Diamond Sky (Diamond Sky Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

‘On the nipple,’ confirmed Anna, glancing towards Lucy with
mischief in her smile.

Josh rolled his t-shirt up to his neck.

‘Just make it quick, will you.’

Joel leaned forward. His mouth hovered over his friend’s
chest, but he pulled back before making contact.

‘How about through the t-shirt?’ he suggested.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ giggled Anna.

Josh rolled his top back down and Joel leaned in once more
before smothering his friend’s nipple with his mouth. He held his position
whilst glancing over to the German girl to see if she was satisfied. Her poker
face was perfect; she gave nothing away. Joel lingered for a little while
longer until Josh gave out a yelp and pushed him away.

‘Jesus mate, you don’t have to bite.’

‘I did not bite,’ protested Joel. ‘That was you. You moved
it.’

‘How can I move my nipple? You bit me, you queer.’

The girls laughed and it was enough to make the boys realise
what idiots they were being. This time they were the ones left red faced. In an
attempt to regain face, they offered to buy the girls a drink. Much to Lucy’s
surprise, Anna hesitated, so it was she whom accepted the boys’ offer. She was
fast learning that if she wanted something; she could no longer afford to just
sit back and wait for it to come to her.

Chapter 3

Emmy
looked at her watch.

The time was 10:07.

He was not coming.

She had expected this. Nobody was more stubborn than her
grandfather. When she was a child, he promised to take her to Sydney as a treat
if she scored straight A’s in her exams. She had never been to the big city and
could not wait to see the skyscrapers, the museums and the ocean.
Unfortunately, a B+ in Geography wrecked an otherwise perfect scorecard. The
plane tickets were booked in advance and her grandfather still went ahead with
the trip; he just did not take
Emmy
with him. Years
later, she found out he was unable to get a refund on her ticket and let it go
to waste. She never dropped a grade again.

‘We can postpone this if you want,’ suggested Charlie.

‘No, we have come too far to let one old man’s bitterness
throw the project into disarray. We will proceed as planned. Tonight, history
will be made; with or without the great Jackson Fox.’

She walked over to a control box, which was placed by the
door to the laboratory. After typing in a password to unlock it, she pulled
down a lever, which opened up the roof hatch. The ceiling gave way to a
covering of stars in the same way that one unveils a plaque from behind a
curtain.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ she said.

‘This is nothing,’ replied Charlie. ‘Try and imagine the
view you will have in just a few minutes.’

She did and a jolt of electricity shot up her spine. Sure,
there was a risk to what she was doing, but it was greatly overshadowed by the
potential reward.

As Charlie went through one final diagnostic check, she
disrobed and lay down on the slab. It felt cold, but she knew the chill would
not last. Soon her body would feel nothing at all whilst her mind would be sent
into overdrive.

‘Everything’s ready,’ said Charlie. ‘All I have to do now is
push the button.’

He slid the slab into the matchbox.
Emmy
remembered the false start she had experienced on her earlier run and made sure
to focus on fully relaxing her body this time.

I am floating

‘Good luck,’ said Charlie, but she was not listening.

I am floating.

Her lab partner took his seat by the console. He could see
that her vital signs were normal and her heart rate was slowly falling. There
was also a monitor from where he could track her progress, although given the
speeds and vast distances she was likely to
travel,
he
expected the signal to be fragile.

I am floating.

Charlie turned the dial to level 2 and waited.

I am floating.

I am...falling!

Unlike the first time,
Emmy
did
not jerk awake and the rush she felt was incomparable to anything she had ever
felt before. She expected to slowly rise as she had done in the earlier test,
but the sensation she experienced was more like moving downward, as if she was
falling off the face of the Earth.

A few seconds into the journey she decided to apply the
brakes, if this was even possible. There were no visual clues as to how fast
she was going. This was largely due to the fact that she no longer had any
eyes. In the lab she still had spatial awareness, this was by way of a kind of
sixth sense, which Charlie christened “psychic sonar”. She sensed no objects in
her vicinity, which could mean only one thing; she was in open space.

