Crucible of Time

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  “Cap’n,” Copernicus said, “I have a course laid in to where it really gets bad, if you want me to take it.”

  Bandicut raised his hands, trying to think clearly. Should I trust Ruall and Akura on this? If he took time to ask for clarification... “Yes,” he said. “Go!”

  The ship banked sharply left, and slipped precipitously downward for several seconds, before coiling back into a spiraling ascent, relative to some dimly perceived structure. In the viewspace, the clouds grew momentarily darker, and then burst back to life with popping lightning bolts. It didn’t seem that much different to Bandicut, but Copernicus called, “We’re now flying between two cloud banks with extreme energy potential building up. Frankly, Cap’n, it’s a dangerous place to be.”

  Akura spoke, and Sheeawn translated, his voice quavering a little, “If the Mindaru follow us here, we may be able to lead them into a discharge that will disable or destroy them.”

  Bandicut felt his hands clenching; he opened them and pressed them flat together, his index fingers against his lips. “That sounds good. Can you guide us out of it?”

  “Pretty sure,” said Sheeawn.

  Bandicut nodded. “Go ahead, then. Give directional updates directly to Copernicus.”

  The Uduon agreed, and called out to the robot.

  Bandicut watched with amazement and terror. As Ruall drifted near, he murmured, “When did you start understanding Uduon?”

  “I have been working on it,” Ruall hummed. “It’s no worse than learning your language.”

  Sheeawn said, “The Mindaru are following us in.”

  Outside, the clouds whistled and shrieked like maddened whales.

  ***

  Under the pilotage of Copernicus and the Uduon, The Long View threaded its way through what to Bandicut was an incomprehensible channel in the fiery maze. It felt as though they were navigating through synapses in a gigantic gaseous brain. “Can you tell when this thing is going to let go?” he asked, wondering if his own heart would burst before the discharge of energy blew them all to kingdom come. “And are you sure we can avoid it?”

  “We hope so, and we hope so,” Jeaves said.

  “Uh-huh,” Bandicut said, and turned to Akura. “What are you seeing now?”

  The Watcher’s face was still mostly obscured by her hood, and Sheeawn was pacing in front of her, but Bandicut could see that her features were tight with concentration. At first she seemed not to hear his question, but after a minute she murmured something, and Sheeawn barked, “Our course is good. She can feel it, a massive discharge building, like a great pressure under the ground. It is coming. Powerful enough to destroy anything solid, she thinks.”

  Bandicut’s hands had closed into a fist-clench again; this time he didn’t try to stop. “How soon?”

  “Very,” Sheeawn said, and then Akura launched into a stream of pathway descriptions and upcoming turns and accelerations, which Sheeawn passed at once to Copernicus.

  A keening sound came out of nowhere in the acoustic tracking, and a moment later came the twin thuds of two more shots from the Mindaru, weakened by their passage around the bends of the gaseous channels. Copernicus fired back a burst of his own, to goad them on; the kill, if it happened, would not come from their shots in here, but from the power of the Heart of Fire.

  The keening grew shriller, louder, nearly unbearable. The clouds that flanked them roiled and began to come together.

  Akura barked a command, and before Sheeawn could translate, Copernicus wrenched the ship up into a steep climb. Were the Mindaru following? The place where The Long View had been a moment ago erupted in a dazzling frenzy of light and lightning and what felt like exploding stars. The acoustic tracking screeched off the scale. Bandicut instinctively yelled, “Get us out of here!” even though they already were on their way.

  Everything behind them was lost in whiteout and supersaturation. The Long View was away, shuddering, heaving ominously but clear of ground zero. Copernicus had them twisting and turning through angry turbulence, plunging through some escape route that only he—or perhaps only Akura—could see. In the firestorm behind them, a faint shadow seemed to be following them. But another shadow was swallowed by the storm.

  Ruall gonged furiously. “Did we get them? Did they die?”

  Bandicut craned his neck to see Akura. She was holding her head. She cried out, her eyes blinking open. She said something that probably only Sheeawn could hear. He listened a moment and then shouted to the others, “We got one of them! She felt it die!”

