Cosmic Castaways

[LilJennie]

A Miki idea that kept going and going ... it mostly focuses on a young engineer named Laurie. -- LilJennie

Cosmic Castaways

By: Miki Yamuri and Liljennie

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Darkness parts with a true sense of urgency. It takes a minute for the resuscitation drugs to take effect so my mind can focus more clearly. I can hear the stasis servos activate as my senses slowly awaken. The end of my stasis tube opens, and the tray I am lying on slides out.

As if in a dream, I can hear alarms sounding. It becomes more and more clear as the hibernation drugs are neutralized and those parts of my consciousness awaken. I begin to sense odors too, like the faint odor of burning electronics, although this smell doesn’t increase as I regain full consciousness.

In my mind, I knew that something serious had happened and my awakening wasn’t the end of journey kind, but a more rushed emergency kind. I sat up – darn, a huge mistake – and fell back into the form-fitting slot of the hibernation tube.

Waves of extreme dizziness and nausea washed through me. By the time I had finished dry heaving, I felt somewhat better, and my head had actually cleared enough for me to finally sit up and take a survey of my surroundings.

I saw one of the master panels flashing all of its emergency lights. The rest of the Hyborium looked as if something had slammed into the ship and the transfer of energy caused this damage.

I slowly got off the tray, taking extra precautions, remembering what had happened when I tried to sit up before. It dawned on me suddenly that for that to have happened, I must have been in hibernation sleep for a very long time. If that were the case, I also knew I would need hydration and some form of food very shortly.

On the way out into the hall I saw the other hibernation tube with my best friend in it … good, she survived. It would be hard to survive all alone. Besides, it would devastate me to lose my very best girlfriend after we managed to escape from the solar system-wide calamity.

I was a 25-year-old woman. I took a hand full of my long blonde hair and bound it into a bunch, making a slightly off-center ponytail.

My friend Melanie was the same age as I and had long red hair and a cute row of freckles across her nose.

I started the revive sequence to her chamber before I entered the hall and left the hibernation room. I tried to reach the main flight deck to see if I could regain control of the vessel if necessary.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that reaching the flight deck would prove to be a real ordeal, as the severity of the damage increased the further down the corridor I went. The debris I had to climb over, or move if I could, made the progress that much slower.

More massive damage was evident, and many severe scorch marks were everywhere. A lot of the wall panels were missing, damaged, or melted. I was glad to note that most of the master control panels in this area seemed to still function. Closer to the flight deck, dangling and sparking wires became a serious hazard.

I picked up an overturned chair and sat at the area’s engineering station. I called up damage control protocol. EMERGENCY flashed slowly in large red letters across the screen. Darn.

I entered several admin emergency bypass codes, and the screen cleared. From what I gathered from the data I brought up, something had knocked the navigation computer offline for a few seconds while we were traversing NR space. Exactly what it was wasn’t clear. The speeds the ship traveled in NR space were so incredible that a few seconds could mean that many universes could have passed before it came back up.

The next readout told of the ship’s emergency systems taking the ship out of NR space for safety, only to have some form of singularity wash the ship with a jet of extremely high-energy photons.

The next data set was a bit chaotic, as the ship’s systems had been severely impacted by the gamma jet and many of the ship’s systems were offline. It was just a flash of images – the ship had still been moving at a significant portion of relativistic speeds when it had entered a star system. We were lucky at first as the ship had avoided most of the outer planets and larger planetoids. Most was the operative word. The computer was still disabled at that point, and the ship had been more or less ballistic. From the best I could tell, the emergency systems came on again and began emergency braking. The ship had avoided a large moon, but it had hit the atmosphere of its primary in doing so.

The emergency protocols aided in the unassisted landing, although it had been more like a controlled crash as our ship impacted and skidded along the ground. To the best that I could determine, it had come to rest by some sort of hill with a large body of water very close. In images from the working exterior cameras I could see verdant growth and several curious critters slowly approaching. At least food and water didn’t seem to be a bother … if all this life was compatible with our biology.

It took a bit and some rerouting of data access points due to crash damage, but I managed to get a fairly clear picture of how we stood. Main engineering and the NR drive had significant but fixable damage. It would take time, but I had all the necessary resources to repair the damage. Main power was still online and diagnostics showed no apparent damage.

The ship’s main computer system, which was basically the entire nervous system for the ship, had remained intact and had done an auto reboot and was finally back on line, although most of the ship from about sickbay forward was in a total shambles. I was glad to note from the indications the data showed, the integrity of the hull had not been breached. With help, I could repair the ship well enough for flight, but it would take a long time. Also, I would need some very specialized manufacturing facilities for some of the equipment. Fortunately, if necessary, I could use a more barebones approach and manually avoid those systems. Doing so was hard and required a lot dashing from one control panel to others.

I sat back in my chair and breathed a sigh of relief. From what the data told me, we had all the necessary items operating and enough available supplies we were in excellent shape and survival looked more than promising.

I would have to repair the main external sensor dish to see if the stellar cartography equipment could identify any recognizable celestial objects or formations, but I had plenty of material to repair it with. This too would take time.

The other good news was that the food replicators appeared to be functioning normally and passed all diagnostics with flying colors, although the equipment replicator was damaged severely, so I wasn’t so sure I could fix it under current conditions.

It was another device that required specialized manufacturing facilities, although, depending on exactly what was wrong, I might be able to rig something that would work long enough to repair specific parts until enough replacement parts had been made for a complete rebuild. Again, only time would tell.

From down the hall I heard a distant retching sound … Melanie was awake and, from the sound of it, was having a similarly difficult awakening experience. I went to help her.

She was just barely managing to sit up. I’m not gonna lie; she didn’t look good. I probably didn’t either. We both needed food and water. “Here,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse and parched, “let me help you …”

“L-Laurie?” Melanie asked, in a similarly raspy voice. She looked at me as if her eyes were trying to focus. They probably were.

“Yeah,” I said. “We crash landed on some planet. Trying to get sensors online so I can find out where.”

“Oh no,” said Melanie. “Who’s alive?”

“You and me are all I know so far,” I replied. “ Haven’t had a chance yet to look for the other Hyborium chambers.”

“Need water …” Melanie stated.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “we both will, and soon. Gotta find a working reclamation substation.”

“Ship interior,” suggested Melanie, trying to stand. “Security … most protected …”

She was right. The security section wasn’t that far away from where we were and was the farthest from the ship’s outer hull. If any water systems were intact, they would be there. We could fix the sensors once we knew we weren’t going to die of thirst.

Melanie slipped to the floor as her legs buckled beneath her. “Ugh … can’t stand … pins and needles … means my legs aren’t dead, but it’s gonna be a minute …”

“OK, let’s get you in a better position,” I said, putting an arm around her back under her shoulder and trying to lift her into a sitting position on the hibernation slab. You’re not supposed to sit on them because you might bend them … but that hardly mattered right now.

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I waited for Melanie to perhaps recover a bit more before I tried to get to Security. Our need for hydration was reaching a critical point. I told Melanie to sit and rest, I would go to security and get water if any of the resource devices there were working. I’d drill in and tap into a pipe if I had to. She agreed, since it was taking time for her to recover, and without water, it was taking that much longer.

As I walked down the corridor, I noticed that the mess all about me was more like a ship at sea that had run into stormy seas; all loose objects had been tossed haphazardly about.

Everything forward of Med Bay showed a lot of damage and debris. I was positive that the forward portion of the ship had taken most of the impact. Of course it did … duh. I had no clue what the flight deck might look like currently, but our need for water overrode any thoughts of attempting to get there at this moment.

I stepped over the small debris that had been scattered about the corridor and came to the security room’s door. A large flashing sign above the door said in large red letters ‘EMERGENCY’.

A tingle of fear ran up my spine – I truly hoped that the Security Lockout Protocol hadn’t been enabled. My fear ebbed a bit as I remembered all the other doors I had managed to open forward of Sick Bay, where the greatest damage was evident, so maybe not.

I walked to the door and placed my hand on the panel. The door whooshed open. I could see the many security screens lining one wall. They all seemed to be working, and the images from cameras forward of Med Bay showed a great deal of damage to those areas. Of course, there were no signals from the flight deck. The equipment here was working and undamaged, but I was still in the dark about the ship’s main command and control center.

I went to Security’s main console, picked up an overturned chair, and sat. A quick diagnostic showed that all the equipment in Security was operating normally except for those video cameras beyond bulkhead ten, the bulkhead just forward of sick bay. I was still not exactly sure if the forward section’s hull had been breached, although after several scans from the engineering station, all data had shown the exterior forward hull was scraped, battered, and dented, but not breached.

I saw the dispersal area. All its lights were green. I went to the controls on the dispersal unit and called for water. A very large cup of water materialized. I quickly grabbed the cup and drank it down. OMG! It was perfectly cool and was just what I needed. My thoughts cleared. I realized that I had been letting myself become dangerously unfocused, probably because of dehydration. I had to focus on water for myself and Melanie. Nothing else mattered right now. If we didn’t survive, nobody would be repairing the ship or finding any other survivors, if there were any. Right. Water.

I typed on the control panel to produce a five gallon water container and two large cups. The items appeared on the replication stage. Then I typed in two very large orders of a meaty stew with lots of veggies. A tray complete with silverware appeared on the replication stage. Its aroma was heavenly. I gathered up my treasures and returned to the Hyborium. Melanie looked horrid, I realized, as I helped her drink the water. She gulped it down immediately. Her color started to change to something that looked more healthy as I gave her another cup, which she also gulped down. “Careful, not too fast,” I cautioned.

Eating proved to be somewhat of a trip, which also was more evidence of how long we’d been in Hypersleep. Our stomachs didn’t exactly agree with what we were eating, which was evident from the cramps, although the stew smelled and tasted absolutely wonderful.

As we struggled to swallow the first real food in we didn’t know how long – in Hypersleep we’d had nothing other than the hibernation chemicals – Melanie said, “I’m no expert, but based on the amount of thirst, the severe nausea, and the fact that the first real food we’ve eaten is causing our stomachs to revolt, we must have been in Hypersleep for at least a year, but that’s just a minimum. I wonder just where we are and how long we really were in hibernation?”

I did my best to swallow the last spoonful of stew. I replied, “I haven’t had time yet to inquire. Now that I’ve managed to get some proteins down, I’ll go check the main computer system in Engineering, since it’s closest. I know major portions of it are operational, at least.”

“I’m gonna come with you,” said Melanie. “I think I can walk now, and I think we should stay together. It’s less risky.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, but she was determinedly making herself stand up, testing her legs. It was clear that it was difficult, but she was right – one or both of us might be worse off than we realized, and if we were separated one of us could pass out without the other noticing for some time.

We made it carefully back to Engineering. “Maybe we can get at least one of the robots working,” said Melanie. “They could check different areas of the ship for damage, look for other hibernating survivors, or even make simple repairs.”

“Good idea,” I replied. “I’ll keep trying to get data out of the computer.”

So Melanie sat down at the repair station and tried to summon a robot. The robot storage compartment door only opened partially, although several deactivated robots were visible standing in their usual queue inside. Melanie grabbed several tools from storage – this was Engineering, after all – and fixed the door. When it finally opened all the way, the first of the robots lit up. It looked a bit banged up, but it said, “Instructions?” in its androgynous mechanical voice.

“Please come to the repair station for inspection and maintenance, Unit … E1,” Melanie told the robot, reading its number from its chest insignia. The robot wordlessly complied, lying its metallic but humanoid body down on the repair table. Melanie began examining its systems and running diagnostics.

Meanwhile, I had identified a fault in the data storage system and patched the data connection. “Yes! We’re in business,” I said, as a number of databases appeared in the computer that had previously been missing, symbolized by a bank of cylindrical objects that appeared on the screen, linked to the rectangle that symbolized the processing unit. “OK, let’s try to reconstruct what happened.”

Melanie had done some repairs on her robot, so she re-ran the diagnostic. “Systems at 98% repair,” it said.

“Great,” said Melanie. “The ship has apparently crash-landed on an unknown planet. Unit E1, I need you to begin a damage assessment. But if you find any other hibernating survivors, please report them immediately. Are you linked to the main computer?”

“Affirmative,” said E1. “Data will be streamed to main storage. Proceeding with damage assessment.” The robot began, logically enough, by scanning the room it was in – Engineering itself.

“Fair enough,” Melanie said. “We do need to know what needs repair in here. Let’s get another one up to speed.” She typed on a console, and a second robot lit up and emerged. “Unit E2, please report to the repair station for inspection and maintenance.” It didn’t take her long to have all four of the Engineering robots up and running.

“... so, as I told E1, we need a damage assessment of as much of the ship as possible before we can proceed with repairs,” Melanie was telling the other robots. “Please, all four of you, coordinate your efforts and complete the assessment. But if you find more survivors in any hibernation chambers, please report that immediately.”

“Affirmative,” the robots replied in unison.

“Unit E3 will inspect aft section,” said E3, leaving Engineering and heading down the hallway to the right.

“Unit E4 will inspect central section,” said E4, also leaving the room.

“Unit E2 will assist E1 with assessing damage in Engineering,” said E2, “then coordinate further activity with team.” Now there were two robots working their way through the systems in Engineering. Well, soon we’d have everything working here or know why not. Data began streaming in from elsewhere on this deck courtesy of E3 and E4, and on one computer screen a map began to fill out with information.

Meanwhile I’d been piecing together the records. We now had all the data we were going to get about what had hit the ship while it was in NR space. Some kind of large anomaly … no, wait, it was actually a large collection of smaller objects acting almost as one. Each object was about a meter across, and that was strange, because it wasn’t known for anything that small to have an NR drive. Matter was difficult to scan in NR space; was it a machine or … some kind of life form? No life had ever been discovered in NR space, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any …

At any rate, either the ship had collided with the mass of objects or the objects had somehow disabled the navigation computer in some way, and we lost NR navigation for a few seconds, though we had some scanner readings – again, scanning was difficult in NR space. Then the safeguards had tripped, and the ship had dropped out of NR space. Then contact with the singularity’s axial beam had fried a lot of the circuitry that was close to the ship’s outer hull in the beam’s direction, which affected quite a few ship’s systems. After that … we’d entered the system we were currently in and shortly thereafter we’d crashed.

Well, we could perhaps triangulate where we were, if we could scan the sky. The nav sensors were working OK, just need to repair the main dish. But … what was this?

I was seeing images of the sky outside the ship. It was daytime – bright daytime, apparently. Blue sky, indicating the possibility of an oxygenated atmosphere, and – oh. I did have an image of the sky. I counted no fewer than eight nearby stars. We were in a octenary star system? But then I started seeing more stars that were clearly within a light year. We were in a star cluster of some kind. Not much luck triangulating on distant galaxies – we couldn’t see them. Their light was drowned out by all the nearby stars. We’d have to fix the drive systems and take off into space to have any chance of seeing any distant galaxies.

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It was very easy to convince Melanie to take it easy and sleep. I had activated one of the servo-bots and repurposed it to bring us food and water. It had a basic sensor suite and could tell when the possibility of its services would be needed.

While we lounged and recouped from the hypersleep, the engineering bots had begun their clean up and diagnostic routines. I rolled over lazily at one point and opened my eyes for a moment. The area around our bunks looked a lot different now than when we first laid here. It had looked terrible, but mostly it was the many different kinds of loose items scattered all over that made it appear much worse. Now that everything was once again in order and in its place, it looked like the ship once again, and I drifted back off to sleep. Cryo had taken a lot out of me.

Melanie woke me this time and told me of the severe storm. I got up and went to the master control panel in Engineering and brought up a view from outside. I could see large debris flying all over, most of it from the huge long skid trail the ship had created when it crashed. From the rudimentary external scanners that were still operational, the ship was in no danger from impacts or flooding.

I sat back and changed the view on the screen to bulkhead number ten, the one just forward of Med Bay. I remembered what it looked like a few hours ago when I first came out of cryo, and it didn’t look good. That area had taken a lot of damage, and I thanked the creator the hull hadn’t been breached.

I pushed a few buttons and brought up the engineering bots’ reports. The NR drive was damaged and had taken some sort of severe plasma overcharge. This would fit with the high-energy particle stream that had hit us when the emergency systems brought us out of NR space; it had knocked many systems offline.

The report was good news and bad news at the same time. The good news was that the NR drive, all of its components, and all of Engineering were repairable, and it was in progress now, proceeding ahead of projected schedule. The bad news was that it would take almost eight to ten months or longer to bring the NR drive to the point where we could begin the first tuning and adjustment run-ups.

I was still more than concerned that none of the other cryopods were accounted for in the listings. I hoped nothing had happened to them. It would be worse than a shame for us to have made this hard an effort to escape the systemwide destruction, only to die on some backwater world, who knew where.

It was time. From all the scans we had done, and our current sensor suite wasn’t the very best, the environment external to the ship was more than hospitable to our genetics. I brought up another view from outside. Whatever the earlier tempest had been, it seemed to have passed by. The violent swirling winds were gone, leaving just torrential rain and massive jagged bolts of lightning, which also seemed to be moving slowly off, as evidenced by the lessening of the severity.

As soon as it was clear, I was going out to inspect the main sensor array. I would take E1 and a small maintenance cart with all the necessary components to completely rebuild the array if necessary as well.

While I was in the storage compartment gathering the equipment and tools I might need, Melanie came in and asked cheerily, “Whacha up to, girr frin’? I thought you might like to have some strawberries. I found the program in the replicator, and it works.”

“I would love to have some strawberries. What I’m doing is gathering the necessary items to fix the main sensor array. We’ll need it to navigate if and when we get this ship airborne again, and I need it to scan and send data to stellar cartography files to see if a celestial match of any kind can be made.”

“What about the rest of the Hyboriums? Have you any information about them?” Melanie asked with concern.

Eating a strawberry, I replied reassuringly, “As soon as I’m done here, that is exactly the next item on my list. Our basic survival systems are functioning normally along with all the computer systems to where I’m confident we can survive as a colony if necessary. I know we can better do what is necessary to repair the ship.”

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Melanie asked. “And … when?” She wasn’t an astrophysicist or engineer, but she did know that a malfunctioning NR drive could potentially have catapulted us across the universe, millions of years into the future, or theoretically even into a parallel universe, though that last possibility had never actually been observed in experiments.

“Not yet,” I said glumly. “We’re in some kind of star cluster, so basically it’s always daytime. The light from so many nearby stars is drowning out our view of the more distant sky. So it’s hard to triangulate. There are some possibilities – if we can find some working probe drones, maybe we could send one up to get us some data from orbit. And once I get the main sensor array working, I could get more complete data about the nearby stars we can see; that might tell us something. For instance, if we’re in a cluster that the computer has a lot of data about, it might recognize that.”

“Well, it’s good to hear that there are still possibilities,” Melanie said. “Also, if you can get that sensor array online, we can scan the vicinity for life forms. It would be good to know what we’ve got here. There seem to be plants, but what kind of animals? How complex is the animal life? Could there be intelligent life? And if there is, we certainly want to know that well before meeting them, because we don’t know they’re friendly. We did come in uninvited – and with a bang.”

“Right – well, then, I’d better get to work on that,” I said. “Follow me, E1.” I got up and grabbed the repair cart, heading toward the airlock.

“Affirmative,” said the robot with its usual unemotional voice, walking behind me.

In the airlock, I donned the usual biohazard suit, a skintight apparatus with a helmet and its own air supply. We didn’t yet know what the local microbes were yet, so protocol dictated that I not risk bringing any critters back in with me, including inside my body. I’d have to fix the sensor array with that thing on. The airlock opened, and I climbed to the top of the hull using the magnetic grapplers I’d brought with me. E1 had grapplers built in and carried the repair cart for me.

I wasn’t too surprised by what I saw when I got to the sensor array. We’d been getting partial data from it, and that was because it was partially damaged, but not fully destroyed or anything of the sort. E1 and I began patching the damage. The lightning from the earlier storm still flashed in the distance.

“Hey Laurie?” came Melanie’s voice in my helmet.

“Yeah, Mel?”

“Are you anywhere near launch tube 3?”

“No, nowhere near it,” I replied. “We’re in the middle of the sensor array.”

“OK, good,” she said. “E3, go ahead.” Far across the hull I saw launch tube 3 open, and a small device launched from it, heading straight up into the sky. Somehow Melanie had gotten a probe drone to launch.

“Oh hey, you got that working,” I said.

“Yeah, I asked the bots for a damage report on the probe drones and launch system,” said Melanie. “They said that the other tubes would need some work, but number 3 was almost perfect, and they brought it up to speed.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “We’ll get telemetry from the drone, then. That can’t be bad.”

After a few hours’ work, I told E1 to test the sensor array, and results were encouraging, so we headed back inside. After decontamination, I removed the hazmat suit and headed back to Engineering to find Melanie poring over a growing map of the planet’s surface.

“Oh, Laurie, you’re back!” she said. “I’d love to get some samples of the life forms, but it’s looking like there aren’t any intelligent species – so far, at least. We can’t rule it out – the probe hasn’t mapped the entire surface yet, and of course there can be subsurface life.”

“What’s it like so far?”

“Well, the planet doesn’t have as much water as some planets – its surfaces are only about 40% water, though that’s an average based on our incomplete map. The land surface is covered with this world’s equivalent of plant life, green and photosynthesizing – which makes sense considering how much light this planet gets. It’s absolutely steeped in stellar energy. And of course there are animal-like life forms that eat those plants, and bigger animals that eat those, and so forth. I can’t really tell whether there are microbes from orbit, but …”

“But if the sensor array is working, we can scan for them,” I finished. “Well, let’s try it out.” I sat down at another console and ran the sensor array through its paces. “There are some sort of microbes, it seems,” I said. “We’ll definitely want to get a sample for you to look at. The array’s giving us a much more accurate reading of the nearby stars – at least, the ones we can see from this side of the planet – and their masses and motion. Putting that into the computer for a search … there. Now if it recognizes the cluster, it’ll tell us. And as the planet rotates, we’ll get more data from stars we can’t see right now.”

“That’s all I can do for the moment,” Melanie said, starting to get a faraway look in her eye. “I have to wait for the probe to complete more orbits and fill out the map …”

“What’s wrong?”

“I … don’t know if I’m going to see my mom and dad again, and my brothers and sisters …” she said, her voice shaking. “We … we’re lost …”

I gulped. She was right, but we had to keep going. “Yeah,” I said. “We are. I … no, gotta keep it together. We can do this. We’ll do it together. OK?”

She swallowed. “OK. Right. Together.” She took a deep breath. “If we’re ever going to get home, we’ll have to fix the ship, and figure out where we are, and survive.”

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After a nice meal and more sleep after the strenuous task of repairing the sensors, I began to wander the lower engineering deck searching the area where I knew the main Hyborium was – or, at least, had once been. The door to the connecting hall slid open with a loud scraping screech. I could see down the hall. There was heavy debris, missing panels, lights, and gobs of dangling fibers and sparking wires.

I was able to see far enough that the master control panel was visible. I wasn’t able to tell exactly, but it appeared almost the entire group had survived. I saw row after row of green.

E2 said in its mechanical voice, “Allow me to enter the area first. In that way I can begin to facilitate repairs and remove as many hazards as possible before we enable the awakening processes.”

I replied, “Sounds like a plan, although, I’m going to help. I’ve got this heavy lift trolley I can use to move the heavy support beams that fell.”

It didn’t take long for the two of us to clear the hall of the heavy debris, and managed to untangle the many clumps of optical cables and fiber control wires. I came up to the main door and pushed the control. It actually opened, although it too made severe grinding sounds.

Then I found myself in the main Hyborium. It was working, and from the readouts on the main console, we had made our escape with all hands ...

I awoke with a gasp and sat up. My heart nearly broke as I realized that it had been a dream. Melanie and I were still the only two survivors among the entire crew.

“Mng … are you OK?” asked Melanie, who had awakened at my gasp. “Wha’ss wrong?”

“I … I had a dream …” I said. “It was nothing.”

“Didn’t sound like nothing …”

“OK, I dreamed we found the main Hyborium and the whole crew was alive. Yeah, I know there’s no such thing as a main Hyborium.”

“Yeah, the things are distributed all over the ship, so we can’t lose the whole crew at once,” Melanie said. “We haven’t found anyone else alive yet, and you’re probably still dealing with the possibility that they’re all … gone.” She paused. “It’s not an easy thing to deal with.”

“There could still be more alive, in the sections we can’t access yet,” I said. “They could still have power, and they could still be in hibernation. Like we were.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” said Melanie. “One day at a time. If we find them, we’ll rescue them. OK?”

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We and the robots continued to work to fix more systems over the next few days. Then the computer signaled that its analysis of the planet and its sky were complete – the orbiting drone and the sensor array had fully scanned all of the planet that was currently accessible and all visible celestial objects, so we now had as full a picture of our surroundings as we were going to get for the time being.

“Sure enough,” I said to Melanie, “we’re in a dense stellar region. We might be near the center of a galaxy, considering we went through the polar jet of a black hole. We’re near enough that the stars are still pretty dense here, but far enough away from the center that there’s still a chance of having a planet with some life on it.”

“And there’s a lot of life,” Melanie said. “I’ve been examining some samples in the bio lab, now that it’s up and running. It’s based on a molecule similar to DNA but different enough that we’re looking at yet another case of parallel evolution, like the life we’ve found on several planets, like Delos C and Nemira D. The plants grow like crazy with all the starlight, and there are lots of animals. And if we’re careful, we can eat some of these, if we have to. The microbes I’ve discovered so far can’t infect us, and that’s not surprising; they didn’t evolve to be able to deal with our kind of life.”

“Well at least we won’t be dealing with new and exciting diseases,” I said. “With the drone probe outside the atmosphere, we’ve at least got some glimpses of other galaxies, and the computer’s running a search, trying to find out anything at all about our position.”

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Over the next several months, the third of the ship from bulkhead 10 rearward was repaired to the point where it looked as if nothing had happened. Repairs on the NR drive proceeded as fast as the current primitive conditions allowed. We were fortunate that we had the proper materials and some minor ability to make some of the more exotic components, coupled with the engineering bots’ expert repair techniques.

