But where were the NAVO?
For a split second he had caught a glimpse of the last fateful explosions and the webs of twisted metal that spun to haunt those precincts of space.
All vanished and there remained only black space.
Miko sat in his harness dumbfounded. No outpost, no ships, no fires, no wreckage. All the fires had been quenched. The Zikri were gone, all except the NAVO sentinel that had fired on them, which revolved in a slow eccentric loop out to port, now a powerless husk. Only Rogos’s dusk-amber light burned below. What had happened? Where had everything gone?
Miko’s mind flickered—on something extraordinary.
They must have been jarred out of time. He recalled that the acceleration had not resolved itself when the NAVO ship had blasted them from the back. What did it mean? Likely they accelerated through the tunnel, and thus accelerated through time. But where were they now? Some distance in the future...or the past.
Miko swallowed the lump in his throat. How far, he could not say, or in what direction they had gone, future or past. He could only guess it might be as easily a few days or few years as much as a few million. No wreckage, no moon, no outpost? That could mean anything or nothing. The moon that housed the Zikri base could have passed some length in its orbit on to the other side of the planet.
Miko’s amphibian-like features curled in a puzzled frown. The fact that the sensors showed no radiation from the explosion, brought a feeling of dread to his stomach.
His mind travelled back to the lectures he had sat through about time travel and the essence of ship drive physics. One rolled painfully in his mind: Through creating a tunnel or vortex of the appropriate force and dimension, a time dilation can occur. A space stretch, allowing any vessel or being in that space to make the gigantic leaps across the gulfs of space. The non-relavistic technology operates on a basic principle of ‘radiosis’: manifesting an intense radionic pulse beamed through a hypercompressed Alopathon crystal. If the frequency of the beam is allowed to reach the terahertz range, the vibrating crystal undergoes a radical shift and modifies the space around it at the molecular level, thus warping space and time. To channel such power means to create a condition for supra light speeds. In the same way, as in the phenomenon of time dilation, a voyage taking millions of years might take only a few hours, or a few days. The frequency of such waves, however, must be inordinately high, and unwavering.
It was beyond Miko’s ken...
He snapped out of his reverie, disturbed by Audra’s shrieks and the jerking prod of her tentacles. Everything was gone, except the crippled NAVO craft...what did it mean?
The tug of Rogos became real. Sitty II now became a target of the planet’s gravity. The ship’s thrust, which was minimal at best, could not counteract the descent. The main power was kaput, barely able to supply a few mitons of time drive thrust. Miko saw, they were being dragged toward the ancient planet.
He had the satisfaction of witnessing the NAVO craft that had instigated this foul-up roll in its death throes. It drifted like a wounded gull toward the ancient planet. He considered blasting it to cinders with whatever power remained in Sitty’s weapon cells, but no such power was on reserve, not to mention that it all seemed wrong. Perhaps the ship, should it regain control, could be his last chance for escaping Audra. Was it a foolish hope?
Audra. How the name evoked a dark pall in his heart. Death or capture by his own people. Which was better? Did he really want to escape Audra? The idea appalled him as much as excited him. He thrust his thoughts back to the dilemma at hand.
The planet loomed larger than expected through the viewport. How fast they were descending he did not know, for the gauges were mostly unresponsive. Miko only knew that the ship was spinning in a slow loop, caught in Rogos’s gravitation, much like the nearby NAVO craft. Through the small oval of glass, he caught glimpses of the dull amber world lying below. Rogos! An ominous shadow and reminder that it would become their grave.
Miko could only guide the sub lumo-thrust manually to somewhat slow their descent. The loss of central power had knocked out the escape pod. Sitty II was however equipped with mechanisms for freefall. Vane brakes and air chutes would open automatically at appropriate times. But would that be enough? There were always inordinate risks when entering an atmosphere to crash-land. He could not say the same for the NAVO vessel drifting not a few miles away, smoking and reeling in a tight death pull like a chewed up carcass. The sentinel had not fared as well being knocked out of the time cone.
Miko stabbed out a webbed finger onto his color-coded holo-screen. Up came a likeness of the planet Rogos, the image flickering on reserve power. A brief pictorial description of the planet’s history played back through the holo-screen. There was not much to see or hear. In the Almanac of Planets was written a brief excerpt on the planet’s origin, and the existence of a very primitive life on its surface.
Miko grunted miserably. He dimmed the screen. Entry into the atmosphere was coming quickly. A deafening roar permeated the hull. The titanium outerbody could withstand the heat, but the fall would be devastating. He diverted more power to the rear stabilizers to reverse the thrust at or near the moment of impact, but not enough. Audra sat impassively, a fleshy gnomish figure, watching the unfolding disaster with a clinical disinterest.
Several masses of clouds, vapours and strange colours fled by the glass port. The craft lurched. Through the flickering scattersplay came glimpses of a vast swampy forest and weirdly
