Worlds Collide (Architects of the Apocalypse Book 2), page 1
Worlds Collide
Jasper T. Scott
Anthem Press
Copyright © 2022 Jasper T Scott
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Art by Christian Bentulan
https://coversbychristian.com
Content Rating: PG-13
Author’s Guarantee: If you find anything you consider inappropriate for this rating, please e-mail me at JasperTscott@gmail.com and I will either remove the content or change the rating accordingly.
Swearing: Brief instances of strong language
Sexual Content: Mild
Violence: Moderate
Acknowledgments
A huge thanks goes to my editor, Aaron Sikes and to my proofreader, Dani J. Caile, and to all the advance readers who helped me edit this first edition.
And finally, many thanks to the Muse.
Previously In the Series
WARNING the following synopsis contains spoilers from the first book in this series, Planet B (Architects of the Apocalypse, Book 1). If you would prefer to read that book first, you can get it on Amazon here: https://geni.us/planetb
Synopsis of Planet B
September 22, 2069
Astronomer Alice Rice is on vacation with her nine-year-old son, Sean, and her husband, Liam. While stargazing, Alice trains her telescope on an unknown star and sees that it’s actually a planet. For a planet to be visible, it has to be inside of our solar system. Despite how impossible that sounds, Alice immediately contacts her colleague at NYU to confirm the sighting.
NYPD Detective Layla Bester is starting over. Her husband-to-be, Neil, cheated on her with Layla’s best friend, Jess. Neil wants his ring back, and Layla is more furious than ever.
Tom Smith is serving a life sentence in upstate New York for allegedly murdering his wife and her lover. Tom’s long-time jailhouse rival, Fango Morales, is plotting to shank him during yard time. Before Fango can strike, both men vanish from the yard and wake up in a green field under a clear blue sky, somehow inexplicably far from Sing Sing Correctional.
Billionaire and interstellar enthusiast Preston Baylor learns about the discovery of Planet B and makes plans to meet Alice Rice at NYU.
Layla is assigned to investigate Tom and Fango’s disappearance from Sing Sing. The warden suspects intervention by higher powers, and mentions the planet that miraculously appeared. Layla isn’t too sure, but she is reminded of a similar disappearance from her youth—that of her high school boyfriend, Axel Harper. To this day, he’s never been found.
Preston Baylor sees Alice Rice as planned, confirming his hopes that Planet B is extremely close to Earth, closer even than Mars, where he regularly sends colonists via his family company, the Space Development Group. But Planet B appears to have an atmosphere, and some type of vegetation, making it a far better target for colonists. Alice adds the caveat that Planet B is actually at the other end of a wormhole, and traveling through wormholes is impossible. While Preston is there, they discover yet another planet on the other end of the wormhole: Planet C, which also appears habitable.
Tom and Fango explore their surroundings. They realize that they’re not on Earth anymore, and Tom, who was a paleontologist before he went to prison, begins to recognize pre-historic plants and animals. They begin to speculate that they might actually be on Planet B. What if aliens abducted them and took them there? But why them?
Climatologist Bruce Gordon is in New York City, delivering a speech at the 74th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Dozens of world leaders are absent, all dealing with their countries’ responses to the mysterious appearance of Planet B. Frustrated by the even greater than usual lack of interest in climate change, Bruce goes to a bar after the conference, meets a woman, and takes her back to his hotel. Later that night, he vanishes from the room, right in front of the woman’s eyes. Bruce wakes up in a grassy field, in a midday rainstorm. Something huge and terrifying chases him into a nearby cave. He thinks it might have been a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but how is that possible?
Layla meets Alice Rice at a bar after work, and feels as if they’ve met before. Layla leaves to return Neil’s ring. A commotion in the bar almost compels her to turn around, but she decides not to bother. Her boss wants her to investigate another mysterious disappearance, this time a man who vanished from his hotel room. Layla promises to look into it ASAP.
In the process of returning Neil’s ring, Layla also vanishes, along with him and Jessica Brady, who came to apologize for the messy situation that led to them breaking off their engagement.
All three of them wake up in a dark field in the middle of the night. Alice Rice is there. It’s freezing out, and someone has a fire going in a nearby cave. They go inside to find Bruce Gordon. They meet one another and trade stories about who they are and how they arrived. Bruce and Alice both look familiar to Layla, but she can’t figure out why. There is a skeleton in the cave with ID that indicates the dead man came from Earth in the 1960s. The remains are over a hundred years old, which means those bones should be dust by now. Alice points to the swath of planets in the night’s sky and theorizes that they are on Planet B. There are at least a hundred and twenty worlds this side of the wormhole, all packed into impossibly close orbits, which is why they can see at least a dozen of them at any given moment. She further suggests that the skeletal remains are in such good condition because time is passing slower on Planet B than Earth due to its proximity to the wormhole.
