Lucas didn’t respond. The professor obviously needed more time to deal with the pain.
Kleezebee’s jaw tightened. “Closure is simply a pseudo-clinical term invented by an overcooked counselor who didn’t have a clue what else to say to his patients.”
Lucas exhaled, but didn’t respond. He didn’t have the words. His mind drifted as the events of the day began to soak in and take root. They mixed in with the rest of his memories, allowing him to escape into that special realm where clarity starts to form deep within your soul. Kleezebee needed help, but he was a tough man to read, let alone comfort. His thoughts turned to Drew, but that made the moment even worse.
He searched his memories for something that Kleezebee had once told him. He found it tucked under a pile of mental dust, in the forgotten section of his brain. He thought about tweaking the words to fit the situation. It might just help his boss. He ran through it in his head:
Let’s face it. Loss happens. Usually, at the worst possible time. But how we respond to it defines our character and that shapes the future of our existence. We can choose to hide in suffocating darkness, drowning in the magnitude of our loss, or we can challenge ourselves to rise up from the despair and treasure the most precious gift of all: Life itself. In the meantime, we battle to survive another cold-blooded day. Yet, without allowing your heart to fill with hope and wonder, taking another breath is meaningless. When you boil it down, all we can really ask of ourselves is to get up, face the day, and take another step forward. The rest of life is pure happenstance. The only real control we have is our attitude toward life and effort for others, nothing else.
Sometimes though, in order to change the momentum of one’s life and escape the gravity pinning us down, we must embrace the unknown and consider new and unexpected possibilities. Possibilities that were never on the radar before. Happiness can’t be quantified, cataloged, or even planned. It’s random and unpredictable—often, a complete surprise. You must have patience and wait for it to find you, not the other way around.
It sounded poignant and comforting in his head, but he decided it wasn’t the right time for a speech. Besides, who was he kidding? He wasn’t a patient man, and neither was Kleezebee—not with the fate of the universe sitting on their shoulders. He tossed the idea away and kept quiet. He wanted to help his boss, but sometimes what you don’t say is more beneficial than trying to comfort someone with stale platitudes and misplaced sympathy. Especially when you’re dealing with a brilliant, but emotionally-detached man in his late sixties.
He sat on the other end of the couch and rubbed the professor’s sore ankle. Lucas drew in a long, slow breath, but couldn’t smell alcohol on the professor’s breath or on his clothes. Maybe the professor wasn’t plastered.
After thirty minutes of silence, Kleezebee seemed to be coming out of his funk. Good thing, too, because Lucas’ hands were cramping.
“Any word from Rico?” Lucas asked.
Kleezebee looked at his watch and pressed two of the orange buttons along its perimeter. “He reported in earlier. The mission’s a go.”
“Am I part of the assault team this time?”
“Yes. Rico says you’re ready.”
Lucas smiled. His heart danced a bit.
“We’ll be staging operations in the safe house along Route 9 for both the BioTex recovery and the procurement of the E-121.”
“You mean that old warehouse near the burnt-down sawmill?”
Kleezebee nodded.
Lucas looked at the rug covering the trap door in the center of the room. “So, I take it Fuji finished his calculations?”
“Yes. They’re quite elegant.”
“It’s about time that wiggler cracked it.”
“I had my doubts, but he proved me wrong again.”
“He’s a unique bundle, that’s for sure.”
The processor shook his head in disbelief. “Chance favored us that day when he found us wandering in the desert after the crash. If it weren’t for him, none of us would have survived.”
“We owe him big time.”
“You have no idea.”
“But if you hadn’t convinced him to help us, the Incursion Chamber wouldn’t exist.” Lucas thought about heading down to the thousand-square-foot basement to visit the eighty-pound, tunic-wearing mathematician, but wasn’t sure if he had the time or energy. It was getting late and he figured Fuji was busy lighting the two hundred floor candles in preparation for his daily prayer vigil. The last time he interrupted the baldheaded monk, he’d been forced to sit on the floor cross-legged for a two-hour chant-fest that was almost hypnotic.
