Solitude: Dimension Space Book One

by Dean M. Cole

  Solitude

  Dimension Space Book One

  Dean M Cole

  CANDTOR Press

  Contents

  Also by Dean M Cole

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  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 3

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Book 2 Coming Soon

  Sector 64: Sneak Peek

  Thank You

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  About the Author

  Also by Dean M. Cole

  Sector 64: Box Set

  The Complete 2-Book Series

  Sandra just discovered she's pregnant, but with humanity on the brink of extinction, this Air Force Captain might be the world's only hope. If you like action-packed, page-turning novels, then you'll love the electrifying action in this apocalyptic thriller.

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  Part I

  "We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us."

  ― James Howard Kunstler

  Chapter 1

  Angela looked down to see the familiar horseshoe shape of Hudson Bay glide beneath her white boots. She shifted her gaze to the south and spotted Canada's biggest annular lake. It ringed Manicouagan Crater—one of Earth's largest asteroidal scars and easily visible from space.

  "Uh, Commander Brown, if you're done sightseeing, I could use a hand here."

  Angela smiled. Mindful of the ever-watchful eye of Mission Control, she resisted the urge to, playfully, hoist her middle finger. Instead, she gave him her cheesiest smile and said, "How may I be of assistance, Major?"

  Major Peterson did a double take. He floated a few feet across from Angela. Behind the visor of his helmet, a crooked grin spread across his ebony face. "Really, Commander Brown? Assistance? What happened to, 'What can Brown do for you?'?"

  Angela sighed and rolled her eyes. "Don't you start, too." Inside her helmet, her head shook side-to-side. "Crack one public joke, and it follows you around for the rest of your life."

  "That'll learn ya," Bill Peterson said with a smile.

  Angela ignored him and continued. "That was 2018. It's been two years. I mean, really?!"

  Paying no heed to her, the major wrapped his gauntleted hand around a coffee cup-sized white cylinder. His body writhed as he struggled with the stubborn electrical connector.

  The pair of astronauts floated near the left or port end of the International Space Station's 300-foot-long solar array truss. The structure supported all sixteen of the station's main solar panels. To Angela, the long edifice looked like the mutated body of a dragonfly with way too many wings.

  "This thing doesn't want to budge," he said with a grunt. The man's entire body lurched as he tried to force the electrical connector to turn.

  "Is that Charlie Eight One Niner?" Angela said.

  After giving the connector's three-inch-thick barrel a final fruitless twist, he released it with a frustrated growl. "The one and only!"

  The two spacesuited figures floated in the shadow of the station's outermost solar panel, but sunlight reflected off the truss, illuminating the major's face. He looked from the cylindrical connector and winked at her. "Got a can of WD-40?"

  Angela smiled and held up a large set of white pliers. "Nope. But I do have the convincer."

  She tilted the joystick grasped in her right hand. The bracket under her feet vibrated, and the robotic manipulator arm attached to the bottom of her boots moved Angela toward Major Bill Peterson.

  A moment later she released the controller. Now they floated face-to-face: Angela standing on the end of the long manipulator arm, Bill clipped to the array's hard points, the offending power coupling between them. A metal label riveted to its side read:

  C819

  Angela grasped its outer ring with the convincer—a tool specifically designed for stubborn connectors. In the zero-G environment, she relied on the stability of Canadarm2, the manipulator arm strapped to her feet, to give her the leverage that she needed to apply a twisting force to the wrench.

  The sticky connector finally broke free on her third attempt.

  With a crackle of breaking squelch, a new voice blared from the radio speaker. "Great job, Commander."

  "Why, thank you, Houston," Angela said. "While I have my tools out, is there anything else … I can do for you?" She glared at Bill and silently mouthed, Thanks, butt hole!

  In 2018, when UPS had brought back their old slogan, she'd asked a pesky reporter, "What can Brown do for you?" The S.O.B. had run with it. His editor had even made it the title of the front-page article. It had stuck, and now two years later, even she had almost uttered the damn thing!

  "Actually, Commander Brown, there is something you can do for me."

  Angela suddenly realized that the voice belonged to Randy McCree, the director of Mission Control.

  "Oh … hello, Director. To what do we owe the pleasure?" Angela said, wincing inwardly. She resented the nervous feeling in her gut. The young physicist hadn't asked for this assignment, hadn't wanted it. In fact, Angela would've been happy if they'd left her to her experiments.

  Ahead of the space station, Iceland appeared on the eastern horizon. Behind them, the inverted white triangle of Greenland's southern tip retreated, slowly sliding behind the curving line of the planet's western limb.

  "Got something I'd like you to take a look at," McCree said.

