Cris nodded, feeling anxious. The uncertainty of what was going to happen next was almost unbearable.
From a distance, Heaven’s Gate appeared as a giant silver ring hanging in space, a ribbon-like hoop of some super-strong material resembling dark granite of a monstrous megathic type. Lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them made up the body of the structure, with curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, lining its circumference, a larger cluster nearer the top of the ring.
As the Thunder drew closer to the ancient object, its vast size became more apparent: with a radius of at least five thousand miles, it was an awesome, titanic megastructure that completely dwarfed the comparatively tiny ship. Indeed, it was, according to Chen, the single largest artificial structure known to exist, and it was at least several million years old, constructed by some long-forgotten civilisation before mankind had even evolved on Earth.
“It’s incredible,” Cris muttered, genuinely awestruck. “And nobody knows who built this thing?”
Chen shook her head. “No. There are a number of theories, but no hard evidence to support any of them. The truth is, we haven’t found any other trace of the Gate Builders, not in this Solar System, or any of the seventeen inhabited Systems in the Terran Alliance. Even the Nommos people, our oldest and most advanced allies, have no real records pertaining to them - and they’ve been around for almost as long.” She sighed. “I’d always hoped to get into xenoarchaeology myself someday, so I could have the chance to study the Gate closer, but Lenton forbade it. He wanted me to stay on Earth.”
Cris was somewhat surprised. He looked at her. “You’ve never been off-world before?”
“You’ll find most people haven’t, Cristian,” she told him, keeping her gaze on the viewport. “Space travel is cold, and fraught with danger. There are many who do not survive.”
Suddenly, an unseen force blasted at the ship, almost lurching Chen and Cris out of their seats. The bridge deck shook violently around them, and it felt as if they were being sucked toward the centre of the ring. A low-pitched alarm started to sound, a light flashing on the main control panel.
“What’s happening?” Cris demanded.
“We’re caught in electromagnetic turbulence,” she said, grappling with the controls. Sweat started to bead on her forehead. “The wormhole is opening. Look! ”
Through the viewport, all Cris could see was starfield. Then, from directly ahead, at a distance of a few hundred miles maybe, he saw huge sparks… sparks of some rainbow-like energy forking from a single, glowing point positioned at the centre of the Gate. Stabbing toward them, engulfing them. For a moment it seemed like they were plunging headfirst down a pulsing tunnel of phosphorescent colour; soaring over swirling shards of liquid-like confetti framed by a shattered diamond.
“Shit!” Cris roared against the vibration of the ship. The sound was droned out by a massive screech of the engines, the metamaterial hull of the ship exposed to stresses that he could only imagine.
Chen couldn’t blink. “This is the closest… anybody… has ever got!”
Soon, they were close enough to the heart of the disturbance that it engulfed the view ahead of them. For a moment, it appeared to sink in on itself, distorting the view of the stars far behind it. Then it changed, morphing into a swirling, stable golden light surrounded by blue clouds.
Tears fell from Lorelei Chen’s face. “The Doorway to Heaven…” she muttered.
Cris exhaled.
They were swept into the light.
ACT TWO - THE EXODUS
16
Light.
Cristian Stefánsson drew in a breath and gathered himself; for a moment of dizzying disorientation, he could not remember who he was, or where he had come from. Chen, the Silver City – the memories seemed as distant to him as an ill-remembered dream.
He blinked his eyes open, and frowned. He was laying in his bed, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. The bedroom window was open and the floral curtains were flowing in a light breeze. He was laying on the right hand side of the double bed, as always, laying on his side with his right arm supporting his head.
What…?
He swung his legs out and stood up, stretching his muscles. “What’s going on?” he murmured. The sound seemed echoed somehow, even though the acoustics in the room never usually allowed for it. He felt slightly drunk, but not uncomfortable. “Where am I?” There was no indignation in his question, only curiosity.
