Her companion, Honey, lay on the floor facing up, beneath Zalara, just out of her reach. He saw Anne Wallace in a far corner reading something on a data pad with one ear or eye assumedly on the girls. Giggles bubbled and filled the otherwise empty room.“Hello, Captain,” Honey called to him. Zalara flipped her head, tumbled off the bar into a heap, clamored to her feet and flew to Tom. He squatted down to catch her but she leapt on him, grabbing him around the neck, knocking them off balance and Tom to the floor with Zalara on top of him.
“Papa! I missed you!” He tried to sit up but surrendered and lay on his back while the warm and snuggling child covered him without mercy. It was completely undignified but he could do whatever the hell he wanted on his own ship.
“I missed you too, Pet.” He hugged her close until he could pry her loose and get back on his feet. “Are you having fun?”
“Mama is sick and they won’ let me stay with her.”
“I’m back now, and Mama is better,” he told her.
“Can we go home?”
“I have a couple things to do. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll go see Mama.”
“They won’t let me,” she pouted, her sweet smile turned upside down and her petite brows shoved together, a look Tom recognized from the mirror when he himself was denied something he felt he should have.
“I give the orders on our ship and I say it’s okay.” She raised her arms, Tom’s que to pick her up, which he did, and held her close chest to chest. He didn’t want to put her down. Her generous touch was a tonic on his battered soul. She melted on him; Tom couldn’t have distinguished where she stopped and he started. He nodded at Anne and Honey, turned, and remembered two Pegasi in his brig and their shuttle docked with the Maria Mitchell.
He mused that if she’d been able to she would have crawled inside him and eaten him for dinner. He changed his mind about their sick bay and headed for the bridge with his twenty-kilo starfish of pink bubblegum attached.
“Captain on the bridge,” Chen Lee announced when Jackson appeared in the elevator doorway.
“At ease. Where’s the Pegasi shuttle?”
“Sir, it’s still docked,” Catherine York, sitting at the com station told him.
“I want that thing disengaged. I don’t care how you do it, but we have to get it off the Maria Mitchell. York, you’re the armory officer.”
“You want me to blast it off, sir?”
“I don’t care what you do to it, just don’t damage Maria Mitchell in the process. I’ll never hear the end of it from Admiral Wallace. Let me know as soon as it’s gone. I’ll be in sick bay. Let’s go see Mama first, then we’ll pick out a movie.” During the moments he waited for the elevator, he glanced at York and Lee. Their smiles swapped for bridge decorum and their eyes returned to the function displays.
“Jack, you look a hundred percent better,” Adams said. Tom shifted to dislodge Zalara from his body to the floor and she ran to Rianya’s room.
“Thanks, Doc. Sorry about earlier.” The man blinked slowly and shrugged his shoulders. “Any change?”
“She was lapsing back and forth without much cognition so I put her on audio theta waves; allows her body focus on healing her immune system.” Tom caught Adams’ gaze and held it a moment. “Go on in,” the doctor said.
Tom followed Zalara into Rianya’s room. She appeared more peaceful, at a deeper rest, the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes had softened in the last hour. He’d ached for days to touch her, and reached to caress the shallow crescent pinna behind her aural canal. Adams had placed small audio wave generators in her ears and brushed her mane behind her head.
“Not much change since you were last here,” Adams said from the doorway. Zalara did her best to climb on the bed.
“No, Pet, you can’t get up there. Sit here,” Tom said, and the girl complied. “I’m waiting to hear from the bridge, Doc, if they call. I’ll stay here with her.”
“You don’t need to, Jack. I’m here, Mills, Henderson, even Ferris comes in and out.”
“She’s my wife. I’m the one who should be here.”
“Okay.” They stood quietly for a moment. “Let’s talk about the mummy then.”
“Now? Really, Doc?”
“Sure. Rianya won’t care. Might be a little technical,” the doctor said, nodding at Zalara. Tom smiled shaking his head, and shrugged. The girl wasn’t going to leave. Adams stepped to a monitor on the wall and called up the data modules he’d seen earlier. “Where do you want me to start? There’s a lot of data in these logs.”
“Logs?”
“That’s right, you don’t know. The space capsule belonged to the mummy.”
“Space capsule? What space capsule? There’s a space capsule? Where?” Jackson said.
