Feedback

And with those words, he realized nothing had changed. This was the same hubris that had led Jae-Sun to travel back in time in the first place.

Looking at the rear membrane, he saw words once carved in desperation.

You can save her

You can save all of them

Her?

All this time, Jason had thought he understood the message he’d been sending himself across the vast expanse of space-time, but he hadn’t. For hundreds of years, he’d missed the real meaning in the messages he’d left for himself.

He’d never intended to save only himself. He’d never intended to save just Lily or even Lily and Lachlan. All along, he’d wanted to save them all.

There was much he didn’t understand about the feedback loop, but he understood the creature was somehow locked into a certain point in space-time, always returning to that stormy night off the coast of North Korea. But why?

At the time, all Jason could think of was that the injury to the alien’s neural compartment had rendered it essentially brain dead. But now his opinion had changed. He had seen an astonishing amount of cognitive function as the creature had shown him visions of its home, visions of its capture, and of the future.

The alien was wounded, of that he was sure. The damage to its skull was clear. The bit and bridle sat before him as a strange alien console with faint, exotic markings.

This dragon of the deep was crying out to him for help. She could see both the past and the future. Why had she continued circling over and over? Why return to that dark night off the coast of North Korea thousands of times? What was she waiting for?

Finally, he understood. She was waiting for him. She needed him to understand what had to be done at this precise moment. She wanted him to set her free. It had taken thousands of iterations to bring him to the point when he could help her.

In the original timeline, Jae-Sun had been selfish, self-centered. Now, though, Jason knew what she needed him to do.

In the vision of the nebula, her fellow creatures had fled through space-time, leaving in their wake flashes of pale blue-light. And he’d seen this earlier today. He’d thought it was Cherenkov radiation breaking before his retina, but it wasn’t. They were out there, waiting to effect a rescue.

This was the answer he was looking for. This was an alternative that could break the time loop. All he had to do was to lead the Excelsior away and leave her to her kind.

This wasn’t part of the plan, but to hell with the plan, he thought.

“I understand,” he said, gently touching at the brain mass that had revealed those visions to him. Everything they’d gone through, it must have been all she could do, all she was capable of in her injured state, desperate to escape.

He drifted forward and removed the nuclear device, deactivating the bomb. The red LED switched to green as he packed the bomb back into the equipment cube. His gloves were clumsy, or was it that his fingers were trembling? Jason couldn’t tell, but the realization of how close he’d come to destroying this intelligent alien shook him.

“This,” he said, turning to face the strange console. “This must go.”

While working with the equipment cube, he had drifted sideways and somewhat upside down relative to the floor of the cavity. The floor itself sloped down at an angle of roughly seventy degrees within the asteroid, and yet in the near weightlessness he could convince his mind that the angled surface was flat. Slowly, Jason aligned himself with the floor, grabbing hold of the console.

“Let’s get this off you.”

The console looked like a mesh of smooth, brushed aluminum with organic branch like edges weaving down into the floor. There were dozens of tiny lights, barely visible in the darkness. As his spotlight drifted over them, they seemed to disappear. At first glance, the console seemed to be part of the vessel, but Jason had seen how brutally it had been set in place.

He planted his feet on the floor immediately below the console and grabbed at the thick edge. Flexing with his thighs, and keeping his back straight, he pushed off, trying to pry the console loose. There was a little give, but the console remained stuck.

Working hand over hand, he moved to one end of the console. Jason positioned himself carefully and instead of slowly increasing pressure, he thrust downward with his boots while pulling upwards with his hands. His head and neck arched back as he strained to pull the console loose. He could feel this end of the console starting to budge.

“Come on, you bitch!” he cried, jerking at the alien device.

Pulling himself along with his gloved hands, he moved to the other end of the console and pried at the structure. This end moved more than the other. Slowly, he was jimmying it out of place. He repeated this several more times until the console drifted just a few feet above the floor, still held in place by thin tendrils reaching out like roots.