Chapter Seventeen

[68845] Frederik

SSV Ergo Infinitum

Frederik’s momentum carried him through the wreckage of the elevator tunnel that remained tenuously attached to Control’s side airlock, still clinging to the storm cellar’s outer hull like gnarled metallic roots. Frederik let out a gasp of pain as his foot clipped one of the jutting ruins. He spun from the impact and slammed—back first—into Control’s airlock hatch.

“Oof!”

A forceful expulsion of air from his lungs, partly from the impact and partly from his own surprise. But he bounced off and away from the hatch.

Blindly, reactively, he grasped for some hold to keep him from flying off into deep space. His palm slapped into a metal bar. He gripped tight. His fingers tingled with haptic feedback, and his EAR interface popped open in front of him. His inertia strained his shoulder joint uncomfortably, but he had a grip on the airlock hatch handle, and he was not letting go. He had aimed true.

Control’s airlock, nestled in the small gap between the real hatch to the storm cellar and the end of the elevator tunnel, reported its ready status on Frederik’s EAR. He pulled his feet up to brace them against Ergo, opened the hatch, and cramped himself into the airlock. Ergo’s radio and EAR channels were still offline, and the walls of Control were too thick for his biosuit to get anything through.

The thick radiation shielding of Control included a one-way fiber-optic peephole, winding in a circuitous path, enabling anyone in Control to look outside. All Frederik saw from outside were distorted blotches of light. Whoever held power in the Control deck would know he was there, and he hoped it was still Io and the rest of Ergo’s crew, not anyone from Fengshen or their adversaries, but he couldn’t confirm until they let him inside.

He hadn’t been gone that long, he reassured himself. They could use Kirk’s plan and cut loose the spin habs. Get out of here. All he had to do was get inside first.

Stuck in the airlock, he may have fallen into a pit of despair and fear and anxiety. Such a pit was ready to swallow him, but he refused to dwell on it and instead hummed to himself to distract his dark thoughts. Anything to keep his mind off his precarity. Anything to avoid falling into that yawning void of impotent terror of being in an unarmored airlock in the middle of a firefight.

Frederik startled when each half of Control’s thick doors swung up and nestled into slots in the deck built into the floor and ceiling—he was being let inside. Io and the crew were the only faces he saw when the doors opened. Frederik let out a grunt of relief and did the microgravity equivalent of falling into an exhausted pile of human-shaped rubber on the floor. He shoved forward, went limp, and let out a sigh as he floated in.

Io floated over to him, muttered something in some unfamiliar Homeworlds language, and wrapped him in her arms as they floated together. In transit to the other side of the deck, Io pulled his biosuit helmet off its O-ring latch, put her hands over both of his ears, and gave him several kisses on his face.
His heart burned with an intense, unexpected desire, and then he leaned in for a proper kiss. Io’s soft and warm lips parted. He felt like an uncontrolled fusion reaction burning in the void’s twilight, forgetting everything that had just happened besides this kiss. Forgetting where he was, he closed his eyes as Io’s grip tightened. Waves of heat radiated between them.

“Ahem,” Taliya cleared her throat to get their attention, breaking the moment. “As much as I enjoy seeing you two together again, we’ve got serious business to handle,” Taliya said, her tone shifting from irritation to urgency.

Frederik and Io disentangled, the weight of their current predicament quickly extinguishing Frederik’s moment of escape. Io pushed off gently from him, propelling herself to a flat beneath the damaged overhead ink display.

“What happened when I was outside?” He asked, feeling the tension line his words as anxiety and dread returned. “What is our status?”

“See for yourself,” Taliya said with a flick of her wrist to bring up the exterior data from Ergo. “Almost all of our external sensors have been compromised.”

“Compromised?” He asked. “You mean damaged?”

“No,” Io said. “She means it in a security kind of way. Whoever those shit heels on hab zero-one are, they compromised our systems so we can’t see what they were up to anymore.”

“And internal systems?” He asked.

“Only getting the problems from hab zero-one,” Io said. “Though ambient pressure, temperature, and oxygenation is all still streaming in. Those still seem reliable.”

“But we shouldn’t trust any of our other readings…unless it comes to external readings from Fengshen,” Taliya placed a hand on Io’s shoulder. “Show him.”
Io’s fingers danced over her personal EAR interface, pulling up multiple data streams, though they were still abstract, almost raw data—nothing visual.

“As soon as you got into the airlock, we could pull your suit’s logs,” Io said. “We validated them against what Ergo’s streams were showing. Seems Ergo’s sensors were reliable…at least in that way.”

“And the verdict?”

“Fengshen’s dead, Eff,” Io’s voice carried a sadness that seemed as grim and cold as the void.

Frederik read through the information from Ergo’s validated sensor logs. It painted a vapor clear picture. Fengshen was now a dead, hulking derelict.

Each of the end caps, where the crew lived and worked, had turned into a burst open smoldering debris field. Fengshen’s long cylindrical body, which normally spun around the engineering bay at its center of mass, had holes all over it. The whole craft had a wild tumble that took it further and further away from Ergo.

