Girl Gone Nova

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “What am I looking at, Doc?”

  That he was calling her Doc again seemed promising. She held back a smile, reminding herself she didn’t do warm and fuzzy. She didn’t get attached.

  “Doc?”

  It was so obvious to Doc what the HUD showed, it took her a minute to realize her clarity came from the peeps. She honed in on one of the outposts and enlarged one of the ships they’d found when they pinged the galaxy during her nova thing. It looked like the one Hel had caught on tracking at Feldstar. The nanites did a compare and confirmed that. All sixteen looked alike, though there were the expected small differences. No two ships could ever be exactly alike. The peeps were able to pull up more data than Hel’s ship had. None of it was good.

  “That’s a ship.” Halliwell stood and moved closer to the HUD. She could have shifted the HUD to him, but he’d left the ray gun when he got up. The further he got from the gun, the better for her.

  “Sixteen ships, sir. One strategically positioned near fourteen outposts and one incoming to this outpost.” And number sixteen was positioned near the outer edge of the galaxy.

  “Why didn’t I know this?”

  “They’re cloaked.” Had these ships been in the galaxy as long as Conan? She asked the question and the peeps tried to find an answer. It was nice and also painful. Hopefully they’d work on that. “These are the people who took me, and the other women, captive.”

  Halliwell tensed. “You think their arrival here is related to our missing people?”

  He’d read her report. That helped.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The people you think can’t be retrieved?”

  Doc hesitated.

  “I need answers, Doc.”

  “I’m trying sir. There’s a lot of stuff you need to know, but when you ask me questions, it slows things down.” It hurt, too. Each question sparked a response or responses from the nanites. Those responses launched offshoot thoughts and ruminations. It was orderly, but still a sort of controlled chaos. She was having trouble keeping up with her own brain. Verbally it wasn’t possible to keep up. “I’m sorry to do this, but could you let me talk and not ask questions? I just need some time to process what I’m learning.”

  He opened his mouth, must have realized he was about to ask another question and closed it.

  “For just a moment, I need to put the portal and your team to the side. I’m working it, though.” For the first time, it seemed possible she could do something about that. Her thoughts, combined with the nanites help, had produced hope. He nodded again and started to pace. At least he wasn’t talking. Data continued to arrive, even as she worked on how to tell him what she was seeing and learning.

  “Sixteen ships. There were sixteen guys in the encampment. Only thirteen women missing. That has to be their entire contingent, otherwise more women would be missing. Single life signs per ship except the one.” The HUD changed to show the ship positioned at the outer edge of the galaxy. This one probably held the non-combatants. At least they were trying to keep them safe. But one man per ship? “Ships automated? It’s possible.” Talking was almost painful, even in short hand. It was so slow. “Weapons and shields better than ours, but not sure we are a target or the outposts. Could be both.”

  Halliwell made a strangled sound.

  “Sorry, sir. It’s an odd experience.” Downloading and uploading, processing, filtering, sifting. “There are more hangers, more ships, but we can’t access them unless I can figure out how to unlock the rest of the outpost. Manufacturing facilities, too. I always wondered about that. That stuff didn’t appear out of nothing.”

  General Halliwell growled and kicked up the pace of his prowling.

  “Sorry, sir. Still processing.”

  As the words left her mouth, the nanites delivered another round of data.

  “Give me a few more minutes of incoherence and then you can talk again.” She finished with a rueful smile and got a grimace in return. She was ready to talk portal when she got an unexpected warning from the peeps.

  “We’re being scanned, sir.” The HUD changed, focusing on the ship now within sensor range of Kikk and their ships. She didn’t need the nanites to postulate that this was Conan’s ship.

  “Can they penetrate our shields? Why aren’t I getting a warning from the bridge?”

  “They aren’t sensing it—”

  Doc stopped as she saw—or felt—the scan hone in on her. Light passed down her body and changed color.

  “Did you see that, sir?”

  “Yes. What the hell is it?”

  He leaned forward, covering her hands with both of his, as if to hold her in place.

  The peeps provided the answer.

  Scan has found alien compound.

  Purpose?

  Assessing. A pause. Possible marker, identification tag.

  Not incapacitating?

  No. Eradicate?

  Can remote transport be initiated through our shields?

  No.

  Monitor for now.

  “Doc?”

  “Apparently Conan tagged me with some kind of tracking compound sometime during my stay.” She frowned. “I didn’t eat or drink anything of theirs. Was probably in the soap. I did wash my hands several times.” It made a kind of sense. If everyone in the compound was tagged, then mass remote transport could be triggered in an emergency. No hostiles scooped up. And it would shorten the time the cloak would need to be down. For a moment she wondered why they hadn’t found her before Hel, but the answer came with the thought.

  Minimal contamination. The storm’s electrical properties masked it.

  It was almost clever. Which didn’t fit with their clunky bride hunt. There was nothing to say this was only place they were hunting. If they targeted multiple galaxies, they’d end up with a more diverse DNA mix. It would be interesting to think about if she didn’t have more pressing issues on her front burner.

