Memoirs of a Timelord (10 page)

       So we steam in like axe murderers, neutralize their weapons and shields, zap their engines with an ion blast, and they are dead in the water.  Next we breach the hull in Compartment 32, and pop thru the hole as a raiding party.

       It's odd being another species.  I remember seeing people I knew, attractive people, and through the eyes of a Klath they were gross, sticklike creatures.  And this was not just the spectral shift of Klath eyes.  Another species is different right down to their aura.  In this case, the modulation of the human exo-energy was a perfect mismatch.  It was the opposite of a complimentary aural signature.  For the Klath, being around humans drove them crazy.  It was like nails on a chalkboard every time I got near a human.  I wanted to bash brains, break bones, and rip their flesh.  Being less experienced at morphing than my classmates, I had a hard time controlling the rage and playing my part.  But in the end I convinced them I was a terrifying beast, intent on a murderous rampage.  Half a dozen security officers fired on me before I finally slowed down enough to let Roxy blast me, saving young Lieutenant Rogars from certain death in the process.

       I gotta say, my girl Roxy fought like a champ.  She put three shots into me, then a good, solid boot to the head.  I played dead until she wasn't looking, then attacked again, but this time it was Prince Charming who KO'ed me with a torque wrench.  He didn't just hit me once...he really clubbed me like I was a baby seal, and kept pounding the living shit out of me until I was good 'n dead.  That got him noticed by m' girl Roxy.  Even from where I was on the ground (with my head caved in) I could see that they had this moment, mebbe three seconds long, where they locked eyes before they went back to kicking ass and taking names.  By the time Roxy was done she'd nearly vaporized Veena and Aldoo.  Good thing the Onkx has good shields, or they woulda both been incinerated.

       But finally we three scrambled back to our ships.  A few seconds later and all three Klath vessels were leaving at a high rate of speed.  The crew cheers, everyone is happy, and the damage to their ship is minimal.  Yaaayyy.

       But in the end Roxy got a medal.  Prince Charming too.   Veena and I were MoxSai at their wedding.  I guess it's sorta like being bridesmaids, except that we took a blood-oath to torture her husband for twenty days and nights if he ever strayed or mistreated her.  Yes, it is true: Voh marital traditions were a little weird, but I gotta point out that there's not a lotta domestic violence in their culture.   

                

       There is an interesting story to how a planet in the KayMus system came to be named after me.  

       In the year after my sister Roxy settled down with Prince Rogars, Veena and I still haunted the ship regularly.  We had lotsa other friends on the Mata, including the Captain who always looked forward to seeing Veena.  We assisted with fuel harvesting enroute, car-pooled their scientists on scouting missions, and generally helped out wherever we could.  The Mata was really like an adopted family to us.  Some people had a cabin in the mountains, Veena and I had the KuluMata.  Sometimes Aldoo came along too, but he was a bit of a tech snob and being on something as archaic as the Mata seemed to nag the perfectionist in him.  Things were on and off between us lately, so he stayed home mostly.

       It was their arrival at the mission's first checkpoint that I got a flavor for true space exploration: Ankrom.  

       It was beautiful to see these two stars bound together in a symbiotic orbit that would not degrade for millions of years.  Orbiting a massive black hole named Singulus, the binary star system was indeed rare. The phenomenon was due largely to the singularity's incredible rate of spin.  This was a mature black hole, with a fully formed singularity at its core.  Hence, the thing had more than enough power to capture a pair of stars.  Eventually it would consume both, and their mass would slowly be back-fed into the universe through weak spots in the fabric.  Essentially the black hole would burp, creating stellar nurseries, nebulas, feeding stars, and even other singularities.  It was cosmic renewal at its finest.  

       Ankrom is a peculiar twin-solar system.  You have two small stars sharing an oblong orbit in such a way that they balance each other out as they loop around Singulus.  At the far end of their orbital path they each pass through the singularity's zone of influence.  Y'see, Singulus spins at a fantastic rate, creating an effect known as frame dragging.  As this singularity rotates at 1439rpm it drags time and space around with it in this turbulent whirlpool.  The more mass it gains, the faster it spins.  So the whole region was prone to gravitational time dilation.  Not only did time slow down, it would come to a crawl.  Get too close and time began to run backwards.  The experience is actually a not as cool as it sounds.  Here's what backwards time looks like: As you first enter the effect time slows.  You don't notice this because you are slowing too.  Mebbe things look a little faster when you look out the window, but that's about it.

       But once time starts running backwards, everything runs backwards.  You live backwards, you think backwards, you are yanked about like a marionette by your own history, and the whole time your own voice is backmasking in your brain, for years at a time.  It can drive you crazy, literally, stark raving mad, so I recommend staying well clear of Singulus's accretion disc.  Not a fun experience in there at all.  

       So up to that point in my training I had a lot of book learning, but this was my first time playing around a singularity like this.  The Captain wanted to avoid the Orion system because it was currently within the influence of Singulus so they were way out of time with us.  Going there would slow them down exponentially.  What would feel like a quick trip would be a decade or more once they reemerged into normal space.  Besides, Orion was a crazy little neutron quark star.  No more than fifteen miles across, she was a pinpoint of light that blasted her solar system with toxic levels of x-rays.  She had been a proud star once, before Singulus siphoned off enough of her photosphere to destabilize her.  In the end, what was left of the star collapsed on itself into a super dense star with a quark core.  Very rare configuration.  I'd read about them but never seen one.  I wanted to go toss asteroids into it, y'know just to see what happens when you throw a 400 mile long rock into a sun that's smaller than Manhattan, but the whole system was under the influence of Singulus for another fifty years.  I wasn't going anywhere near that thing again.  The frame dragging in there was crazy.

