Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Page 13

  For that matter, it was unlike any that anyone had ever been on, as far as she knew—other than the souls taken unawares in the merciless attack. Usually, as the captain, she had all the facts that were to be had before embarkation. Here, there seemed to be more unknown than known. Had something been withheld from her?

  She found herself reaching for a grip stanchion in the docking port section of the outer shell, not remembering much of the involved walk-and-drop trip. Bartell was pulling himself toward the QB1’s slip hatch.

  Did he know something more, already? She now began to suspect that, possibly, he was keeping a secret from her.

  And whoever heard of a USUCC officer doing missions with BUMP? Was it possible that his behavior was an act? Beginning with awkwardness, and now anger? But why? What would that serve?

  She had been treating him just like one of the many men that she’d known, with their overreactions and fragile egos. The thought that BUMP would set a spy to watch her was ridiculous. But she couldn’t shake the strange discomfort. Dominique decided to be a bit more cautious with him, and not assume anything about the man’s feelings. Assumptions led to trouble. She caught up with him and followed as he disappeared down the access hatch to the Light Skipper.

  Dominique could not stand the fact that she questioned her mission. She wanted to see his sealed orders ASAP.

  They needed to go.

  CHAPTER 20

  EVENT: DAY 7, 1400 UT

  Incoming and outgoing crews were not to cross paths.

  The brass had decided to eliminate any possibility of contact. The arrival of the patrol-cruiser class ship, Rapscallion, was choreographed to dock at Toroid Alpha just after the battle-class, Medallion had cast off. The overall mood was ominous enough on Medallion without firsthand contact and stories between the crews.

  The Rapscallion had conveyed the tomb ship, Seeker, into Titan’s orbit and now docked directly to the Med Port, delivering their abused human cargo into the waiting hands and re-growth tanks of the MedSci docs. To move their bizarre patients directly from SBMMP’s docks up into the military slice of the spindeck, the doctors used a military-only, speed-matching lift, not unlike the accelevators on Cylinder Alpha. It took one-tenth the time of the SWFTR railvator/acceleration chamber route, and secrecy was guaranteed.

  While the publicity of this attack was limited to the halls of the military, there was still too much exposure for the liking of certain authorities. Toroid Alpha’s military docking port was a beehive of activity, and too many people were casually discussing what little they knew.

  The crew coming off the Rapscallion was given a week of leave, but their access was restricted to military areas of freefall—no spindeck. And they found these areas to be much more limited than normal; they saw almost no one except their own shipmates. The reason given was that the nature of the completed mission was sensitive and they would be debriefed at the week’s end.

  They would be dismayed by the conditions of quarantine but would not notice the heightened observation: behavioral vid-surveillance and surreptitious autonomic function monitoring.

  Center Security was insistent, just doing its job, taking no chances on the spread of some unknown disease or organism amongst the population. New excuses for continued quarantine would be given at the end of the week, whether or not any unusual symptoms had shown up. That would be the way of it until a new assignment could be found for the Rapscallion and its crew. Even then, observation would continue.

  This was the least offensive solution that security had presented to the station head; he gave it a green light while keeping to himself certain opinions on this pointless exercise.

  * * *

  Coma Specialist Dr. Joseph Gant was nervous. He was typically high strung, and this unusual and strange project made him more so. He had practically been kidnapped and brought up from the planet, taken away from other patients who also needed him badly. His former service in the military had been the chain that yanked him back. To his surprise, he was not the free man that he had assumed. Having been glad of his discharge many years ago, when now threatened with military prison, he opted to “volunteer” to assist in these top-secret circumstances.

  As he’d waited for his patient, the fetuses had been whisked past him. From another doctor he’d spoken with, he’d learned that they’d be secured in the modified re-growth units fitted with the latest artificial intelligence—the military’s most advanced. The AI would administer a complex chemo program supporting the accelerated re-growth process. Gant wondered how it was that such a device was ready at hand. These units had been brought in quickly, certainly faster than it would have taken them to assemble such constructions. Cloning maybe? The question was forgotten as he was occupied by the main issue that he was brought up to handle.

  Gant was in the viewing balcony as his security-cleared medical team worked in the operating theater below. They surrounded the comatose patient: the soldier who had been in the first boarding party, Private Sam Geoff. A combination of substances was being administered in a specific dosing pattern—one that Gant had developed—to assist the patient out of a non-trauma coma.

  He watched as the Med AI metered out different drugs and dosage strengths to areas of the recruit’s body: brain, heart, the base of the spine. It was a careful program of micro-doses at intervals designed to create a specific effect on the body. Gant’s procedure forced a mimicry of light-sleep autonomics. Modern psychotropics and longer-tested substances, rooted in early Chinese medicine, were the tools of Gant’s specialty.

  It was Gant’s theory (with which he’d had success) that his drug-therapy technique resulted in the brain following his orchestration like a pathway to consciousness; a chemo-autonomic trail of bread crumbs, from the false sleep into wakefulness.

  So far, there was no reaction from Geoff. The doctor who was second in charge looked up at Gant, who nodded a silent assent to override the AI for a second time, increasing dosages.

