It only took Omega and Valencia a couple of weeks to figure out what went
wrong with the Nexus, and solve it. Apparently, Vitalie’s use of the network
while traveling through time did screw things up, but she wasn’t the only
one responsible. A Mark II Nexus, being one that was constructed by the
people who invented them in the first place, could handle this complication.
It would have been able to compensate for the temporal interference, and
sort of reboot itself. The one that Omega built is just as good as these in
most respects, but there are some notable differences; differences which the
average person would not be able to detect. After careful examination of all
the parts and systems, they were able to correct the issue, but only for
this particular machine. They’re trying to get to the one on Extremus, which
never received the correction. If they could just establish contact with
someone on board, the current temporal engineer could probably get it done
if they walked them through it, but even their communications are down. They
need a creative solution. In three months, they’ve yet to come up with one.
“We can go to Earth first. From there, we can make contact with someone who
can help us,” Spirit suggests.
“Do you know of anyone in particular in this day and age?” Tinaya questions.
“No,” Spirit admits. “The historical records don’t go this far.”
“What about Team Keshida?” Belahkay offers.
“Gatewood isn’t in the directory,” Omega explains as he’s pointing to the
screen. “I don’t know why not. Maybe they cloaked themselves, or...they
moved. A few of these Nexa are in weird places in the galaxy, which could be
controlled by friends; maybe even Keshida, but maybe not. I wouldn’t feel
comfortable reaching out to them. The Exins think that Verdemus was
destroyed. We cannot disabuse them of this misconception, so we cannot risk
connecting with any mysteries.”
“I can do it,” Aristotle volunteers for the umpteenth time.
“Remember what happened the last time you tried?” Lilac asks.
Aristotle nods. “I was young, and ignorant.”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” Niobe reminds him.
“I have the tools that I need now,” Aristotle insists.
“The timogramen,” Tinaya realizes. “You’ve learned something about it.”
“Not me,” Aristotle clarifies. “Vaska never stopped studying it. She
understands how it works now. It interferes with temporal manipulation when
not accounted for, so all you have to do is account for it. You have to know
how much timogramen radiation is in your system, how much there is nearby,
the temperature and barometric pressure, the position of the sun and
celestial bodies, the precise distance of the destination, and a few other
minor factors. But she thinks she can do it. She’s been building something.”
“She’s been building what, a timogramen detector?” Valencia asks him.
Aristotle bobs his head. “She calls it a temporal radiation compensator, but
like I said, it has to include a whole lot more in the calculations. Plus,
it has to be calibrated for what you’re actually trying to accomplish. If
you’re just trying to teleport, it’s one thing, but where I’m going, it’s a
whole different thing.”
“Wait, but that’s true,” Tinaya begins. “We teleport on this planet without
issue.”
Valencia sighs. “It’s not without issue. The relays just seem to work okay,
because most of the time, people are only making short, simple jumps. But
we’re doing a lot of maintenance on them. The old relays, before the
explosion, were no better.”
“What do you mean, did something happen?” Tinaya asks.
“The Captain. I don’t have the whole story, because I’m not in the loop
anymore, but just before the mirror exploded, she tried to hustle the kids
through. They evidently didn’t make it to where they were going. I’m not
sure how Lataran eventually made her way back, but she was gone for a year.
The Ship Superintendent has to step in.”
Tinaya looks over at her husband. “Arqut, is this true?”
“I guess I forgot to tell you about that. The second lieutenant assured me
that it was only temporary. She seemed to know something, and it seemed
better not to press it. A year later, she showed up.”
“Without the kids,” Tinaya figures. She looks at Aristotle and Niobe now,
who are also hiding the truth. “Why does it feel like I’m the only one in
the dark here?”
“I am too,” Spirit assures her.
“As am I,” Belahkay agrees.
She’s kind of used to it at this point. There were a ton of things that
Lataran didn’t tell her about while she was First Chair, even though she
initially expected to be privy to everything upon being elected. Their
persistent link to this planet was one of those secrets. Full transparency
has never been assumed on the ship, and in fact, would be a dangerous goal
to seek. Ignorance Tolerance is a subject that students study nearly every
year. When it comes to time travel, no one is entitled to know everything,
and children have to learn to deal with it maturely. This is where they
memorize Leona’s Rules for Time Travel. She decides to let it go. “Where’s
Vaska?”
