Sector 64: First Contact: A Sector 64 Prequel Novella Read online

  Sector 64: First Contact

  A Sector 64 Prequel Novella

  Dean M. Cole

  CANDTOR Press

  Contents

  Also by Dean M. Cole

  Get Updates, Win Stuff

  FIRST CONTACT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  11. Epilogue

  Sector 64: Box Set Sneak Peek

  Solitude: Sneak Peek

  Get Updates, Win Stuff

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Also by Dean M. Cole

  Sector 64: Box Set

  The Complete 2-Book Series

  Decades after the events of First Contact, the world still hasn’t learned of our new destiny, but when the results of that encounter render present-day Earth a pawn in a galactic war, Air Force Captain Sandra Fitzpatrick might be the world's only hope. If you like action-packed, page-turning novels, then you'll love the electrifying action in this apocalyptic thriller.

  (Be sure to read the Sector 64 sneak peak at the end of this book.)

  Solitude: Dimension Space Book One

  I Am Legend meets Gravity and The Martian when Earth's last man discovers that the last woman is stranded alone aboard the International Space Station. If you like action-packed, page-turning novels, you'll love the electrifying action in this apocalyptic thriller.

  Separated by the gulf of space, the last man and woman of the human race struggle against astronomical odds to survive and unite.

  Army Aviator Vaughn Singleton is a highly intelligent, lazy man. After a last-ditch effort to reignite his failing military career ends horribly, Vaughn becomes the only human left on Earth.

  Stranded alone on the International Space Station, Commander Angela Brown watches an odd wave of light sweep across the planet. Over the next weeks and then months, Angela struggles to contact someone on the surface, but as she fights to survive aboard a deteriorating space station, the commander glimpses the dark underpinnings of humanity's demise.

  After months alone, Vaughn discovers there is another. Racing against time, he must cross a land ravaged by the consequences of humankind's sudden departure.

  Can Vaughn find a path to space and back? Can Angela—the only person with clues to the mystery behind humanity's disappearance—survive until he does?

  Get Solitude: Dimension Space Book One Today!

  (Be sure to read the Solitude sneak peak at the end of this book.)

  GET UPDATES FROM DEAN!

  Tap the image to get exclusive content, new release announcements, special offers, and giveaways!

  FIRST CONTACT

  "I'm not at liberty to discuss the government's knowledge of extraterrestrial UFOs at this time. I am still personally being briefed on the subject."

  — Richard Nixon

  Chapter 1

  Under a dark moonless sky, Major Anthony Spinelli gazed east from the cockpit of his P-51 Mustang.

  Staring down the long runway, he nodded. "Good a time as any." Then Tony sighed and squeezed the radio transmit trigger.

  "Roswell Army Air Field Tower, this is Black Crow Three. Ready for departure."

  "Roger, Black Crow Three." The Army air traffic controller paused, his mic still active. Finally, he said, "Are you sure you're ready, sir?"

  Tony knew the sergeant and knew that his question had nothing to do with the readiness of his fighter aircraft.

  "I'm fine, Rob." After a pause of his own, Tony sighed and keyed the radio. "Now if you don't mind, got an appointment with this morning's sunrise. The squadron commander wants a couple of hours on this ole Stang, make sure the mechanics got it right this time."

  "Okay, sir … Listen, I'm sorry for your loss—"

  "Dammit, Sergeant Johnson. How about you just clear me for takeoff?"

  Shocked silence streamed from the radio. Finally, the controller's voice returned, tight and curt. "Sorry, Major … Black Crow Three cleared for departure, Runway Zero-Eight."

  Tony winced, but he bit back an apology. After a brief hesitation, he shook his head and dutifully repeated the takeoff clearance. Then he applied full throttle. The Mustang's 1500-horsepower engine roared, and its eleven-foot-wide prop quickly screwed the ten thousand-pound plane into the air.

  Tony patted the throttle. "Purring like a kitten."

  Of course, it had always run smoothly at first. The glitch only manifested after a few minutes of flight, although Tony believed they had finally found the culprit. He expected an uneventful flight this morning.

  A quarter-hour later, as he guided the plane up to twenty thousand feet, Tony patted the throttle again. "Good to go."

  None of the earlier issues had returned. Regardless, the squadron commander wanted him to make doubly sure that it didn't. The Old Man had instructed him to fly it for two hours minimum. Tony thought the commander likely saw this as a test flight for him as much as for the Mustang.

  He turned the fighter to a heading that would take him to a site only seventy-five miles to the west. Not far, but better than flying in big circles. The destination was Trinity, the location of the first nuclear bomb detonation. Tony shook his head. He couldn't believe that only two years had passed since that first nuclear test in 1945. The entire world had changed in those 24 months. A world war had ended, and a cold one had replaced it, but none of that mattered now, not after what had happened to his family.

  The lights of Roswell Army Air Field disappeared behind him. Tony looked overhead. High clouds obscured even the stars from view. In the dark, moonless night, he couldn't see a thing through the fighter's canopy. Absolute blackness filled it as if the entire universe had disappeared, leaving Tony and his airplane in a black void that matched his mood.

