by JK Stone
The Awakening
By
JK STONE
Acknowledgments
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my editor: Thank you for all the hard work you have put into this series. I appreciate the critiques and the guidance you have given me; it is making me a better writer with every edit. To my wife and kids: Thank you for putting up with my tunnel vision with regard to my stories, the open brainstorming, and never-ending proofreading’s that have driven this and the other book series I have to where they are today. To my dogs: What can I say? At least you have let me write in peace when you are not hounding me for attention that is. And finally to my fans: I would like to thank all of you for the encouragement and prodding you have given me to push on and complete the series. I am pleased that my storytelling entertains you, and I hope I continue to release books you all can enjoy.
And Special thanks to Stormy McKnight for allowing me to use aspects of her Terraneu series in my storyline
Table of Contents
The Awakening
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Book One in The Imortum series.
List of Terminology
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Excerpt from Book 2 in the Imortum series
Eleven Unveiled
About JK STONE
Other books by Kord Stone
Copyright and Disclaimer
Book One in The Imortum series.
When Jason meets an artificial life form who is traveling through time and space to repair disasters, he has no idea he is about to become her partner—in more ways than one.
Advanced Lifeform Integrated Synaptic Escort, or Alise for short, is having feelings she has never experienced before. Her new commander has awakened something in her she never expected. Now she’s determined to protect him from the mysterious stranger who is traveling through time to kill him and his family.
A science fiction romance from Stone Age Publishing
List of Terminology
AI: Artificial Intelligence
AL: Advanced Lifeform
ALISE: Advanced Lifeform Integrated Synaptic Escort
DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse
EVA: Extra Vehicular Activity
GMP: Geomagnetic Pulse
GSO: Geosynchronous Orbit
HAHO: High Altitude High Opening
HALO: High Altitude Low Opening
HUD: Heads Up Display
KK: Thousand Kilometers
Lanna: Mars
MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction
OCS: Officer Candidate School
OIC: Officer in Charge
PARSEC: Equal to 3.26 Light Years or 19 Trillion miles
PTD: Phased Time Dilation
SCI: Sensitive Compartmented Information
SLO: Stationary Lunar Orbit
TDS: Time Dilation Ship
Terra: Earth
TPE: Time Phased Explosive
Chapter One
Jason Stone had always known his protective nature would get him into trouble again one day, and now he had proof. He was stuck inside a strange craft with a silver disk in his hand and a dead alien on the floor next to him.
It irritated him that a simple thing like a camping trip could turn out so badly. He shook his head as he thought back on how he got to this point. He had awoken from a particularly grueling nightmare in which he was back in Iraq, suffering torture at the hands of his captors. He felt a sharp pain in his back, then the dream shifted to the memory of his brothers lying dead in their coffins a year ago. That’s what woke him up.
Heart pounding and breathing heavily, Jason stood and wiped the sweat from his brow. Afterward, he tried to ease the pain in his back and neck. Once he managed to get the pain to recede he reclined on his lounge chair, picked up the pill box with his medication and downed them with a few sips of water, then sat back staring up at the night sky, watching as planes and satellites whizzed past, and as he listened to the sound of the nearby waves lapping against the shoreline, he tried to make sense of the shitty life fate had dealt him.
He had begun to drift off when out of the serenity, there had been a sudden blurred flash and a sonic blast right over his head. A concussion wave had knocked him out of his lounger and he landed face down in the gravelly dirt. With his head throbbing and ears ringing he had been momentarily disoriented, and he was shakily making his way to his feet when the ground under his body began to quake and some sort of aircraft crashed into the nearby shoreline.
The adrenaline had begun coursing through his body and everything rushed back into focus. He looked through the settling dirt and dust and saw a long silver pyramid-shaped craft partially submerged in the reservoir about two hundred feet away, and he ran as fast as his concussed body had dared toward the vessel.
Jason heard a faint cry for help from within the vessel and rushed to the exposed hatch several feet away.
The size and shape of the craft didn’t bother Jason much. As a child, he lived in northern Nevada and he had seen a few odd experimental aircraft flying through the sky, not to mention the strange things he had seen while serving in the Air Force.
Jason figured this must be one of the craft from the Area 51 test site or Fallon Naval Air Station.
He’d heard rumors that there had been an incident at the Area 51 test site back in two thousand eleven that forced the site to be moved to an undisclosed location somewhere between the Utah and Colorado border, and he just figured the rumors had been put out to dissuade people from spying on the compound.
