RAGNAROK
Worlds Collide
Michael Smorenburg
First published in the United States of America by CreateSpace in 2017.
Copyright ©Michael Smorenburg, 2017
All rights of Michal Smorenburg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Some of the concepts and quotations expressed in this fictional tale first appeared, some in a different form, in various print or electronic expressions by the originators, authors or presenters so named.
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www.MichaelSmorenburg.com/ragnarok
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House of Qunard Publishing
Copyright © 2017 Michael Smorenburg & Qunard Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN Print: 978-0-620-72263-6
ISBN eBook: 978-0-620-72264-3
DEDICATION
We are not born equal. We are born with potential, but into circumstance.
This novel explores the human spirit and how it becomes suppressed or amplified by the mores and strictures of each epoch.
We are all the same; it is only our circumstance that makes who we are.
RAGNAROK
Worlds Collide
In this work of fiction based as it is on facts: names, characters, places and many incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Clarke's third law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
Also by Michael Smorenburg:
The Praying Nun—Qunard Publishing—2016
LifeGames—Qunard Publishing—1995 & 2016
A Trojan Affair— Qunard Publishing—2016
The Everything Sailing Book Part 2—Adams Media 1999
The Everything Sailing Book Part 1—Adams Media 1998
Business Buyer’s Kit—Career Press 1997
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My appreciation to so many.
Thank you to darling Kirstin Engelbrecht for your tireless line-by-line edits and putting up with me in all ways.
Thanks to all proofreaders.
Thanks to all how have given me so much encouragement toe keep writing.
Chapter 1
Westbound Jet, Paris to LA, North Atlantic
Tuesday, 17 August (Present day)
Latitude: 57°01'09"N
Longitude: 15°56'00"W
The seatbelt warning light pinged insistently and a moment later the Captain crackled overhead, advising passengers to return to their seats.
“Darn,” Tegan Mulholland muttered.
She’d been engrossed in her spreadsheet and delaying nature’s call for the past half hour.
She snapped her MacBook lid closed and slid it into the seat pocket in front of her, unclipped her seatbelt, and moved to stand.
The pinched-faced flight attendant patrolling business class locked on to her like a missile.
“There is a safety warning in place, ma’am. Please return to your seat.”
There’d been instant friction between the two women from the instant that Tegan had invaded the suited woman’s tin can back at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris three hours earlier. One look at Tegan and the flight attendant’s hackles had clearly risen.
The thin veneer of a smile that the uniformed woman kept stretched to the point of tearing over the shell of her bitter personality had cracked, and her misery had begun to leak out.
Since puberty, more than thirty years ago, for Tegan it had always been this way; some women simply hated her on sight.
“I’ll just be a moment,” Tegan assured.
“I’m afraid I cannot allow it, ma’am,” the uniform warned with a brittle edge. She said it spitefully with an expression on her face like a slapped backside.
“Well then…” Tegan inclined her head, “could you please bring me a blanket and potty? I really don’t mind.”
She turned to the man seated next to her. They’d chatted briefly during breakfast, before she’d dug back into the movie’s costing sheet.
“You don’t mind, Pete… If Bertha here lets me go under a blanket? I’m bursting.”
“Awww… naagh wurries,” Pete patted the seat enthusiastically and beamed a suntanned smile as broad as his feral Australian accent. “Blanket’s as good as a bush.”
Bertha made herself scarce.
Tegan was back and buckled up before the plane did its first giddy swoop.
“Whoa! That’s a big one!”
“That’s what all the sheilas say.”
“Yeah, yeah… Thanks for the help with Adolf.”
“Bluddy buncha dickheads on this flight. No sense-a humour either.”
Tegan smiled at him and opened her laptop, the screen a forest of numbers and graphs.
Pete had been watching her work for the past hour. Sneaking peeks past the book he was reading.
He’d become intrigued at the speed of her nimble fingers. She’d tickle a row of numbers and the graphs would dance. She’d pause, nodding to herself.
Her fingers would execute another blur of activity and the graphs would obey. He’d seen enough.
“You not gonna bugger more with those, are you? I mean, how long can you torture the poor bluddy things.”
“Until they talk to me,” she smiled.
“What you hoping they’ll say?”
“That I get a Christmas bonus.”
He laughed.
“You all right for a yank. I mean, you a looker… that much is obvious. But you got balls too. I reckoned from the moment I saw you that you must be from the coast. New York or LA—being human-shaped an’ all that.”
“You sure do know how to chat up a girl, Mr. Outback.”
“Aww… you too kind.”
“Originally Maine; L.A. now.”
She went back to her work and he carried on watching her.
“You were really gonna take a whizz out here under a blanket?”
