First Thrills: Volume 2 Read online

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  SAVAGE PLANET • Stephen Coonts

  WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME • Heather Graham

  MY FATHER’S EYES • Wendy Corsi Staub

  CHILDREN’S DAY • Kelli Stanley

  UNDERBELLY • Grant McKenzie

  WEDNESDAY’S CHILD • Ken Bruen

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Savage Planet

  STEPHEN COONTS

  Adam Solo wedged himself into the chair at the navigator’s table in the small shack behind the bridge and braced himself against the motion of the ship. Rain beat a tattoo on the roof over his head and wind moaned around the portholes. Although the seas weren’t heavy, the ship rolled, pitched, and corkscrewed viciously because she was not under way; she was riding sea anchors, being held in one place, at the mercy of the swells.

  Through the rain-smeared porthole windows Solo could see the flood and spotlights of another ship several hundred feet to port. She was also small, only two hundred forty feet long, roughly the size of the ship Solo was aboard. Carrying massive cranes fore and aft, she was festooned with flood lights that lit the deck and the water between the ships, and was also bobbing like a cork in a maelstrom.

  Through the open door to the bridge Solo occasionally heard the ringing of the telegraph as the captain signaled the engine room for power to help hold the little ship where he wanted her.

  Johnson was the captain, an overweight, overbearing slob with a sneer engraved on his face and a curse on his lips. Solo ignored the burst of mindless obscenities that reached him during lulls in the wind’s song and concentrated on the newspaper before him.

  Possible alien spaceship found in Atlantic Ocean, the headline screamed. Beneath that headline, in slightly smaller type, the subhead read, Famous Evangelist Funds Salvage.

  Solo was a trim man with short black hair, even features, and skin that appeared deeply tanned. He was below average in height, just five-and-a-half feet tall, and weighed about 140 pounds. Tonight he was dressed in jeans, work boots, and a dark green Gortex jacket. Looking at him, one would not have guessed that he was a very successful engineer, and the owner of twenty patents.

  He read the newspaper story carefully, and was relieved to see that his name wasn’t mentioned. The story told how Jim Bob Bryant, the preachin’ pride of Mud Lick, Arkansas, had raised millions to fund the salvage from the sea floor of the flying saucer discovered six months ago by a oil exploration ship taking core samples. Bryant was quoted extensively. His thesis seemed to be that the flying saucer would lead to a new spiritual renewal worldwide.

  On the editorial page Solo saw a column that denounced Bryant as a charlatan promoting a religious hoax. The writer stated that only the ignorant and gullible believed in flying saucers.

  Solo had just finished the pundit’s column when the door opened and a heavyset man wearing a suit and tie came in. He tossed a coat on the desk.

  “Reverend,” Solo said, in greeting.

  The Right Reverend Jim Bob Bryant was so nervous he couldn’t hold still. “This is it, Solo,” he said as he smacked one fist into a palm. “This saucer is the key to wealth and power beyond the wildest dreams of anyone alive.”

  “You think?”

  “Gettin’ into heaven has always been expensive, and the cost is gonna keep risin’. People who get somethin’ for free don’t value it—that’s human nature. Only value what they pay for, and I’m gonna make ’em pay a lot.”

  Bryant braced himself against the roll of the ship and glanced out the porthole at the heaving sea between the ships. “You still think you can make the computers talk to you?”

  Solo nodded. “Yes, but you’ve never told me what you want from them.”

  “Miracles, man—that’s what I want. I want to learn to do miracles.”

  “I don’t know that there are any miracles in the saucer,” Solo said mildly. “We never found any in that saucer we took apart. What we found was extremely advanced technology from another world, another time.” Solo had become Bryant’s right-hand man by convincing him that he had been a lead engineer on the top-secret examination of a saucer the government had secreted in Area 51 in Nevada.

  Bryant, a con man himself, had taken a lot of convincing. Solo had drawn diagram after diagram, explained the functioning of every system and the location of every valve, wire, nut, and bolt.

