"Popular, Witty, Smart," Michael quips back before answering his phone.  "Pick two."

The information he receives isn't particularly surprising.  Any homicide cop in a major city would have to conform to one of several stereotypes, all of them effective.  If she wasn't good, she wouldn't be sitting at a table interacting with Choi, sent to provide overwatch on a counter-terrorism team in a twisted jurisdictional pissing match.  JSOC has its political battles, but at least the rules downrange are different from the politics of the rear.  Here in the Land of the Big PX, it seems like the operations theatre is both the rear and downrange.  If he isn't exposed to the phrase 'Posse Comitatus' in the next ten minutes, Dacovetti is going to be pleasantly surprised.

"I don't think your her type, Crad.  She' doesn't sound like one to settle." he says after thanking Foundation for the information.  He waits a moment before smiling at the medic.  "See, my selection was witty and smart.  Fuck popular."

With the data sent to Foundation for analysis, Michael takes a moment to sweep through the camera feeds available on his monitor in an attempt to identify any strange characters lurking around inside or outside the hospital, excluding the present company.  He'll wait for Hannah to finish her call before leading the trio back in to see how Choi is faring against the Cuban American.

Showing that she obviously didn't choose 'witty', Hannah simply stuck out her tongue in mock playfulness with Painter.  Having traveled with the Irishman for a couple of weeks on the winding backroads had made her feel a closeness with the team medic that she'd grown fond of.  She pointed to Adessi and added with a smile matching Crewe's, "The pretty doctor probably wouldn't mind some attention..."

The auburn-haired pilot stepped off to the side and spoke in rather hushed tones as she took the phone call.  Double Down alternately let her brow furrow and then nodded curtly before answering Barfight.  "Perfect." she intoned at the news that the MH-60S was prepped and ready; her trust in Barbrak's competence was absolute having worked and flown with the man.  "Absolutely." she added with little to no hesitation in her voice as an answer to his query about the door mounts, "We go to every party dressed to kill from now on..."  They weren't going to be outgunned at the next encounter, if she could help it.

With respect to the Dealer's new-fangled detector, she'd let Dacovetti know.  Just not right now in mixed company.

"As I understand it, Doctor's Satish and Jayashri Tamboli were working on creating a viable fusion reactor, in hopes of powering  a massive series of desal plants.  Turn Libya green and make it the breadbasket of North Africa kind of stuff.  We received intelligence that the," Lina's voice shifted slightly, as did her expression as she spoke the next word, "aliens, operating undercover as human terrorists, were interested in the Tamboli's research.  As the time, we were unwitting as to their extraterrestrial nature, so we assumed that as terrorist, they were interested in weaponizing this research.  However, it's possible they had another actual agenda." Lina suppressed a sigh as the end.  These 'aliens' almost certainly had an agenda far beyond what she or any other human could predict.  That was part and parcel of fighting this threat.  How that agenda drove them to kill pensioners 9000 kilometers away, was what they were trying to figure out.

"Chief Paddon, what kind of experimental technology did your unit test?"

Durand leans back against the wall of the small room, his arms folded across his chest, the holstered Glock a reassuring presence at his waist, Not that he expected to need it at a United States Naval facility, but one never knew, particularly when facing an enemy that possessed the ultimate in disguises, being able to apparently alter its appearance at will.

The Frenchman is content to defer to Kowalska as she questions Paddon, for  whilst he had been trained in various methods of interrogation, several of which were quite inappropriate for the current scenario he knew that Dancer was equally skilled in techniques to extract information from subjects, whether cooperative like Paddon or uncooperative like the market trader in Doha. Although he had proven quite willing to talk in the end.

For the most part though Durand just watches Paddon, trying to put his two degrees in Psychology to good use, studying the American's reactions to the Pole's questions, his behaviour, his body language. After all, it's not every day that three people can talk about aliens and spacecraft without at least one thinking that the others are mad. Idly the DGSE operator wondered if the room was bugged, whether one or other of the American intelligence agencies would be listening to every word. If they were Durand doubted if they would think anyone in the room was mad, for they probably already knew more than him, Kowalska, and Paddon combined.

Durand does intervene when Dancer turns the conversation back to Paddon's Squadron and their activities. "Where were you based out of Chief?" Durand pauses for a moment before he continues. "And do you know if the Squadron is still operational?" In other words, is the American military still operating alien technology.

