by Isaac Hooke
“We can’t tell how many of the other robots went with it,” Tahoe said.
“No,” Rade said. “Surus, Harlequin, return to your mechs and pursue Jackal. The rest of us will confirm that the Phant isn’t possessing any of the robots we took out.”
Surus and Harlequin loaded into their Hoplites and departed to the west.
The remaining Hoplites moved forward, escorting Rade and the others who remained in their jumpsuits as they approached the fallen units. Rade’s squawker didn’t show the smoke-obscured undergrowth in fine detail around him, but he still could feel the branches and fronds of small shrubs resisting his advance. In moments he emerged from the smoke screen and found himself passing through an area of thick ferns.
He reached one of the downed Centurions. In addition to disabling Phants, the stun beam had the added benefit of causing robots to momentarily lose all motor control upon impact. Struck machines responded sluggishly for up to a minute afterward.
Rade scanned the chest piece for signs of Phant possession, but there were no telltale glowing droplets: the robot hadn’t harbored their prey.
The Centurion was already starting to recover from the effects of the stun blast—it was trying to swing its weapon upward.
Rade secured the stun rifle to his shoulder, lowered the laser rifle instead, and fired a kill shot. “Men, if you don’t find the Phant, terminate the robots.”
Ahead, other Argonauts were making similar executions.
“Update me,” Rade said.
“Got two Centurions here,” Lui said. “No Phants.”
“Another two here,” Bender said. “No bugs. Dropped the bitches.”
“Too bad,” Rade said. “Surus, none of the five stricken tangos harbored Phants. I’m going to split up the team to search the immediate area. I expect we’ll drop out of comm range shortly. This site will be our base camp. Return here as soon as you capture Jackal, or within the next two hours.”
“Understood,” Surus said. “And thank you.”
“For what?” Rade said.
“For ignoring me when I suggested that six hours might be too large a window of time,” Surus replied.
“What do we do about these robots?” Tahoe said. “We can’t just leave them here for future generations to stumble into.”
“The robots won’t have any effect on the timeline,” Surus said. “Feel free to leave them where they dropped.”
Rade was about to question her on why that would be the case, when a distant, spine-tingling roar filled the air, making him lose his train of thought entirely. The team members glanced about the jungle nervously.
“Boss, before we set out, we still have the holographic emitters stowed away in our mechs,” Manic said. “We pop those on, not only do we vanish from view of any dinosaurs, but with the sound-masking tech Surus developed, they won’t be able to hear us coming, either.”
Rade glanced down at his jumpsuit. The digital patterning had updated to match his latest surroundings. While the disguise worked well when he was standing still, it was still obvious when he moved. Manic was right, with the emitters the team would be completely invisible to the dinosaurs. At least while wearing the jumpsuits—unfortunately, the tech wouldn’t work with the mechs.
“That’s certainly an option,” Rade said. “However, we’ll cover more ground in our Hoplites. Also, we don’t hunt the dinosaurs, remember: our true prey will easily see through the disguise on the LIDAR band.”
Rade surveyed the terrain around him one last time, then he turned toward his men.
“To your mechs!” Rade leaped into Electron’s cockpit and the inner actuators cocooned him. “Bender, with me. We head north. TJ, Lui, fan out to the east. Fret, Manic, south. Tahoe, you stay here.” He wanted to cover all of his bases in case this was a diversion.
Rade moved at a fast walk, the feet of his Hoplite sinking into the spongy, moss-covered ground with each step. He scanned the landscape ahead, but didn’t spot any Centurions through the thick forest of trees. He had his LIDAR active, but it didn’t report anything vaguely resembling a robot out there.
Closer at hand, small dinosaurs were always running away through the foliage as the mechs approached. Rade was reminded of tiny lizards lying unnoticed on a mountain trail, reptiles that would leap into action and draw the eye as they dashed away, disturbed by one’s passage.
