Bear

By Richard Murray Davis

Alien miners traveling thousands of light years through space in search of colored diamonds discover the rare stones on earth at the bottom of the East China Sea. The aliens are discovered using a new sensor able to detect perturbations in the streams of neutrinos constantly passing through the planet. But the earthling’s ability to stop the marauders appears to be as futile as honeybees attempting to protect the hive from a bear. The government seeks help from an international thief and a cadre of psychic spies. Hope of stopping the plunder may rest with an overlooked discovery of a new source of antimatter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646285860

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BEAR

Richard Murray Davis

Copyright © 2019 Richard Murray Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, conveyed over the internet or placed on a website without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please refer questions to the publisher.

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

This is a work of fiction. The characters are products of the author’s imagination. Resemblance to actual persons whether living or dead is entirely coincidental. Reference to corporations, government offices, agencies and titles, military ranks, protocol and hardware and other organizations and places are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality. However, reference to real historical events and real people living or dead, are believed accurate with no intent to misrepresent or deviate from the public record.

ISBN 978-1-64628-585-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64628-696-6 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-64628-586-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

DISCOVERY

February 2045 to May 2045

1. Sunk

February 2045

2. Kit

February 2045

3. Ogg

4. Search

February 2045

5. Pentagon

March 2045

6. Parapsychology

March 2045

7. Cytronics

March 2045

8. OB

April 2045

9. Options

April 2045

ESCALATION

May 2045 to June 2046

10. Downs

11. Hijack-1

June–August 2045

12. Aftermath

August 2045

13. Excavation

September 2045

14. Subpoena

October 2045

15. Conscription

November 2045

16. Plan

January 2046

17. Rogue

February 2046

18. GOOP

March 2046

19. Hijack-2

April 2046

20. Rescue

April 2046

21. Dive

April 2046

22. Recuperation

May 2046

23. Kidnap

May 2046

24. Amends

May 2046

RESOLUTION

June 2046 to January 2047

25. TBX

June 2046

26. Implants

June 2046

27. Payback

June 2046

28. China

July 2046

29. Antimatter

August 2046

30. Attack

September 2046

31. Bear

October 2046

32. Swarm

October 2046

33. Closure

January 2047

Epilogue

Notes

Metrification

Glossary

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgment

About the Author

For family and friends and dedicated to the passing of Frieda and Myron

Prologue

The duration was 6.7 seconds. There was no explosion or shock wave, no earthquake or volcanic eruption, no hurricane or tsunami. The landscape remained the same, buildings unscathed. It barely brushed the surface, destroying only a small percent of the ozone.

The bullets were invisible, the shooter in the distant past. It rendered 107 satellites unconscious. Long-term damage to the biosphere was estimated to be minimal. The beam sliced through the Indian Ocean, across Southeast Asia, and into the North Pacific. The infrastructure withstood the onslaught but not the inhabitants. The ionizing radiation targeted DNA.

A spectrometer on Kwajalein Atoll (in the Marshall Islands) detected the event, as did a high-altitude surviving Chinese satellite over the North Pacific. It was a gamma ray burst, a GRB. The Chinese satellite had a wide-field-of-view, enabling measurement of the angle-of-arrival. The burst came from a supernova explosion of a star in the constellation Leo. The dying star collapsed, instantly forming a blackhole and a collimated beam of high-energy photons. The beam traveled nine thousand light years through the void before reaching Earth.

Many tried to help. The World Health Organization, International Red Cross, and Red Crescent Societies came. Doctors Without Borders, United Way Worldwide, and UNICEF came. But they could do little. There was no cure. Fever and sickness came first, followed by diarrhea, lesions, and bleeding. Treatment entailed mainly anesthetics and anti-nausea meds. The death count was estimated to be over nine million. The end came within days for most, weeks for others. The unlucky were exposed to lower levels of radiation and endured protracted agony.

In the aftermath, the United Nations, together with the World Health Organization, formed a new Institute for Research and Treatment of radiation disease. Funding for studies in cosmology and astrophysics increased. A bill to fund upgrades to the Near-Earth Object Defense System (NEODS) swept through congress and was signed by the president.

The possibility of putting an early-warning system in deep space to detect gamma rays was a nonstarter. The photons were hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light. Locating sensors to detect impending radiation would be a fool’s errand if the information could not outrun the radiation. Some thought the race could be won using atomic particles to do the messaging. Measurements of widely spaced particles comingled at birth had been shown to be correlated. Although the measurements suggested space may be non-local, the ability to transmit information from A to B at speeds faster than light was still in the realm of the will-o’-the-wisp.

