Multitude, p.1
Multitude, page 1
part #2 of Dimension Space Series
Multitude
Dimension Space Book Two
Dean M. Cole
CANDTOR Press
Contents
Another Great Series by Dean
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Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part III
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part IV
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Book 3 Coming 2019
Thank You
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Sector 64: Ambush Sneak Peek
About the Author
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The Complete Sector 64 Set
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The Sector 64 Timeline
1947 - First Contact a Sector 64 Prequel Novella
Today - Ambush - Book One of the Sector 64 Duology
Tomorrow - Retribution - Book Two of the Sector 64 Duology
(Read the sneak peak of Ambush at the end of this book.)
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Part I
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
—Werner Heisenberg
Chapter 1
Everything had gone to shit right in the middle of the best day of Vaughn’s post-apocalyptic life.
That had been two days ago.
Vaughn took a deep breath and then let it out in a long sigh.
My, how time flies…
Shaking his head, he gazed through the forward window of the yacht’s expansive, well-appointed bridge. Blue waves disappeared beneath the prow of the gently heaving ship. On his left, to the yacht’s port, a long line of limestone cliffs paralleled Vaughn’s course.
That fateful “best day” had been a few weeks after he’d rescued Angela from the International Space Station. Vaughn had introduced her to this yacht. Having renamed it as the Angela’s Dream, he’d had visions of plying the world’s oceans with her at his side. They would winter in places like Aruba or Barbados and spend the rest of the year exploring the world’s far corners.
All of that had been before they’d made love, an event that had put the cherry on top of the icing of that “best day.”
Then it had all gone south.
After making love to Vaughn, Angela had dropped the news on him, had told him of the weird goings-on that she’d seen each time the space station had flown over Central Europe. In the months after the Disappearance, odd lines had begun to radiate out from Geneva, Switzerland. Those lines had spread across the continent in a pattern that she’d referred to as a Gravity Flower. Gravity because not only had she seen it from orbit, but the flower-shaped pattern had also appeared on the gravity-wave detector that she’d been running aboard the space station.
And one fact tied it all together.
The supercollider sat at the center of that “Gravity Flower,” and that damned collider had also been at the center of the Disappearance, the event that had wiped all animal life—including the entire human race—from the surface of the planet.
Just as Angela finished telling him about the Gravity Flower, all of the steel structures around them had suddenly lifted into the air and started streaming toward Europe.
Right on freaking cue!
Movement in his peripheral vision snapped Vaughn out of his thoughts. He looked away from the slowly scrolling line of cliffs and then frowned as a large steel building finished gliding into view overhead. It was just one in a levitating line of thousands of steel structures, the same line that had lured them north and the same one that had painted a petal across her gravity sensors.
Of course, Angela had wanted to follow the line to its final destination at, you guessed it, CERN’s supercollider.
Now, instead of heading west into his dream of a sunset, they were sailing straight across the Mediterranean into a nightmare of apocalyptic proportions.
Vaughn shook his head again. “Perfect!”
He flinched as a pair of hands snaked under his arms and then wrapped around him.
Angela pressed the side of her face to his back as she hugged him tightly. “What’s perfect?”
“Oh … Uh, nothing. Just finished reviewing the ship’s systems. Everything looks … perfect.”
He felt her head nod against his back. “If you say so.”
Vaughn smiled in spite of himself. He'd grown very fond of that sleepy voice.
Forgetting his frustrations for the moment, he hugged her arms to his chest.
With her left cheek still pressed to his back, Angela sighed. “On my way up, I noticed we haven’t lost the line.”
Vaughn ground his teeth together but managed to keep the frustration from his words. “Yep, still there.”
Angela turned her face and pressed her right cheek against his back. She pulled a hand free and pointed east. “By the way, what’s that?”
Vaughn tapped a knuckle against the surface of the moving-map display. “According to the charts, that’s Sardinia.”
She snuggled into him and then sighed. “I know it’s not the Caribbean, but at least these cliffs are beautiful.”
Vaughn felt his cheeks warm with instant guilt. Inwardly, he shook his head. How long before she saw through him, saw the asshole that everyone else had seen him as?
“What’s the matter? You just got all tense.”
“N-Nothing.”
Vaughn willed his shoulders to relax. Then he nodded toward the coastline. “You're right. They are beautiful.”
