by M. R. Forbes
The repulser sled beneath them wouldn't make much noise at all, unlike the rockets that used to get things into space. Instead, they floated upwards almost silently, the massive sled bringing the even more massive starship up into the sky.
"Command, we have liftoff," Yousefi said with a satisfied smile.
Command cheered over the comm channel. Kathy could picture the thousands gathered to watch the moment cheering, along with the billions who were seeing it on screens around the globe.
They rose ever higher, the sled gaining momentum over time. By the third minute, they were approaching the atmosphere.
"All systems optimal," Captain Pathi reported.
"Kind of boring, really," Bonnie said, though her face betrayed her. She was wearing a huge smile, her eyes like saucers.
And then they were out into space.
Kathy watched her screen and waited for confirmation that the sequence had gone as programmed. "Sled released, Admiral. Standard thrusters firing." The thrusters would pull them out of orbit.
"Congratulations, team. We're in space," Yousefi said.
Kathy stared out the view screen. They were facing away from Earth, but it was true. There was nothing in front of them but stars - open space that was a whole new frontier for them to explore. A tear of joy made its way to her eye, and she left it to run down her cheek while she said a prayer of thanks.
"FTL engine is coming online," Captain Pathi said. "Two minutes to FTL test."
It was the moment of truth. All of the simulations had been successful, but the nature of FTL meant that it couldn't be tested without sending something up to actually do it. They had wanted to use a non-piloted ship, but the countries in the Alliance complained. They all wanted to send a crew member of their own up in the inaugural voyage, and there was certainly no shortage of volunteers willing to risk their lives on the missions. Since the ship had to be large to house the engine anyway, the Alliance had decided to go all-in and build something reusable, and trust the scientists that were certain the technology was viable and functional.
They were about to find out.
"One minute," Pathi said.
The ship began to vibrate slightly, a pressure building around them.
"Is this normal?" Yousefi asked.
"Nobody knows what normal is." Pathi sounded nervous.
The ship's vibration grew.
"Thirty seconds," Pathi announced.
Kathy closed her eyes, absorbing the feel of the vibrations. She was accustomed to the shaking, it had always happened to the F-70 when she swooped in on a target, the force threatening to tear the fighter apart and leave her to fall to her death. She had never worried that it would happen. She had never worried that she might die.
She wasn't worried now.
The shaking increased, forceful enough that their bodies shifted in their harnesses. The stars began to blur in the viewscreen, coalescing together into a solid, blinding white light.
"Twenty seconds."
There was creaking from the joints, and red data flowed across the walls.
"Abort," Yousefi said. "Abort."
Pathi was at his keyboard. "It isn't responding, sir," he said. "Ten seconds."
Kathy looked around at the crew. They were scared. She glanced at the view screen. It was completely white, as if they had fallen out of space and into sheer nothing.
Or everything.
The view screen went out.
"Five seconds."
Yousefi leaned forward in the command chair, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a silent scream. His knuckles were white against the armrests.
"Two... One..."
To the people on the ground, the Goliath was a dark speck that was there one moment, and gone the next.
They would wait for it, a countdown timer showing them the five minutes that the ship was supposed to be gone.
They would wait, silent and anxious, as that clock ran down to zero.
Then they would wait, silent and fearful, to see if the ship would ever return.
Then they would go home, in small groups at first, and then a flood, witness not to mankind's greatest success, but its most visible failure.
20
"It can't be," he said. The man in front of him wasn't just similar in appearance. He was identical, right down to the small notch in his ear that Mitchell had gotten in boot camp during a live fire exercise.
It couldn't be, but he knew it was.
"You can call me M," the man said. "I know this is a little shocking. The important thing to know is that I'm not you. Not exactly. I'm a clone of your DNA, an identical twin in a sense. A replica, except one with all of your memories - past, present, and future."
Mitchell wasn't sure he had heard him right. "Did you say future?"
"Yes."
"As in time travel?" He would never have even entertained it, except he was looking in a mirror. A living, breathing, speaking mirror.
M shook his head. "Not exactly. We don't have a lot of time, Mitchell. The damage I've sustained is fatal. I've lost too much blood, and my heart rate is already beginning to slow. I'm here because I'm desperate. We're all desperate. We need your help."
"Who needs my help?"
"The human race."
"I don't understand."
M's eyes traveled the hanger, as though he expected someone, or something, to be listening.
"Have you ever heard of eternal return?"
"No."
"In simple terms, it means that time is circular, not linear. That everything which is happening today will happen again at some time in the future, whether it is a billion years, a hundred trillion years, or some greater length of time that can't be easily fathomed or understood. To think of it in a more analytical way, given infinite time and a finite number of potential events, these events will repeat infinitely, starting and ending and starting again with what you know as the Big Bang. For millennia it was only a theory, a religious belief, a footnote of potentiality. Then we created the eternal engine."
Mitchell stared at M. It was the craziest thing he had ever heard. "You're saying that you made an engine that can travel billions of years into the future? That this, all of this, has happened already?"
