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Olimpia woke up on a cot in an unfamiliar place. That wasn’t entirely true.
It did feel familiar, but she didn’t recognize her surroundings. It didn’t
feel safe either, but something was telling her that she chose to come here,
and had some idea what she was getting herself into. It was dark and dirty.
The walls were made of concrete, and the height of the two windows suggested
that she was underground.
The door opened. Olimpia’s brother came in, who she hadn’t realized only a
moment ago that they had even reconnected. So she was starting to get her
memories back, which implied that she didn’t have amnesia, just a fogged
mind.
“Hey, you’re back. It’s been another year,” Delfinus pointed out.
“What day is it?” Olimpia asked him.
“It’s hard to keep track of the Earthan calendar all the way in Miridir, but
somewhere in late 2576. Hopefully that’s enough for you to gauge,” he
answered.
Olimpia nodded and sat back down on the bed to massage her forehead. “Unless
I’ve fallen off of my pattern, it should be the second of October. Where are
we?”
“A planet called Desulforudis. It’s in the middle of a civil war, but it’s
winding down because there aren’t very many people left alive.” He filled a
glass of water from the sink in the corner and offered it to her. “Don’t
worry, it’s clean. Leida has been drinking it for years. She chose this
world so people would leave her alone. She can protect herself.”
She accepted the water and chugged it, having not realized how thirsty she
was.
Delfinus sighed and sat down next to her. “Leida feels awful about what
happened. She thinks you have nanites in your brain which complicate the
psychic wards she gave you. She thinks it worked, but the two competing
systems fought for dominance, so your brain shut down to protect itself. She
and I have been living here together for a year. She figured out how to turn
off my time curse. And yes, it had more to do with time than we thought. I
wasn’t narrating people’s thoughts. It was more like I was seeing the
timeline from the outside, and extrapolating private thoughts based on a
pattern of events from history. It’s hard to explain, but now I can control
it. I can talk normal.”
“Good, I’m glad.” Olimpia breathed. “I remember something. We came here with
a little card. It can take us back to Snake Island in the Milky Way galaxy.
Now, we’ll be thousands of years in the past, but they’ll have a way to
propel us back to the future.”
“I can’t leave,” Delfinus began. “Leida and I—ya know it’s been a year, and
the only other people in this world are trying to kill each other, so...”
“You don’t have to explain why you fell in love.” Olimpia was still a little
loopy and dizzy, but she managed to crack a smile. She patted her brother on
the back a couple times before leaving her hand there. “I want you to be
happy, but...here?”
“It seems counterintuitive, but the Desulforudisians had psychic warfare
capabilities, so everyone by now has their own wards. It’s quiet for her.”
“Does it have to be a planet? You know they make private rotating habitats,
right? My friend, Ramses could whip one up in a matter of weeks. That way it
doesn’t have to be so...” She looked around the room again, “hard to
maintain.” That was the best she could come up with to say that this woman’s
home was disgusting.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said, “but as far as the card goes, we never found
anything. If it’s not on your person, it might be lost. It could have fallen
into a storm drain, or something. We looked for it because I couldn’t
remember if you retrieved it, or what.”
Olimpia spent the next half hour hunting for the rendezvous card in her
pockets, her pack, and the floor of the bunker. She was choosing to believe
that it truly was lost, and not that it was taken on purpose. She was
regaining her memories over time, but the last few hours were still a blur.
The card wasn’t there, and she couldn’t get back to the Milky Way on her
own, let alone to Ramosus.
Olimpia walked into the living area of the bunker, where Leida and Delfinus
were sitting together.
“Hey, I’m sorry about the card,” Leida immediately said. “We did look for it
last year, while you were passed out. And I’m sorry about that too.”
“You can make it up to me,” Olimpia said. “There’s some kind of signal
jammer, which even blocks quantum connections. I need that switched off so I
can make a call.”
Leida shook her head. “That’s not me. It’s planetwide. It’s one of the first
things they did when the war started. They didn’t want people making contact
with other colonies, and calling in reinforcements. The control room is
somewhere in a fortress.”
“You tell me where that fortress is, I’ll get myself in there, unless you
also tell me that they have teleportation technology, and potentially
teleportation-suppressing tech.”
“Not that I know of,” Leida said. “I wasn’t aware that you were a
teleporter.”
“I am many things,” Olimpia replied. “The fortress?”
