Gene Roddenberry's "Andromeda" - Softcover

- ONE -

 

BROAD HINTS AND DEEP MYSTERIES
  
Never shake hands with a razorpig.
--INFORMAL HIGH GUARD MOTTO, CIRCA CY 5000
 
Nothing was clear. That scared her, as much as she could be scared.
Her name was Trance Gemini, at least for now. Her skin was gold, shading to pink in some areas, and her long red hair was caught into tight braids, some of which were woven into an ornate design that offset her sharply pointed ears. Depending upon mood or need, her face could seem soft and caring, or become a mask of cold determination. Even her shipmates, long used to her mercurial state, had no hope of predicting what she would do, say, or manifest next.
She was watching the stars, looking for the lines of force, and trying to divine individual characteristics. She was standing on the huge observation deck of the Andromeda Ascendant, a former Systems Commonwealth High Guard starship that was the epitome of the iron fist in the velvet glove--her outward beauty, composed in the main of curves with only a handful of straight lines, concealed an ability to destroy entire star systems. Prior to the fall of the old Commonwealth, the 1.4-kilometer-long Andromeda Ascendant had carried a complement of forty-seven hundred. Now it was occupied by only a handful of people. Trance had left her mark on the ship, however--the hydroponics gardens had flourished in her hands, and she had placed plants all over the ship. Andromeda was extremely pleased.
She was Trance Gemini. Once upon a time she had been younger, purple, and equipped with a prehensile tail. All those things were gone. Her tail, always a useful tool, had been shot away in a firefight. Her younger self had gone forward in time, and she had come backward to replace her, and temporal paradoxes be damned. She had come back from a terrible future, a time that had claimed all too many of the people she had known, as well as an increasing chunk of the universe.
She had said, time and again, that her agenda was to create the perfect possible future. Yet she had arrived amid chaos in a place where time was out of joint and almost limitless quantum possibilities radiated into the future. Faced with too many choices, she had narrowed them to one. In that instant she had locked down one reality, condemned a brilliant Perseid scientist to the fate he had already suffered, and saved a human she cared about from a horrible death.
She had made the choice out of friendship, for better or worse. She had easily admitted that later. She had also admitted that she had no idea as to the long-term consequences of her actions. It was almost the complete truth at the time. Within seconds she had felt her memory starting to blur and shift, leaving her feeling as though she were looking at her own existence through smoked glass.
It was not the first time she had been through that particular temporal nexus, but she was going to keep that piece of information to herself, at least for now. She had caused one man to sacrifice himself for the good of billions. A fair trade, perhaps…no, she was certain. Gaheris Rhade had been a trusted and admired first officer, and he had betrayed the ship and her crew when the Nietzscheans had revolted against the Commonwealth. He had murdered the captain, his friend, and been frozen in time as the Andromeda Ascendant moved inexorably toward the event horizon of a black hole. Three hundred years later the ship had been pulled free. Rhade had been devastated when he discovered what had happened since the Nietzscheans--his people--had brought down the Systems Commonwealth.
Imposing his will on the great starship, and taking on the salvage crew that had rescued her, he had set out to repair the damage and rebuild, by any means necessary, the Commonwealth.
He had failed, his efforts leading to exponentially worsening conditions. Trance had lived in a future of black despair and endless destruction. When the opportunity arose, she had marshaled her powers and ridden the probability stream until she reached the nexus she needed. Time and space were tangled in complex knots at that point, victims of an out-of-control tesseract machine that was folding space a bit too efficiently.
She had stepped out of her present and into her past. Her younger self had nervously changed places with her--she hadn't remembered being quite that shade of purple--and she had gone to speak with Rhade.
The conversation had not been a long one. When it was over, she had taken him through a spatio-temporal interface, leaving him on the Andromeda Ascendant just before his betrayal. She had left, but she knew what had happened then. Gaheris Rhade had, in defiance of temporal logic, shot his younger incarnation, taken his place, and reversed events by allowing himself to be killed by the man he had betrayed.
Everyone else believed that the mysterious tesseract generator was the sole source of the space-time distortions. Trance, however, knew the truth--that the tesseract generator was only one of the reasons space-time had suddenly begun tearing itself apart.
The universe had needed to realign itself following Rhade's final actions. She had not helped the healing process much by looping around once more, coming backward from a future that was only marginally less terrible. Her younger self was, if anything, even more nervous about changing places with her. There had been no choice other than to take the second journey into the nexus. There was far too much at stake for her to hesitate.
There was a price for her determination, however. With each decision she made, each step she took to set things right, she endured another mental upheaval as her memory realigned to each change in the timeline. The shifts felt like tidal currents pulling at her mind, and sometimes all she wanted was to be swept away. Keeping all the pieces in the proper places was no easy task, even for her.
There was so much to do, still. Sooner or later she was going to have to let more of the truth out, and bear the consequences.
Someday she would have to tell them all what she really was.
Still, things had changed. She hesitated to trust that the changes were all positive, but she could hope. She had put too much of herself into this to fail now.
Nothing was clear anymore. Nothing.
She bowed her head for a moment, and took a deep breath, trying to focus. She looked up again, centering herself, and letting her mind drift until the starfield was all she was aware of.
"Help me," she whispered. "Please. Help me."
* * *
Captain Dylan Hunt, the tall, towheaded commander of the Systems Commonwealth starship Andromeda Ascendant, strode out onto the expansive Command Deck. There was always pleasure in the moment of contemplation before his mind turned to command issues; Andromeda was a live being, and he could feel her pulse, her heartbeat.
Come to think of it, he could literally feel her pulse or heartbeat if he wanted to--all he had to do was reach out to Andromeda's android avatar. Seamus Zelazny Harper, their sometimes-lunatic engineer, had built the avatar using old High Guard manuals found on a former High Guard station. He had started with a standard maintenance android as his template and by the time he was done he had created a perfect match for the idealized image that the ship's AI used. The avatar was slender and exotic, but the sylphlike appearance was deceptive. He had fought alongside her on several occasions, and always felt slow and clumsy in comparison.
To his right, standing at one of the bridge consoles, Andromeda--Rommie, as she preferred to be called--turned her head to look at him. Her face was still, and she said nothing, but it was enough to make him take a mental step backward to see what he was doing to pique her curiosity.
He was smiling,...