An Accidental Alliance

The Pirates of Pangaea. The phrase just sort of popped into my head one evening. I’m not even sure how original it is. I’m fairly sure I never heard anything like it before. Although while an Internet search showed I was not the only one to come up with the name, I found nothing like this so felt comfortable enough to proceed to figure out something to do with the name.

My first thought was that I wanted with to be a science fiction series, but how to get my pirates back two hundred million years in the past? More important; how to do it in a manner I could personally believe. Time travel? Yeah, okay, but frankly I already have a time travel series and if they could go back in time, why not return to the present. Other writers have postulated one-way time travel so that was only a slight problem, but I really did not care to envision Errol Flynn raiding other ships on the seas of Permian Pangaea. I felt it would involve a fully established civilization and frankly I found it as jarring as movies that pit cavemen against dinosaurs. It never happened and I wasn’t about to write a story that said it did, or even could have.

Further research acquainted me with the work of Christopher R. Scotese of the Paleomap Project (
www.scotese.com
). Doctor Scotese has done some amazing work in the field of understanding plate tectonics and his site is a great demonstration of how the Earth has changed over the course of time. The animations on his site start back in the Precambrian Epoch some 750 Million Years ago and come forward to the present day. I spent a long time watching how the world develops and the land masses of Earth came to be as they are today. But those maps do not end in the present. Instead they go forward into the future until the next Pangaea – Pangaea Proxima – is formed. There is some debate as to just what that world will look like as the further one postulates tectonic plate movements into the future the less certain those predictions become.

So I chose one of the several projections I found and built my world around that. Is this what the world will really look like in two hundred fifty million years? I don’t know and I’m fairly certain no one really does, but this is one of the possible projections and it makes a fine world to write a story on.

Once I had that the rest just fell together. Hope you enjoy it.

Jonathan Feinstein
April 26, 2009
Westport, MA

     
Rome is the Eternal City
, Parker Holman mused as his flight came in low over Lake Erie,
but Cleveland is the eternally changing city.
He looked south from his window seat and spotted the city’s signature New Terminal Tower. It had replaced a structure with a similar name seventy years earlier. Standing at over twenty-nine hundred feet from street level to the top of its spire, it had been the world’s tallest building for nearly fifty years.

     
The Forest City, Park remembered Cleveland’s traditional nickname. Looking out the plane’s window there was not a lot of greenery to see in the downtown area, but beyond that the city still lived up to her name.

     
“We are on our final approach to Cleveland Hopkins International,” a woman’s voice could be heard throughout the long cabin. “Please fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables to the seat backs in front of you and put your seats into their full upright positions.” Park, a veteran flier, had already done so, but he slipped the in-flight magazine back into the seat pocket in front of him. He had read the articles in it, and while he had considered taking the complementary publication with him for an article on asteroids and meteorites, he decided against it. There was nothing in the piece he did not already know.

     
Then the plane’s pilot corrected their approach and all Park could see were the western suburbs of the great city rushing past beneath him in a gray-green blur. After another few minutes the blur resolved itself into the black pavement and white lines of the runway and with a slight bump, the plane touched down once, bounced a little and then touched down once again and this time stayed on the pavement as the powerful engines roared to slow them down still more.

     
To Park’s annoyance, the plane seemed to take nearly as much time to find the gate as it had flying in from Boston. That was a bit of an exaggeration and he counseled himself to patience as the large jet taxied to its assigned gate. Time slowed still more as he waited for permission to leave his seat, but finally the flight attendant’s voice returned to wish the passengers on their ways and Park jostled with his fellows to retrieve his carry-on bag from the overhead compartment.

     
He was travelling lightly; just a change of clothing and a few mementos, an ultra-thin computer pad and a compass. He didn’t need the compass, of course. He was not going anywhere such a device would be needed, but for reasons he could never explain, he had carried the old compass with him every time he left home. Nothing special in the way of compasses, in fact, it was the same device he had used decades earlier as a Boy Scout, but he felt a certain amount of comfort knowing it was in his bag.

     
If he was to be honest with himself, he wouldn’t need the computer pad either. There would be no shortage of terminals and pads for him to use, but unlike the compass, this was a specially customized device and he had spent months configuring it to his desires. He would rather put up with the bother of lugging it around with him than have to start all over with unfamiliar equipment.

     
He had flown into Cleveland Hopkins a dozen times before and by now could navigate his way down the long concourse without paying attention to his surroundings. This lack of attention was shared by a woman with dark brown hair and who stood a few inches shorter than Park, had she been standing. She was walking as briskly as he was and on a converging course while trying to read a pamphlet, when they suddenly collided and tripped each other.

     
Both man and woman instinctively rolled as they dropped to the floor and ended up entangled in each other’s arms. “Excuse me,” the woman apologized instantly. “I should have been watching where I was going.”

     
“No, I’m sure it was my fault,” Park told her as they started to disentangle themselves. He stopped as he found himself looking deeply into her dark brown eyes. The woman was maybe a few years younger than he was, in her mid-thirties at the most, and she wore her deep brown hair medium-length in a style that made her face look almost heart-shaped. “I was distracted,” he murmured.
I’m still distracted
, he thought whimsically.

