The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

  I replaced my hand on the wall to make the portal glow.

  Sparks’ eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I’m reading an energy signature similar to what I saw for the outside portal. It looks like you found another one. But the signature wasn’t there until a second ago.”

  “How can it be a door?” I replied. “There’s nothing but solid stone behind the dome wall here. And why is it a different color?”

  Sparks shrugged. “Beats me. The energy signature is slightly different from the first one, but it’s definitely another portal. I detect a tremendous energy source through it. It’s amazing that I couldn’t detect it when we first entered the dome. It’s as if you just opened your front door at home and let the sunshine in.”

  “Is the energy source dangerous?” I shrank back a bit.

  “Not as far as I can tell. It appears to be contained—like in a generator—not uncontrolled. I don’t think it’s any more dangerous than walking into the engine room aboard Shamu while the starflight drive is operating.

  “Thanks. All right, we know that the white oval indicates a simple door. Here we have a pink oval with a similar, but not identical, energy signature. It’s situated in front of a sheer cliff face, so it can’t be a simple door like the white portal. It would appear to be a different type of portal. It doesn’t just lead you to the other side of a wall. Perhaps it goes…somewhere else.”

  “What, like instantaneous matter transmission?” Guido snorted. “That’s a bit farfetched, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “Hey, I’m just speculating. From what we’ve seen of the alien technology so far, it’s a lot more advanced than anything we’ve got. Why not matter transmission?”

  It was Guido’s turn to shrug.

  “If so, where do you suppose it goes?” Tom wondered.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but there’s only one way to find out.” The others nodded. “Cap, do you want honors again?” I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping he’d say yes.

  “Not this time, Swede,” Cap countered, with a smirk. “You found it, you go through it.”

  I shrugged, took a deep breath and reached for the wall again. This time I pressed my hand firmly against it. My hand disappeared from view just as Cap’s had done on the first portal. Then I stepped through.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 15

  “Oh. My. God. Toto, I don’t think this is Kansas.”

  That was Sparks, naturally. He and the others stepped through the portal right behind me. Sparks was right, though. We were no longer in the dome. In fact, I was pretty sure we were no longer on P5M2. Don’t ask me how I knew—I just knew, as apparently did Sparks.

  “I suppose this is the house of a different color we’ve heard tell about,” Sparks quipped.

  Cap sighed. “Are we going to be inundated with Oz jokes now?”

  “Hey,” Sparks countered, “I feel like Dorothy entering Emerald City.”

  I understood what he was getting at. The structure we stood in had the feeling of a cathedral built from ever-changing multihued crystal, reminiscent of Emerald City’s famous horse. The ceiling towered far overhead, resting on impossibly delicate arches spanning four filigreed pillars that appeared more decorative than functional. Shamu could stand upright in this place without even coming within a stone’s throw of the ceiling. The circular cathedral—or whatever it was—appeared cavernous enough to sport its own weather patterns. As in the dome, there was a soft light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Despite all the crystalline forms, there was no glare, and even with the pillars and arches there were no shadows.

  “Sensors detect a strong tesserene presence here,” Sparks reported, breaking the mood. I, for one, was glad he did so. I was beginning to feel intimidated—not that there was anything the least bit threatening about the room we were in. If anything, it was a work of art. Yet, this was the sort of place where one imagined God Almighty Himself might live. It was impossible for a mere mortal not to feel atavistic stirrings of fear and awe.

  “Tesserene ore?” Cap asked with a frown.

  “No, it’s a power source run by refined tesserene, seemingly like our starflight drive but much more powerful.”

  “Bingo!” I blurted. “I think I know what the portal is.”

  “Well?” Tom demanded. “What is it?”

  “Think about how the starflight drive works. It creates an energy bubble around itself that folds space. Another way to put it is that it creates a portal. Then the drive pushes the ship through the portal and out the other side to another location in space.

  “What if, instead of creating a portal around a ship, it could be created inside the ship, or in an office building for that matter? Wouldn’t you have something very much like what we just stepped through? Imagine if we could create portals on Earth that you could walk through and step out onto other worlds? We wouldn’t need starships to travel from planet to planet, unless it’s only to drop off a portal generator somewhere that hadn’t yet been visited. Because you don’t take the portal with you, I presume there’d have to be one on each end. Then an entire army of colonists, or miners, or terraformers could simply walk through and set up shop on the other side.”

  “Good Lord!” Cap whispered.

  Tom’s “¡Dios mío!” echoed the sentiment.

  “That would open the entire universe to us,” Guido said in shock. “We could go anywhere in an instant, instead of taking days to go a few light years, as it does now.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We could set up public portals on every street corner. You step inside, tell the portal where you want to go and step through.”

  “Incredible,” Cap gushed.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Unfortunately, there’s a flaw—a major one—in that rosy scenario.”

  “What’s that?” Tom asked.

  “Answer me this,” I countered. “Why are there only a few hundred tesserene-powered ships in service today?”

  “Simple. Tesserene is in short supply. That’s why we’re out here.”

