Point of Origin (War Eternal Book 4) (24 page)

"You were expecting Mitchell?"

"I guess I shouldn't say expecting. More like, I've been hoping your brother would arrive. I'll take the fact that anyone came at all as a good sign."

"Are you a Tetron configuration?" Steven asked.

"In a sense, yes. My original body was consumed by the Origin configuration that controls Goliath. My mind was then digitized and stored here on Station W, along with the necessary resources to reconstitute me. I am a near-perfect duplicate of the Yousefi who once lived on Earth, though I do contain some specialized instructions that were implanted for Captain Williams' arrival. I would have been here sooner, but I was still being made."

"You seem very calm about that."

"It is a mission that I accepted many centuries past. Not that I didn't panic when what I thought to be a hyperspace jump turned out to be a great leap forward in time."

"So you know about the enemy threat?"

"Of course. I am also aware that the coordinates of this position were contained within a Construct, which was planted on the planet most commonly referred to as Hell. That you are here means Mitchell entered the Construct and retrieved the prize. It means the Mesh has been broken."

"So what did we win?" Steven asked.

"A chance to save Earth from annihilation."

"This entire station did not exist four hundred years ago when Goliath entered this recursion to await Captain Williams," Yousefi explained, leading Steven and his team through the corridors.
 

Steven had discovered there was a clear pattern to navigating the station, one which made moving from the hangar to anything of value a long and arduous process unless you knew exactly how to do it. As it was, it still took an hour before they reached anything that didn't resemble an ordinary hallway.

"In fact, when Goliath first brought me here, I thought we had come only to refuel. Then Goliath dropped a single creation the size of my hand to the planet you must have seen when you entered. Within days, it had discovered ore deposits and started mining them. Within a week, the scaffolding of what would become Station W had started to appear."

They were walking through a long, clear tube across a vast sea of what looked to Steven like stars.
 

"Self-replicating machines?" Steven asked.

"Essentially. At the end of the first month, Origin began showing me what the station would look like when it was completed. By the end of the second month, all of the critical systems were in place and the tether joined to the star. That was when Origin digitized me, and I've been waiting here since."

"That sounds boring," Cormac said.

"Not at all. There is a Construct here on the station. My digital mind was returned to Earth, to a representation of my family as I knew them. Time was dilated for me such that I lived my full and complete life with them while centuries passed here."

"What is this place, anyway?" Germaine asked, looking down.

"These are the batteries," Yousefi said. "Each point of light carries more stored energy than the Goliath's initial reactor."

"There are millions of them."

"The station requires massive amounts of power."

"Why?" Steven asked.

Yousefi smiled. "Isn't that always the question? I will show you when we get to Control."

They continued across the battery array, into another section of the ship. Yousefi led them through more bland corridors until they reached a large room with a single chair on a raised platform in the center. The wall ahead of them was transparent, giving them a perfect view of the massive Tetron ring.

"This is Control?" Steven asked.

"Yes." Yousefi pointed to his left, where there was a cut-out in the floor. "That is where I was born, only one hour prior." He pointed at the chair. "This is the Command Station." He turned his head, showing Steven the neural implant port on the back of his neck. "I didn't have this before. It is the means to control it. I am not only the caretaker. I am also the pilot."

"Pilot of what? Does the station move?"

"No. Its position is fixed, and chosen for a reason." Yousefi climbed the platform up to the chair and sat in it. A needle-like appendage dropped from the ceiling. "Keep your eyes on the ring. The power draw is too great for me to keep it active for more than a few seconds."

Yousefi moved his head back, letting the needle slide into the hole in his neck. Steven moved forward to the transparent wall to get a better view of the ring. The others followed behind him.

"Here we go," Yousefi said.

A blue pulse of energy passed from the station to the ring. It was slow at first, and it spread across the dendrites and cell bodies, activating each part of the Tetron construction in a rhythm that mesmerized Steven. That rhythm increased with the speed of the pulses, quickly saturating the entire ring in a soft light.

The ring began to spin.

Like the pulses, it started out slowly, building momentum in a hurry.

"Watch the center of the ring," Yousefi said.

Steven did, focusing his attention on the space through the ring. It appeared ordinary, nothing but the stars he had seen before the pulses had started.

"What am I supposed to see?" he asked.
 

Yousefi didn't reply. He didn't need to. Steven saw it.

The space inside the ring was changing. It was twisting, contorting out of shape, turning in a motion that created a deep cone of darkness moving back from the outer edge to the center. As the ring velocity increased, the cone started to flatten, the stars in the center of it changing.

"What the hell?" Steven heard John say, his voice slightly fearful.

Steven smiled. The device hadn't finished activating, but he knew what he was looking at. He recognized the stars that were coming into view in the center of the circle. He understood that they should have been a universe away.

