CHAPTER 3 - S21

DATE POINT: DECEMBER 8th, 6 A.U. (AFTER UNIFICATION)

LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM, ABOARD THE UTRN SPECIAL DELIVERY, EARTH, ABOVE THE NEVADA DESERT.

CAPTAIN HENRY O’TOOLE

Paul was snoring loudly, grating on Henry’s nerves. He felt a bit of relief finally when a slightly more abrupt turn snapped Paul awake. He then pulled up a map and nodded to himself before turning to speak to Henry. Ariana sat farther away and seemed to be looking for moments Henry wasn’t seemingly paying attention to steal glances at him. He couldn’t decide if the attention made him excited or nervous as Paul’s warnings rattled about in his head. He refocused himself when Paul spoke up, breaking the silence.

“We're approaching S21 now. Jessie go ahead and work with base ATC to clear us for landing.”

“Already done, boss, taking us in now.” Jessie replied, as on top of things as ever it seemed.

Henry switched camera feeds to the one giving the best ground view and his jaw dropped. Far below them, the Earth itself split open with a rumble as sand poured into a growing crack. This was revealed to be two doors camouflaged to match the surrounding desert floor that then sunk down and slid to the sides. A large landing platform slowly rose from the darkness below. Jesse expertly maneuvered the Special Delivery to hover over the landing platform and slowly lowered them down.

“What the actual fuck?” Henry gawped at the sight.

“Oh dear, if this blows his mind, I can’t wait to see how he reacts when he sees them.” Ariana said with a gleam in her eye.

“Don’t mind her, I am sure you will see nothing down there other than what you already suspected to be true, and all the really exciting stuff is well hidden away from prying eyes anyway. Plus, sister, one must remember that we are all bound by several oaths of secrecy on just about everything that is down there.” Paul said with an edge to his voice. The ship shuddered for a second as it settled down onto its landing gear, and the lift began to lower them down below the surface. Lights switched on, bathing the massive elevator shaft in an amber glow, revealing two massive gears turning which lowered them down the wall slowly and methodically.

“What is this place?” Henry asked with wonder as the cavern slowly came into full view. It must have been an old aquifer or something, Henry thought as his mind took in the spectacle. A small city lay before him, with prefabricated and permanent structures that filled the interior of the expansive space.

“This is S21, one of several similar black sites operated by the North American Union for the purposes of housing unique research and development projects away from prying eyes, and to maintain some semblance of sovereignty after ceding so much of that to the United Terran Republic and the Navy.”

“So, you are saying this site is being kept secret from the Republic?! Are you all insane!?”

Paul stared at Henry for what seemed like forever before he spoke coolly.

“There are some secrets the United States died keeping, so when the North American Union rose from the ashes of the balkanized USA, the surviving intelligence agencies in the assorted states that held these sites in their territories came forward to brief the new government. Eventually sites such as these were born. After taking the brunt of the alien land invasion, the NAU government decided that it was wise to continue to keep these secrets once all the old levers of power were finally recovered. You have already signed your life away to secrecy, everything you learn down here risks upending our fragile global unity. That is a risk none can afford, if you cannot handle keeping this secret I need to know right now so I can handle it appropriately.” Paul delivered the speech without once breaking eye contact.

Henry was suddenly aware that every eye in the cabin was locked on him. Ancient neural circuitry buzzed in his head, making it very clear just how dangerous his current predicament had become as the light from above eclipsed away and the desert floor doors sealed shut above them and as they continued their descent.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I don’t have anybody to spill secrets to anyhow.” Henry conceded the point, realizing just how deeply he was now trapped. Plus, he recognized the value in state secrets, especially ones that could threaten their fragile global unity. The splitting of the world federal government was unacceptable when they had yet to even purge the last of their enemy from the solar system.

“We know, why do you think you were chosen? Your peppy personality?” Paul asked in a condescending tone.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Henry hissed.

