The Corps of Discovery Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3: A multiverse series of alternate history Read online

  Corps of Discovery Series

  Books 1-3

  James S. Peet

  Copyright © 2017, 2018, 2020 James S. Peet

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Surveyor

  Copyright © 2017 James S. Peet

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9996093-1-6

  Trekker

  Copyright © 2018 James S. Peet

  ISBN: 978-0-9996093-3-0

  Explorer

  Copyright © 2020 James S. Peet

  ISBN: 978-0-9996093-4-7

  Cover design by: Patrick Turner and Jeanine Henning

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my family

  PART ONE

  SURVEYOR

  Prologue

  Tim Bowman didn’t intend to open a portal to a parallel Earth, it just happened.

  The half-Irish, half-Japanese Buckaroo Banzai wannabe was actually working on an attempt at a matter transporter. As a kid, he had watched all the Star Trek television shows and decided that he should be able to figure out some way to make the show’s transporter a reality. Several decades later, with a PhD in physics in hand, here he was in a small metal shed on his ranchette just outside the small town of Selah, Washington, finessing his latest attempt. His buddy, Dave Jaskey, was sitting on a swivel chair watching him. Dave, dressed for the cowboy action shoot the two were planning on attending shortly, was holding onto a lever-action rifle he had brought with him to show Tim. It sat, forgotten, in his lap as he watched Tim begin the start-up process for his machine. Where Dave was sitting, he could see the imposing profile of Mt. Rainier, Washington’s largest mountain, through a window at the far end of the shed.

  The machine was a simple-looking affair, consisting of two metal-framed gateways separated by about fifteen feet, and a control panel fed by a standard electric cord from an outlet on the shed’s wall. The control panel was linked to both gates. According to Tim, once it was activated, one should be able to walk through the opening of one gate and appear from the other. Naturally, Dave was skeptical.

  A sacrificial chicken was in a cage next to the first gate. The plan was to push the chicken through the gate and have it emerge from the other. Tim had considered using a goat but figured his wife would be more upset to find one of her milk goats missing than a chicken that had stopped laying eggs. Besides, he figured, it’s a chicken. If it died, it wouldn’t be missed.

  Tim finished fiddling with the control panel, and then said to Dave, “Well, here goes nothing.” He flipped a switch and a humming sound emanated from the two gates. Dave’s eyebrows raised in surprise.

  “Well, at least something’s working,” he said.

  Tim left the control panel and practically ran to where the chicken sat. Opening the cage, he pulled the squawking bird out. Still standing to the side of the gate, where he could keep an eye on the other gate, he reached around and threw the chicken through. It disappeared from sight. He stepped back for a better look at the exit gate, frowning.

  “Where’s the damned chicken?” he asked.

  Dave shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Tim hurried to the opening of the second gate and looked through it. All he saw was the shed’s floor and space between the two gates. His frown deepened, creating deep furrows on his forehead. He ran back to the first gate, and this time actually looked through the opening.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  Dave got up from his perch and walked over to stand by Tim.

  “What the hell is right,” he said.

  The two men saw the chicken, but instead of standing on the floor of the shed, either outside the second gate or between the two, it stood on the ground of a high desert, just like the land surrounding Tim’s ranchette. Off in the distance, they could see a mountain that looked just like Mt. Rainier. But they couldn’t see any signs of civilization, just an untouched natural environment. Dave did a double take, looking at the mountain through the gate and then at the mountain through the window.

  Tim was just about to reach down and grab it when the bird squawked and tried to run away. Its little bird brain had recognized danger, but too late. A tawny bundle of fur leaped in; the two men stood in shock as a large cat with two long fangs bit down on the bird, ending its squawking with a flurry of flying feathers.

  Both men stepped back, shocked. Dave grabbed a cartridge from the leather pistol belt around his waist and loaded it into the rifle. He brought it up and aimed it at the lion. The motion caught the attention of the large beast. It turned to face them, dead bird dangling from its mouth between the two scimitar-like fangs. It lay its ears back and crouched as if to attack.

  At that point, Dave had had enough and shot the animal between the eyes. It dropped like a stone, still clutching the dead chicken between its jaws.

  “What the hell is it?” Tim asked.

  “From the looks of it, a freakin’ saber-tooth tiger,” Dave said, working the lever on the rifle to eject the spent casing, and loading another cartridge from his belt.

  Tim stepped back toward the gate, and then, gingerly, poked his head through it. He looked around for a minute, then pulled his head back and turned to Dave.

  “You look and tell me what you see, so I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  Dave did. When he looked back at Tim, his eyes were wide, the whites showing vividly around the blue irises.

  “A herd of woolly mammoths? Did you just invent a time machine, or what?”

  The two men dragged the dead saber-toothed tiger through the gate and into the shed, dead chicken in mouth and all.

  “I don’t think so,” Tim said. “You’re the astrologist, can’t you figure it out this evening?”

  “Astronomer,” Dave absently replied. It was a standing joke between them.

