Second Earth: The Complete First Novel (Second Earth Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  And that destination was April. She was standing near a couple of the stragglers. They too were just as unimportant to the colony as April and he was. He’d never met the two people that were standing next to her so he beckoned her closer to him, just in case they were friendly with the elderman. He didn’t have time to play the political game anymore. Something very strange was happening and he wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “Beats me. But it certainly ain’t no damn fallen star,” Gustoff said, wiping a film of sweat off his forehead.

  “They think it’s a star?” she asked.

  “Yeah. One of the elderman were telling me that it’s some sort of gift from the God’s. damn quacks. They wouldn’t know an asteroid from a comet if it hit them in the face.”

  April smiled.

  “Well, at least they’re not forcing you back into the mountains. Maybe they’re coming around to the idea that we aren’t alone. Whatever that thing is, it’s the key to us knowing more. That much I’m certain of.”

  Randy kicked some of the dirt underneath him. He watched as clumps of dirt kicked up into the air. Randy wondered if people took notice of the composition of things around them. The grains of dirt. Sand. Mud. Air. Flowers. Heat. Oxygen. Birds. Bees. Bears. Dogs. All of those things, everything. He wondered if the elderman really believed what they said about their so called Gods. He wondered if any of them truly believed what they were saying. That this was an act of God. That this was a star. A fallen star.

  “What are you going to do?” April asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s no point in fighting them now is there?”

  April smiled.

  “You going to punch them?” she asked, showing a row of perfect teeth, which was a far cry from the usual black gums and yellow rotted teeth that most of the colony sported.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. When that thing stops burning, then I can have a closer look at whatever it is. Who knows? Could be some sort of device to communicate with unknown beings,” Gustoff said.

  “Yeah, makes sense. Send down a massive fireball to communicate with unintelligent life forms.”

  Randy laughed. He flung his arm around April and squeezed her tight.

  “Go back home. Get some sleep. I know that’s what I’m going to do. We’ll figure this out tomorrow. Me and you. I promise.”

  April nodded.

  “What about the elderman? What if they attempt to block us from looking at the fire once it’s stopped burning?”

  Gustoff pulled a face.

  “They can try and stop me. This falls into my field. They have their own field. Scaring children with stories of hell is one of them. Stopping the advancement of our planet is another. My fields involve science. And something falling out of the sky and landing on somebody’s house calls for a scientific approach, don’t you think?”

  April shrugged her shoulders.

  “I guess you’re right. But I have a bad feeling about this. Knowing the things we know, I bet you that the elderman will make it doubly difficult for us to even lay a solitary digit on whatever’s burning in that fire. You wait and see.”

  Gustoff nodded.

  “Such the optimist,” he said, breaking into a smile.

  The both of them said their goodbyes and made their way back home. April couldn’t sleep knowing what was out there, burning into the night sky.

  Gustoff on the other hand slept like a baby. It probably had something to do with the copious amounts of liquor he got past his gums in the hour before he fell asleep. He had to drink just so he could get to bed. There was no way that he’d be able to get a wink of sleep if he didn’t. And he also knew that if he wasn’t flat out drunk, he’d have been tempted to pay the burn site a visit when nobody was there. Do a little investigating of his own. But he wasn’t stupid. That would just make things more difficult between him and the colony.

  And that was the last thing he wanted to do. Not now that he was this close to being able to be a scientist for the first time in two years.

  Log Two:

  These things are hard to write when you’re drunk. Drunk as a skunk…I am…drunk as a skunk? Is that the right terminology? I don’t even know where that comes from. Where do these words and terms find their way into our lives?

  How come our colony has so much language, so much history, yet when I do some digging around, all I see are question marks? And what made me think that being a scientist was a good idea in the first place? How do I even know what science is? How does the colony know what God is? Where do these mysterious books come from? Books with people’s names on the front cover?

  Stories? Stories of people like me. People like them. Living, breathing people. Found in crates. Boxes. Locked boxes. Boxes that we had to break open. Hundreds of years ago. A thousand of them falling out of the sky.

  Like a gift.

  That’s what the people of that time called it. They learned to read and write using those books. And now we too can read and write. But nobody knows where these things came from. Nobody asked the right questions. And for two hundred years they went on with their lives. They put these books in special places. Places the elderman called the house of God. A so called church.

  They worshiped the idea that there were Gods above us, ready to bestow gifts upon our colony. Gifts of books. More books. More crates. More stuff falling out of the sky. But many years passed. Many people died. And many more were born.

  Then tonight happened. Tonight … the night April came into my hole and roused me from my sleep. Well, not quite like that, but I wouldn’t have minded. She looked stunning tonight. So stunning that I nearly kissed her at one point. Or at least I thought about it. But that thought was drowned out by the sound of burning wood. Burning metal. Burning. Lots and lots of burning.

  Something fell on some poor bastards dwelling today. It caused two massive explosions. A fire so big you could see it for miles. And once it has stopped burning, then I’ll find out what is within it. Because I know something is within it. Something dark. Something big. Something heavy.

