Second Contact, page 38
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“We have different ideas of the word hospitality,” Trey laughed. He saw the courier out and closed the door.
Outside, the courier returned to his rental van and placed the box on the seat next to him. He drove away quickly, approaching the address written on the box but then continuing straight past it without slowing down.
When he was safely clear of the surrounding neighbourhood, he pulled over and lifted a very basic cellphone from the van’s glove compartment. He sent a short and simple text message — “Done” — to a number he knew by heart.
After checking that no one was looking, he then threw the phone out of his window and drove over it. He reversed for good measure before driving over the phone one last time as he sped out of town.
Easy as that, he thought to himself.
Easy… as… that…
C minus 7
Feather’s Antiques
Salida, Colorado
By the early afternoon, no rats had presented themselves in any of the outbuildings at the Feather brothers’ quaint but spacious family home — really two adjoining properties converted into one — but nor had any plaques bearing engravings of extraterrestrial origin.
The outbuilding identified as the plaque’s likeliest hiding place was positively overflowing with scrap metal. There were no pristine advertising signs to be seen inside, only an endless collection of largely worthless junk and some other incomplete items which may have held some value if they were still in one piece, or at the very least if all of their pieces had been present.
The first third of the small hangar-like building — the section nearest its door — was so far the only area with any clear floor space whatsoever. Further in, dangerously sharp and rusted examples of everything from manhole covers to car-doors littered the floor in a haphazard manner that really did make it look as though they’d all been shaken to the ground by a giant dropping them from an enormous box.
Clark, easily the strongest member of the search party, began the day by lamenting his injury-caused inability to be of much help. Andrew, the glasses-wearing and quieter of the Feather brothers, naturally asked what kind of injury Clark had suffered and what its cause had been.
Understandably reluctant to explain that he had been thrown against a wall in Richard Walker’s hallway by a forcefield which shielded the old man’s abduction by aliens, Clark uncomfortably stuttered over his answer until Emma jumped in with an effortlessly convincing white lie about an on-the-job run-in with a perp that Clark wasn’t allowed to talk about.
Since then, Dan and Emma had been working their way through the crowded outbuilding. Initially assisted only by Michael Feather while the others looked elsewhere, they were joined by the rest of the group just before noon when those others had finished searching through the more accessible of the previously unexplored buildings.
“It definitely wasn’t in the part we’ve already cleared,” Dan said, by now slowly moving scattered items from the central third of the floor. This exercise had been taking a great deal of time and care, and the mood among the searchers had fallen precipitously when their moving of the largest items revealed a second layer of smaller and generally sharper items underneath.
“This stuff is actual shit,” Michael complained to his older but smaller brother who stood with a surprised and disappointed look as he surveyed Dan’s group’s lack of progress. “You guys might be wondering how the hell the plaque could possibly be here because you probably think we must have looked through everything a hundred times to try to get that bounty… but look at this stuff. Broken pieces of bikes, crowbars, broken fences… it’s literally scrap. I don’t know what the hell Dad was thinking keeping all of this. Now that we’re past the first section of crap I can see a big multi-compartment shelving unit with organised boxes, which I didn’t know was there and which might be somewhere worth looking, but there’s still so much crap in the way before we can get there.”
“It’s like he started out as a collector and turned into a hoarder somewhere along the way,” Tara said. Her comment was of the obliviously blunt kind that Emma and Clark would more often expect to come from Dan, but he had so far had the tact to keep a very similar thought to himself.
“Bingo,” Michael said, unoffended. “That’s exactly it. God knows I loved the old guy… but if he hadn’t dumped so much shit in the way, we would have seen that unit the first time we came in here and we could’ve had a run at the full bounty.”
“Well, we know he must have had the plaque for a while,” Andrew chimed in. “After all, the diary of Heilig’s that he was mentioned in was pretty old… right, Dan? That means it’s going to be in with the stuff from his collecting phase, before he started piling up this junk like he was making a nest, so the unit makes sense.”
Michael shrugged in exasperation. “We know that, genius,” he sighed. “That’s why we’re talking about it. But do you want to try walking over this stuff in-between here and there without killing yourself or getting tetanus? There’s rusty spokes from broken bike wheels sticking up from the floor, I can see some wooden fence posts wrapped in goddamn barbed wire, and God only knows what could be under there in the places we can’t even see yet. The good news is that now that everyone’s here, it should only take us another hour or so to clear enough of the floor to get to the shelves, and then we could finally be in business. Timo, you can go inside and start writing that cheque if you don’t want to get your hands dirty.”
Timo chuckled and raised his hands, revealing that his gloves had indeed been getting dirty during his fruitless searching with Clark, Tara and Andrew.
“Touché,” Michael said with an impressed expression. “In that case, feel free to stick around.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss the moment when we find the plaque for anything,” Timo replied, stepping forward to get to work.
