Temporal Contingency
By Joseph R. Lallo
Copyright © 2016 Joseph R. Lallo
Cover By Nick Deligaris
http://www.deligaris.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
From The Author
Prologue
There was nothing quite as satisfying as the roar of a hoversled. Sure, even the most underpowered ships had more potent reactors, but the vacuum of space always muted the bulk of their sound. Only what worked its way through the structure of the ship itself ever made it to the ears of the pilot. But a hoversled? Every rattle and hiss was yours to enjoy.
Trevor Alexander, “Lex” to all but a select few, basked in the throaty rumble of the thrusters. To him the complex overlapping rhythms had all the nuance and elegance of a symphony orchestra, and had the bonus of propelling him across the landscape at 1200 kph in the straightaways. A desert landscape, wavy and distorted with rising heat, stretched out around him in all directions. It was beautiful in a raw, austere kind of way, sandy-yellow and brick-red stone arranged into a lifeless moonscape of irregular spires and sprawling mesas. Flickering red laser lines stretched between roughly placed markers, tracing out a naturally clear section of the planet’s surface. If he focused, he could feel the repulsors ride across the cracked earth. It was a mild shudder layered atop the general vibration that came with oversize engines forcing a ship through an atmosphere that at this speed may as well have been thick as mud. Pumping lubrication and overheated electronics filled the cockpit with a stinging, acrid smell that almost overpowered the prevailing aroma. Lex himself.
Heat management was a tricky thing on any high-speed vehicle. The amount of power belching from even the high-efficiency state-of-the-art propulsion systems mounted on this sled was difficult enough to vent completely in a temperate atmosphere. On Operlo, a planet with a “habitable zone” that seldom dropped below 65 degrees Celsius, it was that much harder to dissipate the excess heat. All of this translated to a cockpit that was practically a sauna even with the air-conditioning blasting. Dressed as he was in flame-retardant, impact-reactive safety gear, Lex was stewing. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. The smell of sweat, the hum of the reactor, the shimmy of the frame, the streak of the landscape: they were all part of the experience, four of the five senses pushed to their absolute limit. And as for the fifth?
“Listen, I think next time we’re going to go spearmint on the gum, Preethy,” Lex said. “I’m just not feeling this wintergreen.”
“I shall make a note of it, Lex, but please try to remember you are testing the Revision 3 hoversled, not the concession stand,” remarked the businesslike voice of Preethy Misra across the communicator built into his helmet.
“Hey, I’m a full-service sort of guy. You hire me, you get it all.”
“How is the equipment performing?” she asked.
He glanced at the instrument panel. Every section of the cockpit that wasn’t populated with controls was covered with digital and mechanical gauges measuring every conceivable metric of the sled’s condition. Presently they were color coordinated quite well, each deep into the red side of the spectrum.
“Meters look good,” he said, yanking the control stick to the left to coax the vehicle around a turn.
Inertia, even subdued as it was by the inhibition system designed to keep the acceleration from squirting his brain out his ears, shoved him to the side of his seat. Three structure sensors started blaring warnings in response.
“As a general rule we try to keep them in the green, not the red,” Preethy said.
“If you’re going to spy on the readings across the com system, then why even ask my opinion? I’m your test driver, and I say she’s a beaut. Holding up brilliantly.”
“And what do you think of the track the surveyors picked out? A worthy third course for our circuit?”
His hoversled rode up a slight incline and lofted, hurdling through the air for several hundred meters before slamming down again.
“What was that?” Preethy asked.
“A minor grading issue. Let me ask, are your track maintenance guys going to clear this off and level it out?”
“There are safety regulations to adhere to. I understand track features such as that will be mitigated somewhat.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. In that case, this is going to make for sort of a tame run,” he said. “I’m feeling it. But I’m not feeling it, you know?”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to articulate yourself a bit better than that if I’m going to take your recommendations to the engineers.”
“Well…” He glanced aside, looking out the right window of his cramped cockpit.
Stretching out beside the roughed-out track was a huge field of natural stone structures, columns of hard stone scoured out of the softer stretches of the landscape by constant winds. The field was dense with them, in some instances leaving barely enough room between for two hoversleds to pass side by side. He grinned.
“I’m thinking something like this,” Lex said.
He fired the retrothrusters to drop his speed to something more maneuverable, then tugged at the controls. The sled struggled to keep its grip on the stone and gravel of the field, skidding wide before settling into a new course. Lex blasted through the laser perimeter of the potential course and off into the cluttered field beyond.
“Lex, please stay on the intended track until we’ve completed the testing.”
“We did three laps. Let’s just take a little detour for a bit,” he said.
“Need I remind you, antics like this have inspired the resignation of no fewer than three insurance adjusters?”
“Thinning the herd, Preethy. If they can’t take a little navigational improvisation out of your racers, they don’t have a place in the business.”
The sled sliced across the landscape and deep into a cluster of stone spires. They swept past in twos and threes, each one bringing a heart-stopping whomp as he charged by with inadvisably little clearance.
