Timepivot

by Brian Ball

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Time drifted onto the ruin of the Galactic Federation. The centuries rolled over the wars of the first part of the new millennium, laying their patina of forgetfulness over the adventures of the survivors of the expedition to the Forever Planet. Only in the memory banks of lost and ruined computers was there a record of the withering piece of time, hung in its weird universe, poised in a matrix of forever, which had waited eons to release its makers from their imprisonment on a planet which was their plaything, workshop, laboratory and engine. No one returned to the planet of the Timepivot. Not of his own volition.

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 186

Sample

O’Flynn jerked hard on the crowbar. A thin chunk of rock flew upward under the impetus of the steel in his muscular arms. He turned to the blasting crew and signaled for the cumbersome drills to be brought forward. For the thousandth time he tried to mop sweat from his dull-green visor. He stopped the action before it was complete; this jagged satellite had no atmosphere, and Operation Plutarch could not afford the frills of an artificial envelope of air on a remote moon in a tiny system out on the rim of the Galaxy. The sweat dried as the efficient sensors in his air pack detected an excess of moisture.

“Take it here. Secondary charges spread at three-meter radials.”

“Will do, O’Flynn.”

There was more than a little of muted admiration in the ready acceptance of his instructions, but O’Flynn was not aware of it; his mind was entirely on the coming shock wave which would neatly level another of the sharp-edged cliffs, leaving nothing but a few heaps of rubble for the giant crushers to grind into a heavy, compacted powder. There was always a sense of fulfillment in the chopping down of the last major ridge on the last mountain chain of a planet; it was the taming of another wild and disordered landscape, so that the vision of Plutarch could become reality. Here, riding its unliving path around a dying sun, the satellite would become one more of the chains of symmetrical spheres which, mirror-like, would beam a true reflection of light to the blackness beyond the Galaxy.

The charges were quickly in place. The three others in his team were humping the drills down to the bug below; O’Flynn caught a glimpse of Karanja’s grin, and a smile broke out onto his own face. It was a good team, one of the best: Karanja; Preston, who thought he might be a reincarnation of the monk Rasputin; and Lingelbach, the immense, slow-moving drill-handler. O’Flynn held his hand out in the gesture that meant “Retire.” They were used to his taciturnity at the end of a big project, so they said nothing. They would talk later, when the job was done. Then the singing would begin, and soon Lingelbach would be bellowing for cold beer, Karanja calling for the project director to celebrate the end of their work in the system, while Preston dressed himself ritually in the black robes of a long-dead seer from the beginnings of time.

O’Flynn caught the mood of his team from their lighthearted leaps down the ridge; he returned from his contemplation of a score of neat, huge reshapings of the crusts of a dozen moons like this. He waved to the team, shaking a fist at Lingelbach, who coiled the big cables around his shoulders as if they were so much twine, and who tossed the massive drill ahead like a javelin.

“He’s just playful,” called Karanja. “Cut it out, will you!” He yelped into the echoing suit as Lingelbach effortlessly tossed him across a fissure which ran for miles into the depths of the planet. Lingelbach burst into song, the march which never failed to send a shaking of pride through O’Flynn. But he ordered Lingelbach to keep off the air, nevertheless.

“And use the bridge!”

Karanja was about to jump back over the fissure just as a purplish splash of dust jetted upward from it. Seeing it, Karanja crossed by the temporary bridge.

O’Flynn looked down into the fissure, quietly satisfied with his plan. The ridge high above him would topple to fill it, the gases which boiled out intermittently would be plugged down. Then the crushers could smooth out what was left. He felt again the prickling at the back of his neck which always accompanied the fierce swellings of pride that came when he remembered the responsibilities he carried, and the mighty nature of the operation. He grinned. Lingelbach was humming the order’s march.

The charges had been set perfectly. It was a textbook explosion. The ridge heaved itself upward and outward. It hung, black and cragged against a violet horizon, and then it poured out in an almost liquid flow into the valleys below.

O’Flynn watched the completion of this phase of Operation Plutarch. He was about to tell Karanja to call up the crushers when a small sliver of quartzite rolled to a stop in front of him.

“Do we call them down?” asked Karanja. He was impatient to be away.

“Just a minute.”

It wasn’t quartzite, though it was embedded in solid rock. It wasn’t rock of any kind; the thing he had picked up couldn’t have come from the ridge at all. It was totally out of place in this silent waste of broken rock and heavy dust.

Aloud, O’Flynn said, “What’s a high-temperature thermal calibrator doing here?”

