MEGAN STARED UNCERTAINLY at the bright spot in the swirling shades of lilac clouds.
Captain Cody narrowed his eyes. "It's just the rising sun, Megan, come on, you're holding us up."
"Something's not right, Captain. Although the landscape looks like a New England park, only kind of rose-tinted like an old photograph, there's no sound." Her excitement at stepping on her first planet was tempered by unexpected nerves. Although she was slim and slight compared to the two powerful men in the squad, her sharp wit and tongue compensated for lack of brawn.
"Don't listen to her, Cody. Environment's checked out from orbit and down here an hour ago. Goddamn, Cody, let's go; we have people to rescue."
"He's right, Megan." Cody's deep voice calmed his crew. "The expeditionary team has been here four months. All we have to do is bring them back. No exploration, Megan, and no conquering, Travis. Move out."
Megan gingerly stepped the half-meter drop from the shuttle onto the short fern-like grass. She might have jumped it, but her pack contained most of their electronics. The men carried heavy-duty armoury and provisions. All of them warily pointed small but deadly handguns. Because all radio communication halted when the expedition landed, they backed theirs up with implants in their neck so they could communicate even if they were captured and stripped.
Megan headed for some low trees and covered the men who were activating a shuttle camouflage device. From over her right shoulder, a dark hand-sized blur flew past straight for Cody. Before she could take aim or shout an alert, it just missed him and shot off into the clouds. As the two men turned, she rushed over. "Did you see that?"
Travis waved his biggest gun in the air. "Ignore her, Cody, it must be this damn purple sky getting to her."
"Shut up, Travis. What was it, Megan?"
"I saw something going at you!”
The captain whirled around looking for threats. "What?”
"I don't know. I…"
Cody persisted: "Okay, what did it look like?"
"It went too fast. It was a blur."
"I didn't hear anything, Cody, ignore her."
"Megan," said the Captain, "let's concentrate on the mission, shall we? It is good for you to be alert. We know there are villages dotted all over the planet including one nearby."
"I was listening at the briefing, Cody, I know this village three clicks away is where the expedition was put down and that nothing's been heard from them since. But listen."
Travis unwisely chewed at a pink grass stem.” We’re wasting time, but listening.”
"No, really listen," Megan said.
They did. Crouched low, turning their heads this way and that. The tree branches blew around with the wind, but they heard no sound except their own voices enhanced by their implant com systems.
"Just wait until we get to a town," Travis said. "I've often experienced silence in the country."
Megan sniffed at a blue windswept honeysuckle-like seed as if to add an unusual odour to her argument. "It’s not just that. The leaves jerk funnily and..." She batted away something–or nothing. She lowered her visor.
The captain stood. "Can we get on with this rescue?" He led the pair towards a tidy path near the outskirts of a village. A few spindly trees and a couple of towers lifted themselves above single floor ochre buildings.
The three would-be rescuers lay in the weird grass beneath an overhanging branch to look for any activity.
"There," whispered Travis, but then: "Sorry, I thought I saw someone come out of that domed house but as soon as I saw him... he disappeared in a puff of smoke."
"Let's keep calm," Cody said. "Megan, set the cam to record five minutes."
As he shifted his position to get another viewpoint, a puff of air forced them all to look towards the path to their left. Too late, the native had come up behind them, passed them, and disappeared into the village.
Cody spoke first. "Did I nearly see what I thought I saw?"
Megan muttered to herself. "Pity I hadn't quite set up the camera."
Travis sniffed the air. "Do you think the atmosphere might have a hallucinogen we haven't tested for?"
Megan viewed the village through the zoom lens. "There's a native sitting at a table outside a house. Extreme left, guys. The wall with a poster. I've just zoomed on it to give the translator some text to start working on."
"Excellent. Megan you stay here and record everything; weapons ready."
She thought she'd be better at communicating with the natives, but then maybe Cody didn't want trigger-happy Travis out of his control. She had telescopic vision via the camera and ears via the new coms implant and settled down again to observe. A vibration along the ground scared her and she leapt up. She touched the ground with her fingertips. Nothing there but a memory, as if a snake had been there when she laid down and slithered rapidly out of the way. She wondered if Travis had tapped into a working brain cell when he suggested hallucinogens in the air.
Feeling the ground with the flat of her hand, Megan prepared again. She made a tripod with her elbows and looked through the lens. Immediately she tut-tutted: Travis walked as the aggressive soldier, pointing his powerful field weapon here and there, while Cody walked steadily up to the sitting local.
