The Intern (The Forbidden World Book 1) Read online

  The only thing the starship crew was not informed about was that in its closed cargo hanger, hidden from the strangers' eyes, Ghost-2 was parked, waiting for its own star moment. Upon receipt of the command through the top-secret communication channel, all the shuttle's systems activated and it docked out of the Fulgarating and was floating in space nearby, ready for the arrival of the valuable cargo.

  The valuable cargo was John Rolls. Of course it was easier to teleport himself right into the cargo hanger, but if something had gone wrong, a small Sun would have exploded in the starship belly and the Fulgarating would have seized to exist, together with its entire crew.

  John Rolls was peering into the screen.

  "A tyrannosaur holding on to its prey," he mumbled, looking at the Fulgarating. It was an ample and fitting comparison.

  The starship looked clumsy and powerful, as well as predatory and streamlined at the same time. The shape of the heavy Fulgarating, not designed to land on any planet, completely lacked the light-minded sleekness of the passenger and tourist ships, or the puffiness of cargo ships, or intentional impersonality of the FSG (Free Search Group) reconnaissance ships. At the front, it had three huge anti-meteor cannons, six more of a smaller caliber – on top and bottom of the ship. Several protective field installers were silver glistening at the front ring. Massive armor shields were covering almost the entire surface of the ship. The metallic-ceramite shell was all covered in stains and blotches: despite the protective fields’ force, gases, plasma and various rays traveling at high speeds were doing their damage. In the docking stations specially designed for daughter ships there were four reinforced rapid deployment bots. Under the concave belly of the ship, the cargo containers looked like a huge egg-shaped cocoons. Powerful arms embraced the cargo and tightly pressed it against the ship’s belly.

  Suddenly, the picture flew up and quickly disappeared beyond the screen. Ghost-2 started the docking preparation maneuver. In about half an hour, a slight push and quiet screeching indicated the beginning of docking. Then the screen showed a yellow text of the message, “Docking Complete.” The messages changed to the green light, “Transfer authorized. Exit through the right gateway. Safe passage!”

  “It’s time,” John got up from the chair, noting with satisfaction that his body was obeying him again. The tranquilizers must have finally started working.

  “Getting old,” John muttered, heading for the exit.

  The gateway door opened silently. With a slight hiss, the matte gray outside hatch floated down. It revealed a brown entrance diaphragm with a prominent Latin inscription “Fulgarating.” The letters, while disappearing, started to flow in a spiral counter-clockwise. The diaphragm parted with the unexpected ease. At the intersection of the shuttle’s and starship’s force fields John Rolls suddenly felt a little dizzy. The diaphragm behind his back closed again. A hardly noticeable shaking indicated that Ghost-2 started undocking.

  John had memorized the ship’s blueprint very well, so he turned to the right with assurance. The Fulgarating had nothing in common with, let’s say, tourist ships destined to the Exelsior resorts. The walls of the narrow central hall were nothing but the countless metal doors, equipment cells, indicator panels and calculator screens. The light panels were placed at the bottom, near the floor. One cell had its cover open, and a back part of the repair robot was sticking out from inside.

  Having made not more than a hundred steps, John reached an elevator shaft. He didn’t have to wait long, a dimmed elevator glass opened and when he entered the narrow capsule, John punched in a complicated password on the sensor panel and pushed the lowest button. The elevator, after a short pause, shot down.

  ********

  In the hall’s twilight, on the massive lodgments there were stationary zero-cabins. They were exact replicas of the one that delivered him here. John sniffed the air, carefully looking around. The air was hospital-clean and cool. There were no traces of strangers’ presence. Everything in the hangar was exactly the way he had left it three years ago.

  John moved along the rows of zero-cabins, stopping in front of each one and activating their sleeping mechanisms with a touch of his hand. There were twenty cabins. Nineteen of them were dummies, and only one was designated for him, number 13. John’s favorite number. Perhaps, when he was younger, it was more out of bravado, a sort of a challenge to superstitions, but with time he grew to think that this number indeed brought him luck.

  When the last egg was activated and all indicators glowed in a steady green light, John went back to his cabin, punched in the code and, after the top slid to the side, sighed and crawled inside. But then he suddenly stopped, as if remembering something important, jumped out of the lodgment and ran to the center of the hall, searching for something in his breast pocket on the go.

  Finally, John pulled a flash drive out of the pocket and put it on the floor in the most lit place. The ship’s brain has most probably already raised the alarm in response to the weird things happening inside and outside of the ship under its control. Sooner or later the crew will come here, and John wanted to dispel their alarm. The flash drive had a convincing legend explaining his short visit, and even more important, it had about a zettabite of information on the events and happenings on Earth and in the Galactic Union from the time the crew had left on this flight. And John knew better than anyone else from his own experience that there was nothing worse than the information hunger during the long flights.

  With a sense of fulfilled duty, John Rolls returned to the zero-cabin and gave the order to depart. The “eggs” started to boom in sync. John closed his eyes and smiled for the first time during the entire day, “Here we go.” Now nineteen dummy zero-cabins will send his biometrics to the pre-determined places in the Galaxy that were very hard to reach. No matter how advanced his adversary is, now they will have to sweat before they discover his true location.

