by Smith, Glenn
“You have to speak it, Lieutenant, in ancient Tor’Roshan, using their system of spatial coordinates and their measurement of time.”
Dylan straightened and turned to him. “Then I guess I need some help, Commander.”
“I thought you might,” Akagi said as he started toward him. The guard lowered the field for him without waiting to be asked.
* * *
Recently assigned Crewman Joey Nelson and his newest friend, Crewman First Class Theodore Petrakos, sat in the small communications room playing poker. Actually, at less than three meters by four meters, it was more like a communications closet, or as they affectionately called it, ‘the cell.’ It housed so many consoles and pieces of specialized communications equipment that barely enough room remained for them to set the card table up between them.
As usual, Theodore—everyone called him Ted, he’d told Joey when they were originally introduced to one another—was cleaning up. Fortunately for Joey they never gambled with real money. Just a gentlemen’s game for them, although Joey was beginning to suspect that Ted didn’t know how to play like a gentleman. The guy won all the time. All the time. No one could be that lucky, but Joey hadn’t actually caught him cheating yet, so discretion being the better part of valor, he continued to keep his suspicions to himself. After all, there weren’t very many people assigned to the remote outpost. To risk alienating the one who’d been first to befriend him when he arrived would be just plain stupid.
“Your deal, Joey,” Ted said, grinning with victory once again.
“When are you going to start losing for a change?” Joey asked him as he collected the cards and started shuffling them.
“I never lose,” Ted answered, shaking his head. “Don’t know how.”
“Yeah well, you’re turning me into a expert at it. I’d be more than happy to teach you.”
“No thanks. I’d rather keep winning.”
Joey finished shuffling and started dealing. “So I’ve noticed. You sure as hell won a lot last night.”
“What do you mean?” Ted asked. “We didn’t even play last night.”
“I’m not talking about poker, Ted.”
“Then what...”
“I’m talking about Noelle.”
Ted sat back in his chair and nervously ran his fingers through his thick, dark curls and scratched his scalp. “What about her?”
“I saw you sneak her into your room,” Joey answered.
“Oh.” He started picking up his cards, one at a time. “Did anyone else see us?”
“Not that I know of,” Joey answered. He finished dealing and set the deck face down between them, then picked up his hand and started rearranging his cards. “But you’d better be careful. She’s still a newlywed, you know, and I hear her husband’s a pretty big guy.”
Ted picked up his last card, but didn’t pay it much attention. “Yeah, I know.”
“And he’s an MP, too.”
“Yeah, Joey, I know,” Ted replied impatiently. “You don’t have to remind me. Besides, it’s not like I was on the hunt for it or anything. It just sort of happened. She actually started the whole thing.”
Joey snickered. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“I’m serious. A bunch of us hung around the dining hall for a while after you left. We were talking about what being assigned to this god-forsaken place for six months can do to a relationship. First she mentioned how tired she was of sleeping alone while she waits for her husband’s transfer to come through. Then I said something about how I only get involved in casual relationships because I like to change assignments a lot. Next thing I know she’s leaning over and asking me if I’m making her an offer, so I said... Well, you’ve seen her so you can probably guess what I said. We went to the rec-room and shot some pool for a while, then went back to my room for a couple drinks. One thing led to another and the next thing you know...”
“Joyeux Noël from Noelle.”
Ted grinned, despite his discomfort. “Exactly.”
“Any regrets?”
“What, are you kidding me?” Ted asked, wide-eyed. “She’s twenty years old and fucks like a bunny in heat. She’s coming over every night from now on.”
“What?” Joey asked, looking at his friend like he had two heads. “Are you nuts? What about her husband? What are you going to do when he gets here?”
“End it, of course,” Ted answered as though it should have been obvious.
“End it? Just like that?”
“Yup,” Ted answered with an exaggerated nod. “Like I said, I only get involved in casual relationships. This one’s no different. That’s the agreement. We’ll stay friends after her husband gets here, but the rest is only temporary. Sex, sleep, more sex, and so long. Once he gets here, we both pretend like nothing ever happened.”
Joey harrumphed. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“Trust me, you’ll see it.”
“I hope so. You’ve been a pretty good friend to me since I got here. I’d hate to have to sit through your funeral. But in the meantime you guys better be more careful. If anyone besides me ever sees you two together like that, you’ll have to live in fear every day, knowing that someone might talk at any time. Who knows what Akagi would do to you if he ever found out?”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“Good.” Joey leaned in a little closer, lowered his voice, and asked with a grin, “So how was she?”
Ted smiled from ear to ear as he, too, leaned closer and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “She was awesome, Joey. Like I said, she fucks like a bunny in heat. You wouldn’t believe how many times she...”
“Hold on a second,” Joey interrupted, his grin fading as he straightened and dropped his cards face down on the table. He pointed over Ted’s shoulder at the console behind him and said, “The message panel’s lighting up like a Christmas tree. Looks like something pretty important is coming in.”
