The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  "What?" Thalia whispered with some confusion.

  I hear voices, sir. Soomber thought to Captain Nocta.

  Dayk reached back down and grabbed Thalia's hand. Then he thought hard about the building nearby flooded with radiation and he suddenly disappeared with a flash.

  Sir! Etos said. I've got two teleportation spikes from the ship!

  I heard it. Nocta said. Follow them!

  In a nanoChron all three men teleported out of the hangar and right outside a nearby building, where Dayk and Thalia had only just rematerialized. They're here. Nocta said, but he could no longer hear his two team mates standing right alongside of him. All he got in his telepathic senses was an eerie dead static, which only vaguely let him catch unintelligible snippets of broken mental activity. In fact, all this telepathic communication seemed dead to him. He looked down at his arm and let his skin morph into vital signs that would tell him why they'd lost communications. "Radiation." He said aloud. "The telepathics are down. This whole area is flooded."

  "Sir, I lost contact with the ship." Etos said.

  "I'm getting fractured signals from it, sir. But otherwise, Lieutenant Etos is right. The signal's gone, sir." Soomber added.

  Nocta looked around the military base and saw ancient human activity only about a hundred meters away from them. “Cloaks!” he said to Etos and Soomber. “Keep primitive contact to a minimum.” In a flash, they all disappeared.

  "Captain Nocta." Etos said as he walked up next to him. "They could be anywhere now. Without communication with the ship, we're completely blind here. What about an aerial scan?"

  "Lieutenant, radiation or not, if he's cloaked then the ship is blind anyway. An aerial scan wouldn't pick up anything." Nocta said informatively.

  "Yes sir, but if the ship is out of range of the cloaking devices, then eventually their cloaks will lose power, and then a scan would..."

  "...would pick them up from anywhere on the planet." Said Nocta, finishing Etos's sentence.

  "Yes sir." Agreed Etos.

  "Lunar altitude would suffice for that, sir. And still keep us well within scanning range." Soomber said, jumping into the conversation.

  Dayk and Thalia stood invisibly along the brick wall that housed the radioactive material only a few centimeters from where Captain Nocta had just vanished. Still holding Thalia's hand, he once again started moving up her arm toward her head. "Stay. Right. Here!" He said as quietly as possible. He felt her slowly nod in agreement.

  “Start looking for prints,” Nocta said.

  Dayk watched Nocta’s own prints suddenly move away from the building and slowly move around toward the other side. He shimmied along the wall heading away from him and when he found his chance he quietly ran away toward the ship. When the signal was strong, he suddenly teleported mid stride away from the irradiated area.

  Thalia stood frozen watching Captain Nocta and his team’s prints as they moved around the area, scouring it for footprints. She was very aware of her breathing and was almost holding her breath as they stood there searching.

  "Do you think they heard us?" Etos said quietly to Captain Nocta.

  "I don't know." He replied. "There's no foot prints, but this is where they rematerialized. We were right behind them; they couldn't have gone far."

  "Yes sir." Etos agreed.

  "Let’s get back to the ship," Captain Nocta said. “We need to finish clean up and get the items in the other building. As soon as we’re done, we’ll head up and wait for their cloaks to run out.”

  Thalia didn't move a muscle as they moved around carefully searching for any sign of them. Nocta got uncomfortably close to her as he approached the building.

  “Sir!” Soomber said, suddenly. “Primitives heading this way.”

  Nocta quickly turned his head and saw a group of men quickly marching toward the hangar. “Dhregh!” He yelled.

  He startled Thalia and she jumped. Nocta heard it and started homing in on the disruption. Neither could see how close to the other they both came.

  Thalia felt her heart began to pound almost audibly. She wished she could stop it from beating so loudly, but it wouldn't relent. And where had Dayk run off to?

  "Um... Sir." Lieutenant Soomber said with a confused twist in his voice.

  "What is it, Soomber?" Nocta asked as he crept toward where he heard the twitch against the wall.

  "I'm only getting fragments, but it sounds like the Paentus is powering up for a jump." Said the Lieutenant.

