Chapter No,12 Explanation

Fool me twice, Shame on me!

The alien intelligent species list did have a Trojan. I doubt that the enemy aliens anticipated how intelligent our androids are at detecting computer attacks. The androids are essentially sentient computers and very little escapes them.

What I found fascinating was the detail in the list. It not only identified each species as to their level of intelligence and technical development, it also gave precise location data for their home worlds by means of pulsar triangulation.

"I've been checking some of these locations," Molly said. "They do have habitable planets."

"Interesting," I said, looking over her shoulder at the document's display. "Hopefully, they'll check out."

"Oh," she said. "I've done a scan of Huntsville, and I can't find the Space Command headquarters. However, there is a curious cement foundation where it once stood."

"Let me see it."

The foundation was huge and covered by debris from the original structure. "What do the X-ray scans tell us?"

"The structure is shielded," Molly said. "We can't penetrate it."

I leaned back in my chair. "Well, that means that we'll have to go down there and check it out." I turned to Judy. "We wish to go down there as soon as possible."

"You may leave as soon as you wish, Jason," she said.

I stood up. "Let's go see what's in that foundation."

Molly and I went to the flight deck and boarded a shuttle.

"Are you ready," Alice asked after we got buckled in.

"Yes we are," I replied.

Alice and Ellen flew us down to the surface near the foundation in Huntsville, Alabama, a city that started out as NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center before it was converted to Space Command Headquarters. The complex was large and covered a lot of ground. The foundation that we see was where the original main building once stood.

We exited the shuttle and made our way to the foundation with Alice and Ellen protecting us. The sun was shining brightly making it hot and humid. When we made it to the base of the foundation, it was obvious that there was no way to enter it. The structure appeared to be constructed from reinforced concrete.

"I can't penetrate this," Molly complained, working with her scanning unit. "It must have some barrier shielding it."

"Maybe the entrance is underground," I said.

"Why would they put an entrance underground?"

"I don't know. This thing appears to be something that's not a normal part of any building. It's almost as if it's a bunker. Maybe they built this to hide from the effects of an asteroid collision." I pointed to a slight mound of dirt near the middle of the foundation. "Scan here and see if there is a bulge or depression down below the ground level."

After several minutes, Molly pointed. "I'm getting an anomaly right there about seven feet down."

I turned to the androids. "Is there some way that we could evacuate the dirt around there?"

"We will unload the excavation unit, Jason," Ellen said.

After a few minutes, Alice and Ellen unloaded a robotic device with a back hoe and maneuvered it over to where we were standing. With a few clicks, they had the unit shoveling out dirt like a ditch digger on steroids. It didn't take all that much time to create a ditch large enough to expose a door that was recessed into the side of the bunker.

I jumped down into the ditch and went up to the door. I found a recessed handle that I managed to pull out but there was no way that I was going to open it. It may as well been welded to the bunker as far as I was concerned.

Alice jumped down into the ditch and came to the door. She grabbed the handle and with a single pull, ripped the door open.

I looked up at Molly. "That's what I mean about how strong they are."

She gave me a smirk.

Molly and Ellen jumped down and joined us as we entered into the bunker. Hopefully, there wasn't any booby traps.

We had to turn on our light units to see where we were going. Molly scanned for any evidence of energy or life as we penetrated further into the bunker. After walking a dozen meters into the bunker, we came to a glass wall. We used our lamps to illuminate what was inside a huge chamber.

"Oh my God!" Molly exclaimed. Those are stasis units. There must be hundreds of them."

"Are any of them still activated?"

"I'm not picking up and energy sources or life signs. I would say that they are all no longer functional."

"I wonder if there's a way we could enter this chamber."

Alice found a sliding door and used her strength to move it open. We entered the chamber and began surveying the stasis chamber.

"We count two hundred chambers, Jason," Ellen said. "Five are occupied by males, the rest are females."

"I don't get it," Molly said. "Why did they fill them with that gender ratio?"

"Very strange indeed," I replied.

"We have located data discs, Jason," Alice said.

