The Farpool (55 page)

Dringoth took that in. “So there
really
are
cities down there,
under the surface?”

Chase spoke. “Hundreds, Major. There are
millions of Seomish. A whole civilization, you wouldn’t
believe—moving your machine would save all of them. You should come
below with us…I could show you things you’d never believe in a
million years.”

Dringoth continued playing with the echopods.
“I don’t know what to believe. Let’s suppose, for argument’s sake,
that I put your idea to Sector. They’ll have to approve it. They’ll
want to send their own people...some are already coming. And
Coethi’s still around…Timejump Command will want to flood this
sector with jumpships, try to clean up the major timestreams.
Provide some kind of defense for Halo Alpha. Look, I’ll be honest
with you two—“ he fluttered his hands, searching for the right
words “—whatever you are…I’m skeptical. But I’ll put the idea to
Sector and see what they say. That’s all I can do.”

Chase and Kloosee both agreed that the offer
was fair. They left the hut and headed out to sea, boarding the
kip’t piloted by Pakma. The other kip’ts of the fleet hovered
nearby.

“Well, what did they say?” Pakma asked.

Kloosee pulsed something more than curiosity
behind her question…the bubbles were complicated, the echoes mixed
and turbulent. Anxiety, maybe? Resignation, blended with a touch of
hope?

“Eekoti
Chase
may have convinced the Uman commander to ask his superiors about
our plan. Maybe it takes a Uman to know a Uman, I don’t know. We’ll
know shortly. In the meantime, keep your distance from the island.
The waters are still boiling. And what’s in those pouches back
there…I’m starving.”

The three of them munched on gisu and ertleg,
with some crab legs thrown in. Chase was hungrier than he
realized.

“Something’s bothering you,
eekoti
Chase,” Pakma told him, as
she sucked on a fruit bulb. “I can pulse it…what is it?”

Chase just shook his head. “I can’t hide
anything from you two.”

“You echo like a midling,” Kloosee told him.
“You haven’t yet learned the Omtorish trick of masking what should
be masked.”

“Well, you’re right, I haven’t. I was
thinking about the wavemaker, how it sort of creates and maintains
the Farpool. If Major Dringoth shuts down the wavemaker, won’t the
Farpool stop working?”

Kloosee admitted that such was likely.
“Longsee…in fact, most of the Academy, think the wavemaker creates
all the whirlpools, including the Farpool. I don’t understand it.
Probably nobody does. But yes, I’d say you’re right. The Farpool
will vanish once the wavemaker is stopped.”

Now, Chase got right to the point. “If you
help the Umans re-build their machine, will the Farpool come back?
Will it re-appear again?”

Kloosee now understood what Chase was driving
at. “Our understanding of the Farpool and how it works is
imperfect. This is a question for Longsee. In my opinion, with help
from the Umans, we can re-create the Farpool when the wavemaker is
re-built.”

Chase had made up his mind. “I want to use
the Farpool again, before it’s shut down. I want to see what’s
happened to Angie.”

Kloosee and Pakma looked at each other.
No words were spoken. They weren’t needed. Echoes and pulses were
enough.
Perhaps Longsee would be better at
explaining the situation to him.

But before either of them could say anything
else, the signaler buzzed. It was Dringoth. He wanted to meet
again. At the hut.

Sector and Timejump Command had approved the
Omtorish plan. Dringoth’s message was simple and direct.

We need to work out the details. At the usual
place…we’ve partially re-built it. Come at once.

Chapter 19

Kinlok Island and Scotland Beach

Time: (Seome) 768.2, Epoch of Tekpotu

(Earth) November, 2122

Within two days, the dismantling
project was well underway. The 1
^st
Time Displacement Battery had a complement of ten Umans, in
addition to Ultrarch-Major Dringoth. The Omtorish fleet consisted
of ten kip’ts, carrying nearly thirty members of that
kel.

Neither side had ever really believed in the
existence of the other.

When the entire kip’t fleet surfaced outside
the bay, floating among the wreckage of dozens of chronotron pods,
Lieutenant Golich remarked to Captain Acth:On’e on the sight.