"Stop tutting me and record that the enemy is probably levelling a weapon at Cody from under the table," Travis said.
"Don't be an arsehole. And don't call the locals enemies until one of them shoots you." Megan hated Travis.
Cody slowly walked up to the seated native, who didn't appear to be taking any notice of the intruders. His skin was a translucent pink and hairless making Megan chuckle as a similar image of her little plump granddad on a veranda wicker-chair came to mind. The native showed more interest in the cup he cradled on the wooden table than in his visitors.
With his hands held open, Cody spoke: "Excuse me, sir. I know you do not understand me but have you seen my friends?" To accompany his speech, Cody did a splendid sign-language job. The native just fidgeted. Cody repeated his performance, while Travis let off a few rounds into the air. Cody, his expression touching on exasperation, turned on Travis, who shrugged his shoulders then stood open-mouthed. Cody spun back round to find the native gone.
"Where did he go, Travis?"
"Dunno. Maybe he went back into his house. What's he left behind?"
Cody picked up what looked like a newspaper; at least the squiggles and dots didn't fall off the parchment-like sheet. The men walked back to Megan so she could scan the document to the translator program. Megan watched them head back into the village wishing she could front line. A green light told her the translator managed to make some sense of the input.
"Megan, come round behind the house we've just been to."
Delighted that Cody must think it was safe and excited that it was her turn to explore, Megan ran round to find them standing in front of what looked ominously like five human burial mounds.
Travis growled, "They've been murdered."
"We don't know that," Cody said. "But it looks as if five of the seven are buried here. Look, Megan." He showed her a damaged helmet that had lain on the nearest mound. Though worn and faded, the word "Marlowe" was discernible above the cracked visor.
"Brett Marlowe was the expedition leader," she said.
Travis levelled his weapon looking for someone to kill. “The bastards.”
"Hold your fire," Cody said. Megan marvelled at his patience. He turned the helmet over, studying it carefully. "What do you see, Megan?"
"I know, it looks very worn for a new helmet only four months out of its box. Maybe he'd been in a battle. Are there any other bits of equipment on these graves?"
They looked at the mulberry-coloured soil heaps. Suddenly, a lilac bird appeared on the mound nearest Megan. No bigger than and as sleek as a hummingbird it looked straight at her for a couple of seconds before it vanished. Megan picked up a rose-coloured feather and said: "One of two things are happening here, guys."
"They kill people from Earth," said one-track Travis.
Cody craned his neck upwards. "Either we're in one of those ancient Star Trek TV shows."
"Or time really is much faster here, except for us," Megan said.
"Or we've slowed down compared to the planet. Come on, you two, get real." Travis laughed.
"How long do you think it's been since we landed?" Cody asked.
Travis said: "About three hours?"
"Look at your watch, Travis."
"That can't be right: only twenty-five minutes."
"Try thirty-two days and twenty-five minutes," Megan said. "I've used the camera data and the computer. Time here is two-hundred and fifty-six times faster than on Earth."
"Yeah right," sneered Travis. "If this planet is in some temporal shift why aren't we whizzing about at the same speed as the locals?"
Megan shook her head. "I'm just telling you what is happening, not why. Maybe our bodies, coming from another time frame, have some resistance. You realise now, Travis, what probably killed the expedition team?"
"They weren't murdered then? Hey, if a bird at home flies at thirty miles an hour, that's over 7,600 miles an hour here! Perhaps one of our team got in the way of a fly."
"Unlikely. We would seem like slow moving statues to them. No problem flying around us at all," Megan said. "No, the expedition team landed here four months ago. That's eighty-five years in this time. They died of old age."
"Could be why they couldn't call down their orbiting shuttle–the radio signal probably distorted. At least we can take off when we want–whoa, what was that?" Cody staggered back when an automobile-sized tram-like vehicle appeared and stopped near him. Two locals disembarked, looked at them for a second and blurred away. Seconds later the tram also vanished.
Travis stared in its direction. "So much for their simple lifestyle. They probably have weapons too."
Megan knelt on the ground placing a hand flat. "I noticed street lights embedded in the walls, so I guess they'd have electricity. I wonder if the tram is powered by an underground field along the green path it arrived and left on? I really love this kind of puzzle."
"Let's concentrate on the mission. If the five mounds are for five people, there might be two survivors."
"Captain," Travis said, "they'd be eighty-five plus the age they arrived at. We might as well go home before we also die of old age."
