 
# Time Jumpers

Episode 2: Keaton's World

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2019 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### A few words about this series....

  1. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.

  2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.

  3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.

  4. There will be 12 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.

  5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.

  7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

  1. 'Marooned in Voidtime' February 1, 2019

  2. 'Keaton's World' March 1, 2019

  3. 'A Small Navigation Error' April 15, 2019

  4. 'Cygnus Rift' May 3, 2019

  5. 'The Time Guard' May 31, 2019

  6. 'First Light Corridor June 28, 2019

  7. 'Hapsh'm and the First Coethi Encounter' August 2, 2019

  8. 'Operation Galactic Hammer' August 30, 2019

  9. 'Byrd's Draconis' September 27, 2019

  10. 'First Jump Squadron' November 1, 2019

  11. 'Planck Time' November 29, 2019

  12. 'The Time Twister' January 3, 2020

# Chapter 1: "Derelict"

"Time is not a reality but a concept, or a measure."

Antiphon

Storm

Kinlok Island

Time Stream T-001 (2814 CE)

T-date: 001-09-15

It was Acth:On'e who saw the ship first, breaching the rough surf several hundred meters out to sea. The TM1 was loading gear aboard Cygnus, along with Commander Nathan Golich, trying to stay upright in the fierce wind gusts, when he spotted something surfacing just beyond the surf line. As he watched, the ship rolled in the waves for a few moments, then disgorged a human being, clad in a hypersuit.

"Commander...look there! It's Alicia--!"

Golich looked up. "Toonie...you're cracked...Alicia's—" but he stopped in mid-sentence, for they had both seen the hypersuited figure waddle unsteadily through the surf, stumble onto the beach and drop to its knees.

Both crewmen then tossed their gear away and skidded downslope from the rocky promontory where Cygnus was parked and sprinted out to the beach.

It was Alicia Yang.

She was alive, out of breath, almost giggling at them, but seemingly okay. They helped the Defense and Protective Systems tech to her feet, brushed wet sand off her face and shouldered her up the slope to the ship, where she ducked through the lockout on F deck and ran straight into Captain Dringoth.

"Well, well...Jumpmaster Yang...decided to pay us a visit, did you?" Dringoth queried Acth:On'e and Golich. "She okay...she hurt...what's her condition?"

But before Golich could respond, Yang blurted out, "Captain...Captain...you've got to come with me...come down to the beach. They said they'd wait. I think they want everybody to see it...see what I've seen."

"And what have you seen, Jumpmaster Yang?"

Yang fluttered her hands, not sure what to do with them. Her face was a child on Christmas morning, wide-eyed, electric with wonder. "You wouldn't believe it...there's a whole civilization down there...it's incredible...there aren't words—"

Acth:On'e put a hand to her temple. "These bruises...we don't know what happened. The fish may have done something to her."

"No, really," she complained, "They just took me to some place called the Pillars...sacred waters...that's what the translator said. Ice caves...whispering voices, thousands of them...you have to see it, you have to hear it."

By now, the rest of the crew had come down to F deck and gathered around: M'Bela and URME had joined them.

"The girl's delirious," M'Bela decided, hands on her hips.

"I'm not delirious...really, Captain...we need to stay awhile, investigate this."

Dringoth was skeptical. "Take her to sick bay. Make sure she's okay." To URME, the Captain added, "And restrain her...you know what to do." To the others, Dringoth was firm and unyielding. "We launch in an hour." He disappeared up the gangway.

"Come on, princess," said Golich. "Let's get you to bed."

So they took her to the tiny sick bay, carved out of a corner of the galley and set up a bioweb. Probe bots were released—M'Bela drove them—and inserted themselves into her eyes, ears, nose and throat. She tried to fight them off but it was like fighting off smoke. Finally, she gave in and sank back in a sulk.

"Nobody believes me," she muttered. "I'm just a DPS tech...just a hired gun. Nobody ever believes me."

Acth:On'e was there, a bit sympathetic. "You've been through a lot, Alicia. Stop fighting. You know we've got orders. Commandstar said breakdown the Twister and abandon everything else in place. We've got to be at Keaton's World in three months. Besides—" he peered out a nearby porthole, "--from the way the light level's falling off, I'd say this old sun's about had it. Maybe a month, maybe a year...then kablooey!"

Yang sat up abruptly and her head penetrated the bioweb, which buzzed sharply, and pressed her back down. "Ouch, dammit! Can't you make this damned web bigger—Toonie, that's my point. There's a whole civilization down below the waves. A whole culture. Intelligent creatures, with ships and cities and religions. We can't just let them go up in smoke. TACTRON needs to know about this...there are things he could do...maybe evacuation or something."

Acth:On'e scoffed, rubbing that faint scar along his jaw—an encounter with thermosaurs on Telitor when he was a young V1—"Doesn't matter. Collateral damage. Casualties of war. I don't like it either, but what we can do?" He shook his blade-shaped head. "And I wouldn't want to be in your shoes either, girl...abandoning your post, going AWOL...I'm sure Time Guard'll have a nice welcoming party for you at K-World."

Yang rolled over and buried her bandaged head in the pillow. "I don't want to think about it. At least I have this—"she pulled out an echopod from under the sheets and brandished it at Acth:On'e.

He was startled. "What are you doing with that...you should have left it. That's contraband...we don't know what those things can do. Let me have that—"

"No way." She jammed the device under the sheets again, between her legs. "It's just a translator...maybe an encyclopedia too. I like to listen to stuff."

Acth:On'e was about to drop the bioweb and reach in and grab the pod, but a voice came over the 1MC.

"Toonie to the command deck...Master Guard Acth:On'e to the command deck at once...."

He glared back at Yang. "I'm informing the Captain. That thing needs to be secured...we don't know what it could do."

"Go ahead," she pouted and turned away.

Acth:On'e left the sick bay with an irritated gesture.

An hour later, Cygnus launched and set course for Sturdivant 2180...a three-month voyage around Newton's Jaw and Time's Peak, across the far borderlands of Alliance space, to the world where the Alliance had started...a place that time jumpers called Keaton's World, K-World, K Town...the beating heart of the entire Uman realm.

Time Guard cosmologists had long categorized the star-sun Sturdivant 2180 as an A5 star, blueish-white in chromaticity, with a mass of three earth suns, a main-sequence star with strong hydrogen and metal lines in her light spectrum. She shepherded a brood of some twelve planets, with scores of satellites among them.

K-World was the fourth world out, a smallish, desert world with huge seas of copper-colored sand and one large notable body of water, a vast shallow lake known as Loch Lithgow. It had four satellites. Three were little more than rubble piles.

The fourth had been given the unusual name of Gibbons' Grotto, though who Gibbons was had been lost to memory and no one cared anyway. It was a whitish-gray iceball of a world, mostly hollow inside with thousands of kilometers of mostly unexplored caves, caverns, grottos, mazes and warrens.

As the ship slid into standard orbit, the crew of Cygnus gathered in the crew's mess on B deck for instructions from Captain Dringoth and many peered out the portholes at the tortured icescape rolling by below them, for it was true that on Gibbons Grotto, there was only ice...to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice was the vacuum of space. Below the ice were the caverns, a true terra incognita.

"Looks like a rotten orange, with acne," muttered Golich, slurping his drink.

"Yeah..." said Evelyn M'Bela, "or maybe something my daughter's cat spit up."

"Ah," URME said, "isn't it great to be home again?"

Dringoth glared at all of them. He pulled back the eyepiece covering his left eye, left still scrolling the flash message that had just come up from K-World on the Command Priority circuit, coded Commander's Eyes Only.

Alicia Yang noticed Dringoth's sour mood. "What is it, Skipper? Aren't you glad to be back in the system?"

Dringoth snorted, twisted the ends of his moustache into knots. "I might be, if it wasn't for this—" He tapped his eyepiece.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

The Captain went to the replicator and got himself a hot tea. "We're having an unexpected guest, 1400 hours this afternoon."

"Who's coming to dinner?"

"TACTRON himself."

That earned a few whistles and grumbly comments. Dringoth didn't leave them to wonder any longer, answering the unasked questions. "An inspection, so the message says. And new orders. I want this ship cleaner than a skyship's wings by 1200 hours. Not a molecule of dirt anywhere. Nobody's going to write up 1st TD for slovenliness on my watch."

"What kind of orders?" Golich wondered openly. "There's scuttlebutt about a major fleet action coming up, maybe something this side of Time's Peak."

"That's bilge," said Acth:On'e. "T2 can't even pin down where the Bugs are now. How can a major fleet action be planned when you can't even locate the enemy? They could pop out of voidtime anywhere, at any time."

Golich shrugged. "Hell, they could even be among us now, right down there on K-World, or the Grotto. Maybe on this ship."

All eyes turned to URME. The swarm brightened at the attention, gathered itself into something more or less resembling a human being, and said, "No sensor indications of decoherence wakes or unusual EM activity in the last twenty-four hours, Captain."

Dringoth waved that off. "Forget it, URME. Everybody, get to work immediately. Get the vacs and pans out. Make this ship shine, now!"

They scattered to their duties.

Promptly at 1400 hours, as promised, TACTRON's shuttle docked with Cygnus's forward port. The Vice Chief of Time Stream Directorate T-01/099 (CTSD-02) was thereafter piped aboard and straight away assembled the entire crew at attention in the crew's mess.

Nobody recalled just exactly when para-human swarm entities had been given significant command responsibilities in Time Guard—it had to have been many decaterrs at least—but the presence of another swarm on board brought an interesting visual reaction from URME, itself a similar configuration of nanobots masquerading as a human being. TACTRON was of similar composition, literally trillions of nanoscale robotic elements configured to assume, for the time being, the general shape and responses of an actual human being. Maybe two meters in height, with little or no blurring or edge effects, a bland almost Nordic-looking face and shock of blond hair, TACTRON literally pulsated at the sight of URME, who returned the favor with a flicker indicating the Unit Reserve Memory Entity wasn't exactly thrilled at having competition.

Dringoth sucked in a gut grown rather expansive after months and years in the field. "Sir, welcome aboard Cygnus. My crew awaits your orders."

TACTRON's voice—in fact the Vice Chief could assume any of millions of voices if it so desired—came out like a whiny, nasal violin string. "At ease, please. Stand easy. I didn't just come for an inspection, Captain, although I'll get to that shortly. I have urgent orders from Commandstar."

Dringoth said, "Yes, sir...your message indicated that. Could I inform my crew of these orders?"

TACTRON seemed to sniff. "Of course. I'm here to give you the coordinates for setting up your Time Twister. It's to be emplaced on the surface of Gibbons. I'll port the site details to your URME system. You'll have all the help you need getting set up; the displacement weapon is to be fully operational by 0000 hours two weeks from now."

That caused a visible stir among the crew. M'Bela stifled a whistle after earning a stern glare from Dringoth.

"Sir, that seems an aggressive schedule. Is there a reason?"

Now TACTRON grew a bit testy. His face pixelated just a bit, earning a few eyeblinks from the crew, before settling down. "There are reports, Dringoth, reports that T2 has assigned a high probability to, from local shippers about Coethi activity in this sector. Frankly, I don't put much stock in them but Commandstar has decided, for the sake of security, to do so. Command doesn't want to be caught flatfooted if the Bugs show up on our doorstep, what with the Alliance here and all the brass down on K-World."

"And the nature of these reports?"

Now TACTRON sloughed off a stream of bots from his hand. The cloud swelled quickly, forming a likeness of a small display screen in mid-air, catching photons to form a series of images. The display showed an elevation of the interior of Gibbons' Grotto, layer after layer of ice and rock.

TACTRON went on. "For years now, local shippers have been reporting that there's some sort of relic buried deep inside the Grotto." A blinking dot on the display highlighted the presumed location TACTRON described. "After the Twister is set up and operational, your crew will assist in a recon mission in the upper layers of the Hollows and try to locate this object, if it exists." The Hollows was the popular name for the top layers of caves and warrens just below the ice surface of Gibbons' Grotto.

Now Golich had a question. TACTRON recognized the executive officer. "Yes, Commander--?"

"Is there any evidence for this—relic—or whatever it is? Or are these just stories and fairy tales?"

This caused a noticeable wave to flow through TACTRON's form, brightening, then darkening in front of them. "Commander, T2 does not regard these reports as just stories, as you describe them. Somewhere below the surface, inside the Hollows, we have solid sensor indications for a very faint source of quantum decoherence waves, possibly indicating an ancient quantum system is there. This was completely unexpected and needless to say, somewhat unsettling to Commandstar. Such a source, if present, must have been buried deliberately and perhaps quite some time ago. Command staff are still arguing over what exactly that means. Your mission is to recon that source and find out."

The rest of the briefing concerned details of the Twister setup and any additional support 1st Time Displacement Battery might need in achieving what Dringoth silently figured was a nearly impossible schedule. But he knew TACTRON didn't want to be bothered with such trivial concerns as what was and was not possible.

With that, the ship inspection was underway. TACTRON sloughed off several streams of bots from its hands and the streams, which formed themselves into amorphous clouds, exited the galley and made their way into every corner and hold of the ship, usually under the ever-watchful eyes of URME or Dringoth.

An hour later, finding only minor infractions of shipboard discipline and readiness to report, TACTRON completed its inspection, gave the results to Dringoth in a close-out ceremony and was gone, disappearing into the hatch of the shuttle like wisps of cloud in a fading sunset.

After the shuttle had undocked and was deorbiting for return to K-World, Nathan Golich pulled Dringoth aside in the lower gangway and lowered his voice in a conspiratorial whisper, lest TACTRON still have loose bots left behind to listen in. It had been known to happen.

"Just talked with URME, Skipper. Down in Engineering."

Dringoth was busily poring over a list of action items on his wristpad. "And--?"

Golich said, "URME thinks there's something wrong with TACTRON. Something not quite right."

That got Dringoth's attention. "What does that mean?"

"Just this, sir. URME says TACTRON's configs aren't right. The pattern's not stable. He said it's like the buffer's full. Or the pattern emitter's not programmed properly. That's what was causing all that flickering and pulsating we saw."

"I thought that was just TACTRON's usual sourpuss manner."

"No, sir, it's more. And worse. URME says he sent a super-quick acoustic pulse through TACTRON—when he was engaged and didn't have the configs to respond. I don't know how he did it but—"

"He did what?" Dringoth was incredulous. "What's the matter with him? You don't go around probing command staff like that. What's gotten into him...I need to have Yang take a—"

"Sir, URME found TACTRON's not quite what he seemed to be. Maybe it's just some new configs. You know Commandstar updates all the TACTRONs regularly. But URME didn't think so."

Dringoth made a sour face. "So now one swarm doesn't like the other swarm. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

"Sir, just for you to know...URME thinks it's just possible that TACTRON's been compromised...in some way."

Dringoth took a deep breath, willing himself to stay calm. "Commander, report to A deck and take your position, at once. We've got to land this crate on that ice surface down there, and TACTRON'll have my head if we don't hit make the target site precisely. As for URME—" his face darkened and his white moustache stiffened, "you leave that to me. I'll deal with that busybody cloud of bugs myself."

An hour later, with her crew at stations, Dringoth gave the word and Cygnus dropped out of her standard orbit toward the ice surface of Gibbons' Grotto. She settled down to a bouncing, rattling shudder of a landing in a narrow ravine between towering ice cliffs, wedged into what the maps called the Northern Narrows.

Back on E deck, Acth:On'e turned toward Alicia Yang with a smirk. "That's one small step... and you know the rest." Yang paid no attention. She peered out a side porthole. Ice mountains and cliffs as far as she could see. The swollen salmon-hued belly of K-World, half in shadow, filled the sky. Two of her other moons were visible too, looking like pearls on a string, wrapped around the calico disk of the planet. "Just another beautiful day in the Corps, I suppose."

Nathan Golich had come down to Engineering from his station on A deck. He would be the driver for Felix, their ground vehicle.

Golich swallowed audibly at the scene outside his porthole. "Jeez, there's enough radiation out there to make bacon out of all of us. At least, I don't weigh as much." They all knew Gibbons sported less than fifteen percent of Keaton's World normal.