  “Exactly. From what Sparks’ sensors reported, these portals must consume vast quantities of energy. Where would we get the ore to fuel millions of sidewalk portals all over Earth—not to mention those on hundreds of other worlds we might want to colonize?”

  “Ah. Good point,” Tom conceded with a wry smile. “I guess we might have been getting ahead of ourselves.”

  “Come to think of it,” I continued, “there are actually two major stumbling blocks to using portals to conquer the universe. That was only the second one. The first, and more immediate obstacle is: how do we acquire the portal technology in the first place? Knowing how to operate one, and minimally at that, is a far cry from being able to understand how to build one, not to mention having the materials and technical savvy to actually construct one. It’s quite possible that if we tripped over the blueprints for the portal today we wouldn’t have the means to build one for centuries.

  “Imagine if someone had handed the plans for a simple nanobot to Leonardo da Vinci. He was brilliant enough that he would have understood the principles behind them—after all, they’re fairly simple machines. But without an electron microscope—not to mention electricity—he couldn’t have even seen a nanobot, let alone built one. He invented the submarine, the helicopter, and the airplane, in the fifteenth century; yet he couldn’t build a single one of them because he didn’t have the right materials. Personally, I don’t claim to be the reincarnation of da Vinci. Who knows how many interim technologies we’d have to master before we could even begin to build a portal of our own?”

  “Well, aren’t you Mister Depressing today,” Sparks interjected. We all laughed.

  “You know,” Tom suggested, “the dome may well be the alien equivalent of a public portal booth. Fly your ship to the asteroid, enter the dome, and then step through the portal. Perhaps this place is their Grand Central Terminal, the main stopping off point, with dozens of routes intersecting in this terminal. If
that’s the case, we could go anywhere from here.”

  That was a sobering and intriguing thought.

  “I thought Swede said we could go anywhere from any portal.” Guido said.

  I shrugged. “I was merely speculating. Who knows? It’s possible that the portals consume so much energy that they have a discrete range. Bigger portal generators, like bigger starflight drives, probably can jump farther than smaller ones. If so, there may be a whole network of huge interconnected regional hubs scattered around the galaxy. A traveler would jump from one hub to the next until he approached his destination—like changing bullet trains to go from city to city back on Earth. Then he would hop off the network at a local portal. That’s just more speculation, of course.”

  Sparks spoke up. “If a portal can go on any planet, then why was the dome we came through on a dead moon in the middle of nowhere?”

  I shrugged again. “Who knows? Maybe it wasn’t the middle of nowhere to the aliens who built it. Or maybe this is how they transported the tesserene they mined on the moon.”

  Cap expressed my thoughts—and probably everyone else’s—when he asked, “So, where do we go from here?”

  No one had an immediate answer. As a result, we fanned out and began exploring the vast space we found ourselves in. It appeared to be one room with no doors or windows. Of course, as we’d discovered in the dome, appearances could be deceiving. For all we knew, there were dozens of unseen portals scattered about.

  It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. There were untold numbers of pinkish and even purplish portals arrayed one after another along the walls. We soon lost count of how many there were. As soon as a hand left the wall, the portal immediately faded from view. A conservative estimate would have exceeded a thousand and after more than three hours of investigating we hadn’t even finished following two-thirds of the circumference. That place was huge! At least, I think it was two-thirds—after all, with no markings on the wall of a circular room, it was hard to be sure.

  “Why are there so many portals?” Cap mused. “Could this one terminal possibly be the hub for that many worlds? And what are the purple portals for?”

  “No telling,” I responded. “Maybe each planet has a bunch of portals, and perhaps each portal is a one-to-one affair. For every portal on Planet A there has to be a matching portal on Planet B or C or D. Or, all of these portals may go to various places on the same planet.”

  As if Cap’s query wasn’t difficult enough, Tom asked, “How could anyone use this terminal for travel? How would they know which portal goes where? How would they find the right portal among all the ones in this room?”

  Sparks immediately pounced on those questions. “That’s the easy part—from their standpoint at least. All you would need is a device programmed with all the portal information. You tell it your destination and it lights up the right portal, and only that portal. Then you’d have just one portal lit up on an entire blank wall. You’d have to be blind to miss it.”

  “Here’s another little question for you, Mister Smarty-Pants,” Guido offered. “If this is Grand Central Terminal, then where is everyone? It’s awfully quiet in here.”

  “Easy,” Sparks replied with a smirk. “It’s a public holiday! They’re all taking the day off.” We all grinned.

  Guido responded, “Apparently no one’s taking a trip to the shore, or to the moons of Glendor-7 for their holiday.”

  “I hate to sound like a whiny kid,” Tom began, hesitantly, “but I’m getting really hungry. Can we go back to the ship for something to eat?” Just then, Guido’s stomach growled in sympathy and we laughed.

  “Great stomachs think alike, I guess,” Sparks said.

  “According to my gauge,” Cap checked his heads-up display, “I’ve only about an hour of air left. We should be getting back anyway.”

  “Um,” Guido started, and then stopped. “Who marked the portal we came through?” We exchanged looks, but no one spoke. “In that case, how do we find our portal?”

