Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Read online

  “Get into a harness,” she finally had to tell him, in order to get the transport to begin its ascent. Once the AI was satisfied, they were up into decel in under a minute.

  The drunk was left a bit green by the ride, and freefall was likely to exacerbate his failing condition. Taylor exited the Tube Transport at the first stop, near the airlock where the Bullet arrived and departed. The guy had to be a newbie, but he wasn’t her problem. She happily left the sorry-looking fellow and his lurid gaze behind as she used the free-fall grips, hand over hand, along a curving catwalk that was suspended three meters out from the core wall. Moving around the torus’s center toward the military dock zone, she followed signs and ended at a Spaceward-Wall Fast-Transit Railvator. The ship docks were divided into just two sections: military docking, the larger of the two, and a second that encompassed all other docking. She’d been to the docking deck before, but not the military’s.

  There was no sentry to question her authority, only a retinal scanner, and no instruction on how to call a car. She tried, simply, “Call car,” and was rewarded with a beep from the scanner and a blast of air from the railway shaft, followed by the cage-like car rocketing up the curved wall toward her. Its SWFTR acronym made sense; the cars above the regular docks didn’t move like that.

  A bit nervous as she boarded, she did not hesitate. Barely in, the doors began to close, so she quickly slipped her feet into the nearest loops in a panic, and held on. The elevator car started right away and slid around the outer lateral curve of the donut-shaped station’s spaceward skin. It moved quickly, though at an easier pace than its arrival, down past the galloping ring that was the spindeck. The backside of its sidewall was peppered with lights moving past. Taylor looked away to head-off some dizziness that threatened.

  She had never had a good reason to buy a pair of mag-gravboots—Taylor never spent too much time in freefall and she loved every minute—but she could feel the familiar beginning ache in her abdominals and other muscles used for activities in zero-G. She maybe should have at least taken the time to get the mag-grav boots that were on her requisition. Oh well, sore muscles never slowed her down, and this incredible freedom to pass through security into forbidden territory was already squeezing adrenaline into her system. It was worth the extra effort because she knew that seeing the ship in its full glory would further heighten the sense of anticipation that she found so exhilarating. She needed it like a sexperience junkie needed the immersion fix.

  The railvator car came to a halt and the doors opened. Taylor released from her footloops, and launched out the door to the grip rail in the center of the ceiling above the walk-deck. Clambering along the rail toward the viewport listed on her zephyr, she came to a manned sentry post.

  The guard looked up. “Halt. How did you get down here?” He pushed off the deck and intercepted her. Before she could say anything, he was scanning her with a handheld scanner. “You may pass, Ms. Jest. It would be best if you were wearing your boots,” he said, and pushed back down off the grip rail. He dropped the two meters to his post, where his Gecko boots stuck him fast to the deck, and he returned to a nearly immobile stance.

  Wow, glad he didn’t send me back. Her body tingled from the close-call. She passed above a few others on the deck below, who were equipped with the proper footwear, and who ignored her.

  Ah. Here’s the port. She reoriented, easing into the clear crysteel, four-person half dome. It pushed out of the station’s bisecting edge like a clear pimple on its gray skin. Looking down, a massive crescent view of Earth pushed out into star speckled blackness, a terminator shadow lay across part of the blue and white vista. She rotated her body to the opposite bearing. Taylor’s heartbeat increased.

  There’s my ship! Of the others that she could see, the Medallion was one of the largest crafts in dock, though judging true size was difficult against the backdrop of the star field.

  Her adrenaline rush augmented the euphoria of weightlessness.

  She stared upward, out the side of the dome to the bottom of the ship… or is that the top? It was magnificent in any case. Roughly four times larger than a patrol ship, it consisted of two fat, longitudinal disks, which she could see edge on, rotating in slow opposition. The perpendicular, penetrating central shaft of the ship was fronted by the bridge, a colossal, tapered half-disk, like a blunted arrowhead. View ports and sensor arrays extended up, down, and forward.

