The Space_Time Displacement Conundrum

by Milo James Fowler

  Why had he ordered Elliott to join them? To learn about the cold fusion reactor and its effect on helm control, purportedly. In actuality, however, it had been to keep an eye on him, to make sure he stayed alive.

  In the past that Quasar remembered—what he insisted on believing was the actual past and not this current alternate version—the ensign had died on the bridge when the Arachnoid bounty hunters opened fire without warning. Lieutenant Davis had been lost moments later.

  Quasar had taken their deaths hard. Davis's more than Elliott's, truth be told, but the two of them represented the next generation of the United World Space Command. Both were so eager to explore—Elliott with wide-eyed wonder, Davis with her dexterous finger poised over a torpedo launch sequence on her weapons console. And as long as Quasar was being honest with himself, he had to admit it: he'd grown quite fond of Lieutenant Davis. Perhaps too fond.

  While of course he would never have allowed any physical impropriety to occur between them—such encounters he saved for away missions with females who didn't sport a UWSC uniform—he couldn't help the thoughts that populated his mind, many of them involving Davis and himself in compromising positions on an anonymous beach with a twin-sunset. He was a hopeless romantic that way.

  Captain Bartholomew Quasar had been lucky with the opposite sex his entire life; it was something he prided himself upon. Yet no other woman had ever affected him like Lieutenant Davis. Perhaps because she was forbidden fruit in his eyes. Or maybe because she had died such a horrible death, burned alive by active plasma from a ruptured conduit.

  It had been enough to drive him nearly insane, but he'd channeled his energies in one direction once the obvious course of action presented itself: Opsanus Tau Prime, far-flung planet of mystery, home of the magical If Only elixir. Perhaps there had been no truth in the babbling of that drunk on a lonely moon's hive of villainy, but it was what Captain Quasar had needed to hear: that he could somehow change the past and keep Davis from ever being lost. And so he had taken his crew on their journey into the unknown, hoping against hope that a do-over panacea actually existed.

  Instead, thanks to the cold fusion near-lightspeed reactor, he and his entire crew had been sucked into a five-century-long limbo. Thank goodness Lieutenant Davis hadn't lived to experience that.

  Would she, now? And even more to the point, the next time Captain Quasar whipped forward through time, would he find her standing at her station as if nothing were amiss? Would the future/present welcome her with open arms as though she had never been lost?

  Not so for poor Ensign Elliott.

  Which brought the captain back to the moment, and the screen on his desk with his somber, crestfallen visage reflected in it. What could he possibly say to the parents of a man he had wanted to kick in the face on more than one occasion and had seriously considered tossing out of the nearest airlock on a variety of others?

  "Tell them the truth." Steve materialized across the desk from him. "Tell them you're glad it was their son this time and not your little heartthrob. Or is it something else that throbs when you're in her presence?" The wizard winked like a dirty old man.

  Quasar stood. "I don't have time for this," he muttered, striding for the door and leaving Elliott's remains in the Carpethrian receptacle on his desk.

  "I'd say you have all the time in the world, Captain. But that would probably sound cliché." Steve chuckled quietly.

  "If you know what's going on, then tell me, dammit!" Quasar turned on him. "Did we reach Opsanus Tau Prime? Did I drink of that magical elixir? Is that why I'm jerking around through space-time like this?"

  "'To right a single wrong, or to salvage a missed opportunity'—that's why you wanted that hocus-potion, am I right?" Steve inclined his head to one side as if he were appraising the captain.

  "That's what I heard it could do. But I assumed I would have more control over it than this."

  "There's your mistake, Captain. Thinking you have control over anything." He sighed with a slow, contemplative nod. "But I assume it's a workplace hazard for humans such as yourself in command of your peers. You think you are responsible for them."

  "I am!" Quasar raised a clenched fist.

  "You honestly believe they live or die by your command? That you can possibly assert that much control?"

  Quasar's shoulders fell. "I sent Elliott to his death."