  “I’m not sure I want to try taking any pictures at night from there,” Dave said, nudging the dead lion with his cowboy boot. “Not if there’s more like this. Why don’t you shut this thing down until we figure out what we’re doing?”

  “Probably a good idea,” Tim said. Giving the lion a wide berth, he went over to the control panel and turned off the machine.

  “So, we’ve got a couple of options here,” Dave said, contemplating the dead lion. “Either you developed a time machine and found a way to the past, or you’ve opened up a portal to an alternate universe, giving us access to another Earth where the megafauna still roam.”

  1

  “I’m not going.”

  “What do you mean you’re not going?” Bill asked, stunned.

  Jessica crossed her arms across her chest. “Exactly what I said. I’m not going.”

  “But, but, we’ve planned on this for years.”

  “No, Bill, you’ve planned on this for years. I didn’t. I planned on marrying you and staying on Earth while you got a nice job. I never agreed to going to another planet. And I’m certainly not up for being the wife of somebody whose idea of fun is gallivanting around wild planets while I sit at home and worry.”

  Bill couldn’t believe what he was hearing. For years he had busted his butt to get into the Corps of Discovery,
and he had assumed that his fiancé, Jessica, was on board with that. After all, it was pretty much all he had talked about since they met freshman year.

  Struggling to understand, he asked, “So, what do you want me to do now?”

  Uncrossing her arms, she came up to Bill and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Simple. Take that job offer from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Once you start, we can finally get married.”

  Reaching up, Bill removed her arms from around his neck and shook his head.

  “Sorry, I can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “I only applied for that job as a fall-back in case I didn’t make the cut. You’re asking me to give up what I’ve worked for most of my life. I just can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. She crossed her arms again. “Look. Either it’s me or the Corps. Your call.”

  Bill looked at her blue eyes, framed by an almond-shaped face and blond hair tied up in a pony-tail, and shook his head. She meant it: she was actually giving him an ultimate.

  Had she changed so much since they fell in love? Or had he ever really known her?

  With a sinking feeling in his gut, he said, “That’s not much of a choice. Either way, I lose.”

  “What do you mean you lose? What am I? Some sort of consolation prize if you didn’t get your precious Corps?”

  Bill leaned forward, gave Jessica a quick kiss on the lips, and said, “I love you, but I’m not willing to stay here and kill my dreams.”

  With that, he turned and walked out through the open door of her dorm room.

  Behind him, he heard her yell, “You bastard!”

  He turned around just in time to get hit in the cheek with a small, sharp object.

  Bill put his hand up to his face as he looked down. On the floor, he saw the small engagement ring he had given her on Christmas Eve. He scooped it up and put it in his pocket.

  Well, I guess that’s that, he thought, looking at the closed door.

  His cheek stung. When he withdrew his hand, there was a small bit of blood on his fingertips. He wiped the blood on his jeans leg and continued down the hall.

  Yeah, this is gonna be fun explaining to “the Colonel.”

  Supper that evening was “interesting.” Along with having to explain to his father (whom Bill thought of as “The Colonel”— always in quotes because that’s how it was in his Air Force family) why Jessica didn’t join them for his celebratory graduation supper, he also informed his father that he wouldn’t be staying on Earth for another day. His father wasn’t too thrilled about his only child leaving Earth to put his life on the line just for adventure, which he said was nothing more than somebody else in danger in a faraway land. Supper was a tense affair but fortunately didn’t devolve into an argument, as all too many of them had while Bill was growing up. It didn’t help that Bill was still in a state of shock from Jessica’s behavior, and, in his mind, betrayal.

  As the two exited the restaurant on Lake Union, “The Colonel” walked Bill to his old, rusting pickup truck. Bill held out his hand to shake with his father, but “The Colonel” unexpectedly grabbed him in a bear hug. “Be careful out there,” he said in a husky voice, then stepped back and added, “Make me proud.”

  Bill was shaken by the emotion coming from his father. It wasn’t just unexpected, it was unheard of. “The Colonel” hadn’t even cried at his wife’s funeral. Then again, six-year-old Billy was crying hard enough he didn’t notice if anyone else was.

  “I’ll try,” he stammered.

  “The Colonel” strode toward his rental car on the other side of the parking lot, never turning around for a last look. That was his way. That was how he always left Bill: no backward looks, no regrets, just a forward determination, like a cat.

  Bill wrestled his keys from his pocket and opened the Toyota’s door, listening to it squeal the entire time. As he backed up out of his parking space, he saw his father in the rear-view mirror getting into his car. Bill had no idea how long it would be before he next saw him.

