Notes: This time, I'm embracing the reboot. Only because I had this idea and I don't know how it's gonna go until I start writing, so here goes. I don't own the Eureka characters, but I do own the additions. Timeline is current through 406, Momstrosity. Reviews welcome! And after seeing 407, as cool as it was, I'm not including Zoe/Zane. That's just weird. This is going to be more along the lines of an episode in length than an ongoing saga
"Two inbound tracks," an Air Force sergeant said to his senior, a Lieutenant. The two were in the NORAD control room at Pederson AFB in Colorado, the new home of Space Defense. "They're not meteors, sir."
"Where are they tracking to?"
"Arizona. And they're decelerating."
The Lieutenant sighed. "Standing orders. Contact General Mansfield in Washington."
"The Army?"
"I don't like it either. Make the call."
Three days later, the sun came up in Oregon just like every other day. Everyone went to work and someone tried to kill themselves… accidentally. This time, the victim was Sheriff Carter, who Dr. Blake was attending to in the infirmary – on his way to the surface, the intrepid Sheriff tripped on the steps and snapped the two bones in his lower arm. And Fearless Leader Fargo was in a tizzy.
"Dr. Blake, I need to see you in private," Fargo said as he interrupted the attending physician.
"Fargo," Carter said, "come on!"
"Let me finish setting this. What's so important?"
"Mansfield called. I have a conference call with him in ten minutes."
"You're handling this pretty well now…"
"Not this time," Fargo said. He tapped his watch and made a walking sign with his index and middle fingers. "That's the topic."
Carter turned serious. "Go," he said.
Alison got a nurse to finish the final layer of casting Carter's arm. She cleaned up and headed to Fargo's office. They had two minutes to discuss things.
"Mansfield likes to see you, Fargo. What am I here for?"
"He can't today. Video conferencing is down and it'll take IT half a day to fix what happened to it."
"What's that?"
"A virus, very nasty thing."
Fargo's phone rang. He put the call straight to speaker. Instead of sitting in one of the desk chairs, Alison took a knee beside Fargo and had his keyboard in front of her to prompt his conversation if necessary.
"Dr. Fargo, is there a reason I'm not seeing you?"
"Video is down, sir," Fargo said. "We're working on it."
"I'll make this as brief as I can. Eureka is about to have a pair of guests, and they aren't from this time. What landing facilities do you have available?"
"We have the helipad and the parking lot. How big are you talking, sir?"
"65 meters long, with a wingspan of 85 meters."
"NO!" Alison typed. "Nowhere to land."
"General, we don't have an airstrip that size. You're talking about something that's bigger than the Space Shuttle."
"They have VTOL capability. Do you have a private, flat piece of land?"
"Not that they won't sink into," Alison wrote.
"How much do they weigh?"
"They adjust their weight. How about that test range where you had your little rocket race? That's private."
"KSC, Vandenburg, A51," Alison typed. "Why here?"
"General, there are facilities that can handle this better than us."
"Dr. Fargo, we've been through this before. Eureka is best equipped to handle this. It's going to take a week for us to truck in 80,000 kilograms of metallic hydrogen for their fuel so they can leave. During that week, like before, you're going to have everyone at your disposal and then some trying to data mine. Are we clear?"
Fargo stopped talking for a couple seconds when he realized the General's implication. Alison looked at him because she didn't have a countermove either. "Forget it," Alison typed. "Say yes and we'll run with it." Alison sent texts to Jo, Carter, and Henry to come to Fargo's office for a meeting of the 1947 Five.
"When will they be arriving, sir?" Fargo asked.
"0300. You'll have two people to deal with and I expect them dealt with as guests and not as prisoners. Are we clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sending you a narrative file with the information we have on the guests. All indications are that they are telling the truth."
"Where are they coming from?"
"Arizona. That was their initial landing site. Their ships can apparently manufacture hydrogen fuel from air moisture, and over the past three days, they have made enough to make a short suborbital hop to Eureka. Where are they really coming from? 3635."
Alison gave Fargo the cutthroat sign, telling him to end the debate with the General and move on. "If you'll excuse me, sir, I need to go make preparations." Fargo disconnected the call.
"That's a relief," Alison said, "at least he wasn't talking about us."
Alison and Fargo brainstormed for 15 minutes until the rest of the cabal arrived, minus Dr. Old Spice. Fargo laid out what the General sent in the file.
"Two people, a male and a female," he read from the email. "They have ships bigger than our space shuttle with the aerodynamics of a next-generation aircraft. They claim to be here through a space-time disturbance, nothing we're not familiar with, and all they need is fuel to leave us alone and go away. The problem is that their ship's autorefueling system won't work in the desert and if they fire it up to maximum efficiency, it could cause weather problems."
"Maybe they can quietly tell us how to fix our problem," Henry said. "They've already blown their own timeline."
"Mansfield's goons already called me," Jo said. "They shut me down. Apparently, our guests are to have full access to GD for the time being. Either they've put on a good act or a gigantic scare to Mansfield himself. I'm with Henry, let's fix this thing and go home."
"Mansfield said we've done this before," Alison said. "When? Fargo, you have to find out."
"I'm looking and I haven't found it. It might be white listed."
