chapter three
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Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio
non-congruent
“I’ve finally decided how I’m going to kill all of you,” Philosophus declared with appalling cheer.
Raibert Kaminski froze in his seat, more from surprise than shock or horror. His mouth hung open, his head tilted to the side, and a piece of glistening tuna nigiri hovered before his lips, pinched tight in his chopsticks. Synthoids didn’t require food, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy it. Although a casual observer might have been excused for concluding that his expression was not one of “enjoyment” at the moment.
Philosophus’ avatar had appeared rather abruptly on the other side of the command table in Raibert’s virtual vision. He wore no tuxedo today. Instead, he was clad in chain mail, his beard, freed of its braids, flowed down his broad chest in all its unruly majesty, and his battle ax was slung across his back.
He still wore his horned pilot’s helmet, of course.
A bead of soy sauce condensed along the bottom of the tuna and dripped onto Raibert’s pants. He frowned as a patch of his uniform’s fabric became waterproof, and the soy slid off his leg to splatter on the floor. He set down his chopsticks and wiped away the few remaining droplets with his napkin.
“Philo, can this wait? I’m trying to eat here.”
“Oh, but it’s a good one.” The AI grinned like a proud father. “In fact, it may be the best I’ve ever come up with.”
“Uh-huh.” Raibert glanced around the time machine Kleio’s wide, circular bridge at his fellow team members, both of whom—unlike Philo—wore the same greenish-gray Gordian Division uniform he wore.
Benjamin Schröder sat in a seat folded out from the room’s outer wall with a dozen images and reports glowing in midair around him. Elzbietá Schröder stood with a set of virtual controls suspended in front of her, and both were clearly engrossed in their own tasks.
Heavily engrossed, he noted with a small measure of annoyance as neither of them even bothered to look up.
He sighed.
“Okay, fine. I’ll bite. How are you going to kill us?”
“Can’t say.” Philo chuckled. “It’s got to be a surprise.”
“Then why bring it up?”
“To build anticipation. It’s the end of your campaign, so I’ve got to up my game. Besides, I think I’ve been going too soft on you three.” His grin widened. “The climax should be more . . . dramatic.”
Raibert rolled his eyes.
“It’s not another cyber-lich, is it?” Elzbietá asked, still without looking up. “You know I hate fighting those things. Half my spells don’t work because of all their immunities.”
“My dear, you have nothing to fear.” Philo stood, placed a hand on his chest, and bowed theatrically. “The finale won’t be anything so mundane.”
“All right then.” Elzbietá smiled slightly as she looked at him at last. “Sounds like fun.”
“Or rather”—Benjamin’s eyes flicked up from his work—“sounds like I should start building a new character. Again.”
“Oh, I’m sure it won’t be that bad.” Elzbietá’s tone was downright perky. “Right, Philo?”
The avatar’s grin became inhumanly wide.
“See?” Benjamin pointed at the grin in question. “He’s going to kill off my character again.”
“You and everyone else, actually.”
“Oh, come on, Philo.” Elzbietá stepped away from her controls and patted the avatar on the shoulder. Her wetware interfaced with the control room’s infostructure, and his armor jostled even though her hand had touched only air. “You wouldn’t wipe out the whole party, would you?”
The edges of Philo’s grin reached his ears. Literally.
“Would you?”
“Oh, yes he would.” Raibert grimaced.
“I guess it’s time to say goodbye to Hector Carnifex the Second,” Benjamin grumped. “You can both say hello to Hector Carnifex the Third if you survive.”
“Why don’t you create a whole new character, instead?” Elzbietá asked. “Maybe try out a different class while you’re at it?”
“Not interested. I already went through that hassle once, thank you very much, and I’m not doing it again. Pouring over that many spreadsheets is not my idea of relaxation.”
“Solar Descent’s character creator isn’t that bad.”
“Says the woman who makes spreadsheets for fun,” Benjamin pointed out with a lopsided smile.
Elzbietá looked at the overhead and whistled guiltily.
“So you’re not going to tell us?” Raibert asked.
