Girl Gone Nova (53 page)

“It is not your concern, woman.”

She got in his face. “It is my concern. You’re about to destroy
my
people out there. Why? You don’t know how to have a discussion? Make a little diplomacy? You came here packing attitude and big-ass weapons without even thinking about it. We’ve done nothing to you. Why do you feel the need to blow us to hell and back? How and when did we become your enemy when this is the first time we’ve met?”

“It is in the prophecy!” He got back in her face. “We come here. We destroy the enemy. We take back what is ours.”

“It was never yours! You’re from another freaking galaxy! How could it be yours?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “It is in the prophecy.”

“Show me. If you’re going to destroy my people, I want to see why.”

Hel had the detonator switch in his hand, she felt his watchfulness, heard his questions in her head.
What are you doing?
She couldn’t tell him what she didn’t know. She was following her gut. It surprised her when Conan complied. His fingers moved on the arm rest and one of the screens came alive with scrolled words. Thanks to her peeps adventures in the ship’s guts, she could read Keltinar, at least enough to get the gist of the so-called prophecies.

“What are they?” Hel asked, his gaze still on Conan.

“They’re notes, scientific notes.”

“Garradian?”

“No.” She didn’t mention the DNA string out loud. Not good for Conan’s character, but Hel plucked it out of her head.

“What’s going on?” Hel asked it, Conan looked it.

“I think someone else slipped the time creeps’ leash.” If they were the good guys, which was hard to believe. How did one go about creating an instability that would attract their attention? Could she already have done it? Time felt wrong, out of synch, messed up. And she felt something else: watched.

She looked up, not because she thought the time creeps were watching from above like God. She just wanted it clear who she was talking to. “Do you hear me? You blew it again!”

Conan started to look relieved they weren’t getting married.

“Enough of this, woman. I will do what I came to do.”

Do it, Hel.
Got a light nod.
How long?

Five of your minutes.
At her mental
crap,
he added,
I thought we might make it off. Sorry.

Five minutes. She could distract him for five minutes, couldn’t she?

“You won’t get the portal. If you do this, the portal will be locked forever. He’s the true Key and he’s made sure you can’t get at it.”
You did, didn’t you?
She got an affirmative, Hel style. She looked up again, yelled at the ceiling. “Do you feel the shiver down your spine, time creeps? If the portal is destroyed, you’ll be out of work!”

Four minutes.
Had minutes always been this long?

“You seek to deceive me.” Conan hit something on his chair. “I will destroy your ships and then you will die, as well.”

* * * * *

Halliwell took the news that the alien vessels were going weapons hot with his customary calm. Waiting was always harder than engaging. Damn, he was glad he hadn’t retired. Always better to go out fighting.

“Pick a target and prepare to fire all batteries.”

He’d sent a data burst through the satellite relay to Earth.

“Gadi ships are going weapons hot as well, sir.”

Halliwell hoped to hell they knew who to shoot at.

“Time to alien weapons hot?”

“Three minutes.”

* * * * *

Three minutes.

Delilah sought to delay the alien. Hel stepped forward to help her.

“You think we do not know about your ships? That we are not prepared for this battle?”

That drew the alien’s attention off his bond mate. Hel felt a flicker of approval that could have been Delilah or the nanites.

“Look at your scans. Look at our ships. Are any of them damaged?”

The alien looked and this time he saw the ruse.

“What ships? I am alone.”

His face chilled to ice, his resolve to attack hardened, but Hel had another card to play.

Two minutes.

With a little boost from the nanites, the extra phase cloaked ships now appeared on the alien’s scanners, two poised to fire on each of the alien’s sixteen ships.

“Nice.” Delilah smiled her approval. Was there something more in her eyes? “Maybe that will yank some time creep tail?”

One minute.

If they did not appear soon…

Hel felt it before he saw it, felt it tingle across his skin as time halted and the glowing light appeared. Out the view screen he saw an energy beam halt half way to its target. The two figures in the time stream looked almost annoyed.

“How is that you remember us?” one of them asked.

