.·:*¨ ¨*:·.

We always figured one day Earth would be invaded by aliens. You know, the ones who always visit us in those elusive UAPs. The ones they make all the movies about. But that was before.

Before we discovered the God Portal.

Perhaps it was always meant for us to find it, but still it was a complete SNA-FU, an accident borne of a man who never followed orders and caused the entire Charlie Foxtrot- in short, that's a cluster fuck of unimaginable proportions.

A decade later and there was still no formula for entry or exit- just a narrow interstice on the edge of the Mecca Hills Canyons between the Orocopia Mnt. Range and the Chocolate Mnt. Range on the Salton Sea in California, but once it was discovered, suddenly the Universe was ours for the taking.

And we greedily took full advantage. But that's a story for another time.

Long story short, we established the first moon base with a permanent colony and within that first decade, created live outposts all over the celestial universe with some of the best and brightest doing scientific research that has proven to be a lucrative wind-fall for the U.S.

Finding that portal changed everything that was ever known by experts in the field about interdimensional travel. It was the key that unlocked the universe. Once it was discovered that entering the portal made space travel in light-years a thing of the past, the rest as they say, was history.

At present, the colony, Olympus Station, is reserved specifically for the families of the scientists and one of those scientists just happens to be my daughter. She helped to pioneer the entire project.

By the year 2038, it will encompass 172,800 square feet. That's three football fields in comparison not including the landing strips.

Olympus was thriving, by all standards. Hell, there have even been two births since it was established and settled in 2029. Unfortunately, neither birth was related to me.

My daughter had just gone through a messy divorce before leaving good old earth. All of it, her fault. Let's just say she fell into a love triangle. But not just any love triangle. No, she had to go and fall for her husband's sister. Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't upset about that part. She has a right to love whoever she wants. I don't have a problem with that and little room to judge. I've been known to engage in some risk taking ventures myself.

I guess it runs in the family.

My problem was her asshole husband. He did everything in his power to discredit her authority among her peers and her profession. If I could have gotten to him I would have killed him. He's lucky he's the Captain of his unit and his Master Sergeant is a friend of mine.

But I digress.

As I was saying, The Olympus Colony was a booming success, until an usual situation upset the entire bio-rhythm. But we'll get to that.

Three years after the discovery, the United States and Israel, working together, formed an alliance, assumed full ownership of the portal and created T-CUAS. The Center for Universal Astronomical Studies.

For years it remained a secret but as always, in humanity's race to the top, our imperfections allowed leaks in the system and soon every nation on Earth found out.

Wars were fought. Countries destroyed. Populations decimated. The US was blamed for all of it but it didn't matter much because the country was a desolate waste. Uninhabitable. Any populous remaining lives in squalor and seclusion with scavenging being their only means of survival.

A few major economies managed to hang on by a thread. And by economies, I'm speaking of the Corporations of Science, Technology and Aerospace.

They quickly took control of the Central Banking system and the crash was apocalyptic. These organizations were located on two continents. The USA and Asia with headquarters in California, Israel, the Indo Islands, Japan and Singapore. Various Hawaiian Islands that escaped destruction became the home of the CEOs of T-CUAS, housing fortresses of privately owned estates with invitation-only access.

To put it mildly, civilization no longer existed as we remembered. Replaced with the Military, small governments ran the penal systems, Scientists, Medical personnel, highly trained computer scientists and programmers, and that shadowy ruling class, a syndicate of CEOs headquartered in Singapore.

These sudden changes totally corrupted those in high places and completely destroyed common life on earth.

For a good while, before the bombs started being dropped, cities became hellscapes of rioting and protests. Humanity doesn't take kindly to drastic evolution.

But the deeds were done so secretly that by the time citizens found out, it was too late anyway.

The Israeli rank and file along with the A-List Galactic Engineers, other elect educators and mechanical engineers were relocated to California where they enjoyed life segregated from radiated earth in the original T-CUAS facilities, surrounded by twenty five feet of cement wall and guarded by the prestigious MOSSAD.

And transportation! That was something left only to the Elite.

Helicopters, Ships, Military Aircraft and only available in Israel, motor powered vehicles known as Coach Modules and of course, the Space Shuttles.

These shuttles were developed specially for multidimensional travel.
Portal approved.

Then of course, the never ending fleet of lunar modules for planetary travel at the various inhabited or uninhabited planets in the Sagitta Orionis Star System.

Fleet facilities were located in Israel and if you were lucky enough to have been in the motor vehicle assembly trade, well, let's just say you were one hundred percent guaranteed a better life than the common poor fucker, by leaps and bounds.

I'm sure by now you are probably asking yourself, how I know all this. Remember that clusterfuck I spoke of earlier? Yeah, I was the pilot who never followed orders and caused the entire incident.

I discovered the Interstice. The God Portal.

.·:*¨ ¨*:·.

We were performing routine exercises that day, flying from Vandenberg AFB. SFB, CA., over the badlands when my headgear crackled to life with a stream of shouted curse words in my ear.