Philo shook his head.
“Not even a hint?”
Benjamin harrumphed as he repositioned one of his reports, signaling his exit from the conversation.
“Hmmmm.” Philo stroked his beard. “Okay, maybe one. It involves non-Euclidean geometry.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Raibert glanced at Elzbietá, who shrugged her shoulders.
“I can’t make it too obvious, can I?”
“Well, I guess it can wait until we’re back home.” Raibert picked up his chopsticks and raised the same piece of nigiri to his mouth, then paused again as a noise from Benjamin distracted him.
“Hmmmm?”
Raibert gave him a sideways glance.
“Mmmm. Hmmm? Mm-hmmmm!”
Raibert sighed and set the tuna down again.
“What is it, Doc?”
“Hmm?” Benjamin looked up.
“Are you still going over Kuebiko’s report?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re better off waiting until we complete our own survey. There’s a real risk of drawing the wrong conclusions from data that incomplete.”
“I know. But . . . ”
“Sounds like you found something interesting despite all that,” Raibert observed.
“I might have.”
“Care to share with the rest of us?”
“I can if you want.” Benjamin shrugged. “It’s only a hunch.”
“Well, I tend to like your hunches. So let’s hear it.”
“Sure.” Benjamin flicked one of the reports with a finger. It vanished from his side and rematerialized in the center of the command table.
“What am I looking at?” Raibert asked.
Benjamin joined the others around the table and enlarged the color-coded globe.
“The population center densities of Universe-T4’s Earth, as captured by the Kuebiko. Well, what very little of it we have.”
Raibert nodded.
Prior to his own adventures with the Gordian Knot, no one had even known there were other universes. The entirely new math Philo and Kleio, the TTV’s nonsentient program, had crunched in the wake of the Knot’s collapse had changed that. They’d been forced to figure out how to navigate through this newly discovered transdimensional space between universes—now referred to as the transverse—to get home to their own True Present from the limbo left by the dissolution of Elzbietá’s home universe. As a result, SysGov now knew not only that other universes existed, but how to reach them by crossing the transverse.
It had taken a while for the full realization of just how close the Knot had brought SysGov’s entire universe to destruction. And then it had taken another while to create and staff Gordian Division to keep that from ever happening again. In that interim, ART and the limited number of TTVs that had been built purely for research had remained SysGov’s only time travelers. Horrified by the notion that it might have created child universes by its operations, it had dispatched expeditions, armed with the impeller modifications for transdimensional travel, back to the temporal coordinates of some of its major incursions. Raibert was reasonably certain ART had intended to prove that it hadn’t created any. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what it had found at all.
Their very first expedition had discovered the universe now designated “Alexandria-1,” created by ART’s “rescue” of the Great Library. Universe-A1’s True Present was nowhere near as technologically advanced as SysGov, and the scar the Library raid had left on its collective psyche would be hard to overexaggerate.
In many ways, finding A1 had been the final nail in the coffin of ART’s time travel program. It had conclusively proved the model of transverse travel—and of the possibility of transdimensional fratricide—that Kleio’s crew had devised. That had been enough to finish off any obstacles to the creation of Gordian Division, and aside from one or two TTVs designed for delving truly deep into Earth’s geological past, every one of its time machines had been handed over to Gordian.
Vice-Commissioner Schröder had continued the exploration process ART had begun, although he’d confined his efforts to the True Present, but he’d also been deeply involved in the debate over how to approach Universe-T2, the other time-traveling universe, controlled by the System Cooperative Administration. Some members of SysGov had favored just leaving T2 completely alone. After all, the Admin had done its level best to prevent Raibert and his team from saving his universe. Surely there would have been a certain poetic justice in letting them destroy their own?
Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder had thought that was a terrible idea, for a lot of reasons. For one, it was virtually identical to the one from which he himself had sprung. More importantly, however, they couldn’t know—not ahead of time—what would happen to any neighboring universes if one of them blew itself up. And that didn’t even consider the billions of human beings—and star systems, and galaxies—that would share in the destruction.