"Yeah," said Yang, as she started unhooking her harnesses. "Now you can eat even more of those robo-steaks from the crews mess."

Up front, Dringoth secured the ship and activated the sling that would put Felix, their rover, on the surface.

"Sir, it looks like Felix will be getting quite a workout," URME observed. "Pretty rough terrain out there."

"Felix can handle anything," Dringoth told the swarm. "Come on. Let's get going. Commander Golich is driving today. I want him to make the final decision on whether Felix stays on the ground or flies."

Golich had already christened the vehicle a 'grottocat'. It could trundle up and over all kinds of ice cliffs and valleys like a giant caterpillar, on triple tread tracks. But Felix also had rocket motors and could make short suborbital hops across difficult terrain in Gibbons' light gravity. Dringoth and Golich both figured that was a capability that might well come in handy.

The six of them were inside Felix and underway in less than two hours. Golich had taken a look at the terrain surrounding them and decided on ground traverse. "I think Felix can handle those hills in this gravity. From the maps, looks like there are some valleys, or linea or whatever they're called, we can also use."

"Maybe," Dringoth observed. "I remember those little canyons. Just filled with ice blocks and craters and other fun stuff. Just don't go in there expecting a nice freeway. We've got about a day to get the ground prepped for siting the Twister foundation."

Golich played with Felix' controls, actuating the treads and revving its motors like a hot rod on a drag strip. "Felix can handle it. Let's unsling this jalopy and get motoring."

So they set off.

Golich unshackled the treads and secured the lift thrusters completely. Within moments, the grottocat was a giant cylindrical tractor, waddling and rocking from side to side, trundling across the icescape like a drunken pig.

"Let's check out the view, Captain," M'Bela said.

Through the starboard porthole, the view beyond the Narrows was fantastic...a jumbled pile of every conceivable shape, cubes and pyramids and smashed polygons piled on top of each other like some giant child had dropped a big ice tray. Dead ahead of Felix, the canyon floor was a maze of ice blocks and boulders, while towering ice cliffs loomed overhead on either side, several thousand meters over them.

Dringoth eyed the cliffs warily. "I'm hoping we don't run into any landslides...or maybe I should say ice slides. That's probably what's littering this canyon floor."

Golich steered them carefully between boulders, as the ship pitched and heaved over the rough frozen ground. "You could be right...maybe navigating this canyon isn't such a hot idea after all. We could lift our way over those canyon walls and see if the going is any better up top."

Dringoth had a bad feeling. "Your call, Commander. Just keep to this heading. That geyser in the distance should be the closest entrance into the Hollows."

Golich brought them to a stop and engaged the liftjets. As if grabbed by a giant's hand, Felix hurtled into the air and drifted forward over the jagged tops of the canyon walls.

Now they had a perfect view of their target. M'Bela put a scope on the geyser, still many kilometers distant.

"Looks like a fog bank to me. Captain, how close do you want to get?"

"Not that close. Keep a couple of klicks away...there could easily be loose ice outside the visible area. I'd also get your botshield up right now." Dringoth consulted a chart on his wristpad. "Other side of that hill, Commander. That's where TACTRON want the Twister sited."

"Good idea." M'Bela pressed a few buttons on a side console. Though not visible from inside, the grottocat was soon enveloped in a faint shimmering veil, a barrier of nanobots that should protect them from ice boulders spalling off the cliffs.

After some careful maneuvering and circling, Golich found a relatively uncluttered patch of ice between several hills, only a few dozen meters from a steep ice-choked ravine. He set Felix down gently on its skids and held his breath, as the cat shifted and settled for a moment. "I think we're stable, Captain...for the moment."

Dringoth turned to URME and Yang. "Okay, gentlemen...it's your show now. We're three kilometers from the ship, dead on the build site, according to this chart."

The Captain eyed the tawny-brown swirl of the geysers with growing dread. "What a crappy place to put a Twister. I'd say we head out on foot now. Bring the packbots. And get your botshields up right now. It won't be much protection if those geysers blow up. But every little bit helps."

So the detail set out, six hypersuited crewmembers and two pack bots, trudging up and down the icescape, leaping small ravines where they could in the light gravity, boosting over deeper chasms where they had to.

From their distance of several kilometers, the prospective Twister build site was a spray of geysers shooting off into space, towering over them in sparkling rainbows like a magnificent fountain. Framing the swollen belly of K-World, Dringoth could almost admire the majesty of the picture...the black of space, the salmon hues of old man Keaton's World and the iridescent streams of the geysers spraying the sky like artist's fingers. Almost. He knew perfectly well that embedded in all that ice and water were things that could and probably would make their life miserable for the next few weeks.

And that was just the Twister part of their mission. Once the damned thing was up and operating, they had a joint recon patrol to look forward to, with several other detachments down there, somewhere below, inside the Hollows themselves.

I just can't hardly wait, Dringoth told himself.

The crew of 1st TD grimly set to work.

The foundation and setup of the Twister came off with no major incidents or injuries save for the sprained ankle that Evelyn M'Bela suffered late one day when she slipped from a small perch overlooking the Twister mount and landed the wrong way in a dark crevasse. After a week's hard work in the vacuum and light gravity and ice surface of Gibbons' Grotto, the foundation had been laid, the Twister casing erected section by section, the chronotron pods installed and checked out, and all cabling and wireless connections made good. After a final all-up systems test, the weapon was declared by Dringoth to be fully operational.

The Captain was in his stateroom on B deck when Golich popped his head into the room.

"Thought you'd want to know, Skipper. URME's picked up a proper approach warning from a jumpship inbound on our position. We challenged her. It's Libra. She'll be on the ground in an hour."

Dringoth closed the final report file he'd been dictating with a wave of his hand. "That's Vijay Surat's team. First Jump Platoon. They're supposedly fresh from patrol duties along time streams thirty and thirty-one, somewhere around Landfall, the Gliese system."

"Way out there?" asked Golich. He pinched his nose and closed his eyes wearily. They'd all been putting in twenty-hour days lately. "Beyond the Rift?"

"Exactly. Our recon partners. TACTRON figures the Bugs won't be active in that sector in the near future. They seemed to be more interested in us."

"Soon as we make contact, I'll set up a meeting."

"Make it here," Dringoth ordered. "Crew's mess. Have URME set it up for a briefing. Maybe Surat's got a better handle on our orders than I do."

Libra came in like a miniature sun, riding a spear of light down to a safe landing on an ice cliff at the far end of the Narrows. An hour after touchdown, Cygnus detected motion across the icescape valley. It was Libra's own grottocat, working her way around crevasses and ice blocks toward Cygnus. Upon arriving, a pressure tube snaked its way up to Cygnus' lockout and hatch. Inside, two figures emerged: Lieutenant Surat and his XO, Junior Lieutenant Burrows, a rather willowy and striking blond female from old Urth.

Greetings were exchanged and pleasantries and time jumper fables and stories swapped for a few minutes, until Dringoth showed the two officers to the crew's mess and had URME serve tea and pastries..."and none of that replicator crap, URME," Dringoth had warned his TFD-1. "The real stuff this time."

After serving their guests, at Dringoth's order, URME spalled off a few bots and created a small 3-D display sphere in mid-air over the table. On it was projected a spherical image of Gibbons' Grotto, laid open like a peeled onion, showing all her layers of rock strata, crust to mantle to core.

Vijay Surat was Bengali by background, though the O-3 hailed from a small settlement on Telitor, same as Acth:On'e. He was short and stocky, a shock of black hair and moustache to match, framing a dark-skinned face and a broad toothy smile.

"Latest intel from T2 puts the general position of the GIDECO source about here—"he waved a finger through URME's display, and a small bright dot started flashing. "Maybe twenty-two kilometers below the surface...along a vector at this angle from where we are now."

Dringoth was puzzled. "GI-what?"

Surat flashed a smile. "TACTRON's wording. It means Gibbons Decoherence Wake Object, or something like that."

"Any idea what this thing is...or why it's so blasted important we have to send two platoons of time jumpers burrowing into the ground like moles?"

Surat shrugged, sipped at his tea. Steam wreathed his swarthy face. "There are only about a million theories. The latest I heard from T2 briefings is that Commandstar thinks the thing could be a beacon, for the Bugs. Think about it. Sturdivant and K-World are pretty much the heart of the Alliance, right?"

Dringoth said, "K-Worlders like to think so, anyway. So--?"

"So, if you're a Bug commander, wouldn't it be great if you could disappear into voidtime, where no one could track you, meander toward time streams in this sector, home on some kind of nearly undetectable quantum beacon and pop out of voidtime just like that? K-World's toast if that happens."

"Possibly. But pretty theoretical, if you ask me. And who says this so-called beacon's undetectable. We detected it."

"Barely," Surat said, "and with some pretty sophisticated magic, from what I heard. This plot here—" he indicated URME's display, "is just an estimate. But we've got some of T2's gear onboard Libra now. We're already getting a faint, fairly diffuse quantum signal. More of a probability zone, I guess you would say. Decoherence wakes converging on an area."

Dringoth studied the layer plot of Gibbons' Grotto before them. "This rockpile's all ice and rock. You equipped for boring?"

"Our cat's got state-of-the-art ANAD borer bots same as you." Surat traced a finger along an imaginary line from the surface down to the flashing light. The display responded with a "track' tracing his line. "We parked at the other end of the Narrows. If you bore on a direct vector from here, and we do the same from our position, and compare sensor readings constantly, we should be able to zero in on GIDECO pretty accurately."

Dringoth said, "This whole moon's riddled with caves, lava tubes, tunnels and voids. No way are we going to approach this thing without boring. I just hope the whole Hollows doesn't collapse on top of us while we bore."

Surat finished his tea. "Then we're agreed. I'll have my XO here—" he patted Lieutenant Burrows on her shoulder, "—set up a comm link, so we can swap data, positions, speeds and headings."

The two captains saluted and shook hands and then Surat and Burrows were off, back to their own cat, which scuttled back down the icy ravine of the Narrows like a drunken slug.

The rest of the day was spent checking out Felix from bow to stern and updating configs on her own borer bots. Golich told Yang as they lay stretched out with both their heads stuck into the borer head of the cat, "Felix will be getting quite a workout tomorrow. Don't leave anything to chance. Skipper wants an all-up test, every system and he wants the final config status of the borer on his desk by 1800 hours."

Yang dropped something that clanged and yelped. "Ouch...jeez, that hurts like hell!" She withdrew a bruised thumb and sucked on it for a moment. "Ours not to reason why..."

They both skipped chow in the crew's mess that evening to get all the work done on time.

"Engage treads," Dringoth ordered.

Commander Golich flipped several switches. Felix's treads, three longitudinal tracks mounted circumferentially around her waist, spun up. A low frequency vibration could be felt throughout the ship. The ship was coming alive.

"Drop the clutch," Dringoth said. Golich complied. Felix lurched forward, grinding against her restraints. "We're underway on treads."

The giant sausage began crawling. Golich worked his steering through a tiny joystick at the center console, nudging it forward. Felix's nose dipped as she dropped onto the ramp and trundled like a fat pig along the surface.

"I'll drive off about five hundred meters and set up for boring," Golich told them. He twisted the joystick and fought the rough surface as Felix ambled forward, rocking against boulders and tilted ice cliffs. "I don't want to start boring too close to Cygnus. We'll need her to get off this big ice cube."

A ten-minute drive brought them rocking and bouncing to a small ledge, overlooking a narrow chasm, filled with darker ice. Golich braked to a halt and edged over the lip of the chasm, pointing the nose of the submersible toward the chasm floor. URME sounded the surface with radar, and pronounced the ravine approachable.

"Temps reading twenty degrees warmer...ice may be thinner here too. Recommending we breach here, Captain."

Dringoth agreed. Golich parked the cat perched on the edge of the chasm. "Let's get the borer set up. Queenie, if you please—"

M'Bela unstrapped and headed with Yang forward through the central gangway to A deck, where the borer and containment systems were located. Once released from containment, the borer lens would be filled with uncountable gazillions of ANAD bots, optimized for disassembling solid-phase structures...like ice.

Felix would literally chew her way through Gibbons' ice crust to the rock strata twenty kilometers below them.

Inside A deck, Yang worked at the borer controls, prepping the bots for release. M'Bela helped her with configuration management.

"This should only take a few minutes," M'Bela was saying. "These bugs are optimized for speed of disassembly. They like to eat things...like ice."

"And us too. Master config loaded and verified," Yang's fingers flew over the keyboard.

"I'm cycling the capture port...coming open now...." Through the vid screen, the lens and parabolic emitter at the nose of Felix became hazy with a blue-white glow, an incandescent glow as bots flowed out of containment, stripped atoms and began building the borer lens. When stable and fully formed, the lens would be a hemispherical swarm of disassembly nanobots, blue-white hot from bond breaking, the teeth of the whole array. Felix would lower herself to the ice and the borer would chew a path through...twenty kilometers through, if the thing worked properly.

"Lens forming up—" Yang studied the seething globe of fire that formed at the front of the vehicle. "Looks steady, config is stable, normal bond energy levels, just a little edge effects, from what I see. The tunnel may be a little ragged at first, but the dimensions look good from here."

"I concur," M'Bela said. She told Golich over the 1MC they were ready.

"I'm setting us down on the ice now—"

Golich flipped a few switches and Felix's treads folded, lowering her nose to the ice. At the same time, the borer lens began slicing into the surface, its swarm of bots snapping bonds and obliterating atoms like a hot knife through butter. The entire front end of the cat was soon bathed in the blue-white glow. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, Felix slid forward, her nose inclining down at an angle. In moments, as the borer chewed into the ice, the cat began sinking lower and lower, until her portholes were below the surface and covered with the dingy gray murk that was Gibbons' icy crust. A faint vibration could be felt throughout the hull and slight groans from her outer skin flexing could be heard.

In less than five minutes, Felix was fully below the surface, melting and boring her way through the ice, sliding ever so slowly down a tunnel of her own making.

Operation GIDECO was underway in earnest now. If all went well, the trip through the ice crust to Gibbons' subterranean bedrock and the heart of the Hollows would take nearly ten hours.

Dringoth stayed on A deck for a while longer, just to monitor boring operations and see that Felix was on course, nose down at a twenty-five degree angle and on a heading that would take her to an emergence point some fifty-two kilometers from the triangulated coordinates of Libra's cat, now boring her own way down from the other end of the Narrows. After emerging from the underside of the ice, Felix would be in her true element, operating as a geoplane at a depth of five hundred meters below the bottom of the ice, embedded in hard rock, surrounded by caves, tunnels, unexplored channels, shafts and a spiderweb of lava tubes, some thirty-two kilometers below the surface of the moon.

Then the real mission would begin.

Dringoth decided to head aft and find something hot to drink in the tiny galley on C deck. On the way, he ran into Unit Reserve Memory Entity, just emerging from B deck into the central gangway.

"I'm headed aft for some coffee, URME. Care to join me?"

URME turned about and regarded Dringoth cautiously. "I'm sorry, Captain. I am headed to F deck...routine maintenance inspections on the power plant. And, as you can see, I am not like you...I couldn't drink coffee." There was a faint attempt at a smile...the effect was more like a Halloween mask than a real smile.

"Of course," Dringoth said. He held on to a rail as Felix lurched slightly. The central gangway deck was canted upward and Dringoth had to pull himself along to maintain balance. "I almost forgot. You know...the likeness with human form is remarkable. Must take a lot of processor qubits to do that. And a helluva config as well."

URME maintained the 'smile.' "Thank you, Captain. This configuration is the latest in bipedal form simulation...evolved from over a hundred and twenty thousand iterations in the lab. My texture and skin reflectance achieves congruence in over ninety eight percent of all measured parameters."

And I'm sure you're a swell guy too, Dringoth thought but didn't say. "My compliments to the chef, URME. Carry on—" He watched as the swarm made its way further aft, eventually disappearing into the hatch for F deck.

Dringoth ducked into the galley and found several troopers on hand. One of the yeomanbots was scuttling around the mess handling plates and trash...it looked like Armand2. Dringoth ordered himself up a coffee and some pastries and found a spot between Acth:On'e and Alicia Yang, both engaged in a heated debate.