"This is RINO.SIX.TWO.SEVEN.DELTA., to TICKLE. SEVEN.ZERO.NINE.INDIA. Tickle! Did you see that BIRD! ABEAM. BOGEY. At your nine o'clock wing tip! Tickle you got me?"

"COPY RINO. TALLY IN SIGHT. WHISKY.TANGO.FOXTROT. What is that thing!"

"A BANDIT with no wings, Tickle!"

"The hell it is, it's riding ANGEL with no VAPE, RINO! I'm full on FIREWALL and I can't catch it!"

"Copy Tickle! You should BUSTER, and BUG OFF!"

"BASE COMMANDER TO TICKLE. SEVEN.ZERO.NINE.INDIA. Leave that BOGEY and RTB. YOUR SIGNAL IS BUSTER to Mother!"

"Negative Commander Base. I'm A.C.T.B for maximum A.C.M. to defend Mother. Lieutenant Colonel Jethro Bascom over and out!"

"BASE COMMAND to TICKLE. YOUR ORDERS ARE TO RTB. Pilot BUSTER. ABORT MISSION and RTB! That's an order, Lieutenant Colonel!"

That was my last transmission to Base.

I was straight up that bogey's ass when the sky split wide open and the flat, cookie shaped UAP turned on its side and sliced right through the jagged vortex at mach speed sucking my F-16 right in with it. There was nothing I could do. There is no slamming on the brakes when you're traveling at 1000mph.

I pulled hard on the side-stick trying to lift above it and bug off but it was like a slo-mo magnetic suction gripped the fuselage and the thrusters fizzled down to a low pressure thrum and I lurched forward in the seat with the heave and slammed my head against the cockpit bubble.

When the initial panic subsided and I was still breathing I checked my instrument panel. The gauges were spinning like tops. The Flight Display Screen however was oddly normal. Of course. I wasn't that high in altitude. The overhead panel lights all read normal for cockpit airflow, electric and hydraulics but my radio was dead.

As I sat there suspended in time, trapped in what I can only describe as a wormhole, the craft I had followed in, advanced at a high rate of speed.

Then without warning my turbofans actually kicked back in and I was thrust back into full throttle. It had to be an atmospheric change I reasoned as I resumed control of my flight. Don't ever ask me how because I can't tell you.

I continued behind it at a safer distance and since I hadn't died, I wasn't keen on getting shot down now. The atmosphere around me was like flying in syrup and everything felt thick. I noticed that inside this area, everything floated in the interim but I knew for a fact I was still in Earth's stratosphere because my temperature gauges were reading normal.

Was this some kind of isothermal layer between the earth and space?

A transdimensional thread of some kind? I remember faintly hoping it wasn't going to belch me out somewhere in a deep space glitch I could never return from.

Ahead, further still, a dark hole of nothing began to materialize and I felt my heart rate increase. I desperately needed to turn back but what I saw in front of me captivated my entire psyche. It was worse than an acid trip gone very wrong. In utter shock I realized that what was ahead of me wasn't just a black hole of nothing. It was a mothership.

A fucking mothership?

Hidden between two mountain peaks and in perfect alignment with the Salton Sea Naval Test Base. What the holy shit was going on here? How could something so huge be completely hidden from view?

How was this not visible to the human eye?

Had I actually travelled further than I realized? I had no idea but what I did know for sure, this wasn't just my imagination. I had discovered something man kind was never supposed to know, much less see and if I didn't get the fuck out I probably wouldn't live to tell the story.

I banged my fingertips against my helmet mic flex boom in a panicked attempt to make radio transmission back to base. I begged and pleaded for the radio to kick in but it just wouldn't connect. As I did that, I lowered the throttle in my engines but they petered out completely, leaving me floating like so much space trash. I made the sign of the cross over my chest and prepared for the inevitable.

I sat transfixed, watching as the cookie shaped UAP drifted silently to the side of that massive mothership, an ugly black monstrosity consisting of so many levels, windows, hatches and decks it could have been a small city and I prayed as I flipped the throttle switches. When they roared to life I laid that side-stick on its side, did a three hundred and sixty degree rollover and headed back the way I came in.

My F-16 burst back through the portal with a sound barrier explosion so loud I felt it through my headgear. I headed for base, radioing in my stats.

My dispatch was met with complete silence for several long moments and I began to sweat. Then I laughed like a crazy man. Who was I kidding. I was having a full on panic attack.

Then the radio crackled to life and I heard one comment.

"Holy fucking shit, Tickle, is this you?"

It was my wingman, Rino. He proceeded to inform me I'd been gone an entire week!

When I look back on that day, I still cannot believe I lived to tell the tale. Logic and critical thinking cannot comprehend the incident no matter how hard it tries. It just doesn't do it justice, but what happened defied all that logic, because logic says when you accelerate that fast the G-force turns your body to mush. That was what RINO had determined happened to me.

He'd seen the whole incident but said they still did fly-overs for a week looking for my plane.

But none of it was that simple, as we would understand later.