“We were attacked, Doc!” protested Ledbetter. “What’d you want us to do? Stand there and let it slice us in half?”

  She turned on him, her anger flaring. “You don’t understand! This was an opportunity to learn, to communicate! But you... you only know one thing: how to destroy!”

  Her accusing gaze landed back on me, but I was far from caring. Those ships up there—I didn’t know what was coming next, but I figured it couldn’t be good.

  “Ledbetter!” My voice echoed through the cavernous chamber as I turned on the corporal. His face showed confusion as he reported to me. “Grab everything. We’re leaving.”

  Before I could say more, Dr. Sharaf started screeching at us. “You idiots! You absolute idiots! Do you have any idea what you might have done?”

  Ledbetter rolled his eyes. “Here we go...”

  “Ana,” I said, “start the sequence.”

  “But… Dr. Sharaf—”

  “Do it without her. Just go.”

  Ana moved to the first corner of the pyramid and began working the walls. Soon, the vortex would reappear—if we were lucky.

  Sharaf was after me now. “I haven’t called a halt to this expedition, Starn. Not yet.”

  “Well, I’m pulling the plug. You’re welcome to stay here and make friends alone, doc.”

  She gritted her teeth. “All right, you stubborn neurotypical ass,” she muttered. “We’ll go back.”

  A few moments went by, and the vortex sputtered again in our midst. I dared to hope we’d make it back to our own time and place cleanly, without any further disasters.

  But at that moment, a creature slithered into the pyramid, and I knew we were in a world of shit.

  It was huge. It towered over all of us, and it was as different from the cyborgs as night was from day.

  Icy tendrils of dread snaked through my gut as it grabbed Sharaf, her frail body looking like a doll in its monstrous grip.

  “No!” Ana’s shrill scream echoed through the pyramid, her hands dropping away from the runes.

  “Leave!” Sharaf’s voice was hoarse, and her face was pale. “Don’t try to save me, just... go.”

  The hell I would. I moved forward, my left arm clenching. But Ana was faster.

  “No, Starn!” She grabbed my arm, her gaze wild. “We can’t. We can’t fight it. She’s right.”

  I ignored her, unlimbering my rifle. But even as I moved to engage, a strange sensation pulsed through the pyramid.

  A vibration—no, a whisper. The vortex had begun to spin again. The colors moved as if they were alive, morphing and blending into each other in a chaotic mess. Blobs of lavender and yellow whirled like paint suspended in water.

  Sharaf had distracted the monster long enough to buy us the time we needed. The air shimmered, the gateway back to our time shimmering into existence.

  “Starn!” Ana yelled, grabbing my arm again. “We have to go! Now!”

  I glanced at her as she tugged on my hand, trying hopelessly to drag me into the vortex. Instead of complying, I pulled my hand out of hers—and gave her a little push. She vanished into the vortex, and I turned back to the massive being that was still toying with Sharaf.

  The creature before me was an entity straight out of the wildest cosmic nightmares. A being of pure, terrifying intelligence and engineering. Standing well over nine feet tall, the alien was an imposing amalgamation of technology and biology. It had a sleek, pearlescent body that shone with a myriad of colors, like oil on water. These surfaces shifted and changed seemingly at random.

  Its form was vaguely humanoid overall, with two long, slender limbs that ended in multiple articulated digits. Each strange finger glowed with an inner light as if powered by some internal energy source.

  The alien’s torso was a disgusting display of advanced biomechanical engineering. The translucent chest panel allowed one to see within. Organs pumped and oozed. What looked like thin cables of fibrous light were woven into the creature’s frame.

  The most striking feature was its head—or rather, the lack of it. In place of a traditional head, the alien had a hovering holographic display. A ball of light projected an intricate set of brilliant points. Was that a communications system? I wasn’t sure, but the lights did seem to wink on and off and shift at random. Perhaps I was looking at the strange being’s thought patterns. Whatever the case, the whole contraption—or creature—gave off a deep humming sound. It was like the buzz of a bug zapper.

