There’s an old saying that goes something like this: History never treats kindly those who try and rush her. I suppose the same can be said for baking a cake, or writing a story that contains multiple diverging storylines. A story that took shape in my mind almost thirty years ago, deep in the middle of the night while standing watch on my first real sailboat. So many things roamed through my mind, and yet the startling thing about all this is that I remember the night, and that story, with absolute clarity. The process of putting this together has been like building a model sailing ship from scratch (and I’ll not mention that I tried that once, which is why I took up writing).

Music matters all the more these days, because everyone needs some Help from time to time.

5.19

“There’s no way you’ll ever get me to kill anyone,” Henry Taggart said to Frank Bullitt.

Roosevelt took his seat at the head of the conference table and looked at Taggart with a weary sigh. “Tell me something, Henry,” Roosevelt said, his almost high-pitched voice raspy from too many years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes. “From the perspective of your place in time, you understand Adolph Hitler’s actions in the second war to be monstrous. Would that be a fair assessment?”

Taggart nodded. “Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t come to that conclusion?”

“Well, obviously the members of Hitler’s inner circle didn’t seem to think so,” FDR muttered, “but that’s neither here nor there. The point I’m trying to make is elementary, Henry. If you could go back in time and, say, kill Hitler when he was a child, or even kill his mother or father, you would kill that monstrosity, that virus, before it ever had a chance to take root. You’d save tens of millions of people from the misery of genocidal warfare, a human misery grounded in one man’s tortured ego. Are you telling me that, if given the opportunity, you’d not go back in time and do just that?”

Taggart nodded. “That’s correct; I would not.”

“Why?”

“Murder is evil. You don’t stop evil with evil. You only become evil.”

FDR looked at Taggart and nodded. “And if a madman breaks into your house in the middle of the night and he’s about to kill your sleeping children with a hatchet, would you allow him to continue, or would you try to stop him, even if that meant killing him.”

“I’d kill him.”

“So you don’t really believe in a blanket prohibition against killing, do you?”

“Obviously not, but one circumstance is exigent, the other enters the realm of the hypothetical.”

“How so,” Roosevelt said.

“Your belief is that one man alone, in this case Hitler, was responsible for all the suffering in Europe in the Second World War, but isn’t that naive?”

“Naive?”

“Sure. I mean, look at it this way. You’re saying the Holocaust was the result of one man’s obsession with Jewry, yet a huge percentage of the people in Europe were anti-semitic. Hell, they still are, or were when I was last there. And no matter what, Hitler alone didn’t make the Holocaust happen…”

“But if you removed him from the equation…”

“My completely uneducated guess, Mr Roosevelt, is that it would have happened anyway. If I remember correctly, Germany was being crushed by reparations and hyperinflation, not to mention industrial policies being rammed down their throats by Britain and France. Jews had been scapegoated into taking the blame for all this, and in the Nazis retelling of this story, the Weimar Republic became a Jewish construct because a few of the leaders of the Republic happened to be Jewish, so the republic took the fall. But again, if I remember my history, the same thing had happened in France like sixty years before, which leads me to think that when bad stuff happens in Europe, the standard European reaction has been to blame it all on the Jews, so what I’m saying is if you went back and killed Hitler the odds are still real good that someone else would come along and light the exact same fuse.”

Roosevelt looked down and nodded. “Maybe so, Henry. Maybe you’re correct, but I’m still not convinced, but then again History has put me in a fairly unique position. I’ve had to learn to live with the decisions I made, which were made with the best information I had at the time, yet I’ve been holed up in that office over there reading and rereading the pertinent histories of the war and I’ve been stunned by how many mistakes historians thought I made. Some of these things I can refute, but others make for very uncomfortable reading. For instance, if we’d had better intelligence on the Wannsee Conference, might we have picked up on other signs regarding the construction of these death camps? On the other hand, there were apparently hundreds of antisemites in the War Department who were simply quashing the earliest reports…”

“You did the best with what information you had, sir.”

“Precisely my point, Henry. You view this Sorensen girl as damaged goods, a Daddy’s Girl? Is that about right?”

“Yessir.”

“And now we know that she, like Harry and Frank here, has developed the ability to jump around through time. And her father knows this and plans to use her to do something. This something we do not quite understand yet, but we first assumed it had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic. Now we have reason to believe she’s going after the battleship Bismarck, in May of 1940. The what and the why still elude us, but let’s assume for a moment that she’s successful. Everything will, in an instant, change. All history after that moment will change. Are you following me, Henry?”

“Yessir?”

“Excellent. Now, what would you make of this if you were given to understand that Adolph Hitler was once again alive, in the exact same way that I am alive in the here and now. And what if you were given to understand that Mr Hitler is once again calling the shots.”

Taggart looked at the faces around the room, looking for signs that this was some sort of Princeton debating society hypothetical, but no one was smiling. “Is this for real? I mean, are you on the level?”

“Oh yes, quite,” FDR sighed as he took a pipe out of his vest pocket.

“Well…fuck,” Taggart sighed.

“Precisely, just so. You took the words right out of my mouth, Henry. Now, what do you propose we do about it?”

+++++

“Does anyone know how she developed the ability to time travel?” Taggart asked after Roosevelt and one of his aides left the conference room.

One of the other men in the room, someone name MacKenzie, nodded and spoke first. “There’ve been experiments going on in the field for decades,” MacKenzie said. “The first, oddly enough, came together after several unexpected results were discovered in another line of enquiry, and in Canada. A professor at Laurentian University, a neuroscientist by the name of Michael Persinger, was doing temporal lobe studies, eliciting what some subjects called contact with God when his subjects used something called a Koren helmet. Subjects predisposed to religious experience sensed God, while those not so inclined still felt some kind of presence, and both types entered into a very relaxed state…”

“Is that the so-called God helmet experiment?” Taggart asked.

“Yes, exactly. Later experiments in neurotheology, using induced electromagnetic fields, yielded similar results, with some subjects reporting out of body experiences and, more to the point, out of time experiences.”

“You mean time travel, right?”

“Yes, and no. There were reports, I believe, of a generalized feeling of being in some other time reference, but nothing specific was mentioned in the literature about travel.”

“You know, it’s strange, but I think I felt something like that once.”