Most of Fengshen’s mass before this incident was propellant for its hybrid fusion driven main rocket engine, and all of that had dispersed into the vacuum, producing a rapidly dissipating artificial nebula around the wreckage. And, worst of all, the debris had already cooled down well below human body temperature—if anyone had clung to the wreckage, they were definitively dead.

“So, what’s our play?” Kirk asked weakly, as he floated over and clutched a cold pack to his bruised head, his nostrils packed with gray medical weaves.

Frederik nodded, gave Kirk a gentle smile he didn’t feel in his eyes. Kirk looked half-dead, exhausted, and angry. But he had survived like the rest of Ergo’s crew.

“We regroup, assess our resources, and figure out a way to either repair this bucket of bolts or find a way off it,” Taliya said, cutting through the tension. “Time’s not our friend here.”

“Fully agree there,” Frederik said with a nod.
Io nodded along. “I’ll start running diagnostics on what systems we have left.”

“Ohlowyeh,” Edouard said. “I need to get my patient to the med bay!”

Frederik looked at their wounded captor. Edouard had laid them out flat, applied dark gray medical weaves over the wounds Ergo’s crew had inflicted upon the demon soldier to regain their freedom. His face twisted with cognitive dissonance. He seethed with disgust at helping a murderer like that, but he was proud of Edouard’s convictions as a doctor.

“Can we get to the medbay?” Frederik asked.

Taliya shook her head. “I am not sure we can consider that area safe. This was the last thing we caught before the streams went dead.”

Taliya flicked several views from the interior of hab zero-one, and Frederik watched, heartbroken at the destruction of his home. Microgravity globules of water, filled with dead fish and plant detritus, sloshed around among broken chunks of spinel ceramic, equipment containers that had not been secure, and the blood, viscera, and remaining bodies of several people.

He found real, though small, comfort in the fact none of them were his crew, and, from what he cared to look at in detail, appeared to be those same belligerents with the demonic aesthetic that had killed Fengshen. But who had killed them?

Frederik caught a hint as a vantablack lizard shimmered into view like a curtain being pulled open in the fabric of reality itself. The lizard then pulled a large equipment container from one of the dead aggressors. It looked like the same Absolute Horizons branded case Frederik had seen earlier.

Automatically, the stream focused and shifted to track motion. At this moment, the lizard snapped its head away from the gore, and its reflective bronze vizor seemed to stare directly at the video stream. In a frenetic flourish of static, the stream cut out.

“Before you ask, we have no idea who—or what—that is, but…” Taliya tilted her head toward the direction of Edouard. “Doc says our unfriendly guest claims to work for Grayson Services Group.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

Taliya nodded. “It should. They’re a band of infamous cutthroat Upper mercs. Ran into them during the war. They’re not good people, Eff.”

Kirk scoffed. “Don’t be so political, Taliya. Look Eff, it only sounds familiar because they were the operators of that spacecraft we scanned at the Absolute Horizons junkyard.”

“You mean the Delightful Death?”

Kirk nodded.

“Well,” Frederik shook his head and cursed under his breath. “They aren’t going to beat the death cult accusations.”

He sensed Kirk was about to complain about the quip, but Kirk also seemed to lose his train of thought when Betty Blue floated over.

“I know who’s on that stream,” she said. “Or I know what kind of organization they work for—I worked with people like that before. I can vouch that they’re on our side. We should reach out. Work with them.”

“And whose side is our side?” Kirk asked.

Everyone, Frederik included, tensed at Kirk’s sudden hostility.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Betty Blue asked in an impressively calm voice.

“Well, there’s us,” Kirk took the ice pack from his head and waved it toward some of Ergo’s crew that were near the back of the deck. “And then there’s you.”

Kirk pointed a finger at Betty Blue. This elicited mumbles and glare from Ergo’s crew as either agreement or resentment flickered among the faces of the crew. Frederik saw a division among his crew appear and instantly widen, and it made him furious.

“You know it’s true,” Kirk said weakly before he turned his finger at Frederik’s chest. “You know we’ve been lucky so far, ohlowyeh, but how long is that going to last?”

“What would you suggest?” Frederik asked, his patience wearing thinner than the nebula around Fengshen.

“We cut our losses—literally. Our passengers here,” Kirk gestured toward Betty Blue and Vis. “They get the spin decks with those other people they vouch for, and we get Control. Then we cut the cord and go our separate ways.”

“Your idea to save us is to mutilate Ergo?” Io snorted with disdain.

In a glance, Frederik saw Io’s argument had carried weight. As much as those who agreed with Kirk wanted to get out from under their current circumstances and did not love the idea of sharing anymore air with strangers, the idea of either mangling Ergo, or abandoning people in the depths of space, was enough to give them pause and fill them with doubt.

Kirk shrugged with his hands. “Our arm is stuck in an airlock. If we don’t cut it loose, we’re all dead when the air leaks out.”

