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Lassiter slowed their forward momentum, dropping them closer to the asteroid as the waypoint approached. The instrumentation cube slowed in tandem with Jae-Sun.

“But you've found one?” Lassiter asked.

“I think I may have found one,” Jae-Sun replied. “It's hard to be sure. These things can move through both space and time, but they leave a trail. Each time they warp, they emit high-energy particles. And they follow a pattern, in the same way that birds will follow the same path to escape the coming of winter.”

Lassiter pulled them to a halt, lowering them down to within two feet of the asteroid. Jae-Sun watched as he established buoyancy, ensuring their suits automatically counteracted the weak pull of gravity from the asteroid.

The two astronauts were side on to the asteroid, so the surface appeared like a wall in front of them, with the distant sunlight running left to right. Pin pricks of light edged around the raised, stippled surface, while long black shadows stretched away from them.

Jae-Sun reached out his gloved hand. His fingers sank effortlessly into the fine powder on the surface of the asteroid. He moved his fingers in a figure eight and watched as the fine powder swirled as though it were suspended in water.

“Never lose your childlike sense of wonder,” Jae-Sun said, turning to Lassiter. “When you go to Enceladus, don't lose your appreciation for how astonishing it is to walk on another world. Even the humblest of microbes on that small moon represent billions of years of evolutionary change, and that's not something to be taken lightly.”

Lassiter nodded inside his helmet.

“First contact protocols necessitate that you wait here,” Jae-Sun said. “Is that understood?”

“Yes sir,” Lassiter replied. “Buddy mode is off.”

Lassiter’s gloved hands tapped at his wrist computer, returning local EVA control to Jae-Sun.

“Whatever happens,” Jae-Sun said, already drifting away from him. “Do not follow me. If I fail to return, you are to initiate the containment plan and deploy robotic probes. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jae-Sun stretched out his hand and thrust away from Lassiter. The white cube raced after him, keeping pace beside him.

Jae-Sun checked his wrist computer, watching the readouts relating to altitude above the rocky surface, way-point distances and signal strength. The pitted surface of the asteroid glided beneath him.

At a hundred yards, Jae-Sun slowed to a halt and turned, looking back at Lassiter in the distance. The astronaut floated above the dusty surface, his spotlights illuminating the rough surface.

“Com check,” Jae-Sun said.

“Coms are good,” Lassiter replied.

Jae-Sun raised his gloved hand and waved. The white suited astronaut waved back in reply.

Jae-Sun turned and continued on. He brought up a topographical overlay in his heads-up display and began moving to a second way-point, one known only to him.

After crossing a ridge and skirting the edge of a large crater, Jae-Sun knew he had moved out of line of sight. Neither Lassiter or the
Excelsior
could see him as he'd moved over the horizon from their perspective. Coms would still work, but the signal would be degraded. This was part of the plan. He'd convinced them there was a need to be coy in the initial approach to these creatures. Dragons had proven elusive for hundreds of years, since they were first spotted by the miners on Pluto. Now that one was at rest on an asteroid, the last thing anyone wanted to do was to spook the creature, and that played right into Jae-Sun’s hands.

Being one of the pioneers of manned interplanetary space flight had its benefits, he thought. No one else could have gotten away with this without dozens of questions being raised from generals across the command structure, but Jae-Sun was trusted. Jae-Sun knew he was about to betray that trust, but he had a higher purpose than the capture of one of these aliens. He had a promise to keep. Where others struggled to understand the mechanism by which the dragons moved and how they evaded observation, Jae-Sun already knew their secret: they moved through time.

A chasm opened up beneath him. The readout on his wrist computer indicated the probability of finding the alien within the dark canyon at 78% based on available readings and the various, faint electromagnetic emissions. Scratch marks lined a rock wall, appearing as though something large had scraped against the dust and rocks.

“I’m moving into a chasm,” Jae-Sun said. “I may lose coms.”

