The Temporal Key Read online

  The Chapters

  Iteration

  The Rancher

  Radiation Poisoning

  Aldartal

  What is it?

  A Brief History of Time Travel

  The Locals Return

  Mack Goes to Roswell

  Jesse Marcel

  RAAF Captures Flying Saucer!

  Taking the Chronis

  New Blood

  Hiding in the Desert

  Trying to Catch the Chronis

  The Wreckage Arrives in Roswell

  Stealing

  Naomi Saulf

  Almost There

  Alien Autopsy

  Meeting Naomi

  Close Encounter

  Escaping the Intelligence Building

  Primitive Air Travel

  Alamogordo

  In Naomi's Apartment

  The Hangar

  The Vortex

  The Wet Man

  Fugitives

  Failure

  Panic and Confusion

  Lost Memories

  Fleeing Alamagordo

  Exile in the Desert

  Iteration

  Dayk woke to a stone digging into his bloodied cheek. His head throbbed with a vibrating numbness, and the whole world seemed to pulse around him. Thick smoke floated over everything that he could see, and a deafening ringing in his ears transformed itself into muffled sounds of chaos. Every breath was thick with the smell of ionized air, burnt grass, and poisonous fumes.

  As he came to, he saw clumps of tall, wild grass, and thick, thorny scrub brush growing randomly from the rocky red terrain. Mesquite and Palo Verde trees were growing sparsely in the distance, and the ground around him had been violently torn in deep gashes and littered with broken pieces of technology. Fires burned all around him on islands of grass, separated by oceans of stone, sending a pillar of smoke up into the afternoon sky.

  Dayk tried to lift his head and look around. We crashed, he thought as he gazed at once recognizable pieces of an advanced civilization that now lay smashed and destroyed across the desert. Through the smoke, he saw only a small piece of his ship, the Chronis, torn apart from the rest of the hull and nearly collapsed some distance from where he lay. His eyes darted about the landscape, hoping to catch a glimpse of any of his colleagues, but all he could see was wreckage.

  Dayk was one of five small, pale-grey skinned people with large almond shaped eyes, enlarged craniums and diminished jaws. They were a thinly framed people who rarely stood more than a meter tall, with mostly androgynous features except for a slight variation in height between the sexes. Advanced technologically, they were scientists on a mission to study one of many lost historical events. This crash changed everything.

  Can anyone hear me? He called out telepathically. There was no reply, only neural-static filled the waves. Anyone! Amikes! He thought out. With a weak, shaking arm he pushed himself up off the ground, and got himself upright with his head spinning. Dr. Amikes! Dr. Fossor! He called out to his colleagues again, but still no one answered. “Dr. Amikes!” He yelled aloud. His mouth was dry and burned in the thin, poisonous atmosphere and it made his voice weak. “Anyone!” He tried to yell again. It was so hard to breathe and every attempt winded him. Please, can anyone hear me? He called out telepathically again.

  …disen…ged! Unable to enga… …afeties! …empor…core coll…pse emi…nt. A static riddled telepathic voice came permeating into Dayk’s mind.

  Please say again! You’re breaking up. Dayk called out. He focused his mind through the static and onto the disembodied voice and listened as carefully as he was able.

  Once again, a weak telepathic signal came into his mind. All core contain… …stems have disengage... Unable to engage safeties! Temporal core collapse emi… Total power loss in two poi… kiloChrons. Sensor grid is offline. Navigation sys… ….been destroyed. Navigational lock-outs engaged. Environmental systems have been compromised. Database integrity is collapsing and is… …from eighty-seven percent. Neuro-computer shut down expected in three hund… and seventy-two chrons. All core containment systems have diseng... The computer began repeating the message.

  Database integrity! Dayk thought in a panic. He looked around at his situation fearing for the worst and beginning to realize that his last connection to the knowledge and information he would need to survive in this time period was about to be severed forever. When the power failed, all their resources would be gone.

