Weird Science Fiction saga about a remote and secret spaceport build during the 1950's in a remote part of the Pacific near Antarctica near the ancient City of R'yleh where Lord Cthulhu was rumored to lie dreaming with his minions....parts of this were actually performed by Sons of the Widow at Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco during Spring, 2012. Several of the backing trackings are available on the Reverbnation and Soundcloud pages. Arvid Peterson performed the electronic music and Eden Black and I performed the spoken word portions.
1.) Robot Evisceration: One of the American scientists on the Pacific island where the secret spaceport is located is half vivisected by a seemingly berserk construction robot, however investigators realize that it was a planned surgical experiment to discover how humans are constructed. Goddess Loquai and the eleven Tennocian aliens who accompany Her realize that some other aliens are intervening…but who? All of the evidence points to the Mi-Go from planet Yuggoth, an insectile race incredibly skilled in surgery and genetic manipulation. A temple is discovered far underground on the island and a military expedition is dispatched.
“There is an interesting story behind all of this. I am named Halloran. I was assigned to the island here in the middle of nowhere at the bottom of the World because someone realized that it was located right next to R’yLeh….yes the dead city of R’yleh where Cthulhu and the Great Ancient ones slumber, ready to reclaim this planet when the stars shift around to the right place again. I feel sure that the US picked this spot for that reason and our alien friends, the Tennocians, whom the German rocket scientists brought with them, must know it too. Motives are clouded and confusing everywhere I turn, but it must all fit together. The island is probably a psychic hot-spot being located on a ley line so close to Antarctica and the dead City.
I belong to an organization called Delta Green. We were formed back in ’28 during the raids on Innsmouth, Massachusetts because the FBI realized it was in over its’ head and needed some specialists in the occult. I was first sent here to the island in ’55 and it has been two freezing cold years on the most barren rock imaginable. The Germans came straight out of the War into American open arms because we needed them, Nazi or not. The Communists are growing too powerful and we need everything we can get. There are nights when I can barely sleep because of the weird conditions here. The aliens arrived out of the blue one day. Turns out they have been involved with the Germans since the 30’s through an obscure little group called the Vril Society in Berlin….sort of a scientific occult séance trying to create a space program based on alien technologies. The Germans recovered a crashed alien spacecraft in ’28 and figured out the physics with a little help from their friends, the Tennocians. Speaking properly, the Tennocians are really from another dimension in another Universe than ours, but they are aliens and even though they are friendly, they are more than a little spooky to be around constantly, even for me
They are tall, like almost 7 feet spindly, with iridescent skin that keeps shifting and changing color. Their fingers are probably 7 or 8 inches long, with very delicate tips. I suppose that is why they are so good at building machines. They keep going in and out of focus because they are really in another dimension. The packs on their backs apparently contain the machines that allow them to visit here although they always have a foot in their own Universe. There are always 11 of them and they never seem to be alone. They always travel in a pack. They call themselves the “Members” although no one knows what it is that they are a member of. Even the Germans have only a partial comprehension of who they are and they are way beyond us poor Americans. The Tennocian leader is the spookiest of all: a woman, the only woman of the Tennocian group and they call her a goddess. Her name is Loquai which may be more of title than anything else. The bizarre thing is that no one has ever seen her even though the rest of the Tennocians are visible. She speaks directly into our heads with perfect English. She has told us that she has been visiting Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, trying to bring knowledge of science and culture. It has been no easy task. The eleven members are apparently her followers and obey her commands immediately. It is weird to see them peel off into action because they all act as one yet each one is doing something completely different. It eventually fits together like a jig-saw puzzle. Weird stuff.
The day that we had our first murder was an October Saturday in ’57. Things had been quiet around the island…the island without a name that we just called Spaceport USA. I spent my time working with the FBI agents trying to pick holes in security and it was uncomfortably easy. Russian submarine bases were rumored to be being built on Antarctica and we were uncomfortably close. A couple of frog men from a sub could be on the island in no time and even though we had tighter security than the Manhattan project, there were still known to be extensive caves deep beneath the island. We sent patrols into them constantly but they were a headache for all of us who were assigned to security.
There was a small cinder-block building out on the Northern shore of the island. It was only used for storage and infrequently patrolled. We heard a siren go off and raced to the area in full battle gear. The siren had never gone off before on anything but a drill and I knew there were no drills scheduled for the weekend. I was the first responder into the building and what I saw will be permanently etched into my brain. There was a PFC standing there in the doorway frozen. He must have been the one who punched the alarm button on the outside of the door jamb. As I pushed him out of the way I saw one of the technical construction robots…something the Germans figured out with the Tennocians. The robot was standing over something I couldn’t see since his back was turned towards me but I could see a huge puddle of blood on the floor. I pulled out my sonic gun and blasted right at the robot’s head….the only part of it that would be vulnerable. The robot turned around and I could see complicated surgical gear in its hands but it was nothing that we, the Germans or the Tennocians used. I blasted again, straight in to his viewport, the only part of the robots that was vulnerable and designed that way in case something went wrong with them and this was clearly a case of that. The view plate shattered and I blasted a third time, finally hitting the inner stochastic brain, which went off in a shower of sparks and smoke.