Homestead Air Reserve Base
Homestead, Florida
10 June 2015
0632 hrs local (1132 hrs Zulu)

The tableau is becoming a theme.  The hangar is not a SCIF, not by a long shot, but it is as close as Marie Kohl, Michael Dacovetti, and a Pelican case full of electronics can make it.  Outside, the slender wings of a Gulfstream G650 and slimmer main rotors of an MH-60S cast spidery shadows on the sun-bleached ramp as they huddle together for mutual protection against a massive and indifferent KC-10.  Inside a bleary Grey Cell sits, slouches, or stands, according to personal inclination, around a quartet of folding tables laden with the slowly-cooling remains of breakfast (whatever his other qualifications, Caporal-Chef Daimien Poirier of L'armée de L'air is either a master food scrounger or very good at filtering Yelp reviews).  Tablets, laptops, and a scattering of hardcopy are interspersed with exsanguinated coffee cups and stripped carcasses of bakery boxes.  Around the island of food and evidence, the cable nerves and video eyes of the Cave are taking shape under the busy hands of the freshly-arrived Amber Cell detachment.

---

Yielding to James Choi's gentle persuasion, Detective Adriana Salcedo has provided the sparse file on the murder of Rear Admiral (ret.) George Frye.  Most of it corroborates what Task Force 47 already from footage and preliminary reports: Frye was killed in the parking lot of his attorney, David Coel of Coel, Young, and Abbey, by an unknown subject with a large-bladed knife.  The coroner's neat handwriting attests to the killer's strength and precision.  Nothing was taken from Frye's person.  His pockets contained wallet, money clip, pen, notebook, phone, keys, folding rigger's knife, and an S&W M&P Compact in .357 SiG with a Crimson Trace lasergrip and one extra magazine. The attorney admits Frye had an appointment with him, made in some haste the day before, but claims no knowledge of the admiral's agenda.  Their friendship has been well-established for decades.  Frye's daughter is similarly unaware of any agenda, though she did remark that her father seemed distracted and irritable in the days before his demise.

"Charlie Sheen" is unknown to Miami-Dade PD.  Among the items arriving in the team's inbox overnight, though, was a transcript of the words exchanged between Frye and his killer, courtesy of an Amber Cell analyst with a talent for lip-reading:

"Charlie Sheen": Excuse me.

Frye: Yes?

Sheen: Admiral (apparent emphasis) George Frye.

Frye: Yeah, who are you?

Sheen: You should not have tampered with stolen property.  We can smell it on you.

Frye: You're--

---

Remote input from Green Cell on the object recovered from Captain (ret.) Dana Albinson's brain contains little additional data of immediate use but frequent yammering in which the phrase "weaponized nanotechnology" features prominently.  Strictly speaking, the object doesn't fit the definition, but it's close enough for concern.  Through trial and error, Michael Dacovetti and Cradaoc Crewe have discovered a specific electromagnetic charge that can cause the device's components to dissociate, as well as a second charge that causes them to "reboot" while suspended in blood or saline solution, assembling anew in the same configuration which was so nearly lethal to Albinson.

---

The first fruits of Project RETICLE, derived from Michael Dacovetti's original signal analyzer design, are now wired into Hannah Omdahl's borrowed Knighthawk and the anonymous Gulfstream.  A third unit's antenna sits atop the hangar.  The scopes are quiet: no WILDWOOD GROUSE emanations are in evidence.  Should that change, Grey Cell's phones will erupt with warnings.

---

The security footage from Nininger State Veterans' Nursing Home, freshly arrived in the care of an intensely curious but diplomatically silent FBI agent, is illuminating.  The only outside personnel on site at the time of Albinson's stroke were five visitors - all known to the staff as long-time friends or family of other patients - and two men from the regular laundry service.  The latter were not the regular crew; they were tight-lipped and standoffish, with thick accents.  Their movements placed them out of sight of the nursing home's rudimentary security system for several minutes at a time.

Departing, one inadvertently exposed a bared forearm to a camera.  It bore a tattoo Sébastien has seen before, on the arm of another man who Andrey Vasilyev called on for assistance after Qatar.  Another nation-less veteran of Spetznaz.

---

Now:

Chief Warrant Officer Ted Bannon saunters up to the table, peels the communication headset from his head, and rummages in the bakery boxes until he emerges with a cream-filled caramel bacon Long John.  "Mm.  Fat pills."  He takes an enormous bite and chews contentedly.  "Vidry just called.  The Senior Chief is up.  He's on his way over and he'll be ready to brief out as soon as you pour some coffee into him.  Do you want to get anything else out of the way before he gets here?"

Poirier had done a great job arranging breakfast, although Durand's Gallic sensibilities were perturbed by the fact that croissants seemed to be as scarce here as they had been in Melbourne. And then he sees what Bannon is eating. What the fuck is that?

Finishing his coffee, the Frenchman places the styrene cup on the table, leans forward. "Can you cue up the footage from the nursing home again please? Specifically the laundry guys leaving." When the video appears on the screen he watches closely until the part that he has been waiting  for appears. "Can you freeze that?"

Durand then rises from his chair, points to the tattoo on the bare forearm that is displayed on the screen. "I have seen this tattoo before. It is a Spetznaz tattoo. So this guy is either current or former Russian Special Forces or an Attar who has taken on the form of a Spetznaz soldier."

