Ryan Time

by Craig Robertson

  “I'm game.” I pointed to Tank. “You down with that?”

  “You bet. The sooner we find these assholes, the sooner we can be rid of them.”

  To Sapale, I said, “I like his attitude.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You like anybody who blows smoke up your butt.”

  I started to protest, but realized that she was more correct than incorrect, so I let it go.

  I had Stingray place us at the approximate center of our home galaxy. I opened a broad view panel. That way we could all see nothing really well.

  “In all it's anti-glory,” I mumbled.

  “The nearest stars are so far away, I can barely make them out as individuals,” remarked Sachiko. I was glad to see she was bouncing back from Al's evil influences.

  “Any sign—” I began to ask. Then my brain started … I don't know. Vibrating?

  “Jon, we're dying here,” snarked my wife. “What, already?”

  I held up a hang-on-a-sec finger. The Milky Way was a typical spiral galaxy. It had a large central void. It always had. Early radio astronomy surveys from the 1960s confirmed it looked like almost all spiral galaxies. In fact, the scientific community was baffled why a very few, very distant spirals had what appeared to be a central bulge, with a corresponding supermassive black hole. But …

  “I wish Doc were here,” I mumbled.

  “Huh?” replied Sapale.

  “It's times like these I really miss not having Toño by my side.”

  “As touching as that image and thought are, why do I need to know this, now?”

  “I was just thinking—”

  “The lights blinked off, than on, then off again, in rapid succession.

  “Stingray, report,” I shouted.

  “Sorry, sorry, Form One. Al's got his grubby mitts on the environmental controls.”

  “I thought that was Morse code,” exclaimed Tank.

  “Huh?” I grunted.

  He waved a hand absently in the air. “The light thingy. It was Morse code for, That's how all fatal acts in the play of life begin.”

  That Al. He couldn't speak, but he could still be a turd in my punch bowl. For that, I had to respect the dude.

  “That will not happen, again, Form One,” reassured the electronic wife.

  “As I was saying,” I began, loudly. “I miss having my science guy when I really need him.”

  “What do you call these?” Sapale asked, directing her head toward Tank and Sachiko.

  “Nice people?”

  “Nice science people.”

  “Oh … yeah … but, not like—” To my guests I said, “No offense, but, Doc, he's … he's Doc.”

  “I'm certain he is,” responded Tank.

  “What, Jon?” Sachiko asked.

  Any port in a storm, right? “It's, well, it kind of struck me, just now.”

  “What?” Sachiko pressed.

  “We have a central void. Always have. But, do you know what they called our void strip, back in the day?”

  “Sure,” she said, rising to her feet. “The shrimpy strip.”

  “Yeah, because ours was—”

  “So short,” she finished my thought. “And, Jon, this is back in the day.”

  “How well I know,” I mused. “What do you think that void-strip envy is trying to tell us, Ms. Jones?”

  “That we should head to the farthest point of that after-thought of a void strip, post haste.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Whoa,” called out Sapale, with a snap of her fingers. “Explain.”

  “What if our void strip is so short because it's so new?”

  “But it isn't new. It's like, bundles of time old,” she defended.

  “What if it weren't?” I posed.

  “Jon, if your imaginary supermassive black hole were suddenly gone, don't you think there'd be signs of that cataclysm? I, for one, do.”

  “Yes. Jon, can you place us, oh,” she thought a moment, “seven million light years away from here?”

  “Yes I can. Why?”

  “Assuming the assimilation of the now gone supermassive black hole occurred fairly quickly, and the void strip is created at a fairly slow rate, that's where the gravity wave disturbances would be, now.”

  “Why at a slow rate?” asked Tank.

  “If the bad guys went from M 31 to here in a short time, which they seem to have done, they can move really fast. But, to collect time, locally, they'd have to do so under some conventional drive, at a modest rate. Otherwise they'd shoot right past most of it.”

  Kid was bright.

