Steamrolled (2 page)

Just in case she hadn’t noticed.

Look at this.
Lurch brought the tracker log to her attention.

That can’t be right.
No way that many trackers would be overdue all at the same time.

It sounds less threatening than “missing.”
Lurch sounded as if he were still searching through data streams.
The missing are all top-tier trackers. Some mid-level, too. There are some not yet overdue but if they show, I’ll be surprised
.

Lurch, as she well knew, was rarely surprised.

Ashe had only recently left rookie status, so no one knew how good she was at tracking—in large part thanks to Lurch—so it wasn’t a shock she hadn’t been targeted. It’s always better to be underestimated was another family axiom.

It’s not all me
, he told her, a touch dryly.
You’re a natural.

The rare compliment left her mentally speechless.

Could you try to focus?

Lurch felt about as not happy as Ashe had ever felt him feel before. It was a lot of unhappy. She felt another shock wave hit the perimeter, harder than the last one, but Carig seemed unaware of it. Unclear if he was oblivious or bluffing.

He can’t see or feel time. In all my existence, I’ve never been hosted by someone who processes time the way you do. Who sees time the way you do. Still the base sensors should be detecting something.

She didn’t ask the obvious question, because if he knew he’d tell her unless he didn’t want to tell her, which he wasn’t or couldn’t.

Sometimes you make my circuits hurt.

Sorry.

“Report to the Chamber immediately.” Carig barked the command. Since barking was his usual tone, it was hard to tell if he was worried.

She left Carig, with a half-hearted attempt to hide her relief, turning toward the main building. It was inside what had been the breach, but whatever had caused the problem seemed resolved. She crossed the boundary with no problems. The sky above stayed clear and calm. No more shooting-at-them-ships.

Any ideas? Theories? Wild guesses?

That Lurch hesitated yet again was troubling.
Based on known theory, this level of turbulence can have two causes. Someone is messing with time.

The missing trackers appeared to support that thesis.
And the other?

Time could be repairing itself. It is…persistent.

I had heard that.
Only three million or so times since she entered the Service, but who was counting.

I have experienced time repairing itself. It was…challenging.

Challenging?

And nearly life extinguishing.

Which could also explain the missing trackers, she realized. Ashe knew a lot of ways to express worry verbally, thanks to Lurch, but only one Earth word seemed right for the moment.

Crap.

Indeed.

TWO

It looked more like a failed mosque than a bowling alley. Robert Clementyne stared at the mostly nondescript exterior with the sinking sense that his mission had failed before it began. Now it seemed like overkill to have
a
team, let alone
this
team. Not that he’d asked for it. The team was his sister’s idea of expecting the unexpected. He gave her points for thoroughness, took some back for what felt like a lack of trust in his ability to do the job. Not that Robert didn’t find his team interesting. If anything, he was the redundant member in the search for information about the transmogrification machine.

The weird and the alien was the bailiwick of Richard Daniels, their “man in black,” and unofficial team leader. When Robert had explained their mission brief, he hadn’t even blinked.

USAF Colonel Braedon Carey was the only team member to have set foot inside the machine. No one seemed to care that this event had taken place in South Texas in 1944. If he believed the top-secret documents of the time. And the evidence of his own eyes.

And then there was the third member of the team, Kiernan Fyn. Robert didn’t let his gaze go where his thoughts were, because every time he looked at Fyn, he found Fyn looking at him. The flat menace in his eyes chilled more than the black SUV’s air conditioning, though Robert tried not to take it personally, since it appeared to be directed at all and sundry. The truly weird part? Despite Fyn’s high, and intentional, intimidation factor, Robert still thought he could take him. He’d be disturbed by the thought, but he’d felt it about every guy he’d met since his sister’s memories had been integrated with his.

Based on size and silence, Fyn’s role was the “muscle,” but why did they need muscle to check out a museum in a small, Wyoming town? And if it turned out they did need muscle, why alien muscle? Wasn’t there someone from this planet sufficiently large and well armed for the unexpected Robert still needed to learn to expect? Hard not to feel he’d been included as a sort of brother sitter by his over-protective little sister.

