by Terry Mixon
“That means our on-scene data is delayed by approximately six hours. The general data from the system that the main probe gathers via gravitic scanners is timelier but only details the ship movements and what can be gathered by time-delayed observation.
“Status update: we’ve just received a new data packet, and a number of previously hidden vessels have activated their drives and become visible to the probes through gravitic scanners. That would be the ambush force that you predicted, Admiral. They’re moving to block the Clan forces from retreating.”
Well then, it looked as if things were about to get interesting for the Clans.
He was about to say something to that effect when the hatch leading into the corridor opened, and Elise stepped inside. Standing right behind her was Lily Stone. Weirdly, his wife looked… anxious.
He surged to his feet. “What’s wrong?”
Lily held up a hand and smiled reassuringly. “Absolutely nothing. Your wife is in excellent health. I’m only here to see Kelsey.”
Elise nodded and smiled. “And while they’re chatting, I have something to tell you.”
Kelsey was surprised when Lily led her down to Invincible’s medical center. She tried to ask her friend what was going on, but Lily only shook her head. “We’ll talk when I get to somewhere a little bit more private.”
“You’re starting to scare me,” Kelsey said. “Is something wrong with Elise that you just didn’t want to tell Jared?”
“If there was, I couldn’t tell you. But in this case, Elise has given me permission to speak freely about what she’s telling Jared right now. I just don’t want to do that in public. It’s nothing bad, but it’s private.”
Kelsey wasn’t reassured.
Lily wouldn’t be behaving this way if something weren’t wrong. Maybe she was a cynic, but the last few years had taught her that a healthy dose of cynicism was a good thing. It prepared one for when things went sideways.
Her second surprise was when Lily didn’t take her to one of the offices but straight to one of the diagnostic tables. Her friend waved a hand at the doctors and medical personnel nearby, shooing them off before she activated the privacy screen so that they could speak without prying ears.
“Pop up here, and I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Lily said. “I need to take a scan of you to verify something while I do. Lie back.”
She did as instructed, but she was growing more nervous by the moment. “Spill.”
“It looks like the EMP on Terra damaged Elise’s contraceptive implant. She’s about six weeks pregnant. I’m checking you to see whether or not you’re in the same condition.”
Kelsey’s mind went blank. “Pregnant? I can’t be pregnant. We’re going to attack the master AI very soon. Please, tell me that my implant is still working.”
“You know how you’re always saying that you have to overcome adversity as a Marine Raider?” Lily asked with a wry smile. “Now you’re going to have to overcome something a lot more challenging. You’re pregnant, Kelsey.”
Kelsey lay there, stunned. How could that possibly be? She’d never even imagined having children.
Oh, sure, she’d known that she would have to continue the Bandar line, but that was years in the future. She and Talbot hadn’t even discussed the possibility of children.
“Oh, my God,” she said as she sat up abruptly. “What’s Talbot going to say?”
“He’s going to be thrilled,” Lily said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It looks like your implant failed on Terra itself. You’re a bit more than five months pregnant. You’re going to start showing in another month or so. You’re lucky that you didn’t have morning sickness like Elise. That would’ve been miserable. Marine Raider augmentation for the win!”
“Oh, this is so not good.”
“Good or bad, that’s the way it is,” Lily said pragmatically. “Would you like to know the sex of your baby?”
Numbly, Kelsey nodded.
“You’re going to have a girl,” Lily said with a grin. “I’m sure that both Talbot and your father will be thrilled. Your mother too.”
Kelsey sat there in shock. How was she going to be able to care for a child when they were in the middle of a war? Worse, how was she going to keep Talbot from grounding her ass during this critical assault? Humanity needed her.
“This is all confidential, right?” she asked. “You can’t say anything about it unless I give my explicit permission.”
Lily nodded. “I won’t say a word until and unless you give me permission to do so. How you tell your husband and Jared is up to you.”
“And so is not telling them at all, at least for the moment.”
Her friend’s eyes widened. “Kelsey, you’re well protected inside your powered armor, but going into combat would risk the child. As a medical professional, I can’t endorse that.”
“You’re right,” Kelsey said with a sigh. “I’m going to ask them to keep it quiet for now. Thanks for letting me know.”
“I’ll always be here for you,” Lily said, relaxing slightly as she gave Kelsey a hug. “I want you to come to see me for a more detailed workup when you have time. We can develop your prenatal plan then.”
“I’ll do that.”
What she wouldn’t do was tell her husband or Jared. Humanity was depending on her, and while it was a horrible risk, they still needed her skill and ability. She didn’t want to risk a child—her child—in this fight, but if they failed, the little girl inside her wouldn’t have a life worth living.
She couldn’t tell anyone that she was pregnant.
8
Carl watched as the light show repeated itself over and over again. He was absolutely certain that he was looking at a map of the flip point network throughout the entire Milky Way, only he doubted it was accurate.
