by Wesley Chu
“What will you do now that Oldest Grace is back?” he asked. “Will Oldest Franwil have to share you? Everyone seems to love you.”
Sasha beamed. “I like learning from both of them. They teach me very different things. Oldest Grace has me help organize the lab with Elise while Oldest Franwil is teaching me how to take care of all of the tribe’s animals.”
“Which one do you enjoy working for more?”
“They’re different, James. Elise says one day, I’ll need to know both things so I can help the people of Earth get better.”
She continued chattering as they ate breakfast. James hardly said a word and just enjoyed hearing his little sister bounce from subject to subject. She was still young, and to his surprise, her life up until now had not killed her optimism. If anything, it seemed it had actually grown since he had brought her to the present.
A little while later, Levin and Cole came down. Cole went straight toward the front of the line while Levin, seeing James and Sasha sitting by themselves, walked over to them. James reminded himself that his little sister was present. He flashed the ex-auditor a smile. “Morning, Levin. I hear Grace is already putting you to work. Leaving for your first jump today?” He turned to his sister. “Sasha, I believe Titus, the new doctor who is supposed to make you feel better, is expecting you at the infirmary. Why don’t you head down there? I’ll be along shortly after I talk to our newest addition to the tribe.”
Sasha nodded and waved at Levin as she got up. “Welcome to the Elfreth, Mr. Levin.” Then she was gone.
As usual, Levin skipped the pleasantries. “Grace has already scheduled me for a jump this week, two the next, and three more after that.”
“Welcome to time salvaging without rules.”
“These wasteland savages do not have any miasma regimens.”
“We don’t have running water, either, in case you were wondering, and I suggest you temper who you call savages.”
Levin glanced around the room and at least had the decency to lower his voice. He sat down at the table on the other side of James. “At the pace the Mother of Time is pushing, I’ll miasma out like you in a year.”
“You’re looking past surviving a year, all things considered? When did you get so optimistic?”
“Don’t get smart with me, James,” Levin snapped. “This is untenable, and you know it.”
James shrugged and picked at his food. He had to give it to the Elfreth. The quality of their food had improved by leaps and bounds since he and Elise had arrived, though considering most of the tribe had been eating bugs, rodents, and plants that could shred a person’s insides if not cooked correctly, there was very little place to go but up. “Look,” he said, spearing a small piece of meat with a sharpened stick and sticking it into his mouth, “we tried for months to find black-market miasma regimens. You were responsible for getting my guy inside ChronoCom killed. The guy who was our friend, if I may add.”
That was still a sore point for James. He knew it was misplaced blame, that he was transferring his anger to the ex-auditor from that Valta securitate Kuo, the actual murderer, but James couldn’t help it; Smitt was an open wound. His scowl was joined by Levin’s as they sat opposite each other, both looking as if they were sucking on something sour.
“I’m sorry,” James said, lowering his head. “That was unkind. If you say you did everything you could to prevent his death, I believe you.” He motioned at the long line now forming all the way out the door. “Why don’t you get some food before you leave for your jump?”
Levin looked down at James’s plate and shook his head. “Water and dry rations will do. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I’d rather work off food I know won’t make me throw up.” He got up to leave.
“Levin,” James called as the ex-auditor got up to leave. He stuck his hand out. “Good luck.”
Levin looked down at James’s extended hand, gave him just the slightest of nods, and then left the room.
A little while later, James went down to the thirty-fifth floor to the building’s infirmary. He heard Titus yelling and cursing from somewhere on the floor and followed the voice. He found the good doctor examining Sasha on a wooden table. Oldest Franwil, her face painted with worry, was there as well. Titus 2.3 saw James walk into the room and turned on him.
“You!” He jabbed James once in the chest with a finger and held out his opened palm. “Hand me that cyanide pill.”
“Excuse me?” James was taken aback. “If you’re thinking about using that on my sister, I’m going to throw you off the building.”