  "What?!" Captain Nocta exclaimed. He looked over toward the hanger where the Paentus remained hovering by itself. As if on cue, the sound of the temporal core charging up began to vibrate through the atmosphere. It made an ominous buzzing echo inside the steel hangar. “They’re stealing the ship!” he yelled. In a breath, Captain Nocta began running back toward the hangar. There was no point in looking for fugitives in a cloud of radiation only to be stranded himself. This mission was secret and there would be no rescue if they got stranded. Etos and Soomber saw Nocta’s prints kicking up dust as they moved, and they took off running after him as fast as they could.

  The primitive military men marching toward the hangar suddenly stopped in their tracks and watched as electric arcs began zapping through the walls of the hangar. They hunkered down, expecting some unknown catastrophe, oblivious to the footprints forming in their path as invisible people ran past them.

  Thalia heard the core powering up and started to panic. Was Dayk leaving her? Was he leaving all of them? She didn't know what was happening, and almost started running toward the hangar after Captain Nocta herself. She was horrified that she might get left behind in this technological backwater, cut off from her own kind and her own time!

  Just as her breathing became so hard that her mask couldn't keep up, a teleportation flash popped just a few meters away from her. She saw it, but there was no one there.

  "Sorry,” Dayk said aloud. "I'm back. I put their ship on auto-return. In about a hectoChron it's going to open a wormhole and shoot them into a one-year journey back home."

  "You did what?!" Thalia said still in a panic. Her breathing was choppy and loud. "That's brilliant!" She said, suddenly feeling an overwhelming relief. “But what about us?!”

  “There should still be a rescue, an actual rescue, coming in four days,” Dayk said.

  “How can you be sure?” Thalia said.

  “Because there’s still too much technology left behind here.”

  They could see three teleportation flashes in the distance as Nocta and his men got close enough to transport. The ship continued winding up for the massive amount of energy that was about to punch a hole in space-time.

  "Come on!" Dayk said. "Follow me to the hangar! We have to get within range of their ship before they jump!" He started running toward the hangar with Thalia right behind him. He could hear her foot falls as they pounded on the dusty asphalt. Lightening arcs started popping off of the hangar more and more frequently, and the closer they got the more they could hear the ship. "Download everything you can and then follow me!" He yelled. They both started downloading as much information from the Paentus as they could. As they got closer to the hangar, they could see the atmosphere begin to warp around the building. "The wormhole's about to open. Come on!" Dayk yelled, and then in one last teleportation flash he disappeared. Thalia saw his flash, and then followed him into the teleportation stream.

  In a couple of quick flashes, they suddenly found themselves almost two kilometers away, just a short distance from Naomi Saulf's apartment. From there they could hear the Paentus as it tore a vortex into the space-time continuum and disappeared. The world was suddenly quiet again.

  Inside the hangar, all of the catatonic men stood blankly by as the wormhole opened up above them. In a burst of blue light, the ship and the vortex suddenly disappeared, and all of the men collapsed to the ground. One by one they slowly began to stir on the empty floor of the massive hangar. Almost nothing remained of the Chronis or its crew. Eac
h of the men looked around themselves in a dazed, and hazy confusion as they gathered themselves up and looked around. They had come to with only vague feelings about why they had even been there in the first place. Some of the men helped others of them back up on their feet. They all dusted themselves off and then scoped around looking for both the questions and the answers.

  "Ok. I give up." Said Clyde Tombaugh. "How'd we all get in here? Anyone remember? You all look about as confused as I feel."

  "I'm not sure where here is." Said Jesse Marcel as he walked around the giant hangar, looking for clues to what had happened to him. "Anyone know where we are?"

  "Well this is the experimental aircraft hangar." Someone said from across the room. "Of course, I'm not sure why the X-1 is taken apart and stacked up against the wall. It wasn't like that yesterday."

  "Experimental aircraft hangar?" Jesse asked with great confusion. "There's no experimental aircraft hangar in Roswell."

  "You ain't in Roswell, son. This is Alamogordo." Said Dick Benfer.

  "Yesterday?" Nathan Warner chimed in. "Wait. What day is it. Somethin' tells me that yesterday wasn't yesterday."

