Time Salvager (39 page)
“Is it dangerous?” she asked.
“Just promise me you won’t leave Boston until I return.”
“I promise,” she lied. Elise knew how stressful these jobs were for him and didn’t want to worry James. That, and she knew he’d fly off the handle if he found out. However, she had already reserved the ground transport to make a field trip with Rima to Mount Greylock in five days, and she had no intention of canceling. Sure, there were risks involved, but no more than what James did going back in time. Both had their wars to fight, and Elise had no intention of not doing her job because her self-declared protector was too busy risking his life doing something else.
Smitt David-Proteus massaged his temples and resisted the urge to bang his forehead against the console at Hops in Earth Central. He had never realized how spoiled he was handling a Tier-1 like James. The handler captains, in all their shallow wisdom, had determined that they would chastise him for his recent transgressions by busting him down to babysit crappy low-tier chronmen doing coal runs and solar farming in the medieval ages.
It was beneath him, insulting, and more than a little depressing. He had gone from managing a single Tier-1 chronman to an entire gaggle of wide-eyed fresh Academy fodder filled with big egos, small brains, and even less common sense. He didn’t expect any of these idiots would survive their first year.
“No, no, Hurls,” he said into the console, his voice resigned. “You have to cut the branches off before you put the tree trunks into the netherstore. Look, the fire starts in nine minutes and needs to burn across the full acreage. The way fire works, it needs something to burn, to fuel it. If you don’t leave enough materials for the flames to jump from tree to tree, you’re going to leave time ripples.”
For a second, Smitt daydreamed about disabling Hurls’s jump band and stranding the abyss-plagued moron in 1894 Hinckley, Minnesota. This was definitely one chronman who was going to drive down the tenure averages. He had to babysit for another forty minutes, pulling Hurls out right before the out-of-control forest fire overran his position. The guy had to unload his entire container, strip out all the branches from the trunks—leaves and all—and spread them across the areas he had already cut to make sure the fire still spread like it was supposed to before loading the trunks back into the netherstore. It was a lot of wasted time and, at the end of the day, the jump recovered only 60 percent of the units earmarked for that job.
Smitt unhooked himself from the handler console and leaned back in his chair. The worst part of all of this was he would have to do it all over again with Horner, another Tier-5 scheduled to jump to the nineteenth century in seven hours and run a smash-and-grab on anything of worth from a steamship sinking into the Marianas Trench.
“The damn handler captains are running me ragged,” Smitt moaned, covering his face with his hands.
Sitting beside him, Punil, a Tier-2 handler, smirked. “Haven’t seen you this pissy in years. All the Academy brats driving you crazy?”
Smitt shrugged good-naturedly. “Just forgot how much of a grind it is and how green we all were back in the day. Fresh fodder, the lot of us. Been taking the Tier-1 experience for granted way too long. Even handling Tier-2s feels like I’m being spoiled. Can you do me a favor and haul Hurls in when he reaches Central? I need to get some rack time before my next babysitting trip.”
“No problem,” Punil said. “Get some rest.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
Smitt stood up and stretched, patting Punil on the shoulder as he walked down an aisle half-filled with handlers of various tiers managing dozens of other jobs. In reality, his irritation with these lower-tier fresh fodders was feigned. Being knocked down to the bottom rung of hand-holding was actually the perfect cover to scout potential marks to help James’s illegal jumps for that savage-tribe pet project of his.
No one would question Smitt’s research into some of the low-tech jump zones, considering all the crud jobs he’d had to run recently. Knowing the auditors were keeping tabs on him, he had carefully covered his tracks, making sure he had reasonable alibis for all his hits into the chron database. For unavoidable queries that could tie him to James, well, he had a secret weapon for that too.
Smitt clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth as he turned toward the exit. James was playing a very dangerous game. By helping him, Smitt was uncharacteristically doing the same. He would even go as far to say that his friend was in way over his head, but in the twenty years that he had known the man, James had always come through. As long as both he and James were careful, they could pull this off. He was a Tier-1 handler after all.