“Not for her, you flaming dimwit,” Titus snapped. “For me! I had to sleep in a dirty and dank room last night. This ass hasn’t slept on such a hard surface in half a century. If I had known we’d all be living like cavemen in the future, I’d have just stayed in my Light Burst and burned up in a blaze of flaming glory.”
“His residence won’t be ready until tomorrow,” Franwil said. “And his list of demands is both long and impossible to fulfill.”
Titus’s face darkened. “I’m not asking for much. Just a few things commensurate to my rank as a Grand Juror and member of the Praetorian Society.”
“There hasn’t been a Praetorian Society in over a hundred years, Titus,” said James.
“Call me Grand Juror, boy. Get me some flaming pillows at least. I won’t tolerate another night like the last.”
“Can we talk about home furnishings later?” James retorted. “Have you examined Sasha?”
The Grand Juror gave him one last scowl and then turned to his sister. Surprisingly, his demeanor changed immediately as he began to ask her questions, check her symptoms, and measure her vitals. This crass old, angry man treated Sasha warmly and with humor, once even making her giggle.
For the next fifteen minutes, James stood at the back and watched like a worried parent as Titus ran a battery of tests. When Titus was done, he complimented Sasha on how brave she was and then sent her out of the room. Once she was gone, he turned his attention back to James and became the asshole Grand Juror again.
Titus jotted a few notes on a piece of bloodcorn husk and handed it to James. “Find this or the future caveman equivalent of this. It should bring down her fever and cough.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” James said, looking the list over. It was too bad Levin and Grace had just left. If they had just another few days to research, they might have been able to locate some of the medicine on this list for their next jump. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
“Possibly,” he replied. “I believe it may be a variant of Terravira mononucleosis though I can’t be sure without running some more tests. It commonly affects young people and was just becoming a problem on Earth during my time. The symptoms are similar, but I can’t be sure. Terravira mononucleosis was never a problem on any of the colonies. I’m going to need to get her blood checked, and I don’t mean with leeches or whatever you medieval barbarians use.”
“Can you cure her?”
“Don’t press me,” Titus snapped. He surveyed the infirmary. “I haven’t had a chance to look this place over. I’ll take a complete inventory of this dump today and make a list of things we need. I think the little girl will be all right. That is, if we get her on medication and treatment before she gets any weaker. For now, make sure her sleeping quarters are cleaned and washed.”
“Thank you, Titus.” James breathed, a wave of relief washing over him.
“You can thank me by getting me some flaming pillows for my sore ass,” Titus said. “I’m serious. Get on it. I want something soft to sleep on tonight.”
“That I think I can swing.” James grinned. Elise had so many, she wouldn’t miss giving a few to the old man. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, that Grace girl I met this morning. Kind of my age, a little younger. Gray hair, statuesque, gorgeous.” Titus leaned in. “Is she single?”
TWENTY-FIVE
RIDING A BICYCLE
Levin sto
od in front of the uneven reflective metal and studied his own face. It had been months since he had last seen his reflection, since before his incarceration on Nereid, in fact. He didn’t recognize the man staring back at him, though part of that could have been the dull, uneven surface elongating his neck and bloating his head. Or perhaps it was the way the dim light softened his features to the point he could barely make out his nose, let alone smaller details. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Levin Javier-Oberon.
“You’ve been staring at yourself for twenty minutes now,” Grace said, sitting in the pilot seat. “Any longer, and you’re going to burn a hole through the hull.” She glanced up and frowned. With a slightly exaggerated effort, she got up and walked over to him, grabbed his hand and led him to the bench. “You’re nervous.”
He could feel his face redden. “It’s been less than a year since my last jump, but after Nereid, that feels like a lifetime ago.” He looked down at the bands around his arms. They still felt foreign to him. Black abyss, everything did. When a guy experienced nothing but deprivation in a pit of humanity’s worst, it tended to consume his entire being, leaving no room for whatever he was before. Now that he was back in the light, if he could call it that, he was having trouble adjusting to his previous life.
