The Gravitational Leap. Darrell Lee

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      The Gravitational Leap

      By

      Darrell Lee

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

      Text Copyright © 2016 Darrell Lee

      All rights reserved.

      Published 2016 by Progressive Rising Phoenix Press.

       www.progressiverisingphoenix.com

      ISBN: 978-1-944277-80-2 (ebook)

      ISBN: 978-1-944277-99-4 (print)

      Printed in the U.S.A.

      Cover by Michele Giorgi

      Cover Design by Kalpart

      Edited by David Aretha

      Formatting by Polgarus Studio

      For Yami

      You are the beautiful bedrock anchoring all I aspire to be.

      Table of Contents

       Acknowledgements

       Prologue

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Epilogue

       About the Author

      Acknowledgements

      Completing this book has been a long process, and I have many people to thank.

      To all the members for my critique group: Fern Brady, Felicia Little, Denna Davis, Dorothy Tinker and James Bauhs. This wonderful cluster of writers is dedicated to the belief that books have power and meaning in this world. Your insights, talent and enthusiastic guidance can be found in all my writings.

      To my early readers: Barry Hodges, Claudia Miranda and Terri Bonner. Your keen eyes for everything from the smallest character detail, to weaponry, to my bad grammar was invaluable.

      To Cori McCarthy and David Aretha of Yellow Bird Editors for their experienced service and suggestions.

      To CEO Amanda Thrasher and acquisition editor Anne Dunigan of Progressive Rising Phoenix Press. Breaking into the literary world isn’t easy for a new author. A sincere thanks for taking a chance on me.

      “In the next world war the living will envy the dead.”

      – Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

      Prologue

      It had existed for billions upon billions of years, a rolling, boiling sphere of burning gas in space, sustaining its life by consuming hydrogen. Fused under the weight of its own gravity, the hydrogen changed into helium. Once the hydrogen was depleted the star swelled in size until it could contain almost two billion Earths’ Suns. Then it entered the second phase of its life and it began fusing helium. A bright star, easily visible in Earth’s winter sky, astronomers had classified it as a red supergiant. They named it Betelgeuse, a name derived from old Arabic meaning, “hand of the central one.” It was 360 light years away, a next-door neighbor on the galactic scale. But even this close, the distance still hid the enormity of its continuous nuclear explosion.

      When the first single-celled organisms developed on Earth, Betelgeuse had been in its second phase for the previous billion years, busily fusing helium. This fusion formed carbon. Gravity pulled the carbon atoms to the core of the star, forming nitrogen, oxygen, and then iron. For eons, the cancerous iron tumor at the heart of the star grew and the helium supply shrank. The star was a bomb with a ticking clock, a clock with a battery that could last far beyond anything that can be grasped by the human mind. In the last few ticks of the astronomical clock, life had crawled out of the slimy mud puddles on Earth and multiplied and evolved and waged nuclear war, filling the atmosphere with a cloud of debris that blocked much of the light from the Sun for centuries.

      Now all life on this tiny planet, orbiting its ordinary star, stood on the threshold of the abyss of extinction. The wounded planet plunged into an icy death spiral that wouldn’t end until the entire globe became a frigid tomb, and it would last a millennium.

      Eventually and suddenly, the core of Betelgeuse contained merely iron, and the fusion ceased. In less than a second, Betelgeuse began its final death throes. Gravitational collapse. For three minutes, countless trillions of subatomic particles, called neutrinos, were squeezed from the star while the star internally crumpled. When it was complete, created in the space the star once occupied was an object with a density so profound that the weight of it rippled the fabric of space and time, like an enormous stone had been dropped onto the smooth surface of the space-time continuum.

      The core’s temperature rose to over a billion degrees as the iron atoms were crushed together until the repulsive force of the iron atoms’ nuclei overcame the force of gravity, and the core revolted in a violent shockwave. As the shockwave encountered the star’s outer layers, it propelled the material into interstellar space. Betelgeuse, the hand, finally waved.

      The light from this explosion, called a supernova, and the ripple in space and time, produced by the creation of the singularity, moved together through the vacuum of space at the speed of light. A precious three minutes ahead of them rang the warning bell, if you knew how to listen for it, the swarm of neutrinos.

      On Earth, the clan had just completed the construction of the Tower. When they looked up at the night sky, Betelgeuse shone bright in the place it always had been. They did not know it no longer existed. It had extinguished. In its death, Betelgeuse had given to mankind, whether they deserved it or not, the slimmest chance to escape their fate.

      Chapter 1

      The pit of winter skulked beyond the horizon like a pack of wolves. The relentless wind numbed any skin exposed to the frigid air. For the previous month it had been like that every day. It was colder earlier in the year this year. Already seven centimeters of snow lay on the ground.

      In his twenty-four years of existence Timo had never seen snow this early. The warmer days, in the peak of the growing season, were a distant memory. At least once during that season he could take his shirt off and feel the stinging rays of sun on his pale skin. Once the snow started,