The Temporal Key Read online

  "Shhh! Yeah, we did."

  "Oh, no! Dr. Amikes!?" Thalia called out! Dayk frantically covered her mouth and shushed her! Thalia looked suddenly shocked at Dayk's behavior. Dayk looked around like he was expecting something to come through the bulkheads, his hand still over her mouth.

  "Dr. Thalia?" Came the ominous voice from outside the ship.

  "I'm sorry Thalia. Dr. Amikes is dead." Dayk choked up for a moment. "But you have to keep your voice down. Captain Nocta is...."

  "Dr. Thalia!" Nocta called out again. "Where are you? Come on out here!"

  "... Nocta is trying to kill me. He's got a gun. I don't know where he got it."

  "What?! What's going on Dayk?!" Thalia asked with confusion all over her face.

  "I don't know. I woke up, I heard Dr. Fossor moaning. I went over to help him."

  "Fossor's alright?" Thalia interrupted.

  "No, he sustained a lot of major injuries, and his leg is impaled on a support."

  "Oh no!"

  "I tied off his leg to stop his bleeding, but he’s going to need serious help. I was headed to the infirmary when Nocta started firing at me!" Dayk quickly finished.

  "Dr. Thalia! You aren't with Dr. Dayk are you?" Nocta yelled out.

  Dr. Thalia glanced down at her arm for the first time. She started to panic as she saw her radiation level turning lethal. "Oh no! We're all going to die! We have to shut down the core! We have to get out of here! Is it too late?!" She yelled with a panicked whisper.

  "How can we shut down the core?!" Dayk asked.

  "Ah, dhregh. Dr. Fossor," Nocta's voice came from outside. Dayk and Thalia froze to listen. "Dayk, tying off his leg isn’t going to save him." He paused. Dayk and Thalia sat holding their breath. "It was good of you to try, but you know we can't leave him like this. Ten days to rescue, the infirmary is destroyed, we’ve got no way to treat him. Are you planning on just keeping him alive until he bleeds out? I’m afraid that’s not an option." There were three quick blasts from the energy pistol that could be clearly heard from outside. There was a withering scream that burst from Dr. Fossor and then silence. "He’s not going to suffer now. That only leaves you!" Nocta yelled out. "Now get out here! Dayk! Let's finish this."

  Thalia jumped with horror. She started hyperventilating in the thin atmosphere. Tears started streaming from her large dark eyes. Dayk winced and bit his lip. "He killed him!" Thalia started wailing out. "He killed him!"

  "And he’s going to do the same to us. We don’t have much time. We have to shut down the core and stop him. Focus! How do we shut down the core?" Dayk steadily asked Dr. Thalia.

  Thalia slowed her breathing and quickly recomposed herself. "Get this console off me." She started. Dayk stood up and lifted one end of the heavy console. Dr. Thalia pulled herself out from under it. Dayk set the console back down as quietly as he could. The alarms and electrical pops hid most of their activity, but a large crash would certainly give them away.

  Thalia stood up. Her hips ached terribly. She held her sides in pain as she put weight onto her legs. "Ahh!" She winced out. "Ok. Let's shut this thing down. If the core goes it’ll blast a hole in space-time so big there won't be an Earth and then none of this would have happened, and…"

  "Thalia, I'm the ship's Navigator and Mathematician. I know more about what's going to happen if that thing goes off than anyone does. How do we stop it?" Demanded Dayk impatiently.

  "We'll have to discharge the Hyper-Fusion Coils." Thalia told him.

  "Wait. Discharge the coils?! Those coils have enough energy in them to punch a hole through space-time and create a wormhole that will stretch over one hundred million years in any direction. We can't just discharge that kind of energy!" Dayk said.

  Thalia began stumbling around toward the control console that was at the base of the Temporal Core. She started punching at the console, trying to use the systems to shut down the core. "Only if we discharge them through the core. If I bypass the capacitors before they reach the Temporal Core and discharge the Hyper Fusion Coils directly through the ship's hull, then I should be able to use the hull as a kind of lightning rod and discharge the energy stored in the coils directly into the Earth." She said as she made her way across the trashed Engineering section toward another console that was still intact.

