PLANESHIFTERS, Critical Mass: Book II Chapter 1: Premonition

It was now fully dark outside and the weather was getting progressively worse as she left the bar on foot and started heading back the way she came. She came around the corner by the overpass and paused in front of the side alley at the base of the ramp, digging in her cargo pocket for a hair tie to get her long, blonde hair out of her eyes as the wind picked up in random attacks, sometimes even blowing straight up. She suddenly had the overwhelming feeling that someone was right behind her. Before she could turn around, a gust of wind blew the leather fedora right past her leg where it spun around on its edge, then came to a stop and rested a few feet out in front of her.

She smiled, finally able to breathe again, and continued tying her hair back. "So, where have you been hiding out?" she called out loud, speaking well over the volume of the wind, but still not turning to look at him. No answer. She was overcome with a sudden bad feeling, and started to spin around to see what was wrong with him, when, YANK! Her head was jerked straight back by her pony tail, pulling her momentarily off balance. Why would he do this?

"Hey!" She dug her heel, regaining some posture, then reached back, grabbing the hand he was holding onto her with and pinning it to her head. She breathed in and squatted low, twisting her frame and pivoting on the balls of her feet with his hand trapped. His arm was twisted all the way under, 180 degrees, when she could finally see his face. She gasped when she realized this was not Dagaz!

She stood all the way up, nearly breaking his trapped arm, then took one step back. As his weight bore down on his lead foot, she suddenly released his hand and thrust a powerful kick right into his kneecap, breaking the joint straight back. His scream echoed off the surrounding buildings, but no one was around to hear it. He mumbled something unintelligible, then passed out from the pain, quaking on the ground in his long trench coat. She stood above him, wide eyed, catching her breath and looking all around in a fighting stance until she was sure the threat was contained.

She knelt down over him and started going through his pockets. He was apparently some sort of wealthy topsider. Jackass probably came down here a lot, looking for prostitutes and was going to try to rape her, she figured. She resisted the urge to pummel him further in his sleep, and twisted around to see where that hat of his went; one hand still on his chest.

The sound was unclear, kind of like a hum from deep down inside her head. Everything shook sideways and there was a strange smell. She couldn't control her mouth and briefly had the sensation of biting her tongue. A strange echo rambled on in her head, like several different voices all trying to say the same word, but from different starting points, then everything started to fade into darkness.

He laid on his back gasping for air, the pain in his leg nearly unbearable. The spring loaded cuff-stunner he grabbed her wrist with was designed to shock the victim until turned off by the remote side, which was still in his hand. Struggling hard to get to his feet, he fumbled the transmitter grip and it fell to the ground next to her rapidly convulsing body. He had no intention of turning it off anytime soon, and he smiled smugly through the pain at the way he stole victory from the jaws of certain defeat, but in the blink of an eye, the verdict was changed again.

"James Stanton!" the voice boomed from right above them. He clambered about in a panicked frenzy, and jerked with his whole body so hard that he literally crumbled back to the ground; scrambling to roll onto his back so that he could get a look at who was behind him. The man was wearing black business attire from head to toe, his arm outstretched toward him, holding a TC Contender single shot competition pistol with night sights and a silencer, leveled motionless right between his eyes. Stanton's mouth popped open, but he was unable to make a sound.

She laid in fetal position on the ground, practically underneath the twitching corpse of James Stanton, with strong gusts of wind whipping her hair into her eyes, along with dust and debris from the roadside. She focused her entire will on maintaining consciousness and relaxing her convulsing body by tuning into the pitch of the obnoxious device's debilitating energy the way Thor had taught her. The lone gunman bent down next to them and dug a set of keys out of Stanton's pocket, then walked over to get his car that was left parked just on the other side of the deserted road, and pulled up close to them, popping the trunk.

He scooped up a small laptop computer from inside the car and shut it in a briefcase, along with some paperwork and folders, snatched Stanton's fedora off of the ground beside them, then carelessly tossed it all in the trunk, followed by Stanton, himself. She desperately struggled to do something, realizing the device had paralyzed her completely, except for the violent shaking. The man turned his attention back toward her and drew the long, single shot pistol from his shoulder holster and leveled it directly at her head. His dark eyes were cold as ice as he made momentary eye contact with her, and it was then that she realized this man was a solid professional, that she probably got caught in the middle of something that didn't even concern her, and that he was definitely going to kill her, nonetheless.

Just then, gunfire erupted from off in the direction opposite the bar, from somewhere in the alley. The man in black doubled over and was sent straight backward, losing his gun instantly as huge wounds opened up in several places on his chest, abdomen and neck. She completely lost her focus on the device and was taken over violently by the stunner's charge again. She faded out of consciousness and slipped immediately into a dream she had experienced numerous times throughout her young life….

She is flying over an area of untouched wilderness, somewhere in the mountains of the northwest; feeling free, but on her way to do something, or meet with someone. The feeling becomes more urgent and much more clear, and finally she is able to see her destination: a small cabin on a tundra covered hillside. Focusing in from high above, she can see Thor walking up the hill toward the house and she swoops down to greet him. Just as she reaches him, instead of continuing toward the cabin like he usually does, he turns around to face her.