  Up and down? Let’s see, forward, fore and aft. But what’s up and down in space?

  Rigid struts extended out from the main body; some had anchor points for the station grapples, and a fat one was connected to the station boarding tube.

  She stared out the port for a few minutes, body drugs pumping, and then headed back to the spindeck, more anxious to be off than before.

  CHAPTER 11

  EVENT: DAY 7, 1100 UT

  A rumor circulated.

  Ensign Chris Friday had heard it less than twelve hours ago: the next assignment promised more excitement than usual. Namely, leading the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Seeker’s radio silence. That was an entirely separate set of rumors. Nothing would be confirmed until they were away from dock.

  Off-duty, the ensign walked briskly through the Medallion’s passages.

  He had stepped away from his duty station moments earlier, when his relief had walked through the door. The man was a few minutes late, sad-faced. Chris could guess why. This gossip would stir the blood of the crewmen and women at the heart of the rumors. As if some primal survival instinct kicked in, sex drive went through the roof. Shore leave would be coveted like gold.

  Chris was jostled from his idle thoughts as he stepped into the path of another ensign, also just off-duty, rushing back to quarters before heading ashore. He smiled and nodded to Ensign Hahn, who wore an anxious and happy look, nodding back in his wordless haste.

  When in spacedock, duty was a redundancy for Chris’s post. Dock Toroid Alpha performed a constant local-system energies check, monitoring in- and outbound traffic; also meteors, comets, and the like. Aboard the ship, Chris scanned this too, but had no authority to act against any of these entities. A BUMP ship was always on standby. If monitoring showed a possible need for their involvement, availability would be instantaneous.

  Subsequent to an accident and tragedy early in the Dock TA’s operation, an offset docking trajectory was now enforced, initiated at the Moon’s orbit or better; no ‘direct to home’ flights were allowed. The approaching ship corrected this angle in the last ten thousand kilometers to Dock.

  For Chris, duty while docked was always laced with boredom, so he used an alert meditation during those times. He had learned the technique nearly a year ago from a former crewmate, Quilliam Spence. Spence told stories that were quite unbelievable; Chris was sure every word was true.

  Before his service with BUMP, Spence had been hooked up with an unlimited amount of money. He claimed to have been flying solo, out for a couple of months in a private two-person ship, a Little Skipper: “I was deep into the vast and lonely space of the solar system, when I was engaged by an alien craft. Proximity alarms were my only warning; nothing had registered on the instruments, but it was visible through the viewport by the way it blotted out the stars.

  “It immediately departed, but then returned on a collision course. I had no choice except to fire on it, but my weapons went down completely. An instant before collision, the other vessel faded out. Roughly 3 kilometers of ship just vanished. But then, I could feel the presence of the alien. I can’t explain it; the craft itself seemed to be the alien; like some big, intelligent space-bug.”

  When the interloper became visible once more, Spence’s entire control system faltered and would not respond. He could do nothing but watch the thing through a couple of viewports. Near the end of the first hour of the engagement—more a mutual observation event—Spence lost consciousness. “I woke to find my
self securely webbed in the flight couch. Inexplicably, I was orbiting Borlon’s fifth planet in second level space. I was so far from home that there wasn’t a military outpost for light years.”

  The alien’s presence was immediately there in his consciousness, but it was a diminishing sensation, as if he were being left here alone. “The thing had toyed with me then lost interest, like a cat deserted a half-dead mouse.” Spence knew he was that dying mouse. Way, way out, above the galactic plane, without a military FTL-drive engine, he had no chance of getting home in his little ship. His dilemma overshadowed the mystery of how this translocation was even possible. The vastness of space swallowed his radio beacon. He was speck of dust in the universe—insignificant and desolate.

  “After I wrestled with the hopelessness of any self-salvation, I decided to aim for home and set the controls to obtain top speed. I would be long dead, a mummified skeleton, but the thought that I’d get home in some future eon eased the weight of loneliness. If something else, hurtling through space, took me out first, well, I’d never know.

