The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  I had been about to sip my wine, and my glass stopped half-way to my mouth. “Secured areas?”

  “Uh-huh. A guard stopped me. He was nice about it, but he said there were high radiation levels and only authorized personnel were allowed in.”

  I glanced at Maire, and she shrugged.

  “There isn’t anything like that on the Lady, but this isn’t the Lady.”

  “Huh. Well, if the section is radioactive, I suppose there are reasons to keep people out. It was fortunate there was a guard on duty.”

  “I’ve been thinking about our other problem,” Maire announced.

  “What, we’ve only got one?” Timash shot back.

  “I meant the problem with our cargo on The Dark Lady.” Our suite was well-insulated from telepathic eavesdropping, but she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I’m going to tell Lobok that I need her to run an errand for me right before we get to the time machine.”

  “Where we hope to find the time machine,” I corrected gently.

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. The point is that The Dark Lady leaves an hour before we do, and I’m going to make damn sure nobody leaves this ship in that hour.”

  Timash looked at me, and I at him, and we nodded.

  “I like it,” I said. “But how is Skull going to escape detection once he has left?”

  Maire gave me one of her looks. “Um, Keryl? Have you met Skull? You know, the smuggler?”

  I filled my mouth with food and chewed vigorously.

  Director Wilner’s apprehension at being summoned from his cabin by two guards calmed considerably when I told him we were disembarking to examine one of the possible time travel sites. He went from anxious to enthusiastic in a heartbeat.

  “It would be hugely ironic if it turned out I spent my entire life trying to recreate technology that had just been lying there for centuries waiting for me!”

  We were waiting to board a ship’s gig to take us to the surface. The Dark Lady had already left. Captain Lobok had thought about questioning Maire’s prohibition against subsequent launches, but that was as far as it got. I gently separated Dr. Wilner from the waiting crew.

  “You would do well to remember that you are not here to gather bits and pieces for your Institute. You are here because we need you, and at our sufferance. We can always arrange to leave you here, although I doubt you would like the neighbors,” I said in a voice intended for him alone. “If I had not lost my own expert, I would have kicked you off my ship already.”

  The director pulled back in shock. “Your expert? You have an expert?”

  It was just like a scientist to focus on the affront to his reputation rather than on the very real threat that I could maroon him here. Or perhaps he was smart enough to remember that if we failed to find what we were looking for here, I still needed him to evaluate at least two other possibilities.

  “Never mind,” I said roughly. “Keep your mind on your work. And no wandering off by yourself. Believe me, these ruins are never as empty as they look.”

  That seemed to get through to him, but there was no way to know. He boarded the gig with the rest of us, Maire, two dozen crew, and me. We swooped out of the Procyon, and landed before I had a chance to get comfortable in my seat.

  My history with abandoned cities included fighting a thunder lizard, kidnapping by mutants, being shanghaied by pirates, and enslavement by the klurath. But this time, I thought, I have more than a score of heavily-armed soldiers backing me up, and another ship hovering overhead.

  I should have known better.

  Chapter 18

  The Ruins of Time

  Unbeknownst to me, when she plucked Dr. Wilner from his comfortable seat at the Chronologic Institute, Maire had also managed to “borrow” some of his equipment for use in our search. I, on the other hand, had never even thought to ask how we were planning to sift through an entire ruined city to find one abandoned laboratory, proving yet again that Maire was, as they say in the movies, “the brains of the outfit.” Our pilot had set us down in the largest clear area he could find near the city center, a logical landing spot since he did not know what we were looking for—not that we did, really—but after taking various readings, the doctor determined that we were in the wrong place. When I asked him if he would be able to find “the right place” from the air, or if we would have to set down and lift off any number of times so he could search, he gave me a cold look and reminded me he had never done this before, so how would he know?

  Even under the circumstances, I had to allow that his attitude was excusable.

  As it happened, he found he was able to take useable measurements from an altitude of a thousand feet, which not only allowed us to cover vastly more territory in less time, but with far less hazard than had we needed to travel overland. It further permitted us to take a survey of the local inhabitants, who fortunately seemed to exclude either thunder lizards (to Maire’s disappointment), or breen (to no one’s disappointment). I began to believe that two dozen men would be sufficient for our needs.

  “I have something!”

  By now I was becoming used to Dr. Wilner’s erratic enthusiasms; given that he had essentially been kidnapped and was operating under threat of bodily harm, any success was a cause célèbre. Was that also what explained the quickening of my own pulse? Or was it some premonition?

  A few minutes’ refinement of his readings led us to hover over an undistinguished block of white buildings, most of them roofless in the wake of some ancient catastrophe. From five hundred feet up we could easily see rubble in the streets, which were otherwise strangely free of dust. The builders of this metropolis had apparently possessed the technology to keep it clean, but not to keep it whole.

  “Pilot!” Maire called. “Drift forward!”

  The gig crawled through the air at the lowest speed above a hover, giving us an opportunity to examine the ruins and the choked streets at our leisure. Maire pored over one of the viewscreens, but what she was looking for I had no idea.

  “Halt forward!”

