The Temporal Knights (79 page)

Though it took nearly a year to reach their top speed of .92 percent the speed of light, the ship continued to perform flawlessly. Now however, at the speeds they were traveling, the ship’s computers handled all of the flying, and there was precious little work to keep either Matt or Murphy busy. They continued to check the ship’s systems now and again, and to double check their course and heading, all of which the computers did on their own continuously. So the men had nearly as much free time as the ladies. They spent much of that time exercising, studying, playing cards or simple video games. The days and weeks passed quickly, with no real external pressure on any of them, and they all got to know one another very, very well. As it went, Matt ended up enjoying studying with Æthelgifu, who was much more dedicated than his own wife, and Murphy was at ease with Ellyn, sharing many of her tastes in music, books and movies.   

All of the cross companionship did nothing to hinder either couples devotion to their partners more intimate needs. Everyone was very sensitive to the need for privacy, which was considerable since they were only awake together a total of about eight hours out of every twenty-four. Boredom was never a real issue and the computers filled the hours with both education and entertainment. For the most part they were all enjoying the trip and each other. Once a month, Matt allowed them all to enjoy the freedom of weightlessness which was exhilarating. They frolicked and played throughout the ship like children, chasing and grabbing, but if the touching became too general Æthelgifu always spoke up, and ended the fun. She did not mind the masculine attention from Matt, or that Murphy showed much the same attention for Ellyn, but she would not allow any open foolishness, and held a very dim view of it. She seemed to instinctively realize that there was a line that the four of them could not cross or they would hurl themselves down the road of complete degeneracy or worse.

It helped that on their fourteenth month aboard; the Lady Ellyn came into the cockpit while Matt was checking their course. She slipped her arms around his wide shoulders and nuzzled his neck for a moment. Matt smiled and reached up and stroked her hair.

“Have they gone to bed?” He asked referring to Murphy and his wife.

“Ummm,” Ellyn mumbled, her kisses moving up from his neck to his ear.

“Give me a minute,” Matt said, growing distracted. “I’ll be right with you,” he told her, happy for her affection which had been very robust these past few weeks.

“Ye’ve already done right by me,” Ellyn answered and playfully bit on his earlobe.

Matt tried to concentrate on the heading, but it was getting tougher by the minute.

“What?”

“Ye’ve already done right by me,” Ellyn repeated and Matt swiveled in his seat to look closely at his wife.

“What…what do you mean?”

Ellyn frowned and gently slapped him on the arm. “Why it means ye’ve gottin’ me with child Matthew Thane.”

Matt’s mouth fell open and Ellyn laughed at the look of terror on his face.

“Ye to be a father,” she told him and reached out and pulled his hand to her belly. He kept it there a long minute, but her midsection was still flat and showed no signs of the pregnancy yet. After a bit, his hand traveled to her breast and they celebrated together right there in the cockpit.

To the men the pregnancy was a tragedy of titanic proportions, but the women took it in stride. Each had brought along the secret herbs and medicines of the day which were known to discourage the female body from conceiving, but both knew that nothing could completely stop the natural acts of God.

“How’s she doing?” Matt asked after Æthelgifu examined her friend.

“Verily well...two months along methinks,” she answered with a smile, amused by the inevitable nervous energy shown by all men. She noticed his worried look and shook her head, though what she knew of midwiving was limited.

“She
be a strong young woman...good hips,” she added by way of comfort. “Twill be fine.”

But neither Matt nor Murphy could be put at ease so simply. Both were aware of the dangers of childbirth. Matt was far more knowledgeable than his friend, having experienced the births of his previous two children, but such knowledge did not comfort him one iota. Both Shelly and little Matt had the luxury of being born in a hospital, with an entire staff dedicated to their safety and their mother’s. Everyone immediately agreed that the next few months could be well spent learning about the subject in detail, so Matt begged off Spanish and architecture, and Murphy electrical engineering, to learn about babies and where they come from. As it so happens, over the next six months, they each learned a great deal, as did Ellyn and Giffu since the computer systems stored all the knowledge known to man, and the subject of human birth was no exception. But of course, the more they learned, the more nervous the men grew as the special day moved ever closer. By the end of the third trimester all of them were on edge, men and women alike, but they were also very excited, none more so than Ellyn, who grew so large she was sure she would pop at any moment. In fact, those last days she begged to have the gravity turned down regularly so that she could get around more easily and Matt, the caring husband that he was, capitulated, but only after receiving promises from them all to increase their exercise load after the birth.

The special day actually came along in the middle of Matt and Ellyn’s night, as babies often do, but for all their worry, Ellyn was the end result of millions of years of evolution, her body specifically designed for having babies, which she did quite well after only six hours of labor. She gave birth to a strapping baby boy, who near as they could tell weighed in the vicinity of eight pounds, and was twenty inches long. He had a thick head of black hair like his father and screamed out his fright and frustrations to his smiling, crying and happy crewmates.

“We’ll call him Oldalf Matthew Thane,” Ellyn announced, taking the babe into her arms and putting him to her breast for the first time. His crying stopped instantly and Ellyn sighed contentedly, oblivious to the look of horror on her husband’s face.

“You can always call him junior,” Murphy suggested and slapped Matt on the back. Ellyn looked up at them and smiled, completely missing the joke. She was still wet with sweat, but happy and utterly exhausted like never before in her young life. She fell asleep with little Oldalf still suckling, leaving no room for discussion about the boy’s name.