Over time, Fuji had proven that through intense meditation and rhythmic chant, he could enter a metaphysical state, whereby his mind was free to tap into and extract scientific information from the Akashic Field—a central repository where all knowledge in the universe is said to exist. Lucas had read about similar claims of transcendent knowledge before, many of which had been touted by some of the greatest minds in history, which included Einstein, Socrates, and even Nikola Tesla, Lucas’ personal hero, so Fuji’s achievements were not revolutionary. At least, not on the surface.
He had tried to achieve Fuji’s level of altered states, but failed miserably. He lacked the mental discipline to focus his thoughts properly and control his breathing. That left only one choice: The use of advanced technology, like the Incursion Chamber.
Fuji’s experiment was based loosely on an old U.S. military project from the 1970s, called Project Stargate, in which the federal government funded years of psychic research with the hope of developing remote viewing, the ability to psychically see events, sites, and information from a great distance. However, Fuji’s theories elevated those concepts to an entirely new hemisphere.
“What about the Smart Skin Suit?” Lucas asked.
“Tested and operational,” the professor answered.
THREE
A smile found the corner of Lucas’ mouth, knowing they were only days away from powering up Fuji’s Incursion Chamber. “That spud can barely carry on a conversation, but he sure knows his shit. We’ll have to come up with a name for his new math. I was thinking ‘Fijix,’ short for Fuji Physics. Got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
Kleezebee smiled, then winced. He grabbed his ankle.
“Did you finish the new interface while I was gone, Professor? You said you were close.”
Kleezebee nodded. “It’s complete and I ran it through a number of simulations. All we need now is a sufficient amount of E-121, and the view screens.”
“How many modules does Fuji think we’ll need?”
“Two. But I’d prefer to have three spheres on hand, just in case we need to make a few runs at this.” Kleezebee checked his watch again. “You’ve got time to go visit your mother’s grave, if you like. Maybe say a prayer or two?”
Lucas shook his head. “Not until we get Drew back.” He looked out the window to his right, just beyond the unpaved driveway where he parked the skimmer. At the end of the dirt trail was a flowery hillside where the empty graves of his adoptive mother, Dorothy, and former lab assistant, Trevor, were located. The video player in his head replayed the last time he saw both of them alive . . .
He was walking down one of the ship’s longer corridors to meet his mother and Trevor, the mammoth Olympic wrestler-turned-lab-assistant, for breakfast outside the mess hall’s entrance when a trio of Krellian guards stepped out of an inter-dimensional rift on Deck Nine of the stolen hive ship. The intruders cornered his mother, but Trevor stepped in the way to protect her. One of the alien guards impaled the Swede with a four-pronged grappling hook mounted to one of its giant claws. Lucas could hear bones cracking as Trevor squirted blood and guts as he was pulled apart and across the deck plating and all over Dorothy. Then the worst happened—the nine-foot arthropods turned their attention to his mother. Lucas was too far away to stop them before they quickly gorged themselves on her bones and tissue. Every time he shut his ey
es, all he could see was Dorothy’s face, crying out for him as the bugs ate her alive.
It was a memory he wished he could erase. Every time he thought about his mother, those final moments of her life were all he could see in his mind. He’d gladly use a crowbar and pry the memory out of his skull if he thought it would work. He hadn’t visited the makeshift gravesite since Kleezebee began erecting the memorial when they first arrived at the colony. He planned to visit Dorothy, but not until his foster brother was at his side. He’d already decided to let Drew offer up a prayer when the time came. He’d had his fill of religion, even more so lately.
Ten days earlier, Lucas had been walking past the twenty-pew church near the center of town on his way to pick up supplies, when he’d overhead the Sunday preacher delivering his famous fire-and-brimstone sermon. Crazy Larry’s voice carried far out into the street, echoing to every corner of the empty town square. His words were filled with the usual rhetoric about God, the Devil, and the glorious rewards of life after death. The self-righteous preacher went on to explain how God’s manuscript is all about forgiveness and faith, that how we live our life is just as important as actually living it.
