The Space_Time Displacement Conundrum Read online

  He knew better than to ask. It would make him appear out of sorts—which he was, of course, but he couldn't allow his bridge crew to know that. He was the captain, and they expected him to know exactly what was going on. He would have to infer things as he went along, which he'd been doing quite a lot of lately.

  Commander Wan glanced at him from her post, her fingers tapping the console. "I took the liberty of hailing Titan Colony. No response, sir."

  "Yes." He assumed his position in the reclining captain's chair, his gaze riveted to the viewscreen. How had they managed to reach Earth space so fast? The last time he'd been in the present—or was this the future now?—they had escaped from the Amazonians and were leading them on a merry chase across the galaxy to unknown ends. But since when had those ends become a direct course toward Earth?

  It made sense, though. After the cold fusion reactor malfunction and resulting sojourn in limbo for five centuries, Quasar would have wanted to return home. But he would have liked to remember actually giving the order to do so. The worst aspect of this confounded space-time displacement were the gaps, the way he would jump forward and backward through time, missing important portions of the present tense that would have given him a better grip on the situation.

  "They say you can never go home again." He leaned back in his chair as the Magnitude headed to Earth. "But I tend to disagree."

  "Humph." Hank sat hunched over his console, focused on the task at hand: maintaining the ship's trajectory while dodging flurries of perilous meteorites and asteroids intent on taking the ship apart.

  "No response from Titan, you say?" Quasar glanced back at Wan, who nodded. "Well, that's odd. How long has it been?" He stared into the unfathomable depths of star-punctured black. Narrowing his gaze, he strummed his clean-shaven chin.

  "Five hundred thirty-four years, nine months, six weeks—" Hank began.

  "Imagine that." Quasar failed to blink. "Yet I don't feel a day over thirty."

  Hank's posterior and superior hands traveled across the display panel as if they had minds all their own, tapping in coordinates and compensating for Saturn's gravitational pull. "There's nothing left on that rock. The colony's gone."

  Quasar frowned at that. "So you're saying—"

  "I'm not catching any chatter, Captain." Wan stared at her console. "No transmissions of any kind. No arrays, no other ships. It's as if the system is—"

  "A lot can change in five centuries," Quasar said, rising from his chair to pace the foredeck. "We should prepare ourselves for whatever we find."

  Hank cleared one of his throats, giving his voice that oddly harmonic quality. "Why return, sir?"

  "Home is where the heart is, Hank ol' buddy." Quasar approached the viewscreen with long strides, thick muscled arms folded across his chest. "I'm afraid I left my heart in Earth orbit."

  "Humph," Hank reiterated.

  Quasar eyed the very hairy helmsman. "You remember what I said after we escaped the Amazonians. After you—" He cleared his throat. "Remind me what you did to their engines?"

  The Carpethrian frowned, bewildered. "We took their reactor coils. They had no replacements. They couldn't maintain full power in pursuit, so they fell behind."

  "Right." Quasar nodded, appreciating the exposition. Things were beginning to make sense—somewhat. "And we set course for Earth." He lowered his voice. "Remind me what I told the crew. About why we were heading home."

  Hank glanced up at him from the console. "Well, you told us it was the only logical course of action, that if we'd gone missing over five hundred Earth years ago, then the United World Space Command would want to know what happened to us." His superior set of shoulders shrugged as if this was old news. "But if these deserted outlying colonies are any indication, there won't be much waiting for us on Earth, sir."

  "Regardless, it'll be good to be back. Only earthborn natives can appreciate the gorgeous blue of the oceans from space, how the planet gleams like topaz from black velvet, a brilliant oasis in the void." Quasar found himself waxing poetic, and he rather liked it. "Favored by the gods of old, lone fount of humanity in all its splendor—" The captain stopped himself. "It's taken us quite a while to reach Earth space." He nodded, hoping Hank would specify how long exactly they'd been on this Earthbound course. But the helmsman remained silent, focused on his console. "How long would that be? Without rounding, this time."

  "Sir?" Hank glanced up with another frown.

