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“The device appears to be protected. It,” Ashe paused, but there was no diplomatic way to admit it, “deleted the drone from my assessment team before it could report.”

“Deleted?” The Chameleon’s man asked the question. “Permanently? Was it sentient?”

What did the worried look he sent his woman mean? Not a shock when Lurch didn’t respond or even twitch.

“An assessment team is always non-sentient. A sentient nanite won’t enter a human without permission.” Sending in an assessment team was on the edge of dubious, but necessary under the circumstances. It didn’t lessen the shock of a deletion and there was the data loss added to all the other troubling nanites attacks. “It might be recoverable if we open the device, but Lurch thinks it unlikely.” Ashe stared at the man, but it didn’t help dilute the intensity of the Chameleon’s gaze boring into the side of her head like Ashe was the one who needed her head examined. A deflection seemed in order. “When I touched him, he tagged me with a tracking mineral.”

Chameleon made a face. “It’s annoying but harmless. We’ve altered the settings so he can’t transport anyone off planet.”

Ashe felt that gut twitch again. “How many women has he tagged?”

“Anyone he’s managed to touch who is under thirty? We have discussed it and decided to let him think he’s getting away with it for now.” Her brows arched, then descended. “It bothers you?”

“Minerals are one of the few things that can be tracked in the stream.” She gave Chameleon a few seconds of simmering, before adding, “The amount he used is too small, of course—”

“Of course.”

“But a concentration of the mineral in one place could be considered in the nature of a beacon…” Ashe shrugged.

You should not enjoy this quite so much.

I know, but she’s so smart, she should have figured out it makes no sense for him to do this when diplomacy is working.
Ashe stiffened.
Did he do this in the alternate time lines?

His assent came without words.
You believe this is part of a larger plot?

I don’t know what I believe, but I need to know what happened with this man in the alternate time lines.
The download of information was immediate, she’d give him that, and nice after all the withholding. She frowned, as she absorbed the data, taking the question to the room.

“Smith tried to remove the Chameleon from the time line.” Could this be how they discovered she might be a lynch pin? But she could detect no sign that her removal caused an instability from Lurch’s memories. There had been two time resets, which was interesting, though she wasn’t clear exactly how just yet.

The records are incomplete.

They aren’t just incomplete. They start here, don’t they?
Ashe felt a jolt of shock. No wonder he protected this time line so fiercely. It was the start of sentient nanites. If someone wanted to eliminate them, this was the flash point to do it. His silence felt like a shrug.
It is possible that the time line didn’t have time to react, given the relatively short duration of the removal. In the stream, two years is nothing.

Something caused the reset.

If someone is tracking resets, from the protection of the base, then it might make them suspicious but they couldn’t know—

—without boots on the ground. Was Smith those boots until the reset kicked him out? Or is Shan the boots?

She looked at Chameleon, following a feeling, rather than a clear path. “Your nanites couldn’t gain control of his ship? Have you tried nanite infiltration in this time line?”

Chameleon’s body language altered to threatening. “We didn’t have any reason—”

Ashe sighed. “Even though he has persisted through three time lines?”
Not as smart as she thinks.

I was there and I failed to make the connection.

Ashe had a sense that they’d figured something out, but what? Obviously the move to contain the nanites was leaking back through time, but why the persistence with
this
time,
this
place?
Can
events
be lynch pins?
Before he could answer, if he could answer it, her thoughts jumped again.
What if the—

—big bug.

Okay, the big bug. What if this big bug is using this time and this place as a marker or a measuring stick?

Or a laboratory.

He fed her more data from the Chameleon’s meeting with the time wardens. No wonder she called them time creeps. On the surface, it appeared that this Smith had manipulated events to bring Chameleon to this place and time, or he’d worked to remove her? It was possible he’d managed to shift the time line but they didn’t know what the time line had been before intervention. Based on the Chameleon’s time signature and her connection to her man, Ashe wasn’t so sure Smith had changed this time or if he had, he hadn’t changed it much. Shan may have persisted, but so had the couple and the nanites as sentient beings.

