Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Page 8

  The shuttle doors opened eventually and additional passengers entered to fill the last few harnesses in this half of the shuttle. He took the opportunity to study the woman.

  Really? How can she be that beautiful? He watched as new passengers took notice of her, did double takes and fumbled in their actions. Both men and women.

  Uncoupled from the rest of the train, once all harnesses were secured, the Bullet car rolled 180 degrees on its bed of magnetic fields. The final passengers then occupied the remaining harnesses in what was now the upper half. For a few minutes Garrison, Astra, and the rest of the early boarders, hung upside-down in their restraints. The doors of the shuttle closed and it started down the last horizontal stretch of rail. Speed built and they moved into the Tube as it bent in a long radial sweep, reorienting them to vertical for their spaceward journey.

  As it began its ascent, all of the passenger crash-webs clicked from free movement to automatic, facing forward with the car’s new vertical attitude. Acceleration decreased then slowly increased as the ground-based propulsion laser came online, boosting. To Garrison, it felt like the beginning of a wild ride to come, rather than the boring trip he’d expected. Megawatts of energy poured into the super conductor magnetics, centering and further accelerating the Bullet like a railgun projectile to its 400-kph speed.

  He decided the best thing to do for the duration of the trip up was get some sleep. He pulled the privacy hood down and must have dozed off because the Bullet seemed to slow too soon. He turned his eye to a gap he’d left in the hood curtain. He could see that Astra was absorbed in reading from a z-vellum. He subtly stowed the hood and pulled the book out again, pretending to read, off and on.

  This last part of the Bullet trip to Dock Cylinder Alpha was slower and, unlike the trip to Dock TA, it lacked the added attraction of station viewing during slowdown. Dock CA was truly just that, a dock. The station had no frills. In comparison to Toroid Alpha, it was not a spectacle to behold, though, despite it’s Plain Jane nature, in its day, it had captured the imagination of the world, representing new hope for the continued survival of mankind by providing the easy stepping stone to reach into the solar system and establish new colonies. The arrival of Toroid Alpha overshadowed the smaller station, and Cylinder Alpha never was able to overcome the stigma of not measuring up to the newcomer.

  Garrison’s state of jumbled emotion was compounded by the monotony of this final approach. His inability to begin a conversation with his co-captain in this hushed environment left the taste of that first heart-thumping moment too fresh. Her reaction, and the foolishness he’d felt painted with, was something that he wanted to correct with a different, confident approach.

  To outward appearances he was at ease. Inside, his stomach was knotted. Garrison resisted his unsettled state, and mused on her name. It translated to Captain Star. That’s just pretentious, he thought grumpily, but he conceded that it wasn’t her fault.

  After uncounted minutes, the Bullet rose into a translucent portion of the tube that allowed a brief, hazy glimpse of the station exterior as they neared the airlock. To distract himself, reroute his thoughts from endless loops, he immediately filled his mind with the details of the station—the way the cylindrical hull curved out of sight; the dimpled texture of the bio-engineered, self-repairing, crysteel skin, the suggestion of ribs, which were the substructure that the skin had been grown over. And, at last, the mechanical interface of the docking airlock as it came into view, and the way the living skin-organism met the hard, cold protrusion of the lock.

  Dock CA’s cigar shape consisted of three nested, tapered cylinders each separated by three meters at the most. The inner two spun at successively faster rates, the outermost was stationery. Predetermined gravities could be found on the inside of those inner skins.

  On arrival at Cylinder Alpha, the Bullet doors slid open with a hiss of pressure equalization and Garrison was out, his harness undone without a thought. The inner set of lock doors stood open and he passed through them, pulling himself along the grip rail into the Gravity Transition Zone. There, away from the outer wall, the deck extended inward toward the Cylinder core. It resembled that of a train platform and was bounded by a clear wall at the platform ledge, and to the left and right of the airlock. A low ceiling helped to confine drifters to the passenger debarkation zone. The clear barrier was intended to keep errant, floating visitors from making it across a three-meter gap where the smooth, varicolored surface of the next, nested cylinder sped upward at a speed of roughly 40 kph.

