Halcyon's Wake: Faith

Forty’s A Crowd

Doctor ‘Mouse’ Timmons was the first to arrive, clutching his Ipad close to his chest and sporting a huge grin. Of all the geniuses on board, in spite of his rather diminutive stature, this guy stood head and shoulders above the rest. Dude had graduated from MIT when he was fourteen with multiple advanced degrees in areas I couldn’t even spell, let alone comprehend. But unlike many prodigies, he still possessed a modicum of social skills, and he and I had become fast friends. Humor seemed a rather elusive concept for many of the elite geek-set — at least my brand of humor, anyways — but Mouse always laughed at my jokes, even the lame ones, which made him alright in my book.

“You have got to check this out, Zack!” he said excitedly, lobbing the IPad across the cockpit like a frisbee. I snatched it out of the air as he brushed past me, sliding gracefully into the Commander’s seat, his usual perch when we were hanging out and watching the earth spin below us.

“You didn’t take any more naked pictures of the first lady, did you?” I said. Mouse was perpetually snapping photos - mostly of the planet’s surface, trying to make sense of the mystery skin shrouding the planet, but occasionally getting some images that ruffled the rest of the crew’s feathers. In another life the sandy-haired 25-year old could’ve been paparazzi, no doubt.

“Way better than that, Zack. Just look, man.”

I activated the IPad and the familiar image of the purple skin covering earth popped up in crisp, high definition.

“Nice pic, Mouse - but I’ve got the real thing right there in front of me.”

“Look closer, man. See anything peculiar?”

I scoured the image, but all I could see were the familiar whirls and swirls I’d gleaned over the last three months, peppered with the occasional dark spots and squiggly lines that looked like erratic veins or rivers skimming across the atmosphere at 60,000 feet.

I held the IPad where he could also look at the image. “Sorry, Mouse - I don’t see anything different.”

“My bad,” he said. “Go to the next image.”

I flipped to the next picture in the library - and something that was very different immediately popped into view.

The landscape was still a vibrant purple, sort of like looking at the moon through a bottle of Welch’s Grape soda, but the distinct outline of a perfect, silver sphere blocked out a large section of the center of the photo.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, zooming in to get a closer glimpse of the silver-dollar sized object. Mouse was grinning like he’d just pulled off the perfect prank as the image adjusted itself on the screen.

The object was a dull silver, definitely metallic, with eight trapezoid-shaped darker areas radiating from the center. Textbook flying saucer stuff, right out of a 1950‘s era movie, and absolutely enormous. The sun cast a shadow from the object across the surface of the ‘sky-skin’, the moniker most of the crew had given the grand, purple haze draping the planet. This thing was bigger than Dallas, if my quick guess-timation’s were right.

“You messing with me?” I asked.

He continued to grin and shook his head quickly from side-to-side. If anything, Mouse was a bit too chipper, and brazenly honest - the one guy on the station that seemed unflappable, even in the face of armageddon.

“No, man. I took this about an hour ago - no shit. I haven’t even shown the commander or anyone in Ops. Whaddya think it is?”

“Dude - it’s a freakin’ flying saucer - unless you’ve been playing around in photoshop.”

I scanned his face for any signs of deception, but the same perpetual, boyish grin was all I could see.

After Halcyon had arrived, any misconceptions I’d had about life elsewhere in the universe had naturally vanished - but this was still unnerving.

“You think these are the ones that laid down the sky-skin?” I asked.

Mouse had always been vocal in professing his beliefs with me about UFO’s. I now knew more about every crazy conspiracy theory that had ever been tossed around before Halcyon showed up, than I really cared to admit. If he hadn’t been a genius way off the scales it would have undoubtedly prevented him from working with the space program. But NASA tolerated his quirks - a lot of the systems on the space station attesting to the guy’s genius, and their tolerance.

“Somebody’s checking it out, Zack - I wonder if this has anything to do with what the President is going to say?”

Voices began to filter in from the cargo bay as the personnel arrived for the briefing.

“Let’s go get some of that cake and find out.”

*********************

Beth was the last to arrive - no surprise, and she joined Mouse and I near the airlock forward of the cargo bay. The rest of the crew were stationed around the perimeter of the bay, munching on the promised cake, and President Bielski stood center-stage, hooking his stockinged feet into the velcro straps on the floor.

Mouse was trying to show Beth the picture of the UFO, but she stood with her arms crossed, wearing a grim expression and thoroughly ignoring him.

“Good morning, people,” the President said, “I’ll keep this as brief as possible. We’ve got a lot of work to do in the next couple of days and I’d like for us to get started as soon as possible. In a nutshell - we are leaving.”

Murmurs around the room echoed off the walls, and Beth shot me a scathing “I told you so” look. I just shrugged my shoulders and focused intently on the President, who was motioning for the crowd to get silent.

“I’ve been reviewing archival information the last few weeks that had been classified beyond my own purview prior to Halcyon’s arrival. Unbeknownst to me and everyone else in government, it seems that we have a base on the moon that was created jointly with the Russians - and others- back in the early 60’s. The facility is self-supporting and has been manned with a small but permanent crew for almost 50 years.”

The President let that statement sink in, and the murmurs transformed into a hushed and somber silence.

“No doubt the arrival of Halcyon transformed all of our belief structures, and the documents and images I’ve been reviewing the last few days have strained my own beliefs to the breaking point, to say the least. Dim the lights, would you, Wayne?”

The engineer stood by a control panel midway in the cargo bay, where all the lighting and audio visual controls were housed. A projector suspended midway in the hangar hummed to life, and an image of former President Eisenhower lit up the screen in the rear of the cargo bay. Mouse gigged me in the ribs with his elbow, his eyes wide.

“Dr. Timmons will no doubt tell you all about what most of us considered to be ludicrous fantasy just a few short months ago. Turns out he and all the other UFO nuts weren’t wrong. According to what I’ve been reading, in 1955 Eisenhower met with an alien race and established a treaty at Edwards Air Force base. That treaty resulted in the construction of a lunar base, among other things, and also a loose alliance with the aliens most of us know from popular fiction as the Grey’s or Zeta Reticulans.”

The President began displaying different slides. Images of the Grey’s, various spacecraft, and what was undoubtedly the current lunar facilities flashing across the screen. Mouse was awestruck, his mouth wide open. Beth still looked pissed and unmoved. What the hell did she know that I didn’t?

“For some reason,” the President continued, “information about this relationship has been kept from the public in a huge way, and I have no answers as to why. Whomever decided to shroud this info apparently never anticipated Halcyon, and even more shocking to me, neither did the Gray’s. Whatever secret, shadow government that embraced this veil of secrecy perished in the last conflagration, and we may never know why all of this occurred as it did...” The President’s voice quavered, rare for a man that seemed to always have an answer for anything.

“...But that doesn’t change what we need to do now to ensure the survival of our species. In the next few days, the seven dwarves will be tethered together and affixed with the engines Dr. Timmons designed, and we will head to the moon.” The President fixed me with a hard stare.

“Not all of us will be making the journey, though. It’s imperative that someone remain here and monitor the sky-skin up close, and hold out for the possibility of communicating with survivors on the surface. I know not all of you are Americans, and I think the concept of borders died when that shroud covered our planet. My last official order as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief is to place Major’s Dalton and Hodgson here as observers - and I will allow anyone else who chooses so to remain here with them.”

Every eye in the room looked at us with pity as Wayne turned the lights up to normal. I was stunned and said with confidence the only thing a Marine could when given a direct order.

“Aye, aye, sir.”