Rescue and Asylum Read online

  Savage Genesis Book One

  Rescue and Asylum

  ISBN: 978-1-5323-9143-9

  © Lee Baldwin

  Baldwin-Books.com

  Dedication

  For my Mother and Father

  Reviews

  Savage Genesis Book One – Rescue and Asylum

  ~ originally published as Aliens Got My Sally ~

  The world that Lee Baldwin created stayed with me... story has a deliberate pulp fiction/B movie feel... an intentional choice by the author... left me with many thought-provoking questions... more here than meets the eye. - Zozbraswife on Amazon

  Lee Baldwin is a master of written dialogue and a genius architect of made-up worlds. - San Francisco Book Review

  Baldwin’s prose is punchy and laced with wit, especially in the edgy banter between feisty Anna and antagonists Gonzalo Sandoval and Carl Mumford...language is streamlined... characters hit all of the right notes: Anna is appealingly feisty in her interactions with her male colleagues and appropriately wary of the professed beneficence of the Cuz of Thiele. - Booklife LLC and PWxyz LLC

  I LOVED This Novel... I wish all books were this original and well-written! Plus, I’ve read a LOT of ‘alien abduction’ literature... so it was especially pleasing to see a different approach! - D. Donovan, Editor

  Entertaining read... grabbed my imagination in the first 100 words... delights the reader with ample servings of mystery, political intrigue, scientific plausibility and hope. I highly recommend this book... provocative, entertaining, and fun. - Randie, Amazon Reviewer

  ...sketches a far future for humanity, a post-biological era of cybernetics and biology combined in a manner that is completely plausible. - Betty, Amazon Reviewer

  The writing is delicious and fast-paced... women’s fiction, because the plot turns on the values of two lifelong friends at the mercy of the patriarchy... the ‘alien’ species has defeated its own version of patriarchal rule, which is a sign of hope. - S. Zysk, Amazon Reviewer

  Well-crafted and gripping. Excellent... absolutely hooked me...a brilliantly twisted mind which produced a true gem of a book. - K.Damas, Goodreads Reviewer

  ...the story moved quickly and kept me turning pages. I really enjoyed the heroine Anna and the outcome ...truly an original. - K. Chapman, Amazon Reviewer

  Also by Lee Baldwin

  HALCYON DREAMWORLDS ~ A world enslaved by the future of desire. Click to buy from multiple retailers.

  NEXT HISTORY ~ The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow. Click to buy from multiple retailers.

  ANGLE OF ATTACK ~ An Adventure in Aviation, Love, and Crime. Click to buy from multiple retailers.

  Chapter 1

  Sally Trips

  QUANTUM BIOLOGIST SALLY JACOBS will discover how freaky the universe can be when a corner of it opens up and swallows her whole. That won’t be because she took a few minutes at the campus café, or because that made her late to observe tonight’s lunar eclipse with a friend. It won’t be because she follows this deserted shortcut to avoid the shadowed parking lot where carousing fratboys smash car windows, or because of the towering rebreathers that roar against urine-tinted sky.

  Sally’s fate will unfold because four out of five infants on this overheated planet are born dead, because half of all humanity goes to bed starving, and because like everyone else, she wears a breather mask to keep the poisoned atmosphere from killing her.

  Focused on leaving a voice message for her friend, she doesn’t notice the little raccoon in the twilight until she’s almost on it. The raccoon is very cute. Sally halts, a smile tugging at her lips. The animal is playing with a yellow ball, which now rolls toward her. Sensing a too-weird undercurrent, she reflexively toes the ball in the raccoon’s direction. The animal bats it toward her, but not hard enough.

  Because Sally is a biologist to her core, she is fascinated with this intelligent behavior, and by the fact that the raccoon has green eyes. But she knows that most wildlife has died off, so how can this one survive out here with no breather? She steps forward to kick the ball.

  The little face remains unreadable as its delicate, clawed hands manipulate a crystal cylinder. The air around them shimmers gold.

