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chapter two

Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio

SysGov, 2981 CE


“All this fuss over a clock running a little fast.” Raibert reclined in his seat on the bridge of the Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio and propped his boots up on the command table. The abstract diagram over the table highlighted their course to join SysPol corvette Rapid Response and SourceCode’s Grand Sculptor near the edge of the debris cloud, accompanied by icons representing each vessel and their comparative sizes.

Kleio’s main body was a gunmetal ellipsoid covered in blisters for its weapons and graviton thrusters. The long spike of the chronometric impeller extended from the vessel’s rear, giving it an overall length of one hundred fifty meters.

In comparison, the SysPol corvette was a slender, understated ellipsoid about half the Kleio’s length. The bulk of the civilian vessel’s three spherical sections dwarfed both vessels.

“It’s not just a little fast,” Philo stressed. “It’s forty years fast. And it’s an atomic clock. It would take over a hundred million billion years for one to accumulate that much error.”

Raibert leaned his head against the headrest and glanced at his IC through the corner of his eye.

“Philo?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“I was trying to tell a joke.”

“I know. Guess I’m not in the mood right now.”

“Him and me both.” Benjamin stood with his back against the wall. “It hasn’t even been a year since the Dynasty Crisis, and already we have another pack of idiots playing God with the timeline.”

“I know, right?” Elzbietá said, the ship’s control interfaces hovering around her seat at the table. “There are plenty of other, easier ways to commit suicide. Least they can do is avoid taking the rest of us with them.”

Kleio had spent the last fifteen hours on a max-thrust course to intercept the debris cloud and come to a relative stop beside it. That meant pushing the ship’s graviton thrusters up to five gees, which was unpleasant for any organic crewmembers—and mildly annoying for a synthoid like Raibert. All three of their physical bodies were in the acceleration-compensation bunks recessed into the bridge outer wall. Their current “bodies” and the “bridge” around them resided within an abstract domain, tied to their virtual senses.

“You, too, Ella?” Raibert took his boots off the table and sat up. “Come on, people. Let’s not panic until we actually have cause. We’re what passes for professionals in the Gordian Division. Let’s try to act like it.”

“What ‘passes’ for professionals?” Elzbietá gave him a half smile.

“All I mean is none of us trained for what we do. I mean, how could we? We’re all still figuring out how to make this whole ‘policing the multiverse’ thing work. Right alongside the rest of Gordian.”

“Well, I consider us professionals.” Elzbietá glanced up. “Hey, Kleio?”

“Yes, Agent Schröder?” replied the ship’s attendant program.

“Do you consider yourself a professional?”

“I do not. While my programing has self-evolved greatly since Agent Philosophus released some of my cognitive limiters, I do not meet the legal requirements for sentience or personhood, and as such, it would be incorrect to consider myself a ‘professional,’ as the term is commonly defined.”

“Aww.” Elzbietá frowned. “Well, I consider you to be one of us, Kleio.”

“Thank you, Agent Schröder. Also, Agent Kaminski?”

“What is it?”

“I have received a message from Grand Sculptor. Chief Engineer Antoni Ruckman, a senior employee of SourceCode, is requesting permission to come aboard.”

“He’s the guy Detective Hayfield asked us to talk to?”

“That is correct.”

“He a physical or abstract citizen?”

“He is an AC, and we are now in connectome transmission range for our respective vehicles.”

“All right.” Raibert stood up and tugged the creases out of his uniform jacket. “You can let him come aboard.”

Ruckman’s avatar appeared on the bridge a few moments later. He glanced around to gain his bearings.

“Agent Raibert Kaminski, Gordian Division.” Raibert extended a hand. “We’re here to look at your clock.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Agent. I’m Antoni Ruckman.” He shook Raibert’s hand.

“Mister Ruckman, this is my team.” Raibert swept an open hand around the bridge. “Agents Schröder, Schröder, and Philosophus. We’ve all read Detective Hayfield’s preliminary report. Do you have anything to add to it before we get started?”