“How did the Phant know we were waiting?” Bender said over the comm.
“It didn’t, obviously,” Rade said. “My guess is he had his robots throw down smoke grenades and then run away only as a precautionary measure.”
“Cunning little bastard,” Bender said.
The two continued in silence for several minutes and soon lost contact with the rest of the team.
“Well, there we go,” Bender said. “We’re all by our lonesome now. Stuck on Earth, sixty-five million years in the past, surrounded by dinosaurs that want us for supper. We’re like walking food cans, inviting the dino can openers to come along to get at the goodies inside.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Rade said. “They’re probably more afraid of us than anything else, I think. At least they should be.”
“So far, sure,” Bender said. “But wait until we encounter the bigger ones. I just wish we’d taken along some HS3s for scouting purposes.”
“We didn’t think we’d be able to use them aboard that starship,” Rade said. “Not with those tight corridors, and enemy fire potentially awaiting around every bend. Plus they wouldn’t have fit on the Acceptor, not with all our mechs squeezed in like that.”
“Excuses excuses,” Bender said. “Maybe the mercs could have lent us some, and we could have shoved them in between our legs. Ah, doesn’t matter anyway. With LIDAR, we got a pretty good view of our surroundings. But you know, I still remember the days when they used to make mechs with HS3s built in. What was that they were called? ASS?”
“That’s right,” Rade said. “The original ATLAS 5s had them. The ATLAS Support System.”
“The good ol’ days,” Bender said. He sighed loudly over the comm. “Ever miss them? The old team?”
“Of course,” Rade said. “But I have no regrets. I still have most of you guys. And I have Shaw now. The kids.”
“I have regrets,” Bender said. “A whole slew of them.”
Rade was quiet a moment, then he said, softly: “If I’m truly honest with myself, I have more than a few myself.”
“We let people die,” Bender said. “Our brothers.”
Rade smiled sadly, though of course Bender wouldn’t have seen it, not while Rade was in the mech. “No. You’re wrong. We didn’t let them die. They chose to give their lives to save us. That’s how I like to look at it, anyway.”
Bender didn’t say anything, not right away. Then: “On a lighter note: we always get stuck saving the world. If it’s not Earth, then it’s some colony world invaded by aliens.”
“That’s our lot in life,” Rade agreed.
Bender started giggling.
“What is it?” Rade asked.
“Usually we’re too late to save the poor bastards,” Bender said. “We repel the aliens, but destroy the colony.”
“And you find that funny?” Rade said.
“Well yeah,” Bender said. “That’s the irony of it all. We’re heroes, and yet we’re not.”
“Let’s just hope,” Rade said, “for all our sakes, that in this case we don’t destroy the colony. Considering that it’s Earth.”
eight
The pair continued north over the next hour. Rade and Bender occasionally spotted some small- to medium-sized dinosaurs, including a pack of five feathery Utahraptors that fled the Hoplites, but otherwise no robots. Rade kept an eye out for any signs the Centurions had come that way, such as dead dinosaurs or robot parts, but found none.
Rade turned back at the one hour mark so that he and Bender would return to base camp at the agreed upon time.
When he arrived, Rade found the mech
s of Surus and Harlequin standing above a mangled jumpsuit, while Tahoe watched the rear. Inside the jumpsuit resided a beat-up robot that was obviously offline, judging from the burn hole in its chest.
“We found Jackal’s comm node,” Surus said. “The Phant transferred it to another robot, fooling us into tracking the wrong prey.”
“It was a decoy after all,” Tahoe said.
“That still leaves three tangos out there,” Rade said. “One of them harbors our prey.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait for the other Argonauts to return,” Rade said.
Over the next ten minutes the remaining teams arrived.
“We found some dead dinos to the east,” Lui reported. “Small things, about the size of humans. They show signs of laser impacts. I think they must have charged our Centurions.”
“Good job,” Rade said. “We head east.”
