Contents
1. The Crash Site
2. Zolyn
3. The Prison Block
4. One Hour Earlier
5. The Welcome Party
6. A Change Of Pace
7. Dinner Theater
8. The Attack
9. Alien Being
10. The Escape Plan
11. Mae
12. The Target
13. The Battle Commences
14. Reinforcements
15. Xara
16. Homefront
17. The Break-In
18. At A Loss
19. Mae Awakens
20. Northern Territory
21. A Brief Recharge
22. The Rundown
23. Drawing The Future
24. Familial Power
25. The Arrival
26. Into The Ship
27. Zolyn In Pursuit
28. The Release
29. Zolyn’s Bargain
30. Loose Ends
31. To The Depths
32. The Commission
Let Me Know What You Think!
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 by Franklin Kendrick
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The author can be found at his website:
franklinkendrick.com
1
The Crash Site
The sky above Boston tore open like an orange peel, revealing the massive, glittering chasm of space. Out of this opening shot a sleek metallic vessel shaped like a teardrop.
The space ship, not of this earth, streaked across the sky, trailing a glittering tail behind it that burned like fireworks. Though this display was beautiful and terrifying to behold, it was not the first indicator that strange things would happen that evening.
What humanity first noticed was, in fact, a disappearance.
“Do you see that?” asked Tiff, one of the specialists at the Boston Institute of Space. She pointed at her glowing computer monitor as her heavy-set co-worker slid his rolling chair across the room. The man, named Henry, held a half eaten glazed donut in his sticky fingers.
Henry squinted at the screen for a few moments before replying, “I don’t see anything.”
Tiff pressed her lips together for a brief moment, then said, “Exactly. Don’t you recognize this?” She zoomed into the patch of empty space and circled it with her cursor. “That’s where the Black Knight satellite is supposed to be. But, it’s gone. Vanished.”
Henry gave her an impatient look, sucked the sugar from his fingers one at a time, then motioned for her to move aside. She didn’t protest and slid her chair away so that he could commandeer her computer. After a minute of clicking around the monitoring software, pulling down selection menus, and trying everything short of a reboot of the machine, Henry sat back in resignation.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Maybe it’s a glitch in the software. After all, there are any number of satellites being tracked every minute. You can’t expect our software to be accurate one-hundred percent of the time. We’re a far cry from the big leagues.”
“Yes, but what if it’s not just a glitch?” Tiff pressed on with concern etched across her features. “Do we have to call somebody to let them know?”
This got a rise out of Henry who nearly choked on his spit as he laughed.
“Who do you expect us to call?” he asked. “The armed forces? This isn’t a movie, you know. I don’t exactly have a direct line to NASA. All we can do is record what we find and then transmit the data to their databases.”
As he talked, a blip appeared on the screen with a tiny electronic notification. Henry leaned forward to verify the record.
“See? It was just a glitch. Now, can we get back to another uneventful night?”
He rolled his chair away, back over to his box of three remaining donuts. But, as Tiff returned to her spot in front of the monitor, her eyes narrowed. There was something funny about the new record that had appeared in the blank piece of space.
It wasn’t the Black Knight satellite. The Black Knight didn’t move with such a quick rate of speed, and it certainly didn’t move out of its orbit. Whatever this object was, it was shooting towards the Earth with immense speed. The scanning software could barely keep up.
“Henry —” she started to say, but before she could finish her sentence, the entire station began to shudder as if they were experiencing a sudden earthquake.
Everything in the room shook and teetered on the edge. A row of heavy reference books toppled over like a line of dominos, sending a thick piece of rock rolling off the shelf. It slammed into the linoleum floor, causing a crack in the material, and also splintering the rock into pieces. Papers fell off a cork board near the door as their push pins, which were already loose from overuse, came unstuck.
Henry braced himself against his desk, covering his pens and other instruments with his fingers spread wide, until a few seconds after the shuddering began, it stopped.
The silence didn’t last long, however, because within moments there was a deep boom from somewhere off in the distance. Henry’s eyes locked onto Tiff’s.
“That was an impact,” he said. Beads of sweat were already appearing on his forehead and cheeks.
With the quickest speed that Tiff had ever seen the man move, Henry began snatching things from his desk and shoving them into his rucksack. Tiny notebooks, a few pencils and a sharpener, and even a guide to the night sky. Everything was tossed into the bag.
“What are you doing?” asked Tiff. “Shouldn’t we call somebody?”
Instead of a straight-up answer, Henry jabbed his finger at some of the remaining papers tacked onto the cork board.
“Grab the list of contacts over there. Quickly. And grab something to write with — and a camera.”
