Music of the Spheres (27 page)

Glancing off screen once more, Michael said, “All right.
Kenny just finished the final mapping. Check your console. He’s labeled all the
commands for you. One to start the generator. Another to engage the damper.”

“Sounds simple enough,” she said, and then sent her
sight
back out.

After a minute, she
saw
what she had feared.

“They’ve launched two missiles. They really want us dead.”
She did a quick mental calculation. There was most likely less than five
seconds before the missiles impacted with their ship.

…four…

“Kenny,” Michael called out immediately. “Are we clear to
engage the Drive?”

…three…

“Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding muffled. “I labeled it
‘GO.’ ”

…
two
…

Without further prompting, Justine reached her finger toward
the haptic console and tapped the command button and—

…
ONE
…

—the universe shifted.

35

Partial Entry From
Omnipedia :

Subject: Alpha
Centauri :

Alpha Centauri is
a binary star system
averaging 4.37 light years from the Sun. The distance between the two stars
varies during their 79.91 year orbit. A third star, Proxima Centauri, lays
about .21 light years from the Alpha Centauri stars, and the three companions
are sometimes referred to as a triple star system, though it is not determined
whether Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound with Alpha Centauri A and B.

Due to the significant gravitational
effects of the system, no gas giant planets have formed. There is evidence that
one or more minor planetoids or comets may have found their way into the system
at some point, and may be orbiting at the outer rim of the system.

In 2095, the first attempt to travel to
Alpha Centauri failed. Though the light speed ship
Quanta
completed the
journey, a mishap upon arrival in our neighboring system resulted in the
destruction of the vessel. The pilot, Captain Alex Manez, survived in an escape
pod and returned to our system in mid-2103.

Tap for more…

36

Alien Space Port :

Alpha Centauri :

Four Years Later

—
After an eternity
of
drifting in the purgatory between the material world and the unreality of the
quantized state of being, Alex was abruptly ripped back to his corporeal self.

He screamed. The pain tore through his very essence. It was
as if every atom in his body had exploded. He couldn’t take the agony—

—and in the nanosecond before he passed out, he welcomed the
oncoming blanket of oblivion.

∞

Eons later, or moments for all he knew, reality crashed back
in as Alex once more regained consciousness. He could feel a bed under him.
There was a musty smell wafting up, and a natural brightness permeated his
eyelids. He was in his human state.

Disoriented, he tried to sit up, but gentle hands pushed him
back down.

“Easy, now,” a voice whispered in his ear.

Alex tried to speak, but he couldn’t move the muscles in his
jaw to open his mouth. He let out a groan.

“Give yourself some time,” someone said. It was a woman, and
the voice was familiar. Justine.
What is she doing here?

“You’ve been gone for a long time,” she said.

He tried to open his eyes, but they were lidded shut. He
managed to open his mouth finally, and this time was able to croak out a
question. “What happened?”

A second voice, one that Alex recognized right away, spoke.

Yaxche said, “Sky Traveler, you have been on a long journey
in the spirit world. We did not know if you would come back to us, so we
traveled a great distance to find you. Now, you are whole once more.”

Fighting against the sudden nausea that rose up as the blood
pressure in his head increased, Alex forced his eyes open. It took him a moment
to focus, and a few more moments to identify where he was.

He saw Michael, Justine and Yaxche, but his stomach clenched
when he realized they were in a cabin on an unfamiliar space yacht.

“Where am I?”

“The
Ultio,”
said Michael. He reached out and touched
Alex’s shoulder. “How are you, my boy? You had us worried.”

“I’m fine, I think.” Alex’s head was clearing, and he was
able to sit up without feeling dizzy. “What happened?” He needed to know.

“Well,” Michael said, “it seems you fell into some kind of a
fugue state, and your consciousness—Yaxche calls it your dream spirit—was
anchored in Centauri System. Kenny’s theory is there was an energy link between
you and the alien space port. Probably from when you were here last. Naturally,
your Kinemetic consciousness gravitated here.”

Here?
Alex’s stomach flip-flopped. “Alpha Centauri?”
He stared at Michael. “We’re in the space port?”

“Outside of it, actually,” he said. “We can’t figure out how
to get in. You seem very upset, Alex.”

Alex gulped. “Uh … it’s … I mean, the last thing I remember
was being on CS3. Now I’m in another solar system. It’s just unexpected.”

Michael gave him a comforting look. “Trust me, I felt the
same way. I didn’t experience anything when we were quantized. It was a blink
of the eye for us.” He glanced at Justine when he said it.

