Dark Energy: The Mortal Fracture

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MISSION

Research Center – 2011

Martin watched as Sade and Wasi exited the air control tower and approached his position. His eyes locked onto Sade and he studied her every move trying to dissect out any clues to her reaction to his presence. Everyone that had been involved in Martin’s plan had known that at some point the time would come when all old debts would come due, and today was that day. Martin, on the other hand, knew that he would be met with opposition, resistance and even outright hostility, especially from Sade. To his surprise, however, she walked towards him in an almost excited cantor. In fact, her body movements indicated that she was glad to see him. Well, maybe not glad, he thought. “Accepting” perhaps was a better word for it.

Sade and Wasi stopped in front of Martin as the rest of Martin’s team continued to offload supplies from the airplane. There was a silence between the trio that froze the already frigid air.

Then Martin broke through the emotional ice with a simple statement, “We need to talk.”

This was all that Martin could squeeze out of his throat, but this seemingly insignificant phrase set into motion an unstoppable chain of events that sealed the fates of all involved and the future of the world that they lived in.

#

Biological Research Laboratory – Arctic Research Center

Martin and Sade stood in the lab facing each other like two Old West gunslingers who were once partners in crime and now each stood on opposite sides of the infamous “line.” They sized each other up trying to identify strengths to be disabled and weaknesses to exploit. They were alone in the lab but the glass window that looked into the room gave Wasi and Datz the opportunity to witness the intense interactions between them.

“What do you want?” Sade asked.

“I need to know just how far your research has come,” Martin stated.

“You already know what I have accomplished. What more can I say, Martin?”

“Granted, but I need to know what you can do, how this treatment has impacted your vision. I need to know what you can see,” he said as he locked the door to the laboratory and engaged the lab’s window shutters.

As the metallic shutter system locked down over the window, Wasi and Datz were disconnected from the events in the laboratory.

“What are you doing?” Sade asked as her heart rate increased.

Martin turned back to face her as someone she hadn’t seen in years. He looked younger, more sincere and more emotionally rooted. This was the man that Sade had loved, but she knew that this persona was no longer the dominant one in his repertoire of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personalities. She knew it was only a façade and soon he would shift back to the dangerous and manipulative entity that dominated his being.

Martin sat down, his eyes darkening with the weight of his intentions. “We’re in big trouble and I need your help. They want a demonstration of the serum’s ability and I haven’t been able to produce any lasting results with my team.”

“How is this my problem?” she asked with a sneer.

“They know that this is your brainchild. If I can’t present them with something that is anything less than miraculous, then they are going to kill me and then they are going to come up here. They own the project, so they can take it from you at any time they want.”

Sade was devastated by this piece of information. “What do they want from me then?” Sade asked trying to find the best way out of this trouble.

“They need a field demonstration,” Martin began as he pulled out a mobile device and brought up a tracking application that was focused on the continent of Antarctica.

“I’ve been tracking a large meteor that is made up of Xterra 657, and from what its trajectory indicates it is going to make landfall in Antarctica. All you have to do is help us find it.”

“How do I do that?”

“I discovered that the enhanced low light acuity serum that I used expands the spectrum of visible light to include a frequency that just isn’t detectable with existing machines. There is a biological component that is necessary to “see” it. When the mineral is pushed into the surface of the planet it occurs at a molecular level, so in essence, it passes through the mass of anything that gets in its way. The only way to track the movement of the negative mineral mass and to capture it is to track the antiradiation trail, which also is found within this hidden frequency.”

“If you were successful with your serum why do you need me? Why don’t you just use your guy?” Sade asked.

“Because the effect wore off and I can’t get it back,” Martin said revealing that he was the test subject and possibly the only person on the planet to have witnessed antiradiation. “I’ve run out of time and I need to know if you can see what I saw. If you can, then all you’ll have to do is track the ghost signature for us and we’re in the clear.”

“That’s all they want from me? I do this and they stop breathing down my neck?” Sade asked suspicious of the simplicity of the request.

“That’s all they want from you,” Martin responded. “Will you do it?”

“If it’s the only way then I don’t really have a choice,” Sade said. “What now?”

“I need to examine you and see how the serum has impacted your physiology.”

“Okay, I guess there’s no time like the present. Where do you want me?” she asked.

“Right here is fine,” Martin responded as he set up his equipment.

Sade pulled off her sweater and undressed in front of him. He watched as she revealed each inch of her flesh to him. It had been a long time since he had last seen her body. She rarely allowed herself to be this vulnerable, especially in front of him, so in these rare moments of intimacy he was rapt with a hunger for her.

