New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three

by S. M. Anderson

  “Join me, Prelate,” the Kaerin whispered before shutting the door.

  He walked around the back of the car slowly to do as he was bid, taking in the horrific visage through the chain fence. The bodies had been arranged in rows and piles and left to the scourges of vermin and rot. No stranger to battlefields, at a glance he could discern the culling had occurred some weeks ago. His sister Tami’aila and her children were out there somewhere amid the remains of a hundred and fifty thousand of his people. Twice that were lost, he realized; Bres’Auch Tun’s war host was likely dead as well.

  “Do you know who I am, Strema?” The Kaerin’s voice sounded grave.

  “No, Lord. Only that you wear the medallion of the Kaerin Council.”

  The Kaerin looked at him closely as he delivered his answer.

  “I am Noka S’kaeda, prelate of the Kaerin.”

  His host paused to let that title seep into his bones with a chill. This man was the Kaerin personified; his word was writ among the High Bloods.

  “My Lord.” He bowed his head.

  “If there is one thing I have come to understand, Strema . . . it is that the depth of sacrifice is important. Your predecessor failed to carry out his writ. The sacrifice of his people was the result.”

  “I . . . I understand, Lord.”

  “Marso’ Telsok, prelate of the Strema, you now carry the life debt of the entire Strema clan. Do I need to elaborate what the stakes of your failure would be?”

  “You do not, my Lord.”

  “There is one more thing.” The Kaerin prelate held up a finger.

  “Lord?”

  “None of this passes your lips. In fact, you would do well to forget it. As far as anyone knows, your predecessor’s war host was successful. They have remained on the conquered world.”

  The Kaerin lord indicated the field of dead in front of them. “Their families have joined them.”

  “I understand, my Lord.”

  “I despise the waste of this.” The Kaerin waved at the tens of thousands of rotting dead. “I would have you remain as loyal as the Strema have ever been. Your sister and her children live. They serve my own household and are well treated. You will be allowed to see them this evening. Your sister is well aware of what happened here; her children are not. Their continued survival, as well as that of your entire clan, depends on your discretion. If you give me reason, I won’t hesitate to cull the rest of the Strema clan, and make certain your sister and her children serve out the rest of their very long lives in an Army brothel.”

  “I understand, Lord, and I thank you for their lives.”

  “We won’t speak of this again.” The Kaerin towered over him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “The Strema are trusted, Marso’ Telsok.” The Kaerin Lord nodded to the rotting piles of bodies. “As a fellow leader, you will understand that even the best of tools must have its edge sharpened from time to time.” The Kaerin’s firm grip on his shoulder squeezed, “I will call on the Strema again.”

  “We serve, Lord.”

  Chapter 2

  Chief Joseph Settlement, Eden

  “Did he say what he wanted?” Kyle felt the dread bloom in the pit of his stomach. He was hours away from two months of backcountry hiking. Elisabeth looked at him and shrugged.

  “He just said he was bringing Doc Jensen with him.” Elisabeth was five months pregnant and sitting on a couch in the common lobby of Chief Joseph’s community center sipping on some herbal tea. If she knew more, she wasn’t saying.

  “Told you, we should have left yesterday.” Jake sat behind her on a stool, looking between her and Carlos with a panicked expression on his face.

  He ignored Jake and just smiled at Elisabeth. “You sure you’re good with this?”

  Her protestations aside, on top of how much he knew he needed some serious downtime; he still felt like shit for leaving on what she called “the boys’ hunting trip.”

  “Stop it.” She smiled at him. “If you don’t get out of here and unwind, you’re going to drive me crazy.”

  “Drive all of us crazy,” Jake added.

  Elisabeth shook her head in disgust. “If you could lose Jake out there . . . I mean, accidents happen all the time, right?”

  “We can manage that.” Carlos punched Jake in the arm. “I’m bringing a shovel.”

  “I’m right here,” Jake complained.

