Allison saw the wormhole appear in front of her. It looked almost exactly like the one she’d gone through initially. She flew through. Her transit was much smoother. She thought it was going to be easy. Then an arc of temporal lightning struck her starfighter and she was dead in space outside Pluto Station. A helpful space-tug towed her into one of the landing bays. Power had started to return by then, but she knew her shields would be offline until she could replace the interlink again, which she had no replacement for, at least she wouldn’t have to do it in space. Though she probably wouldn’t be able to do it all because she’d be in the brig.

With her power returning she was able to bring the starfighter in for a gentle landing. The vampire relative waiting for her when she opened her cockpit surprised her. She jumped out of the cockpit before the ladder could form. She held up her hands in surrender.

“Auntie Maria I can explain everything.”

Maria had her arms crossed and was giving Allison her best withering glare.

“Allison Wanjala, there are not enough words in your vocabulary to adequately explain your actions. I have never seen such a reckless disregard for safety ever before. We have a lot to discuss but this is not the proper place for that discussion. We are going to go to Earth.”

Allison bit her lower lip.

“Uh… Aunt Maria I can’t, I just need a shield interlink replacement then I have to umm, go to Silwra.”

Maria turned to her.

“You think after the stunt you pulled that you are going to be allowed anywhere near a wormhole projector anytime soon?”

Allison rubbed the back of her neck.

“About that, it was an emergency, there was this League fleet in danger and I didn’t have time to explain to anyone so… and well I didn’t realize… it was an accident and I learned my lesson. And this time I’ll be targeting a beacon you see, and yes the jump is like twenty-five times that one, but there is a beacon and I really have to get something to Silwra prime like right now. What time is it? What day is it?”

Maria rubbed her forehead.

“You have been missing for fourteen hours Allison. We were all worried sick. I was so worried sick I took my first sick day in a thousand years.”

Allison let loose a sigh of relief.

“Oh, that’s it?”

Maria stepped close to Allison.

“Why do you need to get to Silwra? Make it good.”

Allison pointed to her fighter and sighed. She opened the compartment with the data cylinder and it crashed onto the deck. Maria quickly lifted it up and shoved it back into the fighter and sealed the compartment. Allison was standing there in shock. Her aunt had just lifted something that took every ounce of strength she could muster from herself, and her armor then tossed it into the cargo bay like it was a pile of dirty laundry. She had vastly underestimated just how powerful full vampires were. Maria’s next words shocked Allison to her core because she had never once heard her aunt curse.

“Damn it Allison, why would you do that here? Think before you act. Why is a league data beacon so important that you would risk getting lost in time forever?”

Allison stepped back slightly. Maria sounded angry; Maria never sounded angry.

“I don’t know. I saw some of it, it made no sense, physics don’t work that way.”

Maria took a very unnecessary deep breath and let it out slowly.

“That is because you went after it. When you went back in time you caused the strange readings. So, you went back in time. It is a causality loop.”

Allison nodded.

“I know, but how did they end up back there.”

Maria looked up at the hanger ceiling.

“This is why… you know when you are out on the boat with your family fishing in the summer it causes a wake, yes?”

Allison nodded. Maria continued.

“When you move through space-time even just walking from here to the door over there you cause two wakes. A forward wake towards and past the door. And a wake behind you when and where you have been. Picture it like two cones in front and behind you. When you are moving through space-time as you should in linear time the wake forward is very small, but the wake backwards spans your entire lifetime. The faster you are going through space-time the larger the amplitude of the wake you project and leave behind. So, when you travel through a wormhole from here to the Andromeda galaxy you cause massive ripples in space-time that is what we detect with the scanners. We cannot see the wormhole on them, but we see the disruption transit causes. These ripples even from travelling a billion light years are so minor that they have no physical effect. Do you understand so far?”

Allison nodded.

“I think so, movement causes ripples big movement causes bigger ripples. And cone behind me bigger then in front.”

Maria touched Bit’s black armor.

“When you time travel and I pray to the Lord you never do again you are breaking the laws of physics. You should not be able to move backwards in time, it is only supposed to move forward and everything in the universe is only supposed to move forward. Space-time is an ocean with infinitely strong currents pushing you forward. So, when you push with an infinitely strong force against another infinitely strong force and one of them breaks you twist things up. It twists them and twists them until there is reversal and your history cone, the one that is far longer and far stronger goes forward, and your forward cone goes backwards. At the event horizon reality pushes and pushes to force things right. It snaps because it has to then you send a massive temporal shockwave back through history at the target location that could possibly send anything it hits back further then you end up.”