  "You had no idea what was going on down there, or that those Arachnoids were interested in the reactor you'd been promised. Your mistake wasn't bringing Ensign Elliott with you. It was believing you could save him from death." He paused, eyes twinkling up at the captain. "The past has already been written. You cannot change it."

  Quasar narrowed his gaze. "And yet I have."

  "You only think you have. You've altered minutia, but the fact remains: Elliott is dead."

  "Davis lives."

  Steve raised an eyebrow. "For now."

  A sudden blast reverberated through the ship's hull, rocking the captain where he stood.

  "You might want to check on that," Steve said.

  Episode 59: The Desolation of Zhan

  Had the Arachnoid bounty hunters returned? Perhaps it was foolish to assume they'd left the planet Carpethria without looking back, screeching and whacking their upper limbs against their heads as if Hank's awful singing had somehow penetrated their minds to rattle around like a caterwauling feline inside an ancient drying machine. Maybe they'd only retreated temporarily in order to return with greater numbers.

  Charging onto the bridge, Captain Quasar found himself confronted with conflicting sensory data. For one thing, the viewscreen on the fore wall didn't face out into space but onto the planet Carpethria instead—which looked nothing like it had just minutes ago. The lush sphere now resembled a poorly terraformed moon instead of the jungle paradise it had so recently been.

  Commander Wan cast him a cautious look as he appeared, causing him to halt in his tracks. The sight of the weapons console dark and unmanned also gave him pause. If this was the future/present as it appeared to be, then why wasn't Lieutenant Davis at her station? Why were weapons controls routed through Hank's console? Had Davis perished during the Arachnoids' second attack—if in fact that had been going on when Quasar found himself so rudely pulled forward through time?

  "Report." Quasar clenched his jaw and forced himself to adjust to the temporal displacement. It was beginning to make him feel queasy, these trips back and forth along his own timeline.

  "We're here, Captain." Hank's voice gargled at the end, but that was common with his pair of throats; sometimes one of them could be unruly. But the way the very hairy helmsman stared at the viewscreen made the cause of his choked-up tone abundantly clear. This was his home planet, one he hadn't seen in a very long time, and much like the captain's consternation at finding Earth surrounded by a floating junkyard, Hank was dealing in his own way with finding his beloved Carpethria in ruins. "I don't understand," he managed.

  Captain Quasar narrowed his gaze at what could only be described as a tortured planet filling the viewscreen as they approached. The verdant Carpethria was no more. This could not be. The Carpethrians were a peaceful race. Who could have done this to them?

  One name came to Quasar: Zhan. He was already responsible for Earth's destruction and that of every colony in the Sol System. Had he committed this atrocity against Carpethria as well? There was only one way to find out.

  "Ready a transport pod, Hank. We're going down there."

  Hank nodded without a word or a humph, gesturing to an ensign nearby to assume the helm once he'd set the coordinates for the Magnitude to maintain a high orbit. Resolutely, he shuffled to join the captain at the rear exit.

  "You have the bridge, Number Wan." Quasar turned to leave. "Tell Gruber to meet us at bay 2."

  "Captain—a word, please." Something was obviously troubling her.

  Quasar nodded to Hank, who exited the bridge. They would meet up at the transport pod. It was good to know that chang
ing the past hadn't altered their ability to communicate without a lot of words. He could only hope it hadn't jeopardized their friendship in some other unforeseen way.

  "Permission to speak freely, sir." Wan kept her voice low.

  "Always." He flashed her a half-hearted grin designed to put her at ease. It didn't work.

  "We're in uncharted territory—"

  "Hardly." He smirked. "We know Carpethrian space as well as our own star system. True, a few hundred years may have passed while we were out of the loop, but have no fear. We are up to the challenge."

  She blinked at him. "Captain, we have no idea what caused such massive destruction to this planet—"

  "Isn't it obvious?" Quasar narrowed his heroic gaze. "It was Zhan, the same devil responsible for Earth's demise. Those annihilation bots and sea nukembers—who knows what manner of devilry he unleashed upon Carpethria once Earth was no longer of interest to him. Speaking of which—" He strummed his clean-shaven chin for a moment. "Did Bill manage to hold onto one of those bots?"

