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The air escapes the rocket since they have no way of closing the bulkheads.
Elise and Zelda strap themselves into the nearest seats as the inertial
dampeners either don’t work, or don’t even exist. Elise feels her face
collapse into itself as the apparent gravity increases. Back when she was
much younger, high gravity training was required for space travel, even if
you were just going into orbit. As the technology became more reliable, and
redundancies were reinforced, they stopped treating everyone like an
astronaut, and the first true passengers emerged. It has been centuries
since she’s felt this, and she does not care for it. She turns her head to
Zelda, who is, of course, loving it.
Several minutes later, the rocket has made it into orbit. The trembling
stops, and the gravity stabilizes. They can finally relax and speak. Elise
catches Zelda up on everything she missed after she was presumed dead. Their
best guess is that this is not a new timeline, but the same one with more
information. The girls sit there together, waiting for something special to
happen, but it never does. This is a problem, because while the vacuum suit
cartridge has its own carbon scrubber, it’s not the most efficient kind, and
is only meant to be used in emergencies. That’s exactly what this is, but
they should really get a more reliable source of air if they’re going to be
here for a while.
Maybe this isn’t the final challenge, and never was. Maybe it was simply the
hardest one yet, and the team has so much more to get through in any
timeline. Elise doesn’t even really care about that anymore; she was only
trying to save Zelda’s life and memories. If the hunt is going to continue,
they have to get the rest of the team back somehow. Short of that, they have
to reunite back on the real Castlebourne, and scrub the whole thing. But for
now, all they can do is sit here and wait.
“There’s more we can do,” Zelda contends. “This is the same alien language
that Colley encountered in the Empty Planet simulation, and the same one
we’ve seen pop up every once in a while on this hunt. He figured it out
eventually, so we can do the same.”
“Keyword is eventually,” Elise responds. “He beat Empty Planet
because language and culture are his thing. I don’t know if we have time. He
didn’t teach us.”
“We may as well try,” Zelda reasons. “One of these buttons shuts all of the
bulkheads, and another one reestablishes air circulation. Or maybe a few of
them, I don’t know, but the puzzle is here, we just have to solve it. We can
do this, Elise.”
Elise sighs. “It’s alien. Maybe it doesn’t have the right atmospheric
comps.”
“Then we’ll make it work. The hunt would not have led us here if it were
impossible. The escape pod is a failsafe to get you out of the game, but
you’re not supposed to take it. You’re supposed to be in here,
and survive. Whatever we’re waiting to happen, it probably can’t happen
until we turn on life support,” Zelda reasons.
Elise nods. “You’re right. There must be a way. The language is
translatable.”
And so the girls start trying to understand what they’re looking at. They
start by tracing the exposed cables from less dangerous systems to their
controls. They figure out what turns the lights on and off, and which
buttons open and close the panels. That gives them a baseline for what the
alien symbols mean. From there, they incrementally learn what everything on
the bridge does. It takes them hours, but they do figure it out.
Meanwhile, they start to understand what the ship is doing on its own. It
doesn’t remain in a circular orbit. They’re climbing to a higher altitude.
For what purpose, they don’t know, but Delta V will be lower farther from
the planet’s gravity well, so it could be preparing to activate an ion
drive, or something else, to leave Castlebourne entirely. They can’t let
that happen, but none of these buttons says that there is a way to cross
back over to the main dimension. The aliens probably couldn’t do that. The
Facsimile is just the Custodians’ way of allowing the hunt to take the
hunters anywhere in the world without interfering with the normal goings-on.
It’s not actually part of the story.”
“Wait, I think this will do something,” Zelda says. She flips a switch.
An alien voice would occasionally make announcements through the speakers,
particularly when they made some change. Knowing how to read the symbols,
and understanding their spoken words, are not the same thing, so they have
never been able to comprehend it. Until now. Now it’s all being said in
plain English. Zelda flips the lights on and off a few times to confirm. “Lights on, lights off. Lights on, lights off—”
“Okay.” Elise pins Zelda’s hand down gently. “It works. That was the last
piece of the puzzle. Now we just need to wait forty-two more seconds until
that periodic announcement we keep hearing triggers again, and finally find
out what it’s saying.”
“I think it’s counting down,” Zelda explains. “The second part is always the
same, but the first part is always different.”
Elise nods. “That would be my guess too.”
“Eighty-three seconds to reintegration,” the voice says, confirming
their guess.
They both widen their eyes. Reintegration? What exactly does
that mean?
Eighty-three seconds pass. Sensors start going off. Proximity alert after
proximity alert after proximity alert. They look through the viewports to
see another space station. They’re fine—they’re not going to collide with
it—but they’re clearly back in the real dimension. This is precisely what
they were hoping for.
Elise opens her bag and grabs one of the communicators that she packed.
“Activating reframe engines in eleven minutes,” the computer
announces.
“Is that the thing that makes a ship move faster than light?” Zelda
questions.
“Yes,” Elise replies in a panicky voice. She opens a channel. “Laise, are
you there? Please respond, Laise. This is Elise Perkins. Please respond!”
“Laise here, go ahead.”
“Have you been tracking the team? Do you know where they are?” Elise asks.
“Yes, they’re in a highly secure facility,” Laise answers. “I’ve been trying to break them out for an hour. I’m only at Step 2. I
could really use your help.”
“If it’s secure,” Elise realizes, “then it probably doesn’t allow
teleportation.”
