Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1)

by T. R. Stevens

  CHAPTER 36

  EVENT: DAY 13, 1640 UT

  The order locker would not open for Garrison.

  The flashing light was accompanied by a gentle beep, which said that the orders weren’t critical.

  “Hey, there’s something in the order locker; must be for you.”

  Dominique’s muffled voice came from the privy. “Be right out.”

  Everything was different. All changed. Rewritten. In the same moment that Garrison felt like a new man, he was also his old self. It was great. All the turmoil that he’d been swimming in, it was gone in the miraculous span of those missing, magical hours. He was ready to take on anything.

  She emerged from the cubicle and eased into her seat gracefully. Garrison took in every move with new eyes, experiencing her with his whole body. She gave him a warm smile of appreciation for his attention. It was genuine.

  They had passed the time in their transit, moving between the cubby and flight couches, making love twice more in as many day-cycles. The energy between them was easy.

  They talked of elements of their past while they performed mundane tasks and systems checks. When they weren’t talking, though, Garrison’s suspicions still obliged him to hum his odd tunes and recite his litanies for sub-vocal cover, in order to keep his mutinous plans a secret.

  He sensed that Dominique was nearing a sort of comfort level that might allow her to ask about his habit, of which she had clearly taken note and could only see as odd.

  Their new connection had many ramifications; one negative was that it amplified his nervousness about the planned suit malfunction. The perfect peace of the present moment was constantly clashing with his thoughts of those plans. It caused his on-duty moments to be rife with aberrant body signatures. So far, Center had not commented. He was glad the moment of his sabotage was nearing.

  The locker opened for her without hesitation, clearly waiting for her various biometrics. He looked over her shoulder while she held her gaze on the zephyr. But other than the heading with her name and title, it remained blank.

  “Hmm. Garrison, you better have a seat or something, these must be keyed for my eyes only, sorry.”

  “Oh… yeah, no problem,” he said, but chill ran through him. The last time there were private orders, they were his, and all bad news. With a pang in his gut, the need to share the content of those orders pressed on him with renewed urgency. Getting lost in the amazing turn of events with Dominique, he had continually dismissed whispered opportunities to share the bad news with her. It was risky, it was heavy, and it would certainly destroy the magic, so he’d postponed it.

  As he moved toward the seat next to her, he wanted to preface whatever these private orders were with some kind of warning. “Nikki…” he said, using her bedroom name, but in a serious tone. He turned back to look at her, but her eyes were already moving rhythmically across the zephyr. He waited, worried, for her response.

  “Huh, I don’t know why this was keyed that way. It’s just some ship system check requests. I don’t…”

  A wave of relief swept over Garrison; he hadn’t noticed his held breath until he let it out in a puff. Dominique stopped in mid-sentence. He waited for her to finish. She remained silent. Something was wrong.

  “What is it, Dominique?”

  “Just… just…” Confusion colored her hesitation as her head unconsciously shook in a negative. She tapped the z-vellum with a finger and stared at it a bit longer, forehead wrinkled in concentration, before slowly laying it on the console where it stuck. He saw that it had blanked.

  “What? What was it?” Garrison’s insides twisted. She continued to shake her head, saying nothing. Her face changed—it was a mask, absent of emotion. Oh no, no, no, no… Something evil was happening. “Dominique, talk to me. What just happened?”

  She remained unresponsive. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but before he made contact, she shrank away, drawing in a sharp breath.

  It was a nightmare. Garrison’s reality shattered like glass. He was frozen, his hand pulled away from her yet still hanging in the air, unsure.

  Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Okay, what do I do now? Garrison was overwhelmed for a moment, but then a grim determination set in. He wasn’t about to lose her now. He didn’t know what they could have possibly put in those orders… or maybe he did, but he needed to find out for sure. He had to talk to her, but without goddam Center’s prying eyes.

  It was time.

  Garrison sat back in his accel seat and scanned the console. Picking up his wordless hum, he reviewed the sequence that he would follow. Then he acted, quickly, impulsively.

  His sudden action got Dominique’s attention. “What are you doing…” as loud pops sounded behind them, “The suits! My god, what have you done!?”

  Following his plan with great regret for looking the fool, he said weakly, “Oops.”

  Dominique moved out of her seat toward the EVA suit locker where a haze of smoke could be seen through the window, slowly being sucked away by the cabinet air handler.

  Garrison got up quickly, more awkward than she had been, catching himself with a hand on the cabin ceiling, “I made a mistake, let me handle it.” He came up next to her and she looked into his eyes for the first time since she’d read those orders. It wounded him to his depths to see those eyes filled with suspicion and resentment. He couldn’t stand it. He reached for her as she tried to move away, tried to elude his touch, but he was determined. He wrapped his hand firmly but gently around her wrist and said, “I’ll fix this.” He did his best to put as much meaning as possible into that simple phrase and double entendre.

  She pulled away with a jerk of her shoulder, and glared at him. Whatever she’d just read on that zephyr, it had poisoned her against him. He wasn’t sure if his simple statement had conveyed his need, his message, but all he could do now was get the suits fixed the way he wanted them.

