Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (3 page)

Behind her, in Tucson (by way of LA), her six-year-old son had finally accepted the fact that he would see his mother again in a week, when Aunt Mae took him to Washington, D.C. With the alien craft still about five weeks away at its present pace, Claire figured she’d have enough time to get settled in before her son came, and then get him comfortable before she got overwhelmed with work. It had taken a lot of reassuring and hugging to comfort him, though. Samuel looked like his mother, but he feared new situations.

Claire on the other hand was undaunted by the challenge ahead of her in D.C., where she would serve as Deputy Supervisor on the Presidential Space Policy Team. It had been just ten days since she informed the President about D9. Already, Claire faced a mountain of paperwork, and some unclassified reports covered her tray table. But for now, as the plane rode smooth air somewhere over Missouri, she let her eyes and mind wander pleasantly.

Then indistinct, but apparently frightened, voices disturbed her peace. Two flight attendants scurried through the aisles with worried looks, and within minutes the voices grew louder and more persistent—and more distinct. “Oh, my God…” “Did you hear…” “Oh, Jesus, help us…” “It’s the aliens, it’s on the news…” “They’re here…”

Claire sat bolt upright and looked around. Her first class cabin mates were starting to absorb the shocking news as well. The person nearest her—a tanned, gray-haired man in his late middle age—was frantically trying to call someone on his cell phone, which was far out of range of any cell tower. Claire’s first impulse was to stand and reassure everyone.
The aliens can’t be here. D9 is more than nine AU from the Sun—near the orbit of Saturn. It won’t be here for over a month
. (An Astronomical Unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, about 93 million miles.)

But then she thought to herself that she’d better find out what was going on first. She had no way to know that on that afternoon, people around the world, including Bret and Darren in Kansas, had first spotted red dots.

Claire pulled out her smart phone and picked up cable news over the airplane’s wifi. The usual two attractive anchors, a man and a woman, sat at a desk, but with their practiced set of smiles, frowns, and grimaces replaced by real fear and confusion. “Once again,” the man said, “we have reports from … well, all around the world….”

The female anchor added, “From at least ten states, Canada, Mexico, countries in Europe, in Japan…”

“And reports are still coming in, flooding in, about, well…”

“Some kind of red dots.”

“You can see the video here, from, from where? From outside Washington, D.C. Lots of confusion and panic. A red circle about ten feet across. Yes, some kind of red dots, circles on the ground and on surfaces. Uh, it seems they aren’t very big…”

“Yeah, from a few feet wide to maybe fifty feet.”

Responding to a cue from his ear plug, the male anchor said, “We don’t have, and I want to emphasize this, we don’t have confirmed reports of injuries yet, and, am I right, no confirmed sightings of extra terrestrials or other evidence of the, uh, aliens.”

The female anchor said, “In just the last minutes, we’ve had reports of these dots, these things, in just about every state and many more countries. And NASA released a statement. It says, ‘We have no direct evidence that the circles of red that are appearing on surfaces around the world are connected
to the alien space ship that is currently more than 800 million miles from the Sun. We don’t know by what mechanism they could be connected to the spacecraft. We have no confirmed contact with the craft. However, at this time we have no other explanation for the red dots.’”

Claire stared at the news video on her cell phone, which showed firemen, police, and bystanders milling around a taped-off patch of suburban side street in Washington, D.C. Some gestured wildly, and a few hurried in or out of the circle of people, while others stood transfixed by a perfectly round, softly glowing red dot in the middle of the road.

What the hell?
she thought. A band of raw, unfiltered fear gripped her stomach, and nausea rose in her throat. It wasn’t the first time that feeling had hit her; it had seized her three weeks earlier, in the Catalina Sky Survey team office in Tucson, at the instant results from the Mt. Lemon telescope made it likely that something directed by alien intelligence was approaching. A week and a half later CSS, had confirmed that D9 was an alien craft. That first wave of fear at CSS had faded in seconds, as Claire and her colleagues focused on pinning down the direction and origin of the spacecraft.