  The trip had been as much her idea as his, and Kyle was smart enough to realize it was Elisabeth’s professional side that knew he needed to decompress in a big way. Before both their lives were upended again, this time by the arrival of a child. The three of them and Audy were going to be dropped off by aircar on the western side of the Lolo Pass and hike over the Continental Divide, hopefully before the pass was closed by snow. Down the eastern side, they were going to retrace Lewis and Clark’s original trip in reverse and make it to the headwaters of the Missouri River.

  From there, they’d float and portage their way down to the outskirts of New St. Louis. Jake was threatening to keep going all the way to the gulf on his own. He felt guilty for how much he was looking forward to the trip, but if he was honest with himself, he knew Elisabeth was right. He needed this.

  Audy and his wife or handfast, Kemi, joined them half an hour later. Kemi, who like the majority of the Jema women was six and a half months pregnant herself, took a seat next to Elisabeth and glared at the men in front of her. Kyle knew the Jema institution or idea of marriage wasn’t nearly as formal or final as the Terran alternative. The initiation and continuance of the arrangement was left to the woman.

  “I can’t believe I used to dream of being with child,” she muttered in Chandrian. Kyle was relieved that he understood her. With the fighting over and having a settlement of Jema as neighbors, even his Chandrian was coming along. “If I had only known.” Kemi continued glaring at Audy. “I would never have let him touch me.”

  Kyle couldn’t help but smile. That was not the way he remembered it. Kemi had practically kept Audy prisoner until she was pregnant. It was a comical reminder of the sick prohibition on children the Kaerin had placed on the Jema for a generation. Every child the Jema would begin having in a few months’ time would be a symbol of the freedom they had won.

  “That part, I can understand.” Jake laughed.

  “And you!” Kemi turned around to glare at Jake behind her. “When are you going to grasp hands with Cali’sajema? Has she not made her intentions clear?”

  “Repeatedly.” Jake smiled. “I’m not ready to be a war bride.”

  “You look like one,” Carlos said to laughter all around.

  The discussion of Jake’s courtship was in full swing when an aircar put down in the landing cul-de-sac outside. Hank Pretty and Doc Jensen climbed out. Kyle noted straight away that Hank was smiling in conversation with the physicist, and relaxed. Whatever it was Hank wanted to talk to them about, he could tell at a glance it wasn’t “grab your gun” bad.

  “Last thing I wanted to do was delay you guys, but I wanted Dr. Jensen to update you before you left. Give you something to think about while you’re out there hiding from grizzly bears.”

  “I admit, you had me worried,” Kyle said, and glanced at the others.

  They’d moved into a small conference room, off to the side of the lounge area. Kyle had been here three days past, helping plan with the community’s farmers what they were going to plant in the spring. It had been a meeting that he actually enjoyed. There hadn’t been one mention of tactics, fields of fire, or who was going to be put out on the pointy end.

  “I’ll bet.” Hank smiled. “I’d be going with you, but I’ve had more time with Carmen and the kids in the last few months than I’ve had in the last four years.”

  “So, what gives?” Jake plopped down at the table. Audy, Carlos, Elisabeth, and Kemi took seats as well.

  “I wanted Jomra to hear this as well,” Hank started in Chandrian. “I know he is seeing to settling some of your people up north.”

 
; “I will tell him all you say,” Kemi replied, with an air of heavy formality that the Jema still used when it was called for.

  “Fair enough.” Hank nodded and then glanced at Doc Jensen. “You’re on.”

  “I’m afraid my Chandrian isn’t up to this discussion,” Jensen began. “In fact, what I need to describe is how the portal technology and the underlying quantum theory work in concert and how it may inform some decisions we need to make”

  “This isn’t going to keep us from our trip?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Hank shook his head with a cynical smile. “But I wanted to put this in front of you all.” He turned back to the smartest person in the room. “David. . .”

