The Rift 2

Book 2: The Rift

by Douglas E. Richards, Joshua T. Calvert

Genres: Alien Invasion; Hard Science Fiction; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

Dr. James Barron narrowly prevented a catastrophic interdimensional invasion in The Rift. But now he must deal with a myriad of threats as great as the one he overcame, including growing rifts in the fabric of reality, anomalous superstorms, and conspiracies that just might span worlds. And most importantly, he must find a way to save a woman he can’t get out of his head, Special Agent Hannah Walker, who vanished through a portal with a treacherous genius named Linus.

James soon finds himself heading security for a research effort taking place deep in the bowels of Camp David, where both Hannah and the portal she entered vanished. Because the portal left something behind: A nexus that floats like a black hole and defies all attempts to unravel its secrets. Is it a weapon? Or a passage to another dimension? Does it portend the end of humanity? Or is it the answer to James’s prayers?

James is running out of time to find out. Because if Hannah Walker is still alive, her fate hangs by a thread . . .

Release date: March 1, 2025

Sample

Prologue

Major David Worth, a pilot with the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, checked the fit
of his three-point harness and gave his co-pilot, Lieutenant Erin Miles, a wave to adjust the
speed.
The four propellers of the US Air Force’s mighty C-130 Super Hercules roared through
David’s headphones like a dull white noise. He felt as if the noise was driving him forward,
which was true. As a Hurricane Hunter with over ten years of service under his belt, this
shouldn’t have worried him.
But this flight wasn’t of the usual sort.
Not that anything was ever ordinary about piloting a retrofitted military transport plane into
the middle of the worst hurricanes and typhoons.
“There it is,” said Erin, sitting beside David and pointing ahead.
They were flying through a layer of white stratocumulus clouds that had settled around the
cockpit like fog. Now the view was clear again, and soft light from the setting sun flooded the
sky. About nine thousand feet below them, the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean west of
Hawaii was already dark, as if it were trying to hide from what was coming. Thirty to forty miles
ahead of them loomed the Eye of the Demon, the largest and most powerful hurricane ever
recorded by satellites.
“My God!” exclaimed Jessica Wilbur, who was strapped into the folding seat behind them.
While she was a journalist, she was also a pilot, now pressed into service monitoring the
instruments. “That’s a monster!”
“We’ll get to the belly of the beast in a minute,” said Erin, seeming almost giddy by the
prospect. With her aviator glasses and blue Air Force overalls, she looked as if she had stepped
into the cockpit straight from the set of the last Top Gun movie. But the major couldn’t help
noticing that her right index finger kept drumming against the yoke in front of her, a clear sign of
nerves.
“I can’t believe I volunteered for this,” muttered Jessica, and she sounded shaken. Who
could blame her?

Few pilots would volunteer for duty as hazardous as this—and as terrifying. Much more so
even than the worst storms ever recorded. According to satellite data, the monster hurricane they
were approaching had reached an extension of three hundred miles, its eye alone sporting a
diameter of fifty miles. It was so uncharacteristically dark that visual data was almost impossible
to obtain from orbit. The strangest thing, however, was that the storm was not moving, which
was meteorologically impossible.
David couldn’t help but think of the Red Spot on Jupiter, a storm first observed in 1665 that
had been stationary ever since, and just happened to be large enough to swallow several Earths.
As if there weren’t enough inexplicable things going on in the world. Still, this was David’s
area of responsibility, and since no one had any idea what this storm was, he was determined to
bring back data that might help.
After months, they had finally decided to send the only two pilots in the 53rd crazy enough
to fly through such a beast as the Eye of the Demon. The fact that Jessica Wilbur had been forced
on them by the press corps had not pleased him at first, but the journalist was a pilot and had also
asked insightful questions during their preparations, demonstrating a keen mind and the
willingness to put in the effort to obtain a sophisticated grasp of the subject matter.
So while he found journalists about as useful as athlete’s foot, he had to give her credit for
having the guts to fly with them. The important thing was that she would soon be distracted
enough not to watch him too closely. That had better apply to Erin, too. Otherwise, he was going
to be in hot water.
“Can you explain what will happen from here?” asked the journalist, already knowing the
answer, but wanting to film it for possible mass consumption.
“As soon as we fly into the outer reaches of the storm,” he replied, keeping in mind he was
being recorded, “our crew members in the back will prepare the drop probes. These are the
yellow cylinders with the screwtops that you filmed while we were loading. Technically, they’re
just the sensors. Mounted on the carriers of the probe via a kind of pneumatic tube system and
then dropped. A parachute slows the fall so that they can sail to the surface. Throughout their
flight, they’ll send temperature, humidity, and air pressure readings to the weather stations—in
this case, in Hawaii. They can also measure wind direction and speed, which under normal
circumstances helps to predict the movement patterns of a storm and warn affected populations.”