"Yes. And no. It's a long story, and I won't be alive to tell it. I know this is difficult for you to believe, but consider that humans once thought the Earth was flat, too. Ask yourself, if time is a loop, what happens when one is able to traverse the loop, either by moving infinitely forward in infinite time, or standing infinitely still for infinite time? The problem with time travel on a linear plane is that it creates paradoxes, questions that are impossible to resolve. Once you've accepted eternal recurrence as the universal truth, all of this will begin to make more sense."
Mitchell spent a few moments thinking about it, trying to understand. "If time is a loop, and you injected yourself into that loop, that means this couldn't have happened before. You threw the entire loop of events askew. How does the universe handle that?"
"The minute I arrived here, every loop that occurs after this one will have the me from the prior loop injected into it at the exact same place and the exact same point of time. The nature of the engine requires that it traverse one cycle at a time. The nature of the time loop means that the minute I arrived here, I closed off every instant of past time within this cycle. Locking it, so to speak. When I say I have memories of your future, that isn't quite true. I have memories of the future you experienced in my original timeline, the source loop. I can tell you everything that happens in that future, but with any luck none of that will come to pass here, now. My presence here, their presence here, has assured that."
"So then tell me, what happens in your future?"
"Humanity is destroyed."
"What?"
"They're coming, Mitchell. The ones who created me. I escaped ahead of them. I came back here to warn you, and to get to you before they did."
"Before who did? Why me?"
"You're the only one who can stop them."
"How do you-"
"You almost did. You came so close." M put his hand to his bloody chest. "I don't have enough time to explain it all. I wasn't expecting this. I didn't know this was going to happen." He smiled. "I couldn't see it."
"The Goliath," Mitchell said, the image of the massive ship's hull blinking into his mind. "This has something to do with the Goliath."
M looked pleased. "Yes. It has everything to do with the Goliath. When time loops, you retain a distant subconscious memory of your prior existence, because the bulk of the matter that makes you who you are has reassembled in the same place, at the same time, to create you once more. Most people never recognize this, they never connect to it. But some do. It is the reason people believe in things like reincarnation or love at first sight, even if they don't understand it.
"The other night, when you were in the bar. There was an attempt on your life, an attack arranged by the Frontier Federation in retaliation for the Shot. I knew the time and place from your history. I knew when to arrive to get the best vantage point."
"You shot me."
"One time. One bullet. There were four shooters that night, Mitchell. There should have only been the two in the car. You killed them. I killed the other, who was under their control. The bullet I fired was not a normal projectile. It was electromagnetically charged, designed to short your neural implant and hopefully trigger your latent subconscious. I wasn't sure it had been effective until you ran a query for Goliath. I was certain you were remembering, but you gave up so quickly. I've been trying not to affect the loop too drastically because every change moves us further from the past I wanted only to nudge. I was still debating whether to risk confronting you in person when they forced my hand."
"You're talking about Holly?" He knew there had been something to her sudden memory loss. He would never have guessed someone else had done something to her.
"Yes. The Prime Minister's wife."
"How did they do it?"
"Your neural implant is connected to a receiver. That receiver is connected to a number of channels, both public and private, which feed transmissions into the implant, and from the implant directly to your brain. The signals are massively encrypted, but that encryption is useless when the enemy has the keys. Instead of images or words, they passed binary through the channel. Commands."
"They hypnotized her?"
"That's one way of looking at it. More accurately, they used her like a drone."
"The come-ons, the sex?"
"Don't underestimate them, Mitchell. They are very different, but also very alike. Faking sexual interest is not a difficult task, especially when it comes to a man like us."
Mitchell felt his face flush at the inference. "I still don't understand why?"
"To stop you. And to stop me before I could help you again."
"Help me with what?"
"Your future. You fought them, and you lost. I traveled across timelines to stop you from making the same mistake. I thought I had escaped unnoticed, but they followed me, and now they mean to ensure that humanity still loses. Everything in this timeline is different now, altered beyond any but the basest understanding of what events might recur. Every infinite future is changed. I don't know what will happen now. Your one hope, your best hope, is that they don't either."
Mitchell put his hand on his head. This couldn't be happening. This couldn't be real.
"What about Christine?" The thought came to him suddenly. She had helped him. Why?
"Who?"
"Major Arapo. She helped me escape. She told me to find the Goliath. I can't figure out how she knew, or why she did it. She doesn't even like me, and she kissed me."
M shrugged. "It may have been a residual transference from the implant. I don't know."
"You didn't drone her or anything?" He knew it sounded stupid. He knew he was stupid for even thinking about her at a time like this. He had a feeling there was something to her actions, something to her. Something just out of reach.
"No," M repeated. "It was not my doing. It doesn't matter now, Mitchell. I've provided you with a ship. I'm sorry I won't be able to make the journey with you. Go. Now. The Goliath is waiting for you, hidden among the stars. It holds the key to your salvation. To mankind's salvation."
"How am I supposed to find it?"