Io spun around in her acceleration flat and pushed herself toward Kirk. “You piece of shit—”

Taliya quickly, disinterestedly, blocked Io’s lunge by gecko gripping her boots to the deck and grabbing a handhold near the ceiling. Kirk, with a look of startled disgust on his face, shoved off like a reflex, pushed himself far away to the back of the storm cellar.

“Enough,” Frederik boomed. “I don’t know what happened when I was out there, but at this point we’re either in this together—all of us—or none of us will make it! We’ll spiral into all-against-all, and then we’ll all lose.”

All but Kirk nodded in agreement. He could not look Frederik in the eyes. Neither could Io, who glared at Kirk with an angry heat as hot as her cut knife.

“Io,” Frederik said with pleading eyes, feeling nearly betrayed by her outburst. “Please.”

She looked up at him, angry, but lovingly. Then, her face relaxed, and she sighed.

“Oke. Oke, Eff. Sorry, Kirk.”

Kirk picked at the ice pack as he looked at his hands. “Fine, sure. Oke.”

It was not a convincing apology, but Frederik knew pressing this issue now would only entrench whatever conflict had brewed up here, and those who were sympathetic to Kirk’s argument might tip back into full support if he went too hard.

“We don’t know how these people from Fengshen would react,” Frederik said loudly. “If we were to cut up Ergo and try to leave. It will put them in a desperate position. Locked down, no delta-vee, stuck in our spin hab deep in the Exclusion Zone. I would not want to put my worst enemy in that position.”

“They deserve it!” Kirk shrieked, startled himself, looked around in fear and then tried to walk his comment back. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be that bad. They’d have plenty of life support, water, and emergency rations.”

Kirk shocked Frederik. Shocked and disappointed. He shook his head, resolved to move on, and it was clear all Ergo’s crew had soured against Kirk.

“Betty Blue,” Frederik changed the subject, pointedly ignoring Kirk’s outburst. “We need access to the medbay. Thoughts?”

“Let me go first. You can use my credentials and I can vouch for you. But you will be safe, you have my word. Anchuan shiyong.”^{[98][Di Lingua]: Safe handling. ↑}

He nodded. “Oke, Edouard? We’re going to take your…patient…to the medbay. Get ready to move.”

***

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but when they carefully opened Control’s’hatches to hab zero-one, they encountered a completely ordinary sight. The hab’s elevator tunnel was completely intact, and the halls had no obvious signs of debris, abuse, or violence—despite what the stream earlier had shown. With no sign of danger, the small group floated through. Betty Blue took the lead, followed by Frederik, and then Edouard with his stabilized patient.

At the threshold, Betty Blue hesitated, looked back at Frederik nervously, and then shouted into the quiet spin hab. “I am with the 304^th Logistics Studies Group! Check my seal! I’m sending it over EAR.”

They waited in the liminal space of the elevator tunnel. There was no word.

“Did they get the message?” Frederik whispered.

Betty Blue shrugged, tensed her hand on the handle of a cut knife held in a reverse grip, steadying its cold gray length against her forearm. She floated through. Frederik followed.

When they exited the elevator tunnel, Frederik saw hab zero-one was, in fact, strangely clear of debris. From the stream of logs, he knew there had been a struggle that had caused fatalities, but little evidence remained. The sight of the broken pisciculture tanks broke Frederik’s heart, and he observed dents and cavitated craters from hypersonic violence on the walls and floor and ceiling.

Yet, there were no bodies, no water blobs filled with dead fish, no microgravity blood clots, no demonic thugs, and no stalking vantablack humanoid lizards. The odd spinel ceramic piece floated past. There were bloodstains on the floor, ceilings, and walls, but the hall’s air volume was eerily empty.

Every muscle in Frederik’s body was tense. He followed close behind Betty Blue as they made their way to the medbay. Betty Blue creaked open the hatch with her offhand, the knife arm cocked back and ready to strike, her legs ready to gecko grip to any surface she could find. Like a trained operative, she entered the room.

On one of the operating tables was a vantablack lizard. It was prone, helmet still on, but a large toroid of blood was on the left side of its chest plate, the indent in the blood was formed by a dark gray sludge that seemed to extrude from the armor itself.

Blood in microgravity and vacuum behaved in such odd ways that it could almost be a different substance entirely. If Frederik had seen anyone hurt like this under spin or in natural gravity, his sphincter would have tightened, and he would have an immediate physical reaction at this sight—empathy and fear at the profound damage to another person’s body. Instead, he had a cool, intellectual fear. The other lizards had to be nearby, hidden in plain sight with metaflage.

Betty Blue shot into the medbay quickly, going in a straight and fast line to a point midway along the medbay’s ceiling. She spun end-over-end and planted herself on the ceiling, her knife pointed out and still ready to use. In an instant, a shimmer, like heated air, appeared behind Betty Blue. Her knife shot out of her hands and bounced away, spinning and twirling, into the dead space of the medbay. Betty Blue grabbed at an invisible vine that had wrapped around her throat.

“Identify yourselves,” a tinny voice demanded. “Now,” the voice emphasized.

Frederik stopped his motion into the medbay by slapping his hands on the hatch frame. His hands stung from the impact, and his shoulders ached as he flexed to slow the rest of his body down, but he stayed at the doorway.

