First Perception
"Where's Thomas?"
"I think he's adjusting the Ionic flow of the drive system." said Tabhi.
I was getting antsy, we had been in Conglomerate space for four solar days now, the longest any smugglers had stayed hidden. I didn't want to press my luck.
"Thomas to the bridge, um, we've got a problem."
"What is it?" I growled at the comm.
"We've got a visitor, and well, she's not happy." he said.
I ran to the core of the ship, wishing I hadn't drank the last of my whiskey the night before.
And this was supposed to be a day of rest. When I arrived I was astonished to find what seemed to be a very angry, very wet, and very naked woman; and she was glowering at me.
"Where. Am. I? And why am I naked?" she asked.
"Um, the naked I have no answer for, Thomas, get her a jumpsuit. Now as for where you are, you're on my ship, which begs the question. How did you get here?" I replied "I'm captain of this bucket, you can call me Captain or Sir, but until we know who you are, NO names."
I already had a price on my head, and double that if it was dislocated from my neck. Today was shaping up to be a bad one, Gaius take me now and throw my bones to the dogs.
"Don't worry about him, I'm Thomas, I'm the engineer on board. The captain is suspicious of everybody.
"I'm Zoey, and the last thing I remember is being I remember is being on asteroid 134.9, I was researching a new concept for space folding...Oh dear!" I overheard as I walked out of the room.
I made a note to ask this 'Zoey' what world she came from. There was something strangely familiar about her, like a faint tickling of a distant memory, or a shadow from the corner of the eyes. I didn't like not trusting her.
"So you're saying that in your neck of space you created this transiting bubble as you called it, that instead of shifting the worldship you built it into, it shifted you. Okay, that I get, miscalculations, but why were you wet?" Thomas asked Zoey over the evenings rations.
"Well Thomas, Asteroid 134.9 is made up of mostly water and stone, but the power of the 'Transit bubble' as you called it must have melted the ice around my lab, and transited only the organic materials. In this case, Me and the melted ice." Said Zoey
I was lost over this, it sounded too good to be true. Instantaneous space travel; even the conglomeration had stopped chasing that smoke trail.
"I decided to have Thomas and Zoey work together on our new problem. Meanwhile I was still trying to find out where I knew her from. It was pointing strangely enough to my prison time at Euryidce base on Ganyemede. Back when I was a lieutenant for the conglomerate. I was locked away for letting a scientist die in an explosion when the asteroid base we were on lost it's pressure in the biosphere.
Doctor Vaughtigern had been testing space folding technologies then too. Maybe he's out there and just not lucky enough to have landed inside a ship. End personal log entry."
"Oh Captain, my Captain?" called Zoey over the comm.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" I growled.
"It's from a poem written in the 20th century by Walt Whitman." Zoey cooed.
"Don't flirt with me, you're Thomas' type, not mine, you're not stupid enough." I replied.
"Aye, Cap. But I was calling to say I'm not used to these types of drive. Where I'm from we still use petroleum based fuels."
"What!" I exclaimed with incredulity. "What part of the galaxy are you from? I'm sorry for shouting but there aren't any areas in this arm of the galaxy that use material fuels, what you call petroleum." Her answer made me choke on my ration of water.
"I'm from Earth."
Those words clicked it all into place. She was from the past, this 'transiting' wasn't space folding, it was time travel.
The reason she was familiar, her case was used against me at my court martial for letting Doctor Vaughtigern die. When I followed the rules, they threw the book at me. And here was the reason, Zoey La Caiafa. Gaius watch over me, I knew I had to help her get back, I had to give my tangential past a chance.
"I think I figured out where I know you from Zoey" I said calmly, even though my heart was threatening to throttle my brain."come up to the bridge we need to talk, bring Thomas too. Tabhi can you bring up my trial tapes, and the ones on the Sol asteroid cluster incident?"
"Aye, sir." said Tabhi.
"As I told her of what had happened after she was named deceased, and explained about my court martial and subsequent dismissal from the Conglomerate's Militia, we set down to the task of trying to figure out her 'Transiting', and how it worked. End Personal Entry"
"You see Temporal Displacement, or time travel the way you did is supposed to be impossible. It's talked about often in 20th century science fiction pulp novels, but it was never really proven until now. Apparently only organic material can transit, otherwise our ship would be melded with your lab in our drive system." Thomas said.
"Okay, I think I've somewhat got it, but if that's the case, when am I? Not that I'm claiming to understand time travel. But I have to play this out until I either wake up, or the devil pops out and says 'You're dead sweetheart.'" Said Zoey.
"Let me field that for you, you're in the 22nd century. It's the year of our lord 2156, now that you've come here our universe is tangented according to the basic theoretic laws of time travel. So I would like to at least try to return you to your own fiction, this way we might even be able to give our tangented versions a better chance." I spoke, but as I said them they seemed hollow, as well Zoey got up, crossed the bridge and slapped me, hard, across the face.
"I'm a century out of sync, and all you can think of is killing of entire other universes, just to change your past. Well fuck you captain, I'll hitchhike elsewhere, now if you'll kindly give me a towel, I'll be on my way." She seethed, but the joke was not lost upon me, but alas my crew isn't cultured like I was.
"I'm afraid you're right, you're a century out of sync, but alas before I can give towels to rude hitchhikers I have to read poetry to them" As I said this, we both laughed a bit and the venom in her eyes lessened. "Now where do you think we should start on Doctor La Caiafa?" Thomas asked.
Zoey began to cover her face, to hide tears of frustration "I don't know what I did to travel here, at least not with your technology." She said with what felt like an unbearable sadness.
"I'm sorry but first we need to get out of conglomerate..."I began to say as the ship's proximity alarms began to wail. "Now isn't the time to talk, we need to rabbit out of here quickly!" I said as I followed Tabhi to the pilots seat. The sensors said it was a Conglomerate Warmonger class cruiser. "Merde! As if this day couldn't get any more complicated! Standard greeting to them, we're just fixing our drive system, you got that everyone?" I said to a resounding chorus of, "Aye Cap!"
"This is the CWS Ragnarok calling Martian freighter ship. Do you have clearance for this sector?" the comm asked.
"My clearance is good, but it's not for this sector, my drive engines had a instability and we had to drop out of FTL to fix them. I was hoping the clearance code I brought would be sufficient to get our drive fixed and resume our course."
"Send your codes" the speaker on the Ragnarok requested, and we sent the codes we had borrowed in Antares prime from a fellow pirate.
I saw the make of the ship was also a 'Martian Spaceworks' brand ship, a newer model and probably faster, but then, Mars made the best ships. This captain was a fellow smuggler and pirate.
"Give me a minute to crack the seals" I said, sending the pirate code to his code request.
"It's good to know the cap is still out there." he said. "Do you really need help?"
"Negative, we just dropped our cargo and were heading back to earth. We were about to cloak when you showed up. Clear skies."
"And Calm waters" the Ragnarok replied.
"Tabhi, set a course for the Sol system, third planet. Take us to the shopping center of Earth." I said showing Zoey how to strap in for FTL travel and setting down myself.
"Aye Mon Capitaine"Tabhi replied.