Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)
Read Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) Online
Authors: Scott Rhine
Map
of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere
Map
of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere
Chapter 2 – Robert’s Rules of Order
Chapter 4 – Asking the Impossible
Chapter 6 – A Perfect Summer Day
Chapter 8 – An Unholy Alliance
Chapter 10 – Motivation and Meteors
Chapter 12 – A Run to the Corner
Store
Chapter 13 – Truth and Consequences
Chapter 14 – In Search of Sasquatch
Chapter 16 – Approaching Oblivion
Chapter 17 – Evidence of Things Not
Seen
Chapter 19 – The Labyrinth from Above
Chapter 20 – Zeus’ Giant Eagle
Chapter 21 – Aliases to Protect the
Innocent
Chapter 26 – Gilligan and Gibraltar
Chapter 27 – Wish You Were Here
Chapter 29 – Plato and the Secrets of
the Lost Pandas
Chapter 30 – The Language of Patience
Chapter 32 – The Journey of a
Thousand Kilometers
Chapter 36 – Busy Little Elves
Chapter 38 – Who Watches the Watchers
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2013 Scott Rhine
To my wife, Tammy, who
cuts to the heart of the human interaction.
Thanks also to my editors,
Katy Sozaeva and Weston Kincade, and my beta readers: Ed Hoornaert and Kelly
Hawkins.
Cover art by
http://www.thecovercounts.com
Auckland
–
Dr. Ahunga O Te Ika Whenau Whanganui, a
Maori physician who likes sports. Genetic design and Anomaly Detection
talents. Has damaged hemoglobin, which causes a blue tinge to his skin. Married
to Pratibha.
Herk
– Rafael Herkemer. A Polish bomb technician for the UN and head of
security. Trained in underwater rescue and firefighting. Body Override talent.
Married to Risa.
Johnny
– Giancarlo Bartilucci, an Italian cook. Food Synthesis talent. Dating
Rachael.
Lou
– Captain Kai Llewellyn, a handsome Welsh pilot who acquired Strange Attractors
and Ideal Planets. Blinded when the ship passed too close to a sun. Since
marrying Mercy, he has developed the talent to sense large gravity wells.
Mercy
– born in Brazil, dual US citizen. A childhood friend of Red’s. She placed
her large inheritance into a charity fund to educate third-world girls in
science, technology, and math. Gravity Generation and Icarus Field talents.
Married to Lou. Nicknamed ‘Mother Hen’ because she raises chickens and nags
people about safety.
Oleander
– Specialist Oleander Dahlstrom. Experienced Norwegian space hand who did
jail time for bombing bank offices but once rescued Red’s aunt and uncle.
Out-of-body scout.
Nadia
– Russian plasma physics and power expert, formerly from the Kaguya
team. Trained in Buckyball batteries and Zero-Point Energy theory. Dating Park.
Park
– South Korean propulsion specialist. Gravity and
Calabi-Yau string
theory talents. Dating Nadia.
Pratibha
– A woman from India who specializes in economic flow models and space
colonies. Mayor of Garden Hollow, and married to Auckland.
Rachael
– Lieutenant Rachael Eliezer. Israeli whose family builds bomb shelters.
Expert in water purification, sustainability, air purification. Dating Johnny.
Red
– Miracle Redemption “Red” Zeiss. A US math prodigy and heir to the Fortune
Aerospace billions. An aggressive pilot with Index, Pattern Simplification,
Collective Unconscious, Empathy, and Quantum Computing talents. Married to
Zeiss.
Risa
– Sonrisa Belinda De Gama Herkemer. Panamanian expert in solar power and
space construction, Herk’s wife, and Red’s former roommate. Alien structural
engineering talent: superdense ice and algae acrylics.
Sensei
– The alien who taught humanity their twenty-seven ideas and administered
their test.
Snowflake
– Alien AI computer that runs the giant spaceship. Takes commands from
the planning committee and has particularly bonded with Mercy.
Sojiro
– Japanese manga artist, computer programmer, and alien-interfaces
expert. Mind-machine Interface and Red Giant Locator talent.
Toby
– Dr. Tobias Baatjies, an Afrikaner botanist and organic chemist who recently
pair-bonded with Yvette. Protein Folding and Nanomedicine Synthesis talents.
Yuki
– Female technician from Mori electronics and a spy for the Mori family.
