The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 11, 2524

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It wasn’t until the next year when Mateo, Leona, and Angela could safely reactivate their tandem slingdrives. They technically could have left shortly before midnight, but they decided it was for the best. They left a message with the Vitalie who lived on Vitalemus, to relay to the Vellani Ambassador if she ever heard from again. She hadn’t, but had kept apprised of Goldilocks Corridor news, and no one had reported seeing them lately, so no one knew where they were at this point. With nothing left for them here, they made the jump, and returned to the beacon floating around in the space where Castlebourne once was. They weren’t alone. They quickly picked up comms from Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Romana. They only had to make a few jumps to rendezvous with each other.

“Gang’s all here,” Mateo mused.

“How did you get back here?” Angela asked the other half of their team.

“You were taking too long,” Ramses began to explain. “We decided to come back here to see if you were stranded after failing to track Castlebourne’s new location. The rest is obvious. We were just about to come find you on Vitalemus.”

“Did you put a pocket dimension in the buoy thinking Romana would be able to use it?” Leona asked.

“No, that didn’t occur to me,” Ramses replied. “It was just a failsafe if something went wrong. With no other habitable structure around here, there needed to be some way to survive, like if you had a stranger in tow with a less advanced vacuum suit, or no suit at all. As it turns out,” he went on while tapping a piece of the buoy that he had separated from the rest, “it was necessary.”

“Is someone in there?” Leona questioned.

“You’ll see.” That was a weird way to put it.

“Can we all go back to Castlebourne together now?” Mateo asked.

Ramses shook his head. “I’m afraid this was a one-way trip. Hrockas scrambled the tracker from his end. Where they are by now is a mystery. I could probably write an algorithm that could predict their movements using their last known location. The choosing one he’s using to push the host star around is powerful, but she has her limits. They can’t be all the way to the outer arm of the Milky Way, or something. But we would have to leave something behind to keep trying to track them...”

“Or I could do it again,” Romana volunteered.

“No,” Mateo countered decisively. “I don’t want you breaking your pattern ever again.”

“Do we really need to find Castlebourne at all?” Marie asked the group. “We were trying to leave it at one point.”

“That’s true, I remember that now,” Mateo affirms. It was the closest thing to home they had ever had, but it was always going to end eventually. It was supposed to end a long time ago, but they got sidetracked with all that Pacey-Underburg stuff, which kept them tied to Castlebourne for a bit longer.

“Do you want to try another aimless jump?” Romana offered.

“And end up back in that hellhole?” Leona added. “No, thanks.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Romana reminded them. “I liked the outfits.”

“You could always wear that kind of outfit, whenever you want,” Leona said.

“True,” Romana replied. She shed her suit, and shifted her nanites to a 1950s-esque dress, not exactly like the kind she wore when they were oblivious and trapped in Underburg, but similar.

“Put your suit back on,” Mateo shouted.

Romana couldn’t reply in the vacuum, but she could still hear via conduction, yet she pushed the back of her ear forward as if she couldn’t even do that. After her father pointed at her with stern determination, she switched her suit back on. “Geeze, Papa Bear,” she joked. “Rambo’s got me covered. That man knows his way around a woman’s body.”

“Goddammit!” Mateo complained. “Don’t say things like that!”

“Okay, okay,” Leona jumped in, as she usually had to do when those two were at it. Romana knew how to push her dad’s buttons, and Leona knew how to put a stop to it, which was to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Let’s just go back to Earth. I’m feeling a little homesick. And it was home for all of us at some point, though not technically the same version of it.”

“That’s a good idea,” Marie concluded.

Ramses looked at his forearm readout. “My coherence gauge is in the Orange, where are you?”

“We just arrived, so it’s still Red,” Leona answered. “We won’t be ready to jump until nearly the end of the day, probably.”

“I’m doin’ a bottle episode!” Olimpia suddenly shouted.

“I was just thinking about that,” Angela said. “Not the bottle episode thing, that’s nonsense. “We should call it slinging. Why are we calling it jumping?”

“Seconded,” Romana agreed.

“All in favor,” Mateo posed. They raised their hands. “Motion passes. New lingo established.” He paused for a moment. “Great, that entertained us for all of ten seconds. What do we do in the meantime? And don’t say RPS-101 Plus. I don’t like playing in my suit. I can’t control my objects right.”

“You just say that because you consistently lose!” Olimpia teased.

“Mah-ri?” Angela began, “why are you looking around?”

“Oh, we just made a decision to go to Earth,” Marie replied. “That’s usually when God laughs and intervenes.

That was true. Everyone started to look around too, but found only space. The sudden intervention she was talking about didn’t usually happen when they were actively looking for it...kind of a watched pot never boils sort of thing, but it was still prudent to check.

“Do you guys realize there are three wars?” Angela offered. She opened the floor up to anyone, but no one responded. “The Exin Empire, the Sixth Key conflict, and those dragonfly aliens. I don’t know if you’ve realized this, but we’ve been switching between them. Once we close one chapter of one book, we start the next chapter of one of the other two books.”

Ramses glanced down at the piece of the buoy he attached to his chest. Only Mateo noticed, and he chose not to address it.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, aren’t you?” Leona asked rhetorically. “We just closed one of the books, but we don’t know which one we’re about to open, if either of the others.”

“I am curious about what’s going on with the Sixth Key,” Marie admitted. “It’s been a long time. I spent some years in one of those worlds.”

“So did I,” Romana said, referring to having grown up in ancient Third Rail.

“But the Ochivari are so fascinating,” Angela insisted. “We could end up in any universe, dealing with any new, unfamiliar culture.”

“Well, we might be able to trigger the Transit to show up if one of us makes a declaration that we want to fight in a cosmic war, or join the military,” Marie suggested.

“Let’s not do that,” Leona volleyed.

“Then the Sixth Key it is,” Angela responded. “Raise the sails! Navigate us to the aperture!” She pointed in a random direction. It was a little funny, but nobody laughed. They just fell silent for a time.

