Soldiers Out of Time

by Steve White

  Rojas’ glare was back at full force. “Very well. You may bring Dr. Frey, if you feel you must.”

  The Comet’s crew consisted of captain-pilot Gaspar Van Horn, and navigator-electronics operator Juliana Tomori. Jason and Rojas, squeezed into the tiny control room, looked over the latter’s shoulders as she tracked the shuttle’s ascent from the surface of Zirankhu.

  As Jason had more than half expected, the shuttle used only minimal thrust from its photon thrusters, relying on grav repulsion even as it drew further and further from the planetary surface and thus grew less and less efficient as a means of propulsion as opposed to lift. The Transhumanist underground’s obsession with security was practically inbred by now.

  But of course something as small as a shuttle had no stealth suite. Tomori tracked it effortlessly.

  “Are you sure they won’t be able to track us?” Rojas demanded of her, somewhat nervously.

  “This ship has every stealth feature that could be built into it, including an invisibility field,” the young Eurasian woman assured her. “Nothing that a basic shuttle like that could mount could possibly crack it.”

  “But what about the ship that, presumably, they’re going to rendezvous with?”

  “We know nothing about that ship, Major, so I can’t answer that.” Tomori spoke distractedly, absorbed in her instrument readouts. “But no matter what they’ve got, they have nothing to point it at. They have no idea we’re here, and they can’t scan the entire sky at the level of detail that would be required to . . . Ah! The shuttle is using its grav repulsion to maneuver to a rendezvous. This gives us the kind of definite target we need for . . . Yes! Got it!”

  Jason didn’t need Tomori’s triumphant ejaculation to know they had acquired the Transhumanist ship through all its layers of stealth. Columns of figures awoke on the readout screen, and he studied them. This was a larger ship than the Comet—almost all interstellar ships were, actually—but not very large. And certainly not a warship. A small-to-medium-sized transport, probably fitted for general merchandise, including passengers.

  They continued to watch as the shuttle made contact and transferred its cargo, and then applied retro-thrust to depart low orbit and return to the planet below.

  “Well,” said Rojas in a near-murmur, “now we wait.”

  “Right,” said Jason, just as softly. Then he smiled at the irrationality of their low voices. It was a natural instinct, even though no conceivable—or even inconceivable—technology could enable the Transhumanists to detect sounds across the vacuum of space. He departed the control room and sought out Mondrago and Chantal. After bringing them up to date, he turned to Chantal. “Does any of this suggest anything to you?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I have no idea what they could be up to.”

  “Then we wait and keep their ship under observation. Hopefully they don’t have too many more visits from the shuttle before they—”

  The intercom awoke, in Van Horn’s voice. “Commander Thanou! They’re moving.”

  Jason grinned at the other two. “Sometimes you just get lucky.” Then he hurried to the control room.

  The mystery ship accelerated outward on photon thrusters with the Comet following at a safe separation, cloaked in stealth. It passed Zirankhu’s Primary Limit and engaged its negative mass drive. Van Horn followed suit, and they surged outward at a pseudo-acceleration higher than they’d expected of a transport, and which seemed somewhat high for a mere interplanetary hop.

  “Where are they going?” Rojas asked Tomori.

  “Well, I can tell you one thing. They’re not headed for any planet of this system.” She brought up a system-wide display on her small nav plot, featuring the planets in their current positions. One didn’t have to be a navigator to see that none of them were anywhere near the mystery’s ship’s projected course. It seemed to be simply heading for the Secondary Limit as expeditiously as possible.

  Jason and Rojas looked at each other. They hadn’t counted on an interstellar trip.

  “Captain,” said Rojas, “have you already laid in supplies for our return trip to Earth?”

  “Yes, Major,” Van Horn nodded. “It was one of my first orders of business after landing on Zirankhu.”

  “Well,” Jason philosophized, “we won’t starve.”

  “And I told Captain Chang not to expect us back at any particular time.” Rojas drew herself up and spoke unflinchingly. “Very well. We follow that ship wherever it goes.”

