by Eric Flint
Off an unknown island
Late afternoon
Lars Floden, the captain of the Queen of the Sea, looked down the table at the assembled staff. The conference room on the bridge deck was full. It was on the port side, just aft of the bridge and had one wall of smart glass windows. Right now the windows were set to opaque white. The opposite wall had cabinets and a countertop to hold whatever was needed from snacks to papers. Also a projector, so that the smart windows could be used as large display screens if needed.
Jane Carruthers was doing a really good stiff upper lip. He wasn’t surprised, as she was very British, even for a Brit. A thin woman, with a ready smile that hid her thoughts admirably. The hotel manager was not in the chain of command, but was—in a sense—second only to Lars in real authority, and in some circumstances, she might hold even more.
Not these circumstances, though. “How are the passengers doing, Jane?” he asked.
“Congressman Wiley is threatening to have our whole company barred from operating out of the United States.” Carruthers twitched a half smile for a moment. “I’m fairly sure that he’s playing for the camera phones, though, since he’s not stupid and knows perfectly well that isn’t going to happen.”
Her smile died. “There was one heart attack—not fatal, thankfully—and quite a few panicked passengers, and some falls.”
Jane turned to Dr. Laura Miles, the head of the ship’s medical department. Miles had two doctors, five nurse practitioners, and five registered nurses as well as nurse’s aides, in her department. It wasn’t exactly a hospital aboard ship, but it was a decent emergency room.
“The heart attack is stable and only one of the falls resulted in a broken bone,” said Miles. “So far we haven’t lost anyone on board. The docks didn’t fare so well. It was too early for the shore activities, but a lot of the shops were getting ready. We had over fifty injuries over there and four deaths when the buildings came down. The fatalities included Anne O’Hare, who apparently had an arm cut off when whatever it was happened. She was in the back of a shop and the building collapsed on her, making it impossible for her to do anything or for anyone to reach her in time. At least it was probably quick. She would have bled out in minutes and lost consciousness even faster.”
She looked at Floden. “Captain, that many injuries put a major strain on our supplies. We need resupply and we need them soon.”
Staff Captain Anders Dahl cut in. “We have all the shore side personnel on board for now. It’s unsafe on the docks and worse in the shops behind them.” Anders paused for a beat. “Captain, should I have people going through the ruins for salvage?”
Lars Floden looked back at his number two. Staff captain was the same rank on a cruise ship that executive officer would be on a warship. The cruise lines did it that way so they could have two captains, and thus two captain’s tables. Regardless of the titles, the staff captain had much the same job as a warship XO, including bringing questions to the captain that the captain would rather avoid.
Questions like this one. They didn’t have a clue what had happened. It was possible that they were going to need everything in those buildings, down to the toilet seats. But the buildings over there were half-collapsed, and Lars wasn’t prepared to send his sailors into a situation like that if he didn’t have to.
“No, at least not yet, Anders,” he said. “I doubt there’s anything over there worth risking our people’s lives for.”
“The Cabana Drugstore,” said Dr. Miles. “Unless we can get medical supplies, we are going to start losing people to chronic conditions that are treated with drugs.” She looked at Lars. “And one of the losses is going to be me. Our supply of warfarin is very limited, and my prescription won’t last forever. We can use aspirin and it will help, but people like me who have heart issues are going to be in real trouble if we can’t get back in touch with civilization, Captain. Most of our passengers aren’t nursing home ready, or at least they weren’t before this. But a lot of them were assisted living ready.”
“Sorry, Doc,” Anders said. “I was over there just after the event. The part of the Cabana that held the drugs was on the other side of the—” He paused, apparently looking for the right word. “—line of demarcation. Whatever brought us here left the drugs in the Cabana Drugstore behind. There was some of the over-the-counter stuff on this side of the line.” Anders looked over at Captain Floden.
“Sure, Anders. Grab anything that’s out in the open. Just don’t risk our people digging through stuff.”
“Captain, where are we?” Daniel Lang, the chief security officer, blurted.
The sun hadn’t set, though it had shifted in the moment of transition from early morning to midafternoon, east to west. Time of year was harder to say. It depended on where on Earth they were. There were people on the island they were next to, but they were staying out of sight, at least for now. The sun was farther south than it should be even in midwinter in the Caribbean. If the compass readings were right, they were in the northern temperate zone, not the tropics.
They had lost satellite communications. Both radio and GPS were gone. So were all the familiar works of man, aside from the Queen of the Sea, the Reliance, the dock and about a block of Port Berry, the little town on the company’s private island. The dock and the block or so of town weren’t in great shape. They had ended up partly over water instead of land and had tilted. Most of the buildings had collapsed.
Lars couldn’t help feeling that whatever had happened had to be the work of someone or something, because it didn’t make sense that any sort of natural occurrence would pick up his ship and the fuel barge and not chop them into little pieces. The lozenge-shaped zone of transference had to be just the right size and shape and had to have just the right orientation. To have that happen by accident was like having an avalanche build the Taj Mahal. Well, not really. But it sure wasn’t the sort of thing that happened by chance.
