The Second Ship
Book One of The Rho Agenda
The Thrilling New UFO Conspiracy Series
by Richard Phillips
Although it was impossible to judge direction cleanly from these depths, far below Groom Lake, he knew the tunnel ran southwest. A railcar, pushed by an electric locomotive, had carried him along the set of tracks that marched down the center to its end. Many years ago, a much different type of cargo had ridden the same rails to the huge steel door he now faced. Twin slots in the base of the door fit snuggly over the rail tracks, which disappeared inside.
Donald Stephenson hiked his army-issue field jacket
more tightly around his neck and moved to the right toward a smaller
door meant for human access. He paused outside to swipe his badge
through the card reader. The door slid open with a small whoosh as the
air pressure equalized.
A sudden shiver caused him to glance back over his
shoulder. The tunnel stretched long and empty behind him until it
disappeared around a slight bend to the left. His only company was the
faint hum of the incandescent lights bolted high above on the ceiling.
He shrugged to dispel the prickly feeling on his
neck, like someone had just stepped on his grave. Christ, he was jumpy
tonight.
Happy Thanksgiving, Don thought.
He was alone in the cavernous room, as was often
the case this time of night, especially on major holidays. Although he
couldn’t understand it himself, he supposed the novelty of working with
the thing had worn thin for the band of scientists who had probed,
pushed, and tinkered with its exterior for the last thirty years without
making any progress in unraveling its inner mysteries.
It occupied a significant portion of the center of
the room, enclosed within a latticework of aluminum scaffolding that
provided walkways for the scientists and workers as well as mounting
brackets for the electronic instruments that clung to the object’s skin
like barnacles on an ancient whaler.
Even now, thirty years after that day in late
March, 1948, near Aztec,
Moving across the room toward the scaffolding, Don
surveyed the ship. It was amazing in every way. The original research
team, at first glance, had assumed some internal malfunction had caused
the ship to crash, but that assumption had shortly given way to a more
disconcerting conclusion.
First, the ship had attempted to conceal itself
after the crash, putting up some sort of electro-optical interference
pattern that made it difficult to see. The smooth cigar shape of the
craft blurred in and out of sight until you got right up next to it. At
least that much of the shipboard system was still working.
Second, and more disturbing, was the damage to the
ship. Even though the hull had not been penetrated, some force had
bubbled and warped it in multiple spots. Testing had concluded the
damage hadn’t been caused by the impact with the Earth.
Based on the evidence, the current theory was that
the source of the damage had somehow caused the crash.
Over the years since it had been moved here,
despite an endless procession of high-energy experiments, some of which
should have heated spots on the ship’s surface to the internal
temperature of the sun, the ship’s exterior had never been penetrated.
Diamond drills, cutting torches, arc welders, lasers, and finally,
high-energy particle beams had not had any effect on the strange
material that composed the beast’s hide. The surface remained cool to
the touch, no matter how much or what type of energy the research team
directed against it.
Though it wasn’t written in any official reports,
popular opinion among the scientists was that only technology equal to
the craft’s could duplicate the damage, implicating some sort of alien
weapon. Don agreed with the speculation and thanked God that whoever had
attacked the ship hadn’t found the Earth interesting enough to linger
after shooting it down.
The research team hadn’t been able to scrape a chip
of metal from the outside, much less get to the interior. So much for
the “genius” of the men who ran the program. But now, Don had his
chance. Luck always had a way of finding him, and these last two weeks
he had been very lucky. He had been allowed to install an experiment of
his own design against the outer shell of the alien spacecraft. Luck
aside, he preferred to think his success was due to working his ass off
these last three years, ever since he had attained his master’s degree
and been assigned to this deep black program. Fortunately, the grueling
hours of research had not been wasted.
On the far side of the ship, Don had set up a
donut-shaped torus, its electromagnets providing energy that accelerated
electrons close to the speed of light. Nestled up against what the team
thought was the door of the craft, a long metallic cone extended out of
the torus, terminating in a set of tubes that would produce Cerenkov
radiation.
