COMPENDIUM 2020 – STORY 21: AEONA – THE CHASM OF TIME
Kerris screamed over the comm. The ship was still in range.
Surely they can hear me? Surely they -
Kerris' heart thumped in his chest as the ship, the entire Kreel Sabre, vanished as though space had folded around it. He reached out towards nothing, his instincts desperate to pull the ship back into being. He reached to darkness. However, the space behind him was anything but dark, and glowing pink light curled around his limbs, pulling him closer to its impossible centre.
His scout craft was gone, too. He was alone in the void trying to fight off the incredible force of the anomaly beneath him.
The chasm yanked him into its gaping, fluorescent maw. Kerris could only gasp as he felt time fracture around him, shards of it reforming around him and shattering again. As he was pulled further through the vortex at the heart of the anomaly, he thumbed the relay to his craft's emergency beacon. If it was in range, someone would hear it.
He tumbled into the swimming cosmic storms, his body flung in every direction as differing orbs and tendrils of raw time reached for him, eager to consume his life energy.
Then he lay still on a cold iron floor. His mind raced. He was hyperventilating. It felt like his heart was about to explode. His vision swam.
“Drink this,” said a clear, ringing voice. Kerris forced his vision to focus, and was greeted by the impossible sight of a red-headed girl in a top hat with a laser burn hole in it. In one hand was outstretched a frothing bottle. In the other was a wrench, covered in the same grease as that smeared on her brown skirt, leather boots and grey shirt beneath the brown leather jacket. A cog was attached to it like a flower in a lapel. Around the middle of her top hat was a pair of brass-rimmed goggles.
“Wh – what?”
“You're Kerris Be'ali, a Kreel officer and a fine chef if the history feeds are correct. You've been thrown out of your ship, the Kreel Sabre, has been eaten by the chasm you were being sucked into. I arrived at this point in time first through. Hi. I'm Aeona. I'm a time-travelling type person and you're in my multidimensional DIY train ship called Winnifred, which I visited you in to stop you being stolen by insane bits of loose time. Hello. This is a beer.”
Kerris pulled himself into a sitting position and disengaged his helmet once its internal display told him the air was safe. Aeona raised an eyebrow, clearly having noticed his chiselled features and rich dark complexion. Kerris eyed the beer.
“Take it, mate,” Aeona said. “You're gonna need it. This isn't the first time you've fallen into the chasm.”
Kerris took the beer and swigged heavily, hoping it would calm his nerves. “What?”
Aeona sighed, her expression sincere. “My friend, you've been trapped in this moment for three centuries.”
*
The ornate golden picture frame was secured in place by chains and bits of old engines. It was empty of art, but tiny holoprojectors in the edges of the frame transformed it into a very serviceable viewscreen. Kerris couldn't take his eyes off it, even when Aeona brought him a third tray of food and ale.
“You holding up ok, Kerris?”
In the lines of floating 3D light, he watched his ship disappear and his body thrown aside into the chasm, over and over again. There were occasional variations in his position or the strange way the Sabre folded away in space, but beyond that, it felt largely like the endless loop that it was.
“Nobody should see themselves die, let alone see it over and over again. I understand now. Could you please stop this?”
Aeona swiped at controls on the gauntlet wrapped around her left arm, and the footage winked out.
Kerris took a pie from the tray and bit into it, filling the strange mismatched bridge area of the ship with the scent of meat, gravy and hot pastry. He stared at the pie, then took a swig of cold ale and looked to Aeona.
“Why are you helping me? I'm nobody special. And how is it possible for your ship to resist being destroyed?”
Aeona stole a sausage roll from the tray and gnawed at it before waving it at Kerris like a teacher with a pointer. “I have an understanding with time. I'm partially made of it, you see. This is a good roll. Made these myself, you know. Anyway, where was I? Time. Yes. The hole in space, that chasm yawning open and eating you and your ship over and over, it should have just been a little blip. Like a little flash of lightning. But it got caught on something in this dimension. I think it got caught on your ship. The Kreel Sabre. Something in that ship caused the anomaly to rip open, and the universe is trying to heal itself. The thing is, on the other side of that hole is the Chronodream.”
