Pete Cawdron - Feedback

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.

Attaching the console to the cube was easy enough.

It was time to go.

“Goodbye, my dear friend,” he said, taking one last look at the soft, kaleidoscope of colors pulsating through the cavity. “Take care of yourself.”

Slowly, he drifted out of the yawning hole in the skull cavity, watching as the cube followed automatically behind him. The console caught on the edge of the skull, but the cube adjusted its motion, working the console out of the gap.

Jason couldn’t look back. Tears welled up below his eyes, sticking to his cheeks like globs of glue in the low gravity. He shook his head, shaking them loose so they would be drawn away by his helmet vents.

His spotlights illuminated the sloping body of this majestic creature as he ascended, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at the central core. Above, a handful of fleeting stars provided the only hint of the universe beyond this dark cavern.

As he approached the top of the fracture in the asteroid, the dim light spilled in around the edges of the yawning canyon. Again, he could see the scratch marks where the creature had scraped against the dusty, rock walls while fleeing for the safety of the darkness.

For a moment, Jason floated above the crevasse. Chunks of dusty blue ice mixed with rocks and boulders. The dark crack beneath him looked more ominous than familiar.

“Farewell,” he said, accelerating away from the fracture in the asteroid.

The equipment cube mirrored his motion, following behind him with the console in tow. If he changed direction or came to a halt to examine his wrist console, the cube darted around, compensating for the added mass it had to deal with.

He cleared the lip of a vast impact crater and returned to the way-point set by Commander Lassiter. His surreal experience inside the darkened fracture seemed almost like a dream out here among the stars.

Jason steeled himself. As far as the universe was concerned, he was Jae-Sun again, in demeanor and attitude. He had to play this part once more, one final time.

Jae-Sun activated his coms and caught the tail-end of chatter with the Excelsior .

“—roughly two hours, but he—wait, I’ve got him on radar,” Lassiter said.

Jae-Sun could see the young man in the distance, just a speck of white drifting above the murky grey asteroid with its pits and boulders, craters and cracks.

“Did you find her?” Lassiter asked.

“Her?” Jae-Sun replied, his mind still awash with all that had happened. “No. There was nothing down there. But she’d been there. I found some debris, part of a control panel.”

“Hot damn!” Lassiter replied with excitement.

Jae-Sun found it strange trying to mimic the young man’s excitement. He smiled as he sailed up to him. Yes, he thought, I should be excited about finding evidence of an intelligent alien species.

Lassiter came around beside the equipment cube, drifting by the console as he examined this strange and curious alien device.