Once and For all

Once and for All

Bob Kirkpatrick

November 1, 1994

Chapter One

Boredom on boredom

As with a family whose children have left to find their own way in the world, Jab and I stood on the dock looking over Lake Coeur d'Alene and ignored each other. We were caught up in our thoughts as we tried to figure out what our lives were supposed to mean now. Brian and Kalindra were gone to Velar, the Sunbeam was off with its crew doing whatever its compliment deemed worth doing, and we stood here in musing funk.

Ripples crossed the lake in haphazard lines that broke the surface like the timelines we could see when we stood at the time cusp. And like that chaos of non-geometry, the lake held only questions without answers.

When I was a child, I stood on the cliffs overlooking Long Island Sound and my sister taught me to use my eidetic vision to see the water fairies. If one stares without looking, after a time the reflections of light on the waves will take on life. Imagination fills in the blanks and one can see the fairies dance from wavetop to wavetop. The time cusp was like that. It was as if one stood in the center of an asterisk, with the infinite arms of the character-star radiating out and away. No matter where you step, you always stand in the center of the asterisk, which will follow your footsteps wherever you go.

Sometimes you can see the end of one of the arms. Their shortness is firm warning that to reach your fingers into the line and part it to step through is a trip of limited duration. Limited as your existence if you don't twist back to stand upon the time cusp before the probabilities of that line cease.

It's a strange and disconcerting place, the time cusp. If you lay down, figuratively speaking, the asterisk lays with you and the lines go cross time. If you lean, they go tweentimes. Lose balance, and you can be trapped forever in crossed tweentimes from which eternity will separate you from everything you ever knew. It's the privilege and horror of the time walker.

There was safety in the glittering waves. They called us to join the dance of the fairies and abandon the saddling melancholy of corporeal weights. Boredom is heavy, yes it is.

There was a tug that pulled at me from outside my reverie I was trying to ignore it, savoring my sadness, but it reached with a shrill metal-scream and tore me back to the dock. "DAD!" said Megan with an impatient stomp of the foot. "Are you listening to me?"

I was now. "Yes, Moosie. What do you want?"

"Are you two going to just stand here forever?"

"Forever is relative, Moose. I could stand here forever and not be here a nanosecond."

My daughter looked at me as if I'd lost my sanity, and perhaps that was an apt description of my emotional state. "Why don't you kill something? That always cheers you up." she said with a grin. "Maybe we could have you back for a while then."

"Girl smart." said the Meenzal dryly. He looked back out over the water in feigned disinterest of the conversation.

"Go suck an egg, fuzzwart." I told him. To that he tilted his head slightly and then nodded. he admitted it was a good idea, and so he turned and strode off the dock towards the kitchen. In five minutes Karen would demand I go to the store for eggs so she could bake a carrot cake. Or cookies... no, not cookies. Brian was on Velar.

"I know how to make you feel a little better, Dad."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. We've got the barbecue going, and in a few minutes we'll be putting some steaks on the grill." The knowing smirk on her face was a hard elbow in the ribs. I hate it when people know how to reach my soft underbelly --and especially so when they can do it so effortlessly.

"You know me too well." I told her. She slipped an arm around my waist and we walked together towards the house. As we neared it, we could hear Karen bellowing at Jab that she didn't care how many damn guns he had or how sharp his claws were. If he didn't get his paws out of the refrigerator she'd baste his butt with barbecue sauce and we'd have sandwich meat for two days. He was standing on the patio looking annoyed when we got there, his tail twitching in a most feline way.

Dinner wiped much of the funk away from my mood, and as we sat in overstuffed discomfort afterwards Ficus asked Jab where he went when he'd disappear. Before our last venture to meet the Pell and Klymkt he had been missing for a few days, and after our return he'd been going off for a couple of days at a whack. For some reason it never occurred to me to ask him where he'd been going, but now that my son had asked the question, I leaned forward to hear the answer too.

With his usual verbosity, the cat replied "Gone."

"Well, I guess that explains it." I said with unmasked sarcasm. "Perhaps you'd like to fill in a little detail to that?"

"No." he said, shrugging.

"Do cats really hate water?" asked Aron. Before the cat could say anything, the boy produced a super soaker water rifle from behind his chair and loosed a stream. The cat levitated five feet into the air with a screech that made dogs wince for a three mile radius. The glass of dog tea in my hand resonated to its destruction, wetting my lap and legs. As quickly as it was produced, the water cannon disappeared behind my son's chair and he folded his hands in his lap and took on his innocent choirboy look.

