The Farpool (66 page)

The force began to increase, a centrifugal
force that soon shoved them to one side of the compartment and
pressed them hard against the walls. Worse, the kip’t groaned and
creaked and began a slow roll, a rotation that didn’t remain slow
for long, but picked up rate at a steady clip.

Soon, they were spinning enough to become
disoriented and dizzy.

Angie felt nauseated.

“…
my stomach…I don’t feel
so—“

Her words were suddenly lost in a bright
flash of light, a searing, painfully white strobing light that
flooded the compartment and blinded all of them.

“Ow
…I can’t
see—“

The spin kept accelerating and moments later,
Cheeoray, Mapulte and Angie all passed out.

Chapter 21

Seome

Kinlok Island

Time: 768.6, Epoch of Tekpotu

Chase knew there was a lot of work to be done
at Kinlok and not much time to do it. Ultrarch-Major Dringoth had
impressed on all of them the urgency of the moment. Sector Command
was nervous about the shutdown…Dringoth told Chase there were
always Coethi jump ships prowling the nearer star systems and
snooping along critical time streams. Sector had given permission
for the dismantling and re-location of the Time Twister to proceed
but just in case, a small patrol squadron from the Upper Halo had
taken up station around Aleth A, another world of Sigma Albeth, a
sister world to Seome. Once they were on station, Dringoth gave the
order to proceed.

The Omtorish fleet set to work corralling all
the chronotron pods which wave and wind action had torn off the top
surface of the Twister and littered across the waters around
Kinlok. That job took a day. When they were done, a large
tchin’ting fiber net had been draped across the waters of the bay,
inside of which clanked and jostled most of the damaged pods.

Kloosee mentioned that it was like herding
pal’penk into their pens. “Except you don’t have to feed them and
talk to them.”

The Time Twister itself was a vast,
twelve-kilometer pie-shaped structure, segmented into quarters,
moored to the seabed with stout anchors and surmounted with
hemispherical caps, which were the chronotron pods. Fully
operational, the machine resembled an enormous inverted dinner
plate, studded on top with dimples and balls. The entire apparatus
was linked by thick ganglia of cables to the island itself, for
power and command and control. The hut where most of the
conferences and planning took place housed tracking instruments.
The control center was housed in a bunker-like structure on the
other side of the island, nestled in a small ravine near the
summit.

The project was planned to gather all the
repairable chronopods together, so the Umans could sort out what
worked and what didn’t. Those that could be repaired would be.
Those that couldn’t would be discarded and Sector would have to
furnish replacements.

Once the pods, the real working elements of
the Twister, were secure, the final teardown of the foundation and
Twister structure could begin. That would take many days.

Through it all, Chase worked closely with
Kloosee and Pakma and Longsee and a host of craftsmen from Omt’or
and other kels. There was quiet talk of the possible emigration.
Word had spread quickly through the workforce that two technicians
had accompanied Angie back through the Farpool. Their job was to
gather further intelligence on Earth’s oceans. How suitable were
they for Seomish to occupy? There was much speculation about
this.

Section by section, the Twister was taken
apart and the sections wrapped in tchin’ting fiber and attached to
powerful kip’ts, which would cross the Pomt’or Current, make the
Gap through the Serpentines and be staged in a gathering place just
off Likte Island, a small bay above the vast underwater canyons,
trenches and ravines that crumpled the seafloor in that region.
There, guided by instructions from the Umans, the sections would be
assembled, moored to the seabed and bonded together. Then would
come the chronotron pods. Dringoth’s crew would handle that
installation.

Several days after the final disassembly had
begun, a Coethi attack appeared out of nowhere. Golich said the
enemy jumpships had squirted out of a little used time stream, one
thought to be isolated, a bridge to nowhere really, but how they
made it to Sigma Albeth’s system in the current time stream, nobody
could say. The Twister was dead, shutdown. Seome and the whole
Sigma Albeth system was defenseless. Even the patrol squadron off
Aleth had been caught napping.

