 
### My Internet Nightmare

Copyright 2015 by J.J. Mainor

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are 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.
Table of Contents

My Internet Nightmare

Author's Notes

Preview: USS Krakowski

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Preview: Are There Heroes In Hell?

Chapter H-1

Chapter H-2

Chapter H-3

Chapter H-4

Preview: Prisoners of Utopia

Chapter P-1

Chapter P-2

Chapter P-3

Chapter P-4

Chapter P-5

Also By J.J. Mainor

As I hit reply and let my comment slip into the ether of my favorite internet message board, I took great satisfaction. I had been coming to my favorite message board for over a year under a variety of names and personas. As my own mood and personality changed, so too did my online presence.

There were always those who disagreed with me. Some ran crying to the moderators when a differing opinion hurt their feelings. Others flamed me openly when my superior arguments trashed their own, infantile ramblings.

Then there was the one moderator abusing his power and stalking me about the message board. Whenever he was online, he always searched for my profile. Jealous of my following on "his" board, he sought to undermine it. Frequently my posts would disappear for no reason. My threads were locked. In the worst cases, he would ban my username and force me to create another.

This mod had a following of his own: a group of like-minded members always instigating flame wars. When their enemies flamed back, the mod had his excuse to ban them. No doubt the whole group congratulated each other through the personal messaging system.

Tonight, I gave them no reason to ban me. My latest post was polite, professional, rational, and all around brilliant. Not one of the unapproved swear words appeared, and I even avoided naming the mod or any of his "crew" by name. I was sure he had no recourse but to sit at his computer and stew, while I waited for the follow-up posts agreeing with me.

Soon another posting grabbed my attention. A reply formed in my mind, but when I hit the reply button, I was sent not to the reply screen, but to the familiar message telling me I was banned!

I admit I was fuming. After all, I did nothing wrong. It was that stuck up moderator with his head up his behind who was only out to get me. Registering a new screen name, my first impulse was to send off an angry message accusing him of abusing his power. What could he do? Ban me again? I could always create another username and come back.

I could have sent him a private message telling him what a power-hungry Nazi he was and that he would regret this latest banning. Instead I decided I'd rather take the moral high road and ignore him. I searched for the register button when I felt a chill beneath my skin. I looked for the thermostat to see if I had neglected to properly adjust it for my comfort, however it registered the same temperature it always did.

"Had I been sitting still too long?" Sometimes I would have to set the thermostat to a higher temperature if I had been sitting too long, but I didn't think I had.

While I pondered the heat or lack thereof, there was suddenly a scratching on my window. I admit I was startled enough to jump from my seat, even though it turned out to be nothing more than a tree branch brushing against my window.

Before I could take relief from that discovery, the room went dark! It was only a light bulb burning out, but I was convinced the stars had aligned to tell me something...or maybe they were conspiring to stop my new registration.

The moderator certainly didn't have the power to reach out across the internet and chill my room, brush a tree limb across my window, or cause my light bulb to burn out. My mind was merely getting the best of me. Outside of a few meaningless mod duties, he had no real power over me. Nothing he could do could ever truly hurt me.

With my new resolve, I returned to my computer. My finger gravitated toward the left mouse button, as I slipped the pointer over the register button on my screen. With a gentle motion, I started the registration process anew.

I knew something wasn't right when the button didn't take me to the familiar screen with the fields asking for an email address, a screen name, and a password. No, this screen was far different.

My eyes scanned across the rows of text dominating my screen, drawing to one line printed in a bold typeface, standing out above all others.

"You're IP has been banned."

This evil mod had torn my very soul in two. The ten minutes it might take to search for instructions on changing my IP and implementing them would surely seem like an eternity. I fell from my chair and onto my knees. Raising my hands skyward, I screamed. That evil moderator had finally broken me.

Author's Notes

If you've read this far, then I hope you are a fan of flash fiction. I can imagine how annoying it is to pick up a story hoping for something it's not. I tried to let you know how short the story was. The word count is usually plastered on the retailer's site where you picked up this copy, but admittedly it can get lost in the other information on the page, and all these extras we authors love to add tend to inflate that word count. I also know how easy it is to click that "buy" button before you realize you're not on the page, looking at the book you thought you were.

I must admit to enjoying short stories myself as a reader. With the weather growing warming, I enjoy spending evenings outside reading other indie books. As much I enjoy immersing myself in a wonderfully crafted universe, sometimes I just want to sit down with a story I can finish in one sitting.

Whether you found this silly little piece to be exactly what you hoped for, or you were disappointed after picking it up by accident, I would encourage you to leave a review with the retailer supplying this copy. And if you wish to check out some of my other work, then keep reading for a few free previews.

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Preview: USS Krakowski

1

It came from behind Neptune: a ship. Large. Dark. Alien. Slipping between the tiny inner moons. Uncertain and uninterested until it settled on a brief orbit around Proteus; a larger, irregular, and rocky body. Its interest short-lived, the ship moved on to the outer moons.

On the icy surface of Triton sat a sprawling complex known as the Madrazo Station. Part research base, part supply depot, its main mission was the harvesting and processing of the ice. The methane and water were themselves vital, but so were the hydrogen and oxygen extracted. Anyone heading to the Kuiper Belt needed the resources, as did the supply ships the station depended on.

The most recent supply ship, the USS _Montefering_ had left orbit almost twelve hours ago. Dr. Mariposa Harkins, director of the station, had just checked on the new arrivals, and was on her way to the storage pod to see how the inventory was going.

As usual, there were discrepancies with the manifest. Since the supply ships belonged to the military, the _Montefering_ wouldn't wait around for them to sort it out. And since there was no accountability for the resources anyway, all Harkins was worried about was what they did get and how much rationing, if any, would have to be done before the next supply run.

Drs. Evelyn Arndt and Hector Cabino were checking the food crates. The spare parts and nonedible supplies had already been checked and sent to their proper departments. They were easy to inventory. But the hundreds of food crates had to be opened and verified by hand. Though the crates were barcoded for easy identification, the barcodes matched the goods inside about as accurately as the manifest matched the shipment.

Cabino opened a crate and examined the meal pouches inside. "More dried carrot chips." He made the notation in the database opened on his Personal Control Tablet. Arndt stole a glance at the totals on her own PCT.

"Good, we now have enough of those to supply all the Jupiter stations."

Dr. Harkins' lack of surprise at the development signaled the frequency of the problem. Last month, more than half the food shipment contained dried cabbage. The month before, they received cherry jubilee. Just once the crews wished the mistakes would bring them excess Salisbury steak or chicken teriyaki.

It was widely known, but never admitted that the military would switch out some of their least favorite rations from their own stores during the supply runs; but in the spirit of accountability, the ships' crews placed the blame on the commissary.

Supply orders were typically picked by underpaid and undereducated functionaries, whose main concern was taking their break period. It was no secret they would fill orders with whatever was closest rather than take the time to search and walk the expansive warehouse. While it was bad enough the drones took no pride in their jobs, there were supervisors who were supposed to oversee the crews and verify the accuracy of the shipments. As long as it was acceptable to blame their crews and deflect responsibility, they would put even less effort into doing their jobs than their underlings.

It did no good to file complaints. The problem had been going on since the first stations were established, yet every time the station directors contacted the managers on Earth, those managers always acted like they had no idea of the problem. There had been instances of near starvation, and more than one accident had turned deadly over the years because either spare parts or needed medical equipment never made it onto the ships. Blame always managed to return to the leadership of those stations, meaning there would never be accountability Earthside.

Dr. Harkins took up her PCT and called up the inventory. Besides the carrots, another notation grabbed her attention. "At least this time this time they sent us the red water flavoring. I was getting tired of the purple."

Dr. Arndt set aside the crate she had just inventoried, and opened the next one. "Now if they could create a flavoring that tasted like something." She examined the pouches inside. "Looks like we get pizza for one night."

Cabino noted it in a message on his PCT and sent it out. Arndt smirked when it arrived on her unit.

Harkins glanced it over and deleted it. "Thanks for saving me the trouble of making the crew's day." Another message immediately flashed on her PCT. "Did we make another discovery already?" She opened the message and found it was not another gag.

"What is it," Cabino asked.

"Probably nothing. I'll let you two get back to work." Dr. Harkins left the storage pod. On her way to the control pod, she scanned through data streaming in on her PCT. One of the satellites in orbit detected movement close to their moon. While it normally detected movement from the smaller rocks littering the Neptunian system, this object had to be unusually large to trigger an alert.

Dr. Weiling Sun, the station's meteorologist, sat in the control pod pouring through the data from the satellite. Harkins took a seat at the station beside her. She set her PCT flat on the work surface triggering a virtual screen from the device. Then expanding it to three screens, she called up the incoming data on one, the video from the on board camera on the second, while leaving the third for shared work.

"Any idea what it is?" Unfortunately the object remained hidden in the shadows of the moon so the camera only registered a dark mass within the darkness. But the satellite's other systems recorded plenty of data for the two scientists to analyze.

Dr. Sun highlighted the object's path and kicked it to Harkins. "It has to be a ship. It made an unnatural course correction before entering orbit."

They both knew it was not American. The USS _Montefering_ was the only American ship in this region of the solar system, and it was twelve hours closer to Earth. Harkins called up the Universal Positioning Data in her third window. By treaty, all nations were required to fix positioning beacons on any space vessels in operation. And while it could take anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours for an updated signal to reach Neptune depending on where in the system a ship was, any signal of consequence would only be an hour or two old at most.

But no signals registered near the station. Sun worked to reposition a couple other satellites. A second one orbited behind the first. If she could alter its orbit as it came around the moon, she might be able to silhouette the object against Neptune. Another satellite orbiting the main planet, was about to emerge from behind the gas giant, giving them a distant view. The cameras would have to be rotated toward the moon, but with any luck, it might have access to light the other two satellites lacked.

In the meantime, Dr. Harkins accessed the station's communications system. "This is Madrazo Station to unknown vessel: please identify yourself." Her message was met with silence.

Dr. Sun brought up the video from the second satellite. "Another minute before it's in position."

"I repeat, this is Madrazo Station to unknown vessel: please identify yourself." Her message once again earned no response. Harkins studied the raw data for any sign the ship received the message. A few readings grabbed her attention. She highlighted the pertinent data and kicked it to Sun. "Am I seeing this correctly?"

Dr. Sun looked through the readings. The satellite recorded extremely low temperatures from the ship, far too cold for human habitation.

"It's possible," Sun observed, "the crew is suited up. They might have life support turned off to confuse detection."

"And if that thing is alien, they might not require the same environment we do."

The second satellite finally captured the ship. As hoped the backdrop of the planet gave them a shape to work with. Dr. Sun ran the calculations to determine its size, while Dr. Harkins pulled up a database of known Earth ships for comparison. There was no match. Still it might have been someone's top secret, experimental design. Dr. Sun found the ship to be rather large, several decks at least, though still maybe half the size of those in the U.S. fleet.

Dr. Harkins repositioned the communications antennae to target the inner solar system. It would be more than an hour before the _Montefering_ would receive any message she sent, and another three after that before it reached Earth. With another ten minutes or so before the third satellite would be in position, she couldn't wait any longer to inform Home Command.
2

The USS _Dominic T Montefering_ was named for the 68th President of the United States. The last President to lose his reelection bid, Montefering was remembered for his botched response to Russian aggression in the Arctic, nearly a generation ago. The territorial disputes had raged for nearly two centuries, but Montefering's disinterest in foreign matters created a vacuum of sorts that allowed the Russians to seize control of the entire Artic sea floor. A furious Canada retaliated against his indifference by cancelling precious oil contracts at a time when available reserves were about to dry up worldwide. Though alternatives had long ago steered much of the world away from fossil fuels and dragged out Peak Oil, a handful of key industries still relied on the crude. The reserves existing in the more extreme parts of the globe such as beneath the arctic sea floor were so valuable, the arctic nations were ready to go to war over territorial rights. And that war occupied most of the 69th President's eight years in office.

When the Air Force commissioned the USS _Montefering_ , there were those who lobbied against the name. The practice was to name the ships of the Space Fleet after recent former presidents and number 68 was the next in line. Even congressmen from his own party were afraid to argue in favor of the honor, but the Air Force was afraid if they made the exception this time, it would set an example that could turn the next commissioning into a partisan battle.

Still time had not softened public opinion of the former President, and the USS _Montefering_ became a bit of an embarrassment to serve on. Over time it earned the least favorable missions, and became the station for the least desirables in the military: the inexperienced, the disgraced, and the burnouts.

The ship's commander, Colonel Rey Cardoza, had just received his command a couple months ago. For him, this was not a punishment, but a stepping stone until another ship became available, but he treated the ship and crew as if they were the flagship of the fleet. Despite the lack of prestige, the assignment was fairly easy while the country was in peacetime. If conflict erupted, they would remain in orbit around Earth supporting any ground operation. During peace, their only task was to ferry supplies and personnel to the various civilian outposts in the system.

As easy as they had it, Cardoza and his crew looked forward to getting back to Earth. In just over twenty hours, they would make orbit. After unloading the cargo and personnel they were returning from the Madrazo Station, the ship was scheduled for three weeks of maintenance, during which time the crew would receive some much needed shore leave.

Cardoza himself looked forward to seeing his wife. With more than twenty years of service, and the kids grown and out of the house, the long deployments had become routine. Yet the reunions were no less joyous than they had been during those first years. He knew many among his crew were in their first years of service, anxious to get back to their parents and spouses and children.

An alert on his PCT brought his mind back to the job. Communications had recorded a message.

"This is Madrazo Station," it began in Dr. Harkins' voice. "Time is zero eight seventeen zulu. We have an unidentified ship in orbit around Triton; and we have been unable to establish communication. Will follow with more details as they become available. Out."

From his PCT, Cardoza issued the orders to his crew to reverse course and return to Triton. With communications taking several hours to cross the expanse of the system, orders were often slow to come from Earth. It meant, the Colonels commanding the ships in the space fleet often had to make command decisions without the input from the Generals they would have had on an Earth based assignment. Nor did Cardoza have the luxury of passing the alert onto another commander because of their maintenance needs. As he brought up the communications system to inform Earth of their change in course, he knew his crew would have to accept the delay of shore leave.

Another message came in. "This is Madrazo Station. Time is zero eight twenty-one zulu. Unidentified ship has broken orbit and appears to be heading into the solar system. Unable to track at this time. I am sending all data we have on this ship. Out."

The Colonel sent out orders to his officers. Sensors would have to be directed toward Neptune to try and locate the target, while the data from Triton needed to be analyzed.

The Personal Control Tablets meant command could be decentralized from the bridge. Officers could spend their time directly with their flights or units within their departments, while commands could be issued and information shared through the devices. Their portability meant the ship's commander could lead while touring his ship, or breaking for a meal, or even visiting the head.

Cardoza called up the duty roster looking for the next officer in rotation for an off-ship mission. It was too early to say that mission was needed, but a team had to be assembled and ready to fly if so. That mission would belong a Lieutenant Jace Modeen.

Like many of the crew, Lt Modeen came with the ship. Cardoza knew he had survived a court martial, but because a condition of the plea deal kept the records on the case sealed, Cardoza had no idea what the charges were. All he knew was Modeen had been demoted to first lieutenant, killing any hopes for promotion in the future. Whatever happened, it could not have been severe enough to force retirement.

From what he had seen, Lt. Modeen was as dedicated as anyone he ever served with. Never heard him complain about his assignment on the _Montefering_ , never heard him complain about command assignments on missions, never even complained about orders. Every "yes sir" came from his mouth with the enthusiasm of a first day recruit. Modeen came across as the kind of guy that was here for the service, and not the rank or pay.
3

Lt Modeen was found in the ship's gym with some of the marines. Though the ship had artificial gravity, it was not maintained at 1g. Officially the purpose was to acclimate the relief personnel to the lower gravity environments on whatever research station they were destined for, though everyone in the service knew the real reason was to save power. Regardless of the reason, it meant the troops had to spend extra time keeping their muscles from wasting away.

The marines secretly loved the lower gravity gym. In the bars back on Earth, they could impress the women with claims of a four or five hundred pound bench press. But Modeen just wanted to make sure his legs would still work when he got back to Earth.

The marines halted their lifts. Modeen couldn't yet feel it, but they sensed something was off about the ship. The marines were largely inactive while the ship was in transit. Officially they were stationed on the ships in the unlikely event of a conflict situation on one of the extraterrestrial bases. Unofficially, they were the workhorses loading and unloading supplies and equipment at each stop. The rest of the time, accounting for about 75% of their mission, all they could do was train within the confines of the tight ship. Life was largely dull, and without much else to worry about, they became rather in tune with the sounds and movements of the ship. They could tell the ship was undergoing a rather large course correction.

Finally noticing it himself, Lt Modeen stopped his workout and reached for his PCT before realizing he had left it in his cabin. Though he was off duty, regulations required he keep it with him at all times. He didn't anticipate an emergency while they were in transit.

The marines had their PCTs, but received little information on the situation. Either they weren't needed, or they didn't have clearance for that information. Modeen approached the one who seemed to be the leader of the group.

"Excuse me, I'm Lt Modeen."

The head marine sneered at him. "Do you want me to salute?"

The others smirked. Modeen took it in stride. He understood had he been younger, he might have been ignorant of protocol in this situation, one in which a salute was not warranted.

"No, I want to borrow your control tab."

The marines laughed again. "And where's yours, Lieutenant?"

Modeen shrugged his shoulders and headed for the hatch. "If you don't want to know what's going on, I'll go find it."

"Wait!" Their leader chased after him and handed over his PCT. Modeen thanked him, brought up the login screen and scanned his fingerprint, giving him more access than the marines had. He scanned through pages and pages of unsorted data to find the reason for the course correction.

"We're going back to Neptune."

The smirks and giggles from the marines turned to shouts of shock and disappointment as the realization of cancelled shore leave struck them.

"Why are we going back," one of them complained.

Modeen found the message from Madrazo Station. "There's an unidentified ship in the region."

At that moment, the hatch opened, and Colonel Cardoza entered the gym. "Lt Modeen, I need you back on duty."

"Yes, sir," Modeen snapped back. "Is this about the unidentified ship?"

Cardoza noted the PCT in his hands, already streaming the data. "It left Triton at zero eight twenty-one zulu. We're trying to locate it now, so we can intercept it. I need you to put together a team and have it ready and waiting in a transport shuttle by fourteen hundred zulu. If we cannot establish communications once we intercept, your team will launch and board that ship to determine its origin and make a threat assessment. Madrazo Station collected data for about twenty minutes. It's not much, but you will need it."

"Understood, sir." After Cardoza left, Modeen returned the PCT to his new friend. "How would you boys like a mission?"

"That's what we're here for. I'm Master Sergeant Dimon Barcus." A Master Sergeant! He ranked too high to lead a single team of marines on an off-ship mission, but the man seemed willing enough. They were so used to remaining cooped up in that ship, he was willing to take on the role of one of his corporals just to see some action. As they shook hands, Modeen counted heads, wondering how many with Barcus were also higher ranking Non Commissioned Officers.

"I'll need a full unit," Modeen asked. "Can you get me a few more heads?"

"Consider it done."

"We'll brief on the flight deck at ten thirty zulu."

The Lieutenant retrieved his own PCT from his quarters and searched for his pilot, probably the easiest choice he had to make.

Captain Corey Deckard was his best friend, and a ladies man. While the marines impressed with their strength and toughness, Deckard was the guy who flew a space ship. It helped Modeen in the bars being the friend of the guy who flew space ships, but he also appreciated Deckard's loyalty.

Deckard had been the only person who stood up for Modeen during the court martial. Being one of the few people who knew the truth behind the incident, he wasn't willing to let his friend take the fall, even though in the end it only helped his own quiet reassignment to the _Montefering_.

It would be a ballsy move to poach the Captain for his mission. Deckard's experience placed him on ship operations. He hadn't been in rotation for shuttle duty since making captain.

"The Colonel will not go for this," Deckard warned. The Captain was the only person on the bridge when Modeen found him, giving them freedom to speak.

"He doesn't have a choice. If I get a go for this mission, that ship will not be stationary. None of those lieutenants on rotation have experience docking with another ship at these speeds. I'm not asking because I want you, I need you."

Deckard had to admit, he missed the excitement of flying the smaller shuttles. The larger ships had their thrill, but they were not meant for quick maneuvers. Yet the shuttle was not meant for the same high speeds the _Montefering_ could reach. His friend would need someone experienced to pilot.

"On one condition," Deckard demanded. "Tech Sergeant Tremaine Geary joins the team."

TSgt Geary had the highest rating on the ship when it came to general maintenance. With a high probability something could go wrong, Deckard wanted the best person on that shuttle conducting any repairs. The added benefit for Modeen was that Geary could assemble a suitable technical team better than he could.

