Earthman Jack vs. The Ghost Planet

by Matthew Kadish

  Then, he remembered the eye he had seen, the big eye floating in space, shimmering with brilliant rays of light. It had been looking at him, as though it were waiting for something…

  How do I get us out of here? Jack asked.

  Jack felt a surge in his hands. He opened his eyes and looked at the glowing domes on the armrests. He felt a strange sensation, like an electrical current running between his hands and the domes.

  In front of him, a holographic screen appeared in the air, so he could see both the data on it and the viewscreen at the same time. Strange words and numbers began to flash up on the screen.

  Anna hopped off the chair and looked at it curiously. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I’m… not sure,” replied Jack. “I think this is how we can get out of here… somehow.”

  “Princess, can you read it?” asked Shepherd.

  “No,” said Anna. “It’s a really, really old form of Old Solar, I can’t make sense of it.”

  “Blast it,” lamented Green, who was also looking at the holographic display. “I knew I should have taken that class in pre-formal Ancient linguistics when I had the chance. Who knew it would come in handy?”

  “It’s asking for coordinates,” said Jack.

  “You can read it?” asked Anna, shocked.

  To his surprise, Jack could read it. The language on the screen wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before, but for some reason, he just instinctually knew what it said.

  “Yeah,” said Jack, “but it just asks for coordinates. Then there’s just a big list of numbers that don’t make any sense.”

  “Curious,” said Green. “I’ve never seen number patterns like that before. Perhaps those are coordinates to previous destinations? Maybe places the Ancients want us to visit?”

  “Whatever they are, pick one!” growled Shepherd.

  “But… what happens when I do?” asked Jack.

  “We’ll deal with that later,” Shepherd barked. “Do it! NOW!”

  Jack focused in on the first line of numbers in the list, and it began to glow. The numbers moved to the top of the screen, and a word that meant “Destination Accepted” flashed before the whole thing disappeared.

  A hum rose in the room. Jack could feel something stirring inside him… no, it was inside the ship – and instantly he knew what was about to happen.

  “Everybody – hold onto something!” he screamed.

  The entire bridge began to fill up with a brilliant white light…

  Outside, the Deathlords continued their assault against the ship, advancing toward it, when a flash of light erupted, filling the entire temple…

  And when the light cleared, the ship was gone.

  Chapter 15

  When the bridge returned to normal, Jack blinked his eyes. On the viewscreen in front of him, there was no longer an Ancient underground temple swarming with deadly aliens. Instead, there was nothing but blue sky and white clouds in the bright sunlight of day.

  Before it had a chance to register in Jack’s brain that only moments ago it had been nighttime in River Heights, a strange sensation assaulted his stomach, as if he were suspended in mid air.

  Suddenly the entire ship began to rumble, and Anna, Shepherd, and Green were tossed violently up to the roof of the bridge. They were pinned there, unable to move. Jack had no seatbelt on, yet for some reason he stayed firmly in the pilot’s seat – though that did nothing to quash the feeling of sheer panic he was experiencing.

  On the viewscreen, clouds began to shoot toward them, and Jack felt himself being squashed into his seat with sickening force as the ship started to spin. The clouds broke, and there rushing up toward them was a massive wall of water.

  Holy crap! thought Jack. We’re falling!

  Indeed, it would appear that wherever they were, they had rematerialized somewhere high in the air and were now dropping like a stone, plummeting with frightening speed directly toward a large ocean.

  “Jack!” yelled Shepherd. “Start the engines!”

  The bridge was shaking violently now, the alarm was still blaring, and impact with the water was rapidly approaching — all of which failed to help Jack concentrate on anything except being scared out of his pants. He felt dizzy, he felt sick, and he had utterly no idea how to keep from crashing to certain death.

  “Jack!” Shepherd yelled.

  Jack tried to pull himself together. He gripped the domes on his seat so tightly he thought he might break them.

  “Jack!” yelled Anna, with Shepherd joining in for good measure.

  The ocean was rushing up at them, getting closer…

  Jack focused on the tingle in the back of his brain. He thought about all his times playing Nova Commander IV and how the controls of that game worked.

  Closer…

  “JACK!” screamed Anna, Shepherd, and Green, all in unison.

  Suddenly, Jack sensed an electrical sensation run from his hands into the domes on his chair again. He could feel the engines of the ship spring to life and the rumble they made as they fired.

  The ocean was just about to greet them when Jack pulled the ship up out of its free fall, causing it to shoot forward with force so great, the water beneath them parted and sprayed as the ship skimmed its surface.

  Anna, Shepherd, and Green all fell from the ceiling and hit the floor, only to be thrust backwards as the ship accelerated.

  “Wooooooooooo-HOOOOOOOO!!!!!” cheered Jack as he increased the ship’s speed and started to climb back into the air. He was having so much fun, he almost didn’t notice his three companions plastered to the back walls of the cabin.

  “Jack—” screamed Green. “Inertial… dampeners…”

  “What?” hollered Jack.

  “Inertial dampeners!” they all yelled back.

