by Steve Lang
Bill shrugged, smiled, nodded awkwardly, and then he followed them around a circular hallway to the small flight deck where a dashboard of curious lights and buttons were blinking green and blue. There were five egg shaped chairs, one of which Monas offered to Bill. The chair directly in front of the odd looking light board was taken by Chip, and then the other two sat to either side of him. Chip waved his hand over a small black panel about the size of a mouse pad.
“Hey, Bill! You ready for this? Drink up, dude, its grape drank!” Monas cried, popping the top on a metal cylinder of liquid, and handed one to Bill. He took it.
“Thanks.” Bill began to drink the grape flavored beverage.
“That’s going to give you a huge buzz man, especially since you’re not used to it.” Chip said.
The dome above disappeared, and Bill stared wide-eyed into the vast void of space, filled with a mixture of fear and childish awe. Vertigo overcame his senses, and he felt as if he was atop a very tall building preparing to fall off. Chip tapped a button on the control panel and a hole in the field opened, sucking them in with immense gravitational force. Where they appeared on the other side of this hole in time-space there were three planets very close to one another sharing dual suns in orbit. One planet was yellowish, another reddish brown, and the third was a shade of blue.
“The blue one is our home, Olympus.” Monas said.
“It looks like earth,” whispered Bill.
“Olympus has about seventy five percent of the oxygen you humans on earth breathe, but yeah, it’s a lot like it.” Monas shrugged.
“What are the other two planets?” Bill asked.
“The other two are bugs and lizards. The yellow planet is Reptilon, and the brown one down there is Squish, where our friend Monas hails from.” Dax pointed.
“We’re actually in a little bit of trouble with the reptiles, Bill. That’s why you’re important in this scenario,” said Monas. His face turned to a solemn frown.
“Yeah, uh, we sort of snuck into their capital city and took their scrying orb.”
“What’s a scrying orb?” Bill asked.
“It’s a glass ball that allows them to see into the future. It’s kind of a priceless relic of their society.
“Why would you steal that?”
“It was just a joke, you know to see if we could do it, but they’re pretty pissed about it and might try to shoot us down,” said Chip. He shook his head.
“We were chased by one of their sentry ships as soon as they discovered the theft. That’s when we went to find someone from earth.” Monas said.
“The worst part is our parents don’t know about it yet. They’re going to kill us if they find out before we can fix this mess.” Dax said.
“Yeah, if the reptilians don’t do it first. The orb is kind of a big deal, because all we got was one per planet. That’s what the makers left behind. It’s supposed to be like millions of years old, have all kinds of power, or whatever.” Chip waved a hand.
“If they didn’t want it stolen they should have guarded it better than having an eighty year old man with a tazer at the door.” Monas said.
“So, um, how am I important?”” Bill asked.
“Here’s the deal, Bill. If the reptilian’s try to take us we’re going to try offering them you instead of suffering a horrible death at their hands. Earth people are big bucks around these parts. You guys make good house pets, slaves, and other stuff. Dude, I really hope there are no hard feelings about this, seriously.” Dax apologized.
Bill felt a lump rise in his throat and a cold trail of fear course down his spine as his mind processed the last few moments. That’s when the first bolt struck their craft, sending the ship careening toward the blue planet, Olympus. Heavy smoke rose from the electronic light board as Chip waved his hands around frantically. Monas jumped in and grabbed the control stick in an effort to right the ship. Dax was trying to put out a small fire that had erupted on the panel, so Bill took that opportunity to run. He dodged out of the flight deck and ran into the room where he had first encountered the three ET kidnappers. Another shot hit them, sending Bill to the floor and he could now feel that they were completely out of control. Having cleared the planet’s atmosphere, they were free falling to the blue planet’s surface in a fiery ball. The dome covering was strobing off and on giving him a view of the inferno they had now become. Bill scrambled for a place to hide and brace for impact when he found a small compartment in the wall, that would be just big enough for his body if he scrunched up inside.
Bill scrambled over, pulled the latch and opened the door. Inside was a metallic cube about the size of a lunch box with a tiny ornate clasp. He crawled inside the compartment putting the box in his lap as the craft plummeted toward the ground at a high rate. He could hear muffled screaming and arguing outside the door as Dax and Monas searched for him while Chip attempted to control their descent. Next there was a massive jolt as the star craft slammed into the ground, skipped like a stone, and then after soaring through the air for a moment crashed hard into the side of a hill. Bill scared and in total darkness, was knocked unconscious. When he came to, daylight shone through a crack in the compartment door, and he heard feet shuffling around. His head hurt like he had been on the three day bender, but he was happy to be alive. Bill opened the compartment door and rolled out down a steep embankment, landing in a puddle of water. His lungs struggled to adapt to the reduced oxygen level of this planet while he attempted to get to his feet.
Bill felt a push from behind and went sprawling back to the rocky ground, smashing his nose on a rock. A blossom of pain exploded inside his head as something began to speak in a language he had never heard. When he rolled over he was staring with terror at a six-foot tall bipedal lizard that was holding what looked like a long silver rifle on him. He realized that he was still holding the small box and the lizard man-thing was looking right at it. The three young aliens who had kidnapped him were torn apart in the crash, and in pieces all over the ground. Bill had been surrounded by expressionless reptilian soldiers garbed in black protective space suits.
