Symbiosis with the Naga had eventually become commonplace, and it was becoming more so all the time. Twenty-five years ago, most human-machine interfaces had been carried out through cephlinks, electronic devices nanotechnically grown inside the human brain. With the help of the alien DalRiss and their mastery of biological processes at a molecular level, a single cell from a planetary Naga that had had contact with humans could be trained to enter a human body, where it served as an organic neural cephlink… and far more. The result was a symbiont like Kara herself, with a Naga Companion riding her central nervous system that could facilitate her union with machines and with other humans. Xenosymbiotic biotech, it was called, and some hundreds of millions of humans—most of them in the Confederation—had already received Companions and become what many claimed was a new and more advanced type of human.
The one big mystery remaining, of course, had been something the Naga themselves had never been able to clarify, and that was where the creatures had come from in the first place. The discovery of the Web—and the first probing of the Web’s stronghold at the Galactic Core—had demonstrated that the Naga had originally been life forms created by the Web intelligence. Though there still were no solid answers, the best guess of the researchers working on the problem was that the Nagas had been designed as advance scouts of a sort, creatures scattered abroad beyond the Galaxy’s central Core to begin converting worlds into immense factories, steadily converting raw material into… something else. Worlds where a Naga had at last grown so vast that it had broken through to the surface—a world Naga was equivalent in mass to a small moon and numbered hundreds of trillions of cells—were eerily transformed, the surface features molded into bizarre towers, domes, and weirdly sculpted, vaguely organic shapes.
The buildings Kara had seen on Core D9837 had been like distant echoes of the organic-looking architecture grown by mature planetary Naga. It seemed to verify that the Naga were following some very old, embedded programming, orders passed down to them by the Web eons before but that had somehow become garbled along the way. The Naga did not remember the Web, but—more interesting—the Web seemed to recognize Naga, although as a kind of cancer, cells that no longer responded properly to direction or control. In effect, the Naga were continuing to follow their original programming that required them to spread across the Galaxy, preparing planets for the arrival of the Web… but some accident long before had cut them off from Web control and turned them loose on their own. For a long time—some estimates said eight billion years—they’d been slowly spreading across the Galaxy, drawn to worlds of a particular mass and magnetic moment, and colonizing them.
It was a chilling thought that literally billions of worlds across the entire Galaxy might already be infested with wild Nagas, while only a handful had been contacted and domesticated by humans. “Domestication” was a relatively simple process, involving no more than allowing cells from a Naga that had had peaceful contact with humans to exchange data with the uncontacted Naga, but the sheer scale of the alien infestation was staggering.
Vic, Kara noticed, had taken a seat at the table and was now leaning back, his eyes closed, a look of concentration on his face. She remained silent, waiting, until he opened his eyes again.
“Well, that’s weird,” he said.
“What is?”
“An oddball effect with Shell Game.” He frowned. “Dr. Norris just called up from Bay Seven. I don’t quite know what to make of it.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“They’ve just recovered one of the Shell Game probes. You know, the ones we’ve been sending through the Stargate to pass disinformation to the Web.” She nodded, and he went on. “We program a certain percentage of them to go through, take a quick look around, and come back. The Web nails some, of course, but most of them have been able to return. We’d never have been able to plan for Core Peek without that reconnaissance data. That’s how we identified all of those rogue planets and bodies in there, including D9837.”
“So, they recovered a probe? What’s so weird about that?”
He looked at her steadily. “If I’m understanding what Norris is trying to say, the probe they just picked up is one scheduled for launch in…” He closed his eyes, concentrating on some inner pulldown data feed from his Companion. “Another five hours from now.”
Kara’s eyes widened. “You mean—”
“I’m afraid so. Somehow, the damned thing came back to us over five hours before we launched it. It looks like the physics boys were right. The Stargate is also a gate through time.”
Chapter 8
Progress in physics has always moved from the intuitive toward the abstract.
—MAX BORN
Professor of Theoretical Physics
University of Gottingen
mid-twentieth century C.E.
Kara was excited. “Time travel! Let’s get down there and have a look at this!”
“Daughter of mine,” Vic said in his best lecturing tone, “you’ve been in the military long enough to know that generals do not jump and run at every report from the ranks. Besides, we’re supposed to meet Daren. Damn it, where is he?”
She chuckled. “You know Daren. Tell you what. I’ll bounce down and have a look. Give you a report later, okay?”
“Sounds good to me. I’d just as soon get a briefing later anyway. When physicists like Norris start throwing data-intensive words around, it gives me a headache. Especially when they tack the word ‘quantum’ on at the beginning.”
Kara laughed. “I know what you mean. Sometimes I think physics took a distinct wrong turn. Somewhere between Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.”
“Einstein I don’t mind so much,” Vic said. “It’s Heisenberg that worries me. If the guy had just been able to make up his mind…”
Ten minutes later, Kara walked into the hangar bay, watching her step as she crossed an open space cluttered with crates and expendables containers, cables, power feeds, and the low, black-and-yellow shapes of K30 cargo haulers weaving in and around the larger, hulking shapes of teleoperated heavy loaders and military equipment. Spotlights glared from the upper reaches of the gantries and crisscrossing support struts that masked most of the overhead. The noise—a clangor of metal-on-metal, the bark of shouted orders, the hiss of a laser arc welder—joined in ear-pounding cacophony.
