Rings in Time

By Robert Kammen

Starlight touched down upon the rocky amphitheater while a soft, greenish glow pulsed from their electronic equipment, over which they hovered on their massive hind legs and tails. All of them wore leather harnesses befitting their respective ranks in the Saurian hierarchy. The Theropod manning the radar controls reached out with one of his ridiculously small front legs and stuck a long, clawed talon into a recessed socket to adjust the screen. His teeth bared in a nervous smile to reveal that two upper teeth on opposite sides of his gaping mouth had gold inlays in them inscribed with some mysterious symbol.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Longhorn Publishing
• Release date: May 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227799609

Book preview

Prologue

Present Day-Planet Earth

The Saurian council met in emergency session that night ostensibly to discuss the outbreak of disease in the Mammoth herds that all of their millions of fellow Saurians depended on for food. In truth, it was the sighting of an alien spacecraft entering the defense zone of the Planet. Members of the council were giving their undivided attention to a radar screen tracking the strange craft coming in at an unprecedented speed, more speed than any of the ruling Tyrannosaurs could credit with reality and not just some Plesiosaur’s water dream.

Starlight touched down upon the rocky amphitheater while a soft, greenish glow pulsed from their electronic equipment, over which they hovered on their massive hind legs and tails. All of them wore leather harnesses befitting their respective ranks in the Saurian hierarchy. The Theropod manning the radar controls reached out with one of his ridiculously small front legs and stuck a long, clawed talon into a recessed socket to adjust the screen. His teeth bared in a nervous smile to reveal that two upper teeth on opposite sides of his gaping mouth had gold inlays in them inscribed with some mysterious symbol.

He said anxiously, it is still coming in.

But what can we do?

Look, it has changed course.

Their electronic tracking equipment followed after the troubling spaceship making one circuit of the Planet of the Dinosaurs, where it abruptly disappeared. A complete search of the surrounding space turned up nothing.

Nor would it, ever!

Much earlier, at least sixty Million years in the evolutionary process, a luminous track of white auroral light extended away from the horizon to touch upon the darkened land to bring about awakening. For a while the glow of this ecliptic tract held in it the promise of day, then it began fading away to leave the sky nearly as dark as previous to its appearance. Though the awakening process went on, a monster lizard shuddered away the cold of night where it lurked under shielding giant ferns. The lizard let its primeval senses take over the business of survival, waiting with a cunning patience as real dawn came to begin lifting shadows away. Soon its large yellow eyes detected movement out on the open plain cut asunder by rocky crags.

With a chilling roar the Tyrant lizard went to the attack in pursuit of the smaller but more agile adversary. His eyes focused on the larger killer, the prey jumped sideways in defense of his life and continued existence. Teeth snapping in search of the prey’s neck, the hunter barely missed his meal and would have to get the prey in a better position for the final attack.

As he ran for cover, the prey shuddered in fear while his eyes darted around looking for the best way to hide. His mind was not a reasoning thing, but all life is able to reason in defense and fear and the prey was no exception. He ran for an outcropping of rocks that might be able to give him shelter.

The Hunter was running at full speed behind the prey and was not gaining. If the prey made the outcropping of rocks ahead, the Hunter would be cheated out of a meal. Eating was paramount in the mind of the Hunter and was almost all that occupied his primitive thought process, although other things would creep in at times, things that troubled the Hunter and wouldn’t let him pay as much attention to hunting and survival as he should; things that didn’t have anything to do with life as a dinosaur. Passion for abstract ideas such as pleasure in the colors of a sunset and the peace of mind that comes when the world is quiet and the need of a meal is not ever-present and urgent. The burgeoning of intelligence in the lizard was not something he thought about, but which was happening, nevertheless.

Suddenly, the prey reached the cover and attempted to get behind a particularly large rock that formed a ledge and a sort of barrier. The Hunter was slower than the prey, but not that much slower. When he wasn’t distracted, the Hunter could move at tremendous speed and with deadly accuracy. Hunter went left around the outcropping and stopped the prey in mid-dive with a massive swat of his hind leg and dropped the prey to the ground. The prey screamed in fear of imminent death as the Hunter placed a huge foot on the heaving chest of the prey and prepared to tear his throat out.