A cosmologist at the University of Cambridge said in a BBC interview the disaster was a billion-year event. Others disagreed. A revisionist theory appeared in a leading journal hypothesizing GRBs may have been responsible for earth’s periodic mass extinctions. The paper focused on the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, which occurred about sixty-six million years ago and purportedly annihilated over two-thirds of all life, including the dinosaurs. A gust of letters promptly appeared rebutting the argument.

The GRB event was epic, but remembered in the Galactic Record mostly for the discovery it precipitated and events to follow.

The bear climbed the tree and tore the hive apart to get the honey.

The bees were an annoyance.

I

DISCOVERY

February 2045 to May 2045

1. Sunk

February 2045

The Okinawa Trough is a depression in the continental shelf in the East China Sea. It is an arc-shaped basin west of the Ryukyu Trench, where the Philippine Tectonic plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate. The region is notable for an arc of volcanic islands that extend north to the Japanese Island of Kyushu and southwest to Taiwan. The trough and trench are within a larger region of volcanic activity encircling the Pacific Ocean known as the Ring of Fire. Ownership of islands within the trough is contested by countries in the region. Mineral rights are at stake.

Reports had surfaced of fishermen seeing small weather balloons floating in the water northeast of Taiwan inside the Okinawa Trough. The area was claimed by China to be within their two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) patrolled the area. Rear Admiral Navid was in command of the East Sea Fleet. He ordered the Bei-Tian, a littoral combat cruiser (LCC) that patrolled the region, to investigate the sightings.

The LCC was sixty-five meters bow to stern and carried a crew of twelve. It was equipped with four hybrid electric drives supporting forty knots in sea state two. The bridge, which was on level 02, was manned by the officer-of-the-watch and a helmsman. Most operations, including radar, sonar and weapons were controlled from the combat information center (CIC) in the ship’s interior.

Wang Shen was captain of the LCC. Wang grew up on a farm in western China. He scored in the top one percent on the National College Entrance Examination and the government gave him a full scholarship to attend the PLAN National Defense University. He majored in naval engineering and upon graduation was assigned an officer post in the Navy.

Wang was married and had an eight-year-old son, but the family was divided. His wife worked in a factory in Zhongzhou, and their son was being raised by his wife’s parents on a farm in western China. After trying for many years, the family was able to get their hukou (residential designation affecting social benefits) changed to Zhongzhou. The couple had recently purchased a condo in a modern high rise on the outskirts of the city. They were anxious to reunite the family and experience big-city living.

Wang was one of the youngest captains in the Navy. The closest he had come to combat was firing two short-range missiles during a military exercise in the East China Sea.

It was the dry season, but you would not know. The sky was an ominous timber wolf gray. The wind was twenty knots from the west. One to two-meter swells were hitting the LCC at ten-second intervals. It was early morning, and there were no ships on the horizon.

CIC called the bridge. Sonar is detecting an object at a depth of four-hundred meters, range six kilometers. Appears to be drifting to the surface.

Ships of war are hesitant to use active sonar because it reveals their position to submarines. Wang had authorized its use in the search for the balloons.

The officer on watch spoke into the ship-wide com, Captain to the bridge.

CIC called again two minutes later. Second object detected, depth three-hundred-fifty meters. Two objects now streaming upward.

Wang entered the bridge, and the watch officer told him of the detections. Wang told the helmsman to change course to intercept. It took the LCC six minutes to reach the first object. Lieutenant Tsi Lee was on dogwatch. The binoculars were mounted on a pedestal on the observation deck. Lee had the elevation lock set slightly below horizon and the magnification at twenty. He had to manually slew the big eyes in azimuth. A crewman in CIC gave Lee the pointing direction.

The lieutenant saw the first object immediately after it broke the water line. It looked like a small gray weather balloon. The lieutenant called the bridge and told them of the sighting. As they got closer, Lee realized only part of the balloon was above the water line. It was being held down by what appeared to be a metallic canister attached to its base. The balloon-canister assembly was about two meters long and looked like a giant light bulb bobbing in the water.

After some discussion about its possible purpose and what the canister might contain, Wang decided to haul the assembly onboard. Not wanting to put divers in the water, he maneuvered the ship closer to the balloon and cut the engines. He ordered the crewmen to open the stern cargo bay on the lower deck. The garage, as the bay was referred to, was used to deploy small boats and cargo. The garage door was hinged at the bottom and could be hydraulically pivoted down into the water to form a ramp. There was a crane mounted on the main deck with an arm that could be rotated out over the ramp. A cable connected to a winch could be lowered from the end of the arm. The winch was controlled by a crewman in the aft control room.

Two crewmen in the garage attempted to lasso the balloon using a rope. In spite of its size, the ship was rolling in concert with the swell, which made the crewmen’s task difficult. They succeeded on the second try. They pulled the noose tight and attached the rope to the cable hanging from the crane. The crewman controlling the winch began rewinding the cable.

