Crucible of Time

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  “Hrrrrrl,” Ik growled. “Our friends are there.”

  “John Bandicut and Li-Jared,” Antares whispered. “This puts them in great danger!”

  Arak rasped sharply. “That we cannot help. Mindaru are loose in the stream. Our job is to prevent more of them from getting there. Watts, anything more from our team?”

  Watts trembled. “Telemetry is static. Crew contact currently unreadable.”

  Arak made a noise like a snarling dog. “What can you pick up? The crew is right here—in the pod! Why can you not—”

  “Because of risk of decoherence. As long as we still have entanglement. Hope remains. I dare not meddle. We could lose them if it decoheres.”

  Arak snarled again and turned away.

  Antares pushed forward, putting herself in front of Arak, clearly unwilling to let him off so easily about Bandicut and Li-Jared. “I ask you again, sir, what of the danger to our friends on mission at Karellia? Do you have no communication with them? Can’t you warn them? Their mission is closely connected to what you are doing here.”

  Arak sounded annoyed. “Why would we have communication? Their sponsors did not trouble to send us details of their mission. We can only guess what they hope to accomplish.”

  That was enough for Julie. “That’s just bullshit! Aren’t they risking their lives to try to stop the Mindaru, too? Why aren’t you talking to each other?”

  “Which would accomplish what?” Arak rattled. “What are we doing that affects them? Or them, us?”

  Ik rocked his head back and forth and tapped the side of his head with a long finger, as though pondering the question. “What, hrrm, might affect them? Allowing Mindaru into the timestream? That might harm them. Breaking the timestream? That might harm them. Mindaru leaving the starstream near Karellia? That might harm them. Should they not be warned?”

  Cromus raised a pincer and tapped it closed a couple of times. “Perhap-p-ps that is so. But we have no communication-n, so what can we do to help them?”

  Julie tried to answer, but she had no words.

  Antares did, however. “You can do this: Help me try to find a way to contact them and warn them.”

  “From here-re?” Cromus said. “We have no long-ng-range c-capability here.”

  Antares tapped a finger on Cromus’s foreclaw, which twitched in response. “What about from here back to Shipworld? Do you have that? Something in realtime? Through the star-spanner, maybe?”

  Cromus pulled his big pincer back to his thorax and acknowledged that they did.

  “Then while my friends here help you deal with the mess you’ve made of your second mission, here’s what else you need to do.” She put a hand on the robot’s head. “Allow Napoleon access to the information from Ik and Julie’s galactic core mission and from this second one. And give me access to communications back to Shipworld.”

  Arak raised two of his hands warily. “Communication to whom?”

  Antares opened her own hands wide. “To the yaantel. Perhaps to Amaduse.”

  “Who or what,” Arak rasped, “is Amaduse?”

  “He is a librarian. He knows more than you imagine about these missions.”

  Over Arak’s rumble of uncertainty, Cromus spread his pincers wide. “I have heard of this librarian. But how will that help?”

  “If there is a way to get word to John and Li-Jared, Amaduse and the yaantel will know it,” Antares said. Her voice was flat and steely with determination. She turned to gaze at Ik and Julie. “My friends, Napoleon and I will do what we can here. You see what you can do to help with the time travel emergency—yes?”

  “Hrrm, that will have to be seen.” Ik rolled his gaze back to Arak and Cromus. “You have not told us what you expect us to do.”

  Arak barked, “Give us the benefit of your experience! Help us help the mission team!”

  Ik raised his hands in exasperation, but Watts interrupted with, “Alarm at the launch point! Instability in the ghoststream.”

  “What kind of—?” Arak began.

  “Voltage spike in the entanglement circuit. No voice from the team, but a distress beacon has been activated.”

  Arak made a sound like an electrical short. He pressed something on his shoulder. “Ready transport to the launch point.” To Ik and Julie he said, “I need you to accompany me. Now.”