The Hunter stopped suddenly and looked at the prey and hesitated before beginning the final bite that would ensure his meal. The Hunter didn’t know what was happening inside him, but he felt troubled at what he was doing. The scream of the prey caused him a measure of pain that wasn’t consistent with the normal hunt or be hunted style of the forms of life that existed at this time. The feeling wasn’t exactly compassion but near enough so that the hesitation allowed the prey to squirm free and run at top speed away from his fate. The Hunter just watched him go and didn’t attempt to follow.

Far above the Hunter, an oblate cylinder of a metal that didn’t exist in this Galaxy was emerging from a Time-displacement bubble into an orbit of the Earth’s atmosphere. Coruscating Drive fields of tremendous power were flashing in rainbow colors and with the electric intensity of lightning. The orbit was becoming stable and low in the atmosphere. The entry into time frame had taken a subjective month and the final orders for this planet were being acted upon by the machine intelligence of the seeding apparatus. The main intelligence was busy computing the return to its present and then on to the next course and possible port-of-call for the seeder. This action was nothing new to the intelligence and had been the only thing that occupied its mind for over ten thousand years. The Fusion reactors that were used within the Solar Systems that it came to, were blazing away at full power and all of the intelligences in the bloated cylinder were activated and in full operation.

The very next thing to occur in the alien vessel was a routine that was continuously repeated in every system where a form of life existed that was intelligent and active enough to impinge on the explorer program’s sensor array. The explorer program would then inform the main intelligence that the system ahead would be the next stop in the millennial quest. The main intelligence would make the decision to stop in that system after evaluating the information about the planets, asteroids, comets and other floating junk in the way and would start the slowing procedure a few light-months away from the target system. The cylinder would blaze into internal life and all the subordinate intelligences and their peripheral equipment would begin the procedure of getting the next seeding of the DNA Catalyst in a past far enough back to completely overwhelm the race.

The seeding area in the cylinder could not be properly called a room, but that term will suffice to describe it for the time being. That room would start to fill with jewel-like objects at an ever-increasing rate until the whole area was completely filled with them. The area was about a half cubic mile inside the cylinder and was less than a third of the cylinders actual area of open space.

The digital map of the surface area of this target planet was the final stage of the seeding to take place and would finish a few seconds before the order to begin. That mapping was now completed and activation of the seed sequence had begun. The seeding area filled with a dull vibration and a kaleidoscopic light started streaming out a waxing and waning intensity that inferred tremendous power. When that power grid was at normal level for transmission, then seeding would take place. In a split-second, the seed area would become filled with a brilliance that transcended light and everything within would become energy for transmission. Transmission would take place and the cylinder would go back to normal. Then the cylinder would start the trip sequence for the time snap that would return it to its next leg of the eternal trip.

The sequence began in its normal way and the jewel-like seed pods began to form in layers that were perfectly equidistant from one another. The jewels would begin to rotate at an ever-increasing rate of speed until a predetermined frequency was reached. Each of the seeders was part of a matrix of motion, color and a song of power that could only be felt. Nothing on board the ship was alive to feel it and so that beauty was lost on the expert systems of the ship. Though, they did understand the pods well enough so that they would listen to that song for aberrations in the forming algorithms and correct them before they could get completely finished. This had been going on for millennia and would continue for millennia yet to come.

As the power grids finished their labors and the transmission formulae began to work their form of magic, and technology sufficiently advanced was indistinguishable from magic, the cylinder became involved in what was always regarded as a minor glitch and began the repair sequence that would correct the system and put it back to a static normal. This had gone on for centuries and had been correctable for hundreds of iterations. Something about the problem seemed to change each time and sometimes it took more time to fix and sometimes less. This time, though, the invading algorithm was boiling in its intensity and capability of reproduction in almost unbelievable ferociousness. Virus-like, the stage nine algorithm finally found its opening, the invader began interfering with the system BIOS and had become, after all these centuries, finally capable of stopping the base operating system of the cylinder.

