VOR 02 The Payback War

by Smedman, Lisa

  The bomb paused for a microsecond, thinking. Where to send Alexi next?

  Alexi had to move. Fast. When the space-time wormhole opened, he did not wait for the crystal to push him in but instead dived through it before the angles could complete their intricate folding. He found himself back in Novosibirsk on leave. As his physical body stumbled drunkenly through the streets, into the theater and up onto the stage, Alexi watched himself from the darkened theater, from the seat beside Raheek.

  Look here! he tried to tell himself. This alien can help you!

  But even after he had stumbled in panic to the church, the Alexi that was physically in that now could not be made to understand. He simply did not have the necessary information. His consciousness was living its life out of order. Missing his memories of what had happened between Vladivostok and Novosibirsk, and with only a tickling of déjà vu provided by the memories of futures that might come, he stumbled through the now, unable to make sense of it.

  Frustrated, Alexi abandoned that now and withdrew his conscious mind back inside the crystal. There had to be another way. . . .

  The bomb seized the moment, tossing Alexi to a time when Raheek would startle him by returning to the helicraft, when the Alexi of that now would try to kill the alien and then would think that the alien was trying to kill him in revenge.

  The Alexi of this now realized that Raheek had never intended to kill him, back when the alien had held the blade of its metal staff against his cheek. Raheek had merely been trying to use the weapon’s mystic energies to jar Alexi’s memories back into place—an alien version of electroshock therapy. Raheek knew that Alexi was the key that would unlock the bomb’s secrets, even if the alien at that point still did not know how, or why. The last thing the alien wanted was for him to die. Although Raheek would change his mind later, when the right now came along. . . .

  Once again, the crystal had erred in its choice of nows to send Alexi back to. The Alexi of that now had no memory of meeting Juliana and establishing a tentative friendship with her, and regarded her as his enemy. But at the same time, he learned that Juliana did not die in Vladivostok. And so he began to actively probe for these missing memories. In the process his consciousness forged connections with the part of his soul that remained inside the crystal, gathering hints and half memories that he could later use to alter the sequence of events.

  That he would later use to alter the sequence of events.

  Which meant that Alexi’s conscious mind had been sent back through time to a now when it was possible to set things right.

  Which was something the crystal never would have done.

  Which could only mean one thing: It was possible for Alexi to jump around in time himself, without the crystal’s aid. But how?

  There had to be a force other than the crystal at work. One that lay within Alexi. . . .

  He suddenly realized what it was. Humans had a limited power over time: They could send their consciousness back to the past, anytime they wanted. That power was called memory. It was imperfect, and imprecise. But it existed.

  Why then could humans not send themselves forward in time?

  Perhaps, mused Alexi, because they were still tied to their physical bodies—constructs that were forced to plod through time one step at a time, not skip through it as the human consciousness did.

  But then another thought occurred to him: Humans could send themselves forward in time, by imagining the futures that might be. These glimpses were of what might be—not what must be. Even psychics who could foresee the future could, by the very act of their relaying this information to others, change it.

  Psychics. The word stuck for a moment in Alexi’s consciousness. That was what Raheek had implied Alexi was, when the alien had called him a mystic. Was there a genetic code that enabled someone to be a psychic, a code that had been passed down through the generations from Alexi’s ancestor who had prophesied the death of Peter the Great? Or was there something else at work, some trigger that explained why only some human beings had “the sight”?

  Whatever the reasons, Alexi had found the answer. The memories he needed—the keys to all of those other possible nows—were stored inside that part of himself that he called his soul. He had only to turn one of them . . .

  As he concentrated, something clicked inside Alexi’s mind. His consciousness skipped back in time—precisely to the memory he was dwelling upon: the moment when his squad had been airlifted out of Vladivostok. He watched as the scene on the helicraft played itself out, as he learned who and what the Zykhee were. And that he had been the one to kill the Zykhee warrior and save his squad—and himself—from certain death.

