Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Page 5

  He had frozen in fear, waiting for an attack to manifest, but none came. With great relief, after sitting motionless in the dark and cramped pod for those tense minutes, he took action. None of his emergency systems would power up as he fumbled in the utter blackness of the one-man lab-ship.

  Eventually, he had put his hands on his EVA case where he kept his chemical lights. He activated three and set them floating together in the cubic meter-and-a-half of space in his control center. Sliding open a tiny observation port with a finger, a reassuring pinprick of light shone from his shielded micro-pile. His power source was intact. With rising confidence he was sure he’d get the bucket running again.

  Anticipating repairs, he secured for vacuum, disconnecting his suit systems from the ship while doing a mental calculation of the time that his liquid oxygen stores would hold out.

  Something at the edge of vision caught his attention... Forse l’ombra? The shadows grew and shrank slowly with the drifting position of his light cluster. He found no real movement as he scanned the illusions. Yes, it must have been the shadows. His gaze came to rest upon the white, nicely spherical souvenir wedged in a cubby. He pondered the object for a moment as it reflected the dim chemical light.

  His lingering notice revealed something strange about it, doubly strange. First, the outline of the stone was blurring. That was not a trick of the light, or fatigued eyes—everything else next to it was in sharp focus. And then, as he leaned in, there was something strange about the shadows themselves.

  Non credo. What…? Comani watched the shadows jump from one slowly changing position to another, like time-lapse. Blinking to clear the hallucination, he looked up over his shoulder at the chemlights. Their movement seemed jittery. He shook his head and closed his eyes, pressing back in his seat. He told himself it was nerves from the pirate worries …but, non capisco, I did not think that I was that bad off.

  Opening his eyes, alternately shaking his head and straining his vision, he wasn’t able to bring the artifact into sharp focus. He leaned toward the rock again and his world twisted bizarrely. An overpowering sense of déjà vu swept over him—again and again. A looping déjà vu.

  Startled and upset, he slammed himself backwards into his accel-couch, away from the object. His left hand went back over his head, hitting the chemlight cylinders. Their minimal bond broke and the cluster flew apart, glowing cylinders careening around at varying speeds, and rebounding from different surfaces. One stuck neatly in a switch-key cubby, while he felt another lose its momentum, bouncing between his headrest and a control surface behind him. The third ricocheted off the curving rear bulkhead and sailed at a slowed speed toward his stone.

  All of this happened in a split-second. His attention was still riveted on the blurry sphere confronting him amongst the riot of shifting light patterns. The chemlight caught his eye as it coasted forward. In a delayed reaction, he reached forward for the slender object. It was out of his hesitating grasp. The cylinder drifted toward the sphere. In a moment the light was gone, completely. It simply disappeared. In that same moment, Comani’s immediate recollection faltered: Was not… was not I just watching a… a light? Before he could puzzle out what he was feeling, he saw that a light-cylinder was gliding toward him, from his left, in a slow-motion tumble. He remembered that something strange had happened, a light had disappeared, yes. He reached and plucked the small cylinder from its trajectory.

  Comani’s scientific training drove its way to the fore, overtaking his concern and confusion. He lay back in his accel-couch; he wanted to be very certain of his facts: the strange rock, with its odd blurriness; he remembered the déjà vu and a disappearing…

  He looked around; including the light in his hand, he counted the same total that he had originally set floating. What of the vanished light?

  Half-formed, fantastic suspicions fought for his acknowledgement. He needed to experiment.

  Remaining well back in his accel-seat, he released the light he held, aimed slightly away from the rock. The slender cylinder was not pulled toward it. The object’s puzzling property seemed not to include any kind of mystical gravitation at least. He watched the chemlight for a few seconds as it bumped and bounced off the opposite wall. It did not disappear.

  Comani’s mind raced, his analytical nature ruling. All concern for his power-loss emergency was gone for the time being. What happens here?

