In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  “I don’t get the impression that the committee necessarily expects me to finish,” I say. “So I’m not super concerned about where I place. I do want to get back to my guide, but my chronometer is out of juice, so I’m stuck waiting on time the old fashioned way.”

  Milo’s gaze has wandered to the mine entrance again, but his attention swings back to me as I finish speaking. “Why do you think the committee doesn’t want you to succeed? What happened?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve had some interesting conversations with some less than pleasant individuals about my prospects.”

  Kara locks her eyes to mine. “Who? Who talked to you?”

  “I actually don’t know his name. He dresses in all black, has a nice scar on his face that really accents his lovely personality. We’ve met twice now.”

  My description of the man from my apartment seems to have had an impact. Milo’s interest is completely with me now. He inclines his head closer and speaks just above a whisper. “Ben. It’s important that you don’t tell anyone we were here, but I do want to find out more about your side of this. If I help you out with some power for that chronometer, will you promise to keep this conversation under wraps?”

  “Your secret side project has to do with the committee?”

  “Keep your damn voice down,” Kara says and waves her bizarre looking pistol at my face. I take a step back.

  Milo puts a hand on my shoulder and addresses Kara. “It’s okay, I swept the hill for microphones on the way up. I don’t think they wired this road with any cameras, but we’ll find somewhere more private anyway.” He turns back to me. “Your unit is probably AC right? Wall outlet charger?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got an adapter for that.” He pulls his shoulder bag free and roots through it. He passes me a white device about the size of a deck of cards with different styles of outlets on its surface. “Here’s the American size. Plug your charger into that. The micro-batteries are internal. Should give you plenty of power.”

  “Thanks.” I palm the device and slip it into my pocket with my charger cord.

  Milo gestures for me to follow him off the road behind one of the miner’s shacks. A quick check of the windows tells us it’s empty. Satisfied we won’t be overheard by any locals, Milo finally addresses me. “We have reason to believe this race is not what it seems on the surface. Racers are being eliminated faster than any prior chronothon.”

  “They’ve made the race more dangerous?”

  “More than dangerous. They’re making it impossible. We were at the exit gate a few hours from now. We thought everyone else had gone through, so we figured we had a little time to play with the system.”

  “What system?”

  “The time gate data link. It’s encrypted, but I have a few tools at my disposal.” Milo taps the frame of his glasses.

  “You can hack into the time gate?”

  “It’s a port for the engineers, but there’s tons of data in there. Opening and closing sequences, video files, relayed messages from upstream and downstream, all kinds of stuff. We weren’t looking for it, but we ran across a video of this mine. One of the teams is going to get trapped by a cave-in here in a couple of hours. Marco Thomas and Andre Watts. The video makes it look like they fired their weapons in the mine and caused the collapse themselves.”

  “That doesn’t seem too unlikely. From what I’ve seen of them so far, they’re a little trigger happy.”

  “Yeah. It looks plausible on the video, too, but we found the time gate sequences for the exit, and Marco and Andre aren’t on it.”

  “They wouldn’t be if they got trapped though, right?” I say.

  “That’s not how the gates are programmed. Each racer has a distinct ID number that’s encoded into the design of the gate so the program will recognize their bracelets. As long as you’re within the time parameters set for the level, the gate should still open when you arrive. The two guys involved in the cave-in might eventually tunnel their way out or get rescued by the other miners, but they’ll be too late to continue the race. That’s not the kicker, though. We compared the list of access codes to the last level’s program. Thomas and Watts’s number were never encoded on this new gate. Even if they hadn’t been caved in, they still wouldn’t have advanced.”

  I consider what he’s saying. “How do you know the program isn’t listing the codes based on later information? If Marco and Andre never make the gate, it never needs their code, so it doesn’t include it. I’m not a time gate programmer obviously but this is time travel, and it seems like it could be sort of a chicken-egg situation. Maybe the gate knew not to include the data because it already had the video of the cave-in.”

