Interlude C

Valerie

“So when to next?” Valerie asked

“2542, there is a colony of robots mining the all the material from the moon of an inhabited planet. If we don't stop them it could disrupt Earth's, that’s the name of the planet, weather and finish off the humans living there.” The owl said

Valerie nodded and set about adjusting the controls and running through the checklist. Time travel was tricky business, you had to compress time and skate across the ripples in just the right way or else you might find yourself lost in the void. At least that was what the owl had told her.

To be honest Valerie didn’t understand the time travel part of the job, it was very confusing and the tech involved was well beyond anything she had seen even during her time as a pirate captain in the Lathne galaxy.

Valerie had captained an entire fleet of pirate vessels through the years. She had been a hero and a villain in equal measure. Her travels took her to several different galaxies in three different universes before she was picked up by the time traveling owl she now worked for. In all her travels the Lathne galaxy had the most impressive technology she had seen.

They had no magic but had still managed to work out teleportation and dimensional gates, solely through the power they harnessed from their star mining operation. The Lathne galaxy was even a prime candidate for inventing time travel.

That was another thing that confused her. They were time traveling, with the goal of finding and protecting the people who would eventually invent time travel, since it hadn’t yet been invented. The only way Valerie could maintain sanity and keep headaches at bay on this job was to minimize the questions and just roll with the weirdness.

When she was first hired on she hadn't been sure they actually were traveling in time, until she had messed up the calculations for the galaxy's rotation and dropped them in deep space for a week while they charged up to jump again. She knew for a fact they had arrived where they were aiming, but the galaxy just wasn't there yet and wouldn’t be for another fifty years, after that Valerie was convinced.

Time travel was great but difficult. First you had to make sure you were in the right dimension and universe. Dimensional travel was tricky business but nothing compared to time travel. Then in order to get to the right time and place you had to load in four sets of coordinates, X, Y, Z, and ¿. Surprisingly the time coordinate, ¿, was the easy one. Just plug in the year, date, and time according to universal standard, which was what all the clocks were set to in the Normalized Interdimensional Time Warping Instrument Tm. The owl had that job. Where he got the information on where to go next and what to do when there, Valerie had no idea.

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Valerie was responsible for calculating the other three coordinates, they were all spatial but accounting for the rotation of planets while they orbited around their stars, and the stars rotated around in their galaxy, and the galaxy drifted along in their universe while the universe expanded was… Well the word ‘difficult’ didn't quite cut it . Being off by only a second in her calculations could have them stuck inside an asteroid or incinerated in a star.

Now that she had her target, and had talked the damn owl into giving her some more details, she could spend the next few weeks doing the math and preparing for their new adventure.

According to the owl, they were going to protect a planet that had nearly driven itself to extinction. One of the few survivors had then decided to mine every useful material from the entire system and build a self sustaining space station and ship off in search of greener pastures. The job itself would be fairly simple and quick, they could probably just slip some information to important people on the planet and let it take care of itself. When Valerie pointed that out the owl decided to lecture her.

“That will work, and yes that is how we will start. That isn't the only thing we must do though. There are several important moments through the next few centuries that we must address if the population is to survive. It would do no good if we stopped the extinction of a people only for it to happen again in a hundred years.”

Valerie shrugged, “I hear you, but why do we need to save them if they are determined to off themselves?”

“Preservation of species is our primary directive. If we don't maintain an acceptable level of deviation from the prime timeline then time travel wont be invented. If time travel isn't invented then we can’t go back in time to change things, if we never went back in time then time travel would have been invented on schedule, so we would have been able to go back in time. There are only so many universes left, if we allow paradoxes to tear them apart like that just because we don't want to do a few equations there will be nowhere left to live… Yes I know that is the real reason why you don't want to go.”

“Owl… these ‘equations' are ridiculous, it takes days just to write them down.”

“Owl?” The bird ruffled its feathers and puffed up, “I am a doctor! You will refer to me as such, you insolent ingrate.”

Valerie rolled her eyes, “Dr. Owl"

The bird calmed down a bit but still huffed his next words, “I have a name, I'm not just an owl."

“Your name is almost as ridiculous as these equations"

“And yet you shall use them both"

“Yes doctor” Valerie said with a sigh

“Doctor…?”

Valerie mumbled “Dr. Hoot”

And the Smug bird nodded.