Echo Two

Some of you have read Echo Six, my first voyage away from crime thrillers and into the realm of Science Fiction. If you enjoyed Echo Six, know that I’m writing the sequel now, Echo Two.

I’m sharing the draft of Echo Two’s prologue, just a teaser and it may answer any questions you may have about the third cadet, Echo Nine mentioned in the first story.

Prologue

Peter Bishop was cursed with an overactive imagination and a brilliant mind. At the age of four, his primary school teacher requested a mandatory meeting with his parents. The teacher was a stern woman, her gray skin reminded him of sharks at the aquarium, her hair a tattered spiderweb, and her boney fingers a hawk’s talons.

“Mister Bishop,” the woman said, ignoring Peter’s mother. “Your son has become disruptive in class, correcting me in the middle of both our math lessons and reading assignments. He’s quite bright, but I cannot have him interrupting me as he does.”

His mother shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “You say correcting you, were you wrong?”

“No, of course not, but Peter thinks his way of adding numbers is faster than the methods our curriculum demands. He tries to teach the others students his way of doing things, quite frankly I don’t understand how he does it, but he knows the answers before I’ve finished writing the problem.”

“We do math problems when I put him to bed. Maybe every mother should.”

The woman scoffed, making a tittering sound. “Do you know he recites lines of poetry from the old classics? Those poems are taught in much higher grades to children much older than Peter. The rest of the students are struggling with a basic primer. Why … one of the girls burst into tears when she tried to repeat Peter. This can’t continue.”

“Then move him to a higher grade level,” his mother said.

“Christina, let me handle this. I’ve heard enough today.”

His father was a shrewd business man, like his father before him. The Bishops were an old money family dating back centuries. He was impassive and cold. He stood, brushing away an imagined piece of lint on his slacks.

“Peter will remain where he is,” he said. “You however, will remember it’s your place to instruct him. Move him up to the proper level if you cannot. We are done here.”

His father stormed out, his mother doing her best to match his pace. Peter looked at the teacher, her pale gray skin now white, a large purple vein throbbing in each temple. He knew how she felt. His father was a master at belittling anyone he felt was inferior.

On Peter’s sixth birthday he sat in an algebra class with students twice his age, most of them resenting his presence, sneering and laughing at him whenever they could. His desk dwarfed his short stature and he sat on two thick text books so he could see over the shoulders of a big kid in front of him.

The assignments were simplistic and boring. Glancing at the new problem on his monitor, he shouted out the answer. “X equals fifty!”

Everyone in the class turned and the boy in front of him laughed. “You little shit for brains. You’re so wrong.”

“I’m never wrong.”

The bell rang and the class rose in unison to leave. The big boy stopped and Peter took a step back. “See you later freak.”

“Peter,” the teacher said, interrupting the confrontation. “Stay. We need to talk.”

Alone with him now, the teacher sat at the desk the bully had just vacated. “Peter, how in the world did you know that answer. Two weeks in my class and I haven’t seen you take a single note, practice a single problem or work out any of the answers on paper. How do you do it?”

“I studied your algebra course on-line at home last weekend and memorized the problems. I don’t need to take notes or work anything out, I know the answers—all of them.”

The man looked baffled, then horrified as if he had just found a roach in his soup bowl.

“I see he said,” standing up and moving away. Maybe you need to study elsewhere. I’ll speak to the board later.”

The next morning, he was moved to the massive library sitting at a single desk in one of the empty corners. The two librarians avoided getting close to him, glancing over at him occasionally—whispering. He felt diseased, like a mutant animal in a zoo. He was different and they knew it. It had made a mistake showing off, and he would never make that mistake again.

The remainder of the year and still alone in the library, he carefully answered each question insuring he would score no higher than an eighty percentile. He had nothing to prove to these adults, or the other students either. He spent most of the days studying psychology and physics from the old textbooks and the new digital versions. Both subjects excited him, filling a gnawing emptiness that troubled him at night. Peter’s father was not impressed with his progress.

Peter sensed the change in his father’s demeanor, he had become curious and suspicious when he was supposed to be studying, so each night he left scribbled math problems on his desk and in the trash. Miss Alvinia, his mother’s house maid, cleaned his room each afternoon after preparing lunch. One day he found several of those discarded notes and his academic evaluation on his father’s nightstand.

Gregory Hans Bishop was a rudimental man, a man set in his ways and he demanded his wife and son follow his example. Peter’s progress report stated the heir to his fortune was an average student. His son was brilliant and labeling his son as average was not acceptable.

At the dinner table, his father slammed his fist on the table rattling the silverware, his trembling hands holding the progress report.

“Average!” The word contorted his father’s lips and the frown lines around them raged in silence. “For two years … is this the best you can do?”  He flung a salt shaker across the room, shattering it on his mother’s prized piano.

“This damned private school is not working out. I’m going to enroll him in another school, Christina. I’ve let you pander him long enough. I want the Institute of Science and Technology in Atlanta to test him.”

“He’s too young Gregory, he’s only seven years old. He’s just a boy.”

“He’s my boy dammit, and he will go where I say.”

As Alvinia began clearing the dinner plates, Peter said what he knew would change his world forever.

“Father, your collar and jacket smell like Alvinia’s perfume.”

In the kitchen, the crashing of fine china broke his father’s angry, silent stare. His mother clutched his hand squeezing it as a whimper escaped her pursed lips.

“Gregory?”

“That … that is preposterous!”

“Smell it yourself mother, you know it’s true. You’ve always known.”

His father dropped him off at the institute two days later and drove away, never saying a word.

Now, thirty years later and known as Echo Nine, he was speeding across the galaxy—four light years from Earth.

The memory of that shattered salt shaker made him smile … until the ship’s sensors began flashing red warning signs across his view screen. Unknown gravitational anomaly pulsed in big red letters. Something was in front of his ship. He could feel it, sense it’s great power, and the genetic core felt it too.

Another alert flashed on the screen, then blacked out, flickered and lit up again. A two-way transmission he couldn’t read was scrolling from left to right. Symbols he had never seen before flashed and pulsed like a heartbeat.

“What is it?” he said aloud. “Who are you communicating with?”

The core, a mass of genetically engineered brain tissue sharing human DNA, understood his question but didn’t respond. He could smell something acrid in the air, and he could taste it too. It was the core’s fear. What could cause a core to experience fear?

“Stop the ship—emergency stop—reboot the main computer.”

I cannot.

The core seldom responded with a text, usually it transmitted a simple impulse he could read through his telemetry suit. But the suit itself was now malfunctioning, ripples of electricity pulsed across it and the data transfer nodes under his skin; it wasn’t painful, more of an irritation he couldn’t ignore.

“Stop this transmission.”

I cannot.

The rippling sensation under his skin was in his head now. Tendrils of low voltage electricity pulsed across his spine and into his brain, pressing it against his skull. Stretching bones and the vertebrae in his neck popped giving him the sensation he was being both pulled apart and pulled out of his seat.

The warning chimes stopped, the view screen died, but the stretching increased. He screamed in pain as part of him was pulled through the ship’s hull. He could see himself now, part of him outside and within the ships drive field, he should be dying in the vacuum of space, or at least freezing to death in the bitter cold, but the sensation was warm.

Something in his head snapped and he screamed again. This time there was no sound. He was racing through space now towards something massive. The closer he got, the greater the pain as every cell in his body began to rupture. Fear was a powerful emotion, one he seldom experienced and he trembled in the stillness of the void—until he heard her voice.

“I’m sorry Peter.”

“Mother?”

“No, Peter.”