by Rick Jones
And as an entrusted employee of the Federation, her mother was buried at Mausoleum 2069.
Sheena stood before the tiers and rows of burial tombs along the walls on the thirteenth level. The stacked vaults ran four rows high and one hundred rows across on both sides of the corridor, with several corridors on each level. It was one of the eighteen decks on the mausoleum where more than 75,000 people had been entombed, and 10,000 chambers were still empty.
Her mother had been buried in a unit that was in the second row from the bottom, twenty-eighth row in. Then, ever so softly, she ran her fingertips over the markings on the wall plate over the script that detailed the beginning and end of her life, as well as the epitaph that read: Loving Mother of Sheena.
Tears welled in her eyes, as they did every time her fingers played over the lettering of the epitaph:
Loving Mother of Sheena
I’m so sorry, mama. I pray that you can forgive me.
Then she kissed her fingertips and rubbed them across the surface of her mother’s wall plate. That act in itself was one of indescribable love. And as often as she repeated this ritual on a daily basis, it was always difficult to say good-bye. Even when a loved one was just an arm’s length away.
Pulling herself back with reluctance, Sheena made her way down the corridor, with every footfall echoing off the mausoleum walls until they eventually withered and died away.
In time she would see her mother again.
But she would also see her in a very different state.
#
When Eriq Wyman was stationed at Camp Coquit as an Elite Force commando in the New Bay Area, he was by all accounts someone with a very particular skill set in the field of combat. In battle against Wasteland savages he was quick and clean, always approaching his quarry like the whisper of wind. And should a savage feel the slenderest breeze against the back of his neck, then it was too late, his life over as Wyman followed through by running a blade across his throat.
He had been a Force Elite for twelve years as a battlefield lieutenant, and served the Federation territories by protecting the New cities from hostile elements considered too close to Elysium walls.
Then one night just outside of New Dallas where the surrounding terrain was a kingdom that only desert scorpions could rule, a band of Wasteland savages had wandered too close to the city, their fires seen from the rampart walls.
And he had been issued an order: Lead your troops to sanitize the area.
In less than five minutes he was leading a convoy of trucks filled with battle-tested men to the beacon points of flame. When they were about a click away from the outskirts of their camp, his team exited the vehicles and set up a perimeter.
The savages were quiet as they sat there looking distant and detached, their faces streaked with dirt and filth as the blaze of the fire reflected off despairing eyes. Hair was severely matted into Gordian tangles. The curves of their cheekbones had been sharpened by emaciation. And for those who did not wear the tattered skins to cover their bodies, racks of ribs were clearly defined against the taut flesh that covered them.
And it was at this point that Wyman had an epiphany.
This group comprising of women and children and very few men weren’t savages at all, but people who’d been crazed by hunger.
He recalled the moment he stepped out of the shadows and into the light with whispers of warning calling out to him, his teammates asking him what he was doing. He held the point of his weapon down, the tip of the gun nearly skinning the surface of the desert floor as he made his way toward the fire.
Then all eyes diverted, the savages appraising this man from the darkness.
But no one moved or seemed to care, their spirits wasted.
He saw the overwhelming sadness among their features, could feel it coming off them in waves as if it was something alive. Then he came to a single conclusion: This wasn’t the look of crazed beasts. This was the look of complete despair and surrender.
Then he dropped his gun, its impact with the sand coughing up plumes of dust.
He couldn’t do to these people what life had already done to them, which was to kill them even though they still stood upon the grounds of a ruined plain.
“What are you doing?” whispered a sergeant, who came up from behind with his weapon targeting those by the fire. “Lieutenant?”
But Wyman ignored him, his eyes fixating on the savages as they began to form a tighter circle, the people now hugging one another for comfort as soldiers emerged from pooling depths of darkness with their assault weapons raised and directed to kill.
“We can’t do this,” he remembered whispering. “We can’t.”
“Lieutenant, we have our orders.”
“I can’t follow through.”
“You have to.”
Wyman shook his head in marginal sweeps from left to right as his eyes became just as disconnected as those who sat by the fire. “These people intended us no harm.”
“Lieutenant, we have our orders. If you do not follow through, then you leave me no choice but to relieve you of command.”
At this point Wyman focused his sight on a young girl that was maybe five or six, but certainly no older, who clung to her mother’s side for comfort. She offered up a marginal smile, slowly raised her hand, and waved to him. It nearly broke his heart because he knew what was coming next.
So he closed his eyes, hard, but it was not enough as he could still see the muzzle flashes through his lids as his team opened up and killed with impunity.
When all was silent as the smell or cordite filled the air, he finally opened his eyes.
Bodies lay everywhere with contorted limbs reaching skyward. Blood and gore marked the sand. And the young girl, who lay dead on top of her mother, stared at him through accusing eyes for not being able to stop this.
I’m so sorry.
The child remained unmoving.
