Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  “I wish there was more time,” Lyntic said.

  “Maybe it’s better if there isn’t.” They gave each other one last squeeze and finally released their hug. There was no room for this trip down memory lane to go any farther.

  36

  Sara Awakes

  Sara’s leg moved. Web sat up in his chair to get a better look. She groaned, and her eyes fluttered. Web’s hand shot in the air to get Jeremy’s attention.

  “Get the others,” Web whispered. “She’s waking up.”

  “She is?” Jeremy jumped to his feet to see for himself.

  “Go get them,” Web insisted.

  Jeremy rounded up everyone, and within two minutes, the whole gang was collected in a semicircle around Sleeping Beauty, hanging on her every twitch.

  “Can we shake her or something?” Mindy whispered.

  “No, it’ll happen naturally,” Web replied.

  Sara’s eyes were slowly opening and closing, taking in little doses of light at a time. Blurry images were beginning to come into focus. Her senses were returning. She saw a gallery of curious faces gazing down at her. It didn’t make sense, yet.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t imagine what to say.

  “How are you feeling?” Web asked.

  Sara slid herself into a seated position and took a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

  “Which way’s up?” Lyntic asked. When Sara pointed to the ceiling, Lyntic nudged Tobi and flashed a smile. “Eighty percent, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Tobi laughed. He was ecstatic that he hadn’t destroyed her memory. He had guessed right, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Lyntic that he had switched to the 20 percent method at the last second.

  “Do you know your name?” Web asked.

  “Sara,” she replied. There was a collective sigh of relief.

  “You were on an exploratory research mission,” Dexim said.

  “Yes,” Sara confirmed.

  “You stumbled across what you identified as possible evidence of the location of the Adari Metraball.”

  “Yes.”

  “You came under attack by the Mundle, after your transmission of this information,” Dexim continued.

  “Yes.”

  “And you—”

  “And I used a memory blocker to block everything about alien culture, in case I was detained by the authorities. I didn’t want to take any chances. This was too important, and I didn’t know who I could trust.” She smiled. “And you’re the fire unit—Dexim and Lyntic. I recognize you from the news articles. I suppose I’m safe now.”

  “Yes.” Dexim nodded. “But we need to know what the situation is—everything you can remember.”

  She looked to Jeremy who was now kneeling beside her, clutching her hand.

  “You’re Jeremy Borden,” she said.

  “Yes.” He nodded with a huge grin, though he didn’t remember telling her his last name.

  “And we must be at your house,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled her hand from his grip and stood. “Did we find the Metraball?” she asked Dexim.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dexim said. “There’s something you need to know. But we should probably start with what you can remember.”

  “I remember doing the block—I didn’t really think it was going to work, but apparently it did—and I remember that I thought a Mundle operative might be after me, so I was trying to find a place to go to sleep.”

  “The memory block doesn’t kick in until the subject falls asleep and wakes up,” Tobi explained.

  “Right,” Sara continued. “So I ducked into a changing room at a department store in the mall and tried to go to sleep. Apparently, I did . . . and I woke up here.” She shook her head. “It feels like it was five minutes ago.”

  “Do you remember anything between falling asleep at that store and waking up here?” Dexim asked.

  Sara thought about it and shook her head no.

  “But you remember me,” Jeremy said, getting to his feet.

  “Yeah—Jeremy Borden,” she replied. “I was watching you. I had determined that the Metraball was most likely on your parents’ property. So, my plan was to get close to you to gain access to the land so that I could verify the findings.”

  “You think the Metraball is here?” Dexim asked.

  “What do you mean you were surveilling me?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes,” she said to Dexim. To Jeremy, she just shrugged.

  “That’s very interesting,” Lyntic said, pointing to Jeremy. “How did you guys meet?”

  “I saw her at the hardware store, and we started talking.”

  Lyntic pointed to Sara. “And you don’t remember that?”

  Sara shook her head no.