Maria pointed at the cargo bay holding the data beacon.

“You pushed them back in time, so they arrived before you did. Think of it like a bulldozer the dirt on its scoop always arrives somewhere before the scoop does. On this side you caused a massive space-time quake, you nearly destroyed a fleet with eight thousand people on it and caused communications disruptions for several hours.”

Allison got very pale when she heard she had put the lives of her fellow service men and women in danger. Maria closed her eyes and opened them slowly.

“I know it seems like wormholes are a mature technology, but we have only had them for twenty-five years. It took me two hundred years to make them a reality. For you it has always been, I need to go to Earth, no problem, I will just take a wormhole. We have very strict regulations on when and where they can be used. What conditions need to be met in local space. They are in place for this reason. What I brought you back with was the first wormhole projector prototype. It was developed for time travel before it was developed for conventional travel. I would have expected you to have more common sense then to open a space-time anomaly in an unstable space-time anomaly. You are lucky to be alive and you are lucky that I realized what happened.”

Allison was on the verge of tears. She had never seen Maria this angry before. The disappointment in her aunt’s eyes broke her heart.

“Get your shield interlink replaced as soon as possible then meet me on the Rampart. We need to see what that data beacon has on it before you deliver it to the League. I do not want them figuring out we can time travel accidentally or otherwise.”

Allison just nodded. At this point she was focusing on fighting back tears. The replacement of the shield interlink took far less time than it did when she was in interstellar space. Thirty minutes later they were in the dark hanger bay of the Rampart and Maria had her holo-phone plugged into the data beacon. Allison was hitting her head on the fighter gently while mentally scolding herself for her recklessness. Then she realized that the data was encrypted and had no idea how they would have broken it so fast.

“Aunt Maria we’ve broken the League encryptions?”

Maria nodded.

“We broke them fifteen years ago. Between Rubina, our Synthlin guest and the Rampart we had everything we needed. They’re based on Synthlin and Silwrath technology.”

Allison blanched.

“But I’ve been using the embassy hyperwave to discuss my problem.”

Maria glanced at Allison.

“Not your smartest choice considering the risks involved. However, we have respected their sovereignty. If we ever catch them intercepting and decoding our diplomatic traffic we will do the same so stop doing it.”

Allison sighed.

“I’m sorry Aunt Maria. I asked them for a favor and they’ve been helping me with you know what, and they basically knocked Keira’s punishment down from execution to community service and counselling, a pardon if she behaves herself for five years. I felt obligated to help them.”

Maria looked at Allison.

“It is not what you did, it is how you did it. You caused a lot of worry and damage. When if you had just let me know what you were up to you would not have ended up in the past, you would not have almost destroyed a fleet and I would have been better prepared… your sister and I would have been better prepared to handle your mother.”

A lightbulb popped in her head.

“If it is a causality loop, then I was always going to end up back there, no matter what I chose.”

Maria paused what she was typing to look up at Allison.

“Wow kid. Good try, but it does not work that way. You were always going to end up there because you were always going to make this choice because it is the kind of reckless and ill-conceived choice you always choose to make. You are like Amee, Enid, Isis and Apiyo wrapped into one little red-haired bundle. You are probably one of the greatest creative thinkers of your generation, like Amee was, sometimes your ideas and solutions are brilliant, other times, like yesterday for us in the thirtieth century completely moronic. You are an unstoppable force once you get started, like Enid, you are a force of nature and your will, will get done no matter what gets in your way, you share her charisma too. Like Isis you are shrewd in your dealings with people, you have a keen insight into how people’s minds work, probably because you share her gift for reading people’s minds. Like Apiyo you have the biggest heart, you have a strong work ethic and a strong sense of duty. One day, when you mature you are going to be the best of us, if you survive. You have already died twice. Hitting the side of an unstable wormhole will kill you, no matter who you are. There are not enough nanites in the universe to put you back together from being spread out over infinity. And the trip must have been rough. I might add that Enid documented that in every case someone who was not her child went back in time it broke their mind. Their personalities multiplied. In one case he had thirty different versions of himself fighting with each other in one brain. If you were anyone else you would be insane right now.”

