Of Crimson Indigo: Points of Origin

by Grant Fausey

  “What?” questioned the hauler captain.

  “Jake––” said Krydal; her quick smile widening across her lips. The pilot pulled her close and kissed her, his hands roaming over her arms and back. She kissed him back.

  “I felt that,” said Nilana. The techno ghost sized up the woman embrace him. It was the kiss of an enemy; one symbiont responding to the feeling of another’s presence, shocked by the bond between them.

  “What was that name again?” Jake’s eyes went wide. He was listening to a male voice echoing in his head, like a cowbell–– unfamiliar, or precise. He pulled away, lip-to-lip with a pretty young woman who was staring at him with love in her eyes.

  “Cydell…?” Obviously, the other man was repeating an unheard of conversational memory, and he was desperately trying to remember some previously engagement.

  “Cry doll?” reaffirmed the woman. Jake gave the cadet the once over admiring her assets. She was tucked nicely into a pair of overalls, with her dark hair tucked nicely under a Packard’s baseball cap.

  “Awe––” The pilot was embarrassed; yet, alive in the moment. He released his hold on the cute brunette, reiterating: “Krydal … Krydal Starr.”

  “No idea,” answered Sarah Jolland drawing a breath, as if it mattered. She was on the other side of a slender man with no peculiar demeanor. He was simply an officer with wide-rim scientist’s glasses.

  “She called herself Crimson,” said the pilot.

  The cute mechanic opened her eyes and went about her business with a sigh. “Oh, her again.” Her comment was mumbled under her breath. “Never heard of her.”

  “Was she attached to ISAF Command?” asked the officer.

  The pilot turned around, burnt the image of her cute little ass into his mind. She was lovely, dressed in camouflage overalls, not combat armor.

  “I what?” asked Jake. The pilot thought for a second, the acronym took him by surprise.

  “ISAF!” answered Jolland, annoyed. “You going to forget me this quickly too?”

  “Just a little shaken I guess.”

  “No doubt.”

  The officer put his hands in his pockets and amended the conversation. “But no less for your little mishap, hey commander?”

  Commander, thought Jake. The pilot glanced back at the mechanic for a second look. Everything was different.

  “Better fire up that scout ship for Mr. Denarak, hey Jolland,” said the soldier. “Unless he’s planning to live out the rest of his days aboard this tub.”

  Mister Denarak? The notion of existing in two places at the simultaneously baffled him, but he was experiencing the fact of multiple lifetimes.

  “Can’t keep teasing the girl like that, Kristic,” said the officer. “Not if you want her to respect.” Jake nodded, better to agree with the officer then upset the balance. Besides, the voice repeated in his head, as if he should know what the hell was going on?

  “Better back up,” chuckled the scientist. Sarah Jolland patted him on the back. “Apparently, Mister Denarak isn’t all here today.” The grease monkey grinned. The hauler captain was on thin ice as it was, and had no intention of stepping into someone else’s shoes.

  “You might wanna give her a hand,” said Nilana.

  “Right––” said the pilot.

  “You okay, Sir?”

  Jake stared at the mechanic for a long moment, wondering if he had met her in some superficial reunion at the end of days, or if it was just her tool pouch that attracted him. She had a screwdriver hanging off her butt. “Ever hear of the Genesis Wars, Sarah Jolland?”

  “Only as a child, Sir.” The mechanic looked at him curiously. “It was one of those scary folktales I didn’t pay much attention too, when I was a kid.” She took a step back, came up between his arms very edgy.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think we’re in the middle of the battlefield.” The deck hand abated whatever actions he had set forth in his moment of bliss, assuming he cared, but the shrill of the scout ship’s canopy opening was enough to send the freighter pilot flying off the handle. His reflection was more mature, the likeness of Christopher Denarak in the canopy.

  “Symbiont disengaged,” whispered Nilana, seductively, her hand sliding down the length of his arm. The pilot pulled away, broke the connection and the experience ended.

  “Saddle up people,” said Patton. Nilana cuddle to the freighter pilot.

