Solitude: Dimension Space Book One

by Dean M. Cole

  Her fading chuckles elicited a final snort.

  After a hard swallow, Vaughn keyed the mic. "I didn't know that old eighties song could sound so pretty."

  "Why, thank you, sir."

  "I'll try to live up to all that, although I'm not sure about the whole larger than life thing."

  "You already are, Captain," she said softly. Then her tone turned serious. "We'll lose line of sight communication in a moment, so after you land, call me on the ham radio, and I'll give you the takeoff time for tomorrow. In the meantime, be careful, fly boy."

  Vaughn smiled and nodded. "Yes, my princess."

  An hour later, as the ship flew over the South Pacific, he activated the descent program. The autopilot brought the engines online and used the small thrusters embedded in the ship's skin to turn the craft one hundred eighty degrees. With the nose facing backward, Vaughn watched the countdown. This time he kept his hands away from the power levers.

  When the countdown timer reached zero, the levers moved of their own accord. Instead of a sledgehammer to the back, Vaughn felt a gradual acceleration as his inertia pressed him into the seat. Firing its thrusters while flying backward caused the spaceplane to decelerate. He'd soon start to fall into the atmosphere. Before that happened, the aircraft would need to turn the nose forward.

  Vaughn wondered about that. He hadn't seen any heat-absorbing tiles on its smooth bottom surface. Unlike the Space Shuttle, the Aurora appeared to have an all-metal skin. He supposed it might be a carbon composite, but either way, Vaughn didn't see how the skin could stand the extreme heat of reentry.

  Suddenly the thruster cut out.

  Vaughn looked around with wide eyes. The plane was still flying backward, and the Earth's surface, and therefore its atmosphere, already looked much closer.

  He looked over his right shoulder and watched the distinctive shape of Mexico's Baja Peninsula slide into view behind the ship. Then he saw the right wingtip had started to glow. A faint tremor began to creep through the fuselage.

  The plane was still facing the wrong direction!

  Vaughn disengaged the autopilot and pressed the right pedal. A small thruster in the nose started pushing it in that direction.

  Urgent alarms suddenly erupted. Multiple red lights began to strobe on the spaceplane's computer screen. The biggest one was a message announcing that the plane had improper alignment for scramjet reverse thrusting.

  A devastating epiphany struck Vaughn like a Mack truck.

  The plane had been waiting until it had sufficient opposite-flow ram air pressure to permit reverse thrusting. He'd forgotten that a scramjet equipped with a thrust diverter could do that.

  "Fix it, Singleton!"

  Vaughn applied full left pedal, desperately trying to reverse his mistake. The rotation had already turned the Aurora sideways! The jet of white gas that streamed from the nose thruster redoubled, but the turn didn't stop!

  Hell, it didn't even slow!

  The plane was too deep into the atmosphere. Its thruster didn't have a hope in hell of overriding the massive aerodynamic forces.

  The spaceplane weathervaned, snapping the nose into the direction of flight.

  Additional alarms rang out, and a fresh batch of warning lights illuminated.

  Both wingtips now glowed white-hot.

  A klaxon added its ringing endorsement to the cacophony blaring in Vaughn's ears. He didn't need to read any of the new alerts screaming their all caps messages across the computer screen.

  Vaughn knew he was well and truly fucked.

  On his left, the wing's entire surface now glowed white-hot.

  Suddenly, it snapped off, departing the spaceplane in a flash!

  The horizon tumbled.

  And Vaughn fell into a black void.

  Chapter 23

  "Are you there, Vaughn?"

  As it had on the previous three attempts, the radio remained silent. Angela's stomach knotted with worry. Multitudinous questions haunted her every moment.

  Did something go wrong with the reentry? Had Vaughn died in a fiery crash?

  Was she alone again?

  Then there was the darkest thought of all.

  Had the wrong man survived Day Zero?

  Angela shook her head angrily.

  No! She couldn't think that. Vaughn had risked his life for her.

  She tried to shove out the thoughts, but they kept worming their way back, gnawing deeper into her mind with every passing hour of radio silence.

