by Tobias Roote
“Yes, it’s me, Justin. Thanks for coming to get me... us.” He looked at the others. They looked as haunted as he did.
“What happened in there?” Furth asked, aware that something significant had transpired. Even his marine unit looked haggard and they had only been gone an hour, just over.
“I’ll have to brief you when I arrive, Justin, it’s not something I want to broadcast at this moment in time,” was all Patterson would say. He gave a half salute, then slumped back as the shuttle launched vigorously from the asteroid directly for the ARK. It seemed in a mighty hurry to leave Alpha Station behind.
***
An hour later, the meeting re-convened. Mike Patterson, his wounds now patched, sat at the head of the holosuite table with Justin Furth on his right. Furth was silent and his features were ash grey. He seemed unusually disturbed by something, but happy not to be the one to break the news.
“Right, ladies and gentlemen. You will want to know what’s going on. You scientists are going to understand what occurred, you might already know. However, it is important for this to be put into words so that there is no confusion. I’m having trouble believing it myself and I was there.” He halted momentarily while he pulled his thoughts together.
“ARK1 was in the position placed by Arty when he jumped us over. We checked our position on arrival, and I checked again with the shuttle’s position before we left. Alpha Station appeared in our allotted space and somehow the two bodies merged together as the Station re-materialised.
What occurred inside the station was frankly terrifying. There was a simple problem of two objects trying to occupy the same space. The solution was internally the ARK and the asteroid battled for dominance and whole sections of one, or the other, just disappeared inside the other. Some parts exploded, something to do with molecular densities, others just merged. Where one was less solid than the other, it just absorbed it. Humans are soft, where they met hard objects the results weren’t pretty. My XO, Johann Schroeder...” Mike Patterson held back a choking sensation before clearing his throat to continue.
“My XO was merged with the bulkhead of a provisions store from Alpha Station. He existed on one side and the other – in between was wall. Most of the bridge and crew had been absorbed into the asteroid which was denser than we were. I lost twenty six personnel. The rep-loop tunnel was solid rock when your men freed me and we were able to check, there were ten people in there. A further ten were in a single group that were making their way to the shuttle bay. The bay doesn’t exist any more. Except for the three of us you rescued, the remaining bridge crew were unrecoverable, or missing.” Mike finished and remained silent, inwardly reliving the nightmare he had come across, of Belling, his head protruding from a wall at a height of approximately four feet from the deck. Caught in the act of falling forward, he had been absorbed into the asteroid’s mass. The face held no expression, not even surprise.
“Questions?” Captain Furth asked, wanting to push the meeting ahead and giving Mike Patterson time to recover himself.
One of the scientists commented. “Captain, I’m surprised. Not at what you describe, but the manner of the merging of the two bodies. Their masses are such that I would have expected total destruction of both objects when merging into the same space. A small object would be absorbed, probably without being noticed, but an ARK roughly two miles across and a mile deep isn’t small. There would be greater competition for the space, yet the asteroid is intact, and so by the sounds of it, is the ARK.”
He sat back awaiting confirmation from his colleagues, or discussion.
Fellowes put up his hand. “I believe I know how we might account for the results we’re seeing.” He turned to his colleague next to him, then to the others, ignoring for the moment the bridge crew while he tested his theory on his peers.
“One of the aspects of QE is that time is said to exist within the present, the future and the past. There are some qualified theories, that should we manage to master Quantum Entanglement, that we might also, in doing so, unlock the possibility of travel anywhere instantly. Not only that, but do so not only in this time frame, but others as well. There is considerable support to suggest the possibility, although others would say it is speculation.”
Some of those others started to disagree, there were murmurings from some, but Fellowes put up his hand to them asking them to wait. He hadn’t finished.
“Arty’s logs in his data-burst indicate he used some form of crystal alloy that I have heard of, but never come across. Alacite is a rare alloy not found on Earth, but mentioned in scientific papers that frequented the science research community a few years back. Arty’s notes indicate that a tuned crystal placed at both points would create a quantum entanglement field that, with sufficient power could transport large masses a long distance. The information doesn’t go into great detail, but indications are that he used a QEF to transport all of the ARKs, the ships and lastly, and tragically, the station itself.”
Mike Patterson turned to Fellowes, then to Furth, “ARK4 - where is it?”
