Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  In its glory days, it would have been the pride of a fleet. It had a symmetrical hull with great scoops curving forward from the top and bottom. The size and shape were reminiscent of an avant-garde opera house that had been hurled into orbit. Rows of guns ran along its edges, and large hatches marked where ships or, more likely, drones could enter and exit. Compared to every other ship at the station, and even the station itself, the thing was a hulking relic of a bygone age. A dinosaur that had somehow escaped extinction.

  After a moment to pressurize, the interior door opened and a man with a sparking stun baton practically folded in half to hang down through the door and jab the device at her. The blue arcs of electricity nearly scorched her helmet.

  He was exactly the sort of fellow one might expect to find gnawing on the carcass of society. His hair had been fashioned into something resembling a mohawk, though the amount of scar tissue on his scalp suggested it was more of a mishap than a fashion choice. He was wearing a “spacesuit” in the sense that it ostensibly could keep him breathing if the hull were to rupture, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing one would willingly trust one’s life to. The bulk of the suit was nothing more than a man-shaped plastic baggie. Suits like that had been kept in the equipment of the low-end passenger cruisers of old, used as disposable life preservers, and had now been pressed into service as permanent life support. Beneath it he wore soiled thermal clothing stitched with illegible hand embroidery declaring allegiance to assorted gangs that had probably ceased to exist shortly after the patches had been sewn.

  “Back off, Bazza. You know it’s me,” she said, casually pushing the weapon aside and hauling herself up.

  The rotation was intended to produce something resembling Earth gravity, but it varied widely from day to day depending upon the speed the thrusters could manage, and today it was running at barely a third what it ought to be. That was still enough to give everyone a “down” for things like open-topped beverage containers and, for the extravagant, showers. It also made folks who had regular access to standard gravity appear utterly superhuman in their feats of strength.

  “And who’re you?” croaked the man, tapping her higher-quality helmet with the shaft of the baton to get her attention.

  She turned to him again.

  “I’m Dakota, Bazza. I’ve been shopping here for years.”

  “Nah, nah. You ain’t her. Because Dakota owes us five liters of oxy. Oxy we paid her to pick up. I don’t see no oxy on that ship of yours, and she ain’t dumb enough to come here without it, so you ain’t her.”

  “Listen, the farmer has been jabbing us for years.”

  “Don’t matter if he was or he wasn’t. He was the only one with a rig big enough to keep us supplied.”

  “Well, now there isn’t a rig big enough.”

  “… What’d you do, Dakota?” he rumbled.

  “I dragged a swarm. Figured he didn’t have the thrust to make a getaway with that rig, so I could snag it after he abandoned. The bot-lovin’ pile of slag toasted the rig and caught a tow from some oldster.”

  “What’re we gonna do for oxy, Dakota!” he barked.

  “We find someone with a new rig. Or we steal it. Hell if I know. Point is, that fella’s done ripping us off, so I say it’s a win.”

  Bazza sputtered and growled for a few moments, too furious to form words. Dakota took the opportunity to grab a seat in the relatively open center of this particular cluster. The six ships that had given their lives to build the structure at the end of this particular cable had done it for a very noble cause.

  They’d been made into a bar.

  Dakota slid her chair up to a table bolted to what had once been the wall of a scout ship and opened the face shield of her suit. Her ears popped in the not-quite-right pressure of the makeshift station. She flagged down a server—or rather, the server—and ordered a drink. That was as specific as she needed to be because this wasn’t the type of establishment that had a selection.

  When a glass of something amber-colored and spicy-smelling was set down before her, she gripped it quite daintily with her bulky spacesuit’s glove. Before she could put it to her lips, she felt someone approaching from behind her.

  “Any closer and you’ll have a hole in your face,” she warned.

  “I have seven holes in my face already, Miss,” wheezed a female voice. “You should choose your threats more wisely.”

  “And you should choose the people you criticize more wisely,” she said, snatching a blaster from her belt and whipping around.

  She found herself face to face with a shriveled mummy of a woman, clinging to life no doubt entirely because of the hover chair to which she was attached via a network of tubes and wires. Dakota leveled her weapon at the woman’s frail face and flicked the safety off, conjuring a threatening whine of charging supercapacitors.

  That universal sound of impending futuristic violence was quickly eclipsed by a far louder, far deeper roar of energy. She looked down to find no less than six autotargeting weapons pointed at her from either side of the hover chair. A telltale shimmer in the air before the chair revealed the presence of an energy shield. It would probably collapse after a shot or two, but that would be more than enough time to leave Dakota a sizzling heap of ionized flesh.

  “I believe I chose appropriately,” the elderly woman said.

  Her voice had a moist, sickly quality, and each sentence ended with a motorized hiss of a machine doing her breathing for her. She must have been a hundred years old. In the days before the collapse of society, that would not have been an unusual lifespan. These days she may as well have been a thousand.

  “What do you want, old woman?” Dakota said, her arrogance remaining intact despite the position of weakness.

  “First I want the adequate level of respect. You will call me Admiral.”

