by F P Adriani
Devin must have noticed her paling face: he quickly shook his head “no” back at us. “We released him first, of course. Once the box’s field was outside the stronger field of the warship, the subfield of the box clearly got weaker; then we were able to penetrate the box using an aminyte laser, which tool is invisible to humans.”
Gary was frowning. “So then will the rogue Keeper get the same treatment as Claudius?”
Devin shook his head again. “This Keeper is indeed part of a sect of Keepers who do not necessarily agree with the tasks the rest of us feel it is our duty to perform. He thought it might be beneficial to have a tie to humans and alert that tie of what a Keeper presence here in this universe means. Before he realized what was happening, the information he’d shared with Claudius was being used against him. He had been imprisoned since.
“He will now be sent back to The Interstitial Universe, where he will face the governing Keepers—they will decide where he will go. We have him confined and have been talking with him. He is a naive, too idealistic Keeper, but he did not mean harm to anyone, especially to humans.”
Shirley was frowning at Devin. “Still, he did foolish things that almost got a lot of people killed. Yet you seem almost blithe about him! Didn’t he give Claudius devices to do all this?”
Nearby, Thura seemed to have faded away a bit.
And Devin shook his head fast yet again, at Shirley. “No, he did not give Claudius devices. Fortunately, he also didn’t have any information on newer tools our sect of Keepers uses, such as the new red worksuits.
“One device Claudius has been using—the one he used to kidnap you, Lydia, and then disrupt your dimensional transporter stream when you fled—that device has been banned for use by the governing Keepers; Keepers aren’t even allowed to preserve this device in The Hall Of Devices. It is from another species…we Keepers do have an enemy—we have not had contact with them in a long time. Sometimes species get rubbed the wrong way and they don’t want to see reason. Instead, they see a threat in us where there is none. Some species are also just very war-like and are always looking for conflict.
“The other technologies Claudius possesses—we have no idea how he acquired those and adapted them for his use. He must have had help. But, we’ve been unable to find any information on that in the path-library and by using our other equipment. We may never know how all of this happened. The Reimark Layer is positioned in the Omniverse in a very central spot—the people there must have had contact with species they shouldn’t have had contact with. The Reimarkians are lucky they didn’t have a disaster happen.”
“And we’re unlucky that they didn’t have a disaster happen,” I said. “Right now, I’m really feeling like the Omniverse is a goddamn mess—and you Keeper crowd aren’t doing a good job of keeping it all together. I’m sorry to say this to you—but I’m just stressed out and disappointed here….”
“The Keepers, like any other species, are always still learning as long as they’re still existing,” Devin said. “Perfection is something we never claim we have—our jobs are too complex for us to ever be perfect. Again, though, this is why we Keepers are cultivating this worker set-up with you and your crew. If you feel you can no longer do it because of what you’ve now learned, we’ll accept that.”
I frowned. No matter everything that had happened, no matter my disappointment, no matter any fears I might have, the thought of going back to the Demeter still just did not thrill me the way this Keeper ship did. A life on here would probably be more dangerous, but it would also be more exciting. At this point, it seemed impossible for me to go back to being a normal goods shipper—that life seemed almost boring to me now. And it also seemed that my ship had slowly become a bed-only for me….
Gary suddenly let go of my hand—to shake his hand at the viewscreen, which now showed only an exterior view of the warship. “What I still don’t understand is: why can’t you banish all of them on that ship like you’re doing with the rogue Keeper—better yet, why didn’t you do this from the get-go when Claudius attacked the Demeter?”
Devin had a slight frown on his face now. “You know what our primary jobs are. You know we try to interfere as little as possible in the active, contemporary affairs of the various universes. We work in the background, not the foreground. We work on creations that have already been discarded or fallen into disrepair. If we go around removing individuals from this universe and throwing our powerful weight around, we are affecting far more of this universe than is safe for everyone, including us. We Keepers live a very long time, but we are not immortal. This is one reason why we had to remove the rogue Keeper from Claudius’ sphere: we do not want Claudius to learn even more about Keepers than he unfortunately already has. Though our lives are devoted to doing things for others and to preserving the Omniverse’s technological history, we are still living beings.”
