by Lea Tassie
Spyder hid. He was all in favor of Charger R/T killing Abarth. That would leave the way open for him to take over the church. Millions of humans had been destroyed but millions still remained. That power base would provide him with everything he wanted.
The neutrino weapon was a sickening device and its use had finally driven Jet to madness. As Abarth continued using it, Jet sank deeper into insanity. Rocking back and forth, with his hands over his ears and sobbing incessantly, he watched as Abarth continued shouting orders and blasting away at the four worlds. He could picture the blast hitting a human, instantly evaporating all the water in the body and leaving just the base materials as a pile of dust on the ground. Women, children, the elderly and infirm, young, strong men and women, all suffering because of what he had created and Abarth now used.
From the world ship the Gray mutants erupted like packs of rabid dogs, all vying to be the first to attack the Tasker ship. Though they swarmed the surface, the metallic constructs of the ship seemed undisturbed by the onslaught, clicking and buzzing as their machinery slowly spun into action. A concentrated blast of particle fire burst forth, cutting down the attacking Grays, as row after row of Tasker guns fired their lethal charges.
Abarth was desperately recalling his remaining troops from the four worlds, trying to increase his attack power. "Damn it, Jet, get the hell off the floor and go to the engine room, we need to prepare for the beast!"
"I can't," Jet stammered. Urine stained the front of his pants.
"We will die if you don't move! Get to the engine room. Everything will be okay if we just stick to the plan," Abarth shouted over the continuous noise of laser fire.
Jet pulled himself together, then entered the elevator that would speed him across the planet to the main engine room, a place of massive size and complexity. From the elevator, he looked out the small windows and saw fields of crops, small cities and towns, all the places that dotted the inner horizons of this world ship. They were blackened now, after a year of the Gray Reptoid hybrids defiling everything. His elevator zipped past fouled lakes and rivers toward the artificial sun the Taskers had long ago created for the people of Mahoud. Inside this beacon of light, which was the world ship's sun, was a tunnel that led to the engine room. Jet raced down the corridor to the entrance of the marvelous complex.
The engine room was radically different from all the technology humanity knew, for the quantum entanglement particle drive system was entirely Gray technology from long ago. Jet walked into a room foreign to humanity. Back engineered to be useable, the QEP drive was breathtaking in scale. Jet stood at the interface created by humans to use the drive and began activating the base programs Abarth had demanded he prepare.
"Are you ready yet?" Abarth shouted over the intercom system.
"Almost. Two more minutes and the system will be active," Jet shouted back. He could not keep his voice steady.
"Damn it!" Abarth snarled, then shouted for the Grays returning from the four worlds to join the assault on the Tasker ship. The sheer numbers of Gray mutations involved in the attack were beginning to take their toll on those small metallic soldiers, as several breaches in their defensive line began to widen. One by one, the Taskers were torn from their command posts and shredded, their limbs ripped violently from their bodies, their heads pulled off.
Charger R/T stood calmly in the Tasker command station, watching Abarth panic. The Taskers didn't concern him. They had spent their existence as mining robots in space and they were devoid of life, responding like puppets on a string. Charger R/T smiled at the frustration the Grays exhibited, their losses so great at the hands of their own ancestors' creations. To the very last Tasker, the little robots fought well, killing many Grays. When the last robot fell, the remaining Gray mutations turned their attention to reaching Charger R/T in the command post. They would soon learn they had made a bad mistake.
Charger R/T was like a spider in a web, drawing the Grays in. They crashed through the doorways, entering the command post, only to be held in place by Charger R/T's ability to control gravity. Charger R/T was growing impatient with the Grays and, instead of waiting, he began drawing them to him by bending gravity and pulling them into the ship. As hard as the Grays fought, they could not escape Charger R/T's pull, and the prospect of their deaths.
When Charger R/T felt he had enough of the Grays on board, he blinked from the Tasker ship and materialized in the world ship's command center. Then, with the power of his mind, he compressed the Tasker ship into a tiny speck, obliterating Abarth's army.
Abarth was stunned. Charger R/T stood now only a few meters from the central command console. Desperate, Abarth shouted, "All I have to do is hit this switch and, with the power of the QEP engines, I can use the neutrino weapon to blast the surface of all four worlds. If you surrender to me, demon, I will grant you the favor of not annihilating every human in existence."
Charger R/T took a step forward.
Abarth shouted, "I'm warning you, I will kill everyone and it will be on your head. Is that what you want? You want everyone to die?"
Charger R/T stepped forward again, and those cold white eyes locked on Abarth.
"This is madness! I have the power to kill everyone and everything! Are you just stupid, beast? Is that it?" Abarth was coming unglued. He was certain the beast was programmed to protect humanity, yet it continued to approach. But if Charger R/T could not afford to let humanity die, he would be forced to comply.
The few surviving Grays rushed into the command center, desperate to attack Charger R/T and get revenge, but they stood no chance of success. Charger R/T caught them by their throats and snapped their necks, killing them instantly. Some he let hang by their throats for a few minutes, as they scratched and clawed at his armor, but the end was always the same.
