Worlds at War (A Captain's Crucible Book 5) Read online

  Bridgette released him.

  Jonathan glanced at her, and she lowered her eyes.

  He stepped inside and then ducked into the tent. He realized immediately that the fabric was intended to shield from a psi-attack. He had seen the insides of such a canopy many times before during his tenure aboard the Raakarr vessel Talon, where he had been forced to berth in a smaller tent to shield himself from Barrick. It was empty of all furniture. It—

  He found himself standing on a stream in the middle of a jungle. Thick foliage lined either shore, along with tall fern-like trees. Overhead the blue sky was clear. The water at his feet was ankle deep and froze his toes. He smelled a mixture of dirt and pine, reminding him of the dusty scent that came after a rainstorm. Indeed, droplets trickled repeatedly from the branches nearby and formed ripples as they hit the stream, which itself seemed formed from the rainwater of a recent storm. Some kind of jungle birds cawed in the distance. Overhead, he saw what looked like pterodactyls flying overhead.

  Interesting aReal virtual augmentation.

  And then he realized that his aReal glasses didn’t have the ability to simulate any olfactory or touch sensations: the smell of the rain, the cold water at his feet, the warm breeze blowing into his face.

  Jonathan tore off his aReal.

  The environment remained intact around him.

  What the hell...

  He heard a strange hooting, growing in volume. A pack of feathered velociraptors burst from the jungle ahead and splashed across the stream. They hadn’t noticed him. That is, until one in the rear swung its head toward him and then froze. It let out a half-mewling, half-clicking sound, and the others stopped, too.

  All claws and teeth, the creatures approached. Backing away, Jonathan put his aReal back on, hoping for some menu to appear that would allow him to dismiss the environment.

  “Maxwell, where am I?” he said. “Maxwell?” The blood rushed past his ears in unison with his pounding heart, nearly consuming his hearing.

  In moments the deadly predators surrounded him. One of the man-sized dinosaurs stepped forward. It swept its right hindfoot along the water’s surface, hooking him behind the ankle and tripping him.

  He splashed into the stream. His aggressor planted a clawed foot on his head, pinning him down. A long, sickle-shaped talon drooped across his vision. His nose was barely above the stream’s surface: he swallowed some water and coughed violently.

  When he ceased his coughing fit, the dinosaur leaned forward and lowered its long neck so that its reptilian eyes were staring him in the face. It exhaled loudly through its nostrils twice in rapid succession, like an angry bull.

  It opened its maw, revealing a row of serrated teeth meant for rending flesh.

  Then it proceeded to lick his face. Moist, humid stains were left on his aReal glasses with each pass.

  All of a sudden the velociraptor raised its head. The others cocked their necks, too, as if hearing something. Then the pack sped away, vanishing into the thick jungle.

  Jonathan clambered to his feet, his heart still pounding.

  He saw Eugene standing on the shore beside him, looking up at him. He recognized the child from the photos Robert had shared with him at their dinners. The two-year-old had an impassive expression on his face.

  Jonathan felt rough hands grab him from behind and he was pulled backward. The environment returned to that of the ship as the tent fabric fell down in front of him. Bridgette dragged him out of the compartment and the hatch shut behind him.

  “What the hell was that?” Jonathan said when he caught his breath. He noticed that the moisture smears had vanished from his aReal glasses along with the rest of the illusion.

  None of that had been real.

  “We just finished watching a dinosaur story,” Bridgette said. “I think it frightened him.”

  Jonathan merely stared at her.

  She sighed. “He’s a powerful telepath. And doesn’t know how to control his abilities. Yet. It’s exhausting. Like living in a virtual world that changes by the minute. It’s like I’m back in my Vaddict days. Sometimes I don’t know what’s real anymore. One of his favorite tricks is to replace Robert with someone else. Sometimes it’ll be Stanley. Sometimes you. But he’s never seen either of you, so I’m not sure where he gets your faces from.”

  “He replaces Robert with me?” Jonathan asked. “Like when?”

  Her face reddened, and she looked away. “For dinner, and whatnot.”