He’d read a magazine article a couple of years ago analyzing the Grantville and Alexander disasters, which had included speculation by some scientists that whatever caused the catastrophes didn’t seem to be simply random cosmic accidents. But he couldn’t remember any of the details. When he had time, he’d have to see if he could find copies of the article—or, better yet, find a passenger who had some real expertise on the subject. The odds that such a passenger was aboard the ship were actually not bad. People who went on cruises tended to be better educated than average and included a fair percentage of scientists and academics.
All of that had been circulating through Lars’ mind since the event, bouncing off his assumptions and being modified as more information was added. The ship’s sonar was working just fine and the bottom of the ocean was different in an oval-shaped patch below the ship. Or, more accurately, the bottom of the ocean was different outside that oval-shaped patch just under the ship, taking into account the chunk of dock and shore that had come with them.
Lars looked back at Daniel. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what universe we’re in. It appears we’re at least on an analog of Earth, but we clearly aren’t in the same place we were”—Lars looked at the clock on the wall—“three hours ago. For all I…” He took a breath and reined in his speculation. “We may know more after the sun goes down and we get a look at the night sky. In the meantime, we need to keep the passengers and the crew as calm as we can and avoid useless speculation.”
Lars turned to Staff Captain Anders Dahl. “Anders, where are we on food?”
“We have seven days’ worth without rationing. We can stretch that a day or two by just limiting the servings in the all-you-can-eat buffets, and with real rationing we can double it. With severe rationing, starting right now, we might last a month. That would be pushing things a lot. We’re going to need resupply of food probably sooner than drugs.”
The meeting continued and not much new was discovered. However, things that were minor before had suddenly gained much greater significance.
&nb
sp; ☆ ☆ ☆
Congressman Allen “Al” Wiley, Fourth District, Utah, sat in his stateroom and fumed. He was here because his daughter Charlene was marrying that moron, Dick Gibson, and wanted to be married by a ship’s captain. Romantic, she called it. Al called it crap, though never in public. They could have made a lot of political capital out of this wedding if they had just stayed in Provo and done it there.
But Charlene had wanted “romantic,” and her mother agreed with her. Darn Doris, with all her silly romance novels. And now some sort of disaster had happened. They were stuck out here on the company’s island and he wasn’t being allowed to make a call back to Washington to get some help. Wiley didn’t believe for one minute that the ship’s communications with the rest of the world were out. Any sort of disaster that would cause that would have wrecked the ship entirely. The lights were working. Hell, his phone had bars, all five bars, and if his phone was working, the only reason he wasn’t getting through to Washington was that damn Norwegian captain was blocking his calls. That had to be it.
Al’s mind cycled back around. Maybe it was a conspiracy. Royal Cruise Lines had screwed the pooch somehow and were trying to cover it up. He called Amanda, his aide. “Amanda, you get me a meeting with that captain. Not the hotel manager, the captain.”
“Yes, sir,” Amanda Miller agreed.
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Amanda stopped pacing when her cell rang with the congressman’s ringtone. After he finished, she sat down on the bed in her stateroom and called Jane Carruthers. She made the request as tactfully as she could. “I know that this is an emergency situation, Ms. Carruthers, but the congressman is on several committees that have oversight over corporations like Royal Cruise Lines. So, if you could free up a few minutes for the congressman to make sure he and the captain are reading from the same playbook…Believe me, it will save us all trouble in the long run.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Miss Miller. And under other circumstances, the captain would be happy to make time for the congressman. But we are still trying to figure out what’s going on.” She sighed audibly—and intentionally, Amanda was sure. “There isn’t anything that the captain could tell him that hasn’t been part of the announcements already made.”
Amanda bit her lip. There had been announcements, one almost immediately after the event, explaining that the ship was in no immediate danger, but that something out of the ordinary had happened and for the moment the crew asked that people stay inside and off the Promenade Deck. Fifteen minutes later, the prohibition against going on the Promenade Deck had been removed, but shore excursions were still off limits. Amanda had immediately gone up to the Promenade Deck and looked out on a disaster. The dock was tilted, actually tilted, and the block or so of buildings behind it were in ruins. The crew was running around doing rescue work, trying to save the people who had lived and worked in those buildings. She reported to the congressman, and Al immediately tried to call Washington to get some help. It was the fact that he couldn’t get through that made the congressman so angry. He wanted to help, and they weren’t letting him.
By now, Amanda was convinced that the satellite receiver on the ship was down for some reason. And it was clear that something drastic had happened to Royal Cay Island. “You need to get the captain to tell the congressman what the problem is with the phones.”
“We don’t know what’s wrong with the phones,” Jane said. “Whatever it is, it’s not on the ship. Everything on the ship is working just fine. The problem is…Amanda, I honestly think the problem is with the satellites.”
“That’s impossible. Nothing could take out the satellites, not even a nuclear war. So unless we’ve been invaded by Martians, it can’t be the satellites.”