On the following morning he stood by and watched a bulldozer plow their bodies into an open grave, the seemingly boneless corpses rolling into a hole for which there would never be a marker to commemorate that they had lived at all. It would be one of many unmarked graves throughout the territories not far from Elysium walls.
Subsequently, for his failure to initiate the order to exterminate, he was summarily relieved of duty and dismissed from the corp. The man who was once considered to be a master of killing insurgents with the cold fortitude of a machine, had been reduced to a man without courage by his peers. But as Federation officials considered his past and stellar performance with the Force Elite, he was reinstated to serve as Master Chief aboard Mausoleum 2069, a less than respectable position from what he used to be, but a Federation post, nonetheless.
He stood inside his chamber preparing for the presidential visit. In his hand was a razor-thin tablet listing the necessary protocols and procedures to follow prior to the president’s boarding.
And since the protocols were deeply rooted in the ship’s maintenance, measures had been developed to reduce any possibility of malfunction that could pose a threat to anyone onboard.
But that was Jim Schott’s department as chief engineer, making sure that all systems were well maintained with constant and computerized analysis. If there was an anomaly in the readings, then appropriate actions to right the ship would be taken.
While tracing a finger along the tablet’s screen, a call came over his intercom. It was Schott, his voice sounding tinny over the system. “Wyman.”
He pushed the intercom button. “Yeah, Jim.”
“You need to come to the comm center.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“There’s something you need to see.”
“Bad news?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
The system clicked off.
Setting the tablet aside, Eriq Wyman headed for the comm center.
Chapter Seven
Jim Schott was never gregarious
by anyone’s standards. But he was a realist.
The last time he had set foot on Earth was seven years ago when he worked as an engineer inside the Field of New Houston. Even then he could see that the city was not the paradise the authorities wanted its people to believe. So as the population grew, so did the demand for food, which put a strain on the aquaponics systems because there were too many mouths to feed and too little fish to supply the need.
So protocols were quickly set: After giving birth to a single child, the procedure of sterilization was mandatory. And it was this particular act that made Schott believe that this was the shot across the bow for the beginning of the end of human freedoms.
Soon other protocols were put in place. Most taking away human rights in order to make paradises like New Houston ‘a better place to live.’ To go against or voice an opposing opinion was seen as obtrusive to societal values. Therefore, anyone without a conducive viewpoint was banished to the Wastelands.
He also watched good intentions from good-willed politicians turn sour as human nature took over, with selfishness becoming the driving motivator in their lives. And with self-interests came greed. And with greed, corruption.
The Fields of Elysium were temporary answers to a planet that was hemorrhaging its life force on a daily basis and was now on life support.
And as a realist, he saw clearly the truth when everyone else turned a blind eye because the truth was too painful to handle.
So when the opportunity to leave Earth opened up he took it, seeing it more as a blessing rather than damnation since no one wanted to leave these utopian cities, which were really dying paradises on a dying planet.
But on Mausoleum 2069 he did find a true paradise. The ship was massive with room to roam freely and alone. The aqua- and hydroponics stations were filled with bounties of food to last for years. Political corruption did not extend to mausoleums since such ships were nothing more than an afterthought on the minds of politicians. And often on downtimes, he would go to the Observatory and stare at cosmic formations that floated in magnificent hues of greens and reds and purples—colors that were lively and beautiful—for hours on end.
For John Schott the realist, this was true paradise.
And like Eriq Wyman, he had his duties, following protocol to a T to ensure the safety of the ship’s inhabitants.
But on this day an irregularity showed up on the monitor.
It was a blip at first, something small and distant. But as it neared, it increased in size. The shape on the screen was not dimensionally a constant, but something that continuously morphed or reshaped itself into something different; something not quite understood.
When Eriq Wyman entered the comm center, he saw Schott standing behind Jen. They were looking at the monitor’s screen, which cast an eerie greenish glow against their faces.
“What’ve you got?” asked Eriq.
Schott pointed to the screen. “I was upstairs checking the external sensors . . . and this is what we picked up.”
The monitor’s screen showed curved, grid-patterned lines. The online image pulsated every two seconds before it slowly faded away, and then a cleaner image would reappear with the newer image a different shape in a different mass, until that image finally disappeared and reappeared as something different.
Wyman leaned forward and squinted his eyes inquisitively. “What the hell is it?”
Jen Jacoby shook her head. “If I was to hazard a guess,” she said. “I’d say it was a cloud mass, but with that being said, Jim here tells me that the sensors wouldn’t pick up cosmic dust because it’s not dense enough. Yet there it is.”
Wyman turned to Jim Schott, who never took his eyes off the screen. “Could it be that the sensors are malfunctioning?”
Schott shrugged. “Anything’s is possible, but we have cloud masses coming through all the time. Why didn’t the screen pick them up?”
“Maybe the sensors need to be recalibrated.”
“I checked them from top to bottom,” Schott returned. “The readouts are perfect. I’ve checked the radar's frequency, pulse form, the polarization and signal processing, everything. The computer’s self-analysis system indicates that the senses are working perfectly.”
