by Shawn Jones
“That was closer than I wanted it to be,” Cort said when was back aboard the flight. “My environment was down to eight percent.”
Dar said, “I was starting to get worried. Did you find what you wanted?”
Cort considered lying to him, but didn’t. “Yeah. It took a while, but it was there. Let’s get back to the house and see what Wills thinks of it.”
California
“Wills, only open it inside the chamber, okay? And make sure the chamber’s Faraday is active.” Cort said as he handed the small box to the archaeologist. “I’m not taking any chances that the signal is picked up.” They had closed the barn off after moving the flight inside. While they had been gone, Wills and Clare had moved the chamber to the family compound. The final sales of the ‘artifacts’ to museums and collectors had completed and only the items that would either be destroyed or sent to Mars still remained. Those items were here in the barn. Its great empty space was no more, the area filled almost top to bottom with repacked and resealed crates from the cavern.
“Of course. I have already put several pieces of equipment in there to help us find out what it is. There is dinner waiting for you. I will be studying this.” Dr. Wills said as he stepped into the transport chamber and closed the hatch behind himself.
Four hours later Cort heard the hatch open. He had eaten and was going over the Mars manifest when Wills emerged.
“Tell me how you came to find this, Cort.” he said as he handed the box back to Addison.
“Just a moment.” Cort sealed himself inside the transport chamber and verified that Wills had put the medallion back in the locket and the locket inside the small box. Stepping out of the chamber he said, “Sorry, Doc. I’m just not taking chances with this.”
“Nor would I expect you to. Nor should you. Though I suspect the shielding only works for our space-time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I believe it is some sort of transdimensional signal. Will you tell me how you found it?”
Cort began, “Do you know what the Soviet Union was? In the late 1900’s I was on a float, er, an assignment aboard a Navy ship. We were in the Bering Sea, listening to them...”
Wills listened for thirty minutes until Cort was done. “So it was near a statue, one hundred and sixty feet under water. Do you remember what the statue looked like?”
“At the time I thought it was a diver in a bell type diving suit. Later though, I wasn’t so sure.”
“Well, that is where my next project will be, I believe. I will have to find an Asianic counterpart to collaborate though. I do not believe what you saw was a statue. Cort, I will not try and talk you into giving the medallion to me. And I do not think man is ready for what it I think it represents anyway. Perhaps Mars is the best place for it.”
“I’ve always kind of thought it wasn’t something the government needed to know about, Doc. Certainly not back then. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone at the time. But I think someone knew, just the same. Whatever it is, it’s special.” Cort paused. “Lemme ask you something, did you by chance put it near a magnet?”
“Yes. Actually, I just exposed it to a magnetic field. The tachyon burst was incredible. That is why I’m going to the Bering Sea when I am done here.”
“Tachyons?” You knew, didn’t you Ben? That’s what this was all about.
1,200 Light Years From Earth
“Sir, we just received a signal from beacon X-1027.”
“Really? When was the last time?” Speral asked her subordinate. X-1027. Toward the end of the galactic arm. She activated her lens. The man who had brought her the news waited as she closed her eyes to read. When she opened them again, he spoke.
“Over one thousand orbits, sir. Based on galactic rotation, the beacon is in the same system as the last time it was activated. Dimensional shift won’t allow for a better fix than that.”
Speral closed her eyes again, reading more information about the system. “Originally it had two habitable planets, only one of which is still viable. We did not seed it because it had evolutionary potential. The second lacked the mass to sustain a younger atmosphere. Well, clearly the beacon is not being activated. I can’t imagine a species learning how to use it, then putting it away for millennia. Put the system in queue to be examined again. Let’s find out how the habitable planet has done. What is the time delay in system analysis for the X-arm right now?”
“Ten orbits, sir. Three orbits locally to the habitable planet.”
“Thank you, Pagztay.” She deactivated her lens and went back to her report.
California
“Today would be Thanksgiving in my time.” Cort said. “So I made you all a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Oh my gods! It smells amazing!” Kay said. “Why did we ever stop cooking this way?” The others were amazed by the change in Kay. Over the months since meeting Cort and Sköll, she had come out of her darkness. She even seemed younger. The years of emotional strain were starting to disappear. She smiled. She laughed. She was learning to live again.
Cort smiled, “That started in my time, when they invented something called a microwave oven. I believe Dr. Wills sold three of them for about a million credits each.”
“What is this, Cort?” Dar pointed at the brown liquid.
“It’s called turkey gravy. You can put it on just about anything. I like it on the mashed potatoes and the stuffing. There is another kind that is good on biscuits.” Cort pointed at the two dishes.
Clare said, “No. I will never ruin this ‘stuffing’ with anything. I could eat it at every meal. Cort, why did people in your time celebrate this day?”
