It keeps going and going. Firstly. Maaka got a name change to Sam or Samuel. Why? Cause I felt like it. Keep an eye out for any sort of reappearances of his old name, as well as characterization, plot holes and the like.
Peacekeepers Joint Command, Beijing, China
Sam followed down the hallway after Colonel Newton. His job had many perks as well as disadvantages, some of which irked him to no end. Working with Colonel Newton was an honor to say the least, but he hated having to follow him around like some lapdog. Still, in the months Sam had worked with the Colonel, he had learned quite a lot, and been lucky enough to be privy to some very interesting meetings that he would have been excluded from had he worked with some other officer.
Less than three hours ago Colonel Newton had received a summons to Joint Command in Beijing. Without another word said, Colonel Newton had taken off for the airport and the two of them had grabbed a scramjet directly to Beijing. The jet had arrived less than an hour ago and Sam was still trying to deal with the powerful jet lag that had come as a result of the fast flight. He had taken several medications to counteract the drowsiness, but he felt like he was fighting a losing battle against exhaustion. Colonel Newton on the other hand, seemed to be completely immune to the effects of crossing so many time zones at such a high rate.
They walked straight for the unassuming door at the end of the hallway, and a split second before they reached the entry, another man walked in front of them from another one of the halls. Sam was surprised to see that it was Emmanuel Tam and it seemed the other two men were no less shocked at the appearance of the other. Dr. Tam smiled as he encountered the two, and Sam walked forward held the door open as Colonel Newton walked inside the room followed closely by Dr. Tam.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Emmanuel,” Colonel Newton remarked quietly.
“Come now. I may work private sector, but do recall who my largest client is. They need my skills for plenty of applications,” Dr. Tam said under his breath as Sam followed in after the two.
Sam looked around the room towards the assembled dignitaries that sat in the many soft chairs in the room. Dim lights flooded the chamber leaving only vague impressions of who was there. It struck Sam as odd that government bigwigs always liked holding secret meetings in conditions such as this. It seemed so; he paused as he thought of the appropriate word, so inconsequential. Who were they hiding from? A few dim lights wouldn’t keep their privacy long. A wide circular table was placed in the middle of the room and a massive wall-screen sat up against the long wall of one side of the room. The sitting dignitaries seemed oblivious to anyone entering the room and the same attitude was passed to their aides that stood motionless behind them.
Colonel Newton strode to one of the chairs and sat down, while Dr. Tam moved to sit in the chair to Colonel Newton’s left side. Sam knew he was only there as Colonel Newton’s aide, not one of the invited experts so he remained standing behind Colonel Newton with his arms crossed behind his back.
He cautiously looked around the room, trying to appear stalwart and disinterested. Spread throughout the expanse of the room he spied at least three members of the United Nations Security Council. One of them, a woman in her middle years, seemed to be fast asleep with her arms folded and her head bowed. The two others were holding a hushed discussion with a General of the Navy on the opposite side of the table. The President of the Security Council sat off in one chair and she conversed with Field Marshal Grimmel, the supreme commander of the Peacekeepers ground forces. Two Representatives from the Parliamentary Assembly, specifically on the Armed Forces Council sat looking awkwardly about the room with the look of people who were well out of their element. Several other Force Commanders sat about in the other rooms as well as some people that Sam didn’t recognize off hand.
Saranya Singh, the President of the Security Council stood up as soon as Dr. Tam and Colonel Newton took their seat. The two of them were all that was left for the group to wait on and so Councilor Sing started the meeting simply by standing. The sleeping Security Council member was immediately awake, and all conversation went silent as all the assembled people turned their gazes to her. The office of the President of the Security Council had changed over time since its original inception. Taking a page out of most parliamentary procedures from past governments, almost every election now consisted of voters picking which party they favored for which group. From Security Council to General Assembly to Parliamentary Assembly to the Secretary General. Now the position was generally one that lasted for the same period as the Secretary-General rather than one that lasted for a year or less. The Security Council President presided over the actual Security Council which looked over all peacekeepers, humanitarian efforts and police forces.
While the position wasn’t as powerful as it had been a century ago, the sphere of importance for the office still carried fairly significant weight in any part of the U.N.
