by Glenn Smith
She finished her makeup almost without realizing it, then got up and stepped over to her bureau. She pulled on clean panties and a bra—a matched set of relatively conservative design in black, in case something happened to her on the job and she ended up in the emergency room—but held off on choosing socks or stockings until she decided what she was going to wear.
Leaving her sock drawer open, she walked over to her closet and stepped inside. “Let’s see,” she said as she started looking over her new collection of office casual outfits as soon as the lights came up. “What to wear for my big debut.” She rifled through her entire collection, one outfit at a time, shoving another two or three hangers to the side with each rejection. She took down her short black party dress, held it up in front of her, and gazed at it for a few moments. She loved that dress. She loved the way she looked when she wore it—the way it accentuated her already very nice figure. Unfortunately, it was too impractical for her immediate needs, so she hung it back up. She finally selected a pair of black dress slacks and a cobalt-blue button down blouse and pulled them on, then went back to her bureau and pulled on a pair of socks.
She stepped up to her full-length dressing mirror and gazed at her reflection. She twisted to her left and then to her right and then back again, looking herself over in the same way she imagined most guys probably did whenever they checked her out, paying particular attention to those parts of her anatomy that those guys tended to pay more attention to themselves. “Not too bad, if I do say so myself,” she quietly commented. She unbuttoned her blouse’s second button and decided that looked sexier. Then she unbuttoned the third, but quickly decided that was too much and buttoned it again. Just the top two then—sexy, yet still conservative enough for the dinner crowd at Manny’s, not to mention a lot more comfortable.
She selected her shiny black low-heeled boots off the shoe rack—wouldn’t be good to get caught up in a foot pursuit wearing high heels—and pulled them on, then grabbed her holstered service pistol, her shield, and her handcuffs off her headboard on her way through to the living room. She slipped her handcuffs into one of her casual red-brown leather jacket’s side pockets and clipped her holster onto her waistband behind her right hip. Then she paused for a moment and gazed down at the glistening polished gold shield in her hand.
An immense sense of accomplishment still filled her soul and brought a proud smile to her face every time she gazed at it. Approaching the challenge one day at a time, just the way her father had advised her to, she’d worked hard and made it through the tough sixteen week-long academy. That shield stood as both proof of and reward for that accomplishment, but even after several weeks on the job she still couldn’t believe that it really belonged to her. The gold shield. ‘SPECIAL AGENT, CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION,’ it read in bold letters around the blue ring that encircled the Solfleet crest in the center. “Special Agent,” she read aloud. She’d worked very hard to earn that title. Tonight she’d prove she deserved it.
She clipped her badge over her waistband in front of her right hip where her jacket would cover it, then pulled on her jacket, flipped her hair out from inside the collar, and left her quarters for the office.
The walk was a relatively short one considering the overall immensity of the facility. All of the single agents lived fairly close to the office. The married ones, on the other hand, lived several decks and a good number of sections away. They had to use a combination of lifts and trams to get to work every day. What a hassle that had to be.
She punched her access code into the wall panel to the right of her office door—one of the many things she liked about being a C.I.D. agent was that every agent had his or her own office—then pressed her hand to the scanner plate and looked straight into the coin-sized camera imbedded in the door. “Barrett,” she said, identifying herself for the voiceprint match. The plate glowed white for a second as it analyzed her palm and fingerprints while the camera quickly and harmlessly scanned her iris. Then the door slid aside and disappeared into the wall.
She stepped inside and pressed the ‘close’ button, then walked over to her desk and sat down. She switched on her computer terminal and called up the surveillance camera command menu, activated the cameras she and Ashley had secretly installed in the NCO club yesterday morning after it closed, and then set her terminal to record everything they saw beginning in ten minutes. Then she reached for her comm-panel.
“Security Control, this is C-I-D.”
“Security Control, Sergeant Rasmussen here,” the answer came.
“This is Special Agent Barrett.” It felt so good to say that. “Charlie-seven. Go ahead and post your personnel as we discussed at this time. I’m on my way to the target location.”
“Understood, Charlie-seven. They’ll be at their posts in five minutes.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Barrett out.” She closed the channel and then got up, secured her office, and headed for the NCO club.
Chapter 3
“And... there you go, Sergeant,” the physician said as he finished micro-suturing Dylan’s head wound and set his instrument down on the wheeled cart, which he then pushed aside, out of the way. “All cleaned, disinfected, and closed up nice and neat. You don’t require any bandages and chances are there won’t even be a scar.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Dylan said as he slowly sat up on the diagnostic bed, noticing that familiar medical facility antiseptic smell for the first time since the cadets had dropped him off there. He must really have been out of it before not have noticed it earlier. “I mean, Doctor,” he respectfully amended when he gathered his wits about him, recalling that he’d once heard somewhere that doctors generally didn’t like it when their patients called them ‘Doc.’ This one had introduced himself as the head of the university’s medical center, and the impression he’d given Dylan while he attended him was that he was the consummate professional. Highly skilled and experienced, but perfectly willing to take on the simple patch-up jobs that some doctors of his caliber whom Dylan had met before would probably have considered too routine and menial a task for them to waste their valuable time performing. And he’d done so quite efficiently, displaying the genuinely friendly manners of an old country family practitioner as he worked, so Dylan felt he owed him that respect.
