Logic therefore dictated that in order to keep William and Brandy alive, I needed to escape.
That, of course, would be far easier said than done. Besides being guarded around the clock, there weren’t many places one could hide in East Antarctica. Not to mention the interest of the extraterrestrials. They had been following our transport for the last twenty-four hours, and there was a feeling of trepidation among the crew regarding what they might do after we landed. Gazing out of my window at a spectrum of alien lights, I realized something far more important than that my miserable life was at stake, but it was unclear whether the aliens supported my return to Lake Vostok or sought to terminate it.
As my mentor, Joe Tkalec, used to say, “Don’t accuse God of being a bad dealer until you play out the hand you’ve been dealt.”
And then Lake Vostok anted up and the cards were reshuffled.
We were crossing over the South Pole, passing through neon-green curtains of energy that marked the Aurora Australis. Manifested by electrons accelerated by the solar wind colliding with protons and atoms in the upper atmosphere, the Aurora danced its charged waves across the midnight sky, the lime-green color defined by the presence of atomic oxygen over the pole.
Having passed over the bottom of the world, Colonel Vacendak ordered the pilot to adjust our course farther to the south and take the C-5 transport into a gradual descent. Many of the crew wondered why we were landing.
Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves soaring over a seemingly endless desert of ice at an altitude of six hundred feet.
As we passed over Lake Vostok, the buried magnetic anomaly seemed to reach up from the subglacial lake like an invisible hand. It shook the plane with vomit-inducing waves of turbulence. We pitched and dipped, our engines sputtered, and the lights went off several terrifying times. Yet this was nothing compared to what happened to our alien escorts.
Facing backward in my seat, I saw a mega-sized saucer trailing below our plane phase in and out before it fell out of the night sky like a bowling ball. Seconds later, it smashed sideways onto the ice sheet, blasting snow a hundred feet into the electrified air.
By the time I glanced out of the window at the other craft, it was raining UFOs.
Unable to match the power of the force field being generated from the buried vessel, the smaller E.T. ships went into free fall, crashing to the ice with thunderous wallops that could be heard and felt for fifty miles in every direction.
The alien craft high overhead broke formation and dispersed.
Having flown beyond the anomaly’s reach, the pilot increased our altitude and adjusted our course to the northeast, heading back toward Prydz Bay.
Round One was over, and it was a clear victory for the Colonel.
We touched down on the rock runway at Davis Station ninety minutes later, everyone on board relieved to be on the ground, their fears now focused on a possible retaliatory response.
It never came. Ground radar indicated that the surviving E.T. vessels had moved into the stratosphere. After another hour of waiting, the Colonel gave the order to unload the Tethys, a process that would take two days. Then the submarine would be wet docked by her surface ship, which was still en route. In fact, the only vessel visible in Prydz Bay was a 319-foot-long hopper dredge that was slowly working its way toward the Amery Ice Shelf.
It was November 2, spring in Antarctica. The sun hung low in a hazy gray sky when I stepped off the plane, the sub-zero continent welcoming me back with a blast of minus-seventeen-degree wind. Dressed in full ECW gear, I followed my keeper across the tarmac like a penguin waddling after its mother, only I purposely lagged behind just to piss him off.
I was assigned a room at Davis Station and released on my own recognizance. With a biochip circulating in my bloodstream, I was hardly a flight risk. Besides, where was I going to go?
Yet, I did have a plan.
The E.T. vessels had disappeared into the ether once we’d begun our initial descent over East Antarctica. Assuming they had been there to escort yours truly to Vostok, perhaps a few of the more sociable aliens might wish to communicate with me in what the Colonel had called a lucid dream state.
Reaching out to communicate with an extraterrestrial is defined as a close encounter of the fifth kind, or CE-5 initiative. Developed and practiced by Dr. Steven Greer and his supporters, the protocol uses vedic-style meditation to initiate telepathic communication between humans and extraterrestrials, in order to forge a mutually beneficial, sustainable, and cooperative relationship between our species. According to Dr. Greer, once an E.T. exceeds lightspeed it enters a state of cosmic mind. Humans can therefore use coherent thought sequencing to interface with an extraterrestrial, causing the craft to actually vector in on the group’s location through their collective consciousness, culminating in some incredible experiences. Not only have lights appeared out of the ether to signal to CE-5 practitioners, messages of peace have been downloaded to the human participants.
Greer found that there was a universal readiness among extraterrestrials to engage in peaceful communications with the common man rather than our appointed leaders, who have downed dozens of crafts using EMP weapons over the last five decades. There are no secrets when communicating through the conscious mind, so if a human participant possesses a dark agenda, contact is cut off. CE-5 participants believe warfare and the use of nuclear weapons have led to Earth’s isolation, our visiting E.T. ambassadors seeing humanity as an aggressive, divided civilization armed with knowledge that could lead to self-destruction. As such, these entities are hesitant to share advanced technologies until a lasting world unity and peace is achieved.
The fact that one of them had chosen to share its knowledge with me gave me hope that I could use Greer’s CE-5 protocols to communicate outside of Lake Vostok.
What was I hoping to accomplish? In truth, I didn’t know. I felt desperate and alone, and Susan’s murder had rattled my nerves. With my son’s life hanging in the balance, I needed something — anything — that might give me an edge, be it information or a weapon… or an alien ally whom I could convince to free my family.
After consuming a mug of clam chowder in the Davis cafeteria, I returned to my room to change into my extreme weather gear. I was pulling on my boots when I heard a phone playing the Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter, one of my favorite songs. Searching the room, I traced the sound to a cell phone stuffed inside my pillowcase.
A text had been sent.
Dragonslayer: FOLLOW THE SHORELINE NORTH AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
My pulse raced. Only one person had ever called me Dragonslayer — my father.
I quickly finished dressing. Slipping the phone inside my jacket pocket, I left my room and headed out of the nearest exit, my face cloaked behind goggles and a ski mask.
It was dusk and curtains of green light were already forming in the eastern sky by the time I made my way down to the frozen surface waters of Prydz Bay. I followed the shoreline north as instructed, abused by a twenty-knot wind carrying a wind chill of minus thirty-five.
I heard someone trudging through the snow behind me. It was my guard. He was following me on a parallel course farther inland, trying to stay out of sight.
The cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out, using my body to conceal its light from my shadow.
WALK OUT ONTO THE BAY 200 PACES AND STOP.