They told Xerian everything—well, not everything—about who they were. They
just told him enough for him to understand why they were going to disappear
at the end of the day, and not return for another original Earthan year.
They also told him about the reframe engine, which is significantly slower
than the standard light year engine that these people were used to, but also
not a useless waste of hydrogen. They explained as little about the cuffs as
they could to get by, but after some probing questions, Xerian learned that
their pattern wasn’t technically necessary. They ought to be able to switch
it off whenever they pleased, and presumably forever. That made the team
uncomfortable. They had to come to terms with the fact that everyone they
met would always find it strange that they would elect to live this
lifestyle. The way they looked at it, though, asking them to suppress the
pattern would be exactly the same as asking a normal person to do it in
reverse. This was how they perceived time, and even the newbies were used to
it by now. It wasn’t out of the question, but perhaps it ought to be. Ramses
figured he could modify the cuffs physically to remove the power/pattern
suppression function. That would still leave them with the other useful
features, like associated teleportation, and a handy computer they always
had on them. Unfortunately, it was more complicated than it sounded. Olimpia
would always need her time illness to be suppressed.
Xerian was patient, so he could stand to wait for the team to spend the rest
of the day recovering from their ordeal, and then not be able to return to
work for a year. The Denseterium was still decades away from realizing their
dream of building a light year engine capable of traversing a whole galaxy
across the observable universe in three thousand years or less.
Theoretically, they could do it now, and in fact could have always done it.
Their goal was to collect every star in the Milky Way, but they didn’t
actually need to in order to demonstrate their might. Why, the whole reason
they were at war with Andromeda was because they were so technologically
advanced already. The Hyperdense galaxy was simultaneously already complete,
and would never be complete. They could use it now, or continue to add at
will They too were patient, because they had an objective in mind,
and didn’t see Xerian as enough of a threat to alter those plans. Hell, they
could have light year engined every star into place almost immediately, but
they were using regular Class E stellar engines, because they required less
energy.
“Is that true?” Ramses asked. “Why couldn’t they just use a lot of little
light year engines to consolidate the stars first? Sure, this uses a lot of
energy all at once, but the stellar engines lose a lot of mass for thrust. I
don’t think they’re saving themselves anything.”
“They are,” Xerian contended. “The stellar material expelled as thrust is
collected and recycled afterwards. A light year engine disperses the
material that it leaves behind so much that it’s pretty much actually
wasted.”
“Who told you that?” Leona asked.
“Uhh, I dunno, that’s just the science.”
“I’m not convinced that it is,” Ramses disagreed. “A light year engine is
incredibly efficient. Otherwise, our colleagues back home wouldn’t bother
using it.”
“They’re just using it for a ship, though, right?” Xerian reminded him.
“Entire star systems are different. They’re open, making it harder to
contain waste.”
“I guess,” Ramses said, “but I can’t imagine the Shkadov thrusters are any
less wasteful. I mean, it takes energy to collect that too. I would need to
see the math.”
“A what thruster?” Xerian asked.
“That’s what we call them where we’re from.” What the team chose not to
explain was that they were from a different reality. They instead said that
they came to this part of the universe from a distant galaxy which Leona
called 3C 295. It was five billion light years away, which would take a
light year engine a century and a half to cross. This fabrication had the
added benefit of justifying their fondness for their temporal pattern. For
them, the fictional trip only took five months. They didn’t explain what
happened to their capital ship after arriving, or who else came with them.
Xerian nodded in understanding.
They could sense his eagerness to finish breakfast, and get started. Ramses
wiped his mouth with his napkin, and took out the reset button. “If
everyone’s ready...”
“Hold on.” Leona tapped on her Cassidy cuff, and suddenly everyone else’s
cuff fell off of their respective wrists. “Okay, now we’re ready.”
“Why did you just do that?” Mateo questioned.
“Oh, did we not tell you?” Leona asked. She looked around the room. No one
knew what she was talking about, except apparently Xerian. “New plan. Once
Ramses reconstitutes the AOC inside the matrioshka detachment, I will
associate teleport there alone. I will then make my way to a different part
of the detachment, drop one of the extra cuffs there, and hopefully get out
in time, before Xerian integrates one of the other cuffs with the Suadona,
using it to associate teleport his entire ship to that new location,
basically blowing up that section of the detachment.”
No one responded for a moment. “What!” Mateo questioned.
“We’re turning the cruiseliner into a bomb,” Leona reiterated. “At that
point, he’ll use whatever tactic he needs to wrest control of the detachment
as a whole.”
“And what exactly are we doing during this time?” Olimpia asked.
“You’ll be safe on a lifeboat,” Leona answered. “This will all be done
remotely. Only one of us needs to actually transport inside the matrioshka
brain to physically move the extra cuff, so it can be a beacon for the
bomb.”
They just stared at her.
“This makes the most sense,” Leona defended. “Why would we all go there?
That’s stupid and pointless. Xerian has already told me the best place to
plant the cuff beacon. It will do a significant amount of damage to cause
panic and chaos, but not enough to blow the whole thing up, which would
defeat the whole purpose of the mission to take over.”
“Are people going to die?” Mateo asked her.
“Maybe. I won’t be able to evacuate people from that section, because then
they’ll know something’s about to happen.”
