20, Jeep

“Doc says that the mother ship acts like a temporal displacer so time slows down for the smaller battle cruisers who come and go from her space docks.”  Master Thief Owens was all smiles in the back seat as the Jeep bounced violently down the washed out dirt road.  

“Well Doc is an idiot surrounded by idiots,” snapped special agent Mikayla Doniak.  “He drinks more booze than any five alcoholics combined and he thinks that leprechauns are real.  Take what Doc says with a grain of salt.”

Pilot Porter stomped on the gas and yanked the steering wheel hard to avoid a large rock that was jutting out of the road.  As per usual, she was very chipper.  “I used to not think that leprechauns were real, but I changed my tune when I watched Doc play poker against them.  They swear a lot and they love cheap Turkish cigarettes.  They’ll trade damn near anything for any form of tobacco.”

“Really?” Doniak asked with a sarcastic tone.

“They love vaping.  Can’t get enough.”  Porter smiled and said, “they’re talented.  Don’t discount them!”

“Stunning.  Little Irish magic men and aliens.  What have I gotten myself into?”

Owens shrugged and said, “The mother ship slows down time, and I want to be the first person to break into it.  I’ll spend an hour exploring it while it’s like you guys out here live thirty years or something.”

Mikayla Doniak had seen weird things since joining this team of international special agents that had amazed her, but her bullshit detector wasn’t having any of this conversation.  “There is no such fucking thing as a mother alien ship, and bending time is impossible.”

Owens looked disappointedly at his friend.  “Suit yourself,” he said defeatedly.

The Jeep drive was awful.  The suspension in the vehicle was in drastic need of repair and the road was more like a dried river bed.  Porter didn’t slow down for anything.  Owens and Porter seemed to be giving Doniak the silent treatment.  The African heat beat unrelentingly down on them.

“Oh, so I tell you that UFO’s aren’t real and now you two aren’t talking to me?”  Doniak was indignant.

Owens was polite, but his enthusiasm was gone.  “No, it’s not that.  It’s simply no good to talk about quantum time displacement with you if you’re not even aware that your government is hiding the wreckage of an advanced alien spaceship from all of us.”

Porter chipped in very matter of factly.  “Half of the ship is in New Mexico, and the other half is buried under Las Vegas.”  Porter grinned.  “Dirty Vegas, to be exact.”

Doniak rolled her eyes.  The view from the passenger seat of her Jeep was incredible.  Zimbabwe was a country of immense landscapes.  Not far from the road, Elephants sauntered leisurely.   

“Even though the government has kept the secret from the public at large, they’ve still never been able to access the inside of the ship.  The exterior is made of an alloy that our saws can’t even scratch, let alone cut open.”

Porter stomped on the breaks and turned hard to avoid a massive pot hole, then chimed in.  “Doc says that the mother ship in New Mexico is protected by snipers that live in the desert and eat scorpions.”

“They’re trained by the Mexican military.  I’ve seen the footage,” Owens added.

Doniak reached her tipping point.  “Give me a fucking break!  Why in the fuck would a handful of government employees hide an alien crash site from the rest of us, and how in the hell would you keep something of that mind blowing magnitude a secret?”  The Jeep engine was loud as it roared along, but Doniak’s voice carried perfectly.  “Doc is delusional and you two need to use your brains!  Let me guess, next up you’re gonna tell me that the moon landing was a hoax?”

Owens crinkled his brow.  “Woah, wait?  What?  You think the moon landing was a hoax?”

Porter pitched in.  “Which one?  The first one?  Or all of the subsequent landings after that?”

Doniak was frustrated, but all she could get out was a very loud, “Dammit!”

“Mickey, the moon landings happened, they were real, and vaccines are real, and science is a process of elimination to try and learn what is real and what isn’t by observing data…”

Mikayla Doniak let out a huge scream of frustration.  “Are you shitting me?!?  You know that the moon landing’s were real but you honestly think that there’s an alien ship that’s wrecked on Earth?”

Owens nodded matter of factly.  “Damn straight, the moon landings were real.  Jesus, Mickey.”

“Where’s your proof?” Doniak spurted.

“Where do you want to start?  Should we start with the thousands of pictures and hours of video footage that the original astronauts shot?” asked Owens.

Porter added her two cents.  “Even the Russian state run media was critical of their own government that the USA beat Russia to the moon.  Do you honestly think that the Russians were a part of a larger cover up or something?”

“No, dammit!  I’m not talking about the moon landings!  Yes, they were real!  I’m talking about your stupid alien ship.  Where’s the proof?”

“Ah, there’s where the rubber meets the road!”  Porter was her normal chipper self.  “Take it from me.  I can fly anywhere on this planet without being detected, but I can’t fly over the bad lands of New Mexico without getting air warnings that I’m in missile training air space.  They threaten to shoot me down unless I specifically avoid flying over that one area of New Mexico.”

Porter looked deeply into Doniak’s eyes and smiled widely.  She kept the eye contact for far too long, considering her eyes should’ve been on the road.  The Jeep flew down the dirt path and bounced randomly when it hit bumps, but Porter never broke eye contact.

