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They were still breathing, and the station hadn’t been destroyed, but it was
in no shape to travel. Ramses and Leona spent the rest of the day affecting
repairs, or rather, programming the automators to start working on them
instead. Séarlas was the engineering twin, and could no longer fulfill this
role. Franka wasn’t completely helpless, but she couldn’t do it all on her
own. They weren’t entirely sure if they were still on their time-jumping
pattern since they were waylaid for a year in the quintessence trap, but
come midnight central, they received their answer. When they returned a year
later, the station was still in a spiral shape, but it was functioning
normally, and Franka was eager to test their quintessence drive. While the
team was capable of returning safely inside of a moving vessel, even if it
ultimately moved light years away, slinging instantaneously across the
universe might break that spatial tethering feature. They just didn’t know
yet, so Franka and her crew had to wait it out for months. Now the question
was, where were they going to go?
“What about—?” Mateo began.
“Nope,” Leona argued before he could even finish his sentence. “I don’t
wanna go back to Earth.”
That was not what Mateo was going to say. He was going to suggest
Castlebourne, and he was about to clarify that when he sensed
caution from Leona. She didn’t want to go back there. He saw her eyes
dart over to Franka and Miracle. No, she didn’t want them to go
there. He had to save it so they wouldn’t get suspicious. “Sorry, we just
hadn’t been back in a while. I was hoping to see what Kansas City looked
like now.” Yeah, that sounded like a plausible sentiment.
“Mostly forest,” Ramses claimed, or guessed; whichever.
It had been a long time since Mateo had to spell something out using his
emotions. He decided to use an abbreviation and hope that everyone on the
team understood. He forced himself to feel Pride, and then
Disgust.
The girls were confused, but Ramses got it. “Let’s go to Proxima Doma. We
need to know what happened there anyway.”
“Perfect,” Franka replied before turning her head to face her crew. “Get in
stasis,” she ordered them. It officially consisted only of Miracle and
Octavia, but Dutch wasn’t on Team Matic, so he had just spent the last year
on Spiral Station. The first two reluctantly agreed, but he seemingly didn’t
know if he had to do what she said. “It’s for your protection,” Franka went
on. “These guys are practically immortal, but one miscalculation in the
inertial dampeners, and I’m scraping your guts off the walls. I just cleaned
them, I don’t wanna do it again.”
“It’s not that,” Dutch said sheepishly.
“Are you afraid I won’t wake you back up? We can set a timer for ten
minutes.”
“No.” He would have been kicking the gravel if there were any gravel. “I was
just wondering if I could switch to using...one of the ones next to the
girls.”
“Oh.” Franka was hesitant, for some reason.
“What’s the problem?” Leona questioned. “Are they VIP pods?”
“The P stands for pods,” Romana joked, trying to lighten the
mood.
“They’re not special, but it’s in the crew section,” Franka explained. “He
used one of the guest pods last year when we had to do a contaminant purge.”
She looked back at Dutch. “If you’re asking to use a crew pod, are you
asking to be on the crew?”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.” He gestured towards Team Matic. “Lord
knows I can’t go with them. I assume you will be parting ways eventually.”
Franka sighed, and stared at her once-parents for a moment. “Probably.”
“If we’re voting, I vote yes,” Miracle decided.
“Same,” Octavia concurred.
Franka smiled like a mother letting her child have another cookie before
Thanksgiving dinner. “Okay. Go calibrate your new pod to your body
properties.”
Dutch smiled, and ran off with the ladies.
“You’re getting in a pod too, right?” Mateo asked Franka.
“Of course. I just wanted to warn you that I don’t have enough for everyone,
so I recommend you suit up, and be prepared to teleport. I mean, if the
splat happens, it’ll happen fast...”
“I’ll sync our interfaces with the slingdrive countdown,” Ramses assured
her. “We’ll teleport 500 meters away, whether the inertial dampeners hold or
not.”
“Good idea.” Franka tried to pivot away, but stopped. “And it’s called a
quintessence drive.”
“No, it’s not,” Olimpia defended her decision to coin the term.
As it turned out, they were all worried about nothing. The inertial
dampeners held just fine. The quintessence drive itself went fine too. Or
rather, it didn’t fall apart. Navigation was still bad, which Ramses
suspected had more to do with the coherence gauge. He did have trouble
repairing it as it was based on slightly different technology than the ones
he built for the Vellani Ambassador, and their array. He was confident that
he could fix it now since they had just gone through a test run, which gave
him more data. Fortunately, they were in a safe enough place. It wasn’t
Proxima Doma, but it was another core world. Or worlds, rather.
