Starships of Eden by Howard Marsh

Author:Howard Marsh
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2015-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The trip to Base Alef in Brazil was a pretty quick one. Harry, Andy, and Alfred had done this many times before, and they had the procedure down pat. They had a small vehicle stored in a shed behind the house. It was more like a small garage than a garden shed, and it was filled with all sorts of strange equipment as well as some common items like lawn mower and snow blower. The vehicle was parked in the rear, under a tarpaulin. It was a sphere like the one that Gabriel was in when he arrived at Pax River, but it was only large enough for three people or two people and one large dog.

Andy “drove” the vehicle and took Sarah and Jimmy to the base in the first run. They wanted to get Jimmy into treatment as soon as possible since he was in pretty bad shape. Then she would return to take Ben and Alfred. Then, in her third trip she would take Harry. The whole process would be completed in only a couple of hours.

Watching the sphere take off was pretty impressive. Ben saw it rise off the floor of the shed and then drift through the open door, only a few inches off the ground. It glowed slightly, as he had expected from Gabriel’s earlier discussions. Then, once outside, it rose about ten feet into the air and turned from silver to pitch black.

Harry explained that they normally would just use gravitational drive and a force field to isolate them from the air but to allow photons to pass in and out as they moved at high speed. Then the ship would be seen as a silver sphere with a slight glow. But when they used the ship from this location, they wanted to be as stealthy as possible. They were too close to the big cities to risk being observed, but they couldn’t use their hyperspatial shielding in the dense atmosphere and close to the ground. So they had to adjust the gravitational force field to make the ship almost completely invisible to any electromagnetic detection. That also prevented them from seeing the outside world, so it wasn’t a preferred way to travel, but it would do for the take-off and landing phases of the trip. When they reached a high enough altitude and moved far enough from the house, they would readjust the field to the normal settings and accelerate to ultra-hypersonic speeds for the rest of the trip.

The sphere rose quickly, producing a very slight “whoosh” as it disappeared. Then Ben looked to the sky where Harry pointed, and he saw the flaming meteor trail as the sphere accelerated to maximum speed on its way to Brazil.

About a half hour later it was Ben’s turn to take the ride, with Andy at the controls and Alfred sitting next to him in a passenger seat. Ben noticed how excited and happy Alfred looked. He supposed that even smart dogs still like to go for a ride in the family car.

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