Once she was stripped down to little more than her bra and panties she hopped up onto an examination table and waited for Martin to begin his examination. Martin moved next to her and stared at her body. Her skin was pale and smooth. Martin’s eyes poured over every contour of her body searching for anomalies between what he saw now and what he knew before of her body. There were scars and discolorations on her body, but these things were not viewed by him as blemishes but rather as delectable qualities of her body that made her beautiful. She had remained nearly the same since he last saw her skin, the last time he touched her.

Sade’s impatience for Martin’s touch made her body tense and her stomach ripple with anticipation. Fighting her attraction to him, she forced her emotional defenses into place and blocked every feeling out. Her body relaxed in response to her new stability and she stared at him as she would stare at an unimpressive painting, disconnected and disenchanted.

Martin nervously removed medical instruments from a bag and examined Sade as he asked, “Are you having any side effects?”

“Not anymore.”

“What about Wasi?” Martin asked hopefully.

“What about Wasi?” Sade asked as her body tensed from the touch of a cold stethoscope on her side.

“Is Wasi experiencing any side effects of the treatment?” Martin asked as he poked and prodded her body.

“Wasi wasn’t a test subject,” Sade clarified.

“The others that participated in the experiment then? There were others, weren’t there? You didn’t just experiment on yourself…did you?” Martin asked as he removed the stethoscope from his ears and allowed it to hang around his neck.

“I thought I’d have more time to experiment. I needed to figure out what would work before I tried it on anyone else.”

“Shit,” Martin said as he dropped his face into his hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t want to use just you. Not for this. This is too important, and I can’t…That was what Wasi was for, to…”

“For what?”

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said knocking the medical bag to the floor and stomping off.

#

Ice Pack Arctic Ocean – Midnight 2007

The flesh and blood of the massacre floated in the salty brine like Matza balls in a bowl of chicken soup. Under the surface of the water, the bodies of the men involved in the incident were drawn deep into the frigid abyss of the Arctic Ocean, their lungs weighed down with heavy seawater, and their bodies contorted by the near-freezing temperatures of their liquid tomb. As they sunk, scraps of their clothing ripped from their bodies and floated to the surface where it comingled with the whale carnage.

Nanoq and Taq continued to dry off and to pull on warm insulating layers of clothing as Martin perched over them like a vulture. He was a scavenger of human desperation and he fed on it like haute cuisine. Nanoq and Taq tried to conceal the true cause of their tremors as they waited for Martin to reveal his intentions. Martin, however, was in no hurry. He knew that the longer they waited the more intense their anxiety would become and the more starved for relief they would grow.

Looking around at the crime scene, his eyes bounced from object to object in the water like a bird hopping from lily pad to lily pad, trying to find something for its dinner. The damage of the scene quickly tallied in his head and he understood that the two survivors of this incident would need bailing out, so he offered them a solution.

“It looks like you boys have gotten yourself into some trouble here,” Martin baited.

Nanoq and Taq looked at each other trying to determine if Martin was waiting for a confession or something else.

“From what I see here you can each expect some time in jail and a large fine, maybe six figures,” Martin said as he delighted in the terror that was filling the souls of the two desperate men that stood in front of him. “If you can’t pay it then the government can take your land, your property and garnish any payments that are owed to you in the future.”

Taq squirmed in place as he thought about how he would be able to take care of his wife and how he would pay for her extensive medical treatments. This would kill her, both emotionally and physically, as without shelter and the medical care that she needed she would be dead within the year.

“I can make this all go away,” Martin enticed them like the devil that he was. “I have substantial influence in important circles and I can make this all look, well, like an act of God.”

“What about the men that…” Taq started but was cut off by a sharp jab in the side by Nanoq.

“Died?” Martin continued. “I can take care of that. It is pretty easy to disguise the deaths of such a small group of people. Things don’t get challenging until the body count is over a million,” he chuckled sadistically.

Martin was right. He had become extremely skilled at accounting for lost lives. It was second nature to him now. In this situation, he could just create a few data sets that supported his report that what caused the deaths of the pod of whales and the men was the eruption of a natural gas pocket. He would report that when the pocket erupted under the Arctic Sea it blew up the whales and broke up the ice pack. As a result, the men were exposed to the toxic fumes knocking them unconscious and subsequently drowning them. It would be a piece of cake, especially with recent seismic activity to the west.

“How much will it cost…to fix it?” Nanoq asked.

Martin smiled as he knew that they now belonged to him.

#

30 Miles East of the Arctic Research Center - 2011

Kim trekked away from the private airstrip that was located about 30 miles east of the camp. As he pushed against the wind and snow, his body ached with memories of the last time he was where he now called “home.” Flashes of disturbing images of his bear attack replayed in his mind. He could feel the breath of the bear on his neck, the force of its heavy paws pinning him to the ground and manipulating his body and the sound of his heart beating through every vein in its body.

