Mirage and Ramses worked closely together. They had to design something that
had never existed before; an onboard bulk energy weapon. A quintessence gun.
The obvious choice was to reroute all that raw power from the slingdrive to
the heat shunt. They were already halfway there—the hot pocket was made to
pull in energy from the drive. The only difference was that it used to only
be for waste heat, and now it had channel quintessence. As per usual, Ramses
developed all of the procedures to make these changes by the end of the day,
and then disappeared. When they returned a year later, it was done. “It’s
all done?” Ramses questioned.
“All done,” Mirage confirmed. “The original planetary-scale black hole was
pushed clear of the gravity well of Castlebourne’s recently moved-in solar
system, so it shouldn’t cause any more issues for them. I made the new black
hole about 690 light years from here, in the intergalactic void, where no
one will bother it. Just in case, however, I left a buoy nearby with a copy
of Thistle on it to monitor for any traffic within the next several billion
years while there still might be some organics who need a certain threshold
of gravity. I figured out how to switch the gravity regulators on Thālith al
Naʽāmāt Bida and Varkas Reflex to the new source, so both planets have
returned to normal gravity. The inhabitants are starting to delocalize
again, though they seem to be a little gunshy about it since they still
don’t know what happened.”
Members of Team Matic exchanged looks with one another. Once again, they had
been rendered obsolete. Their apparent job now was to go in, spot a problem,
then find someone else to fix it for them. Looking at the math, this should
have always been their modus operandi, but they had already discussed all
that. Leona nodded respectfully at Romana. “Okay. You’re up. Where do we go
now, Navigator?”
Romana held her finger upwards and in front of her, as if showing the way to
their new destination. “We’ll go,” she began melodramatically, “inside.” She
disappeared.
Ramses turned back to Mirage. “Thank you for...” He trailed off before
restarting, “well, I was going to thank you for your help, but I suppose I
should thank you for letting me help.”
Mirage smiled sincerely. “You’ll figure out your place in this post-Edge
universe. There are still some worlds that you have not returned to in a
while.”
They said their brief goodbyes before teleporting into their
interdimensional habitat. They had no reason to believe that anyone in
Castledome would mess with their belts, but still, before Romana could give
them a real answer, Leona activated burst mode. The whole stack rapidly
jumped over and over again until they were at a safe distance from all
others. She then sat down at her usual place on the circular couch. “Are we
just taking a break?”
They all looked at Romana. Romana looked at Ramses. “What?” he asked.
“The thing,” Romana egged him on.
“I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ramses said.
“The big thing you were working on,” Romana said, still vaguely. “I think
you called it Operation Starframe?”
“Oh,” Ramses said. “That’s just an idea. I wasn’t keeping it a secret, I was
just weighing the pros and cons. I’m not sold on the utility of it.”
“The utility of what?” Marie asked.
“Well, Project Stargate and Operation Starseed left Gatewood before the
reframe engine was invented. Well, it had technically been invented by then,
but there was only one ship, and Team Keshida didn’t integrate the
technology into the modules, even though time travel could have given them
that. Anyway, at this point, those modules have not yet made it even 300
light years. Operation Starframe would realize that alternative,
but...I was thinking...only for us.”
“No one called it Starframe specifically,” Leona began, “but we considered
that possibility at the Edge meeting. Kestral and Ishida were neutral on the
proposal, but we ended up voting against it. There was only so much we were
willing to give the public, and that...that was just too much. Colonization
should be a controlled effort, happening gradually, so you don’t end up with
a bunch of Linwood Meyers out there. Statistically, some would end up
building something abhorrent on the other side of the galaxy before anyone
realized it.”
“You mean like an oppressive empire run by an immortal megalomaniac?”
Olimpia offered.
“Yeah, just like that,” Leona agreed. “We hadn’t heard of the Oaksent at the
time, but we were worried about the possibility.” She looked back over at
Ramses. “But this would be just for us? For what?”
“Exactly on that last question,” Ramses agreed. “It would be to get us
around the slingdrive’s main limitation. We can only sling to where there is
already an established presence. A fleet of beacons would let us go
anywhere, and we would only have to wait about seven months to cover the
Milky Way. But why would we do that? What would we need that for? One secret
place for us, maybe, I can see there being a benefit, or maybe a few
sanctuaries, but we don’t need the whole galaxy. That’s why I’ve not brought
it up. I’ve been trying to determine the mission statement.”
“Plus,” Mateo said, “once the colonists do end up on those worlds, they’ll
be confused about why there’s already a competing quantum terminal in the
system.”
