Dimension Lapse II:
Return To Doomsday
by
Nicholas T. Davis
©Copyright 2015, Syracuse, NY
All rights Reserved
No part of this publication shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher
ISBN: 1517367557
ISBN 13: 978-1517367558
Dedication
This continuation of the Dimension Lapse tale is dedicated to wife, and inspiration,
Nancy Herman-Davis
CHAPTER ONE
The lone spaceship drifted slowly towards the cold barren world. Angelica Avery was still in suspended animation, lying in the cryo-chamber, waiting for the initiation sequence to trigger the device that would bring her back to the world of the living. She didn't realize at first she traveled a great distance across space and time to find answers about what happened to her father. He was working on a device that would enable him to travel through wormholes, and actually was successful in doing so. It allowed her the opportunity to do the same, even though she had a farther distance to travel once she reached the wormhole entry point. Although she didn’t fully understand the process, her father arranged to operate the system on her ship using a programmed flight course, and being an astronaut herself she knew how to pilot the craft according to her father's instructions.
As the ship came within orbit, the sequence initiated the cryo-regeneration process, and she slowly began to breathe. After about an hour and a half, she began to awake and rose herself wearily to a sitting position. She ran her hand through her black unkempt hair, rubbed her face, and then shook her head. “I wonder how long I was out,” she said aloud.
She looked at the control panel, and couldn't believe the date; she thought she had only slept a month or two. “2163!” she exclaimed, and rose to her feet. “How is that possible?” She stumbled to the main control panel and pressed the button to turn on the manual systems. She activated the onboard android she created named Cely to power up his system up as well. He was about five feet tall, and had a robotic skeletal structure within his ‘housing’ which was really synthetic skin.
His tan skin was similar to hers, with brown hair, and seemed very human other than his synthetic system, and sensors that allowed him to see, as well as speak and hear. Angelica wasn't able to give him the sense of smell, but she was working on it, and emotions anything close to human were out of the question.
“Good morning, Ms Avery,” he said.
“Morning, Cely,” she said. “We’re a long way from home, Heh?”
“That is true,” he answered. “Nineteen point nine light years away from Earth to be exact. That is, from where we entered the wormhole.”
“How is that even possible?” she asked, still trying to grasp the fact that the wormhole generation was successful.
“You’ve been asleep for over eighty years, and you’ve been traveling at one quarter the speed of light.”
“That’s not possible, either,” she reiterated, still feeling a little dizzy.
“You were thrown from the force of the singularity. You’ve been drifting in space for the past ten light years. Also the fact that we are no longer in your universe.”
“Where exactly are we?” she asked.
“In orbit of the planet Tolaria.”
“What were the last coordinates that my father gave before we lost his signal?”
“Here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive, Ms. Avery.” She couldn’t understand why he picked this particular planet. She was still unsure what was to become of them, but had to follow her father’s orders, even though he was long dead by now.
“Very well.” She was reluctant to land on this hostile world. There was no way of knowing if there was actually an installation there or not. “Is the beacon still active?”
The android walked over to another panel, and checked to see if there was a signal. “Yes, it is.”
"Prepare to land," Avery told him, as she put on her silver external spacesuit over her flight suit, and returned to the control panel. Chills shot through her blood, but she didn’t know why, because they made these types of landings many times before during her academy days.
Cely sat in the extra seat, strapped himself in, as Angelica activated the after burn rockets, and began to enter the atmosphere. There was quite a bit of turbulence as the craft entered the thick, gaseous Nitrogen atmosphere. She approached the rocky surface and knew it was going to be a rough landing. Her ship violently shook, as lightning sparked all around them and panel after panel shorted out. The thick purple-bluish clouds were all around them, which made the surface invisible from their view. When lightning struck the ship, they heard an explosion on their right and left sides. “Systems are failing,” Cely reminded her, and tried to compensate. “Rockets two and four are inoperable.”
The ship descended and caught on fire as it slammed against the rocky plain of the surface on the world, but went out due to the oxidizing effect of the atmosphere. It bounced once or twice, flipped at least three times and then came to a stop against a hill of ice. Angelica felt the impact as she shook around in her seat, banging her head on the panel in front of her. Fragments of the ship broke off as it crashed, leaving part of the hull exposed to the atmosphere. Angelica found herself dazed and slightly injured with a small gash on her arm and a bump on her head, but still very much alive. Her companion, however, hadn't been so lucky.
His strapping was cut by a flying fragment of metal, which left his arm dismembered from his mechanical body, and his head damaged, but was still repairable. His memory banks suffered some damage, and it would take time to rebuild themselves. The fierce, frigid, high velocity winds ripped across the surface of the planet. She was having trouble breathing, so she put down her external suit’s visor, and turned the valve on her oxygen tank. She bent over the android, which was now lying on the floor of the ship. The beacon was very strong now, at least a half mile away.