I watched Gary’s lips fall open slightly, which echoed what I was feeling too: apparently, it was very easy for us humans to forget that though the Keepers seemed god-like sometimes, they really weren’t immortal gods, as was obvious on that day in the lounge, that day of disaster when Una died….
I heard Thura’s voice now, and it sounded unusually loud for a Keeper as she said, “This is the Monument, and we, The Keepers Of The Tasui, have a message for those of you still on the warship: your captain and his mission have failed. You must give up in your efforts to gain outsized power. You cannot win against us, but should you continue to pursue your current course, you will continue to meet a response that will destroy your plans—”
A clear vibration now in the bridge floor; it shook the bridge, and made me and probably everyone else on it tilt to the right, as if the ship had been thrown out of equilibrium and was passing on that off-kilter state to our bodies.
“What’s going on?” Chen said fast. “My panel’s showing our centerline has shifted.”
Devin’s fingers were moving fast on his controls. “We’ve been struck by the Claudius ship.”
My heart was going crazy now. “What! Everyone on the bridge get back to your stations,” I said, then I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know enough to take command now. I could barely battle Claudius on the Demeter—forget about here.
But if I had said the wrong thing, Devin and the two Keepers on the bridge didn’t seem to notice or care. Or maybe they were busy thinking about what to do…that seemed to be all they were doing now: just standing there, staring up at the screen.
“Are you Keeper crowd in conference or something?” I said. “Could you let us in on your minds?”
Thura’s head turned my way. “We were actually not talking to each other. I was going over the events and the data we have collected from them. We have lost the location of that fluctuating weakness in the warship’s field. Zuri here has been trying to find it, so we can get a view of the bridge again.”
“Why is that important…” I began. But I never got to finish my sentence because the viewscreen suddenly brightened and faded into that interior view of the warship’s bridge—where, wonder of all wonders, Claudius was standing once again, his dark eyes thunderous and his stiff posture full of suppressed fury.
It seemed like everyone on the bridge did a jaw-dropping double-take, including the Keepers.
My heart hammered against my chest as I said, “What the fuck is going on—I thought he was dead!”
“I was afraid of this,” Thura said now. “Right before the other Claudius body was destroyed, we collected some data on him. There was an abnormal growth history to his DNA.”
She paused, and then Babs said from behind me, “So? That can be a natural occurrence, especially for humans who successfully grow in far layers with slightly different radiation profiles from where we originally evolved on Earth.”
“That is not what I meant,” Thura said. “It appears Claudius is in possession of what we Keepers call an eternity machine. It allows users to reproduce themselves exactly as they are, at any age.”
Shirley had gone back to her panel, but now she said in a frantic voice, “You mean Claudius can make photocopies of himself?!?”
Thura seemed to do a quick flicker-turn to Shirley. “Yes. But each device for doing that can only make a few copies off the ‘master copy’ it’s coded to, or else the new copies will have too many heath problems to develop properly. If the master-copy original dies, at some point, all the copies will eventually have died, and the person will be no more.”
“How many copies can each device make?” Shirley asked.
A pause. Then Thura said, “About ten.”
“Fuck,” I said, “that’s still a lot!” I ran my fingers through my hair, my eyes passing over the astonished, worried faces of my crew. “I don’t fucking believe this. How will we get rid of this guy—and now his Claudii!”
“I don’t understand how this has happened,” Shirley said now, a frown in her voice. “Why weren’t you Keepers able to see this coming? It’s so frustrating that you’re only able to see random bits of the future.”