  Their quarry reached the Secondary Limit of Zirankhu’s sun, formed its space-warping field, and outpaced light. Now, following behind it, they had no fear of being detected. Nevertheless, Rojas insisted on maintaining full countermeasures.

  It immediately became possible for Tomori to infer the Transhumanists’ destination, for a ship under negative mass drive was impervious to outside gravitational influences, so its course could be a straight line. In this case, that line could be projected outward, deeper into the constellation Serpens, to intersect a star designated SS+28 9357.

  “How long?” Rojas wanted to know.

  “It’s seventeen light-years from here,” Van Horn replied. “At our top pseudovelocity of slightly more than 1600 c, we could make it in less than four days. But that Transhumanist ship is doing not much more than 1000 c, so we’re looking at about six days.”

  “I see.” Rojas turned to Tomori. “What can you tell us about this star?”

  “Not much.” Tomori brought up data. “At sixty-three light-years from Earth, it’s well beyond the periphery of human expansion. It’s a single K2v, which means that while it’s on the main sequence it’s near the lower limit of mass for stars likely to have a ‘Goldilocks’ world. Any planet orbiting close enough to it for liquid water to exist would probably be tidelocked, which means that—”

  “Yes, yes, I’m not entirely ignorant of these matters,” Rojas snapped. She turned to Jason. “Do you have any insights as to why the Transhumanists would be interested in this remote, rather marginal star?”

  “Absolutely none. And I suggest that we not theorize in advance of the data.”

  “Still,” said Rojas with a trace of waspishness, “the chances of time travel being involved in their machinations would seem to be growing less and less.”

  “As to that, I can only repeat what I said before: it’s neither more nor less likely than any other idea we’ve been able to come up with. Zero equals zero.”

  Rojas had no answer to that, and they left the control room. Jason sought out Chantal Frey, and told her where they were going. “Can you think of any reason why the Transhumanists would be shipping food to this miserable cosmic afterthought of a star?”

  “No. When I was among them, they never said anything to suggest they were engaged in any kind of off-world, much less extrasolar, activity. Of course,” she added with quiet bitterness, “given their obsession with secrecy, there were undoubtedly limits to what they’d say in the presence of a Pug.” She used the Transhumanists’ contemptuous term for humans in their natural state, an acronym for products of unregulated genetics.

  “One thing,” said Mondrago, looking thoughtful. “If they’ve got people on a lifeless planet of this star, it makes logistical sense to bring in provisions for them across seventeen light-years from Ziranhku, rather than from Earth, sixty-three light-years away.”

  “Besides which,” Chantal added, “on Earth they’d have to do all the transshipment under the eyes of law enforcement agencies that are alert for any sign of their activities.”

  “Very valid points,” said Jason. “Which leave us with the basic question of what they’re doing in this system in the first place. “He sighed resignedly. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Nevertheless, they were no more able to refrain from fruitless speculation than a dog can resist chewing a bone. They had little else to do as the days went by and the sun of Zirankhu fell behind, merging into the star-fields, and the tiny glow of SS+28 9357 appeared and grew in
the view-forward. Six days of this left them irritable and on edge by the time that orange-tinted glow waxed from a star to something resembling a sun.

  Before they approached the Secondary Limit and disengaged their drive-field, Tomori’s instrumentation, though certainly not in the same class as that of a survey ship, had told them most of what they needed to know about the local planets. Aside from a few iceballs orbiting in outer darkness, there were only two: a tiny, charred cinder close to the sun, and a small rocky globe just outside this sun’s narrow “Goldilocks zone.” It was for the latter that the transport shaped its course.

