Alpha Rising (42 page)

“
I’ll monitor sound speed
in the space plasma,” Bach added.

G.R. suddenly stood, scooted around Kaz and
sat on her other side. “Trade spots with me. I’m left-handed.”

Her voice raised an octave. “Now I’m low and
you’re high?”

Bach shook his finger at the touchpad
images. “The arrow shows the direction it controls, Kaz. If we’re
low, you’ll bring us up.” His voice grew rushed and forceful. “I
want total focus on those navigation screens, and faultless
thruster control.” He checked his monitoring device then added, “If
we plan it right, we’ll slide through before the deadly action
begins.”

“
Adjust your backrests and
buckle in tight,” Deni said.

In a stress-driven final attempt at humor,
G.R. grumbled, “We’re on the off-ramp to the Twilight Zone.”

“
Get ready!” Bach
commanded.

Within seconds, a comet glanced off the
Ark’s trailing edge, turning it ninety degrees. As the navigators
fought to right their course, the ship entered a swirling sheet of
gas and dust and everything outside went black. Then came a
head-numbing noise accompanied by a fist-sized ball of fire that
materialized under the flight deck and rolled through the cabin
leaving a blackened trail behind. Smoke alarms blared and onboard
sprinklers rained down on the fireball. The big ship pitched and
yawed like the last car on a roller coaster.

Beyond the cockpit windows
raged what looked like a star war orchestrated by a pyrotechnic
madman. Hundreds of incendiary planetary fragments ripped through
space dragging flaming silvery tails behind them.
Souls of the faithful returning to heaven,
flashed through Bach’s mind as a white-hot
fireball sped toward the ship. Just before impact it veered left
and disappeared. “Don’t blink, and be exact with thrust
correction.” That was his final instruction to the
others.

The Ark, now beyond the accretion disk and
within the event horizon, hurtled inescapably toward the maw.

*****

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Bach touched his face with
both hands. His fingers felt icy cold against his cheeks.
Am I dead or alive?
He
glanced around the cockpit feeling like he’d awakened from a
drugged sleep. The others, slumped on the padded bench as if they’d
napped there, stirred.

Star rubbed her eyes and looked through the
windows into the black void of deep space. “Where are we?” she
muttered. Wondering if the ship’s systems were functional, she
switched on the electro-brain. It booted up with a whir and data
refreshed on a monitor. She moved in close and studied the details.
“We’ve come through the worm hole with our ship’s settings exactly
as we had them,” she announced. “We’re on minimal power.”

Bach wiped his hand across a data panel as
if trying to clear away something he didn’t like. “The Milky Way is
gone,” he said without emotion.

Kaz moved to his side on the bench.
“Gone?”

Star pointed to her panel. “Your solar
system, our zones, and all other astral markers in the galaxy were
consumed by the black hole.”

Head bowed, Kaz whispered, “Oh, please,
please tell me Earth is there.”

“
There are no remnants of
your solar system,” Star replied.

Lynch, Deni, and G.R. unharnessed themselves
and gathered in stunned silence.

Trembling, Kaz reached for Lynch. “Earth is
gone,” she muttered. “My family … my cats.”

He helped her from the bench and held her
close. “We’ve all lost loved ones and everything else, honey. It’s
impossible to understand that we’ll never go home again.”

Deni and G.R. silently watched incoming
scans of dormant space on the electrobrain. Overwhelmed, G.R.
wrapped his arms around her and struggled to speak. “God pushed the
big button and brought down the whole world.”

“
Why were we spared?” she
asked.

Bach noticed Star fighting back tears. He
slid around the bench to her side and they reached for each other
at the same time.

As minutes passed, each of the Arkmates
grappled with the tragedy in his or her own way.

Deni was first to exchange despair for
resolve. She stretched her long legs with a walk to aft ship and
announced, “The passengers must be terrified, I’m going to check on
them.”

All the idle gadgetry and
inoperative advanced technology in the cockpit turned Bach’s
thoughts back to age five when he pretended to fly his
cardboard-box spaceship to distant realms known only to him.
I wish it could be that easy now.