I finally got around seeing what the robot had been doing and I knew we were in for something really bad. One of our scientists or what was left of him was tied to a makeshift operating table. He was pretty much gone from the waist down and there were a lot of incisions into the upper torso that had already been started. What I couldn’t understand is that he was still alive and conscious. I saw a tube with some weird green fluid going into his arm. He looked straight at me with pleading eyes. I took the gag out of his mouth and asked him what had happened and he said he was out walking along the shore and the next thing he knew he was whacked on the head and out like a light, He woke up in the building with the robot pulling him methodically apart. It must have been at least two hours. He asked me to finish it and I shot out the bottle with the green fluid, reasoning that it must be that keeping him alive. He passed quickly, thank God. There were three agents in the room and as we started forensics and gathering together all of the pieces of what had once been our man, one of the Germans walked in with a single Tennocian. It was odd to see one without the rest but the, this was hardly the usual circumstance. The German asked if the Tennocian could assist and I realized that we could really use some help. The other agents and I huddled and we sent word out to the base commander on what was going on and that no one should come out here until we could reconstruct the whole scene. We asked for the medics and got to work.
It was about two weeks later that we finally got the robot dissembled and took a look at the stochastic brain mechanism. There was definitely something there that shouldn’t have been. It was a tiny, almost invisible cube, solid black. The lab boys couldn’t make a dent in it. No acid; no saw, no natural force could touch it…totally impenetrable. The lone Tennocian as we started calling him started to work on it and I think he went about as pale as a Tennocian could get when he picked it up and started reading it with his psychic powers. I could see that he was visibly shaken. “This is Mi-go.” was all he said. I whistled deeply. The Mi-go were an insectoid race that lived way out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto on a planet known only as Yuggoth. A giant planet, black brooding and frozen, the Mi-go lived in caverns deep below its surface. They have been part of human life for tens of thousands of years and even have their own cult here where they are worshiped and served by demented humans who do their every bidding. The Mi-go are known as great surgeons and manipulators of genetics. Why they would be here was troubling past my ability to explain. It meant we had a wholly unknown factor out here in the middle of nowhere and it wasn’t something anyone had every counted on.
It took us a couple of months hard work with the Tennocians to discover what the robot had been programmed to do and why. Working backwards from the pattern of incisions and dissection, along with the psychic codes embedded in the cube that the Tennocians finally broke, we discovered that the Mi-go had a plan. They already knew everything there was to know about human anatomy. This scientist had been assigned to work specifically with the Tennocians as an aide to the German rocket scientists. The robot had been re-programmed to peel back the flesh to get at the Tennocian traces, their subtle psychic powers and mentalities. The real target had been the Tennocians and now we knew we had trouble. The Mi-go wanted to access the greatest power on the island…our alien friends and since they couldn’t do it directly, they went through us, piece by piece sniffing for every scrap of mental energy in our scientist’s body.
We had figured out soon after the murder that we had better be watching not only the ocean shore but also the caves beneath the island. We were unsure as to how deep they went and there was every possibility that they connected with the deep underground world of the Deros, the race of degenerate ancient ones who had been left behind on Earth after a great sun-burst and had hidden below the ground with their advanced Elder God machines and their insatiable lust for human flesh. A Dero- Mi Go alliance was not only possible but probable since it was in their mutual interest and thirst for human flesh. We redoubled patrols into the caves and started going as deep as we could without special heat protective suits. The patrols started carrying heavier armament once they discovered an abandoned Mi-go temple about a mile down. One day we felt a huge tremor emanating from the center of the island. The island had been selected because it was solid rock and as stable as any place on Earth. We took a heavily armed platoon down with us and as we approached the site of the explosion, I saw the second scene which will be permanently embedded in my brain cells. Our soldiers lay in shreds and a glowing ball of light stood in the middle of the cave which looked to be one of the Temples with polished Obsidian statues and weird decorations from some hell hole. Our Tennocian friend stopped us from firing. It would require a specific frequency of sound to detonate this Mi-go booby-trap. We would need a robot equipped with a heavy sonic generator……”
2.) Launch Pad: Besides aliens of all stripes, human factors are bound to intervene in the development of the first American Faster than Light spacecraft. Communist agents are planted deep within the structure of NASA and they are struggling to gain the secrets of the drive from the German and American scientists and their Tennocian allies. The drive building is guarded constantly around the clock but the Soviet agents are able to walk right in with their security clearances. What they discover inside is so far beyond their ability to describe that they are forced to kidnap one of the German scientists who developed the device with the Tennocians to get the secret. In a desperate move, he throws the drive into operation and the Soviet agents are teleported…somewhere!
“It must have been late fall of ’57 when we had our first encounter with the Soviets. Like I said, our security system was tighter than the Atom Bomb project but there are ways that even the closest security checks and counter-checks can fail. As we worked it out later, three Soviet agents under deep cover had been brought in right under our noses because they were actually German scientists! Project Paperclip had been put in place right at the end of the War to pull every scrap of advanced science and every scientist left in Germany out for the good ol’ USA. Patton’s Fourth Army bore the brunt of pulling out the most advanced science where the Germans had it stashed in occupied Czechoslovakia. The Germans had been working on advanced quantum physics and had even created a device called the Bell which had radioactive counter-rotating drums rotating at tens of thousands of RPM. The huge bell-shaped thing jet black, about ten feet high and used almost as much electricity as a whole city. It finally wound up opening rifts in time and space. It also had strange anti-gravity properties which had immediate use in the US space and missile program. Once the Tennocians helped the Germans to reduce the electrical consumption and shield the thing properly, it became the basis for our first faster than light drive. That is why it received a much higher priority than the solid propellant and chemical rockets already dotting the island. No one knew it, but we already had atomic bombs on top of huge missiles zeroed in on Moscow.
