Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles)

by Rob Buckman

  “Thank you, sir. I only want to help. I believe in what you’re doing.…”

  Brock had held up his hand again. “However, the rule here is: everyone in the Marine Corps is a rifleman first.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. At any moment we, and you, could come under attack. That means you have to be able to pick up a rifle and defend yourself and your fellow marines.” The girl looked crestfallen.

  “I would like you to set up a cyber division, with the objective to utilize all our resources to the fullest, as you put it. Would you be interested in such a position?”

  “Who would I have to report to … who’d be in charge … sir?” Obviously, she was very smart, and didn’t want to report to, or be ordered around by some dunderhead who didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

  “You would, and you will report to me, or Admiral Drake. We’d give you all the necessary resources you need to do it.”

  “Oh … my … I mean, yes, sir. I’d be very interested in doing that.”

  “Good, but,” Brock paused and looked at her with a stern expression, “to get that, I expect you to qualify as a rifleman first. Do you understand?” He always did like the carrot-and-stick approach.

  “Yes, sir … but … well, I’m not very good with weap—” There was a knock at the door.

  “Come.”

  “Sergeant Rinehart reporting as ordered, Gunny.” Jango came in and saluted in his usual sloppy way. “Hello, Admiral, how have you been?”

  Scott smiled in greeting. “Not bad, considering.”

  “Jango. I’d like you to meet Private, soon to be Junior Lieutenant Akilah Allway. Allway, I’d like you to meet Sergeant Jango Rinehart. The best sniper in the company.”

  “Oh, um … hello, Sergeant.” Allway looked up at him in awe. To most recruits all the “immortals” were living supermen and women.

  “Hello, Allway.” As they shook hands, Allway noticed Jango was missing two fingers of his right hand. Jango looked at Brock over her head and raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Your assignment is to take Private Allway, and teach her how to shoot.”

  “You have to be … wasn’t she supposed to qualify in basic, Gunny?”

  “Yes, she was, and didn’t. But, what she knows about computers is probably a lot more than you know about shooting.”

  Jango let out a snort. “Right … sir,” he added with a smile. “You’ll have to square it away with the LT, sir. She’s expecting me to teach the next class about aircraft maintenance.”

  “I’ll square it away with the LT, Jango. The deal is, she passes, or she stays a private and plays with computers in her spare time.”

  Akilah looked startled. “But … but … what if I can’t—”

  “If Jango can’t teach you how to shoot, no one can.”

  Jango put on his longsuffering look and resettled his beret. “Any chance of transferring to the Navy, Admiral?”

  “Oh, you want to be under the direct command of the group captain … again?”

  “Err … no. She’s still pissed at me for screwing up the field coil input on her bird.”

  “Thought not. So off you two go, and start shooting at something.”

  Allway closed down her minicomp, stood and saluted. Jango didn’t bother and held the door open for her. “Allway.” Startled, she looked up to Scott’s eyes.

  “When you qualify, and I have no doubt you will under Sergeant Rinehart’s tutelage, the first thing you’re going to do is improve our computer security, right?”

  “Oh … yes, sir.” She blushed slightly, suddenly realizing she had hacked into their computers and looked at data she wasn’t supposed to.

  “I have the feeling you guys hate me,” Jango said, laughing as he exited.

  “I need to teach the insubordinate SOB some manners one of these days,” Brock grouched.

  “Cut him some slack. You know he’d be the first one to cover your six if the shit hits the fan.”

  “True. And I sorta like having him around,” Brock laughed.

  “Have Pete check her out. If Jango can teach her to shoot, let’s get her set up in her own department and let’s see what she can do.”

  Brock nodded. “She’s right, you know. We’ve been concentrating on building an army and navy, and overlooked a few things along the way. Sooner or later we’ll have to start actually paying our people, and those who come here to help.”

  “True, but I just don’t want to go down the economic road that leads to dividing people into have and have-not groups. We’ve seen the results of that, back where we started from, and even now in this wonderful brave new world. It occurs to me to wonder just how bad the disparity is, and how close this society is to the breaking point.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that. You think they are?” Brock looked pensive.

  “That’s part of the problem, we just don’t know how bad things really are on the mainland.” Scott’s gaze shifted to the door where Allway had just left. “Maybe our new computer wiz can tell us.”

  * * * * * *

  Sergeant Eric Shultz sat back with his feet up on the desk watching old Bugs Bunny cartoons and trying to imitate Bugs’ accent. He wasn’t doing very well; he kept snorting with laughter. Night watch in the comm shacks was boring to say the least, but orders were orders. Twenty-four/seven was the order of the day, and after the attack on the base, everyone took comm duty seriously. At 22:50, his comm unit came to life with a squeal. Killing the video, his feet hit the floor as he leaned over to check the frequency.

