Twisted Spaces: 1 / Destination Mars Read online

  ''Holy mother, you did it!''

  ''On computer, baby, on computer.'' Mike closed the old book and put it back into the shelf. ''Now we need to try it in the real world.''

  ''And for that we need the antimatter.''

  ''Exactly. About ten grams.'' With a click of his mouse he transferred the model and the test data to his chief engineer's mailbox.

  ''Now what?''

  ''Now I'll drag myself to bed, baby. Want to carry me?''

  ''No way! But your day is not yet over, my darling. Today's liabilities have to be served.'' She smiled wickedly. ''I seem to remember a promise of a hundred kisses ...''

  ''Oh darn,'' Mike sighed, ''me and my loose tongue.'' Although his words sounded regretful, his heart wasn't in it.

  Chapter 34

  Geneva/CERN

  Monday, 07.11.2016

  The moment Senior Master Sergeant Dupont had identified the group's location, he had known his travel route. The old US air base Spangdahlem, situated in south-west Germany, had been abandoned some time ago and in the meantime been converted for civil use. Fortunately the Americans had not left such a terrible mess of the local environment as the Russian army in the former GDR had, so the air base held no expensive legacies and could be turned into an industrial park with relative ease, resulting in plenty cheap buildings, halls and lots of open space. Located less than fifty kilometers from the Luxembourg border, an approach from the French side via Luxembourg seemed sensible. It also gave Dupont an excuse to visit his old unit, currently residing in the mountain range of the Vosges. His heads-up call to them had been received and acknowledged. Staying overnight and having a few drinks with some old comrades, they talked about this and that. In the morning he went back on the motorway, his staff car from CERN traded against an elder Renault of the Legion. They always kept some vehicles with German registry in stock, just in case. The workman's outfit was stored in the trunk.

  Marcel crossed the German border in Echternach and headed for the Eifel town of Bitburg. Like every other soldier surviving the African desert, he was plagued with an unquenchable thirst, and a beer from Bitburg went a long way in his world. So, at eleven o'clock in the morning, after a journey of roughly seven hundred kilometers, he had a pint of excellent Pils in the pub at the Bitburg train station. Next he bought ten rings of Fleischwurst, Germany's idea of baloney, and sixty bread-rolls in a butcher shop, threw all the bags into the car and headed for Spangdahlem. With a twenty-minute ride to the main gate he would be there in time for lunch. Using his mobile, he placed a short call to his Colonel ... then a change of clothing somewhere on the road ...

  He entered the former air base at the (now unguarded) main gate, turned left following the street along the fence and drove half way around the tarmac. Spangdahlem had been known to possess one of Europe's longest runways, and to Dupont's surprise it still looked functional. It was different with the other installations. Closer to the entrance area the buildings had been renovated beautifully, but as the road continued and the old sergeant reached the base's 'backyard', the long-time use of the facilities became apparent and more and more decay was visible.

  The sought location appeared after a last curve, and it looked exactly like what he had seen on Google Earth. It was an old, massive semi-circular shelter, one of maybe a dozen in this area, a good twenty meters high, twenty wide and fifty long, used originally as an aircraft maintenance hangar for the wing's transport planes. There were three entries in the front: a huge gate in the center, for the planes it had once contained and, to the right and left of it, two personnel doors. The overall impression was that of a weathered, rusty, dirty old slab of concrete, with walls a foot thick, lurking on a large, open compound like a prehistoric monster.

  These shelters were rented out for all kinds of purposes, farmers used them to stock hay, some companies needed short-time storage space and some ran backyard garages in them. This seemed to be the case for this shelter: a derelict car stood in front of its closed main gate, hood open, with a mechanic working under the hood.

  Dupont turned onto the former taxiway leading up to the shelter's front, passed it and drove into the neglected parking lot on its left side. Getting out of the car he fetched the two food bags from the back seat, slammed the doors shut with his foot and marched straight towards the main entrance. He didn't bother to lock his car; if his suspicions were right there would be no need for that.

