Ch. LCdr. Francis
Ch. LCdr. Francis barely had time to fasten his safety restraints before a warning tone told him, and the rest of his cohort scrambling aboard their lifeboat, to hang on for dear life. A moment later, the saucer-shaped, transparent vehicle ejected from the flagship with a thump, and then tumbled through the Nowhen like a gold coin flipped by a riverboat gambler. As the lifeboat turned end over end, the survivors caught recurrent glimpses of their hulking flagship as it sank down the timeline, and then finally vanished toward the past.
“Did… did the Admiral… escape in another lifeboat?” a survivor murmured. But the XO hissed, “As you were,” and everyone knew to drop the subject for now. In spite of that, Chaplain Francis quietly said a prayer for the Admiral.
As the highest ranking officer on board the lifeboat, the XO was captain by definition, and she quickly took charge. She ordered the survivors to sound off and the injured to declare their readiness. The Chief Medic, a graying but clear-eyed, robust man with laugh lines around his mouth and who had managed to reach the lifeboat seconds before it ejected, dragooned an ensign to help him take care of the wounded. The XO told everyone else to either eat something or sleep, depending on how unnerved they were. While those activities kept most of the castaways distracted, the XO gathered her Navigator, Helmsman, Chief Oracle, and Francis, her new Command and Control officer, to confer about when and where it would be best to jump out of the Nowhen and back into ordinary time.
Eventually, the XO ordered her confidants to get some sleep too. The Medic, who was an old friend of hers, asked if she was going to sleep herself, but she said she had too much on her mind to do more than catnap. The Medic half-smiled in agreement, then let her be. Francis, on the other hand, was exhausted by everything that had happened and literally fell into his bunk.
His face had just sunk into his pillow—he was sure of it—when some annoying shavetail ensign shouted into his quarters, “Mr. Francis, sir, you’re needed on deck right now.”
Francis arose grumpily. He was about to give the fresh-faced ensign a dressing down when his cybernetic implants routinely notified him that he had been asleep for three hours, not merely an instant as he had thought. Glumly, Francis let the ensign live.
The lifeboat was made of transparent, golden-yellow force fields in the shape of a flattened ellipsoid. The only parts of the lifeboat made of ordinary solid matter were the life support, propulsive, and field generation machinery in the hub of the circular escape craft. Opaque force fields could be raised between the wedge-shaped stations around the perimeter of the lifeboat to create private quarters, and in one of them was where the ensign had found Lt. Cdr. Francis.
“What’s so important that you had to wake me?” asked the chaplain, more cheerful now than before. Already, his implants were rousing his metabolism to full battle readiness.
“I don’t know, sir,” said the ensign, “but something big is happening. Everyone’s excited, and the captain ordered me personally to wake you.”
Francis dismissed the ensign, then pushed through a ring of onlookers huddled on the other side of the lifeboat. Finally, he stood beside the XO, the Medic, and the Weapons Officer who were looking through the amber hull at the twisted, broken, body of a man that was maneuvering towards the lifeboat through the Nowhen as if under power. The sight of the lone figure moving against the tide of falling lifeboats and individual crew members forced Francis to recall maritime ghost stories of deserted ships cursed to aimlessly sail the seas forever.
The body in the Nowhen came to a stop just outside the lifeboat, where from time to time, one of his mangled limbs or clutching fingers twitched. The crew members from the Armada who were falling through the Nowhen had cybernetic implants that protected them from the harsh environment of anentropic time. But the figure keeping station outside the lifeboat was not a member of the Armada, had no discernible environmental protection, and had no obvious means of propulsion to bring him to the escape boat’s door. However, those questions paled in comparison to who was he, and why was he in the Nowhen.
The Weapons Officer stared at the body with a distant, farseeing look as a pattern like a Maori face tattoo glowed from beneath his skin. The warriors of the Armada had been fitted with cybernetic implants since birth, which were upgraded as necessary to enable the recipient to do their current assignment efficiently. After a while, the Weapons Officer said, “He’s safe. No booby traps or hidden trojan horse weapons of any kind. However, I’m still receiving hailing signals requesting permission to come aboard.”
“Now can I retrieve him?” the Medic asked the XO, as he tried with only limited success to conceal his impatience. The man obviously needed the doctor’s immediate attention. The captain nodded her approval, ordered a permission-to-come-aboard signal be transmitted, and then watched the body slowly float toward the lifeboat and melt seamlessly through the hull. Inside the lifeboat, helping hands and artificial gravity gently held the body while the floor morphed upwards to form an examination table.
The XO sidled next to Francis and asked, “Do you have any idea who this man is, Mr. Francis?” The lieutenant commander looked back at his captain quizzically. She obviously thought he had some special knowledge that could shed light on the situation, but he had no idea what that could be. All he could do was look with sympathy at the mangled figure being worked on by the Medic and honestly say, “I’ve never seen that man before in my life.”
The Medic was working in a sterile environment behind a shimmering force field wall when the XO asked, “Doctor, how’s your progress?” Francis noted how her intense seriousness marred her expression, and concluded something was troubling her deeply.
“Well, considering that I’m trying to save a critically wounded man with nothing except a first aid kit—and I mean that literally—I’m doing pretty well. The patient has already died on the operating table once or twice, but I’ve been able to bring him back each time.”
