Time Salvager (36 page)
James chuckled. “Babysitting, eh? What are you retrieving? Coal? Seeds?”
“Worse. Wood. I’m literally jumping these damn fodders into forests days before massive fires and having them chop wood. It’s so degrading. I mean, does ChronoCom realize who I am?”
“A guy who failed his chronman advancement?”
“I’m a Tier-1 handler! And thanks for rubbing it in. Seems you’ve found a sense of humor since you’ve been away. I don’t like it.”
James grinned to no one in particular. “You just don’t like me becoming a better person.”
“The improvement is debatable,” Smitt said. “Listen, my friend, I need to warn you. Your little operation here came up on one of the wasteland surveillance reports. Just a blip. Planetary regency likes to keep tabs on what’s happening with the savages, and your region’s caused some recent energy spikes. If this continues, you’ll either need to regulate your energy usage or disperse the concentration.”
That was a problem. The past month had become such an unexpected relief that he had almost forgotten that ChronoCom was hunting them. He’d have to be more careful with his movements, possibly park his collie a day’s journey away just to be sure. Anything to keep Elise safe.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” James said. “And … thank you, Smitt. You’ve been more than a good friend. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
“You still owe me a retirement to Europa, or a clean Earth to live on. I’ll take either.”
“You got it.”
Smitt left the subchannel and James made his way toward the lab, hoping things between Elise and Grace had warmed a little. He worried about the ninety-three-year-old woman climbing those stairs day in and day out. They would have to figure out an accommodation for her. He reached the camp and spoke with the column guard, who confirmed seeing the two head into Farming Tower One.
He was eleven stories up the stairwell when he saw Grace sitting on the steps braiding someone’s hair. He frowned. It couldn’t be Elise’s. Her hair wasn’t that long, though it had begun to grow out, making her look a little more like the other women of the Elfreth. James thought it looked attractive.
“Grace?” he asked, approaching her.
Grace looked at him and smiled. Then she went back to her braiding.
James walked around her and stumbled when he saw that it was Sasha’s hair Grace was braiding. He backed up against the wall and saw the Nazi soldier lounging farther up the stairs. Grace continued to braid and fuss with Sasha’s hair, humming and complimenting his dead sister about how pretty she was.
“You’re alive now,” he managed to say.
Am I now, pet?
she replied, looking up.
You think it’s that easy bringing someone back from the dead?
Why haven’t you brought me back then, James?
Sasha asked.
“I…” James opened and closed his mouth. He didn’t have a good excuse. Actually, he did. Sasha was useless to Elise and the tribe. She would be just another mouth to feed. That was justification enough, wasn’t it?
Come back for me too, ja?
The German soldier grinned, beckoning him closer.
Put me to use. I have skills. Bang. Bang.
He pretended to shoot at imaginary targets.
James shook his head; they were imaginary people. What was wrong with him? He needed to do something about his miasma treatment sooner rather than later. A mad, raving lunatic would be no good to Elise.
He left the small group and continued up the stairs, fleeing these fragments of his past. Elise and Grace were real, no matter what ChronoCom had taught him about those from the past. They were living, breathing people who could now make new choices, and forge their own futures.
This was the best way for him to contribute to Elise’s cause. All these years he had thought the resources he retrieved from the past, the technologies, power sources, and equipment, the most valuable things in history that could save the present. Now, he realized that he had it all backward. The resources ChronoCom should have been farming all this time were the people, not just the stopgap bandages of power reactors and fuel supplies. After all, hundreds of years of salvaging had not deterred mankind’s decline toward extinction.
James hurried up the stairs. He caught up with them on the forty-second floor of Farming Tower One, where they were resting on the stairs when he came around the corner. Grace was wheezing and sweating. She looked like she was about to faint.
“Do you know how old I am?” Grace snarled when he came around the bend. “I can’t be climbing all these steps.”
“How could you make her climb all these stairs?” Elise said, shaking a finger at him.