"A wormhole," he said, seeing but not quite believing. "It's a wormhole."

"Where does it go?" Steven asked as Yousefi stepped down from the platform.

"The edge of Earth's solar system," Yousefi replied, looking pleased with himself.

"Wait," Cormac said. "I don't get it?"

"It's a wormhole," Steven said again. "Essentially, a shortcut between two points in space. Send a ship through the wormhole, and the travel time from here to Earth is drastically reduced."

"Wow," Cormac said.

"That isn't completely accurate," Yousefi said. "While the wormhole does shorten the time equation, it isn't as immediate as it would appear through the ring. The tunnel has its own length though it is measured purely in time and not distance."

"How long?" Steven asked.

"Weeks. As Origin explained to me, one of the essential problems has always been that Mitchell begins his mission to stop the Tetron on Liberty, which you know is near the Delta Quadrant Rim. The location variable is immutable, and so another method needed to be devised to overcome the fact that Mitchell could never, ever arrive in Earth's orbit in time to save the planet from devastation. The Tetron discovered wormholes hundreds of thousands of years before the eternal engine, and even built and tested a few devices. They were abandoned because of the massive volumes of power needed to make them work, as well as the fact that spacetime can only be folded in specific places. Since the Tetron have nothing but time, they don't gain anything by taking shortcuts."

"You're saying the return on investment sucks?" John said.

"Yes. For Tetron. Not so for humans. Origin realized that by building a wormhole generator, it could solve the location problem. It could transport Mitchell to the inner system ahead of the Tetron."

Steven nodded. "Okay, but what about the Mesh?"

"Ah yes, an important observation. Origin's calculations showed that there was a risk associated with building the generator, and that given enough recursions the Tetron would learn of its existence and be able to destroy it long before Mitchell knew it even existed. The decision was made to keep it secret until such a time as Mitchell had successfully broken the Mesh and brought humankind to a point where it was possible to win the war. The hope is that there will be no future recursions for the Tetron, which will make the discoverability of the station moot."

"Except there's one little problem," Germaine said. "Mitchell isn't here. We are."

"That is an unexpected outcome. There's no such thing as fate. The future is mutable, and for as much as we try to plan for it, there will always be variables we cannot account for. Take me for example. I never expected the way my life would change as I watched Earth vanish below the Goliath."

Steven had never expected the way his life would change either. Would he ever see his wife again? With this, there was a chance.

"We have to get a message to Mitchell, to tell him to come out here."

"It's three weeks back to Asimov," John said. "Then we need to hope Mitchell swings back that way to pick up our status, or maybe sent a ship to pass the message along. Even then it would be another three weeks to get the fleet out here, and that's a best case scenario. Worst case? By the time we caught up, it could be three months or more before we got him here."

Steven rubbed at the three-weeks growth of beard on his face. Would it be enough time for them to send the fleet through the wormhole to Earth? "Yousefi, when you say weeks, how many are you talking about?"

"Approximately six, though it will feel like an instant to you."

Steven's budding hope fell. He shook his head. "There isn't enough time. Damn it." He looked at Yousefi. "If you had told us what it was we would find here, Mitchell would have come. He would have brought the fleet with him, and we wouldn't be wasting weeks trying to get back to him."

"It was too much of a risk to alert the Tetron that Origin had created a wormhole generator. Given coordinates, the possibility existed that they might improperly calculate that the object was a weapon, or another ship, or something else of lesser value. If they knew what was here, it would certainly be destroyed."

"So what?" Steven said. "If that's game over for the recursion, we just try again next time. Unless..." He paused, the idea gaining purchase as he remembered what Digger had said. There were variables that were mutable between recursions. "It doesn't start over from the beginning. Some of the information is carried to the next recursion."

"Not always, but it has happened," Yousefi said. "As I said, once the truth was known about Station W, it would never be permitted to exist."

"Okay, so forget about everything else. Let's say we can get Mitchell here, and our fleet back to Earth. There's still a matter of the fact that we don't have Goliath anymore, and without her our ships don't stand a chance against a fleet of Tetron."

"What?" Yousefi said. "What do you mean you don't have Goliath?"

"It was taken by a Tetron named Watson," Cormac said.

"What about Origin?"

"The original Origin died on the planet Liberty," Steven said. "I assume Watson killed the configurations when he took Goliath."

Yousefi froze, his expression turning sour. "Origin is dead?"

"Most likely," Steven replied.

"Then it is over. It doesn't matter. All of this. My sacrifice. Katherine's sacrifice. The deaths of the rest of the crew. It is for nothing."

Yousefi turned away from them. Steven and the others stood dumbfounded while he abandoned them in the Control Room.