  The biggest surprise was the simple fact it didn’t kill Dr. Sharaf. I’d felt sure it would end her life. Anything so large, so alien, so terrifying had to be a rabid killer, didn’t it?

  But that wasn’t its immediate purpose. Instead, it lifted the old bat and examined her, as a child might pluck at a hapless pet.

  The moment stretched out, a frozen snapshot of time, then it shattered when I gave a fateful order. “Fire!”

  My words were a raw echo in the alien chamber. To my surprise, no one complied.

  Glancing back, I saw I was alone inside the pyramid. There was no one here but me, the fantastical alien—and Dr. Sharaf. The rest of my squad must have jumped into the vortex to save themselves and return home.

  Turning back, I made a hard decision. I wouldn’t leave Sharaf to this fate. Who knew what kind of dissection or worse torment would befall her here in the past? I just couldn’t do it.

  Sharaf was limp in the creature’s hand—if you could call it that. But it still seemed fascinated by her—so I discharged my weapon.

  The sound was deafening, even to my veteran ears. The hammering laser bolts echoed off the stone walls.

  The alien dropped Sharaf, its holographic head flickering in surprise.

  The alien worked some kind of device of its own. Frost spread over the floor. The cyborg that had been slain earlier was hit, and it transformed into a statue of ice. Another moment passed, and I saw my weapon stop firing of its own accord. My hand had frozen on the gun, and I’d lost the ability to fire it.

  That was a moment of horrific realization. I could feel myself beginning to freeze up as well—but somehow, I wasn’t overcome. It was as if a protective bubble sought to push back the stasis field.

  That’s when I remembered. The talisman, the cut stone on the chain that Redgrave had given me—it was still in my pocket.

  I plunged a hand in there and fished it out. The moment my gloves touched the thing, it was like I’d been freed from purgatory.

  In fact, I realized then that I’d been frozen over—almost. But now, I was able to move again. I lifted my rifle, I aimed at the alien which was still poking at Dr. Sharaf curiously—and I unloaded.

  I didn’t aim for the head this time—that head was a projection, a phantom. I shot for the torso instead. All those moving, oozing liquids. The alien sprung a half-dozen leaks and sagged down.

  Advancing, I kept firing in bursts. The thing was hard to kill, but it lay still at last. I picked up Dr. Sharaf—I had to half drag her out of the alien fingers. She was locked in a mask of terror. I pushed her into the vortex and turned back to examine the alien again.

  “What the hell are you, anyway…?” I asked no one.

  Before I could do much more, the room became a blur of movement and energy. A pack of aliens came on. They seemed to be an unending wave. I shot them as they came, backing up toward the vortex.

  They tried to freeze me—but they were unable to. It was as if each of them was compelled to make the attempt. Perhaps they were robots, of a sort.

  In every case, their jolts of frost were doomed to fail, but their distraction gave me the moments I needed to squirt a burst of bolts at each approaching monstrosity.

  How many did I kill? A dozen? Probably that.

  At that moment, my heel almost touched the vortex behind me. It was like a wheel of time and space, churning ceaselessly. The tiny impossible storm cast an ethereal glow across the ancient chamber. Splashes of lavender swirled in a hypnotic dance with streaks of vibrant yellow, spinning around the vortex’s core like nebulous tendrils of celestial smoke.

  With a final, resolute breath, I let it take me. The colors bloomed around me, growing in intensity. Green and indigo stripes appeared and swirled faster. The whole thing became a blur of color that stretched and twisted, swallowing me whole.

  With a rush of sound and sensation that left my head spinning, I was gone. I’d been consumed by the vortex and hurtled into the unknown.

  Chapter 35: A Rift in Time

  Stepping back into the silence of the pyramid, I took a moment to soak in the familiar surroundings. The remnants of the ancient alien architecture seemed just as I’d left them, yet there was an unsettling quietness in the air.

  “What in the fuck happened to your arm, Sergeant?” Ledbetter asked.

  That snapped me out of my thoughts. I turned to him, a frown creasing my brow. “What’re you on about, Ledbetter? You’ve seen it before.”