  Julie could only nod numbly. But Ik said, “Wait!” and turned to Antares. “You stay here and—hrah!—do what you said you would do, yes?” He asked Cromus and Arak, “Will you assist her, as she asked?” When Cromus clicked in the affirmative, Ik said to Antares, “We will send word when we can.”

  “We must go!” Arak snapped, and herded them away to the star-spanner platform, leaving Antares and Napoleon behind, with Cromus.

  ***

  This local spanner bubble felt to Julie like a flying command center. Arak spoke little to them; he was busy keeping tabs on everything that was happening in the black hole system. Data-holos kept popping up and disappearing all over the inside of the bubble. Arak was not silent, though; he was in constant, raspy communication with a series of voices the stones could not, or did not, translate.

  Julie focused on what she could see outside. One distant object, closer to the black hole, seemed to be their destination: a cylindrical structure wreathed in coils, with spiky protuberances at one end. From the other end shone a spectral beam of light, shooting off to the right toward the glowing, mottled central disk of the Milky Way. She knew without asking: that was the ghoststream, or a carrier for it. The energy that powered it presumably was coming from the black hole, but how that was accomplished, she could not see.

  At one point, Arak paused in his agitated communications and stood twitching his fingers. He glanced in Julie’s direction, and she caught his eye and said, “The team. What can you tell us about them?”

  Arak sputtered, clearly not welcoming the question.

  Welcome or not, Julie persisted. “I mean it. Who are they? What kind of people are they?”

  Arak seemed shocked that she would ask such questions at a time like this. “What possible difference does it make?”

  “Hrah!” Ik said. He had grasped at once what Julie was trying to do. “If we are to advise them on defense against the Mindaru, it is best, hrah, we know what—” rasp “—stuff they are made of.”

  Arak’s face distorted in what Julie took to be displeasure. But he said, “All right. There are three crew members, they are clan-brothers of the Ratan race. They are officers of the home defense forces.”

  “Hrah—warriors?”

  “Yes,” Arak said. “Elite. Part of a unit trained in close virtual coordination.”

  Julie and Ik looked at each other. Virtual coordination? “Do they have enhancements?” Ik asked, tapping his head with a finger.

  “Of course they do,” Arak said. At that moment, several holo reports sprang up, and he turned to respond. Outside, the cylindrical station was growing large in the viewport. When Arak gave them his attention again, he was even less patient than before. “Definitely under attack! What are your suggestions?”

  Ik’s voice grew sharp with distress. “You must ask them—can they shut down their enhancements? At once?”

  Arak shook his head. “I don’t think contact is clear enough. Look, we are arriving.”

  ***

  Outside, the station mushroomed in size. The deck trembled, and with an abrupt flash of silver and dark, they were inside and docked. Arak led them out of the bubble and through some glass doors, and they started across a hangar area that looked larger and more rough-edged than the one they had used for their own mission. Against the far wall was a huge cylindrical apparatus like an enormous rocket on its side, with coils and studs that seemed to mirror the outside of the main structure. This, Arak confirmed, was the particle-stream launcher. It looked immense compared to the one that had sent the two of them into the past, but it also had an unfinished look. Its end on the right passed through a half-silvered hangar wall, wh
ere it emitted the beam of ghostly violet light Julie had seen before.

  “That’s where they are, physically,” Arak said, gesturing to a bulge in the cylinder before turning sharply to the right to lead them into an open control area. “But we can’t reach them physically, not while they are in the entangled state.”

  “What would happen if you just opened it?” Julie asked.

  Arak cocked his head in a gesture that looked almost human. “A catastrophic release of energy, I should think. We have never tried it. There is a precarious balance of extremely high energies being maintained inside that machine.”

  A rugged-looking, shaggy-haired individual with a mashed-in face and five arms met them as they entered the control circle. “Targus,” Arak said. “These are the first-mission time-travelers. Update, please.” To Ik and Julie he said, “Targus is Launch Director.”