“That lasted us another five minutes. How’s everybody’s coherence? Mine’s still in the Red. Do we all have to be Green, or...”

“Maybe not,” Ramses explained. “I would feel safer if we were, though. I would feel even safer with Violet.”

“If you’re bored, we could just go into stasis for a few hours. It’s not bad in here. I found it easy to wake back up when they found me.”

“Well, yeah, Rambo knows his way around a woman’s body,” Olimpia echoed Romana from earlier.

“I want a divorce,” Mateo said, joking, but...clearly not happy for real.

The seven of them continued to hang out there while they waited for their coherence gauges to rise up to acceptable levels. They mostly held onto the buoy to stay close to one another, but occasionally, one of them would push off and float around. They could always return by utilizing their maneuvering thrusters, or just teleporting back. That was what gave Romana the idea to play hide-and-seek. It was a dangerous version of the game, which not everyone in the galaxy would be able to play. Because space was empty and black, the chances of finding someone just by the naked eye were incredibly low. They could use their heat signatures instead, but then detection would be incredibly easy. The only way to do it was for each hider to shut off their own life support systems, and stay in one place for long enough for the seeker to find everyone else first. They could still use their comms, but they would be untraceable. Some of them could withstand the cold for longer, and were better at hiding. Others were caught when they just couldn’t take it anymore. At this point, they could try to teleport away, but the seeker could always jump right to them wherever they ended up.

They played the game for a couple of hours before noticing that the same people were winning each time. It was always either Mateo or Ramses, which made this whole thing feel very unfeministic. Even though Ramses supposedly built their superstrates equally, it seemed as though the women got colder faster, just as they would if they were simply wearing business clothes in an office. The coherence gauges still weren’t Green for everybody, but they were sick of playing around, so most of them just took naps. They floated aimlessly there in the black, mostly apart, though Mateo and Olimpia held together like the two lovers they were. Leona was working on the self-destruct sequence for the buoy. Instead of bringing it with them, they were just gonna blow it up, so no one could have any hope of finding any information on it. It took a lot of time and work to engage the explosives. This was by design, so it couldn’t be switched on incidentally, or when the user wasn’t thinking rationally.

Finally, the last of them turned Green, and it was time to leave. Ramses woke everyone up with a calm, but crescendoing, song. They teleported back into a group, and magnetized their suits so they could watch the explosion together. It was a bit anticlimactic because of how fast and efficient it was, but still something worth seeing. They synced up their slingdrives, and with one final goodbye to the Castlebourne that was no longer there, they slung away.

They landed on the surface of what they assumed was Earth. They quickly detected a breathable atmosphere, and were able to recede their nanites into regular clothes. This did look like Earth, but perhaps one from long ago. Earth didn’t really have any cities anymore. They just lived in arcological megastructures, and some seasteads, if they weren’t just orbiting from space. They were on a street, though. The buildings were sleek and advanced, but just too dense for Earth in this time period. People were staring at them, including parents trying to hold their children close. A man approached them cautiously. “Do you mean us harm?” he asked.

Leona stepped forward. “Absolutely not. We’re travelers, attempting to return to Earth.”

The man looked over his shoulder at the crowd, and then back at Leona. “Never heard of it. How did you do that thing with your clothes?”

“Have you heard of other...” Leona trailed off. She slowly darted her eyes side to side, looking for the right way to word this. Unfortunately, the beginning of her sentence might have painted her into a corner. No, she could figure this out. The Prime Directive applied here until she determined otherwise. “...other cities.”

“You mean on the other side of the tunnels?” the man guessed. “Yes. We don’t interact with them, except to exchange some technologies sometimes.”

Tunnels. Leona looked up at the sky, or what appeared to be a sky anyway. She pulled a small swarm of nanites over her eyes, and used them as sensors. “Yeah, that was definitely a hologram, and they were under a dome. Goddammit, they were back on Castlebourne, and in some kind of simulation. Wait.

The man looked up at the sky too, trying to figure out what she was so baffled by.

The dimensions were off. This wasn’t one of the Castlebourne domes. It was too small. Not by much, but other than the ocean caps, and a few rare exceptions, all Castlebourne domes were pretty much the exact same skeletal design. Where would they be where people would be living under a dome, but alarmed by their use of nanite technology. She looked back at the stranger and breathed. “Have you heard of Proxima Doma?”

“Yes,” he replied. “We don’t know what it means.”

Leona looked back at the rest of the team. She just regarded them for a moment, trying to decide the best course of action. There was really only one. They couldn’t teleport, and they couldn’t explain their odd behavior. The locals wouldn’t understand, and it would break their worldview. “Run.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 10, 2523

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They should have realized that Ramses!324, a.k.a Tok’ra’s responsibilities and loyalties would remain with the people of New Welrios. Apparently, the two factions there had managed to become one cohesive peoples since the rest of Team Matic—including a different version of Ramses—was there. When they sent Old!Bronach back to the Goldilocks Corridor to reclaim his throne, they asked Team Kadiar to ask Tok’ra for his assistance in this matter. It would be his job to make sure that Old!Bronach became a decent leader, and started treating his people well. They never really found out how Tok’ra took it. They didn’t even know how the crew of the Vellani Ambassador broached the subject; whether it was more a command or more of a request. He apparently accepted his new role out of some sense of guilt, which wasn’t what they wanted. More recently, however, he put his foot down, and returned to his roots on New Welrios.

They had become a powerhouse over the last century, armed with a plethora of technologies that Tok’ra built for them. They were completely untouchable, much in the same way that Vitalemus was. Even The Oaksent was reportedly scared of getting near it, or even sending troops. Also like Vitalemus, they had evidently stayed out of the politics, and were satisfied with being independent and isolated. They were living proof that Oaksent’s hold on this sector of the galaxy wasn’t as strong as they once believed. The movies made it look easy, but it was probably pretty hard to keep control over so many worlds. Things had only gotten harder since the team showed up. They hadn’t realized how much of an impact they had had, but things were looking up.

