Only one man saw any meaning in the confused, holographic images transmitted by the dying drones, and even he had a hard time believing his eyes.
Mark Smith rolled in looking groggy. He was still on a light dose of pain pills, Dr. Smith knew. “Sorry for waking you, Mark. What do you make of this?”
Mark wheeled into position behind his desk and examined the rotating, three-dimensional image on his pop-up screen. It was the middle of the night and he felt muddled. “Holographic image. Flora looks like southwestern United States. By the rate of travel of the camera source I’d say it was taken by some sort of high-contrast photo recon system.”
“LADAR,” Smith explained, “mounted on a robot aircraft. It took these images from four to ten miles away.”
“I didn’t know we had anything that good.”
“We don’t. Not anymore,” Smith said sourly. “But the real problem is what you see on the screen. I want you to tell me what you make of it. Watch.”
Mark Howard was watching and trying to make sense of it, and not having luck. The scale seemed wrong. The amber thing looked like the tail section, including strange fins or motors, of a missile or rocket of some kind, but the plants were recognizable yuccas, even colored green by the software, and if the rocket section was that big compared to the yucca, it had to have come off some huge rocket…Then he saw the human shape, digitally colored white to stand out against the amber shape. He opened the amber shape and disappeared inside. The shape started moving, which made the treads visible. Some new kind of tank? He had already assumed he was looking at one of the military testing grounds in the vicinity of El Paso and southeastern New Mexico, so a new tank would make sense there.
Shapes appeared in the air around it.
“What the hell?” Howard looked at Smith, who was determined to not give him any information. Howard was to make his own deductions, without Smith’s influence, then they would compare their assessments.
Okay, so what were those jagged bars in the air around the tank, appearing instantly then fading in less than a second? If they were being electronically rendered by motion-detecting LADAR, they could only be sudden atmospheric disturbances. Their sudden appearance and dissolution meant static electricity, probably. What else could do that?
Then Howard saw the creeping, elongated mass and the cable. The test tank was towing something?
Then he saw the tank tilt and open up the earth, and go inside, dragging its cargo behind it.
“Oh, no.” Mark looked up at Smith, but Smith nodded back to the screen, where Marked watched the gaping hole sit, and sit, then collapse in a plume of dust and vanish.
“What did you see?” Smith asked.
“I saw a maimed earth drill towing something into the subsurface, then close the door behind it,” Mark said. It was obvious, but hard to believe.
“At least we’re in agreement,” Smith stated. “But that means we have a big problem.” He explained what had happened in the past few hours. Lost and officially forgotten military hardware had been stolen from White Sands.
“Fastbinder,” Mark declared.
“The man we saw was not Fastbinder,” Smith said.
“He was in an earth drill,” Howard pointed out.
“But this earth drill bears no resemblance to the one disabled by Remo under the Fastbinder laboratory,” Smith responded. “There are no exterior hydraulics. Remo said the back end of Fastbinder’s drill was flat, but this is tapered on both ends.”
“He was stealing secret military ordnance,” Mark added. “That’s what Fastbinder was all about. What makes you think that’s not him in there?” He tapped his screen.
Smith snapped out a few commands and the image moved back several minutes and went into slow motion, then zoomed in tight on the moving man. The entire image was composed of digitally drawn triangles and polygons, but the man’s face became infinitely more detailed as it filled the window, nearly to life- size.
“Just a kid. With a crew cut. This LADAR technology is amazing, Dr. Smith,” Howard said.
“Yes.” Smith was clearly irked by the loss of the drones, which he explained had all fallen out of the sky during the reconnaissance flight. This amazing stealth spy technology had been trashed by corner-cutting. “He’s talking. He’s happy about something.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s he talking to? Maybe Fastbinder is inside the drill.”
“That’s unlikely. I had conventional spy aircraft perform a sweep of the area as soon as I knew something was happening. It’s good enough to show there’s no more than one human around the drill for quite some time.”
“So who’s he talking to?” Howard wondered.
“He’s just talking to himself. Why not? The real question is, who is he? We must assume he was tied to Fastbinder in some way.”
