Liam saw Kyla and Jordy share a look. The other officers from the Artemis were exchanging glances as well.
“Yes, well, if I had it to do over again, of course that makes perfect sense.”
Liam saw his dad open his mouth as if to say more, but he didn’t. Liam wondered about aspects of Barrie’s story that hadn’t occurred to him before: Even if they were busy repairing the Artemis and studying Dark Star, there were still thousands of passengers in stasis lockdown on the Artemis. Couldn’t some of them have been awakened to take charge of sending some kind of message to the fleet? Even if that message was simply We’re alive, but stay away? It also occurred to Liam that Barrie had failed to mention the metal suit.
“Okay,” said Mom. “So now what?”
“I think we continue to investigate,” said Barrie. “Perhaps you can help us—”
“Hold on,” said Ariana. “Am I missing something? Wouldn’t a better solution be to fly back through to our universe the very next time that portal reopens, and then blow up the portal? That would sever the connection to our universe and presumably end any threat that this station might pose.”
“Well,” said Barrie, “it seems entirely likely that Dark Star could simply construct a new portal. Not to mention that attacking it might make it view us as a threat.”
Liam had thought he might say: anger it.
“What if such a course of action,” Barrie added, “caused Dark Star to determine that our universe was no longer viable, and decide to simply end it?”
“Can it do that?” Mom asked.
“The only thing I’m sure of is that the capabilities of this station go far beyond our comprehension.”
“Well then,” said Ariana, “what about shooting a barrage of missiles through the portal? Destroy it altogether.”
Liam felt his pulse increase. He wondered if Iris was listening to this conversation, and felt certain that she was.
“Is that always your answer?” said Liam’s mom, glaring at Ariana. “Shoot first?”
“Excuse me?” said Ariana. “Do you even hear yourself right now?”
“That’s not the same,” said Dad.
“You—”
“Everyone hold on a minute,” said Barrie, putting out his hands. “We cannot just blow up this station. Never mind the multiverse damage that its destruction might cause; this place is the most significant discovery in scientific history, in the history of our whole universe. Think of what it can teach us, not only about our universe, our reality, but about our very existence.”
Liam saw Ariana leaning over and whispering in Paolo’s ear. In turn, Paolo consulted with Tarra and the other Telphons. Liam caught Phoebe’s eye, standing between her parents. Phoebe shook her head lightly.
Paolo addressed the group. “Thank you for the briefing, Captain. It looks as if you have this situation in hand as much as it could be.”
“I think that’s pretty far from certain at this point,” said Mom.
“Nevertheless,” said Paolo, “we feel it is best if we depart at this time.”
“The portal is closed,” Kyla reminded them.
“We will retreat to a safe position and wait for it to reopen.” Paolo looked specifically at Liam and his family. “If you would like to accompany us, we will return you within range of the Scorpius.”
“And what exactly happens then?” said Mom.
“We are grateful to you for helping us find Phoebe,” said Ariana. “It is a credit to you, and a gesture we will not forget.”
“That’s not an answer,” said Mom. “How do we know you’re not just going to turn around and start attacking us again?”
“I could give you my word,” said Tarra, “but how can you in good conscience question our motives or our actions? Our home, our way of life, our families were all taken from us by you. None of what is happening here changes the fact that you are marching toward our former home, nor the fact that we must find a home.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Dad. “You know we regret what happened on Aaru—”
“Telos,” said Ariana.
“Sorry. We would take it back if we could—”
“Maybe you personally would. But I have a hard time believing that of humanity as a whole.”
“Well,” said Dad, “but my point is you’re still choosing to attack us. We just want to get to our new home. I’m sorry that we displaced you, but you have a small group and an extremely fast ship. Would it not be far easier for you to find a new home suitable for yourselves than for us? Why not concentrate on that, instead of this war of retribution?”
The Telphons grumbled angrily to one another. Liam saw Ariana’s hands clench into fists, her eyes narrowing in fury.