Leona managed to convince the other parties to let the New Welriosians speak. They didn’t want to be so distant anymore. They wanted to participate in the community. The negotiations started back up again. Some of the agreements they had come up with last year had to be scrapped or replaced, but many weren’t rendered obsolete by this development. They pushed forward, and were almost home free. All that was left were signatures of all parties involved. It may have taken a long time, but they seemed to be able to agree that they wanted peace. That wasn’t possible just a couple of years ago. It was going to be a perpetual struggle, just as it was in the Sixth Key, but they should be able to handle it.

There was just one more thing before the deal could be finalized, at least according to everyone but Tok’ra, Dubra and Kivi, and Team Matic. The other negotiators had evidently come up with a new demand during the interim  year, which they decided not to bring up until the New Welrios situation could be resolved. Korali volunteered to be the one to speak for the group. “We want slingdrive technology.” She smiled, thinking that she had them right where they wanted them. “Nothing gets signed until we get it.”

Mateo stared over the table at her. “There are seven of us in total. We are in this room for you. This is not to our benefit. If you fail to sign these agreements, the VA will continue to ferry refugees to their new rightful home on Castlebourne. And in the midst of all that, the rest of you can fight it out all you bloody want. It’s sad, and we feel for the people of the Goldilocks Corridor, whether they identify with the Exin Empire, or otherwise. We won’t feel bad about our decision to bug out, however, because we did everything we could. And again, there are only seven of us. No one would blame us for failing to fix the whole universe. We will not let you get your hands on this technology. There is no threat you could make to change our minds. So sign it, don’t sign it; I don’t care anymore...our job is done. You never had any leverage against us. We came to this world in good faith to help, but we’ll only let that go so far before we hit our breaking point.” He stood up. “Let’s get out of here, ladies, back to Castlebourne.”

Bronach stood up as well. “If you leave, we can’t guarantee the safety of your new homeworld. Even if we do sign this, nothing we agreed to in the document bars us from attacking your region of the galaxy.”

“Do what you must,” Mateo responded. “We’ll take care of our people.” He looked over at his old friend. “It was nice meeting you, Tok’ra.”

Tok’ra nodded back respectfully.

Mateo, Leona, Angela, and Romana disappeared in a flash of technicolors.

They found themselves floating in the middle of outerspace, rather than on a planet, or even near one. Mateo laughed. “Slingdrive still slingin’.”

“That was a good speech you made, love,” Angela said to him. It was up to Leona to figure out what was going on, and to see if they could determine where they ended up, and they all knew it, so there was no point in vocalizing the plan of action. They just let her do her thing.

“Do you mean it?” Mateo asked.

“You said what we were all thinking,” Romana noted.

“Constellations are the same,” Leona interjected.

“They use constellations here?” Angela questioned.

“Well, they’re not named constellations, like Taurus or Leo. It’s just a map of the firmament as seen from our coordinates. We could be a couple light years off course and still be in the right vicinity, but...I would also be able to see the host star, which I can’t. The whole solar system is missing.”

“Wait, I’m getting a message.” Mateo tapped on his wristband.

“So am I,” Romana confirmed.

They listened to the message together. “Friends. This is Ramses. I can’t tell you what it took to get Hrockas to let me drop this buoy in the water for you to find. He hooked up with a powerful time traveler, who agreed to literally move the star system. This is to prevent any enemy from ever finding us. Ever. Depending on when you return, we’re probably only five or ten light years away at this point. Please retrieve the buoy, so no one else can find us. It includes an onboard tracker, which will pinpoint our exact location. Don’t leave it there, please. Rocky’ll have my ass.”

“I see where the beacon is,” Leona said. “It will only take us one normal jump to get there.”

They all teleported away, and took hold of the buoy. Leona popped the access panel open, and started working on the tracker. It wasn’t just there for them to consult on the first screen. She had to log into the system using her credentials, then go through this whole security system to prove her identity. If she made one little mistake, the entire thing would apparently self-destruct, so she had to be very careful and methodical.

“Do we have enough power for a second jump?” Romana asked. “It’s looking a little low to me.”

“It’ll be pretty short compared to where we just came from,” Mateo said to her. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“We’ll wait several hours to be safe while our safety levels rise,” Leona said as she was still working. “They will not have traveled very far at all in that time.”

“Wait, what about the Vellani Ambassador?” Angela realized. “They need to find Castlebourne’s new location too. In fact, if it’s constantly on the move, they’ll need constant updates to keep up.”

Leona stopped and sighed. “That’s a good point. We can’t leave this here, though. Hrockas will be mad. I’m sure he went to great lengths to hide. The new coordinates cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. But we have no idea when Team Kadiar will come back too. We just left them behind, and we cannot communicate with them from this distance.”

“We have to go back,” Romana urged.

“Correction,” Leona said. She tapped one more button, like it was the last one she needed. “We’ll go back. You need to stay here to protect the buoy. We don’t know what the VA’s quintessence levels are. They might not be able to return until tomorrow. We also may not be able to find them at all, so you can be our back-up messenger.”

“Leona, we’re not leaving my daughter here alone.”

“There’s a pocket dimension attached to this buoy. She can rest in stasis, and wait for someone else to arrive.”

“What if that someone else is an enemy, who blows this thing out of the sky?”

“They won’t be able to find it,” Leona reasoned. “I’m turning off the beacon. Only we or the Ambassador will be able to reconnect with it.”

“It’s okay, dad, I can do this. I’m the only one who can turn off my pattern.”

“I don’t like you to use that loophole all the time,” Mateo argued. “It’s so...lonely. I was never lonely. I met Leona right away after I started slipping time, and it wasn’t even two weeks before she joined my pattern. You shouldn’t have to keep doing this for us. We shouldn’t keep putting you in this position.”

