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The Portal
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
218177291.001.png
THE PORTAL Kaitlyn O’Connor 2
© copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor
Cover Art by Eliza Black, Sept. 2007
ISBN 978-1-60394-077-1
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
THE PORTAL Kaitlyn O’Connor 3
Chapter One
The trip had been long and tedious, but it would’ve been a lot more boring, and,
truth be told, probably impossible, if not for the frog DNA.
Dr. Alexis Conyers tried to push that stray thought to the back of her mind, as she
had every time it had surfaced since she’d agreed to accept mutation for the sake of
mankind, but it wormed its way to the forefront of her thoughts again as she struggled to
focus on the activity around her.
Their mission might not be mankind’s last chance, but there was no denying it
was their best hope. Sacrifices were necessary if they were to have any expectation of
pulling it off. She’d accepted that.
They’d all accepted that.
And it still bothered her to think about the alien DNA strands that had been
webbed to her own, making her less than human anymore.
She still felt human. She still looked human, but the bald truth was that she
wasn’t entirely human anymore and she wasn’t as comfortable with that as she would’ve
liked to be. It made her wonder if the desperation to save the human race hadn’t already
gone beyond what it should’ve.
Harnessing the comet had seemed hair-brained and brilliant at the same time …
and so simple it almost made everyone feel stupid they hadn’t thought about it before.
Scientists had studied comets and meteors for decades. Other scientists had trained their
gazes on the search for a truly habitable world, one that would support human life
without requiring terraforming, or building biospheres, or lugging tons of life support
equipment light-years just to provide the minimum to sustain life.
But, until fairly recently, no one had thought to put the two projects on the same
page.
They’d colonized the Earth’s moon, Mars and its moons—moons belonging to
half the planets in their solar system, but that was less than ideal. Not one ‘world’ they’d
conquered could sustain life without a tremendous amount of work and the ever present
danger that some vital piece of equipment would fail and wipe out the entire colony
before help could arrive.
As bad as things had gotten on Earth—and it was pretty damned unstable—it was
still better than anything they’d been able to come up with—although there was some
comfort in not having all their ‘eggs’ in one basket, in knowing it was less likely, now,
that a single cataclysm could wipe out the entire human race.
The probes they’d finally set down on comets to piggyback a ride through the
universe had succeeded where all other efforts had failed, though. The comets had
carried their ‘eyes’ further than they’d been able to reach before, faster, and given them a
far better look at the universe.
With the comet borne, deep space probes, they’d found the perfect new home for
humans--as close to perfect as they were likely to find in time to do them any good, at
any rate. The problem was that the planet was so far away it made the ordinary methods
of colonization impractical if not completely impossible.
THE PORTAL Kaitlyn O’Connor 4
That had resulted in ‘hair-brained/brilliant’ strategy number two—their mission.
Instead of trying to build a fleet of deep space ships to carry colonists to the new world,
they’d built the U.E. (United Earth) Plymouth, crammed it with everything needed to
build the transport portal, a handful of scientists/engineers, barely enough supplies to
sustain those scientists/engineers, and sent them forth in the fastest ship ever built by
man.
It had still taken nearly ten years to reach the new world, and there wasn’t enough
room on the ship for the supplies needed to sustain human life for that long. It would’ve
taken a far bigger ship to do that, more time, and more money.
That was when the geneticists had stepped in with ‘hair-brained/brilliant’ plan
number three—the introduction of foreign DNA into the scientists which would allow
them to be frozen for most of the trip—literally frozen.
Alexis’ stomach churned and a shudder raked its way up her spine.
It wasn’t altogether a new idea. Geneticists had been working for years to help
the human race evolve with the same speed as their world, adapt swiftly to the changes to
keep them from going extinct.
The introduction of frog DNA was still radical, though.
Never before had anything other than the DNA of other mammals been utilized.
And she was still surprised she’d woken up after being deep frozen for so long.
They’d tested it as much as possible, of course, before they’d blasted off into the
unknown, but there’d been no time to do the years of research that needed to be done,
should have been done before it was pronounced ‘safe’. The compromise had been to
deep freeze them for relatively short spans of time, awaken them to do routine checks of
the ship and equipment and make certain everything was still working properly, perform
or check minor course corrections as needed, and then deep freeze them again.
