Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Read online

  He turned his examination to what he’d picked up—a pair of Taylor’s nearly-nothing panties. This would be just the sort of tease she would throw at him now, when she was upset. It said, “This is what you can’t have.”

  “Damn.” He scrunched them in a fist and breathed in her scent. He had hoped to patch things up before he left. Despite the gruff exterior that he believed he presented to the world, he had a softer side that easily found its expression through his relationship with Taylor.

  She might have left moments or hours ago. That the door still let him in just meant the unit hadn’t been reassigned yet. He took a few more steps to the convert-a-privy, scanning for any other orphaned items. Nothing. Cleaned out.

  A fantasy flashed into his mind of its own accord, the thought that she had gone to his Temp-Dwell in hopes of making up with him. Maybe she had just disappeared around the corner as he arrived on her avenue. The idea made him smile. The fantasy, though, was just that, and he knew it. Taylor wouldn’t be the one to make the first move at this particular reconciliation; her jealous reaction was not a show. His smile faded.

  It occurred to him that he did not even know her flight assignment. Even at this early hour he was sure that Sgt. Amio would be on about his own duties, and he doubted he’d get any information from Center. He swore again. He hated parting with her on these terms. And she made it worse with her disappearing act. Well, she would have to live with it. Why should he care so much anyway? After all, if anyone should be jealous, it ought to be him.

  It just wasn’t in his nature. Why did she have to act like this? She flirts about with Sgt. Bellboy, and then gives me the ice treatment because I get an assignment with an attractive woman.

  Stunning, actually. He had seen her picture when he was a captain with BUMP. In his mind her golden hair floated around her face, giving her a glow.

  Garrison became aware that he was standing there, staring at the toilet. He spurred himself into action, stuffed the panties into a pocket, and headed back out into the dawning day, his step approaching a run. He reprimanded himself for getting lost in thought on a flight morning.

  Women. That was the problem; he was going into space today, so now was the time to set feminine confustications aside; to instead set his mind on important things, like procedure, checklists, etc. Mission-forced celibacy was a lot harder if he allowed thoughts of women to intrude.

  Moments into his mental refocus, Capt. Astra’s face came to mind again, stopping Garrison dead in his tracks, heels skidding on the gravel path. In his determination to forget women and embrace his sexual abstinence, he’d left his co-captain out of the equation. The most beautiful woman imaginable was going to be at his elbow for the next... who knew how long? Garrison set his jaw and resumed his brisk walk, determined to re-harden his cracking shell. It was going to take intense focus to keep this mission from being one big sexual frustration.

  He found himself hoping that whatever it was they were after, it would be big, bad, alien and ugly.

  CHAPTER 10

  EVENT: DAY 7, 0600 UT

  Taylor knew she’d been unfair to Garrison.

  Still, she couldn’t stifle her anger towards him. He was instantly obsessed with this Dominique, to the point of ignoring her. As if she wasn’t as important to him as that woman.

  She had awoken with a headache, and her Relief Breather hadn’t provided much relief. She had been tempted to take another breath even though it was a flight day. She doubted it would show in the full flight physical—her first. The pain probably had worse side effects on her body. She’d decided not to chance a rejection; this mission was more important to her than her immediate comfort. The dull throb helped her focus on the seriousness of space prep.

  All packed, at the last minute, she dug a pair of panties out of her laundry and threw them on the floor: a present of mixed messages for Garrison if he came by to try and see her. Then, putting him out of her mind, she left her apartment early to make sure she wasn’t there if he showed.

  Let him stew for a bit. I hope he’s feeling guilty. It’s too bad Lamb isn’t on my Patrol Cruiser. I could have used the distraction. Well, there were bound to be others just as distracting or more.

  Her flight assignment had a mandatory boarding arrival of 1400 hours, but TJ was anxious to be off Earth. She’d set her med appointment early and was sitting in a Center Med Cube in a gown on a cold flexsteel exam table.

