by Rod Galindo
Ray "X-Ray" Isley, Android. Science Specialist, No Nationality.
Primary mission: Exploration of the interstellar medium immediately past M_42¤3ØÝ=×'s Heliopause.
Secondary mission: Locate and revive Voyager 2 spacecraft, catch and release. Launched M1L^2.4, ȴcoy 625-N23 (20 August 1977, Earth Common Era).
Tertiary mission: Continue on toward Alpha Centauri system, past natural lives of human crew; synthetic humanoid crewmember was prepared to transmit data to Earth as long as Explorer Two remained viable.
Armament: Deuterium-based fusion missiles (six), each with multiple warheads (ten). Yield: 0.42153 º¤ (Earth measurement: 310 megatons per missile). Analysis: Ineffective against most Royal Military vessels with Class 2 or higher rating. May cause minor damage to civilian liners. Likely intended use: self-defense against natural threats.
Armor: None. Of note: Superstructure of Explorer Two neared failure upon seizure by Border Patrol using speed-retardant particle beam. At lowest setting.
Current or last-known location: Grid (x)=58362952, Base (y)=32C1, Elevox (z)=T513655. Heliosheath (edge of Earth's solar system).
Current status of vessel: Destroyed by Border Patrol. Reason: departure of quarantined territory of M_42¤3ØÝ=× System, thus breaking the Earth-ØÝ*#Îm Pact of Human King Solomon Era (6542 K.S.E.), prior to Earth's last Ice Age.
Current status of crew: Deceased.
END OF OFFICAL REPORT
SUBMITTED BY
§9ylÎx, HIVE lÎx
PRIMARY ØÝ*)(*ÝØ ATTACHÉ TO EARTH
Glossary of Select Terms
§9ylÎx
Overseer attaché to Earth, pronounced "Senine-y-lix"
ß7ylÎx
Companion of §9ylÎx, pronounced "Beeseven-y-lix"
lÎx
Hive of §9y and ß7y
)I(J&)I(
§9y and ß7y's science and research vessel, named "J&"
ȴcoy
211.1 Earth years
Mji1ȴcoy
53.7 Earth years
¥M_
The equivalent of 34.7 Earth days
ØÝ*)(*ÝØ
The Overseer Council of Federated Worlds in the galaxy
ØÝ*#Îm
The Overseer Treaty, initiated by Hive #Îm
nano¿~
Overseer nanotechnology
º¤
A quantity of explosive yield measurement
¥×(*)
A quantum electromagnetic device that draws energy from the vacuum of space
¤-^-*
A protective mineral embedded in Overseer spacecraft hulls
M_42¤3ØÝ=×
Earth (with "Forbidden X" indicator)
Mji1
A small fraction of time, perhaps a minute
Ωer¦
(You don't want to know)
/B&
A replication matrix used by the Overseer Empire
Grid, Base, Elevox
A three-dimensional grid coordinate system
Thank you for reading Border Patrol.
I hope you enjoyed it!
Now, please enjoy this excerpt from my military science fiction novelette, The Tesla Project: 1975
Find it HERE on Amazon.com
I
Sergeant First Class Mike Tyler touched his earpiece to activate the embedded microphone. "Raven Rock Command, this is Traveler Three, commo check, over."
"Roger, Traveler Three, read you Lima Charlie," came the tinny reply from a random technician, indicating the command center could hear him "loud and clear."
He adjusted the weight on his back, a modified U.S. Army-issue rucksack. It was half empty to allow room for to-be-acquired items but was still heavy, mainly thanks to the working guts of a mini rocketpack the U.S. Army of 2025 allowed him to bring back with him. Not to mention its fuel.
"All departments report GO," announced a civilian wearing a colorful shirt and even louder tie, sitting just over a hundred meters in front of Tyler in a theater-style room. The man and a dozen other military and civilian personnel sat or stood, viewing him through a narrow, rectangular window. "Traveler Three, Standby."
Director Johansen's voice boomed in his ear. "Traveler Three, you are authorized to load your weapons."