Meanwhile OrgonBahakAzan97108, en route to pick up his cargo, witnessed the interdiction. Orgon was born on the planet Oggilea and was a member of a race referred to as the Ogg. The trailing number in an Ogg’s name was his year of birth.

It took only seconds for the space-faring vessel to reach the surface ship. The balloon, with attached canister, was hanging precariously from the cable attached to the crane. The crewmen were attempting to jockey the wobbling assembly into the garage. The sea was choppy. Orgon told the D-Org (a designer organism) to use the maglift. The lift was a helical beam, which produced a strong magnetic field. The metalized balloon and canister were pulled upward in the field. The assembly rose about five meters, but the maglift was not strong enough to pull it free from the cable. Rather than increasing power to the lift and getting into a contest with the cable and winch, Orgon opted to use the cutter.

The cutter was employed in surface mining. There was an alignment problem because of the small angle between the cutter beam and cable. Orgon told the D-Org to cut the arm on the crane holding the cable. The cutter sliced through the arm but, in the process, cut off a section of the garage door and severed a corner of the stern, leaving it dangling in the water. Heat from the beam and molten metal, which had dropped into the sea, raised the temperature of the water near the bay door. The garage was engulfed in a cloud of steam.

The D-Org re-engaged the maglift. The cable and part of the winch arm, which were now dangling from the rope attached to the canister, were heavy enough to pull the rope free. The severed winch arm with attached cable and rope dropped into the sea. The spaceship was mostly invisible except for a region surrounding an opening into which the balloon-canister assembly was being drawn.

Wang Shen witnessed the bizarre event from the bridge. The LCC had a rapid-fire cannon (five thousand rounds per minute) on a rotary mount, but the gun was programmed to only fire against incoming targets. Wang could override the programming, but the target was too close. Fragmentation could reflect back, endangering the ship and everyone topside.

Wang called the CIC. Are you seeing that aircraft, or whatever it is, hovering directly above us?

Yes, sir, we have a definite infrared (IR) signature. Never seen anything like it. It’s huge. Forty meters—maybe more.

Whatever it is, it just attacked us and cut off a section of the stern. Target it with the missile as soon it moves off.

The missile had a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) seeker. The warhead was a conventional high explosive. The starship began moving off when the balloon-canister assembly cleared the opening. CIC fired the missile. The intercept occurred six hundred meters from the LCC. Light from the explosion arrived instantly. The sound arrived about two seconds later. The starship was undamaged.

Meanwhile, the crewmen in the cargo bay could not raise the garage door, and there was a gaping hole in the floor and side bulkhead where the stern had been severed. The sea was flooding the lower deck, and the crewmen were losing the battle with the gushing water.

They could have made it. The hybrid drive was undamaged. But OrgonBahakAzan97108 decided to erase the evidence. He believed in the golden rule: Do unto others as they have done unto you. He also believed the indigenous earthlings were barbaric.

Orgon walked over to the station where the D-Org was and said, I’ll do this. He reset the crosshairs on the cutter beam, increased the intensity, and sliced the ship in half. The beam went through the steel hull and aluminum superstructure like a band saw cutting through a two-by-four. The ship would go down in over two kilometers of water and probably never be recovered.

The cutter beam hit one of the lithium-ion battery banks in the belly of the ship. Water seeped into the batteries, making contact with the lithium, which immediately ignited, setting the entire area ablaze. The searing heat swept through the compartment encompassing the adjacent battery banks. Two of them exploded. The sailors in the garage were thrown against a side bulkhead when the batteries exploded and drowned when they could not get to the ladder leading to the main deck. The crewman manning the winch in the aft control room made it out the side door, but fell and slid down the deck toward the molten splintered hull. He was fatally burned as he went over the edge into the breach.

Lieutenant Lee, who witnessed the preceding events from the observation deck, was thrown onto the main deck when the batteries exploded, breaking his neck in the fall and killing him as the bow canted upward. The sea was boiling and steam rising from the crevice. Two crewmen in CIC and three in their bunks in the interior of the ship drowned in their compartments.

Wang Shen saw the beam slice through the hull and turned to his compatriots on the bridge. Get out, he said, pointing to the door.

The crewmen made it out the bridge door while Wang yelled into the ship-wide com, Abandon ship.

Wang turned and hit the red Mayday button, which automatically transmitted the distress signal. But the signal never made it off the ship. The cutter beam, which splintered the hull, also destroyed the communications antenna on the weather deck.

