Contents
Title Page
Dedication
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CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
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Author's Note
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Destination: Earth: The Enigma Series,
Part Two
Andrew C. Broderick
Copyright 2017,
all rights reserved
Cover art by Andrew C. Broderick
To the good guys.
All of us.
Should one man be judge, jury and executioner? Lee Savage plots the perfect crime: hunt and kill his sister’s murderer using an armed drone. How will he cope with the diabolical situations he finds along the way, and will he kill the man responsible?
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CHAPTER ONE
“Suit check,” Drew said. He heard nothing, and every single light was off. “Suit check.” Something’s very wrong. Everything’s dead. But why?
Then he noticed not only was there no glare from his headlight reflected from the window in Storm’s airlock door, there was no light within.
It dawned on him. Oh, my God. Drew fought to keep the contents of his stomach down. An electromagnetic pulse. Probably from the alien ship. It made sense; it was an easy way to disable, and effectively kill, any other ship in the area.
Drew flexed his fingers. He was still holding the wheel of the airlock’s emergency handle. It was his only connection to anything solid. Since his suit couldn’t maneuver, he’d drift away helplessly if he let go. Drew saw an amazing sight reflected in the glass of the airlock window: the vast gray, blocky superstructure of the enormous alien ship that had emerged from within the Enigma. He turned to look over his left shoulder, to see the vessel, rows of lights punctuating its exterior as it accelerated away like an ocean liner unaware passengers had fallen overboard. The round airlock door handle was his life preserver in a vast, cold, featureless ocean utterly hostile to human life.
Drew closed his eyes hurriedly when the glare from the ship’s engine exhaust came into view. Scanning around, Drew could see other panels from the Enigma’s outer hull drifting slowly away. The Q-carbon hull had done an admirable job of protecting its hidden contents, like an eggshell, for 40,000 years. Now the ship inside had found its wings. It had to be headed to Earth.
As the alien ship grew further away, Drew was able to watch it again as the glare from its exhaust diminished. I… actually… saw an alien ship.
His heart grew heavy at the thought that he would never witness the aliens’ arrival, nor find out what their mission was. And then it hit him: he would never see Elizabeth, Mark, or Lisa again. Due to his overzealous desire to explore the Enigma, his family would be without their father. His heart tumbled in a nameless void as he tried to comprehend this new reality.
Was there any hope for rescue? The Sigma would certainly be disabled by the EMP. Drew twisted around as far as he could to his right. The ship was still there, illuminated starkly from one side by the glow from the alien ship, but of course all her own exterior lights were off. Their only possible hope lay in the presence of the Theta, though she might also have been crippled by the EMP.
A very familiar face caught Drew’s attention through the dinner-tray-sized window: Storm’s eyes were wide with fear, and Drew wondered for a moment whether his face looked the same. But he shrugged off the thought. It no longer mattered if his kid brother saw him vulnerable. They both had ten, maybe fifteen minutes before the air in their suits was exhausted. Nothing mattered anymore. The thought was both sickening and liberating. At least he’d go out doing something he loved, out among the stars, having seen a real alien spaceship more splendid than anything science fiction had to offer. It was a fitting climax to his life. It even managed to wipe out his previous career disappointments. But, Storm… Drew had been there to rescue him, to set his kid brother free from an iron coffin. He couldn’t do it, and that cut Drew to his core.
If only they’d been able to make things right with each other, to reconcile. Now they’d go to their graves without ever having truly connected as brothers, having let their father’s hate forever come between them, as toxic to them as it had been to everything else. Drew thought about his rocky relationship with Elizabeth, too. He’d learned how to relate to women by watching how Rick treated their mother—the verbal sneers, the putdowns, and even though he’d been aware he was repeating the same abusive patterns, and had done his best to break that cycle, it had been his overbearing sense of superiority that had poisoned their own marriage. Possibly beyond salvation.
****
Storm saw a halo of white light reflected around the outside of Drew’s goldfish bowl helmet. And then the lights in the airlock went off as their suits’ power systems failed simultaneously. Dammit!
On the right side of Drew’s helmet, Storm could see the reflection of a long, vast ship. What?! He pulled himself in closer to the small airlock window to get a better view past Drew’s head. So that’s what was inside the Enigma! It reminded Storm of a cruise ship, and he could already see it wasn’t cruising; it was accelerating, leaving them and its cast-off shell behind.
Storm jabbed the airlock open button again a few more times, before the full hopelessness of the situation hit him. No suit indicator lights? No fan? He gulped, and tried to mentally subdue his rapid breathing as he knew, with sickening certainty, that the air inside his suit was all he had left. He turned around to look back into the crab’s interior. Yup, complete failure of all the crab’s primary and backup power systems. Crap!