  Maybe it’s another box? Maybe it’s another gift from the Gods?

  Or maybe it’s progress? Knowledge?

  …

  Salvation?

  Chapter Two

  Randy Gustoff woke up with sweat dripping down his face. He’d managed to soak the sheets completely in his night sweats. He got out of bed and stretched. The morning sun was beating through one of the crude windows in the rock that he called home. Rays of light brought flecks of dust to light as they soared and floated through the dense air. He coughed a few times, feeling a little chesty. Must have been from all that hoo-ha last night.

  The burning building, or as the elderman had put it, the fallen star, must have been the reason for his dry cough this morning. He didn’t want to think too much about it because he was a bit of a hypochondriac, which was ironic seeing that at one point or another, he wanted nothing more than to die.

  But now was different. Now his life had some sort of purpose. A purpose that he was embracing, much like the bleakness he once happily carried around, akin to shackles on his wrists, or ropes around his waist. He’d carried those much like somebody would carry an illness. For a while it consumed him. Then he got used to it. And finally, he made peace with it. Peace with the possibility that maybe … just maybe he was going to die an unhappy man.

  “But things have changed,” he said, a smile creeping across his face.

  Yes, finally, things have changed. Last night marked the first time in four years that anybody in the colony had even entertained the idea of being around him, let alone conferring with him regarding a solution to the mighty problem that surely lay ahead of them.

  Randy didn’t know if they saw it, but he did. The problem that is. There was one. A big one. And it was an obvious one at that. Things didn’t just fall out of the sky. They were either on a collision course with a planet or, and this is a big or, t
hey were deliberately sent.

  The thing is, Randy Gustoff wasn’t much of a keepsake kind of guy. Nor was he a religious guy. Or a superstitious guy. He didn’t believe in so called angels. Daemons. Gods. Apostles. Saints. None of that stuff. He was a clear-cut man. A man that learned everything he knows from mysterious books left behind for the people of his colony from time past. But the problem remained. Just like he’d learned everything he knew from books, books that he personally believed to be time capsules sent by people, just like him, on a far distant planet, for other intelligent life, the colony believes what they believe because of two or three special books that were also found along with the others. These books told wonderful stories of mans struggle. A flood of some sorts. The complete annihilation of everything on planet Earth.

  Gustoff wasn’t sure if these books were real. Or if they were elaborate hoaxes left behind by the people before him. But it did fill him with excitement. For a long while, all he’d dreamt of was this mysterious planet mentioned in many of the books that were left behind.

  On this planet there are loads of different places. A lot of the books follow people in dire situations. Gustoff still finds it fascinating that the books were somehow able to capture the person’s deepest inner thoughts, while also being able to recount the exact conversations that many of these people had while being in constant danger. The ability to remember such facts must prove that whoever these people are, they are far superior in every way to the people that live on his planet.

  Nobody he knows could remember five hundred pages worth of a tale, even if it was their matrimony day. Word for word? Second by second? No way.

  “Some feat,” Gustoff remarked as he finished putting his clothes on and walked to his desk. On it, there was one of the books he’d read about Earth and its people. He was absolutely fascinated by it. So much so that he’d borrowed the book from the church eight times since he’d discovered it.

  “The people of Earth are very interesting, with very many tales,” he says, smiling.

  He picked up the book and marveled at its cover. The book had a picture of a young boy on the cover. He was holding a stick. But it wasn’t just any old stick. It was a magic stick. And the boy wasn’t just any young boy.

  He was a wizard.

  “I can’t wait to meet a real wizard boy of Earth,” Gustoff said, putting the book down. He gave the cover one last look and sighed.

  Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone

  “What mysteries lie out there in the Universe. One day I will see everything I’ve read about in these time capsules from planet Earth. And when I do, I’ll be able to shove it to the elderman. They think they know everything, but they don’t. I know I’m right. I know that Earth exists and the people who live on it are wondrous beings. They are strong, smart and multicultural. They share a passion for space travel and have conquered half the universe. You wait. You wait and see!” Gustoff said as he looked at himself in the mirror. Today he looked different. Less pale. More color. As if the burning of Aston’s house had reinvigorated him.

  “Crap, the building!” he said, almost forgetting what had happened the night before. In all his excitement thinking about Earth and all the books he’d read about the planet and its people, he’d almost forgotten that he could possibly be examining another capsule sent by them. So he figured that maybe it was best to get going.

  “Okay Randy. Today is the day. Today is the day that you prove everybody wrong. We are not alone. We are far from it,” he said to his reflection in the mirror. Randy gave himself a wink and turned around. Walking toward the door, he couldn’t help but whistle a tune. He didn’t know what he was whistling, but it was fun nonetheless.

  Earth hadn’t ever sent them music, so he wasn’t actually aware of it even existing. But he knew they were out there, and that’s all that mattered.

  ***

  Earth … Present day … The Milky Way Galaxy… Approximately 2.5 million light years away from “Second Earth.”

  “Sir, I have some bad news,” Commander Williams said as he entered his boss’s office. His boss was sat behind a large desk. The desk was metal and it reflected his boss’s every motion. Right at that moment he was frowning. Frowning at the interruption. An interruption that he did not welcome.