  Waiting for the doctor, she swung her dangling legs and wondered idly if there was some arcane medical reason, kept from the general public, for the patient to have a cold butt when the doctor finally arrived. Do they have a refrigeration unit under here?

  In a bored response to her own rhetorical question, she leaned forward to look under the table.

  Too quietly, the doctor walked in. “I see you’ve started the exam without me,” he said, as she jerked her head up from between her legs. Her face heated. The doc was good-looking; that didn’t help her complexion regain its normal color. He chuckled at her obvious embarrassment and introduced himself. The exam went quickly, and TJ made a mental note to look “Doc” up when she got back Earthside.

  That done, Taylor headed to the High Vee Tube, always anxious to be off the ground once she’d decided on a space-based stunt or mission. Of course, this was her first real mission, rather than a stunt of her own devising, and she wanted to get up to Low-Earth-Orbit Dock to get a look at her Cruiser.

  There were two Alpha LEO docks, Cylinder Alpha and Toroid Alpha, and several smaller Beta docks in Supra-Earth-Orbit, beyond the debris sphere. The LEOs were tethered to Earth by the Bullet space elevator system cables.

  Aboard the Bullet, as it moved upward toward Low-Earth-Orbit, Taylor was reminded of her recent stunt with Garrison. She smiled, thinking about the nickname she’d given him, Hee Bee GB. He made a show of not liking her pet name, but she was sure he didn’t really mind it. Of course, now his pirate friends were teasing him. He hated that. The thought gave a mischievous twist to her smile. Serves him right.

  With the image of the discomfited Garrison in mind, she pulled down the privacy hood of her accel-web and drifted off. She napped away the last of her headache, adding forty-five minutes to her sleep quotient.

  * * *

  Taylor was startled awake by the mechanical spinning of her webbing harness. It turned 180 degrees, facing Earthward. They were approaching the station; slowdown would begin. The Bullet’s laser pusher cut off. Absolute silence reigned for a few seconds, then the magnets executed a deceleration that was more severe than the acceleration had been. Taylor heard familiar groans and gasps as she was pressed back hard into her harness. Never keen on the idea of the other passengers watching her face go through the distortion of three or more gravities, she’d left her sleep hood down. She did not want to see them either.

  Before long, the high-G decel was over and their webs spun back to face the station. To satisfy the tourists, a clear crysteel viewing portion was built into the last kilometer of tube, for a view of their approach. Sun shone on the donut-shape from the side at this time of day, leaving most of it in space-dark shadows. From a distance, light and shadow caused the station to appear like a set of large and small crescent moons facing each other. A few oohs and aahs came from the same first-time riders that would have gasped during decel. Taylor held her exclamation; she did not want to be lumped in with the newbies, but it was always stunning to her.

  As they closed in on the station, the nose of their Bullet hid the station’s central donut-hole from the Tube passengers’ view. This altered Toroid Alpha’s appearance to look more like a bloated disc than a donut. The sunlight revealed various small structures sprouting here and there; in the dark areas, red and white lights blinked or glowed steadily. The station grew to mega-proportions in the closing approach. The illusion of an impending collision was powerful; a tense silence fell. All at once, the inward slope of th
e central pass-thru became apparent, as if a sinkhole was opening at the center of the station. The tension broke, and the release of a collective held breath was audible, Taylor’s included. Final braking began.

  The common designation of “dock” was an understatement. She guessed the title was left over from earlier days when the much smaller Cylinder Alpha was the only spacedock. Dock Toroid Alpha had everything a good-sized city would need, including housing, retail outlets, an environmental R&R dome, military warehousing, and more. Its main function was military, but it had become a playground for those of the upper middle-class. As she pressed forward into her thrust web with the final decel, Taylor mentally calculated her route to a viewport for the best angle to see the Medallion.

  Nice name for a ship, she thought. It probably had an award-winning crew, or battle record, or something.

