Torbin was in trouble.
At the best of times his B’tari supervisors treated him like a child, a charge who was prone to errant behaviour. A prodigal child, perhaps; and as such was given access to the greatest ever toys, who thought he knew how to make them all work so much better than the adults.
As he sat in the darkness of his quarters he brooded over why it had all gone so disastrously wrong, how the wormhole generator could have collapsed so terminally that no effort – even after days of rebuilding – was able to recreate anything like a stable field (although he did suspect his supervisors were deliberately not making the effort to have it restored). Sure, no human (as far as he knew) was doing anything like that kind of experiment – if only for the fact they had no access to such advanced technology. And when their troubled astronomer Zorandi appeared on the scene it must have seemed like the perfect storm: the meeting of two unstable minds. The result: the B’taris’ foremost astronomer lost somewhere in space – in time. The ship, however, was still there, unchanging. But from the long distance scans Zorandi had faded from view.
One thing they still allowed Torbin was a remote interface with the scanning probes, which were now very near to the region where the wormhole exit had collapsed. On a basic portable device – with its screen display that only allowed him to observe – he noticed the probe’s sensors had detected a spatial field anomaly: space was being warped. What was most interesting, the warping effect increased with every kilometre nearer the ship’s last known location. This feed of course was old, over forty hours now despite its phased tachyon transmission. And increasingly communication became erratic: the image losing clarity, pixellating to just noise and then resolving the surrounding star field that was now strangely distorted, similar to intense gravity waves except the graviton count was normal. No, this was something at a more fundamental level.
The return transmissions were taking increasingly longer as the probe moved towards the ship’s location. This meant only one thing: its local time was becoming dilated way beyond normal relativistic effects, just as if it were in an intense gravitational field. Except, were it produced by an object that object would have to be a billion times more massive than an average star, or an equivalent singularity. But since the probe was showing no accordant sign of acceleration towards anything, this effect did not seem to be produced from a source that could be detected. Unless … the ship.
Zorandi must have felt a sense of destiny. The astronomer been to the edge, jumped in, jumped over metaphorically as Torbin had done literally. That feeling perhaps the same: the excitement more than the fear when the rules of reality have changed.
Torbin was not going to sleep tonight.
.
At 2 am EST Torbin entered the hanger. He was confronted with an array of multi-role craft: designed equally for high speed and high manoeuvrability within or out of the Earth’s atmosphere, one of these vessels had superluminal capability – although his b’tari supervisor denied that such a craft was in their possession. Normally – even at this hour – his every move would be monitored. But this time he had help from someone he had come to regard as a rival – a man of unparalleled arrogance. Roidon Chanley, though, did share a common view that their B’tari overseers were too reluctant to take the necessary action, hamstrung as they were by the increasingly irrelevant doctrine of the Temporal Directive. So Roidon had become crucial in overriding their monitoring systems and providing them with false feeds. For some reason the B’tari had come to trust their other protégée. In Torbin’s mind that only underlined the fact that the man was not to be trusted, that somehow he had used his devious charm to manipulate them (though privately he envied the man, especially when he told tales of his exploits with women).
Torbin knew he had little time to enact his plan. Roidon had accompanied him into the hanger, and it was of no surprise that the man knew exactly which craft he needed to take.
Roidon pointed to the vessel that was slightly larger and darker than the rest. It still shared that egg-like shape, much the same as any human civilian vehicle … but that was the point, although he knew B’tari vessels were able to change their shape. He guessed they were still about a hundred years in advance of humans.
‘Well,’ Roidon said, sounding like some impatient school master. ‘It’s ready for you.’
Without a word Torbin took a few stumbling steps and then jogged the final thirty metres.
‘Just put your hand on the dark circle. It will identify your DNA as being a valid operator,’ Roidon shouted as he followed Torbin.
As he was about to do so, Torbin said, ‘I’m grateful for all your help, and putting yourself at risk of punishment.’
‘Look, as far as I’m concerned it was an exercise in outwitting the B’tari. And maybe something good will indeed come of this venture. Besides, I’ll tell them it was all your idea. Now get going.’
The ship’s door opened upwards, a seamless hatch that looked surprisingly flimsy.
For a interstellar craft it was unusually small. The interior’s cockpit had only two seats, one behind the other, and barely enough room to walk around. A lot of dull silver panels encased dark view-screens. The private compartment he guessed would hardly be any bigger.
