“And how do these … temporal events … How do they happen?” I asked. I was running almost on autopilot, my mind still struggling to wrap itself around absolutely colossal level of information he’d just dumped on me. Everything I’d ever expected Wanderer to be, all the mental scenarios I’d ever devised … none of them had even considered that he could be a real, honest-to-goodness time traveler.
“You mean how did I get here?”
“Um … yes,” I said, wincing as the hesitation slipped out. “I mean, with your suit and everything, and the rest of your …” I paused, trying to think of a good word to describe what lay under the tarp.
“My ship?” he filled in. I nodded in relief. That was that momentary conundrum solved.
“Yes,” I said. “Your ship.”
Again he shrugged. “Like I said, United Terra Space Defense Fleet, Logistics Wing. Conscript.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means,” I said, shaking my head. “The conscript part I’m familiar with. That means you were drafted, right?”
“Basically, yes,” he said, though there was a weight to the way he said it that made me think there was nothing basic about it. “Conscripted to serve my time for the glory of United Terra.” His odd accent slurred the first syllable of the word “conscript,” almost like it was pronounced with a hard K-U instead of a C-O.
“It sounds like you weren’t very fond of it,” I said. I got a distorted snort in return.
“Would you be?” he asked. “Torn from your family, from your home, and told that you’re going to serve United Terra for glory? Advised to buy hefty life insurance to compensate your family in the event that you don’t come home? Being told that you’ll be ‘compensated’ for your services with a monthly pay stipend calculated to serve as the ‘average’ for a service worker of your class?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t be fond of it. You left a family?”
“Of course I did,” he said quickly. Very quickly. This was something that was clearly on his mind. “A wife, three children. Oldest had already left home, but the other two … the other two …” He got quiet for a minute. “Barley was our second; our daughter. She was in a trade apprenticeship to an engineer, going into terraforming sciences under the patronage of a noble. Our son hadn’t made a decision yet, didn’t have to. He was only eleven when I left.”
“I’m—” I began, but Wanderer cut me off.
“Don’t say it,” his voice hissed, and I could hear the undercurrent of anger in his voice. “Just … don’t.”
I nodded and took a moment to compose myself. “Very well,” I said. “So you were a conscript. Logistics?”
Wanderer nodded. “Operational ground support and resupply. It’s—or I guess it was—my job to fly into contested space to deliver supplies to troops that on the ground. Food. Equipment. That kind of thing.”
“What was it like?” I asked. I’ll admit I was still a little off-center, even slightly disbelieving, but the questions kept me going.
“Boring,” he said. “With brief moments of absolute terror. You’re flying into a sector of space with very few, if any, ships. Your job is to deliver your supply—equipment, food, whatever they need—to a team on the ground, and then get back out. As covertly as possible.”
“Is that why your ship isn’t very large?” I asked, looking over at the tarp-shrouded object filling most of the storage unit.
Wanderer nodded. He seemed a bit more at ease speaking about his ship and his job than he had when talking about his family a minute earlier. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s made for small-scale insertions. It carries a Keppler Drive—”
“A what?”
“A jump device,” he said. “Faster-than-light capacity. Anyway, it has that, a small living space—and I do mean small—and supplies. Command gives you your timetable and your destination, you make the jump, do a burn down into atmo, find your team and make the drop-off, then get back out and head home. Months’ worth of food and supplies delivered to a small team in a day or two.”
My head was reeling. Space travel? Faster-than-light? Deliveries to planets in a ship the size of a small boat? “It seems like a larger ship would be better for that kind of thing,” I said.
Wanderer shook his head. “Not for small teams. There’s enough food and equipment in a single drop to supply a couple of small squads for several months while they stay on the move. It’s the fleet’s way of keeping an eye on the border worlds.”
“Interesting.” I wasn’t lying. If anything I was understating it. It was fascinating. But at the same time, I wanted to pull thing back towards what I’d wanted to learn in the first place. Where he’d gotten his equipment, why he was here, why he’d decided to help our city.
I went with the first. It seemed to be the smoothest transition. “Is that where you got your suit?” I asked.
“Run by?” he asked. It sounded like he was questioning what I’d just said, so I repeated myself.
“Your suit,” I said. “The one you’ve been using to fight crime. Is it one of the supplies that you delivered?”
“This?” He looked down at his arms. “No, not even close. This is a standard flight suit.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, almost unconsciously.
“No,” he said. “It’s similar to the combat suits used by the marines, but significantly less tough.” The way he said it, with such a casual demeanor, kind of threw me off. This was a suit that had been observed stopping bullets. And that could turn itself invisible.
“It’s mostly just a precaution,” he said. “In case the ship gets hulled and you need to go EVA, or if you get stranded someplace.”
“Hulled?”
“The suit is rated for spacewalks,” he said, tapping one armored fist against his leg. It made a noise not unlike two chunks of plastic being knocked together. “You’ve got maybe fifteen-twenty minutes of oxygen. In case of explosion or accident, as long as you get your helmet on, you might live.”
