Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Lex roused from near sleep and glanced blearily down. The first glimpse of the screen brought him swiftly to alertness. There were dots on the gravitational sensor, indicating objects too close to their path for safe navigation. That much was to be expected. What was not to be expected were the number of dots.

  “We’re after Karter, right?” Lex said, eyeing the screen.

  “That was the plan,” Future Lex said.

  “Then why am I seeing like… sixty-five dots on here?” Lex asked.

  “This was an unwanted but not unanticipated outcome,” Ma said.

  “… Is this one of those situations where you withheld bad news because you were afraid it would stress me out?” Lex asked.

  “Yes,” Ma said.

  “That never ends well!” Lex growled. “… And wait. You knew this was going to happen, too!”

  “It’s what happened last time,” Future Lex said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because that never ends well either. Plus, I didn’t tell me when I was here last time. And don’t forget, if things are going to turn out the way we want, and they did for me, then we’ve got to stick to the same script.”

  Lex clenched his fists. “I am so damn sick of causality and time loops and all that crap.”

  “Just wait’ll you’re me and see how you feel about them. So, you want to know what we’re looking at, or what?”

  “Are you going to tell me? Or is this more causality crap?”

  “Military drones. Eight automated formations, eight drones per formation. Local era in technology. They were the distraction Ma sent. They worked, but Karter got control. They’re his now.”

  “Great. And are there guns on that thing?” Lex asked.

  “Diamond has some offensive capabilities, yes.”

  “Okay… How is this going to go?”

  “Not well.”

  “Wait… does that mean…?”

  “The goal is to get the new firmware on the GMVD, and get the GMVD delivered. The target cluster is minutes away, so you’ve got to act fast. Get that data module hooked up, get that GMVD delivered, and get the hell out of dodge. Since I have to show up to help you get this far, you have to survive. Beyond that nothing else matters.”

  “In order to avoid circumvention by Karter’s command override, I shall code my communication directly and exclusively to you, Lex. You’ll have to relay all information you need me to know.”

  “Works for me.”

  They returned to conventional speeds and activated their stealth countermeasures. Sixteen of the drones had broken off from the swarm around Karter’s ship and were moving directly toward them. Future Lex took evasive action. The drones followed smoothly.

  “I can’t help but notice we’re not shaking those things,” Lex said.

  “Evidently our cloak is still insufficient to avoid detection from Karter’s sensors. It is reasonable to assume he is feeding telemetry on our location to the drones,” said Ma.

  “Ma says the drones are going to be guided by Karter,” Lex said.

  “I know, we heard her, she only shut off incoming data to her, not outgoing,” Future Lex said. “No sense leaving cloaking on. More power for the thrusters.”

  Karter’s monster of a vehicle was plainly visible, its own stealth measures not yet restored, and the irregular firing pattern of its many thrusters suggested it was still suffering from its share of malfunctions.

  “Karter’s not quite on his feet,” Lex said. He glanced at the controls. “There are no active shields on that ship. Not even navigational.”

  “Makes sense. If I was trying to stop someone from going anywhere, I’d make sure firing up the engines to any worthwhile speed would be a death trap,” Future Lex said.

  The clamps joining Diamond to Coal disengaged, allowing the two ships to separate.

  “Okay. You’ve got guns, I’ve got serious shields. I’m bait, you’re the trap. Work for you?” Lex said.

  “Way ahead of you,” Future Lex said.

  He fell back, taking up a position tucked behind Lex. A video overlay of him appeared on Lex’s display.

  “Ready to go?” Future Lex asked, one hand on the control stick while the other rummaged through his pocket.

  “Not yet,” Lex said.

  Lex retrieved a stick of gum and loaded it in his mouth. He glanced up to see his future self doing the exact same thing.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” they each said, Lex clicking his visor in place again.

  Lex ramped up the throttle and took Coal headlong toward the drones.

  “Switching to combat display,” Coal said. “Please make this fun because the alternative is undesirable.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Lex said.

  The cockpit overlay populated with highlighted dots, each graded for target priority. A white crosshair swept across the display, which caused Lex to tense up until he realized it was an indicator of where his future self was aiming.

  “Our defensive systems are linked?” Lex said, snapping his gum.

  “Yep.”

  “Didn’t feel like telling me that either?”

  “You didn’t tell me last time.”

  “I’m getting sick of that excuse.”

  “Last time you’ll hear it, I swear.”

  A subtle red field labeled Estimated Weapon Range swept toward them. Lex’s mind began running through the first five steps of the dogfight.

  “Ma?”

  “Yes, Lex?”

  “Coal’s pretty darn indestructible, right?”

  “In relative terms.”

  “How much of a hit can we take from these drones?”

  “Assuming state of the art for the modern era, energy weapons will have one to three percent damage capacity, missiles ten to twenty percent.”

  “Avoid missiles, gotcha.” He narrowed his eyes as he saw bolts of plasma begin to flit in his direction. “And what about collisions?”

  “Assuming even minimally functional shields, drone impacts will produce negligible damage.”

