PLANESHIFTERS, Critical Mass: Book II, Chapter 6: Relativity Revised

On the way back to the bridge Sky took an understandable detour, letting go of Thor's protective grip for the first time since they left the medical bay. There were very few places onboard that were good for just being alone and thinking, but the Biodome was definitely one of the best. She had been coming here to read, think, or just hang out for as long as she could remember, and was probably more familiar with all the plants and animals in the many Domes like this one than anyone else in the fleet, including the engineers who designed these things. For her, it was a touch of a life she never had. She grew up hearing stories about Earth, but never experienced so much as a planet with an atmosphere until just a few years ago.

The last stop on their exodus was the planet Cheops, named after the greatest of the Egyptian pyramids back on Earth, due to the presence of a pyramid shaped mountain on its face that was so large, it was actually visible with the naked eye from orbit. She was fairly young when they first arrived, maybe 15 or 16 years old as her memory served, but already in full service of the Fleet Command. The first time she shuttled down to the planet her entire life changed. Though the planet was cold and stormy nearly all the time, she couldn't get enough of the feeling of extreme openness and the expanse of the heavens. It affected her so strongly she took her adult name from it. It wasn't until about a week into their mission that trouble started brewing.

There were a small group of explorers among them who didn't exactly see eye to eye with Command, and took a pretty strong stance against them with regard to the handling of the strip mining operations underway on the surface. Digging deep into the caverns of the mountains for a variation of iron pyrite, or fool's gold, as it was called back on Earth, that was needed at the time to trigger the reactors that powered their engines, the ground crews had come into contact with some sort of indigenous life form. The creatures were nearly humanoid in appearance, at least so the workers thought, so efforts were made to communicate with them. It seemed no one could ever get close enough to get a real look at them, and their sophisticated scanners came up with nothing with enough mass to identify as life at all… yet there they were.

The decision was made to simply continue to "mine around them," but as the crew's efforts started to encroach more and more on their natural surroundings, they began to change shape. What had always been encountered as a humanoid shape, standing in the shadows of the rock, just out of sight, staring at them and then running away when pursued, began to evolve into a series of more and more malignant forms. They were seen in the form of rock formations coming to life right before their eyes, clouds or mist that suddenly took human shape and then charged at the workers, and even as other humans… the worst recorded case being a woman walking all the way back to her shuttle with two coworkers by her side before realizing at the last minute that this was not her friend, but a doppelganger that had taken his form, leaving him nowhere to be found! The frightened woman and her partner didn't find out until the being actually tried to board the ship, and she noticed it's feet weren't touching the ground. It fled, and when they returned to the mine with a security team, the creature was gone… as was their friend.

A large party of them hunted for the man into the night, and had another encounter deep inside one of the shored up tunnels they had dug themselves. They were all carrying torches and light-sticks because the magnetic properties of the highly ferrous mountain range restricted the use of any closed cell power source anywhere near the mines, and rendered their spotlights useless. After about an hour or so, when they were just about to give up on that particular mine shaft, all hell broke loose.

The walls seemed to "come alive" and turn into every type of winged creature and crazy apparition the men could imagine. In the confusion, one man attacked one of them with his torch, and that's when they had an epiphany. These "ghosts," as they were being called, were susceptible to fire! The thing screamed a ghastly pitch that brought the men to their knees, some of them holding their heads and falling to the ground sideways, dropping their torches in the mayhem, but it didn't matter… The fire spread like it was spawned from hell itself, and when the air cleared and the smoke dissipated to some degree of normalcy, not a creature was left.

Two of the men died in the medical bay in the days that followed and most of the others were treated for third degree burns. It seemed the stories of what transpired differed slightly from person to person; every tale slightly skewed toward a different fury from within the mind of the observer, ranging from bats, to witches, to ghosts or dragons, and all manner of twisted spectre and evolved life form. The one thing they all commented on was the smell…. It was said the smell of ether was strong in the air from the moment it all started until well after the fires were gone. The man they were looking for, a well liked Journeyman named Nicolas MacAave, was never found.

Fleet Command made the decision to evacuate the colony that had already started advanced terraforming procedures to better the air and weather patterns, and fire bomb the surface of the planet to speed up mining for the remaining Fleet, who were already charting the next leg of the exodus for the twin planets in the Algol system, nearly 15 light years away. This did not set well with the colonists, or the small group of miners and scientists who had already begun a more advanced study of these unusual beings, who, in their expert opinions, were merely acting in self defense and had shown numerous signs of intelligence.

