Overture

by Mark Wandrey

  Armed with her notes, Mindy began trying some of the touch combinations she thought might work. After learning that she could activate the portal by simply jumping on the dais, it became easier to deal with the two-minute window. Within an hour, the confidence she started the morning with had completely dried up. Nothing she did worked. It was also slow going. Because the symbols rotated, she had to wait for up to a minute for the right one to show up, so she could tap it and freeze the movement.

  When she finally stopped around noon, her arms hurt from reaching, touching, and gesturing. All her work appeared to be for nothing. She sat on the end of the dais and cooked the MRE, using water from a bottle she’d brought with her. The beef stew wasn’t bad, but it was kind of glutinous. This one came with brownie bites for desert. As she ate, she considered the 10 people already on the other side of the portal, on Bellatrix. They only had limited supplies and ammo to deal with the dinosaurs. She hoped they were getting on okay.

  * * *

  Sergeant Lisa Simpson watched the portal dais idly as she ate her meal. Before the portal stopped working five days ago, they’d been subsisting on rations brought from Earth. After 48 hours of no contact, they started adding some Kloth meat to their meals. Now five days in, Abbot and Edwin were competing to add local flora and fauna to their diet. The meal she ate consisted almost entirely of local plants and animals, though she added Earth salt, pepper, and barbecue sauce. The Kloth had a hard to describe gaminess to it. It was chewy, too.

  “No sign of life?” She turned and saw the big Aussie biologist, Steve Edwin. He was casually picking bits of Kloth gristle from his teeth.

  “No,” she admitted, “but I keep watching.”

  “They don’t send more ammo, we’re buggered,” he added. She grunted. There wasn’t anyone at Ft. Eden who didn’t know that. “I’m off in an hour,” he said, gesturing to one of the Puma drones resting in a backpack, “it’s all charged again.” She was glad. His constant efforts to get in her pants were a little boorish. For her, the reason to hope contact resumed was more than ammo and food. As the only woman on the planet with nine men, her future didn’t look attractive.

  “I hope you can figure out where the Kloth are coming from.”

  Edwin grunted and nodded. “We’ll nut out where they’re coming from,” he said.

  Lisa gave him a sidelong glance. “Nut out?” she asked. She suspected nut didn’t mean the same thing where she came from.

  “Means work it out,” he told her, and she nodded. A minute later Daryl Abbot came over. It appeared the British explorer was sharing his skill set, but that was not the reality. Abbot was more of a gentleman explorer, used to having all kinds of support and modern tools within close reach, not to mention camera crews. Edwin, on the other hand, was often dropped off in the middle of nowhere, with some survival gear and a camera. While Abbot was increasingly regretting his decision to come, Edwin was in his element.

  “I suppose we’re ready to go on bloody safari again?” Abbot reluctantly asked his forced partner.

  “That would be ripper,” Edwin said, and grabbed his Bergara rifle. He already had his Webley pistol strapped on. LTC Wilson walked up quickly.

  “You forgot your rifle, Mr. Abbot,” he said and held out the rifle. It was one of the expedition’s four Remington 700 rifles chambered in 30-06. Abbot’s eyes narrowed. “Or did you violate camp rules and forget it on purpose?”

  “Just an oversight,” Abbot said and took the weapon. He held it like someone would hold a live snake. He slipped the sling over one shoulder and his pack over the other. Lisa watched them move off together and hoped they’d survive long enough to get some answers.

  “I hope Edwin doesn’t cap the Limey,” Wilson said. Lisa didn’t say anything, even though she agreed.

  * * *

  Mindy went back to the shared office space for a few hours late in the afternoon. She’d gotten nowhere with the portal, not even gaining any insights. Still, she had gotten some hands-on time with the portal, and she now understood how it took input. She marveled at the device, and became more convinced its origin was other than human.

