Ik asked carefully, /What if, hrrm, we were to try something different?/
Julie’s heart quickened. /Ik, do you have an idea?/
Ik muttered to himself for a moment, as though trying to decide how to say it. /Hrah, I think I do. But it would be risky, also./
/All right. What is it?/
Hesitantly, Ik explained his idea.
***
Julie swallowed hard, but she approved of the idea if the stones did. It seemed a long shot, but any chance was better than none. The fact that she had fought something like these things once before didn’t make her eager to do it again. But she and her stones—and the translator—had faced the enemy and won; they had flung the terrible things into Earth’s sun and saved her homeworld. The Mindaru and their ilk were not invincible.
What Ik proposed was to use themselves as a diversion, to give the Ancestors a chance to make good their escape. The precise method they would use to do this was the next question, but the stones already had some ideas about that. The other question was, how could they protect themselves from the Mindaru, if they were going to put themselves deliberately in harm’s way? The stones were at work on both of those problems.
All this time they were speeding up the timestream toward the future, winding the clock forward; and they expected, soon, to catch up with the group of Mindaru that had entered the timestream in pursuit of the Ancestors.
The intercept calculations were not easy, even for the stones. They were, all of them, traveling not just across time but also across space, out from the center of the rotating galaxy along the ghostly line traced by the starstream as it would exist in the future.
*We will build on what we did coming pastward, and take advantage of the quantum uncertainty of temporal and spatial position.*
/Uh-huh,/ Julie said. /Do I need to follow the exact logic?/
*Just remember that the ghoststream is long and thin, but it’s not quite a taut thread. Think of it as a thread enveloped by a kind of probability fog—*
/Like a length of fuzzy wool yarn?/
*Exactly.*
/And we can use that fuzziness to sneak past the Mindaru and then . . . do whatever we figure out to do?/
*That is our plan. So far.*
The stones were still working the problem as they closed with the Mindaru, tracking the faint wake the enemy left in the timestream.
***
/Do we know yet what we’re going to do?/ Julie asked, after an uncomfortably long silence. /Say we pass them at a big arrow-shaped sign that says, ‘One hundred million years to dinosaurs,’ and they’re just pulling alongside the Ancestors. What then?/
Ik had continued wrestling with the question. /Distract them. Ruin their timing. Interrupt their attack./
/Okay,/ Julie said. /But how?/
The stones emerged from their deliberations to say, *Do you remember the evasive maneuvers we used to get past them on the downstream trip?*
/Of course. But that was just a matter of avoidance,/ Julie said.
*Yes. We hope to use that method to remain undetected, until the right moment.*
/And then—?/ asked Julie.
*And then make ourselves visible—directly in front of them.*
Julie’s heart beat a little faster. /To attack?/
*We have no means of attacking. Our goal would be to startle—and then vanish, once the Ancestors are away.*
/Uh-hum-m . . . okay. Which we do by—?/
*They are riding the timestream originating from Karellia. We are in the ghoststream originating from Shipworld. The two are closely entwined—almost, but not quite, merged into one.*
/So, our fuzzy yarn is all entwined with their fuzzy yarn . . . /
*Yes. With careful, incremental collapse of wave function, we believe we can cause—*
/Schrödinger’s cat to appear? Or the Cheshire cat?/
*Us to appear in front of the Mindaru. It will require careful, modulated sequencing—*
/Right. I trust you to handle the details./
*But you must know there’s risk.*
/Of us being attacked?/
*That also. We meant that each time we alter direction, there is risk of degrading our own stability in the ghoststream.*
/Fraying our yarn?/
*Yes.*
/And there’s no other way to do it?/
*Not that we know of. We could attempt to shade the—*
/No—look, stones, just do it, okay? Ik, okay?/
/Hrah./
***
They initiated an evasive course upon first sighting of the Mindaru. The stones predicted that they might experience the changes as familiar sensory experiences, as their minds interpreted the data. But beneath the images, it was all just wave functions.
