The Human Chronicles Saga Box Set 5

by T. R. Harris

  Adam had locked himself away in the starboard landing bay, spending hours on end trying to solve the problem with the TD module. He’d come to the conclusion that unit was the issue and not some other component within the power line.

  Panur’s mysterious black box had been off limits to researchers. They refused to break it open to learn its secrets, afraid they might not get it back together again. They tried x-raying it—and other more exotic alien technologies—to look inside. It was as if the irascible mutant had anticipated their efforts and placed shielding inside to confound their efforts.

  He scrounged the Library for all the information it had on dimensional travel, as well as topics surrounding Panur and Lila. Yet in his quiet moments, his new ability at near-total recall brought up vivid memories of his past interactions with the short, gray alien.

  Several years back, he’d left Panur alone for a week at his Lake Tahoe home. During that time, the mutant managed to completely rebuild the Pegasus into a supership, as well as construct a personal trans-dimensional portal in his garage. He did all this with components he bought online or at the local Home Depot. Panur was not about complicated. He was about simplicity—the simplest solution to a problem was the best.

  So, would he have converted the Najmah Fayd into a dimension-hopping starship by making the power supply something impossible to duplicate? Or would he have tried to do more with less…as he did everything else?

  The question sparked a revolution in Adam’s thinking.

  Using his enhanced ATD, Adam attempted to break through the barrier keeping him out of the module. Yes, even his ATD couldn’t trace the inner workings of the TD module. This was strange, since he’d never been blocked before from any system he sought to scan. How could Panur have known of the mental scans, and more importantly, why would he want to block them?

  It wasn’t technically true that he couldn’t scan the unit. He hooked up an oscillator to the leads and ran various tests, using step waves, sine waves, box waves and more. Current was traveling through the unit but having no effect on any of the components inside. He could follow this current with his mind, but it made a simple pass through the box without interacting with anything inside. It was as if the TD module was empty, except for a single power line running through it.

  Could that be it? Could the box be a decoy, placed there by the mutant to confuse and confound anyone trying to duplicate his work? Adam couldn’t rule it out. Panur was a bastard that way.

  Adam went back to the leads, forcing his mind to slow down as it entered the box. The power coursing through the unit was steady and unobstructed. He had to find some way to stop and look around, just to make sure there was something else in the box.

  It was strange, fighting a current with his mind. Then he changed the frequency of oscillation, increasing the frequency so it would pulse at a much quicker pace. This didn’t affect the current running through the box, but it did give his mind less resistance, making it possible for him to linger a fraction of a second longer just inside the box.

  And that’s when he noticed the bump. In reality, it was probably a relay of some kind. But in his mind it was a tiny hump off the main power line, an almost imperceptible bump in the smooth flow of electricity. Something was there, something that was closed.

  Adam tried to place his mental probe into the tiny alcove, pushing out to see what was there. His mutant brains cells kicked into overdrive, both collating information while also refining the definition of this mental signal. He was in a trance, oblivious to everything except the tiny channel. He pushed even harder.

  And then it opened.

  It was as if he’d been pressing on a stubborn door that suddenly gave way. His mind fell forward, racing along streams and rivers of electricity, riding a crest that eventually escaped out the other side of the module.

  He awoke from his trance to see the gauge on the unit reading a series of numbers he hadn’t seen in a couple of years. The unit was working.

  And all he had to do was hit the reset button.

  Adam ordered Kaylor to dump out of the gravity-well and the team raced to the landing bay in anticipation of the big reveal.

  “I’m taking her out for a test.”

  “Let me come with you,” Riyad said.

  “It’s too dangerous. What if it jumps to another dimension and I can’t get back?”

  “Yeah…what if?” Sherri protested. “Then you’d be lost, too. I don’t think we’d be happy if that happened.”

  Adam smiled. “I appreciate your concern, sweetheart. But if something goes wrong, I’ll have the best chance of fixing it. I’ll load the ship up with spare parts, batteries—and food—just in case.”

  “Is there not another way of testing it?” Arieel asked, concern on her face. “With the ATD, for instance?”

  “ATD’s don’t work across dimensions. If it jumps, I’ll lose contact. Don’t worry. I’ll just pull back the curtain a little and take a peak on the other side. It should only take a few seconds to see if it works.”

  “Then let’s get it over with,” Copernicus Smith said, bored with the whole we’re-so-concerned-about-you-Adam scene. “Even if it works, there’s still a lot to do. We don’t even know if we’ll be able to find the mutants.”

  “You say the word mutant as if it is a bad thing, Copernicus,” Arieel said in defiance. “My daughter is a mutant.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Mutants are good. They’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “Yes, they are—what?”

  “All right,” Adam said, breaking up the minor dispute. “Let’s get the Defiant loaded and ready to go. This is the moment of truth.”

  It took thirty minutes to pack the starship with all the tools, spare parts, batteries and other equipment Adam might need to correct anything that went wrong with the trans-dimensional jump, although no one knew what could go wrong. They were being overly cautious.