"You feeling rheumatism, Travis?" Megan said, who'd been examining her translator readouts. "There are warnings in that newspaper you found. Apparently, there is a time dilation with altitude."
Cody jumped at the news. "So the locals are being told to keep away from mountains because time is too slow for them?"
"Or too fast, even for them," she said, frowning at the still incomplete translation. "There's a picture of what looks like a Tibetan temple perched on a mountain. Looks old so it could be abandoned. I wonder if there are varying temporal shifts on this planet. Freaky time dilation can occur with proximity of black holes and strings. But I don't know if we'd age faster up a mountain or slower. Give me time and I'll work it out."
"Oh funny," Travis said.
"Team, we are on a mission..."
"Oh, cut out the loyalty crap, Cody. Let's just find them. Back to the shuttle," Travis said.
Megan put a hand on Cody's arm. "You know, the tram seems to go to the mountain in the picture. The temple?"
"Hey, I'm not going in any alien bus!" shouted Travis.
Cody looked at Megan and smiled: "There seems a good possibility that that is where they went. We could search for too long looking at all the mountains in the shuttle. Travis, okay, you go back to our shuttle and stand by for us to call you. We'll take our chances in local public transport."
"The speed will kill you."
"Travis, we are trained to take G forces. Go ready the shuttle and keep instruments on us as well as the communicator. Listen, Travis, suppose none of us return, what would happen in, say, another three hours our time."
"Let's see, that'd be thirty-two days again for here so Mission Control might send another rescue mission. No, hang on, this is a trick question, isn't it?"
Cody and Megan nodded in unison. Then Megan said: "However, if for some ghastly reason we can't return, it would be a brilliant idea for them to know about the time anomaly here. Send off all the data so far even if we're not sure they'd get it without distortion."
"Also, Travis, make a copy with a message and leave it near our landing spot such that another mission would find it easily. Hopefully, locals will leave it alone."
As Travis left, Megan realized that the speed at which the odours dissipate before their noses grab them explained the lack of scents and even of the noxious emissions from Travis.
She smiled just as the vehicle appeared. A quick check and they leapt in and dived for the nearest empty seats. Already accelerating, they had a struggle to stay seated. Three other passengers glanced at them and away. One of them smudged away at a jerked stop.
"Hey, Megan, suppose a conductor comes on for the fare?"
"Don't worry, we'll be there in seconds. If they try and throw us off, we're bigger than they are; link arms to make handling us more difficult. Hey, look there's the mountain with the temple on the horizon–er, about five seconds away. Hey, how do we tell this bullet to stop?"
"Hopefully it will stop at the mountain," Cody said.
"Great, so we'll have a fraction of a second to leap free or be amputated."
"Hey, you sound like Travis. Anyway, no time to argue–here we are and it's stopping!"
Fighting the abrupt deceleration, they fell out, tumbling onto rough ground.
Megan sat up rubbing her bloodied left elbow showing through a jagged hole in her uniform. Cody stayed down. She staggered over to him, convinced he couldn't be dead or he would be a mound by now with a helmet on the top. He stirred and checking her watch; realised they'd lain there for a week local time. How weird must that be for the natives to encounter? She hoped it was still only twenty minutes for Travis. There'd be no end to his ragging them if he could argue it would have been quicker using the shuttle after all.
"You okay, Cody?"
"A bit groggy, must have hit my head on this harder bit of planet. How about you?"
"I cut my elbow but look at it." A new pink scar showed, with patches of dried blackened blood. "Another thing, we've been doing it without noticing but we've drunk nearly all our water and gone through a hell of a lot of chewable rations."
"Whatever it takes, as long as we are both relatively fit. What do you think about taking some boosters to get us up this hill before we become pensioners?"
"Okay. I'll get some pro-Benzedrine out of my kit. Are you getting any of this, Travis? Maybe he's out of range," Megan said. "We travelled in the vehicle for about thirty seconds our time, which equates to two hours their time. It's not possible to know how fast we went–sorry, out of breath, no, we mustn't slow down–but suppose it averaged sixty miles per hour then Travis is a hundred and twenty miles away."
"Catch up on your breathing," Cody said, as they made good progress up the twisted, overgrown mountain track. All three had had to be superfit to qualify for rescue allocation, but the hike tested their stamina.
They stopped talking for the next couple of hours, stopping only to deplete their water supply and rations. Plagued with false hope, they aimed for summit after summit, each one leading to a higher peak. At the penultimate peak they rested in an abandoned gatehouse.
