OTTAWA
National Defence Headquarters (AKA Disneyland on the Rideau)
Clutching her heavy sample case, Anne Cloutier thought the soldiers assigned to escort her to the conference room were quite rude. They had roughly searched and herded her fellow scientists like they were children going through somewhere they shouldn't see, except the concern wasn't for those being herded. That she or any of the others had been let into this part of the building was not usual procedure.
But there was no choice. What we know could change everything... but what use is there in treating us like we don't know already? It was making her hands itch. She scratched idly before catching herself.
The group was eventually corralled into a particular corridor, guarded by two armed soldiers with rifles, and into a room. Inside was a large conference table, projector and screen. High ranking officers of the Army sat along one side of the former, leaving the seats on the other for the scientists to fill.
Anne did not pay attention to the introductions. She was too nervous, though she nodded to the commanders of the Princess Patricia's Third Battalion and the Canadian Ranger group that the missing soldiers belonged to. She had seen them before, at the site. They at least looked curious at what she and the other scientists had to say. They haven't been told yet either.
CSIS Director Vigneault walked in as the introductions ended. CSIS had been told first, as they had been the ones to investigate. Ann was still amazed at how calmly Canada's top security agent had taken news of the result of her part of said investigation. The itching on Anne's palms eased. Surely he is on our side? He took his seat with the general wearing the most gold and medals.
Another officer nodded to Anne as she went to sit at her left in the middle of the table, pulling out a laptop and plugging it into the projector system. Anne recognised her as Colonel Harris. She had been in the CSIS briefing as the Army liaison. So we begin.
"Sign these," Harris said, shoving a stack of folders with papers in them to each participant.
"What are they?" Anne asked.
"Non-disclosure agreements," Harris replied, "Stronger ones."
A murmur went up from the scientists. Dr Shih went further.
"Colonel, what we know is of great significance to the public interest," she said, "You can't just cover up…"
"You do not determine what is in the public interest," Harris interrupted, "Especially not when there are defence implications. Personnel of the Canadian Army are missing, we do not know if it was by hostile action or not, and what you have found is relevant. Sign."
Anne sighed, hoping it was quiet enough to escape notice. She knew there was no dropping this requirement. The Director and the generals weren't even speaking to assist Harris in shutting Shih up.
Reluctantly, Anne pulled the nearest folder towards her to sign. That seemed to provoke Shih further.
"And if I don't sign?"
"All evidence will be destroyed and the military will issue a total denial. We will counter your story with the original hypothesis of a deep sinkhole, bury six empty coffins and ignore any further interaction on the matter."
Anne had known that was coming. In other words, the more we speak about it without military confirmation, the lower our credibility. It was a bluff of course, the soldiers would want to know what happened to their comrades, but it was the sort of play governments always seemed to make. She completed her signings, and saw that the others had started on theirs. Except for Shih. "Sign. This is too big for them to hide forever."
Shih grimaced with frustration, but grabbed her own NDA roughly to comply. Harris waited until the task was completed, before turning to the generals.
"What is this about Harris?" one said before she could speak, "You seem to have scared these poor civvies stiff. The agenda says they're what? Archaeologists? Geneticists? I thought we were here to discuss the missing troops."
"I hope that doesn't mean we'll find our people as dead as those you usually deal with," frowned the leader of the Third Battalion with a glance at Anne. Clearly he had remembered her from the site too. "Though it's been almost three months."
"That remains to be seen," said Harris, "But I can assure you, this is relevant to the question of where the six soldiers have gone."
Anne gulped. I hope so too, she thought to herself, But maybe being alive is worse for them.
"Let's start," the Director said.
Harris put her computer screen up on the projector and began a slideshow. A map of the area appeared, with track lines of the route of the vehicle that had gone missing. "General, Director, as we briefed you on previously, we were easily able to identify the exact site of the disappearance of Lieutenant Duquesne, Sergeant O'Neill, Corporals Zheng, and Privates Arran, Sayer and Singh."
"You found some rocks there, thought it might be sinkhole territory," the General recalled impatiently, "Which is unusual itself. Then CSIS swooped in and continued the investigation."