The helmsman and officer-of-the-watch got out the bridge door, but fell and slid down into the fissure amid ships never to be seen again. Wang was last to exit the bridge. After witnessing the fate of the helmsman and watch officer, he lunged out the bridge door, grabbing the handrail on the side of the deck, which was at about a forty-degree angle. He swung his legs over the top and hung from the rail as the bow went into the froth.

The burning lithium had set the sea afire. It was a bewildering sight. Wang released his grip as his legs went into the water. He began frantically swinging his arms in a hopeless battle to escape the under-tow and swirling burning sea. The boiling water seeped into his life jacket and through his clothes. He gasped for breath. Wang didn’t think of his wife or son until he gagged on the brine, knowing he was going to die.

2. Kit

February 2045

The child awoke when the ship broke in half. She practically fell out of bed and ran to her mother’s room. She stood frozen at bed’s edge, small hands clutching the blanket, dusky brown hair partially covering stern green eyes as they followed the rise and fall of her mother’s chest. Josie awoke looking into the frightened face.

I had another real dream. There was a boat, and a balloon went up in the air, and then the boat broke in half.

Josie knew what it meant, and her brain immediately began to focus.

Kit, why did the boat break in half?

Kit was short for Kathleen Immanuel Taggot.

Something cut it in half.

The dreams had started a few months earlier just after her fifth birthday. Her daughter’s transformation had been dramatic. Before the dreams, she was an overactive five-year-old on a nonstop frenetic marathon punctuated by screaming and shouting. Josie had bought a small circular trampoline enclosed in a clear plastic mesh hoping to drain some of her energy. It worked, but became unnecessary after the onset of the dreams. The trampoline stood idle. The screaming and shouting stopped—replaced with anxiety and angst.

The cat became Kit’s companion. Josie found the kitten while running on the bike path. Her house was separated from the path by thirty meters of wetland. The kitten was alone and frail. She brought it food on the next run. He was regal, so she named him Majesty. The following day, he was on the front step. She cleaned him and let him sleep in the mud room. The next day, he was on the floor in the bedroom and, finally, the bed with its 98.6-degree heater. When the dreams started the cat switched from her bed to Kit’s.

Josie was worried. Kit had the gift. She could see into the ether beyond the horizon. As a teenager, Josie had been plagued by flashes of remote imagery. It had taken years to learn to control them. She sat upright and reached for her daughter. She had to be careful. She did not want Kit to fear remote viewing. She probably did see a balloon—maybe even something that looked like a boat being cut in half.

Remember our talk last week. You don’t have to fear the real dreams. You can stop them by just thinking, I want to return to my body.

3. Ogg

Ursa Major, which translates in Latin to the Great Bear, is a constellation visible throughout the year on Earth in the northern hemisphere, partially visible in southern latitudes. The seven brightest stars in the bear are known on earth as the Big Dipper. The celestial region is better known in the Galactic Record as being home to the Ogg, a race of three-meter leviathans.

The Ogg home world is Oggilea, a planet four times the size of Earth, circling a star at 55.41 degrees declination, 10.67 hours right ascension [¹]. On a clear night, you can see the star shimmering near the heart of the bear. The Ogg are hairless and have thick necks and large protruding insect-like eyes. They have ears, but no nose. Respiration occurs through membranes in their neck. Unlike humans, food blockage in an Ogg’s throat does not prevent breathing.

An Ogg year is about the same time extent as an Earth year. Around the time the hunter-gatherers began farming on earth, a mathematician on Oggilea published a paper deriving the hyperspace tensor equation. The paper languished in obscurity for nearly a millennium until a physicist used it to prove the existence of range-limited wormholes. A wormhole is a bridge connecting two widely spaced points in real space.

The tensor equation predicted the distance traveled in real space depended upon both the size of the object being transported and the energy used in creating the hole. The energy came from particles spontaneously created in the vacuum of space. The particles exist for only an instant and must be collected before they annihilate one another and disappear. If wormhole travel was to be practical, the total time to collect the particles had to be short—less than the time it would take to travel the distance spanned by the wormhole in real space using conventionally-powered ships. Ogg science at the time was a long way from being able to meet the time constraint.

Transition to proof-of-principle came slowly. Four hundred years passed before the science advanced to the point where wormhole travel became practical. It took another four hundred before the Ogg had a prototype ship able to jump across space in less time than it took light to travel the same distance—thus breaking the light speed barrier.

The ship that took the Ogg to Earth was Gen-9. It could collect enough vacuum energy in one week to jump the equivalent of twenty light years. Since Earth was two thousand light years from Oggilea, it took a hundred jumps and two years to make the journey. The Gen-9 enabled the Ogg to reach tens of millions of star systems in a single year.

Long before star travel became possible, bioengineering on Oggilea