Running With Argentine (36 page)

Earth
2349 A.D.

"Captain
Ramires you have a message," announced the computer.

He was sitting at his cabin's dining table eating breakfast.

He swallowed and said aloud, "Play the message."

"It is a text-only message," came the response.

"Who's it from?" he asked, curious who on the ship
would want to communicate in such an unorthodox fashion.

"Admiral Sanchez."

"What! When?"

"The Admiral logged a message that was to be delivered
to you immediately upon entering the void between the spiral arms. Will you
take it now?"

"Of course… Where…"

"You can access it from your desk terminal."

Captain Ramires left the rest of his breakfast on the table.
He moved to his office desk and immediately opened up the message…

Captain Ramires,

You are now approaching the
point of No Return and I want to personally wish you and your crew good fortune
and good sailing.

Major Jacoby and I have been
dealing with this situation for some years now and, if it hasn't started to
already, I will warn you that it can tie you up in mental knots trying to think
through the repercussions of your actions.

Know this… Even after all this
time our best minds still have no idea how this is going to work…

They tell me that our very
universe could cease to exist once you make your temporal jump, that the very
act of you disturbing the timeline could erase this future.

You may be surprised to learn
that I am a scientist, but I will readily admit that I can't keep up with what
they're calling Temporal Physics. At any rate, I choose to believe that we’ll still
be here tomorrow.

My advice to you is to trust
your instincts. Don’t let the unknown freeze you into inaction; Do The Right
Thing in every situation and let the chips fall where they may.

I do need to honor, however,
some of their cautions. There are things I would like to tell you but have been
advised not to. So if this message seems in some ways incomplete, I trust
you'll understand the necessity…

I do want to take the risk of
letting you know that we have received some of your messages. I suspect that
some of them have also been lost, although I am under strong advisement not to
identify to you which are which.

I will say, though, that
redundancy is a virtue. Perhaps each report should contain copies of all
previous reports? I'll leave that to your discretion, but you know what the
stakes are.

One thing that needs to be said…

As you know, the consensus is
that these extinction events are not natural. We believe we are facing an
intelligent enemy.

In regards to that, there are
two schools of thought here. One is that if you can get the appropriate
intelligence to us about our enemy, his strengths, his weaknesses… Everything
we've discussed…

If you can find a way to gather
that Intel and get it to us, we can devote all of humanity's resources to
stopping them.

There is a second school of
thought that believes if you can find the origin… If you can identify the very
first extinction event and address it… That might be humanity's very best
opportunity to stop it.

I know that places a tremendous burden
on you and your crew. Please know that all of us here have faith in you.

I could wish that traveling into
the past wasn’t a one-way trip. I could wish that there was a way I could
someday shake your hand and congratulate you on a mission well done…

Anyway, good hunting Captain.
May the wind be at your back and God at your side…

Admiral Sanchez, out.

Aboard
the Roosevelt

A man could
do an awful lot of good with a ship like the Roosevelt,
she'd said.

At the time, Argentine thought she was talking about
righting social injustices…

Like the growing dominance of the military in the Asperian
sphere; or more starkly, the cruel injustices practiced by the Lords of
Trinity.

With a ship like this they probably could make a difference;
but the truth of the matter was that the allure of Argentine's mountain cabin
dream was still vivid in his mind.

More so than ever.

Perhaps it takes closing in on a dream for a man to realize
just how truly important it is to him – especially if that same man is faced
with the prospect of losing it.

As tempting as it was to command a ship like the Roosevelt,
he knew he could give it up…

But now…

Now the stakes were larger than anyone could imagine.

He'd gone back and forth in his mind, toying with the idea
that what he'd learned wasn't true. That it was some crazy hidden agenda
enacted by madmen that really didn't know what they were talking about.

If the situation had only been explained to him verbally he
probably could've convinced himself of that. But with the circlet interface… He
knew
that the memories were real… He
knew
that Paula believed it
to be true.

She had helped him find the recorded ship's briefing that
Captain Ramirez had given to the ship's crew upon entering the void between the
spiral arms.

One line in that briefing stood out for him. One line kept
replaying itself over and over in his mind…

But whether our mission comes down to a ship battle, or
if it comes down to a single individual from our ship that has the
determination to defend our race, we need to be ready.

Everyone that heard this speech was gone. Everyone, except
for one individual.

And that individual was trying to do exactly what her
Captain had asked of her…

Whether Paula was actually alive or not wasn't an issue, he
realized.

These were a group of people that had given everything for
something that was bigger than just themselves. The odds were immeasurable that
they could've lived out their lives without ever experiencing an extinction
event.

They might have originally bought into a cover story, but to
the best he could tell they had unanimously embraced the magnitude of the new
mission. Yeah, there might be a few examples here or there of some of the
technology leaking out, but with that many people and that many secrets to
keep… There was no question in Argentine's mind that to a person they put the
greater good above themselves.

Especially when you consider that many of the survivors
would have inevitably been subjected to torture, and worse.

Now, the last real crew member of the Roosevelt was asking
him to carry on the mission…

Approximately
9 Million B.C.

