Mac spent the next few days getting his affairs in order and spending time with his children, but he was distracted by Carol’s passing and the upcoming mission. He explained to Serena first that he would have to go on a long trip. She nodded understandingly. She seemed very malleable since her mother passed on. The little blond haired girl, who reminded him so much of Carol, was going to be missed dearly by her father. Although he could not tell her what he was about to do, he called a family meeting to clear the air as much as he could without men in black showing up at the house when he left. Lorraine, Bobby and Serena were sitting in the living room when he came in with a packed duffle bag.
“Mac, are you going to remove the veil of mystery and let us know what’s going on? Ever since the funeral you’ve been keeping a tight lip and moving around this house like a ghost.” Lorraine said.
“Daddy, is everything alright?” Serena asked. She was wringing her little hands together.
“Everything is as good as it can be under the circumstances.” Mac said.
“So, what’s up, Dad?” Bobby asked.
“I’m going on a trip and I may not be back for about a year. Before you say anything, I can’t tell you what I’m about to do, but I can tell you that you all will be protected by General Martin in my absence, and when I see you again it will be a brighter day.” Mac said.
“You can’t tell us where you’re going, but you’re leaving for a year? This sucks.” Bobby said. He stood up with tears in his eyes and ran out the door. Mac’s eyes followed him out of the house, his heart clenching with anxiety. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“Mac, are you sure about this?” Lorraine asked. “Your kids are like my kids, but that’s a long time to be gone so soon after...”
Serena crawled into Lorraine’s lap and buried her crying eyes into her shoulder.
“I have no choice. It may be hard to believe, but this is something Carol requested as her last wish. I love you guys and I’ll be back, but this is something I have to do.I’ll be leaving in the morning.” Mac said.
“You’d better go get Bobby.” Lorraine said.
Mac nodded and walked outside. He did not expect the children to understand without a reasonable explanation, and even though he’d tried to brace himself for this, it was tearing him apart to leave them behind again. Under any other circumstances it would have been easier. Carol would have known what to say to them. She would have been strong for his whole family. Bobby was sitting on the tractor outside their barn staring at the ground when Mac walked up to him. The afternoon air was cool and a storm was approaching as dark clouds formed overhead. Mac could see lightning strikes to the north of his property.
“Looks like we’re gonna’ have another big one.” Mac said. He pointed up at the darkening sky.
“Yeah.” Bobby said.
“I know this isn’t easy, but I’ll be back. You know that, right?”
“I don’t understand why you have to go now. But I guess I never understood your job. I can’t stop you from leaving, but can you at least tell me if this mission is dangerous?” Bobby asked.
“I can tell you I love you and your sister with all my heart and that’s why I have to leave. Take care of Serena, and when I get back everything will be so much better.” Mac said.
“I will, Dad. We’ll miss you.” Bobby said. Mac reached out and gave his little boy a hug.
“Are you sure you’re only twelve? I could have sworn you were going on thirty there for a minute.” Mac said. He chuckled and Bobby broke their embrace, clapping his dad on the shoulder.
“I’ll watch the fort while you’re gone.” Bobby said. He smiled at Mac, and for a second everything was back the way it had been months ago.
The next morning at 5 a.m. Mac received an encrypted text message on his phone. When he touched the hyperlink provided in the message, a biometric scanner application automatically opened on his phone.
“Please raise camera to eye level, hold it an inch from your right eye and then press scan on the screen of your cellular device.” A soft female voice said. Mac raised his phone and stared into the unblinking eye of his camera lens. “Thank you, Colonel MacDonald. You have been cleared for duty and reinstated to your former rank as Colonel in the United States Air Force. Congratulations and welcome back, sir.”
A moment later the text message disappeared from his phone and the scanner application icon that had been on his home screen vanished. The GPS mapping application opened displaying a little blinking light on his screen. Mac began to get excited, and although the circumstances were far from ideal, he still felt twenty years younger, like a conspirator in a great plan. His pulse quickened at the thought of traveling through space. This was why he began working on the special access projects years ago, and now he’d get the chance to do something special, after all those years of wondering what was out there. The location beacon on his phone’s GPS was at the end of a blue line stretching off the screen and as he swiped the screen a few times, following the map, the line diverted to an area in the desert with no main highways or side roads depicted on the map. Mac mounted his cell phone in the window mount, connected the radio application via wireless to his stereo, and put the truck in drive. As he came to the end of his driveway something lightly jabbed him in the hip. When Mac placed his hand on his pocket, he realized the coaster-sized black corbamite disc was the culprit, but he could not remember having put it in his pocket before leaving.