All in all, they’d been awake only a year, total, of their ten year trip, thawed for a
matter of weeks and then back into the deep freeze, but even with the work they had to
perform during those waking times the trip had seemed excruciatingly long and tedious.
Alexis dragged in a deep, cleansing breath, trying to make herself relax as the
engineers finally took their places and began the process of ‘lighting’ up the portal to full
power.
She sincerely hoped it was going to be full power this time. They’d already lost
two probes. They were down to one. If the signal boost they’d jerry-rigged didn’t reach
the counter portal on Earth this time, they were going to be down to drawing straws to see
who would become the guinea pig. There wasn’t much else they could scavenge off the
U.E. Plymouth without the risk that they’d be permanently stranded on New Earth, and
no one wanted to even think about that.
It crept into her mind anyway and Alexis glanced around at her fellow travelers.
Dr. ‘Mel’ Melody Carson, the lanky, almost six foot blonde navigator, was the closest
person of the group that came to being a ‘friend’, although the two of them were hardly
bosom buddies. She was currently chewing her last fingernail off at the quick while she
stared at the blank screen of her console as if she could will the thing to light up. Linda,
who in Alexis’ opinion had far more boobs than brains, but who was supposed to be a
crack mechanical engineer, was staring off into space, her lips moving as if she was
either going back over her calculations … or singing to herself … or maybe praying?
That would be about as helpful as crossing her fingers, Alexis thought dryly,
THE PORTAL Kaitlyn O’Connor 5
wondering if Linda had always been this ‘spacey’ and she just hadn’t noticed, or if the
freeze/thaw process had left part of her brain frozen.
Richard ‘the dick’ Sloan, one of the two ‘grunts’ they’d brought along for
protection and to help move heavy but delicate equipment, was scratching his balls as he,
too, gazed off into space. His side-kick, Gary Pitts, a real whiz, was crouched on the
ground nearby, chewing on the stalk of a plant that hadn’t even been analyzed yet for
possible toxins.
Drs. Li Chung and Angus O’Neal had their heads together over the main control
console and Dr. William ‘Bill’ Long was staring at the gauges of the power unit. The
three men were brilliant and held so many degrees in so many fields it was almost
sickening.
Alexis tried to block the nasty thought that they had no reason to focus on
anything besides their studies since it wasn’t likely they’d had women to distract them,
but she was only marginally successful. It wasn’t that any of the three were deformed or
just plain ugly, but they were certainly no better than average in looks and, more
importantly, to her way of thinking, anyway, their personalities left a lot to be desired
when it came to companionableness, let alone charm. A block wall had more charisma
than the three of them put together.
She was fairly certain she’d never heard anything come out of their mouths
beyond scientific speculation. She’d yet to see even one of the three open their mouths to
say anything remotely conversational. They might as well be eunuchs. She was pretty
sure not one of the three had even looked at Linda and registered that she was a female …
and recalled that they were male, which, as far as she was concerned, said it all.
Any male that could work around Linda and focus on their work instead of her wasn’t a
red-blooded male.
She hadn’t considered when she had set out on the mission that she might be
stuck with the crew of the U.E. Plymouth for the rest of her natural life—and no one else
—She’d been honored to be chosen. She’d been focused on the mission.
One ‘waking’ year of travel and three months of roughing it on the new world
later, she was finding it harder and harder to ignore the possibility that she might never
see anyone but this group again.
And, with the exception of Mel, she didn’t even like them.
Not that she dis liked them, but the degrees that separated ‘like’ from ‘dislike’,
she’d come to realize, were like a vast ocean when one viewed it with the perspective that
this group might be ‘it’, the only people she was going to be around for the rest of her
life.
Not that there was a lot of reason to worry about it. After three months on New
Earth, as careful as they’d been with their supplies, they were still running dangerously
low on everything and they’d been too focused on completing their mission to spare the
time to explore their new world and search for local resources to replenish their
dwindling supplies.
If they didn’t get the portal open soon, they probably wouldn’t be around long
enough to have to worry about what they were going to do with the rest of their lives.
It worried her that they hadn’t been able to hail Earth.
It worried everybody, although they had carefully avoided the subject.
Regardless of the distance they should have been able to reach someone, hear

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