  "What will that do? Exactly?” Dayk asked her.

  "Well, in theory it will kill every living thing within a kilometer, at least." She replied.

  "Whoa! What!? We can't do that!"

  "Sir, if the computer core is down, and there's a fracture in the temporal core shielding, then our other options are to discharge it into the air, which will kill everything for about a hundred kilometers, and collapse part of this hemisphere into a gravitational well, or we let it overload, which we already know will blow a hole through space time." She stated solidly as she jerked a panel off the bulkhead and exposed the hyper fusion coils. "These things are basically just super-compressed stars, folded in multi-dimensional space and coiled up inside a container of extremely dense anti-gravity plating. Discharging them manually still releases massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation and creates an intense gravitational field during the release but allowing the reaction to be expended on its own, through the temporal core, would be catastrophic."

  There were sixteen hyper fusion coils installed in the ship. Dr. Thalia ripped a section of fiber conduit out of a nearby broken console and started pulling the individual fiber cables out. "So, I don't see any other options. And as I see it. If we don't stop the reaction in the Temporal Core, or in the hyper fusion coils, then we're all going to die of radiation sickness and then the core will explode and take the universe with it." She quickly attached one end of a piece of fiber cable to a hot lead on the top most hyper fusion coil. She continued, "But if we discharge the coils into the Earth then the whole reaction will be starved of energy and simply vaporize itself and at worst, we kill everything within a kilometer. Including us if we can't make it out of the blast zone in time." She attached the other end of the fiber cable to an exposed conduit that ran up toward the top of the engineering section and into the bulkhead toward the temporal core. "And as a bonus, assuming we can get away in time, it should also take care of Captain Nocta."

  "Captain Nocta's injured. He’s limping and won't be able to run fast, but we don't know where he is out there either. And he's clearly armed and dangerous." Dayk stated. "How long will we have."

  Thalia stopped and wiped the sweat off her brow. "Well, once I get the coils hooked up to the hull, then I'll use the core to trigger a jump that'll expend all the energy in the coils. I'd say about three hectoChrons."

  "Three hectoChrons!" Dayk startled. "We've got to make it over a kilometer in three hectos? We'll never make it! It's going to take us that long just to get out of this wreckage!"

  "Well, if we don't do this then we die of radiation exposure and the whole thing implodes in on itself anyway." She retorted.

  "And if we do, we die in an energy discharge, but the space-time continuum stays relatively intact." Dayk relented. "Dhregh. Alright. Let's do this. We'll try and make it out. I'm going to go see if I can get us out of this hole in the hull." Dayk started moving toward the rip in the hull. As he got closer, he could see Dr. Amikes crushed by the fallen bulkhead. He made a wide berth around his body and headed toward where the daylight was pouring in.

  Dayk glanced outside of the ship to see if he could see where Captain Nocta had gone to. But the smoke and debris made it impossible to tell.

  "Dr. Dayk!" Came a voice that sounded like it was inside the ship. "Dr. Thalia!" He'd come into the ship the same way Dayk had come in and was making his way through the storage and environmental systems areas. "Are you in here? Come out, come out!"

  "Dhregh!" Dayk said. "How long?"

  "I need another hectoChron!" Thalia said frantically.

  Dayk moved as quickly as he could toward the other side of the room and shut the bulkhead door. "We don't have another hectoChron
!" He opened the manual release panel on his side of the door and started ripping out the fiber cables and then jammed a broken piece of poly-carbonate tubing into the space behind where the door slid open. It wouldn't stop Nocta, but it should slow him down.

  "Alright! Got it!" Thalia said. She ran over to the Temporal Core and started setting the jump commands. New alarms started blaring. "Oh no! Dayk! Override the safeties on the navigation controls. They're aborting the jump automatically!"