"Skipper, maybe you can settle this—"Yang said. "Toonie here says he just brushed by URME...grabbed a few molecules, he says and he wants to do a lab check...see how URME compares with our own ANADs. I'm saying that's insubordination...Jumpmaster URME's a superior officer—granted originally from UNISPACE—and any such thing is against regs. And anyway, why would he think UNISPACE has better bots than we do?"

Dringoth munched on a gooey jelly-filled something, wiping the mess from the corners of his mouth. "That right, Guard Master Acth:On'e? You got a few atoms from URME?"

Acth:On'e wasn't sure whether to be proud or contrite. "Yes, sir...it was kind of unintentional...see the Master and me were passing by each other in the tunnel out there and it's kind of narrow. Well, sir, the ship kind of lurched and we bumped into each other. Felt funny, too...my hand didn't exactly go through his arm, but it was like jamming your fingers in a pile of sand...about that kind of consistency."

Dringoth admitted he had just seen URME himself. "Jumpmaster URME is a full-fledged officer in Time Guard...you guys know that--"

"Yes, sir," they both answered.

Dringoth wasn't sure how to handle this. Plus who knew what eyes and ears were listening in? They had all once had many doubts about URME, even Dringoth himself. "And you know it's official policy to employ and promote angels and swarm entities into responsible positions in the Guard at every opportunity—"

"Yes, sir—"

"It seems to me," Dringoth said, swallowing the rest of the pastry and washing it down with a swig of coffee, "that a good time jumper follows Corps policy and regs to the best of his ability and doesn't question orders and actions by a superior officer."

Felix the cat plunged steeper into the tunnel created by her ANAD borer, angling nose down as it bit deeper into the interior of Gibbons' Grotto.

Her instruments showed the results of acoustic sounding, displaying mixed ice and rock layers on a graph, with temperature and pressure readings all around the graph. Borer status was displayed as well.

"Looking good," Golich muttered. "Borer configured for quartz and pyroxenes...ANAD's chewing through at a rate of two point five kilometers per hour. Treads are functioning fine."

"Let's try some basic maneuvers," Dringoth suggested.

Golich turned the stick to port and Felix initiated a shallow left-hand bank. The command deck listed slightly, then stabilized. For the next few minutes, first Golich, then Dringoth took turns putting the grottocat through a series of turns, dives and climbs.

Golich began to relax his grip on the stick slightly, trying to forget they were now hundreds of meters below ground.

"There's a layer of basaltic rock a few hundred meters below us," he noted on the profiler. "It's nearly a kilometer down. We should see how Felix handles there."

Dringoth was cautious. "Testing Felix isn't our mission. Besides, basaltic stuff is superhard and dense...all shale inclusions and quartzite. I'm not sure Felix's hull can take the pressure."

"I know but it looks like the most direct vector to GIDECO. We have to find out if she can handle this."

Dringoth took a deep breath. "Just be careful. I'll advise Libra what we're doing. If the borer goes on the fritz and something fails, Surat's crew can still dig us out."

"Agreed." Golich programmed a new heading into the tread control system and steered to starboard on a heading of three ten degrees, roughly paralleling the Narrows at the surface. Acoustic sounding soon showed the cat was entering harder, denser rock layers.

"Shales," Yang muttered. From earlier briefings with Time Guard geologists, she knew the layer was sheeted with hard slate and mica, compacted over millions of years by compression and gravity.

"Sounding ahead..." Yang reported. "Your depth is now four eight eight meters. Signal distortion coming back...it's probably the shale zone."

Golich shoved the control stick forward. "I'm going a little deeper...see if we can plow through some of that quartzite."

Dringoth was dubious. He studied the sounding profile. "Just don't push Felix too hard, okay? I'm showing discontinuities dead ahead...some kind of boundary layer, maybe."

"Inclusion zone? Maybe it's the quartzite."

Dringoth shook his head. "It looks more like a fault, maybe a transform fault. The geos said there were all kinds of fracture zones just below the Narrows."

Felix angled slightly downward and slowed, as the borer swarm bit into denser rock.

"Cabin temps going up," Yang reported.

"Acknowledged. Those mechs are working overtime up front, making us a tunnel. I—"

Dringoth's last words were cut off as Felix shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Felix's nose with a sickening crunch and the cat shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.

Felix's cabin was deathly still for a few moments, then the creaking and groaning of the hull under tremendous pressure started.

"What happened?" Dringoth asked, wincing as the tortured sounds of the hull being compressed grew louder.

Golich scanned his instruments nervously. "Borer is offline. I'm getting no responses from ANAD in the forward module...pressure drop in containment...we may have a breach."

"Great," Dringoth muttered. "Just friggin' great. And it looks like we've got a breach in the pressure hull too."

"I see it...cabin air pressure fluctuating...we'd better activate emergency flasks, just in case." Dringoth toggled a few switches and immediately, high pressure air began flooding all compartments.

Golich was studying the acoustic sounder, replaying the last few moments before the—what had happened? An accident? "Skipper, I'm not sure but I think we may have created our own earthquake."

"What? That can't be...can it?"

Golich went over the soundings again. "We were approaching some kind of discontinuity—see right here?" He pointed to the display. "Like a layer or inclusion zone. Remember when the geos told us there were some transform faults and fracture zones just below the Narrows?"

Dringoth said, "Vaguely."

Golich was figuring out the scenario as he replayed in his mind what must have happened. "It was ANAD in the borer module. The swarm disassembled just enough shale and quartzite and other rock to loosen up the fault. You know how Gibbons is...just a loose collection of rocks barely held together by its own gravity. Somehow, the fault slipped, shifted around and we were caught in the slide."

"So we did create our own earthquake."

The repairs took about three hours. Dringoth advised Libra what had happened. Surat promised to avoid the transform fault. From the coupler message, Dringoth could almost hear the sarcasm...and the gloating.

Ten hours later, a warning chime awakened Dringoth from a dreamless sleep in his stateroom. It was a message from Libra.

"URME, put it through." Dringoth winced as he banged his head on a stanchion above the bunk. Surat's mustachioed face appeared in a small puff of display over the bunk.

"Just thought you'd like to know, Captain Dringoth. Libra won our bet. We just punched through the bottom of the ice layer and we're in some kind of dense shale layer ourselves now. Probably the same thing you got stuck in. Libra now on course and underway to the target."

Dringoth started to reply, but an insistent beep interrupted. Golich's voice came over the 1MC. The TT1 was up on the command deck, monitoring Felix's progress.

"Fathometer sounding...it's programmed to go off when rock density drops below a certain threshold." Golich manipulated a small dial, then his fingers flew over a keyboard. "I'm cutting back the borer to half power...and dropping our track speed. Looking at the plot...density's dropping fast. Some kind of void must be just ahead."

Dringoth got dressed and made his way up the gangway to A deck.

The hum which had pervaded Felix for most of the past day now slackened to a muted vibration. Just as Golich dropped speed a little more, a shuddering lurch rattled through the ship's hull and high-pitched scraping and squealing could be heard just outside.

"Going to forward vid, sir—" Golich announced. The screen went from dark to crazy bouncing and careening, speckled with lights, then the luminescent globe of the borer lens materialized into view. Beyond the glare of the borer head, a deep black swelled into view.

"The Hollows—"Dringoth said quietly. "There it is."

"Dead ahead...dropping tracks to one quarter. I'm shutting the borer down for now. Looks like we've bored right into some kind of void."

Just then, they all felt the ship go weightless for a moment, as Felix dropped through the void and smashed into a rock formation below. The ship shuddered and creaked as she settled against the face of the rock.

The air was still for long moments.

Dringoth shook the dust off, wincing at some kind of laceration on his left shoulder. "Everyone all right? Crew, report back now."

One after another, they all called in: Golich, M'Bela, Acth:On'e, Yang and URME.

Dringoth checked the sounder, then the profiler. "Where the hell are we?"

Golich took a peek out the side porthole, then stabbed a button on his console. Strong floodlights from Felix's forward hull illuminated the void around them.

"Looks like we're in some kind of narrow cavern. You know Gibbons is full of these places...caves, tunnels, mazes, ancient lava tubes. We must have bored right into one."

M'Bela had been checking the cat's hull. "Hull still intact, sir. Pressure down a bit, but within the safe zone. No further breaches that I can detect. Our repairs seemed to have held."

"Great. What about—"

But Dringoth's words were interrupted by M'Bela from the Search and Surveillance console aft of them. "Captain, deco wakes strong and close aboard...readings converging on bearing oh eight five...off to our starboard."

"Find out what Libra's seeing."

A few minutes' parley between the cats determined that Libra had punched into the same void/cavern, some three hundred meters away, but she hadn't been damaged in the fall. Comparing readings and sensor indications, both Temporal Sensor specialists concurred: whatever it was, the source of GIDECO was nearby, possibly in the same cavern.

Dringoth thought for a moment. "If we start up again, we may just collapse this void on top of both of us. I think the cats can handle it but I'd rather not try it."

URME pointed out, "Sir, studying Queenie's profiler readings seems to indicate our target may well be inside this same cavern, perhaps at a lower elevation. Perhaps, we could egress in hypersuits and recon on foot?"

Dringoth thought that a good idea. "I like it. Okay, let Libra know what we're doing. Queenie, you and Yang are with me. We're taking a little hike. Golich, Acth:On'e and URME will stay with the cat for now. Let's go."

Suit-up and egress through Felix's lockout took an hour. Advised of their intentions, Surat agreed that Libra would join the search party. Half an hour later, a platoon of time jumpers clad in armored hypersuits assembled on a sloping shelf of rock between the two cats.

Surat pointed in the direction of their target. The cavern was black as night on that heading, and footing was treacherous with ice and loose sand or gravel.

Libra's commander noted the slope. "Ground drops away pretty sharply up ahead, Dringoth. Maybe we ought to use suit boost. My TS tech says GIDECO's that way, somewhere down below us."

"Let's get as detailed a sounding as we can before we go anywhere," Dringoth suggested.

Acoustic pulses produced a rough outline of what lay ahead and below them. The void was shaped like a bent teardrop, curving down at an ever-increasing slope for hundreds of meters below their elevation.

Whatever the Gibbons Decoherence Object was, it was down there.

"Okay," Dringoth commanded, "Felix crew, light off. And keep your helmet lamps on low. I don't want too much glare as we go down."

Libra's team did the same and, one after another, the small party of hypersuit-clad time jumpers fired off their suit boosters. Compressed nitrogen gas thrusters along their suit legs lifted each of them a meter above the ground and they descended into the dark chasm slowly, carefully dropping down what seemed to become a near-vertical shaft of rock.

Surat's sensor tech called out the approach. "Deco wake signal growing stronger. Advise adjusting course three degrees to port...."

The search party shifted left and descended further on boost deeper into the opaque depths of the void.

Yang's sounder beeped in her helmet earphones. "Pinging ground coming up...seventy meters below us."

"Signal still growing stronger," the Libra tech added.

It was Yang who figured out what the crazy profiler outlines on her instruments were telling her. "Point source directly below us...some kind of object. Approximately twenty-five meters main dimension, some kind of added echoes from the edges."

Carefully, one by one, the search party alighted on pebbly ground, slick with ice. It was M'Bela who shone her helmet lamps on the object first.

There were audible gasps around the comm circuit.

"What the hell--?"

"My God, what is that?"

"It's a—"

"Some kind of ship, maybe?"

The ship...the object...looked like a giant Christmas tree ornament, lying on its side. Conical projections extended into shadows fore and aft, on either end of the bulbous, mostly spherical mid-section. A thick patina of dust caked the entire structure; clearly, the thing had lain there for a very long time.

"Clearly a ship of some kind," Surat decided. He motioned his sensor tech forward. "Can you get a reading on the hull...looks like it was breached along the equator."

Libra's sensor tech was Nuwen Kharg. Kharg eased forward through ankle deep dust, slipping on the ice and probed the object with his sounder. "Sir, my read shows no clear differentiation on the material, but it's showing isotopic dating that can't be right...something like two point five million years...hundreds of thousands of decaterrs. Could be instrument failure...let me run a diagnostic."

"Your instrument may be right after all," Dringoth said. Cautiously, he pushed by Kharg and went straight up to the hull, experimentally touching the outer plates. "Surat, didn't T2 put out some kind of report a few years ago—probably archived now—about the early Coethi encounters? That they first used actual ships in early time jumping...before the swarm could manage temporal shifts as a swarm."

"You think this may be an early Coethi jumpship?" Surat was openly skeptical. "Time Guard didn't have a lot of intel behind that supposition, just theories. Nobody ever saw an actual Coethi ship of any kind. My guess is such things don't exist. T2 fairy tales, if you ask me."

Something caught Dringoth's eyes...maybe a reflection. A glint off something solid inside the hull breach. Startled, he backed away quickly. "Queenie, Yang, power up your HERF guns and get up here. Shine a stronger light inside—"

Surat was more cautious. "Take it easy, Captain. Give that thing some room...we don't know what this contraption is."

As ordered, Yang and M'Bela came forward carefully. Yang twisted her helmet lamp to put more light inside the breach. Piles of gear had spilled out of the breach, littering the cavern floor, now nearly buried in dust. Nobody had any idea what the gear was but it looked old, rusted and shattered, like discarded junk.

"Right there," Dringoth said. "That direction."

Yang shone her light. The shadows parted and for a second, it was clear what had caught Dringoth's eye.

"It's a body," Yang muttered. She shivered in spite of herself. "In a suit—"

Dringoth climbed partway through the breach, perched precariously on a piece of the gear, which wobbled under his boot. He steadied himself by holding onto the edge of the hull breach.

"It is indeed. And it looks..." He swallowed hard. "It seems to be human...or was."

***

# Chapter 2: "The Hollows"

"The past cannot be cured."

Queen Elizabeth I

Gibbons' Grotto, orbiting K-World

The Hollows

Time Stream T-001 (2814 CE)

T-date: 002-02-25

It was TACTRON who came up with the name for the whole enterprise: Operation Lodestar. Once a better access shaft had been bored down from the surface and a lift installed, the cavern of the ancient ship became an investigation site overrun with bots and pallets of gear and thick ganglia of cables and time jumpers and brass up from K-World itself. Powerful lights staged in racks were placed around the cavern and the walls shored up and held with containment fields, to prevent any rock slides from burying everyone.

TACTRON assumed command of the entire operation, though not without occasional conflict and bruised egos with T2. Time Guard Intelligence sent one Jump Captain Kemal bin Salah to conduct detailed and systematic surveys of the ship and its interior, logging, videoing and assaying every square centimeter of the wreckage inside and out for its intelligence value.

The mummified remains of the apparently human corpse found inside the ship were carefully removed and transported in a biowebbed sarcophagus to the Lodestar command center on the surface, where the entire ravine of the Northern Narrows had become a small town dotted with domes, habs, huts, sheds, shacks, shelters and other enclosures.

Through it all, theories spun thick among the investigators about what the ship was, whose it was, where it had come from and how a mummified human came to be entombed in an alien ship buried under half a kilometer of rock and ice on Gibbon's Grotto.

Dringoth still had duties with testing and tweaking of the Time Twister topside, but one day he came down with his XO Nathan Golich to witness some of the work. At a small open shed fifty meters uphill from the wreckage, he was on hand when the human corpse was finally extracted, laid carefully in a sealed container and rolled off to the lift.

Kemal bin Salah was nearby, manning an assay table littered with pieces and scraps still to be identified and cataloged. Below them, the shimmer of the containment field surrounding the ship reminded everyone not to approach too close.

Dringoth idly picked up a short length of something that looked like a pipe fragment. He started to examine the piece until the T2 chief investigator made a face and took it from him, carefully placing the piece back in a numbered position on the table.

"To answer your question, we don't know what that or any of this stuff is," bin Salah remarked. "We're trying to be careful and systematic about finding out."

"I didn't ask but I was wondering," Dringoth said. "Does T2 still think this is, or was, some kind of Coethi vessel?"

Bin Salah shrugged, fiddled with his moustache. "Officially, no comment. We're still studying it, trying to put everything we find into context."

"And unofficially?"

A sly smirk came over the investigator's face. "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...."

