Crucible of Time

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  He looked away, searching his own thoughts. Any personal chemistry with the Watcher needed to be set aside. They might be alike in many ways, but they came from warring worlds. He had to stay focused on the mission. Stop the conflict. Stop the damned asteroid attacks. Turn off the damned temporal shield at Karellia. He turned back, and with a rasping deep in his throat, said, “Yes. It will be much better if you stop it yourselves. Because there will be pressure for us to stop it if you don’t.”

  She angled her gaze. “By force?”

  His throat got even raspier. “That’s not how we’d prefer—”

  He was interrupted by Copernicus. “Message from Dark. There is a small asteroid approaching at considerable speed—apparently from a priming accelerator some distance away. Its trajectory will take it directly into this launcher. We should have it in sight soon.”

  Li-Jared stiffened. Now? An asteroid coming? His voice grew knife-edged as he asked Akura, “Are you about to launch an asteroid at Karellia? Is that what this is?”

  She gazed steadily at Sheeawn as he translated, and then she looked away. But a few moments later, she turned back to Li-Jared. There was no apology in her gaze. “I imagine it is,” she said.

  He stared hard out into the viewspace, until Copernicus put a marker on a small, barely moving point of light. This was no longer theoretical. “You knew?”

  “Not really,” the Watcher said. “I am not involved in the launches at all. But I do not know what else it could be.”

  Li-Jared glared his fury, then jerked his gaze away. Damn. Damn damn. He glanced at Bandicut, whose pained expression showed he had been following the conversation. So much for his quiet diplomacy.

  The minutes crept past, as Copernicus updated and enhanced the view. Ruall floated forward in the viewspace, revealing none of her thoughts. Bandicut stood rock still. Li-Jared paced. “We should be prepared to stop it,” he said to Bandicut, who did not reply.

  Finally they saw it clearly.

  It reflected just enough sunlight that it flickered as it moved across the black sky. Tumbling, probably. Li-Jared halted his pacing and stood frozen. Theory and plans be damned! They should be stopping that thing! “Ruall! Are you going to do something about it?”

  The Tintangle ducked and bobbed as though seeking different angles on the approaching asteroid. “I am going to do exactly as we discussed,” she said finally. “We need to study it to understand the details of the launcher. If we interrupt it before launch, we will not know the velocity of launch or the precision of aiming, or even the precise mechanism. All of that could be important in future planning.”

  Li-Jared’s hearts hammered. “I know what we said—but this is a crazy risk! If we don’t head it off—”

  “I am not proposing to allow it to strike Karellia,” Ruall said evenly. “And, you know, the Karellian defenses have been working effectively up to this point. So if for some reason we could not stop it, they would.”

  “Unless we get them to stop using the defense!” Li-Jared shouted. “How long will it take an asteroid launched today to get to Karellia?”

  “As we discussed,” Ruall clanged, before modulating her voice, “we cannot know until we measure the final speed. But a hundred or so Karellian days does not seem unlikely.”

  “By which time, assuming we are successful, we will have shut down the defenses!”

  Bandicut spoke up at last. “He has a point there, Ruall. We could get everyone to agree to peace and shut it all down—and still have an asteroid incoming from today’s launch.”

  The rock was approaching the launcher, a glint against the black sky.

  “Of course we will track it,” Ruall said, with a hint of annoyance vibrating in her voice. “And we will take action once we have seen what we need to see.”

  Unless we don’t. Or we forget. Or the Mindaru show up and kill us. That last possibility was probably the most worrisome. Li-Jared was struggling now to draw each breath. But the question was about to become moot. The asteroid was twinkling straight toward the entry point. He spared a glance at Akura, who was listening to Sheeawn’s rapid whispers, and nodding. He could not read her expression, except that it was tense.

  “We won’t forget,” Ruall said, as though reading his thoughts. “And I remind you, we have good reason to keep these launchers operational. They may be needed to defend against the Mindaru one day.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  Copernicus interrupted. “Folks, I’m tracking it as being dead on course, and ready to shoot on in, ’bout twenty-seven seconds from now.”

