could consider editing myself. It got me a punch in the shoulder from Charlie, a wide-eyed and blinking expression from Bajali, but barely a twitch from Omura.

“The former, but I wouldn’t turn down the latter if an opportunity presented itself. I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to loan Charlie out.”

The lady in question blushed to her hairline and I sputtered.

Omura chuckled. “I didn’t think so. Until the Government starts dropping single women in our compound, I’m shit out of luck.”

No one commented, and the silence lingered a little too long for my comfort.

“Which of the lot of us is going to break this strange tension, now that we’ve indulged in a little gossip?” If we were going to get into whatever it was that Shoei wanted to discuss, I might as well be the person to start the conversation. “I’m powerfully curious as to why you cleared the room, for one thing.”

“Am I transparent?” Shoei took his hands away from his face and sat up in the chair. “We have another set of issues to discuss that are independent of our new airborne menace. Specifically, Charlie needs to report on you and your evolving recovery. You get to spill the beans on yourself. The good doctor here,” he gestured at Baj, “has one or two things to talk about that may or may not be pertinent to you, but certainly are to everyone else.”

“Report on me?” I was a little taken aback by that.

“Honey, they didn’t know if you were going to end up like Buttons, so they made me your handler. After all, I’m the person closest to you.” Charlie reached up touched my cheek, but the whole thing still stung a little bit.

“What do you have to say about your charge here?”

The expression on Charlotte Cooper’s face changed from warm and a little sad to distant. The only thing needed to complete her transformation from girlfriend to therapist was a set of wire-rimmed glasses perching on her nose.

“Frank is lucid. So far, he reacts well within the range of behaviors that we’ve come to expect from him.” It was entirely strange to hear her voice go from warm and apologetic to clinically dry in the space of seconds. “The only anomaly was the warning outburst this morning, but I think we can assume that it was more due to the critters and their abrupt style of warning their host rather than some form of psychiatric issue.”

“I, for one, am really glad to hear that he’s acting like himself. Charlie, I appreciate your willingness to place yourself in an awkward position in this instance.” Omura looked genuinely relieved, even if I was beginning to feel a little pissed off over the whole thing. “Frank, I need to ask you, as your official Liaison Officer, to tell me how you think you’re doing. How’s things?”

“Things are going well, I guess. I’ve never recovered from head injuries that should have killed me before.” I tried to ignore my personal worries about faceless surgeons cutting Charlie into sashimi to get at our child, but they crawled straight up my ass and gave me a horrible thrashing. “I have to say that it’s mighty strange to have my nanotech grab my tongue for their own purposes. Shooting mortars out of the air is one thing, but being the local early warning system is unsettling.”

“I bet so, but at least we have a kind of precedent for it. When Buttons fired on the helicopter during the rescue operation we all hit the dirt without being conscious that we were in danger.” He shifted in the seat, but still seemed to be carrying all the tension in the world.

“That’s true.”

“It is possible that your sensory functions have expanded.” Bajali sounded pleased and pulled a small notebook out of his pants pocket, I assume to take notes. “You did indicate that data was available to you without a conscious thought at the start of this conference. Are you feeling as though you have a split personality?”

“Not a split personality. More like having two cars driving on the same track. One car knows what is going on with the–let’s say the Green Car–but the Green Car is only occasionally aware of what the Red Car is doing.” I pointed at myself. “The Frank that is answering this question is the Green Car.”

“Is there any significance to the second car being red?” Charlie asked.

“Not that I know of. I just picked another color at random.”

“Red clashes with green. That could indicate that you feel unconsciously hostile toward your other car.”

“Honey, did you just psychoanalyze me?” I didn’t give a piebald Yeti testicle about car colors.

“I sure did, honey. Isn’t it romantic?” Her sarcasm was so thick that an elephant could have walked across it. I guess my annoyance showed more than I wanted it to.

“You guys are cute. Strange, but cute.” Omura smiled at us. Some of his tension dissipated listening to us, and I felt a little better for that. “Frank, I want you to keep a record of anything you experience or observe about how you’re feeling or any other new developments in your abilities. Report to me daily, please.”

I nodded, less than thrilled, but I was confident that I could fudge any disturbing data if I had to.