Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “It’s… it’s… Commander Purcell,” Lex said, realizing the truth.

  During his first clash with a group called the Neo-Luddites, Lex had been unfortunate enough to tangle with a commander of that group in charge of a massive military space station. She’d managed to kidnap Karter and had convinced him to create a collection of CME Activators, weapons that could destroy or disable anything remotely technological in an entire star system. The Neo-Luddites were terrorists, bent on destroying current technology to pave the way for grander, more advanced replacements, so this was a dream weapon in their view.

  “Admiral Purcell,” she spat.

  “You’re supposed to be dead too! Ma chucked you into deep space!” Lex growled. “Does anyone ever actually die?”

  “Your computer tried to kill me… Neo-Luddite reinforcements arrived sixteen hours later, looking for you. They found me via the suit’s transponder. Oxygen deprivation and carbon dioxide poisoning took their toll, but I survived. Neo-Luddite medical technology… five years of recovery… severe brain degradation and nerve damage… but I survived.”

  “Further evidence one should always seek the body before pronouncing someone dead,” Trammel said.

  “This is all your fault… All of it… Why do you think the Neo-Luddites wanted to harden the galaxy’s technology? Why did you think we wanted the CME Activators? If you’d not interfered, society would have been ready. Instead, it fell,” Purcell croaked.

  “Nothing could have prepared humanity for a threat of this size,” Silo said.

  “And yet, those who were prepared survived… I made plans. I readied my troops… And when the first wave came, I returned to my position among the soldiers of my homeland. And for ten long years I held off the attacks.”

  “It never ceases to astound me how truly chatty the Neo-Luddites are,” Trammel said.

  “I regained my rank, regained their respect, but it was a lost cause. And I knew you… you would seek a way… I knew you had the transporter… I knew where you would hide… I tried to reconstruct my own… didn’t have the resources…”

  “Yes, yes, the details of your insane obsession over the last fifty years are fascinating, but if it is all the same to you, I would much prefer to spend the last moments of my life free from a psychotic monologue,” Trammel said.

  “I know you have a time machine! Its activation registered on our early warning system. The others didn’t recognize the signature. Thought it was a glitch. But I knew the fingerprint of the transporter when I saw it. The technicians said there was a temporal offset… And I knew… I knew your plan… you would change the past… I tried to tell them. They thought I was insane.”

  “You are insane,” Lex said.

  “But I knew if I…”

  “Right, I’m through listening. Ma, open fire if you would. Target the chatterbox first,” Trammel said.

  “Target acquired. Engaging in fifteen seconds.”

  The madwoman’s display dropped away, and that of the ship, now with range indicators and a good deal more fidelity, replaced it. A hundred red targeting reticules arranged themselves in the image. Most targeted the ship itself, the rest targeted dense clusters of GenMechs.

  “Do we have an estimate on the approaching GenMech population?” Silo asked.

  “Seven septillion,” Ziva stated.

  “Not that I’m complaining, but that doesn’t look like seven septillion robots back there,” Lex said.

  “They are all approaching from the same direction. Only a few hundred thousand can enter safely within a specific timeframe. It will likely take several years for the GenMechs to completely filter into so small a region of space.”

  “Perhaps the others will lose interest,” Trammel said.

  “It is a distinct possibility a large percentage of them will select alternate targets. We may only have to cope with several hundred trillion.”

  “Bah,” he said. “Child’s play.”

  “Activating continuous plasma barrage,” Ziva said.

  The targeting view flooded with brilliant violet blobs of light. As they traveled they spread and lost their cohesiveness, the fuzzy outlines oscillating and buzzing wildly. At a certain point, these expanding clouds of ionized gas became much more tantalizing to the swarm of robots than the ship that was leading them. Clumps of GenMechs peeled off to harvest the bolts and were summarily vaporized. As the plasma aimed at the ship began to splash and disperse against its shields, the effect was like throwing a steak in front of a hungry bear and then dousing it with gravy. The GenMechs mobbed the vessel, crowding into its path, searing against its shield. In a few moments the massive frigate was entirely hidden beneath a mass of sparking, sizzling mechanisms.

