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Brooke nodded, understanding at least the facts of the story, but not
necessarily the subtext. “So where is the Elizabeth Warren now?” she asked.
Mirage and Lilac were back where they belonged in the timeline. The latter
was currently having a discussion with her alternate self, trying to figure
out how they would raise Aristotle and Niobe. That was between the two of
them, and the crew of the Iman Vellani had no say in it. Their trip back
here was uneventful, albeit long and convoluted. They stole the ship from
where Mirage knew it would be sitting unattended, docked at the top end of
the space elevator leading two multiple points on Earth, including Panama.
After she placed Lilac in stasis to keep her alive, she plotted a course to
Alpha Centauri B. During the eleven-year journey, Mirage regrew her skin,
retrofitted their ship with some upgrades, and then placed herself in stasis
too, so she wouldn’t be bored the rest of the way. Once they were at their
destination, they still had to wait another thirty some-odd years before it
was time to literally jump ship.
Mirage’s past self sent a nanofactory to Toliman in the year 2225, just in
case they ever needed to make a quick getaway from the planet of Bungula.
They did end up needing to do that, though it wasn’t as urgent as she was
originally worried it would be. This was where the Iman Vellani was
originally built. The crew wouldn’t board it for another two decades. Until
then, it sat dormant in its asteroid, protected from the ill effects of the
Toliman Nulls that will essentially freeze any sentient entity that attempts
to draw near. To protect themselves from that, Future!Mirage placed the
Warren in an extremely high orbit from the host star. This kept them at a
safe distance at all times until they were ready to head for the asteroid,
and enter the Vellani.
“I left it in its orbit to automatically warn anyone else off of trying to
get to the solar system. Just because the star was annihilated, doesn’t mean
that the Toliman Nulls aren’t still a thing there.”
“Yeah, about that matter-antimatter annihilation,” Sharice began, “are we
ever going to do anything about it? Aren’t people going to be surprised that
a star in the neighborhood suddenly just disappeared one day?”
“That is the elephant that lives in the room, isn’t it?” Mirage posed.
“It’s a problem for tomorrow,” Brooke decided.
“You mean yesterday,” Belahkay mused.
“Anyway,” Brooke went on, “you two have just been hiding on this ship the
whole time? You never came out? You never tried to change anything?”
“Too risky,” Mirage said. “The timeline is complicated enough as it is.”
“No, you’re right,” Brooke agreed. “But perhaps you...made preparations that
could help us now that you’ve closed your own loop?”
“Yes,” Mirage said. “I finally understand who reprogrammed the Vellani. It
was me. I just hadn’t gone back to the past to do it yet.” She swiped a
specific pattern on the wall next to her, which released a hidden
compartment. Inside was a secret quantum terminal. She pressed a few
buttons, causing a crystal to pop out of the storage drive. She took it out,
and held it up. This should contain proof that Verdemus was completely
destroyed.”
Belahkay looked down through the viewport on the floor. “No, it’s still
there.”
Mirage smiled. “It ought to be.” She shook the crystal a little. “If my plan
worked, this should have footage of Toliman b being destroyed instead, and
with a little tweaking of the metadata, we can use it to make the Exins
believe that it was Verdemus. We’ll even burst in there, and scream at them
for making us do that when there is no such thing as a hypercubic crystal
lattice.
“You don’t think they’ll come check?” a skeptical Brooke asked.
“Radiation,” Sharice offered. “We’ll say that this whole region of space has
been irradiated. You can’t exactly tear a planet apart with a giant space
knife.”
“Don’t their ships have shielding, same as ours?”
“No, I once got a quick look at their hull coding. They’re gamma rated for
zero-point-five-l. They don’t have an e-rating. I doubt they’ve even heard
of superenergetic particles. All we have to do is claim that the process we
used necessarily emits exotic particles, and they’ll stay away.”
“How could they have not heard of SEPs?” Mirage questioned. “They have time
travel, don’t they? That’s why come they’ve been a civilization for
thousands of years, even though they were founded only a few decades ago.”
“I think that technology was lost,” Sharice argued, “perhaps intentionally.
