Over a half century into Phase Two of the project, Ex-10 messaged the crew
of the Iman Vellani with the additional plans for the antistar containment
rings. When Mirage asked him why the plans were changed, he told her that
they weren’t. He just chose not to divulge everything all at once. She asked
whether there was anything else that he wasn’t telling them yet, but he
refused to respond. What a dick. Hopefully, any further changes wouldn’t
disrupt their progress, or force them to alter course. Fortunately, they had
not yet begun Phase Three, which involved actually building the structures
using the materials that they were procuring from the nearby star systems.
Even if they had, it would have probably been okay. The new plans called for
an extra layer of material on the inside of the rings.
“Hypercubic crystal lattice?” Belahkay asked. “Forgive me for my ignorance,
but what the hell is that?”
“No,” Mirage assured him, “you’re not the only ignorant one. I’ve never
heard of it either. I know what a hypercube is, and I know what a crystal
lattice is, but a hypercubic crystal lattice? Sharice, what does it say?”
“It’s a special material. Incredibly rare. They’ve only found it in two
planets.”
“In two planets?” Brooke echoed.
“It’s evidently only located deep in the core,” Sharice replied. “It doesn’t
form naturally anywhere else. We’ll have to rip the whole thing apart to get
to it.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard. What exactly is it?”
“It doesn’t say,” Sharice explained, “but if it’s what it sounds like, my
guess is that it manipulates time in some way? Maybe it protects it from
future or past tampering? Damn, I don’t know. There’s barely anything in
this document.”
“Well, how far away is the nearest world that has this stuff?”
“Uhh, 707 light years,” Sharice answered.
“It will take us exactly one year to get there with the reframe engine. How
convenient. Belahkay, how are the automators?”
It was his job to manage all of the machines that were spread throughout
this sector of the galaxy. He synthesized error reports, and coordinated
arrangements to get the project back on track. “It’s been four months since
the last issue, and that one wasn’t that big of a deal, we just lost a chunk
of one planet. It wouldn’t have slowed down the project.”
“You can keep an eye on the progress on the ride. We’ll all go to this
magical fourth-dimensional planet, and see what we see.”
A year later, the Vellani was in orbit over the planet, which they
discovered to be inhabited. Ubiquitous plant life was visible with the naked
eye. There were billions of bodies of water, and evidence of seasonal
shifts. The surface gravity was decently suitable for human life. Oh yeah,
and there was human life there. A small settlement was found, and a closer
look proved that people were currently living there. Something had happened
somewhat recently, though. Most of the buildings had been severely damaged
in an explosion. A few of the structures, which had been built farther from
the apparent epicenter, managed to stay whole, including a perimeter fence.
There was also one more thing that they saw when they zoomed in.
“It’s a time mirror,” Mirage noted.
“People are coming out of it, one by one,” Belahkay noticed.
“They’re armed,” Brooke pointed out. “They’re either about to attack the
settlement, or protect it from someone else’s attack.”
“Can they see us? Do they think that we’re a threat?” Sharice asked,
worried.
“I see no sign of space observation technology. We’re shielded by the
daylight.”
Belahkay pointed at the screen. “Oh, look at that.”
A figure was running out of the ruins of the bombed out settlement. It ran
straight through the gate of the fence, and towards the mirror. Just before
it could make it through, the mirror exploded. “Whoa!” they all shouted in
unison. The explosion sent everyone flying in all directions, no one farther
from it than the person who had been running towards it. They were thrown
all the way across the field, over the fence, across the interior field, and
then back into the ruins of the settlement. There was no way that person
survived that.
“Oh my God, what did we just witness?” Sharice asked, horrified.
Determined, Mirage stepped over to the corner, opened a secret compartment,
and revealed a cache of weapons.
“Those have been here the whole time?” Brooke scolded.
“Yes, mom. Here’s yours.” She tried to hand her one of the rifles.
“No. Never again.”
Mirage tried to hand it to Sharice, who also refused, as did Belahkay. She
growled. “If you don’t arm up, you’re not going down to the surface.”
“Stop us,” Brooke goaded. Then she disappeared.
Sharice looked at Mirage awkwardly, and then followed her mother. Belahkay
stepped over and reached into the cache. He took out a handgun, and hid it
inside his vest. “I got your back.”
They teleported down together, meeting the other two in the crowd of bodies
near where the mirror once stood. They fanned out, and approached a body
each. “Ex-088-GL0821,” Mirage called out.
“Ex-088-GL0403,” Sharice returned.
“Where I’m from,” Belahkay said, “this patch would be for the wearer’s
name.”
“Yeah. I think it’s the same for them. These people belong to the Exin
Empire, almost surely some kind of military force.”
“Ex-10 must be pretty important if he’s as low a number as he is, and these
guys are named in nine figures,” Sharice decided.
“I imagine it’s far more complicated than just one through a billion,”
Brooke guessed.
“I don’t have your fancy sensors. Are they all dead?” Belahkay asked.
“Yeah, they are,” Mirage confirmed. “No human lifesigns. So unless one of
them is an alien, we should go into the ruins, and see if anyone there is
still alive.”
They teleported away to find four people. The woman from the mirror
explosion was lying on her back on the ground, just as they saw her. They
thought that she had landed on the other side of a statue, but it was gone,
and another woman was lying face down on top of her. She was completely
naked. They were both breathing, but cut up from the glass that they shared,
embedded in their skin. Two children were huddled together nearby.
“Sharice, take the wounded up to the infirmary, and place them each in a
medical pod. Then you can come back. I’ll keep an eye on them from here.”
Of all of them, Brooke was the softest. She cautiously went over to the
children. “Hey. It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you. Are these your
parents?”
