Captain Thorenson cast Michael a bewildered look. “I can’t think much of their strategy.”
No. Their strategy seemed designed to fail. A nuisance. A dangerous nuisance but in the end, nothing more. “Unfortunately,” Michael said. “They’ve set up the game so we can’t avoid playing it.” He sighed. “Let’s get going.”
It took almost five hours. Not so long ago, Michael would have been in the thick of the action, but those days were gone and he couldn’t say that he missed them. Getting shot at had never been his idea of a fun time.
Dumas and his people had closed the bulkheads in all the major corridors. Their own forces had to break them down the hard way, with lasers and explosives. After that, it was cat and mouse throughout the ship. Romulus was able to keep track of the enemy, though none of them seemed to make much of an effort to stay hidden.
They were a mix of soldiers and marines, all well trained, all proficient with weapons and all skilled at hand-to-hand. They made no demands and refused to surrender. Michael monitored the situation from the command bridge—the actual command bridge, not the virtual variety, since the attempted subversion of the ship’s systems made simple, corporeal reality seem a more reliable option.
One-by-one, the enemy were tracked down, and fought like madmen. Seven, having been overpowered by squadrons of the ship’s personnel, activated the self-destruct switch in their armor and died a sudden, bloody death as their helmets exploded.
When it was over, and Romulus and the brain had finally eliminated the invasive worm from the ship’s systems, Michael and Frankie made their tired way back to their suite.
“Tough day,” Frankie remarked.
“Not what I was expecting to happen.”
“It could have been a lot worse.”
“That’s the problem.” Michael shook his head. “It should have been a lot worse. I don’t understand what they were trying to accomplish, but hopefully, we can get a few answers.”
The dead had been put on ice, and the ones whose brains had not yet had time to decompose could still be questioned, in a rudimentary way.
Michael had been a soldier long enough to know when an enemy’s move made no sense. All the attackers had fought to their last breath, including Commander Dumas. When offered the opportunity to surrender, they had responded with return fire. When on the verge of being subdued, they had preferred to die rather than give up. “I don’t understand,” Michael said again.
“Let’s think about it in the morning.”
Frankie was right. A good night’s sleep might provide a different perspective. They stopped at their door. Michael pressed his right index finger to the ID ring. The sensor pinged. The door clicked open.
Andrew Sloane felt as if he was swimming upward toward a far distant light. At first, he was barely aware of his own identity. He felt diminished somehow, as if a part of himself had been left somewhere far away. Then, suddenly, his memories returned. He was ****, an avatar, and he was returning home. The thought was poignant, somehow. **** had experienced things that none of his people could ever have imagined. He had regrets. He realized that now. Human beings were such soft, simple things, but they lived lives full of passion and drama. He had enjoyed being human.
What had happened to him?
A figure sat in a chair, holding a gun. Slowly, Andrew Sloane extended his senses outward. The box that held his consciousness sat where Michael Glover had left it, on a low table next to a couch. The figure sitting in the chair was male, small and slight, wearing civilian clothes. Andrew didn’t know him.
Andrew probed through the room. The electronics were shielded, access to the ship’s web blocked. The box that housed his consciousness, to the naked eye merely a small metal box, lacked much capacity of its own. It could emit sound and light and interact with a network, a network currently out of reach. That was all. There was little Andrew could do to affect the situation without access to the resources of the ship’s interlinked web.
A sound came from the doorway. The figure sitting in the chair stiffened. He raised the gun and pointed it.
The door opened.
Andrew sent a quick pulse of energy toward the door, carrying a message that he could only hope would be received, then he screamed. A strobe light shot out toward the man in the chair, who rose to his feet and fired, again and again.
There was a crash, a thud and then silence.
As Michael opened the door, the words duck and roll scrawled across his retinal grid. He knocked Frankie to the side and then dived to the floor as an ear-bursting screech and a series of rapid gun-shots assaulted his ear-drums. A blinding light filled the room.
That was all right. That was all to the good. He had already seen the figure sitting in the chair, the gun rising. Michael rolled to the side, then forward, his movement masked by the light and the sound and came up behind the gunman, grabbed him by the side of the head with both hands and twisted. The gunman’s neck popped. He shuddered, then grew limp.
The screeching stopped. The lights vanished. Frankie sat slumped against the wall next to the doorway, blood dripping from her arm and her shoulder. She grinned weakly. “There is such a thing as too much excitement.”
Alive. They were alive… “Let’s get you to sick bay,” Michael said.
“A diversion,” Anson said. “All of this was just a diversion. They sacrificed thirty-eight men, fifteen women and Commander Dumas for no other purpose than to cover up an assassination attempt on you.”
Michael was pissed off. Michael regarded himself as fair game but Frankie was supposed to be off limits. He realized that this was not exactly how the enemy was likely to see things but it was the way that he felt. “They almost succeeded,” he said.
“Andrew Sloane, or what’s left of him, saved your life.” Anson shook his head. “The guy’s name was Leonard Boyd, supposedly a shop-keeper.”
“Some shop-keeper.”
Anson nodded. “Seven of the fifty-four, plus Leonard Boyd, have brains that are still intact enough to scan.”
