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  The sergeant pointed at the image on his screen. “Sir, my first guess was junk falling back to Earth or a meteor, but then this curve showed up. I called as soon as I confirmed that there had been no recorded launches.” The sergeant pointed at a line of data slowly scrolling down the screen. “It’s definitely decelerating.”

  The officer picked up a red phone on a nearby console and held it to his ear. He continued to read the display over the technician’s shoulder. “Sir, Captain Martin in Operations,” he identified himself after a short wait. “We’ve picked up an incoming bogey as of three minutes ago. Preliminary data is that it is not, repeat, not, a missile. The object appears to be under power and decelerating and shows every indication of having originated from outside our atmosphere. We have a tentative landing area somewhere between Wyoming and the Canadian border.”

  He listened for a few seconds and said, “Sir, yes, sir,” and hung up the phone. “Sergeant, you will continue to monitor the bogey until it drops off of your screen. And try to get something from our orbital assets, too. Make sure you have all of this on back-up. I’m not going to take the fall if General Dalton doesn’t get all the information he needs.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant wouldn’t have this cushy assignment under Cheyenne Mountain if he wasn’t good at it. All recorders had been running from the first. Still, he knew where the feces would land if anything went wrong, and offered a silent prayer.

  I am definitely going to have to pick better places to pee, Katherine thought, not taking her eyes off the craft below. A space ship. Shuttles needed long glide-paths and long landing strips. This thing had come almost straight down at a considerable speed for it to have glowed so brightly. The light lit the whole top of the bluff just before she blacked out. And its ability to decelerate caused her to worry somewhere in the back of her brain.

  In the forefront of said brain, trained in analytical thinking, and possessing a master’s degree in systems analysis and a bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics, was the desire to go down and examine the craft immediately.

  Instead, she looked up at her husband. “Okay, Simon, give. You’ve got to know something. Tell me.” As a former DIA agent, he was sure to have some of the answers she wanted. The expression on his face told her a lot, but not enough.

  Simon Hawke looked down into the small valley and was surprised to see how tall the craft was. He knew the ridge was about sixty feet high, and this thing was only an uncomfortable jump below him. If he could have jumped that is. The slope of the ridge prevented that. His eyes took in the smoldering vegetation around the ship, shuttle, lander, whatever it was. “Well, I was briefed twice before we got married and I got promoted to agent supervisor, but I never really expected to see one if they even did exist. Some of us stayed up nights tossing ideas around. What if the powers-that-be were right? We had to have control of that knowledge or we would eventually cease to exist as an independent nation. That’s what I was trained to believe, but here and now, I’m not so sure. There are groups of special troops stationed all over the country set to act as quick-response teams. The government had a name for them: ALERT teams. Stands for ‘Alien Landing, Emergency Response, Tactical.’“

  Ever since the bungled attempt to hide the crash at Roswell in 1947, most governments around the world had instituted programs allowing them to mobilize forces specifically designed to contain events such as the one Simon and Katherine now found themselves in. Under a variety of names over the years, groups were stationed all over the world in hopes of getting to a craft first. There had been unsubstantiated reports out of South America, Russia, China, Egypt and a number of other places in the intervening years, but none had ever hinted at an intact craft.

  Katherine stared down at the vessel below and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  Simon immediately responded, “Need to know, Kitty-me-love. Besides, I never expected to actually see one in the first place. And I’ve been out of the loop since I retired.”

  She surveyed the scene below her, agreeing in principle. Decades of reading science-fiction didn’t prepare her for this moment, but it did deaden the pain, like morphine. Hell, she even had the latest Honor Harrington book along for reading material. Three miserable days of rain had left the ground a soggy mess and she and Simon had to slog through more than one small swamp to reach the switchback trail up the ridge. The dampness also kept the heat of the craft’s entry from allowing the brush in the area to do more than smolder a bit before dying out. The smoke drifting back and forth on the ever-changing winds added a surreal quality to the over-heated craft below.

  The newly risen full moon cast sharply defined shadows, and Katherine’s breath caught in her throat as she gazed down in wonder at the ship that sat exposed in the silvery light. No Earthly craft could have landed in that confined space, except some of the more advanced vertical take-off and landing types, the ones called VTOL’s, and this certainly wasn’t one of those. No props or fans at all. Shaped essentially like a shuttle, it had floated over her head and apparently landed under its own power. Apparently, she thought, because, its passage had knocked both her and her husband out in some unknown fashion, and now it sat at the bottom of the hill.

  Katherine tried to fit this new information into her world-view. She was bombarded daily with news programs full of travel warnings, anthrax vaccinations and scenes of almost unimaginable suffering from all over the world along with requests for less than fifty cents a day. The burning questions posed by the immaculately dressed commentators were about madmen pushing the button, trains derailing, toxic spills, drive-by shootings or some other psycho committing another unspeakable act in their particular slice of heaven. All topped off at the end with an upbeat, heart-warming nothing about a kitten that survived a fire.

