Splintered Suns

by Michael Cobley

  “A time machine?” said Pyke.

  “Somewhat, although not in the sense of a vehicle. My entronetic device can take an optimum area and push it back into the past—I call it the time-thrower, a label that is easier to understand, I feel.”

  Pyke gave him a quizzical look then glanced pointedly over at the open door with its impossible corridor.

  “I know, Captain, I know how it must seem to you that time is a limited resource—in some ways it is, in other ways it’s a malleable plaything.

  “So, there I was, irrevocably settled aboard Duke Strano’s immense starship, speeding away as catastrophe overwhelmed the Imperial homeworld. The truth was that I’d already arrived at a working prototype of the time-thrower before my capture so I imagined that I had all the time I needed to perfect it, oh, the irony! As it turns out, we were more than two days out from the destroyed Imperium, and traversing what you call hyperspace, when we first encountered the Damaugra.”

  By now everyone had wandered over to Hokajil’s hut for hot drink refills from a dispenser which looked like three chrome cubes sat atop each other at odd angles.

  “This thing that attacked the Defender,” said Pyke. “Is it a creature or some kind of vessel?”

  Hokajil’s eyes widened dramatically. “The Damaugra does not conceal its nature—it is a rare hyperspace denizen but unmistakable once detected. It is a huge tangle of exotic metallic tendrils and coils driven by some kind of sentience, possibly animal-like, and capable of travelling by some unknown motive force. Which also allows it to dive into the lower levels of hyperspace.”

  “We noticed corroded coils of something embedded in the outer hull, here and on other crashed sections,” said Pyke.

  “Evidence of the Damaugra’s loving embrace,” Hokajil said. “The beast seemed to fixate on us, pursuing us with obstinate determination through the eddies and spates of hyperspace. Once, the Duke’s weapons officer managed to wing it with a missile from the mid-section battery—it didn’t like that. The next time we crossed back into real-space the creature also emerged and came writhing after us. And thus it continued for the next four days or more, a ceaseless game of hunt and flight.” Hokajil looked sombre. “It was as if the doom that had claimed the Imperium was relentlessly stalking us, determined that we would share the same fate.

  “In contrast, the mood among the thousands of passengers, who were mostly rich and aristocratic, was relaxed and cheerful. Boisterous celebrations were to be found taking place in every section of the Mighty Defender, and any suggestions that the ship was in any kind of danger were waved away amid mocking laughter.

  “That sense of invulnerability could not last, of course. By the sixth day of this evasion, the Mighty Defender had crossed a full quarter of the galaxy. The captain, Duke Strano, had taken the ship down into the lower levels of hyperspace in a radical attempt to finally elude the monster, a ploy which appeared to work. But when we ascended to the topmost layer of hyperspace, through which most vessels travel, the Damaugra was on our trail yet again. It rammed the ship, tore off our weapons even as they were firing and punctured the hull in several places before the pilots were able to shake it off.”

  All were listening intently now, and Pyke was trying to imagine what it must have been like to pilot such an immense vessel while a monster was chewing its way through the hull.

  “So is that when your captain decided to make for the Ong system?” he said.

  Hokajil nodded. “The ship’s sensor technicians advised the Duke that the Damaugra’s physiology would not allow it to come within the gravity well of a planet, and that the Mighty Defender should head towards the nearest system with a good selection of worlds. This one has five, including a gas giant which became our immediate destination. But just after we entered the system the Damaugra came out of hyperspace again and hurled itself at us—we had no choice but to alter course towards the nearest planet instead.”

  Dervla made a sweeping gesture. “The desert planet Ong!”

  “Hundreds of thousands of years ago it was not quite so desert covered as it is today,” said Hokajil.

  “I’m kinda wondering where you are while all this is going on,” Pyke said, keeping a smile in place to conceal his growing impatience. Every minute spent gabbing here was another minute of freedom for Raven to work her depraved plans.

