Chapter One

Gray swung open the front door of the house. It looked like any of the other conservative houses on the street from the outside – welcome mat, two car garage, and a well-manicured lawn. The inside, too, was unremarkable – dinette set, refrigerator, television, etc. Gray crossed the room and slid a picture hanging on the opposite wall to the side revealing a small and inconspicuous button. Gray’s partner Warner opened the coat closet door and reached behind it revealing a second and equally inconspicuous button.

The two looked at each other nodding in quick succession three times, and pushed their respective buttons simultaneously.

A small panel opened slightly in the back of a different closet under the staircase.

Both men made their way down the stairs and into the closet beneath. Gray opened the panel and twisted the doorknob inside it opening the back wall of the closet like a door. Behind it was a narrow staircase which descended into the dark.

Both men descended the stairs and after reaching a small landing, Gray placed his face in a niche for a retinal scan. When the retinal scan completed, Warner did the same. The dense metal door swung open and both men stepped into a vast and well-lit octagonal-shaped room. Large screens scrolling data adorned the walls all the way around the room, and catwalks interconnected in a maze stretching high across the ceiling. Encircling the perimeter of the room was a walkway to which the catwalk connected. This was where Gray and Warner were now standing. Dense metal doors exactly like the one they just emerged from dotted the walls periodically. Each one of these doors was another entry point and connected the headquarters to a different house on the street. This was the World Space Agency’s North American headquarters.

They made their way down to the main floor. A plainly dressed but noticeably curvaceous blond woman, Linda, with glasses and her hair in a tight bun made her way over to the two men with a pair of folders in her hands. Behind her were dozens of workstations with various personnel milling about quietly. The hum of electronic equipment echoed through the room loudly, as did Linda’s footsteps as she crossed the floor.

“Hello, Gray… Warner. This just came in today,” she said handing them the folders.

“It’s all the intelligence we’ve been able to gather so far on the take over attempt of the space station,” she continued.

“Apparently, the infiltration is more widespread than we initially anticipated. We have reason to believe that they now have personnel on decks one and two of the station. Furthermore, they’ve broken the third encryption code on the station’s bio-monitoring system. They’re only three codes away now from complete control of the station’s life support system. Once they get control of this we suspect that they are going to attempt to eliminate all human life on the station.”

The international space station construction began in the mid 1980’s. Since then, the value of research in space grew exponentially. Projects like SWET (Solar Wind Energy Transmission - the conversion of solar wind into energy transmitted to earth via enormous satellites) and eradication of the AIDS virus boosted international financial support of the station shortly after its invention. Expansion of it had grown immensely during the decades following the completion of SWET, and now the station was home to over two thousand people (most of the Earth’s elite scientists and mathematicians) and had miles of cavernous corridors as well as the most technologically advanced computer systems humans were capable of producing.

Most of humanity’s scientific achievements made in the last fifty years owed their discovery in one way or another to the international space station.

Within the last year, the space station had been infiltrated by an alien intelligence. Initially, the first several subversive measures to destroy the station were blamed on radical human groups on earth who were against some of the medical research done on the space station. The general human population was left to believe this. The truth was that the human population on earth had quietly been infiltrated decades earlier by another species of life which had the technology to genetically manipulate their biology to closely resemble that of a human. For decades they went unnoticed among human population causing rampant destruction and disease which decimated large pockets of human population. Now, they had infiltrated the space station in the hopes of destroying the SWET satellites, thus destroying earth’s lifeline to solar energy.

Linda continued as the two men perused the documentation in the folders.

”We need to transport the two of you to the station to try to stop them. I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen should they break the three remaining codes.”

Gray and Warner exchanged troubled glances.

“We have a team working on uploading further encryption codes to the system, but this is proving difficult due to the security surrounding the life support system on the station,” she said worriedly.

“How soon do we leave?” asked Gray.

“We have arranged for your immediate departure.”