Everyone realizes that they must have been abducted and brought to an alien world which they are now sharing with dinosaurs and other extinct species from Earth.
Elsewhere on Planet B, Tom and Fango continue exploring and meet one of these dinosaurs. It attacks Fango. They narrowly escape by hiding inside of what looks like a hydroelectric dam. Tom and Fango turn on each other, and Fango tumbles over the falls into the river below.
After a very short rest, Bruce, Layla, and the others leave their cave in the morning to look for food and water. The days and nights on Planet B seem to last only about two hours each. In searching, the group runs into more dinosaurs. Jess takes a tumble into a raging river, and gets thrown over a waterfall. She is not expected to survive, but somehow they find her miraculously unhurt at the bottom of the falls.
They make a fire to warm her up, and their sleep is interrupted by the arrival of a group of human natives. They appear to be relatively primitive, with spears and bows and arrows, and no one understands their language.
The natives take them to an arena in their village, where they are made to fight against a T-Rex while the villagers watch. Jess and Neil hide, while Layla, Bruce, and Alice use a combination of primitive weapons that they were provided and Layla’s service weapon to drive off the dinosaur. The native chief interrupts the fight before they can kill it, and he conducts a kind of ceremony in which they appear to be made honorary members of the tribe—with the exception of Neil and Jess, who are imprisoned for their cowardice.
Bruce, Layla, and Alice are taken to a well where their injuries are miraculously healed by the water. It looks like some kind of nanotech to Alice. They are taken to a log cabin where they are given food and water, but kept under guard.
Tom Smith explores the dam and discovers living facilities, as well as a kind of hangar bay with strange-looking spaceships in it. One of those ships flies in while he’s exploring, and the pilot comes out in a sleek black space suit, reassuring him that they actually know each other.
Back in the native village, Bruce and the others plot their escape and a way to rescue Neil and Jess. They help Alice to sneak out through a hole in the bottom of the cabin that is used for a toilet. She is the only one who fits; she takes Layla’s gun, and hurries back to where Neil and Jess were locked up. In order to create a distraction, she releases the T-Rex. She was expecting it to be wounded from the fight, but it appears to be in perfect health. The natives must have used the water to heal it, too.
Alice flees with Neil and Jess and the T-Rex causes mayhem in the village behind them. They find Layla and Bruce and beat a hasty retreat from the village. The villagers give chase, shooting at them with arrows. Alice gets hit and goes down. Before the villagers can re-capture them, a sleek black spaceship appears out of thin air and fires back on the natives. Alice and the others are taken into the spaceship, and the pilot treats their injuries with more of the water. He reveals who he is, and Layla can’t believe her eyes: it’s Axel Harper, her high school boyfriend. But he doesn’t look like he’s aged a day, and it’s been more than twenty years since he disappeared.
The others all realize that they know each other from high school as well. They went to the same school and at least knew of each other, if not directly. That must be why they were abducted together. They think Axel had something to do with it, but he claims innocence and blames the aliens who abducted him, a race of beings he calls the Architect
Alice is desperate to find a way back to Earth and her family who she now realizes must be aging at least sixty times faster than she is. She and the others insist that Axel use his spaceship to take them back to Earth, but he claims that it’s impossible. The ship’s autopilot would take them back down immediately if he were to try to leave. He insists that there is no way home.
Axel takes them back to his living quarters at the dam. He gives them a tour of the facility. They discover a locked door at the bottom of an elevator on a floor labeled “gateway,” but Axel says he’s never been able to open it, and cutting through it is impossible. They give up, and everyone gets some sleep.
Back on Earth, Preston Baylor has discovered that the wormhole to Planet B is traversable; he’s already sent a probe to the other side, and now he is in the final stages of planning a manned mission, which he plans to join personally.
The next morning Axel gives his old friends an aerial tour, and he explains there are other humans on Novus, Planet B’s actual name. Besides the natives that he calls the Jakar, a big group from the 1960s are living on an island. He suspects that people have been brought to Novus at various points throughout history in which humanity was under threat of extinction. One of those points was during the Cold War, due to the threat of nuclear holocaust. Axel calls the people from the Cold War era Novians, but he warns against meeting them. The last time he interacted with them, they tortured him in an attempt to force him to take them back to Earth in his ship. Axel reveals that he is missing his pinky finger on one hand because of them.
Instead of taking them to meet the Novians, he flies them to see the ruins of an old medieval city with crumbling stone walls. He has no idea who used to live there, but thinks the ruins are remarkable. While they are flying overhead, they discover that a large group of people is appearing out of thin air, in the middle of the city. More abductees are being off-loaded by the dozen, right in front of their eyes. They land their ship to find out more, with Alice hoping to find her husband and son. They take advantage of the ship’s cloaking shield and suits of armor with the same technology in order to stay hidden. Axel leaves with Bruce, Tom, and Alice, leaving Layla, Neil, and Jess on board to wait for their return.