  Tonight, Bryant said, “You dig out the technology and I’ll do the miracles. Gonna turn prayer and song into money, Solo, and believe me, that’s the biggest miracle of them all.”

  Solo waggled the newspaper. “I thought you were trying to keep the recovery of the saucer a secret.”

  “The newshounds sniffed it out,” Bryant said with a shrug. “You gotta admit, after the news of this discovery, it was just a matter of time before someone sailed out here to raise the saucer. We’re here first, which is the important thing. Life is all about timing, Solo.” Bryant turned to the porthole and rubbed the moisture from the glass with his sleeve. “This alien ship may be torn all to hell, smashed into bits, but there’s a sliver of a chance that one or more of the computers is intact, or at least their memory core. If that’s the case, we’re in this with a chance.”

  Jim Bob Bryant jammed his hands in his pockets and stared out of the porthole into the night with unseeing eyes. The possibilities were awe-inspiring. Space travel experts all agreed that if man were to attempt a voyage between the stars, aging was going to have to be retarded or prevented altogether for the travelers to arrive alive. The distances were vast beyond any scale that could be grasped by the twenty-first-century mind.

  Bryant smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “Yes, the people of the saucers must have possessed an anti-aging drug, and the formula might be in this saucer’s computer.” The possibility of using such a drug in religious services gave him the sweats. He could found his own church. He could …

  If the saucer crew were people.

  Solo had assured him they must have been, based on the design and operation of the government’s secret saucer, the one no government official had ever admitted existed.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Solo, who was flipping through the rest of the newspaper. He knew so much … or pretended to.

  Bryant sighed. If Solo had been lying all along, he wouldn’t really have lost anything but some credibility, and in truth, he didn’t have much of that beyond the circle of the faithful. This whole expedition was financed with donated money. All Bryant had contributed was his time and lots of hot air.

  From his pocket he pulled the photo of the saucer taken by a camera lowered over the side of the salvage ship. In the glow of the camera’s spotlight, he could make out a circular, round disk, thicker toward the middle.

  Yes.

  Bryant was staring at the photo when he heard Johnson, the captain, give a shout.

  Out of the porthole, Bryant saw a shape even darker than the night sea break the surface for a moment, then ease back under.

  “It’s up!” he said excitedly. With that he dashed through the door onto the bridge and charged down the ladder to the main deck.

  Adam Solo slowly pulled on a cap and stepped onto the bridge. Ignoring the captain, who was still at the helm, Solo walked to the unprotected wing of the bridge and gazed down into the heaving dark sea as the wind and rain tore at him. The wind threatened to tear his cap from his head, so he removed it. Jim Bob Bryant was at the rail on the main deck, holding on with both hands.

  Floodlights from both ships lit the area between the ships and the heavy cables that disappeared into water. From the angle of the cables, it was obvious that what they held was just beneath the surface. Snatches of the comman
ds of the chief on deck shouted to the winch operators reached Solo. Gazing intently at the scene before him, he ignored them.

  As Solo watched, swells separated the ships slightly, tightening the cables, and something broke the surface. It was a mound, dark as the black water; swells broke over it.

  As quickly as it came into view, the shape disappeared again as the ships rolled toward each other.

  It’s real and it’s there. We are so close, he thought, then remembered the other times when he had gotten his hopes up, only to see them dashed to splinters, leaving him bitter and forlorn. Yet perhaps this time …

  Over the next five minutes the deck crews aboard both ships tightened their cables, inch by inch, lifting the black shape to the surface again, then higher and higher until finally it was free of the water and hung suspended between the ships. The spotlights played upon it, a black, saucer-shaped object, perfectly round and thickest in the middle, tapering gently to the edges, which were rounded, not sharp. It was huge—the diameter was about ninety feet—and it was heavy—the cables that held it were as taut as violin strings, and the ships listed toward it a noticeable amount.