“Roger that,” Lassiter replied. Already, his voice was breaking up with the low signal-to-noise ratio. “Still receiving telemetry.”

Jae-Sun felt no fear, no sense of trepidation. He’d been waiting for this moment for hundreds of years.

Most people thought it was only the past that was set, but Jae-Sun understood time was a dimension every bit as fluid as any of the three spatial dimensions of up and down, left and right, forward and backward. The past and future seemed distinctly separate from a human perspective, but that was an illusion. Jae-Sun already knew what the future held. He was determined to make different choices.

He flew down a yawning hole that opened into the asteroid. Darkness enveloped him. His spotlights were feeble, barely illuminating the canyon walls as he descended out of sight and into the heart of the asteroid.

As he drifted deeper, he punched several commands into his wrist computer, deactivating the array of sensors on the white cube. These were supposed to record the interaction with the alien creature. They were largely passive, intended to avoid appearing intrusive to the alien. Had the scientists on the
Excelsior
known what he was doing they would have been horrified, but Jae-Sun had a plan. The instrumentation crate was carrying a payload other than probes and monitors.

“I’ve lost telemetry,” Lassiter said. “Do you want me to reposition?”

“Negative,” Jae-Sun replied. “Hold station. I’m still recording.”

He was lying, but Lassiter had no way of knowing that.

Jae-Sun reiterated his command. “Hold your position. That is an order.”

“Roger,” Lassiter replied.

Jae-Sun cut his com-link, cutting himself off from the universe outside. Lassiter wouldn’t move and neither would the
Excelsior.
They held Jae-Sun in too high regard to disobey. It wouldn't occur to any of them question his judgement. No one would have believed this wasn’t Jae-Sun descending into the inky depths of a lifeless asteroid.

Jason had lived so many years as Jae-Sun his own name sounded strange. The real Jae-Sun was on Titan analyzing readings from the deep space array and relaying advice and recommendations via the deep space network. Well, Jason thought, real was a relative term when it came to time travel. They were both real. They were both one and the same person. The split in the timeline meant they were effectively identical twins. How that worked from the perspective of conscious awareness, he had no idea, but it did.

“Where are you?” he mumbled to himself. “Come on, baby. I know you're down here.”

Above, a handful of stars shone in the thin sliver of the eternally dark sky. An inky pitch-black gloom surrounded Jae-Sun from every other angle, and he felt as though he were descending into Sheol, leaving one universe and falling into another.

Darkness surrounded him. The dim light on his wrist computer read 120 meters and still the darkness seemed to be without end. Rather than the sensation of claustrophobia, with the jagged walls closing in, the intense darkness gave him a feeling of floating within eternity. Instead of being trapped inside an asteroid, he felt as though he were floating free in a void without end. Occasionally, his spotlights lit up a craggy rock drifting silently by in the dead of night. The cavern seemed to open out into a vast empty chamber beneath the chasm.

A smooth edge appeared below him, curving away in an arc as it disappeared into the darkness.

“I see you,” Jason whispered, slowing his rate of descent.

Although he couldn’t make out the entire craft, his navigation computer had already analyzed the shape, providing him with a three-dimensional wire-frame model of the UFO oriented in the same manner as in the view before him. Jason didn't need the image.

“It's been a long time,” he said softly.

Memories flooded his mind, the lost fragments of previous encounters from tens of thousands of time loops.

Gently, Jason reached out and touched the skin of the massive alien vessel hidden in the darkness. Through his gloves, he could feel the structure tremble.

“Easy, girl.”

Already, Jason felt confident in his assessment. This wasn’t a vehicle or a spaceship, but a living organism. Rather than dealing with a technologically advanced alien species, they were dealing with a biological entity. While humanity had reached the stars inside machines, evolution within a stellar environment had enabled these creatures to survive in space.

Slowly, he drifted over the smooth skin of the alien creature, sinking further, descending into the darkness like a deep sea diver. His fingers disturbed a thin film of dust and he watched it swirl as though it were sediment being stirred up in the depths of some murky ocean.