They were in the Gatewood Collective, orbiting Barnard’s Star, which was
about six light years from Earth. “I thought there weren’t any planets,”
Angela argued. “That’s what everyone has always says about it.” Gatewood was
a special place. While it was relatively close to the seed of civilization,
it was decidedly not a colony. It was sometimes called The Lumber
Yard, because it was only a gigantic store, and permanent habitation was
absolutely not allowed. It was only designated for raw materials, and there
was a good reason for that.
A radius of 50 light years was allocated for the stellar neighborhood. Most
of the colonization efforts were state-sanctioned, by one state or another,
or maybe one of the institutions that used to be a for-profit corporation. A
few of those held on past the transition to a post-scarcity economy because
they had by then become legally classified as utilities. Think Google and
Wikipedia. A growing number of colonists, however, were small factions of
people who wanted to start fresh elsewhere. A select few of these were
allowed to find a home somewhere in the neighborhood, but the vast majority
of them were expected to travel all the way out to the Charter Cloud, or
beyond. Since they were not commissioned by an officially recognized state,
it would be unfair for them to use resources from the solar system. But this
created a problem. If they couldn’t build spaceships, how were they going to
leave? Enter Gatewood. While cyclers were transporting people to and from
the other nearest colonies constantly, no route was as heavily trafficked as
the one to Barnard’s Star. That was the limit to the resource expenditure
for the pioneers. The state agreed to transport them to the Collective, and
house them there temporarily, but they would have to begin construction on
their ship or fleet immediately, and bug out as soon as possible.
“There are no habitable planets,” Leona clarified. “Proxima Doma and
Castlebourne aren’t habitable either, but they’re hospitable enough to make
special arrangements, specifically the domes. Other worlds prefer lava
tubes, or orbiting stations. The planets you’re seeing over there in the
distance—there are four of them total—are low mass and extremely hot. Yeah,
you could technically build a settlement on one of them, but it wouldn’t be
very easy. That’s why they chose this for raw materials. They focus mostly
on the asteroids and comets, but I believe they’re already starting to
stripmine the terrestrial planets too.”
“Sorry, guys,” Ramses said through comms. “Off the mark again.”
“No, I’m curious about this place,” Mateo insisted. “Do we know anyone who
lives here? I know Team Keshida moved on, as did the Ansutahan refugees, or
rather, their descendants, but maybe someone else set up shop since we were
last here?”
“Oh, I don’t have any more information than you,” Leona answered. “There’s a
chance that we know someone, but very few entities live here
permanently. Most aren’t allowed to, so it would just be the few who manage
the allocation of resources, and enforce the stay laws.”
“Stay laws,” Marie repeated. “I like that term.”
“We got company,” Franka said through Ramses’ comms disc. He was the
only one who returned to Spiral Station. The rest of the team was just
floating around nearby, enjoying the view of the red dwarf.
Leona activated her maneuvering thrusters and turned around to see a big,
dark spaceship on close approach. “Yeah, we see. Probably Gatewooders,
trying to figure out where you came from.”
“Yep, that’s what they said,” Ramses confirmed.
“Please teleport back here,” Franka added. “They’re going to sweep the station, and if they don’t find you now, but
see you later, they’re gonna think we’re smugglers.”
They all jumped back. “What do smugglers smuggle these days? Whisky?”
“Resource credits,” Franka answered as they were waiting to be boarded.
“There are all sorts of criteria that determine what Gatewood gives you for
your colonization efforts. Stealing credits gets you the best ores, and more
of it, for higher luxury, if that’s your thing. If you have enough, you
might even be able to buy antimatter...” She trailed off.
A man had suddenly appeared in front of them. “Ain’t nobody getting
antimatter out here.” He pulled off his balaclava. “Fusion for all, but
there’s a refinery 42 light years from here called Rasalhague, if that’s
what you’re looking for instead.”
“We’re square,” Franka said to him. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you
before, and I’m familiar with just about every choosing one in the
timeline.”
The man winced.
“He’s not a chooser,” Leona determined. “He’s a product of The Edge.
He uses tech to teleport.”
“How else would you do it?” the guy asked.
“Are there a lot of teleporters like you?” Mateo pressed.