  Perfect! Now that he knew he could direct his consciousness to other nows, he would use this newfound skill to help the Alexi of a previous now use the information he had just acquired. He skipped back to Vladivostok, to a quiet moment in the museum—and by the force of will alone held the crystal at bay until the whispers of future memory told the Alexi of that now how to kill the Zykhee warrior that emerged from the submarine.

  But he couldn’t keep the crystal at bay forever. With a wrench, the crystal yanked his conscious mind away and threw Alexi elsewhen. This time, the destination was Tomsk 13.

  Unprepared for that now, Alexi watched himself get killed by a growler in the underground corridors of the military research facility. At the last moment, as he lay dying, he pulled his consciousness free and sent it to the place where knowledge lay: in the briefing room, where Lieutenant Soldatenkof was explaining what a growler was.

  The crystal tried again. But the Alexi of that when knew not to turn his back on the underground corridor. He squeezed past the collapse in the ceiling—only to be startled by the cryotanks filled with baby growlers that he found there. Terrified by the hatchlings’ attack on Piotr, he turned and ran and died . . .

  Alexi retreated from that now. Back in the crystal once more, he pondered his next move. The bomb was experimenting with him, sending him back to points where a decision could fork in two directions, both of them bad.

  Alexi instead sought out a moment before the one he had just been cast into, a now in which a decision could lead to life, not death. His consciousness jumped back to Tomsk 13 again, but this time, he refused to go into the underground corridors. This time, he was above ground. Only to be mortally wounded. But Raheek was there to heal him, as Alexi knew he would be. . . .

  Alexi could sense the crystal’s growing anger. Had he still worn a physical body, this squeeze through the time-space wormhole would have left it battered and bruised. The bomb fired Alexi’s consciousness into a now that lay just before the moment when Alexi’s soul had entered the tetrahedron. In his panic at realizing that he was to kill himself—and his lack of the memory that told him why—the Alexi of that now accidentally killed Raheek.

  The hop back to this now was a short one. Inside the crystal, Alexi and the bomb withdrew from one another like boxers retreating to the corners of the ring, silently contemplating each other. Alexi’s physical body would have been breathing hard at this point from the strain. The bomb’s physical body . . .

  Was a crystal.

  Alexi saw it now with absolute clarity. He wasn’t battling an artificial intelligence—a silicon chip constructed by an alien race. He was locked into mental combat with a member of that race itself. What had Raheek called them? The Shard. Beings with bodies built from silicon, rather than carbon. Bodies made of crystal.

  The tetrahedron was a gigantic, complex body that the Shard had built for itself. Like Juliana’s heavy-assault suit, the silicon construct surrounded the Shard’s consciousness. But unlike Juliana, the Shard was unable to take its suit off. Body and mind were one.

  When the bomb went off, the Shard whose consciousness was inhabiting and controlling it would be destroyed. Just like the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II, it was willing to die for its country. Or planet.

  Or universe.

  For all Alexi knew, t
he Maelstrom and everything in this strange chunk of space that the Earth had been violently wrenched into during the Change was the Shard’s home turf. And if it was, small wonder that the first overture of that race toward humanity was a hostile one.

  Another thought occurred to Alexi. If he was here inside the crystal, present and conscious in this moment, he must have already won the battle. For him to exist in this now, he had to have survived all of the previous nows that the Shard tossed him to. No matter what deaths lay in those past moments, Alexi could avoid them—and would avoid them.

  The thought gave him the courage to go on. There were a few loose ends to tie up, back in those other nows.

  He sent himself back to Tomsk 13 and met Juliana and Raheek and got on board the helicraft. . . .

  The crystal retaliated by sending him ahead to a now when Juliana took him prisoner. Based on what had come later, in other nows, Alexi knew that it would be only a matter of time before Union paratroopers came and took him prisoner and carried him far away from the crystal and claimed the bomb as their own . . .

