Ocean of Storms

by Christopher Mari

  “It shouldn’t be doing this,” Benny said as a choir of long-dead voices began to chatter all around them. “The system shouldn’t have the power to do this.”

  Without realizing it, Donovan, Zell, and Soong found themselves crowding around Benny’s chair in a circle, partially out of protective instincts, partially to watch every angle of the action. Unlike the holograms on the Astraeus, which were solid both to the eye and to the touch, these holograms were more ghostly and transparent in appearance. What was even stranger was the positioning of these holograms. Since they were not standing on the bridge of the Eos, these holograms had no consoles to hunch over or seats to sit in, so they sat or stood in midair in an eerie approximation of where they stood on the bridge of their long-dead ship. Donovan glanced at the far walls. Men and women were standing half-in and half-out of them and coming and going as if the exterior walls were merely leading to another place in their vessel. He wondered if there were holograms outside projected in midair over the street and below them on other floors in what would have been other areas of the Eos.

  Where on Earth was all this power coming from?

  “Benny,” Donovan called over the noise. “Can’t you clear up all this damn chatter?”

  Benny stared at him. “You’re kidding, right? I don’t even know how the hell it’s doing this.”

  Zell leaned over to Benny. “Can you at least isolate a specific date and play that? It looks like we’re getting everything at once.”

  Benny whirled around in his seat and tried to isolate the individual ship’s logs. After a few frustrated efforts he slammed his hand against the desk. “I can’t. The frigging thing is corrupted somehow. It won’t play any other way. It’s as if every log is playing simultaneously.”

  Just as the din of the noise seemed to overwhelm them, the multiple overlapping images winked out of existence to be replaced by a single image, again of what they assumed to be the bridge.

  “Report!”

  The group turned to see a striking, tall, blond-haired woman with almond-shaped eyes sitting in midair. Like the captain of the Astraeus, she seemed to be in top physical condition and looked to be no more than twenty-five years old. She sat approximately in the center of the room—where the captain’s chair had sat aboard the Eos.

  A brown-haired man with bright-green eyes sitting in front of her spoke first. “We appear to have landed, Captain. Searching temporal database for time and spatial coordinates now.”

  “We didn’t land; we crashed,” the captain said, more to herself than anyone else. “I want a casualty update.”

  A blue-eyed black man to her left turned to face her. “We have reports of several injured crew members.”

  “Structural integrity?”

  An Asian woman to her right responded. “Structural integrity is holding, but engineering is reporting that—” She pressed a hand to her almost-undetectable earpiece. “Captain, we’ve lost the temporal drive.”

  “What do you mean, lost?”

  “Engineering is assessing the damage now. They’re not sure if—”

  “What is working around here?” the captain barked.

  “Ship’s computer is functioning, Captain,” the woman to the right noted.

  “Okay, then let’s see what we can see,” the captain muttered. “Main viewscreen on.”

  Donovan and the others watched as all holographic eyes turned in unison to stare at a point several feet above and behind their heads.

  “Can you,” the captain said with hesitation, “can you confirm if that is lava outside the main viewscreen?”

  “AFFIRMATIVE. WHAT YOU ARE SEEING, CAPTAIN, IS INDEED MOLTEN LAVA.”

  “But where, ship? Where are we?”

  “ACCESSING SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL COORDINATES NOW.”

  “Captain,” the brown-haired man who had first spoken began with hesitation, “we’re getting preliminary telemetry now. We’re on Earth, in East Africa.”

  The captain’s holographic image came out of her invisible chair. “When?”

  “Captain . . . ,” the brown-haired man said quietly as he glanced at his invisible instrument panel again. “This can’t be right. Captain, ship’s suggesting we’re approximately two and a half million years in the past.”

  “How? How can we have been so off? Ship, I want you to run a diagnostic on the temporal drive. Make sure to—”

  The scene winked out of existence, and the figures reappeared in different positions. A blond-haired man with dark-brown skin was standing next to the captain’s chair and appeared to be holding something.