This allowed us to extrapolate items we had no ability to repair, and make feasible substitutes. As far as the mechanical and electronic replicator went, I repaired all I was able to that actually made it almost workable, then started looking for some way to get it to make more parts we needed to completely repair the replicator. If it burned out making its own replacement parts, it meant we could use what it produced to repair what burned out and make another component to repair the burned out units until we had a completely rebuilt replicator … again this will take a lot of time.

We weren’t slack about our external environment either. I used the repaired sensor suite and scanned everything in the small valley the ship had come to rest in. Wherever this happened to be was a paradise. There were microbes and other of those kinds of creepy crawlies, but nothing the bio-scans could find that was a hazard to our genomes or biologicals.

Melanie had taken it upon herself to see how the local bugs reacted to some of ours and started experimenting to see if they would intermingle and map the possible outcomes when such a mix happened. We were amazed to see that they coexisted very well, and the results were benign … at least so far. We took samples of everything we could think of, so this made us fairly confident.

Melanie almost drove me to distraction over her wanting to find more cryo-pods. We searched all the Hyboriums, the rooms where the Hyberculum pods were supposed to be located, only to find the location empty with only the loose wiring and tubing to show that something had ever been there. As a matter of fact, of the 14 Hyboriums we investigated, all the Hyberculum pods were gone, with evidence suggesting that they had been deliberately and hastily removed for unknown reasons.

I did discover, in the stores, what was referred to as a Techno-bot. This was a small spider-like droid with retractable finger-like flexible appendages that it could use to grip items with at the tip of each limb. After programming it to build several more like itself, we had a dozen now all working to repair the NR drive.

I really wanted to get out of here. By this time the computer had determined that the galaxy we were in was unknown to the stellar cartography database. I could tell you all you would want to know about the group of stars we had managed to come to rest in the center of, but the amount of raw energy hitting the planet’s atmosphere kept it charged enough to obstruct deeper long range scans, and the space nearby was so crowded with stars that even the orbiting drone could only see a few other galaxies.

We continued to push into the more heavily damaged parts of the ship. I had brought E1 and E2 along with several techno-bots. Melanie tagged along and aided in carrying items like food and water packs. I had one techno-bot loaded down like a pack mule with everything I could think of to help repair the ship.

After the bots repaired the pressure door’s bearings, it hissed open to reveal a hallway that appeared totally destroyed, with huge beams and large sections of roof paneling scattered all over. Sparking wires and dripping tubes hung from almost everywhere. I could see the huge liquid mess on the floor caused by all the leaking fluids.

The techno-bots accompanied by E1, and E2 proceeded into the devastation and began clearing the area slowly, sealing off the dripping tubes and coating the bare wires for safety while Melanie and I went to one of the doors a techno-bot had cleared. Opening it, we found the captain’s quarters. Just as with every other one, the captain’s Hyberculum was missing. The only clue that anything had been in that location was the dangling wires and tubes. So far, the only Hyberculums accounted for on the ship had been mine and Melanie’s.

“So … where did all the Hyberculums go?” Melanie asked, as she did every time we discovered that another one was missing. “Who removed them, and why, and where are they?”

“Wish I knew,” I said. “It’s worrisome. Either it was some of the crew – but if so, where are they? – or it was bots that did it – but why? – or it was … something else …”

“And why leave just ours?” she asked. “It’s not as if the part of the ship where our pods were was inaccessible from the rest.”

“It’s really mysterious,” I agreed. “But at this point there’s no way it could be some kind of accidental damage. Somebody or something did this deliberately. It gives me some kind of hope that they could be alive somewhere, but … it doesn’t help figure out where.”

“Well, let’s just keep on fixing everything we can,” Melanie said. “Maybe some internal camera got some video or something.”

The bots worked on repairs in parallel, and every now and then another techno-bot arrived. It wasn’t long before we had the path to the command center cleared and functional. The bots stood around waiting for instructions.

“Well, there’s the command center,” I said. “Let’s see if the bearings work … no, of course not,” I added in frustration as I tried the security pad, which dinged green but didn’t open the door. The bots went to work on the bearings, and in a few minutes the door was able to open – haltingly, making loud grinding and crunching noises, but it worked.

Melanie and I pushed our way into what was left of the command center. It looked to me like a bomb had gone off. The control consoles were in pieces scattered all over the space, which was crushed and twisted. There wasn’t even one single intact display screen. It was clear that this area had taken the brunt of the impact when the ship had plowed a furrow into the planet’s surface.

I was thankful we had managed to bypass the main bridge functions and reroute them to the engineering master control sections. It was a whole lot more difficult to fly the ship from that location. With several extra robots now available to man the various stations, it was still very difficult, but doable.

There were still no remains of any crew members – they had either gotten to the now-missing Hyberculums or died somewhere else.

However, this was the part of the ship that would have been covered by the most internal cameras. Any video they had recorded would be stored on their attached storage devices, and it hadn’t been transferred to the main computer because of the severed connections.

If we could restore those connections, the video data would be sent to the main computer, and we could view it anytime – if there was any video data to view. Maybe it would show us what had happened to the Hyberculums, or at least to the bridge crew, before the ship’s crash.

“Well, time to get to work,” I said. “Robots, please first focus on locating any video storage buffers and restoring their connection to the main computer. After that, effect whatever repairs are possible given current supplies. Please compile a list of necessary replacement parts and transmit to main computer.”

“Affirmative,” came a chorus of electronic replies, and the robots went into action. The engineering bots were equipped for a number of technical and material tasks; they could even flatten metal panels and recycle broken metal parts into replicas of the originals, since they were in contact with the computer, and the computer had the specifications of all the ship’s parts.

They couldn’t replicate complex components, though; we’d have to take the shattered remains of the consoles back to recycling, break them down into their base components, and remanufacture them, or even get them broken down to a molecular level and re-replicate and reassemble the parts. The goal was to have a functional command center – then we’d be a step closer to being able to fly this ship.

Then the computer dinged. Apparently the robots had connected it to the command center already. But I knew that ding; it was the sound the computer made when it had detected a significant result. “What is it?” I asked.

Through a bit of static, the computer’s electronic voice stated, “Anomaly detected by orbital drone.”

“In space or on the planet’s surface?” Melanie asked.

“Beneath planetary surface,” replied the computer. “Anomalous mineral readings that may indicate presence of intelligent life forms.”

“What?” Melanie replied, shocked. “I’m going to the captain’s quarters. Put the results on screen there.”

I followed. What I saw amazed me. The drone had been orbiting for months, mapping the surface, then scanning space, then doing a deeper scan of the planet, and only now had it come across this, a linear formation of metal – high iron content, possibly steel – hundreds of meters beneath the surface in a part of the planet that was pretty far from us. This formation was almost a kilometer long and absolutely straight. There were hints of other formations crossing with it, but more scanning was needed.

“Less than one percent chance of that being a natural formation,” said Melanie. “This planet either has intelligent life, or it once did. I don’t think there’s a chance of that being from a crashed ship – there’s no way it would have stayed that perfectly straight through an event like that. Look at our ship, all bent out of shape, at least up here. And this ship isn’t even half a kilometer long.”

The sounds of the robots working in the command center were all we could hear as our minds raced. We’d been on this planet for months, but nothing had contacted or attacked us. Did that mean that the object was some kind of ruined underground city or factory? Maybe there had once been a civilization on this planet. If so, maybe they’d left behind materials we could scavenge.

Melanie had already requested that the computer program the drone to scan that area more completely at that depth on subsequent orbits that took it over that region. We’d have to wait to get more data, but we had to know.

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By this time we had repaired all the launch tubes and related equipment, so we launched two more probe drones to gather as much data as we could about this mysterious buried object.

We had managed to repair the ship’s hydraulics system, and one of the maintenance bots had discovered a plant whose sap mixed with a bit of thin machine oil made a perfect mixable replacement for the lost hydraulic fluid while repairs were ongoing. Our ship, battered, scraped, and dented, stood up on its landing gear as they extended.

I’m not real sure the emotions that coursed through me as I felt each tremor at the master engineering console, I had a tear in my eye knowing the ship at this point was almost fully able to fly once again. This particular repair enabled the ship to rise from its belly and the cargo bay lower ramp to extend which gave us the ability to use the explorer vehicles.

We were very fortunate the two explorer vehicles in the cargo hold were secure enough not to have taken any damage in the landing. Then again, those vehicles were built tougher than a tank. In places like the one we found ourselves in, we couldn’t just pull over to the nearest tree and find a mechanic.

I was in the pilot’s seat, and Melanie was in the engineer’s seat. We had done a full pre-ops check on all systems, and the vehicles were in top operational shape. We exited the cargo hold onto the planet’s surface, which we’d seen through cameras and helmets, but seeing it through a windshield was a different matter. It was a beautiful garden-looking place with a huge blue freshwater lake and many flowering vines and other plants. Sure, there were those super-storms, but we’d chosen a day when the satellites told us that none would be in our path.

We weren’t sure what they were, but we both knew the lake was full of some form of aquatic life of various types. We saw fleeting glimpses of them from time to time.

“They look like they could pass for fish,” I said.

“Well, the lake’s made of water,” said Melanie, ever the xenobiologist. “Life that evolves to spend its entire existence swimming in water tends to be torpedo-shaped, have fins, and so forth. Some solutions are bigger and some are smaller, some are shorter while some are longer and more eel-shaped, but it’s all meant to make it easy to swim through water.”

The trip to the target area was long, and we made it that much longer by stopping every so often to take samples … and darn, not going to lie, being out of the confines of the ship into a place as beautiful as this was nice, and both of us were sort of developing cabin fever. To remain more able to cope, we needed to be out.

There was heavy undergrowth in many places, but there were also wide open grassy expanses as well. We had to cross several small streams and navigate around a rather deep and wide crevasse.

Melanie said as she pointed to the display on her console, “From what the satellite data shows, we should almost be at the first place I want to stop and investigate.”

I looked around at the images and data on her screen and replied, “I can see the anomalous growth patterns and return signal anomalies. I agree.” I pointed to an almost invisible data return that indicated some form of power source was present, although it was weak to the point of almost nonexistent, “and I would really like to know what is making this signal. Should prove interesting.”

Melanie looked at me and said softly, “If whatever’s there is friendly. What if it isn’t?”

“Well, maybe there’s nothing there,” I said. “But … these vehicles are supposed to be armed …” I reached forward, opened a rectangular red panel on my console, and flipped the several rows of switches. Immediately, several racks popped from the sides of the vehicle fully loaded with some type of missile I had never seen before. I also knew some form of weapon came from the top of the vehicle. We heard the door’s outer panel buzz open, and whatever the weapon was extended and locked into place.

I looked at Melanie and grinned. “My only fear is they’re better armed then we are, if we meet something unfriendly.”

As we slowly approached the map coordinates for the anomalous readings we wanted to investigate, I began to notice the contours of the land. In my mind’s eye, I could see a complex of some sort here. This particular place appeared to have been an access point some time in the past.

I removed several techno-bots from their storage compartment, attached a digger unit to each, then programmed them to carefully clear away any debris blocking access. The bots immediately began to clear way the overgrowth and remove regolith. It didn’t take long to recognise this as a fortified access point of some sort. I recalled many such on our home world, and once the bots started clearing the vegetation, this didn’t look much different.

“Nobody’s used this place for a long time,” said Melanie, “but it was obviously built by intelligent life. I wonder if we can find clues about how long ago that was …” She started running some scans on the debris the techno-bots had been removing, comparing it with the scans she’d already done on other plants on this planet. “The oldest stuff I’m finding has been dead approximately 2000 years,” she said. “This area could be older, though. There might just not be anything left of anything older than that.”

Suddenly there was a shrieking sound, somewhere out in the overgrowth, and more shrieking sounds coming from other directions. I called the techno-bots back, and they, Melanie, and I got back into the explorer vehicle, closing the doors. “I think something’s found us,” Melanie said. “Scanning nearby life form readings … large animal life, many signatures, in an arc around us from north to west to south … to east …”

“They have us almost surrounded!” I said, preparing the weapons.

“Wait until we can see them,” Melianie cautioned. “We don’t know they’re hostile. They may make shrieking sounds, but to them that might mean hello.”

And from the overgrowth stepped one creature after another. They were … crablike; that’s how I’d put it most simply. They had a central body, six legs, and two large claws. They actually wore clothing, though, woven fabric draped over their bodies that their eyestalks and claws protruded from. Their claws had metal implements fastened to them. Some of these implements looked like weapons, but others looked like tools.

In time over two dozen of the creatures stepped forth. They made shrieking sounds, clicking sounds, and humming sounds at us. “They’re talking,” said Melanie. “But they don’t seem to be attacking.” Indeed, they were keeping their distance from the vehicle.

“Can the translation computer do anything with this?” I asked.

“Not without any kind of basis,” said Melanie. “What if I got out and started the translation AI?”

“Uh … be careful,” I said. “You’re half of all the humans on this planet, as far as we know.”

She picked up the translation speaker and programmed it to start learning a new form of communication, then stepped out. Some of the creatures stepped back, while the ones with weapon-like implements stepped forward, but she simply set the small circular device on top of a nearby stump. “Hello,” she said, knowing they didn’t understand her. “I don’t understand you. But this machine will help, I hope. We have to talk in order for it to learn how to translate, though.” She pointed at the ground. “Soil.” She pointed at a rock. “Stone.” She pointed at the tree stump. “Wood.” She blew a breath into the air. “Air.”

One of the creatures made some sounds at the others, then stepped forward and tapped the ground with one of its six legs, making a chirruping sound. The computer attempted to repeat the sound. Several of the creatures stepped back and chittered, but the apparent leader hummed at them. The leader tapped a rock and made a series of clicks. The computer repeated this.

This process went on for a while, and the AI system started to put things together. We were able to have sort of a conversation.

“This place danger,” said the leader, translated by the computer. “We come tell you stay away. Many us die here. Long ago. Bad place.”

“We thank you for warning us,” said Melanie. “What happened here?”

After the computer made sounds and the leader clicked, chittered, and chirruped back, the computer said, “Big fight. North-people and under-ground-people kill with big metal things. Like this metal thing but big.” The leader was pointing at the explorer vehicle.

So there had been a war, probably long ago, and they still told stories about it. It involved some fairly serious technology, it sounded like. Melanie asked, “North-people and underground people … are they still alive?”

“North-people … our parents’ parents and farther. Under-ground people … no one knows. No one see under-ground-people long time.”

“Were the underground people like you? Same kind of people?” asked Melanie.

“Yes. But they have big weapons. Big metal things. Other weapons. North-people have too, long ago. But all gone now.”

Melanie tried to explain where we had come from. It was interesting that they hadn’t asked. “We fell from the sky in a big metal thing,” she said. “It fell and was broken. We woke up. Our friends were gone. We don’t know what happened to them.”

“We know your big metal thing,” the leader replied, via the translation computer. “It fell far away, but we could see. Big noise. Very hot for long time. When cold, we went to see. Metal thing opened. We went in to look. Your friends dead. We sad. We take them. Give them proper …” The computer didn’t know this word.

“Proper burial? Proper ritual?”

“We sing old songs, songs to …” The computer didn’t have this word either.

“Songs to your gods? Ancestors? Spirits? Ghosts?” The computer did what it could, and Melanie was using her xenoanthropology training here. They somehow worked out the answer. Yes, they had given our dead crew members their funerary rites. They had sung hymns to their gods and had burned the corpses, as was their custom for their own dead, storing the ashes in stoneware urns. They showed us those urns later on, engraved with their words and sacred symbols. We added nameplates for them.

“We had a funeral for them,” said the leader. “So they did not be angry ghosts. But you and you were alive, asleep. We let you be.” It pointed at Melanie and me. It had seen us while we were in hibernation and done us no harm. I felt more trust toward these people now. They could have killed us while we were helpless, but they hadn’t, so they weren’t absolutely hostile to outsiders.

So the mystery was solved. We knew what had happened to the missing crew. Apparently Melanie and I had been the only ones who had survived by whatever miracle caused it. Every other Hyberculum pod had failed, or they had just been in hibernation too long. It was true that Melanie and I had been in pretty bad shape when we’d awakened.

“We are trying to fix our ship … our big metal thing … so we can leave this world and go home,” Melanie was trying to explain, pointing to the sky.

“Old stories say north-people and under-ground-people could fly beyond the stars,” said the leader. “They say there are other worlds there.”

Had the war destroyed these people’s technological civilization, throwing them back to a primitive existence? Were any of the underground people still alive? Why had they warned us away from the access point to the underground area, which we had moved away from during the conversation? There didn’t seem to be residual radiation or toxins.

Were there automated alarms going off underground right now? If so, the underground people’s troops, alive or robotic, were taking an awfully long time to mobilize, assuming there were any. Perhaps they were warning us merely because of the old stories about this battle site.

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We were in no hurry, and these people were friendly enough. We had brought out some of our camping equipment and set up a quick fireplace and brought out some meats and a few veggies to make a stew. It also afforded us more time to talk with the strangers and allow the translators to continue deciphering the new language.

One of the people came to me and started making clicking and whistling sounds as it pointed to the pot I had been cutting up potatoes next to and tossing in.

I smiled and replied slowly. “Making food … eat.” I brought my fingers to my mouth like I was eating.

The other creature’s eye stalks stood straight up as it made what sounded like happy chittering noises. I was slightly startled as it dashed rapidly off somewhere. I truly hoped I hadn’t offended or upset it somehow.

It returned shortly with a rather large sack which it promptly sat across from me and opened. Within it were basically slightly different looking items like mine that were for making and cooking food in a nearly wild environment.

I watched as the creature sparked a fire using some type of hand held thing. It had a round collapsable stem of something like flint, and a button on the side that pushes a steel piece into it as the creature pressed down with a measure of force collapsing the stem into the handle.

Many sparks flew and a large smoky red place appeared and began to burn. The creature added some of the limb debris I had gathered and had a nice fire going as they started to add ingredients to a pot that now hung over the creature's fire.

It wasn’t long before the aromas of good things cooking began to drift all around. Everyone gathered with what I was sure was anticipation as I used one of the portable scanners on both meals. Best I could tell we should be able to share this meal with no detrimental effects … which we did with great pleasure on both sides. Neither one had ever had the other’s foods before and this first encounter was absolutely a culinary delight.

During our shared meal, We had managed to discuss what was currently known about the structure and not handed down by tradition. The best we could make out, the war had happened many time spans ago – we were still unclear on what they used as a time unit, as the planet’s year was a bit variable. The war had changed their world drastically, as well as their bodies, which had slowly adapted genetically.

As far as any current knowledge, the facility had long been forgotten and avoided, and there was nothing concrete that anyone could think of that might still pose any kind of danger. The only specific thing the creatures voiced was that if we were going in, so were they.

As a matter of fact, I realized by the way they were insisting that if we didn’t take them with us, odds were good they would try to stop us from going in. I didn’t mind; after all, this was their planet, and I really wanted to know what was down there.

We all returned to the site after an absolutely fabulous meal. The robots had cleared the underbrush around the entrance, and it was obvious that this had been a main thoroughfare into the underground facility at one time. The road in had decayed away externally, but although the formidable doors might have had a bit of tarnish, they were still solid.

Melanie went to the door and started examining a feature that looked like some type of button plate or something. It was a rather large metal plate set into the side of the door arch. It obviously used to have buttons and some type of screen that had long since decayed away. She took an auto-driver from her pouch and an impactor. The rat tat tat hammering of the impactor rang out loudly for a few minutes before the large plate was dislodged from its mounting.

Within was an actual mechanical means of opening the door. The creatures eagerly came up with a device. It was oddly advanced for them, I thought, as they placed one end into the slot it was shaped like.

With a loud buzz, a serious stone on steel grinding noise, and a small cascade of dirt, dust, and debris, the door slowly and ponderously opened, revealing a blacker than black interior where the light trailed off into the distance.

The road in on this side of the door was intact, although it was more than obvious that many years had passed since anyone had entered this door. Dust accumulations were thick and undisturbed. I saw locations nearby where lights used to hang on the walls, but what was left of them lay in debris piles along the descending road.

We went back to the explorer vehicle for some multi-tools that included both ambient and spot lighting. The inhabitants brought lanterns fueled by some kind of oil, of either animal or vegetable origin. We had maps on our tablets that did their best to update our current positions based on our movements, as we would be cut off from the satellites we’d launched at this point, but we had the latest scans, and nothing had changed: there were large and regular metallic structures down here. Further scans by the satellites had revealed that the kilometer-long structure they’d found originally was crossed by other long structures, and it looked like a grid of underground buildings, maybe factories, maybe habitation areas; we were about to find out.

The tunnel went downward at a fairly sharp angle until it reached an intersection and leveled off, with absolutely flat and wide passages in three directions: straight ahead and precisely to the left and right. Our spotlights revealed that the side passageways had no branches that went back in the direction in which we’d come; there were paths down there that led farther into the complex, as well as continuing onward into the darkness away from the intersection where we stood.

The native people were already fanning out in all three directions; we could see their lanterns lighting up the walls of the corridors amid the darkness. “Let’s continue down the center,” I said.

“I agree,” said Melanie. “According to the satellite scans, the place is laid out in a regular grid. Approximately every 80 meters there’s an intersection.”

“But are there any doors?” I asked as we walked carefully onward, shining our lights at the corridor walls, which did appear to be made of some kind of metal alloy. I pointed my hand scanner at it. “Iron, carbon, some nickel and chromium – it’s steel. Stainless steel. Well, this matches what our orbital drones detected. This place is full of walls like this, absolutely straight.”

“No sign of any door yet …” Melanie said as she surveyed the right-hand wall; I was examining the left. “Whoa, wait. Look here.”

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I turned and moved to Melanie’s side, as did several of the others with lanterns. The extra light made things bright as day. What she had found was a rather large display panel with buttons. It had more than obviously not been used in quite a long time.

The accumulated dust made it appear like some of those artifacts found in ancient burial mausoleums from our own world. There was no doubt a door or some kind of opening was near, but it blended into the wall and was hidden by who knew how many years of grime.

I came to the wall and began using a small metal bristled brush I had in my toolkit to clear a strip across, sure something would present itself. I was about to give up when my brush crossed over some kind of almost hidden seam. I did a much more thorough scrubbing, following the line of the seam around. It was some type of door, but whether we could open it was another matter. Melanie and some of the natives had been examining the panel in the meantime, but it seemed to be completely dead, entirely devoid of power.

One of the indigenous individuals with us seemed to have observed us enough to be able to program our tech-bots; they were obviously quite smart. He had programmed it to come and open the door without damaging it if possible. I stood with my mouth open in wonder as the bot came to the wall and began using two of its appendages to scrape along the seam deeper and deeper.

I could tell the bot was actually cutting the rectangle shape from the wall and that long ago the door had been sealed. By this time, a cloud of dust was floating around as a small pile of powder had begun to accumulate. The bot stood up on two of its rear legs, forcefully grabbed the rectangle with his others, and with much more force, removed it from the wall with loud grinding sounds.

The clattering of falling debris quieted, and the drifting cloud of dust settled. I approached the black area with my hand torch and shone it in. The area within, from the best I could tell, was some type of control room. I could see many of the consoles and what was left of the seats in front of them. It was obvious that everything in this room had been abandoned and left to molder many years ago.

From what the translator was telling Melanie and me, the others had found similar openings with similar items within. The hall continued past into the stygian darkness. We had found the business offices, and even what appeared to be an engineering section. I also found what the energy signature had been. I wasn’t sure how it had originally worked, but scans surrounding the reactor area showed radioactive decay products, so perhaps it had been some type of nuclear fission energy source. The residual fuel had long since decayed away to almost useless slightly-radioactive lead, mixed with other decay products.

We had found many artifacts, all badly corroded. This facility had been unused and forgotten for generations. We did find the remains of the launch tubes for some type of missiles. One tube actually had an unlaunched missile rusting away within it. Whatever the explosive and fuel had been had long since decayed away. The missile was interesting to look at, but it was so severely corroded that touching it caused it to crumble away to dust.

“Well,” I said, “this power plant isn’t going to produce any electricity anytime soon.”

“Maybe we can replace it?” asked Melanie. “Like with something from the ship? You’re the engineer; is there anything?”

“We could use one of the mini continuum eversion generators,” I suggested. “But it’ll take a while to get one here. Not as long as it took us to get here, though – now that there’s a map, we can … wait …”

So I programmed a nearby tech-bot to go to the explorer vehicle and program it to return to the ship, with a message to tell one of the engineering bots to load the generator onto the vehicle and send it back. These CE generators were what made the explorer vehicle run too, but I didn’t want to dismantle the vehicle unless it was necessary. It would be several hours before it came back with the generator, so once the tech-bot had left on its mission, we returned to exploring.

“This place was a city,” Melanie said as we looked at one room after another. “So far, it could have housed thousands of the inhabitants. And … there are staircases. The city has multiple levels. We don’t know how far down it goes. It could have housed hundreds of thousands.”

“Our entire tribe could live here,” said a nearby native, translated by the computer. “We do not need the strange machines to work. We would be safe from the storms and …” Melanie had to work on this next concept.

“A threat from above? Or below?”

“Above. From the suns.”

“From the suns? Do the suns get really bright? Or too close?” Melanie asked, trying to clear up the confusion.

“Is … The sun reaches out with its fire.”

“A stellar flare?” asked Melanie. “A flame from the sun throws gas from the sun at the planet?”

“Yes,” the native agreed. “Stellar flare.” The computer had learned to translate this concept. So there were flares. That made sense, with so many nearby stars. We had observed a few, but nothing extreme yet. Apparently extreme flare events were a concern. That was troubling. On the other hand, it meant that when the ship finally got into space, it would likely have an easy time scooping up some of the gas.

Well, there was apparently no one living down here, at least not that we’d seen. We explored and mapped the level of the city we were on, with the help of tech-bots and the indigenous people. But there were ways down to the next level below, both a type of elevator that wasn’t working and a type of staircase. They had some fairly extreme spiral staircases that would be difficult for us two-legged humans but would be much easier for these six-legged natives.