  Ruall rang in uncertainty, and Sheeawn bent down, listening to more. Then he sprang upright and waved his hands wildly, shouting, “The other is damaged, but it’s coming after us. She thinks we can get it coming out!”

  Bandicut clapped his hands in anticipation. “Coppy, can you get us out of the clouds, and turn and hit it before it can get a sensor lock on us?”

  “Aye, Cap’n.” The ship dropped through the thinning clouds like a brick out of the sky. The acoustic signals fell to a low hiss. “We’ll be in the clear in about twenty seconds . . . fifteen . . . ten . . .”

  “Akura?” Bandicut asked.

  “It’s coming behind us, but her ability to sense is fading as we leave the energy flux,” Sheeawn said.

  The glowing gases whipped away from the viewspace, and they were out. “Coming around,” Copernicus said, maneuvering sharply back up into the edge of the cloud. They would take the Mindaru from behind when it came out. “There it is.”

  The enemy came out of the clouds sparkling with light like Saint Elmo’s fire. Copernicus calmly said, “Firing once, twice, thrice,” as a lance of light, a ball of fire, and a missile streaked out from The Long View.

  The Mindaru looked afire with electricity dancing along its spines. It was clearly damaged, and it was rotating—no, tumbling—perhaps trying to locate its foe.

  The three-spread from The Long View hit it: one two three. There was a flower of violet, and then a dazzling flare of diamond fire. The Mindaru turned into an expanding spot of brightness against space, became transparent, and faded.

  “It is destroyed,” Copernicus said.

  “Well done!” Bandicut shouted.

  “Who shall we go after now?”

  ***

  It took a few minutes to scan the area extending out to where the two remaining Mindaru had last been seen, pursued by Dark and Plato. One of the Mindaru had gotten out ahead of the other and was speeding toward Karellia. Dark was in pursuit. The second Mindaru had apparently turned to challenge Plato, and the two were engaged in a long-distance dogfight. Weapons fire flashed from time to time, but if any harm was being inflicted, it wasn’t visible to Copernicus or Jeaves.

  Ruall floated forward, perhaps restored by the recent victory. “John Bandicut?”

  Bandicut didn’t answer at once. He was concerned that Dakota’s ship might be out of its depth in that fight, but also worried that even that single Mindaru streaking toward the planet could pose an unacceptable risk to Karellia. “Yes, Ruall.”

  “Your leadership of that encounter was exemplary; and I am not yet ready to resume battle command. But I suggest we assist Dark in attacking the lead Mindaru first. Once it has been neutralized, we can go assist the human ship.”

  Bandicut couldn’t argue with the logical priority, but Ruall didn’t have a niece in danger out there in Plato. “Coppy, can you establish contact with Dark?”

  “Trying now, Cap’n.”

  Akura came forward and inclined her head in Bandicut’s direction. He was a little startled, and said the first thing that came to him, which was, “Great job back there. Thank you.”

  As Sheeawn repeated his words, in Uduon, Akura tilted her head and nodded. But she spoke again, and Sheeawn said, “You seem worried. Do we understand correctly that there is a ship out there with people you know, and care about?”

  Bandicut let out a sigh. “Yes. Humans like me. Including . . . my niece. My brother’s daughter.” It took a moment f
or Sheeawn to translate. When he finished, Akura put a hand on Bandicut’s arm, and bobbed her head several times. That small gesture touched Bandicut with surprising power. With all of their concerns about the two planets, this was perhaps the first time anyone here besides the robots had ever expressed any concern about his feelings.

  Before he could think of anything more to say, Copernicus reported on his conversation with Dark.

  “Cap’n, she says this Mindaru is a slippery one. The damn things are all different. She’s having trouble closing and holding it. If we can get to her, she wants to try something involving the foam we were talking about earlier.”

  “The quantum foam?”

  “Yes, Cap’n. All that energy popping in and out of existence from the vacuum. She wants to know if we can move in just close enough to box it in for a few moments. If we can, Dark will take it from there.” As Copernicus spoke, The Long View was accelerating to intercept.