Stop

When her mind sharpened, she knew this meant that she was no
longer in motion. She expected to be pulled back to her body, but this did not
happen. Her consciousness was being amplified to the extent that she could
actually begin to think with some degree of clarity without being awoken from
her dreamlike state. She cast out her thoughts like a net into the ocean,
hoping they would pick up something. There was nothing. She turned her senses
to the opposite direction and this time she sensed a gigantic mass of energy
before her.

Was this the sun? As more of the intensely bright energy
came into her scope of awareness, she began to realise what she was witnessing.
When she had become aware of her surrounding in the laboratory, the appearance
of material objects such as the walls and the furniture had hinted at an
opaque, almost transparent consistency. Charlie though, had shined and sparkled
with the kaleidoscopic quality of a diamond. What she perceived now was the
glow of a billion such diamonds. She was directly facing planet Earth in all
its glory.

The vision was beyond anything she could have imagined, but
she still had her sights set on a far greater prize. She willed herself away
from the mass of psychic energy before her and pushed her consciousness deeper
into space.

Unlike with conventional forms of travel,
Emmy
was no longer bound to the cosmic speed limit; the
speed of light. She could move in an instant from one point in space to
another. Within the endless void, any region of concentrated energy-matter
reverberated out like an echo in an empty cathedral. She homed in on these
pockets of activity and hopped from planet to planet as if they were mere
stepping stones. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; she left them all
behind as she descended deeper and deeper into space. She travelled further
than any manmade craft or probe had ever gone before.

Every so often she would sense a massive object and feel
herself drawn to it. Maybe when she became more disciplined she could discover
a new planet, but for the time being she was just finding rocks, albeit very
big rocks.

The faster she travelled, the larger an energy-mass had to
be to fall under her umbrella of awareness. She continued on, faster and faster
until stopped by a wall of compact energy. The barrier was not completely
solid, but it stretched out in every direction and even with her new found abilities
she could sense no end to its vastness. It was the cocoon that surrounded the
outer reaches of the solar system. Known as the
Oort
cloud, it is a barrier reef constructed of frozen comets and asteroids
separating the solar system from the rest of the Milky Way. It is also more
than a light year from Earth.

Emmy
switched her focus back to
the sun. Even from a distance of many billions of miles its presence was
powerful. It would take even the most advanced spacecraft tens of thousands of
years to get to where she was, yet she could return home in an instant.

She shifted her awareness once more and found herself
viewing the Earth from the Moon. It was a sight shared by millions thanks to
the images from Apollo 11, but it had never been seen like this. The planet was
lit not by electricity, but by the living energy of every organism on its
surface. Up close, it was so bright that it was adversely affecting the rest of
her field of awareness, like staring directly at the sun. She was dazzled by
its brilliance.

She turned her attention back to the moon, trying to
visualise how the opaque mountains and craters surrounding her would look to
human eyes. This really was a completely different world to the one she knew.
She began to wonder if she was experiencing time as well as space differently,
whilst in this altered state.

How long had she been out of her body? Hours, minutes,
seconds? When her consciousness was stationary, she could sense the movement of
atoms around her, but when she travelled everything became still as she
navigated the crevasses that existed in between time itself.

Her initial euphoria subsided and she was beginning to feel
isolated and uneasy. Something was not quite right, but she could not tell what
that something was. She thought of her body, lying still in the projection
chamber and she could feel her focus begin to switch back to the material
world. It was like waking from a dream, but as the ethereal landscape
disintegrated, a light appeared directly in front of her and something or
someone reached out to her.

She opened her eyes to see the curved ceiling of the
matchbox. The figure had gone. She tried to relax her mind in order to go back,
but she felt anxious from the strange encounter that happened a quarter of a
million miles away and just a few seconds earlier.

Come on
Emmy
- you can do this.

She closed her eyes and focused on nothing but the moon and
the strange entity. So many questions were going through her mind that any
relaxation of thought was impossible. No matter how much she willed it, the
separation would not come.

‘
Emmy
, are you okay?’

The voice was Charlie’s. She ignored it.

‘
Emmy
, can you hear me?’ he asked,
with more urgency this time.

‘Pull her out now,’ demanded a second voice, whose tone was
all too familiar.

The old man had come after all.

