Timeshadow 01

I

Thursday

Sergeant Jim Sutter sat on his idling Harley Davidson, reading his notes on the route the motorcade would take back to the city, and once again he unconsciously wiped away sweat that kept running from inside his helmet down his face. He looked at the bike's instrument cluster, checked the engine's temperature once again, then looked the ambient temperature and shook his head. The air was 102F, and it was not quite three in the morning; road traffic into and out of JFK's Terminal Four had already been stopped for them. The "package" was a Saudi diplomat, but Sutter didn't know who it was, and he could not have cared less; he watched security personnel surround the man and get him into one of the armored limousines. He scanned the area for threats, then the signal was given and Sutter pulled out onto the JFK Expressway; the convoy made for I-495 then to the Midtown Tunnel and made good time, and once on Manhattan they turned north on Park Avenue, heading for the Plaza Athénée on East 64

th

Street.

Sutter saw it first, but all the radios came alive at once.

The motorcade stopped, men got out of cars, Sutter and his motorcycle officers dismounted and stood openmouthed in the middle of the street...

Everyone was staring at one of the skyscrapers just ahead, staring at an electric blue luminescent sphere that had just emerged from the side of the building. Now the sphere was just hovering outside the building, perhaps sixty floors above street level, and Sutter took off his helmet and pulled out his iPhone, began recording video of the...whatever it was.

"What the fuck is that, Jim?" one of the other officers asked, but Sutter just shook his head and kept filming the object. He guessed it was less than fifteen feet in diameter, and whatever was holding it up was completely silent. They were not quite two blocks from the sphere, so he zoomed in on the object. The surface was alive with what looked like short, hairy lightning, and now he could just make out a faint crackling sound, faraway, almost hollow. He looked at the sphere more closely on the screen, squinting in the darkness until he thought he made out the something inside. What? Was there someone inside?

"Let's get out of here," someone yelled, so Sutter pocketed his phone and mounted the bike, but just then he felt a sudden deep chill sweep across the street. He looked at his gauges, saw the ambient air temp had fallen more than eighty degrees, and as he put on his helmet he looked up just as the sphere rose into the night sky, up into a solid wall of cloud blanketing the city. Snow began falling, while less than a mile away the temperature remained well over 100F.

+++++

1

st

Lieutenant Judy Aronson piloted the lead ship in a group of twelve AH-64M Apache helicopters, the squadron en route from Hood Army Air Base, near Killeen, Texas, to Kelly Air Force Base, just outside of San Antonio, Texas. All twelve Apaches were fully armed with war-shots, or live ammunition, even though they would be loaded directly onto Air Force C-17s at Kelly. She didn't have the mission profile yet, but with food distribution and water supplies critically low throughout Central America, she could guess. Maybe El Paso again, she thought, or Brownsville, to shore up the border. Governments were imploding as temperatures soared, as water supplies dwindled. When crop failures in Africa trebled last year, Europe had been overrun with starving hordes; now the United States was acting preemptively, stopping any and all border crossings -- with deadly force used without warning, She hated the duty, but she had her orders.

They had passed Johnson City, Texas, ten minutes ago and the outside air temp was holding at a steady 134F; if the air got much hotter they'd have to limit operations to short duration hops or risk engine damage, and the air-conditioning pack under her seat was struggling to keep her cool. They'd be on the ground in another ten minutes, fifteen more max, and she looked forward to getting into the Crew Ops there -- if only because it was so well air-conditioned...

"Lieutenant?" her weapons officer said, "check your two o'clock, pretty high, maybe flight level two zero..."

"What is it..." She looked up and to the right and her eyes went right to it. A huge sphere, iridescent blue, and huge -- hung up there in the early morning sky, but she couldn't tell how far away it was, or even how big it might be. She cued the radio immediately: "Beagle lead to all sections, tighten up and get eyeballs on the object at out two o'clock high. Anyone got any ideas..."

She looked around quickly as the other Apaches drew into a tight defensive formation behind her, then before she knew it the blue sphere was on them and in an instant they were "inside" whatever it was. Blinding light followed and she got her visor down, her eyes on the panel while she struggled to maintain level flight, then as suddenly they were clear of the sudden turbulence -- and the sphere was gone too.

But then again, so was everything else.