Ted looked back over his shoulder at the panel. Sure enough, a new message was coming in. As he watched, the decryption and decoding protocols automatically engaged—he’d set them to do that so he wouldn’t have to get up—and prioritized the new message as ‘URGENT’ over everything else. “What the...” He stood up, dropped his cards, and stepped over to the console for a closer look. “Holy shit,” he muttered, puzzlement apparent on his chiseled face.
“What’s wrong?” Joey asked.
“It’s coming in on a tight jumpspace beam directly from Earth.”
“A direct beam?” Joey asked, full of doubt as he got up and went over to join his friend. A direct beam to this outpost? “Are you sure about that?”
Irritation erased his puzzlement as Ted looked at his friend. “Who’s the rookie here?” he asked sharply. Then, as he shifted his gaze back to the comm-panel, he added, “Of course I’m sure about that.”
“Sorry,” Joey said meekly. He’d been warned that Ted didn’t like being questioned where his job knowledge was concerned. The guy had an apparently well earned reputation within the specialty for being one of the best to ever do the job. In fact, at least according to everyone else in the unit, he was the best. The problem was that he knew it.
“I’m sorry, too,” Ted said after a moment. “I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
And that was that. Spat over. “So...doesn’t this tight beam message violate pretty much every regulation in the book concerning communications with this place?” Joey asked.
“Damn right it does,” Ted confirmed. “Someone’s in a lot of trouble.”
“Did their identification come up yet?”
“Not yet, but when it does... Hold on a second. It’s coming up now.” And a second later, “No way.” He initiated a quick tracking check, just to be sure, then double and triple-checked the results. “Oh my God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think anyone will be getting in trouble for this.”
“Why not?” Joey asked, his curiosity piqued. “Come on, Ted.
Who’s it from?”
Ted looked up at his friend. “It’s from President Shakhar.”
* * *
“So where exactly are you headed, Lieutenant?” Commander Akagi asked as he nudged Dylan aside, away from the controls.
“Mars Orbital Shipyards,” Dylan answered, figuring there wasn’t any harm in telling the commander just that little bit. Especially when he was about to put his fate, and perhaps his very life, into the guy’s hands.
“No can do, Lieutenant,” Akagi said, shaking his head. “As I told you before, this Portal is focused directly on Earth. I can’t put you down anywhere else.”
“Yes, sir, I know. I thought you meant once I get there.” He looked down at the controls again. “How about somewhere a few miles from Solfleet Surface Headquarters in mid to late April, twenty-one sixty-eight?”
“I doubt I can set you down in that specific a location or time, Lieutenant,” Akagi further advised him. “Something more along the lines of ‘United States’ eastern seaboard, late sixty-seven to early sixty-eight’ might be the best I can do.”
Dylan hoped Akagi was just yanking his chain, antagonizing him, trying to make him even more nervous than he already was. It would be a childish thing for him to do, but the alternative, that he was being straightforward and honest, could mean that he might spend as much as nine or ten months in the past before he was finally able to come home again. Given that choice, Dylan would have preferred to have his chain yanked.
“Well, as long as it’s no later than April, sixty-eight,” he said. “Aim a little earlier if you have to. Just don’t send me back short of that mark or this whole thing will be a waste of time.”
“You got it.”
“And please, Commander, try not to drop me in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I’ll try not to.” He replaced Dylan’s hand on the destination symbol with his own, then called out in a much deeper voice than was natural for him, “Pel’Ka. Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim. Tusa. Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi.”
The destination symbol began to glow beneath his fingers. He pulled his hand away.
Dylan turned and gazed down at the Portal, and as he watched with wonder, eerie wisps of thin, gray-white mist began to appear, dancing lazily across the entire surface of its threshold. Those wisps grew thicker, combined to form clouds, and began swirling in a counter-clockwise direction like a miniature hurricane. A small eye even formed in its center as the arms quickly expanded outward toward the rim, cycling repeatedly through all the colors of the spectrum as they grew.
Dylan held his handcomp out to record the phenomenon as the swirling clouds began to form images of what appeared to be prehistoric Earth. He watched in awe as the eons passed before his eyes. Centuries of volcanic activity passed in the blink of an eye. He bore witness as the polar caps expanded and contracted over and over again with the pulse of a heartbeat. The dinosaurs came and went. Then mankind appeared. Or was he already there? He witnessed the great migration, the expansion of the continents, the growth of cities, the horrors of hundreds of wars, the wonder of incredible scientific achievements and untold numbers of other important historical events, all of them blended together and compressed into mere moments. He glimpsed an old three-man space capsule that he remembered seeing pictures of in history books, but its image had barely registered in his mind when the first starcruiser flashed before his eyes and was gone. A split second later the images seemed to liquefy, to lose their cohesion, and the swirling clouds of color reappeared and swallowed them into the vortex.
Dylan stopped recording and immediately started the playback, intending to determine the precise moment when he’d have to step out into the Portal’s event horizon. Only then did he realize that the centuries had begun to slow as the programmed destination time approached. But even when the targeted moment arrived, the decades were still passing by far too quickly and he wasn’t able to pin down any specific, accurate jump off point.