"Roger, RAVROCOM." He first loaded a thirty-round magazine into the standard Army-issue M-16 that his superiors all but forced him to take along, and "charged" the rifle to load a round into the chamber. He left the weapon on "Safe" because he didn't trust it; one violent bump and the damn thing had a habit of discharging on its own. He was about to take it through a rift in spacetime; he didn't want to imagine what throwing a piece of lead off into the quantum foam—he'd heard it called that once—might do to the universe. There were more trustworthy future upgrades of the rifle, such as the M-16A1, the M-16A2, and even the M-4 and its various incarnations; his fellow travelers had brought them back for study and he had seen American soldiers carrying them on his many trips to the future. But would General West allow him to use those? Of course he won't.
After much back and forth, he was finally allowed to keep his favorite pistol, a .50 caliber Desert Eagle he'd obtained from a trip to 2005. "Betty", as he called the satin-black Mark XIX, combined the power of a revolver with the characteristics of a rifle all soldiers were familiar with, the aforementioned standard Army-issue M-16. These attributes made it the most powerful semi-automatic pistol the world had seen, even up through 2025. He slapped a seven-round magazine into Betty and charged her to send a round into the chamber, but intentionally left the safety off; Tyler had no fear of Betty coughing up a round when he didn't want her to do so. He then re-holstered the ten-inch, polygonal-barreled hand cannon, built to bore through car engine blocks, and touched his earpiece again. "Ready."
"Roger, Traveler Three," replied the Director.
"Coordinates set," he heard someone announce. "Capacitors at ninety-nine percent. Supercoolers are GREEN. Initializing temporal core."
Tyler experienced a slight disorientation as the round platform he stood upon freed itself from the only physical object holding it in place—a long, thick chrome pillar, which was currently out of his sight. In his mind's eye he could see the pillar dropping into the lowest point of the sphere, one hundred meters beneath him. He steadied himself; now only powerful rare-Earth magnets in the platform kept it, and him, from plummeting over three hundred feet to the sea of lightning rods jutting up from below like stalagmites from a cavern floor. Hundreds of similar rods jutted from every direction he looked. A one hundred-meter walkway to his right, leading to the platform upon which he stood, began its painfully slow retraction.
"Core at twenty percent," said the civilian in the technicolor shirt. "Thirty. Fifty. Supercoolers dipping slightly, still well within nominal levels."
The walkway clicked when it completed its journey into the wall just beneath the only door out of the huge spherical room.
"Initiating Relocation Gyros," said another tech.
Sergeant Tyler's heart pumped harder as three large, circular rings lifted from their resting place around the central platform, not unlike the rings around Saturn. They began to rotate around themselves, around him. The largest ring was so big, it spun only a few meters from the inner wall. The middle ring spun inside the large ring. The third and smallest ring was close, too close for Tyler's comfort. The result of this array was three rings spinning independently of each other, all on different vectors, in a dizzying dance. Tyler focused on the control room; he learned long ago not to look too long at those damned rings, they would just make him queasy.
A wind picked up, generated by the motion of the rings. Tyler's gaze rose to the lightning rods above him in anticipation. There they are! The blue-violet stars. He couldn't help but smile at the sight, as the tip of each rod all around the Temporal Sphere glowed with Saint Elmo's Fire in the dense magnetic field generated by the spinning blades. The "fire" created a buzzing that grew in intensity with the wind and
made the breeze smell tinny from ionization.
"Translocation Gyros stable, speed at target parameters, Einstein-Rosen horizon rising," said the colorful civilian. "Transferring coordinates to TRM computer."
TRM. Time Relocation Mechanism. Mike Tyler often chuckled that something with such a name was actually a part of his duty description. Who would have ever guessed?
He had never been in a tornado, but he guessed this was what one felt like. A tiny one, at least. He pulled the bill of his helmet, or "Kevlar", down over his eyes and crouched to make himself a smaller target, less aerodynamic so as not to be swept off the platform.
A new voice filtered into his ear now. "Now's not the time to be sucking your thumb, Mike."