  She had entered many generic reminders in her computer’s calendar, set to make sure she didn’t leave any of her hacking tools on the machine. She checked the progress of the movement of the equipment she’d requested, and gasped when she saw how much had occurred without her monitoring it. Two of the warehouses she’d specified were unavailable due to rioting, so a lot of the goods she requested were moved to the portal camp. Those supplies appeared to be stowed in the vacuum-formed crates designed to go through the portal.

  Mindy had a few moments of panic when she saw all of this taking place without any input from her. She’d set up a sort of perpetual motion machine, it seemed. She was certain someone should have noticed what was going on, as it was almost the only work occurring, as far as she could see. Maybe a bunch of bored people had grasped onto something to do.

  She used her toolkit from the flash drive to make a few more modifications, hoping it would tamp things down and decrease the chances of anything coming apart while she was busy. It took her almost an hour. As it was getting late, she ate a protein bar from her desk. Cooking anything, even an MRE, in the trailer would have been too disruptive. Once she was done, she stashed the flash drive back in the desk with all the other junk, and headed out.

  It had rained that morning, and now the evening was cool and humid. A fog hovered over the park, making the nearby Central Park West high-rises almost invisible. A distinct smell of smoke was in the air. Mindy noticed there were only a few distant sirens. A few days ago, she would have thought things would have calmed down by now, but she knew that was unlikely after talking to Detective Harper. She thought about the radio stashed in her backpack. Maybe she’d give him a call tonight.

  As she was walking along the trampled, dew-soaked grass, Mindy noticed a solitary figure emerging from the portal dome. She could just make out the cast on the man’s left arm and realized it was Volant, the NSA agent with considerable power. She’d avoided him as much as possible. Her position was tenuous enough without crossing his path. She dropped back behind one of the many generator-powered floodlights scattered around the camp as he walked past the sole dome guard and past a line of trailers until he was out of sight.

  Mindy didn’t know why, but she felt her feet taking her toward the portal dome. Just before she reached it, the guard noticed her, recognized her and lost interest. She walked inside to find it empty. The portal was active, much to her amazement. She glanced back toward the door and the now departed Agent Volant, wondering what he’d been up to. The portal disappeared a second later.

  She spent a few minutes walking around the dome, examining the equipment and surroundings for any sign of use. Nothing was evident. Then she climbed the dais and examined the portal when it came to life. There, too, she found nothing different.

  “What were you doing in here?” she wondered aloud. The quiet hum of cooling fans on the machinery was the only answer. The portal shut off after two minutes, and she sat down on the edge. She yawned as she tried to figure out what was going on and eventually gave up and stared at the dais. Milky, translucent, and as smooth as glass, it was hard to believe it was a force field, like the scientists said. It barely held in check power so immense that its unleashing had killed millions…almost billions. She leaned closer and examined the dimly perceived motions inside. “It’s really beautiful,” she said to the empty dome.

  Mindy wondered if the beauty was from alien aesthetics, or a side effect of the engineering that went into building an intergalactic gateway between worlds. She rolled sideways so she was lying on the surface of the dais, her head propped up on her elbows, and stared into it, amazed she’d never done this before. She could almost imagine the coalescing pattern of deep space nebula, or primordial nurseries full of stars about to be born. She felt her mind swirling like those patterns.

  If you don’t get up, you’re goin
g to fall asleep here, she heard some distant part of her mind say, but she didn’t really care. She hadn’t slept well in days, weeks really. Staring into the portal was ever so relaxing and peaceful, and then, she fell through, into oblivion.

  Mindy was floating between the stars, a being of infinite size and dimensions. She could reach out with a hand and touch a nearby star, or cradle a black hole in her cupped hands, watching it hungrily ingest a world. With a thought, she was half a galaxy away, seeing two far flung empires tearing at each other with inconceivable weapons, laying waste to entire star systems in their rage. Then she was looking down upon a world inhabited by quiet, peaceful living trees that could whisper to their kind a million lightyears away. She saw…everything.