The tear-off calendar beside the bed told him it was December 24, 2011, in large red letters. Confused, he ripped off the top leaf, and below it told him that it was now Christmas Day. How was that possible? He’d already lived through that Christmas, months ago. It was 2012 now… wasn’t it?
A voice called to him from beyond the open door, startling him. Kimberley was downstairs, shouting up at him. “Dad!” she was calling. “Dad, come on!”
He reached up a hand and massaged his eyes, tired. He felt like something wasn’t right here, like there was something he was forgetting, but he couldn’t remember it. He donned a dressing gown and went out of the room, his eyes scanning the open landing and the bathroom just across the way. It was his house… but it felt strange, somehow.
Downstairs, Cris blinked at a kaleidoscopic blur of colour and light as his surroundings came into focus. The large, high-ceilinged family room was decorated for Christmas, with a large tree asparkle with light. Cris took in the sight with a feeling of proud pleasure. Clustered beneath the tree – which easily towered at least a meter above him – lay presents of every conceivable size and shape, wrapped in gleaming gold and red and green foil. Branches of fresh holly garlanded the wooden staircase banisters and the stone mantel above the hearth, where a decorated Yule log blazed. Through the large bay window, he could see the street outside, blanketed with a thick layer of fresh snow. Yes. It had been a white Christmas. He remembered this now.
And in the midst of the room, his daughter Kimberley stood with Alexis, his beautiful wife, both smiling and expectant, their bright gazes focused on him.
Cris smiled. “It looks fantastic.”
Kimberley ran over to him and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing tight. “I love you, daddy,” she said, meaning it. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, honey,” he said, with an intensity and tenderness he had never before known. Then he walked up to his wife to kiss her. The golden-haired, slender woman smiled through the kiss with an indulgent feeling of love in her blue eyes.
“Say it’s time to open the presents,” Alexis urged, with fond impatience, and rested a hand lightly upon his shoulder. “Kimberley has been waiting for hours. We’ll have breakfast afterward.”
He nodded, and Kimberley ran toward the tree, sliding to her knees beside the biggest of the presents. She let out a cry of pleasure and began to applaud. Cris watched her with a sense of such complete joy that a smile spread, unbidden, across his lips.
Then he frowned again. He remembered something. He remembered something about long ago, in some other universe. Something about a wormhole… about Lorelei Chen.
He pushed the thought away immediately, trying to concentrate on the present, to the love and happiness that surrounded him. But it persisted.
Lora.
Where was Lora?
He remembered now. He’d woken up from cryofreeze, travelled across the world to the Silver City, then flown into a wormhole with Lora to travel back to his own time…
He blinked. Had it worked? Had he travelled back through time to this moment, to this Christmas he remembered more than nine months ago?
“Where’s Lora?” he blurted, then felt his face flush with embarrassment. How was he going to explain his relationship with Lora to his wife Alexis? He felt a sudden sense of guilt, and the realisation that he hadn’t really thought this thing through properly. But his question was valid: if Lorelei Chen was around here somewhere, he was going to have to fin
d her and sort things out.
A moment later, he noticed that Kimberley was standing beside her half-open present and staring at him blankly. He looked at his wife, who turned and did the same thing. Both of them were standing still, staring at him ominously now, and the sensation of something not being quite right about all this dawned on him again.
“Am I really here?” he asked. “This isn’t right. This can’t be real ...”
Kimberley stepped forward. Her expression didn’t change as she spoke. “It’s as real as you want it to be.” Then she twisted her head to glance at Alexis. “It is corporeal. A physical entity.”
Cris felt a wave of terror and uncertainty wash over him. He felt his bowels loosen. “What. What did you say?”
This time, Alexis opened her mouth to speak. “It is responding to visual and auditory stimuli. Linguistic communication.”
Cris looked at his wife, then his daughter, with an astonished expression. Somehow, they weren’t real. Something else was going on here, something he didn’t understand…
“Am I dreaming?” he asked, unable to hide the fear in his voice. Again, he heard the echo he’d experienced earlier.
