Humble Beginnings

By KA Hopkins

Jake White is your typical middle-aged father, who is just trying to get by and provide a better life for his family. In the span of a single night, his world is turned upside down by an alien snatch team bent on killing everyone he loves. After dealing with the snatch team, he is befriended by a benevolent, sentient alien scout ship and asked to help out with a small problem that unintentionally puts him in the awkward position of being either Earth’s savior - or the worst mass murderer in history.

Forced to seek help from an old Special Forces buddy, Marc Stack, the two set out to help Jake's newfound alien friend. Along the way, they discover mankind is but one of many sentient beings in the galaxy and that extraterrestrials with a galactic corporate agenda have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.

If discovering extraterrestrials have infested Earth was not enough of a shock, Jake notices that something strange is happening to his body...

Humble Beginnings is written in a style reminiscent of classic sci-fi and tells the story of a reluctant hero thrust into extraordinary circumstances that will determine Earth's future, but includes elements of a mystery action thriller. It explores the premise that extraterrestrials have been on Earth for a long time and are doing a lot more than just visiting – the question is why? What is so interesting about Earth that beings capable of interstellar travel would even bother with a comparatively "primitive" species which is constantly at war with itself.

The book offers a refreshingly different take on “extraterrestrials are the good guys and here only to help mankind with our journey to the stars.” Ask yourself - how would extraterrestrials behave if they were motivated by many of the same vices humans are susceptible to? Like any good mystery the foreshadowing is subtle, you may want to read it more than once.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KA Hopkins
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994756909

KA Hopkins

I'm married, have a couple of teenage kids, a bunch of pets including a stray cat that in no way resembles "Boris" other than I have fish that are smarter. Trained as an electrical engineer, currently working as an IT consultant. Have held a number of interesting positions over the years: army officer, air show pilot, teacher, systems engineer, project manager, IT architect, and IT security expert.

Book preview

No book is written in isolation. This book is the result of the contributions from many friends and colleagues who generously donated their time. A number of people were instrumental in making this book come to life. While I would like to thank everyone personally, I'm sure I will forget to mention someone so here is the one-size-fits- all…thank you everyone.

A special thanks to all the beta readers: Marc, Shane, Neil, Chris, Grant, James, Frikkie, Al, Walter and my family.

Last, but not least, a big thank you to: Dave for correcting the misapplications of engineering terminology and Caren for her hard work fixing the many ways that I have found to misuse and abuse the English language.

Synopsis

Jake White is your typical middle-aged father, just trying to get by and provide a better life for his family. In the span of a single night, his world is turned upside down by an alien snatch team bent on killing everyone he loves. After dealing with the snatch team, he is befriended by a benevolent, sentient alien scout ship and asked to help out with a small problem that unintentionally puts him in the awkward position of either being Earth’s savior - or the worst mass murderer in history.

Forced to seek help from an old Special Forces buddy, Marc Stack, the two set out to help Jake's newfound alien friend. Along the way, they discover mankind is but one of many sentient beings in the galaxy and that extraterrestrials with a galactic corporate agenda have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.

If discovering extraterrestrials on Earth was not enough of a shock, Jake notices that something strange is happening to his body...

Chapter 1- Lessons

If you are as forgetful as I am, there is nothing like a really painful stimulus to help sharpen your memory.

Have you ever had one of those days, when you should have stayed in bed, but decided to press on, despite what your gut said?

If I may, let me give you some advice: Trust your instincts. Don’t think, don’t rationalize - when you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach - stop what you’re doing.

Is it hard to listen to your instincts? Yep - it’s like getting driving directions from a partner! You are heading somewhere, not quite sure how to get there and your (better) half says, We should stop and get directions. You are of two minds, your gut says: Mmm, maybe we should… But sometimes your ego overrules, exclaiming: We don’t need to ask for directions! Usually it takes around ten minutes for reality to sink in - you are lost. Seconds after that, the reprimands start.

