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The Rock diplomatic discussions were over. Of course, the various
representatives for the five former realities currently living side-by-side
in the Sixth Key were going to stay in contact with each other, and
diplomacy was never over. Even if they managed to integrate into a single
unified peoples, internal conflicts would require constant care and
consideration. Everyone was happy and unhappy at the same time, and that was
all anyone could ask for when it came to something like this, especially at
this incredibly unprecedented scale. The two major issues that they needed
to cover were how to distribute resources, and how to organize some sort of
joint form of governance. Things could always take any number of steps
backwards, but they were ready to deal with that on their own, without any
help from Pryce Tree, Team Matic, or the Vellani Ambassador. They found
suitable locations in their own universe to handle anything new that came
up.
There was only one thing left to do before the team could finally get back
to their mission in the Goldilocks Corridor. As soon as the meeting was
officially adjourned, Pryce Tree and Princess Honeypea disappeared, as did
the delegates from the true main sequence. Everyone else still needed to get
back to present day, and to the Sixth Key, or to its membrane twin, Fort
Underhill. This other universe was attached to Salmonverse, but it could
only be accessed at one location, for security reasons. Even a bulk traveler
could not realistically enter the brane from a different spot, as the walls
of the membrane were hyperdimensionally thicker than natural ones. For now,
there wasn’t much traffic between the two conjoined universes, but that
could change in the future, so Hogarth Pudeyonavic was currently erecting a
checkpoint station to facilitate border crossings. Until that was finished,
they just had to drop their own names to the little guard vessel, and go on
through the breach.
Theirs was not the only biverse in the bulk. A few others were linked, like
two stars orbiting each other. There were even rumors of a triverse
somewhere out there. And when this happened, for whatever reason, the region
of equilibrium between them was given a special name. They were now in the
kasma. No one on the Ambassador was aware of the difference between the
kasma, and any other part of the outer bulk. Perhaps it was an otherwise
meaningless distinction, there only to designate its proximity to the
connected branes. There was a bit of a lurch as their ship’s inertial
dampener array began to recalibrate itself for the difference in
environment. In a vacuum, you would be in a constant state of freefall,
drawn towards the strongest source of gravity. In an equilibrium, gravity
operated at an even distribution, which made it feel like every atom in your
body was being pulled in every direction all at once. The strength of this
pull wasn’t enough to spaghettify you, but it took some getting used to.
That was why the internal dampeners were so necessary. They were taking
longer to recalibrate. Hopefully, this would not be a problem on the way
back.
“I would think that we would not feel such a thing from our little pocket
dimension,” Carlin noted as he was stepping onto the bridge. Everyone else
was either in the visitor’s pocket, or sitting around Delegation Hall.
“I wasn’t sure either,” Ramses replied. “I don’t know that much about it. I
wish we were spending more time here, so I could take some more thorough
readings.”
Olimpia shivered. “We’re spending long enough.” She hadn’t technically been
in the kasma before, but was trapped between the two halves of the daughter
universe. It too existed outside of the membranes, so it probably operated
under the same physics. Her feeling of unease was not out of nowhere, and
something that they should have been concerned about going into this final
leg of the Rock mission. Fortunately, she lived there for untold time. This
trip, however, would only take about an hour and a half.
Leona hugged her from the side with one arm. “We’re almost through.” The
kasma was about three AU wide, at least here, which could have been
incidental, or deliberate on the creator’s part. The reframe engine did not
work inside, and in fact, they were unable to travel at high subfractional
speeds. They were maxed out at about the quarter the speed of light. Their
attempts to push it faster than that threatened to tear the ship apart at
the seams.
They were watching on the viewscreen, but there wasn’t much to see. As they
were too close to the nearest brane to view it in its full form, there was
almost nothing but utter darkness. A pinprick of light marking their
destination into Fort Underhill had appeared, now that they were only
several hundred thousand kilometers away, but that was it. They were
decelerating for safe entry, but they still would have covered the distance
in a matter of minutes. Suddenly, a spacetrain appeared out of nowhere,
roughly perpendicular to their vector. It was the Transit, of course.
