Author name: Chris Kenworthy

Title: Divergence

Coupling/Genre: original CC.

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: I didn't create 'Roswell', I didn't make it a TV series, I didn't originate the plot of 'Departure' or any of season 2. So there.

Summary: Liz keeps Tess from leaving Earth alone to go to Antar, not realizing that there's something that nobody knows about Alex's death.

Warning: Buckets of angst all about, to start.

Dedicated to my wonderful, amazing, fantabulous beta, TrueLovePooh!!

Author's note: This starts with some 'unaired scenes' from Departure... and then splits off into an alternate timeline. Hope it won't be too confusing.

As he walked down the narrow, rocky path from the Pod Chamber, Michael frowned and flipped through the white letter-printed pages, already dog-eared (for all that they had been printed out less than twenty-four hours ago,) and bound together only with one of those big black alligator clips. That bit about 'no stopping the countdown' was starting to worry him. And why did it have to be a twenty-four hour warmup sequence?? Too much could change around here, in much less than twenty-four hours. Who built a spaceship this way?

But it was clear from the translation of the book that the question of who built the granilith, and why it worked the way it did, was a mystery even to the natives of their home planet. It was capable of remarkable effects, such as travelling through 'warp space' much faster than any ships the Antarians themselves built could, but they didn't understand it.

"It's a gift horse," he muttered to himself. "You don't ask too many questions, you just use it when you have to, and be grateful." It was clear enough that they did need to use the granilith now, or that Tess did, at least. If her baby... Max's son, was being poisoned by the earth's atmosphere, there wasn't enough time to look for another way off the planet, a less risky way... and they probably shouldn't be leaving the granilith behind anyway. He just had to be careful to play by the mysterious relic's own rules.

"Do you still have your nose stuck in that??" Max asked from a few paces behind him. Michael looked up and smiled faintly. "We should have found a translation for that years ago -- it might have taught you some good study habits for West Roswell High," Max continued, and Michael grumped, not feeling in light enough of a mood to take the ribbing with good grace. Also, it looked like West Roswell, or high school in general, was losing its last bit of relevance in his life. Where they were going, who would care about Victorian literature or American colonial history?

So instead, Michael replied by changing the subject to something that he saw as more important. "There's some remarkable stuff here, Maxwell," he said, waving the pages. "Star maps, cultural history of our homeworld and the nearby planets... detailed instructions for 'steering' the granilith through warp space. I'm just trying to make sure that nothing goes wrong."

"We won't need any of that," Max said softly. "The flight route from here back to Antar came up as a default. It'll be a piece of cake to get back."

"And what about what we find when we get there??" Michael asked softly.

Now doubt flashed across the face of the dark-haired young man. "I don't know... we'll just have to hope for the best and face the situation once we get there. Tess has instructed the granilith to lock onto her home continent for the landing. That's one of the places that Kivar's forces wouldn't be able to intrude unilaterally."

Something about the way that had been phrased, the same way that Tess had put it, was nagging at the back of Michael's brain. "Well, there isn't any harm in doing my homework, is there?? Just in case some of it comes in handy?"

Max tried to reach out and take the pages away from Michael, but he resisted. "Man, you've got one day left on earth and better ways to spend it," Max insisted. "Come on." They had reached the bottom of the path now, and his mother's car was already speeding away with Isabel and Tess inside it. The Jeep was parked nearby. "I'll give you a lift to the Crashdown. Liz and Maria will be there, I bet, and I think the two of us need to see them."

"Okay," Max said as he moved the Jeep out onto route 380, heading west. "I think the last time I was really up to speed on your investigation..." he laughed a little bit, wryly, "was at the wake, when you were telling us all about having discovered the concert tickets." He sighed. "Could you maybe summarize the way things went from there??"

Liz looked up at him in the rearview mirror for a moment and let out a low moan. "Okay, let's see... first there was the delivery guy who was the last person we know of to see Alex alive. I'd confronted him out on the field near the memorial, and the next night, the night of the funeral he came to the Cafe, showed me the credit card receipt that Alex had signed... except that he didn't really sign it. It was just a bunch of ones and zeroes... binary code. I didn't know what to make of that at the time, though once we got to Las Cruces the clue started to fall into place. At the time, all I really knew was that I'd latched onto something definitely weird."