Delilah shrugged. “You must have muffed your reset. Shoddy work is so embarrassing, isn’t it?”

Why did she seek to annoy them? Was it good she succeeded?

“You sought our attention, now you have it.”

Their body language was wrong. What did they have to hide?

“Someone is messing with time again. Did Smith escape your leash?”

“We have detected no instability.”

She stared at them for what felt like a very long time, her head to one side.

“You’re lying.”

“You are understandably distraught—”

“What I am is pissed.” Delilah cut them off, her voice flat and cold. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it last time. The look. The attitude. I grew up with it. You’re my parents all over again.”

“What look?” One of them asked the question, before Hel could. He heard wary in the voice and knew Delilah was right, but about what?

“The scientist look. I’ve used it myself a few times. You aren’t minding time. You’re messing with it, using us as your lab rats. You’re using us for some sick, twisted experiment.”

Hel saw the truth of it in their eyes before they turned remote again.

“It does not matter. We will reset Earth time so far back, you will be a child again.”

Hel moved instinctively toward her. “Delilah?”

If he lost her again—he couldn’t let that happen. They had to stop them—

He saw her light up, realized he glowed, too. Felt the internal nova. The nanites that had protected them last time exploded in a rage that equaled his, and also Delilah’s. He had not realized the nanites could feel rage.

He reached for her.

She reached for him.

Fingertips touched, slid together and gripped…

They were yanked into a vortex of light. It spun and dipped around him, around her. Time whirled around them, broken pieces like flat mirrors bending and turning in the vortex with flashes of his life and hers, flashes of other lives, other times. They spun faster and faster. It tried to pull them apart. He wouldn’t let it. He knew his grip bruised her. He didn’t care.

Light built.

Exploded.

Into darkness without bottom.

* * * * *

The blackness faded to gold, taking her to a place that streamed like a transport beam. Doc still had her peeps sending her data. She was in a sort of energy field, but whether it was a cell or a protection wasn’t clear. Hel was here, too. She couldn’t see him, but she felt him, felt the nanite connection, though direct communication was offline. To one side, the streams of gold were vertical, instead of horizontal. Could it be a control panel of some kind? Some peeps flowed toward it, unaffected by the energy field that immobilized her. As weird as it was, she felt as if she went with them. Incoming data spiked, knowledge exploding in her head.

She was in time’s slip stream. She, Hel and the peeps had almost destroyed the fabric of time, had almost ripped it to shreds. Somehow the peeps had held it together until they’d been able to pull all of them free of time’s drag. Or maybe time had ejected them.
Time is persistent.
Equations and data streamed through her head at an incredible rate. She could
feel
time flowing, sensed its ebb and flow as if it were a part of her. She recognized it on some subterranean level, as if she and time had always been connected.

A figure emerged from the flow, taking shape in front of the vertical data stream. He didn’t look at her, his attention on the data stream.

Dr. Smith?

That he was black ops something was clearer now that he wasn’t playing scientist. Could he be a merc? A mercenary? As if he sensed her scrutiny, he finally turned, a slight frown between his sandy brows, as if something about her puzzled him.

“I need to know how you almost destroyed time.” There was an authority in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

Doc shrugged.

He looked at her then, a frown upping his stern factor by ten.

“Who are you?”

He didn’t know who she was.
The relief might have taken out her knees, but it was hard to know for sure with the energy field pinning her physical body in place. “So you can go mess with my past?”

He frowned. “It’s not that simple. Time is—”

“Persistent. And so are you.”

Nothing slight about this frown, though he erased it.

Did that mean he didn’t remember her? Had the time creeps reset his time line, too?

He’d tried to trap the Chameleon, she reminded herself, so he had to remember her, didn’t he? The time creeps remembered her and Hel, though what they knew about them was still an unknown.

The peeps quivered with unease as they flowed back into her body. Smart peeps.

“You should not be here.”

“And yet here I am.” Not that she planned to stay. Her peeps almost had control of the field. This was future tech, but it was
Garradian
future tech. Her peeps were connecting with the grandpeeps and both sides were happy about it.

