Time Salvager (38 page)
James nodded his approval as Chawr’s guys hooked
Collie
up and went through the diagnostics, though he stayed around and watched them go through the maintenance steps. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them; it was just that they hadn’t earned his confidence yet. His new engineering crew were quick learners, but tended to be sloppy when they didn’t understand why they were doing what they were doing. That would come with experience. For now, it was his responsibility to teach them without blowing his collie up in the process.
After they were done and he had double-checked their work, James yawned and walked up a rubble staircase, through the hollowed-out hull of a building down the block from the Farming Towers, and strolled through a small clearing surrounded by ancient skyscrapers with their tops broken off. He was looking forward to his bed; he hadn’t slept in it in over a week.
He walked by a small group of the tribe and waved. One of them, the youngest by the looks of him, waved back. Things were improving daily with them, and as much as James hated to admit it, he wanted their approval. He was tired of being someone most people were wary of.
“Are you there, my friend?” Smitt’s voice interrupted his walk. “I have the aftereffect report.”
“Give it a go, Smitt. Any ripples from the Hyperion job?” he asked.
“A modest one. TI sensors detected strange energy signatures from your jump in. They thought it might have been a probe. The depot heightened security because of your intrusion, which made the surprise attack by the Divinities nine hours later not so much of a surprise attack. Ended with an additional two Divinity attack ships destroyed and an extra thirty casualties.”
“Ouch. That’s messy.”
“The time line managed to self-heal six years later when the entire Divinity base off of Titan was destroyed.
“What about present blips?”
“ChronoCom outpost on Titan reported an unauthorized jump,” said Smitt. “I ran the delays and bought you some time, but they were less than a day off from tagging you. Listen, James, you are starting to cut it really close. They’re on to you. You need to cut back on these jaunts.”
“Just keep me a step ahead of them,” James thought back.
Smitt was right, though. He had been helping James and Grace plan these jumps, making sure they happened when ChronoCom either wasn’t in a position to respond or when they could mask the jump. Either way, there was only so much he could do before the agency wised up. James’s contribution to the tribe as a salvager would expire once he was caught or, worse yet, tracked back to their location.
“I’m serious,” Smitt insisted. “You guys have to cut back, or at least lay low better, especially on Earth. Your Asia decoy only worked for the first week, as did your jig in the Mediterranean. It’s only going to be a matter of time before they realize you never left the region.”
“Make sure they don’t,” James said. “Or at least give us an early enough warning.”
“Look, James, I’ve scanned your area. You have enough going on there that it’s starting to breed significant energy readings. It’s bound to attract attention.”
James looked around the open space, or the town square, as Elise liked to refer to it. It was a lot busier than when he last left it. There were several machines running and he saw over a dozen small fires burning in barrel drums. And while some netting might help cover some of the light, it was just a matter of time before they were discovered.
“What else can we do? The tribe is getting larger. Our energy use is only going to grow.”
“I’ve been researching your problem. What do you think about the mid-twenty-third century?”
James made a face. “I think the Publicae Age was a period of fascist cesspools and a death trap for any chronman.”
“I hear ya. You didn’t do too well during your five jumps back, but that time period was the peak of neural and cloaking technology. What do you think about going back and recovering a stealth hood?”
“I’d think you’re trying to get me killed, Smitt.”
“While that would solve many of my problems, my friend, I think it’s the best solution to your little village’s issues. Want to talk it over?”
James cursed. He avoided the mid-twenty-third century for good reason. But if it meant ensuring Elise’s safety, he said he’d do anything. “I hate your idea already, but all right, let’s hear it out.” He sighed. He pulled out a bottle of wine he had pilfered from one of the storage lockers at the TI base and settled in for the bad news.
There was a knock on the mushy plastered wall next to the doorway of Elise’s lab. She looked up and brightened when James strolled in. His popping up at her door unannounced brought that familiar fluttering in her chest and made her face feel flush. She had been so immersed in her work lately that she was no longer even attending evening meals with the rest of the Elfreth. Rima had taken to bringing up food for her and Grace every night.