"Okay, what next?? Maybe just the key points for now, we can get into the details later on. It's a long drive."

"I know... I've just been to Las Cruces and back, remember??" she pointed out. "Okay... well, I started to think that I needed to learn more about his trip to Sweden, that everything seemed to focus on. So, I managed to get a phone number from the student exchange records from the high school..."

"That was what almost got you and Sean DeLuca arrested, wasn't it??" Max said.

Liz's sidelong look this time was full of frustration and a little tinge of anger. "No comment, because that isn't a 'key point.' And at the same time, I was trying to go through the Swedish embassy, to find out more about the building in that photo of him and Leanna -- I was trying to figure out where she lived, but the building didn't seem to connect to anywhere on his itinerary. The number from the exchange records, when I finally got through to someone there... thank goodness he spoke a little English, but he didn't know any Mister Olsen. The sales slip from the florist's was a dead end, and that was when I was bound and determined to go to Sweden myself, though I'm not quite sure what I could do to beat out a lead on Alex once I was there. Go to the address on the high school's records and pray that there was someone there who knew what I was talking about, I guess."

She took a deep breath and continued. "I was just about to board the plane when I got a call from the embassy on my cell phone -- that the building in Alex's souvenir photos was torn down years ago. I didn't understand, but I realized that the answers I was looking for weren't in Sweden... that Alex might have never been there." She laughed hollowly. "I had to make the woman at the airline feel very sorry for me to get her to reverse the ticket transaction -- it wasn't supposed to be a refundable, not even partly."

Max nodded and made a vague 'I'm still listening' sound, deep in thought. Right then, when Liz had been about to board her plane... he had been holding Tess in his arms. How did he feel about that combination? Had he been mistreating Liz, abandoning her, because of what had begun between himself and Tess Harding? He couldn't stop to think about that now.

"I told Maria about all that, how I thought Alex had never even been to Sweden, and she was the one who really broke things wide open. She went to Derek Swift... you know, Alex's friend from computer lab, and he was able to track the originating IP address of the emails that Alex had sent her while he was away... and the internet address mapped to a dorm room on the University campus at Las Cruces. Maria and I went up there, searched the room, but it was empty, no clues. Some guy came by to try to find out what we were doing, and he said that a guy named 'Ray' had been living in that room for a little over a month in the winter... and the physical description kinda checked out with Alex. He didn't know much about 'Ray' though, except that late one night he'd seen him coming out of the Litvack building -- that's the John A Litvack computer sciences complex. Oh, and that 'Ray' acted very antisocially."

"We were taking a small break from the investigation, attending a free concert on the campus when I spotted a girl that looked exactly like 'Leanna' from Alex's slides. We tried to confront her, but she took off and jumped on a bus that pulled away before we could get to it. That's when we ran into Michael, and I imagine he's told you about the rest since then... and possibly why he was in Las Cruces at that particular moment. Maria's told me that she told him where we would be, and that she would call him if there was danger, but..."

"He started to worry about the two of you a few hours after you'd left," Max filled in absently, his thoughts still on the story that Liz had told so far. "Realized that if there was a crisis, it would probably develop quickly and he'd be no help such a long drive away, so he followed after." There was a short pause. "If you could just go over the rest of it really quickly, that would be helpful."

"Um, okay..." Liz frowned in thought. "I talked to someone in the computer science department, we found out that Alex had been trying to transcibe a very strange language... there was some fragments of the source material in his account on the university file server, and we were able to identify that it was alien stuff like the map and the book, but no trace of the translation was there. Maria tracked Leanna, or Jen Coleman, down in the student newspaper, and we paid a visit to her dorm room. She wasn't there, Maria pretended to be a classmate who Jen had offered to lend some notes to, and we got the address of a house out of town from her room. When we got there, the place was a mess, there was an alien booby trap, a floating red doo-hickey that Michael just managed to push out of the building before it exploded, and a computer with the translation on it. That's where we printed it out from, and I made a copy on disk too."

"Okay, thanks." Max sighed. "I guess this can't have been close to what you expected to find when you first started investigating Alex's death, can it??"

"No," Liz said with a tired sigh. "It seems... a little undignified, or something, doesn't it?? That he was somehow convinced or forced to do this thing for one of your enemies... probably someone trying to find out the secret of the granilith, and probably he was killed in an attempt to cover up the secret."

"Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing," Max agreed. "At least there's nothing in the book that gives away the location of the granilith. There's instructions for using it, but those aren't much use without finding its hiding place."

"How did Jen even get ahold of the book??" Liz asked. "That's what I've been wondering. And she has to be an alien, but obviously she doesn't know the language if she needed Alex and the computer to decode it for her."

"Hmmm." Max mulled that over. "Well, we can't read the language because we're hybrids... there's been no-one to teach us our heritage, not really, and if there's any kind of instinctive learning faculty for Antarian in our alien DNA, then the human side is probably messing it up. Maybe Jen is another hybrid, prepared by our enemies to immerse herself completely in human society."

"Just like you guys," Liz repeated. "It makes a kind of sense."

"As far as the book... maybe there's more than one copy out there. Or maybe Jen was able to break into Michael's apartment and make a duplication of it, before we started keeping all of that stuff up at the rocks." He sighed. "It's a long way yet to Las Cruces... maybe you should get some rest."

"I'm not tired," Liz replied. "In fact, I could probably take over driving if YOU need some sleep. You've been up all night reading the translation, haven't you??"

Max looked over at her with half a smile. He didn't really need to answer that question. "Okay, I'll pull over."

The small, dark red phone sitting on his desk started to ring.

"Hello?" Michael asked, almost before he had finished scooping up the handset out of its long, slender cradle and bringing it to the side of his head.

"Oh, hi... hi, it's Isabel." The voice coming across the electronic lines was uncharacteristically thin and tremulous.

"What's wrong?" Michael kicked himself mentally as soon as the words were out of his mouth -- they were an instinctive reaction, but he didn't really need to ask what would be bothering Isabel, today of all days. The answer was supremely obvious.

"I... I nearly broke down crying, just having lunch with my parents! Only just managed to get well out of the room before I lost control. How can... how could I ever tell them... say goo ---" The rest of the sentence dissolved into dry, racking sobs.

"I... I thought that Max said something about the two of you making a videotape for them... and avoiding all the melodrama of an in-person goodbye," he said slowly. To himself, Michael was wondering what a basket-case he'd be if as well as having to leave Maria behind, he had parents that he loved as much as he knew Max and Isabel cared about the Evans'. Maybe better this way, he repeated to himself softly.

"I know... but I'm not sure if I'm even going to be able to get through that. I keep thinking... of what their reaction will be when they watch the tape... and that just makes everything worse."

Michael thought for a second, not coming up with anything that seemed great. "Well, maybe work your way up to it or something, I dunno. You're going to be going by the cemetery, to visit Alex's grave one more time, right??"

"Yeah -- yes, I think so."

"Liz and Max are nearly at Las Cruces by now, but I bet Maria and Kyle would appreciate spending a little time with you today... and remembering Alex."

There was a pause for several seconds. "Thanks, Michael. That helps."

"Anytime."

"See you tonight." And with that, the line clicked off.

Michael replaced the phone handset, then went back to staring at the sheet of paper in front of him on the desk. It was divided down the middle, with each column headed by a title in block capitals. "THINGS TO GET READY - MARIA, TONIGHT" and "THINGS TO PACK: LEAVING TOMORROW"

"Thanks for coming," Isabel said, as they got out of the car, surrounded by the quiet, peaceful green of Peaceful Pines Funerary estates.

"No problem," Maria answered, stretching a little and looking around. "It's weird how everything still reminds me of him... like the weather. This is just exactly the kind of day that Alex loved most. Bright and sunny, warm but not too hot."

Not much was said as the three of them walked over to the marker bearing Alex Whitman's name. Suddenly Isabel blurted out... "I still see him. I know this sounds crazy, but I talk to Alex, and he answers me. Just sometimes."

Maria and Kyle traded a look, not quite sure what to make of that. "Like a dream, or like a hallucination??" Kyle asked.

"More the second one, now." Isabel took a deep, ragged breath. "I had really vivid dreams right after he died, but they've gone now. Over the past week or so, though... I'm not sure if I'd describe them as hallucinations, or vivid imagination. It's always when I'm alone that he shows up... and so intense and clear that I can see every detail on what he's wearing... the outfits change from occasion to occasion."

