by Smith, Glenn
The appropriately named starskiff H.G. Wells passed through what was still an enormous vortex generator ring as far as Benny was concerned, despite the ‘smaller’ scale, and darted into jumpspace. Only then, when there remained no possibility of being intercepted and boarded—they could still be attacked and destroyed, however—did he enter the coordinates of their top secret destination into the nav-computer. Once he’d done that, he turned the pilot’s chair around to face Dylan and sat back and relaxed. “Now we just enjoy the ride,” he said.
“I’ve been enjoying the ride for the past nine hours,” Dylan commented, still leaning back in the co-pilot’s chair with his feet propped up on the edge of the console and staring out the starboard side windows.
“I noticed,” Benny told him. “You’ve been like a child on Disney World, like you’ve never even been in space before.”
“You know how it is, Benny. Fleet vessels don’t have a lot of windows. This ship lets us see all the way around us, above us, and below us. It’s great.”
Benny smiled. “You have the heart of a true explorer, Dylan.”
Now that they’d jumped, there wasn’t a whole lot of anything to look at anymore, except for the colorful little donuts directly ahead of and behind them, which he’d seen before, so Dylan finally peeled his eyes away from the windows, dropped his feet to the floor, and sat up. “Speaking of exploring, how much longer are you going to make me wait before you tell me where we’re going?”
Benny grinned. “Ah yes. Where we’re going. Sit back and relax, Dylan. I have quite a fascinating story to tell you.”
The chairs had been designed for comfort as well as for functionality, so Dylan felt fine just as he was. But he sat back a little anyway, just to please his elderly companion. Besides, given Benny’s apparent age and his outgoing personality, he had a feeling the guy was ready with more than just one story, so he wanted to be as comfortable as possible.
Benny began as soon as he saw that Dylan was ready to listen. “You noticed my outdated uniform before. This was one of the uniforms I wore when I served as a technician in the old Solar Defense Command more than forty years ago. Of course, my waist size was a bit smaller back then and my shirt had sleeves,” he added with a smile.
Dylan laughed politely.
“I served most of my time aboard the starcruiser Australia. She was a primitive tub by today’s standards, a bit smaller and slower, but she was still a lovely vessel, bless her fusion reactors. She was like a loving woman, only a lot easier to love back, and the officers and crew were the finest collection of spacers I’ve never known.” A look of melancholy crossed the old man’s features. “Da,” he said, nodding slightly. “Space can be a wondrous place, but it can be damned unforgiving, too. I’ve lost a good number of friends over the years, and a piece of myself with every one of them.”
Sadness suddenly weighed heavily on Dylan’s shoulders and his gaze fell to the floor. “I know what you mean,” he said quietly, thinking not too far back on his days of combat—on one terrible night in particular. “I’ve lost a few friends of my own, most of whom were serving under my leadership when they were killed.”
A look not of pity but of sadness and understanding crossed Benny’s features. “I know you have,” he said with heartfelt compassion. “Commander Royer told me a lot about you, including your role in the mission I think you’re referring to now. It’s a terrible sadness what happened to your squad. There’s truly no worse experience for a leader than that.” He drew a deep breath. “But, life goes on. Da?”
“Da,” Dylan answered, his use of the Russian word soliciting a grin from Benny. “Life does go on.” He paused for a moment of silence, then looked Benny in the eye. They’d only just met a little more than eleven hours ago, but somehow, at least at that moment, he felt closer to the man in front of him than he did to anyone else in the world. Except for Beth, of course. He felt like he could tell him anything, even bare his soul to him if need be, and he decided to do just that, within reason, though he didn’t know why. “But it can be really hard sometimes, you know?”
“Yes, it can be,” Benny agreed.
“Sometimes I wonder why I’m still here when so many of my friends and comrades are gone. I wonder why I didn’t die with them.” Their holophoto faces were still fresh in his mind and tears began to well up in his eyes. “What right do I have to still be alive?”
“I asked myself those same questions many years ago, Dylan, more often than anyone should ever have to, and I found the answer to be quite simple really. You have the same right to be alive that everyone else has. You didn’t kill those marines in your squad. The enemy did. So set the survivor’s guilt aside and don’t beat yourself up over being alive. Honor their memory always, but go on with your life. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yeah, I understand. It’s just not that easy.”
“No, it’s not. It will take some time, but you can do it. You must.”
“I hope so.”
“You have no other choice, my boy. Especially if you intend to marry that lovely lady friend of yours and stay married to her.” Dylan looked at him with questioning eyes, but Benny ignored that for the time being. He’d have plenty of time to explain how he knew about her later. Instead, he continued, “If she has agreed to build a future with you, then you owe it to her not to...not to live in the past as it were.” The expression that crossed Dylan’s face told Benny that the younger man had recognized the double entendre behind his words. “So, if you can’t do it for yourself, or even if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for her. ‘Beth’ is her name, is it not?” Dylan nodded, smiling at the sound of it. “There it is,” Benny said, smiling as well. “That’s much better.” He gazed at the younger man for a moment, then got up, crossed to one of the storage compartments near the top of the starboard bulkhead, and took out a tall bottle and a pair of shot glasses.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked.