But right about the same time we got the main level mapped out, the tech-bot arrived carrying the mini CEG. This meant that the explorer vehicle had made it all the way to the ship and back, automated.

“Are we really going to try to hook that thing up to the city’s power grid?” asked Melanie.

“Why not?” I said. “After all, the worst thing that can happen is that we burn out the wires. That’s assuming they haven’t already corroded all the way to nothing.” The tech-bot followed us to the power plant, where I had already found the proper leads and tested to discover the voltage, current, and frequency the systems expected. I had the tech-bot set the generator down and patched it into the system … then …

All around us the city flickered to life, and for a moment we had a glimpse of what it had looked like ages ago. The natives looked around in wonder. “Wow!” Melanie said.

But then, just moments later, the ancient wires gave out, and everything flickered out again. “Aww,” said Melanie.

One of the nearby natives chittered and clicked. “It is all too old,” he said via the translator. “Much work must be done here.”

“Well, this won’t do a lot of good here, but …” I said, and I got the tech-bot to pick up the generator again, connecting a suite of lights and sensors that I had also had the robots fetch from the vehicle. “There. Now at least we have power to run this. This will help us on the next level.”

“You really want to go down there?” asked Melanie.

“Well, we have to see if we can find any of the rarer elements that we need for the ship,” I said. “We detected some amounts of them on the sensors.”

“Let’s go, then,” said Melanie. “Before we get too tired.”

The spiral staircases were extremely steep and had staggered steps; I’d never seen anything like them. The tech-bots scrambled down them with ease, as did the native inhabitants, whose ancestors had built them. But we descended for hundreds of meters and emerged in another building – or perhaps a lower level of the same building – and found it similarly dust-covered.

We worked our way out of this building, managing to get the door open, and found ourselves on another street. It was exactly parallel to the upper one. It didn’t take the tech-bot’s lights and sensor array, connected to the CEG it carried, to determine that this level was very similar to the one above. And the staircase continued down. How many layers there were we didn’t know.

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Melanie and I hadn’t actually planned on an extended overnight stay, but apparently our new friends had. We had spent hours exploring every room we could get to. I had become tired and hungry and made a comment to Melanie that was overheard by one of the indigenous people who carried a translator and a pack.

To my amazement, they had a complete cooking outfit including a portable fire pit. I watched in amazement for a few seconds before I came over and made myself useful. Setting up and igniting the fire was a super snap. Very shortly, the wonderful smell of what I swore was fish and some type of beef filled the area. Well, we had discovered various land and water based life forms, but these people already knew which ones were safe to eat.

As I was stirring a small camp pot, I had a small cramp in one leg due to the way I had squatted. I stood and stretched, and saw they had brought enough padded rolls and other items to make a fairly decent camp. I could have sent a techno-bot back to the vehicle for cooking and sleeping gear, but at this point it was too late – Melanie said it might be seen as refusing their hospitality, which they might find insulting. They had even already set up guard times on a rotating basis. I had to argue with them to be put in the guard rotation with Melanie. Fair was fair, and I didn’t want them to feel I was taking advantage in any way.

The meal was wonderful and the bed roll soft and snuggly. Next thing I knew, the leader of the indigenous people, who I now knew was named Balloopp, was waking me up and handing me a hot cup of a dark wonderful tasting beverage.

None of them would hear our protests about being left out of the guard rotation. Balloop seemed to laugh it off and told us this was their world, and regardless of why we came to be here, we were still their guests, and they intended to keep us safe. I finally gave up protesting, since none of them would listen and thought it more humorous than anything else.

Once we had picked up and put all of our camp away, we once again began a descent to an even lower level. This time, however, when we reached the bottom landing, the area was totally different. As strange as it seemed, this area was clean and seemingly corrosion free. There was no power except in one location, and the energy was of a source unknown to our computer system.

I had one of the Techno-bots open the door at the far end of this huge room. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that something was supposed to have been stored here, whose remains were unaccounted for. We did find something, though. Huge pristine storage areas, all sealed and filled with nitrogen.

It took us a bit to evacuate that large a volume of nitrogen and purge the vault, but we managed to do it without anyone getting hurt. Inside were several disks of some kind, sparkling with rainbow colors.

I wasn’t sure what medium the disks were made of, but scans indicated they were some sort of data storage device, similar to an archaic format that had once been called a Compact Disc.

One of the indigenous peoples started making loud clicking whistles. What I heard from the translator unit amazed me to my soul. The translation said the individual identified the disk as a holographic medium. The computer translated it at first as “full solid light,” but Melanie clarified it.

I asked, “You know of holograms? Do you have a means to read this disk?”

It nodded its eye stalks in what we had come to know as a gesture for yes. It made many clicks, whistles, and groans. The translation was, “We know what that is.” The creature took one of the disks in his claw, then took out a light-emitting device and shone it at the disc. A really badly distorted and grainy image appeared in the air, squiggles and slashes accompanied by geometric shapes appeared in an ephemeral cloud, moving slowly upward … was it scrolling?

“It’s … printing?” I asked.

“Solid words,” they said. “Printing.”

“Can you read it?” asked Melanie.

“Yes but … it is difficult. Not clear,” said Balloopp. “It says there is war. Fighting. This may be a story about the war long ago.”

“But a story told by the people who were there,” Melanie said.

“Yes,” said the leader. “If we can read it all, we would know what the underground people said about what happened. And there may be more here, about other things.”

“Should we take these with us?” I asked.

“If there is no one living here,” said Balloopp, “then we will live here, and this place will be part of our city. We must find out if anyone still lives here.”

I said, “The scanner says there’s something still working down here. It’s … in that direction.” I pointed. “If there is anyone here, they might be there … or that might be a machine. But we should be careful … it may be a weapon left over from the war.”

Melanie added, “Or if there are people still alive, they might think we’re enemies.”

“Very possible,” said Balloopp. He started making whistling and screeching sounds, at which the other natives nearby looked up and started readying their gear and weapons, lining up in formation. The translator said, “Be ready! There may be a fight. Maybe not, but we must prepare!” It probably sounded more impressive in the original language.

The techno-bots were standing idle at the door leading to this storage area, so I had them go to the door at the other end of it. It seemed there was no other way to progress into other parts of this level of the complex. There were some flickering lights in the distance, next to the door. The techno-bot with the lighting system on its back approached and revealed a panel … one that was actually lit up. There were glowing symbols above what appeared to be an array of lighted buttons.

We approached the panel. Balloop came with us, followed by the rest, who were ready for anything. Balloop inspected the panel. “I will press the one labeled ‘Open.’ Then we will see.” The computer could scan some distance through the steel walls, but not very far. I kept a close eye on the screen, because I knew …

As the door opened, the scanner was able to get a lot of data about what was on the other side of the opening. There was a large chamber; several more doors appeared in the distant steel walls. But in the chamber was a large … machine? Vehicle? We didn’t know what it was, but it was the source of the strange energy readings I’d been getting.

The scanner was able to get me some much more detailed scans of the machine, though they still didn’t tell me what it was for yet.

“What … is that?” asked Melanie, tilting her head to look into the next chamber through the open door. Several of the natives, including the leader, were doing likewise, peering curiously at the huge machine in the distance.

And then the doors opened. All at once. We couldn’t see them well, as they were far away on the other side of the huge chamber, but with the doors open, my scanner could see past them.

What I saw were a lot of life form readings.

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Seriously tense moments turned into agonizingly long minutes as the warriors stood ready to take on all comers no matter what they might have been. I had been studying my scanner readings diligently. I was able to get some serious power readings now that the hugely thick explosion resistant doors had all opened.

With them open, we could hear faint tinkling and beeping sounds accompanied by almost silent tapping noises, but no indications of any kind that anything took notice of the doors opening or anything approaching the open doors to investigate.

I said to Melanie as I showed her my scans, “I’m getting a huge life form reading. There could possibly be several million … quite possibly almost a billion individuals, or some other thing like a bio-area or possibly a hydroponics facility preserving certain types of life forms for a later revival. I’m also getting a power generation reading that’s scary.”

Melanie looked at the reading as her eyes grew large in surprise, “Darn, girl, that thing’s producing enough energy to move this planet out of orbit.”

The indigenous group that was with us had grown considerably larger once we made our first camp and appeared to be steadily growing. It fascinated me to no end to discover they had technology that, from the looks of how it operated and the data it gave, was on par with ours.

A huge echoing chattering, chirping, squeaking, clicking clamor rose loudly as it was obvious they were having a very heated discussion about something, but not the heat one would come to blows over, but more of each was expressing their knowledge of the matter. I adjusted the translator so it wouldn’t be confused by echos and turned it on to eves drop. I wanted to know what had excited them so much.

The androgynous voice of the translator said this, “ … but, Balloopp, our most ancient and sacred texts tell of the control room. The descriptions of the place are taught to each and every child from the time they learn to talk. This place … is the control room.”

I looked at Melanie and said in a soft amazed tone, “Control Room?”

Melanie replied, “That would explain that huge power unit.”

I looked at her and cocked my head to one side. “What are you suggesting?”

Melanie said, “I’m a xenobiologist by trade. Might not be the very best ever, but I’m in the top 10%. From the data we’ve gathered, this planet isn’t a water world. It does have rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds, but from all the probe data we’ve been collecting ... there are no major oceans or seas. The population we see couldn’t have spawned here unless this world went through major geological changes after the war. The only problem with that is that the geologic records don’t support that kind of major upheaval. There were changes to the land mass and biosphere in general, nothing like what it would have taken to remove oceans and seas.”

I replied as I pointed to the closest open door, “Our only answers lie in there. Come on, let’s take a look.”

I started moving towards the door with Melanie close behind. All the cacophony of the indigenous people’s voices rose in pitch, then they dashed towards us and followed us in. As soon as we passed the frame of the door, I knew we had made some type of major discovery. The halls were all lighted and white with no shadows. We could see many doorways and branching hallways.

I made my way slowly toward one of the nearest doors. I was totally amazed that there was no corrosion or any sign of neglect anywhere. Someone or something was doing regular cleaning – whether it was life forms or robots, this place was maintained. The door slid open with a tinkling sound. I stopped dead with huge eyes, and my mouth open in total incredulity.

As far as I could see were huge racks with head-sized glowing balls of pulsing energy, all spaced and arranged in an orderly fashion. I saw many types of robots tending equipment that I had no idea what it was. This was far in advance of our tech.

Balloopp came to me and turned on his translator. Its androgynous voice said, “This is a living … computer. It is comprised of many people’s minds and controls what our most ancient of texts calls … The World Ship.”

“World … Ship?” I asked, my mind trying to grasp what this meant.

“I knew it!” Melanie said enthusiastically. “Your people didn’t evolve here! You’re semi-aquatic and must have evolved on a planet with a lot more water than this! And in such a star-dense area there’s no way this planet’s orbit has been stable long enough for life as complex as you to evolve. And … your advanced ancestors must have found this planet and turned it into a huge spacecraft! I can only imagine that something happened to your world of origin that they couldn’t prevent, even with all their technology.”

“Like … its sun became a giant star,” I suggested, “or there was an ecological disaster, or some kind of huge war, which would have been devastating with such advanced technology.”

“Not even our ancient texts tell us that,” said Balloop via the translator, “but perhaps that knowledge is here. We must read what is on those discs. Or … perhaps … we can ask.”

“Patrol Leader,” said one of the natives, “it looks different over here.”

Balloop approached this other one and replied, “I see what you mean. There is a wider space here on the floor where the racks separate. A light shines on the spot from above.” He stood on the spot and said, “Greetings, Ancient Ones. We seek understanding.”

A booming humming filled the room with its echoes, along with loud whistles, chirrups, and clicks. The translator wasn’t keeping up; this was an ancient dialect that was almost as different from Balloop’s language as his was from ours.

After an hour or so of mutual adjustment, some amount of the ancient dialect became intelligible. We had correctly gathered that it was the organic computer that controlled the complex and had controlled the entire planet at one time. It was composed of the brains of many whose bodies had passed on.

“And why can you no longer steer this world through the stars?” Balloop was asking.

The great voice replied, “There was damage. We struck something in the space beyond space …”

“That sounds like NR space!” I said quietly to Melanie.

“It was like nothing we had seen before, a massive collection of self-mobile objects acting as if one,” the voice boomed. “Our systems were badly damaged, and many of our people were killed. Many who knew how to fix the damage died.”

“Lots of small self-mobile objects in NR space!” I whispered to Melanie. “Exactly what happened to our ship!”

“There was a war,” said Balloop.

“That was relatively recently,” said the voice. “We were not involved in it. Those who yet inhabited the upper levels became enraged by the descendants of those who had left the control complex to dwell upon the surface. There was much death. We could not stop it.”

“These people come from another world,” said Balloop. “Their vessel was damaged and fell to this world, and most of their people perished.”

“We detected this,” said the voice. “But observing is almost all we can do at present.”

“Maybe we can help!” I said, and the translator was able to handle this simple suggestion.

“You would offer to help us, traveler?” asked the voice.

“There are only two of us, but I see that you have robots,” I said.

“It is all the working machines can do to keep just this facility in working order,” said the voice, “and then just barely so. If you could repair even a few of the machines, they could repair others, and soon there would be many working to repair the control functions.”

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As time went by, with the help of our new friends, the translator had become more efficient and accurate in translations. To my and Melanie’s total amazement, these people were called the Jheenga Machhalee. The fact that this was Hindi for a type of shellfish is probably coincidental, since they’d never been to Earth – as far as we knew, at least.

The Brain Computer showed us a layout of the facility. It was far deeper than anyone had thought, large enough internally to fully maintain a population of about two billion, with specialty biosphere facilities to support flora and fauna from many other environments – or it had been able to, before it was damaged.

Forgive me, but I had no idea how the power production unit worked, much less how it seemingly made unlimited energy from nothing. The ship’s maintenance bots had enough working knowledge to keep it operating at peak and to make repairs if necessary, but how the massive energy generation was created was not known to them or the computer system.

I was overjoyed to discover that this place had a minor factory area and was able to manufacture certain goods and necessary parts. I immediately began building more techno-bots. I incorporated the newer designs from the local robots and came out with a totally new and very versatile droid.

The first droid was a real pain to build. I wanted these to be versatile and as upgraded and upgradeable as I could make them, which caused certain issues obtaining the proper parts at first.

Once the first one passed initial run in diagnostics, the rest were a snap, because we had the plan and the proper equipment online to create them. The first three produced I designated as constructors and programmed them to build the next series, which were the resource gathering drones.

I wasn’t sure how much time passed as we explored and discovered more. I did become aware that the world-ship’s massive NR drive had been damaged rather severely. It was hard for me to believe that this was the same type of drive our small ship used. Its technology was obviously far in advance of ours. We would need some advanced manufacturing capabilities before we could make the necessary repairs.

This didn’t mean they were totally impossible, but it would take a great many years to build the initial infrastructure necessary to manufacture certain components, and that was assuming we could find the necessary materials to even begin.

We had built and programmed about 100 of the resource-bots over the course of months we were in the underground facility. They had managed to find deposits of many of the metals and other materials we needed to repair the control room.

We had all stopped and had a huge feast the afternoon the Machhalee had finished their project of rewiring the entire abandoned city of the upper levels. It lit up and sparkled like an underground jewel. Many domes we hadn’t noticed before began to glow brightly and filled the huge cavernous area with sparkling and twinkling lights.

We were able to repair the world-ship’s sub-light drive, which used some form of ionized mercurial gas combined with xenon. Moving the planet ship from its current orbit was now possible, but I began to worry about atmosphere and other matters once the planet managed to change its path. I was sure the orbital balance disruptions would cause major upheavals in the current system of things, though one thing I wasn’t worried about was getting enough sunlight. It would have to travel hundreds of light years farther from the core of whatever galaxy or cluster it was in before the planet would experience anything that could be called night.

That was when I discovered electro-hydrodynamic shielding. I was amazed that someone far in the past had figured out how to use electricity to bind free oxygen and hydrogen. Some of the gases naturally combined to form water vapor. The outer layer of magnetic rings of this planet were a forcefield held together by electro-hydrodynamic shielding, which kept the atmosphere from bleeding off into space, and protected the planet from most of the massive bombardment of radiation this star cluster threw at it. I recorded and sent to our ship’s archives plans on how this was done. It was an easy thing to do … if one had a power source capable of producing enough electrical charge. The only issue now was, if we did move the planet, whether the tidal disruptions could cause unforeseen issues.

Melanie and I noticed the diligence and speed with which the Machhalee had cleaned and refurbished a large portion of the area. It was now starting to look like a city and not some long-lost and buried sepulcher.

I sat, mostly frustrated. The NR drive on our ship was damaged severely too, and could be repaired over time. We had managed to get the equipment replicator operating sufficiently to keep the food replicators working, and we had certain kinds of equipment. I was unable to fudge on one of the major electron bond / spin devices that was damaged, so I was limited in the types of devices and parts I could create. Once again, full repair was doable … in about 30 or 40 years after we built the necessary foundational equipment.

“Unless there’s some way to accelerate the repairs,” I said to Melanie while we were eating, “I don’t know if we’ll live to see either our ship or this world-ship leave this star cluster, or galaxy, or wherever we are.”

“Wait,” said Melanie, “can our ship leave the planet now?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but with the NR drive decades away from working, I don’t see where that gets us, oh wait … I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“Yeah,” she replied. “We’ve been trying to figure out where we are. We couldn’t do that because of the atmosphere; with all the stars nearby it’s always daylight.”

“We can get outside the atmosphere and into the stellar neighborhood,” I said. “Maybe we can get a better view of the stars and, more importantly, galaxies.”

“And when we’re done, maybe we can set the ship down closer to the complex entrance,” Melanie suggested. It was true, the ship was still a day’s journey away – well, about 24 hours, anyway; it was hard to speak of days on a planet that never experienced night. We’d been communicating long-distance with the computer and sending robots to retrieve things from it.

So we did that. The ship’s anti-gravity boosters and sub-light drive were fully functional now. The computer was online, even on the command deck, so we had full navigation and helm functions. On the bridge were Melanie, myself, and a few curious Machhalee who wanted to know what the world looked like from a distance.

“This is Laurie to Balloopp,” I said into the comms panel. “We’re about to take off. We’ll tell you when we’re coming back.”

“I hear you,” said the translated voice of the leader. “Tell us the story when you return.”

The ship barely shook when it took off. The external cameras showed the ground falling away and the planet becoming an orb among the bright stars. There was now blackness between the stars, though, and not just pale blue sky. “Computer, initiate spatial recognition scan,” I said.

“Process begins,” the computer said. It would take hours, but it could keep going regardless of whether we moved; it would merely adjust.

The planet shrank to a dot on the monitors as we followed the flight plan. We were outside what would be called the planet’s solar system before the Machhalee realized it. Maybe we didn’t have NR drive, but we were far more mobile than the world-ship when it came to sub-light maneuvers.

“Well,” said Melanie, looking at the stellar cartography readings. “We already know we’re near the center of a galaxy – not the Milky Way, either. The star positions aren’t anything like even the distant future models of our home galaxy’s stars. This is a true spiral, too, not a barred spiral. It’s … what’s that?”

We all saw it: among all the bright stars, there was a shimmer, as if something were warping the camera lens. “I have no idea,” I said. “It’s as if some kind of gravitational lensing were distorting the light from the galactic center – computer, show position of galactic center on main viewer.” A small crosshair image was now superimposed on the main viewscreen in light blue. It was precisely in the same direction as the shimmer.

“Not picking up anything massive enough to cause a lensing effect like that,” said Melanie. “Presumably the galaxy has a central black hole, which would be massive enough, but this would have to be between us and the black hole – and intermittent, at that.”

“Let’s move toward it,” I said, and steered the ship carefully in that direction. There it was again, that shimmering. “What could that be?”

We weren’t seeing the stars moving appreciably relative to us; the sublight engines didn’t have that kind of speed, though I suppose they could accelerate us to a significant fraction of lightspeed if we kept at it in one direction for some time. I had no intention of doing that, though. Estimates were that we were still hundreds of light years from the galaxy’s actual center.

“Wait, try reversing the engines so we’re stationary,” suggested Melanie. I tried that, until we were more or less traveling with the nearest stars – the star orbited by the world-ship was still the closest one, but there were several other stars that were only light-months away, and probably about 100 within one light year.

“No sign of the weird shimmer effect,” I said. “Should I move toward the galactic center again?”

“Try it,” Melanie said. So I did, pointing us in that direction and firing the sublight engines at full forward thrust. And there was the shimmer again.

“What … could that be?” I asked rhetorically. I had no idea of a natural phenomenon that behaved like this.

“Our course was toward the galactic center when we collided with something in NR space,” Melanie said, pulling up a diagram of the course the ship had been on when disaster had occurred. “And the Brain Computer said something similar happened to them.”

“But we’re not using the NR drive,” I protested. “It doesn’t even work. And … something in NR space … would have …” I was going to say there was no way something in NR space could affect normal space, before I realized that there wasn’t supposed to even be anything in NR space, other than ships temporarily traversing it, so I had no idea what something that existed normally in NR space could do. “Computer, assuming there were something made of the native matter of NR space, and assuming there were such a thing as native matter in NR space, are there any theories about what it could do to affect normal space?”

“Working,” the computer said in its mechanical voice. “Theories exist by Nalson and Korainen about NR space possessing some form of matter and energy native to it. Their calculations show that, assuming that such things exist, NR matter could warp the fabric of ordinary space in a manner similar to the curvature caused by mass densities. The degree of curvature would be dependent on the shape, motion, and orientation of the bodies of NR matter.”

“Oof, I would have to study those equations for a while before I could really grasp this,” I said, looking at the theoretical papers once published by Nalson and Korainen, two of the main physicists whose theories formed the underpinning of NR technology. “I’m an engineer, not a multidimensional space physicist.”

“What if it’s those … objects our ship encountered?” I asked. “What if they’re somehow seeing us? Or … sensing us, at least?”

“That would be imagining that not only was there matter in NR space, but there was intelligent life too,” I said. “That would be huge, if it were true, but I’m not ready to believe such a thing without more evidence.”

“As a xenobiologist, I’ve seen life forms that I wouldn’t have been able to imagine before finding out they existed,” said Melanie. “Let’s see if we can figure out a way to talk to them.”

“Well, if they’re real, they sure seem to like hanging out near a big black hole,” I said. “What would that be like to a being that lived in NR space? After all, the speed of light isn’t a limit in NR space. What’s a black hole in normal space like in NR space? Does it even exist there? Does it affect NR space? Does it tickle? Is it like a fun time hanging out near a normal-space black hole in NR space? Darn it, I’m going to have to study those equations now, aren’t I?”

So I did. The equations could be inverted to determine the effect of matter in normal space on NR space. It turned out that even the actual singularity of a black hole wouldn’t be a singularity at the point relative to that place in NR space, but it would have an effect. It was like a constant wobbling of the continuum. Whether beings in NR space would consider that a nuisance or some kind of fun park I had no idea. But … if they existed, what if we could talk to them? Could we learn something about NR space that would give us an insight? Maybe something that would help fix the engines of both our ship and the world-ship?

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Now that we had managed to take our ship on a short shakedown cruise, we did get excellent scans of the space around us to the best of our instrumentation. I now knew the reason for why the density of stars was so great – it was fairly close to the center of this galaxy – but I couldn’t believe what we discovered.

Yes, there was a supermassive black hole, one of a stellar mass we had never before encountered. All the clustered stars made up this giant slowly rotating vortex that appeared to be a whirlpool of stars circling the singularity like it was a drain. Would they all sink into the black hole eventually? Yes, but it was happening on an astronomical time scale; it would take billions of years. We took readings until we felt we had a complete picture, then returned and set the ship down very close to the entrance of the facility.

Putting the data into the computer so it could simulate the next few million years, we watched the monster devour several stars. The central energy beam from the center of the singularity shot straight up through the very center of the rotating vortex. It truly did look like all the stars were circling a drain.

I sat at my computer station on board our ship in total frustration. We could see many celestial artifacts, although the stellar cartography data banks had no recognizable reference points. Even the bio-computer’s data banks, as massive as they were, held no clues for us as to where we had wound up. We must be so far from home that our data banks and theirs had no reference points in common – this was completely possible, of course, if we were in a place so far from anything we knew that the light from the nearby stars would never reach home.

I did have perfect logistics to the point where we had entered this region of space. Obviously the ship had still been moving at relativistic speeds – a large fraction of the speed of light. We’d also discovered that the moon that circled the world-ship wasn't a moon but some sort of defense station. It too had taken damage that would take a lot of time and effort to fix.

We checked the moon out. It didn’t take us long to get its power back on, but other things would take time and study to learn how they went together and how to repair them. It wasn’t a real issue, since the craft was automated and its breed of reaction drive was still functioning, which meant the vessel would automatically maintain orbit. We left a crew of techno-bots on the vessel to maintain and repair whatever they could. In time they would repair some of the station’s own repair bots, and the repair process would accelerate.

I spent almost 30 days searching through all the stellar cartography data from all three computer systems. Even with the AI specifically programmed to seek out the particular matches we were looking for – it didn’t need to be perfect; we just needed one positive match – all the deep survey scans proved fruitless. We were truly lost, and space is very large and empty for the most part.

I started feeling depressed. We could eventually get the engines working, but with all that, we had no idea which direction to go or how far.

By this time, the Machhalee had refurbished enough of the underground facility that it looked pristine. They had reengineered all the guidance and thrust controls. I was amazed, but the reaction drives of this world-ship could move the planetary body to almost ¾ light speed.

We and the Machhalee sat at a large conference table stacked with all kinds of readouts, monitors, and some newly recreated computer tablets. Now we made plans to leave this neck of the universe and at least attempt to find something familiar that one of our species would recognise.

“The difficulty we see,” said the Computer Brain, “is that if we use the conventional drives to accelerate to a large fraction of the speed of light relative to nearby objects, we will be invoking relativity effects, causing time to pass much more quickly relative to us. We could reach another galaxy in 36 days, but millions of years would pass for its inhabitants … and its stars. This would make it more difficult for us to recognize our position, as new stars would form, older stars would collapse and become supernovae, and galaxies would collide and change their shapes. Our combined databases would become inaccurate.”