He set the handcomp to playback at half speed and started it again, only to discover that events still passed by much too fast for his needs. One quarter speed. Again, too fast. He stepped it down to a mere hundredth of the originally recorded speed and tried again. Then a thousandth. That looked better. He could probably work with that. As he waited for history to play itself out again, he programmed a countdown timer to reach zero at that moment when he would have to step out. He linked it to the recording and synchronized it, then ran it through...twice. After one minor adjustment it was perfect. He was ready.
Well, he was as ready as he ever would be.
He drew a deep breath and touched a hand to the recall device, safely hidden away and sealed inside the lining of his jacket, then exhaled.
“Ready, Lieutenant?” Akagi asked.
“Good luck, Dylan,” Benny said, grinning at the familiarity of the scene that was playing itself out in front of him. The Portal looked different from its fictional counterpart, of course, but the similarities between what he was witnessing now and the episode of that old science-fiction series from the 1960’s that he’d recently seen on virtuavision were obvious.
Dylan looked back at his new friend one last time, wishing he’d had more time to get to know him better. A little odd, that wish, considering all the time they’d just spent cooped up in the skiff together. “I don’t believe in luck, Benny,” he said, “but thank you.”
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was suddenly very dry. “Commander...” He cleared his throat. “Let’s do this.”
“All right, Lieutenant. Walk out to the center.”
“What?” Dylan asked, staring at Akagi as if he’d just told him to step off a cliff.
Akagi stared right back at him. “Do you want to do this or not?” he asked impatiently.
Actually, no. But he answered, “Yeah, but I thought...”
“Then get out there.” When Dylan didn’t move he said, “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. You won’t fall through it until you’re supposed to.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Akagi hesitated a moment, then answered with a shrug, “Reasonably sure.”
“That’s not very reassuring, Commander.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said as he turned back to the controls. “It’s the best I can do.”
Dylan sighed, then asked Benny, “Are you sure this thing isn’t just going to kill me?”
“If there was any chance of that Admiral Hansen wouldn’t have sent you out here in the first place,” the old captain assured him.
Dylan accepted that for whatever it was worth—he trusted Benny well enough, despite the fact that he hadn’t really known him for very long, although Admiral Hansen was another issue entirely—then turned back to the Portal and gazed into the center of the weakening storm. As he watched, what remained of the miniature hurricane fizzled into insignificant dancing wisps of smoke once again, but the ‘surface’ beneath had taken on a silvery metallic appearance. It looked like someone had filled a pool with mercury. He swallowed hard then stepped out, tentatively, shifting his weight from his rear foot to his front very slowly, and much to his relief found the mercury-like surface to be as solid as the ground.
Another step. Still solid. He walked out to the center as Akagi had instructed, gazing down at his feet with every short step and noting that his movement through the smoke seemed to have no effect on its haphazard currents. He glanced back at Akagi and nodded. At this point he just wanted to get it over with.
Akagi touched his hand to the destination symbol again and repeated the ancient phrase. “Pel’Ka. Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim. Tusa. Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi.”
Dylan stared unblinking at his handcomp’s readout as the colorful hurricane began to reform around his ankles. The storm clouds swirled faster and faster around his feet a
nd they thickened and expanded outward toward the Portal’s rim. Earth’s prehistoric oceans and jungles and mountains and plains appeared together beneath him, morphing with the passing centuries before they could even fully take form. His heart pounded harder and harder as the millennia passed until it felt like it was going to burst forth from his chest.
The timer appeared on the screen and began its countdown. His heart thundered, feeling as though it might explode at any second. His breaths grew shallow and rapid.
Double digits. Nineties... eighties... seventies... sixties... fifties... forties... thirties... His hands were shaking.
Twenties... He felt queasy.
Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen... He wanted to back out.
“Commander!” someone hollered from a distance.
Dylan looked up, but only for a second before his gaze fell back to the handcomp. Two young crewmen were approaching, running as fast as their legs would carry them.
Ten, nine, eight... Why was he doing this? Why was he leaving Beth?
Seven... Why did he have to do this?
Six...
“Stop, Commander! Don’t let him go!”
Five... He glanced up at the young men again. Why were they trying to stop him?
“Why not?” Akagi shouted.
All eyes, including Dylan’s, converged on the two young men as they skidded to a halt just outside the security field’s perimeter. “His mission isn’t authorized!”
One...
Akagi withdrew has hand as the counter reached zero.
Chapter 72
A second CRACK echoed through the hall less than a second after the first.
“Stay right there, Admiral!” The MP guarding Hansen ordered as he drew his sidearm and slapped the door release. He charged into the hall, leaving the admiral unguarded as well as unrestrained, and didn’t take the time to close the door behind him.
Gunshots, Hansen knew. Double tap with a pulse-pistol. No doubt about it. Nothing else sounded quite the same.
“What happened?” he heard his guard inquire.
“She grabbed a weapon!” a woman shouted in response, obviously hyped up. “I didn’t have any choice!”