The facts were a little fuzzy to her at this point, but she did have some memory of a revolt and some kind of banishment taking place. The Fleet proceeded with the firebombing, and rode out the remainder of their tour with little incident until the end of the planet's solar cycle, bringing on a season of hostile weather and what was predicted to be a 50 year long storm forming from the tight rings of the equator, and converging on the poles. Their base that was set up on the southern pole near the pyramid mountain was abandoned, as was the colony, and the Fleet-wide decision was made to move on. The terraforming efforts that would have softened the blow from the weather were destroyed in the firebombing, so there was no longer any good reason for the settlers to remain.

It was speculated by some "extremists" that the whole thing was a conspiracy their Commanders carried out to keep the Fleet from dividing. It was even suggested that the indigenous "ghosts" were nothing more than fear based hallucinations brought on through the drugging of the miners and the search party by the management, and that the "spirit fire" was just a gas explosion set up by them as well, but as young as she was, she knew the stories had to be true.

She saw the many faces returning from work in the mines, many of which were her friends, and she knew they had seen something that couldn't easily be explained away, but in the end, the result was the same. They raped the planet, they got what they came for, the storm came, and they were on their way. This was just the way of things as far back as she could remember. Since she was a child she only had this one truth to count on… things would always keep changing, their leaders would keep on lying about it, and there would always be a future to stay busy planning for.

As they left, she could remember the main body of the lightning storm coming from all around them, attracted to their tiny ship like a magnet. Bolts of lightning were illuminating sections of sky randomly as she stared in wonder and relative safety through the front viewing shield at the mountains in the distance, the swirling clouds of gasses dancing violently around them, and the huge water spouts from the tempestuous ocean below, rising up to meet the heavens in a vortex of natural energy unleashed before them by the very gods of this hostile world themselves.

Much too young to appreciate the danger they were all in, she absorbed the experience to her very core; living a lifetime in each breath and for the first time in her life, truly living in the moment. This was how she felt when she was with Thor. He was her storm, and yet, he was her mountain.

She was once again capable of living in the moment, and for all the conflict and strangeness the last few weeks had brought into her life, she felt as if she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She smiled, suddenly seeing the humor in this train of thought as she rubbed her belly, ripe with an alien life with whom she had already become familiar and began to love. She wasn't sure why not, but she was absolutely unafraid.

Looking high up in the dome's trees, she strolled along the edge of a tiny meandering stream, daydreaming about what it must feel like to be able to fly. Her mind flashed back in fragments to the dream she had, and for a moment she could almost feel the set of wings behind her, lifting the rest of her petite frame off the ground entirely. She slowly closed her eyes, smiling at the vivid sensation of weightlessness she was able to feel by simply thinking about it. Upon opening them, she realized too late that she was about to step off of the small grass plateau she was standing on into a small, but deep, pool of water, and as she started to fall forward, off balance, her right foot searching fruitlessly for a place to step, she suddenly found herself floating gracefully across the three foot drop to the other side without losing an inch of altitude! She gasped out loud, laughing a little, then looked quickly around the chamber to see if anyone was watching.

It felt similar to the zero gravity work she had done in the past… outside the carrier, but minus the suit and extreme cold. Unsure what just transpired, she looked back at the pool. There was no wake! She hadn't even touched the water at all! Staring for a moment in disbelief, she started noticing things in the water she had never been able to see before.

There were the small transparent fish, about the size of guppies, that she had seen before, and actually helped stock into the system, but among them, unseen by her eyes before this, were even smaller creatures, similar to small sea horses. There were hundreds of them, and for some reason she was able to focus on the individuals without even bending down to get a close look. She looked around the dome, suddenly noticing all sorts of vivid detail she had previously taken for granted.

