Time Salvager (16 page)
If it wasn’t for the agency, all humans would have become extinct a hundred years ago. Only the salvages of the past had kept the species together. Still, it was an uphill climb, one that was getting harder over time. Things were only going to get worse as people became more desperate. It was something Levin had to prepare for. As the high auditor of Earth, he would lead the front line against the bulk of the crimes against the Time Laws. He would have to be ready.
“Auditor Levin,” a hurried voice said at the doorway. Levin raised an eyebrow as Handler Hameel, looking nervous and out of breath, came in and bowed. Something important must have happened if the chief of Handler Operations came personally instead of reaching him through his comm band.
“Yes, Hameel?”
“Pardon the interruption, Auditor, but we have a possible first Time Law violation. One of the chronmen just returned from a job. There were two human-size life signatures on the jump.”
It took a few moments for the words to sink in. After all, of all the Time Laws broken in the past, no one had dared ever break the first. If this allegation was true, the agency had just sunk to a new low under Levin’s stewardship. He looked back down at the brown liquid swirling in his glass, threw it back in one gulp. Yes, this was definitely a trying year.
The familiar flash of yellow blinded James as he fell into the brown ocean sludge. Immediately, the nausea of lag sickness overcame him as he sank into the thick, quicksand-like waves. The rising and falling of the oily brown gunk rolled over and enveloped him, threatening to worsen his already tender stomach. For a second, he forgot about Elise and let her go as he flailed in the top layer of ocean. Without his actively willing her to be contained in his exo, Elise slipped through it and disappeared into the frigid brown void.
When he realized what he had done, James grasped for her again, but Elise had already disappeared into the depths of the muck and shit. Panicked, James expanded his exo and dove down after her, pushing his kinetic coils out and probing desperately for any sign from her. His exo’s power was depleted and couldn’t handle the pressure of going much deeper, but he had to try. He knew she should still be nearby. Earth’s ocean was caked with six meters of grime before it gave way to actual water. Once she hit that, he would lose her forever.
Then, one of the coils brushed against something solid. James turned and latched on to it. He saw a glimpse of Elise choking, stark panic on her face, and he expanded the shield around her body. He grabbed her close as she choked and threw up into the interior of the shield. When she had nothing more to empty, he held her still as she shivered and coughed. They stayed there, suspended in the midst of a brown maelstrom roiling all around the shield.
“James, I detected the jump two minutes ago. The collie is on its way. Should be to your location any second. Is everything all right?” Smitt sounded unsure. “I read some weird signatures.”
James ignored him as he held on to Elise. Slowly, her shaking became less violent and her grip around his shoulders slackened. Her head moved around his left shoulder.
“Wow, this is cool,” she remarked, her voice strained behind the nonchalant words, looking up at the sludge swirling around the protective sphere.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded. “I think so. Where are we?”
“The question is when are we?” he said. “We’re at the exact same place we were four hundred years ago.”
She froze. “This brown gunk is the ocean? What happened?”
“James, come in, man!
Collie
’s above you. Get your ass up there. Your bands are almost dry.”
Several bands on James’s wrist began to shut down. He diverted all remaining levels to his netherstore, and exo, rad, and comm band. Even then, he had less than a minute left.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “For now, hold on tight. We need to get out of here.”
James put his arms around Elise’s waist. A second later, they exploded from the caked layer of ocean and sped up toward the sky. They flew past the low-hanging hazy mist and rose up a hundred meters toward the waiting collie. The collie hovered as it tried to maintain its position against the battering, howling wind. Just as his foot touched down on the wing, the exo’s power gave out. James gripped the door handle while Elise held on to him as the wind blasted them horizontal, their legs scrabbling uselessly for purchase against the slippery wing.
“Smitt, get that door open!” he thought desperately.
The winds wobbled the craft, causing it to suddenly drop and nearly dumping James and Elise over the side. The collie now hovered just above the water as the waves swept gunk along the surface of the wing.