Over the years, people would hike to a mountain range outside of Rachel, Nevada, that the Bureau of Land Management controlled. The land bordered the Area 51 test site and had a nice vantage point so they could see what the military was doing on the base.
The military voiced concerns about secrecy and national security so they and the B.L.M. did a land swap, in essence putting an end to the looky-loos. Soon after that, it was rumored that the base had been moved to the new location. But judging by the craft that had crashed in front of him, he figured the government must have lied again. He muttered to himself, “No big surprise there.”
Jason had approached the aircraft without a thought for his own safety, wanting nothing more than to rescue the person or people inside. He entered the craft through a triangular hatch that no longer had a door attached and he remembered thinking that even though the ship had crashed, it looked as if the vessel hadn’t taken any damage at all.
Shaking off the condition of the vessel, Jason had made it a step or two inside when he heard the cries of someone to his left about fifteen to twenty feet away. He ran through
the barely lit corridor and came upon the man lying supine on the floor and partially propped up against some kind of console. Jason rushed over to assess the man’s injuries and the man suddenly grabbed his hand and pressed something painfully into it.
With a gurgle, the man whispered between forced breaths, “Hurry…press…the…blue…button,” and pointed to his left at a console that was just out of the man’s reach.
Figuring the man was trying to call for help or prevent the ship from exploding, Jason did as he commanded and he pressed the flashing blue button.
Man, had that been a mistake! The moment he pressed the button, the ship began to rumble and everything blurred around him. A moment later a voice began speaking through the intercom in a foreign language, and Jason heard a loud explosion, then the blurred effect cleared. Jason turned to the pilot and asked, “What the hell was that?”
The man looked Jason in the eyes and said between forced breaths, “Was…for…your…safety.” He took another raspy breath and added, “Put…disk…there.” He pointed to a spot on Jason’s head behind his right ear. “It will…explain…everything.” Then he let out a cough of reddish green blood and collapsed dead beside his console a second later.
Startled, Jason had realized this was not a U.S. military vessel, and the man in front of him was not completely human.
Jason had looked down at the silver disk surrounded by blood in the palm of his hand and back to the dead man next to him as he shook his head. Oh hell no! He thought as he dropped the disk on the console and took off for the exit.
Memories of his experiences in the military flashed through his head, and a chill swept down his spine. With a shudder, he thought that he did not want to be found in or anywhere near a spaceship and definitely not one with an alien…a damned dead alien in it at that.
Jason ran up and down the corridor, looking for the escape hatch where he had entered the ship, but all he could find were smooth walls on every surface. He tried not to panic but thought to himself, I’m screwed!
In no time at all the military would be swarming the ship, and when they cut it open like a tin can, they would find him and proceed to do God only knew what to him.
Jason had experienced enough needles and prodding after his rescue to almost be considered a form of torture, and this situation was far more precarious than what happened to him in Iraq.
Jason’s heart was racing and his head was pounding. He knew he needed to calm down before he had a stroke or a heart attack. He took several cleansing breaths, recalling his mindfulness training. After a few minutes, the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears began to recede enough for him to assess his situation.
1) No visible exit.
2) Dead alien…not my fault.
3) There’s a control panel in the room with the dead alien.
Looking down the corridor he said, “Crap.” He realized he’d have to go back to the room with the control panel and dead alien to see if there was a button that would open the escape hatch. Dead bodies didn’t bother him much, he’d seen more than his fair share of those serving in the OSI, it was the knowledge that the military could disappear people in a heartbeat that concerned him the most at the moment.
Jason rushed back to the front of the ship or what he thought was the front of the ship. Hell, it could have been the back as far as he knew. He entered the room and could still hear the voice repeating a message in a language he had never heard before but which sounded vaguely familiar. He went over to the console and examined the touch-screen buttons. They all looked like gibberish to him, though a few had symbols he did recognize.
However, he was unable to read or understand Hieroglyphics, Norse runes, Cuneiform or Sanskrit. Some of the writing vaguely resembled a mixture of Latin and Greek, but it wasn’t quite right.
Jason grumbled out, “Leave it to me to get stuck on a spaceship with ancient dead or dying languages for instructions.”
There were no discernable controls to open doors and at the moment he was not willing to just start pushing buttons haphazardly. Just look at what happened when I pushed the damned blue button. He thought about it a moment and wondered, it couldn’t hurt to push that one again, could it? But the light behind the button had been extinguished and no matter how many times he pressed, hit or cursed at the console, there was still no response.
It didn’t take long for Jason’s survival instincts to kick in. The ship appeared to be laid out in a square with corridors at right angles from the control room. Figuring it would be to his advantage to leave no stone unturned, he went down each of the corridors looking for any sign of an escape route.