Tyler cocked his head slightly and eye-balled the far right end of the giant rectangular window before him. There stood his commander and friend, Major Matthew Wilson, observing the trip. "Asshole," he muttered without keying his mic.
He saw Wilson lean over and speak into one of the microphones. "Say again, Traveler Three, we didn't quite catch that." As usual Wilson wore his Army Class A dress uniform instead of the slightly dressed-down Class B which most other military personnel wore at the facility. His jacket and pants were impeccable, creased in all the right places. A stack of service and campaign ribbons, most of which he had been awarded for various tours to Vietnam, nearly reached his collarbone.
Tyler touched his earpiece this time to activate the microphone. "Just said I'm ready to go," he shouted, so as to be heard over the wind and the buzzing of the glowing rods.
Wilson laughed, silently from Tyler's perspective.
Director Johansen spoke into his ear now. "Sergeant Tyler, initiate hover mode. One-half thrust."
This marked a change in standard procedure. On every occasion before now, Tyler simply jumped through an open rift above the round platform like he was walking through a doorway. This time he was forced to do things a little differently. He opened a small green box on his heavy, olive-drab-green utility belt and removed what looked like the grip of a gun, minus the barrel. With his thumb he pressed the red glowing button on top of the hand grip and heard the click and whir of two gimbaling rocket nozzles extending from either side of his rucksack. He squeezed the trigger. The tiny rockets ignited, filling the sphere with light and exhaust. He mashed the trigger with more force, and his feet lifted from the ground. He listed sideways almost immediately. Oh boy. Wilson was right, I should have practiced more. He struggled to hover in one place over the windy platform.
"Steady, Mike!" he heard Wilson shout in his ear.
"I got it," he shouted back, fighting the handgrip, flying back and forth and forth and back, doing everything he could to keep himself mostly above the platform. At one point he turned his head just in the nick of time to prevent decapitation from one of the spinning rings and a very bad day for all involved.
"Open the rift now!" Wilson ordered.
"Not yet, sir," replied Johansen, "the core is only at…" he checked a readout. "Ninety-two percent. We need to be at least to ninety eight so the—"
"Open it before he's blown into those damned rings!"
Tyler heard nothing more, but could easily imagine the scowl on the Director's face. A second later, the inside edge of each spinning ring exploded with blinding white light. Before him grew the familiar swirl of a rip in spacetime. Blue smoky filaments extended from somewhere unseen around him and were then sucked into nowhere.
"Godspeed, my friend!" Wilson said in his ear. "If my older self greets you this time, tell that geezer it's time to retire, for Chrissakes!"
Tyler gave his commander a nod he wasn't sure was caught. He steered himself into the vortex before him. As usual, the world turned white, the most brilliant white he had ever experienced. It reminded Mike of the "Teller Light" that he read about, which occurred in the microseconds just after a nuclear explosion. A light brighter than the sun. He had once heard a rumor he couldn't quite believe, but which fascinated him nevertheless. It concerned what one of the scientists present at the Bikini Atoll detonation in 1954 said, the one without goggles who had his back to the mushroom cloud and was watching the other scientists. This man—Tyler couldn't remember his name—claimed that at the moment the "Castle Bravo" bomb went off, the flash of light was so bright that he could see the skull and jawbone of each man, as if seeing their heads in an x-ray image. The light was called the "Teller Light", after Edward Teller who had helped engineer the U.S.A.'s first fifteen megaton "super" thermonuclear device.
But there was a much more groovy effect than ridiculously bright light during each 'jump'. Each time Tyler entered the cloud, the white world was there, but it always lingered much longer than it should. It was like watching a film in slow-motion, only he was in the film. He surmised that time itself slowed down as he traveled through the rift, but the scientists assigned to the Tesla Project didn't believe him. He had no proof; all the time-keeping instruments he took with him—including his watch—never strayed even a millisecond from those back in the project control room. For everyone else, his trip was instantaneous. For him, it lasted a good five seconds. He suspected this happened to the other travelers as well, but if so, they never admitted to it. In fact, they laughed at him when he brought it up. They called it "Tyler's Disney Land." Their teasing made Mike wonder if he was indeed crazy. Perhaps it didn't really happen, perhaps it was all just in his head.
