Time Salvager (6 page)
He was making ground step by step until they were only half a building length apart. He was just within reach of Cole’s coils when he struck, shooting out with two of his own coils, one that tied down the coil Cole used to push off, and the other to grab Cole around the waist. Cole’s momentum tripped him midair as Levin reeled him in. The fugitive chronman sliced off the coil around his waist, only to have six more of Levin’s wrap around his body until he could no longer move. He struggled and jerked back and forth against the invisible bonds as Levin floated him closer. As a final precaution, Levin slipped two small coils down the length of Cole’s arms and snapped all eight of the fugitive’s bands.
“It’s over. We’re going home,” he said.
“Just kill me then, Auditor,” Cole begged. “I can’t go back.”
“You need to be brought to justice for violating the fifth Time Law.”
“Please,” tears poured down Cole’s face, “you can’t take me back. My uncle is an auditor. I can’t shame him like this.”
Levin dropped the paint image and stared stone-faced at his prisoner, ignoring the look of shock on Cole’s face. “The only additional shame that could have been heaped on me is if I didn’t bring you back. Come, your mother will want to say good-bye.” A second later, there was a flash of orange light, and the two figures that moments before were dancing on the rooftops of Luoyang were gone.
Gossip of the two mysterious masters spread over the years, with witnesses swearing they had seen the two fly through the air. Gossip became stories; stories became facts; facts became lore. Eventually, the tales grew and the actions more fantastic until it became part of the region’s martial arts legend, which to this day could be found in ChronoCom’s databases.
It was the worst blemish on Levin Javier-Oberon’s career up until the day James Griffin-Mars walked into his office.
A week later, after hitching his collie to the transport
JE Pheelrite
from Himalia Station to Earth via Mars, James could just make out the circular brown outline of his species’s birthworld. Almost every chronman at one point or another had had to run jobs on Earth. Like the majority of people with means, James avoided the planet as much as possible. Luckily for him, most of the times he spent on the planet were in the past, during better days when it wasn’t such a toxic mess.
No government or corporation claimed dominion over Earth anymore. Why bother? There were few resources left to exploit, and parts of the atmosphere were so poisonous that it might as well have been Uranus. That left each of the hundred or so remaining large cities to form their own states alongside the few thousand scattered remnants of the population that now lived in the wastelands or deep underground. There hadn’t been a census taken of Earth for over a hundred years, but ChronoCom estimated there were now fewer than a hundred million people living on the planet of their origin.
Without a megacorporation based here, the only global entity with any semblance of power was ChronoCom, which acted as a policing force when the situation warranted. Earth Central, their base in Chicago on the Northern America continent, was the largest of all the ChronoCom facilities, because the planet still held the richest quarry of time salvaging in the solar system. Otherwise, much of the agency’s administration would have moved off the mud ball to Europa or Callisto years ago.
Smitt walked up next to James and watched the planet slowly grow larger. “They say the water used to be so blue you could see it from space.”
James looked at the brown swirling oceans and grunted. “I don’t believe it. They say a lot of dumb things. Last time I saw the ocean on Earth was back in the mid-twenty-third century in a place called Tokyo, two days before the entire city sank into it. Even then the water was just a lighter shade of shit. I remember some clown declaring that humans would be setting foot in the next solar system by 2350. Imagine how disappointed he’d be if he was around today.”
Smitt’s eyes glazed over, and then he glanced at James. “We’re running behind schedule. Need to get you into position during Earth’s rotation or we blow it. I’ve just ordered the captain to detour to Europe first and drop you off from the
Pheelrite
. We’ll dislodge the collie separately and have her maintain orbit for you. I’ll handle a remote link until I get to Hops at Earth Central. This should be a pretty easy smash-and-grab job for you anyway.”
“You call zipping down to a burning castle while it’s being bombed an easy job? And I have to cut the room apart in how long? Thirty minutes? You’re a crap handler if you think this is easy.”
Smitt grinned. “I’ve just got faith in you. Remember, it’s a rich patron. Funds you, ChronoCom, and most importantly, me. We can’t live without these guys.”