His eyes swept northward as he continued to study the cliffs. He paused when he spotted an out-of-place, human-made structure. It sat crumpled where the emerald sea met the thin, white beach at the base of the cliff. Waves crashed into the thing, launching geysers of spray.
Angela leaned back as she apparently saw the same object. “Is that an airliner?”
Vaughn nodded. “Yeah.”
The structure had resolved as the burned-out and broken hull of a wide-bodied passenger jet.
A colossal shadow crossed over the wreckage, momentarily darkening the airplane’s white tail fin and the waves that were crashing against it.
Releasing each other, they stepped haltingly to the bridge’s side window and stared up into the sky.
Overhead to the left of the ship, the line of levitating structures spanned from horizon to horizon. All of it slowly drifted north barely a thousand feet above the cliffs. The surreal train of steel edifices slowly glided past them, paralleling the rocky shoreline at a speed slightly faster than their yacht.
Angela leaned into him as she continued looking up. “My mind still has a tough time accepting that image.”
Vaughn felt a shiver run through her.
He squeezed her tightly. “Yeah, me too.”
The ominous specter of that much steel gliding serenely overhead was difficult to process. It looked as if the slightest perturbation would send it all crashing to Earth, converting its stores of potential energy into kinetic in a calamitous collapse.
Not that everything in the line stayed there.
They had seen stuff fall from it, things like concrete and nonmetallic building panels, but as far as he could tell, nothing made of steel ever fell from the line.
“Don’t worry. We’re safe for now. I’m keeping us out from under it.” Still looking up, he pointed forward, ahead of their ship. “Unfortunately, we will have to pass directly beneath it when we cut through the Strait of Bonifacio. Otherwise, we’ll have to go all the way around Corsica.”
“Wonderful …”
“Yep, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject, but I’ll hurry every chance I get.”
Angela gestured at the crashed airplane. “Why is that still here?” She looked up. “Why hasn’t it been swept up by whatever the hell is doing that?”
Vaughn shrugged. “Was wondering that too. It must be one of the newer airplanes. They’re mostly carbon composite. Not as much aluminum as the older ones and even less steel.”
Since they’d left the Libyan coast to follow the floating line of structures, Vaughn hadn’t seen many variations in its constituent components. As far as he could tell, everything either contained steel or was made of it. They’d even spotted a few boulders floating in the line. He’d guessed they were some kind of metallic ore.
Angela nodded. “Makes sense.”
They continued in silence for a while.
Around midday, they reached the end of Sardinia’s cliffs, and a channel of water slid into view beyond them.
Vaughn pointed. “There’s the Strait of Bonifacio.”
To its right was the island of Corsica. The line of steel structures passed directly over the channel and then disappeared behind Sardinia’s northern neighbor as they continued on their north-northeast track.
He eyed the line again. “I haven’t seen anything fall in a while.” Vaughn grabbed the helm and turned the yacht toward the strait. “Looks like about as good a time as any.”
Angela chewed her lip for a moment, but then she nodded.
Over the next several minutes, they both watched with nervous anticipation as they passed beneath the line of levitating structures. Now that they were crossing beneath the line, its relative motion appeared faster than it had when they were riding parallel to it. The line’s individual components now raced overhead like the fast-moving clouds of a storm front.
It was a storm alright, Vaughn thought wryly.
And now they were sailing right into it.
Another hunk of the metallic ore drew his eye.
Vaughn shook his head and looked down at the large compass that sat in front of the helm’s wood and brass wheel. “I don’t understand why all of this hasn’t affected the compass.”
“What do you mean?”
Vaughn pointed overhead again. “All these vessels and that ore, it’s all metallic. It must take one hell of a magnetic field to levitate all of it, but it’s having no effect on the compass. It still shows magnetic north.”
Angela shook her head. “No, it’s not magnetism. I already told you that it’s focused gravity manipulation.”
Vaughn looked at her incredulously. “How can you know that?”
Angela raised an eyebrow and then pointed a thumb at herself. “Uh, gravity -wave astronomer here.” She looked up and nodded toward the floating structures. “Focused gravity is making all that happen. That’s why it showed up on the MONA-LISA’s display.”
MONA-LISA was the acronym for the name of the gravity-wave detector Angela had been running aboard the space station. It was something about a Modified-Laser-Interferometer-Blah-Blah-Blah. As far as Vaughn was concerned, they may as well have called it the goddamned Dream Shitter.
He shook his head. “What in the hell did your friends at CERN do?”