  “Transmitting Ancestral Code, darling.” Jake discarded her discord, his eyes glistening with the radiance of her translucent beauty. Each incarnation, transposed itself in a rapid succession of lifetimes shown upon his face, each superimposed over one another in a single memory like a bouquet of personalities revealed in the depths of his reality. The likenesses settled on the face of Krydal Starr, the culmination of all his brethren. He was staring up the wrong end of her M41 assault weapon, in the blowing rain.

  “Akashic record stabilized,” said the symbiont. “Ready for deployment. All incarnations linked.”

  It’s inevitable, thought Crimson. Their love was never set in stone.

  Krydal Starr’s face came into focus on the other end of the rifle, materializing out of thin air, her combat armor disengaged. The weapon discharged, stunning the pilot. Jake’s mind shuddered, shocked by the blast of the bittersweet memory of his beloved shooting him. The sensation crossed his lips, tingling his body, leaving him at the mercy of his own demons.

  “Saddle up people,” repeated Patton, time catching up with itself. “We have a change in our travel plans.”

  THIRTY-THREE: Human Altercations

  • • •

  The old bounty hunter arose soaked from head to toe in bio-magnetic ooze that radiated a vibrant yellow-green on his skin. He pulled off a host of electrodes and dropped the monitor into the electrolytes tank, marching lively across the cold laboratory floor to take a towel from his bioluminescent companion. “Mission terminated,” announced the computerized attendant from somewhere overhead, only to be drowned out by the annoying voice of the symbiont’s quick elimination.

  “The future doesn’t guide itself,” she told him. “We’re only pawns in a much larger game.”

  “The bitch shot me,” answered Indigo, visibly irritated. “Put that in you Akashic record, damn it. Grathamar was right. What happened before will happen again, unless we alter the course of both universes.”

  “Get me some dry clothes, will you?” He realized he was standing there half naked. “I need a drink!”

  Rooka looked over at a half dozen rapidly changing star charts and locked eyes on a set of coordinates showing a planet with two inhabited moons. “That’s got it,” said the rodent. “It’s faint, but there’s definitely something here.”

  “Is it an altercation?” asked Patton. He wanted to know whether or not he was imagining what he saw, or if the universe had actually changed right in front of his eyes.

  “Can’t tell,” answered Krydal. She touched the console, running a finger along the circumferential edge of the hologram. The coordinates locked with precision accuracy on the exact spot Neffum Claris had asked him about. They were at the edge of the abyss, just outside the influence of the planet Myatek’s gravity well.

  “Could be residual matter,” admitted Patton.

  Hudson Warner spiraled the gunship’s engines into hover mode, leaving the Phoenix behind, as he rolled out across the heavens to reveal a majestic world with two populated globes. “No, Sir,” insisted the flight officer. “It’s a different band width. And I have to tell you; these puppies weren’t there two minutes ago.”

  Brenda Hutton reran the numbers. “Could be another jumpship!” she told Patton.

  “Out here?” The commander wasn’t buying it. “Not likely.” Patton stepped behind the corporate liaison into the Command and Control Center.

  “Could be smugglers then,” said Jason Maccon. “If it’s a rift, it could be the result of a runner executing a tear in the continuum.” The scientist hit the deploymen
t grid with both feet, taking his station next to the long-legged vixen. The holographic map in front of her flashed with identification markers, bringing the coordinates of several potential targets to the top of the list.

  The flight engineer corrected the drift in the matter stream, but was having a hard time maintaining his relative position. “I don’t like it,” said Patton. He was tracking more than one possible destination, remembering the chance meeting with the Oceanna Ambassador on the observation lounge catwalk. Fish-faced Claris was particularly interested in a stretch of the barrier having heard rumors of a collapse in the boundary layer holding the alternate realities in place. The commander dismissed the inquisition as merely clarification. The only access to the universal core was via wave transit corridor and the Sodin moon was the only place outside the temporal convergence, where the streams of time crossed.