  As they followed their quarry through the maneuvering necessary for a ship under negative mass drive to approach a planet—decelerating to zero pseudovelocity and disengaging the drive before entering the Primary Limit, then killing the retained intrinsic velocity that had been built up departing from Zirankhu—they studied the planet. It was within the normal size and density parameters for terrestrial planets of its mass range, with a surface gravity of 0.55 G. It had no moons. There were polar ice-caps, partly carbon dioxide snow but holding an impressive amount of water, indicating that there was a lot more in the underground cryosphere. But there was no apparent liquid water, even though the topography, with its dry channels, made clear that the planet had possessed it in the past. In fact the atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide with a little nitrogen and argon, was just barely dense enough for water to exist in a liquid state. These were not vacuum conditions, which would simplify the problems of constructing a base there. And it didn’t take Tomori long to detect such a base.

  As Van Horn put them into a high orbit, they all waited, tensely wondering if that base had anything that could crack their stealth suite. But they watched without incident as the transport settled down into the atmosphere—no need for orbital transfer here—and landed.

  “Can you give us visuals of that base?” Rojas asked Tomori.

  “Yes. We’re on the right side of the planet. I’ll increase the magnification.” On a small screen, the desert surface of the planet seemed to rush toward them, and the base grew into recognizability. It was located on the desert floor at the base of a low plateau. There was a landing field on which the cargo carrier now rested, a very large powerplant, a cluster of domes, and . . .

  Jason drew a sharp breath. Rojas turned and gave him a curious glance. “What is it, Commander?”

  Jason couldn’t keep his hand altogether steady as he pointed to a large circular expanse surrounded by machinery of, at least to his eyes, unmistakable purpose.

  “That, Major, is a temporal displacer. If you don’t immediately recognize it for what it is, that’s understandable. It’s a bigger one than I’ve ever imagined.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  They all stared, speechless, as Tomori produced the figures for the size of what they were looking at.

  “That would be enormous even for us,” Jason finally said. “Not that we could afford to build it. Using the Transhumanists’ technology, which can produce small, cheap displacers, and scaling it up to that . . .”

  “Something else,” Mondrago pointed out. “Their time travel technology is also an order of magnitude more energy-efficient than ours, which is one of the things that makes it so cheap. But look at the size of that antimatter powerplant! If they need to pump all that power into one of their displacers, then whatever it is they send back in time must either be massive as hell, or else go back a lot of years, or both.”

  “Buy why send anything at all?” demanded Rojas, clearly perplexed. “Building this installation out here, sixty-three light-years from Earth, must have been a supreme effort for them. Why should they make such an effort to go back into the past of this godforsaken, lifeless, historyless ball of sand?”

  “Well,” Jason deadpanned, “at least they don’t have to worry about the Observer Effect.” Rojas’ expression told him this was not the time for levity. He turned to Tomori. “Your sensors were going throughout our approach to this planet, right? Can you go back over the readings, visual and otherwise, and see if there’s anything here besides that base?”

  “Certainly. I’ll just tell the computer what sort of things to look for.” Her manipulations didn’t take long, and the computer scan was even briefer. “No,” she stated unhesitatingly. “Aside from the base, this planet is exactly what you would expect it to be. There’s not another artifact on it.”

  “So,” said Chantal, “they’re not doing—or, I should say, haven’t done—anything on this planet in the past that has left any traces in the present.”

  For a moment they all reverted to silence in the face of the unfathomable.

  “Can you zoom in closer?” Jason finally asked Tomori. “I want a closer look at that displacer.”

  “Yes. We still have a while before our orbit carries us around to the other side of the planet.” The base expanded still further, and Jason studied the vast circular displacer stage, as he decided he must continue to think of it even though, unlike the Authority’s Australian facility, it wasn’t covered by a dome. Such a dome would have been a colossal feat of engineering for an expanse this size, and on this planet there wasn’t the same need to shield it from the weather. The control stations surrounding it were, however domed . . . and as Jason watched, tiny antlike figures moved purposefully into those small domes.

  “There’s activity around that displacer,” he said in a voice charged with tightly controlled excitement. “Is there any energy buildup from that powerplant?”

  “No,” Tomori told him. “The emissions are holding steady.”

  Jason and Mondrago met each other’s eyes. Mondrago spoke. “That can only mean—”

  All at once, the displacer stage was no longer empty.