There was no GPS, no TACAN, no civilian VOR/DME signals, nothing. Nothing at all. She got on the radio, called San Antonio approach, and there was nothing, the same when she tried the tower at Kelly Field. Nothing, not even static.

"Beagle one, this Beagle three."

"Three, lead, go."

"Lieutenant? The highway's gone. We were almost over right over 163 and Blanco should be about two clicks ahead, but I got nothing. Road's gone, so's the town."

"Okay, EWO, get me some kind of signal, somewhere. A beacon or radio maybe. Check for any airborne traffic, too. I don't want to run into anything up here. Everyone, start scanning, look for anything that looks like a town or a road."

She looked at her NAV instruments again, and each one was simply useless. The HSI was nothing but red flags now, and the GPS overlay was gone too, not even their groundspeed registered. The only explanation was that the GPS constellation was down, but what about all the VOR/TAC stations? How could those all go offline at the same time? The artificial horizon was working, as were all the ship's mechanical systems, so how could it be? She thought it was almost like Beagle flight had been cut off from the rest of the world...but...how? Why?

"Lieutenant," the weapons officer sitting just behind her said, "I got smoke on the horizon, eleven o'clock, probably twenty miles."

"That's on the bearing to San Antonio," she said. "Check a thermal imagine, see if there's a heat bloom. Can you check for radiation signatures?"

"On it."

"Beagle lead, Beagle group. Got a visual on smoke about one-eight-four magnetic, stay on me and let's get a little closer."

+++++

Jim Sutter sat in the Watch Commander's office, holding his iPhone up and playing the three minute video clip again.

"What is it, Sergeant?"

"I don't know, Lieutenant. After I put my phone in my pocket I saw it, well, it rose straight up into that cloud, and then the snow started coming down real heavy."

"Snow!" he laughed. "It hasn't snowed in New York in over ten years, and it was over a hundred last night!"

Sutter paused this first clip, then found the next in his library. "Well then, take a look at this..."

Sutter hit the play button and the scene shifted to 64

th

Street, right outside the hotel, and he handed his phone to the Lieutenant. "Damn!" was about all the man said, but Sutter watched the old man's head shake from side to side repeatedly as he looked at snow falling in July. "I don't get it," he said finally. "I mean, assuming this is real and you didn't fake it somehow..."

"I didn't want to write it up, sir, but that Saudi guy saw it, and so did his detail. And so did my men, all six of us."

"And you all saw the same thing? The light up there, and the snow?"

"Yessir."

"You didn't post it anywhere, did you?"

"No, not yet."

"Don't. Not until I talk to the chief."

"Yessir."

"You and your men. Keep quiet about this."

"Okay, sir."

"Dismissed."

When Sutter was gone the Lieutenant picked up his phone and hit a speed-dial. "Paul? This kid Sutter caught it on video. Yeah, the snow too. Where are you're men? So, it was on the sixty-third floor? No kidding, right through the glass, too? A perfect circle? The glass melted? No. That just doesn't make sense, does it? No, I'll make the call. Let me know when your men get back. Right, will do."

+++++

"Spirit Two-nine Bravo, you'll be number two to tank, behind Boomer Five-oh-five," the tanker's boom operator said.

"Roger, number two behind the F35," Colonel Tom Courville said. He drifted off to the right of the KC-46 Pegasus, trimmed his B-2 into a slow cruise and watched as the little attack bomber lined up and tanked. Just seconds later the little jet disengaged and floated left and above the big Boeing aerial tanker, joining his squadron.

"Five-oh-five clear. Spirit Two-nine Bravo, clear to start your approach."

"Got it. Coming over." With practiced ease, Courville lined up and accelerated, taking commands from the boom operator until his aircraft linked up to the tanker. When positive contact was confirmed fuel started flowing, and he kept a constant eye on the guidance cues coming from the boom operator -- until...

"Two-nine Bravo to Pegasus Kilo-echo," Courville said. "I've got an object directly overhead, bright blue and descending."

Boomer Five-oh-five, I got eyeballs on it, and I'm going up intercept, going hot now!"

"Two-nine Bravo, you're full and we're breaking off, so have a nice day!"