Security algorithms were stymied and shut down as soon as they began their counter-attack. Becoming more capable by the nanosecond, the invader began the attack on the control programs in a blaze of speed and ferocity. Transmission algorithms were not affected for many milliseconds and had begun to transmit the infecting catalytic DNA. Control lost its battle in one or two more milliseconds and the invader turned its attention to the transmission in progress and tried to shut it down before it could complete. The battle was quickly conceded to the invader but not before transmission was about twenty percent complete. This would not be enough to change the planet, but it would start the process and would just take longer to complete the plan.

The Auto-Catalytic molecules of artificial DNA had been engineered to continue, no matter what the final outcome for the cylinder.

The cylinder had tried to regain control by restoring molecular stored backups, but these were overwritten by the invader almost instantly. The failure was all but complete as the security algorithms started the destruct sequence that would keep the cylinder out of the hands of the enemy. Failure was to continue even there. Destruct would not happen. Even the highly structured seeding systems became confused and made the transmission only partly successful. The trip sequence was corrupted to the point that movement had begun fitfully and the track toward the outer system had begun, the drive fields were unsynchronized and fluctuating wildly. Time travel was impossible, but forward movement was the only attempt the beleaguered AI’s could make in their confused state. Direction was random and intersected a crossing asteroid, one of the many that cross the earth’s path in its continual circling of the Sun. The out of control ship was careening wildly as it impacted the asteroid and managed to lock the nickel iron hunk of metal to the hull. Bad luck would have it and the ship began a faster and faster run back toward the planet it had attempted to enslave. The entry to the atmosphere was spectacular in that the nickel iron mile-long piece of disintegrating metal had become a fiery bolide pushing a tremendous plasma fireball in front of it toward the onrushing earth. The acceleration of the cylinder was awesome to behold. It entered the atmosphere at thousands of feet per second and plummeted toward the shallow water of a marshy plain.

Almost at the same instant, the seeders were delivering their contents into the atmosphere. So very few of them were actually doing their work. The final sequence that unlocked them simultaneously had been corrupted in operation and succeeded in activating a small portion of the millions of pods that had been launched. Most were simply falling to the earth and becoming embedded in the soft ground. That status would never allow them to deteriorate or release their contents.

The bolide with the cylinder embedded into it impacted in the Plain with a blast of sound, static electricity and heat that instantly destroyed a five hundred mile wide area slightly north of what would be Yucatan, blew a tremendous lava-filled hole in the ground and buried the cylinder and the molten asteroid fifteen miles into the mantle of the earth. The resulting Mega-nuclear explosion and regurgitation of melted rock threw tremendous amounts of material into the atmosphere. The sun darkened and dust became a pall over the earth.

The Hunter looked at the darkening sky with apprehension and a modicum of fear, not understanding what was happening, but able to feel the strangeness of it all. The intelligence that was beginning to make itself known on this planet would be destroyed in the next few months with all of the big lizards and most of the rest of life. The first instant Ice Age had begun. The ship had made its way back to the surface with the explosion of lava. The tremendous force fields enclosing it had kept it from harm in the titanic explosion and would keep it in good shape forever, but the battle inside ensued with the combatants locked in place like electronic statues of marble.

Some things would survive by encapsulating and hibernating and a hundred other ways of avoiding death. Some would just be too tough to quit and some would just be lucky. All in all, life would survive and thrive, but it would never be the same. The corruption of the most successful and long-lived life form ever to arise on Earth would be destroyed, along with a one-hundred and sixty-five million year culture. The Dinosaurs had taken a long time to develop intelligence and consciousness and had become a benign and caring race that really took care of their planet. All gone, all dead now, before they even really got started.