He turns to face the others, folds his arms across his chest. "James, can you make nice with local law enforcement and see what we can find out about the laundry service? Who owns it, what their background is, anything that you can get on their employees, especially the two guys who were tasked to go to the nursing home that day. Names, addresses, next of kin, everything that they can give us. Once we have addresses for them someone needs to take a discrete look - it is possible that these guys did a wet job and the real employees are already dead."

Durand then looks over at Bannon. "We have a line of communication to Andrey, yes? I need to speak with him, see what he can add from his end. See if he can find out if any of these guys are not where they are supposed to be right now." He pauses a moment, his thumb stroking his chin, right index finger tapping his lower lip. "Hopefully he may also be able to find out whether this is some sort of officially sanctioned Russian intelligence operation on US soil or a freelance job."

"That's if it's not another of the Attars' identities." There is something that has been bothering Durand for a while about the way that the aliens can take on human form. "If it is, Andrey may still be able to help. One of the things that I have always wondered is how they manage to take on human shape. Do they need to have access to the original person? If Andrey can identify any Spetznaz operators that might be missing that might be helpful."

James rubs his chin between thumb and forefinger. "I can ask, but Salcedo's probably going to want to get in on it. Are we cool with that or do we want handle it on our own?"

-
This message was last edited by the player at 23:25, Fri 04 Mar 2016.

Dacovetti cradles a styrofoam cup of coffee between the finger tips of both of his hands, trying to minimize the transfer of thermal energy from the cup to his fingers due to the warm Florida temperatures while maintaining an acute sense of irony that he is going to pour the scorching liquid down his gullet anyway.  The donuts look tasty and the appearance of his favorite (donut, cake, chocolate with chocolate glazing and sprinkles) is going to overwhelm his resistance to the calorie delivery device within minutes, with a margin of error of thirty seconds.  Give or take. It's possible the airman can distract himself with fantasies of weaponized nanotech (or nightmares, to be fair), albeit unlikely.

"We need an audit of the admiral's personal life.  Mr. Sheen indicated he could smell the stolen technology on Admiral Frye.  That implies, to me, that he still has it somewhere, whether at an office, his home, or an off-site storage location like a U-Store it." Dacovetti takes a sip from his coffee.  "Unless our Senior Chief can shed some light on a promising location based on their past operational parameters."

Karolina looked over the sugar festival that the American's seemed to be picking through for breakfast.  The options for something healthy looked limited.  She was craving jaja sadzone na świeżym pieczywie z hummusem, avocado and a cafe bombon from Milanovo, near her mother's house, but she settled for some toast, strawberry jam, and black coffee.

"Do we have any information on the olfactory centers of Tungsten Memento or Bronze Freestyle?" Lina asked Crewe and the assembled Amber personnel.  Kowalska considered that 'smell it on you' might be a language issue, as well, with the alien's inserting smell for some other method of detection that simply didn't exist for humans.  Either way, the more they knew about the alien's ability to smell, the better, even if all the knew was that they needed to know more.

"It may not be literal." Durand joins in the conversation about the reference about the alien being able to smell whatever it was it was referring to. "It could be a reference to something. " He looks over at Dancer. "Paddon made a couple of references to being exposed to radiation, oui? At one point he said that the whole Squadron glowed in the dark or words to that effect. Say for sake of discussion these guys were exposed to some sort of alien radiation - or something like radiation - then maybe the aliens can detect that? The way that we would using a geiger counter."

"Oh, one other thing on the subject of Paddon. He claimed not to know anyone named Darnell Hawkins. Can we do some extra digging on that name, see if anything unusual comes up?"

Bannon juggles coffee, legal pad, and half-eaten pastry abomination as he makes notes.  "Run ex-Spetznaz dude's description through the usual databases and past our own pet commie.  Look at where the admiral might have been holding something of interest.  Ping the hundred-pound heads about alien olfactory acuity.  Background on Darnell Hawkins, whoever he is..  And check out the laundry service and its staffing practices - Jim, that one is probably worth running through the locals so they feel like we're keeping them in the loop.  And you guys will probably want to talk to the lawyer and the daughter once we've run the admiral's records."

He takes another bite and looks up.  "Thaff fll?  Sorry.  That's all?"

Caradoc waves his own partially-devoured ham and cheese biscuit for attention.  "The other two deaths that didn't look natural.  Buki and, uh," he thumbs through his tablet, "Stephanidis, the robbery.  We should look at whatever those police departments have on those investigations.  Jim, is that something you can get through your detective or will going outside her jurisdiction tip our hand too much?"
This message was last edited by the player at 23:55, Mon 07 Mar 2016.

"A few more cooks..." James lets the sentence trail off, but then thinks better of closing the door on the suggestion. "But then again, it might be lower profile if the local PD to made the inquiries than to put my name and credentials out there any more than they have been already."

