Chapter 16: Return
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Cole couldn’t believe he’d just been dismissed like that. He stormed out of the port and into Mars Colony’s Main Street. “The nerve of that guy, shooing us away like a couple of children. I know that was my design. The numbers weren’t anything I recognized, but the entire display was a copy of mine!”
“I know, Cole, but there’s nothing we can do. You told me yourself that this whole trip was just going to be a distraction from the real mission anyway. You know that he’s right, that we need to move forward with our work, with the mission.” Val was making sense, but Cole was much too angry to tell her so. It was worse to be wrong than to be sent away, he thought. Val circled in front of him, facing him and forcing him to stop. “Listen. This is going to be a good thing. You’ll see. Just roll with it.”
Cole looked into her eyes, the emerald green melting his anger away. “Yeah. I guess so.” He tried to look away, wanting to remain angry, but she reached up and grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing his attention to stay on her. Their eyes met again, and she pulled herself taller onto her toes and kissed him. He was so stunned by the gesture that he simply stood there, looking at her smile as she fell back to her normal height. He lightly licked his upper lip, tasting the tingle that lingered there, and then he smiled at her. “I don’t know how you do it,” he whispered to her.
She let go of his arms, and as she was turning away still smiling, she asked, “Do what?” She started walking away, toward the hotel again, but at a more normal pace than the angry one that Cole had led with before.
“How you keep smiling, ready for the next thing. You never let anything bother you. Surprise, you’re leaving home for who knows how long. Guess what, you’re going to travel through time. Oh by the way, we ransacked your apartment and moved all you stuff to a place on the moon that you’ve never been. Oh look, here’s an alien spacecraft, want to take it for a spin?” He caught up to her easily, his stride longer than hers. “Hey I know we just met, but let’s commit Grand Theft Time Machine together.”
Val simply smiled at him, not answering. She didn’t need to answer him though; her smile said it all. This is who she was. This is who she would always be: a person who was apparently always ready at a moment’s notice for anything, even something completely unexpected.
Cole continued, “Even here, in a small town on a dead-end planet, you can smile and kiss someone who is steaming mad about being rejected. Nothing bothers you, not even me being pissed off.”
“This is not a dead-end planet,” she said as if egging him on.
“Of course it is! There’s not enough gravity here to keep a real atmosphere, but they are growing trees for oxygen anyway!”
“I heard they were going to build a giant space station in orbit, and use it to try and increase the rotation of the planet enough to keep an atmosphere.”
“I haven’t heard that,” Cole said.
“They are going to build the core out of asteroids from the belt…”
“Wait, you’re changing the subject. I’m supposed to be mad right now.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” she answered with a mischievous smile, and walked faster to stay ahead of him the rest of the way to the hotel. They had to hurry to gather their things as get back to the public area of the port where their transport was waiting for them. It was a small shuttle, with more engine than passenger or cargo space, meaning it was perfect for getting a couple of people and suitcases between planets in a hurry.
When they got there, Adam noticed that Val looked distinctly crestfallen that there was a pilot on board already, and that she would not get to fly this one. Adam told her, “I’m sure that Chan wanted to make sure we had an uneventful ride home.” By uneventful, Cole meant that they got into a bit of trouble the last time they flew alone together, but he wasn’t sure if Val had caught the reference. After stealing the time-ship, he wasn’t sure if Chan would let them fly anything together unaccompanied. It made him feel a bit like a child being punished, but Cole tried to push it out of his mind.
They sat in silence for a long time as they took off from Mars, making a course into the empty space between planets. Finally it was Val that spoke. “That did look a whole lot like the display you made. I wonder if that is just a coincidence.”
Cole had continued to think about that too. “I’ll have to spend more time on it, and look at how it’s configured to know for sure. It took me years to get it right. I have redesigned it dozens of times, and know it better than I know most people. If I just could have stayed and pried the time control open, I would have known for sure one way or the other.”
“I don’t know, Cole. Everything else in that ship was unrecognizable. The idea that metal changes form to suit a need is just, well it is too alien. The way it ripples and reforms itself to become landing gear, or a door, or navigation. That is so far beyond us, that I can’t imagine them using technology from our species…” She trailed off, looking out the window. The red planet was fading into the distance, slowly becoming just another dot of light. “I used to think that we were so advanced with our space travel and robots. People used to write stories about life among the planets, and it gave me a sense of pride that I was living the life that people had only dreamed about for hundreds of years. It’s like my gift to them, wherever they are now, showing them that everything was worth it. All the wars they fought and the hard work they did, it was all so future generations could live the way we live today. Being in that alien craft humbled me, made me think that we are not so advanced after all.”
