Secret of the Legion (27 page)

"And if you don't collect the D-neg, or if you do, but the D-neg drive doesn't work as advertised?"

"We've still got our antimat drive. If it gets us through to the alien universe, it may be able to get us back."

"Or it may not."

"We're not sure. We can't tell, from the information we get from the Star. We're hopeful that we'll be able to track the location and presence of our own universe, once we're in the alien universe, so we can return home on antimat drive, if necessary. Nobody's ever done it, Wester—so we can't be sure. But we wouldn't be risking it if we didn't think it was possible."

I looked out to the massive project that was underway before our eyes. The noise was overwhelming us, even with the hardhats. I was becoming very depressed.

"Tara," I said. "You're planning on bringing a lot of people with you, aren't you?"

"Yes. We'll need a lot of people, a lot of expertise, to do what must be done."

"I've got a suggestion. One that will save you a lot of time, expense, and trouble."

"What's that?"

"Take all those people. Put them all in a big room. Then set off a tacstar. That way you won't even have to build the ship. And you'll accomplish exactly the same thing."

The metallic bonder was shrieking away, spitting sparks. A siren sounded. Work probes shot past us silently. "You shouldn't be so pessimistic, Wester. We'll do fine. We make a good team, Wester. We make a great team! I feel so good about this mission, Wester, I feel almost holy. It's a good thing we're doing, a wonderful thing for humanity. We're dropping into the unknown, Wester—unafraid. For the future, for generations of unborn children. For the Legion!"

"It's a suicide mission. A mass suicide, the most expensive, spectacular mass suicide ever. And it's not good, it's evil. The Star's evil. And we're becoming evil by listening to it. I won't have anything to do with this insane, evil mission!"

"I know you better, Wester. You won't stay behind. Don't you know yourself yet? You're out on the edge with me. You've always been there. You're just fooling yourself if you think otherwise."

"I've changed. I've got something to live for, now. I'm not going. It's crazy, and I'm not going! I'm not going to help you kill yourself. Now let's get out of here—I'm sick of this place!"

Chapter 13
Crazy but True

A few days later Tara reappeared, standing in the doorway to my office cube. I had been trying to avoid her, but it's not easy to avoid your supervisor. She placed a datacard on my desk.

"You'll be interested in this, Wester," she said gravely. "We've only just received it, from a very reliable source in Starcom. This is the official report on the forensic investigation of the interior of the Mound. The investigation was conducted immediately after the site was secured by the Legion. Section Twenty-Three will be of greatest interest to you. In Section Twenty-Three, they track the c-cells of every member of Squad Beta from the moment each one entered the Mound. They follow each trail to its conclusion."

"How were they able to do that?" I seized the datacard eagerly.

"They got full tacmod readouts from Eight, Eleven and Four's A-suits. The environment was very bad because of heavy and near-constant deceptor activity, but the readout is interesting, nevertheless."

"How do you know this report isn't ConFree deception?"

"We're convinced this is the real thing. It's a regular after-action report compiled by the Legion. It was given a Cosmic security classification, later, and taken off the records by ConFree. We found it anyway."

"Have a seat, Tara." She sank into an airchair by my desk. "What does the report say?"

"You'll have to read it, Wester, to decide what it means. I'm afraid it's not pleasant reading. I can summarize it for you, if you like."

"Please."

"All right. The c-cell tracks are fragmentary, but they give a reasonably accurate picture of where each trooper went, up until the end. The main problem is that both deceptor activity and starmass interfere with the record. And there was lots of starmass near the end."

"Go on."

"The report notes that they recovered Beta Four's body—Merlin. It also confirms that they located and recovered Beta Eight and Beta Eleven, Dragon and Valkyrie, alive. Considering the trouble ConFree went to later to disguise that, I think this says something about the accuracy of this report. The report states that Dragon and Valkyrie were both placed in protective custody. ConFree was intervening even at that point. It also mentions Beta Ten showing up and being detained."

"So that much of the report is true!"

"Yes. It makes you want to believe the rest of the report as well."

"What about the rest of the squad?"

"The record shows you, me and Gildron making it to the Ship. More truth. It shows Beta One vanishing in a burst of starmass. But there's more—about Snow Leopard. I'm sorry, Wester. They recovered…part of him. A leg, still in armor, severed above the knee. Positive ID. We've got the zero. That's all they found."

I sat there, stunned. Snow Leopard! Our invincible leader—gone! The room whirled slowly around me.

"Are you all right, Wester?"

"Go on, Tara. What else?" Under siege—I was under siege.

"The record shows Priestess and Scrapper disappear in another burst." My heart gave a jolt, but Tara continued. "There's no further record of either of them."