Thura’s clear, bouncing eyes turned right to Shirley. “Even when we can see more than that, we cannot act on most of it. A peculiar aspect of the Omniverse is that if you act based on a glimpse of the future, you can greatly affect the present, too. And the present can be harder to perceive and fix than the future—”
“WHERE is my brother?” a furious familiar voice suddenly shouted.
My eyes shot up to the screen, where Claudius suddenly grew larger to us because he’d moved closer to his front viewscreen camera. Or, shit, maybe he wasn’t actually Claudius. I couldn’t even be sure the one I’d had contact with on the warship was the real one, though I felt like he was. On the other hand, Thura didn’t give a timeline for when Claudius had cloned himself. He might have gotten hold of multiple eternity machines over the years, for all anyone knew. There could be dozens—hundreds of him out there now—shit!
“I’m asking one last time, and then I will fire on you again: WHERE IS MY BROTHER?” Claudius yelled.
I pressed a palm to my usual bridge-panel, and a patch of my sweat grew on the slick dark edge. “Please, Thura,” I said now. “Let me speak to him.”
Devin turned to me—and nodded hard, one time.
Then I finally said (and enjoyed saying), “This is Captain Zarro. Your brother is dead.”
There was a pause, during which a flash of surprised anger contorted Claudius’ face. “Ah, Captain Zarro, you’re still alive. Most unfortunate. But then you won’t be alive for much longer.”
Before I could say, “Keep dreaming, scumbag,” Claudius fired off another shot toward the Monument. He must have recently made modifications to his weapons too, because, going on the numbers on my panel, this shot was a cluster of energy far more powerful than what he’d hit the Demeter with months ago.
I could feel a vibration spread through the bridge floor and up the dark walls now. My head shot around to Thura on the right side of the bridge. “I thought you said we’re safe in here!”
“We are,” Thura said. “He can drain the Monument of some of its energy, but he cannot damage it.”
“Well, maybe he can keep shooting at us enough that this ship’ll wind up dead in space!”
“Why the hell aren’t we firing back?” Chen asked in a frustrated voice, one of his hands loudly banging at his controls. And when I turned around to look at him, the hand doing the banging was his Keeper-tainted one.
Chen’s head was hanging low, and now his eyes drifted up at me, then quickly dropped back down to his panel. His hand finally stopped trying to shake (and break?) his controls. “I just wish we could do some damage to this fucking moronic asshole waste of space already.”
I couldn’t help laughing at Chen’s mouthful of swearing, especially because he didn’t often swear.
“We can’t fire on the warship,” Devin said now. “We’re unsure if there are others on there being held against their will. The field-shielding is also very strong. We can’t damage it so easily.”
“But you can drain it like they can do to us, can’t you?” Babs said.
Devin was quick to nod now, but he only said, “We can, but we won’t. And we have our reasons for this.”
“So we’re going to sit here and play this drain-game with them?” Gary asked in an angry voice. “Why don’t we just take off? I’m beyond ready to start an omnivelocity profile. Just pick a damn place.”
“We must get more data from the ship before we go—” Devin began.
But Steve’s harried voice over the communications-line interrupted him: “Captain—Captain Zarro, Purn said to give Thura and Zuri a message; Purn had to go into the load cells, because of the energy drain from the warship’s shots. For some reason, Purn can’t seem to mind-link up to the bridge.
“About the load cells—he said the power-output ignition isn’t fluctuating sinusoidally. There are discontinuities. It’s too dangerous to travel at very high speeds right now, especially in dimensional streams. Purn needs about twenty minutes to recharge the switches in the load cells.”
“Another reason we can’t take off,” Devin said now, a heavy frown on his dark face. On the screen, Claudius and his crew oddly—and silently, because we were in spying mode again—rushed off the warship’s bridge.
“So you’re telling us we have no options,” Gary said, his eyes on the viewscreen as it shifted to an image of the warship floating in space. “This is crazy. Why have this big ship if you can’t ever throw its weight around—” He stopped talking so abruptly that my head whipped around to him.