Abarth watched in horror as he began to realize his plan of controlling Charger R/T by threatening humanity was doomed to failure. He decided to take the worlds down with him. Time stopped for everyone in the galaxy as Abarth reached out to strike the neutrino weapon’s trigger.
But, as Abarth reached for the button, Charger R/T slowed time down to a crawl. Then he sauntered the remaining few feet to Abarth. He yanked the man off the floor and thrust his great fist through Abarth's ribs, then released his hold on time. Abarth gasped as he realized he was hanging in the air with his chest broken open and Charger R/T's great face just inches from his.
As blood filled Abarth’s mouth, he mumbled, "You win. I give in. Please don't kill me." Charger R/T twisted Abarth about in the air, peering into his eyes, looking for fear. Convinced he saw something, he tossed Abarth to the floor like trash, where he crumpled in pain and agony.
"Now!" Abarth shouted, blood spurting from his mouth. Jet had spooled up the engine of the world ship and, hearing Abarth give the command, he activated a controlled false jump directed at Charger R/T.
Jet had learned from the ship's records the method of a false-jump, with its ability to send out a wave of energy that, when in contact with an object, subjected it to the four-dimensional printers stationed in space. What Jet had done was create a modification of this discovery. He had devised a method of directing the wave like a beam and, directing that beam at Charger R/T, he false-jumped him off the ship.
Caught completely off guard, Charger R/T found himself tossed into deep space. When he stopped moving, he was in a rage. Roaring with anger, he blinked back to the world ship. But he arrived in empty space because, once he was off the ship, Jet had jumped the world ship to escape. The four worlds floated beneath Charger R/T's feet, circling the yellow sun of his childhood, safe from destruction.
Charger R/T's mind reached out into the vacuum of space searching for Abarth but, as long as the world ship remained in transit, he could not find it. He was infuriated with this outcome and rage filled his twisted mind with hate.
In that single moment, Charger R/T reached out with his mind to find all the Grays still in existence and, with his god-like power, tore
the life from every one of them. No matter whether they were children, elderly, or simple farmers in an agrarian society, Charger R/T reached across the void of space and found them. Wherever they were, he stripped them of existence.
Humanity would never forgive Charger R/T for this unjustified reaction.
Charger R/T didn't care. The world ship had stopped moving now and he knew where it was.
***
Abarth needed an escape. He had failed to kill Charger R/T during the human war, the Grays' invasion and his involvement with the black sphere. All his attempts to get revenge against humanity and, more importantly, Charger R/T, had ended in disaster. Now Abarth knew his time was up. There was only one thing he could do, with Charger R/T hunting him, something so radical and dangerous that failure in this would surely result in his death. But, the way things were, he had nothing to lose.
***
Dart speaks to Reader:
How can Abarth possibly escape? Time travel, Reader. I promised you a while back that I'd tell you how it works.
Jet had a precise, scientific mind and he understood what every human had so far failed to grasp, that the Grays' QEP drive engine was beyond brilliant. What the Grays had achieved in the design and build of the QEP engine was outside the range of all but Jet's ability to understand fully. To lock onto a quantum entangled particle somewhere in space and then transmit data to that particle in a binary method was by itself mind-boggling. However, to then use that locked particle to generate a four-dimensional printer out of the mass floating in the vacuum of space was revolutionary.
The next step was beyond revolutionary: the use of this found mass to clone and create new mass at will, using the incalculable powers of a layer of dark space. With the entire universe remaining in a perfect state of balance, the Grays could destroy matter in one location and recreate it in another location in the barest flicker of a second. This, Jet realized, was just the tip of the iceberg. What he was now using had once been spoken of in café back rooms and darkened corners of university campuses all over the world in the late twentieth century on Earth.
Have humans always been interested in time travel? Oh yes, they are always fascinated by the impossible.
Mathematicians and physicists had, in humanity's past, proposed the existence of a quantum locked particle, but one radically different from Einstein's quantum entangled particle. This was theorized as a single atom that existed for the entirety of time. It had been at the big bang event and would still exist at the end of the universe, an atom that never moved from its location, a quantum locked particle. It served a purpose of such importance to the dimension of time that it was almost overlooked, except by one professor. He submitted a paper never fully published in academia because of its unprovable contents and its implications for the nature of time itself. What this professor theorized was that in such events as a black hole, time itself could not escape the gravitational pull, so therefore, like water down a drain, time itself should eventually be drained from the universe.
The idea that time was a finite thing like mass was discounted. But Jet knew this professor was correct. He had discovered this old theory while in prison and, with the knowledge, a radical thought formed. Could he somehow lock the QEP engine to a locked particle in space? Then, with a controlled false-jump, send a traveler to any point in time to that location in space where the locked particle existed? To Jet’s astonishment, he soon discovered that a locked particle was not a rare occurrence. They were everywhere, though so minute in size as to be almost undetectable.
In his first attempt, Jet sent a small red ball ten minutes back in time with the QEP drive by locking onto a particle in the room of the drive engine. Before he could activate the controlled false-jump on the red ball, it instantly appeared in the same location as the one he was sending. With this failure, Jet moved the red ball to a location across the room and retried. He was stunned to witness the ball appear in the location of the particle before he actually sent it.
