“Better than sitting around here waiting for Baer and his bounty hunters to nab us.”
TK grunted. “Let’s get to it then. Show me to the bridge. I’ll check the warp engine controls.”
We went on board, down the main service hall lit in dim crimson by the emergency lights, past the cabins and the head into the bridge, with Billy and Wren trailing like kites in the wind.
I shuttled TK over to the pilot’s chair where the console still blinked and lay bathed in the eerie glow of the emergency lights.
TK sighed. “Bring up the warp panel. These modern interfaces are a little more new-fangled than I care for.”
“As you like.” I hit some side bars on the keypad, showed him the utility menus and he played long fingers along the touchscreen, bringing up a menu. “Varwol 6.0. Mezanine 3.4 kbs. Waxrin thrust gain, nominal. There, Barenium seal. See, you’re too low.”
He played with the sensors and he couldn’t help but notice the iridescent disc that lay three feet away below the auxiliary console. It must have flown free from the strongbox during impact. Could have been it or the box itself that hit me on the head. “What’s this shimmering disc you have here on the floor?” He reached for it.
I snatched it out of the old man’s hand before I remembered how dangerous the thing was, and dropped it like a red hot coal. “Nothing. Just some artifact.” I lanced the old man a wary look.
He did a double take and jerked back his head. “Artifact, my eye.” His eyes narrowed. “That’s why those men were chasing you, right?”
“Forgot to tuck it away in the back. Kinda hard when you’re crashlanding in a garbage pit.” I grabbed it up with my sleeve, laid it out on the control board with care. Something told me to trust the old man, as he’d figured most of it out anyway.
“It’s a small version of something else I saw back on Brisis. Some sort of weapon, I figure. Careful, it’s dangerous.”
He flipped it over in his gloved hands, while Wren came to stare over his shoulder, peering at it with doubt.
“Any more of these things?” he asked.
“None aboard. A larger version of something that looks quite different is locked in a safe place,” I said cryptically.
“What you’ve got here is a phase shifter. Moves atoms around from one time or place to another. How it does it, the physics is beyond me, but I’ve read about them.”
“Even you?” I guffawed. “Thought you were Mr. Fix-it-up and Encyclopedia man.”
“Not me,” he barked, “still a long ways to go. This here’s a remnant of another newfangled tech before the galaxy went to shit.”
I grunted, a thoughtful murmur on my tongue. “Explains how one yobo dematerialized to nowhere-land in front of my eyes.” I wondered how Baer and his idiot hirelings got it. They must have stumbled on it somewhere digging through the many crates of contraband going through their warehouse. Holding out for the highest bidder, like the vultures they were.
TK mused, “In the hands of ruthless people, this device could mean trouble.”
Wren blew air out of her nose. “Don’t you think we’re already on the road to hell, old man? As a species we should have been stamped out long ago.”
“No argument there,” he laughed.
“I think that sinking ship has already sunk,” I said.
“See those key codes or glyphs, bug script?” TK said. “Somehow they set a location. But they’re scrambled or encoded in some cryptic language. Nothing like I’ve ever seen before.”
“Bug, what do you mean, bug?” I croaked.
“Mentera tech, lost long ago—an old alien insect race. Rulers of the galaxy. Good luck finding a translator key.”
“So it’s useless?”
“I wouldn’t say that. The technobrains could probably back-engineer it. Someone with the yols and the clout to organize a think tank.”
“Hence your friend Baer, trying to fence it to someone,” muttered Wren.
Some star lord, if I recall.
“See, I think—” I reached for the thing without thinking, and wished I hadn’t, because TK had somehow armed it with his handling. As soon as I made contact—Zap. I came out in some other place, clutching that thing, blinking like an owl.
A sallow dawn greeted me, a snaky loop of smoke misting on the horizon. Cold dry air entered my lungs, very hard to breath. I clutched at my throat, gasping. Aphid-like shapes moved with slow synchrony across a steely grey sky. I saw more there than ever I cared to see in any lifetime.
The eye can only process so many things at once. I dropped to my knees, fiddling with the device, trying to get it to push me back to the world where I had come from. But nothing seemed to work and it just pulsed that eerie, iridescent glow all the stronger, like an evil eye while my lungs croaked for air. Clouds, strange life forms flitted over the horizon. Birds, aliens, far-off alien craft? I didn’t know, nor cared to guess. Maybe I was hallucinating. The future, past, present? Could have been all or none. From the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of desiccated human bodies lying about. Whatever I did next, fiddling with the script, something jarred the thing back to life.
Zap. I was back in Starrunner, peering up at the hazy forms of figures prodding me. “You okay?” Wren snapped. “You just blinked out there for a second.”
“Holy crap!” I gasped. I sank lower on my knees, chucking the thing aside, as if it were radioactive. “I was out there—somewhere. Some putrid, rotten world. A ruined city. War was in the air, out there, somewhere in time. Alien wars. Strange things roved on the horizon. Decayed bodies all around, leathery skin and old bones.” My