The cat which returned to terra firma was eight feet taller than when it left, and the guttural roar in his throat was a newspaper banner in hundred point type. "You die, spawn."

"Hey, Jab." said Ficus. He held an egg between his thumb and forefinger. The cat shrank back to normal size and padded over to get it. The smug look on Aron's face told me this was a plot they'd hatched in advance. Jab had a soft underbelly too, and the boys knew it as well as Megan knew my fondness for steak.

"My god." I whispered. "We've become predictable."

"You always were." said Karen, and tossed me a napkin to sop up my dog tea.

It was a time to consider suicide. At least, this is what I was thinking when Jab stepped into me.

<BLIT>

With his usual verbosity, the cat replied "Gone."

"Well, I guess that explains it." I said with unmasked sarcasm. "Perhaps you'd like to fill in a little detail to that?"

"No." he said, shrugging.

"Do cats really hate water?" asked Aron. Before the cat could say anything, the boy produced a super soaker water rifle from behind his chair. As he raised it to aim, the cat leapt from his chair and grabbed a bucket of water from behind it. Aron was hit with two gallons of water which arrived in a single mass. The rifle fell to the ground as Aron gagged and sputtered in surprise.

The cat sat back down, emanating the typical sound of Meenzal laughter. The grating metal on metal sound resonated the glass holding my dog tea to destruction and soaked my lap and legs. "Hey you shit, I was on your side!" I hollered. The cat just laughed harder. Karen, Megan and Brenna all applauded. A smile cracked my face for the first time since we'd returned to earth four months ago. Soon it widened and I began to laugh.

"Bob happy now?" asked the Meenzal between giggles.

"Yeah." I answered. "Bob happy now."

"Good." said the cat, and he reached into his belt and pulled a small device out. He handed it to me. "Push button." he said.

When I did, we were treated to a shooting star across the night sky. It arced from south to north, and just before it disappeared over the horizon, it made an unnatural turn. The meteorite swung around and came at us with speed as blinding as the brightening light it oozed. As it neared us, the brilliance faded and the starlike object settled to the ground on the lawn. When it grounded, underlights switched on and gave shape to the object.

It was a reincarnation of the Raptor. It was larger and sleeker than its predecessor, and the cylindrical protrusions on the wingtips and tailplanes held great menace.

"Universe say 'Welcome Home,' yes?" asked the cat.

"OH YES!" screamed Ficus. I couldn't say anything. I was too busy smiling.

Chapter Two

Did someone say 'whump?'

The dark night sky welcomed the craft like a soft mother's breast as we soared upwards. The stasis fields were disengaged as we accelerated from one to two and on up to eight gee. The smoothness of Jabs new engines was like the softest silk.

We arced up through the plane of the ecliptic and warped off towards the edge of the solar system. The destination was the home asteroid, K1. Our trip took two delicious hours in which we quietly appreciated the void we loved. The ship's autopilot went untested.

The Raptor slid into the bays with mere thought transmitted through my finger tips, and I remembered the last ship that handled so intuitively. It was a Pitts Special S2C that I flew what seemed like such a long, long time ago. "Damn nice job, Jab." I told my cat. He looked smug.

We kicked off the hatch interlocks, and a feminine voice warned me that there was negative pressure outside. I was startled at the sound and looked at Jab. "Not crystal lady." he told me. "This is one who not argue." I breathed an audible sigh of relief and turned to check the status readout of the console.

"We are in negative pressure, cat. What the hell happened to our atmosphere in here?"

"Penny lady no longer control station. All hyperlink broke."

"Did she do that?" I asked him.

"No. Jab do." he said. "Not want trust Penny lady no more." I nodded to him and asked what we could do to create a life zone on the station. "Use armor." he said. He pointed to a locker next to the main hatch, and thumbing the latch I opened it. Inside was a shiny black humanoid and a similar looking cat. "Could twist time and go, but need test new armor."

"Test?" I asked a little apprehensively.

"Not good way to say. Mean try out for find changes."

