Time Jumpers Episode 3: A Small Navigation Error

By Philip Bosshardt

The time jumpers have dived through a fissure in time in the Hollows of the satellite Gibbons’ Grotto, to avoid being swarmed by the Bugs. No one has ever gone through an Evans-Klein fissure before, and survived. Now Monthan Dringoth and three others find themselves boarding a derelict ship in a familiar time stream. It’s the same ship Dringoth commanded in an earlier battle against the Coethi. With a chance to clear his name and reputation from this previous encounter, Dringoth makes ready to re-fight the same battle, only there are differences.
One difference is another time jumper who came through the fissure with Dringoth. Vijay Surat knows Dringoth is a prima donna willing to risk everything to re-fight a battle that has already been fought, trying to change the outcome. Surat leads a mutiny against Dringoth’s crazy crashjump tactics, but he fails and after an aborted encounter with the Bugs again, the jumpers find themselves adrift in voidtime, having abandoned their battle-damaged ship.
Now the jumpers are alone and clad only in their hypersuits, cut off from all time streams, marooned in voidtime, in a seemingly hopeless situation. Their life support won’t last forever. They’re trapped. Dringoth has been through this before, after the First Battle of the Gauntlet. Now he has to devise strategies to keep his crew alive and their hopes up while he figures a way out of their predicament.
Any chance of being rescued lies in doing something no jumper has ever done before, something Time Guard regulations strictly prohibit, something temporal physics says should be impossible. But it seems to be their only hope.
Third episode in the Time Jumpers serial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463223697

Philip Bosshardt

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.

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Time Jumpers

Episode 3: A Small Navigation Error

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Philip Bosshardt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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A few words about this series….

Time Jumpersis a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.

Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.

A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.

There will be 12 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.

Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.

Uploads will be made towww.smashwords.comon approximately the schedule below:

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

‘Marooned in Voidtime’ February 1, 2019

‘Keaton’s World’ March 1, 2019

‘A Small Navigation Error’ April 15, 2019

‘Cygnus Rift’ May 3, 2019

‘The Time Guard’ May 31, 2019

‘First Light Corridor June 28, 2019

‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’ August 2, 2019

‘OperationGalactic Hammer’August 30, 2019

‘Byrd’s Draconis’ September 27, 2019

‘First Jump Squadron’ November 1, 2019

‘Planck Time’ November 29, 2019

‘The Time Twister’ January 3, 2020

Chapter 1: The River of No Man Passes

We behold what we are and we are what we behold.

The Bhagavad Gita

Time Stream Unknown

T-date: Unknown

Monthan Dringoth was alone. Alone in a way no human ever had been before.

Trying to escape the collapse of the Hollows when the Time Twister was turned on the labyrinth, Dringoth, Surat, Yang and Chagos dove through the time fissure buried inside Gibbons’ Grotto and soon found themselves riding a dragon’s tail, a chaotic and convulsive seam of time called The Flux. In their jolt days back at the Academy, both Surat and Dringoth had spent part of one summer ducking into and out of time streams, just to get a taste of what time jumping was all about.

For Dringoth, it always led to a day of bad headaches. It was known officially as TST—Temporal Survival Training. Second-year jolts called it the Flux Tube.

The purpose of the Flux Tube was to teach jolts how to survive alone in a time stream outside of a jumpship, clad only in a hypersuit. The Flux Tube itself was like an extended airlock, attached to the side of a jumpship and fitted to the lockout chamber on the ship’s F deck.

Two scared jolts were ensconced inside the Tube.

After making several jumps across time streams, said jolts were discharged into the time stream and left on their own for several days to a week. All they possessed were the normal complement of equipment that came with a hypersuit…and each other. The ship soon disappeared.

Training said that the proper procedure for a jolt marooned in a time stream without a ship was to survive and return to the original time stream by using temporal navigation, by analyzing the convergence rates of worldlines around them, and by judicious use of their own suit boost to effect what the instructors like to call ‘chronometric maneuvering.’

Yeah, right.

Flux was the term given by temporal physics to the turbulent boundary region between known time streams.

The conditions of the TST exercise required jolts to: 1. Provide all needed sustenance for themselves and their buddies; 2. Correctly analyze and take sightings of the time stream and maneuver successfully through several flux boundaries and time streams using only their hypersuits; and 3. Return to the original temporal coordinates in a set time period, hopefully in one piece.

For TST, jolts were grouped into squads of four. Buddy-jumping was the rule of the day. Mutual support and cooperation were required to survive and was expected. TST never involved voidtime or anything like an Evans-Klein fissure…they were too dangerous.

Now, Dringoth floated silently alone, somewhere and somewhen. Four of them had gone through the fissure inside the Hollows on Gibbons’ Grotto.

So where were the other three?

As a young child, Monthan Dringoth had always loved taking a bath. Lots of words could describe the feeling: security, serenity, safety, warmth, cocoon. Not words a three-year old would use, but you get the idea.

Thoughts like these and others came to Dringoth. He was a little disoriented.

Where am I? What is this?

He remembered stepping through the fissure inside the Hollows…Surat, Yang, Chagos, they had all been there…the cave…the brilliant light….

He decided to try a coupler link to Yang. All he got was static.

For sure, this was no TST exercise but the words of Jump Commander Sims, his instructor, kept coming back to him. Maybe taking a warm bath as a three-year old wasn’t the best way to describe being adrift in some unknown time stream. Try this: buried under the covers on a cold winter morning. No? How about stumbling about in a darkened bedroom trying to find your slippers? Or: getting separated from your Mom and Dad on the boardwalk at Loch Lithgow for three hours, with all the panic and frantic worry. Or: locked in a closet by your big sister, fumbling around with jackets and coat hangers.

Monthan Dringoth decided to try a more logical approach to figuring this out.

I think, therefore I am. At least, he thought he was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than his thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.

I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.

A snatch of memory came to him: The rhythms at which time flows are determined by the gravitational field, a real entity with its own dynamic that is described by the equations of Einstein. If we overlook quantum effects, time and space are aspects of a great jelly in which we are immersed. But the world is a quantum one and gelatinous spacetime is also an approximation. There is neither space nor time—only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another…

Gelatinous spacetime? Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.

Now, he was sure of it. There was someone else out there here. Just a snatch of voice, a snippet whispering in the ether—

Does anybody hear me… out there—

It was Alicia Yang.

Yang! I hear you…tune your coupler…you’re very faint.

Dringoth kicked himself around to look everywhere, then stopped the rotation with a pulse of his suit boost. Something shadowy crept across his field of vision, across the starfield.

How’s this, Captain? Am I coming in better?

Much better. Where are you?

Some mumbling and fumbling. I think…I don’t know, maybe a couple hundred meters behind you. Make a gesture or something, so I can see you.

Dringoth waved his arms and kicked his legs for a moment. He didn’t want to do too much of that. Suit boost wouldn’t last forever.

Ah—

A few minutes later, his legs were brushed by something and he looked down.