MacKenzie nodded. “In the ARV. I’m not surprised. That craft employs a massive electro-magnetic coil…”

Henry was sitting bolt upright in his chair now, listening intently as MacKenzie spoke. “Excuse me, but who the Hell are you, and how the fuck do you know about that?”

MacKenzie leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands over his gut. His eyes met Taggart’s and he did not look away. “Because I sent you and Rupert Collins to Kamchatka, to the Sukhoi facility, to steal that vehicle.”

Taggart’s eyes blinked rapidly as his blood pressure spiked. “So…you killed me. And General Collins. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“We didn’t know about the radiation leak, son, but yes, it was my decision. And Rupert concurred, in case you missed that.”

“Is that why he went with me?”

MacKenzie nodded. His eyes never flinched, never looked away. “You weren’t the first men I send to their deaths, Mr Taggart. When the responsibility is yours, well, you don’t know that death is a certainty, but it’s always a possibility.”

“So, it just goes with the job, huh?”

“You could say that,” MacKenzie said, his head canted quizzically. “I never got used to it, no one does, but even so, bad stuff happens. I hated that most of all, the not knowing…”

“You should try dying from multiple metastatic neoplasm disease. Now that was fun.”

MacKenzie nodded. “I understand your anger. Try putting yourself in my shoes when you get a chance.”

“No thanks, I’m trying to quit,” Taggart said with a grin, suddenly walking away from the table and out onto the hangar deck.

He looked around, saw Ellen Ripley standing by the shuttle she’d piloted from Pak’s ship, and noticed she was working with a tech on something in the shuttle’s instrument compartment so, not knowing anyone else here he walked over to her.

“Say,” he said as he stopped in front of her, “you wanna go somewhere and get laid?”

She turned to face him, the expression on her face unreadable, but he didn’t see her fist balling up behind her back. Nor did he have time to react when her haymaker came. He flew back and skidded across the studded metal floor, and though he was seeing stars he sat up and flipped her the middle finger. “I take it that means no?” he said, adding: “What? You a rug-muncher, or something?”

He saw her turn and face him again, then she was walking his way, with what looked like a ten kilo crescent wrench in her left hand.

“Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me,” he sang as he stood and made for the nearest airlock.

+++++

Roosevelt and Nimitz watched all this, of course, on the Gateway’s internal surveillance net, and Roosevelt wasn’t happy about what he was watching.

“Just like his dossier, Chester. No impulse control, erratic, and he uses humor too much…”

“He’s deflecting, Mr President. Just immature, yet I see something in him. Something durable, maybe even dependable.”

“Oh?”

“The truth of the matter is, Mr President, that half the pilots we had at Midway could have been described just as you did Mr Taggart. What remains to be assessed is his ability to make good decisions under pressure, but to tell you the truth I don’t think we’ll have that luxury. Sorensen had too many irons in the fire, sir. If this doesn’t work out, he’s going to try again. And because the Grays are watching, and waiting to see the outcome, Sorensen may act instantly, and without warning.”

“What are you trying to say, Chester?”

“I think it’s time we consider taking out Bariloche. Get Hitler, Sorensen, all the bad apples in one stroke…”

But FDR shook his head. “No, Chester, someone always gets away, and you’re forgetting Peter Weyland. Some unforeseen element always gets missed, so when you show up they’re gone, or they’re ready for you. And don’t forget, in this context surprise is almost impossible.”

“In this context, sir?”

“We’re playing 4-D chess, Admiral, not checkers. Our adversary can, and will, jump around in time to evade us if he thinks we’re coming. It’s just a matter of time before they can, you know.  This Sorensen girl points to that one simple truth. Besides, we have one critical advantage right now. They don’t know where we are, but more importantly they don’t know when we are. And I’m more worried about losing that advantage than anything else. What did Captain Ripley call that detection device? The one Dr. Balin is working on?”

“Hyperspectral Data Detection. It looks for E-M signatures beyond the UV and IR spectra.”

“Quantum something, I thought?”

“Yessir, it picks up radical shifts in quantum entanglement. Disruptions in time are the most likely cause of that, so the presence of a time traveler can be inferred by such a shift.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to take your word for it, Chester. Just the thought of it makes me long for an ice cold martini. Why is there no gin on this vessel…now what’s he doing?”

Nimitz saw Roosevelt was watching Taggart on the screen again, so he looked too…

+++++

Taggart was walking aimlessly down the main A Deck corridor, but he’d just stopped at a large viewport that looked out over the port-side hangar deck. His head was down and he was leaning against the window, and he appeared to be talking to himself.

“Can we pick up the audio feed?” Roosevelt asked Nimitz.

In the next instant the image shimmered and turned to static, then a strange new General Quarters alarm started ringing throughout the Gateway complex.

“That’s the HDD alarm, Mr President. There’s a traveler onboard the ship.”

Roosevelt nodded. “There. Right there. It’s that woman, Chester!”

Nimitz studied the screen, and it only took a moment before he recognized her. It was Deborah Sorensen, and somehow she’d just discovered their whereabouts. “It’s her, Mr President. The Sorensen woman.”

They watched as Taggart jumped back in surprise, then as she ran into his arms, and a few seconds later they both winked off the screen and out of the present. And just like that, just that fast, they were gone.

Roosevelt took a deep breath and looked away, clearly angry. “Well, Chester, it looks like we’ve just lost the initiative. It’s Pearl Harbor all over again. Recommendations?”

“We get you to Hyperion, for one. Then we disperse our ships.”

“What about Pak and his people?”

“Until we’re sure they haven’t betrayed us, I suggest minimal contact.”

Another alarm started blaring.

“Now what?” FDR said as Nimitz switched screens to the command net in the Gateway’s CNC center. Radar screens were resolving new plots, sensors were busy classifying the new contacts, and mid-level officers were analyzing all this data as it streamed in. They watched Denton Ripley run into the CNC, watched him watching the situation develop before he walked over to an intercom. The intercom here in Roosevelt’s study chirped and Nimitz picked up, then switched the call to a large, wall-mounted screen.

“We’ve got about thirty ships inbound,” Admiral Ripley said as they watched another much larger wave of ships appear onscreen, then another. “Okay. Now developing tracks on one hundred twenty starships, all approaching Earth and it looks like at their current velocity the first wave should reach their orbital insertion points within three weeks.”