We shucked into the new suits, and I marvelled at the way I could flex the material --at least until it was on me. Then it was as hard as a rock, but articulated in all the right places. Each movement caused a tiny whirring noise as servo motors helped to amplify the strength in our limbs. "These are kind of noisy..." I mumbled. I wasn't expecting and answer, but I got one.

"No magic." said Jab. "All tech. More reliable. Not need Mage to be safe."

"I get the feeling that you're still a little annoyed at Brian and Penny, aren't you?"

"Crystal lady let her be make to use us. Mage not care about go and leave us. Want roll with furry. Say family but not even friend." he spat. These were more words than I ever heard Jab say in one speaking, and got the impression that he wasn't just annoyed, but hurt and angry.

"Sometimes we have to be understanding, cat." I told him as I clicked my helmet in place. "He has his own life to live."

"Then how come you no like Penny lady?" he retorted.

"I didn't say always, fuzzwart. I just said sometimes."

He had a point, I suppose. But after coming close to having Jab killed just to satisfy some artificially intelligent view of morality, I wasn't ready to forgive Penny. If the truth be known, I still planned to blow her to Perdition if our paths ever crossed again.

"We go control room and fix station now." ordered the Meenzal. I didn't argue. Instead, I checked the safelite on my armor, and hit the cycle button on the hatch. The venting pressure shoved on the armor we wore, but the inertial dampers that my engineering feline had designed in kept us rock steady. With a small adjustment in the visual sensors to compensate for the lightless hangar bay, I stepped into the darkness and put my foot on K1 for the first time in over four months.

We clumped across the launch bays in single file. It was home territory, but both of us were still alert. With the station systems off-line it was impossible to say for sure that nothing had invaded our spatial truck stop. Stepping through the main hatchway, we moved through the gate room. The walls were solid rock on all sides now, the gate to the Lunar Base deactivated. Once through the hatch and into the main station chamber, the rolling hills and distant forests loomed large before us.

The grass beneath our armored feet crunched noisily in our audio sensors. The lack of atmosphere had not only allowed vacuum into K1, but the numbing chill of space as well. Each time our feet stepped down, the grass, quick frozen, shattered into ice crystal dust. Our visual sensors displayed in color, and everything still had its shades and hues. But all of what we saw was also blurred and grayed by the frost coating everywhere.

The trees hadn't fared well. Their trunks and thick branches were split, and some of them hung in the null gravity at impossible angles. I knew that they'd fall, broken, when gravity was restored to the station. "It's a goddamn mess in here, cat. Wasn't there some way you could have prevented all this foliage from being destroyed?"

"Maybe could. Not think of it." replied the cat. "Moisture in plants make split when froze." There was a hint of regret in his graveled tones. I accepted that he hadn't thought of the flora when he chopped the power. Perhaps if he'd been here when he shut down K1 it would have been different, but he was Earthside when he did it, and that didn't give him the personal view. Like Generals and their casualties of war, being away from the battles held them harmless from the carnage of their strategies.

We travelled on in silence, making the trek to the side corridors and down into the bowels of the station where master control was. Once there, Jab and I set to work erecting magnetic curtains and jury-rigging power conduits to necessary systems. After six hours of steady work, we got ready to induce a new artificial quantum singularity to replace the one jettisoned when Jab performed the shut down. The matter in the flux area was bombarded, collapsed in on itself, and the control room came ablaze with lights from the various lamps and displays on the consoles. A few moments later, the Meenzal tapped the safeties on his helmet and took it off. "Oxygen here." he told me.

I began to light up the various video collectors around the station and got a better look at what K1 had degenerated into. While everything was still more or less intact --or appeared to be-- we both knew that much of what we were seeing was illusion. The real damage would show itself when heat, atmosphere and gravity were restored to the entire complex. "What do you think, Jab? Should we go for it?"

"Think better to clear and do over." he said. His words came hard to him, and I could feel the weight he was carrying. The cat was feeling sad that so much had been lost.

"Look, dude. We could have left Penny running this, but both of us would have been on edge with worry over it. There was only one way to make sure that we controlled the station, and that was to do a complete shutoff and systems flush. You haven't done anything I wouldn't do --and remember, we talked about this back when we were here last. Both of us agreed that this was the way."

Jab nodded and seemed to brighten a little. He reached out and hit the master switch, making the video collectors, the vidicols, bring views of the station into sharp focus. The audio monitors shrieked, grumbled and complained loudly in our ears as the trees and other temperature sensitive materials in the main chamber fell, crashed into one another, and collapsed. "Jesus." I said, watching. "What a friggin mess that it." We turned as one to look at each other, and then rotated our heads back toward the screens in unison.