  "How'd I get to Alamogordo?" Jesse asked.

  "Ain't it Monday?" Wayne Roemersberger asked.

  Six MPs came bursting through the back door of the hangar and spread out around the group of men. “Is everyone alright?” One of the privates asked. “What happened to the saucer?”

  “What saucer?” Clyde asked in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sir, there was a disturbance coming from this hangar, General Ramey sent us in to see what happened.”

  “What the hell is General Ramey doing here?” Colonel Turner asked.

  “Sir?” The confused private said.

  “Four days…” Sheridan Cavitt said. His words sounded like he was in a trance of some kind. "A flying disc crashed, but….” He droned on.

  "What is he talking about?" Clyde asked.

  "Who is that man?" Asked Colonel Turner.

  "That's right!" Jesse said aloud. "We were in Corona last night investigating a crash of some kind. There was all this debris, and a rancher. Said he found a flying disc..."

  "Is he alright?" Someone else asked.

  "Sheridan?" Jesse said as he walked over to his monotonous sounding colleague. "Are you alright?"

  Sheridan continued droning on. "Radar picked up a flying object over…"

  "What's he on about?" The Colonel asked.

  "What's wrong with him?" Came another voice from the crowd.

  "Flying saucer…" Sheridan said. Suddenly, he seemed to be coming around, and slipping out of his trance. "Flying saucer?" He said again, suddenly aware of what was coming out of his mouth. "Major Marcel?" He said with a heavy tremor in his voice. “Where are we?”

  Before Jesse Marcel could make it over to catch Sheridan he collapsed back to the ground and passed out.

  Failure

  Captain Nocta screamed as he materialized into the engineering section of the Paentus. He rushed over to the command console along the base of the temporal core and started trying to abort the jump sequence. “Soomber! Try and shut down the navigation controls!” he yelled as Soomber and Etos materialized alongside of him. “Etos, get to the cockpit. Try and disable it from there!” he commanded.

  Etos teleported to the cockpit while Soomber ran over to the navigational systems in engineering. “I’m locked out!” he said as he moved to another station to disable the jump sequence.

  Sir, you might want to get up here! Etos yelled back from the cockpit as the temporal core glowed pink-hot in Nocta’s face, burning brightly with a dense plasma energy that was almost ready to burst through the space-time continuum. The sound of the hyper-fusion coils flooding their charge into the temporal core grew louder and louder, and they could hear powerful electric arcs leaping from their hull to the metal hangar around them outside.

  "Soomber!" Nocta yelled over the reaction taking place before him. "Check the ship. Find out if the fugitives are on board!" He continued trying to override the jump command, but the Paentus refused to co-operate.

  "Sir, the teleport log reports one transport into engineering, and then one transport back to where we were a chron ago from the cockpit." Soomber reported as he gathered information from the ship's systems.

  "Dhregh!" Nocta yelled.

  Sir, you better get up here now! Etos yelled again. We jump in five, four, three....

  "Take over!" Nocta yelled at Soomber, and then in a flash he teleported into the cockpit.

  ...one! Etos said as Nocta materialized next to him and quickly sat down in the pilot's seat.

  With its tale tell burst of energy the temporal singularity was forced open by the core just as Nocta took the controls and in a nanoChron they were suddenly thrown into the inter-dimensional space of the temporal wormhole.

  "Dhregh! Dhregh! Dhregh!" Nocta yelled as he steadied the Paentus into its yearlong return trip. He pounded his fists on the command console as they escaped the mid twentieth century and headed toward their own distant future.

  "What do we do now, sir?" Etos asked as Nocta's rage turned into a smoldering cinder.

  "Now we do nothing. It's over. We failed." Said Nocta angrily.

  "But we managed to retrieve ninety-seven point five six percent of the Chronis and its crew sir?" Etos offered, looking on the bright side. "We couldn't have anticipated that the two fugitives would...."

  "The fugitives are the reason we were chosen for this mission!" Nocta yelled. "We accomplished zero percent of our mission! We failed!"

  Etos bowed his head in submission and turned away from Captain Nocta. "Yes sir." He said diminutively.