  “Chandrian as a language won’t serve for this,” Doc Jensen, began. “English barely suffices, and that only in a very superficial way. Math is really the only construct or language where it makes sense. After having given Colonel Pretty the same briefing yesterday, I’ll try to stay away from the math and science and give it to you in layman’s terms as best I can.”

  “Good.” Hank rapped his knuckles on the table. “Because my head still hurts, and I used to have an easy time with math.”

  “I’ll do my best to tone it down.”

  “Is this where you tell us the portal gates are going to cause us all to grow an extra thumb in the middle of our foreheads?” Jake was suddenly very interested in the discussion.

  “Jake, your forehead is too thick to be affected by anything,” Pretty concluded, and nodded towards Jensen. “But this is very much related to the portal.”

  “You all know we’ve been parsing as much empirical knowledge of the Chandrian gates from the Jema Gemendi cadre as we can?”

  “Yes,” Elisabeth answered for them.

  “We’ve taken what they know regarding how the Kaerin utilize the natural occurrence of their portal and worked it into what we know of how our own portals work.” Jensen paused, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Bear with me a moment.

  “You have to understand that at a working level, our ability to carry out portal travel is us taking advantage of effects we understand in an environment that remains widely theoretical, even to us. We don’t know the why or even the how behind the intersections between the universes, even though we can describe the symptoms of those interactions to a fine detail. We can manipulate or take advantage of the outcomes to get the result we want—namely, we can jump where and when we want—but at a fundamental level, how the underlying interaction happens or comes to be is still a mystery.”

  “But you’ve been jumping, sending our asses to and fro, for a decade.” Jake complained.

  “What we have been able to do for a decade is to artificially recreate the conditions that exist at the intersections, or points of inflection between this universe and the one we originated in. The Chandrians do this as well, but they do it by taking advantage of a natural and regular occurrence of the same conditions.”

  “We knew that, right?” Kyle looked around the table for support.

  “We did,” Jensen admitted, waving his hand. “Stick with me.”

  “Imagine the construct of the multiple universes existing like beads on a necklace. Some are right next to each other; others have beads in between. If Eden is in Universe B, Earth is in A, and Chandra is in C. From here, we can go in either direction. What we can’t do is portal to somewhere else within our own universe. We need the inflection point; imagine it as the point on the cosmic string or necklace where our universes, or the beads if you will, touch. Without those points of contact, there’s no access or door to exploit. With me so far?”

  Jensen looked around the table again and didn’t get any raised hands.

  “OK, I apologize in advance, but you need to understand this. Coherent quantum states oscillate, just like any other physical object. The atoms that make up your body and the electrons that orbit those atoms oscillate. What our portal allows us to do is lock in the energy level of our quantum state within the portal. We open the door, so to speak, to the universe next door and let that energy level or quantum state flow, like free electrons down a wire into the next universe. Think of the entire construct like a giant circuit board. The inflection points are switches that we use to manipulate the flow. That was the breakthrough that Paul’s father had.

  “Due to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, quantum harmonics, the oscillation I spoke of cannot remain stationary. It was always thought, is still thought that oscillation is all it does. Dr. Stephens the senior realized that there is a flow. A flow of quantum potentials along the cosmic necklace I described. It’s that flow we use to translate. We don’t create it; we just take advantage of it. We ride it, if you will. And if we stick to the electrical circuit analogy, which, trust me, only works as a demonstrative analogy—if there’s a flow, we can, I think, build an insulator or actually more of a resistor to restrict it at the point of inflection. Theoretically, at least.”

  Jensen took a deep breath and smiled. He seemed pleased with himself.

  The room of blank faces stared back at him. Hank was holding his head in his hands.

  “I’m still waiting for the layman’s terms,” Jake interjected after a long moment.

  Dr. Jensen was no stranger to the military mind-set, or to Jake for that matter. But he just frowned at the former SEAL and shook his head.

