Friday
March 22nd, 2357
Jet Propulsion Laboratories
The lab tech handed reams of paper to Pitcairn and Aderholdt. "To start with, we went through the geology records. We found some geological markers that indicate a temporally influenced storm happened in 2148 in the western United States. We have no information as to the extent, width, length or strength of the storm, but we do know part of it occurred over New Mexico. With that information and with the temporal disturbance calming down, we were able to track where the wave fractal deposited the transportee. There's no mistake. Stuart Power was transported to Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 4th, 2148."
Delphi didn't even look through the paperwork. That was only half the news, good and bad. "2148. Then it's confirmed. That's later than it should be."
"Sixteen years later than it should be," Elias muttered.
The lab tech frowned. "But once we get exact temporal and geographic coordinates on Stuart Power and determine the correct trackers, you'll be able to move him back to 2132. Right?"
Delphi and Elias glanced at each other, then they both shook their heads.
"We don't know yet," Elias explained. "It could be that history will stay on track if he stays sixteen years from when he was taken from. It could be that moving him back to 2132 could produce more problems since he's seen 2148 and knows what the future would be. He'd probably try to change things which would cause us even more headaches. But there's no way to grab him up on July 4th, 2148, because of the temporal turbulence will always be there on that date and prevents us from getting a lock on him. We only know what happens on a timeline in the days after the turbulence dies down. Once we know that, then we can make a better decision on what to do with him."
Dephi looked through some of the paperwork. All those details, all those minute changes in the overall timeline - she was definitely going to have to make another pot of coffee to get through the quagmire. "And it takes about seven days for some of the changes in the timeline to reach us. Unfortunately, finding him on July 4th only lets us know where he landed. Being able to get a lock on him temporally? That's what we need to find out. We do that, we wait for the timeline turbulence to settle down so we can see the changes -"
"Then it gets worse," the tech explained. "We lose Stuart Power around July 7th, 2148. He's not at Los Alamos after that date. My guess is that he was moved. We're still tracking him down, but now we do have a temporal starting point."
"What about Corporal Chase?" Delphi asked.
"Nothing absolute geographically yet," was the answer. "All we knew to begin with is that she was sent to a temporal test site with JPL's temporal signature in 2148. Nothing was pinpointed. Since she went on the other half of the time wave that Power did, we used the assumption that she was transported to a JPL test site in the exact same temporal coordinates that Stuart Power did, July 4th, 2148, we've got no idea of the geographic coordinates yet. We're getting some strange results on the search, and my guess is that she was moved after the transfer to an undisclosed location which is why we can't locate her. Trying to find where she was sent on July 4th of that year isn't working out to be easy."
Undisclosed? Maybe that could be a clue? "There's not much that's undisclosed when looking back in history, but they could have been undisclosed in 2148," Elias reasoned.
"Sir?"
"We've been trying to find her by looking at the year 2148 as if we were living in that year. We've been proverbially walking ourselves through that timeline to try to locate them. What we need to do is check a post-war listing of Resistance bases and find out which ones existed during early July of 2148 and where," Elias suggested. "Let's work on the assumption that she would have needed shelter and would have tried to reach some friendly forces."
"Check the information backwards. Find out where she could have possibly gone and work back from there," Delphi agreed. "Focus on hospitals, infirmaries, and med labs. Everyone for over two hundred years has assumed she was badly injured in that fight at the Power Base, so let's run with that idea first. Maybe we'll get lucky and find her."
The lab tech began to input the new parameters into his handheld computer. Within moments, he answered, "This is going to take a while. There were a lot of Resistance areas then, not just bases and hospitals. Some of them were pretty small and mobile and had medics."
"How long a while?" Delphi asked.
The computer dinged again. "Oh, that's odd. Not long at all. Reports indicate that one possible location may have been a hospital in Montana."
That was the first break they'd had since the time wave split into two fractals.
"How'd you get all that that fast?" Delphi wanted to know.
"There's an entry in a Resistance leader's journal. A soldier named Dennis T who was in Idaho. He mentions that the Power Team was intact again but we don't have anything else from entries around that date. Hang on... let me check out hospital records... Aha! There's also a report concerning the Power Team and some people working with them being at the Montana base for several days in July of 2148... there was a patient there they were guarding... female... high security... according to one of the med tech's notes, the female was released into the Power Team's care. A lot of the files are damaged or just gone, but I really don't think if someone who was thought dead was there alive could be kept a secret. Do you want to hear my guess?"