"It's a good thing we did," the Director said, "You'll understand."
The General did not appear convinced. You will be, Anne thought to herself.
"We did not find sinkholes, sir," Harris continued, "We found one of the most important and largest archaeological sites ever discovered in the north."
The picture that the projector was showing changed to an early picture of the site, one of the drone images from above.
It was Anne's turn to start. "As you can see General, the large stones were under the snow and arranged in a massive spiral pattern almost fifty metres wide. Carved into them were runes of unknown origin, and it appears as if the stone at the very centre recently moved or subsided in the ground somewhat…"
"Colonel…" the General began, addressing Harris instead of Anne, "Can you please tell me what this has to do with anything? Your new friends might be archaeologists but I'm not. I'm not seeing the connection between an interesting set of stones and where our missing soldiers are."
Harris smiled. "Certainly sir," she said, changing the slide, "According to every available measure and witness testimony, the lead BV of the platoon disappeared exactly in the centre of the spiral."
The General frowned, finally turning his eye back to Anne. "An entrance to something underground?"
That's right, I'm the woman to ask, not your lackey, Anne's mind snarked. "That's what your soldiers thought," she answered, "So they drove spikes into the centre stone and pulled it up with winches. They found no sinkhole, no underground cave. But they did find this."
Harris dutifully changed the slide being projected. The stone in question, a megalith fifteen feet long, was now standing end to end. In the hole it had been sitting in were two dozen skeletons. Small skeletons.
"Good God," the General exclaimed, the other officers grimacing and shifting in their seats, "Are those children?"
Anne exchanged a look with Shih. The geneticist wanted to spring the truth right then. Not just yet.
"Your soldiers didn't know for sure, but there were lots of First Nations artefacts with them. Lots of things of possible religious significance and many pieces of weapons, particularly where they would've been inside the bodies originally."
"Naturally we thought it was a First Nations site and put the stone back," Harris cut in, "We assumed it had nothing to do with our own search. To be sure, we called the medical examiner to make sure it wasn't murdered folks. There was no exhumation, but he found the bodies strange and discovered the first artefacts. So he called Professor Cloutier and her team to investigate. We kept searching the area on our own."
"What it sounded like to me was a sacrifice site or plague pit. They are absolutely unheard of in that region," Anne continued, "The ME thought it might be a mass grave, settlers using a First Nation site as a place to hide the bodies or something along those lines. Very important historically if that was the case. So I took a flight to Yellowknife with two of my team immediately, met Roger and Lewis here from the local First Nations patrimony group, and got a buggy out to the site ourselves..."
"You are beginning to test my patience," the General said, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"Mine too," said the leader of the Canadian Rangers.
The Director made a noise that could only be described as 'polite'. "We can speed things along," he agreed, with a look to the scientists.
Annoyed, Anne opened her mouth, but closed it again quickly. She wasn't sure how to hurry the explanation. Key details would be missed, details that the credibility of the discovery depended on. Not to mention the record. It wasn't easy to legally exhume grave sites usually, but it had potentially been very important for First Nations history, and she felt that needed to be stressed.
Dr. Shih cleared her throat, either to prepare herself or get the attention of the room. Anne's heart clutched. Oh Jesus, she's just going to say it.
"The bodies aren't human, and they're probably not from Earth."
Suffocating silence filled the room, as the eyes of every Army officer narrowed and mouths dropped open. Anne could've killed Dr. Shih. She's just sunk us.
"Excuse me?" the General asked.
"The bodies are not anatomically or genetically human. Or ape. Or terrestrial. Colonel Harris has a slide to show. Or two."
To her credit, Harris did move to the first slide in question, skipping the story of these facts to display a skeleton sketch against that of a young human child's, noting differences. None of the other officers looked up at it.
"Did you say the bodies aren't terrestrial?" another officer asked, "Like they're aliens?"
"I'm glad you asked," Dr. Shih smiled, "If you'll look at the slide, you'll see they all have only three fingers instead of four, and have small claws instead of nails."
The whole table looked up. Not all the scientists had seen the full skeletons before. But Anne could see every face was itched in stone. Just like her team's faces had been when they had seen the first body.