“Nothing, other than your whole family died one by one getting you out of New York and into the hands of the National Guard after the enemy first made landfall, you have always kept to yourself, and you joined the Navy the moment the opportunity arose. You don’t have a girlfriend, hell, you don’t even have a dog waiting for you back home. You are a classic non security risk, and an expendable one at that. Why do you think we are all going on this mission? Every single one of us is just like you.” Paul said, sweeping his hands across the cabin.

“We are all war orphans who signed up for the cause the moment we could. Well, Ariana and I are a bit different, but that is also classified.” Paul finished. Somehow, even though he had been so brutally minimized as being viewed by the brass as expendable, there was a certain solemn solidarity he now felt with this crew that hadn’t been there before.

“You manipulative little weasel…. Fuck. Fine. Are you going to tell me what the actual mission is now?” Henry asked, hoping perhaps finally the evasive intelligence officer would speak plainly, though he doubted there would be any more success this time than any of the others.

“Nope, I promise by the time we leave S21, everything will make a lot more sense. That being said, real talk, if you breathe even one hint as to you being anything other than a trustworthy tow the party line professional down there? They will not hesitate to put a stop to the leak before it happens. Am I clear?” Paul once more delivered the threat with direct eye contact.

“Crystal.” The ground under their feet shuddered as the great lift finally settled onto the floor of the massive cavern. Inside were dozens of buildings and hangars as well as three more elevators around the different corners of the underground base. Henry walked down the gangplank with Paul and Ariana in tow as the crew busied themselves with maintenance and cool down tasks for the Special Delivery. Off to the side was a smaller, human sized elevator with two guards who stared intently at the trio leaving the ship.

“Stop right there you three! We need to verify your identities before we can proceed.” One man produced a cell phone looking device that he used to scan each person’s face and eyes while the other produced a palm hand scanner that also pricked at his hand, likely drawing DNA to sample. Henry flexed his hand until the sting went away. During the testing, the elevator doors opened to reveal two people in lab coats with a third armed guard. One of them, a frazzle haired and dark skinned young woman with an infectious smile stepped forward and spoke first.

“Lieutenant Karst, Sergeant Silva, good to see you again! Ah, and you must be Captain Henry O’Toole, I have great hopes for you as to being the man we need for our project. You see, the nature of our work down here has made it increasingly difficult to find quality candidates, and to find someone with practicable experience in commanding a modern naval warship? Impossible! Certainly not without giving the Navy more of a whiff of our operations down here than we are ready to share. I thought we were in real trouble after Commander Alvarez turned down command of the expedition.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage. May I have the pleasure of getting your name?” Henry put his hand forward in greeting just for her to blush and take it enthusiastically.

“My, your manners. I do think we picked well, don’t you Alphonse? My name is Dr. Chantal Washington, and I am absolutely charmed to make your acquaintance. I designed the weapon system that helps make your new ship so unique, and when we get to my workshop I'll gladly give you the run down!”

The woman was almost impossibly giddy about her job, and Henry found her enthusiasm to be the first genuinely positive thing he had experienced since he had been picked up by Paul nearly a week ago. He found that he quite liked her already. Henry checked himself as he found he was smiling like an idiot. The other person that had come out of the elevator then stepped forward with a serious look on their face.

“Oui, oui, charmed, I am sure. My name is Doctor Alphonse Rousseau, theoretical physicist, and conceptual researcher. Can we please hurry this along? I have many important matters to attend to.” Henry could see that the doctor was going to take a little more effort to win over and to get him to speak more candidly. If someone didn’t start giving him some straight answers soon, he felt like his head would explode.

“Believe me, doctor, I would love nothing more than to speed things up, I have a lot of questions about the nature of the mission, the ship, the crew, everything. Though, that can wait until after your presentation as well, correct?” Henry felt like he had a good read on Alphonse already, so he hoped that playing to his ego would help.

