by David Weber
It crashed in on him, sending his sanity reeling. A world in which the Soviet Union had survived. One in which there was a People’s Republic of China. In which Elfriede, and Gisèle, and Elizabeth had never been born. In which the German Empire had never been restored. In which—his shuddering brain flinched from the brutal images—eleven million human beings had been systematically slaughtered by the country in which his own father had been born! In which—
It was too much. He couldn’t take it all in, couldn’t keep the two worlds separate. They smashed him into fragments, ripped him apart. He was insane. He had to be insane! But what kind of insanity could conjure up an entirely different life, an entirely different world, in the flicker of a mental eye? It couldn’t be happening, couldn’t possibly be real, and yet—
But then one last awareness went through him, more terrible than any of the others, and he lurched up out of his chair at last.
“David!”
The name ripped from his throat as he tumbled into the darkness at last, and he wondered how he could feel such terrible agony for the loss of someone who had never existed at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Libyan Desert
1986 CE
The TTV’s interior swayed around Raibert in a nausea-inducing mix of blurred real vision and perfectly clear virtual displays that pulsed a livid red. He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair.
“Ah!” he gasped as fingers grazed a wet patch on the back of his scalp. “What just…where did…”
The real world around him came into focus, and the virtual warnings locked into their correct places over the TTV’s central command table. Raibert put a hand against the wall, pinched his fingers around the bulkhead, and hoisted himself up. His head swam again, his stomach churned with nausea, and he stood still while the sensation passed.
“Philo?” he called out, both audibly and across the mental firewall that divided them.
Nothing.
A chill swept over him, and memories began to trigger within his groggy mind.
I was eating at the command table again, when…
An alarm had sounded. One he’d never heard before. A loss of gravity, and then darkness. And pain.
Raibert gingerly touched the back of his head. He winced, but surmised the wound wasn’t bad. He queried his implants, and they produced a summary that hovered in his virtual sight, corroborating his gut feeling.
Mild concussion. Which was probably the least of his problems, given all the red over the command table.
“Philo?” he called out again, then louder, “Philo?”
Silence.
“That’s not good.”
The vertigo passed, and he took his hand off the wall to test whether or not he was steady on his feet. He wasn’t, but he still managed to stagger across the wide, cylindrical bridge and grab the edge of the table before he collapsed over it.
“Kleio? Are you there?”
“Yes, Professor.” The TTV’s nonsentient attendant spoke with a soothing feminine soprano. Like the control displays over the command table, Kleio’s voice was a virtual sound produced through his wetware implants.
“What is…” Raibert blinked the returning fog away. “What’s going on?”
“I was damaged by a high-energy chronometric event of unknown origin.”
“And that means…what?”
“I do not know, Professor. I am still in the process of restoring basic functions and collecting information.”
“Where’s Philo?”
“His connectome is in stasis.”
“Why?” he pressed.
“My infostructure became unstable during the event, and emergency systems locked Philosophus’ connectome to protect him. Please be patient, Professor. I am in the process of rebooting critical systems and evaluating the damage. A report should be ready shortly.”
“Okay, good. That’s…that’s good.” He nodded and immediately regretted the gesture. “See to it. Snap, snap.”
“Yes, Professor.”
Raibert swept his gaze—swept it slowly—across the floor and found his chair. He reached down, brought it upright, and dropped into it—again, slowly.
“Oh,” he exhaled. “That’s the stuff. Sitting is definitely better.”
“Professor, I see that you are injured. The wound does not appear severe, but it should be treated as soon as possible. Shall I prepare a medibot injection for you?”
“Yes. Yes, please. That would be lovely, Kleio. Thank you.”
“In that case, I shall have one conveyed to you at once.”
Raibert crossed his arms over the table, laid his head on his forearms, and waited for the injection. A few minutes later, the TTV’s ubiquitous microbot swarms transported a tube full of specialized medical microbots across the ceiling and then lowered it to the table by joining together into a single elongating strand that caught the light like spider silk. The microbots were normally invisible to the naked eye, and they quickly retreated into the ceiling after completing their delivery.
Raibert placed the tube on the back of his head and injected the medical microbots into his bloodstream. The microscopic swarm interfaced with his wetware implants and the two systems set about repairing the blow to his head. He set the tube aside, and more unseen microbots picked it up and carried it off to reclamation.
It may have just been a placebo effect, but he began to feel better almost immediately. He looked up and studied the warnings over the command table, really studied them for the first time since coming to.
“Kleio?”
“Yes, Professor?”
“Why is the whole back half of the TTV blinking red?”
“It is blinking red because the chronoton impeller is offline.”
“It’s what?”
“The chronoton imp—”
“No, I heard you the first time! Are we seriously without a functioning time drive?”
“That is correct, Professor.”
“Well, you need to make fixing it your top priority!”
“I am aware of that, Professor. Please be patient. I shall have a full report ready for you shortly.”
“—look at first…?” a gruff voice trailed off. “What?”
