He smiled and his face went from Adonis to radiance. When he did that, Taylor had the most peculiar feeling that she was in the presence of someone truly remarkable. An unexpected and unfamiliar sense of humility overtook her, causing her to visibly sway and catch her breath.
“You okay?” Chris asked.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, feeling a bit stunned, blinking at him as if he were too bright. “You are different,” she summed up her feelings, and then said, “Thanks, Chris, I think I should go.” She quickly pushed her feet into her boots. “Thanks for the tea… and the talk.”
“Sure Taylor, anytime, really. I’ll see you ‘round ship. Careful of the gravity.”
Taylor saw what he meant as she rose. The Gs were back to nearly zero. She caught herself on the ceiling and moved to the door. She glanced back at the ‘being’ who sat on the pillow, now floating slightly, his legs crossed, smiling at her.
For all the world, he looked like one of those little religious statuettes that she’d seen in various Pre-Obliteration curio shops on Earth.
She nodded to him and stepped out the door.
CHAPTER 49
EVENT: DAY 15, 1000 UT
Swan’s mood was black.
He sat at his desk, a few minutes before ten-hundred. He was aware of his impending appointment with the scientist, Tasimov, but without much thought for it.
General Hanson had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. So now Swan needed a new, high-level attaché.
He took a few moments to go over the records of his meetings with the general to be sure that there were no possible security risks regarding anything that had passed between them. The only thing that stuck out for him, as he replayed his internal memory, was what he’d mumbled about the damn ship-drive issue. As he reviewed, he also saw how scalding his temper had been towards the general. He supposed this was what had set the man off on his drinking binge. He looked at the report again: Detained once, then arrested in Vegas Slice. Amio? Why do I know that name? Oh, right… Swan admonished himself gently for forgetting about the sergeant. Promised him a promotion. Guess I’d better submit that requisition.
Just then his desk avatar toned. “Yes?” spoke Swan.
The melodic voice said, “Dr. Zhyanka Tasimov is waiting in your antechamber.”
His face began to heat with emotion that he did not attempt to understand. “So, she made it, did she?” Attuned to rhetoric, the avatar remained silent. Swan gestured, and a half-meter image of the woman formed at the front edge of his desk. He caused it to rotate, feeling a sense of power overtake his anxiety while he examined her from all angles. His breathing intensified, as if his body were preparing for a fight.
The scowl on her face gave her a fiercesomeness that only served to raise Swan’s blood pressure. He was disappointed to see that she appeared only slightly disheveled, and found that he was filled with anger toward the woman but he wasn’t sure why.
The familiar electric pain shot through his head from the base of his skull, causing him to take a sharp breath. His stiffening neck-muscle spasm pressed his beating jugular against the suddenly constrictive collar of his uniform. He had become twisted up, his heart racing, face hot. He counseled himself aloud, “Okay, settle down, Swanny-old-boy, you need this one to do your bidding.” He closed his eyes, and took some deep breaths. When he opened them again, the woman still rotated before him, looking angrier as the moments ticked by. This time it made him laugh, though. And laugh, and laugh.
It was sometime more before he calmed enough to let her in.
CHAPTER 50
EVENT: DAY 15, 1000 UT
Brainwashed would be how some would put it. But that term did not give a holistic view of the type of people that Admiral Swan was placing aboard the Rapscallion.
The special crew was bunked aboard the ship, as it made ready for departure. They were clear-thinking, self-reasoning human beings. What they lacked was a morality beyond the singular one that had been instilled by the military. They were unpolluted by conflicting ideologies, undiminished by the lack of a common cause.
They were also largely deficient in opinions and emotions. They were not as they had been born, “People of the Earth,” part of the melted melting-pot; there was no back and forth sway of viewpoints amongst their ranks. There was focus, concerted effort and common goals. Alone, each one was a pillar of obedience; together, they were a machine.
The forensics team was led by one of the made-men; in fact, a woman. The captain and crew were all of the type.
The rest of the forensics team, standard un-modified humans, could sense the synchronicity of their crewmates, but the eerie quality set them apart rather than inspiring confidence. The special soldiers referred to others as the alone ones.
The special crew had another thing in common: the voices. Voices that they had been schooled to ignore, their tutors believing them to be a leftover artifact from the earlier regrowth process. It was found to be odd, but ruled inconsequential by BUMP’s Special Project doctors.
To ignore was not the same thing as not hearing. The schooled ignorance had the effect of quieting the voices to a dull whisper. Rarely, a word or phrase could be distinct enough to impinge upon the Special Force member’s consciousness. When it did, this would instigate their trained reaction: Fuzz it. This described their tactic of creating a muting wall of inner noise, going beyond simple ignoring.
The current mood of this vocal ethereal gallery was one of uneasiness. In the head of these special soldiers, the result was a raising up of the whisper to the level of an uneasy murmur. Were a concerned, intelligent ear lent to this hubbub, a distinct tone of fear would easily be discerned.