Hold that thought - the theme of this is a bad idea, but I am wary of advice will be revisited many times throughout this story.

White lies are a necessity in modern society. We innocently use them to fool ourselves and those around us; but you can only lie to yourself for so long until you reach a breaking point and realize: I’m in trouble. I had reached that point. Every joint and muscle felt like it had been bent, torn and abused for too long. When you’re afraid to sit down because you might not be able to stand up again, you might have pushed it too far.

Not being able to stand up after sitting down was the least of my worries. I was at a loss of words to express just how bad I felt. Four days of heavy exertion with no sleep doesn’t seem like much if you’re in your twenties, but in my case it felt like several lifetimes. Forget the mind-over-matter and dig deep philosophies physical trainers like to spout off. My body was completely baked and whether I wanted it or not, it was shutting down. The emotional strain and physical demands of the last ninety-six hours had pushed me way beyond what was sane, I was so tired, I could barely think coherently.

I don’t know why I was surprised, what can you expect when you’re pushing fifty and your best years are past tense. Any feelings that you once had of being a badass and hard-body are long gone. The honest truth is, badass and hard-body never really applied to me. The tough guy memories were mostly from beer soaked anecdotes told to buddies over a barbecue. While I had tried out a few extreme sports when younger, nowadays, my extreme sports were limited to marathon video games with the kids.

Even though I was now more couch potato than badass or hard-body, I still remembered a few basic infantry tactics, shooting and unarmed combat from my time in the army. I have a commercial pilot license with better than average flying skills, having flown aerobatic airplanes and even a few air shows. Not a lot of people can say they have done that, but there is nothing really special or particularly hard about learning those skills - it's only a question of time and money.

Being exhausted didn't help remembering the old skills but as bad as I felt, it was nothing compared to my partner in this misadventure. It had all started out innocently enough; penetrate a nearly abandoned Top Secret underground facility, have a look around and report back. The only caveat, at all costs avoid getting caught or being seen.

My partner, Marc Stack, was a former Special Forces Green Beret, one of the true, honest-to-god hard-asses. He knew all about pushing through the zone to achieve near superhuman feats of endurance. His motto – mind over matter, no mind no matter, easily said, easy enough to understand…not so easy in practice, when your last active service was a decade ago after having been honorably discharged for injuries suffered in combat. After fifteen years of military service with the infantry, airborne, rangers, and Special Forces - the end result of the service to his country; fragged twice and shot four times, all on separate occasions; medically released due to complications and physical limitations due to wounds received in combat. If you are in the air force, five destroyed aircraft makes you an ace. In the army, earning six purple hearts means you helped the enemy become a marksman and it hurts to get up every morning.

Marc’s previous military service injuries and disabilities were now a real problem. He was ash pale, had trouble breathing and looked somewhat dazed and confused. He looked so bad I had to ask: Are you going to live? He responded in a flat lifeless tone: Dying is nature’s way of saying you have failed…I’m not dead yet but the day isn’t over. You have to love the guy’s attitude.

Chapter 2 - Not your average work day

A couple of logical questions come to mind on how Marc and I got into our predicament. Why would two retired, past their prime, ex-military guys (one a computer nerd, the other ex-Special Forces) choose to sneak around a nearly abandoned Top Secret facility? Having violated the wrong place, wrong time rule, our current situation was like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic - no matter what you do, it does not end well.

We were in a massive underground complex, traveling down a series of large tunnels, steadily moving deeper into the complex leaving the safety and comfort of our ride home parked on the surface. We were headed for a series of small cities contained in what were called bio-domes while avoiding what passed for the local police force.

Our troubles began when surveillance sensors picked us out of the normal traffic as we passed the third and last security checkpoint on this level. The first two checkpoints were routine - our ID cards and camouflage uniforms had obviously worked, fooling the security systems, or so we thought. Then again, there was a chance we had been spotted immediately upon entering the complex and the authorities were simply waiting until there was no way for us to escape. If that was the case, I would have to change my opinion of the local police force, as subtlety was not something they were known for.

