PLANESHIFTERS, Critical Mass: Book II, Chapter 7: Cheops

Deciding not to give an overzealous assassin a proper funeral was a fairly easy decision, especially after he went after Sky, but somehow Thor felt a little less than civilized throwing his body out in the next waste purge. He talked it over with Erük and decided it would be appropriate to incinerate McGinn's remains in the medical waste incinerator, giving the man a "cremation at sea," so to speak. They both hoisted half of his severed body onto their shoulders and started down to the Medical Bay.

"You know, Erük, I can't help but feel sorry for this asshole," Thor said, walking down the dimly lit corridor with the upper torso over his right shoulder, head to the rear. "He really was a pretty likable guy. I think he was just so utterly programmed in life that he couldn't let go of his charge after it was obvious that there was no need to carry out the hit… unless…" Thor started sliding through the whole scenario on some slippery slopes, doing little more than confusing himself.

"Unless what?" Erük boomed, making Thor jump just a little since he was still not totally used to Erük's audible voice.

Thor pondered further before answering, still not completely sure of his train of thought. They rounded a corner and hit the button for the elevator. "Unless there's more to this than meets the eye…. Think about it, what was the logic behind him going into cryo to hunt me down in the future, unless the ones who hired him have a way of transcending time themselves? I know that sounds ridiculous, but why else would it matter? What would they have to gain from waiting to track me down? If they found me at CryoKinetics, why not kill me right there? It doesn't make much sense… If they just wanted the money back and me dead, why didn't he drop it after he realized what had happened to both of us? Why not let it go and get on with his life in the future? Anyone I could have told would be long dead anyway... It just doesn't seem like him! The guy seemed genuinely surprised when he learned what happened back on Earth, so why go after me now?"

"I don't know, my brother. Sometimes there is no why…. "

"Maybe he was just an idealist," Thor chuckled, "just couldn't live with the notion of leaving a job unfinished. It's not like he had a reputation to protect… there's not much demand for someone in his line of work anymore!" Thor started thinking quietly back to the conversations he and Kieran had prior to him turning rogue. His energy, his sense of humor, his background… Thor honestly believed that McGinn was "family" material, which in his experience did not grow on trees, and was something to be cultivated when found. He could count on one hand how many times in his life he met someone who he could really connect with, and this one tried to kill him. He wouldn't quickly forget him. It was as if he could feel his presence even now.

He put his hand on the pad for the medical bay door and nothing happened. He tried again… still nothing. He leaned forward to the small glass plane to breathe on it, hoping to wipe it clean if that was the problem, and gasped when he saw his reflection…. He dropped the corpse and spun around to Erük in shock, who was already sensing something was wrong. "Wha-" Erük dropped his half of the body and jumped back about five feet, slamming his back into the opposite side of the corridor in absolute surprise… Thor was McGinn! Down to the last detail, he had somehow taken the physical shape of Kieran McGinn to such a strong degree that the computer didn't even recognize his own biorhythmic signature or physical handprint, either of which would have opened the door!

He spun back around again to look at his reflection one more time, but by the time he adjusted his eyes to the small panel, he was himself again! He burst into a fit of animated but precarious laughter, turning back toward Erük while looking nervously around. "What the fuck was up with that? Did that really just happen?"

"It would appear you have natural adaptive abilities, Thor." Erük stated plainly as he leaned around Thor with one talon on his shoulder, inspecting him, front and back. Some of our kind develop this skill in various forms as a natural defense mechanism. It is called Jvikkah"

"What various forms?"

"Shape shifting, close range teleportation… even plane shifting." Erük stated.

"What exactly do you mean when you say, 'plane shifting,' are you referring to transcending planes of existence... literally?"