“Her lab is in the megablock,” Lilac replies. “She likes to work near a lot
of other people, like she did on Gatewood.”
Tinaya grabs Aristotle by the hand, and teleports him back down to Verdemus
without a word. She sends a quick message to Vaska, who drops a pin. The two
of them walk across the courtyard, and enter the lab.
“Miss Leithe, it’s been a while. How have you been?”
“I’ve been all right. Just trying to get home.”
Vaska’s gaze darts over to Aristotle.
“I told her about what you’ve been working on,” he divulges.
“Well, it’s ready. I mean...it’s ready to be tested.”
“Show me,” Tinaya requests.
Vaska opens up a cabinet behind her, and takes out a fairly large box. “It’s
just a prototype, so it doesn’t look pretty, but I’m confident in its
functionality.” She sets the box down, and removes the lid to reveal a
plethora of gadgets, gizmos, and innerworkings. In addition to the expected
wires and antenna, there are gears turning each other around, like a
timepiece. Tubes are ready to transport fluids between an exposed logic
board, and some other apparatus. Two buttons that kind of look like they
were originally from a mechanical computer keyboard are rhythmically going
up and down in an alternating pattern. LEDs are blinking, and a small
display is showing status data. Vaska extends a tiny spyglass to have it
standing straight up towards the ceiling. She lifts up what kind of looks
like a tiny microphone, but Tinaya recognizes it to be a portable
radiometer, probably full-spectrum, in this case. The familiar crackling
sound that a radiometer makes when it’s picking up radiation begins to
overwhelm the soft buzzing sound that’s been coming from somewhere inside.
“Well,” Tinaya says. “I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t know why I
thought coming here would be helpful.”
“I can take a look at it.” Valencia turns out to have been behind them.
“I’ll make sure it works, and if it doesn’t, make it so it does, or maybe
just improve upon it.”
“It’s certainly big enough,” Vaska acknowledges. “I would love to streamline
it. What if Mister Al-Amin could wear it on his wrist at all times?” She
proposes.
“Does he need that?” Tinaya wonders. “I thought the only issue is when he’s
coming from Verdemus. If he’s anything like his father, he’ll be doing a lot
of traveling.”
“He is standing right here,” Aristotle states the obvious. “And he considers
this to be his home, so he’ll probably frequently return.”
“You’ll need this at any rate,” Vaska explains. “As you said, it’s your
home. The temporal radiation that our respective bodies have been exposed to
would eventually dissipate given enough time away. But you’re both a
choosing one, and you were born here. “It’s a part of you, and it always has
been. You probably can’t survive without it. I imagine you’ll have to return
here whether you want to or not, or grow the timogramen elsewhere. I
hesitate to suggest the latter.”
“Why is that?” Valencia questions.
Vaska is reluctant. “It’s not harmful. It’s time. Temporal energy and
radiation are properties of time, and time isn’t harmful. Except that it is.
Time leads to entropy. It’s what kills us, and destroys what’s not alive.
The timogramen is dangerous. It could be weaponized, and abused...misused.
It would probably serve as an invasive species if allowed to spread to other
worlds.”
“How did it evolve in the first place?” Valencia presses. “Is it just a
coincidence that it grows here?”
“That I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty sure that you did this. You may have
created it when you came here. All the teleportation, and the parallel
dimensions...Tinaya’s glass skin thing. Plus, the way I understand it, this
planet was annihilated years ago, and then someone went back in time to
prevent it. That may have had unforeseen consequences, I really don’t know.
Fittingly, I need more time for my research. One thing I know for sure is
that it’s not perfectly natural, but there has to be something here, or we
would already find the stuff on Earth, and anywhere else that time travelers
have visited.”
“This is all fascinating,” Aristotle interjects, “but what does it have to
do with me, and the job that I need to get done? I have to travel to
Extremus, and get that Nexus working, so we can reconnect. Does this do
that; that’s all I need to know.”
