Oh, Harry…what have you gotten yourself mixed up in now? Time will tell, I reckon – but doesn’t it always? Time, I mean. You know, String Theory and all that hooey.

Time for tea? Yes, I think a stiff EBT would work? Perhaps a scone, as well. Clotted cream and strawberries come to mind, taking a break from walking the Cotswold Trail.

Music? Of course. No Moodies today, Stephen, but a few Tears for Fears might be in order. Swords and Knives, for a start? And some Advice for the Young at Heart might be appropriate, too, at least for Harry. But in the end let’s avoid clichés (Everybody Wants to Rule the World) and get to the heart of the matter, because when all is said and done everything going on here is Elemental.

We left off with the Navy P-8 Poseidon (Kestrel) disappearing, and Spudz was still AWOL, wasn’t he? So, onward – into the fog.

5.6

“Amaranth, Dover, do you have a visual on Kestrel?”

Turner picked up the mic and scanned the misty horizon for signs of an impact or other debris of the surface, but came up with nothing. “Negative, Dover. No contact here.”

“Understood. Ah, Amaranth, request you come to 0-5-5 degrees and check the area between your present location to about thirty miles out on that bearing. Kestrel just dropped off our radar and is not responding to hails.”

“Amaranth to 0-5-5 degrees. Want us to stay on this frequency?”

“Amaranth, Dover, affirmative. Two Guard 16s will be on station in 0-5 minutes, and a CAP of 22s will be overhead in ten plus. The 22s are from the 27^th out of Langley, call sign for their lead will be Falcon One. E-3 is already on station, and all COMMs between you and the Guard units will relay through them.”

“Dover, Amaranth, understood,” Turner said. “Any idea what Kestrel was responding to?”

“A UAP dropping down from extreme altitude. That’s about all we have right now.”

“Understood.” Turner looked at Valdez and sighed. “Go get Callahan, okay?”

“Aye, Chief.”

Turner sighed as he picked up the admiral’s Steiner’s and swept the horizon again, yet once he learned that a UAP was involved he knew all bets were off the table. And…there was still that sub out there, too. If it was somehow involved there’d be hell to pay – and sure enough, a few minutes later he picked up chatter between the AWACs jet somewhere up there above the clouds and a replacement P-8 screaming north out of NAS Jacksonville, getting ready to carpet the area with sonobuoys. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before a couple of fast attack subs showed up in the area, too; Norfolk was just a few hours away for those fast attack subs, and with a sub-hunter allegedly down in the vicinity of a potentially hostile foreign adversary’s sub – well, that meant the red lights and sirens were blaring inside the Pentagon’s E-ring.

He heard Valdez and Callahan coming up the steps – and predictably just as the admiral’s Inmarsat phone started chirping – and sure enough, it was the Secretary of Defense on the other end. Turner reached for the boxy little phone and activated the encryption sequence. “Turner here,” Jim said, putting the conversation on the speaker – just in case.

“Turner? Where’s Admiral MacKenzie?”

Callahan stepped forward and held up his hand, then took the phone from Turner.

“He’s unavailable right now,” Callahan said, “and will be for some time.”

“What?” Sec Def Patrick Mahoney barked. “Who the hell am I talking to?”

“Callahan.”

There was a pause, presumably while Mahoney skimmed through the list of people briefed in on Amaranth’s mission, code named Vine. “Callahan, you say? You’re not on the list, Callahan.”

“MacKenzie brought me along. He’ll explain when he gets off the toilet.”

“The toilet? What kind of turnip truck do you think I just fell off of, Mister Callahan?”

“Not sure I care,” Callahan barked back. “What I can tell you is nothing unexpected is going on out here.”

“Excuse me?” SecDef said, now more than a little perturbed. “Where’s Turner? Give me Turner, now!”

Turner took the phone from Harry – so Callahan started scribbling notes on a steno pad that Turner could see and read.

“Turner here, sir.”

“Who is this character, Jim?”

“Callahan?” he said – as Harry scribbled furiously. “He’s a retired cop, former Army aviator, and he’s dialed in on the mission parameters, General.”

“Army, huh. Like Desert Storm and Afghanistan?”

Turner looked at the next line of Harry’s scribbling. “No sir, Vietnam, then some special ops in the Middle East.”

“MacKenzie brought him in, you say?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay. Well, what do you know about this sub out there?”

Turner looked at Callahan’s next note and shrugged. “We’re pretty sure it’s Weyland, General. And we don’t believe they pose a threat right now.”

“And the P-8? This Kestrel? We have an eighty million dollar airframe down and they don’t pose a threat?”

“Callahan say’s the aircraft is in no danger, for now, anyway?”

