“Like hell I can’t. Climb aboard the Phantom. All of you. You’re coming with me.”
The girls were already responding to the change in his tone to something a lot more authoritative. He’d switched into warrior mode. But so far they had just tensed, and stopped whatever it was they were doing. Preston, forever trying to put the moves on the girls, actually stopped hitting on them for one second and said, “Ah, sorry boss. The whole time travel thing, really messes with my magnetic personality.”
“You don’t have one,” Roman said, marching towards the plane.
“Um, that was a pun, for the pun-challenged,” Preston explained.
“I know what it was, dickhead. But you’re coming too.”
Preston whispered in Zoya’s hear, “he does know I can squash him like a bug, right?”
“You heard the man. Get your ass aboard, you overrated tin can.” She picked him up and threw him towards the unfolding stairs which were now floating like a walkway of river stones along the invisible river flowing from the plane.
Preston climbed back down the stairs. “Fine, but I’ll be damned if I board first and miss you swishing your sashaying asses up the steps.”
“Fine, hold on to what sense of manhood you can while you can, I say,” Zoya quipped, brushing curtly past him.
Preston straightened his suit jacket and his hair with his hands and hit on Eva walking by, matching her stride. “Don’t you want something riding you besides your panty line, huh?”
She shook her head. “Do your pick up lines actually work on normal girls?”
“Yeah. After I snap their necks, they work fine.” Preston continued preening in an effort to more fully recover from his recent brutal landing against the floating stair panels.
Moments later they were all inside the plane and strapped in. Roman was still trying to get used to Svena in the cockpit beside him instead of Elsa. “Why you and not one of the other girls?”
“I’m the closest thing to Elsa you have. My specialty is undercover work, remember? Getting any man to open up any and every part of himself to me.”
“And Eva, what was she doing with the chairs back there earlier?”
Svena finished strapping in. “She was swapping them out with robots only currently in chair mode that can turn into knights in shining armor and do our fighting for us should any or all of us become incapacitated.”
“Hmm,” Roman said, firing up the engines. “Yeah, I should have thought of that.”
He glanced back at the girls. “And Vera? What was with spitting on the plane? Like throwing salt over your shoulder, for good luck?”
Svena snorted. “You do make me wonder where your in-the-heat-of-the-moment-savvy comes from sometimes. She’s better at biochemical synthesis than the rest of us. She was coating the plane with a polymer that will make the surface more aerodynamic, reducing its frictional coefficient to near zero. The nanites in her spit will replicate the solution evenly over the plane’s surface. You’ll fly faster and on less fuel than ever before.”
“And…”
“And before you ask… Darya was getting the Phantom’s brain’s left and right hemispheres to communicate better so it could creatively find better solutions on its own, or override your suggestions in the pilot seat if it thought it had a better idea, at least when it comes to its specialty, flying.”
She parted her hair out of her eyes. “Galina is our systems integration specialist. She was studying the big picture of how all the plane’s components work together to make sure it could survive exposure to what’s out there. And Zoya is both a theoretical and experimental physicist, spanning all subspecialties from cosmological physics to solid state to subatomic. She’s working long-term on adaptation of the Phantom for when…”
“My slip-stream abilities fail and I can no longer slip us in and out of timelines at will. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all of your specialties currently have more to do with saving me than with tweaking this plane. That’s just your cover story.”
Svena smiled. “Like I said, one wonders where you do get your smarts from at those crucial moments where you seem to need it most.”
“Why?”
“We realize Elsa took the queen’s position so she could better protect you. We’re just not convinced she can do the job entirely by herself. Her specialties run along different lines according to the role she’s forced to play.”
“So you’ve been feeding her your best thinking?”
She took a beat, picking under her fingernails. “Yes.”
“Just how much of your minds are you all devoting to saving me right now?” he said, firing up the thrusters.
“We keep the percentage negligible by parallel-arraying our mindchips.” Her tone sounded a little too defensive for his tastes.
“How negligible?”
“Time to go, pilot, before I take over the controls from you.”
He groaned inwardly, not caring for the implications. And shot them out of the airplane hangar at Mach 2. They were launching a vehicle moving at near-rocket speeds up through the city from ground level. That meant navigating around aircars doing their best to stick to the flying lanes laid out by the City AI, and making the Phantom perform the necessary wing-tilts to get between the skyscrapers until they were clear of the city.
Roman noticed the Phantom handled the maneuvers better than he could, correcting for him. For the moment he was still more focused on the tendrils growing out of his hands and into the controls of the plane itself. His neuronet was extending the merger of mind and machine beyond what Roman had already designed into the craft; as it was, there was already a veritable psychic connection between them. Evidently the neuronet wanted still more control to timeslip all of them, not just him, but his passengers and his plane. The process had begun during their little conversation back in the hangar. Now the tendrils were growing up out of the seats and into the passengers.
“Shit!” Svena said beside him about the same time the other passengers mouthed something along the same lines. “Is this really necessary?”
“The mindcap is replicating itself inside you all. For now it will remain in pill capsule form, lodged in your palms. The capsule won’t migrate to your brain and unfold into a mindcap unless you’re separated from me or the plane somehow and get stranded in time. Better pray that doesn’t happen, or you get to enjoy my fate right alongside me.”
The rest of his passengers got the message as he’d flipped the communications switch to the rest of the crew. “Marvelous” and a few like ad libs followed in the wake of his announcement.
“What are we going to do about them?” Svena asked.
“Who?”
She indicated, “look straight ahead” with a nod.
Roman noticed the aircar stuck on the swordfish-like snout of the plane, effectively shish-kebabbed. “Poor bastards. Looks like husband and wife get a one-way ticket to another timeline.”
“Can’t you…?”