"You will. You have to. It's the only way mankind will survive them."
Mitchell growled, his frustration beginning to wear through. "Damn it, survive who?" he shouted. "Who or what the hell are you supposed to be?"
M didn't answer. He started coughing, and then he dropped to his knees. His face was pale, his forehead sweaty. The blood had soaked through his shirt and jacket, and ran down his leg to pool at his feet.
"Be careful who you trust," he said, his voice fading. "Our technology is more advanced than yours. The normal encryption isn't safe, and you aren't safe around anyone who has a standard receiver."
"How can I believe you? How can I believe any of this?" He stared at his clone. It was ridiculous, insane. Maybe he was insane? "Who are they? How do you know that they're coming for me, or that they caused all of this?"
M looked up at him, their eyes locking. "Take the ship. Get out of here. Find Goliath, or you will all die."
He pitched forward onto his stomach and didn't move again.
21
Mitchell stared down at M. For everything he had just been told, for everything he had just experienced, looking at his own dead body was the hardest part.
"What the hell do I do now?" he said, his skin cold and clammy, his heart pulsing. He looked back at the S-17. Did he really have a decision to make? Did he have a choice? If what M had said about their intent to kill him was true, and he was certain it was after they had rampaged through the city, he could either get in the starfighter or die. "Find the Goliath. How am I supposed to do that?"
M hadn't given him an answer or a clue, and space was a big, big place. The Goliath could be anywhere within a galaxy millions of light years around.
If he couldn't find it, the war was already lost. What war? One that didn't exist, against an enemy that didn't exist?
Mitchell put his hand to his head, feeling the cut the device had left in it, and the crusted blood around the edge. He questioned whether any of it was real. Was the dead man at his feet real? He bent down and rolled him over, looking away from the face, his face, staring back at him with blank eyes. He smacked his head, feeling the burn of the wound being reopened. If there was a short in the implant, would this fix it?
When he looked at M again, the face was still a replica of his own. He flopped back onto the ground, sitting and staring out into the daylight through the crack in the hanger door.
"You wanted to fight, Mitch," he said to himself. Either he had gone mad and didn't know it, or he was completely sane, and the threat was real. In the end, it didn't matter. His only option was to live in the world that he believed existed around him, and hope he didn't hurt too many innocents.
He sat there for another minute, letting the stark reality sink in. Then he got to his feet, dusted himself off, and began undressing M. It was a macabre process, made all the more sinister by the man's appearance. It had to be done. Once M was naked, Mitchell grabbed his uniform from where M had stashed it on the floor and clumsily dressed the dead man in it. When he was finished with that, he prodded at the wounds until they oozed more blood out onto the clean shirt, and then wiped the original bloody one against it for good measure.
Satisfied that M was a convincing enough stand-in, he made his way to the hanger doors and finished pulling them the rest of the way open. He scanned the sky, noticing a dark spot against it some distance away. He started to pull up his p-rat to magnify it before remembering his implant was dead. He hoped he could fly the fighter without it.
He returned to the inside of the hanger and picked up M's helmet. He had said he used it as a substitute for an ARR. Hopefully, it wou
ld work some magic for him, too.
He walked over to the S-17. A small hatch in the side beneath the cockpit slid open and a line of small, narrow lifters organized to the ground. Mitchell furrowed his brow in confusion. As far as he knew, nobody had managed to create lifters that small, never mind install them into the nose of a fighter. M hadn't mentioned any upgrades. He had barely mentioned the ship at all.
Mitchell climbed the steps. The cockpit slid silently open at his approach, and he swung himself inside. It was old and worn, the safety straps faded, the textile seat torn in places. A joystick sat on his right side, two pedals rested near his feet, and a series of controls ran along his left. The front of the cockpit was filled with instruments, buttons, and dials, a throwback to the days when ship designers were afraid to leave pilots without control, or at least the feeling that they had some control, in the event of a critical systems loss. Mitchell had to think back to the first trainer he had flown to remember what most of them were for. The newer fighters like the Moray didn't have a dashboard - everything was delivered to the p-rat.
The clear carbonate slid closed over his head, and he felt the pressurization in his ears. Mitchell scanned the cluster for the ignition, finding the switch on the right side of the panel. He flipped it.
Nothing happened.
"Are you kidding?" Mitchell said, staring at the dashboard. He toggled the switch again.
Still nothing.
Was the fighter broken? Dead? He searched the panels for the toggle to open the cockpit again. He found it on the left. When he hit it, the clear shell began pulling back. A soft hiss alerted him that the cabin was depressurizing, followed by the clearly audible whine of an engine and the rhythmic echo of a running mech.
They had found him.
"Of course they did, because I can't get this old piece of shit to work," he said, toggling the cockpit closed again. He'd watched similar scenes in movies plenty of times before. It was supposed to be drama, not his actual life.
He hit the ignition a few more times. "Come on, you bastard."
The first drone became visible in front of the hanger, still a few miles away. Too far for its laser to do any serious damage. He hit the ignition again.
