Never Again

by M. A. Rothman

Dave paced back and forth as he waited anxiously for a response.

  “Moon Base Crockett, this is Mission Control, can you read me?”

  Dave turned to the engineer and said, “Isn’t there a video feed that we used to get? See if it’s active and patch into that as well.”

  “Yes, sir.” The engineer’s fingers became a blur on his keyboard, and he then pointed to the main screen. “Got it. Displayed on screen one.”

  Dave’s heart raced as he saw what looked like the control center for the Moon base. It was still active.

  Suddenly there was motion on the video feed. Burt walked into the room and began typing on a computer terminal. He glanced up into the camera and smiled. “I read you loud and clear, Mission Control. It’s good to be back in touch.”

  Dave yelled, “I need a mic!” An engineer raced up to Dave and handed him a portable mic. He spoke into it. “Holy crap, you’re alive!”

  “How’re you doing, Doctor Holmes? It’s good to hear your voice. Unfortunately, I don’t have a video feed on my end, but you sound great. We’re still about six hours away, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to get Neeta to put the Moon back into its normal spot orbiting the Earth.”

  Dave felt weak with relief as he stared at the screen. His throat suddenly felt thick, and he swallowed hard.

  “So Neeta’s okay?” Dave asked. “Where is she?”

  Burt nodded. “She’s fine. She’s just—oh, here she is—and I suppose I’ll let her do the introductions.”

  Dave watched Burt step out of the way, and Neeta’s face appeared prominently on the screen. To Dave’s amazement, a newborn infant rested quietly on her shoulder.

  “Hi, Dave. I’d like you to meet Denise Radcliffe. She’s two weeks old now.”

  Dave stood and spoke in a reverent tone. “She’s beautiful. But … how? Neeta, how did you all survive?”

  Neeta smiled, her eyes glistening, and a tear rolled down her face. “As I took the shuttle to the Moon, I came up with the plan. The warp ring around the Moon is much larger than Earth’s, yet the Moon’s mass was also significantly smaller than the Earth’s. The acceleration profile we could initiate was much greater than we could do with the Earth. And because the warp ring was so large, I could hit the accelerator and pull all of the debris that was inside the ring away with me. The only thing that was tricky was whether or not I could thread the needle without us getting hit by anything.

  “We lucked out.”

  Dave blinked, and his cheeks began to hurt from smiling. “That’s sheer genius ... oh shit!”

  “What?” Neeta asked, as she turned back to face the camera.

  “In just a couple of hours, nearly the entire world is about to have a ceremony that commemorates what you guys did ... dying to save our world. They’ve got statues and parks and all sorts of crap strewn throughout the globe.” Dave began to laugh. “Well, you two are definitely leaving your mark on this world one way or another. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

  Burt nudged his way in front of the camera and winked. “To tell you the truth, the world can keep any of their ugly statues of me.” He leaned down to kiss the top of the baby’s head, and Neeta grabbed Burt’s hand and kissed it. “These two girls are the only mark on this world that I care about making.”

  Epilogue

  Chapter Forty

  Dave settled into the Mission Director’s chair and clipped his microphone onto his lapel.

  “T-COM, where are we with Explorer 1?”

  “Explorer 1 has broken through planet Epsilon’s troposphere and is at 90,000 feet. It is 348 miles from its landing target and descending at 4,000 feet per minute. Its current horizontal speed is 950 miles per hour. We should have touch down in approximately forty-five minutes.”

  Dave nodded. Everything seemed to be going as planned. “Roger that. T-COM, what are the temperature readings currently, and is there something wrong with the live video feed? Didn’t I ask for it to be activated?”

  “Mission Director, the video feed activation request was sent three minutes and fifteen seconds ago. Currently, the temperature at 85,000 feet is 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and infrared readings suggest that the surface temperature at the landing zone is approximately 153 degrees.”

  Neeta walked over from one of the terminals and chided Dave. “You do in fact realize that the two planets are 23,000,000 miles apart, don’t you? It’s going to take no less than four minutes for a command to be sent, responded to, and then received back here.” She gave him that you-should-know-better expression that she usually reserved for people who said something inordinately stupid. “Those signals we’re sending and receiving are still limited by that inconvenient speed-of-light thing.”

  “Remind me to talk to Frank again sometime about that.” Dave crossed his legs and huffed with impatience. “For all we know, he might have come up with some crazy idea that breaks more of the rules and solves that problem.”

  Neeta pointed at the screen, which began displaying video images of the explorer module gliding through clouds and automatically adjusting its approach angle due to sudden cross-winds. “Well, until you and Frank pull a rabbit out of some hat, I suppose it’s lucky that Burt’s new AI and CPU designs are in the updated Explorer 1 module. Looks like the autopilot is working pretty well.”

  “Amen to that, my friend.” Dave agreed.

  ###

  It had been nearly twelve hours since Explorer 1 landed on planet Epsilon and deployed its rover. Dave watched as the rover raced over the dry, rocky path.