“Oh god, please don’t kill me.” Bill was curled in the fetal position.
He was sure that at any minute they were going to shoot him for whatever was inside that little box, but instead the rifleman just outstretched his hand and motioned with his head to the box. Very slowly, as if he were holding a ticking bomb, he reached out and handed the box over. The one holding the rifle handed it to another of his people who looked inside and nodded approval.
“The scrying orb is in there, sir. Should we shoot this one?”
“Let him live. He’s an earthman. He had nothing to do with the theft.” The leader said.
“Th-th-thank you!” Bill said.
“Have fun getting home. You may wish we shot you after a month on this spinning ball of dirt.” The leader said.
Their leader turned back to Bill, nodded to him, and then he and his crew boarded a ship resembling a giant metal birthday cake and disappeared into the sky.
Bill sat up, still trying to catch his breath, and thanked his lucky stars for being alive. Then he remembered that he was stranded millions of light years from home. He stood, brushed off his pants, and surveyed the area. Several miles away there appeared to be a city with high spires and chimneys of industry spewing smoke from their stacks into the bright sunny day. He had no idea what time it was or how he would be greeted, but maybe there was someone in town who might be willing to give him a lift home. He took one look back at the destroyed ship and its dismembered crew, brushed off his pants, lit his last cigarette, and began walking.
princess amon and
the rift pilots
“The rift trapped Princess Amon and her ship.” The advisor said.
“We’ll have to get her out of there before we’re all destroyed!” Replied Sturgis.
Gage was searching planets in the Nebulon system in search of the Amulet of Hoeth in order to rescue Princess Amon from h
er peril, with no success. His onboard computer contained only a relative location for the relic, and it was somewhere on one of fifteen planets. Time was short, and Princess Amon would soon die, taking the rest of his galaxy with her if he could not dislodge her ship The Aquarius from a time rift. Other, more veteran rift pilots were sent before him to find the amulet. Five out of fifty had returned alive. The others were lost when their craft were destroyed by vorgon raiders, so Gage’s success was crucial to the survival of his people, and the princess.
The vorgon, an insipid sallow skinned race of humanoids hailing from the Rigel sector traveled the cosmos conquering planets, and feeding on any unsuspecting victims that cross their demented path. Long ago, the vorgon had been punished by the intergalactic court for war crimes against nine planets. They were stripped of their technology by The Judge, and had been banished to the dark planet, Griel. Griel’s sun dimmed long ago, and as the last planet in her solar system, the effect for Griel was permanent twilight. Without sunlight to farm, they ate the weak and elderly. The vorgon struggle for survival further twisted their minds, and had it not been for a pirate colony investigating Griel to mine minerals, the vorgon would have died out. Fate was not so kind, and as the pirates were landing, their ships were captured, the passengers were stored in meat lockers for food, and the vorgon were free once more.
Humanity and their ambition to see the stars had helped to create the dire situation they now faced. The human space race began with the Nazi scientists shortly after World War II. Given amnesty, and smuggled out of Germany by the Red Cross, during Operation Paperclip, Germany’s greatest minds continued their work on rocket technology, and human controlled spacecraft. The decades after World War II gave the United States a strategic advantage in the space race with Russia, and with the work of men like Wernher Von Braun, space travel became more than just science fiction. In 1952, NASA completed construction on the first operational star gate, and that was when humans first traveled back to Mars.
While inventing the better war machine, the unacknowledged special access projects had also developed vehicles for long distance space travel using wave technology. When the star gate was completed, NASA used it for transporting humans and supplies to Mars for research, but colonization soon followed, and then Martian cities. In the year 2127 quantum time travel was rediscovered after millions of years of burial on the red planet by the Deep Space Exploration Consortium, DSEC.
Archaeologists discovered high technology remnants on the surface, and as they dug further down, they found more advanced tech, and intact artifacts of Martian society. The Martian understanding of technology and the cosmos was older and far more advanced than that of Earth. Many universities and private sector knew more than they would release to the general public, and the field of archaeology did more in the twentieth century on Earth to prevent information from reaching the public than any other time in human history. Decades after the first dinosaur bones were found, archaeology became a closed society where only a very few knew the truth, and they bound each other to secrecy. That had been then.
When Gage was a cadet he had toured the pyramid with his mentor and commanding officer, Captain Bill Sturgis. He remembered their conversation like it was yesterday.
“The Ministry of the Interior uncovered some very interesting technology in the pyramids, and ziggurat’s. It was all buried beneath red dirt for millions of years. Almost as if it had been waiting for us to find it.” Sturgis said. They were deep inside the pyramid in the primary time travel station.
“From what I’ve seen, the Martians were not much different than us. They have a striking similarity to humans.” Gage said.
“That’s correct, and like humans, Martians documented everything and kept it all catalogued in a vault underground: movies, blue prints, and hundreds of thousands of books detailing every aspect of their society.”
“Did the Ministry ever find out what happened to them?” Gage asked.
