December 22, 1986
Area 51, Nevada, USA
The flight was not long, and Morgan estimated their location to be somewhere in northern Nevada. The cabins of both the plane and the helicopter had been blacked out, so it was a feeble guess at best. He was given a second file to read on the way, which contained the summary of the previous two days' work. An EMP generator had been installed beneath the ship's storage chamber, and Morgan roughly calculated that its yield would equal that generated by a small nuclear device.
::That's some device,:: he thought, noticing that there were no details as to the actual pulse generator itself. He dismissed it as 'need to know' and let it slide. His job was unraveling the mysteries of the artifact, and that's what he set his mind to.
When he stepped out of the chopper, he felt a hot, dry wind and was partially blinded by the intensity of the sun overhead. From what details he could make out, he was in a very remote desert area surrounded by mountains. The facility looked like an abandoned air force base, but Morgan saw the scattered vehicles parked beneath camouflage netting and knew better. Behind him, the helicopter's door was slammed shut even as it was leaving the ground. A pair of troopers armed with M-16 rifles approached him immediately.
After a brief pause and tight salute, the trooper yelled over the sound of the departing aircraft. "This way, Sir!"
Morgan nodded, and was surprised to find himself led into a deserted hangar. When they took him to what looked like a closet, he began to suspect. When they opened the door, he understood when he saw the elevator. The entire facility was underground, and it was immense. The elevator stopped after a descent of nearly twenty meters before opening into a whitewalled corridor with a single door and a pair of guards at the far end. The guards in the elevator remained inside and were whisked away as Morgan started down the corridor. They were already comparing him to something they had on file, one guard holding his rifle ready while the other looked down at a screen on the desk he sat behind.
Presenting his identification, he waited while it was scanned, and began to protest when it was fed into a slot on the desktop. The sounds of shredding plastic was the only audible sound while his identification card was destroyed. Opening a sealed folder on the desktop, the seated guard handed Morgan a new card which looked more like a credit card than the standard ID. It already bore his face, his signature, and a holographic image of his thumbprint. The guard flipped the card and offered Morgan a pen.
"Sign under the mag-ink signature, Sir. This is your new identification card giving you Ultra level security clearance. Keep it with you at all times." He studied the signatures, comparing them, then looked at the other guard, who lifted his weapon. "You're cleared to proceed, Sir. Take the elevator to level six."
"Thank you, Sergeant," Morgan replied, and stepped through the doorway as the armored door slid into the wall.
As he passed through the different levels, he caught glimpses of some of the other rooms. They were the size of warehouses, with massive cargo elevators which could nove both vertically and horizontally through a network of shafts. Upon reaching one of the deepest sub-levels, he was loaded into an electric cart and driven through the maze of corridors and passageways. He pased several laboratories on the way, along with military-style living quarters and lounging areas. Wherever this facility was, it was a very busy place. Most of the doors were closed, but a technician was walking through one of them, and Morgan caught a brief look at something which looked like either an oddly shaped meteor or an ungilded sarcophagus.
Level Six was one of the larger levels, with ceilings which must have been twenty meters above his head, with crossconnecting catwalks. The corridor itself was a good ten meters across, and there was another guard with an electric cart waiting for him. The driver saluted briskly, and Morgan knew that he was new to the facility also.
"Welcome to the Facility, Major. I'm here to take you to Vault Seven."
Morgan sat down in the cart and the driver started the last leg of their journey. It took a few twists and turns to bring him to the area called Vault Seven. The cart rolled through what looked like several miles of reinforced concrete hallway, passing through several heavy doors which looked as if they could contain a nuclear blast. Finally, they pulled up to a stop in front of a set of closed doors. These doors had guards stationed outside, and he had to use his security card along with the guard to open the massive containment door. Stepping inside, he passed through some kind of remote observation booth and then into the large chamber containing the ship. It looked even grander than it had in the pictures. The strobe lights kept it a neutral shade of grey, exactly between black and white.
The ship itself was some twenty meters on a side, and was triangular in shape, tapering from an almost invisible edge to some nine meters in thickness along the central axis. He saw Jack Wilson, the current investigative head, poking his head inside the entryway on the underside of the ship.
"Hey, Jack," he said. When the older scientist looked at him, both men waved, and Jack waved him closer.
The skin of the ship was unlike any metal he'd ever studied. It was smooth like metal, but there was a sensation similar to warmth in it, along with a slight degree of pliability beneath his fingertips. There was a tingling in his skin which had almost been too weak to notice, but as he ran his fingers along the surface, that tingling grew.
"Helluva ship," said Jack. He spoke in a strange Texas drawl which somehow crossed with a Brooklyn city boy's speech to produce something unmistakeably unique. "You up to speed?"
Morgan's attention was drawn away from the feeling in his hand. "Uh-huh," he said. "Checked out on everything I could get."
Jack laughed. "Good enough. Put your flight suit on and I'll start the prechecks. They've put a rush on this one, Morgan. They want to fire the pulse generator before sunset. Somethin's come up."
