Mysterious Planet Earth!

PULP SCIENCE FICTION 

By Brad Rayburn

Chapter One: The Silent World

The year: 2245 A.D. The place: the cold immensity of space, somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars. The crew: six brave souls returning from humanity's greatest adventure—and flying straight into its darkest mystery!

Major Garry Nolan had faced death a thousand times in ten long years among the stars. He had piloted the Pathfinder through collapsing wormholes that twisted space itself into impossible geometries. He had dodged meteor storms around binary stars where the very laws of physics seemed negotiable. He had kept his crew alive through dangers that would have driven lesser men to gibbering madness.

But his hands had never trembled before.

They trembled now.

"Still nothing, Julie?" His voice cracked like a whip across the bridge of the Pathfinder, sharp with an edge that hadn't been there a moment ago. "Not even a whisper?"

Captain Julie Merritt didn't look up from her console. She couldn't. If she met her commander's eyes, he would see the naked fear in her own, and that would make it real. That would make it true. Her fingers—slim, elegant fingers that had mapped the positions of ten thousand alien star systems—danced across the communications array with increasing desperation.

"Nothing, Major." The words came out barely above a whisper. "The entire electromagnetic spectrum is... silent. No radio. No microwave. No laser transmissions. Earth is broadcasting on zero frequencies."

Through the wraparound viewport that dominated the forward bridge, their home world hung in the cosmic void like a jewel on black velvet—a sphere of blues and greens and whites, beautiful as the day they'd left it a decade ago. But something was wrong. Something was terribly, impossibly wrong.

"Give me magnification," Nolan ordered. "Maximum resolution."

The viewport shimmered, and suddenly Earth rushed toward them in breathtaking detail. Nolan's experienced eyes swept across the globe, searching for the familiar constellations of lights that marked humanity's conquest of the orbital sphere. The great wheel of Station Prometheus, largest structure ever built by human hands. The solar collectors that powered half the planet. The traffic lanes where supply rockets moved in endless streams between Earth and Moon, Earth and Mars, Earth and the Belt.

All gone.

The orbital sphere was empty.

Not just quiet. Not just dark. Empty. As if twelve billion souls had simply vanished, leaving their planet as pristine and untouched as the day the first fish crawled onto land.

"Madre de Dios," breathed Dr. Lucio Borato, the Argentinian physicist whose mathematical genius had helped crack the secrets of faster-than-light travel. He was a small man, barely five-foot-six, with quick dark eyes that usually sparkled with barely contained excitement. Now those eyes were wide with shock. "Major Nolan... where are the satellites? Where are the stations? Where is everything?"

"Erased," came a voice from the rear of the bridge. Dr. Gemma Bream—thirty-two years old, youngest Nobel laureate in history, mind like a steel trap wrapped in velvet—stepped forward from her science station. Her face had gone pale beneath the harsh LED lighting, making her look almost ghostly. "Civilization doesn't just disappear, Major. Twelve billion people don't simply... cease broadcasting. Something has happened. Something terrible."

"Maybe they're just on a different frequency!" piped up Sgt. Wrench, the cyborg maintenance specialist whose mechanical body was more machine than man. His optical sensors swiveled toward Merritt with an audible whir. "Maybe Earth upgraded their communications while we were gone! Ten years is a long time, boss! Maybe they're using quantum entanglement now, or tachyon pulse, or—"

"Negative," Merritt interrupted, her voice flat and professional—the voice of someone clinging to procedure because procedure was all that stood between her and screaming panic. "I'm scanning across every known spectrum and several theoretical ones. Even if they upgraded to technologies we don't understand, we'd still detect something. Energy signatures. Background radiation. Carrier waves. But there's nothing. Earth is producing no artificial electromagnetic emissions whatsoever."

"Impossible!" Dr. Bream slammed her palm against a bulkhead, a rare display of emotion from the usually composed physicist. "You can't hide an entire planetary civilization! The energy signature alone from twelve billion people—power generation, transportation, communications, industry—would be detectable from here even with Stone Age instruments!"

A heavy silence fell across the bridge, broken only by the soft hum of the Pathfinder's systems and the rhythmic beeping of navigational computers. Six people stared at Earth—at home—and found it suddenly, inexplicably alien.

Dr. Victor Volkov had not spoken.

The mysterious Russian scientist stood apart from the others as he always did, a tall figure wrapped in shadows near the aft bulkhead. His face was all sharp angles and hard planes, like something carved from granite by a sculptor who didn't believe in softness. Cold gray eyes—eyes that had seen too much, survived too much—remained fixed on the planet below with an intensity that was almost physical.

When he finally broke his silence, his voice was thick with Slavic consonants, each word carefully chosen, precisely delivered.

"We must land."

All eyes turned to him.

"Without mission control," Volkov continued, his accent making the words sound vaguely ominous, "without guidance systems, without ground support... we have no choice. Our fuel reserves are limited. We descend now, while we still can, or we die in orbit like the ancients who reached for stars with wax wings."

"He's right," Nolan said grimly. He'd been running the calculations in his head—fuel consumption, orbital decay, life support limits. The math was unforgiving. "We can maintain orbit for maybe another forty-eight hours. After that, we're committed to re-entry whether we want it or not. Better to go down under power while we still have options."

"But where?" Merritt asked. "Without ground control, without beacon networks, we're flying blind! We could come down anywhere—over ocean, over mountains, in the middle of a—" She stopped herself, but everyone heard the unspoken words: —in the middle of whatever destroyed civilization.

"We aim for the South Pacific," Nolan decided. "Island chains, shallow reefs, plenty of landing options if things go wrong. Julie, plot us a descent trajectory. Target the equatorial band, minimize re-entry stress. Everyone else, strap in and pray to whatever gods you believe in."

His hands moved across the controls with the practiced precision of a decade in command. The Pathfinder was designed for this—atmospheric re-entry, precision landing, all controlled by computers that had never failed them.

Of course, those computers had always relied on ground support.

"Trajectory plotted," Merritt announced. "Initiating de-orbit burn in thirty seconds."

"All personnel, secure for descent!" Nolan's voice boomed through the ship's intercom. "This is not a drill! Secure for atmospheric entry!"