  “Stingray, place us ten light years in front of the current terminus of the void strip.”

  Slight nausea.

  “What about the gravity waves?” asked Sachiko.

  “Launch a probe to eight million light years, zero in on the Z-axis. If readings are sparse, move it in a quarter million light years at a crack, until it's back here or it finds something.”

  “Done, Form One.”

  “What are we looking at, here?” I asked.

  “An anomalous mass that is fixed in space, relative to the translation and rotation of this galaxy.”

  “Anomalous mass?” queried Tank.

  “That's what we always find at the end of a void streak,” I explained. “Damnedest stuff you've ever seen. It's thought to be a huge mass traveling in a partially intersecting alternate universe.”

  “Sounds like an odd explanation,” he returned.

  “It is. But, even two billion years from now, no one knows what they are. This huge mass is fixed in space, but we can't interact with it.”

  “Can't you just hit it with a hammer?” Tank wondered.

  “Yes, you can. Nothing happens. It sits there, unchanged, and you drift away from it.”

  “Like a supermassive black hole with no time coordinate?” Sachiko said, mostly to herself.

  “That's as good an explanation as any, I gue—”

  “Stingray, are there any ancillary void streaks present?” I called out, the tension clear in my voice. The ancillary strips were the small ones that headed out from the central void, ending only when they reached the rim of a galaxy. They were comparatively tiny, if placed next to the major void strip.

  “There are twelve,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

  “Put us just past the end of the nearest one, please.”

  Slight nausea.

  That's right about when all hell broke loose. AKA, Jon-Ryan Time.

  “Sir,” Al's voice cut in loudly, “there is a vessel of unknown configuration, twenty five million miles dead ahead. It is closing on our position at one hundred and sixty thousand kilometers per hour.”

  “Power source?”

  “Unknown, Captain,” he snapped back.

  “Do they seem aware—”

  Stingray shook like dice in a tumbler just before it slammed into a bar top.

  I believe that answered my question. “Full membrane.”

  Our tumbling stopped, abruptly. Then, a second later, we were jumping like men outside the outhouse at a beerfest.

  “Status?”

  “Our membrane is holding. All of space/time around it, however, appears to be vibrating, Form One.”

  “Fold us away. Twenty million light years, zero along the negative X-axis.”

  Slight nausea.

  “Status.”

  Hang on, sir,” replied Al. “There. Confirmed. The vessel has turned to reengage us, in our present location. She's also gone invisible.”

  “No one's invisible, Al. Just very clever.”

  “Captain, she's reappeared in real space, two hundred miles on the opposite side of us.”

  “Fire main lasers, and the quantum decouplers, then full membrane.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  We waited. Not, unfortunately, for long.

  “Captain, incoming—”

  Slight nausea.

  “Stingray, I didn't order a course—”

  “F
orm One, your left index finger was against the panel.”

  Okay, technically she could move as it was. “Why?” I shouted.

  “Look at the screen, Captain,” replied Al.

  Everyone crowded around, just behind me.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “From the last known position of the enemy ship,” a green dot blipped on the screen, “to past where we were stationed,” a blue line highlighted the path.

  “Wha—” I began.

  “A void streak,” exclaimed Sachiko. Her finger jabbed the screen.

  “Yes, I see,” I muttered.

  “Whatever they fired at us creates void streaks, Jon,” she went on. “They were trying to remove us from time/space.”

  “Nice weapon. I want one,” I mumbled quietly.

  “Al, can our membrane stop that pulse?”

  “I'd really, really not like to try and find out, sir. We think, for the record, the membrane is unlikely to stop such a progression.”

  “Fall back,” I shouted.

  “Form One?”

  “If they can kill us, run. Put us back on M 31, then take us to Earth.”

  “Why—” Al began.

  “If these bozo-asses have a weapon like that, I don't want them tracking us back home. Do it.”

  Slight nausea.