“Only the best vodka this side of the galaxy,” Benny answered proudly, slightly over-enunciating the ‘V’ in his effort to pronounce it in the proper English way.
“Vodka? At four o’clock in the morning?”
“It is only four o’clock in the morning if you have been to sleep,” Benny pointed out as he returned to his seat. “We have not been to sleep, so for us it is four A.M., very late at night.”
“And I’ve been up for what...more than twenty-one hours?”
Benny scooted forward to the edge of his chair and handed the glasses to Dylan, then opened the bottle and filled them. Then he closed the bottle again, set it down on the deck out of the way, and took one of the glasses. “Here’s to old friends and fallen comrades,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.
Dylan wasn’t much of a drinker, but how could he refuse to share that toast with this man? A man who had suffered the loss of comrades many times over, just as he had. A man who had been there, exactly where he was now, in that dark emotional limbo, unsure of how he was supposed to feel.
A man who was absolutely right. Old friends and fallen comrades were to be honored. Dylan raised his glass, touched it to Benny’s with a clink, and drank.
And then it was Benny’s turn to smile first as Dylan tried and failed to suppress a fiery cough. “I hope they appreciate this, wherever they are,” Dylan barely managed to say before the coughing fit took hold of him again.
“Da, it does pack a satisfying punch!” Benny commented with a laugh, licking his lips.
“To say the least,” Dylan heartily agreed, recovering. “You sure that’s just vodka?”
Benny smiled.
More than anything at that moment, Dylan wanted to direct their conversation back to the here and now. He wanted to know where they were going and exactly how long it would take them to get there. He wanted to know everything. But as he gazed at the elderly gentleman in front of him he saw a man who, for whatever reason, still needed to tell his story. Still needed to reminisce with someone
about old times. Times, it somehow seemed, that he longed to return to, despite what he’d just said about living in the past.
“I’ll bet you’ve got some great stories to tell, Benny,” he said, providing him an opening.
Benny looked Dylan in the eye and understood immediately what the younger man was doing. He smiled again. “Speciba, Dylan. But there will be plenty of time for that. I suspect you would like to know where in the hell we’re going first.”
“Well...”
“Da, you would. But don’t worry. There’s a story that goes with that, too.”
“I thought there might be,” Dylan bantered.
Benny chuckled, then began his tale. “Not too long into Australia’s deep space mission... By the way, we were the first Earth ship ever to visit another star system. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I did. I remember learning that in history class.”
“History class?” Benny exclaimed, but with a smile. “Am I really that old?”
Dylan smiled with him. “Sorry, Benny.”
“Anyway, we were orbiting this previously uncharted planet when our scanners showed a large mass of refined metal on the surface. Now keep in mind, man had never been to this planet or ever met any aliens before, so this was an wonderous find.”
“What did you do?” Dylan asked, genuinely interested in how a crew of that day and age would have handled such an astonishing discovery.
Benny poured himself a refill—when had he finished his first one?—gulped it down, and poured himself another, then set the bottle aside again.
“We assembled a team of scientists, techs, and security personnel and shuttled right on down there. We didn’t know the upper atmosphere was so violent. Like rough surf on an angry sea, so bad the jostling threatened to shake us apart. Our pilot damn near lost control of the shuttle and crashed, but once we came out of the clouds everything was fine. The air was calm and quiet. Problem was, we’d been blown so far off course and used so much fuel fighting the winds that we had to touch down half a dozen kilometers from the metal mass or risk not making it back to the ship. We had to walk the whole way to the metal mass.”
“What did you find?” Dylan asked, totally engrossed.
“Ruins. A lot of them. Fallen columns, collapsed walls, crumbled building foundations. An entire city’s worth of ancient ruins. And right in the center of it all, a short ramp leading up to the most unusual old relic I’ve ever seen.
“Looking down at it from the top of the ramp it looked like an old swimming pool. The kind you assemble above the ground, but with a rim at least a foot wide. It was perfectly round, about three meters across, and looked to be filled with some kind of liquid metal that gave off steam but no heat. Nothing held it up, either. It had no walls or foundation of any kind. It just floated there, about a meter and a half or so above the ground.”
“What was it?”
Benny looked Dylan dead in the eye and answered dramatically, “The Portal.”
“The what?”
Benny took another drink, then explained, “It was a...a kind of window, or more like a doorway actually...a doorway into the past, although we didn’t know that at the time. It took our scientists over a dozen years to figure out vhat it...what it was, and to get it vorking. I vent back vonce, after they finally did, and learned de most incredible thing. You can actually set it for any time period at any place on Earth and drop right through into the Earth’s past! Theoretically, at least.” Dylan was smiling. “Vhat?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on. Out vith it,” Benny insisted.
“Okay. It’s just that I’ve noticed when you get emotional a lot more of your accent creeps into your speech, and the more emotional you become, the stronger the accent is.”
“Oh, nyet! Is not de emotion. Is de wodka! Yoo shood hearrr me vhen I get really drunk!” he said, humorously over-exaggerating his accent.
