by C. J. Hill
Dedication
To my husband, Guy (AKA Techno Bob), who always comes up with the scientific terms and dialogue my engineering-type characters use. It paid off in so many ways to marry a rocket scientist.
To my kids, Asenath, Luke, James, Faith, and Arianna—thanks for being understanding when I have to put in long hours writing.
To my sister, Ginger Hunsaker, who stayed up late the night before my revisions were due to help me go over them. I probably should have put you in a dedication long before now.
And just so the rest of my family knows that I love them too: Hey, Mom, Dad, Erin, Gibbs, Stephen, and Brandon, I love you! You’re an awesome family! Thanks for your support.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
About the Author
Books by C. J. Hill
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Treason was becoming habit-forming.
When Joseph Monterro escaped from the city of Traventon, he’d thought he was done with his covert life, done with running, hiding, and sabotage. Done with deceiving people who trusted him. Things weren’t ever that simple, though.
Joseph walked onto the grounds of Tranquility Park, scanning the grassy fields for his contact. He saw no sign of the man, but then, Joseph was a few minutes early. He headed toward their meeting spot at the lake.
Santa Fe had plenty of parks, most of them full of amusement equipment, skating pits, and places to hover-jump. Joseph liked this one for its old-fashioned feel. Ducks paddled across the lake, frogs hopped on rocks at its edges, and hummingbirds zoomed around flowering bushes. Even after being in Santa Fe for three weeks, he was still struck with a small jolt of wonder every time he saw an animal. The only animals in Traventon were in the virtual reality programs.
Another difference was the domes covering the cities. Traventon’s had been opaque, making the weather invisible. Santa Fe’s was clear. He still wasn’t used to seeing clouds stalking through the sky like silent, watchful entities.
Joseph pulled his comlink from his pocket and brought up the QGP program on the handheld computer. It had been dangerous to copy design specifications from a weapons system, and it was even more dangerous to write subroutines to fix its flaws. But even if someone saw his screen, it would be hard to tell what he was doing, and besides, Joseph didn’t have the time to be careful. Plans were already in motion.
A few minutes after Joseph reached the lake’s edge, a man walked across one of the trails toward him. Abraham, his contact. The man was probably thirty years older than Joseph—fifty or maybe even fifty-five. A bushy beard covered a good portion of his face, and a black hat hid most of his dark hair. Joseph didn’t know if Abraham was his real name, or whether he came from the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim sector of the city. According to his search of the city’s data, all three groups claimed Abraham as an ancestor.
Joseph turned his comlink off, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and glanced around. A few couples were meandering around the park trails. Some children splashed and played in the swimming section at the other side of the lake. A group of teenage boys launched a light drone into the sky so they could target hunt. No one seemed to have taken note of Abraham walking up to Joseph.
Abraham nodded in greeting, turned so he faced the water, then opened the bag he carried. He reached inside, took out a handful of food pellets, and scattered them across the water in front of him. Dark shadows of fish rose through the lake’s surface, mouths open to snatch the floating pellets. The water puckered with their darting movements.
Joseph kept his gaze on the fishes’ twisting silver bodies. “The council asked me to go to its planning meeting this afternoon.”
Abraham tossed more pellets onto the lake. “I told you they would. Who else is as qualified to go back to Traventon to destroy the QGPs?”
Fortunately, no one. Unfortunately, very few people were also in as much trouble with the Traventon government. The threat of capture, torture, and death had a way of sapping the fun out of a trip home.
Abraham turned to look at Joseph, to study his expression. “You understand what we expect from you in return for our help?”
Joseph nodded. “A life for a life.”
Abraham turned back to the lake. “We’ll need confirmation you made the kill.”
“What sort of confirmation?” Joseph’s mind flashed to a story from one of the books of scripture—a girl who had asked for the head of a man on a silver platter. Not that, Joseph thought. It was bad enough that he had agreed to kill someone. The last thing he wanted to do was carry a severed head around.
Abraham shrugged. “You have a while to think of something. My sources say the team won’t leave for two weeks.”
Two weeks? “That’s too soon.” Joseph was barely getting any sleep now, and he was only halfway done writing the code that would allow the QGPs to work. He couldn’t finish any faster. Especially if he had to spend a large chunk of that time in a virtual reality center acting out ways to break into Traventon’s Scicenter.
Abraham dropped more pellets in the water, unconcerned. “Most of the council wants you to leave earlier, but the team needs to be trained and the engineering department says they still need two more weeks to finish producing those laser-box disrupters you designed.”
Joseph frowned. “I’ll need at least three weeks to finish fixing the program.”
“Then you should have made your disrupter design more complicated so it would take the engineering department longer.”
The design was complicated, and despite the fact that the council wanted to name the disrupter after Joseph, it was only partially his invention.