Star looked out at the blackness. “What can
we do?”

He pointed to the fuel indicator. “We don’t
have enough fuel to go anywhere anyway.”

Star wrote in the journal, then
voice-recorded events. Later, she looked up and saw something
strange on the cockpit windows—a powdery substance, rain-like in
appearance, coating the convex panes.

Bach saw it at almost the same time and
stood straight up. He touched the window from the inside. “What the
heck?”

G.R. watched the silvery powder accumulate
on a porthole, then got up for a closer look. “Meteor dust or
cosmic particles?”

Lynch checked it out. “Could be we’re
driftin’ through a cloud of somethin’.”

Kaz latched onto Lynch. “We’re gonna die.
First we end up in a place like hell,” she choked back tears, “now
we’re suspended in space. I’m sick of being in the wrong place at
the wrong time.”

“
Actually, it’s the wrong
place at the right time,” G.R. said. “If you’re in the wrong place
at the wrong time, nothing happens.”

“
Oh, be quiet!” she snipped
through sobs.

Lynch cradled her head and stroked her
disheveled hair. “Stay strong, honey.” His own nerves on edge, he
yelled at Bach, “What went wrong in carrying out the Creator’s
mission and getting us back to Jenesis?”

“
I never had instructions
to go back there.”

The thick vein of anger divided Lynch’s
forehead. “Well, why didn’t you get all the instructions?”

“
I followed the
instructions exactly as they were given,” he snapped back. “I
assumed we’d return to Jenesis, the Creator didn’t reveal
it.”

G.R. sat in a hammock, fretfully tapping his
feet on the floor. “Lost in space, endured the impossible, black
hole, lost in space.”

“
Knock it off,” Bach said.
“If we’d made it to Jenesis we’d be dead now. Jenesis is gone.” He
looked out. “This is part of the Creator’s plan.”

“
And now we’re in that
dimension between man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge,”
G.R. offered.

Bach sighed. “It’s not the Twilight Zone,
G.R.”

Lynch narrowed his beady blue eyes. “No.
It’s more like biblical history.”

Kaz stared at him. “What do you know about
the Bible?”

“
There’s a lot you don’t
know about me, kid. And I bet you didn’t know that Balal, the name
of the galaxy where we were, is an early form of the word, Babylon,
and in scripture, Dura was a province of Babylon. Then we’ve all
heard of Jenesis, only spelled differently. The other ten planets
had names of ancient cities in scripture, too. But it seems to me
that this was another case of Babylon’s falling to
ruin.”

“
So would the Specter be
dead? And his army gone?” Kaz asked.

“
Guess we’ll find out
sooner or later,” Lynch replied.

“
Just remember,” Bach said,
“we conquered the foe using the ultimate weapon, the mind, and we
can do it again. But now, we need to come up with options for all
the lives entrusted to us on this ship.”

Star jumped up. “Oh, gosh, Deni’s still in
the E-module. I’ll go check on all of them.”

Bach handed her the
a
to
z
roster. “I’m still wondering about
this puzzle. Maybe you can figure it out while you’re back
there.”

*****

When Star and Deni returned from the
E-module, the crewmates gathered around two fold-down tables for a
conference. “Let’s have good news first,” Bach said.

“
Okay,” Deni replied. “No
injured passengers or animals.”

“
And no serious damage
inside the ship,” Star added.

After an oddly quiet time when no one
offered more good news, Bach cleared his throat and said, “Okay.
Here’s the bad news. The speck of fuel we have left isn’t even
enough to start the engines, but with stored power and our food
sources we can remain operational in a space-station mode for a
while.”

“
How long?” Kaz
asked.

“
I don’t know. Our
hydroponic gardens are producing well, but the bottom line is we
didn’t build the ship to sustain life indefinitely. The
environmental module is built to fly independently; it runs on
either electronic or collected heat. But we don’t have a sun to
power it.”

Allowing the others time to worry seemed a
bad idea, so Star placed the roster in the middle of the group and
changed the subject. “Look. We had a few names wrong.”