     
The woman looked back at him. She saw an attractive man of medium height with sandy-brown hair and gray eyes. There was something about him that made her unwilling to leave his accidental embrace, but finally both drew a deep breath together and helped each other to their feet.

     
“Parker Holman,” he introduced himself, wondering why he bothered. He wasn’t going to have time for dinner dates any time soon. As he took half a step back he finally got a better view of the woman. She was dressed in a style currently thought of as corporate casual in shades of tan and green. It was a sensible and comfortable outfit that none-the-less conveyed a businesslike attitude far more so than the Hawaiian shirt and khakis Park was wearing.
 
A glint of gold diverted his eyes to her neck where he spotted a small pendant bearing the Hebrew letters chet and yod which Park recognized as “Chai,” the word for “Life.”

     
“Iris Fain,” she replied with a slight catch in her voice. “Pleased to meet you, Mister Holman.”

     
“Park, Ms Fain,” he automatically corrected her.

     
“Iris, Park,” she replied in return.

     
It was only as an afterthought that Park realized they were surrounded by hundreds of people all hurrying on their way down the concourse. He checked his watch and decided to throw his own schedule out the window. “May I buy you a cup of coffee, Iris?” he asked.

     
“That would be…,” she began, a soft smile on her face. Then her expression changed abruptly to one of mild sorrow, “I’m sorry, Park,” she told him. “I have pressing business elsewhere.”

     
Park wanted to ask for her number and immediately silenced himself. God alone knew when he might be able to call her. He sighed and nodded, “So do I, unfortunately.”

     
“I’d have loved to, though,” she assured him as they started walking down the concourse again.

     
They didn’t talk to each other all the way, but each occasionally stole a glance at the other. When they did so, a look of regret would flash across their eyes and then would be instantly hidden with a slight smile. Park was trying to find the right words to bid farewell to Iris when they both spotted a tall gray-haired man holding up a cardboard sign emblazoned with the block letters, “PVW.” There were three other men with similar signs nearby.

     
“Oh,” Iris noted almost clinically, “There’s my contact.”

     
“Really?” Park asked, suddenly hopeful once more. “Mine too.”

     
Iris turned to look at him, unable to hide a crooked smile. “That’s nice,” she blurted enthusiastically. “Really nice.”

     
“Parker!” the other man called out, “Miss Fain! Over here!” Park and Iris approached the older man. “I wasn’t aware you two knew each other.”

     
“We’re old friends,” Iris replied whimsically, “who just met. Are you Colonel Theoday?”

     
“Arnsley,” he replied, “or Arn. “This is not a military project and I retired five years ago. My students call me Doctor these days, but there is no need for formality.”

     
“It may not be military,” Park observed, “but I had the impression the military had its hand in it.”

     
“Not as much as we feared they might, Parker,” Arn replied. “Only ten percent of our volunteers are actively serving.”

     
“And how many are either in the reserves or retired like you are?” Park asked pointedly.

     
“Another twenty percent,” Arn admitted reluctantly, “but it was the only way to get sufficient funding and you know why Project Van Winkle is necessary.”

     
“I’m not completely convinced it’s necessary,” Park replied, “but it does seem like a reasonable precaution. Wait a minute, are you saying this is not just another extended drill?”

     
“Not this time, Parker,” Arn told him. “We have all five thousand of us coming in at once. We’ll be at full strength by this time tomorrow.”

     
“Why?” Park asked.

     
Arn looked around the lobby and shook his head. “Not here. There will be a briefing tomorrow night but if you want to know before that, you’ll get most of the information off the project computers. There’s a pad in each room.”

     
“I brought my own again,” Park told him.

 
    
“You still don’t trust the project equipment?” Arn looked amused.

     
“What’s to trust or distrust?” Park shrugged. “I just happen to like the way my pad is set up. It would take days to get another the way I like it.”

     
“Very well,” Arn shook his head. “You never were one for following the pack, were you?”

     
“It’s why I never bothered to enter the military after ROTC,” Park told him. “I could see it would do no good for me or our country. There are other ways to serve.”

     
“Yes,” Arn agreed. It had been an old argument. “Why don’t you two find seats on one of the buses just outside? They’ll be leaving as they fill and the sooner you get to the base, the sooner you can get settled in.”

     
The buses were fairly standard for their sort – land-liners than had been chartered to carry the five thousand men and women, in forty-man lots to a secret location somewhere to the east of Cleveland. “Have you known the colonel very long?” Iris asked Park as they found a pair of seats together on the second bus in the line.

     
“About twenty years,” Park nodded. “He was one of the military teachers when I was in college and joined the ROTC there.”

     
“How did you go through reserve officer training and then not actually serve in one of the armed forces?” she asked.

     
“I wasn’t on scholarship,” Park explained. “I originally enrolled because I wanted to, not for the scholarship money. It didn’t work out. I stayed in the corps for the entire four years because I didn’t want to think of myself as a quitter, but when I was finished I decided I was more cut out for graduate school than the Aerospace Force.”