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“Are you all Garradians?”

Purple-not-people-eater and Green-not-giant looked offended.

“We are members of the Time Alliance.” Green-not-giant snapped.

“I am a
Grenardian
, not a Garradian.” More purple suffused Purple-not-people-eater’s face.

If that wasn’t a sign that nothing good ever came from a question, she didn’t know what was.

“Right.” Robert sounded a bit winded, which wasn’t a surprise.

The earth moved again and the anomaly moved closer.

“I hope that doesn’t eat our airship,” Emily said, trying to mentally place it relative to this place and not succeeding.

“Our airship?” Robert looked amused.

“We took it. It’s ours. We should get it airborne before there’s any more shrinkage.” She had no idea how long it would take to get the steam built up again.

“An airship?” Not-Belle sounded uneasy.

“It’s better than wandering around down here with automatons clunking after us.” Really, she shouldn’t have to point out the obvious, even if they were dreamtime creeps.

“We do need to find other shelter,” Green-not-giant tossed in. “This one will be gone soon. We won’t last long out there.”

Not-Colonial frowned. “Will it rise with all of us inside? Usually they only carry an engineer and a pilot.”

Robert looked at Emily, which was, awesome. She nodded. With the Abram’s ball, shouldn’t be a problem. She almost frowned. She’d had dreams where she thought she could fly until the moment she needed to fly.

“We don’t have a pilot,” not-Colonial pointed out. “Unless—” He looked at Robert, then Emily.

“I can fly it,” Purple-not-people-eater said.

Everyone looked at him with varying levels of belief.

“I can.”

Only one way to find out if he was right.

“Aerial recon would be useful. Get the lay of the land.” Maybe they could find Uncle’s E’s warehouse, too.

Green-not-Giant perked up, in a very green way. “Perhaps there is a way out up there.”

They all looked hopeful at that thought.

“Recon is always good.”

Looking into Robert’s eyes, Emily had the weird feeling that he was thinking about a hundred things at once.

More like a million. Robert-oh-my-darling has a unique physiology well suited to nanite/human integration.

Emily thought about that.
You like his brain?

Oh my darling yes.
A pause.
Your brain is very interesting, too.

I’m sure it is.
Not.

There is much here that Robert-oh-my-darling would find interesting and useful if we could continue the data transfer.

So her brain was “useful” to Robert. Lovely.

Not just to Robert. We were most curious why your physiological response was similar to Robert-oh-my-darling, but different. But that’s not why I migrated into you. I had to do it stabilize you in the time vortexes we passed through.

Okay, that was interesting and embarrassing, though if kissing would help…

How self-serving could she be, trying to manipulate an innocent, imaginary voice in her head into asking her to kiss Robert.

Do I make you uncomfortable? Do you wish me to evacuate?

No, of course not.
It was true. She kind of liked having Nod there.
I just want to help you—actually don’t trust me. I just want to kiss Robert again before I wake up. He’s such a great kisser. Like seriously awesome. If kisses are smart, then his are totally brainy and hot. Oh wow. I’m that shallow.

The chuckle felt like being tickled from the inside.
You are deeper than you realize, Emily.

My friends call me Em.

The sigh felt different from the chuckle, but also inside out. Like a puff of warm air against her insides. It felt so real. So did Robert’s arm around her waist. Had her dreams felt this real ever? Had the heat been this hot, the rotten smells this rotten? The motley crew couldn’t be real, but there was something about them that felt almost authentic, despite their motley strangeness or perhaps because of it. The ground shook again, the anomaly eating more of the warehouse, a crate
not
crunching when half of it disappeared. The inexorable silence of it sent a chill that felt very chilly—and very real—down her back.

She shivered, leaning harder against the warmth that was Robert. He breathed in and then out. She matched the move, only opposite, inhaling—with gratitude—his guy smell, just under the sewer scent.

All of it, sights, sounds, smells, the feel of Robert strong and sturdy next to her, combined into a moment of blinding, terrifying, amazing truth.

