Chapter 16

June 28, 2007

The MSS Calistoga was traveling once more at its cruising velocity of six million kilometers per hour, its eight-day, .25G acceleration burn having come to an end almost two weeks before. The ship was now between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn, though the planets themselves were both on the far sides of their orbits and barely visible. Calistoga would, however, pass within two million kilometers of Mars, an event the crew was looking forward to as it would allow them to make some observations of their home planet during a time human beings had yet to visit it and when the only man-made devices were a few probes circling in orbit or discarded on the surface. A viewing party had already been scheduled for the date when the flyby took place.

After passing Mars, the Calistoga would continue on past the orbit of Earth without slowing. Earth was inconveniently located on the other side of the sun at the moment. They would pass within 30 million kilometers of Venus, 14 million kilometers of Mercury, and 40 million kilometers of the sun, close enough that the heat damping system would be forced to do triple duty. The sun's gravity would give them a course adjustment, just enough to steer them directly toward Earth's position. They would then begin their deceleration burn and enter low Earth orbit, or LEO, on September 4.

Once there, the waiting would begin. There would be a lot of it, even under the best of circumstances. As of yet, they didn't even know if the WestHem stealth ship had made its trip or not. Assuming the WestHems did make it through, Huffy would attempt to pin down their location and intercept them as they approached LEO some 75 days after they emerged into the past. There was high hope among the crew that this plot would be successful and the entire mission could be completed without anyone having to make the trip to the surface. But no matter what the outcome, the Calistoga and its crew absolutely needed to be back in deep space beyond Pluto on January 28, 2008. That was the pre-determined time the return wormhole was to be opened to bring them back home.

This fact, in and of itself, was one the crew often mused about. "Think about it," Slurry was fond of saying whenever the subject came up. "They opened that return wormhole six hours after we left. Six hours! From their perspective, this mission is already over and done, for better or for worse, and we're on our way home. Yet here we are, weeks later, still plowing through space on the way to our target. It's a Laura-fucking mind trip."

It was generally agreed that this was indeed a Laura-fucking mind trip. Nor was it the only one the crew discussed obsessively. The potential paradox that had occurred to Cumquat Cypress had also occurred to Slurry and a few others. If their mission were successful, they would emerge from the wormhole only six hours after entering it. The ship they were coming to stop would still be on its way to its jump-off point and would potentially be emerging from the return wormhole at the same time.

"Is that even possible?" was a subject that was debated endlessly. "What about the prohibition about creating matter without expending energy?" they would demand "That's a law of physics, isn't it? Yet that's exactly what we'll be doing. The same matter will exist in two different places at the same time. It can't happen."

But there were those who argued that it could happen and that it already had happened. This argument was quite compelling and involved Ken Frazier. "He's here with us, right now, correct?" someone would ask, usually-for dramatic effect-while Ken was floating in view of the conversation or actually a part of it. It would of course be agreed that Ken Frazier was indeed there with them, right at that particular time, living and breathing and thinking. "Okay, so he's here on this ship with us, but he's also in a warehouse in Los Angeles, cryogenically frozen, at this very moment. Ken Frazier is already existing in two places at the same time, isn't he?"

There were, of course, counter-arguments to this. "Ken is not the same person who is in that warehouse, at least not on a cellular and subatomic level. He spent almost three years on Mars after being awakened. His cells have regenerated and replaced themselves. He is not made of the same matter as the Ken Frazier in the warehouse. His thoughts and memories are still stored and he is, in essence, the same person, but the matter he is composed of is different. We haven't created matter without expending energy."

Round and round these debates would go. And while the possibility or impossibility of their mission was argued, the ship kept drawing closer and closer to Earth and the potential confrontation with the WestHem team.

For the most part, the routines of the ship continued as they always had. This group of 45 people had been aboard the cramped confines of Calistoga for almost 90 days and the day-to-day activities served both to keep them busy and provide comfort in the face of the unknown. While cleaning the decks or doing the laundry or cooking meals or participating in zero-G orgies, one did not have to think too much about what was going to happen when they reached Earth, or what would happen if they failed to stop the WestHem team from changing the past and their entire existence was eliminated.

