Chapter 10 - Causality

"How long until your forces arrive?" Ben demanded.

"Nothing so crude." Replied the captain. "Our fleet will be dispatched tomorrow at noon. It will reach your star system approximately one hour later, by which time several bio weapons will have removed the oxygen and nitrogen from this planet's atmosphere and replaced it with a neurotoxin."

"And why are you telling us this?" Ben asked, silently wondering why every enemy felt it necessary for him to know their plans of mass destruction.

"Because…" Said the Arconian, thoughtfully. "You are going to find out anyway as soon as you read our database. On top of which, while you have been standing here, threatening death, I have configured this vessel to self destruct. If the Kryl didn't kill you, I suppose the honour should fall to me. Saviour of the galaxy from a destructive culture. I would rather appreciate that title. Only about five seconds to go by now…"

"Unfortunately for you," Sarah shouted, rushing over to join the others. "We planned for that move."

"Really…" Replied the captain, airily. He bent forward to read a text display. "In any case, it does not matter. The causality effect has already been set in motion, and you Tennyson, shall inevitably bring about the destruction of your own people."

The Arconian gave a small, unconvincing laugh at the idea.

"Causality effect?.." Muttered Ben. "What's a…"

But there was no time to wait for the being to reply.

Devoras withdrew the D.E.M.O.N weapon from a small silver case he had been carrying. He carefully placed it on top of the anti-matter reactor, turned it towards the entire group, and fired.

An ocean-blue beam erupted from it's tip, engulfing themselves and some of the floor panels. In that split second, detonation charges went off throughout the Arconian ship.

To the Tennysons, it was like being caught inside a silent dream-like bubble, separating them from the outside reality. All they could do was watch. A moment later, the dark engine room filled with smoke and flame. The luminous cyan shielding around the anti-matter reactor abruptly burned bright hot, shattering in it's place as the entire assembly exploded with the force of a dozen nuclear warheads. A storm of plasma coolant and flying debris rained down on the dissolving walls and floor, catalysing the destruction and obscuring everyone's vision beyond the confines of the blue energy field. The chaos lasted minutes although the tall form of the captain, dead or alive, was nowhere in sight.

When the last of the craft collapsed and relative safety was apparent, Devoras deactivated the beam with a quick and decisive glance toward the weapon. The bubble dimmed, faded, and dispersed. With the last of the dense smoke clearing, the star strewn night sky gradually became visible.

"Wow, that's really, really disorienting." Gwen said as she looked up, unsteady in the darkness. "What was it?"

"Well basically, I just used the same setting which pulls the Kryl into phase to push us out of phase." Devoras replied, also affected though to a lesser degree. "The dizziness is most likely a result of the rapid transition from a fluctuating reality to a static one when I deactivated it. It should wear off in a few minutes."

Ben was the first to clumsily step down from the small reflective platform left untouched by the explosion, though he did so somewhat absent-mindedly. He was still trying to digest the almost cryptic words of the Arconian captain.

"What did he mean?" Ben asked. "What's a causality effect?"

Ben gradually began to realise just how cold it became in the desert at night. He gave a small shiver as the icy wind hit him.

"It's kind of hard to explain…" Devoras said. "And it doesn't really make much sense either."

"Try." Ben replied, sounding more interested than he thought.

"Um, OK, think of it like this;" Devoras said. He faced Ben, struggling to find the right words. "Someone from a week into the future travels back through time to tell you that tomorrow, you are going to be responsible for the collapse of a building somewhere. You say no way, I won't let it happen, so you head into town to stop it. By trying to stop the building from collapsing, you actually cause it to happen. What the person told you was actually the echo of a self-rectifying paradox, so no matter what you do, the building will still collapse and you will still cause it, because it already happened from a non-linear point of view. Understand?"

"Uh… No, not really." Ben replied weakly. "What's a self-rectifying…"

"Forget about that." Devoras said, impatiently. "The point is, the captain told you what's going to happen. And I'm betting he got his information from someone else too, because he's definitely not from the future. For the moment, we have to assume that what's going to happen really is inevitable."

"What!?" Ben blurted out, clearly outraged that Devoras was just going to accept the death of the entire Human race as a bit of bad luck. "I'm not going to let it happen. There must be something. Tie me to a lead weight, a lamp post, how I possibly be responsible for it then!"

"That's precisely my point." Devoras said, trying desperately to make Ben understand. "We do not know. For all we know, by doing nothing you cause it. If that Arconian did get his knowledge from another source, then all of this has already happened in the future. Don't you get it? If it didn't happen already, then he couldn't have been told about it in the first place."

Ben took a seat on the edge of the floor panelling. He had to admit, Devoras' theories did fit together perfectly.

"No point in asking how you know all this stuff, is there?" Ben asked.

"Em… Sometime in preschool, I think." Devoras said simply.

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This chapter was updated on 12/12/08. OK, so not a massive change to this chapter. I didn't really feel it necessary.

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