The countdown began. Thirty seconds. Twenty-five. Twenty.

And then, just as the engines were about to fire, every alarm on the bridge began screaming at once.

"Radiation spike!" Merritt's shout cut through the cacophony like a knife. Her fingers flew across her console, pulling up data that made no sense, couldn't make sense. "Major, the Geiger counters are going insane! I'm reading—oh God, I'm reading levels that should only exist inside a reactor core!"

The radiation detector's needle spun wildly, climbing past yellow into red, then beyond red into zones that had no labels because no one had ever expected readings that high.

"Impossible!" Bream was at the science station now, her Nobel-winning mind racing through possibilities and rejecting them just as fast. "That level of ambient radiation should kill us in minutes! The shielding can't possibly—"

"Electrical systems failing!" Wrench's voice had lost its usual comic cheerfulness. His mechanical hands worked frantically at the engineering console, but the problems were cascading faster than even his cyborg reflexes could handle. "We're losing power to non-critical systems! Life support is fluctuating! Navigation computers are—"

The lights died.

For one heart-stopping moment, the bridge was plunged into absolute darkness. Then emergency circuits kicked in, bathing everything in hellish red light that made every face look like a Halloween mask.

"Manual control!" Nolan barked, his pilot's instincts taking over. "Julie, give me attitude thrusters! I need to see what I'm doing!"

Through the viewport, Earth filled their vision. They were falling now, committed to re-entry whether they wanted it or not. The Pathfinder bucked and shuddered as it hit the upper atmosphere, friction heating the hull to temperatures that would melt lead.

"Thrusters responding!" Merritt called out, fighting her own controls. "But barely! Major, I don't think we're going to make a controlled landing!"

"Then we'll make an uncontrolled one! Hold on!"

The descent became a nightmare in fire and thunder.

What should have been a smooth, computer-guided glide became a barely controlled plummet through ionized atmosphere. Warning lights blazed across every console—the few consoles that still had power. The hull screamed as air resistance tore at it. Equipment ripped loose from mountings and crashed across the cabin. Volkov slammed against a bulkhead with a sickening crunch that might have been ribs breaking. Wrench's mechanical arms locked around a support beam, his servo-motors whining with strain as they fought forces that would have torn a human apart.

Through the viewport, Nolan caught glimpses of their fate—clouds, endless blue ocean, more clouds. The South Pacific, just as he'd planned. But there would be no gentle landing at a spaceport. No ground crews waiting with champagne and medals. There would only be water, hard as concrete at impact velocity, and whatever fate awaited them below.

"I see land!" Merritt shouted over the roar. "Small island, twelve o'clock! Major, if you can just—"

"I see it!" Nolan pulled back on the controls with every ounce of strength he possessed. The Pathfinder responded sluggishly, bleeding speed, dropping altitude too fast, way too fast. "Brace for impact! This is going to be rough!"

Rough was an understatement.

The landing vehicle—designed for precision touchdowns on prepared landing pads—hit the island like a meteor. Palm trees exploded into splinters. Sand fountained upward in great gouts. Metal shrieked its death song as the hull plowed a hundred-meter furrow across pristine beach. Then, mercifully, blessedly, the terrible motion stopped.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of labored breathing, the hiss of escaping pressure, and the distant crash of waves.

"Sound off!" Nolan ordered, tasting blood where he'd bitten his lip during impact. "Everyone report status!"

"Merritt... alive..." His co-pilot's voice was shaky but functional.

"Bream here... I think I broke my wrist..."

"Wrench operational... mostly... got some damage to my left shoulder assembly but nothing critical..."

"Borato... present... though I have never been so frightened in my entire life..."

Only Volkov didn't respond immediately. The Russian pulled himself upright with a grimace, one hand pressed against his ribs. His face was pale, but his cold eyes were as sharp as ever.

"I survive," he said simply. As if survival were just another task to be checked off a list.

Nolan unstrapped himself and hit the manual release on the hatch. It opened with a protesting groan and a pneumatic hiss, admitting a blast of humid air that smelled of salt and strange flowers and something else—something faintly metallic that tickled the back of his throat.

They emerged from the wreckage like survivors of an ancient shipwreck, stumbling onto white sand that gleamed like crushed diamonds in the tropical sun.

It was beautiful.

It was paradise.

It was absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.

"Where are we?" Borato asked, his voice small and uncertain in the vast stillness.

Merritt had pulled out her portable geolocation unit and was frowning at the readings. "South Pacific, that much is certain. But according to my 2235 maps..." She looked up, confusion written across her face. "According to my maps, this island shouldn't exist. We're in the middle of an area that was thoroughly surveyed fifty years ago. Empty ocean for a thousand kilometers in every direction."

"In 2245, nothing is uncharted," Bream said, echoing Merritt's earlier words. "Every square meter of Earth's surface has been mapped, categorized, analyzed down to the molecular level. There are no unknown islands!"

"There is now," Nolan said grimly.

The beach was pristine—too pristine. White sand unmarked by footprints or debris. Palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze that carried no hint of industrial civilization. Waves lapping at the shore with hypnotic rhythm, as if this place existed in some bubble outside of time.

And the radiation...

"Major." Volkov's voice was quiet but urgent. He held up his portable Geiger counter, and they all watched the needle dance. "The radiation is everywhere. In the sand. In the water. In the very air we breathe. Yet the levels, while elevated, are not immediately lethal. How very strange."

"Strange isn't the word I'd use," Wrench muttered, his optical sensors swiveling nervously. "Terrifying, maybe. Impossible, definitely. But strange?"

A sound stopped all conversation.

A human sound.

Singing.

They turned as one toward the jungle's edge, hands moving instinctively toward weapons that had been lost in the crash. But what emerged from the foliage was no threat—or at least, not an obvious one.

A girl. No more than sixteen or seventeen, with skin the color of bronze and eyes that held the unspoiled wonder of someone who had never seen an aircraft, never heard a radio, never known anything beyond this tiny speck of paradise. She wore simple garments woven from plant fibers, primitive but carefully made. In her hands, she carried a woven basket filled with strange fruits—purple and orange and colors that had no names in English.