The Field Agent and shooter looks around the room to gauge his other colleague's opinions on adding more hands to the heavy work of finding the E.T. cell and ending its senior citizen assassination operations.

-

Bannon hands off his tasking notes to his operations staff and busies himself with a quick phone call to Incirlik.  The rest of the team finishes their various breakfasts while kicking around the relative merits of involving local law enforcement versus further abusing James' credentials.  The discussion is winding down when an ill-tuned vehicle rattles to a halt outside.  A few moments later, the door swings open to admit Commander Steven Vest, Senior Chief (retired) Robert Paddon, Sergent-Chef Christophe Vidry, and two more French air commandos.

Vest - the only uniformed person in the hangar, aside from the KC-10's aircrew - is freshly-shaven and laundered, but he trails a cloud of fatigue from his sagging eyes and shoulders.  Paddon, looking much more relaxed and rested, inspects the Cave with a mingled air of interest and skepticism once he sets down an oversized pet carrier (the occasional resigned yowl emanates from within the container but Paddon seems unconcerned).  Once inside their colleagues' perimeter, the Frenchmen abandon their casual alertness to scavenge through the baked goods.

Vest extends his hand to James first.  "Special Agent Choi.  Good to see you again.  Chief," he adds, turning to Bannon.  He glances around the assembled Grey Cell.  "Good to finally meet the rest of you in person."

"Sir," Bannon replies.  "I've got Incirlik on the line."  He gestures toward the videoconference array positioned at one end of the table archipelago, where Group Captain Grant Mewes, White Cell's Major Flynn Bryant, and Doctor Sabah Boulos' images stare back from Turkey.  His demeanor subtly shifts to something more respectul and yet warier as he turns to Paddon.  "Chief, if we could get the briefing under way, please?"

"You know, I retired so I wouldn't have to learn PowerPoint," Paddon grumbles, but he takes a seat at the table nonetheless.  He fidgets with notepad, pen, and coffee mug for a few moments before he's satisfied with their arrangement.  Then he reaches down to unlatch the pet carrier and hoists an immense black-and-white cat into his lap.  It's familiar behavior to the students of human behavior among the team: a last few moments bought before launching into a difficult recitation.  Then he takes a deep breath, makes eye contact with the camera, and begins.  Karolina and Sébastien have heard the story before but it's new to the rest of the audience.

"I was posted to Observation Squadron Fifty-Four in the fall of 1958.  It was in the middle of the polar cruise on Skate.  When we made port in Norway, a couple of officers," he nods to Vest, "pulled me ashore and interviewed me.  They asked me if I would be willing to go TDY for about a year to work on an urgent experimental nuclear power program.  Wouldn't give me any more details but that wasn't surprising.  You've gotta understand, Skate was the first production nuke boat in the fleet.  Everything was experimental and classified.  At first, I thought this was some kind of elaborate counter-intelligence sting.  They said they were engineering officers but their knowledge base wasn't what it should have been."  He smiles grimly.  "I got pissed.  Loyalty testing wasn't American, you know?  When I called them on it, they apologized.  Told me the program was foreign technology exploitation.  That sounded pretty good - stick it to the Reds, right?  So I said I was in.

"The cover story for pulling me off the boat was appendicitis.  I didn't know I was reporting to a Naval Air squadron until I got to the squadron.  Our base was in Texas - NAS Corpus Christi.  Most of the engineering functions were there, as well as the," he hesitates, "specimens.  And the workshop.  We stood up a detachment in Pensacola in mid-'59 but that was only for supporting flight testing over the Gulf.

"On paper, my assignment was radiation safety.  I'd been to that school before coming aboard Skate so I thought I knew the job.  And I did - for Skate.  But the other nucs and I had to throw out the book for the squadron's operations."  His face twists in remembered grief.  "I'm ashamed to say we never got it entirely right.  We were working with stuff that human science still hasn't caught up with, as far as I know.  A lot of squadron alumni have died of cancer or," he hesitates again and waves a hand at his head, "just gone bugfuck.  I don't know why I haven't.  I was in it as deep as any of them except the flight crews.

"When I got to the squadron, the story they gave us was that we were working on reverse-engineering recovered Russian and Chinese technology.  No one believed that, not after we got our first looks at the specimens.  No one ever told us how the Navy got its hands on," he breaks contact with the camera to shoot a penetrating look at Vest, who flinches, "extraterrestrial spaceships.  But there were two partial sets of spaceframes and power and propulsion systems.  Fragments of a third spaceframe, too.  All related technology, as far as we could tell, but not the same design.  The fragments and one of the partials had obviously spent some time in the Pacific, probably off the West Coast.  There was a mustang in the squadron, former diver... he identified the barnacle species.  The fragments had been down a long time.  Probably about ten years for the partial.

