Maker E-Book

Robin Brande

• Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

X-Files meets X-Men in this extraordinary series by award-winning author Robin Brande.

THE FUTURE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT.

A standalone collection in the Dove Season Universe.

A mechanical genius joins a top-secret mission to learn about alien technology from the aliens themselves. What he discovers changes everything.

A linguist with the unique ability to communicate with anyone—human or otherwise—uncovers the secrets of an alien race.

At an elite science conference at a remote mountain retreat, a theoretical physicist learns that her theories are closer to reality than she thought. But even her wildest imaginings do not prepare her for the truth.

What if death is only one possible outcome, and there are ways to continue a life? For a grieving husband, the only choice is to find his wife again.

The future is already here. But we can still make it what we want.

Don’t miss the other books in the Dove Season Universe:
Dove Season
Finder
Seeker
Believer
Explorer

Leseprobe

MAKER

DOVE SEASON

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

MAKER

(Dove Season)

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

Copyright 2025 by Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

“Time Map” was published in Pulphouse Magazine Issue #20

www.pulphousemagazine.com

Cover art by Andrey Strelkov/Deposit Photos

Cover design by Ryer Publishing

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN: 978-1-952383-44-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-952383-45-8

* * *

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Dove Season Universe

Time Map

Time Map

Linguist

Linguist

Inviting

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Second Life

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Next in the Dove Season Universe

About the Author

More from Robin Brande

Show Your Book-Loving Style!

A Mind for Mysteries

The Miraculous Unknown

Mountain Tough

Parallelogram Quartet

Also by Robin Brande

DOVE SEASON UNIVERSE

RECOMMENDED READING ORDER

Dove Season

Finder

Seeker

Believer

Maker

Explorer

MAKER

TIME MAP

TIME MAP

The handcuff on my right wrist was much tighter than it needed to be. I wasn’t going anywhere. But I understood their need to assert some authority. The whole base was on high alert.

They had lost three priceless assets, as the people interrogating me kept calling them. I never corrected them. What would be the point? They didn’t want my opinion, they didn’t want my enlightened world view, they only wanted to know how I helped their assets escape. Right under their noses. No security cam footage, no clues, nothing.

They had me in one of the small concrete interview rooms, one-way mirror, just like in a TV cop show. The other half of the handcuff was attached to the leg of a gray metal table that was bolted into the floor.

I’d already been held for about three or four hours. There was no clock in the room, they took my watch, but you get a sense of blocks of time. They let me have one bathroom break, escorted by a guard, then back to the hard metal chair to wait and wait.

I was still in my blue coveralls and black work boots. No one took my shoelaces, so I guess they weren’t worried I’d try to hang myself. From what? The table leg? I knew they were watching me through the glass. I just sat and thought my thoughts.

Mostly about how slick it all was. None of it my idea, which made it all the better. I could just shake my head at it and go along and watch the show unfold.

Plus I learned a lot in that last critical hour. Things I certainly never knew and didn’t even suspect.

In the almost seven years I’d been there, you could say I befriended the guys. The assets. They were easy to like.

But before I got the job, I had to go through two weeks of psychological testing. I figured working as a civilian for the military, there would be all sorts of hurdles, but the psych questions were strange.

They showed me all sorts of pictures and videos of men, women, boys, and girls, all of every possible nationality and color.

They had me hooked up to sensors to see if I reacted negatively at all. Of course I didn’t. I’m a black man, I’ve spent my life with prejudice, so you think I care if someone is Pakistani or Chinese or Native American? Come one, come all, I’ll judge you by your actions. If you’re an ass, you’re an ass, I don’t care what color you are. But if you’re good people, then fine. Come sit by me.

And then, week two, they started slipping in some new kinds of pictures. People with horrible disfigurements. People who had obviously survived being burned. People who might have made a living with a traveling circus back in the old days, the only way they could support themselves.

And then, aliens. Cartoon aliens at first, little green Martians, then little gray extraterrestrials from science fiction movies.

Any reaction, Mr. Swan?

They checked my readouts. Didn’t matter to me, green, gray, disfigured, any of it. I’d lived a life. I’d seen a lot of people.

Just to make sure I wasn’t totally dead, they also showed me scenes from horror movies where face-eating aliens were stalking normal folk. I didn’t care for those, because who would? They checked my readouts. Elevated heart rate, fast breathing, I guess they liked what they saw.

Because I got the job. Technician Specialist. Top security clearance.

