by Scott Rhine
Approaching Oblivion
Characters with Talents Listed
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere
Chapter 1 – Stroke of Genius
Chapter 2 – Robert’s Rules of Order
Chapter 3 – Nine Angry Women
Chapter 4 – Asking the Impossible
Chapter 5 – The Inevitable
Chapter 6 – A Perfect Summer Day
Chapter 7 – Good Lassie
Chapter 8 – An Unholy Alliance
Chapter 9 – Dog Days
Chapter 10 – Motivation and Meteors
Chapter 11 – Spousal Reunion
Chapter 12 – A Run to the Corner Store
Chapter 13 – Truth and Consequences
Chapter 14 – In Search of Sasquatch
Chapter 15 – The Party’s Over
Chapter 16 – Approaching Oblivion
Chapter 17 – Evidence of Things Not Seen
Chapter 18 – X-Ray Rainbow
Chapter 19 – The Labyrinth from Above
Chapter 20 – Zeus’ Giant Eagle
Chapter 21 – Aliases to Protect the Innocent
Chapter 22 – Proof
Chapter 23 – Pandemonium
Chapter 24 – Elysium Fields
Chapter 25 – Meet the Greens
Chapter 26 – Gilligan and Gibraltar
Chapter 27 – Wish You Were Here
Chapter 28 – Persephone Lost
Chapter 29 – Plato and the Secrets of the Lost Pandas
Chapter 30 – The Language of Patience
Chapter 31 – Gift Conference
Chapter 32 – The Journey of a Thousand Kilometers
Chapter 33 – Pit of Despair
Chapter 34 – First Contact
Chapter 35 – Tic Tic Lah-Zay
Chapter 36 – Busy Little Elves
Chapter 37 – Death Spiral
Chapter 38 – Who Watches the Watchers
Chapter 39 – The Fall
Chapter 40 – Legacies
Chapter 41 – Cover of Darkness
Chapter 42 – The OK Corral
Chapter 43 – Sacrifices
Chapter 44 – Fire in the Sky
Chapter 45 – Destinies
Approaching Oblivion
Book Four of Jezebel’s Ladder
by Scott Rhine
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2013 Scott Rhine
To my wife, Tammy, who cuts to the heart of the human interaction.
Thanks also to my editors, Katy Sozaeva and Weston Kincade, and my beta readers: Ed Hoornaert and Kelly Hawkins.
Cover art by http://www.thecovercounts.com
Characters with Talents Listed
Auckland – Dr. Ahunga O Te Ika Whenau Whanganui, a Maori physician who likes sports. Genetic design and Anomaly Detection talents. Has damaged hemoglobin, which causes a blue tinge to his skin. Married to Pratibha.
Herk – Rafael Herkemer. A Polish bomb technician for the UN and head of security. Trained in underwater rescue and firefighting. Body Override talent. Married to Risa.
Johnny – Giancarlo Bartilucci, an Italian cook. Food Synthesis talent. Dating Rachael.
Lou – Captain Kai Llewellyn, a handsome Welsh pilot who acquired Strange Attractors and Ideal Planets. Blinded when the ship passed too close to a sun. Since marrying Mercy, he has developed the talent to sense large gravity wells.
Mercy – born in Brazil, dual US citizen. A childhood friend of Red’s. She placed her large inheritance into a charity fund to educate third-world girls in science, technology, and math. Gravity Generation and Icarus Field talents. Married to Lou. Nicknamed ‘Mother Hen’ because she raises chickens and nags people about safety.
Oleander – Specialist Oleander Dahlstrom. Experienced Norwegian space hand who did jail time for bombing bank offices but once rescued Red’s aunt and uncle. Out-of-body scout.
Nadia – Russian plasma physics and power expert, formerly from the Kaguya team. Trained in Buckyball batteries and Zero-Point Energy theory. Dating Park.
Park – South Korean propulsion specialist. Gravity and Calabi-Yau string theory talents. Dating Nadia.
Pratibha – A woman from India who specializes in economic flow models and space colonies. Mayor of Garden Hollow, and married to Auckland.
