The Last Days of Lemuria, page 3
part #5 of Perry Rhodan Lemuria Series
"Field output at twenty-three percent," Palanker said. His voice sounded cracked. He knew just as well as Bardon that they would not survive the next salvo.
The commander swore and pounded the intercom button with his fist. A video window instantly appeared in the lower right corner of the monitor screen and showed Gura's perspiring face with the engine room behind her. In the background, smoke billowed. Something was burning.
"Semispace phase in fifty seconds," the Chief Engineer said. "All systems stable."
The lights of the seventeen Beast ships came closer.
"Enemy reactivating weapons systems!" Palanker cried. "Increasing energy readings ... Hyperdim echoes ... They're preparing for the next interval salvo!"
"We don't have fifty seconds left," Bardon told Guras urgently. "We have to jump into semispace. Now."
The chief engineer hesitated. "The storage banks aren't completely charged yet," she warned. "You know the risk, Commander."
"The risk of dying here is greater," he shot back. "We're jumping. At once."
Guras stared at him with wide eyes. Then she nodded. "Semispace phase in five seconds."
She disappeared from camera range. All that could be seen were the engine room's bank of converters and coils of smoke that seemed to reach for Bardon with gray fingers.
"Enemy within point-blank range!" Palanker bellowed frantically. "Energy readings at maximum ... Readying interval salvo ... "
Bardon's throat was too tight to even breathe.
He thought once more of his wife, his children, of the oath he had sworn, of the promise to bring them back from the dead and back to life. Tears filled his eyes as he realized that he would not be able to keep his promise, but would follow them into death.
The five-dimensional impact front of the enemy interval fire slammed into the IBODAN's shield. The first fissures appeared in the force field's structure while the howling of the overloaded storage banks swelled into a shrill scream. Jagged lines danced along the energy bubble and were torn open into gaping holes. The weakened force field could only withstand the violence for a few seconds. After one last flicker it collapsed.
Thore Bardon closed his eyes and waited for death. At least it would come quickly and painlessly.
But death did not come.
As the shield collapsed and the screeching of the storage banks abruptly broke off, the combat-control positronic activated the three heavy cruisers' ultra-light engines and hurled them into the twilight zone of semispace.
Now there was silence, interrupted only by the humming vibration of the semispace drive.
Thore Bardon opened his eyes. Numb, he stared at the reddish, amorphous seething of the intermediate dimension that had replaced the panoramic depiction of interstellar space and the light points of seventeen Beast ships on the main vidscreen. Jubilation broke out in the control center. Voices resounded, hysterical laughter echoed. His officers hugged each other in joy.
They had done it.
They had escaped the enemy at the last second.
But Thore Bardon knew it was still a long and dangerous way to the 87th Tamanium.
To the time machine that waited for them there.
They hoped.
3
He was plummeting from an immeasurable height, in free fall into a yawning abyss, bottomless and beyond comprehension. He wanted to scream, but realized that he did not have a voice. He did not know who he was and where he was or what had put him in this terrible, threatening situation. There was only him and the fall, him and the abyss, him and the images.
The images ...
With a shock he realized that he saw the images even though he had no eyes. No eyes and no body. His flesh had been taken away from him and only his mind remained. Like a shadow, like a ghost in the night, he fell on and on, unable to stop, into the all-engulfing depths.
While the images raced past him.
Without eyes, he only perceived them—blurrily and at the same time with paradoxical sharpness—with the senses of his mind, freed from his body. He saw alien worlds move in their orbits, stars dancing in the endlessness, entire galaxies spinning in empty space. Some moved so fast that their glowing spiral arms melted into vague smears. He saw interstellar dust collect into stars that ran through their life-cycles spanning millions of years and then exploded into supernovas or shrank into white dwarfs. He saw the universe in all its inconceivable vastness reduced to a miniature display in compressed time.
But besides these cosmic panoramas there were still other images. Untouched alien landscapes under double suns. Pale moons, overgrown with blue-shimmering plants and trees that burned to ashes within seconds and were replaced by cities that grew like a cancer. Dizzyingly high buildings that grew to the sky in the time it took to take a breath and spread over vast plains with their majesty, then fell into ruin, crumbling debris that was carried away by the elements. Grotesque beings that were born, lived their lives, aged, died, and decayed into dust while others took their places. All seen in a racing time-lapse progression.
He wanted to reach out to them, but he had no hands. He wanted to call out to them that he needed help, but he had no tongue.
And so he fell onwards, unchecked and ever faster, towards an invisible destination, if he even had a destination.
Panic flared up within him and he forced it back down. Even if he didn't know his name, had lost his memory, had forgotten his entire life up to now, he still knew instinctively that panic was the most harmful of all emotions. If he wanted to have any hope of survival, he had to stay calm, collected, emotionless.
Think! he urged himself. Remember! Remember!
But there was a veil between his consciousness and the subconscious into which his memories had sunk like stones in a sea when he began this endless fall into the depths. As hard as he tried, he could not penetrate the veil and so he gave up. Surrendered himself to the free fall, the racing, hurtling stream of images, the overwhelming flood of impressions that beat down on him unfiltered.
