Planetary: Mercury, page 22
Marsh looked at Sarah and said, “I think I’m having a dizzy spell again. Is my nose bleeding?”
She grimace at him and turned back to Rick’s image. “Fine, however it happened, that’s why all the plants had grown so much, and the microbe and earthworm counts in the soil were off. Hell, that even explains why the power was so depleted in the batteries from that section. The lights were on battery power for almost a month!” She snapped her fingers, and turned to the nearby holo field and began doing calculations. Marsh turned to watch over her shoulder as she pulled up power usage data.
Ozi was still digesting Rick’s revelation. He realized Rick was watching him intently as he stared at nothing. He smiled at his engineer and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Teleportation, Time Travel and Stasis Fields all discovered at once. Richard, my friend, I think you are about to become very famous.” He paused and his smile got even wider as he said, “Just like me!” Rick grinned back sheepishly.
“As long as it’s for whatever this is,” Marshall waved at the holo-field, “and not for being the first people to crash into Mercury, you two glory hounds can claim all the fame you want.”
“How very considerate of you Marshall. Now please put all ‘this’,” he waved at the holo-field with a flourish like Marshall had, “in a box and send it to Earth. And do be sure to sign all of our names on the card!”
After a few additional hours of research on Rick Corrington’s part, and some serious back and fourth time between Earth Con-Cent and Captain Zanwe, another group meeting was called. Zanwe spoke to his team. “I have some announcements to make, but I’m going to let Richard here go through his latest discoveries with us first. Go ahead Richard.”
Rick nodded. “OK, here’s my other ‘crackpot theory’… I think Quicksilver is quantum locked to the planet. I’ve been trying to understand why this slipstream would even still be here. The solar system itself is rotating the galactic center at something like two hundred thirty kilometers a second.” The frowns that crossed the faces of his crewmates caused him to sigh. “Five hundred thousand miles an hour?” The frowns went away and he continued. “So even if Quicksilver blew through the solar system recently, and my slipstream stability hypothesis is true, we should have left its transition ‘path’ behind a long time ago.”
Rick shared an animated illustration with them. It showed a zoomed in view of Mercury and the sun, slowly zooming outward. Suddenly, a faint white line speared into the solar system and out again, stabbing right through the planet like a bullet. He paused it to give some narration.
“I believe that Quicksilver intersected with Mercury itself. It went right through, close to the core. I theorize that the interaction with the planet’s mass caused some sort of quantum pairing with the black hole itself. Maybe it’s with a proton on the edge of the Schwarzschild radius, or one that eventually will be? Time is weird around a black hole. Anyway, somehow the slipstream is now linked to the matter in the planet’s core, and that drags the slipstream around with Mercury in its orbit. It’s like the old combustion jet engine condensation trails being pushed around by the wind. Only the temporal nature of it keeps if from scattering about.”
He resumed the animation which began to zoom out much faster. “That means that no matter how long we’ve been moving away from the point of impact, Mercury has been dragging the slipstream along with us.” The white line became a curve that bowed and wobbled around the sun. The view angled and the zoom expanded to show the arms of the Milky Way. The white line, which originated in the center of the galaxy, curved as the solar system rotated in its galactic orbit.
“The galaxy is moving too, though, right? Does your model account for that?” Sarah asked.
“That’s an excellent point, but I’ve assumed Quicksilver’s origin is from somewhere near the center of our galaxy, which means it has the same relative motion. If it has an extra-galactic origin, then yes, the line would bow around in some other direction as well. All I know about the path of the slipstream is what we’ve measured from Chariot’s interactions. The rest is all hypothetical projections. But, based on the changes in inclination to our plasma shield, the model fits.”
“So, do you know how it works?” Ozi asked. “Or at least how we managed to get caught up in it?”
“We think so. Earth’s been helping me hash the theoretical ideas out. What we’ve come up with is this.” Rick produced several graphs and illustrations on the holo-field for them to see before entering lecture mode again. “The slipstream doesn’t affect matter in any way under normal circumstances. It does have an effect on energy streams, though. It twists E-M spectrum particles around itself, temporally causing a gravitational compression in the upstream side then shooting it out the downstream side at a very slightly lowered wavelength. If it wasn’t for the magnified effect we saw in the plasma shield, we probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all. We don’t know where the energy goes, but it got us to thinking about our skip.”
“We think the slipstream intersected with the matter conversion unit. The incoming beam went in, but as the slipstream passed through the re-assembly node, it was trying to reconvert the energy inside the stream. That set off a cascade of events where the stream moved into the beam, compressed the energy and somehow expanded the gravity wake of the stream. It picked up more energy, repeating the process, until it encompassed the entirety of the Chariot. Well, all of it except for the portion of the greensward that got left out. We’re still trying to correlate the energy input versus distance traveled. There’s even a huge debate about whether the travel direction can be changed. It’s going to take quite a bit of study, and hopefully experimentation, to reach any final conclusions.” He paused, rubbing his hands together. “So, that’s where we stand at the moment.”