Large wings sprout outward from behind him and he rises slightly upward off the ground, eyes glowing and arms out to the sides with his palms up. "Thor?" she asked, shakily, as the sky started to darken and the wind kicked up to a strong howl. She could suddenly tell by his energy and the way he was smiling that this wasn't really Thor. She lunged straight up, trying to break away using her wings, but was quickly stopped by a blast of malignant energy from the palms of this doppelganger that sent her reeling over backwards with a sensation that could only be described as concentrated despair.

She was jarred awake to the sensation of falling hard onto the ground, then suddenly realized she was being carried, fireman style, over the shoulder of a huge man as he effortlessly ascended several flights of stairs. Upon reaching the top level, the man, dressed in some sort of official looking uniform, reached out and put his hand on a sensor pad next to a solid steel sliding door. It beeped, then whisked open, revealing a room with about 50 people in it, all of which she realized she knew… All of which were deceased!

She suddenly became very frightened as she gazed into the eyes of one, in particular… her little sister. The five year old girl standing before her had died in her arms when she was a child herself, from complications with a severe flu attack, and now, as she lived and breathed, Kait could tell something was amiss. It was her, down to the very last detail, but her energy was somehow different… She was quite simply someone else. She had a bad feeling about all of this, and she turned to her benefactor: the man who had turned off the stunner and carried her here, only to realize that he was no longer in the room.

She tried to speak, but couldn't. Now she was really scared, and she spun back around to her sister. Involuntarily, she realized she was hovering a few feet from the ground; the sensation of energy permeating the air around her. The hair stood on the back of her neck, and her arms slowly rose out to the sides, palms up. Something was happening as she mentally recorded the looks of awe and terror from everyone in the room. She was becoming more and more detached from them. Within a few seconds, she didn't even recognize her own sister, and she had elevated her pitch to a point well beyond that of anything she had ever imagined. Turning her palms back over toward them, she unloaded. Screams of terror and the crashing sound of lightning and destruction filled the air as she tore the entire room and everyone in it asunder, leaving not so much as a remnant bone to tell their story. In the metal sheathing of the opposite wall, she could hazily make out the reflection of someone she no longer recognized, hovering a few feet above the floor with glowing eyes and wings like a dragon flapping in the air out to her sides.

Gasping for air with her heart racing, she sat straight up in her new bed in the Captain's berth onboard the Phoenix and quickly looked around. She forced her eyes to focus as fast as she could, needing to see what was truly real. Thor was still sleeping soundly by her side, and it appeared everything was just fine, but still she had a hard time shaking the intense and lingering feeling of guilt and shame for what had just transpired, dream or not. She had the first part of this dream many times before, but never the rest. She was unclear what to make of it, and wanted to talk to Thor about it before it faded into obscurity as her dreams often do. She started shaking him, gently but persistently. "Whu… hmmm," he stirred, opening his eyes just slightly, then rubbing one of them. "Are we there yet?"

"Not just yet," she smiled, her middle length dark brown hair tickling his neck as she kissed him gently. "Do you still need more sleep?"

"I've been sleeping for centuries… hell no! I'm good… I hate sleeping!"

"I might be starting to get that way myself," she led in, grabbing his interest as he propped himself up slightly on his side, paying closer attention. "I just had one hell of a dream! You know how when you dream you're someone else, you can't tell it isn't you… it feels like it's you?"

"Yeah, I think so… why? What happened?" Just then, the intercom chirped twice and the voice of Ensign Bjorn Eriksson, their navigator and helmsman resounded from the speaker.

*"Captain, there's something you need to see… You both better get up here as soon as possible!"*

Sky tapped the button pad on the edge of the nightstand, winking at Thor, and called out, "On our way!"

__________

They arrived on the bridge to find Bjorn typing away on multiple screens, obviously more than a little disturbed by something he had found. "Captain…" he nodded, barely looking up from his work, "Commander…" Sky returned the nod, and then looked at Thor and smiled, shrugging.

"Well…?" Thor prodded.

"Okay, let me see if I can break this down in a manner that makes sense at all…" He scratched the top of his head and the back of his neck as he continued to stare at the screen, fishing for the right words.

"Just bloody spit it out, man!" Thor intervened, sarcastically snapping his fingers several times fast, right in the Ensign's face in an effort to break him out of his trance.

"Okay… We have a potential problem. As you know, we have all but escaped the shockwave and the threat of getting caught in the gravitational pull of the singularity, and are cruising at our top speed with the addition of solar sails at very near the speed of light, but almost exactly one hour ago I was studying the singularity, and --"

"Singularity?" Sky asked.

"The black hole. I was studying it closely, getting all kinds of new data! We've never before seen one from this distance, not to mention recording it's birth in the universe, first hand! The data coming in was incredible! I mean, --"

"Bjorn!" Thor yelled.