  “Yes, my apologies—declaiming cannot take the place of conversing.” The elderly inventor paused to gather his thoughts. “Well, when we emerged from hyperspace, assaulted by the Damaugra on our way to this system, I was actually on the bridge of the Mighty Defender. The illustrious Duke Strano had requested my presence, along with the prototype time-thrower, despite its unaddressed operational flaws. Having read my summary report, he had come up with a plan to use my invention against the monster. It was a very hazardous scheme, almost irrational in the degree of risk it presented.” He glanced around him. “Duke Strano proposed that if defeat and destruction by the Damaugra looked inevitable then I would join him in the captain’s launch with the time-thrower. We would be ejected from the launch’s minibay below the bridge, fly in close to the monster then use my invention to grab pieces of it and cast them into the past!”

  Along with the others, Pyke found himself caught up in the drama of Hokajil’s account, and almost impressed by the daring of the Duke’s plan.

  “Did it work?” said Dervla. “Did you get to put the plan into action?”

  The old man suddenly looked weary. He settled down into a creaking chair on the hut’s little porch and sighed.

  “Forgive me—this is the first time I have ever related the entire sorry tale. Raven and her followers had no interest in dialogue, just demanded access to the Mosaic; likewise, Dr. Ustril, while clearly an intellect of substance, was equally impatient to be on her way.”

  Ancil perked up, and exchanged a look with Pyke.

  “The Lieutenant-Doctor,” Ancil said. “Did she say anything about us?”

  Hokajil shook his head. “She is clearly driven by her purpose, an unflinching intent, just like Madam Kaligari. I’ve seen them, seen their struggles, their sorrows and successes … sorry, I get ahead of the closing stanzas of my saga. You asked if I carried out the Duke’s plan—the answer is no. Our desperate journey to Ong’s star system was really one of continuous running battles. After the course change to bring us into Ong’s orbit, we had hoped that this would be enough to make the Damaugra veer off and leave us alone. Instead it charged at us again, collided with the ship’s mid-section and began crawling along the hull towards the bridge.”

  Hokajil’s eyes filled with horror as he relived the event.

  “The Mighty Defender reached Ong and its pilots tried to assume a stable orbit but the drives were wrecked and the manoeuvring thrusters hardly functioning. That was when the captain, Duke Strano, ordered the crisis separation protocols to commence, and the whole vast length of the Mighty Defender was, section by section, disconnected into its parts. At the same time, the Duke ordered me to follow him into the access conduit to the launch.

  “And … I could not. My cowardice prevented it. I was in the grip of powerful terrors, and all I could think of was getting away, surviving, no matter what. So I fled the Duke, fled the bridge, activated the time-thrower, aimed it at a fifty-metre radius area directly before me and cast it twelve hours into the past! I then crossed into it, found everything far calmer, even though we were back in hyperspace, trying to evade the monster. But the fear still had me in its unreasoning grasp—I took elevators, followed corridors until I reached the boundary of the time-zone I’d created, then used the time-thrower again, pushing another area of the forward section even further back into the past.

  “At this point an obsession took hold and I became convinced that I could, step by step, shift myself back to the time before the Mighty Defender even left the homeworld! So, creating a series of time-zones into the past, I headed steadily aftwards till I reached a door to one of the linkways, the general acc
ess corridors that allowed passengers and crew to move easily between the segments of the great vessel. The sensors on my time-thrower, however, told me that another boundary lay beyond the linkway hatch—I was actually looking at the readouts as I opened the hatch and walked through …”

  Hokajil brought his hands together in a loud slap. “And I fell on my face, in the sand, right over there!”

  Wide eyes followed his pointing finger to a patch of flattened sandy ground just in front of the open door.

  “When was this exactly?” Pyke said. “And why? And how?”

  By now, Pyke could barely keep the exasperation out of his voice. Hokajil nodded sympathetically.

  “The effects of causes range from the seen to the unseen, from known to unknown,” he said. “When I activated the time-thrower on the bridge the resonances flow forward in time as well as back—the entire forward section had become separated from the rest of the ship during the Damaugra attack, therefore there was a physical limit to where I could go while inside the time-zones, and a limit to how far back I could create time-zones. When I literally fell out of the most aftwards of them, I was back in my original timeline, although a day or so had passed since the actual crash. Which was, as you see, devastating and catastrophic.”

