Noah Zarc: Mammoth Trouble (Noah Zarc, #1)

by Pease, D. Robert

  Obadiah knew something was wrong. He jumped onto my magchair, licked my face once, then curled up in a ball on my lap.

  “But I don’t understand,” Sam said. “What do you mean they’re trapped in the Ice Age? Why send you back? Why didn’t they just get another deer and come back themselves?”

  “That is what they planned,” Moses said. “Your mother returned to the ship to locate Haon using the onboard sensors, while your father…” The robot trailed off yet again. “There is another gap in my memory.”

  “Run a full diagnostic scan,” Hamilton said.

  “Acknowledged.” The robot turned back toward the screens. “While I am running the scan you can view a recording your father left for you. I believe it is intact.”

  Dad’s image appeared before us—his hair wild and his eyes red. He sat on the snowy ground and looked directly at us. I shivered.

  “As Moses has probably told you, somehow Haon found us.” I could see the vein on Dad’s temple pulse. “He hijacked our ship….” The image flickered. I could see the floor through Dad’s image. His lips continued moving, but no sound came out.

  “What’s he saying?” I looked at Moses, but he was still running his diagnostic scan. “…so I have no…where he…” The sound and the image stabilized. “I’ve decided to send Moses after them—if Haon hasn’t jumped yet the robot should be able to follow.”

  He leaned forward until it seemed like his face was less than a meter from mine.

  “I know this comes as a great shock to you kids. I don’t know how Haon followed us. Perhaps I’ve been too careless.” He stopped again and took a deep breath. I’d never seen Dad so distraught. “We have to find him. Who knows what he…” He shook his head. “Just get here as soon as you can.”

  Dad’s image flickered out, and the weight of ten thousand years fell between us.

  Hamilton spoke first. “Were you able to follow Haon?”

  We all looked at Moses. His eyes spiraled open.

  “Affirmative. Haon traveled to twelfth-century Europe, to a castle in the Scottish highlands.”

  I swiveled toward the door. “Let’s go, then!”

  Hamilton looked at Moses. “Do you have space-time coordinates for Mom and Dad’s location?”

  “Affirmative.” A small door on the robot’s chest opened. A tray slid out with two vials containing a dark red liquid. “I retrieved DNA samples from both time-streams. One is a sample of your father’s blood, the other from a squirrel I captured in Scotland.”

  Hamilton nodded. “So we can return to the exact time and place when you retrieved those samples.”

  I threw my hands up. “Why don’t we just go back before Haon got there? Then we can stop him from taking the DUV II! We still have the original coordinates Mom and Dad used to go after the deer.”

  “It can’t be done,” Hamilton said. “Research has shown time and time again that you can’t alter events of the past. Mom and Dad were stranded in the Ice Age. Haon did hijack their ship. There’s nothing we can do to stop that.”

  I glared at my brother. “Then what good is time traveling?”

  He looked ready to launch into one of his big long explanations but stopped himself.

  “Our biggest problem, at the moment, is that we don’t have a ship.”

  Sam spun around. “What do you mean we don’t have a ship?” she shouted. “We’ve got loads down in the hangar!”

  Hamilton’s voice was calm, of course. “What I should have said is we don’t have a ship equipped for the time jump. Since the unfortunate accident when we lost the DUV I over southern New Mexico…” I squirmed in my chair under his gaze. “We’ve been operating without a backup. Dad said he was planning to move the DUV III to operational status before he made the next jump, but then Moses returned with the time-markers for the Irish deer. Dad was too excited to wait, so he and Mom agreed to do the final calibrations on the DUV III’s warp manifold after they returned.”

  “Then take another ship,” I said.

  “No other ship has a hull built to withstand the strain. Warping spacetime around most objects,” Hamilton snapped his fingers, “simply snuffs them out of existence. Only a ship built specifically to withstand the extreme forces can make the jump.”

  “But we’ve got ships much bigger than the DUV class. How come they can’t handle it?” I was getting irritated. We needed to rescue our parents, and he was lecturing us on the physics of time travel.

