Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) Read online

  Sanctuary

  Cast with Talents Listed

  Map of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere

  Map of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere

  Chapter 1 – Landing on the Artifact

  Chapter 2 – Conspiracy

  Chapter 3 – Guardian Angels on the Moon

  Chapter 4 – Antarctica

  Chapter 5 – Fear is the Mother of Violence

  Chapter 6 – The Seven Seals

  Chapter 7 – Behind the Looking Glass

  Chapter 8 – Defining the Problem

  Chapter 9 – Helix

  Chapter 10 – Snowflake

  Chapter 11 – Space Marines

  Chapter 12 – The Devil You Know

  Chapter 13 – Walking in the Garden

  Chapter 14 – Bat Out of Hell

  Chapter 15 – Mapping the Universe

  Chapter 16 – Spontaneous Combustion

  Chapter 17 – Escape from Normal Space

  Chapter 18 – A Matter of Gravity

  Chapter 19 – Ecological Niche

  Chapter 20 – In the Hands of an Angry God

  Chapter 21 – Dark Days

  Chapter 22 – Let There Be Light

  Chapter 23 – Vow of Chastity

  Chapter 24 – Tau Ceti System

  Chapter 25 – The Big Day

  Chapter 26 – Smooth Criminal

  Chapter 27 – Train Wreck

  Chapter 28 – The Morning After

  Chapter 29 – Paradise Lost

  Chapter 30 – Exile Island

  Chapter 31 – Blank Patches

  Chapter 32 – Walking on the Sun

  Chapter 33 – Odysseus and the Nymph

  Chapter 34 – Answers to Random Questions

  Chapter 35 – Canon Law

  Epilogue

  Sanctuary

  Book Three of Jezebel’s Ladder

  by Scott Rhine

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright 2013 Scott Rhine

  To my wife, Tammy—we’re taking the trip of a lifetime together.

  Thanks to my editors Katy Sozaeva and Weston Kincade, and my newest beta reader Jackie Lynch.

  Cover art by http://www.thecovercounts.com

  Cast with Talents Listed

  Fortune Board Members and Families:

  Amanda Mori – mother of Kaguya, wife of Tetsuo, and security specialist. Simplification talent.

  Kaguya Mori – only daughter of Tetsuo and Amanda. Possesses Empathy, Simplification, and Quantum Computing, which pushed her into a navel-staring state.

  Tetsuo Mori – billionaire head of Mori Electronics, board member.

  Mary Smith – posing as Miracle Hollis, the largest stockholder for Fortune Enterprises and the richest twenty-year-old woman in the world. PJ’s daughter and Mercy’s younger sister.

  PJ Smith – Head of Research and Development for Fortune Aerospace. Mercy’s father. Icarus Field talent.

  Command Crew:

  Commander Zeiss – Conrad Zeiss, alias Taz. Tall and quiet Swiss astrophysicist and navigator. His talents include Quantum Computing, Rubber Sheet Theory, and multi-species Collective Unconscious.

  Lou – Captain Llewellyn, a handsome Welsh pilot who read Strange Attractors and Ideal Planets.

  Red – Miracle Redemption Hollis Zeiss. A US math prodigy and heir to the Fortune Aerospace billions, also a pilot married to Zeiss. Index, Pattern Simplification, Collective Unconscious, Empathy, and Quantum Computing talents.

  Medical:

  Auckland – Maori physician who likes sports. Genetic design and Anomaly Detection talents.

  Toby – Afrikaner botanist and organic chemist who once dated Yvette. Protein Folding and Nanomedicine Synthesis talents.

  Yvette – French nurse-practitioner and psychologist who specializes in high-risk pregnancies. Ethics and Empathy talents.

  Security:

  Herk – Rafael Herkemer. A Polish bomb technician for the UN, and inventor. Trained in underwater rescue and firefighting. Body Override talent.

  Sojiro – Japanese manga artist, computer programmer, and alien-interfaces expert. Mind-machine Interface and Red Giant Locator talent.