Frankie was resting comfortably under mild sedation, the wounds in her arm and shoulder already regenerating. The eight dead bodies, seven men and one woman, lay on tables, with slim plasticine hoses connected to their carotid arteries. The hoses circulated a fluoride solution high in dissolved oxygen into their brains, preventing further decomposition. Induction helmets clung to all eight heads.
“There,” Anson said. “See it?”
Seven of the eight had only vague, fleeting memories left: a few faces, a building or two, a child’s laughter. Nothing else. Only the last, only Leonard Boyd possessed anything coherent.
“A few wisps of memory,” Romulus said. “From various personas, at least four in each brain, nothing useful, except for this one.”
Michael, Anson and Twyla Thorenson stared at the image in the holotank. A city, very clean, very orderly, very advanced. Airpods flew through the skies on their AG. Needle-like spires pierced the clouds. Millions of people, all human, swarmed wide, tree-lined streets. Then night fell, and the city’s lights twinkled against the stars.
“It could be anywhere,” Captain Thorenson said.
“No,” Romulus said. “It’s not anywhere. It’s nowhere. The pattern of stars is the same as we saw in the mind of Aaron McDonald. Nowhere in the galaxy possesses this configuration of stars.”
“Good.” Michael drew a deep breath. “It means we’ve come to the right place.”
Chapter 24
Romulus rarely emerged from his hidden chamber between the walls. From there, he could interface his own neural network with the brain, melding their capacities together and extending his senses throughout the ship. This time, however, Michael had requested a personal appearance. The crew had grown comfortable on Gehenna, the great ship’s capabilities reduced to the background facts of their lives. Michael wanted to impress upon them that there were things they did not yet understand.
The ship’s personnel had often heard Romulus
’ disembodied voice but they had all assumed that this was the ship’s brain speaking to them. It had not occurred to any of them that a significant portion of that brain was housed in a mobile, vaguely humanoid body. Romulus’ black, elongated, almost insectile form made a powerful impression.
All of them were sitting in a VR simulation of the flight deck, staring at Romulus as he pointed out the significant features of their approach. “Thirty years before the dissolution of the First Empire, this world was selected as the site of a project designed to investigate the quantum nature of time, operating upon the Einsteinian paradigm which declared space and time to be inseparable aspects of each other. According to the most prevalent iteration of Einstein’s theory, time, or rather the apparent progression of time, is essentially an illusion, a product of the organic brain interpreting reality in the only fashion that it can comprehend.
“The project’s purpose was to create a mechanism to travel in time. It made sense, since, according to the theory, time and space are in fact immutable, with all points in time simultaneously co-existing. If such were the case, then it should have been possible to travel from one point to another in this inchoate soup of remorseless, infinite and frozen reality.
“The project was unsuccessful, however. Time proved resistant to human efforts. Time could be neither bypassed nor contained. Perhaps the goal was simply beyond the available technology. Perhaps the theory, in some unexplained way, is incorrect. Space, however, was another matter.”
Through the simulation, they could see the installation on Chronos, Electra’s largest moon, coming into focus. “We understand inflation, the expansion of the Universe in the instants after the big bang. We can duplicate the relevant conditions. This is how a pocket universe is constructed.”
Gloriosa lay in bed, feeling morose. Jeffrey Billings had left an hour before. He had stayed the night. They had had sex, twice before falling asleep and once again in the morning. Jeffrey had been ardent, almost fierce. This didn’t bother Gloriosa. She had enjoyed it, and so, she was certain, had Jeffrey, but that enjoyment had not concealed the fact that they had little to say to each other.
There had been no communication between them for almost two weeks and she had assumed the relationship, what there was of it, to be over, but then Jeffrey had called and asked her to come with him to the Prime Minister’s reception. No reason not to, and the sex afterward had been more than satisfying.
Now he was gone and Gloriosa found that she didn’t care.
What was she going to do with her life? That was a far more interesting, and a far more depressing question.
The University of Leiden, on Reliance, offered courses to anyone who could pay a nominal sum, courses which could be downloaded from the internet of every Imperial world. A hundred other universities did the same. It had taken Gloriosa two years of interfacing with the web to acquire the basic education that most citizens of the Second Empire gained in early childhood.
Gloriosa had always known she was intelligent. One had to be, to survive as a slave in Esau Kane’s household. She had recently begun auditing University level courses on a variety of subjects.
Know thyself and act accordingly. A very ancient aphorism, attributed variously to Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Aeschylus, the Oracle at Delphi and inscribed in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Gloriosa sat at a small table in her small suite of rooms, sipped a cup of chocolat and smiled to herself. She enjoyed knowing this.
Gloriosa had been a slave and now she was free. She found, however, that it was far easier to free the body than to free the mind. A mind was constricted and constrained by its earliest teaching, and experience is the most potent teacher of them all.
Gloriosa’s experience had taught her to be suspicious, judgmental and intolerant. She knew this about herself but it was hard to change. One never knew from which direction the next blow would come, what outrageous demand must be obeyed with a smile and without question.
You never knew what life would throw at you.
