Kate Harper stood in the middle of Andrews Air Force Base's longest runway, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her jacket against the late November chill off the Maryland coast. The crash had occurred around 2300 hours the night before, the ground crew had spent all night cleaning up the debris and moving the crashed vehicle inside a hanger before the over flight of a Chinese spy satellite the next morning at 0700 hours. The best way to hide something was not to put tarp over it after all; it was to get it inside a building. All that remained as evidence of the event were scorch marks and deep gouges in the concrete runway that would have to be repaired before the runway could be used again for normal operations.
"That's what I call a hard landing."
Kate turned around to see Leo McGarry, the former White House Chief of Staff, standing behind her with a grim look on his face belied by a twinkle in his eyes. He was still recovering from the heart attack that had driven him from his day-to-day duties within the Bartlet Administration, but he was still too close an advisor to the President not to be involved in something this big. His normally well-tailored suit hung off his frame giving him a slightly skeletal look that made Harper wince.
"You look like you've seen a ghost, Commander."
"You look like hell warmed over, Leo."
"Always big on flattery, aren't you, Commander Harper?" In truth they hadn't gotten along well when they met, sniping at each other over the Middle East peace talks that had finally brought the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Leo had believed she was out to glorify herself and push an agenda. As it had turned out, she was pushing the President's agenda. Still, she respected him, such things were in the past now, and Kate had grown to respect life long politician.
"Well, I am the first American official in a hundred and forty years to threaten to invade Canada. And I thought that was being subtle and generous," she teased and gave him a slight smile. "I didn't know you were in on this."
"The President asked me to help out. He thought you could use another set of eyes in the interrogation."
"I'd prefer to think of it as an interview rather than an interrogation." It was a difference without a distinction in most cases, but Kate Harper was a former CIA agent and she though of an interrogation as being a lot less pleasant than she hoped this would be. She teased more as they began to walk towards the hanger, "Are we playing good-cop bad-cop? Which one of us is which?"
"You are prettier than I am, Commander. I think that makes you the good-cop."
"Even with the female detainees?"
"There are female little green men? What did the Air Force do, turn them upside down and check?"
"If there were no little green women, where do you think all the little green men would come from?" She liked Leo, but he was occasionally old-fashioned and it was worth teasing him over. "They actually aren't green. In fact… they look human. I think we won't know for certain until we run some medical tests. The President has explicitly told us that he wants their consent before we go poking at them."
"Their consent? Don't tell me they really do speak English in outer space."
She chuckled, and shook her head. "They haven't spoken a word. Two men, two women. One of the women took a nasty bump to the head in the crash."
"This is going to be an interesting conversation."
**~**~**
They were moved inside a largely empty hanger with several dozen uniformed guards standing in a circle around them. At the far end of the hanger, a swarm of uniformed technicians, that reminded Apollo of green camouflage clad ants, were examining the Raptor. Their side arms had been confiscated just after the crash but they were left relatively unmolested. While Lee watched the natives, Racetrack had taken to pacing behind him and the Chief was on the ground holding a bandage to Cally's head. They'd all followed his lead and did not speak to the guards or any of the military officers who tried to question them.
The hanger doors opened just a bit, letting in the morning sun as well as two figures, an older man and a blond woman in civilian clothing. They walked towards the group of Colonials exchanging a few words that at this distance were impossible to make out. They showed identification to the guards, who let them into the cordoned-off area.
"Now these look like people in charge," Racetrack muttered just low enough for Apollo to hear.
He just nodded, and the blond began to speak. "My name is Commander Kate Harper. I'm the Deputy National Security Advisor for the United States. This is Leo McGarry, Senior Advisor to the President. I apologize that your treatment has not been as welcoming as we'd have liked, but you must understand that we haven't had contact before with people from another world, and have many questions."
I'll bet you do, Commander, Apollo thought to himself. His only response was to look at her eyes.
"Welcome to Earth," the older man put in almost as an afterthought.
That drew all the Colonials attention and both Tyrol and Racetrack muttered at the same time, "Oh my gods…"
Harper and McGarry exchanged a glance, and Apollo decided that speaking was better than not speaking at this point. "My name is Captain Lee Adama of the Colonial Fleet. This is Lieutenant Margaret Edmondson whose ship your people are taking apart, Chief Galen Tyrol, and Specialist Cally Henderson. We have been looking for the last remnants of humanity for a very long time."
The man whistled and the woman exhaled. "This just got much more complicated."