“But it stops bullets,” I said.
“It stops your bullets,” Wanderer corrected. “To be fair, it won’t even stop all of them, just basic ones. In my time, it’s only useful as a defensive measure against the simplest of weapons; it carries no protections whatsoever against more lethal and creative weapons, or even more advanced ballistic munitions.”
“And the cloaking?”
“Pilot survival,” he said. “Just designed to help me survive if I need to make my way to friendly forces or drift for a few minutes outside my ship.”
An unpleasant mental image flashed through my mind. “That sounds … unappealing.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but it’s better than the alternative. The fleet might be a bunch of slig-lickers, but at least they equipped us well. Of course,” he said in a tone that suggested he was scowling, “that’s probably why they paid us so little.”
I nodded, noticing that I’d been leaning further and further forward during our conversation. I sat back up. Keep it professional.
“So, you’re a conscript from a distant future,” I said, sliding into my “professional reporter” mode. “You mentioned a ‘temporal anomaly’ earlier. Is that how you ended up in our time?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you explain how that happened?”
Wanderer cocked his head to the side. “How complex an explanation do you want?”
“Let’s keep it simple for now,” I said. “You said that it was something you were warned about?”
He nodded. “They warn everyone about it,” he said. “Keppler Drives work by folding space together and then making a breach between the two points.”
“Like folding a map,” I said. “I’ve heard scientists talk about it before, but it’s all theoretical.”
“It’s also a lot more complicated than a map,” Wanderer said. “But they’ve got the right idea. In practice, though, it’s more like folding a piece of … of … what are those ancient paper sculptures called? The
ones that came from Asia?”
“Origami?” I offered.
“Yeah, that,” he said. “Origami. It’s like folding the most complex origami piece ever, except you’re not folding paper, you’re folding the universe. Space and time and all that. You fold it all up, bunch it together and then pow!” He slammed armored fist to palm with a crack that made me jump. “You punch a hole right through and jump.”
“Instantaneously?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said. “It feels almost instantaneous, but time passes. For instance, a fifty light-year jump to me might feel like a trip that took two days, but in the rest of the world, it’s a two week trip. I don’t pretend to understand it. Still, it works.”
“And the anomaly?”
“I was getting to that,” he said. “You see, there’s a drawback to these drives.”
“Which is?”
“You’re folding space like it’s made out of rubber, but once you’ve folded it, it takes time for space to … I guess adjust would be the right word. Unfold itself. Snap back to its old position. Are you following so far?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Now, this folding is … I guess dangerous would be the best way to put it. Once space is folded, you need to give it time to unfold before you try to fold it again, or travel a minimum distance to make sure that you’re away from the last folds you made. With me so far?”
“Yes.”
He continued. “Now, if you’re jumping into a place and the Keppler detects that space isn’t responding right, it’ll just adjust your jump accordingly. So jumping into an area usually isn’t a problem. Jumping out, though …”
“You have to wait for space to unfold,” I said.
He nodded. “And if you don’t … bad things happen. Space … snaps back, I guess is the best way to put it. You stretch it too far and it sort of … goes bad. The trainer who explained it to me told me it was like trying to make origami out of already-formed origami and then having the whole mess break apart on you. Space gets really twisted, can’t take it anymore and … goes nuts. Space and time just … stop following rules that I could ever understand.”
“And that happened to you?” I asked, watching as he nodded.
“I was doing a drop on one of the fringe colonies; one of the worlds that had rebelled. The fleet had a small group of marines there doing guerilla warfare. Weakening local forces, softening up before a full invasion, that kind of thing.” His visor drifted toward the storage unit floor as he spoke, and even though I couldn’t see his face, I could tell he was staring away into nothing.
“It was supposed to be a pretty clean run,” he said, his voice taking a far-away tone, the slight rasp becoming a little more pronounced. “Jump in system, as close to the planet as possible.” His head snapped up towards me, as if he was looking in my direction once more. “You can get pretty close with a Keppler—it’ll adjust pretty well for the gravity well—but you still have to be a little ways out.”
His attention began to drift back down to the floor. “Anyway, I jumped in close, came out right next to this ugly, brown mudball … and that was when everything went wrong.”
“What happened?”
“A rebel ship happened to be in orbit. I don’t know if they were waiting for me, or my timing was just bad that day. But they picked me up before I could even try to go quiet. No demands, no calls for surrender. They just painted me with a missile lock and decided to turn me into orbital debris. I couldn’t outrun it. I couldn’t hide. So I went for the only option I had. I plugged in a jump, triggered the override, jumped … and things snapped.”
“Next thing I know, I’m in the Sol System again,” he said, shifting in his seat. His voice sounded hollow. “But everything’s wrong. It’s empty. There’s no shipyards. No clouds on Mars. No mining habitats in the asteroid belt. No refineries over Jupiter or Saturn. I trigger my comms, and there’s no one talking.”
