Abductees Read online

  Alan Brickett

  ABDUCTEES

  The Gravitonics Chronicles Book One

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, software, 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.

  References to brand names or other inferences of patented trademarks are used only as pertains to events at the time of this publication and are not meant to promote or demote the brands or references themselves except as pertains to this work of fiction.

  Copyright © Alan Brickett 2016

  Cover Illustration © BetiBup33 design

  https://thebookcoverdesigner.com/designers/betibup33/

  The right of Alan Brickett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, share, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.

  Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  You can find out more about the Author and his other work on his Author’s page on Amazon.

  For the readers, for my friends, my family and for Renier who absorbed this story.

  PROLOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM “COMRADES” THE SECOND BOOK OF THE GRAVITONICS CHRONICLES.

  EXCERPT FROM “CONLIN SHAW AND ORION’S ARROW”.

  EXCERPT FROM “CONVICT FENIX”.

  EXCERPT FROM “THE BOLOI”.

  PROLOGUE

  A bright purple light flares up the side of the skyscraper.

  While it is not light which is invisible to the human eye, the spectrum which includes ultraviolet and infrared, it lasts for less than a tenth of a second. Only enough time for anyone who did see it to assume it was some kind of reflection from among the various other sources of light in the city.

  Occurring as quickly as a lightning bolt it would be difficult to say whether the top or the bottom of the shaft of violet light was the start or the end. What was a fact was that the hospital room on the first floor in the west wing that got lit up was definitely affected by it.

  For that fraction of a second three things happened in the hospital room.

  The first was that a wide angled multi-spectrum scan encapsulated the room and took a direct reading to the subatomic level of everything inside it. The second was that the patient in that room, a dying paraplegic man, disappeared from the bed.

  That would have been startling enough if it wasn’t for the added surprise that the IV drip, catheter and holding bands which kept the patient immobilized and in traction all stayed in precisely the same positions they had been.

  Instead of being inside the patient the IV needle and the catheter tube hovered for that brief moment in midair. The clamps and slings held nothing for an instant and then filled again.

  The same patient had reappeared in the millisecond after he had disappeared, except that it was not the same patient. No modern medical technology or science would have been able to tell this duplicate from the original.

  Only a suspicious mind would attribute the sudden vegetable coma state of the patient to being a different body than the one which had left the room. Anyone with this sort of suspicion would not have been able to prove it, however.

  Down to the exact composition of blood chemistry at the moment of scanning, the body left in that room was exactly the same. With barely a moment of electronic interruption, the heart monitor continued beeping steadily.

  X-ray slides on the wall showed the fractured and broken bones at the lower vertebrae of the spine. Those injuries and the damage creeping up to the shoulder blades would match to the nanometer the same damage in the spine of the body in the bed.

  The other end of the purple flare briefly limned an object in the sky above the hospital.

  Floating low over the city at half a mile it was otherwise invisible before and after that moment of brief activity. The shape of a perfect sphere, the object was a starship with a radius of four hundred and fifty feet. The outside of the sphere was knobby, like the surface had been pushed out from the inside by a berserk steel ball baring bounced around at viciously high speeds.

  The actual hull material was not nearly as fragile as that, evidenced by the stationary to one hundred miles per hour acceleration it underwent. The nearby hailstorm the sphere rose through would have shredded a weaker material and put dents in most metals currently known to mankind as the sphere accelerated further.

  Before it had left the storm and the thunder that helped to mask the sonic boom when it went over Mach one the sphere increased acceleration beyond any propulsion of the current era. The starship hit Mach eleven west of the North American coastline over the Pacific Ocean heading southwest.

  Shortly after that it decelerated in the high atmosphere and dropped steeply towards the continent of New Zealand, chasing the night sky well before dawn came upon the hospital left far behind.

  Over New Zealand the starship slowed, heat bled off in the colder air causing streaks which would be mistaken for another aircraft at cruising altitude. It kept to the same airways so that distortion and visible airflow was within the same tracking parameters.

  The starship easily tracked all radar and satellite coverage, with no visible or electronic signature it went completely unnoticed as it settled into a steady twenty mile per hour cruising speed towards the city of Dunedin.

  A casual stop brought it over a house in an unremarkable street in the southern suburbs.

  The house which was obviously a home by the way it looked lived in, sat on a slight rise above the sidewalk with its tar driveway linking the street to a single garage. With the first floor extending above the garage and the lower level having large windows to the inside, it gave off a family home feel.

  On the inside, it became apparent that a family had not lived there for some time.