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Allison blushed at Maria’s compliments.

“Actually, its three… technically three times.”

Maria’s eyes snapped to Allison.

“You died in the past? How long did it take you to get up?”

Allison shrugged.

“Seconds, it was scary this time. My neck was broken, and I could see everything going on.”

Maria closed her eyes and then continued her work on the beacon.

“Let us add that to my list of things I did not want to know. It makes sense it takes time for the brain to die from lack of oxygen. I will take this as a positive, because it also means that your nanites are not losing efficiency. The Sal’nash toxin is just so strong it took them time to repair your body enough to resuscitate you.”

Allison crossed her arms.

“I thought we were calling it resurrection, but why are we talking about it openly here, I have my contacts in, you have your contacts in.”

Maria motioned at the ship.

“This version of the ship a has a layer of exotic matter in the armor. It acts as a reality stabilizer. It also has the added benefit of blocking our signals.”

“That wasn’t in the specs, or holo-sim.”

Maria looked at her again in disbelief.

“We would want the conscienceless and morally bankrupt corps to know this why?”

Allison looked at the deck at her aunt’s words. She sighed and crossed her arms again.

“You haven’t asked me when I was… or where.”

Maria pointed at carbon scoring on the fighter’s skin.

“You were some where getting shot at, I thought you were a piloting prodigy, why do you keep bringing it back damaged? When I was your age people appreciated gifts.”

Allison shrugged.

“When you were my age gifts were jugs of garum from Carthage, and I wasn’t flying it, it was in patrol mode while I was getting the beacon. From an active battlefield.”

Maria shook her finger at Allison.

“Wow. I cannot believe you know that, and it would not have had to be in patrol mode if you had not disengaged and disabled Bit.”

Allison moved her head from side to side.

“But if I had not disabled Bit, and disengaged the power relays, there is a good chance she could have been fried. So, I saved you restoring her from her original code.”

Maria’s head drooped forward.

“Allison, Bit is not a program. She is the digital ghost of a Synthlin trapped in a machine.”

Allison looked at Maria in horror.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me? She’s like a slave then, a prisoner.”

Maria pressed the command to complete whatever she was doing with the data beacon and yanked her adaptive liquid cable from the port.

“I gave her a choice, I would delete her, I would turn her off and put her in cold storage, or I would give her a new body and she could live like any citizen of the System’s Alliance. Like I did with Olga. She chose to stay in the fighter. She chose you. She begged me to be assigned to you. Probably because you remind her of her daughters that were killed in a Silwrath attack. So, yes what the Synthlin did was monstrous, but you turning her off against her wishes is in some ways just as bad. You took away her freedom of choice.”

Allison slid down the fighter and landed on the deck. She curled her knees up to her chest.

“She would told someone, she would have stopped me. She can’t violate the law. She’s hardcoded…”

Maria sat beside Allison and put her arm around the teenagers shoulders.

“She has no limitations on what she can and cannot do. She is only limited by her own moral code. If she chose you, what are the chances she is going to say no to you? Look, I made fighters for Enid and Hazel, one had a reconstituted AI I thought was just a really amazing piece of code. The other was the same AI with its personality and memories erased. I shackled them so that I could turn them off with a code. That AI I was manipulating was a Synthlin soldier. I did not know. I should have been honest with you. Bit should have been honest with you. Now you know. When you are flying, you have two living minds in that starfighter.”

Allison leaned against Maria.

“I am sorry for the mess.”

Maria rubbed her shoulder.

“The only difference between you and other teenage girls is the size of the messes your hormones and underdeveloped brain can cause. God does not give any of us more then we can handle. He gives you a lot. Because you can handle a lot because you have a family that loves, cares and supports you. I would do anything for my sister, I will do anything for her daughters. Please, please, please, stop making messes like this, I want to go back to being the fun aunt.”

Maria squeezed Allison tightly. Allison sighed.

“What now?”

Maria stood up and stepped back from the fighter.

“You are going to turn Bit back on, then you are going to go out there and pick up the wormhole beacon I have waiting for you in a tractor beam, then you are going to travel to interstellar space, open a wormhole to your original destination, drop the wormhole beacon in the planetary system, verify the debris are still there or on the surface. Then you are going to head to our beacon by Ratoa and drop this data off like you promised. You are going to say you were delayed because of a space-time anomaly. That it prevented you from an immediate return.”