“I wish I did. Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go on right now. I’ve been looking through the black box records with a colleague of mine, but the mismatched dates we found lead us to believe those records have been tampered with.”

“What about the missing log entry?” Benjamin pushed off the wall and joined them. “Hayfield’s report mentioned the ship failed to check in about two days ago.”

“That’s right,” Ruckman said. “Under normal conditions, a single missed transmission wouldn’t be alarming. But . . . ”

“Add in the exploding reactor and signs of record tampering,” Benjamin filled in, “and suddenly it all looks very suspicious.”

“It certainly does.”

“Well, fear not, Mister Ruckman.” Raibert patted the AC on the shoulder. “Your case is in good hands.”

“I’d like to start by taking a closer look at the black box,” Benjamin said. “Plus some sections of the hull, as long as no one cares if I cut a few pieces off to fit in the analyzer.”

“Good thinking, Doc,” Raibert said. “Kleio, get with Hayfield and have the evidence we need transferred over.”

“Yes, Agent Kaminski.”

“What do you need hull fragments for?” Ruckman asked, sounding more curious than anything else.

“So I can check them for any chronometric weirdness,” Benjamin replied.

“Meanwhile,” Raibert said, “Philo, I want you chasing down that missing log. Coordinate with Hayfield’s team and see if you can scrounge up what Reality Flux was doing when it failed to call in. Between all of Earth’s civilian traffic, satellites, habitats, and SysPol patrols, we should come across some good video of that ship in flight. It failed to check in for a reason. We need to figure out why.”

“On it.” The Viking vanished.

Raibert clapped his big hands together and faced the engineer. “That should get things rolling. With any luck, we won’t have another universe-ending calamity to deal with.”

“Is that . . . a common problem in the Gordian Division?” Ruckman asked, sounding just a tad horrified.

“Sometimes,” Raibert replied with a casual shrug.

* * *

“Well, that adds a new wrinkle to this mess.” Raibert rubbed his chin as he considered the looping video Philo had tracked down.

It wasn’t a terribly good video, but it did show the SourceCode vessel roughly two days ago while . . . something happened to it. The video came from a luxury saucer leaving Luna and had been collected at great distance by the ship’s automated systems.

Reality Flux was a string of five pixelated green orbs against a backdrop of stars. The video played out from the beginning once more, showing the spaceship flying an ordinary path toward the inner planets—

—when suddenly, the ship began to vanish. It did so one sphere at a time, from bow to stern, taking over three minutes to do so. And then, nothing. Just stars where the ship had once been.

Raibert looked over to Philo. “What do you make of this?”

“Someone must have deployed a metamaterial shroud around the whole ship. A big one.”

Raibert nodded. Enough metamaterial could certainly hide a ship that size thanks to the material’s light-bending properties. Kleio possessed its own deployable stealth shroud which could hide the TTV from most photon-based detectors—all the way from the human eye up to sophisticated radar systems—and could be reconfigured as laser-refracting meta-armor in combat situations.

“I’m guessing the logs SourceCode received afterward were fakes, too,” Philo said. “That the ship wasn’t there for most, if not all, of the day before it blew up.”

“To what end, though?” Raibert asked.

“Can’t say. Not yet, at least. Hayfield has a team of forensics specialists analyzing the video, but as you can see, they don’t have much to work with. I will point out one thing, though.” He paused the video and used a slider to rewind it. “See the stars here? Where the bow used to be? They’re not in the right positions.”

“Which you’d expect from a shroud as it’s being deployed,” Raibert said. “The illusion won’t be perfect until the whole shroud is deployed and rigid.”

“Right, but it looks like we may have caught a glimpse of something else in the process.”

Philo zoomed in and pointed.

One of the stars was . . . silver?

“Another ship?” Raibert guessed.

“Or a very brief, very distorted glimpse of one.”

“That still doesn’t tell us much. If it was a shroud, it had to come from somewhere.”

“True, but a fleeting glimpse of a second ship supports the theory that another vessel rendezvoused with Reality Flux and used a very large shroud to hide both of them.”

