“Like I said, heat of the moment. It’s nothing.”
“Loren…?”
“Cal, just… Just leave it, OK?” she replied. Something bleeped softly on her console. “We’re closing on the location. I’m taking us out of warp.”
“Fonk. OK. Everyone hold on,” Cal warned. He barely managed to cup his hands over his crotch before the ship decelerated with Loren’s usual pelvis-shattering levels of style and panache. Splurt rocketed from his hiding place in the ceiling, thudded into a fried-egg-shape against the view screen, then plopped to the floor.
An asteroid clunked off the hull, filling the bridge with the creaking of damaged metal. Another solid chunk of stone, roughly the size of a football, slammed into the ship’s nose, making the screen flicker.
Before them, stretching out like a vast wasteland, was a cloud of tumbling rocks.
“Is this the place?” Cal asked. The Untitled shook as a rock the size of a family car hit the underside then scraped all the way along it to the back. “I’ve got to say, not what I was expecting.”
“It’s gone,” said Loren. “This was supposed to be a planet, but… it’s gone.”
“What do you mean ‘it’s gone?” Mech asked. “How can it be gone?”
“Death Star?” Cal suggested. “That could do it.”
“What’s a Death Star?” Miz asked.
“A moon with a gun,” Cal explained. “They made, like, twelve of them, I think.” He shook his head ruefully. “Never fonking learned.”
“OK, I’m just gonna go ahead and ignore whatever the Hell he’s talking about,” Mech said, while working the controls in front of him. “Scanners show a lot of rocks and not a whole lot else. This is what it should’ve looked like.”
A star chart was overlaid in a window on the right of the screen. It showed a star with what seemed to be a single planet in orbit around it. Cal tried to read the name.
“Nmnem… Nyimim… Mnumem…”
“It’s pronounced Nmiminimbe,” said Loren.
“That’s what I said. Nmumimum,” Cal replied. “And we’re sure we’re in the right place?”
A chunk of rock thunked off the front of the ship.
“It’s the right place,” Mech confirmed. “Nmiminimbe is gone. The whole planet’s been completely destroyed.”
The full enormity of what had happened finally hit Cal. “Jesus,” he said, and a silence made up of shock and disbelief fell over the bridge.
It went on for quite a while.
Cal glanced at the others, wondering if it was appropriate to speak yet. It wasn’t like they had friends living down on Mnimi… Mimin… on whatever the fonk it was called.
Or did they?
Shizz.
This could get delicate.
“Such a shame,” he said, clicking his tongue against his teeth in disapproval. “Such a tragic waste. I mean, all those people…”
“It was uninhabited,” Loren said.
“What? Then why are we all sitting here moping about it?” Cal asked.
“A whole planet has been destroyed,” Mech answered.
“A big rock became lots of smaller rocks,” Cal countered. “Boo-hoo. The way you were all acting, I thought it was a fonking orphanage or something.”
The Time Titan cut in, stopping the conversation before it could descend any further into bickering. “The Quanturum. I should be able to detect it at this range, but… There’s nothing.”
“Sensors aren’t picking any up, either,” Loren confirmed.
Cal gasped. “So that means…”
He waited.
“I was hoping one of you were going to fill in the rest,” he said, once it was clear no one was going to. “What does that mean?”
“It means it’s gone,” said Loren. “This planet was the only known source of Quanturum, and now it’s all gone.” She looked across to Mech. “You think someone blew up the whole planet to get it?”
Mech shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, planets don’t just blow up on their own. Not without good reason, anyway.” He motioned to the screen. “Nothing showing this place was unstable. Had to be deliberate.”
“Like, why would someone blow up a whole planet just to get some rocks?” Miz wondered.
Tim’s voice trembled around the edges. “What if what happened aboard the Binto Odyssey was a test?” he said. “A proof of concept.”
Loren turned in her chair. “They’re building another bomb.”
“I fear so.”
“How big a bomb are we talking?” Cal asked. “I mean, how much did they use in the last one?”