Leona slammed her hand down onto the shipwide intercom. “Brace for gravity
turbulence!” She pulled her hand away so she could slam it down again to the
emergency stop button. There weren’t many physical controls on this thing,
but that was an important one to include in the design, along with the
touchscreens. “Full stop!”
The ship came to a complete stop, though Leona’s cry was her instinct to be
safe rather than sorry. If anyone had an open glass of liquid, some of it
would have splashed out, but they were otherwise okay. In normal space, a
stop was a misnomer, as everything in the universe was in perpetual motion.
But they were no longer in the universe, so it was extremely possible to be
totally still. They just sat there in the equilibrium, and waited for the
Transit to make its own stop in front of them. Everyone looked around.
Someone was being recruited for the Transit Army. It could be any one of
them, or hell, all of them. Usually, when the Transit appeared, time would
stop for all but their target, but no one reported this happening. Everyone
stayed in realtime, but perhaps that was a consequence of being in the
kasma.
“Unidentified beautiful purple ship, this is Azura of the Transit, please
respond.”
Leona opened a direct channel. “Transit, this is Leona Matic of the Vellani
Ambassador. Who are you here for?”
A different voice came back after a mic bump, and some feedback. “Leona,
this is Saga, but I go by Freya now. I’m looking for my daughter.”
“Does the Transit have anti-teleportation tech?” Leona asked.
“No, it does not,” Azura replied.
“Prepare to be boarded.” Leona switched off comms to address the team.
“Olimpia and Angela, please stay with the delegates. Ramses, man the bridge.
Mateo and Marie, you’re with me.”
At the last second, Carlin took Mateo in a bear hug to tag along. They were
now all four in the Transit, which none of them had ever seen from the
inside before. “Not cool, dude,” Mateo complained.
“Sorry, I had to see this,” Carlin responded. “No regrets.”
Leona approached the woman who looked just like Saga, but something shifted
in her brain, forcing her to be absolutely certain that she was actually
called Freya. In fact, she wasn’t even an Einarsson anymore, but a
Hawthorne. Still, they reunited with a hug. Leona then shook the hand of the
woman standing next to her. “Azura, I presume?”
Mateo was searching through his handheld device as Azura was nodding. He
found what he was searching for. “I thought I recognized the name. I’ve
heard it before, and saw you briefly. You’re an agent of the Maramon.”
Centuries ago, when Mateo and Leona were separated for a long time, he was
trying to rescue billions of human refugees from the universe and planet of
Ansutah. During this desperate act, a Maramon broke into the facility, and
co-opted the portal machine towards his own ends. Azura was one of the
people that he sent off to god knows where. There were other names in this
section of his list, including Cain, Abel, Seth, Luluwa, Awan, and Lilith.
They were named after characters in the bible, no doubt. Then again, this
involved time travel, so which came first, those chickens, or their eggs?
Azura nodded again. “I’m a hybrid, human and Maramon. You’re right, I was
sent to spy on Missy Atterberry in Universe Prime, but I abandoned my post
immediately. Actually, I abandoned it long before that. I secretly swapped
my destination to Universum Originalis, billions of years before Missy would
ever show up. I was bred to despise humans, as were my brothers and sisters,
but that did not work on most of us. We make our own choices.”
“My daughter trusts her,” Freya explained, “and if Treasure says she’s okay,
then I choose to believe as much.”
“Your daughter is Treasure Hawthorne?” Mateo flipped through his list again.
“She’s on here too.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Azura said, “but best not give us any information about
it. There is little chance that she has yet experienced meeting you in her
personal timeline.”
Leona nodded acceptingly, and moved on. “What made you think that Treasure
was here?”
“Thack,” Freya answered. “She can witness events in other branes, but not
outside of other branes. The last she saw her, Treasure was taking my former
ship, the Cormanu out of Salmonverse, but they never exited. Well, they do
show up eventually, but Treasure isn’t there, and the ship has been
repaired, so that’s some other point in the ship’s timeline. Time, right?”
