Bhulan bolted as soon as the coast was clear. Leona and Ramses hoped that
she would stick around to answer more questions, which they were prepared to
ask gradually, instead of in the form of an interrogation, but she wasn’t
into it. This is why Leona chose not to tell her anything about the seed of
her plan to retrieve Mateo. She is probably on her way to her little
secretive cabal to share information. That’s fine, as long as they don’t go
anywhere near Lebanon. That is where Leona’s plan begins.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Ramses asks. They’re parked
on the far side of Danica Lake, waiting for the sun to go down more.
“The fewer the better,” Leona replies with a shake of her head. “Standard
transportation rules, you can only take two people with you.”
He nods.
“Besides, I’m sure you have to get back to the lab. I know you have a
thousand things on the agenda.”
“Not really, now that Curtis is gone. I have no idea where he’s getting his
temporal energy, or why The Officiant was able to just swoop in and
disappear.”
“Then just rest,” Leona orders affectionately. “It’s been a hard...” Her
first thought is to say that it’s been a hard week, but that doesn’t seem
like enough, so she starts thinking about the whole month, but that’s not
enough either. It’s been difficult since they first got here, but not just
that. There’s only one reasonable way to put this. “...since however long
we’ve known each other.”
He nods again. “Come on, Lys.”
“Be careful,” Alyssa says to Leona before she turns back towards the road.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”
“I don’t blame you for a thing,” Leona tells her honestly.
Once the two of them have gone, Leona climbs back into the Bridgette. She
knocks on the bridge steps. “They’re gone.”
Marie opens the hatch, and crawls out. “I’m kind of surprised that he didn’t
come here to check on his engine, or something.”
Leona shrugs. “The teleporter wasn’t necessary. Mateo is four and a half
billion years in the past, there’s not exactly a sense of urgency.” She
removes the floor plans from her bag, and unrolls them on one of the seats.
They’re crude drawings based on what they were able to gather while they
were down there for a brief time, but not official, and absolutely not to
scale.
“Regular paper; old school,” Marie muses.
“Computers can be hacked. I’ll burn these pages.” She points at the plans as
she’s discussing them. “Okay, the Bridgette reported still having trace
amounts of chlorine in its systems, which most likely means that Mateo and
Alyssa came up in one of the pools. Technically, two of them are big enough
to hold this thing, but I’m guessing they appeared in the Olympic-size one.
That’s right here. If we appear in the same one, Alyssa will probably have
already been sent to the Mariana Trench. Well, the trench won’t exist yet,
but...I don’t know how Danica does it, but the point is that the past
version of our sub will be out of our way. If it is there, we’ll either be
floating right next to it, or we’ll end up over here. It’s smaller, but
still large enough to accommodate this whole thing. ”
“Okay, and where do I want to go?”
“Energy generation chamber. I think they called it The Cave. It’s made of
partially naturally walling, because of how the vibrations work. Ramses
explained this before. A long-ass tube runs from the Constant, all the way
down near the core of the planet, and generates energy from the
gravitational differences between the bottom of the tube and the top. Due to
the magnetic field, if you’re in that room, the artificial intelligence that
runs the facility won’t be able to detect your presence. If you can teleport
there on the sly, and do it immediately upon our arrival in the past, I
believe that the system will just think the temporal energy you use to do it
is just residual energy from that arrival. Does that make sense?”
“You want the time travel to mask my jump to the energy room, and then you
want me to hide in there so the AI can’t see me. Got it.”
“Right.”
“Then what do I do?”
Leona sighs. “Danica Matic is powerful because of how old she is, but back
then, she won’t be that old. She’ll really just be another person, without
access to all that knowledge. So what I want you to do is be your badass
self...eventually.”
“Eventually, like how long?”
Leona removes a box of this reality’s version of meal bars from her bag.
“These will last a normal person a month. Due to Ramses’ upgrades, you
should be able to stretch them out to about a year. So all you have to do is
hide in there somewhere for that long, and then you can come out after their
guard is down.”
“See, that’s my problem,” Marie says. “You talked about how little power
Danica will have back then, but Bhulan is a different story. Plus, we think
Dalton was there...”
“I don’t think Dalton will be there yet,” Leona says. “I think he shows up
later. His is not an important religion, suggesting marginal connection to
the original ones.”
“Okay,” Marie says.
“I can’t promise that we’ll win, or that things will turn out okay. You
might get caught immediately. But I don’t think you’re going to get hurt, or
I wouldn’t send you in. These are not our enemies, they’re just...being
dicks right now.”
“I understand. Let’s do it.”
“Okay.” Leona goes over to the controls, and commands the Bridgette to roll
itself into the lake, and submerge. They start to float around, looking for
signs of temporal energy, or anything of note. They don’t know exactly where
to go, so they’re trying everything. Whatever portal first sent Mateo and
Alyssa into the past was probably not placed there on purpose, making it a
bug of sorts. It’s not just a bug, but something called a heisenbug, which
is one that is unreliable to reproduce. The conditions that led to it
happening the first time may no longer be present, or maybe it was just a
one time thing, and the portal has since closed. It would require tons of
temporal energy, and that may be all there was left.
A few hours later, they have scoured the whole bottom of the lake, and
investigated every nook and cranny. Nothing has happened. No portals, no
spikes in temporal energy. They don’t want to give up, so they decide to try
again from the beginning. Leona commands the Bridgette to surface, and
that’s when everything changes. They’re no longer in the lake, but the
middle of outer space.
“Should I teleport now?” Marie asks as they’re staring at the stars below
them.
“No, definitely not.”
No comments :
Post a Comment