Whoever he might be, he was lost.
The abyss had swallowed him up and would not let him go. He fell deeper and deeper towards the unseen bottom—if this chasm even had a bottom—and gave up all hope.
And then, unexpectedly and barely noticeably, like water dripping through tiny cracks, the memories came back. Suddenly a name oozed through. Suddenly he knew who he was once more.
Tolot.
Icho Tolot.
An Halutian.
The thought was accompanied by an impression that stood out explosively from the flood of images. He saw himself as though in a mirror, although he had lost his body and was only an ethereal consciousness. He was tall, measuring well over three meters, with a shoulder span of two and a half meters, a giant with four arms and two short, pillar-like legs. His head was a hemisphere with three large, round, red-shining eyes, barely visible nasal openings. He had a wide, thin-lipped mouth that revealed the teeth of a predator when open. His skin was leathery and pitch black.
He was amazed by the strangeness of his appearance until his memory solidified and became familiar.
Another memory made its way through the veil between his consciousness and the inaccessible regions of his subconscious. He was an Immortal. A cell-activator chip gave him eternal life. IT, a Superintelligence, had bestowed the chip on him. Only by an accident or as the result of violence could he die.
The realization made him shudder as he continued to fall, unrestrained and unhindered, into the unfathomable gulfs below. The memory was accompanied by a name that was inseparably connected with his own fate. A name whose very sound was enough to trigger new memories.
Perry Rhodan.
Rhodanos, as he affectionately called him.
To his surprise, he noticed parental feelings that came along with that thought.
And then, as though the name was a bomb that blew away a massive wall, the memories flooded in, washing over him, threatening to carry him away. Memories ... His first encounter with Perry Rhodan in the year 2400 of the old Terran dating system on the planet Opposite. The mission with the superbattleship CREST II to the Hexagonal Star Teleporter. The adventures in the hollow world and in the microworld of Horror. The journey through the time teleporter of Vario into Lemuria's ancient history. The confrontation with the Maahks and the Masters of the Island. The battles in Andro-Beta and the attack on Andromeda that finally ended with the decisive battle for Tamanium, with the total defeat of the Masters of the Island ...
With his last strength, he pushed against the flood of memories and drove them back, closing his consciousness to the onslaught of images, sounds, and odors. These memories were thousands of years old and had nothing to do with his present, inexplicable situation. They would not help him to understand how he had landed in his present position. Instead they threatened to paralyze him and divert him from what was really important.
But he instinctively sensed that Perry Rhodan had something to do with his disembodiment and the plunge into emptiness. As he fell onwards, the crucial memory suddenly manifested itself with overwhelming force and shook him to the core of his very being.
Rhodan had requested his aid, and he had answered his old friend's call for help. In the Ichest System, he had stumbled across a forgotten base of the ancient Akonians. It was a death trap that he had only barely escaped with the help of Denetree, the Lemurian woman from the star ark NETHACK ACHTON. Then the encounter with Torg Kaltem, a Halutian like himself but coming from a long gone era, and who had fallen victim to an unknown disintegration weapon. The flight to Drorah. The outbreak of an ancient plague on the main planet of the Akonian empire caused by contact with a runaway ark-inhabitant named Boryk. And then the expedition to the Gorbas System ... The landing on Gorbas IV, the battles with the Beasts, the discovery of the time machine ...
The time machine!
Excitement seized Icho Tolot when the last piece of the puzzle was added and the picture was filled out. He had been forced to go into the time machine, fleeing from the attacking ancient Halutians—the Beasts as the Lemurians called them. Only he had taken the last step under his own power and of his own free will, with the sudden realization that his fate was already determined. And now he plummeted into the abyss of time, ever more deeply into the past.
But something bothered him. Something was missing. He suspected there was a piece of important information that had been forgotten in the shock of dematerialization. A piece of information that would explain everything. Concentrating, he thought and let the events of the last few days pass before him once more in review. The memory appeared on the horizon of his mind, and suddenly he knew what the missing piece of information was.
Perry Rhodan had asked him for help because he had encountered a Halutian in the Ichest System that he took for Icho Tolot—despite the fact that at that point in time, Tolot had been on Halute. This other Tolot had turned up again later in the Gorbas System and had made the landing on Gorbas IV possible for him ... He thought of the warm welcome the Lemurians on board the star ark ACHATI UMA had given him. Their joy over the return of their presumed protector, and of the mysterious entries in Levian Paronn's diary, which had fallen—or at least fragments of it—into Perry Rhodan's hands.
Along with the existence of the time machine, all these pieces of information led to only one conclusion: he had a double existence in time. That other Tolot had been himself, only shifted in time. A future version of himself. This involuntary journey into the past that he was now making was something the other Tolot had already done.
His thoughts raced as he continued to plummet past the decades and centuries that swept by at the edge of his perception. Did the existence of the other, future Tolot in the year 1327 New Galactic Era mean that his journey into the past would turn out successfully? That he would come through the adventure alive? Logic favored that conclusion. If he died in the past, he could not have a double existence in the year 1327. He had to have survived, then, to be able to intervene and provide assistance in the Gorbas System later and make his use of the time machine possible.