Rachael – Lieutenant Rachael Eliezer. Israeli whose family builds bomb shelters. Expert in water purification, sustainability, air purification. Dating Johnny.
Red – Miracle Redemption “Red” Zeiss. A US math prodigy and heir to the Fortune Aerospace billions. An aggressive pilot with Index, Pattern Simplification, Collective Unconscious, Empathy, and Quantum Computing talents. Married to Zeiss.
Risa – Sonrisa Belinda De Gama Herkemer. Panamanian expert in solar power and space construction, Herk’s wife, and Red’s former roommate. Alien structural engineering talent: superdense ice and algae acrylics.
Sensei – The alien who taught humanity their twenty-seven ideas and administered their test.
Snowflake – Alien AI computer that runs the giant spaceship. Takes commands from the planning committee and has particularly bonded with Mercy.
Sojiro – Japanese manga artist, computer programmer, and alien-interfaces expert. Mind-machine Interface and Red Giant Locator talent.
Toby – Dr. Tobias Baatjies, an Afrikaner botanist and organic chemist who recently pair-bonded with Yvette. Protein Folding and Nanomedicine Synthesis talents.
Yuki – Female technician from Mori electronics and a spy for the Mori family. Gravity sensor trained.
Yvette –Yvette Chenonceau, a psychologist and nurse who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. Ethics and Empathy talents.
Zeiss – Commander Conrad Zeiss, alias Z. Tall and quiet Swiss astrophysicist and navigator. His talents include Quantum Computing, Rubber Sheet Theory, and multi-species Collective Unconscious. Married to Red.
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere
Chapter 1 – Stroke of Genius
One moment Commander Zeiss was trying to improve the precision of the most difficult calculation of his life, and the next, he was staring at a computer stylus as it rolled in slow motion onto the floor. Sharp, cold pain stabbed near his right ear. Had he smashed into something while playing hockey? No. He wore a rumpled flight suit with a Swiss flag, and he sat on a mattress that was strapped to the floor in a low-gravity bedroom. The narrow band of windows had been silvered to block out external light, so they resembled white stripes on a highway.
A beautiful blonde, covered only by his favorite Tasmanian Devil T-shirt, glanced at him in concern from the other side of the bed. A prodigy, she had been the youngest woman to graduate the UN astronaut program. Thirty-one centimeters shorter than him, she wore the same style of unbreakable tungsten carbide wedding band on her finger as he did. They were married. Damn, I’m lucky. She had joined him in mind and body more times that he could count, but now he couldn’t remember her name.
“Conrad, why did you drop your stylus?” she asked.
His right hand tingled. Heart attack? He’d been trying to write something important, the last gift of his computation trance—something the planners needed to know about the thermal properties of large bodies of water. Instead, his internal dam had burst, flooding the metaphorical town beneath. When no sound came from his open mouth, she hit the red button on the badge clipped to his chest.
He tried to put both arms around her, but only the left moved. To make up for the lack, he squeezed twice as hard.
He gazed into her face, and her eyes filled his horizon. If these were his last moments, he wanted to shared them with her, whatever her name was. He recalled this was their first Christmas day aboard Sanctuary, 272 days into their space mission. Why couldn’t he remember a simple name?
A dark-skinned man in rugby uniform pajamas bounced through the door to his bedroom—the doctor from Auckland. His skin had a blue-gray tinge due to hemoglobin damage. The decontamination area had been too cold when he’d reentered the ship. Zeiss could recall the man’s scores from the academy but not his own wife’s name.
“I told you, no more!” Auckland scolded the woman.
“He felt better,” insisted the beautiful woman with tears in her enormous, blue eyes.
When the doctor tried to look into his eyes to gauge the pupils’ responses, Zeiss leaned sideways to maintain eye contact with the terrified woman.
Her voice broke as she said, “Oh God, I’m sorry. I made him do it. You have to help him.”
Auckland already had his black satchel open. Zeiss felt tiny pills being tucked between his lips and tasted orange—baby aspirin. He moved his mouth and swallowed.