Lt Modeen found Geary in the engine room training his airmen. What he liked about the Sergeant was that this guy was career like him. Geary's father had served on the front lines during the Arctic Wars. Despite having grown up hearing the horror stories from his father, Geary chose to enlist himself. Modeen wasn't sure he would have chosen this life with those experiences in his own family history.

He pulled the Sergeant away from his class. "I have orders," he told him, "to assemble a boarding party in case the Colonel can't make contact with that mystery ship. I need Captain Deckard to pilot the shuttle, but he won't do it unless you're on the team."

"You can count on me."

Modeen took up his PCT and authorized the data for Geary's eyes.

"I'm giving you access to the data we have on this ship. I need you to pour through it and select a team with the skills you think we might need once we're aboard. The Colonel wants us ready to fly at fourteen hundred zulu, and our first briefing will be in the landing bay at ten thirty zulu."

Geary ended his training, dismissed his staff, and buried himself in the trove of information Modeen just handed over. He would have to consider every probability when choosing a team, from needing to open doors to the ability to communicate with an alien entity. His enthusiasm, like Barcus' pleased Modeen; and with his senior staff quickly in place, and the selection process delegated to them, the Lieutenant retired to the landing bay to study the data himself.
4

As it neared 10:30, Modeen noted the individuals trickling into the landing bay, distinguishing those coming for his briefing from those there as part of their regular duty assignment, by the almost lost, disoriented looks on their faces as they scanned the room for others in the same lost situation. Though they spied the lieutenant and properly identified him as the leader of this meeting, they congregated in small groups about as far away from the officer as they could get in that compartment. Officers generally didn't fraternize with the enlisted. And the enlisted men always feared a close interaction would result in an unwanted task or a reprimand for an improper salute. The two castes became so adept at avoiding each other, their skill was on full display in front of him.

Segmenting themselves further, the Marines and Air Force personnel migrated into their own separate circles. Though there was a mutual respect between the two services, it was no secret the Marines saw the Air Force as soft while the Air Force saw the Marines as arrogant. Even within their separate circles, Modeen could identify the corporals from the lance corporals and the airmen from the airman first class without seeing their insignia, just by who stood near who within those circles.

The situation became more interesting when Barcus and Geary arrived to lead their two teams. The men stood up straight at full attention, hands came out of pockets, and gum was quickly swallowed. Barcus appeared to be crueler to his men than Geary to his during the dress down, perhaps showing off to his Air Force counterpart the increased discipline expected among his men.

At 10:29 Deckard came hurriedly into the landing bay, receiving salutes from the enlisted and answering with a half-assed salute of his own. He knew the show of respect was important in order to maintain the respect in the chain of command, but as a pilot his role as a leader was limited. Maybe he would lead the handful of other pilots, none of whom ranked lower than his friend Modeen, and on occasion he would have command of the _Montefering_ during some rather boring hours of transport, but for the most part, he felt more like a peon along with the enlisted men, always feeling uncomfortable being saluted for no other reason than his flight training.

"I see I'm early," Deckard joked.

"I'm surprised the Colonel let you come down here at all. He wasn't happy when I told him I needed one of his flight officers for this mission. Does he know who's replacing you on the bridge?"

"I didn't tell him." Deckard smirked at the big secret unleased on their unsuspecting CO. "I took Lieutenant Farkas out of the shuttle rotation and sent him to the bridge." The danger in granting blanket authority in choosing a team, as the Colonel had done for this mission, is the surprise when the best help is selected from under your command. But Cardoza must have known if the mission would be needed, then those people were important to its success.

The last minute ticked away, and the two team leaders brought their teams: thirteen marines and ten techs including the leaders themselves. It was the first chance Modeen had to inspect the men and women who would be accompanying him, including an assessment of the various ranks to serve beneath him. It was interesting to see these two, like himself, went for a seasoned group: only the token private first class and airman to babysit.

"I am Lieutenant Modeen," he began. "And although Captain Deckard is technically the ranking officer here, I am the commanding officer on this mission." Modeen proceeded with the briefing, sharing all the information they had on the ship along with the messages from Madrazo Station. Then in tandem with the Captain, he laid out the plan to board their ship. It would be dangerous, but no one signed up for military service for a safe career. Everyone here was a professional. As he droned on with instructions and details, Modeen took note of the attentiveness on each face, either toward him, or toward their control tabs as they took what were no doubt copious notes on the mission.

When he was finished, the teams were dismissed to collect whatever equipment and supplies they would need, and to prepare themselves or their departments for their absence. 1300z rolled around rather quickly, and in another hour, they would prepare to launch. In the meantime, the teams were underway loading and stowing their gear and equipment onto the shuttle. Barcus and his men took charge of the food and water, while Geary's team secured their tools and equipment.

In the passenger compartment, a Lance Corporal Oswell strapped a jug of water beneath one of the seats as a Corporal Rystad joined him with a bag of MREs.

"What's on the menu," the Lance Corporal asked him.

Rystad tossed the bag into the compartment. "Salisbury steak."

"Whooee! Those boys sure know how to treat us!"

Deckard stood nearby, auditing their supplies on his PCT. "Now I can check off 'five star dinner.'"

Lt Modeen stepped into the compartment for a brief inspection. "How goes the preparations?"

Deckard threw his arm around his friend's shoulders. "On schedule, Major."

The incorrect address caught everyone off guard. One of the techs, an Airman First Class Naylor leaned in to her two nearby teammates. "Why did he just call the Lieutenant, Major?"

"I heard he used to be one," answered a Senior Airman Bruckenthal. Naylor cast a worried glance to the officer.

Their third, Senior Airman Gorra admonished the other two. "And he is still our CO on this mission. Unless you want to get someone killed, you will forget those thoughts."

Modeen followed Deckard into the cockpit. His friend often called him Major in informal settings. It was part nickname and part respect for his former rank. He never meant any disrespect, but sometimes in situations like this, it dragged up the past at times when it needed to be forgotten the most.

"Shuttle is almost secured," Deckard continued. "While the crew suits up, I'll conduct the preflight check. We'll be ready to launch at 1400."

"With any luck, we won't have to."

"Did the Colonel give you any problem," Deckard asked. Modeen had just returned from briefing Cardoza on their plan, and it was the first the Colonel had learned who would be replacing Deckard on the bridge.

"He wasn't happy trusting Lieutenant Farkas with his ship, but the kid has to learn the controls sometime if he's ever going to move up. Personally I'm glad you're with me instead of him. He doesn't have any experience docking with a moving ship."

"He'll get you all killed," Deckard chuckled. What a comfort he would have been in a true command situation.

The _Montefering_ 's flight controls were left to the senior pilots for a reason. It might seem easy to fly the larger ships when all they did was go from one point to another. They were never meant to land or even enter atmosphere: that job was left to the shuttles. Yet that simplicity in operations was what made their operation more difficult. The pilots couldn't afford to miscalculate orbital velocities or trajectories.

Additionally, inertial dampening technology never reached the effectiveness in science fiction. Acceleration and deceleration maneuvers as well as drastic changes in course had to be careful and calculated. For that reason, Modeen's mission had to be ready to go about an hour before the expected rendezvous at 1500z.

As the group finished up their preparations and took their places in the shuttle, Col Cardoza ordered Lt Farkas to begin deceleration. It would be ten minutes before he would let the Lieutenant begin to turn the ship around. Deckard's expertise would have allowed him to make the U-turn at full speed, but Farkas was like a teenager behind the wheel for the first time. Not only would he have to attempt the turn at a slower speed, but he would have to make a wider swing.

Another twenty minutes would pass before the ship matched course with the approaching vessel. Then Farkas would take ten more minutes accelerating again, but to a speed just slower than that of the mystery ship, allowing it to catch the _Montefering_ very slowly.

All the while, communications continued to broadcast a request for identification with no response. Cardoza finally gave Modeen the go on the mission.

Modeen's team had suited up in their EVA suits and buckled into their seats. Their radios were hot. Modeen checked that everyone and everything was secure before joining Deckard in the cockpit. The Captain already had the stream from the ship's rear cameras on his PCT. The mystery ship behind grew larger and larger in the frame, and the Captain was relieved to see the top of the ship was rather flat.

"At least our landing is going to be easy," he noted.

Deckard called up the shuttle's controls on his PCT. At his command, the bay doors were opened and the compartment vented to space. Deckard released the magnetic landing gear and lifted off from the flight deck. With short controlled bursts from the forward thrusters, he nudged the shuttle backwards toward the exit.

Modeen continued to examine the images coming from the cameras. Being so far from the sun and in the middle of the emptiness, little light reached the ship for accurate analysis. Still enough filtered through for some basic observations.

The Lieutenant thought he could pick out the bridge. As the ship crept closer, he spotted what could have been weapon cannons. Because they were not active, he wondered if the crew did not intend to attack, or if they were they merely waiting for a more opportune moment.

Deckard remained focused on piloting the shuttle. It's forward most surface passed the threshold of the shuttle bay.

" _Montefering_ , this is Deckard. We are clear."

The home ship fired its engines, increasing speed and pulling itself away from the shuttle. The shuttle shuddered in the larger ship's wake. Its crew in the cargo compartment, huddled nervously; several offering silent prayers for their safety.

In the cockpit, Modeen clutched his knees tightly.

"Relax Major," Deckard advised. "This was expected."

He activated the shuttle's exterior cameras and brought the feed up on his PCT. Modeen eyed the images, watching their target grow on the screen.

"If you can't do this..."

"I can do it," the Captain snapped. The turbulence diminished as the _Montefering_ pulled further and further ahead. Deckard stabilized the shuttle, but the disturbance slowed them more than he had wanted. He fired the shuttles thrusters hoping to minimize further loss of speed.

Modeen watched as the other ship began to pass beneath them. Deckard fired the briefest bursts from the maneuvering thrusters to ease them closer.

"Everyone hold on back there," he ordered over the radio.

He inched the shuttle ever closer to the ship's hull as it continued to overtake them. Its rear end was in sight on the camera feed.

"We're running out of ship," The Lieutenant warned.

Deckard turned off the engines and turn on the magnetics in the landing gear. As he inched ever closer, they grabbed for the hull and helped guide them until contact was made. The landing gear scraped along the hull as the shuttle's speed was brought into synch with that of the larger ship. The crew felt themselves yanked toward the rear as the magnetics secured their grip. The Captain checked the readings from his PCT to confirm their lock was secure.

With the go ahead, Barcus unstrapped himself and turned on the lights atop his helmet. He went to the rear hatch and vented the atmosphere. His fellow marines unstrapped themselves and put their lights on. Rystad and another marine grabbed some of the equipment from under the seats while the rest took up their rifles.

Barcus was the first onto the hull, scouting the area with a sensor akin to a stud finder. It wouldn't do to cut a hole only to find a wall dividing their opening. Once satisfied he had a target, Rystad began drilling a hole through the metal while his partner readied a spectrometer. On top of knowing the composition of the atmosphere inside, venting the compartment below would vacate any flammable gasses before they fired up the cutting torch.

Once the drill breached the room below, the force of the air rushing out drove the drill from Rystad's hands and into space. No matter, it served its purpose and they had their hole. The other marine uploaded the readings from his spectrometer while Rystad took up the plasma torch and began cutting through the hull.

In the cockpit, Modeen looked over the atmospheric analysis. As they expected, it was toxic inside the ship. But there was a significant amount of oxygen inside. Since the breathing apparatus on their suits could filter it out, the oxygen they carried could be saved.

Back outside, Rystad finished the entry point. He pushed on the freed metal sheet. Rather than dropping to the floor below, it floated downward.

"No artificial gravity," he noted. It looked as though their magnetic boots would be put to good use on this mission.

Barcus switched on the light at the end of his rifle and slid through the hole into a small room with bunks: crew quarters. As his men entered behind him, he searched for any sign of life, not that he expected to find any after venting their atmosphere from this compartment. He moved to the door, ready to open it.

"Everyone grab hold of something," he ordered. He threw open the door. The atmosphere outside the room rushed in and out through the hole to space. Once the pressure had equalized, the troops left into what looked to be a hallway. Like the room they just left he found no sign of life.

"Close it up," he called back to the last man out. Since they didn't want to vent the entire ship to space, this hallway would have to serve as their airlock for now.

The marines searched each of the rooms off this corridor. Each one turned out to be quarters, and each one turned out to be empty. When they reached the hatch at the end, Barcus held everyone up.

"Lieutenant Modeen, this is Sergeant Barcus. The beachhead is secure."
Preview: Are There Heroes In Hell?

Chapter H-1

We saw them darken the horizon, hundreds of those tiny dots stretching from one end of the sky to the other. The Canadian version of our own Unmanned Bombers. It didn't matter what model they used that day, they was CUBs to us and they brought death to our trenches no matter what model they was.

My job was to command one of the DB-60 cannons and blast those fuckers out of the sky before they got close enough to drop their payload. It was a job that should've gone to a corporal...or rightly, I should've been a corporal. But like most of us in the Infantry and Artillery, command didn't want to promote NCO's when they had too many shitbag lances like me, stupid enough to take the responsibility without the pay.

Guess I shouldn't complain too much. I was in the Arctic a month at that point, and survived two of these bombing runs already. You was considered lucky if you survived just one – damned near invincible if you survived your second, and here I was about to face my third.

They was all the same no matter how you looked at it. One side sent in their UBs to bomb the shit out of the other's position, while the troops on the ground did their damnedest to blast them out of the sky. Out there in the Arctic, you had no fortifications to hide in, just flat, open snowfields going on forever. Everyone dug trenches and did their best not to be obvious, but snow is not the best shield against bullets or bombs. If even one of those bombers made it through, you could pretty much kiss your ass goodbye.

Many wondered why we even sent men out to the ice with all the unmanned weapons at our disposal, but the truth was, we fought for territory. The only way to control territory was to man it, so some group of fools had to stick their necks out for the show.

Like I said, that was my third go with the Canucks, so I saw a lot of my buddies die in that one month. If it was any consolation, (and believe me, it wasn't), we climbed the ranks two or three times as fast as we would have before the War. I earned my first stripe after my first engagement, and the crossed rifles after the second, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Rest of my unit was in the same boat. As the triggerman, PFC Martinez should have been a lance, and the two ordinance handlers should have been at least PFCs, but they was rushed through Basic and assigned to me too soon. Most of the cannons didn't even have a four man team – commanders often had to pull double duty with the targeting and the trigger. As always, I was the lucky one.

The DBs fired off a fifty-millimeter shell, ten thousand feet into the atmosphere. If they was lucky enough to hit a target on the way up, the entire payload went off early. But if they made it all the way up, the shell broke away and each one dropped sixty tiny drone bombs into the sky. They rained down until their power supplies kicked in and the damned things hovered there until one of those bombers struck them, or the power ran out.

They filled the sky like the flak from those great wars a couple hundred years back. It was a beautiful sight, and once we had enough of them up there, it was near impossible to get those bombers through. Only defense against them was to send in more and more bombers with each run, hoping the first wave would clear the sky for the later waves. Sometimes it was cheaper to send unarmed decoys to sweep the sky, but most of the time they hoped the exploding bombers would send fear into those of us on the ground.

Our lieutenant gave the order to all the DBs under his command when the CUBs was close enough to make out their shapes. While the privates loaded the first shell, I adjusted the angle of the cannon. The three of us pulled away and Martinez sent it up. A cloud of smoke rushed out when the chamber opened to receive the next shell, and I once again changed the angle of the cannon. All-in-all, it took us four seconds between shots. A more experienced team could have the thing loaded and ready to fire in three, but again, I didn't have the most experienced privates under me.

One-by-one, down the line our cannons opened fire and it wasn't long before those tiny drones filled the sky as thick as the approaching bombers. They might have been small, and maybe they didn't carry a lot of explosives, but all they had to do was damage one of those things.

If those CUBs lost their receivers, the operator back home in his comfy, climate controlled office lost contact with the weapon. If it struck a wing, the impact was enough to tear it off and send the damned thing down to the ground before it reached us. If we was really lucky, our drone bombs struck the ordinance, and the secondary explosion from their own bombs would vaporize the thing in flight.

The carnage was spectacular, but we couldn't take the time to watch it. We had to keep our own ordinance flying, and the closer they got, the steeper the angle I had to make to stay ahead of them. In less than a minute my cannon went from forty-five to fifteen. After that, any bombers that got through was safe. All we could hope for was intercepting their bombs on the way down.

The first landed about four hundred yards to our left, ahead of our position, but the hundred yard crater it carved in the snow got the men on one of our cannons. Another took out a team only a couple hundred yards to our right.

The privates grew frazzled, but we was Marines. It was nothing we wasn't ready for, and we would stand our ground as long as we had breath left.

Behind our lines waited an Army battalion. Their job was to engage the ground forces that would move in once they knocked out our artillery. Most of the time we wouldn't need their help, and for the first few months of the war, the Marines didn't. But with the Russians to the west and the Canucks to the east, our forces was stretched thin. Figure in the casualties and we just couldn't do it ourselves anymore.

The Army stepped up to offer direct support, but most of the time their ranks was filled with the unwilling draftees. Most of them didn't want to be there and was too busy shitting their pants to open fire on the approaching Canucks. Only reason we couldn't hold the lines was because by the time they sent in those ground forces, all us Marines was already dead.

No doubt they were shitting their pants that day, watching our cannons fall to those bombs. If they was lucky, we might keep control of the skies and scare off the ground forces like my first two engagements. Maybe if we had more experience that day...

My two privates lost all control, hearing more of the DBs fall silent. They stumbled loading one shell, holding Martinez back a full second from launching it. The next round slipped from their hands and dropped to the snow.

"Get a grip, you two!" I shouted. I admit I wasn't much of a motivator that day. I didn't have the patience for their fear that a corporal might have had. I wasn't going to sit there and baby them in the middle of a campaign, make them feel special, and soothe their nerves.

As soon as they got that shell in the chamber, they jumped backwards without looking where they was going. The idiots crashed into me and knocked me face down in the snow. Before I could lift my head to yell at them, all sound vanished around me in a deafening boom of thunder. The normally balmy forty below temperature shot up above my back, and I thought for sure that was it. But one second passed, then another, and the cold quickly returned, and somehow I was still alive.

I lifted my head and rolled over to see where I was. The snow all around me melted and refroze. Somehow I was not incinerated, but when I looked out, I saw the crater dangerously close to my emplacement. The two privates was incinerated from the waist up, and Martinez hung on the cannon with shrapnel tearing through his face. The ground beneath the DB-60 broke and slipped into the hole. I crawled backwards as quickly as I could before I was swallowed up with my cannon.

After bitching at my privates, you can imagine how scared I was at that moment. As an 0895, I didn't have a rifle to defend myself with like the 03s. All I had was that DB-60 and it was now at the bottom of a crater with the rest of my team.

My ears rang mercilessly, but all I could think about was finding another team that could use my help. But it was all over. All around me the other teams fell to the Canuck bombs.

There was bodies everywhere. Some was cut to shreds, others to pieces. Arms and legs littered the field. I saw men lying there with nothing below the waist, and others with no heads. Many of those bodies was burned to a crisp and the smell of burning flesh was everywhere.

When the last cannon fell silent, I looked out across the snow and I saw them. The Canadian Army. Thousands of white-clad men swarming across the open snow like the CUBs in the sky.

The medics moved in to remove any survivors, as the Army commanders ordered their men to move forward and take up positions. Somebody grabbed my shoulder to take me back, but as we passed those soldiers, I caught a glimpse of one man, and the fear in his eyes. He held his rifle like he never touched a gun before. I swore his safety was still on, and thinking he was going to be wholly useless, I pulled away from the corpsman and ripped the rifle from that man's hand.

The surprise on his face was priceless, but I think he was relieved that I took his place. His lieutenant and his sergeant sure didn't notice, so I followed them and took his place in the trenches and craters ahead of our artillery line.

Those Canucks wasn't as helpless as they seemed, crossing those snow drifts without any sort of cover, for they had one more surprise for us. It shouldn't have been a surprise at all except we took our eyes from the skies the moment the bombs stopped falling. And it was still a surprise when their final wave of CUBs moved in to soften our ground forces.

More bombs rained down, freely, without anything to stop them. The trenches became an inferno of melted flesh. The heat was so intense, the frozen snow and ice didn't bother melting, it just turned right to steam. All we could do was hold our heads down and hope we was the lucky ones, just far enough away from a blast to come out of it on our feet.

Their sergeant put his back to the trench wall and looked over his men. He was black like me, but unafraid. His voice boomed so loudly to his men, all the bombs the Canucks threw at us could not drown it out.

