Mysterious Planet Earth
In 2245, a returning space mission finds Earth silent and empty. The crew crash-lands on an uncharted island, discovering a prehistoric world rife with aggressive dinosaurs and deadly radiation.
PULP SCIENCE
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.