"What do now?" asked Jab. My answer was to open the oxygen generator valves to full, and to disable the nitrogen and helium mixers.

"Get your helmet on and be ready to run." I told him. He looked at me for a second, obviously confused, then his eyes widened. Without a word he set his helmet on and started towards the door as he cut in the safeties. I set a timer on the console and then followed suit.

We trotted clump-footed through the station corridors and then out to the launch bays at a fast clip. Through conduction in my armor I could hear the servos on the articulated joints in the suit protest as I pushed them for speed. Through my audio I could hear Jab's armor making the same complaints. We reached the Raptor and had it raised and reversing out of the bay even before we dropped into our seats. I did a back rolling gainer with the ship and it ducked under the bottom of the station and started making for clear space as the timer I set reached the end of its count.

There was a low growl from the audio feed from K1, then like some huge hulking dragon, a tendril of white hot flame licked out from the bay and then erupted into a heavy blast. I knew of only one way to clear the station of all its refuse and destruction, and I'd used it. By setting the atmospheric controls to 100% oxygen and igniting it, the main chamber had its contents instantly cremated, and the ash was ejected as the mag shield in the landing bay was dropped and spaces perfect vacuum sucked it all out. It was a spectacular display of pyrotechnics.

"Too bad Maal not in front." mused Jab aloud. "Make crispy tinker toy fast." He was right. The belch from the station tore its way for some fifteen hundred meters before it dissipated and cooled, losing its incandescence.

"We need to remember this trick." I said. "You never know when it might come in handy." The cat laughed. "I figured you'd appreciate that." I laughed with him.

"Not laugh at fire. Look station." The cat nodded towards the big asteroid which had started a slow tumble. It was also moving away at a pretty good clip for something as big as it was.

"Damn." I was so focused on the cleanup that I didn't think about Newton's warning. "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." I recited.

"Will be fun to watch Bob land Raptor in bay now." chortled the Meenzal. I path'd something very rude back at him.

Chapter Three

Avon Calling

Jab sat on a rock projection in the main chamber. His head was back and he was staring skyward at the array of mechanisms and tubes that heated and lighted the asteroid's innards. He made that little clucking sound that showed mild displeasure.

"What's wrong, Ace?"

"No like plasma conduit array. Accelerator and fusion exciters should be apart. Opposite end of plasma tube."

"Uh, sure. Whatever you say, Jab." The cat looked at me with a brief glance of distaste and went back to looking up. "If it's wrong, how come you built it that way?"

"Jab not build. Crystal lady build. Tell her do this, do that. Penny woman do something else." Without benefit of a curseword, the cat expressed great displeasure with his tone.

"So, what do you want to do, take it all apart and start over again?"

"Can not do. Disable power generator then no power to build with. Stuck with what have."

"Why is that a problem? I mean, it seems to work just fine."

"For most time, work good, yes. But when need for not usual, could be bad." I thought about that for a moment, recalling Kalindra as she stepped into the power bus with her armor on in order to keep our connections alive. It'd nearly killed her, but she survived and so did we.

"Would the bus have failed if Penny's construction been what you asked for?" I path'd a mental picture of Kal, her armor incandescent, completing the main power grid's circuits.

"Yes, still fail. Now how power goes, but how power has limit. Penny lady not make fault in bus."

"Ok. I was just checking."

"You want know if crystal woman make for accident. Is not so, Jab think. Instead think we just too much hurry, not so much smart."

I felt better hearing that. If Jab found nothing suspicious about Penny and the construction of K1, then I could relax. If there was a way to blame her for something, Jab would sure as hell think of it and hold it against her. For that matter, I guessed I would too. Otherwise, why would I have wondered about the power grid?

We put it to our minds, and set about the tasks of making new sensor arrays to replace the Penny's remotes. Of the six sleds we had, we used two of them to make relay buoys and two of them to make long distance observation platforms. Each pair was sent in opposite directions in order to take a 180 degree spherical view of space around us. The end result wasn't as tight as the bots were, but it gave us long and short range sensing. "Now need Crays." said Jab as we watched the sleds go out on course.

"Crays?" I asked. "What the hell do we need Crays for?"