  Lex grinned. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  He pulled hard aside, staying just ahead of a stream of bolts fired in his direction. The ships attempted to compensate, adjusting their aim to intercept his new trajectory, but their attacks were perfectly coordinated, rendering the spray of shots from the sixteen nearest ships effectively one massive focused attack. On one hand, if they hit their mark, they’d cut through his shields in moments. On the other hand, it meant he had only one thing to dodge.

  “I never thought I’d have an opinion on this,” Lex said, working the controls as he wove closer to the drones. “But attack drones kind of sucked in this era.”

  “They were designed to assault other drones. Single targets with the inherent randomness of human decision-making required significant algorithmic—” Ma began.

  Her lesson was interrupted by a target lock tone. All sixteen ships had acquired him, and one by one they launched two-missile volleys.

  “History later, fighting now,” Lex said.

  The thirty-two blazing-red indicators lit up his display. Though they too were unified in their target—so far none of the ships had seen fit to target Future Lex—they had much wider arcing trajectories that made them less of a straight line and more of a cloud. Avoiding this wouldn’t be a simple matter of getting out of the way. He veered and maxed out the throttle, dragging the cloud of tiny missiles along after them.

  Coal’s tiny size made her incredibly maneuverable, far more so than the missiles, but they made up for it in raw speed. He just barely avoided the missiles on their first pass, but after a wide loop they were back on his tail and threatening to overtake him. He was close to the cluster of ships now, which made their plasma bolts much more of a concern as they were coming from a wider spread. Here and there one brushed his shields, chipping away at his defenses and causing the internal speakers to crackle with interference.

  “Ma, real quick. Could
Karter be controlling the missiles individually?”

  “Possibly but unlikely.”

  “So if I go stealth?”

  “They will lose lock.”

  “What will happen after that?”

  “I cannot provide a definitive answer. There are too many potential behaviors.”

  “Screw it, we’re doing it. Brace yourself, Coal,” Lex said.

  He tensed as he brought her into an intercept course with the nearest drone. The vehicle was barely a third the size of Coal, all weapons and thrusters. It had the angular, artless design Lex had come to expect from military products. Unfortunately, such blocky, overengineered hunks of metal tended to be able to take quite a wallop. Fortunately, a fraction of a second isn’t enough time to have second thoughts, so he stuck to plan A. He rammed the smaller vessel, and at the moment of impact, switched the cloaking field back on.

  A flash of white-gold filled his vision as Coal’s overpowered shields absorbed the impact. When the display cleared, he was blazing out the other side, his otherwise invisible ship trailing streamers of glowing exhaust and scattering fragments of former drone. Rear scanners provided him with a gorgeous fireworks display as the cluster of missiles lost lock on him. There were a thousand things the military could have done if a missile lock was lost. As luck would have it, this defense manufacturer had chosen to self-destruct the missiles. Blinding flashes of violet light speckled the space behind him. Most missiles were too far from anything to do any damage with their blasts, but one or two were near enough to the drones sweeping in to pursue Lex to be caught in a burst. When the explosions quieted down, the sixteen drones nearest him had been reduced to twelve. That number didn’t last long.

  Lex’s collision had allowed him to punch through the cluster, turning their attention entirely away from Future Lex. He took full advantage. The weaponry on the minimal ship was a weapon Lex hadn’t seen before. Unlike the blobs of plasma that most attack ships lobbed at one another, Diamond fired needle-thin lasers. They didn’t pack much of a punch, but they focused their energy with such density that they sliced effortlessly through the shields, delivering everything they had into the armor of the drones. A few seconds of focus eventually struck something important, and the electronics of the drone went dark. It was like bringing a scalpel to a knife fight, but it did the job.

  At this point, any semblance of a combat plan began to fall apart. Lex focused on squeezing through whatever gaps in the attacks he could find and making himself as much of a target as possible. Like so many times before, he ceased to truly think about what he was doing. Instinct called the shots, and reflexes put them to action. Coal’s shields started to take hits, ticking slowly down but holding their own. More than once Lex found himself with no escape, only for his future self to carve a hole for him to squeeze through. Perhaps it was because he’d been through this all before, or perhaps it was that the two of them were pulling from the same intuition, but the pair worked perfectly in unison, lining up and herding drones with stunning efficiency. Before long, the drones had entirely exhausted their missile supply, rendering any use of the cloaking device pointless again.

  The task, however, was not to destroy the drones, and while they had their hands full, their real target was busy as well.

  “Lex, I hate to interrupt you while you are so skillfully maneuvering me, but the power levels in Karter’s ship are increasing. His thrusters have taken on a more regular firing pattern, and there is evidence of activity in his weapons systems. He is approaching functionality,” Coal said.

  Lex smashed his way through another drone.

  “Also, much as I enjoy illustrating my physical superiority to these examples of obsolete technology, my shields are approaching twenty percent,” Coal said. “Your evasion has avoided ninety-seven percent of all potential damage, but continuing at a similar rate will cause a loss of hull integrity in seven minutes of combat.”

  “Ma, Coal, I’m stretched a little thin here. I need you two to brainstorm,” Lex said. He held his breath as he dodged a salvo. “What’s it going to take to get to that bot?”

  “Processing…” Ma said.

