Linkage: The Narrows of Time (35 page)

Kleezebee shook his head. “Nobody knows where
we are—or when we are, for that matter. No, I’m afraid we’re stuck
here for a while until we can figure out a way home.”

“Orders, Skipper?” Bruno asked.

“First thing tomorrow, you, E-Rod, and I will
walk into town to see if we can barter for transportation or
additional mules. It’s a long way home to the US.”

“Where we headed?”

“Tucson should work. Might as well see what
home was like a few hundred years ago.”

The donkey let out several snot-filled brays
just behind Kleezebee. The animal nudged him in the back of the
neck, twice, with its soggy nose. “Anybody know what we’re supposed
to feed this thing?”

Bruno laughed for almost a minute before
answering. “I don’t think the ration bars are going to cut it,
Boss.”

Chapter
26

Continuity

“Wow, it must have been hard, not seeing your
family for such a long time,” Drew said.

“Are you kidding me?” Lucas said to Drew.

“What?” Drew replied with a surprised look on
his face.

“You believe all that shit?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I know you’re skeptical, but what I just
told you is the truth,” Kleezebee said.

“Sorry, Professor, but it’s a little hard to
swallow.”

“Trust me, it’s all true. Every word of it.
Why would I make up something like that?”

Lucas shook his head and shrugged. “So, now
what? Are we supposed to call you Captain Kleezebee?”

“No, I’m still the same old professor you’ve
always known. Nothing’s changed except now you know where I’m
from.”

Lucas didn’t respond. How could he?
Everything he thought he knew about his mentor—his trusted
friend—was complete fiction. His perception of reality had been
shaken to its very core and he needed a few minutes to reassess the
situation. It was nearly incomprehensible that his bearded,
low-key, flannel-wearing advisor was really a starship captain from
another time. But in the end, he decided that the revelation was so
preposterous, it had to be true.

“So what happened after the trip into
Chicxulub?” Drew asked.

“We made our way across the Mexican desert
and entered the United States. Fortunately, for us, crossing the
U.S. border in Nogales was much easier back then, and we were able
to get our people and supplies into the country without too much
hassle. We entered southern Arizona, found jobs in Tucson, and
settled into our new lives. It took a while, but eventually
everyone accepted the fact that we weren’t going home anytime soon.
Some of them paired off and started new families while others
married women from your planet. I still held out hope that we would
someday return home, so I never remarried. Instead, I enrolled in
the University of Arizona, and earned my doctorates in short order,
before being hired by the physics department. I worked my way up
from there. We’ve been trying to find a way home ever since.”

“Since you’re obviously on Earth, I take it
you eventually decided that time travel was possible?” Drew
asked.

“Actually, just the opposite. It took us
awhile to prove it scientifically, but we’re definitely not from
your future, or ours.”

“What?”

“When we were hurled through the rift, we
were sent to a parallel universe, to an alternate version of
Earth.”

Lucas was pissed. “Inter-dimensional
travel—just like what’s in my thesis that everyone blasted to
hell.”

“Yes. That’s why you needed to run it by me
first.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know
that?”

“What paper?” Drew asked.

Lucas hesitated for a moment, then decided to
come clean with Drew. “A couple of weeks ago, I emailed my
equations for opening a rift in space to your favorite online
magazine. I was hoping to get published and generate some cash for
mom’s medical bills. But it totally backfired. That editor asshole,
Dr. Green, ripped me a new one on his blog. That’s the real reason
Larson shut us down, isn’t it Professor?”

Kleezebee nodded.

Lucas thought about the facts, lining them up
in his head. “So basically, if I hadn’t sent that paper in to
Green, Larson wouldn’t have shut us down, forcing us to run the
experiment a second time. And we all know what happened after that.
So it boils down to this . . . If I hadn’t clicked that fucking
send button, the end of the world never would’ve happened. It’s all
my fault.”

Drew stared a Lucas for a good two minutes,
but never responded to the news.

“What’s done is done. So let it go,”
Kleezebee said.

