The Solar Patrol

J.G. Miller

Description

What happens when the future invades the present? Tom was only 13 years old when he vanished without a trace, so it is not surprising that the stranger who shows up 36 years later claiming to be Tom is thought to be an imposter. But what if he is the boy grown to be a young man, returned not from the past but from the future-a future with faster-than-light spacecraft, death-dealing ray guns, humanoid robots, menacing aliens, bug-eyed monsters, heroic spacemen, captivating spacewomen, megalomaniacal madmen, sentient dinosaurs, and bioengineered cats? If Tom is telling the truth, an interstellar conflict whose origin lies centuries in the future has spilled over into the present-and the past, present, and future are entwined in a riddle for which there appears to be no answer. The Solar Patrol is a blend of space opera and hard science fiction set in the past as it never was and the future as it used to be.

Sujets

• Space Opera
• Science Fiction
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977211774
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Solar Patrol
A Tale of a Future Once Imagined
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2019 J.G. Miller
v3.0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-9772-1177-4

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


For Jean, Devon, and Derek. Family forever.


There’s no time like the present.

– common saying



Prelude
1902 - Hell Creek, Montana
T he man rested on his haunches staring at the smoothly curved surface that protruded from the dirt. Until but a few moments earlier, it had been covered by the debris of deep time, debris that had supposedly gone undisturbed for tens of millions of years. It simply lay there, its surface blanketed by a thin veil of the ever-present Montana dust, unmoving, uncaring, unfeeling, silent, and totally at odds with the man’s perception of the world. A few inches from the object, next to a partially exposed petrified vertebrae of a dinosaur, lay the man’s pickaxe. The pick’s steel tip was missing, broken off by the nerve shattering blow the man had struck that first revealed the thing’s existence. The shock of the strike had sent a spasm of pain up the man’s forearm, the remnants of which were still subsiding.
He had paused in clearing the debris from the buried object in an attempt to better organize his thoughts. The sound of his heavy breathing mixed with the hollow silence of the nearly nonexistent breeze. He realized that his mouth was now as dry as the dust in which he knelt. Driblets of sweat fell from his face, either splashing on the exposed rock or making miniature craters in the dust. And still the object refused to disappear, refused to surrender to reality, but instead insisted on holding the man as transfixed as the gaze of Medusa.
He felt his eyelids close from an involuntary blink and his eyes burned. That was enough to break the trance. With a jerk, he struggled to his feet, grabbing his canteen as he stood up. He twisted open the cap of the container and poured some of its contents down his throat, quenching his parched vocal tubes. He poured more of the welcome fluid into his cupped hand in order to splash it onto his face and eyes. The man resealed the canteen as he slowly turned, taking in the seemingly limitless desolation that surrounded him. The only sign of life was an occasional ugly green, low sprawl of dry vegetation that hardly deserved the designation. The Hell Creek Formation. A fitting name indeed, at least the “hell” part. In all directions stretched an endless monotony of dry, sunbaked umber and dull brown, broken only by twisted ravines and distant, strata striped cliffs. Nowhere to be seen was any evidence of water, let alone a creek. The only reason anyone came here was entombed in the rock that lay beneath his feet. Its age was Upper Cretaceous, that is, that time in the past near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. And that was why he and his companions now frequented this middle of nowhere. They were dinosaur hunters. But the thing that had broken his pickaxe was neither fossil nor rock. It was utterly alien to the landscape, both in time and place.
The man’s gaze locked on a similarly attired individual, a good thirty yards away, on his hands and knees, using a sharp awl to scratch at the dry crust.
The man called to his companion. “Barnum, you need to see this.”
The expedition leader raised his head as if in acknowledgement, then got to his feet and hurried over. The newcomer’s eyes followed the pointed finger of the first man. Kneeling on the barren slope to get a better look at the still partially buried object, Barnum sounded less than amused. “What is this? A joke?”
“No, sir. I found it when I just now hit it with my pick. Look what it did to the point.”
The expedition leader briefly inspected the damaged tool, then gave his head a shake. “Okay, let’s find out what we have here.”
The two men began using ice picks and whisk brooms to remove the gravelly soil that blanketed the unexpected find while taking great care to avoid damaging the neighboring fossil bone. Before long, enough of the artifact was exposed to allow it to be lifted from its resting place. The expedition leader reached down and grasped the spherical relic with his hands. He hefted it, letting out a grunt as he did so.
“It’s heavy—really heavy.” With some effort, he managed to carefully place it on the ground.
“What do you think it is?” asked his companion.
In answer, Barnum merely gave a shrug.
Except for a dark-blue, slightly raised stripe about an inch in width that encircled it, the mystery object was a perfect metallic sphere, roughly ten inches in diameter. The expedition leader produced a large rag and used it to remove the dirt and dust that still clung to the artifact. The bright chrome-like finish of the cleaned surface gleamed in the sunlight that filled the clear Montana sky.
“What’s this?” said the man who had first discovered the mysterious object. “It looks like some sort of writing.”
Etched on the surface on both sides of the encircling blue stripe were a series of strange looking glyphs.
“It’s no writing that I’m familiar with,” said the expedition leader. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” The other man gave his head a shake.
For the next few moments, the two figures merely stared at their discovery in silence. Finally, Barnum leaned forward and began to carefully wrap the artifact in the cloth he had used to clean it. “For now, we don’t tell the others about this. Okay?”
“But why?”
“Because this—whatever it is—shouldn’t be here. It’s like we’ve unwrapped an ancient Egyptian mummy and found a modern pocket watch. Until we understand more about what this thing is, I think it best we keep its existence a secret.”