  Something floated out of the infinite toward her. Mindy felt her consciousness focus on it. The shape was indistinct, as if it didn’t quite exist. It would have done a Hollywood special effects studio justice. It seemed to be a cross between a crab and a spider that somehow exuded a sense of being and intelligence, and a symmetry only a real living creature possessed. At the front of its body was a shape she thought of as a head, and on the head were five very human-like eyes, all looking at her. A pair of elongated pincers ended in another set of pincers, and another, and another. Mindy’s mind reeled as she tried to focus on the infinite. She pulled back, in real danger of losing herself in the anomaly.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “We are,” it replied. Somehow, that it spoke English didn’t surprise her, despite her mind screaming that this dream was getting way out of control. Her higher thought processes knew it was much more than a dream. “You have/will/are calling us, we have/will/are here.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. They regarded each other for a moment, then it spoke again.

  “I/We/You recognize now. We have/will/did fix this paradox.” And with blinding speed, one of those infinite pinschers shot out to, and through her brain. Mindy screamed, and her being was torn asunder.

  * * *

  Osgood spent four hours in a conference call carried over military satellite internet links. The civilian internet backbone had failed the previous night. Panic was spreading like wildfire throughout the country. He didn’t notice or care beyond the fact that the internet failure was hampering his efforts to solve the portal problem. He’d talked to an army captain in charge of the tanks guarding Central Park, who bumped him up to a colonel he’d never met, who made a couple calls. An anonymous corporal later delivered a little black box with a power supply and a single Ethernet cable port. When plugged into power and his computer, Osgood could reach out once more. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t really care.

  He’d shared the connection through the local network with Skinner a few hours ago, when the other man complained he was having a similar problem. Figuring they were both working toward the same end, Osgood decided it made sense to share the connection and make his work easier.

  The email he’d been reading included a video recording from one of four teams now working on the portal issue. The video was a cooperative effort from a group at MIT working with interpretive dance students at Julliard who were under lock down because of the crisis. He’d almost sent a pissed off reply until he read the conclusions. Quickly, he went back and started over.

  “Good lord,” he hissed, “they might be onto something!” It involved rhythms and recurring incidents of the number 12, which was the square root of 144. There had to be some significance to that number sequence. He watched and read the entire presentation several times, then grabbed his phone to call the team together. The phone didn’t work. “Damn it,” he cursed and rose to his feet, groaning, his back sore from hours of hunching over the computer. He forced himself into motion, pulling open the door and hobbling down the stairs.

  As he walked toward the other trailer 100 yards away, he became aware of several things at once. One, he heard the near distant and unmistakable sound of helicopters. Two, he heard panicked shouts. Third, he heard several sharp coughing sounds, then a scream. He froze. Another attack?

  Several dozen figures dressed in black rushed toward the portal dome. He started to yell at them just as the lone guard, who’d been looking around for the source of the commotion, noticed them. The guard barked an order and clawed at his sidearm. An instant later he was chopped down by more coughing sounds. Silenced weapons, Osgood realized.

  An alarm sounded, a brutally loud buzzer, and everything descended into total anarchy. Within seconds a pair of helicopters swooped in, Blackhawks, nearly invisible in the dark, and dozens of men streaked down ropes falling from their sides. Dozens of NSA agents opened fire with pistols and rifles.

  Osgood stood in the middle of a lane between rows of trailers for a long moment, as a multisided gun battle began to develop. He froze in place, uncertain what to do, when something hit him in the left shoulder. The impact spun him around, and he landed on the ground, face first. His chin hit the metal grating used for the pathways, and he felt teeth break.

  He lay there for several moments, dimly aware that his left shoulder was numb, thinking someone must have punched him. He had to roll up on his right side, because his left arm didn’t want to work. He looked down and saw a red stain spreading on his white lab coat. I’ve been shot, he realized in stunned amazement.