  Next, he pulled the other chemlight out of the cubby where it had stuck, and released it directly at the rock. He leaned in and was assaulted by the same disorientation and piecemeal memory of what he’d just done. As he jerked back again, his thoughts became coherent. He saw that a light floated towards him, as if it had emerged from the object. Where came that from? And where… have I not pushed one to it? He remembered his intent, but not the act. He did another count. Still three lights; something remained constant.

  Comani pondered on what other experiment he might perform. It staved off his worry. The déjà vu was the most troublesome; it was slightly painful and quite intense. It distorted his perspective, destroying his ability to get to the heart of this anomaly. Until power was restored he had no extrinsic way to record these events, as a control.

  He took a deep breath, re-settling his disarrayed accel-harness without a thought. There could be no room in his mind for anything except what forces were at work here. He centered his focus.

  A theory began to coalesce from the warring suspicions, but he had to test it before he could even voice it within his own mind. In his life, the doctor had dealt with cold fact, solid reality. What was happening to him now made no sense in the world of facts. He would have laughed with scorn at anyone offering his unvoiced theory. For Comani to accept it, even as it faced him, was a challenge in the extreme.

  Without pausing to rationalize his decision, he grabbed a water tube from the consumacab, pulled the seal back, and aimed into the zone around where the blurring object sat. His target was the dead front of a panel next to the cubby. The water would provide a de facto record of the event. In a sudden move, he leaned as far forward as he could and mashed the flexible tube in his fist. In the midst of the time vortex, Comani cringed. The moment looped back, accompanied by the repeating liquid sound of water streaming from the tube.

  * * *

  Comani was lying back in his couch, breathing evenly, eyes closed.

  It was too rash, he thought, anticipating what he was about to do. It would be stupid to release water into this null-grav environment. If it all hit the access panel, it wouldn’t be too bad; he had absorbents. But there was the possibility of water shorting out a system. Maybe he needed a different approach.

  He brought his right hand up in an unconscious gesture, fingers to his forehead, thumb on temple—a pose he assumed when deep in thought. His fingers unexpectedly slid across his wet forehead. He flinched; his eyes snapped open. Almost in a panic, he wiped at his face convulsively. Above him floated hundreds of drifting sparks: small water spheres reflecting the chem light. Like some amoebic life form, every so often they merged when they touched.

  Water was everywhere.

  Comani’s mouth fell open, his mind in logic re-route. Could he now accept the theory he had just been pondering? Circumstances had now proved it to be fact. Or, rather, he had proved it, but he did not remember taking that action.

  He coughed, breathing in too much water, and he quickly released the absorbents that would take care of the drifting orbs. Working with this new and amazing information, he was careful to remain reclined. His head was as far from it as possible, without lying completely flat back into the sleep position. Fred was not yet sure whether he should fear the object, or simply treat it as he might his radioactive micropile power source: respect it for its ability to do as much harm as good.

  Just as he had visualized when contemplating this experiment, a coating of water clung to the panel front; gelatinous in the zero-gravi
ty, it had a life-like quality. Yet his brain contained neither a memory of his act, nor that of an audible splash and the obvious dispersion of water droplets, which had to have followed. Instead, his reality was changed to be something different than what his memory told him it should be.

  He could be certain that he had done things moments ago that he did not remember. One explanation could be that the object was facilitating instantaneous thought manifestation—this was his imagined aftermath of the experiment. Without questioning the idea, he concentrated, intent upon a wedge of chocolate espresso cake, a nearly forgotten favorite of his youth. When nothing happened, he actually blushed, angry that he would waste thought on such an experiment.

  Back to the obvious, the strange déjà vu might possibly support the notion that, instead, a slice of time had been extracted from his timeline.

  This led Comani to his next conclusion: this thing, this “stone,” had to be emitting a field, maybe impacting the flow of time in some way.

