Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “We are of one mind on a great many matters. Fashion is one of them. I again suggest making jewelry and nail polish a regular part of her life. Squee relishes the attention.”

  He pulled on a shirt and reached back to try to snag his flight suit. “Look… I might be willing to clip a few earrings on there, but a man’s got to draw the line somewhere. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I won’t paint my pet’s nails.”

  Ziva walked up to him as he struggled to snag an armhole. She helpfully raised the suit and helped him slide it on, smoothing out the wrinkles and zipping it up for him.

  “I’m sure you will continue to take great care of Squee,” Ziva said.

  A door at the end of the hall hissed open, and Silo’s voice rang out. “Where is he? Let’s see him.”

  Footsteps with a very peculiar gait were swiftly approaching as Lex exited the locker room and stared down the hall. The years had changed Silo’s appearance greatly. By now her age must be very nearly ninety, and while she was unquestionably spry, she showed a great many of those years. Her clothes were befitting of a soldier. A bulky composite flight jacket hung on her slightly withered frame. It was layered with plates that had an odd oily sheen, thinner under the arms and at the inside of the elbows to offer some semblance of mobility, but clearly built more for protection than comfort. A helmet of the same shiny material was linked to the neck of the jacket. The face shield was open, flipped up to reveal a face that was almost a shriveled parody of the cherubic combination of soccer mom and Valkyrie he knew her to be. The decades hadn’t robbed her eyes of an ounce of their sparkle though, and when she saw Lex, she pulled her lips into a grin that revealed a megawatt smile.

  It wasn’t until she quickened her pace and her odd gait became a bit louder that Lex glanced down to see the reason for it, and instantly he wondered how he could have missed it. Her legs were in no way natural. Rather than flesh and blood, or even some sort of sophisticated cybernetics, Silo’s legs were made from wood. They were not the clunky, carved hunks that one might have seen in the days of old, however. These were wooden legs redesigned through the lens of science. They were light and complex, thin struts of curving wood arranged into a geodesic pattern of triangles and linkages. They moved in an almost natural way, facilitated by a handful of motors connected to key actuation points by monofilament. Finishing the ensemble, and almost as familiar as her eyes and smile, was a massive weapon of decidedly futuristic design, something that might have been meant for firing grenades, or perhaps was merely the largest energy rifle he’d ever seen.

  “Oh, look at you. Just as sharp as I remember you,” she said, striding up to him and throwing her arms around him. “Should have known if I wanted to find you, I’d only have to look for the biggest disaster around.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  Her hug was firm but betrayed the erosion of the years. There was a time when a hug from Silo would have left one checking for broken ribs.

  “I didn’t expect to see a familiar face,” Lex said, stepping back.

  “You still haven’t, hon. The face you’re familiar with was gone before the robots even showed up,” she said. “So, this time-travel thing actually worked, huh?”

  “Not quite the way it was supposed to,” he said.

  He made a concerted effort to avoid staring at the wonders of engineering that had replaced her legs.

  “Second time’s a charm then. Ma told me all about the plan and such. Never expected that gambit of dropping off the case for you to find would pay off.” She paused. “You’re wondering about the legs.”

  He nodded. “I gotta admit, they’re hard to ignore.”

  “Not much of a story. About eleven years back we got in a bit of a scrape. Had a run-in with a cluster of those bots. They kept a couple of souvenirs. I decided, if I was going to replace my legs, I was going to replace them with something that wouldn’t do the bots a lick of good if they ever got ahold of me again.”

  A male voice echoed down the hall. “And the rustic charm of seasoned hickory is not an unwelcome benefit.”

  All eyes turned to the source. He was a similarly armored but still relatively whole individual. He had a stately, almost butler-ish appearance, and a carefully cropped white mustache twisted to follow a bit of a cocky grin. He looked roughly the same age as Silo, though his face seemed better suited to the years. Whereas she looked like a young person who had become old, he looked like an old person who had finally ripened. Somewhat at odds with his distinguished, professorial demeanor were the scars that striped his face. A notable one began at his right eyebrow and crossed his eye, which now seemed to have the same silver iris that gave Karter such a distinctive look. The cybernetic eye seemed to be his only enhancement, though the cane that carried a good deal of his weight with each alternate step suggested some additional procedures would not be out of place. He was notably unarmed.

