The Signal And The Boys: A Prequel to the Earth's Last Gambit Series of First Contact Technothrillers Read online

  THE SIGNAL AND THE BOYS

  EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT

  A PREQUEL

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  Copyright © 2017 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

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  THE EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT QUARTET

  Freefall

  Lifeboat

  Shiplord

  Killshot

  THE SIGNAL AND THE BOYS

  The place even looked extraterrestrial.

  Scope the flat portico above the main entrance, like a hovering UFO. An avenue of pillars in the foyer formed an Appian Way for a little green Crassus, lined with statues instead of crosses.

  It felt like another planet, compared to where Lance Garner came from, namely Calhoun County, Georgia.

  But the shiny marble seal on the floor said:

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  He still got a little thrill when he walked across it, which was never. He worked in the New Headquarters Building, a typical gummint pile.

  On a rainy March morning he arrived at the building right behind his boss, Phyllis Hoskins. He was overhauling her, striding with his hood up and his head down, when she slipped on the wet steps. The world went into fast-forward. Lance landed at her side, catching her, before he even knew he’d moved. Phyllis gripped his arm tightly, bony white fingers digging into his camo jacket. “Oh my! Thank you, Lance. These stairs are so slippery.”

  Lance no-problem-ma’amed her. “Guess all that training was good for something,” he said.

  Phyllis was 78. She should’ve retired decades ago, but who was going to fire Phyllis? She’d been here since the days of the Blue Book, and more importantly, her father had gone to Princeton with Allen W. Dulles or some schizz like that. The absurd perseverance of this 5’3”, wraith-skinny old bat symbolized the WASP elite’s death-grip on the organs of American power. Yet Lance dreaded Phyllis’s inevitable departure. She was the best thing—make that the only good thing—about working on the Miscellaneous Reports Desk of the DOO, the Directorate of Operations.

  The UFO desk.

  Lance had been going to go to Afghanistan but then he’d got into a brawl with some other CIA guys in a bar in downtown D.C., the kind of place where coddled Capitol staffers spend more on cocktails than the average American makes in a week, and the upshot was they yanked him off the mission he’d spent years preparing for. Got his master’s in international relations. Got the training and everything. All down the drain because he called an African-American colleague an affirmative-action nigga.

  Go straight to jail and do not pass Go, you redneck piece of shit.

  So here I am, standing at the 4th-floor vending machine in the CIA’s Langley jail for wayward officers, collecting coffees for myself and Phyllis. Kuldeep can get his own. What will the day bring? Fairy lights in the skies of Texas? Cows behaving oddly in Wisconsin? Crop circles in Georgia? Lance loved his people—say it loud and proud, his white-trash people—but he had to admit they generated more than their fair share of UFO reports.

  Carrying one cup in each hand, he returned to the office, on whose door Phyllis had taped a Farside cartoon captioned “When worlds collide,” with a picture of aliens solemnly greeting a goat.

  Phyllis and Kuldeep stood behind her desk, poring over print-outs.

  “Something interesting?” Lance said.

  Phyllis looked up. Her face shone so brightly that he could see what a babe she’d been sixty years ago. “Wow,” she said.

  “Wow?” Then Lance understood. He’d been doing this long enough now that he’d educated himself, willy-nilly, in the esoterica of the field. “The Wow! signal?”

  “Yes. We may—we may!—have picked up another one.”

  *

  As far as the public knew, the CIA had closed down its UFO investigations in 1978. That was the famous Project Blue Book, which Phyllis would often regale them about. In reality, the project had survived—thanks largely to Phyllis herself. But it had withered down to one old lady and a couple of undesirables, because the plain fact was that the cranks had kept up with the advance of technology. No longer did they obsess over flying saucers. Now it was all about SETI, the search for radio-frequency signals of alien origin. And the CIA did not traffic in signals. HUMINT, human intelligence, was their turf.