They search the city, not finding Alice’s family, but Tom is appalled to find that Fango is there, having somehow miraculously survived his tumble over the falls. Tom explains the situation with Fango to the others and says that he’s bad news.
In an act of desperation, Alice grabs one of the invisible ships that is dropping off the abducted people. It flies away with her clinging to the hull. Axel and the others hurry back to their ship to give chase. Meanwhile, Layla has discovered something on a lower deck: her engagement ring, lying on the floor in some type of transporter room.
She shoots Axel with an alien weapon set to stun when he comes aboard and explains what this must mean to everyone else: Axel lied. He really is the one who abducted them and brought them to Planet B.
With Axel unconscious, they are no longer able to follow Alice, so they wait for him to wake up, and hope that Alice will be okay. When Axel wakes, he still denies that he had anything to do with bringing them to Planet B, but no one believes him anymore. They force him to fly them back to Earth, assuming that he must have also lied about not being able to leave.
Up in orbit, they are attacked by alien spaceships and forced to crash land in the ruins of the city that they left. Axel explains that yes, he lied, the ship’s autopilot won’t keep them here: but the Architects’ drone guardians certainly will. Now the other abductees can see their ship, and a crowd is forming around it. They make a plan to go out on foot and fetch another spaceship from the dam. Axel, Bruce, and Tom leave on that mission, while Layla, Neil, and Jess stay behind to meet the other abductees. They pretend to be just as clueless as everyone else in order to avoid too many questions and possible trouble from the desperate crowds.
While they’re still busy meeting everyone, including Fango Morales, a spaceship appears in the sky, but this one looks like it’s from Earth. They rush out to greet it as it lands outside the crumbling city walls. Bruce also sees the rocket, and turns back with Tom, hoping that the people on board will be able to rescue them and take them home. Axel warns that whoever is on board, they can’t help; they’re also stranded now, and he pushes on for the dam.
Alice is still clinging to that drone ship. It enters some type of silo, and she begins hurtling down an impossibly deep bore hole in the surface of the planet. She emerges in a gargantuan cavern, and realizes that the entire planet is hollow. Hundreds of tunnels like the one she is hurtling down all meet in the core of the planet where there is some type of energy source radiating a blinding light. She passes through the light and seemingly sails out the other side and up a matching tunnel to the surface of the planet. But when she emerges from the tunnel, she discovers that she’s no longer on Planet B. Instead, she appears to be on one of the neighboring worlds, the one that she and her colleague designated Planet C. It’s a water world with an archipelago of islands.
The drone ship drops her into a pool of water at the top of an alien tree that looks like an upside-down umbrella. In the water are amphibian aliens that try to swallow her whole. A much larger creature that looks like a giant floating jelly fish scoops one of the amphibians up and eats it. Alice discovers that she can interact with some type of AI built into her suit. She’s overheating in this alien environment, thirsty, and hungry, but she can’t even remove her helmet because the atmosphere appears to be toxic. She tries to call Axel for help, but he is out of range.
On their way back, Bruce and Tom see an army of Jakar heading to the ruins, and they pick up the pace to warn everyone else.
Layla and the others meet the occupants of the rocket ship: Preston Baylor, a group of astronauts, and a Space Force general with a team of soldiers. Some brief explanations are given, and the revelation that there are dinosaurs on Planet B sparks Preston Baylor’s curiosity. He goes exploring with the soldiers, only to be attacked and badly wounded by a flock of pteranodons. Bruce and Tom meet up with them in the forest and use the miraculous properties of the water to heal Preston. Everyone is amazed. Fango Morales and another abductee from the city join them in the forest. Tom privately warns Bruce about Fango. Preston is taken back to his ship, while the general and his soldiers press on with everyone else to get samples of the water from a nearby river.
Meanwhile, the Jakar arrive and issue an ultimatum to the people in the city, which Layla is surprised to find that she can understand. Apparently, they learned the Jakar’s language while they slept. Just another facet of the Architects’ mysterious nanotech. The Jakar explain that their god, Agama, demands revenge for the people who were killed when Alice released the T-Rex in their village. They want one person for every one of theirs who was killed and for the witch who was responsible to surrender herself.
Giving in to those demands is impossible, especially since Alice is not even there. Layla and the other abductees and the crew from Earth organize a defense with a combination of weapons from the rocket and from Axel’s crashed spaceship. The Jakar attack. The city is overrun, many people are killed, and the survivors are captured.
Bruce, Tom, and the general return with samples of water from the river. They see that the city has been taken, and they make a plan to rescue their people, among whom are Preston Baylor, Layla, Neil, and Jess.
Axel reaches the dam, gets a new ship, and goes looking for Alice. He finds her on Planet C, still alive, but barely, and hurries back to help the others.