  He searched the computer with his mind and through a noisy telepathic connection, he began to download as much as he could about this period of history; languages, maps, technology of the age, medical techniques, field guides and any other information that he thought might be pertinent over the next ten days. He saved everything he was able in the cybernetic memory in his head, and the information came pouring into his mind faster than he could process any of it. Suddenly his connection to the computer degraded and the flow of information completely ceased. Dhregh! He thought as the telepathics went blank.

  Confused and frustrated, he looked down at the back of his hand and watched as the pigmentation cells on his skin began changing, like an animated tattoo. The mark with concentric circles radiating from a central point meant that the area was flooded with intense radiation. An image of a quickly beating heart appeared next on his arm, with information about his pulse, respiration rates, and the amount of hemorrhaging that he was experiencing from his wounds. His injuries were minor, except for the radiation.

  Radiation! How am I supposed to shut down the core? He thought to himself.

  Beginning to panic, Dayk raised his right palm up and a holographic sphere appeared above it, projected by the technologies grown into his hand. His body was able to represent almost every kind of waveform as a graphical image in this sphere of light. He scanned around looking for his companions, but the radiation belching from the temporal core was flooding the image with a static that appeared to flow from that central point; everything around it was obscured.

  Suddenly, from across the field came a startling moan of agony. He recognized the voice as one of his companions, and he changed the focus of his holographic sphere, hoping to find his colleague in the image, but all he got was garbled static, so he closed his palm and the holographic projection disappeared.

  Blood from his head dripped into his eye and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his flight suit as he got to his feet. He was still unstable, and the world hummed numbly around him in a noisy din. From his standing vantage point Dayk could see more of the wreckage. The ship was smashed into at least three larger pieces and tons of smaller debris. From what he could see through the smoke and through the arid, disorganized terrain the wreckage was spread out over at least several hundred meters.

  At the base of the largest section of remaining hull Dayk could now see Dr. Amikes smashed between two bulkheads. “Oh, no, no, no!” he yelled as he began stumbling toward Amikes’ body. Amikes was the expedition's Chief Scientist, and one of Dayk's closest friends. Seeing his body crushed in the wreckage hit him like a punch to his guts, and he doubled over and fell to his knees. "Oh, no!! No!!" He tried to yell in the thin atmosphere, but his voice was lost in the chaos. An overwhelming sense of defeat rushed across him. He heard the agonizing moan behind him again and turned away from Dr. Amikes. Please be all right! He thought.

  He stood back up and started hobbling his way back toward the moans, tears welling up in his eyes. As he got closer to his other colleague, he started picking up tidbits of telepathic activity, but the signal was full of static and was generally unintelligible.

  He walked to what had been the lab section of the ship and circled around the hull to the other side. “Dr. Fossor!” he yelled as he saw their Chief Archaeologist im
paled on a protruding support structure. The fractured beam of poly-carbonate had torn through his upper thigh, very near to his hip and he bled profusely onto the ground below him. “Dr. Fossor, can you hear me?” he called out as he came alongside of him. Dayk could see that Fossor had blood gushing from his mouth as well, and his left eye was particularly crushed, black and bruised. He tried to hide the cringe when he saw him, but he failed as he looked him over, barely conscious and uncomfortably pinned to the side of their broken ship.

  “Give me a sign, Doc,” he said as he lifted Fossor’s head. Fossor let out a strange yell that seemed like it was coming from a dream state. “Can you hear me?” Static filled telepathic ramblings skipped in unintelligibly as he looked into his one good eye, trying to see if he was even conscious. “Dr. Fossor, the telepathics are out. We’re being flooded with radiation. Can you hear my voice?”

  Dr. Fossor’s one good eye suddenly seemed to lift out of the fog and he raised his head up and looked directly at Dayk. “Not…” he said.

  “Not what?” Dayk said. “Stay with me, Doc.”

  “…Accidentally…” Fossor mumbled out. “The… can’t be…” Fossor raised up a bloody arm and tried to grab Dayk. “Not…” Suddenly he seemed to be choking on his words. No doubt it was the thin air and the poisonous fumes.