"No record." Priestess—my beloved Priestess, what was your fate? Did you suffer in those final moments? Dear Lord, grant her eternal peace. I will never forget her!

"Five—Psycho—is tracked to where we left him. Then he moves, through very heavy deceptor fields. Down a corridor…and there the trail vanishes."

"What! He moved?" My skin crawled. This was the first positive word we had on Paycho's fate. He had lost a leg. We had left him behind, crippled and seriously wounded, facing the enemy behind a stack of grenades. 'Don't worry about your rear,' he had said. Psycho! Why would he have moved? How could he have moved, with only one leg?

"The trail shows Thirteen, Twister, up to where we left her. She moved too, Wester. The record shows it. We left her with a crippled A-suit, in the path of the O's. She couldn't move, Wester. Her suit was cooked. She was doomed. If she could have moved, I wouldn't have left her! The record shows she moved. Someone was with her, Wester. We can't tell from the record who it was. It's very confused, but someone was with her. No matter how we manipulate the record, we can't tell who—or what—it was. But it looks like an A-suit. Maybe even more than one. They proceed together, into heavy deceptors. There the trail ends."

I stood up and went to the wall, turning my back to Tara. My hands were fists, and rage was coursing through my body. Twister! She had moved, too! How could she have moved, with a crippled A-suit? 'I'm done for,' she had said, 'Leave me! Get the Ship!' We had left her. And she had moved! Down a corridor! Someone with her! And we had left her! My eyes were full of tears. Twister! She had stood by our side until the end. She was just a kid, just a little girl.

"Leave me," I said.

"I'm sorry, Wester. There's something else you should know. They found hundreds of bodies. But they can't confirm any of them as Beta troopers. They couldn't even confirm a melted A-suit, from Beta. All they found was Beta One's leg—that's all. Starmass doesn't leave much behind. Read the report. Read everything. We'll talk later."

She left. I couldn't even see the wall.

***

I started going for long walks through Dinda, every noon. I didn't eat lunch, I just walked. It was very pleasant. The seasons were changing. Summer was gone and autumn was rushing at us with crisp air and sparkling days.

After work I would often go up to the roof of the Info building. They had a little canteen set up there with tables and chairs out in the open air. There wouldn't be many people there after work. Sometimes there was only me. It was a spectacular view, overlooking the lake. I would sit there for hours, watching the sunset.

I was doing that one day when Tara appeared. Somebody was with her, a fellow I had never seen before.

"Hello, Wester. How are you?"

I ignored her. The horizon was a spectacular, bleeding glow of crimson and gold, and Tara was ruining it.

"Can we sit down?" I didn't answer. They sat down, exchanging glances.

"Wester, this is Seven Six Seven. Six Seven is a spacetime physicist. He's got something to say that may interest you."

"I'm not interested in your ship."

"You were interested in the forensic report, weren't you?"

"Yes, I was interested in the forensic report. But I'm not interested in the ship."

"All I ask is for you to listen, Wester. That's all. Just listen. All right?"

I sighed. "I'm sorry, Tara. Fine—I'll listen. But the answer is still no. It doesn't matter what you say—the answer is no."

Tara flashed a dazzling smile. "Wester is really cranky, Six Seven, but he's a good soul, once you get to know him. Wester, before Six Seven starts there's something you should know. Gildron has found out something interesting about the Star."

"What's that?"

"The O's didn't make the Star. It originated in another civilization, created by another people. Someone we haven't met yet. I had always wondered about that. There is so much knowledge in the Star, and yet the O's don't seem to have used that knowledge at all. Their civilization is static. It's been static as long as we've known them. The O's only seem interested in expansion, and yet they never even used the Star to improve their weaponry. They haven't used it for anything at all, as far as we can tell, except maybe for their stardrives, but even their stardrives don't seem to have changed in hundreds of years."

"Aren't you the same girl who told me the O's just misunderstood us—that they only wanted universal peace?"

Tara smiled, and looked away. "Well, you've got me there, Wester. I was wrong, and you were right. I'll admit it. I think they had done a little psych job on me. But that's not important. The real question is, why didn't the O's use the Star? Gildron says it's because the O's don't want the knowledge. They regard it as dangerous. That's why they gave us the Star. Gildron says the Star has been used before to destroy other civilizations…or, rather, to allow other civilizations to destroy themselves, with the knowledge from the Star. The O's gave it to us so we'd do the same."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"The people who created the Star must be a brilliant people! I always wondered how the O's could create such a device. I think the Star can create a better world, if you're wise."

"You're going ahead with the Ship, aren't you?"

"Of course!"

"The O's were right. The Star will destroy us."

