Nest Among The Stars

Displacement - Part 6

Breathing the air in deep measured amounts, Michael reacted instinctively to avoid panic. He stripped off the gloves and coat Nathaniel had handed to him only moments ago. This released much of the heat hindering his ability to think properly. Hurriedly he removed the gun from the coat's pocket and attached it to his belt. While placing his gloves in the same pocket from which he had just removed the gun, he adjusted the optic layer over his eyes. Magnifying the surroundings, he made a full 360 degree sweep of the immediate area. Michael knew it could be fatally dangerous if he failed to react quickly to the changed situation he now found himself in. Gathering information and making a threat assessment were the priorities on which to concentrate. Locating water, food and shelter would come next and hopefully, given the oppressive heat of the place, in that order.

"Gabe, verify my location and report to me."

There was no response, not even the slight tingle he experienced when the A.I. was about to communicate with him.

"Gabe, this is a specific direction as previously instructed. Talk to me." He felt nothing. He tried yet again with the same silent result. Gabe too was gone.

A sense of increasing urgency propelled him towards one of the larger nearby rocks as he sought to remove himself from his exposed position.

Crouching, he began to fold his coat into a neat easily carried rectangle. The limited mental exercise in this singular effort assisted with focusing his thoughts. Sitting with his back to the rock, he finished and put the coat aside. Looking up he began a more careful observation of the unusual black cloud crowning the nearby small mountain. After a few moments he was satisfied that, though peculiar, the weather phenomenon rested stable in its position and posed no immediate danger to him. However, given what was transpiring around the unseen summit, he felt it prudent to make any further observations from a more secure, and distant, position.

Unsure whether or not the spot where he had 'arrived' — wherever it was he might happen to be — held any significance with respect to returning to the snow covered field from which he had been removed, Michael decided to err on the side of caution and mark its location. Scrabbling together some fist sized stones he formed an 'X' over the first footprints he had made in the dusty soil.

As he put the folded coat under one arm, he kept his eyes on the strange cloud and began backing away from the mountain. He was on a broad open plain separating two low lying plateaus, the small mountain being the highest point at one end of the largest of these. The ground, hard packed and powdered with sun baked dust, was intermittently covered with rocks of varying sizes, making for awkward footing while walking backwards. The storm remained oddly localized and after a few minutes Michael was convinced it wasn't about to go anywhere. He turned to face in the direction he had been heading and promptly increased his pace away from the mountain.

The land was bare of vegetation and appeared to be void of any sort of life, whether plant, animal or insect. In this aspect it was like all the other worlds humans had discovered. Except for the barely perceptible 'murmuring' carried on the air from some unseen source, he would have guessed it was a dead world. Perhaps he was in an area left in its natural state on a terra-formed world, he thought to himself, which would then hold the hope that other humans might be somewhere close at hand. It couldn't be Mars; the dirt wasn't the right color with too much yellowish brown, not enough red. But Mars or not, terra-formed or not, it could not be another planet. How could Nathaniel have transported him across a vast stretch of empty space so effortlessly? Then again, how could anyone have sent him anywhere at all? People don't just 'blink' from one location to another. It just wasn't possible; at least not humanly possible.