  For a few seconds it seemed that the ship might have been destroyed, but a brilliant surge of light, power being funneled into the shields, boiled away the coating of GenMechs, and the whole process started again.

  “Good lord that thing can take a beating,” Silo said.

  “The Neo-Luddites always did have a fine box of useful toys. It comes from being willing to tolerate a few unwanted explosions,” Trammel said. “To that end, I think it may be wise to ready the Big Gun.”

  “Way ahead of you. Ma, you got yours up?” Silo asked.

  “All available power has been directed to the transporter. I will not be able to activate our primary surface weaponry until after the portal opens,” Ziva said.

  “Then we’re not going to be able to get off more than one or two shots,” Silo said. “I better take my time lining them up.”

  “Targets entering mass driver range, activating,” Ziva said.

  The targeting view picked up a handful more substantial reticules, and after a moment, brilliant white streaks of light began to trail their slow sweep. It was like the tracer fire of a gunship. The streaks didn’t have the same luring effect as the plasma bolts, but they effortlessly tore through any GenMechs they made contact with, often turning them into a cloud of debris, which in turn peppered a dozen more in their path.

  In very short order the targeting screen was an incomprehensible mess of flying debris and glowing slag. Targeting anything individually was impossible. It had all become a wall of devastation approaching the planet.

  “Approaching the minimum effective range of orbital defenses. Switching to surface targeting,” Ziva said.

  The image shifted from the chaotic swirl of explosions to the fuzzy gray sky of Big Sigma as seen from the ground. The dense clouds of debris meant that even in the brightness of midday it seldom seemed brighter than dawn. Right now the ball of devastation was visible as a growing glow in the western sky, one that easily outshone the sun and threatened to white-out the entire sky.

  Ziva zoomed the image to a bright point at the center. Slow sweeps of processing filters rendered it to a just barely visible orb of glowing shield, and at its center, the still intact ship. It was plowing through the debris field like an icebreaker braving the arctic. Explosions wreathed the shield, which had taken on a worrisome flicker. A thin stream of GenMechs rushed in behind, riding the wake in the field. Those robots that circled ahead and attempted to take the ship from the front or target the increasingly relevant facility below were quickly pulverized by the orbiting debris and became just another layer of protection.

  “The frigate’s shield is still at a calculated integrity of twenty-nine percent. If it survives the debris field and enters the atmosphere at the projected distance, no weapons available to me will be powerful enough to collapse it without consuming the laboratory in the resulting blast,” Ziva said.

  “I’ll take care of the shield, and probably the ship, too. But I need you to keep those things off me, because if I’m using the Big Gun, then the little ones are going to be down.”

  “That is within my capabilities,” Ziva said.

  Lex felt oddly detached as the combat unfolded before him. It was like watching footage of a war live via satellite. It was all real, but it didn’t feel that
way. That sensation was quickly banished when the facility around him shuddered.

  “What was that?” Lex asked.

  Three additional exterior views appeared. They painted a worrying picture. All around the facility, the sky was filling with red streaks. Some faded while still in the sky. Others disappeared over the horizon. Many reached the ground, taking a massive bite out of the landscape.

  “The massive influx of mass into the debris field has destabilized the carefully maintained orbits of much of the debris. A reentry cascade has begun.”

  “That sounds bad,” Lex said.

  “It will pass when the largest of the pieces have reentered, but until then, the safety of this facility cannot be guaranteed. I will require all of the debris positioning lasers to prevent GenMechs and debris from interrupting the power supply chain and deactivating the transporter.”

  “When it rains it pours,” Lex said.

  “Analyzing statement,” Coal said.

  “It was figurative, Coal,” Lex said.

  “Figurative in that periods of high atmospheric bombardment are called meteor showers, similar to rain showers? Or—”

  “We’ll talk about it later, Coal!” Lex said.