Regardless if his Disney Land was real or not, he still wondered about the Teller Light. If someone were to ever go into the rift with him, would that person see Tyler's bones? And if so, would history call it the "Tyler Light", after the first guy to ever wonder about it?
A young enlisted man could dream.
Tyler was through. The crackling of the lightning remained, but the wind was gone. Before him was nothing but blackness. Tyler's head jerked from left to right, but nothing met his eyes save for tiny blue stars all around him, and occasionally a bolt of lightning danced from one point to another point behind him, presumably into the wormhole. Or was it the other way around?
The darkness was expected, but was still jarring and unusual, especially with his feet no longer planted on solid ground. He focused on the tiny blue stars, but had a hard way of telling if he was falling or zooming toward that inner wall ahead of him. He did his best to center the hand grip to ensure he had no trajectory of any kind, but it didn't help his nerves. He rotated the rocketpack's handgrip to the right, which rotated him 180 degrees. Now facing the opposite way, he found the red-tinted vortex exactly where it was supposed to be, which replaced the blue one from a moment ago. "There you are."
With it, he at least had solid bearings again, and a confirmation he was indeed motionless, hovering in mid-air. He tried to look past the dimly glowing red portal to 1975, which would remain open until closed by his friends back in that era. It swirled like cigarette smoke in a room with a draft. But other than it, he couldn't see much. The Temporal Sphere looked just like it had a few seconds ago, minus the spinning rings. The lightning rods here in this time all had the same blue-violet glow; the little stars that quieted his soul.
He caught something out of the corner of his eye. A patch of the sphere was illuminated below him. He looked downward, but could see little past his body armor. He nudged the flight control stick forward, then made a slow bank to the left, flying around the vortex. This allowed him to turn his head to the left and look down. The rings were all there, stowed in place and motionless, as they should be, held in place by two giant mounts jutting from opposite walls. The inner ring was in his way, so he flew a little farther out, where he could see through the large gap between it and the middle ring. There! A single beam of light illuminated the lowest point of the sphere.
The camera.
The spotlight mounted to the large low-tech video camera the U.S. Army had sent into the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, or E-R Bridge, the day prior lay on the floor one hundred meters below him. Tyler reminded himself it had actually a
rrived here only seconds ago, relatively speaking, regardless of when it had been sent. The camera itself was in pieces, destroyed by the fall. No matter, it had done its job as pathfinder, saving him from being destroyed by the same fall. In the three seconds it had transmitted its video—yesterday by his frame of reference, only moments ago by its own—it had verified that any traveler would indeed need something to prevent a nasty fall if he or she were to survive more than three seconds on this trip. Hence the authorization to use the rocketpack this time.
Something crossed his mind. The walkway. He looked over his shoulder to find it retracted. Odd. This was not standard operating procedure; when the blades had no reason to spin, as in the case of a receiving sphere, the walkway was always extended to the platform in the receiving time period. The platform was also always there to prevent a traveler from falling to his or her death. Looking more closely, he could make out the platform's outline on the floor; the camera had bounced off it when it made its crash landing.
Crash. This sparked alarm in Tyler's head. The Temporal Sphere was heavily insulated against sound, so the tearing noise generated by ripping the fabric of space and time, the crashing sound of the large camera, plus the roar of his rocketpack could have announced his arrival to anyone who might be in the immediate area outside the sphere, but not elsewhere in the facility. But thanks to the large rectangular window—which was actually six inches of clear metal rather than actual glass—the sphere did not insulate against visible light. And his rocketpack was generating a lot of light right now. His head snapped toward the control room. Enough light shone in there that he could easily make out familiar chairs and consoles. So could anyone else either in there or in the hallway off the control room, especially if the door to the hall was open and they happened to be anywhere near the sphere. It was time to head for the exit and minimize his "noise and light pollution."