  As the powerful engine droned, Tony thought back on his numerous flights over World War II Germany. The plane's familiar reverberation had accompanied him through dark days and darker nights, through life and death. And he'd done it all willingly enough. He'd done it to keep the war 'over there.' He'd done it for them, to keep them safe.

  And now…

  For long minutes, Tony stared into the blackness that had swallowed his aircraft. He shook his head and swallowed back the lump that was trying to choke him.

  As good a day as any? What had he meant by that?

  The scary thing was, Tony didn't really know.

  Some minutes and several miles later, he realized he was staring at a point of white light. His hungry eyes had latched onto it of their own accord. It looked as if an improperly shielded bulb in the cockpit was reflecting off of the inside of his canopy. He searched for the source but soon realized it was indeed coming from outside, in the sky ahead of his airplane. The white pinpoint of light appeared to hover ahead of the Mustang. A quick check of its navigation instruments revealed he had only covered half the distance to the Trinity site. Sierra Blanca's 12,000-foot peak still lay somewhere ahead, but the light was at his current altitude: 20,000 feet, well above the mountain.

  Tony tried to blink the point into focus, but it refused to resolve.

  "Is that another airplane?"

  His hand tensed on the control stick. A stationary light meant that the two aircraft had to be closing head-on, flying right at one another!

  He banked the Mustang hard right. When he leveled off again, the light of the other aircraft began to slide off the left side of the fighter's canopy. The two airplanes were no longer on a collision
course. The other plane would pass just off his left wing.

  As it neared, the other aircraft's light grew wider and appeared to shift its spectrum, blossoming into a multicolored ring. Tony blinked furiously, trying to resolve its source. Instead of the expected slim profile of an airplane, he glimpsed a squat, symmetrical form. The colorful band of light seemed to straddle its center horizontally.

  Suddenly, the shape and its girdling ring of light darted lightning-fast.

  Tony flinched, jerking the stick to avoid the plane, but before the Mustang could respond, the odd-shaped craft had jogged across the nose of the rocking Stang and stopped a half mile off Tony's right wing. The entire maneuver had taken a fraction of a second.

  "What the hell?!"

  Tony flinched again as the thing darted past his right side and then disappeared behind him, blazing east and passing out of sight almost too quickly to register. One moment, it had been there, hanging off to Tony's right, the next it was gone, leaving only a ghostly streak burned across his night-adapted retinas.

  He looked over his right shoulder and shook his head.

  Breathing heavily, he said, "What was—?"

  Suddenly, blinding light filled his cockpit. Tony's head snapped forward. Dazzled eyes blinked. Then the light returned, and he saw the source. Glowing with the internal brilliance of another lightning bolt, a tremendous thunderstorm filled the front half of his universe.

  "Oh, shit!"

  The Mustang slammed into the center of the boiling cloud. Wind shear rocked the plane left and right. Tony fought to keep it upright. He tried to turn the fighter around, to guide it east, back out of the thunderstorm, but tremendous blasts of turbulence tossed the plane left, right, and inverted, threatening to snap Tony's tenuous thread of control and throw the fighter from the sky.

  With white-knuckled death grips, Tony cycled the throttle, stick, and rudder, fighting to keep the Mustang under control.

  Through gnashed teeth, he growled, "Come on, girl!"

  Then lightning bolts started firing off in rapid succession. In the span of a few seconds, two of them struck his airplane. The storm had held its pent-up energy until the last minute, hiding its existence, but now it seemed determined to release all of it as rapidly as possible.

  Between flashes, Tony felt the entire airframe shudder as a loud report came from his right wing.

  Something had hit the plane!

  Then another booming impact shook the fighter. Still struggling to keep the Mustang under control, Tony glanced up to see a crack in the canopy.

  His eyes widened. "Hail!"

  Suddenly, the frequency of the reports increased exponentially, as if a hundred men with sledgehammers had taken to pounding the aluminum-skinned fighter into oblivion.

  Another bolt of lightning struck. A spider's web of St. Elmo's fire danced across the skin of the airplane. In the momentary illumination, Tony glimpsed baseball-sized hailstones shattering as they slammed into already ruined wings.

  He shook his head. "No, no, no!"

  A quick check of his instruments showed that he was losing altitude and airspeed. The increased drag and reduced lift generated by the damaged airfoils and propeller were already pulling the fighter out of the sky.

  Tony decided he knew what his earlier statement had not meant: it was not as good a time as any, not to die anyway. In spite of all that had happened, he wasn't ready to cash it in.

  Tony increased throttle to compensate for the decreased lift. In spite of the storm's buffeting, he managed to arrest the plane's descent and stabilize its airspeed, but then another barrage of icy boulders struck. A new crack ran across his canopy.

  Now even full throttle wouldn't keep the plane aloft!

  "I'm losing her!"

  The Mustang was hanging from its prop. The wings would soon stall if—

  Then they did!

  The fighter snap-rolled, flipping upside down.

  "Shit!"

  The sharp stall coupled with the torque of a firewalled engine violently tossed the airplane into an inverted flat spin. Rotational G-forces pinned Tony to his seat. He tried to reach for the throttle, but his arm felt as if it weighed a ton. The combination of being inverted and spinning at an insane rate pushed too much blood into his brain, instantly generating an excruciating headache.