  “I see now why you’ve been hiding Eugene away in your private room,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes,” Bridgette said. “We made the decision early on before things got out of control in the nursery.” She folded her arms. “So. Why did you come, again?”

  “I need your help,” Jonathan said.

  She seemed puzzled. “My help?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said. “We’ve captured one of the humanoids from the Elder ship. Alive. He’s human, or a human ancestor anyway. Psychic capable. Barrick believes you would be best person to withstand a psi link with it.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Why would he believe that?”

  “He mentioned his attempt to miscarry your child.”

  “I see.” She seemed hesitant. “I never told anyone, not even Robert, but... it wasn’t me alone who resisted Barrick. I linked with Eugene somehow. And you’ve seen what Eugene can do, right? It was all him. His own self-preservation instinct, acting through me.”

  “Can you link with him again?” Jonathan asked.

  Bridgette hesitated. “I don’t know. Is this humanoid in a psi-shielded container of some kind?”

  “He is in a psi-shielded tent, yes,” Jonathan said. “You would have to go inside.”

  “Eugene is also in a psi-shielded tent...” Bridgette said.

  “So that means linking is out of the question,” Jonathan said.

  “I would think so,” Bridgette said. “I’d have to bring him along. And I wouldn’t put him in danger like that. Besides, I’d have to suit him up the whole way, otherwise we’d affect half the crew as we hurried to cargo bay seven.”

  “I never said the humanoid was in cargo bay seven,” Jonathan told her.

  She smiled faintly. “You caught me.”

  “Your latent abilities have become more powerful in Eugene’s presence, haven’t they?” Jonathan said.

  She sighed. “Yes. But I’ve also been practicing with the AI trainers, too. I have to. Or else I won’t be able to raise him properly.”

  “You’re going to get yourself kicked off this ship,” Jonathan said. “You know that fleet protocol doesn’t allow telepaths aboard flagships at this time.”

  “You’re going to kick me off?” Bridgette said.

  “No, but Maxwell will,” Jonathan said. “The AI is a stickler for regulations.”

  “She is not an officially recognized telepath,” Maxwell interjected. “Therefore, unless she does something to endanger the crew, I have no grounds to forcibly eject her from the ship.”

  “Thank you, Maxwell,” Jonathan said. “And please, before you ever forcibly eject her from the ship, ask me.”

  “Of course, Captain,” Maxwell replied serenely.

  Jonathan returned his attention to Bridgette. “If you do this, it has to be you alone. I can’t authorize your bringing a two-year-old into a potentially dangerous situation with a psychic being.”

  Though in truth, from what he had seen, he felt it was the humanoid who would be in danger, not Eugene.

  “As I already said, I wouldn’t dare bring him.” She paced back and forth for a moment, then halted to turn toward him. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Find out who the humanoid is,” Jonathan said. “And what he was doing aboard that ship. Find out why the Elder are here. What they want. Find out how we can convince them to leave us alone, or barring that, how to destroy their ship.”

  “Is there no one else?” Bridgette said. “No other telepaths in the fleet?”

  �
��There are a few, yes,” Jonathan said. “Though as I mentioned, none are allowed aboard flagships at this time.”

  “Except for me,” Bridgette stated.

  “As Maxwell said, you’re not an official telepath,” Jonathan replied.

  “But if it meant saving Earth, you would break that rule,” Bridgette said.

  “In a heartbeat,” Jonathan agreed. “Though my fear in bringing another telepath aboard is creating another Barrick. After he linked with the Raakarr, he became far more powerful.”

  “What if the same thing happens to me?” Bridgette said.

  “At least I trust you,” Jonathan said. “Some random telepath? I don’t think so.”

  She seemed to consider his words for several moments.

  “If I were more powerful, it might be easier to deal with Eugene...” she said.

  “There’s no guarantee that will be the outcome,” Jonathan said. “You go in the psi-shielded tent with that humanoid, you might not ever return to consciousness. You’re my friend, and my first officer’s wife. I wouldn’t ask this of you unless I believed you were the best choice.”