“Can you tell who they belong to, Captain?” Nimitz asked.

“We can infer they’re Weyland-Yutani ships, Mr President, so this is the Co-Dominium’s fleet, the new fleet we’ve been hearing about. Their fields are still up and the first, smaller group came in through the New Chicago jump point, while the larger fleet jumped from New Sparta.”

“There’s nothing of consequence left on Earth, Mr President,” Nimitz said, “so they’re here for you…”

“I disagree, Admiral Nimitz,” Ripley said. “My fleet is all that stands between the Co-Dominium and complete control of this part of the galaxy. It makes the most sense strategically that they’ve come to take it out.”

“So what are you suggesting we do, Admiral Ripley?”

“Formalize our relations with the Pak. Get out of here before the Co-Dominium arrives.”

“Abandon Earth, you mean?”

“Sir, there are only a few areas of arable land in the southern hemisphere right now. Current indications are solid that the planet is about to enter an extended period of almost complete ice cover. Parts of Australia and New Zealand, and the two capes might remain ice free, but there won’t be enough room to sustain any kind of industrial civilization for hundreds of years. Pak has identified dozens of worlds we could go to, and…”

“What about the people on Mars,” FDR sighed, “and out in the asteroid belt? Are you suggesting we leave them to the Co-Dominium?”

Ripley looked down, shook his head. “Mr President, we simply don’t have enough ships to move several hundred thousand people out of the solar system, and we never will, especially not in the time we have available.”

“Which leaves us with only one viable option,” Roosevelt muttered.

“Are you sure you want to do this, sir?” Nimitz sighed.

“No, of course I’m not sure, but it seems to me the best possible solution, given current circumstances.”

“Alright. I’m afraid I agree.”

Roosevelt turned to the screen, his voice grew cold and hard. “Admiral Ripley, gather the necessary personnel and commence Operation TimeShadow.”

“Yes, Mr President.”

“And get me a shuttle, will you? I need to go have a chat with our friend.”

+++++

And so, here ends First You Make a Stone of Your Heart. This story © 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and as usual this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, and nothing but. The third, and final part of the tale will conclude in TimeShadow.

If you’re still here, well, Tomorrow Never Knows just might do the trick. Adios for now.

So the beat goes on. Confrontations loom. Volcanos erupt. News at eleven.

Music matters? I thought this was interesting. Then again, so is this.

5.18

Deborah Sorensen never really understood why she visited the Titanic, let alone how it happened. These experiences just came to her, and she had no apparent control over them. Yet her father had pointed out one condition that seemed to be a common denominator: she ended up in a shower each time one of these events happened, and her arrival in the shower was followed by a rush of seawater and, usually, remnants of shattered icebergs. But…why the Titanic?

She had been sitting in her stateroom onboard the Disco Volante lost in thought, and had been since leaving the shipyard. She now understood a little about Harry Callahan and how he’d mastered using some sort of tonal inducement to enter the necessary mental state for a jump, but she had no idea what he did or even what his abilities were, and if she was going to be completely honest with herself she remained in the dark about how she’d managed her Titanic viewings.

“But they aren’t really viewings,” she said to herself. “Somehow…I was going there. The seawater and the ice are proof of that…”

No. She wasn’t simply viewing, she was traveling through time. Her first experiences had taken place in Los Angeles, and the location of Titanic’s sinking had been more than 3,600 miles distant – yet she’d been there, and at the moment of impact each time she’d been. 

There was a 21-inch chartplotter on the wall above the desk in her stateroom and she could plainly see the Disco Volante’s position on the current chart as the little ship advanced westward across the Mediterranean. Corsica was now almost 200 miles behind them, but her mind ranged over the chart and soon settled on Naples Bay. She’d never been to Italy until a week ago, yet she’d always wondered about Pompeii and what those first shattering moments must have been like. To have lived through such a thing…what must it have been like?

The earthquakes. Small, but increasing in frequency. Puzzlement, maybe? Had people grown so used to Vesuvius’s rumblings that they just stopped for a moment then got back to what they were doing. Maybe one or two people looked up at the mountain, before…?

She read a passage online from Pliny the Younger’s account, an eyewitness report from someplace called Paestum, a village south of Vesuvius. People there felt the earthquakes but late in the afternoon on that fated day they heard an uncommonly violent explosion – the type of explosion not at all common 79 years before Christ came along – just before Vesuvius blew it’s top, literally. The volcano had erupted before, of course, but never like this, and as people came out of their houses, or turned in the market square and looked past the Temples of Hera and Athena, she imagined they would have stood in awe as great gouts of cloud and lava jetted into the evening sky.

She closed her eyes as she tried to imagine their surprise, or their horror, and she felt a tremor of recognition as the Disco Volante rolled atop a large swell. She felt that familiar wave of nausea she had always felt on the first day or so of a long passage, and she knew the best thing she could do would be to get to the rail and focus on the horizon…

…but when Deborah Sorensen opened her eyes she saw she was no longer aboard the Disco Volante; no, now she was standing in an open air market surrounded by men and women, most wearing rough togas and crude leather sandals. A startled boy herding goats jumped back when he saw her appear out of nothingness, and he cried out in a language she had never heard before, and in the commotion several people turned to the sound of his despair.

They saw a woman easily a foot taller than the tallest man among them, and she was wearing strange gray pants and vibrant yellow things on her feet, but the strangest thing of all was her tunic – a maroon and gold thing with peculiar writing on it, and an image of a warriors head emblazoned across the front. Stunned first by the earthquakes rocking the area throughout the afternoon and now the sudden appearance of this Goddess, they watched as she pulled something from inside her clothing, and then, aiming some kind of device at the village, she swung the thing in her hand slowly in an arc…

…but just then Vesuvius let go…

Deborah watched as several hundred feet of the summit literally disappeared in the concussive explosion; smaller house-sized rocks vaulted into the sky while much larger fragments of rock and snow started rumbling down the southeast side of the volcano. Steam vents opened near the summit, and lava began streaming out of dozens of long, narrow slits under the new summit, and just then another earthquake hit, this one bigger than anything Deborah imagined possible. The ground underneath her feet seemed to come alive, the air seemed charged with impossible energy as a high-pitched grinding sound penetrated the core of her being. And then, another explosion.

