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“Why don’t dolphins learn English?” Jae-Sun asked. “Why doesn’t an octopus learn how to use a crowbar? Why don’t chimps have a mastery of fire?”

He paused for a moment, letting those thoughts sink in before continuing.

“It’s not in their nature. Contact may be a biological imperative for us, but it’s apparently not for them. If anything, they seem wary of us. We’re the aggressors, escaping the gravitational confines of our planet and encroaching on their natural habitat. From their perspective, they have every reason to avoid us.”

Lassiter slowed their forward momentum, dropping them closer to the asteroid as the waypoint approached. The instrumentation cube slowed in tandem with Jae-Sun.

“But you’ve found one?” Lassiter asked.

“I think I may have found one,” Jae-Sun replied. “It’s hard to be sure. These things can move through both space and time, but they leave a trail. Each time they warp, they emit high-energy particles. And they follow a pattern, in the same way that birds will follow the same path to escape the coming of winter.”

Lassiter pulled them to a halt, lowering them down to within two feet of the asteroid. Jae-Sun watched as he established buoyancy, ensuring their suits automatically counteracted the weak pull of gravity from the asteroid.

The two astronauts were side on to the asteroid, so the surface appeared like a wall in front of them, with the distant sunlight running left to right. Pin pricks of light edged around the raised, stippled surface, while long black shadows stretched away from them.

Jae-Sun reached out his gloved hand. His fingers sank effortlessly into the fine powder on the surface of the asteroid. He moved his fingers in a figure eight and watched as the fine powder swirled as though it were suspended in water.

“Never lose your childlike sense of wonder,” Jae-Sun said, turning to Lassiter. “When you go to Enceladus, don’t lose your appreciation for how astonishing it is to walk on another world. Even the humblest of microbes on that small moon represent billions of years of evolutionary change, and that’s not something to be taken lightly.”

Lassiter nodded inside his helmet.

“First contact protocols necessitate that you wait here,” Jae-Sun said. “Is that understood?”

“Yes sir,” Lassiter replied. “Buddy mode is off.”

Lassiter’s gloved hands tapped at his wrist computer, returning local EVA control to Jae-Sun.

“Whatever happens,” Jae-Sun said, already drifting away from him. “Do not follow me. If I fail to return, you are to initiate the containment plan and deploy robotic probes. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jae-Sun stretched out his hand and thrust away from Lassiter. The white cube raced after him, keeping pace beside him.

Jae-Sun checked his wrist computer, watching the readouts relating to altitude above the rocky surface, way-point distances and signal strength. The pitted surface of the asteroid glided beneath him.

At a hundred yards, Jae-Sun slowed to a halt and turned, looking back at Lassiter in the distance. The astronaut floated above the dusty surface, his spotlights illuminating the rough surface.

“Com check,” Jae-Sun said.

“Coms are good,” Lassiter replied.

Jae-Sun raised his gloved hand and waved. The white suited astronaut waved back in reply.

Jae-Sun turned and continued on. He brought up a topographical overlay in his heads-up display and began moving to a second way-point, one known only to him.

After crossing a ridge and skirting the edge of a large crater, Jae-Sun knew he had moved out of line of sight. Neither Lassiter or the Excelsior could see him as he’d moved over the horizon from their perspective. Coms would still work, but the signal would be degraded. This was part of the plan. He’d convinced them there was a need to be coy in the initial approach to these creatures. Dragons had proven elusive for hundreds of years, since they were first spotted by the miners on Pluto. Now that one was at rest on an asteroid, the last thing anyone wanted to do was to spook the creature, and that played right into Jae-Sun’s hands.

Being one of the pioneers of manned interplanetary space flight had its benefits, he thought. No one else could have gotten away with this without dozens of questions being raised from generals across the command structure, but Jae-Sun was trusted. Jae-Sun knew he was about to betray that trust, but he had a higher purpose than the capture of one of these aliens. He had a promise to keep. Where others struggled to understand the mechanism by which the dragons moved and how they evaded observation, Jae-Sun already knew their secret: they moved through time.

A chasm opened up beneath him. The readout on his wrist computer indicated the probability of finding the alien within the dark canyon at 78% based on available readings and the various, faint electromagnetic emissions. Scratch marks lined a rock wall, appearing as though something large had scraped against the dust and rocks.

“I’m moving into a chasm,” Jae-Sun said. “I may lose coms.”

“Roger that,” Lassiter replied. Already, his voice was breaking up with the low signal-to-noise ratio. “Still receiving telemetry.”

Jae-Sun felt no fear, no sense of trepidation. He’d been waiting for this moment for hundreds of years.

Most people thought it was only the past that was set, but Jae-Sun understood time was a dimension every bit as fluid as any of the three spatial dimensions of up and down, left and right, forward and backward. The past and future seemed distinctly separate from a human perspective, but that was an illusion. Jae-Sun already knew what the future held. He was determined to make different choices.

He flew down a yawning hole that opened into the asteroid. Darkness enveloped him. His spotlights were feeble, barely illuminating the canyon walls as he descended out of sight and into the heart of the asteroid.

As he drifted deeper, he punched several commands into his wrist computer, deactivating the array of sensors on the white cube. These were supposed to record the interaction with the alien creature. They were largely passive, intended to avoid appearing intrusive to the alien. Had the scientists on the Excelsior known what he was doing they would have been horrified, but Jae-Sun had a plan. The instrumentation crate was carrying a payload other than probes and monitors.

“I’ve lost telemetry,” Lassiter said. “Do you want me to reposition?”

“Negative,” Jae-Sun replied. “Hold station. I’m still recording.”

He was lying, but Lassiter had no way of knowing that.

Jae-Sun reiterated his command. “Hold your position. That is an order.”

“Roger,” Lassiter replied.

Jae-Sun cut his com-link, cutting himself off from the universe outside. Lassiter wouldn’t move and neither would the Excelsior. They held Jae-Sun in too high regard to disobey. It wouldn’t occur to any of them question his judgement. No one would have believed this wasn’t Jae-Sun descending into the inky depths of a lifeless asteroid.

Jason had lived so many years as Jae-Sun his own name sounded strange. The real Jae-Sun was on Titan analyzing readings from the deep space array and relaying advice and recommendations via the deep space network. Well, Jason thought, real was a relative term when it came to time travel. They were both real. They were both one and the same person. The split in the timeline meant they were effectively identical twins. How that worked from the perspective of conscious awareness, he had no idea, but it did.

“Where are you?” he mumbled to himself. “Come on, baby. I know you’re down here.”

Above, a handful of stars shone in the thin sliver of the eternally dark sky. An inky pitch-black gloom surrounded Jae-Sun from every other angle, and he felt as though he were descending into Sheol, leaving one universe and falling into another.