“I cannot release you until I identify the contamination and correct it.”

“You don’t want to fix anything.”

He gave her a black ops look. Funny how that never changed.

“Sometimes it is necessary to—” he hesitated, as if trying to find the right word “—delete a feature so that time can be stabilized.”

They were a “feature?” No, she realized, he was lying about stabilizing time. Doc felt time smoothing out around the slip stream. Perhaps it was relieved it still could.

“You’re just mad we got the drop on you.” She felt the click as she and Hel connected again, felt her ability to breach the field increase as they combined their peep power.

Smith stiffened, whipped back to the data stream control or whatever that was. “What are you doing?”

Doc didn’t answer. People only explained themselves in the movies. Besides, it ought to be freaking obvious. They were getting out. He stared at her through a field starting to flicker like a bad circuit.

“I will learn who you are.”

I will learn who you are.
She thought he knew who they were, not precisely, but ballpark knowledge. His body language said he lied, but he sounded confident. This place wasn’t a time machine, it was a time tracking station, according to the peeps. It tracked instabilities, not people or planets or galaxies. She saw, or maybe she felt the threads of time moving past the slip stream that protected them. It wasn’t a movie. It was a river, a jumble of galaxies and planets and countries and lives. Finding them in that mess would be like trying to find a pebble in the Mississippi River when it was at high flood stage. That would be why the time freaks had used instabilities to play with time. But that didn’t explain Smith.

She didn’t understand most of the data delivered via the peeps, but what she did get, gave her hope. He’d have a better chance finding a needle hidden in the Garradian galaxy. She mentally plucked some of the threads and saw him wince. She gave him her Morticia smile. “Good luck with that.”

He tried to fight them. She felt him fail. He spun away into a mix of light and dark. Did he cry out? She wasn’t sure. The field holding her in place faded. She was falling again. Faster this time and not through darkness, but back into the stream of time. It was cold, then hot…

Doc didn’t want to open her eyes. It took a few heartbeats to remember why.

She sniffed. No cordite, so not a post bomb moment.

She was upright. Holding onto something hard and cool. She took a peek. A marble sink. A Garradian marble sink.

She was in a bathroom. A Garradian bathroom.

There were worse places to be, worse places she’d been.

She still had the peeps. She could feel them in her head, though they were as rattled as she was. Almost destroying the fabric of time twice had that affect.

She lifted her lids. Saw her face, her body in a mirror over the sink.

She was wearing a
dress.

That was new.

Not that she’d never worn a dress, but wearing one in this galaxy was new. It wasn’t just a
dress
. It was a modified
Morticia dress
: black and clinging with sleeves that had drifty points that stopped at her knuckles. It wasn’t long. She never wore long dresses. If she had to lift them to kick it filled her hands with something besides knives or guns. She touched the a-bit-lower-than-her-usual neckline. What was up with that? This dress was fitted—she felt her back and sure enough, no gun snugged into the curve of her lower back. She yanked at the skirt, feeling out of proportion relieved to find a knife strapped to one thigh, a small, but lethal hand gun strapped to the other. Minimal was better than nothing. The heels went with the dress, but holy foxtrot they were high enough to be a different kind of weapon.

Her hair was shorter than last timeline, but longer than the hair cut before that. It brushed her shoulders, utterly straight and about the same length as Cleopatra’s was supposed to have been, but sans the bangs. She didn’t do bangs. Got in the way of a gun sight if she didn’t keep them trimmed.

Her makeup was exotic and a bit creepy.

What was going on? Where was she?

She studied the bathroom, not able to fully appreciate the nice accoutrements. Situational awareness the size of a bathroom was not helpful, even if it was a nice bathroom. The stone walls looked familiar. This had to be the Kikk outpost. The peeps wanted to help, but they were fetal in a dark corner of her brain. Okay, outpost, dress—could be a party. But why was she packing creepy with her other armament? What was her mission objective? Did she have a mission objective? She hadn’t at the last party in this galaxy, two timelines ago.