When she saw them—six figures in torn flight suits, dirty and bleeding and utterly out of place—she froze. Her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise. The basket slipped from nerveless fingers, spilling exotic fruit across the sand.

Then she spoke.

The language was like nothing any of them had ever heard—liquid and musical, full of sounds that seemed to flow one into another without clear breaks. Not English. Not Chinese or Russian or any of the major languages. Not even close to any minor dialect catalogued in Earth's linguistic databases.

"¿Hablas español?" Borato tried, stepping forward with his hands raised peacefully. "¿Puedes entendernos?"

The girl tilted her head like a curious bird, but there was no recognition in her eyes.

Volkov spoke in rapid Russian. Bream tried French, then German. Merritt attempted Japanese and Arabic. Even Wrench contributed a series of cheerful beeps and whistles that were meant to be universal friendly greetings.

Nothing.

The girl only stared at them with those wide, dark eyes—fascinated and frightened in equal measure.

"Wherever we are," Nolan said slowly, "whenever we are... we're not in Kansas anymore."

Merritt had pulled out her portable geolocation unit again, expanding its range, trying to make sense of readings that contradicted everything she knew about Earth. "Major, I need to get to high ground. This equipment was designed for orbital triangulation, but if I can get some elevation, I might be able to determine our exact position. Maybe even figure out what's causing this interference, why Earth went silent, what—"

They all looked up, following her gaze.

Rising from the center of the island like some primordial titan was a mountain—or perhaps a plateau. Its sides were sheer cliffs that seemed to vanish into perpetual mist at the summit, creating an effect like the fortress of some ancient god. Even from here, several kilometers away, it dominated the landscape with a presence that was almost menacing.

The native girl followed their gaze. And suddenly, the wonder in her eyes transformed into pure terror. She shook her head violently, speaking rapidly in her musical tongue, making warding gestures with her hands—universal symbols of fear and prohibition. Her message needed no translation: Don't go there. Never go there. Death lives on that mountain.

"She doesn't want us to go up there," Bream observed unnecessarily.

"All the more reason to climb," Nolan decided. His jaw set in that stubborn line that his crew had learned meant no argument would change his mind. "If there's something on that plateau that explains the radiation, the silence from Earth, any of this madness—we need to know. We gather what supplies we can salvage from the wreck, and we start climbing at first light tomorrow."

"Major—" Merritt began.

"That's an order, Captain." Nolan's voice was steel. "We came back to Earth to deliver our data, to report on ten years of exploration among the stars. Whatever happened here while we were gone, whatever's up on that plateau, we're going to find out. Because if we don't..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

If they didn't find answers, they would die on this island. Slowly. Alone. With no one ever knowing what had become of Earth's first faster-than-light explorers.

That night, they made camp on the beach.

The native girl—who refused to leave them despite her obvious terror—watched from the jungle's edge, crouching among the ferns like some wild creature. Every few minutes, she would glance up at the plateau and shudder.

Overhead, stars wheeled in unfamiliar patterns. Constellations that should have been recognizable were somehow... wrong. As if the very stars had shifted in their courses.

Wrench stood guard, his optical sensors scanning the darkness with tireless vigilance, though his damaged shoulder joint ground and clicked with every movement. Bream and Merritt huddled over the geolocation equipment, trying to coax some sense from its contradictory readings. Borato slept fitfully, muttering in Spanish about impossible things.

Only Nolan and Volkov remained awake, staring into the darkness with the wary alertness of men who had survived too much to trust in peaceful nights.

Nolan stood at the water's edge, where waves lapped at the sand with hypnotic rhythm. Somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, was home. Or what had been home. A world that had somehow gone silent while they danced among the stars. A planet that had lost twelve billion voices in the span of a decade.

What happened to you? he thought. Where did everyone go?

"You are troubled, Major." Volkov's voice emerged from the shadows like something conjured.

"Aren't you?"

The Russian was silent for a long moment, his angular face unreadable in the starlight. Then: "I learned long ago, during the dark years in my homeland, that the universe cares nothing for our troubles. We survive, or we do not. But we must try. To do otherwise is to already be dead."

"Why is she so afraid?" Nolan asked, nodding toward where the native girl crouched. "What's up there on that plateau that frightens her so much?"

Volkov's smile was thin and cold—a knife slash across his granite features. "In my experience, Major, when primitive people fear a place, they usually have very good reason. The old fears... they remember things that civilization has forgotten. We will find out tomorrow what those fears contain."

He was right, of course.

Tomorrow they would climb.

Tomorrow they would discover that some mysteries are better left buried in mist and time.

Tomorrow they would learn that the universe still had terrors waiting for those brave—or foolish—enough to seek them out.

But tonight, under alien stars, six travelers from the future slept uneasily while somewhere above them, shrouded in eternal fog, a lost world waited.

And in the jungle's depths, hidden in shadows that predated human memory, something ancient stirred. Something that had been sleeping. Something that had been waiting.

The climb would begin at dawn.

The nightmare would follow shortly after.

Chapter Two: The Ascent Into Madness

Dawn broke over the island like a wound in the sky—blood-red and ominous, staining the eastern horizon with colors that nature never intended.

Major Garry Nolan stood at the base of the cliff face, craning his neck upward until the sheer rock wall seemed to curve over him like a breaking wave frozen in stone. The plateau loomed above them, its summit lost in swirling mists that never quite cleared, as if the mountain itself were trying to hide its secrets from the prying eyes of men.

"It's madness," Dr. Gemma Bream said quietly, adjusting the straps of her equipment pack with her one good hand. Her other wrist was bound in makeshift bandages from the crash. "We're scientists, not mountain climbers. This is suicide."

"We are whatever we must be to survive," came the cold voice of Dr. Victor Volkov. The Russian stood apart from the others as always, testing a length of rope salvaged from the wreckage with methodical precision. His cold gray eyes flickered toward Nolan. "Is that not so, Major?"

Nolan didn't answer immediately. He'd been watching the Russian all morning, noting the way Volkov moved—too smooth, too practiced. Like a man who'd done dangerous work before. The kind of work that didn't involve test tubes and equations. The kind of work that left bodies behind.

