Dead Reckoning

 Part 10, Getting Lost

⭐🖤⭐

 

            I recognized that mental connection this time. I’d felt it once before up at the plant when I first touched my Raven. It was a convivial meeting of minds.
            “What is your name, woman?” Standing there in the brilliant sunlight, I heard it plainly.
            “Jenae Renee Renton,” I thought. “Just call me Jenae.”
            “Yes, Jenae, we shall be one,” said Raven. I shivered. My thoughts tumbled.
            “I am afraid,” I said aloud.
            Hector Brown was peering inside Raven, totally rapt. He didn’t hear me.
            Mike did.
            “What has frightened you?” he asked me, his face archaic, enigmatic, severe.
            “How can I ever go home now, Mike? Everything is changed,” I pled.
            “Somehow, you will go home. Perhaps this ship is part of that future,” he said. “This isn’t a good time to project fear. Try for hope, maybe?”
            “I can do hope. What else do I have? Really?” I whispered. We both watched Hector Brown, leaning against Raven's hull, studying it from the outside.
            Hector returned from his inspection inside Raven. He nearly had stars in his eyes.
            “I’ve been inside our knockoff starships, but this is completely, well, alien, I guess I’d have to say. There are no signs of construction. No screws, bolts, glue or anything. It could have grown from a seed, or like a crystal. It’s not a bunch of components. It’s one piece. All of it. Fantastic!"
            “Raven speaks to me,” I said. “But it feels like my own thoughts. You know how you talk to yourself sometimes? That’s what it’s like. I think what was frightening me is that Raven and I have become something that feels like one entity in two bodies.
            “I have to figure out what to do with that, and what I can do with that,” I said, looking from face to face. Neither offered any advice.
            “Well, before you fly away or something, shall we take a look at your photos?” said Hector. I hoped he was kidding.  I still hadn’t even tried Raven on for size.
            “Yeah. I don’t want them. I’ll hand them over to you and clean up my photo file,” I said.
            Looking over at Raven, I asked, “is there something you can do to become invisible or disguised or something?” That was aloud, so the men would know what I was up to. It seemed unwise to leave the ship waiting in the front yard.    
            As we watched, Raven faded. Desert land reappeared where it had been before.
            “Thanks, Raven,” I said. “Maybe we won’t create an incident now!” I was proven correct in the next minute.
            Evidently, she had seen us all out in the front yard and wondered what was up, because Lucy Phillips’ old truck slowed down and she turned and drove up the driveway slowly. She pulled up to us and rolled down her driver’s side window.
            “Hey, Jenae, I thought you were working for Maria these days!” she hollered. “Did she fire ya?” She sat there grinning. She was alone. I figured that she was driving to Luminous to pick up John from school.
            “Nah,” I said, “but she said I could work whatever days I wanted to. So I took one off.”
            “Right,” she scoffed and backed around and got ready to drive off. “See ya back in town. Don't get fired now!
            “Don’t know what you see in those two,” she yelled as she left, raising a plume of dust with her passing.
            “Well,” said Hector, “that was a near miss!”
            “But now she’ll start wondering who you are,” added Mike.  “I don’t really know if she is as sinister as she seems. She could be just a nosy old ranch wife.”
            We left Raven out there, invisible, and went back in to get my phone in its Faraday bag and display the photos I had taken in the secretive hangar. I hadn’t seen Dr. Brown’s office/lair yet, but I would now.
            Downstairs, in his room, I could hardly believe my eyes. It was a different world. It looked almost like a laboratory cleanroom. All business.
            We all took seats, and I handed over my phone, unlocked, with the file open. He downloaded the shots I took in the hangar and gave it back to me. I immediately dumped all the photos. My phone was now innocent of evidence.
            “So, Dr. Brown, what do you intend to do with those photos?” I asked him.
            “I’m going to make them completely public,” he said.
            “Why?”
            “Well, for one thing, if there is nothing to hide, you are much, much safer,” he said rather grimly, but with satisfaction. “The other thing is that the world needs to know that there is no danger to us from the real starpeople, the ETs, but that there is danger from the manmade ones. Those are all part of a dangerous hoax intended to railroad mankind into uniting against some alien threat, and thereby increasing the power of the military industrial mafia.”
            I had to sit and think about that for a few minutes.
            “Are my photos that special?” I wondered.
            “Oh yes, Jenae! Because we know where they were taken, and we know who took them. In the photos are examples of the manmade versions, so people will know them when they see them and look out for them. But, also, your Raven and the other real ET vessels in that room are so obviously different that if people are taught to see them as they are, and that they are not a threat to mankind, then the hoax falls flat, please God!
            “Your photos are the best evidence we have to date,” he said.
            “They are going out on my website today, but also, I am sending them to various media and news outlets with a big writeup. They can’t ignore this.  It’s too hot.