Tim moved his hand vaguely. “Perhaps a piece the size of a teshuk. Or a little larger. But smaller than a noomf.”
Cal moved his eyes from Tim to the others. “Is that a lot? I have no idea what those things are.”
“They’re fruit,” said Loren. She made a gesture with her hands and indicated a size a little larger than an apple.”
Cal mimicked the gesture. “Couldn’t you just have said ‘that size’?” he asked Tim, but the Time Titan was gazing at the newly formed asteroid field ahead and wringing his fingers together in worry. “OK, so if they did make a bomb out of all this stuff, just how screwed are we?”
“Eight,” said Mech.
“Is that eight out of ten screwed, like a normal person would do, meaning we have some leeway to do some heroic save-the-galaxy shizz, or eight out of eight screwed, like you do?”
Mech turned back and met his eye. “Out of five.”
Cal’s lips moved silently as he calculated. “So we’re, like, a hundred and forty per cent screwed? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Mech shook his head. “No.”
Cal relaxed a little. “OK, good.”
“We’re a hundred and sixty per cent screwed. And not just us, the whole fonking galaxy. If what the old man’s saying is right, I mean.”
All eyes went to Tim. He had undone his seatbelt and now walked slowly across the bridge towards the screen, his smock swishing around at his ankles.
“You’re correct,” he said. “If the builders of the first device have scaled it up to use a whole planet’s worth of Quanturum, the damage could be insurmountable. What we saw on the Odyssey… what you experienced… those were fractures. Cracks in time which disrupted the natural ebb and flow.”
He reached the screen and stopped. The light of the distant sun danced through the debris field, casting moving shadows across his face.
“A weapon of this scale wouldn’t just fracture time, it would obliterate it. The time stream would collapse. Not all at once, but the damage would quickly spread throughout the galaxy – throughout the universe – until…”
His voice tailed off. He placed a hand on the screen, supporting himself.
“Until what?”
“I don’t know,” Tim admitted.
“What? I thought this was your whole thing?” Cal said. “Time. I thought you knew all about that sort of stuff?”
Tim sighed. “You know about water, yes? You can manipulate it – cause ripples in it with your fingers, pour it into drinking glasses. That sort of thing.”
Cal wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer the question, but fortunately Tim continued before he had to make a decision either way.
“Now imagine you take one of those filled glasses and you drop it. You know what will happen – it will break.”
“Not necessarily,” Cal muttered.
Fonking Smashdown Day.
“Assuming it does,” Tim continued. “Can you predict where the liquid will go? With any degree of accuracy, I mean? Could you draw the outline of it on the floor before it happened?”
“Depends. Is it a carpet floor? Because then I’d need a special pen.”
“My point is, this is like that,” Tim continued. “Only instead of a glass of water, it involves the entire fourth dimension. So, can I tell you precisely what will happen? No. Do I know it will be catastrophic? Yes. That I can promise you.”<
br />
Cal conceded the argument. “OK, you’ve convinced me. It’s eight out of five. But we can still do something about it.” He looked around the bridge. “Right?”
“I’m open to suggestions,” said Mech.
“Trace the time rocks,” Cal said, pointing enthusiastically at the control panel in front of Mech. “Use the scanners or whatever and trace where the time rocks went. Then we just follow the trail.”
He crossed his arms quite smugly and wriggled back in his chair, getting comfortable. “Problem solved. You’re welcome.”
“Can the scanners do that?” Miz asked.
“No. No, they can’t,” said Mech.
“Of course they can. They do it in movies all the time,” Cal said. “Kevin?”
“You hollered, sir?”
“Have the scanners track the time rocks for me, would you?”
“Very good, sir. One moment.”
Cal’s smug expression became even more so. He winked at Mech. “Have the info for you in a sec.”
“I’ve made the request to the scanner array, sir,” Kevin intoned.
“Great job.”
“But it’s looking at me rather blankly.”
“It’s what?”
“Oh! Hold on. I’m getting some data coming through from it now, and… Ah.”
