James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01
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Deep in Pegasus’s belly, Eliza Change escorted her two best guys through her new favorite place. “I found this section about nine days before we exited hyperspace. What do you think?” They were surrounded by enormous tanks of water. The containers were made of a crystalline composite. The water played tricks of the light that dazzled and dappled all around them. The composite material was resonant, picked up their voices and added accents that sounded like musical chimes.
“This place is absolutely… shitastic,” Roebuck enthused.
“Matthew Driver?”
Matthew Driver stood in the dappling light between two of the holding tanks. “I never would have thought there were places like this in the UnderDecks.”
“No one worried about aesthetics down here,” Eliza told him. “I think that makes the moment even more precious, when you find a beautiful spot.”
“I brought food,” said Eddie Roebuck. He shook a blanket out on the floor and began unpacking sandwiches, fruit, and beverages from a cooler.
Eliza sat down next to the blanket, her back against one of the plain, gray columns that formed the structural support of this deck. “So, Matthew Driver, did you really see the future on Meridian?”
“Who told you…?” Matthew snapped. He looked to Eddie, who just smiled, guiltlessly, and tore into the first of many sandwiches.
Eliza touched his arm. “I’d really like to hear about it.”
Matthew paused for a second before answering. “In a way, I guess it’s true,” he said. “I saw the past, too.”
“Tell me,” Eliza went on, taking a sip from her flask.
“The arco-tower where we bivouacked was built on the remains of what had been Meridian’s tachyon pulse transmitter. There was still an active Tachyon Generator buried below the surface, and it was still generating a tachyon field. The way my sister explained it, some kinds of tachyons… sort of absorb time. I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it takes a lot of energy. When the Merids blew up the tower the first time, they put in enough energy to let those events be captured in time by the tachyon field. When our warhead detonated, it had the same effect. Between them, the explosions froze every event for three days on either side in time.
“When I was asleep, my brain somehow received the images locked in the tachyon field. So, I had dreams of the past that was captured there. The same thing happened to Merids who camped out in the same area. That’s why they called it ‘The Bush of Whispering Ghosts’, only they dreamed of us coming.” Eliza brushed her hair back from her face, looked at him deeply, and said, “Well, if that’s what you want to believe, then you are welcome to it.”
The prime commander, I think, is merely relieved that things did not go as badly as they could have. Sometimes, that’s what a human has to do.
The next world we will reach is a colony called Eden. According to our records, there were scores of colonies called Eden, New Eden, Newest Eden, Eden II, EdenWorld, East Eden and others. We can not be certain which Eden this is, but it is probably not the first.
I wonder what we will find when we get there.
Fear no evil. God is near.
Set in my own hand
Queequeg
Table of Contents
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three