  “So how did we get this?” Lance said. He traced the graph of the signal’s intensity with his forefinger. A row of serrations, and then a parabolic swoop up. That was one hell of a spike.

  Phyllis beamed. “I have a friend in Chantilly.”

  She meant at the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO flies the birds, as satellites are known, for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. They collect the data from the birds and hand it off to other agencies, like the NSA. Not the CIA. Not usually.

  “A former paramour, actually,” Phyllis let slip.

  “Phyllis, are you sure about former?” Kuldeep teased.

  “Heck with D.C. It’s Phyllis’s paramour network that runs the country,” Lance said.

  “Naughty! My friend is a happily married grandfather, and that’s enough about that. At any rate, the NRO is staffed by our people, and a few odds and ends from the DoD. So when this item came into their hot little hands, my friend persuaded his colleagues that it would be better investigated by us.”

  “That’s gotta chap the DoD’s asses,” Lance said in delight.

  Kuldeep tapped the vertical right-hand side of the spike. “At the 3.5 second mark, it drops off to zero. Zero? Really? There’s always some noise …”

  Lance eased him aside and leafed through to the scanty information about the signal’s origin. It had been picked up by a FISINT (Foreign Instrumentation Signals Intelligence) satellite the NRO was operating on behalf of the NSA.

  “After three and a half seconds,” Phyllis said, “the satellite crashed! Atrocious bad luck for them, but our good fortune.”

  Lance shook his head. Phyllis wasn’t the world’s greatest technology expert, understandably given her age. “Says here the reception chip for the 200 GHz channel burned out. These sats have a bunch of channels. Only one of them went down.” Phyllis looked like she still wasn’t getting it. “Sat didn’t crash; the signal crashed it,” Lance explained. He stared at the graph with new interest. Maybe it was the caffeine kicking in, but this was starting to intrigue him.

  “So this isn’t the whole signal,” Kuldeep said. “It’s only the first 3.5 seconds of it. Where’s the rest? Did anyone pick it up?”

  This put them back in Phyllis-land. She fairly twinkled at them. “We believe so. At the time the signal was received, the satellite was above latitude 40° West, north of the equator.”

  “And the signal had to hit it at an angle.” Kuldeep scrubbed his hands over his black hair, making it stick out in all directions. “Can’t have come in from above. The antennas are shielded from the sun. Nothing would have happened.” He studied the print-outs. “There’s a write-up of the failure pattern. It says the an
tennas were pointing east.”

  “Exactly,” Phyllis beamed. “So we shift our attention a quarter of the way around the planet, to the east …”

  “RATAN-600,” Lance said.

  The RATAN-600 array, in southern Russia, was the world’s largest radio telescope. And it had been facing the signal that glitched out the FISINT satellite. If anyone had picked up the remainder of the signal, the Russians had.

  “The Black Sea coast is lovely at this time of year,” Phyllis said. “I remember visiting Sochi during the Soviet era. It was quite charming.”

  “Whoa! What were you doing there?” Kuldeep said, in a transparent attempt to derail her.

  “Another time, dear boy,” Phyllis said. “I referred to your good fortune a moment ago because you will now have the opportunity to visit the area yourselves.”

  Lance’s gut kinked. It wasn’t the old days anymore. Investigations no longer ran on shoe leather. “Mind if I try Google first, Phyllis?”

  “No, no, google away,” she said, singing the ‘ooooo’ and raising her arms like a bird about to take flight. Lance smiled. He really did love the old bat.

  With an unaccustomed sense of excitement, he headed for his computer.

  His Google-fu yielded only a few slim leads. Kuldeep’s searches had equally poor results. The next day they conferred, agreed to bite the bullet, and confessed to Phyllis that they were stumped. She smugly revealed she’d already bought their tickets to Moscow.