Ashe tried her time senses, letting the stream, and it’s eddies, filter through her in a way she wouldn’t normally do. It was uncomfortable, almost painful to do without entering the stream. Now that she focused on the stream, she felt it almost spin around the base. It was a relief to shut them off again.

“This place could also be a sort of lynch pin.” It might explain why the Council would make it the base, perhaps even how the Garradians were able to use it to create the space/time portal.

It is heavily infused with nanites, non-sentient, but with the ability to adapt and learn.

Ashe realized Lurch was talking to all of them when the Chameleon’s man spoke up. “You seem very fixated on the nanites.”

“You’ve seen them deleted before coming here.” Chameleon wasn’t asking.

A slow nod. “There are indications that someone is targeting nanites across the time line.”

Ashe thought the Chameleon was as pale as she could get. It seemed she was wrong.

“Targeting as in eradicating?”

“The evidence suggests extinction is the desired outcome.” She studied Chameleon, sensing more than just nanite love bothering her. “In my time, there are factions unhappy with the Nanite Nation.”

“Unhappy how?” Chameleon’s tone demanded a response.

“Unrest. Suspicion—”

“Of what?”

“Genetic manipulation. That extending host lives is thinly disguised species selection. Demands for wider access.”

“Wider access?” The man frowned. “Access is limited?”

“Nanites are a free nation, living inside people they have chosen, and who have agreed to host them. It is a loose confederation of host and hosted.” Though Lurch had lived in her since she was a child, there had been a point of choosing, mutual acceptance of the alliance. Had she requested it, he would have left. “It is an issue of freedom, not access. Many who push for access have motives that are less than stellar. Nanite technology is less constrained, but there are limits on what’s available for security reasons.” As a host, Ashe knew more than most about the limitations, challenges and concerns of host and hosted. For those on the outside, she’d observed both fear and fascination. That she understood, the paranoia, not so much. “There are some small factions that wish to be free of what they call nanite domination, others who suspect the nanites of controlling the Time Service.”

“And do they?” Chameleon’s man asked.

Before finding out how nanite infused the base was, she’d have said no. Did the Council know what they owed the nanites, even as they sought to limit sentient nanites access to the Service? Was that the reason they tried to limit access? Again she felt a quiver of knowing, but not quite knowing what she knew.

“Trackers with sentient nanites are rare in the service and most are Youngers, offspring of an Older.” She paused, then added, “I doubt I would have been accepted had they realized I host an Older, but they assumed that I hosted a Younger. Most Olders don’t choose a child as a host.”

“You’ve had Lurch since you were a child.” It wasn’t a question, so Ashe didn’t bother to respond, just waited as wheels within wheels turned in the Chameleon’s eyes. “Small groups can grow,” she spoke again, with no small measure of grim. “And if one or more of them got access to time travel—” She broke off, thoughts flickering through her gaze. “You said it was bad out there. How bad is bad? Are we facing a time reset?”

“A time reset would be, not good, but not the worst that could happen,” Ashe said.

“You must not have gone through one if you think that,” the Chameleon’s man said, with more than a hint of wry.

“That I know about,” she pointed out. How to explain the unexplainable? How to sort instinct from actual knowledge? And make sure she didn’t launch a new round of paradox tremors. “At least with a time reset, time would mostly return to what it is supposed to be.”

“Mostly?”

“It is not a perfect process. Or a tidy one.”

“No, it’s not.” Chameleon echoed the wry of her man. “So you’re not worried about a reset. What does worry you?”

“There are indications of competing interests in the stream.” It wasn’t a perfect description of what she’d seen in the stream. “If someone is trying to—”

“Game time?”

Ashe needed Lurch to explain the slang, before she could nod. “Yes, if someone is trying to game time, they would need to neutralize or at least minimize any reset.” Did nanites play some part in the reset process? The data download from the alternate time lines suggested they did or could if they chose. “If time resets, I would assume our time gamer—this big bug’s plan would be impacted as well.” Whoever it was existed outside the time line, which pointed back to the Council. It was possible there was some other entity able to figure out the science, but the Service was being targeted, which seemed to point back to the Council—or at least inside knowledge. “There is no research or data to support this, but the stream feels” she hesitated, but there was no right term for what she’d felt, so she settled for, “contrary and there are signs of two forces working in opposition to each other, or at least, that is what my time senses, my instincts, tell me.” She expected to get blasted for this, but Chameleon nodded in almost approval.