“I thought you were back at the house.” He said to himself. Mac turned up the radio and drove south.
It was difficult to look behind him now. His mind was flooded with the possibilities of what new life he would see in the vast field of space, and the strange and mysterious adventures waiting to be had just around the corner. The more Mac thought about the mission, the more he knew on a spiritual level that this voyage to the stars was meant for him, and every decision in his life had led him here. After about twenty-four hours the GPS map line ended on his phone, so Mac stopped his vehicle beside a gigantic, rotten saguaro cactus in the middle of nowhere. He was running low on gas, had not slept and it was hot. He turned off the engine and waited. For five minutes nothing happened, and Mac began to feel the desert heat beating down on him through the windshield. Sweat broke out on his forehead and he could feel beads of perspiration rising on his forearms.
“What the hell?” Mac said to himself.
He stepped out of his truck and into the afternoon sun of somewhere New Mexico and surveyed the landscape. A tan lizard lay motionless atop a flat rock, sunning itself. For miles around him there was nothing but small heat tolerant plants, rocks and seashells. All was quiet and still, until Mac suddenly saw a one hundred foot wide, two stories tall metallic disk shoot by him like a flash of lightning. It raced away, stopped on a dime, and then flew straight up into the sky. Mac was so surprised by the sudden appearance of the craft that he almost fell over. It came back a moment later and hovered less than fifty yards from him, silent as a ghost. Mac stood with his eyes wide open and his hands clenched in tight sweaty fists as three metallic legs descended from craft to ground with a ramp extended from within. Wary and startled, he steeled himself for whatever was coming next. Mac heard boots hit the ramp and watched a figure in a black flight suit walk toward him. He took a breath and squinted. It was General Richard Martin.
“Welcome to Nowhere, Colonel MacDonald!” The General said. He was grinning with that used car salesman smile once more. “Surprised to see me?”
“A little. You always did know how to make an entrance, though.”
The General walked over to Mac and shook his hand. “You want to take a ride?” He asked.
“Is this the ET craft? The one you told me about earlier?” Mac asked. He was walking around the front, staring wide-eyed.
“No, it’s an alien replica vehicle, just like the one that failed out in deep space with the other crew. Damned shame about them.” The General cocked his head and made a tsk sound with his mouth.
 
; “I can feel your empathy bubbling over. Where’s the real one?” Mac asked.
“Let’s go see. Climb aboard, Colonel
MacDonald. Oh, and welcome back to duty, you were missed.” The General said.
“By who?” Mac asked.
“By me. Hey, before we get started...how are you coping with Carol’s passing?” General Martin asked. He fixed Mac with a serious empathetic gaze.
“I’m ready to get started so I can get back and see my kids.”
“Yeah.” General Martin nodded and looked off toward the dessert. “Whole damned earth is going to look like this soon, it’s irreversible at this point and it might take thousands of years for the biosphere to repair itself. Meantime, we’ll be very much alive and light years from here. You ready to meet the mission team?”
“As ready as ever, when do I get to meet them?” Mac asked.
“In about twenty minutes, let’s go have some fun first. It’s been a rocky time for you and I think you might enjoy what I’ve got to show.” The General extended his arm toward the ramp.
Five minutes later they were soaring inside the ARV high above the ground. The General was flying the craft, diving down through canyons, shooting in between buttes, and grinning like a little kid playing his favorite video game. As the ship performed its amazing stunts, their relative position to the horizon never changed. They both stayed upright even if the craft turned sideways or upside down.
“It’s kind of disorienting, staying still while the ship moves. I feel like I should be experiencing G’s.” Mac said.
“This ship creates its own gravitational field, allowing us to move in any direction with no inertia, or awareness by our bodies that there’s anything going on outside. Your eyes see and the brain registers movement outside, but your body experiences nothing.” The General said. They shot out of a canyon and high into the sky, twisting through the cloudless afternoon as Mac sat perfectly still, admiring the deep blue.
General Martin climbed higher until the darkness of outer space began to surround them.
“Is this thing rated for space travel?” Mac asked.
“You tell me. Take the stick, your turn to fly.” The General said. Mac traded chairs with him and began to pilot the craft as they exited the atmosphere.
“Where to?” Mac asked. The vehicle glided with effortless grace.
“Take her out a little ways and back in again. We need to get you acquainted with the crew soon. They’re an interesting bunch, you’ll see. Best and brightest we could find...that can keep their mouths shut.” General Martin said.
“I’m sure anyone crazy enough to volunteer for this lunacy will work out just fine.” Mac replied. He circled the globe while reading an LED instrument panel that displayed a red dot where they exited the planet and a yellow line followed their path.
