“They’re getting through!” a distinct voice bellowed, from somewhere over at the hill.
Yet she glimpsed the speedboat starting to sink and them running in her direction.
One pointed directly at her, as if introducing some notion to them to either capture her or shoot her.
Absolute horror seized her, preventing her from reacting (though she attempted to reassure herself that there was no verification that they had entirely comprehended her existence). And she rushed into the trees on her hands and knees – ignoring any cuts and bruises – leaving a trail of blood from her foot. Desperately yearning to move deep inland, beyond the trees, away from visibility, and to escape death.
The sun blazed, and the air was roasting. The golden sand glowed brightly and the turquoise ocean sparkled in patches through the trees. Dark shapes emerged, resembling their evil figures, but altered to parts of the vegetation – as her sight constantly adjusted.
Something rummaged around, near her, but she ignored it as the light and free tones were from a small animal.
Finally, she stretched out her painful limbs, feeling dizzy, and she rushed towards a hill. Her main undertaking was to find a hiding place, preferably with a view of her surroundings.
Loud explosions from guns sent flocks of tropical birds flying up into the sky. Squawks blared out, as though a colossal deadly jungle beast were on the rampage, further along the coast.
The sounds vibrated on her ears and the pain from her ankle pulsed furiously driving her on and on, for safety, to survive.
Though she knew where they must be, she expected them to leap out at her from unseen places of the hill.
The island blazed in phenomenal colors Shades of every variant flared all around her as though she were rushing through a mind-bending cartoon.
Her imagination conjured up perpetual illusions.
Shimmering lights fantastically shifted about her.
With similarities to a sixth sense, she sensed her death. Darkness seemed to edge into the side of her eyes, resembling colossal angel of death, stretching over the trees, vaguely visible, and haunting her from the afterlife. And she did not know where to go to escape!
She drew comfort in hearing their distant sounds.
Why had this had to happen at the only desolate region that she had gone to? What possible intentions would drive them to such action? They could not be pirates, unless they had been carrying out some other trade. Drug smuggling could be a major trade in the vicinity, but she could not accept that they were carrying out a mere attack on a rival gang. They took part in a mission as soldiers did – not doing it to wound their enemy but to achieve whatever they had accomplished.
Their deadliness resembled an abyss – a bottomless pit – with no real furthest reaches. She dared not fight them. Her best option ought to be to run to a distant place, out of their reach or further out than they would go.
If they survived and threw off their pursuers, where would they go? With great speed and determination, they would have to go to the other side of the island.
The only boat at the island had to be there. Yet, surely, her original thoughts had been wrong! Why would they wish to confront her? The only reason that they might react would be if they assumed that she must be one of the people they were fighting.
The gunfire clearly decreased, but spread out, only leaving one direction left for her. Surely they would go across the island, it had to be the only place for them to hide and remain out of their range.
It struck her as odd that there had been so many people at where it had been considered desolate.
Nonetheless, they could have constructed the site in months, even weeks.
Melinda grew angry! Her tense leg muscles became weak. And her trail clearly led from her to the beach. If they wished to take her hostage, they could accomplish it. Then as she saw how near the location that the men had attacked was from her, she knew that it must be the best place to hide near. They surely would not go back there, and she might acquire information on what was going on.
The voices from some men chasing them seized her attention more and more.
Although she could recognize a small number of words, what they said was beyond rational comprehension – and probably inexplicable.
She moved over to an elevation – where she would gain a view of there – with bushes to hide behind.
Splashes of water sprayed over her bare legs, as she tautly rushed through a stream, sending droplets of water pouring from her deeply tanned skin. Its coolness giving her urges to stop to quench her thirst and to bathe.
Suddenly she realized that the direction that some of them were searching had changed. And she grew positive of it. They spoke almost at her; and it occurred to her that they had to be chasing her. They must believe that it must be a desolate location, so why would they not follow her.
And they could be just as dangerous!
As she rushed over an area of tiny shrubs, hardly feeling the ground any more, she altered her direction, but she continued towards her destination.
How could such a thing happen? On the previous day, she had taken the place to be the Garden of Eden and had even considered staying there.
She glanced about as she went up the elevation.
At the center of it, she observed a complex, and, with astonishment, she realized that they had attacked an American military base.
Strangely, she was not convinced that she should be relieved, and the fact that it must be a secret American military base tormented her.
Her thoughts vanished as their black shapes started to emerge – and that they were armed soldiers.
Yet, as she put up her arms, the troops rushed off!
Their behavior was so peculiar that she realized what they were escaping from, and that terrorists had attacked the base and had activated something!
In the fading sunshine, a burning flare blazed out from the base, and, in seconds, before an explosion blasted out, destroying half of the island, and her with it, she glimpsed that it was an atomic bomb, from its blinding ghostly radiance.
