Time Salvager (24 page)
The sun was still climbing up the sky, its sick orange glow beginning to scorch the Earth. The radiation haze on the fringe of the city was less severe than where he had left Elise. Speaking of which, he needed to get back to her. He still wasn’t confident of her wrist beam skills, and though there was only a small chance she might have blown her leg off, leaving her was a risk he had had to take in case Smitt was tracing the subchannel.
A few bounds later, James was streaking from rooftop to rooftop, throwing out the kinetic coils and hearing the howl of the wind rush by him. He could have just flown directly back to their camp, but he wanted to conserve his levels. After all, who knew when the next time he could recharge would be. He would have to learn to be more efficient from this point on.
James watched the city below him slip underneath his feet. He had been in Boston once while on a salvage. A rich patron had wanted to recover many of the priceless works from the Boston Athenaeum before the war destroyed half the city, and then the Hurricane of 2153 finished the job. There were five million people here the night he jumped in and less than two million by the next morning.
How many ghosts lay here; how many deaths were beneath his feet? James shook his head and pushed those thoughts out of his mind. For the first time since he was a teenager, he had to worry about another living being. After years of being alone, he had someone else to fight for again. He just hoped it didn’t end up like the first time. James gritted his teeth. This time would be different.
He reached their camp, a small fifth-floor room on the eastern side of a building facing one of the main streets that was now a slow-flowing river. Elise was gone. The fire had been reduced to glowing embers, and most of the supplies they had unpacked remained untouched, but she was nowhere to be found.
“Elise,” he called out.
She’s not here,
Sasha, sitting in the spot Elise had slept, said.
I guess you lost her like you lost me.
Grace, who was sitting behind Sasha, combing her hair much like she did in his dream, tsked.
You have a habit of carelessly misplacing important people in your life, pet.
James’s heart seized. What was Sasha doing here? Could it actually be her? When he first saw her with Elise back in 2097, he had written it off as the stress of the moment, but now here she was. He reached out for his little sister, afraid that his hand would pass right through her, but even more afraid that she was actually there. He pulled back just short of touching her. Sasha gave him a sweet smile as Grace continued to braid her hair.
“What is wrong with me?” he muttered.
You’re going crazy.
Grace grinned.
Possibly too much lag sickness.
That was possible. Temporal miasma pills, due to their highly addictive nature, were the only things chronmen didn’t have free access to. Responsibility for distribution of these pills rested on the medical wards at the ChronoCom bases. James just had his regimen before the jump, but he had missed the previous few, and it usually required several doses to overcome the sickness. That could be affecting his senses. Sasha and Grace must be figments of his imagination from the lag sickness.
And what about Elise? Did she just wander off? Was she captured by monitors? There were always wasteland tribes around, indigenous savages that still resided within the husks of the buildings, using the bones of the dead city as shelter against the elements. Maybe one of them had taken her. James clenched his fist. Black abyss help them if she was injured. Afraid to call out too loudly, he tore his eyes away from Sasha and searched the area. He combed up and down the floors, his fear growing by the second.
Elise didn’t have an exo, so her movements would be limited. These buildings had been crumbling for hundreds of years now, and many of the structures were unstable. She could have fallen or a section of the ceiling could have collapsed in on her. Dozens of scenarios flashed through James’s head, each more terrifying than the last. He didn’t sacrifice his entire existence for her so she could die a meaningless death.
Wait, the comm band! He reached out to her through it, hoping she would know enough to answer back. He cursed when he realized that the channel was empty. He had told her to shut it off before he left her, for fear of the monitors tracking her. Now, he had no way to find her in this massive concrete jungle.
Well, James was determined not to rest until he found her alive and well, or touched her lifeless body one last time. He pulled up his AI band and set the point he was standing on as the center of his hunt, and then he began to tear through this dead city looking for its one living soul.