“What is it, Gary?” I asked him fast.
There was a frown on his face as his brown eyes stared at the screen. “So, okay, we can’t book out of here till Purn makes repairs, and we can’t damage the ship’s hull because they might have other prisoners on there. But how about kicking its ass across the universe? This ship is far bigger than the warship. Use our brute bulk momentum to push it far away. That will give us time for Purn to make repairs without our being in reach for anymore shots.”
Devin flashed Gary surprised dark eyes. “What an excellent idea. Thura, can we make it happen?”
“We are now making arrangements to do this,” Thura replied. “We have analyzed the warship’s field further, and we now see that it is vulnerable to collisions with much larger masses. However, as we have never actually done a maneuver like Gary’s described with the Monument, we cannot say what the results will be. And we have no time to consult the path-library to get a probability profile on the results. We have one engine fully online still—we will use that one to build up a momentum. Gary, we want you to initiate the ramming in four minutes.”
Gary was still standing near me, and now I watched him swallow hard: apparently, when he’d thought up the idea of pushing the warship, he hadn’t expected to be the one to have to do it. If it went wrong, he would feel doubly responsible—I knew him.
“Don’t worry, Gary,” I said quickly. “They wouldn’t say for you to do it if you couldn’t.”
His nod now was a little choppy. He walked back to his usual console and began working at it as he said, “Devin, you’ve told us that this ship has a more conventional thrusting option. I’m assuming I should use that?”
“Gary,” Chen said fast, sounding quite excited, “I’ve already started setting up flight-path coordinates for that. Let’s push the bullies around.”
Now that my crew had a purpose, things on the bridge got quieter—even Babs rushed to one of the panels. And then she said, “Chen, Gary, I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t go head on—for days I’ve been studying the schematics of this ship more and how the mass distribution oddly changes, almost as if there are relativistic effects going on. But I think the forward mass fluctuates down to too light for what we need to do. A side push might be better.”
“We are very impressed with how quickly you and your crew have learned this ship, Captain Zarro,” Thura said, and I could have sworn I he
ard a smile in her normally solemn Keeper voice. “Carry on. We Keepers are distracted by our efforts with the Keeper from the warship. He is ill and needs our energy and other efforts to heal.”
“Well,” I said, “even though he screwed up, I don’t wish him bad things. Just, well, please keep at least one Keeper’s mind focused on what we’re doing….”
“Devin will observe. He is most adept at operating this ship,” Thura said.
And the dark-brown color of Devin’s cheeks quickly turned into a mahogany-red blush.
*
Less than a minute before we were going to ram the warship, I suddenly remembered how filthy I was, that I hadn’t washed in too long, and that I had dried piss on my legs inside my suit. I probably smelled bad too.
But I knew it didn’t matter. It seemed like nothing much mattered lately, except the survival of the universe….
“Port nozzles have been extended—fifteen seconds till ram,” Gary finally said.
I tensed in front of my panel.
“Counting down,” Chen said. “Five, four, three, two, one.”
“Engaging full power, Engine Seven!” came Karen’s excited voice over the line from the engine area.
And then we were off, soaring through space, starboard-side first; the view of space out ahead of us in the starboard-direction looked normal for this framework-area of the universe. But then suddenly the view wasn’t normal—because the warship had fired off another white-hot blast, this one even more powerful than the last one.
“Incoming to starboard!” someone said—it sounded like Chen, but my eyes had been glued to the screen—
“Keep going,” Devin said fast. “The Monument’s shielding will absorb the blast and the force of our contact with the warship.”
Everything Devin said turned out to be true—but our bodies didn’t come with individual shields, and when the side of the Monument finally collided with the warship, pushing it back and back and back, I thought my body was being pulled apart. There was a weird, twisting feeling to the bridge space, as if the Monument was now bent into an arch on its starboard side, where it was still pressed against and nestling the warship.