  “Coppy, can it with the flyboy lingo!”

  Copernicus didn’t respond.

  “Jeaves, oversee tracking and analysis,” Ruall broke in. “Copernicus, make a course to flank the missile and overtake it after launch. Coordinate with Jeaves.” Ruall’s shiny expressionless face turned toward Li-Jared. “I have heard your objection. We will track the object the minimum time needed to gather data, and then we will take appropriate action.”

  “I—” Li-Jared began—and then it sank in that Ruall had just agreed with him.

  “Look,” Bandicut said, pointing.

  A glow was building around each of the launch rings, the brightest at the near end. Excited interplanetary dust, maybe, in the presence of the acceleration field. The center of the viewspace zoomed in on that first ring, just as the asteroid flashed through. The rock seemed to crunch in upon itself, as though squeezed by the ring. It also came out the far side visibly faster than it went in.

  Jeaves called out some numbers. The Long View accelerated, pacing the asteroid. The rock flashed out of the second ring going faster still, and streaked on to the next. “It’s getting a big boost from each ring,” Jeaves said, “but it’s also pulled along by the extended fields between rings. It’s accelerating fast.”

  “So it is,” Ruall said. “Let me know when you can estimate the exit velocity.”

  “It’ll be a respectable fraction of light-speed. That much I can estimate now.”

  “But what fraction?” Ruall asked.

  Li-Jared shuddered, imagining the damage an asteroid with that much kinetic energy could do to a planet. The rock flashed through several more rings. It was well on its way. “Listen,” he said, his voice shaking a little. “Don’t you have enough—?”

  Ruall reverberated with a metallic ringing. “I said—!”

  “I know what you said!” Li-Jared winced at his own outburst, shut his eyes, and forced calm upon himself. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Moon and stars, this makes me nervous.”

  “Heads up, gentlemen!” Copernicus barked. “Something’s happening.”

  Li-Jared whirled to look. Copernicus slewed the view and jacked the zoom in and out, tracking on the asteroid as it flew through the second-to-last hoop, with a purplish flash. It was moving dazzlingly fast. But something else was coming into the frame, from the left. Something shadowy and quick. Li-Jared froze. What the hell was that? Mindaru?

  ***

  For a long time now Dark, the sentient singularity, had been shadowing the vessel of her companions, wondering what exactly they were doing. She knew they had picked up additional ephemerals from the planet; but she didn’t fully understand what they were trying to accomplish here. One thing she did understand was that there was danger all around—danger from the Mindaru, of course—but also from the ephemerals of this planet. Danger from things thrown through space—thrown long distances, and with enough speed to hurt.

  While some of her friends were down on the planet, Dark had cruised around, gathering knowledge. There was a remarkable complexity to the spacefaring quality of this world’s inhabitants. They didn’t really seem to travel in person much; Dark ventured close to some of their installations, and she felt no sense of living inhabitants. But something was providing a guiding intelligence to their infrastructure, and Dark wanted to understand what it was. There was a kind of intelligence in the structures themselves, but it was different from he
r friends, different even from Copernicus, who was himself different from the rest. It wasn’t something she could talk or listen to; it was more of a mutter, more like some of the Mindaru subsystems she’d encountered back at the Starmaker Nebula, not quite alive, but alive-ish.

  One thing she could follow, though, was the gathering of asteroids for launch. There was no good to those, not while they were aimed at Li-Jared’s homeworld.

  Once she’d identified the asteroid closest to entry into the launcher, she informed Copernicus and began shadowing the object. She thought the ephemerals could probably stop it if they wanted to, but she wasn’t sure. They too were shadowing it as it flashed through the first hoop, picking up velocity. Then it blazed through the second hoop, gaining more velocity.