  I walked to her screen. We were directly above one of the roofless structures, a corkscrew edifice which, unless I was much mistaken, had once featured sloping walkways on the outside. The mere idea made me dizzy, but unless Maire wished to call my attention to an extreme example of a bygone architectural style, I had no clue as to why she had ordered us to stop here. She sensed my confusion.

  “What do you see?” I started to answer, but she waved her hand impatiently. “Let me ask you again: What don’t you see?”

  “Uh—the roof?”

  She grinned. “Exactly! Where is it?”

  “It… collapsed.”

  “Uh-huh. So where is it?”

  I looked at the screen again, then touched the controls to magnify the view, which took a stomach-wrenching plummet straight down the shaft formed by the building’s walls. Maire’s fingers darted out to regain control, fixing our vantage so that we could see the floor as if we were suspended mere yards above it.

  The floor—which was scored with not a single scratch, nor did any debris fill that space.

  I looked up. “Where did the roof go?”

  The floor was not simply clear, it was clean. Someone had been using this building, and not all that long ago—certainly more recently than the roof collapse. They had removed the debris and dust (using the same technology that kept the streets clean?), and that could only mean this space had been in use. But as hard as I could “listen,” there were no traces of unfamiliar telepathic activity nearby, and I felt the half-dozen men I had brought with us were enough to secure the perimeter.

  We had come down in a small lander, there not being a clearing large enough to ground the gig for several blocks. At Maire’s suggestion, I had ordered the gig to rejoin its twin at an altitude of one thousand feet, high enough to monitor a wide area while remaining directly above our position. Maire, Dr. Wilner, and I, along with six soldiers and a pilot, were cramped because of all t
he crates taking up most of the cabin, but the small craft had been able to descend straight down without coming close to the walls. With the shuttles covering us overhead, I was confident in our security.

  A two-story gallery surrounded us, but the only means of access seemed to be the outside ramps. What had been the point of that, or had there been some means of ascent, some elevator, inside the building which had been utterly destroyed long ago? I shook my head. Since I would never know, it was pointless to speculate. On the second level was a ring of doors that, from our viewpoint, appeared not to have been opened for a very long time. I sent a pair of two-man squads to check them out.

  Within a few moments, the men I had sent upstairs reappeared in the gallery to begin a methodical search of each closed apartment, working opposite walls of the cylindrical interior. For a few seconds, I watched and listened to them work. They were quite efficient. Although the Nuum had little experience in warfare, their experience in urban search and destroy was quite obviously well-honed. At length, I left them to their work; I had my own.

  With most of our guards securing the building, and the other two standing sentry at my express order, that left the pilot, the scientist, the noblewoman, and the admiral to haul crates out of the little landing skiff. Once enough had been liberated to begin unpacking and setting up, Dr. Wilner broke off to do that.

  It was not difficult, but it was tedious. On the other hand, along with the fact that an officer who actually did work never failed to impress the ranks, I know the sentries were sneaking admiring sidelong glances as I hefted some of the boxes without help, boxes that would have taxed the average Nuum and likely required two Thorans to carry.

  Truth to tell, we had not even emptied the ship when Dr. Wilner had news.

  “There’s a definite concentration of chronoton particle residue in this building,” he reported. “But what I don’t understand is where it’s coming from. Unless there was an apparatus set up right where we’re standing and they were able to cart it away, there should be some evidence of machinery.”

  I stole a glance at the two sentries studiously pretending they were oblivious to our conversation. We had not informed anyone of what we were about, and it was unlikely they happened to be familiar with Dr. Wilner’s work. On the other hand, the ship had been sent to the Chronologic Institute, so it would hardly take a detective to deduce the kind of work being done there, or by extension, by the scientist whom we had brought away with us. If Farren was following our activities, the news of our location, at the least, was probably winging its way to him already.

  “Could it be in one of the rooms upstairs?” I asked, glancing upward. “Or, under the floor…?”

  Maire waved to the pilot to put down his burden and rest a minute while she came over to us.

  “Hmm,” Wilner was saying, his nose almost meeting the dial on the gadget he was holding. “That could be… The floor, I mean.” Then he raised the gizmo and made a sweeping motion in the direction of the third level, where my men were still searching each chamber systematically. “Or…wait a moment…” He stared at his scanner as though he could manipulate the readings by thought alone. “This is astounding! The time machine isn’t in the building—it is the building!”

  Suddenly I felt a chill, as if the entire structure was going to suddenly grow legs and run away, or sink into the ground without a trace. At that moment, I wanted to be anywhere but where we were standing.

  The shuttle pilot had been near enough to hear Dr. Wilner’s pronouncement; now he stumbled up to where we were standing, a look of awe on his face that I could not fault.

  “Really, doctor? This whole building is a time machine?” He looked like he expected to see a control panel slide out of one of the walls. “Do you think it could still work?”

  “I hope so,” Wilner replied. “It’s the whole reason I was dragged me out here.”

  “Well you’re right about that, doctor,” the pilot replied. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other guards returning from their tasks. The pilot lifted a small box to his mouth. “Captain, we found it.” Then he unlimbered his sidearm and pointed it in our direction. “Don’t move. Our orders are not to shoot you, but accidents do happen.”