The shimmering blip that was the supply base, equipment store and recreation center for the blasting crews and their more humble colleagues, the moonscape laborers, was in sight. Karanja plunged ahead with a bellow of delight; the job was over. In a couple of days, new orders would come from Galactic Center. The blip would grow tentacles of power waves and begin the long haul to the outskirts of the regular shipping lanes, where it would wait for one of the big hyperspace vessels. Then, hitched to the bulk of the liner, it would surge through the interstices of space and time until it was shrugged off to decelerate into a credible framework of celestial bodies, where ordinary things like suns wheeled through the cobwebs of the systems, and where more dead moons waited to be shaped into gleaming regularity. But until the orders arrived, the team would go catatonic.

Lingelbach would do it with drugged visions, in which his strength would multiply a hundredfold. He would crush boulders in fists of iron and hug armored, meteor-proof drilling rigs against his chest, to wrinkle them in ponderous, powerful movements. He was a man to keep clear of, for he could flick the life from an ordinary human frame with a casual stroke of his arm. Preston, too, was dangerous in the days of waiting. He had absorbed every jot of knowledge to survive the cataclysm of Blow-up; the result of his dream-injected state was an urge to perform grotesque rituals with whatever material at hand. He had sacrificed a visiting inspector on one notable occasion, to the delight of the admiring crusher team. Galactic Center had been understanding. Visitors were warned of the behavior of the pioneers who worked on Operation Plutarch. Only Karanja had gentle impulses during the privileged period. He used an archaic form of release, a concoction which was worshipped in the days of the early spacemen. It came to the supply base in bottles. And that was how Karanja drank it; by the bottle.

O’Flynn found himself unexcited by the prospect of his own approaching bout of conditioned release. Usually he took an excursion into the total experience simulators, the Totex Globes; he had been O’Flynn the sense-swimmer, O’Flynn the conqueror of the Silurians, whoever they were, and—twice—O’Flynn, the strongest blade on Vega. And more. He looked at the blip which was his home.

“Now, how could a sensor and calibrator for liquid rock get into a three-hundred-million-year-old Archean stratum?”

“Give it up!” called Karanja, and O’Flynn realized he had been talking aloud. “We’re through here, and what an honor it’s been to work with the immaculate O’Flynn once more. Man, the way you lifted that last ridge clean into the valleys—the touch of genius, O’Flynn!”

“You were good, O’Flynn,” joined in Lingelbach.

“If it worries you, call Base.”

Preston wanted a share of no man’s troubles at this moment. He was savoring the delirium of his impending descent into fantasy. O’Flynn could almost smell the sickly incense the dark man would use. That, and the raw stink of blood.

“Call Base?”

They were still a few minutes walk away. And after they reached the blip they would have to stow the equipment and send their suits to the decontamination squad. It would be a simple matter for Base to find the answer to the puzzle of the highly expensive calibrator which was stuck so firmly into the sliver of age-old rock ripped from Satellite 13A/B7/5. It shouldn’t, couldn’t be there. And yet it was.

“This is O’Flynn. Keep out of it, you guys,” he motioned to the team—Karanja grinning, Preston uninterested, Lingelbach barely understanding.

“We have you, O’Flynn. Give.”

“So we finished the ridge. You can send the boys in when you wish…”

“Look behind you.”

The immense machines rolled ghostlike over the smashed satellite. Somewhere within the complex of force-shields and flailing mechanisms of each of them sat a rider who directed the program filed by Base. The machines plunged on in line, the superfluous directors contentedly feeding in the contour plans. O’Flynn could never fail to be impressed by the sheer bulk of the crushers.

“I see them.”

“The problem?”

O’Flynn wondered whose voice the robot control used. Or was it an artificial mixture of sounds and intonation?

“Nothing much. But check it out, will you? I found what looks like—is—a meter for liquid rock temperatures in the ridge.”

“Your own equipment?”

“It couldn’t be. I’ve never brought ours from Base. No need to. In any case, this is a real precision job.”

“Your team? Would any one of them carry it?”

“No.” The team? Karanja, Lingelbach or Preston leave any item of equipment behind!

“You were right to report this.”

“I wouldn’t have troubled, but it was the age of the rock around it!”

“Describe it.”

O’Flynn took the glistening rock and gave a geologist’s concise description. Any member of his team could have done so.

“Here we come!” put in Karanja, disregarding O’Flynn’s instructions to stay off the air. “They’ve found a new brand for me—brewed with soil-grown malt barley!”