"Exactly. Plane shifting is when we change from one form to the next… not just physical appearance, but transcending planes of existence as well… for instance, entering the dream world while conscious, traveling the ethereal to contact the departed, and sometimes even transcending time itself. There are many planes of existence; some we know very well and have explored, and some we haven't. What you just did without even trying takes our species years of practice to master! We are all essentially born with the ability to blend in with our surroundings, in color and even texture, but to take on the form of another entirely takes much control over one's own vibration, and a very keen perception of the energy and vibration of others. I gather you've never done this before?"

"Never," Thor answered, looking down at the floor, but a million miles away. "Well... not exactly. Not to the eye. Only the manipulation of energies…. So why now?" he asked, somewhat sure he had an idea already, concerning the source. Thor reached back up and opened the door without incident, then hoisted the body back up to his shoulder and walked into the room.

"I'm not quite sure, but I'm sensing a change in us all," Erük said, picking up his half and entering the medical bay as well.

__________

Bjorn was typing madly on the keyboard in front of him, over and over, as if he was determined to produce his desired result by re-measuring the problem enough times. Sky sat nearby in one of the helmsman seats, half watching Bjorn, and half drifting off from complete lack of sleep. Her dreams of late had been so intense that she usually woke up feeling more exhausted than she was when she went to bed. They had all driven themselves nearly to the brink these last few days, partially due to the events at hand, but it was also customary to deprive oneself of sleep just prior to any expected cryo-sleep cycle to prevent the buildup and long term storage of adrenaline, the results of which can be extremely painful upon waking and add weeks to recovery time.

Sky yawned and looked over at Bjorn, smiling. "Have you made it say what you want yet?" she jabbed.

"What?" He looked confused. "Oh! Ha!... That's funny. No, it's just-" He squinted further, then brought the view of the planet Cheops up on holographic. "Something's not right."

"What is it?" Sky asked, staring in wonder at the blast from her past now floating before her in the air of the cockpit. "Wow... I never thought I'd see that again!" The dark blue planet loomed before her, floating in the air holographically, but with enough resolution to give the appearance that you could reach out, grab it, and go for a three-pointer from right where you stood. Its frantic and seemingly random streams of wind and storm centers careened across the mountainous face of the planet and ripped through its valleys and ocean levels with the speed and intensity of Earth's most menacing hurricanes.

Near the southern pole, clearly visible even on the relatively small facsimile before them, was the great pyramid mountain: location of the pyrite mines and caves used by the early Fleet settlers for refueling the ships for the exodus to Algol. She strained her eyes, but hard as she tried she couldn't make out any sign of the remnant settlements near the base of the mountain. Strange, she thought, even though almost all of the Fleet's larger structures had been scavenged and reconstructed as storage barges and skiffs for in flight transport of ore surplus and raw repair material, there should still be signs of the abandoned colony visible at this magnification. The extreme violence of the great storm that came in on their heels could have erased every trace of their existence, she figured. No sooner had she began to focus on that spot on the map, as Bjorn was turning it around again.

"Yeah, I know what you mean... Check this out, though." He turned the view about 90 degrees counter-clockwise, then pulled back, way back, to include the surrounding 9 star cluster of the Alcyone system. The massive blue giant in the center was shrouded in its usual cloud of interstellar dust, reflecting its blue light in a fantastic show of cosmic beauty onto the surrounding planets and moons; some nearly engulfed by the center ring of gasses and particle matter spun into a giant disc around the brilliant orb, stretching forth from its equator by its tremendous centrifugal force.

Known as Alcyone, Eta Tauri, or "Atlas" to the ancient Greeks, this behemoth held sway over every celestial body in its grasp, including its diminutive binary counterpart, Pleione, Atlas's mortal wife, and her 7 white dwarf daughters who surrounded the system in a fiery show of blue and white diamonds set in a haze of mutable vitality: the great reflecting nebula… a dusty cloud of interstellar matter shrouding the scorching ultraviolet rays of the brightly lit system to a warm blue glow and holding back the fury and brilliance of their master. Nestled in the middle of the haze, unseen by the naked eye at this distance was Cheops, a hostile world of stormy oceans and barely breathable air, turbulent seasons and unpredictable weather changes; an oddly evolved planet of spirits in the mist that once nearly became home to an exhausted human race.