  That left him a little puzzled, but the stones spoke up in his thoughts. *Dark is saying, frame the enemy with weapons fire. Restrict its maneuvering. That will give Dark a chance to do something clever—*

  /With the quantum vacuum—?/

  *I think we’ll see in a few minutes.*

  Looking around, it seemed to him that Ruall and Copernicus already got it. Akura and Sheeawn looked mystified. He would explain later, if there was a later. “If you understand, Coppy, can you follow Dark’s lead?”

  “Affirmative, Cap’n. In about two minutes, we’ll be close enough to get off some bracketing shots.”

  “At your discretion.”

  Copernicus acknowledged, but before he was able to do anything, a series of flashes erupted from the Mindaru. It was not waiting passively for them. The first two hit The Long View’s shielding and shook the ship. The next two missed, as Copernicus maneuvered. A stream of fire came from the Mindaru, until they were corkscrewing wildly to keep from absorbing too much energy. Bandicut began cursing quietly, then not so quietly. The Mindaru was keeping them too far away to get in any shots of their own.

  *This is good. This is good,* the stones said.

  “How is this good?” Bandicut shouted, startling the others on the bridge.

  *It’s keeping the Mindaru occupied. It’s flying a straight line. Dark is slipping in . . .*

  Even as the stones spoke, Bandicut thought he caught a glimpse of a shadow moving across the field—maybe it was the stones that gave him the vision—and a moment later, something seemed to glitch in the display, and the Mindaru appeared to freeze, abruptly halting fire.

  *Dark is manipulating all those trillions of particle-pairs appearing spontaneously from the vacuum—matter and antimatter.*

  /And—/

  *And when the pairs come back together and mutually annihilate—*

  At that instant there was a flash of actinic light where the Mindaru was, not a point, but a patch of light that left Bandicut’s eyes strobing with afterimages. When it faded, he saw nothing where the Mindaru had been. /Is that what happens when a trillion particle pairs recombine and mutually annihilate?/ he asked, awestruck.

  *Apparently so,* murmured his stones.

  “It is destroyed,” Copernicus announced. “Reported by Dark, confirmed by our own scans.”

  “Damn. Hot damn!” Bandicut yelled. “Way to go, Dark!” He paused for breath and gazed hopefully at the beachball-sized planet of Karellia floating in the viewspace. They had protected it one more time. Behind him, Akura and Sheeawn were gesturing and chattering excitedly.

  Bandicut shook a fist in triumph. “All right, then, let’s go help Plato!”

  Dark wheeled in space and sped off ahead of them.

  Chapter 23

  Long Shot

  FOR DAKOTA BANDICUT, the pursuit of ghosts across the interstellar void was both stressful and tedious in the extreme, maybe more so than for her shipmates. They all were worried about getting back alive from this crazy pursuit, but Dakota had the added worry that if something more went wrong, it would be her fault. She had urged going after her uncle’s ship, and Captain Brody had agreed to it.

  But none of them had counted on more of those hostile things, the Mindaru, popping out of the starstream and streaking right past Plato (at a safe distance, fortunately) in the same direction. If that hadn’t been alarming enough, the targets were observed, on the long-range scanners, to have gone through some kind of transformation from a ghostly echo into solid spacecraft. Plato’s sensors couldn’t get much of a read on them, except that they seemed like solid-state objects with no internal air space, and therefore presumably crewless, and very powerful. They appeared to be heading in exactly the same direction as Plato—on the faint trail of her uncle’s ship, The Long View.

  The crew of Plato were a solid and loyal team, and no one openly complained about their off-the-books pursuit of something this dangerous, but it was obvious that few of them liked the idea. Captain Brody clearly didn’t like it, either, but turning back was not a great option. They had no way to get back into the starstream without a years-long journey; and if they couldn’t reach an entry node, their journey home would be measured in many more years. Their k-space drive was many times better than lightspeed, but that was still a lot slower than the n-space of the starstream. And so, they flew headlong into the unknown, and a possible fight, aiming for a mysterious star system two and a half light-years away. Whatever the star system was, there seemed to be a lot of interest in it.

