The Time of The Cat 44
BACKUP PLAN
We looked back to the other hanger. It wasn’t that far, and I wondered why the Pugs had used the truck rather than simply making people walk from one hanger to another. Maybe it was to ensure that they kept together and possibly to keep other humans from realizing what was going on.
We turned and walked back to the first hanger, taking only a few minutes to cross the intervening space. The lights of an automobile came around the corner of our destination as we reached the person-door, and it rapidly pulled towards us.
We got ready to shoot should the occupants prove to be Pugs, but an Air Force captain climbed out and immediately said, “Hey, where the heck is everybody?”
It turned out that he was a pilot and had been on leave to visit his ailing mother in the western part of Nebraska. He’d been gone for two weeks and had just returned. The base was completely deserted, and he had been startled by the lack of security as he drove through the gates. It wasn’t immediately apparent as to what had happened, so he drove around for a while and ended by discovering our little group. As we re-entered the hanger, we filled him in on the situation.
I had left Jefferson behind in the hangar. As we stood there, the cat came up and rubbed around my legs to show me that he didn’t hold it against me. He thought that everything was fine now that we’d come back. I could tell because he sat and purred as we told the captain what we knew.
It turned out that he was a good person to meet. He had been assigned to the airborne laser-testing project for over a year. This project had been in the news and had been largely discredited, but that was simply for disinformation. They’d continued on with the research, and the Mark VII version was now ready for field use. It was currently undergoing testing over the Atlantic. The basic idea behind the weapon was to mount a super-powered laser in a Boeing aircraft and use it to shoot down missiles. However, that was all I knew.
The captain was kind enough to brief us on the system, “The Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser weapons system is a megawatt-class chemical oxygen-iodine laser mounted inside a modified Boeing 747-400F. It was primarily designed as a missile defense system to destroy tactical ballistic missiles in boost phase.”
“The YAL-1 was first test-fired in flight at an airborne target in 2007 using a low-power laser, and then a high-energy laser was used to intercept a test target in January of 2010. The following month, the system successfully destroyed two test missiles, and this was viewed with considerable alarm by various opposing nations. For this reason, funding for the program was cut in 2010, and the program was ostensibly canceled in December 2011. The funding cut and subsequent mothballing of the project were intended to get the system out of the public eye until it was readied for actual use in the field. The testing of the final modifications to the system is now nearly complete,” he concluded.
To me, it sounded like this was exactly what we wanted, provided that it could be deployed and that it could hit an orbital target with enough power to burn out the electronics.
The captain thought he could contact his commanding officer and fill him in on the situation. The test unit, itself, was located at Patrick AFB on the east coast of Florida, and the test group had been flying it out over the Atlantic to a relatively unfrequented location in the Sargasso Sea for low-altitude tests on drone targets.
While the primary use of the weapons system was to burn out missile electronics as they launched and boosted through the atmosphere, there was also an optional plan to use it on a target in low Earth orbit. He thought that there was a chance they could hit the EMP warhead hard enough to prevent it from going off.
It was going to be a real problem getting ready to shoot down the missile, but he immediately made a call on his cell to his commanding officer. He finished and turned to us, “My colonel thinks I’m half-crazy, but he agreed to launch the plane early for a mission that he was going to fly tomorrow at eight in the morning. He’ll wait until there is a confirmation of a launch in Russia, but if there is one at 0600, he’ll go ahead and get it in the air early.”
That gave us a little hope. The pilot agreed to stay in touch with us, but he wanted to try and get back to his mother’s place. He knew exactly what an EMP would do and thought he had about enough time to get there if he left immediately.
I took some solace in the fact that his commander had been alerted, and there was a chance that the warhead would be taken down. We’d successfully rescued all of the people we could, and we didn’t see what else we could do. It looked like our best course of action was to go back through the transporter and try to reach Estes Park. I still had the feeling that we could seriously disrupt the Pugs’ plans if we could only find the transporter head that led to Titan, besides I was concerned about Rudy.