Without thinking Courville trimmed down and drifted right again, keeping the tanker and the blue orb in sight, but just then everything went white, blinding white, and Courville watched as his co-pilot slammed down the blast curtains, plunging the cockpit into darkness. He went "on instruments" then, kept his eyes on the artificial horizon, then his airspeed and rate of climb indicators, but the primary NAV display flickered and went black, then red warning flags popped up, indicating all NAV information was down.

"What the fuck!" his co-pilot, Captain Eve Sinclair, cried. "We just lost GPS; switching to inertial guidance -- now."

The HSI flickered back to life, putting their position about where Courville thought it should be, about 800 miles WSW of Pearl Harbor.

"Boomer Five-oh-five, negative contact, back with you guys but I got no NAV data now."

"Kilo-Echo, we lost NAV too."

"Two-nine Bravo, we've got inertial, and we're, uh, stand by one. Okay. We're seven seven five miles from Pearl, bearing zero-four-four degrees. Why don't y'all form up on me and follow us in. Who do we have up her?"

"Uh, Five-oh-five, me and three wingmen, five-oh-two, five-oh-six and five-oh-seven. I got the Pegasus at my twelve o'clock, and I think we've got a Qantas A380 above us, around flight level three three zero."

"Two nine Bravo. Kilo Echo, could you try and raise the Airbus, see what his status is? I think we'll head on upstairs and see if we can raise anyone at Pearl on VHF."

+++++

"Beagle lead to red section, got a range to that structure right at 2.3 miles, so let's get on down in the weeds for our approach. Blue and Green, y'all hang here for five minutes then move in behind us, weapons hot unless you hear otherwise."

Aronson dove her Apache down to treetop level and accelerated to 160 knots, heading right for the smoke. "This isn't kosher, WEPS, we should be over the suburbs now."

"I got nothin' but the smoke, Lieutenant."

"Okay, I'm going in hot. Red section, echelon formation, and let's pop up about three hundred yards out." She let a little airspeed bleed off and pulled up on the collective, and at 300 feet she nosed over and went into a hover, settling there while she looked at the structures below.

People were pointing and running, a few women had dropped into prayer and a donkey was bucking across a market area...

"Beagle Lead, this is Red Two. It looks like a movie set. Could we be west of the city? You know, where they filmed those movies?"

"That ain't no movie set, Higgins," the pilot in Red Three said.

"Beagle Lead, okay Red Three, what the fuck is it!"

"Lieutenant, that's the Alamo, the real one, I think, and you can bet your sweet ass we ain't in Kansas no more."

+++++

Todd Parks was setting up his telescope at a parking lot located just inside the Saratoga National Historic Park, just east of Saratoga Lake, New York; he was one of more than thirty amateur astronomers setting up scopes at the park that Friday afternoon for a 'Star Party' being put on by several regional astronomy clubs that night. His scope, an ancient Takahashi TOA-130, was already set up on his EM-200 Temma IV mount, and he had just finished connecting the mount to his computer when Sara Goodman started talking to him.

"Did you hear about that shit in the city this morning?"

"No, I guess not. What happened?"

"Something came out of a building, hovered over Park Avenue, then took off -- straight up..."

"Something? Like what?"

"A blue sphere, hollow, like translucent. Then it started snowing."

Parks stood and looked at Goodman. "Snowing?"

"Yup. But there's more. I heard another sphere appeared over Texas and a bunch of Army helicopters disappeared."

"Any wreckage?"

"Todd, I said they disappeared. As in, without a trace. I get concerned, you know, after what you saw..."

What Parks had seen, almost a year ago, had almost -- almost -- made the news. As a project manager for the new Ultra-large LaGrange Point based solar observatory, he had been making observations when something he half-jokingly called The Death Star moved into a tight solar orbit. The object, easily twice the diameter of Mercury, then appeared to fire a beam into the solar corona. Other team members were unsure what the beam was until an astrophysicist near Grenoble, France made the assertion that the object hadn't fired anything at all; it was, rather, she said, drawing energy as a plasma directly from the Sun. After orbiting for five days, the object left the solar system at incredible velocity, and that's when 'intelligence types' from the NSA and FBI showed up. The information was compartmentalized, contained, and shut away in some vault somewhere, with warnings given to all involved to shut up or face dire career fallout. Then Parks started doing research.