Bay Seven was located in the spin-gravity portion of the ship. Someone dropped a heavy tool kit to the metal deck grating from a height of several meters, and the clash nearly made her jump and whirl; somehow, she controlled the reflex and kept walking, searching for Dr. Norris and Lieutenant Coburn. They were supposed to be in here, preparing the next Shell Game probe for its flight into the unknown, and downloading its memory when it returned.
She found them at last in one corner of the cluttered bay, working together at an out-of-the-way table secluded somewhat from the rest of the activity by a wall of supply crates and empty missile transport canisters.
Cal Norris was a slight man with wispy gray hair, the slightly enlarged eyeballs of a man who’d undergone a Companion reshaping to correct extreme myopia, and a wry sense of humor. Lieutenant Tanya Coburn was a pretty, redheaded warstrider officer who’d been part of Kara’s own Phantoms, but who’d been reassigned to the Carl Friedrich Gauss’s science department in order to provide them with her expertise in handling teleoperated recon probes.
“There you two are,” Kara told them. “What’s all this about time travel? You have the brass all worked up.”
Norris looked up and quirked a grin at her. “They’re getting nervous, are they? Can’t say I blame them.” He nodded toward the inert probe on the table in front of them. “This thing is getting me damned nervous.”
“Oh, don’t mind the Doc,” Tanya said. “He’s as excited about this as a kid on Armstrong Day.”
The sleek object on the table was a Mark VII reconnaissance drone, a tiny, jet-black manta-shaped craft two meters long, with a small anticollision
strobe on its back, and the alphanumerics AE356 painted in dark gray on the trailing edges of the manta’s wings aft. Normally, the craft was teleoperated. On this mission, however, the on-board AI had carried out the necessary navigational routines.
“So what happened?”
“That happened,” Norris said, waving one arm at a cargo trailer parked by a stack of empty missile crates five meters away. Resting on the cart was another Mark VII, an exact duplicate of the probe in front of her. Without taking even one step closer, Kara could read the ID on its side, AE356.
“Maybe you should see this, Captain,” Tanya said. She led her over to a viewall on the nearby bulkhead and palmed the interface. The screen lit up an instant later, showing the familiar camera view of the Stargate. It looked like it was being shot from a remote flyer operating somewhere within a few thousand kilometers of the Stargate’s surface. In the center of the screen she could see a tiny, blinking red light.
After holding on the view for a moment, the scene zoomed in closer. Kara could just make out an elongated shape there, something black, with a shiny hull, and what looked like an oval port or sensor lens on the front. The flashing light was a standard anticollision strobe mounted on the object’s dorsal surface.
“That was about half an hour ago,” Tanya said. “Our sentry probes picked up its AI transmission, requesting clearance to return to the Gauss. The only problem was, we didn’t have any probes out at the time.”
“We’re not scheduled to launch AE356 until sixteen hundred hours this afternoon,” Norris said irritably.
“What did it have to say for itself?” Kara asked.
Norris shook his head, scowling. “According to it, it was launched from the Gauss at sixteen hundred hours today. It entered the Stargate at seventeen-fifty and some odd seconds. Twenty-one point three one seconds, to be precise. It performed its scheduled reconnaissance of the Galactic Core, in particular watching for any activity that might be the result of your raid in there this morning. It noted some activity, but nothing that could be considered threatening.”
“No buildup for a counter-raid through the Gate,” Tanya said, elaborating.
“That’s good.”
“It was pursued by a number of Web machines,” Norris continued. “Its AI was able to elude them and it returned through the Stargate, entering at twenty-thirty-two hours, zero-three minutes, twelve seconds.”
Kara blinked. “That was half an hour ago? That probe over there… is nine hours and some older than this one?”
“They are the same probe,” Norris said, nodding, “but manifested nine hours apart in the temporal dimension.”
“And how do you explain that?”
“Well, it’s been known since the late twentieth century that devices such as that should open gates in time as well as space. The equations allow space and time to be more or less interchangeable. Rotate an object this way, and the change in perspective can be manifested as a change in referent time instead.”
“Whoosh!” Kara passed her hand rapidly above her head, from front to back. “I’m afraid you just overshot, Doctor.”
“We know that spatial translation through a Stargate depends on approaching the gate along a certain, mathematically calculated path. Yes?”
“Fine so far.” The precise path for the Phantoms’ transit to the Galactic Core had been very carefully downloaded to her RAM, and she’d been warned in no uncertain terms that if she deviated at all from that path, her strider would be lost.
“Changes in the approach path can change your exit point,” Norris continued. “That much is obvious. It turns out that certain changes in your approach can be expressed not as a change in space, or not in space only, but in time as well. We’ve known this, from the math, but this is the first time we’ve seen any evidence that this sort of thing happens in the real world.” He grinned ruefully, shaking his head. “This is really going to gok up the whole idea of causality, I’m afraid.”