The smell of cold metal, salt and ice from his gear made him think of Sade. They had been through a lot together and she had always provided him with what he needed to survive. Despite this fact, he had betrayed her and he was desperate to right this wrong before he died. This desperation urged his broken body on as he mounted a snowmobile and plowed through the snow.

Kim’s snowmobile raced across the ice, but he couldn’t fight the feeling that something was pulling on his back. It was as if someone had snagged his jacket with a fishing lure and was reeling him in. Kim glanced back over his shoulder and saw the headlight of another snowmobile appear on the horizon, then another and yet another. Soon he was being followed by a caravan of ten snowmobiles.

A rifle was fired into the air launching a warning for Kim to stop. He ignored this warning knowing that he was running out of time. Then another shot rang out, and another and it was this last shot that shoved Kim forward with pain. He lost control of his machine and he crashed into a frozen lump of upheaved ice crushing his sternum into the handlebars. Blood and saliva poured from his mouth as he wheezed and gasped for his breath.

A couple of minutes passed before his pursuers were upon him. One of the men dismounted his snowmobile and walked over to Kim, drawing his gun as he walked. Kim struggled to remain conscious as the man pulled him off the snowmobile and tossed him to the ground.

“Wait,” Kim forced out of his mouth.

The man drew his gun on Kim who was now lying on the ground drowning in his own fluids. As Kim’s vision focused on the armed gunman standing over him he realized that this man was Nanoq.

“I have to get a message to Sade,” Kim pleaded. “I have to…”

Nanoq understood the urgency of this pleading, but he had no intention of missing his chance to be rid of his debt to Martin. Nanoq squeezed the trigger slowly drawing the hammer closer to its fatal anvil.

“Wait, you don’t understand. He’s not telling her the truth. You have to listen to me. He’s not telling her the truth!”

The sound of a single gunshot rang out, racing over the ice flow and out to sea where it was consumed by the dark and the cold, just as Kim’s message of warning had been.

#

In Orbit Around the Planet Earth – 2011

High above the blue orb that floated in an elliptical path around the sun, the predicted “blessing” appeared. As it traveled through the vacuum of space, its volatile contents emitted a trail of negative mass which was propelled ahead of the meteor by the antiradiation energy that it also carried. To the naked eye, however, the meteor seemed normal with a gaseous trail flowing behind it. The antiradiation and negative matter that broke the trail ahead of the meteor was invisible to those looking at the sky above Antarctica. That is to all except for those that knew what to look for, a minuscule anomaly in the electromagnetic signature of the object which was shifted into a parallel frequency.

#

Antarctica

As the meteor hit the atmosphere of the Earth, the heat melted away its rocky crust and shattered its exterior shell. This stripped the volatile object of its protection and allowed its dangerous personality to come to a boil.

Aboard Martin’s research vessel Necalli monitored the trail of the meteor as it descended toward the frozen continent. His electronic data showed that the meteor was going to strike the continent near the crater of an ancient volcano that was covered with three miles of ice. Just as predicted, the meteor hit the ground and was immediately sucked into the ice through a stream of anti-radiation that projected against the resistance of the ice. This unusual force reacted molecularly with the ice spreading apart its atomic mass allowing the extraterrestrial anti-matter to pass through the solids with ease. After the object cleared, each molecule returned to the normal arrangement of its particle alignment and it appeared as if nothing had happened.

On the surface, there was no sign that a meteor had struck except for rock debris that was strewn in a scatter field. Below the surface of the ice was another story. The heat from the atmosphere had initiated a chemical reaction that was releasing anti-matter that was propelled forward by antiradiation. However, as the object traveled through the polar ice it cooled and the reaction slowed and became magnetized. This drew the remaining solid structure of the meteor towards the magnetic South Pole as it approached the rock/ice barrier. When the meteor penetrated this barrier Necalli lost contact with the object as its EM signature again shifted out of the range of his equipment and expertise.

Necalli frantically tried to manipulate the electronics so that it would lock in on the meteor, however, nothing worked. Pushing back in his chair, he spun away from the monitors that were flat-lined. As he wallowed in his frustration, the stillness of the vessel was broken when it lurched to the port side and then the aft. Necalli fumbled for the desk to steady himself as he entered codes to see what was going on. Seismic activity went off the chart near where the meteor had made landfall and it sent shock waves through the Earth’s crust.

#

Arctic Research Center – Biological Laboratory

The laboratory was dark and still. Martin administered an eye examination to test Sade’s new visual sensitivities. He shot a laser into the dark and asked, “What do you see?”

Sade followed the trail of the laser beam and found where it terminated at a wall. “The number six,” she replied.