“What’s the point of a loophole if we can’t use it to loop holes?” She winced. “You know what I mean. I won’t really be alone, I’ll be asleep. And I’ll only wake up if my sisters show up.”

He reached out and hugged her the best he could with their suits on. “Argh!”

She smiled at him, then receded her nanites so she was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. He did the same, so they could hug each other for real. I love you, she mouthed.

I love you too, he mouthed back.

They each reengaged suit mode, then Romana had Leona help her access to pocket dimension. They could still hear her in there through comms, so she was able to promise that everything was okay. It was pitch black, but her suit was equipped with everything she needed. She said her goodbyes, then initiated stasis. Leona needed to watch her vitals, and run diagnostics on her behalf, before they could leave her behind. Once she was satisfied that Romana was going to be all right on her own, it still wasn’t time to leave just yet, because their own slingdrives weren’t safe enough to make another jump. Finally, though, after the waiting period, the three of them synced up their tandem slingdrives, and jumped back to Vitalemus. They were floating in orbit, though, not on the planet anymore, so hopefully no one would even notice their return. It was kind of embarrassing, to make such a dramatic exit, only to come back because they forgot their keys.

They tried to reach out to their friends, but no one was responding. After a few tries, they shifted gears, and made a call to the version of Vitalie on this planet, who informed them that the Vellanie Ambassador had already left, but she didn’t know where they were going. Cool. So now they were stuck in the Goldilocks Corridor with nothing to do, and no way to go back home until their slingdrive came back online.

They just hung in orbit for a few minutes, having no better plans as of yet. They certainly weren’t going to try to land back on the planet.

“Wanna make out?” Angela joked.

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Microstory 2446: Caverndome

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I have no idea how big this place is, or how many corridors and chambers this dome has, but it seems pretty complex and expansive to me. According to the literature, this was a natural cave system that survey satellites and drones discovered while they were mapping the topography of the planet during this project’s early days. Seeing the opportunity, they built one of the domes on top of it. I saw the satellite view myself, and there aren’t any other domes very close to the rocky formations to the northeast of Caverndome, which makes me wonder whether the caves extend far beyond its borders, so they just decided to cut it off, and call it good enough. It certainly is. You could probably spend a whole standard lifetime here, and not see everything. The prospectus hints at the possibility of there being secret passageways and hidden chambers, and given the scope of the network, that’s probably true. I wouldn’t know how to find or access one of them, though. It could be mechanical or electronic, where a wall will part after inputting some kind of code, or it’s a tight squeeze with a big payoff, or it’s just so hard to see through an optical illusion. Some of the walls may straight up be holographic. A lot of people were running their hands along them in case the apparent solid surface gave way to empty space instead. We’re not allowed to bring in our own surveying equipment, which makes sense, because unlocking all the secrets all at once would go against the spirit of the dome. At its heart, this is an ecological dome, which means there aren’t any planned activities. You’re only supposed to come here if you wanna explore and see some cool caves. There is opportunity for spelunking and cave diving, but through the lens of this goal of exploration, not so you can test your mettle, bump your heart rate up, or get your rocks off, so to speak. Don’t come here and be disruptive or annoying. There’s literally a chamber that is specifically designated for echoing. It’s called Olimpia Hall. I would have called it the Echo Chamber, but maybe there’s some significance in the name that I am not cognizant of. If you wanna do that, go there, don’t disturb or undermine other people’s experiences because you were freakin’ born yesterday, and you’ve never heard an echo before. Yeah, it’s cool because of how powerful Olimpia Hall’s echoes are, but it doesn’t have the same effect elsewhere, so stop looking for alternatives. Sorry, I’m complaining about other visitors, when I’m just here to review the dome, but staffing is an issue. I guess it’s not their fault, because like I said, the network is so deep and intricate that they can’t station bots everywhere, but people are taking advantage of that freedom, and it’s making it a frustrating experience, so maybe they can try to find a solution? I dunno, I’ll shut up now.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 29, 2481

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It took Leona a hot minute, but she came to realize that they were no stranger to the ship looming over them. Well, they were still strangers, but they had seen it before. Seventy-two years ago, it appeared to them near Earth while they were still getting around on the Phoenix shuttle, Dante. It pulled them into its cargo hold, and either held them in place for a whole year, or attached itself to their pattern, and only had to keep them for a day. They were never entirely sure of the truth, but all evidence suggested the latter. How did it get all the way out here, and what did it want now? Its cargo hold opened up again, apparently beckoning them inside.

Leona reached over to the console, tapped a few buttons, then typed in a message that read NO THANKS.

“How are you sending that?” Mateo asked.

“Hologram,” she answered. “They didn’t respond to our calls before, but as long as they can read English, they’ll see this, plastered on the hull of our ship.”

The mysterious other ship used its maneuvering thrusters to draw nearer.

“Ram, do you detect any lifesigns in that hold?” Leona asked.

“Negative.”

“Then fire a warning shot right down its throat.”

“We don’t have weapons, sir.”

“The hot pocket,” Leona reminded him. “Purge it.”

Ramses sighed. “There’s not much energy in there.”

“Good, I don’t wanna kill them.”

“Purging hot pocket.” Ramses expunged the heat from the dimensional reservoir, and lit the potential enemies up.

“What the hell was that for?” a voice asked through the speakers.

“Oh, so it speaks!” Leona exclaimed with an attitude.

“We figured you were derelict, and in need of assistance.”

“Last time we met, you kidnapped us, and then spit us out without a word.”

There was a pause. “We have never encountered your vessel before.”

“We were in a different one back then,” Leona clarified. “April 18, 2409 Earthan Common Era.”

Another pause. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “You’re Team Matic.”

“What do you want?” Leona questioned.

“Nothing. We only attached ourselves to your pattern back then to outwit our pursuers. They’re long gone. Now we’re back on mission.”

“Which is...?”

“Classified.”