"Yeah, yeah, right. Sorry. Anyway, I was studying it closely, and about an hour ago, there was an explosion of some kind… a secondary explosion, if you will, deep within the black hole. It was a sizeable burst of energy, and it seemed, at first, to be unidentifiable in nature. I couldn't see a ripple of any kind, or any shockwave strong enough to escape the gravitational field, so I assumed it simply 'imploded,' the way planets and small stars do when they are consumed by a black hole of this magnitude… Then I saw this." He clicked a few buttons and pulled up a screen showing the blast radius of a halo-style shockwave of some kind, surrounding the black hole's center in an almost perfect sphere, but slightly elongated in the shape of an ellipse. Then he showed them another one, this time at least twice the size, strongly exaggerating the ellipse in both directions, as if those sides were accelerating. "This one was taken 20 minutes ago."

Thor looked at Sky, then back at Bjorn, with an increasingly concerned look on his face. "What does this mean," he asked, "and why didn't it show up on a regular scan?"

"What it means is that we are about to get hit from behind by a shockwave composed of concentrated tachyon radiation traveling faster than the speed of light," Bjorn explained. "The reason it didn't show up on any of the regular scans is that tachyon particles are subatomic… if it wasn't for the concentrated nature of this blast, and the fact that I was scanning the singularity when it happened, we would probably not have noticed it until we got blindsided by the shockwave without ever seeing it coming!"

"When what happened?" Thor asked, a little puzzled.

"The blast… It looked, at first, as if something huge was emerging from inside of the black hole! I know this sounds preposterous, but its actual mass, the measureable part, that is, nearly doubled in size immediately before the explosion, as if something absolutely massive was trying to emerge from the other side, and then, BAM! It erupted like another supernova! The difference, this time, was that due to the already extreme gravitational pull of the black hole, the entire explosion was suppressed within the event horizon… that is to say, it was drawn immediately back into the black hole just as soon as it started to explode outward. Sort of an implosion, per se. That's when I noticed the distortion on our view of the surrounding stars, and augmented the scan to include subatomic particles," he added, gesturing at the monitor, still frozen on the last picture of the tachyon shockwave.

Thor slapped him on the shoulder, "Good work! Now what? What's going to happen to us?"

"There's no way to be sure… This sort of thing has never happened in recorded history."

"Best guess…?"

"I've been running some simulations on our solar sails, and it looks to me that the only way to keep from getting run over is to catch the wave. Follow me on this… We already bend the shape of our shield ellipses into solar sails, outside of the heliopause, to combine interstellar winds with our relative speed and enhance our forward momentum, yes? Now picture altering the parameters a little more to shape them into giant spinnakers and drogue chutes, in reverse, to catch as much of the solar halo that is being pushed forward by the tachyon wave, directly from behind, causing us to accelerate drastically just before the main body of tachyon radiation hits us, since, unfortunately, our shields won't catch, stop, or even alter subatomic particles… This should, by all my calculations, give us a fighting chance of not being shredded on a subatomic level by the universe's worst sandstorm, straight from hell itself!"

"Just how fast are we talking about?" Sky probed with a terrified look quickly replacing her light demeanor.

"If we manage to hold together, we will have accelerated to 1.2 times the speed of light," Bjorn reported, matter-of-factly, a nerdish grin playing at the edges of his lips.

"And what about the ramifications of traveling faster than the speed of light, in the first place?" she posed, mainly just for consideration.

"The lesser of two evils," Thor interjected, staring hard at the monitor, then at Bjorn, who half-smiled again and nodded in agreement. "How long until it hits?"

"Two hours," Bjorn said, clicking on the terminal and bringing up an current screen showing a noticeable change in the short time since they had been talking. Sky closed her eyes and just breathed, her mind racing through possible connections to the dream she had not an hour earlier.

"Make all necessary preparations. Meet me back on the bridge in one hour." Thor walked purposefully toward the door, brushing his hand over Sky's on the way by. "I'll tell Erük, I've just got one stop to make first…."

"McGinn?" Sky guessed.

"McGinn."

"I'll get Dr. Astrydd and meet you in the brig… we need to get all nonessential personnel back in cryostasis immediately! Hell, prepping all the chambers will take close to an hour!"

"Do you think we should? Given the nature of the problem?" Thor asked, directing the question slightly more at Bjorn. Sky widened her gaze, shrugged, and exhaled loudly; rolling her eyes in uncertainty, then turning to Bjorn as well.

He stared at Thor for a moment, then at Sky, took a deep breath in and then held it for a long time, tapping on the edge of the monitor as if he was deep in thought. He slowly blew out every last bit of air he had been holding, then cleared his throat to speak…

"Aw, shit, guys… I don't know! I'm just the fucking navigator… damn!" Thor and Sky both burst into a fit of nervous, pent-up laughter, then sprung into action, both heading for the same door.

"Take that as a yes?" Thor nudged Sky playfully. "I'll just meet you back here… I'm going to give McGinn the code to my old quarters, as long as he can handle this!"

"I'll get Astrydd and take care of the others," she smiled.

Copyright 2011 Gunnar C. Garisson, All Rights Reserved