  Clouded in incandescence, Sally tries to retreat. But when she finds herself unable to move, paralyzing fear rises to choking terror. She vanishes from the ordinary universe, along with the green-eyed raccoon and every living bacterium within 20 meters, hating, hating, hating it that her only part in this cosmic discovery is that of the screaming blonde.

  Chapter 2

  Abandoned

  WITH A SOUNDTRACK OF HARSH BREATHING and squeaky court shoes, Anna Lewis takes an elbow from a scraggly guy as she drives across polished boards, twisting under another dude for a decent layup. Elbow-jerk steps across her to take it outside, but Anna flips his foot behind his ankle and down he goes. Hoots and catcalls from others on the court, all guys, not all of ‘em Anna’s height. She smirks and clamps down on the pain in her ribs.

  Play. In the next mad down-court dash, Anna sees the Archaeology admin spearing a finger at her from low in the empty bleachers. The other team makes a shot and Anna steps out.

  “Director’s office,” the woman says. “Stat-stat.”

  Anna hefts her gym bag, pulls on her breather mask and shoves through the air seal into drab evening light. She curses the cloud cover. She’s meeting her friend to view tonight’s eclipse, even though it could be a washout.

  Dribbling her basketball, Anna runs among shadowed university buildings. The Archaeology Department director, her thesis advisor, wants to talk. It damn well better be green lights from the doctoral committee. Her degree after five long years of post-grad means she’ll dump this campus of boy-men and her misogynist advisors and find her way to a good position in computational archaeology. Somewhere else. She’s breathless to tell Sally that her degree is in the bag.

  Anna runs underneath a howling rebreather tower, deafened as it huffs away at the yellowed air. Tops of similar towers are visible between buildings, stacks of carbon briquettes at their metal feet. Along the path, bright info panels sense the med bracelet she wears and target their messages to a fertile female of 28 years, above-average height, intelligence, and physical fitness, offering contraceptives, uterine implants, party drinks, hot booty shorts, and that popular, no-permit StunVixen immobilizer most women carry. A strident verbal command orders her to walk, not run, on campus paths. Dazzling, ad-filled displays overpower sketchy lighting between the university buildings.

  Anna charges a gaggle of tobacco zombies clogging an entrance. Togged out in wildly-painted breather masks, they mill uncertainly to let her through. One rouses at sight of her flashing legs and sets himself for a quick grope. She eludes his questing fingers with a head-fake and crashes through the building’s air seal.

  In the Advanced Studies wing, she ducks down a side corridor among blocky office cubicles. Three bearded Ph.D. candidates in a heated holo-board discussion eyeball her as she zips into a shared cube and frees her phone from its Krypto-Kradle. Seconds later she pulls her breather aside and knocks at Professor Mumford’s office door. His muffled reply sounds through the steel barrier. Full professors get bulletproof everything on this campus.

  Facing him across the desk, Anna doesn’t bother with anything lame like, ‘You wanted to see me?’ She drops her basketball and traps it underfoot, meeting his eyes with expectant silence. Mumford gives her damp shirt a slow pass.

  “Wet T-shirt contest, Lewis?”

  Professor Carl Mumford is such an expert misogynist his look can feel like a pat-down. Anna catches herself from saying, I’m up here, but allows a flicker of annoyance at his cobby maleness.

  “You’ve heard from the committee,” she says mildly. br />
  Mumford leans back in his big chair. “Do you know we’re living in poverty, Lewis?”

  “Poverty?” Anna forces herself to hold steady. He likes to begin his little chats with something irrelevant.

  “You ever spend any time looking at the stars?”

  Anna only nods, impatient to move on to Topic A, approval of her thesis. She sends Sally a quick text: Whrarya?

  “When my father came to this seacoast,” Mumford says dreamily, talking mostly to himself, “the stars at night were a hundred times brighter. As a kid, I built a telescope. Thought I could bring them closer. Your kind doesn’t miss that because you’ve never seen it.”

  “My kind?”

  “You’ve worn a breather all your life. So young. You’re secure in the knowledge that this is the way things are.”