I had to hand it to the guards at the last checkpoint: if they knew who we were, they were great actors, not giving any sign that they had noticed our presence. I thought we blended in well with the local traffic as we were wearing chameleon stealth body suits that contained some pretty amazing state-of-the-art technology. The suits provided protection from all weapons up to fifty caliber and provided a self-contained environment that could reduce our magnetic, thermal, visible, and odor signatures to below sensor detection. Best of all, through the use of billions of fiber optic cables sewn into the fabric, essentially bending light around your body, one could become nearly invisible even in bright daylight.

Advanced as the suit was, all of the passive measures had a major drawback: you're limited in how fast you can move. If you wanted to move faster than a snail’s pace you needed a bio-transponder, otherwise the surveillance sensors in the tunnels could detect your presence by the air displacement of your motion. Since we needed to move quickly and blend in without setting off intrusion alarms, we were wearing stolen bio-transponders that produced a unique signal based upon our DNA. The DNA-transponders allowed the surveillance systems to locate and track every being in the complex, similar to how air traffic control can track all planes around busy airports. DNA-transponders are notoriously difficult, but not impossible, to spoof. Since the sensor is worn next to skin and physically takes a small cell sample periodically, you cannot just pull the old trick of cutting a part off someone and holding it over the sensor – unless you provide the stolen body part with a blood supply and maintain normal body temperature. We had done all of this and had been assured it would work, but somehow an old friend Murphy decided to join the party.

For those of you who don’t know who Murphy is, Murphy’s Law basically states: Anything that can go wrong, will. In military operations we like to add: It will go wrong at the least opportune time, where it can cause the most amount of damage and confusion.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that we were detected by who knows what, one may ask: What were we thinking, trying to carry out a reconnaissance and infiltration of the largest complex of its kind with so little support? Truth is, this mission pretty much skipped over any critical thinking or listening to sound advice, due to the circumstances surrounding our departure.

We were forced to leave home in a hurry as we had borrowed our transportation without the owner's authorization and the owner had clearly demonstrated a real passion for getting it back. Due to the pressing need to be somewhere else - to avoid getting caught, we were not all that particular about the planning details nor who we got support from.

Our support for this mission was highly recommended by a friend of a friend who knew of someone who knew someone who had heard of a guy that might know someone that… I think you get the picture. Hell, we could have found someone more trustworthy if we had used the yellow pages, but given the time constraints, being picky was not an option.

Bob, our not so highly recommended support, provided the DNA transponders and the camouflage stealth suits at great monetary cost. I remembered he proudly assured: Guaranteed to work, never had any problems before, but he didn’t offer any sort of a money-back-guarantee. That should have been a warning sign. What were we thinking, trusting a lowlife fixer called Bob?

Our problems started when our transportation suddenly died and nothing Marc did, including beating it vigorously with the butt of his pistol - could bring it back to life. The dead transport stranded us in one of the many tunnels making up the massive underground complex. It was by any standard an incredible engineering feat. The aerial scans and schematic plans in the heads-up helmet displays did not do justice to what we were seeing.

The tunnels connecting the various bio-domes and hangars varied greatly in size, with some of the larger ones being 200 feet across and 300 feet in height, easily big enough to accommodate a large ocean going vessel. Lighting was good, but there was no source, just a pleasing diffused fluorescent glow everywhere. The tunnels stretched to the horizon with no visible end: the laser range-finder in the helmet display indicated the opening was 20.151 miles away. The tunnel walls were mirror-smooth, almost like metal, but had no visible seams or support structures anywhere. The texture and color of the tunnel walls were actually quite pleasing to both the eye and touch. The tunnel walls were unlike anything I had ever heard of or seen in any underground complex.

