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- Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
THE TRUTH IS ALREADY HERE.
FOR THOSE WHO ARE BRAVE ENOUGH TO FIND IT.
A young biologist discovers proof that aliens have come to Earth.
And some of them have come to stay.
In a remote underground facility, Alice and Marnie escape the people who are hunting them down.
But they still can’t be sure who those people are.
An investigator at the Agency follows the trail that Alice left her—leading to greater danger and darker questions.
Some secrets are meant to stay hidden.
Finding the truth can cost you your life.
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FINDER
DOVE SEASON 2
ROBIN BRANDE
RYER PUBLISHING
FINDER
(Dove Season 2)
By Robin Brande
Published by Ryer Publishing
www.ryerpublishing.com
Copyright 2020 by Robin Brande
www.robinbrande.com
Cover art by yurok.a/Deposit Photos
Cover design by Ryer Publishing
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
Cortez 1964
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Factory
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Las Cruces 1969
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
The Lab
Chapter 1
The Package
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Finder
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Flier
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
More
About the Author
Also by Robin Brande
CORTEZ 1964
1
Travis Baird scrambled up the loose dirt incline in the light of a waning moon. His brown leather everyday shoes weren’t suited. He should have bought outdoor boots in town, but he’d been in too much of a hurry after the call this morning from Dr. Linsk. Get out there now, Travis. Be in position before it’s dark.
Travis’s white Rambler station wagon made the trip from Fort Collins to Cortez, Colorado in about ten hours with four stops for gas. Travis’s wife, Rosie, had the foresight to pack him three ham and cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee before he left, and he only wished she’d packed more. He didn’t have time for dinner. His stomach was rumbling.
It was his first time out in the field. Alan Mayner was usually the one sent out, but Alan was in the hospital with appendicitis. The job fell to Travis.
He needed to get it right. Dr. Linsk was going to hire only one of the biology post-docs to help him with his work as an advisor for the Agency, and Travis needed it to be him. He believed in the mission. And he had a wife and new baby girl to support.
Travis’s foot slipped on the dirt. He dug in with his fingers and kept scrambling upward. He wished he could see the terrain better, but he couldn’t risk his flashlight. He didn’t want to draw any more attention to his presence than he had to.
Information about the UAOs—the unconventional aerial objects—sometimes came in hot on the roar of a rumor. But sometimes, like now, it trickled down slowly, until by the time Dr. Linsk got word of it, the sighting was already over a week old.
Apparently there was a lot of talk among the locals, but nothing had made the Cortez paper yet. The sheriff had discouraged letting the story out. Instead he asked around discreetly with his counterparts in other areas who had faced similar problems. Other sightings. Even a purported crash near Horsetooth Reservoir.
Sheriff Hoyt took their advice and called Dr. Linsk in the biology department at Colorado State University directly. That was good. It meant word might not have reached the Agency yet.
Dr. Linsk didn’t want anyone in the Agency to hear about it until he sent one of his own to check it out. If it was only a hoax, he wouldn’t bother any of his superiors with it. He’d forward the information to the national hotline set up for kooks and frauds and be done with it.
But if it was real. The Agency needed to lock it down right away.
The fact that more than a few locals knew about it, that was what worried Travis. He didn’t want to meet up with any curiosity seekers who could jeopardize the integrity of the scene.
If there even would be a scene tonight. He’d have to wait and see.
Everyone used to think the visitations were one-offs. A sighting in Utah or Nevada or New Mexico near one of the military bases. The cigar-shaped crafts, visible even in daylight, that seemed to create their own misty clouds around them. The silvery disks that peeled off the main crafts and then darted at unlikely speeds, evading any attempts to shoot them down.
There had been a visitation out at sea just a month ago. A hundred sailors stood on the deck of a Navy ship and stared at the red and white lights that flicked in and out directly above them for almost an hour.
Observing. Us observing them, them observing us.
Then the lights jetted off so impossibly fast it was as if they disappeared from the sky. The U.S. military didn’t have aircrafts that moved like that. As far as they knew, no one else in the world did either.
But the ocean sightings were someone else’s territory. Dr. Linsk’s was Colorado.
Travis finally topped the ridge. He could see only dark shapes in front of him, trees and low scrub faintly lit by the weak moon draped with clouds.
He walked forward slowly, quietly, listening for any sound of voices. He appeared to be alone. Maybe the locals had gotten tired of waiting. Or maybe it was the cold. Watching for alien spaceships was a lot more appealing on a mild night.