  There was never any warning of a temporal retrieval, which was why they were always timed according to a rigid schedule. The person or object, its temporal energy potential restored, simply appeared with a slight swirl of displaced air. Only . . . this time the swirl was not slight. Even in this thin atmosphere, a small, brief dust storm blew over the control domes, for the mass that had materialized was that of a spaceship of the same class as the one that they had followed to this system. It rose slightly on grav repulsion and moved off the stage. That was the last thing they saw before their orbit carried them around the limb of the planet.

  Chantal broke the silence with a chuckle.

  “What, exactly, is funny?” Rojas demanded.

  Chantal continued to smile. “There’s an old saying, Major: many a true word is spoken in jest. And I think Commander Thanou may have hit on the truth with his earlier crack about the Observer Effect.”

  “Explain.”

  “Clearly the Transhumanists are doing something—and of course we still don’t know what—off Earth, and in the past. Suppose the Observer Effect somehow makes it impossible for them to perform temporal displacement on whatever planet is the scene of their operations? Or—which somehow seems more likely—it’s impractical for them to build a displacer on that planet in the present? The solution would be obvious: find a planet like this one, that isn’t and never has been inhabited—let’s call it ‘Planet A’—and build a displacer large enough to send back interstellar transports, which could then proceed to . . . ‘Planet B.’”

  Rojas frowned intently. “But why go to the colossal effort of coming all the way out here to build this displacer? Why not somewhere closer?”

  “You don’t fully appreciate the Underground’s obsession with security, Major. They’d want a planet altogether outside the sphere of human exploration, in a worthless system.”

  “But,” Mondrago objected, “humans will eventually explore out here. The Transhumanists’ privacy won’t last.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t need to last very long,” said Jason slowly. “Remember, we don’t know when The Day is.”

  The temperature in the overcrowded control room seemed to drop a few degrees. It was the cloud under which they all lived. The most close
ly guarded secret of the Transhumanist Underground remained as secret as ever. The moment when all their elaborately laid plans came to catastrophic fruition at once could be tomorrow. It was worse when one was in interstellar space, because for all anyone could prove to the contrary The Day might have already have occurred on Earth. Although, Jason reflected, the fact that this interstellar/transtemporal transshipment operation here on what he decided he must call Planet A was still a going concern indicated that the moment was not quite yet.

  “Well,” said Rojas briskly, “be that as it may, we’re now in a position to abort whatever it is they’re doing. We’ll return to Earth with our knowledge of the location of this system, and the Deep-Space Fleet will come here and blast this installation into its component atoms! Or, rather,” she hastily amended, recalling the nightmarish political delays involved whenever the Deep-Space Fleet was called upon to do anything, ”it ought to be possible to do it as an independent IDRF operation—I’ve seen no defenses here.”

  “Not so fast,” said Jason. “We still don’t know where this, ah, Planet B is, or how far back in its past they’re operating, or what they’ve done there—or if that operation has already become self-sustaining even if we cut off their supply line here. We can’t leave yet.”

  “But we’ve obtained all the information we can.”

  “Not by a long sight!” Jason grinned wolfishly. “For one thing, we can deduce how far into the past they’re displacing these ships.”

  “How?”

  Instead of answering Rojas directly, Jason turned to Tomori. “Your sensors can measure the output of that antimatter reactor, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And when we got a sensor lock on their ship, in orbit around Zirankhu, you got a mass reading on it?”

  “Yes.”

  Jason turned back to Rojas. “There’s your answer, Major. It is a truism that the energy expenditure required for temporal displacement is a function of two factors: the mass being displaced, and how far back in time it’s being sent. The Transhumanists’ displacers are equally subject to this tradeoff, even though their overall energy efficiency is incomparably higher than ours. And now that we’ve been able to study their captured displacer on Earth, we know the energy figures to feed into the equation. Knowing that, and the mass, it’s just a matter of simple substitution to get the temporal ‘distance.’”