Elias smiled. "Jennifer Chase, only the name on the reports didn't survive all this time."
The tech sighed. "I'm sorry it took so long to find all this information, but trying to gather all the data from an adjacent timeline that's now the current timeline -"
"All of you did a great job," Elias praised him. He double-checked the reading. "Verify the information. We can't do anything unless we know exactly who's where, why and how. See if you can find a physical description, an exact location, absolutely anything. Let's see if this is really her or just a coincidence."
The tech nodded and walked out of the office.
"Looks like we found them," Elias said, his voice betraying his surprise. "Over two hundred years, an adjacent timeline taking dominance, and we pinpoint the day Stuart Power showed up after we lost him. We're good."
"Only if we can adjust the timeline to what it needs to be," Delphi told him as she began to flip through the paperwork, skimming some of the words and phrases. Something caught her attention. "Elias, the reports from the Cyclotron Lab, they said everything was fine with the equipment, right? Nothing out of the ordinary?"
"Right. Why?"
She handed Elias one of the papers. "The date June 14th, 2132 shows up on the database search before we started researching the date to try to save Stuart Power or even began our experiment. There's a record that the search was erased but it wasn't erased from the buffer files. It got printed out on the database search because the text matched the search format."
"And it was done at the Cyclotron Lab?" Elias began to flip through the papers around the one in question. "It was done on the 19th. Wait..." He walked over to the computer and began to pull up planned experiments. "We were doing our joint experiment with Los Alamos that morning way before sunrise only we were focusing on the year 2217... simple experiment, moving something from one day to the next... the primary experiment and our secondary experiment that we think worked," he turned back to the massive amounts of paperwork and flipped through the pages to find the 19th's printout. "You're right, minutes before the experiments, someone at the Cyclotron Lab looked up June 14th, 2132 but - get this - they pinpointed December 25th, 2147." He glanced back at Delphi. "Information's in the buffer because the rest of the information was erased. Look at this... this record indicates a secondary time wave being sent to June 14th, 2132, during our experiment to 2217, and this record shows that someone programmed the computer to split the rescue wave fractal between 2132 and 2147."
When Elias looked at Delphi, she saw that he realized the same thing she did. Fake Brophy Theorem.
There was only one answer: one of their own had targeted Stuart Power, and then when the temporal labs tried to correct it, they assisted the 'anomaly' that also brought Chase forward.
"So it wasn't the Brophy Theorem," she muttered. "Not a real one. And someone was trying to kill Stuart Power. Both times. Maybe they were expecting him to be deconvoluted on the rescue time beam if he wasn't killed on the one that was sent back to destroy him?"
"I don't think we should tell anyone that just yet," Elias suggested. "We need to check it out a little more. Let's get our ducks rowing straight first. We might find out the truth before anyone else does and deal with it ourselves. I'll see who was at the Cyclotron Lab and who could have done this."
Someone messed up the timeline that in turn messed up their mission.
This was quickly becoming personal.
~o~ This Domino Won't Fall ~o~
Sunday
July 7, 2148
Power Jumpship
Hawk flew the jumpship back toward the Resistance base, still not believing what had happened.
Jennifer was alive.
Stuart was alive.
Wishes were horses, and beggars were riding. That was certain.
He glanced back into the cabin. Scout was continuing to gather data about the storms that were lessening in intensity. There was absolutely no sign of the tachyons. With Stuart back with them, he could be the lead scientist in figuring out how he and Jennifer were back, and Scout was going to give him every bit of information he could find.
Tank monitored the communications frequencies. There was still nothing on the frequencies about Jennifer being alive and back. That was good. Rumors concerning her were still being spread by mouth and not by mainstream communication networks. They wanted to keep her return as quiet as possible for as long as possible. There was no word that the Power jumpship was in New Mexico, not a peep anywhere that Stuart Power was alive and well and back. Everything that was happening to them was still under everyone's radar, he hoped.
Then there was Jon and Stuart. Although the command cabin of the jumpship was not built for privacy, sounds echoed inside the hull, all mixing together until two people could speak and their voices wouldn't be distinct among the other noises. Taking advantage of this fact, Jon and Stuart sat in the rear of the jumpship, getting reacquainted.