My heads-up helmet display showed dozens of tunnels running for miles under the surface, crisscrossing and intersecting, seemingly at random; similar to an ant farm, but scaled up to Grand Canyon magnificence. Nothing about the tunnel shape or wall texture made any sense. Tunnels constructed using Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) are always circular, due to the design of the cutting head, and use Spraycrete, a form of concrete as the wall material. These walls had a texture similar to plastics found in high end cars and were hexagonal in shape.

Puzzling as the tunnel construction was, the bio-domes were even more so. The heads-up helmet display showed twenty bio-domes within the complex, all the same size, one thousand feet tall and five thousand feet in diameter, or roughly a volume of ten billion cubic feet per dome. These domes were easily the largest underground structures ever constructed. Adding up all of the tunnels and domes, the Heating, Ventilation and Cooling (HVAC) requirements had to be in the order of six trillion cubic feet or about a million times that of the US Department of Defense Pentagon building, one of the largest buildings in the United States. How HVAC was possible on that scale baffled me, but it obviously worked well as the air was clean and dry. There was no hint of any metallic or musty smell that is typically found in mines or large underground facilities.

The complex gave the impression that it was ancient, but there was no visible evidence such as wear and tear, debris, dust or fading paint. It felt like it had been designed for so much more, but was currently functioning at only a tiny fraction of its intended capacity. The sheer size of everything around us drove home the point that this facility was meant for something big - just the cost of the service utilities would probably exceed a small country’s annual budget.

From our heads-up helmet displays the thermal scan indicated around 100,000 inhabitants within the domes and tunnels. While 100,000 people is not a bad sized city, the facility could easily support two thousand times that number, or roughly two thirds the population of the United States, so all-in-all it was pretty much deserted. While we encountered few people or vehicles, the police were well represented, patrols passed by every thirty minutes. Unlike previous patrols which had given us a wide berth, the one coming up behind us made a beeline to our position.

The approaching patrol was made up of two teams of two officers each. The officers appeared to have been forewarned that we were not who we appeared to be - their weapons were at the ready. They were seriously armed, with heavy caliber automatic rifles, pistols and something that resembled a riot control shotgun. In place of the normal 12 gauge barrel was a long tube that flared at the end, a little bit like the barrel of an 18th century blunderbuss.

They were six hundred yards from our position, driving what appeared to be hovercraft roughly the size of a large SUV. There were no breaks in the surface other than the cockpit which was located on the very top. It appeared to be made out of some sort of polymer material in-lieu of metal. The surface was mirror smooth and polished to a brilliant shine. Instead of an emergency light-bar on top or lights in the grill, the whole surface of the vehicle flashed a rainbow of colors so brightly it made your eyes water - nothing subtle here. With the light-show there was no need for sirens.

The craft moved silently several inches above the floor in a loose echelon right formation and demonstrated good maneuverability as they changed from echelon right to left and back at speeds approaching 50 mph. Unlike hovercraft I had experience with, these were whisper quiet and able to move in any direction without having to pivot and direct the rear drive fan in the opposite direction.

The police officers were dressed in one-piece combat uniforms, over six feet tall, broad shouldered, heavily muscled with seemingly no body fat. Guess these guys didn’t believe in donuts; come to think of it, I hadn’t seen anything resembling a coffee shop since we had arrived. Judging on looks alone, these cops had the same professional appearance as the state troopers back home. They projected an attitude of, Do what you’re told, answer politely and give the uniform the proper respect it deserves. If you want to act stupid I will take a professional interest in making your life hell. They looked like they would sooner bag and tag and let headquarters deal with you than take any attitude. Long gone were the good old days when you could get in a bit of a tussle with a police officer, spend the night in jail and leave the next day, sober with no hard feelings. Lawyers and Tasers killed that form of entertainment.

Marc broke the tension by stating the obvious: This doesn’t look good. Judging by the readiness of their weapons, they’re not here for some friendly community policing.

My guess is our cover is blown and that’s why our transport died. We have at most a minute and then this party is over. I said.