Ducks paddled in Abraham’s direction, gliding over to see what sort of food he was offering. “You can find a way to delay the team’s departure,” Abraham said. “Shouldn’t be a problem for a smart boy like you.”
In other words, Abraham’s group wasn’t going to help Joseph any more than they had to. Joseph supposed he should have expected that. Help always came with a price. He watched the ducks pecking at the floating pellets. “When will you give me the signal-blocking bands?”
Traventon had one simple way to control its citizens. Every person had a crystal implanted in their wrist that constantly sent out and received signals from the city. If someone didn’t have clearance to go into an area, they would only have a thirty-second warning—a tightening pinch in the wrist that got more painful every second—before the crystal sent out debilitating shocks that made movement impossible. The building’s alarms would sound too, alerting the Enforcers of an intruder.
The
shocks were stronger if someone tried to leave the city. Those didn’t debilitate; they killed. Removing the crystals wasn’t an easy or quick procedure. They were attached to the radial artery and programmed to explode if anyone tampered with them.
“The blocking bands aren’t quite ready,” Abraham said.
“But they will be in two weeks?” Traventon had made the crystal signals strong enough to penetrate not only the city’s regular buildings but also high-security reinforced ones. Covering the crystals had always been impossible until now.
“Don’t worry.” Abraham flicked a handful of pellets to the waiting ducks. “The blocking bands are basically done already. You know how engineers are, though. They’ve got to triple test everything—make sure it works in high temperatures, low temperatures, underwater, with no water. I tell you, if Santa Fe’s engineers had lived in Noah’s day, the animals would still be lined up waiting for permission to board.”
A few ducks waddled out of the lake, fixing their small eyes on Abraham. They weighed their hunger against the risk of danger and edged closer to the food. He tossed some pellets in front of them. “Do you have your list for me?”
“Yes.” Joseph put his hand in his jacket pocket and felt for the piece of paper there. Paper was plentiful in Santa Fe. The people in this city didn’t want to depend entirely on technology. They always left themselves another way to get things done. Paper, in this case, was essential for stealth. You couldn’t hack into a computer to find a piece of paper. You couldn’t capture it as it winged its way through the air as an electronic message.
Joseph hesitated before he gave Abraham the list. On one of the first days after Joseph’s group had come to Santa Fe, Sheridan had written him a note. He wasn’t sure if this was because she didn’t know how to use the comlink the integration liaison had given her, or whether she knew a handwritten note would mean more to him. Whatever the reason, he had spent long minutes staring at the paper, tracing the lines of her words. They were so elegant, so effortlessly smooth and even. Just like her.
Joseph had handwritten a few things before. It had been a part of his studies as a historian. His writing was clumsy, though. Too large, too irregular. Anyone who saw this note would know it was the script of someone who had hardly ever practiced writing. They would know it had come from him.
He handed the list to Abraham anyway, passing it to him as they shook hands.
Abraham glanced at the paper, letting his eyes linger long enough to read it, then he reached into his bag, dropped the paper inside, and took out another handful of pellets. He scattered them on the lake, and the fish darted between the ducks, racing to gobble up the food first. “We agree to your terms. You’ll need to tell President Mason privately that you want to take an extra man with you. We’ll give you his name later. The council won’t like you making additions to the team, but they don’t have a lot of choices, do they?”
They didn’t. Joseph not only knew the QGP system, he knew how to computigate through the Scicenter’s restricted programs.
Abraham turned away from the lake to let his gaze lock on Joseph’s. “You’re sure you’ll be able to complete the kill? When the moment appears, you won’t suddenly decide that taking a life opposes your moral code?”
Joseph didn’t look away from Abraham’s scrutiny. “That’s the benefit of being raised in Traventon. We don’t have moral codes.”
Abraham grunted in displeasure. “No one should be without a moral code.” He tapped his finger against his chest. “You need to search in here and find one; but”—his finger raised in the air to make a point—“wait until after the mission to do that.”
Chapter 2
Taylor Bradford walked toward the Council Hall building, wondering what the president wanted to talk to her about this time. Well, she didn’t really wonder. It was always the same thing. It would have something to do with the QGP weapon. Questions about its capabilities, applications, and how to destroy it.
Large golden letters engraved over the building’s doorway read LIBERTAS IN UNITATE EST—Freedom Is Found in Unity. Latin had been dead for thousands of years, but even here in 2447 people were still using it for mottoes. Everything looked more elegant and official in Latin, she supposed.
Taylor wasn’t a native of the twenty-fifth century. She’d been born in the twenty-first century, and had been minding her own business like any other eighteen-year-old girl, when twenty-fifth-century scientists had sucked her and her twin sister, Sheridan, smack-dab into the city of Traventon.