From the moment of his birth, little Oldalf was a great joy to all of them. He was truly a space baby, and learned to get around in zero gravity before he could crawl, which he did early enough in the weaker gravity of the ship, and he was walking before he was a year old. Everyone delighted in playing with and watching their youngest crewmember
grow and learn. It was just a few weeks past his first birthday when the proximity warning began to flash and the ship did a slow turn until its engines were forward. They began to fire periodically to slow the ship down. The process would take almost four months, only a third of the time it took to get them to top speed, and at the end they would be on the outskirts of the Skawp system...hopefully.

“I am terribly afeared,” Ellyn admitted quietly to Matt one day, as they readied for bed. Oldalf was already sleeping, tucked warmly in his hammock which swung above the foot of their bed. “I dunna want to take our child t’war,” she said falling back into the speech patterns of her youth. Over the years both women had lost much of their English flavor, beginning instead to speak more like their husbands and their true tutors, the computers. The exception, however, was when they were overly excited or mad and then they tended to revert to the language with which they were most familiar.

Matt nodded his head, sharing her fears and glanced over at little Oldalf. It was tempting just to leave; there were dozens of habitable worlds listed in the Skawp’s database, but enticing as it might be to run away and hide, the Skawps would eventually find them…and find Earth. His memories were still overflowing with images of human destruction and death. It was far more than he could bear.

“It has to be done,” he whispered back with finality, expecting that to be the end of it. But when Æthelgifu broached the same subject a few days later, and suggested they just go back to the safety of Earth, both men knew their partner’s education was severely lacking when it came to the Skawps. They set the computers up to teach the two English ladies a little history lesson, which for them, just happened to take place in the future. They set the footage to appear on the large screen in the living quarters, but neither man could sit long and watch the grisly scenes, so instead they took baby Oldalf down to the exercise room where they played with him in relative quiet.

The scenes that played were the worst of the first days, when billions of people died and the Earth was full of rotting corpses. On the screen, bodies by the thousands were being buried with large bulldozers, while others were piled high and burned. It was a horrible scene straight from the world of nightmares. The histories continued through those first grim years, and then later, when the Skawps attacked directly. There was a surprisingly large amount of footage of the aliens attacking and killing human soldiers, but there were also some scenes of Skawps getting blown to bits, or riddled with gunshots. The footage continued all the way up to the last days at NORAD when the Skawps had them completely surrounded. The film was long and thorough, and by the time the women moved to the lower level to join their husbands they were both very pale, eyes wide with horror. They had no conception of the scale of the death and destruction; after all they were relative innocents to even the full brutality of humanity against humanity, having missed the horrors of the Second World War.

“So many,” Giffu said softly and then began to weep. She stumbled into Matt’s arms since he was closest, while the Lady Ellyn stood completely immobile utterly stunned.

“What you don’t get through video,” Murphy told them quietly, “is the smell. For nearly two years I could not get clean, could not rid the stench from my nostrils, no matter what I tried. It was the worst.

“My first wife Cindy,” Matt added, disengaging himself from Giffu, who promptly went to her own husband, while Matt walked up to his current wife, “and my children Shelley and Matt Jr. all died the same week, long before we knew we were under attack from the Skawps. All the women, girls and young boys died in those first terrible days. We didn’t learn until later that the first attack was meant to kill us all, and only alien ignorance about our biological systems saved the males past puberty. It was a big mistake and cost the Skawps dearly. I don’t know exactly how many we killed, but it was millions, but they kept coming and attacking like they didn’t care how many they lost, just so long as in the end they killed us all.”

“That day is still coming,” Murphy said quietly. “When we finally get back to Earth we will only have six hundred years before the attack. Well, this time we attack first.”

Both women nodded their heads, agreeing completely. Whatever danger they would face, they would face it together, for all mankind.

The next few months of deceleration were filled with fear, tension, and worry. The men checked and rechecked their course and heading against the computer maps, afraid the ship had brought them far out into space and near nothing at all. They checked and rechecked the nuclear weapons, and did countless diagnostic tests on the bombs delivery systems. They studied the Skawp planet in detail. It was a planet slightly larger than Earth, and positioned much closer to its red dwarf sun. There were three small moons circling the Skawp home world and one large moon. The surface was nearly all land mass, with a half dozen small oceans, each completely isolated from the others.

The largest city was located just south of the equator, directly in the center of the largest land mass. If the computers were correct, that was where they would find the Queen, hopefully near the surface. For them, it seemed a very big if.

Matt was racked with worry, hoping against hope that the Skawp’s computers told the truth about their history. According to the Skawp’s files their technology had changed little in the last one hundred thousand years. If that was true, there could be thousands of ships moving through the solar system and a great many of them identical to the one they were flying.

Matt hoped this was the case; he worried that their trip through time had somehow affected the entire universe…even the Skawp’s own history. He had nightmares of the enemy ready and waiting, with a strong planetary defense. Who really knew about time? What it was, how it worked?

As they approached the very outskirts of the Skawp system, everyone became resigned to the inevitable. They were going to do their very best to kill the Queen and would most likely die in the attempt, but no one spoke about their chances of success. Their everyday lives went on much as they had for the past three years. There were constant system checks and either Matt or Murphy confirmed their course against the Skawp’s database every hour on the hour. If the ship’s computers were correct they were rapidly approaching the enemy’s home world.

Little Oldalf was a treasure to them all and his constant antics helped to relieve much of the tension that was building as they drew near. Everyone aboard was highly committed and betrayed no doubts until the morning of the 952
nd
day of their journey.

“Slowing to one-third; entering the Skawp system,” Matt announced over the intercom, jolting Murphy awake. He leaped completely naked from the bed, like it was on fire. He stood, still half-asleep and confused, for a moment in the center of the small room. His body heard the announcement but his brain was far from processing the information. Giffu propped herself up on an elbow and gazed sleepily at her husband.