Kara saw what he was getting at. She patted the probe on the table. “Like for instance… what happens if you decide not to send old AE356 here through the Gate? Is that what you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Physics has always tried to erect barriers to prevent any flow of information across time. We’ve always been aware that the math, and especially the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics, have allowed for time travel. But we’ve tried to jigger things so that in practical terms, at any rate, it’s impossible to violate causality, to have the cause happen after the effect.”
“I’m curious about something,” Kara said. She rested her hand lightly on the casing of the probe that had not been launched yet. “For the sake of argument, this is Probe One, okay?”
Tanya and Norris both nodded.
Kara walked the five meters across to the second probe, where it rested in its cradle. “And this is Probe Two.”
“Fine,” Norris said. “What does that prove?”
Kara leaned closer, studying the alphanumerics printed on the second probe’s flank. “Doctor, come over here with me. You’re my witness. Tanya? Go to Probe One. Take a look at the letters on the starboard side aft.”
“Okay.”
“Use your cutter, the one on the table there. See if you can make a mark on the letter ‘E.’ ”
“I think I see what you’re after,” Norris said. He leaned over next to her, fixing his gaze on the gray letters. “Go ahead, Tanya.”
Across the room, Tanya picked up a small laser cutter, the size of a pen, and brought the tip close to Probe One’s side. As Kara and Norris watched, a black line drew itself slowly across the back of the E, between the middle and top horizontal arms.
“Oh… my… God…” Norris said quietly, almost reverently.
Kara walked over to Probe One, where Tanya was standing with a quizzical expression. “What happened?”
Kara pointed at the mark on the back of the E. A wisp of smoke was still curling from the blackened streak charred into the gray paint. “That happened,” she said. “Over there, while we watched. You went from left to right, didn’t you?”
Tanya’s eyes widened. “You saw it?”
Kara nodded. “These two probes are the same.”
“It makes no sense,” Norris said, shaking his head. “I mean, even if Probe Two is Probe One, several hours later in the future, what we do to one shouldn’t affect the other.” He stopped, then blinked several times. “Should it?”
“Hell, how should I know, Doctor?” Kara said. “I’m just a striderjack, remember? But you know, they say that paired electrons, the ones in quantum couplings, used in the I2C? They say that in a way those aren’t really two different electrons, but the same one. That’s why when something changes the spin of one, the spin of the other changes the same way, even when it’s light years away. It doesn’t make sense, not the way we look at the universe. But it happens, and the laws of quantum mechanics say it has to be that way.”
Norris pursed his lips, started to say something, reconsidered, then reconsidered again. “Still can’t buy it. I mean, okay. We have proof that Probe Two is really Probe One, just a few hours older, but sent back through time, somehow, to a time before it was launched. Right?” The two women nodded agreement. “Okay. So what if we decide, hell, no. We’re not going to launch the damned thing at all. What happens then? Probe Two disappears because we didn’t launch it in the first place?”
“Maybe we should try,” Tanya said, one eyebrow arched. “I’d like to know what happens.”
Kara shook her head. “I think we’d better run this one the way the orders are written. Later, when not as much is riding on it, maybe then we can play. For now, I’d say you should get the probe… Probe One, I mean, ready to go.” She looked across at Probe Two curiously. “And on time.”
Tanya laughed. “If this gets routine, we could save a hell of a lot of money on recon probes. Just get one ready, recover it before we send it out, download the intel, then forget the whole thing. We ha
ve our data without risking the probe!”
“Somehow,” Kara said, “there’s got to be some kind of a law in the universe that says you can’t do this.” She thought of her father’s comment earlier and grinned. “I’m starting to get a headache.”
Minutes later, she returned to the conference room on Deck One. Her father was still there, as was Daren Cameron. The younger man sat on the table with one knee up and the other leg dangling.
Daren was a dark-haired man in his late twenties, stocky bordering on pudgy, wearing a sharply tailored civilian skin-suit with elaborate shoulder halfcloaks. A doctor of xenobiology from the University of Jefferson on New America—he’d taken the full doctorate download by the time he was seventeen—he was Kara’s half-brother, the son of Katya Alessandro and Devis Cameron. And there was a strangely twisted love triangle, Kara thought, if ever there was one.
“Hey, Sis! How was the Galactic Core?”
“Hot.”
“Yeah, it’s been hot on Dante, too.” Dante—DM-58° 5564 II—was a world in the Shichiju, home of the Dantean Communes, a species of communal organisms that Daren had been studying for some time now. Their particular mystery was whether or not they could be classified as sapient; certainly, their intelligence was of a radically different order from human or DalRiss, enough so that communications with them might be forever impossible.
“I meant hot as in radioactive,” Kara said, faintly exasperated. Daren, frequently, couldn’t see beyond the limits of his own rather narrow field of vision, and he was self-centered enough that he could rarely empathize with the problems of others. Assigned to the Gauss as part of the xenobiology team studying the Web, he’d nevertheless continued with his own work as well, researching the question of Commune intelligence.
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