What are you hiding, comrade? Nolan thought darkly. And what really happened during those ten years in space?

"We climb in pairs," Nolan announced, pushing his suspicions aside for now. Survival first. Accusations later. "Merritt and I take point. Bream and Borato follow. Volkov, you bring up the rear with—" He paused, looking at the cyborg maintenance specialist. "Can you make this climb, Sergeant?"

Wrench's mechanical face attempted something like a grin, servos whirring with the effort. "These arms can crush steel plates, Major! Rock climbing's just another Tuesday for old Wrench!" But even as he spoke, a faint grinding sound came from his left shoulder joint—damage from yesterday's crash that his self-repair systems hadn't fully corrected.

"Then let's move out. We've got maybe eight hours of daylight. I want to be up and back down before dark." Nolan slung a coil of rope over his shoulder and approached the cliff face. Up close, the rock was ancient—volcanic basalt, weathered and pitted by countless centuries of wind and rain. "Stay close. Watch your footing. If anyone gets into trouble, sing out immediately."

Behind them, at the edge of the jungle, the native girl watched with eyes wide with terror. She hadn't left them since yesterday, despite her obvious fear. Now she spoke again in her liquid, musical language, gesturing emphatically at the plateau, then at the ground. Her hands made warding signs—the universal language of superstitious dread.

Stay, her gestures said. Don't go up there. Death lives on that mountain.

But they were going anyway. Because that's what humans did—they climbed the forbidden mountains, opened the sealed doors, asked the questions that should remain unanswered. It was in their nature. It was their doom.

Captain Julie Merritt took point beside Nolan, her geographer's eyes scanning the rock face for the best route upward. "There," she said, pointing to a natural chimney formation about thirty meters to the left. "We can use that to gain the first hundred meters, then traverse across to that ledge system."

"Good eye, Captain. Let's move."

The first hour was merely exhausting.

The second hour was agony.

By the third hour, Dr. Lucio Borato was gasping for breath, his face the color of old parchment. The brilliant physicist who had helped unlock the secrets of faster-than-light travel now clung to the rock face like a drowning man to driftwood, his fingers white-knuckled on a narrow ledge barely wide enough for a handhold.

"Just... a moment..." he panted, his chest heaving with the effort of drawing air into burning lungs. "My God... the altitude..."

"We can't stop here," Merritt called down from her position twenty meters above. "The rock's unstable—I can feel it crumbling under my fingers. We need to reach that overhang up ahead. Another thirty meters."

Thirty meters might as well have been thirty kilometers.

Nolan pulled himself over a particularly treacherous outcropping, his arms screaming with fatigue. Below him, the beach had shrunk to a sliver of white. The Pathfinder's wreckage looked like a child's toy, impossibly distant. One slip, one moment of inattention, and gravity would claim its ancient due. They would fall, tumbling through empty air, and the island would claim another set of bones for its collection.

He was reaching for the next handhold when he heard it—a sharp cry, cut short. A sound that turned his blood to ice water in his veins.

"BORATO!"

Nolan twisted around on his precarious perch just in time to see the Argentinian scientist hanging by one hand, his feet scrabbling desperately against smooth rock, finding no purchase. Terror had transformed his face into a mask of pure animal panic. Above him, stretched flat on a narrow ledge, Dr. Volkov extended his arm downward.

"Give me your hand!" Volkov shouted. "Quickly, Doctor! Reach for me!"

Borato's free hand strained upward, fingers grasping desperately at empty air. The distance was no more than a meter—inches, really. Volkov leaned farther out, his own position becoming precarious. Their fingertips were almost touching—

Almost.

For one frozen instant that seemed to stretch into eternity, Borato hung suspended against the sky, his eyes meeting Nolan's across the distance. In that gaze, the Major saw the terrible understanding that comes in that final moment—the knowledge that this was it, that the universe had finally called in its debt, that ten years of cheating death among the stars had come down to a single missed handhold on a nameless cliff on a world gone mad.

Then gravity asserted its ancient, inexorable claim.

Borato fell.

Tumbling, spinning, his scream lost in the sound of wind and the rush of air and the terrible, final certainty of impact. Down and down and down, growing smaller, a dark shape against the white sand far below, until—

The sound, when it came, was mercifully inaudible from this height. But Nolan's imagination supplied the details with horrible clarity.

"NO!" Dr. Bream's anguished cry echoed off the cliff face, a raw wound of sound. "LUCIO! NO!"

For a moment, nobody moved. They clung to the rock face like insects pinned to a display board, shocked into immobility by the sudden, brutal reality of death.

Nolan stared up at Volkov. The Russian's face was impassive, unreadable as carved stone. He pulled his extended arm back slowly, methodically, as if it weighed a thousand pounds. Their eyes met across the vertical distance.

"I could not reach him in time," Volkov said flatly. No emotion. No regret. Just simple statement of fact. "He fell."

Or was pushed, Nolan thought with sudden, savage certainty. He'd seen the angle, seen the distance. Volkov should have been able to grab him. Should have. But had he pulled back just a fraction of a second too soon? Had those fingers deliberately not quite stretched far enough?

What are you, Volkov? What game are you playing?

But this was neither the time nor the place for accusations. Not while they clung to a cliff face with hundreds of meters of empty air beneath them and the summit still far above.

"Keep climbing," Nolan ordered, his voice harder than the stone around them. "Nothing we can do for him now. When we get back down, we'll... we'll give him a proper burial."

They climbed in shocked silence. Dr. Bream wept quietly, tears streaming down her face and dripping into the void below as she mechanically moved hand over hand, foot over foot. Wrench's grinding shoulder grew louder with each meter gained, the sound like bones being ground in a mill. Only Volkov seemed unmoved, ascending with the same methodical precision he'd shown from the beginning.

I'm watching you, Nolan swore silently. Whatever game you're playing, whatever you did up there—I'm watching you.

The sun climbed higher, turning the cliff face into an oven. Sweat stung their eyes. Hands grew slippery on the rock. Muscles trembled with exhaustion. But still they climbed, driven by stubbornness and desperation and the simple fact that going down was now more dangerous than continuing up.

It was late afternoon when Merritt finally pulled herself over the summit's edge and disappeared into the swirling mist above.