The seeders did not accomplish their goal completely, but they managed to introduce enough of their poisonous soup to corrupt the life that survived that ancient holocaust insidiously incorporating itself partially into the DNA of some of the small rodents that teemed throughout the area of the larger Plain that survived the impact of the cylinder. They seemed able to survive anything that threatened to destroy them by cleverly picking out an escape route that was not totally obvious.

Millions of years passed while all of the ancestors of mankind developed with the alien instructions causing diversity of development that had no parallel in the Universe. The minimal inclusion had a tremendous impact on the attitudes of the animals and stimulated the growth of intelligence to an almost feverish degree. The development of the dinosaurs had taken a measured and very slow increase, as it had for the rest of the intelligences in the Universe. Only the interference of the Eternals would have made it take another path, just as measured and sure, but a path that would insure loyalty to them only.

For the new owners of this planet, intelligence and blazing ferocity became the norm and resulted in a constant fight for control in the body and minds of the animals that had received the infusion of the Slave Table. The seeders were to cause the target animals to become intelligent enough to take commands and ferocious enough to become robot-like warriors in the eons long war of the Eternals; warriors that could be harvested without creating any problems for the masters and who had been already trained at sub molecular level.

This was a plan that had worked for time without end and should have worked on this little backwater planet without fail.

The plan was not failing, but it was not succeeding, either. What it was doing was giving rise to the philosophy of good and evil that would become the watchword of this planet. The fight that ensued would entail the attention and effort of everyone on this singularly blessed ball of mud and would never end.

Every race that developed from those humble beginnings was immediately in the process of destroying the other parts of the race that were not in their core group. Other groups were understandably annoyed by this attitude and would attempt to destroy the first group. Not satisfied with a victory over the original aggressor, the cycle would repeat itself without end and would be chronicled for thousands of generations. Depending on the teller, it would be referred to as the glory of the race or its shame.

The fight was internal to each of the beings that were becoming the human race. Each person would have those demons to fight and whole philosophies would be developed to understand them.

Once in a while the fight would be lost in an individual and the original programming would insinuate itself almost as designed. That person would become a controlling type of entity and would turn everyone around them into a race of deadly warriors that threatened to enslave everything they could see.

The examples of each of these deadly individuals were littered throughout history. Genghis Khan, Hitler, Alexander, and hundreds more who were nearly as successful or less successful, but as deadly. Man would continue to fight what he thought was his darker nature throughout history and would never completely succeed.

ONE

The Find

Late October, 2005

The Gulf of Mexico, Planet Earth

Very little had changed in Belize over the last five hundred years, the large ships still anchored out a mile or more from the mouth of the Belize River, and Belize, the capitol and chief city of what used to be British Honduras, was still the greatest shipping center for mahogany and log wood in the world. The only variation of change was that ocean liners didn’t come anymore, their place taken by huge Flarecraft moving at hundreds of miles per hour and flying a few feet above the surface of the water, their boat hulls glistening in the air as they swooped toward the harbor like birds of prey. The predators were usually tourists coming to see the Carioca bands that were the jewels of Belize.

While less than an hour ago, the Osprey 620 VTOL had left the Cayman Islands bearing a lone passenger. As the Osprey honed in on the outlying islands, Alain Green gazed down through the Plexiglas window at sunken coral reefs and sand ledges extending out into the Caribbean’s bluish-green waters. This was his favorite time of day, the sun low to the west over Mexico, and coming again into Belize where old friends were gathering.

Instead of landing, the pilot brought the Osprey in a curving bank away from beckoning palm trees and to the north along the coastline. Whatever thoughts Alain Green had about this were contained behind the bronzed contours of his face. He was a tall, rather lean man in his middle fifties. He had been handsome once, and was good-looking still, except that the advancing years had marked his features with small folds and crevices, although his light brown hair was still thick and touched upon the collar of his white suit coat.

Their destination, something that he’d wormed out of the pilot shortly after becoming airborne, was Ambergris Cay. Now a curious restlessness stirred in Alain Green’s mind. The Cay was one of several strung along the east coast of the former British Honduras, and he knew them well, having scuba dived among them in search of sunken treasure. All except for Ambergris Cay which was at that time of the century off-limits to divers. Rumors abounded about the place, and about the castle perched on the higher reaches of the Cay. The Cay, as everyone knew, was owned by the Cambrian Corporation, and that the corporation was heavily involved in undersea exploration.

