Curse of the Altered Moon: Altered Moon Series: Book Two (The Altered Moon Series 2) Read online

  “I’ll be better when this wacko caper of yours is done and over with.” She checked the thruster suit’s life-support systems now for the hundred and first time.

  “Agh, you worry too much.” Cal waved his hand downward to play off her concern. “GABI will get us back in two shakes if anything happens to me. Won’t ya, Gabs?”

  “Most assuredly, Cal.” GABI’s voice seemed to come out of thin air.

  Cat looked around and didn’t see GABI’s hover drone anywhere in the shuttle bay. She looked over at Cal with a narrow-eyed questioning look. “Where is she?”

  “Okay, Gabs, you can come out,” Cal said with a sly smile. A shimmer in the air slowly dissipated leaving GABI’s hover drone hanging in plain sight. “Cool, huh?”

  “What’s cool?” She didn’t catch what the excitement was about.

  “Well…,” he gestured at GABI’s drone, “we found out GABI can record and project what’s behind her in real time.” He waited, presumably to see if that caught on, which it didn’t. “She can disappear, visually, at least. I mean she still puts out an energy signature, but the drone itself is invisible.”

  Cat raised her eyebrows and nodded her head slowly. “Yeah that’s cool, Cal.”

  “Well, I guess you gotta be a tech weenie,” Cal said.

  Cat was thinking something about boys and their toys when a strange idea snuck into her head. “How big of an area can you project?” she asked GABI.

  “I am limited to a twenty-seven-cubic-meter area in order to maintain projected resolution.”

  “More than enough to hide the drone,” Cal said.

  “Yes, but what about someone standing next to her?” Cat asked. “GABI can you turn on your ‘no see ’em’ field’ again, please?”

  “Of course, Doctor.” GABI turned invisible again.

  “The no see ’em field, that is perfect! Mmm—,” Cal took Cat’s face in his hands and kissed her, smooching loudly, “I just love you.”

  The doctor’s well-maintained demeanor slipped a bit as she blushed from Cal’s admission of love for her. She smiled slyly, as she slipped from his grasp and sidled toward GABI’s location, and then it was as though she had stepped behind a curtain. She was gone!

  “No shit! Now that is cool! Oh, man! The fun we’re gonna have with that!”

  Cat’s image showed up here and there as she moved around inside the no see ’em field.

  “Hey, I can see you—sometimes.”

  “Must be when I move behind the drone and GABI picks me up on the scan,” Cat said. “GABI, can you fix that?”

  “One moment.” A few seconds later, Cat disappeared again.

  “Ha! Stellar!” Cal seemed ecstatic.

  “Shuttle bay, this is the bridge.” CJ’s call came over the comms unit.

  “Cal here, Cap, go ahead.”

  “We’re powering down and engaging the moonbeams. Prep for EVA.”

  “Understood, Cap.”

  GABI shut down the no see ’em field and moved over to the thruster suit to settle onto an anchor point Cal had installed to fit GABI’s hover drone. The interior lighting turned to a hard whitish-blue as the ship shifted to the Dark Matter Engine and the captain began to erode the cavern wall with beams of concentrated dark matter they dubbed the ‘Moonbeams.’ Cat walked over to Cal and took his hand in both of hers. His hands were always so warm and hers were as cold as an asteroid. She held his hand to her chest and reached up to stroke his face. The blue lighting made his cybernetic eye look like a silvery-blue ornament.

  “You be careful out there.”

  “Always!” he cheerfully kissed her. “I’ll see ya on the flip side.” He used one of Boss’ ancient Earth phrases. She knew Cal had no idea what it meant, but he liked the sound of it and had adopted it for his own.

  Cat looked at him for a second longer then let her cool-headed doctor persona slip back into place. She turned and left the shuttle bay, shutting and sealing the pressure door as she left. By the time she got back to the bridge, the process of eroding the cavern wall was underway.

  The Moonbeams originated from a pair of dark matter emitters mounted to the front of both wings. The emitters focused concentrated dark matter particles on a relatively small area of one to two dozen meters per emitter. Dark matter’s natural tendency to fill any and all gaps at the atomic level was discovered, developed, and utilized by Nelson Moon, shipwright and designer of the Altered Moon. When the focused dark matter beam contacted the surface of a physical object, the dark matter would infiltrate the molecular structure, break the material down into smaller individual particles, and then separate them.