“This isn’t about me,” the man contended. He bobbled his head, weighing his
options. “But I will answer your question, Gatewood is vast, and some people
here don’t like each other, so we distribute them widely. To keep our
contingency at low numbers, we were given a special command ship that can
teleport somehow. That way, we don’t have to keep one at every single dock
to supervise the pioneers effectively. A few of us can teleport as
individuals. I earned that right.”
“We’re not arguing with you,” Leona promised him. “Just curious. I’m one of
the people who gave you that technology.” She jerked her head towards
Ramses. “He’s on the council too.”
The man stared at her, shocked by this news, but also recognizing that she
could simply be lying. “Prove it.”
Leona receded her nanites until she was completely naked. Then she simply
teleported to the other side of the room. Other members of Team Matic did
the same a few times each, though not naked, because it really didn’t add
anything.
He stared at her again, but with more shocked belief than skepticism this
time. “The New Gods,” he uttered breathlessly, dropping into a kneel and
bow.
“This is what we were afraid of,” Leona said with a heavy sigh, “but I had
to test it, because I needed to know. There were two ends of the spectrum.
We could hoard the time tech forever, or give it all away freely, with no
conditions. We chose something in the middle, of course, because we’re
rational human beings, but...every iteration came with risk. This is one of
the consequences, which I have sheltered myself from for over a century now
since I was so busy with other things.”
“Can we...stop him from worshiping you?” Mateo asked her.
She laughed. “People have been worshiping gods for millennia. They literally
fought wars over it. I can tell him I’m not a god, but if he wants to
believe, he’ll believe.”
“Then let’s take advantage of it,” Franka suggested. She placed herself
between Leona and the man, who immediately stood up, because he didn’t know
if he should revere her too. She wasn’t one of the ones who exhibited
teleportation abilities just now. “You came. You swept. You found nothing.
You left.”
He looked over Franka’s shoulder, at Leona, who was afraid to encourage his
devotion, but she knew that she really didn’t have any choice anymore. She
just shut her eyes and nodded. He lifted his wrist to his lips. “Fall back.
This vessel has full access to our resources. Anywhere they want to go, let
them go there. Anything they want to take, let them have it. Disconnect once
everyone is out of the umbilicus. I’ll jump back to the bridge before you’re
out of range.”
“Thank you,” Franka said to him.
“I would do anything for you.” He didn’t say it to Franka, though, but to
Leona.
“What you can do is use the tech wisely; not to hurt people.”
“Always,” he agreed.
“Thank you. You can go now,” Leona all but ordered. Once he was gone, she
physically turned Franka around by the shoulders. “I don’t care if we end up
lost in M87, or NGC 253.” She also looked over at Ramses. “Get this thing
out of this star system, and you will never come back for the rest of time,
or so help me God, you will wish I wasn’t your mother in any reality.
Do you understand me?”
“Do I seem like the kind of person who would abuse this kind of power?”
Franka asked.
“You absolutely do look like that,” Leona said bluntly.
“She stared at her once-mother for a moment, not breaking eye contact, even
when she spoke to Ramses. “Spool it up Rambo. I guess we’re leaving.”
Ramses did what he could to fix the quintessence drive before joining the
rest of his team at the lower tip of the station. Franka asked to handle
programming the sling herself. She just sounded bitter and annoyed at the
time, but it turned out to be something else. During the interim year, she
had programmed the repairs to make it more modular, so sections could be
separated from each other. She released the section the team was on, and
teleported the rest of the station away. Before they could track where it
had gone, they saw a burst of technicolors in the distance, and realized
that she had indeed slung away to parts unknown.
“Oh, crap!” Ramses cried. “She still has my forge core!” Since he kept
losing access to his labs, he kept having to rebuild them from scratch. The
forge core made it easier to do this. He always kept it somewhere in normal
3D space. The data drive module stored the specifications necessary to
rebuild anything and everything from scratch, and an AI to process it all.
It also came with starter nanites, and some other bells and whistles. He
left it in the timestream so it could fix Spiral Station up while he
couldn’t even be around to answer Franka’s questions.
“Is it unlocked?” Leona asked.
“Yes, it’s unlocked. I thought we could trust them.”
Angela looked over her shoulder. “I guess we’re going to land on one of
those planets after all, huh?”
“No,” Leona reasoned. “We’ll go to the intake station, or whatever they call
it these days. We couldn’t have been cast away somewhere better. We need
resources.”