  “We have contact, barely,” Targus said.

  “Let us hear.”

  They crowded around a console. Still images of three crewmen were on-screen, with rippling concentric circles beneath the right-hand one, presumably the one speaking. His face had fur, and a snout; his eyes were bright. “Trying to get back . . . outrace them . . . pursuing hard.”

  Arak took the comm. “This is Arak. Are they attempting to penetrate your AI network? Are they hacking you?”

  “Yes. Yes. Firewall down . . .”

  Ik winced visibly and said to Arak. “Hrah! You must ask them, can they shut their enhancements down—can they shut everything down? Everything!”

  Arak looked to Targus. “Could they get back without intelligence aids?”

  “I am not certain—”

  “You must!” Ik barked. “Ask them!”

  Arak spoke into the comm. “We are informed it may be impossible to stop Mindaru entry once they get in. Can you shut everything down? All AI systems?”

  “Including their own enhancements!” Ik shouted.

  “Personal AI. System AI. Everything!” Arak said.

  The face looked distressed. “We would . . . blind . . . deaf . . .”

  Arak looked at Ik, who raised his left fist in confirmation. “That is right,” Arak said into the comm. “Come back blind, but don’t let the enemy penetrate your intelligence systems, under any circumstances.” He glared at Ik. “Are you certain of this? Are you certain we’re not killing them?”

  Ik said nothing for a moment. He’d lowered his left hand, but was continuing to rhythmically squeeze the long fingers of both hands into fists, down at his sides. Finally he answered, “If they get back with their AI on, and they are Mindaru infested—”

  “What?” Arak said. “You think they will—”

  “They will kill us all,” Ik said.

  ***

  For the next two minutes, they waited with growing suspense as crude position estimates came in from the monitoring teams. The crew had gone deaf and blind, and there were no longer even telemetry signals to track them by.

  “How long?” Arak asked Targus, who was questioning every controller who had any information.

  “I do not—”

  Targus was interrupted by a dazzling starburst, through the half-silvered wall of the hangar. A thundering WHUMMP! shook the station, and through a dazzling afterimage that left Julie reeling, she was aware of people running in many different directions. Blinking furiously and hanging with both hands onto the console’s edge, she tried to see what was happening at the launcher. When the afterimage faded enough for her to see again, she made out two things.

  The ghoststream had gone dark, and the giant, cylindrical launcher was enveloped in blue smoke.

  ***

  Recovery operations began at once with a swarm of suited personnel and heavy equipment crowded around the launcher.

  “What caused that?” Ik asked, his normally rock-steady voice trembling a little. He looked more shaken than Julie had ever seen him; this had to be visceral reminder of his own near-fatal encounters.

  Arak was swinging his multiple arms in agitation. He was shaken too, she thought. “Apparently the . . . entanglement feedback . . . peaked destructively.”

  “But why? Because of the energy surge? Because of the attempt to close off the timestream?” Julie asked.

  Arak turned to bark several questions, or commands, into the comm. Then he said, “Magnified somehow. The team was trying to block the Mindaru. When they shut down their AIs, they might not have been able to control the surge anymore.” With his uppermost hand, Arak rubbed wearily at his forehead. “It is hard to know.”

  In a few minutes, Targus came back. “It is terrible,” he said. “The power was terrible. They had no chance.”

  Julie accepted that soberly, while wondering, What the hell are we doing here? We don’t know anything about this. Did we just make matters worse? Did we kill those three?

  But Targus turned his ruined-looking face toward her and Ik. His eyes were now blotches of scarlet. “I can assure you,” he said. “We do all possible to ensure the safety of ghoststream operations. But you understand, yes, these are emergency conditions?” He extended one of his hands to Arak and began reeling off some technical information.

  Julie met Ik’s gaze. Were we part of the cause? Ik, she knew, was thinking the same thing. Stones? But the stones remained silent.

