The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  He explained that CDE was not a huge conglomerate, and had no corporate backing like Capitol or RCA or some of the others, but that they were offering a $100,000 advance on a three-album deal. “I’ll be right up front with you,” he said. “The cost of recording your album will come out of your own pocket, and the advance is designed to cover that. But if you do like some young bands do, and fly off to New York on a chartered jet to record at Electric Ladyland or the Record Plant, that hundred grand will be gone before you know it. Shop around. Find a good studio with fair rates. Put yourself on a beer budget, you know? Better beer than you’re used to drinking, sure, but beer, not champagne. And definitely not Dom Perignon. Not just yet. Hell, if you invest in some good equipment, you can record the goddam thing at home and have it sound one hundred percent professional, and that’s perfectly fine with me if that’s how you wanna handle it. That way you can have a good time with this money, but remember that in the end, it’s just $25k per person. A manager at Mickey D’s makes more than that in a year. You know where I’m comin’ from?”

  They did, and they agreed, and they signed their names.

  CHAPTER 30

  2802

  Nigel leaned back in his chair and breathed a weary sigh. “Let’s recap the events that we’ve dealt with up until now. First —” he glanced around the room — “we saw indications of a massive asteroid strike having occurred at Chelyabinsk, in Russia.”

  “Right,” said Sarah. “Instead of the twenty-meter rock that the records show came in low over the city and impacted in a nearby lake on February 15, 2013, the event seems to have been time-slipped back to February 1, and wound up being a much larger body, nearly a quarter of a mile wide, which struck in a nearly vertical trajectory, totally destroying the city and creating a crater with a diameter of nearly six miles.”

  Samuel gave a low whistle.

  “Yes,” said Nigel. “We managed to modify the anomaly by sending Time Team Alpha back to January 1, 2013 and having them generate a time dampening field that slowed the Earth’s orbit and rotation imperceptibly, but over the course of those thirty days it managed to change the position of the Earth relative to the asteroid just enough that the main body missed the Earth entirely and all that hit was the smaller one. It took every ounce of power the reactor could put out in order to create the field.”

  About 1,500 people had been injured, mostly due to things like glass shattering from the meteor’s shock wave. They had considered attempting to make it miss entirely, but previous experience had taught them that every change they made had side effects.

  They had prepared contingency plans for other events such as multiple supervolcano eruptions and solar storms, but knew that their efforts would be in vain against such events; the only way they had managed to generate a large enough time dampening field to have any significant effect on a planetwide scale was to power their equipment by overdriving their new cobalt reactor to dangerous levels.

  “What the hell just happened?” said Nigel. “Whatever actions Team Gamma may have tried, they appear to have been no more effective than the two teams before them.”

  “What was the ELE this time?” asked Sarah.

  Terry sighed. “A space-based nuclear attack by China.”

  “China? America had close ties with the Chinese since well before 2020,” said Samuel.

  “I know. There has to be something wrong with how we’re going about this,” Terry.

  They were seated in a sleek, compartmentalized control center, located in Greater Granite, Northeast Corridor. It was a beautiful, crisp fall day in November of 2802. Outside, the sky was a brilliant blue, and they intended to make sure it stayed that way.

  Nigel grimaced. “Has it ever occurred to you that it may not be us? It might be that the events we are looking at simply don’t want to be changed.”

  “Don’t want to be changed?” said Sarah. “Nigel, are you ascribing sentient will to these historical events?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” said Nigel. “Simply that it may be possible that no matter what we do, the history of our civilization may have come to the point where statistics dictate that it’s time for an Extinction Level Event, and that some events are pivotal, and can’t be successfully altered, no matter what we might try.”

  Sarah smiled grimly. “I do believe that’s one possibility. I also believe that, despite that possibility, we need to keep trying.”

  Terry looked up from his data screen, locking eyes with Sarah. They had already sent two Time Teams back through the Gatespace to deal with the temporal anomalies that seemed to be centered around the year 2020. Team Beta had dealt with a previously undocumented event which occurred in 1940 where a researcher who was unknown in our original timeline discovered a cure for the common cold. The result was that the immune systems of the children born in the following generation were slightly compromised; a generation later, the great-grandchildren of the children born in the 1940s were completely unprepared for a mutated rhinovirus that spread in 2001 and wiped out 85 percent of the population under the age of five. When Time Team Beta managed to fix that, it spun off an alternate timeline where a group of terrorists released self-replicating nanobots that formed a grey goo attack; one nanobot duplicated itself, those two replicated to make four, four made eight, eight made sixteen and so on, threatening to overrun everything on the planet, which Team Gamma had been dispatched to eradicate.

  Terry had been detailing these events, more for his own cognizance than anything else, when Sarah interjected, “Don’t you think I know this? Don’t you think I am trying my best to keep track of every event that happens?”

  “Clearly, we’re under attack by someone or something with more resources than we have available. How long can we keep this up? How many Time Teams can we muster? You don’t think it’s time to give it up?” Terry replied.

