Using a communications array that the Maramon built, Leona was able to make
contact with Hogarth Pudeyonavic. She was aware of the membrane thickener
that the Angry Fifth Divisioner had deployed, and was working on a way to
get rid of it. In the meantime, there was another way out of this universe.
Like many other places, time travel was illegal here. And like all other
places, there were exceptions. The way A.F.’s machine worked—which Leona now
believed should be called a quintessence multiplier, or maybe a
concentrator—what used to be known as dark matter would consolidate over the
boundaries of the target universe. It would seal up any dark energy leaks,
and tighten the borders. What was unclear as of yet was whether this
happened like blood platelets clotting a wound from the inside, or more like
a bandage wrapping it up from the outside.
The fact was, this process happened in realtime, starting from the moment
that it was initiated. It did not extend backwards in time, which meant that
the kasma was still accessible from any point in history. Hogarth agreed to
send them back just long enough to let them cross over through the aperture,
where they could go on their merry way. The only condition was that they not
attempt to change the past in any way, even to stop A.F. from completing his
mission. If Hogarth ended up solving the problem using such a technique,
then that would be her decision, and it would happen on
her timetable.
Hogarth could not, or would not, send them back in time in the little
ship that Leona had engineered for them. The suspicion was that Hogarth
wanted to use the skeleton key that it was equipped with for herself, which
was surely okay, and a fair tradeoff for them. In another deal, they also
agreed to take the hybrid, Aclima with them. She didn’t want to give them
her reasons, but she promised that she harbored no ill will towards them,
nor any nefarious plans for the multiverse. As payment for her ticket
to the past, she gave Past!Mateo his own suit; helmet and all, so he too
could survive wherever they ended up going.
Once they returned to May 30, 2451, the group was free to leave Fort
Underhill. They were planning on crossing the kasma, and entering
Salmonverse through its own aperture, but decided that they wanted to
reunite with the rest of the team first. Now that they were already in the
kasma, it was better to return to Stoutverse now, or they may never get
another opportunity. They would still find a chance to help Past!Mateo
complete his mission on Verdemus, even if that meant having Carlin relapse
them to the Goldilocks Corridor in the 2420s and 30s. That was assuming the
Maramon wasn’t lying about its significance anyway.
They were floating in the kasma now, listening to their past selves in the
Transit deal with A.F.’s wrath. “We have to get on that train,” the present
day version of Angela determined. She was speaking through the laserlink.
They needed to be able to communicate with each other without interfering
with the timeline, so outgoing signals from their comm discs had to be
disabled. Laser communication was a great way to send a signal to a specific
target—or in this case, targets—without worrying about anyone else
intercepting it.
“All right, we teleport to the caboose,” Leona decided. “Stay on the outside
for now, and find something to hold onto for a few seconds. I’ll teleport in
while invisible, and scope out the car, then signal the rest of you.”
“We don’t have much time,” Marie pointed out, realizing that their past
selves were nearing the end of their argument with A.F., and would be
bugging out soon.
“We don’t need it.”
Past!Mateo took Aclima’s hand, and they all teleported to what they believe
to be the outer hull of the rear car of the Transit. Instead, they found
themselves inside of it. They had gotten pretty good at precision, so it
didn’t make much sense that they would be off target. Sure, it was only
meters too far, but it was weird just the same.
Future!Mateo pulled his helmet off, as did everyone else. “What the hell
happened?”
“Let’s just be happy that no one is in here to catch us,” Marie said.
Leona started to look up and down the car. “No, this is weird. Hold on.” She
looked through the window. “There’s the next car.” She jogged over to the
other end. “There’s the equilibrium. I gathered information about this thing
while we were on our way to Stoutverse. Every car is the same size; roughly
thirteen by fifty-five by twenty-one meters. This is much shorter. I would
have seen it on the floor plans if this were a thing. I think...” She
trailed off.
“We’re invisible,” Aclima guessed.
“I think so. There are meant to be fifty-five cars, but this could be the
fifty-sixth.”
“It’s like it was made for us,” Angela mused.
“Check out this caboose!” Past!Mateo joked.
They felt a lurch as the Transit flew into overdrive in a desperate play to
escape the kasma. Olimpia would soon use the Sangster Canopy to cleave a
canal between the two universes to avoid being captured by A.F. All the
future versions of the team would have to do now was sit tight, and wait to
catch up with their own time period, effectively closing their loops. If
they lay low, and waited patiently in secret, they could reveal themselves
in four days, and get back to work with the knowledge of the quintessence
consolidation machine. They could also engineer a new skeleton key, which
should allow them to somehow return to Salmonverse, and make their way to
Verdemus. Navigation was going to be the biggest issue, but that was a
problem for tomorrow. For now, they just had to be concerned with life
support for Aclima for four years.
The secret fifty-sixth car was shorter than all the others, yes, but it was
slightly taller. At twenty-four meters, instead of twenty-one, they were
able to look through a window to see the rest of the Transit. Wow, it really
was inspired by trains. This would be called the cupola. It also had a
window in the back, which was showing them what was happening behind. While
most of them were watching the ship race through the kasma canal, Past!Mateo
was looking in the opposite direction. “Uh, guys? Something looks wrong
here, so maybe you oughta look?”
“What is it?” Leona slid over to check out what he was seeing. Brilliant
technicolor lights were illuminating the walls of Salmoverse and Fort
Underhill. Olimpia’s magical powers were separating them only for long
enough to let the Transit pass through. It wasn’t ever meant to be a
permanent canal, and in fact, that was probably not physically possible. The
walls were closing back in on themselves, and this appeared to be happening
faster and faster. She lifted her watch to her face, and kept an eye on the
timer. “It’s accelerating. We’re not gonna make it.”