  To Dark, its momentum was visible like the glow of a sun. She could look at it in different aspects, different colors and angles, and she could imagine draining that momentum off like a dense sun pulling matter off a bloated red giant. She grew more interested as she watched it flick through one hoop after another, but she also grew concerned. This was one of the asteroids they wanted to stop; so why weren’t they? Was it possible they couldn’t stop it?

  Dark made up her mind. If there was one kind of thing she knew how to handle, this was it.

  The speeding asteroid was a tiny star in her mind, its kinetic energy radiating in her direction like a red hot light. This was becoming too dangerous to allow to continue. Dark waited no longer. She swept in and enfolded the rock in her singularity. She drank the energy of the stone with sweet abandon, feeling the hot dance of its molecules warm her inner core. When she had drained it to a cold ball of rock and metal, she unfolded herself again and released it.

  There: Let it drift in the dark of space, where it could do no harm.

  ***

  Bandicut barked something like a laugh. “That’s Dark out there! What’s she doing?”

  Ruall was twanging in dismay.

  So it was Dark, then, not the Mindaru? Li-Jared squinted, straining to see. The asteroid and Dark had intersected, joined into one, leaving only a shadow. For a long heartbeat, nothing visible happened. Then light flickered dully inside Dark, like heat lightning in a thundercloud. A moment later, Dark fluttered away, leaving the asteroid stripped of momentum, floating in the cold and silence. Jeaves called out, “The rock’s velocity is reduced by ninety-nine percent. Deflection, thirty percent . . .”

  “Then—?” Li-Jared began.

  “Dark took it out,” Jeaves said simply. “The threat to Karellia is gone.”

  Chapter 2

  Through the Nebula

  THE VOYAGE THROUGH the Heart of Fire was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing Sheeawn had ever experienced. For most of his life, he had thought of these glowing clouds in the night sky as the boundary of the universe, the boundary beyond which it was impossible to fly. What lay beyond it? A quick death or a slow one, but surely death in one form or another. As if proof were needed, from out of the clouds had come the attack from the demon world. The first was before his time, but others had followed.

  And now, were he and the Watcher crazy? They were sailing straight into those clouds! They had placed their lives in the hands of alien strangers! One moment he believed the speaking stones when they talked to him, assuring him that the aliens meant only what was best for all of them. The next moment, he was certain he had taken leave of his senses. Before, the aliens had seemed friendly; but now, the one named Li-Jared was extremely angry about the attempted asteroid launch. Sheeawn found himself instinctively keeping his distance from Li-Jared.

  After a day or so, Sheeawn began to relax a little, possibly because Watcher Akura was doing so also. Sheeawn sat on the bridge for hours, gazing into the viewspace. However perilous the clouds, the view was breathtaking—luminous wisps of crimson and violet and green, curled like the petals of a flower. The glowing gases appeared to churn, though according to the robot pilot, that was mostly an illusion caused by the motion of the ship plowing through the clouds. As the hours ticked by and no harm befell them, his immediate fear diminished.

  The robot pilot turned out—unlike the strange and alarming Ruall—to be friendly and helpful. Copernicus spoke freely, explaining that the beautiful red curtains of light and dust that now stretched across their flight path were shaped not by gods or demons, but by magnetic fields that tugged at the narrow gap between the two stars—one his own world’s sun and the other the demon world’s sun. He was learning that the two suns were gravitationally entwined; they were sister suns, and the two worlds were sister worlds. Uduon and the demon world, sisters? Sheeawn found that an alarming concept; but also provocative and confounding. He no longer knew what to think.

  With their passage through the clouds, the view behind them gradually became obscured. Ahead, however, the obscuration was thinning, and a beacon of light began to shine through. According to Copernicus, that was the home star, the sun, of their destination. Despite his misgivings, Sheeawn marveled at the sights. He also marveled at the speed of their passage. The explanations—something about other kinds of space, something called “threading space” and something called “n-space”—didn’t make much of a dent in his bewilderment, even with the help of the speaking stones. To Sheeawn, it was either a miracle or dark magic; he wasn’t sure which. The stones clearly wanted him to believe in n-space over magic, but it was simply beyond him.