  Nelson once told CJ, “Imagine that you pick up a clot of dried dirt, one piece of dried dirt in your hand. Now you crush the dirt with your hand and the clot breaks into a thousand smaller particles, some big, some very tiny. You have broken the molecular bond of the one bigger piece and now have many smaller pieces. That is what focused dark matter does—it infiltrates and breaks apart. It does not disintegrate.”

  CJ thought of that conversation at this very moment, while he watched the Moonbeams work over the surface of the odd cavern wall. A small cloud of particles began to form around the target area that obscured the view of both impact sites.

  “Overlay a particle scan,” CJ said to Boss.

  “Roger that.” Boss made the necessary adjustments to bring up the display. A confusing matrix grid display appeared showing the positions of thousands of particles; they slowly expanded around the target area. A steady buildup of the particle cloud crept its way back along the stream of dark matter from the Moonbeams toward the ship.

  “What’s causing that?” CJ asked.

  “The majority of the ejected matter is being released straight off The Wall,” Boss answered. “Without the influence of atmosphere, the particles will continue to advance unless acted upon by an outside force.”

  “Any threat to us?”

  “Unknown. Essentially it is planetoid dust. Makeup is—one moment,” Boss ran several quick scans, each one making him frown a little bit more. “I take that back, I’m getting readings on something under the rock. One moment.” He ran some additional scans on the new material.

  “Captain, I have a bad feeling about this.” Gina spun around in the pilot’s chair to face him. “This whole score got off to a bad start with having to deal with that tart-scarfing idiot, Polenz. We travel all the way out to this forgotten corner of the cosmos only to find the ‘monstrous tunnel that we can fly straight into’ is no more than a tunnel fit for a worm, and now the rock wall we came to beam our way through isn’t rock after all. What a surprise! This is fu—”

  “Captain.” Boss quickly cut in, most likely to bring the attention back to the expanding cloud of fine debris, but also effectively cutting off Gina’s minor rant. The passage of time hadn’t been able to tame the fiery passion of the Irish one bit. “Only the outer surface is rock. The substructure is something completely different. The inner layer is a synthetic framework filled with a silicon and graphite alloy, lightweight and very strong. It’s laced with small metallicrylic spheres clustered in thousands of groups, containing a number of elements and minerals: sodium, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, potassium, magnesium. I’m even picking up traces of carbonado.” Boss pondered the odd readout.

  “Black diamonds?” CJ looked at Boss in surprise. “Why would someone put black diamonds inside a wall?”

  “A wall full of potentially explosive materials.”

  “Anything on thermal or spectral analysis?”

  “Checking—no, the cloud is growing quickly, though. There’s a buildup of particles now that’s lighting up the screen with feedback. They’re deflecting the scans.” Boss worked to clear up the readout. “I can’t get a reading. Visual is obscured now, too. The cloud is too dense to see anything.”

  “Blast! Okay, shut down the emitters.” CJ set his lips and sighed through his nose. He was beginning to appreciate Gina’s point of view. He didn’t bel
ieve in curses or the supernatural, but Gina was right—this score had been a pain in the ass since the onset.

  They finally made it to their isolated and mysterious destination, squeezed through the just barely big enough tunnels to reach the objective, only to hit yet another snag. Plan A was to make a hole in the wall with the Moonbeams big enough for Cal and GABI to make it through with a thruster suit to recon what was on the other side. That idea had not only come up short, it seemed to have failed utterly.

  CJ poked the shuttle bay icon on the comms panel. “GABI, Cal, I’m calling the game. Stand down from EVA operations and report to the bridge.”

  “Serious? Okay, copy that, Cap,” Cal replied.

  “What about different scans, Boss?” CJ asked.

  “I can’t break through the interference; the cloud has completely engulfed us now. It’s like a bazillion tiny mirrors floating all around us and bouncing our scans in a thousand different directions. It’s weird. Sometimes they seem to interconnect with each other for a second then break apart again.”

  “A bazillion—that many?” CJ smiled, as he yanked his science officer’s chain.

