The Long Road to Gaia

by Timothy Ellis

  Then it was upon us, time returned to normal, and the front of the Bridge structure exploded inwards.

  At the extreme last second, I grabbed Jon, and yanked him back through time, where he smashed left shoulder first into the back wall. From the look on his face, it had hurt a lot.

  The twins landed on each side of him. The three of them were dressed only in their underwear, and they were all bleeding.

  "DON’T JUMP!" Jon screamed, and promptly passed out.

  Jeeves had to wake him up, and Alison put his dislocated shoulder back in place. He was helped back to his chair.

  "Fuck!" he said.

  I could tell it was just for the sheer enjoyment of saying it. After experiencing what he just had, I challenge anyone to say anything else.

  He sighed, looked up, and said "Thank you!"

  I was standing beside his chair, so his thanks went the wrong direction.

  Kali appeared beside me, and together we watched Jon totally fail to get a grip on things for a while.

  Finally Kali leaned over and said "Get a grip Jon."

  He made an effort.

  It helped when he was handed a new belt, and wasn't sitting there in his briefs anymore.

  By now they'd identified the missing nav information, and why.

  "Jane?"

  "Jon?"

  "We're going to want to know why you missed something as important as that."

  He stopped, and sighed.

  "No, forget it. It happened because it needed to happen."

  "Confirmed."

  He looked upward.

  "Can't you just tell me? Why do I have to get hurt to find these things out?"

  He sighed again.

  "No, don’t answer that."

  "He's got a point," I said to Kali, hoping it didn’t piss her off. "Even if you'd just given me a heads up, I could have warned him in time to stop before jumping. Or you could have done it yourself."

  She gave me 'the look'. The one which suggests minions should be seen and not heard.

  "It was a lesson," she said at last.

  "Lesson?"

  Hells donkeys. Some lesson. I seriously hoped she wasn’t going to be giving me lessons.

  "How you react is the most important part of any situation. He needed to be tested to see if he reacted well, or continued to react how he used to."

  "I'd have called that a pretty good reaction given he had his shoulder dislocated."

  "Yes. He passed."

  She looked at me again, and vanished.

  Jon and Jane did an act worthy of a long gone vaudeville. At the end of it, everyone on the Bridge was laughing, except Grace.

  With the benefit of planning, we jumped in and kicked some pirate arse.

  By the time everyone was in bed, the teams had captured two Battleships.

  Not a bad night's work, considering everyone died first.

  * * *

  Something odd happened on Christmas day.

  Well a lot of odd stuff happened on Christmas day, but this one only I noticed.

  Jon had his pad out, and had just noticed it had been updated with a lot of books he hadn't had time to shift to it himself.

  He put it back in its holster off his belt.

  For the faintest glimmer of a second, an exact copy of it appeared on the chair arm next to him, before it vanished.

  I stopped time, went back to the exact moment it appeared, and then slow watched it.

  Even more odd. The pad appeared, displayed a menu, sorted the titles by name, and displayed those with specific words in them, before switching off, and vanishing.

  The words had been Magician, Mage, and Magic.

  I returned time to normal, and not even Jon had noticed it this time. Most likely because of his alcohol consumption over lunch, and the very discordant day he'd had so far, given he hadn't a clue what was going on, and everyone thought he did.

  "Did you see that?" I asked One.

  "No, what?"

  "What?" asked Twelve.

  "Jon's pad was copied, searched, and taken."

  "Have you been in human form and drinking Thirteen?" asked Twelve.

  One grinned, but the grin faded when I shook my head in the negative.

  Kali appeared.

  "Come with me," she said.

  We appeared next to a scrying pool. I’d been here before, but not within this time frame. The setting was familiar, but none of the beings were. However, I knew enough to identify who was what.

  The Mage-King was sitting nearby, with the pad in his hand. A group of magicians were patiently waiting for him to complete what he was doing.

  He waved a hand over the pad, and less than a screen full of entries appeared.

  Power was felt by all, as another hand wave passed over the pad.

  Two entries were left.

  He handed the pad to a magician.

  "Not normally a part of his inner circle," said Kali. "Something of an oddball among these people, with a magic adept with languages, but little else."

  "Can you read these?" he asked.

  The magician touched the screen, and a book was revealed. He looked at it for a moment, waved his own hand over it, and began to read.

  "Yes majesty, I can."

  "Is either what we need?"

  "This one could be, but I will need to read it all to be sure."

  "Read quickly."

  He did as he was bid. But he didn’t need to finish the book to find what he needed.

  "It is here!" he announced.

  "Good. Transcribe it for those with the skills and power."

  "It uses runes Majesty."

  "Bah. We need not such contrivances. Convert them into our magic. And do it fast. We need a way to leave this planet, and soon."

  "Yes Majesty," said the magician.

  "What about the other?"

  The magician tapped the pad a few times, and brought up the second book. This time he waved his hand over it again, sending in a search spell. The book changed position and he began to read.