Hawk saw the look in Jon's eyes. It was the same when they found Jennifer. He couldn't believe what he was seeing but he didn't want to disbelieve it. Two of the most important people in his life were back. Alive and well. Breathing. No one wanted to jinx it.
Could their luck be changing for even a mere moment?
~0~0~0~0~
"I was moved forward sixteen years?" Stuart mumbled, his voice conveying his disbelief.
"We can't believe it either," Jon told him. "I mean, time travel? It's right out of H.G. Wells."
"It's probably not exactly time travel in the purest sense," Stuart explained. "Your pilot and I maybe have simply moved forward on our own timeline by unknown forces." The tone of his voice sounded speculative rather than sure.
"Dad, I have absolutely no idea what you mean," Jon said, smiling.
"I don't know anything about it myself. I remember reading some studies on the subject when I was in grad school. There were a few scientists delving into temporal physics - Shepard, Messier, Brophy - but there were a lot of theories with no evidence to back them up or proof since temporal physics was all theoretical with absolutely no way to test the hypotheses. The theories ranged all over the place. You could travel back to the time of the dinosaurs; you could go forward as far as you want. Another discussed that traveling like that ripped the space/time continuum and opened up temporal portals randomly. One of the theories stated that a person could only travel to a point on their own timeline because that was their only place in the space/time continuum. You couldn't travel before the date of your birth or after the date of your death. I don't know, Jon. It wasn't my field of expertise. Other than knowing there were people studying temporal physics, I don't know a lot about it. I just remember reading something about it."
Jon leaned forward and said in a low voice, "We need you and Scout and Jennifer to become experts pretty quick. I don't like to think that if someone could move you forward in time, they could move the two of you back."
Stuart nodded, noticing Jon's inclusion of the words two of you. He got the distinct impression that this Jennifer Chase wasn't just a team member to his son. "Well, we'll worry about that later. Right now, tell me more about this team you've put together."
~o~ This Domino Won't Fall ~o~
Saturday
March 23rd, 2357
Cyclotron Laboratories
Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.
William Custer slammed his fist down on the console. Things were almost as bad as they were in the beginning. Stuart Power was alive. Everything he'd planned was being destroyed.
How hard was it to kill one man?
He had to find a way to kill Stuart Power.
Worse than that, he hadn't counted on Jonathan Power's reaction to having Chase back and the ramifications of inadvertently changing that bit of history.
He pulled out his journal and wrote a few scrambled notes.
We've gone past confirmation to now having proof. Power's alive. He was sent forward in time by the wave fractal to 2148. The techs can track him between July 4th and July 7th, 2148. They've lost him temporarily but they'll be able to pick up his drecking position in the timeline as soon as the rest of the turbulence settles. The possibility of Power being sent forward that many years and joining the Resistance along with the anomalous occurrence of Chase surviving was unforeseen. If that scenario becomes the new timeline, how will that hinder my plans? Will my family be returned to its prominent position if Power returns at this later date or has his absence those sixteen years created the opportunities necessary for my family to maintain its status?
With the Cyclotron still being kept offline, he couldn't make any corrections to the timeline. All he could do was research it, find where everyone was at all points on the timeline and then make his move as soon as possible. And despite his position at the Cyclotron lab, he couldn't rev up the Cyclotron whenever he wanted to. Someone at one of the labs would have to request it. Otherwise, there would be no way to do anything quietly, and no one was going to make a temporal experiment until they knew exactly what the target date was and what to do.
And if Power lived...
And if Chase lived...
No, he wouldn't allow that to happen. He would take his rightful position among the elite and powerful as was his birthright.
He tuned his time tracking program to start on July 7th, 2148. If he could just find Stuart Power before anyone else does...
~0~0~0~0~
Jet Propulsion Laboratories
Delphi Aderholdt read report after report. Every adjacent timeline recorded prior to the Cyclotron shutdown was analyzed and evaluated. She was re-looking for the obvious and trying to overlook the distractions.
To paraphrase one of her more verbally colorful professors, they'd scited up. Big time.