**~**~**
"So they really are aliens?" Jed Bartlet asked with a degree of wonder and incredulity, leaning against the front of the Resolute Desk with his arms folded. The room was filled with only a few of his closest advisors. CJ and Kate, both sitting on one side of the room with intense looks on their faces and poses that mirrored each other—not for first time did Jed marvel at how amazing these women were—while on the other side of the room were Toby Ziegler, his Communications Director and his oldest friend, Leo McGarry whom he had brought in after the crash.
"Not exactly aliens, sir," Kate explained from one of the couches in the center of the Oval Office. "They claim to be humans from outer space. They say that they have a fleet with approximately 50,000 survivors from a mass genocide that destroyed their civilization, the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. They seem to believe… that we are the thirteenth."
"This sounds like the plot to a cheesy science fiction show," CJ put in from the side.
"I'm not sure I'd call anything related to genocide cheesy," Toby corrected. He was after all the observant Jew in the room.
"Granted." CJ nodded.
"At any rate," Kate interrupted to get them back on track, "they say they were on a survey mission and crashed. They requested access to their ship so they could contact their … mother ship or whatever. There is a complicating factor in that the Air Force is practically disassembling it as we speak. I tried to get them to stop, but Secretary Hutchinson not so kindly reminded me that I wasn't in the chain of command."
The President narrowed his eyes. "CJ, please go give the Secretary of Defense a call and remind him that I am the chain of command."
"Yes, sir."
"This is definitely one of those cases where 'you break it, you buy it' applies."
"Can we decide on a better word to call these people?" CJ began. "Space people sounds silly and aliens is hostile and vaguely… ridiculous."
"We could perhaps call them by what they call themselves, rather than carrying on the great western tradition of giving new names to people and places that already have them." Toby waved his hand vaguely through the air as if to indicate North America.
"Colonial? And that doesn't call up other great western traditions to you? Not to mention that as soon as this gets out people are going to think we are being invaded. We are going to have to think about the public reaction to this sooner rather than later." Once a press secretary always a press secretary.
"Why do we have to go public at all? There are legitimate national security reasons to keep this under wraps," Kate said.
"Sometimes you are too spooky for your own good, did you know that Kate?" CJ tilted her head to the side to look at Harper with a mixture of incredulity and admiration.
It wasn't the first time Harper's covert past had come up. She practically lived the words Top Secret. The President decided to cut off the potential argument between the two of them. "Commander, do you seriously believe that as soon as several dozen ships…"
"As many as a hundred from what I gathered, Sir."
"Do you seriously believe that as soon as a large number of space ships enter orbit that there won't be SETI scientists all over the globe breaking out champagne and readying press releases? They've already stated that their first move upon extraterrestrial contact would be to make a public announcement because for some bizarre idea they think that it would belong to the entire globe and not just one nation."
"It also is a safeguard in case someone in government decides to try and make them disappear," Kate added with a nod.
"They've actually thought about that?" Toby asked.
"I can't imagine why they don't trust the Central Intelligence Agency," Jed mumbled.
Leo spoke up for the first time. "I agree with Commander Harper. We should be careful how much of our culture we expose these people to and how much contact we allow them with Earth. Carefully limit it."
Bartlet shook his head. "I'm not going down on the same page with Tokugawa Yoshinobu."
"You won't if that's as hard to spell as it sounds like it is," CJ commented.
"The 15th Tokugawa Shogun…" Bartlet was greeted with blank stares. "Commander Harper, please tell me they still teach naval history at Annapolis."
"Last I checked, sir, but it's threatening to be replaced by underwater basket weaving."
The President nodded, choosing to ignore the errant bit of sarcasm. "Would you care to explain to those people who Tokugawa Yoshinobu was?"
Kate tilted her head to the side, and glanced at the senior staff, as if she was mentally accessing some file in the hard drive of her brain. "In 1853 four ships, the Mississippi, Plymouth, Saratoga, and Susquehanna under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Yokosuka, Japan. Yoshinobu was the ruling shogun in Japan at the time. His government's policies excluded all foreigners form the islands except a few Dutch and Portuguese trading vessels with extremely restricted access. Two hundred years of isolation and relative peace were effectively ended by the U.S. Navy's military superiority. The Japanese called them the Black Ships because of their color and the smoke that billowed from their steam engines."
"Four years later the shogun was out of a job in the Meiji Restoration that revolutionized Japanese culture," the President added.
"And indirectly led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II," Kate added to the President's explanation.
"We can't stick our heads in the sand, Leo, or else that fleet will be our own Black Ships. They could sit in orbit and dominate this planet and we would have little to say in the matter. We don't have the luxury of taking this slowly." Jed looked around the room. "Not to mention that we have a moral imperative not to turn away people in need."
… to be continued …