Part I 1995 – East Pencreek, Pennsylvania



Chapter 1
The Homecoming
D iane Jones let out a contented sigh as she settled herself on the lawn chair. “Couldn’t ask for a finer day,” she thought, scrunching her body further into the embrace of the chair, at the same time reaching to one side to adjust the dial of a radio that rested on the small table beside her. The sound of music soon mingled with the low roar of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the ringing of a distant church bell signaling nine o’clock. She continued to fidget with the radio’s dial until it locked onto the local “oldies” station. “That’s the ticket,” Diane thought.
Satisfied with the selection, she closed her eyes and allowed her body to ooze back into the recliner as the sound of the mower faded in the distance, abandoning Diane to her thoughts.
“What a jerk to be mowing his lawn at this hour, wasting such a wonderful Sunday morning on yard work,” she muttered to herself before half opening her eyes to take in the deep blue of a gorgeous cloudless sky. She then let her eyelids close again. Indeed, it was a perfect day, with only a week to go before the end of the school year.
As Diane began to mentally plan her summer vacation, her thoughts were interrupted by a low rumbling sound like that of distant thunder. The rumbling was followed by the sound of falling timber, a gust of wind, and then, except for the hum of the radio, an unnerving silence. The middle age woman jerked to a sitting position and glanced about . As there was not a cloud in the sky, she reasoned that thunder was not an explanation.
The breeze died as quickly as it had started.
Diane flicked the switch on the radio to “off.” Not even the chirping of a bird broke the calm. The hairs on the back of her neck began to rise and her body gave an involuntary shudder when, as if on cue, the birds in the nearby woods resumed their songs.
Her mind searched for an explanation. Perhaps someone had fired a gun, or a car had backfired. But what about the sudden breeze? Was it a coincidence or had she just imagined it? She turned in her chair to study the woodland that bordered the far side of the street that ran in front of her home. Maybe a tree had fallen there?
The street marked the boundary between a residential neighborhood of single family homes and a forested area several acres in size, known locally as Sullivans Woods. Diane recalled hearing stories when growing up that the woods were haunted, an idea that had taken on additional credibility thirty-six years earlier when Diane was in the eighth grade. On the night of Halloween that year, three of her fellow classmates had disappeared. One story had it that the three teens had last been seen entering Sullivans Woods. The police had suspected foul play, and had issued a bulletin in an attempt to locate the kids’ science teacher for questioning when he failed to show up at school the following Monday. The mystery had never been solved, nor had any credible sightings of any of the vanished people, including the m