"We started by disassembling the first ship.  We spent three months pulling it apart.  Some times, we had to invent the tools to do the work.  Or steal them."  He grins, taking a decade off his apparent age.  "The world's first industrial cutting laser was one we stole from Bell Labs.  They got the FBI involved because they thought Russian spies did it.  Someone had to hush up the investigation.

"It took another four or five months to rebuild the control systems.  A lot of them were missing and a lot more weren't ever meant for human use.  We had a couple of nasty radiation accidents.  I'm talking lead-lined coffins.  They'd had more before I got there.  They recruited me because the last radiation safety crew died shutting down the Finger.  They had to tear down a workshop and truck it all to Idaho for burial.

"We called the power cores the Finger and the Reaper.  They had inventory numbers that no one ever used.  The Finger was damaged, I think.  Less stable.  It looked like a little jade spindle, three inches long, an inch thick.  It had a crack along its long axis that would fluctuate in length.  It would get longer under stress.  Then it would heal itself if we left it in the vault for a week or two.  The Reaper was the same material but it was a faceted globe about the size of a baseball.

"Both of them were sensitive to your thoughts.  If you concentrated on one, it would become weightless, immune to gravity.  That was the party trick.  You needed the control systems for anything else.  I don't understand the neuroscience but the controller team came up with a way to plug them into a filtered EEG machine.  A human operator with good visualization skills and a way to enter REM sleep could generate a, a radius of antigravity effect.  Or could make them radiate, anything from gamma to high-frequency radio.  When they were radiating, they also generated was a continuous strong static at 575 megahertz. 

"The operators had to pass a bunch of psych screening and some other medical stuff I was never briefed on.  We lost about half of them anyway.  Catatonic, psychotic, schizophrenic.  I personally knew of at least a dozen.  A lot of the deaths are buried as flight training accidents.

"We started flight testing in May of fifty-nine.  I'm aware of a total of four experimental," he waggles airquotes, "'aircraft.'  They used the cores to superheat air for propulsion - effectively, a jury-rigged scramjet.  The first two killed their crews on the first flights.  The third and fourth sorta worked.  The trick was teamwork.  We had to use one pilot to activate the core's antigravity function, a second to superheat, and a third to actually fly the aircraft.  Then you needed a flight engineer or two and a navigator.

"We only flew at night, over the Gulf.  The order was that if we had to crash a ship, to crash it at sea.  Less chance of a Roswell.  There was always a salvage ship on standby somewhere on the Gulf Coast if we had to recover a wreck.  Probably a couple of subs, too.

"They sent me back to the fleet at the end of sixty-one.  Out-processing from the squadron took about two months.  A lot of interviews to transfer what I knew, a lot of security stuff.  I was under observation until the eighties and I still had annual interviews with ONI."  He nods toward Vest.  "They're the ones who encouraged all the squadron alumni to retire to Florida.  All the survivors.  Nice financial incentives.  Most of us didn't need a lot of additional persuasion.

"They never said 'alien.'  Didn't need to and I imagine most of the spooks were pretty awkward with that subject."  He smiles wryly.  "But they were rather adamant about validating anyone who came around asking about the squadron.  So I stalled until I could talk to your shop."  He points to Commander Vest.

He leans back in his chair and eviscerates a ham and cheese biscuit, shredding the contents on a paper towel for the cat.  "That's the short version.  I imagine you have some more questions."

As the Chief spoke about the control systems and the operators that had been lost, Lina's mind thought back to links to the first mission.  She parsed the operation, trying to find something that might have triggered the alien's current mission.  She glanced down a her laptop, looking through the files.  After a moment of reflection, Kowalska spoke.

"MOORETON SWALLOW."  It wasn't a question, as much as a statement.  "Chief, it sounds like the control system that your unit created was as much a kludge as anything.  On our first operation, we recovered embedded alien technology from one of the specimens.  I don't think we've ever had much luck figuring out what it's used for," Karolina looked up at the video array to see if any of the support teams had any better ideas about the device.

"If it's related to controlling the alien technology, that might offer some explanation as to why your cohort are being attacked."  Lina briefly considered STAPLETON TURKEY as a possible candidate as well, but the time line didn't match up.  The most likely explanation was something Grey Cell had encountered or done in Libya.
This message was last edited by the player at 10:59, Sun 13 Mar 2016.

"It could also be something to do with the items that we recovered in Australia."  Durand had listened in silence to the Chief's revelations, now its forward, quite literally on the edge of his seat.  "Perhaps they are concerned that we have obtained something that would allow us to more effectively control these..." the Frenchman hesitates, for aircraft did not seem to the most appropriate word "...aircraft." He can't immediately think of a better one

"And so they are trying to neutralise those who may be able to use it - or at least advise others on how to use it." After all, Durand thought it unlikely that the Chief would be taking to the skies in an alien spacecraft again, but he clearly had the knowledge, and if that could be combined with the correct technology rather than some reverse engineered jury rigged solutions then it was possible that younger men could do the actual testing.