“I suppose you have a point there.” Raibert restarted the video and watched it through to the end. “Did the Flux reappear before it went boom?”

“We’re not sure. Themis is still trying to track down video of that event, but I would assume so.”

“Why?”

“Because we haven’t found any metamaterial in the debris cloud. Nor anything else that’s inconsistent with the ship or its cargo.”

“Someone went to an awful lot of trouble to hide whatever they did out there.” Raibert rested his fingers on the edge of the command table. “What about the recordings on the black box? What’s Hayfield’s team think of those?”

“Only that it’s a very good fake. If it wasn’t for the atomic clock, they would have taken it as genuine and written the whole thing off as an unfortunate accident, probably brought on by a series of maintenance errors.”

“Any ideas on how our mystery perps missed it, then? They seem awfully careful about everything else.”

“That question occurred to me, too, and I brought it up with Ruckman,” Philo said. “According to him, SourceCode customizes the black boxes that go on their ships. They start with stock patterns purchased elsewhere and then modify them in house, and the stock model doesn’t include an atomic clock at all. At some point, one of their engineers must have wanted one added, but anyone using the original printing patterns as a reference would almost certainly have missed it.”

“Interesting. Anything else?”

“Just one more thing. Hayfield isn’t sure about this one yet, but his team is finding evidence the ship isn’t old enough. Or, at least, some parts of the wreckage aren’t.”

“Wait a second. But . . . ” Raibert shook his head. “I thought the problem was the ship is too old!”

“That’s still the case.”

“Then what’s this nonsense about it not being old enough?”

“Here, this may help.”

Philo opened a pathway through the mental firewall separating his mind from Raibert’s, and Raibert confirmed the request. Historical data on the Reality Flux expanded within his mind as Philo’s thoughts crossed over into his.

Reality Flux was one of SourceCode’s older ships,” Philo explained, “but if we assume someone used and abused it for forty unaccounted years, some of its systems would surely have broken down and needed to be repaired or replaced. Hayfield mentioned they’re finding an unusually large number of parts that look like they were printed within the last year. Parts that, according to SourceCode records, weren’t replaced during that time frame. Could be the thieves were just trying to keep it running. Or maybe they wanted to put the Flux back the way they found it, and this is the best they could manage.”

“Great,” Raibert groused. “And here I was hoping all we had was a fast clock.”

The alert for an incoming call appeared in his virtual sight, and he toggled it.

“Kaminski. Go.”

“Raibert, it’s Benjamin.”

“Hey, Doc. Got good news for me?”

“I have . . . news. Can you and Philo come down to the lab?”

“On our way.”

Philo disappeared, and Raibert left the bridge. He followed the central corridor back deeper into the ship, then stepped into a counter-grav shaft, which lowered him to the bottom of the ship’s three levels. He hurried toward the front of the ship and took a left into the Kleio’s newish chronometrics laboratory.

Doctor Andover-Chen, Gordian Division’s chief scientist, often requested the Kleio and its crew for his various projects, and the ship had accumulated an impressive collection of sensitive instrumentation and prototype equipment, most of it stashed in the new lab.

Raibert didn’t mind; he liked big, fancy toys as much as the next guy, and sometimes Andover-Chen’s came in handy.

Benjamin, Elzbietá, and Philo stood beside one such “toy.” The black box (colored an obnoxiously bright orange) sat on a plinth in a clear, cylindrical chamber. Six robotic arms maneuvered around the box, each tipped with a different style of chronoton detector.

Chronotons were elementary particles with closed-loop histories. They spent most of their existence vibrating backward and forward across the timeline. The detection and manipulation of chronotons enabled time travel, transdimensional travel, and a whole host of reality-shredding disasters.

“Well, Doc?” Raibert said.

“First, I just want to stress I’m not—nor will I ever be—as good at this as Andover-Chen.”

“Noted. And?”