  Oleander – Specialist Oleander Dahlstrom. Experienced Norwegian space hand, once rescued Red’s aunt and uncle. Safety officer and super-goo specialist. Out-of-body scout.

  Life Support:

  Johnny – Giancarlo Bartilucci, an Italian cook. Food Synthesis talent.

  Rachael – Israeli whose family builds bomb shelters. Expert in water purification, sustainability, air purification.

  Ship Support:

  Mercy – born in Brazil, dual US citizen, oldest daughter of PJ Smith. Gravity Generation and Icarus Field talent.

  Nadia – Russian plasma physics and power expert, formerly from the Kaguya team. Trained in Buckyball batteries and Zero-Point Energy theory.

  Park – South Korean propulsion specialist. Gravity and Calabi-Yau chamber modeling talents.

  Risa – Sonrisa Belinda De Gama Herkemer. Panamanian expert in solar power, Herk’s wife, and Red’s former roommate. Alien structural engineering talent: superdense ice and algae acrylics.

  Technicians:

  Crandall – Croyden Randall Beaks, US Special Forces. Bio fuel, atmospheric engine mechanic.

  Pratibha – A woman from India, a specialist in economic flow models and space colonies.

  Yuki – Female technician from Mori electronics, a spy for the Mori family. Grav sensor trained.

  Map of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere

  Map of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere

  Chapter 1 – Landing on the Artifact

  The gift that the aliens gave humanity when they distributed the twenty-seven pages is comparable to us telling ancient Romans to boil their water and not drink out of lead cups. Don’t even get me started on women’s rights or slavery. Much of what we do today out of habit and tradition will seem self-destructive by the light of what we know fifty years from now. Unfortunately, our world doesn’t have fifty years.

  —from the training manual for Actives (psionically active agents) by Jezebel Hollis.

  There are no neat guidelines for species-level change. The pages were supposed to encourage us to work together; instead they divided us. The consequences of our lifestyle on this planet force us to act soon. As the system becomes unstable, we must leave the womb or perish. We need the information from the orbiting alien vessel that delivered the pages as much as a newborn needs to breathe oxygen. We recognize no law or authority counter to this imperative for survival.

  —from the journal of Commander Conrad Zeiss, seized in preparation for his court-martial.

  As her team stole the prototype shuttle, a knot twisted in Mercy’s stomach. She hadn’t eaten at all today. Becoming an international criminal didn’t bother her, but preventing the accidental deaths of eighteen astronauts did. A single, old-style Icarus star-drive field could have taken out a small city, accelerating hydrogen away from the ship at the speed of light. The new models were more powerful, untested, and flaky as hell. She was wrestling four of them. Only one engine sprayed their new high-test fuel mixture at record rates. The other three of the gravity-drive fields prevented the insane acceleration from making the astronauts flatter than Oklahoma. With shaking hands, she made constant adjustments and provided a steady stream of data to their coconspirators on the UN moon base.

  To calm herself, Mercy tried to imagine the main cabin of the Ascension as the first-class section of a commercial airliner, with seven wide seats on each side and a flip-down chair in the center for the flight attendant. Instead of a food tray, the wall in front of her had engine m
onitors. When they reached the far side of the moon, the deceleration was more extreme than expected. She almost couldn’t compensate. “What kind of lunatic is piloting?” she whispered.

  “Red,” replied Herkemer with a chuckle over the cabin-only frequency. The head of mission security sat on the center seat in exoskeleton-enhanced EVA armor.

  Mercy just shook her head. She only knew the security man’s name because he had spoken it aloud as he inserted the second key that made her console function. Almost everyone else here had been training together for years, but the only people she’d met before today were Red and the psychologist Yvette.

  “Zeiss normally wouldn’t let her fly like that, but we need to outrun the missiles that will be headed our way in few minutes.” Herk pointed to the grav-sensor display, which showed a small forest of weapons’ platforms.

  A woman with the name ‘Yuki’ on her helmet, the sensor technician from Mori Electronics, was still tied to her acceleration couch with her comm links disabled. Seeing the missiles, her eyes widened, and she tried to wiggle free in panic.

