The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1) by Richard Phillips
Prologue
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, New Mexico, when residents had found evidence of a UFO crash, only a few dozen people knew for certain that the residents were right. Ironically, the abundance of media attention that the Roswell Incident had stirred up the previous year simplified the cover-up of the Aztec situation. By the time a reporter arrived in the Farmington area to do a detailed follow-up, enough false and contradictory information had been planted to ensure the local account would be discredited.
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 New Mexico skies.
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.