“I spent some time drifting, scanning through the bands, trying to figure out why my navigation computer was going nuts, why it was having trouble confirming that I was even in the Sol System. It … it didn’t take me long to start shifting through different frequencies and start picking up transmissions from Earth. But they were all wrong. Everything was wrong.” He was shifting again, twisting in his seat as his fingers folded around one another in complex patterns I didn’t think he was aware he was making.
“It took me a few hours to reach the right conclusion,” Wanderer said, pausing to let out a distorted sigh. “And another day to believe it. I’d been displaced. Snapped across time by the folds of space and time coming apart. I was in the past … a long ways in the past.” He paused, and his visor tilted upwards to look at me.
“Has anyone ever come this far back before?” I asked.
He shook his head. “If they have, they’ve stayed hidden. Or done their duty and sacrificed themselves.”
That was a bit of a shock. “You’re supposed to kill yourself?”
“And destroy all advanced technologies,” Wanderer finished, nodding. “According to regulations, if you’re any further than a few years back, that’s what you’re supposed to do. That way you don’t interfere with the past. Under penalty of death—not that they could really enforce it unless you actually did get back.”
“There’s a way to get back?”
“No.” This time there was no mistaking the angry growl in his voice. “There isn’t, unless you can hide for a couple of years and stay off of the grid. Me? I’m too far back. I can’t sit and wait that long.”
“Wow.” I really couldn’t think of much else to say, and so for a moment I just sat there and let it sink in. Wanderer didn’t seem inclined to break the silence.
He was a refugee, a man lost in time. A soldier who’d never wanted to be one from the sound of it, who from his tone didn’t care much one way or another about the fleet he’d been in the service of. And then in payment for his actions, he’d been thrown through time, stranded hundreds of years from home with no way back.
So he’d become a hero. I felt a bit of pride swell in my chest at that. All that technology at his fingertips—and granted, if he was going to break the rules, he probably could have been more overt, but even so. All that power, all that tech. He could have ruled the world, or most of it.
And instead he’d become a superhero. That took a certain kind of nobility. I wasn’t sure what kind of psychological profiling his “United Terra Space Fleet” had possessed, but it clearly was missing something if they’d let someone like Wanderer slip through their fingers.
The silence had gone too long. I decided to break it.
“So,” I said, my voice echoing through the storage unit. “You were lost in time—our time—but you decided not to follow the rules?”
Wanderer nodded. “Like I said, I didn’t want to die.”
“So you came here?”
He nodded again. “I jumped into orbit—there was nothing in this day and age that would pick up my jump as long as I was far enough out, at least nothing that was going to get a second look at me.”
“Actually …” I said, my mind dredging ancient facts to the forefront. “Was your jump about a week before your first set of heroics?”
“Heroics?”
“Yeah, the raid on the science labs. Where you broke up the criminals going after the scientific equipment.”
“Oh.” There was an odd note to his voice, something I couldn’t place. “That. Yeah, that was about a week or so after I arrived. Why?”
“Believe it or not,” I said, grinning at him. “I think we did pick up your jump. A few neutrino detectors reported a bunch of strange results about a week before you first showed up. They blamed it on a particle collider.”
Wanderer shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I know the Keppler puts out a lot of weird particles when it rips a hole. Maybe they did.”
I nodded, confident that with later research, and maybe a few more interviews about t
he precise nature of his arrival on Earth, I could pin down the times and exonerate those scientists who’d submitted the report so many years before. It wouldn’t help make up for the millions of dollars’ worth of equipment they’d replaced, but it would hopefully give them a little more peace of mind.
“So,” I said, slipping back into my journalism mode. “You came to Earth. What were you trying to do?”
“What else?” he asked, and I pulled back slightly in surprise. There was a feeling of … bitterness ... to his voice. It felt off from what I expected. “I wanted to get home.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t go home?” I said.
“And you think I wanted to accept that?” There was an edge to his voice, a hiss of anger that made me shrink back a little, my enthusiasm wilting slightly under the sudden venom in his voice. “You think I wanted to just roll over and accept that for what it was? No!” He jerked forward in his seat, and I barely kept my legs from shoving my seat backwards as he raised his voice.
“I wanted to live,” he said, his voice rebounding off of the concrete walls. “I wanted to see my wife again. My children! I wanted to watch them grow up. Not die in some past I don’t even remember! I wanted to go home! That’s why I came to Earth. That’s why I came here! And that’s why I stole all that lab equipment! So I could get home!”
His voice died out as he sank back into his seat. I hadn’t even noticed him standing. I was still trying to process what I had just seen. Wanderer, the city’s hero—my hero—shouting about how he could never get home. About how he’d tried. About how … he’d …
What he’d just said caught up with me. “Wait,” I said, my voice almost a whisper. “Stole?”
Wanderer was non-responsive, staring at me from his seat in silence, but I could almost see the tension radiating off of him. I spoke again.
“Stole?” I replayed his words in my mind, rolling them back over through my head. “Lab equipment?”
“That’s right,” Wanderer said, his voice raspy, like he’d hurt something during his outburst. “Stole. As in theft. Unlawful removal. Criminal activity.”
Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection Page 36