“What’s it say?”
“Nothing complimentary, sir. It’s dismissing your suggestion as something of a nonsense.”
“Oh.”
“And questioning your intelligence.”
“Right.
“And your parentage.”
Cal uncrossed his arms. “So, what we’re saying is the scanners can’t track the time rocks?”
“That would certainly appear to be the case, sir.”
Puffing out his cheeks, Cal slapped his hands on his thighs. “OK, well it was a solid idea, but... Anyone else?”
Before anyone could volunteer a suggestion, a ripple of light passed through the debris field ahead of the ship. It seemed to emanate from the point where Tim’s hand was pressed against the screen.
“OK, what was that?” Cal asked, leaning forward. “Timbo? You OK there?”
The old man’s mouth was moving, a murmur of sound burbling deep down in his throat. Cal hopped out of his chair and joined the Time Titan up front.
“Tim? Everything… Ooh, fonk. Look at his eyes. That’s awesome. They’re all swirly.”
Outside, the cloud of rocks became filled with flickering gray shadows. They were barely visible against the blackness of space, and flowed and ebbed like smoke, but Cal thought he could make out familiar shapes in there. Ships. People. Weapons, or maybe tools.
The planet reformed as a haze of dark vapor. Cal saw it as both enormous and tiny at the same time, like he was watching some spectacular live event through the screen of a phone camera.
“What’s he doing?” Miz wondered.
“I think he’s watching a rerun,” Cal said. He beckoned to Splurt, who was still on the floor by the screen. The little blob oozed up his leg, then clambered onto his shoulder. “I think he’s seeing what happened here.”
“Correct,” Tim confirmed, and the voice that emerged from him was that ship-shaking deep rumble they’d first heard back on the Odyssey. “Observe.”
Cal and the others watched, though it was hard to tell what they were watching exactly. A lot seemed to happen in several different patches of space, most of it too wispy and insubstantial to make out clearly.
If Cal had to guess the story unfolding in front of them, he’d say a couple of large spaceships had arrived, then several figures had descended to the surface of Mnimim… of the planet in smaller ships.
There had been mining involved – huge industrial tools that burrowed deep beneath the planet’s crust. A lot of material – the Quanturum, presumably – had been taken back to the bigger ships, but the equipment had been left behind.
The ships had barely left orbit when the explosion tore through the planet, sending pieces of it spinning off in all directions through space, and completely covering the tracks of whoever had carried out the raid.
One figure, in particular, kept rearing up through the fog. Cal saw him giving out orders, directing the drills, and overseeing the planting of the explosives. Each time he appeared, he was more substantial than the last time, as if the image was becoming stronger through sheer repetition.
“Who is that?” Cal asked. He stepped closer to the view screen, his eyes fixed on one of the three versions of the figure currently out there in space. It was a man. Two arms, two legs, facial features all roughly where you might expect.
The image was boarding a wispy spaceship, preparing to leave the planet, when his features solidified enough for Cal to make out the detail.
“Holy shizz. Freeze frame. Hold it there!” he said.
Tim cocked his head a little. The smoke ships and vapor figures all stopped moving.
Cal leaned closer to the view screen until his nose was practically touching it. Even that close-up, the resolution was so high Cal could’ve sworn he was looking through a window.
And there, looking back, was a face Cal recognized.
“Sweet fonking shizzmas,” Cal said. “Is that who I think it is?”
EIGHTEEN
THE MORE CAL STARED, the more convinced he became of the smoke-figure’s identity.
“I know that guy. We know that guy. That’s Dave. Or whatever his real name was,” Cal said. “That’s the guy from the clown planet who was trying to steal the big ball dude.”
The swirling pattern in Tim’s eyes turned a milky white, then faded. He sagged, and the shadow-figures outside evaporated.
“The ‘big ball dude?” he said, his breath rasping from the effort of whatever it was he’d just done.