  Jack had no idea what those were, let alone how to turn them on. Then, he felt a tingle on his hands again, like the ship was passing a current through him, and instantly he knew how to activate them.

  Once the inertial dampeners had engaged, Anna, Shepherd, and Green all collapsed to the floor. The feeling in the cabin changed – they were still accelerating and climbing into the air, but it didn’t feel like it anymore. In fact, it felt like the room wasn’t moving at all. Jack guessed that whatever inertial dampeners were, they kept the group from getting tossed around while the ship moved.

  “Hey!” Jack laughed. “I think I’m getting the hang of this!”

  The others got up, obviously not as cheerful as Jack was. “Where are we?” growled Shepherd.

  Jack wondered the same thing. As if on cue, the holographic screen he had seen before popped up. This time it showed an image of the planet Earth, and it outlined an area of ocean in the Pacific.

  “I think we’re somewhere over the Pacific Ocean,” said Jack.

  “Fascinating!” said Professor Green as he gingerly rubbed the back of his bruised noggin. “Instantaneous travel! Why, I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jack. “What about the portgate? Or the way those Deathlords just teleport in out of nowhere?”

  “Oh, those are very different things,” explained Green. “To teleport an entire ship – especially one that could be moving – across vast distances… why, the power requirements alone are astronomical! Not to mention the sheer number of calculations that would have to be made…”

  “Can you jump us again?” asked Shepherd, obviously not interested in the science behind their fantastic journey. “Somewhere away from the planet?”

  “I think so,” said Jack. “Except…”

  “What?” asked Shepherd.

  “I think… I think the ship needs time to power up the Entanglement Engine thing again.”

  Green and Shepherd exchanged a surprised look.

  “Did you say… Entanglement Engine?” asked Green.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “That’s what the thing that jumped us out of the temple is called, according to the ship. It’s like
a separate engine from the thrusters. Why?”

  Green looked at Shepherd. “Is that even possible?” he asked.

  “Anything is possible,” said Shepherd.

  “Yes, but… for a machine to be able to—”

  “Figure it out later, Professor,” said Shepherd. “Jack, how much time before we’re ready to jump again?”

  “Um… the ship’s saying it’s going to be around an hour,” replied Jack.

  “Do we have any other method of travel?” asked Shepherd. “Does the ship have hyperspace capabilities?”

  “Uh… hyperspace?” asked Jack.

  Shepherd slammed his fist down on a console. “Blast it, Jack! Must we explain everything?”

  “Well excuse me for not knowing stuff!” snapped Jack back. “It’s not like I grew up learning about Deathlords and teleportation and inertial-whatevers, you know? And considering the fact that I just figured out how to fly a fifty thousand year old spaceship with no prior experience, I think I’m doing pretty freakin’ good here!”

  “No one’s saying you aren’t,” said Anna diplomatically, giving Shepherd a look telling him to take it easy. “But the longer we stay within range of the Deathlord fleet, the more danger we’re in.”

  “If only I could read these control panels,” said Green, typing away at the ship’s systems interface. “I might be able to get a better idea of how the ship works.”

  Suddenly, an idea popped into Jack’s head.

  “Does this help?” he asked.

  The language on Green’s console abruptly changed from the ancient language it was using to a language that was a little more familiar.

  “Ah!” said Green. “English! Wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I suppose it will do.”

  Anna looked at Jack in surprise. “You changed the computer’s language?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” smiled Jack. “I just thought it would be cool if the Professor could read the console and the ship went ahead and did it.”

  “So... the ship is actually able to adjust to what you want?” she asked in amazement.

  “I guess,” replied Jack. “I mean, when we were falling I started thinking about how I used to play this video game where you flew a spaceship, and suddenly it started to control just like the game.”

  “Amazing. It sounds like the ship is able to adapt to you!” said Anna.

  “Is that, like, normal?” asked Jack.

  “It would appear nothing about this ship is what you’d call ‘normal,’ ” said Green in awe as he scanned through the ship’s systems on his console. “I’ve never seen anything like this! Did you know the ship is able to repair itself when damaged?”

  “Really?” said Jack. “How?”

  “Well—” started Green before Shepherd interrupted.

  “Professor – hyperspace?” he growled.

  “Oh, uh… yes… it does appear to have hyperspace capabilities,” Green replied.

  “Good,” said Shepherd. “Open a window and get us out of here.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to be possible right now,” said Green.

  “What?” barked Shepherd. “Why not?”

  “The navigational charts,” said Green. “They’re tens of thousands of years old. Nothing on here is named the same as things are now. Not to mention if we were to open a hyperspace window using this data, we could very well fly into a sun, or a planet, or who knows what else?”

  Jack listened to Green and Shepherd’s conversation and couldn’t help but wonder what exactly they were talking about. Ever since the Deathlords had first shown up, Jack’d had the same feeling coursing through his brain that was usually reserved for pop-quizzes for which he was woefully unprepared.

  As he found himself wishing he knew exactly what this “hyperspace” was and how it worked, the back of his head began to buzz again, and suddenly he had his answers.