“Retribution?” She pointed at Liam’s parents. “That’s really all you think this is? You seem to forget that I was there, by your side, for the Phase Two trials. Remember, the ones that took you years longer than you thought? Did you ever notice that some of the biggest breakthroughs in that data came from us? Obviously you couldn’t have known that we understood Telos’s climatic and atmospheric conditions far better than you ever could.”
“And yet you were only helping us perfect Phase Two so that you could steal the data and use it for yourselves,” said Mom.
“If you’d been through anything like we’ve been through, you would realize how simpleminded that thinking is.” Ariana reached into her pocket and held up the very data key that Mom had given to Liam back on Mars, and that Tarra had taken from him on the Scorpius. “Yes, we wanted this data for ourselves. And yes, we were even developing alternate data in secret, how to adapt your version to fit our needs. But we also know what you know about Phase Two: That even with those final successful trials, there’s still a significant margin of error, isn’t there? That there are so many variables in any terraforming project. And so there is still a very real chance that despite your best efforts, Phase Two won’t work well enough to truly make Aaru-5 viable for humanity. And then what?”
“We would—”
Ariana didn’t let Mom finish. “Then you would turn your whole violent, desperate race in a different direction, toward a different planet, and you’d raze that one, and another one after that if necessary. This is why we attack you. Sure, we long for you to know the same suffering that we have felt, but make no mistake: this war is about self-defense. This space station is blowing up yellow stars. So what? We don’t even need that type of star. But we still need a viable planet, a safe planet, and for the Telphons, the biggest known threat in the universe is you.”
“That’s not who we are,” said Mom.
“I’ve read your history books,” said Ariana. “It is exactly who you are.”
“You may have a fast ship,” said Dad, “but there’s no way you’re realistically going to be able to take out our entire fleet. We have too much firepower—”
“You’re proving my point,” said Ariana.
Dad’s gaze darkened like Liam had rarely seen it. “Well then, maybe we shouldn’t even let you leave. Maybe this needs to end right here.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you truly plan to attack our fleet, how can we possibly let you go? Isn’t that right, Captain?”
Barrie watched all of this with a detached look on his face. Meanwhile, the Telphons closed ranks. Members of the Artemis crew began to draw their weapons, despite the uncertain looks on their faces. “Fall back to the ship,” said Tarra, the Telphons moving toward the corridor.
“Wait! Stop!” Liam shouted. He found Phoebe, but her expression had hardened and she was moving with her people.
“Gerald . . . ,” said Mom.
“Captain?” said Kyla. “Sir, what are our orders?”
But Barrie was no longer listening; he had turned his attention to the collection of floating lights over by the platform. Liam saw that a green light had begun to blink in one of the spheres.
“Fascinating,” Liam heard the chronologist say.
&nb
sp; All at once, Dark Star began to vibrate, throwing everyone off balance and emitting a hum that seemed to press against Liam’s ears. Lights began to flash outside. Mom and Dad stumbled, Mina stepping over to grab Mom’s arm.
“What is it?” Barrie said to the chronologist.
The chronologist had turned around from the window and was now facing the map of their universe, holding out his orange crystal. He found Liam in the crowd. “It appears that Operation Forty-Eight is complete.”
At the same time, outside the dome, there was a series of bursts, like small fireworks, all in a tight formation far off beyond the end of one of the great shadowy arms. The lights grew almost blinding and a rectangular shape appeared, with silver circuitry around its edges. A pool of iridescent green light formed in the center, swirling and rippling.
A new portal. It towered over the arm of the machine, throwing the buildings there into stark relief.
Dark Star shook more intensely. Bolts of energy spidered across the surface of the dome. Liam worried the clear structure would start to crack, and they’d all be thrown into space. He thought he felt a lightening in his feet, and for a moment he flashed back to Mars, to the gravity failing as it so often had. And then there was the boiling Centauri star . . .