  Solo stepped back into the sheltered area of the bridge and wiped the rain from his hair with his hand, then settled the cap onto his head as he listened to the voices on the bridge loudspeaker. The deck chiefs of this ship and the other vessel were talking to each other on hand-held radios, coordinating their efforts as the saucer was inched over the deck of this ship. The ship’s radio picked up the conversation and piped it here so that captain could listen in and, if he wished, take part.

  A moment later Bryant came up the ladder from the main deck.

  “Well, we got it up, Reverend,” Captain Johnson said heartily. “And they said it couldn’t be done. Ha! You owe us some serious money.”

  “I will when you have it safely on the dock in Newark,” Bryant shot back.

  It took twenty minutes for the deck crew to get the dark, ominous disk deposited onto the waiting timbers and lashed down. The saucer was so large it filled the space between the bridge and the forward crane and protruded over both rails. It seemed to dwarf the ship on which it rode, pushing it deeper into the sea. The ship’s floodlights reflected from the wet, black surface as pinpoints of light. From the bridge the canopy on top of the saucer was visible, some kind of clear material, but due to the glare, nothing could be seen inside.

  On deck the crewmen were staring at the strange black shape, touching it tentatively, looking in awe …

  Solo watched in silence, his face passive, displaying no emotion. On the other hand, Bryant’s excitement was a tangible thing. “Oh, my God,” Bryant whispered. “It’s so big. I thought it would be smaller.”

  When the cables that had lifted the saucer from the sea floor had been released, the sea anchors were brought aboard and the ship got under way. Solo felt the ride improve immediately as the screws bit into the dark water. The other ship that had helped raise the saucer had already dissolved into the darkness.

  “There you are,” Johnson said heartily to Bryant, who had his nose almost against the window, staring at the spaceship. “Your flying saucer’s settin’ like a hen on her nest, safe and sound, and she ain’t goin’ no place.”

  Bryant flashed a grin and dashed for the bridge wing ladder to the main deck.

  Solo went back into the navigator’s shack. He emerged seconds later carrying a hard plastic case and descended the ladder to the main deck.

  As Bryant watched, Solo opened the case, took out a wand, and adjusted the switches and knobs within, then donned a headset. Carrying the instrument case, he began a careful inspection of the saucer, all of it that he could see from the deck. He even climbed the mast of the forward crane to get a look at the top of it, then returned to the deck. As he walked and climbed around he glanced occasionally at the gauges in his case, but mostly he concentrated on visually inspecting the surface of the ship. He could see no damage whatsoever.

  Bryant asked a couple of questions, but Solo didn’t answer, so eventually he stopped asking.

  Solo crawled under the saucer and lay there studying his instrument. Finally he took off his headset, stowed it back inside the case, and closed it.

  One of the officers squatted down a few feet away. This was the first mate. “No radiation?” he asked Solo. The sailor was in his early thirties, with unkempt windblown hair and acne scars on his face.

  “Doesn’t seem to be.”

  “Boy, that’s amazing.” The mate reached and placed his hand on the cold black surface immediately over his head. “A real flying saucer … I didn’t think such things existed. Where do you think this one is from?”

  “Not from our solar system.”

  “Another star…” The mate, whose name was DeVries, retracted his hand suddenly, as if the saucer were too hot to touch.

  Solo studied the belly of the saucer as the raw sea wind played with his hair. At least here, under the saucer, he was sheltered from the rain.

  “Everything inside is probably torn loose, I figure,” DeVries continued, warming to his subject, “when that thing went into the drink. Scrambled up inside there like a dozen broken eggs. And those aliens inside, squashed flat as road-killed possum and just as dead. Couldn’t nothing or nobody live through a smashup like that. And how about germs, if you open that thing up? What if the bugs get out and kill us or contaminate the world?”

  Solo ignored that remark.

  The first mate turned to Bryant and asked, “So, Reverend, how come you’re spending all this money raisin’ this flyin’ saucer off the ocean floor?”