  “Come on, stay with me!” he said as he worked to keep Fossor conscious. As he grabbed his jaw, he could feel that it was broken. This is bad, he thought to himself.

  Fossor passed out again, and Dayk started looking for other ways to stabilize him. He flipped over his arm and looked at Fossor’s life marks. His unconscious state activated the cells in his arm and his basic vitals showed up like tattoos. Radiation exposure, internal hemorrhaging, irregular heartbeat, head trauma, fractured oculus, fractured mandible, fractured ribs and low blood pressure. “I don’t even know if we still have a med kit,” Dayk said to himself. “Without a proper med bay, there’s no way we can fix all of this.”

  He looked around himself to find something that he could use as a tourniquet for the leg to slow some of the bleeding. He pulled a long piece of fiber cable out from the torn hull and wrapped it as tightly as he could around Fossor’s leg and hip. With the wound being so close to the pelvis, he struggled to cut off enough of the circulation, but he kept wrapping it until he saw a noticeable decrease in blood loss.

  “I’m going to find what’s left of the infirmary and bring back some supplies. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Dayk said. He knew Fossor couldn’t hear him, but he said it all the same.

  He looked quickly around the rest of the broken section of the ship to see if anyone else was pinned inside, but no one else was there, so he took one last look at Dr. Fossor and then walked into the smoke and chaos to find the last two members of his crew.

  “Dr. Thalia! Captain Nocta!” he called weakly into the smoke. There was no reply. “Captain…” he lost his breath. “Captain Nocta!” he yelled again. Nothing.

  It was harder to see where he was going as he got closer to the main body of the wreckage, and electric arcs and fires burned hotly all around him as he moved in. He could feel the radiation warming his skin as he moved deeper into the mess. “Dr. Thalia!” He called out, catching his breath again.

  Suddenly a streak of bright green laser light flashed by his head so close that it almost singed him and then slammed into a bulkhead just in front of him, where it exploded into sparks. Dayk jumped as the blast hit and he spun around to see who or what could possibly be firing a weapon at him. All he saw was an approaching arm being raised in the smoke as it fired a second time.

  He ducked just in time to avoid the second blast and ran as quickly as he could around the far side of the bulkhead as another blast slammed into the desert floor beyond him. He didn’t make it far before he was out of breath and feeling dizzy in the low oxygen. “Captain Nocta?” he gasped out as he stooped down and crawled under the smoke around the side of the heavily radiating ship.

  “Get out here Dayk!” Nocta yelled. “It’s time.”

  “What the hazmar are you doing, Captain? Where did you get that weapon?” He continued to crawl around the far side of the broken ship, and from his low position he could see Nocta’s ankles pushing through the smoke behind him. “No destructive instruments! That’s the law, Captain! One shot from that could destroy a timeline!”

  “Or fix one. It doesn’t matter how I got it, Doctor. What matters is how I use it,” Nocta yelled blindly into the smoke as he limped painfully around the long side of the wreckage. “Get out here!”

  Dayk was utterly confused. He watched as Nocta passed him in the chaos and then he stood up and ran back around toward the edge of the debris field.

  Captain Nocta caught the movement in the corner of his eye and quickly turned to fire two shots at Dayk as he ran. The blasts flew passed his arms and burned through the smoke beyond him. Dayk was about to dive off into the nearby brush, when something in the hull caught his eye. He quickly changed direction and slipped under a collapsed section of the hull that led into what used to be the ship’s cargo hold. From his hidden position, he watched as Nocta hobbled passed him and didn’t stop to turn around.

  As Nocta continued off, Dayk moved deeper into of the main section of the ship. In here the cacophony was the greatest, as alarms and sirens rang out loudly, strange fires burned sideways from malfunctioning technology and toxic chemicals flooded every susceptible pocket of the ship. Steam and smoke billowed from consoles. Oils and strange fluids leaked out of cracks and broken tubing sizzling as it hit the floor, chemically reacting with the surfaces of the ship. Where the ship had met the ground, the hull was rumpled into chaos; collapsed in on itself like wadded origami. Getting through this mess was not going to be easy.