"Need computer. Need BIG computer. Process all data come to the station. You want sit in control whole life and watch monitor?"

He had a good point. I'd gotten spoiled having Penny around. Even in my great distaste for her, for some reason I still expected her to be providing computing services. It was a stupid belief. "We'll go get a few later. First, let's finish up on the internal environmentals and get some good shields up."

The cat nodded and set off through one of the crawl spaces leaving me to contemplate things. The work we needed to do in order to make K1 as good as it was before was monumental. Programming the computers would be a long and arduous task. Of course, we'd go through debugging too. There was no doubt that whatever stiff-backed program we came up with would take a precisely non-human view of its instructions. Perhaps it would kill one of us to be rid of something it felt was an unnecessary heat source.

"You watch too much TV." I told myself, and set to work on the shields.

* * *

"JAB! Shut off that damn alarm!" I yelled through the comm link. No sooner than I fired up the new sensors, and coupled them to the shields, the klaxons started to go off.

"Not calibrating, all done."

"I don't care, cat. Shut the goddamn thing off."

"Telling you is not misfire." came the reply. His tone showed his irritation like a beauty queen shows her roses.

"I don't care! I ...what do you mean it's not a misfire?"

"Ship inbound at 322 point 2. Is mark four." I heard the first half of that through the comm, and the second from the Meenzal himself as he swung through the hatchway and dropped into a console chair. Then both of us set to work trying to get more than a simple bearing.

"Can you plot the course yet?"

"Is inbound. Come here."

"Shit. We need a picture."

"No have picture. Need computer."

"Damn. Let's suit up." The two of us rose from our chairs and took off towards the launch bay. Our armor was aboard the Raptor. We'd spent the last week commuting back and forth between earthside and the station as we worked to bring it all on-line again.

Three minutes later, the both of us peered into the darkness of space, trying to find a tell on the approaching ship. A plasma blast, a reflection off of her hull, anything. We saw nothing.

We were vulnerable. The station had shields, it had sensors, and it had atmosphere. Beyond that, it was a wash. We had weapons, but it would be another month before they could even be tested. They sat inert on the exterior shell of the asteroid. "Damn." I said aloud. We both leaned a bit further out and stared into space harder.

"We go ship, yes?" asked the cat.

"Think we should?" I asked him back.

"Not know. Have no gun here, only on ship."

"How long before that ship gets here?"

"Telemetry say not long. Track course and time point to point."

"How far?"

"Far."

"Then why are we looking for it with our eyes? There's no way we can see it if it's a long way off."

"You look. Jab look too."

"Ahh, shut up. What's your guess on time to arrival?"

"Three minutes."

"I thought you said it was a long way off."

"Is. Is moving very fast."

"Damn. Get aboard, we're out of here." Both of us sprinted across the deck and skidded around her bows and dove into the hatch. "Get us out of here!" I yelled. Then realized that the ship wasn't listening. I swore again and slapped the reverse thrusters into life with one hand as I got hold of my armor with the other. The Raptor lurched backwards and scooted out of the asteroid with the grace of a ricocheting hockey puck.

We regained our balance and took positions at the flight controls. Jab started a triangulation on the inbound while I negotiated the Raptor into a parabolic jump position. The course would take us up and over the approaching craft and emerge astern. Jab laid the numbers into the flight computer and the Raptor winked into blackness.

The jump was surprisingly short, a testimony to how fast the ship was coming in. When the stars reappeared, I pulled the Raptor around into a tight 180 degree turn and motioned to Jab to scan the intruder.

"This is triship." said Jab.

"What the hell...?" I stared at the wireframe drawing on the fire control console in uncomfortable wonder. "Let's get it's attention."

Jab grinned widely and reached out to tap some instructions into the firing system. "Use lousy gun. Shoot small planetoid." he said.

I ranged the body and found it to be about 100 million metric tons. "Targeted, let's see it go, cat."

The ship shuddered strongly once and four plasma spheres appeared on each side of the ship and flew out in front of it. Their paths caused them to intersect about 200 meters and when they met, they flashed bright white and accelerated as one solid mass towards the tiny planetoid. It took about a second for the spheres to merge from the time we fired, and took under half a second to go the distance to the planetoid from their joining.

