Star Trek: The Rings of Time by Greg Cox Read Free Book Online

could smell the rubber soles of her sneakers heating up from the friction. “Say, Skipper, at the risk of pushing my luck, do you mind if I ask you some questions about your illustrious career—including your stint at Area 51?”
    Oh, boy, he thought, going on alert. Here it comes . He’d been expecting this; it was a wonder that she had waited so long to bring it up. Probably wanted to ingratiate herself first.
    “That’s classified, and you know it.”
    “Even after all these years? C’mon, Skipper. Throw me a bone. What else are we going to talk about the next umpteen million miles?”
    “There’s not much to tell,” he lied. “If you must know, yes, I was assigned to the Groom Lake Facility, popularly known as Area 51, for a brief time back in the nineties, where I helped test experimental aircraft that I can’t really talk about. Not exactly the stuff of tabloid headlines.”
    That wasn’t the whole story, of course. In fact, he had been assigned to the development and construction of the DY-100, an experimental “sleeper ship” employing advanced technology reverse-engineered from a crashed “Ferengi” spacecraft recovered in Roswell back in 1947. If all had gone well, Shaun might have piloted the DY-100 on its maiden voyage, but the prototype had mysteriously vanished in 1996 under circumstances that puzzled him to this day. His friend and colleague, Shannon O’Donnell, had taken the fall for the loss of the DY-100, effectively ending her NASA career, but he’d always suspected that there was more to the story than she had ever let on. Last he’d heard, she had been involved with the Millennium Gate project in Indiana, and the DY-100 project had been tabled indefinitely. Maybe they’ll take those diagrams out of mothballs someday, he thought, if we pull this Saturn jaunt off without any more hitches.
    He liked to think so.
    “Why am I not buying this?” Zoe asked aloud. “You must have some good dirt from those days.”
    “Sorry.” He tried to wave it off as if it was no big deal. “Believe me, Area 51 was not nearly as interestingas the TV specials and conspiracy theorists make out.”
    “No alien autopsies or captured spaceships?”
    “‘Fraid not.” He tried to change the subject. “Although my dad sighted a UFO once, back in the sixties.”
    “Really?” Zoe sounded intrigued. “How did I miss that?”
    “Well, there’s not much to the story.” Shaun fingered the dog tags around his neck. “The Air Force picked up a UFO on radar and sent my dad up in a fighter jet to check it out. He thought he glimpsed something in the sky over Omaha, but then it was gone in a blink. To be honest, he’s still not sure whether he really saw something or not.”
    “What do you think?” Zoe asked.
    “Who knows? It could have been a visiting space-craft.”
    As a kid, he had asked his dad to tell him about that UFO sighting over and over again; hell, it had probably helped inspire his lifelong interest in space travel. And his tour of duty at Area 51, years later, had certainly left Shaun open to the prospect of intelligent life from other worlds. He wasn’t about to dismiss what his dad had seen, however briefly, as just a trick of the light.
    “Look at us,” he said, gesturing around at the cramped interior of the Lewis & Clark, which had been named after two legendary explorers. “We’re heading into space to see what—and who—might be out there. I have to imagine that other intelligent species are just as curious.”He chuckled, just so she wouldn’t think he was too much of a UFO nut. “Not that I’m expecting to run into any little green men on this mission.”
    “Or any sexy green girls?”
    “Sadly, no,” Shaun said. “But I like the way your mind works.” He saw another way to divert the conversation away from Area 51. “I’ve been reading some of your blogs, by the way. NASA transmitted them to me—as part of their background check. It seems you have something of a