Time Salvager (33 page)
“And then what?” he said quietly, surprising most here who had never heard him say two words. “What are you going to do once the ten of you eat the food, burn the kindling, and use up the power packs? Where will you go? What next?”
Chawr looked surprised. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll figure something. Maybe head south where it’s warmer or north where more plentiful game runs.”
“So you’re going to just survive then.”
“That’s all there is to life.”
A feeling of déjà vu swept over James. He knew what Chawr was saying; he had lived that way most of his life. In a way, he wanted to be just like these savages and look out only for himself and Elise. He wasn’t any better than any of them. Ever since Sasha’s disappearance, surviving for himself was all he knew. It was all he’d ever fought for. Then he thought of Elise, how she was different, because she didn’t do things only for herself.
James thought about the planet and how Elise might be able to cure it. He didn’t for a second believe her, but what if he could use that to keep the people together? She was right about one thing: there was no way they could live without a community of people. He didn’t know how to survive for a prolonged period of time without his bands. Using his bands wasn’t really surviving anyway. Before, ChronoCom was his tribe. Now, he was alone. As much as he hated to admit it, he needed this tribe.
James powered his exo and launched himself onto the guard column so everyone could see his face. He spoke in a strong, assured voice. “What if I offer you a new purpose?” He pointed at Elise. “My companion and I are on a mission to save the planet. We know how to cure the sickness. We need your help.”
“There is no cure for a dying planet,” someone shouted.
“You lie!” a girl behind Chawr said, shaking her fist at James.
“The sickness has been this way since before I was born,” an old woman said. “It has always been this way.”
“That’s not true.” Elise’s voice rang across open space, even louder than James’s. All eyes turned to her, and for a second, she shrank from the attention. Then her eyes met his, and he nodded. Elise hesitated, gave a small cough, and after a couple of false starts, began speaking. “It didn’t use to be like this. I know. I come from the past.”
There was a chorus of gasps, though most just responded with blank stares. Though mostly isolated from the civilized world, some in this wasteland tribe must have been aware of the Time Laws, because they looked horrified. Others just seemed puzzled.
A little girl clinging to her mother piped up. “So what is it supposed to be like, then?”
Elise smiled. “Earth was beautiful. The sun was a brilliant yellow, the ocean a sparkling blue. The air was pure, and on a clear day, you could see for miles.”
The little girl gasped. “That’s impossible. It’s like a magic land.”
Elise walked over to the girl and picked her up. “It’s not. Let me tell you about Earth the way I remember it.”
For the next hour, James listened with the others as Elise talked about the beauty of the twenty-first century. The entire tribe hung onto every word she said. Her voice quivered with a passion and conviction so strong that those listening could not help but be entranced. Like them, he fell under her spell as she described rolling hills, lush forests, and the thousands upon thousands of animals that roamed the planet. He heard oohs from the crowds as she described the ocean and drew murmurs of disbelief when she told them about the many spectrums of the sky and how the clouds never looked as angry as they do now. Finally, she told them about the changing seasons and how every spring, the landscape turned green with life.
When she was done telling her story, the air around them was quiet except for the crackling flames of the bonfire. James had traveled to the periods she spoke of but had never taken the time or effort to notice the beauty she described. Now something had awoken in him that he didn’t even realize was dead. He wanted that Earth she spoke of and he wanted to believe that it could happen.
James noticed a change in Elise as well. When she spoke about the past, it seemed as if a weight lifted off her shoulders. Over the weeks, she had struggled to maintain a brave front, but James could tell she was hurting. He pretended not to notice when she cried at night, or looked sad. Yet now, when she spoke of the Earth from her time, something in her blossomed, a spark that he had seen only glimpses of since she had first arrived. Now that twinkle in her eyes had returned, and that luminance that had so attracted him to her back at the Nutris Platform was there once more.
It was the little girl who spoke first. “And you can bring it back?”
Elise nodded. “I think so, but I’ll need your help.” She looked up at James.