What, exactly, had triggered the idea, Don could
not recall. Something about the classified eyewitness reports struck him
as wrong, something about a faint blue glow coming from the ship as it
streaked through the
It sounded like a description of Cerenkov
radiation. That beautiful blue light was produced when something
traveling at close to the speed of light in a vacuum entered a substance
with a slower speed of light, like air or water.
It made no sense for the ship to be glowing with
Cerenkov radiation. Estimates of the speed described by the witnesses
were no greater than Mach 2. If Cerenkov radiation was present, it must
have come from some of the starship’s control or power mechanisms. And
if those systems gave off that radiation, perhaps they would give off
some measurable response to the right combination of Cerenkov waves.
Don had no doubt that it was only because the
research team had made no progress in all these years that he had been
given permission to conduct his own experiments over this Thanksgiving
holiday weekend. Those experiments had been running around the clock
since last night.
As he seated himself at the keyboard, above which
thousands of light-emitting diodes twinkled, his eye caught on a
flashing error indicator. He leaned forward.
“What the hell?”
Several of his experimental instruments were giving
bad readings or were off-line altogether. There was also an error
reading from the instruments that controlled the alignment of the
Cerenkov mirrors.
Don cursed softly as he examined the data on the
long computer printout that dangled from the printer to form a pile on
the floor. Scanning down the pages, he identified the time of the
malfunction. 18:53.
“God damn it!”
The entire system had gone off-line shortly after
he had left to go make himself some dinner. More than two precious hours
lost, not counting how long it might take him to find the cause of the
malfunction and fix it.
Having satisfied himself that the malfunction lay
not in the computer controls but in the instrumentation itself, Don
walked rapidly around the scaffolding toward the spot where the particle
injection tube fed electrons to his apparatus, high up on the far side
of the ship.
As he rounded the tail of the cigar-shaped craft,
Don caught his foot on a cable and would have fallen if he had not
managed to grab the scaffolding. Righting himself, he gazed upward to
where his instruments hung. The cables and mountings were broken and
twisted, the Cerenkov mirrors torn from their brackets and tossed to the
cement floor below. But the state of his instruments barely registered
in his mind.
He stared at the large ramp that had lowered from
the side of the ship all the way to the floor, crushing the scaffolding
beneath it. A faint glow issued from the opening.
Don locked his knees to prevent them from buckling
as hyperventilation threatened to knock him unconscious. Gasping,
clinging to the crumpled scaffolding, Don surveyed the instruments along
the near wall, the ones that monitored air quality and radiation levels.
All normal. He might die today, but it wouldn’t be from something so
mundane.
He knew he should pick up the red phone and call
the duty officer back at the main base. That would begin the recall of
all the scientists and military people currently working on the project.
Anything less risked him being kicked off the project, possibly even
having his security clearance revoked.
Sweat dripped down his forehead and stung his eyes
as Don looked up the ramp toward the doorway.
Why should he make that call before at least
walking up and taking a look inside? After all, wasn’t it his work that
had triggered the breakthrough?
If he walked over and placed that call, he had a
pretty good idea that he would never get his chance to look inside the
ship. No. The same morons who had been scratching their heads for thirty
years would come out of the woodwork and lock the whole thing down,
tight as a snail’s ass. Only the most senior scientists and intelligence
types would be permitted anywhere near the ship.
Don was not about to let that happen, at least not
until he had taken a look for himself. His pulse pounding in his
temples, he strode up the ramp, paused at the top to take a single deep
breath, and then stepped across the threshold, disappearing inside.
A single oscilloscope in the instrument racks along
the far side of the room registered a momentary electronic signal flux
before settling back to normal measurements.
Five miles away, in a small room just off Hanger
One, the duty officer, an Air Force Major named Stuart Greeley, made
another entry in his duty log.