  The shuttle came to rest at the upper air lock, just beyond the centerline of the torus. The lower air lock would have another Bullet full of passengers, ready for the trip down to Earth. As the lock’s dual-door arrangement cycled, the entire passenger capsule was moved out of the High Velocity Tube by magnetic fields, and then grapple-locked into a new, outer casing: a Core Acceleration Chamber. Inevitably, passengers became restless at this transition and conversations increased in volume. Taylor was impatient.

  The acceleration chamber served two functions: as a Bullet transporter component and, when not carrying a shuttle car, as a People Mover inside the Dock. A complex system of tubes and rails inside the walls of the station brought it down to the spindeck, a wide, flat, rolling ring within the donut. On the interior face of that ring sat the majority of the enclosed city.

  Track switches also provided for a perpendicular path on the shorter lateral curve of the toroid, taking the chamber past the spindeck to the docks, essentially underneath the spindeck. Only a dedicated military shuttle could access that track. Civilian passengers were debarked to the gravitized spindeck. Taylor watched the military-only track cut-off slide by. She would have to retrace the path from the deck back into freefall in order to get to the docking level where she could see the ship.

  She braced herself for the uncomfortable transition down to the spindeck. The acceleration-to-gravity experience was an odd one. Initial acceleration of the chamber-encased Bullet pressed Taylor and the other passengers back into their thrust webs. In its ¾-kilometer-long loop around the curving torus core the vehicle gained speed.

  Their chamber now gained the gravitational definition of “hanging” from rails, similar to the inverted roller coasters that were so popular in the thrill parks. Quickly achieving the 95-kph target speed, the pressing effect of acceleration morphed into a pull of gravity due to centrifugal force. The pulling force moved noticeably from behind Taylor to below her, as though a sinister entity was stalking and pawing at her. The shift between sensations was stomach-turning, and Taylor’s internal organs were doing a backward somersault. Passengers around her gagged or made other sounds of discomfort, but no one threw up, happily. Thank goodness for the “no food before ride” rule.

  At full acceleration, the relative gravity became a light, point-six Gs. To the left and right, the world blurred past. The oblong chamber matched speeds with the top of a Transfer Tube extending up from the spindeck, and then released, with a slight bump, from the overhead rails and began to lower down the Tube like a small bus in a wide elevator. The Transfer Tube was transparent, providing a dramatic panorama through the Bullet and the acceleration chamber windows.

  Taylor could not make much sense of the view at first as the chamber moved down though a ceiling partition into the cavernous interior. As they dropped, she watched the rotation-matched, one-hundred-foot deck wall, as it appeared to rise up. This relatively static half-wall was played against the apparently rotating outer walls of the torus beyond. It was dizzying for Taylor to look at—like a fun-house illusion, it made her brain spin sideways. A small groan escaped her lips before she pressed them tight together. The deck wall’s curved top-edge steadily rose up to either side like a giant smile, blotting out the dizzying sight.

  Protruding upper level wall-buildings then came into view. These wall-buildings stopped short of the deck level, maximizing the square kilometers of deck space below. They would have varying gravities at their different heights, and housed scientific research labs and the dock’s hydroponics farms.

  With the move downward to the deck, tangential velocity increased. The relatively faster spin magnified the gravity until it reached eighty percent of earth-normal at the deck. Taylor could feel her weight increase—the invisible being pulled on her.

  Almost half of the spindeck’s layout was visible as she looked down. There were three equal zones known as Slices. She could see much of the Civilian Slice, which handled all non-military debarkation. It included permanent and temporary housing, and the stores and shops that people needed for the requirements of daily life.