Chawr, who was pacing back and forth in the back of the group, barked out, “It’s all just fairy tales. You’re just telling us this so we wouldn’t leave with the supplies.”
James looked at him with contempt. “You think that sad pile of shit is worth fighting over? Take it.” Chawr hesitated, his eyes moving from James to Qawol then back to the people around him. James turned to the rest of the Elfreth. “Help us and you will have a new purpose in your lives. You can cure the planet for your children and their children. In return, I will do everything in my powers for the Elfreth and see that you are all cared for with food, shelter, clothing. I am a chronman. You all know what I am capable of. What my powers are.” He turned back to the Chawr. “You saw the food I brought. I can salvage more supplies than you could ever use in a lifetime. You will never go cold or hungry again. What do you say?”
There was a long, awkward silence, so long that James thought he had failed to convince them. Finally, Franwil stood up. She looked at those sitting at her feet, and then at the group causing trouble. Their eyes met, and the young people looked away, ashamed.
“Chronman,” she said, turning to James. “I do not like you. You smell of death and hurt. Your gifts and services to the Elfreth do not wash away your people’s crimes. I do not know if what you say is true, and it would not matter to me if it were. If it were I leading, I would banish you.”
Several of the Elfreth nodded in agreement.
She looked to Elise. “But I see and trust her. I believe her words. Can you do what he says you can do, child?”
The blood had drained from Elise’s face, and she almost shook her head. She looked at James, stark panic on her face. Their eyes met, and he gave her a small nod of encouragement.
“I believe so,” she said. “I just need some time and supplies.”
“Then time and supplies is what the Elfreth will provide,” Franwil said. “An easy sacrifice for such a boon.”
James nodded. These fools might be chasing a silly dream, but at least it gave them hope and kept everyone together. It also gave Elise a purpose. Both purpose and hope were powerful tools that one needed to survive in the present. He was just now realizing that he had lost both a long time ago.
“James,” Smitt’s voice popped into his head. “Are you there?”
“Can it wait?” James replied, eyes still fixated on Elise.
“No, my friend, it can’t. It’s about that tear on Nutris.”
“One moment.” James jumped off the column and walked toward the main Farming Tower’s entrance. No one noticed him leave; they were too focused on Elise and listened with thirsty ears to her every word. He nodded at the man perched on the guard column in front of the tower. The tribesman waved with his stick. It was something at least. A little progress.
James entered the Farming Tower’s lobby and sat down on a marble bench with its edges long since broken and smoothed over by time. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “Go ahead, Smitt.”
“I hacked into the chron database and went through the documentation. Much of Nutris is redacted, so this means the initial request must have come from high up in the chain. It took a while to parse the blackened files. Finally paired up jump manifestos and came across an earlier Valta contract. Seems you were the cleanup crew. Valta had originally contracted Shizzu for the job.”
“If his job was the same as mine, why did he jump back so far in advance?”
“That’s what I couldn’t figure out either. Then I checked the ripple charts. There was a massive time ripple—a level seven—after Nutris that fortunately was short-lived because World War Three broke out. The war basically reset any existing ripples. I checked the Valta records. James, Shizzu was the one who blew up the Nutris Platform. He planted a bomb sourced from the present. The only reason he left was because he was injured while planting the bomb and had to jump back early. That’s when you were sent in.”
James froze. These were serious allegations. “Are you sure of this?”
“I couldn’t believe it myself and went to go follow up with Curran, Shizzu’s handler. Imagine my surprise when I found out that she had somehow earned out and was now retired on Luna. I know for a fact Curran and Shizzu were no closer to earning out of their contracts than us.”
Of course Smitt would have checked his sources. He was a Tier-1 handler and James doubted Smitt would come to him with this if it wasn’t true. The ramifications of ChronoCom purposely carrying out this job and covering it up meant terrible things. Major Time Laws had been broken, no matter how limited the effect. If ChronoCom was willing to engineer dead-end time lines now, then the possibilities of what they were willing to do was endless.