Olimpia’s voice suddenly took over to say, “Captain, there are only a handful of people on this thing, and I think you should come over to see it.” She was apparently on the ship right now.

“Who the hell is that?” the stranger asked. “Where are you?”

“Stay on board, Rambo. Anyone else is welcome to come.” Leona disappeared, to be followed by Mateo and Angela.

“You’ve never heard of invisibility before?” Olimpia brought herself back into view. “You’re not as informed as we guessed.”

A man was sitting at the communications console, still shocked and nervous. “That’s not my department.” He pointed timidly. “I just push the button and talk.”

“I am Captain Leona Matic of the Castlebourne Sanctuary Ship Vellani Ambassador.” Wow, they were no longer a stateless private vessel. “Who is in charge?”

“That would be me.” A thin, busty woman in a tank top and tight pants came in from the hallway. There were numerous tattoos and scars on her body. Her hair was too short to reach her shoulders, and buzzed to a fade on the sides. “Captain Lusine Cross of the Astral Military Force Fireship Lusine.”

“You named your ship after yourself?” Mateo questioned.

Lusine laughed. “Every fireship is named after the person who is to die on it.”

“Fireship,” Angela began. “Historically, these were obsolete vessels that were literally set on fire, and steered into the enemy fleet to cause disorganized destruction. No one was supposed to die on them, though. A skeleton crew always escaped on a smaller vessel.”

“That’s not how we did it where I’m from,” Lusine said. “Any one hundred percent unmanned vessel could be deflected or outmaneuvered by the enemy one way or another. I was sent off to keep my foot on the gas until the very last second.”

“How are you standing here?” Leona asked. “How is this ship intact?”

“Our enemies ran,” Lusine recounted. “We pursued. They opened one of their little portals, and we found ourselves falling through it. That’s how we ended up here.”

That was enough for Leona to figure out what she was talking about. “The Ochivari. You’re from another universe.”

“I didn’t know you would understand the concept,” Lusine said with a nod. “We’ve been trying to get back ever since, and those damn bugs keep trying to stop us, because we have vital information that the Stalwart Porter needs to know to defeat them. We have to strike the enemy where it lives, but we can’t do it alone.”

Leona nodded, understanding more that Mateo couldn’t catch. “You think this brane is their base of operations.”

“It is,” Lusine said with a laugh. “We’ve been to Worlon. That’s where they retreated to.”

“That’s the homeworld. They don’t operate out of there. However many you discovered living in that system is a rounding error compared to their numbers in their new universe.”

Lusine frowned. “You’re lying. You’re lying because you think your own worlds will be destroyed if we bring our war here to your front.”

“Nah,” Leona began, “we can protect our people from that. There’s a reason the Ochivari don’t come after our version of Earth. We’re time travelers, they know they’d lose. They’d lose in any time period, in any reality. So will you if you threaten the safety and security of our most vulnerable and innocent. I suggest you go home. The Transit Army will handle the Ochivari from here on out.”

“I don’t know what the Transit Army is,” Lusine argued. “But it’s meaningless. We’ll protect our people as fiercely as you. I signed up for a suicide mission. You think I’m worried about what you’ll do to me?”

“You are not the first person to feel that way, and you will not succeed where the others lost,” Leona reasoned. “Turn around. Go home.”

“Not until we know where the Ochivari come from. If you’re right, and it’s not this universe, then tell us where it is.”

“I don’t have the coordinates. All I was able to learn from the interrogation logs in Stoutverse was that they call it Efilverse. Trust me, the only thing capable of doing real damage there is the Transit. It’s best you leave it to them.”

Lusine was frustrated, but appeared to be processing what Leona was saying. “We can’t go back anyway. We need the bugs to open another portal.”

“Let me see your Nexus. You may have to leave your ship behind, but I know someone who can return you to your world.”

“We don’t have a Nexus,” Lusine claimed.

“I know how to detect them. It’s here.”

“Part of it is,” Lusine confirmed. “We use it for power.”

Now Leona was frustrated. “Vacuum generator. You’re the one who stole it from Antarctica. Why would you do that?”

“We needed it.” Lusine was not apologetic about their thievery.

Leona’s watch beeped. “Crap, we must be too close to a black hole.”

“Yes,” Lusine said. “We’re hiding out here on purpose, again to avoid detection.”

We only have half an hour until we make another jump. Will you be here in a year?”

“We don’t stop moving,” Lusine explained. “If you’ll allow it, we should like to absorb your energy again, and jump with you. But you’ll have to come inside again, so we can sync up.”’

Leona weighed her options. “Vote.”

Everyone said aye—in person, or through comms—except for Ramses. He didn’t want to get involved. According to him, this one Fireship posed no significant threat to either galaxy, and could only waste their time when they should be trying to find Romana. He felt so bad for losing her. He had to get her back, and as quickly as possible, to make up for that mistake.

Mateo jumped back to the Ambassador, even though the vote didn’t have to be unanimous. “Do you have the data you need?”

“I’ve not had any time to look over it,” Ramses replied. “We’ve been dealing with this since we arrived ten minutes ago.”

“Then do it,” Mateo encouraged. “We’ll deal with this other thing, and meet back up on the other side.”

“I’ll need an assistant,” Ramses said just as Mateo was trying to walk away. “Who in the group can you spare?”

Mateo turned back around. “Who we can always spare...me.”

Shortly thereafter, they jumped to the future, their pattern having been interfered with by the black hole they were orbiting. To free themselves from the gravity well, Leona piloted the VA into the cargo hold of the Lusine, and allowed their new friends to fly them out of the singularity’s relativistic grasp. They used a weird engine, which wasn’t surprising seeing as they were from another universe, but it reportedly didn’t operate the same as it did back where they came from. The laws of physics were different here. Leona was surprised that it still functioned at all. They didn’t have a name for their brane, or of course, the path back. Hopefully Venus Opsocor, Keeper of the Nexus Network, would know what to do.