Lucas didn’t buy any of it. Not after what he’d seen. He agreed—the devil is real, but it’s not some rogue angel gone bad. It’s a nine-foot-tall crustacean-like arthropod with four glowing eyes and an unquenchable thirst for human flesh. This Krellian devil eats whatever it wants, wherever it wants, and whenever it wants: man, woman, child. It didn’t care. Meat was meat. Granted, the Krellian invasion had been thwarted and the non-aggression treaty would keep the foul creatures at bay for a while, but he knew the bugs would be back and with a serious case of the munchies next time.
He wondered how the marauding Krellian Empire fit into “God’s Master Plan.” Sure, his religious faith was nonexistent, but even if he were a Bible-thumper, he couldn’t understand how anyone could cling to religious doctrine after the Sentinel Guards had rolled through town and eaten everyone in sight. He had never studied the scriptures, but figured they didn’t contain any parables about giant, scorpion-like bugs tearing open men, women, and children and eating them alive. If there were a Supreme Being, how could God just sit back and let that horror show unfold? Religious dogma made about as much sense to him as the incoherent prose of the traveler squatting inside his brain.
Truth was, Lucas used to have faith, just not the religious kind. His used to be the reality of hard science, but even that conviction had faded. Everything he believed in had been twisted and mangled until nothing made sense anymore. He’d learned the hard way, after just a couple decades of breathing, that life wears on you, stripping you down one layer at a time until there’s nothing left but sun-bleached bone.
He wished he could unwind the clock and go back to being a scrawny five-year-old, sitting by the front window in the state-run orphanage back on Earth, hoping his long-lost parents would show up and claim him. His puny, insignificant life made sense back then, even though he didn’t know it at the time.
Lucas believed the meaning of life was simple: We exist solely to survive. That our reason for living is to be able to stand on stage at the end of our days and look back and say that we did it—that we beat the odds—that we never gave up. That this life happened to me, not to someone else—me—and it never beat me. He knew that he had to give to get, but that wasn’t going to be easy, not with the glacier of disappointment filling his soul. He vowed to do better.
Just then, Lucas saw a vision of his dead mother standing in the forest on the lonely dirt path that led to her gravesite. She was wearing a flowing white gown, holding her arms out for him. He thought about running to her, but before he could decide, the image disappeared. So did the knot is his stomach. He decided his mind or his guilt was playing tricks on him.
“I understand why you want to wait to visit your mother,” Kleezebee said, snapping Lucas back to reality. “Of course, if Fuji’s correct and your incursion is successful, we can put all this behind us.”
“Yeah,” Lucas replied, accepting the possibility that Fuji’s plan to control the flow of exotic particles in a hyper-localized containment field might ultimately fail. “But we should continue looking for Drew in other dimensions, just in case.”
Kleezebee’s eyelids tightened, as he ran his pock-marked hands through the thinning bundle of gray hair keeping his skull warm. He sighed. “You know the probability of ever finding Drew that way is—”
“I know, Professor. Slim and none. But we have to try. I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I’m not wired that way. Besides, until we have a sufficient amount of E-121, Fuji’s tech is useless. And that’s not going to happen until we recover the BioTex and regenerate our crew. If you ask me, both of them are long shots, even with Rico’s and Fuji’s help.”
Kleezebee stared at Lucas. “Regardless, it’s only been a few days since your last trip. We need to let your body recover before we send you in again. You know the risks of too many successive trips.”
Lucas had made almost fifty trips into other realities and, other than sore legs from searching a handful of University of Arizona campuses and seeing a few random visions of Drew in reflective surfaces along the way, he felt fine. Well, almost fine, if he discounted the jumbled mess of traveler quotations he’d had to endure in recent weeks. “I know, but the longer we wait—”
“It’s already been a year and a half; another few days won’t matter.”
