Damage Control Read online

  Teleportal:

  Damage Control

  Gordon Savage

  Hi. I’m Samantha Pederson. I’m about to tell you what happened after the “Wormhole Trio” was reunited and spirited away to a safe house: protective custody so the government could keep track of their invention, the first operational teleportal on this earth. It turns out that genie was already out of the bottle.

  By the way, I want to thank Gordon Savage for giving me this opportunity to have my say. Take my advice and visit gordonsavage.com for more titles and release information. While you’re there, let him know what you thought of my story and whether you’re interested in a newsletter to keep you up to date on future releases.

  With that said, welcome to TELEPORTAL: DAMAGE CONTROL. Let’s get this show on the road.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  TELEPORTAL: DAMAGE CCONTROL

  Copyright ©2016 & 2020 by Gordon Savage

  Cover art by Richi the best

  https://99designs.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at [email protected].

  ISBN: 13

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Science Fiction | Suspense | Adventure

  Acknowledgement

  This book is my third effort, and I continue to learn. I still needed many people to guide me as I worked on it, mostly my daughters, Kathy and Shannon. I want to thank them for their advice while I attempted to get inside the mind of a woman marine who lost her fiancé to an IED in front of her eyes. And, of course, I want to thank my wife Carol for allowing me the time to work on this manuscript. I'd also like to repeat my appreciation to the late Joe Sabah who was both a friend and a mentor and to Diana Hall who got me started on this path and inspired me to carry it through. Finally, my thanks to Mary Anne Maier, my editor, for cleaning up the final manuscript.

  Dedication

  To my darling wife, Carol, who has put up with me for over fifty nine years. She continues to be the shining light in my life, for which I’ll always be thankful.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  “This is Cynthia Morrissey reporting from the scene of an extraordinary hostage rescue. Using the teleportal device first revealed on my newscast earlier this week, FBI agents liberated the five people being held by alleged Russian mobsters. The hostages were whisked away moments ago by federal agents.…”

  Phoenix News Channel 13, September 10

  Day -24

  I’m Samantha Pederson. I’m a technical analyst for the government at the Technology Reconnaissance Agency, where I’ve worked since 2014. We analyze published discoveries, theories, inventions, and the like for possible threats to our national security. I was present for our first contact with another universe. I wish the rest had been that easy.

  This whole mess started, when my boss, Dr. Richard Frost, found out through an internet post that Dr. Melissa Kim, Greg Masterson, and Troy Santori had possibly developed a functioning teleportal. Considering that teleportals would allow instantaneous transportation to any place, they would have a devastating effect on the transportation industry all the way down to oil refineries and everything that supported them. They would also do away with national borders. Both effects would be grave concerns.

  Dr. Frost called an emergency briefing of our section to decide what to do about the possible effects. I must have opened my mouth one too many times because he assigned me to head up a team to learn about the development, but he might have chosen me because of my combined experience in Marine Corp intelligence and in the agency.

  Right away I discovered my team and I were going to be tested to our limit. Our charter was threefold: to confirm the development of teleportals, prevent the device from falling into the wrong hands, and to keep the developers out of trouble. Unfortunately they were already in trouble before we landed in Phoenix, and it got worse after we arrived.

  We nicknamed the developers the “Wormhole Trio” because they had used what they called wormhole technology to develop the teleportal. Our original plan had been for my team to stay in the background, but we were all green at surveillance operations. The Trio almost immediately found out we were watching them, and they literally headed for the hills, the Mogollon Rim. The upshot was that Troy, Greg, and Greg’s family were taken hostage by Russian mobsters who had been hired to stop American development and erase any trace of it. By working with other federal agents, state police, and Melissa – Dr. Kim, we were able to free the hostages but not without hair raising complications, including the first use of teleportals with live subjects.

  Once the dust settled, the Trio and Greg’s family became guest of the US government at a safe house in western Colorado, so they could continue teleportal development in safety – and so the government could keep an eye on them. Since I was one of the few people outside the Trio who had some idea of how teleportals functioned, my work partner, Jack Kirton, and I were called away from our duties in DC and assigned to work with the Trio at the safe house. I suspect it was Dr. Frost’s way of keeping the NSA from bundling them up and taking them somewhere they’d never be heard from again. It didn’t hurt my feelings any. During our surveillance of the Trio, I had met and fallen in love with Troy.

  ◆◆◆

  Day -24, 1:30PM

  Less than an hour after Jack and I arrived at the safe house, I was alone with Troy in the room that had become the teleportal workshop.