Once they were sufficiently free from the black hole, they decided they needed to wait for Ramses to study the results from their last jump. Jumping again could throw off his conclusions if he was still in the middle of formulating his hypotheses. Luckily, they didn’t have to wait too terribly long. Unluckily, he turned out to have been wrong before. He could still not find Romana with what he had here. One final, highly directed, jump to a new location could do it, though. Luckily again, they needed to go somewhere anyway. They synced the Vellani Ambassador up to the Lusine’s systems, just as the latter had done before with the Dante. Then the Ambassador took over, and initiated the slingdrive. They made it, all the way to Dardius in the Beorht system.

The planet owners were busy with affairs of the state, but Vearden was available. He saw nothing wrong with granting them access to the Nexus building, as long as they didn’t make any attempt to address the public, or engage with anyone besides the Nexus technicians. They also needed to limit their numbers, so Leona and Lusine teleported to Tribulation Island alone, leaving most everyone else up in orbit. While they were waiting for that, Mateo continued to be Ramses’ guinea pig. As instructed, he teleported to various points on the surface of the planet, and through space. He carried sensors with him sometimes, but not always, which apparently generated some sort of map of the region of space where they appeared.

“Come back in,” Ramses said.

Mateo was currently on Lohsigli. While Dardius remained as the seat of power in this solar system, Lohsigli currently boasted a population of tens of thousands of people. Many had emigrated here over the last several decades, following an enemy invasion that the team didn’t have time to learn about right now. It seemed to match up with what Romana told them about her own past. They accepted a data drive as a gift, so they could update their central archives. They would read about what happened when they had more time. Mateo finally returned, tired from all the jumping, and needing some water.

“I’ve figured it out,” Ramses said, quite pleased and relieved.

“Did I help?” Mateo asked, trying to lean back in his chair, though unable to with his armor module still on.

“Immensely,” Ramses answered. “So did the, uhh...alien people. The Ambassador has been stealing information from their computers, giving it insight into a realm of physics that I never knew existed. They use quintessence where they’re from too, though only as a raw power source, not as a shortcut from Point A to Point B. That’s what I was missing; perspective. I can’t go into detail about what I learned, because you wouldn’t understand it, but to simplify, we have all the tools we need; we just have to put them all together, like ingredients. First, we need Romana’s biometric data, which the ship absorbed passively the first time she stepped on board. Second, we need her quantum signature. Every object, or living thing, vibrates at a certain quantum frequency. The ship doesn’t automatically log that for everyone who comes here, but my machine picked it up from her specifically when we linked to each other through the Livewire tethers. Third, we need a way to measure her signature across vast distances. It would be easy if we knew she was on the same planet as us, but she could be anywhere in the universe, which is why the slingdrive is so important. Now, there’s a bit of an issue, which is that a person’s quantum signature shifts over time, but I should be able to write an algorithm that predicts what it’s become since we lost her.”

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t find her before. We’ve had all those ingredients the whole time, even before her signature had time to shift. What exactly has changed?”

“Well, our jumps have given me a clearer picture of how to navigate; that’s one. Also, perhaps I’m downplaying how much the Lusine contributed. I still don’t understand it, but based on what I was able to glean, it comes from a galaxy where you can’t just fly in any direction you want. You’re limited by these sorts of...shipping lanes, which control their routes, even through the ocean of outer space. Again, I don’t really know why it’s like that, but the Lusine is different. It can subvert that limitation. It can go wherever it wants. My impression is that it’s illegal. Anyway, I turned their exploit into my exploit. Obviously, we don’t have those crazy cosmic shipping lanes here, but I was going about the search all wrong. Now I know how to head straight towards Romana, and find precisely where she is. Give me just a tiny bit more time, and I’ll be able to isolate her signature from the cacophony of noise vibrating between us and her.”

They gave Ramses more time, which Leona spent dealing with a rather difficult Venus Opsocor. She did agree to help, though, when Leona reasoned that the crew of the Lusine didn’t belong in this universe. It was logical to help them return home to maintain a kind of multiversal balance. Hopefully this gambit didn’t come back to bite them in the ass, such as when they found themselves in need of traveling to a different brane. But for now, it was necessary. The Dardieti agreed to hook the ship up to their Nexus for a peripheral transport, allowing Team Matic to check this tangent mission off the list, hopefully for good.

“Are you sure?” Leona asked in regards to the search for Romana.

“Certainty is one of those abstract concepts that doesn’t exist, but which we can draw nearer. Am I sure? No. Am I as confident as I can get? Yes.” Ramses nodded, satisfied with his own CYA response.

Leona looked over at Mateo, who nodded too, but for a different reason. “Very well,” she said before a pause to make sure there weren’t any objections. “Yalla.”

Ramses pushed all the buttons, and sent the slingdrive soaring through the quintessential firmament.

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Microstory 2303: To Distract Myself

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You know how it goes, the company you work for gives out branded flash drives during their end-of-the-year party, but it’s not enough space, so you buy another. Then you lose it for a few months, so you have to replace it, but then you find the first one again. Then you make a large purchase, and portable storage is the easiest way to hand over all the relevant paperwork, instead of a big binder, or something. But the flash drive I found last night wasn’t just in a drawer of his desk. It was hidden in the little cavity for the electrical outlet. You may ask yourself, why would I go diggin’ around in there in the first place unless I knew that it was a hiding spot? Well, I’m gonna put this place up for sale at the end of the year, so before that, a lot of little things need to be fixed. I remembered seeing a box of cover plates in the garage, and decided that I might as well replace the one in Nick’s room, because the corner was chipped. Of course it wasn’t a priority, but I’m finding myself coming up with excuses to put off sorting through their stuff, and this was one thing I could try to distract myself. I’m glad I did, or some random stranger would have discovered it years from now. I was kind of expecting to find porn on it, but not really, because he was never ashamed to be a real human being. It turned out to be a folder with two main documents, and what appear to be accessory research files. One is an unnamed novel, but I don’t know what it’s about yet. The other is a stage play called Joseph and His Dreamcoat. It sounds familiar, but I searched for it online, and didn’t find any references. I’ll be reading them both this week to see what we’re working with. I would love to publish them posthumously, however that works.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 26, 2478

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Ramses frantically searched through the operation logs, trying to figure out where Romana could have gone off to, but this ship wasn’t originally designed for time or instantaneous travel. He has had to develop the new navigation system from scratch, and that wasn’t something that he could just sit down and code. Like the explorers of yore, he needed information, and the only way to get it would be to go out and blaze the trails first. It wasn’t ready. None of this was ready, and he was freaking out again, feeling like a failure. He spent all day on it, and then the computers worked on it without him for a year. Nothing. They needed new avenues of data collection.