This time, with palpable evidence of an alien presence on Earth, it would take a few minutes before the act of responding to the new presence pushed Claire’s fear into the background.

But she quickly decided to try to get an email through servers almost certainly stretched far beyond capacity, to assure her son and others close to her she was OK.

Mommy is fine
, she began.
I’m on the plane and will soon be in Washington, D.C. I’ll call as soon as I can, but it may take awhile. Don’t worry. Those things you see won’t hurt you. They’re just…

Here, she stopped. Just what? She had no idea what was going on. But as wrenching cries for help and mercy continued around and behind her, she had to come up with a comforting explanation.

They’re just gifts from the spaceship
, she typed.

After sending the message, she squeezed the armrests of her seat tightly and looked around. The jet seemed to be moving normally, with no sudden
twists or turns. A flight attendant—the short, brunette woman who had delighted in joking with passengers earlier in the flight—stood in the aisle, holding a microphone. With a serious look on her face and seemingly unaware that her uniform cap was askew, she asked the passengers to stay in their seats and fasten their seatbelts. Passengers shouted at her: “What’s happening?” “Are we going to crash?” But the attendant said she would have more information later and walked back toward the front of the plane, amid a chorus of frightened voices.

Why doesn’t the pilot come on and say something, anything?
Claire wondered.

She didn’t realize it, but the last thing the distraught passengers needed to hear was the panicked conversation going on in the cockpit.

“St. Louis, St. Louis this is AF 428,” pilot Andrew Sarriff said hurriedly. “We’re turning around and coming in. Estimated time, seventeen minutes.”

“Negative, AF 428, repeat: Negative,” came the equally rushed reply from flight control at Lambert—St. Louis International Airport. “We have no runway for you. Continue to Dulles as planned.”

Sarriff turned to Flight Officer Denise Lewis, who raised her head from her cell phone and said, “Someone blogged that it’s been reported these red things are killing people by the hundreds, and aliens are fighting their way into government buildings.”

“Maybe they’ve taken over the control tower at St. Louis,” Sarriff said as sweat began to trickle from his salt-and-pepper hairline.

“We should go in anyway,” Lewis said.

“If there really isn’t a runway available in St. Louis, or at some other airport,” Sarriff said, and paused. “…We need to find a road or something we can put down on, even a body of water if it comes to that. There’s got to be some big lakes on the way, in Kentucky or Tennessee,” he said. Lewis nodded her head in approval.

“What the hell are you people talking about?” In the confusion, the crew hadn’t noticed that flight attendant Rodney Powell had entered the cockpit and heard their desperate plans.

Surprised, Sarriff turned and said defensively, “Hey, it’s our job to get everyone in safely.”

“It damn sure is,” said Powell. “Get a grip on yourselves.” He opened the flight deck door and started to walk out. As he was closing the door, he said emphatically, “Just fly the damn plane.” He turned and walked quickly down the aisle with a grim expression, as Claire looked on, more confused than ever.

Just then, shrieks of alarm rose from around her as two F-16 fighter jets swooped in to fly alongside the airliner, about two hundred yards to the right.
Jesus Christ, they’re not going to shoot us down, are they?
she thought before she could get a grip on herself. Looking like aliens in their shiny flight suits and black helmets, the F-16 pilots eyed the passenger jet for a couple minutes before smoothly peeling off and out of sight.

Come on Mr. Pilot, say something
, Claire thought.

Sobs, pleas, and moans steadily rose in desperation and volume from around the plane. By now, panic was nearly out of control. Every few seconds, one male passenger nearby in economy class repeated in an even, almost matter-of-fact voice, “I don’t want to die.”

Claire took a deep breath and muttered, “Well, shit.” She pulled her Presidential Space Policy Team ID badge out of her purse and stopped a passing flight attendant. She wasn’t sure what she could tell the passengers, but figured almost anything would help ease the spreading terror. She explained to the attendant—a young, black woman with almost the same calm, reserved look on her face as she’d had at the start of the flight—that she was a government official who dealt with the extra terrestrial craft, and that she might be able to provide information to calm the passengers. The flight attendant immediately took Claire’s hand and led her to the doorway between economy class and first class. After introducing Claire, the attendant gave her the microphone.