Elias brought in another report. "Temporal disturbance has died down enough to for us to go snipe hunting. We got a hint through temporal triangulation of timeline ripples and those personal journals that the Power Team was at a particular Montana hospital that week in 2148. We were able to backtrack the timeline, use new trackers, and tamp down the actual footprints. Information's solid," he said, sitting down heavily in the chair.
"How solid?" Delphi asked, trying to suppress her excitement.
"Rock solid."
"Give me a recap," Delphi asked as she poured herself and Elias some coffee.
"Kirkland is the name of the doctor that ran the hospital at the Montana base, and we've got the actual geographical coordinates. Chase was there, alive and well. So was Stuart Power. Both of them got sent to July 4th, 2148. Chase was sent to the former JPL site at the San Gabriel Valley, where we rebuilt our JPL labs. Power was sent to Los Alamos after Dread had destroyed the place. It's the exact same geographic location that we rebuilt our Los Alamos Labs. The Power Team found Chase on the 4th, Power on the 7th. We can track them both to this particular Resistance base on the 8th. Specifically. The Power team was there as well."
Delphi laid her head down on her desk and sighed, her hand never leaving her coffee mug.
"You get any sleep?" Elias asked her.
She gripped her coffee mug tighter and pulled it to her. "Yes. I got a few hours and no, you can't take my coffee away from me again." They both smiled. "What about the history? How much has it changed?"
He blew on his coffee to cool it down a little. "Want the good news or the bad news?" Elias asked her.
She raised her head and shrugged. "Dealer's choice. Whichever."
"Good news is that the Resistance still wins the war."
Okay, that was good news. "What's the bad?"
Elias smiled mockingly and sighed. "The Resistance didn't win in the same way or at the same time. Bringing both Chase and Power back altered how it was done. Jonathan Power didn't stay vicious. He didn't keep destroying everything Dreadish in sight. The team's game plan became more meticulous than in the original timeline. More calculated. They had Stuart Power's scientific mind back with them after sixteen years helping them plan missions, and they had Chase back which meant their team was intact again. And let's face it, those five were good together."
Delphi stared at her friend. "And that's bad why?"
Elias showed her a line of data on the report he brought in. "In our new, current timeline, Jonathan Power didn't kill Dread. They were able to take him alive to stand trial, and that was Stuart's idea. The team didn't have to blow up Volcania or wipe out countless outposts, bases or facilities. In short, they didn't eradicate all signs that Dread and Overmind ever existed in the new timeline. They didn't have to because they were able to stop Dread instead of abolishing him. They thought they destroyed Overmind, but all they did was wipe out his main hard drive and most of his programs. Some still existed as viruses and virtual bits of Overmind's personality for decades afterwards. Skirmishes kept on going for a long time. Basically, there was no clean end to the war because it never really ended. A lot more died before it was all over with which means a lot of people who did exist before our experiment started don't exist now."
That wasn't good. "We changed history by changing history because someone changed history," she moaned to herself. "Okay, is it fixable?"
He turned to another page of the report. "One major thing, and you're not going to like it."
Delphi read through the temporal stability report. There was only one way to utterly destroy Dread and wipe out all evidence of his existence. "It's possible that Stuart Power could stay in 2148 and get the same results, but Chase has to die in order to turn Power into an angry man," she concluded. "They've got her back now. If she were to die after they found her, what's the outcome?"
Again, Elias showed Delphi a particular part of the report. "It was losing her that turned him into a tougher soldier. According to the new information, our psychologists are thinking he could lose her after finding her and the timeline will reflect the original more. It won't be raw anger over losing her like in the original timeline. It's pure grief. He'll destroy everything that has to do with Dread including Dread himself and Overmind will be history."
"Then how would bringing Stuart Power back sixteen years later affect a non-change on the timeline?"
Elias shook his head. "Stuart Power being there is how it should have been in the first place, and we're correcting that problem but sixteen years from where he ought to be? We don't know yet. Chase was supposed to die in the Power Base explosion. We can't undo the time wave's split between the two explosions due to the temporal instability that would cause right now, but if we could still remove Chase from the equation..."
Delphi knew what Elias didn't want to say.
"I hate this," she said. "One person can make such a difference. We've seen it countless times, but Chase was the difference for Power. He gave up so much to fight that war, and here we sit casually commenting on the fact that if he doesn't lose Chase, then we lose the world he liberated for us."