  “When she saw him in the store,” Lyntic said, “she must have recognized him subconsciously. And she must have had a subconscious instinct to follow the plan.”

  “The plan?” Jin asked.

  “Yeah,” Lyntic explained, “when she saw him, she knew she was supposed to get close to him, but she didn’t know why.”

  “It didn’t feel like that,” Jeremy retorted.

  Everyone in the group was nodding, now. It made sense. Sara had managed to carry out her plan without any conscious awareness of it. That’s why they were on this property where she expected the Metraball to be.

  “Amazing,” Mindy said. The others agreed.

  “Do you have any idea how long you were under?” Dexim asked.

  “Well—like I said—it feels like five minutes,” Sara said. “I suppose it was about a week though.” She saw a crowd of blank faces looking back at her. “More?”

  “Sara,” Dexim said, “it has been eight months.”

  “Eight months? I’ve been under for eight months?”

  “The transmitter on your delayed broadcast malfunctioned,” Lyntic explained. “The signal wasn’t sent until five days ago.”

  Sara sat back down. “So what have I been doing for eight months?”

  “Working at a hardware store,” Stewart replied.

  “Nathans,” Sara recalled.

  “Apparently, you wrote yourself a note,” Tobi said.

  Sara nodded. “Yeah, I said to wait a week—that someone would contact me.”

  “And here they are,” Stewart quipped, “only eight months late.”

  “So, what’s the plan, now?” Sara asked.

  “We have a transport ship on the way,” Dexim said. “It should be here in thirty minutes, and we’ll take you home.”

  “No, I mean with the Adari Metraball.”

  “You can file a report from the ship, and when we get back to the base, there will be a debriefing.”

  Sara shook her head. “No, I mean . . . it’s here. It’s on this property.” A silence fell over the room. “We can go get it.” An adventurous smile slid onto her face. “We have to go get it.”

  Dexim wasn’t convinced. His idea of a rescue mission didn’t include digging around in the dirt for a long-lost artifact. “We have a schedule to keep.”

  “Twenty-two minutes,” Lyntic added, checking her watch.

  “What’s more important than the Adari Metraball?” Sara said, getting to her feet.

  “The Mundle are tracking you,” Dexim explained, “and our mission is to get you out of here safely. The information you have is valuable, and we have to get you back without delay. It could take years to pin down the exact location of the Metraball, if it’s even here.” He shook his head decisively. “We can’t put you at risk, feeling around in the sand for—”

  “We have twenty minutes then,” Sara interjected. “Let’s get started.” She pushed past them and left the whole group standing in the living room.

  “Where’s the southeast corner of the property?” her voice called out from the kitchen, accompanied by the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing.

  “I like her,” Mindy said with a smile.

  Dex
im wasn’t amused.

  “She’s right,” Stewart said. “If the Metraball is here, you don’t have a choice. You have to take it with you so it’ll be safe from the Mundle.”

  “You mean so Earth will be safe from the Mundle,” Dexim fired back.

  “Is that a problem?” Stewart said.

  The gang joined Sara in the backyard, where she surveyed the land to get her bearings. She had studied the property well, but only in aerial photos and topographical drawings. “This must be the start of the western woods,” she said, pointing to the tree line behind the house. “Is there a small pond just behind there?” She pointed in another direction.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy replied. “It’s about two hundred feet that way, just on the other side of those bushes.”

  “Perfect.” This wasn’t the Sara he knew. The girl Jeremy had known never even dreamed of being this confident and commanding. He watched in amazement as she led the others down the trail into the back property.

  Jeremy sidled up to Web, near the back of the pack, as they filed into the woods. “Is there any chance she’ll remember me?”

  Web shrugged. “Well it’s possible. The memories she gathered in those eight months aren’t being blocked. They’re just hidden away. They’re not connected with the other memories, so there’s just no normal way to access them.”