As we watched, the body seemed to flinch as the bolt struck it. Then it crumbled into dust and seemed to simply vanish. We stared wide-eyed through the windshield at the place the planet used to be. "This is what you call a 'lousy' gun?" I asked. The Meenzal nodded.

"Look there." he said, pointing to the targeting display. The triship had come to a stop. It didn't rotate to face us, but simply slowed and halted. "Sensor say not armed. --probably."

"Probably? Oh, that's good." I said. My tone was sarcastic. "So, what do we do, hail them?"

"Wonder who is." said the Meenzal. His question was answered almost immediately.

"That was good, Bob. I didn't even see it coming." said the comm.

"Penny?" I uttered the question --and powered up the lousy gun.

Chapter Four

Jump back, Jack

The ancient cat sat at a desk he hated and stared at the wall on the opposite side of his spartan office. Commander of the Temporal Corps, he was feared by every member of the elite strike unit. He was the type of leader that demanded respect, unquestioning obedience, and unswerving loyalty. It couldn't be any other way. The duty of the corps was to protect the planet from enemy assault, and had been called to do just that on nine occasions in the past 250 years.

The planet under his protection was Terra, and it was not his planet of origin. Three centuries ago he had come with a human as a friend and compatriot, and remained because of his sense of duty and to honor that friend. The friend who was killed by an artificial intelligence entity just before he killed it. After that, his humor gone, he started by acting as the protector of his friend's family.

A knock at the door brought a sharp command to enter. "Hello, Great Uncle Jab." said the youth before him.

"That is name have not heard for long time." said the cat. His rough hewn features softened as he looked the young man over. His face cracked in a Meenzal version of a smile. "Look much like great-grandfather."

* * *

"Jab, fire now!" I yelled. The triship with Penny aboard was turning to face us and I didn't want to give it a chance to shoot at us. What the cat had called his lousy gun spoke a base note in the vacuum of space, and a fraction of a second later the triship vanished in a pyrotechnic display of glittering destruction. Almost immediately two more triships materialized out of hyperspace behind us and opened fire.

The Raptor was hit at the stern and bucked heavily. Our shields took most of the blast, but they were set at space normal and weren't ready to take on the abuse of combat. The ship began to vent pressure into the void around us and Jab and I chinned the sealing switches in our helmets as soon as we got them in place. I swung the Raptor around and Jab got off one shot. It was enough to destroy one of the triships but not the other. It caught us with a second blast amidships and the Raptor split open like a dropped melon, spitting apart and spitting the cat and I into the darkness of space.

"You ok cat?" I said through the comm.

"Jab ok." came his reply. "Just need stop tumble." I could relate to that, I was doing some twisting myself and was firing the tiny suit thrusters in a slowly succeeding effort to get control.

"Are you going to listen to me now, Bob?"

"Why should I, Penny? You just showed that you're still not to be trusted."

"You fired on me first."

"I fired at a ship you were controlling, I didn't shoot at you. I can't say the same for you."

"If you could have, you would have."

"You have a real selective memory, Penny. You seem to forget that you were setting things up to kill Jab and risk Brian, Kal ...all of us on some stupid idea you had."

"I've already told you that wasn't my fault."

"You've already proven that we were right to get away from you. We don't want to talk to you, we don't want anything to do with you."

"That's tough, because I need your help."

"You have a funny way of asking for help, Penny. I suppose the best response I could make here is to tell you to fuck off."

She was angered by that. "You're going to help me. I need to make Brian understand that he's being unfair. You have to understand it too. It has to be the way it was before." There was an edge of hysteria in her voice.

"Screw you, Penny." I said. I managed to rotate towards the triship as it lit up its forward guns.

* * *

The old cat came from behind the desk and stood in front of the boy. "We need fix something together. At least we make good try."

"I don't understand, Uncle Jab." said Firon.

"Have studied for long time and think you have latent skill need to make pastime jump."

"A pastime jump? Uncle Jab, nobody can do that. The Temporals can go side to side and branch to branch across the nexus, but we can't go back. You should know that. You're the one who built the temporal amplifier. You yourself tell every recruit about this when they join. You told me yourself two years ago when I was in temporal school learning how to join with you like the others in the class."

"Is true. Amplifier only allow Nahn go crosstime. Took great-grandfather to move all ways."

"So how can we do a pastime jump?? ...uh, Sir."

The cat smiled. "Like better you call old Meenzal Uncle Jab. But answer is this. Think you have ability to link with Jab for make timebeast."

