Time Salvager (34 page)
The only problem with her new setup was that she had to climb up those stairs every single time she had to work. Elise was now going up and down the stairs at least three times a day, minimum. At least it was a decent workout. She considered moving her sleeping arrangements closer to her lab and tried that for one night. However, the top of the Farming Towers was pitch black at night and the wind howled through the corridors, so she decided she’d rather sleep in her old tent next to James for the time being.
When the lights from the power generator flickered, she motioned to Rima to pause in her studies and clean the beakers from Elise’s last experiment. That was one thing the people in the Elfreth were very good at; they were thorough when it came to cleaning, especially their utensils and food. Any hint of the plague on animals and plants had to be cut out and cleaned before consumption. These people had learned over time how deadly the Earth Plague could be if ingested.
Elise hurried out of the room. James must have just returned. The generators weren’t powerful by any period’s standards, and they had a tendency to flicker on and off when James’s collie was around. Recently, he had taken to parking his ship closer, in one of the abandoned garages on the periphery of the camp. Whenever the collie was flying around, all the power sources in her lab went haywire. Probably something to do with magnetic fields and power drains of energy fields or whatever. Elise could care less; she had never been interested in physics.
She hurried down the stairwell of the Farming Tower and, ten minutes later, emerged from the base of the tower and crossed the communal fields. Her legs and calves had gotten much stronger already. They were sore the first few days, but now she barely felt the climb. She passed by several of the Elfreth, who waved almost reverently as if she were some savior. This made her stomach churn. She couldn’t look them in the eyes as she passed them, too embarrassed to acknowledge their faith in her.
In the past few days, James had finally begun to use his abilities and technologies for the benefit of the tribe, something he had been reluctant to do earlier. The collie, like most ChronoCom vessels, was equipped to avoid detection, a necessary technology in the pirate-infested gas mines regions. However, it was still susceptible to visual sightings, so all his movements had to be made late at night.
Elise waved when James walk out of the garage. She saw him smile when he saw her; he was doing more of that these days. She felt her heart beat just a little faster as he approached. There were times when he would be gone for days, and though she knew he could take care of himself, she would worry until she heard back from him.
“How goes the cure? Is it almost ready?” he asked offhandedly.
“It hasn’t started yet,” she snapped, more sharply than she intended. His constant asking was starting to get under her skin.
James looked surprised. “I don’t understand. You have everything you asked for. What’s the problem?” He leaned in. “Elise, we made promises to these people.”
Elise felt her ears turn red as she put her arm around his elbow and tugged him along until they were out of earshot of some of the younger Elfreth helping out in the garage. They wandered down to the river so she could speak with him in private. Sure, she could talk to him with a comm band, but it still felt awkward to chat with someone in her head.
“I’m having issues,” she said after she was sure they were alone.
He looked confused, worry straining his face. “What issues? You said you could cure the plague.”
“First of all, I said I thought I could,” she said. “And I still know how to cure it. At least … well, I might have been a little optimistic.” Elise let her frustration show. Even working long days, she knew she had bitten off more than she could chew. She was flailing. After all, she had had an entire team back on Nutris, not to mention a veritable army of engineers, scientists, advanced systems, and robots.
Now she had a fifth-grade chemistry set and a teenager who couldn’t count past nine because she had lost her little finger to an infection when she was young. Elise never realized how much of her supposed science genius was dependent on the tools of her time. This week, it had taken her four days to establish some baselines that she could have calculated in thirty minutes back on Nutris. At this rate, it would take a lifetime before she rediscovered the cure. Some scientist she had turned out to be.
“I need help,” she said. “Half of the equipment I have is too old to use, and I can’t understand the other half…”
He looked confused.
“I’m saying I need equipment from my time.” She said with exasperation. “You need to go back in time and pick them up for me.” She handed him a piece of paper. “I made a new list.”
James looked at it and shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” She threw up her hands. “It’s the tools I’m familiar with.”
James shook his head. “I can’t just go back in time and retrieve items from the past on a whim. Each jump has to be carefully mapped to a dead-end time line. I can’t afford to have time ripples that could change history.”
“You brought me back,” she said.
“I’m a little surprised you’re still alive,” he admitted.
That took her aback. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’ve been taught since the very first days of the Academy that bringing living things from the past to the present causes catastrophic tears in the present time line and cellular instability in organic matter. It doesn’t seem to be happening with you for some reason.”
“So go get the stuff I need then.”
He shook his head again. “If we hit a dead-end time line, I’ll try. Otherwise, it’s too risky. Smitt’s been secretly helping me pinpoint supplies for the village. I’ll see what he can dig up.”
“There’s one more thing,” Elise said. “I need more help.”
“I already told you I will have Smitt—”
“I mean I need more people to help me. It’s too much work to do by myself.”
“What about Rima?”
“Someone with more than a second-grade education, James!”
He shook his head. “I won’t be able to help you. Everyone with any modicum of scientific training in the present is indentured to the corporations already. It’s unlikely I can recruit someone, short of kidnapping them. People with scientific minds are valuable in the present. Right now, we’re just a loose end they have to tie. If we cross that line and steal resources, the corporations will rain hell down on us.”
Elise thought about her alternatives. “Can you go back to the Nutris Platform then? Get some of the other scientists?”
James shook his head. “No one will ever be able to jump into that chronological location again within approximately sixteen hundred kilometers and nine days from the point of the tear. Other planets and celestial bodies will have different limiting parameters.”
“James, I don’t care who, how, when, or what you find,” she grumbled. “Just get me someone. I might be able to make do with some of the tools I have, but I need brain power to cure this plague. That’s even more important than the tools. Hey, are you listening to me?”