  “It’s not entirely about size. It’s more about shape. The DUV class is the only ship we have capable of sliding through the time-stream without causing too great a disturbance. It’s no coincidence that Moses and the DUV class ships have the same profile. The only other ship built to the appropriate specs is the ARC herself.”

  “How long would it take to get the DUV III operational?” Sam said. “I thought it was ready to go, except the calibration.”

  Moses said, “Your father was not prepared to trust the reliability of the DUV III’s warp manifold. Its jumps could be erratic.”

  “So we take the ARC,” I said.

  “We haven’t moved the ARC in years,” Sam said. “And the last time, we had Mom and Dad with us.”

  “Nevertheless,” Hamilton said, “I think it’s our most logical choice.”

  “Fine,” Sam said. “We’ll take the ARC. We need to get moving, we’re running out of time.”

  Hamilton let out a big sigh. “Haven’t you been listening? We have all the time in the solar system. We could leave in ten years and still reach Mom and Dad at the moment Moses left them.”

  Sam’s face grew red and she spoke through clenched teeth. “We aren’t going to take ten years!”

  “Of course not.” Hamilton backed away. “How long do you think it’ll take to prepare the ARC?”

  “Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days.” She looked at me, her brows knitted together. “As long as we all do our part.”

  “I’ll work with Moses to process the DNA samples and establish coordinates,” Hamilton said.

  “Fine.” Sam turned toward the door. “Noah, you and I need to get the animals secure and the ship ready to leave the surface of the moon. I don’t care what Hamilton says—we need to hurry.”

  Sam and I worked all day getting the ARC ready to go. It was hard to focus—I had to go over the simplest stuff again and again to get it right. That night I was so tired I didn’t even get undressed, just collapsed in bed. No matter how tired I was, though, no matter how I tossed and turned, I couldn’t get comfortable. I’m not like Sam and Hamilton. They seemed to be able to keep it together, brush off what was on all our minds, but I couldn’t do it.

  I thought of a morning when I was seven or eight, Mom seated at her desk looking through a microscope while I played with some constructo-cubes on the floor. I loved to play in her lab—all the equipment, the whirring of machines—but what I really loved was just being around her. Talking to her.

  “Mom, do you think I’ll ever be like everyone else?”

  She looked up from her work. “Of course not, Noah. You’re—”

  “Special.” I glared at her. “Maybe I don’t want to be special.”

  She got down on the floor and wrapped me in her arms.

  “Everyone enters this world with some kind of handicap,” she said. “Whether it’s the place they live, the family they’re born into, or the weakness of their legs. No one has a perfect life.”

  Even back then, when I was still just a kid, she didn’t sugarcoat the truth.

  “What makes each of us special is how we deal with our circumstances.” She moved hair out of my face. “I probably don’t tell you often enough how proud I am of you. You handle yourself better than I ever could.” I looked into her eyes. There were no tears, just a firm conviction that she would never let me go.

  Now she was gone.

  As for Dad, being with him was never that easy—he was just harder to talk to, and I guess we weren’t really close. I knew he loved
me, though. I didn’t know how I’d be able to go on without either of them.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning with sheets crumpled in my fists. I’d had enough self-pity. No matter what Hamilton said, we needed to get moving and find Mom and Dad now. I dressed as fast as I could and went looking for Sam.

  The biggest problem with moving the ship from the moon’s surface was gravity. Not the gravity holding the ship down—the ARC could easily break free of the moon’s pull—but the lack of gravity in space. Even in one-sixth gravity on the moon, the animals could live comfortably. It took getting used to, but I was always amazed at how fast they adapted. But once we left the moon’s surface, there’d be no gravity at all to hold them down.

  Of course Dad and the engineers back home thought through that problem when they designed the ARC. Each habitat, or pod, was constructed on its own gimbal, which meant it was a totally self-contained sphere or cylinder that could be spun independently of the ship, generating its own virtual gravity. In addition, during acceleration, all the habitats would simply pivot so that down was toward the back of the ship. Depending upon acceleration, this was a better imitation of true gravity.

