Steve Alten - The Mayan Resurrection

As we began our perilous four-month journey and Earth disappeared from our viewports, we cried and prayed and cried some more. Our salvation was Mars Colony, but we would never arrive, for what lay ahead was an off-ramp-the entrance to a wormhole.

There was no way to avoid it, no way for our pilots to even see it. A sudden surge of the shuttle’s gravity-wave detectors and whoosh – we found ourselves hurtling through the conduit’s funnel of energy, time and space distorting as we plunged through our Galaxy’s version of a rabbit hole.

Imagine falling from a thirty thousand-foot precipice, knowing your life is about to be extinguished, your screams squelched by the length of the drop. In those final minutes everything becomes clear, and you realize how much time you wasted on petty nonsense.

As frightened as I was, I could not tear myself away from my viewport, my mind mesmerized. We passed through gray interstellar gas clouds whose cosmic glow brightened into visible light, drenching us in pastels of crimson and yellow and blue before yielding to a hydrogen field of fluorescent pink.

Voices cried out in the darkened cabin, some identifying the gas cloud as the Orion Nebula. If accurate, then we had traveled some fifteen hundred light-years from Earth in the blink of an eye.

And then the cabin pressure increased and the spacecraft shook violently, and I closed my eyes to die.

How much time passed, I cannot say, but when I awoke, I was still on board the Mars shuttle, only the stars had stopped moving. We were through the wormhole, all twelve of our ships-and somehow we had survived.

I say ‘we’ yet I still had no idea who I was or what I was doing on board the vessel, but the sheer delight at merely being alive… it was too overwhelming to question.

In the distance I could see a red supergiant-a star so large that had it been Earth’s sun its girth would have stretched across the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. In close proximity to this monster was a planetary nebula, its fluorescent-style ring of gases appearing in shades of violets and blues.

I heard voices in the dark debate the red supergiant’s identity, the consensus agreeing it was Betelgeuse, a star over three hundred times the diameter of our sun and ten thousand times as luminous. If correct, then we had been transported to another section of the Orion spiral arm.

And then one of my cabin mates turned to me and addressed me as Bill.

So now I had an identity. The consciousness that had been Michael Gabriel had hitched a ride in the body and mind of William C. Raby. I

… or should I say we, were a marine geneticist, selected for Mars Colony, not by merit, but by extensive international private bank dealings that had helped fund the journey.

Like many of the other passengers, Bill Raby had known the right people to bribe and had the means and political clout to save himself.

But you weren’t really this Bill Raby, were you?

That’s just it, son, in every sense, I had become him. My consciousness dominated his, I felt his fears as if they were my own. I had his memories, and his overwhelming sense of guilt, for like me, Bill Raby had also left a loved one back on Earth, and it was tearing him up inside.

The desperateness of our situation quickly spread throughout the cabin. Our trip through the space tunnel had destroyed most of our ship’s electronics, damaging our outer hull, crippling our engines. Like the rest of the fleet, we were hurtling through space, out of control, being reeled in along powerful gravitational forces that our damaged sensors could not identify.

Another wormhole?

No, it was a planet, its atmosphere vermilion, its appearance in many ways similar to that of Mars, though closer to Earth in size. Like the Red Planet, the alien world possessed two barren moons, one the size of Earth’s lone satellite, the second-a smaller potato-shaped body, perhaps fourteen miles in diameter.

Panic levels rose as our twelve vessels plummeted through this alien world’s atmosphere. With our heat shield damaged, our cabin began heating up like a furnace. Children screamed. Passengers held one another, hoping and praying for another miracle all of us knew in our hearts we didn’t deserve.

But another miracle did happen, coming this time from our gallant crew, who managed to angle the shuttle’s descent just enough to allow us to slip through the searing atmosphere without combusting into ash. A collective cheer embraced the cabin as the blackness of space morphed into a magnificent cardinal red horizon. Aerodynamics took over as our winged vessel soared like a plane high above an alien landscape. As we descended, we could make out a geology composed of barren volcanic rock, splashed with patches of moss.

Fear returned moments later as we continued losing altitude, dropping fast, with no suitable landing place in site.

With a sickening jolt, our tail struck terra incognita. The shuttle skidded, the cabin spun, and once more, everything turned to black…

TOP SECRET/MAJESTIC-12

WARNING: Unauthorized access or viewing of this document without the appropriate authorizations will result in permanent incarceration or sanction by authorized use of deadly force.

PROGRESS REPORT ON SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM

GOLDEN FLEECE

24 October 2027

STAR SHIP VESSEL: BALAM

1. Dr. David Mohr and the GOLDEN FLEECE team have been reluctant to speculate on the propulsion system of the Balam, ever since its arrival in Hangar 13 four years ago-this due primarily to the team’s continued inability to access the interior of the ship. A new theory and its related dangers, however, has led to some unanimous conclusions that must be brought to POTUS’s attention.

2. Previous MAJESTIC reports have stated that the BALAM star cruiser most likely ‘surfed’ its way through Earth’s atmosphere riding its own massive shock waves, maneuvering at lower speeds/hovering utilizing an advanced form of magnetoaeroelectro dynamics. In this mode, the vessel’s polished gold external hull becomes the engine. Waves of negatively charged electron particles, embedded in the carrier frequencies of the electromagnetic waves ‘push’ the vessel through the air mass.

3. A second, infinitely faster method of propulsion is now believed to exist. Located underneath and between the two stern nacelle structures are multicellular exhaust nozzles. Upon further examination, Dr. Mohr’s team has reached a consensus, theorizing that these nozzles may have been designed to channel tachyon energy particles, leading the scientists to agree that the BALAM is capable of superluminal propulsion, labeled by NASA-BPP scientists as ‘Warp Drive.’

4. A third theory put forth by NASA-BPP concerns the BALAM’s ability to create an ‘exotic-matter’ force field, allowing the vessel to theoretically enter a gravimetric vortex (SEE WORMHOLES).

5. The GOLDEN FLEECE team theorizes that the power produced to activate the BALAM’s Warp Drive would be enough to light and heat every city on Earth simultaneously and continuously for more than 100,000 years. The terawatts of power produced every picosecond by the BALAM’s interior reactor cores are the kind of power requirements hypothesized for hyperdimensional travel at superluminal velocities.

SAFETY WARNING / SECURITY ISSUES

6. In the opinion of the senior MAJESTIC team members and also Dr. Mohr: This Warp Drive propulsion system represents an extreme danger to the physical safety of Earth, possibly affecting the power grids and/or the ecology of whole continents if the system is accidentally activated.

7. Quantum-gravity physicists immediately expressed concern should the BALAM’s Warp Drive engines activate, producing a microwormhole. They stated that, should the magnetic containment fields that ‘bottle’ the quantum singularity collapse, the microwormhole could potentially expand to consume the entire vessel and perhaps whole portions of the planet itself.