“But it would take longer than our lifetimes to repair the NR drives,” said Balloopp.

“I had a strange thought,” I said. “There are strange phenomena that happen whenever one moves through space toward this galaxy’s central black hole.”

“Yes, I have examined the data,” said the Computer Brain. “Most intriguing. Difficult to tell whether this is a sign of some sort of life or some sort of heretofore unencountered natural phenomenon involving NR space.”

Melanie spoke up, to my surprise, but then, once I thought about it, it made sense. “If we can establish a baseline for communication, we can find out whether they’re sentient.”

“You think you can do this?” asked the Computer Brain.

“I think that combined with Laurie, we can do anything.” She looked at me with a smile.

I replied, “Well – what I thought about that when we first noticed them was that they obviously know more about NR space than we do. If they exist, they live there. It’s their home. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be able to help us. What if they know as much about normal space as we do about NR space? And more than that …”

“What if they’re hostile?” asked Balloopp. “Both your people and ours found themselves in a great deal of trouble after encountering them. Perhaps they are fiercely defensive of their home.”

“A fair point,” said Melanie. “But it’s also possible that they know the black hole is dangerous to us and they wanted to keep us away from it.”

“It’s also possible that they aren’t sentient at all,” I said, “or even a life form, but instead some kind of natural phenomenon. But I’ll tell you one thing – if we study them, we’ll learn something more about NR space than we know now. None of us have ever encountered anything like that.”

“Perhaps what we learn will accelerate the process of repairing our NR drives,” the Computer Brain stated. “I would rather take time studying the strange phenomenon, whether it turns out to be a life form or not, than risk ensuring that we return to our homes only to find that nothing is left that we recognize. Besides, it is unclear that they are hostile to us, as they have not taken any further steps against either of us. In the case of our people, they have had a great deal of time in which to do so, and they have not.”

“Indeed,” said Balloopp, “if they are hostile, they are not acting hostile.”

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So after some more refitting, Melanie and I were back on the ship, and back in space. I’d come up with some ideas for how to send them signals, and she’d come up with some ideas for how to use those signals for communication.

“Well, we can try it, I suppose,” I said. “OK, here’s what we can do. The NR drive can’t work as a drive right now, but we’ve repaired every part that we can. The rest of it needs a series of factories to rebuild that we don’t have. But what we can do is generate NR pulses – they will propagate through NR space, but they aren’t coherent enough to form a proper NR envelope around the ship. I’m guessing they’ll be able to detect them. If they can send back similar pulses, the sensors can detect those – I’ve calibrated them for it.”

“So we’ve got a two-way NR radio,” said Melanie, “but then it’s a question of whether they’ve got one – and whether anyone’s listening. And even if they are, we won’t be speaking the same language.”

“That’s about the size of it,” I said. “Well, let’s move toward the galactic center until we see the shimmering effect and try sending a basic signal.”

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I sat in a comfortable gravity couch on the newly refurbished command deck of our ship and flicked through the navigational scans in boredom. Even at ⅛ of light speed, it still took time to approach the location I wanted, but we were reluctant to go faster than that, because it meant that when we returned to the planet, double the time would have passed. But we finally reached the region where we’d seen the spatial distortions before. What we had first called a shimmer no longer looked like that, though; this time it seemed to be some sort of sphere of light.

We came to station keeping in relation to the rest of the celestial objects around us. It was a fallacy to think that we were dead stopped in space – there’s no such thing; you’re always moving relative to something. We were traveling at many thousands of miles per second relative to the planet we’d taken off from, although our speed matched all those objects around us and we appeared to be motionless.

Melanie pushed the button on the forward emitter array and began to send the pre-programmed NR pulses toward the now very large and visible sphere. To my total amazement, the data Melanie got back showed that this was some form of heretofore unknown spatial or temporal anomaly. It seemed like the output end of a wormhole – energy was pouring out, perhaps energy or matter that originated from a black hole somewhere else. But where? This phenomenon was nowhere near the size of the black hole at the galaxy’s center, for one thing. If this was the open end of a wormhole, the other end was somewhere else; it certainly wasn’t the one black hole we knew of within hundreds of light years.

We actually received comm signals, but they were severely scrambled at best. We did manage to discover that the huge Pluto-sized planetoid that was on a collision course with Earth had been diverted, a crisis that had been current when we’d left. Now, Earth had two moons, and the tidal forces were almost in equilibrium. It took us a long time and much computing power of all three computers to unscramble enough of the communication to get that much. The rest was more like jumbled garbage. We kept the computers crunching it to see if it could be unscrambled enough to be useable.

Meanwhile, we both worked on analyzing the data from the sensors, which showed readings suggestive of stars and galaxies. It looked like a distorted picture of another part of the universe. The image quality was horrible at best, but the stellar cartography database found several pings on the far side of wherever the rift opened that matched objects on the farthest side of the cartographic data from the deepest explorations the human race had accomplished to date. Even at this, the matches were at an extreme distance from what we would consider home space. But that was better than anything else we’d managed to find so far.

I said to Melanie, “Even if we manage to traverse the wormhole …”

She finished my thought. “... we’d still be unimaginably far from Earth. Without an NR drive, we’d go from stranded in unknown space to stranded in barely-known space.”

“If we could only …” I began.

But I didn’t get to finish, as a large cloud of small round glowing objects emerged from the rift. The center of each sphere was black as black could get while some sort of energy pulsed around them. They seemed to form up in a pattern, then started approaching us, gaining speed and radiating energy in greater amounts.

I said sharply, “Hold on to something … fasten your harness. Gonna try to run.”

We both quickly fastened our fight harnesses, then I engaged the reaction drive, full power. If left to its own, it could achieve 99% of light speed, although this would take time. The ship rotated 180 degrees, then vanished off in a sparkle of reaction mass.

“Laurie … rear sensors …” said Melanie, putting the image from the rear imagers on the main viewscreen. The objects were keeping up with us as if we weren’t even moving. Well, relative to them, we actually weren’t, although we were trying to accelerate – but they just kept accelerating along with us as if it was effortless. But wait – if this was effortless for them, wouldn’t they have caught up to us?

Then they started getting farther away – which actually only meant they’d slowed their acceleration as we continued ours. “They’re … slowing down?” I said in confusion.

“Well, if this is the same thing we collided with,” said Melanie, “maybe they only showed up when we entered their part of space. Some of our theories were that they’re either protecting that area of space from us, or protecting us from it. If we’re leaving it now, maybe they won’t follow. They didn’t before.”

“Maybe we can talk to them if we slow down?” I guessed, turning the ship again to face them and gradually firing the engines, decelerating us.

And they slowed to match. “Try the pulses again,” I said, continuing to bring us closer to match the nearby stars.

“All right,” Melanie said, activating the pre-programmed sequence of pulses. They were designed to seem anthropogenic – a sequence of one pulse, then two, then four, then eight, and so on. It wasn’t something likely to arise by accident from some natural process.

They replied with one pulse, then three, then nine, then 27, then 81, in quick succession, according to the sensors.

“That’s an intelligent source,” Melanie said. “No question. But we sent powers of two, while they sent powers of three. I wonder if that means anything.”

Melanie went through her usual laborious process of trying to establish a baseline of communications. She seemed to really enjoy this, though by now I considered it the most boring part of contacting any non-human intelligence. It took hours. But it was obvious that they were using some kind of computer – as was Melanie, once she’d gotten beyond a certain point.

“This is amazing,” she said. “I think our computer has formed a direct connection with theirs. They’re communicating in an evolving digital language, only ours is based on binary while theirs is based on a trinary system. Still, conversion between those is easy for a computer.”

“Are we getting closer to talking, though?” I asked.

“Rapidly getting there,” Melanie replied. “The computer’s going through the procedure of building up scientific concepts.” She continued to monitor the process.

“OK, they’ve decided to let the computers work and try talking,” Melanie said. She pressed a button, and a voice came through.

“Please stay away, for your own safety,” it said.

“We don’t intend to go near the black hole,” said Melanie. “Especially not in normal space.”

“Not the black hole,” said the voice. “There is a rift. It is unstable. It can change destinations in an instant and tear apart an object that is traversing it.”

I said, “That sounds very bad.”

Melanie asked, “Even if the rift is traversed while in NR space?”

“Especially so,” came the reply.

“Is the rift natural in origin, or did your people create it?” asked Melanie.

“That is a complicated story,” the voice stated.

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We sat totally spellbound as the voice went into detail on how the people had developed NR drive many centuries ago. It told an almost similar story to our research and development of the same drive.

Then came the history lesson on advanced cosmic war. It told of the many types of exotic weapons that had been devised using what was being called an NR particle … of course. This particular particle was unique in that it existed in a constant state of nonexistence until acted upon by certain other energy types none of us or our computers were familiar with. I was already learning something.

We patiently sat through in-depth explanations of what happened when positrons met negatrons and the resultant massive release of energies. It seemed that the NR particle, which we’d only just learned existed, also had an opposite. The amount of energy released when the two of them met caused Melanie and me to almost have a collective heart attack.

No one was sure what was on the other side, but reality and NR space fractured when an enemy had fired a weapon in NR space near this galaxy’s central black hole, which tore a huge rent several light years across in the fabric of both realities. Of course, the ship that fired the weapon had instantly been lost into the void.

After centuries, they were still trying to figure out how to seal the fracture, as well as the many smaller rifts that had appeared near it, including the one through which we could see something resembling our star maps. As far as any of the research went, the other side of the main fracture was an empty void the likes of which boggled the mind.

On the good side of all this, they taught us how to use what we’d learned to repair our NR drive sufficiently to enter NR space on a very low frequency with the materials we had on hand. No one could positively tell us what the time / space transfer times would be, since no one used that low frequency, but it would still be faster than light, which was one heck of a lot better than no NR drive. Now all we had to determine was the direction we’d been traveling back when the emergency systems had taken our ship out of NR space.

“So at least now we can use NR space to some degree,” I said. “Our drive has been impossible to repair without a shipyard ever since we collided with … well, the barrier you threw in our way.”

“Our apologies,” the voice replied, “but you were on the verge of entering one of the rifts, which would have shredded your ship into slivers. We are deeply sorry that there were only two survivors. All we can say is that two are better than none.”

“I can see that there was truly no good choice at the time,” said Melanie. “You chose the option that was least bad.”

“Indeed,” the voice said. “We sent a swarm of drone vessels. We have been trapped in NR space ever since the war, and exposure to the NRparticles has gradually changed us over time. It may be that we cannot survive in normal space any longer. But we have at least survived and, near this black hole, have managed to salvage some bits of matter that trickle through the rifts into this continuum, where we can build and repair our facilities with it.”

“I am still surprised that our idea to communicate with pulses of NR waves worked,” said Melanie.

“It is only slightly cruder than what we use to communicate here in NR space,” the voice replied. “And that is likely because you only just cobbled it together, while we have used it for centuries.”

“We must return to the planet,” Melanie said. “Thank you for your help. I hope we can talk again soon.”

“As do I,” the voice said. “If you can repair your NR drive to some extent, perhaps you can help us escape. Then we will know whether we can survive in normal space again.”

“We’ll help if we can,” I replied. “But let’s see if we can get the drive working. Until then, farewell!”

“May Namshu watch over you,” the voice replied, evidently invoking the name of some religious figure of theirs.

“OK, we should be able to connect the NR source back up to the modulator and then cross-link it to the resonators using the correspondences they showed us,” I said, and we went to Main Engineering to make these changes.

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“Well, here goes nothing,” I said, after hours of connecting and calibrating.

“I guess if this doesn’t work, we just go back to the world-ship using the sublight engines,” Melanie remarked. “It’ll take days, but we can do it.”

“If this works, it’ll be seconds,” I said. “Setting course for the world-ship … calculating entry and exit points … solution found! Let’s go!” We strapped in, I hit the activation button, and … ugh, we felt queasy, but the world-ship was right there, and the automated systems were performing an orbital insertion.

“Oh that’s right, there’s a reason why we have Hyboriums,” said Melanie, looking ill. “Good thing a few seconds in NR space isn’t that bad.”

“Yeah, that was less than enjoyable, but it was fast!” I said. “Deorbiting in under 5 minutes for landing near the city entrance.”

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We explained what we’d learned to Balloopp and the Brain Computer. The Computer said, “This means that the NR drive could be brought into working order much sooner than anticipated … although it will be much less efficient than it was.”

“With the stellar cartography data we’ve been collecting, you can plot a course that can at least take this world-ship out of this dense part of space and into a more normal area,” I said. “Maybe find a nice hospitable star to orbit and take some time to repair and consider where to go next.”

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Melanie and I sat at the engineering station aboard our ship and watched in total amazement as we were taught things about physics none of us had ever imagined. I now understood how we had managed to repair our NR drive without the unrepairable particle energizers and linear ram exciters. Or rather, why that had worked at all.

What they showed was a totally unique aspect of quantum physics none of our scientists had ever contemplated. We were using a type of high energy waveform created by the excitement of the NR particles by a laser tuned to a certain frequency which in turn created motion. There was no apparent action to create the NR wave, which was the reason we called it Null Reaction.

Using the same lasers already in our engine and by placing two calcium atoms in a uniquely designed ion trap that replaced the broken particle energizers and linear ram exciters in the laser’s target area we effectively bypassed the need for the damaged equipment – though if we had had those parts, the system would be far more efficient – but the point was that it would work without them.

We then started zapping the calcium atoms suspended in the ion trap with a laser tuned to a specific frequency, and using the differences in entanglement (rather than a propagating wave of the interacting particles) we created a different type of propagating energy wave in the low band of NR Space.

What we were looking at was a totally new NR wave but of a much lower energy frequency than anyone on our world even knew existed. The most mind boggling thing was, it actually worked without the need for several major support systems, although at a considerable lower frequency.

Repairs on the world-ship began immediately. Even with the help of our new friends and their ability to find ways around irreparably damaged components, it took a long time to get to the first operational tuning run. Even though our engine and the world-ship’s engine looked like a plumber’s and electrician’s nightmare … they worked.

Months had passed. We had learned to actually speak many of the squeaks and whistles of the Machhalee language and they, with certain understandable difficulties, had started speaking English.

They and the now many techno-bots had refurbished and rebuilt the entire bridge control area. Melanie and I sat in a very comfortable gravity couch as those who had been chosen as command crew (which, they’d insisted, included us) ran through many system checks. We even had our own set of items to check, although we’d done this so many times already that we knew what the resulting data was going to show.

I didn’t know what it was that rose up around Melanie and myself, but the next thing I knew, a white mist was drifting off and dissipating around us. The data on our consoles had radically changed too. From the best I could tell, we had moved an unknown distance and were now in a circular orbit about a G2v star, exactly in the center of its Goldilocks zone, similar to Earth’s orbit around our own Sol.

Stellar cartography showed we had hopped about 250 light years in a matter of seconds, and those things that had dropped around all of us on the bridge was a form of Hyberculum that didn’t require us to leave our seats.

The Brain Computer said, “Performing post-activation system check,” and the robots and Machhalee were busily examining various equipment and displays. Melanie and I checked our displays. “Variances of under eight to the power of negative 10. Fine tuning will reduce that even further.” The Brain Computer sounded happy, even though this was still its translated voice.

“Well, I’m glad that worked,” I said, unbuckling my harness and standing up from my gravity couch. “This is a very good sign. We might not know which way home is – for either the Machhalee or for us humans – but at least we’ve got functional NR drives.”

“Indeed,” the Brain Computer said. “And it is now far more likely that we will be able to survive. The chance that the planet would be flung out of orbit and into the path of a star was roughly 1% per month so close to the galactic center. We are now a bit farther away, so the chance is still approximately 1% per century, but that is much better. It is also far more predictable, so if such an event were incoming, we could now easily depart before it happened.”

“OK,” I said, “the next step will be to find a way back to Machhalee space.”

“Not human space?” asked Melanie.

“Well, we should probably talk about it, yeah,” I said, “but there are thousands of Machhalee here. They have families they’re raising on this world-ship. Us? There are only two of us. We are female and there are no males. So I say we help them as much as we can, then once they’re in good shape, we work on finding our own way home. Also, if we can get them in contact with their civilization, which is obviously more advanced than ours, maybe they’ve got data that can help us get home.”

“That does make sense,” Melanie said.

The Brain Computer added, “Pardon me for interrupting, but the likelihood of finding a way home for either of us seems approximately equal at this point. Whichever we find first, that is the avenue we should pursue, in my opinion.”

“Well, the only information we have at this point is a sighting of some navigation points known to our systems through a rift,” I said. “That’s not all that helpful. We can’t derive a bearing from that.”

“Indeed,” said the Brain Computer. “However, we now have a fairly good map of the local group of galaxies. Perhaps we should set a course for one of them and try mapping from there – after, of course, trying a longer jump toward the outer regions of this one. We have scanned thousands of candidate stars that we could comfortably orbit in this galaxy’s far-flung arms.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s work on fine calibration of the drive systems and take that next step.”

For the next several months, we calibrated our drives and made in depth scans of as much of free space as was visible. Even after a relocation of 250 light years, we were still in a somewhat dense region of the galaxy, though no longer within the torus of stars circling the drain of its monster singularity. The massive amounts of energy still made scans difficult, although not nearly impossible, like before we moved.

We first tried it on our ship. The target system was on the screen. “Course plotted and locked in,” said Melanie.

“Engaging NR jump,” I said. The suspension fields dropped over us – an improvement we’d made based on the Machhalee’s technology – and then the NR drives activated, or we assumed they did, because we were unconscious until the fields lifted. “And the star is …” I checked out the scans. “Where is it? Oh! We’re 10 light years off course. We’ll have to adjust that. Fortunately the next jump will be much more accurate.” After the next jump we were in the proper system. There were no planets in the destination habitable zone, as we’d detected from long-range scanning. We collected data, then went back.

We returned from our scouting mission and transferred our data to the world-ship. “Excellent,” the Brain Computer said. “Not only is the target system much as our long-range scanners suggested, your NR drive has been better calibrated.”

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Melanie and I had scoured all the memory storage banks in the world-ship, having the computers looking for some pattern of stars or galaxies they could recognise. We’d shared our data with the Machhalee, too. We were now seriously thinking that none of us would find our way home again.

With the help of several dozen techno-bots, the Machhalee had refurbished the orbital station back to a pristine condition. It had a great capacity for normal space-time maneuverability, but was designed to remain in orbit as a defensive measure and had no equipment of any kind that could be adapted for low-band NR travel. One of the things the world-ship did automatically was extend the NR field to cover the orbital station, so it too came with them on their travels.

It did have a wonderful sensor suite, complete with all the necessary equipment. It had no astrogation equipment nor stellar cartography data storage. One thing it was made to do was create and read the holo-disks we had found archived earlier. It took several months to sort and classify all the massive amounts of data on them, but the library of holo-disks we had found were finally read and entered into the Brain Computer for meticulous study and classification.

Melanie, Balloopp, myself, and the Brain Computer began the months-long arduous task of viewing all the many discs for some kind of useful data. The first group we encountered went into great gory detail of the conflict between the Highworlders and Lowworlders and the foolishness of the Lowworlders who started the fatal conflict over nothing more than they didn’t want them on the surface.

It had then been proven by the scientists that the NR drive couldn’t be repaired, so the world-ship was locked into the orbit we found it in. Then, the positioning of the planet in the star-dense galactic core region and the lack of anything that could truly be called night was causing a die-off of many species on the planet’s surface, leading to a severe lack of certain proteins and other chemicals produced by those species, causing seriously severe health issues among the crew.

Of course, the perception of absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the commander of the Lowworlders had ignored the facts and had even been arrogant enough to kill the head physician who had shown him irrefutable proof of the nutritional problem.

This had sparked the rebellion that had brought an end to the Lowworlders, as many thousands of them realized the truth and joined the Highworlders’ side and fought against those whom they had started to call “The Worms of the Earth.” Once many millions had abandoned the underground facility, the entrance had been sealed, and any evidence of survivors below ground had slowly vanished as the centuries had passed. By the time we found it, there was almost no sign that there had ever been an entrance.

I was awakened one morning by the Brain Computer. It didn’t use the translator circuit anymore; it now spoke perfect English. “Laurie. You must come to Stellar Cartography immediately. I believe I have made a discovery.”

I was more than awake as I sat up. I noticed the Brain Computer’s panel was dark, indicating that its electronic presence had left. I threw back the covers, slipped on my fuzzy booties, and ran out into the hall. The Machhalee strolling up and down the hall on whatever business took little if any notice to the fact that I was in just my bikini panties and a baby T top. I shrugged and dashed off as fast as my legs could carry me.

The door to Stellar Cartography whooshed open. I stopped at the huge holo-cloud view of what was obviously an extremely distant grouping of galaxies.

I entered and seated myself at the control console. The Brain Computer said in perfect English, “I have found a galaxy cluster your people named the Hyperion Proto-Supercluster.”

“Wait, I’ve heard of that,” I said, looking at the cluster of thousands of galaxies.

The Computer went on, “It took me a bit to locate it, as it is approximately 11 billion light years from your homeworld, Earth, but it is only about six billion light years from our current position.”

“That means the light we’re seeing from it is five billion years more recent than what they’re getting back home,” I said. “I’m sure it’s changed a lot in all that time.”

“It has indeed,” the Brain Computer agreed. “From my calculations, I believe that we are on the opposite side of the Hyperion Supercluster from Earth, which could explain why it has been so difficult to determine Earth’s location.”

“Of course!” I realized. “Earth simply isn’t within the observable universe from here. Light from the Milky Way Galaxy has never made it to where we are.”

“And, due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, it never will,” said the Brain Computer.

I said, “So this means, if we go in that direction, we’ll be at least moving toward being in the same observable universe as Earth. If we can get there and scan again, we’ll have a much better chance of seeing something familiar.”

“That is precisely my suggestion,” the Brain Computer agreed. “The problem, of course, is that we currently have no way of finding a usable star system from this distance.”

“Yeah, any yellow-dwarf star will be far too dim to be visible from this far away,” I said, “and even if it were visible, the light we’re seeing now is six billion years old. If we go toward the image of some star, it’s probably not even there anymore. What we’ll have to do is go part of the way there, then update our scans, then repeat.”

“Agreed,” said the Brain Computer, “but there will be a time of cold and darkness before we locate a star …”

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I sat in frustration at the computer console in our ship once again. I had run every bit of astrogation data in the stellar cartography database at this point and combined it with the new figures that defined the lower-frequency NR wave.

From the best I could tell with the scant data I had about it, which was almost none, the huge distances we would need to travel just to be in somewhat familiar space would take centuries of real time, although shipboard time passage maybe only a few hours.

We already knew the high-frequency NR wave encapsulated the craft and the reality that supported its existence, and basically separated it from normal space-time. Technically speaking, the ship and the local space-time bubble that it occupied didn’t move, but the NR wave around it did, thereby not breaking the fundamental law of the light speed barrier.

The ship itself was stationary and in no way violated any physics. NR space was something mankind didn’t really understand but was able to use for FTL travel, and it allowed the bubble to ride the waves and avoid the sinusoidal energy of the local time wave, thereby avoiding time dilation completely.

I had no working knowledge of how the lower frequencies would work to create FTL travel or to avoid dilation, nor did what little data I have look very promising. Until I had more data, I felt deep inside that we would find our way back home, perhaps several billion years after Sol burned out and became a black dwarf after a billion or so years of cooling.

Melanie wandered into the engineering station in her nightie while munching on a strawberry-filled confection of some sort. She had brought a small container filled with them and a large carafe of coffee.

She came to my side, filled my empty mug with coffee, and dropped two honey sweetener tabs in. She placed the container of strawberry filled confections within easy reach and sat in the gravity couch next to mine.

“Have some. I found the replicator data chip for them. They’re great, too.”

I said “Thx,” as I reached for one and took a large gooey bite. I actually pronounced it like that.

Melanie looked over the data on the engineering screens and asked, “Are you trying to plot a course to the Hyperion Supercluster?” She sat forward and took closer notice of the astrogation data. “Do you think we can get some decent astrogation scans from that location and find a familiar Earth object or neighboring galaxy?”

I replied “No,” and shook my head.

Melanie looked at me with big eyes as she took the confection from her mouth, “No? What do you mean , NO?”

I swiveled towards her and locked the couch in place. “I mean, I know nothing of the lower-frequency NR wave. I know how the proper one works and the fact that it allows us to bypass time dilation effects. From the very little data I have from our friends near the galactic center, I don’t have enough data to postulate the time shift for the jump. From the best I can tell, it will be a few hours ship time, and like 30 or 40 billion years in external time. By the time we got there, everything will have moved and changed drastically. Sol will be a cold lump of degenerate matter drifting through the void.”

Melanie interrupted. “Wait. We’ve already used it. How much external time have we lost already? Is everyone we ever knew already long dead?”

I said, “Relax. We know the distance-to-time-dilation ratio from our scouting missions. We’ve only gone a few thousand light years total.”

“A few thousand years means yes, everyone’s long dead!” Melanie wailed, upset.

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “It isn’t linear. We’ve lost a few months traveling through NR space on the lower-frequency wave. We’ve spent more time in regular space. But a jump of billions of light years …”

“Can we do it a little bit at a time?” Melanie asked.

“Well, we could, but that would waste a lot of time,” I said. “But I’ll run some calculations. Anyway, remember the real problem preventing us from fixing our NR drive: we need a civilization with an infrastructure capable of manufacturing the replacement parts we need. We don’t have that.”

“But if we could find one, we could get home properly,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied, trying another one of those strawberry things. She was right. They were good. Best thing to ever come out of a food replicator. That’s not saying much, but still, not bad.

“That means I can help!” said Melanie, xenobiologist extraordinaire. “I assume we’ve been scanning.”

“Of course,” I replied. “Everything within long range is in the computer already. No super stellar density blocking our scanners with a deluge of high energy photons, muons, and whatnot.”