But no matter how much work needed to be done each day and no matter how many orgies and botch sessions Commander Huffy allowed, there was still a lot of idle time on a trip of such a huge distance. The training sessions went on, of course, the special forces team and the ship's crew drilling endlessly through every conceivable contingency that could possibly arise in every step of the mission, but even this still left hours to fill in each day. Ron Sampson helped fill some of this time by opening the intelligence department's spare computer terminals to the crew to probe through the signals being received from 2007 Earth. This quickly became a favorite activity.

The syndicated reruns of situation comedies and dramatic series shows proved to be most popular, not for the entertainment value, but for the sheer amusement at how unrealistically life was portrayed. They most enjoyed the ones that purported to be "family values" type shows, in which problems were encountered and neatly solved in 22 minutes. Full House reruns were a particular favorite, as were episodes of Family Ties, Little House on the Prairie, Seventh Heaven, and The Cosby Show. Following a close second for sheer hilarity were the documentary shows broadcast on the so-called science channels in between commercials for psychic networks and get rich quick schemes. And then there were the commercials themselves. The sheer volume of advertisements Earthlings of the age were forced to and willing to put up with amazed everyone except Ken. On Mars advertising did exist, and there were even commercials slipped into the beginnings and ends of broadcast entertainment, but the ratio was around 50 seconds of commercial time for every 61 minutes of programming. There was also a rigidly enforced truth in advertising law on Mars, something that was alleged to exist in the United States, but which really didn't in practice. Slurry and Rigger were particularly fascinated by the advertisements and would frequently question Ken about something they'd seen.

"So these two corporations are both selling aspirin tablets, right?" Slurry would ask.

"Right," Ken would agree.

"And they're both basically the same drug in the same dosage and the same amount, right?"

"Right."

"Yet this company is going on television and claiming that its aspirin pills are better than the other corporation's aspirin pills because they come in a gel form. They actually say the pills will work faster in this form when even I, who am not a doctor, know this cannot be true. Aspirin is aspirin. Did people actually fall for this?"

"A certain percentage of the population did," Ken told her. "These corporations spent billions on advertising and what you see here was the main way of making their product stand out from other products that were essentially exactly the same, by creative packaging and out-of-context innuendo. Notice that they don't actually say their aspirin absorbs faster than the competitors."

"They did too," Slurry protested.

"Ah, but they didn't," he countered. "They said their new gel tabs get the medicine quickly to where it is needed. And they show you the competing brand's boring-looking, outdated, white tablet. The implication that their pill absorbs faster and is more effective is there, but they didn't actually say it, did they?"

"No," she said after considering for a moment. "They didn't."

"And that's how they get around the truth in advertising rules. It's a loophole that violates the spirit of the rule but not the letter, so it's allowed. Advertisers use a thousand loopholes like that one. Smart people learned to see through them and dumb people-which, I'm sad to say, make up the majority of the populace-fell for it."

Ken found himself watching many of the shows as well, though not with the same sort of hilarity the rest of the crew enjoyed. Instead, he would view episodes of Cheers or Seinfeld or M*A*S*H with a sense of nostalgia so strong it was like a physical sensation. These were the shows he used to watch in his youth and as a young adult. These were the reruns he used to watch late at night with his wife, both of them sipping a glass of wine, laughing at the admittedly simplistic humor. Hadn't he and Annie stayed up late and watched an old rerun of Cheers the very night before he was shot? Yes, like everything else about that last day, he remembered it well.

When he wasn't viewing old reruns Ken would tune into audio-only channels-the radio stations-and listen for hours to rock and roll tunes from his past, songs by Journey, Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, songs he used to hear in his car on the way to work, that he would play on his CD player while working in the garage. He had tuned into the Earthling Internet on Mars and pulled copies of these songs from it on occasion, but such occurrences had been rare and had not carried quite the same weight then as they did now. He was actually in his own time now-hearing the songs only hours after they'd been spit out of some transmitter in Los Angeles or New York or Denver. Once he had pulled in an actual San Jose station and had listened for almost three hours, hearing advertisements for businesses he knew, hearing disc jockeys who had spun CDs in his previous life, wondering at the knowledge that Annie was in San Jose at that very moment and had maybe been listening to the very broadcast.