  “Hidden away,” Jeremy repeated. “So how does she find them again?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “She probably won’t,” Tobi said, quickening his pace to join them. “Like he said, there’s no natural link to those memories.”

  “So, how would you—”

  “Look, kid,” Tobi cut him off, “you have less than twenty minutes left with her. Don’t waste it. Make sure you say your good-byes.” After a few steps, Tobi took pity on him. “Okay, you could try to retrace your steps with her. Try to redo moments—the strongest memories she might have. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  Jeremy nodded and jogged ahead.

  “Poor kid,” Tobi said.

  “Yeah,” Web replied, “it’s always tougher being the one who knows than being the one who forgot.”

  At the front of the pack, Sara was leading the way with Dexim watching over her shoulder.

  “There should be a creek running right along this path,” she said, scanning the terrain, recalling the aerial maps. “And there’s a trail that leads east.”

  “That’s right,” Jeremy said, jogging up beside her. “There’s a path that goes into the back property.”

  “That should take us into a clearing where site 2142 is,” she said.

  “2142?” Jeremy asked.

  “That’s the suspected location of the Metraball.”

  “Cool,” he replied, not knowing what else to say.

  As Sara led them through the trails, Jeremy was impressed that she seemed to know the woods better than he did. What a change from the little lost girl he had brought here yesterday. Stepping into a clearing, Sara stopped dead in her tracks, causing a pileup behind her.

  “That’s it!” she exclaimed.

  “Fort Fear?” Jeremy gasped, getting his hopes up where they don’t belong. “You remember Fort Fear?”

  “I have a great aerial photo of it. And it’s a great landmark, I’ll tell you that.”

  “But you don’t remember being here?”

  “No, I’ve never been on the property,” she said, sticking a pin into his balloon of hope. She walked toward the fort, gazing up in amazement. It was finally in front of her. “When the early test flight crashed, the Metraball was buried to protect it from falling into the wrong hands. Over the centuries, hundreds of planets have been pulled apart looking for it, but never the right one.”

  “And this is the right one?” Dexim asked.

  “I believe it is. The terrain is a match with the topographical mapping in the historical files.”

  “Even if it were,” Lyntic groaned, “you still don’t have any idea where it’s buried out here.” She waved her hand at the vast forest.

  “Yes, but wouldn’t it make sense—if you were trying to hide something—to bury it under something solid? Something that would stay put.”

  “The rock!” Jeremy exclaimed.

  Sara smiled. “The Metraball should be just beneath it.” She pointed. “Right below the fort. We’ll just have to pull it down.”

  “Pull it down?” Jeremy asked.

  Sara pulled the wooden case from her bag and extracted one of the quorets. Jeremy recognized it. It was the one that had mangled the water tower. The Sara he knew was afraid of that cube, but this Sara wielded it with a confident skill.

  “Everybody stand back,” she announced, as she activated the quoret and pointed it toward the fort.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jeremy interjected, “you can’t just pull it down.”

  She hardly even acknowledged his protest, as she extended her arm and took aim. The fort creaked and trembled, as if it had been hit by a mighty gust of wind. The wood popped and cracked as the structure leaned.

  Jeremy saw the fort in front of him, smeared across the ground like a tool shed that had been hit by a locomotive. So many memories lay shattered in front of him. The most recent ones were of Sara and him—their lunch, their conversation, their glances. Sara was oblivious to all that now, as she stepped over the wreckage like forgotten pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The rock was slid out of place, revealing a patch of ground that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries.

  “We’ll need some shovels,” Sara announced.

  Dexim took a moment to think. “Okay,” he turned to Jeremy. “Do you have any shovels here?”

