8 CHAPTER 7

We followed the ensign through engineering, doing our best to avoid being trampled by other engineers rushing this way and that, on their way to a seemingly endless series of emergencies. Through the blaring alert sirens, the pulsing red lights, and the thin haze, eyes watched us as we passed. We stood out, not because we wore CEVA suits, or because we were armed, but because we were the only ones who seemed calm. We were also the only ones walking. Everyone else was running.

The ensign led us through several large compartments, each seemingly more chaotic than the last. The ceiling was high in this part of the ship, but conduits and pipes ran in every direction, giving the area a closed-in feeling. The swarms of engineers, all working in concert, made me think of an ant colony under attack. The consoles blinked more reds and blues, and less and less green. Whatever the details of the accident, it had wrought havoc with this end of the ship.

I watched as three engineers, junior crewmen not much beyond nineteen or twenty years old, race to halt some manner of equipment failure. Their fingers danced across the keys of the console they operated, moving faster than I could follow. The displays in front of them blinked with red lights, as the computer showed them an endless cascade of system failures. The two young men worked furiously to carry out the orders of the woman coordinating their efforts. Her face was covered in sweat, but her eyes never left the screen as she worked the controls and barked orders. The two men watched her as she worked, trying to keep pace with both her orders and her own work. As soon as one area of the display turned green, another would go red.

We were led out of the forward compartments, into the engine room itself. I was instantly hit with a wall of humidity and heat. I felt like I was drowning. The yelling, sirens, and rumblings were deafening. The massive compartment filled four full decks, and the catwalks reached port to starboard, forward to aft, all surrounding the massive twin fusion reactors which loomed over us like two masses in a metal spider's web. The floor was littered with debris. We had to climb over a collapsed girder. Spent fire extinguishers lay everywhere, as did equipment torn up by what was obviously a massive explosion.

Crews crawled over the port reactor like insects, using safety wires to lower themselves down from the highest catwalks like spiders. I noticed that one such engineer hung limp. Nobody seemed to bother taking her down. They were too busy. The port reactor's right side companion seemed alright for the moment, though several engineers were frantically taking readings at its base, screaming in each others' ears as they discussed the readings from their instruments.

It was then that I noticed several still bodies lying on the floor, against a wall. As we passed them, I saw that they were all burned. Of the five I counted, three were horribly burned, but only on one side. The other two were burned only on their fronts. Where the burns covered them, their uniforms were gone, seared away along with their skin. I looked back to the port reactor, and immediately understood what had happened. A massive stream of steam erupted from the reactor, right where an engineering station was located. These unlucky crewmen must have been working there when the breach occurred.

I turned and caught David's gaze. He was trying to assess exactly what had happened here, but this was way out of his area of expertise. He just shook his head at me.

"How bad?" I asked, yelling above the deafening commotion.

He shrugged. "I don't know. Pretty bad, I think." He pointed to the port reactor. "Look at the buckling along the side!"

The reactor's outer skin seemed warped, and in one area collapsed like an accordion. Sparks flew, and a stream of steam shot out through a large, gaping hole. A team of engineers, a dozen or so, were fighting to reinforce it. Most were dressed in hazard suits, but some were not. Obviously, everybody was more focused on stopping whatever was going on, than worrying about personal safety. I had seen situations like this before, soldiers forgetting to put their helmets on, or medics forgetting their gloves. It spoke of a deep sense of panic in the face of an extreme emergency.

The ensign stopped us and pointed to an empty space, one of the few in the room. We took shelter under a catwalk, just as a section of deck plating from a collapsing catwalk two decks up came crashing down where we had been. People dove out of the way, but quickly carried on with their work.

"This is fuckin' crazy!" Kyle yelled over the blaring sirens. "What did we walk into, here?"

David pointed back to where we had come from. "This part of the ship is obviously in a different fragment of space-time than the forward areas. The accident just happened."

"No kidding, huh?" Raj hollered.

Before David could respond, the ensign returned with a burned, blackened woman in her late fifties. Her uniform was torn, and a large burn dressing had been applied to her left forearm. The only thing still visible on her tunic was her rank badge; Commander. Her long brown ponytail was singed, and apparently cut short rather haphazardly, as though she had been the survivor of a near-miss. She was carrying a large wrench, which looked like it had seen some serious use recently. She quickly looked us over, and the glare she shot us made her seem even less patient than the ensign.