  2

  Despite the early hour, the road leading up to the Transfer Station was mobbed, and the massive parking lots were filled, mostly with buses. Signs directed emigrants and travelers to different lots, and those lots fed into different parts of the Parallel, Inc. Transfer Station, a large building looking more like a fruit packing station (which it was in a previous life) than the portal to a parallel universe. A number of protesters lined the road leading up to the building but stopped short at the guarded entrance to the lot. Most held signs saying “No Exploitation,” “Stop the Infestation,” “Gaia First,” or similar themes. They were obviously people who had no desire for humans to expand to the new worlds that Parallel, Inc. was opening for settlement and resource exploitation. Passing through the throng of chanting protesters, Bill drove up to the gate separating the Transfer Station from the surrounding land.

  At the gate, Bill gave the armed guard his destination and was required to show his driver’s license. Another guard waved a wand over, around, and under his truck and eventually gave the first guard an “all clear” signal. That must be one of bomb detection wands I’ve heard about, he thought.

  The guard passed him through the gate and Bill spotted the sign for the Corps of Discovery lot. It had the stylized image of Lewis and Clark that was on the envelope Bill had shown “the Colonel” last night, one man pointing outward, the other standing slightly in front of him, holding onto a musket. The sign pointed toward a part of the building separate from the main immigration area. He pulled into a parking space in front of the building, hopped out of the truck, and walked over to the lone door. Over it was a smaller Corps of Discovery sign.

  Despite the early hour, the temperature was already rising, and the parking lot still retained heat from the prior day, so it was with some relief that Bill entered the building and discovered it was air-conditioned.

  The room was about the size of a small classroom, with a row of computers on one side, each separated by a divider with a chair in front of them; on the other side of the room was a counter with a computer monitor.

  An older woman sat behind the counter. A hideous scar ran down the left side of her face from the edge of her eye to her jawline, partially covered by long, silver-streaked black hair, and she was missing her left arm from just above the elbow. Bill was surprised to see her reading an actual newspaper, the type derived from trees, wood pulp, and a printing press. She was dressed in the brown, utilitarian Corps of Discovery field uniform, and was wearing a headset with a boom mike. Above her right pocket were three ribbons, the type the US military used to substitute for medals when worn on undress uniforms. She looked up as Bill entered, then rose and said “Howdy. How can I help you?” as she put the paper down.

  “I’m here for basic orientation,” Bill said, handing over the letter he had shown his father, "the Colonel", the night before. It stated that Bill had been accepted as a Probationary Explorer in the Corps of Discovery, with a primary designation as a survey specialist.

  The woman scanned it and set it down on the counter, then spoke softly into the mike while she looked at the monitor. Bill looked more closely at the ribbons on her chest. He could have sworn one was for the Purple Heart—the purple middle surrounded by two thin white stripes on either side was the same he had seen on his father’s uniform. The other ribbons were unfamiliar. One was green in the center with two large blue stripes on either side with what looked like a footprint in the center the other was simply sky blue and had a number of metal pieces on it. They looked like little pine cones.

  “Great. Gotcha right here. William J. Clark. We weren’t expecting you until next week.” The last sentence was more like a question than a statement.

  “Yeah, well, things changed, so I decided to come early.”

  “Not a problem. Did you get the informational packet?”

  “Uh, no. What informational packet?”

  “It’s one we send out to every Probie before they report. P
rovides basic info about the Corps and Hayek. Well, never mind, you’ll figure it out when you get there. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll need to do a quick DNA check to verify your identity.”

  Despite having gone through a rather extensive physical before being accepted, Bill was still surprised. “Uh, sure. May I ask why?”

  “You’d be amazed how many people try to sneak into Hayek.” She pulled a sterile swab from a container under the counter. “Lots of people want to move there without paying, so they try to steal a Probie’s identity. Others want to gain access to the gate so they can destroy it.”

  Bill nodded, thinking about the protesters he had just passed.

  Leaning in, she said, “Open wide.” As Bill did so, she none too gently swabbed the inside of his cheek, then placed the swab in a machine under the counter and watched it until it beeped. She then nodded.

  “Good to go! Welcome to the Corps. I’m Janice. Janice Goodland,” she said, holding out her hand to Bill.

  Bill shook it. “Thanks, Janice. What’s a Probie?”

  “A probationary member of the Corps. Much easier to just say ‘Probie’.” Janice smiled. Her face lit up, showing what a beautiful woman she was, despite the obvious damage to her person.

  “You get a lot of people stealing identities?”

  “Enough that we have to be on our toes.” This caused Bill’s eyebrows to rise in surprise.

  “What do I do now?” he asked.

  “First step is in-processing. You get to fill out a few pieces of paperwork. After that, we’ll get your gear and move you over. Once over, that’s it, the point of no return. If you bail, you pay. Once you’re on the other side you’ll be assigned a place. Orientation for the new probationary class is in four days, so you’ll have plenty time to learn about your new home. Meantime, let’s get you started.” Janice reached under the counter and pulled out a micro-USB flash drive, which she handed to Bill. She pointed to one of the computers against the opposite wall and said, “Have a seat at computer number one and wake it up. I’ll make sure it’s set for your biometrics. Insert your flash drive before signing anything, and follow the instructions.”