Time Salvager (40 page)
Smitt didn’t think he was doing anything that wrong. It wasn’t like he was helping James change the chronostream. Far from it. All he was doing was helping some poor savage tribe acquire some much-needed supplies. He felt justified, even.
Oh, who was he trying to fool? Mining this data for James was outright treason any way he looked at it, and if Smitt was caught, there was nothing anyone could do to prevent him from being sent to Nereid or some other awful penal colony.
In the end, though, the consequences didn’t matter. Smitt’s loyalty to his friend was stronger than it was to ChronoCom. James was the only person in his life who had ever given a damn about him. As far as he was concerned, loyalty was the only real thing Smitt had left in this world.
Luckily, the doors behind him never opened. Smitt finished covering his tracks and unplugged himself from the console, making sure to get his rampaging jitters under control as he walked casually out the door. In a few seconds, he would be out of the tech wing and in the clear. With his heart slamming in his chest, Smitt lurched out of data housing at a consciously slowed pace, waving at the two monitors as he passed them. He gave them a nod and proceeded down the hallway.
“Burke,” the monitor on the left called after him. “Lin over here wants to know if you play Lok Gull. Couple of us night shifts are trying to get some games in. Not quite filling out the roster with enough bodies at the moment. Seeing how we all rise and tuck in at the same time, thinking maybe you play?”
Smitt paused at the outer door right before the stairs and looked back at them. After tailing Burke all this time, he knew that the guy liked Lok Gull, and probably the one thing this ruck could use was some friends instead of his bottle. A social life would do wonders for him. However, that could risk blowing Smitt’s cover.
“Oh hell,” he muttered under his breath. He’d taken enough advantage of this guy. Smitt nodded to the monitors. “Go ahead and sign me up. I might forget so remind me. Can we schedule it for after the fifth shift?”
“Will do, and welcome to the Earth, Burke,” the one named Lin said.
Smitt hid his smile and exited the wing. He’d just have to be a little careful in the future when impersonating the guy. The next task on his plate was going to be a lot more difficult and tricky. James had been asking if there was a way he could obtain some miasma pills. Miasma regimens fell directly under the auditors’ purview, and busting into the miasma lab was about as easy as getting citizenship on Europa.
However, Smitt had already been mulling over the beginnings of a plan. He made a mental list of the things he had to gather and the steps it’d take to break into the high-security medical ward. He hated to admit it, but the thrill was starting to grow on him.
“Maybe I could have been a chronman after all.” He grinned, whistling as he bounded up the stairs.
Elise turned down the protection of her atmos and inhaled the thinner air on Mt. Greylock in the American Appalachia half a day by ground transport west of Boston. The entire area had another name now, probably having been exchanged by dozens of governments in the four hundred years since her time. It had taken Rima a fair amount of bartering with some of the neighboring tribes to obtain a map of the region from her era that Elise could read. It was much easier for her to work off of that than to relearn the names of this time period.
The air up here at a thousand meters above sea level was much cleaner than at the base of the mountain. Her hand brushed the trunk of a nearby tree and she rubbed her fingers together. The texture of the Earth Plague was different as well. It was less oily and much smoother. She brought her fingers to her nose. The smell of decay was weaker as well, more earthy.
She wiped her hands and moved a little higher up the path, taking out an instrument James had retrieved from a hundred years in her future known as a geotriangular. Fascinating tech, this thing was. She placed it on the ground and turned it on. A few seconds later, a three-dimensional diagram of the mountain flashed in her brain, almost knocking her off her feet.
Elise turned off the band and blinked away some of the stars in her eyes. She was still not used to the AI band. In the two months since her arrival here, she had one by one added more of these metal bands to the collection around her arms. That computer-in-her-head band, as she liked to call it, was her latest piece of jewelry, and it was by far the most difficult one to get used to.
She sat down and rubbed her sore feet. Locating a good pair of size seven shoes was Rima’s next job. Most of the Elfreth had calluses like rhinos. It was times like right now she especially missed some of the luxuries of the twenty-first century. Normally, she’d just be coasting up one of these mountains in Charlotte, her feet completely rested and the air-conditioning turned on full blast.