She felt the slab pulled from under her and lights dazzled
her as she was brought back into the open.

‘You have to let me go back,’ she said. ‘Someone or
something was out there. It reached out to me. You have to send me back now.’

Charlie’s eyes widened and he let go of her binds. As it
often was, his scientific reason was usurped by a schoolboy’s giddiness.

‘Was it an alien?’

The young scientist was clearly excited, but Professor Fox
had a different take on the news. He shot his junior with a scolding look of
contempt.

‘Do not be preposterous. If what
Emmy
says is correct and she was not alone up there, then it can mean only one
thing. Obviously, somebody else shares our ambitions. If a competitor were to
go public with this technology first then everything we have done here is for
nothing. I simply cannot allow that to happen.’

He turned in his chair and left the laboratory. Charlie
unfastened
Emmy’s
binds and handed her lab coat to
her.

‘Competitor,’ she said with disdain. ‘He makes it sound like
we are running a supermarket. There is a lot more at stake here than mere
technology.’

‘He is funding the project.’

Emmy
shot him a look not
dissimilar to that which her grandfather had moments earlier.

‘This has nothing to do with money either,’ she said.
‘Charlie, do you realise that tonight I travelled where no man or woman has
gone before. I actually made it to the outer rim of the solar system. You
cannot put a value on that.’

‘You reached the
Oort
cloud?’

‘I could almost touch it. Of course, when put into context
of the universe as a whole, it is like we have only reached the garden fence.
There is still a whole world out there waiting for us to explore.’

‘What about this encounter of yours? Do you really think
somebody else has found a way to do what we do?’

She shook her head.

‘Whoever or whatever was up there; they did not get there by
the same means that I did. It simply isn’t possible.’

‘How can you be certain?’

She picked up a book from her desk. When she located the page
she was looking for, she handed it to Charlie. The picture it showed was a
crude imagining of a disembodied soul taking part in astral projection. Charlie
was familiar with the image and he failed to spot its relevance. He looked up
from the page, but
Emmy
had already pre-empted his
question.

‘The cord,’ she said. ‘We have both seen it when we have
left our bodies. It is what allows us to find our way back when we cross over.
Without it our consciousness would be lost to the void.’

‘What about it?’

‘The being that I encountered had no cord. There was nothing
to bind it to our world. I think I have finally made the breakthrough we were
looking for.’

***

The evening progressed better than Lucy could have hoped.
For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was able to relax
without the shadows of fear and grief being cast over her every thought. She
was actually having a good time.

As the lights came on and the music stopped, she wondered
whether there was any further fun to be had from the night. The boys were the
first to stand.

‘Is it that time already?’ asked Joel, who was clearly not
yet ready to leave either.

‘Afraid so,’ replied Lucy. ‘Unless you know of anywhere else
we could go?’

Joel laughed.

‘In Coober Pedy on a Wednesday night?
I think the nearest nightclub is about a four hour drive away.’

‘You could always come back to our place,’ added Josh,
smiling at Lucy as he did so.

She looked to Anna for guidance. The German girl had earlier
taken the lead with the pool game and this dynamic held throughout the evening.

‘Maybe some other time,’ she said. ‘I have tour in morning
and should be getting to sleep.’

The boys were frustrated, but not yet ready to give up.

‘Maybe we could walk you girls back to your hotels,’ offered
Joel.

Lucy was staying in the same hotel that they were drinking
in, but she decided to wait and see what Anna would have to say first.

‘Okay,’ agreed the German girl.

The girls stood and followed the boys to the door. Lucy was
happy to go along with the group and to see what happens. When they got to the
door, Anna stopped abruptly.

‘Did you forget something?’ asked Joel.

‘No, not forget,’ she told him. ‘You offered to walk us home
and now we are here. I’m staying at this hotel.’

Joel waited for her to elaborate by perhaps making him an
offer, but when she did not, his face dropped and he could not hide his
frustration.

‘Goodnight,’ she added.

Lucy and Josh exchanged a look of confusion seasoned with disappointment.
They had both been following their friend’s lead, which left them now
reluctantly parting too. Once the boys had gone, the girls were left standing
in the doorway.