“Remain where you are.”

O’Flynn and his team were still plunging forward against the oddly heavy gravity of the small satellite. Lingelbach, slowest of understanding, was the first to stop.

“Here?”

“Stay here!”

“Why?”

Lingelbach was puzzled, Karanja disappointed, and Preston quarrelsome about the inexplicable order.

The team moved closer together, for a mystery had taken shape. Base had never seemed so far away, even though the shining blip was only a mile distant. When they had been moving toward it, the desolation of the moonscape had been a factor in their existence; it was the backcloth of their working life. Now the black and gray scree, with the occasional gleam of bright ore, began to take on a new meaning for them.

Lingelbach, unperceptive and slow, spoke for them all when he said, “I never felt cold like this.”

O’Flynn looked down at the tiny anachronistic thing set so securely in ancient rock. Preston reached out a hand for it. His thin face glowered down at O’Flynn.

“Is this why?”

“That’s it!” Karanja shouted. “It must be. Is it, O’Flynn? Something to do with the operation here? Has it fouled up the contours plan?”

O’Flynn held his gauntlet with the rock-embedded meter. He was never to know what Preston made of the thing, for Base called at that moment.

“O’Flynn!”

O’Flynn paused. There was a curt peremptoriness about the voice that compelled instant attention. The others stiffened, alert and obedient. The empty landscape was forgotten; they were O’Flynn’s team, the best in the business.

He was finding it difficult to reply to the robot voice. The muscles of his throat had unaccountably stiffened; his gaze was fixed on the rock-cased instrument he was still holding out to Preston.

“O’Flynn! Report!”

“Yes. You’ve found who lost it?”

“You are ordered to disconnect your communicator.”

Three faces registered degrees of shock and incredulity, Lingelbach’s slowest of all. Except O’Flynn’s. Even as the big man’s eyes widened, he could feel the symptoms of shock invading his system, finding expression at last in the sag of his jaw and the stretching of the muscles around his eyes.

His fingers were already on the emergency cut-out which would sever connections between himself, his team and Base.

“Report, O’Flynn! Do you understand?”

“Disconnect. Yes.” His fingers refused to obey. “It must be faulty. It’s contaminated. That’s why, isn’t it?”

“Obey.”

O’Flynn, master of a difficult trade, product of a system he could never understand, conditioned since birth to the acceptance of robot control, still hesitated. In its way, it was a failure of the system, shown to be so by the response of the three watchers. Their hands twitched, unconsciously urging O’Flynn’s own hands into motion. Their heads nodded in unison within the bulky plastic domes they wore, agreeing with O’Flynn’s small movements, willing him to comply with Base’s strange but undeniable command.

“Yes.”

O’Flynn turned away from his men and aimed a finger at the button. He jabbed solidly at a spot an inch away from it. He could not have said what prompted him to ignore the command, The stiffening of the hairs on his neck could have told him something, but didn’t, any more than the slight forward stretching of the muscles behind and below his ears. The sudden tremendous increase in his blood circulation did, however, let him know that he was under stress. As soon as the symptoms of fear and readiness to confront danger occurred, he had rationalized his decision; he had not disobeyed in any spirit of deliberate insubordination. No. Base had forgotten that he was responsible for the team. Without him, they might fail to complete the schedule set down for the completion of the task; they might not service the drills, for instance. Lingelbach might leave his pack of explosives in the decontamination chambers. Karanja was sure to forget to change the seismographic soundings.

O’Flynn grinned at the team.

“What do you suppose—” began Karanja in a shocked whisper.

O’Flynn made the sign that signified “Don’t worry.” The others nodded back at him, miming encouragement. Lingelbach unshipped his pack, clearly with the intention of reassuring O’Flynn. As he made the “Leave it to me” sign, Base came on once more.

“O’Flynn is no longer your squad commander.”

The three men began to talk. They stared at one another, looking away from O’Flynn. Alert to their embarrassed attempts to cover their confusion, O’Flynn restored a semblance of his normal good-humored expression. Base was talking again.

“O’Flynn has broken the Code.”

He felt cold despair engulfing him. The members of Operation Plutarch were a dedicated, specialized and honored body; their rules permitted no failures, no questioning of operation commanders, no resignations and, particularly, no infringements of the Code. Even through his fear, he contrived to remain outwardly calm. He raised a hand to Lingelbach. “Sure,” his action said. “I trust you, Lingelbach.”

The big face was that of a stranger. Preston’s thin face regarded hi. . .