Oh, that’s right. You heard me. Faster than light space drive. If you thought Einstein proved that to be impossible, you are right, but even Einstein made a few mistakes here and there. The drive actually operated outside of time and space the same way that the packs the Tennocians wore enabled them to live in two Universes simultaneously. It was simple but trying to control the powers unleashed by this thing was no easy task. The computers that gave the robots freakishly human behavior were based on quantum physics and used pure atomic energy instead of electronic circuits which would have been vastly slower. By boosting the stochastic brain concept into something about the size of a bedroom, the Tennocians and Germans were able to finally create a brain fast enough and powerful enough to predict the complex forces in the Bell to harness them to the drive. The ship that was going to use the drive had one purpose: being able to reach Yuggoth in a reasonable enough time frame to take the Mi-go by surprise on their home planet. The drive would be able to get out to twice the distance to Pluto in under an hour.
The ship that stood out on launch pad three-N was a great golden sphere, about one hundred feet high. Most of it was complex electromagnetic shielding to prevent the forces in the bell from cooking the robot crew. No human was crazy enough to test this thing and we were not even sure it wouldn’t blast Planet Earth to cinders in the process of taking off, but the Tennocians assured us and the Germans had their equations. The thing would operate at a tiny fraction of full power, take a quick trip out to the planet Neptune, circle it and come home. Communications with the ship would be the really hard part and it took quite some time before a way around the time delay from that far out in the Solar System could be worked out. We were afraid that if the ship got into trouble that far out, we wouldn’t have a way to communicate with it. God only knew what was lurking out there and while the ship was equipped with sophisticated beam weapons which could tap right into the Bell for energy, someone would have to decide what to do in case of attack.
Back to our Soviet agents. They had been planted into the German scientific establishment way back in the ‘30s and no one even in the Gestapo or Abwehr had the slightest inkling that they worked directly for Moscow. While they did real scientific work for the Nazis, they also subtly misdirected some of the war work and reported everything they found that was useful to their superiors in the Motherland. When Paperclip repatriated them onto American soil, there was even less suspicion because all of the Nazis were suspect and there was no reason to think that these three were any different than any of the rest. Paranoia was deep and the desire to grab Nazi technology outweighed the usual security clearances with these scientists. So, we had three Russian agents, under deep cover, as Nazi rocket scientists, right here on the island. Of course, we didn’t know that until after the incident.
I had just come back from some rest and relaxation stateside when the base commander called me with a frantic sound in his voice. The building where the original Bell device was stored had experienced something that no one could even begin to comprehend. A huge blue flash had emanated from the building where the supposedly dormant and unshielded device was kept in storage and it had silently begun to send out a bizarre wave of mind and space bending energy.
Military and scientific personnel were laying everywhere in a confused mass of writhing bodies. Even the robots were out of commission. Breaching the security door looked to be impossible until the Tennocians reminded me that we had a special shielding unit that had been developed as a model for the spacecraft shielding. It was large and unwieldy so that presented a problem, but we had it up on a crane, loaded onto a motorized cart and moving safely toward the Bell building within an hour. There were two of us tasked with getting into the building and shutting the Bell off.
The scene inside was beyond description. Solid walls were shifting and melting with colors I couldn’t even name. Space itself was swirling and I had no sense of time. I felt like I was standing outside looking back in on tour Universe. Without the shielding we would have been like the rest of the building but we slowly inched towards the central bay where the Bell was kept. There was a large red emergency button somewhere but I couldn’t make out where it was in all of the confusion and chaos. My partner reached out to feel where he thought it might be and almost lost his arm in the shifting space. We had an idea. I took a sonic weapon and sprayed it out towards where we thought the wall was. I had a lucky hit. The button went off and everything went back to normal. When I say “normal”, I mean I wasn’t expecting to find the bodies of the three Soviet agents melted into the floor, half in, half out. They were still conscious but so crazed that we had to have our medics shoot them full of morphine and tranquillizer.
Thing was, they were babbling in Russian instead of German. We had someone from the OSS come over and translate. They were so far gone mentally that it was hard to follow them but the essential story is that they had been tasked by Moscow to figure out the Bell and what made it tick. That was when things went haywire and the device went off without shielding, they were caught in the cross flow of rifting time and space. The part that interested me is that they were apparently still in some alternate dimension or world and what they were describing read chillingly like one of the horror stories of the man who first discovered the Elder Gods and Great Ancient Ones in his dreams: H.P. Lovecraft. They seemed to be hovering in a vast empty black night-sky space surrounded by hundreds of tall faceless black creatures with huge leathery wings. Sounded like a Night Gaunt straight out of Lovecraft’s stories to me. How did the Bell transport them halfway to the Dream Worlds and how were we going to get them back? This was a lot messier than it might seem because if the Russians were half in and half out, that meant that the Dream World creatures could use their bodies as portals out into our reality.