I know I came highly recommended. My old boss at Champion Rigs must have known someone in the Army, because they came looking for me, not the other way around. I didn’t know their secret base in the wilderness outside Aspen, Colorado even existed.

The rules were strict. You live on base. You don’t leave. You don’t travel. We provide everything you need for free: food, comfortable housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, you name it.

I was recently out of a marriage and without a lot of personal prospects. I figured I’d take the job for a year or two, just to get my feet back under me. And learn some new things.

I’ve been what people call a mechanical wizard ever since I was a little boy. Not just normal fix-it and build-it kind of childhood play, but next level. When I was five I took apart my mother’s vacuum and a few other appliances around the house, and used the parts to make a working spaceship for my plastic army men. I got it airborne. I’ve always been a nut about flight.

Teachers noticed me, they put me in programs. I won all sorts of competitions. Reggie Swan became a name. My picture in the paper, holding up those big fake checks that show thousands of dollars in prize money—that was me. I made a good living as a kid.

And just like basketball and football standouts who start getting scouted while they’re still in junior high, my parents started getting offers early on. Scholarships to this college or that. High-paying tech jobs with Boeing and Ford and a lot of other companies. And military recruiters telling them why I’d do best in the Army, Air Force, or whoever that particular recruiter represented.

But I have a stubborn streak in me. A real obsession with not being bossed around. And I had a different plan in mind.

Learn everything. Try everything. Not the college route, that wasn’t for me, but hands-on. Working cars and airplanes and ships for a while. Then bridges and high rises. Whatever someone could design and build, I wanted to have my hands on that. Learn how everything worked, down to the nuts and bolts and motors and rivets.

If you start at sixteen, like I did, you can work a lot of jobs by the time you’re forty-six.

But I parked myself at Base X for six years and ten months—the longest I stayed anywhere—because there was more to learn there than anyplace else. I would have stayed there for the rest of my life if I could have kept learning from the guys.

When I finally got clearance to begin the job, the supervisor, Greg, took me to a special room for my orientation.

It was a little bigger than the one where they held me after they arrested me, but it had the same light gray concrete walls and metal table and metal chairs.

Greg said, “They tell me your psych eval was clean. But I won’t let you on the floor until I know you can handle it.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. All they told me was I’d be working on high-tech flight simulators and maybe some special aircraft. It sounded interesting, but not something anyone would have to handle.

The door opened, a woman stepped through, and after her came three little kids.

I thought they were kids. But only for a half a second. Then the light in my brain went on…

Whoa.

They were about three feet tall. Hairless. Skin a pale pinkish-gray. Heads more of an oval shape than round.

Their eyes were gentle and beautiful. That was the first thing I thought. It took me a moment to realize how much larger than were than a human’s. Maybe three times as large, and oval, and lidless. But the way they looked into my eyes, I just loved them right away.

I know that sounds strange for a grown man to say about extraterrestrials, but the bond was immediate. Like bonding with an animal just from the way it looks into your eyes.

You just know. You may be different species, but you are the same. You belong. The trust and the bond are real.

I smiled. I think I even laughed. But with a kind of wild joy that I got to see three such extraordinary beings.

My new supervisor was watching me closely all the time. He seemed relieved at my reaction.

I found out later there had been two other tech specialists before me who washed out the first time they met their new coworkers. Both of them freaked out so mightily, doctors had to come in and give them sedatives.

Then the techs were whisked off the base under all sort of security. I have no idea what happened to them after that.

Because they were risks now to the secret program on the base. They had seen and they couldn’t unsee. They couldn’t be allowed to talk about it, ever. The military has experience dealing with things like that.

But I wasn’t going to be a problem. I was all in, from minute one.

The woman who had escorted the three extraterrestrials into the room introduced them as RJ, LX, and MT.

No kinds of names for friends. I renamed them RayJay, Linus, and Mit.

And finally I found out why I was there.

The three extraterrestrials—ETs, for easier reference—hadn’t been captured, like I read might have happened back in the 1940s when spaceships started getting shot down in places like Roswell, New Mexico.

These three ETs had shown up on Base X voluntarily one day. Just out of the blue. I found out from talking to some of the officers that there have been all sorts of spaceships over the years hovering around military complexes, especially ones with nuclear weapons.

Like they’re monitoring us. Trying to make sure these Neanderthals aren’t blowing up their world like foolish teenagers playing around with gasoline and matches.

But RayJay and Linus and Mit didn’t just buzz the base or disable the missiles, like some other ETs have done at other military installations. Instead, they came straight in one day, flying a disk-shaped craft with a glowing blue dome on top, and they landed on the airstrip right where any gawking personnel could see.