It might have been at one time, but flip points changed as stars moved. When two stars became separated over time, the flip point between them disappeared. It had happened inside the old Terran Empire a few times over its long history, so this was established science.
If the age of the dinosaurs was any marker, the aliens who’d created this map had done so on the order of seventy million years ago. Over that kind of time frame, virtually every single flip point that didn’t go to a star in the same cluster would’ve been severed, while new connections would have been made with stars that wandered through.
Hell, in seventy million years, the Milky Way had rotated around its central core almost a third of an orbit. Any kind of large-scale organization that might have existed in the distant past was undoubtedly gone. Not only would the constellations visible from Terra have drastically changed, so would the makeup of the entire galactic neighborhood.
That didn’t mean that what they’d found was unimportant, though. Whoever these aliens had been, they’d had enough knowledge to create a map of the entire flip point network for a galaxy. Just traveling from one side of the Milky Way to the other would’ve taken lifetimes for anyone using the technology that the Empire had.
The aliens obviously knew something humans didn’t, or they’d had a method for mapping the flip point network that was far beyond what the Terran Empire at its height could envision.
Carl paced around the circumference of the glowing map, tapping into the feed from the drones that Talbot had made available to him. Assuming that the place where the map started flashing was the planet on which they stood, he had a map of what that area looked like. Comparing it with what he had stored in his implants confirmed what he’d already guessed. The maps were significantly different.
“What are you finding?” Talbot asked. “Is this really a map of the entire galaxy?”
“Undoubtedly,” Carl confirmed. “Only, it’s out of date by about seventy million years, so it won’t be helpful in figuring out anything about our current situation. What I want to know is why they left it here and why it chose to reveal itself to us.
“Well, actually, I want to know how it’s powered and how
it works, but I doubt whether I’m going to be able to figure that out in the limited time we have. Why would aliens transport a bunch of dinosaurs so far from Terra? And then, once they’d done so, why did they set up a trigger to announce the presence of this obelisk when Terrans arrived?”
Talbot scratched his chin. “It’s more likely that they set it up so that it announced its presence as soon as anyone landed on the surface. It did so right after we touched down.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Everything seems so targeted that I’m wondering whether multiple conditions had to be met to get that signal. Otherwise, why not just announce its presence as soon as ships arrived in orbit? Surely something this advanced knew the moment we appeared in this system.”
His friend frowned. “You think it was specifically waiting for humans? Why?”
“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, though I suspect that any being from Terra would have sufficed.”
Talbot blinked. “What’s a dollar, and why would I want sixty-four thousand of them?”
Carl waved off the question. “Never mind. It’s just something that Kelsey picked up from some old entertainment vids. Translated, you’ve asked the most important question of all. I’d wager something is controlling the entire network of nanites. For some reason, the aliens wanted to keep the life on this world the way they left it.
“I feel pretty confident that when you came into contact with the velociraptors or the plants, some of the nanites inside them got into your system. From what I understand about how they work, they deactivated themselves, but they could have sent some kind of message back along the control network, saying that beings from Terra had arrived on the planet.
“While humans didn’t come along until long after the dinosaurs were harvested, we share some common genetic characteristics. Whatever controls the nanites would’ve known that we shared a birth world, and that may have been the trigger for summoning us here and showing us this.”
Carl shook his head and sighed. “I just don’t understand why they wanted us to see it. They had to have known, simply based on the types of animals they’d harvested, that it would be a very long time—if ever—before Terra produced a sentient race with interstellar capabilities. Considering how few aliens we’ve encountered, the odds were very much stacked against that outcome.
“Yet they went to the trouble of harvesting plants and animals that were common on Terra seventy-plus million years ago and relocated them to a world that they almost certainly had to have terraformed.
“Why? What were we supposed to gain by seeing this map? As a reward, it’s very cool but ultimately useless.”
“Then there has to be something else,” Talbot said evenly. “Everything has a purpose, even if we have no idea what it might be. The aliens went to a lot of trouble setting this up for us, and now that we’ve arrived at the party, we’re supposed to get a present, right? Or is this some kind of test?”
Carl blinked. If this was some kind of test, what exactly were the parameters? There had to be a question asked for it to be answered. What did this image ask of him?
“I’m going to try something,” he said.
Without waiting for a response, Carl walked back to the center of the room and stood on the smaller oval. He could still detect the repeating signal that he’d triggered to turn the map on. What he was about to try would probably fail, but it was the only way he could think of to answer the implied question.
He transmitted the same signal he’d used to activate the map but sped up the pulses. He kept sending the signal, increasing the speed by a small increment each time. It might not be the solution to the question asked, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
The area over his head exploded with light as the map rearranged itself as if it were speeding through time. He couldn’t comprehend even a small part of what he was seeing, so he didn’t even try. He waited until it had finished and displayed the map in a relatively static form once again.
