Aliomenti Saga 6: Stark Cataclysm (9 page)

That had worked until 2030. But Will had no memories of this time, and the diary had, to this point, remained silent. Why had she not added messages to guide them through this time? Why hadn’t Fil?

She opened her eyes. She had no answer to those questions. She’d settle for guidance about building the time machine so integral to her very existence. She just couldn’t make the numbers work.

It had been her obsession for fifteen years, a distraction from the turmoil of her family situation. When her father had spirited their mother away in the early morning hours that fateful day, she’d been thrilled he’d taken action to save Hope’s life. Others had tried, but the failure was evident in her mother’s strained and painful existence. She couldn’t understand Fil’s anger at their father, why he focused anger on an act she found heroic and even romantic.

As she’d entered her teen years, her mother’s absence became a profound void in her life. Denied female role models who understand not just issues of maturation, but also the unique aspects of Alliance existence, she’d left home. Adam and Fil both loved her and cared for her, but they were men, and though they didn’t think her solution appropriate, they’d supported her from afar, keeping in touch via email. She’d traveled to the nearest Alliance safe house, and then moved to the port of South Beach and on to the Cavern. She’d been welcomed with open arms, found the female role models lacking at home, and regained the sprightly disposition that had waned in the years since her mother’s departure. It was a positive attitude her brother called “adorable,” a word that made her feel like she was still an eight-year-old girl in pigtails.

She loved it.

After she’d been living in the Cavern for several months, she realized the trap she’d set for herself, one Fil and Adam had warned about. Her long-term disappearance meant she’d be presumed dead in the human world, and a reappearance would raise awkward questions. With her isolation within the Alliance world set for decades, she chose to focus her energy on solving the most vexing problem facing them as they moved toward Will’s reappearance in the future.

Time travel.

It was the stuff of science fiction, of fantasy, of anything but reality. It was also critical to her very existence. If she, Fil, and Adam didn’t go back to that day in 2030 and extract her father from the clutches of the Hunters, nothing else would matter. If they were unable to return him to their starting point in 2219, nothing else would matter. If they were unable to get him back to the very beginning, back to 1018, then nothing else in this loop of time would matter. Everyone had done their part up until now. It was her turn.

She had no idea where to start.

She studied every type of theoretical physics, availing herself of online courses, lectures, and discussion groups. She posed as a reporter for a science magazine and interviewed dozens of theoretical physicists on the topic, asking them to provide their insights for an article about the physics of time travel and how they’d transport people back and forth through time. There was no consensus, nothing she could use, nothing that made obvious a solution to the problem.

She’d finally located mathematical formula suggesting an answer to traveling through the fourth dimension—time—by bending the other dimensions in an enclosed space. It made little sense, but she’d built paper models and tried to understand the logic of the theory by demonstrating it to herself. She looked at formulas that had no answers she could compute, and others that made the time leap conceptually possible even while suggesting they’d never be able to execute that leap.

Frustration was paramount. Napping seemed a better option.

A knock startled her from her mental funk. She glanced in the direction of the sound. “Door’s open.”

The handle turned and a man entered. “Sorry, I didn’t know this office was in use. I’ll get… wow, what’s
that
?”

He motioned toward the whiteboard, an old-fashioned relic in a place where three-dimensional modeling tools were common. “It’s a whiteboard. Two dimensions only.”

He chuckled. “I know that.” He pointed to his graying hair, which carried a hint of the red of his youth. “I’ve been around long enough.”

She smiled. “Many of our number have been around long enough to use papyrus and vellum.” She gave him a curious glance. “I hope I don’t sound rude for asking, but…”

“Why do I look old?” He chuckled, then frowned. “That’s a complicated question. I suppose that it’s my way of reminding myself how long I’ve been around. I suppose I could reverse the graying hair, smooth out some wrinkles, but I’m comfortable with my appearance.”

Angel nodded. “That’s very wise, indeed.” She nodded toward the whiteboard again. “If the whiteboard itself wasn’t the subject of your question, I can only guess your interest lies with what’s written there.”

He stepped farther into the room, nodded, then frowned. “This looks like an equation to calculate energy needs for something… perhaps a spaceship?”

Not bad. “Something like that.”

“The values you’ve entered, the resulting numbers… the energy quantities are enormous. I’m not sure it’s possible to generate that much energy.”

She nodded. “That’s the problem. If I have to travel the required… distance, the equation says I’ll never make it.”

He motioned at a chair. “Mind if I sit down? I’ve spent too much time working on numbers of this magnitude on the
other
side of the decimal point. It’s good to stretch my mind to think about numbers staggeringly large, rather than those which are staggeringly small.”

She finally recognized him. “You’re the one called the Mechanic, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “Not sure how I got that nickname, but it’s stuck.”

She laughed. “You’ve apparently fixed everything that breaks around this place, things nobody else has been able to figure out. And the advances with the nanobots are pretty staggering as well. I’d say the name is well earned.”

He nodded once, accepting her compliment. “We all do our best. You… you’re Angel, right? Will and Hope’s daughter?”

She nodded. “Lucky me, huh? My parents are alive and nobody can find them.”

He cocked his head. “If nobody can find them, how do you know they’re alive?”

She frowned. “You know how Porthos, the Hunter, can sense Energy with far greater sensitivity than anyone else? For some reason, I can sense… I don’t know what to call it… perhaps life forces? Something like that. Same degree of sensitivity. I can
feel
my parents’ existence, no matter where they are. Mom’s nearly blinked out a while ago, but she’s stronger now.”

