The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  And yet she had still felt the need, for some reason, to inform Lana that they would find Liam and return him to her. Lana had been coming out of stasis at the time. She probably hadn’t even heard her. Maybe that was just as well.

  Marnia scratched at the false skin at her temple. Infiltrating the Scorpius had also meant reapplying her human disguise, and now every inch of her was itchy.

  “How long until we can rendezvous with the ship?” she asked.

  Calo checked the navigation screen. “A few more minutes.” As he spoke, an orange light began to flash on the console. “Another short,” he muttered.

  “I thought you fixed them all.”

  Calo tapped the light and flipped through schematics on the navigation screen. “So did I. This thing was hit by an EM blast. For every circuit that was fried, there’s another one that was almost fried and could go at any second.”

  “Are we going to make it?”

  Calo highlighted the thruster circuits and bypassed the faulty panel. “Yes. We’re almost beyond the starliners’ long-range sensors. Tarra should be waiting for us there. Even if we had a total power failure now, we’ve achieved the speed necessary to make the rendezvous.”

  “Still, we can’t afford to lose power. We still need air and heat.”

  “We’ll make it.”

  “And then we’ll try to find this doorway Phoebe and Liam were talking about.” She turned to JEFF. “Did they say anything about where it’s located?”

  “Only that it is somewhere between here and Delphi,” said JEFF.

  “There’s a lot of space between here and there,” said Calo. “It could take us ages to find it. Can you be more specific?”

  “I am afraid not.” JEFF’s eyes flickered. “My diagnostics indicate that you have disabled my transmitting functionality.”

  “Obviously,” said Marnia.

  “In that case, may I ask: Have you decided not to continue your attack on the human fleet?”

  “The only thing we’ve decided is that we’re not leaving our daughter behind,” said Marnia. “There will be plenty of time to deal with your fleet once we have her back.”

  There was a crack as something hit the hull of the skim drone.

  “Debris from the firefight,” said Calo.

  Marnia looked around and saw other pieces glinting here and there in their lights. Phoebe’s voice echoed in her head. You have to stop this!

  “The Drove,” Calo said thoughtfully. “They cause these supernovas . . . but why? Why would you want to blow up a star?”

  “Because . . . you’re trying to destroy the universe?” said Marnia. “Or destroy its inhabitants?”

  “Yes, supernovas destroy,” said Calo, “but they also create. Supernovas produce certain elements that are obtainable nowhere else in the universe. They also emit massive amounts of energy.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, the humans destroyed our planet, but their goal was to make something new. Something they could use. What if the point of blowing up these stars isn’t to destroy? What if the Drove are trying to get something they need?”

  “It makes sense,” said Marnia. “But why does that matter?”

  “Because if the Drove want something from the supernova, that means they will have to come back to get it.”

  Marnia felt a surge of hope for the first time in far too long. “And we could be waiting. And then follow them back to the doorway.”

  “Exactly.”

  She rubbed his shoulder. “It’s a good plan.”

  Calo shrugged. “We still have no idea who these Drove are, or what we’ll really be up against—”

  A warning sensor began to flash on the console.

  “What’s that?” said Marnia.

  Calo tapped the screen, twisted to see behind them. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Tarra?”

  “No, we’re still a few minutes out from—”

  “Hey! Bot-nappers!” a girl’s voice called over the skim drone’s link.

  “Fly faster,” said Marnia.

  “This thing won’t go any faster!”

  “I know you can hear me! This is Mina, Liam’s sister. My parents are with me but they’re pretty severely injured. I figure you might know something about that.”

  Lights burst above them. Marnia squinted and saw the underside of a Cosmic Cruiser.

  “You can’t outrun us,” said Mina.

  An alert sounded in the skim drone. Lights flickered all across the console.

  “They’ve slaved our controls,” said Calo.

  “Override it!” Marnia shouted.

  Calo stabbed frantically at buttons. “There’s nothing I can do. This drone is paired with that cruiser.”

  “Let us go!” Marnia shouted over the link. “We need to find our daughter. We—”

  “We’re not here to take you back,” said Mina. “We want the same thing. My brother’s out there, too. We’re coming with you.”

  Marnia froze. Calo shook his head. “Impossible! We’re not going anywhere with you! Not after what your people did to our planet—”

  “I’m sorry, but you don’t have a choice,” said Mina. Marnia could hear her voice shaking. “We can do whatever we want with you, now: take you back with us, or just slam you into one of these fragments from the battle. At the very least, that should be enough to break the cockpit and kill you two in the vacuum of space. Small justice, I’d say. Someone I loved very dearly died that way, along with thousands of others.”

  “Do it, then!” Calo fumed. “Our ship will just blast you out of the sky and you’ll suffer the same fate!”

  There was a pause and now another voice:

  “Ariana, this is Lana.” Her voice was so raw and weak. “We all have blood on our hands. I only understand a small part of what you’ve been through, but right now, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It all matters,” Calo grumbled.

  “Quiet,” said Marnia.