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “No, but it means Conan knows I’m back.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  Why did he think she’d know? She sighed, bit back what she wanted to say and settled for, “Last time I saw him I rejected his proposal of marriage, used my knee on his groin and shot him with his own gun.”

  The General looked like he was trying not to smile. Doc was glad when he managed to suppress it. Smiles weren’t his thing.

  “Let’s hope he likes his revenge served cold. Any other bad news for me?”

  “The portal and your people.”

  He tensed, erasing all smile indicators.

  Even with a plethora of data, this was giving her a normal headache. It didn’t make sense. “I’ve been assessing the files of the people we know went into the portal, and I found something odd.”

  She put photos up on his big screen, leaving up the Conan-tracking HUD that hovered between them like a ghost, though she did move it to one side.

  “Those are the people who went through the portal.”

  “I know,” he grunted. “I look at them every damn day.”

  “It’s far fewer than I expected.” Three scientists and a military escort of four. Seven men. No women. “Why so few? Why no women?”

  She’d have thought evacuating the women would have been a high priority, considering how the Dusan treated female captives.

  He stared at the pictures. “Because we won. That halted the evac.”

  Okay, but…she could understand why they’d send soldiers through first, but only if they didn’t know how the portal worked. Surely Smith knew the downside of portal travel?

  Questions almost choked her, but she knew there might not be answers. Reports had been filed, but the final minutes of the war were confused and chaotic. The Kikk outpost had come under fire. People who knew things had died. Accuracy was not possible. She brought one picture to the front of the screen. “Dr. Smith, he’s the one who told you that travel through the portal and back was possible.”

  “Yes.” A
pause. “You still think he was wrong?”

  Doc shook her head. The peeps had pulled up his notes, which were interesting and troubling. As the General had said, the skill set he’d postulated could solve the portal puzzle matched hers in almost every detail. All they’d left out was the black ops/ass-kicking part. “Not wrong. The Garradians wouldn’t have, couldn’t have created the portal to be one-way. But returning was very uncertain, and his notes that I’ve been able to access feel incomplete. I don’t understand why he’d go through with it when it was a long shot, or why he’d sell it as a sure thing.”

  Halliwell frowned. “We were trying to keep assets from the Dusan that they could use to get to Earth. He was one of those assets.”

  “But you must have had another option for the noncombatants?”

  “I was going to use one of the Garradian ships to get them the hell out of here, but he convinced me it wasn’t necessary. I let him convince me because we couldn’t afford to deplete our resources.” He rubbed his face. “We needed every ship we had.”

  Memory turned his visage grim again. No one had expected to survive the battle. Yet more issues for the General’s guilt trip.

  “Would he have known that?”

  Halliwell shrugged. “I didn’t tell him. Wasn’t need to know, but anyone with half a brain should have known.”

  Doc frowned. Smith had more than half a brain, but that didn’t mean he knew military strategy, or had any basic common sense. The real question was what had he believed about the portal?

  “What’s your problem, Doc?”

  “I’m not sure.” She paused, studying the various threads, looking for the one that was making her gut twitch. Waves of impatience didn’t help as much as the General thought it would. She considered what she knew and translated it into non-geek. It was second nature to her now. She dealt more with non-geeks than geeks, so didn’t get to speak geek that often anyway.

  “It took the Garradians years to map the galaxies connected to the portal. They sent research devices through first, retrieved them with special beacons. When they finally sent people through, they carried these beacons that allowed them to be retrieved, but learned even then retrieval wasn’t precise. The greater the distance, the greater the variable in outcome, both in going and in returning.”

  Words tried to push out, as the various connection rates between ideas sped up, but she needed air first.

  “We know the last person to use the portal traveled to Earth. Everyone assumes that’s where Smith and his people went, that they traveled somewhere into Earth’s past, but there’s been no sign of them in our history.” And if he thought he was going into Earth’s past, why the security detail? She was pulling data directly from the outpost at an impressive rate. She felt a bit like an Overlord of the universe, but didn’t mention it to the General. He was still looking twitchy.

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t on Earth. They were under orders to be careful about affecting the timeline.”

  “Careful is fine, but no impact is almost impossible. Plus, there are signs of impact on Conan’s society. And then there’s the fact that the portal settings have been changed.”

  “Changed? How do you know that? You haven’t been down there yet.”

  She shrugged. “You gave me very thorough help with the nanites, sir. According to current readings, anyone going through the portal right now would be sent to a dwarf galaxy about 300 million light years from this one. The people there call the planet Keltinar.” That had to be where Conan and his barbarians came from, though their current reality didn’t resemble the data the Garradians had collected on them as much as she’d have expected. Of course, their civilization should change over that length of time. But they’d gone a long way from where they’d been when the Garradians studied them to Conan and his bride hunt.

  “Did they go back or forward in time? When were they sent to?”