  Tony grunted with the effort to reach for the throttle.

  His eyes widened as he saw the altimeter. Spinning like an unwinding clock, it plummeted through 5000 feet above sea level. That left less than 2000 feet before he'd hit the area's high desert.

  He screamed and with a mighty effort drove his hand forward and finally grabbed the throttle. He pulled it aft, and everything slowed. The sudden drop in rotational G-forces made it feel as if he'd become weightless.

  His checklist booklet lazily flapped across the cockpit like a seagull flying in slow motion.

  He was weightless!

  Suddenly, his cockpit lighting dimmed and then faded to black.

  The thunderstorm birthed another lightning bolt. Looking into the storm, Tony watched the bolt's energetic fingers slowly arc across the sky.

  Then he froze.

  The glowing clouds outlined a dark void: a large object hovering just outside his canopy. Tony stared at it in open-mouthed amazement.

  The forgotten, fast-moving aircraft had returned, but now it hung motionlessly only a few feet from his head!

  The lightning faded, but the multicolored lights he'd seen earlier suddenly filled the air around his fighter. The feathery, ethereal beams shone from no fixtures. It looked as if the air around the craft was glowing.

  Tony tore his eyes from the image and checked his altimeter. His fall had stopped. The Mustang's altitude now held stable at 4800 feet. But that was only 1800 above the ground! In the haunting light, he could see his destroyed wings.

  Whatever the hell this … this thing was doing, if it stopped doing it, he'd smack into the ground within a few short seconds.

  He had to get out now!

  Tony grabbed the canopy and unlatched it. In spite of the damage, it slid back easily. Outside, undulating but otherwise stationary raindrops hung suspended around the pair of vessels.

  He stared at the fat-bodied craft. "What are you?!"

  Tony looked from the dark silhouette and its rotating ring of multicolored light to his altitude. His stomach said that he was falling, but somehow the altimeter remained unchanged.

  He shook his head. "Time to bail!"

  Tony unbuckled his harness. His weightless body drifted out of the seat.

  Then he closed his eyes as a brilliant lightning bolt struck his fighter again.

  At the same moment, a rainbow of colors flooded through his lids. Through slitted eyes, Tony watched the craft's ring of multicolored lights flare and then die.

  Then the dark object tumbled away! Just before the thing faded into the storm, another flash of lightning revealed it as a fat saucer shape, like two bowls joined lip to lip.

  Suddenly, the storm's wind returned with a vengeance. The suspended raindrops swirled away, and Tony fell out of the still inverted fighter as it violently spun out of sight.

  Plummeting toward the waiting desert, Tony frantically yanked at his parachute's ripcord. The pilot chute shot out, dragging its cache of silk from the pack. It unfurled, and the risers snapped taut, jerking him skyward as the parachute arrested his renewed fall.

  Tony looked overhead, gazing into the beautiful sight of a fully inflated canopy. "Oh, thank God!"

  Then he felt a tremendous updraft pull him higher. His ears popped as the vertical winds drew him deeper into the storm.

  He looked up with wide eyes. "No, no, no!"

  Last year, an Army Air Corps pilot had bailed in the middle of a thunderstorm and died of exposure and oxygen starvation. The crash investigation team had determined that the man and his parachute had been sucked up into the storm and that its massive updrafts had held him above 45,000 feet for several minutes—more than
long enough to induce death from asphyxiation. It was the same lifting mechanism that formed hailstones.

  With both hands, Tony pulled down the right riser and grabbed several of the cords, desperately trying to partially collapse the chute, but another surge of rising air yanked the strands out of his hand.

  As the winds pulled him higher, a layer of ice began to form on his goggles. The massive storm was doing its utmost to turn him into a human hailstone.

  Then, panting and freezing, Tony felt consciousness slipping away.

  "No! … No …"

  Chapter 2

  Tony woke with a start. A distant brown surface hung beneath his feet. Blinking, he tried to bring it into focus.

  A violent shiver racked his soaked body.

  Then the world resolved.

  "What the hell?!"

  Tony flinched. The spasm sent his dangling legs into an arcing swing.

  New Mexico's high desert hung a couple of miles beneath the soles of his boots.

  Wide-eyed, he looked up. An olive drab parachute towered overhead.

  Suddenly, orange light blossomed to his right. Tony's head snapped in that direction. He watched the sun creep above the eastern horizon.

  He'd been flying, but … what?

  "My plane!"

  "The storm!"

  Tony flinched again as a brilliant flash and a tremendous explosion came from his left. He looked that way and saw a towering thunderstorm filling the western sky.

  Then his eyes widened as he remembered being in that storm.

  "I'm alive!"

  When Tony had felt consciousness slipping away, he had thought he was done for. The storm had held him in it long enough for the sun to rise. He must have ridden updrafts and downdrafts for more than half an hour. Fortunately, the storm had spat him out before holding him aloft long enough to kill him. Aside from a splitting headache and a serious case of the shivers, Tony felt alright.