  “I thought you said it was Barrick who believed I was the best choice?” Bridgette told him.

  “He does.” Jonathan reached out and wrapped his hands around hers. “But I do, too. Especially after talking to you. In fact, I’m convinced of it more than ever. The entire future of humanity could be resting in your capable palms. Will you do it?”

  She looked him directly in the eye. Without blinking, she said: “I’ll do it.”

  twenty-five

  Bridgette stood in cargo bay seven before the green tinted tent containing the humanoid. The tent was opaque, so she could not see him. But she could hear his soft breathing behind the fabric.

  “Can he understand our words?” Bridgette said.

  “The subject’s brain is close enough to our own that we were able to install a language processing chip,” Lieutenant Connie Myers told her. “The chip processes English, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, French and Italian. We know the subject can understand the words, because we’ve been monitoring his brain. The comprehension region lights up when we read sentences to him. But so far, he has refused to answer. Or rather, he seems unable to. The subject hasn’t used his vocal cords his entire life. We tried playing back an AI language training program for him to help form the words, the kind of stuff you’d give a newborn baby, but he hasn’t cooperated.”

  Bridgette nodded.

  “Here, wear this.” The chief scientist attached a small device to Bridgette’s waist. “Press the button, and I’ll send the MAs to extract you immediately.”

  Bridgette glanced at the robot MAs that stood guard on either side of the tent. Faceless, lifeless things, all sharp angles and electroactuators. She often found it hard to believe such beings were self-aware. The sentience of Artificials was much easier to believe as at least they looked human.

  She reached down and fingered the device. “If I’m unconscious, the device isn’t going to help, is it?”

  “We’ll be monitoring your brain activity the whole time you’re in there as well,” Connie said. “If you lose consciousness at any time, or anything else happens like a stoppage in breathing, we’ll extricate you immediately. If your brain frequencies become too erratic, we’ll also remove you.”

  “How will you be able to tell the difference between erratic brain frequencies and extraordinary psychic events, without a baseline?” Bridgette asked.

  “We have a baseline,” the chief scientist told her. “When Barrick underwent his psychic interactions with the first Raakarr alien we captured, we monitored him, too. We weren’t able to pull him out in time, however, because we didn’t have the proper baseline.”

  “So Barrick is my baseline,” Bridgette said doubtfully.

  “Yes,” Connie replied. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to intervene before you reach the point of no return.”

  Bridgette sighed. She turned her attention to the green canopy, then she lifted the entry fabric and entered before she could change her mind.

  The gentle glow from a vertical light bar illuminated an operating table with a humanoid clamped to the surface. Steel restraints surrounded his wrists, ankles, and midsection. He was naked save for a cloth draped over his hips that covered his privates, too. Definitely human, though his features were markedly Neanderthal—receding forehead, protruding brows, elongated jawbone. She had expected him to be dark haired and brown eyed, but his hair was bleach blonde, and his eyes a stark shade of blue, similar to her own.

  She spotted the small spherical camera in one corner, beside the light bar, then turned toward the table.

  As she approached, those all-to-human eyes looked at her pleadingly. She felt a sudden overwhelming pity and reached toward one of the clamps that held his wrist.

  “Bridgette, what are you doing?” the chief scientist’s voice came over the cargo bay circuit.

  Bridgette retracted her fingers as if something had bitten her. “Sorry. I had a sudden urge to free him.”

  “The subject is already getting in your head,” Connie said. “Be careful.”

  Bridgette took several deep breaths, then reviewed what she planned to ask him.

  “Hello,” Bridgette said. “I’m Bridgette.”

  No answer. Those eyes simply stared at her, seeming emotionless now.

  Unsure of what to do, she held her hand to her chest. “Bridgette.”

  Still nothing. She shifted uncomfortably.

  “Who are you?” she said. “Why do the Elder attack Earth?”

  She thought she saw a hint of a smile form on those lips, but otherwise the humanoid did not speak.

  “Are you one of our ancestors?” she continued. “Why were you aboard that ship?”

  Nothing.

  She wondered if the language processing chip in his head was really working.