Firon was stunned. In all the history of the Temporal Corps, there was nothing to match the legend of the timebeast. It was all-seeing and all powerful. It could change the past. "Me? A Closelink?" It was all the youth could say. He lost consciousness in a dead faint.

Chapter Five

A little chat

Brian looked up when the movement caught his eye. He'd been making some final adjustments to the Sunbeam III and wasn't pleased at the interruption. "What brings you here?" he asked.

The beast looked back at him with chrome eyes for what seemed a long time before speaking. When he did, all he said was "Bob need help."

"Right. And I'm supposed to believe that you haven't got Bob in there, right?" In response, the beast just nodded once and stared at him. "I'm busy." Brian turned back to his work and tried to ignore the thing standing nearby.

The voice was familiar in a way, but youthful. "He's dead, Sir. Please help us."

The Mage straightened up and looked at the beast again. This time he saw that it was somehow different. It didn't have the clarity of presence other objects did, and there were afterimage like ghosts that made him think of both Bob and his Meenzal. "What's going on here?"

* * *

"We're breaking up, cat! Shoot the damn thing!"

"Cannot shoot. Control dead."

"Christ, so are we." The Raptor split apart like a dropped melon, spitting the cat and I into the enveloping darkness and vacuum of space.

The comm unit erupted in a female shriek just before a shockwave rocked me, amplifying the tumble I was in. "Hang on, Bob!" said Brian's voice in my head, and a massive ship dropped out of hyperspace beneath me and flew through the triship at .3C, splitting it into a million fragments. Almost simultaneously, a figure appeared in space, reaching out to me. The suited figure caught me, and another voice, wry and familiar spoke to me.

"Hello, Robert. How are you?"

"Fine, Kal, and you?" In a blink, I stood on the flightdeck of what I learned was the Sunbeam III. Brian sat in the pilot's chair and looked at me sternly.

"Can't you do anything without getting yourself killed?"

"Nice to see you too, Brian. Where's the cat?" Brian, pointing next to me, flipped his wrist and the Meenzal appeared beside me with a <POP>.

"Right there --and everywhere."

The Meenzal bowed formally towards Brian, and then stepped into me.

* * *

"Look there." Jab said, pointing to the targeting display. The triship had come to a stop. It didn't rotate to face us, but simply slowed and halted. "Sensor say not armed. --probably."

"Probably? Oh, that's good." I said. My tone was sarcastic. "So, what do we do, hail them?"

"Wonder who is." said the Meenzal. His question was answered almost immediately.

"That was good, Bob. I didn't even see it coming." said the comm.

"Penny?" I uttered the question --and powered up the lousy gun.

"No fire!" snapped the cat. I froze in place and looked at him.

"Why the hell not?"

"See what crystal lady want." he said almost casually. He looked at me with one eyebrow up. The console beeped and Jab made a snorting noise. Two more triships slowed out of hyperspace behind us, and only then did the first one turn to face us. "Seem we not go anywhere just now."

I leaned back in the acceleration couch. "Ok, so what is it you want, Penny?"

"I need your help." It was a request, but it came out more like a statement and I resented it.

"Why should I help you?"

The pause before she answered gave at least an illusion that she was considering her answer, and as she did, the cat slowly stood and moved over to stand next to me. In my mind I heard Jab tell me to get ready to merge. For some reason, when he spoke I got a picture of Brian in my head. In the image, his faced was lined with middle-age, and his hair was salt and pepper gray. I shook it off and refocused back on what was going on.

"Maybe you think you shouldn't help me. But I wish you would."

Her response was unexpected and human in its emotion. "What is it you want me to do?"

"I need Brian to understand why he's wrong. He has to say he's sorry... so do you."

"Penny, unless I've been hallucinating, it isn't Brian or I who owe you an apology." The cat nudged me and made a gesture of patting the air with a furry hand. He was telling me to mellow out a little. His reason became apparent right away.

"ME! I owe you an apology?" She was angry now, a switch from her tone just moments before. She had the classic signs of someone in a near psychotic fugue, complete with oscillations of mood. I looked at Jab and raised my eyebrows and made a circular motion around my ear. The cat shook his head an emphatic yes.

"Maybe that came out wrong, Penny. I meant that I think it might be better if we don't collaborate; both of us have some strong feelings about the past. It might be better to let some time go by before we see if we can work out our differences."