Seems to me we have two choices. Here, hold my rifle. Marc dropped his rucksack and started to tear through it, throwing pieces of kit on the ground as he rooted around looking for something in the bottom compartment. Got it. I was afraid I might have left it at home. This has never failed to solve a problem in the past.

I looked at what he was holding - it appeared to be a large block of gray children’s plasticine. What he actually had in his hands was something a lot more dangerous. It was ten pounds of plastic explosive better known as Composition 4 (C4). C4 is a chemical miracle that looks like children’s plasticine, but has other interesting properties. It’s so stable that you can burn it, shoot it, drop it and nothing happens - however, put a mercury blasting cap into it and you want to be standing more than a hundred feet away when it goes off. With our course of action decided, I never asked him what option B was.

Marc smiled giving me a devil may care expression, Jake, do me a favor and stop that transport truck coming up behind us.

Given the police presence, the transport truck was already slowing down. I helped it slow down significantly faster by taking aim with my 7.62mm M14 suppressed automatic rifle and put several three-round bursts of armor piercing shells through the engine compartment. The suppressor definitely helped to reduce the noise of the rifle bullet - but supersonic bullets travel faster than 1300 ft/s which no suppressor can dampen a hundred percent. As a result, the sound shockwaves echoed off the tunnel walls and all but deafened us. The rifle fire definitely got the full attention of the police patrol and they increased their speed towards us. As the transport ground to a halt, Marc ran to one side of the vehicle, inserted a remote detonator into the plastic explosive and placed it just behind the driver compartment.

With more than a bit of sarcasm I shouted, Come on dude, no one is going to be that dumb and chase us around the transport so that you can catch them in a blast.

"Got any better ideas, asshole? If you haven’t noticed, there’s zero cover in this tunnel for the next twenty miles. With our ride disabled we are making a stand here, whether we like it or not!"

Caught off guard I gave him my catch-all reply when at a loss for words, Fuck you!

Marc replied, Yo’ Mama! and sprinted around the front and down the far side of the transport, with me on his heels. He placed a three-round burst in the front windshield of the lead hovercraft, just in case they did not see us, causing the crew to abandon their vehicle and close with us on foot. We dashed back around the front of the transport, only to run directly into the gun sights of the second hovercraft crew. We both dropped to the ground and started sending single-shot harassing fire downrange.

In a real fire fight, unlike the movies, you can shoot a tremendous amount of ammunition on full automatic and not hit a target twenty five yards in front of you. Amateurs emulating their favorite movie action hero will always fire on full auto, which is impressive for noise and smoke, but little else. The second police patrol, taken by surprise at our accurate fire coming through their windshield, ducked for cover, pinned inside their hovercraft.

Marc grabbed my shoulder and pointed to the top of the transport. Move now - covering!

The transport blocked the direct line of sight for the police officers on foot; Marc’s carefully placed covering fire prevented the police team still in their hovercraft from seeing me perform a tactical withdrawal. A tactical withdrawal allows you to extract yourself from a fire fight in a controlled fashion. Given how scared I was, if it had not been for Marc’s leadership, I was tempted to drop my weapon, turn tail and run. Instead, more afraid of letting Marc down than getting shot at by the police, I did what I was told - crawled up the ladder on the side of the transport and threw myself down on top.

I yelled, Covering! and started to lay down single-shot aimed fire at the police officers still in the second hovercraft. Because their heads were still down, the slight change in the bullet trajectories between Marc’s position on the ground and mine on top of the transport, went unnoticed by the police. Marc, seeing I was in place, pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and dropped it where we had laid only seconds before. To help sell the diversion, he dropped both a Simufire sound maker and Simubody thermal simulator in the smoke cloud.