Kerris shook his head. Listening to Aeona was like being shouted at by random pages of different books. “And that is?”
“Big load of mad time stuff between universes, Like temporal loft insulation without the itching.”
“And your part in all this? I'm lost as to why you came here.”
“Listen, fella. I made a mess of things with my own people because I go darting around time getting up to mischief and sorting awful situations out. This seems to fit my job description. Plus...”
Kerris laid the tray at his feet and grasped the armrests of the chair that faced the picture frame screen. “There's a catch here, isn't there?”
Aeona reactivated the viewscreen and switched its view to a rendering of the chasm. “Look. This thing is getting bigger. Every time the loop is completed, it weakens the space around it, meaning that eventually, if left long enough, this chasm of time could eat an entire quadrant. It could damage the universe so much that time goes insane and rearranges all of creation. Now, why was your ship there in the first place?”
Kerris stared at the screen for a moment, then stood and paced around Aeona's mismatched jumble of hull panels, odd gadgets and cobbled-together control stations. The ship was as odd as her.
“We had come to this region of space in order to test engines my superiors had stolen from an enemy. We thought they were a secret triumph, yet we found out they were kept secret because they were dangerous.”
“How can your engines be dangerous on this scale?”
“They warped localised time, with the idea that greater speeds could be achieved by essentially projecting the craft, in the form of a temporal disruption, to a destination before it arrives physically. The effect is that the real ship is pulled through time as well as space and thus arrives within a tenth of a second.”
Kerris' face fell, and for a minute or so the only sound was that of Winnifred's engines.
“I'm going to have to die, aren't I?” Kerris looked to Aeona with sunken eyes filled with tears. “I did the temporal training. I understand that paradoxes like this must be broken somehow. If I die, then the cycle is broken and the breach might close.”
“Might,” Aeona chimed in brightly. “Alternatively you could wake u at the start of the cycle again and it just carries on forever. Or you could destabilise the entire universe and destroy everything that ever existed. Swings and roundabouts, really.”
“My god...” Kerris wept into his hands.
Aeona sighed and made a mental note to study emotions a bit more. She was always putting her stompy boot in it during tense situations. She placed a hand on his trembling shoulder.
“There's another way, you know. Bit more dangerous than suicide, but that's the fun of time travel.”
“What do you mean?”
She flicked up another image. The Kreel Sabre itself. “Your ship caused this, so why don't we sabotage it before the whole thing begins? That way this never happens, we all go home for cake and live imperfectly ever after.”
Kerris went to the viewscreen, examined his lost ship's holographic image, then turned to the short redhead with the ridiculous hat. “Do I have a choice?”
Aeona grinned like a child with a new toy. “Probably not.”
*
Kerris watched as Aeona deftly worked the strange mashup of controls she had gathered for her time ship. The engines hummed in strange arpeggios as they moved through the Chronodream to the right moment in history, coming to a stop at a moment Kerris knew only too well. He stared in wonder at the image on the viewscreen of himself outside, sealed in his suit and helmet, tethered to his scout ship as he worked to repair a thruster that had been damaged by passing debris.
He remembered every movement as though he had lived the moment thousands of times. Technically he had, but his body wouldn't agree with his mind. To him, this had only happened a few hours ago before Aeona found him, but to the universe, it could have happened generations ago.
“You ok, mate?” Aeona asked quietly, walking over and swiping at controls on her wrist. “Time travel can mess with the mind a bit. I mean, look at me.”
“This is what has to be done,” Kerris answered just as quietly, audible over his helmet's speaker. “How do we get to the ship?”
“We walk,” Aeona said, and with a flourish of hands she cast a cog-shaped portal before them, its edges crackling with turquoise light. The smell of ozone filled the bridge.
“There's so much we don't understand, even with all of the science at our disposal,” Kerris said, marvelling at the portal.
Aeona stepped to the portal. “That's how science works, man. Trial and error. You get stuff wrong until you stop getting it wrong, and suddenly you've moved things forward.”
“Are we changing history by doing this?”
“Nah, just putting it back on track.”
They stepped through, and the portal closed behind them.
*
The chasm was beginning to break open, its young form visible in space as a glowing tear in the darkness. Kerris saw it the moment the two of them stepped onto the deck of the Kreel Sabre.