Next, the doctor put his head under Zeiss’ dead, right arm and lifted. In the low gravity, one-tenth Earth standard, lifting was easy but moving eighty-five kilos would still take work. “Red, we need to get him to the scanner.” When she blinked in confusion, he clarified in short bursts. “Sick bay. Now. Help me.”
She tucked under his left arm, and the pair aimed him toward the open, oval door.
Zeiss helped, but his legs were jerky and uncoordinated. Auckland had called her Red. That was her nickname, not her real one, the personal one only the two of them shared.
The circular central chamber had no gravity, but a surplus of doors: the storage room, four bedrooms, sick bay, the dining hall, an airlock to the patio, and a round tunnel to the shower level. They were adjusting to the weightlessness of the dimly lit chamber when a brown-haired woman wrapped in a sheet poked her head out of one of the other oval doors. The woman’s right hand was bandaged. “Red, you’re radiating stress so loud you woke me up. Is there a problem?”
Zeiss could sense the newcomer’s gravity talent as a blue halo—no, there were two talents. Pregnant and happy, Mercy was broadcasting a soothing contentment like the blooms of her marigolds. Though he’d never seen her in a dress, jewelry, or makeup, the brown-haired engineer had a purity that made her shine. Mercy had been his wife’s friend from childhood. Why could he remember everyone else’s name?
Red stepped between Mercy and the men. With a tremor in her voice, his wife ordered, “Go back to bed. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
Together, the men launched across the heart of the command saucer, called Olympus, toward the medical bay. Below, Zeiss noted the snowflake-shaped cluster of control beds was empty. The hoods in the center of the pattern reminded him of old-style hair dryers. Once they landed on the far side, the doctor slapped a strip of tape attached to Zeiss’ wrist onto the wall. The alien-made, Velcro-like substance anchored them both momentarily and prevented a ricochet. Dirt smudges formed a starburst pattern on the wall from so many landings here, similar to dirty fingerprints around a light switch.
When Mercy refused to budge, Red shaded the truth. “Don’t tell anyone, but Z overdid the calculations a little on the interface.” She jerked her head toward the snowflake contraption in the middle of the room. She whispered so she wouldn’t wake the crew members sleeping in adjoining rooms.
Mercy nodded sympathetically because she was a workaholic and pushed that same limit regularly. “Auckland is giving him the usual speech and banning him from work for a day?”
Red held a finger to her lips and leapt over to the now-open medical lab door. He could hear the impact of her bare feet on the lintel. Slapping her anchor strap over the top of the doorframe, she swung into the microgravity zone like a swashbuckler.
By the time Red entered sick bay and closed the door behind her, Zeiss was sprawled on the exam bed. Auckland injected him with some kind of nanodrug and fussed over an instrument panel to monitor the diffusion of the tracers through his system. To distract her during the agonizing wait, Zeiss grabbed her right hand with his left. He tried to recall a clue to his wife’s name. Mercy would know it because she was a childhood friend. Mercy’s father had run the Brazilian launch facility at Alcantara. Red’s mother, Jezebel, had run Fortune Aerospace. After several miscarriages from a multi-Talented mother, the daughter’s birth had been heralded as a miracle. He eventually found his lover’s name in the fog—Miracle, Mira for short. He repeated her name like a mantra. If he didn’t forget the name, he wouldn’t lose her.
She asked, “Is it mental backlash like the Alcantara bombing or the sonar attack on his whales a few years ago?”
All of the crew members had read portions of the twenty-seven pages that aliens had given Earth to guide it to the next level of civilization. Each page changed the brain structure, sometimes in dramatic or harmful ways. Zeiss had absorbed more of the Collective Unconscious page than any other human. Although he could feel the pressure of any collection of intelligent beings, he was most comfortable around infants, dolphins, and whales. Because of this talent, the violent deaths of beings he’d mentally linked with hit him like a physical blow. His personal theory was that the aliens had this same disadvantage, which explained their caution when dealing with other races.
The doctor shook his head as he continued turning dials and squinting at the results.
