Second Contact, page 2
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Popular and affable, Billy was more delighted than anyone when Dan McCarthy’s initial bravery eventually led to the discovery of the spherical alien artefact which forced the government to admit a truth he had long held as self-evident. The precise timing of the moment when President Slater reluctantly spoke the four magic words — “we are not alone” — had been utterly perfect for Billy, coinciding as it did with his ET Weekender in Myrtle Beach. That event’s festivities had attracted tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters, but the organisational headaches which lay behind its success paled in comparison to those Billy had encountered when planning his latest and most ambitious venture yet.
The tourist group Billy was currently regaling with Kerguelen-related trivia and anecdotes from various stages in his colourful life had already been travelling with him for over a week, and they had plenty of time left before their Great Tour came to an end.
Ever since Disclosure Day, as it had naturally come to be known, the locations mentioned in the documents which led to the modern rediscovery of an alien sphere off the coast of Argentina had become some of the most desirable tourist destinations in the world. Billy’s tour began gently enough at Lake Toplitz in the Austrian alps, which Hans Kloster’s infamous handwritten letter had pinpointed as the site where an alien craft was discovered by Nazi officials in April of 1938. The second stage involved a very short and very pleasant journey to Salzburg, where an alien artefact had recently been rediscovered in a storage locker belonging to the late Karl Heilig, an amateur treasure hunter and prominent archaeologist who Billy had known of professionally but not personally.
From there, each of Billy’s groups proceeded to Lake Namtso in Tibet, where an alien sphere was said to have levitated from the water and into the arms of the expedition team sent to find it following Kloster’s successful decoding of a map found in the alien craft.
Trips to the three remaining sites of the Nazis’ sphere discoveries then followed, beginning with a voyage to Kerguelen before the tour groups ventured as close as reasonably possible to the inhospitable Antarctic coastal area once known as New Swabia and continued on to the tiny southern island of Bouvet.
The Great Tour concluded in the coastal Argentine city of Miramar, where the famous sphere which contained two world-changing artefacts had been lifted from the ocean just over a year ago; some 70 years after a surrendering U-boat crew was said to have dumped it in the ocean in order to ensure it never fell into Allied hands.
Each of Billy’s groups contained 120 tourists, 40 of whom enjoyed a full-day land tour of Kerguelen during each of their first three days docked at the remote island. He told his adventurous and wealthy tourists to make the most of their time on dry land, since landings at Bouvet — their next port of call after passing New Swabia — were notoriously challenging and rare, typically requiring helicopter transportation from the ship.
And although Billy had fought hard to overcome countless obstacles in arranging his ambitious Great Tour project, his insurers’ refusal to cover any terrestrial activities on Bouvet Island ultimately spelled an end to his hope of including a land expedition in the itinerary. This mattered more to Billy than his tourists, who knew that the island was uninhabited, anyway, and that the established history held that a Nazi crew had found the Bouvet sphere while conducting tests around the island rather than on it.
Billy’s eyes and body regularly drifted towards a large window during his breakfast-time talk, as he never tired of the bizarre island’s sights. The area immediately outside was relatively flat, in stark contrast to the eye-catchingly harsh peaks and rolling landscapes which defined other areas of Grand Terre, but there was something magical about the island that made Kerguelen the place Billy always looked forward to returning to most of all.
In Billy’s eyes, it was a one-of-a-kind destination worthy of all the attention it had recently garnered and more. One relatively trivial novelty which proved popular for tourist photographs were the warning signs at areas where animals regularly crossed over marked roads. Tourists took delight in posing next to these signs because the animal inside the red triangle was not a deer nor even a bear, but rather a large seal. To some, this was symbolic of Kerguelen: home of one idiosyncrasy after another.
To the surprise of many, there were deer on the remote southern island — several thousand reindeer, to be precise — following their introduction along with sheep and the less welcome proliferation of ravenous rabbits and seabird-troubling cats.
Billy’s tourists, meanwhile, were always warmly welcomed by most of the island’s research staff; Billy was respectful in ensuring that his tourists behaved impeccably, while the money he brought in had aided many researchers by enabling upgrades to their ageing equipment and transport vehicles.
By far the least welcome Kerguelen residents were another group of recent arrivals: several dozen staff representing the Global Space Commission.
The GSC had initially formed as the Global Shield Commission when the opening of the Argentine sphere revealed two engraved plaques, whose messages many perceived as warnings against the imminent arrival of a hostile alien race or a threat from an incoming asteroid. When the third plaque almost entirely quashed these fears upon its discovery in Salzburg, the GSC’s politically shrewd Chairman, William Godfrey, wasted no time in rechristening the young organisation as the Global Space Commission in a successful bid to maintain its relevance.
Under Godfrey’s leadership, the GSC brought the Earth’s powerful nations together, pooling their resources in pursuit of a truly collaborative brave new era of space research. The past year had seen a tremendous centralisation of decision-making power, with all national space administrations soon to be confined to history and full integration procedures well under way.