  "Yes Majesty," he said again. "This is simpler in concept, but I fear much more difficult. But Majesty,…"

  He paused, as if trying to work out how to say something.

  The Mage-King actually waited for him to go on.

  "Majesty, I believe these to be fiction, not real and never actually performed before."

  "No matter. The idea and concept are all we need. Find someone who can turn them into reality."

  He waved his hand around the group.

  "Explain to these."

  The magician did as he was bid, excused himself to begin reading both books properly, bowed, and left.

  The Mage-King looked around at the others.

  "Find those who possess these skills. Do it fast, for they will need much training and practice in a short time. Test everyone, even those who show little aptitude for other branches of magic. We must hope we have a master of at least one of these arts among us, who doesn’t yet know it. Find them. Find them now."

  The others bowed and left.

  The Mage-King activated his scrying pool again. He continued watching the party we had just left.

  Kali nodded to us, and vanished.

  2616

  One

  I watched Jon's fight with the Assassin on Enterprise, but he didn’t need my help.

  I whispered some ideas to him as he sailed the void, which struck me funny at the time. What a galactic entity has to do to get a laugh now and then.

  With the team preparing to go down to the planet in the Sirius system, I knew something was about to go wrong when One turned up.

  She pulled me into the future, and we watched Jon's unsuccessful attempt to save some of his team.

  "What do I do?" I asked One. "Every time I yank him back he gets hurt."

  I looked at her when she said nothing.

  "Or are we leaving them here to die?" I went on.

  "Oh no, they can't die. At least, not yet."

 
; "So?"

  "Wait, I'm checking the possibilities."

  It took her a while, so there must have been a lot of them.

  "Fine," she said at last. "He's asleep at a good place in time. Show it to Jon as a dream, and let him change it."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes. Most of the projections of what he does turn out a lot better. All he really needs to know is what they had planned will take too long."

  "Why don’t I just whisper that to him?"

  "Where's the fun in that?" she grinned at me. "Besides, without the visuals, he probably won't believe it."

  "Good point."

  We returned to where we started from, and I went forward again making a recording of it.

  I shifted back to where Jon was sleeping, and played it into his mind as he slept.

  "NO!" he screamed, and jerked upright so violently he was propelled completely off the bed.

  "Stop doing this to me!" he yelled at the ceiling, as I started to run.

  "Huh?" I said.

  One was laughing.

  "He thinks he time travelled again. You made the mistake of feeding him real time, so it felt to him like he actually lived it."

  "Damn."

  We watched as Jon went to insane lengths to recover his team as fast as possible, using exactly what they had originally said was too dangerous to use – a fighter and a grav sled.

  In the end, he hauled the shuttle out as well, and ended up smashed at the back of Custer's Cargo Bay. They to cut him out of the fighter.

  "I'm not sure that was the best way of handling it," I said to One.

  "Why?"

  "He nearly killed himself this time."

  "It worked. Don’t knock it."

  She vanished before I could say anything further.

  * * *

  I was wandering around the ship not much later, when I bumped into the twins talking to Jane. I connected to both the twins at the same time, and whispered to them.

  They started talking about building the digging machine and giant suits they'd seen in Jon's 'dream'.

  I left them to it.

  "Thirteen!" came a voice.

  "Yes?"

  I steeled myself for a dressing down.

  "Good thinking."

  The next feather I encountered, knocked me over.

  * * *

  When I returned to see what Jon was doing, I found Aline telling him about what the twins and Jane were doing.

  I gave Jon a vision of a line of giant suits, firing into a sea of black.

  Then I wondered why I’d done so. Then I wondered where it had come from.

  It sounded like Kali chuckling in the background, so I stopped wondering.

  * * *

  Jon had taken the ship into the Null point. The whole way out of it, I stood next to Jane.

  About half way out, One spoke.

  "You need to tell Jane when to stop."

  "When do we stop?"

  "I'll tell you."

  "Why?"

  "For good reasons."

  "Jane," I said to her, the same way we had talked the first time we met, "when I tell you to stop, stop the ship."

  "Why?" she asked.

  "Everything is not as it seems here. We need to be somewhere exactly, and it requires the ship to stop first, before we can determine where to go next."

  I was guessing.

  "Will you explain that after?"

  "No. I think you'll figure it out on your own."

  "Gee thanks."

  We waited.

  "Stop," said One at last.

  "Stop," I said to Jane.

  We stopped.

  "What the hell?" she exclaimed.

  I grinned, and went back to standing behind Jon.

  * * *

  Called, I shifted to the Pure Land meeting place. I was the last to appear it seemed. One, Twelve, Kali and Ganesha were there before me. There were no spare seats for others. I sat.

  "Jon requires some information now Thirteen," said One.

  "What sort?" I asked.

  "Past life," said Ganesha.

  "He needs to dream this information," said Kali.

  "Which lives?"

  "From his last Atlantean lives."