We turned into the now vacant hangar. It was empty, except for a bad odor and some pieces of clothing that the crowd had left behind.
As we walked across the echoing space to the transporter room, I considered the events that had led us to this point. We’d seen many spiders in numerous locations and the newly christened Pug-bears in the room with the hanging Pugs, in the cage in DC, in Carlsbad, and here. It was now obvious that the spiders and Pug-bears were one and the same. That had dire implications because a large force of Pug-bears would be nearly impossible to combat with small arms.
Then it hit me. Somehow in the heat of action, I had only focused on the immediate necessities. I had heard the Secretary’s explanation of the relationship between the Pugs and the Pug-bears, but only now did it really reach my conscious level of processing.
The Pug-bears were the dominant race! The Pugs were only servants or helpers. I couldn’t see how that could possibly be. To this point, the spiders and Pug-bears had not exhibited anything other than a savage willingness to attack. They’d shown no understanding of weapons and no signs of intelligence.
I finally came up with a tentative theory that had to do with the way they grew up. Their reproductive strategy led to the immature creatures scattering out and fending for themselves. Perhaps they didn’t develop the capacity for intelligence until they reached their adult size.
That explained the spiders, but I was still left wondering if, when, and how the Pug-bears became intelligent. The one in DC had seemed totally animal-like unless the moans that it made were an attempt to communicate. So had the one in Carlsbad, but then we were unknowingly threatening its eggs.
The ones that I’d just erased could have been recent adults and not smart enough to know to run from an eraser-gun. Then I remembered that the one that killed the Secretary had a more developed head section. As I recalled, its head was larger than the others. In proportion to their bodies, their heads had appeared all mandibles with fangs, and the space behind and above their eyes was flattened. The last one had a much larger - I guess you could call it - brain case.
It seemed like their brains only developed after they became fully grown. That thought led me to realize that life on a planet with the monsters would be difficult. They were pure, vicious bundles of predatory instinct as they grew and might only acquire a tempering level of intelligence when they became adults. I thought that would mean that they would have no family instincts. Perhaps only the most robust of them survived to adulthood. It would also mean that, once they spread over the Earth, our species’ days were strictly numbered.
As we reached the back wall, I came up with another unanswered question. If the Pug-bears had chosen the Pugs, how did they communicate? I had to leave that line of inquiry for later. The rest of the group was already in the transporter, and I hurriedly entered, turning to face the front as I did.
Liz freed one hand from carrying Jefferson and pushed the button. She’d become, by default, sort of our official button-pusher. The transporter did its thing, but it didn’t bother any of us. We’d all been there and done that numerous times.
We came out in El Caracol as expected. There was no one around, so we simply let the door open and then shut. As soon as it shut, Liz hit the Carlsbad connection button, and we transited instantaneously through space to that location.
This time, the door opened to reveal the backsides of two Pugs wearing New Mexico State Police uniforms. They were in their human guise, but we all recognized them now. They were bent over inspecting the remains of the Ranger that we’d dealt with on our earlier pass-through. His body was still where it had fallen, so they must have just found his remains. Police officer uniforms or not, our splinter-guns poofed, and they dropped beside the Ranger’s corpse.
“It looks like they’ve infiltrated a lot of our law enforcement organizations,” commented the sergeant.
“Yeah!” I responded. “Tell me, have you seen any of them in military uniform?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t somehow inserted themselves into the military also,” he answered.
“We can sort it out later! Right now, we’ve got to get to Estes,” Liz snapped. She was plainly worked up.
“Alright! Everyone, listen. We may be walking into a hotbed of the creatures where we’re going. Make sure your guns are ready. Also, please make sure of your shots as we exit the door. It’s tight, and we don’t want any friendly-fire casualties,” I told the group.
“Ready to go?” Liz asked, her hand hovering over the right-hand button.
That was another reason why I loved her. She had a great memory. Until she reached for the button on the right-hand side, I’d forgotten that the left one would take us back to the Yucatan. She was great with details like that, at least when I didn’t distract her.