Leida raised both of her eyebrows and simply pointed to the nearest window.
Olimpia moved a chair over to the window, and climbed on it to look outside.
She could easily see what Leida must have been talking about. It was in the
shape of a mountain, but was clearly made of artificial materials. She
stepped back down. “How many people will try to stop me if I break in there?
I’ll need to look for the controls.”
“No people,” Leida answered. “The people are all dead, but the automated
systems will stop you.”
“What kind of automated systems?” Olimpia pressed. “Optical? Thermal?”
“Probably, yeah,” Leida replied. “So unless you can turn invisible...”
Olimpia made herself disappear. “Yeah, I can turn invisible. I have other
tricks, but this one is my specialty.”
“How do you have so many time powers?” Leida questioned.
Olimpia showed herself again. “Time powers aren’t magical. It’s just a
matter of finding and understanding the intersection where time, biology,
and neurology meet. That’s what Ramses said anyway. You two stay here, I’ll
turn off that jammer, and then we’ll all leave. By this time tomorrow, you
should be free. I don’t want to argue about it right now, but there are
other ways to isolate yourself from society. I’ll explain when I return.”
She turned invisible again and teleported away before either could respond.
Olimpia transported herself to the base of the fake mountain. The doors were
wide open, probably because the defensive systems were confident in their
ability to keep unwanted users out, and also because the population of this
planet was estimated to only be in the thousands at this point. She strolled
in, prepared to teleport away if the sensors were sophisticated enough to
detect her.
This turned out to be harder than she hoped. The place was gigantic, but
since no one worked here anymore, a total mess too. She had a hell of a time
just finding the room that controlled the massive signal jammer, and it took
even longer to determine how to shut it off. It was on a split-control
mechanism, which made sense given how vital this tool would have been to the
war effort. Olimpia tried to trip both terminals herself using
teleportation, but it wasn’t enough. They had to be flipped at the exact
same time. So she returned to the bunker to seek help. She only needed one
of them, but both came.
“If you want to do this,” Leida began, “I’ll help and support you, but we
don’t know what’s gonna happen. It looks like this machine does a lot of
things—not only control signals. We don’t know enough about it.”
“Did you steal my rendezvous card?” Olimpia asked her.
“What?” Leida was shocked. “We went over this, no.”
“Then please flip the switch for me,” Olimpia said.
Leida conceded with her face before her voice. “Okay.” She stepped onto the
platform.
Olimpia counted down from three, then together, they turned it off.
Her connection reestablished itself instantly. Olimpia tapped on her wrist
to send a message. At millions of light years, it could take hours to reach
Ramosus, depending on what kind of relay and boosting infrastructure they
had in this galaxy. So the three of them went back to the bunker to wait it
out. Olimpia was hungry, so they ate too. Leida wasn’t a savage. The bunker
wasn’t clean or nice, but she had all the necessary amenities, such as a
simple food synthesizer. And a shower. Olimpia needed a shower too.
As midnight central was approaching, that was when Olimpia started to grow
nervous. Even at this distance, the call should have gone through. Without
that rendezvous card, they were stuck here, and she wasn’t sure she was
buying that it could have slipped down a storm drain, or something. If she
could only remember more of yesterday...
“Is there anyone else you can call? If they’re the only people who can jump
this far, maybe there are other friends who can check in on them?” Delfinus
suggested.
Olimpia consulted her watch for the umpteenth time. “It will take a year for
them to get back to me, but yes, there’s an alternative. I just wish I had
sent them a message at the same time to hedge my bets. That was a stupid
move. Now I’ve wasted all this time.”
“We’ll be here,” Leida assured Olimpia. “It will only be a few minutes for
you, and we’ll be waiting. Tell your other friends to come a few hours early
so I can provide them with a proper welcome; maybe serve some tea. Then when
you show up, you leave whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay,” Olimpia agreed. “Thanks.” She was still suspicious of this woman,
but Leida had been nothing but helpful since they met.
Olimpia set her message to the Vellani Ambassador, knowing that they
wouldn’t receive it until after she had disappeared from the timestream. Her
friends would know this too, so they would not try to make their way here
right away, where they would have to wait anyway.
When Olimpia popped back into existence on October 3, 2577, the VA was on
the ground next to her. And the bunker? The bunker was gone, replaced with a
big, scarred crater.