“Smitt, how exactly was Valta involved in this?”
“From what I can tell, they ordered the contract and supplied the bomb. That’s why Sourn ordered you to make the retrieval only after the disaster happened. They knew you couldn’t jump back beforehand. You were still caught in the tear from Shizzu’s jump.”
James swore. They had knowingly put him in a no-jump withdrawal scenario and hadn’t told him. That was an incredible violation of trust and was very dangerous for the chronman involved. James had no doubts that this information was highly classified. Smitt must have taken extreme measures to dig it up.
“Smitt, thanks. I’m sorry I doubted you. I put you in a terrible position. You watched my back. You’re a good friend.”
“No more than you did for me back at the Academy, eh? Listen, I also have to warn you. Valta is actively involved with the manhunt. They want your friend badly.”
James curled his hands into fists. “This situation is much worse than I thought if a megacorp is involved.” He stood up, took a deep breath, and began pacing the foyer. “And Shizzu, that abyss-plagued bastard. Next time we meet, one of us isn’t going to be able to talk about it.”
“Are you going to tell your friend?”
Several scenarios ran through James’s head and none of them turned out well. Still, keeping ChronoCom’s involvement in the disaster from her didn’t feel right. She deserved to know, and things would be doubly bad if she found out on her own. In the end, he realized he had little choice.
“Eventually, when she’s ready. For now, I need her trust, and she needs to have her hope.”
Elise scowled at the column of machines lined up against the stone wall of her newly assembled lab. Most of the stuff was straight-up stone age, primitive tools from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that wouldn’t be fit for a grade-school bio lab in her time. The few modern pieces James had retrieved for her were so high-tech and in that weird twenty-sixth-century mumbo jumbo, and she couldn’t figure out for the life of her how to make the damn contraptions work.
The problem wasn’t so much the actual machines; that stuff she could figure out with time. Elise’s main source of grief was this century’s dialect. She never really had a gift for languages and couldn’t decipher more than half the words on these futuristic devices. It seemed the comm band that allowed her to understand all these people and their different languages didn’t extend to her ability to read any of it.
So there she had it. Between the primitive tools used by scientists in the tenth century and the super-advanced ones she couldn’t read, Elise was stuck, expected by everyone around her to cure the Earth Plague. Elise looked over at Rima, who at that moment was studying the characters for World English numbers. At least she had someone to help bring her food. Rima couldn’t read and Elise had a sneaking suspicion that they had assigned the girl to her only to keep the young troublemaker out of trouble. The lights in the room flickered. Elise looked up and waited for them to go out.
The Elfreth had enthusiastically embraced their new mission in life and moved her lab indoors to one of the higher levels adjacent to the sky bridges in the Farming Towers. Now, Elise had a room with four walls and a ceiling, and some pretty decent views from her own private lab.
They even relieved her of her daily chores and assigned Rima as her assistant. The girl had a steep learning curve, though, and Elise had to put aside time to teach her basic math. It was frustrating, to say the least. At this very moment, Rima was sitting on a stool in the corner working her way up rudimentary base-ten math.
James was as good as his word and had surprised her several days later with a roomful of equipment. He pulled literally almost a truckload of equipment out of his never-ending magic hat. In the end, he was able to obtain thirty-one of her list of forty-four items, with promises of fulfilling the rest of the requests once he located them. Chief among the things he obtained was a battery-powered generator hooked up to an array of solar panels on the roof. Now, she had all the lights and fires that she needed. By the end of the week, it was starting to feel like a real lab.
While both James’s and the Elfreth’s commitment to her research was heartening, the promises and responsibilities that came with it worried Elise to no end. Now, she felt a responsibility actually to succeed in finding a cure for the planet. Before, when it was just her and her three-sided hut, her experimenting was just that. Now that she had sold everyone on the idea that it was possible, the entire tribe had jumped on board and expected her to deliver a clean Earth.