“Turner, where the hell are you getting this information?”

“Callahan, sir.”

“And how the hell does he know?”

“They’re fine, sir,” Eve said as she walked up onto the bridge. 

“And now who the hell is this?” SecDef thundered.

“This is Eve, General Mahoney.”

“Oh,” he said quietly, responding almost respectfully. “Well, okay then. Turner, you know I don’t like this, right? This ain’t in the playbook we agreed on, Chief.”

“Understood, sir. Callahan thinks we should continue the search, let Weyland’s people think there’s something wrong.”

Mahoney grumbled something unintelligible and everyone could hear him turning pages on his desk. “Eve? You okay with all of this?”

“Yessir, and don’t worry about Callahan, sir.”

Everyone heard the grumbles that followed – just before the line went dead – and Turner shook his head as he looked at Harry. “What do I tell the airdales?”

“Just…as little as possible,” Harry said as he plopped down in the bridge-chair next to Turner’s, then he swiveled around and saw Sara standing there – beside Eve – watching and waiting for him. “You ready to talk?” Harry asked her, his eyes boring into hers.

She nodded. “My cabin, or yours?”

+++++

Lieutenant Commander Cole Knight, his eyes locked on the blue sphere about to collide with his aircraft, instinctively centered the yoke and pushed the nose over, trying to build speed and put some distance between him and…whatever the hell that thing was. He got his left hand to the throttles and was about to advance them when the entire instrument panel seemed to shimmer, then stretch – until everything turned black. Then – and it might have been a second later, or a year – he was aware his aircraft was inside the sphere.

And that the sphere was in deep space. He saw stars everywhere he looked, and suddenly he felt very, very small.

He tried to speak up, to say something to Abramson, but the muscles in his face and larynx simply would not respond. He tried to breathe and he felt imploding panic when he realized that wasn’t working, either.

‘I’m dead,’ he thought. ‘This is death. But what happened to us?’

Then –

– a discontinuity –

and his aircraft was no longer inside the sphere.

He felt a gut wrenching shimmer run through his body and he squeezed his eyes shut, then reopened them to a new reality.

And he saw the P-8s main panel. Everything was working now – but there were no NAV signals, meaning that the wasn’t receiving GPS or VOR signals. Which meant he had no idea where he was.

But it was night out, and it was cold out there.

“What the fuck?” Abramson whimpered. “What the fuck was that, Skipper?”

Knight immediately got on the intercom and called his lead systems operator in the main cabin behind the cockpit.

“WEPS? You there?”

No reply.

“SONAR, you with me?”

“Skipper,” came a scratchy, hesitant reply, “what was that?”

“I don’t know. You got anything? Any bearing to that sub?”

“No sir, nothing.”

“Nothing? How could…”

“Skipper,” the lieutenant nominally in charge of the tactical situation back there said, “we’re down across the board back here. There’s nothing coming in, and I do mean nothing. SatCOMMs are down, GPS is down, and, well, it looks like we’ve lost all contact with…everything.”

Knight looked at the OAT display, now showing an outside air temperature of minus 80 degrees, but now the backup mechanical altimeter was showing the aircraft at 41,000 feet AGL – in stable, level flight – which was frankly impossible. They’d been flying down in the weeds, with the aircraft’s pressurization set on Auto but dealing with pressures 20,000 feet lower than this – so how did it reset so quickly? And he knew he’d pushed the nose over to descend and now here they were in level flight? Let alone it had been early morning when he first saw the sphere, and now it looked like the middle of the night out there…

The compass showed they were flying a heading of 090 degrees, so he looked out the cockpit window by his right shoulder and tried to get his bearings that way. 

“There’s Orion,” he muttered under his breath, “but he’s too low, he should higher – above the horizon…”

“What?” Abramson said.

“Orion. He’s too low…so that must mean…”

“What? What does it mean, Skipper?”

“No…no…that can’t be…something’s not right…”

+++++

Callahan closed the door to his stateroom behind Sara, then he went and sat on his bed. “You know what I hate about this tub?” he said as Sara stared at him. “No chairs. King sized bed and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, but not one goddamn chair. That ain’t right.”

She shook her head. “How about a park bench. Would that do?”

“Yeah, sure. Got a miter saw handy? Maybe a table saw and some oak?”

“Oh, Harry.”

“Don’t Oh Harry me. What happened to us?”

“Us?”

“Me and Frank. When we went out into the bay? When we found that ship underwater and then everything changed?”

“You weren’t supposed to find that, Harry.”

“So they what? Changed the timeline?”

“Something like that. But maybe it was you who changed a timeline.”