“Well, if you ask me,” Cole said, “stealing technology from a lesser race would be pretty humbling too. Could you imagine having to go figure out how to drive an automobile, and then trying to incorporate that into modern spaceflight somehow?”
“Actually, I have driven an automobile before, a petroleum fueled one even. It was pretty fun actually.”
“Those are illegal to operate! You really are more of a bad-girl than I realized.” Cole looked at her and she just smiled back, that mischievous smile he liked so well. There was a comfortable silence for a long time after that, and Val had leaned close to Cole, slipping her arm around his upper arm as if to keep him from going anywhere. It made him happy to think that she wanted him to stay close. He rubbed his lips together a little, trying to feel their first kiss again, but it was gone now. He felt the urge to turn and kiss her again, but he was always bad with women, unsure of himself. Cole decided that if he had the urge to kiss her, it would probably be bad timing, so he resisted it. Instead, he asked her, “What are you thinking about right now?”
“Adam. I have this weird feeling about him, like déjà vu kind of. I feel like I’ve met him before, like I know him. Obviously I don’t though, not if the things he says are true. Looking at that alien ship was an internal struggle for me, because it seemed to confirm that there is no way I could have ever met him before. Still, I can’t shake the feeling.”
Cole thought about it a moment, and then told her, “I think he just has that effect on people. Audrey seemed pretty interested in getting to know him, as did Chan. I have to admit, I was pretty drawn to him as well. Maybe it’s our human curiosity, maybe it’s something the aliens did to his biology. There’s no way to tell.”
“Yeah, you are probably right. I’m sure it’s just him, not me. Everyone he meets does seem strangely attracted or intrigued by him. I heard that people dropped by gifts for him, strangers that only knew he had never been around other humans before.” She stopped that train of thought, looked up at Cole, and reminded him, “Aren’t you supposed to be briefing me for my mission?”
Cole had slouched into her a little, leaning on her as she leaned on him. When she wanted to talk about work again, he sat up straighter and she let go of his arm. “Well, obviously the most important thing for you to do is to stay safe. I don’t want to… I mean we don’t want to find out that something bad has happened to you when you are out there in the past. We have combed the records that still exist about the period around the alleged alien crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and we didn’t find any trace of you there, and that might be good, or that might be bad.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“On the one hand, if the mission is successful, then you wouldn’t have left any evidence of your presence there. On the other hand though, if you never make it, then there won’t be any record of you either. While Chan and I were going through possible scenarios, I tried to include one where there were no aliens at all, but that the alien crash was actually our ship. Chan would not hear it though. He has consistently maintained that there were aliens in that crash, and immediately dismissed any talk of them not being there. At first, I found it a difficult position to take, dismissing certain theories, but then it occurred to me that Chan might know something that I don’t.”
“He knows there are aliens.” Val wasn’t asking, but she didn’t seem to be speculating either. She seemed to be simply stating the logical conclusion of this train of thought. “He knew there were aliens around before Adam showed up talking about their existence. That’s why we paused everything on Luna and flew to Mars to look into it. He accepted it as fact, not speculation.”
“That’s the way the Admiral works.” Cole looked past Val, out at the sun that was growing in the distance. “He is always one step ahead, always holding some wild card that no one else even realizes is in the deck.” Venus was coming into view now. Cole assumed that Mars and Earth were on different sides of the sun in their respective orbits, and that the pilot was going to use the gravity of Venus to slingshot them around the sun to Earth and Luna. That meant Chan was really in a hurry to get Val on her way. There was no reason to slingshot unless you really wanted to get somewhere fast. Then he remembered something that he hadn’t connected before. “Chan was involved in some sort of alien research before taking over my research team. I heard something in his office while I was trying to figure out why he fired me. A Commander in the Martian Militia made a comment first about never seeing anything like Adam’s ship, and then said something about having studied these ships with Chan before. It didn’t make sense to me until just now. Chan already has some idea about what you can expect to find in 1947.”
Val caught Cole’s gaze and said, “You don’t think he’s sending me into a trap do you?”
