Humble Beginnings Read online

  Humble Beginnings

  Undreamt Consequences

  By KA Hopkins 2015

  Copyright KA Hopkins 2015

  Amazon Edition

  EPUB ISBN 978-0-9947569-1-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Judy Bullard Custombookcovers

  Editing by Caren van Rooyen

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Synopsis

  Chapter 1- Lessons

  Chapter 2 - Not your average work day

  Chapter 3 - Guide

  Chapter 4 - Catching the Flu

  Chapter 5 - My name is White, Jake White

  Chapter 6 - Wrong place wrong time

  Chapter 7 - And now for something completely different

  Chapter 8 - Not Darwin’s version

  Chapter 9 - How may I be of service?

  Chapter 10 - Looking up an old friend

  Chapter 11 - Convincing an old friend to do stupid things

  Chapter 12 - Marc gets introduced to Ship

  Chapter 13 - What’s really on the Moon

  Chapter 14 - Bob the fixer

  Chapter 15 - Prepping for the Moon

  Chapter 16 - The new me

  Chapter 17 - Understanding who I am

  Chapter 18 - Man’s future may not be so bright

  Chapter 19 - Patriots

  Chapter 20 - Taking care of the troops

  Chapter 21 - A side trip to London

  Chapter 22 - Letting the cat out of the bag with the family

  Chapter 23 - The Ultimate solution for NSA

  Chapter 24 - Making Earth a safer place

  Chapter 25 - Big Lou

  Chapter 26 - Bad news for the thirteen families

  Chapter 27 - Making it personal

  Chapter 28 - Family reunion

  Chapter 29 - Shopping

  Chapter 30 - Jake is oh so special

  Chapter 31 - We screw up big time

  Chapter 32 - The enlightenment of the stupid cat

  Chapter 33 - Oops! An unexpected turn of events

  Chapter 34 - Why the Grays gave Earth Alien technology

  Chapter 35 - The covert war heats up

  Chapter 36 - Found

  Chapter 37 - Old Lizard Face strikes back

  Chapter 38 - Special Forces Families

  Chapter 39 - Anarchy

  Chapter 40 - Stealing an alien interstellar ship

  Chapter 41 - Elder

  Chapter 42 - Not saying goodbye

  Biography

  Acknowledgements

  No book is written in isolation. This book is the result of the contributions from many friends and colleagues who generously donated their time. A number of people were instrumental in making this book come to life. While I would like to thank everyone personally, I'm sure I will forget to mention someone so here is the one-size-fits- all…"thank you everyone."

  A special thanks to all the beta readers: Marc, Shane, Neil, Chris, Grant, James, Frikkie, Al, Walter and my family.

  Last, but not least, a big thank you to: Dave for correcting the misapplications of engineering terminology and Caren for her hard work fixing the many ways that I have found to misuse and abuse the English language.

  Synopsis

  Jake White is your typical middle-aged father, just trying to get by and provide a better life for his family. In the span of a single night, his world is turned upside down by an alien snatch team bent on killing everyone he loves. After dealing with the snatch team, he is befriended by a benevolent, sentient alien scout ship and asked to help out with a small problem that unintentionally puts him in the awkward position of either being Earth’s savior - or the worst mass murderer in history.

  Forced to seek help from an old Special Forces buddy, Marc Stack, the two set out to help Jake's newfound alien friend. Along the way, they discover mankind is but one of many sentient beings in the galaxy and that extraterrestrials with a galactic corporate agenda have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.

  If discovering extraterrestrials on Earth was not enough of a shock, Jake notices that something strange is happening to his body...

  Chapter 1- Lessons

  If you are as forgetful as I am, there is nothing like a really painful stimulus to help sharpen your memory.

  Have you ever had one of those days, when you should have stayed in bed, but decided to press on, despite what your gut said?

  If I may, let me give you some advice: Trust your instincts. Don’t think, don’t rationalize - when you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach - stop what you’re doing.

  Is it hard to listen to your instincts? Yep - it’s like getting driving directions from a partner! You are heading somewhere, not quite sure how to get there and your (better) half says, “We should stop and get directions.” You are of two minds, your gut says: “Mmm, maybe we should…” But sometimes your ego overrules, exclaiming: “We don’t need to ask for directions!” Usually it takes around ten minutes for reality to sink in - you are lost. Seconds after that, the reprimands start.

  Hold that thought - the theme of “this is a bad idea, but I am wary of advice” will be revisited many times throughout this story.

  White lies are a necessity in modern society. We innocently use them to fool ourselves and those around us; but you can only lie to yourself for so long until you reach a breaking point and realize: “I’m in trouble." I had reached that point. Every joint and muscle felt like it had been bent, torn and abused for too long. When you’re afraid to sit down because you might not be able to stand up again, you might have pushed it too far.

