Time Jumpers Episode 11: Planck Time

By Philip Bosshardt

Chasing a renegade Chinese seedship across time, jumpship Cygnus has arrived at a time several billion years after the Big Bang. There are few stars, fewer galaxies. Looking for the planet where the seedship went off course and crashed, the time jumpers surmise that this is also the homeworld of the hated enemy Coethi. They pick up faint signals from the ship and follow them to an unstable star and a small planetary system. The Chinese ship seems to have crashed here.
On the surface, Dringoth and the crew of 1st Time Displacement Battery find the whole planet is nothing but bots, mutated from the remnants of the Chinese ship. They determine that, with the local star-sun unstable, they may be able to strand all the early Coethi bots on the planet until the star goes supernova, as Time Guard Intelligence believes actually happened. If they can keep the Coethi from dispersing into space until their own sun goes belly up, the entire Coethi race, mutated from ancient Chinese bots, will cease to exist and Uman civilization and the Alliance will be safe.
But when one of the crew, Evelyn M’Bela, is swarmed and bots infest her head, Captain Dringoth must make a hard choice. Cygnus leaves the planet and jumps back to her own truetime to take care of M’Bela, but instead they wind up near the planet Storm, of the Sigma Albeth system, where they have been before, installing the original Time Twister. Worse they have arrived in the very midst of a Coethi attack. Somehow their efforts to strand the Coethi in the past haven’t worked out...yet.
Dringoth is injured in the jump and the XO must take command. Golich decides to use a dangerous tactic to decoy the swarm away from Storm, so they can do a nanobotic insert on M’Bela.
But the bots inside Queenie’s brain and the greater swarm beyond are in contact with each other and the battle to save M’Bela takes places on one of the strangest battlefields the time jumpers have ever experienced, with the very life of a critical crew member in the balance.
Eleventh episode in the Time Jumpers serial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463550083

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 11: Planck Time

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 Jumpers is 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 to www.smashwords.com on 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

‘Operation Galactic 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: Here Be Demons

"Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once and it might sail out of your hands forever."

Anthony Doerr

Jumpship Cygnus

Time Stream: T-000

T-date: Unknown

Nathan Golich noticed the ChronoNav readout as soon as Evelyn M’Bela did. It was reading T-000. Neither of them knew exactly what that meant.

Cygnus had made the jump from the late Carboniferous Period of ancient Urth successfully, but to where?

Dringoth called out, Queenie, where are we?

ChronoNav’s confused, Skipper. It’s reading all zeroes…T-000. It doesn’t know where we are.

Dringoth nodded, figuring first things first. Okay, secure the jump. Commander, bring us to all stop.

While Golich was powering down the singularity drive and all propulsors, bringing Cygnus to a complete halt and nulling all rates, Dringoth chanced a glance out the nearest porthole.

There were no galaxies visible and only a few massive stars. The Universe was much smaller in this epoch, filled with a diffuse light, a plasma fog. A few stars were ‘switching on,’ backlighting the fog. Normal matter was still developing, with strings or loops in the spacetime foam ripping parts of itself into numerous micro black holes, which then transmuted the foam into elementary particles.

Dringoth called down to Alicia Yang on E deck. Alicia, how’s URME coming along?

They had lost the master getting away from Configuration Zero in that cave in east Africa before jumping to their present location. But Yang had done yeoman work re-generating the bot master in the hours after the jump.

Yang came back, Most of the re-gen is done, Captain. The master’s functional now. The core’s complete, along with the actuator mast and main platform. Power cells, sensors, propulsors are coming along. I still have to lay in all the growth triggers, learn in comm circuits, check all algorithms. But’s he functional.

Bring him up here. I want some of his wisdom on where we are and what we’re seeing.

Right away, Skipper.

Yang came up to the command deck and launched URME. The swarm seemed thin and drifted slowly about the deck but responded to commands and questions appropriately, albeit with a little fuzzing and fritzing in his voice.

There are all kinds of theories about what this era would look like, Captain. My guess is we’re still in the time of recombination. Maybe past it. Just a few billion years after the time of photon decoupling. We saw an earlier period of this same epoch on the First Light mission.

Golich just shook his head. They didn’t teach this at the Academy, URME.

URME gathered itself around M’Bela’s search and surveillance console and tried to explain. "The best theories of cosmologists talk about this time, right after the Big Bang. At this point, the universe was a hot, dense plasma of photons, leptons, and quarks: the Quark epoch. At 10−6 seconds, the Universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently to allow for the formation of protons: the Hadron epoch. This plasma was effectively opaque to electromagnetic radiation due to something called Thomson scattering by free electrons, as the mean free path each photon could travel before encountering an electron was very short. This is like the current state of the interior of our Sun. As the universe expanded, it also cooled. Eventually, the universe cooled to the point that the formation of neutral hydrogen was favored, and the fraction of free electrons and protons as compared to neutral hydrogen decreased to a few parts in 10,000.

"Recombination involved electrons binding to protons or hydrogen nuclei to form neutral hydrogen atoms. Because direct recombination to the ground state…the lowest energy state…of hydrogen is very inefficient, these hydrogen atoms generally formed with the electrons in a high energy state, and the electrons quickly transitioned to their low energy state by emitting photons. URME pixelated slightly, as a noticeable wave washed through his still-forming swarm formation. I think that’s what we’re seeing now…photon decoupling."

Dringoth considered that. We’re the first people to ever see this.

Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel any better, Golich said.

Dringoth checked his console. We do have maneuvering with propulsors, at least. Queenie, do a full sweep, all sensors. I want to know what’s around us.

M’Bela complied, studying her scans. Sensors showing nothing at all, Captain. EMs, thermal, radar, no point sources. Just this diffuse glow, like we’re in a fog.

URME spoke up from his station, the Temporal Fire Director console. I’m seeing something, Captain. Quantum effects. It’s very slight and I’m trying to narrow it down.

Dringoth was instantly alert. What is it, URME?

Quantum wake, sir…possible decoherence wake disturbance. Just popped up.

Golich snapped his fingers. Hundred to one, that’s our target. But we don’t know what the Chinese seedship signature is like.

Dringoth left his seat, and went aft to see for himself. Show me.

URME manipulated the display and an amorphous blob centered on his scope, very faint, first there, then not there. Could be nothing, sir. It’s just very faint. Possibly some kind of singularity drive, pulsing to maneuver around.