Gravity sensor trained.
Yvette
–Yvette Chenonceau, a psychologist and nurse who specializes in
high-risk pregnancies. Ethics and Empathy talents.
Zeiss
– Commander Conrad Zeiss, alias Z. Tall and quiet Swiss astrophysicist
and navigator. His talents include Quantum Computing, Rubber Sheet Theory, and
multi-species Collective Unconscious. Married to Red.
Chapter 1 – Stroke of
Genius
One moment Commander Zeiss was trying to improve the
precision of the most difficult calculation of his life, and the next, he was
staring at a computer stylus as it rolled in slow motion onto the floor. Sharp,
cold pain stabbed near his right ear. Had he smashed into something while playing
hockey? No. He wore a rumpled flight suit with a Swiss flag, and he sat on a
mattress that was strapped to the floor in a low-gravity bedroom. The narrow
band of windows had been silvered to block out external light, so they
resembled white stripes on a highway.
A beautiful blonde, covered only by
his favorite Tasmanian Devil T-shirt, glanced at him in concern from the other
side of the bed. A prodigy, she had been the youngest woman to graduate the UN astronaut
program. Thirty-one centimeters shorter than him, she wore the same style of unbreakable
tungsten carbide wedding band on her finger as he did. They were married.
Damn,
I’m lucky.
She had joined him in mind and body more times that he could
count, but now he couldn’t remember her name.
“Conrad, why did you drop your stylus?”
she asked.
His right hand tingled.
Heart
attack?
He’d been trying to write something important, the last gift of his
computation trance—something the planners needed to know about the thermal
properties of large bodies of water. Instead, his internal dam had burst,
flooding the metaphorical town beneath. When no sound came from his open mouth,
she hit the red button on the badge clipped to his chest.
He tried to put both arms around
her, but only the left moved. To make up for the lack, he squeezed twice as
hard. He gazed into her face, and her eyes filled his horizon. If these were
his last moments, he wanted to shared them with her, whatever her name was. He recalled
this was their first Christmas day aboard
Sanctuary
, 272 days into their
space mission. Why couldn’t he remember a simple name?
A dark-skinned man in rugby uniform
pajamas bounced through the door to his bedroom—the doctor from Auckland. His skin had a blue-gray tinge due to hemoglobin damage. The decontamination area
had been too cold when he’d reentered the ship. Zeiss could recall the man’s
scores from the academy but not his own wife’s name.
“I told you, no more!” Auckland scolded the woman.
“He felt better,” insisted the
beautiful woman with tears in her enormous, blue eyes.
When the doctor tried to look into his
eyes to gauge the pupils’ responses, Zeiss leaned sideways to maintain eye contact
with the terrified woman.
Her voice broke as she said, “Oh God,
I’m sorry. I made him do it. You have to help him.”
Auckland already had his black
satchel open. Zeiss felt tiny pills being tucked between his lips and tasted
orange—baby aspirin. He moved his mouth and swallowed.
Next, the doctor put his head under
Zeiss’ dead, right arm and lifted. In the low gravity, one-tenth Earth standard,
lifting was easy but moving eighty-five kilos would still take work. “Red, we
need to get him to the scanner.” When she blinked in confusion, he clarified in
short bursts. “Sick bay. Now. Help me.”
She tucked under his left arm, and
the pair aimed him toward the open, oval door.
Zeiss helped, but his legs were
jerky and uncoordinated. Auckland had called her Red. That was her nickname,
not her real one, the personal one only the two of them shared.
The circular central chamber had no
gravity, but a surplus of doors: the storage room, four bedrooms, sick bay, the
dining hall, an airlock to the patio, and a round tunnel to the shower level. They
were adjusting to the weightlessness of the dimly lit chamber when a brown-haired
woman wrapped in a sheet poked her head out of one of the other oval doors. The
woman’s right hand was bandaged. “Red, you’re radiating stress so loud you woke
me up. Is there a problem?”
Zeiss could sense the newcomer’s gravity
talent as a blue halo—no, there were two talents. Pregnant and happy, Mercy was
broadcasting a soothing contentment like the blooms of her marigolds. Though
he’d never seen her in a dress, jewelry, or makeup, the brown-haired engineer had
a purity that made her shine. Mercy had been his wife’s friend from childhood.