“And I never saw you again. I think that hurt me more than anything else, ya know?”

She smiled again. “Oh? Why’s that?”

“Didn’t…don’t you know?”

She went to him, put her outstretched hand on top of his head and his universe imploded, collapsed in on itself, then he experienced total darkness and a brief shot of panic – and before he realized what had happened he was sitting on a park bench in the shade of a row of eucalyptus trees. Late afternoon sun slanted through the trees and he heard music…coming from an almost new VW microbus puttering by…on Marina Boulevard…and he recognized 10cc’s I’m Not In Love coming from the little V-dub before the music faded down a street that hadn’t looked like this in 60 years. 

The green grass…the sailboats…this had to be the Little Marina Green next to the yacht club…

Then he realized Sara was sitting next to him.

“Is this what you wanted, Harry?”

He looked at her, then looked down at his hands. No wrinkles. No age spots. He reached up, felt his Smith & Wesson Model 29 tucked in its shoulder holster under his old tan corduroy jacket. Only the jacket felt stiff and new.

She pointed towards the marina and smiled. “Remember that, Harry?”

He saw Dr Weyland and Sam Bennett talking, and then he saw Devlin talking to… 

“That’s me,” he sighed as the scene unfolded before his eyes. “That first day, when we sailed out to Ayala Cove on Angel Island – Before I hit my head.”

“Is that what you wanted to see, Harry? What you wanted to remember?”

He nodded. “I fell in love with you that day,” he whispered. “And then it was all gone. All of it.”

“But the memory remained, didn’t it?”

He nodded. “How is that even possible?”

“They didn’t want you to lose that. They knew how important it was to you.”

He turned and looked at her, saw she was crying and he reached out, then gently brushed away a tear. “I tried to love after that…”

“But a love like that? Love stopped you, didn’t it?”

“Trust, I think. I couldn’t trust anything after that. Never could, not after…”

“June?”

He shrugged. 

“It wasn’t your fault, Harry. You did everything you could…”

“It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Every time I thought I was going to…that I was falling in love…something always went wrong…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Harry.”

“Of course it was,” he whispered, this old voice a hoarse imitation of his own.

“Would you like to see her again?”

He recoiled from the thought, suddenly felt sick to his stomach. “June? My Looney-Junes?”

“Yes.”

“No. Sara, don’t you understand? I fell in love with you out there,” he said as he pointed at the bay.

“Harry? Do you feel guilty…”

“No,” he cried as he held out a hand. “Stop, please. Don’t do this to me, please…not now…”

She took his hand and kissed it, then she took his face in her hands and leaned into him, kissed him gently at first, then more passionately.

His vision stretched, his chest felt constricted, then they were back on the king sized bed in his stateroom on Amaranth, but he saw his reflection in a mirror and he hadn’t aged any since that afternoon sixty years ago. He felt his shoulder holster, and then he felt something he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.

She was reaching down now, feeling him through his loden green slacks. “Think you remember how to use that thing?” she smiled.

He leaned into her and they kissed, and about that time he realized he had two intact legs again and he grinned as an inrushing feeling of freedom regained washed over his soul. “I think it’s kind of like riding a bicycle,” he whispered. ‘Once you learn you never forget,’ he didn’t need to add.

She was reaching for his belt when the feeling hit him like an echo – and for a split second he felt the thought running into his arms. He closed his eyes and tried to hold back the tears, because for a moment it almost felt like maybe, just maybe, that some dreams really do come true.

And an eternity later he looked up at her swaying to music all her own, and he saw the age spots on his hands again, and when he tried to wiggle the toes on his right foot the familiar dead weight of his prosthetic limb had returned, yet there she was. She hadn’t disappeared in the blinding flash of his relentless despair, she had remained through it all…

And then she looked down at him, her eyes seeking answers to the questions she felt in his.

And then he remembered…she was pretty good at reading minds, wasn’t she…? He wanted to run and hide from his own thoughts and feelings – but then she reached out to him again and cupped his face in her hands…

“You never learned to trust your feelings, did you?” she asked gently.

“Oh, on the contrary. I think I relied on…”

“No, Harry. You’re mistaking feelings for instincts. You’ve been running from your feelings your whole life,” she said, closing her eyes as she probed his memory, “since…the storms? Storms, Harry?”

He looked away, tried to wall off his mind – but that was impossible now. He was an open book to her, and they both knew it. “When my mother played I felt the air change all around us…around our house. Even the air changed.”

“When was this, Harry?”

He tried to run again but then he remembered how his legs had felt like so heavy on those summer nights, like he was trying to run through quicksand. “I was…always up in my room when she played her music like that. It could be a clear night out and within minutes the storms would come, and it felt like she was calling out to them…”

“To who, Harry? Calling out to who?”