Captain Ramires paused in
thought…

He was trying to put the finishing touches on a new message
that would hopefully be found by his people in the future.

He reread it for the twentieth time and realized it was
fine. Which was good, considering he needed to get ready. His senior officers
had been invited for dinner by the government of Paladin III, the planet that
in 8 million years everyone would know as Earth.

That was a nice change of pace.

So far in this era, every culture they’d run into had either
tried to take advantage of them, enlist them in some empire building scheme, or
were simply too afraid of them to initiate a dialog.

He supposed it was easy to understand.

The Roosevelt represented technology that was centuries
ahead of any civilization they’d so far run into.

At any rate, his scientists had already manufactured the
diamondite crystal his message would be lasered into. It’s what the
Betelgeuseans had done to preserve their records – so they knew it could
survive millennia.

Within the next couple of days they would enclose it in a
structure that would be constructed at the Cydonia site on Paladin IV (Mars).
Captain Ramirez remembered reading about the rumors that used to circulate
concerning Cydonia, the face on mars, the pyramids… it had all turned out to be
nothing.

His scientists, however, would build a pyramid that was
unmistakably not a natural feature.

As to the message itself…

ΔΔΔ

Directed To: Admiral Federico
Sanchez, Terran League Space Navy (or his predecessors or successors)

We are now inching our way
backwards in time.

The closer we draw to when we
believe the last extinction event occurred, the shorter our jumps - the goal is
to observe it, not overshoot it.

Our cosmologists tell us that
their observations indicate we are now 9.3 million years in our past. This is
slightly off from what the temporal engineers had expected; we continue to
recalibrate and refine the technology.

There are distinct differences
in the universe around us between 24th Century Earth, our previous jump and
this one. That previous jump placed us only a few thousand years in the future
from where we currently sit on the timeline, and that era is starkly different
from what we are seeing now - more on that in a minute…

First, I want to describe what
we are seeing in this era.

It is unimaginable.

When we first re-entered the
Orion Spur from the void the differences were obvious. Human civilization fills
the galaxy (or at least this spiral arm, if the local cannon is accepted).

I don’t mean that it has
expanded in a sphere from one planet; I mean that humanity is so pervasive that
no one even remembers where, or if, there was an origin point. Although there
is no one overriding culture or society to serve as a platform for all
scientists to arrive at a consensus, the idea that humans are the natural result
of evolution, any evolution, seems universal.

As we made our journey back to
the Sol system we realized that 24th Century Earth lives in a sparsely
populated desert compared to this epoch.

When we arrived at Earth we
found it heavily populated. The planet is currently known as Paladin III.

How can there have been an
advanced space-faring civilization in Earth’s past, and for us (you) to have no
surviving record of it? 8 million years is a long time, but surely some
evidence would remain?

This brings us back to what we
discovered in our previous jump, which put us several thousand years in Paladin
III’s future…

It was empty.

We couldn’t find any intelligent
life. We couldn’t find any evidence that there had ever been any intelligent
life. It is no wonder there is no surviving record of this civilization lasting
8 million years; no evidence lasted for even a few thousand!

On Earth, we identified a
species that would probably develop into Sahelanthropus tchadensis. This
hominin had recently started walking on two legs and had developed small canine
teeth. It will, however, take several evolutionary branches and a few million
years for this species to even start using tools.

Our scientists believe that we
have crossed the last Extinction Event.

Whatever caused it didn’t just
wipe out all intelligent life, it erased all human constructs down to man-made
alloys that don’t occur in nature.

To avoid confusion we are
calling the time period after the extinction, the Earth Epoch. The time before
will be the Paladin III Epoch.

If we assume that technological
advancement is a decent gauge of the age of an intelligent species, we could
deduce that both epochs survived to about the 8 million year mark. This begs
the question: Why is our own epoch more sparsely populated than the previous
one?

If we determine that the
Betelgeuseans were correct, that there have been an entire series of extinction
events, and if we discover that the proliferation of humanity reduces with each
event, it must be considered as a possibility that these extinction events are
deliberate attempts to culling or eliminating the human race.

Our next destination after
leaving Paladin III and IV will be Betelgeuse, or as it is known in this epoch:
Asperia.

We have surmised that political
entities located there and known as Secret Societies would have the resources
to research extinction events. One of them is the most likely candidate for
building the archive we discovered 8 million years later.

If we can somehow add what they
know to our own experiences we will be greatly aided in our mission.

I must take the space to mention
how proud I am of our crew. When dealing with time periods of this scale it is
difficult to fear an extinction event as eminent, but because it is our goal to
observe one, the pressure of it is constantly hanging over our heads. Our
people have stood up to it, though.

Should we be successful in
isolating the moment of occurrence, there is of course no guarantee for our
survival. For that reason I will be increasing the number of message drops we
leave for you. This one will be positioned within the next 48 hours and I will
soon leave another one with everything we learn on Asperia.

Rest assured, the captain and
crew of the Roosevelt hold serving mankind as our highest purpose.

Captain Jaime Rodriguez, T.L.S.
Roosevelt