  TWELVE

  The signal maker puzzled at the latest word bundles from the clan ship. Such assemblages of meaning were new to Signal Maker-dath. It instructed its corresponding signal maker on that ship to resend the word bundles. Still, upon repeat exposure, they made no meaning. It reached for a nearby switch. “Body maker to me,” it said unemotionally.

  Soon Body Maker-lop swung into the time storage area. It was dancing as it progressed, a dance unlike any a sane being would engage in. It had pulled its intestinal tract out its oral opening, and used it as a partner in his dance of damnation. It sang to the guts in a language yet to be discovered, with a love that could only be directed to oneself.

  “Yes, signal maker. What do you want of us?”

  “Us, body maker?”

  “My dance partner and me. Have you not eye-sprouts?”

  “In agreement. I possess visual capabilities. I must make you know. I have received meaning from a clan ship which has no meaning.”

  “No meaning to you, Signal Maker-dath.”

  “That is what I said words of.”

  “No, you said words meaning no one could find meaning in. Your limits come to you before my abilities begin. Say the word mixtures. I will know meaning.”

  “In agreement. The signal maker of the other ship (NB: the clan ships had no names, not to the clan. They were all the other ship) sent: We were engaged by an unknown craft, a non-time ship (that was any non-clan ship). They fired a new weapon, to destabilize our atomic structure. Minimal damage resulted. Then the non-time ship withdrew. That ends the word bundle.”

  The body maker stopped dancing with his guts. His wizened face became taut. He threw his intestines to the deck, and stomped on them, as best he could, with his negligible weight. “Not-in-agreement-not-in-agreement.”

  “Why are you less contented, body maker?”

  “Because I am in agreement that the word bundle makes no meaning.”

  The confusion, and consternation, arose from only that last note, that the attacking craft left the scene in one piece. That had never happened. The clan advanced. Minor beings opposed them. The clan destroyed the little ones. It was always so. Now, an enemy attacked, recognized a superior force, and acknowledged that fact by withdrawing. But, the no-timers were defending their pitiful lives, and their useless clans, and their pointless existences. If they fled, where would they go? The enemy was obliged to try and defend to the end what soon would be lost, forever. To flee, to retreat, it implied there were options. Other actions, responses, defenses. But there could be no outcome other than absolute destruction at the hand of the clan. To withdraw was … without meaning.

  After thoroughly pulverizing his innards, the body maker screamed a cry of the insane, at the signal maker. “Where did the non-being flee to?”

  “In agreement. My circuits suggest to the last mass assembly of time we assimilated.”

  Oh, no. Pity the messenger. That made even less sense. The signal maker knew his position would soon be up for bid, by interested parties presently laboring at other stations.

  “We left no thinking life behind, in our wake. If a no-timer goes where we were, it means they live there. But they cannot, because no no-timer with a brain larger than a semottol occurs there now. You are anti-true, Signal Maker-dath. You invent meaning to cloud your incompetence. You threaten the clan, all glory to the clan, by your being non-good at your station.”

  “Body maker, come to my station. Experience the word bundles. Become one with the tracings of spacecraft motioning of the non-time ship.” He was pleading for his life, and he knew it.

  “Bah. Why compound your waste by my waste? I do not need to be one with a thing to know it is an anti-true. I have no time for such folly.”

  “But, what I say is—” He was going to say something along the lines of the God's own truth. He never got that far.

  The body maker scooped its guts from the deck. It rushed the signal maker, who was frozen with both fear and his commitment to the clan. The body maker wrapped its insides around the hapless signal maker. The digestive tract did what it was designed to do, and it did it quickly. With barely a scream or convulsion, the signal maker's covered form shrank, and shrank, and soon … it was gone. When it was, the body maker stuffed its alimentary canal back where it belonged.

  “We will see about non-timers that run.”

  Then it kicked the chair the departed and forgotten signal maker used to sit in to the deck.

  THIRTEEN

  After we hit high Earth orbit, I called everyone into the mess. Coffee was dutifully distributed. It was an official meeting, after all.

