The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) by Raeden Zen

imagery, a new rendition formed, that of the Earth and a body of land labeled ICELAND and closer still to an island within an island in a lake called THINGVALLAVATN, where a portal of violet and blue light emerged, melting the snow around it, revealing grass and soil.
    The twins turned from the island back to Lagrange point one, where the lower hatch on the shuttle opened. Down fell a surveillance bot. Then the Voltaire froze, and upon the island the bot burst from the portal. The bot scanned the terrain with various viewers—infrared, ultraviolet, organic—and took in a gulp of air. Then it plunged back into the portal. The shuttle shot into motion again, back toward the Earth, while the bot fell from the bottom of the portal at Lagrange point one. Thrusters on its boots sent it hurtling back to the Earth, where it eventually entered a high-altitude skydive. As it neared the surface, it released a parachute from its upper back. It landed. A strike team swooped in to retrieve it in their helicopter, then returned to Area 55.
    “Yes!” Heywood said. “A mission established with the use of surveillance bots. We sent two bots with Captain Micaella Lidesien’s strike team, and in two cases the tests allowed for rejection of the null hypothesis, that backward time travel wasn’t achieved.” Oriana exchanged a look with Pasha. “We’re sure the alternative hypothesis is valid. We achieved backward time travel.”
    “How can you be so sure?” Oriana said. This was all so foreign to her. The superluminal beam, a tachyon beam, would be extremely difficult to create. And if Heywood did, in fact, create a tunnel through space-time, it must’ve been at an astronomical cost—there’d be no way they’d have a third chance.
    “Tests of the atmosphere proved the unalterable truth!” Heywood was saying. He waved his forefinger in the air.
    “Reassortment transformed Earth’s atmosphere,” Mintel said, “and if you two weren’t so green, you’d at least know that.” He held his head in his hand and shook it.
    Heywood sucked in his lower lip and looked at Ruiner. Oriana suspected what he was thinking, that she and her brother weren’t ready for a commonwealth mission. Why did Antosha insist on their participation? Why put the Timescape Mission at risk?
    “We know all about Reassortment,” she said, looking to Pasha. She turned back to Heywood. “So we’re to go back in time and destroy the Reassortment Strain?”
    “Gods, no!” Heywood looked mortified, his eyeballs bulging so far out that Oriana thought they might pop.
    Mintel put his hand on Ruiner’s shoulder. “Cap’n, this isn’t going to work.”
    “Such actions are impossible within the timescape,” Dahlia said.
    “Impossible,” Heywood agreed.
    “Time is laid out in its entirety,” Ruiner said, his voice so wise, so calm, so unlike Mintel’s and Heywood’s that Oriana almost believed him, “with all past and future events located there together.”
    She wouldn’t give in. She’d learned much about physics and theories of time during her development. “That could also be interpreted to mean this mission is a part of the normal timescape,” Oriana said, “a reversal, a change that we—”
    “Our studies don’t suggest that,” Heywood said. “We can achieve superluminal travel and maintain a portal through space-time with exotic matter, but we don’t believe we can influence the worlds on either end, and life on either end should proceed as if no split occurred.”
    Pasha looked at the bot in the hologram, then back to Heywood. “If this is a reconnaissance mission,” he said, “why send a strike team? Why not use your bots?”
    “Antosha believes that if we understand the synthesis of the organism, if we understand how it first reassorted itself, we can conquer it. All we’re doing is bringing back the pure data.” Heywood lowered his eyes. When he raised them, he rendered the Earth and the Beimeni zone, above which appeared