  I didn’t understand how it all worked, but I loved the ride. In space, when we weren’t accelerating, only the pods had gravity. It was a blast floating around the ship in zero-g—no need for magchairs or thermsuits. I was free as a bird.

  Over the next two days, Sam and I worked together to get all the gimbals unlocked. We had to test every habitat. If there were any issues we’d go down to the pod and find out what was wrong. Most released remotely as they should, but even so it was no small task to get the rest in order.

  On the morning of the second day, Sam and I worked to release the dire wolf habitat. Something had dropped between the outer hatch and the pod’s exterior plate, causing it to jam.

  “How long do you think Mom and Dad can last?” I said.

  Sam shook her head. “Remember what Ham said? We have time on our side. The DNA sample Moses retrieved will allow us to pinpoint exactly when and where Mom and Dad are in spacetime. So even though for us it’s been two days, for them it’ll only be a few hours at most before we show up. Make sense?”

  “I guess so. It’s just hard to get your mind around it.” I thought for a minute. “I still don’t get what DNA has to do with anything.”

  Sam stopped cranking the ratchet she was using.

  “Well, I’m no expert, but the way Ham explained it to me was that the earth is constantly bombarded with cosmic rays—radiation that travels millions if not billions of miles through space from every direction. That radiation leaves markers in the DNA—signatures that when analyzed can give the location in spacetime for when and where that organism lived. Our DNA is keeping a record of everywhere we’ve ever been, and everywhen.”

  “Ah, now it’s perfectly clear.” I laughed. “But...I still don’t get it.”

  Sam laughed too. “Yeah, it gives me a headache too.”

  “And you and Hamilton are the smart ones—imagine what it’s like for me to try and wrap my mind around it.”

  “I’m sure you do just fine. You only pretend to be slow while you’re pulling the wool over Ham’s eyes or mine with some scheme.” She smiled and got back to work on the hatch.

  “You know he hates it when you call him Ham, don’t you? He says he’s no side of pork.”

  She laughed. “Why do you think I do it?”

  By mid-afternoon, two days after Moses’s return, we had the ARC ready to go. Hamilton wanted to wait one hour more for daylight to cover the near side of the earth—less chance of being spotted. During the twenty-first century, thousands of telescopes were pointed toward the night sky. We would try to keep the moon between Earth and us for as long as possible. Our parents always stressed that the most important rule of time travel was not letting yourself be seen.

  We strapped ourselves into our seats in the ARC Control Center. I always got excited right before a lift-off. So did my stomach, but I knew it would calm down as soon as the engines roared to life.

  Sam sat in Dad’s chair between Hamilton and me—she was in charge. She had a long checklist displayed on the monitor connected to a swivel arm on her seat. Even Mom and Dad didn’t know everything it took to get the ARC off the ground.

  Sam tapped her finger on the screen. “Pods ready for departure, Noah?”

  I scrolled down the long row of numbers on my monitor. All had a steady green light.

  “Pods are go.”

  “Power and pressure systems?” Sam said.

  “Power is nominal. Pressure is holding at a steady one atm.” Hamilton, who had a better idea how the ship operated than Sam or I, was in charge of the vital systems.

  “Ham, do you have a lock on the time-stream for Dad?”

  An image on the screen showed a pulsing beam of light connecting a long line of round Earths, like a string of blue pearls moving off into the darkness of space.

  “Northern Europe, 8512 B.C., requiring three hundred and twenty-six jumps.” Hamilton looked at Sam. “Warp-processors powered and ready.”

  “Disengage the docking clamps,” Sam said. The screens switched to an external view of the ARC. Cameras, mounted on several sides of the crater we called home, showed the ship from every angle.

  “Take us out of here.”

  I felt the tiniest shudder as the main thrusters fired.

  Sam turned to me, then Hamilton, and gave us a thumbs-up.

