Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  He pulled his reader from his belt and began to look over the satellite recordings. They weren’t far from Walker’s landing site. That was where they had to go. Whoever had decided to produce this gruesome play had left the captain of the ship off of his cast list. But he was in it regardless and he was determined to make sure every last thing went horribly wrong.

  As he spoke, he checked his sidearm. “That rumbler will have just about every soldier from the Valor. They’re headed to Walker’s landing site where they will find Walker’s expedition. Rodrigo didn’t fire on Cummings in self defense. She shot him because he was trying to prevent this. You can all guess what happens next.”

  “Here?” Cabrera asked. “Now?”

  Beckett nodded.

  They all stared at the ground, the air, away from each other, away from their captain. Green or experienced, they all knew what was at stake. For some reason, some of the crew had been given a different mission, the real mission. Find the Einstein, murder her crew.

  No one said anything, but they were all thinking the same thing. Why send the Valor? Why not send a captain and crew who all had the stomach for the job at hand? And, now that they understood, what was their role?

  Beckett’s choice had been made for him when they’d decided to recruit his crew as assassins. “We have to prevent Walker from launching his black box. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow that black box reaches Earth before he even lands here. They sent us here knowing that. Those logs that we were given were doctored or maybe even falsified. If we’re here, there’s a reason.”

  “What reason? How can there be a reason?” Cabrera exclaimed with disgust in her voice.

  Beckett was going to answer, but he was interrupted again by Bonamo. “They’ve split up.”

  Beckett paused, listening. It was true. The vibrations of the rumbler were growing more faint while the sound of the air bike’s engine was getting closer.

  “Someone’s coming here?” Burbank asked. “Why?”

  “It’s one bike,” Bonamo said and there was no longer any doubt about his listening skills and the truth of his Sight and Sound score. “It’s moving fast.”

  It was Rodrigo. Beckett was sure of it. She was sending the others to finish Walker and his crew while she came to confront Beckett. If she intended to kill him, he couldn’t say, but he couldn’t let it interfere with stopping the rest of the soldiers from butchering Earth’s greatest pioneers. He looked at the three people with him. Two rooks and a doc. Not exactly the best fighting force the UESF had to offer. But it would have to do.

  “I’ll have to wait here and meet her,” he said, without bothering to tell them who she was. “Bonamo, you’ll make all combat decisions, but Cabrera is the officer in charge.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

  “Save as many as you can. Stop Walker from launching that black box. Shoot to kill.”

  “No, Ted, no!” Cabrera cried. “I can’t kill anyone, least of all people from our crew.”

  “They’re not your friends, Samantha.”

  “I’ve patched them up a hundred times, saved their lives even. Now you want me to kill them?”

  Time was growing short. Beckett grabbed her by the shoulders and held her tightly. Their faces were so close that she was sure he was going to kiss her again.

  “You can either kill them or stand by while they slaughter the crew of the Einstein. Either way, you’re never going sleep the same again.”

  She didn’t have a response to that. She couldn’t look away from Beckett. Bonamo and Burbank, just children really, were also staring at him. For a moment so brief that it wouldn’t even register in his memory, Beckett understood what he was asking of them and how it should have been impossible for them to comply. Then Bonamo spurred himself into action and began to double-time it through the jungle. Burbank followed immediately and Cabrera, caught between what she had to do and what she wanted to do, started after them.

  Monkeywrench

  Boone found Rollins sitting alone in the mess. There were a couple of other people in there taking regular meals. He was wary about confronting the computer officer in the open. Not only didn’t he know who was on whose side, he was at a complete loss as to what the sides were. He had worked some of it out to the best of his ability. There were potential murderers and there were potential rescuers, but he couldn’t figure out which was which.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Boone said to Rollins, not even bothering to take a seat at the table.

  Rollins looked up at him with a relatively calm look on his face.

  “Now,” Boone said in a very hushed tone. “I’m armed.”

  Without responding, Rollins stood up and stepped away from the table. Boone motioned for him to leave the room and he did. Once in the corridor, they began making their way up toward Control. Boone probably could have chosen a more clandestine place for their meeting, but he picked the conference room. He had never been able to get a read on Rollins, not in the three years that he had known him. He didn’t necessarily consider the computer officer a physical threat, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Lawrence Rollins was about forty five years old. He’d lost most of his hair and his belly was small enough to be disguised by a big shirt, but not by a uniform. He had round shoulders that trailed away into this arms. Boone had never once seen him take advantage of the ship’s gym, although it was so small that not more than two crew members could work out at the same time. Still, men like Rollins could surprise you in a fight.

  The control deck was deserted, which suited Boone. With Beckett, Tedesco, and Rodrigo off ship, there wasn’t likely to be anyone to disturb them inside the conference room. When he opened the door, though, he discovered Jack Tunsley and Chief Hardy. Hardy was at the head of the table, with Tunsley on his right. Their heads were leaned in toward one another in a conspiratorial pose. They looked up as the two newcomers entered. Panicked, Boone shoved Rollins inside and drew his sidearm. He hadn’t been bluffing when he’d claimed to be armed.