The Mechanic looked impressed. “That’s a useful skill indeed. It’s always nice to know your loved ones are alive, isn’t it? Even if you can’t see them.” He nodded back toward the board. “As to your problem… have you considered the possibility that the equation might be wrong?”

Angel nodded. “All the time. I don’t want to toss the equation as wrong simply because I don’t like the answer.”

“Maybe you’re asking the wrong question,” the Mechanic mused. He scowled, rose, and moved to the whiteboard. “See, this section here is nullifying the distance traveled, and the section over
here
is drawing little power from your fuel source.” He stopped for a moment. “This is… wrong. What type of fuel are you planning to use for your spaceship? You’re not getting any real power from that fuel source. If you change the fuel source or derive more efficiency from it, you can get more energy from less fuel and bring your trip back into the probable range.”

“That doesn’t change the amount of energy we need to generate, though.” Angel stood and paced the room. “I don’t know of a fuel source that could generate that quantity, so changing the source and the conversion efficiency doesn’t matter.”

“It could, actually,” the Mechanic told her. “When you propel a ship or rocket, you have to account for the mass of the fuel until it’s consumed. If you can reduce the amount of fuel, you reduce the mass of the object propelled. Increase the energy produced per unit by a factor of ten, and you get more than that back in reduced energy requirements, because you’re using proportionally even less energy at the end.” He tapped a portion of the formula. “Right here. See? The exponent here relates to the mass of the craft, but that includes the mass of the fuel. Because it’s exponential, the mass of the fuel you need has a huge impact.”

Angel walked over to the whiteboard and looked at the formula again. Had she missed something so obvious? “What if I’m limited to a specific type of fuel, though?”

The Mechanic shrugged. “If your formula is correct and you’ve accurately captured the properties of that fuel source, your trip won’t happen, unless you make a series of shorter trips. If your formula is wrong, though, you can fix it and find a better solution.”

Angel nodded slowly. “That makes sense.” She held out her hand. “Thanks for stopping in. I need to go take a walk and think about this without staring at numbers, so you’re welcome to move in here if need be.”

The Mechanic nodded. “I might do that. I hope you find the solution to your problem. That’s a fascinating equation, by the way. I’d love to hear what you learn.”

“I’ll be sure to let you know. I may ask for your help again. You have a knack for seeing what others fail to see.”

He nodded and rose, holding the door open. “I need to go grab a few things. Enjoy your walk.”

She walked out ahead of him. “I will.”

The pleasant scent of the air of the Cavern always cleared her mind and focused her thoughts, and she needed that clarity. The Mechanic had looked at the validity of the equation, had recognized that the math was correct, and had identified the fuel source as being the limiting factor. She didn’t know if the equation was correct, or how she’d build the machine, but something else he’d said gave her an idea.

She’d been so focused on the concept of projecting the energy needs of the two trips—the round trip to 2030, and the one-way trip to 1018—that she’d never considered how she’d test the machine. She couldn’t build a time machine and never test it until they climbed aboard to rescue her father. They needed some degree of confidence that it would work.

The Mechanic’s comment about taking shorter trips gave her an idea.

She would test a machine by sending it
forward
in time, not by decades or centuries, but by mere minutes. It would enable her to test the machine itself; watching it arrive a minute into the future as she reached that point in time by normal means. If the machine vanished from her present and appeared in her future, she’d know the machine worked. She’d adjust her equations based upon actual energy use rather than hypothetical theory. The quantity of energy required for such a test would be a miniscule fraction of that required for either planned trip, a quantity she could both fathom and produce.

They’d use the results, refine the formulas, and might even find that the actual quantity of energy required was a mere fraction of that currently projected. She smiled at that thought. She was treating time travel itself as given, questioning only the duration of travel possible. It was a huge mental leap forward; she no longer believed the trip impossible.

She headed back to her apartment and located paper and pencil. She liked the scratching sound pencils made against the large wooden table in her kitchen, finding the sound helped her focus. The pencil flew over the paper and the test machine’s image emerged. It need not be large, just big enough to hold sensors to measure the current date and time, energy consumed during the trip, a GPS device, and a signaling system to track the machine if it didn’t reappear at the time or place expected. She frowned, tapping the pencil against the table. Her father had traveled twelve centuries into the past, and from South America to northern England. How could she move a craft from one point to another while simultaneously turning back the clock?

She’d worry about that problem at a later date.

She found her copies of the formulas upon the whiteboard in her desk and began revising the numbers for her proposed test. The sound of the pencil scratching the paper took her back to a happier time, when she’d listen to her mother write, before the effects of ambrosia withdrawal robbed Hope of her ability to hold a pencil.

It was a time when three of them had been together. Would all four of them ever be together? No hiding, no disguises? Would she ever have the chance to embrace her father, a man she’d never seen or spoken to?

The knock at her door startled her.

The Energy signature that leaked through brought a huge smile to her face. She teleported to the door, flung it open with such force that she dented the wall, and smothered her brother with a crushing hug.

He returned her embrace with a breathless chuckle. “Missed you, little sis.”

“I missed you, too.” She felt a tear trickle from her eye and slither down her cheek before she pulled away to look at him. “It’s been a long time. You look well.”

“
You
look all grown up.”

She laughed. “It
has
been a long time, hasn’t it?”

It was only then that she noticed the young woman standing next to Fil.

The woman looked familiar, someone Angel was sure she’d seen about the Cavern, but whose name she couldn’t place.