  The comm began making urgent noises. Dominique stepped back to the console and waved at it impatiently, sending the audio to her ear. Garrison could not hear the other end of the conversation. It was obvious enough from her words. “We’ve had a bit of an accident… The suits may be damaged.”

  A pause. “Yes, Captain Bartell feels that he can assess and repair as needed.”

  A longer pause. “Right. Astra out.”

  Dominique looked at Garrison and addressed him coolly and formally, unconsciously running a hand back across her furry blond scalp. “I sincerely hope that they are repairable, Captain Bartell, we have a mission to complete.” She turned away and settled back into her seat. With quick jerks, she cinched down her main webbing restraint as if to prepare for a rough ride.

  Yes, a rough ride, thought Bartell, as a shell reformed around his heart like a creeping plague.

  CHAPTER 37

  EVENT: DAY 13, 2300 UT

  Force. Space-time anomaly. Quantum field manifestation.

  Phrases used by the select few brilliant, scientific minds of SBMMP who had worked on the project. Their phrases generically described the motive source that moved the military’s ships between far-flung interstellar destinations.

  The mysterious object expanded an invisible bubble around the ship. Companion tech allowed it to be variable, dependent on vessel size. The bubble and its source, though not completely understood, were, in function, a practical wormhole. The object at the heart of it, according to loosely applied theoretical science, was a physical manifestation of space-time foam, or its material analog, riddled with vast amounts of infinitely small wormholes.

  Experimentation had shown that, when high energy was added—or fed—to the object, it would manifest one of these wormholes as a bubble. The ship would then travel within it.

  For those involved in the drive project, finally disbanded two years earlier, of the few who had dared to venture an origin opinion or theory, nearly none voiced any considerati
on for sentience. Or at least, no more than they might attribute to a ray of visible light.

  Great minds think alike… and are sometimes wrong. At least in part. In this case the oversight was a convenient one that BUMP was happy to accept and foster. And unhappy to have challenged.

  In elite groups, fear of ridicule and ostracism, paired with the desire for the camaraderie of their peers, often served to keep popular opinion strong. But sometimes there exists one, or a small number of voices, that are in conflict with the majority opinion. The same set of facts will lead these rogue scientists to alternative speculations resisted by the majority.

  Mysterious anomalies that some comfortably referred to as ‘yet to be solved’ were the same puzzles that led other freethinkers to twist the facts differently, arriving outside of the box. One such black sheep was Bridge Cooper. His circle of compadres had been small, owing to the nature of the project’s secrecy. It became smaller due to his nature.

  Bridge was a typical eccentric, out of place in the rigid environment of the military. The success of the work in his youth on the Gravity Rejector project had led to renown and jealousy in the scientific community—and conscription by BUMP.

  He was tall and skinny with a full head of black wiry hair, fast going to gray. To friends he was Coop. His detractors called him Kook, and joked that he’d “flown the coop.”

  During the second decade of R&D, improving designs of the previous one, Bridge had taken to informally discussing his offbeat notions in the company of his work group. It had earned him his reputation and the growing distance of his colleagues. Six years later, he finally made the mistake of putting forward certain theories officially, ideas which would cast BUMP in a dim light, were they the truth.

  In a paper titled The Alien, Bridge circulated this theory amongst his fellows, presenting it as fact, but he’d also gotten it past his CO, to others that he thought might be interested.

  As a result, further research had been terminated and his superiors had moved him back Earthside. He had been restricted to base, effectively sequestering him. His peers’ rejection and isolating attitudes did not impact him greatly but he missed the environment of the station and struggled with other aspects of his relocation. Bridge lived most of his life in his head, so while the military could take away his research tools and forbid him from sharing his knowledge, they could not erase it from his mind. At least not without illegal process.

  And so, he continued his calculations from differing angles of inquiry—took his own kind of approaches to the data—and continued to come to the same conclusion: the substance that the military was using for the translocation of their ships was intelligent.

  The esoteric set of calculations that were attached to his proofs went beyond his fellows’ schooled realities; the mathematics traipsed along the edge of fantasy as far as they were concerned. His postulates included string theory and its membranes, and also Bridge’s own “new math,” which was an interesting, self-supporting set of equations, none of which the rest of his work-group could verify.

  Where SBMMP was concerned though, his theory amounted to a criminal action on their part—the imprisonment of an allegedly intelligent species. SBMMP’s official policies regarding such beings were noble, though disregarded.

  To this day, Bridge remained ignorant of the fact that his life hung in the balance between his brilliance and the threat that he represented to BUMP’s ability to move through space.

  His disturbing theory, while laughed at by his colleagues, had precipitated a discreet line of inquiry. This had slowly rattled its way up a short, powerful chain of command, stopping in corporate echelons, shy of the President of Earth United, then back down until, after almost two years, it came back to annoy an already rattled Admiral Swan.

  * * *

  Swan got a z-message. It had just wiped itself, judging that its contents had been thoroughly digested.