Lucas disagreed. There were an unlimited number of alternate universes to search and they had only just begun. But he couldn’t operate the rift displacement equipment by himself, so he decided not to argue the point. An angry Kleezebee wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Just so you know, I’m fine and ready to go whenever.”
“Any more hallucinations?”
“Nope. Not a one. I’m good to go. Trust me.”
Kleezebee’s eyes tightened on him. He hesitated, then said, “I’m not so sure about that. But regardless, we need to give Fuji’s plan a chance first. Agreed?”
“Sure,” Lucas said, though he really didn’t want to. Kleezebee had been trying to convince him to open his mind and his heart to extreme possibilities, but Fuji’s theories were difficult to accept—perhaps, in part, because they were beyond his comprehension. He wanted to believe, but believing and achieving were two separate things.
Lucas preferred the comfort and safety of proven scientific fact, though that had become a rare commodity in recent months. He knew first hand that some speculative versions of science were the greatest of lies, even if a brilliant mathematician like Fuji claimed he had calculated and quantified every conceivable outcome.
Lucas knew the drill; he’d lived it. Every scientist is confident his theories will work, right up until the last possible moment when the unexpected happens, condemning some poor lab rat to die a horrible, mangled death. Sad thing was, Lucas was slated to be that lab rat, the one who would step into the Incursion Chamber wearing the Smart Skin Suit. If Fuji’s calculations were off even a thousandth of a percent, his destiny would be that of a vitrified heap of cosmic goo.
He stood up from the couch and walked to the kitchen counter, his back to Kleezebee. He put the cap back on the jug of raspum, twisting it tight. “Is Rico coming back here first?”
“No, Rico wants you to meet him there.”
“Just me?” Lucas turned around to face his mentor.
The professor rubbed the crux of his foot. “Yep. Looks like I’ll have to sit this one out.”
“What’s the plan?”
“That’s up to Rico. He’s in charge of tactical. Now that we know about the Dunn-Rite Café, it won’t take him long to devise a plan. I just need to call it into him. He’ll brief you when you meet up with him. Just do me a favor: Try to keep your head down and let the man do his thing.”
“Not a problem, Professor. I’m just glad that dude’s on our side. You still gonna let him take Cyrus out?”
Kleezebee nodded. “T
hat’s the arrangement. Otherwise, he never would have helped us. But he’s agreed not to make his move until after our mission’s complete.”
“He’s a better man than me,” Lucas said, admiring Rico’s restraint. If Cyrus had raped and killed his sister, he’d never be able to hold back his revenge; not for a second. “What about the Royal Guards?”
“That’s why you’re going in tomorrow morning, when Cyrus and his men are at the victory party in New Robyn City. He’s going to need them for crowd control and probably won’t have them protecting the café.”
“Good idea. Let’s hope Freakshow is with him so we don’t have to deal with that psychopath.”
“Can’t rule anything out at this point.”
“I still can’t believe Cyrus got re-elected.”
“You really need to concentrate on things you can control.”
“Yeah, but Cyrus the Virus? Come on, the guy’s fucking insane.”
“Why should this universe be any different? It doesn’t matter where you go; public opinion is controlled by the media. I’m afraid it’s just human nature. Whenever there’s a vacuum in leadership, militants will rise to power and seize control. People will believe what they want to believe, especially when they fear all hope is lost.”
“But still, we should have found a way to let the public know that we saved this colony from the Krellians, not him. We’re the real reason the bugs signed the non-aggression treaty. If that asshole hadn’t confiscated your technology, we could’ve used it to—”
Kleezebee held up his hand, palm out. “None of that matters now. We need to focus on finding what’s left of our friends. And do so quietly. We’ll only get one shot at this. Cyrus has spies everywhere.”
Lucas agreed, though he didn’t want to. He exhaled slowly to calm his temper. “You hear anything from Claude lately?”
Incursion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 2) Page 3