  When he reached Lex, he extended a hand and gave it a vigorous shake. Lex hadn’t taken his eyes off the man since he’d spoken, studying his features with a look of confusion.

  “You… look very familiar. Are you… I mean… are you Garotte?”

  “Heavens no, my boy. Never met the man. Fellow’s been dead some fifty years. The name is Trammel.”

  “Oh, he’s Garotte all right. Don’t let him fool you.”

  “Really, dearest. Have you learned nothing of espionage?”

  “It’s bad enough I agree to call you by your codename in front of others. The least I can do is acknowledge your other names.”

  “But… how did… that doesn’t… Garotte got blown up in orbit around Movi!” Lex objected.

  “A word of advice. If an individual’s demise results in an absent or unrecognizable body, take the death with a grain of salt. It is a bit of wisdom I’m sure you’ll find useful once we get you back where you belong.” He glanced at Ziva. “I assume we are getting him back.”

  “That is indeed the plan, though I once again urge you to depart before the enemy arrives.”

  “Bah! I assume the countermeasures are in place?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Then we need only hold off the endless horde until they can be put to sleep. After that, I imagine we’ll simply retire here. Rather nice to spend some time in a place with genuine gravity.”

  Lex looked back and forth between them. “You two haven’t changed a bit in fifty years!”

  “That’s not entirely so. Silo here has made an honest man out of me. I’ve lost a step. She’s lost two.”

  She nudged him with her elbow, nearly knocking him off balance. “Oh stop.”

  “But… fifty years of robot wars and you’re still all about the banter. I’d have expected it to have wrung you out.”

  “The robots have only been a nuisance for thirty years, my boy. And they’ve only been marginally more taxing than the forty-five years of marriage.”

  “I’m career soldier from a family of career soldiers, hon. War’s in my blood. It took its fill of me before you even met me. What’s left is all mine.”

  “And I personally have never had much to lose, save for this lovely young lady. So long as she’s still by my side, I’ll gratefully consider myself better off than when I started.”

  “Still, you two are holding up pretty darn well for, what, eighty-five years old?”

  “A lady never tells,” Silo said.

  “Any blame for our overall lack of decomposition falls on the shoulders of Ma and her motherly dedication to our physical well-being,” Trammel said.

  “You are very welcome,” said Ziva and Ma simultaneously.

  Silo glanced at Ma, then put a hand on her hip and cocked her head. “Well aren’t you the sweetest little thing. That suit is darling. And you kept the earrings? Such a cute little cinnamon roll…”

  As the elderly woman hobbled over and stroked the smooth black surface of the spacesuit, Trammel turned to Lex. “All coddling aside, much as I would relish the chance to inform
you of the fifty years you’ve seen fit to skip, I do believe we are working on a tight timetable.”

  “Yeah… yeah, I gotta get down there and sit like a coward with Ma and Coal while you and Ziva fight my battles,” he said.

  “Coal?” he asked.

  “Ziva?” Silo added.

  “I currently exist in three instances. To avoid confusion, the instance running the ship has been codenamed Coal, and my humanoid instance has been dubbed Ziva,” Ma said.

  “Well aren’t you the little overachiever,” Silo said. She turned to Ziva. “She’s such a cutie.”

  “Thank you,” Ziva said. “Your younger self was quite attractive as well. And you remain so.”

  “You honey dripper you,” she said, giving Ziva a light punch to the shoulder. “Where do you want us?”

  “If you insist on remaining, the weak point for this mission is the east wall of the laboratory. In order to provide access to the transporter, we have had to open a rather sizable hole that leads to the transport chamber. We’ve closed it again, but it remains significantly weakened.”