  “We have a runner, Commander,” said Krydal. “I’m going forward.” Jake stepped in front of her, trying to get out of the way, but was more of a hindrance. Krydal’s armor formed a protective shroud about her body a microsecond before she transmitted to the flight deck of a small fighter clinging to the bottom of the gunship.

  “Keep the buffers open,” ordered Patton over the intercom. “We don’t want you becoming a part of history.”

  “Understood,” answered the corporate liaison.

  “Throttle up, Brakka.” Krydal pushed the levers forward, feeling the jolt of acceleration and something else. The fighter morphed out of the bottom of the gunship, spread its wings taking on the appearance of a dragon-like creature and spiraled outward in a hazy illumination, vanishing into the dead of space like a spindle, forming on an energy vortex.

  “The apertures widening,” radioed the corporate liaison, as the trajectory telemetry came online. “You should see the transit field forming in front of the vehicle.”

  “Tell the freighter pilot to keep his pants on,” said a voice in her head. “I’ll be back!”

  Krydal panicked the moment her ship slipped forward into the time stream. The readouts were changing rapidly. “Lock coordinates,” insisted the symbiont. “Looks like something has a foothold out here.” Her voice faded. “Transmit when ready.”

  “Understood. Uplink confirmed.” Krydal grabbed the throttles, did everything she could to stabilize her trajectory, but something wasn’t right.

  “She’s drifting,” rattled Patton. “Looks like you’re in two places at the same time.”

  “What’s happening to her? Asked Jake. He didn’t understand.

  “There’s a transit field forming right on top of us,” screamed Hudson Warner. Jake looked to the flight officer in a moment of utter terror. Whatever was happening to them was happening to him … to her. There was no foreknowledge of the altercation, no timeline error. The timeline was clean … no alterations. The field was stabilized. Operational. Yet, something was definitely wrong. “Could be residual matter,” repeated the commander. He was reliving the experience, repeating a moment in time. The Firehawk was disjointed: no longer part of the coordinate system. The gunship was free floating in the cold dark heart of space. Krydal Starr had not recorded the uncharted anomaly once in all their travels.

  “Could be another jumpship,” said Jason Maccon, crossing the flight deck to where Patton stood in the command and control center.

  “Not likely,” responded the commander.

  “Could be smugglers,” said Hutton. The holographic map lit up like a holiday tree. “A runner perhaps.”

  The fighter appeared on Patton’s view screen, hovering in two distinct places at the same time. “Auto-reversion,” echoed the flight deck speakers, crackling with static. Krydal was caught in some sort of temporal distortion.

  “They’re changing history,” screamed the commander. Patton’s eyes went wide, his body in a near frenzy. A hundred pinpoints of flickering light dotted with hundreds of calculations, each a red triangle inside a blue dot.

  “Where?” asked the deck officer.

  “Everywhere!”

  “Jump––” Jake screamed at Krydal over the comlink. “Jump now!”

  “Get us the hell out of here,” yelled Patton.

  Krydal awoke, her mind screaming. The stars disappeared in the rising darkness, a collision with the present––the fabric of the space-time continuum altered, along with the course of history. The future of one universe ostracized by the other; the whole of humanity reduced to a remnant. “What the hell was that?” She rattled; her eyes transfixed on the monopoly forming in the heavens were the Phoenix used to be.

  “Open transit field,” she told the machine, making a quick calculation while she pressed a hundred buttons all at once. The words no sooner uttered from her mouth than the sound resonated into an executed command. She was a long way from the edge of darkness, but another universe had corkscrewed out of the abyss into the cosmos like a snake rearing its ugly head. If only there was enough energy left in the converters to spike the transit field and spindle-open a portal to the past, she would be safe in her own existence, outside time and space. Going back would change nothing, however, her future was being erased. Everything she knew, eliminated. Eternity itself was under siege.