Which leads on to another question. "You've told us that you left the Squadron in Nineteen Sixty One Chief. Was the testing still going on when you left? And do you know what happened to the aircraft? Where they are now?" Durand's eyes flick back and forth between Paddon and Vest, the questions clearly addressed to both of them.

Hannah had started the meeting with a rather casual, if professional, demeanor.  She was nursing a tall travel mug full of black coffee and had only one bite left of one of the glazed fat pills that had been brought in.

But, the auburn-haired army pilot was sitting up straight and watching the elderly nuclear technician very closely when it became apparent that he'd had at least as much, if not a helluva a lot more, experience with alien technology than they had.  He'd actually worked on and used an extra-terrestrial propulsion drive; it took a few moment for that statement to settle in.

And it took a few more moments for the ramifications, political, technological, and social to further set in.  "Wow." is all that she could manage for a moment; talk about being one with your machine.  The others seemed to take the information dump much more in stride, but Hannah couldn't help it.  It just seemed so ... alien.

"Chief," she addressed Paddon more directly than the others with their personal musings.  Though Omdahl waited her turn, of course, as her question was much less technical (and she was interested in the answers to the questions about where and what capabilities the hybrid craft had) and a touch more personal, "of the three stations required to fly the craft, which did you have the most experience?  What sort of tests did you and your crew run?  I mean, how fast did you guys go?"  Double Down couldn't help but be curious as to whether he was power, plasma, or avionics and control - and whether that was by choice or not.  Her questions seemed to stem from both professional and personal curiosity.

And personally, Hannah really wanted to ask the man about purple-ish glows, as well.  But that could probably wait for a bit.

The data pours into Dacovetti's mind, each little piece breaking into several more questions, a fractal tree of knowledge and ignorance assembling into a random, if not beautiful, mental structure of 'what-ifs" and "holy shits."  That the government, or governments, have known about these intruders for decades doesn't come as a total shock, Michael does subscribe to the theory of total panic should the public ever find out about aliens in a less than complete manner, he is shocked that the secret has been so well maintained, that anyone leaking information has been so effectively labeled a kook or crazy.  There are questions he wants to ask that seem to have no bearing on the briefing other than trying to satisfy the teenager that still lives somewhere in the meat space between his ears, but instead, he tries to focus on the main points, understanding that they might be far enough out anyway.

"The alien craft that were recovered, is there any indication that they operated under the same flying conditions and technologies that your craft did, or did you bootstrap up a work around based on what you understood at the time."  Dacovetti pauses, tucks his empty styrofoam cup under one of the legs of his chair, then tries again.  "I guess, do there ships work the same as our ships? "  It is a surprisingly clear question from the tech nerd department.  "Did any of them show any apparent capacity for long range, as in interstellar, travel, or are we missing their base-slash-mothership?"

So many more question tumble through the airman's mind, the windows to a different future suddenly blown open.  Technologies to travel the stars are actually, possibly, in human hands.  The means to escape from a tiny little fragile existence on this tiny little blue speck.  If, the big if, they can get there shit together and deal with a possible alien invasion.  That extra bit of detail almost derails his enthusiasm, but not quite.  He's practically vibrating in his seat, and it isn't the coffee.

The question he doesn't ask, the one he most wants to, follows directly on the heel of Seb's last inquiry.  How long before I can get my grubby little hands on your stash, along with Crit, Jeannette, and the rest of the Green Cell?

Crad stares meditatively at the guano-spattered beams holding up the hangar's roof.  "It's more accurate to say 'implanted' than 'embedded,' Captain," he muses to Karolina.  His eyes grow hungry.  "Chief, you said 'specimens.'  Did the squadron have access to any remains of the, uh, original crews?"  The addendum Or any captives hangs in the air over the table.
This message was last updated by the player at 22:46, Tue 15 Mar 2016.

On the satellite link, Mewes leans toward his camera.  "Senior Chief, I'm Group Captain Mewes, RAF.  I'm the commander of Task Force Forty-Seven.  Please allow me to open by thanking you for your work and your willingness to speak to us.  I know this can't be an easy conversation after so long."  He gestures toward the camera.  "Bearing that in mind, I believe Grey Cell is covering most of my own questions.  The only thing I'll add at this time is that yours is the first concrete testimony we've received regarding any prior official contact with our visitors or their technology.  Since we became aware of them, we've been assembling evidence of other recent encounters but the picture is still very incomplete.  Your government is compartmentalizing this information very tightly and I believe it's taken the deaths of several of your former colleagues to convince them to bring us into this far into the fold.  Please understand that I am not exaggerating when I say that any detail you can share with us, no matter how trivial, may make the difference between life and death for my people."  He sits back, arms folded in a rare display of simmering frustration. 

Vest blinks heavily and clears his throat.  "Group Commander, with respect, I'm the Pentagon's liaison to your task force and I'm not certain all the compartments are open to me.  Though I believe you've been trying to work through the Air Force.  Am I right?"

