chapter five
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Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio
non-congruent
“Everybody okay?” Raibert’s voice came out of the dark. “Still got all your parts?”
“I think I’m fine,” Benjamin said. “Just can’t see a blasted thing. Ella?”
“Still here . . . wherever ‘here’ is. Now what do we do?”
“We should probably just wait it out,” Raibert suggested. “Every microbot swarm aboard should default to helping Kleio’s systems boot back up.”
The compartment shuddered and metal screeched in a distant part of the ship.
“‘Should’ boot back up? Seriously? With your luck?” Benjamin replied.
“Yeah, you’ve got a point.” Raibert unstrapped himself and grabbed the table rail as he floated out of his seat.
“What are you doing?” Elzbietá asked.
“I’m going to force a restart of the bridge infostructure. Stay put.”
Raibert brought up his synthoid’s lowlight vision, spun in the air, planted his feet on the table edge, and kicked off. He floated over to the wall and cushioned his approach with both arms as he landed at the edge of the doorway.
“There’s a processor node behind the wall near each door,” he said over his shoulder as his fingertips felt for the seams in the wall panel. “I can manually restart the bridge infostructure from there.”
“You think that’ll work?” Elzbietá asked.
“It should. You two hear that sound?”
The pitch-black compartment fell silent as both his companions strained their hearing.
“The air’s still flowing,” Benjamin observed.
“Exactly. That means we’re not completely without power. This stuff is meant to never turn off, but something’s scrambled it. Normally, Kleio would just clear the errors, but she hasn’t. What if that means she doesn’t have a connection to the bridge anymore?”
“When in doubt, reboot,” Elzbietá said.
“Exactly.”
He ran the edges of his fingers down a seam in the panel, reached a corner and slid his hand across, then up at the next corner.
“Damn it,” he muttered. “Where’s the release?”
“What’s wrong?” Benjamin asked.
“Nothing,” Rabert said. “It’s nothing. I’ve got this.”
The panel release continued to evade him, and he muttered balefully under his breath. Then he locked his fingers into a knifelike shape and jammed them into the seam. He curled his fingers underneath the panel and ripped it free of the wall with a mighty pull. Too mighty, in point of fact, as the rectangular panel slipped from his grip and twirled through the darkness until it clonked against something. Hard.
“Ow!” Benjamin yelped. “What the hell?”
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I should hope not! What just happened?”
“I had trouble finding the release, so I performed a ‘manual bypass’ on the panel.”
“You mean you ripped it off and flung it across the room?”
“Yeah. That. On the bright side, I did get it open.” Raibert slipped his hand behind the processor node and found the manual restart switch. “Fingers crossed.”
He tugged the switch. Data pathways opened in his mind, and virtual displays lit up around him.
“My VR displays are back up,” Elzbietá said.
“Mine, too,” Benjamin confirmed. “Pity they can’t light the room.”
“It’s a start,” Raibert replied. “Can you tell how bad it is?”
“Looks like you were right,” Elzbietá told him. “Except that Kleio’s not just cut off from the bridge. She’s completely off-line, and most of our systems are in standby. I should be able to manually restart them from here.”
“Wait one—”
The lights switched back on and gravity promptly flattened Raibert against the floor.
“Oof! Second.”
Philo’s avatar reappeared, and the Viking looked down at him.
“Raibert?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“What are you doing on the floor?”
“I’m wondering that myself.” Raibert pushed himself up, brushed off his uniform, and returned to the table. “Glad to see you back online.”
“That makes two of us. Is it just me, or is Kleio still down?”
“She’s off-line, all right,” Elzbietá said, and opened a translucent schematic of the TTV’s sleek, elliptical form over the table. She expanded it, and Raibert whistled through his teeth as he saw the solid red line. It ran from the ship’s bow, passed through its midsection lengthwise, and exited through a hole near the impeller spike at its stern. All total, it traversed through eighty-two meters of Kleio’s one-hundred-fifty-meter length.
“Well, damn,” Benjamin breathed.
“It looks worse than it is,” Elzbietá said. “It’s bad enough, for sure, but it could have been a lot worse. Something hit us hard enough to punch straight through the bow here. It took out the main gun, clipped the central computer core there, and then blasted its way out here. But aside from the gun and core, our primary systems are intact.”
“Is the core salvageable?” Raibert asked.
“I think so. One of the swarms is rebuilding the critical pathways right now, but it’ll be a while.”
“Then we make do without her.” Raibert faced his integrated companion. “Philo, I need you to take over her functions until she’s back up.”
“Consider it done.” The Viking vanished.
“What about outside the ship?” Raibert asked, turning back to Elzbietá.
“Chronotons are still surging all around us, and we’re being pulled deeper into the past.”
“Can you get us back on track for T4’s True Present?”
“I’ll try.”
Elzbietá activated the impeller and eased power into it. The TTV’s schematic vanished, replaced with a graphical view of the chronometric weather around them. She struggled against the current for several minutes, and Raibert watched the kilofactor readout on her display tick down until it was almost zero.
