Catalyst: Valkyrie
This is the new online edition 'Catalyst', first published on G+ a couple of years ago. A new piece of the story will be published to the site every couple of days. To read from the start of the story, GO HERE.
Copyright Dark Aelf, 2021
Labrinth
Labrinth was in the darkness, teasing
dust.
She leaned down and blew the ground.
Dust swirled all around her. Some motes climbed high into the air. As shafts of
light falling from the high dome above hit them, she became briefly visible in
the darkness.
She watched as the particles settled
on the blast wall and start to tremor. They shivered in tune with the beat of
the reactor twenty floors below.
She turned back to look at Mission
Control. A little way from her, the center of the dome was a hive of activity.
Mission specialists and their consoles were caught in silhouette on the high screen
to the left of the command area. A grainy image of Catalyst was frozen in black
and white tones on the screen, against a blurred background 39 years in the
future. On the other side, the time gate cast waves of soft blue light that
pulsed through over the curve of the dome high above.
She watched Station Commander
Benedict take command of operations at the Command Desk from a junior officer.
She imagined him, sunburnt and creased with recent stress, white knuckles at
the com. She had been waiting for his return.
The loudspeaker system crackled with
his voice, “This is Mission Control, our temporal distance from Catalyst is 39
years, 15 days, 5 hours. His velocity is steady at 1274 seconds per tick.”
He paused and added, “Here in Mission
Control we are standing by.”
Labrinth moved in the shadows to a
closer vantage. She saw Benedict hail Cannonball. A murmur of anxiety echoed
around the consoles. She was not the only one waiting for their next move.
Labrinth heard Cannonball shout, “Cut
the chatter!”
Benedict and Cannonball spoke loudly
for the benefit of the surrounding teams. Benedict asked, “Early acquisition
worked this time. What did we discover?”
Cannonball shook his head, “Nothing
good. Analysts are working on it, but I saw a glimpse of an Island Lagoon map
in the video feed. Catalyst might be trying to make his way back here. If the
analysts confirm that, we need to send in Labrinth.” Labrinth grimaced and
shrunk back into the darkness. She was hundreds of miles from anywhere. Stuck
at a facility far out in the desert at Australia’s only rocket range, the
space-port Woomera. Salt lakes in every direction. No television or radio. No
rockets either, anymore. Just stars and, maybe, a softball game on the weekend.
There were rumors that the American base nearby had a copy of movie Jaws and
might invite people over.
Still, perhaps she was lucky to have
any job at all. She was hanging on by her fingertips. She was a foreign affairs
officer, in a year that had seen Australian embassies in a range of countries
close with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon and the descent
into chaos of a dozen other countries. War was being waged close to Australia’s
borders. Indonesian forces killed five Australian-based journalists during
their incursion into East Timor. A sweet job in the Europe desk, fell through
with riots when the Spanish dictator conceded that he was too ill to govern.
She started to drift again with feelings of anger about the way things were not turning out for her. The government had seconded her here: some obscure scientific group cobbled together from the remnants of half a dozen failed rocket programs. It was dull and deadly hot. Then, 11 days ago it all went wrong.
Now it was hot and deadly
desperate.
Benedict walked away from his post.
He was arguing with two engineers.
He reached a decision and motioned to
dismiss the men. She thought, “They are all men, except for me.” He stalked
back to the Command Center and flicked his mike and told all the specialists to
take their seats. One of the engineers followed him and tried to talk to him,
but this time the conversation was quiet.
Labrinth hesitated for a second and
then circled fast in the shadows, avoiding the circle of consoles and flashing
lights until she could hear the whispers.
Benedict was angry. He spat at the
engineer, “And so that’s why we started to put power out onto the domestic
grid? You have got to be kidding me!”
The Engineer stuttered a response.
Labrinth recognized Brad. He took a breath and tried again, “Not my call.
Treasury back in Canberra made the call. This facility is bleeding cash, and
they decided to make it up. All I am saying is that if you take that much power
out of the grid at the moment, you will drain the power out of every energy
resource in 500 miles. My team tells me that it may take days to restore power.
The politicians will go crazy. You will go crazy.”
Benedict, growled, “Ok, you made your
point. I have no choice. But when I give you the call, I want every bit of
power committed to this facility. Do you understand?”
Brad paused and then shrugged, “Yes.
I have told you what will go down.”
Brad turned and walked over to the
grid consoles, shaking his head.
Labrinth quietly withdrew to find
more dust. She ignored the buzz of activity that grew as the facility moved
back into radio range of Catalyst. She was thinking about what this meant to
her.
In the past 11 days, the same process
had repeated itself 40 times, once every 7 hours. Just six hours of downtime;
not enough time for real sleep. Then 60 minutes of finding Catalyst, searching
target areas and locking onto his artifact, trying to get scraps of early
acquisition video feed, and starting to transmit him short real-time messages.
The messages from Mission Control were highly compressed. Catalyst’s time ran
far faster than time here at Mission Control.
The Mission Control messages all took
the same form. They pleaded with Catalyst for information. In the beginning, he
sent back useful information. More recently, his messages did not make sense. Sometimes
they would be able to guess a word or two from the video feed. Then, the radio
window shut.