  “You see?” Tunsley shouted, throwing his arms into the air. “I told you!”

  “What’s this all about, Boone?” Hardy said in his usual impatient tone.

  “You tell me,” Boone countered.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Tunsley. “It looks like a mutiny to me. I have to admit, Bill, I would never have pegged you for having the balls for it, but after the way you rolled over to Rodrigo...”

  Boone narrowed his eyes and squared his shoulders. There were spies everywhere. “Is that what you think?” Boone switched his attention. “Is that what he told you, Chief? Well let me clue you both in. I was surrounded by a squad of infantry with very clear intentions. I stumbled into them and I think Rodrigo would have just killed me if she didn’t think it was too messy. Instead she dangled a carrot in front of my face. I pretended to take it.”

  Tunsley blew a raspberry. “Pretended! You think I’m going to believe that?”

  “Tunsley, I don’t give a shit what you believe. I’m tired of you.” He turned again to Hardy. “Chief, there is a mutiny on board. I’m not a part of it and, I guess, neither is our dipshit engineer. But this bastard certainly is.” He jabbed the barrel of the gun toward Rollins.

  For the first time, Rollins sat up and took notice. It was tough to match an emotion with his expression. Rollins was so stoic that it was sometimes difficult to think of him as being anything more than an automaton. Still, there was something going on under the surface now.

  “I assure you, Mr. Boone, I am not in league with the mutineers.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Rollins. I found the sensor dump in the trash. I know you deleted it.”

  “What sensor dump?” Tunsley asked.

  “Shut up!” said Boone, then turned back to Rollins. “You’re the only one who could have trashed it so you tell me why you did that instead of reporting it.”

  “Boone, what the hell are you talking about?” Tunsley pressed.

  This time, Boon
e answered him. “Something made planetfall. After we did, something else came down. This son of a bitch erased the records and kept it to himself. He was pretty sloppy about it, too. How can you have been so sloppy, Rollins? You’re the fucking computer officer.”

  “That is difficult to explain,” Rollins said, without saying anything at all.

  “Was it an eXchengue ship?” Tunsley asked. “A New Earth ship?”

  Boone shook his head.

  “It was a Ghost ship,” Tunsley suddenly declared as if he’d completed a major feat of deduction. “Holy shit, the captain was right.”

  “Only in a manner of speaking,” Rollins said, finally sinking into one of the chairs.

  Boone was infuriated by Rollins’ attitude, even more so because of his earlier inability to effectively confront Rodrigo. “You seem pretty relaxed for a guy who’s been a party to mutiny.”

  Rollins considered his words for a moment, then said, “Mr. Boone, I assure you that I am not part of Lieutenant Tedesco’s mutineers. I’m a little surprised by you, however.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Tunsley chimed in.

  Boone wheeled on him. “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  “He is what he is, Mr. Boone,” Rollins said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tunsley complained.

  Rollins sighed. “He will never be different. You, however, Mr. Boone, may represent the evidence that bears out one of my theories.”

  The way Rollins spoke gave Boone the creeps. He seemed to know absolutely everything there was to know about the situation and yet kept himself expertly detached from it as if he was simply some scientific observer.

  Boone was about to say something when Rollins looked up at him. “Sergeant Rodrigo promised you a transfer in exchange for you doing nothing. Mr. Boone, you’re supposed to take that offer.”

  “Says who?” Boone challenged, forgetting Rodrigo and the threat for a minute.

  Rollins looked around the room at the eyes of the men gathered there. The gun in his face didn’t concern him in the least. It would take much more than that to coerce him, yet he felt that he had made a significant breakthrough in his research. Talking about it might very well produce even more enlightening results. “Gentlemen, what I’m about to tell you may alter the course of history irrevocably. Since, however, that is what Ghosts do, I don’t see the harm in it.”

  The three men remained silent.

  “The ship that entered the atmosphere and landed at the Einstein’s landing site was, in fact, the Einstein. Because of a flaw in its drive, it made a time jump. It came two hundred years into the future, where it encountered us. We are the futuristic force that kills them all.”

  Boone hesitated, stunned by the impact of Rollins’ delivery.

  “Wait a minute,” Tunsley said, shaking his head. “You’re crazy. Jesus Christ, Rollins, do really think we’re that stupid?”

  But, Boone was less doubtful. He had seen the satellite images. He knew that, at least, one piece of the story was true. The Einstein was the ship that had landed after the Valor.

  “Did you ever wonder, Mr. Tunsley, where a Ghost ship comes from or where it goes when it escapes?” asked Rollins. “Of course you have. Everyone has.”

  “Are you about to tell me that you’ve figured that out?”

  “Ghost ships travel through time,” Rollins said. “That’s why you’ll never see the same one twice.”

  “Bullshit,” Tunsley declared. “Time travel’s impossible.”

  Rollins shrugged. “How many times was it stated that interstellar travel was impossible, and, yet, here we are.”

  “No one knows anything about the Ghosts,” Boone said to him. “How could you possibly know that they’re time travelers?”