The Medic leaned over the mangled man with a strange, incomprehensible medical instrument that blinked and whirred. Then he said, “At first, judging from the stone dust covering him, I thought the patient was suffering from only crush injuries, as if from a landslide or a fall off a cliff. But when his wounds wouldn’t stay healed, I realized he had also been hit by a time-based nanotechnology weapon.” He looked at the patient more closely and pointed with his little finger. “You can tell by the way the wound glows faintly, and the wound’s edges waver in and out of focus. I cured that with some programmable nanotechnology gel.”
“You injected him with time-based cybernetic implants?” the captain said in alarm. “I don’t want to contaminate him with any of our tech….”
“I’m sorry Captain, but I had to. He would have died otherwise,” the doctor said, understanding his commander’s concern. “And it’s a good thing I did, too. Once I realized time-based technology was involved, I scanned the patient again and discovered this.” The Medic stared intently at his patient in a way only someone with medical cybernetic implants could. After a few seconds, his hands began to glow as if lit from within, then he reached toward, and then into his patient’s chest. When he pulled his glowing hands back, he was holding a ribbed, silver cylinder about 8 centimeters in diameter by 40 centimeters long.
“That’s a time-ship captain’s event log!” the XO said, incredulously. “You found that thing inside him?” The event log was a type of autonomous drone that recorded and preserved a captain’s last thoughts, goals, regrets, and testament before facing an unavoidable disaster. It was a way for a captain to leave a personal explanation for their choices. It was a message-in-a-bottle meant for survivors to learn from. Somberly, the XO wondered if the Admiral had had time to cast off her message-in-a-bottle.
The Medic put the cylinder on a small table that morphed up out of the floor beside him, and then his hands stopped glowing. “Actually, the log wasn’t so much inside the patient’s body as it was floating, station-keeping if you prefer, within the boundaries of his body. Instead of the log being lodged between the patient’s flesh-and-blood organs, it was operating in asynchronous ‘stealth’ mode, keeping itself a fraction of a second in the future; always out of phase with the local space-time; invisible and intangible, but still able to affect its surroundings. The event log didn’t hurt the lad at all. Something else did all this damage to his body.”
The captain turned to the flagship’s Navigator for his expertise. The navigator conferred with his cybernetic implants for a moment, then said, “Captain, an event log is essentially a small, autonomous time-ship. The main difference being its capacity to record events. Someone programmed the log to go into stealth mode, enclose this man inside its force field armor, use its gravitational tractor beams to drag him along, and then jump both of them to the Nowhen and fly to us.”
LCdr. Francis was stunned by what the navigator was saying. The obvious questions escaped Francis’ lips before he could stop himself. “But who sent the event log? Who programmed it?”
The XO looked world-weary as she massaged the back of her neck with her left hand. Who?” she said, still rubbing her neck. “It was you, Chaplain. You sent the event log—and this man—to us. So what I want to know now is, why?”
Francis struggled to keep what he was thinking off the expression on his face. Instead, he said evenhandedly, “Why do you think I’m involved?”
The XO prompted her Weapons Officer to explain. The red-headed officer in charge of weapons and security said, “We were at a loss when we saw this lone, broken man approaching the lifeboat. When he seemed to somehow transmit a request for permission to come aboard, I was naturally suspicious. However, the transmission was quantum encrypted, so we knew it wasn’t forged; and the signature on the transmission was—yours. Only you could have sent it, Lieutenant Commander; no one else. But as if that wasn’t enough, your signature’s ‘creation date’ stamp says the transmission’s sender, you, is 60 years older than you are today. That is, you’re going to send this event log when you’re 60 years older than you are now.”
The XO interrupted, “How is that, Mr. Francis? How is it that you sent a message-in-a-bottle 60 years from now; carried by a horribly wounded man you’ve never seen before; and as the Oracle’s scans clearly show, the wounded man comes from an era centuries in our current past? Tell me that.”
Francis’ mouth opened and closed like a fish plucked out of water.
The captain grabbed the event log, thought her identification code at it, frowned sourly, and then held it out toward LCdr. Francis. “We’ve been trying unsuccessfully to open the event log ever since we detected its hailing signal, but no one can do that except its addressee. Do you see why you’re making my neck hurt? You sent this message-in-a-bottle to yourself, and now only you can open it. Why would you do that, Mr. Francis?”
Francis looked at the sour expression in his captain’s crescent moon eyes as they sailed over her midnight face, but he had no answer for her. Knowing himself, the only reason he could think of for locking the event log was because the message it carried was… dangerous. The expression on Francis’ face turned as grave as his captain’s. Of all the dangers that faced a time traveler, the possibility of creating a paradox—a violation of cause and effect; a paradox that could erase its creator from both existence and history, as well as possibly any innocent bystanders—was by far the worst.
Slowly, reluctantly, Francis took the event log proffered in the XO’s outstretched hand. “I think I should open this… in private,” he said solemnly. The XO nodded agreement. Holding the cylinder in his hand felt to Francis as if he was handling a live grenade. He couldn’t help holding it at arm’s length, as if that would make any difference if he suddenly disappeared from history and took the lifeboat and its occupants with him. When he reached the little sector of the lifeboat that was his quarters, he raised opaque and soundproof force field walls that were resistant to spying. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then absolute privacy was the best way to protect his comrades from what he was about to learn.