  Sarah slapped her hand down on the surface of her console. “We’re talking about the survival of our race, of all of humanity. I’m not giving up until we’re all reduced to a… a glowing dust cloud in space.”

  “Well, then,” Nigel said, “I suppose it’s time that we tackle this thing firsthand. I am assigning Terry and Sarah, along with myself, to Time Team Delta, and Calliope and Samuel, you will make up Team Epsilon.”

  I was driving through the desert

  I was listening to some tunes

  It was late at night and by the pale starlight

  I saw a man silhouetted against the moon

  He was tall and thin, I felt my skin begin

  To crawl as he smiled and cried

  I think that you are headed my way, d’ya mind if I hitch a ride?

  “Hitch a Ride,” Brad the Bard

  CHAPTER 31

  1960

  In the desert east of Las Vegas, a pair of mule deer shied away cautiously as an odd shimmer appeared in the air several feet above the ground nearby. After a few moments, there was a sudden crack of thunder and the shimmer appeared to blossom into an iridescent green whirlpool, slowly turning on its side like a windmill.

  It wasn’t long before first one, then two, and finally a group of five people emerged from it, standing there in the desert in front of the vortex. The group included Nigel, Terry and Sarah, plus two additional members, Geoff and Janelle; once again, they were dressed in the olive drab garments as before, but now minus the colored epaulettes. Each member of the team removed a belt which had a sort of control device attached to the buckle and put it in a canvas bag. Terry collected them and concealed the bags beneath a nearby sagebrush plant.

  There were five of them; Terry thought of them as being like the five fingers of a hand. They looked at each other uneasily.

  “Well,” said Terry, who had been first out of the vortex. “Now what?”

  “Now,” said Nigel, “we find our way to the closest town and do the verification process.”

  The other four nodded. Janelle pulled a small device out of her pocket and looked at its screen. “
That way,” she said, pointing toward the southeast.

  The five members of Time Team Delta began walking in that direction.

  CHAPTER 32

  2020

  The man who was once known as Bradley Lawrence stepped out onto the small balcony outside of his hotel room in Eugene, Oregon. Now known as Brad Lord, the last year of his life had been a whirlwind of activity. He was 22 years old and the band he co-founded upon his arrival in L.A. a year ago, Gemini Genius, had released its first CD six months later and basically taken the world by storm. They had spent the past five months crisscrossing the United States, playing for enthusiastic crowds, enjoying the company of even more enthusiastic young women along the way.

  He’d made good on his promise to come home for a visit as often as he could; he’d been home for four days at Christmas and ten days between legs of the tour in late July.

  Now it was October 28, 2020, and Gemini Genius was playing its biggest show yet, at the Matthew Knight Arena, the basketball facility of the University of Oregon, before a crowd of eight thousand people — despite the fact that they were the opening act, warming up the crowd for headliners the Foo Fighters.

  Though their soundcheck was not scheduled for another two hours, the butterflies were swirling in Brad’s stomach already. He was looking out over the morning flow of tourists milling around the streets, wondering how many of them were going to see the Foos that evening, and wondering in turn how many of them even knew who Gemini Genius was.

  As it turned out, quite a lot of them did.

  CHAPTER 33

  2802

  While Time Team Delta was working to prevent the attack on the West by Chinese rogue agents, it came to light that in conjunction with the events that had involved Steven Denver and Project STAMINA in 2009 (and 2024) as related in Denver’s book Gatespace: A New Odyssey, now known to be a thinly veiled retelling of actual events, an unforeseen alteration had been made to the main timeline of history.

  Reading through the dossier, Calliope Sullivan, who had become part of the Time Team just weeks before but was intimately familiar with the Project STAMINA events, read out loud: “Jonathan Wilkerson was born in Dothan, Alabama in 2001. Raised by his grandparents after the death of his mother, Wilkerson never knew his father; rumor said that he had been an enlisted man at the nearby Army base who had shipped out to the Middle East, leaving behind his girlfriend and the child he’d planted in the fecund soil of her womb.

  “Wilkerson had grown up learning from his Pawpaw that there was a pecking order in this world and that white males were at the top of it.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “One of those, hm?”

  She continued to read: “The day after Jonathan’s eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Army and never looked back. Five years later, he had made it to Staff Sergeant and was one of the NCOs in charge of security at the South Central Montana Vehicle Depot during a time when the Army was in charge of security around what was known as Project STAMINA, for Space-Time Anomaly/Montana Incident/North America.”

  Calliope’s partner, a young man with broad shoulders and an unruly mane of black hair, nodded at her and said, “Sounds familiar.”

  “It should, Sam,” she grinned. As a young Ph.D, Samuel Denver had been the chief civilian researcher at the facility studying the strange green tear in space where his father Steven had disappeared years before.

  Calliope continued reading: “While Wilkerson’s job had nothing to do with the scientific aspects of the anomaly — he was strictly a foot soldier, I gather — he listened well, and knew how to get people to tell what they knew without even knowing they were doing so.

