“And what is your name?” Anna smiled at her.
Tyler gave his daughter an encouraging nod.
“Eva,” she smiled quietly while bashfully playing with the balloon.
“Well,” Anna smiled, “that is a lovely name. Eva, I am very, very, pleased to meet you.”
Eva’s cheeks flushed a little and the balloon squeaked in her hands.
For a long while they talked about the old times and the early days of the Foothold project. The lunar cylinder in orbit had been an inspiration to a world still in recovery; a symbol of a new beginning, to focus the minds of the young.
Once a highly covert project, the Field had become almost ubiquitous. Depending on its standard or inverted uses, it had been called by many names over the decades.
The inverted use, like the Node, was sometimes referred to as a ‘Stasis’ Field, particularly when the goal was hibernation. In standard uses, like the original experimental model, it had gone by names like ‘Accelerator’ or ‘Maturation’ Field. In the trivial time-neutral uses, like the ones that surrounded ships during atmospheric re-entry, it had even been called a ‘Force’ Field; much to Anna’s annoyance.
In some ways mankind had mastered time, but in other ways, Anna knew the Field had undone it.
Each short hop within a Field was a discontinuity. Although biological chains remained unbroken, familial bonds had suffered; it wasn’t unheard of for grandchildren and grandparents to be the same biological age. Advances in zygote technology could, with appropriate resources, bring an embryo to maturity much faster in a lab than a womb.
What mankind had gained in efficiency, it had lost in patience.
She’d heard there were others on Earth who’d felt the same way. Some communities had apparently shunned the temporal technology but not in a primitive or Luddite sense; they’d simply chosen to live their lives together in the same time-frame.
Sitting here in her warm apartment with some of her last remaining friends, she could certainly understand it. She found herself wondering what sort of world, or worlds, little Eva would grow up in. Would a playful sense of curiosity be able to persist?
Right now, Eva was still playing with her long balloon. It had deflated a lot over the hours but she still seemed fascinated by it. Holding it in the middle of a tight fist, she was alternately squeezing at either end. The round bubble of air at one side of her fist would disappear, then emerge on the far side, instantly.
Anna felt the moment of inspiration arrive.
A similar thing had happened to Douglas Walker when a birthday balloon had popped in his hands; temporal Field inversion had been the end result. However, the inspiration she felt now was not related to time, but propulsion.
She smiled and watched as Eva compelled the spherical space to jump between two locations. It wasn’t hard for Anna to imagine the distance as light years rather than inches.
Today, 411 years after the date of her birth, she knew she’d reached another milestone. The propulsion mechanics of Eversion Point Displacement might take decades to develop. But for now, surrounded by a few of her friends, Anna simply enjoyed the present moment.
VEGA
3rd December 2381
Pavna knew their Field-wrapped hibernation vessel had been collecting and storing personnel for decades, in preparation for the trip to the Vega. Some, like her and Mat, had standard genetic sequences, but there were an equal number of augmented individuals aboard too. Several of these were descendants of the original ‘Substandards’ she’d helped to rescue from the USV, but others had opted to undergo voluntary resequencing.
In preparation for the worlds they would find on the voyage of the Vega, not all of the ring habitats were to be spun at the same rates, or have the same oxygen levels. In the interests of maximising human adaptability, Noah Broadstone’s idea had been to prepare different strands of human development in order to utilise worlds that were not an exact fit for Homo sapiens.
Using the hibernation vessel ensured that a time-separated genetic cross-section of individuals would arrive at the Vega at the same time. Until the ship was complete though, they remained in orbit; taking long strides through time. Although Anna Bergstrom had explained the principles of her Field technology, every jump had seen the past recede with alarming speed.
It had also been a painful experience. Each time they’d halted their journey through time, it had been to say goodbye to someone they knew. Their small groups of friends were going their separate ways; in both time and space.
In 2133 they’d woken briefly to say goodbye to Tyler Briars and Olivia Grest, who were bound for the Andromeda’s completion in the twenty-three seventies. Their differing pattern of time jumps meant they wouldn’t meet with the couple again.
In 2173, they’d awoken to bid farewell to Danny, Abel and of course Cathy. In a magnificent and explosive display, the Eridanus had departed from Earth, never to return. Preserving their finite resources, the Eridanus’ Chronomagnetic Field had activated within an hour of departure. Though the lunar-grey cylinder remained visible for months, there could be no real-time communication.
The year 2306 had been particularly painful. Anna Bergstrom, the woman who’d brought them all together and laid the path to the stars, had departed on a transport. After a video link that seemed too short, she’d used a popular piece of sign language that their close-knit group had inherited from Tyler Briars. Signing off for the last time, Anna had pointed to herself, crossed her arms over her chest, then pointed at Pavna and Mat.
For each one of these stops, the combination of Field and hibernation unit meant that mere days were passing for Pavna and Mat. Although their muscles did not have time to weaken in the zero-gravity environment, their spirits did. With no time to mentally adapt to each person’s departure, they’d been left with an ever-compounding sense of loss.