“Nice,” he said, grinning.
“I think we can do this without Kleio,” Elzbietá breathed. “Just got to take it slow.”
“Good to hear. Do you think this surge is—”
“Hold on!”
The ship swerved sharply as a massive rocky object—thousands of times larger than the time machine—phased into abrupt reality directly in front of them and Elzbietá jerked the omni-throttle back. She sent the TTV scooting sideways, across its craggy exterior, and then the obstruction vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Whew!” She exhaled explosively. “That was close!”
“Where did that thing come from?” Raibert demanded.
“Some sort of debris is being pulled into the past, same as us. It was only in phase with us for a few moments. I’ll keep an eye out for more. It just caught me off guard, is all. If there are more, I shouldn’t have too much trouble dodging them now that I know what to look for.”
“Hold up,” Benjamin said. “Can you take us back and phase-lock with whatever that was?”
“Sure. Why?”
“A hard look at it might help us figure out what’s happening.”
“Good idea,” Raibert agreed. “Do it, Ella.”
“All right. Here we go.”
Elzbietá reversed course and brought them into phase with the mass. Its enormous bulk loomed ahead of them, like an alien mountain range cut off from the rest of the world in a rough circle, as Benjamin opened a video feed and began collecting data.
“Is that from an asteroid?” Raibert asked.
“If so, it’s weirdly shaped,” Benjamin replied. “No impact craters on this side. Ella, can you swing us around to the other side?”
“Sure thing.”
The view shifted as Kleio flitted closer to the object’s rough edge. Benjamin zoomed in, and the expanded image showed that edge to be composed of thin layers of differing rock, all piled on top of each other and compacted together. Smaller chunks floated near the edge.
Then Kleio crested past the rim and the far side of the mass came into full view.
“My God . . . ” Benjamin breathed.
Elzbietá’s jaw tightened in horror, and Raibert shook his head.
“What the hell is going on here?” he asked softly.
“I wish I knew.” Benjamin’s voice was equally soft.
Kleio sped past the gargantuan spires of a broken city. A populated city . . . in which every vehicle and inhabitant was frozen in place.
No, not frozen, Raibert realized. It’s paused.
It was a city torn from its world.
A city where time no longer existed.
* * *
“There’s Cyrillic characters all over the place,” Benjamin said a few minutes later. “I think this city is from T4’s Earth.”
“Why do you say that?” Elzbietá asked.
“Well, T4 is where we were headed,” her husband pointed out. “And you know the years I was targeting with my theory? 1960 to 1980? Well, I chose them because I had a hunch the Cold War ended differently in T4.”
“Raibert, do you know what could cause something like this?” Elzbietá asked.
“Not a clue.” Raibert shook his head.
A boulder phased in beneath the city and plowed up through its streets. It blasted through a skyscraper, scattering chunks of steel and masonry like shrapnel. Some of the fragments phased farther into the past while others added to the cloud of detritus around the city. Another hulking rock crashed through the city at a diagonal, splintering half a dozen towers. The city was being ground up into its basic components, piece by piece.
“If this really is from T4,” Benjamin said, “then what hit us was probably a small chunk of T4’s Earth. In fact, all the debris we’ve encountered so far could be what’s left of the planet being sucked into the past.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Doc,” Raibert gave him a sad look across the table, “but I hope you’re wrong.”
“I know. So do I. I just . . . ” Benjamin paused and grimaced. “I’m just trying to make sense of this.”
“Same here,” Raibert said. “Same here.”
“Hold on.” Elzbietá sat up and expanded a sector of the city. “What’s this?”
“What do you have?” Raibert asked.
“That’s an impeller signature!”
An icon blinked as Elzbietá highlighted the signal.
“Are you sure?” Raibert asked. “That’s a really odd profile.”
“No, she’s right,” Benjamin said. “It’s weak and intermittent. Could be damaged. But it’s almost an exact match to what Kuebiko spotted before it pulled out.”
“More importantly, it’s an active impeller,” Elzbietá said. “It’s not moving, but it’s obviously powered up. What if it was powered up when whatever happened hit?”
“Now that”—Raibert’s eyes lit—“is an excellent point, Ella! If its impeller was up, the field may have protected it from whatever’s happened to the city. And if that’s the case, there could be survivors on board!”
“Maybe.” Elzbietá nodded. “It’s worth a look.”
“Well, then!” Raibert settled back into his seat and strapped in. “Sounds like we have a ship in need of assistance. Ella, take us in.”
“Right.” She cracked her knuckles and summoned the controls to her fingertips. “Hold onto your butts! This could get bumpy.”
She throttled up, and Kleio dove toward the city. Pebbles pattered off the hull as she swooped in through the skyline. The top ten floors of a skyscraper tumbled lazily in front of them. Kleio dipped underneath, and the patter turned into violent sleet.
“There.” Benjamin pointed. “Hovering just above street level.”
A long, boxy outline lit up in the visual feed. The shape was awkward and primitive-looking compared to Kleio’s sleek profile, but a stubby impeller spike stuck out of one end.