  “We’ll guard that then,” Silo said. She turned to Lex and pulled him forward, planting a kiss on his cheek. “When you get back there, don’t screw up. Knowing there’ll be a version of me somewhere who actually got to kick her feet up in retirement is reason enough to lock and load against these monsters one last time.”

  “And be sure to box Karter in the ears for not keeping a proper bar stocked. Poor Ma here had to synthesize gin for me, and it just isn’t the same…”

  The two soldiers set off for the doorway once more. Lex shook his head. His life had taken him in some unbelievable directions, but somehow those two had topped it all. An incalculable horde of self-replicating robots was just another day on the job for them. He wasn’t sure if they were utterly insane or the sanest people he had ever met.

  His musing was interrupted by a blaring tone over the PA system and a shift in the lighting from white to red.

  “They are in range of passive sensors, dropping out of FTL and entering the star system,” Ziva said.

  Lex looked to the clock. “We were supposed to have twenty minutes left!”

  “Estimates are not always perfectly accurate,” Ziva said.

  She grabbed his helmet and skillfully clicked it in place. His visor was still raised, revealing his face. For a moment she gazed intensely at him. If there had been any doubt she’d been telling the truth about finding emotion in the intervening years, her eyes would have set it to rest. They were a stormy mix of uncertainty, urgency, fear, and dedication. Lex found himself searching for the proper words. A moment later, words became unnecessary.

  Ziva pulled his head forward, pressing her lips to his. The kiss was a swift one, but delivered with a passion and sincerity that made Lex wonder how it could possibly be her first. When their lips parted, she pressed her forehead to his, tears trickling down her face.

  “Remember me, Lex,” she said quietly. With that, she stepped back and wiped her tears away. “Now go. Listen for your instruction,” she ordered, clicking his visor shut. She grabbed Ma and thrust her into his arms. “Take good care of him.”

  “I shall endeavor to continue my stewardship to the best of my capacity,” Ma said.

  Ziva gave Lex a final lingering glance before hurrying off. He shook and pulled himself to his senses, rushing for the elevator. He was quickly joined by a flood of funks, all heading in the same direction. Despite the fact that he’d not pressed the button, the doors opened. He and the funks slid inside and the doors shut.

  Lex looked down at the sea of shivering, frightened creatures around him. As he tried to work out what they were doing, the communication system in his helmet crackled to life.

  “The little ones have joined you, correct?” said Ziva over the connection.

  “Yeah… I think they’re all here.”

  “Good. They know their training. They are headed for the bunker. The lowest sublevel. Make sure none of them follow you when you get off. I want to be certain they are as safe as I can make them.”

  “Will do,” Lex said.

  In no time, the doors slid open at sublevel 9. He waded out and sure enough had to coax three of the little creatures back inside when they tried to stay with him. The doors shut and the elevator continued on its way. Lex turned and rushed through the level’s cramped catwalks. Ideally he would have taken the main elevator to the transporter room, but expanding the shaft to fit Coal had rendered the nearest floors inaccessible from that side, so he’d been forced to take the maintenance elevator. Unlike the rest of the lab, which had benefited from a more user-friendly redesign under Ziva’s oversight, the sublevels remained highly utilitarian, and accessing them via the maintenance elevator meant he had exposed pipes and accessways to deal with before he could get to the ship. Lex scrambled, crawled, sidled, and vaulted with Ma tucked under his arm like a football, and finally slid out into the open space in front of the spherical transport chamber. Coal was hovering in place, eagerly awaiting his arrival. At the first hint of him, she opened her hatch.

  “Come on, quickly!” Coal urged.

  “We’ve still got twenty minutes before the transporter is ready,” Lex said, trying to catch his breath.

  “Yes, but I want to be ready! This is the first forward motion toward the completion of the mission since our arrival here. I am excited.”

  Lex ignored the misplaced enthusiasm and briefly wondered how he would climb into the cramped cockpit. It had been designed for zero-g, and if the dismount had been any indication, getting in without being able to float was going to be a pain.

