| LT. MAITLAND'S LETTER a character story by Amy Luther |  |
Dear Mom, I know, I haven't written in a long time, but some things have been happening that I had to tell you about. You remember that trouble I had last spring? Well, they didn't press charges. I was suspended for a while, and I have a black mark -- like a reprimand, but it goes on my permanent record. After the disciplinary action, they sent me down south of Las Cruces to man a station right next to a Biotechnicia company town. It's lonely, but at the same time it's nice to be away from all the hustle in Santa Fe. I think there are only about fifty people here in town, mostly company farmers growing super corn. They sent me a grand total of five officers to get the place up to speed. Even with six people, though, we had more police presence per capita than Albequerque does. Most of the first crew rotated out, and it looks like this place will be the crappy end of the stick for all the cut-ups on the force. To be fair, though, I had some good officers down here for a long time, mostly people who screwed up once in a big way and deserved a second chance. I understand the rest of the force calls this place "Mayberry," which would make me Andy Griffith. So far, "maintaining order" has consisted of disabling modified pest control droids refitted to attack "bugs" up to five feet in height and spray cat piss instead of pesticide. We've also broken up a bar fight, refused a bribe from a Biotechnica rep, intervened in a domestic shooting at the local grocery (luckily, all she managed to hit were the pickle jars), and driven a pack of roadwarrior-esque drug traffickers out of town. Broke my thumb trying to put together a mini-copter we seized from them. I guess I'm just not cut out for the air anymore. We're right next door to White Sands, which is rather creepy. There are weird lights in the sky at night over the base. They're a bit heat lightning, and they come on every night at the same time, and go off at exactly the same time every morning. People say the military's conducting UFO experiments, and I think it might be true. I know it sounds crazy, but I've seen a lot of things that I can't explain. The Army guys constantly ride roughshod over us. They have gunships like the one I showed you at the station in Santa Fe, and they do flybys on the station. My four-by popped a radiator hose on the way back from town one afternoon, and while I was sitting there, baking in hundred-degree heat, ten miles from everywhere, one of the bastards does a strafing run on me. Blanks, happily, but how the hell was I supposed to know that? We even had some trouble with a couple of Army boys raising hell in town. Cost me my arm, I'm afraid. My insurance plan took care of it, so don't worry. I'm fit and fine and crushing glasses left and right with my new one. We arrested the Army boys and had an AV sent down to take them out for arraignment. The base Colonel had a fit when I refused to release them, but he left readily enough -- too readily, though I didn't know it. When we transferred them out of the station, someone sniped both of them with a high-power rifle, and I'm fairly sure it was someone from their base. Just a couple of scared kids, and somebody had them killed. There wasn't a damn thing special about them except for the fact that they were from White Sands. They didn't kill anybody in town. They didn't even cause much property damage, and they sure as hell didn't tell us anything. So why would anyone want to kill them? I know the Army's conducting test flights out there because we've seen the lights in the sky. Not the ones I was talking about earlier -- these look like plane running lights, but they execute maneuvers that are just not aerodynamically possible. A couple of weeks ago one of them went down. We investigated the crash site, and the wreckage didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before. And you know I've done enough flying that I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. We saw the pilot, too, a full conversion job, and even though I don't know what the hell it was flying, I know it wasn't anything normal, because they only use the FBC's when they're running with specs that exceed normal human tolerances. Crazy enough for you? There's more. One of my officers went out on patrol -- we keep twenty-four hour roving patrols of the town and outlying farms -- and we lost contact with him for several hours. When he reported in, he had no idea he'd been gone. He'd lost four hours and gained a nice new airhypo mark on his throat which he didn't recall receiving. I had my civvie paramedic check him out, and it turns out the officer was full of an unknown compound ... one identical to one the medic found in the bloodstreams of the Army boys when he was patching them up to send north. We've even had cattle mutilations. Every week or so, we get a report from one of the Biotechnicia farmers that one of his biogen cows has been killed. We go out, log it, and it's always the same thing. A two- or three- ton steer, laid out like a frog in a dissecting tray, no blood anywhere, the cuts cauterized like it'd been sliced by a laser, and the autopsy showing that the damage was done while the steer was conscious -- without anaesthetic. No tracks. Nobody heard anything the night before, and I'd sure like to know how you slaughter a fully conscious steer without making noise, using restraints, spilling blood, or spooking the herd. And here's the prize in our little box of Cracker Jacks: last month something got out of the base. The Army put the whole town under "military quarantine" while they hunted for it. I saw it, and it wasn't human. I know it was dangerous, or at least classified, because they had a whole squad of Dragoons -- you know, those full conversion cyborgs that they use instead of tanks? You might remember them from that CNN story they did a couple of weeks back. It was a mess. AV-8's swarming like bees, army men exchanging fire with the farmhands, cutting off our com lines, blocking the roads. They had an entire squad of Dragoons out, loaded with non-lethal ammunition, mostly catchwebs. Those are a bit like the motion restraint canister I left in your car that one time, the one that got so hot that it exploded. Same concept, bigger mess. It got into the station -- the thing, not the canister, and it crawled all through the air ducts and opened up the radio and built something out of the parts. We were blockaded in the station --- we wouldn't come out, and we wouldn't let the troops search the station, and while the base colonel was warming up to shelling us out, we heard it creeping in the vents. I had to go in after it with a flashlight. Chased it up to the roof, and that's where I got my look at it. I'll be seeing it in my sleep for the rest of my life, I think. While we were up there, nose-to-nose, one of the Dragoons jumped on the roof. There's another thing I'll never forget -- staring down the rotating barrels of the minigun mounted on its arm. I never moved so fast in my life. I hurled myself back down into the station, expecting to hear the Dragoon rip the roof off and come after me. Instead there was a flash, like a million suns rising, and a thump as the Dragoon fell over. Everything electric in the station went dead, and the thing was gone. I don't know what it did; I thought it was an EMP, but they tell me otherwise. The thing was damn smart, whatever it was, smart enough to disable the Dragoons and get away. Of course, the Army guys searched the whole station later, but they couldn't prove I'd been face-to-face with it, since the Dragoon on the roof had been wiped by whatever the thing had done to generate the flash. I think if it weren't for that, I'd be strapped down to a table somewhere on base with an IV in my arm and a bright light in my face. Hell, I probably shouldn't even be writing this down. I have the feeling that if they do find out that I know what was going on, I'll end up disappeared, because the base Colonel is one scary man, and I know he ordered the two Army kids shot. I don't know what's going on out here, but I think we're a very small bug under the Army's very big heel, and I keep waiting for the crunch. I guess I'm just paranoid, but I'll feel better knowing you have this letter. Just in case. Love, |