Justine had a playful smile on her face when she asked Alex,
“Are you thirsty?” and reached for a squeeze pack of orange juice beside her
without looking.

Alex took it when she offered it to him, and as the liquid
hit his tongue he realized he was parched. And starving.

But what had just transpired caused him to look at Justine
in surprise. She did not have her optilink on, nor her harness. Yet she had
passed him the juice without faltering in the least.

“How did you—?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Use your
sight.”

He did. “You’re … a full Kinemat?” he asked in wonder.

“Yes.” A contented smile on her lips, she nodded. “It was
Klaus.” She told him about the hijacking and the experiments.

When she finished her tale, Alex asked her, “You were aware
the entire trip here?”

There was a particularly distant look on her face when she
nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was pretty exciting at first, but
after four years and however many months, well…” She fell silent for a moment,
and there was a reflection of the pain of loneliness on her face.

“Are you able to sleep?” he asked her, wondering if his
insomnia was a typical side-effect.

She shook her head. “No. And that took a while to get used
to.” Justine smiled. “We are the same in every way, except that I am aware during
quantization.”

Alex, like Michael and every other person who had not been
irradiated by charged Kinemet, had no awareness when he was quantized. Again,
that proved to him that he was not fully transformed—he was stuck somewhere
between human and Kinemat. But he was overjoyed that humankind had made the
next step in its chrysalis. Justine had made that transition, though it had
been forced on her by Klaus.

Alex asked, “You all came here just for me?”

“Well,” Justine said. “That, and we were kind of chased out
of Sol System.”

Alex sat up straighter. “What?”

“Are you up to hearing the rest of the story?” she asked.
“We can wait until you’re feeling better.”

Alex shook his head. “Other than needing a sandwich or
something else to eat, I’m good. Tell me everything.”

They did, Justine and Michael taking turns relating
everything that had happened since Alex had shifted out of consciousness, right
up until they arrived in Centauri.

“About seven hours ago, we arrived in orbit around the small
planetoid you described. The one with this system’s star beacon,” Michael said.
“We scanned the area and found the spaceport you told us about. It only took us
about five hours to get here. But now we’re just hovering outside the
structure. We hoped you knew how to get in.”

Alex shook his head.

Michael said, “We’ve just been doing scans of the port. It
looks like the hangar is only half of this structure. There’s most likely some
kind of working and living area on the other side, but we can’t detect any
signs of life. We think we found a bay door to the hangar, but can’t figure out
how to open it.”

Sometime during the last part of the story, Kenny had
arrived. When he spoke, his voice was measured and controlled.

“I managed to rig one of the spectrographic sensors up to
the ship’s computers. And I got a reading from the Centauri star beacon.”

When everyone looked at him blankly, his jaw rippled in
frustration at his inability to get his point across. “You see, when we first
arrived in Alpha Centauri, the beacon
went dormant right away. You know.
Once we had come out of light speed.”

There was an inscrutable look on his face, but then Alex
connected the dots. His eyes widened.

“You were able to link to it now because it’s giving off
electromagnetic waves. That means—”

“—Someone’s coming,” Michael and Justine said in unison.

∞

In a group, the four of them rushed out of the cabin and up
to the bridge where Kenny had installed the sensors. The spectrographic readout
showed an ever-increasing wave signal.

Alex was a little unsteady on his feet, but the food and the
hour of rest had done wonders; physically, he was recovering quickly. His
heart, however, beat in his chest like a hammer.

Over the past few years, Alex had had plenty of time on his
hands to research every aspect of Kinemetic science, and based on the readings
he saw, he quickly calculated that whatever the new arrival to the Centauri
system was, it would enter normal space in less than five minutes.

Where it would arrive in relation to Centauri’s star beacon and
the space dock was unknown. The first time Alex had made the trip here, he’d
appeared a little over twenty-thousand kilometers away—a very short distance in
astronomical terms. The
Ultio
had also arrived at the same location. The
average ion drive could propel a ship that far in a couple of hours, but Alex
didn’t know if it would take the newcomers that long.

He had to tell the others, but couldn’t find his voice. Hope
and fear both warred within him.

“Are they coming from Sol System?” Kenny asked. “Did they
follow us?”

“Impossible,” Michael said in answer, though the crease in
his brow showed that he had a kernel of doubt.