  “Yes.” Boss peeked around from behind his readout console. “Give or take a smoot.”

  “You two are awfully lighthearted considering we’re in the middle of a ‘bazillion mirror’ shitstorm,” Gina chided them both. “Sirs,” she added after she got the ‘commanding officer look’ from each of them.

  Cal, Cat, and GABI stepped onto the bridge just as CJ poked the engineering icon. “Chief, we’re going to main power. Come up to the bridge for a sitrep.”

  “Copy that. On the way.”

  “All right, secure from dark matter operations and bring up main power,” CJ said. “Let’s shed some light on this crud and see what we can see.”

  The light from the Altered Moon’s exterior floods and running lights was reflected back at them from, just as Boss had put it, ‘a bazillion tiny mirrors,’ all spinning and swirling with seemingly random inertia. It was mesmerizing; the chaotic mass flashed in an ever-shrinking pattern. Just as CJ wondered why the chaos had a pattern, the swirling mass of particles all lined up perfectly, closing a circuit of energy between the lights of the ship and the material of The Wall. A flash of energy sped from the ship and disappeared into The Wall where the Moonbeams had made a hole through the outer layer.

  GABI called out in alarm, “Captain! Imminent detonation! Energizing defense fields!” GABI barely had time to get the words out before the entire cavern wall erupted in a massive explosion. The force of the blast propelled the pieces of black diamond and rock wall through space at tremendous velocities in all directions. The hailstorm of tiny diamond missiles tore through the Altered Moon’s hull like buckshot through an old tin can.

  One projectile pierced the main view port, passed millimeters from Gina’s head, continued to zoom past CJ, ricocheted off the bulkhead, and shot around the bridge once. Only half a second passed before hull breach and perimeter alerts started to scream out their alarms. In the next half second, the shockwave from the blast threw the ship upward and to the left before slamming her backward hard into the far wall of the cavern. The brief inferno burned so intently it pushed the damage control systems past their limits, which forced overloaded circuits to short out power junctions throughout the ship. White-hot bits of burning chemicals coursed brightly through the dark cavern and melted their way into anything they landed on, whether it was rock wall or hull plating.

  The crew was tossed around the ship like candy pieces inside a piñata. The ship itself slowly spun forward and to the right rebounding from the impact with The Wall. CJ shook the stars out of his head and got up on his knees. There were bloody scratches on his right hand and forearm and the back of his head hurt. He got to his feet and quickly scanned the bridge. Emergency alarms were blaring and sparks and small fires sprang out from wall panels. Boss and Cal were down, Cat was moving, Gina was getting up, and GABI was okay. He turned off the alarms, which left them with the pop and snap of the electrical fires and the high-pitched scream of the air as it was being sucked out through the hole in the view port.

  “GABI, close emergency bulkheads!” CJ grabbed an emergency breach seal from the maintenance locker and ran to the view port. “Gina, you need to get us under control before we hit something else!”

  “Emergency bulkheads are in place, Captain.”

  “Copy that.” CJ turned the breach seal over, pulled the activator tab, and yanked the protective cover off when the indicator turned red. The seal gave off an unpleasant acrid odor as he slapped it over the hissing hole in the view port. The chemical process would hold the seal in place until they could repair the damage in dry dock. He went over to Cat and helped her into a chair, then poked at the 1MC icon on the comms panel. “Katy? Katy? Chief Latimer respond!”

  “I’m here, CJ—I’m here—still in engineering,” Katy said, panting breathlessly over the comms.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, but I’m going to need a lot of help down here.”

  CJ took a nanosecond to be thankful she was alive. “Copy that, I’ll be there when I can, bridge out.” He turned to Cat. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay, Captain, just shook up.” She moved her body around to find the sore areas.

  “You sure?” he looked into her eyes. “Okay, then check Cal and I’ll check on Boss.” He went over to where Boss lay crumpled up against the wall, a fair distance from his suspensor chair. The big man’s forehead almost touched his knees. His left arm was under his body and stuck out behind him; his right arm was thrown over his legs.

  “Boss, can you hear me? Boss?” CJ knelt beside the man who had become his best friend over the past two years. “Oh, man.”