  His knowledge of time-theory was sparse. He tried to recall: In other dimension is other “Federico” who has seen water appear from null, in point of time past, which… No. At a moment in time, probably before I have this lapidare… No.

  It was confusing and too wild. He quit the theory; it was just as unlikely as matter manifestation. But still, Comani could not see how he wouldn’t have witnessed what had happened with the water—even if it only existed as just a memory. But how could he have a memory of something he did not experience? Well, he did not have the memory, in any case, so, paradox-moot.

  But he was here when it happened; he should now have that recollection. The question circled back. The object was becoming harder to focus on. Pressure built to solve the riddle, as if this was a bomb that could be diffused by the right answer.

  Wait… Stupido! He checked his internal time; he was missing more than two hours.

  His ship clock readout would be black until he restored system power. He could not crosscheck this revelation.

  These circular thoughts had his head spinning, when a very loud noise intruded on the eerie quiet of his drifting laboratory. Had his systems been powered up, alarms would have sounded as an enormous force of deceleration compressed his world. He was painfully flattened into his loosened webbing harness. The movement brought his head into the closest proximity yet to the increasingly blurry stone.

  Reality then changed drastically.

  CHAPTER 8

  EVENT: DAY 7, Pre-dawn, 0400 UT

  Warm air blew gently up the mirror, clearing steam from her shower.

  Captain Dominique Astra gazed at her mirrored image as she sat in the convert-a-privy, now in its women’s toilette mode. Dominique appreciated her body and the exquisite beauty with which she’d been blessed. While that beauty was a boost to self-esteem, as an officer in the SBMMP, she tried to ignore that advantage and stay well grounded. No woman made it to command with an oversized ego in the male-dominated environment.

  She slipped into her single-piece flight suit; it contracted to its skintight vacuum setting, which left little to the imagination, then relaxed to the looser, non-vacuum fit. With her bags packed the evening before, she was set to go in under ten minutes. She donned her emblazoned flight jacket over what now looked like a pantsuit, and stepped out the door of her barracks apartment. She took a deep breath, shaking her golden tresses out of her jacket collar. Pre-dawn air is the sweetest, she thought.

  The military installation was in New Earth Zone. The construction was ticky-tack Bot-omated carbo-fibre, but at least BUMP had omitted the overall paving. Instead, they had flattened and polished the rough volcanic geography, and imported soil to fill as needed. Dominique knew that there were efforts to instill a fashionable style to the construction but it still seemed right out of the head of some stodgy general.

  It was better than the Boundary Renewal Zones though: over-paved, plasticized environments, built with this same tried-and-true, safe and narrowly defined nanotech, which had been developed in the late twenty-second century for structure creation. Its quick and easy construction-customization feature allowed that “more fashionable” look. Those installations were on the edge of no-man’s land where the radioactivity had diminished, shrinking farther into the center of the burned-out forbidden regions. The military had long-since pushed out from pristine areas, through New Earth Zone, and moved past the Boundary Zone in an effort to erase scars of a fearful past.

  All of the military’s constructions emanated a feeling of outdated hyper-cautiousness, a leftover sentiment in the wake of the Obliteration more than two hundred years gone by. She supposed it was more habit than anything else; a security blanket that mankind held onto, as if sterility replaced caution and could ward off the stupid things that were done in the name of advancement. At least nanobugs were still forbidden, their manufacture punishable by death.

  Though Dominique’s frontier was in the stars, she wished they would figure out how to emulate more of the Old Earth Zones. The wonderful, ancient forests resonated deeply with her spirit.

  Wishes wasted. She put them out of her mind and brought her attention to the present. She set off on the well-worn footpath that ran through the grass toward Center.

  The moonset caught her attention. “I’ll be there before long, sweetheart,” she whispered under her breath, and unconsciously quickened her step as if that might get her up and away all the sooner.