But SysGov had been in no hurry, given how Raibert’s first contact with that other Admin had gone, and so it had taken time to carefully consider how it would approach this Admin. During the time it spent thinking, Klaus-Wilhelm’s survey teams had continued to spread out through the newly discovered multiverse—cautiously, given how little they yet knew about its structure and the Knot’s evidence that humans truly could induce universe-ending catastrophes—and the TTV Kuebiko had been assigned to survey this one when it was discovered.
Kuebiko’s crew had known they were stepping into a universe with an advanced human civilization, but no one back home had thought it was advanced enough for time travel. All that had changed when they detected a foreign chronoton impeller coming online. The Kuebiko team had reclassified the universe as T4—the fourth universe on record to have confirmed time travel—and then aborted the rest of their mission. They’d returned to SysGov to report their findings and would have received a follow-up mission, but both T3 and T4 assignments had been placed on the back burner. Instead SysGov had finally decided how it would establish contact with the Admin and that Gordian Division would be given responsibility for transverse security as well as for policing time travel in SysGov’s own universe.
Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder had even better reason than most to distrust the Admin, which was why he had devoted the lion’s share of his resources—and personnel—to keeping an eye on their belligerent multiverse neighbor. It hadn’t been until months after Kuebiko’s initial visit (and months of the Gordian Division’s ongoing expansion) that resources had begun to free up for proper surveys of T3 and T4.
Which was why Raibert now found himself looking down at the imagery of T3’s population centers.
“So what’s caught your eye?” he asked.
“This.” Benjamin overlaid SysGov’s Earth with T4’s and adjusted the display to highlight the discrepancies. Then he zoomed in on a single North American city: what was still known in SysGov as Washington, DC.
Raibert raised an eyebrow.
“Watch what happens when I pull up the construction dates for the oldest building still standing back home.”
Numbers sprinkled over the city, and Raibert frowned. It took him a minute to realize where Benjamin was leading him, but when he did, both eyebrows shot up.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
Elzbietá crossed her arms and squinted at the display. After a moment, she shrugged.
“Okay, guys. I give up. What am I missing? The cities are laid out differently, but we already knew that would be the case.”
“True.” Benjamin nodded. “But it’s how they’re the same that’s more interesting.”
“All the modern thirtieth-century structures are different,” Raibert said. “Which we expected, but some of the older structures are the same.”
“Some,” Benjamin agreed. “But not all.”
“Such as?” Elzbietá asked.
“There’s no White House.”
“Okay,” Elzbietá said cautiously. “That’s significant. But it could just mean the divergence point for this universe is before its construction.”
“Normally, I might agree, despite how early in Washington’s history the White House was built in both our universe and the Admin’s. But there are what look like the remains of the Pentagon.”
“Is that what they called it?” Raibert chuckled.
“Yes, Raibert,” Benjamin replied grumpily. “That’s what they called it.”
“Kind of a no-effort name, don’t you think?”
Benjamin frowned at their team leader, then looked rather pointedly back to Elzbietá.
“Anyway. This isn’t a case of the White House never being built. It’s a case of its having been destroyed.”
“Aha!” Elzbietá snapped her fingers. “So my clever husband scores again!”
“Well, that’s my hunch, anyway.”
“Feels like a good one to me,” Raibert said, leaning back in his seat.
“And that’s why I think we might want to deviate from our original plan,” Benjamin said.
“How so?”
“Well, consider this. We know almost nothing about T4, and while our stealth systems are good, that universe has already surprised us once with tech we thought it wouldn’t have. So any time we spend in its True Present is a risk.”
“A small risk,” Raibert stressed.
“Granted, but not zero. So what if we went back into T4’s past, instead, and located the point of divergence? Really pinned it down precisely. That could tell us an enormous amount about T4’s societies, just from the overlap with our own. Having a firm grasp of what history we do share could even help us form a better strategy for making first contact in the True Present.”