  “We watched our children grow up together,” said Lana. “No matter our differences, right now we want the same thing. That’s why we flew out here. Our people are headed in the opposite direction. . . . I’m not even sure we could catch them now if we tried. You have JEFF, and you have a ship powerful enough to search the galaxy for them. We’re not going to kill you; forgive what my daughter said. I suppose you could kill us, if you want. I know we have a lot to reckon with, but right now, we’re asking for your help.”

  Another link channel beeped to life in the skim drone. “This is Tarra. We see you’re being intercepted. We’ll have them targeted and neutralized in a moment.”

  “Wait,” said Marnia, grabbing Calo’s hand before he could reply. “This was what Phoebe wanted. If we’d listened to her the first time, she’d still be here.”

  “What she needs is to—”

  “Calo!” Marnia hissed. “Listen to me: finding Phoebe is one thing, but Liam has some kind of power we don’t understand. And when we find him, there’s no way he’s going to trust us. If he and Phoebe run off again . . .” She motioned to the Cosmic Cruiser. “He’ll trust them.”

  Calo stared at her. “But they—”

  “I know what they did, and what we’ve done since. But Lana’s right: that has nothing to do with what we do, right here, right now.”

  “Our people will never go for it. Never mind the strike team. When word gets back home . . .”

  The word home stung, but Marnia knew what he meant: the Styrlax cargo ship parked near the smoking ruins of Telos, which housed the two hundred and twenty-three Telphon refugees—twenty-five now, as Tarra had reported that two babies had in fact been born since they’d left Telos for Mars—all that remained of their people in the universe, except for the fourteen members of this strike team. Thirteen, Marnia thought, without Phoebe. After attacking the Scorpius, the team had plucked enough stasis pods from space for all the Telphons back home—once their original users had been tossed into space, that is.

&n
bsp; “They’re asleep,” Marnia said. “They won’t know until it is over.” Asleep and waiting until the human threat was eradicated before they would set off in search of a new home. Every one of those Telphons had lost as much as Marnia and Calo, or more; and he was right that they would abhor the idea of teaming up with the humans. Tarra, their commander, might not go for it either, though she had agreed to this search for Phoebe, at least briefly.

  But neither Tarra nor the Telphons back home knew what Marnia and Calo now understood after talking to JEFF.

  “Calo . . . ,” said Marnia.

  He sighed. Flexed his fingers. “I know.” He keyed the skim drone’s link. “Tarra, that’s a negative. Do not engage. We are joining the human cruiser. Prepare to let all passengers aboard unharmed.”

  “But we—”

  Marnia cut her off. “We’ll explain when we arrive. We need each other . . . for now.”

  3

  EARTH YEAR: 2211

  HAISHANG COLONY, MARS

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 16H:49M

  “Liam.”

  “It’s your move.”

  Mina is giving him that look, the one that’s part glare and part pity.

  “Sorry,” Liam says. He studies the holographic game board between them and slides one of his pioneer groups from the mining planet of Betax to the swamp planet of Temina.

  Mina pushes her long black bangs out of her eyes and frowns. “Why would you move there? The market for swamp exhaust is dead.”

  Liam isn’t sure. Because he wanted to buy the exhaust cheap? Or because he was thinking about how Mina’s stasis pod might be lost in space?

  That’s in the future, he reminds himself. And besides, she’s okay, remember? You found her pod, just before you left the Scorpius. . . .

  That’s right.

  Here, it is a sunny afternoon on Mars. Liam and Mina sit on the balcony. Mom and Dad are in the cool just inside the door: Dad reading a holoscreen, Mom applying moisturizing electrodes to her feet. Did they wake up? Have their injuries healed? Forty-three years in stasis . . .

  Distantly, he feels that surge again, a nervous flare of adrenaline like there is a jet flame inside him that is permanently turned to “on.” What if his parents didn’t make it? What if they can’t recover from such a long stasis? What if that’s Liam’s fault, for not getting them off Mars sooner, for missing the starliner, for—

  And there it is again, behind his eyes: the great boiling fireball, about to explode. Centauri A, seething with lethal fury, ready to erase him and everyone he loves, and there’s nowhere to run, the skim drone dead—

  STOP, he pleads with himself. Here, they are okay. See? Here, everything is safe.

  The feeling calms a little. Yes, here on Mars, he doesn’t have to worry.

  Overhead, the sun gleams through the geodesic triangles of the dome. Below their balcony, the avenue burbles with conversation and the whirring of the moving walkways. The dry smell of colony air with the slightest tinge of desert dust. . . . If Liam tilts his head, he can see through gaps between the apartment complexes and just catch a glimpse of the distant maroon shadow of Olympus Mons. A cool, mysterious place that he will soon get to know better than almost anyone.

  His nerves fire again when he pictures the chronologist’s observatory at the top. The darkness when they first climbed down inside. The way it toppled off its high perch, threatening to crush them as they sped away in the skim drone. The way everything has been unsteady ever since— Stop! None of that has happened yet.

  “Hey.”

  “Liam, come on,” Mina says.

  “It’s your turn,” Liam replies.

  “Ugh, I just went. While you were sitting there spacing out, I monopolized iridium mining in the entire inner system. So the sooner you move, the sooner I can finish demolishing you.”

