Dilation Chapter 3: The CDC
Each barracks housed a couple hundred soldiers. They were only temporary, but far roomier than any housing Raynor had received in the militia. Eventually, they’d all be moved into apartment-like rooms in three large dormitories, but during the interim, the barracks were available; Starling Base wasn’t currently in use as a defense station.
The non-military time-skippers were moving into the towers first, knowing more or less what sort of work they’d be doing. The soldiers had less clarity, but they’d have a better idea tonight. Their regimens were coming in, which would outline specific courses over the coming months. It would clarify a bit of confusion as they began moving into long-term domiciles.
Despite her curiosity, Raynor fought the impulse to bother Fowler. The man sleeping a dozen beds away was portrayed quite unfavorably during her time, which seemed to be the case for many.
Many, but not all. Some cultures had no public knowledge of the invasion. A large chunk of them didn’t know aliens existed at all, and even in societies that outlined Fowler as the responsible party, there were those who lauded him. Their mismatched group came to this century to kill monsters from space. Who better to befriend than the Cain of aliens? The reverence seemed to make Fowler uncomfortable, which Raynor thought was peculiar.
A captain she’d never met called them from the front of the barracks. “Attention, cadets. Your initial training schedules are ready. Since most of you aren’t familiar with jewels and data terminals, we’re supplying you with physical, non-interactive copies.” Two corporals started moving along the rows with small tablets — thin, rigid tiles in their recipient’s native language. “You’ll all surely have questions about the types of training you’re being assigned, but these are just the first months. Many of your job classes are outdated, so you’re being introduced to specialities related to your experience. The most common are combat pilots, which we don’t have — ”
Raynor’s stomach twisted in her gut. She’d been flying since before she was old enough to have a license. It was the entire reason she was here at all. She figured human pilots would be less common, but had assumed there would still be some sort of remote piloting.
She took a deep breath. Intermittent chatter from the corporals fell beneath the captain’s crisp voice as she outlined job classes that relied on skills honed through piloting.
“ — and drone modulators are far more effective when they have advanced piloting skills.”
Drone modulators…
When war first took to the stars — not long before Raynor’s own time — one of the first limitations had been signal delays. Some operations took place hours away as light traveled, so those squadrons either had to be trained for complete autonomy, or drones. Most were simple, stupid machines able to carry out basic chores without oversight; mechanical soldier ants designed to complete one or two specific tasks.
Advanced drone ships with full combat capabilities had been in production during the revolution. The expensive ships were controlled from afar by remote operators similar to pilots, which is what Raynor had expected the future to hold. She’d flown beside some, but they were even more plagued by the complications of signal delay than pilots. Now, it seemed autonomous ships had become smart enough to erase pilots from existence entirely.
Still, she was here. There was no going back. Raynor hadn’t been born a pilot, she became one through years of practice.
She would adapt — it’s what humans did.
The night sky was clear as they touched down at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in Chamblee, just north of Atlanta. With the sun completely set, the air was still and cold. Back when Walker was traveling frequently, she had gone to Atlanta a few times, but always flew directly into the city. Chamblee reminded her a lot of Durham. She didn’t get a chance to truly appreciate the town as it sped by her window on the way to the Centers for Disease Control. Rural roads quickly turned to town roads, then to city streets, and before long, they were at the edge of the CDC campus.
A small, 1950s-style firehouse sat at the front of the property, but the grounds featured several buildings exceeding a dozen floors. Handfuls of business-casual men and women strolled along the sidewalks and a few cars scattered the parking lots. Pierson pulled up to a smaller, four-floor office building, which they promptly took an elevator to the third floor of.
The hallway was dimly lit; each office they walked by was closed and dark. Towards the end of the corridor, a single door sat open, the light from within streaking across the ground. The nameplate on the open door read: JEREMY DOBBS, Ph.D. Rounding the edge of the door, Walker saw a young man sitting at a clean, minimalist desk. To one side was a tall, four-drawer file cabinet. On the other stood a large bookshelf packed full of reference books, many of which overlapped with Walker’s field — polymorphism, apoptosis, cellular metabolism.
