Time Salvager (25 page)
Levin snorted. “Or we can just cut off their power supply. We hold the keys to keeping these companies civilized and lawful.”
Young sighed, and for the first time, Levin saw the hard, confident exterior of the director soften, revealing cracks in his legendary iron facade. “You’re a good auditor and even a better man, but there’s more to being a director than being a good auditor. This shit we do jumping back in time is the easy stuff.” He pointed out the window. “The real dangers lie out there, where all the megacorporations and governments lie.”
“I don’t understand,” Levin said. “We power half the solar system. Without us, humanity will collapse.”
Young nodded. “Yes and no. We do hold the fate of humanity in our hands.” But the corporations hold our balls in theirs. The agency is at the mercy of every single megacorp’s whims. They’re the ones that supply us with support: manpower, education, equipment, and technology. In return, we supply them our salvage.”
“Seems to me our leverage is as great as theirs.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, son,” Young said. “Let me tell you something. Where do you think our jump bands come from? Our exos? All our equipment?”
Levin listed off every piece of equipment assigned to the monitors, chronmen, and auditors in rapid succession as well as all their component suppliers.
Young cut him off halfway down the list. “All from corporations. None of this is proprietary. What is to prevent someone like Valta from obtaining their own jump bands and running their own salvage?”
“The Time Laws strictly—”
“Nothing!” Young finished. “Not a damn thing. We are the only agency allowed to jump because Valta, Finlay, Radicati, and all those other fucking megacorps know that if one of them starts messing with the chronostream, they all will. They all know that it’s better that none of them have that ability than all of them do. That’s why ChronoCom has that authority, because they fucking give it to us.”
Levin was stunned. “If that’s true, then why do we still allow them to break the Time Laws?”
“Because that authority is an illusion that they can take back at any moment. If Valta wants something, we can push back only so much. In the end, it’s better we do the job right than reject their request and have them flub it going off on their own. We try to stay as true to the Time Laws as possible. Otherwise, those bloodthirsty corporations will simply plunder the entire chronostream for every scratch of profit they can claw out of it.”
Levin sat through another ten minutes of Young lecturing him about the way everything in this universe actually worked. He felt numb, but he knew what the director said was the truth. He had seen small signs of this many times throughout the years, but had always had such a disdain for the corporate side of ChronoCom’s operations that he had stayed in the dark regarding those matters. It was a somber realization.
For years, he had considered ChronoCom the beacon that stood before humanity and stemmed the tide of collapse. Now, he realized he was nothing more than a referee, a mediator making sure all the corporations didn’t play too rough.
“Thank you, Director Young,” Levin said finally. “This has been educational.”
Young nodded. “Keep this in mind. Make sure Valta and Sourn stay happy. Otherwise, there will be abyss to pay, and you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of ChronoCom because we can’t afford to be on your side.”
Much to Elise’s family’s and friends’ delight, she had always been a bit of a neat freak, from something as silly as organizing all her books by genre, alphabetical order, and color, to making sure that the contents of her refrigerator were divided into their proper food groups.
Sure, sometimes that caused friction with her loved ones, like when she continually organized her last boyfriend’s stuff to the point where he couldn’t find anything. They fought over her cleaning habits for months. He was a slob anyway; their relationship was doomed to fail. She just liked things clean and organized, the way they were supposed to be. It made the world a better place.
This made her situation right now on future Earth doubly horrifying. If she could have one wish right at this instant, it would be to take a massive broom and dust off the entire planet. Maybe toss the whole planet in the wash. She wrinkled her nose. By the smell of it, it definitely needed to be disinfected as well.
Elise was standing on a pile of rubble at the water’s edge, watching dirty gooey waves push debris and slop onto the rocky shores. This was the second time James had told her to stay still and she had ignored his command. Well, the first time that hadn’t been completely true. She probably would have waited for him at the Heights if those guys hadn’t come. This time, though, she got bored waiting for him and decided to stretch her legs down by the river in front of the building. What harm could there be? After all, who knew when James was coming back? It seemed every time he said he’d be back soon, he was never actually back soon.
There was a whole world out there for her to see. She had made a hobby of being an intrepid explorer ever since she was a little girl, often spending days wandering the mountainous forests of the North Oregon coast as a teenager. Twice, her parents had had to call for search and rescue. It never deterred her, though. Her love of discovery of the unknown and learning new things led her to biology and eventually to the Nutris Platform. It had also led her to where she was today. In the ruins of Boston. In some godforsaken dystopian future. And hungry as holy hell.
“I should have picked gymnastics or gotten a puppy as a hobby instead,” she grumbled. Her stomach grumbled with her.
She knelt over the water’s edge and skimmed the surface with a stick, watching the oily texture gunk and slide off. She lifted it to her nose. The water was stale, even though it was from a river; it lacked oxygen and nutrients. There was a stench lingering in the air, as if she were walking alongside sewers. It smelled of rust, rot, and death. It also smelled familiar.
Perplexed, Elise splashed some of the water onto a concrete slab with the stick and spread the liquid apart, careful not to get any of it on her. She was pretty sure this atmos band thing would protect her from any harmful elements, but wasn’t ready to bathe herself in toxic river water yet. She sat there and watched intently as the water dried and left an orange residue stain on the rock. She sniffed it again. The same smells as before, but there was something new. The residue consisted of small bits and fragments of animals and plants, long since dead, but never properly decayed. They just rotted and continued to break apart into smaller and smaller pieces until they eventually formed this brown mush.
“No way,” she said, her curiosity making her forget about her dire situation. “This can’t be what I think it is. Could it have grown so far out of control?”