  "Uh, yes, sir. He has it in cargo bay 4. He's disassembling it, I believe."

  "Have him stop that at once. I would like him to focus on the heat signature alone. If we can match it to what we find on the surface, we'll know without a doubt that Zhan was responsible." He nodded slowly, staring at a point in space beyond Wan's stoic expression. "And we will demand both justice and due recompense."

  "But Captain, this Zhan person has been dead for hundreds of years—"

  "As I said before, when we find his descendants, we'll demand that they answer for his crimes. It's only fair, considering." With a shrug, he turned to leave.

  "Be careful, sir. I—" She paused as Quasar glanced back with a confident wink. "I don't like it. It's too quiet down there." She consulted her console. There were life signs on the surface, but no indication of mass movement or vehicular transportation of any kind.

  "We'll let you know what we find." With a nod, Captain Quasar departed and took four decks' worth of ladders down to the bay where the transport pod was docked.

  Hank already sat at the helm, plotting their coordinates to reach the surface in once piece. Gruber stood outside the hatch with an atom rifle propped back against his shoulder and a Cody 52 in a folded holster, which he extended toward the captain upon arrival.

  "Better safe than sorry, sir." Gruber's knowing look brought back memories of their recent Carpethrian visit—which technically wasn't as recent as it seemed to Quasar. "Anybody down there? It looks deserted."

  "It's a big planet, Chief." Quasar forced a confident smile. "I'm sure we'll find somebody."

  "Or they'll find you." Steve appeared in time to amp up the tension.

  Episode 60: Electromagnetic Interference

  As Captain Quasar and Chief Gruber strapped themselves into their seats inside the cramped central compartment of the transport pod, Quasar noticed Gruber was sweating profusely. Old habits died hard.

  "Ready, sir?" Hank reached upward with one hand to flip a pair of switches mounted above his console while his other three hands navigated paths across the helm console with deft familiarity.

  "Take us in."

  Hank nodded. The pod sealed its outer hatch automatically, and the ship's bay door opened with a rush of escaping air. The depthless, directionless void of space yawned before them. With ease, Hank navigated the pod out into the black, veering downward in a smooth trajectory that would take them into Carpethria's upper atmosphere.

  "Whoever's down there, why aren't they answering our hails?" Gruber sounded cautiously intrigued by the situation. Any excuse for him to carry his atom rifle, and he was up for the challenge. He leaned toward Hank. "Aren't these your people?"

  "Humph." That was all for now from the Carpethrian.

  "We have reason to believe the same Zhan-person who attempted to destroy Earth came this way. Perhaps he knew Carpethria was Earth's greatest ally. Regardless, we must assume the worst and hope for the best." Quasar nodded, in total agreement with himself.

  Gruber nodded as well. "Still can't wrap my head around it, sir. Five hundred years. I guess all sorts of crazy stuff could have happened in this quadrant while we were out of commission, stuck in that limbo-thingy."

  The pod hit some turbulence upon entry, the green-grey atmosphere swallowing them entirely and tossing them about despite Hank's steady hands at the controls. Then a sudden shockwave hit the transport pod, and all systems went out—lights, helm control, viewscreen, everything.

  "That can't be good," Quasar muttered in the dark.

  "There's some kind of electromagnetic interference in the atmosphere, Captain," Hank said, gripping his dead console.

  "Are we falling? Because I feel like we're falling," Gruber announced.

  "Electromagnetic?" Quasar frowned again, although no one could see his pensive expression inside the pitch-black pod. "I don't remember Carpethria having any such atmosphere the last time we were here." Because it hadn't.

  "Perhaps a result of whatever weapons were used to level the surface?" Gruber cleared his throat suddenly. "We're falling, aren't we? I think we are."