        "The story is also going to around twenty five pivotal people in astrophysics, people who will understand the importance of the story. I'm also sending it to friendly government people. Oh, it will be the talk of the world.
            “I am going to expose the black operation up there where you come from. In about two days they won’t even want to admit you exist, let alone try to find you. They will crawl back into their holes and vanish, waiting for the next opportunity to deceive the world about the ‘alien threat’!”
            “Mike, Dr. Brown, do you think I can really go home?” I asked.
            “Let’s give it a couple of days for the news to go around the world, then plan your return as safely as we can,” he said.
            I didn’t imagine that I would be riding the bus out of Luminous.
            “I can’t imagine returning with Raven! Well, maybe I can. I’ll think about that.”
            But I hadn’t even set foot in Raven yet.
            Meanwhile, Lisa drove by in her Toyota and seeing the horrible black thing gone, apparently, and having cooled off, she decided to come back to work in Mike’s kitchen. So, I didn’t get a chance to cook after all.
            From down in Dr. Brown’s office we could hear her marching around her domain, setting things to rights, from the “terrible mess” at breakfast. The return of the cook is a great thing.
            While listening to the happy racket upstairs, Dr. Brown filled me in on the how’s and who’s of ET craft. According to him, there are roughly two types. My Raven was one kind. It didn’t have a propulsion system that we would recognize as such. It had a mechanism for pulling energy out of the substance of the universe! That’s why they had warned me of how powerful it was, that it was like a channel to inconceivable physical power, controlled by the mind of the operator.
            The other type, he said, were more like a manifestation of the mind of the pilot. Those craft can’t be shot down by anything man has for a weapon and seem to be a kind of crystal or creature of light. This was hard for me to understand. They didn’t really need to travel between star systems. They are where they manifest, either here or there. Obviously, I was not that type of pilot, even though I was potentially some kind of pilot, a thought I still hadn’t dealt with.
            It was a lot easier to have hope and maybe even expectation after all I had learned.
            I sure didn’t want to project the wrong kind of attitude into a thing like Raven!
            Mike said we should wait until Lisa had gone home after dinner before going out to make friends with Raven. We didn’t want to upset Lisa again, because she was a great cook, and temperamental. He didn’t want to lose her.
            So, after steaks, green salads, and homemade masa harina tortillas, and Lisa’s departure, we once more approached the area where Raven sat invisibly waiting for me.
            It was nearly evening. I said, “hello Raven. I’m back.” 
            And just as magically as he had disappeared, he reappeared. I found it better just then to refer to Raven as he. He just seemed more like a knight than a lady, or a neuter!
            So, as the sun slid down over the severely beautiful Texas landscape, once more the side of Raven opened showing his interior. I glanced back at Mike and Dr. Brown and decided to step inside.
            It was a little awkward. There was a flattened area to clamber over and then I sort of plopped inside feet first, landing on a slightly yielding softly lit surface.
            When I looked around I was shocked utterly to see that the inside was much larger than the outside would have indicated. It was a huge low room. There were chairs and other bits of furniture of a rather rounded organic looking style. There was a large screen up at the nose of the huge ovoid room. I felt as if I had dropped into a dimensional shift somehow. 
            “Hello, Jenae. Welcome,” the soft internal voice said.
            “We are both here,” it continued.
            “Yes,” I said, “we are both here.”
            “No, there is a third, Jenae. The pilot and designer who perished is here also. Only his body died.”