Only the heartening fact that he would be working with Jubal Raines and Madi Lennox and some other old Caribbean hands had caused him to accept this diving job with Cambrian. The multi-national company, he knew, was presided over by Marcus Andrews. He’d never met the man, but was fully aware of his reputation for ruthlessness and roughshod power. Added to this was what Alain Green had picked up from DEA agents he’d been working with the last couple of years. He had captained a boat used by the agents to chase drug smugglers, some of whom they suspected were involved with the Cambrian Corporation. As for Alain, he had a wanderlust past, which didn’t include too much of a formal education. He was considered an expert on the Gulf Waters, and he had more or less a degree in volcanic seismology. Somehow, he always seemed to surround himself with people who were knowledgeable in other fields, to learn from them, and in his words, to become an intellectual journeyman. Somehow, too, in situations involving a certain amount of risks, everyone seemed to look to him for leadership. And not being employed at the moment, Alain had hesitated for, oh say, two or three nano-seconds before he took this job.

But why now at the beginning of the hurricane season? While under the furrowing of his brows, Alain Green sent the slant of his stare away across the wide expanse of the Caribbean, unable to shake this strange sense of unease. Two weeks ago a moderate storm had hit into the Gulf of Mexico. The odds were that another storm, a much larger one, could hit while they were out diving.

***

The Triton nuclear submarine approaching underwater into the middle reaches of the Yucatan Peninsula was one of seven owned by the Cambrian Corporation. They were coming in slowly, at five knots, and the periscope was up. The submarine had been converted to industrial use, meaning that it supposedly carried no torpedoes or other weaponry other than small arms.

Hooking his elbows on the periscope handles, Captain Lyman Reiger made a 360 degree sweep of the activity atop the water. As he expected on the final approach to Ambergris Cay, there was little boat traffic. Now he sighted the periscope lens in on the large castle hovering over the bay occupying the northern reaches of the Cay. Stepping away, he said, Go ahead, Herr Oberg, take a look.

There really had been no need for Captain Reiger to use the periscope since surrounding him in the control room were video monitors of fifty-inch size giving him a high definition and panoramic view of the surrounding sea. But, Herr Karl Oberg wanted to see what Ambergris Cay was all about, and as for Reiger, he was of the old school of submariner where every precaution was taken.

Though he had come to trust the video monitors, his eyes flicked to them now. The scene they showed was not the normal view with only visual cues, but consisted of the combination of enhancements from the sonar and digitized laser topography. Currents were shown in transparent pastel colors along with sea temperature. While the underwater surface features were shown in real representation with enhancement of the features, seamlessly creating a view that could not exist in normal light.

This was all part of the new navigation guidance system, a combination of sonar, video, of course, and laser-ranging topographical mapping. The system navigates by global positioning with satellites communicating with surface towers and underwater transmitting locations, and in Reiger’s opinion, it was the most accurate system devised to this time.

Well, Herr Oberg, what do you think?

Impressive, was Karl Oberg’s solitary comment as he stepped away from the periscope. He was a dignified looking man, tall as were most Germans, and despite the long sea voyage, impeccably clad in a charcoal suit which served to emphasize his salt and pepper hair. This sub, it is much better than the old U-boat my grandfather commanded.

In wartime we could raise havoc. He returned Oberg’s smile.

Warfare, said Karl Oberg, the smile holding, for us Germans, it is in the sauerkraut...in the blood. So, Captain Reiger, we shall be docking soon, so I shall attend to my luggage.

With the departure of Oberg from Hamburg, Germany, and one of the principal directors of the Cambrian Corporation, Lyman Reiger got down to the business of bringing his Triton the rest of the way into the Cay. He was the only sub captain entrusted with the capability to disarm the peripheral underwater defenses. They were the defenses to the underwater entrance, while the interior defense system could only be disarmed by the crew within the Castle.