  Her flight would be with Captain Bartell. She’d read his file: single, former military, exemplary service record, presently employed by USUCC. That last part had concerned her for several reasons. This was a two-person assignment, and as usual, her crew would be male. She suppressed her thoughts about how it would go between them during the mission. Its length was open-ended; that could mean as much as a month or more.

  Dominique had lots of practice with sexual dynamics in her position. Multi-Military Patrol was made up of the combined branches of the different armed forces, creating a single military entity. There were Earth and space-based branches.

  Ultimately, this coalescing of disparate focuses worked. For the last hundred and seventy-five years, the militaries of the remaining world governments had cooperated, becoming one entity, despite suspicions that were as slow to die as those that had fueled the twenty-first century religious wars.

  Male-female camaraderie was strong amongst the enlisteds—those who fielded any of the hard or dangerous grunt work. But this quality seemed to evaporate when one moved into the officer class. Dominique worked in a mutual respect relationship alongside the women of the military. But for the men, hard-shelled was an apt term.

  Yet they lost a lot of that quality if they managed to get her alone. When out of sight of other crewmembers, their behavior ranged from being overly eager to please to unprofessional bravado. Rank was no modifier. Ensigns, captains, and even a five-star general; it was no different.

  She didn’t try to manipulate these men, but their willingness to be manipulated created a problem for her. In her commanding officer role she set her sex aside, but many men could not. As a result they saw their service under her to be more like favors to her—a willing, but personal sacrifice. This would always create a barrier to command.

  Whenever possible, she avoided serving alone with a man. This time, no choices were given. In these situations she did for herself, neither giving nor expecting favors outside the strict lines of command.

  Bartell was a creature of not only BUMP but also USUCC. She wasn’t sure what to expect from him; while his file was full of impressive but dry facts of his service with BUMP, there was no focus on his personality. Why had he ended up serving with a bunch of ex-pirate low-lifes?

  Distracted by her thoughts as she went through the pre-flight med with the female physician, she mentally clarified her professional position; I don’t mind the admiration of men. It’s nice, but best kept at a distance.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 9

  EVENT: DAY 7, 0530 UT

  A spacer did not keep a permanent Earthside dwelling.

  It was an image thing. Anyone who left Earth on a regular basis maintained a more transient reality. Class distinction.

  The block of Temp-Dwells that Garrison used gave him quick access to USUCC, which situated their headquarters on the perimeter of the military base. Many believed that the guild had originally chosen the location to irritate BUMP, given the relationship between the two organizations.

  Taylor’s choice of location was driven by other needs. Or urges, rather.

  Temporary accommodations suited her flighty lifestyle and appealed to her self-image, considering the company she kept. In actuality, up until now, her travel had been limited to the Low-Earth-Orbit docks. She’d begged and bribed Garrison, since they’d met, to take her on one of the USUCC missions. He had resisted on the premise that the ship crews were too disrespectful or abusive to women. Since she’d begun to bar hop with some of them, she wasn’t buying the excuse anymore.

  The truth was that he would be uneasy having the men ogling TJ while he was standing right there. Additionally, missions were often very boring with no action at all. He did not want her to see that. She had a fantasy, which Garrison was happy to foster, about the dangers that he faced regularly.

  He left enough time to head over to Taylor’s present Earthside apartment, close to the base’s main gate. It wasn’t a long walk, and lost in idle thought about the coming mission, Garrison almost passed by TJ’s unit. Just another door and window in a long stream, all alike. The lock clicked, as the biometric scan recognized him; he pushed in, not losing a step.

  “Hey, Taylor?” he called out.

  Even as her name left his lips, he saw she had already gone, relinquishing the unit for this mission. He heard a noise and turned; a cleaner-bot emerged from a small door at the base of a wall. His eye scanned in the direction it headed, where he saw a small familiar bit of fabric. He lurched across the room to snatch the object, frustrating the robot’s attempt to do away with it. Veering away from his heavy footfall in self-protection, it continued to patrol, finding smaller debris.