The Eye of the Demon became larger and larger outside the cockpit window. Its reach
stretched from horizon to horizon, dark claws of extremely excited air particles and frozen water.
Even at a great distance, it was possible to see the force with which the dark cloud masses
rotated around their center. Flashes of lightning lit up repeatedly throughout the seemingly solid
structure, revealing an eerie illusion for fractions of a second as if the saturated water vapor was
the seat of an ancient, evil deity. Bright warnings popped up on David’s small weather display,
indicating wind speeds approaching record levels.
“The drop probes have their own sensors that measure their speed,” continued David.
“Providing further insight into the storm.”
He struggled to keep anxiety out of his voice and off his face. No easy task. If he died today
and this footage was seen, would viewers find him heroic for demonstrating such calm and
bravery? Or would they think him an idiot?
If they believed the latter, he wasn’t sure anyone could argue the point. After ten years, this
was the first time his palms had become sweaty while flying into a storm. On the other hand,
there had never been a storm like this one outside of Jupiter.
“The GPS transmitter starts transmitting just before it hits the sea, right?” asked the
journalist.
“Exactly,” he confirmed. “So the received data can be assigned to a geographical position.”
“How long do the probes fall?”
“For about ten minutes. During this time, they’ll send out around one hundred sets of data
each. We drop dozens of them per flight.”
The storm now became a wall of pure darkness in front of them, apart from the angry
tendrils of lightning that kept flashing through the mountains of clouds. It was as if the evil deity
had decided to let them see its wrath.
Do not come any closer!
But that’s exactly what they did. The Eye of the Demon had grown to gargantuan
proportions, and its behavior was simply wrong, so it was essential that they found out what was
going on.
“It’s about to get a bit uncomfortable,” said Erin. “You’d better check your seatbelts again.”

David heard a rustle behind him as Jessica complied with the recommendation. Erin had
sounded so hoarse that even the journalist, who had only known her for a short time, had likely
noticed.
“Tell us again what you said in the briefing about the C-130,” she said as the black wall in
front of them began to cloud up the windows and panic set in like never before.
“The C-130 is designed for storm resistance,” said David, almost glad to have this
distraction. “It has an airframe of uncommon strength. In addition, it sports four turboprop
engines, enough to power through the fiercest of headwinds without breaking down, even while
swallowing large amounts of rain and hail.”
“Hail?”
“Yes, you’ll be able to hear it shortly.”
David now took over control of the plane from Erin as planned and felt the familiar
vibration in the steering. He reduced the thrust slightly and checked the altitude and speed one
last time. Both were stable.
Then he pressed the button for the cabin announcements. “Two minutes,” he said loudly.
After just a few seconds, the aircraft began to shake as if it were traveling at too high a
speed over a gravel road. The cockpit began to rattle. What would have caused an anxious
silence in a passenger plane wasn’t even worth mentioning to the ten crew members sitting at
their workstations in the back.
But that changed when they dipped their first toe into the cyclone itself. The plane was
shaken so violently that the vibrations in the fittings were clearly audible even through David’s
headphones. He kept a firm grip on the controls and had to make constant adjustments to keep
them on their heading and flying level.
The extreme crosswind whipping at them from the east caused them to be repeatedly
displaced, and they found themselves caught between different layers of angry air particles
infused with ice, which were compressed into projectiles of hail by the cold and extreme
pressure.
The bullets of ice now thundered down on their armored hull as if they were being shot at by
an entire army using machine guns. The impacts were so numerous that they could hardly be
distinguished from one another and caused a single loud noise.

