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Jason looked toward the back of the creature’s skull. Hundreds of years ago and in a different time frame, he’d thought of that hard, smooth surface as a wall, but as he floated there in his spacesuit, he could see it was a partition, a membrane segmenting the skull into quarters. His spotlight swept across the smooth surface. Once, words had been etched into that thick membrane.

You can save her

You can save all of them

Now, though, the wall was empty and those words seemed like ghosts from the past.

Jason understood that the overwhelming feeling of deja vu was from having stood here hundreds, perhaps thousands of times while trying to break the cycle.

His white equipment cube drifted through the jagged opening and inside the dome. In the glare of his spotlights, its sterile surface and hard lines looked alien inside the organic creature. Jason switched off the tracking system, leaving the cube floating beside him.

As his spotlight swung around, light rippled over the rough texture of compressed brain matter on the other side of the skull.

Rows of tiny red lights flashed in the vacant front-left quadrant of the dome. This front quarter was the only vacant space within the central dome.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not sure if the creature could hear him or even if it would understand. Perhaps he was speaking just to assuage his conscience. Perhaps this was a confession, one spoken to no one but himself in the bitter darkness.

“I wish there was another way.”

The empty void remained silent.

Jason reached out and keyed a code into the equipment cube. A compartment opened and he pulled out a clunky device that looked somewhat like a metallic basketball with tiny pipes and wiring wrapped around it, hiding its explosive shell and plutonium core.

To his surprise, he was breathing heavily. Physically, there was no reason to, but the stress of the moment preyed on his mind.

“Why didn’t you run?” he asked, arming the nuclear warhead with his stubby gloved fingers. “Why did you loop over and over again? You had all of time and space. Why did you return to Korea time and again?”

A soft green LED turned red, indicating the bomb was armed.

Jason breathed deeply, sighing as he exhaled. It all seemed so easy in their planning. Time travel was too dangerous for humanity. Nuclear weapons had once brought the world to the brink of annihilation. What would a mastery of the very fabric of space-time afford this infant species still reaching out from its parent star?

This was a mercy killing, he told himself. The alien was brain dead. That was the only possible explanation he could conceive to explain why the creature had been locked in a time loop. He had no choice. He couldn’t let this alien fall into anyone’s hands. He had to destroy the creature, regardless of his own sentiments. Eventually, others would stumble upon these dragons of the deep, but perhaps by then humanity would have reached beyond adolescence.

“Farewell, old friend,” he said, using his suit thrusters to move forward and position the nuclear bomb so it was wedged between the console and the dome. All that remained was for him to return to the Excelsior and remotely detonate the device. He had to leave. He couldn’t remain there. He had to see the plan through and end the madness of time looping over and over again.

There was something about the console that looked strangely out of place, and that distracted him for a moment, taking his mind off his singular purpose of destroying the creature.

Jason turned, drifting under power, controlling his motion with deft skill as he looked around within the alien skull, wanting to understand what had happened to drive it into this abyss. He reached out and grabbed at the strange console as his spotlights pierced the transparent outer dome, lighting up the sloping front of the creature.

“What have they done to you?”

In those few seconds, he understood something quite profound, something that had escaped their attention for centuries. There were two alien species involved, not one. These magnificent beasts, capable of migrating through space and time were being hunted by some other alien culture, one capable of taming and controlling them. The console was a horse bit, a harness, some kind of biotech designed to control the creature, to transform it into a mule.

“Lobotomy,” he whispered in horror.

For all the interest Homo sapiens had in the fabled dragons of the deep, it seemed the real alien monsters were still hidden from sight. Someone had attacked this creature. To the best of Jason’s knowledge, this was the first occasion in which there was any inkling of an aggressive, conquest-driven interstellar species that could represent a real threat to humanity.

He turned his attention to the ruptured section to his right. The membrane had burst and spilled into the empty quadrant. He could remember seeing this mass set like stone when the creature had been housed in reactor one.