She missed evenings around the campfire. That was when the tribe bonded, and it felt a bit like Thanksgiving every night. It was also the only quality time she spent with James. She missed him most of all, but her work was too important now.
Grace, sitting at a workstation across from her, rolled her eyes and chuckled. “I’ll let you have him today, lamb.”
“Thanks, Grandma. I promise to bring him back in one piece,” Elise answered sweetly.
The two of them had gotten off to a rocky start: Grace initially demanded to be addressed as the Mother of Time or High Scion. Elise responded by telling her new assistant that Gaia would wither and die before she called Grace that. Then Grace tried treating Elise like her assistant. When Elise reminded her who was actually in charge, the tension in the lab became thick as molasses. The final outrage was when the so-called Mother of Time tried to steal Rima away from her.
Elise had long since given up trying to mold Rima into anything resembling a lab assistant. That became a moot point when Grace came on board anyway. However, the girl had become invaluable as Elise’s personal assistant. Rima still desperately wanted to stay near her, so instead of trying to make her something she wasn’t, Elise moved the girl out of the lab and put her natural skills to use. She had a rifle allocated to the girl full-time and had one of the tribesmen teach her how to drive one of the rickety ground cars. Now, Rima filled the roles of her personal assistant, bodyguard, and driver, making her completely invaluable to Elise day to day. There was no way Elise was going to give her up.
To both their surprises, it was James who finally broke the ice, mostly because of Grace’s continued insistence on calling him “pet.” That pushed Elise over the edge, and the two bickered so loudly that the people working on the roofs could hear them go at it. They arrived at an uneasy truce when Grace agreed to concede the nickname if Elise promised to find another assistant for her.
Since then, their relationship had warmed up little by little as Elise came to appreciate just how brilliant Grace was. In the short time since Grace had joined them, she had displayed a frightening aptitude for picking up research and, for the first time, Elise felt like she was making real headway on this Earth Plague cure. The way Grace was able to slide into her role and propel Elise’s work forward right away was uncanny. In return, Elise satiated Grace’s thirst for knowledge about the twenty-first century, Grace’s favorite period of time. It was also one of the reasons she had originally studied time travel.
Now, the two had settled into an awkward mentor-mother relationship built upon mutual goals, one-upmanship, and more than a bit of snark. Elise wouldn’t admit it, but she, after the initial hiccups, had eventually grown fond of the sharp-tongued elderly woman.
Right now, Elise kept the butterflies in her stomach under control as she joined James for a stroll. They had both been busy—James with keeping the lab and the tribe supplied, and Elise with her research. She wasn’t ready to admit it to him, or to herself for that matter, but she missed their time together. The two had seen each other very little ever since the tribe got behind her, and every time they did get the chance to spend some time together, she’d feel the tingling, nauseating thrill of her stomach twisting into knots. Not that she’d show it, of course.
They walked side by side, close together but shyly not touching, down the sky bridge paths, making small talk and making the circuit around the Farming Towers. Most of the glass panels on the passageway connecting the two structures were long gone, so the crosswinds constantly pushed her toward the edge. As they strolled across the sky bridge to the adjacent building, they passed several of the Elfreth making their way to the ground level. Several of the older women exchanged knowing smiles. Elise pretended not to notice, but her blush betrayed her.
“I brought you something.” James pulled a sunflower from inside his jacket. “I know how much you love flowers and how you always complain there aren’t any around anymore. I found this at one of my previous jumps. I thought it was pretty. I was going to save it for your birthday but—” he shrugged.
Elise’s face turned crimson as she accepted it. Sunflowers weren’t the first thing that came to mind in terms of romantic flowers, but this small gesture meant a lot to her. As she often did when slightly nervous, she began to gab.