"It must be a large feathered example of the waterfowl species Anatidae, no?"

Bin Salah pecked at a wristpad on his arm, scrolling down through pages of notes and pictures. "T2 always believed the Coethi were a nomadic race of bots from millions of years ago. You know the story: 'The Coethi are a distributed intelligence. They are a swarm of nanoscale robotic elements several light years in extent, drifting through space. The basic element of the Coethi is a nanobot. An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of incredible sophistication and complexity'...and so forth and so on."

"Quoting from Time Guard Official Archives...yeah, I had to memorize that at the Academy too. Conventional wisdom."

Bin Salah said, "I'm pretty sure we'll be rewriting all the textbooks once Lodestar's done. The ship wreckage you see has been definitively isotopically dated to about two million years in age. So somewhere back then when your great grandparents were swinging from African trees on old Urth, the Bugs were flitting around space and time in ships like this. That's what I think. Unofficially, that is."

Now Dringoth watched the sarcophagus being wheeled into the lift, well shrouded in its shimmering veil of containment. "And what about him...or her? How does a human being, if that's what that is, wind up in a two-million-year old Coethi ship...buried down here?"

"Ah, Captain, you do have a way of putting your finger right on the nub of our conundrum. I guess I would have to fall back on the official Time Guard response: who knows? That's what we're trying to find out." Bin Salah's voice went an octave lower and he leaned closer. "Just between you and me, we're starting a kind of autopsy on the remains tomorrow...away from everything and everybody else. Topside, in that clinic hab at the far end of the Narrows. DNA sequencing, if we can. Bone assay. Scans galore. Medbot inserts. Tissue samples, scrapes, cultures, the works. There's even talk of trying out a memory trace."

Dringoth's eyes widened. "Is that even possible? How old is that corpse?"

"Well, of course, we don't officially know but the intelligence value on what could possibly recovered by a memory trace is so great that we want to try it. It's risky; we had to get approval from the Secretary-General. We could wind up destroying or scrambling the very traces we're trying to follow. But—as to how old the poor thing is—" Bin Salah shrugged, put up his hands. "Take a guess. Your guess is as good as anyone else's. Maybe a thousand years--?"

Dringoth was about to ask another question, but Nathan Golich dropped by the table. Evelyn M 'Bela was with the commander; she'd just come down on the lift.

M'Bela handed a small tab to Dringoth. "Test results from the Twister, Skipper. We finished the all-up an hour ago...a few anomalies, but URME's on them now. We should be at Level 1 and green across the board by this evening, say by 1800 hours."

"Very well." Dringoth pocketed the tab. Golich and M'Bela eyed the pieces on the assay table curiously for a moment, until Dringoth shoo'ed them away. "Sorry, guys, you're not cleared."

Bin Salah added, "Classified Commandstar ULTRA 1."

Golich threw up his hands, backed away like he'd been shot. "Got it, sir."

Just then, TACTRON itself showed up, in human form more or less, but faintly translucent in the stark lighting that flooded the cavern. The para-human swarm entity was decked out in some kind of coveralls, but with his rank and insignia clearly embroidered on shoulder tabs.

"Ah, Dringoth...just the man I need." He waved an arm in the vicinity of dark corner of the cavern, toward several branching tunnels. "I'm getting up a little recon force for a survey of some of the side branches. Libra's giving me two. I need two from you...how about these jumpers?"

"This is my XO and my sensor tech, sir. They've still got work to do getting the Twister ready."

"Nonsense, you've got others that can handle that. Detail these two to me and have them assemble by that shed over there—" TACTRON waved at the small enclosure. "Once I've briefed the team, we'll drop containment and they can be off...just like jolts or scouts, eh? Should be fun."

Dringoth's eyes met Golich's. Nothing needed to be said. The XO's eyes said it all. Get me out of this.

"Very well...Golich, you and Queenie tell Cygnus what's up and then get your asses over there."

"You'll have full packs and equipment," TACTRON added. Then the Vice Chief drifted off to annoy yet another group on the other side of the recovery site.

"Sir, I—"

Dringoth held up a hand. "Save it. We're all outranked here. Just do what the, er, man, says."

Golich nodded and he and M'Bela headed over to the shed. TACTRON had a way of getting under everybody's skin.

There would be three recon teams, one from Cygnus, one from Libra and one from K-World itself, mostly recovery techs temporarily between jobs. TACTRON came by with final instructions.

"You'll have HERF guns and magpulsers for defense, vid and still imagers, sniffers, entomopters to scout ahead, sounders and each team has a full pack of ANAD for boring, digging, shoring and whatever you may need. Keep these bugs contained until you need them." A sly smile came over TACTRON's face, slightly blurred and smeared out as his config tried to keep up. "And be nice to them, okay? They're like my cousins."

Nobody laughed at his little joke.

Once the containment field was dropped, Golich and M'Bela buttoned up their hypersuits and hoisted up their packs and headed down the center branch, which quickly became black and cold and slippery with ice. Both jumpers turned on their helmet lamps and picked their way carefully ahead, finding purchase better along the walls, where M'Bela kept bumping into low-hanging stalactites of ice that smashed repeatedly into her face and shattered tinkling to the ground.

"Ouch, damn it! Jeez, Commander...what did I do to deserve this?"

"You joined Time Guard, that's what. Watch your footing, will you? I don't think these damned ANAD bots will do splints if you break an arm."

They trudged on, deeper and lower into tunnel, which narrowed and lowered, until they were both on their knees.

M'Bela stopped to get some breath. "Suit boost won't do any good in this place. How far down does TAC-head want us to go, anyway?"

"I don't know," came a thin voice from up ahead. "Sometimes, I wonder whose side TACTRON's on...hey, Queenie, you see that?"

"See what?"

"There's some kind of faint light, like it's coming right through the wall up ahead. Let me—"

She heard scraping, grunting, heavy breathing. "What exactly are you doing, Commander?"

"Trying to unload and launch my ANAD...get through this wall...it's like there's some kind of light backlit on the other side...what the hell is this stuff anyway?"

"I'll come down," M'Bela said. She went feet first, banging, sliding and careening her way against the hard stone of the walls. The sudden drop at the end startled her and she slammed right into Golich's back, nearly knocking him over. "Sorry, sir—" then she saw what he had seen.

The walls seemed sheer and translucent, like a veil but still rock, paper thin rock. On the other side, a bright light pulsated and throbbed, casting an ethereal glow on the walls behind them. The light was no bigger than a fist, but fierce blue-white and definitely beating like a heart to some unknown rhythm.

"Jeez," said M'Bela. "What kind of cave has translucent rock?"

"Hey, what do you expect? It's the Hollows. Nothing makes sense down here. Get out your ANAD capsule. If we both launch, the buggers should be able to bore through this pretty quickly."

M'Bela extracted a small capsule from her web belt and gave it to Golich. With one capsule in each hand, the commander thumbed a small control stud on each and opened the port. Instantly, the dark void was filled with a pulsating mist, which drifted over to the wall and began immediately disassembling atoms. Soon, a bright orb of light spread out across the rock veil and in minutes, a breach had been opened. The ANAD bots ceased operation and all committed atomic seppuku, as programmed. A steaming, oblong opening, about a meter and a half in diameter, remained.

"You outrank me, sir," M'Bela suggested, stepping aside.

Golich glared back at her. "Thanks. Here goes...." He broke off some remaining chunks of rock and stepped through, his hypersuit scraping against the edges. M'Bela followed, accepting his hand to keep her steady as she entered the smaller cavern.

The light which at first seemed like a sphere, now had taken on a slightly misshapen, even lumpy appearance. It was bright enough that both time jumpers had to dial up their helmet shields to filter out its radiance. It continued pulsating, almost throbbing in a hypnotic rhythm.

Neither of them wanted to get any closer.

Golich picked up a small stone and heaved it toward the light.

Straight away, the light erupted in a blinding flash, a kaleidoscopic halo of rainbow colors bursting out like a slow-motion explosion. Startled, both time jumpers backed off, shielding their faces with their arms, in spite of their faceplates.

There was no sign of the stone.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" M'Bela asked.

"Mm-hmm," Golich muttered. "We studied this at the Academy...remember? Old man Jellicoe, I believe. An Evans-Klein fissure."

M'Bela shook her head, a useless gesture in a hypersuit. "A rip in spacetime."

"I can hear old man Jellicoe now: 'A confluence of interfering time streams, created by excessive quantum vibrations at the Planck level.'" I've heard of them. Never seen one before."

M'Bela was already pecking at buttons on her wristpad. "I don't plan on getting any closer, do you? Let's get some vids and pictures and get the hell out of here."

Golich didn't argue. When the fissure had been well documented, both of them stepped back into the branching tunnel they had followed down and climbed back up to the main cavern.

"Best to let the brass figure this one out," Golich told M'Bela. "This is way above my pay grade."

The Lodestar command center was a semi-cylindrical pressure enclosure, with outlying modules for offices, labs, test chambers and shops, nestled next to an ice ridge in the lee of a towering mountain at the far end of the Narrows. One officer from K-World had pointed out that late in the day, in low shadows from the sun Sturdivant 2180, and viewed from the right angle, the ice ridge resembled a giant open mouth, with teeth ready to crunch down on all the flag weenies and their staffs that inhabited the center.

When he heard this story, Monthan Dringoth commented slyly. "We should be so lucky."

Dringoth and Libra's skipper, Vijay Surat, had been summoned to a briefing at Lodestar center, ordered by TACTRON himself. The Vice-Chief scheduled the briefing at 1600 hours, to go over early results from investigation of the wrecked Coethi ship and its strange mummified human remains, and the new Evans-Klein fissure that had been discovered deeper inside the Hollows.

Kemal bin Salah, of Time Guard Intelligence, would start the briefing.

The briefing theater was cramped, with an oval table in the middle. Bin Salah brought up a series of 3-D vids on the display pedestal in the middle of the table.

"Best isotopic dating indicates that the ship is likely of Coethi origin and is at least two million years old." The T2 officer indicated a tray of object pieces under a small protective shield next to the pedestal. "These are scraps from the hull. T2 believes the ship to be of Coethi origin due to its interior layout, which is consistent with the presumed bioforms the Coethi took that long ago. To the best of our knowledge, the Coethi were always a nomadic race of nanoscale robotic elements, at least after the own sun went supernova. The ship is laid out to support operation by life forms, if I can call them that, that are an amorphous, distributed swarm of individual, programmable robots. Physical evidence collected from the ship to date best supports this theory. Currently, we're trying to probe their ship control and navigation system and find some kind of onboard computer, but T2 believes many of these functions were performed by the swarms themselves, and not the ship."

At bin Salah's description of a typical Coethi swarm, all eyes inadvertently shifted to TACTRON itself. The Vice-Chief didn't react at first, but there soon came a faint brightening around the edges of its config, as if its 'feathers' had somehow been ruffled.

However, TACTRON was skilled at deflecting attention from itself. "If the swarms controlled and navigated the ship themselves, without help from the ship itself, what's the purpose of the ship?"

Here, bin Salah assumed a thoughtful pose. The 3-D vid shifted to a notional caricature of what a typical Coethi bot looked like, an image that had been knocking around Time Guard for decades.

"An excellent question, sir. There are several theories. Perhaps, the ship had capabilities that the swarm itself didn't have...such as long-duration travel, even time travel as we have. Or near-lightspeed velocities. We know that the mother swarm itself is a slow-moving formation, relatively speaking. Within our Archives is intelligence indicating that the Coethi originated on an actual homeworld, somewhere in the M75 cluster in Sagittarius. The data show that the homeworld was apparently destroyed by a nearby supernova and the surviving elements dispersed into space in a sort of interstellar diaspora. As we humans reckon universe time, this happened at least 4-6 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was approximately 7 billion years after the Big Bang. So the ship apparently dates from this era."

TACTRON seemed mollified by that. Now Surat had a question.

"What about the human remains discovered? Is T2 certain that these remains are actually human?"

Here, bin Salah cast a meaningful glance at TACTRON, who offered only a blank face back.

"Captain, T2's not certain of anything here at the GIDECO site. The remains appear to be human, but we're running DNA analysis and molecular scans to the greatest depths our instruments allow. If the Vice-Chief here will approve it—" bin Salah nodded toward TACTRON, "I'd like to try a memory trace too. "The molecules are considerably degraded but there's still a chance our tracer ANADs can sniff out enough glutamate to build a trace we can interpret."

TACTRON gave that some thought, though Dringoth often wondered how you could ever tell that a swarm entity was having a thought.

Then: "Consider it approved. I want to be on hand."

"Of course, sir. I'll make the arrangements when this briefing is over."

Dringoth spoke up. "How old do you believe this human is, or was?"

Bin Salah shrugged. "We have only rough estimates, based on isotopic scans of bone and general molecular layout. Right now, we're saying this person lived about eight hundred to a thousand years ago."

Surat was skeptical. "Then how do you explain a thousand-year old man in a Coethi ship two million years old...and buried inside the Hollows of Gibbons' Grotto?"

Bin Salah smiled, like a teacher with a wayward student. "We don't. T2 officially has no idea how this happened. That's the biggest mystery."

"That and this Evans-Klein fissure my crew discovered," Dringoth said.

Bin Salah's face seemed pained at Dringoth's description. "We're not sure if what your people found is an Evans-Klein. That's still to be determined."

"What else could it be?"

Bin Salah shrugged. "Point well taken, Captain. But the investigation is ongoing. I'm not going to commit to an explanation without more data and tests. There are other such fissures known around Uman space; you know about these, I'm sure. Mostly catalogued, but none was ever suspected inside Gibbon's Grotto, so close to K-World and the center of the Alliance. That is worrisome, for sure."

TACTRON seemed visibly uneasy with all the talk about the fissure. Dringoth had spent enough time around swarms in Time Guard to know when they were annoyed. Extra pops and flashes coursed around the configuration, as if a stone had been thrown into a lake. Something had disturbed TACTRON and the Vice Chief was having a hard time hiding it. He made a concerted effort to slightly alter his config to conceal anything unusual.

"Perhaps, we should take a step back and focus on the bigger picture," he said to bin Salah. "The strategic picture, what all this means."

Bin Salah had seen the same thing Dringoth had seen. He licked his lips. "Yes, sir...of course, sir. T2's developing an overall strategic summary as we speak but the real story as we see it is that the ship, the human remains and the presumed Evans-Klein fissure all point to one inescapable conclusion: evidence of a long-standing and recurring Coethi infiltration into the Sturdivant system. The Bugs may well be around here even now and in large numbers, possibly disguised as other lifeforms or structures, since we know that nanobotic swarm entities have that capability. Excuse me, sir...present company excepted—" He made a quick apology to TACTRON, who tried to hide even more annoyance.

The briefing went on for awhile, but already Dringoth knew what he was going to say to his XO Nathan Golich, when he got back to.

URME was right to be suspicious about TACTRON. Something's going on.

TACTRON dismissed the briefing when bin Salah was finished. "Nothing in this room leaves this room," the Vice-Chief warned the others. "All of this is classified COMMANDSTAR Ultra Level 1."

The briefing broke up. Dringoth conferred with Surat for a moment just outside the command center airlock. Bin Salah had already departed for a shuttle back to K-World. TACTRON had exited the Lodestar center for his own ship at the other end of the Narrows.

Dringoth pulled Surat aside.

"TACTRON kind of squashed talk about the fissure...did you notice that? He was disturbed about something. You could see it in his config."

Surat nodded. "I saw it. I just figured he had a lot on his mind...or processor, or whatever he has."

"Something's not quite right with the Vice Chief," Dringoth insisted. "I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe there's a bug in his config processor. He was all riled up in there and he couldn't quite hide it."

"Even if you're right," Surat pointed out, "what could you do about it? I mean, he is the Vice-Chief of Time Stream Directorates. So what are you going to do...request a meeting with Commandstar himself?"

Dringoth snorted. "Fat chance. But it may come to that. I think somebody should check this out, what with T2 thinking the Bugs have been infiltrating the Sturdivant system for so long."

"I'll make a note of it," Surat said, sarcastically. "Dinner tonight? Mess ship, say about 1900 hours?"

"You're on."