“Smitt!” James screamed out loud.
“Working on it!” Smitt answered. “There’s electrical interference.”
Elise gasped and pointed behind them. James turned and froze. A massive wave was rolling toward them. It climbed higher and higher until all he could see was an entire wall of brown. The impact of the wave would kill them before they drowned.
The collie’s door opened with a hiss.
“Get in! I’m putting in
Collie
’s route now. She’ll shoot once the door closes.”
James could hardly hear Smitt’s voice in his head over the low rumbling thunder of the oncoming wave. Fortunately, Elise still seemed to have her head about her. She squirmed out of his grasp, grabbed him by the neck, and heaved them both inside. They tumbled onto the floor as the door shut. A wave struck the starboard wing, tilting the collie and bouncing them against the side wall.
“Get us out of here!” James yelled. A steady stream of brown water battered against the cockpit windows. The two bounced around like balls inside a container before the violent rocking finally stopped and everything grew dead calm.
Elise groaned as she turned from her side and lay on her back. James pushed himself from his belly up to his knees. There was a nasty gash across Elise’s cheek and blood was pouring down from the crown of her head. He wasn’t in much better shape.
All his bands had powered down except for his comm band and the netherstore, which was barely holding on with its embedded auxiliary power. James unhooked his netherstore band and transferred the link to
Collie
.
This was the first time since he had joined ChronoCom that he didn’t have any bands running. Right now would be a terrible time for the cabin pressure of the collie to drop. He had never felt so naked before in his life.
Speaking of naked …
Elise was pointing at him. “What happened to your clothes?” His paint had slipped off and he was wearing only a pair of undergarments. “And what happened to your face? It’s all white, like an albino’s!”
He ignored her questions. “Anything broken?”
Elise groaned. “My head, my sanity, my…” She wrinkled her face. “My nose. I smell like I just took a bath in the sewers.” She sat up. “But no, nothing seems broken.” She paused. “What about you? You don’t look so hot, and your face is turning paler, if that’s even possible.”
For the first time, James realized the full extent of the crime he had just committed. He had broken the first and most important Time Law. Since ChronoCom’s birth in 2363, no chronman had ever dared to bring someone back from the past before. It was one of the primary laws ingrained into every initiate early on at the Academy. As far as the agency was concerned, they were both as good as dead. Not only was it a capital offense, he could have weakened and endangered the chronostream. Furthermore, the Vallis Bouvard Disaster hung heavy in his thoughts.
James clenched his fists as he frantically tried to figure out how to get out of this mess in a way that wouldn’t involve their execution. The monitors might not know about her yet. Maybe he could hide her. Stash her in one of the distant outposts. Keep her away from the monitors. The solar system was vast enough that maybe this one accident might slip ChronoCom’s notice. After all, this had never happened before, as far as he knew. They wouldn’t be expecting it.
The collie made a sharp turn toward Central. He leaped toward the cockpit and punched in several new commands.
“Why did you put
Collie
on manual?” Smitt asked. “Your AI band is offline. I can’t get a read on your life signs. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he thought back. “Will report in soon. Just, um … need to check on something.”
“All right, my friend. Whatever you say.” Smitt sounded anything but all right. “Listen, about that strange signature—”
“The comm band is out of levels as well,” James cut him off. “Going dark for a bit. Will report in soon.” It was a flimsy excuse. The comm band used so little levels he could have kept the link open. It was against protocol for any chronman to disengage from his handler while on assignment without extraordinary cause. Well, James had extraordinary cause, all right.
The collie had reached the eastern seaboard of the Northern American continent. Brown sloping oceans gave way to a gray barren landscape dotted by the devastation of centuries of war, waste, and environmental degradation. They were currently flying over a large radiation field of a wrecked city that had been razed by one of the dozen conflicts.
Elise’s eyes had widened like full moons as she stared at the devastation below with a hand over her mouth. She looked at him and pointed out the window. “Is that the Washington Monument we just passed? What happened?”