“Philo!” Raibert exclaimed, a modicum of relief eclipsing his worries, if only for a moment.
“Wait a second.” The abstract citizen’s Viking avatar appeared in Raibert’s virtual sight and made a show of whirling around in a confused circle. “Was I in stasis? Oh, that doesn’t look good.” He took in the warnings over the command table, then turned to Raibert. “Wait, are you hurt?”
“Yes, yes, and yes, though not badly to the last one. By the way, it’s good to have you back. I was starting to get worried that I’d have to deal with this alone.”
“I am here as well, Professor,” Kleio said.
“True, true.” Raibert nodded, and this time his head didn’t swim. “But it’s just not the same with you.”
“I am not sure how to interpret that last statement, Professor. However, I can surmise that if I had feelings, they would be hurt right now.”
“Then it’s probably a good thing you don’t have any.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now, where do we stand?”
“I have collated enough data for an initial report. Shall I review it with you?”
“Fire away.”
All but one of the warnings vanished, and a schematic of the TTV expanded to fill the entire space over the table. The TTV’s basic shape resembled an elongated gunmetal ovoid 150 meters long. Various systems, such as its defensive weaponry and graviton thrusters, dotted the surface like shallow blisters while a thick spike protruded out the rear to nearly double its overall length.
Except in this case, the spike was bent at its midpoint.
“As you can see,” Kleio began, “the impeller spike has suffered significant damage, and I am currently incapable of temporal flight.”
“Can we repair it?” Philo ask
ed.
“I do not know. A more thorough evaluation is in progress.”
Raibert sat back in his chair and waited while a cold, sickly feeling invaded the pit of his stomach. The TTV had impressive self-repair abilities thanks to its atomic printers, bulk printers, and microbot swarms, but the chronoton impeller was in a class all its own, and its construction involved very specialized forms of exotic matter that, unsurprisingly, required very specialized printers to produce. They could repair the impeller if the damage wasn’t too severe, but they lacked the ability to replace it.
“Kleio, this is a really important thing to know,” Raibert said. “Can we fix it or not?”
“I have microbots surveying the impeller exterior and will have more information available shortly. Shall I continue with the rest of the preliminary report?”
“Listen, Kleio,” he snapped, “the rest of it really doesn’t matter if we can’t phase out, don’t you think?”
“I am sorry, Professor. Please be patient.”
“You seem agitated,” Philo said.
“Of course I’m agitated. The TTV is all banged up, my head still hurts from getting slammed against the bulkhead, and it might turn out we’re stranded. So, yes, I think I am fully justified in being a little agitated right now.”
“Don’t worry,” Philo said, and put a virtual hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
Nothing physical touched Raibert’s shoulder, but his virtual senses made the gesture from his companion feel like the real thing down to the roughness of Philo’s palms and the warmth of his touch. Raibert took a deep breath and rubbed his face.
“All right, Kleio.” He let out another slow breath. “Let’s hear the rest, starting with where and when the hell we are.”
“The Libyan desert,” Kleio reported. “March 5, 1986 CE.”
“Is that bad?” Raibert asked. “The late twentieth century can be a rowdy place, if I recall.”
“Nuclear proliferation,” Philo said. “The Cold War. Mutually Assured Destruction. So, yeah. A little rowdy.”
“Been here before?” Raibert asked.
“A few times with you-know-who.”
“Oh, God!” Raibert said, catching the reference to Philo’s previous companion. “Sorry I brought it up.”
“It’s all right. I know bits and pieces about the period, but I’m definitely no expert.”
“Same here. Kleio?”
“Regrettably, I have limited data as well. As you are aware, most of my data storage has been devoted to exhaustive libraries on ancient Rome, per your mission prep orders. The associated printing patterns and VR recordings take up a considerable percentage of my memory storage, and your own high-fidelity recordings during the mission taxed me to the limit. You may recall that I brought this problem to your attention when I suggested you switch to a lower resolution, but your orders were instead to scrub all nonessential data from storage to make room for more recordings.”
“Uuuuh.” Raibert planted his face in his hands. “I did tell you to do that, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Professor. And I followed your orders by conducting a thorough purge.”
“No need to rub it in.”
“I am not rubbing it in.”
“Whatever. Any indigenes nearby?”
A 3D visualization of the surrounding desert appeared on the table with blurred, shadowed zones where they didn’t have line of sight. Windswept sands and black crags surrounded the crater formed by the TTV’s impact, and the noon sun burned on its smooth, shining hull.
Well, mostly smooth. Raibert tried not to focus on the bend in the impeller.
“We appear to be in a remote and uninhabited part of the desert,” Kleio reported. “For our safety, I am relying on purely passive detection systems, but I do not detect any indigenous humans.”
“Well, there’s that at least.”
The last thing they needed were people from this time period getting curious about the “UFO” that had suddenly crash-landed. But just in case that happened, it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
“Weapons?” Raibert asked.