  "How long has it taken us to reach Earth space from where that black hole dumped us into the clutches of those Amazonians? I'd like an exact figure, for curiosity's sake."

  Hank nodded slowly, watching the captain for a moment. "We've been en route since you gave the order—"

  "And that was…?" Quasar raised an eyebrow.

  "Two years, five months, seven weeks, four days, thirteen hours, fifty-six minutes, and eleven seconds ago."

  The captain failed to blink. "Yes. Of course."

  Had he been asleep all that time? Doubtful. As soon as he'd dropped onto his bunk, he must have whipped forward through space-time yet again.

  But more to the point, how long had Asteria and her Amazonians followed the Magnitude? And how far behind were they now? Had they given up their chase, or would they pursue the Magnitude all the way to Earth?

  It was kind of flattering, when he really thought about it.

  Episode 40: An Insurmountable Barrier

  What had happened to Earth space? Why were no colonies on the outer moons, or at least the remains of said colonies? It did not bode well at all for what would be found on Earth. Had the United World Space Program gone belly-up in Quasar's absence?

  Regardless, Captain Bartholomew Quasar found himself brimming to overflowing with nostalgia. True, in his mind he'd been away from his home planet for only five years—that's how long it had taken to nearly reach Opsanus Tau Prime. But now mere thoughts of Earth were having a profoundly giddy effect on him. "How much longer?"

  "This system is crowded with debris." As if on cue, a miniscule meteorite bumped into the Magnitude's port side, sheering off a section of the hull despite the electromagnetic shielding. Hank winced at the ship's violent shudder. "We have to take it slow."

  In another hour or so, Earth finally came into view—but it was unlike anything the captain could have expected. So much flotsam and jetsam orbited the planet that, despite enlarging the image on the viewscreen, Quasar could not see even a centimeter of the giant blue jewel itself amidst all the wreckage.

  "Looks like an orbital junkyard," Hank observed.

  "How'd it get like this?"

  Hank shrugged his superior set of shoulders. "Earth's always been messy."

  "I beg your pardon!"

  The helmsman swiveled to face his commanding officer. "Humans have been dumping trash into space as long as they could ignite rockets."

  The words were true, no matter how much they stung. United World Space Command had been in contact with Carpethria for many years, sending drone-piloted freighters full of precious minerals the Carpethrians lacked in return for technological upgrades. Thanks to their cooperation, Earth had leapt ahead of the evolutionary curve with regard to space travel, and in the process, even though the two humanoid species had never physically met prior to the Magnitude's voyage for the purpose of installing the cold fusion near-lightspeed reactor, both species had learned plenty about each other—some of it not so complimentary.

  "Open a channel. I want to speak to whoever's in charge down there." No UW Prime Minister could have ever allowed such a disgrace to befall the Earth.

  "Captain, it's unlikely there will be any sort of infrastructure to support communication," Commander Wan said.

  Quasar glared at her with an arched eyebrow until she complied. "People of Earth, this is the Effervescent Magnitude. We will soon be entering orbit. Please respond."

  Nothing.

  The captain cleared his throat. "People of Earth, this is Captain Bartholomew Quasar." He paused, eyes stin
ging with emotion as the floating debris came into sharper focus, a barrier so dense even sunlight couldn't penetrate it. "Please answer me."

  "It's a wasteland down there, Captain." Hank shook his head in disgust.

  Quasar was tempted to agree. But then a ray of hope pierced his heart as a flurry of static whined on the comm.

  "Hello?" came an uncertain voice.

  Quasar released a whoop. "Hello! You're there! Well, of course you are. To whom am I speaking?"

  More static. "Uh, Bill."

  "Bill? A pleasure to make your acquaintance! What is your designation?"

  "Uh—"

  The fellow seemed to need a little coaxing. "I am Captain Bartholomew Quasar of the Effervescent Magnitude. And you are?"

  "The janitor."

  Hank pointed to the display panel where a single life sign blinked on a map of the North American continent. There were no other readings anywhere else on the globe. Quasar suffered a sudden sinking feeling in his gut.