“After nearly twenty terr in the Corps, I
thought I’d seen everything. Talking fish…driving boats.” Golich
just shook his head, wondering if there was any bug juice left in
the crews mess.

The hut on the sand ridge overlooking the bay
became the de-facto headquarters of the mission. Dringoth told
Chase, Kloosee and, now, Pakma, that rounding up the chronotron
pods was the most important step needed at the beginning.

“They’re irreplaceable. The pods generate the
twist field. Without the pods, the Twister’s a big pile of
metal.”

So, the Omtorish fleet set to work corralling
all the pods which wave and wind action had torn off the top
surface of the Twister and littered across the waters around
Kinlok. That job took a day. When they were done, a large
tchin’ting fiber net had been draped across the waters of the bay,
inside of which clanked and jostled most of the damaged pods.

Kloosee mentioned that it was like herding
pal’penk into their pens. “Except you don’t have to feed them and
talk to them.”

The Time Twister itself was a vast,
twelve-kilometer pie-shaped structure, segmented into quarters,
moored to the seabed with stout anchors and surmounted with
hemispherical caps, which were the chronotron pods. Fully
operational, the machine resembled an enormous inverted dinner
plate, studded on top with dimples and balls. The entire apparatus
was linked by thick ganglia of cables to the island itself, for
power and command and control. The hut where most of the
conferences and planning took place housed tracking instruments.
The control center was housed in a bunker like structure on the
other side of the island, nestled in a small ravine near the
summit.

The project was planned to gather all the
repairable chronopods together, so the Umans could sort out what
worked and what didn’t. Those that could be repaired would be.
Those that couldn’t would be discarded and Sector would have to
furnish replacements. The Time Twister was still operating,
although at a reduced level of effectiveness.

“There are still Coethi ships in the sector,”
Dringoth explained one day. “Even damaged, the Twister can still
yank the bastards to the other side of the galaxy if they come
within range. The Halo still needs us…thank God for that. We may be
damaged but we still pack a pretty good punch…just staying up and
operating will keep the Coethi honest.”

Chase was curious about how the Twister
worked. Golich took him on a little tour of the command shack one
day, just for the novelty of showing off a ‘monster’ to his Uman
comrades. He enjoyed watching them jump out of their seats, then
waved everybody back.

“It’s okay…he’s one of the fish. And he
speaks English too…imagine that.”

Golich explained the Twister’s operation.

“The Time Twister is designed to manipulate
space and time over short volumes of space. Any object caught in
the Twister’s field of influence is accelerated out of the existing
space –time field and flung through a wormhole into unknown and
hopefully very distant reaches of space, perhaps even into other
universes.” Here, Golich called up a display of the machine on a
nearby console. Chase moved closer, causing other crewmen to
scatter abruptly, backing away from Golich’s ‘monster. The
Lieutenant just smirked and went on.

“The Twister contains a naked
singularity at the core of its field. Fifty-five terr ago, we
learned how to use existing stars and their extreme gravitational
fields to compress matter enough to create such a singularity. The
distorted space-time field around this singularity core of the
Twister is known as a
twist
field
.

“Our engineers now have a way of
creating, maneuvering and regulating the effects of the twist
field. This is done through a screening field and a series of
filters known as
twist
buffers
, or just
T-buffers
.

“Like a nuclear power plant with its core
always on, but regulated by control rods, the Twister is also
always on. The singularity engine at the core, once created and
activated, can’t be turned off. But it can be regulated through a
series of T-buffers. These moderate the twist field. The control
station manned by these crewmen here essentially operates a system
of T-buffers.”

Chase thought about the Farpool. “You said
one of the side effects of the Twister is all the whirlpools around
here, in the water.”

Golich agreed. “We’ve seen those. Just side
effects, as you say. Your own people—what are they called--?”

“Seomish…actually, these kelke are
Omtorish—“

“Yes, certainly…they told us about the
whirlpools. Frankly, we use them for sport. The twist field pinches
spacetime just enough to create these vortexes…harmless enough, I
suppose. Sometimes, when we’re bored we catch fish and throw ‘em
in…just to see what’ll happen.”