“I’m not dreaming.” It wasn’t a question, at least not technically, but Robert shook his head.

“No.”

“Holy crap on a cracker.”

TWENTY-FOUR

“If you’ll take my advice,” Chameleon sounded like she thought Ashe wouldn’t, “you won’t tell him your full name. In his culture an exchange of names is an engagement or maybe marriage. We’re not sure.”

“We are not allowed to reveal our names.” Ashe knew she sounded prim, and she stood on shaky ground. If she managed not to reveal her name, it might be the only regulation she didn’t break in this place. Chameleon’s arched brows and the mockery in her eyes said she knew it, too. Up to now, events had unfolded too fast for Ashe to do more than react.
Act, not react
was another family stricture and she felt a need to change the dynamics sooner, rather than later—though both sooner and later were tricky to define on a Time Service operation. She stopped the thought there, so as not to start a round of eye twitching or a time spiral.

Lurch tried to help her organize the incoming data, but she needed to
think
, to try and get some perspective on what they’d learned. Back before the “drill” she’d felt an urgent need to move, to act, now she felt as much urgency to stop and consider. It helped to be outside in real air after so much time in the stream, though it felt odd to be on the outpost when it wasn’t the base. It looked almost the same, but it wasn’t. Unlike the base, or her brief time in the time tear, this outpost teemed with activity. Garradians—no—Gadi and Earthlings passed by in almost equal numbers. Unification was in the “later” column in this time. It felt a bit like being in one of those historically based Earth vids.

Time looked different here, too. She didn’t just see it surging through this place in new and interesting patterns. She felt it, too, felt its persistent, eager progress. Time didn’t stop on the base, at least not in the section she worked out of, but it did proceed at a reduced pace and the patterns were more sedate when the inhabitants had fewer choices to make and the time shields and sensors filtered out much of the stream. Ashe didn’t like extended time on the base. As a time sensitive, slow time itched, despite her protective uniform. Even those not as sensitive to time as she was got twitchy if they lingered in slow time for too long.

Here in real time, it looked to be mid-day, well into the hot season, judging by air thick enough to swim through. Even the Chameleon looked hot, an interesting feat for someone so fundamentally cold. The humidity wasn’t a surprise, since the outpost had always been surrounded by a large body of water and was in a temperate climate zone on Kikk. What did surprise was how little it had changed in the passing of so many seasons, so many Earth years.

Lurch had a time stamp from spiking into the outpost’s systems, but it was little help when time continued to flex and flux out in the stream. The food and visit to the loo had helped recharge her physical systems, but mentally she lagged like bad time. Neither the Chameleon nor her man seemed inclined to talk, allowing her to consider the bits of data drifting through her head in disconnected pieces. He’d downloaded protected historical data for her to compare against this reality. It didn’t always help as much as it should, since humans recorded their own history. Ashe looked around as they walked, trying to do it without tourist-like gawking, though that was a challenge. There had been a period in their history where tourists had toured time. No surprise that didn’t work out, but she could see the appeal. This place, these people had helped shape her future—if she still had one when the time dust settled.

When Ashe mentioned that someone in the Council might be involved, Lurch had wanted her to show Chameleon their faces—up until the paradox tremors ramped up like a furious panthric. It had been worse than meeting her ancestors and Lurch backed off in a hurry. So no sharing—or possible insights—there. It heightened her sense of isolation from Service resources. Just because she could navigate the stream like a pro didn’t mean she could repair time like one. She felt another round of regret for her inability to pause time.

It might not be possible to pause time when it is so unstable.

Lurch had a point—one that reinforced her own instinctive sense it was the wrong move.