“You forget, love,” he said as he was replacing his cuff. “I’m still the one
in charge here.” She may have had the ability to remove their cuffs without
their permission, but his remained primary. This was going to have to happen
fast. He tapped on the screen, dropping Leona’s cuff too. He then magnetized
all of the cuffs into his lap. He stole Ramses’ reset button, and pressed it
as he was literally running away with all of the devices. As he ran down the
corridors, he kept his eye on the progress bar that illustrated how much of
the AOC had been restored on the matrioshka detachment.
Ramses was upon him before the bar had reached a hundred percent. “Wait! I’m
all right with you being the one to do this in Leona’s stead, but...we need
one of those cuffs. The matrioshka brain has ways of blocking anyone from
teleporting into their borders without authorization, but our technology is
incompatible with theirs. They don’t know how to block the signal. So just
give me one of them, and you can go off and execute the plan.”
“New new plan,” Mateo said cryptically. “Nobody’s teleporting
anywhere...except for me, I guess. But nobody’s killing anybody, period.
There’s a peaceful way to do this, and I’m gonna find it. I’ll let you know
where I am when it’s time.”
“What if you get caught before you can send us your location?” Ramses asked.
“If I get caught, and I’m not able to send a message, then it’s not time.
Pretty simple.” Ramses’ reset device beeped. One hundred percent. They had
their ship back.
“Wait!”
“Tell my wife, were I you.” Mateo locked onto the signal of one of the
Cassidy cuffs that were being stored on the AOC, and transported himself
right to it.
He looked around carefully, worried that it didn’t work, and he wasn’t where
he expected to be. Everything appeared to be in working order, though, with
the ship powered down, currently operating on dormant lighting. He was
standing in engineering, which was a section he didn’t spend a lot of time
in, since he didn’t know how anything worked down here. Even so, he knew
where the cuffs were stored. He unlocked the secret safe, and counted. They
were all here and accounted for; the four he brought with him, the one on
his wrist, and the five extras. Leona and Xerian wanted to destroy one of
these for the sake of the mission, but as far as they could tell, these here
were the only ten such devices ever created, except for the one in Kestral’s
possession. Half of them were designed by an unknown party—likely some
version of Holly Blue—while the rest Ramses made after reverse engineering
one. So he could probably make more, but it was still best to treasure them.
Besides, there had to be a diplomatic solution to this. Mateo was no
diplomat himself, so he—
“Hello?”
He jumped up, startled. This wasn’t super surprising, though, was it? A
mysterious baby ship that disappeared five years ago suddenly reappearing
right where it was before? That was bound to raise some eyebrows.
Winging it had gotten him this far so far, so he might as well try to ride
that wave until it crashed down upon him. He quietly spun the safe back into
the recess. Then he echoed the question, “hello?”
“Mateo?” Wait, was that Angela?
He ran through the numbers again. He definitely just left nine cuffs in that
safe, and he was still wearing the primary. How had Angela come with him?
“Angie?”
“Report!” she whispered back loudly.
“Uhh...report!”
“I asked you first!”
“I asked you second!”
She growled. Giving up, she climbed down the steps. “I came back in because
I forgot to grab my multitool. As I was heading back for the upper level,
the dormant lights turned on, but that seemed normal, and the hangar bay had
plenty of lighting. And I could hear a flurry of activity outside. When I
made it back up to the airlock, and looked outside, it was still lit up, and
still noisy. Until it wasn’t. The lights all switched off at once, and the
bay was completely empty. It felt just like it does when we jump to the
future. I figured it was best not to open the outer door.”
“What is the date, according to the main sequence timeline, at least?”
She sighed. “March 18, 2376.”
Mateo checked his cuff. That wasn’t what it showed, and it should have
adjusted accordingly if he had jumped back in time either way. “You jumped
five years.”
“It felt like a blip.”
There wasn’t much seating in engineering, because it wasn’t necessary. There
was one chair at an interface terminal, and a bench that was a tight fit for
two. He sat down on one end, and tapped his hand on the other. She squeezed
in next to him, and he placed his arm around her shoulders. “You’re a
duplicate. You see, Ramses installed something that he didn’t tell us about.
It was a reset button. Basically, he made a copy of the AOC, but sort of
left it in the aether, so that if the real one was ever destroyed, we could
get it back. I think the temporal battery has been drained.”
“The AOC was destroyed?” Angela guessed.
He nodded. “Huge antimatter-matter annihilation. Took out part of a city
hundreds of kilometers away. Don’t worry, everyone who lived there was
either already dead, or evacuated.”
“When does this happen?”
“It doesn’t matter, we can’t undo it. All we wanted was our ship back. I
don’t know what went wrong exactly. I imagine the backup process had already
begun when you slipped back in to retrieve your tool, and you were backed up
as well. Way he tells it, that should not have occurred.”
“So I died?”
“Oh no,” Mateo assured her. “That’s what I mean, you’re a duplicate. The
other Angela is safely on another ship, as is everyone else. It could be
thousands of light years away, but I haven’t calculated our coordinates yet.
I came here to retrieve the copy of our ship without putting the team at
risk, and maybe—I dunno—end a war or two?”
“I see. This could get awkward.”
“Yeah.”
“No, you don’t understand. Olimpia...”
“We know.”
“Oh.”
“Angela, we’re gonna figure this out. You have every right to be in this
timeline, and the next. It’ll be fine. In fact, I could certainly use your
help. You used to be a counselor, after all. I mean, that is, if you want
to. There’s a reason I tried to keep the other Angela out of it in the first
place.”
“Why don’t you call me Marie, to distinguish us. And of course I’ll help
you. Tell me everything you’ve learned in the last five days.”
No comments :
Post a Comment