“OK, time to get coding,” she said, opening an actual project and starting to write actual code. “Gotta find those civilizations.” Good thing our sensors were in top working order, unlike the NR drive. That’s one thing we’d been able to completely repair.

“I’ll leave you to that,” I said. “I’m an engineer, not a xenobiologist. Let me know if you need any tech work done. I went back to trying to understand NR wave theory, the math that only a few people in all of Earth space understood even in part, and none of them were here.

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A few days passed. I talked to the Brain Computer about NR wave theory. It understood the math to a great degree, but it had difficulty explaining it to me. “From what I’m seeing here, the time dilation is related to the length of the jump in a non-linear way, but that means the length of the jump is completely determined at departure time,” I said. “But what happens if you drop out of NR space early?”

“The time dilation factor is determined by the length of the jump to point of termination,” the Brain Computer said. “It is immaterial whether you planned a longer or shorter jump.”

“But that means the information about how long your jump will be somehow travels backward in time to affect you when you start the jump,” I objected. “That’s not possible.”

“Why?” the Brain Computer asked. “I believe you call this ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

“But that’s only between subatomic particles,” I objected again.

“Normally true, but not in the case of NR waves,” the Computer replied.

Melanie rushed in carrying a tablet. “I found something!” she shouted. “Or my program running on our computer found something!”

“A civilization?” I asked.

“Look!” She tapped the tablet and set it down on a surface, and there was a holographic image of a stellar system. The view zoomed in on one of the planets near the star. “This planet has tons of satellites in orbit and a highly industrial technology level,” she said. “And then there’s this.” There was a large spacecraft in orbit, and then, with a familiar-looking flash of violet-tinged light, it was just gone. “That was an NR jump! That planet is only about 2100 light years away from where we are right now!”

“We could go scout it,” I said. “See if it’s still got that level of technology even though we’re seeing it 2100 years ago.”

“That’s what I’m suggesting!” Melanie squeaked. “We have to find out! Even if their civilization fell, maybe they left some NR technology behind that we don’t know about yet. Then maybe you can reverse-engineer it and boom, we’re home!”

“Well,” I said carefully, “you’re right that we definitely need to check that out.”

“Experience dictates caution,” said the Brain Computer. “They may also have advanced weapons and be hostile.”

“Hmm, good point,” Melanie said. “Let’s scout closer and find out more about them.”

So that was how we came to be on the borders of their solar system, right around the heliopause, monitoring their broadcasts. “They look like … lizard people,” I said, once we’d managed to reconstruct their visual broadcasts. Of course, they probably saw at slightly different wavelengths from what we did, so their cameras were made a bit differently and we couldn’t be sure we were getting the colors right, but still, they were bipedal, with two arms and two legs, and large eyes that could see a broad range from front to sides, and their skin looked scaly. Their planet was rather close to their star, so their world was pretty hot.

“I haven’t translated their language yet, but the computer and I are working on it,” said Melanie. “They have some pretty violent media, but of course so do we; we have no idea how much of this is fictional. And we made the right decision, not using the short-range sensors. They might detect those.”

I nodded. “But they obviously still have NR technology,” I added. “NR capable ships have been coming and going since we got here. The radiation bursts are undeniable.”

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The computer system had begun to notice discrepancies in many of the navigation scans while making the huge many light year jump to get us to this system. Comparing all the scan data acquired during normal transit dropouts as per normal navigation, the stellar configurations that were being scanned and used to navigate were changing … but not according to predictions in any way. A long-distance hop with the low-frequency NR wave produced a very interesting issue.

The computer had many transit scan files with many quadrillion cross-referenced and verified location points. The NR transit appeared to happen almost instantly relative to the low frequency NR bubble the ship was in.

All astrogation reference scans indicated that the cosmos had changed the closer they came to point of NR drop out / arrival. This was normal; the stars and other objects within any galaxy are always moving with time relative to one another. The most surprising thing the comparisons showed was that these changes were in retrograde; in other words, time was reversing.

The closer the ship came to the destination point, the more all the objects of the galaxy were being retrograded to the past accordingly. Upon arrival, they had moved and arrived at their previous locations, where we had observed them before departing … 2100 years in the future.

This was an anomaly the computer had no way to resolve. I was figuratively scratching my head about this. There was no reason for this to happen. It wasn’t as if 2100 years had passed without this civilization falling or advancing, as we’d thought. It was as if no time at all had passed. This was strange.

We had used the same low-frequency NR wave to travel from the galactic central region to the outer spiral arms, and that had been a journey of far more than 2100 light years, but we hadn’t observed this time reversal phenomenon. Why had it happened this time?

I was sitting at the engineering station going over the in-depth scans of the planet and the many ships that rapidly came and went near it, entering and leaving NR space with the characteristic burst of high-energy particles. I had begun to worry about the data we’d been passively gathering about the larger of those ships. All of them were battleships of one configuration or another, armed to the teeth, based on weapon energy readouts and shield densities.

Melanie, on the other hand, was concerned about the sentient species itself. “I’ve never known a reptilian species this large,” she said, “other than one on Earth known as the Komodo dragon. Not only is it carnivorous, it’s highly aggressive as well as poisonous. Its bite isn’t fatal to humans, but it causes paralysis, allowing the beast to consume its prey without a huge ordeal of fighting and chasing it down. I’m worried about our prospects for negotiating peacefully with them.”

From the looks of the audio-visual transmissions I was seeing, this species had to be as aggressive as they came. I was amazed they’d managed to advance this far without eradicating themselves. Apparently how they did it was by taking their aggressive natures to other planets and releasing it there.

I wasn’t so lost in my research that I failed to notice when one of the screens began to flash a large red warning. I raised an eyebrow and opened the data feed. Basically, the computer told me two extremely important things. One, it showed me all the nav data and the retrograde motion the cosmos had apparently gone through as we’d approached this planet. I couldn’t believe it. I was still trying to deal with that.

The second thing it showed me was even more important, as about six of the nastiest warships I had ever seen had taken notice of our ship and were rapidly approaching with their shields up, and all their weapons armed and energized. They had scanned us, the computer was saying, and evidently they hadn’t recognized us, they’d assumed we were a threat or at least a target, and they were on their way.

“Eep!” Melanie exclaimed. “What do we do? I’m not a weapons officer; I’m a xenobiologist.” She started thinking very quickly.

“I’m not a weapons officer either; I’m an engineer,” I said. I also started thinking very quickly.

“Do you think –” we each said to each other at the same time. “You first,” I said.

Melanie didn’t waste time. “Do you think you can do something impressive to make us look super dangerous?” she asked. “This ship is actually bigger than any one of theirs; it’s just that there are six of them.”

“You’re thinking that might make them back off?” I asked. “I think I can put a lot of power into one grav disruptor shot. That has a high probability of doing a lot of damage and bypassing what they’re using for shielding.”

“I don’t know about backing off, but reptilian behavior is typically to respect strength,” said Melanie. “If we don’t start from a position of strength, they won’t respect us. I don’t think they see us as a threat. They’re aggressive to anyone and anything they come across. They’re here to blow us up no matter who we are. It seems to be how they’ve avoided blowing themselves back to their Stone Age with their advanced weaponry – by venting their aggression on everything else they find.”

“I’ll be ready to try to get us out of here if this doesn’t work,” I said. “Targeting the biggest ship. It’ll give them pause if we go after their strongest, not their weakest.”

“Yes,” said Melanie. “That’s what they would do too – oh! Wow, that was a good shot!”

The grav disruptor wasn’t flashy or impressive looking; the beam was barely visible at all as it traveled through space at the speed of light. You could only see it if you carefully observed as it slightly bent the light of the background stars as it passed. But when it hit its target, it was as if a mini black hole had passed through it.

Their ships were long and narrow, and coming toward us, meaning that the beam passed straight through the axis of the ship, scrambling and twisting all matter as it went. That ship was now a long narrow shell; just inside the shell was twisted metal, and within that was a cloud of brightly glowing plasma.

“Right, we can’t do another one of those for a few minutes,” I said. “That has to recharge. We’ve still got other options, like the torpedos, mines, fighter drones, mass driver, and the rest. Think they’ll back down, by any chance?”

“No, they were all going to attack us, and that’s still what they’ll do,” said Melanie. “We just went from prey to interesting prey. Anything you can do to the other five? If not, I’d suggest defensive measures. They’re going to fire soon, and we don’t know a lot about their weapons, but … they’re weapons.”

“Right, whatever they do isn’t intended to be healthy for us,” I said. “Firing a full salvo of torpedos at the next largest ship, then laying out the stealth mines in the space around us. Preparing the mass driver, but we’ll need mass to throw at them. Fortunately, now there’s a derelict ship heading this way. Putting the computer in control of the defensive force fields – it’ll react faster than we can.”

The torpedos moved at sublight speeds and were easier to detect. They fired some kind of beams at them, but there were dozens of them, and they only took out five. The torpedos were very nasty and were also grav disruption weapons, but short range. Each one nabbed a bite out of the targeted ship, and they were designed to be immune to their own effects, so after the first one took a bite, the next one traveled farther and struck what was left, taking another bite, and so forth. The other ships shot down more of the torpedos before they went off, but by the time all the torpedoes either detonated or were neutralized, there wasn’t much left of that second ship, just some scrap metal and drifting cooling plasma.

By this time the other four ships had started firing at us. I fired some of our weaker particle beam weapons at the projectiles they were throwing at us, while the computer detected where they were aiming their beam weapons and rotated our force fields to intercept them. I had scattered the mines while they were dealing with our torpedos. If they tried to approach, they would take massive damage. And soon the grav disruptor would be recharged …

“Any sign that they’re reconsidering their strategy?” I asked Melanie.

“Not yet,” she said, watching the tactical display carefully. “They came here to shoot us down, and that’s what they’re trying to do. Maybe if they’re down to one, and that one ship is damaged, they might think again.”

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Two ships were now drifting scrap piles. At first, the remaining four didn’t seem to change their tactics. Then, the tactical system began to notice a divergence as they seemed to be veering off. Two went one direction and two went another. Tactical still showed this was an attack plan, and it was right, as one set of the ships dove in towards us.

Just as systems showed they were about to fire their own weapons, the red charging indication for the grav disruptor turned green, showing it was charged and the fire button once again became active. I immediately targeted the ship that was closest and rapidly approaching then fired. It was an amazing coincidence, but the grav disruptor hit the other ship’s shields just as it fired its own salvo.

We sat and watch something transpire that no one would have ever suspected as a huge anomaly formed and opened. Around the ovoid edges of this new rift, it looked as if massive boiling clouds had formed, filled with arcing energy bolts.

Needless to say, the ship ceased to be any kind of recognizable matter and vanished into this huge rift before it exploded, sending large tendrils of energy off in all directions. The second ship in this close formation was washed over by one of the passing energy tendrils before the wave dissipated. All energy readings and life form readings from that ship were now gone; it was dead in space, though still moving roughly toward us, due solely to inertia. It impacted on some of the mines, which blew holes in its now unshielded hull. Melanie moved our ship slightly so the derelict hull missed us.

Melanie looked at me with big eyes. “That was some fancy shootin’ thar, Tex.”

I shrugged and replied, “I’m not exactly sure what happened. Our grav disruptor impacted on another energy wave of some unknown type. You saw the result.”

The strange anomaly dissipated, and space returned to normal, minus the two warships. The last two ships apparently got the message, as they immediately turned and vanished in the sparkle of a full-powered NR rift.

About that time Melanie said, “They know we’re here for sure. This whole system is now coming to alert status of some kind. I suggest we get out of here. We were lucky so far.”

“I agree, but … that derelict might have a functional NR drive ….” I bit my lip. It would take days to salvage the parts. “No. We don’t have that kind of time, and it’s likely to be …” I quickly scanned the floating derelict. “Utterly destroyed. Not worth the risk. Let’s go.” Melanie set a course back to the world-ship. I hoped beyond hope that our 2100 light year return voyage didn’t mean that 2100 years would have passed before we arrived. I hit the enable switch after setting the return course.

As we were entering low-bandwidth NR drive, we heard some comm chatter from the many warships in the system. Melanie’s linguistic program had deciphered some of their language, and it sounded as if none of their instrumentation was able to determine what kind of drive we’d used to escape, since they apparently hadn’t yet discovered the low-energy wavelengths of NR.

We arrived back at the world-ship. To our utter amazement, according to stellar cartography, the universe had returned to the point it had been when we had first traveled to the system of the lizard people.

As we landed, the Brain Computer contacted us and welcomed us back. It was in total confusion over the passage of time. From what it told me, we had just left, and only a few minutes had passed. I was concerned. “This isn’t consistent.” I described what had happened, and the Brain Computer had a theory.

“You say correctly that this is inconsistent,” it said. “If you had arrived there instantaneously, you would still have seen the system as it was in the present, not as you observed it from here, 2100 years in the past. If you had then turned around and observed this system, the one we are now in, from that point, you would have observed it 2100 years in the past as well. That would have been consistent. Instead, you found yourself 2100 years in the past. Indeed, I observed your arrival and some energy from the battle. That light arrived here after traveling 2100 light years. And yet, when you returned, you went forward in time 2100 years, not backward. This could only happen if there were an unknown factor at work,” it said. “It may also have been responsible for the peculiarly effective behavior of your weaponry during your battle with the hostile life forms. Could your friends from NR space still be watching over you, even from this distance?”

I thought. “The meaning of space and time are different in NR space, or so I’m given to understand. I’m not a theoretical NR physicist. Maybe they could be. But they haven’t sent us a message.”

“Alternate theory,” said the Brain Computer. “You desired to go to a specific place and time.”

“And somehow the low-frequency NR drive knew that?” I asked. “I don’t know about that. We don’t even have a control in our navigation systems to enter a destination time, only spatial coordinates.”

The Brain Computer replied, “Both theories could be right.”

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I set off for main engineering right away and looked more carefully at the repairs we’d made to the NR drive at the suggestion of the friends we’d made in NR space. So much of the technology was still foreign to me. What even was this circuit? … What was this component for? … But then I noticed something. My data flow monitors were picking up an intermittent signal in a conduit leading from a component whose purpose I had absolutely no idea of. I noticed that when I was thinking intently about what it did, the signal became very strong. I put the monitor on record and tried an experiment in meditation, trying to clear my mind and think of nothing, or at least the thought of thinking of nothing. When I decided I’d tried that for long enough, I opened my eyes and looked at the data that had been recorded.

The entire time I’d meditated, the data flow in that conduit was almost zero. It was now spiking again. Could this device detect my thoughts?

The thing was … all NR drives can bend time a bit. If you want more time to pass while you’re in NR space, you can have that happen by adjusting the waveform parameters, but people usually don’t want that. Most people want as little external time to pass as possible during their trip, so if they take a trip and return home, it isn’t a million years later. That timelike path option is usually what people want, to the point where there weren’t usually even controls on the panels for that. We’d thought the low-frequency NR technique was less capable of timelike travel. We’d thought it was going to take us billions of years of external time to reach the Hyperion Supercluster. But what if the drive could tell what we wanted to do by reading our intentions? Could it travel a timelike path all the way there … if we wanted it to?

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I was in total awe at the possibilities of our new low-frequency NR transfer system. It not only traversed interdimensional space/time as normal NR drives did, but it was also a means to ride an actual time wave. I had the lead techno-bot help me go over the details of the repair changes that had been made to the drive to see if they could be reproduced.

The device that had so intrigued me turned out to be a neural receiver / translator / transmitter. I discovered that its wiring and interconnects ran from the main navigation array through the main astrogation and targeting array. The very couches we sat in were wired into the circuit so that yes, it was more than possible that the system knew our intent. That must have been how it had behaved differently even though we’d never changed any of the controls.

I did my very best to trace it out entirely, but NR drives were far more intricate and complex than any other technology on the ship, and the added new technology made it even more complex. A single sitting in engineering going over wiring diagrams couldn’t possibly suffice to grasp the entirety of the system.

I sat back in the gravity couch in thought. With this new drive it may be possible to arrive at Earth and aid in averting the disaster that we’d heard was impending back home before we’d begun this trip. Many more thoughts danced through my head … until they tripped and fell over a far more sinister thought about reality.

It dawned on me that this twist to our technology gave us the unique ability to time travel. It also could get horribly out of hand and could quite possibly result in some idiot doing something in time that exterminated life on Earth, or caused a paradox that could destroy all causality in the universe.

I wrote a quick sim and ran it in accelerated time. The idea was to observe how the introduction of time travel changed things in an imaginary universe. I discovered that running the sim in accelerated time was unnecessary. It only took a few short sim time years before something happened that destroyed human life on Earth. I commed Melanie and had her come to the main engineering control center.

She came into engineering in her usual bouncy way. This time, she had a container of grapes. They looked vine fresh, from what I could see. She popped one in her mouth and held the container to me. “Have some. They taste like fresh picked.”

I took one and bit into it. Seedless, but exquisitely tasty. “That’s amazing! I have something you need to know about the repairs that were made to the NR drive.”

Melanie popped another grape in her mouth and leaned back in the gravity couch next to me. “I can listen. NR theory isn’t my specialty.”

I swiveled my couch around to face her and locked it in place. “This is serious. Our new drive has the ability to traverse time. We can arrive back at Earth at just about any time we choose.”

Melanie’s eyes grew large. “That’s great news! So all we need is to find a reference point.”

“Not as simple as all that.” I replied as I ran the time sim for her.

She watched it, and I watched her face. Her expression rapidly changed to one of shock. Whatever disastrous decision one of the simulants had made, the change it caused in the past of the simulated Earth destroyed everything in a most weird and gory way as some form of massive coronal tidal wave came through and everything dissolved as it passed, leaving nothing, not even the planet or even the simulated Sun.

“Our drive destroys entire solar systems?” Melanie asked in shock. “What did those NR aliens do to it?”

“No, it’s not the drive itself,” I said, “it’s using it carelessly.” I explained about how it turned our ship into a time machine.

“Wait, but nobody’s ever traveled in time before,” Melanie objected. “How do we know it’s even possible to change the past? What if the universe doesn’t allow that kind of thing?”

“Good point,” I said, nodding. “We don’t know whether it’s possible or not. But if it is … it can cause very serious problems. So we can’t just assume everything will be fine. We have to plan as if the worst-case scenario will happen, so we’re prepared. Then if that doesn’t happen, we’re fine. But if it does, at least we have a plan.”

“So this is all the … low-frequency NR drive thing, right?” Melanie asked. “Once we get home, or anyplace where they can replace our regular NR drive, we can just blow up the low-frequency one, or quietly take it apart, or whatever, and we don’t tell anybody it happened, and then nobody else ever builds one, and things are fine.”

“I’m afraid it’s not going to be that simple,” I said. “The fact is that sooner or later someone will discover this technology. Our going home may accelerate it without our even intending to – someone will think about how we needed our NR drive replaced, wonder how we got home without it, and put two and two together.”

“What if someone … already did?” Melanie asked, her face suddenly white as a sheet. “What if …”

“Oh no,” I said. “The disaster that affected Earth … what if someone built a drive like this … or …”

“Or what if by going home … we cause it?” asked Melanie.

“We’ll just have to be very careful,” I said. “It could still be just something that happened naturally.”

“We have to tell the Machhallee about this,” Melanie said. “What if they get home and do something terrible to their planet?”

So we did. Explaining what I’d discovered to the Brain Computer, I said, “So we don’t know what will happen, but the sim I wrote suggests a wide range of possible outcomes, some of them …”

“Some of them are extremely destructive,” the Brain Computer agreed. “Therefore we should take care in using the low-frequency NR drive around any inhabited systems until we can better understand this phenomenon.”

“Right. Maybe measure its effect on some uninhabited systems.”

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So that was what we did. The galaxy we were in had never been observed from Earth, so it didn’t have a name in any human databases, but it was a rather familiar spiral type, and many of the nearby stellar systems had planets, but few showed any evidence of life.

“OK, course plotted,” I said. “That system is only 46 light years away. Now, let’s clear our minds and think of arriving there now, meaning that it will look 46 years older than it looks now, but that’s not going to make a lot of difference on a cosmic scale. The stars aren’t going to run out of fuel, life isn’t going to suddenly evolve, nothing like that. Just a purely timelike path.”

“Ready,” Melanie said, after closing her eyes.

“Here goes.” I engaged the NR drive, and the energy cocoons descended upon us … and when we came out of it, there we were. It was an interesting system, with a bright blue-white star and a yellow dwarf not unlike the Sun in a binary pair.

“Scanning the system … ok, good!” Melanie said. “Everything looks consistent with what we wanted to do. Seeing light from the system we just left the world-ship in … and that looks consistent with what that system probably looked like 46 years ago, from computer projections. Of course, the world-ship isn’t there yet.”

“OK, good,” I said. “No surprises so far. Now, there are planetary-sized objects orbiting the yellow dwarf, including lots of smaller planetoids, and the larger companion star is far enough away that they have pretty stable orbits. But no evidence of any life, probably because of that companion star. On a long term their orbits probably aren’t completely stable.”

“All right then,” said Melanie, running a more detailed scan of the system now that we were at close range. “Among many others, there are two planetoids whose orbits are close enough that they could collide if we made a very slight alteration to the orbit of one of them at a moment about 15 minutes from now.” The diagram of the plan appeared on the viewscreen.

“Great,” I said. “We’ll just use that as a test. We’ll make the change, to send one on a collision course with the other … that’s Scenario A.”

“Right,” agreed Melanie. “Then there’s Scenario B, where we’ll leave the system, then use the NR drive to come back before they collide and move the planetoid back into its former trajectory so they won’t collide.”

“Then we observe it and see what happens,” I said.

So we did that. We moved into position, then used the tractor beam to “throw” one planetoid at the other one. In a few days, if no one did anything else, the planetoids would collide. We were looking at Scenario A. Of course, if things went according to plan, we’d eventually change things. What we didn’t know was whether we’d see ourselves do it.

And then there was a flash of radiation, detected immediately by the sensors, and a ship looking exactly like ours blinked into the system. We watched as it moved into position, enveloped the planetoid with its tractor beam, and moved it back into its original trajectory. Then they vanished again with the characteristic burst of cross-spectrum photons, and they were gone. “Not so much as a hail or a signal,” said Melanie.

“Talking to yourself across time is probably a bad idea in general,” I replied. “So, we’re now in Scenario B. The planetoids won’t collide. Their orbits are back in resonance. Now we leave, and use the drive to become that other ship we just saw.”

Melanie suddenly looked white as a sheet. “What if … we didn’t do that?”

I gulped. “If we did that … then who was that other ship? What if that … wasn’t us? What if it was another ship that just looks like ours? What if it wasn’t us aboard? They never talked to us, so we don’t know …”

“I don’t like that idea,” Melanie said nervously.

“You know what? Let’s just do it,” I said. “I’d rather not think too much about that scenario. That sets up a paradox that might mess with the causality of the whole universe unless somebody builds a ship just like this one and does what we just saw happen. Let’s call that Scenario X, and let’s not make that happen.”

“Right, no Scenario X,” Melanie agreed.

“Setting course …” I said. We moved to a spot far enough away from the system that we’d be able to come back to the right event-point and returned. There we were, our ship from just a while before, in subjective time, sitting there watching. We moved into position, tractored the planetoid back into its former trajectory, and left the area again, moving to a point a few light hours away, where we could observe everything happening.

“Look,” said Melanie as events unfolded. “There we are … and now we’re moving the planetoid …”

A short while later, I said, “And there we are again … there are two of us … and the new us is moving the planetoid again … and now they’re gone … and now the first one of us is gone …”

“That’s weird to watch,” I said.

“But we remember being all of those ships,” I added. “So it’s not that weird to us. Anyway, now we go back to the world-ship and report what we just saw.”

And we did. The Brain Computer said, “Fascinating. You were able to manipulate the universe using the NR drive as a method of time travel. But given proper care, you left the system as you found it. If there had been life there, it would have been virtually unaffected by what you just did.”

“Yes,” I said, “so I think we may be safe to use the NR drive to attempt to reach the Hyperion Proto-Supercluster.”

“I concur,” the Brain Computer said. “We must merely ensure that no one using the NR drive has thoughts about unwanted deviations in time.”

The Brain Computer had had a helpful thought about the fact that the world-ship would be without a sun. The defense platform had a very powerful energy source and could temporarily act as a substitute sun for a few hours at a time, which would be long enough to get our bearings and set a course for the next step. There was no need for the life forms on the surface to freeze after all. The defense satellite would just have to bathe the surface with a rather large amount of broad-spectrum infrared photons. That would tax its energy source, but it wouldn’t be for long.

The Machhallee made preparations, and we tuned the world-ship’s vast NR drive until its readings were just as smooth as the one aboard our ship. We even made a few test jumps to orbit other yellow dwarf stars within long-range sensors. Then we finally made a test jump of one million light years toward the Hyperion Supercluster.

When the energy cocoons dissipated, sure enough, we were in intergalactic space. We sensed no stars anywhere near us. We saw the light from the galaxy we had left, now a million light years behind us, so we were seeing it as it was a million years ago – not different except in minute details, as it had still been a spiral galaxy back then, and even the star systems we’d visited had existed; they would merely rotate around the galactic center until we came along a million years later, from this point of view. And the Hyperion Supercluster didn’t seem much closer, naturally enough – we’d traveled less than a tenth of a percent of the way there. But most importantly, nothing looked wrong.

Melanie and I were in our ship, on the surface of the world-ship, while all the Machhallee were underground for their protection, just in case. But the defense satellite was in the sky, beaming infrared down upon half the planet as it orbited. According to scans, the ecosystem was largely unaffected so far.

“All surface readings seem nominal,” the Brain Computer said when we contacted it with our scan data. “It would appear that a jump of one million light years was entirely possible and did not even tax the capabilities of the low-frequency NR drive. Preparing for a jump of 5.92 billion light years, taking us to the borders of the Hyperion Supercluster.”