Anne quickly indicated to Harris to change to a different slide. The projector soon had a set of DNA test results up, one column marked human, another marked 'NWT find Ref 003'.
Dr. Shih was happy to continue, the shellshock in the audience encouraging her. "We managed to get a viable DNA sample from one of the bodies. That was far from certain given the bodies appear to have been placed there around eight thousand years ago, but we got lucky with local conditions. What we found was unlike anything seen in Earth's animal kingdom. Or anywhere else we know of."
"How was it different?" the General asked, suddenly entertaining the notion.
"Unless you're a geneticist, it would be hard to explain," Anne said, before Shih launched into an explanation regardless.
"To put it a simple way, DNA is a code that describes how to build a living creature. On Earth most things have a code with certain kinds of structure, using certain kinds of molecules. The DNA of this creature is unlike anything on Earth, from what we can tell this early on."
"So you're saying it is an alien?" the General asked flatly.
Anne swallowed her pride and admitted the truth aloud. "An alien… or an artificial creation, but given no one has had the ability to create a being like this from scratch on Earth that we know of, artificial likely means alien too."
The General looked to the Director, who was happy to weigh in. "We had our own people replicate the result. The bodies are real. We got the same DNA data too, though there is still a slim possibility the creatures are from Earth. It's 90% certain Dr. Shih is right about the genetics, but that isn't the only evidence."
He pointed at the others at the table. "These other scientists have preliminary data which confirmed it in other ways. Geology of the stones, linguistics on the runes, chemistry of other parts of the bodies, even the dental examination… All unique and unrelated to anything on Earth, certainly unrelated to anything previously found in the region."
The General chewed on that for a minute, but came to the right conclusion in Anne's opinion. "So either there was a society of unique ape-like creatures in the NWT eight thousand years ago, or we have proof that life from another world has visited Earth?"
"Possibly," the Director said, "There's no shortage of evidence to examine. It still isn't impossible all of it is Earthling like the rest of us. If this is a hoax, it's a very good and expensive one. And we have no evidence for it. An ordinary truck couldn't hike those stones to that location. Every one of them has more bodies underneath them too."
"Going by the average of the first three we've lifted up, there may be as many as a thousand of the creatures buried up there," Anne added, "It's almost certain we'll be able to get more DNA samples." The General paled. Anne smiled inwardly. Good, you understand the ramifications. If they're extraterrestrial, the evidence will be irrefutable.
The commanding officer of the Third Battalion got to his feet, his face red with anger. "Are you suggesting that aliens abducted our soldiers?!"
"Sit down!" the General commanded. The officer complied immediately, though his face was still a storm.
Seeing the key moment had arrived, Anne reached for the sample case at her feet. Might as well go all-in. "I'm not sure if abduction is the right word," she said, "Maybe your troops are still somewhere in that wilderness, or have been captured by another country using technology, and all of this is a coincidence. Or maybe they opened a door no one remembered or knew about before, to a place we've only written about in science fiction. Unless someone saw a flying saucer and Colonel Harris hasn't told us?" The Colonel snorted, amused by that little half-joke.
Good, Anne said to herself, You're calming down. This will go well. She placed the case on the table in front of her and stood up. The thing was large and heavy, she couldn't open it from a sitting position.
"What is that?" the General asked.
"Something else we found," Anne replied, before turning to the two officers commanding the missing troops, "If there was an abduction, I'm not saying little green aliens did it. At least not alone."
She lifted the outer shell off the sample case. Inside was a yellowed skull, clearly human or ape-like, but big enough to be used as a helmet by an ordinary person. It had a flat face, large square teeth and small eye sockets.
"Say hello to Bigfoot," Anne declared.
That's the first arc, folks! Rounded out with news from Earth.
I'd like to thank everyone who made it this far. This story has plenty more in the tank, especially as the action will be moving southwards to a large extent from now on and we're going to be meeting a whole lot more familiar characters.
I would also like to thank pete132 and calamityj0n on the Alternate History forum for nominating this story for the Turtledove Award this year in the ASOIAF category. It's an honour simply to be nominated.