Several other handlers waved as he walked past them. He made sure to acknowledge every one of them. While other Tier-1 handlers acted almost as haughtily as chronmen, Smitt knew better. He wasn’t the smartest handler, or the quickest-thinking. Nor was he the best administrator or tactician. He was actually average in every metric that defined a good handler. However, he had something going for him that most other handlers didn’t: Smitt was a damn likable guy. In the grim business of salvaging, where almost everyone detested everyone else, the intangible currency of people liking you was as good as a Titan source.
Smitt checked the time. Instead of heading upstairs to his quarters, he headed down toward the lower armory level. A few minutes later, he reached the quartermaster auxiliary and chatted his way past Kiesche, the monitor on duty, to retrieve the gear Horner needed for her job tomorrow. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to requisition the necessary equipment until the day of the job but, again, being a swell guy had its perks. A few seconds later, he was given access to the armory.
As Smitt walked inside, he glanced at the spot on the floor where James had laid him out a few weeks earlier. He hated to admit it, but that was probably the best thing that could have happened to him. Sure, it had given him a splitting headache and fuzzy vision for the following week, but it did clear him of some of the auditors’ suspicions. That was worth getting his head cracked over. Even better, the events that followed allowed James to escape with the bands he needed. Smitt hadn’t planned things out that way, but he felt the results justified his concussion. No matter how the others now viewed him, he was still loyal to his friend of twenty years.
When the two of them were graduating from the Academy, only James made it to the chronman tier. Smitt, with his anxiety and nerves, had completely bombed his final test. He was resigned to packing it up and returning to the processing plants back on Proteus for a life of hard and frigid menial labor. In fact, he had flamed out so spectacularly that he had not only failed to tier as a chronman, but as a handler as well.
James, one of the highest-rated graduates, had gone to bat for him and demanded Smitt be allowed a retest, saying he wanted no one else to be his handler. He even went as far as to offer his resignation from ChronoCom. Their mentor, Landon, already a Tier-2 chronman at the time, had agreed. That second time, Smitt passed, and was spared a short and miserable life building oxygen replicators. No one ever thought he would make it to Tier-1.
“Showed those assholes,” he muttered as he opened the lockers and pulled out the bands Horner needed for the job. Tier-5s, basically apprentices, were not allocated their own equipment and had to be spoon-fed every step of the way, with their bands given and taken from them at the beginning and end of every job. As he put all the bands into his netherstore, he glanced over as another handler walked into the armory. With a practiced sleight of hand, he slipped an extra charged paint band into his container.
“Hey Smitt,” Eve, the other handler, said as she went about her own work. “Sorry to hear about what the caps are doing to you. Some bad business all around, giving you those little shits to manage.”
“Right? I should be packing my bags for Europa,” he complained, waving his arms in an exaggerated fashion. “Someone had to take the fall, and as long as they didn’t take anything out of my savings, I’ll earn out with these scrubs just as fast. I’ll just have to work harder.”
Eve nodded and wished him luck. Smitt finished his work and picked up his pace, walking a little faster out of the wing than he’d like. He would have to hurry if he was going to pull off data collection tonight. It was the middle of the night in Chicago, and the third shift was just about to switch over. This was the best time for him to hit up monitors who would be eager to get off duty.
He walked as fast as he dared back to his quarters and activated the paint band, impersonating one of the newer sysware techs he had painstakingly stalked. The guy, only a few months on the station, was a loner with a drinking problem, had no friends, and rarely left his quarters when off duty. He afforded Smitt the perfect cover for avoiding the watchful eyes the auditors probably had on him.
A few minutes later, Smitt, looking darker, bald, and more rotund, made his way to the west wing of Central, slowing down and changing his gait. The new sysware tech walked with a limp, and had a tendency to scratch his crotch and tuck his hands into his armpits. Smitt had spent an entire week following him, studying his every movement and habit, as he had had to do thousands of times before when prepping intelligence for James. Except now, it was Smitt running his own jobs. This was at the same time thrilling and frightening. He had failed the chronman tier for very specific reasons, after all.