She grabbed limited supplies of food and water, placed one loaded Berretta M9 pistol into her belt, and one in a pocket in the back of her suit, then started out towards the east in the howling blizzard of frozen nitrogen particles, as she remembered why she started this whole journey in the first place.
Her father was working on several experiments in the fields of genetic research and space propulsion technology. His opinions were once well respected by his superiors and his ideas were far ahead of anything that was being presented at the time. After they committed him to a mental institution, they deliberately discredited him. She still didn’t understand where his ideas came from; ideas that were years ahead of anything being developed at the time. The basis of his theory was that by using the density of a black hole or star, one could develop a device able to create a singularity or wormhole that allowed the traveler to pass through it to a parallel universe, or another region of space. It was a shame that in later years, NASA dismissed him from future projects, and tried to get him to turn over all his research to them.
When he refused to, they arranged to have him committed, recanting his theories, and calling him mad. They would be the ones to change their opinions of him if they saw what he ultimately achieved. NASA funded his entire laboratory, and just before the institutional admission, he entered a code that only he could access to the device. NASA found the device was useless because it was far too advanced to be reverse engineered. Shortly after he escaped from the institution, he stole the spaceship that NASA designed
for such a journey, and his two favorite chimps as well. Angelica was ordered by the academy to use the other prototype to stop him, if at all possible. She of course had no desire to do this, and in reality was more than willing to help him achieve what he planned.
She knew he made it through to the other universe, because the signal that was preprogrammed into his ship’s computer registered on her systems after Angelica passed through the singularity. Once she entered the singularity, the signals became stronger. The problem was that the actual location would take months to travel to. After emerging from her own universe, she plotted the course for the beacon signal and placed herself into cryostasis until she reached her destination. Her father must have found a shortcut of some kind to get to where he was now, or he was no longer alive. She also didn’t know that she would be floating in space for such a long time either.
As she followed the beacon signal, she could feel a strong gust coming at her. She quickly dropped behind an ice hill as the seventy mile hour winds blew over her head. She weighed only 80 1bs here and could easily be blown away. While there was a moment of calmness in the storm., she continued to jump and ran quickly towards the direction of the beacon. She stopped when the beacon beeped continuously, but found no hatch in sight.
She kicked the frozen nitrogen beneath her feet, then dropped to her knees and began to tap the frozen surface with the handle of her pistol. The wind picked up again, and she feared that a gust would knock her over or carry her away. She tapped on it about five minutes, until she was finally able to pull the ice from the surface of the hatch where the beacon was. She pulled open the hatch, which was lighter than in normal gravity, shined her flashlight into the hole, and looked for the ladder to climb down. ‘I hope that nothing is at the bottom other than Papa,’ she thought, very nervous. She dropped herself into the hole, climbed down the sixty feet deep entrance, and remembered the message her father sent her just before he disappeared. He stated something about molecular changes he was going through while entering the singularity. Angelica hadn’t experienced this effect, only a little dizziness upon waking. It could have been the opening of the wormhole, but why wasn’t she affected in the same way?
Wherever and whatever this place was, it was very dark until she reached the bottom of the shaft. There were tunnels in both directions at the bottom, and it was lit with emergency lighting, which didn’t surprise her. Even though the lights were operational, the main power was shut down. She pulled out her pistol, and followed the tunnel that went to the right.
Angelica reminisced of being a little girl, and the time her father first took her to his science lab. She was amazed at all the scientific equipment, and animals he kept for experiments, and she knew every element in the periodic table by the time she was eight years old. Her fascination for science was as strong as his. For her fifth grade science fair, she built a primitive laser. Her father taught her the process, and she designed a smaller system using solar panels, lithium batteries, and a little ingenuity of her own. He was so proud of her that day. She always wanted her to follow in the footsteps of her father and become a scientist. He trained her in lots of areas; genetics, physics, and quantum mechanics. By the time she was 18, she was beginning to understand his theories, and learning how to apply them. There was a secretive side to him as well, and he only confided partially in her assistance, spending the late hours of the night by himself. One night when Angelica was twelve, she entered his lab, and he put his notes away as quick as he could.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Just working on some formulas, Sweetheart,” her father said. “It’s a little complicated and I don’t think that you would quite understand it.”
“But I like chemistry too.”
“Not this stuff. When you’re a little older, I’ll explain it to you.”
She also missed her mother, Marie, who died when Angelica was very young. Marie was a brilliant woman, no less than her husband, and it was a shame she contracted an incurable disease that even her father, the great Dr. Louis Avery didn’t have an answer to. She had thick, dark hair and hazel eyes like Angelica, and was very beautiful. Her mother rocked Angelica in her arms to sleep every night, as she sang to her. Although she didn’t understand it at the time, her parents would stay up after that discussing their theories, and bond together as a team as well as lovers.