Why could he remember everyone else’s name?
Red stepped between Mercy and the
men. With a tremor in her voice, his wife ordered, “Go back to bed. I’ll tell
you tomorrow.”
Together, the men launched across the
heart of the command saucer, called Olympus, toward the medical bay. Below,
Zeiss noted the snowflake-shaped cluster of control beds was empty. The hoods
in the center of the pattern reminded him of old-style hair dryers. Once they
landed on the far side, the doctor slapped a strip of tape attached to Zeiss’
wrist onto the wall. The alien-made, Velcro-like substance anchored them both
momentarily and prevented a ricochet. Dirt smudges formed a starburst pattern
on the wall from so many landings here, similar to dirty fingerprints around a
light switch.
When Mercy refused to budge, Red
shaded the truth. “Don’t tell anyone, but Z overdid the calculations a little
on the interface.” She jerked her head toward the snowflake contraption in the middle
of the room. She whispered so she wouldn’t wake the crew members sleeping in
adjoining rooms.
Mercy nodded sympathetically because
she was a workaholic and pushed that same limit regularly. “Auckland is giving
him the usual speech and banning him from work for a day?”
Red held a finger to her lips and
leapt over to the now-open medical lab door. He could hear the impact of her
bare feet on the lintel. Slapping her anchor strap over the top of the doorframe,
she swung into the microgravity zone like a swashbuckler.
By the time Red entered sick bay
and closed the door behind her, Zeiss was sprawled on the exam bed. Auckland injected him with some kind of nanodrug and fussed over an instrument panel to
monitor the diffusion of the tracers through his system. To distract her during
the agonizing wait, Zeiss grabbed her right hand with his left. He tried to
recall a clue to his wife’s name. Mercy would know it because she was a
childhood friend. Mercy’s father had run the Brazilian launch facility at Alcantara.
Red’s mother, Jezebel, had run Fortune Aerospace. After several miscarriages
from a multi-Talented mother, the daughter’s birth had been heralded as a
miracle. He eventually found his lover’s name in the fog—Miracle, Mira for
short. He repeated her name like a mantra. If he didn’t forget the name, he
wouldn’t lose her.
She asked, “Is it mental backlash like
the Alcantara bombing or the sonar attack on his whales a few years ago?”
All of the crew members had read
portions of the twenty-seven pages that aliens had given Earth to guide it to the
next level of civilization. Each page changed the brain structure, sometimes in
dramatic or harmful ways. Zeiss had absorbed more of the Collective Unconscious
page than any other human. Although he could feel the pressure of any
collection of intelligent beings, he was most comfortable around infants, dolphins,
and whales. Because of this talent, the violent deaths of beings he’d mentally linked
with hit him like a physical blow. His personal theory was that the aliens had
this same disadvantage, which explained their caution when dealing with other
races.
The doctor shook his head as he
continued turning dials and squinting at the results.
“Is it Fortune syndrome?” Red asked
because the degenerative neurological disorder had claimed her parents. Between
the link and their Quantum Computing talent, he and his wife could borrow brain
power from anyone in a ten-meter radius. However, the human mind wasn’t built
for the stress of prolonged high-gamma brain waves. In Zeiss’ lectures at Sirius Academy, he’d called it “burning the candle at both ends.”
“TIA—a transient ischemic attack,
which is a minor stroke,” whispered the doctor. “He still hadn’t recovered from
the last time you pushed yourselves to plot a course for this ship. All this
calcium he’s taking for the low gravity isn’t helping his blood pressure,
either.”
“We’re the
planners
,” she
stressed, gesturing toward the corresponding six arms of the snowflake. “The
six of us are the only ones who can direct this craft. Z is the navigator. He
has to do his job before the rest of us can do anything.”
“Each brain injury is cumulative,
like with carpal tunnel. If the typist doesn’t rest enough or ice, the repeated
swelling causes nerve damage. The worst cases don’t listen until they start
dropping things. I’ll do what I can to minimize the trauma, but he may need
therapy, months of it. Meanwhile, absolutely no quantum calculations—
none
—not
even borrowing him for yours.”
“I promise.”
“I mean it. This sort of event is a
warning, like a tremor before the big quake. About a third of these patients
have the big one within six months. Anticoagulants will help him, but then any
injury could make him bleed out.”