  Should it happen that a body were to come into contact with that special surface, very little friction would be transferred, and secondary safety measures would retrieve the wayward visitor, who might simply receive a friction burn if bare skin were involved. Fortunately, the upward motion of the opposite wall helped to minimize risk: passengers unaccustomed to the sight, ‘newbies’, were usually overcome by the desperate need to hold tightly to something.

  In the null gravity, passengers moved past Garrison where he waited, just inside the air lock doors, for Capt. Astra to catch up. He wasn’t ready to begin a conversation yet, but he couldn’t appear to be dodging her. Some people glided by, and some chose to follow a tether rail as they all moved toward a part of the clear wall where a series of doors stood open to several cubicles. These sat on pairs of sturdy-looking arms that extended from slots in the upward-moving wall. Every now and then the blur of a doorway could be seen racing by in the space between the arm slots; it would eventually receive its cubicle after it attained a matching speed. In these gravity elevator cubes, accelevators, passengers secured themselves and their luggage with various grips, footloops and case-retaining straps. None of this group had made a pit stop at the airlock privy. Between that and their unconcerned attitudes, Garrison marked them as regulars.

  Almost last out of the Bullet, Astra glided easily out of the lock exit and over to the grip rail; she came to rest beside him. He covertly admired her graceful form and body.

  “Captain Bartell, I assume.” She hooked a toe under a foot rail, and unconscientiously swept her hands back though her free-floating, silky hair, binding it with a tie. “That is, you do look rather like the BUMP file holo-frame I’ve seen.”

  Garrison found the gesture highly distracting. “Yes, Captain Star; that holo is ten years old.”

  She waited a second then corrected him. “It’s Captain Astra.” There was no trace of upset at his unconscious slip.

  Inside he cringed. “Of course. I don’t know why I said that. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Just then, a middle-aged man, being helped toward the waiting accelevators by two women, began screaming and flailing about, making it impossible for the group to proceed. His panicked reaction showed signs that he might be sick, and the group reversed course along the tether rails, back toward the airlock.

  Many first-timers did not make it past this point without first scrambling awkwardly into the cub-privy located next to the air lock. It provided a vomit-vacusink and a modicum of privacy to preserve dignity. The upward-flowing wall of the next cylinder, which stretched off in either direction, tapering at each end, compelled the brain to see a much longer corridor. Combined with weightlessness, the overwhelming illusion of falling was sometimes more than the unaccustomed person could rationalize. While this fellow’s reaction was the most extreme, severe nausea was the most common.

  Most travelers in space had the sense to obey protocol and not eat for twelve hours before heading up. Dry-heaving was just as embarrassing, though.

  Garrison, Astra and a few others watched the drama. The two helpmates waited outside the privy door with embarrassed looks.

  Garrison turned back to Astra and said, “Why don’t we plan to meet for something to eat, thirty minutes before preflight? I’d like to attend to some personal business.” It was clean and simple, his tone confident, giving away none of what he was feeling inside
.

  A neutral, “Fine,” was all she returned. With her duffel across her back, she reoriented her body to a sideways, mid-air crouch, and with her feet on the outer wall, she called to the passengers entering the only chamber that had not left. “HOLD PLEASE.” Dominique launched, diving through the air at the perfect angle and speed to sail across the distance. Before she disappeared into the chamber, she spared a glance back and gave a cute wave.

  The doors closed and the chamber slid fractionally away from the landing platform. The support fork withdrew two engagement pins from the deck of the platform with a kachunk. Hidden in the wall slot, the support arm’s calipers applied pressure to a rail that turned with the inner skin, and the accelevator immediately began to move upward with its passenger payload. The car lifted out of sight, only to slide by again less than a minute later as it gained on its door-mating speed.