  Mercy looked up from her own data feed and suggested, “Maybe if you loosened her . . .”

  Herkemer shook his gold-plated helmet. “Sorry. She’s a known spy. We can’t risk her telling anyone what’s going on.” His accent was eastern European, but it was so faint that Mercy couldn’t discern which country he came from. “Don’t worry. Do you remember when we ignited all four engines at once?”

  Mercy swallowed. How could I forget? There was a small chance that they might’ve merged into one big field, killing us instantly. After a successful low-power test of the prototype, the Ascension team had engaged all four drives at full strength to reach the alien artifact as fast as possible. “Zeiss said that much power would generate an electromagnetic pulse. All our gear had to be shielded. I didn’t understand why.”

  “We used the flare to blind the remote sensors for these orbital weapons. We only have a few more minutes to get inside that hole before they can see again and all hell breaks loose out here.”

  “Why would someone shoot us?”

  “If our opponents can’t have the secrets of the alien technology, then no one can. The official party line is that the Arabs and Chinese refuse to submit to Imperialist domination. The truth is they want all the benefits from the aliens without being hampered by the charter.”

  She’d known about the political détente. The UN space program had been treading water for twenty years, but this was the first time she’d heard about the sheer volume of lasers and missiles.

  “We’ll be safe inside the artifact?”

  “Theoretically . . . Until the big stuff from L1 and Earth orbit arrives.” L1 was the stable region in lunar orbit where the pull of Earth’s gravity balanced the moon’s. Fortune Aerospace had a major construction platform at L1 where the Ascension had been assembled.

  Dancing red lights on the ceiling of the shuttle startled her. Another plugged-injector alarm? Twisting her whole body in the awkward spacesuit, she managed to see the Japanese man behind Yuki. He was fiddling with the glass sphere that served as a control for the alien telescope. What was his name?

  Receiving an order from the bridge, Mercy shut down the drive units. When they had designed the Ascension, the Zeisses knew the shuttle couldn’t fit through this hole with the drive pods still attached. When the cockpit crew hit the jettison button, the drives blew away from their hull with tiny explosions. The pods were fitted with beacons to enable easy retrieval. “Say good-bye to two billion dollars in R&D.” Paradoxically, she breathed a sigh of relief, realizing that she could no longer kill everyone with a fat-fingered keystroke.

  Herk read the sensor console and mumbled. “Confirming lens has been opened to the maximum—forty meters across. The grav sensors are showing some serious mass through that hole, but the visual still shows the same star field as before.”

  “The main body of Ascension is thirty-one meters across! Does Red have the skill to fit through that gap?”

  “No, but Lou does. He’ll sweet talk Ascension in. I don’t approve of his morals, but the man has a feather touch—like a hummingbird caressing a flower.”

  Over the command channel from the cockpit, Red said, “Everyone join hands and recite the code of ethics we’ve agreed to follow in space.” Agreeing on this charter had been an exercise required by the aliens before humans could leave the solar system. Other races meeting them in the void had to know what to expect, and alliance colonies needed a common set of core rules. Unlike those who read the Ethics page, however, obedience was on the honor system.

  Forewarned this might happen, Mercy had the text display inside her helmet. With hands joined, the group reading felt like a congregation reciting the Our Father in church. Mercy might have enjoyed the activity if she’d had more than a few minutes to compile her observations on the test flight and make suggestions for the next model. The incoming missiles could destroy the crew or the message relays at any moment.

  After the final word of the charter, Herk said, “The visual changed. There’s a hangar down there.”

  Knowing future generations depended on her, Mercy ignored the drama of the artifact landing as she read the raw data on her slate and dictated design notes like mad.

  Everyone in the crew was eager to set foot on the alien ship, and they bounced out of the shuttle in minutes. “Careful,” warned Herk. “The gravity in the hangar is less than half that of moon base. Take baby steps.” After frog-marching Yuki out of the cabin, Herk tapped Mercy on the soldier. “Hit ‘send’ and grab your APK.”

