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Pribadium doesn’t have Sugar board the Teaguardian. Instead, she does what
she said she would, and programs it for a relativistic loop to keep them
busy. That way, they can’t interfere with their important demolition work.
Pribadium and Sora then teleport over to Sugar’s ship so they can learn
about what happened after the bulk portal closed.
Years ago, Tau Station was forcing its way through a haphazard breach in the
membrane of the universe. They were trying to enter something known as the
bulk. There are an infinite number of universes, known as branes, floating
around this “hyperspace” where time has no meaning. Everything that happens
within it is happening at the same time. Everyone who is crossing over using
their own methods—the Crossover, the time knife, Ochivari wingsinging—it’s
all happening at this exact same moment, relatively speaking. The bulk sees
time as a spatial dimension, rather than a temporal one. So when Sugar,
Runaway, and all of the survivors of the dimensional collapse, are floating
around, trying to continue to survive, time is really only an illusion.
Not all of the space station made it through, but fortunately, every section
that had life in it did. They were congregated in the auditorium. The tear
in the spacetime continuum wasn’t large enough, and didn’t last long enough,
to keep the rest of it intact. It came out on the other side twisted and
mangled. The surviving section doesn’t even have any means of propulsion,
except for a few stationkeeping thrusters, but they can’t naturally be
controlled from here. Sugar and Pribadium have had to jury-rig a way in. In
the meantime, the survivors have been getting by on the emergency food
synthesizers. Metabolism is supposed to stop while you’re out in the
bulk, but you will still get hungry, depending on how shielded you are from
the equilibrium.
“We need supplies,” Runaway points out. “We need to be able to move. We need
to look for a home for these people. Whatever we end up doing, we can’t just
leave them here for all of eternity.”
“I agree,” Sugar says. “But the thrusters aren’t powerful enough. The amount
of force required to move an object of this mass through an equilibrium
isn’t a reasonable expense. We need to siphon that energy into a small
vessel, pilot that out of here, and go look for help. The station will
simply stay where it is while that’s happening.”
“So we need a ship?” Runaway questions. “We looked, there is none.”
“There are industrial fabricators, though. I can build one,” Sugar promises.
“You can build something large enough to carry all these people?” Runaway
asks.
“Again, that would be a waste of power. This would only be a small
shuttlecraft, for me and me alone. You will stay with your progenitors, and
keep them safe.”
“I don’t like you going off alone,” Runaway admits.
“We gotta keep it tight,” Sugar explains. “I can do everything myself.” She
pats Pribadium’s forge core, which she has hanging off her hip. “This has
all of our research, some of which postdates my last memory as the original
Pribadium. It also has an AI.”
“That’s not good enough,” Runaway contends. “I want you to have a corporeal
person by your side. If you have to leave the ship in a brane that you
visit, someone should be standing next to you. Now stop arguing, and let me
find that person.”
“Huh?”
Runaway shuts her eyes. A moment later, she reopens them and walks over to
one of her progenitors. She escorts him back, arms interlaced like a date.
“Sugar Delgado, Vantu Hidayat.”
“Or Van. I was told you wanted help with something?” he asks.
“She will be going on an away mission, and needs a lieutenant. You are a
jack of all trades. You’ve studied engineering, medicine, even temporal
sciences, despite the fact that you’ve never heard of real time travel
before.”
“I know all of that stuff myself,” Sugar tries to explain to Runaway.
“He’s not going because you need him to do things for you, but to do
them with you. I thought we already went over that. I just didn’t
want to saddle you with a moron like...never mind. Van is perfect. I don’t
even need to let him answer whether he wants to go. I know him well enough
to know that he will. That’s why I picked him.”
Van smiles. “I wasn’t planning on stuffing a habitat into an asteroid, and
retreating into a virtual construct. I was building myself an exploratory
vessel. I want to visit new worlds in base reality. I was told that aliens
didn’t exist, but I had hope anyway. Now you two tell us that they’re real,
they’re just in other universes. I am so in.”
“Well, it’s going to be a couple of weeks,” Sugar says. “I don’t have the
ship yet. I suppose I can add one more seat to the design. But there will
only be one bathroom.”
“Not a problem,” Van replies sincerely. “I can help fabricate too, not
because you need it, but just to take some of the tedious burden off your
hands.”
“Very well,” Sugar decides. “Let’s get to work.”
“And so we built the ship,” Sugar says, finishing her story to Pribadium and
Sora. “We departed, ultimately finding a new universe with tons of
resources, and a very friendly technologically advanced peoples, who helped
build us this thing.” She indicates the capital ship they’re on right now.
“I chose it because of its modular properties.”
Pribadium nods. “It can be a transport vessel as easily as a cargo ship.
Then it can become a warship or a hospital. Why come here, though, instead
of returning to Tau?”
“We tried to at first. Tau Station was different when we got back.
Its...meta-time had changed, it’s so weird. It was attacked, boarded, and
overtaken.”
“By who?” Sora pressed. “Aliens?”
“Yes, basically,” Sugar confirms. “The Maramon. They came in higher numbers
and superior firepower. They wanted Tau Station for themselves, but they
didn’t like what it was called, so they changed it to something else. Van
and I barely got out of there alive, but we’re pretty sure the Maramon
either killed the human survivors, or transplanted them across the
bulkverse. We came here to seek your help finding them.”
“We have our own problems right now,” Pribadium tells Sugar. “Sora’s Doma
Tertians still need a place to live, and as we all know...” She glares at
Sora, lovingly but not too playfully. “...they can’t live here. They need to
be transplanted too.”
“That can be arranged.” She used a finger sequence to call up a monitor,
which switched to the feed from the hangar bay, where a smaller transport
ship was sitting. A man, presumably Vantu, was running an inspection on the
exterior.
“That’ll do.”
“Wait, you skipped something,” Sora points out. “What do they call the
station?”
Sugar nods. “They call it...The Stage.”
