Caught Somewhere In Time

Start reading from the beginning…

Val had broken the law a few times, but usually it was doing what she had to do to get a job done or to stay alive, never to help someone whom she had just met. This was completely out of character for her, but then she had been walking blindly since Chan selected her as the pilot for this team. Now at least she had a direction and a purpose: to help Cole find out why he had been fired. What had he done to get fired in that short time between being asked to give her a tour and meeting him in the café? Maybe it was something Chan only learned during that period, but then surely Cole would have some idea what he had done.

She trusted him, and his eyes told her he was an honest man. They got up from the café table and Cole started walking down the concourse.

“Where are you going? The ship is through the lab.”

Cole smiled at her, “I can’t just walk in there and take it. The receptionist does more than offer service, she controls and records entry into the complex. There’s only one way to the ship without passing her, and that’s through the long tunnel from the Administrator dock.”

“Isn’t there some security leading in there though? We won’t be able to just walk through a door and gain access to Chan’s ship, or any of the other administrator vessels,” she replied.

Cole stepped onto a moving walkway and quickened his walking pace. His long strides made it difficult for Val to keep up. There were people all around them now, so they had to keep their voices down. When Val caught up with him, he told her, “Administrators come and go as they please here. They don’t need authorization to depart like anyone else does. There is only a secure door blocking the public out of that hangar because the people in charge don’t want to be hassled by security while they are taking care of business. It’s right through there.”

He pointed to a short hall of elevators that ascended or descended to different levels of LunaBase. Val looked, and other than being marked by LunaBase’s logo, there was nothing remarkable at all. There were seven doors, three on each side of the hall, and one at the end. When she followed Cole into the hall, she noticed that two of the elevator call buttons had lights that lit up when she approached them. She deduced that was the Administrator’s security: elevator call buttons only lit if you had the proper clearance to use them. “Where do these all go?” she wondered out loud.

“Most go to internal office areas like our complex, but this one,” he pointed at the nearest light that was lit, “goes to the roof. It’s interesting that Chan gave you access to that. The one we want is there at the end of the hall.” He pointed to the other lit call button, and Val pressed it.

This door, easily twice as wide as the others, opened to a large elevator, apparently one meant to carry freight or luggage. Inside, it had another door in the back of the car, but no buttons to control it. When the door closed behind them, gravity began to lessen, and Val could not tell whether they were ascending, descending, or not moving at all. When the door in the back of the car opened however, they were clearly in the Administrator dock. Val had been here only a few hours ago and remembered that almost all the vessels parked here were large. She whispered to Cole, “We parked close to the long hallway, and I was only here a few moments. I don’t remember where the ship was.”

“Cole smiled at her a little crookedly and said, “That’s OK, I’ve been around here plenty. Follow me.”

He grabbed a bar that seemed to wrap around the outside of the whole dock, and pulled himself forward using it as he started jogging. With the low gravity here, a using the bar to pull him forward had two obvious advantages. First, it kept him from rising very far off the floor when ran, and second, it converted his upward momentum into forward momentum, giving him more speed in his step. He seemed to be flying almost out of sight before Val grabbed the bar to follow. Just like Cole had, she tugged herself forward with both hands as she took the first few running steps. She raised a couple of feet of the ground, but not far, and was cruising at about three or four times her normal running speed when she touched down again for another step a few yards later. She kept her body low and her head titled up and moved in a more cat-like fashion then she would normally move in heavier gravity. Leaning forward allowed her better control and kept her closer to the ground where she could continue running.

She was moving so quickly that when she saw Cole had stopped up ahead of her, she was unable to stop fast enough. Her feet touched the ground, and Val accidentally leaned too far forward sending her into a forward dive. She missed when she grabbed for the bar, causing her to twist in her flight right toward Cole. He turned just in time to see her coming, and with one hand gripping the bar, he caught her around the waist with the other arm before she flew past him. Val had taken gravity for granted as a means of helping her control movement. In the low gravity areas of the base, what goes up will eventually always come down, but you couldn’t count on coming back down as a means of stopping forward momentum.

“Been flying long?” joked Cole as her helped her get her feet back underneath her. Val merely blushed as a response and tried to get her bearings. “It’s right over there,” he said and pointed just beyond where they were standing. He let Val get ahead of him as they walked more casually toward the secure door. She looked around and didn’t see anyone else here. The door opened at her approach, and Cole rushed around her into the doorway before Val could enter. It snapped closed behind them, and they were in the long white hall, still alone.