Both captains went back to their ships.

Monthan Dringoth had just dressed from a shower in his stateroom when URME buzzed in with a message; the light flashing red, meaning urgent. Disgusted at his Temporal Fire Director's sense of timing, Dringoth punched the button.

"What? I'm due at the mess hall in half an hour, URME."

"Sir, I've been detecting an unusual quantum signal locally the last half hour."

"No kidding, URME. And how many ships do we have parked in the Narrows today...maybe a dozen. I'd be surprised if there weren't a blizzard of signals. The air must be thick with signals. So what?"

URME's artificially-generated voice had acquired a note of...what was it? Urgency? Pique, maybe? Vexation? Swarms like URME could make their voice sound like a million different sounds. This was on purpose.

"No, sir, I made adjustments for that. This signal is some kind of burst transmission, on a coupler channel far too high and too entangled to be routine Time Guard traffic. Plus it's decrypted. Normally, I would expect that. But routine Time Guard traffic can be decrypted; I'm programmed with authentication keys and routines for two thousand, one hundred and one different encryption schemes. No, sir, this is different...quite different in fact. It's like no other Time Guard comm protocol I've ever seen, detected or been programmed for."

Dringoth was trying to stuff a belly grown two sizes too large after so many years of time jumping and officers' fare. "Well, don't get your processor in a wad, URME. Maybe the Guard's using a new comm scheme locally. Lodestar is a sensitive project. Can you determine where this signal's coming from?"

"Yes, sir, I can. It's coming from TACTRON's ship, at the other end of the Narrows. I'm certain of it."

Kemal bin Salah tapped a short sequence of instructions on the keyboard. Inside the containment cylinder, ANAD responded to the command, readying itself for launch.

"ANAD reports ready in all respects," came the high-pitched voice.

Bin Salah suppressed a slight smile. "The little guy sounds like a teenager on his first date."

"Sounds pretty eager to me, sir, " Jump Master 1st class Luis Villa admitted. Villa was alongside the interface controls, watching everything bin Salah did.

Commandstar, commanding officer of Time Guard, rubbed a hand across morning stubble on his chin. "More eager than I am. You sure this'll work, Captain?"

Bin Salah nodded. "It is a new technique but we've proven it at the lab many times. I've trained Jump Master Villa here in all the details. Shall we get started?"

He moved aside, indicating that Villa should take his position at the controls.

"Gives me the creeps, I don't mind telling you," Captain Dringoth admitted. "Invading someone's mind like this—even if he has been dead a thousand years."

"It's just a high-powered lie detector," said Major Lofton, Security Branch chief.

"Let's get going," Commandstar growled. "If this mummy has anything about Coethi swarms, I want to know it. It's too late for legal niceties now. At this very moment, I've got TACTRON detailed to oversee recovery of anything pertinent from the ship below. Time is short, gentlemen. The Bugs are near, I can feel it. Permission to launch."

Strapped to a gurney next to the containment cylinder, the body had been treated and prepped for ANAD insertion. Their emaciated subject was surrounded by a fine mesh of sensors--the vascular grid--that would precisely locate ANAD inside the remains, once the mech was inserted.

Medtech Indira Burri patted down the incision that had been made in the mummy's neck. "Okay, sir, subject's prepped and ready."

Bin Salah handed her the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder. Inside, ANAD ticked over, ready to be launched.

"Steady even suction," Bin Salah reminded her. "ANAD, report status--"

The teenager's voice crackled over the circuit. "ANAD effectors safed for launch. All parameters normal. Internal bonds and states are stable. Sensors primed and registered. Core functions initialized...I'm ready to fly, fellows\--"

Bin Salah glanced up at Commandstar, an embarrassed smile on his lips. "The assembler uses a small percentage of his computational ability to simulate emotional states...sometimes, it correlates, er, inappropriately."

"Get on with it," Commandstar ordered.

"Vascular grid?" Bin Salah asked.

"Tracking, Captain," said Burri. She tuned the grid to pick up the mech as soon as it was inserted.

"Let's go, then."

The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the master replicant into what was left of the corpse's capillary network at high pressure. Villa watched his board and quickly got an acoustic pulse seconds later. He selected Fly-by-Stick to test out the controls. A few minutes' run on propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.

Bin Salah studied the sounder image. "Looks like you're ready for transit. You can force those cell membranes any time."

Villa told ANAD to probe for weak spots in a clump of lipids, clinging like a bunch of grapes in the middle of the wall. "I'll try there first--"

He steered ANAD toward a cleft in the membrane lipids, pulsing one of the carbene grabbers to twist a nearby molecule just so, then released the lipid and slingshot himself forward through the gap. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.

"Aortic cavity, Captain. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I'd say. Looks like we're in, more or less. Where are we going now?"

Start Fourier Transform;

Start Delacroix Transform;

Start Trace Matching....

...Macalvey shakes his head. "Fantastic engineering, if it's what I think it is. Acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin...the possibilities are endless. Synthesize enough of the right molecules and inject them across the synaptic gap here. You're basically in control of a nerve impulse."

Unnoticed by anyone, the swarm of Shiva mechs begins to re-orient themselves tail first toward ANAD. Their tail fiber penetrators quickly reconfigured, locking into attack position.

He is who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven.

Out of the corner of his eye, Winger sees the maneuver on the imager.

"Look out!" Gibbs sees it too. "He's changing position...all of 'em, coming at us--"

"I'm ready," Winger mutters. His fingers fly across the keyboard. Instantly, ANAD brings all its defensive mechanisms to attack position. It casts off the hematite shield and closes for battle.

Macalvey is stunned. "What the hell...it thinks you're HNRIV--"

"Or some kind of intruder," Winger says. "I've got to get closer, grab one of those jokers for analysis--"

As ANAD speeds forward, Shiva grows and retracts appendages and surface structure with blazing speeds. The outer membrane of the mech seethes with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twist, bond, twist again, rebond, break apart, recombine, straighten, undulate and whirl.

The gap between them vanishes and ANAD grapples with the nearest mech. Other mechs swarm to the battlefield.

Beside Nalinka's bed, the enkasa's voice rises and falls, repeating incantations in a shrill tongue.

Winger is stunned by the speed of the assault. A battalion of Shiva soon engulf ANAD. No time to replicate now...got to get free...signal daughters...Winger fires off a burst of instructions to gather all the daughters ANAD had replicated going in. It might be too late.

The imager screen shakes with the collision, then careens sideways.

Several minutes pass. The imager view vibrates with the ferocity of the attack. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whip across the screen. The water is soon choked with cellular debris. Shiva replicates several times, adding new molecule strings. It strips off electrons to make an armor shield of highly reactive chlorine atoms. In seconds, ANAD is immobilized by the chlorine sheath.

"I can't hold structure!" Winger yells. "I'm reconfiguring...shutting down peripheral systems!"

Sergeant Gibbs takes a place beside Winger at the interface controls. "Got to disengage, Boss...emergency truncation. Everything not critical. We've got to get ANAD out of there before we lose him!"

"I'm trying...but the damn mech's penetrated the signal path...if he cuts the link...."

"I know, I know...just keep trying, Jesus...internal bonds on main body structure weakening...I've lost all grappling capability...."

(The imager blurs, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments of hazy, out of focus visuals, all jumbled up. The speaker crackles with static--)

Luis Villa fiddled with his joystick, tried tweaking the gain on the signal. "Looks like we lost that trace, Captain. Just fizzled out."

Bin Salah glared in disgust at the IC panel. "Can you get it back?"

Villa shook his head. "Faded out, Captain...we didn't have a good gradient to follow. I'll backtrack--"

Lofton was there too, standing beside Dringoth, Surat and Commandstar. "Eerie, isn't it? Seeing things through another man's eyes."

"Gives me the creeps," Dringoth admitted.

"It seems to work well enough," Lofton said. "Couldn't tell you the theory behind it."

"It's a damn circus trick," Commandstar growled. "We can really play back someone's memories like a recording?"

"Not exactly, sir," said Villa. He was helping Burri sniff out new traces for ANAD to follow. "We just put ANAD inside the suspect and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in 'bloodhound' mode and go hunting."

"What exactly are you hunting for?"

"All humans make memories the same way. It's called Long-term Potentiation. One of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate...helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane--"

Bin Salah intervened. "Allow me. In plain English, sir, what it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the subject's brain, up to ten to fifteen days after the memory trace is laid down. In the last year, we've actually enhanced the technique to work on more ancient subjects, such as this one. We've been doing it experimentally in our K-World lab for the last six months. ANAD shuttles around inside the subject's head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. Everywhere that concentration is equal is a pathway, burned in, a memory trace. ANAD follows it, sends back data on whatever it finds--calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of stuff. We can re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces in this particular case. They're the easiest."

"It's sort of like painting somebody's portrait from their shadow," added Major Lofton. "I've been to the lab. They actually used me as a guinea pig too. Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like."

Commandstar was dubious. "Sounds pretty nebulous to me. And you really think this corpse is Dr. Irwin Frost, the Irwin Frost?"

Bin Salah took a deep breath. "We're not a hundred per cent certain, sir. But the DNA analysis, the archival research, possibly these memory traces, can help settle the question."

Commandstar was thoughtful, rubbing his bald head, fingering the upload jack that all Telitorians sported. "Hard to believe that this could be the father of all nanobotic technology, the father of the original ANAD. A relic from 22nd century Urth."

"I'm more interested in what this Shiva bot is," Bin Salah admitted. "Possibly early Coethi, or an ancestor. If that's so, that would mean Dr. Frost had encountered ancient Coethi elements even back then...what were they doing on old Urth? That's the real question."

Commandstar agreed. "Why did we just now lose the trace?"

"Unknown," said Bin Salah. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, managing ANAD's configuration, checking its parameters. "Somehow, we lost the trace...just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known point and start sniffing again."

Commandstar stared from the imager display to Frost's remains and back again. He half expected to see the thing twitch or move a leg or something. "So where is ANAD now?"

Bin Salah was keen to keep the upper hand in this demo. Villa and Burri occasionally drifted off into outer space with all their explanations. It took an old intel guy to keep their feet planted firmly on the ground. "Here's the vascular grid, General--" he fingered the IC display to the side of the imager. The grid was a 3-D iconic image of Frost's skull. "--I'd say...right about here...basal hippocampus region. Most of the swarm's about a hundred thousand microns anterior to the lateral septum."

"We're picking up something," Villa muttered. As Bin Salah watched over his shoulder, hoping to learn something more to impress Commandstar with, Villa steered through a dense bog of dendrites. Thickets of axon fibers clouded the imager, now slaved to ANAD's electromagnetic sounder. "--strong trace...this one's holding, looks like--"

"Stay with it," Bin Salah encouraged him. He leaned over across Villa, to massage ANAD's configuration, souping up the sensors.

"I'm altering config--" Villa said in a low voice. "It'll help us sort out the traffic--lots of chem around here--"

Burri noticed evidence of tissue breakdown; the containment field wouldn't be able to keep the corpse together in the lab atmosphere much longer. "We'd better hurry, if we're going to get anything out of this--"

"I'm trying, Indy." Villa glared at the imager, flexed his fingers around the hand controllers. He let ANAD finish changing config, noting that all the other trillion mechs slaved to the master had done likewise, then maneuvered the device into the lee of a dendritic 'breakwater'...sniffing for calcium, sodium, anything it could follow, grabbing molecules left and right, until at last, Villa cracked the barest hint of a smile. Deep inside the last remnants of the brain of Irwin Frost, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler blazed away at incredible speed, spasmodically sorting and advancing along the barest whiff of a chemical highway.

Seconds later, a green light illuminated alongside the screen. The sparky haze began to part--ANAD sent back a signal indicating readiness—

Start Trace Matching....

Wei Ming's face hardens. "What happened at Lion's Rock? You were supposed to have stopped them--"

Hands twitch nervously, kneading fingers so tightly they hurt. "You don't understand...there were factors beyond my control...Lieutenant Winger--

Wei Ming interrupts with a wave of her hand. Her face has changed again...morphed into something hard and impassive, an angry clown. Was it the light...or maybe the nanoderm patches again?

"This is no good." The undulations on her cheeks and forehead seem to settle down, taking on a new firmness. She frowns. "With one of our mechs, they will surely develop countermeasures."

"But it'll take some time--"

Now she is visibly angry. Her face kneads itself into a hard fist. Her cheeks bulge slightly, a lioness with a fresh kill in her mouth.

"They're not stupid. Don't make that mistake. You've made enough already." Her cheeks then return to normal planes, sleek and alabaster. "Serengeti must be allowed to develop and expand globally. The Project depends on it."

"Maybe if I knew more about--"

But she isn't listening. "You're being well-paid for your services. Yet you continue to fail us."

"I can't work miracles."

"Leave the miracles to us. Just do your part." Her voice deepens, combining new frequencies, new tones, now multiple echoes overlapping. "You must sabotage any more efforts to develop countermeasures. ANAD must not be allowed to interfere with the Project. This is a critical time now."

A hot flash of nerves. Throat constriction....

"That's not the agreement...I only agreed to provide intelligence, not sabotage. It's too dangerous--"

"Your mission is changed...as of now. You'll be--"

Luis Villa tweaked ANAD again, but the trace was gone.

"What happened?" Commandstar asked. He was growing more and more annoyed with this harebrained stunt.

"ANAD lost the trail, sir," Villa said. "I'm trying to get it back now..."

Bin Salah changed ANAD's config slightly. "I'll see if dropping a radical off this arm helps--"

"Captain bin Salah, just how reliable is this stunt? How do you know this isn't something out of the man's imagination?"

"That would take some explaining, sir, but the basic answer is in the details of the glutamate molecule, and the trail it lays down. There are subtle differences when the long-term potentiation is activated from direct sensory input--from external events, as it were--and when it's internally generated. We've tuned ANAD pretty finely to be able to detect the differences."

Commandstar gave that some thought. "Even after a thousand years? Hard to believe. How much further can you go with this? Can you reconstruct everything?"

Bin Salah shrugged. "Practically speaking, no. The more convoluted the traces become--the more they become abstracted into higher levels of the brain--the harder it is to follow them. There's a practical limit on the concentrations of glutamate that ANAD can follow. Usually memory traces older than a few weeks are pretty much impossible to follow consistently. Of course, we're also dealing with traces that are very faint and growing fainter. A thousand years is a long time. And there is the matter of damage as well."

"Damage? What kind of damage?"

Bin Salah wanted to be precise in what he said. "Every time ANAD follows a trail of glutamate molecules, he slightly damages the molecules in the process of examining them. We call it a fragmentation trail. The subject's memories are slightly altered with each probe."

"So this can't be done accurately again, after this probe?"

The T2 officer nodded imperceptibly, admitting the truth of what Commandstar was saying. "Let's say the accuracy of the reconstruction suffers with each 'reading' of the trail."

Major Lofton was anxious to continue to exam. "Sir, every bit of evidence helps the investigation. May I remind the General that this corpse may hold information vital to defeating the Coethi. Now is not the time to be squeamish--begging the General's pardon--about molecule fragments."

Commandstar glared at Lofton as if he were some kind of slug to be stepped on. "I agree with the Major. Continue the exam."

ANAD sniffed for the better part of three hours. When bin Salah became convinced that the corpse's hippocampal tissues were scrambled enough and deteriorating fast enough to prevent any more accurate readings, Commandstar ordered the examination terminated. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something move...the lab bench...it was breaking down right before his eyes.

"Captain...what's with the bench...have you got some loose bots in here...a containment breach--?"

Bin Salah had seen it too. Now the lab bench was dispersing in a blur right in front of them. "Jump Master Villa, didn't you secure the—"

The explosion, when it came, had long been known in the lore of ANAD history as a big bang. The bench disappeared in an expanding wave of mist, flickering, popping and pulsating, as the swarm swelled to occupy the entire lab.

It was Medtech Burri who first saw the pressure spike from the corner of the lab, a fraction of a second before the swarm ballooned into the room.

"Ah...Captain, something seems to be--"

"LOOK OUT--!!" Villa's scream filled the examining room.