  “Oh, yeah,” he muttered, seeing it was from one of the “tourist” units on the mainland. He sent back an acknowledgement and hit the record button.

  A few second later, a high-pitched squeal issued from the speaker as whoever it was sent a highly encrypted burst transmission that lasted no more than a split second. Shultz tapped his comm unit and scrambled the tech team to get over to the comm shack as quickly as possible. The message could be just a check-in signal, or something else.

  Once the team slowed the recording multiple times, they were even more puzzled than usual. Not only was the message encrypted, but turned out to be in Morse code, making it impossible for anyone aside from the military in New Zealand to read. Scott and Brock read the message and passed it on to Pete and his team, still puzzled by the message’s cryptic nature, and the need for extra security.

  … Hit pay dirt … sending soonest … this will knock your socks off …

  Several days later two giant transport shuttles with an underslung load came in for a gentle landing outside an empty hangar on the far side of the airfield, and placed their cargo on an anti-grav platform. After that, it moved off to the side and landed as Karl Peterson and his R&D team exited the hangar to look at the strange cargo. They shook hands with the “tourists” and welcomed them home. Then they hurriedly moved the platform inside the hangar and sealed the doors. After a quick debriefing, Karl sent the search team off for some well deserved R&R while his people stripped the tarps off the strange-looking object. On the platform in front of them lay two nondescript lengths of tubing, each twenty feet in diameter and fifty feet long. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about them, unless you counted their gaudy carnival colors. That was, until one of the team walked into the end of one tube and appeared to step out the end of the second tube twenty feet away, seemingly at the same time he stepped in.

  “What the hell!” came out of more than one mouth.

  What just happened couldn’t be happening, yet no matter how many times they did this, or where they moved the tubes, the same thing happened. It was mindboggling to see the foot and leg of one person entering the tube on one side of the hangar and see his other leg and the rest of his body exiting the other tube on the other side of the hangar a split second later. The only way to stop it was by stepping in and not moving. To anyone entering, it looked as if they were standing in a fifty-foot-long tube, yet by standing someone at each end, one co
uld see the person back and front no more than a foot in front of them at the same time.

  “All right people, listen up.” Karl scratched his head, something he’d been doing a lot of in the past few hours. “First, I want these tubes examined inside and out. I want them photographed, videotaped, scanned, and gone over with a very fine-toothed comb.” He looked around the group. “But,” he said, holding up one finger, “no one is to use any active methods, passive only, and that includes your fingers, nose, and eyes. Look and note everything you see, feel, or smell.” They all nodded.

  “Lick the damn thing if you have to. We have no idea what we’re dealing with here, and I don’t want to damage them, or you, in any way. So be careful.”

  He dismissed them and they started work, all of them whispering into headset microphones while head-mounted cameras recorded their every move. After six hours, with everyone going over the same spots as everyone else, they all came to the same conclusion: the tubes themselves had nothing to do with the effect; they were just that, tubes, poorly attached to the end rings with pop rivets. Karl scratched his head again, feeling as if a bald spot had started from all the scratching he was doing. He walked around the tubes again and examined the steel ring mounted at the end of one tube. According to the laws of physics he knew, these rings couldn’t be doing what they obviously did. When he went into cold sleep with the others, he was nothing but a lowly E-5, but after several session under the induction learning hood to brush up on his speciallity, they’d promoted him. He was now a lieutentant and in charge of a motly crew of R&D techs weenies.

  By a quick hand count, all agreed that removing the rings from the tubes was the best course of action. With exquisite care, they ground off the heads of the pop rivets and removed the gaudy-colored tubes until only the four rings stood on a platform by themselves, each on a separate dolly. At one point, Karl stood with his feet on the platform and leaned inside, peering around the outside edge of one ring. Holding on to the edge, he lifted his foot and wiggled it inside the ring, seeing an identical foot wiggling at him from the other edge of the other ring ten feet away. This got a laugh for his team, since he looked funny stretched between two points like some magician’s magic trick. It was all a little disconcerting, so he stopped: it was like having telescopic vision in one eye and normal vision in the other.

  Again the team went over the rings, examining every square inch, and this time came up with two facts, plus disorientation since someone stepped into, but not through one of the rings. The main item they discovered was that the ring at each end of the tube was in fact two carefully machined sets of rings held tightly together by some unknown means. Apparently, each set was mated with an identical pair by some as-yet unknown effect. To keep things straight, someone spray-painted numbers on each ring so they knew, at least without going through, which pair matched. They also discovered you could only walk through a pair of rings one way to cross between one side of the hangar and the other. If you walked through the wrong way, you simply stepped through with no displacement. Over and over again, the team watched in fascination as someone stepped into or through one ring, and exited the other even when set at right angles to each other. Even facing the rings toward each other didn’t have any effect on transfer, or translation.