At the point of optimal contact,
there would be a short period of 86 seconds when the central screen would
spring into life. The massive screen would come to life, a couple of grainy
images at a time and then a sickening roller-coaster of images almost beyond
comprehension. Then they would lose signal, and the specialists would pass the
information they collected to the analysts.
It was fascinating at first. Because
of Labrinth's connections and experience, Benedict kept her in the loop. She
helped compose the messages to Catalyst. But the failure to get any meaningful
responses from him for the past six days was starting to press on all members
of the command.
Then suddenly, it had all changed.
One of the teams worked out how to send someone to Catalyst.
Labrinth frowned. Cannonball should
have gone, but they were still worried about the impact of the initial time
trials on him. So, Labrinth got the job. Partly, because of her past work in
intelligence gathering, and slightly because she knew how to use weapons.
So she suited up and went, through
the blue time gate, into the future. She shuddered, feeling the cold metal of
the artifact around her neck. They would leave her 3 Mission Control ticks
before pulling her back, after an hour meeting with Catalyst, in the future.
She felt a thrill; something was
happening. Benedict was going to use power. That meant he was going to use the
gate, and she would get a brief respite from the heat.
She heard the loudspeaker crackle.
Benedict broadcasted her name, “Agent Labrinth, report to Mission Control.
Now!”
She stopped. Unconsciously she spent
a couple of seconds feeling for her revolver, ammunition, a small backpack of
stores, currency and gold.
She remembered the argument before
coming back to Mission Control twenty minutes earlier. She and her support team
had disagreed about what she should wear. She had carefully described dress
style from her previous insertions, but no one would help her remove the flair
from her jeans. Finally, she cut them off herself. She walked into the circle
of light.
Cannonball looked down at her cut
down jeans. He looked at her and frowned an unasked question. Then they walked
with her towards Benedict.
Cannonball murmured to her, “He wants
you to stay in the future for a full cycle. He doesn’t trust Catalyst anymore.
I think we are just tired and frustrated, but he thinks Catalyst is going to do
something stupid. Whatever. I want everything you can find us about our near
future. The information we have is useless. Benedict wants stuff from the
period Catalyst is in; we need intel on the hard stuff, weapons, and coms. And
I want Catalyst’s artifact back: we need to find out what went wrong with it,
why we cannot get him back.”
As they came up to the coms station,
Benedict looked at them and broke in, sputtering, “Try to find a way to get
Catalyst back, but if you cannot, keeping you safe is my priority. Anything
else, including Catalyst, is expendable. Your mission will take 12 months. Get
me my data. Do not get yourself killed. Do not lose the artifact. Any
questions?” Labrinth processed “expendable” and nodded.
Cannonball said, “You have trained
for this. You can do it.”
Labrinth snapped a salute, “Yes
Commander!”
She took a step back, feeling the
tremors from the reactor beneath her.
Cannonball stood next to Benedict who
flicked his mike. A crackle echoed across the dome. Instantly, the other 40
people around the room quietened.
Benedict was tired, the tone in his
voice showed signs of stress, “This is Mission Control, more than 271 hours
into this exercise. It has been a long day here. A few moments ago I asked you
all to sit down and prepare for the coming events. Agent Labrinth, step up to
the gate.”
He cast an anxious glance at the
Mission Control clock. He continued, this time his voice crisp and fast, “All
right. Everything is looking good. I seek Go/Stay authorization for insertion
of agent Labrinth into the Catalyst timeline.”
As Cannonball called off each of the
service groups, the team leaders shouted a response.
Engineering - Go!
Vitals - Go!
Guidance- Go!
Power - Nominal!
DelCon - Go!
Surgeon - Go!
Cannonball said, “We are good for
insertion. Go-go-go!”
Agent Labrinth took one last look at
Mission Control, took out her gun and stepped towards the gate.
She took a breath watching for the
Guidance team leader’s hand signal.
Labrinth told herself, “It is 3:32 pm
on 10 November 1975. I am Stephanie, known here as Agent Labrinth. I am 27
years old. Agent Labrinth will return. Stephanie will come back. Nothing can
stop me. I will be back here in 7 hours.”
“But I will come back a year older,”
she heard herself say.
She has seen the grainy pictures the analysts had data mined from the future. Cityscapes changed beyond recognition. A world population that had almost doubled. There were new political boundaries that made no sense. Wars were taking place in places unheard. Unreal images of spaceships, robots, and monsters appeared without explanation. There was technology she did not understand. She thought, “This time, I have time to make Catalyst explain.”
Guidance gave her the signal, and she
moved fast into the blue light, conscious that the reactor pulses had started
to pick up. She took another step, as waves of tremors, like small earthquakes,
flooded the floor.
The facility screamed as it suddenly
drew power from everywhere. Labrinth saw that all the clocks had stopped.
Suddenly she saw stars. And then they
started to move towards her.
She dimly heard DelCon call out,
“Temporal speed for Agent Labrinth increasing. Achieving landing velocity in 10
ticks.”
The reactor tremors became waves,
rippling over the floor.
The specialists moved into
operational mode, calling out directly to each other “Maths Team 2 generating
multiple paths.” “Overlaying landing radar.” “Path 1 no go.” “Path 2 looking
good.” “Power at maximum and becoming unstable.” “Switching paths. Confirm path
2.” “Landing radar has flared.” “Confirmed path 2.” “I hope.” “We are good.”
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