Date Point: 15y10m
Ceres, Asteroid Belt, Sol
Sam Jordan
Sam honestly hadn’t felt this… alive in his life. He was dancing on a knife-edge, riding on the thrill and danger of discovery. Every time he outwitted the investigation, every time he slipped through a door while it was closing, it was…
He’d never imagined a feeling like this. And all of it, all of it, for the greater good of both mankind and the galaxy. Freedom beckoned: all he had to do was stay one step ahead of the pursuit.
If his sponsor hadn’t shown him how to accomplish his little time-distortion trick, it all would have been impossible.
At least the weapon was ready. It had taken him weeks to recover the physics package, but that was all part of the plan. Designing and building a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser around it from spare parts while convincingly falsifying the requisition orders to cover his tracks had been… thrilling. His innocent, chirpy smile and trustworthy tone of voice had both been tested, and they’d held up. He always had a convincing alibi, he always managed to deflect suspicion just enough.
If they only knew. They were smart… but Sam was smarter. That knowledge was a drug.
He checked his timepiece again. He had three minutes. Good. Two minutes spare.
The gyroscopes were working properly, this time. His contraption looked janky and hand-built, but by God it was precision engineering. It had to be, for this job.
The target was, of course, invisible to the human eye. He was relying entirely on instruments and precision timing to take this shot, and had only one opportunity. He had to hit a moving target from more than twenty AU away, at precisely the right millisecond. That kind of precision defied belief, sometimes…
…But everything seemed to be ready. There was nothing more to tinker with at this point: It’d either succeed, or fail. It was out of his hands.
He checked the timer and the aim one last time, then left the little crater he was using for this and bounded back across the Ceres surface in three long leaps. As the dust left the temporal acceleration field he’d rigged up around his suit it hung frozen in the vacuum, like a still photo. It was a strange effect, with strange consequences. He’d nearly broken an airlock the first time he tried to let it out: as it turned out, doors didn’t much like it when different parts of them were experiencing wildly different degrees of time dilation. Just another daring escapade to give him a rush.
He signed the suit back in using Drew M’s access code and dismantled the field generator into its innocuous component parts. It didn’t feel great to use the diligent Aussie as the fall guy, but that was the price of freedom. Besides, Drew’s name would be cleared in the long run. Sam didn’t have any illusions that he could evade capture forever: he just needed to evade capture for long enough. Whatever came after would be the price he was willing to pay.
After all: Humanity didn’t belong in a cage.
It was time for the Sol Shield to come down.