  “What the bleep you talking about?” Anna doesn’t feel she’s all that young anymore, not after the delays and red tape of her pursuit for a doctorate in archaeology these last five years.

  “This is not the world, Lewis. This is a pissed-on scrap of what we had.”

  Anna’s nostrils flare at the lecturing tone. “I love looking at the stars.”

  “You’ve never seen them.”

  “Online,” she protests. “Hubble, James Webb, Tess. Armstrong…”

  “With your own eyes, Lewis. I know you want to. You climb the hills late at night. Damn risky, even for a jock like you.”

  “Life’s a dangerous adventure or it’s nothing,” she says firmly. “My friend comes.”

  “You two gals? Alone up there in the dark?”

  She’d love to try out her immobilizer on this bleephole of and adviser but instead gives Mumford a stony silence. Tall and fit and 25 years younger, Anna knows she could take him in a brawl. It’s seldom shared with men the literal combat training women must undergo to survive in modern society. Anna Lewis is the kind of woman that certain men find easy to hate because of her star-girl looks.

  “Lewis, someday the world will realize that the human race has never been alone in the cosmos. It’s 2084 and all we’ve really got, deep-space-wise, are telescopes.”

  “We’ll always have UFOs,” Anna growls, impatient with his small talk, hungry for the best news of her life.

  “UFOs are real,” Mumford says in his lecture-hall voice. “Have always been real. Exoplanet tech is real.” He considers her for a moment, a calculating smirk on his weathered face. “If you had brain one as a researcher, you would ditch your voodoo search for alien mine shafts. Your best work points to astronomy.”

  “I think we do great astronomy when we dig into the ground,” she tells him firmly. “Stuff that’s real about our origins.”

  “You did that. Your alien mining theory. “But don’t you have any juice to study planets around other stars?”

  “Good astronomers already doing that. Besides, you approved my topic.” Anna steps down hard on her rising impatience. She’s more interested in unnatural subsurface deposits than stellar spectra and radio signals. And this convo is boring as hell to a woman who wants to light out for a saner part of the country.

  Mumford shakes his head emphatically. “We are stalled on critical technology barriers. Hydrogen fusion for cheap electric power is still 15 years away…”

  “They were saying that 90 years ago.”

  He nods. “Taxpayers and congressmen have no appetite for space travel. All we can show for a century of launches are footprints on the Moon. And sixty-three dead colonists orbiting Mars.”

  “A Mars colony is doable. It’s all politics holding us back,” Anna says. “Not technology.”

  Mumford is unimpressed. “This plot you generated.” He hooks a thumb at the monitor behind him, one of her arty-colorful plots of possible pre-humanity mining operations. Over the top of that window she catches the corner of a random newsblog: Woman Gives Birth to Live Human Head. She jerks her attention back to him, betting he’s circling a piece of bad news reserved especially for her.

  “You’re keeping me in the dark about something,” she says, feeling he’s rehearsed this, maybe in front of a mirror. “To start with, exactly when is my paper on pre-human mining sites coming out?”

  When she arrived on this campus five years ago, she’d described to him her statistical methods for locating unnatural anomalies in subsurface metal and mineral deposits: possible mining operations before the rise of Homo Sapiens. He claimed she’d publish faster if he became her co-author. That paper and several in its wake met with odd little snags in the academic approval chain. Mumford gives her a smug frown.

  “Forget that paper. When we lucked onto some funding, I took the liberty of running with your first results.” He doesn’t mention he took that minor liberty three years ago.

  Anna cannot suppress a gasp. “Professor! You used my estimates to open a dig site?”

  He flashes his most winning smile. “Carl, please, my dear. Not professor. I’m your friend, remember?”

  Soothing her impatience by rolling the basketball underfoot, Anna’s face is a mask. He is no friend of hers, although the campus rumors he spreads claim much more in the way of intimacy.

  “We owe you for this, Lewis. There’s a little dig project in Colombia that’s investigating one of your likely pre-human mining sites.”