"The Devil has come to claim our heroes, but we're gonna show him! We're gonna spit in his face and tell 'im we're stayin' right here! He's gonna have to drag us kicking and screaming, but he cannot take us to Hell, because we're not ready to go! You soldiers hang tough! Don't you let him take you because we still have a job to do!"

One of their bombs landed too close for my liking, but it didn't knock that sergeant off his feet. Sergeant Lewis, as I learned he was called, only stumbled, and it was when his head turned my way that he took notice.

"You're not one of mine, are you?"

"Uh, no sir," I answered by mistake. I thought he was the lieutenant trying to act tough until I saw the stripes.

"Don't call me 'sir.' I work for a living!" Then he gave me the once over before shrugging me off.

The bombs stopped falling and we raised our heads from the trench. It didn't look good for our side, and the Canucks was still a mile out. With all those craters, it almost looked like we was on the surface of the moon.

Lewis didn't give us time to feel sorry for ourselves. "The Canucks don't care how many buddies you lost!"

I put my rifle over the wall and rest it on top of the trench, taking a moment to admire it. The LR-17 was one top-of-the-line weapon! It could fire a thousand rounds a minute with accuracy to a mile, though with the cold we didn't trust it more than three quarters of that. Still it was better than anything we had in the Marines – they always gave the Army the best of everything!

The Canucks had a few interesting weapons of their own. Some of their men fired long-range water grenades at us. Normally you wouldn't think of water as a weapon until you find yourself in the frozen wasteland above the Arctic Circle. Those grenades exploded over our heads, creating a freezing rain. The temperatures so cold, the water was ice before it hit us. Since our parkas was already wet and freezing, the ice only encased us more, making it harder to move in those frozen clothes.

But all we needed was our fingers to fire our rifles.

Then the next round of grenades came at us, only these wasn't filled with water. It was liquid nitrogen!

"Duck and cover!" the Sergeant screamed.

And we pulled ourselves into balls and buried our faces in our arms to protect what little exposed flesh there was. Much of the nitrogen was still liquid when it dropped on our coats, freezing the fabric to brittleness. When we rose to take our positions once more, pieces of the parkas broke off and left us with holes, exposing sections of our bodies to the cold.

Still, we ignored it and opened fire.

Some of the draftees began to cry like little children. Others did their duty because it was better than dying. The Canucks was within a half mile, and Sergeant Lewis couldn't afford to break fire and baby them. As far as he was concerned at that point, it was on their conscience when it came time to tell their children and grandchildren how they spent the war cowering in a hole.

The third round of grenade fire was familiar and explosive. The platoon to our right, already decimated from the bombing, took the first grenade, cutting their numbers in half. Another landed in our little piece of paradise and my first instinct was to throw my body over it and take all of the blast. But before I could move, some brave private picked it up and took it to the edge of the trench. The rest of us ducked and covered again as he tried to throw it away, but it went off before it left his hand.

"Corpsman!" Lewis screamed, but there was none around.

The private screamed in pain, cradling the stump of arm where his wrist and hand used to be. Lewis opened his coat and ripped off his belt while he noticed the rest of us standing around and watching.

"Get up there and do your jobs," he screamed, pointing at the top of the trench, "before they kill us all!"

I brought up my rifle and opened fire again. Those Canadian bastards kept coming, right into our fire. They was crazy, especially for Canucks. Something was wrong about this and the men sensed it.

Lewis was too busy tightening his belt around that private's stumpy arm to ride his men. So when it looked like our trenches was about to be over run, most of the draftees dropped their rifles and raised their hands in surrender. I wanted to fight on to my dying breath as did a few of the proper enlistees, but without the support, we was simply outnumbered.

The Canucks realized it was over and held their fire as they reached our trenches. They stood at the tops of those walls with their rifles pointed down at us, just begging us to make a wrong move. Something in their eyes and their cold sneers told me they didn't want prisoners, but what honor they had left wouldn't allow for a massacre.

Miraculously, I survived my third battle in that tundra, but I came away a prisoner of war.
Chapter H-2

To say we should've never entered the Arctic Wars is wrong. It was the Russians that invaded us. It was Russian troops landing in Alaska, so what was we supposed to do? Just let them have one of our states and give up our claims to the Arctic seafloor? Of course not! We certainly didn't want America going down in history as a pushover in the last war over oil.

America never backed down from nothing. Sure we didn't always win and we earned a lot of bloody noses over time, but we didn't make our place in history by taking our ball and going home. We didn't hold onto our sovereignty by hiding behind our borders and keeping our people home.

No, we taught the world not to mess with us by playing the bully. But like most bullies, sometimes you're targeted by another bully as we was by Russia. Other times, your victim stands up and fights back like Canada did.

Our mistake in the wars was underestimating our neighbor's weakness. President Montefering thought we could parade into the northern territories and seize the Canadian coastline before Ottawa knew what was what. He thought if we took over their claims to the seabed, it would strengthen our position against the Russians.

He had no idea that our neighbor was already at war with the Russians. The Kremlin seized some stupid island in the Arctic Ocean as a launching pad to opening a second front in Alaska. The Canadians almost pushed them out, even took some prisoners, but mostly they sat back and waited. They thought the Russians was gonna to walk all over us. If they secured Alaska, they was sure to push eastward into the Yukon. Canada was secretly building up for that invasion; they wasn't preparing to fight us at all. But when Montefering sent the Marines in, Canada was prepared to defend itself anyway.

The Canadian campaign was a total disaster. The country turned against Montefering, but he wasn't ready to admit defeat. He doubled down our forces and chose to maintain a two front war rather than admit his mistake and grovel for Canada's forgiveness. But he needed more troops and he did something even more unthinkable. Montefering reinstated the draft after more than two hundred years!

It looked bad for him going into an election year. The draft proved so unpopular, it looked like he was going to lose his most reliable states to Avery. When absentee ballots failed to arrive at the front, rumors went up that he stopped them from going out. It was even suggested the draftees was selected from likely Avery voters to keep them away from the polls. Problem for the President was, finding a Montefering voter was like searching for a unicorn. No matter how many didn't get to vote, there was no way he was winning that election.

Unfortunately for us in the Arctic, it would be three more months before he left the White House. Montefering was desperate to salvage a legacy for himself. He was the first President to be voted out of office in a long time, and he didn't want to become a joke to history. He thought if he could do something drastic, something rash to win that war quickly, the future might be kind to him.

What we didn't know when they brought us to Prison Camp Hudson, was Montefering ordered bombers across the border. Two days before we was taken prisoner, we bombed Montreal.

None of that mattered to us though. We spent days marching across the snow and tundra. No telling how many since the sun hardly showed itself, but we must have been heading south since it felt like it actually got warmer and the thick snow gradually vanished.

The camp sat near a massive lake surrounded by nothing but open, empty space. Miles off in the distance we saw some low mountains ringed with the green of the evergreen fields, but that was too far away to worry about.

A wall of chain link surrounded the entire site with a row cutting through the middle, separating their half from ours. They pushed us into the prisoner section and lined us up in the central courtyard, wounded and healthy alike.

There was already a dozen other prisoners, Russians, working out in front of one of the barracks, and they stopped to watch us, curious. Was they studying us? Sizing us up and judging their odds of stealing our parkas and boots? If they was, they would have a fight on their hands. We outnumbered them almost four to one – only forty-two of us survived. Even if half of us was injured, half of those severely, we could still put up one hell of a fight if those Ruskies wanted to try anything.

The Canadian guards stood around us with their rifles held ready across their puffed-out chests, trying to look more intimidating than professional. And when they had us sufficiently intimidated, three individuals stepped out from the office and passed through the gate from their side to ours.

They took position beside their guards, and one took a couple steps forward to let us know he was the important one. The man was thin and gangly, especially for his age. We could see that through the thick parka. Not to say he was weak, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a strong wind knock him off his feet. French was his first language, but he spoke good English through his thick, French accent.

"I am Colonel Stahl Levesque," he told us. "I am the commander here. You are to be held under my authority in accordance with the Revised Geneva Accords, Amended 2164 until we determine if you are to be tried for crimes against the State.

"Make no illusion about your time here. This is not a country club as many of you expect. The road in and out of this camp will be inaccessible by the end of the month and we are unlikely to receive supplies until spring.

"You should also know with the war going on, priority has gone to the troops on the front. We get all the water we need from the lake, but food will be tightly rationed. There is nothing I can do about that, but the more you complain, the more I will cut your rations. You will find the more cooperative you are, the easier your stay will be.

"Once you are all settled in, Sergeant Fournier will collect your information and assess any special needs you may have."

Sergeant Luc Fournier was the man standing to his right. A short stocky, guy, he was one strong motherfucker. He seemed suited to this cold weather, but worse, he was suited for his real role as Chief Interrogator. His stare alone got information from the weakest of our troops, information that would have earned time for treason – if those men and women lived to face a tribunal.

A man of our own stepped forward from our ranks as if to challenge our captors.

"Sir, under Article 14 of the Revised Geneva Accords, Amended 2164, I hereby request immediate medical attention for some of the men and women under my command."

A flash of anger overcame the Colonel, but he forced it away. Then he took his careful steps toward this fool, standing face-to-face with him while he sized him up.

Our so-called commander swept the hood from his head to show off the pretty boy hidden beneath. He was tall with blond hair and blue eyes, and skin as pale as the snow. With his square jawline, he looked like he might have stepped from an underwear ad instead of a military formation. I looked across, expecting to find a yellow bar on his insignia patch. I was mildly surprised to see a silver one instead – only mildly surprised.

The Colonel cocked his head, unimpressed by his act of bravery.

"Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Corey Johnson of the United States Army."

Colonel Levesque cocked his head the other way, chewing it over. Johnson wasn't Lewis' LT, and he certainly wasn't mine, but as the only officer to have survived with us, the unfortunate burden of command (for what it was worth) fell on his shoulders.

At the time I wasn't impressed by the guy. He looked like one of those taken seriously only because of his height. That's not to say you couldn't trust tall men with command, but too often we saw men promoted into authority because of one physical characteristic or another, without any thought to ability.

Your platoon sergeant might have looked like he walked out of a recruiting poster, but when he walks the men into an obvious ambush, you realize he shouldn't have been lifted to corporal, let alone sergeant. If not for fuckers like that, we might have stood a chance in those parts in those first months. If NCOs and officers alike had been selected on combat ability instead of charisma and charm, the Canucks might have been knocked out of the war before I ever signed up.

When that hood came off and I saw another charming, pretty boy, I almost considered switching sides there and then. Thank the Lord I didn't or I would never find out how much honor that man truly had.

"Well, Lieutenant Corey Johnson of the United States Army," the Colonel finally answered, punctuating each and every one of his words, "it seems my country faces a huge humanitarian crisis because of your government. Unfortunately for you and your men, our medical supplies were needed elsewhere. I will have the camp doctor look over your men, but you should know there is not much he can do for them."

That should have been the second sign we was in trouble, the first being the absence of all English Canadians. We didn't realize it then, but the camp was manned entirely by French Canucks; the English was all transferred elsewhere. Levesque was French, Fournier was French, even Major Emrick Lavoie, the silent partner in that triumvirate was French.

Then again, we didn't know there was an entire French Canadian city lying in ruin with millions of civilians still pulling themselves from the ruble. All we thought about was the long rest we thought we'd get until that war was over.

The draftees, those who wasn't crying in self-pity or suffering from their untreated wounds, couldn't have been more delighted at the thought. They didn't want to fight anyway, and those cowards knew a POW camp meant they'd just hang out as far away from the front as if they was still in the United States. Before we saw the insides of those barracks, they had this idea they would just lie in their racks all day and let the enemy take care of all their needs.

Yeah! Before we saw!

There was four barracks on our side of the camp, crudely thrown together with nothing but thin sheets of plywood between us and the elements. They put the women in one and split the men up into two others. The Russians had the fourth.

We stepped inside and it was freezing! What did we expect though if they wasn't used? A few of the privates went right for the electric heater in the center of the room while a few more swarmed the crude woodstove made from an old oil drum.

With no wood around, we didn't know what we was supposed to burn anyway. The inside had not one speck of soot, and whatever furniture was supposed to be in there was gone. We knew there used to be wooden bunks because we saw the nail holes where they was ripped from the studs. And four small impressions in the floor told us where a table once sat. But it was all gone, probably taken by the Russians to warm their own barracks.

"It doesn't work!" we heard from one of the privates. Our eyes turned toward that heater, and Sergeant Lewis marched over as if he was a drill instructor and his recruit done messed up up.

"Did you plug it in?" He stressed it, hoping the poor private knew how stupid he was, but he wasn't. Of course it was plugged in! We had no lights inside or any other electric equipment at all to tell us there was electricity to the building, but that private swore he felt a mild shock when he unplugged the heater and plugged it back in.

"Maybe you need to let it warm up," another said optimistically.

I drifted to the back of the room where I wouldn't be noticed, and just watched them play with that thing.

"Don't take it apart," someone complained. "What if you can't put it back together?"

"I did this for a living back home!"

Right away, I recognized that as the man whose place I took in the trenches. I thought I was keeping him alive, but I got the poor bastard stuck here with me anyway.

His name was Patterson and from what he told the rest of them, he was an HVAC technician back in Reno. I would never think he'd get experience working on heaters in Nevada, but seems I was wrong. He pulled out some sort of circuit board and shook his head.

"It's completely fried. It can't be fixed."

No one wanted to hear that. Winter was only a couple weeks away and it was already freezing as balls. Without heat, there was going to be a lot of casualties before spring came, and up there, spring came a hell of a lot later than it did back in Chicago.

"Can't you bypass the damage or something? Anything can be fixed!"

Patterson jumped up and just about shoved that board into the other private's face. The wires are fried! The diodes and cathodes are fried! The whole thing looks like it was set on fire! It cannot be fixed."

It was then, Lewis stepped in to calm everyone down. "This isn't the only barracks. I'm sure the heaters in the others work just fine."

That was when the Lieutenant made his reappearance. He popped his head through the door with the same desperate look all those privates had.

"Do you have heat in here?"

"Thing's a piece of shit," the Sergeant told him. "Can we move in with the rest of you?"

"I think we have to. None of them work – not ours, not the women's. All we have is our own body heat."

The moans was loud enough to drive out all noise. It was just as bad as having all those bombs blowing up around me again, and the Sergeant had to shout to be heard over it all.

"What about the Russians? They got heat?"

The noise didn't get any quieter. The disappointment only turned to outrage. After all, the Russians was a bigger enemy than the Canucks. It was the Russians that attacked us and started this whole mess. It was the Russians who tried to take American land and resources – we had no interest in landing on their shores.

But like many messes you find yourself in, sometimes you have to turn to your enemy to get you out of it. Besides, they was probably just grunts and soldiers like us, fighting America because Moscow told them to. Right now they was in a Canadian prison camp, not American. Why, we was practically brothers in arms at that moment!

...At least that's how the Sergeant painted it. He and the Lieutenant marched out of the building with many of the privates crowding nervously in the doorway. I stepped in behind, standing on my toes to get a glimpse. I wasn't an NCO, but something nagged at me to go with them, but I didn't. Something just as powerful held me back, and kept me at the back of that nervous crowd, and made me glad I wasn't going out there with them.

All I did was watch with the boot privates as Johnson and Lewis approached the Russians. It seemed friendly enough and whatever they was saying to each other, they took their time to say it.

Still, I felt almost ashamed for not wanting to be a part of it. I guess it's easier to put yourself on the line when it's your life. There really isn't a lot of responsibility involved in throwing yourself on a grenade. Death does not take a lot of work to achieve and it's surprisingly easy. It's the living and all the responsibility around staying alive that's hard.

I spied that private who took the grenade in my place. He sat in the far corner alone, cradling that arm. The Sergeant's belt remained tight around the stump, but without anything to cover it, the whole mess was rather disgusting. He may have been a private, but he thought faster than I did. That could have been me sitting there suffering, but if it was, I would have been in worse shape and in a lot more pain.

"What's your name?" I asked, taking a seat on the floor next to him. I could see it plain as day on his nametape, but it made for a better introduction than "How do you feel?"

"Trujo." He was about to add a "sir," until he saw my lone chevron.

"I'm Freebourne. Where you from?"

"Lansing."

"Michigan? Then all this isn't too bad for you. I'm from Chicago myself, so I know how bad the winters can be around there."

"You have a girl waiting for you in Chicago?"

I was taken aback. I was there to comfort him and let him know he had a friend, and there he was asking me about a girl as if he knew I was the one that needed that comfort.

"Naw," I told him. "I signed up for this. Not a lot of girls stick with you if you leave them for the Marines. It's a different story if you hook up in the service, but not if they came first. What about you? Anyone to look forward to when you get home?"

"Maria. A fine girl. She went out with me when no one else would. Would laugh at my jokes, watch the fights with me, even put up with my artist phase."

"Bet the girls will be jealous now when you return a hero."

"I don't care. She could have had Bobbi Fernandez, but she turned him down for me. You can't buy that kind of loyalty."

I caught his eyes falling to that missing hand and I knew what that poor guy was thinking.

"If she chose you over Bobbi Fernandez, she sure as shit won't leave you over this. At least you didn't lose something more important. A hand? They'll get you fitted for a prosthetic and she'll never know the difference. I heard they're able to connect sensors in the fingers to the nerves in your arm so you can actually feel when you touch something. Only downside is you'll still hurt when you're hanging a picture and miss with the hammer."

Trujo smiled briefly while he rubbed what remained of his forearm.

"That's not what I'm worried about. I'm afraid I won't even make it back."

"Don't talk like that," I told him. "Of course you'll make it out of here. We all will. And someday, when this is over, you'll get to tell the little Trujos all about what daddy did in the war."

"I lost a lot of blood man. Do you know what that does to your body when it's cold? I'll die of hypothermia before the rest of you feel it."

"Don't talk like that! You're no doctor. And I know the medic didn't tell you that."

"The medics didn't make it."

I really had nothing to say about that. I was feeling sorry for him, and now he made me feel sorry for those nameless medics. They wasn't fighters. They didn't sit beside us in the trenches with rifles in their hands, fighting back. They put themselves in danger to save lives. Our lives.

I never thought about it until Trujo brought it up. I assumed they was to the rear of our position treating the wounded Marines – my buddies. I never thought about it...I never noticed they moved through the trenches with the corpsmen stabilizing the wounded before pulling them to the rear. And those who was back there with the few surviving Marines...I guess I just assumed they took the injured and pulled out before the ground assault. I know a few of my buddies was taken to the other building, but if Trujo was right that none of the medics survived, that meant the rest of their patients didn't make it either.

In a way I became angry at Trujo. If my buddies didn't make it, and here he was, one of the lucky ones, already talking about dying and giving up. It made me think their sacrifices, and the sacrifices of those who didn't get a chance with the medics...it made me think everything was for nothing.

But I couldn't think that way, and neither could Trujo. But I sure as hell couldn't be mad at him or he might truly give up. I took a deep breath to calm myself while he was occupied with that stub.

"You heard the Colonel," I finally told him. "They have a doctor."

"But he said they don't have supplies."

"But I'm sure they have heat. Look, when their medic looks over our wounded, I'm sure he'll keep you over there in a nice warm ward while your body replenishes that blood of yours. Maybe there's not much they can do, but you've already passed the worst of it. You stopped the bleeding, and you survived it. The rest is easy."

It was then our officer and his new sergeant returned with news from the Russians. The privates at the door cleared the way, hounding them for news, while I looked up hoping for Turjo's sake and for his morale the news was good.

Lewis was about deliver the news after he saw Johnson struggling to speak, but the Lieutenant stopped him. It was his duty, and it seemed he wasn't going to shirk it onto someone else's shoulders.

"Their heater doesn't work."

It only outraged the privates some more.

"How do you know? You didn't check."

"Those bastards could have been lying!"

"I bet they broke ours just to see us suffer."

Anger flared from the Sergeant and he couldn't keep quiet, no matter how much the Lieutenant wanted him to. "That is enough. We know they're telling the truth because they insisted we all bunk with them."

It made little sense to a group of no-nothing privates already allowing suspicion and paranoia to drive them. In a way we was lucky to have Sergeant Lewis because those boys would have found some pitchforks and torches and gone out there to lynch those Russians. He just froze them to silence with a glare and told them all how it had to be.

"Without those heaters or any wood for the stoves, all we have is our body heat. And it's not gonna keep us warm if we're all by ourselves. Every one of us, men, women, Russian, American...we're all gonna have to put aside our inhibitions and pool our warmth if we hope to survive in this camp."

"They can't do this," one of them complained. "This goes against the Geneva Convention!"