She thought it must have been an atomic bomb detonating nearby, but no, it was Vesuvius, coming alive again.

An impossible column of roiling, dark gray clouds was boiling up into the evening sky, and she realized the sound had hit several seconds after this latest eruption began, but most of the violent energy was now on the northwest slope of the volcano and so just out of view. Another equally cataclysmic eruption began, another equally thunderous clap of explosive energy hit her and she realized she was no longer standing. No one was standing. And yet everyone was staring in open-mouthed fear not just at the erupting volcano, but at her.

She had obviously made the mountain explode and now everyone around her was drawing back from this strange creature, for they were clearly terrified by this sudden appearance of one of the Gods…

She looked at her iPhone, saw that it was still recording so she aimed the camera at the erupting volcano then hit the red button on the screen to stop recording, then she powered-off the unit before she put it back in a pocket. The boy, the young shepherd, was now kneeling at her feet, his outstretched hands palms-down on the cobbled stone square, and then another explosive gout of lava and flame erupted from the seething fissures as she watched, yet most of the men and women gathered there were pointing at her, awestruck that a God had come to them. Then a handful of the woman cried out and ran away, the overwhelming despair of the moment suddenly filling their eyes with pure adrenaline-charged terror.

“Oops,” Deborah sighed…

And in the span of a human heartbeat she was back on the Disco Volante, only now she was on the foredeck – while flaming embers and black ash rained down on her. She saw the man at the yacht’s helm scream and jump back, then she heard his voice over the ship’s intercom.

“Emergency! Fire on the forward deck. All hands to fire stations!”

She wondered where the fire was, until she looked down and saw flames licking at her face.

Henry Taggart looked around the cubicle, his entire world in the here and now, still not really knowing what to think. The blue walls, blue as in the shifting colors of the sea, gently curving and with one large viewing port in the exterior wall. The moon, Earth’s moon, filled his view, and when his eyes had first opened here he had looked out over the stark shadows cast by the jagged peaks of Shackleton Crater near the South Lunar Pole – and he’d never been as afraid in his life.

A man, well, maybe not a man, had been standing at his bedside, looking at what just had to be medical instruments of some kind, only this man had to be eight or nine feet tall, and his skin was pure white. White like snow was white, yet his eyes were as black as night. All in all, the man – or was he a man? – reminded him of Michelangelo’s David, that statue he’d seen once in Florence, yet its actions were human, his mannerisms were too. But he – it? – certainly wouldn’t be speaking English.

That was when he’d first noticed the viewport, and the moon beyond, and right then he’d wanted to scream. Then again, he remembered all the times growing up in Newport Beach when he and his friends had rumbled up to Anaheim and gone to Disneyland, and how he’d always run straight to Tomorrowland, right to the Mission to the Moon attraction. When the Douglas Corporation took over ‘the ride’ from TWA they’d added a realistic Mission Control room, complete with animatronic technicians manning the consoles, and then there was the ride itself. Blasting off and looking down at the receding Earth, then looking up at the moon as it got closer and closer, but then with Armstrong and Aldrin everything had changed, and for a few years anything had seemed possible.

And now, here he was. Looking down on the moon. In orbit in some kind of space station built by…who, exactly? He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.

All he’d known, up until a few minutes ago, was that he was half-past dead, his body eaten up by cancer, and now some creature had him hooked up to weird looking medical instruments and it was injecting something that looked an awful lot like that silver liquid, was it mercury? that they’d used in oral thermometers when he was a kid. Whatever it was, the fluid was thick as concrete so they’d had to insert a catheter into a fat vein under his collarbone and the stuff burned like hell going in and all of a sudden he didn’t want anything to do with this place!

He started to move but found he couldn’t. He couldn’t even move his hands.

Then the real panic set in.

The instruments beeped once and the creature looked down at him. “Please relax,” it said, but the inflection, or was it the syntax, was all wrong. Taggart wanted to ask it a question but while his mouth moved a little he couldn’t form words – and then his panic ratcheted up a notch.

And the creature really didn’t like that. It took out some kind of doohickey that looked like an old metal tire pressure gauge and then held the thing up against his forehead, and he felt himself falling again, falling into an infinite darkness, just like he was falling down into those shadows on the moon.

+++++

When his eyes opened he looked around at little bumps and protuberances on the ceiling and it hit him then: ‘Wherever this is, it isn’t human.’ The scale of things was all wrong, and then it hit him: this placed smelled, and bad. Like dirty feet that had been camped out in the same pair of sneakers for about six months. Sharp, acrid filth, in other words. He hadn’t noticed before, but then he remembered: his sense of smell had been compromised for months, well before they’d arrived in Paris. Maybe right after Amsterdam, after the bomb.

He tried to wiggle his toes and to his surprise they felt fine, so he experimentally flexed his wrists. Both hands responded, and he felt a wave of euphoria wash through his sense of anticipation. He lifted his head and that worked too, so he pulled his arms up a bit and lifted his torso up on his elbows and looked around. His head felt clear, clearer than it had in months; no headache, no blurry vision clouded his sight, so he lifted his legs and saw them respond under the thin transparent membrane that served as a sheet. An alarm chirped and a moment later Michelangelo’s David walked into the cubicle again, and the statue actually smiled at him when it saw he was awake.

“Look better. How feel?”

“Good. I feel very good. What did you do to me?”

“Bad cells, gone now. Body can heal.”

“Bad cells…?” Taggart sighed. “You mean the cancer?”

“I mean bad cells. Errors in replication, fixed.”

Taggart’s eyes welled up as he struggled to regain his composure. “Where am I?”

“This ship belong Pak. Your people close.”

“My people?”

“Your people coming. You go ship. Your ship send shuttle. Soon come.”

“My ship?”

The creature pushed one of the bumps on the ceiling and the transparency holding him in this ‘bed’ disappeared, and after a slight electric jolt Taggart felt himself floating free, drifting up towards the ceiling. Another wave of panic came for him but the creature grabbed his arm and pulled him over to the viewport. “Ship there,” it said.