The General pressed a small button and the narrow view widened to the entire canopy, allowing them a 360-degree view of space and the beauty of their home planet below them. Mac was over China when he looked out the window to see a cigar-shaped craft floating out to the starboard side of their vehicle. It was a massive ship; Mac figured it must have been a mile long. It was ivory white and glowed radiantly in the darkness.
“What’s that? Is it one of ours?”
“Afraid not, I’m not sure which race operates that one, but we’ve got around fifty-seven races of ET’s checking us out. They’ve been around, well, since the days before the first pyramids were constructed.” The General said.
“Do we have any idea what they want?” Mac asked.
“They all do something different here. Some races have been here trying to protect the planet from us; others study humanity like we’re bugs under glass. The travelers see us as an intergalactic zoo. There are a few that mine precious minerals deep underground to take back home to their planets. We can’t go that deep underground, yet and a war with them would be futile on our part, so we let them help themselves.”
Mac began to see others out there with them as well, but these oddities seemed more organic, like jellyfish in the ocean.
“Those ships down there, the jellyfish-looking craft, are living vehicles that frequently cross between our dimension and the one right next to ours. The pilots are connected to and command their ship through their own conscious will. We’ve only ever caught one of these and that’s because a lightning storm took it down. When the pilot died, the ship began to deteriorate almost immediately. The damned thing stank like a rotting whale in the hot sun, if you can imagine.”
“Up here the whole time?” Mac asked.
“Afraid so, to most of these people we’re a science experiment, sort of a test to see if we’ll figure out our problems before we kill each other off or doom the planet. What puzzles me is why they don’t interfere physically until we start playing with nukes. Each time we launch one that can leave our planet somehow the warheads are disabled and the rockets are dropped to the earth.” The General said.
“Why would they care if a few nukes are dropped?” Mac asked.
“Well they have a vested interest, Mac. Some, but not all of the entities, are mining this planet for resources, like I was saying earlier. There is so much biodiversity on this planet that the inter-dimensional and galactic communities are counting on its survival, but not necessarily ours. So when we fire a nuke, they stop it. After the United States and our neighbors detonated over 400 above ground atomic weapons back in the last half of the previous century, the sheriff got a little pissed, you could say.”
The jellyfish ship began to signal with red, green and blue phosphorescence that rippled through it like lights in a swimming pool.
“Let’s take her in, we’ve been out here long enough and I need to get back to work.” The General said.
“You want the stick back?” Mac asked.
“Nope, this will be you full time in a day or two anyway. You’ll be leading a crew of young engineers and scientists out to Zeta Reticuli.” The General said.
“Kids? You’ve got me babysitting?” Mac asked.
“I swore them in myself. Look, they’re young, bright and crazy as a shit house rat for volunteering to go on probably one of the most hazardous missions in the history of the DSEC space program. They’re prepared to get us there or die trying, and that’s all I expect out of any of my officers. You’ll be fine, don’t worry so much.” The General said.
“My kids are on the line for this mission, Dick.”
“I guess you better make it there and get that star gate working.”
“Where do you want me to land?”
“The coordinates are in the system, just say The Cave.”
“The Cave.” Mac said. His eyebrows raised.
“New destination is the cave as requested Colonel MacDonald. Estimated arrival is fourteen minutes.” The ship’s computer said.
“That’s neat.” Mac said.
“This thing can also make coffee.” The General said.
“Do I get to fly the real thing?”
“Yes you do, today.”
“Does it have the same bells and whistles?”
“More, actually. It’s the most advanced space craft ever made, that we know of. There are probably more out there, but the one you guys are taking to Zeta Reticuli will flip your lid.” The General said.
The two flew on in silence as the craft returned home on autopilot and in less than fifteen minutes, they were darting straight for a cliff face in the middle of the desert. It looked as if they were going to strike when a door wide and tall enough to accommodate the large ship opened instantly and they passed through the opening. The hangar was alive with soldiers in black jumpsuits, moving back and forth as the ARV came to a stop, and lowered her landing gear and ramp.
“Please enjoy the rest of your day, Commander.” The computer said.
“Thanks.” Mac said.
“You’re welcome.” It replied.
“I love this machine. Mac, I almost wish I was going with you on t
his one my friend. Almost.” General Martin said.
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re all broken up about staying back.” Mac replied. Martin chuffed a chiding laugh.
The two walked over to a larger craft than ARV where four fresh, young, good-looking twenty-somethings were standing around, reviewing charts and graphs of quadrants in outer space.
“Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention for a few moments?” General Martin asked. The troupe stopped what they were doing, about faced and saluted the General. They held it until he rolled his eyes and reluctantly saluted back.
“At ease, please.” General Martin said. “This is Colonel MacDonald. He’s your flight commander for the mission to Zeta Reticuli. He was also on the project team that helped discover that life exists on other planets. Until this morning the Colonel was retired.” The General said. A few of the team were nodding in acceptance, but Mac saw these fresh faces and wondered if any of them had ever experienced an uncertain future.
“Good afternoon. I’m Colonel Derrick MacDonald, but you can call me Mac when we’re not standing around any other high-ranking officers. Have any of you ever had combat experience?”
A tall dark haired man stepped forward. “Sir, I’m Lieutenant Jack Sparling, Security Engineer, and I spent four tours in Afghanistan during the poppy field wars. I was infantry with the 9th Marine Regiment out of Camp Lejeune. We were called the Hell Razors, because of all the action we saw and survived, sir.” Jack said.
“Hell Razors, huh? I’ve heard of you guys. There was an officer in your outfit named Major Cataclysm, right?” Mac asked.
“The Major was a part of a spec ops unit operating mostly in the jungles of South America, but yes sir, he started the outfit. I never met him, sir, that was before my time.” Jack said.
Jack had a darker complexion and looked like he might have been of Latino descent. He had a jagged scar running down the right side of his face from ear to chin, disrupting an otherwise handsome face.
“Why’d you volunteer for this mission?” Mac asked.
“I want to save as many people from earth as possible from the inevitable environmental collapse.” He said.
“What about you? I guess we’ll just go around the circle and then I’ll give you my why.” Mac said. He was looking at a pretty blond, standing a little over five feet tall. She had a late summer tan and blue-green eyes that drew him in. Mac thought about Carol and quickly redirected his eyes.
“I’m Lieutenant Kim Cross, Colonel. I’m the team science officer. I graduated with a Master’s of Science degree in biology and marine biology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After graduation, I was head of an oceanic cleanup project in the Pacific Ocean plastic sea. My research team put in place an environmental plastic collection system that separated organic life from inorganic plastic debris, but when funding ran out we had no choice but to abandon the project. General Martin called me three days after we returned to shore and it was pretty much a no brainer. We’re screwed if somebody doesn’t do something. Plus this is an opportunity of a lifetime.” Kim said.
“Agreed, if any of you have been watching the news, you know that they aren’t telling us half of the real danger. This planet only has about five good years left before we begin to starve and die. So, what’s your story, Lieutenant?” Mac asked. He turned his attention to a tall man with a crew cut who resembled Max Headroom. When he spoke Mac detected a faint Bostonian accent.
“Well sir, I’m Neal Jorgenson the team engineering officer. I have advanced degrees from MIT in robotics, and mechanical engineering. I’ve spent the last several years creating biological robots in an underground laboratory for Synden, a military weapons manufacturer and R&D company. I took the mission because who wouldn’t want to rocket out into the freezing cold void of space and risk their life to save the planet they came from?” Neal said. Mac nodded and gave a silent chuckle.
“Ok, fair enough. I’m sure a good time will be had by all.” Mac said.
“Yes sir, I can’t wait to get started.” Neal said. He flushed a little and Mac got the impression that he was a shy man. Neal seemed like the kind of guy adept with numbers and mechanical devices, but bad with people.
“Last but not least, I’m guessing?” Mac said.
He turned his attention to a five foot three brunette with captivating brown eyes, short hair, but not too short, and a flip to her bangs. Her flawless skin hid her age and he guessed that she could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty.
“I’m Stephanie Brandt, I’ll be the ship’s medical officer. I’ve treated soldiers on the front line in four wars. If you get sick, injured or blown up, I can help. I’ve also got a daughter and she’s the reason why I’m going.” Stephanie said. Mac saw that Stephanie was the only one with Captain’s bars on her uniform.
“Great to meet you, Captain. Were you commissioned right out of college or did you bootstrap out of the world of the enlisted?” Mac asked.
“I was commissioned right after graduation. My other friends went on to make large sums of money in plastic surgery or cash only clinics, but I chose borderline poverty to serve my country and never looked back.” Stephanie said.
“That’s the harsh truth, isn’t it? Well, it’s nice to meet all of you. I’m Mac, or Colonel MacDonald in the more formal sense, and I’m just like all of you. I want to get as many people out of earth as possible, before the end comes. I’ve got two children and I’d like to see them reach adulthood. In my prior career I was working on a classified project that gave the General the intelligence he needed to put this little search party together. I also understand that the last mission was a catastrophic failure, but I trust this one will be a success. I’m a damned good pilot, my style is to lead, not boss, and we’ll get along swell as long as everyone is pulling his or her weight. If you are an individual who cannot work on a team, now is the time to leave.” Mac said. His hands were on his hips as he looked from one face to the other. Nobody moved.
