Raine VS The End of the World (15 page)

“Oh.”

When at last they landed by the beach and Gerrit re-stocked his parachute, a shrill siren sliced through the still air. Its high-pitched ringing wailed in the darkness. The duo became swiftly aware of hundreds of pale, blind creatures of every shape and size emerging from the water and making for the center of the landmass.

Raine squinted in the general direction they were moving towards; there was some sort of bunker.

“What is that sound?” Gerrit asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing!”

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he told her, somewhat excitedly.

“Whatever it is, I think we ought to follow those critters,” Raine said, pointing up towards the far-off opening they’d fallen through.

Far-off specks materialized overhead and grew rapidly in descent. Suddenly, a hot dog stand fell towards them and exploded not a hundred feet away, shaking the island and spewing sand into their faces.

They were being bombarded.

“Holy shit,” remarked Gerrit.

And here I thought I was done running away
, Raine thought.
Guess fate’s not leaving me with much of a choice.

“Run!” she cried, taking his hand. They made for the shelter, following close behind amphibious beasts dodging or falling prey to the variety of missiles.

Gerrit was determined. A brief thought made its way through his mind:
the ‘Verse had never before been this unpredictable.

Something beyond his normal strength propelled him forward. He tightened his grip on Raine’s hand, activated a speed-enhancing
Haste
spell, and bounded over the beach. The bombing continued.

“Don’t you have more of those teleport bubbles or something?” screamed Raine.

The boy pulled out a small handheld device from his belt pack. “Even if I did, they wouldn’t work in a Hidden zone like this, but this is an instant shield generator. Just tell me when and I’ll activate it!”

She peeked upwards just in time. “DUCK!”

Gerrit pulled Raine down beside him and activated the shield. She spun around as the generator’s soothing hum created a pulsing dome of energy.

Raine couldn’t avert her eyes from looking directly at the firebomb as it hit the shield and exploded, sending flaming shards every which way. Right above her, Gerrit’s intense eyes let her know without words that he was waiting for a go signal.

“Clear!” yelled Raine as the debris vanished, and in one swift motion Gerrit bolted forward, pulling her close behind. They hadn’t gone more than four steps.

“DUCK!”

Again he pulled her down beside him and activated the shield. This time a giant pencil case smashed open, sending its oversize contents flying every which way.

“Clear!” Raine called, once the pencil compass stuck into the sand like a lance.

“Two left! We’d better hurry!”

They sprinted through the thick sand as fast as their virtual legs could take them and made it to within a hundred feet of the entrance. Suddenly a cruise liner fell out of the sky.

Raine was so shocked she couldn’t even call out “DUCK!” All she could do was tug at Gerrit’s sleeve. He glanced upwards. Neither could turn away from the monstrosity. Gerrit pressed the button and they both stopped, flabbergasted, as the ship bounced off their protective bubble and inexplicably shattered as if it were made of Lego bricks.

They pulled their way out of the debris and reached the shelter entrance when Raine turned around and noticed a small penguin waddling towards them.

“Um, Gerrit?” She intoned, pointing.

“Stay inside!” commanded the warrior, who promptly ran out to meet the pesky bird. A cement truck materialized not a hundred feet in the air and landed right where Gerrit had been a split-second ago. Raine covered her sand-struck eyes. When she opened them, her stalker was dashing towards the shelter, penguin safely nestled in his arms.

She let them in and shut the door just as an explosion blasted her off it.

IX. Trauma

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan

Lily clamped her teeth down hard as the thermonuclear engine propelled her
Phoenix
through the atmosphere. Nearing the burnout point at a steep angle far from the equator, the pressurized shuttle shook her with as much G-force as she could handle.

Needless to say, she would rather have been down on the surface, coordinating her strike teams. But Leandra, Joaquin, and the others had their orders, and she had no alternative but to put her trust in them.

Blast that stupid envelope
, she thought. One of her red envelopes, an urgent message from her future self with more than the usual amount of encryption, had been sent to the
Belladonna
. There was no way Rutger could transmit the message electronically without risking interception by the enemy.

It had better be worth it. I’ve wasted a good bit of fuel on this trip.

As if that weren’t bad news enough, when the
Valkyrie’s
rocket slide launched her from Terra, she dropped her bottle of anxiety pills somewhere in the cabin, and it rattled out of arm’s reach. Tears erupted from her eyes at the increasing G-force as the afterburners kicked in. In a few seconds she would break away from the pull of the Earth’s gravitational field, and it was in these trying times that the traumatic memory played itself out once more in her mind’s eye.

My parents are gone.

Dark safety goggles over closed eyes, seven-year-old me cries for their lives, curled up on the floor as the Belladonna’s reactor bursts with converted solar energies.

SpaceTime Warp Initiation in ten seconds.