“That’s not all that I need to know,” Valencia contends. “You will be taking
me back, and I need to feel comfortable and safe with that. The questions
that I’m asking now are directly related to me reaching that level of trust
in your abilities.”
“Fair enough,” Aristotle relents.
“Can that thing make him more precise and reliable?” Valencia goes on,
pointing to the contraption.
“On a planetary level, yes,” Vaska answers. “What happened to him before,
when he went back in time, and landed way off course, that shouldn’t happen
again.”
What does that mean, on a planetary level?”
Vaska clears her throat, and starts touching things on the compensator, and
moving some things around as she’s explaining. “The spyglass is a modified
form of the Jayde Spyglass, which is why it has any hope of seeing thousands
of light years away. But relative to other stars, planets don’t really move.
Of course they do—everything moves—but compared to the reframe speeds of the
Extremus? It’s nothing. These tubes here feed clarified timogramen juice
into the contaminant filter to capture and counteract the temporal radiation
that’s bombarding the compensator while it’s in this environment. There’s a
limit to that, which is dependent upon its size. The pure timogramen juice
can’t absorb enough background radiation to protect the other instruments
for the precise targeting that you’re looking for. Therefore, we can shoot
for a planet, but not a ship.”
“What if you built a bigger one?” Tinaya decides to suggest. “You could be
more precise then, couldn’t you?”
Vaska winces. “With the bigger one, you can specify a more precise target on
the planet, but still not a ship traveling at reframe speeds away from us.
At a certain point, size doesn’t matter. A larger surface area means more
radiation, which means more clarified timogramen juice is necessary, and you
end up with diminishing returns.”
“You didn’t say a bigger one,” Aristotle points out. “You said the bigger
one. Did you already build it?”
“That’s what I built first,” Vaska answers. “This one is the prototype
portable model. I didn’t think that you would want to use the other one,
because it’s a power hog, and for my part, I don’t know why it would be
necessary.”
“It still needs his temporal ability, right?” Valencia poses. “It just helps
people do what they already do?”
Vaska shakes her head. “No, this one only works with him. The bigger model
too. It would be useless for anyone else’s power. But yeah, he still gotta
do what he does.”
Valencia nods. “We need the precision. Aristotle has to aim for a mining
site in one of the star systems where the Extremus deploys a fleet of
resource automators. We’ve been getting a lot of data from Project Topdown,
so I know where those are going to be.” She consults her watch. “But if
we’re gonna intercept them, we have to leave today. The next proverbial gas
station isn’t for another proverbial hundred miles.”
“It’s ready when you are,” Vaska promises. “It’s in my garage, and it’s on
wheels.”
“Do you wanna say goodbye to your husband first?” Tinaya asks Valencia.
Valencia taps on her neck. “Omega?” She waits for a few seconds. “Bye.”
Vaska leads them into the garage. Aristotle uses his manly strength to
pretend to pull the giant temporal radiation compensator out, and onto the
sidewalk while the electric motor does the actual heavy lifting. The pallet
jack drops the machine onto the grass. A few of Omega’s clones approach out
of curiosity. Vaska and Valencia hook it up to the grid, run through a
diagnostic, and a form of a preflight check. She and Aristotle agree to take
the risk, knowing that it could kill them, and then they unceremoniously
turn on the machine, gather the necessary data, and have Aristotle interface
with it. Once it’s at full power, he receives the literal green light, and
they both disappear.
“I hope it worked.”
“Let’s go find out.” She takes Vaska by the hand, and teleports up to the
moon base. They walk into the Nexus lab to find Valencia and Aristotle
waiting for them.
“Welp,” Valencia begins. “It technically worked, but we were off schedule by
about four hundred years, and needed to build a couple stasis pods.”
Vaska frowns. “I must have missed something. I’m sorry.”
“It’s quite all right, right?” Lataran says as she’s coming out of the
control room, eying Valencia. “Now. I’ve been cooped up on that ship
forever, and I haven’t been here in a long time. Who here is gonna give me a
tour?”