  Osgood didn’t really know what to do, but he was certain that sitting there on the ground with bullets flying around him wasn’t a good solution, so he struggled to his feet. He found he was more than a little dizzy as he looked around for somewhere to run. Two men in blacked out uniforms ran up to him. There were places on their chests where patches used to be, and both wore intricate harnesses.

  “You know this one?” one of them asked the other.

  “I’m Osgood,” he said quickly, “take me to Volant.” He looked toward Volant’s trailer, out of view behind others. He could hear gunfire over there, too.

  “He’s on the list,” the other said, nodding his head.

  “Right,” the first one said. Osgood looked back at the two men, and into the barrel of a handgun.

  “But…” Osgood started to complain, and then he was no more.

  * * *

  “What do you want us to do?” the army captain demanded. Volant resisted the urge to punch the man. He’d run all the way to the army command center from his trailer after he’d ordered his agents to create a perimeter around their area of the camp. The assault had been completely unexpected. These weren’t his superiors and their people, who were still hours away. Half his force was out at LaGuardia, making sure the airport could handle the inbound transport’s arrival. Like the rest of the city’s services, the airports were barely functioning. Stranded travelers filled the airports, as many airlines were unable to get even one flight off the ground.

  “I already told you,” he said, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching, “this is some rogue element of the government! They don’t have insignia, and we weren’t told they were coming.” The two dozen M1 Abrams battle tanks were his key to holding the compound. But the military was recalcitrant to enter the fray. Their chain of command was broken in many places. Since arriving to provide security, they hadn’t moved.

  “I already told you, we don’t have any orders beyond providing security,” the captain replied. Booming shots and screams echoed from the camp, and Volant cursed. “So, unless you have—”

  The captain didn’t finish the sentence because two tanks further down Fifth Avenue exploded with a thunderous crash. Pieces of steel and armor flashed through the night. Volant heard a ‘thwipping’ sound and felt a sting on his right cheek. He reached up and felt wet blood and a tiny gash. He’d come within a few inches of dying.

  “Is that good enough for you?” he barked at the captain.

  “Get off my fucking tank!” the man yelled and slammed the cupola closed. Volant got off the side of the tank as best as he could manage. It was even harder for a one-handed man to climb down from an eight-
foot-tall tank than it had been to climb up onto it in the first place. But he’d gotten tired of yelling up to the smarmy captain, so there he was.

  As he slid down the side, the whine of the tank’s Honeywell turbine engine coming to life got louder and louder. He sped up his efforts and almost fell when he got to the ground, quickly moving to the side as the tank came to life and the treads started churning the already mangled sidewalk.

  A missile obliterated another tank 75 yards away with the deafening ‘crump!’ of high-order explosives. Volant ran for his life. He saw where that one came from; a flashing rocket contrail linked the dead tank to the roof of a condo along Fifth Avenue. Just above the roof was a barely visible Apache attack chopper.

  He maneuvered through hell as the portal camp turned into a ball of flaming death all around him. His Sig Sauer P220 was in his right hand, and he was dearly missing his left. He’d never been an accomplished single-handed shooter. As he dove into the fray and ran toward the portal dome, he shot targets of opportunity, and hid as bigger groups of unknowns in blacked out uniforms moved about. He had almost reached his objective, where his men would be, when he found he needn’t go any further. His men were all dead, their bodies piled up like a cord of wood.

  “Fuckers,” Volant cursed quietly, then pulled back behind a garbage dumpster next to an office trailer, as a pair of raiders went by. He saw something as they passed. One of the men had neglected to remove the logo from his black camo. “FBI” was clearly visible.

  Thunderous explosions and the roar of turbine engines echoed nearby as the army slugged it out with the attacking helicopters. Volant knew enough about military tactics to know that without support, the tanks faced tough odds against the attack choppers. Cannon shots tore up million-dollar condos all over the richest real estate in the United States. A few sirens sounded. He doubted any would get close until the fighting was over.