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As soon as the hybernation equipment lifted, we knew something serious had gone wrong. Where we were expecting the modern-day Hyperion Supercluster, meant to be a developed version of the Proto-Supercluster that we had been observing from several billion light years away, was a huge collection of proto-galaxies, forming stars, and other celestial objects just beginning to gather and slowly rotate.

Melanie gasped, “Where’s the cluster?” She brought up astrogation data and stellar cartography data and started analyzing it. “From what visual and long range scans show, we not only missed; we are in uncharted …”

Several monitors brought up comparison data and the important data signal chirped. We looked it over and I almost had a coronary. From what current scans were showing when compared to the stored database, the universe had retrograded back in time 10 billion years, perhaps more.

I commented with disbelief obvious in my tone, “We not only missed, but we arrived before the cluster was a real cluster. We’re … we have no idea where we are. Our home galaxy doesn’t even exist yet. We can’t even pinpoint the huge cloud of coalescing gas and dust that’s going to turn into it someday.”

The more we scanned our local space and time, the more it proved we were in what we thought of as the far distant past once it was compared with our stored astrogation data. From this location in space and time, there wasn’t even a chance of finding anything remotely familiar, since virtually none of the astronomical features used as markers hadn’t even come into existence yet.

The Brain Computer spoke up and said softly, “Relax. I’m not exactly sure why the jump missed the particular time frame we were shooting for. However, I do have enough data to return us to the proper time/space/dimension.” The main screens filled with calculations. “Ah. I see. We had been assuming that only the thoughts of those involved in operating the NR drive could affect it. That appears to have been incorrect. From the best I can tell, one of my people had a thought on their mind during transfer and the system took us to this time as a result. I will call a conference, and all are required to attend.”

I said to Melanie, “This is horrible. We know the proper direction to travel to find home space, but under the current circumstances, and based on what happened, I still have no idea how to make the time travel aspect work.”

One of the Machhallee tried their very best to speak English, but due to the way their mouthparts were put together, the accent was hard to understand. After a few minutes, the Machhallee seemed to get frustrated and turned on the translator.

They said, “I figured out how to reduce the time errors due to stray thoughts. We need to take the time to run down the wiring and connections for the thought-sensing equipment and shield it from all the gravity couches except for maybe the pilot, the navigator, and the first officer. We might even single out one particular gravity couch and have it be the only one unshielded – maybe the only one even wired into navigation. That should reduce this type of odd time displacements in the … ummm … future?”

I said, “That’s fine, but from this location, how do we find our way back …”

About that time the imminent collision alarm went off. Forward scans indicated a rather large planetoid was speeding toward us.

Melanie said, “Incoming space rock! I’ve got it on tactical … the grav is locked and loaded.”

It was over a hundred kilometers across. If it hit the world-ship, it could do significant damage. It could even destroy our ship, if it hit close enough. I told her, “Fire, full power!”

The world-ship’s orbital defense platform fired a very powerful grav wave at the approaching planetoid. It impacted at a weird oblique angle, sending the planetoid careening off, all the while collecting more speed due to gravitational slingshotting through many of the objects that would eventually become the Hyperion Supercluster.

One thing the Brain Computer took minor notice of, was the direction the planetoid took, and the speed it was now traveling.

Once the immediate threat was over, I realized something and said, “That was really rare. This early in the universe, there weren’t a lot of the heavy elements you’d need to form a solid object, especially one that size. There just hasn’t been enough time for the universe’s stars to produce a lot of solid elements. There are some, obviously, but not a lot.”

“Indeed,” said the Brain Computer, “judging from the abundances of heavy elements estimated from all evidence, we must be somewhere between one and two billion Earth years since the event you term the Big Bang. But now, we must find a way to this supercluster in the present day that we departed from, a place reachable from our point of departure along an NR-optimal timelike path. There is no word in either of our languages for the path we took to arrive at the event-point we are in. However, you have returned to your event-point of origin with great precision multiple times, so it must be possible.”

It was one thing to talk about shielding the NR drive from the thoughts of so many of the world-ship’s inhabitants, but discovering a means of shielding something from thought was quite another thing altogether. It took months to develop a form of matter capable of doing such a thing, and it proved easier to shield the NR drive than the gravity couches. We then found that the NR drive refused to operate at all unless it was able to receive input from the thoughts of at least one operator. Apparently it needed mental guidance.

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I sat at the main engineering sections data terminal with a serious headache. I was trying my best to reconcile a High Frequency NR particle and the way it traversed through space-time. After a few major miscalculations, I discovered I was trying to force a result that was going to be a much different data set than the one I had ignorantly assumed.

Once I stopped randomly adding or subtracting time coefficient variables, and stuck to defining the exact energy levels, I realized that the low-energy NR wave was a totally different type of energy and didn’t display any type of particle characteristics I could find. It was something like the classical wave theory of light, which dominated over particle characteristics at low energies.

One day, after the world-ship had completed a minor sensor repair and upgrade, we made an astonishing discovery in the core of one of the nearby randomly floating asteroids. We went there with the ship and took core samples, discovering a strange mineral that the computer had never seen before.

I had heard stories about time crystals from the Machhallee that reminded me of some crackpot theories I’d heard long ago, with a similar name to a different phenomenon, but I had no idea that such a thing could be real. It was giving all our scanners the same sorts of readings as the thought-sensitive sections of the revamped NR drive, so I experimented.

I built a targeting device to add to the lensing array of our NR drive, and I learned that the crystal organized and directed the thought patterns in such a way that we now had the ability to directly choose both a destination time and location … that is, if we had the astrogation data to use, which we didn’t.

I discussed it with the Brain Computer, which was totally amazed at the results, and at the time crystal targeting helmet I had built, which looked like a normal helmet dotted with sparkly spheres that contained the essence of the time crystals. The Brain Computer was willing to help interpolate the astrogation data if we could run some tests.

Once I had wired the helmet into the navigational array, it was time to test it. Short hops that I knew the time and locations of seemed to work flawlessly and gave the Brain Computer some baseline data. Now was time for the risky part. I was going to try to take us back to the proper point in space and time – the one we wanted to be at. If this worked, we’d solved our random time issues. If it didn’t, Heaven only knew where and when we would wind up.

While a time crystal shares some of the atomic properties of crystals, unfortunately for science fiction and fantasy fans, they are not at all like a crystal you can see and touch. Time crystals are actually a unique arrangement of quantum bonded particles that are in perpetual and repeating motion in both time and space. The crystals I had created were bonded NR particles, creating an entirely new type of item … an NR Time Crystal.

The time for the test had arrived. I focused my mind on the destination time. It appeared on the nav screen, and I locked it in. A spatial displacement of zero appeared as well, and I locked it in. “There,” I said. “No room for the NR drive to take us on some wild goose chase this time.”

“Now if only that helmet you’re wearing didn’t look so silly,” said Melanie.

I smiled in spite of myself, double-checked the readings, and said, “Brain Computer … coordinates are locked in.”

“Readings are in agreement,” came the reply. “Activating on confirmation.”

“Confirmation in five, four, three, two, one, mark!” I replied. And the cryosleep curtains descended …

Around us were galaxies! Lots of them. They weren’t close, but they were in all directions. The viewscreens showed we were in a region of space rich with galaxies, and more importantly, well-developed galaxies with a noticeably higher density of heavy elements. “Billions of years have certainly passed,” I said.

“Now we just wait for the computers,” said Melanie.

So we did. And in ten minutes or so, the Brain Computer confirmed it. “I can now conclude that the region of space in which we find ourselves is the Hyperion Supercluster, projected into the future from the detailed scans we had made of it from a distance. We are at the destination point had the path been optimally timelike.”

“Yes!” I cheered, standing up. “Now we can scan closer to home … I think.”

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I sat at the engineering master panel and banged my fist on the couche’s arm. I knew the direction we were supposed to be scanning, but none of the data returned showed anything recognizable to our stellar cartography database. The distances were still far too great. I knew we would have to travel to the other side of the cluster if there was any kind of hope of finding a recognisable stellar object. At least there was a way to do that now.

The Brain Computer’s console lit up, indicating it was at the engineering station. Its voice said, “I have some data and tracking information I think might be of interest to you.”

I swiveled my couch around, locked it into place, and routed the Brain Computer’s output to the large screen. The images I saw were those of a huge planetoid on collision course with the World Ship. I recalled that incident. The next series of images showed how the orbiting defense station had deflected it from hitting the planet with its graviton wave weapon, but the angle at which it had deflected the planetoid had allowed it to gain several orders of magnitude more speed due to gravitational slingshotting as it had passed other objects.

I sat back in the couch and said, “I remember when we had to do that to avoid a major collision. Since the rock did no damage and didn’t hit anything along its deflection path, I don’t see anything terribly important.”

As the image on the screen changed, the Brain Computer said, “It isn’t so much what happened immediately at the time – how about 11 billion years later?”

I looked at the image closely. At this extreme distance, the Milky Way appeared as a faint, extended glow. I already knew the Milky Way was part of what we called the Local Group of galaxies (which contained more than 54 of them), which in turn was part of the Virgo Cluster, as we called it, which was part of the Laniakea Supercluster, which was part of the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex.

“Oh!” I said. “Well done! You’ve found our home galaxy and its neighborhood!” The Brain Computer was superimposing its extrapolated projections of what those objects were like today, because the only light we were seeing from them was 11 billion years old. The Hyperion Supercluster, where we were, looked like a proto-supercluster from Earth, with galaxies just forming, and that was what our home looked like from here.

That was when I noticed the extrapolated path of the planetoid we’d deflected. My mouth fell open as I looked over the scans of the planetoid, and I had a terrible feeling pass through me.

All the readings of the diverted rock were exactly the same as those made of the imminent impactor at the Earth system. I hadn’t noticed it until now, and the Brain Computer had only realized this recently itself. That impactor was the whole reason we and the other ships had gone into NR space, trying to avoid total extinction of the human race, under orders from the Earth ruling council.

A truly horrible chill ran up my spine as I came to the shocking realization that we’d caused it. We were the anomaly. I knew the direction we had to travel, but not the exact distance. Now that I had thought I had solved the time issue, I realized that we were the ones who had sent that huge planetoid careening off towards impact with Earth some 11 billion years in the future.

When I was finally able to speak again, all I could say was, “No. No, no, no. We have to stop this, or all life on our home world will be destroyed.”

Melanie had entered the room partway through this, bringing me something tasty to try as she often did, but she’d dropped it on the floor when she’d come to the realization that I had. “But,” she said, “but no. No. We saw. Through the rift. The NR space people showed us. The impactor was diverted. They saved Earth.”

“We don’t know,” I said. “We messed up causality. We even tested it. We can change things before we decide to do it, and watch the results before we’ve caused them. We shoved a rock at Earth in the past, and maybe somebody fixed it, but maybe that somebody is us.”

“So just like we went back and fixed the paths in that test we did …” Melanie began.

“Yes,” I said. “We have to do that again. Except on a much larger scale, and if we don’t, we kill everything on Earth.”

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So we started making our plans. “I would like to interject,” said the Brain Computer, “that owing to the fact that the revised low-frequency NR drive allows us to travel in time, put simply, we do have as much time as we need to formulate our strategy.”

“Hey, they’re right,” said Melanie. “We can do this. We just have to make sure that we don’t break anything.”

“The big thing I think we have to avoid breaking,” I said, “is causality itself. What we can’t do is prevent the rock from ever threatening Earth. If we do that, we change things so our ship is never launched at all.”

“Wouldn’t that just … prevent us from ever launching the rock at Earth?” asked Melanie. “That seems like it would be fine.”

“Not really,” I said. “Not only would it mean that everything we’ve done will simultaneously have happened and never have happened, and I don’t know what that would do to the space-time continuum …”

The Brain Computer interrupted, “It would mean that no one would ever have arrived to help us. It was only thanks to you that we were able to effect repairs to our NR drive.”

“Oh no!” Melanie said. “You’d have been stuck locked away under the world-ship forever … only not forever, because so close to the center of that galaxy, the world-ship’s orbit was unstable, and eventually it would have collided with a star.”

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Melanie and I sat at the navigation station with the thought helmets on. The sensation from sensor feeds to my mind was incredible as I actually saw clear images and other necessary data. As upgraded as we had been able to make our devices, the distances we were trying to observe were astronomically large and the very best we had was a fuzzy glow far off in a vast void.

Melanie said as she typed on the keyboard in front of her, “We can attempt a jump, but how far we jump is impossible to determine. Data indicates most of the energy is so far red shifted it is very near the edge of its sensitivity.”

The voice of the Brain Computer came from its interface, “Have either of you given any thought to the energy necessary to accomplish what you are planning? The best my scans of your ship indicate your power levels are better than a magnitude too little to accomplish the jump, and snag an errant planetoid.”

I replied with strain obvious in my tone, “We have to do something, or all life on our home world is doomed.”

The Brain Computer replied softly, “As memory banks stored it, was it not the orbital station that fired the deflecting shot?”

Melanie nodded as I interjected, “Yeah, but because we pressed the button. And you wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for us trying to get home anyway.”

“Who allowed you to proceed and even gave you impact coordinates?”

“Only because we … “ I started to object.

The Brain Computer interrupted, “You can’t miss the point, however, It was we who are actually responsible, so therefore it is we who will allow you to once again use the defense sphere’s energy weapon, otherwise there’s no point to even try.”

The latest stellar cartography data came to the main screen. Our current location, the Hyperion Supercluster, came into view in the holographic projection. Another fuzzier image appeared, then slowly rotated and superimposed itself. Once the two images were matched, our current location was waypointed.

The Brain Computer explained, “What we’re seeing is a superimposition of our current readings and the same image from stellar cartography but as viewed from an Earth vantage point – the Hyperion Proto-Supercluster, as it appeared 11 billion years ago. We have conclusively discovered the direction we are to travel. Due to the amount of change over time as apparent in the Earth viewed image, the distance is unknown with precision, but it is over 11 billion light years. We can miss, I suppose, but if we miss in the wrong place, we will be still be totally lost if sensors can’t locate any reference points.”

“Well, will more calculation and data collection improve our chances any?” I asked.

“Not noticeably,” replied the Brain Computer. I hadn’t thought so.

“No point waiting any longer, then,” I said. Melanie agreed.

“Very well,” the Brain Computer stated. We strapped in, and the cryo-fields descended …

When we awoke, we were looking at the Milky Way galaxy, almost face-on, its central bar structure clearly visible. I realized what this meant. “We missed,” I said, “but not by much.”

The Brain Computer stated, “Indeed, we missed the coordinates of Earth by about one million light years. Compared to the distance of over 11 billion light years, this represents an error of less than 3 millionths of a circle.”

“About 3 arc seconds,” I said, after some mental calculations. “Not bad, all told.”

“No,” said the Brain Computer, “but we have calculated something else. That is also our home galaxy.”

“What?” asked Melanie. “That’s so unlikely as to be nearly impossible! There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.”

“Be that as it may, our data indicates that we hail from the same galaxy,” the Brain Computer stated. “Perhaps our fates were entwined before we knew them to be. But that is a conundrum that can be solved later. For now, your home world’s survival remains undecided. With current observational data, at a distance of only about one million light years, we can clearly place your stellar system’s coordinates. This is, of course, keeping in mind that the galaxy will have rotated about its center since then.” The on-screen image was superimposed with a projection forward in time, with the location of Earth’s solar system within the current image and the projection marked.

“And we want to arrive at the precise moment when the planetoid is near crisis,” I said. “That requires even more precision. Let’s try one more jump – but let’s miss on purpose. I suggest …”

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We were now about half a light year from Earth, observing the familiar solar system with our sensors.

“It feels so good,” said Melanie, “just knowing that we know where we are. Instead of being completely lost in time and space, we’re in a place where we can say where home is.”

“I feel the same,” I said. “Now, if we got the timing correct, we should be able to see the planetoid as it bears down upon Earth … do the sensors corroborate that?”

“Affirmative,” replied the Brain Computer. The sensor image appeared on the screen, annotated by various markings highlighting the position and velocity of Earth, the Moon, and the planetoid. “This image is live, in the sense that it is based on data currently being received by our sensors. However, we are of course half a light year away. What Earth will look like six months from now is unknown from this position.”

“Right,” I said, “so what we want is an optimally timelike trajectory so as to bring us to Earth at that moment, the one we see there, the moment of crisis, when the planetoid must be dealt with or there will be disaster. Too soon, and we’d never have been sent out to begin with. Too late, and all life on Earth is potentially wiped out.”

“Oh, now I see why you wanted to deliberately miss Earth on the last jump,” said Melanie. “From here, our inaccuracy will be very low.”

“What’s more, we won’t have to bring the world-ship,” I said. “Its gravity would likely be disruptive to the Earth-Moon system, and its sudden appearance would probably be disruptive to Earth society and politics. We don’t want humans somehow blaming the Machhallee for the planetoid or something else ridiculous like that.”

“Affirmative,” said the Brain Computer. “Your ship can easily make this jump on its own. We will meet you at these coordinates after your intervention.” Time and space coordinates appeared on the screen, with an annotation that they were being sent to our ship’s computer. The world-ship couldn’t sit here at this point, in interplanetary space without a star, for an indefinite period of time, warmed only by the defense platform. The Brain Computer had probably picked a nearby star to orbit as it waited for us.

Melanie and I looked at each other. “Time to go,” I said. She nodded.

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Things proceeded rather quickly once the Cryo-screen had lifted. Immediately, ship systems calculated that our time and space displacement coordinates agreed with where we had wanted to be and when we wanted to be there.

Immediately after that, the imminent impact alarm began to sound as the tactical system targeted the planetoid automatically. Failsafe systems worked perfectly and had everything aligned and ready to fire.

One thing came to my attention as I readied to deflect the oncoming planetoid. I was very grateful to the Machhallee for their assistance and the massive upgrades to our graviton weapon, but the new energy requirements for the low-frequency NR drive and its time systems we had installed were still new to me.

“Power reserves at 75%,” I said. “That jump took 25%.”

“75% energy left,” said Melanie. “Is that enough?”

“I’m calculating … barely,” I said. “After the shot we’ll have nothing left for several hours while the system recharges. We won’t get another shot.”

Melanie announced, “Main sensors show … the planetoid will reach the failsafe line in five seconds.”

I had to act now. Melanie had targeted and locked in a very nice cliff face on the planetoid to strike.

“Firing,” I said. I pushed the button.

All lights on the bridge winked out. Everything was totally dark. We could do nothing but sit there in amazement, horror, and tension. Then, gradually, control panels began to light back up, beginning with life support. Then the main viewscreen came back on, showing only the view from the main forward camera, its default setting.

The planetoid moved slowly, inexorably, in Earth’s general direction. “Did it work?” asked Melanie.

“No way to know for certain yet,” I said. “We need sensors to read its position and computers to extrapolate its trajectory.”

A few minutes more tension later, the computer and sensor panels lit back up. “Analyzing …” Melanie said, now that there was data to analyze and something to analyze it with.

Readouts started appearing on the main viewscreen superimposed on the camera view. The planetoid’s trajectory had changed, so the weapon had fired. But had it been enough?

“Looks like it didn’t have quite the punch we’d expected due to the energy we spent jumping here,” I said, “but there’s still a chance.”

We sat in total fear as we watched a planetoid almost the size of Earth’s Moon move along its new trajectory toward either disaster or redemption. Melanie tried to relieve the tension by saying, “You don’t have to hold your breath. Life support came back up a little while ago.”

Then the computer announced the results, by switching the view to a schematic of the planetoid’s new orbit. We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw it. Earth now had a new moon, and it would appear opposite to the original Moon in the sky. The planetoid had settled into a proper orbit in exactly the same plane and eccentricity of the original Moon, but with a shorter semimajor axis and 180 degrees (the Brain Computer would call it “0.5 circles”) out of phase.

What I regretted were the extra tidal disruptions, tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that would occur over time, though probably the only people noticing them would be scientists who kept careful track. More people would be harmed over time. Of course, Earth people being who we were would naturally send teams to explore the new moon. Somebody would probably give it a name.

But even if more people were hurt or killed in the time to come due to more intense tides or natural disasters, we had averted a definite ELE impact on Earth and had sent into orbit a very valuable mining opportunity. Now, we sat in the rapidly cooling control center in pitch dark, except for the light from the viewscreen and the flickering control panels.

Melanie asked, “How long will we be on minimum power? Are we gonna freeze?”

I said, “Don’t worry – as you said, life support came on a while ago, and heat is the easiest form of energy to make. Every single system creates it, and life support is built to circulate it throughout the ship.”

Melanie asked, “Do we have enough energy to use the comm system? Call for a bit of help?”

I replied, “No need. We just need to wait for the power reserves to recharge a bit. From what it last said, we should be able to use NR drive shortly.”

“What about those ships approaching us and probably wondering who we are?” Melanie asked, pointing to some targets that were being highlighted on the main viewscreen. “They’re probably hailing us, but without comms we can’t hear them.”

“Well, they would easily be able to tell this is an Earth ship,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ll board us or wait for us to respond, but if I were them, and sensors told me that the ship had two life forms aboard and virtually no power but reserves were recharging, I’d figure comms weren’t working, and I’d just wait until the ship could respond. It’s not as if we’re a threat.”

And true enough, they didn’t fire on us or anything. There was a wing of fighters at first, which had been scrambled to intercept the unknown vessel, but they went away when they found there was no threat to intercept, and by the time larger vessels were able to get to us, comms were working again.

Now, as you may recall, we had no intention of allowing the ship as it was, with its low-frequency NR drive with its time travel capabilities and such, to fall into anyone’s hands. We had it, and we’d almost killed Earth without even meaning to. What if someone went back to the Big Bang and completely rearranged the composition of the universe, so Earth would never exist at all and intelligent life arose on a completely different set of planets under completely different circumstances? That would be a far more complicated error to undo than merely altering the orbit of a planetoid. So we had to do something.

It was easy enough to make excuses over no one boarding the ship, and no one questioned any of our reasoning … partly because some of it sounded so silly they more than likely didn’t want to get involved. The Earth authorities didn’t seem to realize what had happened, and that was probably for the best. We were able to stall for time until the power reserves recharged enough to get to the rendezvous point with the Machhallee.

“Are you sure you don’t need any assistance?” came another hail. “Scans show only two people aboard that MZ-111 class exploration cruiser, and it would normally require a bare minimum crew of 15, according to the handbook.”

“No, negative, no worries,” I said. “We’ve got to get back to base, and the reactor will have the power reserves charged back up soon. We’re in no trouble.”

“Well, as long as you’re sure …” The indicator then said we had enough reserve power to reach the rendezvous point the Brain Computer had given us.

I cut off comms and said to Melanie, “Time to go. I know we’d both like to go home, but now’s not the time.” I hit the jump sequence actuator, the cryo fields activated, and … we were in a different system with a yellow dwarf star, about 40 light years away from Earth. Scans showed the Machhallee world-ship in orbit around the star. We hailed the Brain Computer and went in for a landing.

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Once we’d set down on the surface of the world-ship, Melanie and I sat at the main engineering station with the Brain Computer and ours logged in. We were looking for some viable solution to our time dilemma that wouldn’t cause a time anomaly. We completely had our fill of trying to fix paradoxes, although our current data showed we were the paradox if we continued under current situations. Fortunately, the only paradox left to resolve was how to return to Earth without giving anybody any idea about the low-frequency NR drive.

The Brain Computer suggested, “Since we have a somewhat tenuous control over time travel, what if we selected a time continuum bubble, built another ship with the same NR drive issues you had at first, and fabricated records showing that the damage happened when you overloaded the system moving the planetoid ...”

“... And move the replica back in time to the point we give the authorities permission to board.” I interrupted. “But then, how would we get the replica to that time location without low-frequency NR?”

The Brain Computer replied, “The same way I take our orbital defense platform with us. It’s easy. Extend the current drive field to encapsulate the new ship and … voilá …”

Melanie looked up from the console she had been typing on. The large screen in front of her showed the massive equations for the maneuver our astrogation database suggested to accomplish the ship transference. “From the best I can tell,” she said, “this data set is a huge mess. As far as I’m concerned, maybe a physicist or something might like it, but me, no way.”

I discovered the Brain Computer could laugh same as I at that.

The Brain Computer said in a jovial tone that transmitted well through its audio and translation system, “All things considered, however, according to that data set, we should be able to accomplish it without anyone but us being the wiser. Since we are displacing ourselves in a time bubble, we could take a billion star cycles and no one would be the wiser.”

The data on Melanie’s screen changed. “I have the astrogation and time data ready if everyone is happy with that plan.”

There were no objections. Melanie entered the data into the astrogation/time unit, then we put the helmets on and imagined what it was we wanted … the hibernation field lifted, and we were in a spot that was blacker than black. We were on a cold, rocky planet with no atmosphere, but our sensors showed the area was rich in all the minerals and metals we would need to make a convincing second ship. Since our ship was a nothing-special plain-Jane type of utility craft, manufacturing many of the components was easy. Others, we’d just have to do without and make it look like they were missing due to burnout damage.

We could even let the utility bots work, jump a decade into the future, and survey their handiwork, and that was what we did. In the end we had a ship that worked about as well as ours had when we’d crash-landed on the world-ship – better, actually, because not many systems were actually “broken.” The reactor was blown, or it looked it, but that was because the rare fissile isotopes required to make it weren’t available.

Actually, we could probably have built some exploration robots and set them to searching for those materials, send them back in time a century to let them work, then caught up with them to see how they’d done, but it just didn’t seem worth it. We’d be telling our rescuers that our reactor had burned out from overtaxation, and that’s what it looked like.

“But the question is, how does it fly?” I asked.

“It doesn’t have a reactor …” said Melanie.

“I know, I was trying to think like a pilot for a second there. Unless you want to fly the thing?”

“I could, you know. I went through basic piloting just like you did.”

“You have no idea how much I want you to,” I said. “I’d really rather be in engineering.”

“Actually,” Melanie suggested, “let’s do that. It would make more sense.”

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So that was how, when the world-ship quickly swooped into and then out of the Solar System, leaving us behind at the very instant we’d left previously, I was in main engineering looking as if I was frantically trying to hold the reactor together with duct tape and baling wire, while Melanie was in main control, trying to keep the ship on an even keel. And we picked up the conversation with our would-be rescuer right where we’d left off. From their point of view there’d been nothing but a flicker on their sensors.