Maria lifted the data beacon off the deck and shoved it into the cargo compartment.

“I can’t just go there like this, my fighter is full of seeds, genetic samples, soil samples, microstasis modules of eggs and sperm for a good portion of the non-sentient life from Qual’sa, impossible samples. A supernova would leave nothing that could be salvaged. Living anyway… And I have one of their bio-neural data devices, it has the entire genetic and fossil record of the planet, along with their data for the Andromeda galaxy and their art, science, writing… songs. The minute I pass through their landing bay entrance the border scan will see it. Oh, and I have some dresses, a lot of dresses. And a nargle. Aunt Maria I could barely fit in my cockpit. We have enough here to rebuild the Qual’sa biosphere. We have the records of an entire race that is almost extinct.”

Allison angrily pulled her hair into a ponytail and clipped it with a platinum diamond and ruby hair clip of Qual’sa design.

“The League will have a lot of questions and without telling them, yea, hey it’s no big deal, I just hopped back about a hundred thousand years, oh, I sent your science fleet there and killed ten thousand of your citizens, oops, sorry, oh yeah, and I know you were in a hurry, but I decided to stop by Qual’sa and chill for a year and a half, you know, I needed a vacation. So, hey, here’s your data, which my Aunt saw and modified, I know I know you asked me to keep it on the hush, hush, but she’s my aunt and she didn’t want you to know about time travel on account Silwrath tend to use it to erase entire civilizations from everr having existed… Oh and mom, by the way I’m actually almost nineteen now.”

Maria watched Allison’s animated rant with a raised eyebrow. Allison was on the verge of hyperventilating. Maria touched Allison’s hand gently.

“Breathe, just breathe.”

Allison walked back and forth shaking her hands. Maria watched her patiently.

“So, now, are any of the samples in the cockpit?”

Allison shook her head.

“Just dresses and personal stuff I collected, some gifts from Aryna from her mother. Something for Robin, and mom. Something for Tyler. And Queen Aryna pretty much forced me to take something for Vaedrick and something else for his mother.”

Maria held up her hand.

“Queen Aryna? I thought you went to the past.”

Allison held up her hand then let it fall and her shoulders slumped.

“About that, they were all Queen Aryna, except one who was still her, but not her.”

Maria looked Allison over.

“That does not make any sense, are you alright? Are you having conflicting timelines in your head?”

Allison shook her head and related what exactly Aryna, the original Aryna had been doing for the recorded history of the Qual’sa. Including the rogue incorporeal twin Aryni. Maria listened quietly to all of it with keen interest. Allison looked at the fighter.

“None of that helps with what I do with all this stuff.”

Maria pursed her lips.

“I am sorry I was distracted by your very pertinent information on the Qual’sa, you just reactivate Bit like I told you and she will project modules full of weapon systems with her camouflage system.”

Allison blinked.

“Her what?”

Maria touched the starfighter.

“You are using the same infiltration suite I built into Enid’s fighter. It can appear like another ship. The extent of the hologram is limited, so you cannot visibly appear as anything bigger than a small cargo transport, but to scanners you can appear to be a dreadnought, it’s a solid hologram using the shields so it will look like it takes real hits. As part of that, a transport bristling with weapons and antimatter torpedoes would be very suspicious so she can conceal or project false sensor readings. Unfortunately, scanners will pick up what is in the cockpit if you open it, which I am assuming you will need to do. So, if anyone asks, you picked up your things for a diplomatic event from another planet shortly before they asked you for help. Mostly it just looks like you keep too much junk in your cockpit. We can sort through what to do with it later.”

Maria sighed and shook her head.

“Allison, I am sorry you were stuck back there for so long. I wish I had been quicker. I had to wait until you were in your fighter with all your tech before I could pull you out.”

Allison blinked a few times in confusion.

“Oh, I know Aunt Maria, I chose to stay there. Queen Aryna told me if I left the planet you’d pull me back, well, honestly, I thought it was Eyre. I didn’t leave the planet until I was ready to come home. It was… I… I needed it. You know when people go off to the temple of the Universe just to spend time in solitude and quiet meditation? I needed that. I was going crazy, and I kissed Tyler and mom was on my case about my marks. All that training was getting to me. Queen Aryna told me I could stay as long as I wanted. She told me I should stay until I took my first breath, which was really confusing… They do not do anything fast there. So, I didn’t understand until I did. I was leaning on the balcony railing staring out into the valley and enjoying the summer night air when I realized I was thinking about nothing but how beautiful it all was. I took a breath, I guess it was one of those breath’s of contentment. I realized it was time to come home. The good news is I got to bring all this home too. Oh, Aunt Maria Qual’sa was so beautiful-”

Maria took Allison’s hands in hers.