  Yes, Swan understood the message all too well. The technology that SBMMP used to drive their ships and the exploration pods was “to be continually employed in its current capacity, but its unknown origin was to be resolved immediately, at whatever cost.”

  It had been a boon to man, personally sheparded by Swan during his generalship, making possible the current level of expansion that had been underway for nearly two decades. Yet now, someone high up was raising the intelligence issue as a grave concern, shaking his tree.

  Where did the spheres come from?

  Goddam politicians. Just how many of the leeches knew about his top-secret tool? It was the admiral’s opinion that the higher stratums of the military, the ones that had removed themselves from the fight and danger of space’s fringe, were full of paper pushers and men whose job it was to fret over the smallest details. Bureaucrats and their bean counters.

  The damn propulsion system worked, didn’t it? Who cared where it came from? It was a gift that had been dropped in their laps. But no, someone had a bug up their ass, and now it was his problem. As he railed against having to respond to this directive, an electric stabbing impacted his skull. When he eased up on the intensity of his political complaint, the pain subsided. No drugs that he’d tried had brought any relief to this recent malady, but changing his thoughts did the trick quickly.

  He focused his frustration on a safe target. It’s that prick scientist who started all this.

  Swan was afraid something like this was going to happen; it just took longer than he’d expected. And the timing couldn’t be worse. Goddam! He should have arranged to shut the man’s mouth instead of just transferring him. ‘Where did it come from?’ they want to know. Another stab into his skull.

  “How the hell am I supposed to answer that?” The admiral had the general in front of his desk again. He had ignored Hanson from the moment the man had taken his stance before his spare workstation, currently littered with z-reports. He had forgotten that the man was there. Swan’s final outburst had summarized a torrent of mumblings.

  * * *

  Hanson was soured on his spacedock commission. He’d not been acquainted with the admiral before this stint and now wished to be un-acquainted as soon as possible. He was considering how he might get transferred back to E-BMMP.

  Hanson stood listening to the admiral as he vacillated between a mumble and a whine about some propulsion technology of which the general had no understanding or knowledge. The man’s instability seemed to be growing. The general wondered if it was the interstellar engine technology, which was something that had always been kept under wraps.

  Captain Astra was at the root of the admiral’s agitation. Unpleasant interactions had changed to volatile exchanges ever since he’d brought the report of the woman’s sexual affiliation with Captain Bartell. Hanson knew Astra by reputation. It was his opinion that the admiral had been compromised by the strength of his emotions. Obsession?

  The general wanted to be released from his attention stance, so he took a chance and responded to the outburst. “I’m sorry, sir, what technology is it that you’re referring to?”

  The admiral looked up at Hanson as if he’d appeared out of nowhere. “What… what…” he said vociferously, then realizing that he’d spoken something aloud that he shouldn’t have. “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Hanson lapsed back into silence. It seemed to be as he suspected. If he needed it, he might have something on the admiral that he could use to his own advantage. He thought mainly of keeping his own nose clean or, for that matter, forcing his own reassignment. It was a card that he’d just as soon not play as he became more acquainted with this man and his virulent temper.

  “Goddamit! Why don’t you get outta’ here, Hanson! I’m not ready for you. And don’t go off-duty until I tell you! Stay close!”

  Without reference to Swan’s earlier summons that had him standing here for the last ten minutes, the general turned on his heel and strode out. He didn’t think that Swan
even noticed his failure to salute. This just keeps getting better, he thought sarcastically, wondering how to occupy himself during an unknown amount of extra duty-time.

  He mused about the last message that the admiral had sent to Captain Astra—the message that he wasn’t supposed to read. When he’d slotted it up for relay through the Cross-Link-Encryption Transmitter there had been no prohibitions on the message, other than the preprogrammed wipe after Captain Astra read it. It was up to him to install the “eyes only” command. It was the admiral’s oversight, and Hanson hadn’t been motivated to go back and tell him. It was just another sign that the man was giving up focus to emotions.

  But Hanson couldn’t get past his own curiosity. He’d taken a risk and data-flashed the message to his oculars. It had been unremarkable. Hanson had not cleared his ocular implant cache yet, and he could still see the entire text of the message, if he chose to focus on it. It was chancy to keep it but the message was just routine stuff. There was just one problem. It was more than twice the size it should have been for the amount of data being sent.

  He’d destroyed the chip as the admiral had ordered; Hanson had taken enough of a chance by imprinting it. But he was fairly certain that the CLET system would have some record of the transmission. Just by its nature—sending two simultaneous, parallel, encrypted streams, for comparison at the other end—it must have to make a duplicate data set to do that. Or, at least use a delay buffer. Maybe that duplicate was stored in the buffer stack, not yet cleared by overflow.

  Just pondering these things, knowing what final intention they led to, the general’s discomfort turned to anxiety. The knock and clomp of Hanson’s cheap-issue grav boots echoed overloud in the near-standard-gravity halls of the SBMMP office complex, M&M Slice. It was late already, 2300 hours. Shifts would change in an hour.