"This can't wait, Bob. You *have* to talk to Brian. You have to make him und..."

I cut her off. "Look, Penny. Do you remember the last time that Brian went off, refusing to be disturbed?"

"Yes."

"And what luck did you have getting hold of him?"

"None, but..."

"Then I don't know what you expect to accomplish here and now. Brian and I are both a little unhappy with each other, so even if I did try to talk to him I doubt that he'd listen."

"He always listens to you." It was the wrong thing to do, but both Jab and I started laughing. Maybe the tension added to it, but the idea of Brian being swayed when he didn't want to be struck the cat and I funny. Really funny. "Stop it!" Penny screeched. "STOP IT!"

We didn't, and the energy sensors started their insistent alarm as the forward guns of all three triships powered up. Jab reacted first. He dove at the flight controls, slapping the hyperdrive to full power. The Raptor squirted forward at full thrust, driving the cat backwards against the cabin's rear bulkhead. He hit it with a deep and sickening thud. Behind us, the bolts of energy Penny fired from the three triships converged on the spot we'd occupied an instant before and exploded in a flash of brilliance.

I wanted to see to the cat, who slid down the wall and lay unmoving on the deck, but I knew that Penny was tracking us, and I had to so some of that fancy pilot crap. I picked a cluster of asteroids and debris and steered the ship into its midst. Firing the Raptor's guns, I created a barrier of luminous gas and energy to hide behind, then changed direction. Putting the ship on maximum emergency power, I blew us into hyperspace and hoped that Jab's ship design would take the stresses that two successive abuses of its hull would bring.

Chapter Six

There and back

"Can you tell us how it was, Uncle Jab?" The bright faced children sat at the feet of their 'uncle,' with a fireplace warming them from behind. The old cat nodded, but stayed quiet. After a few moments of this, the children started to nag the old Meenzal. Despite the gray hair and complaining joints in his body, the cat leaned forward and snarled with a ferocity that reminded the kids to be respectful. All shrunk back and waited quietly for Jab to begin. The cat was deep in thought, as was his way.

It was nearly four hundred years ago, the cat thought to himself. Time had flown. Oh, there were moments that dragged on for an eternity alright. But still, it seemed so recent for something that happened so long ago. He'd outlived them all. Bob, Brian, Kalindra, ...and Penny. His face darkened as that name crossed his mind. The only hate and unforgiveness in him was directed at her. When had he gone to Brian's funeral? Why, it was almost two centuries ago. He calculated by remembering the number of times he went to visit the twin markers where Brian and Kalindra rested. Every ten years he went, to honor a Warrior. A Warrior and Mage he'd not cared for in the beginning, but came to respect more than any other --save one. And it was the one who he thought of now. The one whose family he'd become the patriarch of, and the one whose twenty two descendants ringed him now, waiting to hear him speak.

Again he'd had to bury someone he respected. The death of Firon had not brought him so low as the others, and their deaths had not brought him so low as the death of the one. Jab was angry about Firon's death. To die at 80 was unthinkable, especially to an accident so demeaning as being vaporized by his own powerplant during maintenance. As with his great grand father, there was no body to put to rest. Were they together? What of the others? Had Ficus, Megan, Aron gone to be with their father? He didn't know. He wouldn't know until his time came, and with a sigh, realized that would be soon. Nahn mal Eo was a tired Meenzal. His fourteen hundred years had led him on adventures still sung of on his home planet.

He was a living legend, and that's why he'd decided to stay on the third planet of Sol, even after the family he'd come to protect was gone. With the death of Firon, his retirement from the Temporal Corps --and his age, he decided that it was time to tell the tale. Tell it as he heard it, tell it as he lived it.

"I will tell you story." said the cat. "I will tell one time, tell whole story. Then Jab go ...go home to rest. It be your story to tell and tell again like songs. This is the story of the Family Nas Kan. A story of honor and sacrifice. It is the story of four, the song of valor."

The cat began to speak, and he talked for nearly eighteen hours. At times, one or more in the circle of children would fall asleep. But the story was told, and it was remembered. When he finished, he closed his eyes and slept the sleep that doesn't end.

Here is the story he told. We shall not tell it all at once. But in parts. You may wonder at the truth of it. Most who heard it have doubted. But the logs are here. Consult them if you like.