  “Back, though how far is difficult to calculate, there’s a lot of differences between their concept of time and ours—” She and the peeps ran some numbers and came up with an estimate, though one with a large margin of error. “I’d estimate maybe one hundred of our years…could be less, but probably not more than that.”

  She rubbed between her brows. Her brain, even with upgrades, didn’t like questions it couldn’t answer and this was a biggie. Why would Dr. Smith strand himself in the past on an unknown planet? He was the resident expert. How could he not know the risks? And if he didn’t do it, then who had? She’d wondered if someone used the portal after the last Garradian left, but the peeps insisted that the portal had been locked and remained locked until unlocked by the Key. So either Dr. Smith had changed the settings or someone else had changed them, either accidentally or maliciously.

  Her brain charged off in all four directions, trying to find theories to support or disprove any of them. It was a kind of murder, but one without an obvious motive. If you wanted to kill someone, there were easier, faster ways to do it. She couldn’t see where anyone had benefited from it, though she’d be the first to admit she lacked critical data to postulate any kind of theory.

  “Is it possible one of the geeks messed with the settings after it was unlocked?”

  “They were under orders not to.” Halliwell looked grim, but he sounded a bit winded.

  “I wish I could talk to someone who meant to go through, but didn’t. Or someone who saw it happen. There’s no clear account about what happened in the portal room that day.” There were a lot of holes in the play-by-play. Again, by design or intent? Maybe there was a need for her black ops persona in this operation—though she couldn’t see how Smith would have known that.

  “Major Loren was in command of the outpost defenses, but he died just before it ended.” He rubbed his face tiredly. “What does it matter? You can’t bring them back.”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t bring them back.”

  The General spun to face her, his body leaning over her. His gaze bored into her. “What are you saying, Doc?”

  “Traveling great distances and spanning a lot of time is seriously imprecise, even if I could use a beacon for my travel, and finding them without beacons is impossible.” They wouldn’t have arrived on Keltinar together, unless they went through at exactly the same moment. Seven guys couldn’t fit through the door at the same time. “But a short distance, short time? When we know exactly where they will be? That’s possible.” If her calculations were correct and the peeps seemed to think they were.

  The General’s eyes widened. “You think you could go back two years and stop them from going through?”

  She grimaced. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not? You just erase it. It never happened.”

  “It did happen. If we change our past, we risk changing our future.”

  “So?”

  “Didn’t you see any of the Back to the Future movies?” First he looked surprised, then grim again. Last came the scowl. “It’s the law of unintended consequences. We have no idea what impact any of those people would have had on our current time line. Reintroducing them into the timeline will change it and not necessarily for the better.”

  “How can letting them live their lives, like they should have, be bad for the timeline?”

  “What if one of them gets drunk and has a hit and run and kills me? I cease to exist, can’t come and figure this out, creating a time paradox. While I’ve never experienced one, the scientific consensus is that they are bad and should be avoided at all costs. Or at least when possible.”

  “Okay, changing the timeline is bad. I get it.” He didn’t look like he did, but he was trying. “Why tell me about it then?”

  “What I propose is that we keep our future intact by jumping them over the past two years. I go back to just before they go through the portal and bring them to here and now. Inserting them into the current time stream now should be more benign, or at least less risky. They could still mess up the future. There are always consequ
ences to every action, but at least it wouldn’t impact the known history, the known past. They’ll lose two years, but it’s better than living out their lives on an alien planet a hundred years before they were born or risking a time paradox.” She paused. “Well, it will be if I can do it.”

  “We’re back to the technology that we still haven’t accessed.” She nodded. “Why didn’t it become active two years ago when the outpost was unlocked by the Key?”

  “It wasn’t locked by one person. According to the nanites, it was locked down in stages.”

  “So if you can’t unlock it—”

  “I can’t bring our people home and we’ll be facing fifteen alien ships with better cloaks and weapons than our two ships. And there’s the Gadi ships heading our way.” They could withdraw and let Conan and the Gadi duke it out, but Doc didn’t suggest it. The General wasn’t leaving until there was no chance of bringing his people home or he was dead. And if he were dead, technically that would be not leaving.

  “Can we use the alien threat to bring the Gadi back into our camp? Or at least put them between us and the aliens? They won’t want the outposts taken over or destroyed.”

  “They’re outgunned, too. And if the Leader isn’t in control of all his ships…”

  “So even if you manage to bring my people back, they might be coming back here in time for yet another battle or two?”

  Maybe he hadn’t understood her report. His screen changed. Doc walked over to the diagram.

  “This is a preliminary plan for an intergalactic ship designed by Dr. Smith. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, just didn’t remember until I connected his name with the memory.” Technically the peeps had made the connection, trying to answer her mental question, but telling him that might make his eye twitch. She pulled up the scans for Conan’s ship and put it next to the diagram. “This is the scan of the alien vessel.”

  A long pause while he studied both diagrams. “They’re almost identical.”

  “Many of the specs are different, of course. That’s to be expected considering the time involved.” Though she’d have expected more variation than this in the plus-or-minus one hundred years—unless they only recently found the plans and built the ships.