  The external power lines were uncoupled and the rest of the team retired to a control room with a view of the bay. Adam entered the shiny new starship and sealed the hatch. His ATD was already linked into the controls, ready to serve as his co-pilot. The air was evacuated from the room and the aft door was opened.

  The aft internal gravity-wells were dialed back, making the ship virtually weightless. Adam then gave a few small bursts of chemical propellant to lift the ship and send it floating out the back of the Nautilus tail first. When it was clear of the freighter, Adam spun the ship around and took her out a few thousand yards before matching the relative momentum of the Nautilus.

  He was ready.

  As Panur had explained long ago, trans-dimensional travel wasn’t so much a matter of distance but one of access. There were an infinite number of dimensions, all separated from each other by the width of a hydrogen atom—the first and most-basic building block of creation. Gaining access to these other dimensions was the trick. A disruption of the space-time continuum was required, and this was achieved through a series of counter-acting vibrations produced by the TD module. They were channeled through the ship’s systems utilizing the focusing ring setup. But rather than creating an intense point of gravity resulting in a miniature blackhole, the waves separated space to form a tear in the fabric of space.

  The Klin had built massive land-based wave generators that tore open space across a wide swath, large enough to send entire fleets of ships between dimensions. This alerted the Sol-Kor and their genius scientist Panur of the existence of the Milky Way Galaxy and a level of technology which they could exploit.

  But then Panur miniaturized his invention, bringing it down to a size where it would fit on an individual starship. This is what the leaders of the galaxy feared, a time when every ship had the capability to jump between dimensions, either to stay there, or to jump back in the Milky Way thousands of light years from where it had exited. Such vessels would be impossible to track or defend against. They could simply appear above a planet or behind a defensive line
. No one would see them coming…until it was too late.

  In the wrong hands, Adam admitted TD travel could be a terrible weapon. And as he prepared to trigger the controls that would open a portal to another universe, he snickered.

  As long as this technology was in his hands, everything would be fine. In the hands of anyone else…not so much. Was that arrogance or what?

  When a strange green glow appeared outside the Defiant, Adam knew the module was working. This was the tell-tale indicator of trans-dimensional travel. He dumped out of the jump and normal space returned—or at least normal space for this universe.

  And that had been one of Adam’s major disappointments during his prior TD jumps. It seemed there were no exotic creations among the infinite number of universes. All were essentially a static version of all the others, with the same matter, the same laws of nature; hell, even the same variety of carbon-based lifeforms causing trouble for everyone else.

  Neither in his universe nor in other dimensions—had he come upon any magic or supernatural events. Even if he didn’t understand the how of things, he knew there was a scientific explanation for…well, everything. It was only a matter of understanding, of learning.

  He shook himself out of his melancholy. The TD ship was operational; he was in another universe. Now all he had to do was get back home.

  He activated the controls and another green fog appeared outside the ship. When he closed the tear in time and space, he was back in his universe. Or was he?

  The Nautilus was gone.

  Adam was on the verge of panicking until he checked the starcharts and found he was in fact back in the Milky Way, just not where he’d left it. Time and space had currents, and even as he lingered in another universe, these currents shifted, both here and in the alien dimension. He’d drifted, and after some quick calculations, found he was about six light-years from the Nautilus.

  The crisis wasn’t serious. A quick CW link to the Nautilus and the huge freighter was on its way. Adam could have activated the gravity drive in the Defiant and met them halfway. But he could only create a single deep-well event before the temporary batteries drained. If he had to dump out and start the generators again, he’d be shit-out-of-luck.

  He had twelve hours to wait for the Nautilus. Unfortunately, the Defiant was too small for him to play with his air currents; he’d suck up too much air for him to breathe if he did.

  So instead he began to reflect on what he’s just accomplished. He’d solved Panur’s mysterious power configuration and now had a fully operational TD starship. The long transits between trouble spots was over. He could cross the galaxy in a matter of days, rather than months. And he had the means—hopefully—of tracking down the elusive pair of super-mutants. He truly believed he’d just taken a major step toward defeating the Klin menace.

  So, he went aft, to the galley, to see if the builders of the Defiant had stocked the processors with any booze. He’d be disappointed if they hadn’t. He felt like celebrating.

  27

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here,” Sherri said, gawking out the bridge viewports as the Nautilus came in for a landing on an island set in the middle of an azure and green sea.

  “Why the hell did you guys leave?” Copernicus asked. He was as much in awe of the scenery as everyone else. “It looks like paradise. This could be a good place for a retake of our tropical vacation, Sher.”

  Yes, the view of the quickly approaching island was inviting, but Adam knew a deeper truth. His old base on Pyrum-3 held some terrible memories for the people who had once lived and worked here, thanks in part to Robert McCarthy’s father, Nigel.

  Adam didn’t want to dwell too much on the backstory—everything was recorded in the archives—except to say that McCarthy the Elder attacked the base with a team of Human commandos. In the process, Adam lost some good men, including a young Navy Commander named Lee Schwartz. Adam captured McCarthy, yet on the trip back to Earth, he managed to escape, killing two more of Adam’s men. After that, the team disbanded, until McCarthy resurfaced, and up to his old antics of galactic domination again.