Martin made a note and shifted the laser to a new frequency. He again shot the laser into the dark creating an invisible light path. “What do you see now?” he asked wondering if she could see in infrared.

Sade saw the infrared beam that was flowing through the darkness. Again she followed it to its point of interception at the wall and saw the number four. “The number four,” she replied, getting bored with the game.

“Interesting,” Martin said as he made a note and adjusted the laser to a very special frequency. “And what about this one. What do you see?” Martin waited with bated breath nervous about what results this final test would produce. “Well…what do you see? Anything?”

Sade shielded her eyes from the “light” that was streaming from the laser. As it hit the wall, the light penetrated through it leaving no reflection. “I can see the stream but it isn’t terminating at the wall. It looks like it is going straight through.”

Standing up she followed the path of the particle beam to the wall. Then she entered the next room and saw that the beam had penetrated the wall and continued to the cold storage where her meteorite sample was contained. She opened the door and saw that the beam bent to make contact with the sample. This is where the beam terminated and reflected the image, a cross.

Martin entered the room and asked, “Anything?”

Sade closed the doors and lied, “No. It keeps going. It doesn’t seem to want to reflect off anything. What frequency was that?”

Martin’s cell phone rang cutting his attention away from Sade’s question. Stepping out of the room he answered the call. Sade tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but the message she intercepted was too cryptic to fully comprehend.

“Yeah…Shit…We’ll be there within the day.” Martin disconnected his line and returned his phone to his pocket. Sade stood in front of him waiting for information about what the call was about.

“That was Necalli. It’s made landfall, the meteor, and we’ve already lost its trail. We need to get down there quickly. Necalli said that there has been a lot of seismic activity in the area which means the meteorite is breaking up. We need to get there before there’s nothing left to find.”

“Okay, so what do we need?” Sade asked.

“Something I was hoping to avoid, one final treatment to amp up your results.”

Martin rushed to his bag and began mixing up a new serum to give to Sade. The serum was thick and made up of a variety of different components. Sade sat down in a chair and watched Martin nervously concoct his potion.

“The good news is that since this serum has a half-life in the blood of 268 days you will only need a single treatment. The bad news is that you are going to feel like you are being burned from the inside out for the next six hours.”

Martin shook the beaker to gently mix the volatile ingredients avoiding all eye contact with the recipient of this mixture. He couldn’t bear to look at her now, to see the fear in her eyes as this would make him reconsider using her, but this had to be done. If the mission were to be successful, he needed to use her.

Sade let out a heavy breath as she propped her arm up on the counter. “Will you stay with me then?” she asked.

Martin’s body froze in response to this question. “Of course,” he replied.

This simple response melted his anxiety and allowed him to draw a syringe full of the serum. He then wiped Sade exposed skin with an alcohol pad. She grabbed Martin’s arm stopping him from injecting her. “Wait, what’s in it?” she asked to satisfy her need to control some aspect of what was going on.

Martin stepped back and realized that she was just as nervous as he was and that by explaining the properties of the serum he would give both of them a moment of detachment from the pain and suffering that was to follow. This would make it science and not personal, for both of them.

“The new mixture contains retinaldehyde, the antibody, telomerase, and neodymium chloride.”

“Telomerase?” Sade asked.

“It is an anti-stress hormone. It should help to protect your immune system and the neodymium chloride will help you to focus more easily on the antiradiation/anti-matter particle beam. There is nothing in here that will kill you, I promise. It’s just going to hurt.”

Sade grimaced at this revelation and looked nervously back at him. Martin caught her gaze and assured her, “I went through it and survived, and we both know that you are a hell of a lot stronger than I am.”

Sade laughed nervously. She then realized that she was still holding Martin’s arm keeping him from proceeding. She released his arm and nodded, signaling the start of the treatment.

#

After five hours of excruciating pain, the side effects of the treatment finally began to subside. Sade lay on the floor resting her head on Martin’s lap as he stroked her hair and tried to comfort her. It was apparent that they had both were exhausted from the experience.

“You know I’m doing this for you. This really is a gift,” Martin said trying to convince both of them that this was all for a good reason.

“I’d prefer flowers” she retorted as she began to regain her strength.

“I’ve really missed you,” Martin said as he bent down and kissed her forehead.

“How long will you let me live?” Sade asked trying to get some answers out of Martin before he shifted back into a more guarded mood.

Martin was silent.

“I know we are reaching the end of all of this and I just need to know when it will happen,” Sade said desperately.

“Don’t worry about it,” Martin told her. “It will only make it worse. Just try to enjoy what time is left.”

The snap in his voice told Sade that he was now fully possessed by the monster that he long despised.

#

To be continued...