  With the finality of closing the lid on a coffin, she shut her console. Then she opened both her under-seat bin and the hollow armrest. She grabbed her astronaut preference kit—about a cubic foot of personal possessions—plus a monstrous flight recorder and a hand-powered camera.

  Herk helped her with the heavy recorder satchel. “You’re not taking much of your own.”

  “Some spare clothes and a deck of cards.” As he helped guide her down the ramp, Mercy explained, “I gave my extra weight allowance to Red so she could take Elias Fortune’s ashes.”

  He nodded. “You’re all right, Smith. Your sister came to my wedding—lent us the corporate jet for the honeymoon, which was nice because we couldn’t exactly bring plates or kitchen appliances along on this trip.”

  God love him—he’s the strongest guy in the lot, and he’s nervous. Mercy took the lens cap off. Without Icarus-field drive pods, she no longer had technological purpose on the mission. “Sorry, I have camera-monkey duties.”

  “No shame in being the eyes,” he said, dropping the heavy satchel behind her on the hangar floor.

  She panned around the vast chamber as two other women did the same thing with advanced digital devices that broadcast to the recorder pack. Her toy was just a fail-safe in case the artifact inhibited electricity. The floor reminded her of tooth enamel. The walls resembled an out-of-focus Monet with reds, blues, and greens. Only when Red mentioned the farm where the aliens had landed did the shapes resolve into a barn and pasture in Mercy’s mind. Others said that the place stank like cow flops, so she kept her helmet in place for now.

  The short, Hispanic woman who specialized in alien materials leaned down to touch the flooring with a handheld tester. “It appears to be ceramic. All the edges in the room are rounded. I can’t see any corners or seams where we could to pry it up. I can’t tell what’s transmitting the images, but the clouds are moving.”

  Red strode up to a large, golden rectangle on the wall, which appeared to be made of the same material as the bulletproof, fireproof pages that the aliens had scattered as invitations to this party. “Close the gravity lens.”

  The skinny, Japanese guy played with the crystalline control ball, and the night sky irised shut, replaced with more Old MacDonald scenery.

  Red put her hand on the wall and said to the alien ship, “We’re here for our inheritance, Sensei.”

  The touche
d section of wall reconfigured into a ramp, like self-folding origami, inviting them inside.

  “It could be a while before it’s safe for us to leave, or a rescue party reaches us. Everyone grab a cargo cube and come inside, where we have more cushion from the blast,” Commander Zeiss ordered as calmly as an old fisherman predicting rain. Mercy noticed he was a foot taller than either Red or herself.

  Herk rotated a latch on the Ascension, and a seven-meter-long luggage rack lowered from the shuttle belly. Stacked two high, there were fourteen identical, black crates and several long poles. Modeled on the EU Mars expedition, these boxes were supposed to hold everything they’d need to survive for a couple months in space. Nearly everyone pushed a cube, but Herk took one end of the poles. “Come on, Crandall.”

  Mercy recalled from her briefing that the other man had a horrible first name, like the Catcher in the Rye character—Croyden. He preferred to go by his middle name Randall, but Red had smashed the two together into a single moniker—Crandall. This team loved nicknames, so it stuck. She was afraid of what her nickname would be when the time came.

  The mechanic, and expert on bio-fuel, was in exoskeleton-enhanced armor like Herk’s. “Someone should stay out here, in case it’s a trap,” reasoned Crandall. His buzz cut and accent pegged him as former US military.

  Herk waved his arm. “Come on. Red says the aliens want us all in the next room for the welcome ceremony.”

  “Since when do we obey aliens instead of orders? CENTCOM told me to stand ready at all times to blow an escape hole for the rest of you, or get the intel out if you all die.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  Crandall flexed his left glove, and the nose cone of the Ascension lowered, dropping the swivel-mounted Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser (COIL) and revealing a new missile tube not on the original schematics.

  Mercy’s eyes bugged for a moment. That explains why the weight distribution was all out of whack. Damn the Pentagon; that imbalance could’ve killed us all.