“I’m not telling you shit.”
“Things about off-world affairs,” Carl says, ignoring the comment, “things about what’s really going on out there between the Grays and Reptilians, the Sirians and especially the Collective.”
“What part of, ‘I’m not telling you shit’ didn’t you understand?” Mark says.
This time Carl turns and looks him in the eye. “All of it.” He turns back around, heads to a metal desk at the wall. “Now, do you want to talk, or do you want this to do the talking for you.” Carl turns back around, and this time he’s holding a large syringe. Mark doesn’t need to be told what it is, but Carl tells him anyway. “Sodium pentothal… truth serum.”
Mark says nothing, just sits there stone-faced.
“Not so glib anymore, are you?” Carl says, scoffing. “And you know what, I think we won’t take any chances today.”
“You’re—” Mark starts to say, but Carl jabs the needle down into his thigh, pushes the plunger with his thumb. Both men watch as the liquid goes into Mark, all of it.
“Now,” Carl says, taking as step back and brushing back his closely-cropped and graying hair, “let’s start with an easy one, a close one.” He sits down in the roller-chair opposite Mark. “Tell me about Black Knight. What does it know… what is it sending out?”
“Black Knight?” Mark says, his face screwing up in confusion. “No one controls that… no one on Earth, at least.”
“But someone is… who?”
Mark shrugs, and Carl frowns. He wishes the truth serum was taking effect, but it takes time. He decides to take a different approach.
“I’ve got a team working to take it over.”
“Take it…” Mark starts, before chuckling. “What the hell are you gonna do with that ol’ clunker?”
“We’ll use its instantaneous download feature to send a reverse signal, though one with a net attached. On the other end of the line, the Sirians will never know what hit ‘em.” Carl frowns and shakes his head. “I just wish it wasn’t so damn far away.”
“Around Arcturus, that’s where the signal’s coming from, right?”
“Yes. Arcturus is another star in the Boötes system. In ancient Mesopotamia the star was associated with the god Enlil.” Carl chuckles. “The New Agers think that Arcturus is the gateway for the soul to take once it leaves the body, and perhaps they were right once… but not anymore.”
“No,” Mark scoffs, “now you steal those souls before they can even make it past the planet’s outer magnetically-charged energy field.”
“You must admit that it’s efficient,” Carl says, looking down at his nails for a moment before looking back at Mark. “In the five years that we’ve had the system fully up and operational, we’ve had an 84 % success rate when it comes to soul capture.”
“Soul capture, is that what you call it?”
“You have a better name?’
“How ‘bout ‘hell’?”
Carl laughs. “Oh, Mark… always the fighter, even when it’s clear you’ve lost. In that way you’re no different from your father.”
“So in those five years, how many souls do you think you’ve stolen?” Mark asks changing the subject, trying to get as much information as he can. Carl senses this, and begins to grow bored with the conversation.
“Millions,” he says, “now, why don’t we—”
“You’ll never make it work,” Mark says quickly.
“No?” Carl mocks him. “You seem to forget that the Grays have spent the past twenty or more years cementing their presence here — and they’re just working for the Reptilians! All the abductions, all the impregnations… it all leads to one thing — a hybrid race that humans can’t tell apart from their own. Eventually those hybrids will have the reins of government firmly in their control.” He cocks his head to one side in a shrug. “They already do, really, what with the Rockefeller’s and their foundation, as well as the all the influence coming from Kissinger.” He sighs. “But I grow bored of this conversation, one that’s giving me nothing.” He looks down at his watch. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes when the serum has taken full effect.”
Without another word Carl turns on his heel and heads out of the room, leaving Mark stuck to that chair, a vile toxin coursing through his veins.
14 — Black Knight
The three men sit at the large conference table, no one saying anything. Most sit staring at the table or the floor or twiddling their thumbs… waiting for the right time. Finally Bennewitz shakes his head and looks over at Walter. “Could be the Black Knight Satellite again.”
“Oh, God… let’s hope not,” Walter replies with a groan.
“Black Knight?” Turn says, one eyebrow cocked. “Uh… guys, remember — I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you’re talking about.”
Bennewitz looks to Walter. “You want to explain it, or should I?”
“Be my guest,” Walter replies, whereupon Bennewitz nods and looks back to Turn.
“Came about back in March, 1960,” he says. “TIME Magazine ran a story on the Dark Fence radar program and how three weeks earlier they’d found an object orbiting above the continental US. Well, it was determined that it was a dark satellite, for the main reason that it wasn’t transmitting any signals that we could detect.”
“It was just floating there?” Turn says, and Bennewitz nods.
“Just floating. At first we figured it had to be the Russians, for who else is gonna be launching satellites up into orbit… and keep them right over our roofs lookin’ down?” He scoffs. “We knew it wasn’t Russian for the simple reason that it was in a polar orbit.”
“Polar orbit?” Walter repeats. “But… but… we couldn’t pass over both the north and south poles once per revolution until…”
“1965,” Bennewitz says, nodding. “Neither we nor the Russians could do that twenty years ago, but here was a satellite that was doing it.”
A silence falls as both men let Turn digest the words. Bennewitz picks it up after a brief pause of ten seconds.
“Six months later in September 1960 the Grumman Aircraft Corporation managed to get some images of the thing. Their Long Island factory snapped a photo of a reddish-pink glowing object that was moving in an east-to-west orbit… something that was the complete opposite of what most man-made satellites did, which was to orbit north-to-south.”
“Also means it couldn’t have been doing the polar orbit that Time Magazine said it was,” Walter says.
Bennewitz nods. “Wouldn’t be until three years later — in May, 1963 — that astronaut Gordon Cooper caught a first-hand glimpse of the satellite when he was doing his 22-orbit Mercury-Atlas 9 flight. Said it was glowing neon green and that it was larger than any man-made satellite that he’d ever seen.”
“That’s not all, either,” Bennewitz says after a brief pause, one in which Turn’s eyes are narrowed, his brow furrowed, and all sense of what is possible and impossible in the world has gone from him.
“Oh?” the super soldier says, shocked that there could be more.
“Back at the time it was first discovered by Time a bunch o’ ham radio operators started to say they were getting weird radio signals. One in particular even said that he’d received a signal that, once he’d decoded it, said the message’s origin was a place called Epsilon Boötis.”