"I don't think we'd better get ready to haul you away to the looney bin," Maria admitted. "It isn't exactly normal for us, but maybe that sort of thing is more common with... your people. Max got haunted by that guy at Christmas, after all."

"I know that it isn't really Alex communicating with me," Isabel admitted. "Partly because the dialog doesn't have his unmistakable Alex zing... just what my poor subconscious can try to whip up as a pale imitation. But... I can still *feel* him around me, somehow. That still feels real."

"Yeah, I think I know what you feel," Kyle whispered slowly. "I was down on the south side the day before yesterday, near his place, and the vibe from him was so strong it nearly set my body resonating."

"Hey, am I the only one missing out on this??" Maria complained for a moment. "Maybe it's an alien thing... you've been changed, Kyle, after all. Not that we really know what that means..." She sighed.

After a little, Isabel mentioned, "You guys take the car when you're ready to go, okay?? I want to stay later -- I'll walk down to the bus stop when I'm ready to go."

Maria apparently realized a hint when she heard one. "Want to see if Alex will show up once we stop crowding you?"

"Yeah, kinda."

Maria ran a hand over the grass growing above the coffin and started back to the car. Kyle rubbed the headstone for just a second.

Liz sighed as the wind blew her hair back. They had done as much as they could at Las Cruces -- she had proved, rather to her surprise, that Jen Coleman was a human, and probably had been framed of any involvement in Alex's death. She and Max had gotten into a huge argument in a science lab on the campus, and she really didn't want to leave things with him like this. They'd gone through too much.

"Do you remember the trip back from Marathon??" she asked impulsively.

"Umm, well yeah, of course I do," Max replied evenly. He was still cautious, she realized. Still guarded. He wasn't saying much because he didn't want to get into another shouting match either.

"Was a night kinda like this one," Liz mused. "Desert wind blowing in from the south..."

"It was daylight when we were coming back from Marathon," Max corrected her, with a smile on his face and in his voice. "It was daylight when we got to marathon, because of the delay with the road closure, and Kyle finding us at the Sultan's hideaway motel." Max laughed. "Also, the wind was from the east south-east that whole time, I remember it distinctly. It tends to be from the south-east in early fall, but this was more easterly than usual."

Liz shook her head. "You just always have to be right, don't you??"

"No, I don't *have* to. I just usually am."

"Well, I remember driving with you at night sometime," she said. "Not sure if it was on the WAY to Marathon, or that crazy night we found the first orb, but... it was a good memory, and I was trying to hold on to it."

"I have to admit..." She could tell from something in Max's voice that he was trying to keep from bursting out into inappropriate laughter, "my best memories of that night don't have much to do with driving."

"Oh, really??"

"Nope." He shot a fond look at her sidelong. "More like you and me, all alone in Michael's apartment. BEFORE Maria burst in looking for him."

"Okay, yeah..." Liz could feel herself blushing all the way up to her forehead. "That's a good one, I admit. What else??"

"Hmmm..." Max thought about that a second. "Practically nothing from the last year... how depressing is that?? Our golden age is well behind us." He sighed. "Shooting pool at Senor Chao's."

Liz let herself sink into that memory... taking the opportunity to bend down, close to him, to judge a shot... watching the way his body moved as he worked the cue... and knowing that he was focused on the view the same way when it was her turn. "Yeah, that was good." Their bodies nestled next to each other as she tried to teach him how to sink a double bank... the way his face looked with that ridiculous smudge of black chalk just below one eye, next to his nose. "Our first kiss, on the balcony, the night the heatwave broke."

"The first time you visited me in the UFO center," he offered, "and I told you that we could have had the conversation out in the front room." Liz laughed at that one.

"I know how weird and unfair it is, Liz," Max suddenly blurted out. "That after everything we've been through, and everything that's gone wrong this year... it's coming to an end way too soon, and kinduv in a bad way. But I have to do what I have to do. You understand that, don't you??"

Liz paused an instant, then grunted a noncommittal sound and turned away. He would just have had to ruin things like that... classic Max Evans.

"KYLE!!" Tess nearly screamed her lungs out, and Kyle snapped his head around, from where he had been staring towards the door, at nothing at all, lost in memory... and re-focused, staring just as hard at Tess. "He was here. Alex was here!!"

