[LEGACY VERSION] The Emperor of Time (Book 1 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 15 - Barenin

Alexi moved from station to station around the engine room, the roar of machinery and calls of crewers ballast for the hurricane in his mind. The jump into translight had strained the engine interface--on a healthy ship, a ship built for translight engines, the exchange of power would be nearly silent. But this ship was ancient. Alexi had gutted the systems and rebuilt with spare parts. The old Kaireyeh engines were disabled and two upper decks cut away to accommodate the towering orium tanks. The whole effect was noisy and ugly and offended every one of his senses, but it was better than flying the ship with Kaireyeh. If they were travelling in Kaireyeh right now, the Kaireyeh around the ship would push him to face his fears.

He had enough to do. This was the ship's first flight in translight while running for their lives. But then, you couldn't rebuild a ship in secret and expect to have months to test it.

A thought broke through his mental caterwauling and the holopad in his hand shook. There was no logic in destroying a world. The Aezthena at Hale--whoever they were, and he was not yet willing to assign the blame to Sela--should not have been there. What happened at Hale should not have happened--not in any timeline, ever. He knew that in his bones.

So what was he going to do about it? Play engineer while the universe rewrote itself? By the math, it should be impossible to change a paradox, but it was happening. It had been happening for nineteen years since he'd first arrived in this time.

The Miravec had banned Kaireyeh travel because of its unreliability--a ship in Kaireyeh might go where you thought you wanted to go, or it might go where you actually, subconsciously wanted to go. Sometimes it would rewrite the passengers to who they didn't know they wanted to be. There was no hiding from the sentient math of the universe.

Kaireyeh had sent him back farther than he'd thought he'd wanted to go. Was Kaireyeh rewriting his history, trying to heal the wounds he'd left? But if so, it had made everything worse. Whatever he'd changed this time had ended in the destruction of his world.

He became aware of his crew giving him odd looks as they passed. He'd been standing still near the tank monitoring station for some time. He looked at himself through their eyes--he was too pale, edging Aezthena again. His eyes were glinting gold, which was nothing the crew hadn't seen before, but unsettling to them nonetheless.

Alexi moved to another station and checked the readouts. He didn't like the numbers. The power yield of the reaction in the orium tanks was too low--he adjusted some parameters. He forced himself to go through the calculations manually in his mind, spelling everything out. No automatic logic cycles--just human thoughts. He began to breathe again.

He felt the crew's tension ease. The humans of this time had no concrete concept of what he was, but they could feel it in their guts. They'd absorbed it in their legends, their holo-dramas. They knew pale skin and golden eyes meant monsters.

And what if he told them their monsters were real? Would they believe him? Four hundred years ago, humans had created what they thought was a next evolution of the human race. They melded human biology with synthetics and bound it all together with Kaireyeh; the result was a new race that could think with the processing power of the universe, and could understand and manipulate space and time itself. But those humans who'd created the first Aezthena hadn't understood Kaireyeh, not even a little. They'd never understood that Kaireyeh was alive, and that the twisting of it to create the Aezthena abominations would drive those abominations mad. It was astounding how quickly a human forgot empathy, once turned Aezthena. The Aezthena were super-intelligent, super-powerful sociopaths, and it didn't take long for them to decide they didn't need the humans. It didn't take the humans long to decide they needed to destroy the Aezthena at all costs.