“The storms. It felt…no, that’s not right. She was summoning them, and when they came to her she would go out there in the thunder and the lightning and she had this staff and she would conduct the storm like it was her own personal orchestra…”

“Was it a dream, Harry?”

He shook his head. “Dreams don’t do what she did, Sara.”

“What did she do, Harry? What did she do that made you want to run and hide?”

“She…she disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“She went up into the clouds, right up into them and she would be gone for hours.”

Sara climbed off Callahan and stood, then she held out her hand. “Let’s take a shower before we go back to the bridge, okay?”

He took her hand but all the while he was looking for a way to escape, to run away from the nightmare once again. Because he knew what came next.

She turned on the water and led him inside, let the hot water run down his neck and his back, and after a few minutes she came close and held onto him – gently at first, but then more tightly…

“Harry? Don’t fight it, okay?”

“Fight…what?”

“Just let go…it’ll be over soon…”

And as a split second formed and passed his world narrowed then seemed to stretch out beyond infinity – and he was suddenly aware of the cold. He was surrounded by a cold, hard wind, and then she let go of him.

He turned to face the wind and saw the bow of a steamship knifing through the water below, but the cold air was assaulting his eyes, causing them to water. He tried to wipe them clear and that was when he saw it. The iceberg, dead ahead. He wanted to sound the alarm only now his arms felt like lead and it was impossible to move anything, even to speak. He was consumed by an infinite fear – because he knew Death was coming…

Just like when his mother started playing, when the storms came to her. He turned to Sara and she was staring at him, at his eyes…

“Don’t fight it, Harry. Just go with it…”

“What?”

His vision narrowed, he felt his body stretching again – and he closed his eyes to the fear that enveloped him…

Until warmth returned.

He opened his eyes and saw a small city stretched out below…

Then he understood that he was floating…above the city.

“What is this?” he whispered, turning to Sara again. “Where are we?”

“Copenhagen.”

“What? Why? Why are we here?”

“Don’t fight me, Harry. Please?”

“Why? Why are we here?” he repeated.

“You have to talk to her again, Harry.”

“Who? My mother?”

She looked away, knowing that what came next might destroy him. Might destroy them all. “Don’t fight me, Harry. Please. Fighting me will only things worse…”

+++++

“Chief?” Turner heard Valdez say over the intercom.

He picked up the mic and selected the IC function: “Yo,” he muttered.

“The shower in Callahan’s cabin has been running for over an hour. The watermaker just kicked in to compensate.”

“Did you knock on his door?”

“No,” Valdez sighed. “What if they…you know…they’re doin’ the hunka-chunka?”

“This ain’t the Hilton, Jenny. Knock on the damn door, and if no one answers go on in.”

“Okay, Jim.”

“And let me know what you find…”

Amaranth was in the approximate area where controllers at Dover Air Force Base had lost contact with Kestrel, and when he wasn’t scanning the surface with binoculars his eyes were fixed on the bottom scanning sonar. He knew it was a long shot, but if Callahan and Sara were wrong he just might find something on the sea floor.

“Chief? You there?” Valdez cried, obviously alarmed…about something.

“Go ahead.”

“There’s no one here, Chief. There’s clothing all over the place, but no Callahan, and no Sara.”

Turner sat up in the plush helmsman’s seat and shook his head. “Any sign of a struggle? Any blood?”

“Negative. The bed is a little messed up, that’s all.”

He scanned the horizon again, then set the high power open array radar to Max Range and looked at the display. A Maersk container ship was twenty miles east, still well offshore, heading for New York City, but that was the only other traffic out there, and the AIS was clear, too… “Okay,” he said to Valdez, “I’m coming down.”

He hated to leave the bridge unattended, but he took off down the stairway, taking the steps two at a time, then he jogged to the circular stairway that led to the aft lower deck; Callahan’s stateroom was the first door to the left and he walked in the open door and into the bathroom just in time to see what looked like tons of blue ice pouring out of the shower compartment – followed by a hideously strong blast of arctic air. Then, as the cold air hit the warm steam inside the head compartment, Callahan and Sara emerged from the condensing mist, and then a third person emerged, an ancient looking woman – and all three were as naked as the day they were born. 

Harry turned to the old woman and caught her as she started to fall, and Turner could see blood on the woman’s back, and that a fair amount was running down her legs.

Then Sara looked at Turner. “Would you get Eve, please?” she asked calmly. “And ask her to bring along a trauma kit, would you?”

