Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles) (24 page)

“That’s what caught the cameraman’s eye, so he climbed aboard and took this.” Pete hit the controls again, repositioning the head at the beginning of another sequence.

This one showed the start of the ride, and for a while Scott got dizzy trying to figure out which way was up. Then the tunnel came roaring toward them and they plunged into darkness, emerging a moment later, but there was no indication of what happened. The camera panned left and right to show the surrounding countryside as the car went through another group of loops and twists, finally coming to rest at the station.

“So it doesn’t tell us how it was done,” Scott commented, starting to lose interest. It was a neat trick, but nothing else. Pete said nothing, so Scott looked up at him, seeing a smirk on his face. “All right wise guy, tell how they did it.”

“The marine who came across this on the newfax swears it’s real. You go in one part of the park, and come out of the tunnel at the other end five miles away,” he said.

“Five miles! For Christ sake, what were those guys drinking over there?” he said, but the look on Pete’s face said this wasn’t a joke. “You’re telling me these guys made a video of a roller coaster and traveled five miles just by passing through that … tunnel?”

“That’s right,” he said. Scott sat there, stunned, the different possibilities running through his mind.

“I hope you’ve done something to check this out,” he said at last.

“You bet I have. I’ve got three two-man teams over there searching for it now. I’ll have them check out the ride to see if it’s a fake. If it’s not, I’ll have that tunnel right here.”

“Find out who invented it as well, and if he’s alive, I want his ass right here.”

“Ten-four, skipper, I’ll see what I can do.”

“And Pete, good work, very good work. Made sure that the discoverers get a suitable reward, and my personal thanks.” Pete acknowledged his request, and took off out the door.

Scott sat there for a time, doodling on a pad and writing down different ways this effect could be used, but this all depended on what the effect was, how it worked, and if they could duplicate the device. Questions upon questions were piling up, one on top of the other— with no end in sight. It seemed that no matter how much he delegated to others, within a short period of time he was up to his neck in more questions that needed answering. He felt tired and drained, and every time his thoughts drifted to what he’d seen inside the alien ship, the more tired he became.

The detailed report on the possible size of the alien empire also made him feel uneasy. With that many resources to draw on, it wouldn’t be long before they’d send in a major task force to stomp on his little parade. The analogy of fighting an octopus at the bottom of the sea and midnight was true, except he felt as if he was fighting a whole herd of them, never really defeating any one. Last night, another one swam out of the darkness when it became apparent that Kat was pregnant again. The old Shakespeare quote about a man with a family became a hostage to fate crossed his mind, but he couldn’t dwell on that. He had a job to do, and nothing could stand in the way, not if the human race was to survive.

One of the last items in the interrogation report still sent a shiver up his spine—during the interrogation, it became clear that any race that became a threat to the aliens was immediately exterminated, its planet wiped clean of all life. No matter. They would throw everything against them, and do whatever it took to ensure this ended, no matter what the cost. To them, it was a matter of survival, for they knew that if any race became strong enough to defeat them, they would be destroyed. When the president made the deal, he had indeed opened Pandora’s box, for all of them. In a moment of pure clarity, Scott saw down through time, and realized there was no end, and no way to ever close the box again.

Being a small self-contained unit, it didn’t take an act of congress, or six months of meetings, to get anything done. Within a day of hitting the ground his command team had organized the scout groups: two old-timers, and one new recruit. One of the old-timers was a female who agreed to dress up in the ridiculous smothering outfit females of this world were required to wear. There was some resistance to the makeup of the team, but as Pete pointed out, “our girls,” all trained marines, might spot something their male partners might overlook. Where and what they would look at was up to them, since Scott strong-armed special passes out of President Westwood that permitted the teams to go anywhere they wanted, and to use the public transport systems without question.

Even so, it was going to be tough, what with the restrictions that females had to be escorted by a male family member at all times. That meant if they had to go somewhere, where only men were permitted, they’d have to stash the women in a hotel room until they got back. The females said that was okay with them, since that would give them time to catalogue the data and transmit it back to base.

All knew that time was of the essence, so the hastily assembled teams went off to different parts of the world in marine shuttlecraft, rather than wait for the local shuttle to arrive. Scott went on an inspection tour with Brock, mainly to assess their weapons production and ship construction. Everywhere they went they found feverish activity, since everyone now connected with the program understood the time constraint they were under, but Scott wasn’t happy and it showed.

“Even with three half-assed shipbuilding yards, we can’t keep this up Scott,” Brock said at last, echoing his own thoughts.

“You too?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing as you.”

Scott blew out his cheeks. “I’m wondering now if fighting the aliens as soon as we did was a mistake. We weren’t ready, and now we’re playing catchup.”

“It’s not as if we had much choice after they attacked us in New Zealand, is it?”

“True,” Scott admitted. “Since someone in that fucking world council is in contact with these assholes, and told them who and where we were.” He thumped the bulkhead with the side of his fist, frustrated and worried, not that he’d ever admit it.

