Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (21 page)

Roland was a bit behind. “Who is Skippy Africanus?”

Edith continued. “The Patrol has been a reactionary force, protecting our timeline. The agents, that’s what the individual members are called, each have specific eras and locations assigned that they’re responsible for.”

“How many agents?” Moms asked.

“Thousands,” Edith said. “But most are almost always gone. In the past. On patrol in their time. Only a few are here, were here, at any one time. Usually checking in. Making sure the flow is smooth. Doing research. The weird thing is, only a handful of the agents are from our time, each with a responsibility for a large era. The vast majority of operatives are from our past. Recruited for their expertise in their own specific eras, usually the duration of their lifetime, overlapping, of course with agents before and after. No current-era agent is allowed to go into the past unless they are matched up with an agent from that era. Those past agents are recruited and then trained by the Patrol to act as agents.”

“Trained where?” Nada asked.

“I don’t know,” Edith said. She shook her head. “That’s something that’s not clear in my memory. I know I know. I just can’t remember.”

Nada shot Frasier a dirty look, which was a wasted effort.

“That has to be a major operation,” Eagle said. “To adequately cover our entire past around the planet would require thousands and thousands of people. Think of the time and geography that needs to be covered.”

“The information given agents from the past,” Edith said, “is tightly controlled. They’re told only what they absolutely need to know in order to deal with any ripples in their time. The Patrol works very hard to make sure they don’t know their future.”

“Makes sense,” Doc said. “No one misses someone from the past. But someone from the present in the past could cause a problem. No matter how well trained one was, it would be impossible to completely blend in to a different era.”

“
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
,” Eagle said.

“Exactly,” Edith agreed.

Roland was starting to twitch and Scout went and stood by him. “Ignore most of what they’re saying,” she whispered to him. “Nada will tell you who to shoot.”

That soothed the big man for the moment.

“So these agents,” Moms said, having had a moment to think this through, “are probably still in place, doing their jobs.”

Edith nodded. “Most likely. But. We can’t communicate with them without the HUB. That’s the portal through which they come and go. Came and went. But there’s a good chance those in their eras, which they are experts in, are indeed still in place. The problem is, when you’re in an era, it will take time to realize a ripple has been enacted. By then, in that time, it’s most likely too late to negate the ripple. The agent can come back to the present through the HUB, research the ripple or the shift, if it gets to that, and then go back, perhaps with a current operative, to earlier in their era, and make the correction by preventing the change.

“
And
, more importantly, we can’t tell them if there’s been a problem in their time if we see the ripple from our perspective looking back, but they haven’t noticed it. Most ripples are noted in our present, and we go back and alert the agents of the appropriate era to take corrective action, negating even the need for them to come to our time. That’s the more usual Protocol by far.”

“I got a bad headache,” Roland said.

“Go on,” the Keep prompted.

“So a ripple is different than a shift?” Doc asked.

Edith cleared her throat. “I was told it is extraordinarily unlikely that a single ripple can cause a shift in our timeline. But a series of ripples, coordinated on a specific path, can cause what they call a shift. That’s when something begins to change in our present.”

“That’s what we’ve begun to experience,” Moms said. “The weird stuff that’s been happening to us.”

“What weird stuff?” Foreman asked, but he was ignored by the team.

“Are the changes permanent?” Doc asked. “You say the Patrol can go back and revert the timeline?”

“The Patrol can fix the shift,” Edith said. “Whether that reverts ancillary changes is something I don’t know.”

“What?” Roland said.

“The big danger,” Edith continued, “is if there are enough shifts which aren’t corrected, we could get a time tsunami.”

“That don’t sound good,” Roland muttered.

“It’s never happened,” Edith said. “But if twelve hours go by in the present and the shift isn’t corrected, then it will be a tsunami. Our timeline will change permanently.”

“Why twelve hours?” Doc asked.

Edith shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Geez,” Nada said. “We’re flying blind here.”

“That’s the countdown that started,” the Keep said.

“What countdown?” Moms asked.

“Upon the alarm being sounded,” the Keep said. She looked at her watch. “We now have seven hours and twenty-two minutes.”

“To do what exactly?” Nada demanded.

“Silence!” The Keep was surprisingly loud for such a tiny person. “I admit I’m not used to working on a team. But we need to work together. Let the woman finish. Then we’ll deal with the situation.”

“Hold on,” Doc said. “Why has the countdown started? Has there been a change in our past? Or has it started because the Time Patrol is gone?”

“I don’t know,” Edith said. “We know the HUB is gone. Here’s the key. The
but
, so to speak. If you follow the logic, then an agent has infinite time in the past to make a correction. But in the present, we only have the twelve hours.”

“Let me see if I follow,” Moms said. “If a shift is experienced now, as long as it’s noted, and an agent is sent to the past to alert the agent of the era the ripple or shift started in, within twelve hours, things are good to go?”

“Yes,” Edith said. “But we almost always deal with ripples. No rush on those, except we never know if they’re adding up to a shift.”

“So the Time Patrol disappearing,” Eagle said, “is a shift.”

“Right,” Edith said.

“Hold on,” Eagle said. “So no ripples were noticed?”

“Apparently,” Edith said, “some of you have experienced ripples. But the Time Patrol disappearing; that’s unprecedented.”

Doc took a step forward. “That’s cutting it awfully thin, twelve hours. It would be easy to miss these ripples.”

Edith shook her head. “Don’t you understand? That’s why the Patrol stretches all the way back to the beginning of mankind. We have twelve hours in the present, but all of history, after the initiating event of a ripple, to notice it. So any agent
past
the initiating of a ripple up until the present can report it.” She pointed toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “And that’s why we’re here. We have art in there from across the world. A series of ripples make it to a shift, it will show up in the art from some time and some place.”