  “Fine, fine. What do you want, Admiral. Can’t imagine you came out here for the atmosphere. ’Specially since they’re running out of it.”

  “I came here because I’ve been monitoring the area, and I’ve seen a massive shift in the local GenMech distribution. Did I overhear you bragging about wielding them as a cudgel to get your way?”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “And then you claimed to have encountered what you called an ‘oldster.’”

  “Yeah. Little ship, but dense, you know. Way too chunky to be something someone would make these days. But in real good shape. At least I think. I only saw it for a second. It was really stealthy.”

  “Did you see the pilot?”

  “No. It was audio only on the radio connection. Sounded like a young guy.”

  “Do you record your transmissions?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want you to transfer the audio record to me.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “I won’t kill you and take it myself, along with the rest of your ship.”

  “Hey, you may have some decent firepower on that floating stool of yours, but what makes you think you can… that frigate outside is yours, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And I’ve left the weapons armed, on autotarget, and on a dead-man switch firing delay. That was eighty minutes ago. I die and very shortly afterward everything within two thousand kilometers of this station will be converted to orbiting debris.”

  Dakota sighed and set her drink down. “Nobody touch this. I’ll be right back.”

  She holstered her weapon and clicked her visor in place again.

  #

  Dakota muttered to herself as she slid down the grappler line to her ship. Behind her, the elderly woman was moving at remarkable speed toward the frigate. As impressive as the massive ship was, the hover chair was almost more impressive. The shields were strong enough to take the place of a suit, and the built-in thrusters moved her with nearly the acceleration of Dakota’s full ship.

  By the time Dakota had clicked herself into her cockpit and shut the hatch, the Admiral had reached and entered her own vessel. It angl
ed menacingly toward the smaller ship and began to flicker a set of forward beacons.

  “All right, all right, you old hag,” Dakota said, clearing her throat. “Voice control, activate. Access audio logs. Seek starting timecode minus oh-six-three.”

  Communication records began playing back in half-second chunks until she recognized the sound of her recent encounter.

  “Stop, clip prior silence to following silence. Load to optical transmit buffer and transmit.”

  Her headlamps began to flicker in the short-range communication protocol that had been more or less universally adopted since the use of standard radio had become a death sentence. It was reasonably high bandwidth, at least, so the audio was delivered almost immediately.

  “Microphone to optical buffer, stream on transceiver mode. … Okay, you’ve got your audio.”

  “One moment…”

  Over the data connection created by their flickering lights, she could hear the audio she’d sent being played.

  “It sounds…” the Admiral began. “Wait…”

  She replayed a small section of the recording, the piece in which a strange female voice briefly muted communication.

  “Yes… Yes… It is her… SHE is here…”

  Dakota squinted at the blinking lights of the frigate. “So are we done? Because I just know one of those idiots is drinking my drink.”

  Rather than answer, the frigate repositioned itself and roared with purpose away from the station before jumping to FTL.

  “Time-wasting hag…” Dakota muttered.

  Chapter 4

  The world slowly and unpleasantly returned to Lex. He’d been deeply asleep while his body worked its way through the overabundance of delicious and high-quality toxins he’d enjoyed the night before during his chat with Ziva. Now his head throbbed, and his mouth felt like someone had emptied the canister of a vacuum cleaner into it. He opened his eyes reluctantly and found the room to be mercifully dim. The memories of his prior evening’s activities were even dimmer and became progressively spottier as the drink-laden discussion had worn on. At the moment he didn’t even remember how he got to bed, or why it was such a large and comfortable one. Rather than the bunks he typically occupied while visiting Karter, Lex had awoken in what looked more like a courtesy suite at a nice hotel. He was in a king-size bed, its sheets churned up and disheveled. He imagined Ziva must have helped him to the room, as layered atop his body and the chaotic sheets was the cuddliest, warmest comforter he’d ever felt. As a few more IQ points ticked their way past the splitting headache that was occupying his thoughts, he realized that it wasn’t a comforter after all.

  Several of the funks—or more likely all the funks—had assembled on top of him as he slept. Ma had taken up the position nearest to his head, with the rest mounding themselves atop him and each other, and all of them sleeping peacefully. The only thing interrupting the chorus of peaceful breathing was a mild hiss of white noise and the quiet, intermittent mumble of Ma’s voice playing across her speaker.

  “… highly therapeutic… suggest you… soothing… overall wellness…”

  He smirked. “Psst, Ma,” he whispered.

  She stirred, her eyes blinking open, then turned to him.

  “Yes, Lex?” she said at full volume, prompting an irritable whine from some of the nearest funks.

  “You were talking in your sleep again,” he said.

  “My apologies, Lex. I thought I had corrected that flaw. Did I disturb you?”

  “No. I was out like a light.”

  He liberated his arm from beneath the half-dozen funks who had entangled themselves with it and grabbed hold of the edge of the bed. Partially out of the desire not to startle or overly disturb them but primarily to spare his throbbing head any undue stress, he hefted himself very slowly to a sitting position. Ma trotted up to his shoulder as he sat up.