The Exins we met could be just as oppressed as the rest of the empire.”
“We’re banking a lot on that idea we brought up a while back about how
disorganized they are,” Brooke warned. “We may be wholly misinterpreting
that. They could have e-rated shielding, but we’ve just not seen it. Shari,
you didn’t get a look at the hull coding for even every vessel in the
fleet.”
“I’m confident on this,” Sharice insisted. “They won’t go near it,
especially if we sell the lie. We know that there is no hypercubic crystal
lattice in the core of this planet. How could we know that if we didn’t do
as they asked?”
Mirage and Brooke both shook their heads, unsure if this was all worth the
risk. The bad guys wanted the Verdemusians dead, whether by the crew’s
hands, or someone else’s. They could have a backup team lying in wait. “What
if the crystal lattice does exist? What if Spirit is wrong about that?”
“I’m not.” Spirit was leaning against the doorway. “But if you feel more
comfortable, why don’t you test it? See for yourself if it’s there.”
“We can’t destroy a whole world on the off-chance,” Sharice contended. “That
would defeat the purpose.”
“It doesn’t have to be permanent,” Spirit reasoned. “Tear it apart, and then
go back in time to stop yourself from doing it. All the humans will be up in
space, just in case something goes wrong, but you might as well check for
yourself, right?”
“Are you suggesting we used the homestone to reverse it?” Mirage asked her.
“No, you don’t just have a rewinder on this thing? It has everything else.”
“We’re less time travelers, and more associated with time travelers,” Mirage
explained. “I mean, we’ve all broken the conventional laws of physics, of
course, but...no, I didn’t engineer a time rewinder on the Iman Vellani.”
“Yes, you did.” Someone else was there, standing against the other doorway.
It was Mirage. It was some other version of Mirage.”
Present!Mirage sighed, more annoyed than shocked. “What the hell?”
Future!Mirage glided over to the opposite wall, and swiped a pattern on it
to reveal a secret control terminal. “This is preprogrammed to reverse time
by one year, but you can adjust it as necessary. You still need to build the
planet-destroying machine, but I’m sure you already have an idea or two
about that.”
“Yeah, I’ve never been worried about that,” Present!Mirage confirmed. “It’s
just a simple transdimensional gravity beam. I just don’t know about this. I
don’t like fudging with time, or gravity. What’s to stop us from going back,
and avoiding all of this?”
“If you weren’t here,” Spirit began, “you would not have been able to save
my friend, Tinaya’s life.”
“Or mine,” Lilac said, also coming into the room. “And who knows what would
have happened to the children? You can’t undo anything.”
“Except for destroying the planet,” Present!Mirage countered.
“Except for that,” Future!Mirage agreed. Without another word, she gradually
faded away until she was completely gone.
“I think you just erased her from the future,” Belahkay guessed.
“Whatever,” Mirage said. “It’s not up to her anyway. We vote. Everyone
votes, including Tinaya. We’ll stick her mind into the virtual construct,
and get an answer.”
“Everyone?” Lilac pressed.
“Yes,” Mirage replied, “including your alternate self.”
“I don’t have an alternate self,” Lilac revealed. “We are one now.”
“How did you manage that?” Brooke asked.
“I don’t know. It just happened.”
Mirage smirked. She knew how it was done.
“No, I’m talking about the prisoner, Ilias Tamm,” Lilac clarified.
“Prisoners have rights,” Brooke said adamantly. “This is his planet too, and
he has the right to have a say in what’s done with it. We’ll explain the
stakes to him, as well as to the children. I agree, everyone votes, and it
must be unanimous.”
A year later, Verdemus was torn apart by transdimensional artificial
gravity, which supposedly released exotic particles in the region that
rendered a radius of fifty light years too dangerous for normal ships to
survive. Exotic particles were actually just very, very, very energetic
particles that were extremely difficult to shield against. They were capable
of passing through an entire planet, kind of like neutrinos, but destructive
to baryonic matter. They aided in time travel tech so the only way to shield
against them was by manipulating spacetime, essentially forcing them to pass
along the shielding on a new vector, rather than through it, and then
letting them go once they were on the other side. They were rare, and the
crew didn’t think that the Exins understood them enough to have what was
called an e-rating, so it was safe to make this claim.