Johnson held up his hands to bring the attention back to him. "In the morning, I will demand a meeting with Colonel Levesque. Maybe they can't do anything about the heaters, but they can sure as hell get us some wood for those stoves. You all saw the trees, and I'm sure some of you saw the Bearcat on the way in. If they won't send a unit to go bring some back, I will demand they let us go out there to get some ourselves."

The low grumbles seemed to spell acceptance. Maybe it was easy to be that close with the enemy if it was for one night. And if it didn't work out, at least it would dispel the suspicion that they was lying about having a working heater.

Anyway, I think it was that moment when I realized the Lieutenant wasn't such a bad guy. He managed to secure a truce with the Russians, and he promised to stand up to the Canucks if they thought they was going to freeze us out. All I was worried about then was making sure Private Trujo stayed warm through the night. If he could survive with all the doubts bringing him down, then surely those of us still sitting on two hands and two feet could make it through this winter just fine.
Chapter H-3

I never seen so many people hold onto their modesty! I swore most of those soldiers was willing to try their luck with the temperatures because they didn't want to cuddle up for warmth.

The men was already standing around in the Russian barracks looking at their new friends like they was aliens or something when they was sleeping in one big dogpile. Then the Lieutenant brought the women in and you saw most of the faces light up.

One brave private approached PFC Ames. Ames was what we called an Arctic fox. She wasn't much to look at, especially with her hair cut so short for service. Back home, she would have been lucky to catch one of the stragglers at last call, but out here in the tundra with our choices limited and many of us not seeing action in months, she looked hot as shit through our goggles. And right away, someone thought they had a chance with her.

"What say you sleep with me tonight? I think I can keep you warm."

Now there are usually two kinds of women serving with us up there. The first is just as horny as we are. Like the men, they'd sleep with anything with a pulse. As long as it had a dick, they was fair game.

The second type is the one who gets upset. Now they can be the best kind out there or they can be the silliest you ever did see. Some of them will pull out their rape whistles and act like they was being held by force. Others will play the stress card and hide out in medical.

We found out Ames was a little of both.

"If you can harden up, it's a deal."

Of course it was a joke. As cold as it was, none of us was getting hard, no matter how much porn we had with us. It was that moment, I decided I liked her. She was one of the few of us who didn't let that camp and that cold get to them already.

Most of her fellow women complained about cuddling up with so many men, while most of the men refused to lie so close to each other. It didn't bother me none even though I had a head in my crotch while mine was on someone's thigh. It was snug as a bug as we liked to say in the Marines. My lights went out while everyone else continued bitching.

Then my glorious sleep was interrupted by some obnoxious prick.

"All up for morning exercise!"

I thought it was one the camp guards until I lifted one of my eyes open. The accent wasn't French, and it wasn't American. Thank god, 'cause I would have punched out Lewis' lights if he thought I was getting up for morning PT!

The thick Russian accent called out again. I opened the second eye, thinking he was calling his own men. But his men was already up. That bastard expected us to obey his call for PT. What right did he have?

Like some of the privates beginning to stir, I looked to the Sergeant expecting him to knock some sense into that Russian bastard, but he just took one look at that big, dumb Ruskie and the two came to an understanding without saying a word.

"Everyone up!" Lewis joined in. Many eyes went to the Lieutenant hoping he would override the command, but this decision was well within Lewis' domain if we was back at our own base. Johnson just rose from the pile of bodies and pulled his hood calmly over that blond fuzz of his. Outranking even our Russian guests, he had every intention of joining them.

"You won't freeze if you keep moving," he added to the chorus.

I finally saw their point. I didn't like it one bit. I certainly didn't want to be reminded about some of the worst things of being a Marine. PT was something I hoped the Canucks left behind when they marched us here, but I understood it wouldn't feel so cold once we got our blood pumping.

At least they let us use the outhouse first...that cold, bitter outhouse. I won't even get into how miserable an experience that was! Let's just say you never saw forty-two men and women complete their bodily functions so fast.

We was on that courtyard soon enough, following that Russian bastard as he tortured us with his Russian calisthenics. There was still no sun, but at least the courtyard was one of the few places without snow. It made the running easier on our calves when they decided to force us into sprints.

I secretly hoped Sergeant Lewis would take over, but he and the Lieutenant decided this was the time to assess the survivors and find out who they had responsibility over. They did the exercises like everyone else, but they moved through the group conducting brief interviews with everyone while they worked up a sweat. I just shook my head though. As one of my DIs used to say back in boot camp, "if you can talk, you're not working hard enough."

There was a few too injured to come out there, but Johnson already knew who they was: seven privates and three PFCs, including my new friend Trujo. While they walked the line assessing the men and women, I was already painfully aware of my own situation.

See, I was looking out the day before, and I didn't see another pair of crossed rifles. The only other person in our group who rated was the one corpsman who made it. She might have been an E-4, but she wasn't in the chain of command. No one took orders from her but other corpsmen.

I wasn't anxious about meeting the Lieutenant just yet. Technically I was third in the line of command even though I wasn't even an NCO. I wasn't exactly sure how it might work in a joint situation such as this one. For all I knew, as a Marine, I might not have expected a spot in the chain with the mostly Army group. If I was really lucky, Johnson might be the kind of guy not to trust a Marine. If I was lucky, he was picking out the senior Army PFCs to take charge of unit sized groups.

I wasn't counting on that though and tried to move myself as far to the back of his line as I could. Before I realized it, I found myself next to one of those Russians while we was doing jumping jacks.

His name was Yeorgi, and he was only one of three of them who knew any English.

"How long you been in here?" I asked, trying to break the ice and hoping I couldn't make this any more uncomfortable than I already did.

"Six months, me think."

"Fuck me!" First words out of my mouth, and I doubt it impressed. "You put up with this for six months?"

"Not so bad. It summer when we came. Almost like home."

It was almost easy to forget much of Russia sat this far north. I guess when all you want to do is kill each other, you don't really take the time to think about where they came from. I figured if we was going to try to survive together, least I could do was show that interest.

"Where's that?"

"Vladivostok. Hearty winters. Much like this."

"Guess it was easy for you then," I said without thinking.

"Nyet! These Canadians are dogs." Then he spit on the ground to punctuate his point. "They mad because we make mess of their pretty snow. Scare their seals away. We heard what they tell you yesterday. They told us same thing six months ago.

"They say there is no food because of war, but we see the supply trucks. We watch them unload. They keep best for themselves and give us scraps. You see. Their officers get fat eating food meant for us.

"They say they cannot fix heaters. They say there no parts and they cannot get new ones. When they take you for questioning, you look around. I look around when they take me, and I saw three heaters. I think it to show me they in control.

"Canada!" He spit on the ground once more. "They make world think they so friendly, but they are dogs. There were more than one hundred of my comrades when we got here. Now we are twelve."

I didn't want to believe that when he told me! I couldn't believe it. If they lost that many during summer, I didn't want to think about what winter meant for us.

"What about the Red Cross," I asked him, "or the UN? Don't nobody come to inspect the camp and make sure they was treating you right?"

He spit on the ground a third time at the sound of the UN. Frankly, I had the same thoughts when they did nothing for us after the first Russian attack! Ten thousand troops landed on our shores, and the rest of the world acted like we deserved it. I almost think Montefering wanted Canada's oil claims just for the satisfaction of telling the world to go to hell when they expect us to share it.

"No one come to see us. UN don't care. Red Cross don't care. They see Russia as thugs. One African migrant die on way to Europe, it major calamity. Ninety-five Russians die in torture camp, and it is 'praise to our gods!'"

I think if I didn't have a bunch of other things to worry about, I might've pondered on some big revelation. Maybe I would feel bad for thinking the same way when beneath that Russian bravado, they was just men like us.

But I didn't, and I didn't. Something troubled me, and I just had to ask to make sure they wasn't just a bunch of cowards.

"If they was killing you, why didn't you try to escape?"

"We try! We lost forty men! And they have ways to make sure we do not try again."

Before I could ask what those ways were, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"What's your name..." I turned to see who it was, allowing Johnson to read my insignia so he could finish his greeting. "...Lance Corporal."

I was almost embarrassed he knew my rank. It was as if I had just given him permission to dump on me for his entire shitty day. If he wanted a body for a working party, I was now the first person he would come to find. If the sun ever showed itself and he wanted it swept from the courtyard, it would become my job. And if any of those privates got in trouble with the guards, it would be my ass he'd chew out. Those rifles had become a target on my uniform, and just like with Marine NCOs and SNCOs, all the shit flowed to and stopped with me.

"Freebourne, Jackson Freebourne." I stuttered too much, sounding like a recruit with a DI screaming in his face for the first time. My only saving grace was that the cold and my tired breath gave me excuse.

"This one's a Marine," Sergeant Lewis chimed in as if he was already thinking of the fun ways he could fuck with me. It was bad enough being a lance in the Marines, but with all the shit we and the Army gave each other all the time, it was worse being a Marine lance in an army platoon.

Thankfully for me, it didn't seem to make any difference to the Lieutenant. I could see him mulling it over in his head, locking it away for later use. How he learned everyone's names so quickly was something I couldn't understand. Sure we all wore nametapes across our parkas to make it easier, but somehow he committed them all to memory.

It wasn't as if he had much of a choice. The Canucks confiscated our Control Tablets and his Command Tab. I suppose they might have found orders and strategies hidden away on Johnson's or Lewis', but if they searched mine all they was getting was my collection of porn...Hey, we all need something to get us through a long deployment. I won't apologize.

Anyway it didn't seem to matter to the Lieutenant.

"Two of your buddies are here with us," he said as if he was trying to be friendly. "Do you know PFC Dumas or Private Moreno?"

I shook my head. "Moreno joined us three days before the last charge, and I didn't really work with Dumas. He was one of the few 03s still out there."

Johnson gave me a nod as if he understood, but wanted me to be their friend anyway. "They might like to hear from one of their brothers. You should go see them."

I admit I took offense at that. Maybe we was brothers in service, but so was everybody else here. Maybe most of these men and women were Army. Maybe most of them was draftees and didn't want to be here at all. And maybe most of them was nothing but a bunch of whiners, but truth was we was all in that shithole together. They was my brothers no matter what their story was. Hell, even the Russians was brothers in my eyes.

Eh, but maybe I took it the wrong way. The Marine Corps did create a bond between us we didn't have with the other branches, just as the injuries inside that shack bonded those men and women in a way I couldn't understand.

I would have to think on it later because a shrill whistle sounded to bring everything to a halt. The Russian commander, a man named Dimitri, left the instruction to grab our Lieutenant.

"We go get breakfast," he said, pointing to the gate.

I think it was their way to keep tabs on the senior members of our groups. When the rations showed up, they expected our leader and the Russian leader to pick them up at the fence and distribute them as they saw fit.

The first few days we was there, we often saw the guards on our side of the fence when they came to retrieve prisoners for interrogation. Once they had all the information they wanted though, it stopped. They came over there only when they had to. Our Lieutenant was even supposed to meet them at the gate if we had a man requiring medical attention.

The call to chow, as it was, signaled the end of our PT. While Johnson and Dimitri was away, the rest of us sort of hung around. Behind me I heard an awful lot of sniffling and turned to see where it came from.

Another young woman, maybe fresh out of high school, with a face, bright and stinging red, rubbed her sleeve across her nose. Her nametape read Sheppard and her insignia lacked the chevron of an E-2.

"Getting sick?" I asked her. It was probably selfish of me as much as it was real concern for her. All we needed on top of everything was for someone to get pneumonia or the flu and it would spread like wildfire in our tight arrangement.

"Naw," she said none too convincing. "I get like this whenever it's cold. Being from Maine, you'd think I'd be used to the cold, but the air back home is always so moist, my nose doesn't stay dry."

I took her reason, but I knew in the back of my soul I should have pushed it. I should have brought it to Sergeant Lewis' attention, but the thing is a lance corporal ain't a snitch. Those who are, lose the "lance" and cross to the dark side of the NCO ranks. You would think those of us who bitch about never getting promoted would figure that out, but we don't. Maybe some of us believe promotion should be earned through honor instead of back-stabbing. All I knew was I would make sure to sleep as far away from her in that pile that night as I could get.
Chapter H-4

They took me that afternoon. After they took our injured to medical, they started to process the rest of us. Two of the guards tapped me on the shoulder and almost dragged me through the gate and into one of the smaller buildings on the other side.

The first thing you noticed was the heat. After spending all day and all night in thirty below weather, the heated room was almost too hot for me. I noticed the three heaters spaced around the wall, and immediately thought about what Yeorgi said to me.

My mind instantly went to thoughts of those heaters – those precious, lifesaving heaters! I tried to remember how many guards I passed at the gate, figuring my chances of taking them down. I counted the steps in my head between here and there, trying to imagine how quickly I could run through their space. I didn't imagine this building having much security at night...or what we consider night. As they shoved me into the chair across from Sergeant Fournier, all I could think about was how easy it looked to come back here and steal one of those so we wouldn't freeze to death in our sleep.

That was until that Sergeant cleared his throat and stole me from my happy dream.

The Major kept court by another table in the corner, watching over our Con Tabs. After I gave Fournier my name, rank, and serial number, the Major found my Tab and gave it to his Sergeant.

I remembered what Lieutenant Johnson told us all that morning when they came and took the first of our people.

"I hope you all remember the briefing you received before you deployed out here. You are required to give them your name, rank, and serial number. Do not think you need to play hero and keep your identity a secret. However you are not required to say anything else. In fact, standing orders are that you do not say anything more unless you require medical assistance."

Sure, we all remembered that briefing. Most of us didn't pay much attention, though. There isn't a soldier in uniform who thought they could be taken alive. I guess just like everyone else, I always thought I would go down fighting on the battlefield. Or if I was captured, I'd be the one to sneak out in the middle of the night and escape back to my own lines.

I don't think reality is ever what you think it will be.

There was the story of one corporal captured by the Russians earlier that year. He didn't think he'd crack under pressure, but once the Russians started the torture, he sung. He told them everything he knew, including the location of his Forward Operating Base.

Command never takes kindly to squealers (unless they're squealing on their buddies to their sergeant), and the story was they fined him half his pay for two months, and busted him down to private. Of course a lot of us doubted it ever happened. None of us had heard of the Russians returning prisoners, so the first question was how did he get out to face the court-martial.

But like all the stories we heard in those health and safety talks, it didn't have to be true. Fact was the enemy could put your head in a vice and force you to talk, and the brass would fault you for cowardice in the face of the enemy. It didn't matter if it ever happened, all we knew was that it would if it was us.

Fournier tapped away on my Con Tab while he chewed over what little I told him.

"I know all about you lance corporals," he told me with a smile a mile wide. "You hide in the background, avoiding duty while pretending you don't know anything. But I know better. I know you are the ones that hear everything that goes on around base. After all, how do you avoid your seniors if you do not know where they are and what they are up to at all times? We both know you have more information than your sergeant, and you hear about orders before they pass to him, Oui?"

"I'm glad you think so highly of me," I told him, or something to that effect. I guess if I was back home and he said that to me, I might be afraid that my sergeant also knew that. Shit, if he found out my hiding places whenever he needed those bodies for the working parties, I'd never catch a break!

"I also know they do not promote you. They do not pay you what you deserve." Then he looked down to something on my Tab. "It says here you commanded one of those DB-60 anti-aircraft guns before we took you. Is that not the role of one of your corporals?"

"If you say so." I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of a straight answer. Even if I wouldn't get in trouble for answering, I just didn't feel like it.

"Did they make you command one of those guns without rank, or do you just like blowing up our drones?"

"I just follow orders."

He smiled again and went back to my Con Tab, playing with the screen before showing me what had him so interested.

The bastard found my porn collection! I was looking at a still of the world-famous porn star, Cherry Blossom. Her juicy tits hung out all over the screen, and her lips was puckered as if telling me to give it to her right then and there! I think my dick stirred for the first time in days.

"Are these the orders you follow?"

Like I already said, I won't apologize. I told you how lonely it can get in the field. And war is nothing like what civilians think. We're not spending every hour of every day in brutal combat. Most of the time is spent sitting in a trench by our DB-60 waiting for something to happen. There are only so many things you can talk about with your buddies, and so many shows and movies you can watch before you get bored. But porn! Porn never gets old.

Just when I was starting to appreciate the beauty he put in front of me, he took it away and kept her for himself.

"I know what you are thinking," he teased me. He really didn't know though. All I was concerned about at that moment was getting that tablet back somehow and reclaiming that juicy porn collection. "You think you will be a tough hero. You think this is some sort of game, and you will frustrate my efforts to get information.

"But you should know information is overrated. Take your movies for example. Such trash, but for you it is more important than your rank – you don't have to give me another snappy answer, I already know it to be true."

He showed me the screen once more. The menu was already opened over my directory with the "delete" option highlighted. Then with one touch, he erased my entire porn collection! Terabytes and terabytes of porn, collected over all the hours of downtime in the last six months vanished with the touch of a finger.

There was hope I told myself. As long as he didn't format the memory, I could retrieve all that porn from the abyss of garbage files. I would have to get my Tab back first, but there was a very good chance it wasn't gone for good.

Fournier stood from his chair. Then very slowly, he came around to my side of the table. He made sure I could see his shiny, polished boots. When he had my attention, he dropped my Con Tab to the floor and ground one of those boots into the screen, making sure there was nothing left to retrieve. I never been so mad before as I was at then.

The Sergeant gave those pieces of my life one good kick across the room before returning to his chair.

"Something else you should know, Lance Corporal Jackson Freebourne, Major Lavoie is not her to make sure I do not violate the Geneva Conventions. He is here to watch his interrogator work."

I think at that moment I swallowed hard, expecting the worst. It was also the first time since I got there, I took it all seriously. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing," he smiled. "Nothing at all but your obedience. I did not bring you here only to learn your name and rank. I wanted you to see how much better we can make your stay here. If you and your friends are good prisoners, I can improve your situation. But step out of line and cause the Colonel any amount of trouble, and that tablet of yours will become you and your friends."

I didn't like the way he said that. I didn't like it at all. Something told me it wouldn't be that easy, but it sounded so promising at that time. When we spent that first night freezing our nuts off, the thought of all that heat made me believe there was truth to his promise. I should have known then it wasn't going to be as easy as staying out of trouble, but then, I didn't want to believe anything else.

The guards painted a large spot across my forehead to tell them I was already counted. Then they took me back to our side of the camp, and back to those familiar faces.

"What did you tell them," Sergeant Lewis asked me before I was even across.

"Just my name, rank, and serial number like you said. They didn't ask me anything else, really." In a sense it was true. I wasn't about to tell him about them finding my porn. It wasn't important to the Sergeant anyway, so I saw no sense in telling him.

Lewis shook his head. From what the others was telling him, my experience was the same as theirs. It was like I thought going in, anything they really wanted to know was already taken from our Tabs.

Some of the others who went before me didn't take it so calmly like I did. Before I was done with the Sergeant, we heard a voice rise up from across the courtyard.

"They have no right! It's against the law!" I think he was Private Rankles, one of those white, privileged college students from Seattle. Probably no one in his family tree served the military for over two hundred years, and like a lot of these college kids I met up there, he thought it was beneath him. Funny thing about those kids, their parents made more money in a year than my mom saw in her lifetime, but they didn't have the influence to get their kids out of their duty when the draft notices showed up.

They was always the hardest to break in boot camp, but the DIs had the most fun doing it. As much as we bitched about those kinds of kids and found any way to make their lives more miserable, we liked having them around. All the NCOs had their hands full dealing with their attitudes. And thanks to their refusal to do most of the work, guys like me had it easier blending into the background than we might have had before.

But this was not one of those times I looked forward to Private Rankles' complaints. Johnson was already over there trying to calm him down, and the Sergeant ran from me to help.

"What did they do?" Johnson asked him.

"They're keeping the heaters from us. They make us sleep in this cold just so they can torture us. That's a war crime!"

"I know," Johnson told him as sympathetically as he could. If that was my Sergeant (God rest his soul), he wouldn't be so understanding. He'd just coldcocked the brat to teach him his place.

I didn't know the rules of war. I wasn't up on the Geneva Convention and all two hundred years of amendments, revisions, and updates. If you asked me what we was allowed to do to an enemy and what we wasn't allowed to do, all I could tell you was what our commanders told us before we deployed, and I can tell you treatment of prisoners was not something we needed to know in the artillery.

I thought about what Yeorgi said about the UN not inspecting this camp. For all I knew, he made all that up just to scare me. I wouldn't put it past him, hell I might have done the same to him if I had been there six months and he was the one who just got there. What I do know, is you can't count on the rules protecting you when you're actually in a war. Tempers can flare and anger can take over, and you're not thinking about what some court _might_ do to you _if_ you get caught.