  Jeremy nodded, and after a quick trip to the supply shed, Tobi, Jin, and Lambert were carving holes into the ground where the fort used to be. Dexim checked his watch and the sky. Their ride should be arriving at any time. Mindy asked Stewart what exactly a Metraball was and why anyone would want it. Stewart recounted the legend of the long-lost Metraball propulsion system—at least the parts he could remember. He explained how in the early testing phases—many centuries ago—a plane with the only working Metraball prototype had crashed on a distant planet and the search for the Metraball became a mythological hunt for buried treasure. Lyntic chimed in with the rest of the details, explaining that Sara’s research had turned up evidence of that crash here on Earth, including information about the possible burial site of the Metraball.

  “Why was it buried in the first place?” Mindy asked.

  “The same old game,” Lyntic said.

  “To keep it out of the wrong hands,” Stewart explained.

  “So they’re digging for buried treasure,” Mindy said.

  “Exactly,” Stewart and Lyntic replied in perfect unison, which brought a smile to their faces and made Mindy’s stomach turn.

  Jeremy approached Dexim and Sara and mustered the courage to take a final shot at redemption. “Can I have a word with you . . . in private,” he asked Sara, his eyes shooting back and forth between her and Dexim. Dexim didn’t like it, but he nodded at both of them and stepped away, allowing Jeremy to stumble through an uncomfortable story about a stick he used to carry to school. Listening to this nonsense, Sara began to stare at him as if he had lost his mind.

  “Okay, never mind that,” Jeremy said. “I just—could we . . . could we just take a walk?”

  Sara knew what the boy was up to. Apparently they had some romantic interlude while her memory was blocked. That was fine, but she had no memory of it now. And at the time, she had no memory of herself.

  “Look,” she said, “the brief moment we shared, whatever it was, it’s not a part of me. I’m sorry. I don’t know what we did—and frankly, I don’t think I want to know. Maybe we should just leave it alone.”

  “I’m only asking you to take a walk. It’s only a walk.”

  She nodded. Perhaps she owed him that. Dexim kept a close eye on them as they eased down the trail.

  “I’m sorry about all of this,”
she said. “I really am. But I’m going through a lot right now. I’ve lost eight months of my life—which still hasn’t sunk in—and we’re on the verge of what might be one of the greatest discoveries in recent history. I’m just not in a position to deal with this right now—whatever this is.”

  “That’s okay,” Jeremy said. “Don’t worry about it. I only want to ask you to do one thing.”

  Her curiosity was piqued.

  “It’s a simple thing.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Close your eyes and keep walking,” he said. “Trust my voice to guide you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It’s fun. You’ll like it. Trust me.”

  After some more encouragement, Sara agreed. She closed her eyes and listened to his commands—leading her three notches left and five notches right—just like before. Only it wasn’t just like before. The feel was missing. It was cold and stiff. And she finally stopped and asked, what’s the point, with an irritated tone.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Jeremy said.

  She saw him standing in front of her, defeated.

  “There is no point,” he said with a gentle smile. “I just . . . I wanted to say good-bye.” He pulled a folded envelope from his pocket, his voice catching as he began to speak. “You wanted me to write you this letter. . . . You wanted to remember.” He wiped a tear from his cheek, thinking that the Sara he knew would have wiped it away for him. “It was nice knowing you. . . . And thank you for the memories—the memories that you gave me.”

  Before Sara could make an awkward reply, the moment was interrupted by a strange force that permeated the air. The treetops rustled and swayed. A whirlwind swept through the trail, throwing leaves and dirt in all directions. Another whirlwind followed and then a third. It seemed like a natural phenomenon, unless you were expecting an alien spaceship. Jeremy looked to the horizon just above the clearing. Knowing what was coming, it almost seemed as though he could see the stealth ship as it lowered itself in a hail of wind.

  A few feet before touching down, the stealth dissolved, revealing the tall, round ship as it settled onto the grass. Mindy recognized this ship. It had hovered above her yesterday. It had sucked Stewart into its belly, and it had backed over a mighty oak tree. Apparently, it had been returned to its driver, and that lumberjack of a driver was stepping out onto the grass.