“You explain, Doc. I’m hungry.” Cort said to Wills as he began eating his turkey.
--
“The supply ships are already on their way. They will be in orbit by the time you and Mother arrive.” Clare was sad as she spoke. “I will miss you.”
Cort reached out to her hand. “I’ll miss you too. I hope you and Dar wrap things up soon. Then you could join us if you still want to.”
Clare held the back of Cort’s hand to her lips. After she kissed it, she said, “I will. Hopefully I will be on my way before you even get there. I wish Grandfather would come.”
“His place is here. He knows that. He’s not like you. He doesn’t thirst for new knowledge or experiences. I think the last year has aged him a lot.”
The moon was rising in behind the lake. Wispy clouds passed in front of it. Clare put her cheek in Cort’s palm. “Mate with me, Cort.”
Nine
Utah
“It is very unusual to not have our people supervise the loading, Mr. Sike. And with a passenger I am very worried. Are you sure?” Launch Coordinator Alt asked.
“We have been over this. Your work on all the previous launches has been admirable. However, this load will be secured by my team. As well as the next two. You will still handle all future launches. Nothing more is to be said on the matter, am I clear?”
“Yes, sir. Please let me know when you are ready.” Alt walked away.
The HLF, or heavy lift flight, took off three hours later. At thirty-two thousand meters altitude, it slowed to cruising speed and deployed its cargo tether acquisition arm. Four minutes later, the arm grappled and then locked into the tether anchor. The flight cargo bolts detached and the HLF descended, leaving the cargo vessel attached to the tether.
Kay waited until she felt the shift in momentum that Clare had described before she unbuckled and let Cort and Sköll out of the box they were in. They had two minutes before the tether rotation would begin. Cort buckled the wolf’s harness into an empty seat, then checked Kay’s harness before taking a seat and strapping himself in.
“Thank you for taking me with you, Cort.”
“Just ten weeks, Kay. Then we will build our new home.” And find your son.
They felt another shift as Sköll whined. The rotation had begun.
When the satellite ten kilomete
rs above them began to rotate, the cargo vessel gained altitude and speed. It completed one and a third rotations before an onboard computer disconnected from the tether. The vessel escaped the Earth’s atmosphere moments later and began to align itself for the long flight to Mars. The ion drive wound up and the ship began to accelerate.
Kay and Cort unbuckled and floated their way to a viewing port. Kay cried as she watched her blue and green home recede from the viewport. She knew she would never see Earth again, except as a light in sky. Cort was not one to look back. He took a quick glance at Earth and then found distant Mars in the space they traveled.
After a few minutes of silence, Kay said, “We should get started.”
“Tell me what you have in mind, Kay.” Cort still wasn’t convinced about the synthetics, but he was willing to talk about them. After the discussion on the flight to save Wills, he mentioned the conversation to her. She told him she would have to catch up on the latest studies, but she would look into it.
“One of the last projects I worked on was to develop a bio-synthetic. That is, one that was not metal based. The research was promising, but ultimately funding was stopped because it would mean a return to long-banned weapons. Namely, the ones you are using now.”
“Because your synthetics would be immune to disruptors?” Cort asked.
“Exactly. The scientific community recommended the project end because it implied a step back in both judicial and military technology. So far as I know, the project was completely mothballed because of the recommendations. That does not mean it did not have merit. Actually it is just the opposite. It had too much merit. Especially when you consider the healing aspects of the technology. It would still take a severe traumatic injury to stop an opponent, and the disruptors would be useless.”
“What about my Atlas interface? How would it be affected?” asked Cort.
“Synthetics see any foreign matter introduced to the body as invasive. Introduced to the body. Anything that is already there when the synthetics reach critical ratio is considered normal. Critical ratio is the term for synthetic volume that denotes when there are enough synthetics for full effect.” Kay could see that Cort was still following so she continued, “In your case, since the interface is already there, it would be seen as ‘normal’. In fact, I am not sure, but it is possible that the synthetics would repair any damage that the interface sustained due to injury. So that is not a concern with either the standard synthetics or my bio-synthetics.”
“Disruptors?”
“Standard synthetics are pre-programmed to respond to their frequencies. So the simple solution would be to not include frequencies in their responsive programming. But I do not like that idea because you would still feel the effects. While a disruptor would not deactivate them, a prolonged burst would still cause the metal in them to overheat. Theoretically you would have seizures. Oxygen saturation would be impossible. It would basically be like one of your ‘microwave ovens’. My bio-synthetics would not be affected. The downside to my bios is that they are untested. I cannot even promise they would work. They also might kill you. I just do not know.”
“Well, you can test all you want for ten weeks. After that I need to be one hundred percent. What do you need from me?”
