My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Read Online Free PDF

set in a protuberance just behind the point where the wings attached. Otherwise, there was no evidence of any windows. Small lumps and pieces of equipment broke the lines of the hull at regular intervals and hung from those wings. I couldn’t tell what they were, but the way they were positioned made me think of weapons. That ship made my skin crawl. Unless Washington was keeping even bigger secrets than usual, Danny Troy had just met the invaders from outer space.



Chapter 3
    I f I don’t remember a great deal of my first impression of the base, it’s probably because I was in a state of shock. The part of my brain that was functioning was tied up trying to provide an explanation of what I was seeing—any explanation other than that Angel’s psychosis had merged with reality. The one point that gave me hope, even after seeing the ship and hearing the language, was that for little green men these people looked human. When the guard flipped his visor up after jumping onto the Jeep, I saw a face that would have been at home on the streets of New York. The one other figure I saw outside looked equally human. When I mentioned it to Angel, he corrected me slightly.
    “They’re the same as us, best I can tell,” he said, “but they call themselves Srihani. They call us Srihani, too.”
    A rose by any other name, I thought.
    My mind wasn’t focusing too well just then, but I remember wondering how all of this had been concealed. Granted, the entire base appeared to have been skillfully dug in, but there were dirt tracks indicating traffic along the canyon floor, and there were entrances into the opposite cliff wall. The air force, I had read, had satellites that could read license plates from orbit. Sooner or later, it would seem, they would notice that something was going on in the Dakota badlands. Either that, or someone would fly over the little canyon and wonder about roads in a blocked off canyon, miles from anywhere. Even if no one was ever curious enough to investigate, how did they bring that ship up and down without lighting up every radar screen from Vandenberg to Washington? The answer to the first question, Angel told me, was a variation on the device that had fooled me into thinking the tunnel entrance was solid rock. The virtual imager was worthless against the scanning devices the Srihani had, but it was adequate to hide the base from Earth technology, as long as there were no large artifacts out on the canyon floor. Other devices kept the ship off NORAD’s screens when it took off and landed. If they landed late at night, the risk of a visual sighting would be negligible.
    Angel drove the Jeep up to one of the entrances. Seen up close, it was an archway chopped into the side of the cliff, with a metal door set at the rear of the opening, where it was hidden from above. Angel got out of the Jeep there, in response to a comment from the guard, and motioned for me to do the same. He walked up to the door and put his hand on a small metal plate that was set into the rock next to the door. Quietly, the door slid open and Angel walked in. I followed him. (What else was I going to do?) Judging from the width of the track set into the stone, it would have taken an antitank missile to breach that door.
    The space inside must have been made in the same way as the tunnel, a polished semicircular arch with no decoration at all. Here there was light, from a row of glowing strips that ran along the highest point of the arch. There were a pair of benches set into the wall. Angel sat down on one; I took the other.
    “Well, Danny, what do you think now?” he asked.
    “I think I had one drink too many in Cleveland. Is it possible to still be drunk two days after your last drink?”
    “Not that I’ve ever heard.” He smiled thinly.
    “All right,” I said, “I believe in your base. What happens now?”
    “We wait. Just a little bit, I hope, until they let Carvalho know I’ve brought someone back with me. Carvalho