       With our trajectory set to take us past Jaynar, the big gas giant, we were going to deploy probes and snap pictures as we went by, but no stopping in.  There was no chance of colonizing a gas giant at their technological level, and the moons were all rocky chunks of debris, so no point in even slowing down for that planet.  Surveys had told us that the other big planet in the system, MoTar, was another gas giant with a wonderfully low density and some really beautiful rings.  But also worthless for Voh habitation.

       So that left the little watery planet of X-OB32.  It was so titled because it was never named.  Stellar observatories and advanced probes had only glimpsed it and sampled the spectral data a handful of times.  Hence, it had yet to be formally named.  The Mata's mission plan had been to make the diversion to Ankrom only if they spotted viable fuel or resources for future vessels.  Needless to say, when the ship's sensors picked up a planetoid completely covered in salt water orbiting in the green zone around KayMus, we all got a little excited.  You can do a lotta things with water.  Drink it, split it into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing, bathe, grow crops, etc.  Large quantities of NaCl were useful as well.  A whole planet of the stuff in liquid form was solid gold.  We had to drop in and explore.

       Now you have got to understand that there isn't some prime directive in place out here in uncharted space.  Nothing said I had to be strictly an observer.  Sure, we couldn't give them any protected technology, but nothing said we couldn't give 'em a ride.  See, to keep the KuluMata from burning up too much gas by dropping out of transit speed, they would continue on their course over the top of the system while Veena and I ferried about forty scientists and security officers down to  X-OB32.  Our hotrods were easily fast enough to catch up with the slow moving Mata when we were done, so no worries there.

       Roxy was assigned to head the security detail and strapped into the cockpit beside me.  Giving a glance back, she shook her head with wonder at how the tiny little craft had expanded to include twenty more seats.

       "Neat trick.  Someday you gotta tell me where you're really from." Roxy smiled as she settled in.

       "Earth." I said simply.  "I'm from Earth, born in Tucson, Arizona.  United States of America, nineteen eighty-two.  I was an Air Force brat until I was five."

       She never believed me when I told her.  It was like telling someone on Earth that you were from Atlantis or the Garden of Eden.  To the Voh, Earth was legendary.  It was a fable you tell your kids about when you tuck them in.  But no one believed it was real.  I think she had always just assumed I was kidding.  My sense of humor was a little dry at times.

       "So Veena said she was gonna name the place by being the first to set foot on it." Roxy smiled as she fastened her helmet in place with the visor up.  Her bulky space suit crinkled as she shifted position in her chair. I was still wearing a purple tank top and bike shorts.  We don' need no steenking space suits!

       "Did she now?" I asked as my mind queried the Guf for confirmation.  Sure enough, the voices told me she was planning on scrambling as soon as she could get her passengers aboard.  The Captain was riding as her copilot and they wanted to be first.  Looking back I noticed a few stragglers who seemed to hang back from the boarding process.  I figured right away that the Captain prolly told them to sand bag me so he could get the jump on us.  

       "Watch." I held up a finger to Roxy just before I reversed the ship a few meters, effectively scooping up the stragglers as they were forced to jump onto the boarding ramp or be run over. From there I just slammed the doors and jumped straight up through the bulkhead, fully phased.  I wasn't surprised to see my sister Veena there already, moving fast towards the distant sun below.  I throttled it and left a ring of burnt plasma for her to fly through.  

       But Veena liked a good race and she remodulated her engines before fire-walling the throttle.  There was something so surreal about the whole experience.  We were there in deep space, outside of any appreciable gravitational influence from the distant stars or Singulus, and free of most cosmic debris.  Plunging at a dizzying rate, our descent was silent for the first few minutes.  Then we felt it; the first hint of the stellar bodies that lay ahead.  You can go flat-out in open space, but things change when you approach something with the mass of a star, and this system had three of them if you count Singulus.  Between the gravitational waves and the stellar headwinds, the ship gave a shudder at our excessive speed.  Really the ride was comparatively gentle, but the closer you get to light speed, the more time is dilated.  Essentially time slows down for those aboard the vessel.  But this creates an illusion that the world outside is moving incredibly fast, when really it's just you who is going super slow.  It's a lot like watching the trip at 50x speed. Even subtle course corrections seem rough and abrupt at that rate of perception.  But to a stationary observer watching in the distance it took you two hours to make that course change.

       I just upped my field integrity but never let off on the throttle.  Sensors told me that Veena was doing the same.  She knew she could take the stress of a hot approach, though I doubt her passengers believed it.  

       "Holy Whores, slow the hell down!" Roxy was petrified as I cut through the tail of a comet.  I could see her hands gripping the Granny handholds besides her seat.  If we had been in a Voh ship, we would have already disintegrated.  What am I talking about?  The Voh don't have anything as fast as my hot rod.  Besides, most of it was an optical illusion caused by our excessive speed.  Really, we weren't even breaking light speed, but the faster we go the more time slows, and the more it looks like we are going crazy fast when you look out the window.