Levin looked up at Grace. And then there was the Mother of Time. He had all but worshiped her during his tenure at ChronoCom. This woman was responsible for humanity’s survival more than any other person in history. Without time salvaging, mankind would have gone extinct by now.
He must have been staring, because Grace rolled her eyes and put a hand on his cheek and pushed his face to the side. “Stop looking at me like you want to fuck me. You’re far too ugly for my taste. The Mother of Time has to maintain some sort of standards, even around here.”
That earned a little smile from Levin. The Mother of Time’s sexual appetite was legendary. He had originally thought everything he had learned about her at the Academy was grossly exaggerated, the truth stretched into tall tales over the centuries. In this particular case, it seems it had all been true.
“You’re doing it again, Auditor.”
“Sorry, Mother of Time.”
“Call me Grace. My TI days are long over.”
“Call me Levin. So are my ChronoCom days.”
A small light told them they had arrived at the planned coordinates. The two of them moved to the front of the collie and looked out the window as the sun blazed brightly off the starboard side of the ship. Grace pointed at a vid hanging off the ceiling and tapped a black space near the left side. “You want to be three hundred meters west of here in exactly four minutes. I’ll initiate the jump. Remember, you have nineteen minutes before the Blackwood falls into the sun. Be out of the ship by that time. Do you understand? You have zero latitude here. One more second and you’ll become Titus’s substitute as a sacrifice to the sun god.”
Levin nodded. Back when he was a chronman, a stash-and-grab like this was easy, something he was doing in his Tier-4 days. Right now, though, his stomach was in knots, and he felt like he was running his very first salvage.
She patted him on the back as he prepared to leave. “Kick those jitters and show me what one of the highest operatives in my agency can do.”
It was a silly statement, but it worked. Levin stood up a little straighter and felt a small boost of courage. This woman knew how to push all his right buttons. Who was he kidding? Grace Priestly probably knew how to push everyone’s.
Levin powered on his exo and atmos, double-checked the collie’s interior life supports, and opened the hatch doors. He launched himself toward the marker Grace had designated through his AI band. Behind him, the sun blazed angrily, so large it eclipsed all of black space. His atmos, rad band, and exo were all working hard to keep him from being burned to a crisp, but even so, he could subconsciously feel the heat searing his back.
“How are you doing?” Grace’s voice popped into his head.
“Just like riding a bike,” he replied.
“Do they still have bikes in the twenty-sixth century?” she asked.
“No, but one of the first classes we took at the Academy was how to pilot all forms of primitive vehicles. That includes horses, cars, and bicycles.”
“What about aircrafts?”
“That’s the second class.”
“You’re near the jump point, Levin. Going in four, three, two…”
Everything turned yellow and Levin felt a vibration wash over him. It was a familiar shock to his body, an old lover stirring buried feelings of nostalgia over something long forgotten. When the yellow faded, and the stars obscuring his vision blinked away, he saw a long, thin cylindrical ship barreling into him. He didn’t have time to adjust his exo before he bounced off the hull and spun away. It took him a few seconds to recover and pull out of the spin. He studied it as the wayward craft spun out of control on two axes.
“Couldn’t have given me more than half a second to get acclimated?” he growled.
“I told you I’m precise. You have sixteen minutes. Prioritize weapons, batteries, and food. According to the Blackwood’s last distress calls, the power grid had blown out, so avoid engineering altogether.”
Levin sped to the moving ship and latched on to the exterior hull. Immediately, the sun and the black space began to spin in seemingly random patterns as he joined the ship’s rotations. He created four coils and kept two glued to the surface as he made his way to the hatch midway down the ship. It was a pretty standard design for twenty-second-century freighters, and he felt fairly confident he could navigate its interior with relative ease. Within a few seconds, he cut through the outer hatch and worked his way through to the compression chamber past the inner door to the ship’s main quarters.