She told him about her experiments and trials and how helpful Grace was. She moved on to the gossip within the Elfreth and how all the older women doted on her and tried to match-make her with some of the young strapping men in the tribe. She continued talking about her plans to make Rami her new apprentice and how she wanted to start a school to teach all the Elfreth children. She finally stopped herself when she realized that they had made an entire circuit around the Farming Towers and he hadn’t said a word. Elise decided she liked that about him. She appreciated how deeply he listened.
“How’s the cure coming along?” he finally broke his silence and asked.
“You realize,” she said, “assuming that it’s even possible, it’ll take years before we find a cure?”
“Years?” He frowned. “We don’t have that long. I can’t keep us hidden from ChronoCom forever. I thought you said back in your time, your people were already close to a cure.”
“We
were
,” she said. “Doesn’t mean we are now. Back in my day, the Earth Plague was only five isolated blooms in remote parts of the world. The damn thing is everywhere in this time.” Elise waved her arms in a big circle for emphasis just as a stiff breeze blew in, pushing her a little too close to the edge of the skyway for comfort. She squawked and latched on to James’s elbow.
“Why couldn’t you just start where you left off?” he asked.
“Because back in good ol’ 2097, we had this something called technology.” She hated sounding like a broken record. “Resources and manpower a little more sophisticated than a couple of Bunsen burners and a hundred-year-old lady.”
“I heard that,” Grace said in her head. “You really should learn how to control that comm band of yours. I’m worth a hundred of your primate scientists, by the way.”
“Stop listening in on me,” Elise thought back. It was true, though. She was awful with comm band management and tended to blab all her thoughts accidentally to both James and Grace, the only two others with bands in the camp. It had led to several awkward exchanges. She closed Grace’s channel.
“Well, resources and better equipment I’m working on. What else?” James asked.
Elise thought about it for a second and decided to go for the big issue that had been plaguing her for the past several days. “The biggest hurdle is that the virus mutates constantly like most ribonucleic acid viruses but is also highly resistant to our environment yet. It mutates at an alarming rate. That’s why we need to devise a cure that can adapt constantly with the hundreds of strains that the Earth Plague comes in.”
“How did you resolve it back then?” he asked.
“It wasn’t an issue back then,” she said. “We had a bacterial sequencer that could track and adapt to progressive mutations on the fly. We just don’t have that technology anymore. Without it, we’re pretty much screwed.”
James’s face scrunched up. Elise had learned to recognize that look on him when he was speaking with someone on his comm band or was deep in thought. “Back up for a second,” he said. “That sequencer. What does it look like and where can I find one?”
Elise shook her head. “Only three prototypes existed. One went down with Nutris, and the second one, the original, was destroyed after it caused a flu-variant outbreak in Poland. The third I have no idea.”
James put a finger to his chin and rubbed his now-hairless face, compliments of her nagging. Elise wasn’t a fan of sandpaper beards. “This sequencer,” he asked. “Was there a crystal with a bunch of sharp needles pointing at it?”
Elise frowned. “How do you know what it looks like?”
He shrugged apologetically. “Um, well, I stole it.”
“You did what?” Her eyes widened.
“I’m sorry…,” he said.
“No.” She laughed. “You being a time-traveling klepto is a good thing. If there’s a working sequencer here, we might actually have a chance to cure Earth Plague.”
James hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“I believe it’s in Valta Corporation’s possession. It will be nearly impossible to retrieve.”
Elise held James’s hands and moved into his embrace. “Can you at least look into it? Please? It’s very important.”
“I’ll ask Smitt to dig up what he can find on the Nutris items,” James said. “No promises. There’s a good chance they could already be out of our reach.”
“Thanks, James, you time-traveling klepto liar.” She stood on her tippy-toes and pecked him on the cheek.
“The other reason why I came to see you,” he said, sporting a funny look on his face, “is because I need to leave again in four days. This time, I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Where are you going? Back into space?”
He shook his head. “I have an upcoming jump to the Arabian Sea. ChronoCom’s been tightening their surveillance grid. Smitt believes they’ve isolated our whereabouts to within this hemisphere. High-altitude travel is now too risky. I’m taking the collie underwater through the Atlantic.”