More out of a sense of self-preservation than humanitarian concern for the Soviets, I huddled yet again with the Tennocians. Without them I was beginning to wonder how we could possibly survive out here in such bizarre circumstances. This time, they were a bit stumped at first. Clearly a controlled powering on of the Bell was called for but our shielding unit would have to be carefully controlled to allow us to pull the Russians out of the floor. One of the Tennocians volunteered the little black Mi-cube that we had pulled out of the robot a few weeks back. He had been toying with it and discovered that it was really a miniaturized stochastic brain of its own, possibly once a human brain that the Mi-go had converted to electronic form. They were famous for putting human brains into canisters and taking them out to the far rim of the Solar System for a sightseeing tour. None of the brains had survived without going insane although several of the canisters had been deposited at random locations in large cities around the globe. The Mi-go apparently tired of their pets easily or perhaps they had darker motives in demonstrating the fates of anyone caught in their web.
We wired the Mi-go electronic brain into the shielding device and stood back. The Tennocians would have to operate it with telepathy. We went outside the building and sent a robot in to hit the power switch. The bell hummed into its eerie form of life and emitted a characteristic blue violet glow. The shielding unit was holding and its powerful electromagnetic fields were stable. Two of us volunteered to go in. We pulled what was left of the Russians out of the floor and got the heck out of there. The robot flipped the switch and the Bell hummed down. We looked over onto the floor and where the Russians had been there was a shimmering silvery energy. Somehow the Dream Worlds must have pulled them back in and to this day I have nightmares about what must have happened to them.
I still had the problem of potential Russian spies to deal with and sure enough, it surfaced again, this time right on the launch pad…..
3.) Neptune: The FTL ship is launched toward the planet Neptune but it is intercepted by agents of the Mi-Go and taken to Yuggoth for reverse engineering. There doesn’t seem to be any option but the self-destruct button but the robot-captain of the ship comes up with a plan to not only escape the vast ship they have been abducted into, but to plant a bomb that will disrupt time and space around Yuggoth for decades!
“The automatic launch, fortunately, went without a hitch and we didn’t blow this corner of the Galaxy into tiny particles of dust. After our last experience we did a complete check of the ship, all personnel and even the robots. It was too much risk to take on the possibility of sending the ship out there into deep space without a thorough check. It set the launch back over a month but with the drive that wouldn’t affect the launch window like a normal chemical rocket. This part of the story I have to relate from the comfort of the master control room in the big bunker on the center of the island. The launch pads are placed out toward the periphery of the island for both safety and central visibility.
The robots were functioning perfectly and the drive was doing its stuff. Less than 60 minutes and they would be at Neptune in orbit doing their photography and analysis and heading home a day later. Theoretically, they could be there in about five minutes, but the ship was operating at a fraction of full capacity, just in case. I have to admit that the whole thing was absolutely amazing and even the Tennocians were impressed that we were able to pull this thing off so quickly. I credit that to the Germans because it was their decades of research into Quantum Physics that made it possible.
The views we were seeing through the live cameras were absolutely breathtaking. The Tennocians had never even been this far out in the Solar System and things are different out there….much more in the way of comets, planetoids and comets whizzing around. The Inner Solar System has its own vacuum cleaner…the Sun…which tends to suck up anything small and loose all the way out to the orbit of Mars. The outer planets were whizzing past so quickly that they were mostly blurs on the view screen. Navigation was holding, although even with the stochastic “super-brain” it was being challenged to hang on for dear life. Long-range radar was helping out a lot since it wasn’t affected in the same way as light by the relativistic effects. It was a different kind of distortion which was interesting, because classical physics said it should be the same. There were still many things to learn with all of this but we were on the way.
The equipment and “crew” were functioning superbly and, for once, all of the hard work seemed to be paying off. The craft finally began its deceleration about 15 minutes before orbital insertion and even that went well. We were not sure the thing wouldn’t just keep blasting off into Infinity but the system of reversed polarities in the shielding worked perfectly. Before it hit us completely, Neptune was sitting there in all of its glory, vast and blue and turned 90 degrees on its side in comparison to the inertial navigation which always maintained a true connection to Earth’s North-South axis. I think we all gasped at how remote and strange and beautiful it all was.
Immediately, we knew we had a problem. The ship was registering a drift which it shouldn’t have been and the view screens were showing something vast and ancient and horrible approaching rapidly….pure black obsidian, polished and too reminiscent of something we had seen down below the surface of the island: a Mi-go temple ship, which functioned both as a holy site and a fast, although not faster than light spacecraft. The damn Mi-go had a tractor beam on our ship and God only knew what they were going to do with it. The Mi-go had been around Earth long enough to be able to speak most of our languages so it wasn’t long before they broke into the radio frequency and announced that they were taking the ship back to Yuggoth as a valuable prize for their science and the glory of their species.
Sure enough, the speed began to pick up and Neptune whizzed out of range. Given the state of Mi-go technology, it would take them at least a couple of weeks to make it back to the home planet, but we were concerned that they would attempt to enter the ship in the meantime and ferret out what they could. Even a piece of our advanced technology could be too much if it fell into their prying tentacles, so we had to think fast. It was only a matter of time before they broke our hatches open.
While we huddled with our alien friends, the Tennocians, we were surprised when the robot commander of the ship broke silence and radioed us in code. The robot suggested a plan so daring and audacious that we wondered about its “sanity” but we all agreed that it would be the only option given the time constraints. The ship hadn’t been “armed” per se because it was never even considered possible that it might have run into anything that far out. Now that we know better, things will be different. What the robot wanted to do was to break into the Mi-Go ship himself and deliver a small present….a miniaturized version of the drive that was used to power some of the auxiliary equipment in the navigation sector. Without its shielding, it would make an incredible bomb, unleashing the sort of time-space terror that greeted our Soviet friends back in the drive building.