"I'm trying to stop two reactors from blowing up and taking this ship with them," she barked. "I don't have time to play games. Who are you, exactly? Quickly now!"

I took a step forward, "I'm Captain Jack Mallory, Marines. This is my recon squad, Sergeant David Forres, Sergeant Kyle Taggart, and Corporal Raj Sandhu," I explained.

"Commander Alexis Hall, Chief Engineer," she replied. "Now what are doing in my engine room?"

As I opened my mouth to answer, an explosion two decks up, this time on the starboard reactor, sent people and debris scattering. I heard screams as engineers dove out of the way. One crewman caught in the blast was thrown off his catwalk. He fell, striking the railing of the catwalk one deck below him as he dropped the full three stories to the base of the engine room. His body was still, and a pool of blood formed under his back. Raj and Kyle hurried to him, dodging falling debris.

Commander Hall was thrown against me by the explosion, and we both struck the bulkhead hard. I held onto to her out of instinct. I was still trying to clear my head as she pushed off of me, her tiny body nearly throwing me to the deck.

"Ensign Bretin!" she yelled at the engineer who had met us, and the two of them dashed away from us.

I hurried after them, trying to keep out of the way as engineers rushed to deal with the new problem. David was still with me, but nursing a gash on his face, just below the right cheekbone. He had it under control, but it was deep. I reached into my butt-pack and pulled out a field dressing. I unwrapped it and put it over the bloody wound, all the while trying to keep track of Commander Hall and Ensign Bretin.

The two engineers raced to the base of the starboard reactor, where several steam geysers shot out just overhead. The heat was overwhelming, and I felt my suit's cooling fans kick in. Three engineers were furiously fighting with a stuck lever. All three were fighting to bring it into the down position, and Hall and Bretin joined the effort. We also jumped in, but the lever was stuck in the 'up' position. Hall grabbed Bretin, and yelled something into her ear. The ensign rushed off, and returned moments later with an odd piece of equipment, like some over-complicated hand drill. He handed it to Commander Hall.

The Chief Engineer used her massive wrench to smash the cover off of the lever's base, screaming fiercely as she swung the metal tool. It was a little intimidating to watch, and for the briefest moment, I thought that with a rifle in her hand, she would be a force to contend with on a battlefield. As it was, she was doing battle with chaos and damage. She drove the business end of the drill into the lever's base, and leaning in, switched it on. The drill slowly turned the gears of the lever.

She looked to us, gritting her teeth from the effort of keeping the drill steady and in place. "Pull!" she roared.

The other engineers, along with David and me, grabbed hold of the lever and heaved with every bit of strength we could muster. I screamed, as if my battle cry could force the lever downward. Everyone else was doing the same. Slowly, between Hall's tool and the weight of our effort, the lever came down and locked into place. A moment later, two of the steam geysers lessened, and then stopped.

She started barking orders to the others. "Ensign Bretin," she yelled as she pointed, "see to the secondary inputs, and make sure they're still online. Then get up top and figure out if the reactor's stabilizers are salvageable. We already used the spares on the other reactor, so you'll have to figure out how to make them work."

"Yes ma'am!" the ensign yelled, and rushed off towards a ladder to the second level of the engine room.

The commander turned to the other three engineers. "I want you to start a cascade shut down of the mains. Do it one node at a time, and then vent the aft valves until the system is clear. You have five minutes. Move!" she barked when they didn't instantly jump to it.

She turned to us, and with a crooked finger, motioned for us to follow her. She led us away from the engine room, down a short passageway that led to an office. The small room was littered with hand-pads and tools, and some debris, much of it scattered about and on the deck. The forward wall was transparent, looked out over the engine room. Her office, I presumed. Once David closed the sliding hatch, the noise died down. Still, a rotating red alert light on the ceiling reminded us of the ever-present emergency, and bathed Hall's face in a frightening, almost menacing glow.

"Ensign Bretin tells me you're a little confused about the date," she said. "That's the only reason I'm giving you time to explain yourselves. You have two minutes to explain yourself, and that's really two more than I should give you."

"Commander," I started, "we were deployed from Port 25 in an effort to stop the Saturnus' experiments before you initiated stage three."

She nodded. "You're late."

"Yes, ma'am, but we didn't expect to be," David replied.

Hall looked toward David. "Sergeant Forres, right? Exactly when did you expect to arrive?"