She hyperventilated a little and
sobbed into Zeiss’ chest while he rubbed her back. Within ten minutes, he was
able to say “Shh” to soothe her. A few minutes later, he croaked, “If your nose
drips on my uniform, I’ll have to do laundry again.” She didn’t do many housekeeping
chores.
Her relief at his coherent speech spawned
another wave of weeping, and her unbound hair kept dragging across his face. It
was like being greeted by a pet spaniel after a month’s absence. He couldn’t
tell her to stop because being able to hold her again with both arms felt too
good.
By the time her tears tapered off, the
sedatives had begun to numb him. Eyes closed, he floated at peace, registering
the buzz of voices but not caring.
****
Red said, “Auckland, no one can
know what happened to him, not until after we make the next jump.”
“He’s the bloody commander. They
have to know.” The doctor rarely cursed and never in front of women.
“You said it was
minor
, and
the team has already agreed to the mission.”
“What?”
“Look, this is just the sort of
thing that the runaway-home coalition will seize on to force us back to Earth
as failures.”
“I don’t know. If we weren’t
stranded out here, he’d be bounced from the space program.”
“Technically, your injuries put you
off active duty, too. If we don’t pass the aliens’ test, Z is going to prison for
the rest of his life for stealing the shuttle, and our race will be isolated
from ever meeting starfaring races again. Do you really want that?”
“If it means he lives, I might.”
“Give us a few days,” Red pleaded. “Let
him choose. You owe us that much.”
The doctor kneaded the tense
muscles of his own neck. “We have a ship’s meeting tomorrow. He can’t work that
soon.”
“I’ll chair the meeting and tell
everyone he’s sleeping off another migraine from overuse of the Snowflake interface.”
“If he has another episode, we’ll
have to get him to the stasis chamber at the center of the saucer. That means he’ll
need to live up here until he’s out of danger, and we’ll need to clear the
chamber of its current occupant.”
“I’ll arrange it,” she insisted.
From the control room, Red
double-checked all her husband’s recommendations. The ship used water both to
propel them through space and to run the two-kilometer ecosphere. Every drop
wasted in unnecessary jumps and maneuvers meant less for them to live on. Zeiss
had found a way to save another 10.3 percent on the fuel. His new plan
maximized their chances, but it was still a gamble. If anything went wrong,
they could all die. No wonder her husband’s short, sandy hair was growing gray
at the temples. The phenomenon reminded her of how rapidly presidents of
countries aged their first year in office.
She was triple-checking when Captain
Llewellyn, known to everyone by his call
sign
Lou, floated into the command chamber. The pilot’s uniform had
actually been ironed for a change. He looked like a well-toned G.I. Joe doll,
reminding her of the crush she’d had on him at the academy. His golden beard wasn’t
strictly regulation, but all the females, plus the gay male planner, had
lobbied for him to be allowed to keep it. He may have been Welsh, but little
flecks of red and his swagger pointed to a Viking in the woodpile.
Because Lou’s optic nerves had been
burned out, he couldn’t see the black circles under her eyes. The current
resident of the stasis chamber, Toby, had masterminded the ‘accident’ by
switching the ship’s exit point too close to a sun and preventing him from
leaving the alien interface. Oddly enough, the horrible experience had improved
Lou’s personality, making him more sympathetic and less superficial. Red tried
to sound chipper as she said, “Looking sharp,
Lou
! You’re up early.”
He whispered, “Can you do me a
favor?”
His suave British accent made her
want to say ‘yes.’ Instead Red rolled her eyes. “No, I am not changing the
ship’s name from
Sanctuary
to
Pellucidar
.” Mercy was reading
aloud the pulp novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was about Tarzan in a savage
world inside the hollow interior of the Earth. Lou had pointed out repeatedly
that the name fit the alien-built spaceship perfectly. The aliens had crafted a
two-kilometer diameter pocket under the fabric of normal space and filled it
with dirt, water, and every type of plant the seventeen human astronauts would
need to support themselves. They could see the vast, green interior from the
control room’s ‘overhead’ windows.
“I’m over that,” Lou explained. “This
is serious. Mercy plans out every minute and lays my clothes out for me like
I’m three.”
Red smiled at the anal-retentive
display of affection. “Her mother did that for her father. He was blue-green
color blind and didn’t like wearing a watch.”