Pavna could feel consciousness creeping in again; another hibernation jump was complete. Keeping her eyes closed, she drew a deep breath in preparation for the next round of heart-wrenching separations. In a peculiar mix of emotions, she remembered that there would be no more separations; the next scheduled stop was the Vega itself.
She could hear Mat calling to her but his voice sounded more urgent than usual. His voice suddenly became louder as he yelled into her ear.
Her eyelids snapped open and she could see him standing over her. The hibernation vessel was still dimmed. She attempted to sit up but found that her head and arms were deathly heavy.
“Now!” Mat was shouting.
“What?” she slowly raised her head.
“We have to get out, now!” he disconnected her intravenous wristband and began dragging her out of the hibernation unit.
She could hear other voices now, those of the other people aboard; their tone was panicked. Her groggy senses snapped into pin-sharp focus: she was feeling heavy because there was gravity.
One of the other people dashed to Mat’s side.
“Thirty seconds!” he said, “Did the habitat ring -?”
“Are the supplies out?” Mat cut across him.
“Yes, but -”
“Get everyone clear!” Mat shouted and pushed him away, “Go!”
Pavna swung her legs out of the unit and climbed out onto the floor, immediately losing her balance. He stopped her falling and told her:
“Containment breach. We’ve gotta go!”
More supplies-laden people shot past them in the direction of the back of the vessel, running at odd angles to the floor. It took just a second to adjust to the fact that nothing was wrong with gravity; the craft simply wasn’t upright.
“Computer?” Mat called out as they ran, “Time to breach?”
“Twenty-four sec-econds,” the voice stuttered.
The rear exit was open and beyond it she could see the others running away into darkness. Mat stopped to grab a small packing case and pointed at another.
“Get that!” he called.
She pulled on the case’s
handle but the case itself was jammed behind a crushed wall panel and wouldn’t move. She stooped to try freeing it and heard a quiet voice calling out in pain.
“Mat!” Pavna yelled, grabbing hold of the wall panel, “There’s someone here!”
“Twen-twenty sec-ec,” the computer prompted.
Mat also grabbed hold of the panel and together they tore it open. Pavna could instantly see that the woman was trapped under further metalwork, a metal pole passing through her bloody midriff. There wouldn’t be enough time to free her. The woman was trying to lean forwards, desperate to tell her something.
“Pav!” Mat shook his head and looked in the direction of the exit.
“One second!” she moved closer to the woman.
Permeating the small space between them, a sense of coldness suddenly reached Pavna. Through bloodstained teeth, the woman grinned widely and whispered, “We broke your little basket.”
Pavna felt the words pull the heat from her veins. It was the woman from the briefing room. The woman now began laughing through her physical pain.
“Eggs!” she coughed blood and laughed.
With revulsion and fear flooding through her, Pavna pushed away from her.
“Ten sec-ec-ec,” the computer warned.
Pavna grabbed the freed case and began sprinting towards the exit with Mat. Behind her, the woman continued to laugh.
The rear exit stood open and Pavna could see the others standing in the darkness outside; their actions caught between beckoning them out and poised to sprint to their aid.
She felt her last footstep leave the metallic flooring.
And land on the soft ground outside.
They cleared the craft’s overhang and ran out into the dark, rain-soaked forest.
“Don’t stop!” Mat yelled as they continued to run.
She knew there could only now be a few seconds before the craft’s fusion containment failed. For every one of those seconds she could only hear her heartbeat and the thud of her feet as they carried her away. As she reached the line where everyone was standing, a new sound reached her; a weak siren was coming from the distant craft. Her run collapsed to a standstill and she turned to look behind her.
A long trench of ploughed-up earth stretched from their position to the downed craft. Behind it was the rest of the night forest; broad leaves alive with the falling rain. The downpour was bouncing off the craft’s metalwork, creating a surrounding haze and filling the air with the sound of white noise. The box-like vessel was listed to one side and Pavna could see the stuttering lighting within. Sparks were now fizzing from various places as the structure degraded.
The siren noise stopped and, at the same moment, a transparent sphere suddenly expanded from the centre of the craft; visible only as an interruption to the rain. The lighting within the craft suddenly became stable and the sparks became constant showers. White light suddenly erupted and filled the sphere with a churning orange mass of flames. For a fraction of a second, it appeared that a miniature sun was nestled at the heart of the wet forest. Then the flames evaporated and the bubble faltered, sending a loop of white-hot plasma lashing out at the nearby trees. In an electric-purple discharge, the tops of several trees vanished in flashes of light.
Pavna realised that the computer had projected a Field around the craft during its final seconds; the fusion breach was being contained by a small bubble of accelerated time. The explosive effects were passing in milliseconds, but the intense heat was also starting to destroy the Field generator itself. As she watched, the sphere shrank to a smaller size and a second arc of plasma whipped out; converting another tree into a flash of light. The spherical hole in the rain pulsated again and she instinctively lowered herself to the wet ground; an action duplicated by those around her.
