Strange New Worlds 2016 (37 page)

“Captain, I’m no Lynter.”

That name was only invoked during dire circumstances. A cautionary tale told in whispers
around the Academy of a time traveler that became so enamored with yesterday that
he fled into the past to escape his own future.

The service tried to rescue him, but he would have none of it. He’d rather wallow
in musty history celebrating its quaintness, its slower pace. Well, one day the past
caught up to him, and he died an ignominious death on a street corner.

I needed to tell this captain that wasn’t me. That wasn’t who I wanted to be. It was
who I turned out to be.

“Captain, did you know in all the time I have spent trapped in this kabuki theater,
I have made and had only one friend? Like me, he was abandoned too. Forced to live
on the streets without the simplest bare necessities like food and shelter. I befriended
this kindred spirit and made sure he was fed, even if it meant I went hungry.

“Why, you ask? Because he was more human than the humans that passed me by every single
day. They wouldn’t waste an act of kindness on me. But he did. His humanity kept me
going for fifteen years until he died. I still mourn Tachyon’s passing.”

“You’re talking about a stray?”

“Well of course I’m talking about a stray. None of these wretches care what happens
to me.”

“Captain Braxton, I need you to get moving.”

I folded my arms and huffed.

“I haven’t agreed to help. Beam me down a weapon and maybe I’ll do it.”

“You won’t need one if you get there in time.”

I kept my own counsel and said nothing.

“I could return you to the twenty-ninth century. Stand by to be beamed up,”
he said.

Thirty years of pent-up emotions poured out in a stream of tears. Civilization awaited
on the other side of a temporal inversion. My life sentence had been commuted. Then
it dawned on me.

“Leave me here, Captain,” I begged. “Leave me in the twentieth century.”

“You know better than anyone else that I can’t do that,”
he replied.

“This mission is our destruction. We have been ordered to commit suicide.”

“It’s not suicide if one timeline never was. Our continued coexistence poses a future
threat and constitutes a direct violation of the Temporal Prime Directive. We both
know that,”
my other self reasoned.

“Why not vaporize us with a hand phaser?”

No reply. Ranting and raving came quite naturally to me after three decades in the
twentieth century. I pressed on.

“Too messy? Too much like murder? It’s so much tidier to beam me up, store me inside
the pattern buffer and rematerialize me on twenty-ninth-century Earth. Beam me down
any time after I departed for the twenty-fourth century. That should do it. Let time
eradicate me. Why should we get our hands dirty?”

I expected more of a pause before my other self quoted regulations like a first-year
cadet at the Academy.

“Preserving the sanctity of the timeline comes above all else.”

Did I just say that? The irony of this situation was not lost on me. The juvenile
mind that needed convincing was my own.

“I was dead before you left the twenty-ninth century and when you return nothing will
have changed. I’ll still be dead. I was, am, and will be captain of a timeship. Even
though my command is lost, I haven’t lost my sense of duty. I won’t contaminate the
timeline. Let me have a life in this time.”

I waited for a reply from myself. The silence fed my fears. Fear of my other self
training a transporter beam on these coordinates and carrying out orders without question,
like any good soldier would do. My glimpse of a safe, intact future would be the last
sight that I carried with me into oblivion. Janeway, by preserving the future, had
ended mine. I broached the silence again.

“You know me like you know yourself. And you know I’m telling the truth. Tell the
Temporal Integrity Commission that. Tell them you have our word. Do this for me, for
yourself.”

The combadge went dead. And then it dawned on me what a dimwitted fool I had been.
I’d wasted my breath. He was prepared to delete himself (me) from the timestream.
A temporal transporter leveled at me would force my conscription. It was still my
choice to make.

“All right,” I shouted to the sky. “I’ll do it. Just don’t erase me.”

“You okay, Captain?” Officer Sims asked.

I didn’t hear the constable sneak up on me. His female partner always stayed behind
the controls of number 36897, the black-and-white motor car they both traveled in.
Fortunately for me, my behavior was not out of the ordinary and would not draw suspicion.

“Of course I’m fine,” I said. “What do you want?”

He always smiled and put his hat back on after stepping outside his machine. This
was an overt display of his power and office, something that I should respect. And
he always talked to me in soothing tones like we were friends instead of jailor and
prisoner, our true status.

I always hated that about him.

“I was on my regular patrol and heard shouting. Sounded like some heated words between
you and someone else. You’re not getting into arguments with the locals again, are
you? Do we need to talk about this downtown?”

“We don’t have time for this. Get rid of him.”

Sims kept talking as if nothing happened.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“What was I supposed to hear?” Sims asked.

“Only you can hear me,
you old fool. We’re in silent mode. I have a Betazoid communications officer. I dictate
and he sends my commands down through the centuries to you, telepathically.”

Sims started to move toward me. Instinctively, I drew back away from him.

“Come on, Captain,” Sims said. “Let’s go.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

“No. Let him take you. You’ll get to the target faster.”

“And how am I supposed to carry out my mission behind bars?” I asked.

“What mission?” Sims asked.

I cleared my throat and said nothing. He led me over to the primitive transport, pushed
my head down—crumpling my fedora in the process—and shoved me into the backseat, safely
ensconced behind black grillwork.

Sims came round the vehicle and sat next to his partner up front.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“God, he stinks,” the partner said. “I’m rolling down the windows.”

Hate to admit it, but she was right. I smelled like a Bolian who was denied access
to a bathroom for a week. Hard to tell out in the open, but in an enclosed space it
became harder to deny. But I had bigger problems than olfactory ones. Topping that
list was how I was supposed to get out of this automobile.

These little joyrides usually ended up with me led away in handcuffs to a holding
cell and transferred to a mental hospital. I can be separated from my stuff for hours
or days, depending on the mood of the arresting officer and damn doctors.