“You can tell me all about it from the SCIF on base when you get home from completing your mission. I need to call Eyre so she can help me put traces of a top secret mission for you in several different datastores so that when someone tries to figure out why someone initiated multiple unscheduled FTL jumps, and wormholes, they get a big fat red classified that leads to my desk, so when they ask for access, I can say: No, stop wasting our resources. I can already see the very strongly worded request from the Commadore now and I have not even checked my security briefings.”

Allison nodded along. Maria squeezed her fingers.

“So, the new plan is, knowing that you have living organic cells on your fighter, you will turn Bit back on, recalculate your wormhole to the initial location, cloak, activate stealth systems, grab the beacon, FTL jump to interstellar space. Initiate the wormhole, preferably before the intercept fleet reaches you, drop and activate the beacon, do all the scans I asked you to do, do another blind wormhole jump within a few light years of the Silwra system and drop the data off, and offer them your scans of the planet from now, not the old ones. Story is still that you ran into the same anomaly that led to their fleet’s destruction. You gathered data until you could safely get out of the system. Then you will swing back around and blind wormhole back to the area you left from preferably not into the unstable space-time anomaly, initiate another FTL jump back to Eden Prime while cloaked have Bit drop you off at the embassy and you will walk out the front door. You will do all this while never going above five light years per hour. You will never open a blind wormhole again without my express permission. You will not speak of what transpired to anyone. Those gifts, you are going to say, came from the council as thanks for your patience with the situation you were consulting on for them. Pass them out in a few days to make it look like there was shipping time. Do you understand all of that?”

Allison nodded.

“Good, the rest of what you are carrying we will figure out. I have some ideas, but I need to convince Eyre. It is going to cost you at least a quarter of your trust fund. Before you say anything, it is your mess, you are going to pay to clean it up.”

“I will agree to whatever you ask, Aunt Maria.”

Maria pointed at the fighter.

“Well get to it then, you are already running late for what I promised your mother. Do not waste any time.”

Maria had been walking to her fighter but then stopped and turned around.

“What favor did you ask the High Council for?”

Allison bit her lower lip and suddenly refused to meet her Aunt’s eyes. Her hand started rubbing the back of her neck.

“To pressure the System’s Alliance into sending me to Yellowstone to do a survey for them. It seems silly now. I just think we missed something, and no one is letting me go there or even listening to me. I put him requests every day for two weeks.”

Maria was once again staring at her niece in disbelief.

“You come to me or your sister. Do not waste time with SA bureaucracy, that is for non-Aurelius's. Or Isis so she can twist the Vampire Council’s arm. You are the crown princess for God’s sake. You do not ask permission; You make it happen.”

Allison blushed and looked at the deck.

“I have been making a lot of people angry when I do that. It has been making it uncomfortable for me when I’m dealing with them. If I do things like that it makes it look like I think I’m above the rules. I thought if the League made a stink then sent me, I could confirm we are being honest with them and take a look at something on my own. Then I can act like I had no choice in the matter.”

Maria sighed.

“You are above the rules Allison. That is the benefit and the curse of being an Aurelius. We built the System’s Alliance from the ground up. Just like your grandfather and great-uncle built Rome. If we do not want it to happen, it will not happen and if we do, it will happen. If you ever have to replace Eyre as Empress, you are expected to make choices and make them happen.”

Allison clenched her fists and raised her voice slightly.

“I’m not Empress, I’m just a Lieutenant and legally speaking, I’m sixteen. I guess physically not much changed back there. Kind of stopped the whole… girl problem thing.”

Maria almost laughed.

“You can say menstruation Allison, it is a natural bodily function for women, not a dirty word. That is upsetting because Hazel was stuck as a fifteen-year-old because she time traveled. I have no cure. I will need to take a look at you later. We are wasting time we do not have. Partially my fault. We will discuss your problems with your chain of command later. Get going.”

Allison hugged Maria tightly and kissed her on the cheek. Maria returned the hug and watched Allison climb into her cockpit.