The rest of the equipment had registered normal. Some sort of time-blocked cluster, and that wasn’t exactly wonderful. Still, it could happen, I supposed, and I began sliding around the undertime looking for a likely shark-people planet.
Dull
—that was one word for it.
Tiresome
was another.
Careful
was the third. There were close to a hundred thousand systems in that small cluster and I was trying to find the one that would erupt into mayhem a million-plus years foretime of my search.
With the life/energy detector and my own senses of probability, I felt I should have gotten a quick feeling for which systems had any possibilities at all, but real day after real day, I’d go from the Aerie to the Travel Hall, deep-dive and slide out to the shark cluster, pushing my detector out into the now at each system I located. At first, Heimdall waited patiently. Then he began to suggest less deep dives.
That got to be a pain, and I set up a staging point backtime in the cluster itself, only checking in with Heimdall occasionally. I kept track of my progress and got past sixty days without finding anything.
It took work to be a coward. The rest of them seemed to believe that they were invulnerable to the forces outside Query, but being immortal has nothing to do with that. I was the one being called upon to stick my neck out, and I didn’t like what I was finding—or wasn’t finding.
First, there wasn’t
any
intelligent life on any of the planets I checked, even those with oxygen atmospheres. Second, I was blocked from going deeper in my backtime range at a million years, half my normal, and that half took full effort.
I was skip-scanning a couple of hundred systems a trip, and when the first fifty systems turned up blank on the detector, I took the gadget back into “our” territory and retested it. The detector worked fine, even a million years back.
Then I studied several of the cluster systems more closely. Sure, there was low-brain animal life, plenty of plants, but nothing big, nothing smart. I had hunches, but I kept them inside.
The few nights I spent on Query I spent alone. Loragerd was off somewhere, and Verdis avoided me. Maybe I was driving everyone off.
I wasn’t sure. Maybe my whole approach was stupid, but I was scared. The more I looked, the more the pieces didn’t add up.
Item: Three suns going nova simultaneously.
Item: A star cluster filled with ships that tracked undertime.
Item: An intelligent race that appeared to destroy all other life on sight, and the injured of its own species.
Item: A cluster in which time-diving is difficult.
Item: A cluster that has large numbers of inhabitable planets and no intelligent life—nearly a million years before the sharks start to spew from the cluster and across our galaxy.
The last item really bothered me. All inhabitable planets, with exceptions too rare to consider, develop at least semi-intelligent life. Even some gas giants, I knew from my experience on Anemone, had intelligent life.
For that reason alone, the surveillance boundaries of the Guard were limited to one sector of one galaxy. A substantial section of a single galaxy is too much even for immortals with the equivalent of instant travel. Too often we forgot how big the universe is.
I kept at it, though, and skip-scanned through more than a thousand systems in sixty days, feeling proud until I realized that it amounted to about one percent of the cluster.
On my few check-ins, outside of a few glances and a gently pointed
remark from Heimdall, everyone left me alone. When you got right down to it, the Guard had to work that way. There just wasn’t that much surplus for second-guessing timedivers.
Along the way, I adopted a quartering technique, relying on feel and knowing that, somehow, when I got close I’d know it. That was what we all based a lot on in the long run—feelings, plain and simple. If necessary, I’d decided I’d spend four years plus on it—that would amount to twenty percent of all the systems—and that was a lot easier on my life expectancy than the way Wryan had done it.
It didn’t take that long—only another thirty-seven days of skip-scanning before something clicked. It was a plain, seven-planet system with a normal G-type sun, hard-core inner planets, with two small gas giants farther out. The detector showed a slightly higher reading, as well as energy flows on a different level.
Planet number three had an aura, and I slid in, following the feel, the shading of time toward the ancient. The Tower of Immortals had that feeling, like the Sacred Forge of the Goblins on Heaven IV, or the Priest-King’s palace on Sertis.
I was careful, even a million years backtime, recalling the holos Sammis had collected.
After tracing my strange feel to its strongest point, I set my own holopak for instant exposure and made a flash-through. I repaired then to my staging planet, the vacant planet of the blue seas, to study what the holo showed.
The one frame I had taken was stark enough, and ugly enough. The years of erosion, wind, rain, hail, fire, and time itself had scarcely blunted the edges of the black fortress. The structure was a good kilo on a side, if not more, and nearly as high, as if a giant god had plunked it down in the middle of a flat, grassy plain.
Black it was, so deep a black that there was light in the space between stars, by comparison, black enough to swallow light. And old—that black monstrosity dripped years. The Tower of Immortals had been built yesterday compared to the black fort.
I sat down on a grassy knoll of Azure. I might as well give it a name, and I did, after its blue seas. I looked at the holo frame again.
On a second study, other details stood out—like the laser which was sweeping toward the holo center, or the absolute smoothness of the plain.
I shivered. Big, strong Temporal Guards who could leap centuries with a single dive and catch the thunderbolts from storms weren’t supposed to shiver, but I did.
What sort of weapon was a mere thunderbolt against a mechanism
that could last millennia and track and attack an object that appeared in real-time for only milli-units? Could this old fortress track under the now?
The first contact, strictly with an artifact, and it was hostile.
I forced myself to keep concentrating on the holo frame. The regularity of the distant hills behind the fortress, virtually all the same level, was another disturbing note.
I closed both eyes, took several deep breaths, and tried to concentrate, letting the feelings come as well. Sharks, shark people, staging base, sterile planets, weapons … all ran through my mind. Yet I had still not seen an actual shark person—I just thought of them as such from the shape of the ships Sammis had caught. Was that really accurate?