"A full twenty-four hours before you started running stage three," he explained. "From our perspective, the Saturnus departed Port 25 two days ago. We were deployed twenty-fours later, after we received a transmission indicating problems aboard."

"Problems?" she asked. "What sort of problems, marine?"

David looked to me for permission to explain everything, and I nodded. He continued.

"The transmission we heard indicated that the Saturnus had been compromised by Edra commandos. Also, it seems the crew was suffering from temporal psychosis."

The commander was silent as she worked through what David was telling her. She nodded slowly. "The Captain?" she prompted us.

I took over. "The transmission indicated that Captain Paetkau was refusing to halt the experiments, despite enemy forces encroaching on the bridge."

"Who sent the transmission?" she asked.

"I did," I replied, careful to look her square in the eye so she would be sure I was telling the truth. "I sent it. Or, more accurately from my perspective, I will send it."

She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a rag. She was about to use it to wipe her face, but it was full of dried blood. She dropped it on her cluttered desk with a sigh. She wiped the sweat and grime from her face with her hand, not that it did much. She didn't say anything at first. She absently rubbed her left forefinger and thumb together and seeing the blood on it, wiped it against her tunic.

"Time fragmentation," she said slowly. "Just like I said would happen."

"You expected this?" I asked.

She nodded, and in a sudden burst of anger, brushed the pile of hand-pads, tools, and debris off of her desk. Then she was calm again, rubbing her finger and thumb together again, looking out of the window to the destruction beyond.

"The project's scientists ignored me," she said bluntly. "They assumed that nobody without three doctorates could possibly understand how the time core functioned." She shook her head in disgust. "I have been a naval engineer my entire adult life. I was the Chief Engineer of the carrier Verdun before my assignment to the Saturnus. I have worked in more engine rooms than almost anyone else in the entire fleet. I understood the math, and I knew exactly what they were trying to do. That's why they picked me. They wouldn't listen to me, though, which is more irony than I can stand."

"Can you explain what happened?" I asked.

She looked back over her shoulder, at us, and shook her head. She turned back, looking out the window as engineers hurried back and forth.

"No," she sighed, "I can't. No offense, Captain, but you couldn't begin to understand what's happening with the time core. It's far too technical for you."

"What about the Edra?" I pushed. "I spoke with your security chief, and he said that one of your engineers spotted Edra commandos aboard."

"That was Ensign Bretin," she explained. "The one who brought you here. Kevin spotted them moving through an empty section just aft of the starboard fuel storage cells."

"That's where the squid ship was docked," David added.

She turned to us. "You saw them?"

I nodded. "We exchanged fire with them, a few minutes ago. They pursued us from deck nine, forward of the core, all the way back to engineering. We seem to have lost them, or they broke off their pursuit. We're not really sure which it is."

"That lunatic Aisin insisted Kevin was imagining things. The further on into the experiments we got, the worse he got." The commander grew more agitated. "Kevin spotted them just after stage one was complete, and of course he called it in. Aisin came down, looked around, and saw nothing. He was furious, bitched out the kid, and left with his men. Then, after stage two, for whatever reason, he came back to yell at Kevin again. I had to order him out of engineering."

"We spoke with him before coming here," I explained. "He's barricaded himself and some other survivors in the forward passageways, on deck seven. From his perspective, it's been four months since the accident."

"The fragmentation," she said with a nod.

"He's pretty paranoid," David jumped in. "He seems to think your man is a part of a plot, and refuses to acknowledge the presence of the Edra. Everyone we saw is suffering from severe psychosis. The only thing stopping him from coming here with an armed guard is the severe radiation near the core."

Her head picked up at that, and her eyes went wide as something obviously occurred to her. She searched the pile of hand-pads on the floor beside her desk, tossing them aside as she looked for something specific. Finally, she came across a large pad and set it on the desk. She spoke as she worked away, punching in numbers.

"That's the time fragmentation," she said, not bothering to look at us. "It divides off the various regions from each other. My guess is," she started to say, before entering more data into the pad.

"Yes?" I asked.

"This explains why I can't contact anyone outside of engineering," she muttered to herself.

"Your guess is?" I prompted her.

She ignored me for a moment, looking over her calculations. The hand-pad displayed a side map of the Saturnus, with various regions colored differently. She held it up to us.