“You’re not going to leave anyone behind this time?” TJ said. “In case the Phant returns? We already know it has to come back here eventually. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have encountered Jackal when the robot returned to the future.”
“That’s true,” Rade said. “And there’s a chance the Phant programmed the Time Selector with a shorter recall interval, say three or four hours. So it makes sense to leave a couple of mechs here to potentially intercept and capture the Phant if it evades the rest of us.”
“Wait, you could trap the Phant in the past if you are not careful,” Surus said. “Something I would very much recommend against. It’s better to let our prey return to the recall site on its own after we stop the Phant from doing whatever it is it came to do.”
“Can’t we take the Phant back with us when we return?” Rade asked. “By standing on the designated site at our own recall time?”
“No, it doesn’t work like that,” Surus said. “Only those who made the initial jump are transported at the recall time. If the Phant and whatever host he is using are on the site with us, we will vanish, but the Phant will remain.”
“So it doesn’t really make sense to interfere with the Phant’s return, you’re saying...” Rade told her.
“Unless you want a long-lived Phant to meddle with humanity throughout the entirety of your history and prehistory,” Surus said.
“Not really,” Rade said. “We would return to find the world enslaved.”
“We could set a trap, capture it, interrogate it to find out what it did, and then let it go,” TJ said.
“It will be too late at that point to reverse what the Phant has done,” Surus said. “Better to let it go immediately, than risk the recall interval passing.”
“So that settles it,” Rade said. “No guards. If the Phant is returning here, it will have completed its nefarious task, and we will have already failed. I prefer to stick together anyway. We move east.”
The team set out in an eastward direction, moving at a slow run, essentially wading through the steamy jungle. That was about as fast as they could travel in that thick undergrowth. At least the ground wasn’t as spongy as to the north.
“If we fail, can’t we just time travel back here and try again?” Lui asked during the journey.
“No,” Surus said. “The universe won’t allow two future copies of the same individual to transport into the same time frame. We have just this one chance.”
“That suddenly makes this mission feel more important,” Manic said.
“As if it didn’t feel important in the first place,” Bender said.
“So two future copies of the same individual can’t transport to the same time frame,” Tahoe said. “But what about two copies in general? Let’s say I wanted to travel back five years to visit a younger version of my self. Would that be allowed?”
“That is allowed, since there is only one future copy,” Surus said. “And one past copy. But if you tried to send yourself back again to the same period, perhaps to stop your previous future self from interacting with your past self, the machine will reject the destination.”
“What if, for my second attempt, I sent myself back five minutes before my first visit?” Tahoe said. “With a recall time of one hour, so that I force the machine to create two copies of myself?”
“Then you will be automatically recalled at the five minute mark,” Surus said. “And if you are not on the teleportation site when the recall happens, you simply cease to exist. You’ll instantaneously wink out of existence as the universe cleans up after itself.”
“Time travel is a paradoxical, strange thing,” Tahoe said.
“I never claimed it was anything otherwise,” Surus said.
“But meanwhile if the first copy doesn’t make it back to the Acceptor in time for the recall,” Lui said. “He doesn’t wink out, right? He still continues to exist, but he’s just trapped in the past.”
“That’s right,” Surus said. “An unenviable proposition, to say the least.”
“But it does mean that you could conceivably duplicate yourself, or other objects, that way,” Lui said.
“True,” Surus said.
“Hey Manic, you can finally achieve your dream of having sex with yourself!” Bender said.
“Actually, I’m already thinking of ways we’ll be able to duplicate precious cargo for profit,” Manic said. “Assuming Surus allows us.”
“Likely not,” Surus said.
“Duplicates, and future copies, and only one copy allowed at a time...” Fret said. “Man, all this talk about time travel and its paradoxes is giving me a headache.”
“That’s because you got a tiny brain, bitch,” Bender said. “Sixty-five million years have passed since the current moment. Think about that. You represent sixty-five million years of evolution. Man oh man, I’m not impressed. When I look at you, devolution comes to mind more than anything else.”