The Field collapsed in a rapid, stuttering series of compressions, then failed. With nothing to hold the hot air in containment, a sudden shockwave expanded outward. Pavna quickly flattened herself against the ground and saw the force of the spherical expansion blast the rain skyward, then a wave of heat passed over her. As the heat dissipated, the temporarily delayed rain resumed its fall and drenched her dry back.
When she looked up, all she could see was a red glow in the forest. A red-hot ball of twisted metal was all that remained of their transport vessel.
Instantly she found herself back on her feet.
“Casualties?” she called out into the darkness.
A list of minor injuries came back, and the questions began.
“Did we screw up the entry to the Vega ring habitat?” someone said.
In the dim reddish light, she could see Mat shaking his head.
“We’re not on the Vega,” he pointed upwards, “If we were, we’d see the central axis above us.”
“Did we overshoot our hibernation?” a panicked voice rang out.
“Scheisse!” another man began pointing to the environment around them, “Ist dieser Planet Alpha Lyrae?”
“No,” a small voice came from behind her.
Pavna’s eyes were beginning to adapt to the low light. When she turned around she could just see the source of the voice: a young boy.
“That’s Canis Major,” he said calmly, pointing to the stars, “If we were seeing it from the direction of Alpha Lyrae, it wouldn’t look like that. We’re somewhere north of the Earth’s Equator.”
She remembered the boy as being one of the augmented descendants who’d boarded one stop ago. What specific trait had allowed him to analyse their situation so quickly, she wasn’t sure. But she wasn’t about to take his opinion at face value.
“Let me check,” she pulled her palm tablet from her pocket and pushed repeatedly at the button on the side, “Damn, it’s not booting.”
It soon became apparent that none of their pieces of electrical equipment would start. She saw Mat kick at one of their supply crates.
“Shit,” he pointed to the glowing mass of metal, “The Field collapse EMP-fried our electrics.”
“So we can’t even radio for help?” an incredulous voice reached her, “Surely the Eridanus Launch Centre will send out a search?”
Pavna knew the lack of radio was the least of the problems, as did Mat who now sat down heavily on a crate.
“The last of the Earth launches were thirty years ago,” he said, “We were supposed to be the last ship to leave orbit for the Vega. Nobody’s coming.”
The reality was that, even when the Vega detected their lack of approach, there were no fast rescue ships; emphasis had always been on migrating away from Earth, using time itself to compensate for lack of speed. By the time anyone reached Earth, several years could have elapsed and no-one would know where to start looking.
The rain continued to hiss down.
Already the metal wreck was beginning to cool.
To survive, Pavna knew they’d need heat and light.
“Help me,” she held out her hand to Mat.
“With what?” he gave a despondent shrug.
“Mat…” she simply pointed to herself, crossed her arms over her chest then extended her hand to him again, “Please.”
He nodded and, pulling himself upright, took her hand.
She led him and the others to one of the felled trees. Grabbing one of the smaller wet branches she tossed it onto the remains of the spacecraft. A few seconds later, the heat overcame the water and the branch burst into flames. The others now did the same, piling branches and dead wood onto the growing fire.
The orbiting ring of sparkling debris rose during the night; a fine diamond bracelet against the velvet-black of space. In one place, Pavna could see there was still a large concentration of lunar material. The fabricators would continue their unhurried routines of collecting precious volatiles and minerals. Automated launches would periodically fire orbital payloads towards the main construction hub but, as had always been the case, they may only do so every few centuries.
When she looked around their impossible campfire, Pavna wa
s reminded of a video she’d once seen. Danny, Tyler and Caroline had recorded their first night in exile from the Node; in a similar way, they’d built a campfire to ward off the cold while they planned their next steps.
When she thought about where that video was now archived she had a sudden thought.
“Mat, there might still be a way!”
“I know,” he was nodding, “You’re talking about the mothballed Iceland facility?”
“Yes!” she felt her enthusiasm well up.
“Pav,” he sighed and took her hands, “It could be thousands of miles… we don’t even know which direction it is…”
She took one of his hands and placed it on her rounded abdomen.
“Even if we never make it, we have to try,” she said, “Don’t we?”
Mat closed his eyes and nodded.
“We’ll just take longer strides…” he smiled.
During the long first night, they spoke with everyone; opinions differed on the best approach to take. Just after sunrise, the group divided in two.
One group headed south in the direction of the equator.
Pavna and Mat, accompanied by many others, headed north.
FIRST GUARDIAN
2nd January 7142
Atka knew that many of his people had turned their backs on the truth, but he had not wavered. He had heeded his mother’s words. She had told him of the hallowed Hall of Inscription, where the walls were filled with the paths of the ancestors, where pictures and symbols told the origins of the Guardians. She had also told him of the day that her own mother had witnessed the sealing of the temple. Stone by stone, vine by vine, the temple had been sealed to keep its heart safe from a storm.
He’d listened to his mother’s words of wisdom, that the Guardians came from the stars and would one day return. Until then, she had told him, they would exist as guardians of the Orb, colourful Sky-Spirits who watched over the people during the nights.
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