The Farpool (61 page)

When the steady drone and beat of the Time
Twister reverberated throughout the cockpit, they all knew they had
come back to the same time and place.

Chase had been nervous, wondering if the
Umans would do something with the Twister that might affect the
Farpool. From here though, everything seemed the same.

An hour’s navigation brought them to
the project site, near one of the Twister’s mooring cables. It was
a shallow ravine, wedged between small hills, festooned with
shattered lava tubes and strange dark pits along the seabed.
Scattered across the ravine were scores of tents and platforms,
where the Omtorish worked on their part of the dismantling project.
Huge fiber nets swollen with collected chronopods were tied to
stakes in the seabed. Other sacs contained
mah-jeet
and other creatures used to break down
the machine’s foundations.

Veskort drove them to a larger tent on a rise
overlooking the ravine. There, Kloosee and Pakma and other kelke
were helping wrestle a chronopod inside.

They were overjoyed to see Chase and Angie
again.

“Ke’shoo…ke’shoo
!” cried Pakma. She helped Angie
squeeze out of the kip’t and nuzzled and nosed her up and down,
pulsing happiness along with some fatigue, and a touch of sadness.
“I’m so glad you came back…how are you…
litor’kel ge
!”

Chase and Kloosee nuzzled each other in the
Omtorish way, beak to beak, with whistles and clicks and screeches
in between.

“We barely made it back,” Chase admitted. He
thanked Veskort for some remarkable piloting skills. The prodsman
grunted, pointing to the battered cockpit.

“We were lucky…look at that. It’s a wonder
the cockpit wasn’t torn right off…this sled’s ready to be
scrapped.”

Chase winced at the beat of the wavemaker, so
nearby. “Sounds like nothing has changed. I guess I’m glad…at least
the Farpool worked.”

“Here,” Kloosee placed Chase’s hands
alongside the chronopod. “Help us with this…Longsee’s inside. He
wants to take a look at one of these Uman devices…see how it
works.”

Pakma and Angie swam off to another tent.
Pakma wanted to hear Angie’s latest echopod journal and show off
some new scentbulbs. Chase, Kloosee and Veskort helped wrestle the
chronopod inside the tent.

Longsee was inside, hovering over a small
sling. They managed to nestle the pod into the sling. Longsee then
saw Chase.

“Thanks to Shooki, praise be unto
him…at least, you made it back…things have changed,
eekoti
Chase. The Umans are reneging
on their agreement…it’s bad…we must talk…you have to go see the
Uman commander soon—“

“What’s happened?” Chase asked. “The
wavemaker sounds as loud as ever—“

Longsee tried to explain, even as he nosed
and poked around the chronopod, trying to find a way inside. “We
must learn how these things work…in case the Umans leave.”
Presently, he found a tool that looked like a multi-pronged claw
and was able to prise his way in. The interior was crammed with
boards and chips and small spheres enmeshed in some kind of
gel.

Longsee went on. “You’re not
mistaken…right after you left, we got notice on the
signaler.
Eekoti
Dringoth
wanted to talk. I went up, hovered just below the
surface…communication was poor and there were
misunderstandings…that’s why we need you. If I understand
correctly, the Uman enemy—the Coethi—have returned. Attacks
continue. The great sky-light grows darker every day, so they say…I
haven’t seen it…
eekoti
Chase,
I’m an old man. To be so near the Notwater…” he scrunched up his
nose and shivered, shaking his tail “…it’s hard. It’s painful. You
must go talk with the Umans and learn what has happened. Dringoth
says they can’t shut down at this time.”

They poked around the insides of the
chronopod for awhile, then Kloosee said he would take Chase to the
surface, to Kinlok. They would signal the Umans, request a meeting
right away.

Later that day, Chase found himself slogging
through windswept pools of water on the beach and trudging up the
sand hill to the small hut that had been their preferred meeting
place. Outside, two Umans stood grimly by: Dringoth and Golich.
They seemed to recognize Chase and hurried him inside.