With gravity on, jogging was much easier. It started to dawn on Val exactly how dangerous what she was doing was. Technically, she hadn’t done anything very wrong yet, merely went for some exercise in a restricted area with a new friend. She was about to change all that by committing grand-theft transport however. Due to the nature of the ship she was going to steal, it seemed like there would be maybe more serious consequences than just losing her appointment as the pilot of this program. As they reached the end of the hall, Cole stopped, winded from the jog. Val was just starting to get her blood pumping, being in moderately better shape than her new friend, but she understood how someone might easily need a break after the jog they had just made.

“Cole,” Val started, “are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, have you thought this through?”

He was silent for a moment, looking at her with his warm brown eyes. She loved the way his eyes looked at her. “We aren’t stealing it really, only borrowing it. We can’t keep it, and it will really only be gone for a matter of a couple of minutes.”

“A couple of minutes? I thought you wanted to go back in time?”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed. “We’ll go back in time a few hours, I’ll dig around and research what happened, and when time catches up to us, we can land the ship a few moments after we depart.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Val was confused about the time traveling aspect. “If we take the ship back in time, we’ll have it with us. We can’t be in two places at once.”

“I will explain it better later, but for now, you’ll just need to trust me on this.”

She did trust him. Val wasn’t sure why she trusted him, or what she was doing helping him out, but she felt like it was the right thing to do. Pilots rely on their intuition a lot to get them safely through otherwise dangerous situations, and she didn’t feel any danger right now, only curiosity about what would happen next.

Cole asked, “How closely did you look at the ship earlier?”

“I got close enough to nearly run into it, but that’s all. How are we going to get inside if we can’t see the door though?”

“That’s easier than it might seem. There is an access hatch under the ship. The problem is that while it’s open, the ship will be visible, or at least the access hatch will be. Only the exterior of the ship bends the light, the open hatch makes the interior visible.” Cole seemed concerned about this detail, but Val didn’t know why that would be a problem.

“We’ll be visible too, and once we close the hatch, we’ll be inside.”

Cole’s eyes fell on her face again, and he smiled. “Good point. If we get caught, it won’t be because they saw the hatch open. Somebody could see us before they see the hatch.” He paused a moment, and his face went slack staring at Val. He seemed to be considering something. Then, he spoke rapidly, having determined the next step, “I’ll go first, and open the hatch. You follow about five seconds behind me; that should be long enough to open it up. We’ll have to move quick and stay low, so we are going to jump low from the wall like a swimmer doing laps. Are you ready?”

Val nodded and both of them crouched low to the ground, on hands and knees. Cole opened the door, crawled into the low gravity area, put one foot on the doorframe now behind him and pushed off, flying through the air only a foot or two off the floor. Val began to count, whispering to herself, “One.” Cole reached to the ground with his hands as the air resistance started to slow him, and pulled himself forward again, giving him a few more inches of altitude. “Two.” She could see as he glided under the edge of the nearly invisible ship that an strange, dark are appeared over him, presumably the ship bending his reflection around it. “Three.” Val climbed through the doorway and pulled it closed behind her, feeling her weight leave her hands and knees. “Four.” As she crouched back against the wall for her leap, she put her toes into the vertical corner of the floor and the wall and pushed the seat of her pants almost all the way back to the wall. She looked up and saw a doorway open beneath the ship and Cole began to climb up into it. “Five.”

Val pushed off from the wall, and with her face forward, she pushed her hands out in front of her, slowly moving them from in front of her to her sides, as if she were swimming. Her training in aerodynamics came into play now, and she didn’t need the extra push off the ground like Cole had used. Instead, she used her hands and the arch of her body to create an air pocket beneath her that lifted her slightly from the ground to keep her from dropping to the floor. She let the air resistance slow her this way, without touching the ground, and as she saw the open hatch approach, she twisted her body so she was face-up. The maneuver brought her almost to a stop and allowed gravity to pull her that last inch or two down, skidding about six-inches in a sitting position to a stop right under the ship’s entrance. She stood up, and in a fluid motion she rose from her feet into the ship.

Cole closed the hatch beneath her and said, “I didn’t realize you were so graceful, especially after catching you in the other dock!”

“Maybe I wanted to be caught,” she joked, smiling at him.

“The danger of being caught is not over. It doesn’t look like anyone saw us, but we still need to get the bay open and get outside.” Cole sat in the cockpit seat and started turning the ship on.

Val recognized the controls from a simulator she had flown in a recent training session. “Is this equipped with HoloNav? I’ve simulated these and have always wanted to fly one!”