  Not being able to stand up after sitting down was the least of my worries. I was at a loss of words to express just how bad I felt. Four days of heavy exertion with no sleep doesn’t seem like much if you’re in your twenties, but in my case it felt like several lifetimes. Forget the mind-over-matter and dig deep philosophies physical trainers like to spout off. My body was completely baked and whether I wanted it or not, it was shutting down. The emotional strain and physical demands of the last ninety-six hours had pushed me way beyond what was sane, I was so tired, I could barely think coherently.

  I don’t know why I was surprised, what can you expect when you’re pushing fifty and your best years are past tense. Any feelings that you once had of being a badass and hard-body are long gone. The honest truth is, “badass” and “hard-body” never really applied to me. The tough guy memories were mostly from beer soaked anecdotes told to buddies over a barbecue. While I had tried out a few extreme sports when younger, nowadays, my extreme sports were limited to marathon video games with the kids.

  Even though I was now more couch potato than badass or hard-body, I still remembered a few basic infantry tactics, shooting and unarmed combat from my time in the army. I have a commercial pilot license with better than average flying skills, having flown aerobatic airplanes and even a few air shows. Not a lot of people can say they have done that, but there is nothing really special or particularly hard about learning those skills - it's only a question of time and money.

  Being exhausted didn't help remembering
the old skills but as bad as I felt, it was nothing compared to my partner in this misadventure. It had all started out innocently enough; penetrate a nearly abandoned Top Secret underground facility, have a look around and report back. The only caveat, at all costs avoid getting caught or being seen.

  My partner, Marc Stack, was a former Special Forces Green Beret, one of the true, honest-to-god hard-asses. He knew all about pushing through “the zone” to achieve near superhuman feats of endurance. His motto – “mind over matter, no mind no matter,” easily said, easy enough to understand…not so easy in practice, when your last active service was a decade ago after having been honorably discharged for injuries suffered in combat. After fifteen years of military service with the infantry, airborne, rangers, and Special Forces - the end result of the service to his country; fragged twice and shot four times, all on separate occasions; medically released due to complications and physical limitations due to wounds received in combat. If you are in the air force, five destroyed aircraft makes you an ace. In the army, earning six purple hearts means you helped the enemy become a marksman and it hurts to get up every morning.

  Marc’s previous military service injuries and disabilities were now a real problem. He was ash pale, had trouble breathing and looked somewhat dazed and confused. He looked so bad I had to ask: “Are you going to live?” He responded in a flat lifeless tone: “Dying is nature’s way of saying you have failed…I’m not dead yet but the day isn’t over.” You have to love the guy’s attitude.

  Chapter 2 - Not your average work day

  A couple of logical questions come to mind on how Marc and I got into our predicament. Why would two retired, past their prime, ex-military guys (one a computer nerd, the other ex-Special Forces) choose to sneak around a nearly abandoned Top Secret facility? Having violated the “wrong place, wrong time” rule, our current situation was like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic - no matter what you do, it does not end well.

  We were in a massive underground complex, traveling down a series of large tunnels, steadily moving deeper into the complex leaving the safety and comfort of our ride home parked on the surface. We were headed for a series of small cities contained in what were called bio-domes while avoiding what passed for the local police force.

  Our troubles began when surveillance sensors picked us out of the normal traffic as we passed the third and last security checkpoint on this level. The first two checkpoints were routine - our ID cards and camouflage uniforms had obviously worked, fooling the security systems, or so we thought. Then again, there was a chance we had been spotted immediately upon entering the complex and the authorities were simply waiting until there was no way for us to escape. If that was the case, I would have to change my opinion of the local police force, as subtlety was not something they were known for.

  I had to hand it to the guards at the last checkpoint: if they knew who we were, they were great actors, not giving any sign that they had noticed our presence. I thought we blended in well with the local traffic as we were wearing chameleon stealth body suits that contained some pretty amazing state-of-the-art technology. The suits provided protection from all weapons up to fifty caliber and provided a self-contained environment that could reduce our magnetic, thermal, visible, and odor signatures to below sensor detection. Best of all, through the use of billions of fiber optic cables sewn into the fabric, essentially bending light around your body, one could become nearly invisible even in bright daylight.

  Advanced as the suit was, all of the passive measures had a major drawback: you're limited in how fast you can move. If you wanted to move faster than a snail’s pace you needed a bio-transponder, otherwise the surveillance sensors in the tunnels could detect your presence by the air displacement of your motion. Since we needed to move quickly and blend in without setting off intrusion alarms, we were wearing stolen bio-transponders that produced a unique signal based upon our DNA. The DNA-transponders allowed the surveillance systems to locate and track every being in the complex, similar to how air traffic control can track all planes around busy airports. DNA-transponders are notoriously difficult, but not impossible, to spoof. Since the sensor is worn next to skin and physically takes a small cell sample periodically, you cannot just pull the old trick of cutting a part off someone and holding it over the sensor – unless you provide the stolen body part with a blood supply and maintain normal body temperature. We had done all of this and had been assured it would work, but somehow an old friend “Murphy” decided to join the party.