Annie was never far from his mind as he grew closer and closer to her, though he took great pains to hide this fact from Slurry. If they went down to the surface to take the WestHem team down he would be within sixty miles of her when they made landfall-she in San Jose, living the life of a police widow, he in San Francisco. What did she do now? How did she spend her days? Did she still miss him as much as he missed her? It was a given that her grief had faded enough for her to enter another romantic relationship. Though she was yet to meet David Brown-who would become her next husband-the encounter was not terribly far in her future. Still, she would love him enough to retain the drive to keep him alive, the drive that would eventually succeed five generations later. And what of his son? The son he had never met would be in San Jose as well-three Earth years old and probably just getting out of diapers. Did Annie tell him stories of his father yet? Was she even now planting the seed that would culminate in his resurrection 185 years from now?

At times Ken would find himself staring at the main view screen on the bridge of Calistoga, fixating on the bright blue and white blob that was Earth. He would use the zoom controls to bring the image closer, until he could make out the blurry forms of the continents covered with clouds. They were down there and he would be so close to them, yet he knew he would not be able to see them, to meet them, to even put himself in the same telephone area code with them. This was not just because Lieutenant Spankworth would forbid such a thing-though he would. It was too dangerous to the time stream, potentially more dangerous then what the WestHems were planning. If Annie saw him or heard from him, it might sway her from the path she was supposed to follow. She might not end up marrying David Brown-which would mean his son would grow up without a father figure, which might have detrimental effects on his future life. Also, if they didn't become attached to David Brown, they would not move to Corpus Christi, Texas. Perhaps this would have no effect on her future, but there was a good possibility it would. San Jose, California was a major transportation hub and a major producer of electronics. During World War III, it would be extensively bombed by Chinese planes operating out of occupied Washington and flying in low over the ocean. Tens of thousands of San Jose citizens would be killed as a result. Would Annie and Ken Jr. be among them if they stayed? It was enough of a possibility that it had to be assumed to be a fact. If the life of Annie or Ken Jr. were changed in any small way in 2007, it was possible that the means by which Ken himself would one day be awakened would change as well. So no, he could not visit Annie, could not see her, could not talk to her. As he had told Slurry, she might as well still be 30 million miles and 188 years away, just as she had been on Mars.

There was no actual night and day aboard a spacecraft, only adherence to an agreed upon reference point of timekeeping. On EastHem and WestHem vessels that reference point was Greenwich Mean Time. Aboard Martian vessels the reference point was New Pittsburgh time since the original Martian settlement served as the prime meridian on Mars. When Calistoga had been in its own time period it had adhered to NP Standard time as the time aboard the ship just like any other Martian vessel. Now that it had crossed into the past, the reference point had been changed to coordinate with the time in their target area-namely Pacific Daylight Time. This had taken a bit of an adjustment for the crew since on the day they had gone through the apparent time on the ship had shifted forward eight and a half hours, but now, as they entered the third week since emerging in the past, everyone had shaken off the jet lag and were adjusted to living on Earth time.

At 2234 hours on a Friday night, Ken, Slurry, and Commander Huffy were all in Huffy's small but comparatively luxurious cabin just aft of the bridge. The doors were shut and locked and the computer screen was on stand-by, showing a screensaver image of classic Martian naval vessels. The room was warm and steamy, the scent of lust thick in the air, as were the sounds of moaning and the purrs of pleasure. The three of them were floating about a meter over Huffy's bed, their bodies intertwined and sweaty.

Slurry was on the bottom of the pile, floating horizontally, her back to the floor, her legs spread wide. Ken was vertical, his head toward the ceiling, his feet hooked into the headboard of the bed to anchor them, his throbbing penis buried in his wife's vagina, thrusting enthusiastically in and out. Huffy was by far receiving the most sensation. She was floating horizontally like Slurry, only with her chest facing the floor. Her legs were wrapped tightly around Slurry's head, her wet pussy pressed against Slurry's sucking lips. Her own lips were down low, just above the junction where Ken and Slurry were joined together. Her long tongue was sticking out, mostly stabbing at Slurry's erect clit but occasionally licking the juices from Ken's shaft as it slid in and out.

