Noah Zarc: Mammoth Trouble (Noah Zarc, #1) (3 page)

The control room went silent. We watched Haon hoist the deer on his back and stagger off into whiteness. Suddenly the steel room around me seemed cold and lifeless.

Obadiah knew something was wrong. He jumped onto my magchair, licked my face once, then curled up in a ball on my lap.

“But I don’t understand,” Sam said. “What do you mean they’re trapped in the Ice Age? Why send you back? Why didn’t they just get another deer and come back themselves?”

“That is what they planned,” Moses said. “Your mother returned to the ship to locate Haon using the onboard sensors, while your father…” The robot trailed off yet again. “There is another gap in my memory.”

“Run a full diagnostic scan,” Hamilton said.

“Acknowledged.” The robot turned back toward the screens. “While I am running the scan you can view a recording your father left for you. I believe it is intact.”

Dad’s image appeared before us—his hair wild and his eyes red. He sat on the snowy ground and looked directly at us. I shivered.

“As Moses has probably told you, somehow Haon found us.” I could see the vein on Dad’s temple pulse. “He hijacked our ship….” The image flickered. I could see the floor through Dad’s image. His lips continued moving, but no sound came out.

“What’s he saying?” I looked at Moses, but he was still running his diagnostic scan. “…so I have no…where he…” The sound and the image stabilized. “I’ve decided to send Moses after them—if Haon hasn’t jumped yet the robot should be able to follow.”

He leaned forward until it seemed like his face was less than a meter from mine.

“I know this comes as a great shock to you kids. I don’t know how Haon followed us. Perhaps I’ve been too careless.” He stopped again and took a deep breath. I’d never seen Dad so distraught. “We have to find him. Who knows what he…” He shook his head. “Just get here as soon as you can.”

Dad’s image flickered out, and the weight of ten thousand years fell between us.

Hamilton spoke first. “Were you able to follow Haon?”

We all looked at Moses. His eyes spiraled open.

“Affirmative. Haon traveled to twelfth-century Europe, to a castle in the Scottish highlands.”

I swiveled toward the door. “Let’s go, then!”

Hamilton looked at Moses. “Do you have space-time coordinates for Mom and Dad’s location?”

“Affirmative.” A small door on the robot’s chest opened. A tray slid out with two vials containing a dark red liquid. “I retrieved DNA samples from both time-streams. One is a sample of your father’s blood, the other from a squirrel I captured in Scotland.”

Hamilton nodded. “So we can return to the exact time and place when you retrieved those samples.”

I threw my hands up. “Why don’t we just go back
before
Haon got there? Then we can stop him from taking the
DUV II
! We still have the original coordinates Mom and Dad used to go after the deer.”

“It can’t be done,” Hamilton said. “Research has shown time and time again that you can’t alter events of the past. Mom and Dad
were
stranded in the Ice Age. Haon
did
hijack their ship. There’s nothing we can do to stop that.”

I glared at my brother. “Then what good is time traveling?”

He looked ready to launch into one of his big long explanations but stopped himself.

“Our biggest problem, at the moment, is that we don’t have a ship.”

Sam spun around. “What do you mean we don’t have a ship?” she shouted. “We’ve got loads down in the hangar!”

Hamilton’s voice was calm, of course. “What I should have said is we don’t have a ship equipped for the time jump. Since the
unfortunate
accident when we lost the
DUV I
over southern New Mexico…” I squirmed in my chair under his gaze. “We’ve been operating without a backup. Dad said he was planning to move the
DUV III
to operational status before he made the next jump, but then Moses returned with the time-markers for the Irish deer. Dad was too excited to wait, so he and Mom agreed to do the final calibrations on the
DUV III’s
warp manifold after they returned.”

“Then take another ship,” I said.

“No other ship has a hull built to withstand the strain. Warping spacetime around most objects,” Hamilton snapped his fingers, “simply snuffs them out of existence. Only a ship built specifically to withstand the extreme forces can make the jump.”

“But we’ve got ships much bigger than the DUV class. How come they can’t handle it?” I was getting irritated. We needed to rescue our parents, and he was lecturing us on the physics of time travel.

“It’s not entirely about size. It’s more about shape. The DUV class is the only ship we have capable of sliding through the time-stream without causing too great a disturbance. It’s no coincidence that Moses and the DUV class ships have the same profile. The only other ship built to the appropriate specs is the
ARC
herself.”

“How long would it take to get the
DUV III
operational?” Sam said. “I thought it was ready to go, except the calibration.”

Moses said, “Your father was not prepared to trust the reliability of the
DUV III
’s warp manifold. Its jumps could be erratic.”

“So we take the
ARC
,” I said.

“We haven’t moved the
ARC
in years,” Sam said. “And the last time, we had Mom and Dad with us.”

“Nevertheless,” Hamilton said, “I think it’s our most logical choice.”

“Fine,” Sam said. “We’ll take the
ARC
. We need to get moving, we’re running out of time.”

Hamilton let out a big sigh. “Haven’t you been listening? We have all the time in the solar system. We could leave in ten years and still reach Mom and Dad at the moment Moses left them.”

Sam’s face grew red and she spoke through clenched teeth. “We aren’t going to take ten years!”

“Of course not.” Hamilton backed away. “How long do you think it’ll take to prepare the
ARC
?”

“Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days.” She looked at me, her brows knitted together. “As long as we
all
do our part.”

“I’ll work with Moses to process the DNA samples and establish coordinates,” Hamilton said.

“Fine.” Sam turned toward the door. “Noah, you and I need to get the animals secure and the ship ready to leave the surface of the moon. I don’t care what Hamilton says—we need to hurry.”