Cole apparently realized that he was in the pilot’s seat and got up, offering it to Val. She sat down and continued the power-up procedure, scanning the controls. “You will be able to fly this, right?” he asked her.

“Of course! I used to play games like this before I could talk. I took my first ship into orbit when I was ten, and just last year I was formally trained on HoloNav last year, being the first person to ever pass the final exam on the first attempt.”

She slid her hands slowly into the control gloves, which were like oversized mittens gripping handles. There were tighter openings for her two index fingers inside the gloves that allowed for the control of floating cursors in the holographic display that descended around her head. The display provided her an electronic representation of the surrounding space in three dimensions that she could move her head around in to see at any angle her chair would allow. This technology eliminated the need for windows on the exterior of a ship, and the limitation of not always having light to see by. The display showed her the empty bay around her, with a marker on the bay door above her. The cursor simulated for her right index finger floated up as she pointed her finger that way. With a flick of her finger, the door was selected and Val asked, “Are you ready to do this?”

Cole would be able to see the hologram around Val’s head, and so he must have seen that she selected the door for opening. “It looks like you know your stuff pretty well. Let me get strapped in and then let’s see if we can sneak outside.”

She turned her head and saw Cole sit in a passenger seat a few feet behind her. No more than two people would fit comfortably in this ship, and the interior was only slightly bigger than most private bathrooms she’d been in. The interior was round, with a seat against the back wall on the other side of the floor hatch. The pilot’s seat had its back to the hatch and the other seat, and faced a console of controls and an otherwise blank section of wall. There was room to stand and walk inside, but you couldn’t take more than two or three steps before having to turn around. When she saw Cole had buckled himself in through the partially holographic wall of the bay they were in, Val flicked her finger to open the bay door. The command was actually sent electronically from the ship to open the door just like any other computer command, but the representation of the hologram made it appear that she had merely flicked it open with her cursor, meanwhile the room outside the ship mirrored what she saw in her display.

The bay over them opened and Val raised the ship silently out of the door. She went to close the bay door behind her, as was protocol in ships that controlled exterior objects, but Cole must have seen the cursor move that direction. “NO!” he shouted, “You have to leave it open! Just fly away quickly, before we are seen!”

Urged on by the force in his voice, she lifted up away from the lunar surface very fast, and started moving out of orbit, putting the moon between them and Earth. Her display showed the sun off to one side in the distance, and Luna shrinking behind her. “This thing moves quick! I don’t feel the pull of our speed though…” she trailed off into silence, realizing that there was another modern convenience added to this ship: variable antigravity. The newest ships had started being fitted with gravitational field generators that offset the pull of gravity in one direction by applying additional gravity in the opposite direction. Whereas in an older ship, a fast takeoff like she had just experienced would have pinned her to her seat, the gravitational field in this ship pushed her in the opposite direction, nullifying the effect and keeping her from having so much as a sinking feeling in her stomach. This technology had evolved from the field generators used in places like LunaBase and on Mars, and moved swiftly in conjunction with piloting controls.

Val slowed the ship and turned it around seeing that the moon was partially eclipsing the Earth in her display. She pulled her hands from her gloves and the display dimmed, becoming almost transparent. Val pivoted her seat around to face Cole. “What the hell was that about? We are sure to get caught now! You can’t just leave a door open like that, what if someone walks into the bay and suffocates as all the oxygen is being sucked out behind us? That was incredibly irresponsible! I don’t even know why I helped you steal this damn ship. What is wrong with you? What is wrong with ME?” Cole merely grinned at her, listening to her fume. “And stop smiling all the time, it makes it really hard to be mad at you,” she finished, pursing her lips almost as if pouting.

“Are you done?” he asked. When she nodded, Cole answered. “We had to leave it open, because if we had closed it, we would just have to open it again to get back inside later. Well, later to us that is. I have a feeling we made it just fine however, without getting caught by anyone.”

“I still don’t understand any of this,” she said. “We haven’t made it anywhere just fine, just away from the surface.”

“When we lifted off out of the bay, I saw a ship watching us. It was directly behind your head in the display, so you wouldn’t have noticed it.”

“Is that why you yelled at me to go? Don’t do that! I only react when things like that happen, I don’t stop to think it through. Now we might be in big trouble if somebody saw us.” Val started to really get scared. “I’m going to lose my license. They’ll never let me fly again!”

“Don’t worry, Val. Nobody followed us.” Cole’s voice was deep and soothing. “I think it was this ship that I saw in the display. I think it was you that saw us leaving, and I think you were getting ready to land.”

Continued on January 30, 2010