With an orange GSC flag now the only one flying over Port-aux-Francais, a handful of self-important GSC observers were never far from view. These observers were officially there to oversee the operations of staff from France’s National Centre for Space Studies, who had conducted research on Kerguelen for decades without the need for such oversight. But given the highly visible GSC deployments at every location linked to the alien revelations, including at Lake Namtso where no space-related research had ever been conducted prior to their own arrival, this official line fell apart under even the slightest of scrutiny.
The GSC observers had always stayed out of Billy’s way and he had always made sure to stay out of theirs. He told a few jokes at their organisation’s expense every now and then, which usually raised smiles on the faces of his tourists and drew stronger laughter from the station staff who understandably harboured intense resentment towards the outsiders who recorded their movements and activities as if they were convicts rather than dedicated researchers.
After one particularly barbed joke about William Godfrey, Billy saw several of his tourists’ faces react in visible shock.
“Come on, it wasn’t that bad…” he chuckled. But even as he spoke, the way the expressions of shock spread around the room told him that they were reacting to something else. Within another second or two, Billy noticed a change in the room’s light.
At that moment he turned to the window behind him, and at the very next he ran towards the door, immediately calling everyone to follow as quickly as they could.
Outside, Billy Kendrick and his lucky tourists gazed up in awestruck silence at what was by far the most incredible thing any of them had ever seen: an impossibly bright fireball in the crystal clear sky above Kerguelen.
The doors of other nearby buildings were thrown open and slammed closed as people ran out to see the incredible meteor streaking its way across the morning sky.
As almost all of the tourists reached into their pockets to grab their phones in an attempt to capture some all-important selfies with the mesmerising meteor in the background, only Billy and a few others were paying full attention at the most spectacular moment of all — the moment when the meteor exploded in an unfathomably powerful airburst.
The screams began quickly, in reaction to the flash blindness some experienced when a previously beautiful sight in the sky suddenly gave way to a near-total flash which appeared dozens of times brighter than the sun. The medics stationed on Kerguelen and the doctors on Billy’s ship were in for a busy day, but no one would have any lasting problems.
After the flash, a smoky trail developed in the sky. Many tourists understandably ran inside in a natural defensive reaction to the tremendous explosion, but Billy stood in astonishment at the beautiful moment which had been bestowed upon him.
Billy knew his history; he knew his impact events and he knew his bolides. All bolides — exploding meteors — were spectacular sights to behold. But observing a bolide of this magnitude? Well, that was stupendously rare.
Like everyone else on Kerguelen, Billy also knew that he was slap bang in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Antarctica and Madagascar and countless miles from anyone else. The odds of seeing something like this were astronomically long, and the odds of seeing something like this somewhere like this were even longer.
But for it to happen while Billy was in this specific “somewhere like this”… not just any tiny island where he was only spending a few days, but one so central to the world-changing events surrounding Dan McCarthy’s leak and the long-overdue Disclosure it brought about… well, to Billy’s mind, there weren’t enough digits in a telephone number for those kinds of odds.
And then came the sonic boom, after what he thought must have been comfortably more than a full minute. The majority of the few tourists who had so far remained at Billy’s side now hastily fled for shelter, even more understandably running from a near-deafening sound which could easily have been mistaken for a heavy bombardment.
One tourist with whom Billy had grown friendly during the preceding week — Janice, a retired lawyer from New Zealand — walked slowly to his side. The woman, still shielding her tender eyes despite the fireball’s smoky trail being all that was left, had one simple question for the guide whose intellect and instincts she trusted greatly: “What the hell was that?”
A serene smile spread across Billy’s face. “Janice, my friend… that was them.”
C minus 97
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
The presence of their father prevented Clark from pushing Dan for details on what gave him the idea that “they” were coming back, but he knew only too well who Dan was referring to.
As Clark studied Dan’s changing expression, which had begun to relax when the intense pain at the back of his neck ceased and was now veering towards something that looked more like excitement than fear, their front door swung open in a rush of motion.
Emma Ford, still dressed for work, ran inside and headed straight for Dan. “Have you seen it?” she asked, wasting no time. “Do you think it could be, you know…”
Clark forced a cough. “None of us know what you’re talking about,” he said, repeatedly raising his eyebrows and subtly tilting his head towards Henry in an effort to stop Emma from saying too much. “Is something wrong? We can talk in the kitchen, if you want. My dad is trying to watch the game.”
Emma nodded then looked back to Dan, belatedly noticing the drying tears under his eyes. She squeezed his hand and silently asked him what was wrong. He responded by briefly touching the back of his neck with his other hand. Emma’s free hand then instinctively reached for her own neck, which had a small remnant of a scar in exactly the same place as Dan’s, but she shook her head to tell him that she hadn’t felt anything.
“Hold on a second,” Henry’s deep voice boomed from his spot beside the couch. “Look!”
The standing trio stopped on their way to the relative privacy of the kitchen and glanced at the TV. Below the familiar sideline reporter, a breaking news banner now filled the bottom area of the screen: “BREAKING — DEVELOPING INCIDENT AT KERGUELEN”.