There was silence. Then one of the officers checked the sensor log, he fiddled for a few minutes as he found the position in the records and then replayed the sequence of events that absorbed ARK1. The sensors indicated both ARK1’s mass and that of Alpha Station - there was no trace of any other ARK which they all knew from the data-burst included two separate entities in transit from Earth. Only one arrived - which was impossible.
Fellowes was growling as he ground his teeth. He was frantically chewing something over and trying to pull it together in his head. The others, now getting used to the quick-thinking brainiac in their midst, gave him a moment, which seemed to be long enough.
He sighed. “I think I know what happened and it explains everything...”
The intercom went on a bleep emergency call interrupting him. It was Sarah Cowen for Fellowes.
Cowen was looking around her in panic, as if something was creeping up on her. Everyone could see the confusion in her face. It registered with all of them.
As she turned back to the camera she saw Fellowes and her face went white. “I don’t believe it! Colin - how the fuck did you know?” she screamed at Fellowes.
Fellowes quickly muted the intercom and spoke into it quickly. Sarah Cowen, cowed by whatever it was he had said to her, sat wild-eyed while Fellowes turned back to the others.
“Supposing there was an accident just as Arty, the station and ARK4 entered the QEF?” he offered.
“Supposing the accident caused a power flux in the field somehow? Causing a distortion?”
One of the others piped in. “It could change its final location in terms of distance, position – “
“..and TIME!” Fellowes finished - taking back his theory before the other could steal his thunder. He looked at them.
“I think there was a surge of power, or perhaps an additional drain on power that altered Arty’s calculations causing a distortion, not in position, but TIME.“ He turned excitedly to Furth and Mike as he spoke.
“It would account for the arrival of the Asteroid minus ARK4, it would also explain why the explosive effect of re-materialisation didn’t occur as it should. Because where time was concerned the asteroid already occupied that space before ARK1 arrived. The two timelines simply hadn’t yet merged.”
He looked into the screen which faced him still showing Sally Cowen, her mouth now open as the realisation of his explanation fully dawned on her. She had the final bit of the puzzle, but she needed to remain patient a minute longer.
He turned to Mike Patterson who had followed his every word so far, and was silently chewing over the information.
“When you were being recovered from the collapsed ARK, I asked Sarah to collect a piece of alloy from an AG sled that was stored at the back of the hangar. l knew the metal for those sleds couldn’t be older than four years, because they were made by Arty’s and Pod’s nanites and they didn’t exist before then.” He turned to the inte
rcom and un-muted the call and increased the volume so everyone could hear.
“You tested the metal for its age, Sarah?”
She just nodded, not trusting her own voice.
“Sarah, what age does the metal read?” Fellowes asked cautiously.
“It... it reads.... one hundred and four years old.”
Alpha Station had gone back in time one hundred years.
Mike suddenly understood. It explained why there was nobody in the station, they had already left, or died in the intervening years. He doubted the latter, but it also made his thoughts jump to ARK4. If it wasn’t here, then it had gone somewhere else. So had the two hundred thousand people on the station. And, they had done so a century before ARK1 had taken up position in this system, but because of the delayed effect it didn’t materialise in the present until now. A paradox, and one that had cost him twenty six personnel and a very close friend.
***
Four hundred and fifty thousand miles away a sensor swept the skies. It did so periodically every fourteen hours, approximately half the planet’s day. Normally after its scan, which took three and a half hours, the response resulted in a single line of code displayed on a screen deep in the bedrock of the planet’s crust. It would then shut down its sweep and return to a passive state ready for the next recurrence of its twice daily routine.
Except that today it ‘finally’ recorded something. Today it picked up a signal from deep in space that matched exactly the conditions that had been built into its event parameters one hundred years previously. Its program acknowledging a positive result, broke out of its loop and instead of shutting down, clicked onto a new event. One which instructed it to follow a new routine.
Two things then happened.
An alarm sounded above the screen where, for the last century it had recorded a non-event. Next, as commanded by its own looped instructions - it began transmitting.
Deep in his bedrock home, XeraC smiled at the alarm sounding across the other side of his underground fortress. His virtual features relaxed into those of a man who had waited one hundred years for his people to arrive. His time had finally come.
THE END
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN READING MORE OF MY BOOKS - PLEASE SIGN UP TO MY MAILING LIST HERE
(http://tobiasroote.com)