  On the last ten meters he slowed down, making sure the mechanic could see his hands. The guard, that's what the lonely man must have been, was in his late twenties, had brown hair and a short, sharply tended beard. The chap came across as sturdy, tough - and unusually serious. Taliban Hunter was Dupont's first thought, and he immediately wondered where this idea came from. Although the man did not look up, Dupont felt as if he was under constant surveillance. The moment he reached the guard, he saw he was right: a miniature monitor was lying on the car's air filter and showed the entire court yard - including the two of them. A H&K 9mm pistol was resting beside it - cocked, safety off. That unwelcome thought flashed up again: Taliban Hunter. Careful ...

  Classical checkpoint situation, one checker, but where was the man's protection? There should have been at least one other, with an assault rifle at the ready, standing at a wide angle ...

  The 'mechanic' finally looked up. ''Jules Lefebre,'' the sergeant offered, and the man nodded once, than turned back to his engine. The whole situation was a bit weird, one man as security measure for such a secret? Then, as Marcel turned to the left personnel door, a tiny spec of light caught the attention of his trained eyes - coming from the roof of the next shelter.

  ''How many?'' he asked quietly over his back towards the 'mechanic', meaning the snipers.

  ''Eight,'' the man mumbled to his engine block while unlocking the distributor cap. ''Move on.''

  That would do all right. Dupont walked to the left personnel door, which opened after punching in the numbers. Stepping through, he registered that the entrance was in fact a massive steel bulkhead that led into a five-by-five meter chamber, with its walls made of bullet-stopping white bricks. It also had a cleverly overlapping back wall, effectively forming an indoor hand-grenade trap with a frag protected passage - a setup right out of the book. Five very serious looking young chaps in camouflage, standing in a wide semicircle along the back wall, awaited him. H&K MP7s at the ready, pointing straight at him, fingers within the trigger guard.

  One of them spoke up: ''Why did Jules have to die?''

  Dupont was taken back: the words had come in French - in the Legion's own hard dialect.

  ''What?''

  The man repeated, emotionless: ''Why did Jules Lefebre have to die?''

  The old sergeant gulped, took a breath: ''He was deadly wounded. Someone did him the Legionnaire's Honour, gave him the coup de grâce. I don't know who.''

  A sixth man in a white lab coat appeared from behind the brick wall blend: ''I did. Welcome.''

  Dupont recognised the speaker at once: this was the voice from that communicator Leclerc had - the ominous Michael.

  ''How the hell ...''

  ''Please excuse our little performance, mon Adjutant-chef, but we have to make sure.'' Michael waved a hand, the weapons came down and the men relaxed, stepping aside. ''I was a lieutenant in the US Army, stationed in Afghanistan. Special Forces.'' He pointed around: ''As were these men. We fought the battle of Mazari Sharif. And later the one of Tehran.''

  That stirred something in Dupont: of Mazari Sharif and Tehran he had surely heard. ''For real?'' He gave his voice an unbelieving sound: the battle of Mazari Sharif was a legend within the Legion.

  ''Yes, mon Adjutant-chef, for real.''

  ''So what really happened at Mazari?''

  Michael touched Marcel on the shoulder, pointing him toward and around the blinds, into the hangar: ''Intel told us to expect fifty insurgents,'' he said. ''The Army went in with a platoon-sized force. Our squad had orders to run security for them, protect their
flanks and eliminate snipers. They attacked the insurgents, nailed them down. Then more showed up; three/four hundred, heavily armed. Outnumbering us five-to-one. Showered us with mortars and RPG's. The godforsaken dust was everywhere, couldn't see shit. We got trapped and called in for air support. No luck there, planes and choppers were busy elsewhere.'' They reached the open hall, bathed in white light, but Dupont was far too fascinated by Michael's narration to look around.

  ''The Legion came to our rescue, just in time, dropped on the insurgents like Thor's hammer. Together we shot the shit out of them, killed the lot, but in the end it was hand-to-hand combat. Needed to smoke them out, house by house. Jules and I fought side-by-side. We were nearly done, when Jules took two in the stomach, right on the same spot.'' Michael paused a moment. ''His body armour gave in - it was the old BA4, you remember it - and he got completely ripped to pieces. Stomach, liver, pancreas, intestines, everything smashed to shit. Medevac wasn't possible, the choppers were still busy. But it didn't matter, Jules was beyond help. Medical help, that is.''