"Laura bless the Martians," Ken grunted as he powered in and out, feeling the tightness of Slurry's body gripping him and the simultaneous touch of his commander's tongue. His left hand was holding Slurry's body against his by the thigh while his right hand caressed Huffy's breast, his fingers tweaking the nipple in a way he had come to know she liked. He could tell Slurry was fast approaching orgasm. Her pelvis was starting to gyrate in an uncontrolled manor and he could hear the muffled grunts of her moans from within Huffy's crotch. He himself was under tight control as he had already cum once earlier-that time in Huffy's sucking mouth, where she had shared the deposit with Slurry in a deep tongue kiss that had been visually erotic enough to recharge him for the mission he was participating in now.

It was just as Slurry's spasms really started to go into overdrive that they were interrupted. The emergency intercom system suddenly beeped out its shrill alarm and the voice of Darla Ogle, the navigation officer who currently had the con, spoke out: "Commander Huffy to the bridge, immediately. I repeat, Commander Huffy to the bridge, immediately."

"Noooooooo," Slurry whined. "Rape my nostrils with a pig's cock! Not now!"

Huffy raised her head without hesitation and pushed off the sweating, lusty pile, floating up into the air. She became businesslike in an instant, looking at the intercom terminal. "On the way," she said. She didn't bother getting dressed or even toweling off. She put one foot on the side of the bed and pushed toward the hatch that led to the bridge.

Seeing this, and alarmed by the tone that had been in Ogle's voice, Ken disengaged from Slurry as well, pulling his shiny, dripping cock from her body.

"Ken!" Slurry yelled. "Get that thing back inside me!"

"We'll finish up in a minute," he promised. "Let's see what's going on."

"Oh, for the love of Laura," Slurry panted, watching helplessly as Ken pushed off the bed and followed Huffy to the hatch.

The night shift bridge crew were all peering intently at their instruments as Huffy floated into the room, drops of sweat, saliva, and vaginal secretions spinning off her body. "What's going on?" she asked.

"We've just had an unexplained change in momentum and course," Ogle reported. "Velocity dropped by .034 percent, course changed by nearly a tenth of a degree to the right. Some kind of force just acted on us."

Huffy frowned as she heard this. Since they were coasting in the vacuum of space, their momentum and course should have remained fixed at what it had been when their engine burn had ceased. This was in accordance to Newton's Laws of Motion, which stated that an object in motion would remain in motion and travel in a straight line until a force acted upon it to change that. "Are we still being influenced?" she asked.

"No," Ogle replied. "The duration of the force was 31 seconds and then it cut off."

"Check all systems to see if there was any rogue maneuvering thruster activity," she ordered, pushing off the wall again and drifting over to her command chair. She set herself down in it and strapped in. Behind her, Ken, equally naked and dripping, floated into the center of the room and looked over her shoulder. Slurry, her curiosity now aroused since her sexuality was not, came floating in from the hatch to see what was going on. She, like her partners, was still dressed in her birthday suit.

Ogle spoke a few commands into the computer and the text on her screen changed momentarily. She peered at it and then shook her head. "No thruster activity has occurred since an hour before the cessation of our acceleration burn. This is confirmed through computer record and exterior sensors."

"Did we vent anything?" Huffy asked next.

"There have been no hull breach alarms," Ogle said. "I'll check the propellant and the atmospheric generators, but we've had no indications of leaks from there either. In any case, if we'd vented enough to adjust our course that radically there would be no air left for us to breathe."

"Good point," Huffy said thoughtfully, scratching at her swollen vaginal lips.

Ogle went through an abbreviated diagnostic of Calistoga's systems and confirmed that everything was working just as it should, with no detectable expellation of gas into space, certainly not enough to affect the velocity of the ship. "Nothing in the ship caused this, Huff," she said. "The force had to be external. Best guess is gravitational."

