Post #133 August 6 2018

“Excerpt from Time Jumpers”

As promised, here is a peek at the first episode of my new series Time Jumpers.  The episode is entitled “Marooned in Voidtime.”  It debuts February 1, 2019.

 

Chapter 1: “Storm Warnings”

“Time is an illusion.”

                                    Albert Einstein

Storm

Kinlok Island

Time Stream T-001 (2814 CE)

T-date: 001-01-22

 

It was foggy, misty, and wet when Cygnus finally touched down on the world that all the time jumpers called Storm.   The ship settled to a rattling landing on the edge of a rocky precipice, overlooking the ocean.  Ice and sleet flecked the portholes.  Wind gusts rocked the ship.  Back on E deck, Alicia Yang looked over at Acth:On’e and just shook her head.

“Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood, Toonie.”

The TM1 said nothing back, just focused on his console.

Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth’s voice crackled over the 1MC.  “Secure all vanes and planes.  Rudder amidships and locked.  Make sure the core’s safe.”

His second in command, Jump Commander Nathan Golich studied his board.  “Singularity core at ten percent, just ticking over.  Planes and vanes secure.”

After all the vibrations had subsided, Dringoth checked with the TS1, Evelyn M’Bela.

“How close to our target coordinates, Evelyn?”

M’Bela, sitting behind the two command consoles, studied her board and its plots and displays.  “Best I can make out, we’re within a few decades of the temporal focus, based on your maneuvers and our physical landing point is here—” she pointed to a map.  “Southeastern edge of this little rockpile of an island, about six hundred forty kilometers from the polar ice pack. Cygnus will auto-confirm once she takes sky sightings.”  M’Bela peered out the porthole at the ice fog enveloping the ship.  “If she can even take sightings in this crap.”

Dringoth pronounced himself satisfied.  “Okay, then, that’s it.” He got on the comm.  “First Time Displacement Battery, get your asses in gear.  We’ve got work to do.”

Cygnus had come to Storm with a critical mission, so said Time Guard and Battalion Ops.  The planet was nothing but ocean, save for a scattering of islands.  Scouted and mapped a decade ago by the Survey Service, Storm had been left alone until the enemy Coethi had begun to make a major move into this sector.  Storm may have been a dreary backwater of a place, but she was strategically located right in the face of the Coethi advance.  Newton’s Jaw itself was behind Storm and her star-sun Sigma-Albeth B, only a few light months away.  The great lens of gravimetric instability was likely the Coethi’s first target if their advance continued along this vector.  That and the small system around 40 Omicron 2—Gavrilon and Nanjiang, principally—non-Alliance worlds but Uman nonetheless.  The intel people at T2 had theorized that the Jaw would make a tempting target to the Coethi advance, owing to the fact that if a jumpship entered the zone, she could take shortcuts to whole bag of time streams, without having to risk popping into and out of voidtime.

Storm was right in the middle of a vast arc of space centered on Newton’s Jaw.  The dreary backwater was now a place of high, maybe even critical, strategic significance.  And it was 1^st TD’s job to install and operate the Time Twister on this rockpile.

Dringoth gathered the entire crew in the wardroom on B deck.

“We’ll do the job the way we trained.  Acth, you and Golich will break out the skimmer and get going on the foundation and the main structure.  Yang and M’Bela, unship all the chronotron pods and bag ‘em up.  Once the structure’s solid, you’ll be installing those.  URME, you and me will stay with the ship for the time being.  I want an all-sector scan up and operating at all times.  Get with Alicia on that.  The Bugs are nearby, I can feel it.  They may be somewhere out there in voidtime, just waiting to pounce.”

URME 101—the Unit Reserve Memory Entity—nodded and said, “Yes, sir.   Copy that.”  The head of the para-human swarm entity nodded, just slightly out of phase.  Everybody saw it—after days and days underway, they were used to it by now—and when Dringoth frowned at the roughness of the configuration—Yang straight away jumped in and said, “I’ve already got a patch for that config, Skipper.  I can download it tonight…better tracking, for sure.”

“Do that,” Dringoth growled.  “Every time URME shakes his head, I get dizzy.”

The crew moved out, donned their hypersuits and, one by one, cycled through Cygnus’ lockout on F deck.

The first order of business was to set up some kind of defensible perimeter around the ship, out to a distance of several hundred meters.  This was done by Alicia Yang, the Defense and Protective Systems tech.

Yang plopped down through thin ice into the shallow lake they had landed in and was immediately brushed by a large lizard-like creature undulating its way across the surface.  “Cyclops doesn’t even have a name for it.”  She adjusted her headgear slightly to get more annotation in her eyepiece.  “Some kind of sauropsid reptile…probably can move at high speed land or water.”

The rest of the team followed Yang across the shallow lake, sloshing their way up a low bank to drier ground.  The DPS1 extracted a small capsule from her web belt and thumbed its control stud on top.  Instantly, a fine mist issued from the capsule, flickering slightly over their heads.  Yang waved it about her head in a circle.

“Launching ANAD sensorbots now,” she announced. 

The mist dispersed and vanished from view.  But now, 1^st TD had eyes and ears to probe their surroundings and warn them of approaching danger.