“Here. Take a look.” Benjamin grabbed one of the charts and expanded it. “We’re detecting a very faint chronometric dissonance in the black box, and we’ve seen the same pattern in the hull sections we’ve tested. It’s subtle, though. In fact, I don’t think we would have spotted it without those last upgrades to our diagnostic software.”

“And by ‘dissonance,’ you mean . . . ”

“This device”—Benjamin pointed to the black box—“either came from another universe or it spent enough time outside ours to essentially become ‘tuned’ to that second chronometric environment. Either way, we’d expect to see some residual dissonance shortly after it entered our universe, and that’s exactly what we found.”

“Look at you!” Elzbietá smiled as she knuckled her husband in the shoulder. “Getting all cozy with the technobabble!”

“The tutoring sessions with Andover-Chen have certainly helped.” Benjamin paused, then frowned. “Though, I will admit, listening to him talk about chronotons is like trying to sip water from a fire hose.”

“Better you than me.” Raibert tapped the expanded chart. “So, Doc, your conclusion is the ship spent some time outside SysGov before it blew up.”

“Yes. In fact, I’d almost say it’s guaranteed. We shouldn’t see any dissonance in a realspace-only vessel.”

“Which brings us back to those missing forty years.” Raibert let out a slow sigh. “Okay, let’s try to put what facts we have together. Conclusions, people?”

“About two days ago,” Philo began, “someone stole Reality Flux and took it into the transverse.”

“How, though?” Raibert asked.

“The criminals would need an exotic matter scaffold,” Benjamin said. “Either one of ours or one we don’t know about. Ours can transport anything up to and including a Directive-class heavy cruiser, so they’re large enough to handle SourceCode’s industrial ships.”

“All of our scaffolds are being used for the construction of Providence Station,” Raibert countered.

“Then they must have made one on their own,” Benjamin said. “A lot of companies are involved in Providence’s construction, which means the designs for our scaffolds aren’t nearly as secure as we’d like them to be.”

“All right.” Raibert nodded, agreeing with the theory so far. “Let’s say you’re right. What then?”

“They must have taken Reality Flux to another universe,” Philo said. “After reaching it, they went forty years into the past, then caused enough of a disturbance to branch the timeline and create a new universe. Their alternate timeline then rapidly caught up to us in the True Present.”

“And just like that,” Benjamin said, “they managed to cheat the multiverse out of forty extra years.”

“After they were done with the ship,” Philo continued, “they brought it back here and then arranged for the ship to be placed back on its original course and destroyed.”

“Makes sense so far,” Raibert said with an air of caution, “but I see a possible hole in this theory. Why didn’t Argus Station’s chronometric array pick up the phase events?”

“A problem with a simple solution,” Benjamin said. “These criminals managed to equip their scaffold with impeller baffles, making the phase-in and phase-out events as quiet as possible.”

“If that’s the case”—Elzbietá shook her head—“then whoever’s behind this went through a lot of trouble.”

“Right.” Raibert lowered his head in thought. “So, the bad guys steal a massive hoard of industrial goodies, take it to another universe, and bring it back subjectively forty years later.”

“During which time,” Philo said, “only a day passed for us.”

“But why blow up the ship after going through all the effort to bring it back? Why bring it back at all?”

“I . . . don’t know,” Philo admitted. “Seems to me it would have made more sense for the ship to go missing.”

“Or for them to bring it back but not destroy it,” Elzbietá added.

“There must be a reason, though,” Raibert said. “Everything else we’ve seen gives me the impression this heist was carefully planned and executed.”

“I’m more concerned about those forty years,” Benjamin said. “That alone proves there’s a new universe out there, and we have no idea where it is or what it branched off of. We also don’t know who did this or why, but stealing industrial hardware spells trouble.”

“What could they build in forty years with all that?” Elzbietá asked.

“Just about anything they wanted,” Philo said, “assuming they had access to the right raw materials and printing patterns.”

Raibert let out a nervous sigh. The rest of his team stood in contemplative silence until he looked up and clapped his hands together.

“All right. It’s clear this isn’t a one-crew job. Time we called in backup.”