The Umans sat in chairs beside instrument
consoles. Chase leaned against a table.

Dringoth seemed pre-occupied, anxious. “Like
I told your friends, the Coethi are back. Sector Command sent
orders not to shut down just yet. We’ve got some housecleaning to
do, trying to sweep the bastards out of this sector. Already,
they’ve starballed the sun twice…she won’t take much more. My exec
thinks she’s might even go supernova one day…I don’t want to be
within a hundred light years if that happens. And Coethi have
infested dozens of timestreams around here as well. They’re like
rats…they’re everywhere and we’ve got to clean ‘em out.”

Chase felt like he’d been put into a
difficult position. On the one hand, the fact that the Twister was
still operating made the Farpool still navigable. He might not have
made it back to Seome otherwise. On the other hand, the Umans had
agreed to relocate the blasted machine and the longer that took,
the more damage to kels around the world.

This is like being a diplomat. What the hell
do I know about being a diplomat? I’ve been selling T-shirts the
last few years.

“How long will this…cleanup…take?”

Dringoth looked at Golich. “How old is the
universe…it’s easier to answer that. Coethi has somehow managed to
come up with hordes of new jumpships and they’ve infiltrated all
kinds of strategic timestreams, really important ones, critical
ones. If we don’t do our part, TACTRON says we may have to concede
the whole sector…maybe the whole Halo.” Dringoth spat on the
ground. “That’ll do wonders for my career, you know.”

“Can you get some help…from this Sector
Command?”

Golich cut in. “Maybe you don’t understand
what kind of enemy the Coethi are…Ultrarch-Major, maybe we should
show him the intel file, all the studies, the after-action
reports.”

Dringoth had a perplexed look on his face.
“I’m sorry, son…I’m just having a hard time believing I’m having
this kind of talk with a big frog…yes, of course, Lieutenant, get
the file.”

Golich produced a small tab from his uniform
pocket. He finagled with it to output a voice that would describe
the enemy, something compatible with Chase’s echopod. Then he
activated it. Chase heard this:

1. The Coethi are (thought to be) a
   race of sentient semi-robotic aliens whose main weapon against Uman
   forces is something called a starball. It is directed against the
   sun or star of a targeted Uman planetary system. The only known
   defense is a Time Twister. When a starball enters or is pulled into
   the twist field of a Twister, it is flung out of local space-time
   into the farthest reaches of the Universe.
   

2. Umans and Coethi are contending
   for influence and territory in a region of the Milky Way known as
   the Galactic Halo.
   

3. The main-sequence star
   Sigma-Albeth B is near the center of a key sector of the Halo. It
   has four planets, one of them Storm. Storm is an ideal site to
   build and operate a Time Twister to defend this sector, known as
   Halo-Alpha. The sector is above the plane of the galactic Orion
   Arm, in which most of Uman space is located, including the solar
   system and its strategic timestreams T-1 to T-99.
   

4. The Coethi originated in the
   Perseus Arm and view the Halo sectors as convenient ways to expand
   their territory and influence into the Orion and other arms in this
   quadrant of the galaxy. But Umans are in the way.
   

5. The Coethi are a distributed
   intelligence. They are a swarm of nanoscale robotic elements
   several light years in extent, drifting through space.
   

6. The basic element of the Coethi is
   a nanobot. An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of
   incredible sophistication and complexity.
   

7. Nobody knows how the Coethi came
   to be, even the Coethi themselves. As an organized superorganism of
   bots several light-years in extent, they have existed for a
   substantial fraction of the age of the Universe. Best guess by Urth
   scientists is 4-5 billion terr old.
   

8. The Coethi are a true superswarm
   of vast proportions. In size and extent and connection density, it
   exceeds the complexity of all the human minds that have ever lived
   on Urth combined. It is a thinking sentience, whose true
   environment is now interstellar space.
   

9. There is an archive of knowledge
   within the Coethi, a sort of computational cloud or main memory,
   which retains all information ever created or experienced by the
   swarm.
   