He had stopped and was staring up at the sky. He had a strange look on his face. “Yes. I was just thinking. Actually, I might know just the person. Let me see if it’s possible.”
Grace Priestly took a few steps back and studied the canvas from the opposite end of her quarters. The tints were off—the whites a bit too dull, the hues in the sky a bit too plain—but then, she hadn’t packed that many colors. Maybe it was just because her childhood memories of home were much more vibrant, or maybe it was that her old mind finally was failing her.
Grace tsked. Of course not; her mind was just as sharp and her memory just as clear as the day she had last been on Earth nearly a century ago. Just because she was about to die didn’t mean she was dying. She walked to the other corner of the room and looked at the painting from the side.
The fading sun reflecting off the snow was perfect, though perhaps a shade too dark. It was an adequate reflection of home. Certainly nothing she would ever show to another soul—something she wouldn’t have any concerns with shortly—but definitely a piece of work she was proud of, considering the circumstances.
Grace looked out the window. The spinning stars had settled and were now just streaming by at a leisurely pace. The good Captain Monk, as narrow-minded and unimaginative as he was, had done a very good job righting the
High Marker
. She didn’t think he had it in him. Too bad all that work to stabilize the ship from its out-of-control trajectory toward the heliosphere was a waste of time.
According to the last report, energy reserves were down to 2 percent. The engineers were still baffled with the question of where all the rest of the fusion power went. Over 90 percent of a Titan-class starship’s levels doesn’t just vanish into thin air. That was enough power to keep Eris lit up for two years.
Grace knew the truth, though, and it was much more fantastic and logical than anyone else in this time could guess. She thought back to the meeting with the time traveler, her own personal Grim Reaper who signaled her impending demise. It was a slight comfort that the foundation she had laid down for this time-travel agency still existed. At least something of her creation would survive, something she had not expected of the Technology Isolationists. The war had gone badly …
The ship was rocked by a thundering explosion, and the blast shields protecting the interior of the ship slammed down. That’s twice this had happened in less than an hour. This time, though, something was different. Not only did the blast shields stay closed, she could hear additional sounds of other barriers coming down outside her room. The entire ship must be going into a full lockdown as the
High Marker
isolated her structural components. That could only mean a hull integrity breach.
Grace pulled up the bridge through her command console. “Report, Monk.”
Monk’s haggard face appeared as he yelled off-screen. The floating comm eye must have caught him at a bad time. It followed him as he ran across the bridge and scanned an array of flashing red lights on one of the side stations.
“Focus on that console,” she ordered.
The comm eye flew up just behind the good captain’s head and zoomed in on what half a dozen of the bridge officers were staring at as well. Grace clicked her tongue; what a waste of manpower. The ship had struck something, and the object, instead of being destroyed on impact, was hard enough to punch a hole straight through the exterior plating of the second level of section three. What was strange was that, according to the console, it had also penetrated the blast shields that had dropped down to cordon off that section as well as the hallway blast shields. Whatever this thing was had destroyed three layers of shielding. Four; the section blast shields had also just gone down. Grace’s eyes widened. The object made a right turn …
“Oh my,” Grace murmured. “So many interesting things. What a terrible time to die.”
Could it be? Hours before they were all going to die, had they actually discovered alien life? After five hundred years in space, did humanity just receive their answer about life outside this system? And was the damn thing actually rampaging through the corridors of the ship? She watched as the object or creature continued down different paths, turning left at another intersection, cutting through a common room, and then backtracking the way it had come.
“It knows how to use the lift,” she muttered as her eyes trailed the blinking red dot moving throughout the ship. “Interesting.” Monk yelled out orders and waved his hands wildly, almost knocking the comm eye out of the air.
“Pan to the captain,” she ordered.
The good captain’s face had gone sheet white, as had the faces of almost all of the bridge crew. Monk barked several more commands off-screen and then focused back on the screen. A few seconds later, a dozen green dots blinked to life on the screen and swarmed toward the red dot.
“Get a security eye in there,” he said.
Four additional screens floated in the air above his head, each showing a real-time feed of the security eyes zooming down corridors toward the red dot. It seemed the security personnel, the green dots, got to the red dot first.
“Initial contact from Sec Team One with visual says humanoid!” an acolyte said from off-screen.
Humanoid? That was a surprise, though something that could blow through the hull of a warship and blast through impact shielding was definitely more than that.
“Sec Team One down!” the acolyte continued. “Sec Team Two engaging from the rear.”
“Back to the console,” Grace said. She caught the screen just in time to see the first splash of green dots closest to the red target blink out of existence. She saw another group of green coming up from behind it. Then they too blinked out. Still, Monk sent more security personnel after it.
“Get some Kill Mutes out of stasis!” he roared. “I want them awake and working in five minutes. And get a mech team powered up.”
Grace watched as a third group of green dots disappeared. Well, if Monk was going to use Kill Mutes and combat mechs in the tight spaces of a warship, he might as well just blow it apart now. Those killing machines weren’t made to fight in such tight quarters. They would tear the
High Marker
apart from the inside out, though considering what that intruder was doing, did it really matter? She was deathly curious, and deep in thought when she caught the end of one of Monk’s orders.
“… Sec Team Six to escort the High Scion out of her quarters to safety,” he was saying.
She checked the console again and realized that indeed, the red dot was moving toward her section. Fascinating. Her patience was rewarded as the first of the Security Eyes reached the corridor and recorded a visual of the intruder. She would at least get to see an alien life before she died, which was definitely worth the price of admission. Discovering alien life had always been one of her fondest wishes, unlikely as it was to be granted. The gods had an interesting way of fulfilling childhood dreams.
