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.”