  “Over the course of nearly a year, he had put together a plan that would change his life and that of the nation forever.”

  Samuel Denver looked at Calliope and frowned. “It certainly did. But we’re going to do our best to put things back to normal.”

  CHAPTER 34

  2020

  Gemini Genius had been onstage for about 25 minutes of their allotted 40-minute set when a young woman in the third row screamed, “I love you, Brad!”

  It was the first time that he had experienced such open, public adulation, and as the crowd began to cheer and applaud, the young musician’s face turned pink.

  The rest of GG — Ben Gregg, Wade Anthony, Stefan Braun, and “Thunderfoot” Lorefield — grinned at the blonde vocalist. Of the four of them, they knew who both the media and the fans adored. The four of them had been playing clubs in L.A. for quite a while before Brad’s arrival; when he joined the band, it seemed as if it took them to the next level. The average attendance at their shows nearly doubled, the quality of their performance vastly improved, and the tunes that they were writing seemed to take a leap in quality. Moreover, A&R men — the record company people who were responsible for scouting new talent — who had passed on them before, when they were called SheetMetal, suddenly took a renewed interest in them, and three months to the day after Brad became a part of the band they had inked their deal with CDE Records. Two months ago, they achieved what every band considered proof that they had at least broken into the national spotlight — they were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

  Brad grinned and looked out at the crowd. “Thanks,” he said. “We love you too.”

  Then Thunderfoot clicked off the introduction to a new song they had written specifically for this show, entitled Big Green Country. Ben’s guitar whined and snarled, and then Brad started the first verse:

  I was down in old Eugene

  I was singin’ on the streets

  I was lovin’ all the people walkin’ by

  And they were lovin’ me right back

  Givin’ me a heart attack

  I couldn’t help but smile ‘cause they all loved this guy

  In Big Green Country, I’m in Big Green Country

  And life is easy, in Big Green Country

  In Big Green Country, I’m in Big Green Country

  And life’s so good I think I’ll stay.

  And, as it turned out, he did.

  CHAPTER 35

  2025

  Jonathan Wilkerson had risen from his bunk at 0230 one fateful morning, dressed, strapped on his sidearm in its holster, and silently slipped out of his barracks door. It was a new moon, and overcast, so the night was pitch black. He went to his office, silently entered, and retrieved the large key ring from the drawer of his CO’s desk. He left as silently as he’d entered.

  He obtained an M4A1 carbine and ten clips of ammo from the armory, along with a body armor vest. Then he went to the STAMINA research center storage facility and “liberated” one of the Compact Manned Maneuvering Units (cMMU) that were used when it was necessary for personnel to enter the Gatespace. Wilkerson strapped the unit to his back and headed for the fenced area at the center of the camp and entered it.

  He didn’t hesitate, but plunged into the green swirl.

  Calliope and Samuel, as it happened, were close behind.

  CHAPTER 36

  1960

  Delta Team had walked about two and a half miles through the desert heat before they found a road. According to a sign that stood on the shoulder of the highway, it was designated as Interstate 40, and led westward to Barstow, California.

  The quintet began walking along the shoulder of the road, and when it was safe, began filing down the side of the road, following the flow of traffic. About half a dozen vehicles passed them in the first few minutes. One of the drivers startled them by leaning on his horn, startling them. Geoff shook a fist at the car as it disappeared in the distance. “Bastard!”

  “I hope that not everyone we run into here will have an attitude like that,” said Sarah, who was carrying the directional device.

  Nigel smiled grimly and nodded in agreement. He was nominally the leader of Delta Team, although in practice they all led the team at various times, depending on the situation, and according to their individual strengths.

  Janelle nodded. The
y all kept walking.

  Before long, a semi-truck passed them, slowing down perceptibly as it did so, and pulled onto the shoulder about two hundred meters down the road. As they approached it, the team members glanced at each other, hoping that this driver wasn’t planning some sort of even more aggressive action than the guy who had honked at them, and silently calculating the appropriate action to take if it turned out that he was.

  As they approached, the driver’s door swung open and the driver leaned out. He was muscular, his hair bleached blonde from the sun. His face and forearms were red with sunburn, and he was dressed in a worn flannel shirt, threadbare, faded jeans with holes in the knees, and scuffed, muddy work boots. He wore a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap on his head.

  “Hey, there,” he called out. “D’jall break down?”

  Geoff and Janelle glanced at each other. The man seemed friendly enough, but that accent…

  “Uh… no, we didn’t have a vehicle breakdown. We’re merely, um…” Nigel strained to remember the term for traveling by soliciting rides from passing motorists.

  “Hitching,” said Sarah.

  “Yes,” Terry agreed. “Hitchhiking.” He cast a half-smile at the others.

  “Well, hell,” said the trucker. “Y’all come on and climb up in here. I got a sleeper cab, so there’s plenty of room. Where y’all headed?”