“Thank you, Richard. That is a very concise explanation. And, your point about experimentation is what I want to talk about next, in fact.” He opened his arms wide to encompass them all. “I have good and bad news for you. The good news,” Ozi informed them, “is that there are many interested parties back home. This means that our request for extra power from the grid has more or less become the classic ‘shut up and take my money’ meme. We adjust course again in two hours to get us back on track for Shadow Station.” Hearty cheers greeted his announcement, but he held up a hand.
“The other good news,” he paused and looked at each of them in turn, “is also the bad news. We are going to have to go on double shifts for the next few days to meet our new expanded mission parameters. We get to be the first to study Quicksilver’s trail.”
“Earth Control Central has devised a series of remote missions that we will be responsible for conducting. We will be building and launching probes that mock our drive shielding so that precise positioning can be determined. After that, we’ll also be launching a fully functional matter conversion module and mini-plasma drive unit for some ‘test jumps’. All of this will be on top of our original duties, of course. We’ve just gone from being a first of its kind power relay station, to what may very well turn out to be the first intra-galactic starship port!”
“Ha!” Sarah laughed. “It’s like that old Chinese curse… ‘May you live in interesting times.’
“Well, at least we won’t be bored!” Marshall said with a grin.
Ozi smiled back at him, and then at rest of his crew as well. “Call me overly optimistic, but I have a feeling that the entirety of the human race is about to forget the meaning of the word ‘boredom’.
About the Author
J.D. Beckwith is a mechanical engineer with delusions of writing grandeur. A lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, he has recently taken the opportunity provided by an economically induced sabbatical from manufacturing bulldozers, excavators, and garbage trucks to try his hand at the craft he’s always admired. He hopes to have his first novel, a genre confused techno-thriller comedy titled eConscience Beta, released on Amazon sometime in 2017. In between time spent expanding his bibliography, he amuses himself with reading, tabletop & RPG gaming, arguing on the internet, growing tomatoes, and herding cats… all while trying to stay hidden in the woods of Northwest Georgia. You can find his sporadic book reviews on Goodreads cross-posted with other nerdy stuff on his blog—wampuscatenterprises.wordpress.com.
ANCESTOR’S ANSWER
Bokerah Brumley
Saishu City, 2287
Seated on the floor, Kiyoko Mori sipped quicksilver from a delicate jade tea cup, ignoring the muffled curses from the older man tied to the desk chair behind her. With her other hand, she read from a battered journal. The pages detailed the corrupt experiments the man had funded, yet none of his were the ones she sought. He wasn’t the beginning of the moral disease, but he was close to it.
No matter. His will would soon break, and she would learn who started it all. Then she would be on her way through the portal. She sipped again from the bitter liquid, relishing her old mind inside her young body. The combination made her job easier. She only hoped that she could bring honor to her family by completing what had been asked of her soul. Almost time.
Autumn sunbeams streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling glass window, highlighting the blueish tint to her white hair and illuminating the blood splatter across an ivory couch. She kept watch from the corner office of the eighty-second floor, her optical acuity unmatched since being remade. Strapped to her waist, she wore a sheathed tachi sword, the length stretched out behind her—the exclamation point on her resurrection’s purpose. She bit her lip, and the fingers of her free hand fluttered against the hilt.
The samurai blade had been passed down through her lineage long before the perversion of technology pushed the old ways from the minds of her progeny. But she hadn’t seen it in a millennium, and the fact of its existence passed out of family memory. She never expected she would grasp the relic again or be asked to use it on her future grandchildren. Behind her, the man began weeping and apologizing to his family for his sins. If he only knew how the future cried out against him, petitioning the dead to intervene.
Kiyoko would not let it happen—could not—let her descendants continue in their depravity against humanity, building a mighty business on the dismemberment of the innocent, aborting life, and miscarrying justice. Determined, she sipped again and then glanced behind her. “Are you ready to tell me, musuko?” The perfunctory question did not garner a response beyond a yell mostly smothered by the gag she’d wrapped tightly around his mouth.
She closed the experiment log and placed it gently on the floor. The horrors turned her stomach even more than the metallic tea. Limbs removed from still-moving children and placed on the winning bidder. Babies left to grow until the moment their mothers entered labor then harvested as spare parts for an apathetic generation. And her descendants ran the twenty-four-hour supermarket. She loosed a long and shuddering sigh.
Yet, even faced with all of that, would she be strong when the moment came? The doubt had followed her. Her existence had been spent in the form of a caretaker, not a crusader, not a wrong-righter. She married, raised a family, and served as a mother to orphans when an accident made her into a widow.
She’d been chasing “the moment it all began” for nearly a lunar cycle, and she still didn’t know if she could do what had been asked of her. A Kami, in the form of her own great grandmother, had visited her in the ether between heaven and hell to tell her of the sordid truth of the future and pose a solution. When Kiyoko agreed, the spirit gifted her with a sword, a mission, and a new body. At the beginning, she had been sure she could save their family’s honor, save all those lives. Yet now…
Kiyoko grimaced at the last swallow of her metallic, pre-travel concoction. The mercurial mixture burned as much as it always did, but she couldn’t disregard the step. The last jump had damaged her cells and bleached her ebony hair. She shouldn’t have skipped protocol then, and she wouldn’t omit it now.