  “GABI take flight control!” Gina said. She burst out of the pilot seat and hopped over the railing around the science station, landing next to CJ. “Bernie?”

  “Gina, do not move him!!” Cat called from across the bridge where she brought Cal around. “Captain, carefully check for a pulse!”

  CJ softly felt Boss’s wrist for a pulse. He cursed himself as a stupid idiot for not thinking of that in the first place, and with great relief he found one. “He’s alive.”

  “Be right there,” she answered back.

  After she cleared Cal, Cat came over and ran a med scanner over Boss’ body, reading off the results as she went. “Okay, okay, okay. The position is extreme, but there is no spinal damage. The neck is okay. His left shoulder is dislocated, and he has a concussion. Okay, the spine is clear. We need to roll him. Captain, you cradle his head between your forearms and put your hands out to support his shoulders and back as we roll him over. Gina, get right here below his hips on both sides. I’ll guide the arm out from under him. We’re going to lift up, carefully straighten him out, and then roll him over on his back. Clear?” Cat looked up at both of them to make sure they understood what to do. CJ and Gina were both clear and ready.

  “Okay, go,” Cat said.

  The three of them lifted the big man up as gently as possible. Cat straightened his legs and torso as they rolled him onto his back. A feat easier said than done when Bernard Keltzer weighed in at about one hundred thirty kilos these days. “Okay, hold on to him and don’t let him move.”

  Cat moved Boss’s left arm away from his body while she kept his elbow bent and his wrist straight up from the floor. CJ winced in sympathy as she gently pulled Boss’ upper arm straight out away from his body while rotating his arm so the forearm and wrist were now flat on the deck with the hand palm up, like he was throwing a baseball. Some small careful wiggles and the arm slipped back into normal position and Boss’ glenohumeral joint was once more intact.

  “We need a stretcher,” Cat said, as she ran a medical scanner across Boss’ abdomen.

  “I’ll be back in a flash.” CJ stood to go, but Gina laid a hand on his arm.

  “No, Captain, you take care of the ship. I’ll get the stretcher.
” She gave his arm a quick squeeze and left for med bay.

  “GABI, drop any bulkheads to med bay,” CJ said.

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “You okay here, Doc? What about Cal?”

  “Yeah, I’m good, sir.” She took CJ’s hand to clean and wrap the cuts on his arm. He started to complain, but she shushed him. “It’ll take two minutes. Cal took a pretty good blow to the head, but there’s no concussion, so he’ll be fine.”

  “Good. I’ll leave them in your care, Doctor, and see to my ship.” He stood after Cat’s work on him was done.

  “Aye, sir. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Just get these two back on their feet. We’re going to need everybody.”

  Gina returned right then with the maglev medical stretcher. The three of them moved Boss onto it and Cat hit the power button. The stretcher rose from the floor to hover a meter or so above it.

  “Gina, help Cal down to med bay, then get with GABI and run a damage assessment on the flight systems. I’ll find Katy and we’ll check the engines and life support.”

  “Ohhhh, my head…what happened?” Cal asked, still groggy after being thrown against the bulkhead.

  “Come on, I’ll fill you in on the way.” Gina took him through the hatch. Cat, with Boss on the stretcher, followed them out, which left CJ and GABI alone together on the bridge.

  “GABI, you have what’s left of the conn,” CJ said wistfully. “Keep us in position and don’t let us hit anything. Just…do better than I did and we’ll be all right.” He turned to start what was bound to be a very long repair process.

  “Captain, may I point something out?”

  “Yeah sure, GABI, go ahead,” CJ answered, although he didn’t really feel like getting a pep talk on discouragement from his synthetic operations officer at the moment.

  “The Wall is open.”

  *~*~*

  Chapter Three

  GABI’s simple statement pealed out like a bell in the night, piercing CJ’s veil of disappointment. The Wall was open. He turned slowly to look at the view screen at GABI’s station. The Wall was a ways off, but clearly there was a hole all the way through it, and by the looks of it their shuttle, Moonshadow, could fly right in. They had done it. They had pierced the infamous Wall. Now all they had to do was explore the chamber beyond, secure any and all artifacts or treasure, and make it out alive. CJ tore his attention away from the tempting hole in The Wall. He knew that he had people and a ship to tend to before he did anything else.