As the pace of that work picked up and the floor was cleared of dangerously sharp metallic objects piece by piece and inch by inch, Michael began asking Timo a lot of fairly specific questions about his planned projects at Fiore Frontiere. Having dominated the global news agenda shortly after the Kerguelen bolide, these plans for a privately funded but publicly minded space program had since fallen from the headlines.
Indeed, even Timo had barely thought about the imminent ceremonial opening of his new headquarters at the old IDA building in Colorado Springs, which had been long-planned but only recently announced. His various businesses and organisations were generally well-oiled machines which could operate without the need for his direct involvement, and the surface-level renovation of the old IDA building’s facade and of Richard Walker’s infamous press room were days away from being ready. Ceremonial was the key word when it came to the imminent opening — no real research or development would be carried out within the building during the several months it would take for the full refit to be completed — but at this point Timo wasn’t sure how big of an event the ceremony would be.
That, like so much else, depended on what the plaque would reveal. Dan’s dream scenario that the plaque would point the way to the as-yet-undiscovered planet commonly spoken of as New Kerguelen — generally considered as either the Messengers’ home world or a habitable second home for humanity — was also Timo’s deepest hope. And if that did indeed come to pass, Fiore Frontiere’s grand opening would be the perfect time to reveal it to the public.
“I’ve seen some photos of the new signage at Walker’s old IDA place,” Michael said, speaking as he carefully lifted the wheeled base of an office drawer unit from the cluttered centre of the room and placed it nearer the door, in an area which was itself becoming inevitably crowded with relocated garbage. “It’s already looking way better with the Fiore Frontiere sign. But what I want to know is whether all of the stuff you said you were planning is actually going to happen. You know, the giant space-based telescope for spotting faraway planets, an ark for taking people to New Kerguelen once you find it… is all of that stuff real, or were you just trying to push Godfrey into doing more?”
“And is that why there was so much focus on planetary defence when you were on Focus 20/20?” Andrew chimed in. “Were you strategically fear-mongering so that Godfrey would hurry up and do something?”
“We all have more questions than answers,” Emma said, cutting Timo off before he could reply. He didn’t take it personally; they were on the same page, and all she was doing was minimising the risk of anyone saying the wrong thing. “But I do have one new piece of info that isn’t public yet: Slater is having a press conference tonight to address the California Fireball. I have a lot of contacts who are very close to Slater but not quite in her inner circle, and even they have no idea what she’s going to say.”
“Do you think she might say we’re pulling out of the GSC?” Dan asked, hearing this news for the first time. “Either that or a demand for immediate GSC action?”
“She’ll say something calming,” Emma said. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I start liking Slater after everything she did last year, but she’s a lot more responsible in what she says than Walker, Cole, Godfrey, anyone like that. Whatever she’s pushing for, she’ll be pushing behind closed doors. Tonight will probably be something about her having sought and received assurances from the GSC that they’ll step up their game on certain things, and I imagine she’ll say that Godfrey has her full support. There might even be a light jab at Cole and Jack, telling them that the GSC needs commitment from everyone and that it would be reckless and irresponsible to let politics get in the way. Obviously I don’t know what she’ll say, but if I was in her corner then that’s what I’d be suggesting.”
While the rest of the search party were turned to Emma, pausing for a moment to pay attention to her take on what could be a very important development, Tara very carefully lifted a large but light sheet of thin metal which turned out to be an extremely worn-out advertising sign from a soda fountain. There was nothing else underneath this sign, which had been diagonally propped up against other items and thus looked like it was resting on top of another layer of dangerous junk.
“Guys, look: there’s pretty much a path to the shelves,” she proudly announced.
The others turned and saw that she was right; only a four-foot stretch of shallow-piled junk now stood between their clear section of floor and the many organised boxes which lay invitingly beyond the lake of scrap metal, neatly stacked on each of the wide shelving unit’s several levels.
“I could put that sign on top of the rest of the stuff and walk over it,” Michael suggested.
“I’m the one who’s looking in those boxes,” Dan said. Rather than any egotistical desire to be first, he was driven by the practical need to see the plaque’s unknown and potentially explosive engravings before the Feathers. “But yeah, I’m up for walking over the sign. Kind of like a bridge.”
Clark stepped forward to study both the large sign in question and also the shallow pile of relatively harmless-looking items which stood in Dan’s way. Satisfied that it was safe, he encouraged Tara to hand the sign to Dan.
“Be careful,” Emma said.
Dan smiled warmly. “I will.”
With refreshing ease, Dan took two steps on the large sign and reached up for the highest box on the left side of the shelving unit.
“Pass the boxes back,” Clark said.
Paying little attention to anything but his own actions, Dan placed the first of the deceptively heavy boxes on some of the junk next to his makeshift bridge and crouched down to look inside it.
“The real treasure is never in the first chest, anyway,” Michael said with a laugh.