“Both 12mm defensive Gatling guns are fully operational. In fact, almost all other systems are at or near full operational status. My infostructure has been temporarily degraded in some areas, but I should have it back to normal soon. The stealth shroud cannot be deployed until we pull out of the crater and I enact some basic repairs to the outer hull, but that is the only major fault other than the impeller.”
Philo summoned a status report over his hand.
“Looks like both telegraphs are still working. So at the very least, we can call for help if we need to.”
“Good to know.” Raibert rose from his seat and didn’t feel the least bit dizzy. The chronoton telegraphs had a maximum range of eighteen years up and down the timestream, which meant they couldn’t reach the thirtieth century directly, but they could contact other TTVs traversing the nearby timeline.
“Yes, that’s very good news,” he added, his mood improving by the moment. Even if the impeller was completely out of commission, all they had to do was hunker down and wait for rescue.
Eventually.
“I have some other good news, Professor,” Kleio said.
“Let’s hear it.”
“I have finished evaluating the damage to the impeller, and I have high confidence the damage can be repaired.”
The Kleio’s attendant program was—at her core—nothing more than a number cruncher. A fantastically powerful number cruncher, and one wrapped within a user interface shell that could fake its way through most conversations, but that’s really all the gentle, simulated voice was capable of. Faking it. She could take the results of countless mathematical simulations and pretty them up into digestible chunks like “I have high confidence in X” for her sentient crew, but she couldn’t think. Not in the same way Raibert and Philo could.
“Well, that’s just splendid!” Raibert replied.
“I have begun printing the additional microbot swarms I’ll need to realign the impeller spike. The necessary quantity should be ready within the hour.”
“Wonderful!”
“However, I do recommend the Ministry perform a full systems check upon our return to the thirtieth century.”
“Best news I’ve heard all day!”
“You’re looking better,” Philo said.
“That’s because I feel better!”
“Well, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to go parallel with Kleio and help coordinate the microbots.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Philo tipped his horned helmet to Raibert and vanished.
“Well then.” Raibert put his hands on his hips. “If no one has any objections, I think I’m going to take a shower and wash off the blood.”
*
“Philo?” Raibert asked a few hours later.
“Yeah?” The AC’s avatar materialized in his virtual sight.
“Have you seen this?” He pointed to one of several chronometric charts over the command table.
“No, I’ve been busy with Kleio fixing the impeller. We’re almost done, by the way.”
“We may want to think carefully before we leave, because this”—Raibert shook a finger at the leftmost chart—“is really weird. Granted, it’s been a while since I took my TOE exam, but I’m pretty sure chronotons aren’t supposed to do this.”
“Is that what hit us?”
“Yeah. Some sort of chronometric storm that’s sweeping forward through time. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I don’t think anyone has,” Philo admitted. “Hold on, it’s been forever since I’ve looked at the TOE myself. Kleio, you didn’t delete that too, did you?”
“No, I did not, Philosophus. I consider the Theory Of Everything and all related material to be essential resources for safe TTV operations. I excluded it and all other thirtieth-century records and patterns from the professor’s data purge.”
“Good. One moment while I access it. And…there.”
Philo’s avatar vanished, and pathways along their mental firewall opened. Raibert confirmed the pathways, and details of the TOE crystalized in his mind thanks to Philo’s assistance.
“Whatever happened,” Raibert began, “we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again, either to us or someone else. If the vector’s correct, the storm front is between us and the thirtieth century, which means we have to pass through it before we can warn anyone else.”
“Yeah, I see that. But I think we should be okay. The first time, it came at us from directly behind and it was moving fast.”
“Which explains why Kleio missed it,” Raibert finished.
“Right.”
TTVs navigated through time and space with a triangulated chronometric array that provided full 360-degree coverage around the vessel. That level of detection wasn’t too important for an Observation TTV like the Kleio, but large teams of Preservation TTVs on artifact rescue missions needed to coordinate their phase-in points precisely and found the extra spatial awareness essential.
The system’s sole weakness became evident only when a TTV was underway at high time factors, because its own impeller created—not a blind spot exactly—but definitely a blurry spot in the array’s field of view temporally behind the craft.
“Now that we know what to look for,” Philo continued, “we should be able to push through the storm front without too much trouble.”
“Maybe so, but that’s not the weirdest thing I found while you and Kleio were busy.” Raibert opened another hole in the firewall and tapped a finger through the second chart. It contained the outline of a short, middle-aged (from a thirtieth-century perspective) male. Himself to be precise, but also surrounded in a halo of abnormal chronoton activity.
“Oh,” Philo remarked thoughtfully. “Oh.”
“Yeah. What the hell do you make of that?”
“It looks like the chronotons around you are…I guess resonating would be the best word to use?”
“That’s what I thought, but resonating with what?”
“No idea. This is probably going to involve some high-level math to analyze. Kleio and I can work on it after she’s done with the repairs. Have you seen this anywhere else?”