"Gravitational," Huffy said, a strange grin on her face. "And there's only one thing we know of that would cause a 31 second pull of gravity powerful enough to move us off course, isn't there?"

"A wormhole opening," Slurry said.

"Fuckin' aye," Huffy said. "I think our friends just came through." She turned to Lieutenant Mike Spammer, who was working the detection and countermeasures terminal. "Spammy, get the computer to crunch the numbers and see if we can pinpoint the location of that gravitational source. If we can find where they came through, we can project their course and narrow down the search field."

Spammer looked doubtful. "I'll see what I can do, Huff," he said. "But there are a lot of unknown factors here. If we don't know exactly how powerful the gravitational influence was and how far away it was, we're not gonna be able to pinpoint anything. We need to know at least one variable for the equation to be solved."

"Use the force of our wormhole as an approximation of theirs," she said. "It'll at least be in the erogenous zone, if not exact. That'll give us a bearing and a starting point, if nothing else."

"You got it, Huff," he said, turning to his panel.

"Once you get that figured out, concentrate the passive sensors in that section of space. I know they're too far away to detect, but at least we'll get in the habit of looking for them there."

"Right."

"Helm," she said, turning back to Ogle. "Sound the acceleration alarm and get us back on course. Do it carefully. Our ass end is probably pointing toward the WestHems. I know they're probably too far off to detect us even if we burned our engines at full throttle, but we'll take no chances. The burn will be at no more a tenth of a G."

"Fuckin' aye, Huff," Ogle responded. "Sound acceleration and begin course correction. Engines at point one-zero G."

"From this moment out," Huffy announced, "we operate under the assumption that the WestHems are out there and closing in. Stealth procedures are now in effect. Waste heat is to be accumulated in the outer hull spaces and vented in controlled bursts. I don't want that ship detecting our presence in this time, not even a hint of it. If they find out we're here before they make their move, the whole fuckin' mission is blown."

Since they did not know exactly where in space the WestHem wormhole had opened, what time it had opened, or how powerful the gravitational influence it had caused actually was, their calculations involved more guesswork than fact. Based on the manner in which this force had acted upon Calistoga, they were able to determine at least the general direction to explore. The pull of gravity had come from an arc of space some thirty degrees wide and fifty degrees from top to bottom. This was, of course, a huge area, encompassing many millions of kilometers of space, but Martians tended to be glass-half-full type of people and Huffy and her crew were grateful to have eliminated more than 70 percent of their potential search area.

As far as determining distance, travel time, and exact course, their data was based on the assumption that the WestHem wormhole had been approximately of the same force as the Martian wormhole. This narrowed their search field down even further, but the margin for error was calculated out to a depressingly large factor. Huffy and the rest of the ship's operational crew were forced to admit that the chances of actually finding the WestHem vessel before it entered orbit around Earth were rather slim. It was an assumption that turned out to be correct.

Calistoga continued on toward its target, day-by-day, night-by-night. The detection crew kept a sharp eye out for the slightest indication of heat in the designated search area, but they received no hint of any kind that there was even a ship out there. If not for the gravitational influence they'd encountered, they might have been prone to believing the WestHem wormhole had failed.

In the meantime, the ship's routines went on. Training sessions continued every day until every member of the interdiction team was familiar with every aspect of the mission and had hundreds of contingency plans ready. Meals were prepared and consumed, and the mess cleaned up. Various members of the ship's crew got together during their off-duty hours and enjoyed recreation with each other in the grandest Martian tradition. At least once a week Commander Huffy gave authorization for intoxicant use and a party in the wardroom, which always turned into a full-blown sexual orgy. Morale remained high and the crew remained focused. Ken realized about twelve days after the WestHem wormhole had opened that he had now had sex with every female member of the crew. He felt absurdly proud of himself for this accomplishment. After all, how many sailors in his day could have truthfully made such a claim?

In the meantime, he kept a vigilant watch on Planet Earth as it grew larger and larger in the view screens. His home was getting closer and, as it did so, he found himself thinking more and more of Annie and his son. They were down there, with no idea that the patriarch of their family was approaching them at more than 1600 kilometers a second.