  “Wow, it’s good to see you,” he said. He put his arms around me and kissed me. Then he held me at arm’s length and looked at me as if he still couldn’t believe his eyes. He said, “When they drug us out here in the middle of nowhere, I was afraid I’d never see you again.” He pulled me back to him. “I don’t ever want to be without you again.”

  “Not a chance. You’re stuck with me.” I brushed a wisp of hair out of his eyes and kissed him again. “I’m not about to let you get away.” I leaned my head into his chest.

  A peal of laughter from the front deck broke the spell. We both looked toward the open door. Troy stepped back. “Let’s continue this tonight … after lights out.
I really do have some work to do, and you can help.”

  Fifteen minutes later I was helping fine tune the portals when he let out a war whoop that jarred me out of my chair. He ran to the open door and shouted to the team members, “Hey! You’ve got to come see this.” He was so excited that he was literally dancing around in front of the computer he had been working on.

  Melissa was the first one into the lab. As soon as she came through the door, she must have seen what had Troy so worked up. She stopped so suddenly that Greg’s wife ran into her. With a look on her face I can only describe as shock, Melissa stared at Troy’s monitor and whispered, “Oh my God.”

  I followed her gaze. The call light was flashing, but the call-in readout didn’t make any sense. The coordinates couldn’t be real. If they were, someone – or something – from someplace other than Earth was calling in

  ◆◆◆

  Day -24, 2:00PM

  In minutes most of the occupants of the safe house had gathered in the room with us. Only the guards were missing. Greg’s son, Kevin, glanced back and forth between Melissa and Troy. “What’s all the excitement about?”

  Melissa choked out, “Somebody is calling us.”

  As far as any of us knew, the only working teleportals were in the room with us. Questions exploded: “Who?” “How?” “What do you mean?” All the chattering made it almost impossible for anyone to answer. Troy silenced everyone with a piercing whistle.

  He passed control of the room over to Melissa. “Mel, would you explain to everybody what this means?”

  Melissa still appeared to be in shock, but despite being dazed, she responded with metered words, “As unbelievable as it sounds, we seem to have made contact with an alternate universe. That’s the only rational explanation I can think of.”

  The room remained totally silent as the group digested what they had heard. Then the excited babble returned. Melissa had to wave both her hands above her head to get quiet again. When the noise finally subsided, she continued, “This is an incredible opportunity, but we have to be careful. We can’t delay too long in responding, or the whatever-they-are at these coordinates may think it’s just a glitch and turn off their invitation.”

  “Don’t we have their coordinates?” I asked.

  Melissa nodded. “True, but if they’ve moved on, they might not respond to us. We don’t know how or why this came about. If we don’t act quickly, we might lose the chance to make contact. On the other hand, we can’t just open the interface. That could be an invitation to disaster.” She looked at Troy. “I can’t see any reason why we can’t open the interface in visual only mode, can you?”

  “Radiation. Heat. Glare, but other than that, no.” His humor went over most everyone’s’ head. “It would be safer to respond to them without opening the interface in any mode. Maybe we could send a pulse pattern through the call-in circuit. They could tell from the pattern it wasn’t natural and know it wasn’t some kind of glitch. In the meantime I can adjust the opacity of our teleportal so none of that nasty stuff could get through.”

  He turned to me. “Sam, would you send the pulses?”

  “Got it.” I sat down at the computer and started sending a dot-dash pattern where the number of dots and dashes increased and then decreased. I was in my second repetition when the call light started flashing with incoming dots and dashes.

  I almost jumped out of my seat again. It was Morse code, “HELLO”

  I felt like a kid who had just aced my first test in school. I responded with “HELLO YOUSELF [pause] WHO IS THIS”

  In those few seconds we were waiting for a response, Troy finished adjusting the teleportal parameters so the interface bandwidth was limited to visible light and the transmissivity was opaque. Then he nodded for me to accept the call-in. I had to wait for the incoming response to finish. It said, “YOU SPEAK ENGLISH.”

  Rather than send a reply, I clicked the accept button. The interface shimmered and went black. Then Troy slowly cleared the interface. As the vague gray shapes on the other side began to brighten, in a way it was anticlimactic. We were looking at people. They appeared to be ordinary humans. This had to be another earth.

  Melissa whispered, “Alternates.” The name immediately stuck.

  For the longest time both sides of the interface, we and the Alternates, could only stand there with our mouths open. Then someone, Greg’s daughter, I think, smiled and waved, and pandemonium broke loose; both sides began waving and chattering excitedly. Kevin was the first to take useful action. He surprised us by dragging the white board over in front of the portal and erased all the scribblings. He quickly wrote, “You can you read this, can’t you?” I have to admit it was faster than Morse code.