This was the part that always made me nauseous. The part where Mommy holds my hand and tells me everything’s okay.

But Mommy’s gone now.

Instead, XF-22 holds me close. Even his rigid, mechanical arms provide no small comfort as the space station whirls around like a top.

The spinning grows faster and faster.

Countdown timer reads two seconds.

“Hold your breath, Lily,” she’d say. “Pretend you’re underwater, safe as a fish in a tub.”

An echoing boom shakes the air. My stomach jumps up into my chest, and for a second, I’m weightless. Everything is calm.

The loud crunching sounds fade and the Belladonna’s finally stopped spinning.

It’s over. The camel just passed through the eye of the needle.

Uncurling from a shivering ball of sweat, I surface, take a breath at last.

“Are you all right, Captain Lily?” XF-22 asks from the speaker within its metal mouth.

All I can do is nod.

It takes a while to regain my balance. I amble out to the bridge.

It’s empty, and silent as a warped fever dream.

The Earth casts its blue glow across the wide room.

I shuffle over to the control panel, slippers silent as they cross the carpeted floor. My head’s placed to the glass, hoping against reason, logic, and the laws of physics for their safe return.

Instead, all I could see was the Earth. The planet that birthed my parents, and their murderers.

But it wasn’t the Earth as I’d ever recognized it. The continents were distributed all wrong.

The readout on the control panel pegged the date as 225,000,000 B.C. I’d been sent back to the late Triassic period.

Mom and Dad’s half-empty coffee cups remain in their cup-holders. This is when it got too much.

“Rutger! Take me back! I want to go back and save them!”

“Negative, Captain.”

“Why?! And don’t call me ‘Captain’! Call me ‘Miss Lily’, and that’s an order!”

“Apologies, Miss Lily. Presently, I cannot return you to the future. It goes against the instructions left by your mother.”

“Then take me back earlier!”

“Negative. Even if I could fulfill your request, you are not permitted to use the SpaceTime Temporal Drive until you have completed your parents’ education program.”

“Their what?”

A massive list of required reading, viewing, and studying appeared in the holographic display. Logic. Rhetoric. Languages. Ethics. Philosophy. History. Advanced maths. The sciences.

Ugh. “Um. Homework? Seriously?”

I’ve triggered a response. Father’s voice emanates from the console. Ghosts of my parents materialize, clad in their familiar lab jackets. Recordings. Daddy speaks first.

“Lillian, if you’re running this emergency program, your mother and I are unfortunately dead. For that, I am truly sorry. You will need to take ownership of the
Belladonna
, or else destroy it. That is why and where we come in. See, your progress in astrophysics and martial arts has been phenomenal, but as far as the mission’s concerned…”

With a nod, he signals for Mom to take over.

“Dearest Lily, you’re probably wondering what this list is all about. Your father and I raised you the best that we could. We trust you completely with our life’s work. But you are currently the sole pilot of the most complicated piece of machinery in known history. Don’t think about the mission for now, okay? We don’t want to force you into it. You have your own future. We want you to work through this with us. So don’t worry, be happy. Promise?”

“I promise,” younger me says fervently, sticking out her pinky to match her mother’s. It activates a response.

“Good. Before you can get behind the controls of the
Belladonna
, you must first complete your training. We have personally programmed your classes, and made the options as freeing as possible. I wish we could have fostered a true dialogue, letting you choose your topics, the way it’s always been. But even the most advanced technology has its limitations, and your life, and the lives of many others, may one day depend on your understanding. So we’ll see each other every day for a while.”

I can’t help the tears upon seeing my parents’ faces, but I nod in assent and understanding. I’d get to see my beloved Mom and Dad just a little longer. Filled with a newfound courage, I vow that I’ll get them back, or else make them proud of their daughter.

I don’t need to promise anything. I’m going to finish what you started, or I’m going to die trying.

The
Phoenix
popped right out of the atmosphere in a ball of flames. Lily felt weightlessness take hold and drew a breath of relief, her suit drenched in sweat. She hated her frail, diminutive body, but at least the limb enhancements helped stabilize her circulation.

She rested her eyes as the shuttle continued its hour-long journey to the
Belladonna
, and set the top-mounted turrets to seek out and automatically destroy any of Lorelei’s probe satellites.

Practicing her Vipassana Meditation, Lillian observed her breathing and pulse calmly and equanimously, slowing her oxygen intake.

Multiple cloaking mechanisms protected the
Belladonna
from all prying eyes. Its own probes circled in orbit, reinforcing the outer space junk barriers. The only way Lily could find her way back home was from a homing beacon in her key. She greatly wished that she could have activated the
Phoenix’s
SpaceTime Warp Initiator, but her last bits of saved-up temporal energy not too long ago.