  “Can we keep the com chatter down to combat relevant statements,” Silo said. “Don’t mean to be pushy, but my focus isn’t what it was, and we don’t have time for a reload.”

  “Of course, my apologies,” said Coal.

  The viewer focused on the point of ground presumably occupied by Silo and Trammel’s cloaked ship, highlighted and expanded. A shimmering glow filled the view, then faded as both the defensive and cloaking fields dropped. Six enormous support struts lowered to the ground and locked in place. One of the weapon pods split open at the top, and a roughly rectangular device with a glowing ring at its tip rose and targeted the ship.

  “Activating black hole mortar…” Silo said.

  “Holy crap. Karter actually made one of those!?” Lex said.

  “Of course not. He made five,” Trammel said. “Now hush up.”

  “Aligned. Containment active. Three… two… one…”

  She didn’t need to say the word fire. When the device released its payload, the whole ship slid back fifteen meters, very nearly colliding with the lab. One would have expected such a recoil to result from a truly massive projectile, and it did, but massive in this case was not a synonym for large. A point of black, barely the size of a marble, fired out of a barrel. Military science has always sought to find ever denser materials to fashion into projectiles, the better to deliver kinetic energy to the target. Stone, lead, tungsten, depleted uranium, and so on. The logical conclusion to this sequence was that densest of all things, the singularity.

  A black hole as small as this one was not self-sustaining, but that was just as well. A containment field not only kept it intact, but also served as guidance as it ripped through the air.

  Silo had aimed the blast well, though the air was already so thick with GenMechs that she could have fired at random and hit a half dozen. The impacts weren’t particularly impressive. Where the event horizon of the singularity hit a target, a perfectly circular hole was bored through and the black dot continued on its way, having added the stolen mass to its payload. It punched neat holes through more than a dozen GenMechs without slowing, each of them seeming to drop out of the air simultaneously as though struck by the mother of all sniper rifles, then finally met the shield of the frigate.

  This was rather impressive. Though it was less than a pixel in the targeting display, when the singularity struck the shield, it lit up like a supernova and then failed utterly. The dot continued to the armor plating, bit a hole in it, and burrowed deep into the frigate.

  “Releasing containment,” Silo said.

  An explosion seemed to shake the whole hemisphere. Lex wasn’t clear enough on the science to know precisely why what happened happened, but he’d seen it before and knew it was coming. The explanation included words like Hawking radiation and relativistic orbital velocity. All he knew was that when they hit the switch, the black hole went boom, releasing all the mass it had accumulated either as energy or shrapnel.

  Despite the apocalyptic sound it produced, the most intense area of destruction was remarkably compact, taking a spherical divot out of the ship. That divot must have included a substantial part of its power and propulsion, because the reentry angle of the ship became significantly more ballistic. It struck the ground, grinding across ten kilometers of cratered earth until it came to rest.

  “Gosh I do love that gun…” Silo said gleefully. “Switching to small arms. Keep an eye on that ship, though. I don’t know if we got the bridge.”

  A few minutes ticked by, Lex watching tensely as the battle unfolded. The clock read three minutes remaining on the transporter activation. It had already begun to hum and glow. Brilliant lines of laser light crisscrossed the sky, slicing GenMechs in half. Huge shotgun blasts of flack perforated and pulverized flocks of the GenMechs. Clusters of homing missiles picked them out of the air. But the flood was unabating, and soon the glow in the sky dimmed.

  “The orbital defense layer of the debris field has been compromised. Expect a massive influx of GenMechs,” Ziva said.

  A piercing alarm sounded.

  “GenMechs have made contact on the roof of the laboratory. Releasing defense drone,” she added.

  “Defense drone? Who’s flying it?” Lex asked.

  “I am,” Ziva said.

  An additional video window opened and showed point-of-view video from some sort of swiftly flying contraption, which was, within moments, destroyed by the GenMechs.

  “The multitasking and increasing power fluctuation is taxing my calculation capacity.”

