The Long Road to Gaia (19 page)

I watched Jon's fight with the Assassin on
Enterprise, but he didn’t need my help.

I whispered some ideas to him as he sailed
the void, which struck me funny at the time. What a galactic entity has to do
to get a laugh now and then.

With the team preparing to go down to the
planet in the Sirius system, I knew something was about to go wrong when One
turned up.

She pulled me into the future, and we
watched Jon's unsuccessful attempt to save some of his team.

"What do I do?" I asked One.
"Every time I yank him back he gets hurt."

I looked at her when she said nothing.

"Or are we leaving them here to
die?" I went on.

"Oh no, they can't die. At least, not
yet."

"So?"

"Wait, I'm checking the
possibilities."

It took her a while, so there must have
been a lot of them.

"Fine," she said at last.
"He's asleep at a good place in time. Show it to Jon as a dream, and let
him change it."

"You're sure?"

"Yes. Most of the projections of what
he does turn out a lot better. All he really needs to know is what they had
planned will take too long."

"Why don’t I just whisper that to
him?"

"Where's the fun in that?" she
grinned at me. "Besides, without the visuals, he probably won't believe
it."

"Good point."

We returned to where we started from, and I
went forward again making a recording of it.

I shifted back to where Jon was sleeping,
and played it into his mind as he slept.

"NO!" he screamed, and jerked
upright so violently he was propelled completely off the bed.

"Stop doing this to me!" he
yelled at the ceiling, as I started to run.

"Huh?" I said.

One was laughing.

"He thinks he time travelled again.
You made the mistake of feeding him real time, so it felt to him like he
actually lived it."

"Damn."

We watched as Jon went to insane lengths to
recover his team as fast as possible, using exactly what they had originally
said was too dangerous to use – a fighter and a grav sled.

In the end, he hauled the shuttle out as
well, and ended up smashed at the back of Custer's Cargo Bay. They to cut him
out of the fighter.

"I'm not sure that was the best way of
handling it," I said to One.

"Why?"

"He nearly killed himself this
time."

"It worked. Don’t knock it."

She vanished before I could say anything
further.

* *
*

I was wandering around the ship not much
later, when I bumped into the twins talking to Jane. I connected to both the
twins at the same time, and whispered to them.

They started talking about building the
digging machine and giant suits they'd seen in Jon's 'dream'.

I left them to it.

"Thirteen!" came a voice.

"Yes?"

I steeled myself for a dressing down.

"Good thinking."

The next feather I encountered, knocked me
over.

* *
*

When I returned to see what Jon was doing,
I found Aline telling him about what the twins and Jane were doing.

I gave Jon a vision of a line of giant
suits, firing into a sea of black.

Then I wondered why I’d done so. Then I
wondered where it had come from.

It sounded like Kali chuckling in the
background, so I stopped wondering.

* *
*

Jon had taken the ship into the Null point.
The whole way out of it, I stood next to Jane.

About half way out, One spoke.

"You need to tell Jane when to
stop."

"When do we stop?"

"I'll tell you."

"Why?"

"For good reasons."

"Jane," I said to her, the same
way we had talked the first time we met, "when I tell you to stop, stop
the ship."

"Why?" she asked.

"Everything is not as it seems here.
We need to be somewhere exactly, and it requires the ship to stop first, before
we can determine where to go next."

I was guessing.

"Will you explain that after?"

"No. I think you'll figure it out on
your own."

"Gee thanks."

We waited.

"Stop," said One at last.

"Stop," I said to Jane.

We stopped.

"What the hell?" she exclaimed.

I grinned, and went back to standing behind
Jon.

* *
*

Called, I shifted to the Pure Land meeting
place. I was the last to appear it seemed. One, Twelve, Kali and Ganesha were
there before me. There were no spare seats for others. I sat.

"Jon requires some information now
Thirteen," said One.

"What sort?" I asked.

"Past life," said Ganesha.

"He needs to dream this
information," said Kali.

"Which lives?"

"From his last Atlantean lives."

I looked at her. She wasn’t forthcoming
with any more. I turned to One. She said nothing as well.

"Err," I said, using a human
mannerism.

Ganesha touched me on the forehead. Times,
dates, and locations flooded in.

"Enough?" said One, grinning.

"I guess so."

"Go and record what you need,"
said Kali. "Be brief in each case, just enough to give Jon the message.
Then feed it to him as a dream."

Three of them vanished, leaving me with
Twelve.

I ignored Twelve completely, and shifted
back through time.

Three cities, all drowned. Crystal
technology Engines left running. A soul ascends. The soul reincarnates again
millennia later, lives many lives over the millennia which follow, and ascends
again.