  Hell, that was the reason for this sanctuary in the first place! And now this.

  “What was that you said about something called ALERT teams?” she asked. The possibility of government agents dropping out of thin air unexpectedly unnerved her more than a bit.

  Simon replied, “Teams of specially trained agents whose mission is to get this thing out of sight and into a place where it can be studied.”

  “Like the Roswell ship?” Kitty asked sarcastically. “We’ve been getting dribs and drabs out of that for the last fifty years and they still haven’t admitted to it existing.” In the circles she used to run in, it was a well-known fact that things like the transistor and fiber optics were a direct result of technology from crashed alien spaceships. And that was a wrecked one. Here sat an intact vessel.

  “How long before one of those teams arrives, and how many will be involved,” she asked.

  “Why do you want to know?” Simon asked suspiciously.

  “Look,” Katherine said patiently, an internal clock starting to tick in her head. “In this day and age, this kind of thing can’t be kept secret. Too many countries have the ways and means to track it and grasp the meaning of what we have here.” She spoke almost as if to a child. “If the U.S. gets hold of it, everyone is going to want in on it out of pure fear that we will gain too large an advantage over everyone else. And I truly wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it’d be one of our allies that does the first button pushing if we don’t give in to their demands.”

  Simon shook his head. “I’ve lived with you way too long, woman. You’re beginning to make sense. So we keep it out of everybody’s hands. How?”

  “If we can’t convince the occupants to split immediately, I don’t know what we’ll do. If they don’t leave, it sure looks like World War III to me.” At that moment, a high-pitched whine interrupted the crackling and popping of cooling metal coming from the now-darkened ship. As the pair on the ridge watched, a hatch opened in the near side, hinged at the bottom. When it was fully extended, its edge rested on the ground about twenty-five feet from the hull.

  A dim red light shone out of the opening, and for a time, noth
ing more happened. Kitty asked Simon again, “How long for one of those teams to arrive?”

  He thought for a moment. “Assume a unit stationed at Malmstrom,” he named an Air Force base in north-western Montana. “Not really expecting an event, they would be a bit unprepared for an immediate activation. Confirmation, authorization, and execution would take some time. Besides the team itself, there will be at least a half-dozen scientists, helicopters to ferry them here, support craft to provide ground troops or perimeter duty as necessary, you’re talking between forty and sixty men roused from a dead sleep.”

  He looked at his watch, then the moon which had been below the mountains when this started, and saw that it was almost two-thirty AM. “I’d say two hours for the first personnel to arrive, maybe a little less. The possibility of an earlier arrival is also something that must be considered as well. Those will be primarily special ops units to secure the area. The brains will arrive at a more leisurely pace. Most of those guys will be civilians and they’ll have all sorts of equipment to study the thing with. But jets scrambled from the same base could arrive here within half an hour for a preliminary fly-over. They are equipped with infra-red and UV, as well as normal cameras, and they will probably be F-15’s or -16’s.”

  Kitty, customarily straight-forward in her dealings with Simon, usually told him just what she thought. This time was no different. “Simon, if we let the government have that ship, no nation on Earth will believe that we don’t have it and I see World War III coming out of it.” Sometimes, when she was at her most insecure, she tended to repeat herself.

  Simon started to give her an appraising look when the light from the interior was blocked by something moving around inside. “Looks like our choices just got a lot more limited,” he noted.

  Gayle reveled in her solitude. It was all that Kitty and Simon had said it was: deer actually walking into their camp, and with the total absence of civilization’s noise and light, the stars spilled across the night sky like jewels from the hand of God. Finally.

  The first three days had been a pain, though, with all three of them pretty much confined to their tents. A front had stalled, bringing three days of off-and-on rain. No campfires, no breakfasts over an open fire, nothing. It had all been done in the cramped quarters of the two tents. Dreary, to say the least. Not what she had been led to expect, and Kitty apologized several times a day, but she had no control over the weather. At least it hadn’t turned cold and snowed, a distinct possibility at this altitude even at this time of year.

  Kitty was her best friend, of course, had been for over thirty years, and Simon was, well, Simon. Him, she had only known since just before the wedding. It was obvious that he adored Kitty, but even after fifteen years, she knew virtually nothing about his life before their meeting. His early life, he talked about easily enough, trouble with his father, some juvenile scrapes that left him with a choice of military service or jail, if pressed, but her delicate, and not-so-delicate questioning over the years still left a blank spot in the life of her best friend’s husband.

  It was that very mystery she focused on as she fed the fire, gazing outward into the darkness. How easily he had fit into their lives while keeping a part of himself secret. At least from her. Which could mean that Kitty was keeping a secret from her? She kept trying to brush the idea off as paranoia, but the memory of one of the times she had brought the subject up kept coming back, Kitty brushing it off with, “Oh, that. National security stuff, like how we met.”

  “So, he was a spy?” Gayle had asked.

  Kitty shook her head. “I think the term field operative or field agent would be more appropriate. Not everything he did was clandestine. I mean he just walked into MIT and started asking questions. No spy-stuff. Just good detective work.”