  It had been made clear to Gant that he was to do whatever necessary to wake the soldier. He was told that this person might be their only hope for more information on what had happened out there. Gant walked a thin line now, between waking Private Geoff and overdosing to the point of brain death—or worse. His chemical tools could be as destructive as they were therapeutic.

  As he stood and watched, his hands wringing the grip rail, a strange noise rose from below. At first he thought it was coming from the drug administration equipment, but it slowly grew louder. Initially starting as a high-pitched whine, it grew into a high moaning. Several members of the five-person team moved back from Geoff’s body. As they moved away, Gant got a clear view of the private’s face. It startled him.

  Geoff’s eyes, previously closed, were stretched so far open, it seemed they were held with a spreader; nearly the entire eyeball was visible. The soldier’s mouth was now locked in an impossibly wide aspect. Coupled with the emaciated features resulting from more than a week of isolated coma, Sam Geoff’s face was truly a mask of horror.

  The disembodied moan coming from their patient grew quickly into a bone-chilling scream.

  Stunned by this dramatic, frightening change of state, the entire medical team was frozen. Gant spoke urgent instructions into his implant channel; no one responded. He had to shout over the awful scream. “OVERRIDE AND SEDATE!”

  The doctor monitoring the AI quickly mouthed some commands. After two or three seconds, Geoff’s scream began to drop in its pitch and decibel, like the dying sound of an ancient air raid siren. The soldier took several desperate gasps for air then quieted, eyes closed again, breathing normally but deeply.

  “What is the brain function?” Gant demanded.

  One of the team looked at a colorful holo-monitor. “Registers a normal sleep state, no longer in the comatose state.”

  Thank God! “Okay, have the AI check and maintain stability of the vital
signs. Set waking doses for six hours from now.”

  Three of the doctors left the operating theater quickly, as if to escape. The remaining two completed tasks as necessary.

  * * *

  What the hell was that about? Gant had never seen that kind of reaction before, not even in the most extreme cases. It had to be whatever was floating around in that soldier’s consciousness; the part used for waking cognizance and memory storage. Geoff’s last conscious experience was still in the brain’s memory buffer, fresh, as if it had just occurred. Gant wasn’t looking forward to the details, however informative they might be.

  * * *

  Private Sam Geoff’s dreams had a lucid quality to them—there was a clear sense that there had been no dreams a moment before. Something had ripped away the safety of that dreamless place. A nightmare, one recently lived through, resumed now.

  This time, Sam was floating over the scene, experiencing the devastation from a freshly upsetting perspective. The recollection within the nightmare was vivid: Sam had been squeezed out, but, unfortunately, not blinded to what took place all around. Not blind to the fact that the occurrences were caused by Sam… or maybe not, but instead something that was directing the private’s body. Puppeteering.

  With the reaching out of a hand, life was sucked from the victims. No conscious command to move, but still, Sam’s arm and body moved, taking victim after victim. To say that the life was drained from fellow soldiers was not the way to put it. It was the essence—whatever energy made them who or what they were—made them human—it was vacuumed from them.

  It took just moments to eat their Souls.

  No sound issued from the private’s throat, yet Sam’s scream intensified, for as each victim was “eaten,” a multifaceted horror played out. The man or woman, the victim, looked into Sam’s eyes with fear for their lives. Surprise or betrayal etched their features, just before their faces began to horribly morph and shrink.

  Held fast to the floor by their boots, the suits and uniforms convulsed as the body of the person inside got smaller, shrunken, extremities drawing inward. Simultaneously, an alien sense spread within the private’s mind: gratification for what was happening.

  NO!

  Sam ate their life. Each victim got smaller, younger. Visible through helmets, heads shrank so fast. And when the skull and eyes stopped contracting, the nose, ears and mouth still shrank. Heads appeared suddenly distended—the oversized cranium of infancy—seeming about to burst; “NOOOOO!” A short, strangled cry, and the face shriveled to impossibly small. Sam watched the miniaturized, terrified countenance as it disappeared from the helmet, down into a drifting uniform.

  Each of these six-second mutilations moved in slow motion for Geoff, and somewhere inside, the private sensed something drinking it in, enjoying the process. The outrage increased as each captives’ terror poured in on top of Geoff’s own, hitting like a train wreck: the fears of one, then another, and another, gathered in the course of a lifetime, rushing in on the crashing edge of their terror—compressed into these deadly-potent moments of transfer. It slammed into Geoff again and again, in rapid succession, while also stretching over the agonizingly slowed movement of time.

  At some point in that past nightmare, the torture of those long moments had subsided, leaving Private Sam Geoff alone in a mercifully dreamless sleep.

  But now, somehow, that peace had been torn away. The insanity renewed, and as it replayed, something else came with it, the final act: a thing that could only be the Soul of each victim—Geoff saw it shredded—exploding in a cloud of crimson shrapnel. The fragmented, ephemeral substance was then pulled into a red stream of particles flowing into nowhere. A vanishing, like light into a black hole.

  Geoff’s heart also was shredded, pulled along by the exit of each Soul from the universe.