  THIRTY-FOUR: Turning Tides

  • • •

  The Firehawk was gone, destroyed in a massive explosion: the thread of its existence too far off the temporal stream to matter. The knot in her stomach turned to acid; her heart transfixed on the idea of a hostile world as she watched the planet Myatek beneath her shatter with such ferocity that even the darkness of the abyss shuddered in the wake of its destruction. The prospect of survival was diminishing quickly. Krydal braced herself ready for the impact of the blast wave, but the cockpit flooded with the rays of a forming transit field effectively splitting the fabric of the space-time continuum in perfect harmony with the universe. The hint of the temporal fracture permeated reality, tracing along the craft’s outer skin like light passing through the cutouts of a stencil.

  “Jake––”screamed Krydal. She was alone in the universe, an alarm resounding in the cockpit of her mind. Brakka throttled up, formed an electrified field around the faint image of the Shadowrider then vanished into oblivion, only to reappear a moment later, slipping silently across the debris field. The ring station was adrift in a cloud of interstellar dust, a maze of twisted metal and ruptured bulkheads, left to rot amidst the vented chambers: a lifeless hulk of battered pipes, broken fuel lines, and bleeding electrical conduits. A dead hulk. The outer assembly was opened to the sky, hydraulic fluid frozen from its wounds like plastic streamers leading from metallic joints.

  “It’s all gone, Brakka,” she said in a whisper. “Like in a nightmare.” Krydal shed a river of tears, covering her face and mouth. Brakka moaned, his heart pounding rapidly in a frozen wasteland of external fluids, spreading molecules and the essence of an endless chemical spill. The beast’s eyes closed tightly to itself, a low rumble echoing from somewhere below the menacing whine of its engines. The Shadowrider was in pain; heart broken by the event. Not a single energy signature registered on the living machine’s scanners.

  “Set course for the Phoenix,” said Krydal with an empty heart, her world set askew. “Our travel plans have changed.” The fighter slipped out of transit in one piece; all of its moving parts functioning, as if nothing had ever happened. Nevertheless, both the machine and the corporate liaison had witnessed the explosion. The gunship ruptured in a fireball then vanished, imploding in upon itself in a horrifying penetration that pierced her heart. A billion pieces of ruptured spacecraft vaporized along with her beloved.

  “I know,” she said softly. “But we can’t stay here. Our future lies elsewhere.” The fighter drifted forward in a sea of vapor, its engine dim, bulkheads creaking: the beast’s eyes tired of unspoken words between them. Wounded.

  “There has to be a way out of this,” Krydal told the machine, regaining her composure. She was thinking like a warrior. The corporate liaison pulled up an
area map on the holographic scanner and pushed a few keys on the keypad, resulting in several new complications. She was alone with her reflection. Old and gray, only a vision of her former self remained.

  “Fire up the converters,” she told the Shadowrider. “Perhaps there is a way to avert this catastrophe all together.” The fighter responded sluggish, but with rekindled spirit. “I think it’s time we make a few changes of our own.”

  The Shadowrider lurched forward, accelerating across the cloudy dustbowl. Krydal reformulated her combat armor to a new color: an outer layer of bioluminescence thickened with a tinge of darker crimson red. “Set course for the Mansion,” she ordered. “And pray it’s still there.”

  The gravity field compensated for maximum acceleration, pulsed with enough energy to shock the main drive to life then flushed the power core forcing the old woman tight against her accelerator seat. The cockpit windows glossed white with speed, melding the outer skin into one swift movement. The vehicle punched through the sky, shattering the threshold of a transit wave corridor, according to her plan.

  Crimson Krydal Starr emerged from the crack in the boundary to find the place where she started her journey. She had managed to stumble across the threshold into the past without so much as a crack of thunder to announce her arrival. She was on her own, alone in the middle of a wilderness … somewhere in an unforgiving past. She remembered her dragon-shaped fighter descending smartly on the fortress. The four-legged beast settled amidst the tall timber, overlooking an inconsequential treetop village set below a majestic waterfall, at the threshold of the temporal convergence. She had one foot in the past, the other somewhere within the confines of the future, her body trapped between both worlds, a witness to the event. The ancient carvings stood apart from the woodlands temples, reminiscent of the idyllic guardians who managed to survive the treacherous journey across the great void. But they were of a different origin than before.