  *

  Then they had to fly to Mineralye Vodi, way down in the Caucasus. The plane rattled and creaked. Lance stared out of the window, waiting to crash. It was dark outside, so all he could see was his own washed-out reflection, like a skull. Lance had skin as white as a Kabuki mask, and colorless hair that he trimmed with the electric clippers every Sunday morning. His people were so poor that when Hurricane Frances sucker-punched their neighborhood, it was an aesthetic improvement.

  Why’d you join the CIA?

  Kuldeep, next to him, chowed down on beef stroganoff with apparent relish. His answer, given a long time ago over a beer: I thought it would make me cool.

  And then he’d ended up at Miscellaneous Reports.

  Sucks to be you, Kuldeep. But also sucks to be me.

  Lance had been planning to join the Marines, after college turned out not to be a good fit for him. Full scholarship to UGA, and he’d been fixing to throw it all away, but then the Agency came to campus. The recruiter persuaded him not to give up. Instead, they got him another full scholarship to Duke, where he acquired his master’s. He still didn’t know what they’d seen in him. The only part that made sense was how they’d busted him down to Miscellaneous Reports after his epic political-correctness violation. Lance did not feel sorry for himself. He accepted that he’d screwed up. The question was what good was he doing his country now, flying across Russia to investigate 3.5 seconds of radio noise?

  “Man, that was disgusting,” Kuldeep said, pushing away his tray. “Aren’t you gonna eat?”

  “Naw.”

  “Wanna play chess? I brought my travel set.”

  “Sure,” Lance said, pushing up his sleeves. “I’ll whip your nerd-gogglin’ ass.”

  “Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.”

  “I’ll knock your posterior to candyland and back.”

  In penance for his sins, Lance had undertaken to delete all slurs, four-letter-words, and profanity from his vocabulary. It was impossible to talk without insults, though, so he had to get creative. It made Phyllis and Kuldeep laugh.

  Two games later, they landed in icy darkness. Lance kept a watchful eye on the security guards who pried into their carry-ons. If they found the hidden compartment in his rucksack … His Agency-issued gun was made of plastic, didn’t show up on X-rays, but a fingertip search could still uncover it. But the rucksack was returned to him intact, with a Russian grunt. Guess they didn’t pay these guys much. Lance sympathized.

  Russia, outside of Moscow, bore a startling resemblance to Calhoun County, Georgia. Everything was rusting into the ground. The difference was that in rural Georgia, nothing worked. In Russia, everything still magically worked, somehow. This was why Lance didn’t like overseas business trips. Afghanistan would’ve been one thing. Pretty much anywhere else was an unflattering mirror held up to the underbelly of America.

  Kuldeep buried himself in work during their minibus ride to Zelenchukskaya, where the RATAN-600 array was located. Lance talked to the scientists. They were tagging along with a team of three people from the Arecibo Laboratory in Puerto Rico; that was their cover. Kuldeep could easily pass for a scientist, as he was a data guy anyway. Lance was pretending to be a grad student—at 28, he still looked the part. The Arecibo gang clearly resented the fact that a pair of mystery men from a nonexistent research institute had been foisted on them, but Lance was good at warming people up. As the bus bumped through the barren, snow-blanketed hills, he got them talking about their passion.

  SETI.

  The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

  What a bunch of bullcrap! Lance hadn’t changed his mind about that since he started at Miscellaneous Reports, regardless of the odd superstitious shiver. But these people weren’t superstitious. And they weren’t Phyllis, either—they didn’t have bees in their bonnets dating back to 1962. They spoke learnedly about the Fermi Paradox, the zoo hypothesis, and the parameters for hypothetical alien civilizations. The Beeps—this was what they called the mysterious signal of March 16th—excited them. The Wow! signal had nothing on this, they said. This was the real deal, at last.

  Lance felt like he had stepped into a parallel universe, an illusion reinforced by the bizarro landscape outside. Cliffs reared like giant snow-dusted fossils. ‘Villages’ consisted of a few Soviet-era highrises plonked down in the middle of nowhere. The USSR had run on belief; when people stopped believing in it, the whole shebang collapsed. It was the same for the Beeps—as long as people believed it might mean something, the signal exerted power over them. But there was probably nothing there at all.