  A warbling alarm trumpeted through the module. Angela grabbed her smartphone and canceled the alert. She gave the radio a final glance and then pushed off the bulkhead. A moment later, she glided into her old workstation and placed the phone in its cradle.

  To keep track of the strange readings emanating from the Super Collider, Angela had left the gravity wave detector running in spite of the station's reduced electrical supply.

  She activated the phone's voice recorder.

  "Still waiting for word from Captain Singleton." Angela paused and took a deep breath. "On the bright side, this gives me a chance to follow up on the situation around the Super Collider." The woman gnawed her lip and then added, "Still haven't told Vaughn about that. Figured he had enough on his plate … Guess I was right …"

  Angela shook her head. "Sorry." She blew a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and then continued. "Anyway! The ISS is about to pass over Switzerland. If it's as clear as I hope, I'll get to see Geneva for the first time since Day Zero. As I mentioned previously, the anomalous gravitational waves have continued, but smoke and clouds have obscured the area. The fires burned themselves out a couple of weeks ago. Since then, spring rains have swept most of the crap out of the air."

  She checked the gravimetric display. The first time she'd seen the anomaly, it had the recognizable spiraling pattern of merging black holes, but over the subsequent weeks, they'd taken on a completely different look. Now the rendered lines radiated out from a central point like petals of a daisy.

  "Still seeing the gravity flower on the display. Not sure what the hell to make of it, but hopefully, we'll know something in a couple of minutes."

  Thoughts of Vaughn briefly took a back seat as Angela stared intently at the live external video feed. She watched the burned-out husk of Paris drift silently across the display. As the station continued its easterly track, the French countryside glided into view. Angela chewed her lip nervously as she waited for the Swiss border region to slide into frame.

  "Almost there."

  A ray of noon sunlight glinted off of something on the surface.

  "Just caught a reflection."

  The woman's eyes narrowed as she drew closer to the monitor.

  "Is that a river? It must be huge!"

  Angela shook her head. She knew there hadn't been a big one there before.

  "Guess it could be a combination of snow melt and spring rain. Maybe a dam burst somewhere upriver."

  As the station progressed farther east, the waterway broadened, and additional streams slid into view. Then a massive silver surface edged into the image.

  Angela's eyes widened, and she pulled away from the monitor. "What the heck is that?!" She leaned back in. "It looks like Lake Geneva grew tenfold! It's covering the whole area!"

  Her wide eyes darted left and right as she scanned the image, searching for a recognizable point of reference. The lake had flooded the entire city as well as the French border.

  Finally, she nodded. "It looks like the collider is right under the center of it."

  Angela tilted her head. "But that doesn't make sense. The ground there slopes down, out of the Alps. Water shouldn't be able to collect like that." She paused and then raised her eyebrows. "Unless the land changed."

  The large, glistening river she'd seen coming in from the west merged with its neighbors and connected with the mercurial lake. Then Angela saw several other rivers streaming into the reflective body from every direction.

  Sunlight bounced off
of the center of the lake, washing out the feed. The video camera adjusted to the change. In the now-dimmed image, the lake and its tributaries resolved as a silver daisy drawn against a black background.

  Wide-eyed, Angela looked from the video feed to the identical pattern drawn across the gravimetric display.

  "Oh, my God! It's the … the gravity flower!"

  Chapter 24

  Something knocked Vaughn's head. Then it happened again.

  He opened his eyes and tried to blink the world into focus.

  Strobing white light circled him.

  Gravity kept shifting.

  In spite of his struggles to stop it, Vaughn's head lolled to and fro.

  Finally, a grimy window came into focus. Through it, the man watched an endless stream of undulating horizon sweep from left to right.

  Vaughn swayed back and forth. He reached out to touch the … What? Canopy?

  Canopy!

  He was in a spaceplane!

  Or … he had been … until …

  Vaughn tried to sit up, but a harness and the wildly fluctuating G-forces threw him back into the seat.