  Quasar stroked his solid jaw in thought—another gesture that went unnoticed by anyone but himself. "If that Zhan-person used up all of his annihilation bots and sea nukembers on Earth, he may have used an entirely different weapon of mass destruction on Carpethria. And if so, the heat signature of that bot wouldn't match, anyway."

  "Sir?" Gruber sounded incredibly stressed at the moment.

  "Just thinking out loud." Quasar inhaled through flared nostrils and blew out a sigh. "Very well. The situation at hand is grim, I agree. But do not lose heart. We may be hurtling toward the planet's surface at a few hundred kilometers per hour, and there may be no way for us to get our systems back online—even if we had auxiliary power—"

  "We don't," said Hank. "Not internally. But there's an external manual kickstarter at the stern."

  "What? Who in their right minds would install a kickstarter on the outside of a spaceworthy vessel?" A rhetorical question, and the captain expected no answer. "Where are those environmental suits located?" He knocked on the paneling around him, but no storage compartment was to be found.

  Hank cleared his throats. "There's one suit, sir. It's here in the cockpit."

  "One?" Quasar blinked into the dark. How could that be? Whose bright idea had it been to supply a single suit in a transport pod large enough to carry four passengers?

  "Uh, I'd say with seniority and all, you should be the one to put it on, sir," Gruber said with as much courage as he could muster.

  "Agreed." Hank popped open the compartment. "Doesn't fit me anyway."

  Quasar cursed under his breath. "Very well. Give it me."

  Hank tossed the heavy suit into the passenger compartment, and its rubbery legs flapped across the captain's lap while the magnetic boots dropped to the floor with loud clunks. Less than a minute later, Quasar had released himself from his harness and tugged the suit on over his uniform. With Gruber holding him steady, the captain squeezed his head into the helmet and activated the heads-up display. Instantly, he could see in the dark. Thankfully, the electromagnetic interference hadn't damaged any of the suit's systems.

  "Wish me luck." Forcing open the manual release to the airlock in the rear of the pod, Quasar stepped inside and activated the exterior hatch. A wild rush of near-freezing air blasted inside as it opened, along with a blinding light—the grey-green sky of Carpethria. Climbing up the ladder to the roof of the pod, Quasar peeked out just long enough to see how close they were to the planet's surface.

  "Oh my..."

  The harsh crags of the Carpethrian shipyards rose up to greet the pod as it descended in a collision course straight for the very same complex where the Effervescent Magnitude had been given its cold fusion reactor, once upon a time.

  "You'll have to climb outside, Captain!" Hank hollered into the rushing air like a cat standing in front of an industrial fan. Gruber merely clung to
his harness and opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water, his cheeks flapping uncontrollably. "Keep your boots planted—"

  "I know!" Quasar shouted back. He was no stranger to spacewalking.

  Deliberately, he emerged from the hatch and stomped his right boot onto the hull plating. After waiting for the magnetic seal to activate, he withdrew his left leg and did the same. But at this rate, he would never reach the stern in time. Standing on the roof of the pod like some kind of astro-surfer, Captain Quasar stared in disbelief as the end of his life rose up to meet him. He never thought he would die on Carpethria, of all places.

  Truth be told, he'd never considered dying at all.

  Episode 61: Back from the Dead

  Luckily for Captain Quasar, today was not the best day to die. As soon as the transport pod came within half a kilometer of the abandoned Carpethrian shipyards, an energy net of some kind caught the vessel, and if it hadn't been for the captain's magnetic boots, he would have gone flying face-first into the jagged canyon below. As it was, he could hear Hank inside the pod tumbling around the cockpit. The Carpethrian always refused to wear a seatbelt.

  "You all right in there?" Quasar called.

  It sounded like Gruber was heaving. All that came from Hank was a low "Humph."

  "We have been spared from a horrible death," the captain announced, "but the source of our timely salvation has yet to reveal itself!"

  Activating all manner of scanners on his helmet's heads-up display, Quasar panned the area below them with a keen eye—but to no avail. It seemed their benefactors wished to remain anonymous.