He remembered what had happened in his lab six months before this first test with the red ball. A small blue cup appeared in his path from nowhere. He thought it was odd, but couldn't dismiss the idea that he might have been overtired and merely hallucinating. A few days later another blue cup appeared in his path in the lab. This time he decided somebody was playing a prank on him and dismissed it. But over the next six months, small blue cups kept appearing. In the first test he conducted, he had used one of the many blue cups kicking around.
It took him a while to clue in that time travel was actually working. He put a note to himself in one of the cups and a lab assistant remembered seeing the cup with the note in it a few months previously. They retrieved the cup from a cupboard and there was the evidence – the cup and note had traveled back in time. It was like the chicken and egg enigma.
You want to travel through time, too, Reader? But you are traveling through time already, at the normal rate and toward the future. Well, all right, we might have time to experiment with traveling back in time. But not until I finish my story.
***
Jet had achieved time travel, but it was a one-way trip. He had explained to Abarth and Spyder a few days earlier how the system worked, but Spyder wasn't interested and Abarth was unable to fully understand.
"Okay, so imagine an ocean with its waves crashing on a beach. The waves can't just land on the beach and stay there. If they did, the ocean would eventually run out of water." Jet was explaining this on the bridge of the badly damaged control center of the world ship. They were in hiding from Charger R/T, so far as it was possible to hide a small planet. "The only way that the water can return to the ocean is through the rip tides, like rivers underwater."
"Okay, I understand that part," Abarth replied coolly. He always hated it when Jet talked science. He felt stupid and small, no matter how much Jet tried to accommodate him. "But how does this have anything to do with time travel?" Abarth had bandaged his broken ribs again. They were healing well. The longevity program developed by medical science saw to that.
"Well, like the ocean, if a black hole absorbed time, then the universe would run out of it. So, like a rip tide, time has to travel backward to refill the ocean of space." Jet was explaining as he demonstrated this principle with small bolts he was placing on the table. "Here is a pile of bolts next to this cup. If the cup were a black hole, the bolts would just continue to fill the cup. Eventually we would run out of bolts." Jet filled the cup with bolts. "So, imagine small locked particles in space. These are like anchors for time particles to grab onto. They are far enough away from the black hole for the time particles to grasp."
As Jet dumbed the conversation down to mere bolts and cups, Abarth slowly began to understand.
"This is what I like to call a time rip," Jet said as he removed the bolts from the cup and placed the cup some distance away next to a bolt that represented a locked particle. "In theory, we can escape back in time to before all this started."
Abarth really liked this plan, but Jet added a caveat. "But you have to understand that it's a one-way trip, because no QEP engine will be found where you end up, so there is no way to leave the time line where you land."
Abarth looked at Jet and said, "What?" He truly had no idea what Jet had just said. His dedication to faking a spiritual life and searching for power left no room in his imagination for scientific mysteries. To Abarth, all this science was just mumbo jumbo.
"If we go back in time, we're stuck there," Jet said.
Abarth had no intentions of it being 'we.' He didn't need science or Jet anymore and, at the first opportunity, he would put an end to this relationship.
Jet was not a fool. He suspected that Abarth might have other designs. He had been duped into complying with Abarth's madness long enough and so made preparations to ensure his own safety. He had guessed that Abarth would attack him on the pressure point that would kill him. This ancient martial art method of killing could only be defeated with a block. Jet k
new he didn't possess the physical ability to stop Abarth's use of this hit, but he could use padding in his clothing to protect himself.
Spyder sensed that Abarth planned to kill him, too, and he didn't intend to stick around to find out if he had guessed right. When the opportunity presented itself, he blinked to Ceres.
Abarth didn't bother following him. The man had been helpful with the Grays, but otherwise he seemed rather inept. He might kill a few more humans on his own, but he'd never have the kind of power Abarth had wielded. And would wield again, when he came back from this trip into the past. No matter what Jet claimed, he'd find a way to come back.
***
Jet lay face down on the floor. With his one remaining good eye, he could see that his right arm was torn and bleeding badly right in front of his face. There was no feeling in his left arm and he had no idea where it was in relation to his body. He also had no feeling in his legs. He'd probably been paralyzed by Abarth's attack.
Jet remained motionless, intently listening for Abarth's footfalls but hearing only the sound of his own rough breathing. He had no idea if Abarth had already left the engine room, which would mean he was safe now, or if the man was watching him from a distance, waiting in cruel anticipation of Jet displaying some sign of life. Minutes felt like hours as Jet watched the blood pulse from his arm and pool on the floor beside him. Like thick red paint, it flowed over itself like magma. Then the pain struck, flashing in his brain with the power of a tidal wave. Inadvertently, he moaned, revealing that he was alive. If Abarth was nearby, his death was assured.
The attack did not come and Jet began to wonder if he might survive. Taking a chance, he tried to look around the room. It was then that his one good eye gained focus on a large black boot just feet from his face. Jet strained to focus on the boot and, twisting his head, looked upward. Looking down on him was Charger R/T who, with the light emanating from behind, appeared to Jet as a large black mass.