She shook her head dismissively. "What are you talking about??"

"Alex was in this room!" Conviction was slowly growing, replacing surprise. "The day he died. I can't believe I didn't even remember this, I must have blocked it out..."

"Kyle." There was something in Tess' voice that was subtly desperate. "He wasn't."

Her quiet denial did little to deter the train of excitement that was growing in Kyle. "No, he was... Alex was here!! I have to tell my father." He got up to leave. This could be a clue that would blow the whole case open...

"Kyle, come here!" Kyle shouted for his father, but turned around as Tess stood up and followed him. As they stood there, facing each other, Tess screwed up her eyes shut and concentrated... and Kyle had a sensation of a mental discontinuity, like that momentary feeling of falling when you're trying to get to sleep.

"So..." Tess smiled sweetly. "What were you saying??"

For a second, Kyle wasn't sure. He tried to review the conversation, but the last thread he could grasp seemed curiously distant. "That I'm gonna really miss you," he said, smiling faintly and hugging her. "And I wish you didn't have to go."

They drifted back to sit on the bed. "You know why I have to go, Kyle," Tess reminded him. "If I had my way, I really wouldn't want to leave you, either. But it's for the sake of the baby."

"That part, I have to admit I don't get," Kyle admitted. "You can breathe the air here, and Max can. Why can't junior??"

"You never were good at biology," she commented with a shake of her head. "Okay, try this analogy with, umm, with dog breeds." Kyle snickered softly. 'Human beings are poodles, and Antarians are shitzus. Max and I are both first-generation crossbreeds - pooshis or whatever they're called. We have a particular combination of poodle and shitzu traits that always come out because they're dominant, and we always have one poodle gene and one shitzu gene balanced against each other. Makes sense so far??"

"Uh, I guess." Kyle really *didn't* like biology, and was having a hard time keeping from laughing at the pooshi analogy, but he'd asked the question and was pretty much stuck to sit through the answer.

"Now, the thing is, pooshis don't breed true to those same characteristics among themselves. Based on random combinations, the second generation child will get a much more thouroughly shuffled mix of poodle and shitzu characteristics from his pooshi sire and dam... he'll be a mutt." Tess made a cute face. "Not that Max or I mind, of course, but a breathing Earth air is probably like the poodle tail... all poodles have it, and pooshis get it too, but mutts have no guarantee."

"Huh," Kyle muttered. "Wonder of wonders, that actually makes a kind of sense."

"And also," Tess reminded him, "Max and I grew up in those pods until we were about the biological age of six or so. We didn't *have* to breathe earth air directly, maybe, until we had grown that much and were capable of taking it. But we have no idea of what it would take to put my baby into a pod, even if we wanted to." She sighed. "Bottom line, we don't have enough answers here, and an alien world is the only place to go to get them."

"Okay." Kyle sighed a little. "Well, do you have... this is going to sound kind of corny, but do you want something of mine to take along with you? I get the feeling that luggage space is going to be limited, and you probably won't be able to bring the flowers or anything, but..."

She laughed softly. "Already ahead of you, lamptrimmer." She got up and opened the top drawer of the dresser a little way, pulling something out. For a second Kyle couldn't identify the little loop of black fabric, and then...

"Hey!! I lost my deposit at the rental place for not bringing that back!!"

Tess giggled softly, keeping hold of the black bow tie. "Well, it's mine now." She sat down, carefully protecting the trophy as if she expected the football player to make a grab for it. "I know that things didn't play out exactly like either of us thought, but I'm glad that we went to the prom together."

Kyle shook his head. "Drop me an astro-mail sometime if you can, okay rocket-girl??"

"Count on it."

Michael sighed a bit as he started to feel himself... "come down," he supposed -- a little further. The way Max had explained it wasn't as accurate as Michael would have expected; either that or things were different because Michael had 'done the deed' with a human girl, instead of another hybrid.

There was the floating sensation, sure enough... but hot electric energy?? Not so much, unless it was a strained metaphor. He felt a sense of calm, of warm pleasure, and vaguely an impression of a deep and abiding peace that was connected to everything in the universe. And he saw things, heard things... things from his past, things that might have been from the deep past before he was around. Things that would be in the future, and things that might have been but would never come to pass.