“Can’t wait to see you pull this one off,” I said.

Sims looked over his shoulder and gave me an uncomfortable smile. He turned to his
partner and said, “Take the one-oh-one. It should be moving this time of day.”

“Good. The peacekeeper is making it easier on both of us.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

“Hey, Captain, you might want to keep the outbursts down to minimum. If you catch
my drift,” Sims said. “Could be the difference between a chat with me and a stay at
the hospital.”

I stared out the side window as the cityscape rushed past. Architecture was aesthetically
unpleasing and functionally lacking. Log cabins or caves would be a step up from this
squalor. Signs all over the urban sprawl demanded that the inhabitants
KEEP THE CITY CLEAN
.

What a joke. This had to be the dirtiest city on the planet. It wasn’t fit to house
refugees from a war zone in my century. At least the part of the city I called home
had the ocean, even if it was a pale comparison to the vastness of space-time. Something
about the salt-scented breezes that curled around my alleyway comforted me.

“Go around back,” Sims said. He picked up a corded handset mounted to the dash and
said, “Two-forty-seven-Baker bringing in a five-one-five-zero suspect.”

I started to speak, but my body was being taken apart one atom at a time. The powerful
temporal transporter beam reached across the centuries to find me, destroy me, transfer
me, and reconstruct me all in a moment’s time.

Materializing on a sidewalk in Los Angeles drew no one’s attention, typical behavior
for these self-absorbed screw heads. I tilted my head skyward and shouted, “That was
subtle. Well done.”

“Law enforcement of this era misplace criminals all the time.”

“I am no criminal.”

“
Go stand on a street corner and do whatever displaced humans do in this timeframe
.”

“Why didn’t you just beam me from the alley to here in the first place?” I asked.

“
Chroniton flux readings would be too high for a transport of that distance. The time-traveling
thieves would be alerted to your presence.”

I hated it when he was right. There appeared to be no other fellow outcasts who claimed
this stretch of roadway. You don’t want to encroach on another unhoused human’s territory.
I learned that lesson the hard way in the first few weeks of my exile.

I dug through a waste receptacle for a disposable container of their weakened version
of
raktajino
. Red lip prints stained the sides and earthy dregs wafted from the one I retrieved.
It was still warm to the touch. I always carried a stylus on me and scribbled an appropriate
plea.

PLEASE GIVE. GOD BLESS

All that was left to do was to find a corner that afforded me a clear view of the
Chronowerx building, then eke out whatever sympathies still resided in these vainglorious
cretins. A shuffling gait usually elicited an appropriate response. A despondent look
pasted to my face would help too.

I staked out a crossroads with a string of multicolored lights, which afforded me
the best opportunity to mimic atypical behavior. The less fortunate frequented these
intersections where those who rode in private transportation were obliged to stop.

Motor carriages of this era spewed toxic amounts of carbon monoxide. Society compelled
its lowest ranking caste members to engulf the polluted air for a small recompense
to be doled out at the driver’s whim. I’m sure I inhaled unsafe levels with my container
held out, seeking alms. Most ignored me, some gave me a few coins or paper currency
to make me go away.

And when the lights changed and the engines roared, I scampered out of the road to
avoid being run down. I was digging through my cup, counting my take, when a new voice
began speaking to me and me alone.

“Captain Braxton. This is Lieutenant Ducane. We serve together.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “For one thing, there’d only be room for one of us.”

“Sir, we serve aboard a
Wells
-class timeship, much larger than an
Epoch
-class.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To warn you, sir. You may be suffering from the Atavachron effect. And retrieving
you from the twentieth century runs some serious risks.”

“Good. I can use this information against myself,” I said. “Tell me more.”

“You have spent so many years, decades in fact, in Earth’s past that pulling you out
and bringing you back to our present may kill you.”

“Sounds like poppycock to me,” I said.

“No, sir. There have been studies that show your memory engrams, even your biorhythms,
are synced to the past from your lengthy stay. And just like a traveler prepared by
the Sarpeidon device, a return trip to the future could be fatal. I have to end transmission.
Good luck, sir.”

Why didn’t the other Captain Braxton warn me? What game was he playing?

I didn’t know what to say to Ducane. It had been far too long since another human
being was humane to me. I started to thank him, but stopped. A young merchant standing
behind a food cart stared at me with a distressed look on her face. Since she only
heard one side of the conversation and I had no portable phone, she thought me quite
mad.

I yelled at her and she moved farther down the street. Didn’t matter. I had work to
do. Ducane instructed me to continue panhandling until dusk. Then I was to head over
to the southwest corner of the building. Starling’s henchman resided just inside the
double doors hunched over a primitive monitoring device.

I tried to remain inconspicuous digging through a waste receptacle just outside the
well-manicured grounds. My actions would appear quite mundane to the unpracticed eye
and afforded me a prime observation post. In short order, I was able to locate and
log the guard’s activities down to the minute.

“Get ready”

It was Braxton this time.

“One step ahead of you,” I said.

After the guard exited the building, I gave him his requisite ninety seconds to cross
the street and enter the motor car stables for their inspection.

“All clear.”

I trotted across the small parking lot in the rear of the building and stood in front
of the double doors. My lock-picking skills were a little rusty, I admit, but I managed
to get indoors in twenty seconds.

“Hurry up before he comes back.”

“This isn’t my first mission, Captain.”

Then it hit me all at once. The canned air was much cooler than the stifling heat
that lingered outside. The feel of the cool air pressing against my skin was intoxicating.
And I had a roof over my head, and just down that corridor was an indoor bathroom
with soap and water. I bet they even had one with a shower. Oh, a shower would be
heavenly, especially after years of bathing in the Pacific Ocean.