Taggart shrank from this new world. This Pak, whoever he was, had a ship that was at least two miles long, and the flight deck below this viewport had at least a thousand shuttles docked in neat, orderly rows. He could see some kind of orbiting space station, minuscule next to Pak’s ship, just beyond the flight deck, and it too was orbiting the Moon, and there were several small ships docked to this station. What had to be his shuttle was drifting between this space station and Pak’s ship, slowly heading this way, and right now he could see Earth in the distance, well beyond the Moon.

“Do I have any clothes?” Taggart asked.

The creature looked at a display on his wrist, and Taggart assumed it was a translating device of some sort. “No. Shuttle bring.”

“Do you have a name?”

Again, it looked at the device on his wrist and nodded. “Yes. I am Physician. Much pleased treat you.”

“My name is Henry. Much pleased being treated.” He looked out the viewport and saw the shuttle was much closer, and that it was headed to a docking port above this room, which was itself above the massive flight deck, so all things being equal he had to be in some sort of tower that overlooked the rows upon rows of docked shuttles. He found it difficult to move again, but then realized that movement in zero-G had to be radically different from walking about on land, and this ship was most definitely in zero-G. He pushed off the wall beside the port and went sailing across the room… “Oh, shit,” he cried, but the physician deftly pushed off and caught him.

“Maybe sit best,” it said.

“You got that right.” The creature deposited Henry on the slab that seemed to be the equivalent to a bed, and with another tap on the ceiling a field of some kind settled over Taggart and he was glued to the surface again.

“I go, bring human,” the physician said as it disappeared into the corridor beyond his cubicle, and it seemed that now his bowels were getting with the program and kicking into gear. He looked nervously around the cubicle for something that resembled a toilet, then started to sweat…

A few minutes passed and a girl, a human woman entered and the look in his eyes must have said it all.

“You feeling alright?” the woman said.

“Poop-chute is waking up, fast. I gotta go something fierce, and soon.”

She went to the wall and hit a protuberance and something that might have been a toilet, in a Daliesque nightmare, morphed out of the wall. “There ya go, Sport,” the woman said. “Hope you don’t need privacy. They aren’t real big on that here.”

“Uh, is that a toilet? It looks, well, kind of alive?”

“It is. It’s an organism, been genetically altered to absorb waste. It excretes pure protein.”

“Right. And how does it do its thing?”

“Just sit on it.” She reached up and hit the protuberance on the ceiling and he drifted free, then he pushed off and rocketed over to the wall above the…toilet. “Whoa there, cowboy! You don’t need much force to move around up here,” she said as she grabbed him, then she helped get him settled on the…toilet.

The…organism wrapped itself around Taggart’s midsection, then he felt warmth down there. Everywhere, as a matter of fact. 

“Just relax,” the woman said, smirking. “I know, it takes some getting used to.”

Taggart’s eyes crossed as something grabbed his penis, then his eyes shut when he felt something form-fitting around his anus. “This ain’t right,” he just managed to say as his bowels cut loose.

“Beats shitting in your spacesuit in zero-G,” she deadpanned.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he moaned. “You bring some clothes for me?”

“In the shuttle.”

He shook his head. That meant he’d get to strut through this ship in his birthday suit, but one more indignity surely wasn’t going to make a difference now. “Great,” he sighed. “So, what do they use for boom-wad up here?”

“Boom-wad?”

“You know…toilet paper?” an exasperated Taggart sighed.

The woman laughed at that. “Never heard that one before. Just hang on tight, because it’ll…”

But Taggart’s eyes crossed again as the organism set about cleaning him up. “Oh, no way man, this can’t be right…”

+++++

“So,” Henry asked the woman as she helped him into his seat in the shuttle’s tiny cockpit, “you gotta name?”

“Ellen,” she said as she struggled with one of his shoulder harnesses. “And you’re Henry, right?”

“Taggart. Just call me Taggart, okay?”

“Well then, I guess that makes me Ripley.”

“I think I like Ellen better.”

“And what if I like Henry more?”

Taggart sighed. “Then Henry it is,” he said as he held out his hand. She took it and smiled as she worked her way into the pilot’s seat to his left. “You fly this thing, too?”

She nodded as she worked switches on the overhead panel, then she shot a ‘thumb’s up’ to one of the creatures standing inside the nearby airlock, and a second later he heard the shuttle disconnect from Pak’s ship. Ripley hit the thrusters in the shuttle’s nose, and the big central display kept updating the shuttle’s vector as it swung away from the massive ship’s gravity well, but Taggart didn’t recognize the technology on the shuttle’s panel.

“You mind if I ask a personal question?” he said.

“No. Fire away.”

“What year is it?”

Ripley looked at him and smiled, but she didn’t answer the question.

“So, I’m not supposed to know, is that it?”

“I’m not sure that’s been decided,” Ripley replied. “Anyway, you’ll be briefed when we get to the Gateway.”

“The Gateway?”

“That space station,” she said, pointing to the odd looking jumble of cubes and toroids dead-ahead.

“Are those ships docked to it, or part of the station?”

“It is hard to tell, I guess,” Ripley said. “But yes, there are two ships docked there right now.”

“When I, when I was about to die we hadn’t even made it back to the moon.”

“I know. A lot’s happened, I guess. Still, I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling.”

“Other than freaked out by that toilet thing?”

“That scared me the first time I had to use one.”

“Scared? You were scared?”

She looked at him quickly and nodded, then got her eyes back on the central display. “Yeah, scared.”

“I can’t imagine you being scared,” Taggart said with a brief shrug.

“Oh? Do I look that tough?”

“No. You look confident.”

She looked at him again and smiled. “I read your file. You’re kind of an anarchist, aren’t you?”

“Me? An anarchist?”

“What they called a tech bro? Didn’t believe in much, no close attachments?”

Taggart nodded. “Yup. That’s me. No close attachments.”

“Well, at least you’re looking better now.”

“You’ve seen me before?”

“Yeah, a couple weeks ago one of the Pinks deposited you on the hangar deck and disappeared. You were just about dead, too. The medics onboard didn’t know what to do so the decision was made to get Pak’s people involved.”

“Who are they?”

Again, Ripley just shrugged. “We’re not really sure who they are…yet. They appear to have taken our side…”

“Side? Is there a war going on?”

“Isn’t there always?” she smirked. “Anyway, urPak got you to his father’s ship and we didn’t hear much for about a week. After Pak told us you were going to make it, well, we’ve been trying to figure out why the Pinks brought you to us.”