Unfortunately, Special Forces overrode the din with their training, tuning strongly to one another, and turning up the mental static. Hard-focusing on tasks at hand also helped to drown out the voices’ clamor.
Major Rattana Mason and Captain Crist Boronson were the team leaders. Rattana’s commitment was unwavering, but she was having a harder time than usual with the voices. In the spirit of maintaining the Special Forces’ harmonious connection, she came to the Captain’s Ready Room, off the Bridge of the Rapscallion. She searched for the words to request assistance from her Captain.
Boronson used her familiar nickname in this private meeting with his acting first officer. “Alright Rat, what do you need?”
“I’m having a difficult time fuzzing the voices, sir.” The speech of these soldiers followed a clipped cadence, in a tight, formal English taught them by the tutors of their new life’s education. They had been little exposed to the rougher, less refined element of the military forces that worked around them. The jarhead idiomatic lingo was a foreign language to these individuals; something that they had been taught to be used as a communication tool when working in concert with the grunts or jarheads.
“Well, Rat, we know that it’s within your ability, you haven’t had this problem before. Why now? What could have changed for you? I have not received any other feedback of this nature from other team members.”
The captain himself had developed his fuzzing capacity very early. For him there was no effort or thought attached to the skill. For Boronson to say that he had learned the ability would be like saying that he had learned to breathe. He had all but forgotten about the voices. The talent now had its purpose in creating a smooth surface over a rough sea; it allowed single-minded focus. Nonetheless, the skill was not always so inborn. Just like any learned talent, some were better at it than others; some picked it up sooner and faster.
Mason was one of the late bloomers. Her deformative interaction with the elemental force, during an accident in the early research, had been curtailed; the woman had only been regressed to the toddler stage of life, not needing incubation and regrowth like the rest her affected crew. Her early childhood in the Military Cradle was not a happy one, if such a descriptor could be
used to describe any of the special cadets’ early years.
Beginning after the toddler stage, when a normal child would typically develop imaginary friends, these cadets were harshly schooled against it. That phase marked the beginning of lessons in reason and logic.
As Rattana proceeded into her elementary years, she failed to find her inner singularity, nights often sleepless, unable to tune out the voices. She often engaged with them in conversations that were quite coherent. She was an eager student; the people in her head seemed wise by comparison to her own knowledge, and were kinder than her military instructors.
She faced ridicule from her classmates as she shared the things that she’d learned in previous nights’ intellectual intercourse. Punishment and censure came from her instructors when they learned of her sharing.
Eventually she mastered the technique, walling herself off from the entities in her head, against their continued protests, shutting out even those who claimed friendship and hurt feelings. The shaming by her teachers and piers was the greater force, and in the end, won out.
Mason addressed the captain’s question. “Sir, I feel that something has indeed changed but, begging your pardon, I do not believe that the change lies within myself, sir.”
The captain ever so slightly cocked his head, a calculated action meant to convey that his First Officer and Forensics leader was speaking unintelligently. “Please explain yourself, Major.” He shifted the tense of the conversation to a more formal level, stressing her title.
Rattana did not miss her captain’s signals, and was beset by an emotion that had been suppressed for nearly twenty years. The shame.
She had come to the captain to express a concern of which Humanity itself should be aware. It was a fear that had been raised on the inner podium from which the voices now spoke loudly. Her hard-learned barriers to them had been over-topped by the rising cacophony of objections, and finally she had given in and listened. In some deference to her training, she had not responded. Still, the voices somehow sensed her renewed attention, and once they’d clearly conveyed their message, had subsided in their insistence to be heard.
And here she was with her captain, his posture intent on the words that she would speak next. Her body was running away with her self-control as her face began to heat. In him she saw the censure that was to come. She translated his looming posture to a threatening one. Rationality exerted control, her hard-reasoning mind gearing up for self-defense. Could I lose my position as Major? It was the last key needed to turn the direction of her intention in that moment.
She would keep these forbidden thoughts to herself.
With the sharpest mind of those on her team, she redirected. “It is the change in my situation, sir. I feel that my forensic skills have not been suitably tested. In such a critical mission, as we are now undertaking, I am experiencing a concern that I may not perform as well as I might, had I undertaken additional field experience. I must be honest, I feel this doubt has affected my focus.” In mid-sentence, the background din and volume of voices rose once again. By the time she’d finished the sentence, it was a struggle to keep from wincing; it impacted her like the roar of a train passing.
“Ah, Rat.” Boronson switched back to informality; she had averted her personal and professional crisis. “I have full faith in you. Don’t think that I speak without knowledge. I, myself, have garnered a great deal of learning from reading your papers. I would not have made any different choice for your post, had I another, more qualified candidate from the alone ones.”
“Yessir.” She placed as much humility and appreciation in the single word-phrase as possible, given that she could barely hear the man over the other haranguing voices in her head.
* * *
Withdrawn, above the angry exclamations of the others, a more reasonable pair of voices conversed, watching through the ghostly veil as Rattana’s indistinct form walked the corridors toward her quarters.