  For those of you who don’t know who Murphy is, Murphy’s Law basically states: “Anything that can go wrong, will”. In military operations we like to add: “It will go wrong at the least opportune time, where it can cause the most amount of damage and confusion.”

  Ignoring for a moment the fact that we were detected by who knows what, one may ask: “What were we thinking, trying to carry out a reconnaissance and infiltration of the largest complex of its kind with so little support?” Truth is, this mission pretty much skipped over any critical thinking or listening to sound advice, due to the circumstances surrounding our departure.

  We were forced to leave home in a hurry as we had borrowed our transportation without the owner's authorization and the owner had clearly demonstrated a real passion for getting it back. Due to the pressing need to be somewhere else - to avoid getting caught, we were not all that particular about the planning details nor who we got support from.

  Our support for this mission was highly recommended by a friend of a friend who knew of someone who knew someone who had heard of a guy that might know someone that… I think you get the picture. Hell, we could have found someone more trustworthy if we had used the yellow pages, but given the time constraints, being picky was not an option.

  "Bob,” our not so highly recommended support, provided the DNA transponders and the camouflage stealth suits at great monetary cost. I remembered he proudly assured: “Guaranteed to work, never had any problems before,” but he didn’t offer any sort of a money-back-guarantee. That should have been a warning sign. What were we thinking, trusting a lowlife fixer called Bob?

  Our problems started when our transportation suddenly died and nothing Marc did, including beating it vigorously with the butt of his pistol - could bring it back to life. The dead transport stranded us in one of the many tunnels making up the massive underground complex. It was by any standard an incredible engineering feat. The aerial scans and schematic plans in the heads-up helmet displays did not do justice to what we were seeing.

  The tunnels connecting the various bio-domes and hangars varied greatly in size, with some of the larger ones being 200 feet across and 300 feet in height, easily big enough to accommodate a large ocean going vessel. Lighting was good, but there was no source, just a pleasing diffused fluorescent glow everywhere. The tunnels stretched to the horizon with no visible end: the laser range-finder in the helmet display indicated the opening was 20.151 miles away. The tunnel walls were mirror-smooth, almost like metal, but had no visible seams or support structures anywhere. The texture and color of the tunnel walls were actually quite pleasing to both the eye and touch. The tunnel walls were unlike anything I had ever heard of or seen in any underground complex.

  My heads-up helmet display showed dozens of tunnels running for miles under the surface, crisscrossing and intersecting, seemingly at random; similar to an ant farm, but scaled up to Grand Canyon magnificence. Nothing about the tunnel shape or wall texture made any sense. Tunnels constructed using Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) are always circular, due to the design of the cutting head, and use Spraycrete, a form of concrete as the wall material. These walls had a texture similar to plastics found in high end cars and were hexagonal in shape.

  Puzzling as the tunnel construction was, the bio-domes were even more so. The heads-up helmet display showed twenty bio-domes within the complex, all the same size, one thousand feet tall and five thousand feet in diameter, or roughly a volume of ten billion cu
bic feet per dome. These domes were easily the largest underground structures ever constructed. Adding up all of the tunnels and domes, the Heating, Ventilation and Cooling (HVAC) requirements had to be in the order of six trillion cubic feet or about a million times that of the US Department of Defense Pentagon building, one of the largest buildings in the United States. How HVAC was possible on that scale baffled me, but it obviously worked well as the air was clean and dry. There was no hint of any metallic or musty smell that is typically found in mines or large underground facilities.

  The complex gave the impression that it was ancient, but there was no visible evidence such as wear and tear, debris, dust or fading paint. It felt like it had been designed for so much more, but was currently functioning at only a tiny fraction of its intended capacity. The sheer size of everything around us drove home the point that this facility was meant for something big - just the cost of the service utilities would probably exceed a small country’s annual budget.

  From our heads-up helmet displays the thermal scan indicated around 100,000 inhabitants within the domes and tunnels. While 100,000 people is not a bad sized city, the facility could easily support two thousand times that number, or roughly two thirds the population of the United States, so all-in-all it was pretty much deserted. While we encountered few people or vehicles, the police were well represented, patrols passed by every thirty minutes. Unlike previous patrols which had given us a wide berth, the one coming up behind us made a beeline to our position.

  The approaching patrol was made up of two teams of two officers each. The officers appeared to have been forewarned that we were not who we appeared to be - their weapons were at the ready. They were seriously armed, with heavy caliber automatic rifles, pistols and something that resembled a riot control shotgun. In place of the normal 12 gauge barrel was a long tube that flared at the end, a little bit like the barrel of an 18th century blunderbuss.