“Then it’s obviously not cosmic dust,” said Wyman.
Jen Jacoby tapped a finger several times against the touchscreen. “But it is,” she said. “I can pull up an image from the Jupiter-Six satellite.” After a few more taps with her finger, another image appeared on screen.
The leading edge of the dust cloud boiled forward like the flow of lava mud, taking new ground. It was surprisingly dense with electrical pops of light going off inside the mass the same way electrical charges go off inside cumulus clouds before the storm. Whereas most cosmic dust is transparent and see-through, this particular mass appeared solid.
“On the surface it looks like cosmic dust. But then again it doesn’t,” added Jen.
“Can you zoom in?” asked Wyman.
“Sure.” With each tap of her finger on the screen, the image expanded while the pixels automatically refocused for crystal clarity.
“It’s definitely a cloud mass,” said Wyman.
“Nothing I’ve seen before,” returned Schott. “It’s so thick that the sensors are picking it up as something solid.”
The inside of the cloud continued to flare up as electrical charges continuously burst like the synapsis of a human brain, the light within going off like muzzle flashes in different arrays of colors. There were reds and blues, greens and yellows, beautiful colors that always shifted as the mass constantly reformed and reshaped itself, the cloud always swirling.
“You think it’s dangerous?” Wyman asked.
Another shrug from Jim Schott. “Who’s to say?”
“Can we forecast its route by trailing its wake?”
Jen Jacoby began to type away. “I can pretty much do anything.” After about ten seconds of typing in commands, the image on the screen showed a map of the entire galaxy that stretched as far as the Orion Belt. In the wake of the cloud mass, a trail of particle dust extended from its current position to a point beyond the screen’s perimeter, meaning that it came from a corner of the universe well beyond the Milky Way system. But the path was clear. It had traversed space on a perfectly linear course. And it wasn’t about to shift from its direction, either.
It was on a collision course with Earth.
“First of all,” began Wyman, “how big is this thing?”
Jen zoomed away at least six times on the screen before they could see the mass in its entirety.
“Dimensions,” said Wyman. It was a statement, not a question.
Jen’s fingers dashed quickly over the console’s comm keys. Lines and grids established themselves on the monitor and automatically deduced the size of the mass through triangulation. When the calculations were completed, the sizes were posted on the screen.
“By comparison to most dust forms, this one is relatively small,” stated Wyman, as he stood straight and folded his arms across his chest. “But it’s big enough to eclipse the planet. Now we need to understand its capabilities. Whether they’re harmful or not.” And then: “How far away was the Jupiter-Six when it made its pass?”
“About 196,000 kilometers.”
Still a distance away, he considered. “Any disruptions to the satellite at all? Anything that could’ve thrown it off-line, even for a moment, due to the discharge of its electrical impulses?”
“Nothing,” she said. “The sensors on the Jupiter-Six picked up releases so minimal that they hardly registered at all.”
They stood there watching the cloud move in glacial motions as wisps of vaporous tendrils rose from the main body to lap at the surrounding space as if tasting it, before they retracted back into itself.
“So you think it’s safe?” he asked her.
“Like Schott said, who’s to say? This is something new to all of us. Something different. I would think it would be easy enough
to find out.”
“I agree.” Wyman said. “How long will it take for a probe from the Jupiter-Six to make contact?”
“I can have it there in eight hours.”
“Do it.”
“Roger Wilco.”
For the next two minutes Jen Jacoby linked up with the Jupiter-Six and entered several commands. One being the launch code for the probe. After everything was established to be in its proper format, she initiated the program. Pressing a finger against the ‘ENTER’ button, a signal was transmitted to the probe attached to the satellite.
And within less than a second it launched into deep space to intercept the mass.
Chapter Eight
7.62 Hours after the Launch of the Deep-Space Probe
Though it appeared to be traveling at an astronomically slow pace, the cosmic dust was moving at a rate of more than 17,000 miles per hour.
The space probe, capable of traveling at nearly 25,000 miles per hour, raced towards the anomaly with an intercept time of less than four minutes.
The cosmic dust continuously morphed into indefinable shapes mixing colors that created indescribable hues. Lightning flashes went off behind the cloud cover, causing the entire form to ignite with explosions of illumination.
When the probe was two minutes out from penetration, a command signal was sent to the motherboard. The protective cover to the probe’s lens peeled back like a cyclopean eye and gave it sight. Then the sensors attuned themselves to analyze the cosmic matter within five hundredths of a second.
As soon as the probe was 10,000 meters out from its impact point, the lens began to fine-tune its vision by catching close-up views of magnificent cloud swirls.
At 5000 meters the probe’s analyzing tubes rose from its hull, the sensors ready to dissect components down to parts per billion.
A blink of an eye later, it penetrated the mass.
Chapter Nine
Eriq Wyman had just finished discussing matters regarding the cloud mass with the Federation Chairman in New DC, when he got the call from the ship’s command center. It was Jen Jacoby.