  Neeta pointed at the screen and the camera veered wildly as the rover automatically turned to avoid a crevasse and continued toward what looked like a distant pile of rubble on the horizon. “Isn’t it strange how straight that path is? I hate to speculate, but it almost looks like a road ... an old cracked and unmaintained one, but a road nonetheless.”

  Dave tried to remain skeptical, but something inside him felt she might be right—and that’s what kept him awake at two in the morning, watching. “Maybe it’s an old, dry riverbed.”

  Neeta gently smacked him on the arm and aimed a laser pointer at the edge of the so-called riverbed. “Dave, give me a break. If it were a riverbed, you wouldn’t see the edges fall off like they do. This straight path is elevated above the rest of the ground by almost six inches. I don’t understand how it could be natural, not with those straight lines going for as long as they have.”

  “GNC,” Dave spoke into his microphone. “How far ahead is that outcropping on the horizon?”

  “The rover’s telemetry readings say it is 14.3 miles away.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Dave waited and silently wondered if there was any logical explanation for a straight elevated path that went on for miles and miles.

  ###

  It was 3:00 a.m. and the rover slowly navigated through the rubble at the end of the long, rocky path. Dave had lost any hint of exhaustion.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, staring in awe at the unmistakable signs of what looked like demolished buildings amidst the rust-colored sand that made up the majority of this planet’s surface.

  Neeta pointed at some of the gray rubble. “Look at all those straight edges. Wait, that’s a partially-collapsed wall with what looks like a window in it. Holy crap Dave—there is, or was, something on Epsilon that built this. There can’t be another explanation!”

  A flash appeared on the video screen and the speakers in the auditorium activated. “Mission Director, the rover has detected movement.”

  The camera angle turned quickly, and in the distance Dave saw a grayish blur zip across the reddish-brown background.

  “Rover 1 has taken evasive maneuvers.”

  With his heart racing, Dave stood and watched helplessly as the rover tried to race away from the rubble. Any commands he sent now would take relatively forever to get there; the rover’s artificial intelligence chip was in charge.

  As the rover stumbl
ed and climbed over rocks to get back to the outskirts of the demolished city, the camera angle suddenly veered upward and a warning printed on the video feed said, “Ground Traction: 0%.”

  The camera veered back and forth in a wild and unpredictable manner. It suddenly showed a metallic skull-like face, with lights where the eyes should have been, peering into the camera.

  Neeta gasped. “Is that a ... robot?”

  As all variety of warnings scrolled across the corner of the video broadcast by the rover, the metallic creature tilted its head quizzically in view of the rover’s camera. Suddenly, a metal finger jabbed at the camera and the image went blank.

  Dave fell back into his chair and weakly asked, “T-COM? What’ve you got?”

  “I-I’m sorry, sir. We’ve lost contact with the rover.”

  Author’s Note

  Well, that’s the end of Primordial Threat, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed it.

  I’ll freely admit that when I began writing this story, I felt like I’d turned a page in my writing “career.” For a long time, I’d written things geared for my kids to enjoy, mostly epic fantasy. However, it was never anything I took too seriously. I did it because it made my sons happy.

  Along the way, I’d made friends with some rather well-known authors, and when I talked about maybe getting more serious about this writing thing, several of them gave me the same advice, “Write what you know.”

  Write what I know? I began to think about Michael Crichton. He was a non-practicing MD, and started off with a medical thriller. John Grisham was an attorney for a decade before writing a series of legal thrillers. Maybe there’s something to that advice.

  I began to ponder, “What do I know?” And then it hit me.

  I know science. It’s what I do for a living and what I enjoy. In fact, one of my hobbies is reading formal papers spanning many scientific disciplines. My interests range from particle physics, computers, the military sciences (you know, the science behind what makes stuff go boom), and medicine. I’m admittedly a bit of a nerd in that way. I’ve also traveled extensively during my life, and am an informal student of foreign languages and cultures.

  With the advice of some New York Times bestselling authors, I started my foray into writing novels. With Primordial Threat, it’s easy to imagine that I might focus solely on science fiction, but I’d note that I’ve always been a sucker for mainstream thrillers, especially those with international settings. Elements of that may have leaked into this novel, and I hope it was a welcome aspect to the story. I’d always been given the advice to not mix genres, ever, but I sometimes don’t listen.

  As I wrote that line, my wife was looking over my shoulder and claimed I never listen. Thanks, dear.

  Truthfully, I hadn’t intended to self-publish this novel. My intent was to send this to mainstream publishers. After all, I got lots of rave reviews from the traditionally published authors who’d read the manuscript. They were all very kind and a great source of encouragement.

  I eventually did submit the story to acquiring editors at major publishers, and even though I’d received some interest from them, they all in the end felt it wasn’t right for their particular audiences at that time. In hindsight, it’s very difficult for an unknown author to “break into” traditional publishing, and for the acquiring editors, it’s a big risk taking a chance on an unknown author. These are things I can fully appreciate.

  Given that, I was faced with a choice of leaving the stories in a desk drawer and moving on with my life, or taking a chance and seeing if I could find the audience for my stories.

  Obviously, I’m stubborn and chose the latter.