Mina gripped his arm. Her face had gone pale, her eyes wide. Liam swallowed hard.
Vibrating all around them, in their bones. Outside, the new portal grew brighter.
And then the light in the center died down, but the circuitry around the glowing doorway remained bright.
Now the map above them in the control room began to change. Their universe shrank down to the same size as the others, and a new light began to bloom. It began as a pinprick and exploded in size, growing to a marble, to a small balloon, and as it grew, it began to differentiate itself—not a solid sphere of light but rather thousands, millions, billions of pinpricks, all darting and swirling. The bubble continued to grow; it was half the size of those around it now, the light inside still multiplying and expanding but also now coalescing into spirals, globs, flowing shapes. Galaxies, Liam thought. The bubble neared the size of their universe, and the galaxies themselves danced around one another in strange arrangements, all the while more lights growing, now some of them popping in explosions of color, strange clouds of colored gas like paint smudges. The bubble enlarged to fill the space over their heads.
A moment later, it was complete.
“A new universe,” said Barrie, his head cocked, face awash in its light. “Iteration 90. . . .”
He turned and looked out the dome. “That new portal must lead to it.”
All at once the map of this new universe began to zoom in, shooting past clusters and galaxies and nebulae, giving Liam a sensation like he was falling into the map. The view closed in on one galaxy with spiral arms. Zoomed farther, millions of light-years per second, the tightly packed arms becoming jagged rivers of diamonds and rubies, then a field of stars, the space between stars becoming larger the closer they got, until they were looking at a map of maybe fifty stars, now twenty, now two . . .
Now one.
One pale yellow star with a field of objects around it, hundreds of smaller bodies in space, but eight main planets with telltale shapes: one with an enormous belt of rings, one on its side with a thin vertical ring, one larger than all the rest, with a great red spot.
“It looks like our solar system,” said Mom.
“But it’s not,” said Barrie, “it can’t be.”
The map kept zooming: a scattering of asteroids, a rust-red planet, and finally a single orb, blue and brown and white, swirls of clouds and rugged landforms and water.
Barrie tapped the image and data scrolled beside it. “That’s impossible.” He turned to the chronologist. “This is a new universe, isn’t it?”
The chronologist held his crystal up toward the map. “By all indications, yes.”
“What are we looking at?” said Mom, her voice shaking, as if she already had guessed.
“Atmosphere ninety-eight percent nitrogen,” said Barrie, “liquid water, gravity factor one-point-oh . . .” He turned to the rest of the group. “It’s Earth.”
Interlude
PLANET DESIGNATE: PHINEA
NORMA ARM SECTOR 12
57 TRILLION KM FROM THE CENTAURI SYSTEM
Just over six light-years from the Centauri system, in the northwest quadrant of the fourth planet orbiting a mellow red dwarf star, a white light began to blink. The light was on a device something like a phone, and its blinking caught the attention of the two young beings standing around it, shading their eyes from the afternoon heat.
“Is that her?” asked one of the beings, whose name was Morena.
“I think so,” said the other, whose name was Leno and who was holding the device. “Dad!” he called over his shoulder. “I think we found her!”
His voice echoed through the maze of narrow, red-walled canyons, their sides striped with crimson. Here and there, large sections of the walls glimmered with plates of silver-and-lavender metallic ore.
“Coming!” Dad called distantly.
Leno started down the narrow, twisting path, following the signal. A cool breeze rushed across their faces. The sun had just set beyond the mountain ridges, and overhead, the sky had cooled to a bluish-lavender.
“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” said Morena, falling into step behind him.
“He’ll catch up. Besides, the show starts in half an hour.”
“Why did she have to do this today?”
“I don’t know,” said Leno, although, being a few years older than his sister, he’d heard their parents grumbling about how Great-Grandma always got weird around Touchdown Day. But still, this was the biggest festival of the year! And the thermal energy show was amazing and it started just after sunset.