“Ingenious,” Eagle said. “The backup reporting system.”

Edith nodded. “Yes. The Patrol disappearing, that wipes out any agent reporting in other than through the art.”

A phone rang, cutting through all the talk. The Keep picked it up, listened for a moment, and then put it down. “Support has removed the armor from the thing you killed. And they’re afraid the body might be booby-trapped.”

The team headed out of the van toward the Met. The Keep waited until they were all gone, and then sat down in the chair facing the encrypted audio-visual channel. She turned it on. The screen flickered for a moment as it was frequency jumped and then matched to the set on the other end.

The image of the President appeared.

“I’ve considered the situation as per your reports,” the President said. “Your summation?”

“We can’t allow a breach to occur from this location,” the Keep said.

“Recommendation?”

“You authorize Furtherance for this locale. I will take personal charge. I’ve had some people run the numbers. It will be contained underground.”

The President bit her lower lip as she considered this, a habit her aides had managed to break her of—mostly. “Are you certain?”

The Keep hesitated, Edith Frobish’s words about a shift and possible tsunami echoing in her troubled thoughts. “I’d prefer to err on the side of caution on this. Containment is a priority.”

The President nodded. “I’ll issue the order.”

“What is this place?” Ivar asked, eyeing someone who looked suspiciously like a pirate sharpening his cutlass about fifteen feet away.

Ivar was seated in an airplane seat set into the black “sand,” and since the ashtrays hadn’t been sealed shut, one from before 1990. Earhart was in a similar seat facing him. The camp was a hodgepodge of not only people, but gear. Airplane seats, canvas sails for overhead cover (did it rain here? Ivar wondered), wooden chests and barrels, and even a bronze cannon, which Ivar suspected was somehow connected to the pirate, since he was sitting on it as he sharpened his cutlass.

“The Space Between,” Earhart said.

“Between what?”

“Worlds,” Earhart said.

“Who are these people?”

“We’re the Outcasts. People who were taken from our timelines and can’t go back.” She leaned forward. “Listen. The world you are from. The timeline. I assume I disappeared on my round-the-world flight?”

“Yes,” Ivar said.

Earhart gave a sad smile. “I think I disappeared in every timeline. Would have been nice to know I made it in one of them. That event seems to be a constant, except for those where civilization didn’t survive long enough to invent the airplane.” She shook her head. “A different timeline is a different world, even though it’s still Earth. Has the Shadow attacked your timeline?”

“Um, I guess not,” Ivar ventured. “What’s the Shadow?”

“The Ones Before?” Earhart asked. “The Others?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Ivar said. “But like, shouldn’t you be really old?”

“What year did you come from?” Earhart asked.

When Ivar told her, she sat back and considered him. “Interesting. Much further along than most who come through here. Your timeline must be doing well if you are not aware of the Shadow.”

“We’ve had some things called Rifts,” Ivar said. “And Fireflies came through.” He then explained the Nightstalkers’ experiences with those strange phenomena. When he was done, Earhart pondered it for a few moments.

“Very different from the way others have experienced the Shadow,” she finally said, “but who knows? Maybe it took a different form in your timeline. What are you doing here?”

Ivar’s mouth worked, trying to formulate something to say that sounded intelligent, but he couldn’t. Finally he fell back to habits learned as a PhD candidate: He pled ignorance. “I don’t even know where
here
is. I don’t know what this Space Between is. I was at work in the Archives at Area 51, then I woke up on the beach, or whatever you call what’s next to the water.”

“What is Area 51?” Earhart asked.

“A supersecret government base,” Ivar said, and then regretted it, because it was supposed to be secret. But then he wondered why he regretted it because this was just frakking insane.

Ivar had a hard time with change.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Did I get sucked through a Rift?”

“You must have come through a gate,” Earhart said.

“Is a Rift a gate?”

Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know what a Rift is, and it seems you don’t either, so I can’t tell you that. A gate goes from one timeline to another. Or to this place.”

“Okay.” Ivar thought about that for a moment. “So sort of Rifts. But probably different. So. Um. Who exactly are you people?”

Earhart gave a thin smile. “I told you: the Outcasts. People who got sucked in through a gate, whether on purpose or by accident.”

“But you look—” Ivar paused, because even he knew, even here in this strange place, that talking about a woman’s age and appearance was a subject fraught with peril.

“Not any older? I was thirty-nine when I came here,” Earhart said. “I know I’ve been here a while. How long, I don’t know. There’s no sunrise or sunset in here. But it has to be a couple of years at least. It seems none of us really age in this place. Or if we do, not in a way that’s noticeable. One small advantage of this purgatory.” She held up her hand. “My fingernails don’t grow. My hair doesn’t. We all seem suspended in time.” She nodded over her shoulder. “The one of us from the furthest back is a Phoenician sailor. From about one thousand years before the birth of Our Lord as near as we can tell. I ended up here in 1937.”

For Ivar, like most millennials, 1937 was as distant in the past as horse-drawn buggies and no video games. Incomprehensible. “What happened to you?” Ivar asked.

Earhart sighed. “We—my navigator, Fred Noonan and I—took off from Australia and flew to New Guinea. Then we took off on a leg to Howland Island.” She fell silent for a moment. “We hit a gate, although I didn’t know what it was at that time. I managed to ditch and then we were attacked by terrible sea creatures. Kraken. Noonan was killed. I blacked out. And when I awoke, I was here.”

“Kraken?” Ivar had visions of “Release the Kraken!”

“Like a giant squid,” Earhart said, “except worse. They seem to go in and out of gates when gates open in certain places. We’re lucky we haven’t encountered any here.” She looked about. “We currently have sixteen people. From various times and various timelines. We’ve learned to talk to each other.