* * *

Agent Anton Silchenko, Head of Gordian Operations, had served under Commissioner Schröder—then a generalmajor in the imperial German army—since the beginning. Or at least what he thought of as “the beginning,” since it involved the liberation of his beloved nation of Ukraine from the Soviet swine. He’d met the man in 1946, one year into the Great Eastern War, a war that never happened in this timeline, and therefore, “never” ended in 1951 with the total defeat of Stalinist Russia.

In that sense, Anton and his fellow Ukrainian veterans enjoyed more in common with the Admin, since they shared the same “alternate” history, but he felt no kinship there, no sense of allegiance. He and the other survivors of the Gordian Knot were men without a home, except they didn’t need one. They had their leader, whom they’d followed to victory time and time again, and they had all followed him into the Gordian Division to a man. They were hardened veterans, each and every one of them, Anton included, capable of enduring hardships and pain that would break lesser men.

But they were not without their own weaknesses.

Mention to any one of them that he’d let the General/Governor/now-Commissioner down, and Anton wouldn’t be surprised if that man broke down into tears.

Because Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder, as great a man as he was, still needed them. Still needed him, and by God he would continue to serve the man he owed so much to in any way he could, with every fiber of his being. He would follow that man through the gates of hell barefoot, if asked to. He would trek to the very ends of the Earth and charge into the bloody crucible of battle without a second thought, as long as Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder told him it was necessary.

He just . . . had never expected this.

It’s funny, Anton thought with an inward grin, the places fate can lead us.

He looked around Gordian Operations, the generously-sized room deep within the bowels of Argus Station, an orbital construct so large it served as home and headquarters for over nine million members of the Consolidated System Police. Such a wonder could never have been constructed in his time, even on the ground. Even if the entire world had united in the common cause of its creation. And yet it was one of countless technological marvels spread across the solar system.

An alert appeared, manifesting in his virtual vision thanks to his thirtieth-century wetware, and he tapped it.

“Gordian Operations. Silchenko.”

“Agent Silchenko, incoming transmission from Kleio. Priority Two.”

Anton stiffened and sucked in a sharp breath. A Priority Two meant Raibert and his crew had found evidence of a precursor event. Something that, while not catastrophic by itself, held the potential to escalate into the destruction of whole universes.

“Let’s hear it.”

A comm window opened with Raibert filling the frame, his eyes severe and his face like etched stone. The time stamp indicated the Kleio was roughly two light-minutes away, which would make any back-and-forth conversation awkward.

“Kaminski to Gordian Operations. We’ve got a Priority Two on our hands. Analysis of the wreckage from Reality Flux came back positive for chronometric dissonance, indicating the craft spent a lot of time in another universe, and that universe’s True Present was expanding forward at an accelerated pace. Our conclusion is the vessel was taken to another universe sometime within the past two days, where it experienced forty subjective years due to a new branch in the timeline. Our recommendation is for all available TTVs to begin an immediate search of the surrounding transdimensional space for signs of a new branching universe. We’ve attached our recommendation for how far out into the transverse we believe we need to look.”

Anton paused before replying, then let out a slow exhale. He knew why Raibert’s crew had been dispatched to the site of the lost SourceCode ship, but he hadn’t expected it to be this bad!

Kleio, do you see any benefit in continuing your investigation of the wreckage?”

He waited four minutes for the response.

“Not at this time. Themis Division should be able to take it from here. If something new comes up, it’ll be their forensics teams that sniff it out. We’ll be more help elsewhere, if you ask me.”

Anton nodded. That made his next call easier. The Commissioner would want to hear about this as soon as possible. Argus Station and Providence Station could communicate via chronometric telegraphs, but the bandwidth on such messages was extremely limited and subject to clear “weather” in the transverse. An in-person report would be better.

Kleio, you are hereby redirected to Providence Station where you will brief the Commissioner on the situation. Meanwhile, we’ll recall what TTVs we can contact and begin organizing your proposed search.”

Another four minutes passed.

“Understood, Operations. We’re on our way.”



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