Simufire sound makers sound like old fashioned Chinese firecrackers, but have been modified to closely approximate the supersonic sound of high-power rifle fire. They can be programmed for single or automatic fire with a battery life of up to several days and respond to the sound caused by weapon fire. The effect is simple, yet effective. When the enemy fires their weapons, after a random delay, the Simufire will respond with both single and automatic simulated fire. The Simubody is a thermal simulator that can replicate the heat signature of four people for up to twenty-four hours.

Under the right circumstances the Simufire and the Simubody simulators can sound and give off a heat signature nearly indistinguishable from a half-section of infantry randomly firing automatic weapons. In this case the circumstances were perfect: no wind and the enemy thought they knew exactly where we were positioned. With the smoke, thermal and Simufire decoys active, Marc and I went silent on top of the transport.

Taking advantage of the lull the police officers jumped out of their vehicle and proceeded to fire an impressive amount of bullets into the smoke. The shotgun-looking weapon was much more than a shotgun. It fired what appeared to be a continuous stream of flechette rounds that impressively ripped the air as they passed beside us. Each flechette round is composed of several tiny dart like projectiles designed to shred targets, unlike bullets which are designed to poke holes in them.

While one police team assaulted the smoke and decoys from the front, their partners came up the far side of the transport to catch the position we had vacated seconds before, in a cross fire from the rear. Overall, the cops used solid doctrine; their tactics of setting up a firebase and flanking a stationary enemy position in an unprepared defense that had minimal cover were perfect. Only, we were not stationary and had better situational awareness with continuous observation on the police, while they had lost visual contact due to the smoke screen and simulated thermal images.

In the fog of battle, neither police team noticed that their sensors were not one hundred percent accurate, as both teams blindly rushed into the smoke, firing their weapons on full automatic. One would have thought that their orders were to capture us alive, but given the volume of weapons fire they had a pretty flexible interpretation of, apprehend dead or alive. With the police focused on the sound and thermal decoys, we ran the length of the transport and jumped off the far end, putting the bulk of the truck between us and the police. As we hit the ground, Marc hit the remote detonator trigger. I have to admit he was right - ten pounds of plastic can solve a lot of problems. The explosion and accompanying flash were spectacular, lighting up the tunnel for several hundred yards in every direction. As Marc had hoped, the two police teams had run directly through the smoke screen into the blast zone.

Marc shot me a grin and leaned over to shout in my ear as we were both deaf from the explosion, Never underestimate the power of stupid! These guys are great cops who never give up, but their tactics are pretty simple because bullets don’t hurt them much.

Roger that, but your little light and sound show probably tripped every sensor for miles. They know we’re here for sure, so much for a quiet sneak-and-peak. Got any other bright ideas? I’d even settle for a dumb one.

Marc ran over to the nearest hovercraft and checked the tracker console where he could see a representation of all police units within twenty miles of our position. He started to play around with some of the buttons on the console, to see if he could change the tracking parameters. He looked for anything obvious that the Central Surveillance AI might use to find us. After a minute or so of watching Marc examine the tracking display and randomly try different buttons, I shouted out, If you’re done fooling around we need to leave most ricky tick!

"Don’t get your hopes up, but it appears we have a couple of minutes, if I had to guess, it looks like their command and control center has never dealt with the idea that a field police unit - let alone two field police units - could be destroyed while on patrol, so real time monitoring is not what it should be. We’re not out of the woods, but near as I can tell, only the fire alarm was triggered."

As I looked at the burning transport lighting up the tunnel, I remarked, Got to love technology - looks like the programmer missed this scenario in the surveillance routine.

Marc continued to change the scan perimeters when he uttered, Ooh, that’s interesting. I looked over his shoulder to what he was pointing out on the tracking display. Here we are, and here’s all personnel within twenty miles. Notice anything? Trying not to sound too stupid, I said, Other than we’re in flashing red, nothing jumps out at me…how about a hint?

"The DNA transponder codes we’re using are from guys supposedly offsite to prevent duplicate codes. Any code duplications are immediately flagged by the Central Surveillance AI. Our plan was to impersonate a valid user to avoid the risk of inserting a fake code into the surveillance system.