"Major!" Her voice drifted down, muffled and strange. "Major, you need to see this! It's... it's impossible!"

Nolan found reserves of strength he didn't know he possessed and hauled himself up the final few meters. His hands gripped the plateau's edge, and with one last desperate heave, he pulled himself up and over—

And stopped.

And stared.

And felt his mind rebel against what his eyes were showing him.

They had emerged into another world.

The air was thick—not with normal humidity, but with something else. Something that gave it a strange, greenish tint, as if they were looking at everything through ancient, tinted glass. The light was wrong, filtered through the perpetual mist that shrouded the plateau, creating an eerie twilight even though the sun should still be high overhead.

And the vegetation!

Trees rose around them like cathedral pillars, massive beyond anything that should be possible. Ferns the size of houses spread their fronds across a landscape that looked like it belonged in a museum diorama, not on Earth in 2245. Vines as thick as a man's torso coiled around trunks that had to be centuries old—no, millennia old. The jungle was alive with sounds: chirps and calls and distant crashes that spoke of large animals moving through the undergrowth.

"The radiation," Volkov said quietly, studying his Geiger counter. "It is stronger here. Much stronger. The readings are..." He paused, his cold eyes narrowing. "This is weapons-grade material, Major. Massive deposits of unrefined uranium. Perhaps even plutonium. The interference—it explains everything. Why our systems failed. Why Earth went silent to us."

"But how?" Bream asked, her voice hoarse from weeping. She cradled her injured wrist against her chest. "Natural uranium deposits don't look like this. Don't feel like this. It's as if..." She trailed off, unable to articulate the impossible thought forming in her brilliant mind.

"As if we've gone back in time," Merritt finished quietly. "As if this plateau somehow exists in Earth's distant past."

"Ridiculous!" Wrench's mechanical voice was dismissive. "Time travel is impossible! The paradoxes alone would—"

A sound cut him off. A sound that should not, could not, must not exist in the year 2245.

A roar.

Deep. Resonant. Primal. The sound of something enormous and ancient and utterly alien to the modern world. It echoed across the plateau, vibrating in their chests, setting off every primitive alarm bell evolution had installed in the human nervous system.

"What in God's name was that?" Bream whispered.

They got their answer a moment later when the ferns parted and something stepped into view.

It was impossible.

It was extinct.

It was real.

The creature stood perhaps twenty meters away, its massive head swaying on a neck as thick as a tree trunk. It was easily fifteen meters tall—a mountain of flesh and muscle and prehistoric fury. Its skin was mottled green and brown, like living camouflage. Small, intelligent eyes studied them with the cold calculation of a predator evaluating potential prey.

"Dios mío," Bream breathed. "That's a... that's a..."

"Brontosaurus," Merritt finished, her voice barely above a whisper. "But that's impossible. They died out sixty-five million years ago."

The dinosaur—because there was no other word for it, no matter how impossible that word was—took a ponderous step forward. The ground shook. Another step. The trees trembled. It lowered its massive head toward them, nostrils flaring as it sampled their scent.

"Nobody move," Nolan ordered quietly. "Maybe it's a herbivore. Maybe it won't—"

The Brontosaurus roared.

The sound was like standing inside a thunderclap. It was rage and hunger and territorial fury all rolled into one earth-shaking blast of prehistoric wrath. Its massive tail swung around with devastating force, smashing through trees like they were matchsticks.

"RUN!" Nolan shouted.

They scattered like leaves before a hurricane. The forest erupted into chaos around them—crashing, roaring, the thunder of titanic footsteps pursuing them through the nightmare jungle. Nolan lost track of the others almost immediately. The ferns were too thick, the visibility too poor in the strange green-tinged twilight.

He ran blindly, branches whipping his face, roots trying to trip him. Behind him, the Brontosaurus crashed through the undergrowth with the unstoppable momentum of a living avalanche. How long he ran, he couldn't say. Time lost meaning in this place that existed outside of time.

Finally, gasping for breath, his lungs burning, he stumbled into a small clearing and collapsed against the trunk of a massive tree. The sounds of pursuit had faded. The forest around him was silent—that pregnant, watchful silence that meant predators were near.

"Major!" Merritt's voice came from his left. She emerged from the ferns, her face scratched and bleeding. "Where are the others?"

"I don't know. We got separated." Nolan pulled out his communicator—a small radio unit that should have been able to reach anywhere on the ship. He keyed the transmit button. "This is Nolan. Anyone reading? Report your positions."

Static. Just static. The uranium was interfering with everything.

"Bream!" Merritt called out. "Wrench! Volkov! Can anyone hear us?"

A scream answered her. Female. Terrified. Cut short with sickening abruptness.

"BREAM!" Nolan was running again, following the sound, Merritt close behind him. They burst through a wall of ferns and into a scene from a nightmare.

Dr. Bream lay crumpled at the base of a tree, unconscious or worse. Blood stained her flight suit. Standing over her, its massive head swaying with curiosity, was the Brontosaurus—or perhaps a different one. In this prehistoric hell, there could be dozens of them.

And between the dinosaur and the fallen scientist stood Dr. Victor Volkov.

The Russian had somehow found a thick branch—a club of ancient wood as long as his arm. He held it like a weapon, positioning himself squarely between Bream and the monster that outweighed him by a factor of thousands. His face showed no fear. Only cold, calculating determination.

"Volkov, get out of there!" Nolan shouted. "You can't—"

But Volkov was already moving. With a battle cry that would have made his Cossack ancestors proud, he charged the Brontosaurus, swinging the club with both hands. It was futile—like attacking a tank with a toothpick—but it got the creature's attention. The massive head swung toward him. Volkov dodged, rolled, came up swinging again.

The distraction gave Nolan his opening. He sprinted forward, grabbed Bream under the arms, and dragged her backward. Merritt helped, and together they pulled the unconscious physicist to relative safety behind a massive fallen log.

The Brontosaurus, frustrated by these annoying creatures that refused to behave like proper prey, decided it had had enough. With one final, earth-shaking roar, it turned and crashed back into the jungle, leaving destruction in its wake.