Smitt entered the data-housing wing in the sub-basement of Central and inserted his doppelganger clearance hack into the security zone. This, too, was retrieved from the sysware tech when Smitt had found him semi-conscious at the bar one night and helped the guy back to his room. Swell guy, that Smitt, everyone had said. After he laid the guy onto his bunk, a swipe of the doppelganger and a copy of the paint band got all the clearance he needed. He grinned as the doors slid open. He made eye contact with the two monitors guarding a second set of doors and lumbered forward in his awkward gait.
“Another shift, Burke?” the monitor on the left said. “Just got here and already piling it on. You’re going to make the rest of the techs look bad.” Burke was actually scheduled for the fifth rotation.
“Just trying to double-shift my way off nights,” Smitt said gruffly. “Would be nice to see some sun once in a while.”
The monitor chuckled. “I hear you. I don’t know what daylight looks like anymore.”
The monitor on the other side of the door shook his head. “So you can burn under the ozone? Nah, I’m happy with nights. Can’t wait to transfer off this shit planet.”
The two let him into data housing without another glance. Smitt hurried to the rear terminals where the consoles hard-lined into the gigantic chron databases. No matter how much surveillance and security the auditors wanted to slap on him, all of it would have to be outside data housing. As long as Smitt accessed the information from inside this central core, he could bypass all the outer firewalls, sniffers, and bugs. Short of their injecting a bug directly into his head, he should be in the clear.
He connected his AI band to the console and began to retrieve the list of information James, the scientist, and the fucking Mother of Time herself, Grace Priestly, wanted. From jump locations of natural gas deposits to food granaries to solar panel stockpiles, Smitt went down their shopping list and grabbed it all. What his friend was going to do with that information was up to him.
More recently, Grace Priestly—Smitt refused to call her by anything less than her full name—had started making requests directly. At first, he had balked at taking orders from anyone other than James, but no one said no to the Mother of Time. She didn’t seem like someone who took no for an answer. Bringing her back here was insanity. A part of Smitt still couldn’t believe James had the audacity to do that.
Smitt began poring over the chron database and operations logs, querying anything that could prove useful to James and that anomaly who was the root of all Smitt’s woes. He corrected himself; James had berated him for calling her that. It wasn’t her fault he was stupid enough to bring her back. That colossal blunder was all James. She was supposed to save humanity’s home world, after all. Smitt grunted. Fat chance of that.
An hour into his sleuthing, Smitt stumbled upon something interesting. “What’s this?” He frowned, and dug deeper. His fingers tingled with excitement at the possibility of making a breakthrough on one of James’s more difficult requests.
After chasing redacted reports for the past two shifts, he had finally come upon a pretty mundane operations report of a ChronoCom transport commissioned by Valta a week after James’s jump to Nutris. The transport’s mission was to rendezvous with one of the corporation’s ships just outside the asteroid Hygiea.
All this wouldn’t ring any alarms, except that the transport captain wrote in his logs that when he first reached the rendezvous point, he had raised his ship’s alert level, because he thought they were under attack by a heavily armed giant ship with no identifying signatures.
A week later, the ChronoCom Baligant outpost observed an unmarked Zeus-class warship heading toward the supposedly unpopulated Cassini Regio, the dark side of Iapetus, Saturn’s third-largest moon. Now, giant warships weren’t common. At least not anymore. A few more minutes of sleuthing showed that Valta had only four Zeus-class warships. Three of them were positioned along the Radicati militarized zone, and all three were marked.
“What’s an energy-guzzling warship doing where there’s no warring to be had?” Smitt asked, tapping his fingers along the console. He checked the time. “Oh crap.” He would have to continue this later. He had stayed too long. Smitt glanced back at the door and his hands began to sweat and shake. The real Burke should be heading down here soon. The longer Smitt stayed, the higher the odds of getting caught.
This had always been his problem, why he had failed to test into the chronman tier: he couldn’t handle stress. If someone walked in right now and just did a surface-level trace on what he was doing, it would be over. Add in his connection to James, and the auditors would have him on a rack in seconds. Right now, it was all he could do to keep from hyperventilating and passing out on the data-housing floor.