As before, the map began at a single point, and the flip points from there began illuminating themselves. He compared the small section of a map that he had in his implants with what was being displayed and discovered that the two were now virtually identical. The only difference that he could see was that his version didn’t have a few of the permutations this new map had.
That might very well be because he hadn’t finished exploring all the branches of the local multiflip point node, or it might be because all the alien device was doing was projecting possibilities. Even if there were some differences, what he was looking at now had the potential for getting them to Twilight River.
He ran the map through his implants and found what looked like Twilight River. There was a far flip point there that looked like it went to a system with a branch of the multiflip point node that they’d recently visited. If this map was accurate, there was a path to Twilight River.
“What just happened?” Talbot asked. “Did you blow it up?”
Carl shook his head and grinned. “I think I found us a way to get to the master AI. Now all we have to do is get out of here and tell someone.”
Elise sat down at the table, took Jared’s hands in hers, and pulled him down to sit beside her. “I’m fine, but I’m afraid I have shocking news. You’re going to be a father.”
She could feel the tears starting to gather at the corners of her eyes. They were tears of joy, but she knew from long experience that men couldn’t tell the difference, so she needed to be overtly reassuring.
“Before you say anything,” she continued, “I want you to know how happy this makes me. I’m about six weeks along. Are you ready for another shock? It’s twins. I know their sex and can tell you if you want to know.”
Her husband leaned forward and gathered her into his arms, squeezing her tightly. “This is wonderful!”
She held him tightly, crying for real now. She’d known that he’d be happy for her—for both of them—but it was a relief to have it out in the open.
The two of them sat there for long minutes, just holding one another and saying nothing. Eventually, Jared pulled back and wiped his own tears away on his sleeve. He squared his shoulders.
“Tell me.”
“Identical twin boys. Lily says they’re perfectly healthy. That brings up another problem for us to solve. What shall we name them?”
“Should we name them yet?” he asked. “I don’t want to be a pessimist, but we’re a long way from home, and a lot could happen before we get there.”
She gripped his hands tighter. “We can at least talk about names. They don’t become official until a child is born in any case, at least on Pentagar. I’d imagine customs are similar in the New Terran Empire.”
He nodded. “If you have no objection, I’d like to put a couple of names up for consideration. When I was a boy, I had the best pair of granduncles you could imagine. Jim and Joe were there for me when I was growing up. My grandfather died in an accident before I was born, so they filled in for him.
“They’re still a big part of my life, even though I rarely get back to Xander to see them these days. It would mean a lot to me if we could think about James and Joseph.”
She nodded. “They won’t technically be Mertzes, since they’ll have my name, but they’re just as much a part of the Mertz family as they are the Orisons. When we get back home, you’ll have to send them word that they’re going to be great-granduncles.”
“They’ll be thrilled. They won’t be able to take them out to the woods like they did me because they’re getting up in age, but with modern medical treatments, they’re still both going to be there for them growing up.”
He leaned back and looked at her. “This is going to be complicated. Not only will they be princes on Pentagar, they’ll also inherit the Dutchy of East Bay on Xander one day. I suppose they’re also princes of the blood in the New Terran Empire since they have the blood of emperors in their veins.”
She chuckled. “One of these days, someone is going
to look back at their family tree and go, what happened here? What is this big knot?”
He laughed. “They’re not going to have to wonder. They’ll know their parentage from the beginning. I don’t want our children to have to go through what I did when I found out the truth. It would’ve been a lot simpler for me to know how convoluted things were right from the very start.
“I suppose we could simplify things for them a little bit. Whoever the oldest one is, he’s going to be the heir to the Kingdom of Pentagar one day. I think it would be fair if the other one is the heir to East Bay. That way, no one gets shafted.”
She nodded. “That makes perfect sense, and it’s wise of you to think so far ahead. They’re going to appreciate that when they grow up. I’m so thrilled that you’re happy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How could I be unhappy to hear that our family is growing? Yes, the timing is inconvenient, but one of the things I’ve learned in life is that you have to work with the circumstances you’re given. You are happy about this, right?”
She nodded with only her smile answering his question. She couldn’t explain to him how she felt, because “happy” didn’t cover just how much love she was feeling at this very moment. Her life had taken a turn that she hadn’t anticipated, and she was thrilled.
“Do we want to tell anyone about this?” he asked.
“I don’t have any objections.”
He raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “Marcus? Are you listening?”
“The subroutine responsible for privacy is listening at this moment. Should I terminate the subroutine and pass this conversation on to my larger self?”
“Please do.”
A moment passed. “I’m happy for you,” Marcus said. “Though I can see that I’m going to have to do some research. I knew that biological beings reproduced in this fashion, but I’d never considered the possibility that anyone I knew could grow other beings inside them. It’s somewhat… unsettling.”