“The Kiians were holding out on us! When I got back from Cinco, Quixote told me all about it. The engineers have been on it in the cargo bay, extracting data, and they can link the space ship with the body.”
“I’m a little overwhelmed at the moment, Doc. Maybe you could give me the abbreviated version without too many details?”
“I’ll try.” Adams leaned against the wall next to the monitor. He tapped a small box in his hand and images appeared on the screen.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
“In here, Jane,” the doctor called.
“Captain, it’s good to see you. Have you talked to her yet?” Tom shook his head.
“We’re about to discuss Vaughn,” Adams said. She nodded and wrinkled her lower lip against her top one.
“Vaughn?”
“That’s the name of our time traveling mummy man.” Adams started the recording.
“Travel Log, Commander Vaughn James Wiseman,” said the young man in the recording.
“That’s him?” Tom asked both doctors who nodded.
“Fifteen March, twenty-three seventy-six.”
“Stop.” Tom said. He closed his eyes hoping the darkness might help his brain think clearly. Adams paused the recording. “Twenty-three seventy-six? He’s actually traveled back here from two hundred and some years from now?”
“Not exactly,” Jane said. “Well, yes, but not to here from the future. It’s hard to explain, Captain.”
“He’s really a time traveler? Is this the first real evidence of human time travel?”
“He’s not entirely human, Jack,” Adams reminded him. His last fully human ancestor was about two generations ago. Actually, about twenty-two sixty to eighty, a hundred years from now, I would calculate.”
“He looks about thirty, kind of young,” Tom said absently. “Wow. We have evidence of time travel sitting in our cargo bay?” he mused. “That’s going to take some time to sink in. So, continue.”
“I had Jane put together a chain of events to sort out what happened, more or less, from the records we have and what we got from the several sources around here.” The doctor changed the image.
· 2340 Commander Vaughn J. Wiseman birth year according to ship data records, on Pegasus Colony
· 2375 Wiseman and Mann travel to past on Earth with cure for Plague (the plague of 2375, not 1350)
· 1350 Wiseman and Mann are unsuccessful (obviously)
· 1750 Wiseman and Mann fall out of their temporal stream at the halfway time index (500/500 years)
· 1750 Cuatro (19 Y) is also half way point between Earth and Pegasus 85 (40 LY).
· 1750 A few days or weeks after they crash on Cuatro, Mann dies.
· 1750 Wiseman infects mammalian population on Cuatro and dies.
· 1845 Cuatro experiences sudden extinction threshold
· 1870 Cuatrons use limited data from space capsule to advance their technology and travel to Cinco hoping to establish population without disease.
· 1910 Cuatrons die out on Cinco, Cinconians become next hosts
· 1940 Kiians come to help, cannot.
· 1955 Pegasi begin to supply antibiotics to Cinconians. Status quo until now.
· 2165 Kiians find mummy and ship on Cuatro and see financial opportunity
“Pegasus Colony?” Tom asked with a scowl.
“Apparently, it exists in the future,” Adams said. Tom looked back at the next image.
Approximate ancestry for Commander Wiseman
.625 Human
.125 Pegasian
.125 Cetian
.125 Unidentified
“That’s … interesting,” Tom said. “After the trouble on Earth with re-population I wouldn’t have thought humans would be …” He stopped himself, looking at Zalara, his child of two worlds. “It’s, um … how far back did you go?”
“It goes back as far as you want it to go. The divergence seems to have occurred before the pandemic, perhaps 2100, or 2150. It’s hard to pinpoint actual dates.”
“Captain,” Jane said, “Rianya had some of his DNA worked out before she became infected. You want me to pull it up?”
“It doesn’t matter. We weren’t interstellar until 2105.”
“There were aliens on the Earth, though,” she said.
“More puzzles for doctors and historians. I have other things to worry about right now.”
“Aye, sir, the plague project is stalled,” Jane said. “If you like I can reprioritize and come up with a new plan.”
“That’s fine, but we need to find Dr. Gregory, on the planet, before we get back to helping these Cinconians.” Jane nodded and left Rianya’s room. Tom tapped the intercom just outside of her door. “Bridge: is that shuttle disengaged yet?”
“Captain,” York answered. “I have it ready to blow off. I had to seal the airlock and fit some lithium explosives--”
“So get that thing off already!”
“Aye, Captain. Stand by, sir.”
The Maria Mitchell quaked slightly and stabilized.
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