On August 18, 2007, Calistoga used bursts of its maneuvering thrusters to turn its ass toward Earth. The fusion engines were lit at a thrust of .15G and the deceleration burn began. Over the next eight days the ship was slowed from a velocity of six million kilometers per hour to a mere 27,000 KPH, which was orbital speed for Earth. Upon reaching this magic number the burn ended and the ship continued to coast toward its objective. On September 4, Earth's gravity pulled Calistoga into a polar orbit at an altitude of 800 kilometers. They had arrived.

"Detection, how are we looking?" Huffy asked from her command chair as the first of what promised to be many orbits began.

Spacer Glory Trower was on duty at the time and her holographic display was liberally lit up with contacts and radio sources. "Still sorting through it, Huff," she replied. "A lot of these contacts are so outdated the computer is having trouble classifying them. As it stands now, I've identified the International Space Station with a space shuttle and a Soyuz capsule docked to it, 124 satellites, and more than twelve thousand pieces of space debris ranging in size from six millimeters to a meter and a half in LEO. Our orbit is not a standard altitude for the time so there is nothing in our projected path to worry about."

"Twelve thousand pieces of debris," Huffy said sadly, shaking her head. "Don't they know they're going to have to come up and clean up all of this shit eventually?" Her question was rhetorical, of course. They did not know they were going to have to perform all of that "housekeeping," at least not yet. They would learn that the hard way after several ships were lost due to collisions with this debris when the space race went into overdrive in the post World War III era.

"In addition," Trower continued, "there are 59 satellites in geosynchronous orbit-mostly communications, weather, or military birds. The coverage is such that we'll be able to tap into at least ten of them at any given point in our orbit."

"Very good," Huffy said. "And how about ESM?" she asked, referring to the detection of active sensors.

"I'm getting a shitload of search radar activity," she reported. "But all of it is ground based. Their coverage is spread throughout the globe but it's not really uniform. It overlaps in many places and there are huge gaps in it. My guess is it is not coordinated."

"It's not," Huffy said. "Every country with the capability is doing its own thing. The Americans and the Russians and the Chinese all have tracking stations in operation around the globe but refuse to cooperate with each other."

"In any case," Trower said, "there is nothing I'm picking up that is capable of detecting us up here. There is no active IR scan at all and the radar is so primitive it wouldn't get a hit off us unless we were less than twenty kilometers away. Even our advanced satellite passive infrared is incapable of detecting a stealth ship in orbit. I hardly think their system is anything to worry about, as long as we don't emit any unencrypted radio signals."

Huffy nodded and then used her intercom to contact the Intelligence Department. "How are we looking down there?" she asked Sampson.

"I've already tapped into the com-sats of all the major military powers," he reported. "Their encryption systems are a joke. I think the computer actually yawned while it broke their codes. Nothing but routine traffic going on, certainly nothing like what you'd expect if they'd just discovered a strange space ship establishing orbit around their planet. I'm confident they have no idea we're here."

"Perfect," Huffy said. She turned to the bridge crew. "Let's start getting our buoys laid, shall we?"

Over the next two hours, the amount of time it took to complete an orbit, six passive detection satellites known in naval tradition as "buoys" were launched from the top of Calistoga. Each buoy was one meter in diameter and constructed of radar-absorbent, infrared-neutral material that made it pretty much impossible to be detected even by modern sensors, let alone by primitive Earthling devices. These buoys used electric rockets to push themselves slowly upward into a high polar orbit where they would keep watch on the approaches to the planet. The hope was that they would detect the WestHem ship during its deceleration burn. The buoys also kept their electronic eyes glued to the orbital plane itself where, if they failed in the first mission, they would at least detect the separation and deceleration of a landing ship. They were spaced so their coverage was exactly uniform, covering all portions of the globe and all areas approaching it, in overlapping patterns. When the mission was complete, they would be collected before the return to modern time. If, for whatever reason, they could not be collected, their orbital speed was such that within six months they would be pulled into the atmosphere and incinerated.