“That’s impossible,” Angela said. “We already know that we’ll make it. We’ve
done this before.”
Leona shook her head. “The Transit will make it, but not every car...not
this one, and maybe not the next one over. I don’t know. There is a margin
of error in my head math that I am not comfortable with.”
“We need to teleport to the next car,” Marie assumed.
“I’ve been trying,” Future!Mateo said. “We can’t do it, not now. I think it
Olimpia’s power is blocking us.”
“Or the kasma, or the canal, or the bulk, or the quintessence. There’s no
way to know what the problem is.”
“Fine, then let’s just walk over there,” Marie offered.
“Can’t do it!” Aclima declared from one level down. “The door’s locked!”
Leona looked back at the advancing walls of doom. “Brace for impact!”
Suddenly, the door that Aclima was trying to get through opened from
the other side. A man stepped through. “What’s going on in here?”
Before anyone could answer, a burst of technicolors flooded the room from
the outside, and threw him across the car, and down a couple of levels.
Everyone else fell down too, though not quite as hard. Leona got herself to
her feet, and raced down to shut the door, but it didn’t seem necessary.
They were exposed to the harsh environment of the equilibrium, but doing
just fine. The atmosphere wasn’t trying to escape. Well, there had to be a
reason it was called an equilibrium in the first place, right? Still,
she closed the door, and reached down to check on Aclima, who had hit her
head, but was conscious, and recovering quickly.
Everyone checked on each other, and seemed all right as well, having
suffered only superficial wounds. They found a cot in a nearby compartment
to lay the man down. Leona looked down at him with a sense of familiarity.
“I know him.” She pulled her handheld device out, and started swiping
through their list of known persons.
“That’s not important right now,” Marie told her. “We’re drifting.”
“So go check the systems,” Leona ordered. You’re tech-savvy enough. I
shouldn’t have to do everything.”
“I know who that is,” Past!Mateo said as both Angela and Marie were walking
down to the control terminal. “I remember him from your memories, back when
I didn’t exist. That’s the guy in the secret seventh pocket dimension on the
Elizabeth Warren. His brother was the one who killed Annora Ubiña.”
Leona nodded. “Right. But it wasn’t his brother. It was his cousin.” She
found what she was looking for in the list. “Jarrett. That makes him
Hadron.”
Hadron’s eyes were still closed while he swallowed, and adjusted his
position on the cot slightly. “That’s me, Hadron Grier.”
“What are you doing here?” Leona asked.
Aclima slipped her hand under Hadron’s head, and pulled it back out. There
was a little bit of blood on it. “No more questions.”
“That was one question,” Leona clarified.
“I’m fine,” Hadon said, sitting up, and allowing Aclima to move the pillow
up to the wall for him to lean back on. “My medical nanites will heal the
wound. To answer your question, I never thought I would see you again. My
cousin was sent to prison for murder, but since he did it for me, it was
decided that I wasn’t completely innocent. I was sentenced to house arrest
for three years. That was fine, I was finally free of the tyranny of Durus.
Still, when a magical door suddenly opened up on a wall that wasn’t supposed
to have a door, I took the opportunity to cross over.”
“You worked in The Crossover,” Leona noted.
“For a while, until I found myself taking up a righteous cause in Universum
Originalis. I should have known that I would end up in a place like this.
What goes around, comes around, eh?”
Aclima pulled her suit’s drinking tube past her neck, and hovered over him
to let him have some water.
“Thanks, love,” he said. “Are you gonna take me back to jail?”
Leona scoffed. “Ha, what? That was, like, 280 years ago.”
“Oh.” Only now did he get a look around. “I don’t understand what this is. I
was in the caboose. I thought maybe you were a boarding party, but this
appears to be of Transit architecture.”
“This is the real caboose,” Future!Mateo explained to him. “It was invisible
for some reason.”
“I see.” Hadron took another sip from Aclima’s water tube, which from the
right angle, looked a little like he was breastfeeding from her.
Angela came back. “Interestingly, this thing can operate on its own power.
We think that we can follow the Transit to Stoutverse, but we’ll never catch
up. It doesn’t go fast enough.”
“That’s okay,” Leona said. “Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang. Plot a course,
and yalla.”
“We’ve already done that,” Angela replied.
“Great. Mateo?” Leona asked
“Which one of us?”
“Both,” she answered. “Go explore this place. Find out how many cots we
have, and see if you can find a food synthesizer, or anything else we can
use.”
They did end up finding a food synthesizer, as well as a number of cots,
though they didn’t really need them all that badly. The most important
discovery was an advanced industrial synthesizer, which was compatible
enough with the datadrive that Leona already had with her regarding the
skeleton key. She was able to build a new one in a matter of hours, which
allowed them to cross over into Stoutverse without having to piggyback on
the Transit proper as it entered. They didn’t even have to worry about
laying low until they closed their loop in this world either. That
navigation issue randomly spit them out of the bulk on June 12, 2464, which
wasn’t that much later than when they left.
They were able to reconnect with Ramses and Olimpia, who updated them on
everything they had been dealing with. The government wanted to use a
Westfall visitor as a human bioweapon, and since they couldn’t accomplish
that, they just took his blood to develop a serum, which they distributed to
the whole population. Despite it seemingly being over, Westfall still
wouldn’t let the man go home. They offered to try to take him back instead
using their new bulk traveling machine. That seemed to be enough to break
reality, though. When Dutch Haines attempted to follow them through one of
the doors of the bunker, he disappeared, hopefully back home where he
belonged anyway. But there was no way to know. Oh well. They were still
going to leave, but they weren’t going alone. Kineret asked to tag along,
but this was a complicated situation, because technically, due to her
position as the Primus’ lieutenant, it was considered going AWOL. They
needed to approach this with care and caution.