  Ledbetter gave me a sideways glance, his eyebrows knitted together in bewilderment. “Well, sure, but it wasn’t like... this. It’s damn near doubled in size since we last spoke.”

  A chill ran down my spine. It couldn’t be. They all knew about the mutation. They’d seen it—hell, they’d fought beside it. Yet now, Ledbetter was looking at my arm as if he’d just noticed it. As if... as if it was the first time he’d ever seen the thing.

  I got a funny feeling in my gut as I glanced down at my mutated left arm. It was the same as it had always been, grotesquely large and unnaturally strong. Nothing was different. At least, nothing should be different.

  “Ledbetter…?” I began. There was a sense of dread gnawing at my insides. “How long have I had this funny arm?”

  Ledbetter shrugged. Confusion twisted up his face. “I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess I only just noticed it.”

  My brain felt like it was going to slide off a cliff. Had our meddling in the past altered more than we could have imagined? Had we inadvertently changed our own history, our own realities?

  Looking at Ledbetter’s confused face, my heart sank. I’d managed to return home—but things weren’t the same. They just weren’t.

  “Damn…” I muttered, my gaze running up and down my monstrous arm. “Damn it all to hell…”

  Ledbetter was talking, but I wasn’t listening. I walked away from him and steered back toward the power generator. Ledbetter followed, mumbling something about me having a brain-fart. I wished it was only something so mild.

  Once we reached the alien machine, the rest of Red Company greeted us with wide grins and hard slaps on the back.

  “Welcome back, Sergeant!” Quinn boomed. “A successful venture into the unknown, eh?”

  I gave him a tight nod, trying to push my unsettling conversation with Ledbetter out of my mind. “We went in, and we came back in one piece. I’d call that a win, sir. But… where’s Commodore Saventes? Has he gone back to his ships?”

  A cloud seemed to pass over Quinn’s face. His boisterous smile faded.

  “Saventes?” he repeated as if the name was unfamiliar. “Oh… right. Saventes and his cruisers... they didn’t make it. Redgrave took them out when we claimed the base—remember?”

  The room seemed to spin around me. My stomach was churning now—and not in a normal way.

  The cruiser squadron was... destroyed? All of them? That just wasn’t possible. There had been no word of such a catastrophe before we ventured into the portal.

  “But... he was just here,” I stammered, my brain feeling like it was misfiring. For some reason, I felt like I needed to take a shit—like, right now. What had I done inside that pyramid-thing? “We… we spoke before I left…” I said, trying one more time.

  Quinn shook his head. His smile was gone. “I don’t know what to tell you, Sergeant. The commodore’s warbots helped us take the base, but we didn’t get to the warp cannon in time. Redgrave trashed all those ships—and the commodore went up with them.”

  My mind was a whirlwind. I tried to make sense of his words, tried to reconcile this reality with my own memories. But the pieces wouldn’t fit. They couldn’t fit.

  Had we changed more than we’d realized? Had our journey into the past rewritten not just our personal histories, but the very course of the war?

  The questions swirled in my mind, each one more unsettling than the last. But for now, I had no answers. Only a sinking feeling in my gut, and the dreadful certainty that nothing would ever be the same.

  Feeling kind of floaty—I guess it was some kind of grief or shock—I led my weary squad out of the alien fortress and back into the windswept plains of Ganymede.

  Once I was outside and had a clear field of view, the truth of the lieutenant’s words became undeniable. The ruins of Earth’s cruisers littered the crater floor a few miles off. Their twisted metal hulls weren’t supposed to be there—but I couldn’t deny the reality that was right there in front of my foolish eyes.

  “It wasn’t like this,” I muttered, my gaze sweeping over the wreckage. “Three of those cruisers survived the battle.”

  At my side, Dr. Sharaf stiffened. “What did you say?” she demanded, her voice sharp.

  I’d been speaking half to myself, but I’d slipped up. I turned to face her, and I decided I didn’t care. I had to tell the truth.

  “The cruisers, doc… They survived. But now... they’re a pile of junk.”