  I looked at the unbroken, unblemished expanse of multihued, crystalline wall surrounding us that contained at least a thousand portals, and my heart sank.

  * * * *

  “My fault, lads,” Cap said with a grimace. “I should have had someone mark the spot we came through before we wandered off. Sparks, can your sensor pad trace the portal we used?”

  “Let me see…. The energy signatures are all similar; still, I think I can identify ours, eventually. I just have to walk along the wall and check them one by one.”

  “Get a move on it. Our air won’t last forever. Even after we get out of here, we still need enough to get us back to the pod and the spare tanks.”

  “Roger.”

  “And you can skip the last bunch of portals you checked. We know they won’t be the ones.”

  “Of course.”

  Sparks walked most of the way back toward where we thought we’d started. After fifteen minutes, he was making progress, just not as quickly as we were consuming our oxygen.

  “How much longer, Sparks?” Cap inquired.

  “I’m going as fast as I can, Cap. If I rush I might miss it. As I said, these signatures are similar. It takes a few seconds each to weed them out. The ship’s computer could do it almost instantly, but this handheld unit is nowhere near as powerful.”

  “I understand, but if we don’t get out of here in the next thirty-five to forty minutes, we might not have enough air to make it back to the pod.” Sparks merely nodded, already engrossed in the task of finding the needle in this crystal haystack. He continued on in this fashion, slowly walking around the perimeter of Grand Central Terminal. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty. The tension increased every second we stood there. It was like Shamu all over again.

  Guido apparently had been having the same thoughts. “I can’t believe it! All that work earlier to avoid suffocating, only to die here of the very same thing? It just isn’t fair!” He uttered a deep visceral grunt of frustration.

  He raised a hand to forestall replies and said, “Yeah, I know. Cap’s Universal Truth Number Three: ‘Life ain’t fair. Deal with it.’ It doesn’t really help us, though, does it?”

  After twenty-five minutes we were all seriously worried. Sparks hadn’t completed even half of the circuit yet, and we were almost out of time. Sweat began to bead my forehead, despite the agreeable temperature in my suit.

  “Anything yet, Sparks?” Cap’s nerves were beginning to show as well.

  “Look, damn it, the more you interrupt me the longer it’s going to take! You’ll know as soon as I do.”

  Cap threw his hands up in defeat. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now.”

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” Tom inquired. “This standing around doing nothing is hard on the nerves. What about if we try sticking our heads through some of the portals, to see what’s on the other side?”

  “It might work,” Sparks replied testily.

  Our interruptions obviously weren’t improving his disposition.

  “Or you might get sucked all the way through and discover that you can’t get back. I have no idea. Now shut the hell up and let me get back to work!”

  Tom countered, “Well, it’s worth a shot! We’ve got to do something. In another fifteen minutes we’ll be totally out of air. At that point we might as well open our faceplates and get it over with quickly, rather than suffocating slowly in our suits.”

  “Tom,” Sparks sighed, “the more you distract me, the longer it’s going to take. Now let me…wait—what did you say?” He glanced down at his sensor pad. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  “I beg your pard—!”

  “No, not you—me. Stupid. By all means, open your faceplate!”

  “Now wait a min—”

  “I’m serious! I was so busy looking for the portal I forgot to check for the presence of an atmosphere here. It’s just like in the dome—breathable! It makes sense. If this is a transportation hub,
of course the travelers need air.” He then proceeded to open his faceplate to prove his assertion. When he didn’t immediately die a horrible, excruciating death, the rest of us did likewise. Our suits automatically shut off the airflow when the ambient pressure remained above the quickseal trigger threshold.

  “Well, I guess this buys us some time,” Cap exclaimed, after taking a tentative breath. “But we still have to find our way back at some point. We don’t have any food or water with us, so we won’t last forever.”

  It may have turned out to be a false alarm, but the incipient feelings of panic were all too real. That was something I could happily do without for the rest of the mission! Now that the crisis seemed to be over I became aware of other feelings.

  “Speaking of food, now I’m hungry, too.”

  Cap nodded. “If Sparks finds our portal….”

  Tom looked up and playfully shouted, “Hey, aliens, we’re hungry. How about some food?”

  We all chuckled, except for Sparks, who was too busy studying his sensor pad to notice. With the realization that we’d dodged another bullet, we were all acting a bit giddy.

  The laughter cut off almost immediately as a pedestal materialized right in front of Tom. He was so startled that he stumbled backward and fell on his ass.

  Atop what looked like a section of floor was a sort of serving plate or shallow bowl with free-flowing curved edges, seemingly made from the same crystalline material as the rest of the room. On the plate reposed several dozen walnut-sized spheres of various colors.

  Sparks, four meters behind Tom, was still oblivious.

  “Sparks—get over here with that sensor pad!” Cap shouted.

  “Hmm? Oh, what’s that?” He pointed at the contents of the pedestal.

  “That’s what we want you to tell us.”

  As Sparks scanned the plate and its contents, Cap continued the explanation. “Tom jokingly asked the aliens for food, and then this showed up, apparently out of the floor.”