  “I thought of that.” Milo pulls a tablet from Kara’s pack and it shuffles through pages with mere gestures from his fingertip. “Here. Check this out.” He turns the tablet so I can see it. “This is the code for the gates. That sequence right there? That’s Andre’s base number. It shows up in all the levels prior to this but none after. But if you look at the origin code of this program, you can see it was written by someone who had access to the information before these gates were even built, way before the video ever got uploaded. It’s in the root code, the stuff they originally programmed the gates with. Andre was never going to get through this gate. No chance.”

  “Do you have the list from Egypt?”

  “I think so. I’ll need to find it. Why?”

  “This guy Dennis and his guide couldn’t get through the gate. They said they put their objective in the repository and it disappeared. Then the gate wouldn’t open.”

  “Disappeared? That’s different. We were through by then. Did you see what their objective was?”

  “No. I never saw it, but Dennis said it was a rock he found in a quarry.”

  Kara pulls her cap from her head and her auburn hair tumbles around her face as she smacks the wall with the cap. “This is all useless if we don’t know why. They have all of our numbers. They’re picking us off one by one. This has to be something big. Too many people are getting taken out on that list for this to ever blow over. The race committee won’t be able to run another chronothon ever again. It’s terrible for the sponsors, for ratings, for everybody. Why are they rigging it?”

  Milo and I stand mute after her outburst. Kara runs her hand through her hair and puts her cap back on, then kicks a rock out of the way. As it tumbles along the ground she draws her weapon and blasts the rock into oblivion. I flinch initially, expecting a bang from the gun, but the only sound is the rock breaking apart into hundreds of pieces. The weapon seems even more deadly in its silence.

  “Kara was the first one to find the discrepancy in the code,” Milo says. “We just started hacking the gate for the last couple of levels, but we knew something was wrong since the Middle-Ages.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “We had a warning message come through from one of our contacts back home. Part of it got damaged in the transfer, but we got enough of it to suspect the danger.”

  “Will you stop telling him everything?” Kara’s expression toward me is still hard. “You’re going to get all of us caught if he can’t keep his yap shut.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t need to know what it said, but do you mean you have a way to send messages somehow? I actually really need to get a message to someone, but Viznir told me it could disqualify me.”

  “It could if you use channels that the committee monitors,” Milo replies. “Our method is a bit more discreet.”

  “Can I use it? It’s really important.”

  Milo looks to Kara. Instead of immediately shooting down the decision, her expression actually lightens a little. “We can do it. But only because it means if you turn on us, we’ll have something that will get you disqualified just as fast.”

  I hold up my hands. “That’s fair. I just need to send the message soon.”

  Milo tucks the tablet back into Kara’s bag, then straightens his own. �
�Write down what you want to say and where and when it needs to go. We’ll send it from the rendezvous. We’ve already spent too much time here. We need to see what they rigged in that mine and how.”

  “Thank you. That’s the best news I’ve had all race.” I can feel some of my tension lift. “And I think I know who planted your device, or at least a good suspect. The time traveler who brought me here was with the circus. He came out of that mine just a bit before you arrived and looked pretty pleased with himself about something. I can’t prove anything, but I’d bet he’s involved somehow. I didn’t get the impression he was the type to worry over harming racers. He’s the six legged monster in the show but he goes by Ajax.”

  Milo nods. “We’ll look into that. We’ll catch up more at the rendezvous. Just keep this all between us.” He and Kara check for activity on the street before sprinting toward the mine entrance. I’m left alone beside the vacant miner’s shack with just my thoughts.

  As Milo and Kara vanish into the darkness of the mine, I turn south and walk downhill to the train tracks. I pull the power pack and charger cord from my pocket and plug in my chronometer. The red glow immediately disappears from the bezel and the chronometer begins its telltale humming while it charges. I make my way to where the train cars are waiting for pickup. This area is busier than the camp. Another group of Chinese men and a few guys who look like Native Americans are loading cars with ore. A couple of white men with rifles are guarding the operation. I keep out of sight and sneak around a stand of pine trees to some of the already loaded cars.

