Send Simon Savage #1 (11 page)

‘All in the fingers, mate,’ Harry said. ‘We conquer time with our fingers. But don’t rush it.’

Simon carefully placed his right hand on a flat glass touchplate.

‘
You—have—clearance!
’ came the electronic reply.

‘I hate that voice,’ Simon said.

‘They say it’s the prof’s voice specially re-recorded, just to freak us out.’ Harry smiled. ‘Is there any particular past date you have in mind?’

Simon thought carefully. After being recruited by the Bureau, he had memorised the geographic coordinates of the beach where his father’s car had been found. He had also memorised the approximate time of his disappearance. ‘Um, Kiama Beach, south of Sydney, November ninth last year,’ he said coolly. ‘About three p.m.’

Harry chuckled. ‘Got dumped by a big wave there, eh?’

‘Yeah, sort of.’

‘Okay, let’s put the TPS on standby,’ Harry said. He typed in the coordinates and a series of commands from a manual that lay open by his right hand. ‘Then I hit
ACTIVATE
. Got it?’

Simon nodded and kept his eyes on the Timeline Operations Screen. A second later, a red flag flashed at the start of the timeline.

Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘Huh? That’s unusual. It’s red-flagged.’

‘Why? What’s that mean?’

‘For some reason, normal access to that time and that location is off-limits. It happens. Sometimes they bar particular timezones. Is it significant?’

Simon quickly checked out Harry’s body language. Did he know more than he was saying? But one look at Harry’s open manner made Simon relax.

‘No, I just made it up on the spot,’ Simon lied.

‘Well, no worries then.’

Simon took a long look at the red flag. No access. Why would the Bureau stop a TPS going back to that day? Were they hiding something?

Simon pretended to yawn. Now all he wanted to do was get back to his room—and think about what that timezone bar might mean. ‘Hey, you know, I might call it a night after all.’

‘We’ve only done ten minutes. Do you want to end the lesson?’

‘Yeah, reckon I will. I am feeling a bit tired.’

‘All right,’ Harry replied. ‘We can take this up again when you return.’

‘Okay, Harry, thanks,’ Simon said, heading for the exit.

‘Good luck on the mission!’ Harry called out, watching him go. Then he frowned, reached for his clipboard and jotted a few notes on the evening report sheet.

Simon shuffled into the garden and looked beyond the cloudy sky to the distant stars. Tonight, the stars seemed even further away than ever.

16

The 24th Century, North America

S
imon opened his eyes, blinked a few times and felt a brief surge of dizziness. Then he scrambled to his feet, found his balance and spotted Danice nearby. ‘Hi—are you all right?’ he said.

‘Yeah, I feel a bit woozy, but I’m here.’

‘So we made it.’ They were standing on a roughly made wooden platform high in the treetops. Simon touched his wrist pilot to retract his helmet. The musty smell of wet trees filled his nostrils and the timbers under his feet creaked as the trees swayed in the cool pre-dawn wind.

First things first, he thought, switching off the Zone Activator on his wrist pilot. The hovering TPS vanished and the wormhole dissolved.

‘Better check our location, too,’ Simon said.

‘I know where we are. This is the right place,’ Danice said, retracting her own helmet. ‘Follow me—this way!’

She stepped onto a rope-and-plank suspension bridge that connected their platform to another tree platform about forty metres away.

Simon followed.

‘You can’t tell in this light, but we’re about sixty metres up,’ Danice said. ‘Just stay along the middle of the bridge and walk steadily. If you don’t move too much from side to side it won’t rock. And don’t look down if it makes you feel weird.’

‘I don’t mind the height,’ Simon replied. ‘That isn’t what’s making me feel weird right now. Where are we going?’

‘To my house!’

‘Right, I knew that.’

Simon soon found a steady pace as they walked from bridge to bridge through the dense forest canopy. The bridges were like an elevated trail above the ground—a series of suspended walkways linked together so the tree-dwellers could move from one section of the forest to another without having to risk their lives on the forest floor.

As they walked, the sun rose and the sky lightened. All around, the spires of thousands of massive trees spread far into the misty distance.

‘Awesome!’ Simon breathed. He still couldn’t believe he was really in the twenty-fourth century.

‘Take a look down there.’ Danice pointed to the ground below.

A striped feline body flashed across the forest floor.

‘What’s that?’ Simon asked.

‘A tiger, I think.’

‘A tiger?’

‘Yeah, there’s a few in this part of the forest,’ Danice replied.

Suddenly there was a swishing sound and an arrow thumped into the trunk in front of Simon.

‘
Sheesh
—watch out!’ he cried, jumping back.

Danice tore the arrow from the bark and checked the three feathered vanes at the notched end. Clearly, she recognised them because she laughed.

‘This is funny—someone shooting at us?’ Simon asked. ‘Is that what you do for kicks around here?’