Aeona checked her gauntlet. “We've got twenty minutes before the chasm opens up far enough to fold this ship into another universe. Where do we go?”
Kerris nodded towards one end of the corridor and walked at pace. Aeona followed, fiddling with the controls on her gauntlet.
“This is so strange,” Kerris said, barely more than a whisper. “I'm outside the ship right now, trying to fix my scout ship, and I'm also here with you, heading towards the engine room to mess things up so that I don't get caught in a time loop. What happens when I do it? Does one of us vanish out of existence?”
“Not really,” Aeona answered. “It's more like both of you become the same thing. You're both you, and things should snap back into place.”
“Will I remember this? Meeting you, doing this?”
Aeona looked to him instead of her gauntlet. “I don't know, mate. All we're doing is putting things how they were. Back on track, yeah?”
She held his gaze a little too long, and both of them knew that the other wanted to say more. Kerris understood. This wouldn't be a part of him. Past self and future self would never know what present self had done here, out in the depths of space.
“I'm giving you another chance,” Aeona said at last. “That's all.”
“Another chance to do what?”
“To see what comes next. Come on, Kerris. Let's get to those engines. I have a plan.”
*
Engineers didn't pay Kerris any heed. They were used to seeing him around the ship and weren't aware he was also currently outside, about to be consumed by a hole in time. He gestured for Aeona to follow whenever it was clear to do so.
“Here,” he said as they arrived at the two conical engine cores, encased in strange metals that would conduct the flow of time around them. He set to work on them via access terminals beside them.
“Cracking bit of engineering, that,” Aeona said with honest admiration as she examined the cores. “But flawed, as all the best things usually are when they start out.”
She realised the sounds of Kerris working had come to a stop. She glanced at him and sighed.
He was shaking. A blaster in his fist was pointed right at Aeona's head. Of course. He knew the ship well, so he also knew where things were stashed.
“Kerris-” she began to say.
“No,” he said, trembling. “You're doing this for a reason. I want to know what it is. What do I do in the future that made you want to help me? Do I discover something? Do I get rich? What is it? What's the reason for all of this?”
“It's not always the person involved in a time-related mishap that does the thing. Sometimes it's their kids or grandkids. Even a spouse. I don't have any insider knowledge of your future, man. It's just that somewhere along the way, something wonderful happens in a bloodline. And anyway, the reason I wanted to save you? I did it because you deserved it, and now you have a chance to make sure the cycle never begins.”
Kerris held her gaze, his hands shaking, the weapon shaking along with them.
“Aeona,” he said through anxious tears. “Thank you for my second chance.”
He moved the weapon towards the core nearest to him and fired into it. Again. Again. As he emptied the weapon's power cell into the other core, guards and a crowd of other officers rushed towards him, screaming as the cores smoked and crackled. Alarms flashed red, and the ship lurched violently. Energy arced between the two cores and then they shorted out, control arrays all around exploding in showers of sparks as the entire propulsion system failed.
The guards pinned him down. All eyes were on Kerris. Nobody saw Aeona cast a glowing cog portal and step backwards through it, back onto the bridge of her strange ship.
She set the portal to close, and as she did, she heard Kerris cry out in the middle of the chaos he had caused.
“Thank you, Aeona! Thank-”
The portal closed. Aeona breathed for a moment and then moved to the picture frame viewer. With a swipe at her gauntlet she brought up a new image and watched from the safety of Winnifred's interior as the chasm of time flashed and writhed in space. She watched the ship move slowly away. She heard the roar of time itself as the chasm folded in on itself and ultimately vanished, rippling the void of space like water until finally falling calm again.
Whatever journey Kerris would take, at least now he could take it.
Aeona sat on the floor, cross-legged. Thinking. It had been good to have someone to get up to mischief with. After a couple of quiet minutes, she tapped orders into her gauntlet. Winnifred's on temporal engines rumbled into life, following the random coordinates their master had set.
The junk ship hurtled through time and space, taking Aeona to her next destination. Wherever that may be.
On its bridge, she smiled.
Aeona loved surprises.
===
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming. Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex and Turn One Shock as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
Find Andrew on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
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