The trick was going to be how to trigger the thing and make sure that it went off with a boom. The robot suggested some of the blasting materials that we would have used for taking specimens from Neptune’s rocky satellites. They need to rig a psychotronic connection that could be triggered by their stochastic brains, which, by the way, are wired for telepathy with the Tennocians around. The last hurdle was how to get inside the Mi-Go ship and plant the device. Telephoto lenses revealed that since the Mi-Go normally lived and traveled in the frigid depths of space and didn’t require an atmosphere to breath, that they just left the door open, so to speak. There would be no problem entering the ship but we had no idea what sort of alarm system they might have on there. The best idea seemed to be to throw the bomb in there and beat a hasty retreat before the detonation blew the ship into another dimension.
The technical work was done and the Commander left the airlock with his present in tow. It was still a sizable unit despite all of the miniaturization. He wisely chose the area of the Mi-go ship shrouded in shadow (the Sun still shines, even out here, after all) and drifted over in complete silence. He was wearing a camera so that we could see what was going on. His sensors didn’t detect anything identifiable as electromagnetic radiation as he neared the ship so we made a quick decision sent through the coded FTL radio to send him a bit deeper in and take the risk, to ensure the complete destruction of the ship. The Mi-go ship turned out to be heck of a lot larger inside than we had anticipated from its’ outside appearance, so the makeshift decision to go deeper was well founded…no sense in blasting just one side of it when we needed to send it out of our Universe.
The black obsidian carvings inside the ship depicted stomach churning surgeries being preformed upon countless alien races. The big insects seemed to take delight in cutting open and rearranging their victims to some bizarre aesthetics that only they could possibly understand. I think we all felt a little bit weak in the knees when the robot turned down a vast hallway in the ship crammed with thousands of brain canisters from God knows what planets. The Mi-Go spend thousands of years traveling from star-system to star-system in order to find their specimens, which are then offered up to the repulsive frog-god Tsathhogua, whom the Mi-go have worshiped for countless hundreds of thousands of years. That was precisely why the Mi-go were so desperate to get hold of our drive…it would allow them to find countless more victims for their horrible surgical manipulations. That was all the more reason to blast them into oblivion, or worse.
I was starting to get more than a bit nervous because we hadn’t run into a single Mi-go and it began to smell like a huge trap. I grabbed the commander just as the Mi-go descended in force and grabbed the device away from the robot. It was if they had worked out our most likely logical response and then used it against us to get a small copy of the drive. It was a disaster of titanic proportions and I was hard pressed to even begin to imagine what we could do, but then something happened out of the blue. There was a short burst of coded information from the robot and then the bomb went off with a weird whining sound, like something shredding itself to pieces. Actually, it was shredding itself to pieces. Without the shielding, it was literally spiraling out of existence and ripping everything in range apart, piece by piece. The Mi-go were the first to go, followed by the room and then the ship winked out of being. There was literally nothing left. The remaining robot crew in our ship immediately began the trip back before any more visitors could arrive and they arrived back safely within the hour.
We were all drained and exhausted but one thing still puzzled me. What was it that the robot had said before igniting the bomb right in the hands of the Mi-go? I searched around the dwindling crowd in the bunker and found the communications analyst to ask her. He said: “Let there be light”…that was all he said.
4.) Rolling Waves (of time and space): The FTL ship, the Polaris, is finally out of the Solar System, heading toward Yuggoth for a pre-emptive strike, when a desperate message arrives form the secret spaceport…if they don’t return, Earth may be doomed!
It was right about one year later. Late 1958, almost Christmas time, to be exact. I had taken several trips back stateside to pursue other endeavors of the Delta Green spooky variety when I got a call from the Chief to hurry on the next military transport out to the Spaceport. There was a tone in his voice that I didn’t like at all but I have learned over many years to just wait until I get there and get my briefing on the spot. It’s a lot better that way, all around. So, I arrived on the airstrip two days later and immediately noticed that the place had changed quite a bit in one year. Everything was built up and concrete and steel instead of cinder block or Quonset hut. The launch pads looked about twice as large as before with a much wider array of chemical and FTL ships, all of them huge. Clearly a lot of progress had been made on all fronts. As I was to discover during my briefing, not only had the island and the Spaceport changed drastically, but we now had a large space station in orbit and a base on the Moon from which we were taking regular flights out into the Solar System trying to find new resources out there. Things had been quiet on the Mi-go and Soviet fronts; as a matter of fact, we now had a secret deal with the Russians to share the exploration of the Solar System with them. The only sore point left was Yuggoth. The Mi-go made occasional forays against our ships in deepest space, but we were so heavily armed with weapons employing time-space effects that we blasted them out of space every time they came within 100,000 kilometers of our ships. Yet, they kept coming every once in a great while with that maddening patience that has kept them going for hundreds of thousands of years…
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The plan hatched up between the Soviets, the Germans, the Tennocians and our new Space Force (It turned into a separate branch of the military right after that first incident on Neptune) was to lob a huge planet-busting missile right into the heart of Yuggoth and slam the whole thing into another dimension with most of the Mi-go on it. The one thing that militated against that was the fact that the planet was so huge. About one quarter the size of Jupiter, it was rock-like but riddled with thousands and thousands of caves and caverns. Neither human nor robot had ever been there, but enough survived in Earth lore and dreams to substantiate that the caves were quite real and our unmanned probes had gotten a few images of the surface before the Mi-go got to them. Of course we had booby-trapped the probes so it was quite a show when they went off, but the Mi-go being essentially insects, always have a few more of themselves to go around if there is an accident.