I had no doubt with all the satellites flying around, one of them was on us at all times. You just couldn't hide a facility like this, even if you put it underground. And hell, our own government might have been watching us at that very moment. They might be up there collecting all the evidence of those war crimes, and I'm sure Colonel Levesque knew it, but that was no help to us behind that fence. Until our government liberated that camp or secured our release, those laws could not stop these Canucks from doing what they wanted with us.

Lieutenant Johnson knew that, and Sergeant Lewis was all too aware himself, but some of those kids still thought some piece of paper was going to keep them safe.

"When I go for my interview," the Lieutenant told them, "I promise you I will demand our rights under the Geneva Convention. I will demand they give us a heater for the barracks. I will demand they give us more food. And I will demand they give us water that isn't frozen solid."

"Trust me, Private," Lewis added, "you might be a college educated genius, but these officers know every loophole in those treaties. They know loopholes to those loopholes. If they want to make your life miserable in here, I promise you they have ways to do it that would make your own government stand up and applaud. You are doing yourself no favors right now. Your only job is to keep yourself alive until we're released. You leave it to me and the Lieutenant here to worry about fighting for those rights."

You could tell Rankles wanted to argue, but everyone he riled up fell for their lines. I think people still didn't know what to make of the pretty boy Lieutenant, but that Sergeant had a way of speaking that inspired. He might tell you he could raise the dead and you'd believe him. So when he said the two of them was going to fight for those men and women, everyone believed it.

As those soldiers dispersed and the guards returned to trade one prisoner for another, Johnson marched up to them and stopped them.

"Take me next. I need to see your CO."

The guards had orders otherwise, but they didn't object. The officers would get their turns eventually, so it was easier for them to take our Lieutenant now.

Our men only saw it as proof of what they was just told. Johnson said he was going to fight, and that was just what he was doing.

As I watched the guards take him through that gate, I honestly didn't know if I could do what he was doing. Sure, I gave that Sergeant a bit of attitude when it was my turn a half hour ago, but it never crossed my mind to complain to him about the cold. I never once thought about opening my mouth in that room and complaining about all those heaters they was wasting while ours was broken.

Honestly, I don't even know if Johnson was the kind of man who would take that stand if he didn't have that silver bar forcing it upon him. Either way, he didn't have a choice. That bar did force it on him. The only officer in that camp, he had nowhere to hide from the camp guards like the rest of us could.

And it got me thinking that I could be in the same boat. Maybe I wasn't technically an NCO, but my rank put me uncomfortably close to command and it put me too close to the spotlight for my liking. Later on that day, when I managed to get myself alone and away from everyone else, I tore my insignia from my jacket and the BDUs underneath. I figured on quick inspection, the guards would mistake me for one of the unimportant privates if Lewis and Johnson was both indisposed and they needed someone to act as our representative.

But while I still wore that chevron and those crossed rifles, I had to watch our Lieutenant cross that yard with a Canuck on either side of him. He turned his head to us one last time as if to say everything was going to be all right, and in that moment we believed it. That was the moment we knew he was not some disconnected officer; he was one of us.

I couldn't take my eyes off of him. I followed them all the way to that small office where one of the guards opened the door and led him inside.

That would be the last time I ever saw Lieutenant Johnson.
Preview: Prisoners of Utopia

Chapter P-1

Jails are pretty much the same wherever you go: four walls, an impenetrable door, uncomfortable beds, a very public toilet, and a sink. They all reek of filth, sweat, and stale urine. Stains mar every corner and crevice; cleanliness is never a concern for the jailors or the jailed.

Cole Greenburg had seen enough of them in his brief nineteen years to recognize the cell he was in as just another jail. It wasn't much different from the one he bailed his friend from last year, or the one some guy from the barracks landed in during Basic Training after punching a drill sergeant. This was the first time Cole found himself on this side of the bars though.

The whole situation seemed surreal to him; Cole was never one to get into trouble. Sure he caroused with the other recruits during weekend liberty. Like them, he sometimes had too much to drink. Sometimes he got a little too fresh with the ladies frequenting those bars. But somehow in that chaos, he always managed to keep enough of his mind to avoid the stupid mistakes that landed so many of his Army buddies in front of the First Sergeant on Monday morning.

It didn't seem to surprise him though to find himself in this jail. He wasn't surprised to find himself locked up with his father, Michael. It didn't even bother him that this was supposed to be another universe, an alternate Earth.

Had this not been the third world they visited since the mishap in his father's lab, he might not have believed it. The arresting officers and the guards in the other room all wore strange uniforms, but along with the unrecognizable languages they spoke it was all proof of nothing more than the fact they were no longer in the America he knew.

Cole had no idea how such a thing was possible. The whole field of study was Michael's wheelhouse. The quest for evidence of this multiverse was the single thing that kept his father from home all through his childhood. His singular focus on proof of its existence drove out all thoughts of his family and finally convinced Cole's mother to walk out when Cole was sixteen.

Whenever Cole needed his father's help with homework, the old man was too busy working on his own math problems. He was late to Cole's graduation because he claimed to have had a flash of brilliance and wanted to jot it down before he lost it. And when the boy chose to use his 96 hour pass to say goodbye to his father before disappearing on a six month deployment to Iraq, the man was too busy finishing his prototype.

The multiverse was all that man could talk about at the dinner table – when he talked – and yet Cole could never wrap his mind around it. One would think having a brilliant astrophysicist for a dad would have given him an advantage in his own science and math studies, and yet the opposite proved true.

Cole struggled through both subjects all throughout school. To his father, he was a disappointment. His mediocre high school football career didn't even make up for it. When he announced he had enlisted in the United States Army, it was like he had announced he was gay in an Evangelical household.

No, the thought that this was supposed to be a different Earth in a different universe didn't seem as strange as the fact he was locked up in a jail with his never-do-wrong father.

The morning meal came in a close second for bizarre. They were given nothing more than a bar-shaped thing no larger than a candy bar, but with the texture of bologna. If only it had the taste of bologna, Cole would have counted himself lucky. But the "food" had little taste to it whatsoever. He recalled more flavor in that horrible oatmeal they served in the mess hall on the first day of Basic.

His stomach grumbled, waiting for the midday meal.

Neither of the prisoners had any idea what the actual time was. They had not seen a window to the outside since they showed up in the middle of that bizarre market, and there were no clocks on the wall to show them the passage of time. Cole didn't wear a watch, and his cell phone (not that it was very useful after that moment when Michael's lab vanished around them) had been seized with the rest of their belongings, including that magical universe-hopping contraption, so he couldn't even check time on that.

"Guard!" he called out through the opening on the cell door. It appeared they understood his language as little as he understood theirs, but if he could get their attention, he was sure he could communicate his desire for food.

A man with reddish-brown skin entered the holding area and approached the cell door. Cole had tried to guess his origins, thinking he was East Asian, but his eyes didn't look right, and he stood taller than many of the Asians in his battalion. When the man spoke, the funny language didn't sound like anything he heard from an Oriental mouth back home.

Cole placed his hand to his mouth trying to communicate his desire for food. The guard cocked his head before understanding the request. Instead of the desired outcome, the man gave a hearty laugh as if his suffering was a big joke. Then he turned and left.

Cole slumped back onto his rack and dropped his head into his hands. His father sat on the rack across from him, with his eyes closed, but his head up. It was his usual posture when working through his own thoughts, and Cole knew the old man was more concerned with his theories than with his own son's hunger.

Hell, he was probably more concerned with Jessica at that moment!

Four years older than Cole, Jessica was Michael's latest research assistant and the last member of their unfortunate trio. She was a doctoral candidate, putting in her time under Dr. Greenburg before presenting her thesis and hopefully taking a job with NASA.

To Michael, she was the child he wished he had: smart enough to keep up with his theories and with the same burning desire for the stars that he had. The man shared more dinners with her in the past two months than he ever shared with his real family, and he never cared how much it hurt Cole when he would brag about her or all the other research assistants he had worked with throughout his life. Though they came and went, year in and year out, the man had more praise and more pride for each of those temporary children than he had for the son who stuck by his side after the divorce.

Michael didn't care what might happen to Cole before this was over, but with Jessica in a separate cell somewhere else in this jail, the old man was worried sick over the things those guards might be doing to her – or perhaps it was a cell mate inflicting those unspeakable tortures.

Cole had to break the silence. "Can you at least pretend you care what's going to happen to us?"

Michael raised his head as if his son's complaints were a nuisance to his peace and tranquility. "I'm sorry," he snapped. "I forgot your generation has to announce every one of your stupid feelings to the rest of the world. Guess what! No one cares if you're sad because someone called a celebrity a 'fag' online! I'm too busy thinking about how to get my hopper back!"

"Unless you happen to have a key to the cell, I don't see how that's going to happen."

"I figured since my son is in the _Army_ , maybe he could call in the Seals to break us out of here in a Blackhawk."

Cole rolled his eyes. Any chance his father found to throw his disdain for his service in his face, he took it.

"And how would I do that if we're supposed to be in one of your other worlds?"

"See? Instead of wasting your life, you should have gone to college and learned something useful. Then maybe you could be helpful!"

Cole shook his head and dropped his head back into his hands. It was always useless trying to talk to his father. Even when he wasn't trying to goad the old man, the old man always found a way to insult him.

He knew in that other mind, there was blame swirling for their predicament. They barely put that lab behind him before the old man screamed at him for activating the device. It didn't matter that Cole was a good five or six feet away from it, nor did the old man accept responsibility for the fatal flaws in its design.

All Cole wanted was one more chance for some sort of relationship when he booked that ticket for New York. When he stepped off the plane and into the terminal, he wasn't even surprised his father wasn't there to pick up him. Cole had to find his own taxi and give the driver directions to the university – no use going to the house across the river in New Jersey first since Michael spent all his time in that lab.

The man practically lived in that lab. Michael had had his theories on the existence of the multiverse for as long as Cole could remember – likely even beyond that. He always knew those other universes lay out there somewhere, but how could he even get there? Mankind couldn't even travel to another star, let alone beyond that to a different universe. Yet Michael knew there was a way to find those other universes. He always talked about how the space between two universes was different from that within a universe.

Cole could never understand how there could be other universes living side-by-side with this one. His teachers in school always talked about this universe as if it was everything. The concept of parallel worlds was one he only saw on TV and there it was presented as if each one existed in the same space but out-of-phase. According to his father it had something to do with bubbles in a bath. It made no sense at all to Cole, and eventually his father grew tired of explaining it over and over.

Their relationship froze around the time he entered junior high. That was probably the time Michael realized his son didn't have the aptitude for advanced science. It was around that time he stopped bringing his son to the lab.

There were always excuses with Michael. In those early years, he spent his time doing some crazy math. He had to create the formulas and equations from scratch that would even point to the existence of his supposed multiverse, and guide him on a path towards proof.

Cole's mother would complain when he walked in at the most absurd hours of the night – when he came home at all. She would scream at him with a prepared tirade, and when she finally took a breath to study the pain she expected in his eyes, all she received was a calm if emotionless explanation regarding a breakthrough with those calculations.

By the time he put the calculations behind him and moved on to inventing the technology he expected would grant him a peek at those other universes, the mother turned her attention to the son.

To his detriment, Cole looked too much like his father. The similarity hardened as his face slowly changed through adolescence. When it was clear Michael would give her complaints and her anguish no satisfaction, she turned it all toward her son, finding fault in everything he did and magnifying the same notes of disappointment in his weak grades.

When he entered high school, Cole knew the day was coming when his parents would divorce. He had been ready for it every day, but like always, his father kept right on with his work as if the problems at home didn't exist.

The boy came home from school one day to find his mother waiting at the door. Her stuff was already packed and away in her new apartment, but still she waited for her son to come home. Cole knew this was it and expected to leave with her. Though his mother's attitude hurt him worse than that of his father, he tried to understand her pain and let it roll off his back, hoping that one day she would become the mom he used to remember – the mom who used to bake cookies at Christmas time, the mom who used to take him trick-or-treating each Halloween as a child, the mom who used to bake his birthday cake and decorate it herself.

He stood at the door that day, unable to ask if this was it, instead waiting for her to give the word. In a flash, he could have his clothes packed and they could be away from this cold man. Instead a flash of anger crossed her face and wounded tears glazed her eyes.

"You ruined my marriage!" she spat at him. Then she pushed him aside and turned her back on him, on Michael, and on the whole house.

For all the insults Michael threw at him over the years, all the disappointment built up in that man's small heart, and all the distance he kept from his own son, it was that one simple statement from his mother that hurt him more than all of it.

It might have been ridiculous to think he deserved the blame for his parents falling out of love with each other. Then again, even as a teenager, Cole knew it was his perceived failure and disappointment as a son to his father which kept the old man away as much as his work. He had held hope right up to the end that his mother didn't so fault him; but it was that final accusation along with the fact that she had waited to deliver it, and probably practiced it all day, that marked an unmistakable end to that maternal relationship.

He stayed with his father as the lesser of two evils, and it was that one last hope for affirmation that brought him to his father's lab before placing New York and New Jersey behind him once and for all.

Michael was too excited over his creation to offer more than a barely audible "hello" before returning to Jessica and the affectionately dubbed "hopper."

The device itself was rather awkward and clumsy. Three large rods were set in the middle of the room, equidistant from each other, and each one had a mess of wires and motors (at least that's what it looked like to Cole) wrapping the base. Cables from each converged on both a power supply and the laptop controlling this device. From the talk between the two scientists, it sounded as if the device was finally complete and ready for its first test.

Cole had to admit had he been closer to his father, he would have been happy to finally see the completion of his life's work. As it stood, he was merely relegated to the far corner of the room and out of the way as if he were the man's umbrella.

He thought it better to just leave and put this all behind him before it raised his anger. The power supply sat underfoot, and he tripped over it when he turned for one last look at his father. Michael rushed over to see that it was all right, and calling his son "idiot" under his breath only affirmed that concern didn't extend to Cole.

The young man headed once more for the door and stopped. For all the disappointment he felt, there was a certain curiosity he couldn't put aside. The test was about to get underway, and he had to admit he wanted to see if the device worked as planned. He hoped it would fail and become the disappointment his father claimed he was. A piece of him expected to rub it in should it prove that man spent his life on a pipe dream.

Jessica set a lead bar between the rods and stepped back. Michael smiled over the expected disappearance as he opened the activation program on his laptop. With the entry of a few commands, the power supply sprung to life, feeding power to the motors. The whirring grew louder at the base of each rod as those shafts of metal began to vibrate, subtle but quick.

Cole felt the air vibrating all around him as the light within and around those rods bent and stretched. The lead bar became a blur as did everything on the other side of the experiment, as if he was looking at everything through a pool of shimmering water.

But that blur grew larger, encompassing the rods themselves and expanding outward beyond the intended field. Jessica's excitement only peaked as she no doubt realized what this success would mean for her degree and later job prospects, but Michael's brow furled; a scowl betrayed his disappointment as he turned to his laptop once more and tried to shut it down.

"What's going on?" Cole asked him, finding his father's temperament to be contagious.

"Don't bother asking a question when you won't understand the answer," his father snapped, trying to ignore him to focus on the problem.

That was the last straw as far as Cole was concerned. He turned for the door, only to realize the field generated by that device had begun to encompass him. The vibrations left the air and filtered through his skin. He felt it through to his organs, imagining this was how an egg felt when hard-boiled in the microwave.

Jessica felt it too. "What's wrong with it?"

"The coils are drawing too much power," he answered with the kind of understanding and concern Cole expected a father should have shown a son. "The tuning rods are expanding the field."

He tried to explain how he needed to shut it down before it sent off the entire lab, but before he could even begin, the room went white around them.

Cole rubbed his eyes trying to get his sight back as he felt the vibrations leave his body. While the world slowly came into focus again, his father already shouted a string of obscenities. As he took in the overgrown forest which had replaced the walls of that lab, Cole began to understand the problem.

All three of them looked to each other, but it was only Michael who truly understood their predicament.

Excitement replaced Jessica's worry. To her, it was more than she ever could have hoped for. She was supposed to see the proof of the multiverse when that bar disappeared to some unknown realm – yet here she was, seeing one of those other Earths with her own eyes, smelling the fresh and pristine air unspoiled by human actions, and witnessing a Manhattan without the skyscrapers and streets and people.

But Michael was terrified. "This is very bad," he mumbled as he shook his head.

Cole wanted to ask what the problem was, but he knew his father would only dismiss him and insult his intelligence some more, so he decided to let the teacher's pet make the inquiry.

"The device wasn't designed for travel," he explained to his assistant. "It wasn't meant to expand the field outside the rods, and we were definitely not supposed to send people through."

"So just start it up again and get us back home," Cole offered, still not understanding what his father's problem was.

"It wasn't designed for that!" his father snapped. "It was designed to send an object out, not bring it back!"

"Are you saying we're stuck in...this!" At that moment, Cole's mind could focus on nothing but his liberty. If he wasn't back on base by 0600 Monday morning, he would be labeled a deserter. His command would discharge him dishonorably, and when they did back, he would be arrested and thrown in the stockade. Michael had always hated him for joining the Army, and it seemed his work had managed to steal that from him. The one thing he had going for him in his life was the service, and his father's selfish work ruined that.

"There's a chance the doorway is limited," Michael said as he checked over the equipment to make sure it still functioned. "It is possible this thing only goes between our world and whatever world this is. If that is so, then activating the device might take us back."

"If not?" Cole hoped for the possibility his father was right, but the old man's hesitation to state the alternative left him more fearful than ever.

"Then we end up in another universe," he answered rather matter-of-factly.

"Can't be worse than this one," Cole blurted out, studying the tall, thick trees all around him, the overgrown weeds and briars dominating the undergrowth, and the lack of any sign of animal trails cutting through it all. If there weren't even animals living in this supposed world, then what hope would there be of finding other people that might help them?

"You really didn't pay attention all those years," Michael sighed, putting to bed any hope of explaining the situation further.

Jessica, suddenly uncomfortable with the tension between the father and the son, decided to mitigate it by answering for them all. "There are possibly an infinite number of universes, each with their own variations. Many have other versions of an Earth that are different to ours, but many more do not. If we get sent to one of those universes, we won't live long enough to know it."

Cole regretted asking the question. It made his desertion seem like a minor nuisance. Suddenly he wondered what the hell was wrong with his father to devote his life to such dangerous research. This wasn't like the atom bomb which only affected people he didn't really care about, though it had served a purpose (albeit a gruesome purpose). This quest for the multiverse was nothing but a vanity project. There was no purpose in travelling to these other universes, especially when their own hadn't yet been explored. There was no reason to send people away, especially if it could end in death.

The past twenty years was spent satisfying his own ego, and now it looked like it might kill his own son and a grad student.

Yet, Cole knew, sitting in that cell across from him, his father blamed it all on him. Never mind that Michael had checked over his equipment before powering up. Never mind that it was his faulty device that carried them from one primitive world to another before landing in this nightmare. And never mind that it was his rush to test that put this all into motion. As far as Michael was concerned it was his clumsy son who sabotaged his life's work simply by tripping over the power supply.

Chapter P-2

Cole fell back into his thin mattress and stared up at the empty rack above him trying to forget his father in those stains marring the underside. Most were so faded and old, he could only guess if they represented spilt blood or splattered food. He didn't want to think about the bodily functions that might have created them.

The only reprieve those two had from each other came after their arrest yesterday. The guards separated them from Jessica, and despite the obvious language barrier, Michael insisted on arguing over the girl and demanding word of her fate. Cole couldn't stand listening to his concern over his surrogate, but he was afraid to speak up or the accusations would head his way again.

It went on for an hour before the guards finally returned. Michael protested stronger, but the first guard produced some sort of shock stick, sticking it through the small opening and flooring the father with a rather strong jolt of electricity. Cole could contain his humor, but he struggled with everything he had to do so.

But his amusement lasted only until the guard opened the door and pointed for him to follow them. Cole's heart jumped into his throat, wondering what tortures they had for him. At that point it didn't seem there was any way to communicate, so interrogation seemed useless.

It was a shame he thought, since there was no reason to keep secrets. If this really was a different Earth as his father claimed, and if that stupid hopper couldn't get them home, then there was no reason not to tell them everything. Still, Cole followed them out hoping to find some way he might talk with them.

They left the holding area and moved on toward the next door. Every space he had seen was surrounded in bland, gray walls. The only break came in the ceiling which radiated with light. It wasn't that the fixtures were recessed, it was the ceiling itself which glowed in one solid sheet of soft light.

And still, once the guard pushed him into the interrogation room and forced him into one of the chairs around the table, he had not yet seen a single window or any sign of the outdoors.

The guard took the seat across from him and tapped the table, springing the top to life with an image of the shop they had invaded when the hopper brought them to this world. With another tap of his finger, the image went from the two-dimensional representation splayed out like a placemat to a three dimensional model dancing between their heads.