As his lights illuminated the hide of the creature, he noticed changes in the skin texture. Images flooded his mind. Memories he had no previous awareness of suddenly seemed so clear. He blinked and could see scratches. Words and formulas had been carved into the hide of this magnificent animal. They weren't real, he understood that, but once they had been and now his mind replayed them, recalling each pattern as he drifted over the creature.

His gloved hand skimmed over the hide of the interstellar beast as he sunk deeper into the asteroid. He could almost feel the phantom sketches, the symbols and letters he remembered from another lifetime. They had scarred the creature's thick hide, having been hastily carved into its skin. He'd never understood these formulas. Jason knew what they were but why they'd been carved into the creature had puzzled him. All he could think of was that they were some multi-cycle attempt at comprehension spanning the vastness of time itself.

He and Lachlan had only ever lived through one iteration. Jason was only consciously aware of his singular passage through time. He'd avoided the feedback loop. Jason knew these ghostly memories weren't his. They were from another Jason, one that existed in a previous time loop.

Memories flashed through his mind, glimpses of formulas and words, sometimes entire phrases carved into the skin of this magnificent animal. Jason had never seen the creature before in anything other than photographs, but thousands of previous iterations had etched these figures in his memory in defiance of time travel. He understood he existed in a vortex, with his life reset time and again, and in the deep recesses of his mind, he could still remember.

For Jason, the critical moment had come in the RV so many years before.

Rain had lashed the windows.

The dark night seemed to stretch on forever.

Their recreational vehicle had hit something while driving along an interstate and the cabin skewed sideways as the driver slammed on the brakes. Broken branches flipped up beneath the underside of the vehicle, slamming into the chassis and puncturing two of the tires.

The specifics of what happened next were lost to him, but he remembered being left alone with Lily.

Photos lay scattered on the floor of the RV.

They spelled out a dire warning.

fe ED b A ck

d E st R oY

Rea ctor 1

At the time, it had been hard to believe. How could photos taken in the past, falling in a chaotic, random manner, form a deliberate message? The implication was that the etchings represented not only the past but the future. Somehow, someone in the future knew that those past photos would fall in that exact manner and used them to send a message to the present, but that was impossible. Or was it? Jason thought the answer lay in the first word, feedback.

Jason had realized the etchings weren't all the same age. The scratchings in the
R
of
Reactor
were lighter in coloration than either the
E
the
R
or the
Y
in dEstRoY, and each of them was still lighter than the
ED
in
feEDbAck.
The implication was that they'd been written at different times in a different feedback loop.

He had debated the mechanics of time travel with Professor Lachlan for almost three hours after that, stopping only when dawn reminded them they'd lost a night's sleep. There was a reporter, Jason had forgotten her name after so many years, but she was the first to accept the idea.

Feedback, Jason had argued, meant there were two time streams, a primary and a secondary line. Time would appear identical in each loop. The actors on the stage would have no idea what was happening. For them, time only transpired once, but the markings revealed secondary events existing within time. The carvings were proof they were caught in a feedback loop within space-time.

“But we can never know for sure!” Professor Lachlan had argued. Even some four hundred and sixty years later in the dark depths of a distant asteroid, Jason could still hear his mentor uttering those words.

“No, we can't,” Jason had replied in what seemed like a dream to him half a millennia later. “It's not just these words that reveal the feedback loop, it's their timing. Why did they appear now? Why at this precise moment? This is no accident.”

“Of course this was an accident,” Lachlan protested. “Are you seriously suggesting someone staged this by throwing branches on the road?”

“No, no,” Jason protested. “The words. They're no accident. This is deliberate. They hijacked this event to get this message to us.”

“They who?” Lily asked.

“They—us,” Jason replied. “We are the only ones that knew this would happen. We are the only ones that could have staged this.”

“You're saying we sent this message to ourselves?” Lachlan asked. “That we sent a message back from the future?”

“Yes.”

“But how could that work?” Lily asked.