A couple of hours later, Dr. Hammer was finished with her other work for the
time being, and was available to speak with the team. She stepped into her
own office, and didn’t seem shocked to see them. Siria must have warned her
through a text message, or something. She smiled at her assistant, and
nodded, but didn’t say anything, yet Siria knew that she could leave, and
tend to other things. “Could I see the card?” Dr. Mallory asked once Siria
was gone.
Mateo handed it over.
Dr. Hammer inspected it carefully with her eyes, then inserted it back into
the reader for more information. “Miss Webb does not have my access code.
Neither should you. Please look away.” Her hands hovered over the keyboard,
ready to type it in.
“We should leave real quick,” Ramses suggested. “Our brains can process
keystrokes, and determine which keys are being pressed, based on the sound
each one makes, unique to its position on the board, and its distance from
our ears.”
Dr. Hammer narrowed her eyes at him, regarding him with fascination. “I
should like to study you.”
“Maybe one day,” Ramses tentatively agreed.
Dr. Hammer typed in her code without worrying too much about it, and read
the screen in silence for a moment. “Where did you get this?”
“A friend,” Mateo replied.
“A friend...who?”
“Who...I trust,” Mateo said, still playing it close to the vest.
“Should I trust them?”
“Indeed.”
“Well,” Dr. Hammer began. “When I stick it into that device, and stick you
into that machine, I can tether you together, but in order for it to work,
it must first be logged into the system. Otherwise, someone could simply
steal one from the manufacturing room, and use it without authorization.
Whoever gave it to you, that’s what they did. This is stolen property, I
didn’t issue it.”
“I’m sorry,” Mateo said sincerely.
“Mister Matic, there is a reason I have not offered you a place at this
facility. Well, there are a number of reasons, the main one being your
significant connection to the Superintendent. For anyone else, I can prevent
him from seeing what’s discussed in these meetings, but you’re more
difficult to tease from his prying eyes. I don’t know what to do about that.
We can’t let him go spouting off about confidential information. It wouldn’t
be fair to the other members. He already knows too much.”
“I understand,” Mateo replied, just as sincerely as before.
I’ll skip the sessions. I’ll just say that he’s gone off to one, but I won’t
follow him there. I respect doctor-patient privilege.
“Hold on, I’m getting a message,” Dr. Hammer said as she was clicking the
mouse. She read the Superintendent’s claim. “The fact that you’re watching
us at this very moment does not instill confidence in me that you would
honor the boundaries. Even one peek could have devastating consequences for
my patients that I cannot allow.”
The team wasn’t fazed by her apparent conversation with the Superintendent.
They sat there patiently and quietly.
“Another one.” She took a second to read it, then paraphrased it for the
whole class. “He promises to stay away, and says that there’s plenty of
story to be told that has nothing to do with this place.” She sighed. “I
don’t know. I don’t even know what to do about this emotional bond. I can
find a workaround on the calibration, but you’ll all be able to use it,
which is not the purpose of the card.”
“We don’t need the card,” Leona explained. “We go wherever we want, whenever
we want. We promise to stay out of it, just as the Superintendent did. Mateo
will be the only one to use that card.”
“And if anyone breaks this rule, you may revoke it,” Mateo added.
“We don’t really do that,” Dr. Hammer explained.
Mateo shrugged. “Do it anyway, if it ever comes up.”
Dr. Hammer thought over her options. “Is this the whole team?”
“My sister, Angela’s still on the ship,” Marie said.
“The two of them were once one and the same,” Leona clarified, “in case that
matters when calibrating the machine for Mateo, or whatever.”
“It doesn’t. But she does need to be here. You’re like limbs of the same
person, so you all need to be a part of it.”
Angela teleported down to the office, which alarmed Dr. Hammer, who believed
there to be a barrier around the building that prevented anyone from showing
up anywhere besides the vestibule. She wrote a note to herself to reinforce
the security system, even though she obviously wasn’t worried about the six
of them. She went on with the procedure. Mateo alone lay down in the card
tethering machine, but they could all feel the procedure in their minds, and
their bodies. A connection was created, between them and the card, and also
to the facility. Their bond with each other felt like it was reinforced as
well, though that might have been in their imaginations. The whole process
only took a couple minutes. Mateo sat up, and left the room to go through
orientation with Siria. As the Superintendent, I’m not allowed to divulge
what he learned on his tour. I know only that it happened.
Meanwhile, back on the ship, the rest of the team was hanging out in
Delegation Hall. Leona was reading a book, the other girls were chatting
about nothing, and Ramses was looking through data on his tablet. After
doing this for a bit, he looked away with a sort of concentrative frown, and
shut his eyes. Finally, he said, “one more jump.”
“What was that?” Leona asked, though she didn’t take her eyes off the page.
“If we make one more uncertain jump, I believe that I will at last have the
navigational abilities to find Romana.”
She turned her ereader away, and looked down at the floor between the two of
them. “How certain are you of that?” Now she looked him in the eye.
“Fifty-fifty,” he answered.
She nodded, and considered it. “This sounds like one of those situations
where we should vote on it.”
“We’ll do it when he gets back,” Olimpia said, referring to Mateo.
“We know how he would vote,” Leona replied. “We may as well do it now. You
can call me his proxy, so I get two votes.”
Marie scoffed. “Raise your hand if you don’t think we should go.”
No one raised their hand.
“Motion passes,” Marie decided.
Leona took a breath, and yawned unwillingly. “Ange, run a pre-flight check,
just how we taught ya. Rambo, you handle the quintessence drive, of course.”