“You’re welcome, son,” the doctor answered. “And ‘Doc’ is just fine with me.”
Dylan pivoted on his bottom and swung his legs down over the side of the diagnostic bed, then closed his eyes and opened them wide again as another wave of dizziness washed over him. He steadied himself with his hands, then opened and closed his eyes several more times until he finally regained his equilibrium.
“You okay now, son?” the doctor asked, almost smiling. “Can you tell which way is up, or do you need to lie down a little while longer?”
“I think I’m all right,” Dylan answered.
“Okay, then why don’t you go ahead and try to stand up?” He stepped back to give Dylan a little more room but stood ready to grab hold of him, just in case.
Dylan slid off the diagnostic bed onto his feet, checked his balance for a moment, and then reached for his shirt, which he’d draped over the foot of the bed. “I think I’m good.”
“A couple of very fine young men, those two cadets who brought you in here,” the doctor commented.
“Isn’t that a requirement at this school?” Dylan asked as he pulled his shirt on.
“True, this university’s standards are exceptionally high. They always have been, at least as long as I’ve been here. But those two young men? They’re two of the most impressive first year Pre-Med students I ever did see. Noticed them right from the beginning, almost as early as their orientation.”
“Is that right?” Dylan asked as he fastened his shirt, just to be polite while his eyes darted from wall to wall, searching for a calendar. He needed to find out where he was. More precisely, he needed to find out when he was. He needed to know how much time he had to get to the Mars shipya
rds and make sure the Albion didn’t go anywhere.
“Yup, they’re going to make fine doctors some day, they are. Both of them.” He stepped over to the cabinet that hung on the back wall, punched in a code, and then keyed its door open. “Lucky for you they decided to go out and have some fun this weekend for a change instead of closing themselves up in their dorm room to study like they usually do,” he said as he searched through the dozens of various sizes of pill bottles on the shelves. “Otherwise, you might have laid undiscovered in that alley ‘til you finally bled to death.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Dylan commented, looking over at the doctor. That last comment had sounded like something those other doctors might say. But this doctor? Maybe he wasn’t so different after all.
“Sorry about that,” the doctor said, no less indifferently, as he apparently found whatever bottle he’d been looking for and took it out, then closed and locked the cabinet. “Here,” he said as he returned to Dylan’s side, holding the small bottle out to him. “Take one of these whenever you start getting a headache. Just don’t tell anyone where you got them.”
Dylan looked him in the eye and asked, “Why not? What are they?”
“They’re new,” the doctor answered. “Officially, they’re still experimental, but I happen to know they work like nothing else on the market and that there aren’t any side effects to worry about. Government approval is probably just being held up in committee somewhere.”
“What are they?” Dylan repeated.
“Fastest-acting pain killers I’ve ever heard of. They’re called Liferin.”
“Oh,” Dylan said as he finally accepted the bottle, being careful not to smile or otherwise hint that he recognized the name. He’d never been one to rush to the medicine cabinet—in fact, he avoided taking medications of any kind whenever possible—but Liferin was what the doctors had given him for pain during his convalescence after he was nearly killed in action during his final mission with the Rangers, so at least he knew they were safe, and that they would work quickly when he needed them to.
The Rangers. Also known, by those relatively few who actually knew about them, as the ‘Panthers.’ 1st squad, 4th platoon, 7th Marine Corps Ranger Battalion. A ‘non-existent’ battalion that served under the direct authority of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Command. He’d only served with them for relatively short period of time, about nine months before he was wounded, but he missed his fellow Rangers. He missed them a lot. He’d never known such camaraderie and esprit-de-corps anywhere else in the service.
“Something else wrong, son?” the doctor asked him.
“No, sir,” Dylan answered, snapping out of his reverie. “No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, Sergeant. And I mean that literally. Like I said, they’re experimental and I’m not supposed to give them out yet, but sooner or later you’re going to need them.”
“Don’t worry, Doc. I won’t say anything. I appreciate your help.”
“And for God’s sake use some common sense, will you?” the doctor went on, folding his arms across his chest. “Don’t go downtown in uniform unarmed, especially if you’re heading west of Center City. For whatever reason, the local street punks down there really don’t like soldiers. Especially soldiers who are also police officers.”
“Why is that?” Dylan asked, genuinely curious about what could possibly be so different about the city during this time period, whatever time period this was, that made it so much more dangerous than he could remember it ever having been while he was growing up. “Why is it so dangerous for us out there?” Gambling that he’d arrived in the time period that he’d been aiming for, he added, “I thought all those new poverty and hunger prevention programs the government came up with were supposed to make our cities safer, not more dangerous.”