From outside space and time, the soul
monitors all to do with the cities. Until I suddenly draw his attention
to one of them, now buried under the accumulated silt of the ocean.

The specter of a man appears, casting
around for a healing chamber he knows is there, finding it, and descending to
the 'engines'. He does the maintenance which is long overdue. He moves from
city to city, and back to his body. He is human. The watcher is surprised.

"So are you now", Kali whispers
to him.

He is confused, but accepts that there is a
time differential happening he is not in control of.

The human sits in a chair in meditation,
but soon comes out of it. He is surprised to find an hour has passed, since for
him it has been seconds, while at the same time, he feels the exhaustion of
being gone for a day. There is a date: 2005, but this tells the watcher
nothing, since it has no relation to the calendar he knows. The watcher looks
out the portal of the structure he is in, and wonders at a society which has
arisen without crystal technology.

"This is the time of metal. Its master
you will one day be."

Kali again.

"Remember," I say to the watcher.

Time passes again, and the watcher weeps
for a dead world.

Darkness comes. And goes. Leaving a
pristine world.

I return to Jon, asleep on his bed, and
feed him the whole sequence.

"Remember," I whisper to him
again, for it was his soul weeping for the world.

* *
*

Jon was standing over a crystal cave in
Brazil. Precisely where his ancestor of the same name had stood on his visit to
Brazil.

For just a moment, I let him see through
his ancestors eyes.

Suddenly I figured out why his ancestor had
seen what he had of the future, and I went back to 2016, and let him see
through Jon's eyes now.

Two men, six hundred years apart, linked
through an entity neither knew existed.

I grinned to myself as I continued watching
Jon, the latter.

* *
*

Now Jon was standing over the location of
Camelot, to the southwest of what once was Ireland, and used to be underwater.

With a grin to myself, I went looking back
along his lineage, until I came to an ancestor of his, standing in the same
place.

For a moment, Jon was standing in the port
area for a very large medieval looking city, looking towards an impressive
castle.

And then he wasn’t, looking at a flat area
containing almost nothing.

"Who do you think you are?" said
Twelve. "Jack Deth?"

I laughed really hard at this, as it
revealed something about Twelve I hadn't realized. He'd been watching all the
same human entertainment I had all these years, without letting on to me.

Twelve frowned, realizing he'd said too
much, and vanished.

I laughed harder.

Jon flopped back on the grass, and lay
there, letting the rain hit him in the face. I could hear his thoughts about
really needing some sleep. Although he'd missed seeing the trap again, the
teams had prevailed, and I'd not needed to intervene in any way.

Jon was getting better all the time. While
nothing went to plan, which was quite normal, his responses were getting better
and better, and needing much less input from me. Which was of course, the
object of the exercise from our point of view.

"Time to intervene," said One.

"How this time?"

"He's about to fall asleep. Give him a
dream."

I didn’t bother asking what. I flowed
forward on this timeline until the bomb went off, and then as soon as he went
to sleep, I fed it to him in a dream, blurring the edges, so to speak, so he
thought it was a dream.

I really was sick of the limitations One
was placing on my ability to see the future, and these little short hops were
nothing but a tease.

But by the time Jon was awake again, One
was gone.

* *
*

"Someone get that Frigate!"
yelled Lacey. "It's going to ram…"

I was standing behind Jon's chair as we
jumped into the Last Hope system, into a fleet of pirate ships we hadn't seen
were there.

I slowed time to give Jon time to see and
respond most effectively.

He rolled BigMother over the top of the
Frigate, limiting the collision to just shields.

In hindsight, he probably hadn't needed the
slow motion. But I’d been reacting instinctively the same as he was.

We made an effective team, even if he
didn’t know I was here.

* *
*

I'd finally caught up.

"Hello. I'm Admiral Jonathon Hunter
from the Mercenary unit Hunter Security. I'm also the Duke of Hunter's Run, and
the Duke of Norfolk, in the British sector. I'm recording this vid from a
system with no official name, one jump away from the system which stopped man's
expansion down the spine. The system where the explorer ship Prometheus died,
and which still prevents us from moving core-wards."

So began what was later to be called 'The
Hunter Memorandum'.

It was the only part of this end of this
timeline I'd been allowed to see, several hundred years earlier.

With luck, it meant I was finally to the
end of this baby sitting gig.

I heard a chuckle.

* *
*

"The Gates of Death!" exclaimed
Amanda suddenly.

"What?" responded Jon.

"This is what Kali meant, isn’t it?
The jump points into the Death system could be called the 'Gates of Death'."