The Coethi did what Coethi do: they launched
a series of starballs, fusium bombs, at the sun and most of them
made their impact in a series of eye-blinding detonations that
rocked the star to its nuclear core.

Within days, the light level had begun
to subside. Huge waves churned Seome’s seas, as temperature
differences went extreme. Winds roared across the surface, gusting
at sustained hurricane force levels. Salinity levels in the upper
levels of the ocean changed as evaporation rates increased, making
much of the upper reaches of the sea uninhabitable, colder,
saltier, turbulent with the force of the waves above. Currents
shifted course, affecting navigation, affecting the
ootkeeor
, the deep sound channel.
Tremors and seismic shocks rocked the world.

There were many casualties, not the least of
them the vast cavern of Ponk’t itself, which partially collapsed,
killing thousands, sending thousands more into the open waters in
panic. Other kels were affected too. In the Orkn’tel Sea to the
south, islands collapsed, underwater landslides blocked the
northward-flowing Orklat current, effectively isolating the
Orketish from the other kels.

For many, it was worse than the Uman machine,
which had gone silent, as it had been fully disassembled and the
great convoy bearing the sections westward to the Likte Trench had
been scattered by ferocious surface cyclones.

Kloosee and Chase did what they could
but were grim in the effort. They had lost friends and colleagues
in the Coethi attack. The hardest of all to endure was losing
Longsee himself, whose kip’t had been smashed into the side of a
seamount by what had been called
ak’loosh
, a great-globe-circling wave foretold
in ages past, now circling the world, gathering strength with each
circuit. Longsee and two pilots had died in the impact and Kloosee
could not console himself to the loss.

Glumly, he drove his own kip’t onward,
leading a small group of battered sleds through erratic currents,
hunting for echoes from the Gap in the Serpentines that would put
them on course for Likte Island and its deepwater canyons. The
kip’ts bore several pie-shaped segments of the wavemaker, the Uman
machine, along with racks of chronotron pods which would be
re-installed once the new home base of the Time Twister was
constructed. Other kip’ts carried or towed foundation elements,
mooring cables and equipment for starting up the Twister in its new
location…if they ever got there.

Kloosee and Chase took turns piloting and
navigating the sled, with Kloosee sounding carefully ahead,
listening intently for the telltale echoes of the Serpentine
Gap.

“It’s chaos out there,” he insisted, sucking
on a gisu bulb. “All the waves above, the tremors and mudslides
below. I can’t get a good reading.”

It wasn’t what he said but the way he said
that made Chase realize how depressed and sad Kloosee really was.
There was a fatigued weariness to his voice that Chase had never
heard before and he was sure it wasn’t just his echobulb
translator.

“You really liked Longsee, didn’t you?”

Kloosee said nothing for a few moments,
concentrating on driving the sled forward through heavy silt-laded
waters. They were riding an erratic offshoot of the Pomt’or Current
and Kloosee was having trouble keeping to a steady course.

From somewhere in the back of his mind, he
dredged up a memory, which he related to Chase….

“
In my
4
^th
mah as a ward of Kelktoo,
I left the em’kel without permission several times, once traveling
as far as the island of Tostak, in the Sk’ortel. I was curious…I
want to pulse new places. But I was caught by the authorities
there, taken to Tostah and lectured sternly by the Kelktoo there
before being turned over to the custody of an Omt’or kip’t pilot
heading back to T’or. En route back to T’or, I tried to get away
again but the pilot recaptured me and beat me. Not badly…I
recovered. When Longsee inquired as to the cause of my injuries
after I came back, I shrugged it off as a run-in with a baby
seamother…which Longsee didn’t believe but he said nothing further
about it. Oh,
eekoti
Chase, I
was impetuous and headstrong as a youth but I learned a lesson
about obedience there.”

“Did they punish you when you came back?”

Kloosee forced a smile. “Longsee never
questioned what had to sound like an unconvincing explanation and
this impressed me. From then on, I felt I could talk to Longsee and
I did so regularly. You’ve talked about two people important to
you…you called them
father
…
mother
…an
eekoti
expression, perhaps?”