“Peacekeeper forces were all put on High Alert earlier today. I’m afraid the decision had to come faster than I could wait on getting appropriate permissions,” Saranya said.
Sam casually shifted his eyes around the room. There were a lot of big names here in the room. Why were Colonel Newton and Dr. Tam here? They certainly had influence, but surely not as much as these others did. There were three and four star generals sitting in the room. Colonel Newton was well below such rankings
Saranya pulled out a small wireless remote. A flick of her finger on one of the buttons caused the wall-screen to flicker to life. A press of another button and the screen changed to an image showing an overhead view of a very large building. Sam recognized it as the Secretary General’s personal house at Vienna. He continued keeping out his exterior faced of almost lethargic coldness. Aides were supposed to be seen and not heard. No, scratch that. Not even seen. If someone actually notices you standing there, then there is something wrong with the way you’re going about your impassiveness.
“Yesterday evening at 2134 hours local, there was an intruder alert at the Secretarial Mansion. The intruder was not caught,” Saranya continued.
Sam waited for her to continue now that his curiosity aroused with just those few words. How is an intruder any of our concern? It was a distressing occurrence, but not something that merited a meeting of such scale as this. By the looks on the faces of the other assembled dignitaries, they were all thinking the same thing. All of them except a few that was. The other Security Council members as well as some of the Generals did not look confused. They had a look on their face that was a mix of fear and being sick to their stomach.
“I’m sure some of you are wondering how such a development demands such an emphasis. Believe me, the incident gets better,” Saranya said with a smile that left Sam slightly discomforted.
The smile triggered a memory, something he had forgotten from years ago. The concept harkened back several months after he had finished basic. He and Pixie had managed to pool enough money to take a quick weekend trip to Africa during the duration of leave. The respite was to venture to what Pixie had called “the last wild place on Earth.” They had both been young, excited, and stupid. In a moment of sheer stupidity, neither had remembered to fill their jeep with enough hydrogen for the entire trip out into the savannah.
The end of the first day had seen them stuck in the Kalahari Desert waiting for rescue. Had they not had their coms in their ears, he would have sincerely doubted their chance of surviving the day. The bright sun basked down on them, raising the day temperature to well above anything he had ever been comfortable with. Off in the distance a herd of antelope—gemsbok?—drank at the edge of a watering hole while a pride of lions looked on from the shade of an acacia tree. After the jeep had broken down and come to a complete stop there had been an awkward pause between the both of them for what had felt like an hour and she had turned to him and given him a smile just like the one Saranya had now. The smirk had spoken of an almost sadistic enjoyment behind the misery of the fact that they were stuck. What could have been a miserable experience waiting for some sort of rescue had instead become a day and a night to remember. Or at least he had thought so at the time. Thinking back, he could remember the last time he had even thought of Africa. Or of Pixie. He briefly wondered where she was now. What she was doing. I should have stayed, he thought. But I couldn’t miss out. This was the opportunity of a lifetime! She would have done the same!
He snapped out of the memory. How had the President of the Security Council’s smile brought such memories as those on? Sam mentally kicked himself as he had realized he must have missed some important part of the briefing. Up on the screen, the satellite image of the house had changed into a detailed three dimensional image of the mansion. A red line representing a path of some sort snaked through the house and led to random locations, before exited out in the same direction the red line had originated from. A pathway through the house by the intruder, Sam immediately figured out.
“After Perrone got down to the bunker, the intruder persisted through the house, as if they were playing a game of cat and mouse with the security personnel. Every time the security guards thought they had the guy cornered, he escaped through a window or a door and reappeared somewhere else in the building. Security cameras got nothing. Nothing that is but blurs and amorphous shapes, and even with digital enhancement, there was nothing solid. This escapade lasted for almost fifteen minutes until the intruder left the house as quietly as they had come in.”
She pressed a button on the remote and the wall-screen flickered to the image of a security guard. The man stood impassively against a clean white background while a data table of statics for the man appeared along the right side of the wall-screen. Some sort of Western European background by the look of him. He was slightly round at the middle, but seemed to be well in shape regardless.