Though Bjorn and Sky both were very young when the Fleet came through here nearly 20 years ago, they distinctly remembered the nebula being a distant anomaly shrouding most of the fury of the outer three suns, the sisters to the southwest, Merope, Elektra, and Maia. With no real "night-time" to intermittently cool the surface of the planet, it was widely speculated that as the system passed through the nebula, Cheops would slowly become uninhabitable due to extremes in solar radiation leading to the extinction of all plant life, but to some, it was a promise of some reprieve from the intensely cold and shifting weather conditions they usually endured here, and its passing was something to look forward to. In either case, its anticipated passing was the basis for the type of accelerated terraforming the Fleet focused on for the first couple weeks or so, but abandoned as the politics made settlement next to impossible.

Bjorn shifted the holographic view of the system another 90 degrees, turned it on its side so they could see straight down, then zoomed in on just the nebula and some of the surrounding quadrant. The nebula clearly shrouded not only the three outer suns, but the three closest sisters, Asterope, Taygeta, and Celaeno as well as Atlas, Pleione, and about half of Cheops itself! Bjorn typed a few commands into the computer and the view shifted to show the nebula's last recorded position... the day the Fleet embarked on its voyage to the Algol system, clearly showing the nebula on the outer rim of the system, engulfing only those three stars and their orbiting planets. Bjorn looked up at Sky to get her reaction.

"Isn't that about right... Given the 20 years that have passed?"

"It moved in the wrong direction, Sky!" Bjorn stated melodramatically, squinting his eyes at her, though only a few feet away. "I've run multiple scans of this in the last several minutes, and, well... this seals it. The cloud is moving from the other direction... toward the position I just showed you... when we were here before."

"So what are you saying, Bjorn?"

"We are in the past! This proves it!"

"Proves what?" Thor spoke out, coming through the open doorway with Erük right behind him. They approached the hologram and Thor paused by Sky's side, leaning forward to kiss her gently on the forehead. He stood up with one hand on her shoulder and stared at Bjorn, waiting for a reply.

"Watch," Bjorn said to everyone, hitting a couple keys. "The image flows through a period of twenty minutes time-lapsed in a few seconds, showing by reference coordinates below that the nebula is moving away from the planet, uncovering it, so to speak, however slowly, but toward the southern hemisphere. "

"And the problem is...?"

"Here's the shot of the planet from the same vantage point on the day we set sail for Algol 20 years ago," he said, hitting a few keys. "The nebula was already nearing the southern edge of the planet, but thick around the three suns in the outer quadrant to the southwest. It is nearly clear over the entire rest of the planet."

"Couldn't it have changed directions for some reason?" Thor asked.

"The nebula isn't even really what's moving, the solar system is what's moving... through space. Believe me, we are in the past! It had to have happened during the tachyon storm."

"How far back are we?" Thor asked, closing his eyes and trying hard to wrap his mind around the events of this day.

"I can't tell from here... I need a point of reference. There are too many variables. Could be just a few hours... could be significantly more."

"If I read the reports in the computer right, there should be a small settlement down there, right?" Thor asked Bjorn and Sky.

"Not anymore. I'm pretty sure everyone left when they firebombed the surface. It destroyed their terraforming cultures. I was pretty young, though," Sky answered.

"Not settlers... the report says it's an abandoned penal colony. The rebels who turned on the Fleet after the firebombing... aren't they still down there? Exiled and left unlocked to fend for themselves...?" Bjorn shrugged, probably being but a child at the time, but Sky sat with an intense stare. It was starting to come back to her.