Molly and I went over to where she was near a wall.  A rack filled with data discs used to store humongous amounts of data occupied a two-meter shelf unit.

"I got a strange feeling about this," I said. "This bunker was obviously meant to save people from the after effects of the asteroid collision. However, something this complex would have taken quite some time to construct in secret under Space Command Headquarters. If the asteroid collision was a surprise discovery, this is not consistent with what we're seeing here."

"What are you suggesting?" Molly asked. "That this is part of a conspiracy."

"I don't really know for sure, but maybe these data discs will reveal why this is here."

After collecting all of the data discs and checking for any other sources of information, we left the bunker and returned to the shuttle.

Alice and Ellen piloted the shuttle back up to our ship in orbit. We immediately went to engineering.

"Do we have a way to read these discs?" I asked Queen.

"Yes, Jason."

She took one of the discs, which was about the size of a DVD but much thinner and covered with gold, and placed it in a slotted device. After a few minutes a screen lit up with a document.

"This is going to take some time to go through," I told Molly.

We sat there together looking at the screen as I scanned through the document.

After several minutes, I leaned back in my chair and sighed. "I don't believe this shit! This designates the bunker as part of the Phoenix Project, a crazy scheme to renew the Earth with a pure human population." I pointed. "Look here! It says that they knew long in advance that the asteroid was going to collide with Earth and repressed the information so that nothing would be done about it until it was too late."

Molly looked at me with a surprised expression. "That means that they deliberately killed billions of people."

"Evidently, these women that were placed in stasis were supposed to become the mothers of the new human population after the effects of the collision had dissipated. I can't believe that they were going to do this with only five men."

She chuckled. "Those men were going to have fun fathering this new population."

I flashed a smirk at her before I pointed again. "Look at this. This says that the reptilian aliens did abduct humans as breeding stock. Apparently, humans and other intelligent species are the reptilian alien species' main food source."

Molly made a face. "Yuck! That's gross!"

"This says that they have been doing this for a long time. Apparently, this reptilian species is much older than ours."

"They estimate that they're over a million years old," she said, pointing to a section of the document.

"This part really makes me angry. It says that our Explorer-1 mission was sent to annihilate the reptilians and the reason they sent all these androids was to essentially destroy them in the invasion. The younger men in our crew were supposed to return and help father the new human population." I turned to her. "You know what that means, don't you?"

She stared at me. "What?"

"They were going to euthanize us and any older crew members on the way back to Earth."

"That's ironic, in a way," she said, sounding glum. "We and the androids survived and returned way too late to revive them."

"Yes," I said, grinning. "Justice ultimately prevailed. The bad news is that their insane plan resulted in the extinction of Homo sapiens."

"I don't understand why they wanted to repopulate the Earth like that. What purpose would it serve?"

"They explain that in this section," I said, gesturing. "Evidently, these women are all of the same ethnic background, which according to this is Germanic."

"That sounds like another insane plot to change the world's racial makeup doesn't it." She said.

"Yes, Nazi Germany. That didn't work either."

"Actually, their plan had some glaring holes in it," she said. "For one, they should have realized that a pure ethnic population would soon become genetically inferior. The other problem is that this collision event eliminated most of the animal species that could provide food, not to mention that food crops were also destroyed."

"I don't think they allowed for the possibility that this asteroid collision would be as destructive as it was. They also didn't allow for the time dilation effect. They assumed that our mission would take seven years out, one year to accomplish the demise of the reptilians, and seven years to return to Earth. That's fifteen years that would work out to 30 years on Earth. Since the men and women that were to create this new master race were in stasis, that would have minimized the time dilation effect for them, but what they didn't realize is that thirty years wasn't enough time for the planet to recover from the collision effects."

She smiled. "The best laid plans of mice and men."

I chuckled. "Yes, could go astray! And they did." I got up. "Well, at least we know what happened, or in this case, didn't happen."

"What are we going to do now?" Molly asked.

"We must go to Mars and see if anyone there survived."

She smiled, which I took as a good sign that she wasn't depressed by what we had discovered.