  “—drive’s out for now. We won’t be sure how bad it is until the lava flows away from the stern so we can—”

  “Captain!” the same young Asian woman called.

  The captain turned to her. “Have you established contact with the Council?”

  “No, Captain, but we are getting a response. It’s the Astraeus. She’s here, in this time. But—”

  The single log playback disappeared suddenly and was again replaced by a squall of overlapping voices and a myriad of overlapping images. Faces and bodies blurred in and out of existence and ran into one another and over one another and through one another. Donovan squinted, trying to make sense of what he was witnessing. The bridge seemed chaotic, but he couldn’t tell whether he was looking at something that had really happened or was merely seeing the result of too many ship’s logs being played at once.

  “Goddamn it!” Zell roared. “Benny, can’t you clean up this goddamn mess?”

  Benny cursed under his breath and vainly attempted to separate the fragmented bits of data into separate streams. As he worked, some images would disappear while others would freeze or speed up to a screech of sound and a blur of motion, almost as if Benny were playing several movies at once, pausing some and fast-forwarding through others.

  Soong grabbed Donovan’s arm and yelled over the noise into his ear as if she were at a rock concert. “It’s no use! The files are corrupted—they’ve been exposed to the elements for too long! We have to shut it off before we lose all the data!”

  For a moment it appeared to Donovan that she was right. The noise in the room had become almost deafening. Occasionally a fragment of conversation would come out clearly, catch their attention, and then disappear into all of the ambient sound.

  “—Astraeus is trapped—engines destroyed on impact with the lunar—”

  “—we shouldn’t be here—”

  “—we had to come—to assume—the Astraeus had failed in her mission—our time wasn’t changed—”

  “—wildly off course—we didn’t account—positions of the Earth—that’s likely why we crashed—”

  “—can’t be two million years in the past—all our tests—the temporal drive couldn’t have miscalculated our arrival date by that much—”

  “—ACCESSING TEMPORAL—”

  “—damage to the hull is minimal—lava’s receding—we should be able to—”

  “—where’s that—”

  “—no, no, no—I—”

  “—no, I want—”

  “—isn’t possible—”

  “—negative, Eos. It’s no good—we can’t—engines are wrecked—”

  “—Captain wants a status report on—”

  “—is it possible to mount a rescue mission once we’re—”

  “—ten dead, sixteen injured—need to regenerate tissue on fourteen—”

  “—I’m not going to sacrifice the lives lost—”

  “—I agree—deaths can’t be in vain—”

  Then, just as suddenly, the multiple images and voices disappeared and were replaced by a single image of these descendants of humanity. The playback no longer appeared to be on the bridge, but in another part of the ship. Gone were the men and women hovering in midair at their invisible stations on the bridge. Instead, the captain was standing in the center of a room with her head down and her arms folded. Her face was anguished as she listened to three men
in what appeared to be futuristic space suits. Each was holding a helmet under his arm. One of the men was speaking.

  “Benny, did you do this?”

  “It wasn’t me, Donovan. It just cleared up.”

  “Quiet!” Zell demanded.

  “—in a prehistoric jungle, Captain. The ship is right. From what we’ve seen, we’re definitely in the distant past.”

  The tallest man spoke next. “We’ve found a variety of animals that existed about two million years ago. We’ve also come into contact with a tribe of our distant ancestors.”

  “Our distant ancestors?” the captain wondered.

  “A type of australopithecine,” the third man noted. “We’d have to get a closer look to be more specific.”

  “Are you certain?” the captain asked him.

  “As certain as I can be from what I recollect from my evolution classes,” the third man said with a firm nod of his head. “There’s a tribe of at least twenty of them about twelve kilometers from our position. It appears that they were near the volcano when our ship crashed into it and are now fleeing the lava flow.”