Less than an hour later, Morgan was wearing his midnight blue flight suit and had a clipboard tucked beneath his arm. The facility seemed to be more empty than it had been, and he saw no one actually in the ship chamber. Jack came out of a control room and walked Morgan over to the craft. The suspension jacks had been removed and the entire craft just hung there without support.
"Twenty minutes to go," said Jack. "Just go on inside and wait. We found out that if you sit in the pilot's chair, the hatches close. The chair itself is mimetic. It conforms to your body shape."
Morgan smiled. "One size fits all."
Nodding, Jack returned the smile. "You've got your checklist and itinerary?"
A slight movement of his elbow jostled the clipboard. "Yep. All set."
"Okay. Go in and we'll try a radio check. We haven't tried it with the hatch closed, so if you don't pick us up, just go on with the checklist. The hatch just started functioning about four day ago. Whatever system's lifting it up kicked in two days ago. It's not magnetics or thermal."
"Wow," said Morgan. "Any changes in the EM field or magnetometer readings?"
"Not a thing. I wanted to hold off and see where it was going, but the honchos said that we were going ahead. Get inside, we've got to start trying to figure out what's going on."
Morgan climbed into the ship, and walked forward to the flight deck. He sat down in the pilot's chair, shaped from a variant of the material which composed the outer hull. Several indicator lights came on, displaying symbols in several different colors and brighnesses. As he put his arms down on the armrests, the weird tingling in his hands spread to his spine. The seat itself shifted around him, partially enveloping him. He could see that there was a hard shell on the outside, but he felt some kind of gel filling the gap between his body and that hard exterior.
"Radio check," he said, speaking into the microphone of the headset he wore. "1,2,3,4. Radio check."
He received no response.
::Okay,:: he thought, and proceeded to work with his checklist. When he went to move, the entire arm of the chair stretched with him to allow him to make the reach. The casing which had been rigid became almost fluid. With each passing minute, the chair seemed to become more and more comfortable. He felt something cold press against the back of his neck, and then the chair seemed to become irrelevant as the tingling flared within his body, then vanished. He could see that he was still 'wearing' the seat, but it didn't restrict him in any way. Even the ship itself seemed to change around him. Things he couldn't make sense of before became clearer.
::Wow,:: he thought.
He somehow knew that the ship was depowered except for emergency systems. Looking at the controls, the glyphs on their surfaces seemed to almost acquire meaning. Staring at them, he saw the glyphs begin to shift and change, reforming themselves into text he knew he could read. He started picking out symbols and understanding them. He felt no pain, only a crystalline clarity and an odd feeling of a loss being filled.
::I guess no one ever sat in the chair long enough for this to happen,:: he rationalized. ::Or maybe it's just another function becoming active over time.::
On the wall of the chamber, a clock was ticking
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"Sir," said Jack. "You'd better have a look at this."
The head of the project stabbed his cigarette butt into an overflowing ash tray. It had been a very busy day, and he immediately lit another. Things were in the works. Big things, of which this test was only a part.
"What is it?" he growled.
"It's the ship, Sir. It's changing configurations."
Looking at the viewscreen, the smoker frowned. The ship appeared to be shrinking as they watched. "Is the device ready?"
Jack stared at the screen which held the image from Vault Seven. "But Sir, shouldn't we sto--"
It was hard to remain calm. The ship's pilot had lied to all of them, and now things were getting far out of hand. "Bump the timer down to ten seconds."
Jack protested. "But -sir-, the ship's changing form! It's never shown anything like that before ... and Major Parafaith's inside! Shouldn't we--"
"Wilson, you're relieved!" With a snap of his fingers, two security men seemed to condense out of the very air, they arrived so quickly. "Take this man to detention and ... detain him. Quickly."
The two guards seized Jack beneath his armpits and dragged him from his chair, and then from the bunker which was several miles from the abandoned base. Sitting in the now vacant chair, the smoker flicked the ash from his sigarette and punched buttons. The timer jumped from two minutes to ten seconds. He took a long, satisfying drag, and smiled.
::Major, getting rid of your parents was a lot easier,:: he thought.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
To Morgan it seemed as if the ship had disappeared, leaving him floating naked in the middle of the chamber. He wondered about the time, and knew what it was. Information was flowing into his mind, but it was flowing more quickly than he could process. He needed more time, and the counter popped up in his mind again.
::A minute and fifty-two seconds left:: he thought.
A strong image flashed into his mind and remained. It was the symbol of a mushroom cloud. At that same moment, his world disappeared, washed out by a sudden bright white light.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"We have detonation, Sir," a technician reported. "At least .. I think so."
Cigarette number twenty went into the tray, and the pack into the trash. The man who crushed it's last fires out looked towards the technician angrily.
"You -think-?"
"I'm only getting trace readings from the sensor network. Including the backups. It went up a little but not anywhere near high enough. Maybe it misfired, Sir."
A NEST team was sent for, and sent into the chamber. The elevator and all of the equipment functioned smoothly down to the entrance of Vault Seven. The chamber itself was slightly warm, but other than background noise, their radiation detectors read zero. Ship and pilot were gone, and there was a deep pit in the floor where the nuclear device had been.
"The weapon -did- fire," said the team leader. "But there's no sign of anything else here. Nothing at all except for the pit created by the blast."
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