“Well, I will not test on you until I am much more confident. So we will start with some blood.” Kay floated away. “Seriously, Cort? You thought I would test on you directly? What is the phrase you always use? Son of a bitch! Are we far enough away from Earth to turn on the gravity generators yet? I have got work to do.” She looked back one more time, rolling her eyes at him.
--
Three weeks later Cort and Sköll were walking along the center of the cargo vessel when Kay commed him. When they got to her makeshift lab, she motioned him to a seat. Sköll sniffed at Kay then lay down beside Cort. Cort was still impressed by the simplicity of being able to walk around or sit under full gravity. Mass-energy equivalence was an equation: E=mc². As early as the 1990s, scientists had been able to generate and magnetically contain mass based on the equation’s variant m=c²/E. By increasing the strength of the magnetic field and the number of sub-atomic collisions of light particles, in the late twenty-first century they had been able to generate sufficient mass to produce measurable gravity. Advances in the field led to true artificial gravity generation by the dawn of the twenty-second century. The Cull and geo-political restructuring delayed further research until the mid twenty-third century. By that time, power generation had evolved to the point where the process could be applied to space travel.
Kay turned a monitor toward Cort. On the screen there were blood cells. “Here is what I have been fighting.” she said as she started a video. It showed what appeared to be a time lapse. After the introduction of Kay’s synthetics, the blood died within minutes. “But here is what I’ve got now.” she started another video. This time the blood appeared to live much longer. Halfway through the video, a second needle appeared on the screen.
“The needle is filled with water. Watch how the blood cells turn a brighter red. The bio-synthetics are pulling the excess oxygen out of the water and feeding it into the blood cells. I did not plan on that, but it will be beneficial.” The second needle disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a third. Kay went on, “This time the needle is injecting a virus. Notice how the synthetics attack it immediately. I think I have got it.”
“So does that mean you are ready to test on me?” Cort asked.
“Yes. The question is, are you ready?” Kay still had trouble reading Cort. He was the most enigmatic man she had ever met. Probably because his world was so different than the one she knew. But this time she thought she recognized excitement.
“Which arm?” the warrior smiled.
“I will want to monitor you very closely for a few days after I inject you. As in, you will be in bed most of the time until I am sure you’re okay. I will also be taking a lot of blood and running a lot of tests. Can you deal with that?” Kay had never seen Cort sit still for more than an hour, so she wondered how this was going to work.
“Yeah. But you might need to knock me out some. I’m not much for being immobilized too long. Say, do you know how to play cribbage?”
--
“That is it.” Kay said as they watched the fresh cut on Cort’s forearm begin to heal itself. She put the scalpel she had used down and was timing how long it took for the wound to stop bleeding, then for the flesh to begin restitching itself, and finally to be closed over. “I am impressed,” she said a few minutes later. “You are healing faster than you would with standard synthetics. I cannot really claim credit for that, though. I suspect it is because your synthetics have less programming. Since they have fewer instructions, they have less to process. How do you feel?”
“Great. A little creeped out, but great. And just in time, too. Look.” Cort pointed to the viewport. Deimos was in the edge of the window and as the big auto-piloted freighter adjusted its attitude in relation to the planet below, both Phobos and Mars came into view. “We’re almost there, Kay.
“Kay, I have to be honest, when I agreed to take you along, I didn’t see you as an asset. I agreed to take you because you somehow found hope in Sköll and me. You needed us. And we came to love you. Your loyalty and your laughter touched me. We both know you stole Sköll from me.” Cort smiled and pointed at the wolf. He was sitting beside Kay with his snout on her thigh. “He’s yours now. And I am glad for that. Sköll is my friend. But he’s your companion. You are both safer with each other. Which brings me to our next step.”
“Our next step?” Kay asked.
“Yes. You’re a much better administrator than I ever could be. I want you to set up the base.”
“Set it up?” Kay’s look was skeptical. “There are three of us, Cort. And Sköll could care less how we run things. What is there to run?”
“After we land and get Aeolis online, I’m going to Oxia Palus. To the main colony. I need you to get Aeolis up and
running while I’m gone.”
“Why are you going there?” Kay was suddenly scared. Unsure of what to say or do.
“I have to get my grandson. Your son. I’m going to get Rand.” Cort watched the words sink in. Kay began to weep.
“Really? Please Cort. Really, can you bring him back to us?” Kay was almost frantic now. “Please, gods! Bring him back to me!”
“I will Kay. Like you and Dar and Clare and Wills and Sköll, he is family. And I will bring him home if I have to kill every other human there. You have my word.”
Kay stood and walked around her desk to stand in front of Cort. She traced the scar on his face and said, “I was right. You are hope. Thank you, Cort.”