“I owe everything to them. My Dad runs a surf
shop on the beach. My mom raised me and my brother and sister. I
love ‘em, even though my Dad thinks I’ll never amount to anything.
He wants me to go into the business with him, like inherit it and
keep it going.” Chase chewed on a lip. “I pretty much don’t want to
do that…and Angie…she wants me to be more, too. Kloos, I like it
here…I’m kind of somebody here. Like a celebrity.”

Most of what Chase said didn’t translate well
and he could see Kloosee didn’t really understand although he said
he did. Chase knew the Omtorish, like most kels, didn’t allow their
young to grow up with their birth parents. They joined the Kelktoo,
the academic em’kel, at a young age, and were raised by
teachers.

Chase wasn’t sure he could have handled
that.

“I’m listening to snatches of talk on
the
ootkeeor
—“ Kloosee
admitted. The kip’t rocked and shuddered as he fought to stay with
the current. Behind them, not visible in the murk, were three other
kip’ts, all towing pods and sections of the Uman machine and its
foundation works.

“What do you hear?”

Kloosee seemed tense in relating the stories.
“It could just be talk. But there are persistent songs about the
Umans…some of the repeaters are singing that the Umans are leaving
Kinlok…pulling out. One repeater reports of sighting a great spear
of light, flying upward from the island…I’m not sure what this
means.”

Chase had the signaler they had long used to
request meetings with the Umans. Longsee usually worked the thing;
Chase wasn’t sure how it worked, or if it would work across the
great distance they had traversed from Kinlok. Still he had to
try.

“Maybe I can find out…maybe this thing—“ he
finagled with the fist-shaped device for a few minutes, eventually
finding some control studs on the bottom. One after another,
systematically, he pressed them. Scratchy voices erupted out of the
device mixed with bursts of static and words cut-off and Chase
listened. Perhaps it was a recording. None of it made any sense but
there was no mistaking the tone of panic in what he heard….

“Commandstar was briefly attacked by a Coethi
jumpship six milliterr ago and partially disabled. TACTRON has
assigned me to damage analysis and I must tell you, Dringoth, it is
extensive. Coethi was able to momentarily displace the ship back to
a time when it was still under construction. TACTRON countered with
a shift in voidtime to another timestream but not before the
destruction had spread. I don’t have to describe to you the
explosive effects of such instantaneous displacement.

“The result is that Commandstar is unable to
provide any assistance in drawing Coethi vessels into your range.
We are currently shifting through voidtime at a very slow rate that
makes us extremely vulnerable to another attack, while repairs are
being made. We may even have to re-enter truetime for awhile.
TACTRON’s war programming prohibits the unnecessary risking of
Commandstar, so for the time being, you will have to rely on your
own scanning for protection. I realize what a burden that puts on
your system but it cannot be helped, believe me. We are barely
functional here….

“Sector Command has approved your request to
re-locate defensive operations to Keaton’s World, pending shutdown
of your Twister….in the event Coethi enter your timestream, you
must ensure no part of the Twister falls into their hands—“

“What does it tell you?” Kloosee asked.

Chase listened a while longer, until he was
sure he understand what the signaler was saying. “Bad news, Kloos.
The Umans left Kinlok. Blasted off. Pulled out. With the Time
Twister shutdown and disassembled, they’re re-deploying some other
place, something called Keaton’s World. I don’t think it’s in this
system.”

“What does this mean,
eekoti
Chase?”

Chase just shook his head. Maybe selling
T-shirts on the beach would have been a better choice. “It means
we’re on our own. The enemy of the Umans, the Coethi, are
destroying your sun. If they succeed, all life on Seome will die.
Your skies, your islands, your seas, all of it will go dark. It’ll
freeze up. And without the Time Twister, there’s no way they can be
stopped.”

Kloosee tensed up. “It’s as the mekli
priestesses at the Pillars say…the
ak’loosh
is here. All the kels will
die.”