  But that now gave him a vital clue: the latitude and longitude of the “meteorite impact site.” Alexi clutched it to his consciousness, determined to give this information to Raheek. But first he jumped back further in time, to the moment when Nevsky planted the seed of an idea in his mind: of a soldier throwing himself on an unexploded grenade to save his comrades.

  And ahead to a moment when he and Juliana began to develop a tentative friendship, only to have that bond break when Alexi had made the mistake of comparing himself to Juliana’s lost lover. In retaliation for her outburst, he disabled her therm suit. Which would lead to an interesting now, down the time line . . .

  But there were other things to do, first. Alexi jumped his consciousness back to a now in which he found the canisters of nerve gas in Tomsk 13 and watched bemusedly as he obeyed the strange compulsion that told him to carry one on board the helicraft. Then he jumped ahead slightly in time, to the point where he realized that a growler had attached itself to the bottom of the helicraft—and that the nerve gas was the only thing that would kill it. After the growler had been dealt with, Alexi was able to tell Raheek the coordinates of where the “meteorite” fell.

  The Shard’s next attack caught Alexi off-balance. This time, it sent him back to the battle of Vladivostok. Once again, it presented him with a now that included a momentous discovery: the Zykhee spaceship that had been forced to land in that city—thousands of kilometers from its intended landing site—after human ships attacked it during its approach to Earth. Startled by this knowledge, Alexi died—this time at the hands of the Zykhee who had stayed behind in the museum to try to repair the damaged ship while its companions sought another way to get Raheek to the Shard.

  Alexi tore his conscious mind away and jumped it forward to a point where he learned three vital things: that the bomb disrupted time; that an adult growler was in the immediate vicinity of the impact site; and that the tetrahedron was surrounded by Union drones.

  The cost was Juliana’s life. But by jumping all the way back in time to Vladivostok again, Alexi was able to lure Juliana away from the spot where she was killed. Away to the museum on whose roof the Zykhee spaceship had landed.

  Which led to her promotion . . .

  Which led to her being put in command of the special ops team that parachuted into Tomsk 13 . . .

  Now Alexi was on the right track. He just needed to jump to the now in which he discovered the baby growler, and the now in which he used it to lure the adult growler into range of the drone. . . .

  But that led to the setback of Juliana trying to use the highly acidic growler saliva to break apart the tetrahedron—as Alexi found out when the Shard skipped him ahead to a now in which it killed all three of them.

  Building on this tiny victory, the Shard hurled Alexi into the now in which Raheek killed Juliana—a now in which, even as Alexi wept over her grave, he learned from his dead ancestors the secret weakness of the Shard.

  The Shard jumped him ahead—just a little ahead—to a now in which the Union soldiers killed Alexi before he could use that secret. . . .

  Alexi threw himself back—just enough, to a point in time when Juliana was alive, and could be the one to shoot him instead.

  Which brought his consciousness circling back, as he had always known it would, to this very same now.

  It was Alexi’s turn to gloat.

  You can’t defeat me, he told the Shard. Part of me has been inside you since that moment when you first tossed me back to Vladivostok—when you first entered Earth’s atmosphere. There’s no escaping me—and others like me. As long as there are humans on this Earth, there will be someone who can defeat you.

  A thought echoed back from the Shard—a gloating note of triumph. There was a time before humans existed on this planet?

  Fear rippled through Alexi’s consciousness. He suddenly realized his mistake. The Shard could escape him. It only had to go back far enough in time, to the age of the dinosaurs . . .

  With a ghostly echo of laughter that reverberated through the millennia, the Shard was gone.

  Alexi found his soul suddenly cast free. With one last effort of will he cast his consciousness out, searching for the single defining moment that could change his life. . . .

  31

  Unidentified object in quadrant one-zero-nine.