  It was a little unsettling to see yourself coming and going at the same time, so they quickly pointed the ends away from each other. Looking into the open end, it looked as if they’d just stepped in one and out the other. From the edge, they stepped in and vanished at one end and stepped out the other, with no discernible time lag between.

  “My eyes tell me its happening,” Sandra commented, “but my brain can’t accept it.” She shook her head.

  “Sandra’s right, Karl,” Kim muttered, also scratching his head in puzzlement. “We don’t even have the basic notion of the physics behind this … whatever it is. From what we know, this effect is impossible!”

  “Not impossible, since we can see it works, it’s just something we don’t understand … yet,” Karl said. “Let’s go over them again, people,” he said with a sigh. This elicited a groan from his team, but they went to work.

  The second inspection didn’t reveal how each set of rings was held together, unless it was magnetic, and other than a flush-mounted plate, there didn’t seem to be any control mechanism. Karl carefully inspected the plates set on each side, peering at the six recessed, stainless, Allen head screws, wondering if he dared remove them. In the end, he sat down with a cup of coffee and contemplated the enigma before him. The team meanwhile moved the rings into different corners of the hangar and played a game of tag, like a bunch of school kids with a new toy. In the end, they all ended up sitting with Karl, and let the implications of the discovery sink in.

  “That is definitely weird.”

  “The question is, can we duplicate it?” Julia, a shapely blonde who usually ran a mortar platoon, asked this.

  Karl started to scratch his head again, then stopped, pulling his earlobe instead, deciding to irritate another part of his anatomy for a change. “Yeah, I’d hate to destroy one of these rings trying to learn the secret, and find out we can’t.”

  “I agree,” Julia said. “But what bothers me is why they didn’t produce more of these. It would make one hell of a transport system. You step in at New York, and step out in Paris, or anywhere else for that matter. So why just a carny ride?”

  “You’ve got me there,” Karl sighed. “Of course, that’s if the effect works over long distances. Maybe that’s why they never mass produced it. But it’s something we should look into.”

  “We should move one set of rings to some other place outside the camp,” Julia said. “Say, starting at a distance of half a mile and moving it farther out. Maybe there’s a limit on how far this effect goes.” Kim suggested.

  “Right. It could be the reason they never duplicated it.” Karl mused.

  He sighed again. “All right, boys and girls. Wrap it in something and let’s try it out.”

  They did. Mounting one set of rings on the back of a tractor-trailer rig, they drove it half a mile from camp. Several of the group walked back and forth between the rings, with no change in the effect. Over the next day, they moved it farther and farther away, in the end, stopping at twenty-five miles. The effect was the same; no matter what was between the rings, like a mountain, or lower down, in a deep gully. In the end they drove back no wiser than before. Apparently distance had little or no effect on the rings.

  “Did anyone manage to come up with any more information on this, such as the inventor’s name?” Annette asked.

  Karl looked at the group at large, seeing them shake their heads. “Anything else, anything at all?”

  “I found this,” Kim said, stepping forward. He handed Karl a blown-up photo that showed the name and a group of numbers.

  “This is embossed, or maybe forged right into the metal,” Karl murmured, examining the photo closely, “so it might be a manufacturer’s name.” He looked into the distance for a moment, thinking. “Kim-san, get on the global net and see what you can come up with,” he ordered, turning to the remainder of the group. “Take a break, people, I’ll see you back here in six hours, Kim might have something by then. In the meantime, see if you can come up with how we can examine these rings without breaking them.”

  Kim spent the first three hours tracking down false leads before finding one that proved useful. He queried the shipping department’s computer and came up with the right part number, the quantity ordered, that led to a produce wholesaler, the other a manufacturing company that used it as storage space for computer files. That left two possible leads, but he needed another hour before he gave up on the first and skipped to the second. Both were one-man electronic businesses of some unknown purpose, and a check of business licenses gave him the second’s home address.

  Ever suspicious, Kim checked behind him, then made sure nothing visible on the screen might make someone looking at the videophone moni
tor suspicious. Then he dialed the number. An older man answered, greeting him with a warm smile. It didn’t take long to determine that he’d been the owner of the enterprise, and that he was a jobber for a large electronics company, picking up their overflow. Kim asked if he knew anything about the prior renters, and got some surprising answers. He thanked the man and started the search for the missing renter, running into a brick wall each time. On face value, it was as if he’d dropped off the face of the earth.

  “So what did you find out?” was Karl’s first question when Kim walked back into the hangar after two hours’ sleep.

  Kim yawned and walked over to grab a cup of coffee before answering. “The last person to rent the place found a lot of equipment inside the building … valuable equipment. The leasing company told him they’d been holding it against the unpaid rent.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “According to the records, and what this guy said, no more than ten years ago.”