Okay, maybe Taylor hadn’t just been minding her own business. Sheridan liked to remind her, pointedly sometimes, that Taylor was partially responsible for the whole sucked-into-the-future thing because Taylor had invented the QGP: the quark-gluon plasma converter. It was a machine that changed matter into a timeless energy flux.
It didn’t matter how many times Taylor insisted to her sister or Santa Fe’s council that she hadn’t meant for the QGP to be turned into either a weapon or a part of a time machine; there was still apparently a lingering cloud of responsibility hovering over Taylor’s head.
Taylor had designed and helped build the QGP while working on her graduate degree at the University of Tennessee. The QGP transformed matter into energy and then retransformed it later in another location. The machine could have had applications for travel in space as well as on earth. It could have been used to transport medicine from one part of the planet to another almost instantaneously. It could have done so many good things.
Instead, Dr. Reilly, a physics professor at UT, had stolen the credit for the QGP. In what was either cosmic justice or really bad luck, Reilly then accidentally turned himself into an energy flux wave that didn’t reconfigure until four centuries later. He’d wound up in Traventon.
Unable to build a working QGP for the Traventon government, Reilly had used Taylor’s QGP to suck her and Sheridan into the twenty-fifth century so that Taylor could help him.
As if she would help him.
Yeah, up until the moment Taylor had found herself floating inside the Time Strainer, being a genius had seemed like a good thing. It had taken Taylor and Sheridan several days, and more than one close call, to escape with Joseph to Santa Fe.
Now Taylor walked up the steps of the Council Hall. Under the Freedom Is Found in Unity motto, a sculpted relief showed people from different cultures and religions walking, talking, and working together. The people were smiling, clearly happy to be so unified. The relief would have been more accurate if it had shown a few of the people scowling, one or two spying, and the rest competing against each other.
Santa Fe had been formed in the twenty-fourth century when the other cities passed a treaty prohibiting religion. The religious groups had put aside their differences to build this city, but it was clear their truce was only necessity deep. Even after ninety years, the city was strictly segregated.
The city’s pro-unity signs were frequent targets of vandalism. Down the street on one that read, “Strength comes from peace,” someone had scrawled, “Strength comes from a stocked armory.” Another sign near Taylor’s apartment said, “When we work together, we have everything we need.” It was the object of constant editorial revision. “I don’t need Christians” had been written on the bottom. The next day the word Christians had been crossed out and the word Jews was inscribed. Then it was Hindus. Over the next few days, every religion in the city had its turn at being unneeded. Finally someone wrote, “I don’t need bigots,” across the whole list. Actually, Taylor had done that, and she probably shouldn’t have since she’d been living in Santa Fe for only three weeks, but really. A city founded by religious groups ought to be a bit more loving.
Taylor considered the phrase inscribed over the Council Hall doorway again. Maybe vandalism was the reason the council had put their motto in Latin. People didn’t care about commenting on words they couldn’t understand.
Taylor walked up the steps to the front doors, expecting them to slide open. Then she
remembered she had to hold her ID card up to activate the door’s scanner. A purple light ran over her, and the door finally opened.
She went inside and strode across the lobby. The whole room looked like it had been constructed out of glowing white marble. Golden veins fanned here and there, and as she walked past them, parts of the wall and floor sparkled. Coming here always made Taylor vaguely feel as though she’d walked into a jewelry box.
Joseph was leaning against the security desk, studying something on his comlink. He was a twenty-year-old genius who’d been one of Taylor and Sheridan’s translators when they’d first been brought to this century. Genius incognito, that was. He’d hidden his computer abilities from the Traventon government by working for his father as a historian instead.
Joseph frowned at his comlink screen and for a moment reminded Taylor of a cologne ad from her day: a tall, ruggedly handsome guy with broad shoulders who was brooding for no apparent reason.
Well, he could have been from her day with one notable exception. He had blue hair. In this century people dyed their hair in the same colors people back in the twenty-first century had used for their clothes.
Joseph looked up from his comlink. “You’re forty-five minutes late.” Instead of speaking with a twenty-first-century accent, he used the modern one. Taylor was supposed to practice it.
“I was in the science district,” she said. “I got lost.”
Joseph cocked an eyebrow. His blue eyes were skeptical. “No, you didn’t. I had the city map memorized three days after I got here. I doubt it took you much longer.”
“Two days, actually.” Taylor flashed her ID badge at the guard behind the desk. The badge projected a holographic image of Taylor in the air in front of her. “It doesn’t matter if I’m late,” she went on. “I’ve already told them everything I’m going to about the QGP. At this point they’re just dragging me back here to annoy me.”
The guard nodded and waved her on. Taylor headed toward the hallway that led to the council chambers. “Besides, you can’t criticize me—you’re not in there either.”