“Pinky.”

“What?”

“Pinky. One of the Pinks. She’s been protecting me for years.”

“Sorry, got to concentrate now…” she sighed, lining up one set of vectors with some kind of landing approach aid on the display, and suddenly this Gateway didn’t look so small, and neither did the ship docked overhead.

“Hyperion?” he said, reading off the name painted near the ship’s stern. 

“That’s right,” Ripley sighed, struggling to match vectors on what appeared to be the approach’s vertical axis and then, when the shuttle was perhaps a quarter mile out a huge hangar door opened, revealing a fairly large shuttle landing area actually inside the station. Men in spacesuits were inside the hangar, and Taggart realized the shuttle he was now in was actually like some kind of four man craft, because there were two really large shuttles inside this hangar. “The Gateway is much older than Hyperion and was built to handle the first shuttles transiting to and from Armstrong Base…”

“Armstrong Base?”

“The first American base on the lunar surface.”

“Ah. Of course. You know, when I was a kid I went to the moon every month or so.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. At Disneyland, the first one, in Anaheim.”

“I haven’t been?”

“To Disneyland?”

“To Earth.”

He looked at her again, not sure if she was kidding or not, then, deciding she wasn’t, Henry Taggart thought better of asking her any further questions. He was already sure he wouldn’t like the answers.

+++++

He was sitting in a conference room by himself. Earth appeared to be about the size of a kid’s marble when held at arm’s length, and the pale blue dot rotated into view about every two minutes. At least, he said to himself, up was up inside this room, and down was down. The gravity here onboard the station was, Ripley told him before she left him here in this room, about eighty percent of Earth’s, so walking was not only possible, it was also almost effortless. Playing football up here would be, he thought, hilarious.

A door opened and two military types ambled in and took a seat; a moment later two short men in civilian clothes entered and sat across from him, and one of these, the younger one, was staring at him. This character had short blond hair and looked like he’d been plucked right out of the sixties: houndstooth sports coat, Levis, old school Adidas sneakers, RayBan Wayfarers on his forehead. Piercing silver blue eyes that looked like laser beams, and those eyes looked angry, too.

And then Harry Callahan walked in and he didn’t know why, but the sight made Henry Taggart bust out laughing. Callahan stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Taggart like he’d suddenly grown a second head.

Then it hit him. Callahan looked like he was about thirty years old, and the last time he’d seen him Callahan had been much older. Like fifty years older. Taggart stopped laughing, then crossed his arms over his chest.

Then two Navy admirals walked in – just ahead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Who appeared to be about thirty and who was walking, not in a wheelchair.

Taggart looked away. Looked at the Earth coming onto view again. He felt light-headed, like he was lost inside a dream…

“This the man, Callahan?” Roosevelt asked this much younger version of Harry Callahan.

“Yessir, it is.”

“Detective Bullitt? Anything you want to add to your report?”

“No sir, not at this time.”

“This ship she’s on? It was still in the Mediterranean? I mean, when you last saw her?”

“Yessir. She made a jump, apparently to Vesuvius around the time of that big eruption. When she returned her clothes were on fire.”

Roosevelt turned to Taggart. “Detective Callahan tells us you were once close to Miss Deborah Sorensen? Is that about right?”

Taggart was speechless. “Excuse me, but are you Franklin Roosevelt?”

Roosevelt looked around the room, exasperated. “Has no one briefed this man?”

Shrugs all around. Everyone was suddenly avoiding eye contact, too.

“Well, dammit,” FDR grumbled, “why am I not surprised?” 

“I knew her,” Taggart said, trying to take some of the heat. “What’s she done now?”

Roosevelt wheeled on him. “What are you implying, Mr. Taggart?”

“Deborah was kind of a world class screw up, sir. Like everything she touched turned to shit. A dilettante.”

“More money than sense? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yessir. Classic case. Sweet as could be but absolutely no self understanding.”

“Easily manipulated?” Roosevelt added.

“That’s right,” Taggart said, stifling a burp.

“You alright, son?”

“I haven’t eaten in…well, I don’t remember the last time I held down food.”

“You were pretty sick when you got here. Some kind of cancer, they tell me. How are you feeling now?”

“Great, sir. Never better.”

“Pak’s people are world class,” Roosevelt said, missing the irony completely.

“Does anyone know what they did to me?”

Roosevelt turned to one of the naval officers. “Captain Ripley? Care to explain?”

The younger of the two officers nodded and stood. “Pak’s civilization has mastered all forms of genetic manipulation. When they go after cancerous disease they simply go after replication errors, but you’ll soon begin to feel other effects, as well?”

“Oh? Such as?” Taggart sighed.

“The first thing is you’ll feel younger. You’ll also feel, well, more easily aroused…”

“Sexually, you mean?”

“That’s correct,” Captain Ripley said, smiling a little impishly. “And you’ll perform better in that department, as well.”

“Oh,” Taggart deadpanned, “joy. I can hardly wait. So, when will the disease return?”

“It probably won’t,” Ripley said, confused by Taggart’s reaction. “You’ll likely live without any further disease for the rest of your life.”

“Great,” Taggart sighed, clearly depressed by this news. “Now, can anyone tell me why I’m here?”

“Detective Bullitt?” Roosevelt said. “Care to tell our guest?”

Bullitt stood. “I’m going to take you there, get you as close as I can. You’re either going to talk her out of her current mission or you’re going to have to kill her.”

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

Oh yeah, try this if you’re feeling lost.

Another brief section today, nothing fancy, nothing too startling. Music? The Who’s Bargain.

5.17

Deborah Sorensen walked around the stateroom of her new home, an almost 50 year old Feadship – that had seen better days, probably 20 years ago – with a sense of foreboding. The upper decks aft of the bridge had been gutted, at least on the inside of the superstructure, so while outwardly the yacht looked unchanged, this was in fact far from the truth. The main salon and galley were gone, but so too was the sun deck with it’s hot tub on the deck above; it it’s place she saw heavy Cor-ten steel plate on the decks and walls that had been freshly installed and crudely painted with gray primer, leaving only the barest framework of a ceiling in the main salon. Two container-sized launching tubes would be placed in this new open space once the yacht arrived in Rio de Janeiro, and only then could their real mission begin.