The memory of her mechanoid made Elise a little melancholy; she missed her robot. Earning her advanced certification on Charlotte while she was still a teenager was one of Elise’s proudest moments. While other children her age learned to drive or hover vehicles, she spent countless hours walking the depths of the ocean floor. Part of her was looking forward to finding and piloting an advanced future version of her beloved Charlotte, but it seemed the present had done away with mechanoids altogether. Pity. A lot of things these days were pretty damn pitiful.
Elise took a few more snapshots of the ground beneath her as she wandered up the mountain. Interestingly, the vegetation grew thicker the higher she climbed. The signs of the Earth Plague receded here as well. Elise made a few notes, put a few more samples in tubes, and slipped them into her netherstore container. She continued to climb.
She was making real progress in her research. Some of her testing had produced promising results, though she was still a long way from a full cure. The Earth Plague was a surprisingly simple virus that could have been headed off before it mutated and spread. She was confident that, if the Nutris Platform hadn’t blown up and sunk into the sea, they could have nipped it in the bud and created a cure, probably mass-producing it for the rest of the planet within a year or two.
The only problem was replication. Even with a working cure, it had to be cheap to produce, since present Earth wasn’t exactly full of resources. Her lab didn’t have the equipment to replicate and send the cure out all over the world. With the level of degradation already present on the planet, a cure could take months to propagate across the globe. By that time, the plague would have mutated a dozen times over. No, whatever cure they developed, Elise needed a delivery system that cured the entire planet all at once, or at least in a relatively short span of time. Hopefully, James could retrieve something from the past or Grace could use that big brain of hers for an invention that would address this issue.
Yes, with Grace’s help, they were making some progress, though more of their time was spent keeping the lights on in the lab than she liked. Grace had spent the first week designing and rigging a working elevator, much to the excitement of every person who had to work in the Farming Towers. Now, the Mother of Time was almost as popular as Elise. In hindsight, it was time well spent.
There wasn’t much of a path up here; whatever traces of civilization that had once remained in this area were long gone. Still, she trudged through the increasingly thick underbrush, eager to see what was near the top. So far, she’d found a direct correlation between the air quality, carbon readings, and height of the vegetation. It meant that the plague’s ability to prosper depended on …
Something in the trees to her left rustled. Elise froze midstep and waited, slowly moving her arm to shoulder level and pointing at the leaves shaking back and forth. The rustling moved to her left, as if cutting off her retreat. She heard the brush to her right shake as well. Elise spun to her right, her arms swiveling back and forth from the two sources of noise.
“Beam level max. No, level two,” she thought to her wrist beam. That wouldn’t kill a living creature, but would still be strong enough to knock out a charging elephant.
The rustling sounds in the brush continued, and maybe it was her overactive imagination, but they now seemed to be all over the place. She was surrounded! Her arms began to quiver from the adrenaline pumping through her body. She felt her heart rate rocket up until it seemed like each beat shook her entire body.
“Keep it together, girl,” she muttered. “Remember your training.”
Something squealed behind her, a high-pitched yipping sound that was distinctly inhuman. That made Elise feel better, if only a smidgen.
“Focus, by Gaia, stupid girl,” she said.
The rustling sounds were getting closer. Or maybe it was because they were closing in on her. Whatever the thing was, it could come at her from any direction at any moment. Elise considered making a break for it, but thought better of it. After all, the odds of her outrunning this thing were low, and all that would probably happen from fleeing would be exposing her back and leaving herself completely defenseless. No, she was going to make a stand and give herself a chance.
The seconds slowed and ticked by as she waited to see the predator stalking her. Her arms were tiring, and she was breathing so hard she wasn’t sure her aim would be straight even if the thing was standing in front of her. Then it appeared.
