Linkage: The Narrows of Time (37 page)

“This had better work; we’re running out of
time,” Lucas said, captivated by the activity on the screens.

“How long will it take for your people to
answer, Professor?” Drew asked.

“It all depends on their ability to decrypt
my message and follow the instructions I sent them.”

“What did you tell ‘em?” Lucas asked.

“I gave them the exact spatial coordinates of
this room, as well as my equations.”

“Equations?”

“To open the bridge from their side. When we
were marooned on Earth, we had only just begun to explore the
possibilities of the new rift-slipping technology. I continued to
refine the equations here, but we had no way to know if our people
back home have done so as well. The equations I sent will insure
they have what they need to make this happen.”

“That assumes they won’t need some time to
build the equipment they need to open the rift. You might be stuck
here for a while longer.”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“Maybe they’ve spent the past fifty years
perfecting the technology on their own and building the
hardware.”

“If that’s true, all they needed to know was
that we’re still alive, and our location in the multiverse.”

* * *

Four hours later, Lucas was leaning back in
his chair, watching the video screens, when he nodded off for a
second. His nose snorted once, waking him up. He looked around to
see if anyone noticed—no one did.

He stood up and walked briskly around the
room, swinging his arms to get the blood flowing. He needed
caffeine. “I’m going to run down to the mess hall, and grab a soda.
Drew, you want one?” Drew nodded. “Anyone else? Coffee? Soda?
Bagel?” Lucas asked. Both Bruno and Kleezebee declined. The video
techs ignored him.

As he walked to the elevator, his shadow
started jiggling along the back wall, jumping from one place to
another with no predictable pattern. Lucas saw that something was
catching the security guards’ attention, making them look past him
as he approached the elevator. Lucas turned around and saw a
flickering light near the center of the room. It resembled a tiny
lightning storm, maybe six inches wide, and it was expanding
gradually.

“Guys!” Lucas yelled, pointing at the
phenomenon. Kleezebee and Bruno turned to face him, as did Drew,
whose eyes grew to the size of ping-pong balls.

The security guards ran past Lucas with their
weapons drawn. Kleezebee scrambled around from the far side of the
light, and held out his arms. “Stand down,” he told his guards.
“They’re our friends.”

The security guards lowered their guns and
moved to the right of Kleezebee, who was now standing on crutches a
few feet in front of the light. Bruno slipped in between the guards
and Kleezebee, while the video techs got up from their stations and
waited to the far right of the security guards. They all seemed
eager to greet their long-lost brethren.

Lucas moved to the left of Kleezebee and put
his hand on his mentor’s shoulder as a gesture of solidarity.
Kleezebee looked at him and smiled. Lucas nodded. Drew rolled next
to Lucas, to his left.

The portal, now six feet in diameter, seemed
to stabilize as its oscillating light rays slowed their pace. A
trio of green laser beams appeared from the rift’s center,
spreading out horizontally across the elevator doors.

“Don’t be alarmed, they’re just following
safety protocols and scanning the area,” Kleezebee said.

The beams danced independently around the
room like spotlights piercing the night sky above a Hollywood movie
premiere. Their pattern seemed random, moving quickly in multiple
directions, until every inch of the surveillance room had been
mapped. Then they vanished.

“Here we go,” Bruno said.

Fifteen seconds later, murky silhouettes of
three tiny figures began to take shape at the center of the portal,
as if they’d just stepped into view at the far end of a giant
funnel. The figures moved forward, toward the portal’s event
horizon, slowly growing in size. The figures thickened and
solidified with each passing second. Even though they were no
longer hazy shadows, Lucas still couldn’t make out much in the way
of detail. Their heads were larger than he expected, perhaps
because they were wearing spacesuits or helmets of some kind, and
it looked like they were carrying something in their hands.

Lucas looked at Kleezebee and then Bruno.
Both men seemed to be mesmerized with anticipation, each smiling
like a groom-to-be, enjoying his last night of freedom at a local
strip club. Lucas was proud to be sharing this moment with his
friends who had toiled for decades to reach this epic milestone. It
was too bad History hadn’t been invited to this reunion; Lucas’
name would have been forever etched into the annals of time, never
to be forgotten.