It was hard for Angelica to believe that her mother only weighed eighty lbs. when she died. It was horrific to watch her slowly fade away, until the morning she was only five years old, and woke up to find her dead; on her mother’s birthday no less. She never fully recovered from the tragedy, and cried for weeks on end, asking herself why. The young woman and her father vowed to find a cure for the disease and any other that was terminal. Fate had a way of changing the way she looked at life from that moment on.
After her mother’s death, Angelica decided to devote as much time with her father as she could and assist him where her mother had left off. They had reached fruition in their theories, and she was right behind him in the other spaceship when he suddenly vanished. Now she was facing an alien world without his help, and there was no guarantee she would find what she was looking for, or any evidence he had even been here, except the beacon. He confided in her that he found a suitable world for his experiments, but didn't tell her where it was.
There was something about this planet that interested him. She knew he brought his favorite two chimps with him to use their DNA, but she didn't know the exact nature of what he was doing with them. Most experiments he was very open to her assistance, but not this one; he kept it very private, even from her. She knew about the wormhole vessels, but not about what his motive was once he reached the planet.
Back at the ship, Cely activated his own backup code, and restarted his system. His vision pixels were fragmented, his left arm was missing, and one of his hearing sensors was damaged. “Oh dear,” he said with garbled speech. “I’ll have to manage.” He rose himself from the floor and grabbed a soldering iron from a compartment next to him. While soldering the loose wiring and closing tubes that dripped hydraulic fluid onto the floor, Cely sensed the structure of the wrecked ship shake from the winds all around him. He put on a flight jacket and grabbed a pistol from the armory compartment. He knew that it would be futile to leave while the winds were so strong. He didn’t breathe oxygen, eat or sleep, but negotiating the storm was more than he could undertake.
In the complex, Angelica came to a large metal door which had a keypad next to it. When she punched in the code her father had transmitted to her to open it, nothing happened. “What the hell?” she asked, puzzled. Her first decision was to turn in the other direction, but the door opened, and revealed what was left of the main control center. She entered cautiously, holding her pistol in front of her, and her legs wide apart. She was a little suspicious and frightened of the door’s action, suspecting that it might be a trap. Being dark, she turned on the small flashlight attached to her pistol.
Angelica could feel a rush of cold air from the open section of the ceiling that was torn apart by an explosion. Frozen nitrogen covered part of the walls and floor at the far end of the complex. She entered, shocked and unable to believe what she saw. There was destroyed machinery and rubble, and it didn’t look like any of the computers could ever be operational again. Walking through, she could see human bones scattered amongst the rubble, decayed and charred. There was also something else, something alien. Some of the skulls looked like some form of primate, but with only one eye socket, and then there was some kind of insect exoskeleton, which had six limbs, but obviously walked as a biped. There were also decayed pieces of some kind of humanoid, but not quite human.
It was obvious to her there was some kind of battle here, and an explosion as well. The walls were burned from extreme heat, and ash was everywhere. To the right, there was what appeared to be a landing deck for spaceships of some kind, but most of them were shattered or unusable. Angelica now a
ssumed whatever happened, her father was in the middle of it somehow. She started to cry, but stopped, knowing that it would only use her oxygen supply quicker. She was curious to find out if the air was breathable, so she pulled out a small sensor from her suit pocket and activated the button that checked the air quality. Seeing it was Oxygen, but more Nitrous Oxide, and extremely cold, she felt it would be safer to keep her helmet on for now, and keep her suit temperature control at 68.
Putting the sensor back, she pulled out her pistol again, and walked in the direction of where the catwalk was. The catwalk ladder was wobbly, but she weighed lighter here due to the gravity, and she felt it would hold her. She climbed it carefully, holding tight to her weapon. She still felt the need for a little added protection; there were no guarantees she was totally alone here.
It shook a little and when she reached the top, as she jumped onto the catwalk, crouched down and kept her pistol ready. She rose to her feet, and headed down to another door, which opened into a corridor. It was empty, and led to several other rooms. Angelica decided to head towards the door that was at the end of the hallway first. All of the corridor doors appeared opened.
When she came to the door, she found it led into another corridor, and went to the room farthest from her. She walked into the room, which was a conference room of some kind. Cold wind rushed at her from outside where the window was severely smashed. She immediately left the room and headed to another room down the hall.
As she entered the doorway, and there was a smaller control center with viewing screens, but none of them were operable. She glanced at the panel, and saw a button that read activate force field, and deactivate force field, but neither one was on or working. She also saw several buttons for each section of the complex. It was obvious this planet had a defense system, but it somehow had been compromised.
Dimension Lapse II: Return to Doomsday (Dimension Lapse Series Book 2) Page 1