Lucas agreed, though he was still
upset—mostly with himself.

Drew turned to Kleezebee and asked, “How did
you prove it, Professor? The alternate universe part.”

“Matter in each universe vibrates with its
own specific subatomic frequency, meaning your universe and ours
vibrate differently. Eventually, we were able to use that fact to
rule out time travel and determine what actually happened to
us.”

Neither Drew nor Lucas said anything.

“Do you remember what I taught you in my
Quantum Mechanics course? That the laws of physics can vary from
one universe to the next.”

Drew and Lucas both nodded.

“The same is true for the flow of time. It
can vary as well. Your version of Earth is four hundred years
behind ours, meaning we’re re-living your version of history.”

“Wow, this story just keeps getting better
and better. What’s next? Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi?” Lucas
replied.

Kleezebee put his hands on Lucas shoulders,
squeezed gently, and then said in a soft, gentle tone, “Look,
Lucas. I know you’re upset, but you need to listen to me carefully.
Right now it doesn’t matter where I’m from, or how I got here, or
that you sent that thesis to Green. We can’t change the past. All
you need to be concerned with is what do we do next to stop the
Krellians before they destroy your planet.”

Lucas nodded. He didn’t want to admit it, but
Kleezebee was right. Billions of lives were at stake, including his
mother’s, and they still had a job to do.

“So, that’s how you knew what real estate to
buy and when. You used your knowledge of Earth’s history for
profit,” Drew said.

“To some extent, yes. We also earned
substantial royalties from several technology patents we own. We
pooled our money and purchased old missile silos from the U.S.
government to serve as our network of underground bases.”

“How many do you have, Professor?”

“Thirty-seven. All but two of them have
working jump pads, which is how we move our staff and supplies
around the world.”

“Can you tell us who will win the next five
Stanley Cups? I could place some bets and be a billionaire before
I’m thirty,” Lucas replied.

Kleezebee quickly shook his head. “Sorry.
There’s no guarantee that history will unfold the same on your
version or Earth. The very nature of the multiverse stipulates that
there must be differences, some subtle, some not. For example, in
our universe, Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California,
and Ronald Reagan became President. Also, our Michael Jackson never
went through gender reassignment surgery to become Belle Mae
Watson, the country music singer.”

“What happened to the real Bruno?” Drew
asked.

Kleezebee choked up for a moment. “He died of
prostate cancer in two thousand one. We used our BioTex to keep his
memory and his spirit alive.”

“Why is all this happening now?” Lucas
asked.

“Two reasons. First, the U.S. Navy was
finally able to recover the E-121 for us from our ship. We had to
wait for Earth’s technology to catch up before our ship’s power
core could be salvaged from the deep-sea trench. Once they had it,
our replicas inside the Navy had it redirected into our hands.”

“What’s the second reason?”

“You brought the Krellians here by changing
the specs on your E-121 experiment.”

“The Krellians are behind the energy
fields?”

Kleezebee nodded. “We think so. When you
changed the experiment, NASA’s energy spike sent the E-121 canister
to our home universe, which the bugs must have intercepted and
traced back to your dimension and time. We assume they’ve been
looking for us ever since we disappeared through that rift.”

“Why would the bugs give a shit where you
went?”

“They want our BioTex, assuming they were
able to decipher the data they downloaded from Trinity’s data core.
It would give them a huge tactical advantage in the war.”

“That’s assuming the war’s still going on
after all these years,” Drew said.

“Trust me, it is. As long as there’s advance
technology to be had, they’ll never stop.”

“Unbelievable,” Lucas said, looking at the
ground, shaking his head. “We’re in the middle of an intergalactic
war.”

“Actually, it’s more like a trans-dimensional
war,” Drew replied. “I take it that gooey stuff from the nebula was
the BioTex.”