Ramses shifted in his seat a little. “Well, we don’t need a terminal to
reach it, and I don’t even think it needs to be that big. I still don’t know
the threshold. What does a presence even mean? Could we leave a 20th
century digital watch there to serve as the beacon? What if one of the
Al-Amins was there with no technology at all? Could we map onto another
person instead?”
“So let’s do that,” Romana suggested. “Let’s spend the rest of the day
running those tests. Send a bunch of reframe probes in all different
directions, at different distances. One will be carrying the watch. Another
will have a smartphone. One can have, like, an electric car... And so on,
and so forth. I guess we would be doing the tests next year, instead of
today, but still, you could start today.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ramses countered. “We’ve still not figured out the
point.”
“Options,” Leona said. “It gives us options. What if there’s a threat out
there that’s below the threshold, so we can’t get to it, but it can get to
us, or someone innocent? Or what if we learn that the beacon does have to be
electronic, and can’t just be people, and an anti-tech cult of cannibals
forms on a colony a thousand years from now, but they’re so remote, no one
can get to them...except for us. Because we left a digital watch on their
planet’s moon 700 years before that?”
“You want us to be the stewards of the galaxy?” Ramses pushed back.
“Well...guardians is taken.”
Ramses blinked a few times before taking a couple deep breaths. “All right,”
he said with the enthusiasm of an entry level worker who didn’t want to lose
his job, but also had his limits. “I’ll get started on it.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Leona insisted. “This isn’t an
order. I thought you wanted it, but you can reject the idea, or delay it, or
whatever you need.”
“No, I want it, but it’s gonna take some time,” Ramses warned. “I don’t
think it will be too much work for me—the automators should take care of the
fabrication while we’re gone—but it took Team Keshida years to develop the
original Project Stargate. To be fair, that was 300 years ago, but clanking
replicators can’t break the laws of physics.”
“Take your time,” Mateo told him. “We’re all here for you, even if that
means staying out of your way.”
Ramses returned to his lab to develop yet another project. The rest of the
team was useless for the rest of the day. They didn’t have nearly enough
reframe-capable vessels, and wouldn’t for another year, if that. Romana
still wanted to sling somewhere.
“I have an idea of where we could go,” Mateo began, “but I don’t want to
overstep my bounds.”
“No, please, ideas welcomed,” his daughter encouraged.
“There’s an island back on Earth. I went there—well, I may have time
traveled, so I don’t know when it was—but it had all sorts of fun things to
do. Scuba diving, boating, parasailing, hiking, E-T-C. The whole thing was
artificial, but looked natural; just perfect. They called it Star Island.”
“Yes, I heard about that,” Romana replied awkwardly. “Boyd, uhh...”
“He talked to you about it,” Mateo guessed. “It’s okay, I know that he
changed from that time when we first met. I think you would like it there as
much as I presume he did. There must have been some reason why he summoned
us there, instead of literally anywhere else.”
“Then, if that’s what everybody wants,” Romana said, trailing off to wait
for others to respond.
“This is your choice, remember?” Leona said.
“And I’m not a dictator, remember?” Romana volleyed.
Leona just smiled at her and nodded.
“Okay, we go to Star Island,” Romana decided, trying to be self-assertive
and commanding.
While most of the group was transitioning to their swimsuits, Leona took the
liberty of initializing the slingdrive array, jumping them all to Earth.
Their belts were floating on the surface of the sea now, magnetically
linked, but not in a stack. Ramses teleported out of his lab, into the
common area. “Where did you just bring us?”
“Moku Hoku,” Romana answered him. “Have you heard of it?”
Ramses seemed annoyed. “I didn’t know we were gonna sling. I kind of needed
the quintessence to conduct my work.”
“Oh, we didn’t think of that,” Romana said apologetically.
“It’s my fault, I should have known,” Leona contended.
“I’m the navigator,” Romana argued. “I’m responsible for this decision.”
Ramses breathed again. “No, it’s okay. I just need two of you to stay behind
so I can run my tests somewhere remotely. Or we can have fun today, and
delay the project.”
Leona walked up to Ramses. “Let’s delay it. You should enjoy yourself too.
You have certainly earned the vacation. It’s gonna take a few centuries to
get it done anyway, right? What’s one extra year?”
Ramses considered it before shaking his head, and walking away. Just as they
were frowning, he spun back around, and transitioned to his own swimsuit.
“Let’s show these hedonistic Earthans how to really cut loose!” They
cheered in unison, and might have popped the champagne to get the party
started if any of them drank.
They first teleported out into the water to make sure the belts were
securely invisible, then left them floating around out there to go have fun
on the island. They would come to regret their carelessness when three of
them turned up missing at the end of the day.