  Anna kicks the basketball hard against the front of his steel desk. Mumford jumps at the enormous boom in the small office. She traps it underfoot and snarls, believing she’d be justified to twist his fool neck.

  “You deliberately ripped off my original work to get funding for a fat project! That is academic theft!” Even as she glares at him, it crashes in on Anna that this meeting is not about her degree.

  “Sandoval’s getting results,” he says. “He needs you down there pronto.”

  “They want me down there,” she says numbly. Her stomach sours at the idea of a camp-out in the mountains of Colombia with two dozen stubbly excavators. “Forget it. I’m interviewing. Send someone else.”

  Mumford’s eyes go hollow and Anna’s throat tightens. This jerk of an advisor intends to yank her world out from under her.

  “You should be proud. It’s really your dig.”

  “Then why am I finding out like this?” She strokes a small gold locket at her throat.

  “This is academia, Lewis. Your subsurface heat maps guided Sandoval to something. You need to see it in situ before they disturb it.”

  “He can send video. We’ll settle it in five minutes.”

  “You’re going.”

  “Bet me!” Anna’s got that gut-sick feeling, but Mumford is unperturbed. In a whisper, he says, “couple months ago, NASA showed me a star chart.”

  “That means exactly what to me?”

  “A view of this galaxy we’ll never see from Earth.” He tilts back casually in his chair. “That star chart came out of your texture encoding algorithms.”

  Now she is interested. Texture encoding of an early Colombian sculpture is the core of her doctoral thesis.

  “There’s no way you could get that.”

  “NASA’s computing power has turned up more from your methodology than star charts.”

  Anna places both palms on his desk and leans in. “Hold it, Carl. First you rip off my subsurface heat maps to launch a dig. Now you’ve got NASA running my texture algorithms? You’ve leaked my thesis to the government!”

  “Calm down, girl.” He gives her a Lothario smile. “It’s all under wraps.”

  Nerves prickling, she says, “then bring up that star chart. I want to see the other side of the galaxy.” Her pulse picks up. All her life, Anna’s held to the belief that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, not only in modern times but in the deep past. She wants to believe that one day humans will encounter a true spacefaring culture, but she has doubts about how humanity will handle that. Hopefully those visitors will have conquered insanity.

  Mumford shakes his head. “It’s all at the dig site. Sandoval can show you. Too sensitive for el
ectronic transmission.”

  “Courier, then! Has to be a better way to do this. I got…”

  “Plans, Lewis? Your eyes on this dig right now are mission critical.”

  “Forget it. I’m reporting you. Using your position to perpetrate a theft.”

  Mumford’s lips curl as he lobs his bomb. “You’re not reporting anyone, Lewis. I’m doing you a favor. The committee rejected your thesis.” Before she can protest, he adds, “We thought things were fine, until your paper pulled that p-flag.”

  Anna’s guts turn to liquid. She was expecting something about how warmly the doctoral committee regards her original work, how they see her bound for a bright future. But now her committee chair is charging her with the most serious academic crime. Plagiarism.

  “My work did definitely not get p-flagged! It’s completely original. Only my quoted sources…”

  Mumford ignores her. “You’ll have two months in Colombia to gather your wits and do a careful rewrite. It’s perfect cover for a delay. Blame it on Sandoval’s project. You’ll come back looking like a hero and I’ll bless your thesis. And you, little girl, will keep your stupid mouth shut.”

  Anna fights for breath. “Work nights while fighting off Sandoval’s drooling felons?” Her knees go weak, her every nerve screams for this not to be true. His arrogance and insults are one thing, but academic probation is a black mark that will stain her entire career.

  “Here’s your plane ticket and a student visa.” He flicks a legal size envelope across the desk. “You leave from Arcata airport in three hours. Tick-tick-tick.”

  The bottom drops out of Anna’s stomach, even as she’s chewing on the fact he said student visa instead of work visa. She finally gets it, the reason for Mumford’s unaccountable stalling on their supposed co-publication of her alien mining heat map theory. He wants to make her invisible.

  “Tough about the thesis,” Mumford says in a consoling tone. “I know you’ll work it out.”