  I’ll assume that if you’ve just read these last few paragraphs, you’ve only done so because you’ve read this novel in its entirety, and I’ve hopefully kept you entertained. If so, that means I’ve found you! You’re that elusive “audience” that the publishers had said they didn’t know how to reach.

  Yay!

  If I could ask anything from you, dear reader, it would be to please share your thoughts/reviews about the story on Amazon and with your friends. It’s through reviews and word-of-mouth that this story will find other readers, and I do hope Primordial Threat finds as wide an audience as possible.

  Again, thank you for taking the chance on a relatively-unknown author and reading his debut science fiction novel. I should warn you, it’s only the beginning.

  It’s my intent to release two books a year, one in the science fiction/technothriller category, similar in style to this book. The other book would be best categorized as a mainstream thriller with international influence.

  That being said, I have released another story at roughly the same time as this novel. A mainstream thriller titled, Perimeter.

  If you’ll indulge me, below is a brief description of Perimeter:

  Levi is a "fixer" in a fix.

  The CIA needs his help. The Russian mob wants him dead.

  With enemies closing in and nowhere to turn, he learns that the one person who may hold all the answers ... is his dead wife.

  Addendum

  As a child, I always had an active imagination and would continuously drive my parents crazy with a myriad of “what if” questions. After a while, they shoved me at the local public library, and that’s when I was finally introduced to the world of books, and more specifically, science fiction and fantasy novels. My earliest influences were J.R.R. Tolkien’s classics, as well as those of Isaac Asimov. Titles such as these tickled my imagination both as a child and into adulthood.

  My formal background has kept me fully immersed in the world of science for decades. Given my science background and my access to some folks in academia who are theoretical physicists, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve found ways to draw from both my background and theirs to produce stories that involve technology in some way or another. Many might consider this novel as a hard science fiction tale, and I suppose they’d be correct.

  One might ask, “What is hard science fiction, and is it something that I can read?”

  To me, the key thing that differentiates hard science fiction from “soft” is that in the former, science is not just an ingredient of the story, but a key part of it.

  However, in my honest opinion, that shouldn’t mean you need advanced degrees to understand what is happening. All you should need is a love of good stories that contain science and technology. It is up to the author to make the science portion accessible to all that would read it.

  In this tale, I’ve strived to maintain some level of scientific accuracy to the things that a reader is exposed to. Certainly, there will be elements in any tale of fiction that are impossibilities today. However, built upon a solid foundation of science, I attempt to venture forward with some predictions of what could be, and from that, construct a tale that should hopefully be entertaining and maybe somewhat enlightening.

  In this addendum, I wanted to note some things that I’ve used in this story, and give you, the reader, an insight into how some elements of hard science might relate to them or serve as inspiration. For example, I’ve created in this story what in essence comes down to a warp engine of sorts. Sure, there are absolutely no such things in today’s science that exhibit such properties, guilty as charged. However, such a thing isn’t in the realm of complete and utter fantasy; there’s actually reasonable physics behind it! I’ve introduced strange concepts associated with magnetic confinement of fusion, and having that serve as an engine of sorts. Would it surprise you to learn that such things are in fact aspects of today’s fusion research? I also speak a lot about something called DefenseNet; could such a thing actually be made? Or maybe the concept of a space elevator seems crazy to you, but would you believe that such things are hypothetically almost within our grasp today?

  All these things have a basis in academic research. Let me hopefully tantalize you with the possibilities, as I point out things that might have initially seemed like wor
ks of fantasy, but have real science behind them.

  As I give very brief explanations of what may be very complex concepts, my intent is to only leave you with sufficient information to give a remedial understanding of the subject. However, for those who want to know more, it is also my intent to leave you with enough keywords that would allow you to initiate your own research and gain a more complete background understanding of any of these topics.

  This should also give you a peek into some of the things that have influenced my writing of this story, and maybe have you start asking what all authors inevitably ask themselves, “What if?”

  DefenseNet:

  In this story, I introduced the concept of DefenseNet, a futuristic solution that serves as a means of fending off incoming asteroids that might be aimed for Earth. As you ultimately learn, DefenseNet is a complicated solution containing multiple parts, including the concept that Dave Holmes calls a Warp Ring. I’ll go into that piece later in this addendum.

  Let me simply focus on the concept of fending off incoming asteroids.

  In this story, DefenseNet employs a series of high-powered lasers to act as a shield against incoming threats. In some popular stories, people might choose to blow things up or somehow attach rockets to an asteroid to move it out of the way, both of those approaches are hugely impractical for any number of reasons. Certainly one of the biggest issues is the time it takes to respond to a threat and actually reach the object.

  The statistics I gave for an incoming asteroid threat within the book are actually accurate.

  If we had a stony meteorite that was 100 meters wide entering the atmosphere at a normal (45 degree) angle and at an average speed (35 km/s), the impact would be the equivalent of a 32 megaton nuclear explosion. It would hurt, and hurt pretty badly.

  I’d note that those impacts don’t happen every day, but something 100 meters or so hits the Earth every 6 or 7,000 years. We’re due.