  Bryant said matter-of-factly, “I intend to make some money with it.”

  “Well, I hope,” DeVries said thoughtfully, a remark Bryant let pass without comment.

  As those two watched, Adam Solo donned self-contained breathing apparatus. He fiddled with the controls and adjusted the mask until he was satisfied with the airflow, then he motioned the other two back.

  They waddled out from under the saucer. Satisfied, he placed his hand on the hatch handle and held it there. Now, after ten seconds or so, he pulled down on one end of the handle and rotated it. The hatch opened above his head. Water began dripping out.

  Not much, but some. The saucer had been lying in 250 feet of water; if the integrity of the hull had been broken, seawater under pressure would have filled the interior. This might be leakage from the ship’s tank, or merely condensation. Solo wiped a drip off the hatch lip, jammed his finger under the breathing mask, and tasted it. He was relieved—it wasn’t saltwater.

  Now Solo inspected the yawning hole. He stuck the wand inside and studied the panel on his Geiger counter. “Background radiation,” he told Bryant, who had also donned breathing apparatus. The preacher rubbed his hands together vigorously, a gesture that Solo had noticed he used often.

  Solo turned off the Geiger counter. He carefully wrapped the cord around the wand and stowed it in the plastic case, then shoved the case up into the dark belly of the saucer.

  DeVries craned his neck, trying to see inside the saucer. “Like, when you going to climb into this thing?”

  A smile crossed the face of Adam Solo. “Now,” he said. He raised himself through the hatchway into the belly of the ship.

  Jim Bob Bryant crawled under the ship, then squirmed up through the entryway. He closed the hatch behind him.

  The first mate slowly shook his head. “Glad it was them two and not me,” he said conversationally, although there was no one there to hear him. “My momma didn’t raise no fools. I wouldn’t have crawled into that thing for all the money on Wall Street.”

  * * *

  The first mate made his way to the bridge. Captain Johnson was still at the helm. “Well, did you ask him?” the captain demanded.

  “Wants to make money, Bryant said.”

  “I already know that,” the captain said sourly. “Oh, well. As long as we get paid…” After a moment the captain continued, “Solo’s
weird. That accent of his—it isn’t much, but it’s there. I can’t place it. Sometimes I think it’s eastern European of one kind or another, then I think it isn’t.”

  “All I know,” DeVries said, “is that accent isn’t from Brooklyn.”

  The captain didn’t respond to that inanity. He said aloud, musing, “He’s kinda freaky, but nothin’ you can put your finger on. Still, bein’ around him gives me the willies.”

  “They got money,” DeVries said simply. In his mind, money excused all peculiarities, an ingrained attitude he had acquired long ago because he didn’t have any.

  “Imagine what that thing must have looked like flying.”

  They fell silent as they stared at the craft, looked from right to left and back again, trying to take it all in, to understand, as the sea wind whispered and ocean spray occasionally spattered the windows.

  DeVries finally broke the silence. “It’s heavy as hell. Like to never got it up. We almost lost it a dozen times.”

  “Notice how the ship’s ridin’? Hope we make harbor before the sea kicks up.”

  DeVries grunted. After a moment he said, with a touch of wonder in his voice, “A real, honest-to-God flying saucer … Never believed in ’em, y’know?”

  “Yeah,” the captain agreed. “Thought it was all bull puckey. Even standing here looking at one of the darn things, I have my doubts.”

  * * *

  The only light inside the saucer came through the canopy, a dim glow from the salvage vessel’s masthead lights. It took several seconds for Solo’s eyes to adjust.

  The room was large, almost eight feet high in the middle, tapering toward the edges. In the rear of the room was a hatch, one that apparently gave entry to the engineering spaces. Facing forward was a raised instrument panel and a pilot’s seat on a pedestal, one with what appeared to be control sticks on each side, in front of armrests. As Solo had told Bryant, the seats were sized for humans. The pilot could look forward and to each side about 120 degrees through a canopy made of an unknown material.