She tapped her chin. Far below, dark water raced under the bright red bridge, contrasting sharply with the yellow and orange leaves riding atop the ripples. She tugged on her ear lobe. The thick bamboo edging along the paths and perimeter separated the harsh edges of manmade architecture from the organic shapes of the garden. It reminded her of simple days, playing in the protected bamboo forest in Kyoto while her father continued his research.
Before her sons had turned to the salvage of innocent lives wasted for convenience, only to dismantle their tiny bodies and auction them to the highest bidder…
A whimper brought Kiyoko’s attention back to the task at hand. She placed the empty cup on the edge of the stainless steel coffee table beside her. She stood and crossed the plush carpet to the middle of the room, considering her prisoner. Time for a new tactic. She looked young enough to be his granddaughter; maybe she should address him accordingly.
“Ojiisan,” she said. It felt out of place to address her elderly great-great-great grandson with such respect, particularly after tying him to a chair and injecting him with an immunotoxin, but she pressed on. “I must fix what is broken. Eternity requires it.”
“What do you want from me, daughter?” His pupils were abnormally wide for the daylight, dilated by the serum surging through his veins. “I don’t know anything,” he said, but his lip twitched.
“Where are the other notebooks, Ojiisan? Where did this begin?” she asked, kneeling before her descendent. “The ones that have been passed down.” His face was so much like her fathers, so much like all the others that she had questioned, and her heart twisted. She had followed the trail back through time, and she was certain she’d found the one that would know.
He struggled against the linen bindings. “You will ruin what we have built,” he protested. She didn’t know if he understood who she was or where she came from, but he must sense her drawing close to the truth. He was close to breaking.
“It must stop. That is the message I bring.” By the edge of my sword. But she could not say the last words aloud.
He trembled. “Then you will change our whole future.” If I have the strength, she prayed.
“Our souls have been banished between Takama-ga-hara and Yomi-no-kuni for too long,” Kiyoko whispered. She waved to the building around them. “Our eternal peace was not worth this artificial happiness.” She needed to find the point where it all began. He had the key. “Kami returned me to my body to mend the wound in the fabric of eternity caused by our family. In exchange, they will allow our family into Takama-ga-hara.”
“Kami are only superstitions,” he bit out, but his anger had no heat, and tears pooled in eyes.
“Where are the records?” she asked.
“It’s not illegal,” he said, stiffening his spine.
“But it has always been wrong,” she countered. “You commit crimes against life.” She paused, tempering her anger at the willfully blind fool before her. “Where are the records?”
“I will not tell,” he whispered, but his gaze drifted to the Great Wave painting behind his desk and her gaze followed. “It’s the original Hokusai. It’s worth millions,” he mumbled as though she cared about the priceless work of art. His shoulders slumped. The hardness in his eyes softened, and his head lolled to the side as he lost consciousness.
“Millions of lives stolen, Ojiisan,” she said, patting his shoulder as she moved around him to the painting. She removed it from the wall and faced the giant safe nestled in the thick wall.
When Kiyoko placed the experiment logs back in the vault, she knew where to go next. She replaced the priceless work of art. She took a moment to appreciate the talent it had taken to paint, but she was ready to move on. She knew where her purpose ended because she knew where it all began. She had only needed the final location from the journal, and she could end the evil before it began.
Consulting her time map, she planned her jump. She would deliver justice to their family. She was the messenger sent to bring the good news. They would enter Takama-ga-hara. Dishonor would not be their legacy.
Hiroshima, 2121
Balding maple trees shadowed the riverbank while the remains of a rice field rustled violently in the cold wind. Standing on the cobblestones by his trusty wooden cart, Akio Mori shivered. It was going to be a bad winter, but they were well prepared.
The compound was stocked with rations to last them for years, and the government didn’t involve itself with those that had returned to the old ways. The guise had worked for ten years, and Akio was on the verge of a breakthrough.
A strong gust brought the sound of maniacal laughter. Akio stepped quickly to the back of the cart, and threw back the burlap cover. He retrieved a syringe from his cargo pocket, tapped the side of the cylinder, and then jabbed the needle into the thigh of his prisoner.
“Participants needed,” Akio said, repeating the classified ad he’d placed in the digital newspaper, “for medical research. Compensation negotiable.” The last part was a lie, unless you counted the free replacement limb. When it worked. Maybe this one would. The last participant had a gruesome death after the grafted leg died. It spread infection throughout her body. Though their methods did not overcome the immune system’s rejection, they had learned much.
He was confident and willing to sacrifice as many as it took to overcome the setbacks. The deaths would not be in vain. They would soon achieve the ability to turn the largest stream of medical waste into a profitable resource. Discarded children were cheap to obtain. He grasped the volunteer, lugging him from the rear of an old-fashioned transport and through the gate. This one is the key. He is the breakthrough. He believed it through to his bones.