She laughed, “What do you think?” She looked up from the screen a moment.
He interrogated her eyes for his answer.
“Yep… you’d ‘ve done it,” he concluded. “I like that. Tough lady.”
She smiled at him and went back to her figures.
“Seriously? You not gonna talk to me?”
“I’m talking, aren’t I?”
She smiled and looped a stray hair back behind her ear, secretly loving the distraction and his loose and easy chatter.
“Yeah… but I kinda like the eye contact. Eyes your colour… only ever seen that off Greece.”
She kept pecking at the keys.
“What’s that screen got that I don’t have?”
“A hundred bar.”
Saying the number, she turned her torso slowly and deliberately in her seat. Facing him almost chest on, she openly appraised him up and down, her eyes gliding over his lips.
He was a ruggedly handsome man in an industrial strength sort of way, taut of build and a bit more muscular than she liked them, but vast in cha
racter.
His meandering nose suggested he was no choirboy. His cheekbones so sharp and angular they seemed to threaten cutting through the sundrenched tan. He was so unlike the podgy executive colleagues and clients of her corporate world.
You have no idea, Pete, my friend, just how distracting you are. You could shut up for the rest of this trip and I still wouldn’t get this spreadsheet to work, she thought as she gently closed the screen on her MacBook.
Pete smiled at the gesture, clearly enjoying her appraisal of him.
He suddenly responded in the quirkiest manner, bulging his eyes and rocking his head like a Bollywood actress.
“Oh, very attractive,” she said, “…and a little worrying.”
But for all his silliness, there was an instant, a moment, when they had clicked; a spell he’d strangely hastened to break.
A man like this would not miss such a moment. His eyes said it all, the moment had been too much for him.
Hmmm… afraid of intimacy, Tegan warned herself.
“So, you’ve got a name?”
“Pete,” he extended his hand for a shake, in mock greeting.
“A last name.”
“Ahhh, yeah. Crawford.”
“Pete Crawford… Okay. I’m pleased to meet you Pete Crawford.”
“And you are?”
“Tegan Mulholland.”
“A pleasure, Ms. Mulholland.” His smile was engaging as he emphasized the ‘Ms.’ as a question.
“Miss,” Tegan corrected, hissing the clue.
“Miss…” he repeated with a wry smile. “And we’ve got, what…?”
He looked at his watch with a theatrical gesture and a comic glint in his eye.
She finally noticed the chunky piece of hardware on his wrist.
“…Only eight more hours t’get to know one another.” He paused a moment presenting the watch like a trophy.
“Ahhh, this old thing,” he grinned, pantomiming as if she’d asked him about the watch.
“Breitling? Is that what you want me to ask?”
“Awww Jezus no. Breitling? That’s for bluddy poofters. Naagh.”
She took his wrist and examined the timepiece.
“Now, that feels good,” he grinned.
“Richard Mill…” she read the maker’s name aloud. “…Automatic Chronograph Diver… should I be impressed?”
“With me or the watch?”
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that, Pete?”
“I intend to be,” he winked.
They chattered on for an hour and more, Pete successfully diverting Tegan from work every time she tried to retreat to it.
The fasten-your-seatbelt sign had long since extinguished, and people were sporadically moving about the plane.
“Honestly, honey. I love you dearly already. But you’re a real distraction and I have more than a few pennies riding on this pitch.”
She laid her elegant hand with gentle poise on his forearm as she said it and electricity sparked between them.
Yikes! she thought. What was that..?!
Below the linen and his skin was real strength. Uncanny strength. Unyielding strength.
“A hundred you say?” Pete had clearly felt it too and was redirecting them both back to the superficial, to her earlier mention of the figures on her screen.
She nodded.
“Bar…? Hundred bar, as in million.”
She nodded again, smiling, pleased that she’d impressed him.
“Dollars? US Dollars?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, if you’d told me it was a cheap movie, I could have made a call and fixed you up already. We’d already be on our third glass of celebratory Moët by now.”
“You’d have to go to First Class to get Moët,” she retorted, a sting of irony folded into her tone.
But again, she turned in her seat. There was something in his voice that told her he really meant it about the finance.
He’s either nuts or more intriguing than I thought.
“So, you’re sitting here in Business Class, honestly telling me you’d find funds with one phone call for my hundred-million-dollar movie? You don’t honestly think I’ll take you seriously?”
“And are you in First Class doing your hundred-bar sums?” he counter-challenged with an impish smirk and twinkle in his eye. “I don’t think so. So, if I’m a bullshitter because I’m in Business, where does that leave you?”
“Hmmm… but I have a studio paying for my ticket in Business, what’s your excuse?”
“And they don’t reckon you’re worth that hundred-bar to sit upstairs?”