  From the cargo hold he moved through the bulkhead door to the environmental systems. The room was tight, hot, and full of the largest machinery on board. Just on the other side of the small room sat the door to the engineering section, and it would be there that he had his best chance to disable the temporal core before it collapsed and ripped a hole in the fabric of space time.

  “Dayk!” came a muffled voice from outside the ship. It was barely audible over the ship’s internal noise, but he heard it, nonetheless. He continued forward, working his way to the engineering section. “Come on, Dayk! I’m going to find you!”

  The bulkhead between the environmental section and engineering had a sealed oval door in its middle that refused to open without the normal power. There was a small panel near the automatic controls that gave ready access to the manual override. He opened the manual release panel and pulled the catch lever. The door slid open only a little way and then slammed against something hard. Dayk pulled on the door but it wouldn’t open any further than what it had. He felt around the edges and then pushed his head through the small opening, wriggling himself through to the other side.

  As soon as he made it through the door, he saw Dr. Thalia. She lay crumpled on the ground halfway pinned under a command console that had broken loose. Daylight was pouring in through the collapsed and broken tear in the hull creating pillars of light through the smoke and chemicals engulfing the small room. The transparent shielding that separated the temporal core from the engineering section was cracked. Electricity arced like some pink, plasma-discharge ballet across the shielding surface. In here the alarms were the loudest, and while the rest of the ship had felt like utter chaos, it was nothing compared to the engineering section. Lights and alarms of all kinds screamed and flashed from every direction.

  Through the wreckage Dayk saw the other side of Dr. Amikes. It was clear now that he died from a crushed skull. Dayk wrenched inside. A wave of horrible agony overtook him. He had known Dr. Amikes for most of his life. They had spent most of their careers together. He was the one scientist at the Temporal Sciences Center that Dayk had really felt a connection to. Seeing him there, crushed in the wreckage was too much. He fell to his knees and tears almost instantly be
gan welling up in his eyes. This was the worst day of his entire life, and it looked as though it was also going to be his last.

  “Dayk!” he heard the yell outside again.

  Dayk recomposed himself as best he could and made his way over to Dr. Thalia's body. Was she dead or alive? He grabbed her arm and pulled up the sleeve on her flight suit. She was alive! She was unconscious and showed signs of a concussion in the markings on her hand, but otherwise she appeared to be relatively physically uninjured. Her radiation level, however, was beginning to turn black. She was nearing a fatal dose of exposure and had suffered a massive amount of chemical exposure and was slowly being burned by the intense heat and corrosive surroundings. He scanned her body through his enhanced vision looking for additional lacerations and other signs of trauma, but the static was too intense for the technology in his head to cut through.

  "Where are you Dayk!?" came the muffled voice of Captain Nocta again. "I'm getting sick of this chase! It's time to end it!" There was a long pause. He had no idea what Captain Nocta was talking about. He had only just started chasing him a few hectoChrons ago, it wasn't like this was some lengthy endeavor.

  Dayk started trying to revive Dr. Thalia. "Dr. Thalia. Wake up." He shook her. No response. "Thalia!" He quietly tried to yell in her ear. No response.

  "We've gone through the crash, now let's get this over with. You’re not getting away, and I’m not going to die!" Nocta continued.

  What is he talking about? Dayk thought to himself.

  Dayk shook Thalia again. There was still no response. With a heavy sigh Dayk resolved himself and then slapped Dr. Thalia. "Thalia! Wake! Up!!" He whisper-yelled.

  Dr. Thalia started to stir!

  "That's it. Come back to me."

  "You ask me to wait until after the crash. I waited. Now it's time to finish this. You know what that means? It means that this mission has to end." Came Nocta's muffled voice. "It means you have to fail." Something in Nocta's voice sounded tired and frustrated.

  "What the...." Thalia snapped into consciousness. She was almost instantly alert. "What happened?" Thalia frantically started looking around at the destruction. Her head snapped this way and that way, quickly taking in all that had clearly gone wrong around her. "Oh no! Dr. Dayk! Did we crash!?"