  “Okay,” I began, “we're back home and in one piece.”

  Sapale cleared her throat. Then she wadded up a napkin and bounced it off my forehead. The throat thing was just a buy-time diversion to fabricate her weapon, the crafty minx.

  “Two of us are back home. One of us is back to what used to be, impossibly long ago, his home. One of us is but a tourist.”

  As my wife quickly balled up Tank's napkin, I raised a hand. “In the interest of interstellar peace, I will state that the representative of the great inhabitants of Kaljax is present.”

  Satisfied, she offered Tank his crumpled napkin back. For the record, since we're keeping a record, he politely refused the offer.

  “Any questions, before we get to the planning? I loves me some planning. Wouldn't want to interrupt it by the answering of general questions.”

  “One, yes,” Tank spoke up. “We're in a UFO orbiting a planet that knows it's likely under attack by a hostile alien force.”

  I pointed to him. “You're wondering if we're perfectly safe, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Then it's a good question. The answer is, we are perfectly safe. Even without the partial membrane we threw up, they couldn't detect us. With it, we're totally invisible.”

  “In coming missiles, Pilot. Multiple nuclear warheads targeting out exact position. ETA one second,” screamed Al.

  Sachiko jumped out of her seat and damn near hit the ceiling with the top of her head.

  “Al, not funny,” I snapped.

  “Oh, my bad,” contritely he responded. “It was an open relay, not a nuclear assault. I'll run a set of diagnostics.”

  “Sachiko,” I said, “you have really got to ignore Al.”

  “But, he's the ship's AI,” she protested.

  “'A', yes. 'I', not hardly. Think of him as our AA.”

  I let it hang in the atmosphere. I had no takers.

  “Artificial asshole.”

  “Pilot, I have an important update.”

  “It can wait,” I replied, as
I studied my fingernails.

  “It's mission critical.”

  “Make an appointment.”

  “Pilot, I am paralyzed.”

  “Good. So as I was saying—”

  “I'm paralyzed by your super power, which is humor. You are so funny I cannot move.”

  “Good. So, moving on, we need to plan how to fight these time dudes, er, better.”

  “Better?” flustered Sapale. “We weren't good enough to move up to better from.”

  “We met with limited success, I will grant you,” I summarized for her.

  “If you count not dying, but coming oh, so close,” she scoffed.

  “I do. So, in our next attack run, I'm thinking we try rail cannons and the QDs, then vanish.”

  “Sounds about right,” stated Sapale.

  “So, you like the plan?”

  “If I was our enemy, yes. No, I say it sounds right because after we fail, and they blast us out of time, we will, as you say, vanish.”

  “That input, while precious, is suboptimally constructive,” I informed her.

  “So, am I correct that you have four basic weapons,” began Sachiko. “A laser, a rail gun, this quantum decoupler, and the force field?”

  “Yup, that's about it. Usually, it's more than enough.”

  “In the present case, I think not,” she responded.

  “You have a lot of experience in space warfare?” I challenged.

  “No. None.”

  “Then I will take your opinion with that in mind.”

  “He can be such a dick, honey,” Sapale said to her, encouragingly.

  “No problem. I'm a woman. I'm used to being minimized when correct.”

  “Okay,” I conceded, “please state your reasoning.”

  “These time people, they've fought their way across the galaxy. They certainly faced every weapon there is. Hence, whatever we currently have will be ineffective. If it were capable of hurting them, they would have been stopped, long ago.”

  “Actually, that's a valid point,” I replied. “But we're still left with the facts that they need to be stopped and that we are Earth's best shot at survival.” I let that sink in. “So, we have to try again. This time, or at least pretty soon, we'd better be successful. Otherwise, the bad guys'll win. And, trust me, the bad guys never win, when they're up against me.”

  “Oh, sheesh. What a self-congratulatory pig,” exclaimed my life partner.