  Michael took a deep breath, continued: ''He asked me, ordered me to take his pistol, and I did it. Got the shooter with it, too. And, later, a lot of others.'' He produced a sub-compact Glock that had seen heavy use. ''Carry it ever since,'' he said, holding it a moment in silent contemplation, then stowed it away again.

  ''Later we thanked your men the old way, drank your wine, learned your tongue. Bonded with the legionnaires. Were able to return the favour too, just three month later, at Chagcharan.'' He paused, then said in a low voice: ''Honneur et Fidélité. No ordinary man can understand this.''

  But Senior Master Sergeant Marcel Dupont, survivor of so many battles and fights, did. Honour and fidelity, Blut und Ehre, Semper Fi, it was all the same - blood brotherhood. It permeated nationality, colour, religion and gender. He had learned something, too. About Chagcharan, a name he also knew. That second he made his decision. To help. No matter what. He stopped in his tracks, stood at attention and saluted the man. Michael, not being in uniform, accepted it the right way, just by nodding.

  ''Let's get those bags of yours to the galley, mon Adjutant-chef. I can imagine some guys are already waiting. And you look like you can use another one of those Bitburg brews.''

  Chapter 35

  Beijing

  Monday, 07.11.2016

  It was evening again. Chan was hunched in front of her computer, eyes burning and running simulation after simulation. She was dead tired, but did not want to surrender yet. The answer had to be a multi-stage one, of that she was sure. At some point the unknown satellite beam had to reach Earth, and identifying - or better narrowing down that point, finding the ground station or another comm-sat relay, that was the primary task. She had modelled the cone of the outward pointing antenna to narrow down the possible positions of the alien satellite. It was a well-defined sector of space, but it was huge, naturally.

  Considering the large number of possibilities, Chan switched from scientific assumptions to intelligence ones: not all possible solutions also were realistic - or practical ones. So, for example, she thought it to be likely that the orbit of that unknown outer-space satellite in fact was rather close to theirs, simply to keep the synchronisation problems to a minimum (at least that was what she would have done). Besides that, she suspected the satellite to be small - like one of those hobby micro-sats you could get deployed into orbit for a few thousand dollars. In addition she considered it nescessary, that the bird would use a narrow beam transmission for sending data back to Earth (again something she would have done). With any other method the danger of detection was far too high. She also preferred a ground station scenario to another satellite link chain; the former had far more traffic running through them and far less security in place than the nearly priceless and jealously guarded satellites.

  The atmosphere set another constraint: if the narrow beam hit it at too flat an angle, it would bounce outwards and at a certain range of angles the signal would lose too much energy and scatter. After all, this was high frequency stuff and almost acted like ordinary sound waves. All these factors were part of her model, of course, and she already had excluded a large parts of Earth - for example one always found satellite ground stations on dry land, never on a floating base on any ocean, but there were still a lot of surface ....

  The door of her office suddenly slammed open, abruptly startling her out of her thoughts. A young, pretty-boy lieutenant came in, dragging a folded military style cot into the room. Chan was dead tired, but not tired enough to miss the heart-breaking attractiveness of the newcomer.

  ''General Xao said, if you don't lie down and sleep for at least four hours, I'm ordered to arrest you and drag you to a holding cell,'' the lieutenant stated in place of a greeting, and added: ''And keep you there for full eight hours.''

  Chan laughed out. ''Did he also tell you to entertain me while I try to fall asleep?''

  ''No,'' was the laconic answer, ''but I was told that if I touch you before you have found what you are searching for, I will be reassigned to our north-pole station.''

  That made Chan laugh again. ''He wins.'' She hit a print-button on the keyboard, extracted a paper sheet containing a map of some kind from the laser printer and circled an area on in. Wrote on it 'Check all ground stations here, 37% it's probably one of them. Careful, please.' and handed it to the handsome man. ''Give this to General Xao.''