  Hyperspace is, in fact, another dimension – one that allows for faster than light travel. The way it works struck Jack as actually being quite cool, since the hyperspace dimension is exactly like our own, containing the same stars, planets, black holes, moons, and every other celestial body one might find in this great big galaxy. Except, instead of being solid matter as they are in our dimension, things in hyperspace are like shadows of what they are here. They have the same gravity and the same mass, but that’s it. There is no life in hyperspace, no water, no air, no gas – just impressions of the really big stuff that exists in the universe.

  However, what makes hyperspace even stranger is the fact that it is much, much smaller than the reality we all know and love so well. Whereas the dimension in which we live is a universe that is constantly expanding and growing, the universe of hyperspace is doing the exact opposite – it is contracting and shrinking.

  That means things are actually closer in hyperspace than they are in our dimension. So by entering the hyperspace dimension and traveling at the speed of light, one is able to cross thousands of light-years in our dimension in a matter of hours. And because it is the same universe – just in a different dimension – the moment a traveler exits it, he’ll be exactly at the destination he arrived at when in hyperspace.

  Of course, because hyperspace travel still requires moving at the speed of light to cover the necessary distances, exact navigation is needed if one hopes to survive the journey. Due to the fact that things are spatially different in the hyperspace dimension, it is imperative to know exact distances in one’s own dimension to properly calculate them – because even though things exist in hyperspace simply by their gravity and mass, if a ship were to fly into them at the speed of light, it would be obliterated into dust.

  Jack scratched his head. For a kid who had a hard time grasping simple high school physics like Newton’s Laws of Motion, he sure was able to understand the concept of multi-dimensional space travel pretty quickly. In fact, ever since he tried to disconnect Anna from that glowing orb thing, he found lots of things were coming to him more easily than they ever had before. He couldn’t help but wonder what other information he had in his head that he didn’t know was there.

  “Are you sure we can’t use the charts?” Shepherd asked Green. “Can we make an approximation? Do a blind jump?”

  “Well, it would be risky,” replied Green. “Since these charts were created, the universe has expanded - planets have moved, new stars have formed and old ones have died – who knows how many changes have happened since this database was last updated? Because of the differences in the distances of hyperspace, without the proper charts, we’d never be able to calculate our exact course. If we were off even by couple of feet, it could be disastrous.”

  Suddenly, Jack heard a series of alert beeps and a holographic radar screen popped up in front of him. He saw three large, red dots on the exterior edge of the radar moving toward them quite fast.

  “Uh-oh,” said Jack.

  Shepherd looked at him, alarmed. “What?” he asked.

  Jack asked the ship what the dots on the radar were, and on the holoscreen in front of him an image popped up showing three small, triangular-shaped ships. The base of the ships contained their engines, leaving a trail of putrid green exhaust behind them, and their tips were narrow and twisted, aiming right for Jack’s ship. Their edges gnarled into sharp, blade-like wings, and their hulls were made of a black, obsidian material. Jack instantly had them pegged as Deathlord shards.

  “We’ve, uh… got company…” said Jack.

  Shepherd grimaced at the dark shards on the holoscreen. “Professor,” he said, “keep working on a way to get us out of here. Princess,” he turned to Anna, “man the engineering panel and see if you can get the shields up. I’ll take the weapons. Jack…”

  “Yeah?” asked Jack.

  “Try not to get us killed,” he said, like he was assigning homework.

  “Great idea. I’ll get right on that,” said Jack dryly.

  Anna and Shepherd rushed to the control panels on the second ti
er of the bridge to man their stations while Green began typing, furiously muttering things about “vectors” and “calculations.” Jack focused on the holographic displays before him.

  The shards were coming up behind them fast. Jack increased the ship’s speed to try to outrun them, but the shards were smaller and more agile. It would only be a matter of time before they’d catch up.

  Jack’s instincts were to fire at the ships before they had a chance to attack, but without shields or working weapons at this point, options were limited. He had to keep the shards at bay long enough to give Anna and Shepherd the time they needed to get the ship working properly.

  Jack decided to gain speed by going into a dive. He angled the ship downward, heading toward the ocean. The ship alerted him to incoming enemy fire as streaks of red plasma blasts shot by wildly. Jack glanced at the holoscreen and saw the shards firing from the tips on the front of their vessels, but they were still too far away to have much accuracy. That didn’t keep their blasts from being uncomfortably close, though.

  “Uh, shields?” said Jack as more blasts streaked by. “Shields would be nice!”

  “Powering up the generator now!” replied Anna.

  Jack heard a hum kick in and felt static electricity ripple through him. Instantly he realized the ship’s shields had been raised and were now active. Not a moment too soon either, as a blast landed squarely on the rear shield, right where one of their engines was.

  The shield wasn’t like anything Jack had seen when Shepherd was fighting the Deathlords. It was an invisible barrier around the ship, created by densely charged electrons that repelled all matter and absorbed energy. However, the shield could only be maintained as long as the generator on the ship was able to achieve a certain output. With each impact, the generator would compensate by redistributing electrons to the impacted areas, thus weakening the entire shield array, at least until it had a chance to power back up and generate more electrons to reinforce the shield.