The wait is almost over. Teleportal: Damage Control will soon be available on Amazon. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the launch announcement will be on the website (https://bit.ly/2DOLjea) next week. Look for it.
In the meantime, here’s a little bit of the first chapter to whet your appetite:
I’m Samantha Pederson, an analyst for the government at the Technology Reconnaissance Agency, where I’ve worked since 2014. We analyze published discoveries, theories, inventions, and the like for possible threats to our national security. I was present for our first contact with another universe. I wish the rest had been that easy.
This whole mess started when my boss, Dr. Richard Frost, found out through a highly suspect internet post that Dr. Melissa Kim, Greg Masterson, and Troy Santori had possibly developed a functioning teleportal in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Considering that teleportals would allow instantaneous transportation to any place, they would have a devastating effect on the transportation industry all the way down to oil refineries and everything that supported them. They would also do away with national borders.
Since both effects would be viewed with grave concern by the government, Dr. Frost called an emergency meeting of our section to decide how to determine if the post was valid and, if so, what to do about it. I must have opened my mouth one too many times because he assigned me to head up a team to learn about the development, but he might have chosen me because of my combined experience as an officer in Marine Corp intelligence and in the agency.
Right away I discovered my team and I were going to be tested to our limit. Our charter was threefold: to confirm the development of teleportal technology, prevent the device from falling into the wrong hands, and keep the developers out of trouble. Unfortunately they were already in trouble before we landed in Phoenix, and it got worse after we arrived.
We nicknamed Melissa—Dr. Kim—, Troy, and Greg the “Wormhole Trio” because they had used what they called wormhole technology to develop the teleportal. Our original plan had been for my team to stay in the background, but we were all green at surveillance operations. The Trio almost immediately found out we were watching them, and they literally headed for the hills—specifically, the Mogollon Rim. The upshot was that Troy, Greg, and Greg’s family were taken hostage by Russian mobsters who had been hired to stop American development of the device and erase any trace of it. By working with other federal agents, state police, and Melissa, who had avoided being captured, we were able to free the hostages but not without hair raising complications, including the first use of teleportals with live subjects.
Once the dust settled, the Trio and Greg’s family became guests of the US government at a safe house in western Colorado, so they could continue teleportal development in safety—and so the government could keep an eye on them. Since I was one of the few people outside the Trio who had some idea of how teleportals functioned, my work partner, Jack Kirton, and I were called away from our duties in DC and assigned to work with the Trio at the safe house. I suspect it was Dr. Frost’s way of keeping the NSA from bundling them up and taking them somewhere they’d never be heard from again. It didn’t hurt my feelings any. During our surveillance of the Trio, I had met and fallen in love with Troy. (https://bit.ly/2TqhplV)