“Kerguelen…” Henry continued, reaching for the remote. “Dan, did you see something about this downstairs? Is this what freaked you out?”
Dan stammered. “Uh, I, uh… yeah. I just saw something on my TV. Yeah. That’s how I knew something weird was happening.”
With Henry busy changing the channel and Clark impatiently staring at the screen to learn the nature of this developing incident, Emma continued trying to read Dan’s expression. “You really think it was them?” she mouthed without making much of a sound.
Dan shook his head and replied at a similarly low volume: “Whatever just happened, I know it was them.”
In an interesting quirk caused by the phenomenal speed of the meteor and the reliable efficiency of satellite communication, footage of the meteor’s initial atmospheric entry had been shared around the world before the sonic boom from its explosion reached the ground.
The McCarthys caught the looping footage midway through its third airing, after the flash but before the explosion. When the moment came, the TV’s soundbar filled the room with a bass-heavy boom that physically startled everyone. Even Emma, who knew it was coming, hadn’t been prepared for the level of this sudden burst of sound; she could only imagine what it must have sounded like in person.
She turned once more to Dan, keen to see his reaction to the surely unexpected revelation that an exploding meteor had apparently been responsible for the mysterious twinge in his neck that told him something was happening before he saw or heard what it was. He looked remarkably calm, which helped to ease Emma’s uncertain mind.
Unfortunately, when Sarah Curtis — Dan’s least favourite Blitz News anchor — returned to the airwaves beside a half-screen version of the footage after its third full airing, calmness was in short supply.
“Already,” Curtis began in her best fear-mongering tone, “speculation is rife that the location of this extraordinary incident, which is so obscure and remote that coincidence seems implausible, may indicate that this is some kind of deliberate message from the Messengers themselves. And if that is indeed the case, it certainly seems difficult to consider that a destructive fireball from space could possibly be construed as a message of peace.”
Emma lifted her phone from her pocket and quickly tapped her way through a few menu options. Seconds later, she tilted the screen towards Dan. It displayed data from her Social Media Meta Analysis app, and with a single glance Dan could see that the incident wasn’t going down well. The main mood cloud was filled with two large words: panic and fear.
When Emma scrolled down, the positive-negative pie chart was a wash of red apart from a tiny sliver of green and a slightly larger slice of uncertain blue. The straightforward trend list, which highlighted words which were being used far more than normal, contained some specific terms which didn’t surprise Dan given the nature of the aggregate reaction-tracking data he had just seen: Kerguelen, bolide, GSC, Messengers, meteor, Godfrey, plaque.
The final word in this trending list was the one which gave Dan pause.
Henry’s continued presence made it impossible for Dan to candidly discuss any of this with Emma and Clark, the only others who shared his secret, but in the confusion of the moment he didn’t know what he would have said even if he had been able to speak openly.
Sarah Curtis and her studio guest, a man who had been there to talk about something else and whose identifying caption Dan had missed, wasted no time in ramping up the fear factor even further with a word that hadn’t been spoken much in the last year: hostility.
“I think this is undoubtedly going to reignite the hostility debate,” the unknown studio guest said, “a debate which we have complacently assumed to be settled ever since the third plaque turned up in Salzburg. I also believe that attention will inevitably — and rightly — turn once again to Richard Walker and his indefensible role in keeping the truth from humanity for so long.”
Henry McCarthy sighed at this comment and wheeled his way around the couch. To Dan’s frustrated bemusement, Henry had often voiced his view that Walker had been unfairly vilified for covering up the truth for so long during his time as head of the now defunct Interspace Defense Agency. Henry had no love for Walker following his frequent personal attacks on Dan, but in broader terms he accepted that the disgraced politician had done what he’d done for unselfish and patriotic reasons.
Dan held his tongue for very different reasons whenever this subject came up, but he knew full well that Henry’s views on Richard Walker and the IDA would be significantly less dispassionate if he knew the whole truth… the real truth.
“I think I’m actually going to head to the grill,” Henry said, making his way towards his bedroom as soon as he announced this new intention. “I haven’t seen Byrd in a few days and he’ll be watching the game there. Clark, you in?”
“Not tonight,” Clark said. As the trio quietly understood, Henry’s departure would finally give them a chance to talk openly about the remarkable situation at Kerguelen.
Dan pointed towards his basement, telling Emma and Clark that he’d be waiting for them down there.
But no sooner than Henry had entered his bedroom to get ready, he came right back out with his wallet and phone in his hand. “I’ll be late,” he said on his way to the front door. “Nice seeing you again, Emma. Stop by for dinner sometime. But next time…” Henry trailed off and knocked three times on the open door. “Knock.”
“Unless it’s an emergency,” she replied.
“Maybe if it’s a real emergency. But if it’s another glorified shooting star…” he trailed off again, knocking another three times on the open door before going outside and pulling it closed.
The second the door was closed, Emma threw her arms around Dan and hugged him tight. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