  As Sheeawn grew more at ease, Akura seemed to become more solemn, especially as the sun of the demon world grew round in the viewspace. Sheeawn interpreted a number of conversations between Akura and Li-Jared, at first about the attempted asteroid launch, but then about other topics. Akura strove to make Li-Jared understand her world’s need to defend itself. Li-Jared did not deny that, and he had no explanation for the bombardment that had fallen on Uduon. That, he said, was a question they both would ask of the leaders of Karellia.

  ***

  For Akura, one thing that unexpectedly helped her to adjust to the stress of this trip was her discovery that the clouds were not just awesomely beautiful; they were somehow alive. Maybe not alive like a person, or like one of the inexplicable living beings on this strange ship, no. But there was a way in which the Heart of Fire touched Akura’s inner watcher-senses, much in the same way she felt another person’s inner aura or mind-soul, but without the personality or will. Here among the clouds she felt layerings in space, folds and variations in the magnetic fields, and intricacies in the flow of energy through the gaseous medium. She knew nothing about the alien science of it, but there was a texture that imprinted on her during the passage. It was not unlike the way she knew her own world’s circles of connection, through the intertwined tree roots, through the folds and layers of fire-forged rock, through the moisture in the aquifers. Given time, she felt she might learn her way through this nebula solely through her watcher-sense.

  This was a feeling she kept to herself.

  As the ship emerged from the far side of the clouds, however, she became more focused on the approaching planet, and on understanding Li-Jared. His explanation that he was from Karellia, but had been away for a long time, was just at the edge of incomprehensibility to her. Where was there to go? If she couldn’t understand Li-Jared, how could she trust him? There was a lot at stake in her placing trust in these aliens, not just Li-Jared but Bandicut and the rest. She had precious little evidence on which to base her trust. She was the first Watcher ever to meet aliens, much less think of trusting them, and the risk and responsibility sobered her. She could not read the personality and will of the aliens to the degree she might an Uduon, but she had a persistent, instinctive feeling, a watcher-sense, that she was not wrong in taking this risk.

  “I hope, Karellian, that this is a good risk,” she said to Li-Jared, when he indicated to her the point of light that was Karellia. She had not meant to speak her inner thoughts quite so bluntly, but there it was; Sheeawn was already translating.

  He appeared startled. “Ar
e you concerned about what will happen when we get there? That they might harm you?”

  “What? Yes, of course.” She pressed her fingertips to her chest, then flicked them outward in dismissal. “But not mostly that. Mostly, I’m concerned about making a wrong decision for my people.”

  Li-Jared’s eyes showed understanding. Those eyes that looked so . . . Uduon. “You know,” he said, “our people are not so different.”

  She stared back at him. “You look much like us, if that is what you mean.”

  “Yes, that is part of it. But I wonder if we might be—?” he hesitated, and then did not finish the sentence. “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we are related in some way? Some distant connection, long ago, when the worlds were young?” Akura had wondered that herself, from the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and she didn’t much like the thought. She saw Sheeawn trying the idea out in his own head as he translated her words.

  Li-Jared drummed his fingers on the bench seat cushion. “Perhaps. Who knows? I expect our scientists—yours and ours—could work it out.” He sighed and changed the subject. “I so look forward to seeing Karellia again! It is a beautiful world.” He gestured to the billowing Heart of Fire now in their rear view. “It was named after those clouds, in part. ‘Karellia’ means ‘World of beautiful, perilous sky.’ I ache to see it again!” He hissed a sigh that obviously carried deep emotion. “But honestly, I do not know how I will be received. Not just you, but me, too. I know very little of what has happened there in the long years of my absence, and I do not know what they will say when we reappear in their sky—with guests.”

  Akura fixed him with a stare. “But you believe there can be peace. That we can make peace. Even though missiles from your world are landing on mine?”

  His fingers twitched again. “We must make peace. Or everyone will suffer.”

  “There is great anger and fear on my world.” She tapped her chest. “In me. That will not just go away.”