The Survey Service had named this little rockpile Kinlok Island.  It was nothing but a big claw and tooth-shaped spit of rock and hills, barren except for a few forlorn and very prickly trees, and small swipe of beach along the southwest coast.  Rough surf, driven by gale-force winds, smashed and hissed against the promontory below the ship.  Spray and ice chips were everywhere, stinging faces not yet covered by hypersuit helmets.

“At least it’s breathable,” muttered Golich, twisting a handle to release the skimmer.  The sled dropped down on its cradle, slid off onto the ground and began automatically unfolding into operating position.  “Grab those bags and we’ll load up.”

“Smells like Telitorian eggs…that somebody left out too long.”  Acth:On’e opened a small compartment alongside one of Cygnus’ landing gear and scooped up an armful of small containers.  Each one contained a small replicant swarm, complete with master bot, configged when opened to begin assembling the seabed footings, foundations, support cables and upper dome of the Twister.  Two kilometers in diameter when fully replicated and outfitted, the Twister would resemble an inverted dish, with its surface studded by small polyps, the chronotron pods.  Controls and processor gear stood at the apex of the dish, in a small housing that looked like puckered lips. 

Golich sniffed, checking the skimmer for seaworthiness.  “Oh, well, ours not to reason why—”

They slid the skimmer down a nearby slope, loaded her up and set off through heavy chop and spray for a position marked on their eyepieces, several kilometers out to sea.  The Survey Service had identified the coordinates as just above a small trench in the seabed, some three hundred meters below.  It would make for a good solid ground for the Twister’s foundations.

Acth:On’e was content to let Golich do the steering, while he counted down the distance to the drop site.  “How long do we have to stay here?” he wondered out loud.  “Smells like a sewer I once fell into on Telitor when I was a boy.  It was outside Kasala, just before my V3.  I had that memory wiped in the upload.”

Golich shrugged, squinting through the sleet.  “Wish I could do that.  Wipe bad crap from my head.  As to how long we’re here, that’s up to the Captain.  Battalion says get the Twister up and operating and then sit tight.  T2 thinks the Bugs will make a move pretty soon.”

Acth:On’e called bingo when his eyepiece said they had reached the coordinates.  “Right here.  Mark and anchor.  Isn’t this gadget the Mark I version?  Untested and all?  How do we even know it’ll work like they say?”

“Hey, Toonie…when you’re in the Guard, jolts like you and me don’t get to actually know anything.  We just do things, like whatever the brass says.  Get buttoned up.  We’ve still got to go down there and find the right spot.”

The two of them sealed their hypersuits, buddy-checked all fittings and seals and dropped overboard into the freezing water.

Once completed, the Time Twister itself would be moored to the seabed with stout anchors and surmounted with hemispherical caps, which were the chronotron pods.  Fully operational, the entire apparatus would be linked by thick ganglia of cables to the island itself, for power and command and control.  A hut, still to be erected, where most of the controls were located also housed tracking instruments. 

Many skimmer trips would be needed to tow sections of the Twister’s outer casing, the vast dish-shaped structure that rode along the surface like a breaching whale, partially exposed to the icy air and partially submerged.  It was upon this huge dish that the chronotron pods would be mounted.  And before that could happen, the dish would have to be made fast to her foundation, itself to be buried in the muck and ooze at the bottom of the trench. 

Much work remained to be done.

After some discussion and perusing of survey results, the crew had decided to use a shallow valley just beyond the surf line of the island as a staging place for pods, foundation and main structure elements, and all the mooring, tensioning and cabling that held the entire assembly together.

On their descent, just to satisfy his curiosity and keep Acth:On’e from pestering him with doubts, Nathan Golich pressed a button on his wristpad.  Moments later, a sultry voice from Training began a theoretical explanation of this huge contraption they were assembling….

“…The Time Twister contains a naked singularity at the core of its field.  Over fifty terr ago, Uman engineers 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. 

“Uman engineers developed a way of creating, maneuvering and regulating the effects of the twist field.  This is done through a screening field and a series of buffers, 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…”

A chime sounded in Golich’s helmet.  The seabed came up fast and Acth:On’e said, “We’re here, Commander.  The index point.”

Golich took a deep breath.  “Let’s get cracking and get the hell out of here.  I don’t like the looks of some of these creatures around here.”

 

So that’s the excerpt from Episode 1.  I hope this intrigues you enough to take a look at this new series called Time Jumpers when it debuts next year. 

Here are a few more words about this series….

1. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.
2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.
3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.
4. There will be 12 episodes.  The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.
5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc. 
6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.  
7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:
    
   Episode #        Title                                                                 Approximate Upload Date

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                 February 1, 2019        
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’                                            March 1, 2019
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’                             April 15, 2019
4.             ‘Cygnus Rift’                                                  May 3, 2019
5.             ‘The Time Guard’                                           May 31, 2019
6.             ‘First Light Corridor                                       June 28, 2019
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’     August 2, 2019
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’                        August 30, 2019
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’                                           September 27, 2019               
10.             ‘First Jump Squadron’                                    November 1, 2019
11.             ‘Planck Time’                                                  November 29, 2019
12.             ‘The Time Twister’                                          January 3, 2020
     
     
    The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 13, 2018.  See you then.
     
    Phil B.