  The entire drama began to repeat in an unending loop. Geoff attempted to claw out of this horribly lucid dream state to no avail.

  Suppressed by drugs, the awakening would not come for another six hours.

  CHAPTER 21

  EVENT: DAY 7, 1340 UT

  Garrison nursed his anger.

  It gave him a grip.

  Semi-isolated in the EVA suits for take-off, it had been mostly silent between the captains, radio chatter with Center the primary conversation. The Quantum Butterfly was well away from the dock, having jumped through the required hoops to exit flight-space around the station. Astra engaged the auto-controls and took off her helmet. She turned to look at Garrison as he did the same. He returned the look evenly from his parallel flight couch, and resisted his automatic desire to stare at her bald head.

  She turned to the Order Locker at the right of her flight couch. It opened at her touch. Though these were Garrison’s orders, the lock was keyed to her electrical body-field signature. From the compartment, she withdrew a sheet: his Orders on a zephyr vellum. Oddly it was blank; it did not display for her. She handed it across to him.

  He stared at the blank sheet for a half-second, until text covered the page. His eyes flicked carefully down the copy. With each progressing line, he was confused. More and more, that confusion evolved into a throat-clenching anger. As he neared the bottom, the text scrolled up smoothly until the last few lines were revealed. Within two seconds of reading the last word, the sheet blanked out.

  Considering that it had remained blank until she’d handed it to him, he had suspected that it might self-erase. As he had begun to digest the information that he was being given, he knew that it would. The last line, “Eyes Only,” was more threat than instruction.

  A myriad of nano-sensors were embedded into the ubiquitous zephyr sheets: optical followers, body-field and brainwave sensors, and others. The optical pick-ups tracked his eyes; brainwave sensors tracked his subvocal patterns. They acted in a redundant fashion to assure that the message was read, understood, and then, if so programmed, destroyed; all traces removed from the vellum’s memory.

  He did not notice the document blanking out; his brain seared as the orders burned in. His face was flushed, on fire, and a pressure in his head pounded at his temples.

  No… Garrison was in a state of disbelief as he continued to stare at the blanked-out document. His reality narrowed down to a tunnel of awareness, a blackness blotting out all but the blank vellum where the retinal ghost of the banished orders still floated. Slowly, in waves, the moment crashed back.

  He was jarred by a noise on his right. He glanced to see Dominique dutifully minding her business. She turned her head as she became aware of his attention. He watched her eyes search his features; she obviously saw something there, but Garrison wasn’t sure enough of himself to know what his own expression might betray. He numbly handed the z-vellum back to her. She didn’t seem surprised to see that it was blank, automatically slipping it back into the locker, but she looked at him with a question unconcealed on her face.

  He turned away from that face. Outrage welled up inside. He was acutely aware that any word, any whisper that he might utter, any emotion that he bodily experienced, was being monitored by Center. He was gagged and bound.

  Within, layers of fury rose like nested explosions. He hid it as best he could from her while inside, he raged unfettered. He closed his eyes, held as still as he could, and gave himself to a silent storm of emotion.

  Garrison hoped that Astra was not looking at him, but if so, that she would misinterpret whatever it was she saw.

  CHAPTER 22

  EVENT: DAY 9, 0550 UT

  Admiral Clarence Swan sat stiff-backed, engrossed by the report on his desk.

  A miserable Dr. Gant stood in the center of the space before the desk. Next to him was General Hanson in a rigid stance. The doctor fidgeted with the gold band on his left ring finger.

  The only thing swan-like about the Station Head, Gant thought to himself, was the white suit. Otherwise, the man could be better compare
d to a bird-of-prey: imposing chiseled face, hawk-nose, streamlined by his severely groomed white hair. He hated the man.

  The environment was hard-edged. The gray flexsteel desk, more common to officers of lower rank, was all business with no pomp. Behind the admiral, the shelves for books were mostly empty, holding only a full set of classic-printed hempayrus volumes, Historical Military Actions. One shelf had a row of z-report cases, labeled on the spine, just like the bound packet of z-vellums Gant had prepared and sent to General Hanson not two hours before; the same that the admiral now scrutinized.

  Things involving his report were happening quickly. With the clearances he had been given, he had been able to find out that the Medallion, as well as a ship called a Light Skipper, had already departed to investigate the cause of his patient’s condition.

  Gant experienced deep remorse and guilt for the preceding day-and-a-half. A human should not be made to undergo what Pvt. Geoff had—especially on his authority. It was on his shoulders, put there by the admiral.

  The death of the soldier had caused Gant to seek mental support from the station’s military psychologist, rousing the woman from her sleep at 0430. She had not been too helpful and suggested he return when she had fully awoken. He paid a visit to the Spiritual Center in an effort to find some source of forgiveness. The fact that he had been ordered to follow the drug protocol, resulting in torture for Sam Geoff, was his one and only saving grace. And that was tissue-thin.

  Orders or not, the torture was meted out through his hands. Knowing the effects of the drugs used and what the results would be, as the lead physician, his conscience had prevented him from turning the task over to one of the other team doctors.