  As the cubicles picked up the rotation they shifted on a gimbal, orienting to the new and increasing spin-generated gravity. The floor inside the chamber would suddenly gain its definition for the occupants. At the end of the short journey, to a rider’s perception, the ceiling would open and the floor would elevate up through it. Astra and the others would then walk onto the inner surface of the spinning layer.

  Garrison sighed as he watched her accelevator pass several times. His stomach was queasy. It wasn’t the interaction that he would have scripted for their first meeting, but considering how he was feeling, it went better than he expected.

  Freefall held no surprises for Garrison. His brain automatically adjusted for moving surfaces and relative weightlessness without a conscious thought. His queasiness had nothing to do with the motion of the secondary cylinder.

  This tumultuous place was not unfamiliar—and he hated it. Worse, he feared that these feelings might not abate and would cause him added embarrassment along the way.

  Garrison checked his time, 1028 hours, about two-and-a-half hours to kill before he would see Astra again. He could take care of one mission-related task but he really had no personal business to handle. That had just been a quick excuse for a little more time before having to talk at length with Astra. He didn’t have anyone to visit, since he knew none of the personnel on the station. The closest thing that Garrison had for friends, besides Taylor, were his crew in USUCC, but if they found out he was doing this, they would no longer be his crew, let alone friends. For that reason, he had quietly slid from sight, making his getaway this morning, unseen. They would take off without him, if need be. His second-in-command would handle things until he showed up again. Another reason why he preferred USUCC to BUMP.

  Taylor was the nearest thing to a close friend that he had at the moment. Usually, his closest friends were women. Unfortunately, Taylor was giving him the deep-space treatment. He already missed the easy connection they shared.

  Garrison had never been able to figure out the difference between women like Taylor and those like Dominique Astra; so easy with one type and with the other, so confusing, aggravating, and, in the end, unrewarding.

  TJ was incredibly beautiful, and the sex was fantastic, abandoned. When they were out together, it was Garrison who laughed at the behavior of other men. They would be the ones tongue-tied, clearly wanting to say something clever to impress her. The tables had turned on him. Even more unfortunate, Astra had seen him in his foolishness—the look on her face, her little eyes-down-smile.

  It’s obvious, he thought glumly.

  For a moment, he pondered how much more preferable the BUMP brig might have been to continuing this mission with ‘Captain Star’.

  A loud hiss and thump startled him as the air lock doors closed; the Bullet was returning to Earth without passengers. Jolted out of his contemplation, Garrison jumped slightly. He maintained his one-handed grip on the rail, but his inadvertent muscle movement served to propel his mass from the deck. Without his geckos, he lifted off the platform in the micro-gravity. He managed to bring his other hand to the rail as he tried to regain a sensible position. He tightened his grip to slow his rotation, but he let his feet swing behind him, above the plane of his head. He had to wait it out; it just served to frustrate him more. He looked ridiculous and was glad that everyone had gone. This was just another example of how on-edge he was.

  When his feet contacted the curving wall, he gently pushed off, reversing the entire motion, adeptly coming to rest back on the deck.

  Another noise came to his ears, the sound of a vacuum flush, clearly identifiable as coming from the privy. Lost in his thoughts, he had forgotten about the two quiet women waiting outside the restroom. They both stared at him with uncomfortable expressions. The first of the accelevators was coming to rest at the platform. Garrison was embarrassed and not in the mood to share another small space with the women and their questionable companion. He moved away from the Gravity Transition platform, along a grip rail, and through a door in the clear boundary wall, in the direction of the longer vendor route to the innermost spinskin deck.

  The low ceiling ended and the hollow between shells narrowed as he moved along the length of the station toward its tip. Here, there was no clear safety barrier, the spinning wall was exposed on his right. It spawned a cool breeze that felt good on his flushed face. He reached a maintenance rack and took a grapple-tether gun. He clipped the leash to his suit, above his center-of-mass. Garrison sighted down the gap between inner and outer walls and pulled the trigger. A blast of compressed gas shot a geckofoot some fifty meters on, where it thunked against the spaceward, inward-sloping wall. It trailed a super strong fila-carbon tether, and, with the flick of a trigger, Garrison was reeled toward his cargo-access destination and the core-tube spin-drop elevator system.