  ''Sure.'' He reached for the paper, then held out a few cereal bars and a bottle of water. ''Now, take this!''

  Chan put her machine into sleep-mode, took two of the energy bars from his hands, wolfed them down and drank the water. After a short visit to the adjacent toilet she staggered over to the cot and, completely exhausted, fell onto it. The lieutenant placed a cushion under her head, threw a blanket over her. ''Sleep well, sunflower,'' he whispered to her, ''I'll be watching over you.'' Then he moved out and switched off the light.

  Chapter 36

  Spangdahlem

  Monday, 07.11.2016

  During lunch in an improvised canteen at the hangar's opposite side, MacMillan, now Mike to the French sergeant, had introduced a lab-coated, quite voluptuous woman in her late twenties with long, curly red hair, as Ellie, his deputy project manager and the love of his life.

  Marcel had taken one admiring look at her and realised that he and his ex-Army colleague had far more in common than just ideas of honour and fidelity.

  After a simple meal they started a serious tour through the hangar: workshops filled with busy, white coated people working on grids, casting polymer forms, wrapping coils, hacking at computers. ''Not much to see,'' Michael had summarized.

  Finally they walked the few meters to the hangars center. Marcel had seen little of that until now; the cardboard walls were a good two-and-a-half meters high and the corridors comparably narrow. Then they entered the central assembly space and he had an open view - and he felt stricken. There in the middle of the hall, a golden sphere was floating in the air, maybe two meters above the ground, without any visible support or any sound. It was a good fifteen meters in diameter. and the silent hovering made it all the more diabolic to the older man. After a while of gawking he turned to his host: ''Why is it named Stardust?''

  MacMillan laughed: ''A salute to a hero of my youth. It's the name of Rhodan's first ship''

  ''Rhodan?''

  ''Perry Rhodan. Popular German science fiction novel in the sixties and seventies. More than two thousand episodes.''

  A woman approached, busily pushing an obviously weightless, man-sized crate at chest height in front of her, walking towards the sphere. Pointing, Michael drew Marcel's attention to a red-yellow line on the floor. As the woman reached it, she stopped short and fumbled in her coat pocket. Marcel turned to his host, a question on his lips, but Mike just nodded towards the woman: ''Watch.''

  The woman moved on, right under the floating globe, spoke something into a communicator. A moment later a round opening appeared in the lower third of
the sphere and a man looked out, saw the woman standing under him and waved. The woman grabbed the crate, turned and pointed it as if it had no weight at all and gave it a short push. In front of Dupont's unbelieving eyes the crate floated upwards toward the man, who snatched it out of the air and dragged it in. The air lock closed again and the woman turned away. At the red-yellow line she stopped, did something in her lab coat pocket, then moved on, out of sight.

  ''Comprenez-vous, mon Adjutant-chef?'' Mike looked at Marcel.

  ''Beyond the line there is a zone of weightlessness?''

  ''Exactly. We call it a Zero-G zone.''

  ''And the woman has some kind of neutraliser?''

  ''Close, she has a little antigrav, like the one CERN blew up.'' He produced a wicked smile. ''As soon as she enters the zone, she switches it on and it keeps her on the ground.''

  Marcel shook his head. ''Unbelievable.''

  The women Ellie, laughed. ''Wait, here comes another supply shipment. Could be interesting.'' She pointed to a man pulling a long row of floating crates obviously effortless behind him, each crate chained to the other with some plastic rope.

  The earlier scene repeated itself in front of their eyes, now it was a man with ten or so connected boxes. The rest was the same: entering the Low-G zone, calling the sphere, pushing the first crate up, then pulling the other like a chain of sausages into the air lock.

  When the man left the low gravity area, Ellie waved him over. Turning to Dupont she said: ''This is Chang. He's our supply chain master. Chang, this is Mister Dupont from CERN.''

  ''Welcome!'' the young man bowed.

  Before Marcel could say anything, Ellie went on: ''What did you load, Chang?''

  ''Mostly oxygen powder for the emergency air producer.''