  Taylor could see just as much of the Vegas Slice—her usual destination. It was named for a derelict and forgotten city on Earth, whose magnificent ruins of twisted metal structures and monolithic concrete shells were hidden under a rampant jungle of growth caused by post-Obliteration environmental shifts. Originally unaffected by the disaster, the city’s transient population had dwindled nonetheless, due to the psychological trauma after the Obliteration. The decadent celebration of life that the metropolis represented could not withstand the planet-wide economic and moral depression that had ensued. Without tourism providing the enormous resources required for maintenance, it fell into disrepair and was eventually abandoned. Taylor had once traveled to the city and spent a couple of weeks engineering a stunt on an old roller coaster, with the help of some portable rocket engines.

  Here, Vegas Slice provided any kind of distraction–from outrageous sex shows and sexual escort services, to any form of gambling, all legal here on DTA. A vacation enviro-dome was also located there, offering tamer, family-oriented endeavors. Taylor was a gambler. Luck was on her side, almost always.

  At first glance, someone might confuse Vegas Slice for the military zone, since nearly half the population, at any given time, was uniformed or fatigue-attired personnel on furlough or shore leave. Streams of green and black attire moved through those streets as she watched.

  Not visible to Taylor from this Drop Tube, the final Slice was off limits to anyone not having business with SBMMP, the Space-Based Multi-Military Patrol. That segment was commonly referred to as M&M Slice. While it had its own dedicated Bullet transport from Earthside, M&M Slice could also be entered through guarded gates from Vegas or Civilian.

  On Earth, Taylor had impulsively boarded the next transport up, which happened to be the Civilian/Vegas Bullet, debarking in Civilian Slice at the Vegas boundary line. She could have hopped a Bullet bound for the docks with her current clearance but she didn’t want to wait even a few minutes at her ground station.

  A warning toned and the doors of the nested transports and the Transfer Tube opened simultaneously. A recorded voice and a projected attendant avatar advised passengers to unfasten from their webs and “depart carefully down the exit ramp; relative gravity, point-eight earth-normal.” Taylor felt the difference in the first springy step.

  In the direction of Vegas Slice the sound of music emanated, though it was distant. Here, in Civilian Slice, there were few people about at this time of day. Her optical implants had no access to any military data nodes, so she went first to a nearby vidisplay terminal. “The Medallion,” she said at the screen, then, “Captain.” The terminal silently read her authorization chip, and then instructed her to review her data interface for this information. From a small tube at her hip, she extracted her rolled-up, personal zephyr vellum, which took up less space than a rigid MUI interface did. The zapped information was there, including the captain’s thumbnail photo and name, ‘Jonathon Sparks’, displayed under the ‘New Data’ tab, along with dockin
g location and other pertinent, non-classified info.

  On a whim, she whispered, “Marital status.” In the typical hush of the early hour, the reply that came from a hidden speaker was over-loud, “Marital status of all military personnel may be accessed only with appropriate clearance. Do you have another request?”

  Startled by the unexpected auditory assault, she moved back a step, nearly bumping a woman in officer’s attire coming out of Vegas Slice; she got back a sideways glance. Looking back at the terminal she said, exasperated, “No thanks.” The vidisplay remained silent. Apparently, she had come up against a limit in the clearance that Sgt. Amio had arranged for her.

  Taylor hurried on her mini-journey to the view port destination in the docks. She would need to backtrack up to null-grav, then find a transport down the curved, outside wall. The path took her back through the Transfer Tubes.

  Deceleration to zero-gravity wasn’t nauseating like acceleration was, yet she would have to come right back through gravity transition again to do some shopping on the spindeck. TJ didn’t care; she was committed.

  This time she would be in the acceleration chamber directly, without the inner shell of the Bullet shuttle car. The chamber carrying the Bullet had already moved back into free fall, and at her signal an empty acceleration chamber rose up from a storage area below the deck. Entering the clear chamber, she strapped into a pivot-harness along the wall. A single other passenger had followed her into the transport. The man looked at her with alcohol-impaired eyes and barely concealed lust. He had clearly stumbled out of Vegas Slice. His destination seemed to be in question.