“An early version of it. We studied that
sample and eventually learned how to synthesize it. If the
Krellians get their hands on it, it would make them unstoppable.
They’d be able to increase their numbers geometrically through
endless cloning. They might even capture and replicate some of our
own high-ranking officials, to infiltrate our leadership and
uncover the location of our colonies. Multiple worlds and trillions
of lives are at stake.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this before,
Professor?”

“We operate on a strict need-to-know basis
for obvious reasons. Plus, we weren’t absolutely sure the Krellian
Empire was behind these attacks until recently, when we started
putting all the pieces together. Remember when I told you in your
apartment that I had seen the black powder once before, a long time
ago?”

Lucas nodded.

“It was on Colony Three-Five-Nine after the
attack, but we didn’t know why it was there or what had created it.
We had never seen the energy fields, either. When the domes started
leaving behind the same residue, we began to suspect the Krellians
were behind the attacks. It wasn’t until you uncovered the source
of the energy spike, that we understood how our enemy found us
here.”

“Basically, we phoned them and told them
where you were,” Drew replied.

Kleezebee nodded. “When we later analyzed the
pattern of the domes, we realized they were tracking us, appearing
in places our replicas had been.”

“Shit, that’s how you knew where the Green
Valley energy dome would appear. You used BioTex to lure it
there.”

“Bingo,” Kleezebee replied.

“So tell us about these bugs? Can we stop
‘em?”

“They’re a warrior race of sadistic,
malevolent creatures that can’t be reasoned with, bargained with,
or dissuaded from their mission. They scavenge entire worlds
without mercy, consuming its resources, its technology, and its
inhabitants.”

“They’re cannibals?”

“No, they don’t eat their own, but they do
think of all other species as a food source.”

Lucas remembered the pyramids of human
remains left behind by the energy fields each time they
disappeared. “If they eat other species, why are their domes
leaving behind the pyramid of remains when they retract to their
dimension?”

“We believe it has to do with your Earth’s
most virulent contagions, like NVL and Striallis. It’s likely that
the Krellians detected them in the bodies of those they returned.
It’s probably the reason why your planet has not been consumed in
mass thus far. Your
flavor
has upset their palate, and your
technology is of little interest to them. They are here for my
people and our technology.”

“So your version of Earth was able to avoid
these viruses?”

“Yes, those two we did. But we had to deal
with a few you avoided, like H1N1 and AIDS. Trust me, it’s been no
picnic in our dimension, either.”

“What do the Krellians look like?” Drew
asked.

“They’re nine-foot-tall crustacean-like
arthropods. They have a hard outer shell that acts like armor, but
they’re bipedal and walk upright. The closest analogy on Earth
would be a fusion of a giant beetle and a crawfish. They have a
powerful set of front claws, long, suction tentacles, a tail with a
serrated-edge stinger, and they drool uncontrollably. Their
appearance is revolting to say the least. And the smell—”

“Next, you’re going to tell us they have acid
for blood, like in the movie
Aliens
,” Lucas said.

Kleezebee laughed.

Lucas wasn’t trying to be funny.

“No, but they’re ruthless predators who’ll
fight to the death to achieve their goals. They simply will not
stop until every advanced civilization in every universe has been
consumed, and its technology acquired.”

“If you leave our planet, will they stop
their attacks?” Drew asked.

“That would be a logical assumption.”

“How will they know when you’re
off-world?”

“In order to track us, their energy fields
must have some sort of remote sensors that can detect our specific
bimolecular signatures. Most of the time, they haven’t been very
accurate, particularly during the daylight hours. We assume that’s
why their domes employ a systematic farming pattern to cover an
entire area once they’ve detected us.”

“Most of the time?” Lucas asked.

“It all has to do with the number of active
domes in the area. When there are three or more, we think they use
a hidden signal to network their sensors together, to perform
multi-point triangulation. We try not to remain out in the open and
stationary for too long, especially at night. Our replicas are even
more vulnerable since their BioTex signature is easier to detect
among this Earth’s inhabitants.”

“When my replica was sucked up on I-19,
didn’t the bugs get their hands—I mean claws—on some of your
BioTex?”