“Is it Fortune syndrome?” Red asked because the degenerative neurological disorder had claimed her parents. Between the link and their Quantum Computing talent, he and his wife could borrow brain power from anyone in a ten-meter radius. However, the human mind wasn’t built for the stress of prolonged high-gamma brain waves. In Zeiss’ lectures at Sirius Academy, he’d called it “burning the candle at both ends.”
“TIA—a transient ischemic attack, which is a minor stroke,” whispered the doctor. “He still hadn’t recovered from the last time you pushed yourselves to plot a course for this ship. All this calcium he’s taking for the low gravity isn’t helping his blood pressure, either.”
“We’re the planners,” she stressed, gesturing toward the corresponding six arms of the snowflake. “The six of us are the only ones who can direct this craft. Z is the navigator. He has to do his job before the rest of us can do anything.”
“Each brain injury is cumulative, like with carpal tunnel. If the typist doesn’t rest enough or ice, the repeated swelling causes nerve damage. The worst cases don’t listen until they start dropping things. I’ll do what I can to minimize the trauma, but he may need therapy, months of it. Meanwhile, absolutely no quantum calculations—none—not even borrowing him for yours.”
“I promise.”
“I mean it. This sort of event is a warning, like a tremor before the big quake. About a third of these patients have the big one within six months. Anticoagulants will help him, but then any injury could make him bleed out.”
She hyperventilated a little and sobbed into Zeiss’ chest while he rubbed her back. Within ten minutes, he was able to say “Shh” to soothe her. A few minutes later, he croaked, “If your nose drips on my uniform, I’ll have to do laundry again.” She didn’t do many housekeeping chores.
Her relief at his coherent speech spawned another wave of weeping, and her unbound hair kept dragging across his face. It was like being greeted by a pet spaniel after a month’s absence. He couldn’t tell her to stop because being able to hold her again with both arms felt too good.
By the time her tears tapered off, the sedatives had begun to numb him. Eyes closed, he floated at peace, registering the buzz of voices but not caring.
****
Red said, “Auckland, no one can know what happened to him, not until after we make the next jump.”
“He’s the bloody commander. They have to know.” The doctor rarely cursed and never in front of women.
“You said it was minor, and the team has already agreed to the mission.”
“What?”
“Look, this is just the sort of thing that the runaway-home coalition will seize on to force us back to Earth as failures.”
“I don’t know. If we weren’t stranded out here, he’d be bounced from the space program.”
“Technically, your injuries put you off active duty, too. If we don’t pass the aliens’ test, Z is going to prison for the rest of his life for stealing the shuttle, and our race will be isolated from ever meeting starfaring races again. Do you really want that?”
“If it means he lives, I might.”
“Give us a few days,” Red pleaded. “Let him choose. You owe us that much.”
The doctor kneaded the tense muscles of his own neck. “We have a ship’s meeting tomorrow. He can’t work that soon.”
“I’ll chair the meeting and tell everyone he’s sleeping off another migraine from overuse of the Snowflake interface.”
“If he has another episode, we’ll have to get him to the stasis chamber at the center of the saucer. That means he’ll need to live up here until he’s out of danger, and we’ll need to clear the chamber of its current occupant.”
“I’ll arrange it,” she insisted.
From the control room, Red double-checked all her husband’s recommendations. The ship used water both to propel them through space and to run the two-kilometer ecosphere. Every drop wasted in unnecessary jumps and maneuvers meant less for them to live on. Zeiss had found a way to save another 10.3 percent on the fuel. His new plan maximized their chances, but it was still a gamble. If anything went wrong, they could all die. No wonder her husband’s short, sandy hair was growing gray at the temples. The phenomenon reminded her of how rapidly presidents of countries aged their first year in office.
She was triple-checking when Captain Llewellyn, known to everyone by his call sign Lou, floated into the command chamber. The pilot’s uniform had actually been ironed for a change. He looked like a well-toned G.I. Joe doll, reminding her of the crush she’d had on him at the academy. His golden beard wasn’t strictly regulation, but all the females, plus the gay male planner, had lobbied for him to be allowed to keep it. He may have been Welsh, but little flecks of red and his swagger pointed to a Viking in the woodpile.