  “Let’s go get Mom and Dad.”

  On screen, our giant ship erupted in flames along its bottom edge. Normally, ships used maglifters to launch, creating a magnetic field polar opposite the field of the planet or moon. The ARC was so big it needed conventional rockets to help get it off the ground. The ship, shaped somewhat like an enormous snub-winged manta ray, with deck after deck flickering in blue light, slowly rose from the moon’s surface. From the outside, with no frame of reference, the ARC didn’t look as big as it really was— at more than sixteen kilometers long and eight kilometers wingtip to wingtip, larger than most twenty-first-century cities on the planet below us.

  Thrusters fired as soon as the ship cleared the rim of the crater, tilting the nose of the ARC upward.

  “Brace for main engine ignition.” The shipboard computer’s mechanical voice filled the room.

  “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Ignition.” An enormous ball of fire exploded from the rear of the ship, and the holoscreens flickered out for a second. The craft shook and rumbled all around us. I felt the vibration in my bones. It had been a long time since we last moved the ARC and I’d forgotten how much force it took to get her going. If I didn’t know better, I’d have worried the ship was going to fall apart around us. I hoped Obadiah wasn’t too scared in his crate back in my room.

  The screens changed to show the stars above us. The round, cratered horizon of the moon was just visible along the bottom edge. For several long minutes the acceleration was so great I could barely lift my arms.

  “Reaching moon orbital altitude in ten-seconds,” Hamilton said. He peered at his own monitor closely.

  “Five seconds.”

  I switched my monitor to the rear view. The moon’s surface fell away at an astonishing rate.

  “We’ve reached moon orbital altitude.”

  My body grew light and my stomach lurched as gravity changed to zero-g. A smile crept across my face. I couldn’t wait to fly around the corridors of the ship.

  Sam let out a sigh of relief. “How long until we make the first jump?”

  Hamilton overlaid the main screens with the same ‘string of Earths’ image. Over the first globe was a timer counting down.

  “Three minutes and fourteen-seconds. Powering the warp manifold now.”

  I continued to monitor the pods. Peeking in on several species told me none suffered much from the acceleration. Most lay down as if they were sleeping. But gradually, when the rate of acceleration
decreased and apparent gravity returned to the level they were used to, the animals started to move about again.

  “How long will the jumps last?” I said.

  “Moses estimated two hours, thirty-seven minutes,” Hamilton said. “Preparing for the first jump.”

  I watched the timer tick down from thirty-seconds. The stars shimmered through a purple haze that bent the light.

  Twenty seconds.

  Stars rippled, while blue-green electrical energy crackled around the ship.

  Ten seconds.

  A loud hum filled the room. Stars melted and blurred together in a fiery conflagration of energy. One moment we rocketed toward space, the next moment the screens were filled with a view of Earth.

  The ARC skimmed over the continent of Africa toward the darkness of space. Within minutes, the earth disappeared behind us. The next image of Earth in line on the display now had a countdown of fourteen minutes, seven-seconds until jump.

  Hamilton had tried to explain, several times, how the whole time travel thing worked, but I still couldn’t get it. Somehow, while the ARC traveled through space, it created a dense field around itself, which warped the fabric of space and time. Hamilton said all we needed to do to travel back in time was aim toward a point in space where the earth used to be, or any other landmark, then warp present space so it touched past space. Then we could slide through a hole between them.

  At one point when I was feeling totally lost, Hamilton took an old handkerchief and a needle and thread and tried to explain it again.

  “This handkerchief represents spacetime.” He drew a dot near one edge. “This is the present location of Earth.” He drew a dot on the other edge. “This is a past location. In order for us to travel back to the past, we need to bring these two edges closer together.” He folded the handkerchief so the two dots touched.

  “Now, the difficulty is the energy needed increases exponentially for the amount of spacetime warped. So we usually hop through time in shorter jumps.” He drew several dots between the two. Then he took the needle and thread and pushed it through each dot.