  The voice, even though it originated several thousand kilometers away at Moonbase Gagarin, was coming in loud and clear, squirted in laser-light pulses. For the millionth time in his three-year career with the space arm of the Soviet military, Alexi thanked Christ that he didn’t have to deal with the outdated and faulty equipment that the Earth-based forces were issued. Especially in a critical situation like this one.

  “Da,” Alexi answered. “My instruments have it.”

  He followed the red pulse as it blipped across the three-dimensional display on his console. At the center of the display was a blue dot representing Earth. Farther out, a white dot represented the moon. The red blip had come from just beyond the moon’s orbit. Since the comets and meteoroids had been left behind with the other planets in the solar system when the Earth was yanked into the Maelstrom during the Change, there was a strong possibility that the red blip was a foreign object. Perhaps even an alien spacecraft, like the one that had nearly wiped out the NP-30 ship. Alexi shuddered, wondering if the blue-skinned bastards had finally found Earth.

  If it was an alien craft, it could be the last thing Alexi ever saw. Just three days ago, one of the Union’s patrol ships had disappeared without a trace after firing upon an unidentified object. The garbled communications the Neo-Soviets had intercepted suggested that the bogey had been a ship of some kind—or at least an object that was capable of returning their fire. Whatever it had been, they’d lost it.

  What do you suppose the object is? the communications operator back at the moonbase asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alexi said. “But I’m about to find out.”

  Alexi called up mass, spectral, and reflective analyses of the object. His lips pursed when he saw the results. It was big: nearly a kilometer across. And according to the probable chemical breakdown that scrolled across his datascreens, it was made of a single element: silicon.

  That alone was cause for alarm. If the object was pure silicon, it had to have been deliberately manufactured—probably by aliens, since Alexi couldn’t think of a single reason why humans would construct such a thing. It certainly wasn’t natural. On Earth, silicon only occurred naturally in combinations with other elements. And the asteroids that had occupied the solar system until the Change were made up of carbon, ice, and iron.

  Alexi whistled softly into the wire-thin microphone that was taped to his jaw. The skin under the tape itched where his whiskers were growing out. He resisted the urge to scratch. Instead he concentrated on the mystery that lay before him. At last: something exciting. It was what he’d craved, ever since he signed
up for the military’s space arm. Exciting enough to make him forget the uncomfortable bloating that the zero G was putting his body through.

  “Looks like an unidentified object,” Alexi told the comm op. “Probably alien. And it’s on a trajectory that will take it toward Earth.”

  Wish I was there to see it, too. The wistful new voice over Alexi’s headphones was Vasily, another scout-ship pilot. He was on the other side of the Earth, performing a reconnaissance over the Union. Permission to attempt an intercept? he asked.

  Nyet, the comm op told him. Continue with your mission. Minsk will handle any intercept.

  Whatever the unidentified object was, it was minutes away from Earth. And Alexi’s scout ship was the only Neo-Soviet craft standing in its way.

  Alexi positioned his body over the pilot’s seat and hit the control that powered up his directional thrusters. He drifted down into the seat as he began the burn that would point his ship in the direction of the object. He had more than enough fuel to go in for a closer look and still be able to return to base on the moon. His ship didn’t have the firepower to do anything about the object—even if it was just an inert chunk of silicon, he couldn’t hope to deflect it or break it apart. One of the Union’s battle stations could do that, but the only one in this quadrant of space had been knocked out of commission by a Neo-Sov attack, ten days ago.

  Alexi would only be able to observe and report. And to wonder if this might be a historic moment.

  He let the thrust push him back into his padded chair, every muscle tense as his scout ship jetted its way toward the unidentified object. Already his mind was writing the entry that would appear in Neo-Soviet textbooks, once the war was finally over and school resumed. It wouldn’t be as large an entry as humanity’s first contact with an intelligent alien race—which at the moment was top secret; only the men and women of the Neo-Soviet space-recon teams knew that the Maelstrom was inhabited by more than just growlers. But it would be an entry, nonetheless. And Alexi’s name would be part of history.