  The Alternates gaped. They all nodded, and a couple mouthed “Yes.” One of them ran up to their portal and turned it so it faced their white board, which was firmly attached to a wall. He wrote “We sure can.”

  Melissa took over our white board and started an exchange with the Alternates. Everyone else stood around talking, except for Troy.

  He removed the cover from the call-in box of the teleportal and began hooking a microphone and speaker into the circuit. When he finished, he held the box in front of the portal and showed the Alternates what he had done. They understood, but it took them a little longer to hook up a mike and speaker because they had to remove the cover from their controls to make the same modification. When they were through, one of the Alternates took the initiative and said, “Okay, we’re hooked up. Do you hear me?”

  Troy responded, “You bet.”

  We could talk to each other. Since we had already seen they wrote in English, it was no surprise that they spoke it as well, albeit with a vague accent.

  We introduced ourselves all around. Troy started it. “I’m Troy Santori. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this. What say we start by introducing ourselves individually back and forth? Who wants to be first on your side?”

  A plump man, a little shorter than I, stepped closer to their portal. His round face and horn-rimmed glasses reminded me of a puppet scientist I’d seen on television. Unlike the puppet, however, he had a full head of brown hair. “That would be me. I’m Dr. Eric Friedlund. It’s a pleasure to meet you and quite a surprise.”

  The Alternates turned out to be a teleportal research team at their version of NYU headed by Dr. Friedlund. Teleportals were their primary means of transportation, and his group had gotten a grant to search for active teleportals in other universes. So far ours was the only one they had found.

  When the introductions were over, Kevin in his usual direct approach asked, “Can we open the portal now?”

  Melissa jumped in. “Sorry. We don’t know if their universe and ours are compatible. Until we do, we’ll have to be satisfied with this awesome stereo view.” She glanced at the Alternates.

  Dr. Friedlund was quick to agree that we needed to be cautious. “Opening a portal to an antimatter universe could be disastrous, and who knows what other dangerous variants there could be. The first thing we need to do is devise a way to safely test opening the interface before we do it without restrictions.”

  Kevin said, “Aw, I wanted to be the first person through,” but didn’t press the issue.

  The guards had to get back to their duties and the cook wasn’t impressed, but over the next several hours the rest of us on both sides of the portal held an enthusiastic discussion of how our worlds were alike and how they differed.

  The Alternates had managed to avoid World War II and international tensions such as Stalinism and terrorism weren’t a problem. But they also had a twenty year head start with teleportals, which had effectively done away with borders and gave them a lot more insight into the use of portals than we had.

  Since our primary concern was safety, we asked how they dealt with preventing misuse of their teleportals. Even though their political climate makes the misuse of portals less of a worry, they are still concerned about privacy and personal safety. Ex
changing technology with them will definitely be a major help in developing our own security measures.

  We were so engrossed in our disussions that we totally forgot the time. Before we knew it, the cook announced dinner was served. We quickly agreed on meeting the next morning, a sort of overview of what we could gain from each other and how we would go about it. Kevin once again surprised us by asking the Alternates for their exact time to make sure we were synchronized. It was a good thing because they were on Eastern Standard Time. They had briefly flirted with daylight savings time, but teleportals made it pointless.

  As we headed for the dining room, Greg’s wife wondered aloud whether we should invite government representatives to the table. Boy, did she cringe from the glares she got.

  ◆◆◆

  Day -24, 11:30PM

  When Troy and I went to bed that night I expected to continue where we had left off in the afternoon, but he was so excited about the first contact that he kept babbling about it. As we were climbing into bed, he said, “Other humans, can you believe it? Of course you can; you were there. Wow.”

  I snuggled up to him, and he put an arm around me. He continued, “Think of what we can learn from them. They’ve been using teleportals routinely for twenty years. Can you imagine? …”

  I brushed my fingertips across his lips and said, “Shush.”

  He stopped talking and kissed me. “I sure am glad you came today.”

  But then he said, “I still can’t believe it, another universe.” Eventually he ran out of steam and dozed off. I can’t say I was really disappointed. I was excited too. I bent over and kissed him. He didn’t stir. Oh well, we were going to have a lot more nights together – hopefully, not all like this. I pulled the covers up and drifted off to sleep in his arms.

  Contacting an alternate earth had upset the whole dynamic at the safe house. Our original purpose there had been to develop ways of preventing terrorist and criminal exploitation of portals without having to resort to government control over all of them. Now, determining how far we could safely go toward opening the interface to the Alternates became our primary objective.