There was no turning back now. Both sides’ cards were in play. Raine would be her trump card. The ace up her sleeve. And Queen Lorelei’s hand was slipping.

After docking at the external arm to allow for zero gravity maintenance to be done on the
Phoenix
, Lily drifted through the airlocks, climbed out of her spacesuit, and floated down the tunnel between the shuttle’s docking arm and the main hull of the
Belladonna
.

“Good evening, Miss Lily,” came a sound from the P.A. system as she stepped through the next pressurized airlock to the bridge and settled into the artificial gravity.

“Evening, Rutger,” she said, undressing. “Have my dream analyzer ready, and the bath set to 105 degrees. Afterwards, I shall want a mug of hot cocoa with marshmallows.”

“Of course, Miss Lily.”

Sitting in front of her holo-display with an incomparable mug of cocoa and a puffy mess of recently blow-dried hair, Lily resigned to allowing herself a modicum of solace. Using a small track ball and two buttons attached to her armchair, she scrolled through footage taken off the
Endless Metaverse
server that day. From every conceivable camera angle, there was Raine with her confused stares, a curious child navigating a dangerous digital domain. The poor girl had no idea what she was getting into. Lily checked her Dream Recorder; it was still loading the brain wave data from her last trancelike vision.

“Miss Lily, the message has been analyzed and has not been corrupted,” Rutger said in a soothing voice.

Lily turned in her armchair to see XF-22 standing before her in an apron, holding a silver platter with the red envelope. She examined its sole content - her personal calling card - underneath a magnifying glass and over a small black light. Symbols emerged. Familiar hieroglyphs, her newest trademark language. It was legit. She mentally deciphered them and read the letter aloud.

L,

Greetings love. Message sent via recovered cells on NEdn. Further resources nonexistent. Primary Agent 99 in custody of Alpha; recovery at Maximum Risky. Difficult spring: army mobilization complete. Possible split server transference leading to insurgency destruction at Heart protected Nowhere Land 0004-1-923701. Apologies: strike team unable to locate and shut down Overseer. Final extraction and confrontation require assistance not attempt SingleHand warn true.

Love and trust,

L

“Damn,” Lily said, and crumpled the card in her hands. Then she straightened it out again, read it once more, and handed it back.

“Rutger, as usual, make note of coordinates from origin and add to no-travel list. Refuel the
Phoenix
. I will prep a game plan in due time.”

Lillian planted a golden circlet on her head and concentrated very hard on what she’d just read. She then pointed at the central console.

“Read ‘em back,” she requested. It was one of the methods Lily had developed to keep herself sane; by having Rutger log and store her inner thoughts in a massive database, she could think clearer about her quest.

“According to this message, Lorelei will execute a trap using Gerrit as bait. She remains in possession of twenty-two fuel cells and the Temporal Drive power converter, preventing me from engaging the fission reactor and converting fuel towards time travel. We don’t have any more fuel. We can’t change the past. This is it. I really feel like some frosted wheat cereal.”

Following the adaptive behavior procedures set in place by Carl Hermes, Rutger laughed, putting the Captain a little at ease. “Shall I materialize a bowl of frosted wheat cereal?”

“That does sound great, actually,” Lily said with a nod, still lost in thought. “Thank you.”

After finishing the cereal, Lily asked Rutger to bring forth a candle.

She lit it, and held a respectful silence for her future-self, now trapped in a doomed parallel existence. Lily went by her parents’ Causality Theory, which was this: any parallel timelines created would eventually disappear entirely, with the true world line being determined by changes in the far past as dictated by prior temporal interference.

It was based off something once called ‘The Butterfly Effect’, a pre-war term from the Alpha world line, coined by proponents of Chaos Theory. There were other hypotheses about the outcomes of these universes, but most ended with the untimely life failure of Lily’s future self.

Now that Future Lillian had sent her report, she would continue the mission until the now-tangent universe presumably disappeared (or continued to go on, if the Causality Theory was wrong). If she ultimately botched her duties at Earth’s end, she would issue the failsafe, destroying the
Belladonna
, along with herself inside it.

The Captain often thought of all the ways she’d died or failed in alternate timelines, according to the backlog of notes other Lilies had sent back to the Triassic, lifetimes before the circumstances that led to her current predicament.

Apparently, uniting the world powers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by revealing her data about the solar flare ended in chaos on Earth, and the
Belladonna
being hunted down.

Convincing the great philosophers of Ancient Greece and Persia of the dangers of the future was a promising attempt, but in that timeline the
Belladonna
was fatally struck by a meteoroid and, having barely escaped with her life in the
Phoenix
, Lily could only transmit a final goodbye before being stranded on Earth during that time period.

Swaying the outcome of World War I led to a very different world, one that developed space travel before understanding its consequences, resulting in a literal space war between nations that culminated in widespread genocide.