He heard Preethy clear her throat over the communicator, then address someone on her side. “Gina, would you please send me the link to the appropriate land surveys for areas surrounding track three? … Thank you.”
Lex eased the hoversled into a lazy turn into a denser patch of columns, effortlessly plotting a course between them and thrilling as his proximity warning switched from a periodic blip to an almost constant tone.
“Lex, please bring the sled to a stop immediately,” Preethy said. Her tone was still as calm and collected as it had ever been, but vibrating beneath it was a very real tension.
“Why, what’s up?”
“Fifteen hundred meters ahead of you starts ore-field 145, one of our larger zinc mines.”
“Okay, first off, fifteen hundred meters were gone before you finished talking. Second, what do I care about mines? Those are underground, right?”
“This particular mine has been runni
ng since before Mr. Patel’s landscape conservation efforts. Mining has been temporarily discontinued there due to geographic instability. Automated boring machines were working quite near the surface.”
“How cl—oh jeez!”
He pulled hard at the yoke and tapped a side thruster, narrowly avoiding a yawning opening in the ground ahead.
“What was that?”
“Little pothole. Nothing to worry ab—”
His assurance was cut short by the crackling grind of collapsing stone as the ground beneath him began to give way. He cut off power to the main thrusters and maxed out the repulsors, effectively wrapping the whole sled in the electromagnetic equivalent of a bumper. After a short drop, he slammed down onto a bored-out cylindrical tube.
The natural inclination at this point would have been to stop, but Lex knew when land started to collapse it didn’t usually stop right away. He wasn’t interested in having several metric tons of landscape land on top of him, so he juiced the thrusters and darted along the tunnel.
“Preethy?” he said shakily.
“Are you hurt, Lex?” she asked.
“No, but I’ve got a minor criticism of your sled design.”
“Perhaps now is not the time for that.”
“It’s pretty heavy on my mind,” he said, his hands dancing across the controls.
“What is it?”
“No headlights.”
Ahead, the tunnel was utterly black. He routed some power to the retrothrusters without cutting any from the main ones. It wasn’t a very wise decision, since it put terrible strain on the hoversled’s frame, but at this point very few decisions Lex had made were motivated by wisdom. The glow from the straining reverse thrusters just barely illuminated the way ahead. What he saw was a fairly enormous tunnel, easily eighty meters in diameter and a perfect circle in cross section. It continued straight at least as far as the eye could see, which at the moment wasn’t very far at all. Cracks and fractures all along the ceiling convinced him that continuing forward was the best option, as further collapse seemed imminent.
“Any chance you could—”
“I’m loading the tunnel network layout into your race computer now,” Preethy said.
“Much obliged.”
A progress bar popped up on one of the instrument screens, rocketing from 0 to 50 percent rather quickly, but then slowing drastically.
“Looks like we’ve got a little bit of a connectivity problem.”
“Our… intended to… transmission through…” Preethy said, her voice eventually entirely swallowed by digital distortion.
Lex glanced at his altitude meter—an odd but surprisingly useful inclusion on a hoversled—and noticed that he was creeping steadily deeper into the negatives. One by one the sensors that depended on satellite data went black or errored out. The map download ground to a stop at 86 percent.
“Right, okay. That’s probably enough,” he said, tapping the screen. “Satellite connection lost, switching to full.”
The navigation system, not exactly the most robust system on the market considering it was designed to report where on a known track the vehicles were, struggled to cope with the task of working out where in the mine system it was. After a few moments, the screen flashed: Recalibration needed. Please decrease speed to zero.
Lex glanced about again. The integrity of this stretch of the tunnel seemed much more secure than what he’d left behind.
“I think I can manage that,” he said, dialing back the thrust and bringing the sled to a halt.
The screen thanked him and began to tick through its diagnostic, but without the thrusters to light the way, Lex was left with only the various very angry indicator lights to illuminate his surroundings. No longer pushed to its limit, the vehicle released the pops and pings typical of a device easing down from the sort of mistreatment he’d been administering. Behind it though, he started to pick up a distant sound that didn’t sit well. A second or two later, just as the screen switched to the word finalizing, he began to feel the sound. The whole tunnel was rumbling and shuddering. Pebbles and stones started to clatter against the windscreen.
“Time to go,” he said, punching the throttle.
His navigation screen now helpfully displayed the cave network, with tiles missing where the data was incomplete. A route to the finish line was plotted, along with a warning: Low-fidelity mode. Position is within a one-hundred-meter radius.
“Oh, great. That’s plus or minus the entire tunnel,” he muttered. “Can’t say I’ve got a rosy opinion of the nav system, Preethy.”
A few seconds of moderate speed seemed to have put the collapse far behind him, but the odd crack or fault running along what little of the tunnel he could see convinced him that the danger associated with too much speed paled in comparison to the dangers associated with too little. Fortunately the boring machines that had processed this hunk of planet clearly couldn’t turn on a dime, and cylinders were pretty much the ultimate banked turns, so his journey through the mine was remarkably hoversled friendly. Not only that, but the lack of pounding sun meant the cooling system on the thrusters and in the cockpit could actually dump some heat.
