Overrun: Project Hideaway (24 page)

"Mr. President, we have a
signal,” the woman said again. “We have a signal and images starting to come in
from the overrun Science Dome 15 site."

She maneuvered her chair to the
side of her command terminal to allow the President room to sit down next to
her.

A face appeared across the pale
blueness of one of the holovid screens. Baldwin tapped at the controls in front
of him to pull up the signal on his own monitor.

"Security clearance
requested," the voice of the man appearing across their holovid came
suddenly through.

The image faded in and out
making his voice slurred and slightly garbled. "Authenticity verification
from message recipients requested. Please comply."

"Give him the clearance
code," Ford said to Baldwin through the side of his mouth without taking
his eyes from the holovid. His order was unnecessary as Baldwin was already
pounding furiously into the keypad near his screen.

"This is General Maxwell
Tuttle, Quadrant Commander," the voice said while the image settled into
clearer view.

Tuttle’s face was splattered
with blood and covered with grime and soot. His eyes were dark and lit eerily
by small fires burning around him within the confines of the war-shredded room.
"Reporting reconnaissance efforts from within the Science Dome 15 command
facility."

Two figures lurked about the
shadows behind him. Shattered bodies were strewn amongst the rubble all around
them.

One of the figures moved about
the body of one of the command staff slouched over an equipment console.
Pulling the man’s body gently by the shoulder, he lowered it delicately behind
him onto the floor.

Dust and smoke hung heavily
through the air causing Tuttle to cough harshly while he spoke.

Behind him the figure stared
across the ground and stepped carefully across the body he had just pulled away
from the console.

“Go ahead, General," Ford
said quietly.

Tuttle’s eyes flashed a look of
recognition at the sound of his voice.

"Mr. President,"
Tuttle wiped at blood running from a small cut across his left eye. "Mr.
President, we've just entered the command area of Science Dome 15. As you can
see there’s not much left."

"Have you been able to
access the central network?" Baldwin asked from his own holovid unit.

"We're working on that now,
sir," Tuttle replied.

Over his left side, a second
figure appeared from behind a giant portion of the collapsed ceiling lying in
the center of the room. The mounds of twisted metal and obliterated concrete
stood like a small island in the center of the destroyed command center.

The second figure carried two
bodies, one across each shoulder. Hauling them behind where Tuttle was making
the holovid transmission, he set them delicately down on the opposite side of
the outermost doorway.

Reentering the command center,
the second darkened figure became quickly lost again behind the mountain of
wreckage.

"There are a couple of
things of which we can be certain, Mr. President," one of the them spoke
over Tuttle's shoulder from the dark. He walked forward to stand next to Tuttle
in front of the small holovid.

"Captain Mike Samuel,” he
said introducing himself into the small blue screen.

"Go ahead Captain,"
the President said quietly. He could still feel the eyes of everyone in the
room boring their way through the bones of his back.

"The first is that the
emergency evacuation plans weren’t as successful as first believed,” Samuel
said quickly. "There are people everywhere. Upper brass defense military.
Science staff. Administrative crew. They’re all here. It doesn’t look like
hardly anyone got out."

“We can’t believe that’s
entirely true,” the President said more to himself than to the holovid screen.

A low whine and a blinking light
from one of the command consoles made Samuel step back from the transmitter. He
turned around and walked away leaving the image of Tuttle's face alone across
the holovid monitors of the Administration Dome command room.

"The ship is up,” Tuttle
said after glancing briefly over his shoulder towards where Samuel stood just
out of range of the transmitter. We’ve been able to confirm a signal was sent
from this facility. Systems have been initiated and brought online. But it
wasn’t done from the central command room.”

"Someone activated the
initiation procedure?" Baldwin asked incredulously. Lines furrowed from
the top of his eyes and spread across his sweaty forehead.

"No, not the actual
sequence," Tuttle answered him. "That can only be done from central
command. This was done manually. No real procedure. Just brought up. We’ve been
able to trace the transmission to equipment deep beneath the dome. But due to
the severity of structural damage, we might not be able to get down there to
confirm. However, we have been able piece together enough of the command room
log to surmise that it had been decided by a vote of appropriate personnel that
the main start-up procedure not be used.”

“Then why…?” the President
began.

“According to the last entry
logged minutes before they began devoting full resources to repelling heavy
attack…,” Tuttle continued interrupting the President. “…it had been explicitly
decided and ordered that the ship be kept down."

"That is not good,"
Baldwin breathed out softly under his breath. "Not good at all, Mr.
President. If the order was ignored and someone was able to successfully able
to bypass the main start-up system, and the pilots were able to survive this
kind of ad hoc rejuvenation sequence..."

"Someone could be up there
right now, at the controls, with no idea whatsoever on what the hell is going
on," the President finished for him.

"That is entirely possible,
Mr. President," Tuttle said gravely.

"They would have to contact
Earth,” Baldwin answered Tuttle while looking at the President. “That would
have to be the absolute first thing they would have to do."

"Not necessarily,” Tuttle
interrupted him. "In fact, probably not.

“When they were sent up, it was
never intended for them to ever contact Earth. Not ever and no matter what.
They might not have even ever been given that capability. If those men were
brought out of hibernation without instruction or contact, the captain would
have initiated the Emergency War Procedures sequence and locked the ship down.
At least that was the intended protocol."

"So what you are
saying..."

"What I am saying, Mr.
President, is that if they are awake, and that seems to be all we can tell from
what is left of the Science Dome 15 command room, then they have absolutely no
idea what is going on. And really no way to find out."

"They're sitting ducks up
there," the President said his mouth dry. “Is it feasible to contact
them?”

“It’s a risk sending them a
transmission…,” Baldwin began.