  Of the three bedrooms, all were dusty and not in use with the bedding still crisp along the lines of the bed and blankets. None of those beds had been used for weeks if not longer, even the room which still had a stand and table to hold medical equipment.

  The kitchen on the ground floor had only cutlery in the sink, which although clean still showed a bulk washing attitude. The dustbin had takeaway cartons and boxes from various restaurants with the latest evidence being a plastic packet on the table branded with a fast delivery promise or your money back guaranteed.

  The contents of the delivery packet sat in the same room as the subject of the starship’s search through the house.

  The room was designed to be a study, with a large desk now pushed against one long wall and a sofa put against the other in contradiction to the bookshelves. The fast food was consumed by the occupant of the sofa who snored away softly in mental exhaustion.

  On the desk sat four different computer screens connected to two separate computer boxes tied into the data line. These sent their own glows of light across the sleeping figure who had placed the empty carton of fast food neatly on a side table.

  The same violet glow appeared in the room with the same subatomic scan as before.

  Indexing every molecule of the desktop surface where papers and notes were organized in precise piles the scan stopped. The man on the couch disappeared, leaving the space open for photons from the two screens to impact harmlessly where he had been lying.

  This time a replacement was not left behind, and the starship l
eft no trace as it again accelerated into the sky, this time arcing north and west, breaking the sound barrier only when it was over the ocean and away from casual ears.

  The ocean-going cruise ship that was in hearing range of the sound did not notice anything over the sound of the party taking place on board.

  Instead of moving over the Indian Ocean, the starship went over land again by the lower ends of old Russia and up along the countryside towards Europe. Keeping to a steady course, the starship slowed to under the speed of sound around the outskirts of northern Italy near the city of Turin.

  A graceful arc brought it into city limits where it closed to hover over an apartment building near the more affluent commercial areas.

  The nighttime here had started some time back, long enough that the partying group in the penthouse were well on their way to unconsciousness. Whether natural sleep, a drunken or drugged sleep or any other kind of fugue there were only some people awake and them only because they had a nefarious purpose and had not indulged.

  One particular room had three supine figures on a bed with mustard yellow Egyptian cotton sheets. The luxurious surface of the bed was dented in with the middle-aged man underneath one of the women, the younger one.

  Stains on the sheets, which would bring profound swearing from the cleaning staff, provided evidence of the excesses to which these three had given action. The older of the two women, by far more beautiful and elegant than the younger, still wore her G-string, somehow having manipulated the attention of the man entirely over on to the younger female.

  She was just as unconscious from the sedative in the champagne as the other two, however, and as such as vulnerable as they were.

  With the three aware members of the party seconds away from opening the door to this room the violet light flared for the microsecond it took to enact its work.

  Again the subatomic scan, with particular note taken of the pooling liquid pressed into the sides of the older woman. She then disappeared as quickly as the two others had before her.

  The liquid did not move into the gap she left behind.

  Instead, it too held back for that fraction of a second. A new body appeared in the same pose and position on the bed with precisely the same characteristics of the woman who had been taken down to the smeared makeup and small spots of champagne and other organic compounds around her mouth.

  The only difference was that this body was also mindless, a complete vegetable.

  A fact lost on the three men who entered the room and proceed to use silenced revolvers to efficiently put three bullets each into the three unconscious people. When they eventually checked they would find conclusive proof that they had, in fact, killed all three of their targets since a brain scan would have been pointless after death anyway.

  The sphere was heading up and away before the first muffled phut, phut, phut of a silenced revolver went off.

  South then West over the Mediterranean Sea the sphere climbed and hit Mach ten before Greece.

  Smoothly it flew across the roiling water and waves before exiting north over the leg of Spain, over the gulf and into the skies of England. Slowing at high altitude, the starship bled off speed and timed the echoing bang from the sound barrier to match the perpetual traffic at Heathrow airport.

  Sidling over the city of London it came to a stop over an unremarkable portion of South Harrow. Underneath the main road bridge slept eight street bums, all wrapped in their own dirty clothes and whatever they could use as a blanket.

  Although not fast asleep in each case, due to keeping a wary eye out at all times, the cold was enough to have them huddled down with eyes tightly shut. So none of the other seven saw anything when a violet light speared down from above and removed the eighth man.

  This time there was another replacement, the body left behind was already well into death from Hypothermia. When the agents keeping an eye on this particular bum did their weekly check-in, they would find the corpse and log it as having died from exposure.

  So again there would be no one to wonder as to where this particular abductee had gone. The other bums would be quite happy to share out his treasure trove of clothing and decent shoes.