“Great!” General Martin shouted. “Let’s go to the briefing room and get you up to speed on what you’re up against, shall we?” General Martin said. He motioned toward a black glass covered room.
The small team followed the General across the hangar, and when he got to the door he put his eyes up to what looked like a View Finder toy bolted to the wall. A green laser scanned his eyes and the door slid back, allowing them access. Mac was first behind the General as they all entered a presentation room, where a triangular projector control was sitting on the center of a long white table.
“Colonel MacDonald, each of your team members has prepared a presentation to fill all of us in on the various aspects of this program. We’re calling it Project Phoenix, because of the mythical bird that sets herself on fire, dies, and is reborn anew from the ashes of her predecessor. Before we do that though, let’s all take a look at what it is we are trying to accomplish.” The General said. He pointed to a suitcase-sized object in the far left corner of the room.
“I’ll bite, what is it?” Mac asked.
“That’s the TSA-2056, or Time Space Anomalizer. As you may remember, colonel, we captured it from a downed spacecraft back in 2056 and it took us two years to figure out what it does. This baby opens a star gate, or an inter-dimensional portal. We’ve been able to attune it to our global positioning satellites and triangulate spots on earth to test it out.” The General said.
He walked over to the device and dragged it to the front of the room. Then he produced a small, thin computer tablet from his left front pants pocket, about the size of a credit card, and began to tap on the tiny screen.
“Just a second, everyone, I’m putting in coordinates for the last place we opened the gate to now. You have to be very careful with this device when you use it. We lost a few good scientists when they miscalculated the longitude for El Segundo and accidentally opened a hole in space. They were sucked through and we never saw them again. “ The General said.
He tapped two mor
e times and a whirring sound, like wind through an open field of grass began to emanate from the device.
“That’s comforting news. How’s it work, General?” Mac asked.
“We have a rough idea. It seems to pull energy in from the field of energy that surrounds us and moves through all life. Time-space, consciousness related energies. The metal used for this device is superior to anything we have on earth, I’m sorry to say. We think, but can’t be sure, that this device has a memory function of some kind. We know there’s an organic life form living within it.We found it by using high resolution scanners, we just can’t get inside it. I believe—and so do some other engineers—that we have a being of higher consciousness contained within this case. What we also believe is that this TSA-2056 will record the journey from here to Zeta Reticuli, and also keep track of any asteroids, planets, or space debris that you avoid along the way. We’ve tested it here on earth and found it to be quite accurate at avoiding freeways and large buildings as the gate opens. We don’t want to be wrong about where this star gate opens either, because if you open it and the doorway is too close to say, Saturn, we risk pulling part of that planet in through the gate, or collapsing both our planet and Saturn in on each other. The point is, we don’t want any of this to go bad, or not as bad as last time anyway. Also, don’t lose the remote.” The General said.
General Martin held a small remote in his hand that was about the size of an electronic car key and pressed a little button. When he did, two golden rings appeared in the room, one in front of the other, and began to rotate one clockwise, the other counterclockwise. The space between the rings wavered until a desert scene appeared before them, and suddenly they were looking out onto a rocky butte-filled scene.
“Where are we, sir?” Jack asked.
“Welcome to Sedona, Arizona. This little device in my hand communicates with the TSA-2056, and whatever the bearer of this remote thinks about is what the doorway opens to.”
“That’s a neat trick.” Kim said.
“It’s no trick. Walk through, go ahead. You won’t get trapped out there, not unless I press this button again. Oh, and make sure you’re on the right side of the star gate before pressing the close button. I almost didn’t mention it, but I figured it would be on me if I didn’t, and you accidentally stranded yourself in an uncharted star system.” General Martin said.
Mac was the first one to go into the desert. The air was hot and arid, the ground covered in rocks, sticks and sea shells, but what was interesting to Mac was a sun painting on the side of a cliff thirty feet from him.
“That sun was painted over nine hundred years ago. We found out when I opened this door the first time and a tour group was going through here talking about these cliff dwellings. I heard enough to learn about that sun over there and then shut the gate before any of them saw me.” General Martin said. “Well, you all need to leave soon and we’ve got some more to talk about. Shall we return to the meeting?”
They stepped back through the doorway and a moment later, the wall materialized once more. It could have all been a dream but for the scorpion that had followed them back through the portal and was now wandering around in the conference room.
CHAPTER 5