Communication was a challenge. It took a while to find someone suitable to act as interpreter.

It took a week, in fact, before they somehow found Kirsten Simmens, the woman who escorted them into the room the day I first met them.

She was an attractive young woman in her late twenties when I first met her, small, slender, with pale skin and long blonde hair. I don’t know where they found her or how. There must be some kind of database, though, because her skills were perfectly suited to this case.

RayJay and the other two had small slits for mouths, but they didn’t seem to have the mechanism for speech. No vocal cords. Nothing that allowed them to make any noise at all. I never heard them groan or laugh or cry. It would have been like trying to communicate with a fish.

They spoke with their eyes. They latched on with their gaze and you just knew what they were feeling. Sad, scared, frustrated, delighted—I felt many of their emotions over the years.

But Kirsten Simmens could do more than just feel what they felt. She could hear what they wanted to tell her.

It was at a particular frequency, she explained to me when she realized I was ready to learn how to do it myself. Like tuning in to a faint and secret radio station that you could only access if the ETs gave you a special dial.

Not everyone could hear them, even if they wanted to. RayJay and Linus and Mit were in charge. They decided who could hear them and couldn’t.

And then when you did hear them—it made me laugh the first time. Because they were mimics. They talked to you in your own voice.

“Hey, Reggie?”

“Yeah, Reggie?”

That’s what it sounded like. Like me having a conversation with myself in my own head.

Kirsten spent a lot of time with the three ETs and gained their trust. And the fact was, they wanted to be able to talk to someone. They had come to this planet and this particular base on purpose. It was no accident.

But they were new to the planet, obviously, and didn’t know which humans they should trust with their knowledge.

I came along two months after they’d already been there.

And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I became their best friend.

They showed me. They taught me. They confided in me. Not just the mechanics of their spaceship that they intended to give to us humans.

They told me everything I asked. About themselves, about their people, about the planet that they came from, and their galaxy. All of it.

And they taught me how to build a spaceship like theirs. They taught me things maybe no other ET has shared with any other humans.

I learned how to easily create anti-gravity propulsion. How to make a ship invisible. How to pilot one without installing any levers or controls, but only by thinking to it with my mind.

RayJay told me he hadn’t planned on sharing those extra details. He had specific instructions about how much to teach the Earthlings. He and the others were here to help us advance, as others like them had come before—many times over the millennia—but they were supposed to dole out just so much at a time. To keep our more primitive minds from overloading. And also to make sure we were using their technology for good, not to invent new ways of killing ourselves. We already had enough of those.

But RayJay could see that I was different. I could understand as much as he decided to teach me. And my heart is peaceful. I’m not a man of violence.

And RayJay knew that I loved him and Linus and Mit. He knew I would always protect them, I would never betray them, I only wanted what was best for them all the time.

I gave up caring about any of my old life. About anything outside the base. I didn’t need anything but to work and to learn morning until night.

I would take the eleven o’clock bus back to my housing on base every night just so I could shower and sleep for a few hours, then I’d come right back on the first bus at six.

And I’d been living that way, loving every minute of my life, for the past almost seven years. My brain felt like it had grown ten times bigger than it ever was. I had learned so much about the universe and space travel and other life forms, I could write a hundred books on them to start and still have more to say.

But even the best things can’t last. Think of your favorite dog or cat, dying too soon, when you wish they would live with you your whole life.

You still have all that love for them, you would still want them by your side even when you’re an old, old man, but that isn’t how life works. Even extraterrestrial life.

I could see that RayJay wasn’t looking right for a while. His skin was losing the pink tint that always made all three of them look like they were blushing.

He was getting to be a duller and duller gray.

Finally I said, “RayJay, are you dying on me?”

He answered me in my own voice, speaking directly into my head. “Reggie, we have to go soon. Will you help us?”

We were alone in the special hangar where they kept the guys’ ship. Only a few personnel were allowed to come in there.

So we were alone at the moment, just the four of us, and I bawled like a baby. I couldn’t make myself stop.

I hugged RayJay. Then the other two guys came in for the hug, too, and we stood there, just clinging to each other like brothers who were about to be separated.

They didn’t make any noise, but I could hear them inside my mind crying with the same sound I was making. Like hearing myself, and then three echoes of the same sobs. It made it so much worse to know that they were feeling it, too.

But then I got hold of myself. I said of course I’ll help you however I can.

And then RayJay let me in on yet another secret. Of how I could help them escape.