  As he drifted like hooked fish, so again did his mind: he recounted the missteps since he’d first heard Dominique Astra’s name, less than twelve hours ago.

  CHAPTER 13

  EVENT: DAY 9, Retro to Day Zero, Late

  Comani was not himself.

  He had undergone an emotional and psychological assassination during a time in which he was displaced as the motive force in his own body.

  This terrifying experience blurred reality and set him adrift in a repetitive reliving of that horrible event.

  It began before his emergency descent to the beautiful, frozen waste of Eighre Masc, and just moments before he became a captive of pirates.

  In a macabre twist of circumstance, it was the pirates who became the victims in their brief time together with the doctor. Yet they were not the prey of Comani but of the thing that had puppeteered his body, commandeered his will.

  Just before the pirates’ initial attack, in the moment of severe deceleration, he had involuntarily moved toward the artifact. It took him then. Only minutes before he left his SciPod ship and mounted the pirate’s boarding ladder, he was out of control, a prisoner in his own body.

  Through the hole they’d incised in his hatch, he moved toward a loosely wielded pistol, and there began his forced witnessing of the subsequent, bizarre executions.

  As he climbed upward, he reached, or rather, his hand reached out, through no will of his own, toward the first pirate, where he stood over the entry hatch, warily watching as Fred transferred to the scow. The man’s face changed then. Initially the face of a lean, tough character, it went gaunt as Fred’s hand drew closer. Cheeks and eyes shrank inwards to hollowness, becoming the picture of a man on the brink of starvation. He was made further grotesque by the round-eyed look of horror from his eyes, lidless in their hollows.

  The pirate convulsed, firing his pistol downward into the tube. His compatriots at his back stared, unmoving, not able to see the man’s face, not understanding their danger. If their crewmate chose to execute this prisoner, they would not be bothered.

  Comani’s perspective seemed to have been shrunken down and trapped within a strange boxed-in reality somewhere behind his eyes: he fell back at the b
last, muscles tensing and then releasing—his body’s automatic response to being shot. His head exploded in searing pain that flashed through him, and was gone in an instant. Looking out through the limited window on his world, he realized his body had not changed position from the previous second. The energy bolts fired at Fred’s head appeared to have no damaging impact, and his hand was just coming to rest on the pirate’s ankle.

  Now, any confusion that Comani was experiencing—the logic-conflict of his fatal shooting—was left behind as the insanity continued.

  The man whose leg he was touching, changed further. His graying hair began to writhe like tiny snakes. Changing to a medium brown, his crop grew shorter then longer. The loose skin and wrinkles around his mouth and eyes drew backwards, tightening, going from dull to shiny. The starved appearance was momentarily replaced by one of youth.

  Next, the morphing man began to shrink, pulling inwards from all extremities. The man’s mouth was wide open in a silent scream.

  As this happened, a flood of energy buffeted Comani. It rushed into his body… a body that was not his anymore. The torrent filled his cubed reality, wild and angry, as if a carnivorous beast had been thrust into this cage with him. He cowered mentally, drawing into a corner of this non-space, staring unwillingly, unable to shut any eyelids, unable to shut out the unfolding massacre.

  The pirate’s hair shrank into a crew cut, yanked into his scalp. The memory fabric of his two-piece flight suit reacted unpredictably to the man’s changing body; becoming loose, the pants shrank to an accordion-shaped wad around the middle of his legs. Those legs were not a man’s but a boy’s.

  The tangled sound of shouts rose up. Comani ignored them as he was forced to watch the continuing horror show: the boy was still mouthing a scream as he grew smaller, into a child. Boots went adrift as his knees and feet pulled up, his back beginning to hunch. His nakedness was covered once again as the shrinking form withdrew upwards into the now oversized shirt. It was a toddler’s head that protruded from the shirt’s neck now, distorted by the ghastly, frozen expression.