Time Salvager (3 page)
“As per your directive.” He seemed almost resigned to her fate.
Grace seized on the slim opportunity. “Take me with you,” she blurted out, clutching his wrists. The time traveler’s resolve wavered; conflict flashed across his face. “Even in the future, there must not be many like me.”
“None with your mind,” he agreed, shaking his head. “But, the first Time Law prohibits—”
“Screw the Time Laws!” she said. “I wrote the damn things, most of them half-drunk while intellectually masturbating. They mean nothing. Take me with you.”
Grace was begging now but she didn’t care. For the first time in over half a century, her emotions overcame her. This felt shameful, but her work wasn’t complete. She had too much to offer humanity still. She had the entire Technology Isolationist faction to care for. Worse yet, now that her lifelong ambition of utilizing this recently discovered time-traveling technology had been proven successful, there were so many possibilities to explore. She just had to be a part of it. Thoughts of visiting the utopian ages of the twenty-first century made her heart skip a beat.
“Take me.” She sobbed and threw her arms around him.
The time traveler averted his eyes. “I … I can’t, High Scion.”
He held her in an embrace for several awkward minutes. Finally, he pushed her away and she noticed his eyes glaze over for a brief moment.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’ve already stayed too long.”
She released her grip reluctantly, pulling herself together and regaining her composure. She remembered who she was again. “How much time do I have?” she asked.
“I don’t know, High Scion. Historical records indicate the
High Marker
’s last known location was one hundred forty-eight AUs past Eris. Then the ship disappeared.”
She wiped her wet face. “Call me Grace.”
The time traveler looked at her one last time and gave her one last bow. “It was an honor, Grace. I’m … I’m sorry.”
There was a bright yellow flash, and then the time traveler that had worn Swails’s face disappeared.
A burst of light temporarily blinded James Griffin-Mars, and he found himself staring at the dull glow of the sun ninety-eight AUs away, a lone yellow point in black-speckled space. A strange ring of total darkness surrounded it.
It took a few seconds for the lag sickness to subside as James sucked in large gulps of air from his atmos band. He hadn’t thrown up from time-travel-induced nausea since his first salvage and wasn’t about to make that fresh-fodder mistake again. Smitt would never let him live it down. If anything, this sick twisting in his guts should feel like an old friend by now. The lag sickness had been coming on stronger of late, sometimes even lasting hours after a foray. Maybe it was just this particular salvage, but the pain and bile rising into his throat hit him harder than usual.
James squeezed his eyes shut and counted down from a hundred, using the beating of his heart as a metronome. Floating in the empty space didn’t help with the nausea, and his body seemed to have inherited the
High Marker
’s rotation when he jumped back. He was spinning fast enough to wring the liquid out of his body. The atmos band around his wrist managing the environmental shield was the only thing keeping his insides together in the vacuum.
James pulled up the time on his AI computer band: 22:38:44, 05, June 2511, Earth Standard, exactly sixteen hours, fourteen minutes, and thirty-three seconds since he had first jumped back to the exact same date and time in 2212.
A distant voice, like sound coming from the other end of a long thin tube, crackled inside his head. “James, this is Smitt, you back in the present? Come in, my friend.” There were ten counts of silence before the voice repeated itself. “James, this is Smitt, are you back in the—”
“I’m here,” James answered, his comm band relaying his thoughts back to his handler. “Any ripples?”
“Negative. Swails’s body was found back on Eris, but the ripple only affected a three-week stream before the time line healed over it. How’s the package?”
James activated his exo-kinetic band and pulled himself out of his spin. The ring of darkness surrounding the sun disappeared into a lone black circle as his body stopped rotating: the dwarf Eris. He stared at its black surface, so different from the glittering display of life he’d seen just a few short hours ago from his point of view. In the past, Eris was a bustling colony, brimming with lights, life, and constant movement. Now, it was an abandoned husk. James opened the netherstore container and checked its contents. Nodding with satisfaction, he raised his head and looked back at the sun.