He wondered what his mentor was thinking. He
couldn’t imagine what it was like for Kleezebee to be without his
wife and son all these years. Dreaming of them; longing to hold
them close again. Would they be waiting for him on the other side
with loving smiles and open arms? What if they weren’t? What if
Caroline were dead or remarried? Would getting his people home be
enough for Kleezebee, or would it tear his guts out, leaving him a
shell of a man?

Drew was sitting to his left in his
wheelchair, looking like a kid waiting for a hot fudge sundae to be
delivered, completely oblivious to the complexities of Kleezebee’s
homecoming. Drew was a glass-half-full kind of person, always
looking on the bright side, always expecting things to work out.
Lucas admired his little brother for having that type of blind
faith in the unexpected, but he wasn’t wired that way. Lucas dealt
with life’s twisted sense of humor by planning for the worst and
hoping for the best. It might seem like an overly simple concept to
some, but it allowed him to sleep at night. Fate had a funny way of
finding him, often times with harsh intentions.

Lucas looked back at the portal just in time
to see the visitors stepping through to his universe, but what
appeared wasn’t human. Three, nine-foot tall creatures appeared
with a pair of giant claw-like appendages extended out in front.
Two of them advanced forward, standing in front of the third like a
football team’s offensive line moving to the line of scrimmage to
block access to the quarterback.

Their bodies were burnt orange in color and
made of stacked layers of donut-shaped modules—like exposed
vertebrae—held together by thin connecting tissue or bone. Their
heads were stretched back horizontally into an elongated sphere,
with two sets of glowing, compound eyes along the front. Mucus
dripped from the creatures’ mouths, slinking down to the floor as
the aliens moved. A collection of tentacles hung down from the rear
of their exoskeletons like dreadlocks, maybe twenty feet long, with
a pulsating orifice on each end. Stinger-like tails thrashed about
behind the creatures with barbs or serrated edges along the pointed
tip.

Lucas wanted to run for cover, but his feet
wouldn’t move.

The first two aliens were carrying grappling
devices mounted to their claws. Before the two security guards
could get off a shot, the aliens fired, impaling the men with the
jagged hooks. Almost immediately, the creatures retracted their
weapons, ripping the men apart from the inside. Blood and guts
splattered everywhere.

The aliens’ tentacles snaked along the floor
and began siphoning the human remains through the pliable opening
on the ends. When some of the bigger hunks were ingested, the
tentacles bulged like a boa constrictor swallowing a rabbit for
supper.

The third alien raced forward, using the back
of its mighty claw to knock Bruno, Kleezebee, and Lucas across the
room in one swing. Lucas landed upside down with his back against
the wall, knocking the wind out of him. He was dazed, gasping for
air, but alive. Bruno landed on top of Kleezebee, just to Lucas’
right. Neither of his colleagues was moving.

Lucas tried to stand, wanting to protect
Drew, who was sitting helpless in his wheelchair, but his legs
wouldn’t cooperate. The alien was much quicker than Lucas would
have predicted. It snatched Drew from his wheelchair and wrapped
him inside a web of tentacles, before carrying him back to the
portal. Drew was hanging horizontal against the creature’s side,
looking back at Lucas, with his leather pouch hanging free outside
his shirt. Lucas cried out for Drew just as the creature
disappeared through the rift with his brother in tow.

Two of the techs picked up the security
guards’ handguns and fired at the two remaining creatures. The
invaders raised their claws to protect their heads while the techs
fired a continuous volley into what Lucas guessed was their torso.
A gooey orange substance gushed from their bodies each time a
bullet hit its mark. The creatures backed up, single file, toward
the rift, with their tentacles continuing to suck up the last few
chunks of the guards.

The creature nearest to the techs took the
brunt of the weapons’ fire, while the other one slipped through the
portal. The remaining creature appeared to be succumbing to its
wounds as it stumbled sideways into the portal’s event horizon. The
rift closed around it, chopping off one of its claws and legs. It
flopped to the floor.