"No, Wester. It's knowledge—only knowledge. It's not good or evil. If we're good, we'll use it wisely, and prosper. If we're evil, we'll use it foolishly, and perish. It's up to us. Not the Star."

"Mankind is evil. The Star will kill us."

"I have more faith than you, Wester. Six Seven, tell him."

"You're familiar with the principles of antimat drive?" Six Seven asked. He had slightly curly reddish hair and a flushed face with cold blue eyes. I couldn't recall ever having seen him before.

"Yes, they taught us that in Basic. I'm familiar with the concepts."

"Good. Then you know it is only the antimat quantum drive that gives us the raw power necessary to create and hold open a dimensional vortex—a wormhole—in spacetime, penetrating hyperspace to exit our universe and reenter it at another point, cheating time and distance."

"Yes, I'm aware of that."

"We use antimat because it works, and because it is the most powerful substance we can successfully manipulate to achieve the desired effect—holding open the wormhole for a reasonable period of time. But it is not the most powerful substance in our universe. If we could manipulate and focus the power of a black hole or a neutron star, for example, we would have a more powerful star drive. Unfortunately, we can't."

"Why do we need a more powerful star drive? Isn't antimat good enough? Why would anyone want more power than that?" I didn't mind being obstinate.

"There are other universes out there, beyond hyperspace. They're real, and infinite—just as real and infinite as our universe. But we can't visit them—yet. Antimat drive is not powerful enough to get us into other universes, in any kind of controlled way. A black hole would—if we could manipulate it."

"There are millions of galaxies out there, in our own universe. It's infinite! You can never explore it all! Our own galaxy alone is so vast there's no need to ever leave it. If going to another galaxy is out of the question, why go to another universe, even if you could?" I could go on being obstinate forever.

"If you need a reason, we have one—D-neg. One tiny, microscopic grain of D-neg and we won't need a black hole. We'll have the power to routinely pop into other universes. And there is no D-neg in our universe."

"Who needs it? We visit another universe, to collect D-neg, so we can visit other universes? I just asked you. With everything in our universe, why visit another?"

"The reason is that D-neg opens up new, and fascinating, possibilities. D-neg, when held in stasis by unitium and spun on its axis, creates a gravitational field of almost infinite strength. This forces spacetime to distort, around it. This, in turn, creates a time axis, a time warp. A ship powered by D-neg will fall into the time warp created by the D-neg. Once it's in the light cone, a ship can travel forward into the future or backwards into the past. And it can stop whenever you want. And return to whenever you want."

"You're not serious."

"I'm totally serious. This isn't theory, it's established science. We've long known it could be done. The only problem was that we never had the exotic matter to generate the power to create a true time warp. D-neg will give us that power."

"Now do you see why we want to build the ship?" Tara asked.

"With D-neg," Six Seven said, "we have a stardrive, an inter-universe drive, and a time drive—all in one. We can do anything with it. Anything we want. It's the ultimate starship."

"My God." I was still pondering the implications. "Do you mean…you can really visit the past?"

"Yes."

"Walk around in it?"

"Yes."

"And…change it? Change the past?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"You can shape the future, you can contribute to the present, but you cannot change the past."

"What do you mean?" So much for being obstinate. Now Six Seven had my interest.

"There are a lot of paradoxes. Some of them we don't fully understand. Others are clearer. What I mean is…what you can do in the past is limited. The three of us are sitting here, now. In the present, a fleeting instant in the infinite, unstoppable river of time. Developments in the past have allowed this to occur. No other outcome is now possible, at least in this universe. You can't go back, now, and change the past, so there will be only two of us sitting here."

"Why not? If I go back in time, like you say I can, and I kill you, or I get killed there, one of us won't be here."

"But I am here—as a result of what happened. So are you. So you didn't kill me. And you didn't get killed, either. But tomorrow is different. Tomorrow hasn't happened yet. You could go back in time tomorrow, and return later this evening, and kill me as I sleep in my bunk, and I won't be around tomorrow. When you return back here tomorrow, after your successful time hop, you will learn that someone killed me in my bunk the previous night. But you can't prevent me from making it here today—I'm already here. It happened."

"But that doesn't make sense. If you can go into the past, you should be able to change things. And you just said I could. You said I could go back in time and kill somebody."

"You can do things that will shape—or affect—the future. You can even do things that will result in the three of us sitting here, today. You could return to the past, push Tara out of the path of a speeding groundcar, and thus insure that she's sitting here today. Your timehop might turn out to be the only reason she's here. We can't know unless you do it. You can contribute to the three of us sitting here, today. But you can't stop it. Party number four is not at this table. To continue the analogy…maybe it's only because you went back in time and killed him. But if he makes it to the present, you can't kill him in the past."