The rest of the office was fairly open. A couple of canvas hangings of landscapes adorned the walls, along with a poster of an MMA fighter Walker had never heard of. At the edge of the room, a small brown couch sat next to a white mini-fridge, and a pull-up bar hung on the inside of the doorway. It looked a bit like a frat boy’s room, albeit a clean one who was studying some seriously advanced biochemistry.
As Walker took in the scene, Pierson got Dobbs’ attention. It seemed the young man was expecting them. He dynamically jumped up from his desk to shake their hands, repeating each of their names as he did so. He towered over Walker, eye-to-eye with Pierson plus an extra twenty pounds of muscle. He could easily have been a football player, and for all Walker knew, he recently was. He looked grad school age.
“Welcome to the CDC!” Dobbs boomed with a handsome smile. “I’d give you a tour, but I assume the rest will be here soon. Please, help yourselves,” he gestured to the mini-fridge. “I’ve got water, vitamin water…there’s also beer, but given the circumstances, we probably shouldn’t.”
“What exactly are the circumstances?” Walker sank into the couch. Dobbs’ energy was refreshing, and she might actually be able to get some answers from him. The DIA agents remained by the door, far from relaxed as Dobbs sat back down in his desk chair.
“You mean you don’t know?” he asked.
“I’ve put some pieces together.”
“Riiight. None of us ‘knows,’ but with the information at hand…we pretty much do.”
“I haven’t been given any information.”
The exuberant smile faded from the man’s face. He glanced at Fowler and Pierson. “You didn’t tell her?”
“Lauer was unable to speak with her directly,” Fowler said coolly. “We’re not authorized to divulge any information.”
“Can I tell her?”
“As I said — ”
Dobbs raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “Okay…well, if I go to Gitmo, I’m taking the Wi-Fi password with me.” His eyes lit up as he turned back to Walker. “We’re gonna go find aliens!”
For the first time all night, she laughed. He said it like they all won a trip to Six Flags. “How much of that has been confirmed?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “But at the very least it’s an alien ship. The CDC has a small group setting up a medical quarantine right now, but it’s all legit. An engineer from NASA tracked it back up to space and out of Earth’s gravitational pull — it screwed up a bunch of private satellites.”
“Where is it?”
“It crashed up north in Chattahoochee National Forest; a great hiking spot, also really fun to say.”
“And it’s definitely an alien ship?” Walker asked, trying to veil her suspicion. “Not a foreign satellite or something?”
“Or something.”
“Do you know who else is going?”
Dobbs started listing people off on his fingers, “The secretary of defense; another one of these guys,” he gestured to the DIA agents. “A code-cracker from DARPA, and the guy from NASA: Plum — a man I can only hope is a professor somewhere.”
“That’s decently rounded,” Walker said. She wanted to ask Dobbs why he was included, but wasn’t sure if it would sound rude. “What sort of research do you do?”
“Well, I started in pharma making new antibiotics, and that caught the CDC’s attention, so for the last five years, I’ve been working on reducing antimicrobial resistances here.”
“Really? You look so young.”
“I am. I was twenty-two when I got my doctorate.”
“Wow.” It was the only response she could think of. “So, your work doesn’t have any theoretical overlap with extraterrestrial biochemistry?”
The room vibrated from the deep echoes of his laugh. “Aha! No. I think you proved well enough that our community doesn’t handle that well.” Walker must have made a face of some kind. Dobbs’ smile faded. “Sorry, Dr. Walker. I didn’t mean anything by that. I loved your paper.”
“You read it?”
“Of course, how could I not? It was this whole thing.”
“It wasn’t exactly an essay on xenobiology, was it?”
“No. And they only added me because I was young and the CDC had just picked me up. Talk about lucky, right? I mean, who knew that would be the greatest thing to happen to my career?” He leaned forward on his desk. “Granted, this whole operation seems ass-backwards, doesn’t it?” He turned to the DIA agents by the door. “No offense, fellas.”
“You’re fine,” Fowler said motionlessly.
“I’m honestly surprised we could put together a quarantine team — quaran-team…trademarked. None of them have any clue what to do or expect. They’re mainly just going to sterilize everything and collect samples. I think someone in D.C. grabbed the first piece of paper resembling procedure and started dialing anyone near Georgia.”
“You got that feeling too?” she said.