The Constilinium and the Chameleon’s intersection problem didn’t make sense to her mind, but her instincts were twitching like it mattered. She couldn’t see a time trail yet, not in the conscious part of her mind, but she smelled one. It hovered just out of reach, giving her an itch between her shoulder blades that Lurch couldn’t remove. If this Keltinarian man mattered to the overall puzzle, if he turned out to be a time pin, possibly shifted in some way, how was she supposed to deal with him? She wasn’t allowed, nor was she trained to deal with it. Regulations dictated that she return and report the problem, leaving someone with more experience to effect a repair. Two problems with that reg.

First, there might not be anyone with experience left to deal with it. And of course, there was their concern about possible time traps around the base.

The stream was complex. It wasn’t like someone could throw up a net across all time and snag a tracker. Any trap would have to be placed in the right stream or streams. If she hadn’t already seen the time attacker’s work, she might have risked it, but whoever it was did good work. Knew where and how to game the time system. And snagging low-level trackers would be easier, because they had certain vectors they were required to follow—the main reason she did her sideslips, but those were landing sideslips. That type of trap would be a lot harder to avoid in the stream, particularly close to the base when options narrowed.

She had an emergency portal recall device but was glad she hadn’t used it. Didn’t seem to be a coincidence that the Chameleon’s brother had been diverted during recall transit. It seemed to indicate that someone had thrown the net far, wide and deep. And closed that route to her as well. And if she did make it back, if the Council was corrupt, would they fix it?

Here, more even than out there, it sobered her to realize that there was no safe place for her. Here she risked causing a paradox, there she risked capture. She felt the weight of the challenge and her isolation, not just from Service resources, but from her family. She hadn’t seen them since her induction, but had planned to drop in when she got her first leave. She’d never felt so alien, so isolated from the familiar.

It seems an unfriendly place for me, as well.
Lurch sounded a bit wry for someone whose risk was his continued existence.

I might be annoyed with you, but I’m not looking for a nanite extinction event.

I am pleased to hear you think it.

Sarcasm did not become him, if he could be becomed.

There are other ways to influence time.
Ashe had been going through the data automatically downloaded into her head upon entering the Service.
I just wish I had more information about time pins and how to deal with them.

I do not suppose it is an accidental oversight that it isn’t there.

I wish I could spend time in the center, get a big picture look at what’s happening. I get the sense of a pattern, a plan. If I could see more, I might be able to track it back to the source.
It felt so weird to be here, on the base, but not
on
the base, all the resources just out of reach.

There is no guarantee that you’d see the real picture if the Service has been compromised.

He had a valid point.
How did
she,
with so little data, arrive at the idea of a shifted time pin?
Ashe hated to admit it, but it impressed her, even if Chameleon was wrong.

I lived in her head until her death and I still don’t understand the way her mind works.

He didn’t think it, but Ashe knew he felt the same about her. She grinned, then she sighed. None of this helped with her current problem.

If this man had been shifted, somehow they had to figure out when he was supposed to be and how to get him back there without access to any Service resources. Even the future was closed to them if time started fluxing on a large scale. During periods of severe instability, the future could become actively fluid. As far as she knew, no one could land on fluid. Even now her future could be turning unstable as the time tremors spread through the stream. If she didn’t figure this out, there’d be no family for her to visit.

Stabilizing time is our mission.

Our impossible mission.
Ashe fought back a sigh, then before Lurch could toss it at her, she added,
the impossible just takes longer
. She resisted the impulse to point out that longer was relative at the moment and focused on the stricture instead. The idea that the impossible was possible did intrigue her on a gut level. It implied that with proper application of resources, the impossible
was
possible. The concept, she could admit to herself, appealed. She’d always hated obstacles and people telling her she couldn’t do something. Perhaps it was a genetic imperative. But before she bent her brain to the pin, she needed to ascertain he was what the Chameleon suspected—assuming it was possible to tell.

The Chameleon and her man both stopped near a bend in the curving path they’d been following between towering stone buildings and the peaceful park that surrounded them. Five hundred years in the future, the park was somewhat different—plants were organic and therefore changeable—but the buildings looked the same, at least on the outside. The tree she’d slammed into during the time in the alternate reality looked the same—