Chapter 13
The Alien Artifact
(From the novel The Alien Sphere)
Chief Science Officer James Dexter struggled to focus on a distorted form of the sun, seemingly magnified, shimmering around, as his spacesuit adjusted its polarized faceplate to compensate for the extra light.
He expected to see the Martian Space Station in the faint sky – in a vague form of a satellite with networks of translucent tunnels, with large round and square non-transparent bulges.
The landing site, about him, had resemblances to volcanic regions in Iceland, which drew his attention away to the nearby fault line.
Members of the crew analyzed soil samples nearby. While others inspected the shuttle, for structural damage.
Professor Burrell, a biologist/exobiologist, investigated everything, thoroughly.
“Well, Mars may be excellent for mining ...!” Burrell muttered, through his communicator, gazing about him.
“The moon may be better ...!” he replied.
“Yet why are there no proper meteor craters ...?”
“The atmosphere’s indicated at ninety-five percent carbon dioxide, three percent nitrogen, and the rest in traces ...” he replied, pointing to a monitor on his spacesuit. “Well, for one thing – though it’s surely thin air instead – winds here are thought to reach the forces of hurricanes ...!”
They began following Commander Strachan, as he led the crew away, in a specific direction.
They half-heartedly followed – observing the soil and rocks – while looking out for traces of fossils and life forms, within the layers of ground.
Dr Selina Jackson, a zoologist/biochemist, suddenly yelled.
He left some puzzling smashed rocks, and, with wonder, followed her eyes to a shape, shining brightly, at a mound.
Deputy Commander Basinger, who was mainly an astrophysicist/planetary geologist, like Dexter, went
to it.
“They must have visited here?” Basinger asked, curiously.
Selina suspiciously examined Commander Strachan – who was trying desperately not to respond.
“Impossible!” Commander Strachan announced firmly. “We’d know of it. This entire section is the least checked region on Mars. We’re here to put up a flag and open up the region to future explorations. It’s considered to have many rare minerals – desperately needed ...”
“We must have found one of the first space probes that they sent here – in the late twentieth century –”
“Or the remains of one of their rockets ...”
“Yet, why is it a metal sphere? And how did it become embedded like that?”
“It must have fallen down – from up in orbit!”
“It looks as if it might have landed here,” Burrell joked. “From outer space! From a spacecraft passing overhead ...”
“It seems to be intact!”
They stood around it, studying it – mystified.
“Even if there were an atmosphere, and it crashed at high speed, it shouldn’t be implanted in this rock like this!” Burrell muttered.
Dexter shifted in close, and Basinger touched its surface.
“This rock, encrusting its surface, must be at least thousands of years old!” Basinger stated, gasping.
Dexter copied him, brushing his glove over the rock, encrusting its surface, and felt a weak pulsating vibration – from something – as if it were alive – deep in its interior.
II
The Black Hole Experiments
In the outer fringes of the black hole, shifting wildly about itself, within the opened up alien sphere, a metallic gleam of light was magically suspended, motionlessly in mid-air, from the surface of an electronic clock, by the scientists.
The clock held at the end of an almost invisible cable, of translucent material, had its precision digital numbers frozen in fuzzy multidimensional forms (in a suspended cluster of partially transparent layers).
Professor Bergman, the leading scientist, had it released further, edging it into the black hole, creating more spectacular optical effects from the clock, making it distort in twisted forms (shaping beams of light with matter like a form of glass sculpture).
Its numbers shifted fast forward, until they froze again, and the clock almost vanished, and they stopped its progression.
A loud cheer erupted from all of the scientists and technicians crowded into the laboratory, applauding.
Dexter realized that it was more than a rupture in space. It had properties of suspending time! It was a hole in the fabric of space and time, and a gateway into the depths of time.
He had staggered when he had first observed the pulsating alien sphere, when he had entered the laboratory of the UN Space Agency – where leading scientists were carrying out a series of basic experiments on it.
They had not been able to determine its origins, so they had brought it back to the Earth, to allow leading scientists to investigate it.
He had shuddered as he had studied its cleaned surface and perfect sphere shape, with no blemishes or openings.
The abnormal antics of the laboratory scientists had captivated him – mystifying him with the depth of their nervousness, and fear of something! Some still repetitively studied the controls of an immense laboratory laser, with alarm – preparing themselves!
What were they going to do? Had something gone wrong in their earlier experiments?
A swift flash of light had exploded out, and the laser’s flickering beam had blasted into the sphere – silencing all the scientists.
It had triggered it to unlock, open (with a deafening bang), and reveal its inner chamber, where it was – by the manipulation of gravitational forces – suspending a black hole.
Professor Bergman calmly raised his hand, quickly giving a signal to a technician.
