The Farpool

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 21

  Seome

  Kinlok Island

  Time: 768.6, Epoch of Tekpotu

  Chase knew there was a lot of work to be done at Kinlok and not much time to do it. Ultrarch-Major Dringoth had impressed on all of them the urgency of the moment. Sector Command was nervous about the shutdown…Dringoth told Chase there were always Coethi jump ships prowling the nearer star systems and snooping along critical time streams. Sector had given permission for the dismantling and re-location of the Time Twister to proceed but just in case, a small patrol squadron from the Upper Halo had taken up station around Aleth A, another world of Sigma Albeth, a sister world to Seome. Once they were on station, Dringoth gave the order to proceed.

  The Omtorish fleet set to work corralling all the chronotron pods which wave and wind action had torn off the top surface of the Twister and littered across the waters around Kinlok. That job took a day. When they were done, a large tchin’ting fiber net had been draped across the waters of the bay, inside of which clanked and jostled most of the damaged pods.

  Kloosee mentioned that it was like herding pal’penk into their pens. “Except you don’t have to feed them and talk to them.”

  The Time Twister itself was a vast, twelve-kilometer pie-shaped structure, segmented into quarters, moored to the seabed with stout anchors and surmounted with hemispherical caps, which were the chronotron pods. Fully operational, the machine resembled an enormous inverted dinner plate, studded on top with dimples and balls. The entire apparatus was linked by thick ganglia of cables to the island itself, for power and command and control. The hut where most of the conferences and planning took place housed tracking instruments. The control center was housed in a bunker-like structure on the other side of the island, nestled in a small ravine near the summit.

  The project was planned to gather all the repairable chronopods together, so the Umans could sort out what worked and what didn’t. Those that could be repaired would be. Those that couldn’t would be discarded and Sector would have to furnish replacements.

  Once the pods, the real working elements of the Twister, were secure, the final teardown of the foundation and Twister structure could begin. That would take many days.

  Through it all, Chase worked closely with Kloosee and Pakma and Longsee and a host of craftsmen from Omt’or and other kels. There was quiet talk of the possible emigration. Word had spread quickly through the workforce that two technicians had accompanied Angie back through the Farpool. Their job was to gather further intelligence on Earth’s oceans. How suitable were they for Seomish to occupy? There was much speculation about this.

  Section by section, the Twister was taken apart and the sections wrapped in tchin’ting fiber and attached to powerful kip’ts, which would cross the Pomt’or Current, make the Gap through the Serpentines and be staged in a gathering place just off Likte Island, a small bay above the vast underwater canyons, trenches and ravines that crumpled the seafloor in that region. There, guided by instructions from the Umans, the sections would be assembled, moored to the seabed and bonded together. Then would come the chronotron pods. Dringoth’s crew would handle that installation.

  Several days after the final disassembly had begun, a Coethi attack appeared out of nowhere. Golich said the enemy jumpships had squirted out of a little used time stream, one thought to be isolated, a bridge to nowhere really, but how they made it to Sigma Albeth’s system in the current time stream, nobody could say. The Twister was dead, shutdown. Seome and the whole Sigma Albeth system was defenseless. Even the patrol squadron off Aleth had been caught napping.

  The Coethi did what Coethi do: they launched a series of starballs, fusium bombs, at the sun and most of them made their impact in a series of eye-blinding detonations that rocked the star to its nuclear core.

  Within days, the light level had begun to subside. Huge waves churned Seome’s seas, as temperature differences went extreme. Winds roared across the surface, gusting at sustained hurricane force levels. Salinity levels in the upper levels of the ocean changed as evaporation rates increased, making much of the upper reaches of the sea uninhabitable, colder, saltier, turbulent with the force of the waves above. Currents shifted course, affecting navigation, affecting the ootkeeor, the deep sound channel. Tremors and seismic shocks rocked the world.

  There were many casualties, not the least of them the vast cavern of Ponk’t itself, which partially collapsed, killing thousands, sending thousands more into the open waters in panic. Other kels were affected too. In the Orkn’tel Sea to the south, islands collapsed, underwater landslides blocked the northward-flowing Orklat current, effectively isolating the Orketish from the other kels.

  For many, it was worse than the Uman machine, which had gone silent, as it had been fully disassembled and the great convoy bearing the sections westward to the Likte Trench had been scattered by ferocious surface cyclones.

  Kloosee and Chase did what they could but were grim in the effort. They had lost friends and colleagues in the Coethi attack. The hardest of all to endure was losing Longsee himself, whose kip’t had been smashed into the side of a seamount by what had been called ak’loosh, a great-globe-circling wave foretold in ages past, now circling the world, gathering strength with each circuit. Longsee and two pilots had died in the impact and Kloosee could not console himself to the loss.

  Glumly, he drove his own kip’t onward, leading a small group of battered sleds through erratic currents, hunting for echoes from the Gap in the Serpentines that would put them on course for Likte Island and its deepwater canyons. The kip’ts bore several pie-shaped segments of the wavemaker, the Uman machine, along with racks of chronotron pods which would be re-installed once the new home base of the Time Twister was constructed. Other kip’ts carried or towed foundation elements, mooring cables and equipment for starting up the Twister in its new location…if they ever got there.

  Kloosee and Chase took turns piloting and navigating the sled, with Kloosee sounding carefully ahead, listening intently for the telltale echoes of the Serpentine Gap.

  “It’s chaos out there,” he insisted, sucking on a gisu bulb. “All the waves above, the tremors and mudslides below. I can’t get a good reading.”

  It wasn’t what he said but the way he said that made Chase realize how depressed and sad Kloosee really was. There was a fatigued weariness to his voice that Chase had never heard before and he was sure it wasn’t just his echobulb translator.