The man said something in his funny language and Cole only stared at him through the image wondering what he wanted him to say.

"I don't know what you're saying," Cole told him apologetically. "Do you even know English?"

The man responded with another incoherent statement as if it were his reply. His posture suggested he wasn't impressed, but wanted his questions answered anyway. As far as Cole knew, this might have been his interrogation technique: to leave him confused to find out what information he might volunteer without direct questioning. Maybe it was the equivalent to letting him sweat it out until he offered his confession. They might have had a translator to interpret Cole's English, or this man might have understood English on his own and played ignorant as part of the act. The best Cole could do was tell him what he knew and hoped that was enough.

"If you can understand me," he began, "this is going to sound strange. Truth is, I don't entirely believe it myself. I'm half expecting to wake up and find out I've been in a strange coma or under some sort of hypnosis. I don't know, but according to my father we're from a different universe."

The guard kind of cocked his head and raised his brow as Cole might have if he heard this claim from that side of the table. All he could do was tell it and let the man decide. Who knows, if they thought he was insane maybe they would throw him in the nut house instead of prison for whatever law it was their entrance violated.

"You would have to ask my father how it's possible. All I know is it's supposed to be like bubbles in a bath. One minute I was standing in his lab, the next we were in some forest. Then we went to some rocky place with harsh air. After that, his stupid device put us in the middle of this place."

He indicated the miniature shop before him, and on cue as if he understood, the guard changed the image to show the same shop with the three of them and their device sitting in the middle of it. Everything that had been sitting where they ended up had vanished. Whether it was sent to the supposed world they had just left or it was obliterated completely, he couldn't say. All Cole knew about their travel method was that it cleared their destination so that they didn't merge with something or crash into something dangerous.

"You guys showed up before we even knew where we were."

The guard said something else, but Cole had no idea what he wanted, or what he could tell this guy.

"If I could understand what you're saying, I would gladly tell you whatever you want to know. Believe me, I'm not interested in playing hero here."

The guard was frustrated, but the door opened behind him before he could voice his frustration. Another figure entered wearing a crimson gown and carrying what looked like a syringe without a needle. She circled the table and took Cole's arm. They had drawn enough blood during his enlistment physical to know what was coming.

Without a needle on that thing, he wasn't sure how she was going to get his blood, unless it was like one of those magical hypo sprays they have in those science fiction shows that draw blood or inject vaccines without breaking the skin. He felt pretty good when she place the tip against his forearm, but that feeling ended when he felt the needle eject from the device and into his skin. Blood flowed into a small vile within the syringe, and when this woman was satisfied, she withdrew that syringe, removing the vial and handing it to the interrogator.

For his part, that man removed the model from the table and set the vial flat on the surface. With a tap, the table sent out some sort of scanning beam into the blood and returned a series of foreign words. If they were trying to identify him, Cole knew he wouldn't be on file, but rather than hinting toward truth of his other universe story, the lack of information only frustrated the interrogator.

The pair argued in their funny language. Though Cole had no idea what they were saying, it was clear the woman had no idea what to tell the man who was dissatisfied with her answers. She finally threw up her hands, grabbed the vial of blood, and stormed out.

The interrogator turned back to Cole, taking a very deep breath to figure out the next step.

If it was an identity he wanted, Cole figured he might as well provide it. After all, there wasn't much he could do with a name.

"My name is Cole Greenburg. I'm a private first class in the United States Army."

He thought about giving him his full name, but it was unlikely it would matter much. Maybe if they pressed him later, he would offer it up, but until then, "Cole" would have to do.

"Does any of that mean anything to you?"

He couldn't tell if it did or not. The man rose from the table and gestured for Cole to follow. Apparently, the man heard enough and decided to return him to the cell.

His reprieve from Michael would be extended as they wanted his father next for questioning. As the old man's absence wore on, Cole figured he must have been spilling his guts about his theories and the complex workings of that stupid device. Though he had long-ago grown tired of the audience of his son, that strange-talking man would give him enough of an opportunity to talk on and on about it all as long as someone feigned interest.

It wasn't until the mealtime that Michael returned to that cell. He seemed almost angry with his son, yet he didn't say a single word. The man simply skulked on his bed while he picked over that strange bar. The so-called food was similar to that which they would receive in the morning (if their sleep cycle truly occurred during night), only difference was this bar reminded Cole more of glue than cardboard.

It was the same kind of bar they received at the end of the second day – their first full day in that cell. By that time, Cole was so hungry, he ate his bar without any regard for its texture or its taste. These people clearly weren't concerned for their needs or their taste buds, so he figured there was no use sticking his nose up at this meal.

It also seemed they weren't interested in further interrogation. The only times they saw the guards on that second day was when they brought the meals and when they were annoyed enough to satisfy their prisoners' whining.

The third day dragged on similarly with no hint the guards wanted more answers. Cole was so sick of his father and his silent accusations, he wished badly for another prisoner to talk to. By that point it didn't matter if the guy was surly, violent, or just plain crazy because Michael had no interest in talking with him. The man would just sit on his rack staring out into space, thinking of magical solutions to their impossible problem. Sometimes he would change things up and lay on that rack. Another prisoner would break that frustrating silence, and if Cole was lucky, maybe the man might be the kind to put his father in his place.

The lights flashed to life on the ceiling overhead to signal the start of the fourth day. Cole heard the door to the holding area open and he went to that small hole in his cell door to take the bars that were coming for the morning meal. While he waited, he heard the latch to this door move.

Maybe they were ready to interrogate them again, or maybe they had decided to charge them. Cole figured with the way things had gone, it was doubtful they decided to let them go. At this point, he had missed his check-in at the barracks. His sergeant would have checked the police reports from the weekend's liberty and discovered his name was not among them. Even if they let him go and his father was to somehow find a way to get them back home, his life was already ruined, so it no longer mattered.

The door parted and Cole found himself looking at two strangers. The man had the same reddish-brown skin of the cops, but the woman's complexion was closer to white – almost a bronze as if she had tanned regularly. Both were older, closer to his father's age, and wore similar gowns to the one the technician bore during his interrogation. Instead of red, their color was royal blue.

The woman handed him a tiny device that looked like an earplug, only a bit smaller. She then pulled one from her own ear, showed it to him, then returned it. After pointing to the one she had just given Cole, the younger man slipped it into his ear. It might not have been wise allowing them to accost him with their strange devices, but during his stay in this cell, no one had really tried to hurt him. Other than the occasional electroshock treatment his father received when he tried to make demands of the guards, no one had given him a reason not to trust them.

The woman watched as he slipped that device into his ear, and when his hand dropped back to his side, she smiled.

"Can you understand what I am saying?"

Cole's utter shock at hearing his native tongue roll off her lips must have answered for him.

"You speak English!"

For the first time in their stay, Michael raised his head toward his son at the proclamation. He hadn't heard English from anywhere but from that boy's mouth. Then again, he wasn't entirely interested in their new guests, so he waited, figuring he missed her speech.

"No," the woman explained. "The translator I gave you allows your brain to interpret my speech into words you understand. I actually speak Greek."

"Greek?"

Michael didn't have the benefit of the translator to hear what the woman was saying. To him, it sounded like two idiots talking to each other in their idiotic ways. He couldn't yet say much for these new guests, but it didn't surprise him from Cole. Rising from the rack, he joined his son by the door to investigate the madness. Before he could even open his mouth, the reddish man handed him one of the translator devices.

"What is this?" he demanded of the stranger.

"Just stick it in your ear," Cole sighed.

Michael bore a look of offense at his son's seeming insult. "Would you try to take things seriously for once in your life?"

"I am serious," the boy insisted. "It lets you hear what they're saying in English. Now stick it in your ear and shut up."

Michael looked from the tiny device to the man, then the woman who returned him a warm smile. After far too much thought, he finally slipped the little earplug thing into his ear.

"That did not hurt, did it?" the woman asked him to his astonished delight.

"It really is!" Michael stuttered. "A universal translator!"

He looked once more to the woman, studying her lighter complexion, looking for hints to her ethnicity.

"What was my son saying about Greek? Who are you?"

"My name is Arank," the man finally spoke. "This is my colleague Eudora. Yes, we are Greek."

Michael studied the reddish man, scrunching his brow with uncertainty. "You don't look Greek."

"Dad," Cole smacked him across the shoulder, speaking from the side of his mouth, "don't be racist!"

"It's not racist!" Michael protested. "Greece isn't exactly a multi-colored society. If I had to guess, I would say he's..." He paused abruptly, turning back toward Arank as the realization of who these people were finally flooded into his conscious thoughts.

"...Indian!"

At that, Arank took great offense. It didn't bother him to have his Greek heritage challenged, but being called "Indian" was the insult.

"I am not Indian!"

"I'm sorry...Native American." Michael rolled his eyes. His students gave him far too much nonsense over political correctness; he had hoped he could at least escape it in another universe. But it was not the PC that bothered and confused the pair before him.

"Do you mean Native Armenian?" Eudora asked him with a twisted look on her face.

But the confusion wasn't mutual for Michael. He seemed to understand their differences, even if he still formulated those differences in his head.

"My god, Cole!" he shouted, turning to his son with more interest than he had shown the boy in years. "The English must not have settled the New World here. The Spanish and the Italians didn't cross the Atlantic, hence these were never the Americas. If they all claim to be Greek, that must mean Greece controls this land. But the Greeks, like the Romans, were not so much colonists as they were conquerors. They would have subjugated the Natives, but left them in place."

Cole merely rolled his eyes at the entire false history lesson. He might not have picked up math and science as much as his father wished, but he did remember the Greeks were conquered more than two thousand years ago. It was a preposterous notion his father proposed, yet had he understood the possibilities Greenburg's multiverse promised, he might have accepted a variation of Earth where the ancient Greek Empire carried on and flourished.

"You mean Greece does not control Lenapehoking where you come from?" Eudora asked their suddenly interested guest.

"I don't know that name," Michael admitted while thinking on it intensely. Something seemed familiar about it but he couldn't initially place it until he dredged through the forgotten corners of his memory.

"Lenape! They were the ones who sold Manhattan..." he stopped himself, afraid he might say too much. If they were to hear how his kind had swindled the Native population in their world and driven them to near extinction to steal the land from them, these people might fear his device portended a similar effort directed toward their world in their universe. Michael realized they had to be careful what he told these people about their Earth if they didn't want to suffer for the crimes of their ancestors.

"You mean Manahata," Arank corrected, interrupting his thoughts.

Michael was in awe. Theories had indicated the infinite size of the multiverse and the certainty that such variations could be found, but to see it for himself – a human society unfolded in a unique and unfamiliar way – it almost made up for the fact that he probably wouldn't ever get a chance to publish his findings.

Cole remained unimpressed and uninterested by it all. They had discovered who these people were and where they came from – mystery solved. The more important question hung in his mind given their situation, and someone in his father's little cabal had to worry about it.

"Not for nothing, but you people don't seem surprised by our story. I'm living this nightmare, and I'm still not convinced my father isn't playing a trick."

Michael was visibly angry at the implication, but Arank and Eudora seemed to appreciate the youngster's to-the-point style.

"You want to know why we're here," Eudora nodded.

"We can discuss that on the way," Arank cut in. "We have secured your release, though the authorities are not exactly happy about it."

"They were about to execute you all for murder," Eudora added.

"Murder!" Cole's skin went pale.

"Yes. There was a man in that shop who vanished when you appeared," Eudora reported. "According to the reports, you confessed."

"I didn't confess to murder!" Cole protested. There were tall tales that his command could be nasty when it came to the tricks they played on misbehaving soldiers. He had seen a few of his fellow recruits punished for various infractions, including the man charged for desertion, but from what little he heard after the facts, there wasn't much to indicate the charges were trumped up in any way. Even if he ever faced the charges for his own "desertion," he never expected they would have to make up supposed facts, or invent a false confession. This kind of worsening nightmare only happened in some of the worst governments on his Earth, unless...

He turned to his father with icy accusation. "What did you tell them?"

"None of that matters," Arank interrupted once more. "Fortunate you are that the report on the incident came to our attention. All that matters is we secured your release on the condition that you help us with our research."

Michael suddenly looked upon their new friends as if he were a star-struck fan meeting his favorite actor. "You are working on inter-universal travel!"

"Correct," Arank told him, "and it seems you have managed to solve the problem that we could not."

Chapter P-3

Arank and Eudora led Michael and Cole out to the lobby where they collected Jessica, already waiting for them; then they headed out and away from that frightful police station.

Michael noted (as he had when they were brought here) that the station opened out into a large, public corridor the way it might have opened to a street back home. As they put it behind them, they passed a number of public offices and such, all bearing nameplates written with two distinct languages, one honoring the ruling Greeks, the other calling to the native Lenape; neither language he knew, so he could only fantasize that they were either predatory lawyers hoping to cash in on the misfortune of their citizens, or true government agencies there to serve the law-abiding public. So long as they were headed far away from this dreaded quarter, Michael didn't care to find out which.

All he knew was the more territory they covered, the more of a mystery this interior world presented to him. Nowhere could he see any sign hinting to the outside world – no windows, no doorway out of this structure, not even a skylight presenting them with a sliver of the glorious blue overhead. It was entirely possible their Manahata was buried, maybe beneath the ice marking one of the world's coldest periods.

Moving into happier places, the walls themselves lit up with advertisements. The words he could no more understand, but he recognized the happy faces, the figures holding some product, and those modelling the latest fashions – the visuals were universal as they were in Times Square. But those ads were everywhere! Like LED billboards with a softer appearance to the lights and colors, plastered against every wall, and where the corridor opened up into public courtyards, they curved around the massive columns holding up the ceiling above.

But not every one of those displays bore advertising. Many flashed what appeared to be public art. Stylized depictions of animals danced across many walls. Wolves chased squirrels. Deer romped through electronic trees. Porcupines shed their quills in what he could only describe as a fireworks-type display.

Tapestries covered doors and served as awnings over the display windows into the shops. Some tried to look like deer or bear skins, others bore graceful lines and patterns as he might find on ancient Greek columns.

At first his eye fell on the Native influences, but the more he took it in, the more he realized the Greek influence was just as strong in the architecture and art. These Lenape may have been conquered and forced into Greek servitude, but over the time they had come to consider themselves Greeks and folded the Greek culture into their own.

He spied depictions of olive trees painted on ornamental amphora serving as public sculpture. He recognized the figure of Poseidon by the trident in the hand of the statue. He assumed another figure was Zeus standing next to one clad in a deer-skin loin cloth likely representing a Native god.

If this place reminded Michael of Times Square, it wasn't just because of all those ads. Away from those dreary government offices, the crowds thickened. Some of those plazas were every bit as spacious as his familiar Times Square, and they were every bit as crowded with people swimming slowly through the crowds, shoulder to shoulder, front to back.

Most were clad in the same single-piece tunic worn by the cops, the medical technician, and these two scientists. The woven cloth reminded him of the Greek influence, while the covering itself seemed to belay a modernized Lenape style. Though the garments were not something usually seen on the streets of his familiar New York, the signs of opulence and wealth were obvious.

Bright colors or elaborate patterns differentiated the well-dressed from the more slovenly in their earth tones. Intricacy in the beadwork on the belts many wore around their waists or in the neckwear adorning most of the women and some of the men announced an individual's status.

Arank had no interest in showing these two what might have been tourist sites. As soon as they had crossed the crowd, he brought them to what could only be described as a transit hub. Housing the structure's elevator system, it more closely resembled a subway platform.

Travelers waited at one of a number of tubes. One took passengers upward, another downward. To the side, another pair allowed travel across the structure. Cars moved rapidly and ever-constantly through the tubes. Some stopped and slid forward out of the traffic while waiting passengers boarded. They were small and apparently private to the traveler and his or her party, but they were frequent enough to accommodate the most impatient rider – as soon as one departed, another took its place waiting to be loaded.

The scientists led the party to one of the tubes heading sideways, leading them into a car once it came their turn. The car itself was tiny, maybe five feet square, with thin benches along the three sides away from the door. The walls were glass, allowing the passengers to watch the sights as they passed. Though once the car returned to the traffic lane and took off, it immediately entered a dark tunnel between the walls. Had it not been for that familiar lit ceiling overhead, none of them would have seen anything in that dark passageway.

With the privacy of their transport, Arank finally broke his silence on their research.

"About eighty years ago our scientists found a way to open a doorway to the other universes out there. When they determined it was stable, they sent a probe through to study what was on the other side. It met the vacuum of space. Unprepared for that kind of environment, they allowed it to take its readings before they cut it loose.

"Subsequent tests found similar environments, so they began to send probes capable of space travel. They were able to collect samples from many of the universes they reached, and return home."

"How do you know you were in another universe," Michael interrupted, "and not in some other part of your own?"

"I will get to that," Arank interrupted. "Not every doorway took them to empty space. In some cases they found versions of Earth where the surface had not yet cooled enough to support life. They found versions of Earth where the atmosphere had been stripped completely off. And in one case, they lost their probe when the world broke up at that very instant from the expanding red sun.

"The research was dangerous, so Athens decided it should remain classified – to be studied only by approved scientists at their discretion. They allowed a handful of teams to pursue the research over the years in hopes of finding a habitable Earth to which we could send a human team, but in eighty years no one has been successful.

"As you know, the odds of finding another universe with another version of this world are astronomical – almost impossible."

A flash of light from outside the car pulled Michael's attention away from his otherworld colleague. For a brief instant – one long enough to recognize the sight, but not long enough to study or appreciate it – the car was outside! The tunnel passed beyond the structure and showed him the space between two buildings. Though there was sky directly overhead, all he saw around him was wall – beige and gray, weathered and dull, concrete or something similar. The structure they had seen from the inside was indeed massive, so massive, he could not make out the ends of the building, nor those of the one they had entered.

Arank could tell he was impressed, but his research was more important. He went on as if he hadn't noticed the brief distraction.

"Not one of the thousands of tests over the years led us to viability, yet according to your statements, you claim success in all three of your attempts. Just the fact that you are here gave us hope, but when we tried to open a portal to your universe, we failed."

"Wait!" Jessica interrupted. Their time in that jail was more difficult for her than it was for the two men. Separated from the only two people she had some familiarity with and thrown into isolation, she had no one to talk to, no one to assure her she would be all right, and no one to at least assure her she had a friend in their ordeal. She sat alone on her bunk for the three days, anxious at every appearance of a guard.

In a different culture with potentially no concept of human rights which comforted her back home every time she would walk through the streets on her way to the university, she was not naïve about the treatment she might receive. She half-expected one of those men to rip off her clothes and force her onto that bed for his own pleasure. At one point during her interrogation, she thought that frustrated guard would smack her around like a ragdoll and force the answers he sought to his indistinguishable questions.

Her mind had created increasingly horrific scenarios for which she had no one beside her to deflate. Each of those three worlds they had discovered seem more horrifying than the last, and none in this little band of theirs wished for home more than she had. It was her anxious mind which seized on Arank's claim first, hoping for the miracle that these people had a way to get her back to her New York City on her Earth.

"You know where our universe is!"

"In a sense," Arank told her. "Once the researchers were able to retrieve samples from other universes, they quickly discovered something interesting. We have known for centuries that there is a certain vibration within the subatomic particles that make up all matter. We have learned that vibration is unique to each universe."

"That's impossible!" Michael interrupted. "If the multiverse is as infinite as we've theorized, there has to be repetition."

"That is what we thought. The variation is so minute, there are in fact an infinite number of vibrational variations. It is conceivable there is overlap somewhere in the multiverse, but in the eighty years we have had to work on this, we have not found one. When we searched for the vibrational frequency of our own universe, the only connections we made were to those where we left our probes."

At that, Michael's eyes went as wide as his assistant's hopes. "Are you implying what I think?"

"Yes. That vibration allows us to map the multiverse and navigate it."

"Not for nothing," Cole jumped in, "but if that is true, how come you can't find a habitable Earth?"

Arank smiled at him as he might a first year student. "You cannot set a course for a single island in the ocean if you do not know where it is. We have to find and map these universes before we can go to them specifically."

Michael shook his head, muttering "idiot" under his breath. He was a firm believer in the saying that there are no stupid questions, only stupid people; and his son seemed to demonstrate it more than most.

The space outside flashed once more as they passed to yet another of these massive buildings. The scientist was too embarrassed by Cole's question to notice it, but Jessica had seen it coming and turned her head to study as they passed. She marveled at apparent size of these things; each one about the length of a full New York City block, and likely just as wide. Maybe a quarter mile square, and she thought they climbed just as high if not higher.