  “With rations for another six months, I decided to make use of the time, and write a memoir of my short life and this amazing event that had ended it.” He’d just begun it when the AI warned, in a voice he’d not heard before, that he was approaching the Oort Cloud at the outskirts of the Sol system.

  “I was confused, filled with disbelief and joy. My faster-than-light conclusion was incredible but inescapable. From that point, I took the controls, and watched as the ship made some additional, self-guided FTL jumps until it was reasonably in-system.”

  Once in dock, Spence could find no technical changes to the craft. He got no sympathy for his wild story until a friend in the military directed a general his way.

  The little ship impressed General Swan, proving to be more than a match for the military’s interstellar drives. That ride had led to unfortunate outcomes: Spence had been conscripted into BUMP immediately and assigned to Chris’s battalion. The general commandeered the craft and somehow took credit for the discovery, minimizing Spence’s role. The ship was re-typed: ‘Light Skipper’, and Swan rode the accomplishment to an Admiralship.

  But listening to Spence tell the story, it seemed he had no animosity for the man. Chris knew that he wouldn’t have been too happy in Spence’s shoes. The only offense that his friend ever offered to the general-turned-admiral, was telling the truth of the story when someone was interested. Few had even a chance to be curious—the ‘Admiral’s Discovery’ was kept under wraps and his promotion was not publicly lauded. The best Spence got out of the deal was an officer entry-rank of Lieutenant rather than Ensign.

  A week after Spence had returned to Earth, he’d discovered a newly acquired skill, which he attributed this to the alien contact—an alert meditation. Chris suspected this new skill contributed to the man’s easygoing personality despite the unfairness of his treatment.

  Spence had been able to teach this skill, somewhat, to Chris during their months of service together. Chris could now do this meditation, sure that he did not achieve the depth that his crewmate did. He’d lost track of his friend when Spence was transferred off the Medallion after a few months.

  The soft pop of Chris’s gecko boots returned dull echoes along the Medallion’s deserted corridors. In his walk to his cabin he reflected on his own personality: on first hearing the rumor of their coming assignment, he had canceled three hours of shore time, contrary to what the studies said he should be doing, what most of his crewmates were doing.

  His own response was to think of home and family. His parents and sisters were down there, tucked away in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, above the desert waste of the ruined Central Valley, not far away compared to the distances soon to come. His mind went to the snowy winters of his childhood twenty years earlier.

  He would spend his leave in his cabin making calls on BUMP’s credit.

  CHAPTER 12

  EVENT: DAY 7, 0630 UT

  Garrison quickened his step and tossed his gear duffel onto the trolley deck, stepping on behind it.

  The open transport had slowed obediently at his approach. A ten-minute ride would bring him to the maglev train platform. It connected the spaceward Nexuses at either end of its eight hundred kilometer run. There wasn’t much chance he’d catch Taylor at the station; she’d made sure she was not trackable. But he’d convinced himself he didn’t want to see her anyway. They weren’t even departing from the same space dock. She’d be off of the military’s docks on Toroid Alpha. Garrison called it Dock T&A because the largest focus on DTA was a narrow one: sex in Vegas Slice. The legal sex trade on the dock worked well for the fraternizing soldiers and military personnel but he’d never enjoyed being around it. Taylor pushed his limits quite enough. Legal prostitution had been moved up to the stations, off Earth entirely. The ground-bound were left with the same seedy, illegal sex trade that had existed for millennia.

  Garrison would be going up to Cylinder Alpha, which meant that he would have a two-hour trip on the Earthside Bullet Rail, almost the full 800 kilometers due east, to the D.C.A. Nexus. Taylor would have gone twenty kilometers west to the D.T.A. Nexus, then up to Toroid Alpha. It was possible that she was up there already.

  Both BUMP and USUCC were headquartered closest to the larger Toroid Alpha because USUCC’s ships flew out of the non-military docks on the opposite side of Toroid Alpha, so it was typically where the action was for Garrison.