Only the crew plus Spirit Bridger was on board the Iman Vellani Proper. The
rest were on the Vellani Ambassador, which meant that they did not go back
in time. Once the timeline was reset, they had no recollection of the past
year, because they had never experienced it. They knew that it had happened,
but now they were able to move on with their lives from here, safe on
Verdemus, protected by a fake bubble of exotic radiation. Belahkay and
Spirit got to know each other for the course of that undone year, and both
could remember the relationship that was kindled by it. They wanted to see
where it was going, so he left the ship and stayed behind on Verdemus.
Mirage gave them and the rest of the Verdemusians a shuttle that could be
used for interplanetary travel, or very slow interstellar travel, if they
ever needed to evacuate. It could not reach fractional speeds, and
definitely didn’t have a reframe engine, so their options were limited. But
at least they weren’t singular, which was what they were facing without the
crew’s arrival and intervention.
Brooke and Sharice took the ship off into the black, and quite deliberately
told no one where they were going. They had to do this, because the Vellani
needed to stay off the radar for the foreseeable future. Its discovery would
ruin the lie that Mirage was about to tell Ex-10 regarding the fate of
Verdemus, the Verdemusians, the ship, and her crew. At the rendezvous point,
she teleported over from the Vellani Ambassador, and just started to wail on
him for killing her crew. It took nearly twenty faceless stormtroopers with
chains to get her off of him. She was pulling her punches, though. She
didn’t want to kill him, she just wanted to sell the rage that she was
supposedly experiencing due to what happened. They stuck her in hock while
they healed their leader, and let her stew a bit.
A few days later, he came to visit her, as calm as ever, and apparently not
vengeful from her attack. “Start at the beginning. What happened?”
Mirage prepared herself to solidify the cover-up. “We did what you asked. We
went to the planet in question. There were people on it, but not too many,
so we pulled them up to our ship, and got back to work. They protested, but
we were there to do a job, so we ignored them. I built a machine that uses
transdimensional energy to manipulate gravity, which ripped the planet
apart, and do you know what I found there?”
“Nothing?”
“Oh, so you know. There’s no such thing as hypercubic crystal lattice.”
“No. We just wanted you to destroy the world. It is of utmost importance
that the people you found living there did not multiply. They are our sworn
enemies, and they were in a position of great strategic advantage. They were
too close to the new antistar, and we couldn’t have that. It’s fine that you
saved the ones who were already there, though. We don’t have any strong
feelings about them as individuals.”
“Oh, I didn’t save them, you asshole. Have you ever heard of exotic
particles?”
“Yes. But I admittedly don’t know what they are.”
“I don’t either, but they’re deadly. I was in charge of supplying the power,
so I was far enough away, and naturally shielded, when we turned on the
machine, but my crew was not so lucky. They were bombarded with highly
energetic particle radiation, and killed. They didn’t die right away. No, it
took time, but all of their cells were split, their DNA unraveled, and their
inorganic parts degraded extremely rapidly. They may have been able to
transfer their consciousnesses to new substrates, but those would have been
destroyed too. They insisted that I escape to get my revenge before too much
of the radiation could get to me on the other side of the host star that we
were using as a power source. You let me out of here, and that is exactly
what I will do. Or you could come in here, I’m not picky.” She was doing a
pretty good job in this role. It didn’t hurt that if any of this were true,
she probably would actually react this way.
Ex-10 smiled, almost kindly, likely because he felt that he was in a
position of safety and power. “Well, then I suppose I will have to never let
you out, except to transfer you to our penal colony.”
Mirage suspected that this might happen, which was why she programmed the
Vellani Ambassador to turn invisible and escape under certain conditions,
such as her absence for a week. “I will get out eventually, even if it takes
me a hundred years. I’m gonna live forever.”
“And I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ll be dead by then. I decidedly won’t
live forever, so I’m not worried.” He lifted his radio. “This is Ex-10. Plot
a course to Ex-666. Warn them too, so they have time to make arrangements
for a special new prisoner.”
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