“Betty Blue, serial hash one four one oh eight two two oh dash seven four oh one five nine nine six one five. Check my seal!” She choked.

Frederik stared in horror at the empty space where he thought the voice was coming from, but there was nothing but the shimmer of hot air writhing around Betty Blue’s neck.

“What’s going on, ohlowyeh?” Edouard asked from the hallway.

“Shhh!”

In the corner of his eye, he thought he had seen something. A snake or a stream of water. It picked at Betty Blue’s seal bracelet on her left wrist. And then, the space around Betty Blue filled with an infinitude of crumpled, crackled, aluminum doshirak tins. Just as suddenly as it began the metaflage illusion ceased. In its place was an armored, vantablack, biosuit standing before him, arm wrapped around Betty Blue, holding her in a headlock. A long rifle covered in silvery AlKapThil foil pointed at Frederik.

Immediately, the strange lizard-like suited figure released Betty Blue, the rifle swinging into its arms and then cradled safely pointing at the wall. The stranger radiated a kind of deadly tension in its stance. And then, the reflective bronze vizor depolarized, and Frederik saw two deeply intense, dark brown eyes staring back at him.

“Betty Blue, good to see you again” the vantablack lizard said as if they had just reunited with an old friend.

“Not the greeting I expected,” Betty Blue said as she rubbed her neck.

The lizard pushed off and landed back next to their wounded compatriot on the medical flat. “What company you keep.”

“That’s Obialo. You can trust him,” Betty Blue waved at Frederik palm up. She then waved palm down at the vantablack lizard. “This is Omolara. You can trust her.”

“Armed guests are not welcome on Ergo,” Frederik said with a sharp glare at her weapon.

Omolara gestured at the wounded figure with the blood toroid. “That attitude is how this all happened. You bear some responsibility for my wounded bird.”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“You ran into him outside,” Omolara growled. “Distracted him and got him shot.” “If everyone followed my rules, nobody would’ve been shot.”

“And if I hadn’t ignored your rules, and even shot some people on this spin deck, you’d be on that table too—if you were lucky,” Omolara said icily.

“Hey, wait a minute! Both of you!” Betty Blue interjected.

She shoved off and floated through the dead space to retrieve her knife, spun around in midair, and landed between Frederik and Omolara.

“Frederik warned you we were compromised, and Omolara put her life on the line to stop this… this kill team. You can trust each other!”

Omolara put a hand up in a conciliatory gesture. “Oke, binu ohlowyeh.^{[99][Di Lingua]: Okay, sorry boss. ↑} We can compromise, keep the guns to this spin hab and outside?”

“Fine,” Frederik grumbled with bottomless fatigue at all the militarism creeping into his life. “Is that what that was? A kill team? Sent by Grayson Services Group?”

“Yes,” Omolara said.

“What did they want?”

“Are our other assets secure, Betty Blue?”

Frederik frowned at the snub.

“Our VIP is still alive, yes.”

“Good, take me to her.”

“Wait,” Frederik pushed himself away from the door further into the medbay, ready to demand some kind of explanation.

Before he could continue, Edouard knocked Frederik aside, his patient in tow behind. “Excuse me, ohlowyeh, but this can’t wait.”

Edouard strapped his patient down to a free medical flat and, with calm-yet-quick motion, pulled a gun-like device from his trauma kit. Omolara tensed then relaxed when Edouard removed a nozzle from a resealable sheath and attached it to the gun-base. The doctor floated over to Omolara’s wounded colleague. With a flick and a whirr, he vacuumed the blood off the wound. The doctor attached a transfusion bag to the handle of the gun-object and deposited the washed and filtered blood into it.

Edouard let the blood vacuum float above the medical flat. “They have a wound on their arm, too. We need to get their glove off,” Edouard leaned over the wounded vantablack lizard. “And you’re going to need to let go of your coilgun.”

“That’s our doctor,” Frederik said to the perplexed Omolara. “Edouard.”

“What’s your name?” Edouard asked as he loomed over the vantablack lizard.

Omolara stepped next to Edouard, keeping herself on the deck with gecko grip. “Harris-Walker…it’s his family name. Betty Blue? Help him out? Obialo and I need to have a more private conversation.”

Omolara floated past Frederik. He followed.

“I have a lot of questions for you, Omolara—”

“Dr. Silva, she’s alive?” Omolara asked.

Distracted by the question, he landed on his feet awkwardly, as if he were a wonda mo on his first trip to space. “Vis? Yes. What’s this all about?”

Omolara fidgeted with her long coilgun covered in foil. “I can’t tell you that. Just get her here, to this hab module.”

Frederik crossed his arms and stood there in silence.

After a while Omolara chuckled. “You know if I tell you I am technically violating all sorts of regs, right?”

“I don’t care about your secrecy and all that juan juye,” Frederik narrowed his eyes. “I care if my people get out of this alive…that we learn what this all was for, and why we were put into the middle of it.”