  Within a short time, all of the equipment had been re-crated and hauled back aboard our shuttle, along with Dr. Wilner. Maire and I were now standing in the middle of a bare floor, a half-dozen rifles leveled in our direction by steady-handed soldiers. Our pilot, a man whose name I had never learned but who face I vowed never to forget, was apparently acting as squad leader, since he was the only one to speak to us.

  “We’re leaving now,” he said from the shuttle hatchway. “You probably won’t believe me, but it would be in your best interests not to move from that spot.” The ring of soldiers expanded as they backed away, their gun muzzles never leaving us until they broke formation and loaded onto the shuttle, which lifted away with a whisper of air. I could feel whatever weaponry the craft might carry still trained upon us.

  “What do you suppose he meant by telling us to stay still?”

  I shrugged. “But whatever he meant, I think we are better off if we do as he says until they leave.”

  But it was we who left. The walls around us began to waver in my vision—and then they were gone.

  They were back in a second—a second that had felt like a day. But it had not been a day; there had been no time, no sense of time wherever we were, but only now a sense that time had passed—now that we had returned to a universe that had time. I am at a loss to understand how I felt this, because even though I have time-traveled before, the sensation this trip was new and different, as though there were other ways to time-travel than the one I knew. I recalled the Librarian asking Kyle Zachary, “Do you think you’re the only race that ever discovered time travel?” I wished the Librarian were here now so that I could ask him.

  “Keryl! What happened?”

  Maire, thank God, was still with me and appeared unhurt. In fact, nothing appeared to have changed at all, save that our dazed expressions proved we had both experienced the same odd interval.

  “I think…we time-traveled.”

  “A very good guess, actually!”

  I spun around to see who had spoken. A round little old Nuum stood there, a smile on his face, a gun in his hand.

  “Keryl Clee,” he said. “At last. I’ve been looking everywhen for you.”

  And then he shot me.

  Chapter 19

  The Desert Hunters

  Unlike my previous two recountings, I cannot properly relate what happened subsequent to this point all by myself, as I was absent from several of the most critical developments and actions. These developments occurred to my comrades whilst Maire and I were otherwise occupied. Therefore, I must step away from my personal recollections for a time, but I do not believe that the narrative suffers in any way by my stepping aside in favor of my co-authors. Indeed, it enriches the context of my story considerably.

  My friends’ adventures must be conveyed at their own time and in their own terms. That they acquitted themselves with distinction throughout difficult circumstances will be self-evident.

  Timash

  Keryl,

  If you think I’m going to write this all down in that flowery language like you use, you can do your own editing. I never claimed to be an author. You’re about to find out why. But you asked for it, and you’re going to get it. Don’t blame me if it isn’t—you know, like that guy you keep talking about from your own time. The one who wrote all the plays. You want somebody who can tell a good story? Ask Uncle Balu. Me, I’m all about the facts.

  You did say you want everything just like it happened, or at least as well as I can remember it, since a lot of the time I was too busy to write down my feelings—and sometimes my feelings toward you weren’t very nice anyway, so it’s just as well. Nothing personal, but I’m not keen on being shot at quite so much as when I’m with you—or looking for you, or running your err
ands, or whatever.

  Where do I start?

  “Well, boy, start at the beginning!” is what Uncle Balu would say, so that’s where I’ll start. After you saw us off—Skull says thanks for the extra supplies, by the way, they came in handy—we set out for the horizon as quick as we could. Not too fast, since we didn’t want to let the Nuum know we were onto them, and if they sent somebody after us there wasn’t much we could do anyway, but we didn’t hang around, either. And as soon as we were out of sight of that town where we left you, Skull got busy. Before I could even say, “I’m glad that’s over,” we had changed course 45 degrees, cut off our navigational beacons, and were tearing through the air like a tiger spider running down a free lunch.

  After that, I was finally able to ask him where we were going—a question that, unsurprisingly, Zachary Kyle wanted answered as well.

  And Skull just grinned at us and said: “I’m the captain. That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  I should have guessed, of course. Eventually I figured it out, but only after we were flying above some huge desert so hot you could feel it on the ship. Even though the world was coming to an end, Skull had to take a detour so he could see Sanja. Not that I could blame him, really. I wouldn’t have minded having enough time to swing by Tehana City myself to look up an old girlfriend or two. But I wasn’t the captain, so it was off to Zilbiri. Which, as it turned out, may not have been his best move, but that has to wait a little while.

  An interesting place, that desert—if you like desert, which I don’t. It’s about a hundred thousand square miles of nothing but sand. But it made it pretty easy to find the tribes, since all that sand makes the tents stand out. We made a couple of false stops, but we finally got it right. Several hundred tents in the middle of a nowhere that looked like any other nowhere, but what do I know?

  The last time you were there, I hear things got pretty nasty, which probably explains why when we arrived not everybody was real happy to see us. Skull and I took a sled down to talk to them—I will not do that again, it was too damned hot! I have to say, though, when they found out you weren’t with us, they relaxed a little bit. Which is to say they didn’t point their weapons directly at us. Then Skull asked where Sanja was, and they all pointed stuff at us again.