Novus Intelligens #Sci/fi

Posted: July 1, 2019/Under: Uncategorized/By: Christine Young

Novus Intelligens: Newlywed science agents Jules and ‘Manda Santros face their toughest mission yet: a menace that threatens two star faring civilizations and aims to make mankind in particular, extinct!

Novus Intelligens: Sci/fi

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BLURB: Novus Intelligens

They’re back! And this time, they’re a team in more ways than one! As Mr. and Mrs. Santros, Jules and ‘Manda Mooney are now both science agents for the Terran Consortium’s Military Intelligence. Join them on their toughest mission yet as they first become targets for murder then split up to find out who or what is behind a series of missing space freighters, the destruction of a Navy battleship, and a self-repairing spacecraft housing what may be a new form of life. When their paths finally reunite, Jules and ‘Manda discover that the dangers they’ve faced individually, pale in comparison to the one they both must now face together: one that threatens two star faring civilizations and aims to make mankind in particular, extinct!

EXCERPT: Novus Intelligens

A gasp broke the silence as Maia followed him into the room and saw the oddly crumpled form.

“Professor Santanti!” she exclaimed. “He looks…dead?”

It was a question that demanded answering so Jules took a closer look, rolling the form over to make an identification. The face with its trimmed goatee and wispy grey hair around the ears was familiar.

A neat hole in Santanti’s chest, its edges charred, provided Jules with all the evidence he needed that the man was dead.

He patted the body down but found nothing that would explain its presence there. From his estimation, Santanti had not been dead for more than an hour.

“He’s dead all right,” said Jules, straightening.

“I…I don’t understand,” said Maia, still rattled.

“If it makes you feel any better, neither do I,” admitted Jules.

Unspoken was his concern about the manner of the man’s death. Although death by pulse pistol was not uncommon, Jules couldn’t help but make a connection with the weapon used in the attack on himself back on Callisto. Was it a coincidence? Unfortunately, there was just not enough evidence to draw any conclusion in that regard.

On the other hand, the question about the source of Santanti’s funding, his death, and the too coincidental appearance of his body within an hour of Jules’ unannounced visit to the villa, suggested there was someone else behind the professor’s death, someone with the credits and the organizational ability that could end up building a nitinol battleship.

Although by finding the professor he’d technically accomplished the mission Leclerc had assigned him, the case was definitely far from closed.

Jules was about to make a quick report to MI about finding Santanti and his suspicions when looking up, he noticed the edge of a workstation in an adjoining room. The professor’s perhaps? He decided to make a check of the station first before making the report.

“Is that the professor’s study over there?” he asked.

“Yes, but that workstation was searched by the other investigators like they did the ones at the office.”

“No harm in double checking,” said Jules as he headed over to the room.

He entered the study which was as neat and tidy as any of the rooms back at the downtown offices. There was another door on the opposite side of the room.

“Where does that go?” he asked Maia who had shadowed him into the study.

“The professor’s bedroom I think.”

Jules circled the workstation, took the chair he found there, and sought out the series of ports and slots intended for connecting external devices and whatnot to the built-in computer system. Carefully, so Maia didn’t see, he slipped a nano-card from a pocket in his ‘suitjacket and inserted it into one of the slots.

The card was called a cloud chaser. One of the Science Division’s most important, and secret inventions; it released pre-programmed nanites into any workstation’s hardware that were programmed for only one thing, to search out wiped information. No matter what anybody thought, such information still existed somewhere in the cloud and the nanites would find it. In that regard, a cloud chaser was one of the best friends a science agent could have.

For Maia’s benefit, however, Jules decided to go through the motions of searching the workstation in the conventional manner.

“Do you have the voice activation code for this station?” he asked her.

“I didn’t before, but Main Frame Central has since cleared me for that. Workstation 356F12, activate.”

“Activated,” said the station. “Welcome, Maia.”

“Thanks,” said Jules. “Workstation, access…”

But that was as far as he went, before he was stopped by what he could only describe as a funny feeling. Something wasn’t right, but whatever it was, he couldn’t identify it.

“What?” asked Maia, seeing the look on his face.

“Did you feel anything?” asked Jules, sitting straight in the chair and looking around.

“No.”

“A draft or something?”

“Well, maybe. I just had a chill go up my back.”

Jules stood up slowly. Everything seemed the same. He looked back toward the sitting room and could see Santanti’s body on the floor just as he’d left it. Outside the plas glass windows, the sun was still shining. He looked at the door in the opposite wall. Walking over to it, he opened it and looked in. A bedroom, as Maia had told him. Yet another door faced him to the right.

“That’s the master bathroom,” said Maia at his shoulder.

Jules went over to the door, pulled it open, and stopped.

There was no bathroom. Instead, it was the sitting room. Sunlight poured through the big plas glass windows facing the sea and, on the floor, just as he’d last seen it, was Santanti’s body.

“Wait a minute,” said Maia, amazed. “That can’t be. The sitting room is back that way…”

Across the sitting room, Jules could see the doorway leading into the study where he could just see the corner of the workstation. Quickly, he turned back to the bedroom door. The study was there just as they’d left it and beyond, the sitting room.

Wondering, he moved swiftly through the study to the sitting room, turned the corner, and found himself in the same bedroom!

“I don’t understand this at all,” complained Maia, who’d followed him from room to room. “How can we be in the bedroom again? We should have ended up in the dining room.”

Saying nothing, but beginning to suspect, Jules charged across the bedroom to the other door and found himself in the study again.

“This is crazy,” insisted Maia. “How can we keep coming back to the same rooms all the time? We should try some other doors.”

But there weren’t any other doors before and there still weren’t now, so Jules backtracked through the bedroom, into where the bathroom ought to have been and, as he expected, found himself back in the sitting room.

“We’re trapped,” he said aloud, but it was an observation mostly meant for himself.

Meanwhile, Maia began to lose patience as she moved about the room, banging on the unbreakable plas-glass windows then taking a chair and trying that. Whether she hoped to attract outside attention or break out of the house, her efforts failed.

“How do we get out?” she demanded as the world she’d always taken for granted suddenly failed to conform to her expectations. “What happened? I don’t understand any of this!”

Jules tried to maintain his own sense of calm. “Like I said, we’re trapped in some kind of circularity loop. A Mobius trap. Something that was always theoretically possible, but no one ever managed to build one.”

“A what?” asked Maia, her eyes tearing up and threatening to ruin her carefully applied makeup.

“A Mobius trap. A phenomenon that bends both time and space so whoever is caught in the singularity strip can’t get off but simply goes around and around through the same spaces…”

“For how long?”

“Forever. Unless a way can be found to break the cycle.”

“How can we do that?” pleaded Maia, who was on the verge of panic.

It was something Jules was trying hard to prevent in himself as well.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s never been done before.”

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Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TDVYFL5