Soundless Conflicts
Page 46
"S'alright," she mumbled, eyes squinting at the display. Markers were jumping around like fading dots, moving forward and back across half a dozen display ghosts. It was hard to focus on just one. "It missed."
"It hasn't even fired yet!"
Petals finally hit final charge, each tip blazing with contained balls of power normally reserved for primary stars. They dipped together, touching each to the central column in a radiant explosion that instantly turned to a supernova flash that whited out the workstation display. But that was fine because Jamet could feel the beam go by: A soundless roar like standing too close to a power relay when it suddenly goes to full charge. Invisible fields smashed through the entire interior of the control room, sending loose tools and metallic scrap into a brief tornado of movement. Even the overhead lights blurred, shadows jumping back and forth where there shouldn't be any.
For a brief moment Jamet saw someone by her chair, tall and lithe like a bird, bent over with an air of confused inspection. She turned, surprised and ready to shout, but they were gone before her eyes could track. Only trash and tools remained, dozens of afterimages flying around each until they resolved into a single item. "S'that?"
"Lieutenant!" Siers was nearly shouting. "Report if you're alive!"
"It missed! It missed the smelter! Holy shit, she called it!" Then, incredibly: "Wait, how the hell could it miss with a shot that big? Impossible should be atoms right now."
"Actually, she called it before it happened." Paul sounded thoughtful. "Which has me concerned about causality again. But what was it aiming at, if not the smelter? Emilia, help me backtrack the recording. What was near the smelter before it fired?"
Siers brushed the question aside with crisp orders. "We're leaving. Lieutenant, if you're awake, prepare to receive us in as early as ten minutes. I'm going to manually-"
Metallic hail started hammering the outside of her smelting facility, terrifically loud bangs and pings than sending consoles into a frenzy of status updates. Alarms began blaring a moment later, nearly drowning out the comm link.
"Noooo." She slurred the word, then focused. "Navigational... hazard." It felt like lifting an entire mountain but she got a foot up on the console, running cold toes through every blurry image until enough indicators received acknowledgement to shut up the alarms. "He hit... drone cluster... near me."
"Captain, I am forwarding footage from before that shot." Another callout appeared on the workspace, showing the smelter and a region of busy space beyond it. Hundreds of asteroids spun through the image in slow tumbles, in and out of frame until Paul highlighted something. "There, about five thousand miles away. See it?"
Janson sure did. "Ah, that's the tailings."
"The what? It looks metallic, how did we not see that on scan?" Siers was furious.
"We did!" Emilia pulled the image back, then highlighted both the smelter and Paul's marker. "It's a part of the smelter operation! That's where they dump waste products, stuff they don't want or can't use. It's supposed to be there, it's a part of the facility so our visual scan didn't bother cataloging it."
"Makes sense. Smelters don't get everythin', always a pile of tailings layin' around. Looks like it was getting converted into something a lot bigger than contaminate storage, though."
He was right-- with the image zoomed close everyone could see the telltale hexagons eating half the side of the dump site. "How large is- or I suppose was it? Comms, Engineer?"
Emilia sounded unhappy. "Couple hundred miles wide, sir. It's, uh... a lot of dump in one spot."
"Ah! I knew there was a reason. Captain, remember when ah was confused about where their exotic materials were comin' from? I think that was it. Hell of a good recycler on those drones, I'm guessing." Janson seemed pleased to have a puzzle solved.
Siers' voice hit with a reverb and echo effect from using the ship broadcast at the same time as their conference call. "All personnel, prepare for undocking and maneuvers. Harnesses are required, find one immediately." He switched back to normal. "Lieutenant, we're coming if you can hear me."
Wait-- they did this part already. Didn't they? Jamet was so tired everything came through with a weird echo. "Nooo. Navigation... hazard. Don't."
"Oh! Wait, don't!" Emilia repeated Jamet in a panicked tone. "That hit scattered debris everywhere! Well, whatever wasn't vaporized. We'll be going at high speed face-first into chunks of metal and pieces of whatever those drones are. Can we handle more damage like that?"
The overheads flickered around Jamet's control room. She looked up with bleary eyes, slowly tracking around the area as shadows jumped across every space. Everything was throbbing now, from her arm all the way down to both legs. A pounding heartbeat, rolling back and forth like a tide felt in every bone and muscle. Each pulse made the room bright and dark again, sending a dizzying number of reflections and ghost movements spinning out of sight. Nausea hit like a tidal wave, held back only by deep breaths and raw will.
She looked towards the only safe place in the room: Straight upwards over the chair. The portrait was still there, wry and half-amused, poised to speak but silent. Jamet took comfort in the non-motion of the marker strokes while focusing on keeping herself from vomiting, trying to ignore sweat rolling underneath pieces of skinsuit.