  Now he was left with the final touch of this complicated puzzle so that his “evacuation plan” looked like a finished and complete painting.

  John Rolls smiled again, observing the countdown. This time, the leap will be much simpler. The exit point was at a starship moving with the same relative speed as the Fulgarating.

  ********

  “Greetings, Wild Boar!” a metallic voice roared from somewhere above. “You are right on time, as always!”

  “Don’t call me that,” John snapped, rolling over the cabin board and carefully getting up on his feet. “You should have better helped me get out of this eggshell.” He was happy to realize that this time the negative symptoms from the leap were not as strong as the previous time.

  “All right, Wild Boar, I won’t,” the ship’s AI could have just laughed as well, “judging by the fact you’ve popped up here, I turned out to be right?”

  “As a rule,” John said walking to the command panel, “the higher a reasonable individual’s level of intelligence, the lower the level of arrogance.” John sat himself down in the chair with great pleasure, and put his legs up on the control panel. “Make me a double burger, and don’t forget ketchup and mustard. My stomach is growling as if I haven’t eaten in three days.”

  “Wouldn’t have done you harm,” the AI’s mechanical voice sounded with a reproachful hint. “The level of cholesterol, sugar and various toxins in your blood is long above the norm. When are you going to take a restoration therapy treatment, finally?” the mechanical voice paused for a second waiting for a response, and having received none, continued, “Otherwise, believe me, you will leave this world sooner that the Beekeepers get to you.”

  A quiet ring sounded to the right of the control panel. A protective screen moved away with a whisper and from the inside of the delivery window lit with a maroon light John extracted an mouth-watering burger.

  “This is what I’m talking about!” he tore a huge piece and said with his mouth full, “And you with your cholesterol, get lost!”

  John was grateful to the AI for this non-obliging and mea
ningless fight. He even suspected that the AI started it to give John time to come back to his senses after a mad leap. The Wild Boar manipulated the food molecular synthesizer and constructed himself quite an appealing sandwich with a large cup of black coffee.

  Having spread himself in the chair, John was enjoying the rare moment of peace, comfort and quiet. He realized that he was incredibly tired from the last few crazy days. But his tiredness was more mental than physical.

  He now was at the one of five absolutely top secrete command posts, one can say, the holiest of holies, of the Military Space Fleet.

  “The rocket has launched,” the AI announced matter-of-factly.

  John stretched his body. He still had one more maneuver to make, after which the planned operation could be started. The starship in the command post of which John was sipping his coffee, has been losing speed for the last 10 hours, to reduce the pull. It was following the trajectory called evolventa, in the direction of a lonely black star hiding in the Harpius constellation. The course selected by the AI based on the most optimal calculations was safe but not easy. John was looking at the monitor showing the data from the isolocators and saw the lines of gravitational waves curling around the collapsing star just like the snakes on Medusa of Gorgon’s head.

  John was no astrophysicist, but he had a general understanding of the upcoming maneuver. The rocket that the AI just reported about, was speeding toward the black hole. To be more exact, this was not really a rocket but a GRACER (gravitation amplification by collimated excitation of resonance) charged with the energy enough to shatter Jupiter into small particles or to make a black hole shake just like it was shaking when it was being born. In such amplification, there appears an effect that astrophysicists call “a temporal bulb.” Simply put, the black hole is wrapped by complex time-space layers. According to the AI calculations, their starship should float in one of such layers. Beyond time and beyond space, or, to be more exact, in a time-space plane that is different from the usual ones.

  John finished his coffee in one big gulp and wrinkled his nose. He remembered his conversation about this with one of the most accomplished Earth’s astrophysicists. Good that Valstein was there with him. He, of course, is out of this world as well, but at least he can talk quantum physics in a human language. Valstein explained to him then that there’s no better hiding place in the entire Universe. This is an ideal hideout. An object floating in a modulated time-space plane of a collapsing star is completely invisible for any outside observer anywhere in the Universe. And this is exactly what John needed.

  “Take the correct position in your chair,” the AI said in a leveled metallic voice. “The maneuver will start in 380 seconds.”

  John shifted in his chair a little without arguing, and the chair started to shape, completely wrapping around his body and taking a horizontal position.

  ********

  The hall of the command control was half-dark. John Rolls was sitting at the long oval panel on one of the dozen of chairs, the rest of which were empty. In front of him, in the very center of the hall, a transparent sphere was floating, a holographic model of the known Space and Periphery. The sphere was rotating slowly, and it seemed that together with it, the entire Universe was rotating, glowing with spiral-shaped galaxies, brightest in the center and gradually dulling toward the edges. Others, looking more like elliptical star clusters, were floating among the gas and dust nebulas, glowing with the myriads of lights from supernovas. Bright pulsars were blinking, as if counting galactic seconds, throwing spurts of vicious x-rays around for thousands of parsecs. The universe was living its life, full of mysterious events, where the human race was still a modest observer.