There was a knock at the door and two auditors walked in. Levin spared just a glance their way as both sat down on the opposite end of his desk. The original class of auditors made an effort always to keep an open door for their brothers. Most auditors still remembered their chronmen days and were far too private to follow this policy. Levin was one of the few who held on to this mostly symbolic gesture for the sake of tradition.
He didn’t trust the two auditors who had just come into his office in the slightest. The one on the left, Geneese, was a floater—an auditor who, without a permanent station, was used wherever and whenever his skills were needed. Levin had worked with him previously on a few retrieval jobs in the Ship Graveyard. The man was a by-the-books auditor, excelling at orders but rarely creative enough to deviate from directions when the situation required it. This made him the perfect auditor for half the responsibilities of the chain and the worst for the other half. He would have to be leveraged carefully.
Shizzu was even more of an unknown. He was probably the most unheralded Tier-1 chronman that Levin had known in his lifetime. He was surprised to hear of the man being raised to the chain. If a chronman had not been raised to auditorship by his eleventh year, he probably would never make it. Shizzu had been a chronman for fifteen. That made him ancient by auditor standards.
Regardless of what he thought of them, they were his brothers now. Shizzu was just a few years short of earning out and could have just floated his way to retirement. Whatever circumstance allowed him to join the chain, he took the auditorship rather than the easy way out. Levin could respect that, even though he had doubts about the man’s worthiness.
“Brothers,” he began, eyes still focused on the fast-scrolling vid. “I trust you have reviewed the operational scope?”
“Fugitive chronman hiding in the present,” Geneese said. “Should make our lives easy. I’m surprised three auditors are being allocated for this, especially one so high up the chain.”
A minor dig at his weakened status; Levin let it slide. “It’s the least of my penance for allowing it to happen on my watch.” He looked over at Shizzu. “You and James were in the Academy together?”
Shizzu shrugged. “Five years and we barely shared a hundred words. Even less as chronmen.”
Levin pulled up the man’s records and skimmed through the surprisingly brief transcript. The only real skill Shizzu had that made him stand out from other chronmen was his ambition and ability to kiss the right asses. Other than that, he was an expert tracker and investigator, and a poor team leader.
It still puzzled Levin how he had obtained an auditorship with such an undistinguished career. He found the answer at the end of the transcript. His last mission was completely redacted. It must have been a golden ticket assignment that had elevated him to the chain. Funny, Levin hadn’t realized it was for sale.
Against proper decorum, he asked, “Tell me about your last job as a chronman, Shizzu.”
Shizzu’s spine stiffened. “The auditor files are open to all. You may take a look if you like.”
“They’re all redacted, brother.”
“For good reason, then. Someone of sufficient rank—”
“I’m ninth in the chain. If I can’t view it, no auditor can.”
“Then the directors see fit to keep it from the eyes of the auditors.”
This piqued Levin’s interest even more. His instincts told him that it was important to pry, and they were rarely mistaken. It was unusual for chronmen to operate on jobs that kept auditors in the dark. Only directors had this authority, and with the recent occurrences and Shizzu’s sudden promotion, there were far too many coincidences here for Levin to overlook.
He approached it tactfully. “You are a new brother working with two experienced auditors. There is a level of trust necessary for us to function as an effective unit. Obviously, your last job elevated you to your auditorship. I need to know what it is so I know if I can depend on you.”
Shizzu pondered Levin’s demand before finally answering, “It was a corporate-sponsored salvage into the late twenty-first century.”
That time period set off an alarm in Levin’s head. Where had he read another report regarding this recently? Then he remembered. Levin leaned forward on his desk. “Tell me everything.”
The meeting lasted another five minutes before Levin barged out of his office, leaving his two underlings there, confused and unsure if they were excused. Levin didn’t care if they sat there until they starved to death. Those two were the furthest thing from his mind as he nearly sprinted out of the auditor wing, causing anyone who saw his stormy face to scurry out of his way. He couldn’t remember a time when he was this angry, not even when he found out about Cole’s desertion.