That name sounded familiar. James had taken extensive history courses while training to be an operative, but he had always been a mediocre student. It took him a few moments to recall his history and geography.
“Razed in the middle of the Third World War,” he said. “Both the Democratic Union and the Confederate United States surrendered the next year to the Tri-Axis Alliance of China, Pakistan, and Russia.”
“When did this war happen?” she asked.
James kept his face neutral as he spoke. “Two thousand ninety-eight, the year following the destruction of the Nutris Platform. It lasted nineteen years and cost over forty-three million lives. Global GDP—”
“Stop. Please,” Elise looked like she was in shock. She sat down on the bench and buried her head in her hands. “My family. My friends…”
James hesitated. Unsure exactly what to do, he reached a hand out and patted her on the back, stiffly. “By the time it happened, you were already dead.”
He thought the words would provide her some comfort. After all, it meant she didn’t have to live through all that suffering of the years that followed. Instead, she just sat there silently, numb, her arms cradling her knees as she huddled in the far corner of the bench.
Embarrassed and unsure how to handle her, James walked back to the console and checked the scanner. They’d be landing in Chicago in a matter of minutes. He’d have to hide her before heading back to ChronoCom. Maybe after he answered whatever questions Smitt and the monitors had, he could retrieve her. If Valta held up their side of the bargain, he could be in Europa in two days. He’d take Elise with him, of course. Maybe they could start a new life, assuming she even wanted to stay with him.
This was all assuming Elise’s health wasn’t an issue. If the Vallis Bouvard Disaster was true, people moving forward in time were doomed to become mentally and molecularly unstable. James never put much stock in that story, thinking it nothing more than scare tactics from the Academy, but it poked at the back of his mind. Well, he’d have to wait and see. For her own good, he might have to kill her after all.
The slum city of Chicago appeared on the horizon. First things first, he needed to find a safe place to hide Elise. He lowered the collie through clouds thick with smoke and soot and entered the habitat zone just under the skyways of moving vehicles. Collies were larger than regular low-altitude transports, and his entry beneath the sky lanes was bound to draw attention. They’d have to park the collie and proceed on foot. He maneuvered to the western town of Humboldt, an industrial center that processed the majority of the city’s waste, to park between several mammoth buildings with dozens of smokestacks rising high into the sky, each stack puffing out noxious plumes that spread out until they faded into the clouds.
Hopefully, the heavy smoke would hide his entry, and there would be fewer people around this more heavily polluted area. When the collie powered down, James went to the emergency storage locker and pulled out two respirators and chem suits, handing one to Elise.
“Put this on,” he instructed. The chem suit was overkill and could draw some attention, but it wasn’t unheard of. It would attract a lot less attention than the antique clothes she currently wore, which ironically looked much more futuristic than the clothing of his time. Not to mention the attention his being nearly naked would draw.
Elise, still in shock, took the gray rubber suit in her hand and stared dumbly at it. Then she frowned. “Why did you give this to me? Are we heading to town or are we growing Ebola cultures in a test lab?”
“Your body hasn’t been immunized or protected. The air will make you sick until you acclimate or we get you a band,” James said. “Also, you don’t exactly look like a local. We’ll need to hide you for a while until this problem gets sorted.”
Elise slipped into the oversize chem suit one leg at a time. She looked like a little girl wearing her father’s clothes. “What do you mean, get sorted? What problem are you talking about?”
“Come on. Let’s go,” he said, opening the hatch and ushering her out. “There are laws that prohibit bringing someone to the present day. I’ll explain later.”
He hurried away from the parked collie, pulling Elise along by the hand and walking down a narrow road with a dozen of the towering processing plants on either side. Elise stared at gray sky, visible through the crisscrossing gaps between the buildings. James kept a hand on her wrist and led her along. A few minutes later, they entered an underground tunnel to the mass transit, and were soon moving deeper into the Earth. Elise, her face covered by the respirator, looked around the train, packed with dirty and tired workers returning from the night shift.