Depressingly, all he managed to find were three more rooms at the corners of the ship. One had a metal bed, the next a spongy floor and the last had several suits lining a wall. None of the other three rooms had so much as a flashing light, let alone an exit or any control mechanisms whatsoever. Jason made several sweeps with no luck. He even tried pounding on the outer walls but they were solid as a rock.
Feeling dejected and with no escape from the ship in sight, he returned to the only room with a control panel and seating. Sighing he figured there was nothing for it; he would have to press the unknown buttons on the console and pray he didn’t kill himself or anyone else in the process.
Jason approached the console and pressed every symbol on it repeatedly. He even pounded on the screen a few times to no avail, but nothing he did seemed to make any difference, and in the end, he decided he would just have to sit it out in the seat next to the dead alien.
Rubbing the spot in the center of his palm where the silver disk had been pressed and cut into him, Jason took a seat and he figured that with any luck when the military did finally breach this tin can, he might be able to talk fast enough to not get lobotomized in a secret lab somewhere. As soon as he sat down, he focused on what the overhead voice was saying. He thought it might be speech but it sounded like the buttons on the console looked… pure gibberish.
*****
Jason was beginning to get irritated. To his best guess, he had been on the ship for at least twelve hours and he wondered how long this process was going to take. The military had to be there by now, given that the Fallon Naval Air Station was only sixty to seventy miles away and the Nellis Air Force range was just south of that.
The military would have to have seen the ship on their radar and sent some planes to investigate by now. His watch had stopped working sometime around the time of the crash. He figured the impact must have put out an electromagnetic pulse because both the digital and analog hands were frozen at 10:10. Jason didn’t know why but something just seemed wrong when he looked at the watch, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
*****
After what felt to Jason like a whole day had passed, there was still no sign of any activity from outside. He thought somebody must have at least reported the crash by now. He had been camping in his favorite spot, the one he and his brothers had gone to as children, and where they had planned to camp last year—before Jerren and Justin were murdered.
Jason had been the only camper there due to the low water level, but he still figured the park rangers would have to have passed by and seen the wreckage first thing in the morning. That must have been twelve or thirteen hours ago, not to mention the fact that the Interstate was only a few miles away and there were no trees, just wide-open spaces. Someone must have seen or heard the crash, he thought as the frustration mounted.
*****
The voice from the ship kept repeating its message every minute or two for what seemed like at least twenty-four hours now, with only slight changes every hour, give or take, and it was really beginning to get annoying. Jason was hungry and he wanted to put some space between him and the deceased alien. He decided to make a thorough inspection of the ship now that he had calmed down.
Jason was apparently stuck in the ship and he figured that he might as well try to find out as much as he could about it. Intel is always an
ally, he thought hopefully. He figured he might get lucky and come across some food or drink. With any luck, maybe he’d overlooked something. He doubted it but it couldn’t hurt to look. The dead guy would have needed to eat as well, wouldn’t he? Jason wondered.
The ship wasn’t very large. He figured it to be a little over sixty feet squared on the outside. The inside rooms were about forty-eight feet from end to end, and it appeared to have only the four rooms, one at each corner. They were diamond shaped with a smooth wall on the inside where a corner would have been if the room had been square, and along either side of that wall were matching corridors at right angles leading to the other corner rooms. The first room had the control panel with the deceased alien in it.
Moving counterclockwise, he’d entered the second room, which had a closet feel to it. A variety of space suits hung from the outer walls. He rifled through them but found zilch. Nothing had changed since the first time he’d looked. There were still no exits and aside from hangers and clothing, there was nothing else in the room. The third room contained only spray heads in the ceiling and a spongy floor, and the fourth room had a bed on a pedestal. It looked as if it was made of stainless steel and not very comfy. This must be the no-frills spaceship. Jason chuckled. Who did that guy piss off to get stuffed in this bucket? He wondered.
Jason looked around and a thought occurred to him that this felt more like a scout type of a ship. And if it was a scout ship, maybe there was a mother ship nearby that would rescue… Ah hell at this point I don’t care who gets me out of here as long as they hurry. He thought a bit irritated. He was hungry and very thirsty and that didn’t help to ease his nerves.
Jason had spent too much time in the sun yesterday and he knew he hadn’t consumed nearly enough fluids, even with the few sips of water he took before all of this started. From the looks of the ship, there was no food or water aboard. Let’s figure this out, Jason thought, You can survive ten to fourteen days without water if you’re properly hydrated in the beginning and stay out of the heat.