“Sergeant Michael Sedgewicke. After being debriefed, he is our most credible source of information. All the accuracy tests came up positive. The stories he told us were the truth or at least as much the truth as seen from his perspective. He saw them when they first showed up and he saw them when they left the premises as well,” Councilor Saranya said. She paused as if she didn’t want to continue speaking about Sergeant Michael Sedgewicke. She held her fist to her chin as if she was deep in thought.
“Sergeant Sedgewicke got one clear look at the intruder when they exited the premises at the atrium. While the lighting in the area was dim, it was clear enough that the Sergeant got a decent view at the intruder. Or rather the leg of the intruder as they slipped through the window. It… was not human.”
“Not human? You mean it was an animal?” one of the Parliamentary Assembly representatives asked. The man stared up at Councilor Saranya behind thick rimmed classes. Sam recognized the heavyset man as Cedric Smith, one of the representatives from some section of North America.
“No. I mean it was… not of this world. He said he saw the foot quite clearly. His words were,” she paused and spread her left hand into an L with the index finger and thumb. A tiny view screen popped into being between the two fingers and she read, obviously skimming, directly from the screen. “Narrow, and long. Three-toed foot, each toe splayed from the others at one-hundred and eighty degrees. Bumpy skin like a lizard’s.”
Sam saw the eyebrows rise on pretty much everyone in the room. He tried to hold onto his composure as well remaining as impassive as he could. This is definitely odd. The room fell silent as it seemed every dignitary waited for someone else to break the silence. Finally Councilor Saranya broke in.
“This represents a security breach of the utmost importance as you can imagine. And implications of such as this are wide ranging as well. So you see why I’ve had the armed forces put on High Alert of the off chance that we need them, but…”
“But what can they do against saboteurs and spies?” Colonel Newton finished the sentence as Councilor Saranya let the sentence hang in the air.
“Exactly. We need to get a plan out in operation in order to better determine what exactly is going on here,” Saranya said.
Sam noted that no one seemed to be speaking about the elephant in the room. They all seemed to be trying to avoid saying anything about it in fact. Aliens? Sam couldn’t believe that. Why here? Why now? Mankind’s own pursuit of the extraterrestrial had increased in the past decades. The desire to find out if there was anyone else in this expanse of space had been met with nothing more but stony silence. No one was listening. Or maybe they were and just didn’t want to respond. A chill ran up his back as he considered the possibilities behind that statement. There were plenty of outcomes he could think of following that line of thinking and not all of them were necessarily good things.
“Did we get any satellite images of the area?” Dr. Tam asked.
Sam suddenly realized why Dr. Tam had to be here. As the sole provider for technology for the U.N., if anyone could come up with any sort of technological solution to the problem, he could. Sam kept his ears open as he listened to the conversation.
“Within ten minutes of the even finishing, an overhead satellite managed to snap several thermal shots of the area for three miles in every direction. Nothing. That’s the problem with such proximity to a large urban environment. Whatever we’re looking for could be in the city and we could have them on the image and not even know it,” one of the Security Councillers said. Sam didn’t recognize the woman off hand. She had Chinese features, and her name was on the tip of his tongue, but he kept silent.
“Perhaps we need to turn out attentions skyward then. Any approaching uh… extraterrestrials would have to keep themselves in orbit. If you couldn’t spy anything on the ground then perhaps you could keep a watch for anything anomalous in the skies. It would almost be far easier. The only problem is knowing how far to extend your viewing range away from the planet,” Dr. Tam said aloud.
“If I recall, current satellite orbits extend to about half Lunar distance. That range could be decent enough to at least watch for anything approaching. You wouldn’t get any details other than the confirmation of an anomalous presence. I don’t know how effective doing that would be. You could watch for years and miss what you were looking for,” Colonel Newton said.
“We’ll get it done. It’s a start at least. In the meanwhile, I’d recommend going to a communications blank out on this for the moment. There doesn’t seem to be that much of a threat at the moment, so I think we’d be safe in moving forward with that. We’ll have to definitely put all security forces on a communications lockdown. Some whistleblower will leak the High Alert out so we’ll need to find a cover story for that,” one of the other Security Councillers said. This man had dark Arabian features. Sam thought he detected a hint of a Persian accent in his voice.