The sharks, or whatever, had been there longer than Sammis or Heimdall had figured. I was tempted to go back and tell everyone, but mad enough to decide against it. Damned if I was going back with my tail between my legs after one slightly scary brush with an ancient fort.
I checked my equipment, stuffed the holo frame into the equipment chest I’d brought to Azure, and closed the flaps on the bubble tent.
After a deep breath, I slipped through the mind-chill of the time tension and headed back to the planet of the black fortress. I stayed in the undertime beneath the structure, grasping for a link, a direction. In a funny sort of way, all created objects in the universe have time links, shadow paths, branches linking them with their creators. Call it an outgrowth of the fact that none of us can tamper with our own pasts.
The black fort, staging base, whatever it was, had a thready link farther backtime. I couldn’t follow it far because I was near the end of my own backtime range, but I grabbed a damned good feel for the direction, and I slid along the directional I’d picked up, keyed and ready for anything.
I could pick up the deadliness of the second contact from well beyond the system’s geographical confines—a dark feel stronger than the glow from the Tower of Immortals.
I noted the location and let myself drift foretime toward Query. After that I rated a solid sleep in my own Aerie, and there was no way I was tackling that second contact without feeling completely refreshed. I hadn’t kept track of objective Queryan time, and when I broke out in the Travel Hall, it was close to local midnight.
A trainee I didn’t know was waiting.
“Sir … you’re Loki?”
“Yes,” I growled at the girl, wondering why Heimdall, and it had to be Heimdall, had left someone to contact me.
She paled, but didn’t flinch. That alone recommended her for hazard duty, considering the mood I was in.
I took the folded sheet she handed me, stuffed it into my jumpsuit thigh pocket, and walked straight for the exit portals of the Tower. Outside, I planet-slid straight to the Aerie.
I collapsed into the furs as soon as I had my boots off.
Sleep didn’t last all that long, and I was awake not long after dawn. Not that I thought at first, just looked at the rising sun throwing light on the peaks and the canyons below, watched the weak light splinter off the ice fields of Seneschal, and let the silence penetrate—and with it the realization that I was afraid. Scared. Fearful. Names didn’t matter; the feeling was the same.
When I returned to the cluster, I was headed for a breakout where beings or machines reacted with incredible speed. For the first time, the ability to dive, even to throw thunderbolts, didn’t seem like that much of an advantage. I wouldn’t be captured, never again, but I could be killed. Zap.
I remembered the folded sheet I’d wadded into my jumpsuit and retrieved it. Simple it was, and to the point. Finish or report your progress within a ten-day. Heimdall must be getting nervous. I crumpled the sheet and tossed it into the recycler end of the synthesizer.
Took my time cleaning up, rechecking my equipment, putting in new power cells—in general, stalling. I had to face the fact that I was putting off a return, and I had to return and finish the assignment, either that or beg off and let someone else get killed.
I had no doubts that any other Guard who undertook a mission to the cluster and found the sharks would be dead within a unit of contact—except maybe Sammis, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair to dump it on him. He’d lost enough already.
I might be dead also, but I pulled myself together and dived—straight from the Aerie. There was no real sense in going to the Travel Hall. Heimdall could grouse all he wanted to. So could Verdis. No matter what happened, there wouldn’t be any rescues. I was going to succeed or get zapped.
The first dive was to Azure, my staging point, where I curled up in the bubble tent for a catnap that turned out longer than that. A million-year dive was tiring, even if it took no objective time.
When I woke up, I felt better, and I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I decided to call the second shark planet Lyste, for reasons unclear to me, except that the Sertians have a god of destruction with the same name.
I set the holopak and made a flash-through of quick points on the
system’s fourth planet, the one that reeked of age and shark. Then I slid back to my bubble tent to survey the holos.
The single frame of the first breakout displayed a perfectly cultivated row crop of some sort, not a single straggle of grass or weed showing.
The second flash-through was from what I’d figured from the undertime to be a small city. The holopak had come up with two frames.
In the first was a cart, apparently fueled by a stack of logs that seemed to be individual plants. I could discern no other machines, but several “people” in the background. They looked healthy, strong, and purposeful. Semi-humanoid was as good a description as any—smooth black skin, hairless, scaleless, short and stocky pair of legs, upright carriage, two arms ending in a hand of some sort, and a head.
The second holo frame had a detailed head-on picture of a “shark.” I’d lingered a fraction of a unit to get that second frame. That could have been a mistake. The pedestrian marching down the street had seen me, recognized a threat, and turned in the space of less than half a unit. The reason the shot was head-on was that he/she/it had been caught in the act of firing a hand-held dart gun. The holo caught the dart emerging from the end of the gun—and I had no difficulty in grasping its barbed and hostile intent.
As I sat on the grassy knoll, I shuddered. What was I getting into? Why did even urban pedestrians react with instant violence to strangers?
I studied the second frame again. As I looked over the face, with the nostrils, if that’s what they were, between two heavy-lidded eyes and with a virtually neckless head set on the squarish body, I could see that a number of other bystanders had reacted to the flash-through.
It was no fluke—they all had micro-unit reflexes.
Fine—I’d found the home planet—maybe. Now what?
I ate and took another nap after I found myself shaking. Was sleep a way to escape? I didn’t care, and when I woke I munched through some more dried ration sticks before considering my options.
I couldn’t very well eliminate their progenitors. I was at the backtime limit of my range. That meant frying the planet, but I still didn’t know how many others there might be. I didn’t believe that the people who had built the black forts had built only two—or what shape the one on Lyste was in, since I hadn’t looked at it yet. And that meant I really didn’t know enough.