They wound their way down the dry canyon—Great-Grandma called these paths gulches, a word that wasn’t even in their dictionary but which she’d picked up somewhere long ago. As they walked, the spiny rock walls on either side grew from chest height to a few meters over their heads. It was chilly here in the deeper shadows. Leno shivered and felt the thermal cells on the shoulders and back of his shirt humming to life as they switched from their solar collection mode to warming.
“Ah!” A clatter of rocks, a sharp hiss.
Leno spun to see Morena on her knees, coughing, a cloud of shimmering air beside her. “You’ve got to be careful!” he said, dragging her to her feet and away from the cloud.
“I didn’t see it!”
She’d stepped on a bubble shell—a thin surface of rock that hid a pocket of methane. They were left over from the ancient gas oceans that had once covered the planet and shaped its landmasses. Scientists thought that Phinea had once been a rogue planet, tracking silently through space, before being caught in the gravitational embrace of Anya, their star. The methane oceans, liquid at extreme cold temperatures, had evaporated, but here and there, remnants were still trapped beneath the surface. Leno had heard some older kids saying they liked to scout out areas with pockets like this and rather than merely break them open, as Morena accidentally had, they would toss in an incendiary stick and turn the gas into a momentary jet of flame. You had to be careful, doing that. Leno had heard about a kid in the next settlement over who had lost two fingers.
“Just watch where you’re walking,” he said.
“I was.”
“Leno? Morena?” Dad’s voice echoed distantly behind them.
“Over here!” Leno called. He pressed on, deeper into the shadows. The sides of the canyon became narrower and higher.
“It’s getting hard to breathe,” said Morena.
“We’re right on the edge of the safe zone,” said Leno. He craned his neck but could no longer see the shining tip of the nearest atmospheric turbine, a few kilometers away. He checked his link. The white light was close now.
“Is she in there?” Morena pointed ahead.
The gulch ended at
a steep slope made of collapsed slabs of red stone. There was a narrow, triangular fissure in the corner, leading into darkness.
“I think so.” Leno lowered his wavelength adapters over his eyes and switched on the lenses.
“Could Great-Grandma even fit through that?”
“Come on.” Leno ducked into the fissure. For a moment, all he could see was a dark blur, but slowly, the adapters sketched in the outlines of the rock walls angling tightly around him.
“I don’t like this,” said Morena, edging in behind him.
“Don’t be a wimp.”
“I’m not a wimp! I’m going to wait outside for Dad.”
“Fine.” Leno pushed ahead, his hands on the walls to either side of him. His head scraped the ceiling, and his knees began to ache from shuffling along in a crouch. His lungs felt tight, even though he was taking deeper breaths than before, like he couldn’t expand them as much as he wanted, like the walls were somehow keeping him from breathing. “Grandma?” he called. He checked his link again. He was almost on top of the blinking light.
Finally, the passageway opened up and Leno found himself in a large chamber. The air was cold and smelled damp and sour. His adapters revealed a high ceiling, its walls glittering with metal veins. Here and there, patches of the walls glowed with a fuzzy substance.
And there was Great-Grandma. She was leaning against a large slab of rock in the center of the chamber, her head slumped to the side.
Leno scrambled over the uneven cave floor and knelt beside her.
“Grandma, hey, are you okay?”
Her eyes were shut, and for a moment, Leno worried that she’d finally passed on—it could be any time, Dad had said. She’s had a long life, longer than any of her peers.
But then he saw her chest move, heard that strange whine of her breathing and even that metallic ticking that accompanied it from time to time. He looked around, but she didn’t seem to have remembered her breathing pack; Dad was always telling her not to forget it.
“Grandma, wake up.” Leno shook her shoulder. “We’ve got to get you back. The air’s not good here.” No response. “Come on, the festival is starting soon.”
The Shores Beyond Time Page 17