“Smitt, all packages secured. Pick me up.”
“Sending the collie your way. You came back a bit farther out than we predicted. Hang tight. What took you so long?”
James pulled up the tactical from his AI band. Smitt was right. He was twenty minutes late on his return, courtesy of those last few moments with Grace. At the speed the
High Marker
was hurtling through space, that twenty minutes covered a vast distance. Still, it had been worth the delay to spend a few more moments with the legendary Mother of Time.
Sixteen hours ago, he had jumped back to 2212 on Eris and snuck onto the
High Marker
before it took off. Then he had murdered Swails, sent the body back to Eris in one of the cargo containers, and spent the entire day impersonating the pet as he watched Grace Priestly at work. It was a magnificent experience.
Still, he had almost missed his window. If he had dallied another twenty minutes on the
High Marker
, at the speed it was flying out of control, James would be dead by the time the collie got to him. Even now, being twenty minutes off, it’d take the collie over an hour to reach his position. This was the tricky part of ship jumps. Placement and parallel periods were two completely separate variables; both had to be carefully calculated. And no matter what, the present time line continued. The amount of time James spent in the past had to be added to the present during his return jump.
Forty minutes later, James caught a glimpse of a small flickering light traveling from the center of the black circular mass that was Eris. As the collie approached to intercept, the light slowly grew larger. Space had a funny way of distorting distance. While the gleam of the collie started out no larger than the nail of his forefinger, it grew steadily. It was still another half hour before it finally pulled up next to him.
James willed his exo to push him toward the collie until he stepped onto its starboard wing. A few breaths later, he was inside, strapping himself into the pilot’s seat. He connected his bands to the collie’s power source to maintain his levels, but didn’t bother compressing the interior of the collie, preferring to depend on his atmos for air.
Chronmen generally had an unsavory reputation within the solar system, but no one ever called them careless. Careless men in his profession did not live long. At least once every few months, James would hear about someone who knew someone who had deactivated his atmos in an old collie, only to pass out and never wake up because of a slow decompression leak.
The collie, short for Tang Collinear Streaker, was relatively reliable as three-hundred-year-old ships go, but then again, she was three hundred years old. Whatever paint might have been on her when she was first built had long since flaked off from the constant abuse of space travel. Her starboard side was a mismatched patchwork of armored plates that made the collie look like its halves were separate pods welded into one deformed monstrosity.
The interior of the ship looked like the cell of a brig, a plain rectangular box with a metal bunk on one long side opposite the hatch, and a small latrine and storage bin in the far back. The ceiling was barely tall enough for James to stand up, and there was just enough room for a person to pace in circles if he felt like exercising. Otherwise, besides the control panel and seat up front, the bare-bones collie was low-tech in almost every other way. That was what made the ship so desirable. Complicated ships made for complicated maintenance.
James watched as the life support systems came online and reported the ship’s status. He didn’t bother following the health check. If the damn thing blew, there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he knew what had to be done, he wouldn’t know how to do it. Chronmen had enough on their plates just doing their jobs without worrying about the mechanics of their ships. It was up to the nut docs and Smitt, his handler, to deal with the rest. The only thing James knew about this contraption was that when the blinker on the upper right of the console turned green, which it had done just now, he’d be ready to go.
“Smitt, I’m inside
Collie
now,” James thought, as he opened one of the lockers and threw on a chem suit to cover his near-naked body.
“Good job, man,” Smitt said. “When are you going to give the old girl a proper name?”
“What’s wrong with her name?” James asked.
Smitt chuckled loudly with a snort that James had gotten used to and thought endearing. “You’re the only chronman who names his collie
Collie
. You’ve got the imagination of a metal plate.”
James grinned. “Saves on paperwork. Anyway, coming home with package in tow.”