As they had seen from their brief trek through that first super structure, each one might have been an independent, self-contained city, bringing the concept of live, work, and play into the confines of a single structure. Just as many in New York lived their lives without ever having to leave the city, people in this world might never have to leave their home tower.

Like before, her brief glimpse was over before she could truly ponder all the meanings. They were indoors once again before the distraction disturbed the science lesson. Arank continued with his speech before he lost anyone's attention to the wonders outside their glass car.

"I admit we took the results of the blood analysis the authorities made to place your universe in our map. Like I said though, when we tried to open the doorway, we could not reach it – we ended up in another universe entirely.

"Next we wondered if we could integrate our technology with yours. We had your device sent to our lab, but it cannot accommodate the targeting array. Our current theory is that we have a flaw in our technology that actively blocks us from habitable universes. While yours seems to seek them out.

"If we had time, we might be able to dissect both devices and eventually find the difference that solves our problem, but we do not. Thankfully for us, this project has such a high priority, we were able to secure your release in the hopes that you could help us understand your technology."

Cole glanced down to the large letters spelling out "Army" across his chest. He may not have understood the technical aspect of their research, but he understood the urgency this Arank had just spelled out. It had never portended anything good during Basic when it was announced that time was short. Even in conflict, the worst wars were always undertaken in haste. And he never knew any society to seek help from one deemed inferior unless the deal proved later to be a disaster for the lesser partner.

He had been taught to keep his mouth shut in a prisoner-of-war scenario. All they were required to give an enemy was name, rank, and serial number. Any other information, or even an innocuous request of their captors could draw unwanted attention and possible torture. Though it burned within his stomach to learn what their hurry was in this project, that training suddenly pounded at his head to keep quiet.

In a way, he was thankful his father didn't have the same good sense.

"If you don't mind my asking," Michael spoke up, "why the urgency?"

Arank deferred the question to his partner.

Eudora leaned forward on her narrow bench, offering her expertise to this group once more. "The world's population officially hit one hundred billion last year."

"How the hell do you have that many people?" Michael shouted, too surprised to give her the chance to explain. "This world could never support a population that large, no matter how good your agriculture is."

"Which is why we do not rely on agriculture," she told him. "Most of our food and water is artificial."

"Even so," Michael cut in again, "there isn't enough material in the Earth's crust. I doubt you could even collect what you need from space to accommodate the demand."

"Then I can assume your world does not have the ability to manipulate matter at the subatomic level."

"You mean like a transporter?"

"A transporter cannot accomplish what I speak of," Eudora told him with a smile. "We can physically dismantle an atom and rebuild it into an entirely different element. We do not need to seek out certain elements, because we can create whatever we need from the elements we have.

"We have the ability to take the atoms and join them into whatever form we please. If we wish to produce squash, we simply 'assemble' a squash. We do not need to grow food because we can create it."

"There is still the energy problem --"

"Not for us," she cut him off. "We can store and recycle the energy given off when we split an atom, just as easily as we can store the individual electrons and neutrons until we need them again."

"Incredible," was all Michael had to say about it all. "No wonder your population is so massive."

"Yes," she agreed. "Unfortunately the population has been growing too quickly. Every year we move closer to our maximum production capacity, and the advancements that allow us to expand that capacity are not coming quickly enough. The gap between our demand and our capacity shrinks annually. We predict we have less than two years before the demand exceeds our supplies."

"Surely, with rationing," Michael offered absent-mindedly before Eudora cut him off.

"Our people have never known rationing. They have not suffered hardship, at least when it comes to resources, in more than ten generations. Though we live by a free market, Athens has decreed all citizens receive basic food, clothing, even housing. It is not an offer made exclusively to the poor – it is not a system of welfare as other empires have experimented with. Everyone receives the basic necessities of life so that they can choose to spend their currency on indulgences.

"I must admit it has created a sense of entitlement among the people. If we were to institute cutbacks to the distributions, the population would not understand. Many would think the explanation was nothing more than a cover – that the cutbacks were but an excuse to line the pockets of a corrupt regime. There would be riots in the plazas, clashes with the police. Local governors would have to call in the military to contain the violence, and I am afraid it would not look good to those who initially wait out the chaos.

"Our sociologists predict three major empires will fall to the masses. Two more are uncertain. Both Greece and Rome will lose the inter-continental territories. War will eventually break out as fear grips the world and some of the surviving rulers see opportunity to expand their borders.

"By the time the situation stabilizes, experts predict as much as forty percent of the world population will be lost, and it will be a full century before infrastructure is rebuilt and industry fully restored. I can guess by your surprise to our world that yours does not carry forty billion people."

"No," Michael punctuated with a slow shake of his head. "We only have six billion."

"So you can see our urgency," Eudora went on, "when we expect to lose six to seven times your entirety."

"What do you hope to accomplish?" Cole asked nervously. For an empire built on conquest and expansion, even he understood their only hope was to conquer one of those other Earths, perhaps his own. To expect their help, they were gambling on ignorance to steer this group.

"It is not what you think," Arank tried to assure him, sensing some of that fear. "The infinite size of the multiverse and the sheer number of variables in play mean there are far more universes in existence without another Earth. Those variations on Earth itself mean there are far more uninhabited versions of the world than there are those with human life on the surface.

"Our hope is to send off a billion colonists to each of those Earths. They will use their worlds' natural capacity to feed them and the strain on this world will be gone."

"The beauty of that plan," Michael noted, "is that you can create a new colony on a new world when the population is in danger of exceeding your production again."

"Yes," Eudora agreed. "It will be tough for the colonists, but we can easily spin it in a way that makes the move desirable. Otherwise, we would have to target worlds with existing infrastructure. As you noted, your world has so many people already, any war we might fight to conquer them would prove just as bloody as if we did nothing and stayed home – there is no benefit."

That seemed to satisfy Cole who used the remainder of the trip to study the dark tunnel outside and the brief moments of light as they passed between the buildings.

Michael too, seemed satisfied. He spent the remaining time discussing the help these Greeks wanted from him. With his understanding of the hopper, they hoped to integrate his technology with theirs, and similarly theirs with his. With a single, completed device, they could establish their colonies, and he could return home and continue his own explorations without fear of getting lost again. He hung on every word his translator delivered from Arank's mouth, all the while thinking of the Nobel Prize he would win and the big check that came with it.

Chapter P-4

Jessica Fulton inspected the lock on her door for the third time since she was left alone in this apartment, tracing her finger over what she assumed was a fingerprint scanner, and wondering how secure a lock it really was. There was no knob or handle by which she could open the door, but like every surface in every portion of these buildings, the face of the door lit up with a menu of options. Thankfully for her sanity, whatever system controlled this unit had been instructed to display in English.

It wasn't the smooth English her brain discerned from that translator which presented itself to her. As the professor had to remind her, with the Roman Empire still in control of Western Europe, the Normans had no opportunity to invade the British Isles. In this universe, the ancient form of English never merged with the Norman's French to evolve into the language they were familiar with.

The translators in their ears did have the capacity to study the speech centers within their brains. It learned their native language while it facilitated the translation, and Eudora easily sent those findings into their new homes. The computer was able to present all commands and instructions throughout the home in something approximating English, but there were flaws in the translation. The Greek woman assured them it would learn as they interacted with the home's controls, otherwise, they had little choice but to put up with the strange spellings and faulty grammar.

Jessica had little desire to interact with the door's operation. She merely wished to verify that it was indeed locked. Though her smartphone had allowed her to do quite a few things back home, it was still strange for her to trust her security to a device.

She thought about the security in her walk-up in Queens. That reinforced door at the entrance had a metal piece over the edge where the bolt entered the frame to assure her that no one could jimmy the door open. The callbox for visitors comforted her that no one without a key could gain entry unless one of the residents knew them. This door had nothing reassuring other than that fingerprint scanner and the display telling her "door sekured."

She closed the display and stepped away, taking another look around this space of hers. According to Eudora, they had been assigned to a block of housing reserved for faculty, somewhere in the middle of the structure.

Normally these units would not have been granted as "free" units under the guarantee their hosts had described. Citizens looking to "upgrade" would pay a premium for the extra space and added luxuries. However, from what Jessica could gather, this entire building was devoted strictly to government-sponsored projects deemed so important, even crucial, the researchers and their staffs were granted the upgraded units as part of their compensation packages.

Michael had whispered in her ear that it was not an entirely selfish reward. If the staff were to rent outside the building, there was a risk they might discuss their project with outside civilians. By keeping the entire staff so close to the work, they could ensure there would be fewer leaks on some of the more sensitive research.

It suited Jessica just fine. She had to adjust to navigating the layout of the individual floors and subsections within the one building; she didn't want to think about having to find her way across multiple buildings until she had a stronger familiarity.

New York City was tough enough to navigate her first week in town. Though most of the streets are numbered, she had gotten hung up many times trying to get used to the directions in which the numbers ascended and descended.

Subway stations were not so easy to locate for someone more familiar with biking everywhere back home; and getting used to the strange numbers and letters identifying the individual lines gave her a headache at times. She didn't want to admit how many times she ended up in a station only to find the line she sought was serviced at the station two blocks down. It also didn't help that she had to make two separate transfers on her way to the university in Manhattan.

In these strange buildings, all she had to do was find the elevator and head up or down. As far as she was concerned, she could walk across the building and the entire "commute" would pass without the headaches she might suffer trying to travel across the buildings.

Her eyes danced about the apartment for the tenth time. Electronic artwork covered each segment of the walls. If she wanted, she could change the display on each panel to display individual works or she could set them all to show her a single, massive piece. If she was so inclined, she could simply instruct them to display a solid color approximating the walls in her old apartment.

The panels could also display entertainment or news. She might query the public database on one of her walls. She could open a communication to Michael's apartment, or she could call Eudora if she had a question.

If she didn't want to work on the walls, she might use the coffee table at the center of her living room. Jessica slid her fingers delicately over the smooth surface which provided all the same functions as those panels lining the wall. One difference was that the table also had the three dimensional capabilities she had seen at that police station. She might bring up a model of the building to give her a better understanding of directions.

Those interactive surfaces were everywhere in this world: kitchen counters, tabletops, closet doors, shower walls, and even the mirrors. The entire apartment had been designed with a level of customization she had never dreamed possible.

But the exploration couldn't go on forever. Though they were allowed much of this day to clean up and rest before the work started in the morning, they were expected to attend a dinner in the evening, sort of a welcome-to-the-project affair where they would meet the other researchers, hob-nob with the local officials hoping to boost their status, and get to know each other in an informal setting.

First, she was determined to get the dirt and grime off her body and out of those clothes.

According to the apartment's instructions, the "washing machine" was located in the master bathroom.

_That can't be very convenient_.

She thought of the noise it must generate and how it would keep her up at night if she forgot to run the cycle during the day. When she located the device inside what she initially thought was a linen closet, she wasn't sure if it made any noise at all. Or if it could even clean her clothes.

Her hands opened the device and picked through the hangers, studying the clips that must have been for her socks, the towels, the wash cloths, and anything else that couldn't simply hang from those thin metal rods.

_When in Rome_ ...or Greece as the case was. She stripped everything off her body and placed each piece of her wardrobe on a hanger. When she closed the device's door, she studied it, expecting a menu to tell her what to do next. She swiped her finger across the surface and still nothing.

She sighed with a sideways glance at the frustrating machine, then shut the outer door that had hidden it from her in the first place. That faux-wooden panel brought up the menu she desired, much to her relieved delight.

Several options were presented, forcing her to think about her garments for the first time. It wasn't as though she had ever bothered to separate her things when washing them in her building's laundry room. Even if she cared, it seemed like someone in that building was always washing their clothes. And with one of the two units always broken, it got to be quite a waiting game. Had she kept the whites with the whites, and the delicates separate, she surely would have ticked off the neighbors with all those cycles, trigging the building's first laundry wars.

When she saw a selection for "mixt," she shrugged and selected it. _They deserve a little TLC_ she figured.

With that decision out of the way, it was time to try the shower stall. Jessica slid the thick glass door open and stepped inside. Like every other device in this apartment, there were no knobs – nothing tactile to make her hands feel useful. That left her to wonder which wall would give her the menu for drawing the water.

She settled on the one directly under the showerhead, and was overjoyed until she glanced around and realized there was no soap or shampoo or whatever passed for a cleaning agent in this world.

Of course!

What did she expect? It wasn't as though her apartment in Queens came furnished with soaps and shampoos. This wasn't a hotel, so she looked to the menu on the wall, figuring this would be a water-only shower.

A disappointing thought until she actually read the menu. The options told her the soap was in the water!

It wasn't quite soap per se. Jessica couldn't tell what was in that water, but it felt magical. She let that silky water dance across her skin and massage her tight muscles. The heat was just enough to melt her nerves and carry her thoughts off to nirvana.

She tried to remember the last shower she took.

How long were we on that rocky world?

How long were we in that forest?

That shower was too dreamy to let her worry about the math, but the thoughts about "when was the last time..." reminded her of the last time she had called her mother.

She was no undergrad freshman, calling every week like clockwork, missing the home-cooked meals, the free laundry service, and the doting concerns. Those calls had drifted to once every other week, then once a month by the time she pursued her master's.

At this stage, those calls home came whenever she had time. When Dr. Greenburg didn't need her in the lab, she had to focus on her own thesis. There was no time to hang out with friends, and there was certainly no time to call home for a variation of the same conversation she and her mother always had.

The more she thought about her mother, the more envious she grew of Michael and Cole. At least they had ended up in this mess together. Neither was alone like she was.

To her, Michael was the professor. They had a very friendly repore in the lab, but in this lonely shower, she didn't forget that was all he was to her: he was the teacher and she was the lowly grad student.

Cole was too young and far too immature for her tastes. They didn't even have anything in common around which to form a friendship, and heaven forbid those researchers fail to meld the two devices into a single functional unit. It was just too icky even considering he could be her only choice for companionship should they be stuck wandering aimlessly across the multiverse forever.

It won't come to that.

She was certain Dr. Greenburg could make their technology work. She was certain they would get home before long. Her doctorate would wrap up. NASA would come calling. And she could woo one of those cute, nerdy astronomers.

A change in the water texture told her this shower was about to wrap up. She considered telling it to run another so that she could draw out this pleasure, but the wall ahead of her flashed with a message that someone was at her door.

Jessica fumbled with the screen panicking when her fingers traced wet marks across the surface; afraid she might short it before realizing it had to be waterproof to reside inside her shower.

The screen was only marginally helpful in how to deal with it. She began to panic that her clothes were not yet clean, or more likely not even dry, leaving her with the very frightening prospect of answering while wrapped in a towel. Then she noticed a list of options toward the bottom for answering.

Does this thing have video?

She shuddered at the realization there might be a camera in her shower, drawing a new round of alarm that someone might hack into it to watch her in all her steamy nudity. The option to send a text-only message to her visitor allowed her to push those thoughts from her mind.

The exchange back and forth, told her it was the others collecting her for the dinner date. She sent them a hurried message that she would need a few minutes, praying those clothes were already dried.

She pulled the panel aside and opened the machine, wondering how the two men handled their laundry while thinking she had to somehow get herself another set of clothes for variety. It was certainly a turn of events from that morning when her only concern was worry over what those guards were going to do with her.

Her fingers touched her jeans, expecting the worse. When they came back drier than her own skin, a squeal of delight escaped her lips. She raced to towel herself off and slip into the fresh clothes. Studying her reflection in the mirror, she then lamented the absence of eyeliner or some lipstick – even a brush to tame that damp, blonde mop disgracing her skull would have been welcome. Arank and Eudora and the rest of their guests must have understood their situation, but it did little to tamp down the embarrassment of presenting herself as she looked in that glass.

Jessica opened the door on the party waiting patiently outside. To her delight, Dr. Greenburg had his lab coat wrapped around his patterned shirt and pressed khakis. Arank seemed to have dressed casual with a sleeveless vest over an unusual pair of brown pants, while Eudora seemed dressed for a toga party.

Then there was Cole, proudly sporting that tan Army tee shirt tucked into a pair of tan cargo pants bloused over his boots as if he was about to march off into a recruitment poster. They might teach those boys discipline in the Army, but they sure didn't teach them any fashion sense.

Chapter P-5

Cole remained overly conscious of the advertisement sprawled across his chest. He knew some of the ancient city-states revered the warrior culture, especially Sparta, but somehow, he didn't think his love for the movie 300 was going to help him fit in with this world.

He hadn't yet learned if these people still respected and glorified their military. For all he knew, they no longer had need of an armed force. If these researchers understood the word across his chest, they might have been holding him in silent contempt.

There wasn't much choice when it came to wardrobe. It wasn't as though he had time to pack a bag for this trip, and somehow the rucksack carrying the belongings he had brought with him from Fort Benning didn't make the trip with the rest of the crap from his father's lab. Until he had an opportunity to procure a new set of clothes, he was stuck with the billboard.

His sergeant had stopped him on the way to the bus, warning him he might want to reconsider his civilian attire. The man even went as far as to call him and some of the other boots "motards" for broadcasting their service to the world.

Cole understood the point the saltier dogs made, he really did. It wasn't as though he had proven his worth. He hadn't yet gone out on deployment and "earned the right" to call himself a soldier as some of the other sergeants barked. There were even accusations from some of the senior enlisted that boots like him went out to the civilian world to fish for that occasional appreciation from people who couldn't tell the true war heroes from the states-side boots.

None of that played into Cole's choice. He wanted nothing more than to throw his service in the face of all the New York liberals who quietly rued his generation's habit of blaming the politicians for the wars, not the soldiers. He could see every time he was in a Panera Bread or a Starbucks or a Chipotle and someone played one of those videos too loudly on their cell phones or tablets – the ones where a soldier comes home from overseas and surprises their unaware children – or when someone in uniform happened to walk in that many of those faces had a look of disgust twisted on them. It almost offended them when someone approached and offered a "thanks for your service," that they could not approach and spit on the individual as they had done when their own generation returned from Vietnam.

And in Cole's mind, it wasn't as though he paraded around in his full uniform as some of the others in his platoon were apt to do. Sure, the shirt was authorized for PT, and he could get away with it under his desert Alphas, but the cargo pants weren't regulation. They might have reminded one of those uniforms, but they didn't sport the camouflage pattern those uniforms pants bore. He might have been a motard in the sergeant's eyes, but really, he wasn't that "motivated."

If it bothered their hosts, they didn't show it.

Arank and Eudora had led them to one of the lifts and taken them up almost sixty stories higher in that massive structure. The five of them stepped off and headed into a plaza ringed with restaurants. This must have been the entertainment district in this building, and Cole wondered what other kind of entertainment they had to offer around here.

Still, those translators didn't translate the written signs describing each venue, so he was just as lost in navigating this district as he had been in understanding those guards without that magical device.

The plaza itself bustled, but it was nowhere near as packed as those they crossed when their friends led them away from that jail that morning. The crowds were small enough where the public space had a more relaxed feel to it.

People hung out by the massive columns. Couples kissed around the fountain. Some even watched the ads roll off the pervasive billboards.

As they neared one restaurant, there was one woman in the entire crowd who caught Cole's eye. Her skin was reddish like Arank's and her hair was jet black, pulled back behind her head. She appeared to be a teenager like him, but her plain, almost out-of-place clothing with streaks of dust layering the dull gray of the cloth, and the broom resting in her hands while supporting her weight as he passed her by suggested she was there as custodial help and not as a tourist.

Their eyes locked and hung on each other while they passed. Hers were piercingly dark. Though it might have given her an ominous quality to anyone else catching her attention, to Cole they were almost mesmerizing. Yet there was nothing mesmerizing in the way she watched him back – almost as if she were studying him.

Cole had been so used to being a white male in a white world, his skin color never entered his mind. It was never a feature that left him sticking out as an oddity as it did in this world. The pale Greeks stood out against the red Lenape in much the same way, but even their skin had a tinge of olive which differentiated them from him – and there were more of them within the population so that someone like Eudora was not the oddity Cole and his father were.

Cole considered she probably never saw someone as pale as him (he had to admit, despite the hot Georgia sun, he was awfully pale, even for a white boy). His eyes fell away from hers when they had passed far enough ahead that he could no longer crane his head without being obvious.

His group had reached the restaurant they were after anyway, and Cole was hungry.

Inside, he spied the rest of the guests waiting for them. They rose from the large table set in the middle of the restaurant to greet them and introduced themselves.

Of course they already knew their escort Arank who was the lead scientist on this project, and Eudora the sociologist and liaison to Athens.

An older woman introduced herself as Wawetseka. Her title didn't quite translate, but she was the equivalent to a lieutenant governor for Lenapehoking (the actual governor being detained with a prior commitment). Like many politicians back home, she seemed kind of worn and tired, as if she had been waiting years for her turn at the state's helm, only to be frustrated at every opportunity that arose.