The surface was weird…a mixture of jet black and shining silver rocks in vast stripes tens of thousands of miles long. There was no evidence of water or ice but the lore spoke of underground oceans and a humid environment lit by naturally phosphorescent fungi. We had no idea how deep in the missile would have to penetrate before it hit pay-dirt. I was inclined to be more cautious and figure out a way to get the intelligence here on Earth from some degraded sect of Mi-go worshipers than to try to send someone, even a robot down to the surface. Luckily, Delta Green had identified exactly such a group and had infiltrated them to get the precious information. After months of attending incredibly boring meetings in a quiet suburb of London, our operatives struck it rich….there was a reading of an ancient book describing a journey down to the caverns and it spoke of them being over 100 miles below the surface. The initial disappointment turned to hope when the Tennocians pointed out that we could rig up a missile with an unshielded FTL drive in the nosecone that could literally bore through time and space into the requisite area and then blast itself to smithereens.
The scientists and technicians set about all of the construction which basically only required attaching the drive to the chemically driven missile. Easy enough given the large number of robots that were now working around the clock on the island. I was beginning to see where all of the growth on the island was really coming from. The work was done and it was January 2nd, 1959 when the ship was ready to take off on her mission. The course was being plotted out on the huge psychotronic brains kept in zero-g on the space station. The zero gravity allowed the artificial brains to grow to enormous size and complexity and it was rumored that they were gradually reaching toward human intelligence although no one was quite sure if that was really a good thing or not. The missile was attached to a berth in the core of the big spherical FTL ship called the Polaris so that it could shoot out like a torpedo when the Polaris got close enough for the kill. The ship took off with a mix of robots and humans aboard and headed out the deep space lanes that had been created because of all of the traffic in Russian and American spacecraft shuttling to the Moon and Earth orbit.
The craft was about fifteen minutes away from Yuggoth when we got the call from Delta Green. It was almost never the case that the Chief called us directly so I figured something huge was up. It turned out that the cult that was operating up in England had leaked it that the Mi-go were planning a huge invasion of Earth and that grabbing one of the FTL drives at any cost was part of the plan. That meant we had to get that ship out of there, fast.
Communications still had a momentary lag because of the vast distances, but the ship’s commander finally responded and we explained the situation. It was right about then that their radar detected a vast swarm of Mi-go starting to surround them. It was not looking good at all. There was neither the space nor the time for them to turn and head back. They were going to have to fight it out alone. Even if we sent a fleet after them it would be too late. The commander had one option left. He did some fast calculations and decided that a quick sweeping movement toward Yuggoth might actually throw the Mi-go off and allow them to lob the missile as originally intended. They ship might have to self-destruct but it would slow the Mi-go down, maybe for years. The Polaris suddenly lurched toward Yuggoth right through a swarm of the space flying creatures and narrowly avoided one of their temple ships. The commander waited until exactly the second when the Polaris was close enough and at the right angle of attack to press the fire button. The confused Mi-go suddenly realized what he was up to and massed in a swarm to head off the missile aimed at their home planet. They didn’t realize that underneath the nose cone, the unshielded FTL drive was already starting to generate wildly fluctuating space-time discontinuity. The closer they got, the more they were sucked into the wormhole trailing behind the missile. When it lobbed into the planet, it was at full capacity, boring through solid rock as if it was butter. When the underground ocean blew, a vast arc of steam raced off the surface of the planet and cooked everything for thousands of miles. The waves of time and space discontinuity were starting to reverberate and the whole planet was shaking wildly. By now, the Polaris had seen enough and beat a hasty retreat before the Mi-go could give chase. There was a strange moment of silence and then a huge crater opened up where the missile hit. Strange colors and weirder shapes twisted the underground ocean right up into space and threw it through a black hole into some dimension or Universe somewhere. The Mi-go were no longer going to be amusing themselves with the screams of their victims on the shores of the underground seas of Yuggoth although they were far from being gone. It would be another decade before they recouped, but like I said, they have an unholy sense of patience.
5.) Dance of the Nannites: ARVID ELECTRONIC SOLO
6.) Grab that Hazmat suit: Grey Aliens have arrived in force and are spraying the whole island with black oil that turns human flesh into a weird hybrid, mutating it into an alien monstrosity within 24 hours. The invasion is on because we now threaten their hegemony in the Solar System. The Loquai and the Tennocians are well familiarized with the Grays and know their weakest spot…their mathematically perfect minds cannot handle anomalous events and the Tennocians reach deep into their alien universe for the strangest event of all!
“Well, the Mi-go appear to have been put out of commission for awhile but the one thing that you learn working for Delta Green is that nothing stays quiet very long. The Tennocians brought this one to me. There was apparently another species of aliens prevalent throughout the Solar System, who suddenly sprang into action as soon as the Mi-go were out of the way. This was a species of little gray people with weird writhing long fingers (kind of like the Tennocians), great big silvery eyes, no ears and pinched little mouths. They were, unlike the Tennocians, from this Universe and came out of a star system pretty close to us that appears to be in the Constellation of Orion. They are pretty unfathomable little creatures as far as their motives go. They apparently think in strictly mathematical sequences and symbolic logic without any concept of what we would think of as ethics or rules of behavior. They can be very friendly one second and then dissecting you the next.