  "I'm on it!" Dayk ran over to one of the control panels and started punching in his overrides as quickly as possible. One of the controls flashed red as he punched in his commands. This last command engaged the system and the red flashing light turned into a solid green and the Temporal Jump alarm joined the cacophony of alarms already singing their dangerous tunes. "Let's go! There! Through the torn section of the hull. We should be able to make it out!" Dayk and Thalia started running toward the tear to the outside.

  Behind them, Captain Nocta suddenly appeared through the door. "Get back here!" He yelled from behind the glass. He pulled on the manual release several times, but the door didn't open.

  Dayk helped Thalia squeeze through the rip in the hull, and when she was out, he watched her disappear quickly into the smoke. He heard her start coughing and gasping as he started pulling himself through the opening.

  Captain Nocta pried the bulkhead door open far enough to get his gun into the room, but the door slid open from his left, and being right handed, he held the gun awkwardly through the door. Looking over his shoulder to aim, he fired a few clumsy rounds of green light into the room. Then he watched angrily as Dayk made it out of the hole and back into world.

  Dayk caught up with Dr. Thalia as they both ran through the smoke toward a rugged tree line only a short distance off. The thin air made their heads light as they ran. Their hearts pounded like steel in their chests and the smoke and noxious gasses made the journey even harder.

  As they cleared the smoke, they got their first look at where they were. It was open country; rocky outcroppings popped up from the land like miniature mountains. There were plenty of places to hide, and yet there wasn’t. Hiding behind one rock outcropping would only give them cover for a few moments at best, and there was nothing to shield them from the impending blast.

  As they reached the first tree line a green burst of light exploded on one of the nearby mesquite trees. Dayk spun around mid-run to see Captain Nocta emerging from the smoke. His limp was clearly not affecting him as much as it seemed to earlier, but he still wasn't in a full run, and every time he fired at them, he stopped to take aim.

  "I... I can’t... Breath!" Thalia winced, beginning to stumble. Another green burst came at her from behind.

  "Come on.... Thalia...." Dayk heaved “We've only.... gone.... about two hundred.... meters...." He grabbed her shoulder and helped her stabilize herself. "We've got.... eight hundred.... more...."

  "So does he...” said Thalia.

  They came out on the other side of the outcropping where a hill went down toward a dry creek bed at a steep and long grade. As they began running down toward the ravine, Dayk stumbled and started rolling toward the bottom. Thalia tried to catch him but was caught by her own momentum. Dayk managed to catch himself and get righted. He stumbled and panted heavily for a moment and then began charging down the hill after Thalia.

  “My head… is… spinning!” Thalia puffed out as she climbed up the other side.

  Just as they reached the other side of the ravine the green blasts returned. They crashed in to the next clump of trees, letting the thorny branches tear their cloths and skin. Bursts of green light crashed around them again, until they pushed through into open desert and continued running downhill.

  Dayk looked back to see Nocta coming out of the small patch of trees on the other side of the ravine. How was this possible? He should have succumbed to his injuries and the thin air by now, he thought, but he was hot on their heels and gaining on them.

  They got only a short way through the open plane when a green burst exploded from in between Dayk's legs. That one was too close! He looked back to see Nocta pursuing them through the desert now. His left arm was still clearly damaged, but his right arm charged forward, pistol in hand firing round after round at both Thalia and Dayk.

  Thalia felt a searing burn on her forearm as a green blast grazed through the sleeve of her flight suit. The heat threw her off and she tripped in the dirt. Dayk stopped and went back for her. "I'm alright!" She said. Green blasts hit all around them. Dayk dragged her to her feet and they both started running again.

  Just as they approached a large boulder in the middle of the wasteland, they suddenly heard the ship winding up for a jump. The loud whirring sound came emanating out of the broken hull.

  "Oh no! It's too early!" Thalia yelled, “We're not going to make it!"

  They ran as hard as they could. Dayk looked back in time to see Captain Nocta stop and look back at the smoking pillar that raised high into the sky, clearly distracted by the sound of the ship charging up for a jump. They had run almost half a kilometer, but they still had so far to go, and their chests were already about to burst open. Dayk suddenly grabbed Thalia and started dragging her as quickly as possible behind the boulder.

