“Of course,” Ma said, one of the arms already inbound with a carafe. “I will request that you moderate your intake. You do have a history of overconsumption.”
“That’s just because life keeps giving me excellent reasons to drink.”
She topped him off while another arm rolled in with a flatscreen. It switched on and displayed the artwork Coal had been discussing, which faded tastefully by in a slideshow that also included assorted snapshots of the adventures and joyrides she and Lex had been on.
“How would you like to proceed with the discussion?” Ma asked.
“Let’s start with what happened here.”
“I do not know what happened here. It happened after my archival date and before my recovery.”
“But Karter is, like, Mr. Surveillance. He must have it recorded from every possible angle.”
“There wouldn’t be recordings of a network penetration attack, Lex. There would be logs,” Coal said.
“This is true, though I did mention a physical disturbance on the planet’s surface. In both cases, the data associated with the attacks has been purged.”
“Why would he do that? Or why would you do that?” Lex asked.
“The data purge, again, was most likely to ensure no lingering, residual effects of the penetration.”
“Do we know where the physical disturbance was? Sure, the recording is gone, but it’s still your job to keep this place safe. Have you done scans and stuff?”
“I have utilized automated sweeps with Karter’s faster, better-equipped ships. There is no sign of a disturbance anywhere on the northern hemisphere of the planet.”
“What about the southern hemisphere?”
“Unknown. The southern hemisphere is off-limits for scans. Per Temporal Contingency Protocol, the southern hemisphere is to be isolated and unobserved in order to give a secure location for time-displaced individuals to congregate without unduly altering the flow of history.”
“Right, right. I knew that.” Lex thought for a moment. His head perked up.
“I suspect the three of us have reached the same conclusion simultaneously,” Ma said.
“If there was a physical disturbance and it wasn’t anywhere in the north, someone must have disturbed the southern hemisphere. Someone must have violated Temporal Protocol,” Lex said.
“Likely,” Ma said.
“Certain,” Lex said. “We need to get down there.”
“That would violate—”
“I know!” he snapped. “I know it would violate protocol. But we’ve got to…” He turned aside. “If I tell you why it’s so important we check down there, that would violate protocol, too. Which wouldn’t bother me, but you’d just ignore it and I’d be wasting my breath.”
“I am quite certain your breath will just be recycled by the CO2 scrubbers, Lex,” Coal said. “It will not be wasted.”
“… Thanks, Coal. Listen…” He tapped his fingers. “Okay. Karter isn’t here, yes?”
“Correct.”
“And he has been gone for months, yes?”
“He has.”
“When is the last time he left the planet for that long?”
“It is unprecedented. Karter’s trips away from Big Sigma are typically either against his will or for durations of no longer than two weeks. In his words, ‘I picked an uninhabited planet for a reason. That way all the idiots are out there.’”
“And you don’t know the precise circumstances of Karter’s departure.”
“No.”
“What if Karter’s been kidnapped again? I came here pretty much straight from finding out that someone named EHRIc sprang Commander Purcell from where she’s been convalescing since you hurled her out into space. She was the one calling the shots when Karter got kidnapped last time. With a bonus vendetta against you, this could all be playing into her plan. Somehow her partner busts through the cyberdefenses, she screws with the southern hemisphere, grabs the current you and Karter, then rolls back to an older version of you, with a bonus Temporal Protocol setting and instructions to ignore and actively attack anyone who comes to see what happened. It’s a darn good plan to get full revenge, because who is going to be stupid enough to call your bluff and try to get down here except for me?”
“I choose to classify the traits that inspired your arrival on this planet despite warnings as ‘doggedness’ and ‘bravery’ rather than ‘stupidity,’” Coal said. “And I further list myself among those with such traits.”
“I appreciate the solidarity.”
“Processing…” Ma said. “Though there is significant speculation involved, if the underlying data can be shown to be true, it is not unlikely. Do you have evidence of Commander Purcell’s involvement?”
“Coal, did you record the audio, by chance?”
“Audio and video. Though the video was primarily of the not-very-pleased Neo-Luddites with guns who were staring at me. Transferring.”
“Off-line scan. Processing. Virus free. Protocol compliant. Viewing. Processing… Three of the voices on record match prior data regarding Neo-Luddite activity. Location data is consistent with known Neo-Luddite activity.”
“Known Neo-Luddite activity? You knew they were there?”
“Karter and I have been contracted by the counterterrorism forces of multiple militaries with regard to Neo-Luddites, due to both Karter’s direct experience with them and our general engineering services.”
“Did you know Purcell was alive?”
“I had speculated her survival with a ninety-five percent confidence and her location with a seventy-six percent confidence.”
“And you didn’t just go and take her out?”
“That is not my role. It is, in fact, contrary to my role. I believe the counterterrorism unit’s thinking was that their position was one of weakness, and maintaining surveillance on the remaining Neo-Luddites was of greater value than the likely scattering of the group with additional operations. Furthermore, there is no audio or video of Commander Purcell. This is not evidence of her absence, but it is not evidence of her presence, either.”