“But can we fucking signal
them?!" the President snapped and turned his glare towards Baldwin next to
him.

Baldwin’s face was blank and
stern. He kept his gaze on the holovid monitor and didn’t look back at the
President.

"I agree, it’s not
advisable,” Tuttle said from the smallness of the holovid screen. “At least not
from Earth.

“The J.G.U. are too close to all
our transmission points. They would easily be able to detect and monitor any
signal we send up from the planet. We can't risk giving them away."

"We also can't risk someone
getting to them first," the President's voice started to sound strained. "Despite
the devastating attack to the facility, why would the decision have been made
to keep the ship offline? What would their rationale have possibly been?
Technology important enough to spark global war, and it’s just been left
sitting up there for someone else to claim it?"

"I would have done the same
thing, Mr. President," Tuttle replied. "I wouldn’t have brought the
pilots back up. With the ship left like it was, it would have been virtually
undetectable. There is no record of their exact location in space. There never
was. They were given computer-generated flight instructions after their launch.
Being kept down, the J.G.U. would have had the entire galaxy to search.

“But if before the dome fell
they had decided to initiate the main start-up procedure, that signal would
have been immediately detected and traced. In an instant they would have known
we had something up there, and not too far after that learned the exact
coordinates of the ship."

Samuel stepped back up to the
holovid transmitter from the shredded terminals he had been working on behind
Tuttle. His face was gaunt and grim.

"I’ve been able to confirm
full functioning of the ship, Mr. President," he reported. "We’ve
also been tracking troop concentration within the facility. They’re securing it
from the outside, sealing it off so that no one can break in or escape. Other
than that they appear to be vacating the interior."

"This might indicate they
have traced the coordinates of the Hideaway and are on their way to abduct the
ship," Tuttle said. “It would explain why they have abandoned this
facility so quickly. They found what they were looking for. As a result, we
might even see a reduction of their invasion force and less of a push on the
domes that are still standing. They may have accomplished their main objective
of this war.”

"That is not likely,
General," Baldwin said curtly his back pressed up stiffly against the back
of his chair. The Hideaway Project was devised by a small group of men, and an
even smaller group brought about its implementation. The J.G.U. have no
knowledge of the Beam Cannon Hardware and certainly no knowledge of the
project. Even if they discovered and traced a contact signal from us to them in
space, in all likelihood they would attribute it to system damage from battle
and dismiss or ignore it altogether. They wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

"Just like they had no
knowledge of Plan Zero," Tuttle said coldly making Baldwin jerk back like
his face had been violently slapped.

"Only a small group of men
ever knew about Plan Zero," Tuttle continued to softly accuse. “Wasn’t
that also the belief?”

The President raised his head
and stared directly into the holovid image of the bleeding quadrant commander
standing in the smoking battle-torn room.

"Yet, the J.G.U. let
themselves be baited into an attack. And they're still here while our forces
are almost dead. Do you still believe that they don't know anything about the
Hideaway Project?

They knew it and sent probe
teams in to trigger the explosions. They knew it all along. They wanted the
bombs to burn out the land so they could rebuild it just as we had planned to
do. Once the Beam Cannon Hardware they were coming after was finally in place.”

"General Tuttle...,"
Baldwin began to respond just as icily back.

"Minister of State,"
Tuttle interrupted him for a second time. "We’ve encountered bodies all
over the facility. Tortured bodies. We believe one to be the dome commander
himself. It appears they worked on him pretty good.

“The J.G.U. knew there was
something worth finding here. I think they were surprised at what they
initially came across and needed to know more. Much more. At this point we have
to assume the J.G.U. are launching a mission at the Hideaway."

The entire control center fell
silent at Tuttle’s last words through the small holovid speaker. Everyone
stopped their work and looked over at the President.

Ford physically felt the terror
beginning to permeate the atmosphere of the already tense room.

"How long do you estimate
they’ve had this information in their possession?" the President asked
slowly.

"Sir, these people have
been dead for at least forty-eight hours. There is still ground activity
outside, but it appears to be moving away. Most everything here has been
destroyed by fire or been taken out by the self-destruct systems that they had
time to initiate. With that in mind, we can’t really tell anything except how
long they’ve been dead.”

"Would forty-eight hours be
enough time for them to analyze the data and launch a retrieval?"

"I would guess they could
analyze the data for a simple coordinate location in under sixteen hours and
launch a mission into space within a few hours after that. Judging by how fast
they've been rolling across the United States, we have to expect them to exceed
even our best estimates."

“So that would be a ‘yes’, then,
General?” the President snapped irritably.

“Yes, I believe that they could
be close, Mr. President,” Tuttle answered solemnly.

"I agree, Frank,"
Baldwin said finally turning to the President while at the same time avoiding
the wide-eyed stare of the brown-haired woman next to him.

"Are you able to determine
a trace yourself?" the President asked staring intently into the holovid.

"We will be momentarily,”
Samuel spoke again next to Tuttle. “We’re accessing what's left of the network
now. We should be able to calculate a rough course and estimated position in
space based on its last automatic contact signal. Most of that information
still seems to be intact.”

"Get what you can and
finish destroying the rest," Ford responded. "Initiate any destruct
sequence you can find. I don’t want anything remaining when you leave. Nothing
but smoke and falling debris."

"Yes, sir, Mr.
President," Samuel said turning away.

He backed away from Tuttle and
leaned across the battered broken components of the equipment console behind
him.

"If you are able to
pinpoint any type of possible location, I don’t want anything transmitted over
the open air," Ford ordered Tuttle. "Get outside the perimeter and
activate your tracers. We'll send air transport to rendezvous with you there.
You will personally deliver those coordinates to us. I refuse to risk anything
else."