Hopefully the Sigma would be along soon to rescue them. The strange bluish-white light had faded, and Storm noticed for the first time that Drew’s headlamp was off, as were the little indicator lights at the bottom of his faceplate. Had his suit failed too? Oh, God, an EMP of some kind….
“Storm to Sigma, do you copy?” Storm knew it was foolish, but had to try. “Storm to Drew, do you copy?” Had the pulse come from the alien ship? He couldn’t blame them if it had; they’d been putting holes in the Enigma, after all. The blazing engine exhaust from the alien ship’s rear end came into view, and Storm had to close his eyes against the glare.
Where was the Sigma? Surely she would come to the rescue? Surely she hadn’t been affected by this too. She’d be here soon… if Drew ever managed to get the airlock open. But Drew, too, would only have ten or fifteen minutes of oxygen left, and the exertion of trying to turn the wheel would have shortened that significantly.
Drew’s helmet was silhouetted by the bright engines of the departing ship, rendering his face invisible, so there was no way Storm could tell if he was trying to say something. But he had something to say to Drew. “Drew, leave the airlock and get back to the Sigma!” he shouted into the dark. “There’s no point in both of us dying; you have kids to take care of.” Could Drew even see his face? “Drew, le
ave me. Save yourself!” Of course, that assumed he could somehow get back to his own ship, or they’d pick him up without the use of his maneuvering jets. Who was he kidding? They were both dead men.
Another thing I screwed up. My marriage, my business, and now I’m going to die because I tried to save Anna from her mother. Not only that, but Anna would also lose her uncle Drew because of him. She loved her uncle Drew and Storm had tried to keep their enmity under wraps for her sake. It had mostly worked. It was a hard thing to fool kids, especially one as perceptive as Anna. She knew something wasn’t right between them, but Drew had made an effort to get to know her. And with both of them gone, who’d save her from Bonita’s abusive boyfriend? His eyes welled up with hot tears at the thought. He wished he could write one last note to Anna, or even just record a last message for her. It was almost too much to hope Drew would at least have the sense to tie himself to the wheel so they could at least recover both their bodies.
****
“The telescope image just went dead, right after I detected a massive burst of light, heat, and gamma radiation from just behind the Enigma,” Mark Hansen, chief scientist aboard the Theta, managed to utter through mounting shock.
“Jesus in heaven,” whispered Gabrielle Sands, the ship’s curly-haired captain. There was a long pause. “They’re dead.” She buried her forehead in her palm. “A nuclear war in deep space? Over an alien object? The Russians just made themselves war criminals.” She shook her head as though trying to awaken from a trance. “I’ll spit on every last one of their graves for this, so help me. But for now, we do our duty,” she said, straightening and looking each of her bridge crew in the eyes. “Immediate priorities? Report?”
“We don’t know for sure that the Russians did it, since the ship wouldn’t answer anybody’s calls…” Drexel McBride, the pilot, offered.
“We’ve got to get back to Earth and tell them what happened. Right now,” Mark said. “They need to know not just what happened here, Russians or otherwise; they need to know there’s an alien ship headed their way.”
“Is it possible there were survivors?” Gabrielle asked.
“I don’t know how many megatons that blast was, but it was pretty close to the Enigma. If anybody did survive, it’d be a miracle.”
“Even if they weren’t instantly vaporized, all their systems would be completely fried by the electromagnetic pulse,” Drexel said. “Anybody left alive would only have suit oxygen. The odds of us finding them in time…”
“If anyone’s alive, no matter how slim that chance, that has to be more important than the news,” Mark said.
“But… we’ve got to warn Earth!” Gabrielle said. “They need to know there’s a huge alien ship headed their way!”
“No,” Mark said, quietly.
“What? As the captain of this ship, I am ordering that we get home as fast as possible to warn them. We don’t know what the aliens’ intentions are!”
“Gabby, they’re not warping there; they’re accelerating. Five billion miles is a hell of a long way without a warp drive. Earth has quite a while before they get there. We need to at least go and look for survivors. How fast can we get there, Drexel?”
“I’m figuring it out now. Even at 4G acceleration it’d be more than twenty minutes to cover that 400 miles. We need to warp in.” Drexel turned around to face Gabrielle. “That okay?”
Gabrielle pursed her lips and nodded.
“Everybody strap in,” Drexel said. “We’re going to ground zero.”
****
“That damn Q-carbon material hardly reflects radar,” Drexel grunted, a few seconds after they dewarped. “And given that it’s as black as night, we can’t see it.”
“Doesn’t help that the telescope’s burned out from the blast,” Mark said. “But, few things are truly impossible.”
“Just fly us around as quickly as possible until we see something—anything—that isn’t Q-carbon,” Gabrielle said.
Drexel grabbed the joystick and throttle. “Manually, then, on all fronts. Everyone keep your eyes peeled. How fast were the panels of the Enigma’s hull moving away from the ship?”
“Pretty slowly,” Mark said.