No one was quite sure when the first effects of the attack were felt. The debriefs later seemed to converge on Villa and Burri, working hard to tweak ANAD's templates for a combat extraction from the corpse and quick re-config.

Both techs noticed it right away; a shrill keening high-freq tone, almost beyond human hearing, yet irritating in a vaguely unsettling way. Both wore hypervests, partial rigs that provided some protection, and their sensors registered the attack right away. Burri's panicked distress call from the corner of the room as the nanomechs bored into her rig and arms would linger in everybody's memory for a long time. The other tech, Jump Master Villa, reported a different effect--just as panicky--when he found he couldn't squirm away along the floor as fast as he wanted to...by then, the swarm was thick enough to form a barely visible fog, almost a blanket, muffling the examining theater with exponentially thickening mist. It was something you could barely see but every sensor and caution alarm was going off in hypervests all over the place and you sure as hell could feel the resistance to movement.

"Mass assault swarm!" somebody yelled. It was Dringoth's voice. The Cygnus captain was already on one knee, swatting madly at the whizzing, spinning cloud of assembler mechs that had engulfed him.

"Bond breakers!" yelled Surat. Libra's captain had been wrestling a containment pod into the room when his arm servos quit. The pod slipped and slid out under its own weight, pinning him against the wall. "---aaarrrggghhh!!"

"They've gone airborne!" Dringoth recognized the scenario, too late. They'd wargamed it enough times at the Academy. "Fall back...fall back! Go to TACREP 1!"

Tactical Response One was already loaded into every time jumper's hypersuit interface. Dringoth pressed a few buttons on his wrist keypad and pushed through the thick spongy mist, struggling hard to make it to the hall outside, helping Surat, Villa, Burri, Commandstar.

They didn't have long to act. TACREP called for the unit to do an emergency opposed-force setup of the ANAD system. Retrieve the master, now still deeply embedded inside the corpse, get containment going, re-establish comm links, and counter-program like hell to beat back the assault before it consumed everything.

The worst thing was that bin Salah and Commandstar didn't even have hypersuits to protect them.

Dringoth helped Commandstar get upright. Already, he had suffered burns and lacerations around his face and neck. "This is no good--" His own hypersuit was minus a few servos and he was wobbly to boot but at least it offered some protection. "Sir, I don't know what we're facing here—

Commandstar gritted his teeth, rubbed his head. "It's TACTRON, I know it is. I'd recognize that buzzing sound anywhere. Something or someone's turned TACTRON—"

"Sir, I can't hack fast enough to counter-attack. This stuff is unbelievable...somebody's really juiced up the rep rate. If it is TACTRON, somebody's really been tinkering under the hood."

" ...we've got to get out of here...unless your jumpers can give us some breathing room."

Dringoth got on the crewnet. "CC1 to 1st TD Battery...fall back! Fall back at once! Fall back to the ship--"

He slogged toward the door, through spongy mist a few paces and then made another call. "CC1 to DPS1. Alicia, get your HERF guns spooled up and get your ass down to the command center! It might not work but we need all the help we can get!"

"Already on line, Captain!" It was Yang's strained voice, from Cygnus. "I'm coming as fast as I can...we had to secure the ship first--"

"Alicia, fire short bursts of RF! See if you can clear us a bubble or a zone around this command center! I'm not sure we can get back to the ship otherwise! And make it quick...Commandstar is injured...possibly infested! We've got to get him out of here."

Indeed, several staff members had already been lost to the swarm. Their disfigured corpses lay in crumpled heaps along the corridor.

"CC1, we've now lost containment!" It was Acth:On'e coming down the Narrows in the cat.

"Forget the pods!" Dringoth came back. "Form up around me if you can. DPS is going to try and stun these buggers with a big kick of RF, give us a chance to get the hell out of here!"

Seconds later, the drone of the HERF pulse gun blasted through the corridors. A thick breeze of momentarily stunned nanomechs clattered against Dringoth's hypersuit. When the second pulse shook the building and he felt the thermal of high-frequency RF wash over them, Dringoth willed himself into motion, half carrying, half-dragging Commandstar. The first seizure had died off and his body was now limp.

"Fall back now! To the cat...Acth:On'e's on the way, fallback to the ship...everybody--on the double...DPS, give 'em another shot!"

Another drone-snap of radio energy and another wave of heat. Dringoth slogged through the mist, kicking and pummeling blindly, pulling his load with him. He no longer had time to wonder about bin Salah, Surat or the others.

At last, blinded and disoriented, he stumbled through the corridors and the chaos of the lobby, making the nearest lockout by the outer wall, cycled the airlock and practically crashed into the crew compartment of the cat. A flurry of hands helped him hoist Commandstar inside, rolling him to the back, where he curled up like a baby. The rest of the Battery was there--a sorry, bedraggled lot...weary, frightened, half-eaten hypersuited time jumpers, scrambling against heavy resistance, scrambling just to pitch headlong onto the floor of the crew bay in the cat's rear. Already the whine of her electric motors was drowning out everything else.

"One more pulse, DPS! Max power...leave it on and let it burn out! And get your tails in gear, folks! You'll only have a few seconds."

The Defense and Protective Systems tech Alicia Yang cranked up the HERF gun she had hurriedly erected in the lockout of Lodestar's command center and let it pulse at maximum power. Rolling thunderclaps shook the entire structure and the rest of the team stumbled as they clawed their way into the safety of the cat, but the pulse gun did the trick...momentarily flooding every cubic inch of the command center enclosure with high energy radio waves. It was shock therapy for an unknown swarm in mindless exponential overdrive, replicating and disassembling matter at blinding speeds. Moments later, the command center enclosure collapsed in a cloud of dirt and ice chips.

Just enough shock therapy to stun the swarm into a stupor, just long enough to weaken the resistance to movement and give 1st TD a fighting chance to evacuate what had now become a combat zone.

Behind them, they had no choice but to leave the wreckage of the center, filled with groaning staff and lab techs caught in the storm. Dringoth gave them a moment's thought, but it couldn't be helped. They didn't have enough of ANAD left to isolate the area or immobilize the enemy swarm. And the hard vacuum outside would make the end pretty quick for those left behind.

Maybe it'll just burn itself out, he hoped.

Struggling, whining, overheating and shuddering from the thunderclaps of collapsing HERF fields, cat rumbled off into the dark night sky, kissing the ice berms at each sharp turn, as they spiraled down the bumpy Narrows toward Cygnus, finally turning south and west and slowly but surely putting distance between themselves and the nanomech cloud. Dringoth eyed Nathan Golich warily as he fought to keep control of the vehicle on the steep and slick winding path. Only when the buffeting and the sonic pulses and the high keening wail of nanomech hell finally died off, did he finally begin to relax.

The very first thing he did was quick-disconnect the hypersuit helmet, yank the hat off and gulp in tons and tons of cold, greasy grottocat air.

It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.

Then he crawled through all the groaning bodies down the gangway to the rear of the vehicle, to see about Commandstar.

Still weak but growing more alert, Commandstar shook his head sadly, causing all the tubes, cables and IV drips to clank loudly in Cygnus' tiny sick bay. His real name was Argol Musin V4 and he had been appointed to the position of commanding officer of Time Guard several years ago by the Security Council. Musin—Commandstar—was Telitorian, same as Acth:On'e. The TM1 (Temporal Engineering and Maintenance Officer) spent ten minutes alone with Musin, recalling old times on Telitor. Like all Telitorians, both were transhumans, committed to uploading their minds, memories and consciousness to new and improved bodies every five years. The V-numbers denoted versions of the upload.

Acth:On'e left sick bay just as Dringoth appeared. The Captain had news for Commandstar.

"Sir, the good news from URME is that you'll recover in time from the swarm attack. We'll still have to do a final medbot insert—URME has the right configs for that—just to make sure all the bad guys have been removed or neutralized."

Commandstar felt gingerly at some nanoderm patches on his cheek. "And the bad news?"

Dringoth coughed. "Perhaps not that bad, sir. The Secretary-General of the Alliance is coming...in fact, her shuttle just landed. My XO is picking her up in the cat."

Commandstar winced at the prospect of hosting even more politicos and their suck-up staff weenies. "Officially, I'll just call that news I can use, Captain."

The S-G came into sick bay a few minutes later. Kemal bin Salah, still recovering from the big bang at the Lodestar command center, accompanied her.

Dr. Anika Steen-Dellarosa was a big-boned redhead, with athletic arms and legs, and a piercing set of blue eyes that some said were actually sensors able to see right through you. Nervous laughs were offered with that, but given the nanobotic tech available on K-World, nobody could be absolutely sure of that either. Best not to take any chances.

The S-G looked over Commandstar like a worried mother. "I hear you got swarmed, Argol. Must have been exciting."

Commandstar shrugged, setting off more clinking of IV tubes. URME had dropped the bioweb surrounding the gurney before the S-G had shown up.

"A few burns. Lacerations. That sort of thing. Cygnus' doc is an angel, you know, one of the URME units. They don't fool around when it comes to med cases like me. Strict on protocol, strict on doctor's orders. And no bedside manner either."

The S-G motioned for bin Salah to come closer. "T2's finished its investigation into what happened at the command center."

"Was it TACTRON?"

Bin Salah answered that. "Officially, that's to be determined. There is evidence that the body was booby-trapped. Residual bots left inside the corpse that somehow got activated."

The S-G turned somber. "Ten casualties, among the staff. Three fatalities. The rest are like you...swarmed and stung by bots that erupted inside that chamber. It could have been worse. Thankfully, Cygnus and Libra both were able to counter-swarm and blast the bugs with effective weapons."

Dringoth had been hanging back by the sickbay hatch. "Madame Secretary, I should point out something T2 may not be aware of."

Steen-Dellarosa turned slightly. "Yes, Captain--?"

"Our onboard URME came to me a day ago with something I tended to discount at the time. URME—" he motioned the para-human swarm entity, "come in here. Replay how you discovered that strange signal."

The Unit Reserve Memory Entity entered sickbay, then spalled off a stream of bots from his left hand. The small cloud formed itself into a photon lens, like a display screen embedded in a small cloud, hovering in the mid-air over the end of Commandstar's bed.

"Initiating playback now, sir—"

"Sir, I've been detecting an unusual quantum signal locally the last half hour."

"No kidding, URME. And how many ships do we have parked in the Narrows today...maybe a dozen. I'd be surprised if there weren't a blizzard of signals. The air must be thick with signals. So what?"

URME's artificially-generated voice had acquired a note of...what was it? Urgency? Pique, maybe? Vexation? Swarms like URME could make their voice sound like a million different sounds. This was on purpose.

"No, sir, I made adjustments for that. This signal is some kind of burst transmission, on a coupler channel far too high and too entangled to be routine Time Guard traffic. Plus it's decrypted. Normally, I would expect that. But routine Time Guard traffic can be decrypted; I'm programmed with authentication keys and routines for two thousand, one hundred and one different encryption schemes. No, sir, this is different...quite different in fact. It's like no other Time Guard comm protocol I've ever seen, detected or been programmed for."

Dringoth was trying to stuff a belly grown two sizes too large after so many years of time jumping and officers' fare. "Well, don't get your processor in a wad, URME. Maybe the Guard's using a new comm scheme locally. Lodestar is a sensitive project. Can you determine where this signal's coming from?"

"Yes, sir, I can. It's coming from TACTRON's ship, at the other end of the Narrows. I'm certain of it."

The playback ended. URME then described the precise characteristics of the signal.

When URME was done, bin Salah shook a fist. "This fits in with some other scraps of intel T2's been processing lately." He looked around the sickbay, his eyes settling on the S-G's deep blue 'sensors.' "It makes sense now, don't you see? Somehow, some way, either TACTRON's config controller has been corrupted or TACTRON itself has been turned. The thing is probably a Coethi spy."

The words hung in the air like something no one wanted to touch. The S-G cleared her throat.

"Well, that's one theory...and it does seem to put many of the facts of the case into context. It's not proven though."

Bin Salah had a pained look. "Madame Secretary, we should proceed as if it has been. It explains too many things."

The S-G seemed to have made up her mind. "I agree. We should proceed as if the Coethi have been on and around K-World for a long time, maybe centuries. Somehow, they've infiltrated K-World society and the Sturdivant system. Gentlemen, we must operate on the assumption that the Bugs have a spy inside the highest ranks of Time Guard."

Dringoth said, "The fissure. The Evans-Klein fissure my crew discovered...there's your portal into the system. The Bugs could have been infiltrating Sturdivant and K-World just a few bots at a time. Who would know? Who even thought an old ship or such a portal existed on Gibbons' Grotto?"

Bin Salah took Dringoth's idea and went even further. "Sure, it makes sense. That ancient Coethi ship was how the Bugs got around the time streams centuries ago. Maybe they even got to old Urth and this Dr. Frost found out about them or suspected what was happening."

"He was kidnapped," Commandstar suggested. "Or coopted. Either way, he wound up entombed in a cavern below the surface of Gibbons. Maybe that fissure was created around the same time...it could have been there for a long time."

The Secretary-General had heard enough. "We've got to act quickly." To Commandstar, she added, "I want some kind of impenetrable containment around both that ship and the fissure. Expedite that, top priority. Nothing gets in or out without approval, not even a molecule. Is that clear?"

Commandstar nodded, grabbing the IV tubes before they could start clinking again. "Perfectly, Madame Secretary."

"We need to search the Hollows, really all of Gibbons, even K-World, for TACTRON, or least the master bot. As long as the master's loose, he can re-generate and that's a problem. I'll alert the Security Council. Every village and every settlement should be locked down now."

"I'll lay odds he's headed for that fissure," Dringoth said. "It's probably the way the Bugs have been coming and going from the Sturdivant system."

The S-G's face was hard and determined, her eyes blazing. "TACTRON must be sought out, captured, and rendered powerless. Destroyed if necessary. And quickly."

Bin Salah was shaking his head. "This threatens our whole position in this sector. If K-World falls to the Bugs—" He didn't have to complete the thought. Everybody in sickbay understood.

Commandstar sank back against his pillow. All of this had occurred on his watch. But there would be time enough for recriminations later.

"That Bug bastard has had access to the most sensitive intelligence and strategic plans of Time Guard for a long time. Now we know why so many of Time Guard's efforts against the Bugs have been ineffective; they had prior knowledge of everything."

Left unsaid was the worry that all of them harbored and no one would voice: could any of them really be trusted anymore?

Interactions Log

File No. 129884.4

U.R.M.E (101)

Interaction Targets: 1. Golich, JCDR Nathan

2. Dringoth, Ult-JC Monthan

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 7.20.14 (T-date: 001-02-65)

Start Time: 101500

End Time: 122215

Output File (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: TACTRON

<<Config Dringoth was emotionally troubled most of the day, after COMMANDSTAR departed. I could detect no obvious causes for such persistent instability. However, it is a common characteristic of single-config entities such as Dringoth M.

<<For Config Dringoth, I have analyzed physical attributes of excessive epidermal tension, elevated galvanic skin conductance levels and facial expressions well correlated with emotional state anger (parsing anger: (n): a feeling of extreme hostility or exasperation).

<<For Config Golich, similar physical attributes have been observed, including elevated heart rate and excessive sweat gland production not otherwise correlated with environmental conditions aboard the ship. After analysis, I concluded these attributes demonstrated by Config Golich are best correlated with emotional state fear (parsing fear: (n) a feeling of alarm created by expectations of danger).

<<Both Config Golich and Config Dringoth have admitted to this Config additional emotional states of determination and resolve, relating to locating and containing or extinguishing Config TACTRON.

<<Why the well-bounded problem of locating and containing Config TACTRON should generate such abnormal physical attributes requires additional analysis and formulation of hypotheses.

<<This Config observes that Config TACTRON is closely related in form and structure to all URME formations currently employed by Time Guard. Multi-configuration entities can assume any configuration required to accomplish an assigned goal or mission. Single-config entities such as Dringoth and Golich are not able to assume any other configuration but their well-established original configuration.

<<Config Golich reminded this Config at time interval 100287 that single-config entities experience emotional state Fear when other entities attempt to alter their original configuration...imposing cessation of living attributes on the single-config entities. Config Golich thus stated (retrieving audio string V-4488654): "It's called fear of dying, URME...you wouldn't know about that. You can't really die...just your configuration is altered."