“Excellent.” There was a pause. “How did you pull it off? I mean, did you meet her? Talk to her? Grace Priestly was supposed to be heavily guarded. Does she look just like those vids of her?”
“She was … worthy,” said James. “Remarkable. Even to the end.”
“She knew about you?”
“You’re not called the Mother of Time and hailed as the smartest person in history for nothing. She figured it out quick enough. Took it better than most.”
“How did you get close to her?”
James grunted. “How else do you get close to a lord during the Warring Tech period?”
“You fucked Grace Priestly?” Smitt’s voice went up an octave and cracked. James couldn’t have shocked him more by saying he had discovered alien life. “So … um, how was it?”
James leaned back and looked out the aft window. The ship had windows only on the port side, as the starboard side was covered in plates. The engines came to life and the collie slid around Eris toward the Ship Jungle. He thought back to holding the weeping Mother of Time in his arms.
Following the Warring Tech period after her death, the Core Conflicts of the origin planets—Venus, Earth, and Mars—drew in the outlying colonies. Eventually, the wars’ resource demands became so great that the outliers—Eris, Pluto, and Mercury—were resource-suffocated until they eventually had to be abandoned. Eris, once a scientific bastion of the old Tech Isolationists, was now a planet of ghosts.
A beep from the console tore James away from the window. The collie was about to enter the Ship Jungle. The space ahead began to clutter as more and more specks of what looked like gray dust dotted the blackness. The vid on the collie’s dashboard registered thousands of approaching signals, the carcasses and bones of hundreds of thousands of ships that had fought over the gaseous and chemical resources of the solar system’s gas giants—Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn. The Gas Wars, which had taken place seventy years after the Core Conflicts, were said to have been the deadliest conflict in the history of mankind, causing a billion deaths over a span of forty years.
The collie maneuvered into the graveyard, navigating around and among the hulks that had been used by previous generations. There was still good mining here, though the real payday lay in the past. James saw the insignia of the AR Star Fortress, one of his past salvages. He remembered that one well. The Star Fortress had been a mobile base that housed a quarter million of Mars’s Flak military and was their launching point to claim Oberon, a moon of Uranus and the home base of the Kuma Faction. In the end, the Star Fortress base broke and three hundred years later, James reaped massive rewards off its power core, which should have bought an entire year off his contract. Instead, he pissed away six months of the buyout on whiskey and whores.
“
Collie
’s responding sluggishly. Might need you to work through some of these controls,” Smitt said, static covering much of his words.
“Switching to manual.”
He took control of the ship and began to guide her gently through the debris field. The collie had already slowed to a crawl as they neared Neptune. The junk field grew more congested the closer he got to the planet. James was, at best, a passable pilot, and maneuvering through such a dangerous section of space pushed his skills to their limits. Without Smitt’s help, there was no way he could have navigated
Collie
through this hazard zone.
An exhausting seven hours later, the collie finally exited the Ship Jungle, little worse for the wear, other than a few scrapes and minor collisions. It’d be another few days before he reached the ChronoCom outpost at Himalia Station. Exhausted, James put the ship back on auto, lay down on the rusty metal bunk in the back, and activated his cryo band. Within seconds, he felt its effects as sleep swept over him. He needed the rest. Time travel was a wearying affair and a strain on the mind. Hopefully, his brain would be too exhausted to dream; James doubted the musings of his unconscious mind would be pleasant.
Just as James was drifting off, someone shook him awake. On reflex, he powered on his exo band, expanded his field, and lashed out. The powerful exo-kinetic system—the military-industrial complex being one of the few industries still innovating—practically made him a god whenever he ventured back in time. The yellow glow of the exo sparked to life, expanding outward and slamming the intruder into the interior wall of the collie. A kinetic coil sprouted from it and wrapped around the man’s waist. It squeezed.
“Whoa!” the dock engineer gasped and threw his arms up. “Easy there, Chronman. You’re among friendlies.”