He sat on the forward-facing seat, which seemed to mould to his human form, to feel almost no sense of pressure from it as he faced the darkness from above. He had the creeping thought that Zardino, his supervisor, would somehow materialise behind him. He refused to check for the b’tari’s presence, instead placing his hands on the side rests.
It began.
Various symbols flashed before his eyes that made absolutely no sense. Words were spoken that made equally little sense.
‘Please speak English,’ he tried.
‘English-human language identified,’ came a heavily synthesised androgynous voice.
Torbin pulled out his PDU, and said to the craft, ‘This device contains the coordinates I need to reach. Show me an interface point.’
A dark square lit up to the side of him; he pointed the PDU towards it, the info squirt took less than a second before the ship told him the data would be added. Then asked if he’d like to embark immediately.
‘Make it so,’ Torbin said with a certain relish.
Now he had to hope that Roidon’s security override was still holding, that the hanger exit would not shut before he could leave.
‘Give me visual,’ he requested.
Torbin’s heart was pounding so fast he wondered if the ship would think there was something wrong, suspect he was committing an illicit act. But it continued to taxi out of the hanger.
It asked him: ‘Which level of acceleration do you wish?’
‘The maximum,’ he said, only thinking of how his supervisor would at this moment be running towards the nearest fast ship in the hanger.
‘Prepare for eight gees acceleration in ten seconds.’ No inertial dampers?
He thought of rescinding his request, but before he’d come to a decision on that the ship lurched forward, and Torbin blacked out.
When he came to he was in space. The ship was speaking to him. ‘Repeat: We are about to enter MDT.’
‘MDT?’ Torbin asked groggily.
‘Meta Dimensional Transference.’
‘Like warp drive?’
‘Do not understand question.’
‘Never mind. Just proceed.’ How typical of the B’tari to have a technology so exotic and keep it entirely secret.
‘Ten seconds until activation,’ it warned.
Everything began to go very strange. The meaningless symbols within the display panels were multiplying: green shapes doubling, tripling, and the edges of the panels themselves did likewise.
Torbin was feeling sick. He had to get off the chair, but as he lifted himself something even weirder happened: there were other versions of him, repeating his action. He then staggered to what appeared to be a side bar. He thought he had put his hand around the chrome bar, but his hand just seemed to go right through it. And when he fell to what he knew to be the floor, it didn’t seem to hold him. Just as if it was no longer solid, he was slipping through, the bulk of it encompassing him. Some kind of electronic circuitry. Only then did this part feel more solid like a medium compound rubber. The shock of it all actually made him forget his nausea.
After a few seconds of languishing in this base section of the ship, Torbin attempted to pull himself back up to deck level. The sensation of the material surrounding him was something he could not really describe; perhaps it was like a spongy foam of the type used in cushions. But when he had reached the top level the floor had seemed to solidify beneath him. And now the flight deck itself was no longer a confusion of multiplication. Everything seemed to have returned to normal.
‘What just happened?’
‘We have entered MDT.’
‘That’s why everything went … strange.’
‘That was the transition phase. The ship changed to a different dimensional state but at a different rate to yourself since you are of organic matter.’
‘And now I’m in matching phase in this other dimension.’
‘Affirmative. Neither you nor this ship is encumbered by the physical matter of space.’
Torbin got back on his chair and watched the forward display of the faint blue of the stars streaking towards him.
All that research he had done in hope that one day his wormhole technology would be used to traverse space. And even though it had been, albeit many years after he’d first envisioned it, he was now witnessing something entirely different. The notion of changing the nature of one’s own physical presence in space rather than space itself seemed like a metaphysics dream, not even considered as a theoretic possibility. What was matter on a fundamental scale, just forces, vibrations? The physical stuff – the particles themselves – only made up a tiny fraction of what appeared to be solid.
Could this even be the technology that would save humanity from the temporal eradication wave? It would certainly allow them to escape the wave, perhaps find some corner of the galaxy, if not leave for another. And did the Elusivers even know about this?
A terrible thought had just struck Torbin. Within a matter of hours he could be at the location of the adrift ship. Maybe this was just the trap the Elusivers were hoping he’d fall into. They would then gain possession of the only technology that possibly threatened their plan.
Do I change course? Turn around?
***