The thought reassured him a little, but then doubts began to surface. Could he really be certain? He understood enough of temporal physics to be aware of the risks of interfering with the past. The incalculable time paradoxes that in an extreme case could extinguish entire lines of reality. One false step in yesterday would be enough to make today completely different ...
In any event, in whatever epoch he found himself when this plunge came to an end, he would have to be very careful not to endanger reality as he knew it. Even the greatest caution would not prevent him from causing changes, however slight they might be. Even the most seemingly inconsequential actions could have extreme consequences over a long period of time.
Fear crept over him as he realized how far back into the past he was falling. Perry Rhodan had found evidence that the other, future Tolot had been along on the dilation flight of the star ark LEMCHA OVIR. That very likely meant that he would emerge in the early period of Lemurian history. In the era before the development of faster than light travel. In a past more than fifty millennia back.
50,000 years was a long time.
Long enough for even minimal interference with the flow of events to escalate into enormous changes.
No wonder that the other, future Tolot had avoided any direct contact with him, his earlier self. He knew just as well as he did the terrible dangers that a time paradox could bring with it.
He fell onwards, ever deeper into the abyss of time as the images of long forgotten epochs flickered around him, the helpless plaything of temporal energies that he could not control. He plunged towards a destiny that had long been fulfilled by the other, future Tolot.
And he was afraid.
He was a Halutian, millennia old, virtually invincible, hardened in uncountable crises and conflicts, but he was still afraid.
Of the past that was his future.
4
The jump back into normal space took place only a few minutes after the beginning of semispace phase. It was accompanied by the flickering of the red warning diodes on the engine controls and the muffled howling of the storage banks that fed new energy into the IBODAN's collapsed shield. On the main vidscreen shone the UV-rich light of a planetless blue giant star that filled a quarter of the monitor.
Thore Bardon's glance fell on the navigation control's display panel. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead. They had only put 30 light-years behind them in the short semispace phase. They were still within the enemy's remote detection range! With a blow of his fist he activated the conventional radio connection with the two other ships of the reduced squadron.
"Initiate stealth mode!" he exclaimed. "Power down all primary ship's systems. Reduce energy consumption of secondary and tertiary systems to minimum. Communication by radio until further notice."
The subcommanders of the OLATH and the HORDAMON acknowledged his orders. Even as their messages came in, the reddish veils of the semispace fields around the IBODAN faded away, and the howling of the storage banks went silent. The lights in the control center went out and were replaced by the murky glow of the emergency lighting. Even the hissing from the ventilation shafts of the life-support systems grew fainter as the combat-control positronic carried out Bardon's orders and initiated stealth mode.
All machines that gave off telltale energy readings were shut down or switched to energy-saving standby mode. The three heavy cruisers drifted without propulsion in space near the star.
Bardon hoped that he had reacted quickly enough to deceive the Beast ships' remote detection. The nearness of the star would contribute by drowning out the ships' energy signatures.
As the seconds dragged by and stretched out to minutes, damage reports came in from the various sections of the IBODAN. Several decks were heavily damaged, two emergency generators had exploded, a portion of the stern sensors were destroyed, but otherwise the ship was maneuverable. Amazingly, there had been no deaths. Just a few injured.
Our luck wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, Bardon thought in relief.
The OLATH and the HORDAMON had also survived the brief battle with the Beasts largely unscathed and without losses. The slight damage could quite quickly be repaired with the means available on board the ships.
Then Bardon thought of the GORGARTH and the PALPADIUM, and his relief changed to sorrow. So many good men and women had lost their lives in such a short time. Friends and comrades, subordinates for whose safety and welfare he had been responsible.
He had failed.
Worse yet, the losses endangered the success of the mission.
He clenched his fists and stared with narrowed eyes at the harshly brilliant globe of the star shining from the main vidscreen. They had not been the first to die on this expedition, nor would they probably be the last. He couldn't let that divert him from his plans. Too much was at stake ... He gave a start as the monitor window to the engine room reappeared, showing Guras' tired face.
"Commander," she said, her voice raw, "as I feared, the rushed jump into semispace phase overloaded the modulator banks. Two units have failed completely and the rest are moderately damaged. We can repair them, but it will take time."
Bardon cleared his throat. "How much time?"
The chief engineer shrugged. "One to two hours. And as a result of the total failure of the two modulator banks, our semispace velocity has been reduced to eighty percent of normal." She took a deep breath. "I recommend that we head for a spacedock as quickly as possible to replace the destroyed modulator banks."
But they didn't have the time to take the ship to a spacedock. Each day that passed increased the risk that the Beasts would discover the Suen Project's secret research base on Torbutan and destroy the time machine that was so desperately needed. They had to resume their flight to the 87th Tamanium as quickly as they could even if it meant that their semispace velocity would be permanently reduced. Once they had found the time machine, they could give the heavy cruisers a thorough overhaul.