  “I know it because I am a Ghost.”

  Tunsley snorted.

  “You’re not a Ghost,” Boone said. “You’re human.”

  Rollins nodded. “So are the Ghosts. We are humans from one of your distant futures.”

  “You’re an officer in the Space Force,” Hardy finally interjected, not even trying to hide his disgust. Rollins was clearly trying to play on their paranoia to avoid the repercussions of his actions, but Hardy knew everything there was to know about the members of this crew. “You have an entire history.”

  “Fabricated,” Rollins answered with almost no emotion. “I’m someone different every time.”

  “Every time?” Boone asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t you listen to him, Boone,” Hardy said, his face reddening. “He’s been on this ship for four years, or have we been working with a ghost of the Ghost?”

  Rollins smiled. It was a tiny little thing, clearly learned from Mona Lisa herself. “I’ve actually participated in this event six times. It’s crucial to my research. Mostly I manage to get onto this ship as a deck hand or low ranking crew, but those positions have made it difficult for me to gather any significant data. As a result, I decided that I needed to hold a position of prominence. So I went back much further. I spent a long time building a meticulous identity and getting myself transferred to the Valor as computer officer.”

  Rollins watched them carefully. At least they had stopped accusing him of lying. “Humanity is doomed,” he continued dramatically. “Before space travel, people were obsessed with a worldwide apocalypse. If you read your history, you’ll find that there was this planetwide fascination with it. There were lots of stories of plagues and natural disasters. Zombies. Once we went to space, that faded. After all, what was one planet in the grand scheme of things? In the far future, though, there will be a catastrophe so unstoppable that it will span all of the worlds on which we live. Where do you go when you can’t even escape to the stars?”

  No one answered. They didn’t even realize that the question wasn’t entirely rhetorical.

  “Your only escape is back through time,” Rollins finally said. “The Ghost ships are refugees from your future.”

  “Wait,” Boone said, not wanting to entertain this fantasy, yet unable to stop himself. “If you can come back in time, why not change the future, avoid this catastrophe?”

  “Rollins, you’re full of shit,” Tunsley echoed.

  Rollins nodded solemnly. “That was the intent at first, but try as they might, the early Ghosts couldn’t break through the pattern. The truth, though, is that we have never really understood time. You and your engineers believe that time is linear. The people from my century knew better, but still felt it fit some mathematical formula, a geometric pattern that might very well have its roots buried in some higher math that we hadn’t yet discovered. But I think they were wrong, too.

  “If my theories are correct, time is much more complex than even the most twisted mathematical formula. I think time is constructed from an algorithm or a series of algorithms that work in concert with one another. Those algorithms are inordinately complicated, intertwining with one another as they are executed. In fact, I suspect that time is recursive.”

  In computer programming, a recursive operation is one that doubles back on itself. Most commonly, the operation receives information, works with that information to construct a result, and then performs the same operation on the result.

  “It sounds like an endless loop,” Boone said.

  Rollins nodded. “Recursive algorithms usually have a base case or an escape clause built into them. The idea is that you are whittling down a piece of information into result after result until you ultimately come across a final product.”

  “Then what happens?” Hardy asked.

  “Why, then the program can continue on.”

  “Time,” Tunsley mused, “as a recursive algorithm.” He was so intrigued by the theory that he had trouble dismissing it.

  “Much of what has gone on here supports my theory,” Rollins said.

  “And we’re the parameters, the pieces of information that the operation is whittling down?” asked Hardy.

  “I think you
’re simplifying it,” Rollins said, then nodded to himself. “But the concept is generally correct. If you break down a series of events into an operation, there must be countless operations occurring at various intervals throughout what we think of as history. The events of two weeks ago or ten years ago may be running concurrently with these events today. All it takes is some new variables in order to introduce a new flow of information. When the Ghosts unlocked the ability to escape into the past, they introduced new variables into the algorithms.

  “What I’ve learned today is that the iterations are not fixed. Mr. Boone has accepted Rodrigo’s offer every time until this one. That means some other variable has affected the result. During the next iteration, which may be happening even as we have this conversation, some other variant may exist. Their frequency may occur at an exponentially increasing rate until the course of events hardly even resembles our experiences.”

  Hardy, who was paying more attention to Rollins himself than his theories, had listened to the testimony of countless witnesses on countless cases. As chief, he’d had to call crew members to account for their actions time and time again. When they lied, they struggled with those lies. They fought to keep the details in order. Rollins didn’t have to do that. He told his story so effortlessly. “And that’s why you keep going back and reliving this?”

  “Exactly,” said Rollins. “This time out I wanted to have the opportunity to really understand the events as they played out. The only way I could do that was to have the run of computer control. I spent a few years devising an identity and working my way up through the Space Force. When I was ready, I requested a transfer to the Valor, served under Captain Beckett for four years, and gained his trust.”

  Tunsley looked at Hardy, then looked at Boone. Then he looked from one to the other again. He had completely forgotten about his original accusations. Boone being a mutineer was no longer nearly as interesting as the psychotic story that Rollins was telling.