He'd found other, very similar occurrences recorded as far back as the first SOHO observations in the early 21

st

century, including some grainy video of two identical orbital insertions, the first in 2002, the second in 2013. These observations had been ridiculed and filed away, but he began searching through observations in 2024 and found notes from a like interval deleted. His occurred in 2035, a year ago, and he'd been very worried ever since. About what, he couldn't tell, but with the steady and rapid deterioration of global weather patterns beginning in 2024, and the catastrophic degradations that began a year ago as a backdrop, he was growing very concerned there was a causal link. One he just hadn't figured out yet.

Sara Goodman had been a skeptic all along. A good one, though, supportive of his research in solar seismology, an MIT trained astrophysicist and researcher now working for the NSC, she was one of the few people he trusted with his "other" observations. He'd invited her to Saratoga to look at the stars, something they'd both enjoyed doing once upon a time, and he always enjoyed her company, the conversations they fell into when they somehow forgot to argue with one another about his government conspiracies.

She had a much newer, totally computerized scope set up next to his and was close enough to talk to, and now he wondered where she was going with this -- but she grew quiet, got back to setting up her scope. She'd been looking forward to this for weeks...

Kids from "special schools" all over New York and Vermont had been invited to these star parties for decades, and Parks expected between two and three hundred people to show up that night. Someone had the bright idea to get a couple of carnival vendors up there too, so there'd be snow cones and hot dogs to keep everyone happy -- 'til at least three in the morning, anyway. Many of these kids were emotionally impaired, though most were physically challenged in one way or another, but anyone was welcome and local radio stations helped get the word out. One of them, a station from Rutland, Vermont, even had a van set up to a live broadcast from the park, and Parks had to wonder who'd listen to a broadcast of astronomers at work. Like watching grass grow, he thought.

As darkness came he starting aligning the mount on the first stars out, then syncing it to his computer -- and just then a school bus pulled into the lot, and the first group of kids made their way to the telescopes. Within an hour, more than five hundred people were were walking around, many kids with their parents and grandparents with them, and he heard Sara talking about M57, the Ring Nebula, and about it's age and distance from Earth. One of the kid's parents, a middle aged woman of indeterminate intelligence, began asking Sara about the age of the universe, and when Sara started to answer the woman interrupted.

"The universe is six thousand years old," she said, and Sara followed with her standard rebuttal, but the woman wouldn't listen, couldn't listen, Parks thought, without challenging her entire belief system. He shook his head and turned away, entered some coordinates on the screen and began slewing the scope to a new target.

"Besides," the woman said, "my girl can't see shit anyway. This crap wouldn't do her no good, no how."

"Oh," Parks said, "what's the problem?"

The woman turned and looked at Parks, at his inquisitive face and kind eyes, and she walked over to him, dragging her seven year old girl roughly by the hand.

"She can see about two inches in front of her face. That's all. That's what God did to punish her for..."

"Well, you know what? I can show her something right here that I bet you'll both like."

"I don't know, Mr, I don't know..."

Parks knelt down and looked at the girl; her eyes were a bloody battleground but she reacted when he turned on his penlight. He held his hand in front of her face and aimed the light on his fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up, sweetie?"

"Two," the little girl said.

"That's right. Say, what's your name?"

"June," she said.

"Well June, how about we take a look at something really cool. Come with me."

He pulled up his observing chair and and helped her sit on it, then he helped her get to the eyepiece and explained how to look through it. He could see light from the telescope reaching out through the eyepiece and touching her eye, then her heard her take in a deep breath...

"Oh!" she said, "what is that?"

"Well, June, that's a planet, called Saturn. Saturn is famous for it's rings. Can you see the rings in there?"

"Oh, yes, they're beautiful! Mommy, you've got to see this! Come look!"

Parks let 'Mommy' see Saturn, and she too was very impressed, then June wanted back on the chair and was at the eyepiece once again...

"I guess she was born this way?"

"Yessir," the woman said.

"Kind of interesting, don't you think then, that she can only see things a few inches away, yet she's looking at something almost nine hundred million miles away right now?"

"I guess. Why?"

"Her vision isn't really a handicap, you know, anymore than the people who tell her she can't do things. With a little encouragement, there's no telling what she can do. Next time you look up at the stars, try to remember that, would you?"

"Okay."

"June? I'll be back here next year, and I hope I get to see you then. Okay?"

"Okay. What's your name?"