“Well, who’s paying your ticket?”
“Me. That’s why I’m flying cheap. I need to be in California. Business arrives the same time First Class does.”
“A practical man…Well, we’ve got a stalemate,” she smiled engagingly, steadily drawn to really liking the man. “We’ve both got big claims and good justifications.”
“I don’t care if you don’t believe me, sheila. It is what it is.”
If it wasn’t for the accent, it would have sounded rude, but somehow he made it a challenge.
“What’s scary is that I do believe you.”
“Don’t. I’m thoroughly untrustworthy.”
“But you’re honest.”
“Well…” he paused, pondering that. “When I burn money, I do it properly and not on a few hours of posing.”
His smile made something within her femininity contract.
“So… What do you do? Professionally, I mean.”
“Tell you over dinner.”
“We’re flying with the sun, we’ll only get lunch up here.”
“Yeah… like I said, I’ll tell you over dinner.”
She looped the stray hair behind her ear again, “I don’t think so.”
“I’m a betting ma—”
The plane slammed with a teeth-clashing impact, the fuselage making that noise along its length that a chiropractor wrenches out of a spine.
“OOOOOFFF…!”
The air was driven out of Tegan and she dodged a slop of Perrier that leapt from the glass on its way to her lips. Just a fraction of it hit the hem of her canary-yellow pencil skirt near her left knee as it went by.
“I hate it when these goddamned planes do that.”
“Nothing t’ worry about, except that thing.” He pointed accusingly at the closed laptop with some of the spilled water on its lid.
Tegan quickly brushed the drops away but left the computer on the open tray table.
PING—the fasten-your-seatbelt sign illuminated again and a garbled apology about “clear-air turbulence” competed with passengers’ conversations.
“I’m a fatalist,” Tegan shrugged. “The plane breaking up doesn’t worry me. Airsickness does.”
“Jeeezus, you not gonna chunder are you?” Pete looked genuinely worried and dodged his knee to sidesaddle, away from it touching hers as it had snuck its way to doing over the past few minutes of conversation.
She pointed to an anti-motion-sickness plaster behind her ear.
“Nope…. I use protection.”
“Awww God… great. Would’a spoiled this whole date,” his craggy face breaking into smile, nested brackets either side of his mouth and crow’s feet framing ice-blue eyes. “You’re a really solid sheila.”
They were silent a moment and a strange thought flitted through her head that made her frown slightly; she contemplated what he might look like with a beard. It would be a pity to cover over that much character, she decided. That moment a cold shudder went through her that made her mind leap to the old cliché of someone walking on her grave.
She looked out of the window, down onto the plane of clouds thousands of feet below. It was a downy blanket from horizon to horizon. Only an occasional ball of cotton wool piled out above the planed surface. The tiny shadow of their jet ran over its surface.
“Look at that.”
Pete was pointing at the
monitor, at the progress of their little plane icon on the map up on the screen. Europe was behind them now, just a sliver to the right of frame. The American continent was steadily creeping in from the left margin, already occupying one third of the screen.
“Crossing the coast soon. Only six or so hours to landing.”
“Delightful,” she agreed. “Since you won’t let me work, any chance you’ll let me catch a few winks?”
She pulled the battleship-grey fleece blanket up to her chin.
“Forget it,” he smiled.
“At least you’re honest.”
Chapter 2
DARPA (State Dept.), Arlington, Virginia
Tuesday, 17 August
Latitude: 38°52'43"N
Longitude: 77°6'31"W
“Confirmation in from Admiral Marshall, Chief of Joint Operations. Geoscience Australia reporting a seismic event at 55…49…03 South and 159…26…0 West, eight minutes ago. They’ve triangulated to our rig alright.”
The frown that furrowed Daxton Cronner’s forehead gave his face the appearance of a stratified cliff. The creases of his career and the culmination of this project were now permanently etched into his expression, grey now dominant in what was left of his threadbare hair.
This mission ranked off the charts for confidentiality. Labeled TS/SCI —above Top Secret—it also carried the Sensitive Compartmented Information designation.
Daxton was one of the few with oversight to look at all compartments of information as a whole, to know what every compartment of engineering was doing and how they’d fit together. That knowledge lay far beyond his comfort zone.
TS/SCI meant that, similar to the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear bomb, only a handful of scientists and brass knew all of the details and objectives. Those down in the pit, now working on the project’s implementation, only knew the part they were working on. They had no knowledge of the details specifying how it was going to achieve the intended feat that they were monitoring.
As Daxton watched, feedback was pouring in from the clutch of key individuals in friendly governments who were not on the inside of the TS/SCI confidentiality barrier, but had been apprised of possible climatic or tectonic anomalies that might flow from the test.
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