“It would seem that they had a cataclysmic nuclear war that devastated the planet. It forced the remaining people to flee to earth.” Gage looked at Sturgis with wide eyes, Sturgis smiled wryly. “The machine you see now was discovered after excavating down about a hundred feet through rocks and rubble to the pyramid’s entrance.”
The pyramid they were in was the largest one next to the tetrahedron, which was three miles tall, and had once been dubbed Mount Sharp by early explorers from earth. The time machine at first look seemed to be nothing more than two combined crisscrossing rings with a large platform in the center. On the platform was a large cylindrical cigar-shaped ship that could hold over five hundred crewmembers. “After several years of trial and error, and a few scientists’ deaths, we figured out how it all worked and time travel began again. This platform is a jumping off and safe return point.” Sturgis said.
“So, how’s it all work?” Gage asked.
“In the back of this ship is a room with a smaller set of rings and fiber optic cables snaking their way in a network to the bridge. They send wave frequency energy back and forth through the ship, allowing the ship’s hyper drive to match the frequency of two interdimensional connecting points, and pass through. The internal computer keeps the crew from becoming lost in time.”
“What about the platform?”
“It’s a jumping off point. The external magnetic rings begin to rotate around the platform, creating a kind of magnetic storm, and they interact with a power superconductor. Once enough magnetic vibratory energy is created within the rings, the ship takes one million light years and puts it behind her. The ship travels interdimensionally without ever moving an inch. The warp drive creates a hole that appears in space-time fabric that allows anything on the platform to pass through. Humans are forbidden from standing on or near the platform, because…accidents have occurred in the past.”
“Accidents, sir?”
“A member of the cleaning crew was accidently sent to a time unknown when one of his partners dusted the engage button.” Sturgis explained. Gage winced.
“We later discovered that there are specific rules for how time travel is to be conducted, but in their haste to play with the great new toy, none of our predecessors discovered the rules until those horrible rifts had been created.”
“My dad used to talk about the rifts when I was a kid, but I never really understood what he was talking about. I somehow got the feeling that they’re like black holes.” Gage said.
“A rift is unlike a black hole. In a black hole, all parts of the object entering the event horizon are sucked in and spit out on the other end of the universe, and it may not even be your universe where you end up. There are all manners of issues regarding black holes, and the Martians documented them as well.” Sturgis showed Gage to the door leading up.
“The rift is a time anomaly caused when a traveler goes back to a time where he or she actually existed. Time-space does not know how to correct for the anomaly so a rip in the field is created, and if any ship passing by comes close enough to the rift, it’s drawn into the gravitational pull and caught in a repeating loop between this time and the past. Subsequently, everyone on board the vessel is born, grows, gets old and dies in one day and time, until the ship can be removed from this rift. The Martian documents have stated that the affect is a nightmare for the people experiencing the rift.”
“Oh my god, that sounds awful, sir.” Gage shook his head.
Sturgis nodded and led Gage up to the surface. That conversation had been ten years ago and here they were again, this time dealing with a crisis of enormous magnitude. Gage stood on the observation platform looking out toward the tetrahedron, and at the many passenger ships zipping around the enormous structure. The city constructed below the tetrahedron was dwarfed by its enormity. Gage, a privateer, now that he no longer followed her majesty’s orders, had been summoned by Sturgis days before when he was on a smash and grab of some royal Terellian jewels on the planet Jago. The intergalactic court would soon be looking
for him. Sturgis knew of this, and of Gage’s recent activities as a thief and pirate. The only way to keep his friend and former protégé out of jail would be to get his help in saving their part of the galaxy.
“I know you’re out of the Navy, and are no longer bound by the officer corps, but we need your help.” Sturgis said.
“I’m not helping you with anything. Those days are long gone, Sturgis. I’m a private contractor now.”
“You’re a pirate, and when the intergalactic court catches up to you there will be nothing I can do to help. If I know what you’re doing, you can be certain The Judge does.”
“Like I said, what’s the problem? How can I help?” Gage grinned.
Gage stood five feet ten inches tall, wore a Van Dyke beard, slicked back hair, had the wide shoulders of a linebacker, tapering down to a slim waist, and with his holstered pistol, signature blue jeans, and rock and roll T-shirts, he presented a rugged masculinity. His irreverent style of dealing with others had endeared him to just as many as he had repulsed. On a drinking night he could be found face down on the table by two in the morning, an empty bottle of good Scotch beside his head, and one of his crew preparing to carry him back to the ship.
“A galleon travelling from planet Argon 5 to Reillos encountered one of these rifts, and unfortunately for all of us, this particular ship was carrying a Princess Amon. She’s an interdimensional portal keeper, which means she can use telepathy to open portals for personal travel from one time to another.”
“That’s a handy ability. Does she ever teach anyone else how to do that?”
“Well, if she does, she’s not teaching anything at the moment. When she became trapped in the rift, the princess fell into a deep sleep, and the power she controlled began to emanate in a green wave of energy from her ship. This energy wave burned everyone on the vessel alive within a nanosecond of being released, and the only saving grace was that they didn’t have to experience the cycle of life on repeat.” Sturgis explained.