“So if Treasure left one universe, and never entered another, she has to be
in the outer bulk somewhere, including possibly the kasma?”
“That’s right,” Azura confirmed. “We had no idea that you would be here, but
we were hoping that you knew something. Have you encountered anything
unusual here? Anything at all?”
“No,” Leona answered apologetically. “It’s been smooth sailing. No anomalies
detected. Though, we’re not experts on the kasma,” she added per Ramses’
interjection through comms. Yet. He was loving the chance to spend more time
here to gather data. They all suffered through an awkward silence for a
moment. “Well, we would help you find her if we could, but we have no idea.
We actually need to get over to the other side to drop off all of these
deleg—” She stopped herself when saw the viewscreen. “Are those readings
accurate and in realtime?” she asked.
“Of course they are,” Azura replied.
“Ramses, where’s the aperture? I don’t see it anymore. Are we drifting?”
“Hold, please,” Ramses said, leaving them holding their breaths for a
minute. “No, the aperture is gone. They’re both gone actually. I’m only
getting faint readings.”
“Don’t bother trying to make it the rest of the way,” came a familiar voice
through the Transit’s communication array. It was that angry Fifth
Divisioner who kept coming back to irritate them, like a latent disease. He
was the herpes of the antagonists world. “My alt closed it on the other
side. You’re trapped.”
Freya opened a channel. “This is Freya Hawthorne, Engineer of the Transit.
You do realize that we can travel to other universe, right? We don’t need a
permanent aperture to fly through.”
“We reinforced the membranes too,” A.F. clarified. “Your little toy train
isn’t going anywhere. Some of you will die there. Others will be retrieved
shortly.”
“Sir, there may be a chance if we try to breach the cleavage between the two
universes, but we have to go now,” one of the Transit crew members claimed.
“That’s the main difference between the kasma, and any other region of the
outer bulk. It carries the same properties, but is cut off from everything
else, as a pond could be just like any other body of water, but still
isolated by vast swathes of land.”
“Before you escape,” Leona began, “can you take on some extra passengers?”
Freya turned to her engineer. “Get it ready.” She turned back to Leona. “Get
your people over here. You’ll have to leave your ship, though.”
Leona laughed, “no, we won’t. Rambo, get ready to pack up the Ambassador.
We’re taking it with us, but I want everyone on board the Transit first, so
Waltons and Olimpia, start teleporting them over two by two.”
Mateo jumped back to help with those efforts without being asked.
“There’s plenty of room,” Azura said. “We’ve only recruited a couple of cars
worth so far. The problem is, I don’t know where to go.”
“Just take us wherever. We’ll figure out how to at least get back into
Salmonverse later, even if that means seeking help from whoever runs the
Crossover. I assume they use better tech?”
“Does a smartphone use better tech than a flip phone?” Azura asked
rhetorically. “The membrane for Fort Underhill is already too thick for us.
That’s how Hogarth designed it. We actually would need that aperture, just
as you do.”
Freya’s engineer reported that they were ready to go just as Ramses was
reporting that the Ambassador was empty, and ready to be folded into its
pocket dimension.
“Come on over!” Leona ordered Ramses.
A minute later, he appeared, grasping the model size of the Ambassador. He
was on the floor and unconscious. It would seem that surviving in the
equilibrium was not the same as surviving in a vacuum. Mateo scooped him up,
and demanded to know where the medical car was. Azura told him, and he
teleported away.
Freya pushed the button, and the Transit flew off at the speed of light.
According to her engineer, the kasma was like a tube, about three
astronomical units apart, but theoretically several dozen AU long. At one of
these ends, they theorized that it tapered off so that the branes weren’t
technically touching each other, but there might have been a passageway just
large enough for them to squeeze through. “We were wrong!” she cried as they
drew nearer. “There’s no cleavage! We’re just gonna crash into it!”
“If there’s no space for us to get through,” Olimpia said, pulling the
Sangster Canopy out of her bag of holding, and opening it up. “Then I’ll
make space.”
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