“You’d make a very good lawyer, Ma,” Lex said.
“Strict interpretation of procedure and facts are central to my design.”
“Can I just go and look?” Coal asked.
“Go where and look at what?” Ma asked.
“Go the southern hemisphere and check where Lex was stored until he was defrosted after his prior mission through time,” Coal said.
“Your phrase ‘where Lex was stored—’”
“Okay! But what would you do if Coal and I went down south?” Lex said.
“I would stop you.”
“How?”
“Through whatever means were required that did not violate existing protocols.”
“Which means you’d only be in direct control up to the limits of short-range ground-based communication. Then it would be ship-based automation.”
“Correct.”
“Which we easily defeated on the way here.”
“Correct, though Coal’s command privileges have since been revoked, so your specific methodology would no longer be sufficient.”
“Mmm… And what if we got to the equator?”
“In order to preserve Temporal Contingency Protocol, I would be incapable of sending anything to pursue.”
“And what would happen when we came back?”
“I am not comfortable with this line of discussion. It implies intent.”
“This is just idle chitchat.”
“If I were to encounter someone who by way of direct or indirect action were to have come into likely contact with temporally displaced individuals, artifacts, or information, I would be forced to apprehend them. They would be debriefed by a specialized fragment of my own intelligence that has been stripped of emotional considerations and provided with a full suite of logical and moral heuristics. That instance of myself would be in
stalled on an isolated system and would be used to question the individual or individuals with the potentially anachronistic knowledge. If the existence of that knowledge were to be determined to be a danger to the present state of the galaxy, steps would be taken on prevent the spread of that information, either through continued isolation within the southern hemisphere of Big Sigma or through elimination.”
“And if the information presented suggests a threat great enough to violate Temporal Contingency Protocol?”
“Then appropriate, justifiable corrective action would be taken to resolve the indicated threat.”
“See? That doesn’t sound so bad.” Lex swirled his wine. “Apropos of nothing, what sort of sporty, single-seater land vehicles does Karter have in his collection?”
#
Seventeen minutes after their completely innocent conversation, a half-repaired SOB burst through the wall of the hangar. It was followed by Lex on a vehicle that looked more like someone had torn one of the thrusters off the hull of a space station and attached a seat and handlebars to it.
“These shields Ma installed are much stronger than the ones I already had, Lex,” Coal said to Lex over his slidepad.
“Science marches on, I guess,” Lex said. “Karter never could leave well enough alone when it came to tinkering with existing technologies.”
A searing blast of laser carved a molten scar across the ground ahead. Lex juiced the throttle and vaulted over it. Gravel splashed aside as the repulsors keeping his absurd rocket bike aloft reengaged with the ground.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just ride the SOB,” Coal said, shrugging off a direct blast from one of the laboratory’s roof-mounted lasers.
“Ma is holding herself back. There’s no doubt about that,” Lex said, glancing down at the vehicle’s sensors to see a cloud of other vessels indicated in pursuit. “She wouldn’t have let us get this far if she didn’t think there was a good reason to do it.”
A small, unassuming orb of a craft surged up behind Lex. He yanked the controls and stuttered the repulsors. The rocket bike briefly went airborne. A heartbeat later, a tractor beam crackled from the belly of the orb and tore a boulder-size hunk of the landscape up. Coal locked onto the boulder with her own tractor beams and whipped it aside. The smaller drone was whipped aside as well, like the next link in a chain. Both drone and stone shattered against the next in the seemingly inexhaustible fleet of ships in hot pursuit.
“But she’s obviously still going to try to keep us from going, and I’m frankly amazed you’ve even made it this far,” Lex added. “I’d think she’d have installed a kill switch during the repairs.”
Two ships streaked past Lex on either side. Some sort of force field deployed in his direction from each of them. He killed the throttle, and the field overshot in front of him. His vision filled with near-blinding blue light as the two force fields linked into something like a net. The ships killed their forward momentum and doubled back. He pulled a sharp turn and flared his repulsors, blasting up a cloud of stone that caused the field to spark and buzz. The ships paused to restabilize the field. He managed to loop around them and continue. Coal dropped down and popped the heat-dumpers, belching an EMP that grounded both ships and a half-dozen others not far behind.
“If you were smart enough to pull the engine kill switch off yours before you got on, don’t you think I was smart enough to get rid of mine?” Coal said.
A larger ship pulled up aside and began charging an emitter. Coal’s shields facing the ship intensified to the point of incapacitating brilliance, and she smashed against it. The collision did little damage to either ship, but it did nudge the would-be attacker far enough aside to foul its aim.
“It’s better that we be two different targets,” Lex said.
“I’m faster than you,” Coal said.
“I’m nimbler than you.”