The pilots and passengers were shaken violently, sometimes pushed down, sometimes lifted
up, as if gravity had ceased to exist. It was brutal already, and they weren’t even close to the eye.
The silent lightning flashed all around them at increasingly short intervals. Their aircraft was
struck, once, twice, perhaps more. Lightning strikes were often not even felt, only in the case of
heavier hits, which caused the instruments to flicker briefly or a sensor to fail.
David eyed the small toggle switch under the edge of the instruments where his foot pedals
were located. He had fitted it yesterday during the last check so that nobody could detect it.
With the retrofitted sensor unit under the bow—albeit no bigger than a shoebox—it had been
a little more complicated. He didn’t understand the technology behind it, although he could guess
that it was a sophisticated sensor unit designed to send his unknown but generous business
partners the data they needed. He didn’t know who they were or what they wanted. But he knew
what a million dollars in cash could do for his family. Besides, what harm could come from
helping laymen obtain specialized weather data from within the eye of a super typhoon?
Especially since it wouldn’t affect their official mission one iota.
Advanced research would only be a benefit to humanity as a whole.
A squall hit them like a train and tore David from his brief reverie.
“Oh My God!” said Jessica. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
She kept repeating this panicked phrase as if her brain had melted, or if it was an incantation
to ward off evil spirits. As distracting as this was, neither he nor Erin had the luxury of wasting
time getting her to stop. They needed to devote their full focus on keeping the plane from
spinning out of control.
They flew through such a thick soup of ice crystals, rain, and hail that David could no longer
see the wingtips of the mighty plane. Only the glow of the high-powered headlights managed to
penetrate the darkness, and only for a few yards.
“Shit,” said Erin in awe and absolute terror, her voice sounding raw over the radio. “It’s
absolutely ferocious. Worse than we even imagined.”
David was about to reply when they were slammed sideways by another gust of wind. The
plane banked to the left, like a toy model thrown away by a defiant toddler. He fought the
controls with every ounce of his strength and experience and just managed to stabilize the
aircraft, preventing the storm from tearing off its wings. A storm that appeared unimpressed by
the aircraft’s heavy reinforcements.

The Super Hercules shook more and more violently the farther they advanced into the
merciless forces of nature.
“Altitude stable!” shouted Erin. “Incoming flow steady. Holy hell!”
“What is it?” he shouted.
“The wind speed is almost two hundred miles per hour!”
David blinked in disbelief. They were now being buffeted by the strongest sustained winds
ever recorded, taking the crown from Hurricane Allen in 1980. The men and women on duty that
day, many decades before, were still considered heroes, with their photos hanging above a bar
frequented by those in the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Perhaps his and Erin’s
photos would soon be hanging there, too.
But he had to wonder if this would be a posthumous honor. A photo displayed at his empty-
casket funeral.
With great concentration, he steered the aircraft through the storm, which had become ever
darker, despite still being constantly punctuated by powerful lightning flashes. The hail and rain
had long since been so thick that they were flying blind, navigating with instruments alone. The
lighting had intensified, now having become an omnipresent flicker, as if someone had activated
a gigantic strobe light somewhere ahead of them in the fog.
Again and again, the plane sank or rose violently, without warning, like a leaf in a tornado.
The hail continued with such ferocity that David couldn’t believe it hadn’t already penetrated the
hull and turned them into Swiss Cheese.
A crack appeared in the side cockpit window, and he prayed that it would hold. He wasn’t a
religious man, but he seemed to be saying a lifetime’s worth of prayers in minutes. The armored
glass had been designed to withstand bullets or bird strikes at full speed, so he couldn’t even
imagine the kinetic energy with which the ice must have hit.
“Major, are you out of your mind!” shouted the journalist at David. “We have to turn back!
What are you waiting for? This storm’s going to kill us!”
In her panicked state, she had forgotten they were connected by headphones and speakers,
and her shouting was so shrill that David thought his eardrums might burst. Now he wished
she’d return to repeating her mantra.
“Shout in my ear again and I’ll kill you myself,” he said quickly, not taking his focus off his
mission for a moment.

They had calculated all variables as best they could and had still undershot their fuel needs
by a considerable margin. At this rate, it would take them more than forty minutes to reach the
eye, leaving them just enough fuel to fly through the center once and turn back around instead of
making several passes from different angles.
They were in a vortex of extreme forces, inside the largest storm in recorded history, which
made navigating in a straight line impossible.
The next forty minutes passed without David’s awareness, his sense of time suspended.
Finally, they advanced into the hurricane’s eye, and all around them grew quiet. He usually loved
entering the eye of a storm, where violence turned to peace, squalls to calm. The motionless
center of even the worst typhoon was always something unreal, almost tranquil, as all was
suddenly right with the world.
Not this time. For one thing, while the airspace was now free of clouds, it was still pitch
black outside, yet no stars could be seen.
“Wind speed five miles per hour,” reported a relieved Erin, blowing out a long breath.
“I can’t believe we’re still alive,” mumbled Jessica.
“We’ve reached the center of the storm,” said David for the record, allowing himself a deep
breath before leaning forward to look over the high dashboards of the cockpit consoles. “Erin,
are you seeing this?”
She leaned forward to get the same view as her partner. “What the hell is that?” she said in
dismay.
The air in front of them seemed to shimmer, like summer heat waves over hot asphalt. A
large part of the storm’s eye was covered by it, but at a lower altitude, about a thousand feet
below them. The area was not clearly defined but surely stretched for many miles.
Wisps of the anomalous effect wafted around like semi-transparent tentacles. It was almost
as if the shimmering had a life of its own and was licking at the typhoon that was raging around
them. Its black clouds formed dense walls in every direction as if they were inside a dark tower
that was well over six miles high and seemed to merge with the darkness of space.
“Are those lights down there?” asked Erin.
At first, he had thought they were misperceptions, afterimages of the instrument displays
that formed a jumble of colors in front of him, all vying for his attention. Then he thought they

