Great Basin Desert, Nevada.
Sergeant Lloyd Childs hunched over the wheel in the five-ton cargo truck, fighting to keep his eyes open while the convoy rolled down the highway. His shoulders ached. He couldn't stop yawning. He had this cramp in his leg and his eyes throbbed from the glare of the headlights, but he had to bear down, stay alert, "keep it frosty" like the major always told them. Jackass. The last time Childs heard anybody use the word "frosty" was in that Aliens movie. The second one. Face-huggers. Space Marines. Now that was good stuff.
Childs yawned again, watching the center line shoot through a smudge of light on the pavement. The convoy had been on the road for six hours now, hauling a classified load to the Paradise Chemical Depot in California, a disposal facility for blister agents, sarin munitions, VX nerve gas and a lot of other crap you didn't want to get on your pants. Maybe he didn't have a college degree, but he didn't need some half-bright major who used words like "frosty" breathing down his neck about safety. Childs wasn't sure what he had in the back of the truck, but he didn't want to find out by getting in a wreck and spilling it all over the highway.
A dust devil whirled through his low beams, zapped visibility, spattered the windshield with grit. Two in the morning, Interstate 80, Nowhere, Nevada, and the weather was turning to crap. Lightning flashed on the horizon, a web of high voltage jumping from cloud to cloud, and the wind rolled tumbleweeds across the freeway. Big mothers. A gust hit the truck and the tail lights of the Suburban blurred up ahead. Childs rubbed his eyes with one hand, clamped down on the wheel and tried to focus. The security guy from Revok Industries had crashed out on the passenger seat, so Childs couldn't do anything but listen to the radio and space out on the landscape. Not that he had jack to look at.
Outside the smoky, overheated cab, the desolation was flat-out gigantic, a huge sweep of nothing that felt like another planet. The Great Basin Desert lay cold and dark for hundreds of miles in every direction, its ragged mountains just visible against the faint zodiacal light that circled the horizon. A storm was blowing in from the north, a line of black anvilheads creeping across the Milky Way like an invading army. Just what they needed. All Childs wanted to do now was drop off their mystery cargo, dive into a cold one and pass out for a couple years. Screw this black transport crap.
They had five vehicles altogether, spread out over a quarter mile of highway: a lead Humvee, a Chevy Suburban command vehicle, Child's cargo truck, a second Humvee bringing up the rear and an escort helicopter that was running into grief with the weather. Childs couldn't spot the chopper now. It must have circled back around again.
Time dragged by. At two-thirty, they rolled through Battle Mountain, Pop. 3000, a couple blocks of dusty neon signs that were already fading in his rearview by the time they got there. After that, it was just desert again—UFO territory, mountains and valleys, no sign of life. Meteors streaked across the sky and the wind swept the dry lakebeds, rushing through the arroyos and blowouts choked with sagebrush, thistle and greasewood shrubs. Childs sat back, one hand on the wheel, zoning on the center line as the miles ticked by, winding through the desert.
Twenty-five miles later, he saw the lights.