  “No survivors?” said Dervla.

  “Not here, no, none. The destruction was total, and I soon discovered that there were no supplies, nothing to support life out in the middle of nowhere. But I had to stay alive somehow, so I re-entered the ship …”

  “You survived by going back into the past?” said Dervla. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not really. You see, each one of the time-thrown zones exists in its own small loop of time, and is a source of endlessly regenerating resources, food, water, clothing, entertainments and even company. I wondered what to call it—a patchwork, a miscellany, a medley, but settled on Mosaic, which gives the sense of something artistically intended.

  “In any event, I was at first distraught at how events had turned out and I began to wonder if there was some way to alter this outcome—only I found out that while all the intermediate zones were cycling through their unchanging slice of the drama, the bridge itself was exactly as I’d left it! When I revisited it, I could see that everything was exactly as it had been, the emergency lighting, the battle stations, the Damaugra clawing outside the viewing window, the captain coming down to enter the embarker alcove that would send him down into the launch, and him yelling at me to follow him …”

  Hokajil shivered. His face looked pale and lined.

  “You got the hell out of there, I imagine,” Pyke said.

  “Correct, I did indeed—one return visit was quite enough. I returned to the time-zones nearest the exit to the post-crash world. I wanted to hide myself away from the horrors of the bridge at one end and the wasteland of sand and wreckage at the other. My sojourns here were few and far between until one occasion when I discovered unfamiliar footsteps tracked all through the shelter and around the outside. That was when I found out about the gateway to the drive section, which I had previously dismissed as a piece of junk left in the hold.”

  “Did you go through?” said Dervla. “To the drive section?”

  “A few times,” Hokajil said. “It was fascinating yet also unwelcoming. After a time I felt even more of an exile there than I did in the midst of all this sand.”

  “So just how have you managed to survive all this time?” said Dervla.

  “There is a curious anomaly which occurs at the boundary between the time-zones, a kind of faceting that gives rise to additional time-zones that aren’t adjacent to the main timeline.” Hokajil shrugged. “An unforeseen consequence, but I discovered that time dilation effects take place within them … and all the time-facets which split off from them as well. A week spent in some of them is the equivalent to a century or more out here reality.”

  Pyke smiled. “Which is how you made it through the millennia!”

  “Just so. Though I’m not sure what would happen were I to leave—the years might just catch up with me.”

  Dervla sniffed. “Is it even worth our while entering this mosaic of time-zones? Meddling with temporal stuff just sends a chill down my spine.”

  Pyke shrugged. “I get what you’re saying, but Mr. H’s time-thrower, time-zones, time-facets, the whole shebang—it’s not really in the past, I think.” Pyke squinted at Hokajil. “You said they were like bits of the past stuck in a loop, right?”

  “Yes, that’s generally correct,” said the old inventor. “Although some changes have crept in over the many, many years as a consequence of the faceting, like the generation of alternative versions of the main continuity. The only meddling was done by me, long ago, so no responsibility attaches to any of you. But while deliberating your next actions, consider this—I have seen you, all of you, in the Mosaic!”

  This caused a stir of bafflement and surprise in equal measure.

  “We’ve only just got here,” said Ancil. “How can you see us in ‘there’ before we’ve arrived?”

  “It’s the effect of causes!” said Hokajil. “When causes occur in exotic places like the Time-Mosaic, the effects are likewise exotic.”

  “Exotic!” Pyke snorted. “A fancy word for weird!”

  “More like inconstant.”

  “Bonkers!”

  “Slightly erratic.”

  Pyke chuckled. “Mad as a box of frogs armed with rocket launchers!”

  Smiling, Hokajil held up his hands. “I bow to your superior hyperbolic skills.”

  “What can I say—it’s a gift.”

  “Indeed, and the times when I saw you and your crew, very occasionally over the years, was a gift from exotic causality!”