The diagram of the ship was divided into four sections. Engineering was one such section, and the forward area, beyond the core, was another. The core itself was its own deep red, and the bridge and surrounding areas at the top of the ship were colored blue.

"We're here," she pointed, "in engineering. You came from here, right?" she asked, pointed to the forward area of the ship. When I agreed, she continued, tracing her finger over the lines that divided off the different colors. "The Saturnus' supporting bulkheads run through these lines. It's also where the heavy emergency doors shut in case something goes wrong. I dropped them after the port reactor started to go critical."

David gently pushed me aside, taking the pad from the engineer's hand. "The fragmentation formed along the heavy bulkheads."

"They're specially built," the engineer explained. "The materials are designed to channel the energy from the central core. It's part of what makes it possible to form a wormhole through time as well as space."

"The bridge is isolated," David commented. "Do these colors predict time displacement?"

She nodded. "Crudely, but yes, they should. The core is going to be its own special mess, but outside of the core, I should be able to predict time fragmentation. Anything close to the wormhole generator pylons, you know, those two big things sticking out from the hull, is going to experience faster time progression than the rest of the ship. Based on your perception of time, it's obvious that engineering is experiencing much less of it."

"What about the bridge?" I asked.

"That should be behind the curve," she explained. "From their perspective, stage three won't have occurred yet. Beyond that, don't ask for specifics. I don't have them." She handed David the pad, but look to me. "You can still stop this. Get to the bridge, and stop Captain Paetkau."

"Hold on," I said, raising my hand. "Our information suggests that the Captain might already be suffering from psychosis. How is that possible, if from her position, the accident hasn't happened yet?"

She hesitated for a moment, gathering her breath. "Because there was another accident during stage one."

I felt my eyes go wide with shock. "And you continued on?"

She nodded. "Captain Paetkau was in the central core housing during stage one. She was right there, beside the core. She was close enough to touch it."

"Oh no," David whispered.

The engineer nodded, and continued. "It was a minor temporal fluctuation, but I begged her to halt the experiment and bring us back to port. She brushed me off. When it happened again during stage two, her behavior become noticeably erratic. Lieutenant Aisin was there, as well. He had just come from engineering, in fact."

Things were starting to make sense, even if I didn't understand the temporal side of things. There were still things that were far too murky for me, such as how she expected the bridge to be pre-experiment, even though stage three caused this mess. I asked the engineer about them. She wasn't much help, unfortunately.

"You have to understand, Captain, we've never tried this sort of thing before," she said. "I don't fully understand how time fragmentation works. My guess is, once the bridge initiated stage three, we experienced the time fragmentation, and the bridge actually experienced a sort of time regression. That's assuming my calculations are correct, of course. I can't be certain of that."

I waved her off. "Alright, fine. I get it. What do we have to do to stop this?" I asked.

"Get to the bridge, Captain," she insisted. "Stop her any way you can."

"What about entering the core chamber itself?" David asked. "What if we destroyed the time core?"

She shook her head. "You're assuming the core is experiencing a time frame which is pre-accident, but that's probably not true. In fact, time might be so fragmented that you wouldn't be able to approach it at all. It would be like, I don't know, trying to walk through a cloud of broken glass, for lack of a better explanation. Every fragment could potentially kill you. My guess is that you would be able to see that sort of fragmentation. It would be that severe."

"Alright," I said with a confident nod, "the bridge it is."

She gestured to the pad with the ship's diagram on it. "Show her that."

I nodded. "My orders are to stop this disaster at all costs," I said as David and I headed toward the door. "Explaining things politely is step one. Step two is less polite."

She gave me a single, fierce nod. "Good. I've lost twenty men and women today, Captain. One of them was literally melted into the deck plates up to his abdomen. If you can undo this, you'll have my thanks. Of course, I won't remember this conversation, but you get the idea."

A small explosion shook the deck, and Commander Hall rushed past us, back into the engine room. We followed. Kyle and Raj were waiting for us near the still body of the fallen engineer. Raj's knees and lower legs were covered in blood, where he had knelt to help the man. Kyle's suit was much the same. I stepped in close, and quickly explained the situation.

"Alright, look," I yelled over the blaring sirens. "We have a better handle on what's going on here, but our mission is still the same. We're going to the bridge and ending this shit. We do that with words or shots, whatever it takes."

"Time to fuck 'em up!" Kyle barked.