“I’ve got my phone,” Tiff replied, complying with Henry’s request. She tucked the list of phone numbers into her pocket.
“No,” Henry continued. “We need something huge. High quality. There’s a Nikon over on that shelf. It shouldn’t have been damaged — yes, over there in that bag. We will want to take some pictures with the highest quality.”
“Pictures of what, though?”
“Why can’t you keep up?” said Henry with a wave of his hand. “Something huge crashed not far from here, and I’ll be damned if someone else is going to document it first. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to us for, I dunno — ever? Now, gather up everything that we might need. I’m jotting down the coordinates now. Here.”
He tossed her a set of keys. They jangled as they flew through the air and she caught them, feeling the sharp jab as their jagged edges struck the soft flesh of her hand.
“What do you want me to do with these?” she asked, feeling completely overwhelmed with everything that was being tossed her way.
Henry’s face was alight with such excitement that it was as if he were a child on Christmas morning. He grinned broadly.
“Go start the car.”
Minutes later the two of them were racing down the access streets of the Boston waterfront. Most of these were only accessible with a permit, and thankfully, the Institute was one of those permitted to use the roadways. This meant that there was little to no traffic getting in Henry’s way as he pressed down on the accelerator.
Tiff was managing the map on her phone screen, shouting out orders as they reached v
arious intersections. Most of the surrounding area was industrial, with concrete barriers and walls keeping workers from tumbling to their deaths or becoming injured. Beyond the chain-link fence that seemed to stretch everywhere, Tiff registered a faint orange glow, which she pointed out.
“There it is! The crash site.”
“I see it.”
Henry was still smiling. The glee hadn’t left his face, and the sheen of sweat on him, which reflected the street lights that passed overhead, made him appear almost mad. It was a passion that Tiff had never seen on him during the entire time she had worked with him.
He licked his lips.
“I bet it’s a foreign satellite,” he mused. “Or maybe a piece of space debris that took out the Black Knight. Maybe there are even pieces of the Knight entangled in it. Wouldn’t that be something?” He turned along another access road that took them closer to the long fingers that made up the pier system.
Tiff didn’t want to disagree. Figuring out what the Black Knight was made of — a mysterious satellite that had orbited Earth for who knew how long — would be a sure-fire way to cement their names in the history books. They would no longer be obscure workers in the observatory, being paid very little to collect and analyze data on a set of computer monitors, but rather, they would be skyrocketed into fame.
However, there was always a fear in the back of Tiff’s mind that objects that fell from space could be harmful to get close to. What if there was radiation? Or some other disease from the atmosphere that nobody had heard of before? There was a reason that people were usually advised to stay back whenever something crashed to Earth.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and simply agreed with him.
“You won’t get us too close, will you?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly due to her fear, but also from the jolting of the vehicle as it crossed over a series of raised speed bumps.
“Not too close,” Henry agreed. “But, close enough. At least the general public can’t get over here…not for a bit, I think.” He glanced up out of the windshield as if looking for drones, but there were none.
They turned another corner and came to a chain-link gate that was locked tight by a thick steel chain and padlock. For a moment Tiff thought that Henry was going to ram the gate, but thankfully he had more sense than that.
He screeched the car to a halt and promptly turned off the engine.
Tiff followed him as he got out of the car. She walked over to the gate and looked through the grid of metal.
They weren’t far from the crash site now. She could see shimmering heat where whatever it was had slammed into the ground, which was part of a concrete platform down by the water. Great chunks of the structure had broken free and fallen into the salty sea that lapped gently against the pier as if nothing untoward had happened. The only sign that something had disturbed the peacefulness of the evening was the orange glow, the shimmering of heat, and the great crater that obscured whatever the object was. All that Tiff could see from her vantage point was the opening of the crater, which was no more than a collection of spider-web cracks and crevices in the platform.
“Looks like this is as close as we can get,” she said in a relieved voice. But, that relief was snatched away in an instant when she heard the jangle of the chain-link gate and turned to her left to see Henry climbing upwards. “Henry! What do you think you’re doing?!”
“Getting a better view,” he said.
Within moments he had made his way over the top of the fence, which unfortunately did not have barbed wire (to Tiff’s dismay), and he hopped down to the other side with a thud as his sneakers hit the concrete. The camera was slung over his shoulder and had made it in one piece.
He hurried off at a brisk pace, disappearing behind a set of barrels while Tiff remained on the other side of the fence. She was torn. What should she do? Her legs felt jittery, but she didn’t want to just leave her co-worker in the middle of a disaster area. She crossed her arms and groaned.