Rather than sort through his feelings about this—he was a scientific genius, not a shrink—he kept his gaze fixed on the building, even though he didn’t understand it either.

The Steam Generation Bowling Alley
had a high—and ill fitting—rounded dome that had been painted black, though not recently, if the patches of dismal purple bleeding through were any indication. The four sides had fading murals taken from great moments in steam history. Robert knew this from the museum website because all that remained of those great moments were flecks of multi-colored paint embedded in brick. Not what he’d expected, though in the last six months, anything that did meet his expectations was unusual, so not meeting them might be meeting them.

I don’t think that qualifies as expecting the unexpected.

Robert ignored the nanite interjection, something else he’d come to expect, but had not yet learned to wholly deal with.

In theory he understood that the transmogrification machine they sought to secure might be the key to capturing the mysterious Professor—and sometimes Doctor—Tobias Smith, who had caused problems in at least three galaxies and several periods of history. Evidence suggested that where the machine went, the not-good Professor/Doctor would soon follow, but the machine wasn’t in the museum. He wasn’t even sure the museum was in there.

The website insisted that a museum did reside within the bowling alley, but there was nothing on the exterior to indicate its presence. It was possible that information about the museum had vanished into the brick with the murals. He hoped that the museum had not vanished into the bowling alley or they’d wasted a serious chunk of time getting to where a museum used to be. Not that it being there guaranteed they’d find any useful information. How useful could a museum be that shared space with a bowling alley?

He could concede that it wasn’t the only strange pairing they’d encountered upon entering the town of Wilcox. There was the gun/doughnut shop they’d stopped at on the edge of town. Good doughnuts, excellent gun selection. Also in the weird pairings column was the bait/beauty shop. No one asked to stop there, though even Fyn had wanted to stop at the Jesus Saves snow cone and fireworks stand. A pity it was closed.

Everything about this present, this Earth, this time, was weird to Robert, even the
save money, live better
Wal-Mart. They’d seen several getting here and they all seemed to attract many customers, so it must be more interesting inside than outside. He would have looked it up on his smart phone, but it had half a bar and no network in this part of Wyoming. Six months ago bars and networks weren’t on his mind, nor were this town or its bowling alley and possible museum site. Back then there’d been nothing on his mind, though he didn’t like thinking about that.

He frowned at the bowling alley. Aside from its unfortunate exterior with its awkward dome top, the bowling alley was just a two-story structure set to the rear of a poorly maintained parking lot. Something that tried to be landscaping—and failed—straggled on either side of the wooden double doors of the bowling alley. Weeds, with a surprising lack of enthusiasm, poked out of the myriad cracks in the parking lot’s tarmac. In his admittedly limited experience with weeds, they seemed to always be enthusiastic. Both doors had head-high windows that needed washing. One had an off kilter, unlit “open” sign somewhat visible through the grime, giving the whole a dispirited appearance that didn’t bode well for the usefulness of the museum that might or might not exist.

Man in black jeans, Ric, pulled in next to the only other vehicle in the lot: a pickup that looked long past its sell-by date. Robert was aware he should have known its age and manufacturer. He was a guy, only he wasn’t a real guy. He was a male.

Define difference
, Nod asked.
Are they not synonymous?
Wynken and Blynken indicated their confusion in what was now familiar nanite fashion.

Carey gave the truck an admiring glance. “Nineteen thirties Ford. Sweet grillwork.”

That’s the difference.
Robert mentally dredged up a few more examples, like sports, spitting, passing gas, and banging beer cans against the forehead. Not being a real guy he didn’t know that many. All three nanite personalities winced. Did that make them male, female or gender neutral? He still didn’t know. If there were gender cues, he wasn’t sensing them, though in a strange way he “saw” them with more clarity than most of the real people he’d interacted with since his little sister yanked him out of his psychotic break six months ago. He blinked, well, six months and nine years.