  He could remember seeing the wing glowing, but after that …

  Nothing.

  The world continued to revolve around the cockpit.

  The spacesuit's helmet slammed back into the headrest.

  "Flat spin! I'm in a flat spin!"

  The pilot reached for the flight controls, but there were none. Fighting against the oscillating forces, he looked left and right.

  Both wings were gone!

  "Shit!"

  Staring wide-eyed through the dirty canopy, Vaughn couldn't see any part of the plane!

  It was gone.

  He leaned forward, trying to look up. Just before the G-forces slammed him back into the seat, Vaughn saw a small drogue chute fluttering in the dark sky above what he now realized was a capsule. Instead of an ejection seat, the spaceplane had an escape pod.

  Under the stabilizing effect of the drogue, the capsule's rotation finally slowed. Vaughn leaned forward, looking at the canopy. He ran his fingers along its inner face. That wasn't dirt. The heat of an uncontrolled reentry had charred and scoured its outer surface. He could see that the superheated atmosphere had eroded the hardened canopy. The worst spots looked paper-thin. Fiery plasma had come within millimeters of flooding the cockpit.

  Vaughn was damned lucky to be alive.

  A new realization hit the man like a punch to the gut.

  He didn't have another spaceplane. He'd seen enough evidence in the Aurora's hangar to know that this craft had been the latest in a line of scramjets. Not only was it the only one in operation, it was the only one that had ever made orbit.

  And now it was toast. Hell, with the exception of this capsule, it no longer existed.

  How in the hell was he going to rescue Angela?

  "Damn it!" Vaughn yelled as he slammed a fist into the ceiling.

  The man flinched as a loud bang rang through the capsule. Suddenly weightless, Vaughn floated off of the seat back. Only the harness held him in place. The man jumped again as two sharp reports shook the pod. Outside, a hemispherical clamshell floated away, and a bundle of white and red cloth tumbled from the roof.

  Then the capsule lurched as if it had bounced off the world's largest trampoline.

  When the oscillations settled, the man looked up to see a huge parachute.

  For a couple of minutes, the capsule wound and then unwound beneath the flexing chute, causing it to undulate like a lethargic jellyfish pulsing its way across a cobalt sea.

  A moment later, the pod finally stopped spinning. Vaughn leaned toward the hazed canopy and peered down. He was still above 10,000 feet. Beneath the slowly rotating capsule, a finger of sandy land snaked into a blue ocean. Vaughn recognized the thin strip of ground as Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

  He stared wide-eyed at the line where tan desert met blue ocean, trying to judge which side of that boundary his capsule would land. It looked like he was headed toward the western shore. For a moment, upper-level winds carried the capsule inland, over the desert, but as it descended through 3000 feet, the pod began to drift toward the beach and the ocean beyond it.

  "Oh shit!" Vaughn croaked.

  Then the capsule's sideways drift slowed.

  A minute later, the ground rushed up to greet him.

  At the last moment, the man thought to press his back and head into the seat.

  Then a Mack truck seemed to slam into him.

  His stream of consciousness skipped forward like a poorly spliced video.

  Dazed and confused, Vaughn tried again to blink the world into focus. He was lying on his side. Actually, the entire capsule was. The sounds of metal grinding across sand and rocks rumbled through his helmet.

  He started hyperventilating. The inside of his visor fogged.

  An enormous crashing impact knocked the sliding capsule back into the air. Then the pod slammed into the ground again.

  Vaughn's visor shattered. Hot air flooded into his helmet.

  Blinking and panting, he looked through the canopy. The still inflated parachute was dragging him across the desert. Vaughn's eyes widened as it disappeared over a large, jagged outcropping of tombstone-shaped rocks. Unfortunately, the parachute's cords passed unmolested through a gap in the stones.

  As the capsule rushed toward certain impalement, Vaughn saw a red- and yellow-striped handle in the pod's ceiling. Seeing its label, he grabbed the parachute jettison handle and yanked. It popped out of the recess trailing a thin cable.