  Nocta sat steaming while Etos tried to look busy at the navigational controls; a useless gesture now that they were zipping forward in time. He was tense and angry beyond words and wanted nothing more than to punch break everything around him. The uncomfortable silence built up until he could take it no more. "Watch the ship." He said, and in a flash Nocta teleported to the recreational health and fitness area at the back of the ship. He marched up to the large wheel hovering beside the bulkhead and jumped into it and started running. He ran and ran gaining speed as the wheel turned around him and he went around the wheel. As his breathing got harder, he began punching his fist into the bulkhead wall in between his fast jogging stride.

  Nocta angrily feared the worst. Would he lose his commission? Would he be sent back to guarding the entrances to laboratories, checking identities of scientists as they came and went through more fascinating lives than his own, or worse? Would he be expelled from the Elite Guard all together? Sent to work a civilian life in disgrace?

  He ran faster and faster in the exercise wheel, punching the wall harder and harder as he and the wheel revolved around like the hands of a fast-moving clock moving in opposite directions of each other. In a quick flash, Lieutenant Soomber materialized into the room, and saw the Captain sweating hatred as he ran.

  "Oh, it's you, sir." Soomber said as he materialized.

  "What do you want, Lieutenant?" Nocta growled.

  "Well, I heard a banging on the bulkheads, and I was checking to make sure it wasn't a malfunction sir." Soomber replied.

  "Obviously, it's not. You're free to return to engineering." Nocta said, facing forward and continuing to run. He punched the wall twice in Soomber's presence.

  Soomber could see that the Captain was in no mood to communicate, and he started heading for the bulkhead door. "Thank you, sir." He said as he started to walk through the portal to the forward section of the ship.

  Just as he reached the other side of the door, he heard the Captain's voice from inside the rec center. "Lieutenant!"

  "Yes sir?" Soomber said turning back through the portal.

  "Go through the archiver and find out exactly who we did recover. It's possible that Dr. Dayk or Dr. Thalia weren't among the fugitives who survived." Nocta said, still running.

  "Sir, I though
t we were ordered not to examine the wreckage once it had been archived. They were kind of specific about...." Soomber started.

  Nocta gnashed his teeth at the sound of his subordinate's argument. The mission had failed, the gloves were off, and new rules needed to be applied. "Lieutenant!" He yelled. "I gave you an order! We're in deep time. Things have changed. Don't question me again."

  "Yes sir." Soomber said, and then he turned and continued forward to the front of the ship.

  Lieutenant Soomber walked forward through the infirmary and into the cockpit of the ship, where Lieutenant Etos sat lazily monitoring the ship's systems in the wormhole. He plopped down in the pilot's seat next to Etos and let out a heavy sigh. "He's pissed." He said quietly to Etos.

  "Yeah, just a little bit." Etos agreed. "This is the weirdest rescue ever." He went on.

  "This is the second rescue I've been on...." Soomber started.

  "Third for me." Etos interjected.

  "...in almost twenty solarSines." Soomber finished. "This is the first one that lasted less than a kiloChron."

  "The shortest one I've been on, was my first." Etos said. "We were in normal space-time for about six kilos. This one definitely takes the prize."

  "You ever been on a 'rescue' with one with these?" Soomber asked, brandishing his gun.

  "You ever had a rescue that was kept secret from the Science team?" Etos asked with a suspicious air in his voice.

  "What the hazmar is this?" Soomber asked him.

  "It's not normal, I'll tell you that."

  "Now he wants me to go through the archive and see who we did get." Soomber said.

  "The dead scientists?" Etos asked with some morbid alarm. "I thought we weren't supposed to go through the archive. Collect it, get it back, no peeking. That's it, right?"

  Soomber shrugged his shoulders and turned to the command console. He began tapping commands into the holographic controls and within a nanoChron a database of the entire archived ship came up in a massive matrix floating before him. With a thought, he filtered out all but the biological components and the list was narrowed to a more manageable series of data. He flipped through it one by one with simple gestures until the three crates packed with the ice showed up floating in the hologram in front of him.