At first it felt like the detour they had taken on their way downstream; but this time they stayed closer to the main current, so they could follow a shadow trace of the Mindaru. To Julie, it felt like speeding underwater, steering a course by the quivering shadow of a boat overhead, a faint wake on the surface. When the moment came, they would put themselves directly in front of their foe like a breaching whale. But they had not yet caught sight of the Ancestors they were hoping to protect.
And then they did, a cluster of faint, dark traces barely visible ahead of them. The Mindaru were closing the distance separating them.
*Prepare for abrupt maneuvers.*
As they angled to intercept, the flow became turbulent and the sensory inputs noisy. The targets became harder to pick out, and for a few seconds, they lost tracking on the Mindaru. By the time they’d sorted through the noise, the Mindaru shadows were already practically upon the trailing members of the Ancestors group.
*Hold tight.* The stones altered course again, to send them straight up into the closing gap. Julie tensed every muscle.
An instant later, they were surrounded by Mindaru swarming in apparent chaos. No, not chaos—they were moving in coordinated spirals. Were they corralling the Ancestors?
/Can’t we stop them?/
But they were already too late. The Mindaru had culled the hindmost Ancestor from the herd and surrounded it. Julie felt something quiver in the space around her. She saw a flicker of thin light beams dancing, and then something came into sharp focus, just for an instant—and then it was gone, with a splash of violet light. Decoherence?
Julie’s breath tightened. /Did they just kill that one?/
/Hrah./
*Yes. We must act quickly to save others.*
The Mindaru were already moving onto the next vulnerable Ancestor. But the stones worked faster than Julie could follow. Their ghoststream bubble moved sideways, and then abruptly back. Julie felt a twinge of dizziness, and suddenly they were visible, and directly in front of, one of the Mindaru.
The Mindaru sheared away in alarm or surprise, and the Ancestor swooped and veered in the other direction, seeming to recognize its peril; and after a heart-stopping moment, it plunged out through the boundary of the timestream and away—free from the Mindaru, but tumbling off into uncharted interstellar space. Julie thought she glimpsed a complex play of shadows as it left the stream. Had it just dropped out of its wave function? No way to know.
She had about one heartbeat to meditate on that, and then they were moving again. She felt a sudden flush of weariness. What had that maneuver taken out of her? Before she could think about that, they sprang back into sharp relief in front of another Mindaru. She gasped out in pain at the maneuver, as if she’d been stung. The Mindaru jerked sideways to avoid the bubble, giving another Ancestor a chance to tumble out of sight. But a moment later the Mindaru was back. The stones took that as a warning and steered them clear.
But not for long. On the next approach, the stones brought them quite suddenly nose-to-nose with one of the Mindaru. *This might hurt,* the stones warned. So right. It jarred the Mindaru—but also jarred Julie hard, and it stung even more sharply. What was this pain all about? Energy escaping from their delicate balance? Wh
atever the cost, it startled and delayed the Mindaru long enough to give one more ancestor a chance to escape. Weirdly, Julie thought she felt something familiar about the thing, a feeling that reminded her just for an instant of the creature they’d observed at the edge of the sea. Probably it was nothing. But whether real or not, that feeling gave Julie a fleeting satisfaction.
The feeling vanished when the bolt of lightning hit—an attack from the Mindaru, not on the Ancestors but on them: needles stabbing into their sensor network, fast-moving tendrils trying to penetrate their shields and control arrays. It was not just the bubble under attack, but the stones, and Ik, and Julie in her own head. Rats screeched and clawed to get into her mind. She screamed back at them, clamping her eyes shut. Firewalls slammed closed. For several heartbeats, she saw only gray, and mist, and felt that her every limb was paralyzed. Then the view sprang open, and the Mindaru tumbled away, hissing in frustration.
/Are we free?/ she gasped. /Or did it get its teeth into us?/
*Free. They’re not yet quite as formidable as their descendants will be. But we have lost the element of surprise. There is little more hope for this strategy.*
/Hrah . . . / Ik sounded winded. /What now . . . ?/ Repelling that direct attack had taken a lot out of him.