Michael stretched. The floating was gone now, and most of the calm, but he still felt warm and happy. And he felt Maria stretch too, next to him.

"I think we just took a huge step in human-alien relations..."

When Liz finally slipped through the front door of the Crashdown and disappeared, Max let his brave face slip, and struggling against the tears, he let his head droop forward and screwed his eyes shut.

She didn't sleep with Kyle. The sentence rang in his head. He had refused to believe it for weeks, and then finally accepted it, for the sake of saving his friendship with Liz as much as anything. But it had been a lie, the whole time. A pantomime, played out for his benefit.

Why had Liz done something like that?? The question led reasonably clearly to the answer. Liz must have taken it upon herself to push Max away, to force him to accept his 'destiny,' no matter how much the realization of that fate would hurt her personally.

"She loved me that much," Max whispered, not believing it at first. And how had he repaid her?? He'd treated Liz so cruelly ever since Alex's death, maybe as a way, deep down, of punishing her for the betrayal that had never really happened.

He shook his head, trying to clear away the tears, and started the ignition of the Jeep up again. There was so much he could still treasure that he didn't deserve. Like Isabel... he had been about as mean to Izzie as he could possibly imagine, throwing her dreams away out of hand and threatening to do the most despicable things conceivable to keep her by his side in Roswell. And yet, as soon as she had heard about the problems with Tess and the baby, she had immediately flipped around from her (justified) campaign of petty revenge, and had supported him unconditionally. In exactly the way that he had NOT been there for her after Alex's death.

And now she was willingly giving up even more for him than he had tried to take away, Max realized with a guilty shock. Isabel was terrified of saying goodbye to Roswell and their parents, of leaving planet earth and everything she knew behind, to try to make a fresh start on a world that she didn't know anything about, except that many people would identify her with a famous traitor. But she was going along, without any objections, because that was what it would take to stand by her brother in his hour of need.

He parked the car and headed inside. It was early in the morning now, and there was no sound except snoring from his parents' bedroom. But when he approached Isabel, sitting cross-legged on her bed, arms folded around herself, he could tell that she was quietly sobbing to herself.

"Wha-aa... what if I said, ooh, I wanted to stay??" she managed to choke off between huge, ragged gasps. Well, so much for 'no questions asked' he supposed. And for an instant Max wanted to say, 'Yes, for gods' sake, stay!! Go to college far away, live any dreams you have left. You've given all that I could ever ask for, I'll survive without you if you really want to stay behind.'

But he didn't say that... in fact, he started talking without any real thought in his head as to which way his answer would finally lead. "When we first came out of the pods, and we lost Michael, it was just the two of us in the desert." Isabel looked up at him for just a second, but she couldn't seem to bear the eye contact and shot her gaze downward again. "I knew that I wasn't alone -- that I had my sister. To me, earth isn't home, and whatever's out there..." Uh-oh, now he could tell which way this was going. Way to lay yet another guilt trip on your poor sister, Max -- but he had to admit it was also the truth. "... isn't home, but you're my home." There, now he'd said it.

Isabel looked up at him, and nodded, ever so slightly. She understood.

"Okay," Tess said softly as they drove up into the desert hills. "And why exactly are we wrecking the Jeep??"

"We still want the whole thing to seem as natural as possible," Max told her, "so there's no loose ends that could endanger the people we're leaving behind. What we want everybody to assume is that all four of us would have left town, in the Jeep. My dad will probably try to track it down, so we can't abandon it anywhere that it's likely to be found quickly, and we can't take it with us. Therefore, we're sending it off a cliff somewhere in the desert where no-one's ever going to find it, and he'll assume that we're still on the move, never staying in one place long enough to get picked out of the haystack."

Tess thought about that a moment. "Okay... makes sense."

"What about you??" Max asked. "Have you talked with the sheriff about what he's to say, if anyone notices that you've gone?? The story about him taking you in after your father disappeared has kind of made the rounds in Roswell."

"He thought he'd just stick with the basics," Tess explained. "That I'd found some information that my dad was still alive, and left town with a few friends, looking for him."

Max nodded, and shut up. He still wasn't quite sure what to make of Tess' line about forgetting Liz once they got home. He didn't *want* to forget Liz. He was doing what he had to do, but his heart would certainly never be Tess Harding's.