Commanding officers were supposed to be stoic and aloof, of course, but deep down he was afraid. Afraid of losing everything he cared about, afraid of failing to protect his new country. He hadn’t been able to protect the United States against a nuclear attack, which he’d sworn to do. Was history about to repeat itself? At the start of World War II, neither the USA nor Great Britain was prepared for war, America even less so than the UK. On top of that, Great Britain lost much of its military equipment on the ignominious retreat at Dunkirk. Each country had a navy that blunted any immediate attack on the mainland, but Pearl Harbor and Scarpa Flow showed that neither was safe from a sneak attack. Here they were just as vulnerable from high orbit. A few dozen rocks from space could smash them back to the Stone Age, and they had little or no defense against it. Their shield would only stand up to so much bombardment before it collapsed. Why the aliens hadn’t thought of that, instead of a direct attack on his base, was an unknown. England had fielded the Spitfire and the Hurricane against the might of the German air force, while America had fielded her new carrier fleet against the Japanese, first holding them at bay, then taking the fight to the enemy. They needed something similar.

What scared him most was the aliens’ unknown war-fighting capacity. How fast could the aliens’ production facilities produce ships to replace those they’d lost, and how fast could they train new personnel? It had to be far beyond Earth’s limited capacity. They needed the game changer before the next incursion, or they might not be so lucky next time. In the end, he wandered over to Doc Chase’s office and did a little arm-twisting to get him to cough up a bottle of his moonshine. They sat sipping and chatting for a while until Scott fell silent. Chase looked at him a moment.

“Something bothering you, Scott?”

“What? Sorry, I was just thinking about what one of our techs said to me just after we arrived here.”

“Okay, I’m listening.” Scott smiled. Doc Chase was a lot more savvy than he let on, his grumpy old country doctor demeanor more of an act.

“Let me ask you a question first.” Scott rubbed the rim of the glass across his pursed lips while he marshaled his thoughts.  “Take a man from, say a man from three hundred years in our past, say about 1700, a really smart man, and bring him forward to our time in 2035. How much of the things he saw around him would he understand, let alone comprehend how they worked?”

“I’d say very little. He would recognize the ordinary things like a table and chair, or some of the more mundane items, but little else. So what?”

“Would he be able to, say, even with a good historical background, understand the workings of a television or radio?”

“Good heavens, no. He’d probably think it was witchcraft, or that we were in league with the devil.” Chase chuckled. “To him, things we take for granted, ordinary things like microwaves or cell phones, they’d seem like magic.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I don’t think we’re any smarter than a man from 1700,” Chase said. “A little better educated perhaps, more open-minded to possibilities maybe. Why do you ask?”

“Well, the tech I was telling you about got a little itch, and being a nosy tech took one of the holographic communication units apart.” He gave Chase a frown. “She had no trouble taking it apart and figuring out how it worked and putting it back together again.”

“So? I’m not following you.” Chase murmured, refilling their glasses.

“Then tell me, how come we understand every single damn invention these people have come up with in the last three hundred years!” Scott growled. “Are we smarter than someone from 1700?”

The doctor looked at him and blinked, then sipped his drink, and it was almost as if Scott could see the wheels turning slowly in his head.

“I see,” Chase muttered. He didn’t quite, but wanted Scott to finish his thought.

“In three hundred years, we shouldn’t have even been able to recognize a holoprojector, let alone take one apart!” Scott snapped, feeling angry. “Good god! Look how far we came technologically-wise in one hundred years, let alone three hundred.” He stood and started pacing across the room, occasionally sipping his drink or refilling his glass. “Christ! We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in less than a hundred years.”

“Humm,” Chase muttered, “you’d think they’d have come further than that.”

“Damn right! In three hundred years, we shouldn’t have been able to understand a damn thing about this place, the same as a man from 1700 wouldn’t, or couldn’t understand our world back then. Yet we do. There isn’t one invention we’ve found so far that we can’t take apart, and with a little poking and prodding, find out how the damn thing works. Just what the hell have these bloody people been doing for three hundred years?” It was a sobering thought. Suddenly, he found himself angry out of proportion to the thoughts that triggered it.

“By the sound of it, they’ve been sitting back on their asses and coasting along on old technology,” Chase answered. “Except anti-gravity, but even so, people back then were working on it.”

“You’ve got that right. I’ll give you that they didn’t have the impetus of war, or the military-industrial complex to churn out new gadgets, but ye gods! You think they would’ve been able to come up with something radically different from our time.”

“From what we know, it looks as if the religious fundamentalists got their way.”

“Yeah. One world under the rule of God, so to speak.” The thought made Scott shudder. “If it’s not in the Koran then it’s bad, or even outlawed.” Another thought struck him, and reaching over, he punched in the number President Westwood had given him.

“Salaam … Oh, General Scott. How are you today?”

Scott was thankful he’d foregone the usual greeting, since it still grated on his nerves. “How am I? Worried and curious, Mr. President. I need another favor.” Despite his iron control, Scott could see the tightening of expression on the president’s face.

“What is it this time?” Westwood said.

Even after all that had happened, President Westwood still didn’t get it. Scott said, “I need you to round up every young engineer, technician, and scientist you can find and ship them to New Zealand for a visit.”