“I’m not impressed with what evolution came up with regarding you, either,” Fret said.
“Oh but you should be,” Bender said. “I’m the ultimate specimen of humanity. A lean, mean, lady killing, bug killing, sexy ass fighting machine. With the biggest dick among us.”
“Yeah, keep thinking that,” Fret said. “Maybe one day you’ll actually believe it.”
“He already does,” Manic said. “Not that it helps him.”
“I’m going to mute you fools,” Bender said.
“Question for you, Surus,” Fret said. “How do timeline changes work exactly? If we change something here, does time branch, creating multiple alternate timelines? Meaning that humanity still exists in an alternate future, one that is now inaccessible to us?”
“I hope that’s true,” Tahoe said. “Because it means my family is still alive somewhere.”
“Branching timelines?” Surus said. “No. There is only one timeline I’m afraid, not multiple. The universe doesn’t like complexity.”
“Too bad,” Tahoe said.
“So then how does it work?” Fret persisted. “If there is only one timeline, how can we ever hope to restore the previous course of events? Our presence here has to mess things up. We’ve left behind damaged Centurions for future generations to excavate. I’ve already crushed to death hundreds of worms in the soil just trudging through this jungle. And what happens if I accidentally kill a weasel? Or something bigger, like a Utahraptor, or a T-Rex? Like the Phant’s Centurions already did. Wouldn’t that massively change the future, because of the butterfly effect? You know, from chaos theory? Where a minute localized change can have large effects elsewhere, in this case the future?”
“No,” Surus said. “The universe doesn’t like change. It resists and absorbs most changes, no matter how big or small. Imagine time as a flowing river. You throw a toothpick into the river and what happens? Essentially nothing. How about a rock? Same thing. You might briefly affect the flow, but downstream there is no effect. A bigger object, like a tree, will have a greater immediate impact of course, floating downstream for several kilometers until it is broken apart, but otherwise on the whole t
he river is unaffected.”
“So wait a second, if what you’re saying is true,” Lui said. “Then how did the Phant change the course of human history?”
“I said the universe absorbs most changes,” Surus said. “There are exceptions, of course. What I call key waypoints in the timeline. Human telepaths can sense these waypoints, and use them to ‘predict’ the future. We Phants can sense them sometimes as well. If one interferes in one of these waypoints, it changes everything, causing ramifications so big that the universe can’t ignore them. Going back to our river analogy: it’s like causing a mountain to crumble into the river, damming it up and causing it to flow down another branch entirely.”
“So our Phant changed something really big,” Fret said. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yes,” Surus said.
“Any ideas what it did, exactly?” Tahoe said.
“I have a few,” Surus said.
“Care to enlighten us?” Tahoe pressed.
“I don’t want to excite you,” Surus said. “Nor frighten.”
“It takes a lot to scare us,” Tahoe said.
“Even so,” Surus said. “I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself for the time being.”
The party continued through the jungle. The undergrowth had begun to thin out, so that for the past twenty minutes it was like the team passed through an almost ordinary forest. The trunks were well-spaced, though the thick canopies overhead still blotted out most of the sunlight. Most of the trees looked like ancient oaks, hickories, or magnolias to Rade.
“Where did all the shrub go?” Manic asked.
“My guess would be small grazing dinosaurs,” Lui said.
The team soon found signs of grazing in the occasional piles of dung that were scattered about. Those big cow pies contained undigested leaves and branches mixed in with the general sludge.
The Hoplites came upon a pack of eight small, bipedal dinosaurs that had been shot down. They looked like cousins of Utahraptors, but smaller, with seemingly longer, deadlier talons. They were covered in black feathers, with distinctive orange quills in the upper back regions. His Implant classified them as Deinonychuses, based on fossil records. Rade saw the burn marks on the bodies that showed where the lasers had struck.