"I think... You know, it seems like there was a lot of talk about a group of separatists from one ship, in particular... I can't remember the name, but that's probably what you read about. Bjorn, bring up the close up of the pyramid mountain, turned 180 degrees upside down... I want to see it again. If there is still a colony, that's where it should be... they wouldn't have had the equipment to move building materials very far." He hit a few keys and the image of Cheops grew to about the size of a basketball again, dominating the entire view, then shifted upside down, revealing the pyramid mountain, shrouded in a vortex of bad weather. As it moved visibly fast around the great landmark, a small group of what looked like could be buildings were visible near the base. She leapt from her seat, pointing at the globe. "There! At the base of the mountain! Look!"

"Yep... I think I see it too. Are these people we would want to contact, though?" Thor asked.

"They were separatists, not murderers. Aren't we as well?" Sky posed softly.

"How many are there?" asked Bjorn, scrolling through the Fleet record on the subject, but not finding any definitive information.

"I don't remember. It seems like quite a few families, but there was also talk of Fleet prisoners being marooned on some planet... Maybe it was this one. I'm not really sure. What I do know is that we were following a beacon from some kind of civilized source when we made the decision to land here in the first place... It was actually the only reason we even found the place to begin with, having entered the system from the nebula side. It was sort of like a lighthouse beacon in the fog to us. Searches were conducted all over the planet... searches that cost many lives and a fortune in resources in the end, and we never found the source. We lost... we lost-"

"What? What's wrong, Sky?" Thor leaned in to comfort her with one hand on her back. She was starting to get choked up, her eyes tearing up and her breathing getting a little shallower. She looked up at him with a look of grim revelation on her face.

"I think that was when I lost my parents." She was slowly recalling things she had somehow forgotten, or rather buried deep down in defense and blocked herself from remembering. Her eyes were miles away as her voice quietly emerged, melancholy and entranced. "They went out looking for me during a bad storm shortly after we landed on the planet. I was... exploring the mines. I was looking for the spirits the workers kept encountering and got stuck inside until the storm passed. Their skiff never made it back to the compound. The last transmission they sent, they were following some kind of signal coming from within the eye of the storm. They… thought it was me," she sobbed, leaning forward with her head in her hand, "When I returned the next morning, they were gone, along with three others who went out looking for them. I guess I never really let myself grieve... hell, I didn't even accept that they were gone for quite a while afterward… kept expecting them to come around the corner at any moment with some bizarre story of where they had been. I guess I blamed myself."

"I'm so sorry," he said, gently rubbing the back of her neck and shoulders. "I'm sorry for the timing, as well, but we need to go down there. We need to take star chart readings from a point near the mines where their old readings correspond, then cross reference them to find out just how far we traveled… but you don't need to come. In fact, it might be wiser if you didn't," he said in a fatherly way, placing his hand gently on her stomach and looking thoughtfully into her eyes.

She mustered up a smile, then playfully pushed him back a few feet. "You can kindly fuck off, Captain Krey! Nobody knows that place like I do, and I am definitely going with you, thank you very much."

"That's what I wanted to hear," he said with a smile, then scruffled her hair on his way to the front bridge controls. "Plot us a course for atmospheric re-entry and download it to the shuttle, Bjorn, I think it's probably best to leave the Phoenix in orbit to conserve fuel and limit the chances of any kind of enemy incursion by the so-called settlers." Thor pulled his katana from its sheath and pointed with the tip at the small cluster next to the pyramid on the hologram, itself, causing light distortion to sketch out and shine in random directions as the shiny steel blade penetrated the image. He skillfully moved it just slightly, over to the right behind the corner of the mountain outcropping. "Put us down right next to the settlement on their blind side, around the southwest corner of the pyramid mountain. Sky, you know the terrain... help me stock the shuttle. We leave as soon as that storm down there breaks." He slashed out and to the right, fanning down, then returning overhand to the left, pulling the blade back along his left hand, then returning it to his sheath with a quick slap on the hilt.

Copyright © 2011 Gunnar C. Garisson, All Rights Reserved