The doctor harrumphed. “Yeah, right. Where’ve you been all your life, out on the frontier somewhere?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Well now that you’re back on Earth, stick your head out a window and take a good look around sometime. Most of the impoverished are no better off now than they were when we were still under martial law. Those times are still fresh in a lot of people’s minds, like a sort of open wound, and a lot of them blame Solfleet for their problems even more than they blame the local police department. Personally, I think our cities were a lot safer for everyone back then. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind seeing you fleet boys patrol the streets in force again, right alongside the local police.”
Martial law. Dylan thought back on the stories his mother and his older siblings had told him when he was a child. Stories about the difficulties of living year after year under harsh military rule. Stories about living with the many hardships that such a strictly enforced code of laws and regulations inevitably created for families who were just trying to survive any way they knew how. But martial law had been lifted more than twenty-five years ago, back when Dylan was little more than a toddler, and hadn’t been reinstituted even once since that tumultuous time. Even at his obviously advanced age, how could this doctor possibly compare the present situation with...
Oh yeah. For a moment Dylan had forgotten how he’d gotten there. He’d forgotten that he wasn’t in his own time period anymore. Assuming he’d arrived in 2168 as intended, then for the doctor and everyone else in the world, all those tumultuous years of martial law had only just ended a few short years ago.
If he was going to complete his mission successfully he was going to have to remember where and when he was. If he happened to forget that at the wrong moment, even once... “Maybe the streets were safer then,” Dylan acquiesced, “but that’s certainly no way for people to live.”
“Would you rather live in a society with the crime rate we had to deal with before martial law was instituted?” the doctor asked, making it sound almost like a challenge. “Because we’re headed right back in that direction unless someone in the Federation government gets off their duff and does something about it. And I mean soon.”
Preferring to avoid getting tied up in a political debate, especially since he wasn’t armed with any facts with which to do battle at the moment, Dylan simply pointed out, “I’m too young to remember those days before martial law very clearly.”
“Of course you are,” the doctor agreed as he leaned back against the diagnostic bed. “But it was bad as Hell, let me tell you. Organized crime was in full swing again, the neighborhood streets were controlled by gangs, the police were all but powerless to enforce the laws... Got so bad a guy couldn’t even sit out on his own stoop in the evening. Then came the revolt against the United Nations and its one-world government. The uprising was put down in a hurry and martial law was declared, and then everything changed almost overnight. The crime rate fell to almost nothing, and with all those troops in the city we could finally walk the streets at night without having to fear for our own safety.”
“But only until twenty-two hundred hours,” Dylan reminded him, remembering that little detail from the stories. “Then you either went inside or you found yourself in confinement for the night.”
“A fair trade, if you ask me.”
“Not everyone would agree,” Dylan pointed out, thinking about his sister in particular. As he recalled, she’d gotten herself into hot water more than once for sneaking out of the house after curfew, and on at least one occasion had even dared take part in a non-violent protest calling for the Federation president’s immediate resignation. That when she was only ten years old, if he remembered correctly. “In fact,” he continued, “as I recall, when the United Earth Federation government took over for the U-N government and didn’t end martial law right away, people started demanding another new government.”
“Yeah, well, most people don’t use the sense God gave them,” the doctor countered.
He had a point, and Dylan voiced his agreement, saying, “True enough.” Then, deciding the time had come to get o
n with his mission and suddenly remembering his handcomp and fearing that he’d lost it, he asked with no small amount of urgency, “Did those cadets happen to bring a handcomp in with them?”
“Right there,” the doctor answered, pointing over toward a small table by the door.
Exhaling with relief beyond measure—he didn’t know what the hell he would have done if he’d lost that handcomp—Dylan walked over, picked up his handcomp, and slipped it into its belt pouch on his way out. But as he passed through the doorway, he turned back and asked, “Where’s the nearest bus station, Doc? I need to get back to the aerospaceport.”
“You should have just stayed there in the first place,” the doctor told him. When Dylan didn’t respond to that, he told him, “The campus station is out the front door, straight across the center of campus, then left. Second building on the right is the ticket office.”
“Ticket office?”
“It’s an old city, Sergeant.”
“Right. Thanks, Doc. And thanks again for patching me up.”
“That’s what I’m here for, son.”
Dylan left the treatment room feeling a lot better than when he arrived, which was saying quite a lot, given how badly he’d been feeling then. But as he walked out into the lobby and passed the front desk, he glanced over the receptionist’s shoulder and immediately stopped dead in his tracks when he saw it.
He’d already figured out that he’d fallen through the Portal barely in time to avoid being vaporized by the nuclear blast that had no doubt destroyed it a split second later. He knew that he’d traveled back through time into years past. But now the reality of it hovered before him in bright red numbers and letters as if to announce his miraculous arrival to the entire world.