  Searching for something on the train that might make a good anchor, I finally settle on a steel coupler between train cars. I suspect the area shouldn’t be in use when the train stops in town, and it provides me some cover from the guards while I dial my chronometer settings. I realize I’m guessing at what time it is now, but the slate in the window of the train station listed the train’s arrival as two in the afternoon. I mentally work my way backward from then and use Milo’s statement about us being three hours and twenty minutes shy of the first racer’s arrival to estimate the rest. I scratch out the math in the dirt next to the tracks with my finger and, once I have my best guess, set my chronometer. I settle myself on the coupler in a position that will be secure even if I misjudge and wind up on the train while it’s moving. I double-check my settings one last time and press the pin.

  Shit!

  The rocking and swaying of the coupler is the immediate sign that I’ve indeed missed my target. I steady myself as the tracks whip beneath me in a blur of dry dirt and occasional tufts of withered grass. I grip the side of the train car and cautiously get to my feet on the coupler. I poke my head into the wind and search for my destination. Pucketsville is a slowly diminishing blob on the horizon behind me. I curse and reset my chronometer. I overshoot my next jump the other direction and arrive back on the coupler prior to reaching the town. Instead of recalculating, I just ride the train the last half-mile into the station.

  The conductor stops the engine with the passenger car parallel to the platform. My ore car is a dozen car-lengths back, so I hop off into the weeds and steer clear of the crowd waiting to board. It takes me the better part of half an hour to walk back to the circus and locate Viznir. I find him staring dejectedly at a poster of a man with two noses.

  “What are you doing?”

  Viznir jumps. “God! Where did you come from? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  I give him an abbreviated account of the fight with Ajax, but leave out the part about encountering Milo and Kara.

  “You went past the restricted time line?” Viznir’s forehead wrinkles in frustration. “We’re going to be penalized for that.”

  “I know. What happened to the kids?”

  “Their parents found them. Another happy conversation you missed. I thought the dad was going to level me.” The withering glare he gives me suggests it’s my fault.

  “If you wanted to tangle with Ajax instead, speak up next time and I’ll take the kids.”

  Viznir appears somewhat mollified by that. I notice he has the jar of eyeballs in his hand. I point to it. “You got the objective? Sorry I didn’t get around to that.”

  “Yeah.” Viznir passes me the jar. “You can carry it now. It’s revolting.”

  “Did you happen to find a stone lying around near the bleachers? I lost the anchor to go back for our stuff when Ajax displaced us.”

  “Are you kidding? That place was a disaster after you guys started fighting. I barely had time to get in and grab the objective before the sheriff showed up.”

  “I guess we’ll have to find another way to get our stuff back.”

  We make our way to the sheriff’s tent, and luckily only the deputy is in attendance. Unfortunately he follows Viznir and me into the tent to retrieve our belongings. He surveys the racks. “We’ve had an interesting day today. People been coming in with some things I’ve never seen before.”

  I notice a few modern rifles and handguns hung on racks, making me wonder which other time travelers are still walking around the circus.

  The deputy rubs his chin. “I can’t say I remember which ones were yours.”

  “It’s okay. I hid them.” I smile at the deputy.

  “You did? Where?” He looks around the scant furnishings of the tent for something he could be missing.

  “Would you mind facing the other way for just a moment. I don’t want to give away my secrets.” I hand the jar of eyeballs back to Viznir and dial in my chronometer settings.

  The deputy seems confused, but his curiosity gets the best of him and he agrees to face the other way with Viznir. I double-check my time coordinates and use the center tent pole as an anchor. When I arrive a couple of hours before, I can hear my own voice and the deputy outside discussing the fangs on the werewolf. It only takes me a few seconds to retrieve our belongings and blink back.