Omolara’s helmet bobbed up and down. “Ye, A gah am sabi.^{[100][Di Lingua]: Yeah, I understand that. ↑} Look, I wasn’t just being cagey Obialo—I literally can’t explain what Dr. Silva does.”

“But you know something?”

“I know what Grayson thinks she does, and I know roughly what Grayson wants with her expertise.”

“And why we got dragged into this?”

“That’s just a matter of bad luck,” Omolara said. “Really, believe me. Same reason I am still alive, and not someone else.”

“And what is it that this Grayson Services Group wants?”

“Over here.”

She floated over to the stowage lockers, opened one, and pulled out the Absolute Horizon’s labeled crate from before.

Omolara used her right hand to gesture at the crate. “They want what’s inside, and all I know is they think whatever this thing is will shift the balance of power in the universe forever, and that Dr. Silva is one of a handful of people who understand what this is and what it can do and how it works.”

Omolara gave the box a shove. Its momentum carried it over to Frederik glacially.

“Now, Obialo, can you bring her to me, and she can explain to both of us what this is all about?”

He weighed his options as the equipment case floated over to him, but he did not see many options. What he had told Kirk was correct. If Ergo cut away the spin habs in an emergency separation, Omolara could react with hostile intent, and her gaze, her demeanor, and her ability to survive everything that had unfolded since Ergo reached Fengshen made him very confident that Omolara would achieve whatever her objective was, regardless of the fight Ergo’s crew put up.

He grabbed the container with his long reach, pulled it closer to him. “What happens if I refuse to bring her to you?”

Omolara shrugged with her free hand, the other firmly on the grip of her long rifle. “Talking to her is not mission critical. If you think she’s safer in your storm cellar, I can just as easily keep an eye out on her from here. It’s not a demand, ohlowyeh, it’ll just make things easier.”

Frederik looked down at the equipment case. It had a lot of inertia to it, like something that would be hard to lift under spin. He found the latch and popped open the vacuum safe lid. Inside looked like a physics research vacuum chamber packed into the crate with rubber nitrile. It was a long chrome cylinder covered in various apertures and instrument interface inputs with thick bolts and plating—reminiscent of the monitoring instruments along the length of Ergo’s stellarator fusion plant. He bit down on his instinct to ask what he was looking at—he knew Omolara’s answer would be “ask Dr. Silva.”

Upon further investigation of the case, he discovered an industrial grade power cable, a standard vacuum rated transformer, and an EAR interface box for interacting with the contents of the crate. When he opened the EAR interface, a seal check greeted him. He waved it shut and closed the case, not even bothering to see if his seal interfaced with the device.

“Let me take a guess here,” he looked up at Omolara. “Vis is the only person we know of who can unseal this?”

“That would be a good guess. And whatever that thing is, Grayson was willing to kill a lot of people to get it out of our safe house. A lot of good people.”

“Oke, I’ll ask her to meet us here.”

They did not have to wait long for Vis to reach hab zero-one after Frederik sent word to the storm cellar. Accompanied by Io, at Frederik’s request, both Vis and Io asked what this all was about.

“Just show her,” Omolara said.

“Show me what?” Vis asked as she planted herself perpendicular to Frederik along the wall next to him.

He opened the equipment crate and tilted it so she could see the contents. He saw a tremor of confusion, then shock, then amazement, then deep sadness.

She exclaimed, then cursed, then muttered what amounted to a secular Martian prayer under her breath to someone named Mimo. “Nawa oh! Pol tsow. Mimo anchuan shiyong.”^{[101][Di Lingua]: Woah! Shit fuck. Go well, Mimo. ↑}

She pinched at the seal bracelet on her left arm and began pawing at the invisible EAR windows of the device.

Io landed behind Frederik, stabilized herself with her hands on his shoulders, and planted with gecko grip. Click click.

“Oke, will someone tell me what the fuck is going on here?” Io asked again.

“He did it…,” Vis said in a tone of voice like she believed this explained everything. “He actually did it. Where did you get this?” she asked Frederik.

He waved to Omolara. Omolara shook her head.

“I can’t tell you where I got it. That’s classified.”

“You got this from Vimila, then?” Vis said distracted. “I know he continued our work on Vimila. I can’t believe he didn’t tell me they actually built the tsow gahdah thing. They were so cagey about it all! Am gah Mimo ill ma dan.”^{[102][Di Lingua]: Damnit, Mimo! ↑}

Omolara shifted and fidgeted uncomfortably before she murmured. “No comment.”

Frederik’s eyebrow shot up at the non-committal confirmation.

“So, what does this have to do with aliens?”

“Aliens?” Omolara asked, her eyes bunched in confusion. “What aliens?”

Vis continued to wave at EAR windows. “Unrelated… I think. Seems to me the simplest explanation is those people were following me after I left the project and saw uninhabited space as a great opportunity for a bit of extraordinary rendition—or assassination—when no one was watching. Chaey—” her voice broke with a gasp, and she cleared her throat. “Chaeyoung and the others were…collateral damage…at least at first.”

“Do you mean…actual aliens?” Omolara asked again.

“Doesn’t matter right now…they’re far away and dead.”