“No, he didn’t have big… I mean, he was trying to steal a big ball from a prison. It had a bad guy inside it.” Cal clicked his fingers a few times as he hunted for the name. “Geronimo.”
“Geronimus,” Mech corrected.
Tim’s eyebrows raised. His face paled. “Geronimus Krone?”
“That’s the guy,” Cal said. “Dave there, although that’s probably not his real name, now that I come to think about it, he tricked us into helping him steal the space prison that Krone was locked up in. The big ball thing.”
“Geronimus Krone,” Tim said again. He stumbled a little until he fell against Mech, then held onto the cyborg’s arm for support.
“Yep, Dave wanted to free him. Presumably to do bad shizz. Didn’t pay too much attention to the details,” Cal said. “Good news is, Dave’s dead – we blew him to pieces – and old Geronimo is still safely under lock and key. Or, I don’t know, retina scanner and eye, or whatever.”
“Where?” Tim demanded.
“Zertex put him somewhere. Not sure where, but it’s fine. They don’t want him free any more than we do,” Cal said. “Or, you know, we assume so. We’re like ninety-five per cent confident.”
“We need to check,” Tim replied. “Geronimus Krone must not be free. Must never be free.”
“You know the guy?” Mech asked.
“I know of him,” the Time Titan said. “Him, I never personally had to deal with. His generals? Them I met, although not a day goes by when I wish that I hadn’t.”
“I know a few people like that,” Cal said. “Naming no names.” He coughed loudly. “Mech.”
“Fonk you, shizznod.”
“Guys, shut up,” said Loren. “Let him talk.”
Tim smoothed his smock down with one hand, and his beard with the other. “The generals, they served Krone during his reign of terror, leading his armies across the galaxy and crushing all who dared stand against them. Men, women, children. They didn’t care. They were monstrous. Darkness and corruption made flesh. They called themselves the Four.”
Cal snorted. “Jesus, they must’ve been up all night thinking of that one. I mean, talk about obvious.” He frowned. “Unless, you know, th
ere were only two of them, in which case, I take that back.”
“The Four what?” Miz asked, leaning forward in her chair in a way that suggested she was taking at least a modicum of interest, which was possibly a first for her.
Tim peered along his nose at her. “Greyx, correct? I believe your people knew them as the Four Blights,” he explained.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard that story,” Miz said, and from her expression it was not one that had a particularly happy ending.
“They feature in the myths and legends of most civilizations,” Tim confirmed. “In some stories they arrive in great space ships. In others, they travel by sea, or on wings…” He flicked his eyes to Cal. “Or on horseback.”
Tim gave Cal a moment to take that in, before continuing.
“The legends of the Omparo people say they stride purposefully. The Rikkitiks believe they come on pogo sticks. The Maggashakai record-keepers insist they all come standing on one another’s shoulders, wearing a very long coat,” he said. “The details are slightly different, but the core of it is the same. Four individuals, ushering in death and destruction and the end of all things.”
“The Space Four Horsemen!” Cal gasped. “No. Hold on. The Four Space Horsemen. The Four Horse Spacemen?” He shrugged. “Fonk it. One of those. Yeah, I’ve heard of those guys. Real end of the world shizznods.”
“What happened to them?” Loren asked. “Where did they go?”
“The other Time Titans and I…” Tim began, then his voice betrayed him and he was forced to take a moment to compose himself. “We went against our code and agreed to intervene.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Other Time Titans?” said Cal. “I didn’t know there were others.”
“There were twelve of us. Now there is only me,” Tim said. His eyes shimmered in the light of the distant sun, but this time there was nothing supernatural about it. “My brothers and sisters and I, we stood against the Four and their armies. We took time and we turned it into a weapon to be used against them.”
“Alarm clock in a sock?” Cal guessed. He mimed swinging something around his head. “Because that’s gonna hurt.”
“We collapsed the fourth dimension on top of them,” Tim said, his voice becoming a whispery hiss as he recalled the memory. “We tossed them in a temporal hole and we poured time itself into it until we had buried them alive.”
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 20