“
What names were wrong?”
asked Bach.

“
We assumed Ptero and Xian
were spelled phonetically, but it’s p-t-e-r-o. And Xian is spelled
x-i-a-n. Even the little fuzzy phroo animal—it’s a phroo, with the
ph sounding like an
f
.”

Deni added, “And Yang goes
by his middle name. His real name is Quan—with a
q
. But there’s a Rook
named Kwan, with a
k
, so Yang uses his middle name.”

“
Yes, it was Kwan who took
our fuel on Ashkelon,” said Star. “I’m glad to forget him. But the
problem is, we still have two letters unaccounted for.”

“
Which are?” Bach
asked.

“
A
and
e
.”

“
So we’re missing two
people?” Kaz asked.

G.R. said, “Yep! Eleven planets … picked up
two each from ten planets, and four of us from Ashkelon. Twenty-six
letters in the alphabet—two missing.”

“
Why bother with the roster
anyway?” Lynch asked in his lazy drawl. “We can’t go get anyone
else. It’s a done deal.”

Bach said, “Altemus had something in mind
when he put that checklist aboard. Why are there two letters open
when we have all the inhabitants?”

Kaz jumped from her seat so fast she knocked
over a water bottle in her haste. “I know, I know, I’ve figured it
out!” She quickly wiped up the spill.

“
This should be good,” G.R.
deadpanned with a snort.

“
You’re just jealous
because you don’t have an ‘opinion,’ nor a clue,” she teasingly
countered.

“
Do tell, Oh Great
One.”

With a satisfied smile stuck to her face,
Kaz offered, “When Bach said ‘inhabitants’ instead of ‘people,’
didn’t that ring a bell?”

No one responded.

She waved a hand at Bach, “You did that on
purpose didn’t you, Bach? You’re so smart. I bet you did that on
purpose. You already know what I’m going to say.”

Not wanting to admit he didn’t know, he
shook his head slightly.

Kaz wore a cunning look and replied as if
answering a Jeopardy question, “Who are the apes?”

“
The apes!” Bach
shouted.

“
You said they weren’t
among the animals of their planet, that they showed up from out of
nowhere. They must have names, but they can’t tell us,” she
said.

Deni digested the comment, then said, “Maybe
this is a case of all that pollution causing a higher form to
evolve into a different species.”

G.R. said, “Maybe they’re humans who were
taken there by the Specter after an experiment gone wrong.”

Kaz said, “That’s scary.”

“
Well, hold those
thoughts,” Bach said. “We’ll research and document the
possibilities later. They’ll make thought-provoking journal
entries.”

“
Ape women,” G.R. said,
trying to stifle his laugh-snort.

Kaz giggled. “Do you have inside info,
G.R.?”

Deni sounded like a mother.
“Will you two stop it? Now get serious. We need to figure out their
names. Obviously they should start with an
A
and an
E
.”

“
I do like thinking of them
as more human,” Star said.

“
Yeah, we should name
them,” Lynch said. “And that would mean that picking up four of us
on Ashkelon was the right thing to do. The roster’s complete with
our names included.”

“
I’ll check the old co-op
crews’ travel journals to see if they mentioned apes or names,”
Deni said.

G.R. reared back on his
stool, “Okay,
a
and
e
, how
about Evolution and Atom, a-t-o-m.”

“
Dumb,” said Kaz with
thumbs down.

“
Not dumb. A logical
offering—opposite interpretations of mankind’s
beginnings.”

“
Amour and Eros?” Lynch
said with a grin.

G.R. screwed up his face. “Eros?”

“
Erotic love … maybe it’s
time you learned.” Kaz hooted.

Deni closed the book. “No mention of apes on
Zarephath.”

Star shrugged. “We can list them simply as A
and E.”

Chuckling, G.R. said, “I’d prefer real
names. Maybe Darwin, or how about Hairy, h-a-i-r-y.” His braying
laughter ignored by the crew, he tried again. “Hairy,” he said,
snorting.