  “I must say, Lex. The experience of communal sleeping is having a substantial impact, physiologically. Being part of a group of other creatures is proving highly therapeutic. I find myself greatly at ease as a part of this parliament, and the presence of the creatures has had a measurable influence on your stress indicators. Following the successful completion of our mission, I suggest you consider getting a second, or perhaps several, funks. The soothing effect of pet ownership appears compounded in larger groups. For both yourself and Squee, there could be a valuable improvement in overall wellness.”

  “I think not, Ma. Funkytown is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here,” he said.

  Lex swung his legs out and rested his elbows on his knees to cradle his head.

  “You overimbibed last night,” Ma observed.

  “Yes. Yes, there was certainly too much imbibing,” he agreed.

  “I am surprised you allowed him to indulge so excessively,” Ma said.

  Lex raised his head. “Who are you talking to—gah!”

  In the corner of the room, unseen until now, he spotted the glow of red irises. Ziva was standing beside the doorway. In one hand was a glass of cold water. The other was curled into a loose fist.

  “How long have you been there?” he asked.

  “When your heart rate began to elevate, indicating your forthcoming awakening, I fetched some anti-intoxicant and some water. I have been here for seven minutes,” she said. “And in reference to your comment, Ma, though his present condition is unfortunate, and frequent instances of this degree of overindulgence are inadvisable, Lex was suffering from what could have been considered an excess of clear thinking. The haze of inebriation, I feel, was in this case a much needed respite from the issues at hand.”

  “No argument there,” Lex said, holding out his hands.

  “The relaxation it induced seems to have given your body a chance to recuperate. You slept nearly fourteen hours,” Ziva said, offering two small pills and the glass.

  He popped the pills into his mouth and downed the water. “You are a lifesaver, Ziva.”

  “I am pleased to have been of service,” she said.

  She paced to the door and swiped at the light controls, gradually raising the illumination level, while Lex squinted and winced.

  “So what did you two do after I went to bed?” Lex asked.

  “Performing maintenance on Coal proved to be a challenging endeavor,” Ma explained. “Repairing something in such a way as to remove all faults is simple. Repairing something while selectively retaining faults is considerably more difficult.”

  “Her attitude left a bit to be desired. Though her actions are somewhat indicative of my own in my early development, primarily in the form of her rabid appetite for new information, but her unwillingness to moderate herself has a preadolescent quality that I am quite certain I’ve never displayed at any point,” Ziva said.

  “However, the functionality of the ship is now fully restored, her processing power and data storage is fully restored, and the appropriate portions of the electronics have received hardening to hopefully prevent further damage during the next temporal offset,” Ma said.

  “Okay. That’s good. We don’t need her getting any more nuts.”

  “I heard that,” remarked a voice over the PA system.

  Lex glanced up. “What was that?”

  “In order to avoid isolating Coal in the repair bay while we await the power levels to rise sufficiently, we provided her with a hard link to the sensor and communication system of the facility,” Ziva explained.

  “That would have been useful to know earlier.”

  “I did not anticipate you speaking disparagingly of Coal. My apologies,” Ziva said.

  “Sorry about that Coal,” Lex said.

  “It’s okay. I forgive you,” she said. “I watched you sleeping under a pile of funks. You’re too adorable to stay mad at.”

  Ziva grinned. “Her behavior remains somewhat inconsistent.”

  “I submit that inconsistency puts me more in line with human behavior,” Coal said. “Humans, by and large, are define
d by randomness.”

  Lex leaned back and sighed. “The pills are kicking in. Thank heaven for modern medicine. I don’t know what brand of rum you keep on hand, but it goes down smooth and kicks like an ostrich.”

  “I do not believe it existed in your time.”

  “Well it’s good stuff. Things are kind of hazy. … What exactly did we do last night? Everything after the second glass is one giant mush in my head.”

  “You don’t recall?”

  “I remember we were talking about something, and I think it got awkward…” he said, trying and failing to dredge up some clue.

  “Your memory of awkwardness is accurate. Would you like me to recount the details of the evening? Or perhaps offer you a recording?”

  “How awkward was it? Do I want to remember?”

  “Unlikely,” Ziva said.

  “Better off forgotten, then.”

  “Drug-related amnesia, or blackout drunkenness, is often associated with alcoholism, Lex,” Ma said. “Have you had prior incidents?”

  “I don’t really get drunk that often, Ma.”

  “I personally have witnessed a great many instances.”

  “That’s because when we’re together I’m usually in the middle of some horrifying nightmare scenario.”

  “Correlation may not equal causation in this instance.”

  “Not this again,” Lex said, rubbing his head. “This was my first drink in weeks. Technically it was my first drink in fifty years.”

  “Deflecting the situation with attempts at humor can be considered denial,” Ma said.

  “Hey. That wasn’t an attempt at humor. That was raw wit,” Lex said.

  “Did I miss Lex when he was drunk?” Coal asked, somewhat behind in the conversation. “I would have liked to see that.”

  “Regarding the timeline of your consumption: alcoholism isn’t about the frequency of alcohol consumption, but the nature of alcohol consumption. I apologize for having enabled your chemical dependency, Lex,” said Ziva.