Larry barged into the office with a note in hand. He stopped as soon as he saw he interrupted a meeting, but continued after the shock wore off. "The military is asking for us to send the helicopter to Portland for a pickup at midnight tonight."
"Send it," Fargo said. "Who's coming?"
"Dr. Fontana by special request of the military. What's going on?"
"Nothing you need to know about yet," Fargo said. "Go away."
"That's more of the Dr. Fargo we're used to," Larry said as he left.
"Could this get any worse?" Carter asked.
"Don't say that!" everyone in the room replied.
"Jo, the landing site is the test range," Alison said. "Prep it for two very large spacecraft, lights and all."
"You're going to have to involve Zane in this," Jo confessed. "If they've made a threat that Mansfield is responding to, he'll be able to tell."
"I'll tell him," Fargo said. "Sheriff, the General said we're getting truckloads of fuel for them. Can you secure the mountain road and keep it quiet?"
"Like when we brought the ice core in? Sure."
At 2:30 am, a small convoy of cars left town to the remote hilltop landing site. In addition to the 1947 Five, Tess and Zane were included. As the General predicted, two very large and sleek craft silently glided to the site. Both reflected the floodlights off their jet black surfaces. The only areas not as shiny as Vader's helmet were the chrome pinstriping and the twin cockpits on top. Ladders extended from the fighters to the ground.
Two figures walked to the gathered Eureka braintrust. Both had on black flight suits with shoulderboard ranks and ribbon panels. One was about 5'7" tall and had on a flight helmet that matched the fighter. The other was about 5'2" and had a bluish-silver helmet.
"Go ahead," the taller pilot said as he took off his helmet. "I know you want to look. So let's get that part over with."
"I'm Dr. Douglas Fargo, head of Global Dynamics."
"Commander Scott McClellan. My wingman, when she takes off her helmet, is Star Captain Haley Dalembert. Your boss was pretty straight forward, you get to ask questions for a week and hopefully, after that we're out of your hair. Who's the eager one scanning the fighters?"
"Zane Donovan, particle physicist," Fargo said.
"Yeah, the boss mentioned most everyone here has a science background. I guess it's good that I do too. In another life, I'm an astrophysicist." McClellan straightened his sandy hair and straightened his glasses. "The inner missile pylons have a one megaton yield. The outer pair on each wing are 25 megatons each. The forward bomb bay on each ship has 10 50 megaton weapons while the rear one has a single 250 megaton bomb."
"This one's different," Zane yelled. "Antihydrogen. A shit load of it."
"2,740 kilograms, in round numbers," McClellan said. "Biggest firework in our arsenal."
"That's 118 gigatons of nuclear warhead equivalency," Zane said as he came back to the conversation. "What do you use that for?"
"Making a statement."
"Why does only one ship have one? Yours at that."
"We were coming home from a mission. We turned a 6 kilometer diameter comet to steam with one before it made a most unfortunate impact on a planet."
"Not this one, I hope," Henry said. "I'm…"
"Dr. Henry Deacon," McClellan said. "And I just screwed up, didn't I?"
"You could say that," Henry answered. "Do you always carry weapons?"
"We've been at war for 36 years with one enemy or another," the second pilot said when she took off her flight helmet. Dalembert shook out her blond bangs and ponytail, and much to Zane's surprise, she was pretty easy to look at. "Armament loads can vary, but there's always something to fire."
"It's regulations too," McClellan said. "I'm a ship commander, so in addition to having a wingman at all times, I have to be able to take care of myself."
Tess stepped up from the shadows. "You said you destroyed a comet."
"It took an odd turn around an unusually massive moon. We got the call at 42 hours from impact and made the… what, 102,000," McClellan asked his wingman.
"102,564 actually."
"A rather long trip really. We did the deed, had a customary meeting with the politicians, they got to tell us how good we were, gave us the key to the planet, we slept for a night and headed for home, which happens to be here for us."
"Technically not for me," Haley said. "Human but not from around here. But I do live here."
"You just blew it up and left?" Tess said. "What about researching something like that?"
"I already did," McClellan said. "I saw one crash into a planet before. Comets aren't my thing, but they're nice to look at. My thesis was on supernovas."
"This is Dr. Fontana," Fargo said. "She works with long-range signal detection organizations."
"Looking for life out there, huh?"
"Something like that."
"Well, I guess I'll give you a piece of goodwill. You're looking in the wrong places. Epoch 2000, look at right ascension 14 hours, 15 minutes, 40 seconds by declination plus 19 degrees, 10 minutes, 56 seconds. You'll have more success there than anywhere else. I wouldn't send them any messages though."
"Why not?"
"They've already been here. 500 or so years ago, give or take. They're watching rather closely."
"What star is that?" Tess asked.
"Arcturus. See why I suggested not talking to them?"
"Yeah, that's practically next door."
"Even with their current state of space travel. They're friendly enough, even now, but they might get a little jumpy if you start talking all of a sudden."
"Any place we shouldn't look?"
"You mean are you going to inadvertantly send a signal somewhere and bring in a bunch of badasses to overrun the planet? Yeah, it's safe to say that you probably shouldn't be transmitting anything at this point. Four absolutely no-go zones would be Mizar, Saiph, Vega, and Sirius. You get them stirred up, they'll level the old homestead."
