“I didn’t know,” Jason whispered to himself, realizing he couldn’t separate himself from Jae-Sun. They were one and the same person, the only difference between them had come from thousands of iterations through time.
“I thought I understood,” he pleaded to the empty vacuum. “But I didn’t.”
It felt strange to be defending actions Jae-Sun wouldn’t make for hundreds of years. Defending? Was he being defensive? Or repentant? Even Jason wasn’t sure at that point.
“That was a different time,” he insisted, feeling as though the silence of the creature somehow condemned him.
What was this magic? How could he see into a future that hadn’t happened yet? He had to destroy this device lest its magic fall into the wrong hands.
Magic! Yes, he thought. What else was this but sorcery by human standards? There had to be some science to the animal’s motion, but humanity was so primitive by comparison that this magnificent creature seemed almost divine, like one of the fabled cherubim that wept over the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Jason wanted to believe those words, but the red LED flickering on the side of the nuclear bomb spoke only of violence. It pulsated, casting an eerie glow in the open brain cavity.
“I can change this,” Jason said to the ghosts echoing around him in the darkness.
As he turned, his spotlights lit up sections of the wall in the skull. Words and equations had once scarred those surfaces. He could still see them in his mind’s eye.
“I can fix this!”
And with those words, he realized nothing had changed. This was the same hubris that had led Jae-Sun to travel back in time in the first place.
Looking at the rear membrane, he saw words once carved in desperation.
Her?
All this time, Jason had thought he understood the message he’d been sending himself across the vast expanse of space-time, but he hadn’t. For hundreds of years, he’d missed the real meaning in the messages he’d left for himself.
He’d never intended to save only himself. He’d never intended to save just Lily or even Lily and Lachlan. All along, he’d wanted to save them all.
There was much he didn’t understand about the feedback loop, but he understood the creature was somehow locked into a certain point in space-time, always returning to that stormy night off the coast of North Korea. But why?
At the time, all Jason could think of was that the injury to the alien’s neural compartment had rendered it essentially brain dead. But now his opinion had changed. He had seen an astonishing amount of cognitive function as the creature had shown him visions of its home, visions of its capture, and of the future.
The alien was wounded, of that he was sure. The damage to its skull was clear. The bit and bridle sat before him as a strange alien console with faint, exotic markings.
This dragon of the deep was crying out to him for help. She could see both the past and the future. Why had she continued circling over and over? Why return to that dark night off the coast of North Korea thousands of times? What was she waiting for?
Finally, he understood. She was waiting for him. She needed him to understand what had to be done at this precise moment. She wanted him to set her free. It had taken thousands of iterations to bring him to the point when he could help her.
In the original timeline, Jae-Sun had been selfish, self-centered. Now, though, Jason knew what she needed him to do.
In the vision of the nebula, her fellow creatures had fled through space-time, leaving in their wake flashes of pale blue-light. And he’d seen this earlier today. He’d thought it was Cherenkov radiation breaking before his retina, but it wasn’t. They were out there, waiting to effect a rescue.
This was the answer he was looking for. This was an alternative that could break the time loop. All he had to do was to lead the Excelsior away and leave her to her kind.
This wasn’t part of the plan, but to hell with the plan, he thought.
“I understand,” he said, gently touching at the brain mass that had revealed those visions to him. Everything they’d gone through, it must have been all she could do, all she was capable of in her injured state, desperate to escape.
He drifted forward and removed the nuclear device, deactivating the bomb. The red LED switched to green as he packed the bomb back into the equipment cube. His gloves were clumsy, or was it that his fingers were trembling? Jason couldn’t tell, but the realization of how close he’d come to destroying this intelligent alien shook him.
“This,” he said, turning to face the strange console. “This must go.”
While working with the equipment cube, he had drifted sideways and somewhat upside down relative to the floor of the cavity. The floor itself sloped down at an angle of roughly seventy degrees within the asteroid, and yet in the near weightlessness he could convince his mind that the angled surface was flat. Slowly, Jason aligned himself with the floor, grabbing hold of the console.
“Let’s get this off you.”
The console looked like a mesh of smooth, brushed aluminum with organic branch like edges weaving down into the floor. There were dozens of tiny lights, barely visible in the darkness. As his spotlight drifted over them, they seemed to disappear. At first glance, the console seemed to be part of the vessel, but Jason had seen how brutally it had been set in place.
He planted his feet on the floor immediately below the console and grabbed at the thick edge. Flexing with his thighs, and keeping his back straight, he pushed off, trying to pry the console loose. There was a little give, but the console remained stuck.
Working hand over hand, he moved to one end of the console. Jason positioned himself carefully and instead of slowly increasing pressure, he thrust downward with his boots while pulling upwards with his hands. His head and neck arched back as he strained to pull the console loose. He could feel this end of the console starting to budge.
“Come on, you bitch!” he cried, jerking at the alien device.
Pulling himself along with his gloved hands, he moved to the other end of the console and pried at the structure. This end moved more than the other. Slowly, he was jimmying it out of place. He repeated this several more times until the console drifted just a few feet above the floor, still held in place by thin tendrils reaching out like roots.
Jason was sweating. His suit compensated for the exertion, lowering the temperature and circulating dry air to draw off the humidity produced by his perspiration.
Lying on his back, he reached under the console, grabbing at the roots. Lying there, he felt the vertigo of spacewalking. He could have been lying next to the floor, leaning against a wall or drifting close to the ceiling. All possibilities were equally valid, but for his sanity he chose to think he was lying there, even though he was floating inches above the floor.
The creature shook as he jerked at the roots, tearing them free like loose wiring.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, pulling the debris away and watching as the console toppled slowly, propelled forward by his jerking motion.
With the console floating freely within the skull cavity, a rainbow of colors began appearing on the surface he’d thought of as the front windshield.
“You like that, huh?” he said, smiling to himself.
Jason grabbed the console, using his maneuvering thrusters to drag the console toward the fractured opening. The computer controls in his suit struggled with the center of gravity being shifted to one side, and he quickly powered down, arresting his motion before he spun out of control. The only way he was going to get this out of here was by using the equipment cube to drag it, as the cube was designed to retrieve collection samples and its navigation systems could deal with more complex maneuvers.