Travis found the trunk of some kind of evergreen tree and sat with his back against it.
He looked up at the sky and waited.
What happened in New Hampshire last fall changed what they all thought they knew.
These visitations weren’t one-offs after all. Not necessarily. A husband and wife, the Fullers, were driving home from a party one night on the isolated dirt road that led back to their farm, when suddenly their truck lifted off of the road.
Just rose into the air several feet. Not because it went over a bump or for any other natural reason. The couple had driven that same road a hundred times, and it was always as straight and solid as the Fullers themselves. But now they were suspended in the air, lifted by some unseen force. Mrs. Fuller screamed. Mr. Fuller might have, too.
The truck floated forward about a quarter of a mile, then bounced back down to the road. Mr. Fuller pressed his foot hard against the gas, trying to outrun whatever just happened, but then the truck floated up again and the two of them clutched each other and shrieked.
Mr. Fuller stuck his head out the driver’s side window and looked above them. A round object, flat on top with a sort of dome in the center of the bottom, hovered above them, an eerie blue light shining down from it onto the Fullers’ truck.
The truck bounced down again. This time the Fullers were silent.
Mr. Fuller drove slowly, carefully, while he whispered urgently to his wife about what he saw.
“No, don’t look!” he shouted, but too late. Mrs. Fuller stuck her head out to see.
The blue light hit her straight in the face. Mrs. Fuller howled with pain. Her eyes felt like someone had stuck them with burning pokers straight from a fire.
“I can’t see! I can’t see!”
Mr. Fuller turned the truck around and raced his wife back to town. The unconventional aerial object, whatever it had been, disappeared and left them alone.
The ophthalmologist who was called to the hospital said he’d never seen injuries like that in all his thirty-four years of practice.
The skin around Mrs. Fuller’s eyes was so swollen he could barely pry them open even a little to look.
When he was finally able to shine a light on them, he said her pupils looked like blood-filled marbles. They took two weeks to return to normal. Mrs. Fuller was blind that whole time. They weren’t sure she’d get her sight back, but she did.
And then the Fullers, intrepid husband and wife that they were, spent the next seven weeks driving up and down that same dark, lonely road hoping it might happen again.
It did. One night around midnight they felt the familiar lift again of their truck. This time both of them had the sense to keep their heads inside.
They gradually started telling friends and family. More people began driving the no-longer-lonely road.
Four more people met with the mysterious craft and had their vehicles plucked off the ground.
And that’s when the Agency sent out a new directive to all its teams urging them to be patient and send someone to stick around known sighting locations to see if it might happen there again.
The glowing white UAO here in Cortez had been seen by multiple witnesses a week ago. They said it descended toward the ridge with a strange jerking motion and then settled there for over an hour.
The next morning Sheriff Hoyt found indentations that might have been from the base of the craft.
All the vegetation around those indentations had been burned in a perfect circle ten feet around.
Like maybe a craft had touched down or lifted off.
Locals talked about coming up here the day after and scooping up handfuls of the alien dirt to keep for themselves. They started showing it around. More people climbed the ridge to collect jars of the dirt.
Travis had no hope that by now there would still be any samples worth collecting.
He would have to wait for a second visitation.
2
When Travis first told Rosie the kinds of projects he was working on, she covered her mouth and laughed.
He didn’t care, he loved her laugh.
He had been courting her for several months, although he was so shy and unskilled at it, she probably didn’t realize it for most of that time. Tuesdays through Saturdays, the days she worked as a waitress at the Sunshine Coffee Shop, he stopped in every single morning on his way to campus for a cup of black coffee and an order of buttered toast.
It was an expensive habit, one he really couldn’t afford with the pittance he made as a lab assistant to Dr. Linsk, but he’d rather skimp on other expenses than give up that one. It was the best part of his day.
Rosie had wide, expressive brown eyes and a beautiful, ruby-lipped smile. She had long curly brown hair that she wore pulled back into a thick ponytail. She smelled like apricots, which he learned later was her favorite scent. She had an aunt who made homemade apricot lotions and apricot jam and often sent Rosie some of both.
Rosie always looked cheerful, even on the mornings when the coffee shop seemed overrun. She didn’t get flustered. Travis liked that about her. He started thinking early on that he would like to marry a woman like that.
Then he realized what he really meant was to marry her.
It took him four months to build up the courage to ask her out.