Lucas was bent over, holding his abdomen,
when the elevator doors opened and a four-man security team rushed
into the room, followed by two medics Lucas recognized from the
infirmary. He figured one of the video techs must have called for
reinforcements. The security team dashed to surround the quivering
alien, leaving behind boot prints in human blood.

One of the medics, a woman, ran up to Lucas,
“Are you injured?” Lucas nodded. “Where does it hurt?” she
asked.

“Everywhere,” Lucas grunted with diminished
breath. His chest felt like it had been run over by a cement
truck.

The female medic helped him off the floor and
then raised his hands over his head. “Try to relax and breathe
normally,” she said.

Lucas’ breathing slowly returned to normal.
“Better,” he said, nodding. His whole body ached. “I’ll be all
right. Go help my friends,” Lucas told her, pointing at Kleezebee
and Bruno. She did.

Lucas staggered over to the portal’s last
position, pushing his way through the guards surrounding the
wounded creature. The alien was convulsing, spurting jets of orange
blood from its severed limbs and bullet wounds. Its claw, stringer,
and tentacles were not moving, no longer a threat.

“Where’s my brother?” he asked the creature,
ignoring its putrid smell. There was no response. He kicked the
creature in the head, crushing one of its four eyes. “Answer me!”
he screamed at it before one of the guards pulled him away from the
marauder.

“I doubt it understands you,” the guard
said.

“Those
things
took my brother!” Lucas
said, trying to squirm free from the guard’s arm lock. “I have to
get him back!”

“Look at it,” the guard said, turning Lucas’
body toward the creature. The convulsions had stopped, and its eyes
had started to dim. “It’s almost dead. It’s never going to tell you
anything.”

Reality set in, sending a torrent of emotions
washing over Lucas. His mind went numb and so did his body,
dropping him to his knees. He sobbed into his hands.

* * *

Several minutes later, Lucas felt a sudden
calm in the room. He wiped off his cheeks, his nose, and then
looked up. The guards were helping the medical team remove the
alien’s carcass from the surveillance room. Both Kleezebee and
Bruno were alive and receiving treatment from the same female medic
who helped him earlier. Lucas stepped around the pool of orange
blood, and walked up to Kleezebee. “We have to go after Drew.”

“I wish we could, but there’s no way to find
him. Even if we knew where he was, we can’t open the rift from this
side.”

“We can’t just sit here. There has to be
something we can do.”

“Trust me, he’ll be all right. They won’t
hurt him.”

“How the hell could you possibly know
that?”

“Because the Krellians didn’t send through a
battalion of warriors to kill us all. It was only a small surgical
strike. They’re going to want to trade.”

“For what?”

“The BioTex.”

“But why Drew? Why not me or you? We were
much closer to it.”

Kleezebee looked at Lucas with an apologetic
look on his face. It took him a moment to respond. “Because Drew is
my son.”

Lucas’ brain went into a spin. “What?”

Kleezebee ushered Lucas to a chair sitting in
front of the video control station. “Have a seat and let me
explain.”

Lucas sat down in the chair with his arms
folded across his chest. He couldn’t wait to hear another of
Kleezebee’s whoppers.

“Remember when I told you earlier, that after
we crashed, my crew began to pair off and start new families.”

“Yeah.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to choose a new
woman. I loved my wife too much, and I still held out hope we would
get home. But eventually, after twenty years of futility, even I
began to doubt our chances of getting home. I gave in to the
realization that we might be marooned on your planet for a long
time, quite possibly for generations. I was lonely and decided that
I needed a son, someone to carry on my legacy and continue the
work. But, I was too old and too busy to raise a child, and I
certainly didn’t want a new wife.”

Lucas was starting to suspect that Kleezebee
had knocked up Drew’s mom. “What did you do?”

“I had our geneticist open a fertility
clinic.”

“The same one that Drew’s bio-mom chose, am I
right?”

“Yes. We needed a woman with no family, a
compatible genetic makeup, and who possessed superior intelligence.
Lauren Falconio fit the bill. After she selected her donor sperm,
we highjacked her pregnancy and inseminated her with my sperm. I’m
not proud of what we did, but if we hadn’t, Drew wouldn’t be here
today.”