  "Come on Thal...."

  BOOM!

  Every tiny hair on their bodies stood stiff as a board. A bright flash engulfed the world and then in a nanoChron lightning bolts shot out spherically from the epicenter, crashing and grounding themselves everywhere; tearing holes in the clouds in the sky! Their bodies suddenly convulsed as massive amounts of energy blew through them, every ounce of air was instantly charged in an ionized cloud. They suddenly slammed backwards into the boulder, and then both they and the boulder began falling backwards toward the ship as gravitational forces skyrocketed in the violent release of energy. Rocks and broken branches, flying cactus and cholla, and random bits of debris all began falling horizontally with them toward the epicenter of the blast. Before they were knocked unconscious, they slammed to the ground through a statically charged shock wave that crashed passed them onto the other side of the wasteland.

  The Rancher

  Mack Brazel was in the house eating an early supper on the J.B. Foster Farms Ranch when he heard what sounded like a strange, massive explosion some distance away. There was a flash from outside and the whole house shook violently. The air suddenly felt electrified and all of Mack's hair stood on its end. In mid bite, his bowl of cold beans quickly slid off the table onto the floor, and his spoonful was ripped right out of his hands, splattering onto the other side of the table. Picture frames, cans of food, small tools and everything else that he kept on shelves, leapt from their perches and onto the floor a few feet from where they should have landed. A strange nausea crept up in his gut, and for one brief moment Mack felt as though he might be quickly falling forward in his seat.

  The whole thing was over in a second. Mack looked rapidly around the ramshackle ranch house as though some clue to what he had just experienced existed somewhere around him. Everything in the place had shifted or fallen away from the east wall and was scattered and pressed up against the west wall. He hesitated for a moment, as though waiting for something worse to follow whatever it was that had happened. There was nothing, and the world was still again.

  This wasn’t the first-time Mack had been drawn from his food by some super-human phenomenon wreaking un-natural havoc just a short number of miles away. A few years prior the military had been testing their new super-weapon, the Atomic Bomb, at the White Sands, only some seventy or so miles away. The whole area had gone up in a stir over this deadly new weapon, and all the locals had developed a sour taste in their mouth for the military and its presence there in New Mexico.

  Mack remembered hearing the atomic blast two years earlier. He could see the mushroom cloud from the porch of his ranch house, and the bright flash that accompanied it was like a dawn within a dawn. At the time, all the ranchers had been
told that it was an ammunition malfunction, as though that were an acceptable explanation. An ammunition malfunction that massive meant that the military was both dangerous and incompetent.

  Three weeks later the truth was revealed after they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Then suddenly, the scientists at Los Alamos became the heroes who helped end the war, and the blast from the previous week's test felt more like a contribution. But as the testing and the military presence continued, the locals retained their initial distrust.

  There were several military and government installations in the area that had been installed only five or six years back. The White Sands Proving Grounds had been one of the biggest nuisances of all. Set up at Alamogordo, near the Jornada del Muerto desert, they were constantly testing weapons; blowing things up, flying strange aircraft, or launching things into the sky that would eventually rain down onto someone else's plot of Earth.

  Another of their damned tests?! Mack thought as he leapt from his seat and ran outside. From the porch of the ranch house everything looked fine. The sky was blue, with only a few clouds floating lazily through the stratosphere. If something had exploded out there, no sign of it remained. But then a faint smell caught his nose. It was a smell like burning chemicals and ozone. Mack stepped off the porch and looked up. It was here that he caught part of a dark pillar of smoke that crested over the roof of the shack behind him. Mack ran around to the back side of the ranch house, following the smoke pillar down to its source with his eyes as he cornered the building. That don’t make sense, he thought. Why would everything fall t’ward it?

  From the back of the house he could clearly see the tall pillar of smoke rising from the Earth. It was at least five or six miles away and looked to be on part of the Foster Farms land. Mack looked hard as he watched the smoke dissipate into the sky. There was too much obstruction to tell exactly where it was coming from, but it wasn’t very far.