Cody recovered first. "What do you notice, Megan?"
"I hate questions like that, Captain. I had an aunt that would always say: 'What d'you know?' Even if I told her I knew more than her and she knew more than me, she'd come out with it again next time."
"Okay, at the risk of sounding like your aunt, what do you notice? I've lost the power of long speech." He gasped, his lungs still heaving.
"There's a subtle change in the sky colour from lilac to pink and, hey, I can smell these maroon tiny flowering plants. Umm a cross between lavender and jasmine. Heavenly.”
“Appropriate for a temple area, Megan, but does that mean…”
“Time has slowed up here? Besides aromas having time to reach our noses how else can we tell? There’s no wind to rustle the trees. Are we too high up to see birds and insects?” She knelt on the wooden floor at the portal of the gazebo-like gatehouse to examine the rough grass. A pink grasshopper looked back, then hopped away, but not so fast she couldn’t follow it.
“Yes.” She turned to look at Cody, grinning and tapping at his watch.
“Hey, we should get Travis up here,” she said. “The longer he stays down in fast time, the less likely he’ll find us in time. He’s probably hours ahead of us already. Damn, why didn’t I think of that earlier?”
“Megan…”
“No, sir, it’s serious. If he is hours ahead of us now, he can’t receive a signal from us. Even if we go back down we’d probably find he’s gone or see an earlier version of him. Oh, shit, we’re going to have temporal paradox problems and it's all my fault.” Her eyes filled with the emotion of her error.
“While you were busy throwing stones in a pond and timing ripples, I told him to take off and land on any high mountain before we ran out of radio contact. Still can’t raise him yet, though.”
They hugged.
"On the way up," Megan said, "I dwelt a little on the temporal shifts affecting this planet. Although the nearby presence of a double black-hole was suspected, Earth, being so keen to find a habitable planet, brushed aside speculation on their possible effects. Of course we are far from an event-horizon that could be dangerous but maybe the twin black holes are close enough to create shifts in time, variable with altitude here and maybe with latitude too."
"You might be right, but let's see if our climb will be rewarded."
A rickety footbridge spanned a chasm separating them from the final pinnacle housing the temple. With painful lungs and legs, but not wanting to delay any further, they crossed one at a time.
Together they entered the derelict temple. Shafts of pink sunlight diagonally spotlighted cobwebbed statues and sparse furniture. With unnecessarily reverent silence Megan nudged Cody to look at dancing motes picked out in the light above their head.
“What kept you?”
The creaky old voice startled them. In a dark corner on a wicker bed lay an ancient woman.
Megan recovered first. “Are we glad to see you.”
“Not as glad as I am, my dear.”
Cody asked, “Are you Doctor Tanya Semper?”
“Give the man a medal,” she said. “Are you getting me out of here before I’m too old to fool around with my husband back home?”
“Er, yes, is there anyone else up here?” Cody said, taken aback at the thought of geriatric amour.
“Only Boyd, he’s out back picking some banana-type food. Yuck, but it’s kept us going. Leave him, he’s a cantankerous old fool.”
“I’ll be glad to be rid of that old witch,” said the oldest man Megan had ever seen as he shuffled in a rear door carrying a basket and gourd.
“Boyd Tinker, I am so pleased to see you, um, again,” Cody said, helping him with the food and water.
“Never mind all that,” croaked Boyd. “How are you going to signal your ship?”
“Don’t worry,” said a worried Cody.
Cody took Megan outside. “He has a point. Travis still hasn’t responded to me. Has he said anything to you?”
“No, shall we signal him the old-fashioned way? He might see it if he’s looking out on one of these mountains?”
“Good idea, I’ll gather some firewood, get some green, or pink plants to generate smoke.”
“We’ve got flares,” Boyd said, who’d followed them outside. “Homemade but they work. You don’t think I’ve waited years just so I could listen to that old bag moaning on, do you?”
“I told you how to make them,” Tanya said. “And who looked after you when you kept getting sick on your stupid homebrew…”
A few minutes later a green smoke trail curved through the sky.
“I see you. At least I assume it’s you guys,” Travis said, flying in from behind a nearby peak.
Megan laughed. “I never thought I’d be so glad to hear your voice.”
“Come in and land on level ground to the south of the temple,” Cody said. “And we have two passengers to bring home.”
“Hey, that’s great. I bet they’re looking forward to having some real grub at last.”
“Umph,” Boyd said, “not as much as seeing the faces of our paymasters as they try to work out our overtime pay!”