Delilah would have preferred to heal him at the moment of the psychotic break, but that would have messed with the timeline in ways difficult to predict, and pinpoint time travel was impossible—even for someone like his sister who routinely did the impossible. There’d have been no quantifiable impact on anything but him if they could have healed him in the present, but she and the nanites had determined that there’d been too much atrophy of both body and brain for a successful healing. So six months ago, Delilah had used the space/time portal on the Kikk Outpost, arriving nine years in their past—and within a successful healing window determined by the nanites. Once they’d healed him, they brought him to the present. The process had upset their birth order by making him the younger sibling, but it had protected the past.

When he’d expressed concern for the future, the familiar stranger she’d become informed him that the future would have to look out for itself. She had her brother back. Game over. The time travel aspect, and the sibling birth order messing, would have made his head ache, but the nanites made sure nothing ached these days. They also helped him manage the negative aspects of being a genius—aspects that had caused the psychotic break.

This was his first visit back to Earth since his awakening and he found it more alien than the alien planet in another galaxy where he currently lived and worked. He’d been odd before the break, but now he was a hybrid of uber-odd. Because of the mental download, he knew this world, knew much of the time and the culture, but he didn’t
know
any of it. He felt sixteen and a thousand, he felt scary and scared—not of his surroundings exactly, but of making a wrong move or saying the wrong thing. Of taking down the wrong person. Of injuring someone who didn’t deserve to be injured. He, who had never held a weapon or taken a life, was afraid of hurting someone. Talk about mind bending. He felt the weight of his sister’s confidence mixed with General Halliwell’s less than enthusiastic endorsement. Of course, the General was still pissed at Delilah for waking him up. Maybe he’d have gotten over it if he could have disciplined Delilah but she was married to the Gadi, Helfron Giddioni, and out of his jurisdiction.

“Lock and load, Chewie.” Carey unbuttoned his navy sport coat.

Without the integration of his sister’s memories, Robert wouldn’t have understood the nickname as much as he did—which was not a lot. There were similarities between the famous, fictional wookie and Fyn, Robert supposed. It fell into that guy gray area where even his downloaded memories couldn’t help.

Once outside the vehicle, Fyn and Carey closed on the entrance like it was a military objective. It felt odd to know that, but odd was where he currently resided.

“Closed.” Carey pointed out the hours listed on a notice tacked in a corner of a grimy window.

Fyn tried the door. “Not locked.”

He released the two words like he had a per day quota. He also seemed to think the unlocked door was an invitation to enter. The others went in on his heels, and since their mission required it, Robert followed them into a shabby foyer, though he felt conflicted about it. It was empty of everything but a staircase and an arrow tacked to the wall pointing up for the bowling alley. Still nothing about a museum. There appeared to be no access to the ground floor. The building seemed to be fashioned from cement, but he still wondered at the wisdom of having a bowling alley on the upper floor. And why did he feel the rumble of an engine through the soles of his tennis shoes?

Fyn took point with an air of menace. Robert might have been worried, but Fyn had entered the plane that brought them here in the same way. The other two followed, though it was unclear if they felt menace or curiosity. On their six, Robert was the last to enter a world more alien than the one in the other galaxy where he wished he was right now. No question the Kikk Outpost was weird, but he expected it to be weird. He hadn’t expected this.

Expect the unexpected.

I’m working on it
, he told them, even though he wasn’t. How did one work on expecting the unexpected? And even if one managed it, could one really expect this?

Pipes, cylinders, grills, vents, gears, and pistons gleamed dully in the gloom. They appeared to cover part or most of all four walls and various other surfaces, including sections of the floor. The air he inhaled was damp, smelled of popcorn, stale coffee, and hotdogs. A metallic taste lingered on his tongue. Somewhere that engine pulsed, stronger now that they were on the upper floor; sending a distinct hum up through the soles of his shoes, and now he could hear steam hissing in pipes. Should have expected that in a place called
Steam Generation.
He moved deeper into the room, past his companions who looked around like they expected something to explode. It wasn’t an overly pessimistic expectation.