Elias sat back. "We would not be working here today if everything that Dread built wasn't torn down. Everything had to be rebuilt. Overmind had to be completely wiped out so he couldn't take over computer systems again and that meant destroying every computer system on the planet because he had grown to be a bunch of programs all over the web. Our computer systems wouldn't have been built if any of Overmind's systems still existed because they would have taken over anything built after the fact. All biomechs had to be destroyed, not just dismantled because there were some people out there who were always loyal to Dread and his Empire and would get the biomechs working again. They would have used any of Dread's facilities as a base of operations if they had been completely destroyed by the Resistance. All that hinged on the fact that Captain Power practically went rabid when he lost Jennifer Chase. Not losing her, that changed a lot down the timeline."
Delphi thought through all the scenarios she could, all the possibilities. "So we have to get Power to destroy Dread and Overmind, not just capture them in the new timeline. Which, of course, changes the timeline again. It does lend credence to the theory that in the original timeline, he was a grief stricken man who lost the love of his life and took it out on Dread. Any idea how we can do that?"
"That's above my pay grade," Elias explained, a slight smile on his face. "I know what the Temporal Administrative Council will want to do, but I'm not agreeing with it."
"They'll probably want to remove Chase," she concluded. "And make it look like Dread was behind it."
"That would put Jonathan Power back on track, but he'll lose her," he sighed.
She noticed a slight glint in her friend's eye. "Elias, you're up to something. You've got something in mind?" she wanted to know.
"What makes you think I do?"
"Because I've known you for years and you love to pull all kinds of shenanigans," she remarked. "Besides, I know how sneaky you can be when you put your mind to it. What are you thinking?"
"Can't we get a message to Power somehow? Keep Chase alive? Tell him that he has to destroy everything to do with Dread and Overmind or the future is at risk?"
She almost laughed. "Then we'd have to explain time travel," she pointed out.
"What makes you think they're not already thinking that?" Elias countered. "They were a pretty smart group. If we can get a message to them -"
"Maybe have the best of all possible worlds?" She considered it. "You know, when I was a little girl, I loved hearing the stories about the Power Team, about how they would swoop in and win no matter what the odds. Then there were all those myths behind what happened at the base. The idea that Chase died protecting the Resistance and stopping a biodread has been one of the most researched theories from the Badderdays. Just once, I'd like for this story to have a happy ending."
"What do you want to do?" Elias wanted to know.
What to do, what to do... Delphi knew they had few choices. "Who'd you have for temporal physics at the Academy? Brewster? Shannon?"
"Gilbert," Elias answered. "Why?"
"I had Chesling. He was about five years from retirement when I took his class, but he would address each physics class with this analogy -"
"About the dominos?" Elias interrupted. "I heard about that. If one domino doesn't fall, it could change everything, right?"
"If Power were to lose Chase... Elias, this is one domino I don't want to see fall."
Elias sighed. "Me either."
"Do we have Jillian's latest updates?"
Elias pointed to a particular report. "Right there on top. She sent them over just before I came in here."
"Okay. We send our findings, our conclusions, and our recommendations to the Temporal Administrative Council. They'll have to decide on the next step." She took a deep breath. "And if they choose the wrong step, maybe we need to have a Plan B." She paused, then, "Anything new on the information from the Cyclotron Lab?"
"I looked through some pretty well-hidden-in-plain-sight information on the paperwork. I also checked the logs. Turns out a Doctor William Custer was the only one on duty that night at the lab, and he logged in to the system prior to any of this starting. I checked into his personnel records as much as I could. He's one of the pencil-pushing scientists at the lab. He does reports. Lots of them. He cranks up the Cyclotron whenever we get ready to do a temporal experiment -"
"He's a cyclotech?" Delphi asked. "One of those techs wouldn't have the expertise to preprogram it to split a wave fractal, would they?"
Elias cleared his throat. "Custer might. He's not a tech. He's a temporal engineer. He graduated top of his class, the only reason he's at that lab and not one of the scientists here is that he's not into research. He's more comfortable around machinery and paperwork. I'll check out more of his background so we can either clear him or accuse him."
"Let's keep this part of the problem quiet. I'm not going to destroy a fellow scientist's career on mere speculation and coincidence," Delphi said. "I want proof."
"I'll go digging," Elias told her. "About time I got my hands dirty in all this.