“Still, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!” Dobbs’ excitement was infectious. Regardless of how the government decided to do things, Walker would be seeing something tonight that no human had ever laid eyes on before.
Fowler cut in abruptly. “Is there a larger room we can use? Secretary Lauer is on his way up.”
Faint, green scribbles from some sort of chemistry formula were partially erased on the whiteboard of the small meeting room. An oval table sat in the center, surrounded by chairs of the same design. It would do. Fowler didn’t imagine they’d be here long.
After a couple of minutes, Sconi arrived with Secretary Lauer and the other two specialists. Lauer had a narrow, stern face with piercing eyes, his hair in the standard military high-and-tight. His suit was expensive, accessorized with a red power tie that mostly covered a small gut.
Fowler had never met the other two contracted experts. The woman, Kelly Ditka, worked at DARPA: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She was in her late twenties, with short brunette hair and light freckles that gave her face a much friendlier appearance than her demeanor, which was entirely Washington D.C. She developed some sort of intelligent program to identify Russian communications — a linguist turned codebreaker.
The other stranger was Dr. Theodore Plum, an astronautical engineer from the UK. Judging by the Liverpool Football Club jacket worn over his NASA polo…probably from Liverpool. He’d worked at Lockheed, applying to NASA after passing his citizenship test.
Lauer gave a half-hearted greeting before speaking with Walker off to the side. Probably the typical political garb…thanks for coming, sorry about missing you on the phone, I’m about to explain everything, and so on.
They were greeted with small manila folders this time. The corner bore the Department of Defense seal and the word CLASSIFIED was stamped in red block letters across the front. The folder didn’t contain much — official timelines of the night’s events and maps piecing together the UFO’s flight path. There were some impressive satellite images of the craft just before it was shot down. It looked sort of like a pointed oval, with light coming out of a band along the top and bottom. It was a bit hard to tell from so far up.
The first half of the briefing was old news for Fowler — a polished regurgitation of the information they’d received at Rivanna. It meant he no longer had to walk on eggshells around the civilians though, which had required a lot more attention than he wanted to give to it.
“We’ll head up in both cars,” Lauer continued. “Agent Fowler, take Doctors Walker, Dobbs, and Plum in one. Pierson, you’ll be driving myself, Ms. Ditka, and Agent Sconi in the other. Our military quarantine was in place around 1854. Nothing left the area prior to that point; we suspect any intelligent life is deceased. Once through the military quarantine, we’ll arrive at the CDC’s. They have protective and examination equipment there.
“It must be reiterated that the dispersal of any information pertaining to this mission will be tried as treason. All research and notes will be collected on government-issued devices. Your phones and computers won’t be allowed through quarantine, and you won’t be able to publish anything you learn — especially not in wartime.”
“You mean that thing with Russia?” Dobbs joked. The secretary either didn’t notice the tone or chose to ignore it. He nodded and continued without losing step.
“Should the need arise to release the information, you’ll be appropriately accredited, but assume it will remain classified until long after we’re dead.” He gave a slight chortle. “This is usually where I explain that having official ties to classified government research is more beneficial than publishing. People tend to jump to more extreme assumptions than the reality, but I don’t think that will be the case this time around. These are the terms for your councils. If anyone prefers to not be involved, this is the time to say it. We’ll arrange your trip home and monitor you going forward.”
Monitoring was probably unnecessary. Anyone they told would think they were nuts. Fowler half-expected to see at least one of the civilians duck out, but none of them did. The secretary proceeded to list off areas of concern for the Pentagon — toxic chemicals in the alloys of the ship and the bodies onboard. A mobile lab was being set up beside the medical quarantine for more extensive tests.
Lauer turned to the three DIA agents. They habitually stood slightly more upright. “Your primary task is to be three extra sets of eyes. In the unlikely event we find living creatures — sentient or otherwise — you are not authorized to fire unless given a direct order from me.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison. The instruction didn’t shock Fowler in the least. As far as the DoD was concerned, every person on this team was expendable. If there was a live alien on the ship, it was more valuable than all eight of them combined. He and Sconi exchanged a glance substituting a full conversation — their priority was safety, even at the cost of their careers.
Just before 2100 hours, they locked their phones in Dobbs’ office, an unprecedented tension hanging over them as they left down the dim hallway to the elevator.