Kimberley, or whatever it was, gave him a mildly curious look. “It doesn’t understand where it is,” she said. “The illusion of separation still blinds this one to Truth. It is a physical entity.”
“Who are you?” Cris asked. He didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, and he didn’t like the sound of it one bit.
Kimberley took another step toward him. She looked at him for a moment. “It’s me, daddy,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Cris roared. Sudden tears stung his eyes; he blinked them back and swallowed hard, finding his voice. His heartbeat quickened with an abrupt anticipation. “So why are you talking like that?”
“It doesn’t understand,” Alexis said. “It isn’t ready…”
“Ready for what?” Cris demanded. “What are you talking about?”
Alexis and Kimberley were staring at each other now. “It isn’t ready,” Alexis said. “It does not understand.” They stepped away from him, and were suddenly awash with an intense light.
“That journey must lie ahead of it,” Kimberley said, and then the light overcame them all.
Light…
Light.
The Thunder surged forward into the blackness of space, heavily damaged, the resulting inertia sending their brains into the backs of their skulls, the g-force almost too much to handle.
Chen screamed, her senses running haywire. Ahead of them, a large looming planet rushed toward them. Tears formed in her eyes. She didn’t know what planet that was; she didn’t know where they were…
Cris sat with his eyes squeezed shut, clenching his jaw, bracing the force of it, as suddenly the view ahead of them was engulfed by a vast white flash, accompanied by a low-pitched whining sound, so loud it overpowered their senses. It was the sound of the wormhole behind them closing in on itself.
They were through…
The violent thrashing of the Thunder’s engines made a horrific sound as they hurtled toward the cloud-thick atmosphere of the brownish planet below them. The ship was wildly spinning now, out of control. Alarms began wailing, and everything became a blur of motion, sound, and fire, a violent whirlwind of destruction.
Cris roared with terror. The planet looked like it was on fire, but he knew it was only their ship, racing through the atmosphere at a highly dangerous trajectory, gas particles outside hammering the hull with extreme force. He barely heard a digitised voice saying: “Warning! Peak shock layer temperature exceeding sixteen-thousand Kelvin… Isontropic compression exceeding safe limits…Heat shield failure imminent…”
Somehow, through the blur of light and sound, Chen was pressing buttons on the control panel. “Hold on!” she screamed.
All Cris could do was stare helplessly out the viewport, the alarm raging, as the featureless and barren surface of the alien world rushed up to meet them with deadly force, engulfing the Thunder in its vast embrace.
17
Kimberley…
Cristian Stefánsson inhaled a lungful of smoke and coughed, then winced at the sudden involuntary spasm in his ribs. The sharpness of it helped to clear his head of lingering, confusing thoughts of Kimberley and Alexis; he stirred, and realised that he had been thrown more than ten feet across the Thunder’s bridge and hit the wall of jagged, brownish rock that had come through the viewport. Lora sat at the pilot’s console behind him, breathing heavily, still in shock.
“Cris? Are you all right?” she asked, apparently unharmed.
He nodded, even though his legs trembled beneath him, and his head was covered in blood. He felt so heavy. He grimaced at another stab of pain in his ribs and the complaints issuing from torn muscles in his shoulders. Blessedly, the ship was now silent and still; the ground beneath their feet was solid, yet perched at an extreme angle. Evidently the ship had crashed nose first and was now resting with its aft section in the air.
Chen checked over the instruments that still functioned. The engine temperature was critical. She whispered a command, but jolted back and covered her face with her hands, cursing, as the bulkhead exploded in a shower of sparks.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “If the engines overheat, the ship could explode.”