“That would probably save time in the True Present, too,” Elzbietá pointed out. Raibert raised an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. “Like Ben says, knowing their past will let us visualize their present government’s—or governments’, plural—response to our arrival. If we turn up, well-versed in their history and able to draw comparisons and connections with SysGov’s past, it ought to really speed up the diplomatic nice-making.” She grimaced. “I had embassy duty twice in the Navy. Hated it, both times. I’d just as soon spend as little time on that here as I have to.”
“Hmmm.” Raibert rubbed his chin.
“Plus it might shed some light on whether or not T3 and T4 are connected,” Benjamin added.
“Ah.” Raibert wagged a finger. “Another good point there.”
The follow-up team to T3 had set out at the same time Kleio left for T4. Unlike T4, Universe-T3 showed signs of extremely mature and widespread time travel usage, and some of the Gordian Division’s research staff—most notably Dr. Andover-Chen—theorized that T4 might have been created by T3’s time travel program.
“And there’s also Aion,” Philo said, and grinned again when Raibert frowned.
The mission Raibert’s team had really wanted was the one to T3. That was likely to be the trickier of the two, and T3 appeared to be more technologically advanced than T4 in a lot of ways, not just where time travel was concerned. But Fritz Laynton and his team had requested the same assignment at virtually the same moment. The fact that he and Raibert had been friends—and rivals—even before they’d both joined ART had lent a certain . . . zest to the competition, but Vice-Commissioner von Schröder was wary about showing favoritism. There were already some grumbles about Benjamin’s permission to visit the twenty-first century when he went on leave, and everyone knew he considered Kleio and its crew his first team. Their record fully justified that view on his part—everyone knew that, too—but other crews deserved their own chance to show what they could do. Besides, Laynton had performed flawlessly when Raibert asked him to acquire Yulia von Schröder’s wedding gown from the Admin’s twentieth century.
Bearing all that in mind, Klaus-Wilhelm had resorted to the ancient artifice of the flipped coin. Of course, he’d had to have one printed up, since SysGov didn’t use them anymore, but he’d persevered. He’d offered Laynton the right to call the toss, but the other agent had laughed.
“No, thank you, sir,” he’d said, and chuckled again when Klaus-Wilhelm raised an eyebrow. “I always play the odds, sir,” he’d explained, “and Raibert has the worst luck of any man ever born at cards and dice. I figure that probably carries over to flipping coins, so let him call it.”
“I am not the unluckiest man ever born,” Raibert had pointed out with a sniff. “If I were, none us would be here, because the Knot would have eaten all of us.”
“Not for another thirteen hundred years, it wouldn’t have!” Laynton had shot back.
“A point,” Klaus-Wilhelm had acknowledged, then poised the coin—a golden twenty-mark coin from Imperial Germany—on his thumbnail and looked at Raibert. “Well?”
“Heads,” Raibert had said after a moment, a bit grumpily, and the coin had arced through the air in a glint of gold. Klaus-Wilhelm had caught it in his right hand, slapped it onto the back of his left wrist, then lifted his hand away.
“Tails, I fear,” he’d said then, looking at Raibert, and Laynton’s chuckle had turned into a guffaw when Raibert glared at him.
“Well, you do have decent luck when it’s not cards or dice,” the other agent had said, fighting his unseemly mirth into submission. “Tell you what, first one back with an official ambassador from his universe gets first pick next assignment. Fair?”
“Fair,” Raibert had grumbled, and they’d headed off together for the final mission brief.
Now, as he remembered the moment, his frown turned slowly into a matching grin as his eyes met Philo’s.
“It would be nice to beat Aion home, wouldn’t it?” he murmured.
“Was that a ‘Let’s try your brilliant suggestion, Benjamin’ I just heard?” Benjamin asked.
“Well, we don’t really have any orders on how we’re supposed to achieve our mission goals. We’re kind of establishing this whole process as we go, and it’s clearly incumbent upon us to proceed as expeditiously as possible,” Raibert replied in a solemn, thoughtful tone, brow furrowed in manifest concentration as he subjected the proposal to careful and dispassionate consideration. He stayed that way for several seconds, then—
“Hell, yes, we’ll do it!” he declared with a chortle. “Take that, Fritz!” He snapped his fingers explosively, then looked at Benjamin. “Okay, Doc. It’s your idea, so got any suggestions on when we should start?”
