Impie
Junior Member
Posts: 137
Registered: 01-07 |
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams
Novella's still in the works, but school's trying to get in the way, so it'll take longer than I expected. Here's a piece from a later point in the story, reflecting on part of the original storyline:
After the shooting spree that resulted from Carlyle’s trip through the 'hole, the eggheads on Phobos and Deimos got curious about the innards of their newfound galactic shortcut. The Deimos guys modified one of their security bots and sent it through to Phobos, hoping to document everything it saw during the trip. The video came out all scrambled to hell, and even with a team of techies on it round the clock they couldn’t make it any clearer. I watched it a little while ago; it looks an awful lot like the red static I saw in command control and a number of the TV’s in Phobos Labs, but—and the eggheads were equally puzzled by this—despite the portals’ instantaneous transporting effect, the video is clocked at one hour and twenty-six minutes.
Well, funny things started happening after that experiment, some which I consider awfully terrifying. Apparently Sarge did, too--enough that he saw fit to leave them out of our briefing.
According to Hall’s email correspondence with Deimos’s chief eggheads, technical problems swarmed Phobos’s brother base two days after the probe went through the gateways. Electronics went on the fritz all over the installation, mostly insignificant crap like monitors frizzing out, radio transmissions cutting off abruptly, and lights flickering for no reason. One email made mention of odd red lines on the televisions that chilled my blood.
The malfunctions reached the Anomaly and became much worse. I found a radio transmission from a shaken Deimos security officer who claimed something had come out of the gateway. He wouldn’t say what. The TDG had activated itself and something came out and dragged one of the engineers through the portal. They’d pulled the plug and sealed off Deimos Anomaly, but heard all sorts of activity going on in there—footsteps, metal banging, whispering. Eventually all was quiet, and they unsealed the lab to find everything exactly as they’d left it. After that, Deimos didn’t send out any messages for a while, so everyone figured things were back to normal.
One morning Phobos called Deimos to arrange the next probe experiment and nobody picked up. They weren’t even getting a return signal, like the radio on Deimos was off the hook. That’s when they got the call from UAC-Mars. They couldn’t get through to Deimos, either: the entire moon had vanished from the sky.
I think I'm a few entries away from the end of the first draft, and then it'll be time for the first major edit. Might clock this at under a hundred pages or so. I can't remember the last time I stuck with a story of this length 'til it was finished.
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Doom's the best! Beats the rest! Hellular, wadular, inter-active-odular...
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11-15-07 07:57 