"Correct," Mewes replies.

Bannon leans over to Michael and, sotto voce and shielded from the camera, drawls, "Well, thar's yer problem."

Vest misses or ignores the aside.  "Sir, I think you'll have better results if you work through me in the future."  He smiles slightly, without apparent humor.  "I am authorized to state, on the record, that the U.S. Air Force - present company and other task force personnel excepted - is not cleared for any U.S. Navy program related to the subject under discussion."

Mewes exchanges a weighted glance with Major Bryant, and his eyes seem to seek out Bannon's in the screen.  "Thank you, Commander.  I'll take that under advisement.  Senior Chief, my apologies for the digression."

Paddon gazes thoughtfully at Vest and strokes his cat, then transfers his gaze to the camera.  "No problem, Sir.  I'm not surprised to hear the Chair Force isn't cleared for this.  Most of you weren't born at the time but consider the political environment we were working in.  Anything nuclear or space-related was a reason for some pretty bloody infighting between the services.

"Someone mind getting me a refill?  I'm under a cat here."

Caradoc, clearly the junior man in the room (as usual), rises with a suppressed sigh and takes Paddon's proffered cup.

"Thanks, Doc."  Paddon's fingertip scrolls down his notepad.  "Okay.  Timeline.  I don't officially know what happened after I got out.  Unofficially, over the course of my career, I ran into a few guys who'd been in when I left.  They were all out of the squadron by the end of '63.  We didn't talk about activities after I left but I got the feeling the operation was shut down at that time.  The commander probably has more complete data."

"Not as complete as I'd like."  Vest scratches his temple.  "My office is still in the records reconstruction business too and a lot of the information from that era was never committed to databases.  The only complete records I've been able to find are the Veterans' Administration medical records and they line up with your timeline.  All assignments to VO54 ended on December 10, 1963.  Which, probably not coincidentally, is the day the Air Force officially canceled its Dyna-Soar program.  There's a story there but I don't have it yet."  He grimaces in frustration.

Paddon nods and turns to Hannah.  "Miss, I was never a zipper-suited sun god."  He grins at her.  "I worked the most on the flight engineer's instrumentation.  After that, I was concerned with the guy in the superheater chair.  During test flights, I was in Mission Control monitoring telemetry from one of those stations or the reactor itself.

"Top speed was limited by the technology we had to work with.  We were competing with Oxcart for titanium and we didn't have computer modeling for aerodynamics.  The best speed I ever saw was Mach 3.6 and that was about two minutes before a catastrophic airframe failure.

"When I say 'specimens,' I mean the hardware.  Sorry, Doc.  No alien autopsies.  Though from the one intact crew station... let's just say I think there's some substance behind the movies.  Child-sized and more or less humanoid is my guess.

"The propulsion and controls were the most frustrating part.  There wasn't anything we'd recognize as an engine, just a bunch of solid-state crap around the place where the power core went.  No flight control surfaces, no intake, no exhaust.  There was a bunch of stuff that I think was life support but that was not my department."  His eyes grow distant.  "No shit, we broke at least two physicists while I was there.  One catatonic, the other psychotic.  Don't know where they wound up.  And the lab accident that killed the last radiation safety team... I didn't have the words at the time.  Now, I think the technobabble you'd want is 'gravitational anomaly.'"  He stares at Michael.  "Something flung the lab equipment at one end of the Finger straight forward.  Along with one guy's hand.  At about forty to fifty G's acceleration."

We're not just looking at gravitational distortion then, Michael's mind whispers to him, we're looking at something that can counter act 50Gs of acceleration, something ensuring material or flesh isn't ripped apart in the process. Unless one were unlucky enough to be caught in the path of a hypersonic object.  The airman's brain attempt, briefly, to calculate what space travel would look like at a sustained acceleration rate of 50Gs, to calculate how long it would take to get up to light speed before giving up the exercise as strictly theoretical.  Even at the speed of light their adversaries would be taking centuries, if not millennia, to arrive on earth.  Clearly they were breaking other long treasured physical constants in human physics.

"Can you tell us what the others were working on? Prior to murdering the Admiral, his attacker stated that he could sense, or smell to be exact, the presence of alien technology on him.  Any idea why?"  Dacovetti leans back in his chair, considers the abuse that his branch of service has taken in the briefing so far, and grins.  The TACPs have never been what you would call "enraptured" with the regular Air Force, sharing some of the disdain their brethren in the other services throw the wing wipers way, but he still bleed Air Force blue.  He turns his attention to Vest.

"Sir, I don't mean to imply that you haven't reached out, but where in the Pentagon is the Air Force presence for this information?  If the turf wars were as bad as the Senior Chief is implying and you're confirming, then they probably have more pieces of this puzzle locked away somewhere also.  Maybe even personnel that we need to identify for possible protection from alien threat.  I don't want to say Area 51, but, you know..." he lets the thought trail off into the silence of the room.