Rowtag was a junior to the project, second to Arank. His face was as leathery as Arank's and his expertise matched his age. Michael would be working with him whenever Arank had to step out, but otherwise, he was expected to deal exclusively with Arank.

Chogan and Lysandra were the equivalent of lab assistants. Though they had their own degrees in the Greek version of astrophysics, they were still relatively young and therefore required to put in their time under a more experienced scientist as an apprentice might with a master. Like Jessica with Michael, they were still trying grasp the intricacies of fieldwork.

The last individual was also the most curious. "This is Huritt," Arank introduced.

The young man circled the table to shake their hands, making sure to approach from Jessica's side of their group. He was about her age, younger than either Chogan or Lysandra, but he was more "athletic," as Cole thought, not really wishing to admit to a stronger adjective. Like the other men, he wore a plain sleeveless vest, but his arms filled it out more flatteringly. He left it open across the chest to show off, and it was obvious to Cole that Jessica was very impressed. Her eyes studied the slicked back hair and the square jaw.

Huritt took the young woman's hand and kissed it delicately while keeping his gaze locked with her starry eyes. "It is a pleasure to meet you," he said. The actual voice sounded smoother than the English translation that came through the earpiece.

"I'm Dr. Michael Greenburg," the old man said, extending his hand for the courtesy.

But Huritt did not take his eyes off Jessica's, nor did he release her hand. Cole couldn't help but notice Jessica's blushing cheeks. They practically lit the room by themselves, and he had to roll his eyes while noticing the slight smile Arank offered for their display.

"Huritt comes to us with a background in temporal mechanics," the lead scientist added to get Michael's mind off the unintended slight.

Cole's father dropped his lonely hand and studied both the scientists quizzically. "Temporal? Are you saying you can travel through time as well?"

"Not at all," Huritt told him softly without removing his eyes from the magnificent woman standing before him. "From what they tell me, each of your universes offers a glimpse into another time. Those worlds offer unique histories unlike our own, but they are glimpses into a past nonetheless."

"Sometimes the future," Michael noted.

"True," Arank said, taking his seat as an invitation to the rest of the group.

Cole really didn't want to take a seat next to his father, but their hosts didn't leave him much of a choice. The servers came around to take their orders, and he decided to distract himself on the décor rather than risk making eye contact with Michael. The voices around the table were loud enough that he didn't miss anything.

"I must admit," Huritt spoke to the group while his eyes returned once more to Jessica seated squarely across from him, "that I do not entirely understand the concept of your multiverse. If these other universes exist, where are they and how do you expect to travel to them?"

_Like bubbles in a bath._ Cole doubted anyone on this project had the same trouble grasping these concepts as he had. More than likely, it was a subtle test of how much his father understood; and the man was all too happy to show off his knowledge once more.

"We have a number of theories," Michael began, "as to the nature of these universes and where they've come from. The most popular suggests that they exist in the same plane of existence, but they are slightly out of phase with each other, that by piercing some dimensional barrier, we can cross from one to the other without truly leaving our lab.

"Other theories suggest that they are collections of matter separate from that which we consider our own universe, and they aren't far from the truth. Think of the multiverse as a collection of bubbles in a bath. All of these distinct universes spring up beside each other within the larger fabric of empty space.

"That fabric by itself has a distinct texture which gives rise to the new universes, but once a universe forms and corrupts that texture, a new universe cannot form within it. The edge of each universe also has a bit of surface tension which holds back the neighboring universes. It is not impossible, and it will happen that the surface tension can break just enough to allow two universes to merge into one giant universe."

"If that is the truth," Huritt wondered, "then how is it possible to travel to these other universes when we cannot cross our own?"

"Simplistically speaking, the matter of these universes acts in much the way soap does when you add it to dirty water: it repels the foreign matter in the water. In a sense, all we have to do is reach that surface membrane and the universe itself will propel us around and away and into one of those other universes.

"Now, as your scientists have discovered, it can be dangerous. You could end up anywhere within another universe. Worse, you could end up sliding along the surface of each bubble until you reach the end of the multiverse where you may never be able to pick out your own from that infinite sea of bubbles."

"But you still have to reach the edge of your own universe first," Huritt insisted.

"We're already there!" Michael exclaimed. "When a universe begins with a Big Bang, all the matter is thrown outwards in all directions at a near constant speed. It all rides the edge of that shockwave and occupies the outer shell of the universe in much the same way all of your buildings rest on the edge of the Earth's surface.

"The universe seems three dimensional to us, but it is only so in the way that your city is three dimensional – You do not build all through the crust going down to the core and you do not build these cities rising into space. Relatively speaking, your cities are rather flat, and thus is the nature of the universe.

"But like the Earth, that universe is a spherical structure. There might be little within the sphere, but we can see through to the part of the universe that occupies the far side of the sphere. And like the Earth, if we could travel clear across what we perceive to be the universe, eventually we could go all the way around that sphere and return to Earth without having to turn around and backtrack.

"Since we are already at the edge of the universe, we really don't have to go anywhere. The device I designed creates a field that is repellant to the surface tension of our bubble. When I untether that field, the universe itself makes the trip possible."

It was Wawetseka who interrupted next with her own supposed confusion. "I must admit I do not understand how we can see the past by going to these other universes."

"In my world," Michael sighed, "science fiction likes to use the cheat that the entire multiverse was created at the same instant – that each universe exists in the same moment of time so that we might see how our society would look if one event played out differently – but that is not the case.

"These alternate universes are constantly springing into existence, so no two will ever share the same moment in time. You and your society might represent a moment in history a thousand years ahead of my calendar, or you might live a thousand years in my past – we won't know for sure until we actually calibrate our separate calendars.

"But you saw that for yourselves when you said past researchers sent a probe out to witness the destruction of the Earth during the sun's red giant phase. And we saw it when the first two worlds we visited represented Earth at different points in its very early history.

"Now, I theorized that when a universe springs into existence, the neighboring universes develop shortly after. The very first universe sits at the center of the multiverse while the new creations spread from it in much the same way a universe expands from that central point of the Big Bang. If I'm right, it means all neighboring universes will line up more closely with yours than those at the far edge of the multiverse. And if our two worlds are separated by a thousand years or less, then we would be relative neighbors in the multiverse."

The servers brought the food and the discussion fell to silence. Glasses fell to the table. Napkins went into laps. And forks rose to prominence as each one became anxious to sample the chef's creations.

The natives of this world took the first bite without much thought. To them, this food was familiar. The Lieutenant Governor might have been used to more lavish meals, while the scientists were probably eating familiar foods presented in a way that elevated it above their means.

Before Cole sat a cut of salmon topped with beans and squash with a drizzle of lemon juice and a few spices he wasn't familiar with. It might have all been standard food he had remembered, but he would never have thought of topping salmon with beans and squash.

As he sliced his fork through the flaky fish and brought the first bite to his lips, he was reminded of what Arank said about their food being manufactured. He was curious as to what fake food tasted like, and the twisted expression broadcast his answer.

"You don't like it?" Arank asked.

All eyes looked up at him from their own plates, and he could already hear his father's voice in his ear berating him for embarrassing them all. It wasn't that he didn't like the fish and he didn't want to offend his hosts with the thought it was so.

"I don't hate it," he offered trying and failing to choose his words carefully. "It just tastes different from what I remember. There is something strange about it and I can't quite place it."

"It is the manufactured nature of it," Wawetseka noted. "No matter how closely we are able to duplicate natural food, there is something in the flavor we can never seem to capture. Most people, all they have ever known are the manufactured products, so they do not realize that flavor is absent. They are used to it and like it. But for those of us lucky enough to have indulged in a natural cut of meat or a natural vegetable, we find it hard to enjoy this. Do not feel bad, my boy. I know you do not find it 'bad,' merely 'disappointing.'"

Cole smiled at her attempt at kindness, but still he didn't want them to feel he bore insulting thoughts toward their generous meal. "It reminds me of the veggie omelet in our MREs – tastes nothing like veggies or eggs."

Michael nudged him with a sharp elbow hoping to silence him before he made a bigger fool of himself, but Eudora leaned forward in her chair, anxious to hear more.

"What is an MRE?"

"Don't!" Michael sneered in his ear, but Cole simply ignored him. His father was merely upset that he was no longer the center of attention.

It did not escape Cole's notice that the man swam in the attention those Greek and Lenape eyes fixed on him when he shared his stupid theories on this whole multiverse. His pride and his ego practically exploded across the table as he got to share his life's endeavors with an eager crowd. Even Cole realized these people knew those theories, and they probably had a better grasp of it all than his father did.

Now that those eyes were fixated on his son – his disappointment – he couldn't stand it. Somewhere in that hard head of his sat a refusal that Cole had anything of interest to offer these geniuses. Everything had to be about him, and the man loathed the idea that someone so inferior could be at the center of attention.

Cole only too-happily indulged their hosts' curiosity, if for no other reason than to frustrate his father.

"Meal-Ready-to-Eat. They're shelf-stable, pre-packaged meals our military uses in field ops when we don't have access to the chow hall."

"They sound like the protein cubes our infantry carries," Chogan noted. "I take it your _MREs_ have been formulated to resist chemical and radiation weapons."

"Of course not!" Cole blurted out with undiplomatic surprise. "Chemical weapons are illegal. And nuclear weapons are too destructive."

"Illegal!" Wawetseka blurted with a similar lack of diplomacy. "How can anything be illegal in war?"

"We have treaties," Cole went on. "Our leaders agree not to use those weapons because they hurt the civilians as much as the armies – and they're inhumane. Chemical weapons don't just kill the enemy, they torture them slowly. They're designed to inflict needless misery."

"But that is the point of war," the Lieutenant Governor asserted. "When all else fails, you have to show the other side how bad their situation will be if they do not capitulate. How do you expect the civilians to abide by your authority if they do not share the pain of defiance?"

"We don't," Cole admitted. "It's not worth the trouble to assume direct control over another country. Our politicians figure it's easier to install a friendly leader and let them worry about the day-to-day operations. Besides, they can't work for you if they're dead or the whole population suffers from chronic disease."

"Perhaps your armies were using the wrong weapons. Do you not have weapons that will simply render the other side unconscious? Instead of killing the other side, you put their army to sleep and force the leaders to quake at the sight of your unopposed forces marching to their door. Or if death is your goal, why do you not have a toxin that kills without torture? It seems to me, Mr. Cole, that your leaders lost the stomach for true warfare. It sounds as though they turned their backs on an entire class of weapons before they truly unlocked the potential.

"And as far as the population goes, they will never be 'innocent' until they are made to accept any new order. When the Greeks first showed up on these shores with their guns and their missiles, my ancestors did not trust them in the least. They were not interested in trade or friendship; they made it clear the Lenape were to bow to their leaders and pay them tribute. We would never have capitulated had the Greeks merely targeted our chieftains. My ancestors had to see how brutal those warriors could be before they surrendered."

Michael leaned in and whispered his disgust once more into his son's ear. The conversation had veered into territory that would have been uncomfortable in their own world, and he wasn't about to allow Cole to destroy the cooperation these people were willing to offer.

But his objections were overheard by all around. Both of the paler Greeks sat up straighter wishing to interject their opinions into the discussion, but Wawetseka waved them to keep silent as she herself was all too happy to educate their guests on their politics.

"I am sure you will satisfy your curiosity eventually, so why not hear it now? Your assumptions are correct that our ancestors struggled with the arrangement, but the truth was if they had repelled the Greek forces, they would have succumbed sooner or later to the Roman invaders, or the Malinese, or possibly the Chinese. Though they abhorred the idea of paying tribute to any foreign power, the benefits of the relationship outweighed the inconvenience.

"The Greeks gave them medicines to protect against the diseases they brought over. They brought over European crops to diversify their diets. They introduced Greek technology to allow them to till their fields with greater speed, sow their crops with greater density, and preserve their food to better get them through the harsh winters. They helped defend our territory against our jealous neighbors, and kept their wars off our soil.

"My ancestors might look upon the cities we have built for ourselves today with their most reviled disgust, but it is these cities that have allowed us to support our population without spoiling every square of our land. If it were not for the Greeks, we would not have one spot of Nature left to cry over after the destruction these urban centers would have wrought across the landscape. And had they not waged war against all Lenape instead of just the politicians and soldiers, we would still be fighting the Greeks to this day instead of appreciating all they have done to advance our culture.

"We are not ashamed of our heritage, we celebrate it; and the way it sounds on your world, you do no favors to those other cultures in trying to spare their civilians from the horror of your wars."

The conversation continued on military matters as these people were intensely curious about the other ways in which the other Earth carried on their wars, but Cole quietly admitted Wawetseka's opinion of the Greek conquest left him wondering how things might have been different in his United States had the Natives been forced to assimilate, instead of suffering extermination and relocation.

Also By J.J. Mainor

The Depot-14 Series

The Americium Shipment

Best friends Jakarta Jones and Colton Wells own and operate one of fourteen supply depots in orbit around the planet Durango. Today proves to be a bad one when an armed gang boards the depot, taking them and their clients hostage while they wait for a cargo ship carrying a valuable load of americium. To keep the hostages alive, the pair must bide their time and wait for the right opportunity to strike back. But as the cargo ship grows ever closer to the station, can they find that opportunity, or will they lose the americium?

Broken Saber

When Colton goes down for murder, it's up to Jakarta to find the evidence that will free him.

Family Vengeance

After returning home to settle the estate, Colton learns his father's death was murder. Now he must fight his own desire for revenge to avoid becoming a murderer himself.

Crash Landing

A security job turns into a fight for survival when a passenger ship crash-lands on the hostile world of Hen. While Jakarta struggles to defend the survivors, her biggest threat may not be the natives.

Revenge With a Kiss

Jakarta falls for a traveler Colton doesn't like. Are his feelings justified, or is it a case of simple jealousy?

The Freedom Reigns Series

The Siege of LX-925

In the early 23rd century, four nations dominate interstellar travel. Their programs have remained a mystery to the people of Earth, including their own people, and the UN wants to know why. Previous inspectors have yielded little insightful information. Dr. Remy Duval is the latest to venture into the unknown.

The Republic Ship Freedom has been ordered to remove a group of defiant miners from the dead world LX-925. As Remy marvels over the advanced technology at the crew's disposal, he quickly understands the horrific downside to these wonders. Risking everything, Remy schemes to bring a peaceful end to the standoff before it escalates into genocide.

The Vorman Insurgence

Broken and humiliated, Remy Duval must play the defeated prisoner to the sadistic Colonel Freedom while he plans his escape and return to Earth.

The Colonel and his crew are after answers to the uprising on LX-925 when new orders send them to TL-311, a planet recently conquered from an alien race called the Vorman. Half his lieutenants are sent down to the surface with their own teams to test their leadership. The mission: to seek out and eradicate any Vorman that remain behind.

With half the staff remaining behind, Remy expects to get his chance to take over the ship and make his escape...until Colonel Freedom sends him down to the planet with Lieutenant Anders. When things couldn't get any worse, they find out too late there are more than just a few Vorman waiting on the surface.

The introduction to Hell is over...now it's time for Remy to burn.

Subject D-20

When the Acerna threaten an Independent Union facility, the RS Freedom is called in to extract the Republic's liaison. During the mission, Remy Duval witnesses the most heinous act yet, and decides he's had enough. With a new ally by his side, he takes advantage of the growing chaos to attempt a mutiny.

Aliens get aboard, a spy runs loose, and to top it off, Major Sadile's medical experiment, Subject D-20, escapes the medical bay; the sadistic Colonel may be the least of Remy's worries. But one thing is certain: failure means the end of the road for the UN inspector.

The Fifth Fleet

With the Freedom under his control and repairs nearly complete, Remy Duval and his small crew of rebels find their plans to return to Earth placed on hold when a Vorman ship discovers their location. His old friend Sake seeks peace, but determining his true intentions will expose everyone's secrets and betrayal. However it will be the Republic's largest secret, the Fifth Fleet, that threatens all his dreams of peace.

Freedom's Wake

Remy Duval's one chance to save Earth lies in navigating the Freedom across a deadly patch of concentrated radiation known as the Crucible. His sanctuary lies in a hidden dimension while the ship travels unguided. But when a race of mechanical beings slips aboard and threatens their plans, Remy and his crew must suffer exposure to repel this new menace.

Target: Earth

The race is on! Remy Duval must rely on every trick and tactic picked up during his long ordeal if he expects to stop the Vorman attack on Earth, but first he must deal with his own demons and the nagging fear that to win the day, he must sacrifice the last bits of his own morality. In the end, he may be more like the monsters he spent his life prosecuting than he cares to admit.

The Timberlands Series

Timberlands: Blood and Prey

After witnessing his brother's death and fleeing from the killer in the woods during a camping trip, Gunner returns to the remote timberlands of Northern Maine with three friends to recover the body. He feels he's ready for the killer this time, but he's not ready for the surprises the forest hides.

Timberlands 2: Fatal Friendships

A real estate agent selling the timberlands finds eight trespassers searching for their missing friends unaware that the curse of the timberlands has transformed one of those missing friends into an angry killer.

Timberlands 3: Inferno

A team of hotshots move into the timberlands to battle a wildfire, but they march straight into a grudge match between two killers battling for dominance – and bodies!

They Knew

An ancient race called the Oegyein once ruled this galaxy, but today, very little remains of their empire. Most of what we know is the stuff of legends and myths.

When Tau Bello discovers an ancient ship floating in the cold emptiness of space, it proves to be but the first clue in a treasure hunt that promises to unravel those legends and myths. It is a hunt that attracts a lot of unwanted attention, and for some, those promises are worth killing for. Tau quickly discovers the real treasure may not be untold riches or vast scientific knowledge, but his very life!

Dione's War

A generation after the Vandals wiped out Earth's population, a tenuous peace has settled in between the Vandals and the few survivors to have escaped Armageddon. Many of the refugees have accepted Vandal rule as Loyalists while the rest have held onto some sort of independence in the Opposition Colonies.

Dione Pafford lived with her parents as Loyalists, mining their tiny and desolate moon. While on a survey mission to a previously unexplored corner of that moon, she discovers the wreckage of a long-crashed Earth warship and its lone survivor: Jack Corbitt. It is a discovery that upends the peace and finds her people once more hunted by an enemy who has grown too powerful. To survive extinction, Loyalists and Colonials alike look to Dione as the entire conflict becomes her personal war.

The Greenburg Timelines: Prisoners of Utopia

Cole Greenburg wanted nothing more than to see his father one last time before his deployment to Iraq.

Jessica Fulton was a semester away from earning her doctorate in astrophysics and attaining a promising future with NASA.

Michael Greenburg was close to completing his life's work on his theories of multiple universes when his device sent the trio out prematurely, leaving them to wander the alternate Earths aimlessly.

Their one hope to get back home and resume their normal lives lies with a world more advanced than their own.

On an alternate Earth where the Ancient Greeks still rule and Natives still dominate the western world, technology has placed society on a course for self-destruction. Their hope lies in expansion and Michael's hopper promises to open up new worlds. In exchange for access to other, uninhabited, alternate Earths, the Greeks offer a path home; but as the group realizes this advanced world is not the utopia they believed, and the people are not the altruists they presented themselves as, Cole risks everything to fix their mistakes while his father tries to open the door for them to leave before their time runs out.

USS Krakowski

Disgraced Lieutenant Jace Modeen takes a team aboard an alien drone ship for what should have been a routine mission of study and discovery. But it quickly becomes his chance to demonstrate his leadership and redeem his past mistakes when he learns the ship heralds a larger attack force with a world-shattering origin.

Are There Heroes In Hell?

The long-awaited follow-up to USS Krakowski!

Nearly 40 years before Jace Modeen and the USS Krakowski saved the Earth, the Arctic Wars dragged the world's nations into a conflict so brutal, old friends become enemies, and old enemies become monsters.

USMC Lance Corporal Jackson Freebourne served on the front lines before his position was overrun and he was captured by Canadian forces and sent to an icy prison. If the elements don't kill him, the guards might, and the only chance for survival involves keeping his head down and staying invisible. But it is hard to stay invisible when torture and death are the rules of the day.

Compared To What

Hades Garden is a small town in legal limbo. It has become a safe haven for criminals looking to start over. As long as you're in town, state and federal law can't touch you, but break the laws of Hades Garden and you're out

Dale Ridgewick comes to Hades Garden with the cops on his tail and a bagful of cash in his truck. Trying to start a new life, he buys a house, finds a girlfriend, and gets a job. But when a workplace rivalry threatens the peace he seeks, Dale harnesses his dark past to wage war, unaware his nemesis harbors his own deadly past.

Plantation

A murderous ghost stalks the guests and staff at a bed and breakfast.