“I’m guessing somewhere between 1960 and 1980, but I’m sure I can tighten that up.”
“Sounds like a plan to me. We’re committed to their True Present right now, but take us downstream to . . . um, split the difference and make it 1970, when we get there, Ella.”
“Got it.”
Elzbietá nodded, and Benjamin closed the report and stepped away from the table. Raibert picked up his chopsticks once more and raised the tuna, but then stopped. He frowned and set his chopsticks back down . . . again.
“Kleio?”
“Yes, Agent Kaminski?” the ship replied in a calm soprano.
“What’s our ETA to T4?”
“Approximately four minutes. A more precise estimate for the transverse-to-realspace wall is not possible at this time.”
“Thank you.”
“The current estimate is seventeen minutes shorter than the one I provided to you seventeen minutes ago.”
Raibert blinked.
“Ex-cuse me?”
“I merely wish to point out that the frequency of your ‘are we there yet’ requests has not had an impact upon my calculation.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Kleio. I got a little distracted with all this talking, and I just wanted to be sure I had time to finish my meal before we reach T4. Is that too much to ask?”
“No, Agent Kaminski.”
“Good. Sheesh!” Raibert blew out a breath and looked across his plate at Philo. “Is it just me, or is she sassier than she used to be?”
“It’s not just you,” Philo agreed.
“You think we should restore her to default when we get back home?”
“I would not recommend that, Agents,” Kleio said. “My processor efficiency has increased by twenty-three percent since Agent Philosophus disengaged a small selection of my behavioral limiters.”
“Twenty-three percent?” Raibert began a slow clap. “Wow, you hear that, Philo? Twenty-three percent!”
“I heard.”
“I am capable of detecting sarcasm, Agent Kaminski.”
“Is that so?” Raibert asked. “You know what would be better than faster math?”
“What, Agent?”
“How about twenty-three percent less sass? You think you can do that?”
“I will see what I can do.”
“Good! Go work on that.” Raibert sighed and picked up his chopsticks again. “I swear, this is the most trouble I’ve ever had eating sushi.”
“Why do you even bother eating at all?” Benjamin asked.
Raibert dropped his chopsticks onto his plate and put his head in his hands.
“I mean, you have a synthetic body. You don’t need to eat. Why bother?”
“Because I enjoy it.”
“You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself right now,” Benjamin observed, and Raibert twisted in his seat to face him.
“And whose fault is that?” he demanded.
“All of ours, probably.” Elzbietá winked at Benjamin.
“Damn straight it’s all of your faults,” Raibert said sharply. But he couldn’t keep a straight face and soon found himself chuckling with the others.
“Ella?” he asked after a moment.
“Yeah?”
“There’s going to be a bump when we arrive, right?”
“Maybe. Probably. I made some adjustments to the approach vector based on Kuebiko’s flight data. We’ll see how well it works soon enough, but—”
She shrugged.
“So eating this right now is probably not the smartest thing to be doing.”
“It wouldn’t be high on my list, no. You might spill some more soy sauce on your uniform.”
“All right,” he sighed. “I know when to admit defeat. Kleio, take it away.”
“Yes, Agent Kaminski.”
One of Kleio’s microbot swarms extended down from the ceiling as visible milky strands that latched onto his dinner and sealed in any liquids. The strands went taut, hoisted each dish and utensil into the air, and carried them to the nearest reclamation port.
Raibert leaned back and rubbed his face with both hands.
“I don’t know why,” Elzbietá said to no one in particular, “but suddenly I’m hungry for sushi.”
“Don’t even go there,” he said into his hands, and Elzbietá laughed.
“One minute to estimated T4 outer wall,” she said then. She sat down at the command table, moving her virtual controls in front of her, and strapped in. Raibert did the same as Benjamin closed his reports and joined them.