For a long moment, nobody moved. Then Volkov lowered his makeshift club and walked over to where they crouched. His face was still calm, but there was something in his eyes now—something human that hadn't been there before.

"Is she alive?" he asked quietly.

Merritt checked Bream's pulse. "Alive. Unconscious. Looks like she hit her head when she fell. Maybe a concussion, maybe worse. We need to get her back to the wreck, to whatever medical supplies we can salvage."

Nolan stood slowly, his eyes locked on Volkov. "You saved her."

"Da." A simple acknowledgment.

"Why? After Borato fell, I thought..." Nolan trailed off, but the accusation hung in the air between them.

Volkov's cold gray eyes met his without flinching. "You thought I let him fall. You thought I was a spy, perhaps. A saboteur. An agent of the old regime sent to ensure the mission failed." His voice was flat, emotionless. "You are not entirely wrong to suspect, Major. I have done terrible things in my life. Things that would make you sick if you knew the details. But I am not what you think."

"Then what are you?"

The Russian was silent for a long moment, staring out into the prehistoric jungle that surrounded them. When he finally spoke, his voice was distant, as if remembering things buried deep.

"I am a survivor, Major. Nothing more, nothing less. I survived the purges in my homeland. I survived the labor camps. I survived betrayals and accusations and the kind of darkness that destroys most men. When the space program selected me, I saw it as escape—a chance to leave Earth behind, to leave the past behind. But the past..." He laughed bitterly. "The past never stays buried, does it?"

"Borato," Nolan said. "You could have saved him."

"No." Volkov shook his head. "I could not. He slipped from my grasp. I am many things, Major, but I am not a murderer. Not anymore. Not after..." He stopped, seemed to gather himself. "The tyranny of my former homeland taught me many things. It taught me how to survive. How to endure. And it taught me that life—even one life—is precious beyond measure. I would not take Borato's life deliberately. Not for any reason."

Nolan searched the Russian's face for any sign of deception. But all he saw was weariness—the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who had carried too many secrets for too many years.

"I believe you," Nolan said finally.

Volkov nodded once, accepting the statement without gratitude or relief. "Good. Because we have bigger problems than my past. Look around you, Major. Look at what we have found."

Nolan looked. Through the strange green-tinted air, in the fading afternoon light, he could see shapes moving in the distance. Large shapes. Many of them. The plateau was alive with creatures that should have been extinct for millions of years.

"We need to find the shuttle," Merritt said urgently. She'd been working with her geolocation equipment, trying to get a reading through the interference. "According to these readings—which could be completely wrong given the radiation—we landed about two kilometers from here. Our shuttle, I mean, when we first crashed yesterday. If we can reach it, if we can recover the data recordings from the wormhole journey, maybe—"

"Maybe we'll have something to show for this nightmare," Nolan finished. "All right. We move carefully, stay together. Bream needs to wake up, and we need to find Wrench. Then we locate that shuttle, grab the data, and get off this damned plateau before something else tries to eat us."

It sounded like a plan. It even might have worked.

But as the sun began to set over the lost world—as the shadows grew long and the sounds of prehistoric life grew louder—Major Garry Nolan couldn't shake the feeling that the worst was yet to come.

They had discovered a world that time forgot. A place where the past lived on, preserved by radiation and isolation and some quirk of geology that had kept it hidden for millions of years.

But the plateau's secrets were far from exhausted. And as night fell over the land that time forgot, new terrors stirred in the darkness—terrors that would test them all before this nightmare ended.

If it ever ended at all.

Chapter Three: Escape From The Lost World

The green-tinged twilight of the lost plateau was deepening toward night when Dr. Gemma Bream finally opened her eyes.

"Easy," Captain Julie Merritt said softly, steadying the physicist as she tried to sit up. "You took a nasty blow to the head. How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," Bream said weakly. "And I feel like a Brontosaurus used my skull for a football." She winced, touching the ugly bruise on her temple. "What happened? I remember running, and then—"

"You fell," Major Nolan said. "Hit your head on a root. You've been out for about twenty minutes." He didn't mention how Dr. Volkov had risked his life to save her. That conversation could wait. Right now, they had more pressing concerns.

"Where's Wrench?" Bream asked, looking around the clearing. "And Borato?"

The silence that followed was answer enough.

"Borato fell during the climb," Merritt said gently. "He's gone. And we got separated from Wrench during the stampede. We need to find him, and we need to locate our landing craft."

"Landing craft?" Bream's brow furrowed in confusion. "But we crashed on the beach. The Pathfinder's shuttle is—"

"Not the shuttle," Nolan interrupted. "The data recorder pod. When we initiated emergency landing protocols yesterday, the ship's computer automatically ejected the mission recordings—ten years of wormhole data, everything we observed, all our discoveries. Standard procedure for crash landings. The pod has its own beacon, but the radiation is interfering with the signal."

"And without that data," Volkov added quietly, "ten years of exploration, ten years of risking our lives among the stars—all of it is meaningless. We must retrieve those recordings. They are our only proof, our only legacy."

A distant roar echoed across the plateau—long, low, and threatening. It was answered by another, and another, until the prehistoric jungle reverberated with the calls of creatures that had no names in any human language.

"We move now," Nolan decided. "Before full dark. Merritt, can you get a bearing on that beacon?"

The geographer pulled out her equipment, fiddling with the dials as static hissed and crackled through the speakers. "It's faint, but... there! Bearing zero-four-five, approximately one kilometer." She looked up, her face grave. "Major, that puts it right in the middle of the thickest part of the jungle. If there are more of those creatures—"

"Then we'll deal with them." Nolan's jaw was set with grim determination. "We didn't come sixty-five million years into the past to leave empty-handed. Let's move out. Stay close, stay quiet, and for God's sake, don't antagonize anything with teeth the size of your arm."

They moved through the alien forest like ghosts, picking their way between ferns that towered overhead like the columns of some vast cathedral. The light continued to fade, and strange phosphorescent fungi began to glow along the tree trunks, casting everything in an eerie blue-green luminescence that made the shadows seem alive and malevolent.