  Lex nudged Coal around a stream of shots, which destroyed a trailing drone.

  “Nicely done,” she said.

  “The GMVD is certainly inside the ship. We shall have to gain entry. This will become impossible if the shields or engines become functional again. We must assume Karter has closed the known security gaps in his communications, as they will have been responsible for the success the drones had in delaying him. Likely the reason we have not had to endure him gloating over the com system was his deactivation of it as a stopgap security measure. I may be able to exploit a single remaining installed flaw in his security if I can make physical contact with the ship.”

  The words trickled in around the edges of his mind, squeezing through his focus much as he was squeezing through the defenses.

  “Can we use the tether?” Lex asked.

  “Yes. I would require fifteen to twenty seconds of contact, and I would need to be patched through Coal’s systems.”

  “That’s no good. Fifteen seconds with a tether tying us down is a death sentence.”

  “All remaining options require me to leave the ship and contact Karter’s ship directly.”

  Lex dodged two more shots and considered his options. If he ejected Ma, not only would he be risking her life, he would be putting her pretty much in direct contact with a man who could completely subvert her free will. The only alternative was…

  “Lex,” said Future Lex. “I know what you’re thinking and I’ll cover you.”

  “Good,” Lex said quickly. “Coal, when I pop the cockpit, you take back manual control and retreat.”

  “I asked very nicely for you to make this fun, Lex. This does not sound like it will fulfill the survival criteria.”

  “Hey, Future Lex signed off on this, which means I survive it. So relax, it’ll be a blast.”

  He reluctantly took a hand from the controls and reached up to snag Ma. After pulling her from her perch and plopping her around his neck, he angled the ship for the unusual task of jettisoning its pilot. Next came the most dangerous part, decreasing his speed enough to make the trip to Karter’s ship survivable, yet somehow avoiding destruction as he became an easier target for the shrinking but still substantial number of drones.

  “This is going to hurt both of us, Coal, but try to keep yourself safe.” He took the all-important data module and tucked it into a pocket on his thigh. “Ready? … One… two… blowing hatch!”

  The instant he hammered the button to open the hatch, thus leaving himself completely at the mercy of physics and Coal, his mind slowed the world down to appreciate what might be its last moments. All sound but his own breathing and the hiss of his oxygen regulator dropped away as the air rushed from the cockpit. The hatch swung fully open, though not quite as quickly as Lex had anticipated. This caused his helmet to clip the edge of the hatch and sent him flipping end over end backward. In order to accommodate Lex’s exit, Coal dropped her shields. It took mere moments for him to pass through the portion of space formerly occupied by the shields, but in that time more than a dozen plasma bolts splashed against her hull. She was a tough cookie, but each blast still took a bite out of her, ablating a divot in her armor. When the hatch swung shut again and the shields were restored, Lex took a breath and looked up, his rotation now swinging him around toward Karter’s ship again.

  Plasma bolts whipped by him, but he tried to ignore them. Logically military drones designed for space combat should be pretty poor at targeting human beings. Realistically, even if they were superb at it, there wasn’t a tremendous amount he could do about it now. Instead he focused on the approaching ship and ran through the steps it would take to end up on the hull in one piece rather smearing across it or, as was currently more likely, missing entirely. First he would have to stop the rotation, so he tapped twice on the control panel to activate glove cont
rol of the jet pack. At the right moment, he activated the jets. That was the same moment he remembered it had been broken during his approach to Past Karter’s lab.

  “Ma! We’ve got problems. The pack’s out, and we’re off course!” Lex said.

  He swung around for the rear-facing portion of the rotation and saw drones beginning to peel off from Coal. Since Future Lex had his hands full elsewhere, there was little doubt who these bots were about to home in on.

  “This was not one of my better plans,” Lex yelped.

  “You were pressed for time,” Ma pointed out helpfully. “Don’t be hard on yourself.”

  She activated her own pack and held tight to him, first ending his rotation, then attempting to divert his path.

  “I have insufficient thrust to bring you into a proper trajectory and slow you adequately,” Ma said. “At this speed your suit will rupture on impact.”

  “Uh… Uh…” he said, hoping to shake an idea loose. Then it struck him. “Hang on, the kinetic capacitor!”

  He activated the glove controls and triggered the “charge” mode. As it soaked up his momentum, he pressed against the front of his suit, decelerating quickly enough to give him tunnel vision. When it was over, he was moving far more slowly, but still faster than he’d like.

  “These glove controls are pretty intuitive, once you get used to them. … That’s it. Cap’s full,” Lex said.

  “That is minimally sufficient,” Ma said.

  She darted around and positioned herself in front of him, wrapping her forelegs around his neck and her hind legs under his arms as best she could.

  “Please hold tightly. I shall attempt to utilize my grappling hook. This will not be pleasant.”

  Lex wrapped his arms around her. A complex grappler launched from her harness, trailing a monofilament cord. Lex watched anxiously as it streaked toward the broad belly of Karter’s ship. Very nearly at the end of its tether, the hook struck and held tight, but they were far from out of the woods. It drew taut, Lex held tighter, and their flight turned into an arc.

  “Please move your left arm slightly, to clear the nozzles of my pack.”