"How did I ever fall in love with someone like you??" Max hissed, his voice hard as steel, face a mask of fury. "How could I ever MARRY you??"

"You were different, you were a *king*!!" Tess raged back. "Now you're just a boy." Furious, Max brought up his hand towards her shoulder, nerving himself to touch her and make the connection, but Tess reminded him, "If you kill me, Max, you kill our son."

Max looked up at the alien time display on the granilith wall. More than two minutes left... but he didn't want to have anything more to do with this. "Go," he growled.

"Max, you can't let her take the granilith to Antar!!" Liz called out from the passageway into the pod chamber proper. Max shot a look at her, and she ran over towards him, gesturing for Max to meet her part-way.

"I don't like it either," he started, "but what other choice do..."

Michael had followed Liz, and he was probably close enough to hear as she whispered heatedly at her sweetheart. "Max, I couldn't say anything before, but the G is capable of *sending someone back in time!!* That's the danger I warned you about, when you were leaving for the summit, and that's why you can't let Tess leave in the thing, alone!!"

For a second, he couldn't reply, and Liz must have mistaken that surprise for indecision.

"It's a terrible power in the wrong hands," she insisted, "it has to be!! To give your worst enemy the power to go back and change any one event in the past..."

"Liz, Liz..." Max forced himself to keep his own voice down and keep an eye on Tess, halfway across the room. Isabel and the others were also drifting close by now. "How could you possibly KNOW all this??" And then the answer hit him.

"Because I met a time traveller... I met *you*, Max. You from thirteen years in the future. That's all I can tell you, right now!!"

Max turned to look at Michael, still startled by all the recent developments. Fortunately, his blood brother was nodding and smiling grimly.

"Contingency plan. There are colony worlds on the star chart, Max - places that Kivar can't exert his power very effectively, but with the same kind of atmosphere as the homeworld. Planets genrally friendly to the old order that we represent! We could steer the granilith there, and... I dunno. Dump Tess and the kid with someone who can take care of them and keep her out of trouble, and then fly right back here."

"She's dangerous," Kyle chimed in. "Make sure you don't underestimate..."

"I think that two of us should be able to handle her," Michael said, his eyes looking daggers past the granilith cone at the pregnant girl who was focus of all their debates. "Now that we know a little of what to watch out for. Leaving one who gets to stay behind here."

"I'll go," Isabel volunteered quickly, an eye on the 'clock.' "I don't have nearly as much reason to stay as either of you."

Max accepted that with a quick nod. "You should get to stay, Michael," he offered. "It was because of you backing out that we know."

But Michael just shook his head. "Not the way it works now, Maxwell. You've got things to take care of here, and... well, frankly I think she's into your head a little. Be more secure with Izzy and I pulling guard duty."

He put a hand on Max's shoulder. "Take care of them." And then he gathered up Maria into his arms for a quick farewell embrace. "We'll be back as soon as we can." That was an annoucement to the group in general.

Isabel had walked over to confront Tess herself. "You understand what's going to happen, right?" she asked, a hateful, furious death mask on her face. "If you interfere, we will do whatever we need to to you, to complete the mission, and killing you will be the last thing on that list." Tess blinked, then nodded once in fearful submission. Isabel jerked her head toward the cone. "You first."

Tess reached up, nervously, to touch the granilith cone, which was now humming at a high pitch, and with a flash of light she was gone. A few seconds later, another flash shone out from within the cone, and Tess could be seen inside, a somewhat vague and misty figure. Michael entered the same way, his outline seeming to overlap hers once he was inside, and Isabel came aboard last.

"Let's go," Max said, and the four of them who remained hurried out, through the pod chamber proper, and down the path as quickly as they could. Dust was starting to appear all around them and the rocks shook beneath feet... shook everywhere. As Max reached the base of the small mountain and hurried to a good lookout vantage, his arm around Liz's shoulders, there was a burst of sound, and a small, oddly-shaped projectile shot out of the highest rocky peak and off into the sky, curving upwards, scattering a puffy cloud into wisps of stray vapor as it shot right through.

"Godspeed, spaceboy," Maria whispered, her voice trembling. "Come home soon."

"Come home safe," Max whispered under his breath.

TO BE CONTINUED...