“What does he want with the Amber Room anyway?” James asked. “Humanity is teetering on resource starvation and this rich Europian pays for a Tier-1 chronman to risk his life to go back in time for a silly piece of art? Of all the self-indulgent and wasteful expenditures…”
“Not our job to ask,” Smitt said. “Guy says he’s the descendant of the king that built it. Wants it back in the family.” He paused and stared at the collie attached to the aft starboard bulkhead. “By the way, I think we should change
Collie
’s name to
Priestbanger
.”
“Fuck you. I’m fine with
Collie
.”
Smitt rolled his eyes. “Calling a collie
Collie
is dumb. That’s like naming me Human.”
James eyed Smitt up and down, and grunted. “Barely.” A rare smile cracked a corner of his mouth.
Smitt gave him the middle finger. “All right, my friend, go kick some Nazi ass, but try not to kill anyone that isn’t supposed to die anyway.”
The
Pheelrite
shook as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, her portholes turning red from the heat of entry. The vibrations were so rough, James’s teeth rattled. Two hundred years ago, ships slipped through Earth’s atmosphere without the passengers so much as feeling it. It was a sad indication of how much technology had been lost over the centuries. The red around the portholes disappeared, replaced by a dark brown gel that caked onto the glass. They must be on Earth now.
The hull of the ship pitter-pattered, pelted by rain or hail or whatever it was. The brown gunk was washed away by more brown gunk as the transport vessel sliced through clouds with little grace. Again, the hull began to rock, which worried James some. This ship had obviously seen better days. He wondered if they’d be able to make it to the landing zone in one piece. If the ship exploded in midair, he might survive a high-altitude fall, but Smitt and the pilots would be pretty much screwed.
“Coming in north from the Baltic Sea,” the pilot’s voice piped over the comm. “Will reach fifty-four north longitude and twenty east latitude in four minutes.”
Smitt’s eyes glazed over. “Still running late. No time for a landing. Prepare for an airdrop.”
James sighed. Go figure. They always had to make it as difficult as possible. “Let’s get it over with.” He moved to the bay doors. The hatch split open down the middle and a shrill screech blew into the hold. “Hand me the coordinates and timings.”
Smitt had to grab on to a handle attached to the wall as he counted down toward the moving jump. James’s atmos kept the wind from affecting him. He looked over at Smitt expectantly. “We’re still two thousand meters up. Too high to jump.”
“Coordinating drop at six hundred thirty. Jump initiates at four hundred. It will hurt and you might be operating at seventy percent power for the mission but that’s the best we can do,” Smitt said. Sixteen seconds later, he held up his hand and ticked down his fingers. When his last finger balled up into a fist, James leaped out of the transport.
The free fall was short. One moment, he was plummeting toward the brown rubble of what was once Europe covered in gray ash and soot. The next, there was a yellow swirl of light and then darkness. Then James caught himself free-falling again. His eyes watered and his stomach seized, and then he felt the all-too-familiar sensation of bile climbing up his throat. James willed his body past the lag sickness. After all, he was falling at—he checked his AI band—250 kilometers an hour. Now wasn’t the time for a bellyache.
James blinked and focused on his continued descent. For a moment, he thought the jump had failed. The ground beneath him was still a landscape of rubble and ruins. Then he noticed the dozens of fires scattered across a broken city that hadn’t been there before. He looked up and saw a group of antiquated planes flying in V formation. A line of explosions cutting across the landscape brought his attention back to the surface. He was landing in the middle of a war zone.
A few seconds later, he slammed into the ground with as much impact as any of the primitive bombs being dropped. His exo lit up and redirected the kinetic impact of the force away from his body. The Earth indented three meters deep and created a termination shock wave forty meters out, blowing a plume of dust and debris high into the air.
James fell to one knee and took a few moments to regain his bearings. He pulled up his criticals on his AI band. Nothing broken, no internal bleeding. Life signs and health still optimal. Exo at 67 percent. The high-altitude drop had taken a lot out of it. Even with the exo at two-thirds levels, he was still practically a god and could conquer half the continent if he wanted to.