Kenny nodded his agreement. “The only two agencies with full
access to quantum drive schematics are Quantum Resources and NASA. The security
checks I had to go through to get access
after
I had been hired were
exhaustive. There’ve been informational leaks and technological espionage
before, but never on this level.” He glanced at Michael for agreement.

Justine speculated. “Our pursuers had weaponized Kinemet in
their warheads. Maybe they’ve developed the tech on their own.”

Kenny turned back to his monitors. “Any geek in their parents’
basement can figure out how to do that. It took Quantum Resources years to
develop the first functioning quantum drive. Even if these guys managed to mine
their own stash of Kinemet, it would be years before they mastered the
technology.”

Justine countered. “Klaus was able to make a leap ahead of
us, and he was just one guy.”

Frowning, Kenny gave a terse shake of his head. “He had
access to the scroll. I say it’s a ship from
out there.”

“Aliens?” Michael said in a breathless voice, his eyes
filled with wonder.

“Well,” Kenny said as the graph on the monitor spiked, and
then flat-lined, “we’re going to find out very soon.”

∞

If the new arrival was, indeed, the mysterious warship that
had chased the
Ultio
out of Sol System, and they had somehow paralleled
Klaus’s experiment and created another Kinemat, then Alex and his friends were
in trouble.

But the other possibility was potentially worse.

Alex summoned up the courage and, as the four of them stared
at the monitor, he said, “I’m so sorry that I never told you the whole truth.”

At first, no one reacted. It was as if they didn’t
understand a word he had said. But then Michael slowly turned his head toward
Alex.

“What truth?”

Taking a deep breath, Alex took a step off to the side and
looked at the large holoscreen showing a panographic starfield.

He said, “Outside of you and Justine, I’ve never told anyone
about the space port in this system, except for the oversight committee
representative—and I regret telling him that much.”

“You could have told me,” Kenny said, looking hurt. “I had
to find out about this from them.”

Alex flushed. “All I told them was that when I came to this
hangar on my last trip out, its automated systems attached a portable quantum
drive and sent me home. I didn’t want that knowledge to get out, because it
would only lead to more questions that I couldn’t answer.”

“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” Kenny said, but there was only a
hint of reproach in his words.

But it was Michael who guessed the truth. “You made
contact.”

Alex nodded. “Yes.”

Justine and Kenny turned as one, mouths agape. “You met an
alien?” Kenny asked.

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?” Justine asked.

“I mean I don’t know who it was for sure. I didn’t see
anything. When I came out of quantization, I was inside the hangar, and the
machines were installing the drive. The only part that I left out of my story was
the voice message on my console. Once I listened to it, I had to purge it from
the ship’s memory.”

“Which is why you blew the storage banks,” Michael said.

“Yes. I panicked and pushed too hard. But I remember the
message word-for-word.”

“Your eidetic memory,” Kenny said.

“Yes,” Alex said. “And the message was in Mayan.”

Kenny glanced between Alex and Yaxche. “Mayan?”

Alex nodded, and turned on the ship’s translator. He spoke
in Mayan, and the others listened to the English version:

∞

I offer my greetings to you, Sky Traveler. I am Ah Tabai,
a Sentinel of the Collection. Our people have waited for a thousand years for humankind
to walk the path of light, and journey beyond the boundaries of our home system
to join with us.

It saddens me that our reunion must be delayed. I am
afraid that I bring a message of despair.

Your world is in extreme danger.

Almost one thousand of your Earth years ago, the Grace
vanished without a sign of where they went. They were our leaders, our mentors,
our elders and caregivers. An ancient race, they were the ones who built the nexus
of star beacons and infused them with their essence. The Grace existed in the
galaxy eons before any culture Emerged from their systems. There has long been
a legend that the Grace hid the sum of their knowledge in an unknown
pre-Emerging star system.

The Kulsat, once the favored of the Grace and one-time heirs
to their knowledge and wisdom, have turned aggressive and power hungry. When
they’ve become aware of a pre-Emerged system, they’ve scoured them for signs of
the Grace and their legacy. They have not hesitated to destroy everything in
their path to find what the Grace have hidden.

I have sent instructions to the space port computer to affix
a temporary light-speed engine to your ship, and it will send you back to your
system. You must avoid traveling ‘outside of light’ at all costs, and refrain
from returning to this star system, or the Kulsat may sense you.

With luck, your system will remain undetected long enough
so that you may learn to fully Emerge. Only then will you be able to defend
yourselves against the Kulsat.

Travel swiftly, Cousin. Go with Grace.

∞

Once Alex finished his recitation, he turned to face his friends.
They were all stunned.