“Precisely, now let’s move along into the elevator, Dr. Washington’s lab awaits, mine is elsewhere, but that we can cover shortly. Now, Henry, how much do you know about faster than light travel?” Dr Rousseau asked.

“Beyond the fact that the aliens have some unknown form of it, and that it's rumored Joshua Warden escaped the solar system using their same method? Just that we haven’t cracked it ourselves. I was under the impression that even in the best case scenario we are decades if not centuries away from achieving FTL by any realistic method.”

Truth be told, Henry had spent some time researching the possibilities one by one, but they all seemed to take insane amounts of energy that just weren’t possible with even their best fission reactor tech. Dr. Rousseau simply smirked as he ushered the group into the elevator.

“Very well, so you have a laymen’s view on the matter. There are three primary means by which we believe it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light. The first means is via wormholes, but those require the ability to create and manipulate black holes and we simply are not there yet. We have a theoretical framework for how we can get there using null matter physics, but we would need working fusion power with a huge amount of net surplus energy, or we would need to tap into a large percentage of the word’s existing power supply all at once. Obviously that method is dead in the water for now.”

They had begun actively plunging the levels until the elevator dinged and opened to level 31. Henry began to get a sense of just how massive the whole facility truly was, as he realized they had fifty floors worth of buttons on this elevator alone. Just what had the NAU been up to? The doctor interrupted Henry’s train of thought when he continued after a breath and a pause.

“The next is the warp drive, which works to shorten the distance between two points by warping the geometry of spacetime itself. It basically collapses spacetime in front of the bubble and expands it behind, allowing the ship to in effect travel faster than the speed of light without actually seeming to be moving at all. The more power you can pump into it, the greater the effect. We actually use a very low energy, low efficiency form of this in the Telekinetic drive, which gave us some clues as to how to bring the energy efficiency of the actual warp drive even closer to feasibility.” Dr Rousseau paused to drink some water before he continued.

“The problem is, once a ship activates a full-on warp field, it is trapped within with no good way to actually break the warp field from the inside that we know of. We are playing with the technology, and we are planning to test a mobile, paired warp gate design soon that would activate a bubble on one end then capture and collapse the bubble on the other end with ships traveling at warp in between, but there is a lot of testing to do there still.”

Henry stared at the doctor with his eyes wide open in shock. “I had no idea we were that close to a breakthrough!” The doctor simply waved him off.

“We are a year at best away from our first small scale test of the concepts involved in the solar system. Even then, we will have to pre-position the end gate in a target solar system before we can send even a probe through the home gate. If the gates do work, however, they will form a huge logistical advantage for us to keep forward operating fleets and outposts supplied at regular intervals and to provide reinforcements if the gate itself comes under attack. Nonetheless, even if our designs work exactly as intended, we are still years away from implementation in any sort of way that could directly affect the war effort. “

Henry took in the information as they walked the labyrinthine halls, getting excited for the reveal that he was sure was coming.

“So, doctor, you mentioned three methods that you have identified as feasible for us. Are you telling me that we have cracked the enemy FTL method?”

A smile lit up the doctor’s features before he spoke again.

“Thanks to the assistance of certain…. Assets shall I say, we managed to capture much of the research notes from the Quan-Tech industries black site at Ceres from which Joshua Warden and his tech team first cracked the enemy FTL system while they still had their space infrastructure head start over the rest of Earth. They did purge most of their data before he left, but we were able to recover enough that we have found some success, in conjunction with the tech we recovered from the ship that we destroyed over Manhattan.”

They had arrived at a pair of double doors which Dr. Rousseau barged straight through, leading them into an enormous workshop with rapid prototyping tools and machines lining the walls as well as a central hologram table. This time Dr. Washington spoke up.

“Welcome to My laboratory! Are you ready to meet your new ship?” Chantal said, positively brimming with excitement. Henry suddenly found himself feeling very good about the direction his new mission seemed to be headed. He was finally going to be getting some answers.