  The starship leaped out of London ahead of the incoming rain, south over the large island it then made its first turn east before hanging an angle southwards once more over northern Africa. There the sonic boom as it went supersonic beat across the open lands where the general population was so used to United Nations relief aircraft they did not even bother to look up.

  Over the jungles of the Congo, the starship startled animals from their rest in what was now early morning for them although still pitch black outside.

  It was not odd for the animals to be startled, so the military encampment protecting the supplies and refugee workers took nothing untoward from the sudden noise. Inside a group of prefabricated structures setup as barracks, there was a room with two bunk beds and one occupant.

  The other occupant was on shift, and she was currently moaning about the empty coffee pot and having to brew a new one. The sleeping person was also female and slept the kind of sleep which only those in the military learned to acquire.

  The purple light flared again, leaving the sparse room empty of anyone and without a few clothes and a sturdy rucksack. A body was not left behind, only emptiness and a record of her access card being used to exit the building and the surrounding encampment within five minutes of her disappearance.

  With the sun chasing the journey of the starship still a few hours away from where it was now the sphere lifted itself silently up into the night sky.

  Without any engine sound, nor the sound of jets or rockets to propel itself free of the Earth’s gravity. Straight up into the clouds then the higher atmosphere it went, slowly, no sonic boom or other evidence at a high altitude of where it went.

  Nothing for satellites or anyone else who was particularly observant to see or hear.

  Considering the science required to achieve this compared with Humanity’s current technological level the fact that the sphere could get off Earth and out atmosphere so leisurely spoke volumes about its advanced technologies.

  Even considering the abduction process and the technology behind that.

  Once in a high orbit, the starship hesitated for just a moment before accelerating hard away from the moon and upwards of the ecliptic. It hit forty gees in less than four seconds and continued into a steady fifty five gee per minute acceleration after that.

  Fifteen minutes into this the starship was outside of any large gravitational forces, just in case anyone on Earth was somehow monitoring the kind of fluxes that would show up when it did what it did next.

  Space at a particular point was speared with forces strong enough to tear a planet into insignificant component parts. The continuum bent, twisted and came apart under the inexorable force exerted by the starship and opened into another frame of relativity.

  With only a brief surge of violet light it disappeared into the wormhole it had created and shot away faster than the speed of light.

  Connor sat up so suddenly his big body stretched the silver singlesuit he was wearing across bulky muscles. He paused like that, gray eyes blinking a few times as if he couldn’t believe what was happening.

  The singlesuit fabric reformed itself, as if it had a mind of its own without him noticing.

  Red hair fell around his ears and across the back of his neck as he looked down at his legs and then at his hands, which he lifted up to examine. He wiggled his toes, and an ecstatic grin spread across his big-boned, handsome face before quickly fading away.

  “Am I dreaming?” he asked himself.

  Connor checked his body, more thoroughly than one would expect.

  He pinched himself through the second skin of the silver singlesuit, on the slightly blue-grey sides that ran under his arms and alongside his chest. The small pinches brought pain, so he wasn’t dreaming—unless it was a very realistic dream caused by more drugs.
<
br />   Would they have given him more morphine?

  That would mean his paralysis had gotten a lot worse. The room he was in didn’t help much to make him think it wasn’t a dream either: all four walls, ceiling, and floor were metal, and there were big, secure doors on opposite sides.

  He twisted to get his legs off the cot he was lying on, which was just like any other camping cot. There were four other cots precisely the same as his, but each held a different person. Two were men, and two were very obviously women, their singlesuits clinging to them just as tightly as Connor’s did to him.

  There was some sort of padding over his shoulders and supporting his chest, thighs, ankles, and wrists. Connor would have expected this kind of outfit to be used in extreme sports or perhaps ocean diving.

  It took a groan from one of the other four occupants of the room to bring Connor back to his immediate surroundings. One of the other people was stirring, one of the women, African American or full-on African judging by the dark-skinned head, full lips, and tangled brush of short-cropped black hair on her head.

  “Careful now there, missy.” Connor tentatively held both hands up, halfway from his waist so that he wasn’t threatening.

  Hell, is this a dream after all? Skintight suits, five people in a metal-walled room with two doors… What is this?

  The woman turned to look at him when he spoke, she was a little slow, dazed, but her eyes were quickly coming to an alert state. A disciplined mind was behind that face. Connor was pierced by her gaze when it locked onto him as the only other upright person in the room.

  With a competent grace, she shifted her legs under herself at the edge of the cot, ready to move in any direction at a moment’s notice.

  “What is going on?”

  Connor tilted his head to the side. Her accent was strange, not American at all, so she was most likely an African woman.