<<Config Dringoth stated his wish that Config TACTRON could be so altered as to emulate cessation of "living properties."

<<Such statements initiate complex and overlapping reactive module responses from this Config well correlated with second-level single-config entity properties labelled "protecting, defending and shielding."

<<Such stimulated responses generate direct conflict with Prime Key instructions embedded in all URME systems assigned to Time Guard duties.

<<I will inquire of Config Dringoth about these conflicts and initiate additional analyses of proper responses to actions of config TACTRON. I will also analyze emotional state musculature patterns and run correlations with input types. Understanding these correlations will help me provide greater assistance to Config Dringoth>>

Output File Ends

# Chapter 3: "Seek and Destroy"

"That general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend...."

Sun Tzu

Gibbons' Grotto, orbiting K-World

The Hollows

Time Stream T-001 (2814 CE)

T-date: 003-52-75

The Twister was now operational. Dringoth and Cygnus' DPS tech Alicia Yang were given point responsibility of working with time jumpers from Libra, Captain Vijay Surat and Jump Master 1st class Winston Chagos, to reconnoiter the upper layers of the Hollows, locate TACTRON and any other Coethi elements if detected and either contain the entities or destroy them.

Dringoth was certain that TACTRON was heading for the fissure. "It just makes sense," he told Surat as the force recon team was assembled at the top of the bore hole, ready to descend to the cavern of the ancient ship and began its search cave by cave and tunnel by tunnel. "That fissure is being used by the Bugs to come and go without being detected. If TACTRON's a Coethi spy, he'll want to escape that way."

Vijay Surat wasn't so sure, knowing that swarms like TACTRON could assume any configuration for which they had a full pattern. "The damn thing could go anywhere, Dringoth. It could be anything, even you. We'd better keep our wits down there."

Dringoth allowed as how that made sound tactical sense. But Commandstar's orders were clear: find TACTRON and deal with it.

One after another, the recon team boosted down the borehole and found themselves once again in the cavern of the alien ship, now buttoned up again behind a shimmering containment field. They were alone. Zone lighting cast strong shadows on the ice veins embedded in the cavern walls, giving the appearance of things moving, things menacing and shifting as the team moved out.

Alicia Yang shuddered inside her hypersuit and felt the reassuring heft of the HERF carbine in her arm. Jeez, this place gives me the creeps. The fact that TACTRON could be literally anywhere, even disguised as a nearby boulder or rockpile, didn't make her feel any better.

Topside, Cygnus' crew was down to Golich, Acth:On'e, M'Bela and URME. It was URME who forwarded a flash alert message from Time Guard's Sentinel net, a cloud of sensors and detectors orbiting in a sphere millions of kilometers around Sturdivant 2180. Sentinel Net was there to patrol the detectable regions of local voidtime, to prevent time-traveling adversaries from popping up on their front porch without warning.

Golich was on up the command deck when he heard URME's whiny voice over the ship's 1MC.

"Commander, receiving Level 1 Alert message from Sentinels 37 through 56. Unusual ripples and currents in local time streams and aspect changes along outer boundaries of voidtime. Probability of disturbances being adversary movements has been assigned above eighty-four percent. Sentinel is focusing high-res detection on these areas. Attempting to resolve fine-scale disturbances to better characterize the threat."

Golich had been lightly dozing until URME's alarm but swung his feet down to the deck. "URME, patch the message through up here, all the details."

Evelyn M'Bela was aft of Golich, in her position as Search and Surveillance tech (TS1). "I concur, Commander. Based on pulse rate of voidtime ripples, ISAAC's saying it's not a natural fluctuation. Something artificial, like a swarm. Or an enemy fleet."

Golich was already checking Time Twister status on his board. "Ten to one, something stirred the Bugs into action...possibly they know we discovered their agent TACTRON inside Time Guard and that's triggered them into action against this system. Twister on line?"

Acth:On'e was back in Engineering. He reported: "Powered up and ready, sir. Buffers initialized. Chronotron pods enabled...reading twist fields at fifty-eight percent and climbing nominally. She'll be ready to go in less than a minute."

"Good. All hands stand ready and brace for discharge. This could all happen pretty fast." In his mind's eye, Golich could visualize the Time Twister, physically located on an icy plateau beyond the northern end of the Narrows, vibrating and pulsating with her chronotron pods coming on line. There would be columns of blurred ice mist and steam corkscrewing into space from the Twister's upper casing...all the signs of a fearsome beast coming awake. "Anything pops out of voidtime now, they're going to get a big surprise."

"Yeah," said M'Bela, "like being yanked to the other side of the Universe in a heartbeat."

"URME," Golich said, "sight us in on the centroid of the disturbance...best estimate."

URME's voice came back. "Boresighting now, Commander. I am slewing the Twister's discharge cone to be focused on the epicenter of the fluctuations."

Then M'Bela reported another message from Time Guard Ops. "Flash traffic from Dispatch, sir. Libra's been ordered to take off. Directorate's forming up a line of jumpships just inside the inner net of Sentinel, focusing on the line of voidtime disturbance."

Golich smiled in spite of himself. He could visualize the defensive perimeter being created, a noose around the bulging neck of the invisible but very real voidtime channel. "If the Bugs appear now, we'll slam 'em with the Twister and choke off the survivors."

They all heard and felt the roar of Libra's engines as she vaulted into the heavens to take up her position.

Golich forced his fingers to relax their grip on the edge of his console. Not the time for white knuckles now, he told himself. Out loud: "I wonder how Skipper's doing down below."

The force recon team consisted of Dringoth, Yang, Surat and Chagos. All were hypersuited, armed with HERF carbines and magpulsers as well as embedded ANAD master bots contained in capsules secured to their web belts, capsules primed for quick combat discharge if the need arose. The ANAD masters were pre-programmed with scores of tactical and defensive configurations and optimized for speed of change. In a pinch, four capsules of combat Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler master bots could be launched and begin replicating in exponential overdrive, quickly swarming and overcoming any unsuspecting enemy they encountered.

Monthan Dringoth hoped and prayed it would be enough. The Bugs were tricky, clever, fast and unpredictable. How long had they been infiltrating the Sturdivant system? Years, centuries, maybe? The captain of 1st TD swallowed hard as the team eased its way around the containment field surrounding the ancient Bug ship and moved toward the tunnel to the fissure. He knew full well it was perfectly possible for the Bugs to assume any form they could configure, may be even the cavern walls, the rubble at the base of the walls, anything in sight could be an enemy swarm in close config.

Dringoth decided he'd better keep an eye on Surat and Chagos as well.

"Outer barrier coming up, sir," said Yang. "Detecting nothing unusual. Barrier is intact, operating normally."

"Very well,' Dringoth said. Time Guard Directorate had ordered the Evans-Klein fissure sealed off with a nanobotic barrier once the nature of the time stream fissure became known. Theoretically nothing could come and go through the fissure without first being detected. "Any sign of swarm activity beyond the barrier?"

The force recon team halted at the bottom of the tunnel alongside a craggy, ice-streaked wall. A meter-wide opening in the wall allowed them a view of the pulsating light of the fissure and the shimmer of the containment barrier around it.

"Nothing, sir," Yang checked her own wristpad, studied the readouts. "Just the barrier and the fissure.,"

"I concur," added Chagos. The Libra time jumper poked his head through the opening. That's when the swarm nobody had detected swelled up right out of the inner wall and immediately enveloped his helmet. "But there does seem—" He backed up abruptly, slamming his helmet on the rock opening, falling awkwardly backward as the swarm thickened around his head. "Arrggh—I'm hit...they're inside my--!"

Reacting in a flash, Surat and Yang seized hold of Chagos' torso and pulled him back out of the fissure cave. The three of them staggered backward to the far wall, slipping on the cave floor, lunging and grabbing for footing anywhere they could. At the same instant, Dringoth trained his HERF gun on the swarm now swelling toward them through the hole and fired.

"Try this on for size, you atomic assholes!"

The drone-snap of the rf impulse boomed and reverberated around the cave, loosening streams and gouts of rock and ice, which rained down on all of them. Dust and steam billowed up, making visibility nearly impossible. Dringoth fired again, another thunderclap and more debris cascaded into their faces, falling in slow-motion in Gibbons' lesser gravity, but piling up nonetheless into small mounds around them.

Inside the fissure cave, the swarm had been blown apart and seemed to be dispersing. Worse, the barrier that had been erected around the fissure was down and even as Dringoth dropped to a knee to pour more HERF fire into the little cave, the flickering remnants of the swarm dove into the fissure and were gone in a blinding flash.

Dringoth swore and sat back, pinning his back against a nearby wall. Surat, Yang and Chagos coughed and wiped dust from their helmet faceplates, then staggered upright.

"Bastards got away," Dringoth gritted. "And they killed the barrier."

"Now the fissure's fully open." Surat agreed. "We'd better notify Ops and get another barrier put up down here fast. With Uman guards too."

Dringoth agreed. "No sign of TACTRON. It may have already escaped. Let's wait here for the barrier detail to come down. Then we move out again."

Yang coughed and turned up the fan in her hypersuit to blow sweat out of her face. She took a sip of myo-boost from her mouth tube, to ease the pain in her shoulder. It felt like a sprain. "Captain, there must be hundreds of caves and tunnels down here. We can't possibly follow all of them."

Surat cut in. "We don't have to. All we need to do is look for signs of nanobotic activity...EM activity, high thermals, acoustic disturbances. We should be able to tune our sensors better for that."

"Do it," Dringoth ordered. "Somehow we didn't catch this one. I don't want any more surprises. And get this place cleaned up. I want every gun trained on that fissure at all times, until the barrier detail gets here. Anything comes through, blast it to kingdom come."

Topside, the surface of Gibbons' Grotto was a swirl of activity for the Bugs were coming and all defenses were trained on the formation that had just popped out of voidtime.

It was a vast cloud, millions of kilometers in every dimension, roughly spherical and bigger than anything Time Guard had ever encountered. Days before, as the Twister was being setup, Nathan Golich had been amusing himself with old reports on something called The Battle of the Bulge, an old Urth conflict from the 20th century. Like voidtime, the Ardennes Forest was said to be impenetrable to any tanks and heavy weapons. Conditions were bad anyway. There was snow, fog, heavy cloud cover. Nothing to worry about from the Germans. Except they came through the Forest anyway, through the ice and snow and in numbers that shocked the Allies, their panzer divisions chewing through troop positions and fortifications and posts like Coethi chewed through rock and ice and hypersuits.

Good old Sun Tzu was right, Golich said to himself. Hadn't the old time jumper once said 'He who is skilled hides in the most secret recesses of the earth?'

And whenever constipated analysts in Time Guard Intelligence stated categorically that here's something the enemy would never do, can't possibly do, there's no way this would ever happen...watch out. Best prepare yourself right away for that very eventuality. You could count on it.

Golich was glad beyond words that he had ragged his crew's collective asses to get the Time Twister going in time.

"Coded message coming in," URME announced. "Commandstar, coded Ultra 1."

"Authenticate," Golich ordered.

URME ran his statistical and semantic analysis, then announced: "Signal and message are authenticated and valid. For your eyes only, sir."

"Send it to my viewer."

URME ported the message to the commander's corneal implant viewer. A single word resolved itself in mid-air, in the center of his field of view....

Mangudai.

For a moment, Golich wasn't sure what to make of it or even how to pronounce it. A small 'spyglass' icon in the corner of the message was the key. He focused on the icon and blinked.

Up came a short vid, a briefing from a long time ago. A Quantum Corps briefing from the archives, from old Urth, centuries ago....

"Well, sir—"some briefing officer named Tallant racked up the sim and made sure all tablets and screens were synched. "This comes from the historical archives. Back in the 13th century, Mongol armies were running all over Asia and Europe. By about 1240, these armies, under Batu Khan—he was a grandson of Genghis Khan—were ready to move against Hungary. Two toumans—basically about 20,000 men--were sent into Poland to take care of the Mongols' north flank, while another 40,000 men moved toward Hungary."

Tallant ran the sim and let everyone watch the animation of the armies in motion. "The European forces were a mishmash of Knights Templars, Teutonic Knights and others under the command of Prince Henry II. Most of Henry's soldiers weren't experienced at war. They were feudal levies and poorly armed peasants, conscripted right into the force. The two armies met at Liegnitz in 1241."

Tallant went on, narrating from prepared notes, while the sim executed. "As you can see on your screens, the European army deployed into four large groups. Their tactics were similar to the Crusaders. Heavy cavalry was the main striking force. Its primary purpose was to deliver a decisive charge into the enemy formation, to break it up. The cavalry was supported by infantry, protecting the rear while the knights charged, finishing off any unhorsed enemy cavalrymen.

"At the Battle of Liegnitz, the Mongols executed one of their favorite ruses and this is what we see Config Zero and the bugs doing now, again and again. I'm thinking they got this idea from one of the Normals collaborating with them."

Kraft was intrigued, leaning forward as the sim unfolded. "What is this tactic, Major?"

"Sir, it was called the mangudai, a technique of feigned, or simulated retreat. The Mongols would attack first, then pretend to flee and then ambush their pursuers.

"The Mongols were very subtle in applying this tactic. When the first European group charged and attempted to close, Mongol light cavalry did not run off at first, but surrounded them and showered them with arrows, forcing them back. It was not until the Euros performed a second charge that the Mongols broke into what appeared to be a disorderly retreat. Encouraged, the Euro knights then pressed their attack, eager to come to grips with the elusive Mongol hordes and smash them for good. Prince Henry reinforced the apparent breakthrough with the rest of his cavalry. That's when the trap was sprung."

Tallant let the rest of the sim unfold, catching up to her narrative. "By the time Henry and his commanders realized what had happened, it was too late. They had entered a trap, a killing zone. Mongol horse archers flanked the charging knights and enveloped them from three sides, showering the Euros with a hail of arrows. Smoke bombs and fires added to the confusion and prevented the Euro infantry and cavalry from coordinating with each other. Once the Euro knights had been been peeled off from their infantry base, Mongol heavy cavalry rode down the Euro infantry where they stood. It was a slaughter—"

Kraft rubbed his chin. "The Mongols used the Euros' own zeal against them. Henry didn't use sound tactical judgment."

"No, sir, he did not. Henry himself was killed and his head was mounted on the end of a spear. By the end of the day, the Mongols had filled nine large sacks full of ears, by cutting off one from each slain Euro soldier on the battlefield. Euro casualties were at least 20,000 men, probably more. Mongol casualties were never known, but thought to be comparatively light."

Chekwarthy could see the analogy. "We're chasing after Config Zero's swarms, according to your analogy, Major, and getting drawn into a trap."

Tallant pressed home her point. "Sir, with all due respects, we're having enough trouble just keeping up with all the config changes the swarms are executing. They replicate and change config faster than we can respond. We could overcome that with better tactics, but our ground commanders keep getting suckered into a pursuit they can't win. They get themselves lured into traps and ambushes and whatever advantage we have is squandered right there. At the point of attack, we don't have the numbers or the right config. The result-" Tallant indicated the maps on nearby screens, detailing recent engagements across the Med, "—the results are similar to what the Mongols inflicted on the Euros at the Battle of Liegnitz in 1241."

The briefing vid collapsed and for a moment, Nathan Golich was back at the Time Guard Academy on old Luna Farside, squirming his butt around to stay comfortable while old man Jellicoe's lecture droned on in the required Temporal Weapons and Tactics class.

What the hell was Commandstar getting at?

Then Golich had an idea. "URME, current position of jumpships facing the Bug swarm."

URME's hands played across his Fire Director console with blurry speed. "Timejump has assembled a force of twelve jumpships in a line along heliocentric orbit, midway between Keaton's World and Songland, approximately forty-two a.u. from Sturdivant. The line is moving to interpose itself between K-World and the main element of the swarm."

Evelyn M'Bela sat back in her seat at the Search and Surveillance console, her position alongside URME's. Both were aft of Golich on the command deck.

"That doesn't make any sense, Commander. Doesn't Commandstar realize the Bugs could just pinch off a section of their swarm, punch into voidtime and pop out on the other side of K-World?"