"You know it!" Raj replied.

I nodded. "Nobody cares how we play the game, boys."

I could feel the adrenaline between the four of us, just like every other time we went into a fight. Now that we understood what was going on, things were clearer. This was starting to look more like a straight up combat mission, and that's what we did best. I turned to David.

"Lead on," I ordered him.

We hurried out of the way, as a group of engineers rushed past us with a large piece of equipment. We found a ladder that led up to the top of the room, on deck 6. We climbed carefully but quickly, several small explosions almost shaking us off the ladder. By the time we reached the top, the chaos below seemed to have increased. A geyser of steam enveloped the bottom deck, and there was screaming everywhere.

I gazed down from the catwalk, as half-seen ghosts moved in and out of the steam cloud. I shook my head, and ordered us to move on. If we didn't stop this, a few more deaths in engineering were the least of our problems. At the forward end of the catwalk, there were massive sliding doors, just like the ones we had entered engineering through.

"This is a supporting bulkhead," David said. "It should be the edge for this particular time fragment."

He opened the panel beside the door, and after some re-wiring, it opened partially. Beyond the door was a thick fog, just as there had been before, at the other door. Though we had no idea if it was safe to pass through it exposed, David suggested against it. We activated our helmets, and the chaos below seemed to switch off as soon as it folded over my head. My ears rang, but David's voice was still clear through the speakers near my ear.

"We need to move ten meters forward," he explained, showing us his ship's map. "Then we take the ladder up to deck 3. There will be another set of doors there."

"Alright, let's go," I said. "Raj, take point."

Raj unslung his rifle and stepped through the fog. I followed, with Kyle and David taking up the rear. The compartment beyond it was free of smoke, and none seemed to blow in from the engine room. The lights flickered, but most were on, and we could see our way. Our radiation counters crackled to life again, just as loudly as before.

We moved on, making several turns. We quickly found the ladder we needed, and climbed up three decks from deck 6 to deck 3. According to our schematic, we were one level above the top of the core, which was twenty meters forward of our position. Thankfully, the radiation here was low, and we folded back our helmets to conserve air. We had to force our way through a damaged hatch onto the deck's passageways.

Throughout our entire route, we didn't see a single member of the crew. The passageway was quiet, empty. Most of the deck plates were warped, just like below, and a lot of the wall panels were scattered around. It looked like someone had torn the place apart. As we moved toward another ladder nearby, I heard yelling.

We stopped, and turned in time to see two crewmen running away from us. One of them turned to us, and looked at me with panic in his eyes. The two of them ducked around a corner. I ordered my men to follow them. The flickering lights here created a strobe effect, and it was difficult to focus. It gave me a feeling of vertigo, but I pressed on, trying to catch up to the fleeing crewmen.

"What now?" I wondered, as I chased down the panicked sailors.

As we rounded the corner, something grabbed my head and smashed it against bulkhead. Through the dizziness and flickering, I saw shadowy figures envelope my men. I felt Kyle thrown against me, and we collapsed to the deck. Raj was grabbed by the throat and lifted clear off the deck. His assailant threw him a good five meters down the passageway, against a closed hatch. David managed to get off a shot, but the plasma bolt went wide, and blew out the lights over our heads.

A moment later I was dragged to my feet, and pushed against the bulkhead. Someone ripped the rifle out of my hands. The flickering from the nearby lights wasn't enough to see my attackers. I tried to reach for my shoulder light, but a gun barrel was shoved in my face.

"Do not move!" the strange voice hissed insistently.

I squinted through my rattled vision. My eyes followed the odd-looking pistol down to the gloved hand holding it, and then down the arm. The scale-like armor shone in the flickering light, giving off a reddish sheen. My eyes traced the slender arm to the shoulder, and then to the thin neck, also covered in red, scaly armor.

The gray face glaring back at me was almost human, with thin lips that partially hid sharp, black fangs. The nose was absent, with two small breathing holes expanding and contract as my assailant breathed. The eyes were the worst part of the face. They were inhuman, cold, more like a snake's eyes. The slits were vertical, with deep black irises, and deep red where we had whites.

I tried to shake free, but thin, powerful fingers wrapped around my throat, and a second gun barrel was pressed against my left temple by another figure in red scales.

"I said do not move, human!" The hissing voice now had an angry, metallic quality to it.

The Edra had us.