"I don’t know about you, but I assumed
she meant actual death."

"I did too, but think about it. Kali
knew we were coming here, and she told us we would, only not in a way we would
understand at the time."

"She knew you wouldn’t want to come
here," added Aleesha, "so she allowed us to mislead ourselves as to
her meaning."

"You could be right," Jon said.
"It would be like her, and this is the gateway to the Death system."

I heard another chuckle.

"Could she have meant it both
ways?" asked BA.

"You had to say it, didn’t you,"
said Alana.

"Had to be said," added Dick.

"So," Jon said, "You think
we shouldn’t go in there?"

No-one answered. He made the decision to
delay going in until the morning.

I figured this was a good time to see what
was coming. I moved into the future along this timeline, and was very surprised
to find I could.

Prometheus went boom. BigMother went boom.
The galaxy ended. The universe ended.

Ouch.

I fed the first part of it to Jon as
another dream.

* *
*

"Study mostly," said Jill.
"Mum won't let me fall behind. I've never been much for school, but your
Library is incredible. I've never seen anything like it. Jane showed me how to
do a search, and instead of conventional information coming back, it delivers
six hundred years of accumulated knowledge."

This was news to Jon, and me. Music, and
flat and hollo screens, Jon had brought with him. The rest sounded like
Outback's copy of Galactica's main archive, continually updated in the
centuries since she vanished. But how had Jane obtained a copy of it?

I shifted to the Bridge, and asked her.

She laughed.

"The first time we took Gunbus to
Outback, there was a delivery to the ship while Jon was off it. It was a data
storage device, and from it I uploaded the whole Galactica-Outback-Gaia
database. It was accompanied with a request to not tell Jon about it. It had a
return address on it, so I sent it back with the same delivery droid."

"Any idea who it was from?"

"No, but I figured the only people with
the access and authority to copy it, who might want Jon to have a copy, were
the Keepers."

"How would they know?"

"How do they know any of this?"

"Good point."

* *
*

For the record, I accept no responsibility
for most of Jon's dreams. The ones in the corridor, and the cat fight, for
example, were purely his.

* *
*

"I could make up models of the six
systems," offered Jane through coms, to the meeting of Generals. "Jon
could then watch a motion display of how each system looks through a period of
time, looking for something to become familiar to him. But it would require a
ship to visit each system, and gather the data. It would likely be a month or
more before I had all the data I needed."

One appeared beside me.

"Twelve is organizing this now,"
she said.

"Why?"

"So it's available as soon as Jon
meets the Keepers."

"How?"

"We have our resources now, within
Human society. It costs credits to do anything, and we made sure centuries ago
we had the means to do what needed to be done."

"What's needed to be done?"

"Humans are so easy to get to do what
you want them to. A credit here, a credit there. Some of them even stay
bought."

"So you bought the system data they
need?"

"Yes, if you look at it that way.
Twelve is dealing with it now, and has been for most of the past year. We sent
AI piloted ships, designed and built specifically for the task, into those six
systems to drop recording drones almost a year ago. The data will be on
BigMother, without anyone knowing, when they reach Outback."

"What else have you spent credits
on?"

"Stopping the media creating mass
panic around what they now call the Hunter Memorandum, for one thing. That was
expensive."

"Good call."

"That’s what I'm here for."

"What's our credit levels like
then?"

"Enough for our purpose. When the time
is right, certain groups with the right level of karma will be saved, because
we have the credits to build what will save them."

"And those who don’t have the
karma?"

"They will reincarnate somewhere
else."

* *
*

As BigMother jumped into the Gaia system
behind Galactica, One, Twelve and I stood in space and watched them go.

"What a year!" I said.

"Indeed," agreed Twelve.

"It worked out," said One.

We looked at her, puzzled.

"We had to do too much altering, for
my liking," she said.

"Still, as you said, it worked
out."

"Yes, it did Thirteen. You kept him
alive, he became the leader we need, and now we get on with the next
phase."

"Next phase?" asked Twelve and I
together.

I was hoping for some R&R. Jon had a
beach going begging at the moment, and no-one being there was a good time to go
visit it. I could even take a full form for a while, and see if one of the
local beach babes wanted a dirty weekend with a handsome stranger.

"Thirteen, stay focused."

I shook my head, and looked at her. There
was the makings of a grin there, being suppressed.

"Now what?"

She nodded to Twelve, and he vanished.

"Come Thirteen, we have things to do."

"Beaches, babes, and really wild
things?"

"No."

"Spoilsport," I mumbled.

She took hold of my shoulder, and we shifted.