Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

White Seven, the other scientist on the team, was a short, burly man with a gruff demeanor. Pierce rarely spoke to the man, but was impressed by the scientist’s wide knowledge of everything but social graces.

The White Team was completed by a weapons expert named Reggie. Reggie was technically callsign: White Eight, but despite Deep Blue’s admonition that White and Black support team members each keep their names to themselves and use only their callsigns, Reggie had introduced himself to everyone at the base as Reggie, so the name had stuck. He was the consummate joker, but the sort whose jokes were more frequently directed at himself. Everyone liked the man. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about every weapon they had on the base. Reggie certainly destroyed any stereotypes Pierce had had about weapons training experts. He pictured most of them to be hard-assed drill instructor types, and he wasn’t surprised to discover that King had thought much the same. Reggie was also the only one around to best King at horseshoes up on the campground.

On the other side of the room, the Black Team was under-represented, because half of them-the pilots, callsigns: Black One through Black Four-were currently out in the field. Two mechanics that repaired the team’s helicopters and the Crescent were present. Both men wore bib overalls, and both tended to keep to themselves. Pierce had seen them around the base a few times. They were both short and skinny men, with grease caked under their fingernails from a lifetime of mechanical work. Both men were dark haired, and Pierce occasionally wondered if they were brothers. The men were callsigns: Black Seven and Black Eight.

Black Five was an overweight man of at least sixty years old. Deep Blue had introduced Pierce to the man only a few weeks earlier. Balding and always wearing half-moon glasses, Black Five probably looked older than he was. When Pierce had seen him, he was neck deep in computer programs, on the phone or both. Deep Blue had introduced Black Five as an intelligence analyst, but he had been recruited because he also had a Ph. D. in physics. Deep Blue liked team members to pull double duty, which was why Pierce was expanding his expertise into general history and even paleontology, should dinosaurs ever emerge from Antarctica. Sounded ridiculous, but the ridiculous was kind of their thing.

Black Five stood against the wall, speaking softly to a man Pierce had never met. But Pierce knew this wiry, muscular man in the charcoal suit could only be one person. Black Six was the team’s only former Central Intelligence Agency member. He was a field operative. The team’s very own spy, like James Bond. But due to the nature of his work, he was usually in the field. Pierce had, until this moment, only heard of the man, and never actually laid eyes on him. Black Six was younger than Pierce might have thought-perhaps in his mid twenties. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes, but the cut of his hair was a bit long, and Pierce could easily picture the man sliding undercover as an executive one week and as a surfer the next.

Lewis Aleman cleared his throat.

“We’ve got General Keasling, Deep Blue and King on the line in New York. Bishop, Knight and Black One and Two are also online as they transit to Europe. Mr. Boucher, is on the call from DC. I have the rest of Endgame here with me. Here’s the situation as we have it so far.

“We’re dealing with a threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. I’m afraid most of the news I have is pretty grim…”

“Lewis,” Deep Blue interrupted. “Let’s start with the bad news.”

“Okay,” Lewis said, looking down at the floor. When he looked up again, sorrow hid behind his eyes. “The world is going to end in four days.”

Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH

3 November, 0715 Hrs

Complete silence followed. Pierce watched as jaws dropped around the room.

“Come again, Aleman. Did you say the world was going to end in four days?” Deep Blue’s voice sounded rattled.

“That’s what I said. The portals are stabilizing and appearing with more regularity around the world.” Aleman sounded tired, but certain.

“Portals?” Pierce recognized the gruff voice of General Keasling.

“Yes, General. King accidentally entered one in Chicago and came out again.”

“I was only in contact with the portal for a few seconds,” King’s voice came through the speaker as clearly as if he were in the room, and Pierce found himself suddenly missing his friend. “But all I saw was darkness and multiple tangos coming at me before I was swept out by the parachute.”

“Yeah, King,” Aleman continued his briefing, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought and cross-referencing it against all our other data on these things. Everything fired inside the portals hasn’t come back out. Your F-16 crashed into one and we didn’t see a sign of it after that. You came back out of one alive though. We’re definitely looking at a portal.”

“To, uh, to what Aleman?” Pierce recognized the always-cautious voice of Domenick Boucher, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and one of only a few people left in the current administration that knew of the existence of Chess Team and the entire Endgame organization. “If these energy balls are portals, then portals to what? To where?”

“That is the question, Mr. Boucher. My best guess, based on the information available, is…to another dimension.”

Boucher scoffed on the other end of the call. “Another dimension? Like in Star Trek or something? You can’t be serious.”

“Dom…” Deep Blue’s voice was stern, and the message was clear: Give the man a chance to explain and the benefit of the doubt. Besides being the leader of Endgame, no one on the call would ever forget that this man was also formerly the leader of the free world.

“Sorry, Lewis. Please explain.” Boucher sounded as tired as Pierce felt, and he imagined the Director was up to his neck in briefings of his own, trying to explain to the new President what the hell was going on around the world.

“Theories of other dimensions have been around for a long time. Basically, what you need to do is imagine a bright red shiny ball. The ball is sitting on the ground and it’s casting a shadow. The shadow on the ground is-”

Black Five cleared his throat loudly, cutting Aleman off. He raised an index finger and stepped forward. “Sorry, but that’s a horrible explanation.”

“It was-”

Aleman was cut off again. “Accurate? Maybe. Understandable? Hardly. In layman’s terms, alternate dimensions are multiple possible universes, otherwise known as the multiverse. But there are just as many theories about how it’s possible as there are probably universes. Tegmark’s four-level classification, anthropic principle, cyclic models and my personal favorite, M-Theory, which would be impossible to explain to any of you in a timely manner, unless you all have a working knowledge of p-branes.”

For a moment, Pierce thought that Black Five had just insulted them, but realized that wasn’t the case when the man continued without cracking a smile.

“And no one knows which theory is correct, because we have, until now, never had any tangible evidence that they exist beyond the numeric musings of mathematicians and the insistence of Star Trek fans. However, most theories agree that these alternate dimensions could look very similar to our own, with alternate versions of ourselves living similar if not nearly identical lives to our own, but that they could also be very different. Alternate dimensions don’t just affect humanity. They affect everything right back to the beginning of time. In some dimensions there might not be an Earth, or even a Milky Way galaxy. In others, Earth might exist, but maybe the dinosaurs never went extinct, or the moon was never formed, or life evolved in a way that is totally alien to our Earth, which I believe is what we’re seeing here. The creatures have similar features-eyes, teeth, limbs, claws-things that we recognize as being advantageous to living on planet Earth. But they’re also quite different, which means their Earth is likely quite different. How, I couldn’t speculate.