“One of those vortexes is a whirlpool we call
the Farpool.”

Here, it was Golich’s turn to seem perplexed.
“And you say this Farpool can fling you across time and space…even
back to Earth? We had no idea. Not that it would have mattered…”
Golich looked up, seeing through the roof visions of the Coethi
enemy. “We have our own mission here.”

Chase agreed. “It can. The Seomish call
this mother of all whirlpools the
Farpool
. By accident, they’ve learned that at
certain times of the year, under certain conditions created by the
Time Twister, the Farpool can send small objects…a few Seomish and
their gear…to other places and times. One of those places turns out
to be Earth itself. Home…Scotland Beach. That’s how I got
here.”

“You told me they brought you here.”

“I came willingly. In effect, the Seomish
have learned how to travel in time and space, at least to
Earth.

Golich frowned. “We heard that Urth had been
quarantined…too dangerous to expose them to Coethi attack. An awful
lot of strategic timestreams converge at Earth…the Corps had to
shut them off.”

“The Seomish are pretty smart, Lieutenant.
They’ve catalogued the conditions they need and built an algorithm
to help predict when these conditions will occur. When the right
conditions appear, they know to be ready to enter Farpool. That’s
how my friends, Kloosee and Pakma, wound up on Earth.”

Golich still found it hard to believe. “You
know nobody around here really buys this. They still think your
friends are a bunch of freaks…some kind of talking fish. But what’s
happened the last few days---helping us round up the pods, helping
us segment and break down the foundation, severing the mooring
lines, the support cabling…no pet fish could do that. I mean, just
look at you…you look like a bad dream, something I’d see after
eating too much of the slop they call food around here. Too much
bug juice.”

“It’s that procedure—I can’t even pronounce
it--“

Golich held up a hand. “I know, I know. You
told me. But still-“

Now Chase asked the question he really wanted
to ask. “You’re going to keep the Twister operating as long as you
can?”

“We have too…this sector of Halo Alpha
depends on us.”

“And the whirlpools will still be there?”

Golich shrugged. “I suppose so. Why--?”

“That means the Farpool will still work.”

“If you say so.”

Chase knew what he had to do. Kloosee and
Pakma both had parried his questions about going back through,
seeing Angie again. Now, he thanked Golich for the tour of the
command shack and scrambled back across the rubbly terrain of
Kinlok to the sand dunes overlooking the bay. The Omtorish fleet
was mostly submerged, now helping tie off and secure the Twister’s
mooring lines. Several kip’ts still lolled in the shallows of the
bay, while their crew made repairs and stowed provisions.

One of them was Kloosee’s. Chase hiked down
to the water’s edge.

Kloosee and Pakma were still in their
lifesuits. They were shoving the kip’t out into deeper water. Chase
came up, gave them a hand.

“Can I talk to you?” Chase asked.

They managed to get the kip’t off a sandbar
and then all three of them climbed in. Kloosee drove the kip’t
toward one of the Twister’s mooring cables, anchored to the seabed.
The Twister was still operating so the concussive booms of the
chronopods slammed the water. But Kloosee had lined the cockpit
with seaweed strands, partially muffling the noise.

“We’ll have to use
mah’jeet
to sever the mooring cables,” he
decided. “They should be able to eat through the fibers, given
enough time.”

“Kloos, I want to go back through the
Farpool. It’s not far from here…I know we’ve
discussed…
tried
to discuss
this. I want to see how Angie’s doing.”

Kloosee settled the sled on the sea bottom,
opened the cockpit and slipped out to examine the cable anchoring.
Pakma and Chase followed.

Pakma spoke up. “
Eekoti
Chase, we don’t have a lifeship with us.
You can’t go through the Farpool without a lifeship.”

Now Kloosee weighed in. “The Metah would have
to approve. The Farpool is risky. We don’t send people through
without preparing, consulting the Academy, talking with Longsee.
His scientists have learned how to time the Farpool, minimize the
risk.”