“As you see,” he announced, “it manipulates perceptions of space and time – within its outer radius! It suspends, accelerates, and suspends it. And if you’ll look – to the clock – suspended at its outer radius – it decelerates it too.”
The cable emerged outwards, pulling the clock back, with its numbers going swiftly backwards, until its numbers once again became motionless.
“And if you examined that clock, you would see that the numbers don’t move backwards!”
Dexter copied Basinger, Burrell, Selina, and the others, and clapped wildly.
He briefly wondered if it could be a form of time machine.
“Professor Bergman!” a scientist, next to him, called out. “If something fell in there, would it go on a quantum leap? Would you say that it would appear at some stage after its collapse?”
“I personally believe that it would travel into the future. But where it ends up is not in my field of knowledge!”
Dexter wondered if in reality the black hole was different from what they perceived. But he dismissed the idea. He did accept their philosophy!
“What are your intentions?” another scientist called out, from behind the group. “Are you going to send something in there?”
“We have investigated it little, so far, and if we do, I can assure you that I shall have you all informed about it!”
“What uses to industry do you think it may have?” the scientist continued. “Could science not use it? It has the power to stop time in its outer radius!”
“We do not know at present how safe it is! We shall test it much further, and we may find a use for it – as you mentioned.
“If you will take an observation of its shifting movements, which we have been studying closely over the past few days – which some of you may have observed – as its constrained pattern of movements has dramatically altered.”
Dexter examined its lethal appearance. It resembled a large black bubble of pure energy – buzzing wildly and dangerously about – ready to discharge somewhere.
“Do you believe that space is full of black holes like this?” another scientist asked. “Is space full of them from events such as the big bang? And how long do you think it will last?”
“There may be many, scattered throughout the universe, and a danger to any explorations of space! Thus we can study this one, and learn to detect them.
“The length of time that they exist may depend on their size and the conditions that they exist in. We just don’t know how long they last! However, I can give you other details about this one. Our fact sheets have all our findings, from our experiments, which may interest you.”
A technician entered, nervously listening to everything, and began handing the documents to the scientists at the doorway, and they queued up to the back of the laboratory.
While Dexter stood waiting for them to finish, he sensed something peculiar, but he kept his sight on the queue, where the scientists were having captivating discussions.
As he listened more, a gentle draught appeared, and he discontentedly tried to detect where it was coming from.
But it increased, and he realized that it was not a draught – the air was being sucked away. And he glimpsed a hideous black shadow over the floor, with a horrific shape emerging.
He then stood frigid, watching the black hole crawl through the laboratory’s protective screen material.
In an instant it vanished and reappeared across his path. And he could not escape: the strength of its pull was far too great.
The whole laboratory erupted into a frenzy of activity, and he plunged into it – hurtling into blackness – with existence rapidly vanishing.
III
The Fringes of Eternity
In a blur, he was floating over all the stars of the universe, and tumbling through the depths of eternity – far from the nearest stars – out beyond reality.
Obscure illuminations endlessly shifted, as he wildly spun around, with no real awareness of anything.
A tranquil abyss flowed surreally against him.
A shape gradually emerged, of a stretch of sh
ininess.
He came to, from his state of disarray, studying it.
How had he managed to end up in such a far-out place? Where was he? How could he survive?
He felt as though he had been falling through something, and he tried to grasp the concept, and where he had been.
There was no longer any light of the outer universe!
Large stars magically appeared about him, with incredible dimensions, and shone with blinding rays.
Howling air suddenly blasted at him, and around him, and he plunged down, and he saw the night sky, swirling about him.
He was over water, and falling out of the sky.
He realized he could survive, and prepared himself.
A roaring and blinding surge of water hit him, and he dived through it, swiftly sinking downwards. And he automatically put out his arms, pushing away water, stroking and tugging, pulling himself from the endless depths of water.
Chapter 14
From Beyond Reality
(From the novel The Alien Artifact 2)
A miniature white hole magically floated inertly in mid-air in front of the entity/transcendent at the front of its voyager within a field of energy, in its own reality, while energy beams dragged its radius apart.
It resembled a star in space as it fired energy discharges at regions of it to spin it wildly about itself, and it simultaneously increased the light behind it to whiteness. The speed of its rotation increased and increased and the power of it could be felt in vibrations and whirling sounds.
With vociferous explosions and gleams of light exploding out it imploded until it had almost vanished and turned black, and the entity/transcendent stretched it apart until it resembled a miniature black hole with fuzzy multidimensional forms rotating around it, clearly from time shifts clustering in clustered layers.
It formed a black bubble of pure energy, buzzing wildly and dangerously about ready to discharge.
The Deadliest Alien Artifacts (Story Collection) Page 13