  “Are there any more?”

  “There are eight drones remaining.”

  “Let me fly them!” Lex said. “Route controls to Coal!”

  “Rerouting.”

  He took a deep breath as the center of his display spread out to the inside of a darkened launch bay. “Eight lives… that’s more than most games give you…”

  As he’d watched his friends doing the fighting and felt the now constant rumble of the ground as it was peppered by debris strikes, Lex had felt himself becoming increasingly anxious. The very instant the readings populated the screen, that all dropped away.

  Now he was in control.

  He boosted the throttle and launched the thing out into the fray. Two quick swoops told him all he needed to know about maneuverability. Ma had painted priority targets for him, and a dome of blinking red dots around a central point served as his threat indicator. The drone was like flying a wasp, ridiculously nimble but not packing much of a sting. In his first outing he managed to scrape off the three GenMechs that had touched down on the roof and walls. His second drone racked up a kill score of twenty-three. By the time he’d reached the final drone, there were mere seconds left on the countdown, but a final glimpse of his video feed before he was struck down froze his breath in his chest. Something was streaking along the landscape, heading directly from the downed remnants of the frigate.

  “Did you see that?” Lex yelped.

  “I did. Purcell is not down. We have received heavy damage on the entry face of the facility, but I am attempting to get a visual,” Ziva said.

  A flickering, distorted feed from the main entrance slid into the central portion of Lex’s display. A shield shimmering with the same intensity as the one from the frigate but a fraction the size was approaching at a blinding pace. It was Purcell, her mobility device under constant assault from the GenMechs but shrugging off the attacks.

  “I’ll get the ship around front,” Silo said.

  “There is no time. She will reach the interior in fifteen seconds. I cannot allow anything to interrupt the operation of the transporter. The engagement has already begun.”

  On her dedicated video feed, Ziva’s red irises surged brilliantly as she stepped to the doorway and selected a matte-b
lack rifle from beside it. The display was beginning to flicker and distort as an intense glow emanated from the transporter’s core behind Coal.

  “Monitoring power levels,” Coal said. “I will enter the chamber when the necessary threshold is reached.”

  The words fell on deaf ears as Lex stared in agony at the screen. The view shifted to a camera at the far end of the entry hallway. An outer camera revealed the sphere of energy surrounding Purcell as she closed the last few meters. Potent bolts of energy erupted from side-mounted blasters, splashing against the heavy-duty blast doors and causing them to run like candle wax. The blue lines on Ziva’s suit took on a blinding glow, shining between the plates of her over-armor. Lights along her rifle shifted from green to red.

  “Power threshold approaching,” Coal said.

  A final blast knocked the inner door from its hinges, and Purcell’s mobility device from hell roared inside. Ziva pulled the trigger, and a blue net deployed from a launcher slung under the barrel of her rifle. At the same moment, Purcell opened fire on her.

  The net sparked and flashed with some sort of countermeasure as it struck the force field, causing each to dim and fade. Purcell’s blasts hit their mark, one striking Ziva’s abdomen, the other striking her shoulder. She didn’t cry out, but the force of the blasts hurled her backward and knocked the rifle from her hands. The afflicted sections of the armor sizzled and ablated under the energy blast, and Ziva’s shoulder fell limp, more blue light shining through damaged skin at her upper arm.

  “No!” Lex cried.

  He began to fight with the buckles restraining him and hammer at the door controls.

  “What are you doing, Lex?” Coal asked.

  “We’ve got to help her!”

  “Lex, please understand this comes from a place of deep respect. You are a soft-hearted fool, and we will not allow you to make this mistake,” Ma said.

  “Agreed,” Coal said.

  The words Manual Control Disabled flashed across the display. Lex heedlessly fought to be released as he watched an army of the mobile robotic arms descend upon Purcell, latching on to her chair to attempt to immobilize it. Claws pinched shut gun barrels, sheared through power cables, detached emitters. Even as the chair was being disassembled, its raw power dragged them all forward, closer to Ziva.