10. Within this Archive is information
    indicating that the Coethi originated on an actual homeworld,
    somewhere in M75 cluster in Sagittarius. The data show that the
    homeworld was destroyed by a nearby supernova and the surviving
    elements dispersed into space in a sort of interstellar diaspora.
    As Umans reckon universe time, this happened at least 4-6 billion
    terr ago, at a time when the Universe was approximately 7 billion
    terr after the Big Bang.
    

11. There is no known head or
    leadership group or body. The main part is called the Central
    Entity.
    

12. Nanobotic elements of the Coethi
    engage in some specialization to ensure that the swarm survives and
    the Central Entity is maintained. Bots can specialize in such tasks
    as logical processing, communication, maintenance, archiving and
    memory, internal transport, navigation, world-seeding, orientation,
    etc.
    

13. It’s not too farfetched to
    consider the Coethi as a sort of galactic brain, although it
    certainly doesn’t encompass the entire Milky Way galaxy.
    

14. But the Coethi have an Imperative
    of Life which compels them to grow and expand the swarm.
    Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm
    life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or
    hive mind (like a neural network or computational cloud). To the
    Coethi, this is the Imperative of Life itself. The Imperative of
    Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or
    builds structure or order. Life is anti-entropic.
    

15. In order to get their heads around
    the idea of the Coethi, some descriptors our scientists have used
    have been: galactic brain, interstellar neural network,
    computational cloud, galactic internet, and universal web. The
    basic organizing principle or topology of the Coethi is unknown and
    can only be speculated about.
    

16. The general physical dimensions of
    the Coethi swarm have been estimated to vary anywhere from a few
    billion kilometers in breadth to several light years. Cosmologists
    say that very few organized structures in the Universe are that
    big. Astronomers point to some nebula, gas and dust clouds, even
    black holes as objects of that dimension or larger. There are some
    cosmologists who question whether the Coethi swarm is truly alive
    in a traditional sense. Even biologists say the proven existence of
    the Coethi stretches the definition of life and sentience nearly to
    the breaking point.
    

17. The Coethi can manipulate quantum
    states at the subscale fine structure of space itself to
    communicate and affect matter at great distances. As one scientist
    says, “If the Universe were a great quilt, the Coethi can yank on a
    fiber at one end and untie a knot at the other.” Their ability to
    use quantum entanglement as a means of manipulation is eons ahead
    of Umans’ ability to understand, let alone emulate.
    

18. The Coethi launch a starball
    weapon by amassing vast, concentrated quantities of what Uman
    scientists call fusium. They concentrate the fusium and focus it
    using part of the main swarm, then launch the starball at a star or
    sun.
    

19. The starball affects the balance
    between outward pressure of fusion in the star’s core and its
    gravity. Basically, the starball slows down or inhibits the fusion
    reactions so that gravity slowly wins out. The star collapses and
    may, if massive enough, go supernova.
    

20. Voidtime is the Uman name for
    transit ‘channels’ through space-time to other space and times.
    It’s a sort of intermediate space between alternate timestreams.
    For over four hundred centiterrs, Umans have been able to travel
    back and forth in time. So can the Coethi. If the Coethi breach
    Uman voidtime channels, they play havoc with official timestreams
    and change Halo history. They could locate Commandstar and destroy
    Uman presence in all Halo sectors, if this continued. Coethi
    vehicles and weapons used for these probes and assaults in Uman
    voidtime are called time crashers.
    

21. Vehicles for making this transit
    between alternate timestreams are called jumpships. The process is
    called a timejump. Much of the War has been fought between Coethi
    and Uman jumpships in voidtime and in and among alternate
    timestreams.
    

22. Uman strategy
    now is to prevent the Coethi from expanding into Halo-Alpha and
    also from penetrating the official timestreams that could cause
    catastrophic damage to the Halo past and destroy Uman presence in
    this sector. 1
    ^st
    TD operates the Time Twister to defend against
    these possibilities.
    

Chase looked up when the audio ran out.
Golich and Dringoth studied his face, not knowing how to interpret
how something that looked like an alligator would react.