Starcosmo

Chapter 5: Astra

Two weeks later

Pyramid Lake Wilderness

Nevada

“Why is it so fucking cold?”

In the middle of the Nevada desert, Chaz Little was out of his element.

It was approximately 38 degrees and he could see his own breath steaming out from between his teeth. Despite thick wool gloves and a thick ceramic mug of coffee, his fingers were freezing.

“Quit the bitchin,” Wan Okazaki was wrestling with a large black suitcase-like object, grunting with effort. “You could help me instead.” Grunt. “A little exertion’d warm you right up.”

Chaz gingerly set his coffee mug on the hood of the Xplora and trundled over. His friend was right, but he was reticent to uncoil his limbs from their tight wrap around his core. Chaz was used to the 90+ degree days and 80% humidity of the Inland Empire of Central California, not this high-desert ice-box they’d found at nearly 4,000 feet.

Still, the view was almost worth it. Almost.

The stars were magnificent, brilliant and ice-bright, hanging in the sky like suspended diamonds. There was no moon, so the nearby ridge of mountains was bathed entirely in the soft light of the stars. This was the Pyramid Lake wilderness area of northern Nevada, and it was a bleak and blasted moonscape of emptiness if Chaz had ever seen one. So what were they doing out here?

Spying. They were out here to spy on the government.

Chaz had been reluctant to come along on – “field work”, Okazaki called it. He was much more comfortable in his climate-controlled apartment, lassoing the latest rumors and blurry photographs, piecing together the most giant jigsaw puzzle that ever existed – the puzzle that would, when finally assembled, prove once and for all that the United States Government was harboring illegal aliens. Not the cross-border kind; the extra-terrestrial variety.

Chaz ran an online blog and bulletin board called Truth Above Rumors; it had over 30,000 followers and 1.2 million monthly unique visitors. He had 12,000 active forum posters and received about 500 individual emails a day – some with questions, props, or asking for advice, but about 20 of which were the straight shit – direct evidence of extraterrestrial life, in the form of photographs, snippets of recorded audio, or first- or second-hand accounts from somebody’s brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandfather, memoirs, diaries, unpublished newspaper articles, leaked memos, briefing documents, redacted budgets, Freedom of Information Act Requests, you name it. Chaz loved it.

But it was those emails that were on his mind as he stooped to help his friend wrestle their load into position. Out of the service area, they would be piling up. He’d already been “off the grid” for over 20 hours. God, there’d be a thousand when he got back. That was going to be a major slog-fest.

“Easy, easy,” Wan was saying. “Don’t hurt my baby.”

They were pushing the suitcase into a small depression in the dirt, on the small crest of dirt they had drive up onto.

“What is this thing, anyway?” Chaz asked as they finished muscling it into position.

Wan stood up, proudly patting the black plastic cover as he did. “Rolls-Surrette deep cycle battery,” he said, the smug in his voice. “It’s going to feed us two megacoulombs over the next eight hours.”

“Woah,” Chaz said, as if that meant something to him.

“Yup,” Wan was now unfolding several telescoping poles. “We’ve got a laptop to run, camera, infrareds, inertial dampening for the telescope, and heat signature mask.”