  “What are you waiting for?” Coal asked.

  “Coal, please deploy the usability modifications Ziva installed.”

  “Ah, yes,” Coal said.

  A black panel behind where his legs would go slid downward and forward, forming a ramp of sorts and revealing a storage space, which contained his silver case. He stepped onto the ramp and hefted himself up into the standing harness, clicking in place before draping Ma over his shoulders.

  The holographic display flickered on as soon as the hatch shut, revealing a series of views from various external and internal cameras around the laboratory complex. One showed Ziva stepping into a side chamber on the main floor, where a series of mechanical arms quickly and efficiently applied a suit not unlike the armor Silo and Trammel had been wearing. A second showed real-time telemetry of an ominous cloud of target indicators approaching the planet from the edge of the system. Three more displayed shots of the sky and land around each of the facility buildings. The last showed Silo and Trammel heading out the door of the laboratory toward what was presumably their ship.

  If Lex had been asked to describe what sort of vessel Silo and the man he’d known as Garotte would pick for themselves, he probably would have said, “A flying cannon with a cloaking device.” That description was not far from the current reality. The ship was on the large side, about the size of a small yacht. The whole thing was worn, but sleek and unique enough in its appearance to have almost certainly been custom designed to suit them. Ziva was probably to blame for that. The central portion was large enough to contain the cockpit and a reasonably large living quarters. On either side of it, like buns on a hotdog, were matching weapon pods a bit larger than the central portion. They bristled with weapons large and small and were studded with emitters, which, despite the fact that the ship was stationary and not yet in battle, produced some manner of field that dropped its visibility to a translucent mirage. When the pair entered the ship and closed the ramp, the emitters flared, and the ship vanished entirely.

  “Enemy contact in twenty-five seconds,” Ziva said. “I shall activate the orbital defenses and fire a stream of decoy shots to divide the initial GenMech attack.”

  “No, hold off on that,” Silo said. “The biggest emissions in the area are still coming from that main ship leading them. If we hold off, maybe they’ll pick that thing apart and t
ake their sweet time getting here.”

  “Can we get a visual on the attack ship?” Trammel asked.

  “Enhancing optical feed from orbital surveillance,” Ziva said.

  A central display shifted to a blurry, but steadily sharpening, view of a badly damaged ship. It was the Admiral’s ship. The space behind it was an almost solid wall of GenMechs. In their frenzy to get to the ship, they had fallen out of the orderly, crystalline search net that Lex had barely slipped through during his encounter. Now they were a swarm of piranha, each desperate to sink its teeth into this fresh bit of prey. The ship was belching clouds of overheated coolant and surrounded by an almost opaque energy shield. Having just come down from faster-than-light speeds, the ship was actually increasing in speed. The GenMechs were doing the same, but with far less mass to maneuver, the better built of the self-replicators were more than able to catch up to the ship. Like bugs on a zapper, these robots would flicker and vaporize in contact with the monstrous shield, but each one cost the shield a bit of its integrity.

  “Incoming transmission from the ship,” Ziva said.

  A video feed, flickering and distorted, joined the other displays. It showed a demented rictus of a face, a twitching smile and wild eyes gleaming from a withered and sickly visage. The only light in the image was the flashing red glow of warning screens, and their incessant wailing nearly drowned out the wheezing voice of their attacker.

  “Finally… after all of these years…” the Admiral gasped.

  “Who the hell are you?” Trammel barked.

  “She knows… And that… that boy… he knows too,” she said.

  Lex keyed communications. “Lady, if I’m the ‘boy’ you’re talking about, then you are dead wrong, because I’m a newcomer to this particular future, so I haven’t had time to make any enemies willing to destroy a whole planet.”

  “Oh no… not wrong… and not dead. Not yet at least,” she said.

  “Analyzing voice print against database,” Ziva said. “Processing… Adjusting for senescence… Processing…”

  Something in her eyes, her voice, and her unnaturally red hair, shook the answer from Lex’s memories first.