  John Rolls was somewhat confused. No, the source of his unexpected confusion was not the hologram floating in the center of the command control, of course not. He had worked with such digital models of space hundreds of times before, albeit not so detailed and visual as this one. The confusion was coming from a different matter. The problem was the extent of authority granted to him.

  Secrecy was paramount in his work. And secrecy, as it is known, does not like publicity. John had planned and implemented most of his operations alone. Of course, he had quite a wide network of experts and confidants, but every one of them was working only on a narrowly specific and strictly defined task or function, having no idea of the ultimate goal of the mission.

  He quickly glanced at the empty chairs at the command. Right then, for the first time in many years, he regretted that there was no one there to share with him the heavy burden of responsibility that was hiding behind the short phrase “extended authority.”

  John moved sector F-14056/0002 closer, then fidgeted his fingers and singled out subsector A-113, and, having made circles with his hand, achieved the needed angle and zoom.

  An unusual object, in size comparable with the Solar system, was silently floating in a light cloud of a dust nebula. It was absolutely impenetrable. Someone, at some point and for some purpose, put a tight lid on something, having curved the surrounding space in an unthinkable way. It has been three years now that various galactic services have been trying to resolve the puzzle, trying to penetrate the “cocoon.”

  The Galactic Security Service that classified all related information as top secret led the project. As far as John knew from his own sources, nearly a year ago they were about to make a breakthrough. The rumor had it that if they didn’t manage to find a way to take the “cover” off the object, they at least found a way to dive under it.

  And that’s when the problems started. After long debates and heated arguments, the GSS gave in and had to share the authority with the Committee on Contacts. Why was this not done earlier? From the very beginning it was clear that the “cocoon” was not natural, but had been created by the hands of, if one can say so in this particular situation, an unknown civilization. But, as they say, better late than never.

  John quickly ran his fingers across the sensory screen. The slowly rotating sphere immediately flashed twelve red lights. “No, stop!” John didn’t take a shortcut and literally recounted them all one by one on his fingers. Now he got thirteen. He raised his eyebrows in surprise, “Where did the thirteenth come from?”

  To implement the plan he had developed, he was provided with, albeit with reservation, nine ultra-modern shuttles. With great difficulty, he managed to get three more. He still couldn’t believe he had managed to do it. These were unique space devices, equipped with the most recent models of D-engines. They cut through the space swiftly, like a sharp knife through soft butter, and could cover up to 500 parsecs on minimal energy usage. Strictly speaking, these shuttles were the very “Trojan Horses,” with the help of which the Earth residents hoped to penetrate the Z-2 object.

  His plan was simple. The GSS staff were betting on transporting the shuttles to the Base masked as cargo and supplies, certainly under highest secrecy and security measures. John greatly respected the experts from the counterpart agency, was friends with many of them and wished them all luck. But in contrast to them, he did not believe all those events that accompanied the “Pandora Box” operation from the very beginning were accidental. At the risk of being written off as paranoid, John felt with his gut that some alien force interrupted them from getting to the “cocoon.”

  This force was always acting softly, unnoticeably and covertly, masking for accidental coincidences or the rare naturally occurring anomalies, leaving no traces but ultimately destroying all the plans so carefully developed by the Earth residents.

  John Rolls understood that the enemy was much more superior of him on all parameters. He did not even doubt that it was an enemy. Even though this covert counteraction so far has not resulted in any fatalities or casualties, it still was a counteraction. John, just like any other specialist working undercover in backward worlds, could confirm based on his own experience that this was just a matter of time. Once the counteraction reaches a certain critical mass point, the true motives of the
parties are revealed and the situation often becomes unmanageable.

  John Rolls had no faith in God or Satan. He recognized and respected only one force: His Excellency Random Accident. It was impossible to predict, it was impossible to butter up or to strike and agreement with. It could only be lured in by creating a multitude of counteracting factors, something that the Wild Boar has been working on for the last three years.

  “The thirteenth,” he repeated now out loud. John looked at the coordinates of the last object. The screen said, “Tau Kita-1,” a space base. John has already guessed that this shuttle was on a completely different mission and he could see it only because of his “extended authority.”

  “The thirteenth,” he said again stretching the word as if tasting it. “Let’s see!” he punched in the course quickly and the ship’s AI immediately confirmed his guess. Tau Kita was located within the reach of F-14056/0002 sector. John called up to the screen the list of the summer staff deployed on the Base. There were 526 people who had a license to pilot the shuttles of this class. He had no time to even browse through each file.

  John personally and carefully selected the candidates for piloting the twelve shuttles under his command and assigned them to the positions close to the object. Some of these trusted people were active-duty pilots, others worked as mechanics, yet others – in the flight control units. One thing they shared in common: none of them knew the others existed. They never contacted each other and up to this day did not even suspect what their mission would be. As soon as they receive the order, each of them will have their access code activated and given a green light. The flights will be executed as regular scheduled flights. He didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention to them.

  “So, let’s see,” John was nervously drumming his fingers on the chair’s armrest. He closed his eyes for several seconds. “All right,” he said after making his final decision and leaned over the sensory panel to start the random numbers generator.