Lex wove among some jagged rock formations as a cluster of drones started to gain on him. Half of them were smashed to pieces attempting to pursue.
“I’m bigger than you,” Coal said.
“That’s a bad thing when someone’s chasing you.”
A line of ships rounded ahead of them, once again linking with force fields. Before Lex could work out a way to get around them, Coal’s tractor beams locked onto his bike and hoisted it, and him, up into the air. Her engines blazed, and the pair streaked forward until something latched on to Coal from behind. She gave Lex one last shove. He tore through the sky while she pivoted in place to deal with her aggressor.
The bickering between Coal and Lex probably would have continued, if not for the fact that a bike moving at the speeds this one could achieve wasn’t the most conducive vehicle for communication. By the time Lex’s endless jukes and dodges had put him far enough ahead of the automated ships that he could focus more on speed than evasion, he was well past the speed of sound. The force field that augmented the windshield was shimmering with a compression front like he was reentering the atmosphere. It made him rather visible, but the same high-security situation that made this little act of disobedience necessary also made finding him very difficult. Ma had figuratively tied her own hands with her security protocols. The ships, once too far from her and each other, couldn’t collaborate for a sweep or use long-range scanners. Lex had expected there to be some sort of fanfare, or at least a physical wall of some sort when he reached the equator and entered into the officially designated part of the planet that, for all intents and purposes, did not exist to Ma. Instead, he only knew he’d made it far enough when he stopped periodically having to adjust his course to avoid the stray ships that periodically found him.
He checked his slidepad. Unlike last time, he’d had the foresight to turn on the inertial-measurement mode of the device so that he could figure out which way to go. His destination was the suspended animation chamber that he’d woken up from after his last jaunt into the past. It would have been a lot more useful if he actually knew precisely where it was located in relation to the lab, or where the one his future version lay in was located. All he had was a vague idea of where the first spot was and no idea where the second was.
Lex slowed down as he got into the general neighborhood of where he’d “arrived” after his first trip to the past. Now that he was only moving inadvisably fast, rather than ludicrously fast, the sound had died down enough for him to hear a voice over his slidepad.
“… repeating this until you come in range. I’ve crossed the equator and am moving at high altitude in search of the destination. Please place your slidepad in beacon mode and boost its power. I will continue repeating this until you come in range,” Coal said.
Lex slowed the bike enough to risk a hand to adjust the settings on his slidepad. “Coal! You made it through?”
“Yes. Seventeen minutes ago. When did you arrive?”
“An hour or so ago.”
There was a telling silence.
“That is because you are smaller and nimbler,” Coal said. “I will, however, reach our destination first, as there is no longer anything to prevent me from moving at maximum speed.”
“No doubt.”
“I have your location. Do you want me to pick you up?”
“That depends, how badly damaged are you?”
“Assessing. The cockpit hatch seems to be missing again.”
“I’ll just stick with the bike then.”
“Understood. Adjust your heading by three degrees. Based upon your velocity, it will take you approximately three hours to reach our target.”
“You know where our target is?”
“The physical disturbance was not subtle.”
“How long until you get there?”
“Three minutes. Are you certain you do not want a lift?”
“Sometimes it’s nice to just ride, you know?”
“Of this I am well aware. I will be leaving range of your slidepad in thirteen seconds.”
“Se
e you when I see you.”
He watched a bright spot streak across the sky and made sure he was heading in the proper direction. He wasn’t quite dressed for the rather cool temperatures on Big Sigma. Having a shroud of debris blocking a lot of the sunlight does that to a planet. But the rumbling motor between his legs threw off enough heat to keep him from shivering. He found himself smiling as the rhythm and purr of the borrowed bike worked its way into his mind. He spat the gum he’d been chewing into his hand and stuck it on the handlebars. The odd gray dawn was creeping up ahead of him. For the first time since he’d learned things were going wrong again, he felt his mind start to ease.
Not seven minutes later, that sense of ease vanished.
“Lex, I made a detailed visual record of the target of our search.”
“Was it the capsule I woke up in or the capsule Future Me is in? Did you go down and check it out? I seem to remember my hiding spot being a sort of crevasse, so I assume I’ll have to go down and check it out if we’re going to be sure of what happened.”
“That will not be necessary. Are you still moving?”
“Of course I am. I’m heading to where you were.”
“I recommend you bring your vehicle to a complete stop before I send you what I observed.”
“Don’t be silly. Just tell me.”
“Not until you bring yourself to a complete stop.”
“Why?”
“You are very shortly going to have the whole of your mind occupied by the imagined disasters that could have led to, and could result from, the image I am going to send you. That will leave no mental capacity for piloting the vehicle and thus may lead to a crash.”
“It’s that bad?”
“That is my assessment.”
Lex eased the throttle down. Moving as fast as he was, it took nearly forty seconds for him to slow sufficiently to be able to lock the repulsors without just ejecting himself from his seat. Once he was stationary, he tapped the slidepad.
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