Nolan took point, followed by Merritt with her tracking equipment. Bream came next, still unsteady on her feet, with Volkov bringing up the rear, his eyes constantly scanning the darkness for threats. The Russian had picked up another club—this one even larger than before—and carried it with the casual competence of a man well-versed in violence.

Who were you, Volkov? Nolan wondered again. Before you became a scientist? What did you do in those labor camps you mentioned? What darkness did you survive?

But those questions would have to wait.

"Major!" Merritt's urgent whisper brought the column to a halt. "The signal's getting stronger. We're close. Maybe two hundred meters ahead."

They crept forward through undergrowth that grew thicker with every step. The sounds of the prehistoric jungle surrounded them—chirps and rustlings, distant crashes, the occasional earth-shaking footfall of something massive moving through the darkness.

And then they saw it.

The data recorder pod sat in a small clearing, its white hull gleaming in the bioluminescent glow like a beacon from the future dropped into the distant past. It was roughly cylindrical, about the size of a small car, designed to survive impacts that would pulverize a human body. One side was dented where it had hit the ground, but otherwise it appeared intact.

"Thank God," Bream breathed. "It looks undamaged. If we can just—"

She never finished the sentence.

A sound erupted from the jungle to their left—a mechanical grinding, followed by a cheerful electronic voice that was jarringly out of place in this prehistoric nightmare.

"Boss! Boss, is that you? Oh, thank my lucky circuits! I've been looking all over for you guys!"

Sgt. Wrench emerged from the ferns, his mechanical body covered in mud and vegetation. His left shoulder joint was still grinding ominously, and there were new dents in his chassis, but his optical sensors glowed with unmistakable relief.

"Wrench!" Nolan felt a weight lift from his chest. "You're okay!"

"Define 'okay,' Major. I've got seventeen separate system malfunctions, my left arm's down to forty percent efficiency, and something that looked like a twenty-foot chicken tried to eat me about an hour ago." The cyborg's voice took on a note of mechanical pride. "But I found the pod! Been guarding it for the last thirty minutes. Just waiting for you to show up!"

"Good work, Sergeant." Nolan clapped the cyborg on his functional shoulder. "Now let's crack that thing open and get our data before—"

A new sound cut through the night. Not a roar this time, but something worse—a snorting, grunting, building in intensity like a steam engine working up to speed.

"Oh no," Merritt whispered. "Oh no, no, no..."

They came out of the darkness like living tanks—three of them, each easily eight meters long, their massive bodies supported on four pillar-like legs. Bony frills protected their necks, and three wicked horns jutted from their faces like the spears of some ancient cavalry charge.

"Triceratops," Bream said faintly. "Late Cretaceous. Herbivores, but extremely territorial and aggressive when threatened."

"They look pretty threatened to me," Wrench observed as the lead dinosaur pawed the ground with one massive foot, lowering its head in an unmistakable challenge.

"The pod," Volkov said urgently. "They see it as an intrusion in their territory. We must move it, or move them."

"How do you move thirty tons of angry prehistoric muscle?" Merritt asked.

"You don't," Nolan said grimly. "You distract it. Wrench, Volkov—you're with me. We'll draw them off. Merritt, Bream—get that pod open and secure the data recordings. You've got five minutes. Maybe less."

"Major, that's suicide!" Bream protested.

"It's necessary." Nolan pulled out his survival knife—a pitiful weapon against creatures that had ruled the earth for millions of years, but it was all he had. "On my mark... NOW!"

They broke from cover, shouting and waving their arms. The effect was immediate and terrifying. The lead Triceratops bellowed—a sound like a foghorn mixed with a bull's roar—and charged.

The ground shook. Trees bent and snapped. The prehistoric juggernaut bore down on them with the unstoppable momentum of an avalanche given legs and fury.

"SPLIT UP!" Nolan screamed.

They scattered. The Triceratops, confused by multiple targets, swung its massive head toward the largest and most obviously artificial target—Sgt. Wrench.

"Oh, scrap," the cyborg muttered, and ran.

For a machine whose left shoulder was barely functional, Wrench moved with surprising speed. He dodged between trees, ducked under low-hanging branches, his mechanical legs pumping in a blur of motion. But the Triceratops was faster, driven by territorial rage and millions of years of evolutionary perfection.

"WRENCH! LOOK OUT!" Volkov's warning came a second too late.

The dinosaur's horn caught the cyborg in the midsection with a sound like a car crash. Wrench was lifted off his feet, impaled on the massive horn, his metal body shrieking as it buckled and tore. The Triceratops shook its head violently, trying to dislodge this strange prey, and Wrench went flying through the air to crash into a tree trunk with bone-shattering—or in his case, chassis-shattering—force.

"NO!" Nolan charged forward, but Volkov grabbed his arm.

"Wait," the Russian said. "Look."

The cyborg was moving. Slowly, painfully, sparks flying from ruptured circuits, but moving. He pulled himself upright, using the tree for support. A massive hole gaped in his torso where the horn had punched through. Hydraulic fluid leaked in dark streams. But his optical sensors still glowed.

"Boss," Wrench's voice was weak, distorted by static. "I don't... I don't think I'm gonna make it off this plateau."

"Don't talk like that, Sergeant! Just hold on! We'll—"

"No." The cyborg's voice was firm despite the damage. "My central processor is compromised. I can feel my higher functions degrading. In another few minutes, I'll be nothing but a malfunctioning piece of hardware. Dangerous. Unpredictable." His optical sensors focused on Nolan with something that looked like sadness. "You know what you have to do, Major."

Nolan's throat tightened. "Wrench, I can't—"

"You can. You must." Wrench tried to laugh, but it came out as a burst of corrupted static. "It's been a privilege serving with you, boss. Now shut me down before I hurt somebody. That's an order from one soldier to another."

For a long moment, Nolan couldn't move. Couldn't think. Then, slowly, he reached around to the back of Wrench's head unit, found the emergency shutdown panel, and opened it. Inside, a single red switch glowed in the darkness.

"Goodbye, old friend," Nolan whispered.

"Goodbye, Major. Give 'em hell for me."

Nolan flipped the switch.

The light faded from Wrench's optical sensors. The cyborg slumped against the tree, now nothing more than an inert collection of metal and circuitry—a machine without a ghost, a body without a soul.