They had given Romana a communication disc, and her own IMS, but she wasn’t wearing an upgraded substrate, so she didn’t enjoy an emotional bond with the others. That was probably why she spun off alone, leaving everyone else behind. What they realized they needed to do now was determine whether the tether worked for any of them. Perhaps they couldn’t find her because it didn’t work at all, or perhaps they just didn’t know what they were doing yet. Since the Vellani Ambassador was preoccupied by a proverbial level three diagnostic, they were gonna have to do this themselves.

“How far should I go?” Mateo’s helmet was locked in, but his visor was still up.

“As far as you can,” Leona answered as she was making sure there weren’t any leaks in his suit. “We’ll instruct you from here.”

Marie was doing the same for Olimpia. “Just make sure you’re going in opposite directions. You head towards the sun. Pia, go for Pluto.”

“Got it,” Olimpia confirmed, jerking her head down as her visor dropped as if the gesture had caused it to happen. She quickly switched the helmet to depth hologram mode, which essentially turned the whole thing invisible.

Mateo did the same, then walked over to her. They reached out with their right arms, and slammed them against each other. “See you on the other side, love.”

“Not if I see you first.” Olimpia quickly let go, and spun around before disappearing.

Mateo tipped himself over backwards, and disappeared at the last second before hitting the floor. He found himself floating in orbit over Castlebourne. He hung there for a moment, just to admire the view. Then he pushed himself into burst mode, and jumped as far from the planet as he could. He went a few degrees off the host star, but eventually passed it, and kept it at its back. He stayed in contact with his friends, especially Olimpia, who was making good time too. He was starting to get tired, but he never said anything, and never gave up.

“Okay, kids, you’re far enough,” Leona began over comms. “Switch off your beacons, and go radio silent. Choose a new direction in secret, and keep going for another ten minutes. Zig zag if you want, just don’t tell us where you are. Only make contact in an emergency.”

“Roger, boss,” Olimpia replied.

“Understood,” Mateo added. “Going dark now.” He did as he was asked, then started teleporting again, somewhat perpendicular to the orbital plane. It wasn’t a perfect ninety degree angle, though. He was on his way sort of back towards the sun, but on the scenic route. He did zig a few times, and even zagged, but kept mostly on a straight line. Ten minutes later, he stopped jumping, and just let himself drift. It took a lot out of him, so he drank some water, and some dayfruit smoothie. He thought about watching the next episode of American Housewife on the queue to pass the time, but he was supposed to be darklurking. Even a little extra heat waste could alert the team to his location. Ramses wanted to design miniature heat shunt pocket dimensions for their suits, but it was low on the priority list at the moment. They were supposed to ignore such old school tracking techniques anyway, but it was best to not tempt fate.

Less than thirty minutes later, a suited somebody appeared out of nowhere, and tackled Mateo. “Tag, you’re it!” Angela cried through helmet conduction.

“It worked?” Mateo asked. “You could sense my location?”

“It did. Turn your comms back on. Marie already found Olimpia. She turned right around, and came back towards the planet to trick us, so she was pretty close again.”

“I thought about doing that,” Mateo said for all to hear.

“I’m glad we both didn’t do the same thing,” Olimpia decided.

Outer space and the sun suddenly disappeared to be replaced by the interior of the Vellani. They were back in the airlock. Ramses walked in. “That confirms it, we can find each other, but not Romana.”

“Theories,” Marie asked, “besides the obvious that the tether’s range is limited, and we are limited in our ability to test it?”

“Everyone be quiet,” Ramses ordered. “Just close your eyes and ears, and listen with your mind. Think about her, and only her. You should hear something.”

They did as he said. It took Mateo a moment, but there was something. It wasn’t Romana’s location, but it was something. It was like...static? Some sort of noise. It wasn’t constant, though, like television snow. There were blips, and if they were exhibiting a pattern, surely one of the smarties would be able to translate it.

“Calibration delay,” Leona finally figured.

“That’s right,” Ramses agreed. “At least I think so.”

“What does that mean?” Olimpia asked.

“The tether has to take a moment to recalculate its connections each time there’s a significant change in position of one of its nodes, e.g. one of us. We could feel it as you two were teleporting away from us. Of course, since you were still relatively close, there wasn’t much of a delay...”

“But if Romana went a lot further or farther, it will take a lot longer for us to pinpoint her location,” Angela realized. “But it’s been quite a while. How long are we expecting it to take?”

Ramses took a moment to respond. “The calibration should be measured in seconds, even at the furthest reaches of time and space. The reason we can’t find her is probably because she’s not staying in one place. She’s in constant flux.”

“Like my sister, Aquila,” Mateo guessed.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Ramses said. “It was before my time, but maybe. If our hypothesis is correct, Romana is truly lost in time.”

“What could we possibly do from here?” Marie asked. “Could we—I dunno...try to match her energy?”

Leona smiled. “That’s a nice thought. If we intentionally became as erratic as her, we might end up in the same temporal dimension. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work. If anything, it would make it worse by triggering more calibration than our tethers should be expected to calculate.”

“So, what do we do?” Mateo pressed. “How do we find my daughter?”