Dan heard this but nevertheless rifled through the varied contents of the box, moving aside some oversized key-rings and a very old-looking cow bell. With those out of the way, his hand then felt the smoothness of the next item before his eyes saw it. His heart-rate immediately quickened; there was no mistaking what he was touching.
Before he even turned the previously elusive plaque around to see what was engraved on the front, Dan McCarthy excitedly yelled to the others: “It is! It’s in the first chest!”
C minus 6
GSC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
To say that GSC Chairman William Godfrey was disappointed in his staff would have been an understatement on the level of saying that his relationships with national leaders in London and Washington were somewhat strained.
For despite clear instructions to carry out what he considered a straightforward task, his team had utterly failed to establish any kind of meaningful spatial or temporal relationship between the recent celestial events which had cast such a shadow over his organisation and which were fanning the flames of a hysteria that could threaten its very existence.
Mathematical and geographical analyses by both human experts and supposedly intelligent computer algorithms had given him nothing; two of the precise locations that his experts had suggested as potentially relevant — the dying Chinese satellite’s entry point over Montana and the perigee point of the Earth-grazing asteroid observed across a huge stretch of California and western Nevada — lay such a tremendous distance from the other key site at Kerguelen that nothing made immediate sense. Temporal analysis came up equally short, with more than one senior figure in more than one GSC facility reporting that it seemed as though a key piece of the puzzle was missing… if there even was a puzzle to solve.
During the few hours before the California Fireball, Godfrey had experienced a period of relative calm. President Slater accepted the data-backed conclusions in the GSC’s report about the Chinese satellite, acknowledging the verified and time-stamped statements and reports from GSC personnel around the world — including former NASA officials — which backed up Godfrey’s claim that the satellite was always expected to burn up and never posed a threat, and that the only surprise had been its slightly early entry.
This calm had been transient, of course, and was decisively pierced by a wandering asteroid which served only to massively amplify and exacerbate pre-existing fears. Protests on the street, though highly unwelcome, were something Godfrey could live with; more pertinently, they were something he could outlast — something he could survive.
But in the face of political whispers about a high-profile withdrawal from the GSC — the highest-profile withdrawal possible — William Godfrey’s prognosis was far less positive.
If Slater pulled out, the show was over. All attempts to reach anyone at the upper end of her administration had so far been utterly blanked, and the recent announcement that a White House press conference would take place later in the day already felt like the final nail in Godfrey’s coffin.
He knew that with no American presence, the Global Space Commission would share a level of legitimacy and potency with the League of Nations; he knew that with no American presence, the organisation he had worked so hard to build up would be lucky to see out the month.
Some of Godfrey’s staff remained frightened by his words from the previous evening on the subject of a potential alien invasion. The strategic reports he had been given on that front were about as useful as the reports he’d been given on recent celestial events, but Godfrey cared little about any of that now.
If the aliens were coming, part of him was beginning to spitefully hope that they were hostile. They could blitz the planet with laser rays for all he cared; because for William Godfrey, a life without power was no life at all.
But if they didn’t come — or at least until they did — he would fight tooth and nail to hang on to what he had.
And if fate should insist that William Godfrey was going down, he sure as hell wasn’t going down alone.
C minus 5
Feather’s Antiques
Salida, Colorado
Before any searching began, and at Emma’s strict insistence, the Feathers had signed a quickly edited version of the contract she prepared before leaving Birchwood earlier in the day. In exchange for their cooperation and silence, the discovery of the fourth plaque meant that the Feathers were now due to receive a cool ten million dollars from Timo Fiore.
The instalment-based payment schedule would hold back the majority of the money for long enough to ensure that the brothers would indeed stay quiet for a period of many years, and it would also simultaneously temper the difficulty of explaining the source of their newfound wealth to anyone who might enquire.
“Laundering” was perhaps too strong a word, but Timo understood the concern and assured Andrew that there would be no problems on that front; he exaggerated only slightly in saying he had more moneymen on his payroll than he had bones in his body, and he was upfront in sharing his assessment that the brothers’ antiques business presented an ideal cover story for significant cash influxes given the eternal plausibility of big finds and equally big sales.
What the contract did not afford the Feather brothers, as Michael was now learning to his palpable frustration, was a guaranteed right to see the plaque’s engravings. Dan would have had no problem in showing them and no great precautions had been taken thus far — after all, the Feathers had participated fully in the search — but Emma cautiously encouraged him to keep the plaque to himself and to not even look at the engravings until it was safely back in the car and on its way to Birchwood.
Dan ran his hand over the smooth rear surface of the plaque. “We need to check it’s actually engraved before we leave,” he said.
“Check in the car,” Emma replied. “We don’t want to involve them in anything we don’t have to. Especially when we wouldn’t know what the anything is until it was too late.”
“I’d say we’re already pretty involved,” Michael protested. “After all, we did help you find the damn thing! And what exactly is it that you think could be on there that you don’t want us to see?”