  ***

  Alone, off shift, in her cabin, Dakota gazed up at the ceiling, pondering the state of affairs she had helped bring about. Could things possibly have gone any more differently from her expectations when she’d stepped aboard, back at High Concept? Her mind was churning, and writing to Harrad seemed the best way to corral her thoughts. She shook her head, rocked forward in her chair, and started typing:

  Harrad, Luv,

  What is this, feels like the tenth time I’ve written you since we were thrown out of the starstream. It always feels foolish, and probably is, knowing how unlikely it is that you’ll see any of these messages before you see me—assuming I get back in one piece. But still I want to put my thoughts down. Since we may be heading into conflict, there’s always the chance that Plato will survive but I won’t. That’s pretty unlikely, and I don’t say it to be morbid—but if it happens, I hope you’ll at least get these little snippets of my thought. I’ve recorded some holo for you, too, but sometimes I seem to think more clearly when I’m writing.

  Every day, I ask myself why we are doing this—why I, of all people, urged us to do this. I so want to get back to you, more than I can tell you! But we have our responsibility to protect the starstream, and human space. I don’t necessarily think it will come to that. But my translator-stones consider it that important. My human head has to agree. And my human heart can’t abide standing by while my uncle flees before these things, whatever they are. We have to help, if we can.

  We are now just a few days out from the star system we’ve labeled “Geronimo A.” The things we presume to be Mindaru are still ahead of us, but we don’t know exactly how far, and won’t until we drop out of k-space. We were tracking a blip that we thought was The Long View, but it barely paused at Geronimo A and went right on through the energetic nebula that envelops the whole binary system, toward Geronimo B, the other star in the system. No idea what it did there, but it or something like it came back a few days later. Is it even my uncle’s ship? I think it is, but at this distance we can’t be sure.

  If so, I’m worried for it, because the first of the Mindaru we tracked arrived at A right around the same time. We picked up some energy discharges, and then both of them flew off toward B! It’s got us all mystified. Tracking through k-space is tricky at best, so there’s a lot of guesswork in our analysis.

  Well, I do want to have some of this transcribed—just in case—but that’s not the real reason I’m writing. I’m writing to let you know I love you, and I can’t wait to get back to
you. (Although I hope you hear it from my lips before there’s any reason for you to be sifting through my stack of messages!) How are you, and how is your sis? How’s the alt’spatial vision study coming? Found a way yet for us to mimic the eyesight of those Parasian doves? Seeing in five dimensions could really be handy for us right about now.

  Drat. Don’t you know, it’s almost time for me to go back on shift. More later. Love you.

  DB

  ***

  Two days later, tracking indicated that the two Mindaru ahead of Plato had slowed and dropped into normal-space as they entered the outer region of the Geronimo A star system. Taking stock of the situation, probably. Whatever the reason, it gave Plato a chance to catch up, if they were quick about it. Plato’s crew were now preparing as best they could for various first-contact scenarios, and also for battle.

  Not everyone was convinced that what they were doing made any sense. At Dakota’s request, Captain Brody called the officers and department heads together for a briefing. “I’m going to let Commander Bandicut run this meeting,” he said, once they were all gathered around the briefing room table. “She has something she wants to share with you.” He extended a hand. “Exo?”

  Dakota took a minute to look over the roomful of officers, and give them a chance to absorb her serious intent. Then she began: “Some of you are wondering why we are, to put it baldly, sticking our necks out so far on the long shot of pursuing these targets that we know so little about. Especially since the first one that we met, back in the starstream, displayed alarming hostility and striking power.” That brought nods. “You already know that one reason is concern for the safety of the friendly contact we made in the stream—and yes, one of the people on that ship is my uncle—but our reasoning goes way beyond that. His ship also represents an important first-contact with an extremely advanced culture. Another reason for pursuit, obviously, is concern for the inhabitants of that planet ahead of us. But I want to share a third reason with you. And in order to do that, I must first share something else.”