+++++

Callahan helped Sara clean up the galley after everyone finished with the evening’s spartan meal, though Sumner Bacon had carried Ralph Richardson’s and his daughter’s plates to their huge stateroom forward on the main deck. The sun had set a few hours earlier, just as Amaranth entered the official New York Traffic Separation Scheme off False Hook, New Jersey; now they were approaching the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, with Brooklyn to starboard and Staten Island to port. The air was cool, Turner told them before he returned to the bridge, so they’d best put on jackets if they wanted to spend time outside.

Callahan thought everything about this little ship was over the top. Two Sub-Zero refrigerators in the galley proper and another in the starboard forward passageway, and there were two Sub-Zero freezer units down by the aft laundry room. There were two Bosch dishwashers here and another in the crew galley. An eight burner Viking range and a Thermador double wall even completed the display of conspicuous over-consumption, and the galley, like everything else on this tub, felt slightly obscene to him. He imagined pulling into some hurricane ravaged island community in this thing and all the starving people scraping by out there would be looking at this thing, and the people onboard bobbing at anchor off their village with pure hatred in the souls. What was the point, he wondered? Or was that the point? Was ostentatiousness the point – in and off itself? To shove your wealth down the throats of those less fortunate? After some ninety years walking this earth he still wasn’t sure, even though once he’d started down that very same path.

He turned and looked at Sara as she finished loading one of the dishwashers and he couldn’t help but watch her move – and wonder what his life would have been like if… If only… Wasn’t that the way it always was? If only? Follow that path into overwhelming doubt and depression?

But she was here. Now. And wasn’t it enough to simply enjoy the moment? To live in the moment and to let the future take care of itself? Wasn’t that what his grandmother had told him earlier? Before the Old Man in the Cape showed up?

He walked out onto the aft deck and sat above the swim platform looking at the city as Amaranth approached Ellis Island, with Lady Liberty still sheltering her huddled masses in the shadow of all that impossible wealth just across the Hudson. What would New Yorkers of the 19th century, he wondered, think about a ship like this? What would people of the 22^nd century think? Would those people understand the forces that created this thing? Or was human nature a constant?

He heard the automatic doors hiss open and close a few seconds later, and Sara handed him a cup of coffee before she sat down beside him.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Our watch starts in an hour,” she said as she sat and leaned against his shoulder.

“Oh God, I forgot all about that. You going to stay with me?”

“Yup.”

“Have you thought about what happens when MacKenzie returns?”

“What happens? What do you mean?”

“What happens to us?”

She sighed. “In the moment, Harry. You have to learn to let all that other stuff go. You have to live in the moment, remember?”

“I love you, you know?” he sighed. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“And I love you too,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”

But Callahan had not stopped to consider the things he had learned over the course of the past two days. One vital thing in particular, a most basic fact very easily overlooked. 

How many of these beings were there? And how many Saras? And how many beings were out there who shared this particular Sara’s thoughts? Even if he understood, or was just beginning to understand the vast depth of her telepathy, he might have been able to come to terms with the one thing all these apparent clones shared: their thoughts were not theirs alone. 

The telltale signs were there, everywhere he might have looked had he cared to take that chance. 

Indeed, he had been involved with a vast network of minds paying very close attention to everything this Sara said, what she heard, and perhaps most importantly of all, what she felt. 

What Harry Callahan did not know was that, in the end, this Sara was just one piece on a vast chessboard that literally spanned galaxies – and so billions of years. But she was but a pawn on this constantly shifting board, an ephemeral breeze surrounded by vertiginous hurricanes of thought.

But Callahan? Harry Callahan was anything but a pawn. 

And though he had no idea what waited in the days ahead, he was about to be forced to make the very first move of a new game. A game that had been taking shape for millennia almost without end.

So much now depended on his move. So many destinies would be altered. Civilizations might rise as a result, while others would surely fall. Civilizations that were little more than cells within the largest organism imaginable, and each one lived – and died – inside the tidal streams of consciousness. This universe was an organism that, like every such creature, possessed a consciousness all its own.

Would he, this consciousness wondered, make the best move? Or would his civilization be cancerous, his civilization destined to be removed from the stream of consciousness that was this particular universe.

So brief was this thing Harry Callahan called life. How could any being like this learn enough in the span of one lifetime to know how to proceed, how to make the correct best move? Four other civilizations had gathered to watch this game unfold, though one had already vowed to excise this cancer before it spread – no matter the outcome.

Wars had started over far less than this, and more than one civilization had already made extensive preparations for that outcome.

And yet, as was almost always the case, consciousness was fascinated by all the possible moves and counter-moves.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites. com | this is fiction and nothing but, plain and simple.

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