If I’m reading this display correctly, the original owners of the DNA we stole are walking around the complex. In fact, they’re in the local cop shop right here. Marc pointed out the location on the screen with his finger.

Marc continued, That would explain why we got through the first two checkpoints. It looks like everything Bob gave us worked after all, with one small exception: he was supposed to keep the donors on ice until we called him. Depending on how they got away and how well the autosuggestion memory implant took, there is a good chance the entire mission is blown. We’re going to need new DNA codes.

Marc, wait one… I jumped off the hovercraft and ran over to what was left of the police officers. Surprisingly, they were in relatively good shape considering the size of the blast they were caught in. Marc wandered over and watched as I removed several transponders from what was left of the police patrols. I see where you’re going - we can borrow the police transponders since they are not DNA tagged.

Bingo, we have a winner! These guys don’t have DNA and since they are nearly invulnerable to weapon fire, no one saw the need to physically link the transponder to the individual when the surveillance system was originally programmed. The scenario of a cop losing a transponder by force was thought to be impossible.

Killing police officers sets a bad precedent, but it is hard to get worked up over killing someone that had never been alive. What we had just destroyed were advanced autonomous machines called Sentinels.

Marc, as much as you like blowing stuff up, I still think the best option, if we run into any of these guy’s buddies, is to avoid contact altogether. We want to avoid any situation that might lead to a straight-up firefight.

"Agreed, straight-up fights are for pulp fiction. In real life you want to engage the enemy with as much decisive killing force as you can muster, preferably overwhelming their capability to shoot back. If that doesn’t work, running away to fight another day is always an option.

From the looks of the advanced technology in these Sentinels, someone took the concepts demonstrated by Boston Dynamics in their humanoid Atlas technology and put it on steroids. These machines appear to be several generations more advanced than what’s in the public domain. I said.

"No shit. This entire facility makes no sense, everything we have seen so far is decades ahead of any technology commonly acknowledged. This place is so far beyond anything I have ever read about, or heard rumors of, even in my classified days when I had access to Top Secret Material. While I would love to chitchat on why nothing appears to make any sense in this facility, we need to go. What’s your plan to exfil (ex-filtrate) the area?"

"Since deep thinking is not one of my strong points - especially when being shot at - best I can come up with has a whole lot of ifs involved, I said. If we can get rid of the police hovercraft and bodies, it might look like the patrols have yet to find anything. If the police DNA transponders work, we can be tracked but should not set off any alarms. If we figured out how to drive the police hovercraft we might be able to hide in one of the bio-domes."

If...

Marc interrupted my train of ifs, Stop already, this is not helping!

"I know it’s a lot of ifs, but we need to break contact for a couple of hours. Enough time to find someplace to hole up and plan something a little less reactive and more proactive. Our suit jammers and fiber optic camouflage create enough distortion we won’t show up on the surveillance tapes, but we are not home free by a long shot. The authorities will see through the confusion pretty quickly once someone starts a frame-by-frame review of the surveillance tapes.

In the meantime, we need to get out of sight. I’m thinking the bio-domes are our best chance - there’s a risk of exposure because there are more people around, but it has to be better than these tunnels. The tunnels are death traps, all you have to do is block off both ends and there's no escape." I could see by the dazed look in Marc’s eyes that he was not catching any of my comments.

He said, You know, I appreciate your effort to enlighten me and get my opinion, but a simple 'follow me' works. What about heading back to the surface?

That’s the most likely place anyone will look for us. Only an idiot would hide deeper in enemy territory knowing all security forces are on the lookout.

Marc answered with a grin, Then it's unanimous; we’re idiots.

Marc ran back to one of the hovercrafts, I ran to the other. I climbed up the stairs and dropped into the seat. In front of me was a large display, very much like our helmet heads-up display, that provided a multi-layer view of everything within a