  "What do your duties entail—as janitor?"

  "Waste disposal. I get rid of all the crap."

  Quasar nodded, though he did not fully understand. By all appearances, there was no one left down there to clean after. "And where does it go?"

  "Up."

  The captain's hands tightened into fists, one of which he pounded against the mute button. "That moron is responsible for this mess!" His eyes narrowed to slits. "But we've arrived just in time. Discharge all weapons."

  "Captain?" Wan stared.

  "You heard me. We're going to blow that junk to smithereens. Now fire!"

  She did as commanded. Every plasma torpedo and depth charge from the ship's arsenal hurtled toward the debris, exploding on impact and spreading like wildfire as incendiary plasma tends to do, dissolving the shield around the earth like a piece of paper set aflame, revealing the reflected glare of the sun in a violent yet glorious outburst.

  "Let there be light!" Captain Quasar roared as the brilliant blue orb he remembered returned in full effect.

  At the same instant, life signs appeared across Hank's display panel: thousands upon thousands of them at all points of the globe.

  "Captain?" Hank gestured.

  "You see? It's no post-apocalyptic wasteland! It's a thing of beauty, and life is thriving down there!" Quasar almost jumped for joy. "We have liberated them!"

  "Uh, hello?" Bill's voice returned through static.

  "You're free, my man, free! You and all your friends!"

  "You've destroyed the sun barrier."

  "Guilty as charged!" Quasar laughed. "If that's what you called that orbiting sea of space junk!"

  "You really shouldn't have done that."

  "Oh?" Quasar swallowed his chuckles. Bill's voice sounded a bit on the grave side. "Why is that?"

  "It was shielding us from the sun. The annihilation bots left by Emperor Zhan are solar-powered."

  Quasar frowned. Annihilation bots? Emperor Zhan? Hank pointed at the blinking life signs which weren't really life signs at all but rather heat signatures: machines powering up.

  "They were tasked with destroying the Western Conglomerate, but I come from a long line of Janitors, left behind after the Great Exodus to keep the sun-shield packed with pretty much anything I can launch into orbit. I've done a good job of blocking the sunlight for some time now. Until today."

  "So you're saying—"

  "The whole planet's gonna blow."

  Episode 41: Diabolical Bots

  Hank's four hands flew across the navigation console, plotting a new course out of Earth space. Captain Quasar's sinking feeling began to rebound; he was going to be sick in a major way.

  "There must be something we can do." He pounded a fist against his chair's armrest.

  Hank nodded. "Run."

  "I tend to agree," said Commander Wan. "What's happened here—it's beyond anything we could have prepared for."

  "We can't let the earth be destroyed!"

  "Too late," said Bill on the comm.

  Quasar cursed. "How were we supposed to know about solar-powered annihilation bots? And who the hell is Emperor Zhan?"

  "He was head of the whole Eastern Conglomerate," Bill said. "How long have you been away?"

  "Over five hundred years," Hank replied.

  Static. "Oh."

  "Bill, we won't leave you to die, and we won't let those robots have their way." Quasar's eyes darted from the console to the viewscreen. The fact that he was here and now, at this moment in space-time, meant only one thing: "We're here for a reason—to save the day!"

  "Don't you worry about me," said Bill. "I've already programmed my jettison pod. But maybe you could hook me with a tractor beam or something once I'm up there?"

  Quasar ended the transmission. "Take us in, Hank." He returned to his chair and buckled up, activating the ship-wide intercom. "Attention all hands. This is your captain speaking. I know we've come a long way, and it's taken us a long time to get here. No one could have predicted finding our home planet in such disarray. Rest assured, all will be put right. But for now, things are about to get a little dicey."

  Hank swiveled to face his commanding officer. "Captain?"

  Quasar pointed at the viewscreen. "Enter the atmosphere. We've got some bots to smash."

  "With what?" Commander Wan turned to the captain with a quizzical frown.

  The sinking feeling returned as Quasar remembered they had already exhausted their entire weapons complement against the sun barrier. "Is the tractor beam still functional?"