  Her face paled beneath her helmet’s dim lighting, her eyes widening in alarm. “That’s not how I remember it… What did you do back there?” she demanded.

  “What? On the far side of the portal…? Nothing special. I killed a few of those weird aliens—the ones that attacked us in the end. That’s all.”

  “You’ve changed history, Starn,” she hissed, her breath fogging up her visor. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  I met her gaze evenly, my jaw set. “I did what I had to do to survive—and I saved your ungrateful butt.”

  “That’s not how time works!” she retorted, her volume rising. “You can’t just change things to suit your needs! There are consequences, Starn! Serious, universe-altering consequences!”

  Her words rang inside my helmet. I didn’t need a doctorate in quantum physics to understand the importance of what she was implying. We’d tampered with the past, and now the present was reshaping itself around our actions. The universe was resetting its clock, and we were rogue gears throwing everything off balance.

  But in the end, what choice did we have? I was a soldier, not a scientist. My kind followed orders. We protected our own, and we did what we had to do to survive. If that meant breaking a few of the all-important laws of time and space, then so be it.

  We trudged along, and the hulk of the nearest cruiser loomed ahead of us. Its blackened hull glittered in the cold light of Jupiter. I kind of considered asking exactly how they’d been destroyed—but I didn’t. It didn’t make much difference, after all. What was done was done.

  Sharaf was uncharacteristically silent, but that blissful respite ended when her gaze locked onto my enlarged arm.

  “Starn…?” she said finally, breaking the silence. “Your arm has mutated—badly. That shouldn’t be possible. Lot Nine should have cleared that up long ago.”

  “What? You mean Lot Six?”

  She blinked at me. “No, you cretin. I said Lot Nine because I meant Lot Nine. I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. Lot Six was a failed experiment. We discontinued its use while I was still in medical school.”

  “Um… well… let’s just imagine I’ve had a lot of Lot Six shots. What can Lot Nine do that’s better?”

  She gaped at me for a moment. “Another paradox?” she whispered. “Have we detected a fresh hole you’ve ripped into the very fabric of this universe!?”

  “Uh… probably.”

  Dr. Sharaf sighed and struggled to contain her outburst. “Lot Nine is superior. It can reverse mutations—to an extent.”

  I glanced down at my freakishly swollen limb. “A new drug, huh? Well, that’s nice.”

  She nodded, her eyes still fixed on my arm. “Yes. You shouldn’t have that level of disability. It’s unsightly.”

  I snorted. “Maybe it was a good thing I killed a few extra aliens… well… it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Oh, but it does, Sergeant,” she argued. “In this timeline, we’ve made more advances in mutation treatments. Cox... he had a tail—you know about that, right?”

  “Yes. He had the same problem before I left. You cut it off, and he was in constant pain.”

  She blinked at me. “How barbaric. His tail has been completely absorbed by his body. No amputation was needed. I can do the same for you.”

  I chuckled, flexing the fingers of my monstrous hand. “And here I thought this big arm was part of my charm.”

  Sharaf gave me a stern look. “It’s your choice, Starn. But the drug could help you. You wouldn’t have to... live with that.”

  I looked at my arm, at the thick, gnarled veins that snaked across the bulging muscles. It was a constant reminder of the battles I’d fought, of the enemies I’d taken down. Despite the pain, despite the constant stares and whispers, I couldn’t deny the confidence it gave me.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said finally, turning my gaze back to the path ahead. “But for now, the arm stays.”

  Sharaf grunted, but she didn’t argue. We walked on in silence. The hulking remains of the Earth cruisers passed by. They were a horrible reminder of the cost of our victory... and the unknown price we had yet to pay.

  After we reached the ramps and passed through the airlocks, I was relieved to be back aboard Borag. At least the ship seemed familiar.

  I weaved my way through the chaotic hustle of Borag’s command center, passing harried crew members and the constant hum of machinery. The heavy metal door to Captain Hansen’s quarters hissed open, revealing her hunched over a glowing console, her face taut with concentration.

  I cleared my throat. “Captain, got a moment?”