Elise wished she could take samples right now and study the brown gunk. If this crap was what she thought it was, then the potency of the virus discovered only a decade ago, in 2087, was much more serious than anyone from her time could have possibly imagined. She went farther downriver and double-checked her findings, taking samples from several different areas.
She climbed into one of the toppled buildings leaning against another on the other side of the canal. There was a balcony she could hang off of to grab a sample from the center of the flowing river. Maybe the substance and texture there would be different. Carefully watching her step and climbing onto the walls to scale over debris and sections of submerged hallways, Elise scrambled through the dark slanted corridors.
She traversed several small piles of rubble and then stopped when she saw light. She approached it carefully and whistled when she came across the embers of a dying fire in the corner of one of the smaller rooms. Beside it, there was a small nest of cloth making up what looked like a bed. Next to that was a small satchel. Someone had been here recently. Were they passing through like she was? Did they live here? How could anyone survive in this place?
What if they weren’t friendly? Yesterday’s beating flashed through her head and she flinched involuntarily from that memory. Then she remembered her wrist beam. Well, she wasn’t going to be that easy a mark anymore. Let those bastards try to lay a hand on her. Wait, did she remember how to shoot this thing? Elise spent the next few minutes practicing with the wrist beam.
As she fiddled with her control, a shadow strolled into the room. Elise stared, mouth agape, a person about her size and height stared back equally with surprise. Almost an afterthought, she raised her wrist beam at him. If this was an actual gunfight—if they still called it that these days—she would have lost that draw yesterday. However, she was lucky they were both taken off guard and she was the only one armed.
The person, human by the looks of it, wearing black clothes splotched by brown sludge, with a face and hair to match, gasped at the wrist beam. He whimpered. Elise then realized that he was a young scrawny boy, though she couldn’t be sure about his age. If he was living out in the wilds here, he could just be severely malnourished. He was staring wide-eyed at her hand. Elise looked down at her arm and realized that he recognized the weapon. The split second that she had taken her eyes off of him, he took off.
“Wait,” she called, taking off after him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to point that at you.”
She chased him, not completely sure why she was doing this. Her better senses were telling her to treat the kid like a feral animal and get out of his hunting ground as fast as possible. He knew the terrain and could be dangerous. For all she knew, he could be a cannibal. The possibilities and terrors of this place were endless.
Still, Elise chased the boy. Up a small hill, through several slanted hallways, down a hole in a wall, and down the side of the building. He was quick, darting back and forth around the various objects that protruded from the ground. If he hadn’t been so busy zigzagging back and forth, she would have lost him long ago. That was when she realized that he was trying to make himself a hard target so she couldn’t shoot him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Come on, kid, stop!”
Surprisingly, she got the child’s attention. He slowed and looked back at her. He wasn’t, however, watching where he was going. He tripped over a windowsill and fell into a building. She heard a high-pitched squeak followed by a thunk and a cry of pain.
Elise ran up to the square hole and peered over the edge. Unfortunately for the boy, he had fallen into a large room that must have been at least a two-story drop. He was lying on the floor, holding his knee, and whimpering like a wounded animal. Her heart reached out to him; he couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve, judging by his scrawny little frame. And this was all her fault.
Determined to help, Elise took the long route down to the child, through a lower-level window, past a flooded hallway, and up through a back stairwell, before she found a way to his room. It took nearly twenty minutes, but he was still holding his knee when she, sweaty and exhausted, with no idea how to get out of here, found him. The boy crawled to the corner, quivering with eyes wide.
“It’s all right, buddy,” she said, keeping her right arm behind her back and trying to soothe him like she would her dog. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
It took her five minutes to close that distance between them. Finally, she got within arm’s distance and reached out to check on his knee, though she could tell by the swelling that it was definitely broken. Just as her hands touched his leg, the boy slashed out with a knife in his hand.
“Ow, you little brat!” she squawked, pulling back.
He succeeded in nicking her forearm, giving her a lovely gash. It was good thing she had quick reflexes, or it could have been a lot worse. Then she remembered that he had busted his knee because of her. Again, she approached cautiously, making what she hoped were reassuring gestures, though this time, she watched for his arm. When he tried to slash her again, she caught his wrist.
“Stop it!” she scolded.
He tried to strike her with his other arm. The two struggled for a few seconds.
“I mean it!”
He tried to kick her with his broken leg and howled when it connected with her shins. They both cried out in pain. Elise had babysat hundreds of times, and the best way to handle a child acting up was to let him wear himself out. However, this child had a knife in his hand and she didn’t have the time, so she gave him one measured look and then slapped him across the face.
She shook her finger at him. “I said stop it! Now stay still.”
The child was so stunned he dropped his knife. Elise kicked it aside and began to check his leg. It was definitely broken, but didn’t seem like a compound break. He should recover from this if he kept his weight off.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, motioning for him to stay. Not like he could move much anyway.
In a few minutes, she returned with a few pieces of wood and cloth she had found in an old apartment and fixed a small splint around his leg. Then she gave him the leg of a table to use as a walking stick.
“That’s the best I can do for now,” she said, helping him up. “Where are your parents?”
He shook his head.
“All righty, then, guess we’re stuck with each other for a bit.”
Finding a way out of the building proved to be their next challenge. They boy could hardly walk, let alone climb, jump, or drop down from a ledge. They began to wander the rooms, making their way toward ground level. Several times, she had to push him up onto a ledge. She half-expected him to try to run off every time they got a few meters apart, but was pleased to find that he waited for her every time. Either he had come to trust her, or he realized that she was his best way of getting out of this sideways maze. By the time they escaped the building, the sun was beginning to set. They must have spent the entire day in the damn building.
“At least we’re out now,” she said with forced cheerfulness.