  Adam eventually personally closed out the chapter on Nigel McCarthy, after chasing the psychopath to the Large Magellanic Cloud, one the sister galaxies of the Milky Way. Nigel was dead this time. Adam made sure of it.

  Adam had used the base as the headquarters for his small force of intergalactic troubleshooters, affectionately referred to as Cain’s Crusaders. They were sanctioned under the auspices of the leader of the Expansion at the time, the Silean Kroekus—back when he was one of the good guys. He’d met his ultimate fate at the same time as McCarthy, and in a galaxy far, far away.

  The base had living quarters, workshops, a starship hangar—and a weapons cache from when they were here ten years ago. Adam was hoping it were still here.

  The huge, ugly behemoth that was the Nautilus dominated the small landing field, which has been designed primarily to hold small, fast fighters. It was especially gaudy-looking when set against the seductive tropical setting, complete with alien-looking palm trees, crescent white beaches and shimmering blue-green water.

  The team made quick work of the move in, the Humans content with the slightly higher than normal Juirean-standard gravity, although it made Arieel, Kaylor and Jym a little winded after only a few moments of hauling gear and supplies into the vacant buildings.

  The main structure was a free-form style building shaped like a shell standing on edge and made of a polyurethane composite material. It boasted over twelve thousand square feet of living quarters broken into nine spacious apartments beginning on the second floor. Each had wide balconies with incredible views of the island-dotted sea and the mainland three miles across the channel. There were plenty of rooms to go around, especially considering that Sherri and Coop shared one, as Adam and Arieel shared another.

  Part of the team took inventory of the supplies still on the base, while others moved the Defiant from the landing bay of the Nautilus and into the hangar. To Adam’s delight, everything they’d left was still here. He suspected it had been protected by the docile—yet impressive-looking—natives of the planet. They were centaur-like creatures called Cupin’los, which were not unlike the ones Adam had run into on the nameless planet at the beginning of his Nuorean bounty adventure. Yet these beings were gentle and had never tried to kill him. With the gravity a little out of the comfort range of the bulk of the galaxy’s inhabitants, the planet remained largely unsettled by off world interests, and it had stayed that way throughout the years.

  Adam set to work in the shop section of the hangar, building the next ingredient in his quest to find the mutants.

  “What is it?” Arieel asked when she first saw the four-foot tall, two-foot round object. Sherri and Copernicus were with her.

  “It’s a CW broadcaster,” he told them. “It’s basic, designed to hack a message into nearly every signal that passes its way.”

  “What message?”

  “It simply says ‘Lila, call home.’”

  “You are serious?” The Formilian seemed genuinely excited.

  “I figure it’s Lila who wears the pants in the family, so I addressed it to her.”

  “Pants? I do not believe she would wear such attire if there were alternatives.”

  “But she is in control; Panur will do what she says.”

  Arieel nodded. “That is true. That is true in most male-female relationships.”

  Adam didn’t argue the point. He couldn’t.

  “Anyway, the message will spread out at the speed of a CW link. It’s a longshot, I know, but it’s the best I can come up with.”

  “You are often right in your assumptions. I trust you, my love.”

  Adam had to smile. He was indeed a lucky man, to have the most beautiful Prime female in the galaxy calling him her love. She was also a handful, and her alien ways of acting and speaking was a challenge in their own right. But he would soldier onward; the benefits far outweighed the
negatives.

  “Where are you going to put the beacons?” Copernicus asked. “You said there are an infinite number of universes. You can’t place a unit in each one.”

  “I’m going to set the first one in the Milky Way, just in case they’re here. The second one will go into the Sol-Kor galaxy, Panur’s home universe.”

  “Why do you assume they’re in another dimension? As you tell it, they left in an Aris starship that wasn’t capable of TD travel.”

  “Yeah, but it had two of the most-intelligent beings to ever exist inside. If they wanted to turn the ship into a galaxy-hopping marshmallow, I’m sure they could.”

  “I am going with you,” Arieel announced.

  “I’ll only be gone a day at the most.”

  “Yes, but I will keep you company.”

  Adam looked over at Sherri, who was grinning ear-to-ear. “I believe she wishes to help you christen the Defiant…officially, if you know what I mean?”

  “Hey, I’m just going out to plant the beacons.” Then a smile stretched across his face as well. “And to christen the Defiant…officially.”

  There was a power pack in storage that would fit in the Defiant. It wasn’t perfect, but it would allow for a half-dozen wells before petering out. Six days after landing on Pyrum-3, Adam lifted the TD-capable starship from the surface, and with Arieel strapped into the co-pilot seat, he made for outer space. He chose a location just outside the Pyrum star system, away from local interference, but well within the established CW relay lanes. He dropped the beacon and activated it with his ATD.

  Two hours later, he’d completed a thorough check of the TD module and systems to make sure everything was still in order. He never had any concern with Panur’s system. But since then, the techs back on Earth—as well as Adam—had messed with the module. It was working now, but it would take many more jumps before he gained complete trust in his own handiwork.