“What the hell?” James raised his arms, palms up. “How was I supposed to have planned ahead for this?”
“You should have!” both women snapped.
James tried very hard to keep his eyes from rolling. “I’ll see what I can do. For now, allow me.” He powered on his exo and gently lifted both of them with his kinetic coils, carrying them all the way up to the seventieth floor. The entire time, the two women berated him on his thoughtlessness. Somehow, in the fifteen minutes he had left them alone, they had become friends and decided to combine their powers against him.
When they reached the lab, Grace made one quick circle and came out with a list of demands, most for items which James had never heard of. Still, she had a way of putting words together so that he found himself agreeing to almost everything. Then, she walked over to the ancient elevator bank with one half of the sliding doors torn off. She poked her head down the dark shaft and then signaled to him. “Clear this, and have a fabricator build an elevator. This one isn’t a request.”
“You mean the things you wanted before were optional?”
“No, pet, they weren’t, but this one I need especially. I need a working lift if I’m to work up here. And I’m sure those tribepeople of yours will appreciate it as well.”
“I don’t even know where I can find a fabricator.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll have to do it myself. Only way I know it’ll be done right. Pay attention. Take notes, pet.”
Suddenly she rattled off a list that was easily fifty items long. James didn’t know how she knew all this off the top of her head, but then again, that was why he had brought her back. He had a sneaking suspicion that life was about to get much more interesting.
Levin and Kuo stood in the town square of the village of Pinto waiting for the ancillaries to report in. In the distance, the cratered city of Madrid stretched out for several kilometers in either direction for as far as the eye could see. Madrid had been one of the first major cities to fall during the AI War, a victim to the surprise attacks of the gigantic Mountain Hulks passing through the Strait of Gibraltar on their way to Germany, similar to the second coming of Hannibal thousands of years earlier. A city of millions was reduced to rubble within hours when the land underneath collapsed from the stress of hundreds of vanguard burrowers cutting through its foundation. Now, all that was left were scores of crevices punctured deep into the earth.
The people of Pinto, a settlement of miners and excavators, made a living picking through the remains of this once-great city. Most major cities had similar settlements of scavengers nearby. They filled an important role in humanity’s ecosystem.
The difference between Madrid and most other fallen major metropolises was that it had actually sunk into the ground, as if swallowed by a massive sinkhole. Because of the added challenge of being buried underground, the city’s bones weren’t picked as clean as many other city corpses. New useful raw materials were still being discovered daily and Pinto had prospered as a trade hub. It was here that Levin received his first solid lead regarding James. One that he hoped could take him a step closer to finding where he was hiding.
The agency had been dangling off-planet relocation as a reward for any news of the fugitive chronman’s activities, and an abnormally large number of tips had filtered in from this region. Once the information was deemed viable, Levin and his people had swept in under cover of darkness and blockaded the entire village. Currently, Shizzu and Geneese were questioning the local government and merchants of Pinto while three squads of monitors were performing door-to-door searches of the outlying buildings. Levin and Kuo had set up their base of operations in the center of Pinto and were waiting for their findings.
He highly doubted someone as skilled as James would allow himself to be trapped so easily, but Levin wasn’t going to allow a solid lead to slip by. He looked over at Kuo, who was staring intently out of their makeshift canopy at the giant crater down the hill.
“How deep does it go?” she asked.
He walked up next to her and peered down into the black pit. “They say it’s almost a half a kilometer down. Supposedly, the Machines had giant burrowing worms that ate the earth from underneath. Then when the bombs from the Mountain Hulks began dropping, the entire city fell as one giant piece. Some of the miners say there are entire chunks of the city completely intact down there.”
“And these Earthlings eke a living picking the bones of the city?”
“Not everyone can have all their needs synthesized artificially.”
“Carrion eaters,” she spat.
“ChronoCom picks the bones of our past, do we not?” Levin corrected. “Doesn’t that make us carrion eaters as well? And since the corps depends on the energy we retrieve, what does that make you?”