“Amanda, the sun moved,” Jane said. “Look at your watch. It’s supposed to be 10:00 AM in December in the Caribbean. The sun should be to our southeast—but it’s west of us, and obviously a lot closer to sunset than sunrise. It’s also farther south than it should be, by a considerable margin. Like fall in Maryland or Spain.”
Amanda did look. She knew where the sun should be and she saw where it was. “Thanks, Jane. For telling me.” She hadn’t noticed till Jane mentioned it, too focused on the broken buildings and injured people. Now she did notice and became truly frightened.
Then, perhaps for the very first time since she had gotten her job with Congressman Wiley, Amanda put herself before the congressman. She turned off her phone, went to the bar, and got plastered.
Off Formentera Island
After nightfall
September 15, 321 BCE
The sun had gone down. Elise Beaulieu, the first officer for navigation, adjusted the sextant with careful fingers. Instruments from fifty years ago were being brought into play and combined with ship’s computers. So far they had found that the North Star, Polaris, was not in the right place. Even in the two hours since sunset, they had been able to detect motion in Polaris. That was enough to tell them that they were before the birth of Christ, or at least not that long after it.
The planets were giving more precise data, and as soon as Mars came up they ought to be able to get a year.…
And there it was, just on the horizon. Elise plugged the numbers into the slate’s program and got a date. According to the computer, they were in the year 321 Before the Common Era. That was using the standard calendar of the twenty-first century and counting backward, using modern knowledge and technology.
She tapped another icon and called the captain. “Captain, we’re in 321 BCE. From the moon, September fifteenth.”
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Lars Floden nodded. “Thanks, Elise.” He tapped off the phone. “Did you get that, Jane?”
Jane Carruthers pulled up the date from the encyclopedia. “The experts aren’t in agreement about how the dates line up with the events of this time. It’s a safe bet that Alexander the Great was—is—dead, but whether he’s been dead for six months or six years is less certain.”
The Queen of the Sea, in order to save bandwidth, updated the most popular—read, most accessed—web locations every time they hit the Port of Miami. It saved the satellite link for things like email and instant messages. They had a complete and up-to-date mirror of Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, online New York Times website, and even Google Earth, all stored on a set of computers in the IT section of the ship and accessible instantly through the ship’s wifi or any of the half-dozen internet cafes on board. “Alexander the Great is two years dead. Rome is a republic, but what they meant by republic isn’t what we mean by it. Besides, Carthage is the big dog in the Mediterranean.”
“What about the rest of the world, Jane?” the captain asked.
Jane clicked the mouse, then read for a moment. “China is a bunch of warring nations. Qin Shi Huang won’t be born for a couple of hundred years.” She looked up from the computer. “In the Americas, the Olmec have collapsed and, according to Wikipedia, it was because something happened to the land so it wouldn’t support farming.”
That doesn’t sound like good news, Lars thought, because we are going to need farmers. We have almost five thousand people to support, and we can’t feed them on nothing except fish.
“Any idea where we are?”
“Best guess, Captain, somewhere in the Med,” Anders said. Then he got a distracted look. “Give me a second.” He called up a camera view. “I know where we are, Captain. We’re on the south end of Formentera Island, about seventy miles off the coast of Spain. My wife and I vacationed on the island of Formentera for our second honeymoon. About two years ago. Nothing else is the same, but the coastline is.”
“So what’s happening in Spain in 321 BCE?”
“Nothing we want any part of, Captain,” Jane Carruthers said. “I think the Carthaginians owned it at this time in history, and if I recall my third form history, they sacrificed babies to their gods.”
“Is there any place in this time where they didn’t?”
“I’m not su
re, Captain. But we can’t just sit here forever.”
“All right. I’ll talk to Joe Kugan and we’ll get some sea room. Meanwhile, find me someone who knows something about this time.”
“Also, Captain, we need to tell the passengers and crew what we have found out.”
“I don’t want a panic, Jane.”
“Better one now than one later. One later that is laced with mistrust because we were hiding things. Panics wear themselves out, sir. If nothing drastic happens, then people get back to business.”
CHAPTER 2
Off Formentera Island
9:00 PM, September 15, 321 BCE
The voice over the loudspeakers was calm and matter-of-fact, as if the ship’s officer was simply reporting on the weather:
“Ladies and gentlemen, using astronomic instruments, we have determined the date. It is the year 321 Before the Common Era, and it is September fifteenth by our calendar. Also, we believe we are in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain. We have no idea how this has happened, but the captain has decided that for all our safety, we need some sea room. We will be moving away from the docks to insure that boarding by the locals is more difficult.”
All around the ship everyone reacted individually, as their natures dictated. There were cases of panic, but more often than panic was disbelief. There was consternation and curiosity. The phones of passengers all over the ship were turned on and 321 BCE was looked up. Other people shrugged and went on with their gambling, shopping, dining, or other entertainments.
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Jason Jones pulled out his cell phone and tried to call his mother. He got a “no signal” message. Then he tried to call his father, who was just five feet away, sitting on his bed with his laptop opened. Dad’s phone rang with the Lone Ranger theme and he looked over at Jason.