"-I'm willing to try, lieutenant. Can you hear me?" Siers asked it with the sad tone of someone expecting bad news.
"I'm... here..." Why did this seem so familiar?
"Sir, I don't think we can fly into that. Nobody can, not until fragments of that blast have time to clear out. Even then it'll take a wrecker with some heavy singularities to eat the big stuff." Emilia was trying to be reasonable and sad at the same time. "Ask Impossible, she'll say the same."
His voice was rough on the communications line. "Lieutenant-- Jamet-- if you're still there: The shot wasn't aimed at the facility. We think it was meant for a nearby drone cluster and you were right on the edge."
She said that before. Didn't she? Just a bit ago?
"But the debris is a significant navigational hazard."
Navigational hazard. Jamet whispered the words at the same time. She definitely said that first, just a minute ago. Even the portrait agreed, eyes permanently turned away in sardonic disbelief.
Siers sounded fatalistic, nearly haunted. "We are undocked now and I need to know if you believe we can make it to you." Jamet opened her mouth, lips moving as she mouthed the next words with him: "I'm willing to try, lieutenant. Can you hear me?"
The portrait overhead slowly came to life. Marker lines blurred, afterimages splitting off in visions of different poses. Eyes closed, then open. Mouth smiling and then frowning, eyebrows slanted in sarcasm or raised in surprise. The artist caught in this chair for a year and a half going through hundreds, then thousands of different possibilities in the space of a long breath. Not just a single picture: Every possible combination they ever could have drawn, given infinite tries and inspiration. Black marks of emotion; rage giving way to despair, then loneliness and isolation as time went on and on, endlessly, no communications, no one coming...
...and Jamet could see it now, see her arm lifted overhead. Whole and unbroken, pointing a thick black marker like a paintbrush. One stroke at a time, pauses in between that lasted both days and instants all at once. But the skinsuit arm was wrong-- thinner than hers, the material red with silver slashes. And the glove was off, showing bird-thin wrists and a long, slender artist's hand holding the marker lightly in a three finger grip. It wasn't hers. She was seeing someone else, sitting in the same immoveable chair, tied to the same spot by an evil system.
"It's time," she whispered as realization hit, hearing the long-gone artist say those exact words with her. The same words, at the same time, but different meanings: Jamet spoke with wonder and realization, remembering Paul's comment about tachyons and the Siers' confusion over recordings. But the past woman said it differently, with despair and heartbreak roiling under a shell of depression.
Jamet
tried again, wanting to explain what was happening to herself and the past ghost all at once. "We're together." She meant it as an explanation-- I am here, with you. Do you see? We're the same right now. The ghost whispered it at the same time, but aimed upwards at the completed portrait. Like a prayer. Like a goodbye. We're together.
Then they sheared off, afterimages of a smaller woman sitting up in the chair and stepping down. Ghost lights dying as past systems shut down, leaving her in a twilight darkness. Jamet craned to watch as the shadow moved away, stepping to the airlock with her marker still held in one hand...
"Lieutenant! We are on our way!" Siers yelled it as if he were in the next room, trying to be heard over a rush of sound.
The ghost of an airlock opened for the woman, both there and not at once. She watched a figment of echo and shadow walk through a closed hatch, then murmured to the comm pickup. "No, you're not." Jamet shook her head. "You haven't left yet."
The afterimage faded away, leaving behind only her airlock. Sealed, solid and real. But Jamet could still hear the marker, squeaking and slashing at the other side. A furious shade writing months of tearful anger on the mausoleum walls.
Her head didn't throb any more. But the images were still there, skating off every wrapper, piece of paper or console. Dozens of possibilities, overlapping at once. She looked down at the workspace, seeing the incoming fight both far away and right on top of the smelter all at once. A dot labelled Kipper jumped positions every time Jamet blinked, crossing from right next to the derelict habitation ring to halfway between them with each motion.
But never farther. No matter how many times Jamet looked, the Kipper's course always stopped with a terrible finality. Like an egg thrown against a wall, the dot zipping along and suddenly smashed, gone. The implication wasn't hard to grasp: Collision. Destruction. But communicating that horrible outcome was a problem. Where was she right now? When was she at this moment? Could she do anything about it, and how?
Perhaps she could cheat. It seemed simple, really, all about the timing. Jamet waited until the Kipper's callout reset to the habitation ring, then spoke as strong and clearly as she could into the console's audio: "I'm here. Emilia is right: You'll all die in the debris wave. Don't come."
She waited for the dot to move again, to fly into a fatal collision at the desperate speed of friendship. But it didn't move-- possibilities, collapsed. Paradox solved. "It can change," Jamet whispered in tone of stunned joy. Then she laughed, head thrown back. "We can change it!"
And the portrait over her head turned, looking downward with surprise and something close to anger. Endless possibilities of marker strokes condensed into a single storm cloud of expression, deep lines and forced perspective conspiring in groups of shading to give the illusion of motion.