Melanie said to the ship that had been hailing us, “Well, we should be able to make it to Earth orbit … let me just check … bridge to engineering, how are things going down there?”

I played my part. “Oh, no worries, things are just fine, I can do this! The …” Right about then something in the makeshift broken-down reactor made a noise, so I took advantage of that and swore at it. I won’t repeat the exact words I said. They were choice. “When we get back to Earth I’m gonna recycle you into a trash compactor! Oh …” I seemed to remember that I was still on the line with Melanie. “Uh, yeah, things are fine! I’ll have it working in no time. Don’t worry!”

“Repeat, are you certain you don’t need help?” came the voice of the rescuer. I knew full well that they were a private mining security ship, not part of the Solar System Guard or anything, but they could still report our position and get us help.

Melanie replied, “Uh, well, Laurie’s always been a bit … overconfident? You know engineers, they never want to admit they can’t do something. And she can fix the reactor, I know, but the question is whether it will take longer than we have life support power left.”

“Right,” said the rescuer. “I take it you’re OK with us calling the Guard, then.”

“Absolutely,” Melanie said. “I thought we could make it before. But now …”

“Calling them in now,” the rescuer said. “That’s odd … they say they’re already on the way. What would have them anywhere near this orbit right now?”

“I … um, couldn’t say,” said Melanie.

Well, it wasn’t long before we got another hail. “This is rescue ship SSG Aegis to unknown MZ-111 class vessel. We’ve been called in because of a report that you need assistance, as well as some … other strange reports we’ve been given.”

“Xenobiologist Melanie Heller speaking,” Melanie said. “Yes, engineer Laurie Carrol and I are the only survivors. We have a bit of a story. But for now … our reactor is burned out, and life support is only going to last so long.” I knew that we had a good 48 hours of life support, plenty of time considering we knew there was already a ship talking to us.

“Well, if you’re fine with it, we’ll just bring you aboard,” said the comms officer from the Aegis. “We’re all a little spooked considering that we’d been evacuating Earth as best we could only to find that we now have an extra moon.”

“I’d … gathered that, from the chatter I’d been hearing,” said Melanie. “What a strange thing.”

“Yes, I don’t know much about how that could have happened, but I’m only a comms officer on a rescue ship. That’s way above my pay grade. But there’s a shuttle on its way to bring you over.”

“That’s great! Thank you! Lighting up docking bay 6.”

I stayed quiet during this conversation, though I heard it all, figuring they’d assume I was busy in engineering, but I was ready to go when the shuttle arrived.

We were in the airlock when the docking bay opened. “Well hey there,” said a white-uniformed woman with medical insignia. “I’m Dr. Gina Maines, and I’ll be taking you to medical to get you checked out. Procedure, of course.”

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “I’m so glad to see another human being! I mean, Laurie’s my best friend, but well, you know what I mean.”

Dr. Maines chuckled. “Of course.” She was accompanied by a few others, two of whom transferred to our ship, probably to see whether it could be maneuvered into an orbit where it could be salvaged, and two of whom came with the doctor and us to the medical bay.

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Some of the engineers marveled at several of the unique upgrades that the Machhallee had accidentally incorporated into this mockup of our real ship. The inclusions were easy to explain as things I’d come up with on the fly, and the engineering crew accepted that. It’s what many of them live for.

The ship, as a whole, was still operable. The main reactor, the NR drive, and the equipment replicators were shot. The rest of the mockup was in fair working condition. Those things that were damaged looked exactly as the engineers expected the overloaded items to look like, and they overlooked the tiny details that told a far different story.

Dr. Maines had just completed a through med scan and alien bio-scan. We had some unique microbes in our systems – nothing that affected us in any way, but they were unique to Earth. She discovered several other creatures hidden away in small folds of the uniforms too. They were cute and looked fuzzy under the scanners with big googly eyes.

Dr. Maines came into the exam room while Melanie and I were dressing. She looked at the small tablet in her hand and said, “Except for several passengers within your systems, the both of you are in excellent health. I hope you don’t mind, but since several of the microbes are unknown to Earth, I’ve taken several samples of them from your scans. I’m attempting to germinate and spawn them if I can and make a collection to study.”

I said as I zipped up the front of my uniform, “I’m fairly sure there are several other types of critters hidden in places. Nothing we found while we jury-rigged our drive was harmful in anyway. Matter of fact, several species of four-legged critters were quite tasty.”

We all laughed.

The doctor said, “I’m happy to report that there’s no need for further quarantine. I could find no biological or mineralogical contamination. We did find several fuzzy critters. They are adorably cute, but also harmless.”

Melanie asked, “What about our ship?”

The doctor replied, “Don’t worry about the ship. Space Com said they’ll repair it for free, especially after what they found recorded in the historical log files.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what, pray tell, could they have possibly found that made them do multi-trillion dollar repairs?”

The doctor smiled. “So modest. Makes me want to cry. What they found, silly, was the complete record of your appearance and subsequent redirection of the orbital track of the incoming impactor. It also included the damage report that showed the ship was in working order up till the point you used some enhanced graviton beam and moved it into planetary orbit, pushing your reactor past the breaking point with the energy draw.”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“Yes, that, the part where you saved Earth,” said Dr. Maines. “Now, I’m just a doctor, and I don’t make these decisions, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to want to talk to you about that at some point.”

“Yeah, I figured they would,” I replied. “It’s … complicated. We were kind of … just at the right place at the right time, I guess? There was no real choice in the matter. Nobody else could do it.”

“Sure there was a choice,” said the doctor. “You could have done nothing, let the big rock smash into the Earth.”

“No,” I said, “I really couldn’t have done that. Neither could Melanie.”

“Well, anyway, you’ve got a clean bill of health,” Dr. Maines said, signing the document with her digital key. “You’re free to go as far as I’m concerned … but there’s a bunch of bureaucracy and politics and whatnot that’s about to descend upon you. Fair warning.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I wasn’t looking forward to this next part.

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The next part isn’t really that interesting, so I’m not going into details. Lots of questions. Of course, I couldn’t say anything about time travel or the fact that we’d been responsible for the planetoid’s trajectory in the first place, so I didn’t. They did have records of our ship’s flight plan, and I had to leave the Machhallee out of that story, so the story became a lot more mundane – we’d crash landed on a planet with just Melanie and me as survivors, we got things back into some kind of working order so as to limp back to Earth, and on the way we realized we were right in the path of the planetoid, so we rigged up the ship to pour all the power into a modified tractor beam that I’d come up with by combining the ship’s towing system with its weapons system and the NR drive, and in the process burned out the drive and the reactor. I’d used the computer to calculate the amount of energy required, saw we’d just barely have enough, and we did it.

They don’t give ticker-tape parades anymore because there’s no such thing as ticker-tape, but it’s still an expression to convey the adulation. I got really tired of the attention, and I think Melanie did too, though we ate better than we had in years.

The ship technically belonged to the Earth Evacuation Force, although that was being repurposed for other mundane tasks, and our ship and a life time of free upgrades and drydock refittings was given to us as a major reward for saving the earth. We were offered big promotions, well-paying jobs, speaking engagements – so many opportunities that we couldn’t take them all. But Melanie and I didn’t want them.

“I miss the Machhallee,” she said one night when we were in a hotel room after yet another media interview. “They’re still looking for their home planet. They helped us find ours. I think it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t help them find theirs in return.”

“In a way, we did,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ve found their way home yet, but they did say that they’re also from the Milky Way – just maybe somewhere on the other side of it, or something.”

“What if …” she said, “what if we sorta introduced their people and Earth to each other?”

“Arranged an official first contact?” I asked. She nodded. “Well, we’d have to work it out with the Brain Computer. And they’d probably have to find some way to finagle it with their government – just as we’d have to with ours.”

“Oh, wait, there’s a problem with this idea,” said Melanie, looking disappointed.

“What’s that?”

“We’d get even more famous.”

I chuckled. “I think there’s no avoiding that at this point.”

So I send a message – I just used my personal comm, but I’d modified it with new hardware and software, communicating using an anti-timelike NR wave that we’d discovered together with the Brain Computer, and encrypted with an algorithm and key system that we’d worked out before parting ways.

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I explained my thoughts to the Brain Computer and informed it that the mockup ship had been completely refurbished and repaired. It had its full regular NR drive fully operational, the high-frequency one that Earth currently thought was the state of the art. I also told it that there were a few upgrades to the ship as well, like the hibernation curtains – apparently they had thought that I’d invented that, and it was now being installed on all new Earth NR-capable ships. Melanie and I liked that a whole lot better than a hyberculum.

The Brain Computer gave us coordinates just the other side of Andromeda for a G2V yellow star that the world-ship was orbiting – which was odd, considering that we thought the Machhallee’s homeworld was in the Milky Way Galaxy, but we trusted it after all we’d been through together.

It was kind of hard to get away from the adulating science and political communities. I mean, hey, it’s not every day the Earth gets saved from an ELE smashup, but that was the actual bit that made us able to get away; we wanted some time alone away from the masses and newsies.

The cryo-curtain lifted. “Did we misjump?” I said. “I’m not seeing the world-ship at all, and navigational scans don’t agree with …”

But while I was doing long range scans searching for the celestial objects we were told should be our markers, the world-ship appeared, snagged us with a tractor beam and extended its NR field around us.

Next thing I knew, the cryo-curtains raised again, and we were in orbit around a beautifully lush world orbiting a yellow G2V star off almost exactly an AU away. We were now in orbit with the planet’s defense moon, which was now orbiting further out than it had been. I understood the double-jump tactic, though – any records Earth might later download from our NR drive would show that we went somewhere in Andromeda. It wouldn’t contain any data about our second jump, because it didn’t perform that jump.

The Brain Computer’s voice came over the comm. “Welcome, my friends. We missed you these last many months. I do have some rather bad news, however.”

I asked, “What’s the bad news? Is there anything we can do to help make things better?”

A detailed scan of space several hundred light years away showed a large empty place within the galactic body. It showed … an active event horizon. A chill ran down my spine as the implications of what I was looking at sank in. “Oh no,” I said, and Melanie realized it too shortly afterward and gasped in shock.

The Brain Computer said, “We now know why we built a world-ship and traveled from our homeworld so long ago. Apparently some major mishap within our home system’s sun caused it to collapse in upon itself and form something like a black hole without a supernova. Of course, we knew this was coming, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. I’m not certain how long ago this happened, but it is strange that we do not have any data about this in our archive.”

“Was it lost in whatever disaster stranded you on the other side of the Hyperion Supercluster?” I asked.

“Or maybe it was lost in the war between the surface-dwelling and the subterranean Machhallee?” wondered Melanie.

“Both of these are possibilities,” said the Brain Computer, “but we must now face a future in which we have no homeworld to go back to. It is possible that other colony world-ships were built and established new homes in other places. Perhaps we will meet them one day. But for now, we must make this place our home.”

“The world-ship’s surface seemed fairly hospitable to your people,” Melanie said. “The surface-dwelling Machhallee lived there comfortably enough.”

“They were able to survive there, but we are primarily an aquatic species,” said the Brain Computer. “We still have memories of living most of our lives in water. And there are large bodies of water on this world. But …”

“You’ll need oceans,” said Melanie.

“Affirmative,” the Brain Computer said.

“Can we help?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied the computer. “Water is one of the most common chemical compounds in existence, consisting as it does of simply hydrogen and oxygen. Our sensors indicate that there are billions of small chunks of mixed ices in the outer regions of this system, as is the case with many stellar systems we have encountered. But mixed ices may contain substances that are poisonous to us. Again, we have singled out several of these objects with only a negligible concentration of toxic substances. But we will need your assistance to bring them here.”

“I see,” I said, “rounding up some comets and bringing them in for a non-destructive landing. Quite doable, considering that our previous ship managed to yank a rock the size of Earth’s moon out of its orbit. These would be much smaller than that.”

“Your previous ship, flaws and all, remains on the surface of the world-ship at the same location,” the computer told us. “You would thus have two ships to work with.”

“Hmm, you would want to make sure to change your ocean levels gradually,” said Melanie, “to give coastal life forms a chance to adapt and move to higher ground. How long does it take a large chunk of ice to melt?” She consulted the computer. “Oh. It could take place rather quickly.”

“And you speak of something that should be done gradually,” the Brain Computer replied. “Perhaps the objects should be fractured into smaller fragments and those landed separately over time.”

“That could work,” said Melanie. “Laurie?”

I was already running simulations of placing different sized chunks of comet at different parts of the world-ship’s surface. “It should be relatively easy, but … oh wait …” I adjusted the plan a bit and put it up on the main screen.

The main screen then showed a planet with bright rings of ice crystals. “All we have to do is bring the chunks within the planet’s Roche limit,” I said. “Tidal forces will break them up into smaller crystals, and the planet will have beautiful ice rings. Over time, though, the rings will gradually fall into the atmosphere, where they’ll evaporate as they fall in, raising the overall humidity and causing more rain. We can do some more simulations to ensure we’re not going to add too much water, but this is probably the most gradual process I can think of.”

“I had never computed this plan,” the Brain Computer said. “It is very elegant.”

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In the many months that had passed while making the idea a reality, we had managed to gather many trillions of gallons of what analysis told us was near pristine water ice from carefully selected comets. Putting it in orbit around the world-ship as large shattered ice chunks on collision courses … that was easy too.

Extra rains and humidity began almost immediately as much of the ice debris fell into the world-ship’s gravity well and evaporated on entry to the atmosphere, increasing its humidity. The large sparkling ice rings the world-ship now had were extremely pretty. We made sure to take many images of them for the archives.

Any issues with us vanishing from Earth space were resolved by our making routine visits to attend one of the boring press conferences, or committee inquiry panels, or appearances on Network News, or even Faux News.

As the Brain Computer and we had hoped, the huge valley began to slowly fill with water as many new rivers and streams formed to carry the extra deluge of rain water. There was even one new river that grew to gargantuan size.

All along the edge of the slowly rising water, the flora and fauna had enough lead time to move to higher ground as the water ever increasingly became deeper. I noticed, with great joy, that many aquatic creatures and plants were spawning in the growing sea, creating a stable environment. This wasn't instant by any means, but I had the means to go forward and look, then make proper adjustments once I returned.

The only issue the overjoyed Machhallee had, and it wasn’t a huge issue, was the salinity of the large sea we were creating. Thus far, it was the largest expanse of fresh water on the world-ship.

Melanie reminded us that salt in the ocean comes from two sources: runoff from the land and openings in the seafloor. Rocks on land are the major source of salts dissolved in seawater. Rainwater that falls on land is slightly acidic, so it erodes rocks.

But the issue with weathering and erosion was that it takes millions of years for the oceans to become salty that way– there are some additional contributions from underwater volcanic activity, but again, that’s very slow. There were some techniques to hurry this process along, but a consensus on whether any of those techniques were necessary was still being debated by the High Ruling Council of the Machhallee, as was the meeting and possible treaty with Earth.

I sat back in my comfortable gravity couch on the command deck and admired the world-ship and its beautiful and sparkling ice rings.

Melanie said, “It’s amazing to me. Here I am creating an actual ocean on a world not even charted by my civilization.”

I laughed, “How it is, don'tcha know? First you save a world, then you build an ocean …” I shrugged my shoulders, “All in a girl’s work load, wouldn't you say?”

I looked at her with a complete deadpan expression. Melanie made a few noises then burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself by that time and started laughing with her.

I said between laughs, “The ice chunks in orbit made a really beautiful halo around the planet.”

Melanie replied, “There are many pictures and long video clips of the world-ship and the creation of its ice halo. I intend for the Machhallee to have a complete record of events.”

I said, “Only immediate thing I did was make a deep water inclusion in the middle of the valley. It happened quickly, but slow enough the creatures could move to higher ground. As you said, the flora that were lost weren’t a genetic loss. The plants that were damaged are in abundance external to the valley, so those plants don’t require any special handling there. That place should give the Machhallee a good starting point. It will be deep enough that they might even build a city there eventually as time passes. From what scans have shown us, the ocean is growing larger almost as we speak. From what I’ve seen, the land creatures seemed to have the right idea and left the valley. Those external to the valley acted very different from those fleeing the rising water.”

Melanie said quickly as she began typing on the console in front of her gravity couch, “Now, that’s data I would love to have. Hope you kept some kind of archive.” Her view screen filled with images and clips along with analysis of it all.

I replied, “Sure did. A complete record to date of all creature activity within the Ocean Valley. That’s how I labeled it in the archive so ... until it’s properly named, that’s good as any.”

“The Machhallee have already named it in their language, not that I can pronounce it,” said Melanie. “There’s still the issue of salinity – we can’t just wait millions of years.”

“Well, there are two possibilities,” I said. “We find an external source of salts somewhere and bring it here, or … well, we load the Machhallee onto our ship and send the planet back into the past a few million years.”

“But the Brain Computer …” said Melanie. “It can’t come with us if we do that. Or can it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe, if it can find a way to make itself more portable temporarily.”

“Or, as you say, we can find a source of salts somewhere else,” Melanie said. “We’ve been scanning the system ever since we arrived, and we have a pretty comprehensive list of the objects in it and what they’re made of. Let’s just ask the computer whether there’s a lot of sodium, chlorine, or both – potassium chloride works too. A bit of calcium and magnesium chlorides are found in Earth’s oceans as well, and they don’t hurt anything.”

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I sat at the scanner console in total amazement. I knew there was heat, severe cold, high energy radiations, and even dust particles. What I wasn’t expecting was all the other minerals, metals, and multitudes of other chemicals free floating through space. But Melanie knew, I guess. Different areas of expertise.

At the suggestion of the Brain Computer, I had repurposed several of the constructor bots we had built to construct the mockup of our original ship into harvesters, moving through the stellar system in search of salts for the new ocean to be. It worked far better than I had hoped, as it only took several days for them to collect enough minerals for me to work with that I could create enough salt to fill what had now become an extremely large ocean sized freshwater lake.

I opened my utility screen and began trying to organize my thoughts enough that I could design some sort of automatic dispenser that would meter the salt out in regulated amounts to keep the salinity within bounds.

Melanie came in about that time with a large slice of what looked like pecan pie and whipped cream and asked, “Whatcha up to, girr-frin’?” She sat in the gravity couch next to me and looked over my preliminary designs. She then suggested, “Make them into stone cylinders with openings for the water to flow through. Place the salt mixtures in an area within the tower that allows only so much water trickle through a day.”

She typed furiously for a few minutes. The design that appeared on the screen looked like a perfectly round tower with many small openings that allow water to circulate through. Within the tower was an area that only allowed so many gallons of water to trickle through per hour.

I said, “Excellent, for a xeno-biologiest. Darn, girl, you would have made a good engineer.”

Melaine laughed. “Should I start the constructors fabricating them?”

I brought up a large map on my screen and highlighted the extremely large river that had formed and was carrying much water into the new ocean. I pointed, “There, in that river. We’ll name it Salt River.”

Melanie giggled, “Good name. I’ve started the constructors building the salt towers.”

I said as I contacted the stores, “I’ll have the salt packages delivered for setup inside.”

Melanie said, “According to this report on your idea, this should create an average brine percentage in the ocean around 3.5%, which means that for every 100 grams of seawater, 3.5 grams are dissolved salts, considered as "brine". This new environment within the newly created ocean should be complete within 80 years. Best we can do.”

“80 years?” I frowned. “Well, I don’t know biology as well as you do, but I’m sure that changing the environment too quickly will be bad for the life forms.”

“Yes, it can be,” Melanie replied. “And it’s not that bad – the Machhallee have been doing the best they can with fresh water for centuries, making small salt-water spas for themselves when they can. It’s not as if fresh water hurts them. They’re just most comfortable with salt water. Mostly it’s for their babies – their eggs need salt water, and this way they have a whole environment to hatch in, instead of needing artificial salt-water baths for their eggs.”

“They have to do that?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I’ve been talking to their females about it all the time,” said Melanie. “They were very interested in the salinity level of the ocean we’re building, so I asked why, and they explained. They’re really looking forward to a more natural environment for their future babies.”

“Well, it’s going to take years, but it’ll happen,” I said. “We’ll be gradually adding the salts, but at the same time the lake will keep growing … we’ll just be keeping the salinity steady for a while, because those two effects will cancel out, but eventually the water level will reach equilibrium and the salinity will top out at around 3% more or less.”

“In the meantime, we’re building more comfortable and sophisticated habitats, using the latest technology,” said Melanie. “Those utility bots are working fine with the Machhallee home blueprints the Brain Computer provided. They seem pretty happy with them. There will be Machhallee cities on the surface!”

“Maybe soon we can arrange a meeting with representatives from Earth!” I said.

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After discussing it with the Brain Computer, we flew back to Earth with a message from none other than Balloopp, who had been elected the political leader of the surface Machhallee. We were going to explain that we’d encountered the Machhallee during our travels and they wanted to establish good diplomatic relations with Earth, who as we told them had never before encountered alien intelligent life.

“And so, it is my hope that we of the Machhallee people will become good friends with the Humans of Earth,” Balloopp said on the hologram display. “Thank you, and farewell for now.”

“You go on vacation and come back with news that you’ve met intelligent alien life?” asked Admiral Kiram. “Next you’ll be, I don’t know, building stars or discovering the secret of dark energy, or who knows what! I don’t know how many new kinds of medals we’re going to have to invent to award you two, but you just keep surprising us.”

“We’ll have to figure out how to tell the news media about this one,” said President Yi, “but congratulations! As if you didn’t already have a place in the history books, what with saving Earth from an extinction-level rogue planetoid impact, you’re now the first humans to encounter intelligent alien life! I’ll have to consult with the diplomatic corps to compose a response to Mr. Balloopp. What’s his official title?”

“It doesn’t translate exactly into English,” said Melanie. “It’s sort of a cross between a president and a chancellor, in terms of how their political system works, so I suppose we could pick one of those. They have a ruling body of elders and an elected assembly, and together they choose a chief executive, and they use an information infrastructure provided by their Brain Computer, which is interested in the well-being of their people but disinterested in politics … so it’s simultaneously much like some Earth governments in some ways and in other ways totally different.”

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I sat at the engineering main console and perused all the data we had gathered on low frequency NR waves and this new thing we had been shown recently, the new NR time crystals. A light came on, and I had a major epiphany. I now sort of understood something that high frequency NR did in a known and set way … it kept time displacement consistent with ship time.

In a manner I had yet to figure out, high frequency NR waves displaced a bubble of current space/time surrounding the object creating the NR frequencies and pulled it into a local NR space with the same energy frequencies.

To my astonishment I had already discovered that no one had ever really taken the time to research the outer fringes of the energy bubble the ship rode within while traversing NR space, although they were a known phenomenon. What I had just realized was that these outer fringes were the low frequency bonded crystalline NR particles that made up an NR time crystal.

All the current equations I came up with agreed. I had the ship computer and the Brain Computer both check the highly complex math to insure accuracy. I laughed – not one single NR physicist had ever done any kind of research into the propagating wave form, and the data I just discovered was universe-shattering; it was radically new and would advance NR physics several hundred years.

I had no idea what the particular weapon was that whatever enemy had fired while traversing NR space, but at least now I knew what had happened … and perhaps how to fix it and bring home those poor beings we had met who were stranded there.

I set up several models based on what I knew of NR physics, with the computers checking behind me to insure I made no mistakes. The three models approached the tearing of the fabric of reality within NR space from several different perspectives. The end analysis of all three models showed the same theoretical result, so I knew I was onto something.

Whatever the weapon was had impacted on some large form of the NR time crystals exactly when they were transitioning from one state to another. This was one of those cosmic accidents that could only happen maybe once in trillions of years … and only if some idiot were so cocksure that they actually believed it was a good idea to wage war by rolling those dice.

I’m very glad I was nowhere near it when it happened, but the blast had to be galactic in scope, based on the size of the tear and the many rifts that appeared due to the tremendous amounts of graviton disruption.

I was typing furiously on my newest equation when Melanie walked in eating a banana and placed a bunch next to my keystation. “Have one,” she said as she sat in the gravity couch next to mine. “Replicator made them exactly perfectly ripe.” She looked over what I was doing and said with wonder in her voice, “Are you sure? I can see that the data we have on the rift shows a positive electric charge with the rift's magnetic field strength around 25-65 microtesla at the surface. All the figures showed charge and energy on the positive side. It also shows a very low gravitic signal.”

I said, “Precisely. From what my models tell me, I will need about 300 metric tons of anti NR time crystals to achieve the necessary graviton response to ensure proper closure and sealing of the rift once it’s been detonated. One thing needs to be perfectly clear … we can be nowhere near it when it goes off; the explosion will be galactic in energy displacement according to the figures.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Melanie. “You’re wanting to actually make this and set this off? Why in the world would you ever … oh wait. Those aliens trapped in NR space. You’re thinking this will set them free.”

“Yes,” I answered firmly. “We’re indebted to them, really, for showing us the way to low-frequency NR travel. If there’s anything we can do for them, we should.”

“If you’re really going to do this,” she suggested, “you definitely want to tell them about it first. My impression is that they’re also not going to want to be anywhere near when it goes off.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should have thought of that. But now that we have a fully functional NR drive, we can go back to where and when we met them and tell them about the solution.”

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And so it was that we were back in the galaxy where we had originally found ourselves, where we’d crash landed on the world-ship, traveling farther toward the dense galactic core and looking for the telltale shimmer effect that indicated the stranded aliens in NR space were attempting to make contact.

“Got the sensors tuned to NR waves and the output linked to the communications array?” I asked Melanie.

“Sure do!” she said. “We’re transmitting a hailing message through the NR wave generator, using the data we have about their language.”

Then the dense field of stars in the viewscreen shimmered strongly, and the shimmer coalesced into a bright light, which split into a ring of eight lights, each with a dark center. The ring of lights rotated about a common center. I immediately stopped our movement, making us stationary relative to the average movement of nearby stars.