I asked them to wait one more day. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. But I understood that RayJay needed to go back or he wasn’t going to make it.

They told me they knew from the start that they would only stay for seven years. They had prepared their bodies to survive in our atmosphere for that long.

And they knew that I would be with them for almost all of those seven years.

“How did you know?”

“We saw you,” came my own voice in my head. “On our time map.”

They had hinted about their time map a few times before, but I never really understood what they meant.

“Do you mean time travel?” I asked them the first time, but they said it wasn’t exactly that. “Is it a time machine?” I tried. “You see a time on your map and you can go there?”

But still the answer was no.

Now RayJay tried one more time to help me understand. He pressed one of his four pale gray fingers into his chest where a heart would be if he was a human instead of what he was.

Then he drew a line through the space between us, and pressed that same finger to where he knew my heart was.

“Beginning,” said the Reggie voice in my mind, “end. Time to end of time.”

“But you saw it,” I said, trying to grasp what he meant. “Like looking at a map, but not of a place. It was of a time.”

I could feel RayJay smiling with his eyes. And I heard the rest of his explanation, and finally understood.

Before coming to Earth with Linus and Mit, they had looked at a time map to see when to come.

Just as they had consulted other maps to find the best location to bring their gift of technology to teach the humans. And just as other extraterrestrials before them had chosen the best time to bring their own earlier technology to humans living in earlier times.

Why are there suddenly a rash of discoveries and advances in different places around the world, all in the same few years?

Because the leaders of the ETs send out teams. They try to seed our planet with knowledge by sharing information with people they think can understand it. Little by little, bringing us children along. Helping us to do better. Helping us to understand the better and peaceful ways so maybe some day in the future we can join the greater unified community and not just try to shoot everybody who looks and sounds different.

So RayJay and the other two volunteered to be one of the teams. And they knew they had seven years to do as much as they could for as long as their bodies could survive. But which seven years should they use?

They saw me on their time map. Reginald Swan, making my way through a life as best as I could.

Not knowing I would get the job Base X. Not even dreaming I would one day meet RayJay and Linus and Mit.

But they knew. They saw it. Just like astronomers can map out the future paths of the stars.

So they landed when they did, and they waited for someone like Kirsten to come along to explain why they were here and what they intended to do.

And then they waited longer still, just a few more months, for their friend to show up, answering a job offer that didn’t exist before they arrived.

I passed the psych test. I would accept people of all kind. I would accept aliens. I wouldn’t freak out.

To the contrary, the minute I saw those three, it was like I’d come home to a planet I didn’t know I had left.

And then all my lifelong mechanical wizardry finally had a reason to be.

If they had time, I wish they could have shown me how to make a time map of my own. To find out what to do next, now that they were leaving.

But there wasn’t time. I could see that. RayJay had waited as long as he safely could.

Linus and Mit were still looking healthy to my eyes, but I knew they would soon look as gray and sickly as RayJay.

You have to let people go. Even if you don’t want to. And I was ready to do whatever I could to help them.

So they gave me the one more day that I asked for, and they told me as much as they could about whatever else I wanted to know.

Including how to help them escape. It took so little effort. That’s why it worked so well.

They did not travel through the stars to get here to Earth. They didn’t travel light years. They didn’t travel distance.

They traveled time and dimension. Both of them entangled together. They slipped from their time and dimension into ours.

To our human sensibilities, they must have needed a spaceship to do it. And I spent the last seven years picking it apart and reverse-engineering it and learning about anti-gravity and all of its other special properties.

When they never needed the ship at all. And they proved it to me when they left.

They asked me to bring three items from my home. Small metal objects that were easy to conceal.

I plucked out three clean teaspoons from my kitchen drawer their last morning. And even though I was sad, desperately sad to know my friends were leaving, I still had to smile to myself at the absurdity of thinking these spoons were somehow going to transport them to a galaxy so far away.

I knew that whatever they were going to show me would be the last perfect lesson. But I couldn’t even guess how it was all going to work out.

I dressed in my blue coveralls and heavy black work boots. I stuck the three spoons in my coveralls pocket.

I took the six o’clock bus. I didn’t even pause at the commissary for my usual cup of coffee. I was too sad and nervous. I wanted both to delay it and to get it over with.

The three of them were waiting for me in the hangar beside their ship. The security cameras that monitored us at all times would have seen us greet each other and go inside the ship as we did almost every day.

There were no cameras inside the ship. There wasn’t room and there wasn’t a place to mount them. The interior walls were curved and smooth and there was barely space for the three small extraterrestrials and one six-foot human.