While they were in the middle of their checks, Mateo returned, and listened
to the update. “Wait, is it going to take us to her, or just help us find
her eventually?”
“The latter,” Ramses answered.
“If it turns out to be enough,” Leona added.
“Where are we going? Anywhere?”
“A random jump would give us better data than a target one. I think that’s
my problem. I think I’m trying to exert too much control, when I should
really be letting the slingshot guide my trajectory.”
“That’s not how slingshots work,” Mateo argued.
“We thought you would want this,” Leona told her husband.
“We could end up anywhere,” Mateo went on. “That means inside of a star, or
at the beginning of the big bang, or hell, a different universe.”
“I wrote safeguards into the program to prevent us appearing inside of a
solid object,” Ramses began to explain. “Or a liquid or plasma, for that
matter. Those are basic protocols, even the teleporter has them. The big
bang was so dense that it would be tantamount to being in a sun, so the
protocols would cover that too. As for another universe, the slingdrive
can’t do that. We can pierce the membrane from the outside, but not from
inside. We can only slide along it.”
“My position holds,” Mateo stood firm. “It’s too dangerous of a
proposition.”
“What did you talk about down there after we left?” Leona asked.
“You know I can’t tell you.”
“Can you tell me if you’re an impostor?”
He waited to respond. “Not applicable.”
“We thought for sure you’d vote to go,” Olimpia said, stepping into the
room.
“I would,” Mateo agreed. “I am. It just didn’t sound like any of you
discussed the dangers that this poses. You only made it here because I took
a fear pill. We don’t have that luxury this time. Wherever we go, it may
take us on a wild adventure that lasts for years. As we’ve tethered our
personal timelines together, that would mean Romana stays alone until we’re
finished fighting Cthulhu, or whatever it ends up being.”
“She’s alone if we do nothing,” Leona reasoned. “We need this data.”
Mateo twirled his rendezvous card between his fingers, just as the other
Leona had earlier. He was probably thinking about what he talked about in
group at the Center for Temporal Health, but I was not there, so I don’t
know anything that anyone said. He chuckled, perhaps getting the feeling
that someone was leaning on the fourth wall from the outside. “I should
stay. Whatever happens, wherever you end up going, you can always end up
back here at least. Let me be your anchor. Something goes wrong, jump right
back.”
“Dr. Hammer doesn’t want us doing that sort of thing,” Leona reminded him.
“That’s not what this card is for. It’s not what that place is for.”
“I’ve just...we’ve been here before...so many times. We’ve been on a
mission, and then we end up on a tangent. We have to break that cycle. We
have to stick with something until it’s done. Our team has grown, yet
remains incomplete. I’m afraid.”
“Give us the room, please,” Ramses said mysteriously.
Leona and Olimpia were a little surprised, but they left without arguing.
“What is it?” Mateo questioned.
“I analyzed that card,” Ramses said. “I couldn’t get much from it, but I
bounced tiny ablation lasers off of the surface, which were absorbed by our
sensors. They detected two DNA signatures from the sample. One was yours,
and the other was Romana’s. She’s the one who gave it to you.”
Mateo didn’t want to say anything, even though he had obviously been caught.
“She was wearing gloves.”
Ramses smiled. “She probably wasn’t wearing them the whole time. Lemme
guess, she was from the future?”
“Maybe.”
He smiled wider. “I’ll keep your secret, as long as you vote yes, and come
with us. We will find her again, so she can go back to see you in the past,
and close her loop. I don’t think you should be this worried. Studying that
slingdrive, and improving it, has been my sole focus for days. Please trust
me, Mateo. You’ve done it before.”
Mateo sighed. “All right. Fire it up.”
They returned to the group, and confirmed that everyone understood what they
were getting themselves into. They may find themselves back on Earth
centuries ago, or on the other side of the universe. No result was more
likely than another, however, regardless of where they ended up, they should
be able to initiate a second jump, and go back to where they belonged. This
should give them the data they needed to understand how the drive worked, so
that they were not flying blind for that second time.
Ramses stood there like he was waiting for someone else, but he was the only
one qualified to operate this thing. Even Leona hadn’t spent much time on
it.
“What?” Leona asked.
“Say the thing. Say that word I like.”
“Oh.” She laughed. “Yalla.”
They jumped, and for a moment, they were disoriented, as was the ship,
though the computers recalibrated themselves, unlike the first time they
tried to use this thing. “I can tell you where we are, but not when,” Ramses
announced. “I have enough positional data to know that we’re in the Miridir
Galaxy.”
“It’s June 28, 2480. Present day, for lack of a better term in our line of
business,” Leona elucidated them while consulting her special time watch.
“We’re not in the Beorht system, though,” Ramses continued. “Dardius is
about two thousand light years from here, give or take a couple hundred.”
“All I care about is the new navigational data,” Mateo said to him. “Can we
pinpoint a destination now?”
“I’ll need time,” Ramses said in an apologetic tone. “I can’t even tell you
if the new data looks promising. I’m sorry.”
“Well, if we’re this far from civilization, finding the peace you need to
conduct your work shouldn’t be a problem,” Angela figured.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Olimpia contended. She was looking through
a viewport that wasn’t big enough for them all to see.
Leona threw the image onto the screen. There was another ship out there. Her
armband pinged, so she looked at it. “External sensors are detecting a Nexus
nearby. It’s probably on the ship.”
“What does that mean?” Marie asked.
“We can’t possibly know yet.” Mateo reached back for his helmet, and put it
over his head. “Prepare for another tangent.”