were reflections on the cockpit windshield until he realized that they were actually lights on the
water. Thousands of them, yellowish and warm like torchlight, but without flickering.
“I’m descending farther,” he announced. “We need to take a closer look.”
With that, he lowered the nose of the Super Hercules slightly and reduced its thrust.
“That could be a very bad idea,” said Erin warily. “This shimmer is giving me the creeps. At
a visceral level. As if being inside the worst storm in human history isn’t bad enough, this is
really freaking me out.”
“I hear you,” he said grimly. “Add this to the growing list of bizarre shit that’s happening
around the world. As much as I’d like us to, we can’t just stick our heads in the sand. We need to
learn what’s going on here.”
Erin sighed but didn’t reply. As they descended, he checked to make sure all the cameras
and other sensors on the hull were working properly.
The lower they got, the clearer it became that the lights were on the surface of the Pacific
Ocean, or at least just above it. He saw massive structures, perhaps buildings, illuminated by the
yellowish glow. Hundreds of them, in the middle of the sea, moving slightly up and down.
But it was almost as if he was seeing this all through a tear in the sky, a rift, as if the light
entering his eyes was distorted somehow. As if his brain didn’t quite know how to interpret these
visual images that seemed to be passing through the mother of all funhouse mirrors. Perhaps this
imaginary rip in the sky, and what it showed beyond, was what Alice had seen when she peered
through the looking glass.
Something else was enthroned in the center of these buildings, a kind of ring structure
several hundred yards across—or so he estimated. Its outer shell kept glowing as if the effect
followed a pattern he couldn’t recognize.
“That must be the source of it!” said Erin in awe, pointing.
David’s mouth fell open.
The flickering or shimmering that filled the core of the storm’s eye came from this ring
structure, seemingly born at its center from a dagger-like mast and stretching far up into the air.
Suddenly, the steady glow of the ring looked even more unhealthy and dangerous than it had
before.
“What the hell is that?” he muttered, looking at the radar map. Nothing was displayed on the
screen. Supposedly there was only water, even if the data was obviously faulty. Extreme results

kept appearing and disappearing again, as if they were flying over a mighty skyline that vanished
into thin air shortly afterward, only to reappear.
Some of the lightning strikes must have damaged their plane after all.
“There should just be the Pacific Ocean here,” said Erin. “Lots of it. The nearest landmass
would be the Kwajalein Atoll, but that should be several hundred miles away.”
She paused. “Hang on, I’m getting a signal from the radio.”
“Turn it up.”
A humming sound arose, sometimes muffled, sometimes booming, like thunder in the
distance. Over that, crackling sounds fluttered and whispered, reminiscent of rustling leaves.
Suddenly, a shrill whistle cut through the air and abruptly stopped. Soon after, the humming
started again, this time deeper and more menacing.
David shook his head in confusion. “Switch it off,” he ordered. The eerie series of sounds
were impossible to fathom, and only succeeded in freaking them out even further.
Suddenly, the ring below lit up brightly and the strange pole in its center began to glow. The
glow intensified and the translucent tentacles of the anomaly pulsed before expanding in one fell
swoop. The tips stabbed into the walls of the rotating behemoth of a hurricane dozens of miles
away. Where it touched, lightning flared like wounds.
It was at this moment that David understood that this was the reason for the constant growth
of this storm, the Eye of the Demon, which was spreading across the Pacific without direction. It
was simply getting bigger and bigger because something coming through the imaginary rift was
feeding it with energy and making it angrier. He also understood that if it continued like this, this
typhoon would eventually encompass and consume the entire Earth. Nothing could stop it, and it
would only become more voracious.
He had to get out of there and report what they’d seen, which may or may not show up on
video and sensors.
He banked left and brought the plane around to a heading that would return them to their
initial entry point.
But that was not to be.
No one on board noticed the invisible tentacle of the anomaly rearing up behind them like a
twitching arm. Not even when it cut diagonally through the Super Hercules and made a large part
of its hull disappear, as if it had never existed at all. ...