“That was my thinking,” Laise agrees. “That’s why I’m shutting off the power.”
“Good girl,” Elise says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Sending the coordinates now.” A brief pause. “Power will take a few minutes.”
“I can’t jump that far in one go,” Elise explains to Zelda. “I have to start
now. She affixes the communicator onto her nanite vacuum suit, and seals
most of it up, leaving only the visor open. “You stay here. If you can delay
FTL, do it, but don’t stop it.”
“Aye, Captain,” Zelda says. “And Captain,” she adds when Elise tries to turn
away. “One more thing.” She takes Elise by the helmet and kisses her
passionately.
Elise lets her go and smiles. “I love you.” She drops her visor and
teleports away.
Miracle called this burst mode. She can only jump about a thousand
kilometers, so the first time she does it, she’s still in the middle of
outer space. She immediately jumps again. Then again, and again, and again,
until she’s back down on the surface. She’s standing next to Laise now, who
is still waiting for Castledome’s power to turn off.
Laise salutes Elise, then shifts her fingers to count down. “Four, three,
two, one.”
After all of the lights shut off, Elise picks Laise up, and teleports away.
They’re deep inside the castle now, in what looks like a dungeon. All of
their friends are chained up on the other side of metal bars, which Elise is
somehow not able to teleport through. They must be on auxiliary power. Azad
is here too, dressed in medieval garb, instead of his usual heavily armored
IMS unit. He draws his sword.
“I don’t have time for this,” Elise complains. “The ship is about to
disappear.”
Azad jerks his head towards another sword leaning against the stone wall.
“Then you better hurry. Because I’m the only one keeping that cell locked.”
He tenses up.
Elise doesn’t move. She looks over at her friends, who are watching them,
but not speaking. She can’t do this. Obviously, if she wins, Azad will
either heal in this body, or transmit to a backup. That’s not really even
the problem, though she might feel differently if she does put that weapon
in her hands. The real issue is that she doesn’t want to transfer. She likes
the body she’s in right now, and she was so preoccupied with training that
she never went in to duplicate her current DNA. She will lose her wings,
she’ll lose teleportation...she’ll lose everything. But her friends need
her.
While Elise is frozen like a coward, Laise picks up the sword. She attacks
Azad instead, and damn is she good. Elise didn’t take the time to get to
know her, or ever ask why Miracle conscripted her for her team in the first
place. This might have been the reason, because she is kicking Azad’s ass.
He might be letting her win because he secretly wants them to complete the
hunt, but he’s making a good show of it at least.
After a few minutes, Laise manages to knock the sword out of Azad’s hands.
Elise runs over to pick it up, because they never do that in movies, and it
often leads to a final blow by the villain. She’s not going to use it
herself, though.
“Do I have to kill you?” Laise asks Azad sternly, the tip at his neck.
“The gate is on a deadman’s switch,” Azad replies plainly.
Laise nods. She looks away, then quickly drives the blade into Azad’s
throat. At his final heartbeat, the gate slides open, leading to hugs and
kisses all around.
“Uh, Elise?” Zelda asks through comms. “You better get back here. The ship enters reframe speeds in three
minutes. I couldn’t slow it down, or stop it if I tried.”
Elise frowns at her friends. “It’s too late. We’ll never make it in time.”
“We could try to compound our temporal energy,” Miracle suggests.
“I don’t know what that means,” Elise says, though she can hazard a guess.
“We don’t have time to get into it,” Miracle begins, “but when you cross the
streams of two sources of temporal energy, it can create a feedback loop,
pulling more than they normally would on their own. It’s dangerous, though.
We could miss our mark, which we absolutely cannot do since you’re the only
one with a vac suit.”
“We have to risk it,” Jolanda decides. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll each
end up in our respective backup bodies, and miss the window. I would rather
try.”
“We vote,” Rage says. “Raise your hand if you wanna risk it.” She looks over
at Laise when everyone raises their hand. “Are you back in? Are you with
us?”
“Damn right,” Laise says. “I regretted leaving the second I did.”
“Do it,” Rage says to Elise and Miracle.
There’s really nothing for Miracle to teach Elise. The latter already knows
how to build her energy for longer jumps. She’s never been able to reach
8,000 kilometers before, and certainly not with any passengers, but she has
the idea. She can feel it. As she’s holding Miracle’s hands, she can feel
the power. It’s intoxicating. With every wave of energy, it feels like
they’ve reached their limit, but then they let more and more in.
Elise focuses on Zelda again. She is their target. If they can get close to
her, they’ll all be safe. The power feels good, but they may be reaching an
actual limit, because the pressure is also getting to be a little much. She
keeps pushing, though, no matter how much it hurts. They build until their
hands are shaking, and then they build more until their whole bodies are
shaking. A glowing white light starts bursting from their eyes, and their
pores. If they don’t try this now, they could quite literally explode, and
since we’re dealing with time travel, they might not all end up in their
backups.
Now.
Elise wakes up on the floor. The architecture suggests that she’s back on
the alien ship, but it’s nowhere she’s been before. It is definitely not the
bridge. She stands up and wobbles a little before catching herself on a
chair. She takes deep breaths to regain her balance while she stares at the
door. Once she’s ready, she exits.
The others are in the corridor with her, having seemingly just woken up as
well.
Minotaur leads them back to the bridge where they find Telman standing there
patiently with a cool poker face.
Telman waits for everyone to file in. “Welcome...to Level 2.”
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