Her father had made his case and in a way she had agreed with him, agreed with his reasoning for this action – but also his reasons behind the formation of the Eagle Group. The group was, he’d told her, nothing more than a collection of concerned businessmen working in concert to manage a vitally necessary contraction of population pressure, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. All of these things were now self evident, but they had been for decades and nothing had been done. And she’d had to agree – because even to her conditions were already terrifying – and growing worse by the day. So, what was the best apolitical anodyne? 

Instead of a protracted period of decline and collapse, a period that could, literally, play out over a hundred years – or even longer, the founding premise of the group was to accelerate this collapse. Do it now, quickly, so that there would remain a nucleus of humanity left to start over again. To get it right the second time around.

Looking back on her father’s life from her current place in time she was stunned by his prescience. Her father had, almost by himself, foreseen the consequences of explosive population growth and calamitous resource extraction back in the 1970s, and instead of sitting idly by and doing nothing he had acted. He’d created the Eagle Network to prepare the way ahead, to desensitize select groups of people, to help prepare them for the difficult choices ahead.

She had been blown away by the scope of what she heard from him. The Eagle Network had morphed into a sprawling effort to accumulate political power to further the ends of the group, to manage the contractions ahead, but along the way the group had accumulated enemies, too. And now these enemies were gathering, about to act, but the group had developed a new, very bold way forward.

Her father had carefully watched the way, as a child, she’d developed her own unique abilities. She could not only ‘see’ other places and other times, she had also left the current timeline and repeatedly journeyed back to 1912. But where else had she gone? And when else had she gone? He soon understood that these first journeys had been involuntary, that she’d had no control over when or where she went, or even the timing of these events – until she’d met that orca, in Tahiti. An old male orca, and he’d shown her how to harness her abilities, to direct her energy. 

And Ted Sorensen had been terrified of her ever since.

She’d thought herself special – for a while, anyway – until she realized that there were a handful of other people with this ability, and then she’d learned that this pool of people was constantly growing. Slowly, at least in the beginning. But when would this ability reach a kind of critical mass? When would it go from fringe to mainstream? And what would be the consequences of at first hundreds of people jumping around through time, altering timelines, to eventually more and more people jumping?

Absolute chaos would result. Time itself would become meaningless. 

And then her father had told her one last self-evident truth, the one truth that had rocked her conception of reality to her core.

This incipient chaos held growing implications not just for life on Earth. Conceivably, life everywhere in the solar system would be impacted. And then members of the Eagle Group, her father among them, had been contacted by an off-world civilization, and the final implications of this growing ability had taken on alarming new dimensions.

Not only was life on Earth at stake, but now members of the Eagle Group understood that these growing abilities threatened life through not only the galaxy, but conceivably even the entire universe.

And now the universe was reacting. Much like antibodies swarm to attack an infecting micro-organism, a vanguard of off-world, spacefaring civilizations had been monitoring developments here on Earth, and perhaps for thousands of years. Once humanity’s incipient abilities became apparent to them, one by one they started to watch us more closely – and to then draw up their contingencies.

But this period of monitoring was rapidly coming to an end.

And now, Ted told his daughter, at least one of these off world civilizations was preparing to act.

But members of the Eagle Group had convinced this group to delay taking any action – for now. Because the Eagle Group had a plan, a new plan. The Group was going to act decisively to rewrite recent history, to put an end to not only explosive population growth but to put an end to the ability of some people to bend the laws of time.

But this was proving to be the most difficult part of her father’s plan, yet now Sorensen thought he had the solution.

He was going to bait a trap. Get everyone with this ability into one place, and then destroy them all.

And if the Group failed, the Grays would act. Quickly, and decisively. 

“How?” she’d asked her father.

“They will use the Earth to destroy the Earth. That’s all we know, Deb. If we fail, they will act.”

“So, if I understand what you’re saying, you want me to use my abilities to change our history? Is that about the size of it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought about what might happen to us? I mean, all of us?”

And when she looked at her father he’d started crying, crying as deeply as she’d ever seen anyone cry in all her life, and yet the true depths of his love had shone through this despair. 

And in that moment she could finally see the way ahead, her destiny, what she’d been born to do, and the journey she was doomed to fulfill. 

Perhaps, she said to herself, this path led to oblivion. She could feel that in her bones now. Perhaps there was no other way to change the world, but thanks to her father she could see that now. People would never act on their own. People had to be led.

By men like her father.

+++++

Baris Metin watched as America Eagle pulled away from the wharf, Captain Mendelssohn still steaming for Marseille to take on fuel, and this had left him nominally as the new captain of the Disco Volante. His contract with the Eagle Network had been amended to take account of his new rank – and he was more than pleased with this new salary – but this woman – a woman! – was officially in charge of the vessel. Peter Weyland himself had made that much clear to him.

She’d come onboard and gone directly to her stateroom, the last untouched space on the yacht that still retained all of her former glory, right down to the solid gold bathroom fixtures and mirrors on the ceiling over the king-sized bed. The yacht’s large engineering and deck staff was still onboard, but only a lone cook and two stewards remained, though they were here to look after the woman. 

Yet she’d not left her stateroom once since boarding.

The inter-phone chirped and he picked it up.

“Bridge here,” Baris said.

“Captain Metin?” the woman said.

“Yes, speaking?” He noted her voice carried the weight of someone in charge.

“Please set a course for Gibraltar that takes us north of Corsica and just south of Minorca, and get underway at once. Please maintain radio silence for now, so shut down the AIS for now, and all personal cellphones are to be switched off.”

“Yes Ma’am,” he’d just managed to say before the line went dead, so without thinking he dialed up the engine room. “Prepare to get underway,” he told the Chief Engineer before he rang off. He pulled up Corsica on the huge, though quite old, Raytheon chartplotter and studied the coastlines of Corsica and Minorca; there were few obstructions on the north coastline of Corsica aside from a few charted rocks off the northwest point, off the tiny island of Giraglia, and he’d keep those well to port when he passed Corsica. Then there was nothing but 320 miles of blue water to the island of Minorca, off the southern coast of Spain. Assuming there were no mechanical issues or need to refuel there, the last leg to Gibraltar was another 610 miles, so call the entire trip roughly 1200 miles, and the Disco Volante’s range, according to her logbooks, was 33-to-3,500 nautical miles, so refueling wouldn’t be necessary.