Beautifully drawn eyes focused across a distance too impossible to put a number on, slowly catching Jamet's in a look of surprise they both shared at the same time.
What... are you?
"What are you?"
Chapter 43
The Who We Were
"I'm here. Emilia is right: You'll all die in the debris wave. Don't come."
Jamet sounded immeasurably distant on the communications link, voice half-turned away and preoccupied with something else. Siers stopped, one hand hovering over the airlock release. "What? Say again, lieutenant?"
Emilia shouted something at Janson, then nodded and turned towards the CEO workstation, visor flashing. "Sir, I don't think we can fly into that." She did something to the forward display, highlighted a huge swath of space that moved slowly away from the Tulip's shot marker. "Nobody can, not until fragments of that blast have time to clear out. Even then it'll take a wrecker with some heavy singularities to eat the big stuff." Eyebrows slanted downward in worried sympathy, both hands held up in helplessness. "Ask Impossible, she'll say the same."
His hand slowly came off the console, slowly and deliberately like it might bite him for moving too quickly. "Paul?" Siers murmured, not quite trusting his recent memory. "Did you catch that?"
The gangly specialist nodded, eyes a little too round and face white. "If you are referring to the lieutenant responding before Emilia's point then yes." He leaned to one side, fingers dancing over the ship logs. "I even have it right here. Both transmissions are on record, out of chronological order."
"Would it be safe to say there may be some flow-of-time concerns? The same as the Tulip's arrival?" He stroked one hand over mustache tips, fingers trembling slightly. Something about this situation was still tickling his memory.
Paul looked slightly nauseous, but tapped the back of his neck where his chips would be. "Too little information for a hypothesis, sir. But Research systems are lighting up just from what we have seen and I... believe that would be a valid concern. With one slight change."
The forward screen updated, callouts appearing with a zoom on the Tulip ship. The vessel was slowly getting shredded as it doggedly continued a forward course directly in line with the smelter. Drone swarms whirled in looping circles, lunging in for side-swipes and long ripping slashes that left huge rents in the hull. Emilia cried out in sadness as another petal sheared off and spun into darkness, leaving the flower motif slightly lopsided.
"What would that be? And please don't bother holding back, I believe we're far into the unknown now." Although that wasn't quite true: This was familiar somehow, but placing the when and where was tricky.
Paul watched the ongoing battle with distant eyes, attention either heavily into the ship systems or just traveling through likely scenarios. "That plasma weapon, the one large enough I would not hesitate to classify it as a superweapon? I find it coincidental that both times they have employed it we have experienced issues with causality both beforehand and afterward."
There it was again. "Before and after firing." Something clicked, a connection made that was so old it felt more like an afterimage of a dream. "No, not firing. It was before and after testing. They were testing it and the temporal issues were a side problem!"
"Sir?" Paul looked from the workspace to Siers, concern riding his face in waves. "Are we on separate conversations? Or caught in whatever the lieutenant is experiencing?"
"Dodge, you stupid idiots!" Emilia was raging at the display like an armchair general, pointing and moving both hands in elaborate movement descriptions. "It's not a hard concept! Go port! Starboard! Dive or something!" The Tulip took another long, ripping tear that opened one side to vacuum. Something spilled from the interior, large and small pieces sliding outwards like blood from a cut. "Don't just line up and let them take you apart! Come on, even I can figure that out!" If they could hear the angry Comms technician it didn't show: The ship didn't waver a fraction, except to spin and slap defensive leaves at swarming drones. It remained on course, taking brutal gouges in pursuit of a goal.
Janson sounded just as concerned, although if he was engaging in dramatic hand flourishes no one could see them. "Ah agree, why aren't they doin' anything? Ship's not fast, but it's huge! Even if they just took a big circular course an' spun lengthwise it would force drones to come from only one angle. Stayin' straight like that takes hits on every side. Even ah can figure tha' out."
"Maybe they're just dumb? Inexperienced, never been in a real fight before?" Emilia yelped as another piece of the Tulip came off, no bigger than her palm on screen but representing miles of hull material up close. "Oh dead stars they really are Academy graduates, if they even have something like that!"
But Siers wasn't listening. He was chasing memory instead, so deep and so far even the action around him faded into nothing. Stars and novas, it was so far back-- less remembered, more a feeling, like rummaging through a dark closet and finding an oddly shaped item. He touched the mental association with gentle thoughts, turning it this way and that in the darkness between insight, looking for the way it fit together in the puzzle of his mind. Was it his experience, personally? ...no, he believe so. Something heard. Secondhand. From somewhere ab
ove him, a deep voice with offhand shop talk, the sound of it tied to thousands of other memories. Sport, how ya doin'? Settled yet, making any friends?
And suddenly he had it.