  I clear my throat when I return and the two men turn around to face me. The deputy’s eyes widen at the sight of all our stuff on my shoulders, and he nods in approval. Viznir takes his pack and gun belt and immediately returns the jar of eyeballs to me. I stuff the jar in with my other things and straighten up.

  “You fellas ought to be in the magic show yourselves!” The deputy looks around the tent and even goes so far as to poke his head behind the gun rack. “You rig up some kind of trap door or something?”

  “A magician never tells his secrets.”

  The deputy removes his hat to scratch his head then pats the top of the hat as he puts it back on. “All in good fun then, I reckon.” He smiles. “I’m getting pretty good at the one with the coin from your ear. My kid loves it. You want to see it?”

  “Um, sure.”

  The deputy fishes out a coin from his pocket and makes fair attempt at making it disappear. One edge of the coin is still visible between his knuckles as he shows us his “empty” hands, but I just smile and let him make it reappear from behind my ear with a flourish.

  “Ta da!”

  “That’s pretty good. Any more back there? We can use some beer money.”

  The man grins at his success. “Yeah, the kids love that one. I’m working my way through a few playing card tricks, too. I didn’t bring any with me or I’d show you.”

  “No worries. We really have to be on our way.” After we exit the tent, I pull the map from my pocket and turn to our new friend one more time. “Do you happen to know where this is?” I point to the repository symbol on the map.

  “Hmm. Looks like Pike’s canyon. Just a bit north along the tracks.”

  “Walking distance?”

  “It’s a fair piece of walkin’. Train goes past, but there’re no stops till Seaver’s Junction. I’ve never seen anything other than jackrabbits out there. No reason for folks to stop that I know of. What are you looking for?”

  “Meeting a few friends. Hopefully for some dinner.”

  <><><>

  Viznir and I cut across the open prairie heading
north, and it takes about thirty minutes to intersect the tracks. We’re both sweaty by the time we reach them and neither of us wants to hike the remainder of the way to the repository. We have a heated debate about the best way to get to the train since it’s already departed and finally settle on using a red rock boulder as an anchor to jump back to when we expect it to pass. As we’re standing there setting our respective time devices, I curse when it dawns on me that I’m still carrying the eyeballs and we have no way to get the jar back with us. Viznir seems to contemplate ditching me for the sake of the ride, but after a few moments of staring at each other in silence, we resign ourselves to the walk.

  My muscles are starting to stiffen from the exertion of the fight and my calf is throbbing slightly from the snakebite, but despite the physical discomfort, the walk is relatively pleasant. The sun dips and settles behind a red rock butte on the horizon, decorating the sky in pink and orange.

  As we near the canyon and veer away from the rails, we find other sets of tracks. Barley’s paw prints are easy to identify. The others are tougher to decipher, but I pick out a few sets of feminine shoe prints in the mix, making me wonder if Ariella and Dagmar are ahead of us or whether they belong to Genesis or one of the other women. The light is growing dim by the time we enter the box canyon. It appears to lead nowhere, but after diligently following the tracks of our predecessors, we discover a narrow cave mouth leading into the rock. I follow my flashlight beam down a claustrophobic path that dead ends at an underground stream. When it seems we can go no farther, I scan the cave walls and discover they’ve been decorated in Native American drawings. The drawings depict deer and coyotes, wheels and figures with spears. Among them I’m surprised to find the wavy lined symbol for the repository. Stepping closer, I find a rock ledge that has been carved out with small divots. Resting in some of the divots are miniature wooden canoes that range in size from a few inches to a couple feet long. One of them has my name on it. Curious, I extract my jar of eyeballs and set it into the hollowed space in the canoe. Nothing happens. I double-check my bracelet then consider the spaces between the remaining canoes. No other objectives are in attendance, but there aren’t many canoes left. I pick mine up and walk with it to the edge of the stream.