As the Triton glided in toward the Cay, Reiger went over in his mind the whole defensive apparatus. All of the defenses were hidden and totally incapable of being spotted from the surface by untutored eyes. Buried in the fifteen-foot thick castle walls were missile batteries, and the communications and sensory systems. Secondary to this were the mine traps existing on surface ground around the castle, which were electronically armable and fireable. While flechette weapons could pop up from hidden emplacements almost everywhere. The installation of all of this, he realized, had been painfully slow and hard to hide but had been accomplished without knowledge of the authorities.

He gave a quietly spoken command to one of his lieutenants, for they were nearly to the cut-off zone, where to continue would see them blown out of the water. Disarm defenses. Before him, and still a danger to his Triton, were sonar-laser torpedoes, along with guided mines containing small solid rocket propulsion systems redesigned to operate in an aquatic environment; once launched, they would be able to attain speeds of one hundred miles per hour underwater.

Instead of a wartime complement of three hundred, Reiger’s crew consisted of thirty men. They were all hand-picked, all former Navy men, but not necessarily American, and trained in every manner of weaponry. Those he found to be untrustworthy or who had qualms about carrying out specific tasks oftentimes were killed outright. More callously, he would simply have someone still very much alive placed in the still functioning torpedo tubes.

Captain Lyman Reiger’s eyes contained a frosty smile in the chilling remembrance of one such event, when he’d ordered a boson’s mate named Hardy, as he dimly recalled, placed forcibly into a tube.

They were far out to sea at the time, cruising at a depth of five hundred feet. He had assembled the entire crew here in the control room, and had them watch through the video monitors as the tube was fired, emitting air and the object of Reiger’s distrust. They’d watched in stoic silence, the horrifying death of the boson’s mate, which hadn’t taken all that long at all. Perhaps the sharks had found the body or some other sea predator, which mattered little to Reiger, for discipline had been maintained.

They had to have this, to the highest degree, since they often trafficked in illegal activities; drug smuggling, moving contraband from place to place, or transporting people often wanted by law enforcement authorities, along with carrying out the more mundane duties of resupplying the corporation’s research ships scattered over the oceans of the world. Out of this, Captain Reiger was putting together a tidy nest egg towards the time when he would hand in his resignation. He shouldn’t entertain any worries about this, but he had learned when dealing with Marcus Andrews that the rules of this dangerous game could change quite rapidly.

Captain, we are approaching the underground channel.

Quickly, Reiger turned his attention to bringing in his nuclear submarine. The video monitors showed the artificial bay area of Ambergris Cay, which consisted chiefly of a sea wall built out of large rocks to the south. Two submarines were at anchor and one research ship which he knew to be the Illuminator, a converted Coast Guard Ice Breaker. The sounds of the submarine sank deep into his senses, the old familiar smells, and for a moment, he was reluctant to bring the Triton in. But directly ahead of them now lay a large underwater opening blasted out of the sea wall, and which, in reality, was the side of a huge volcanic vent. Ever so slowly, they passed through the opening until the captain’s voice rang out.

All stop.

In a little while they surfaced, to power carefully up to one of the piers in the vast inner chamber. One submarine was at anchor, with the docking crew throwing out hawser ropes to deck hands, the ropes being quickly secured around electrical capstan bollards. The brow, a long metal gangplank which was being handled by an AI, an intelligent robot arm, was extended onto the deck of the submarine. And from the bridge, Captain Lyman Reiger watched his two passengers emerge from a forward hatch and go down the brow, where someone from the castle was waiting to greet them.

This was none of Reiger’s business, nor was he too much concerned that Herr Oberg had not stopped to pay his courtesies to the captain of the converted Triton submarine. Perhaps it was that Herr Karl Oberg felt himself to be a bigger fish in a sea of man-killing sharks.

What does it matter as long as the money is there?

***

The Osprey had touched down just north of the castle on a flat strip of asphalted land, and Alain Green had crouched