  “Australopithecine,” the captain muttered, her eyes brightening. “And a tribe of them right outside our door.”

  The first man stepped forward. “What are you thinking, Captain?”

  She smiled dimly. “That we might not have to leave here empty-handed, gentlemen.” She looked at the first to have spoken. “Munson, I want you and Dr. Maciak to meet me in my quarters in one hour. Bring all of your scans of the tribe with you. I’ll be in engineering until then checking on the repairs.”

  The image disappeared again but this time was immediately replaced by another image. Donovan assumed it was in the captain’s quarters, because she was there along with the crewmate she called Munson and another man with reddish hair and deep-set black eyes, whom he assumed to be Dr. Maciak. The latter man was speaking.

  “—a risk, Captain, certainly. But it might work.”

  The captain leaned invisibly on what Donovan assumed to be a desk. “Then we have to take that risk.”

  Munson was leaning on what Donovan assumed to be a bulkhead, with his arms folded across his chest. “Even if what you say is correct, Doctor, we can’t just test this theory on crew members—assuming that we’d get volunteers.”

  “We wouldn’t risk the lives of the crew,” the captain noted. “We’d have to first attempt it on the primitives, see if the process would work.”

  “So we’d have to capture some of them,” Munson mused with his head down, “bring them back here, experiment on them, figure out if the procedure’s safe for us, and then try it on ourselves?”

  “You sound as if you don’t approve, Munson,” Dr. Maciak noted.

  “I’m not sure if I do,” Munson answered. “This would be . . . a crossbreeding experiment. A rather repugnant idea. And even if we could—”

  “Do we have the right?” the captain said with a smile as she finished his sentence. “I’m not sure about this either, Munson. But we’re out of options. The human race is going to die out if we don’t try something. The engineers assure me that they can reverse the time warp and bring us back home. But I’m not willing to attempt another time jump to see if we can make it to the twenty-first century to warn the people of that time. It’s a desperate choice, I know, but what other choice do we have?”

  “Maybe the choice is to let the human race die out, Captain,” Munson said softly. “We brought this on ourselves with all our genetic meddling. I don’t see how more of—”

  The captain stood up. “Munson, I appreciate your opinions. But we’ve lost too many people already—not just from the plague, but all of our crew members and those aboard the Astraeus. She’ll never get back home. I’m not willing to sacrifice any more lives.”

  “Understood, Captain.” Munson straightened up. “Just let me know when you want me to lead the recovery team.”

  “You leave in three hours. That will give Dr. Maciak and his team enough time to set up environmental blocks to prevent us from being exposed to the primitives’ germs.”

  Munson turned to Maciak. “How many do you need?”

  Maciak rubbed his chin. “As many as you can get. We’ll need—”

  The squall that hit Donovan and the others was murderous in its intensity. All of them winced in turn and covered their ears as the noise from so many overlapping recorded voices and sounds overwhelmed their senses. Benny tried to shrug off the increasingly chaotic din as he worked to separate the corrupted streams of information, but the noise was too much. As much as he tried, he couldn’t pull his hand from his ear long enough to work the computer. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around. Donovan was jerking his head toward the center of the room.

  Benny turned to see the image of what he first assumed to be an ape biting and clawing at the man the captain had called Maciak, followed by other images of more apelike creatures attacking other crew members. The images didn’t last long, no more than ten or fifteen seconds. Only long after the images went dead and the noises disappeared did Benny realize he had been watching mankind’s ancestors killing his descendants.

  Chapter 23

  Time had lost its meaning for them. Their self-imposed deadline for leaving had passed without a mention. After making another futile attempt to retrieve some of the missing ship’s logs, the foursome had settled into the plush couches Zell had provided at the safe house to drink and piece together what they had seen. Donovan stifled a yawn and looked up with bleary eyes across the room, wondering if the sun had come up.