A lizard-like creature stepped out of the jungle and stuck its tongue out at her. It made the same squealing sound as its forked tongue flicked the air in front of it. It rambled to the right as if drunk and then flicked the air again. Elise’s arm followed its path as it went back and forth, ready to shoot if it took another step closer.
As a biologist, she was fascinated by the creature. Its body was like a snake’s, allowing it to stand tall and reach high, the way a giraffe would. Its torso and legs were almost human, and she had missed it at first, but there were two nearly vestigial arms. Their eyes locked and for a second, she saw intelligence in those eyes, recognition of sorts.
To her right, another one of these creatures came out, this one larger, with an even longer body. Elise jumped back and aimed at this new threat, only to see it give her a look almost of disdain as it walked by her. The second creature walked next to the first and their tongues flicked at each other. Then the two walked away from her. The first creature looked back at her one last time before the pair disappeared back into the jungle.
Elise found herself holding her breath a few seconds longer, her fingers tingling from the strain of the adrenaline and from holding her aim for so long. She still detested violence, but this was the new reality of her world now. Her heart wouldn’t stop slamming into her rib cage. She sunk to the ground and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down.
Elise had seen more than her share of creatures since she arrived in this time period, most nonexistent in the past. The ruins of Boston were a hive of different species, and strangely, many of them were like these two creatures, with several human-like features. She didn’t know how that came to be, either from biological manipulation or natural progression, but seeing strange creatures like this unnerved her less and less.
“Hey Elder Elise, checking in. Your readings are a little high. Everything blue?” Rima’s voice popped into her head. The girl was speaking to her through an old handheld patched into her comm band.
Elise grunted. If what her body was doing was considered only a little high, then they need to recalibrate whatever was monitoring her. “I’m fine,” she said. “And stop calling me Elder. I’m not that old.”
“If you say so, Elder Elise.”
The Elfreth all started calling her that when they decided she was the savior of the planet. As far as she knew, only Qawol and Franwil were called Oldest, while a small group of the more senior citizens among the Elfreth were known as the Old Ones. She guessed being called Elder was better than being Oldest or Old One, which as far as she knew referred to people who were actually just old.
“How is your gathering, Elder Elise?”
“It’s beautiful here, Rima. You should come join me.”
“No can, Elder Elise. Tribe needs the voom. Can’t tie it up for so long. You still okay for two days sun top?”
That much was true. The Elfreth had only three transports, including James’s, and he didn’t let anyone else fly his collie. That left two rickety four-wheelers to be shared among hundreds of people, which meant these cars were always in need. There was no way Elise could keep this one to herself for three full days, so Rima had to drop her off and drive back right away.
“Sun top is fine. You should try to come early and check this place out. It’s beautiful. You know, this planet wasn’t always like this. It used to be…”
Her voice trailed off when she saw a small black speck in the distance approaching her. She might not have noticed it if it wasn’t flying very low over the jungle canopy, the force of its propulsion blowing the trees to the sides. Elise had not seen any signs of civilization since she left Boston. Could this be a coincidence? She doubted it.
“Rima, I have a visual on somebody approaching. Going to hide. Keep this channel open.”
“I am too far away already, Elder Elise. Turning around.”
“Don’t do that,” Elise said, lowering her voice to a whisper as she crept into the thickets, her eyes never leaving the growing speck. The thing was definitely heading straight toward her. She wasn’t so optimistic as to think that this was just a coincidence. If it was hostile, there was little Rima could do to help. She would just be putting herself in danger.
“Listen carefully, Rima, head straight back to the tribe. If something happens, tell Grace. She can find James.”
“But Elder Elise—”
“Do it now! I’m turning the comm off in case they can track it.” The channel went dead as Elise waited. James was out on some job, whether jumping back in time to gather supplies or off gallivanting across the globe to trade with other pockets of civilization. He’d been away from the tribe more often than not, constantly running errands for her and Grace. Elise worried that he was putting too much on his shoulders. He’d been looking haggard lately. She’d have to talk to Grace about that. Could all that time traveling be bad for his health? Well, he never complained or said anything about it. Typical James.