"Major!" Merritt's shout came from across the clearing. "We've got the data! Let's move!"

The Triceratops were regrouping, preparing for another charge. Nolan took one last look at Wrench's motionless form, then turned and ran.

They sprinted through the prehistoric jungle, branches whipping their faces, roots trying to trip them. Behind them, the Triceratops bellowed their fury, but mercifully didn't pursue beyond the boundary of their territory.

"Where now?" Bream gasped, clutching the data module to her chest like a precious child.

"Down," Nolan panted. "We get off this plateau before—"

The ground lurched.

It wasn't a subtle movement. It was a violent, sickening heave that sent them all stumbling. Trees swayed drunkenly. Rocks tumbled down invisible slopes. From somewhere deep below came a sound like the earth itself groaning in pain.

"Earthquake!" Merritt shouted unnecessarily.

"Not earthquake," Volkov said, his face grim in the phosphorescent glow. "Volcanic activity. The uranium deposits—they are unstable. The concentration is too high. The entire plateau is sitting on top of a geological powder keg, and I think we just lit the fuse."

Another tremor, stronger this time. A tree toppled with a crash that echoed across the plateau. In the distance, they could hear the panicked calls of dinosaurs fleeing they knew not what.

"The cliff face!" Nolan ordered. "If we don't get down before this whole thing blows—"

They ran. Not carefully now, not stealthily, but in blind panic, racing against the mountain itself. The tremors grew stronger, more frequent. Cracks appeared in the ground, hissing with sulfurous steam. The temperature was rising—they could feel it even through the humid air.

They reached the cliff edge just as a massive tremor split the plateau. Behind them, a geyser of superheated steam erupted from the jungle, followed by a fountain of molten rock that painted the twilight sky in shades of hell.

"Down! Down now!" Nolan didn't wait for ropes or safety equipment. He grabbed an outcropping and began descending as fast as he dared. The others followed, their fingers bloody, their arms screaming with exhaustion, but driven by the primal terror of what was happening above them.

The descent was a nightmare. Every few seconds, another tremor would shake the cliff face, threatening to tear them loose and send them tumbling into the abyss. Rocks rained down from above. The air grew thick with ash and smoke.

Somehow—through luck or divine intervention or sheer stubborn refusal to die—they reached the bottom.

The beach was chaos. The native girl was there, frantically gesturing at a large outrigger canoe pulled up on the sand. She shouted at them in her musical language, pointing at the water, then at the mountain, her meaning crystal clear: Get in the boat! Get away from here! Now!

They didn't need to be told twice.

They pushed the canoe into the surf and clambered aboard as the first major explosion tore the top off the plateau. The sky turned red. Ash and burning rock began to rain down like the wrath of angry gods. The native girl grabbed a paddle and began rowing with desperate strength, and the others joined her, pulling against the waves with every ounce of remaining energy.

The island was dying behind them.

The volcano roared with the voice of creation's fury. Lava flowed down the cliffs in rivers of liquid fire. The jungle ignited, sending pillars of smoke into the darkening sky. The tremors had become one continuous earthquake now, shaking the very foundations of the world.

"Faster!" Merritt shouted. "We need to get beyond the—"

The final eruption cut off her words.

It was cataclysmic. The entire plateau exploded upward in a column of fire and ash that must have been visible for hundreds of kilometers. The shockwave hit them like a physical blow, capsizing the canoe and sending them tumbling into the churning water. Nolan grabbed for Bream, pulled her to the surface, fought against the waves that tried to drag them under.

When he finally managed to right the canoe and haul everyone back aboard, he turned to look at the island.

It was gone.

Where the plateau had stood—where dinosaurs had walked and prehistoric plants had grown in defiance of sixty-five million years of extinction—there was now only a burning mountain collapsing into the sea. Smoke and steam rose in vast clouds that blotted out the stars. The water around them was thick with ash and debris.

"The lost world," Volkov said quietly, watching the destruction with those cold gray eyes. "Annihilated. Perhaps it is better this way."

"Better?" Bream's voice was sharp with grief and exhaustion. "We just witnessed the destruction of the most important paleontological discovery in history!"

"Better than having it discovered by others," Volkov insisted. "Better than having it weaponized, studied, exploited. The interstellar age and the prehistoric world—they cannot coexist, Doctor. One must give way to the other. Now, at least, it ended on its own terms."

Nolan said nothing. He was too tired for philosophy. Too numb from loss. Borato, dead on the rocks below the cliff. Wrench, shut down and left behind to burn. And for what? For a data module that might explain nothing about why Earth had gone silent, why civilization had vanished.

"Where do we go now?" Merritt asked, voicing the question they were all thinking.

Nolan looked around. They were adrift in the open Pacific, in a primitive canoe, with no supplies, no equipment, no way to navigate. The native girl sat in the stern, her face unreadable, watching the burning mountain with eyes that held ancient knowledge.

Above them, stars wheeled in patterns that should have been familiar but somehow weren't—as if they truly had slipped sideways through time, into a world that was Earth but not quite their Earth.

"We paddle," Nolan said finally. "We stay alive. We protect the data. And we find out what happened to our world." He looked at each of his remaining crew members—Merritt, exhausted but determined; Bream, cradling her injured wrist and the precious data module; Volkov, enigmatic as ever, his secrets still locked behind those cold gray eyes; and the native girl, who had saved them all.

"We're explorers," Nolan continued, his voice gaining strength. "We survived ten years among the stars. We survived faster-than-light travel, alien worlds, and a plateau full of dinosaurs. We'll survive this too. Because we have to know the truth. About Earth. About what happened. About what kind of world we've come home to."

"And if the truth is worse than we can imagine?" Volkov asked softly.

"Then we'll face it," Nolan said. "Together."

They paddled into the night, leaving the burning island behind. The data module rested secure in the bottom of the canoe—ten years of discoveries, proof of humanity's greatest achievement, and perhaps the key to understanding their greatest mystery.

Somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, was Earth. But whether it was the Earth they remembered, the Earth they'd left behind, or something altogether different—that remained to be seen.

The adventure was not over.

In many ways, it had only just begun.

THE END
... OR IS IT?