  Angela's head moved back and forth as she scanned the long solar array. Great! The woman had only been mission commander for a week, and on her first spacewalk, she'd already screwed up so badly that someone had summoned the director.

  Apparently, NASA's ever-watchful eye was focused on her at that moment. Randy McCree chuckled. "It's nothing to do with your work. You'll need to look a little farther away to check this issue."

  "Okay," Angela said, drawing out the word. "What do you have for us, Director?"

  "Need you to take a look at Europe."

  "Europe? Have you guys misplaced France … again?"

  After a pregnant pause, the director's voice returned flat and humorless. "It seems we might have."

  Commander Brown and Major Peterson exchanged confused glances as their smiles faded.

  Randy McCr
ee didn't wait for her to reply. "A few minutes ago, several data centers went quiet. Our hackers can't get anything from them, either."

  Angela knew that by hackers he meant Information Technologies, or I.T. for short.

  "Did they lose power?" Major Peterson said.

  "No. There just isn't any new or active data coming through them. Since then, the problem has only worsened."

  "Um, Houston, I'm not sure what we can see or do for you from here. I mean, Teddy is pretty good with computers. But—"

  "All the servers are in Central Europe," Randy said, cutting her off. His voice had acquired a frazzled edge. "But there's more. We can't raise anyone on the phone either. And all of the region's news networks went silent, too. There's a satellite looking at the area." He paused as if searching for words. "But what we're seeing … It doesn't make sense."

  The cold blue waters of the North Atlantic scrolled beneath the ISS. Their current track across the planet would soon take them over Ireland, Britain, and indeed, France.

  "I need human eyes on this thing," Randy McCree said.

  Commander Brown knitted her eyebrows. "Thing? What are you seeing, sir?"

  "Well, it almost looks like an aurora."

  Angela and Bill exchanged concerned glances. Exceptional auroras usually signaled the arrival of particularly energetic solar discharges—something that could prove fatal to astronauts not within the metal walls of the space station.

  "Is it a coronal mass ejection, sir?" Commander Brown said calmly, relieved that her concern hadn't crept into the words.

  "No, no, no. We haven't had any CMEs in the last several days, and certainly, nothing pointing toward Earth. No, this is something else."

  Angela started breathing again and opened a station-wide channel. "Teddy, I need you in the Cupola."

  "What's up, Command-Oh?" the Russian crew member said, his mock SoCal surfer boy accent lilting each word.

  Angela looked ahead. Beneath the aft end of the port or leftmost forward-pointing solar panel, she watched Ireland's rocky shoreline crest the blue horizon. Overhead and to her right, the long, articulated truss that connected all sixteen of the station's main solar arrays extended 150 feet to the structure's midway point. There it connected to the line of modules that formed the body of the ISS. Between her and the intersection, banks of solar arrays extended left and right like mirrored wings.

  She looked forward again. As they continued eastward, Angela glimpsed an upside-down reflection of Ireland on the bottom of the outermost solar panel.

  Movement to her right front drew her eye. In the faceted windows of the Cupola, a blond mane drifted into view. Even from 200 feet, she could see it filling a significant portion of the station's observatory.

  "Jesus, Teddy! I told you to tie that back," Angela said and then reopened the connection with Houston.

  "Hey, man. Don't be hating on the 'fro."

  She cleared her throat. "Um, Mission Specialist Theodore Petrovich, we're on with Director McCree."

  Teddy donned a navy blue baseball cap that sported the circled red chevron of Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. The hat reined in his blond mane. Inside the observatory, the man held up his palms in a what-gives gesture. His mock Valley intonation morphed back into his almost clichéd Russian accent and dropped an octave. "Da, Commander. I'm in position." After a brief pause, he added, "Good morning, Director McCree. What can Brown do for you?"

  Angela shot him an angry look that went unnoticed by all but Major Peterson who chuckled lightly by her side.

  "Telemetry shows that you are about to pass over Ireland," the director said. "There's an atmospheric anomaly we'd like you to take a look at. It's over England now and approaching their west coast. So you should—"

  "No way!" Teddy interrupted, the return of his Russianized SoCal accent drawing out the words. After uttering a few others in his native tongue, he said, "What in the hell is that?!"

  To Angela's right, Bill twitched. "Son of a …!" he said with a tone of shocked awe. After casting an embarrassed glance toward her, he pointed east.

  She looked forward, and her eyes widened.

  A curtain of white light was rising above the horizon.

  "Oh my God," Angela said in a whisper. She could see why the director had compared it to an aurora. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere, its light faded to black in undulating feathery fingers.

  Then the full height of the thing rolled into view, and the comparison collapsed. The colorful sheets of the aurora borealis usually ran in faint curving lines that never quite reached the planet's surface. However, this thing's light extended all the way from the edge of space down to the ground.