Leona and Ramses were silent.

“What do we do!” Mateo repeated himself in a raised voice.

“I don’t know,” Ramses admitted.

Mateo finally removed his helmet, and dropped it on the floor. He tried to walk towards his best friend, but the helmet slid along right behind him. “Goddamn proximity control magnets. Tethers will be the death of me!” He hastily turned off the feature to cut his stalker loose, so he could talk to Ramses in peace. “Do whatever you have to do. Tear that machine apart and put it back together backwards, take every ounce of temporal energy from me, call a time god; I don’t care. Find her.”

Ramses briskly walked out of the room, presumably to comply.

“What? Do you think I was too harsh?” Mateo questioned the room.

“Ram’s okay,” Leona assured him. “He understands that he doesn’t understand what it’s like to have a kid. That being said, it doesn’t give you the right to treat friends like enemies, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled for that line, lest you cross it.”

“Okay.” Mateo put his helmet back on. “I’ll be on the roof.” He teleported outside and activated his boot magnets to stay in place. The ship was moving at very low subfractional speeds to get back to the planet. There wasn’t any reason to jump back there instantaneously, even though they obviously could with ease. He stared into the abyss, and when he grew tired, he lay down and watched the stars above him.

A clanking of boots approached him. Someone else wearing an IMS appeared in his view. They switched on their hologram to make themselves look like Romana.

“I don’t need role play therapy, whoever you are,” he contended, forgetting to turn his comms on. “I’ll tell her whatever I need to tell her when I see her for real.”

The way Angela talked to him before, by placing her helmet against his, was a way to send soundwaves into each other’s air spaces since they wouldn’t make it across the vacuum. This was a really great way for two people to communicate without involving anyone else. Theoretically, any signal could be hacked one way or another. In an atmosphere, even if there were no electronic or mechanical devices nearby, maybe someone was eavesdropping. Helmet conduction was probably the safest way to keep a secret that was ever invented, as long as everyone kept their radios off, which was true of Mateo in this case. This mystery person didn’t need to crouch down and place their helmets directly together, though. They took out a device that was specifically designed for it. They stuck one patch on their own visor, extended the second patch out with the retractable wire, and stuck the second one on his. “I really am Romana.”

“They found you?” Mateo asked, still not sure if he believed it.

She sat down next to him as he was sitting up. “No, not yet. But they will.”

“Tell me how we do it in the future, so we can just do it faster this time.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she replied. “Rambo has to go through the whole process. I only came back in time to alleviate your stress.”

He stared at her for a moment, then looked away. “You’re not really her.”

“You really think one of your friends would trick you? Plus, I just read your mind.”

“If you’re from the future, you would know them better than me.”

“I’m not from that far in the future,” she claimed. “But here’s the funny thing, we never did run that DNA test, did we? The girl you met the other day might not have ever really been Romana. Or maybe she was, but her history wasn’t true in the first place. Because you actually never ran a DNA test, meaning Romana the baby was never necessarily your child in the first place. It could be Silenus’ baby instead, and the whole embryo being passed down the matrilineal line was a giant lie. Or you do have a baby, and she’s out there somewhere, or she was, or she will be, and we cloned her, and inserted someone else into the copy. Or someone else cloned her, and I’m the real one, and every version you’ve met until now has been an impostor.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. You never really know someone.”

“All we can do is our best,” she added.

“I thought you were supposed to make me feel better. How is this helping?”

“I am, and it is. Here’s the lesson; you’re an advancer. The whole point of you as a salmon was to force you to jump through time, leaving everyone behind. Other time travelers leave their families in their own pasts, but they usually do it all at once, like ripping off an adhesive bandage. You did it gradually, giving you time to watch them slip through your fingers. You should be used to it by now. If you never see me again, you’ll be okay. You have three other daughters, and a son. You didn’t raise them either.”

“Again, your pep talk isn’t working. The fact that I don’t know any of my own kids is not a point of pride. It is my great shame.”

She sighed and nodded as she watched Castlebourne grow larger and larger. She removed a silver business card from her arm cache, and handed it to him. It clinked a little, and felt hard, like metal, instead of paper, but it appeared to be blank. “I’m not really here to make you feel better. That’s not something I could ever do. You lost out on fifteen years with me. I’ve had exactly that much time to come to terms with it. You haven’t. Activate that whenever you’re feeling upset, and need to talk to someone who understands. Most rendezvous cards are single use, but this one is permanent.”

“This is therapy? Who’s it with? Dr. Hammer?”

She smiled with teeth. “Good guess. She’s the facilitator, but it’s more of a support group, full of people who have gone through what you have. I’m sure your story beats ‘em all, but they’ll be a great resource just the same.”

“They all lost their children in general,” he pressed, “or time travel took them?”

“The second one,” she promised. “Some of them are the travelers, some of them were the ones left behind. Some are both.”

He frowned at her. “How long will it take Ramses and Leona to find you? When will you close this loop?”

Mateo’s comms disc pinged, so he opened a channel. “Mateo, come back inside, I figured something out,” Ramses said.

Romana helped her father up from the hull. “Won’t be long now. You go first. I don’t want you to see me leave again. It must be so traumatizing by now.”

After a quick hug, he disappeared, but he secretly jumped back outside to watch her from a distance. Dark particles. That was how she came here, and how she left. This somehow all involved Buddy Citrus. Realizing that there was nothing he could do about that at the moment, he went back to the group inside.

Ramses presented them with something that they all recognized. It was the little machine that scientists in the Fifth Division designed to help them locate each other before, back when Dalton Hawk separated them to all the five realities. “The original is long gone, but I still have the specs, so I printed a new one. This is how we’re gonna find your girl. All I need to do is figure out how to interface it with the slingdrive.”

Mateo stepped out of the armor module of his IMS. He stumbled back  a little like a newborn fawn, bracing himself on the wall before leaning against it. “Do it.”

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