Julie too felt the toll of the battle, brief as it had been. It left her feeling stretched thin, as though each movement had drained her a little more. The stones had warned them of the risk. She was afraid they might be losing their connection back to the future, back to their bodies. What if they decohered and disintegrated right here, half a billion years in the past, or wherever they were now?
There was no answer; but there were still Ancestors at risk. The stones tried once more to make their bubble visible in front of an attacking Mindaru, but it ignored them. Apparently they were now just a nuisance, not worth changing course for. When the nearest Ancestor attempted to flee, it was caught and engulfed, and died in little flashes of light. Two more ahead of it met the same fate. There were still a few more, farther up, but what chance did they have?
Dizzily, Julie said, /Is there anything else we can do? We’re losing them!/
*Not from here.* The stones steered them back into the shadows beneath the main current, and steadied their flight back up the timeline toward home. *We must flee. But we also must decide whether to ask Base Control to fire a decoherence pulse.*
/To stop as many Mindaru as possible?/ Julie asked.
/And kill us?/ asked Ik.
*That is a risk. We will keep to the outer edge of the stream and hope it washes past us. It may destroy some Mindaru. More important, it could seal off that opening downstream. If we are fortunate, it will still allow us to flee back to the future.*
Maybe, might, perhaps. And if it made matters worse, what then? Julie wondered. /Why can’t we get the hell back to Base and out of the stream, and then fire the pulse?/
*We are needed to guide the aim and focus of the pulse. We do not want to repeat the mistakes of the last mission.*
No, we do not, Julie thought.
The stones began transmitting to Base Control, suggesting precise coordinates and frequency requirements for the pulse. They concluded with: *Stand by.*
/Stand by for what?/ Julie asked.
The stones answered by adjusting their course again, taking them toward the gray haze away from the main channel. To the outermost fuzz of their string of yarn, she thought.
/Aren’t you putting us awfully close to the boundary where we might get flung out of the ghoststream and disconnected?/ Ik asked.
*It is a calculation of probabilities. The chances of our being found in any one location here are low. Or if you prefer, we are becoming more diffuse. This, we hope, improves the likelihood of the pulse passing us by without effect.*
/But I don’t want to be thrown out like the Ancestors, half a billion years from home./
*Unlikely. But if it were to happen, we would not last long enough to notice,* the stones said dryly. *This is the best plan we have been able to devise if we hope to use the decoherence pulse and survive. Do we have your approval to proceed?*
Julie sighed. /Yes./
Ik murmured approval.
*Hold tight, then.*
***
Nothing to hold onto but my ass, and a virtual one at that, Julie thought. Now that they were committed, she just wanted it to be over. The Mindaru were nearly invisible shadows rippling far away. For a long time, nothing happened. She let her breath out, gasping, and forced herself to keep breathing.
And then came a rumbling: a wave coming toward them, building. It was a surge of energy, cascading down the eons from the future. It was about to roar past like a gargantuan, runaway freight train.
The stones busied themselves doing something with the stream, somehow shaping the path for the surge.
Julie looked up toward the future. Although she felt the thing coming, she saw nothing but the empty, glowing tunnel of the ghoststream. Then it became visible: a flickering pinpoint of light in the distance. Growing in brightness, it was like the headlight of a train far away, its light shining onto the rails ahead of it, pulsing from side to side, flashing a warning. /Ik, do you see it?/
/Hrah, yes!/
The light leapt toward them. It was as though the train’s headlight tilted up, just enough to cause the reflection on the track to spring toward them with impossible speed. It blazed, roared. Julie wanted to scream, but then it was past them—past the Mindaru shadows—gone.
Had it hit anything? She couldn’t tell.
*It’s not over,* said the stones. *Brace yourselves for the rebound. The blowback. We can’t control that.*
The first passing of the wave wasn’t what would be most destructive. What would really hurt was loss of coherence in the entanglement between the future and past. If that were to occur, it would be when the pulse reached the far end of the ghoststream, still anchored near the origins planet.
