Page 58 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
“Slightly panicking about the black hole.”
“Remember when I said I was more like my mother? She was the one that figured outhowto take a sample of a black hole and engineered a metal that could withstand it. She wrote her thesis on our black hole, and it was her research that helped me figure out time travel and time machine construction. It’s perfectly safe in one ofmymachines. I wouldn’t go near it if anyone else is promising it’s safe and doesn’t have access to my mother helping them with tiny details.”
“She’s brilliant,” Omi said. “She’s like Kuka and took some medical classes while she was at university. She didn’t complete the surgeon program, but her classes led her to develop some of the tech I’m being taught now.”
“She’s also just nice,” Enix said.
She’d better be nice to Enix, or I wouldn’t be nice. That was good to know because I guess she was going to be my mother-in-law. Was that even a thing on other planets?
“If it wasn’t safe, I never would have brought other people with me when I tried to time travel and if I thought it wasn’t safe for my Velne, I’d just stay on this planet with you.”
“Okay. I trust you. But if a black hole turned Big Daddy into a pervert, it might give me the ability to haunt the shit out of all of you if I die.”
“You won’t,” Omi said. “I stowed away, and I made it.”
“Good point. I usually have to freak out before any major decision, and now that it’s done, I can leave the planet now. Literally, not in a bottle of Everclear this time.”
“Then, strap in. We’re about to visit my planet seven thousand years in the past.”
Maybe. If that was where Big Daddy wanted us to end up.
My initial plan was to go back seven thousand years on my planetfirstso I could see how a human got the holy texts here and go forward from there. I couldn’t exactly do that because my brother finished his time machine first and could have been on Earth doing literally anything.
It wasn’t just him hunting the Devouring Mother. My brother was a lot, and I was actually worried about him. We didn’t know enough about Earth and my brother was entitled on a good day. There was a part of me that worried he’d also try to dominate that entire planet and try to crown himself king because that’s what he wanted to do to our galaxy.
But that was settled. I wished it hadn’t come down to killing my brother, but he really gave me no choice. My mother would understand, but my father was probably going to grill me over every little detail. Valtens ended up the way he did because of my father. My mother was the queen, and my father was her consort. My father never really liked that.
But first things first. Ideeplyregretted that the first time Baxter got to time travel, it was just two weeks back in her own city. Big Daddy tried to make up for it by letting her fly him. I wasn’t even sure if he would take us back now with me driving.
Everyone was strapped in but me. I’d be setting the controls and strapped myself down because anything could happen in a black hole, even with all my preparations.
“Want to go home seven thousand years in the past?” I asked, pressing the button to activate the black hole matter.
“Maybe,”Big Daddy said.
I didn’t know if he was just being difficult, or he was about to take us somewhere I’d never been to before and have to figure it out. Big Daddy liked to mess with us sometimes. Taking us where we needed to go instead of where we wanted to go ended up being a good thing, but that wasn’t the only way he fucked with me.
I just sighed and strapped myself down. Wecouldend up on my planet seven thousand years ago or we could end up somewhere entirely different. And I hated that I basically had zero control over that, but I was the one who wanted a sentient time machine, so it was my fault.
“Hang on tight, Big Mommy.”
“What does that mean? Oh, holy shit!”
Yeah, my time machine didn’t really work by shooting off into space and breaking the atmosphere if we were leaving a planet. It was instantaneous. The black hole matter in Big Daddy’s core was yanked through time and space back home to its original black hole.
This was a little different from Baxter’s first experience time traveling because we were leaving her galaxy. It was a bit of a yank through the black hole and then once we were clear of the gravitational pull, it got a lot smoother.
I could tell when we were through and there was something I needed to show her. I unbuckled and held out my hand.
“Come see.”
“Is it safe now? Sorry, not sorry if I puke on your shoes. I used to get car sick as a kid because my parents drove like what we just did.”
“Completely safe.”
“I’ll hold your hair back if you get sick,” Torrek said.
“Wait, nope. Maybe. Yeah, I’m not going to puke.”