They shared a brief laugh, but Dylan wanted to hear the rest of the story, despite the fact that it was quickly becoming too incredible to believe. Then again, the whole concept of his mission was too incredible to believe, yet here he was. He coaxed Benny along. “You said this Portal can show you the Earth’s past?”
“Da! I mean, yes.”
“Why just the Earth? Why not other planets?”
Benny cleared his throat, as if to keep from snickering at a rather stupid question. “Dylan, the Portal isn’t some old science-fiction drama’s all-powerful guardian of time,” he explained, concentrating on not reversing his ‘V’s and ‘W’s. “It’s a real-life doorway into another time and place. When you’re in your house, you can’t step from your living room into your bedroom and end up in the kitchen, can you?”
Dylan shrugged his shoulders. “Had you asked me that a week ago I would’ve said no. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“So where did this Portal come from?” Dylan asked, still feeling a little doubtful.
“The ancient Tor’Rosha built it.”
The Tor’Rosha? That name, that one small bit of information, caught Dylan off guard and completely changed his perspective, casting Benny’s ‘Portal’ story into an entirely new light and leaving him momentarily speechless. As far-fetched as such a device might have sounded, it was a fact that the long-extinct Tor’Rosha were known best for their ancient yet incredibly advanced technologies. Suddenly, despite his better judgment, he believed.
“You mean this thing really exists?” he finally asked.
“Of course it exists!” Benny exclaimed. “Vhat? Did you think I vas making the whole thing up? The Tor’Rosha built dozens of them, all over vhat...what...is now Coalition space. And those are just the ones we know about. Who knows how many more of them might exist further out? Each one is a doorway onto one specific planet.”
“And each one displays the history of its target world?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s pretty incredible, Benny. How can they do that?”
“You got me. I just know what I saw it do.”
“Do the Tor’Kana know about the Portals?”
“They must, almost certainly. But they don’t know about this one in particular, as far as we know. We have certainly never told them about it. We’ve been sitting on it quietly ever since we found it.”
“Why? The Tor’Kana probably could have helped our scientists figure it out a lot faster.”
“Yes, they probably could have.”
“Then why...”
“For planetary security. Think about it, Dylan. If we had reported the discovery of a Portal aimed at Earth to the Tor’Kana, chances are the Veshtonn who now occupy their home world would have learned of it. And what do you think they’d do with that knowledge?”
Dylan considered that for a moment, then answered, “I don’t know, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be anything good.”
“I’ll tell you what they would do. They would pounce on that Portal so fast we wouldn’t know where they came from, and they would send a whole legion of varriors into our past to vipe us off the face of the Earth! That’s vhat they’d do!”
“Of course,” Dylan said, feeling a little stupid. The answer had been pretty obvious. “I hadn’t thought of that. I even brought up a similar argument myself during my mission briefing, though in a different context.” He took another sip of his vodka and shook his head. “All this time-travel stuff. I think I’m getting a headache.”
“It’s the wod...vodka. Take another swig. It’ll probably go away again.”
“No, it’s not that, Benny. It’s just... I’m thinking about my mission. I’ve read theories about all this time-travel stuff, but the reality of it is brand new to me. I’ve served as a Military Police Security Forces troop, a criminal investigator, and a Marine Corps Ranger. The planets I’ve visited weren’t strange new unexplored worlds with bizarre alien technologies. Hell, I’ve never even been aboard an Explorer class starcruiser before, let alone been out there beyo
nd the fringes of the frontier where all you first-contact explorers have your adventures. Well, with the exception of Tamour, that is.”
“Do I detect a bit of dissatisfaction in your voice?”
Dylan drew a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, Benny. It’s just that...well, sometimes we make decisions in life, then years later realize that some of those decisions were the wrong ones all along.”
“Like growing up and marrying the wrong woman and wishing for years afterward that you’d never broken up with that one special girlfriend you had in high school?”
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know...”
“Never mind. Let’s just say that Commander Royer checked you out very thoroughly, and that my briefing was just as thorough.”
“Damn, Benny, did she tell you the girl’s name, too?” Dylan asked sarcastically.
“Actually, yes. Diane Hawkins, I believe it was?”
Dylan was speechless. He couldn’t believe Royer had actually given his high school sweetheart’s name to the old captain, or that she’d even bothered to find out what it was herself. After all, why was that of any importance? What did it mean to her? What did it have to do with anything at all, for that matter?
When he did finally respond to Benny, he confirmed her name with a simple, “Yeah,” and then said, “Anyway, I was referring to this mission. Maybe I should have stuck to my guns and refused it.”
“Refused an order from an admiral?”
“He didn’t order me at first. He gave me a choice and I declined. It wasn’t until later that he ordered me to go.” He sipped his vodka, then shook his head slightly and added, “Maybe I should have just stayed in the Corps. In fact, if I could live my life over again I think I’d go to the Solfleet Academy and request assignment to an Explorer class starcruiser.”
“But you can’t live your life over again,” Benny pointed out. “However, if you complete your mission, perhaps things will be different for you when you come back.”
Dylan grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that, either,” he said. “Well, actually I have thought about it, but not in a positive way. But you may be right, Benny. Maybe things will be different. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up serving on an Explorer class after all.”