“We had her. We were so close.”
“Maybe she is still receptive. Maybe if there is someone else that she could give the message to? I might have blanched in the face of that man. Did you see how he became threatening?”
“Really? No, I missed that. Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I guess it might have been subtle, but it was obvious enough to me.”
“It doesn’t really matter. We lost her, whatever the reason.”
“Well, someone’s got to try and talk to this soldier again. Why did she change her mind at the last second? If we knew that, maybe we could convince her to talk to someone else.”
“Unfortunately, I think it would be a waste of effort, I don’t think that we can use her as a reliable messenger. Look at those she is surrounded by, after all. If she couldn’t tell the one man who could do something about it, whom else is she going to tell? We can’t get through to any of these other robots. God, I’m glad I didn’t ever run into one of those Elemental things. Either you end up dead—really, really dead—or you wind up like that poor dead girl, Samantha Geoff. Or, you get to be one of these soldier pawns; no good.”
“We have Comani, anyway. He did okay, recovering from his possession. And the two captains are getting close to Eighre Masc. Maybe that’s the best way to spread the word. If the doctor doesn’t come off as a lunatic. Thank God for Jessica. Sad story, but it’s a good thing she died.”
“Mmm. Okay, let’s talk to Angelo and the others and see what we can do next.”
The etheric reality of the space around the ship shifted in a minor way; the facilitators were elsewhere.
CHAPTER 51
EVENT: DAY 13, 1500 UT
“…the creatures aren’t normally within our universe.”
“Instead we believe that they are intelligent wormholes self-translating between another universe and ours, or a parallel component-universe to our own. When they are captured, though, their properties are confined to our ‘membrane’. Is this clear? I’m leaving a great deal out.”
It was not clear. Comani was trying. The information clogged his neural pathways. Many universes, amorphous parallel planes, multiple dimensions.
“Let me say something about gravity…”
A new, enthusiastic voice interrupted, usurping the explanation. “Yes, yes, it was once believed that gravity leaked away from our reality, causing it to be a ‘weak force’. Instead, the discovery of these beings may mean that gravity is a very strong force somewhere else, call it a ‘singularity’ dimension—a sub-universe, either packed into our membrane, or maybe existing in a separate membrane, yet still somehow interacting with ours. It would exist in infinite dimension, but with no time or space.
“With the apparent exception of these creatures, which we are calling ‘Elementals’, only gravitons can escape the bounds of this place, and they filter through with regularity, allowing enough gravitons in to keep our universe balanced and happy.
“In spots, we reason that the graviton filter is damaged by stellar objects in our own sub-universe as they experience violent deaths. The tears are black holes, open windows into this sub-universe where gravity is a ‘strong force’. They let the gravitons flood into our perceivable dimensions.
“Our gravity machines, the Gravity Rejectors, are like crowbars on the filter pores between the realities; we’re prying them open a bit. To everyone’s good fortune, the fabric of the universe appears to be idiot-proofed against mankind’s typical folly; it’s rather elastic at these levels of change.”
Comani took a mental breath, sensing an end point, but no. The voice continued as if Comani had comprehended the explanation. “Now, setting all that aside for the moment, we were perplexed by the time-related experiences; just as surprised as you were in your science pod. Very personal for a few of us, these events forced certain assumptions.
“Trying to explain what had happened, we started with the wild assumption that, somehow, ti
me was a force, like gravity, it was the start of a pretty neat hypothesis. But it all fell apart, and we ended up somewhere else. If you think that’s wild, wait till you hear what comes next.”
The terrologist wasn’t sure what to think. He had a hard time even formulating a question around the confusing things the voices were saying.
The speaker continued, “Now: ‘Are we alone?’ That has been a question for the ages, and I don’t mean aliens, visible beings. I mean higher, invisible intelligence, universal guiding principal and whatnot. As scientists we shy away from the question, normally. Metaphysics.”
Oh mio Dio, Comani thought, no more, please.
The first voice cut back in with an annoyed tone. “Hold on there, Phil, you’re wandering away from the point at hand. Besides, that wasn’t even what I was going to say about gravity.”
Phil didn’t apologize but, excused his tangent by addressing himself to Fred. “Don’t get me wrong, Doctor Comani, I’m not a God-freak, I didn’t even believe in a Supreme Power until I woke up here. That was shock, let me tell you.
“Supreme Power, now there’s a…”
It was too much. Comani jumped in before they went on with their tangled account. He tried to direct the conversation back to an area that he could grasp. “So you named the things Elementals?” Agreement. “And expands the Elemental’s field, to include the ship, by modulating the amount of gravity around the object—the less gravity, the larger the influence field, and vice-versa. The magnetic field contains the Elemental.”
Someone corrected him. “The plasma also has to be shot into the creature’s sphere of influence for the field to grow. Like feeding it. And the gravity and magnetic fields act together as the control and containment. And the larger the bubble, the slower the travel.”
Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Page 28