Fortunately, the ship’s artificial gravity still held. He stood in the middle of a long hallway that spanned a hundred meters on both sides. To his left, he heard yelling. His AI band alerted him to medium radiation emanating from the right, though it was nothing his rad band couldn’t handle. Levin took off down the right corridor. Running in the ship felt strange, as if each step felt heavier or lighter than the previous. The artificial gravity must be unstable and probably close to giving out. He had to hurry. Once it gave, considering how badly this ship was out of control, things could get dicey.
“Second door to your right. Should be a cargo hold. Just grab everything.”
Levin blew through the double doors and entered a large room with cube containers stacked all the way up to the ceiling. In the center of the room, a group of men and women huddled in a circle, holding hands and praying fervently. They gaped at him as he strolled in and looked around.
“Seems I have company,” he thought to Grace.
“A couple of Neptune Divinities. I would consider it a personal favor if you tell them the High Scion says hello and then kill them.”
“A little bloodthirsty, Mother of Time? They’re going to die anyway.”
“You have no idea the pain and suffering these bastards put the TIs through.”
“Who in the Holy Heavens are you?” one of the Neptune Divinities demanded, standing up.
Fortunately, he seemed unarmed, or Levin would have had to do something about it. He ignored the man and opened his netherstore container. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “Really. Keep praying.”
The man took a few steps toward him and raised his arm. By now, the rest of the Neptune Divinities had noticed him as well. A woman got up and ran for the door out of the corner of his eye. The rest surrounded him.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Levin said. He created half a dozen kinetic coils and began to cut the bindings holding the cargo in place. Several of the Neptune Divinities gasped as he lifted a dozen containers at once and arranged them into a single file. Then he expanded his netherstore and floated the containers in as if down a conveyor belt. More cries of alarm from the Neptune Divinities followed. Their cargo seemed to float and disappear into thin air.
<
br /> One of the men made the foolish decision of trying to stop him. He charged Levin’s exo shield and bounced off it as if he had hit a wall, knocking himself unconscious. The rest of the group attacked, trying to surround and disrupt his work. Irritated, Levin created a long coil and swept them to the side and pinned them to the wall.
“The most efficient thing to do is to just kill them.”
“Please, Mother of Time. Let me do my work.”
Levin ignored the cries of the struggling Neptune Divinities as he gobbled up stack after stack of containers. By the time he was done, his netherstore was twenty-six containers burdened and its levels had dipped to 64 percent. He checked his status: thirteen minutes remaining. He turned to exit the room and ran into a group of armed soldiers manning the door.
“Oh, for abyss’s sake,” he growled.
“I told you,” Grace said. “Should have listened to me. Like James, you’ll learn in time that I am always right.”
The squad opened fired, pinging Levin with gauss projectiles, popular in this time period. His levels plummeted 10 percent just from the initial barrage. He swore: he had forgotten that the type of exos the agency used were notoriously inefficient when it came to gauss weaponry. He dove to the side and aimed six coils at the squad of four, smashing them backward and into the corridor wall outside.
“Get moving, Auditor. You’re wasting time, and levels, for that matter. The hit you just took could have held another three tons in the netherstore.”
“I’m a little out of practice.”
Levin charged forward without exo-enhanced speed, deciding to conserve his levels for the rest of the job unless he absolutely needed to use them. Two of the guards in the hallway were unconscious and the other two were just picking themselves off the floor. Levin grabbed the one closest to him by the collar and yanked him headfirst into the wall. He stepped up to the second and kicked him in the face.
He continued down to the next cargo hold and took a look inside. It was loaded with dozens of warheads. He skipped it. The warheads could be converted to power sources, but he doubted the wasteland savages had the technology to do so. The third hold contained long-term ship rations. He upended those quickly into his netherstore. His levels were dropping fast. Levin continued on through the holds, grabbing pallets of clothing in one room, and finding water filtration systems in another.