“Um, Porter, don’t you think you should pay attention to where you’re driving?”

Porter smiled even wider.  “No!  I’m good!”  Without looking, she yanked the wheel to the left, then straightened the car out, all without ever taking her eyes off of Doniak.  “I know where they do their missile tests, and it’s not there.  So the only explanation is, they’re hiding something big.  Really big.”

Finally, Porter went back to paying attention to where she was driving.  A few seconds later, the car started pulling hard to the right.  “Dammit, we got a flat,” Porter announced.  She pulled the rig over and jumped out.  

Owens jumped out from the back seat, grabbed a jack and started lifting the tire.  “Rear driver side tire.  Looks like a pretty good sized thorn, Porter.”

“No biggie!” Porter replied.  She was grabbing a flat repair kit from under her seat.  Within a few minutes, they had the tire off and were plugging it with a rubber patch string.  Porter went back to chatting leisurely about the alien mother ship theory.  “But I’m serious, Mickey, I have friends in the aerospace defense sector and they all agree, there’s never been one missile test over the bad lands of New Mexico.  Ever.”  

Owens pitched in.  “Not to mention, there are all sorts of magnetic anomalies that occur in that area too, so you can’t always trust your instruments.”

Doniak had gone from annoyed, to angry, and had now transcended to genuine curiosity.  “So let me get this straight, the instrument anomalies aren’t from any natural mineral deposits or strange geologic formations, but rather they’re from a space ship.”

Owens nodded.  “Yup.”

“From space.”

“Yup, that’s what space ship means.  A ship from the cold, unforgiving nothingness of space.  Uh huh.”

Doniak smiled and continued.  “And this ship crash landed on Earth.”

Owens shook his head in disagreement.  “Nope, it didn’t crash land.  It split up into two large pieces in the middle atmosphere and crashed in two places.  The strongest piece landed in New Mexico.”

Porter chimed in.  “And the weaker piece landed outside of a small mining town called Las Vegas in the 1920’s and got buried, sand storm after sand storm.  The construction boom of the 1970’s and 80’s built right over the wreckage.  The only reason humans ever found the wreckage at all was because ground penetrating radar was invented.”

Doniak helped the two of them get the tire back onto the bolts as Porter began tightening the nuts to secure the tire to the rig.  She had them.  “So this space ship, that is made of an alloy that’s so strong that we can’t cut into it…”

Owens interrupted, “it’s so hard, we can’t even scratch it.”

“Right, right, we can’t even scratch it.”  Doniak composed herself, “it’s that strong, but yet it’s weak enough to break into two pieces as it flies through our atmosphere.”

Both Owens and Porter took a second and looked at each other.  Neither of them said it, but they looked at each other like each was saying, “are you gonna tell her?”

“It’s impossibly strong and can survive an impact with the ground, but it breaks up when it hits… the air?”  Doniak stood back and let the cognitive dissonance do the rest.  “You see, the story has no legs to stand on.”

The Jeep roared to life again and took off as Owens explained the wreck.  “The ship broke into two pieces in the place where the organic growth plate was.  You see, the ship is half alive, half metal.  It can grow, then solidify.  The growth plate was like a hard wax, but when the ship broke in half, it died and crusted over.  Now we can’t get in.”

Doniak was so frustrated that all she could say was, “fair enough.”

“I’m gonna break into that ship someday,” said Owens.

“And if humans can revive it, I’m gonna fly it,” added Porter.

Doniak didn’t bring up the subject further.  They were still one hour away from their destination, and the Zimbabwe roads weren’t quite up to the standards of much of the developed world.  The three of them were on a wild goose chase to find the lock box that went with a key they had.  They had no clue what the lock box contained, if anything, and they didn’t have a plan as for what to do next.  It was an adventure, Doniak had said yes, but with every bump on the hot African dirt road, she was questioning why she ever agreed to go on this trip in the first place.  

“Well,” Mikayla Doniak said sheepishly, “I hope you two can find the ship, break in, and do whatever it is you do in an alien space craft.”  

“Thanks, Mickey.  That means a lot,” Owens admitted.  “Hey Porter, if you ever get to fly that ship, what would your plan be?”

“Oh, dang!” Porter shouted with glee.  She yanked the steering wheel hard again as the Jeep went up onto two wheels.  It landed back down on all fours and she hit the gas.  “I mean, ideally I fly us to the next star system, then beyond, you know?  I’d want to decorate the cockpit to make me feel like I was home.  I’d start with the water color painting of the Irish seaside.  Remember the one that our leprechaun artist friend painted for me back a few years ago?”

Owens smiled and said, “that’s a nice piece,” before Doniak could protest at the absurdity of leprechauns actually existing.

“Thanks Owens.  I still have the lucky gold coin from beating him in that pipe smoking contest too.”

Doniak rolled her eyes and tried not let the bumpy road take away her spirits.  

In the distance, a private plane was landing in rural Zimbabwe with a woman who wanted to see if her lock box had been emptied of its incredibly rare contents.