When Paddon stops talking Durand glances down at the handwritten notes that cover the yellow legal pad on his lap, different parts either underlined or circled, including the first thing he wrote down, even before the Chief had started talking. He's hiding something??? The 'he' in question is Mewes, sitting thousands of miles away in Turkey. Something about the RAF officer's manner and demeanour has raised a red flag with the Frenchman, makes him think that the Englishman is keeping something from the others, although what that may be is another matter altogether.  That was not a subject for this meeting although he fully intended to follow up on that later with the others.

A momentary flash of anger goes through Durand's mind. Why the fuck does everyone seem to think that it is a good idea to send us into the field with half of the fucking information? The Frenchman knows all about compartmentalisation, the need to know, but they were the guys putting their necks on the line. Mind you, it seemed that the American Navy did not trust the American Air Force either.

"So everything got closed down at the end of 1963. Allegedly." Durand looks up from his notepad. The word dynosoar is circled and followed by several question marks. "That's a couple of years after the first manned space flights. Could that be linked?" He shrugs."And if the American Air Force and Navy are keeping things from each other who else is involved? The CIA? NASA?" Not to mention the Russians, the British, the French...
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 19:28, Fri 18 Mar 2016.

Paddon's eyes widen at Michael's revelation.  "The admiral," he says slowly, "was one of the test pilots on Thing Three and Thing Four.  He's the only one I know of who survived and made flag rank.  If anyone would have been in a position to keep working on the project after the squadron shut down... or..." he hesitates.

"Or to have kept some of the research material??" Mewes asks.

Vest visibly suppresses a snap reaction, reconsiders, and emits a pained noise.  "Shit.  It is possible.  Admiral Frye consulted for a lot of defense contractors after he retired and he traveled out of the country more than we liked.  It wouldn't have been impossible for him to hide a small private project."  He turns to Michael.  "Sergeant, the Air Force lockout predates my own office's creation.  We were stood up during the Clinton administration.  Part of the in-brief for us is a standing order dating to 1957.  It's never been rescinded.  So I don't know what, if anything, the Air Force has on this."

"As the chief alluded to, 1963 is also when the SR-71 was in flight testing as the A-12," Mewes puts in.  "I won't say there's, ah, alien technology in the Blackbird - quite the contrary - but it's another piece of aerospace history in which the CIA was involved."  He frowns.  "If I recall, Dyna-Soar was an early spaceplane concept.  Among other things, it was designed as a space interceptor."

"If I may, sirs," Bannon puts in, "we're getting away from the current operation.  My people are developing some intel based on the senior chief's debrief and this discussion but we still have a bunch of alien motherfuckers out there killing our former sailors."

Lina threw enough shade at Mewes, after his disclaimer-cum-introduction, to shelter a small village in the Sahara.  She thought better of challenging the senior officer in this forum though and after a few seconds, returned her interest to the briefing at hand.  As she did so, she wondered if the whole of the United States Government operated this way - fragmented and with little coordination, each Department, Agency, and Branch a stove pipe of horded information and projects.

"Perhaps there's a parallel program and aliens are killing Air Force test personnel over whatever projects they had going on," Lina proffered, taking a dig at the concept of interservice rivalry while obliquely suggesting that the alien's may have a target list larger than Observation Squadron Fifty-Four.

"In any event, I think the Chief is correct," Lina said.  "Not you Chief, the other Chief," motioning between Bannon and Paddon to make sure that everyone knew she meant Bannon.  Karolina took a moment to suppress unkind thoughts about US ranks and DOD branch coordination.

"Chief, is there anything we might need to know that will help us save Ceelen, Hawkins, and Herrera?"  The Pole shifted two fingers to show she meant Paddon now.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:59, Tue 22 Mar 2016.

Paddon adds a few wrinkles to his forehead.  "Lieutenant Ceelen was my immediate CO for the last bit of my assignment to the squadron.  He was in charge of all the flight telemetry.  If he remembers any of it, he's probably your best source of actual technical data.  Smart guy.  Coulda been a nuc but he was a claustrophobe.

"Herrera's name is familiar but I can't place him.  Hawkins is still a blank.  What were their ratings?"

"Herrera was an AW," Vest supplies.  "Uh, Aviation Warfare Systems Operator at the time," he elaborates for the rest of the room.  "He was a sensor operator on S-2s and S-3s.  Hawkins is listed as a cryppie."

"Huh."  Paddon cocks his head in thought.  "We didn't have any reason for ASW but Herrera might have jumped ratings.  Someone like that is going to be another twidget.  He might have flown on Thing Four as the navigator's assistant.  The radar set on that bird was a little," he waggles a hand, "eh.  Needy."

"Hawkins... sorry, folks, I have nothing.  We had a counter-intelligence group attached to us but that doesn't fit."