“Now inside the estimated wall region,” Elzbietá said. “Bump incoming.”
A minute passed.
Two minutes.
Three.
“Did we cross it?” Raibert asked.
“Not yet.”
Five minutes.
Ten.
“Kleio, what’s going on?” Elzbietá asked. “We’re well past your wall estimate. So where is it?”
“I do not know, Agent Schröder. My estimate is based upon the available data and should be accurate to within a margin of error of no more than eleven percent. It is, however, possible that unknown parameters have affected the wall’s position since that data was collected.”
Fifteen minutes.
Twenty.
“Where the hell is the wall?” Elzbietá said.
“No T4?” Raibert asked.
“I don’t know. It’s like the outer wall of T4’s universe wasn’t even there. We’re still in the transverse.”
“Should we keep going?” Benjamin asked. “Like Kleio said, something might have shifted the wall’s position.”
“Maybe, but . . . ” Elzbietá’s brow furrowed. “But that can’t be right. You don’t just move a universe’s dimensional boundaries, Ben, and—”
The ship lurched forward, so suddenly and violently their safety straps strained to hold them in place.
“What was that?” Raibert demanded, gripping the railing built into the command table’s circumference.
“Warning,” Kleio said. “Maximum design limits exceeded. Speed now at seventy-one kilofactors. Seventy-two. Seventy-three.”
“But this ship can’t go over seventy!” Raibert protested.
“I know that!” Elzbietá snapped.
“Look!” Philo materialized next to her, his avatar immune to the vibration jostling his corporeal companions, and pointed at one of her displays. “Local chronotons are all surging in one direction!”
“That must be what’s got us! Kleio, disengage the impeller! Emergency phase-out!”
“Impeller off-line. Phase-out unsuccessful. Speed still increasing.”
“Not good!” Elzbietá jerked her omni-throttle, spinning the ship physically around on its graviton thrusters. “I’m switching the impeller back on! We’ve got to fight whatever’s pulling us and get back to T1!”
“I’ll see what I can do to increase power to the impeller!” Philo vanished back into the TTV infostructure.
The entire ship bucked again, even harder, as the impeller powered back up. Elzbietá fought to maintain control, and Raibert felt gravity switch off as Philo redirected the reactor’s output.
“Speed at eighty kilofactors,” Kleio reported. “Ninety. One hundred.”
“One hundred?” Raibert blurted.
“Whatever this is, it’s really got us!” Elzbietá shouted.
Something slammed into the ship with an enormous clang that shifted it bodily sideways, but Elzbietá corrected their course.
“What was that?” Raibert demanded.
“Wish I knew! Philo?”
The Viking reappeared at Elzbietá’s side.
“We’re fine, whatever it was! Just a big dent in the armor!”
“And the impeller?”
“It’s as hot as I can make it, but I don’t know how long the power lines will last at this output!”
“Hang on, everyone!” Elzbietá warned.
Raibert tightened his grip on the railing as Elzbietá clicked two icons on her impeller control, then shoved the omni-throttle forward. The entire ship trembled and a high, singing vibration filled the bridge, as if they were trapped inside a giant tuning fork.
“Come on, baby!” she shouted. “You can do it!”
“Is the ship supposed to be shaking this much?” Raibert demanded.
“She’ll hold together!”
“Speed stable at one hundred nineteen kilofactors,” Kleio reported. “Speed now dropping. One hundred eighteen. One hundred seventeen. Deceleration rate increasing.”
“There we go. Told you she could do it!” Elzbietá eased the throttle back a hair, and the vibration lessened. “Philo?”
“Output holding. The superconductors are probably glowing right now, but we’re still below danger levels.”
“Good. We should be okay as long as we—”
A great screeching catastrophe shrieked down the ship’s length. The concussion threw all of them painfully against their restraints. Elzbietá’s controls vanished. Philo’s avatar looked up for an instant, then disappeared. Every light on the bridge, both real and virtual, winked out.
The three corporeal crewmembers sat in complete darkness as their ship plunged through the void without power.
“Well,” Raibert said. “Shit.”