  Garrison came out of his mental drift when his shuttle came to a stop. After a robotic exam at a Med Cube he boarded the next train.

  Halfway to his destination, coming into the tropical city, Oasis, Garrison watched a torrential downpour streak across the glass sidewall of the train. Many New Earth population centers linked into Oasis. Its climate was a result of the forced desertification inside the controlled vicinity around the High Vee Tube stations, to either side of the oasis region.

  The space elevators were made possible by these controlled weather zones. The center of each 200-kilometer radius of control had to be at least 800 kilometers apart, which left a 400-kilometer unrestrained weather corridor between controlled zones—The Central Nexus Oasis.

  Weather control was achieved with break-through, gravity neutralizing modules, known as Gravity Rejectors, mounted along cable tethers that ran between the Earth and each of the two low-earth-orbit docks. These cables terminated at deep ground stabs that encircled each Tube station.

  Garrison’s train pulled into the last station before the DCA Nexus. He took the opportunity to change to the off-planet Bullet car here, instead of waiting until the Nexus, when there would be a crush of passengers. The Bullet car was coupled to the leading end of the earthbound maglev train. The special car was filled with dangling web harnesses instead of traditional seating. He flashed his auth at the reader and stepped up to the nearly-full upper half of the thirty-person transport. His breath caught as he glimpsed the most stunning woman he’d ever seen. Without taking his eyes from her porcelain-perfect face, he backed into the closest available accel-web; his fingers automatically found the fastenings to secure himself.

  An impression brought him out of his entrancement, turning his gut. The train was accelerating heavily by this time, and through the swaying camouflage of interceding passengers, Garrison stared at the woman. He’d hoped to catch her eye, yet her eye did not wander, and her outfit and demeanor had finally penetrated his consciousness—new styling of casual military attire that he’d mistaken for civilian, and her aloof, professional attitude. Somehow, she looked nothing like his memory, much more beautiful. It was Astra, though with her golden halo of hair.

  The thought of being in a tiny ship with this woman for the upcoming mission was both exciting and distressing; it affected him, messed with his physiology. Sincere concern replaced his desire.

  Glancing over occasionally, Garrison stewed in his secret distress. In the smooth q
uiet of this final leg before the Tube Nexus station, a fellow passenger swung about in his harness to talk to another. It opened a clear line-of-sight to a name patch bonded to the arm of the woman’s flight jacket.

  “ASTRA”

  Though he knew already, it was like a final nail in the coffin of his concern, and it produced an involuntary groan. Against the low conversational tones in the Bullet, his out-of-place noise was too loud; a few heads turned—including Dominique Astra’s. He was still looking at her, and she returned the look with indifference: a disinterested stranger.

  Caught by her gaze, he’d missed his chance to look away. The moment stretched. His throat tightened and he stopped breathing, very conscious of his face, as he tried to maintain a neutral expression. Their eyes locked for an eternity—a second or two— then her casual stare morphed into a puzzled look and dawning recognition. She smiled and nodded at him. She knew who he was.

  Like waking from blow to the head, the muted sounds of the quiet maglev ride came back in waves to Garrison’s eardrums. He became aware of his body. Distressed to find his mouth open, he snapped it shut, nodded and smiled while his face reddened. Before his countenance reached peak brightness she looked down, bringing her hand up to her mouth to hide her amusement at his clear discomfiture.

  Perfect. This is some way to start this relationship. He determined to not look at her again.

  To pass the time and mitigate his discomfort, he dug into his flight bag and pulled out a semi-speculative historical account, printed on hempayrus in old-style book format. It was centered on the Obliteration and was something that would normally hold his attention.

  After fifteen minutes, the train slowed its pace as it approached the final ground station, the Tube Nexus. After that: Space. Garrison couldn’t recall any of the history he’d just read. He jammed the book back into his bag and closed his eyes. He tried to appear relaxed and unconcerned, swaying in his harness. The train came to rest and Garrison opened his eyes a crack. Astra wasn’t looking at him.