Io chuckled. “Oke, this is surreal. So, what the fuck does that little crate do, and does it help us get out of our predicament?”

“Let me…yes! Nawa oh, ye!”^{[103][Di Lingua]: Woah, yeah! ↑} Vis whooped in triumph. “It’s working! It’s fully functional!”

Vis flicked over an EAR window to Frederik. It was simple but amateurish in that way only an EAR interface made entirely from the ground up would. It looked like someone had used text characters instead of graphical elements to stitch it together with autonomous systems for user interfaces. Besides a lot of jargon and status windows that made no sense, one thing Frederik understood was this was a prototype, and it had some sophisticated name.

[Closed Time-like Curve Computer Programming Interfaces for Wonda Mo]

“Vis,” Frederik said as he scrolled the text that followed. “I think you need to start from the beginning. What is a closed time-like curve computer?”

She gave him a toothy grin and floated with the strange object cradled in her arms over toward the hatch to the maintenance and fab room next to the primary airlock. “Here, let me show you.”

***

“What do you know about how a gidizip works? Or the K-tube network.”

Frederik already had a headache.

“Well,” Frederik rubbed his temples as he tried to remember everything he could about ERR–AL drives Diya had taught him. “Gidizip is essentially a large particle accelerator that generates an envelope, and the wake—or whatever it really is—from that process pulls and pushes the craft forward…and somehow when you travel forward in that bubble you skip distance without actually traveling through all of that distance.”

“Hmm. That’s more-or-less correct,” Vis said though she did not look impressed by his answer. “A gidizip skips that distance through the creation of space-like separated wormholes, which is a consequence of spacetime emerging from quantum phenomena—”

“I’m sorry, spacetime does what now?” Io asked.

Vis smiled and shook her head. “Sorry, that’s getting too technical. Essentially, when a spacecraft goes through the ERR–AL bubbles, it creates a tangled, always changing, envelope of distorted spacetime, and if you do this in just the right way,” her voice whined in emphasis. “Then these wormholes appear in front of the spacecraft, and you can travel through them right before they collapse, skipping the distance that separates them. That part was just as you said, Frederik.”

“I think I understand,” he said, as he nodded thoughtfully.

“But have you ever wondered why we can’t use these to go places separated in time?”

“Separated in time?” Io asked.

“As in travel… in time? Time travel?” He furrowed his brow.

“Ye, exactly,” Vis nodded with a smile curling at the edge of her lips.

“Well… time travel is impossible,” Omolara said. “Which tends to prevent something from happening.”
Vis laughed. “Yes well, that’s one answer, but is time travel impossible?”

Frederik shrugged with his hands, now feeling confused. “Never heard of it happening…but I suppose I wouldn’t have heard of it if someone bin gidizip and changed the past, right? Because then it would be history as I remembered it.”

“Does this have to do with the tau proper time split?” Io inquired. “It takes a handful of hours to gidizip to Sol, but it’s err… ninety days elapsed on Sol?”

“Partially,” Vis shrugged with her hands. “It is true you do experience time slower when compared to an outside observer as you go through a gidizip trajectory, but it’s better to think of that path as simply a much shorter distance between objects, not a faster travel speed at all. You aren’t locally traveling light years really, it’s closer to light days. That’s why when you’re at the end of a gidizip, there’s that flash of light before the spacecraft comes through. Light still travels at the cosmic speed limit through the ERR–AL envelope, and nothing ends up truly faster than light…except perhaps for the non-local exploitation of spacetime emerging from a quantum phenomenon that allows the shorter path between points to be created in the first place, but that’s…that’s a bit more in-depth than we need to get right now.”

Io groaned.

“Are you implying there’s nothing to prevent that…shorter path taking me back in time?” Frederik’s head was swimming as he waved at the prototype. “And what does that have to do with this? Is it a time travel machine?”

“Haha! No,” Vis smiled after her hearty laugh. “Just trying to walk you through the logic of it all, instead of just telling you what it does. Most people assumed there was some cosmic censorship that prevented time travel, that the sets of rules that establish the space-like separation of wormholes—the mechanism that creates the shorter path of light days instead of light years in a gidizip—simply could never allow you to traverse light days in reverse. But it turns out they were mostly wrong. Instead, there is a consistency condition, created at the most fundamental quantum level, and the only reason we don’t see this in most ERR–AL drives is directly related to the existence of the exclusion zones.”

Frederik tugged at his beard and frowned as he struggled through what Vis was telling him.

Now Io was rubbing her temples. “This sounds…pol tsow zloy-zloy.”^{[104][Di Lingua]: Shit fucking madness. ↑}

Vis frowned. “I realize it sounds crazy, but…” she waved at the device sitting on the fab table and now hooked up to Ergo’s primary power systems in front of her. “This only works because of what we discovered before I left the project.”

“And what did you discover?” Frederik pressed, insistently.

“You won’t appreciate it if I just tell you what it is. You need to know one last piece of information.”

Io groaned.

Frederik rubbed his temples. “Fine. Keep going then.”