/Let’s go!/ she cried, as the stones accelerated their own rush back to the future.
Megayears spun past outside the stream, stars bursting to life and exploding in death, the galaxy wheeling in majestic rotation. What the Mindaru behind them were doing, they couldn’t tell—whether pursuing or escaping.
*We did the best we could,* the stones said. It sounded like an epitaph.
The best they could do? They had saved a few of the Ancestors, and inconvenienced the Mindaru. Was that all they had to show?
*We did what we could,* the stones repeated, as though attempting to persuade her. Or maybe themselves.
/Hrah,/ said Ik. /And what have we done to our own timeline?/
Julie grimaced. Had they changed the past, and thereby altered the timeline in their own century? Or had they done exactly what was needed to keep it just as it had been? She blinked fast at the blur of years measured by the lives of worlds outside the timestream.
*Or did we repair it after the last team’s unfortunate mistakes?* the stones asked.
And with those words, the blowback hit.
Chapter 14
Hard Pursuit
KORO WAS NOT happy; Bandicut could see that clearly enough. “Where are you taking us?” the Karellian sputtered, waving at the viewspace, where his homeworld had disappeared behind the clouds of the Heart of Fire.
“We are pursuing the Mindaru, likely all the way to Uduon,” Ruall answered, floating in a widening circle around the bridge. “Has anyone seen Bria?”
Koro ignored the question. “Are you abducting us?”
“Not at all,” Ruall clanged. “We are in the middle of a military maneuver. As soon as it is possible to return you to your home—”
“Why are you taking the Karellians to Uduon?” Sheeawn interrupted, seeming every bit as alarmed as Koro. “You could be letting them see things that—”
“We are all going where our pursuit of the Mindaru takes us,” Ruall snapped, with clearly diminishing patience. “And right now that is the Uduon system.” S
he waved a paddle-hand at Bandicut, as though asking if he could please take over calming the rabble.
Bandicut was grateful when Li-Jared stepped up to the task. “Here’s what you all have to understand,” the Karellian said, rubbing his thumbs and forefingers together as he stood in front of the four guests. He angled his head toward the image of the Mindaru fleeing ahead of them. “If we let that thing escape to tell its friends, there are going to be a lot more of them.” He pointed at Quin and Koro. “Especially if Karellia doesn’t turn off that temporal shield.” Before either could respond, he swung to point at Akura and Sheeawn. “And that can’t happen unless Uduon stops throwing asteroids at Karellia.”
The four stared at him with a mixture of emotions that appeared to range from distaste to uncertainty to defiance.
“Now see here—” began Koro.
Li-Jared silenced him with a glare. “Those things will be death to both of you. And after that, to a lot more worlds. What will it take to make you believe that?”
Bandicut was weary of it, but in his heart he couldn’t blame them. They simply had no experience with the Mindaru. Even the encounter just past had shown them how hard the Mindaru could be to catch, but not the damage they could do. Bandicut sighed as Li-Jared continued, “Did you see how effective our best shot was against that thing? Those shots we fired would have destroyed a fleet of your ships. That was our best shot—right, Ruall?”
Ruall made a soft cymbal sound. “Yes,” she said, and Bandicut thought she sounded disappointed. “Until we can think of something better.”
The Karellians and the Uduon were now quiet. Finally Quin said, “Is that supposed to make us feel better? Are you going to defend us against these things? The way you just stopped that one?”
And that was really the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? Could they really be expected to disarm, if The Long View couldn’t handle the enemy?
Li-Jared sat down with a grunt and gazed forward into the viewspace, watching the space pursuit. The Mindaru was a blinking marker arrowing straight through the glowing clouds of gas between the Karellian and Uduon star systems. It was moving at a speed The Long View could barely match while staying mostly in normal-space, which they had to do so as not to lose track of it. Unless the Mindaru stopped to sightsee along the way, or decided to turn and fight, there was little hope of catching up with it before it reached Uduon home space.
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