“I see it,” Elzbietá said. “Smaller than I expected.”
“We might just have enough room to stash the whole thing in the cargo bay,” Raibert observed.
“We do,” Philo reported. Most of his avatar remained invisible as he concentrated his resources on managing Kleio’s systems, but his helmeted head reappeared, floating like the Cheshire cat above the table. “It’ll fit if we jettison the main gun’s wreckage.”
An oblong boulder phased in and smashed through another tower. The building’s top spun over and its antenna spire shattered against Kleio’s hull with enough force the entire TTV shuddered.
“If we’ve got room, then let’s grab it and get the hell out of here,” Benjamin said.
“That’s a better idea than sticking around in this mess,” Elzbietá agreed. “Philo, take control of the outer hull. I’ll move in to scoop it up.”
“Ready.”
The disembodied head vanished as Kleio skimmed above city streets full of petrified automated vehicles. The bulk of the TTV’s prog-steel hull knocked over lampposts, severed cables, and demolished billboards. The other time machine floated ahead of them, closer to the ground, and Elzbietá brought Kleio still lower, slowing until she came to a stop next to the smaller craft.
Philo split the bow open to form a wide, hungry mouth that vomited out a heavy, twisted cylinder which had once been Kleio’s main gun.
“Bow open and wreckage jettisoned. Gravity in that section is disengaged.”
Elzbietá licked her lips and switched the omni-throttle to a finer control mode. She eased it forward, and the front lip of Kleio’s hull crushed a flatbed truck and smeared its wreckage across the street. She added a little more power, and the other time machine’s impeller spike slipped into their cargo bay.
She cut power to the thrusters, let Kleio coast forward until the entire time machine was inside, then applied a burst of reverse thrust.
“Got it!” Philo announced. “Closing the hull and ramping up internal gravity.”
“Nicely done,” Raibert said. “Any problems?”
“Its impeller is creating some chronometric drag,” Elzbietá replied. “But our impeller’s way more powerful. We can compensate.”
“Good to hear.” Raibert unstrapped and stood up. “Doc, come with me. Ella, keep us safe.”
“I’ll take it from here,” Philo offered from the bridge infosystem. “I’ll move us out of phase of the city and stay clear of signatures that might come into phase with us. We should be safe for now. If the current gets rough again, I’ll let everyone know.”
“In that case, Ella, you’re with us, too.”
She and Benjamin unstrapped and joined Raibert. The three of them passed through a prog-steel shutter, hurried across the corridor, and took the counter-grav shaft down to the bottom of the three-story-tall cargo bay.
The black hull of the primitive time machine sat at an angle. Its impeller had scored a groove across the starboard wall, and a corner of its boxy main body was jammed against the port side. Impact dents covered most of the surface, and the tip of the impeller had skewed slightly to one side. Raibert ducked underneath its spike and rounded the hull toward what he assumed was the front.
“Everyone ready for an impromptu first contact?”
“Not really,” Benjamin grumped. “I wish Kleio was online so we could load up on Russian linguistics.”
“Speaking of which, do either of you know what that says?” Elzbietá pointed to the Cyrillic characters emblazoned across the time machine’s flank.
“Nope,” Raibert said. “You, Doc?”
“I relied on auto-translators for this sort of thing even back in the twenty-first century, let alone after I got my wetware upgrades.”
“Then I guess that’s another wait-for-Kleio question.”
They reached the time machine’s front. It was dominated by a single flat, enormous window, and Raibert tried to peer through it. Unfortunately, the window was clouded with dirt and grease and the interior was dark. He abandoned the effort with a shrug and crossed to a side hatch just aft of the window.
“That looks like blood,” Benjamin said, pointing at what might have been handprints smeared across the hatch. “And these could be bullet impact points.”
“That’s a little ominous.” Raibert knocked three times. “Hello! Anyone in there?”
Benjamin rounded the corner to the front window and wiped away a circle of grime with his sleeve. He shielded his view with both hands and pressed his face against the glass, then stiffened as the cargo bay’s illumination penetrated dimly.
“I can see someone inside! A young woman. She looks injured!”
Raibert tried the hatch.
“Blocked,” he grunted.
“Then bust it down!” Elzbietá replied.
Raibert backed up for a running start, then sprinted forward and smashed his synthoid shoulder into the hatch. It didn’t budge.
“No good!”
“Try the window!” Benjamin suggested.
He backed off and Raibert hammered a fist into the window. A previous impact had already weakened it, and a web of cracks spread from his fist. Two more punches and the window shattered. Jagged edges tore at his sleeve and synthoid skin, but he raked his arm across the opening, breaking off glass teeth, then grabbed the window frame and vaulted inside.
A young, athletic woman with an oval face lay sprawled across the floor next to the pilot seat, dirty-blond hair tousled and blood leaking from her nose and mouth.
“Philo, warm up the medical bay!” Raibert slid his arms under the woman and scooped her up. “You’ve got a patient incoming!”