  I looked at her. She wasn’t forthcoming with any more. I turned to One. She said nothing as well.

  "Err," I said, using a human mannerism.

  Ganesha touched me on the forehead. Times, dates, and locations flooded in.

  "Enough?" said One, grinning.

  "I guess so."

  "Go and record what you need," said Kali. "Be brief in each case, just enough to give Jon the message. Then feed it to him as a dream."

  Three of them vanished, leaving me with Twelve.

  I ignored Twelve completely, and shifted back through time.

  Three cities, all drowned. Crystal technology Engines left running. A soul ascends. The soul reincarnates again millennia later, lives many lives over the millennia which follow, and ascends again.

  From outside space and time, the soul monitors all to do with the cities. Until I suddenly draw his attention to one of them, now buried under the accumulated silt of the ocean.

  The specter of a man appears, casting around for a healing chamber he knows is there, finding it, and descending to the 'engines'. He does the maintenance which is long overdue. He moves from city to city, and back to his body. He is human. The watcher is surprised.

  "So are you now", Kali whispers to him.

  He is confused, but accepts that there is a time differential happening he is not in control of.

  The human sits in a chair in meditation, but soon comes out of it. He is surprised to find an hour has passed, since for him it has been seconds, while at the same time, he feels the exhaustion of being gone for a day. There is a date: 2005, but this tells the watcher nothing, since it has no relation to the calendar he knows. The watcher looks out the portal of the structure he is in, and wonders at a society which has arisen without crystal technology.

  "This is the time of metal. Its master you will one day be."

  Kali again.

  "Remember," I say to the watcher.

  Time passes again, and the watcher weeps for a dead world.

  Darkness comes. And goes. Leaving a pristine world.

  I return to Jon, asleep on his bed, and feed him the whole sequence.

  "Remember," I whisper to him again, for it was his soul weeping for the world.

  * * *

  Jon was standing over a crystal cave in Brazil. Precisely where his ancestor of the same name had stood on his visit to Brazil.

  For just a moment, I let him see through his ancestors eyes.

  Suddenly I figured out why his ancestor had seen what he had of the future, and I went back to 2016, and let him see through Jon's eyes now.

  Two men, six hundred years apart, linked through an entity neither knew existed.

  I grinned to myself as I continued watching Jon, the latter.

  * * *

  Now Jon was standing over the location of Camelot, to the southwest of what once was Ireland, and used to be underwater.

  With a grin to myself, I went looking back along his lineage, until I came to an ancestor of his, standing in the same place.

  For a moment, Jon was standing in the port area for a very large medieval looking city, looking towards an impressive castle.

  And then he wasn’t, looking at a flat area containing almost nothing.

  "Who do you think you are?" said Twelve. "Jack Deth?"

  I laughed really hard at this, as it revealed something about Twelve I hadn't realized. He'd been watching all the same human entertainment I had all these years, without letting on to me.

  Twelve frowned, realizing he'd said too much, and vanished.

  I laughed harder.

  Two

  Jon flopped back on the grass, and lay there, letting the rain hit him in the face. I could hear his thoughts about really needing some sleep. Although he'd
missed seeing the trap again, the teams had prevailed, and I'd not needed to intervene in any way.

  Jon was getting better all the time. While nothing went to plan, which was quite normal, his responses were getting better and better, and needing much less input from me. Which was of course, the object of the exercise from our point of view.

  "Time to intervene," said One.

  "How this time?"

  "He's about to fall asleep. Give him a dream."

  I didn’t bother asking what. I flowed forward on this timeline until the bomb went off, and then as soon as he went to sleep, I fed it to him in a dream, blurring the edges, so to speak, so he thought it was a dream.

  I really was sick of the limitations One was placing on my ability to see the future, and these little short hops were nothing but a tease.

  But by the time Jon was awake again, One was gone.

  * * *

  "Someone get that Frigate!" yelled Lacey. "It's going to ram…"

  I was standing behind Jon's chair as we jumped into the Last Hope system, into a fleet of pirate ships we hadn't seen were there.

  I slowed time to give Jon time to see and respond most effectively.

  He rolled BigMother over the top of the Frigate, limiting the collision to just shields.

  In hindsight, he probably hadn't needed the slow motion. But I’d been reacting instinctively the same as he was.

  We made an effective team, even if he didn’t know I was here.

  * * *

  I'd finally caught up.

  "Hello. I'm Admiral Jonathon Hunter from the Mercenary unit Hunter Security. I'm also the Duke of Hunter's Run, and the Duke of Norfolk, in the British sector. I'm recording this vid from a system with no official name, one jump away from the system which stopped man's expansion down the spine. The system where the explorer ship Prometheus died, and which still prevents us from moving core-wards."

  So began what was later to be called 'The Hunter Memorandum'.

  It was the only part of this end of this timeline I'd been allowed to see, several hundred years earlier.

  With luck, it meant I was finally to the end of this baby sitting gig.