  Dervla smiled. “Our entering the Mosaic makes echoes of ourselves bounce around, up and down, back and forth …” Her eyes widened. “You could warn us about what Raven and her followers are up to, y’know, if they’re going to ambush us five minutes after we step inside, or the like …”

  Hokajil shrugged. “I’m afraid I didn’t see anything so specific. It was just brief glimpses of your progress that I spotted. And only in the first zone of the Mosaic—I’ve not really ventured any further along the main timeline than that for quite a long time.”

  Pyke thought about this, glancing at Dervla and the others. “Do we go on, stay here, or go back? Assuming we could reactivate the portal.”

  “We might be able to contact the Scarabus in orbit,” Moleg said. “If we can boost whatever communicators we’re still carrying.”

  “We should go on, Chief,” said Ancil without hesitation. “I know Ustril left us in the lurch, but she’s making a huge mistake chasing after those other crystal pieces—we should help her if we can, and track down the crystals, too.”

  “I think we should go on, too,” said Dervla. “But for me it’s really about hunting Raven down so that I can push a big gun barrel into her face!”

  “I go with that, Chief,” said Kref. “Raven’s a nasty piece of work who’s getting nastier all the time!”

  Pyke turned to Hokajil. “It looks as if we’ll be taking a stroll along Temporal Lane. Any advice you can offer before we gatecrash the Mighty Defender’s bridge?”

  “What should you know? The people are real enough so be polite. The food and drink may be to your liking, or not. Oh, I would caution you against crossing into any of the facets you encounter …”

  “Facets?” said Dervla with a frown.

  “The time-zones, over the centuries, have become unstable at their peripheries with alternate timeline splinters appearing along the edges. Each holds its own version of the ship: most display minor variations in design aesthetic, while others vary greatly from the Mosaic’s main continuity, a few jarringly so. Oh, and are you well enough armed?”

  Pyke grinned at Ancil who shook his head in mock gravity. “Nowhere near, Chief!”

  “We’re a bit short on hardware at the moment,” Pyke told Hokajil. “C
an you sort us out?”

  “Indeed, yes—after you enter the ship, three decks down there is a security station staffed by two guards. Once you get them out of the way, you’ll find a weapons locker in the main office—the code is LGS451 and it contains more than enough hardware for your needs.”

  Pyke drained the last cold dregs of filner tea from his beaker, having found himself acquiring a taste for it. He put the beaker down on the table next to the odd urn and a plate of jomby biscuits, which he found easy to pass on.

  “Do you still have that time-thrower gizmo?” he asked Hokajil. “Might be handy to have along.”

  “Sadly, I mislaid it during a deep expedition many years ago.” The old inventor looked forlorn. “Actually, I was ambushed and it was stolen from me.” He held up the half-egg device. “This auxiliary trigger is all that remains of it.” He indicated the waiting open door. “Are you ready to begin your journey to the bridge, Captain? You don’t want to be late!”

  Dervla grinned. “Time for your big entrance, Bran!”

  “Just as long as it’s not my big exit.” He glanced round at the others, Kref, Moleg and Ancil. “Okay, last one to the weapons locker gets the starting pistol—let’s go!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Pyke—The Crystal Simulation

  Bound and gagged, they’d stuffed him into a cramped, enclosed, horse-drawn cart. It had a single bench wide enough for one and two side windows covered by cloth blinds. Enough light leaked in to reveal the starkness of his bleak situation, a confinement box on wheels jolting and rattling through the streets of Granah. The cart was cold and dank and it stank, but Pyke’s mind was locked in a circle of guilt and grief.

  Dead, he thought. She’s here and hasn’t gone away so she has to be …

  He could barely bring himself to think it. When you got right down to it, at one time or another he’d been a crappy captain, a crappy lover and a crappy friend to her. What made it worse was that it was the real Pyke out there in the really-real world who’d failed. He got to mourn the loss of her while good ol’ Simulation Pyke had to deal with the presence of Dervla’s copy, a Dervla incorporated into the Legacy’s demented storyline!