  “Sorry.” Liam shakes his head. Was he spacing out because he was thinking about the future? You weren’t back then. You are now. Remember, those are different.

  He looks over the game board and is almost surprised to feel a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth as he moves another one of his pioneer teams.

  “Why are you smiling?” says Mina. “You’re playing out your own funeral.”

  He wants to say that he likes it. This moment. That is what he is thinking now. He is tempted to tell her that he’s been here quite often. That in their future, when she is on the Scorpius and he is crossing the void between Saturn and Delphi in the Cosmic Cruiser, he will use an alien watch to revisit this exact moment, many times. That it feels safe here. That he feels whole. He can sense those other versions of himself here, too, faint tinges of their energy.

  But Mina would be very confused by this. Besides, this wouldn’t be the memory he finds so comforting if he were to change it now. What makes it special is how it was, how his family was together, how at least for the duration of this game, he wasn’t worried about the future at all.

  He glances at his parents, sitting inside, looking relaxed. Such a rare sight. I could warn them. About the explosion in the underground lab, about Phoebe and her parents and the coming attack. But would it change anything? The sun would still go nova. And even if his parents knew the dangers ahead of time, would things actually work out any better than they had? Or would that new future in fact end up being worse? As it was, they had so narrowly survived the events on Mars, at Saturn and Delphi . . .

  Could I find out? Was there a way that he could look at these other possibilities? See what might have been? He has glimpsed such things before, and yet he feels the surge of nerves again, sees the boiling star—

  Stop it! Just be here. Mina asked you a question! That’s right, and this moment, just after Mina asks, is the one he wants to pay attention to most.

  “Check our totals,” the Liam on the balcony says, the smile tugging harder.

  Mina glances at the columns of data along the side of the board and frowns. “Wait, how did you get more money than me? And how is swamp exhaust suddenly worth so much?”

  Liam remembers now: his whole strategy was to let Mina invest in iridium mining, because he’d noticed that if you made too much money from the mining, you had to start paying a lot more for climate control. And the most important ingredient for climate control systems was swamp exhaust. So while she had been moving to colonize the planets rich in ore, he’d been settling on what appeared to be the worthless backwater ones.

  “You tricked me,” she says with a huff, but smiles too. “I didn’t realize you had such a good poker face.”

  He wants to tell her it’s not a poker face. It’s just the look he gets when he’s thinking about so many things at once that it gets overwhelming. Except it was less of that back then, the first time. The real time. How had he done it? Had he actually bluffed, despite how that always made his stomach flutter? All the lessons on breathing, on keeping his spinny thoughts in line, when he was younger and used to have night terrors and his parents took him to that therapist, back when there still were therapists. And yet somehow during this game on the balcony, he had pulled it off, tricked his sister. Even impressed her.

  He almost wants to cry now. This Saturday afternoon—would there ever be another like it . . . ?

  “We should go,” says a voice beside him.

  “I know.” What’s the hurry? he wants to add, except he should remember; even in the past, time is still passing. “Just one sec.” He watches his old self move his star bases into the ninth sector, reveling in the thrill of victory.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mina says, staring at the board, at the spinning totals. “You’re going to win. And I didn’t even let you.”

  She looks angry but also smiles, and Liam feels his heart swell with pride. Then and now. Like a warm, safe sun.

  He turns to the mainframe: “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Come on, wake up.”

  Not yet.

  If only he could tell her that he’s not asleep.

  “Was the chr
onologist’s watch your first interaction with the higher viewpoints?”

  Liam and the mainframe walk down an avenue in the downtown of the colony. A mag-shuttle whirs by overhead. It’s busy out here today; throngs of people flow through the rust-colored afternoon toward the grav-ball stadium. A match will be starting soon. Others shop, or just stroll. In the distance, Liam can see a crowd at Vista, atop the Earth Preserve. Are they looking at Earth? Has it burned up yet? Any day now.

  A passerby glances at Liam’s legs, perhaps wondering why he’s wearing black thermal wear instead of the standard-issue, hand-me-down gravity clothing, or where he got such a cool, hard-to-find Haishang Dust Devils jersey, the one Phoebe will give him on their last day.

  No one seems to notice the mainframe. This doesn’t surprise Liam, because even though she shines brilliantly, and appears to be made entirely of tiny, angled mirrors reflecting a vast field of stars, he can only really see her in the corner of his eye. In fact, she may only be visible to him. It seems, too, as if behind her there is something impossibly bright and massive, something more to her, but once again, Liam is unable to turn far enough to see it.

  “Call me Iris,” she says. “It’s a bit more friendly than mainframe.”

  “You’re reading my mind again.”

  The impression of her shrugs. “I am assimilating data.”

  “You make it sound like I’m the computer.”

  “Every living thing is, in a way. And I don’t just mean your data. I’m also analyzing all this VirtCom activity.”

  “All of it? You mean, like, the whole colony?”

  “And the ships in orbit, and the starliners and passengers beyond that.”

  Wow, Liam thinks, but doesn’t ask how that is possible, or what that might mean. Better to just be here now, on this familiar street.

  “Where is the shop?” Iris asks.