  "That's no aurora," Bill said.

  Angela nodded wordlessly, unable to speak. This was wrong, very wrong.

  The curtain of white … energy? … appeared to run in a perfectly straight line left and right until it disappeared over the curve of the north and south horizons.

  What the hell could create something like that? she wondered.

  The director's voice snapped Angela from her reverie. "What are you seeing, Commander?"

  "Houston, we've spotted the … the anomaly." Breathlessly, she added, "It looks like a wall of light!" Her respiration rate had doubled. The astronaut swallowed, trying to rein it in. "But not like an aurora. The light reaches all the way to the surface. I-I can't see through it!"

  The damn thing was high, too high!

  "Houston, I'm not sure we'll clear it!" Bill Peterson said. "Looks like we're flying straight at it."

  The ISS's ever-arcing orbital path sent them careening toward the white wall. Its upper reaches extended high above the planet. The opaque curtain concealed everything beyond it. It looked as if the space station was rushing toward the energetic rampart like a doomed moth on a collision course with a planet-sized windshield.

  Angela's entire body tensed. Pain radiated from her clenched fists. Then the planet's eastern horizon slid into view over the energy curtain's upper reaches, and she relaxed a shade. If they could see the horizon beyond the anomaly, they must be above it. Right?

  As their path carried them closer to the wave, Europe and then England and even the Isle of Man slid into view behind the wall. In the highest reaches of the ever-thinning atmosphere, the anomaly appeared to fade and then disappear completely. But she had no way to know if its effect—whatever that effect might be—extended above that point.

  Angela's body began to tense again as the thought took root like a weed.

  Inexorably, the ISS continued east, racing toward its date with the anomaly.

  Looking down now, she watched the base of the wave move across the surface, advancing westward, moving in the opposite direction of the ISS. The wavefront raced across the Irish Sea. As the station passed over the Cliffs of Moher on Ireland's western shore, the curtain of light swallowed Dublin ahead to the east.

  She held her breath as they sped toward the upper reaches of the anomaly.

  "Here it comes!" Teddy shouted.

  Angela crossed forearms in front of her helmet. To her right, Bill had the same involuntary response. "Oh God!" he yelled.

  Head turned slightly, Angela watched through narrowed eyes as the wall rushed at them. North and south, its extremities appeared motionless, but the central section rushed at them with impossible speed, closing the gap in milliseconds.

  Then the curtain of light vanished as it passed beneath the ISS. Below her boots, the plane of light disappeared completely!

  "It's—"

  Before she could announce the fact, the line returned. Edge on, the two-dimensional plane had become invisible, but as they continued along their eastward track, it reappeared.

  Angela released her held breath and reopened the private ISS-wide channel. "Is everyone okay?"

  "Dude!" Teddy said with a long exhalation that matched hers. "Da, I'm fine."

  Commander Brown looked over to Major Peterson. She saw a reflection of the white wave's undu
lating upper extremity painted across his curving visor. "Bill?"

  Wide-eyed, the man looked up from the light. After a moment, he nodded and held up a thumb. "All good here." Then he shook his head. "But you're the physicist." Bill pointed beneath them. "Any idea what the hell that is?"

  Angela shook her head as well. "Not a clue."

  Director McCree's urgent voice broke into their conversation. "Commander Brown, are you okay? Come in, over."

  Angela reconnected to the external radio. "Roger, Houston. I think we're okay." She paused, looking down, watching the wave cross the island's west coast and head out to sea. "It's moving west pretty fast. It just crossed Ireland in a few seconds."

  "Roger. That's what we're seeing here," McCree said. "None of the station's radiation detectors spiked as you crossed the boundary. Now that you've had a … uh, closer look, can you tell what it is?"

  Angela shook her head. "No clue, Houston. But it's not an aurora, not like any I've ever seen, anyway. I just noticed something else. Now that we've passed it, I can see it has an arc."

  As they glided past the English Channel and over the French countryside, she scanned north and south. "If I'm right, it's a ring. We should be seeing the other side of it in a few minutes."

  "Yes, you will, Commander. The far side of it just reached the Black Sea." After a pause, his voice returned with renewed gravitas. "And we just lost contact with Moscow."

  "Oh, my God," Angela whispered.

  "Moscow?" Teddy said uneasily.

  "Yes, Mr. Petrovich. We'll reestablish communications as soon as we can, but it might be a while. Our hackers still haven't figured out a workaround."

  The director's words triggered an epiphany. "Houston," Commander Brown said. "Has this thing lost any energy? Does it appear to have lost any of its intensity since you first detected it?"

  "No, Commander," McCree said in a matter-of-fact tone that told her he'd already thought of the issue she was about to raise.