Claire’s knees wobbled and she almost lost her resolve when she looked out over the passengers. More than a hundred tightly packed, terrified faces stared at her from inside the plane’s aluminum tube body, sharpening a feeling of claustrophobia and vulnerability. The roar of the jet engines now sounded ominous.

“My name is Claire Montague, and I’m on the Presidential Space Policy Team,” she said, trying to speak slowly. “I was actually on the first team of
scientists that discovered D9, the space craft.” The passengers looked at her in silence, desperately hoping to hear something reassuring. “I know from data we got just hours ago that D9 is 800 million miles away from us, and on its present course, won’t reach Earth’s vicinity for more than a month.”

“But what about the red dots?” half a dozen passengers asked almost in unison.

An older, female passenger near the rear of the plane called out, “It said on the Internet a red dot in Canada or somewhere gave off a gas that killed fifty people.”

Claire’s jaw dropped. A young man with short hair, apparently in the military, turned to the woman and said, “But I saw there haven’t been any casualties, except for the ones caused in accidents by people getting
away
from the dots. Even by people trying to get
to
the dots.” Several other passengers affirmed that report.

Amid the murmur of voices, Claire said, “Ladies and gentlemen.” For just a moment, and despite the grim situation, she couldn’t help feeling amused that, standing in the aisle with a microphone in her hand, addressing the passengers, she felt like a flight attendant. “Listen, there’s going to be a lot of conflicting information out there. But stop a second. Our airplane is not diving up or down or right or left. The airplane is flying normally. The lights are on, the air conditioning is on. The systems are functioning normally. I’m confident we’ll get into Dulles Airport as scheduled, and then we can contact our loved ones.”

She herself didn’t feel as confident as she asserted, but the edge was gone from the passengers’ panic and terror. Partly it was because of the explanations given by Claire and some of the other passengers; partly it was just the act of addressing the crisis rationally, which steered people away from an ever-accelerating plunge into fear and irrationality.

Claire handed the microphone back to the flight attendant and started back to her seat. She’d taken only a couple steps when a woman with two children seated next to her grabbed her, painfully pinching the flesh on Claire’s forearm.

“What are they like on D9? Are they like us?”

From up and down the plane, other frightened passengers reached out to Claire with questions: “Do they have super weapons?” “They’ve already told the government what they want, right?” “When are they coming for our guns?”

Claire felt she didn’t have anything else useful to say, but the flight attendant looked at her intently with a furrowed brow that said “Don’t go.” So she turned to the other passengers and started talking with them one by one, not so much answering their questions as showing that it was possible to talk about their fears with a sympathetic person.

After about half an hour, the plane started to descend to Washington. D.C., and Claire pulled away from the still-worried passengers to take her seat. She tried to call her sister and other friends and family, but couldn’t get through the clogged system. As the plane got lower and lower, she looked out her window for any sign of what was really happening. From several thousand feet up, there were no indications of anything abnormal. The Pentagon, the Washington Monument, and other landmarks stood out from the sinewy boulevards and green parks, with their trees and grass, as usual.

Then a small plume of smoke about a half mile from the Pentagon caught her eye. Then another, closer to the horizon, and then another. As individual vehicles became distinct, she saw the flashing lights of numerous emergency vehicles. Traffic was at a standstill at some intersections, with masses of cars bumper-to-bumper. And Claire thought she saw several cleared-off spaces with tiny red dots in the middle sail by as the airplane approached the runway.

When they landed and taxied to the terminal, Claire tried to reach people on her phone, and searched her email for messages. Eventually she found one that had evidently gotten through right after the red dots started showing up.

It said: “Report to Denver One immediately.”

D
ENVER
O
NE

T
he landing was
smooth, and the plane arrived at the terminal right on time, belying the drama during the flight. Deplaning started as a slow but orderly process, as usual, but shouting and shoving matches soon broke out as passengers struggled to quickly manhandle carry-on luggage from overhead bins and squeeze into already crowded aisles, often while trying to make phone calls at the same time.