“Henry, please…”
Henry appeared further away, the same look of determination on his face as he pulled out the camera and checked that it was all in working order. He noted Tiff’s disapproval and called over to her.
“You can just stay there! I won’t be long.”
A zipping sound got louder overhead and both he and Tiff looked up to see a few drones flying in. Their red lights flashed every few seconds. No doubt these belonged to the news stations that were sending out cameras to try and get aerial footage of the overall crash site. There might not be much to see from above, but Henry still seemed very optimistic from his vantage point as he inched closer to the lip of the crater.
“I’m going to get a few shots,” said Henry, and he crouched down, peering over the edge of the smashed concrete with the camera up to his eye. There were a few clicks, then he repositioned himself a few feet to the right. Steam was billowing out of the opening of the hole.
Tiff was starting to become comfortable. Nothing bad had happened so far, so she guessed that there was no harm in being so close. She was more concerned with heat than anything else. Henry would have complained if there was heat and moved away by now.
But, he did not, which hopefully meant that the two of them would be able to return to the institute in one piece with no side effects.
Even from such a distance, Tiff could hear Henry muttering to himself as he continued to document the crash.
“This is crazy… Somebody’s going to have to pay a ton for this kind of imagery…”
Raising up on her toes to try and see more, but finding it futile, Tiff called over to him once again.
“What do you see? Is it a rock?”
Henry shook his head.
“It’s not a rock. I can’t see much through the smoke, but it looks like something shiny. Something manmade…”
“Maybe a satellite?”
Henry hesitated.
“Not like any satellite I’ve ever seen. Maybe I can read some serial numbers or something if I zoom in enough. Let’s see…”
He adjusted his lens and searched for any kind of markings that would tell him what the object actually was. Tiff wished that she could see what he was seeing, but she didn’t want to try vaulting the fence. Knowing her luck, she would rip her clothing on the top, and this was one of her favorite pairs of jeans.
No, she would just wait for Henry to come back over and cycle through the pictures. Overhead, the drones continued to zig-zag gracefully over the crash site, but it looked like they couldn’t get a good look either with all the smoke and steam.
Suddenly Henry’s snapping increased at a rapid rate. Click-click-click.
“I see something!” he hollered out of the corner of his mouth. Another blast of clicks, then, “Is this a private plane of some sort? It looks like there’s something crawling out of it…”
“A person?”
Tiff suddenly had flashes of a bloody, injured person clawing their way out of the crater. How a flying craft could have survived such a wreck with anything still alive was beyond her. But, she believed Henry and pressed against the chainlink gate, straining to see anything.
“I think I can get a little closer...”
Henry stepped closer to the edge of the crater, the camera up to his eye. In an instant his foot overstepped and Tiff screamed as she watched the man go falling head first into the hole in the ground.
“Henry!” she yelled. “Henry, are you alright?! Say something if you are alright!”
There was no sound from the crater. Just the hum of the drones overhead.
Tiff’s heart raced as she feared the worst. Her co-worker was dead. He had slipped and broken his neck. How was she going to explain this to the higher ups at the observatory? They should have never left their post!
She was just pulling out her phone to dial 9-1-1 when there came a moan from the crater. It was unmistakably Henry.
He was alive!
“Henry —” she said, a relieved
smile on her face. Maybe she could climb over the barrier and help him out and the two of them could get out of here...
But, in an instant, there was no need to climb the barrier. The two of them were on the same side once more because Tiff’s jaw dropped as she registered Henry flying limply out of the crater. His overweight body soared into the sky as if someone had just chucked him like an over pumped football, and he landed with a gasp on his back not even two feet from where Tiff stood.
“Henry!”
As she rushed to crouch beside him, a massive streak of light shot out of the crater and rocketed across the sky. It was headed for the tall buildings of the city, and within moments it had disappeared.
Tiff turned her attention to her injured co-worker. His chest rose as he took a shuddering gasp.
“You’re alive!” Tiff cried, grabbing onto one of his hands. “What happened down there? What was that light?”
Henry’s eyes opened, peering through a layer of tears, and he managed to raise his free hand, which still clutched the camera. With a painful wince he forced the camera into Tiff’s hand.
“It.......it’s all th-there,” he said with great difficulty. “The...proof...”
Tiff put the camera around her neck and went to lift up on Henry’s shoulder.
“We can deal with that later,” she said. “First we’re getting you out of here. Can you stand up —?”
Henry snatched the collar of her shirt and pulled her face so close to his that she could feel flecks of spit as he pleaded with her.
“Yes, we have to get out of here! That thing...it... it’s not human!”
The Aberrant Series (Book 4): Super Invasion Page 1