  They arrived at Zelenchukskaya after twelve hours. All they saw of the place that night was barracks-like buildings hunkering in the headlights. They checked into a grim guest-house. Lance went straight to Kuldeep’s room and paced up and down. “Did you get anything good?”

  While Lance was chatting with the Arecibo scientists on the bus, Kuldeep had been wirelessly stealing data from their laptops. What all these SETI people had in common: they were incredibly gullible.

  “Arecibo didn’t pick up the Beeps at all,” Kuldeep answered glumly. “That’s why we’re here.” He brightened a bit. “But guess what? They’ve made a preliminary translation of the signal.”

  “Yeah? What’s it say?”

  “‘Ahahaha LMAO.’”

  Lance laughed. He was hungry; their late supper in the guest-house’s cafeteria had not been appetizing. “You got any food?”

  “Pringles,” Kuldeep said, pointing at his rucksack. Lance got them out. Sour cream and onion. He took a handful and offered the can to Kuldeep.

  “No thanks, man, I’m fine.”

  Kuldeep was sitting on the floor with his back to the noisy, but not very warm, radiator, wrapped in the quilt off his bed. His brown face looked a bit gray in the reflected glare from his laptop.

  Lance dropped down in front of him and grasped his bony kneecaps through the quilt. “You feeling OK?”

  “Fine.” After a second Kuldeep changed his mind. “I don’t want to sound paranoid, but did you see the way those guys were looking at me?”

  “The guys who met us off the bus?” A pair of Russian astronomers, with smiles that barely reached their lips, let alone their eyes.

  “Yeah. Sometimes it just hits you … I’m the only brown person for a thousand miles.”

  “Dude, they don’t want any of us here. What, you think they poisoned you or something?”

  Kuldeep rolled his eyes. “Forget it.”

/>   Lance went back to his own room. The thing was, it wasn’t like Kuldeep to be paranoid. Kuldeep Srivastava was your Hindu-American Joe Sixpack. He went out of his way to eat beef, watch football, and pretend like he got Phyllis’s references. As far as the UFO thing went, he took Lance’s own tack of humoring Phyllis while keeping his mind firmly closed to the possibility of alien life. What had spooked him? Could he have found something on the Arecibo scientists’ laptops he hadn’t mentioned to Lance? Or had the collective madness of the SETI crew begun to infect him … tin-foil-hat syndrome by osmosis?

  Now you’re getting paranoid, Lance told himself, and went to sleep with his gun in the drawer of his bedside table.

  Jet-lag woke him several times in the night. At last, sunlight brightened the curtains. He skipped a shower—the water pressure was shitty—and went down to breakfast. Buttered bread with pieces of sausage and cheese on top. Omelets. Cereal. Kuldeep appeared just as everyone else was finishing, looking as if he hadn’t slept a wink. Lance made a sandwich out of the bread and cheese and stuffed it into Kuldeep’s hand as they crossed from the guest-house to the laboratory block. The sun glared on the snow. The wind sliced into any exposed skin.

  Their Russian hosts were all smiles now. They welcomed the Americans into a conference room that reminded Lance of his elementary school, right down to the smell of chalk and socks. Lance, reverting to old habits, sat in the back row, while the American scientists untruthfully praised their accommodations, and thanked the Russians for the courtesy of inviting them here. Lance still wondered why they had been invited, as their hosts clearly wished them a thousand miles away.

  The lead Russian scientist, a short man with one of those Slavic faces like a crumpled paper bag, spoke English with a precision that would have gratified Phyllis. “What you must understand is that the Beeps are probably of terrestrial origin.”

  This was the kind of scientist Lance liked. He didn’t make any exaggerated claims for his specialty.