“Well, we discovered that exclusion zones only exist because the quantum phenomenon that allows the shorter paths to be generated during a gidizip is itself distorted by the quantum source of gravitation and creates time-like separated trajectories. In effect, you exit the next little hop-jump inside an exclusion zone before you even enter the wormhole, and this disturbance prevents your future self from traversing the next wormhole.”

Frederik rubbed his face and groaned. “Wouldn’t this mean you just time travel instead of exiting?”

“Not exactly. What we found is in the EZ the ERR–AL envelope forms what we would call a self-consistent closed time-like curve. When you enter a strong enough gravity well, the next wormhole exit accelerates away from its entrance, resulting in a short-cut in time, not just space. Quantum self-consistency always enforces the fact that you exit before you enter because it turns out time travel isn’t strictly forbidden. You never enter the wormhole, because if you did, you would collide with your past-self catastrophically. At a quantum level, nothing can annihilate its past self, and so the wormhole throat simply becomes an impassable point, and your gidizip is cut short.”

“Oke, so I can’t go back in time and kill my grandpa, and the most fundamental structure of the universe enforces this?” Io asked.

“Yes, and this also means if we understand those consistency conditions, we could engineer paths in time that consistently link up back with themselves. We just can’t simply expect them to happen randomly. That’s what this is—it’s a closed time-like curve computer. We use table-top particle accelerators tuned in just the right way to make the smallest ERR–AL fluctuations that are possible. Just enough for a single photon—a single particle of light—to sneak through a microscopic wormhole. The exclusion zone effect sends it back in time, but because we manipulate the ERR–AL fluctuations with this in mind, it only comes back when it has reached a desired condition, otherwise it loops in a closed trajectory, almost like it’s outside of time—though that’s just an analogy, it’s actually—”

“And the implications of this are?” Omolara muttered impatiently.

“If we set that consistency condition correctly, we can use these photons to make a very special kind of computer,” Vis waved to the prototype. “Which Mimo and Ali and the others at the Vimila facility successfully created before this prototype made its way here,” Vis looked deeply sad and distressed, and her voice sounded weak. “And Chaey—and they…did not.”

After a few moments of stunned silence, Frederik’s thoughts finally settled down and coalesced into something coherent.

“What can this computer do?” Frederik asked, though it was obvious they were all thinking the same question.

“If I am right and they got it fully functional, I can show you what it can do and solve a problem we all have,” Vis said with a little more cheer than before as she prodded and poked at connections, pawed, and flicked at EAR interfaces, and generally buzzed around the strange device. “I left the project when it was only in the theoretical stages.”

“They must have been far along when you left,” Frederik said.

There was a flicker of sadness on Vis’s face. Frederik felt guilty, though he was unsure why. It was short-lived, as Vis’s excitement returned, and she smiled gently at him.

“I worked with Mimo again when I was…when I was a hostage.”

“Is this what Grayson had you doing?” Omolara asked.

“No,” Vis shook her head. “They probably wanted that eventually, but they had us focus on using what we learned to make a prototype ERR–AL drive that used a lot less energy and reduced the exclusion zone by half.”

“Nawa oh!”^{[105][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑} Omolara said.

“Don’t worry, we sabotaged it. Sent it crashing into an exoplanet in some uninhabited system.”

Omolara’s stance was notably relaxed. Frederik nodded politely, as if that explained everything. He suspected he was only getting partial information, or perhaps his head was still reeling from all the theoretical physics he had to ingest.

“Let’s see if this works!” With a flick, Vis pulled open an EAR window for Frederik to see. “There! My colleague Mimo—Dr. Jakande—set up a simple demonstration program. And…” she bit her lip as she read the text on the window. “Looks like everything I would expect it to be! Let’s give it a try.”

With a flourish, Vis waved both her arms around, and the demonstration began.

It was deeply anti-climactic. He had expected a grand fanfare as the strange device activated. A groan of metal, a whirr of machinery, a beep or boop or anything at all to show the device had begun its work for some strange purpose using what amounted, in his mind, to a violation of physics. Really, all that happened was the EAR window shifted slightly and displayed an initialization and run status bar. The bar filled up slowly.

“How long is this going to take?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know… twenty minutes to initialize all the closed time-like curve logical bits,” Vis said. “Once those CBits initialize, we can secure all the seals we need in about five minutes.”

“And how is it going to do that?”

“Oh,” Vis looked at Frederik, her expression flitting between a mischievous smile and a somber pout. “It’s unsealing orbital control’s restrictions on Ergo by brute force. In twenty-five minutes, we should be fully sealed and allowed to go anywhere we want in the Ya Ke system.”

“A gah tsow pol sciur dey!”^{[106][Di Lingua]: I’ll be as certain as a shitty fuck. ↑} Frederik cursed in astonishment. “Twenty-five minutes? And that’s brute force?”

“Twenty minutes of initialization first,” Vis said. “But yes!”

It was an amazing claim, but Frederik was numb. There was a lot to do, and if this closed time-like curve computer worked like Vis claimed, they could at least solve one problem, but Ergo’s problems were legion. He could see the weight of everything looming above them and, despite being in microgravity, his posture hunched under its influence.

