Idyllium Mission: Day 1

“HE’S ALERT,” somebody yelled.

The gurney slammed onto the concrete and he felt his brain explode. Pushed through parted glass doors, a squeaky wheel laid a soundtrack for the rush down the hall where florescent bulbs strobed overhead, pounding his eyes like a migraine. Three or maybe four medics scampered around him, one with a flashlight confirming the pupils constricted as they should under the assault of the focused beam. He struggled to twist his torso, but the grip of the strap cinching his forehead to the gurney immobilized him.

An abrupt stop jarred him. He watched people in scrubs stick sensors to his temples, steal his blood, and unbutton his shirt to splay a spider web of diodes to the scaffolding of monitors over his head. As he became more lucid, he robotically answered their questions, which they told him confirmed he had no concussion.

“Where have you taken me?”

No one answered.

His eyes widened as an IV port pierce his cubital above the forearm, and a bag of clear liquid floating above caught a shimmer of the intense overhead lighting and the room spun.

He reached his right hand to his left wrist. Gone! Without his bio-pad, Captain Marc Sanders had no way to find his team…

___

Earth: 5 Days to Crossover

ROBERTA HILLTHORPE KICKED OFF the red stilettos, leaned back as far as her chair allowed, and surrendered to the weight of the world. Two worlds, actually.

She planted her feet on the smooth glass desktop, cleared of all clutter save for the holographic display. Fondling a tumbler, she considered her liquid advocate as the weasel who invited himself into her office stood there waiting for a “Good morning, Walter,” which she didn’t offer. He must have been acutely aware their roles had flipped and, despite his appointing her as his second, she ran the United Global Alliance in his name.

As the Strategic Counsel Leader of the UGA, she had dedicated the better part of her time to finding humanity a new home. A real estate agent for the entire planet, she mused. While touting it to the public as their salvation, they didn’t have the years needed to migrate to Mars—if that were even possible. As the planet choked on its last breaths, Roberta intently worked out her true plan.

Breaking the silence of her thinly veiled annoyance, Chairperson Walter Vescovi asked, “Are we sure we’ve exhausted all diplomatic options?”

“We, Walter?” Roberta dropped her feet to the tile floor with a thud and huffed deliberately. “The one time you insisted on being involved, and you blew our chances for that.”

“We asked for refuge, migration of over four billion people from Earth to their world. It seemed a fair question.”

“And I had an answer that would have kept the option on the table. Why you had to tell their Prime Minister’s office about how our industrialization ruined the environment…” She exhaled forcefully through her nostrils. “And it horrified them when you explained the nuclear incidents that ruined our ecosphere. Anyone should have expected it would.”

“They had the right to know.”

Weary from a conversation they had replayed too many times, Roberta hoisted her elbows on the desktop and leaned forward. “And they shut us down. Now this is all we have.”

“But occupation by force? And for goodness sakes, Roberta, sending nuclear warheads over there… They have nothing like that. It’s one reason their planet is still pristine.”

“Look, when we took office, we pushed Mars as our only hope. Even now that it’s a bust, we’re still selling it to the masses. Finding Idyllium was our chance, it’s our future. And it’s the only one we’ve got.”

Letting Walter stew for a bit, Roberta mused over how the James Webb telescope searched the cosmos for a habitable planet. When astrophysicists reexamined what they had classified as echoes of earth, their discovery resurrected a hope Roberta had considered dead and buried. “When we found Idyllium, we got our second chance. I intend to take it… I will save the four and a half billion people under our care.”

“But to undermine their economic, social, and political systems? To take out their defenses and then invade an entire planet? Do we have the right?”

“We have the right to live, Mister Chairperson.” Hillthorpe stood and rested the knuckles of her balled fists on the desktop. Towering over the unimposing man, she spoke to his reflection on the desk’s glossy surface. “We’re not the bad guys here. They refused to help, sentencing us to death. Now their own deputy PM is working with us to remove their prime minister and allow our infiltration and future migration.”

“Just don’t detonate any nukes over there. If that is to be our new home, let’s not ruin it like we did this one.”

Roberta sighed. “As I’ve told you, that is a last resort.”

Banishing the anxiety from his squeaky voice, Vescovi asked, “Will the first team be ready?”

“The advance team. Why do you think I’m spending so much time in this dreary hellhole of a compound? I’m personally overseeing their final preparations.”

“And you’re sure about the two civilians joining the mission?”

Roberta cackled. “Sharon is hardly a civilian. She’s been on several assignments, and she’s the best environmental scientist we’ve got.”

“And the journalist?”

Technically her boss, Roberta allowed Walter’s questions to trickle onto her forehead like an unrelenting drip drip drip. She endured the torture, knowing it granted his conscience permission to scribble a signature on whatever executive orders she needed to draft.

“Communications specialist. We have plenty of qualified marines, for sure, but Marc asked for her specifically. Besides, Kat’s a friend and I trust her. She’ll be ready.”

“Perhaps such an unusual make-up of our team will ensure the opposing force on Idyllium is not an exact match of doubles from the team we’re sending.”

“The brainiacs first told us the world there is a mirror of ours, down to the hemorrhoids on our butt cheeks. Doppelgängers, they called them. But they based that on a multiverse theory, and our best minds now think that doesn’t exist, that we have found one single parallel world.”

Walter rocked on his feet. “Should Captain Sanders expect to encounter himself, Commander Mullins, and the others when they get there? Exact duplicates of themselves fighting to protect Idyllium from… us?”

“No. They have no me running things on Idyllium, luckily. I have someone over there looking into it for me and, going back over a century…, not a single doppelgänger.”

“Good. Very good. Our future is riding on this, and time is running out. We can’t afford to fail.”

“Walter, you know me well enough by now. I always have a contingency plan.”