  “You really liked Longsee, didn’t you?”

  Kloosee said nothing for a few moments, concentrating on driving the sled forward through heavy silt-laded waters. They were riding an erratic offshoot of the Pomt’or Current and Kloosee was having trouble keeping to a steady course.

  From somewhere in the back of his mind, he dredged up a memory, which he related to Chase….

  “In my 4th mah as a ward of Kelktoo, I left the em’kel without permission several times, once traveling as far as the island of Tostak, in the Sk’ortel. I was curious…I want to pulse new places. But I was caught by the authorities there, taken to Tostah and lectured sternly by the Kelktoo there before being turned over to the custody of an Omt’or kip’t pilot heading back to T’or. En route back to T’or, I tried to get away again but the pilot recaptured me and beat me. Not badly…I recovered. When Longsee inquired as to the cause of my injuries after I came back, I shrugged it off as a run-in with a baby seamother…which Longsee didn’t believe but he said nothing further about it. Oh, eekoti Chase, I was impetuous and headstrong as a youth but I learned a lesson about obedience there.”

  “Did they punish you when you came back?”

  Kloosee forced a smile. “Longsee never questioned what had to sound like an unconvincing explanation and this impressed me. From then on, I felt I could talk to Longsee and I did so regularly. You’ve talked about two people important to you…you called them father…mother…an eekoti expression, perhaps?”r />
  “I owe everything to them. My Dad runs a surf shop on the beach. My mom raised me and my brother and sister. I love ‘em, even though my Dad thinks I’ll never amount to anything. He wants me to go into the business with him, like inherit it and keep it going.” Chase chewed on a lip. “I pretty much don’t want to do that…and Angie…she wants me to be more, too. Kloos, I like it here…I’m kind of somebody here. Like a celebrity.”

  Most of what Chase said didn’t translate well and he could see Kloosee didn’t really understand although he said he did. Chase knew the Omtorish, like most kels, didn’t allow their young to grow up with their birth parents. They joined the Kelktoo, the academic em’kel, at a young age, and were raised by teachers.

  Chase wasn’t sure he could have handled that.

  “I’m listening to snatches of talk on the ootkeeor—“ Kloosee admitted. The kip’t rocked and shuddered as he fought to stay with the current. Behind them, not visible in the murk, were three other kip’ts, all towing pods and sections of the Uman machine and its foundation works.

  “What do you hear?”

  Kloosee seemed tense in relating the stories. “It could just be talk. But there are persistent songs about the Umans…some of the repeaters are singing that the Umans are leaving Kinlok…pulling out. One repeater reports of sighting a great spear of light, flying upward from the island…I’m not sure what this means.”

  Chase had the signaler they had long used to request meetings with the Umans. Longsee usually worked the thing; Chase wasn’t sure how it worked, or if it would work across the great distance they had traversed from Kinlok. Still he had to try.

  “Maybe I can find out…maybe this thing—“ he finagled with the fist-shaped device for a few minutes, eventually finding some control studs on the bottom. One after another, systematically, he pressed them. Scratchy voices erupted out of the device mixed with bursts of static and words cut-off and Chase listened. Perhaps it was a recording. None of it made any sense but there was no mistaking the tone of panic in what he heard….

  “Commandstar was briefly attacked by a Coethi jumpship six milliterr ago and partially disabled. TACTRON has assigned me to damage analysis and I must tell you, Dringoth, it is extensive. Coethi was able to momentarily displace the ship back to a time when it was still under construction. TACTRON countered with a shift in voidtime to another timestream but not before the destruction had spread. I don’t have to describe to you the explosive effects of such instantaneous displacement.

  “The result is that Commandstar is unable to provide any assistance in drawing Coethi vessels into your range. We are currently shifting through voidtime at a very slow rate that makes us extremely vulnerable to another attack, while repairs are being made. We may even have to re-enter truetime for awhile. TACTRON’s war programming prohibits the unnecessary risking of Commandstar, so for the time being, you will have to rely on your own scanning for protection. I realize what a burden that puts on your system but it cannot be helped, believe me. We are barely functional here….

  “Sector Command has approved your request to re-locate defensive operations to Keaton’s World, pending shutdown of your Twister….in the event Coethi enter your timestream, you must ensure no part of the Twister falls into their hands—“

  “What does it tell you?” Kloosee asked.

  Chase listened a while longer, until he was sure he understand what the signaler was saying. “Bad news, Kloos. The Umans left Kinlok. Blasted off. Pulled out. With the Time Twister shutdown and disassembled, they’re re-deploying some other place, something called Keaton’s World. I don’t think it’s in this system.”

  “What does this mean, eekoti Chase?”

  Chase just shook his head. Maybe selling T-shirts on the beach would have been a better choice. “It means we’re on our own. The enemy of the Umans, the Coethi, are destroying your sun. If they succeed, all life on Seome will die. Your skies, your islands, your seas, all of it will go dark. It’ll freeze up. And without the Time Twister, there’s no way they can be stopped.”

  Kloosee tensed up. “It’s as the mekli priestesses at the Pillars say…the ak’loosh is here. All the kels will die.”

  “Even worse…the Farpool is gone. I have no way home.”

  Kloosee throttled back on the kip’t’s propulsors to negotiate a narrow chasm up ahead. He hoped this was the opening to the Gap. “When the ak’loosh comes, it means Shooki is angered. Judgment is coming. There’s nothing anybody can do.”

  Now Chase knew why he had come to Seome. It slapped him in the head like a monster wave from the Gulf, the kind that often rolled onshore in advance of hurricanes, the kind the lifeguards whistled you out of the water for.

  ‘Oh, yes, there is, Kloos.”

  “What is it?”

  “We can build our own Time Twister.”