  When Targus finished the breathless technical rundown with Arak, he suddenly included Ik and Julie in the conversation again. “We will make adjustments. For the next mission.”

  “What next mission?” Julie asked harshly. “Are you trying to tell us someone can travel safely—after that?”

  “Hrah!” said Ik. “I want to know what happened to the last team, and why!”

  Julie said, “We know there was a power surge, but . . .”

  Targus produced an expression that did not improve the appearance of his face. “That is nearly all we know.”

  Ik’s voice was barely a growl. “Rrrrm, you must know more than that. How did they die?”

  Julie suddenly wished she knew more about those three departed souls—or else maybe that she’d never heard of them. Who had they left behind when they died?

  Targus glanced at Arak, who made a clicking sound—apparently signifying permission to speak. “We have no physical remains to examine. The collapse of the strained entanglement over such a span . . .” Targus paused, perhaps searching for words. “The molecules of their bodies . . . likely disassociated in the moment of the flash. Essentially instantaneous.”

  Julie tried to stop thinking about the three, tried to stop thinking of herself in their place.

  “We will attempt to gain information,” Targus continued. “From the instruments and AI memory—”

  Ik’s face froze, and then he shouted, hands flying up, “No! You must not!”

  Targus’s hollowed-out face looked even more distressed. “Why? We must learn what happened.”

  Ik took a single stride forward, his long-fingered hands practically framing Targus’s face. “If there was any chance that the AI was exposed to the Mindaru, you must not try to connect to it!”

  “But,” Targus protested, “if we cannot analyze whatever is available, we cannot avoid repeating—”

  “NO!” Ik’s bark caused Targus to jerk back. Ik lowered his voice, but his tone was commanding. “You must not!”

  Arak started to rasp out a question, but Ik brought him to silence with a chopping gesture. “It is because—” and he paused to take a slow, deliberate breath “—if your intelligence systems came into contact with Mindaru in any way, they could be infected. And if infected—”

  “Hrrrk-k-k,” said Arak. “Here on the station we have tools to deal with infection.”

  “Not this infection.”

  Another rasp. “I think you underestimate our—”

  “Not this infection! If you have never dealt with it, you cannot know. I have, and it nearly killed me, and it did kill my voice—my yaantel-stones!” Ik took a moment to compose himself. “You said you
wanted our help because of our experience with the Mindaru. If you meant that, then listen to me! You must physically destroy the intelligence memory, if any of it remains.”

  Arak hissed a slow breath in and out. “We did seek your experience.” He turned to Julie. “And you?”

  She swallowed, remembering all too vividly. “When I faced something like this, the yaantel and I destroyed it by throwing it into our sun.”

  Arak winced. With one eye still scanning the two of them, he said to Targus, “You must destroy the memory core, then.”

  “Not just the core,” Ik said. “All of it. Any component that could conceivably carry any trace of activity.”

  “That would be the whole structure,” Targus said. “The physical crew compartment is embedded with programmable matter.”

  “At once, then!” Ik said. “Quickly! Down to the molecular level!”

  Targus tapped the fingers of two hands together. “I am not certain how—”

  “Magnetic containment,” Arak said. “Incinerate, then shoot it into the black hole. Yes?” That last was to Ik and Julie.

  Ik said, “I have no better suggestion.”

  Julie said nothing. She was still shuddering at the possibility of Mindaru malware invading the systems they would use to travel in time.

  “That leaves us precious little data,” said Targus. “Adjusting the next mission—your next mission—now even more urgent. I am sorry. We will—”

  “Hrah,” Ik cried. “What do you mean, our next mission? You have not yet told us the goal of the next mission! Do you expect us to try to stop the Mindaru that just killed this crew?”

  Arak brought three of his hands together. His voice was thick and harsh as he said, “That is not possible, I think. No, we want you to look for a way to stop the entry of any more Mindaru into the timestream. Find another way, without triggering . . . this . . .” The three hands parted as he extended his arms toward the wreckage.