  “We may be able to restrict or deny further portal incursions from one of the two neighboring universes, but only one at a time, not both. It would also negate our ability to translate there as well. If we lock the door to and from Earth, Chandra is still accessible to us, and they can come here. Same holds in reverse if we lock the door to Chandra.”

  Kyle glanced at Hank, who was looking at him in question. Which side to block?

  “You said, may be able?” Kyle asked.

  “I did. It’s a big project; once it’s built it could theoretically be used to block access from either universe, A or C, just one at a time. If we had the infrastructure in place right now, we could only block the Earth side.”

  “But you just said we could do either.” Jake was actually listening.

  “Again, in the simplest of terms, we know what Eden’s . . . let’s call it Eden’s address, although frequency would be more accurate, looks like from Earth in terms of a quantum state. We have the right frequency or energy level probability to make the jump, and therefore, we can theoretically block it.

  “We can go to Chandra right now, because we can see it and make the same measurement at the point of inflection. But we have no idea what Eden looks like, through our quantum tunnel, from Chandra. We wouldn’t know what to block. Does that make sense?”

  “Can we just take your word for it?” Jake asked.

  Jensen shrugged. “The math doesn’t have shortcuts. In the quantum world, you can measure a position very accurately, which means you have no idea where something is going or how fast; or, you can measure its vector accurately, and have no idea where it is along the space in the string. You need both to do what we do. The only way we get that info is to view the point of inflection from both sides, and that is not something that the math can give us. Direct measurement is needed.”

  “Meaning?” Hank was actively scratching his head.

  “When we sent our first portal to Eden from Earth, it was nearly a month before we had enough data to make the return trip, which was fine, because it took nearly that long to build up enough energy to make the trip back with our phone booth.”

  “Phone booth?” Kyle was shaking his head.

  “You’re not a Doctor Who fan?”

  “Pretend I’m not. In fact, don’t pretend.”

  “It was a self-contained portal engine, about the size of two cargo containers side by side, powered by a small thermal nuclear reactor and large battery pile. We sent it here, myself and a small team, trusting we could get the data we needed to make the return trip.”

  “You did that? Not knowing if you could get back?” Carlos�
�s eyes were wide open.

  Jensen shrugged. “We trusted the math.”

  “So, we’d have to do the same? Go to Chandra to get the data, both to be able to get back, as well as affect an eventual defense from here?” Hank leaned forward, his elbows on the table.

  “There’s a lot of work we’d need to do first, so there’s no rush on that, but yes. In fact, we don’t have the phone . . . the self-contained unit here; it’s mothballed back on Earth.”

  “Could we build another phone booth thing? Here?” Jake asked. “I really don’t want to go back and end up in the New Mexico gulag.”

  “We could,” Jensen said after a moment. “It just adds to the timeline.”

  “Where is it?” Kyle asked. “The HAT was destroyed.”

  “Inside an old silver mine in northern Idaho.”

  “I don’t like that idea.” Kyle shook his head. “Chandra, I think, is an issue that we can deal with; at least there, we have a technological advantage. Earth figures out where and more importantly how we came here. There’s no way we can stand against that. Going back just puts that in play, maybe sooner than it would otherwise.”

  “I agree.” Hank nodded. “But you can see why I wanted to catch you all up on this before you left. Dr. Jensen has a lot of work to do before we need to decide on a course of action.”

  “I do,” Jensen agreed.

  The meeting started to break up, when Kemi’sfrota rapped her fist on the table in a fair approximation of what she had seen Hank do earlier.

  “Do the Jema have a say in this decision?”

  “Of course,” Hank answered.

  “We need the ability to go to Chandra, talk to the other clans. The Kaerin will not simply rest there.”

  “But we may be able to block them from attacking us,” Elisabeth countered.

  “There is the whole world of Chandra living under the Kaerin, if you can call slavery living. Are we being asked to forget them?”

  “It is something to consider,” Audy said in explanation to both him and Hank. “It is a sentiment with a great deal of support among the Jema. To put it in your terms, Jomra has been getting an earful from our people.”