“If it works,” Io said with a click of her tongue and a pat on Frederik’s shoulder. “We need to make sure Ergo can take a main engine burn, and that we have access to all the remaining sensor systems.”

“Let’s get Larsen over here, then you two can start the inspection?”

“On it.”

“Vis? Let me know if it works. I’ll be in Control if anyone needs me.”

As he flew down the hallway to the elevator tunnels, there was a shudder throughout the spin hab. The overhead lights flickered from their mid-day setting into the deep yellow emergency strobe. Frederik tensed, flailed for a handhold to arrest his forward motion, and expected the worst. More debris collisions, more Grayson goons, or a catastrophic system failure somewhere on Ergo.

“Emergency spin habitat separation procedure has begun.”

A stream of pure invective poured from his mouth in a furious shout.

From down the hallway, he heard Io scream. “What the fuck?”

As he hurled himself forward to the elevator tunnel, he discovered the hatch had already closed and sealed. He pounded on the spinel ceramic surface, waved open his EARs to Control, but it was cut-off.

“What is going on?” he asked as he opened a general radio frequency.

Taliya responded, but all he heard were the sounds of violent struggle. Like clothing being beaten free of dust, with the sounds of anger and violence. He heard Taliya and Kirk screaming, and then a muffled Kirk said. “You can’t stop it! I already made the deal!”

Taliya bellowed out a stream of curses in every language she spoke, then grunted before Frederik heard the unmistakable sound of someone being punched.

“What is going on?!” he asked, desperation and anxiousness seeping into every cell of his body.

“Eff! I am sorry he betrayed us! He betrayed you. He made a deal with Grayson to give her up! Rat bastard made a deal while we were busy.”

“Stop the emergency separation, Taliya,” Frederik said.

“We can’t!” she said with desperation that gave Frederik chills. “They backdoor’d all our controls and then sealed it when they were in here, and someone just handed Kirk the only keys!”

Frederik’s hand jittered. “How long do we have?”

There was an electric bzzzt across the radio. Taliya screamed out. Static hissed and popped over the channel for the next several seconds of silence from the other end.

“Taliya? Taliya? What is going on—”

“Anyone else want some?” Kirk screamed out, then laughed. He sounded distant at first, then his voice was loud, though he sounded congested. “Better brace yourselves down there, Frederik. You have less than a minute.”

Frederik punched the spinel ceramic elevator with his fist, just hard enough to hurt and send him recoiling back. “What did you do to Taliya?”

“Just gave her some voltage from a stun gun. She’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. Better worry about yourself instead,” a spitting sound came through the radio. “I’m sorry, Frederik. I really am. Grayson was going to keep chasing us until they got what they wanted. They had all sorts of traps and backdoors plugged into our systems before we reached Fengshen. They just got too busy to spring any of them on us. But if we kept fighting them, we’d all end up dead. This was our only real survival option. This way they get what they want, and we get to go home.”

“Juan juye.”^{[107][Di Lingua]: Bullshit. ↑} Frederik roared through his gritted teeth.

Kirk sighed. “I am sorry you got caught on the wrong side, but it was always going to come down to us or them, Frederik. If only you weren’t so stubborn.”

Warning klaxons started a countdown. Sixty seconds. Frederik pushed off the wall with both of his legs and shot down the hall back to Vis and Omolara.

Frederik halted his flight, feeling his hands rip and straining against the handholds around the door. He looked at a stunned Vis. Omolara tensely gripping her long rifle.

“Change of plans. Can you get that thing to hack our comms? Get a distress signal out?”

Vis shook her head. “Only four CBits are initialized…I need more time.”

“Can you get it done?” Frederik repeated urgently.

Vis scratched her head. “I don’t know I—not in sixty seconds,” she spun around and swiped and typed and worked furiously on her EAR interface.

Frederik pointed to Omolara. “Secure that! And brace yourself.”

He pushed into the room, secured himself with a wide stance and gecko grip, and in a panicked frenzy checked all the equipment containers. Io flew in.

Frederik nodded across the hall. “Check the medbay!”

She redirected her motion with a slight kick of the wall and went out into the hall angled toward the medbay.

“Edouard! Edouard! Stabilize your patients!”

There was a sudden jolt. The warning klaxons got more urgent. A countdown boomed on the speakers in the hab. “Five…four…three….”

Frederik grabbed anything he could use as a secure handhold, flexed his feet in his boots to ensure his gecko grip was solid.

“Brace. Brace. Brace,” Frederik boomed as the countdown passed one second.

A thud reverberated through the entire structure of hab zero-one. The lighting wavered, dimmed, then died before the pale yellow of emergency lighting replaced it. Main power cut. There was a slight jerk then a hard shove that pushed Frederik down, his face almost smacking against the stowage compartment in front of him. Vis, Io, and Edouard yelled. There was another shake, a loud metallic groan that hurt his ears, and then they were all in microgravity.

“I think I did it,” Vis said panting. “I think I got a distress call out. Before we lost power.”