The Tennocians knew them well because they had worked with them for several years out in another solar system. While the Tennocians were odd in their own right, coming from another dimension and all, even they thought the little gray people were too bizarre to be able to handle. They had given up on them centuries ago. So, it appeared that the Grays were on the prowl now that the Mi-go were no longer a threat to them and we were the next threat on their list! Now that we were out in space with a faster than light drive and heavy time and space based weapons, we became a huge threat and they were all about eliminating threats in any way possible. The Tennocians had their mysterious contacts out in the outer edges of the Solar System and the news was that the Grays were heading to Earth to deal with the threat and that was us on this island! The Spaceport had been not only heavily armed but was hardened with steel and concrete against even nuclear weapons. There were a lot more ships out in space, at the station and on the Moon, so we were more safely spread out as well. Still, the Spaceport sat there like a sitting duck. There was no word for quite some time, probably a few months and then all of a sudden the radar and sensor operators began to register hundreds of small circular objects hovering around the island moving and maneuvering at very high speed. Our defensive positions were hard pressed because there was such a cloud of them, but with some help from the defense robots we managed to knock most of them out. We were down to the last four and then suddenly they all disappeared off the screens.
We naturally thought they were going for reinforcements but it turned out that their unpredictability worked to their advantage. Instead of a frontal assault, they had dropped a few lone soldiers down in a remote stretch of the beach. There was a momentary alarm on the perimeter and then nothing…it was as if they had vanished into thin air. What had actually happened is that they turned on devices that made them appear to disappear in a sort of optical illusion. They were not only there, they were slowly climbing the gantry towers on several strategically located launch pads. Before we knew what had happened, they were up on top of the gantries with sort of spray gun type contraptions, spraying this black oily fluid in a fine mist, all over the base. At first there didn’t seem to be any reactions but then we heard some scattered screams. Four of us Delta Green operatives grabbed the heavy hazardous materials suits and slammed out into the middle of the island…we had no idea what to do since there were people all around us being hit with the black oil and it was having horrible effects on them, twisting and changing them into grotesque caricatures of humanity. The screams were deafening and the pain was everywhere. We couldn’t easily target the Grays because of their little invisibility machines. We just got a general idea of where the oil was emanating from and hit it with our heavy sonic weapons. We knocked out a couple, but the damage was done. Anyone who wasn’t either inside or in a hazmat suit was done for as far as we could tell. Then the Grays hit a second wave of their little disc machines and we had to make a decision to detonate the whole island or throw an unshielded FTL drive in their faces. While the four of us were huddled, the Tennocians miraculously appeared out of nowhere. We assumed they would be killed by the black oil, but it didn’t bother them in the least. They walked through it with no problems. Recalling that they taught the Grays most of what they knew, it made sense that they would have a built in immunity to most of their weapons. We called them over for a parlay and they came to an unexpected conclusion. We needed something that would interrupt the Gray’s linear and hyper-logical thought mode. We needed something that transcended any rational pattern of thought because that was the Gray’s biggest weakness.
We really needed a goddess! The Tennocians called to Loquai, whom I hadn’t felt for almost two years. She still didn’t appear in any visible form but what she did is literally divide the fabric of space and time to create a big hole…into absolutely nothing. I got the clear sense that she considered the Grays to be something like her naughty children as she sucked them into what became a black hole. I could see their ships and their bodies being sucked by tremendous gravitational forces that distorted them in long twisting and spiraling shapes. It was both awe inspiring and terrifying to see physical matter ripped piece from piece into its constituent forces and sucked down a hole like a drain pipe. She let a couple of them get away to tell the tale so that the Grays would be contained for quite a while. I got the clear sense that messing with the Goddess was not a good thing to get involved with and even though she didn’t even say a word, Loquai sent her message, loud and clear, right across the Solar System.
7.) Deeper than R’yleh: The final threat emerges: Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu send their minions, the Deros, from underground to destroy the base. The Tennocians are baffled by Cthulhu since he is from yet another Universe than their own. As they desperately try to break into his mind, it is up to the human scientists to make sure that the stars do not go right or he will awake
“Like I said at the beginning, Delta Green was called into this whole mess because the island that the Spaceport was located on was so baffling close to R’yleh, the famous dead city of the Great Ancient Ones where Lord Cthulhu lies dreaming, etc., etc. I for one believe that he is down there but I doubt that the stars will ever come right enough for him to wake up while Mankind is around. He has his minions and his servitors and his cults but outside of some ritualistic murder once in a great while, they don’t that much at all. Waiting for words in their dreams that come only rarely. No, the real threat as far as I was concerned was the more earthly of them and the closer to us, like Nyarlathotep and Y’golonac…earthbound entities with a taste for torture and the exacting of worship through blood.