  “Can’t you see that I’m busy? The Deep Space Program doesn’t run itself,” he said, pushing back in his chair. It rolled backward and the man stretched his legs while yawning. He didn’t get a lot of downtime, so he embraced it while he could.

  “Well, the news?” he asked, clicking his neck.

  Commander Williams stood there in the entranceway to the office and sighed. He had some files in his hands. He walked up to the desk and dropped them in front of his boss, who’d stopped stretching now and was staring at the papers on his desk.

  “What’s this?” he asked, opening the file and scanning the first page. “The Andromeda project, what of it?” he asked, turning the page and continuing to read the information on the paper. Suddenly he stopped reading and looked up. Williams could feel the gap around his collar getting warm. He wanted to loosen it for some air but couldn’t. This was a formal situation after all.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah. As sure as we can be. We lost signal with them six hours ago. They’d reported that they’d traced the origin of the signal. The signal from crate 7005. Crate 7005 was sent by the Board two hundred and seven years ago. Apparently it landed on some planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. The planet is small. Smaller than ours. But it looks like it has life sustaining capabilities,” Williams said.

  His boss gawked at him and then shook his head.

  “Life sustaining capabilities? Are you telling me that we could get first contact? After sixty years of searching the Milky Way, we luck out and find something on Andromeda straight away?”

  Williams shook his head.

  “No sir. I’m not saying that. The thing is, we don’t know what we’ve found. All we know is Timson and his crew did a fly-over over the planet. They contacted control and informed them that they’d picked up some heat signatures on the surface. Signatures that looked a lot like a town of some sorts. A community, if you will.”

  His boss started to smile. He couldn’t believe it. First contact. With alien life! What an amazing feat. And all in his time in office. He’d forever be known as the man that found life on another planet. A man that lead great men and women like him into deep space travel.

  “This is amazing. We must call a press conference. This has to be announced. We found life!” he said, getting off his seat and punching the air. It was quite the overreaction for a suited and booted officer of the Board, but this was a cause for celebration. The man turned around swiftly and grabbed a glass. He poured himself a drink and downed it in one, forgetting to offer the young commander a refreshment. Before he could rectify his mistake, Williams was getting to his original point.

  “I think you’re misunderstanding me Sir. Timson and his crew lost contact with us. The last time they pinged in their location was over six hours ago. We’ve pinged them ourselves, trying to get some sort of radio wave confirmation that they are still up there, but unfortunately it seems as if the ship has vanished.”

  The man in the suit gently put the empty glass tumbler down on the table and sighed loudly. A large collection of both air and disappointment escaped his body as he sat back down.

  “So they have them?” he asked.

  Williams frowned.

  “Have them? I’m not sure I follow sir,” he said.

  The man in the suit stood back up and made his way toward the young commander. He brushed against his desk and knocked something over. But the man in the suit wasn’t interested or worried about such a thing. All he was preoccupied with was the realization that not only had they possibly made first contact with an alien race, but they’d lost a ship to them in the process. The man in the suit didn’t want to believe that it was true. It just couldn’t be.

>   “The aliens…you think they shot the ship down?” he asked the young commander, a mere inch from his face. Williams could see the sweat forming on his boss’s face. His skin gleamed with perspiration. He was taking this a lot harder than he’d intended him to.

  “Sir, I don’t know what we’re dealing with here. However, I do know one thing, and that’s we better fire up the jump gate, get a crew in orbit of that planet and find out what we’re dealing with.”

  ***

  Back on “Second Earth” …

  “What happened here?” Randy Gustoff asked as he approached the burn site. The fire had simmered out and all that remained was the charred remnants of Aston’s house. Randy was glad that there were no bodies visible in the rubble. He couldn’t deal with that. He never was a fan of the human form when it was dead, and didn’t really care for it when it was both dead and burnt black.

  April was the only other person at the burn site. Everybody else was either in bed or had lost interest in what had happened, which Gustoff thought was insane. People in the colony were all too quick to call it a day and move on with their lives. If something couldn’t be explained, then it must be divine intervention of some sorts. It was a trend that the colony followed all too often. They were as predictable as time itself. It made him sick just thinking about them in their beds, sleeping, unwilling or un-wanting to find out what was going on.

  “Where’s the…” was all Randy could say. April turned to him and sighed.

  “I don’t know. You’d expect there to be more… I don’t know… something, right?” April said, her voice uneven.

  Gustoff nodded.

  “Well, there isn’t. There isn’t anything. There’s just the house. Or what’s left of it. But you said something crashed into it. Fell out of the damn sky. If that’s the case, then where the heck is it?” he asked, moving closer to the burn site. He got down on one knee and ran his left hand through some of the ash on the outer perimeter, letting the dirt flow through his fingers. It was fine and weightless. Warm to the touch, but not boiling. Small orange embers floated to the sky as Gustoff examined the site. He didn’t dare step on the rubble, not wanting to tamper with it until he knew exactly what he was dealing with.