Angela tensed and pulled back from him. She bristled and thrust an extended finger toward the line of levitating ships. “I’ve told you, there’s nothing they could’ve done to cause this!”
She pursed her lips as she considered her next words.
Vaughn knew what was coming. They’d already had this discussion several times.
It never ended well.
“It has to be somebody else.”
Vaughn shook his head. “What? Please, not the aliens thing again.”
Angela crossed her arms. “Well, do you have a better idea?”
“Yeah!” Vaughn said, sounding more confident than he felt. “I think your friends tore a hole in space.”
“And what?” Angela scoffed. “They opened some kind of portal?”
Vaughn nodded. “Yeah. Maybe they did open a portal, and maybe there’s one of those magneto-stars on the other end of it.”
Angela blinked her surprise. “You mean a magnetar?”
Vaughn nodded. He had read an article about magnetar a few months ago before the world had ended. As he recalled, it was a neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field.
Doubt suddenly twisted Angela’s face, but then she shook her head. “No, it can’t be magnetism. You said it yourself. Look at your compass. Normal.”
“Well, if it’s gravity manipulation, why did water fall from the ships? Why didn’t the liquid just hang in globs around the vessels?”
“I told you, it’s focused gravity manipulation, as in selective. We’re directly beneath it, and we don’t feel a thing.” She jabbed a finger toward the sky. “Someone or something is shielding those ships from Earth’s gravity. There has to be intelligence behind it.”
Vaughn rolled his eyes. Then he heard a distant thrumming.
Angela glared at him. “Don’t do that! Don’t write me off, Vaughn!”
He crossed his arms. “If there’s intelligence behind this, why haven’t they done anything about us?”
As he spoke, the low-frequency vibration he’d heard grew louder.
They both stepped back and looked at the floor of the yacht.
Was something going wrong with its engines?
Suddenly, the deck heaved beneath their feet, and a roaring crash echoed through the bridge.
Vaughn’s eyes widened. “That came from outside!”
Together, they ran through the rear exit and emerged onto the yacht’s back deck just as a huge geyser of water jetted into the sky directly behind their ship.
Vaughn looked up and then took an involuntary backward step. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
Beside him, Angela nodded mutely.
A massive, mile-long suspension bridge was passing overhead. Its cables hummed as it sailed through the atmosphere, generating the low-frequency vibrations they’d heard inside the ship. Their sedate flapping looked like a slow-motion video of vibrating guitar strings, the frequency of the thrumming so low, Vaughn felt it more than he heard it.
Vaughn exchanged a wide-eyed look with Angela and then looked up again.
He swallowed hard. “Well, we can add flying suspension bridges to the list.” Extending his fingers, he counted off. “Buildings, trains, tankers, tanks … metallic ore!” He extended a sixth digit. “And now bridges?!”
Suddenly, the entire suspension bridge twisted like a cloth being wrung. As it did, vast sections of its concrete roadbed sloughed off, the twisting motion launching chunks of the stuff in every direction.
“Oh shit!” Vaughn shouted.
They both took several backward steps.
A large section of road was falling directly at them. Before they could react, it plunged into the strait, narrowly missing the back of the yacht.
Vaughn yanked the tablet computer from his leg pocket. Using the bridge remote, he tried to increase the ship’s speed.
It wouldn’t respond.
The engines were already generating max power.
He looked frantically left and right. Small rocky islands blocked him from turning the yacht. Dead ahead was his only option.
The ship’s current course would soon take them out from under the line.
If they survived that long.
They were now on a northwesterly heading, but the steel structures were drifting on a line just left of due north. Considering the length of the suspension bridge and its ability to throw concrete in wide arcs, they were going to be in trouble for some time.
Angela glared at him. “You just had to say it!”
“What?! What did I say?!”
She mimicked his voice and made air quotes. “If there’s intelligence behind this, why haven’t they done anything about us?” She jabbed a finger at the sky again. “Looks like they—!”
Her eyes widened, and she screamed as another chunk of roadbed arced toward the yacht. It crashed into the ocean mere yards from the ship’s port side.
Turning back to Vaughn, she glowered at him. “Looks like they’re doing something about us now!”
Vaughn opened his mouth to protest, but then the whistling death song of multiple chunks of plummeting roadbed drowned out his words.
Water geysered up from the ocean in dozens of places as a shotgun pattern of concrete slabs peppered its surface.