“Uh, I’m getting a response,” said Melanie. “Putting it through.”

“You have returned,” said the computer’s voice, translating what it was receiving. “You have ceased relative motion. We assume you are here to communicate and not to progress closer to a rendezvous with a dangerous rift.”

“That is correct,” I said. “We want to talk to you. We believe we have found a way to help you. There may be a way to close the rift and eject you back into normal space.”

“That would require a huge effort,” the voice replied. “Why would you do this for us?”

“Because,” I replied, “you saved our lives. You taught us about low-frequency NR travel. We managed to return to our home planet. But I have a theory that the detonation of NR time crystals should be able to solve your problem.”

“We have calculated this,” the voice replied, “but we do not have the ability to do this from NR space. We have no access to NR time crystals. They are an artifact of normal space. Is your intent to cause a large enough detonation to cause this to happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do not know how to describe the amount of energy this will release – I’m sure we use different unit systems. But we wanted to coordinate with you. We will be far away from the detonation site. You should be too.”

“Indeed,” said the voice. “One would have to be mentally deficient to desire to be near that place and time. If it did not convert you outright into your component mass-energy, it would trap you within NR space with us. We assume you will be using some sort of remotely activated device.”

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Melanie and I stood in the launch bay as the servo bots delivered what I was calling a “NRuclear weapon,” in my attempt to lighten the mood. It was actually kind of the opposite, undoing the damage done by a truly devastating weapon. The engine was a low-frequency NR drive. From the best calculations could tell, the time shift differential in the low-band frequencies would aid tremendously in creating the time stitch, for want of a better term, we would need to basically sew the fabric of NR space, normal space, and time back into their proper places.

Needless to say, I was highly nervous to the point of being scared. This invention, if misused, could become the most powerful explosive device ever created by humans of Earth. I knew that if this was detonated within a galactic body, without extremely precise planning and parameters, that entire galaxy would be destroyed, and a new rift would open …

I realized something. The detonation that had caused this huge rift had also taken out an entire galaxy in the process. I scanned the area thoroughly, and based on the massive graviton displacement it became more than clear that an entire galaxy had vanished when this rift was created. Now, I wondered if it would return to normal space/time when we detonated the anti-NR device.

After we had returned to the ship’s command center, Melanie sent the signal to our friends in NR space and told them to evacuate the local area, which they had been preparing to do ever since we’d told them about our plans. While she did that, I plugged my palmtop computer into the missile’s guidance system and made the final adjustments. All the internal system lights turned green as the coils began their charge. It was time to see if this was going to turn into one big disaster.

I said, “Melanie, I’m sending targeting information to the tactical station. As soon as the missile launches, we have to be gone. Doesn’t matter the direction. The explosion will be large enough to wipe out an entire galaxy.”

Melanie replied, “Ok, rift highest gravitic reading location targeted. NR is enabled and standing by at full power. And escape course plotted.”

I said, “Enable drive,” as I launched the missile. I had enough time to see it leave the launch tube before the cryo-curtain descended.

The next thing I knew, the cryo-curtain had lifted and we found ourselves almost 33 million light years from where we launched the missile. We would have to look at the scan data while we traveled to see exactly how the explosive had functioned, but there was an immediate good sign: where the huge rift used to be, now a fully-formed beautiful spiral galaxy was there. If this had been any other kind of device, we’d have to wait 33 million years or move back toward the detonation point to see the results, but this had stitched together space and time itself.

I immediately began long-range scans of the new galaxy. It was hard to tell exactly from this range, but the closer systems all appeared to contain life. I couldn’t help myself, nor could Melanie. We had to at least get a preliminary data set and drop a few probes to continue the explorations.

It was about then that the tactical alarm went off.

“What?” cried Melanie, scrambling to activate the sensors and at least see what was going on.

It was immediately obvious what the problem was. Scans showed many ships, most of them combat-capable, heading directly for us on an intercept course. There was no way to get away at this point; they were approaching so rapidly that they were already within firing range if they were so inclined.

“But … how?” I said helplessly. We simply hadn’t expected such an encounter, deep in intergalactic space, far from any inhabited system. But …

“Wait,” said Melanie. “Further scans show all weapons systems powered down. The only active systems are navigational scans, and the only incoming energy are their scanner beams washing over our ship.”

I started breathing again. Maybe they had no hostile intent. “They could have blasted us to bits, but they didn’t,” I said.

“It’s them!” said Melanie. “It’s them! It’s them!”

“Who -” I began.

“They’re using our code, but they’re using regular digital comm signals!” she said. “It’s the ones from NR space! I’m putting it through!”

“... us, please respond. You have no idea how grateful we are. We didn’t think it was even possible.”

“Hello!” I said. “You sure found us quickly!”

“Greetings, friends,” the voice said. “It took considerable effort to track down your energy signature, but it’s understandable that you wanted to be far away from the detonation point. Then it was just a matter of returning to the moment after the detonation.”

“Oh, that’s right, time travel,” I said. “But on to other matters – I’m so glad to know that you’re safe, and that our efforts weren’t in vain! Did … everyone make it?”

“There was one casualty,” the voice said, “but fortunately only one. And he was of advanced age. The transition was just too much for his body to handle. We will have a memorial service for him. He was one of the few with memories of the war.”

“So … it hadn’t really been that long for you?” Melanie asked.

“Well, yes, and no,” replied the voice. “We weren’t experiencing time the same way. We estimate a time ration of millions or even tens of millions to one.”

“Can … can we meet you?” asked Melanie. “After customary first-contact anti-contamination protocols, of course.”

“Of course, and we would love to,” responded the computer translator voice. “We may have to rely on computers to translate for a while, though. Our sensors detect that you communicate via sonic vibrations in atmosphere. Most interesting.”

They turned out to have a high-metal body chemistry and communicated via electromagnetic waves their bodies naturally emitted and picked up, in the short-wavelength radio range. They could sense a wide frequency of electromagnetic radiation, including what we call visible light. But instead of being two-way symmetric as most life on Earth was, they were three-way symmetric, each one standing comfortably like a tripod on three long legs. To us they looked a metallic blue in color, and they wore clothing of varying materials and textures. It was any human’s guess what we looked like to them.

But in the translation system Melanie built, based on what we’d already been using, the one we’d been talking to was named Cryllinax. “He looks like a Cryllinax,” she said. “And I’m not sure about the pronoun. I’m not sure what kind of gender system their language has. I’m not sure of much yet, really. But it’s a start.”

And then we got the biggest surprise of all: they were by far not the only species we’d rescued from NR space. Their galaxy was very, very far from Earth, but we’d saved an entire galaxy full of new sentient species. So not only were we, Melanie and I, responsible for meeting the first intelligent aliens the human race had ever seen, we’d also met the second, third, fourth, and … all the way to quite a high number. Cryllinax and his people had already been a coalition of four species, but their galaxy had been made up of thousands of races.

Once again we recorded messages of greeting for Earth from as many people as wanted to send them, and that was a lot. Melanie had to do a lot of rudimentary translation, but Cryllinax helped; their computers already had parameters for translating all these languages.

On our way home, Melanie said, “The most ironic thing is that we now know about thousands of intelligent races in a galaxy that’s billions of years away from ours … and other than humans, the number of sentient races we know about in our own galaxy is … one.”

“I guess it all depends on where you accidentally find yourself exploring,” I replied. “I still wonder how both we and the Machhallee, both from the same galaxy, wound up in the same distant galaxy, our ships disabled by the Coalition’s protective barrier to prevent us from falling into the rift that Cryllinax and his people did. If we were going to meet somebody that way, why wasn’t it someone from some other galaxy, which would’ve been far more likely?”

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I had more diplomatic folders than the entire embassy in its whole history. I had the computer correlate all the systems and peoples wishing to make contact with Earth. There were many offers to join some sort of Federation of systems. I noticed right away, there were several different Federations, Coalitions, Alliances, Unions, and so forth, asking for diplomatic and first contact privileges. It was inevitable.

Melanie had hidden away in some secret compartment and didn’t want anyone to know where. I knew just how she felt. Once I turned this data over to the World Council, I really wasn’t looking forward to what came next.

We were already famous. We earned millions just by waving at crowds, not to mention all the interviews, and literary offers. I know what it was all for, but Melanie and I had grown tired of all the hoopla and wanted it to end. What we were about to do would spark another even more intense round of popular adulation.

I took one more look at the sparkling jewel of the newly returned spiral galaxy before I enabled NR jump. This time, when the stasis curtain lifted, we were in orbit of Traveler, the name of earth’s newest moon.

I could already see new outposts and mining operations on the surface in my scans. It still amazed me at how much gold, silver, titanium, and diamond the huge rock held. Enough materials there to devalue everything for centuries, or an opportunity to bottleneck supplies and thus keep the price artificially inflated, like the De Beers and Rothchilds did for years over their diamond hoard.

My biggest fear was how many of the petitioning systems were advanced far beyond even what Earth would term as magic. Trust me, there were many. My biggest fear was that Earth’s whole infrastructure would fail when all these advancements were introduced suddenly. It had happened over and over in Earth’s history. The modern advanced people met the primitives. The primitive civilization would fall apart after a very few years.

I picked up one of the diplomatic packages. It was from a system calling itself “ReEmergence.” Its technology was so far in advance of Earth’s that I wondered why they would want to be in some sort of agreement. Just out of gratitude? Or for some other reason?

After reading their dossier, I discovered they needed interactions with more primitive peoples to keep their own civilization on the proper track and in the proper mindset. It seemed that they had nearly destroyed their entire planet in the past, but the lessons they had learned gave them powers beyond description. They were in no way gods, nor did they wish anyone acting as if they were. All they wanted was what one might call normal social interaction, which was perfectly ok with me. And certainly they’d lose interest once Earth was no longer primitive from their point of view. But certainly that couldn’t be everyone’s reason to be so interested.

I knew it would start shortly. Space Command was already trying to contact us. I knew that as soon as the download started, it would all break loose. I flipped the transmit switch. The many trillion petabytes of data began to transfer. I held my breath.

“Holy … smokes,” said the Earth Chief Foreign Minister, a new position that had recently been created when the Machhallee’s existence had been revealed. “Captain Carroll, when you said that ‘several’ new species wanted to make contact, I thought you meant maybe five or six. I’m going to need to expand the diplomatic corps quite a bit. We might have to train a generation of new ambassadors.”

I sighed at the screen with half a smile. “Yeah, sorry about that, but … I really had no choice. Morally speaking, I knew how to save literally trillions of lives, and the only other option would be to leave them trapped in NR space. I … don’t want to think about the kind of person who would know that and just walk away.”

I got another kind of message from the Earth Minister of Defense. “Captain Carroll, were you thinking at all about the military implications of this?”

“Well, not really, Sir –”

“Obviously not. Now, strangely, I don’t find myself worrying about thousands of new political entities arriving back in the universe, because they’re literally outside the conventionally observable universe from here. Yes, they all have the ability to travel here, and we can travel there, thanks to NR drive technology, and they’ve probably got generations more advanced drive systems. But they had a war with somebody who had weapons that could throw a whole galaxy through a rift in time and space. Wouldn’t you think that somebody would be a bit peeved that they escaped – peeved at them, and at whoever set them free?”

“But Sir –”

“We are going to have to seriously improve our defense technology, and fast,” he said. “Although I’m not sure there’s anything we could do assuming such an entity decided to turn its wrath upon us – exactly what chance would we have against something like that?”

“Well, it’s true that –”

“Not even a galaxy full of advanced civilizations could stand up to that kind of assault,” he said. “And – are they offering to protect us? I don’t even know yet whether they are, but they couldn’t protect themselves. How could they protect us? Well?”

“If I may answer, Sir …”

“I’m listening, Captain.”

“The enemy who did this destroyed themselves with this weapon,” I said. “They don’t exist anymore. Their atoms were converted into the runaway surge of energy that tore open the rift, along with the atoms of their planet, every other planet in their system, and their star. That’s what I’m told, anyway.”

“And do you believe it?” he asked.

“I could show you the calculations,” I replied. “The story does check out. That is the approximate amount of energy it would have taken to create that rift – the mass-energy of an entire stellar system. But also – they do have ways to protect themselves, against any normal form of attack.”

“Normal? Define normal in this situation.”

I tried. “Well, when you attack somebody, your goal is to damage or destroy them while leaving yourself alive, right? Even a terrorist might commit a suicide attack in order to destroy an enemy so their family or their people might live in a world without that enemy. But an attack like that – it’s said it was an accident, an untested weapon that caused a runaway chain reaction and went completely out of control. Not even a terrorist would destroy themselves, their entire family, their entire world, their entire species, just to attack an enemy. That’s not a normal attack.”

He visibly relaxed. “Now, a psychopathic nihilist might do that kind of thing,” he said, “but not necessarily to attack an enemy. I gather this was meant to be a military action in a conflict, and one with unprecedented destructive power – but not that destructive, and not against their own stellar system.”

“Right, Sir,” I agreed, “they were trying to visit utter destruction on their military enemies, but things went terribly wrong – for everyone. Fortunately, the results weren’t as fatal as they’d intended for their targets, just them.” I wasn’t telling him about the one form of attack that nobody could defend against, as far as I knew – the one that I’d hidden the low-frequency NR drive from Earth in order to protect it. The people of the distant galaxy certainly knew about time travel. They must have found some way to prevent opponents in a war from using time travel to cripple their enemies’ very existence. Perhaps there was a treaty. Or perhaps there was some kind of protective technology? Or did the universe simply not allow that?

“Now, I know that look you’ve got in your eyes,” he said. “You’ve just thought of something. I know engineers. Offense or defense?”

“Defense, Sir,” I said, “but I don’t want to say anything until I can work out whether it’s really possible.”

“In a way, I’m feeling better about this conversation,” he said. “But you think about the consequences of anything you try before you do it. The military consequences. That’s an order. Assuming you’re even still in my chain of command, which I’m not terribly sure of nowadays.”

Some time later, Melanie came to me. “Here, try some of these. I baked actual cookies.” We were back on Earth now, so she had access to her actual kitchen, not just food replicators. She was carrying a plate of delicious-looking and -smelling baked confections. I tried one.

“Melanie, have you been baking all this time OMIGOD these are so good …” Homemade real chocolate chip cookies. I don’t know how she does it. I burn everything. That’s why I work with metal.

“You’ve probably noticed that I bake, cook, mess with replicators, whatever, when I’m stressed,” she said. “I share the results because I don’t need all those calories. Simple as that.”

“What are you stressing over?” I asked. “I’m trying to figure out how all the civilizations in Galaxy B still even exist, considering they all know about time travel and considering the fact that each of them certainly has at least one enemy.” We’d started calling the distant galaxy “Galaxy B” between us, because we needed to have some name for it.

She almost dropped the plate. “I … was stressing over the exact same thought,” she said. “Some of the Yrani people told me about their ancient tradition of using time travel to always be there when a loved one passes away. That’s when I realized that some of Galaxy B’s civilizations have had time travel since times they consider ancient. And yet they still exist. Even though they might have enemies who could go back in time and change things so they never existed. You know … like we almost did to ourselves. So there must be some way to prevent that.”

“Exactly!” I said. “I was talking to the Defense Minister about the enemy who destroyed themselves and threw their whole galaxy through a rift to NR space with their untested weapon, and about how they had no defense against that because nobody commits systemwide suicide just to attack an enemy, so nobody even comes up with a defense against that … but then I thought about the annihilation of Earth that we both started and stopped. And about defenses against that kind of interference.”

“We’ve got to find out how they do it,” said Melanie, eating another cookie. “Yumm.”

That was why we sent a message to Cryllinax. What he said explained a great deal.

“There are two theories about that,” he said. His English was improving – or his manipulation of the computer that produced a voice that spoke English, anyway. “One is that the universe won’t actually allow paradoxes. If the action would produce a real causal contradiction, the universe will find a way to prevent that action.”

“So if we hadn’t gone back in time to prevent Traveler from hitting Earth, the universe wouldn’t have let us alter its course to hit Earth in the first place?” I asked. This was confusing.

“Something like that,” said Cryllinax. With multiple sensory organs all around his head like that, nobody would ever be able to sneak up on a member of his species. “But the other theory is that you have to actively defend yourself against paradox attack.”

“With what?” Melanie asked.

“A variety of methods have been developed,” he replied. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the precise method my people use, for security reasons. But I will tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?” I wondered.

“Every species in our galaxy wants Earth to have paradox defenses,” he said. “As long as you don’t, someone could launch a paradox attack on both Earth and our galaxy in order to ensure that you don’t exist to rescue it from NR space.”

Melanie gasped. “They take us out in the past, and you go back to NR space – the ultimate revenge attack! If there were anyone to take revenge.”

“Exactly,” Cryllinax replied. “You probably have many schematics for paradox defense devices waiting for you in whatever communications system you use, or your diplomats do, or both. Nobody wants to see what you did undone. Some have considered the possibility of altering our past so our galaxy never went to NR space at all, but the theoretical scientists tell us that NR space interferes with our timelines too much for that to work. That’s why we couldn’t do that while we were in NR space and escape that way. But even now, our past world lines go right through NR space. So that probably can’t go anywhere. Anyway, the same goes for the Machhallee, of course.”

“They want to protect the Machhallee too, right,” I said. “Without them we probably wouldn’t have survived, let alone been able to rescue your galaxy.”

“Most certainly,” he said. “Many diplomats have approached the Machhallee world-ship and its Brain Computer and government. Those diplomatic channels are also opening up.”

“Wait,” I said. “We’ve been wondering why, of all the species we could have run across in a distant galaxy, we met one from our own. It’s like people from different towns in Iowa going to Hollywood and mistaking each other for movie stars.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s an old Earth joke,” I said. “The point is that by the odds, we should have been far more likely to meet someone from one of the trillions of other galaxies in the universe, rather than a species from our own. What if …”

“A causal connection may soon be forged that will ensure that you meet them there,” said Cryllinax. “Be assured that there is great interest in erecting paradox defenses along your entire pathway of destiny, to ensure that your past can never be altered.”

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I sat and sipped my cup of hot tea and honey while I looked over the huge assortment of diplomatic packages intended for Earth. I suddenly realized there were two different types of diplomatic packages. One was obviously intended for Earth’s ruling councils, then there were others with specific details and were specifically designated for me and Melanie.

That’s when dummy me realized that, in all the diplomatic communications and packages intended for Earth’s governments, not once was there any mention of low frequency NR nor time travel. There were a lot of awkward circumlocutions carefully dancing around mentioning time travel and timelines, but enough straight talk to show how important creating a time lock for Earth’s solar system’s history would be advisable. Enough references to high-level NR waves and a remembrance of the issues during testing and early usage of NR drive made it seem like an acceptable safeguard.

This was unexpected, but somehow the petitioning civilizations realized that Earth was in no way ready to know of time travel, and most of them feared that Earth would create a real paradox that might destroy all creation if its existence were revealed at this time.

I found the huge file marked “Historical Time Lock.” I wasn’t prepared for the tremendous amount of new NR physics and fundamental laws governing them no one on Earth had dreamed of. It was like making a backup of a computer file onto another medium. The only issue was that the medium was a totally new conceptual approach to a time bubble.

Since NR space affected and greatly influenced all matter in our known universe, it made sense that one could seal our solar system’s historical record within a bubble of high-frequency NR waves, with a square wave of low-frequency NR energy surrounding the NR bubble insuring it would remain sealed. Now, Cryllinax had mentioned that different civilizations had different approaches to time locks, perhaps indicating that there were different strategies that would work similarly, but this was certainly one of them, and it aligned with what I understood about NR technology – which was still admittedly not a lot.

Within the next few days, I found myself up to my bottom in alien hardware. I had never before seen many of the devices I was attempting to build. I was fortunate that the Brain Computer and the Machhallee themselves were technically competent and aided tremendously in building these strange devices. Of course, we built a large group of mobile satellite systems to support and carry it.

At their core, the devices required a rather large collection of NR time crystals that would bond with current energy waves and basically seal our solar system off from any external interference that didn’t exactly match the many devices’ propagating wave. This meant that even if something had traveled back in time, the energy fingerprint would be different, so the individual would be unable to influence anything in that current setting. I wondered about our own interference in the past, accidental though it was, but it turned out that it was already part of the waveform and taken into account, probably because the wave functions of the particles making up Melanie, myself, and most importantly our ship, had for billions of years been part of Earth and its solar system. They were so thoroughly entangled with the rest of the particles that there was an obvious resonance, one that an intruder from outside could never match.

“You realize what is happening here,” said the Brain Computer over our communication link as my project neared completion. “We are both building paradox-protection devices at the same time. We are even collaborating on them. They are quantum-entangled with one another.”

“Are you saying that this might be the reason why we were both drawn to the same event-point wave train in a galaxy on the other end of the universe?” I asked.

“The universe has no ends in the customary sense,” they replied, “but otherwise, yes. By completing these devices and activating them, we are not only protecting our stellar systems, but forging an eternal link between our civilizations. We met because we were always going to meet.”

“I wish that history didn’t involve the eradication of your original homeworld and the near-extinction of your species,” I said sadly. “I wish that could be changed.”

“Indeed,” said the Brain Computer, “but on the other hand, we will survive into the future and can rebuild. It could have been otherwise, and had we not met you and Melanie, it may well have been the end for us.”

Melanie came in. “I made strawberry shortcake,” she said. “Try some of this. I think it’s great, but let me know what you think. Oh, hi, Brain Computer.”

“Greetings, Melanie. What has brought you here?”

“Nothing, really,” she said, but paused. “OK, I’m lying. I just had a long talk with the Minister of Defense.”

“I’m going to bet it wasn’t about the weather,” I said. “Ohhhhhh Melanie, this stuff is so awesome, I can’t even describe it. I’m an engineer, not a poet.”

“No, not at all,” she said. “The short version is that there’s going to be a huge top-secret debate at the highest levels of our global leadership about whether to reveal the existence of the paradox lock and the existence of time travel to the public. Someday they’ll find out one way or another, sure. Will some terrorist try to destroy the paradox lock and hold it for ransom unless the world accedes to their political demands?”

“Considering that once activated, the paradox lock will be invisible to all but specialized hardware and unassailable except by even more specialized hardware,” said the Brain Computer, “their worries seem somewhat far-fetched.”

“Yes,” said Melanie, “but you know the military mind. It’s their job to imagine threats and strategies to counter them, and all they have to go on is how such things have worked in the past. Remember world cultural treasures that have been destroyed by terrorists who didn’t even have any demands, depriving future generations because of their ideology. So what about the ones who actually have demands? And they’re running around somewhere every day. They’re not reasonable people. The fact that destroying the paradox lock could result in the total obliteration of whatever they hold dear doesn’t convince them.”

“Well, they’re debates on the highest level,” I remarked, “which means that’s officially not our problem.”

“Except they want us there,” said Melanie.

I groaned. “Noooooooo!”

“I think they’re probably going to come drag us there if we don’t go,” Melanie added.

“Noooooooo!” I repeated.

But we went. We told them all the details. The upshot was that they would reveal the existence of time travel first – eventually, once the paradox lock had been up and running for a few decades. And once time travel was a well-known phenomenon, perhaps in a few centuries, they’d reveal the existence of the paradox lock, to explain why experimentation had discovered that human history couldn’t be changed, whereas things that didn’t affect any sentient race’s history could. And at that time they’d reveal how very close we had come to utter paradox annihilation of Earth’s timeline and possibly the entire universe.

Unfortunately this meant that Melanie and I were thus guaranteed to become even more famous later on. Maybe we’d get lucky and be dead by then.

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Several years had passed and our solar system gained an artificial planet. With help from the Coalition of Galactic Planetary Systems, of which Earth was its newest and most distant member, a planetoid-sized space facility was constructed.

For the lack of a better description of its function, It was Earth’s Consulate for the Coalition of Galactic Planetary Systems, including the elected council that governed the planets and colonies from Earth. The Machhallee would be getting one soon, once their civilization had rebounded to the point of building spaceships and starting colony worlds again, as they had in the past.

Melanie and I had been given this extremely huge penthouse office on the top floor of one of Earth’s prized scientific corporations, Nanogen Inc. Our office was so large it had it own zip code … or should have, anyway.

From this location at the engineering station built into our office, I had access to all the data flowing through all the earthly channels. There was even a protocol Melanie had written to search for any words or phrases that related to time travel.

As the leaders of the world had sworn, time travel data was missing from all the feeds. As a matter of fact, time travel and its associated data along with all the new math formulas that led to many mental exercises, and were getting awfully close, were basically considered nothing more than an interesting way to practice math.

I knew all the new NR physics were real, and it wouldn’t be too much longer before one of the bright undergraduate eggheads figured it out. I was extremely glad we had convinced Earth’s ruling council of the need for paradox protection for Earth’s solar system. The day one of those undergrads figured it out, it would almost surely be severely needed – if it wasn’t needed before then because of an alien paradox incident.

I wasn’t sure what our pay was for working at Nanogen; all I did know was that anything we asked for was brought to us within minutes. And the annoying presence of the newsies and writers wanting an interview. What I hated was the impromptu ones, where an almost hidden crew turned on a light and appeared like magic, asking lots of pointed questions.

The comm on my desk chimed – I had an incoming call. To my utter amazement, it was Balloopp. In a soft translated voice he invited myself and Melanie to come visit. They wanted us to see their new inland ocean and wanted us to know it had reached 1% salinity. He also explained how they would come and retrieve us with the appear and snatch like they did before, which was fine with me.

I explained to Melanie the plan, and we readied ourselves and boarded our ship. Space Command didn’t pay much attention to what we wanted to do, since they knew exactly who we were, so we got away with a heck of a lot more than we would have under normal situations. Basically they knew that whenever we went somewhere, we’d come back with something amazing.

We managed to leave Earth’s solar system with no registered destination. The cryo-curtain raised just long enough for us to see a strange ship appear. The next thing I knew, our ship was on automatic and was making a picture-perfect landing on a verdant green garden world with a huge sparkling ocean – the world-ship was coming along. We had made our escape from all the noise and confusion. Now for a bit of relaxation and good company with old friends.

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