They went to Brusco’s, the Italian place, and over plates of spaghetti and meatballs they finally got to have a longer conversation than just the usual How are you today? and Can you believe this rain?
Travis learned that Rosie wanted to be a nurse, but she needed to save money for nursing school first, since her parents couldn’t afford it.
He told her about wanting to be a scientist since he was a kid. How he used to study insects and birds in his back yard. Some of his fellow students wanted to use their PhDs to become professors, but all Travis ever wanted to do was research.
“What kind of research?” Rosie asked.
He wasn’t really supposed to talk about it, but he did.
“Martian biology,” he said.
That’s when Rosie covered her mouth and laughed.
Travis was quick to attribute the idea to his doctoral advisor, Dr. Linsk, so Rosie wouldn’t think Travis had just made it up on his own.
“There are pictures taken from some of the telescopes,” Travis said. “We can actually see changes on the surface of Mars at different times of the year. We think it might be plants changing in whatever seasons they have up there. And if there are plants, there might be other kinds of life, too.”
“Like… Martians?” Rosie asked.
“We would call them that,” Travis said. “But we don’t know what they look like yet.”
Rosie looked at him with a mixture of amusement and doubt.
“We actually get funding from the Department of Defense,” Travis said, hoping that would make the work sound more impressive and not just like a Saturday afternoon science fiction movie.
“Why would they do that?” Rosie asked, swishing her garlic bread through the leftover marinara sauce on her plate.
“Because we have to be ready,” Travis said. “In case we need to go to Mars or some other planet some day. Or if…” He hesitated, swallowed. He really wasn’t supposed to talk about this. “Or if they come here.”
Rosie laughed again, but uncertainly this time. She tilted her head at him. “Tell the truth.”
Travis leaned forward across the red-checkered tablecloth. He could smell the apricot on Rosie’s skin.
“They’ve already been here,” he whispered. “In 1947. A spaceship crashed in New Mexico. My professor has samples from one of the bodies.”
Rosie’s round eyes grew even rounder. “No, you’re fooling. Stop it.”
“I’m not fooling,” he said. “I’m dead serious. You can’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to tell you.”
After dinner they walked a bit on the street where Rosie lived. Travis had brought her home, but they weren’t ready to be done with the date.
He told her all about Dr. Linsk’s work for the defense department before Travis ever became his student. Then in 1962, when Travis was just beginning his PhD studies, a representative of the Agency came to see Dr. Linsk about doing more specialized work.
President Kennedy was going to make a speech in a few weeks, the representative said. The President was going to tell the world we were sending men to the moon.
Before any of that happened, the government needed to make sure it was safe.
They had reason to worry it wasn’t. He told Dr. Linsk about the crashed spaceship from 1947. “It was right near one of our top-secret weapons installations,” the man said. “That wasn’t a coincidence.”
No one knew where the spaceship came from, but “It wasn’t from New Jersey,” he said. Before President Kennedy sent any of our boys up into outer space, the government needed to know what else might be up there with them.
The man from the Agency said there were samples from the crash, “artifacts,” he called them, stored at various military bases around the country. If Dr. Linsk wanted to become involved, the Agency would send over some artifacts in a few days.
Travis didn’t know about any of that at the time. All he knew was one morning Dr. Linsk approached him in the lab and handed him a petri dish. Inside was a pale, rubbery-looking scrap of what looked like a blister you might get on your heel.
“Tell me what this is made of,” Dr. Linsk said.
Travis thought it was an impromptu test.
He worked on it all day and into the night. By the next morning, exhausted and bleary-eyed, he had to confess to Dr. Linsk that he’d failed. He couldn’t identify a single component of the blister, no matter how many different tests he tried to run.
Instead of looking disappointed, Dr. Linsk seemed delighted. He clapped his hand against Travis’s back and told him to go home and get some rest.
In time he invited Travis, on a trial basis, to help him with some of the Agency’s various projects.
Travis was excited about the work. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to protect this world. And that might mean finding out whether beings from Mars or Venus or some other planet were spying on us and meant us harm.
“You’re scaring me,” Rosie said after he told her all that. She paused in their stroll along her street and huddled against him in the warm June air.
Travis felt as natural as he ever had putting his arm around her and gathering her in close.
When she lifted her face to his, he knew it was time to kiss her.
It took him five more months to save up for the smallest diamond ring. After Thanksgiving dinner with her parents and little brother, Travis asked Rosie to take another walk.