Looking back up into the trees she noticed some clusters of fruit dangling at the lower canopy level and was overcome with a sudden primal urge to eat them. As if she had done nothing more than blink, she suddenly found herself standing, not on the grassy patch in the field, but on top of the actual branch she was just staring at from below, holding onto the smaller branch with the cluster of fruit! She was shocked, and jumped a little bit out of her skin while looking down and reaching into the fruit cluster for something solid to grab hold of. Realizing a couple seconds into this flailing dance that she wasn't going to be able to recover her balance, she instinctively looked down for a water landing and shot outward with the last bit of control over the situation that she could muster, holding one arm protectively around her belly. In the same blink of an eye that put her on the branch, she was suddenly standing waist deep in water, with a huge splash shooting out 360 degrees out to the sides in a circular pattern, rather than up and out, as her initial trajectory should have produced.

She stood still in the water, unable to fully assess whether she had been injured or not for at least a good minute or so after the water stopped moving. There was no pain in her legs, there were no imprints in the mud under her feet, and there was never the sensation of falling, or any time elapsed, even though the branch had to be at least 40 feet up in the air and 20 feet out to the side! Looking down at her own hand, she saw the bright red fruit, dripping with water from the pool, and she laughed out loud, took a large bite out of it, then started to climb up out of the water, smiling ear to ear with one hand still on her belly.

__________

Sky arrived on the bridge to find Thor, Bjorn, and Erük huddled around a monitor staring quietly at the screen. Erük turned and watched her approach closely, still obviously amazed by what was transpiring within her, as well as her outward appearance.

"You hold within you the essence of our entire species, Sky, do you feel this?"

"Oh, I know, Erük, believe me! He's making his presence known, that's for sure," she said aloud, smiling and rubbing her belly softly.

"I'm not just talking about Ar'Jvikkah,"

Erük led. Thor looked up from his terminal and glanced at Erük, then at Sky, nodding seriously. She looked back at him, puzzled. He walked slowly over to Sky and wrapped his arms around her. She couldn't get over how much different he looked, even on the surface… It was as if they had lost 10 years worth of aging in one day.

Bjorn, the youngest among them, looked up from the terminal and spoke out, his voice cracking a little as if he was going through puberty all over again, "We're quickly approaching the Alcyone system's outer planetary rings. I strongly suggest we cut our speed back to normal if we're going to use any resources from our older outposts…."

"Alcyone system?" Sky looked at him, astonished, "Older outposts…? Jesus, you don't mean Cheops, do you?"

"Yeah! Isn't that amazing?" Bjorn laughed, giddy as a child, "I can't believe we're already this far!"

"Amazing? We shouldn't be anywhere near Cheops for at least another 20 years of cryostasis! We haven't been on course for more than 2 days!! Just how fast are we going?"

"Well, we're getting mixed readings from telemetry… none of the stars are where they're supposed to be."

"What the hell does that mean?" she asked plainly, as Bjorn continued to type madly on the terminal's keypad in front of him.

"Just a few more… cross reference points… and-" His mouth hung open as he stared blankly at the screen, not really wanting to tell them what he was seeing.

"What? Spit it out!"

"According to all available star charts on this area, using our last recorded vector just before the tachyon wave hit us as a baseline… we are either transcending time-space through a quantum relationship with-"

"English… Please!"

He looked up at them with a shocked look on his face, his mouth still hanging open. "I think we've went backward in time… I think we're actually in the past!" It suddenly got extremely quiet in the room, then it was Sky who slowly cleared her throat, grinning skeptically, and spoke.

"How far?"

"Probably only hours... I'll know more when we slow down… at this speed everything is coming in waves… as if we're phasing in and out of existence. I don't know how else to explain it."

"A wormhole?" she asked, starting to take him a little more seriously.

"I don't think so. It has something to do with breaching the speed of light… The light from the surrounding stars isn't where it would be if we were standing still. We are literally outrunning time."

"Explain," Thor demanded.

"OK, let me see… When you see the light from a distant star, you are actually seeing the past, due to the fact that it took (x) amount of time, usually many, many years, to become visible to your eyes from that distance, yes? Three things are moving… the star, the light from the star, and the vantage point… Well, in this case, the vantage point is moving faster than the beam of light, so there is a kind of temporal distortion taking place that cannot be quantified… at least not by me… at this time."

"Sorry I asked… I liked your first answer better!" Thor laughed, pulling his hand through his hair as he approached the front console and planted his fist down on it, breathing in deeply then exhaling, preparing for whatever came next. "Full stop. Let's see what kind of shite we've stepped in now…"

Copyright © 2011 Gunnar C. Garisson, All Rights Reserved