Gloriosa was grateful to Michael Glover, a man who had suffered many blows in his own life and who seemed to have emerged from his trials even stronger. Michael Glover had saved her, and the life she now lived was one that every one of her childhood companions would envy.
She had tried to pay him back, first by offering her body, then by trying to become whatever he wanted her to be, which seemed to be nothing more than herself…whoever that was.
The University of Leiden offered so many possibilities. She wanted to learn things. She wanted to become…something. Something more…whatever that was.
A knock came from the door. A thought revealed a hologram of a man standing outside her room. He was tall, with broad shoulders, thick, dark hair, a handsome face and an uncertain expression. “Yes?” she said.
The man blinked. “Gloriosa? Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The man’s lips quirked upward. “It’s me,” he said. “Andrew. Andrew Sloane.”
The installation on Chronos was just as Michael remembered it, an enormous pyramidal spire, rearing up against the stark blackness of space. It shimmered, multi-colored lights flowing across its surface. The installation’s landing parameters had trapped them, the last time they had come this way. The London had been dragged inside, where they had discovered gateways into three pocket universes, one of which had contained one small sun with one small world orbiting around it, the world upon which Sheila Atkins and all her people had been living.
That Universe was destroyed, ripped into sub-atomic particles once universal expansion reduced the density of matter below its critical threshold.
The smaller the size of a universe, the faster this process took place. Sheila Atkins Universe had lasted for over 100,000 years. And now it was gone, the blue, glowing portal winked out of existence.
The two other portals, however, were still there. Drones had already gone through and were sending back a steady stream of data.
“You were correct,” Romulus said. “It is the second gate.”
“I would have thought the first. We saw stars in the distance.”
“There are stars in the distance, but they are not the configuration of stars that we observed in the minds of our assailants. It is the second gate. The last time we were here, the gas giant below the portal obscured our view. Very few stars were immediately visible.”
Scientists tended toward the practical. Chronos Two’s scientists had not allowed wishful thinking to cloud their judgments. They had entered the escape ships and were now building new lives for themselves on Illyria. They had transmitted everything they knew about pocket universes to Romulus and the scientists on board Gehenna.
Arlo Scott glowered at Michael. “Why didn’t we come here immediately?”
“Because we had a mission,” Michael said, “and coming here had no apparent relevance to that mission. Now it does.”
Arlo Scott sniffed. Arlo Scott was a very smart, very creative man. Like most such men, however, he tended to be single-minded. His priorities did not always align with Michael’s. “Cheer up,” Michael said. “We’re here now.”
“How far away are we?” Michael asked Romulus.
“Approximately seventeen hundred light-years.”
“I’ve never left our Universe before,” Arlo Scott said, “except for our fortunate escape at Akadius.” He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “I’m looking forward to this.”
Frankie and Rosanna stared at Andrew Sloane-2, as he had chosen to designate himself. They were sitting at their accustomed table in the cafe, drinking coffee with brandy and whipped cream. Andrew looked endearingly boyish with a milky moustache on his upper lip. Gloriosa smiled at him, looking pleased with herself.
“The problem with entanglement is that the entangled system is easily disrupted,” Andrew said. “This process is called decoherence. When entanglement was first discovered, scientists thought it would enable faster-than-
light communication throughout the galaxy. Decoherence is why this turned out to be impossible. A burst of energy or a random cosmic ray is enough to disrupt the system. When Commander Dumas inserted his worm into Gehenna’s cyberspace, it sent an observational query throughout the ship. It was enough to disrupt the entangled state. What was previously one entangled mind is now two separate individuals.”
“Is that one of our stored bodies?” Frankie asked.
“Yes. I thought no one would mind. I was tired of wandering through the virtual world. I find that I have gained a fondness for reality.” He glanced at Gloriosa, who was sitting at his side. They exchanged a quick, intense look. Rosanna gave a tiny snort and rolled her eyes.
Frankie frowned. “You said you were tired of being human, that you missed the song of the stars and the feeling of cosmic radiation sleeting against your wings. You said that it was time to return to your people.”
Andrew frowned as well. “There are two of me, now. This me feels different.” He glanced again at Gloriosa.
“Reality,” Frankie said. “What a concept.”
“Activate,” Michael said.
Arlo Scott smiled ferociously and pressed a button on his console. Just like last time, a glowing blue ring, almost a kilometer across, appeared in space ahead of the ship. A small drone went through the ring, vanished and re-appeared thirty seconds later. Arlo Scott queried the drone. The data appeared on their screens immediately.
“We appear to have achieved success,” Romulus said.
Arlo Scott raised an eyebrow and sniffed.
“Well,” Michael said, “if I could think of something deeply inspirational, I would say it, but since I can’t, let’s just see what’s out there.” He smiled.
Scientists were still debating whether slip-space had an independent existence, or whether weather each ship traveling through the void created it separately and anew. There was no absolute reason why natural law would work the same way in a new and different universe, though from the few they had already encountered, it seemed to. Would they be able to enter slip-space, now that Gehenna had entered this new Universe? Would it be the same slip-space? Did it matter?
The Well of Time Page 20