The kids were six, maybe seven years old, but they didn’t seem too terribly
scared. The boy shook his head. He gently elbowed the girl in the arm. She
pulled something out of her pocket, and held it up. It was a rock.
“You want me to have this?” Brooke asked. She carefully stepped forward, and
took it from the girl.
“My mom’s in there,” the boy said.
Brooke moved it around in her hand, and then reached back to hand it to
Mirage.
“It’s a homestone.” Mirage bent over, and looked the boy in the eyes. “Did
you use this to get here, or were you going to use it to go somewhere else?”
“She used it to get here,” the boy explained. He took a rock out of his own
pocket. “I used this one. I came alone. She came with my mom.”
“Don’t mix them up,” Mirage advised. “Homestones are identical. We’re not
even sure that it’s not just the same stone at different points in
spacetime. If one of them contains his mom, we have to work with the right
one.”
“It could contain his mom?” Brooke questioned. “How’s that?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never heard of it, but I believe him. If he says that
the girl and her mother came together, then something must have happened to
the mom.”
“She’s not her mother,” the boy corrected. “She’s my mother, but we’re not
siblings. It’s just that we both first traveled through time at the same
time.”
“I see,” Mirage said. “You sound older than you look.”
“It’s been several years for me,” the boy—or rather, the young
man—explained. “She’s older than she looks too, but even when she was older,
she looked young.
Mirage nodded, and turned to the other three. “The homestone takes you back
to where you were when you first experienced nonlinear time. It reyoungifies
you to the age that you were, but it doesn’t undo history. It potentially
gives you a second chance at life, but whatever originally happened after
that moment still took place in the timeline.” She sighed, and looked over
the girl’s stone. “You can take passengers with you, but it’s not the safest
way to travel. Again, I’ve never heard of someone getting stuck, but I can’t
rule it out.” She turned back to the young man. “Can I take this to test
it?”
He nodded.
“What are your names?” Brooke asked.
“I’m Aristotle. This is Niobe Schur.”
Niobe cupped her hands over Aristotle’s ear.
“She can talk,” he told the crew. “She just doesn’t like to meet new people.
When she gets to know you, she’ll warm up to you.”
“Well, what did she say?” Belahkay asked him.
“She doesn’t go by a name anymore. She goes by a number. I’m trying to fix
that.”
“So this planet is in the Exin Empire,” Mirage reasoned.
Aristotle’s eyes narrowed. “No. This belongs to the Extremusians. The Exins
are just the ones who kidnapped us, and forced us to live in the Goldilocks
Corridor.”
“My mistake,” Mirage said apologetically.
“The women you took up to your ship,” Aristotle went on. “One of them is
First Chair Tinaya Leithe. She’s very important. I don’t know who the naked
one is.”
“Aristotle! Niobe!” A third adult woman was running towards them from a path
that went through the forest behind the settlement. “Oh my God!”
The crew stepped back instinctually to make themselves look less like a
threat.
The woman hugged the children, and frowned at the crew, trying to stop
crying. “I saw the patches. You’re Oaksent’s people.”
Mirage shook her head. “We’re not part of them. Well, to be fair, we work
for them, but we had no idea they came here. We were not told that this was
a populated planet. They asked us to procure a rare component for something
we’re building for them due to a debt that must be paid.”
“Another weapon of theirs, no doubt,” the woman spit.
Mirage sighed. “It’s possible. It’s possible in the way that a car can be
used as a weapon if the driver chooses that.”
“We mean you no harm,” Brooke added. “Your friends are healing on our ship.”
The woman wiped tears from her eyes, and looked at the young man. “I thought
that they had taken you. I couldn’t find you. No more hide-and-seek. It’s
too dangerous.”
“We were taken, mom,” Aristotle said to her sadly. “The Captain rescued us,
but when she tried to take us back through the mirror, we didn’t end up on
the Extremus.” He paused. “We’re from the future. He handed her his
homestone.”
“You’re his mother?” Mirage asked.
“She’s my Past!Mother,” Aristotle explained. “My Future!Mother, from the
other timeline, she is indeed in that stone. I can feel her.”
The mother stood up straight, and composed herself. “My name is Lilac. Can
you get my alternate self out of there?”
“I can try,” Mirage answered. “ I promise nothing, but I have cloning tech
in the Vellani. Your DNA would do us a lot of good in that department if
your alt has lost her original substrate.”
Lilac pulled her sleeves up. “Take however much blood you need.”
They all teleported up to the ship in orbit. While Belahkay monitored the
other women’s progress in the medical pods, Mirage started to take readings
from the homestone. They needed to find out if a consciousness really was
trapped in there, and whether it was intact. Sharice took her own mother
aside for a private conversation. “It’s clear to me that we can’t take this
hypercubic lattice stuff out of the core of this world. The only way to
extract it is to destroy the whole thing.”
“I know,” Brooke agreed. “I just accessed the updated records. The Extremus
launched from Gatewood, and is moving at maximum reframe. It’s literally
impossible for us to ever catch up to it. I think they had a time mirror on
board, and were using that to travel back and forth through a portal. If
these people don’t want to leave with us, they’ll have to stay here. This is
their world, we have no right to it. More to the point, the Exins don’t have
any right.”
“What do we do?”
“We protect them, at all costs. If Mirage’s explanation of how the
homestones work is right, those military guys connected to this mirror from
a different point in time. That’s probably what blew it up; they got the
wires crossed. If we can stop them from ever attempting to override the
original connection—”
“We can prevent the attack on the settlement,” Sharice guessed.
“That woman,” Brooke began, “the...First Chair. She knows something. She was
running for that mirror for a reason. We need to talk to her when she wakes
up.”
“She’s awake,” Belahkay announced.