  Zell sat with his arms across his broad chest, a chilled scotch glass in one hand resting against the inside of his elbow. For decades he had scoured the Earth searching for fragments of the past, for pieces of civilizations long gone. He had more experience than anyone else in this room, knew far better than all of them how nations rise and fall, how civilizations die. But even with that knowledge, even with knowing how fleeting empires had been throughout history, he had never expected to see the end of humanity itself. And he never would have assumed in his wildest dreams that the end of humanity would come at the moment of its birth.

  Since viewing the Eos’s logs, all four had found it hard to understand what they were feeling. But the one feeling they had been trying to silence was a sense of defeat. Since the day the EMP signal had arrived from the Moon, they’d been facing death one way or another. They’d faced it, cheated it, and come out on top. Now, seeing those ship’s logs, they wondered . . . They wondered if all of what they knew, all this building and striving for centuries, all the wars and the troubled moments of peace, and all the debates around all those tables about so many crazy issues mattered in the end.

  For Donovan, the answer was clear: Hell yes, it mattered. He was unwilling to give up, even now in the face of all this. Between the files they had in their possession and the notes he had been frantically making for the last several hours, he knew he had enough to convince those fools in Washington of the dangers that lay ahead. And if he couldn’t get to Washington, if they really were trying to kill him, he would go to London, to Paris, to the United Nations. He would get someone to listen. He would play the logs. He would make them understand. He had to. He had to keep fighting. They weren’t dead yet.

  All of them had made a considerable effort to get drunk in the last few hours, with little luck, even though they had made a fair dent in the bottle of Jack Daniel’s Donovan had opened when he first came in. The bottle sat on the coffee table now, its contents barely reaching the bottom of the label at this point.

  Sometime around four in the morning, the group had switched from liquor to coffee. On the bar sat a coffeemaker, its half pot occasionally hissing.

  Soong picked herself up off the couch and wandered over to where Donovan was now sitting on the floor.

  “You must be tired from writing.”

  He barely glanced at her. “I want to get it all down while it’s still fresh in my mind.�
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  “You should rest, Alan.”

  He smiled at her consideration and touched her arm. “I wish I could.”

  Soong frowned. “There has to be an easier way than taking down all these notes.”

  Zell cleared his throat, as if he was shaking himself awake. “Of course there is.” He reached down and pulled a small digital recorder from his backpack. He looked at Donovan. “Try it my way for once, you Luddite.”

  Donovan chuckled. He tossed his pen across the coffee table, where it skittered momentarily before rolling under the couch. “Maybe just this once, Elias.”

  Zell placed the recorder down in the center of the coffee table and switched it on. Donovan sat back against the couch.

  “Where do we begin?” Donovan asked.

  “Who knows?” Benny asked with a smirk. “In the twenty-eighth century, or two and a half million years in the past?”

  “The future,” Soong stated. “That’s where it started.”

  Zell relit his cigar. “From your perspective, Dr. Soong.”

  “But she’s right,” Donovan added. “What happened in the future influenced the past in this case.”

  “Okay,” Benny said. “Let’s go a step at a time. According to the intel we got from both ships, sometime in the twenty-eighth century a plague nearly wiped out all of humanity. They couldn’t save themselves in the future on account of the fact that they had manipulated human DNA so much that they had somehow totally screwed with their immune systems. So they decide to take a little field trip back to the early twenty-first century to warn the people of our time not to muck with genetic engineering.”

  Donovan continued: “But both ships go wildly off course and crash into the Moon and Africa in approximately two-point-five million BC.”

  “However,” Zell noted as he sat forward, “once the Astraeus had crashed into the Moon, it was unable to make another time jump. That crew set up camp under the lunar surface but likely died out within a generation. The Eos had fared better, but the captain of that ship was hesitant about attempting another time jump. Her engineers were certain that they could reverse the wormhole and get back to their time. So they tried to bring some hope back to their future. And they decided to do that by harvesting DNA from the immune systems of the closest relations they could find in the distant past.”