We had the caves under the island pretty well cleaned out of anything and anyone, or so we thought. There was a sizable colony of Deros down there but they seemed to be a lot more interested in massed civilization on the mainland…as many human minds to twist as possible. We did lose someone down there once in a blue moon but they didn’t warrant full on assault. Then things changed…Nyarlathotep usually stuck to himself since he had over 1,000 avatars to use for his dirty work of paving the road for Lord Cthulhu and the other Great Ancient Ones once they were freed to pursue re-taking their prized planet Earth, but he took a sudden interest in the island. It was 1962 and the Mars colony was in full swing. We started noticing beautifully engraved occult symbols popping up on some of the local rocks and even out on the coral reef. Delta Green had seen those signs for many years and we knew that Nyarlathotep was here to make mischief. The fact that he was probably mixed up with the degenerate Deros and their powerful Elder God machines was almost a certainty and we asked key personnel to start keeping a dream journal for any unusual occurrences or premonitions. Thinking about all of the forces reined against this poor little island, I had come to appreciate the power of the alliance between the Tennocians, Loquai and the human scientists from Germany, Russia and America. It was a miracle that we had come this far so quickly and I sense that is the reason why the boys back in Washington gave us all of the support we needed, even if it came out of a black fiscal hole that Congress couldn’t fathom!
Back to the Desert Prince, Nyarlathotep, himself. He was far more subtle than the heavy handed Mi-go insects and the rigid and codified Grays. He was a magician, a worker of wonders and a charlatan who charmed his way in, often in human form. We had a new batch of technicians and electricians process through the Spaceport on rotation, many of them bound for the orbiting space station and then on to the Moon or Mars. I should have realized that Nyarlathotep is famous for working with electricity and I should have known that he would hide himself among a group of people that we would never suspect because they were vetted so tightly before they ever got here. It was the oldest trick in the book…he possessed a junior grade technician and then went to work, building a device that would call the Deros out of hiding into the night and allow them to suck the island dry of victims for their tortures and twisted magic.
The wonder-machine was also tied into Cthulhu’s alien dreams. The Tennocians had tried to get into his mind to see what made it tick, but it was too alien even for them. They came from another universe but so did he and never the twain had met. We all started having exactly the same dream. The dream journals proved it. It was a horrible nightmare of twisted mutant creatures and unimaginably ancient gods coming to rip us apart, inch by inch. The pain was palpable and must have been projected by the Dero mech or machinery five miles down below us. It was so bad that everyone was starting to walk around like a zombie. This was the first time that the Tennocians were genuinely stumped because even they were having the horrible dreams. I realized that this had to be something that our science should be able to deal with. I could make the assumption that the machines were at fault for causing this mental torture, so we decided to rig up a little torture of our own using high frequency sound and stimulated brain waves, shot through the whole island and down into the Dero lairs.
The last thing we were possibly expecting was that the Dero would actually come up and engage us in combat, but the island suddenly erupted with shrieks and explosions. At least the Dero were something we could fight but there were a lot of them and they were bringing their ray guns and heavier weapons. We had a military compound built at the Spaceport with a full complement of space marines armed to the teeth but this was something we really hadn’t seen before and the Dero were vicious little creatures, twisted and evil. I thought about it and realized that there was no way we were going to be able to defeat them because more and more would just keep coming, so I radioed to Washington and cut through the red tape to the State Department. We shut off the sonic generators and brain wave stimulators and began a Magick circle. I know that sounds crazy, but we only had one option here. We evoked Nyarlathotep and before we knew it, he was standing there in full glory as a tall Egyptian Pharaoh. It was time for diplomacy and since he was the closest to being human of all of the Great Ancient Ones, we were about to make an historic offer. The deal was this: we would stop harassing the Dero if they would go back to their occasional forays and stop harassing us. We would even establish ties of communication. The deal was only applicable to the island and they could do what they normally do elsewhere, but this could turn into an apocalyptic event if we didn’t have some kind of peace treaty. Nyarlathotep was clearly intrigued with the concept but why should he be interested in making peace with his enemies; the blight of humanity ruining the planet that he believed really belonged to the Great Ancient ones? Delta Green had found out a long time ago that there actually was a time when the Stars would come around to the right position where the astrological forces would free the Great Ancient Ones from their tombs beneath the oceans and the earth. We needed to buy enough time for humanity to get somewhere safe like Mars or out in the Asteroid belt. Now that we had the technology to be able to do it we just needed to make sure that we had time to leave…at least enough of us to start again out in the stars.
We essentially bargained over the fate of the Earth and recognized the eventual right of the Great Ancient Ones to re-inherit the planet. This wouldn’t happen for thousands of years, but with the help of the Tennocians and Loquai we would be able to move to a new star system, even spread out into the Galaxy and find hundreds of Earth-like planets. I don’t think anyone expected the Great Ancient Ones and the Deros to stop being who they were, but this would return things to their previous state of stalemate. Nyarlathotep was pleased to be accorded the rights of the Great Ancient Ones; we had time, but the Deros didn’t really come out with anything. Their whole story was that they had been abandoned when the Sun had a deadly flare and the rest of the Elder God race had taken flight in their vast spacecraft. They were the working class and the slaves who were not deemed important enough to save. We offered to return them to their home planet over time if they would stop harassing us, at least here on the island. They had never been treated with anything approaching respect before or treated as equals so they were ecstatic that they could finally, after hundreds of thousands of years, return to their legendary home out in the Sirius system. It was the biggest deal with the Devil imaginable but what else could be do? Loquai uncharacteristically appeared in a shimmer of light which we could barely stand to look at because of its brilliance. She actually spoke to us and revealed that the whole reason the Tennocians had appeared and were helping us was to free Earth from its oppressors and return it to its rightful owners. Humanity had been an experiment that had turned out well since we were able to adapt and we would adapt to the Stars. The saga was about to begin.Click here to add text.