She ignored him as she spotted Shizzu approaching from up the hill. He stopped directly in front of Kuo and bowed. This wasn’t lost on Levin. “Auditor, Securitate,” he said, “we have received confirmation from two separate manufacturers here that a man matching fugitive Griffin-Mars’s description has led a small group, usually two to four individuals, here multiple times over the past few weeks to barter for goods. They were also able to identify the distinct features of his collie.”
“Several others?” Levin mused. “He has a posse now.”
“What did they trade for?” Kuo asked.
“Solar panels, power generators, lab equipment, and several bottles of distilled alcohol. They traded base goods the first time here: food, clothing, and hemp. The second time they were here, they bartered for fiber fabricators, weapons, fuel, and several more bottles of alcohol.”
“Sounds like James, all right,” said Levin.
That information painted a startling picture of James and that anomaly he was hiding. They were building something and required industrial resources to do it. What could they be up to? Not only that, who were these others with them? Had James linked up with one of the survivalist groups?
“What did those with him look like? Can those merchants tell us anything? Their garb? Skin color? Accents?”
“The merchants did not notice anything out of the ordinary except that they weren’t from the region and didn’t look civilized, Auditor,” Shizzu said. “However, one of them did overhear some of their exchanges and believed it a Northern American dialect of Solar English. The people with him seemed intimidated by the village and looked to him as their leader.”
“Of course he’s their leader,” Kuo said. “A chronman wouldn’t follow a bunch of savages.”
Levin ticked off the items Shizzu mentioned. “He isn’t running. Interesting. All this time, we thought he had gone into hiding to someplace either remote or back in time. Notice he’s actually trading food.”
If he was still in Northern America, then there would still be a lot of ground to cover. The entire continent had taken the brunt of the devastation from the Third World War, and now was one complete wasteland, except for the half-dozen cities that still sparsely dotted the landscape. If James were leading a bunch of primitive savages, he could be hiding anywhere.
Levin corrected himself; they were still people. His eyes wandered over to Kuo. The damn woman was corrupting his thoughts. Over the past few weeks, she had shadowed his every movement as he set up the surveillance net around the planet, chasing every unauthorized jump that could lead to James’s whereabouts.
The severity of James’s defection had climbed all the way up to the Council. Now, there was an ongoing discussion among the administrators about following Valta’s lead and chipping all chronmen to prevent an occurrence like this from happening again. Some went as far as to favor disabling the antidetection systems on the collies. Doing either would endanger the lives of every chronman operation out there. Leave it to the administrators to concoct such terrible ideas. To make matters worse, Valta had offered to carry out the service for the agency. Levin scowled. What back door would the corporatation create for themselves there?
“How many times have these savages aided the fugitive?” Kuo asked.
Levin did not like where this round of questioning was leading. The Valta operative saw situations in black and white entirely too often. Given her low opinion of the natives out here in the wastelands, she might consider these people’s innocent trading with James to be treason.
“At least three, Securitate,” Shizzu said.
Kuo rounded on Levin. “The planetary government must send a worldwide communication of this immediately. All settlements must be banned from trading with these fugitives.”
“That is not an easy thing to enforce,” Levin said. “All it would serve is to prompt the settlements and our fugitive to be more discreet in the future. That only makes our job more difficult.”
“Allowing it to continue only makes our job more difficult.”
“Your ability to point out the obvious is startling,” he said. “Shizzu, inform the leaders of this settlement that James Griffin-Mars is no longer associated with ChronoCom, and that he is now an illegal fugitive within the planetary government. Any further interaction—trade, business, or personal—will be considered aiding and abetting a known criminal and punishable by sanctions to the settlement and imprisonment to the leaders of the community.”
“Auditor Shizzu,” Kuo added, “find all the merchants the fugitive had dealings with and have them imprisoned for treason. If any resist, execute them.”