Sam and I worked all day getting the
ARC
ready to go. It was hard to focus—I had to go over the simplest stuff again and again to get it right. That night I was so tired I didn’t even get undressed, just collapsed in bed. No matter how tired I was, though, no matter how I tossed and turned, I couldn’t get comfortable. I’m not like Sam and Hamilton. They seemed to be able to keep it together, brush off what was on all our minds, but I couldn’t do it.

I thought of a morning when I was seven or eight, Mom seated at her desk looking through a microscope while I played with some constructo-cubes on the floor. I loved to play in her lab—all the equipment, the whirring of machines—but what I really loved was just being around her. Talking to her.

“Mom, do you think I’ll ever be like everyone else?”

She looked up from her work. “Of course not, Noah. You’re—”

“Special.” I glared at her. “Maybe I don’t want to be special.”

She got down on the floor and wrapped me in her arms.

“Everyone enters this world with some kind of handicap,” she said. “Whether it’s the place they live, the family they’re born into, or the weakness of their legs. No one has a perfect life.”

Even back then, when I was still just a kid, she didn’t sugarcoat the truth.

“What makes each of us
special
is how we deal with our circumstances.” She moved hair out of my face. “I probably don’t tell you often enough how proud I am of you. You handle yourself better than I ever could.” I looked into her eyes. There were no tears, just a firm conviction that she would never let me go.

Now she was gone.

As for Dad, being with him was never that easy—he was just harder to talk to, and I guess we weren’t really close. I knew he loved me, though. I didn’t know how I’d be able to go on without either of them.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning with sheets crumpled in my fists. I’d had enough self-pity. No matter what Hamilton said, we needed to get moving and find Mom and Dad now. I dressed as fast as I could and went looking for Sam.

The biggest problem with moving the ship from the moon’s surface was gravity. Not the gravity holding the ship down—the
ARC
could easily break free of the moon’s pull—but the lack of gravity in space. Even in one-sixth gravity on the moon, the animals could live comfortably. It took getting used to, but I was always amazed at how fast they adapted. But once we left the moon’s surface, there’d be no gravity at all to hold them down.

Of course Dad and the engineers back home thought through that problem when they designed the
ARC
. Each habitat, or pod, was constructed on its own gimbal, which meant it was a totally self-contained sphere or cylinder that could be spun independently of the ship, generating its own virtual gravity. In addition, during acceleration, all the habitats would simply pivot so that
down
was toward the back of the ship. Depending upon acceleration, this was a better imitation of true gravity.

I didn’t understand how it all worked, but I loved the ride. In space, when we weren’t accelerating, only the pods had gravity. It was a blast floating around the ship in zero-g—no need for magchairs or thermsuits. I was free as a bird.

Over the next two days, Sam and I worked together to get all the gimbals unlocked. We had to test every habitat. If there were any issues we’d go down to the pod and find out what was wrong. Most released remotely as they should, but even so it was no small task to get the rest in order.

On the morning of the second day, Sam and I worked to release the dire wolf habitat. Something had dropped between the outer hatch and the pod’s exterior plate, causing it to jam.

“How long do you think Mom and Dad can last?” I said.

Sam shook her head. “Remember what Ham said? We have time on our side. The DNA sample Moses retrieved will allow us to pinpoint exactly when and where Mom and Dad are in spacetime. So even though for us it’s been two days, for them it’ll only be a few hours at most before we show up. Make sense?”

“I guess so. It’s just hard to get your mind around it.” I thought for a minute. “I still don’t get what DNA has to do with anything.”

Sam stopped cranking the ratchet she was using.

“Well, I’m no expert, but the way Ham explained it to me was that the earth is constantly bombarded with cosmic rays—radiation that travels millions if not billions of miles through space from every direction. That radiation leaves markers in the DNA—signatures that when analyzed can give the location in spacetime for when and where that organism lived. Our DNA is keeping a record of everywhere we’ve ever been, and every
when
.”

“Ah, now it’s perfectly clear.” I laughed. “But...I still don’t get it.”

Sam laughed too. “Yeah, it gives me a headache too.”

“And you and Hamilton are the smart ones—imagine what it’s like for me to try and wrap my mind around it.”

“I’m sure you do just fine. You only pretend to be slow while you’re pulling the wool over Ham’s eyes or mine with some scheme.” She smiled and got back to work on the hatch.

“You know he hates it when you call him Ham, don’t you? He says he’s no side of pork.”

She laughed. “Why do you think I do it?”

By mid-afternoon, two days after Moses’s return, we had the
ARC
ready to go. Hamilton wanted to wait one hour more for daylight to cover the near side of the earth—less chance of being spotted. During the twenty-first century, thousands of telescopes were pointed toward the night sky. We would try to keep the moon between Earth and us for as long as possible. Our parents always stressed that the most important rule of time travel was not letting yourself be seen.

We strapped ourselves into our seats in the
ARC
Control Center. I always got excited right before a lift-off. So did my stomach, but I knew it would calm down as soon as the engines roared to life.

Sam sat in Dad’s chair between Hamilton and me—she was in charge. She had a long checklist displayed on the monitor connected to a swivel arm on her seat. Even Mom and Dad didn’t know everything it took to get the
ARC
off the ground.

Sam tapped her finger on the screen. “Pods ready for departure, Noah?”

I scrolled down the long row of numbers on my monitor. All had a steady green light.

“Pods are go.”

“Power and pressure systems?” Sam said.

“Power is nominal. Pressure is holding at a steady one
atm
.” Hamilton, who had a better idea how the ship operated than Sam or I, was in charge of the vital systems.

“Ham, do you have a lock on the time-stream for Dad?”