Cris nodded, and watched silently as she pushed herself out of her seat and climbed against the planet’s considerable gravity to reach the bridge door. The gravity – maybe 1.4 g, maybe more – made movement difficult, and tiresome, but her Rãvier suit was able to compensate to a certain extent, making it seem more like Earth’s gravity. The automated bridge door mechanism wasn’t working, so she forced the thing open with a measured shove; heightened strength was once again being fed to her through the Rãvier suit. Absently, she wondered how they could have possibly coped without these suits, and thanked God, or whoever, that they had them right now. The inside of the ship beyond the bridge was dark and ominous. Cris grimaced through pain as he pulled himself across the expanse of the bridge, moving to join her.
“Where are we?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead she bent down and picked up a Vei’nl from under their feet that had become dislodged and thrown across the bridge during the crash, and lifted its chitin-like control membrane. “Proximity scan,” she whispered quietly to it. Then after another moment, she shook her head. “I can’t tell where we are exactly, Cris. We need the ship’s sensors for that. But these readings tell me it’s an atmospheric match – for the most part, at least. Surface temperature is forty-two degrees Celsius, and appears to consist mostly of silicate rock. Barometric pressure and oxygen are within acceptable parameters, so theoretically, we should be able to leave the ship without too much concern. Either way, our Rãvier suits will keep us safe, to a certain degree.”
Cris followed her to the exterior airlock, feeling sick with confusion and uncertainty. Where the hell were they? And the experience… in the wormhole… Was it real? Or had it just been some kind of dream? He clasped one hand around the nape of her neck, feeling the silky softness of her thick dark hair, and kissed her longingly. Before he could think of anything to say they both heard thumping sounds from the airlock.
“That’s the pressure equalising,” she said, and a moment later the outer door whispered open, revealing the salmon-pink sky of the outside world beyond. They went to the threshold of the door and peered out curiously, their Rãvier suits butting and sliding against each other like a pair of awkward tortoises trying to dip their beaks into the same tiny life-giving puddle.
A brown, featureless desert stretched out as far as the eye could see, yellowy-coloured boulders scattered across the barren, gently rolling sand dunes like toys left behind by some careless child. The horizon seemed infinitely distant compared to that on Earth; clearly, this was a much bigger planet, and there wasn’t a coastline or a river in sight. It was very much a barren and hostile world, and coated wit
h ejecta from impacts – perhaps volcanic eruptions, but more than likely meteor hits.
Cris sighed. What the hell were they doing here? The wormhole should have taken them back through time – to the twenty-first century – not to this wasteland on some unknown exoplanet. Then he frowned, again remembering the strange and lucid encounter with Alexis and Kimberley on that Christmas morning in the year 2011. He couldn’t decide if it was a memory of something that actually happened as they passed through the wormhole, or something he’d dreamed, but whatever it was, it was bothering him like a serious itch he couldn’t scratch. It seemed too real to be a dream; the sights and smells, the bizarre conversation… everything had been so overwhelmingly real. But then – it didn’t make any sense to him.
He felt light-headed, as if he had jogged a couple of miles in thin air at high altitude. “Breathe for me,” he muttered to his suit, then let out his breath and took a deep gulp of his suit’s air. It tasted sweet and fresh, just what he needed. Returning his attention to the here and now, he watched as Lorelei Chen started down the ladder, making her way carefully down the exterior ‘skin’ of the bioship. As if in a dream, Cris followed, one foot at a time, his sweating palms sliding along the gleaming organic rails. The biological metamaterial of the outer hull had absorbed the blazing heat of their fiery entry into the planet’s atmosphere, and now, amazingly, seemed icy cold.
Cris stepped hastily onto the last rung of the ladder, and thanks to the ship’s somewhat precarious landing angle, was forced to jump a dozen or so feet to reach the sandy surface of the planet. His Rãvier allowed him to land on his feet without any problems, though he was still reminded of a time he once broke a limb jumping out of a tree. Then, for a moment, he felt a sense of childlike wonder as a hot desert breeze blew across his face, and realised he was standing on another world. Another planet, orbiting another sun. It was incredible, something he never imagined he’d do, not in a million years.
The Complete New Dominion Trilogy Page 14