“How is that possible?”

If Chameleon had asked the question, Ashe might have returned a sharper answer, but it came from her man. Still, it did not seem wise to admit just how new she was to the Time Service. Before she could compose a response, the Chameleon filled that gap.

“If they are doing it, then it’s possible. The real question is what’s their end game? What’s their desired outcome? In addition to nanite extinction.”

“If time became unstable, someone who knew how to manipulate it, could—in theory—set time on a totally new course. Lives, history, planets, and galaxies would all be altered and the survivors wouldn’t know it.”

“Except the time wardens,” the man pointed out.

“The Time Service is out of time,” Ashe conceded, not sure if she should continue.

“You’re being targeted, too,” Chameleon finished what Ashe didn’t want to say.

She nodded. “Someone has placed traps in places trackers go, the only place you’d know for sure to find us.” She found a memory. “You were held in one of these stations in the stream.”

“Yes, we were, by Smith.”

“I observed one of these traps. They were similar to the stations, though they’d been altered. I saw nanites extinguished by these traps.”

Ashe didn’t like to admit it, but it felt better to share the burden, to feel not so alone. She’d never faced a situation that Lurch couldn’t help her with, in fact, most situations in her life he’d taken her along for the ride. Now she had to figure out how to stop this time stream assault and do it without getting Lurch killed.

“And the host?” Chameleon’s voice was beyond grim, well into deadly.

“The host was alive when I left.”

“You knew him?”

“I was assigned to him for the duration of the drill.”

“You left him?”

Ashe tensed at the implied condemnation, could almost hear the echo of the adage
we don’t leave our people behind
. “He was senior and he left me. And I had no way to free him. We couldn’t even assess the trap without extinguishing more nanites. I would have been trapped with him.” Her chin lifted. “We did leave observers behind.” That she had lacked time to check on, events had moved so swiftly. “And I had other, more pressing priorities.”

“Well, here’s one for you. You need to get out there and find my brother.” Chameleon leaned in, held back only by her man’s hand on her arm.

“No.” Ashe lifted her chin higher. “That’s the wrong play. This man, your intersection predates these other incursions.” She hoped she was right about that, but it felt right. “If we solve the problem here, if we can track it back,” and possibly forward, “it should help ease the stress on time. If we get side tracked, whoever is doing this could end our lives while we follow the wrong track. Something about the Ambassador, this place and time, matters—”

“I get your point.”

It seemed the Chameleon wasn’t used to lectures or being told no. Then she smiled, one edged with wicked.

“I guess that means we have to examine his head.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Faustus shifted his virtual presence to the arrival bay before Doctor called to tell him the drone was incoming. He didn’t need the notification. He could see the signs of it approaching, even at the top of his tower. It was possible he could see the sway more at the top of his tower, yet another reason to be thankful for his ability to be a virtual visitor. That movement would be most unpleasant for his stomach. He’d always suffered from motion sickness, which made it all the more ironic he’d ended up traveling through space.

He wondered which he’d see when the drone arrived. The specimen or the bloody mess that remained of the specimen? An unfamiliar excitement gripped him. He wasn’t sure he liked it, though he was careful not to let it show as Tobias and Doctor joined him at arrival dock. He didn’t look at Tobias. Now was not the time to be distracted with that problem. He wanted to give Tobias his full attention at the optimal time. Multi-tasking denied him the full experience of their pain and his pleasure. And after he finished dealing with Tobias, Glarmere and Carig should be secured. He’d gotten two arrival alerts before he shifted locations, alerts that must be them. He hadn’t observed the surgery for a while, so he might stop by for that. A pity he needed them alive. The Doctor would have to use sedation when he inserted the devices.