Danice ignored him and looked across to another colossal tree, a hundred metres away across a gully. ‘Alli!’ she yelled. ‘Alli!’

Simon saw that a dwelling had been built ingeniously in the tree’s topmost branches. On the platform outside there was a girl. She started jumping up and down and waving her arms.

‘Danice! Danice!’ she screamed. Her cries echoed through the forest.

‘Someone’s glad to see you,’ Simon said.

‘It’s my sister,’ Danice said with a grin. ‘A few more bridges and we’ll be there. Just follow me.’

‘They’ve been successfully inserted,’ Harry reported. ‘They’re in the neutral zone now, sir. The TPS has withdrawn. Shall I program the satellite to return to the same location in forty-eight hours?’

Cutler nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the mission schedule.’

Harry looked at the timeline and grimaced. ‘We could have delivered them closer to Old City.’

‘Not worth the risk,’ Cutler replied. ‘The Chieftain would be more likely to pick up their timeline if we opened it too near his cave.’

‘That’s if he’s got the sort of equipment that will detect these things, sir.’

‘Well, there are things we know about him, and there are things we don’t know,’ the captain said. ‘It’s up to Simon and Danice to find out what it is we don’t know.’

In the tree house, Simon was surrounded by Danice’s family.

‘And what did you do to Danice?’ Damien asked. ‘Where did she go? Where’s she been all this time?’

‘Damien, ease off!’ Danice said. ‘I just got back. I’m safe! I’m here! Stop asking all these stupid questions.’

Damien scowled at Simon’s suit. ‘And that gear you’re wearing. You’re dressed like those guys who took Danice in the first place. Where are you from? What are you up to?’

‘I’m just doing my job,’ Simon said. ‘I was told to bring Danice back, and that’s what I’ve done.’ It was a pretty lame explanation, Simon thought, but that was his official excuse. He would have to stick with it.

Damien shot an accusing glance at Danice. ‘What have they got you involved in?’

‘They don’t mean us any harm,’ Danice said. ‘Believe me, they’re better organised than the Chieftain and they’ve promised to help us.’

‘Help, how? And who are
they
?’ Damien said.

This was also news to Simon. ‘No one told me about any help,’ he said.

‘Sorry, Simon,’ Danice replied. ‘I wasn’t allowed to say until I got here. I had my own special briefing, you see.’ She glanced at Hanna and Alli. ‘They promised me that if I helped them, then they’d try to get Bigdad out of Old City and get us all back together again. Even relocate us. Somewhere safer.’

‘That explains a lot,’ Simon said. ‘I wondered why you were so helpful after being as good as kidnapped by the Bureau. Is this why you agreed to become a temponaut for them?’

Danice smiled with a brief shrug of her shoulders.

‘Your father?’ Hanna’s eyes lit up as she struggled up from her wooden chair. ‘Back with us. And you, too, Danice!’

Simon stepped forward to give Hanna a hand.

‘It’s okay, let me do it,’ Alli said, quickly taking Hanna’s arm. ‘Mama doesn’t like people to fuss. A year ago, she broke both her legs. The planks of the walkways rot easily and sometimes they snap.’

‘A lot of people fall,’ Hanna said, shrugging it off. ‘I’m not to be singled out for it.’

‘I can help all of us,’ Danice said to Damien. ‘Maybe make our life a bit easier. Let Simon and me complete our mission.’

‘What mission?’ Damien glared at Simon again. ‘A moment ago he said he was just here to see you home. Now you’re talking about a mission! I don’t trust him. I’m not letting you go——’

Suddenly there was the rapid thrum of drums in the distance.

Damien sprang to the open window and looked into the sky.

‘What is it?’ Hanna asked anxiously.

A series of blasts from a ram horn echoed through the forest.

‘Four short—four long!’ Damien turned back into the room. ‘It’s a raid! We have to get out!’

Simon looked at Danice. ‘What do we do?’

‘We’ve got two choices,’ Danice said, pushing him towards the door. ‘Get away—or get caught!’

17

T
he woodland, which an hour earlier had seemed quiet and empty, was now a riot of chaos and noise.

Three giant cigar-shaped airships hung in the sky. Scores of shouting, black-clad soldiers abseiled commando-style down ropes onto the walkways connecting the tree houses. In the surrounding groves, ram horns spread news of the raid. Hundreds of forest-dwellers poured down ladders and ropes to escape in a terrified stampede.

‘Go!’ Danice shouted down to Damien, as he helped his mother to the forest floor.

‘We’ll be at the Fire Caves!’ Damien called back. He shepherded Hanna into the dim underbrush on the other side of the clearing.

Danice pointed to the east. ‘We have to go that way—to the cliffs,’ she said to Simon.

Suddenly a man screamed, ‘
Let me go, I’ve done nothing! Let me go!
’