The Disco Volante’s ‘X-O’, or executive officer, was an eager kid from Buenos Aires whose great claim to fame was taking some kind of seamanship courses when he was still in preparatory school. Still, Baris saw that Diego Gardel was bright and eager to learn, but more importantly he understood that the kid was what he had to work with right here, right now. In a way, he told himself, the kid was probably a test, and as such he knew that Peter Weyland would judge him by how well he handled the kid. 

‘Tough, but fair,’ he reminded himself, the same way his best mentors in the navy had handled him.

Gardel had been on American Eagle for a long time. If the kid had a problem it was conceit, because with his blond hair and blue eyed good looks women considered him irresistible, and Baris thought the kid was vainglorious in the extreme. The scuttlebutt was that the kid was banging Britney and one of the other female stewards onboard, and Baris assumed that was why the kid had been transferred with him. With no female crew members onboard the Disco Volante…the kid would cause no more problems for Britney, and therefore Dr. Weyland.

The inter-phone chirped again and he picked up: “Bridge?”

“Ready to get underway down here,” the engineer said.

Baris chafed. The engineer should have addressed him as Captain, so the man was testing him, staking out his turf. “Who are you addressing?” Captain Metin snarled.

But then the line went dead.

He turned to Diego. “Please go to the engine room, Mr. Gardel. Have the engineering crew report to the bridge.”

“Aye, Captain.” The kid grinned and scampered off down the stairs.

Then he did as he’d been told; he called the chief steward and reported the transgression.

And now the chief steward was on the bridge as the chief engineer slouched his way up the stairs and onto the bridge, obviously taking his time, pushing the limit for all it was worth. His underlings appeared equally unenthusiastic

And before Baris could say a word the steward took out a silenced pistol and shot the engineer in the head. The man dropped like a sack of rocks and the other crewmen jumped to attention. But not Diego, Baris noted; no, Diego simply pulled the fallen engineer out of the way, making room for the steward to address the silent men from the engine room after he told them to come all the way up the stairs.

“Insolence on this ship will not be tolerated,” the steward said. “This man is the captain, and this is the executive officer, and when you address them, you will address them as such, by rank. It is Captain Metin, and X-O Gardel, and I understand this is something the former chief engineer decided not to do. So just a word of warning; we have an important mission to complete and we will maintain proper discipline for the duration. You will be paid handsomely, of course, as per your contracts; but break ranks and you will meet the same fate as Mr. Bartok. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Now, who among you feels ready to assume the chief’s duties?”

One man raised a hand.

The steward nodded at the man. “Miller, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir.”

“You are now the chief engineer.”

“Aye, sir. Thanks you, sir.”

“Captain?” the steward said, turning to his ashen-faced ‘captain’. “Any further orders for your crew?”

“Prepare to get underway, Chief Miller,” Baris Metin said to the man, though he felt ill and that his world suddenly made no sense. “And everyone is to switch off their cellphones.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Dismissed,” Baris added, though he was not at all sure what the hell was happening on this vessel, but sure he wanted nothing more to do with these people. He watched as the steward and Diego pulled Bartok down the stairs, then he turned to the helm, doing his best to ignore the spreading pool of blood on the teak and holly floor underfoot. “Cast off all lines,” he said to the deckhands over the intercom; the three deck hands sprang into action, and a few minutes after American Eagle cleared port the Disco Volante followed in her wake. An hour later Baris changed course, making for their first waypoint.

When the kid returned to the bridge he sat silently, though he was looking at Baris with a strange grin in his eyes. “You want me to get that stuff off the floor?” the kid asked.

“Sure. Why not.”

“No problemo,” the kid said, still smiling. “This your first time?” he added.

“First time for what?”

“Company discipline. It can be a little harsh.”

“Harsh?” Baris said sarcastically as he pointed to the spreading stain. “Is that what you call this?”

“Yeah,” the kid said as he got a mop and some disinfectant from the cupboard opposite the stairwell, “my grandfather’s been with the group since the early days. He said it’s always been like this.”

“A television network? Really?”

“No, no, not the networks, the group. You know, the Eagle Group?”

“Oh,” Baris said, but he’d been in intel long enough to know when and how to play along. “How long have you been in – the group?”

“Oh, all my life, really. I grew up on the main campus.”

“Oh, that must’ve been interesting. Have you always been interested in boats?”

“Yeah. I belonged to the Youth Corps, and we had a big boating program. I learned navigation and stuff like that when I was ten years old…”

“At the main campus? Really?”

“Yeah. When did you do your initiation?”

“I haven’t been yet.”

The kid stopped what he was doing and looked at Metin suspiciously for a moment, then finished cleaning the floor before he disappeared down the stairs.

Baris usually felt good when he returned to the sea, but not today. After setting the autopilot when the ship reached its starting waypoint, he cycled through all the CCTV screens, looking at the crewmen in the engine room for the longest time. None of them had seemed particularly surprised when their chief was gunned-down right in front of them, and he wondered why. A few minutes later he watched the kid and the chief steward dump the engineer’s body overboard, then he watched the kid mopping up more blood on the aft deck and swim platform, and with that same vacuous smile on his face.

‘A campus? Something called the Eagle Group, with a campus.’ His mind was racing, chasing shadows while thinking about all the things he just didn’t know, yet one thing was certain. These weren’t good people; in fact, when he looked around this ship he felt nothing but evil and suddenly something like cold dread gripped his heart. ‘Why gut the ship aft of the bridge? Why had he been instructed to make this journey with the AIS switched off? And who the devil was that woman in the main stateroom?’

He cycled through pages on the chartplotter and stopped at the main radar screen. He saw a contact dead ahead and about ten miles ahead so picked up the binoculars and took a look.

It was American Eagle. And a large helicopter was landing on her helipad.

He put the binoculars down and looked around the bridge; suddenly he felt small, and very alone. 

And he wished he could talk to his brother, but radio silence meant no phone calls allowed and he didn’t want to end up like the chief engineer – in a spreading puddle of blood on his way to a watery grave.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | this is fiction plain and simple, and nothing but. And no, no…We Won’t Get Fooled Again.