Adventures of the Cosmic Woman

Chapter Ten

Vincent Caver, the CIA-appointed Operations Manager at Pine Gap, broke into a sweat within twenty paces of the door as he walked Infield out onto the fake lawn behind the smaller buildings near the back of the vast lot.

'Well,' he said as he checked his phone. 'They're running tests.'

Infield snorted. She kicked at the AstroTurf, trying to find the edges of the sheets. The heat bore down hard. Infield was aware of it, but not uncomfortable. She didn't want or need to change out of her woolen tracksuit. Caver fiddled around with his phone while she breathed arid air and looked at the cold, artificial facility just plonked in the middle of an endless wilderness. Rocky outcroppings watched over them from a distance with memories of time immemorial. The howl of a distant wind whispered from across the plains.

'We might conduct our tests out here from now on,' he said as he wiped his brow with a handkerchief. His glasses had beads of sweat on the lenses. 'I don't usually come out here during the day.'

'I can tell.'

'Thanks,' he said as he gave her a sideways smile through his salt and pepper goatee, the only hair on his whole head. 'You're not so bad. I wish you'd cooperate, is all.'

'This is as new to me as it...'

'... is to us. Yeah, I know.'

'Well then what is this?'

Caver put his hands. The sweat darkened the sides of his black blazer. 'We're desperate. That's what this is.'

Infield looked out into the desolate silence of red rock and dust. He pronounced nuclear "nuke-uler".

'At least your daughter's safe out here. We're all safe if anything does...' he waved his hand as though the idea was too grim to articulate.

'I'm trying.'

Caver sighed. 'I know you are. Listen, take a break out here. You want anything? Coffee or anything? I'll have it brought out to you.'

'You're not going to let me back in there are you?' she half smiled.

'Not... not right now, no.'

'Okay.'

'Just don't run off, will you please? Work with us here.'

'I'm trying.'

'I know you are,' he sighed. Touched his phone. Nudged the fake grass with the side of his shoe. Then muttered something and went back in through the little door in the side of the featureless white building and Infield was alone in the endless silence.

She walked off the AstroTurf and out over the loose sands that grabbed at her feet with each step. Infield found herself floating. It made walking easier. With a chuckle at the dreamlike new power, she hovered right out to the perimeter fence. Then she looked back at the facility. Then she looked out into the static sea of hot rocks and dust and dead looking foliage that wound up like ghoulish talons fossilized mid-grasp.

They won't notice.

Doctor Darrian Infield shot off into the sky. Up and up. Until Pine Gap was a tiny, unnatural formation among an endless sea of jagged red rocks and sand and petrified foliage. The inversion layer gave her a blast of super-fresh air and she squealed with delight. Infield leveled out and started off in a random direction. At a steady pace. The wispy clouds gave a tingling current of electricity that felt nice all over so she floated to savor it. Pine Gap was soon gone from her view.

Below her were no towns, no settlements, no villages.

Not even any mines.

She'd seen evidence of the mines on their flight over. Huge gouges ripped up from the land and abandoned. Just left there. Land that had existed as it was for untold millennia. Looked at by who knows how many generations and left alone. And then coal or uranium or whatever was found. Just like that, destruction. Because something valuable might be buried in there.