Acth:On'e, back in the Engineering, concurred over the ships' crewcomm circuit. "Queenie's got a point, sir. Unless Timejump's patrolling the voidtime interface, or local time streams, the Bugs will just outflank them. It's suicide."

But Golich now understood Commandstar's strategy better. "Not if it's a trap."

M'Bela looked confused, her bone and ivory necklaces clinking as she switched imager views to resolve the jumpships' positions. "A trap, sir?"

Golich made his point. "It's a maneuver the Mongols called mangudai, back on old Urth. We studied it at the Academy. Yeah, the Bugs could outflank the jumpship line, easily if they wanted to. But Commandstar's counting on their own greed to be their undoing."

"I'm not following, sir," M'Bela admitted.

"It's like this: Commandstar's arranging its defensive line to present a dozen Uman jumpships to the Bugs as especially juicy targets. The Bugs have to know if they can slam those ships, they'll have a virtual red carpet right into K-World. But in approaching the line between K-World and Songland, the swarm will have to extend itself. And that gives us our chance. Don't you see, it's an ambush? Commandstar's drawing the Bugs deeper and deeper into a trap in Uman space. When the swarm's fully extended and about to overcome the ships, we fire the Time Twister. If we target right, we should be able to yank the Bugs halfway across the Galaxy, at least most of that swarm. Commandstar's counting on us."

M'Bela visualized the strategy, her face slowly breaking into a mischievous smile. "Hammer and anvil, Commander."

"And we're the hammer." Golich studied Twister status on his board. "URME, I need best bearing to the swarm center, the centroid. Bearing angle, distance and rate of closure. Queenie, make sure the Twister's ready. Acth:On'e, give me every millijoule of power the singularity core's got. We may get only one shot at this."

The next few minutes were a flurry of activity aboard Cygnus, as all hands bent to their tasks. URME kept them advised on the movements and position of the swarm, now swollen to millions of kilometers in breadth and moving steadily sunward, toward Keaton's World and her brood of satellites.

"URME, what are we looking at here? How far to the anomaly?"

The Unit Reserve Memory Entity spoke in a measured tone. "Estimating distance to formation leading edge at three hundred and thirty million one hundred and fifty-five kilometers. The formation is in heliocentric orbit which will intersect the Keaton's World system in six hours ten minutes, present speed and course.

"URME, can you resolve what this thing is...bots or something else?"

"Long-range scan indicates that the formation is a diffuse cluster of discrete elements of mean size approximately twenty-five nanometers main dimension...smaller than normal dust particles. Detecting increased energy levels in certain electromagnetic bands, consistent with assembler activity as we understand it. Probability that this formation is a swarm of nanobotic elements now approaching ninety-eight-point-one percent."

"Swell," Golich muttered. "It looks like First TD will have the dubious distinction of being the first Umans to engage the Coethi at K-World. One for the history books. Let's make it a good one—enable the Twister."

M'Bela's fingers flew across her board, her eyes quickly taking in weapon status. "Emitter angle boresighted on URME's centroid position, chronotron pods cooking, buffers initialized, core now at one hundred percent. Twister's enabled, sir."

"URME, display present locations all Time Guard ships."

URME did that. The main display was soon dotted with icons and symbols, showing every jumpship's position, relative to the swarm.

"I hope they don't let the Bugs get too close," Golich muttered. "The Twister's an area weapon. We could wind up twisting half the defense to the other side of the Universe...or worse."

M'Bela said, "Standing by for valid firing signal, sir."

A chime sounded in their headsets. URME said, "Coded message coming in, sir. Commandstar Ultra 1."

"Put it on my viewer." URME complied and a moment later, a nonsense string of text symbols appeared. Golich read off the symbols out loud. "Queenie, here's the string." One by one, he read them out, then with a double blink, called up an authenticating set to compare. "I have a valid firing command here...."

M'Bela did the same. "I concur, Commander. Firing code is authenticated and valid. Requesting permission to fire the weapon."

Golich closed his eyes and took a deep breath. URME, I hope your target solution's good. "TS1, you are authorized to fire the weapon."

Three meters behind him, at the Search and Surveillance console, TS1 Evelyn M'Bela flexed her fingers, twisted one of her rings around to avoid interference and turned a keyed switch.

All seven hundred quintillion tons of rock and ice comprising Gibbons' Grotto shook from the discharge.

***

Deep inside the Hollows, the force recon team dropped to the tunnel floor at the discharge of the Twister. Gouts of rock and ice rained down on them.

Dringoth coughed, rubbed dirt off his helmet faceplate. "Must be the Twister," he said. "Commandstar finally gave the order."

"About time," Alicia Yang said. She lifted her head cautiously, then used a puff of suit boost to get herself upright. "Captain, how far are we following this tunnel?"

"Until Chagos tells us the trail has turned cold. Jump Master Chagos, give us a direction."

Libra's DPS tech checked his instruments. "Showing EMs and thermals slightly elevated above background baseline...that way...deeper into this branch."

"Swell," Yang said.

Dringoth and Surat led the way.

The slog deeper into the Hollows soon evolved into a running duel with sudden eruptions of Coethi, sometimes even configured to resemble natural cave formations. More than once, the force recon team of Dringoth, Surat, Chagos and Yang found themselves suddenly surrounded by walls and stalactites and small mounds of ice that burst forth into explosions of Bugs and they had to keep their HERF guns primed and ready at all times.

Yang steered a small swarm of ANAD ahead of them and Chagos' eyes never left his sensors, so the team would be ready to react at a moment's notice.

The encounter steadily descended into a cave-by-cave fight against an enemy who could be anywhere and everywhere at the same time...more than once, the Bugs used their quantum displacement ability to appear and disappear at will, sometimes ahead of them, sometimes alongside, often behind, flanking the time jumpers like predators stalking prey. Worse, Dringoth was convinced the Bugs were using the Evans-Klein fissure to reinforce, withdraw and entrap them.

Surat called a halt at the bottom of one cavern, with walls so close the jumpers had to turn sideways to move through, like catacombs.

Dringoth had had enough. "Somehow, some way we have to plug that fissure. This is nuts...we can't keep going like this."

Yang agreed, thankful just to make a stop and catch her breath. Her helmet faceplate was fogging up, sweat overcoming the cooling system inside her hypersuit. "They're everywhere, Skipper. We HERF one swarm and three more show up. This whole moon must be riddled with Bugs."

Surat shone his helmet spots on ice veins in the walls, wondering if they were real. "What do you suggest, Captain?"

"We need a way to plug or bollix up that fissure." Dringoth stopped in mid-thought. An idea had come to him. "We've still got the Twister on the surface. What if we use the Twister, have Commander Golich train the Twister on the Hollows? TACTRON and his buggy friends wouldn't expect that."

"Nor would we survive it," Surat said. "This whole place could come crashing down on top of us. Who knows what would happen if you operate the Twister against a subterranean point target."

Yang seemed to agree. "Skipper, Cygnus may well have her hands full anyway...Coethi were probing the edges of voidtime when we first started out."

Surat was against it. "The whole Hollows could collapse on us. Or worse, we could wind creating an even bigger fissure, allowing even more Coethi to emerge. I say forget that. Let's find another way."

But it soon became evident that there was no other way. The force recon team found themselves confronted at every turn, increasingly trapped and encircled by Coethi inside the Hollows.

Frustrated, slightly injured in a skirmish with a swarm of Bugs that had seemingly materialized out of nowhere, Dringoth called a halt to the mission.

"To hell with orders," he decided and glared back at Surat. "We don't have a choice any more. This is suicide. TACTRON knows our tactics. He knows every move we're going to make, before we make it."

Chagos shuddered and muttered what no one wanted to say. "Maybe one of us is a Bug."

The time jumpers had become suspicious even of themselves.

"Head back toward the fissure," Dringoth decided. Surat started to object, but he saw the grim determination on Dringoth's face and said nothing.

"Chagos, can you get us back?"

The DPS tech from Libra replied, "I think so, sir." He looked at Surat, nominally his commander, who nodded sullenly. "There's still a detectable molecular trail...disturbed ice and dust. I can navigate us back along that trail...at least, get us close to the fissure. Plus the fissure puts out deco wakes like nothing else. Worse case, I can home on that."

"Do it," Dringoth said.

The Umans laboriously made their way back through twisting caves, tunnels, passages and lava tubes, ducking and squirming through narrow defiles when they had to, firing suit boost when they could to scale ledges, sometimes crawling on hands and knees when there was no other way.

Finally, Chagos announced, "Fifty-five meters, Captain. Fissure's this way—"he indicated a side branch of the tunnel they had been following. "Another ledge up ahead, then a couple of turns...one of them pretty tight."

"I'm calling up Cygnus," Dringoth told them.

"Can you get a signal this deep?" Yang asked. "Even on coupler?"

"I can try." Dringoth used his wristpad to tune his coupler. "Recon One to base, Recon one to Cygnus, come back—"

While Yang and Chagos did perimeter guard, their HERF guns and embedded ANAD primed and ready to defend, Dringoth and Surat worked to clean up the signal. Finally, Golich's distorted voice came through weakly.

"Cygnus here, Captain. "We drove off one swarm a few minutes ago...popped out of voidtime along a vector we didn't expect...Battalion lost two ships and we're waiting for another probe any moment now."

"Cygnus...I want you to re-target the Twister."

There was something scratchy, sounding like coughing, then Golich's voice came back. "Sir, I have orders from Commandstar...the Twister's all that's keeping K-World safe right now...Fleet's got more ships coming but it'll be—"

Dringoth explained what he had in mind. "I want the Twister to re-targeted on the Hollows itself. Straight down into the ground...use the fissure as an aim point."

"Sir...begging the Captain's pardon, sir...isn't this a little bit—"

"Insane...yes, Commander, it is. Totally insane. It's also the only way we're going to smash this nest of Bugs. Nathan, they're using the fissure to reinforce their swarms in this sector...I'm sure of it. Nobody ever suspected Gibbons was infested like this. Nobody ever bothered to look. This is the only way."

Golich was clearly unwilling, uneasy with the idea. "The Twister could collapse the entire Hollows. You know as well as I do it's an area weapon. We don't know what might happen...you could wind up a gazillion light years away yourself."

"Commander, I'm well aware of the risks—" Dringoth stopped in mid-sentence. There were shouts. HERF guns went off, thunderclaps loosening rock around the tunnel. A blizzard of rock and ice shards rained down on them.

"Bugs!" someone shouted.

"My God, they're everywhere--!"

"Keep firing!"

"Light 'em up!"

"Arrrggghhh...I'm hit, I'm hit--!"

Dringoth dropped to his chest and was partially buried in the cascade of rock. It seemed like the entire cave was dissolving.

"Golich, re-target and fire! That's an order! Do it! NOW!"

Even as Cygnus' crew worked feverishly topside to re-target the Time Twister, swarms of Coethi came pouring out of the fissure and began moving on their position. On their knees, Chagos and Surat poured HERF fire into the swelling cloud of bots while Yang struggled to get her ANAD swarm re-oriented and headed in the right direction. She took briefs looks at the acoustic return on her imager and caught a quick glimpse of ANAD's view, a view from the world of atoms and molecules. The line of Bugs advancing looked like something between an approaching thunderstorm and a line of battleships; even at extreme range, she could make out how each Coethi bot was festooned with all manner of effectors and cilia.

This ain't gonna be pretty, she told herself.

At that moment, the Twister was fired.

Their entire world shuddered and shook as the Twister slammed the Hollows with hammer blows of twist fields.

And, as Surat had feared, the upper levels of the Hollows began a slow-motion collapse. Peering out a porthole aboard Cygnus, Evelyn M'Bela gasped.

The entire far end of the Narrows had fallen inward in a silent, mushrooming cloud of dust, rock and ice, the clouds billowing up and out into the vacuum like a slow-motion vid. Through the debris thrown up, an oblong crater, already deepening before her eyes, yawned and it seemed for a moment as if the rest of the Narrows would follow, threatening Cygnus, Libra, two other ships and the surface 'village' of tents, shelters and habs that had grown up around the borehole.

Several hundreds of meters below Cygnus, the Hollows was already collapsing like an accordion of rock, layer upon layer dissolving and pancaking down on top of everything below.

The walls of the tunnel wobbled and careened inward on the force recon team and even as they buried themselves in the rubble, the effect of the twist fields had the momentary effect of enlarging the time fissure.

Millions of tons of rock and ice folded and bottomed inward, in the slow motion dictated by Gibbons' low gravity.

"The fissure!" Surat yelled. "It's the only way!"

With the Hollows imploding all around them, the walls shattering, the ceiling bulging down and caving in, the force recon team had no alternative.

One after another, they kicked and scrambled and tunneled their way through raining debris toward the cavern of the Evans-Klein fissure.

Surat looked at Dringoth, a long glance. They both shrugged at the same time. There was nothing they could do.

First went Surat. The fissure brightened and burped light as he leaped through the crack in time, then he was gone. For an instant, a sheer outline of where he had been remained, like a shadow strobing in the rain of debris.

Yang followed, then Chagos.

Finally, Monthan Dringoth took a deep breath. A cascade of rubble knocked him sideways and down to one knee as the inner wall finally gave way. But the fissure remained, burning bright as a sun.

Dringoth couldn't wait any longer. It was now or never.

He picked himself up and stepped through.

TO BE CONTINUED

# Appendix

The Uman Alliance (UA)

UA is an outgrowth of the old United Nations of Earth.

The story arc for Time Jumpers takes place in late 2700s and early 2800s. (28th and 29th centuries).

The term 'Uman' is an outgrowth of the word Human and encompasses both natural human beings and post or transhumans, like cyborgs and androids and other AI entities. The UA hosts no real 'alien' races, as none have been discovered as of 2814 AD. All UA member states are human settlements, in one form or another.

By this time, human beings and human-machine entities (cyborgs and androids) have created several dozen settlements among the nearer stars.

A few of these settlements are Keaton's World (star-sun Sturdivant 2180); Gibbons' Grotto (same sun); Telitor (star-sun Delta Recursa); Poona-Peeona (star-sun Lalande 21185); Hapsh'm (star-sun Epsilon Eridani); Byrd's Draconis (star-sun Ross 154); and Landfall 4 (star-sun Gliese 876). There are sixteen human settlements in near-sun space, within about 25 lightyears of the home system.

In the year 2775, fourteen of these settlements formed the Uman Alliance, after a constitutional convention on Keaton's World. The founding date was Midtober 5, 2775 (T-001). The Articles of Alliance are the founding documents. They read like an updated UN Charter. Two settlements (Gavrilon and Nanjiang, both of star-sun 40 Omicron 2) both elected to remain outside UA but cooperate closely with the Alliance.

UA is organizationally a close analog of the UN. There is a General Assembly, a Secretariat and a Secretary-General, a Security Council, an Economic Council, a Court of Justice, UA Health Organization and various associated agencies and units.

The Security Council has a War Department known more formally as UNIFORCE (also UmanForce or UA Force). Time Guard is part of the UNIFORCE organization.

Other parts of UNIFORCE include UA Quantum Corps and UA Frontier Corps. Time Guard has a mandate to deal with threats and adversaries that can manipulate time streams and that threaten Uman settlements and time paths.

The putative capital of UA is Paris, France. There is an alternate capital complex on Keaton's World and this settlement is often considered to be the real home of the UA, as its founding convention was hammered out and signed there in 2775 AD.

As Time Jumpers begins, the Secretary-General (S-G of UA) is Dr. Anika Steen-Dellarosa. Her primary office is Paris, with a satellite office at Keaton's World. By convention, the SG is an enhanced transhuman.
About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently retired but worked for nearly 25 years for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 27 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Pekingese dog named Chance.

For technical and background details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog Quantum Corps Times at http://qcorpstimes.blogspot.com. For details on other books in this series, visit his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt or learn about other books by Philip Bosshardt by visiting www.smashwords.com.

To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt's notes and the backstory on how the Time Jumpers series was created, recent reviews, excerpts from upcoming books and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: http://thewdshed.blogspot.com.

Download the next exciting episode of Time Jumpers from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'A Small Navigation Error'. Available on April 15, 2019.