  She nodded, eyeing him warily.

  "Take us in, then!" The captain raised a fist.

  Hank did as commanded, and the Effervescent Magnitude plowed into the earth's atmosphere, breaking through massive cloud banks to pass over the gutted moonscape of a continent ravaged by nuclear war. Across the crater-pocked surface, scores of giant robots a hundred meters high lumbered to and fro bearing signs of carbon scoring, evidence that they had seen serious battle. Directing high-powered, shoulder-mounted laser cannons at the ground, they scorched the earth's crust, blasting it to pieces until chunks of the planet went flying upward around them in all directions.

  But as the star cruiser approached, the annihilation bots lost their focus on the task at hand—destroying the planet one continent at a time, apparently—and whirled around to face the Magnitude. A barrage of laser-fire hit the ship head-on, instantly sapping the electromagnetic shield and blasting straight through to the exposed hull.

  "Captain!" Hank caterwauled over the shrieking alarms as his console and everything else on the bridge quaked and rattled. The ship moaned like a whale giving birth.

  "Hold course!" Quasar's fingers danced across the console on each armrest of his chair, activating the ship's tractor beam.

  All of a sudden the alarms fell silent as two, then four, then half a dozen of the annihilation bots stopped firing and floated upward from the ground, rotating awkwardly in midair, unable to compensate for the abrupt lack of equilibrium, their central processors perplexed by the unexpected weightlessness. But their confusion didn't last long. They reactivated the laser cannons in a matter of moments, only to succeed in blowing each other to pieces with explosions of jittery electric light and plumes of black smoke. Captain Quasar let out a victorious whoop as their dismembered pieces rained down to punch into the earth.

  "Six down, sixty thousand to go," muttered Commander Wan.

  Quasar glared at her. He would not be swayed by his first officer's negativity.

  The Magnitude crossed kilometers of ash-covered earth and the charred, mangled skeletons of major city skyscrapers, and as each giant robot with evil intent came into view, the captain sucked it up with the tractor beam and whipped it around in mid-air, employing its laser cannons against the other bots in brilliant streaks of sizzling white. In no more than an hour's time, he had destroyed nearly a hundred of the awful automatons, leaving a trail of smoldering ruins in the ship's wake.

  "We can't take much more
of this," Hank reported as a new batch of bots appeared and opened fire upon the creaking, swaying Magnitude before Quasar had time to activate the tractor beam. "The next barrage will bring us down, sir!"

  Quasar grimaced, pressing the controls with white knuckles as he pulled the robots higher into the air only to thrash them back to the ground in a jumbled heap of broken, sparking metal. "How many enemy bots ahead?"

  Hank blinked at the display. "Too many to count."

  Quasar was quicker this time as a dozen more annihilation bots lumbered into view, and soon they too were left behind in crumpled, smoking piles of junk discarded across the cratered earth. "Why didn't we pack an EMP or something?"

  Hank shrugged.

  "Get that janitor back on the line." Quasar grimaced, punching at the console in a heroic effort to destroy yet another batch of diabolical bots.

  "I'm still here," Bill said. "Haven't left yet, in case you were wondering."

  "Can you see what we're doing?" Quasar shouted.

  "Yeah, I figured that was you."

  "Care to lend us a hand?"

  "Don't see how I could help."

  "Have you an EMP or few?"

  "Nope."

  "Then what do you have, man? How'd you send all that junk into space?"

  "Uh, rockets."

  Quasar ended the transmission with a clenched fist on the intercom button. "Hank, take us to Bill."

  Episode 42: Sea Nukembers

  Moments later, after scouring the surrounding countryside and destroying every annihilation bot in sight, the Effervescent Magnitude—looking much the worse for wear—arrived at what appeared to be the remains of a military command center, half-buried in the earth under dunes of ash.

  "He's in there," Hank gestured, reopening the comm channel.

  "Bill, we're going to need your rockets." Quasar licked his lips, glancing at the display where thousands of the annihilation bots' heat signatures remained, heralding the earth's imminent demise. "How many do you have?"