“Okay, anyone want to estimate how far they might’ve gone?”
“Twenty miles an hour for five minutes… A little over a mile, so debris cloud’s gotta be two-and-a-half miles wide.”
“That’s better than nothing to go on,” Drexel said, angling the ship in a slow turn. “We’ll head back in the direction we warped in—that’ll put us on the side of the Enigma they were on.”
Everyone was pushed back in their seats as Drexel maneuvered the ship.
“Dammit! We aren’t going to be rescuing anybody unless one of us is outside. They only have a few minutes left!” Gabrielle half-yelled, cursing herself for not thinking of it earlier.
“I’ll go out,” Mark said. “Is there any way we can depressurize faster than twenty minutes?”
“Um… the emergency valve?” Drexel answered, trying to both think and fly at the same time.
“Got it. Help me suit up, Gabby.”
“Be careful, guys, I’m going to be changing course often and rapidly.”
Mark and Gabrielle clambered down the narrow passage leading from the right side of the cockpit to the airlock. Drexel braked the Theta’s upward movement as they reached the predicted debris zone. The other two braced themselves against the ceiling.
Mark flew into the suiting area, ripped a suit open, and pulled himself into it as fast as he could. “I’m not even bothering with preflights,” he said.
“Run them anyway, even if you don’t wait for the results.”
“Fair enough.”
Mark pulled up the zipper and ran his hand up the seam, causing it to disappear, leaving an unbroken outer layer. “Do you think I’ll need any equipment?”
“Take everything you can: ropes, cutters, and tools.”
“Right.”
He pulled on his gloves, while Gabrielle repeated the procedure to seal them tightly. “Good luck,” she said.
“I’m going to need it.”
They braced themselves against the ceiling as the Theta changed course once more. Once they were weightless again, Gabrielle locked Mark’s helmet in place, yanked open the inner airlock door, and helped him into the bathroom-sized space, before tossing in tools and equipment.
Mark pulled the door shut and began to power up his suit, before mashing the button to depressurize. Once that was underway, he opened the clear protective cover over the emergency depressurization switch and flipped it. The space was filled with a loud hiss, almost a roar, which rapidly diminished as the air available to carry the sound vented into space.
CHAPTER TWO
“See anything?” Gabrielle asked as she pushed herself back into the cockpit.
“Not a goddamn thing,” Drexel hissed. His blonde hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. “It’s worse than a needle in a haystack. At least that doesn’t involve looking for black objects in total darkness.”
Gabrielle sighed as she grabbed the handholds and swung herself into her seat to Drexel’s left. She clicked her harness into place. “Turn around, and turn all the lights off.”
“Can’t turn the displays off, but I’ll do what I can with the rest.”
Stars crossed their vision slowly from left to right as the Theta pirouetted. They strained their eyes, looking for a raven in the night. The engines of the departing ship were still visible, now only as bright as Venus in the night sky.
“There!” Drexel pointed.
“Where?”
“Just saw something eclipse a star, straight ahead.”
“Wrong direction though, right?”
“I’m betting it’s the nose section. That’s much bigger than the side panels, and also farthest from the explosion.”
Gabrielle’s small frame seemed to shrink into the seat as the futility of their task grew ever more apparent. “It was also
protected by the force field around the ship, unlike the panels. I’d be surprised if anything aft of there even still exists.”
“Mark to bridge. Any luck?”
“Negative, but get the door open so you’re ready to go anyway.”
“Will do, but don’t do any fast turns while I’m heading out. I’m not keen on getting flung into deep space.”
“I guess we just keep turning slowly and scanning,” Drexel said.
“I’ll be able to see out pretty well in a minute, too,” Mark said. “We need every eye we can get. Shame I don’t have mapping probes. Could toss them out like footballs and see if they picked anything up.”
“We’re still around where we think they should be?” Gabrielle asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to shine my laser cutter out there on the off chance the beam illuminates something,” Mark said. “Should be able to spot anything up to half a mile away with it.”
“Great idea,” Gabrielle replied.
Stony silence followed as the Theta continued her slow pirouette, the window for finding anyone alive winding ever down, like the devil’s stopwatch. I’m looking at stuff that’s hundreds of light years away when I just need something a mile away, Gabrielle thought, as the distant heavens passed slowly by. If there is a god, we need him now.
“Get the telescope and scan on infrared and gamma, Captain!” Mark said.
“But…” Gabrielle began. Then she smacked her forehead. “Of course! Only the visible light instrument was burned out from the explosion. Swap in the other detectors, and any pieces left will light up like Christmas trees. I’m on it right now.”
Gabrielle waved her hand in front of her, and a new display appeared. With several button pushes, the telescope sensor was swapped out for one that would image on infrared.
“You want me to turn the ship?” Drexel said.
Destination: Earth: The Enigma Series, Part Three Page 1