Paint image 1944 officer: Third Reich SS Hauptsturmf
ü
hrer, he thought, pulling up all the prearranged tacticals that Smitt had planned the day before. The uniform had to be painstakingly detailed for the paint band to draw accurately.
His appearance shifted as his disguise layered itself onto him, each line and shade drawn one by one, changing his facial features and covering his tight bodysuit with the black uniform of a Nazi. Now he looked like a portly midlevel officer of the Third Reich.
James climbed out of the crater and walked down a deserted street in downtown K
ö
nigsberg, or what was left of it. There wasn’t anyone in sight. He scanned the area and saw cratered cobbled streets and houses set on fire. Many of the buildings had only two or three outer walls. Piles of rubble littered the landscape. He could hear the low rumble of more planes passing overhead, punctuated by additional bombs exploding in rapid succession, shaking the ground. One of these blasts was going to hit the castle soon.
“Smitt, you there?” he thought.
“Coming in a little fuzzy, James. Remote link is weak; must be the interference. Damn area is coated with ions. Probably from the AI war; we’re basking in the center of where all that went down. Listen up, I barely got you in and we’re still off the mark. Get moving. You don’t have a lot of time. Remember, you’re deep in time so tread extra carefully.”
Smitt was right. Most time lines healed over ripples, but messing around certain sensitive periods of time could have catastrophic effects that the main chronostream couldn’t heal over. That’s why ChronoCom kept such tight regulations over which chronmen were allowed to jump to which tier of salvage. The Second World War was one of those sensitive points in history where only Tier-1 chronmen were allowed to operate, because even small ripples here could cause serious consequences.
James moved at a brisk jog, making sure not to run faster than humanly possible, since he could exceed that by quite a bit with the exo. He left the main road and made his way through narrow back alleys, hugging the walls when explosions shook the ground. He passed through the shell of a bombed-out building, climbed over a hill of rubble, and jumped the fence into a park where the tops of trees were on fire.
He scanned the small park and saw a young boy burrowed in the sands of a playground staring up at him. The boy was either terrified or in shock. James looked up at the sky. The sands here were as good as anything else. He wanted to help the boy, but such altruism was forbidden. What could he do anyway? The boy was hundreds of years dead back in the present. He probably wouldn’t survive the week. After all, the Russians and the British blew this damned city to the black abyss before this war ended. Still, James couldn’t help but stare back.
He forced himself to look away and continue on. Right as he jumped the fence out of the park, an explosion knocked him onto his chest. He scrambled up onto his knees and stumbled into an alley as bricks and sand rained. James looked back at the park. The playground was now a crater. He clenched his fist.
“You’ve veered off route,” said Smitt. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a lot of bad shit dropping on my head,” James said.
“What, you think one of those medieval arrows is going to pierce your exo? Come on, hurry up!”
“Hardly arrows,” said James as another massive explosion knocked him off balance. Armored or not, these primitives knew how to war. Even at full power, he didn’t think the exo could take the brunt of one of those bombs. It was no surprise mankind got so good at killing once they were in space. They had gotten a lot of practice on Earth. Maybe calling himself a god here was a bit premature.
It took much longer to cover the three kilometers to the castle than he had anticipated. By the time he stood on the edge of the castle grounds, one of the bombs had already struck the courtyard. Checking the paint of his disguise one last time, James pretended to clutch his helmet and ran across the open field, hurdling over the mounds of upturned dirt and stone. As soon as he got through the side entrance, he was met with three hostile and terrified guards.
“I hope this translator is accurate,” he thought to Smitt through his comm band.
“Not like these primates can ding you,” said Smitt.
“I’m here to oversee the transport of the Amber Room panels,” he said in flawless twentieth-century German.
One of the guards gave him a funny look. “The city is falling all around us and all you care about is the stupid Russian relic?”
James feigned irritation. “Orders from the F
ü
hrer. Take me there at once.”