  Gayle had learned to let the matter lie, and Simon was likable enough. And he did love Kitty. That was obvious. He doted on her. More to the point, Kitty loved him, too. Which was where she usually left off in her musings. She added another log to the fire, propped her feet up, picked up her book and began to slowly turn pages by the light of the Coleman lantern.

  Her first indication that something was amiss was when the pages took on a reddish tinge that couldn’t possibly come from the lantern. She glanced first at the fire, thinking that it had somehow flared up. When that proved to not be the case, she started looking for a fire somewhere in the area, unlikely as that could be with all the recent rain. The red glow continued to increase, throwing vague shadows across the campsite. She looked up and her mouth fell open.

  Roughly triangular-shaped and glowing a bright, cherry red, already dimming, the thing dropped from the sky and floated over the butte where Simon and Kitty had set their telescope up before setting down at the base of the ridge.

  Heart pounding, she picked up her .223 rifle and a flashlight, hesitated for a second, and took Simon’s obsolete military 30-06 M-1 rifle instead, opting for the heavier stopping power if needed. Slipping quietly through the darkness with a hunter’s deftness, she made her way toward the strange craft between her and her friends, the smell of smoke getting stronger the closer she got.

  General Herman C. Dalton worked to keep his hand from shaking as he spoke into the phone. “Colonel, you are to have your team in the air in no more than twenty minutes, is that clear?” He listened to the response and the question that followed. “Right now, all we can say is that your destination is somewhere in mid-western Montana. Your pilots will be updated en route. Two F-16’s out of Malmstrom have just been scrambled and will take care of the over-flight. Yours is the closest team and I expect your advance people to be on the ground within ninety minutes. And Colonel. No slip-ups. I want that area completely interdicted. No one in, no one out, until we have all the information we can get.”

  The General turned to the conservatively suited man sitting in the overstuffed leather chair. “Operation Sidestep is underway, Sir,” he said as humbly as a certain sergeant had spoken to a particular captain not too many minutes before.

  “Good,” the man answered. “The Director will be pleased if this goes well.” The General was another of those that knew what happened when things didn’t go well, and said a silent prayer of his own, because the Director wouldn’t be pleased if there was any kind of screw-up

  Trajo kep Kuria looked out the hatch at the alien mountainside. Now he was going to walk out into that alien environment and feel true wind on his face one last time. The icy breeze on his face burned a bit. Part of that was the virus, of course, but he did come from an older, smaller, hotter planet. Almost anywhere but the tropics would be cold to him. And here he would die, within the hour probably, from the lack of control he had over his body. And his mind wouldn’t focus. What had he been thinking about the aliens?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Simon’s pulse slowed towards a semblance of normal, his eyes drawn to the little valley below. Formed during the last retreat of the glaciers that had covered North America thousands of years ago, it had provided a sanctuary for both him and Kitty for nearly fifteen years now. Every spring, when cabin fever drove them out of their home in Billings, Montana, it gave them almost everything: a small artesian spring that burbled over and around rocks left behind by the long-gone glaciers, a fair-sized pond complete with brookies, a small stream bleeding off the excess water, wild life strolling around, and near-complete seclusion provided by an access road only four-wheel-drive vehicles could navigate. And even those had to be on the small side to get past some of the constrictions on the road in. All-in-all, it was an almost perfect place to let the cares of running their small security company wash away one week each year.

  Across the small valley the beacon that was their campfire blazed, tended by Kitty’s friend, Gayle Miller. Simon and Kitty took their annual camping trip to this same valley every spring. This year they had included Gayle in their escape from cabin fever, but this time it looked like it was going to be anything but stress-free. Simon idly wond
ered how she was taking the situation.

  He turned his eyes back to the thing at the bottom of the steep slope. Deep inside, he felt a sadness slip over him, knowing that this sheltered haven would never be the same again. Simon glanced down at the woman beside him. His six foot height often made him feel clumsy beside his wife’s barely five-two. But she carried twice the mental fire-power of anyone he knew. That was how she had captured him.

  Looking for a leak in our cold-fusion program, Simon had been the overt operative on the team sent to MIT to investigate the situation. While Doctor Conroy was a brilliant physicist, he made a lousy spy. Kitty, as she preferred to be called by her friends, assigned as his research assistant while she worked to get her own impressive string of letters after her name, had kept a log of all the good Doctor’s connections to the university main-frame. While his personal password would only operate the terminal in his office, everything leaving and returning to Conroy’s machine went through Kitty’s terminal first. Noticing certain oddities, she had long ago quietly begun making back-ups of all e-traffic, in a secure file located elsewhere in the massive amount of data in the university’s restricted access section.

  When he found out about Simon’s presence, Conroy panicked and tried to send just enough data to Kitty’s terminal to implicate her, but she had long ago planned for such an eventuality. Anything now being sent to her terminal from his was automatically re-routed right back to his own station, renamed and hidden among his own research notes.