Just about the time he began to genuinely enjoy this novel means of sled racing, he squinted at the nav screen to see what looked like a spiderweb approaching. Several tunnels had crisscrossed this same volume of land, resulting in a long sequence of very sharp angles where they intersected. It was the sort of place where a one-hundred-meter misapproximation of position could send him straight into a wall, and it probably didn’t do much good for the structural integrity of the tunnels either.
“Okay. No big deal. Intuition, Lex. We want to go in an… up-ish direction.”
A nagging voice in his head suggested he could probably drop the speed to a crawl and inch his way around the turns, particularly since at this point a throbbing engine was more likely to cause a new collapse than help escape one. Overruling the voice of common sense was the much louder and more instant voice of exhilaration, which made the very well-reasoned argument, We’re going to do this as fast as possible because it is awesome and we are awesome. It was a voice Lex had allowed to guide an unnervingly large number of his major decisions.
Steering by the glow of his thrusters and the seat of his pants, Lex made six sharp turns in rapid succession. By the time he glanced back at his navigation screen, it was flashing the word rerouting.
“What’s to reroute about? I can see daylight up ahead,” he said, squinting at the point of light approaching. He cleared his throat and spoke to the computer. “Navigation, advance view in direction of travel.”
The system began to track along the path ahead, coming to a narrow line a short distance farther along.
“Stop, zoom.”
At his command, the scale adjusted, revealing the label Ventilation. The diameter of that particular tunnel was labeled on the map.
“Okay. Two meters. That’s not so bad. The width of this sucker is,” he glanced at the clearance chart, “one point eight six meters. Plenty of room.”
He dialed the speed down just a hair, mostly by boosting the retrothrusters to give him a bit more light, and scrutinized the tunnel walls for any sign of change. It came rather suddenly, in the form of the surprise that the ventilation shaft was covered with a grating and aligned with the ceiling of the tunnel, not the floor. He yanked the controls and twisted, inverting the sled. It briefly lost contact with the walls of the tunnel. When the repulsors finally restored the induced attractive force that had replaced pesky, unreliable things like tires, he was lined up with the vent, but not quite straight.
The momentum was more than enough to punch straight through the metal grating blocking the vent, but his back end clipped the edge of the shaft, and the dislodged grate caught under one of the forward thrusters. This converted his roughly forward motion to a spark-spewing spiral. Every sensor and gauge either lit up menacingly or failed completely. Grinding metal and whining thrusters produc
ed a deafening din. Dislodged hunks of stone from his graceless entrance to the vent struck his windshield, and the unpleasant aroma of a plasma leak quickly asserted itself.
He wrestled with the steering and got his spiral under control just in time to run out of vent and launch from the stone tube like a cork from a champagne bottle. He landed cockpit down, digging furrows through the bleached stone of the landscape before a few more flicks of the controls got him upright.
Preethy’s voice came back to clarity. “Lex! Lex, please respond.”
He took a deep breath and spat his gum onto the windshield. “I am A-okay. The Rev 3 is a little dinged up.”
“That is not our concern. Please power down. A response team is heading in your direction.”
“Sounds good. And Preethy?”
“Yes, Lex?”
“Do yourself a favor and review the video footage from the sled. Tell me folks wouldn’t cross the galaxy to see racing like that.”
#
Preethy and Lex sat in an open-air hover cart. It was driverless, consisting of little more than a pair of bench seats facing each other and a rigid awning over them. It looked more like a moving gazebo than a vehicle. Two medics were giving Lex a checkup, but aside from a gash on his cheek from when his head had hit one of the safety harness buckles during the vent shaft escape, he was unhurt.
He brushed his fingers through his brown hair, which he’d cropped to nearly a crew cut to cope with the heat of the racetrack. The long hours on the track had left him a bit sore, but one of the positive parts of his return to racing had been his return to a regular conditioning routine. Stamina was a major factor in any mid-to-moderate-length race, so he’d started upping his exercise regimen, and it had made him a good deal leaner and better toned than he’d been in the three years since he was forced out of racing the first time.
“I do wish you would stop damaging the prototype hoversleds, Lex,” Preethy said simply.
Ms. Misra was almost picture perfect in the role of a young female executive. She was stoic to the point of almost being cold in her demeanor. Her complexion and features were distinctively Indian: rich brown skin and straight black hair. She dressed impeccably, but it was here that her executive aesthetic faltered slightly. Quite fit, Preethy enjoyed a set of curves that she seemed aware made concentration difficult for those with an eye for such things. As such she always wore clothing that hugged them just a little tighter, and showed off just a little more of them, than one might find acceptable in the average employee handbook. The outfits didn’t look tawdry or cheap by any stretch, but they seemed to have been painstakingly designed to test the limits of professionalism without crossing the boundary. At the moment, that outfit was a tan and black business dress, dark glasses, and dark lipstick. She clutched a datapad to her side, something Lex had rarely seen her without.
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