  Another loud bang echoed through the capsule as the racing parachute finally separated from it. The pod slid for a few more feet and then finally stopped with a jolting metallic crunch. The abrupt halt threw Vaughn into the harness hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs.

  He lay there for a long moment, open-mouthed, struggling to breathe. When he finally did draw a breath, it exited him in a wheezing, spasming cough.

  Vaughn grabbed the canopy jettison handle and gave it a twisting push.

  A multitude of simultaneous blasts set his ears to ringing as a shock wave rocked the entire metal capsule, but the canopy remained in place. Then he looked through the top of the charred window and saw only rock.

  The escape pod had come to rest with its exit jammed against one of the tombstone-shaped boulders.

  "Shit! Really?!"

  Acrid smoke that smelled like ignited gunpowder filled the module, burning Vaughn's eyes and lungs.

  The man started coughing again.

  Thin rays of sunlight burned through the pod's smoke-filled atmosphere like white laser beams. With his gloved finger, Vaughn traced them to their source. Small gaps had appeared along the line where canopy met capsule. The explosive bolts had moved it some, opening up a small gap.

  A bead of sweat trickled into his eyes.

  It was getting damned hot in here.

  Vaughn shook his head, then released the seat belt. After a few seconds of squirming into position, he placed his boots against the underside of the canopy. He took a few deep breaths and then shoved his hunched shoulders into the seat bottom, trying to slide the pod away from the pinned canopy.

  Nothing happened!

  It wouldn't budge!

  The exertion popped fresh sweat from his brow. Vaughn swiped at it, but the suit's non-absorbent skin only smeared dust into the moisture. The back of the glove came away covered in the muddy mix.

  The temperature was rising precipitously. The heat now pouring through the shattered visor made it feel as if Vaughn had stuck his face in an oven.

  "Shit!"

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Looking around, he reevaluated his situation. Then, squirming around again in the confined space, Vaughn braced his back against the bottom of the canopy this time. He took another quick breath and then shoved his boots into the seat bottom.

  Squealing its protest, the capsule finally budged. Vaughn took another breath and then
shoved with all the might his skinny trembling runner's legs could generate. The metallic pod slid across the rocky sand with a loud squawk.

  For a few seconds, he just lay there panting, relishing the relatively cool air that now poured through his shattered visor.

  Finally, Vaughn squinted into the cloudless sky, then shook his head.

  "Way to go, jackass."

  Vaughn walked toward the top of an apparent cliff. The rock outcropping that had almost killed him had saved his life. Now twenty feet from the precipice, Vaughn still couldn't see land beneath the escarpment, only sparkling blue ocean. To either side of him, thin rock slabs, similar to the one that had stopped his pod, probed the cobalt sky like thirty-foot-tall praying hands.

  As he drew closer to the cliff's edge, structures and developed land slid into view below. He stood on the precipice and studied the palm tree-lined walks and pools of a beach resort.

  Vaughn began to shed the sweltering spacesuit. He soon had doffed the top half and started working on removing the lower portion. Now in nothing but socks, underwear, and t-shirt, Vaughn dug a multitool out of one of the suit's pouches. He sat on a nearby rock and started cutting and hacking the feet from the undoubtedly expensive spacesuit. He tossed aside the unneeded portion and then slipped the makeshift boots over his socked feet.

  Vaughn stood. He looked back to the dented, burned, and now abraded capsule. Shaking his head, the man turned and walked to a trail cut into the face of the cliff. He followed its zigzag path down and soon crossed onto the resort's property.

  As he walked down the retreat's curving stone-lined sidewalk, the shuffling sound of the loose-fitting, mangled spacesuit boots echoed off stucco walls.

  Miraculously, the resort still had electricity. Water sprayed from several of the property's fountains, rising and falling in burbling vertical streams. It appeared that the lawn's sprinkler system had failed about a month after the world had ended. The overgrown and now very brown lawn had breached its confines before succumbing to the desert clime. It protruded from the concrete's cracks and expansion joints. Questing tan fingers of desiccated grass covered the walk's rock border and concealed its curving edges.