  So far she had detected nothing from the humanoid at all. Her abilities had come along enough that normally she could get a slight read on people without trying too hard: a sense of their emotional state, or an errant thought here or there. But from this humanoid she got nothing at all. He must have been guarding his mind.

  She gazed uncertainly at those unblinking eyes.

  Can I initiate the psychic connection the same way I learned to do with Eugene?

  Barrick had once told her alien minds could not initiate a psychic connection, and that humans had to do it first. The telepath had been speaking of the Raakarr at the time. But both Jonathan and Robert had received visions from the Elder “eggs,” so that didn’t hold true for all aliens. Perhaps Barrick had been lying. Well, whatever the case, the individual lying before her was human enough not to count as alien anyway. So it should have been able to attempt the connection first.

  And yet it had not.

  She decided that she would have to attempt the psi link.

  The soft-back chair she had asked for was present beside the bed. She sat in it and leaned against the soft padding. When she was comfortable, she closed her eyes.

  The darkness was marred only by the phosphenes produced by the pressure of her eyelids on her visual system. Ignoring those dancing pinpoints of light, she cleared her mind, and went to that place above thought and reality.

  The phosphenes vanished. Only a small, blue sphere floated in the dark. A tiny bundle of energy. Her.

  She reached out in the vast darkness and found the humanoid’s mind. Thin ribbons of red whirled into existence, slowly gathering into a red sphere that resided near her own.

  After the opposing object solidified, she reached toward it, thin blue tendrils emerging from her sphere. When a lead thread of energy tentatively touched it, something entirely unexpected happened.

  The red sphere quadrupled in size. Red tendrils erupted from the opposing object in thick, twisting masses, cutting away her tiny threads and wrapping around her sphere.

  Just like that, she was on the defensive. Struggling to pr
event the red sphere from engulfing her. It had pulled her to its surface, and was slowly drawing her inside. She resisted, throwing up all the psychic defenses she had learned while dealing with Eugene, but the mind she fought against had a lifetime of experience and knew how to defeat them all. She was losing herself.

  I’m going to fail Jonathan. And humanity.

  And then she was inside the sphere.

  The darkness was replaced by light. She stood on a plain. Brontosauruses towered over the grass, eating the expansive leaves of trees whose canopies reached to the sky. Other herbivorous dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes roamed the grass around her, devouring the trees and other shrubs. None of them paid her any attention: she was merely an observer.

  She glanced down at herself and extended her arms. She was present bodily, and wearing the same blouse and trousers she had worn to the tent.

  The reality around her seemed completely real, though she knew it was not. She was immersed in a psychic world, an experience intimately familiar to her thanks to Eugene. She remained calm. Collected.

  She sensed no malevolence as she observed the scene. Still, she wasn’t sure if the humanoid was trying to control her mind in some way, perhaps using this scene to distract her while he installed some subtle subconscious suggestion.

  As she turned to take in the entirety of the scene, she was taken aback by what she saw hovering over the plain behind her. In the distance, the Möbius strip vessel of the Elder hovered close to surface, eating up the horizon. An expansive ramp had descended from the ship to the plains. Silver, pod-like craft roved through the air, herding a pack of four-legged herbivores toward the enormous vessel. The dinosaurs stampeded up the ramp and vanished into the ship.

  The scene changed.

  The towering trees and dinosaurs were gone. The grass had transformed, becoming shorter, darker. A tribe of thickly-bearded Neanderthals were gathered nearby. Clothed in loincloths, armed with wooden spears capped with flints, they stared eastward.

  Bridgette followed their gaze. Once more the massive ship of the Elder devoured the horizon in the distance. Closer, a small metallic pod resided near the gathered Neanderthals. It hovered seven feet above the ground; hanging down to the surface underneath it were several long silver tentacles of different sizes, some so thin as to be ethereal. The front portion of the pod’s cockpit was translucent, revealing a glowing being inside. The light was too bright to make out any features. Overall, the pod reminded Bridgette of a jellyfish with a passenger inside. It was obviously an exploratory craft of some kind that had come from the Elder ship.