No, that wasn’t true. He wasn’t angry at Cole, just profoundly disappointed. Deep down inside, he knew that he would have to be the one to hunt down his wayward nephew, and that once he did, it would spell the end of his relationship with his entire family. None of them would ever speak to him again, even though it was Levin who pulled the entire Javier-Oberon clan out of poverty. They knew Cole’s fate was sealed the instant he poisoned his handler and fled into the past, that Levin had no choice but to hunt him down himself.
Levin guessed that he could have assigned the hunt to someone else; Shizzu would have been perfectly suitable for the task. But no, it had to be Levin, even at the cost of his relationship with his family. There was no other way to clear the dishonor. ChronoCom was all he had left, and those fools in the directorships were endangering it.
Levin barged past the Watcher’s Board, taking only a moment to pay it proper respect: 50,373 monitors, 3,479 chronmen, and 223 auditors. A class at the Academy must have recently graduated. The numbers were still below what they should have been but at least they hadn’t plummeted precipitously. Six years ago, the number of monitors was below thirty thousand after the ill-fated conflict with the Puck Pirates of Uranus. Four thousand monitors had died in a span of two hours.
Levin ground his teeth and slammed open the double doors to Young’s office. The director, face buried in a book—a real bound one made of paper—ignored him, his eyes still focused on the pages as Levin stomped up and pounded a fist on the desk.
“You authorized the Nutris job?”
Young put up a finger to his lips, flipped to the next page in his book, and continued reading. Levin had the urge to reach over across the desk and yank the old man out of his chair, but he stopped himself. There were many ways to be suicidal; assaulting a director was probably the worst. His only recourse then was to tower over Young and wait for a response. Six minutes later, Young seemed to have found a good stopping point and finally snapped his book shut.
He looked up at Levin. “You’re still fucking standing? Oh yeah, with that stick up your ass, I forget you won’t sit down without being invited. Sit.”
Levin stayed standing and jabbed a finger down on Young’s table. “Shizzu’s Nutris Platform job. The one that elevated him to the chain. Is it true? Who authorized it?”
Young looked confused for a moment before he finally shrugged. “Is that what you’re pissy about? For a second, I thought you were going to come and demand I give your nephew a reprieve. I would have given it to you, you know. You owing me a favor would have been worth it. I’m surprised you didn’t cash in on it.” He rolled his eyes. “Instead, you barge in here demanding to know about a fucking job.”
“Time Laws were broken! Who ordered it? The High Director needs to be made aware of this!”
Young chuckled in a raspy voice. He opened his mouth and paused, his eyes glinting. Finally, he leaned back and spoke. “Do you know why? Even though you’re a planetary high auditor of the most important planet in the solar system, you’re still just ninth in the chain, Levin?”
Levin felt bile climb up his throat as he quivered. “If this is an indictment of my abilities—”
“Oh, nothing to do with that,” Young said. “You are the finest auditor ChronoCom has, which is why Earth is in your care, but you will never rise above the ninth. Do you know why?”
Levin kept still.
It was Young’s turn to slam his fist against his table as he stood. “Do you really want to know who authorized the Valta job? High Director Jerome did, you fucking inflexible idiot. You want to hang someone for breaking the Time Laws? You better go to the very top!”
Levin felt his stomach twist and a jolt shoot through his body as those words sunk in. “Why would he authorize this? This goes against everything the agency stands for.”
“Have a seat, Levin,” Young snapped. “No, sit, damn it, and let’s talk about your promotion.”
Levin reluctantly did as he was told. Most of this information he already knew. It hadn’t escaped his notice that his career within the agency, while exemplary by any measure, had leveled out. It had never bothered him much, until now. He knew he didn’t play administrative politics as he should, but he had always felt his record spoke for itself. Apparently it didn’t.
“You don’t know the balancing act all the directors must do against the rest of the solar system,” Young said. “Our power and control is delicate. When a powerful corp like Valta wants something, it has to be done. The only thing we can do is extract a high enough cost from them that they will think twice about making a similar demand again.”