Roman shook his head. “If the mindcap had deemed it a worthwhile price to pay, it would have done so already. Sorry to be so mercenary, but that’s the way it is.”
“I’m sure it’s to a better place they go, if their Christian God has anything to say about it.” She pointed to the fish symbol on their license plate.
THIRTY-THREE
“Where the hell are we?” Svena gasped, unstrapping her seat belt by way of the buckle in the center of her chest where both straps met. It was as if she hadn’t breathed during flight.
“Damned if I know. You’re the brainy ones. I’m sure one of you will figure it out.” Roman unstrapped himself, cast a wary eye on their stowaways, and waved at them with a fake smile plastered across his face. “Hope you enjoy your vacation getaway of a lifetime,” he mumbled, as he finished climbing out of his seat.
“Something tells me this trip cost you more than it cost them,” Svena said, following him out of the cockpit. He’d had to catch himself from buckling at the knees
twice already by grabbing hold of the passenger seats.
He chose to ignore her little quip about his impending fate. He had to stay in the moment for what he needed to do. Let’s hope he could.
The girls filed out of the plane ahead of Roman.
Once Preston was outside, he tested his “magnetic personality” by slipping the aircar off the spindle-snout of the plane with a wave of his hand. Found it worked. He relaxed noticeably. Went over to the passengers inside the car and, resting his arm on the roof, leaned into them as if he were valet service. The terrified driver inside with the paunch, receding hairline and sweaty skin lowered the window. His wife with the thrift store platinum blond wig not terribly well glued down over a smoke-wrinkled face leaned forward for an unimpeded view of Preston.
“Welcome to your home away from home,” Preston said.
“Where, where, where are we?” the driver finally managed.
“Another timeline. I’m afraid you’re stuck here. Look on the bright side, maybe you and your family already died in this one, and you can now go on living tax free. If you do see your doppelgangers, I recommend running for the hills. Should you meet, usually means total annihilation. Of course that’s according to un-augmented minds, so who really knows?”
The wife in the passenger seat said, “Do they have two-for-one specials in this time line?”
Preston smiled. “No idea, but with a make-do attitude like that, something tells me you’re going to be fine.”
She turned to the husband. “We were two-hundred and fifty thousand in debt in the other timeline, Alvin. I say we count our blessings. You start up with your gambling again, I won’t wait to be rescued from you a second time. I’ll build my own god damned time machine.”
Preston smiled. “I’ll leave you two to it. Better you kill one another than I kill you. I have standards. You’re too useless and insignificant to warrant a reaper like me.” He tucked in his shirt after leaning in to address them, and, finished primping, pulled himself away from the car and rejoined the group.
“Guys,” Preston said, “don’t do time travel, and especially don’t do nature. Too easy to get grass stains on the suit.”
Preston was referring to the jungle they’d managed to find themselves in. They were high enough up a mountain to appreciate that the forest went on forever in all directions.
A roar came out of nowhere loud enough and deep enough to shatter their eardrums. The trees shook and the ground rumbled from the creature’s footsteps. The dinosaur that passed overhead managed to step right over them without even noticing they were there. It left a footprint big enough that should some rain come to fill it, they could all enjoy the swimming pool.
The two civilians had joined them, coaxed to the safety in numbers at the sound of the roar. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about your gambling being an issue,” the wife said.
“Oh yeah? Five’ll get you ten, we don’t last the night.”
She frowned, sighed, and shook her head slowly, more at a loss over what to do about her inveterate gambler of a husband than what to do about surviving a world with dinosaurs.
“Look on the bright side, old boy,” Preston said, resting his hand on hubby’s shoulder. “You’ll knock pounds off that waistline running from these things.”
“What the hell did your neuronet bring us here for?” Svena asked Roman.
Vera had crouched down to examine a piece of snot that the Godzilla-size dino had left in its wake, snorting up a storm chasing after whatever higher-pitched shrieking animal in the distance. She hovered her hands over the mucus, and for a while, her hand lost its shape in a cloud of nanites flying off her skin to run her scientific probes for her. “There’s ancient bacteria here aplenty that are more than a match for our neuronet-eating mold back home.”
Roman shook his head and groaned. “No, it wouldn’t be that easy. My neuronet would make sure the solution involved all of you and that in some way the clues would push your investigations along into saving me from oblivion.”
“So, it’s trying to help you?” Darya said.
“Of course it is. It may not be able to solve the problem it created, but I don’t suspect it is any keener about spending eternity in oblivion than I am.”
“But if it’s laying out clues for us,” their systems analyst, Galina, said, “then it already knows the answer.”
“Perhaps, and I’m just too dense to put the pieces together myself, even with its help. Or perhaps it’s working its own agenda, trying to draw you in so you can make the modifications you need to the neuronet to take up the calling of time travelers yourselves. Maybe it too wants to influence all of humanity, not just some of it. Does seem to be a sign of the times. Even AIs want to play master of the universe games.”
“All this speculation isn’t helping,” Galina said.
“Perhaps this will,” Eva said. She pointed to the sky.
What appeared to be horseless chariots, each with its own chariot rider, were giving chase to the Megasaurus that had nearly unwittingly stomped them to death moments prior. The chariots were clearly powered by some form of antigravity. The chariot riders were using laser pulse rifles for hunting. Some of the assault weapons also fired larger plasma torpedoes that had the downside of taking out large swatches of forest if they missed their mark. Not that that was all that much of a calamity, because the forest regrew over the exposed ground nearly as fast as the holes were made. Trees could move on this world, walking on their roots. Ivies could open their flowers and spit out seeds that, upon striking sun-exposed soil, explode with growth to claim the niche before slowing to a more sustainable rate.
“I’m guessing the anti-gravity technology on this world has something to do with Roman being able to fend off oblivion,” their physicist, Zoya said. “We need one of those chariots for me to examine.”
“No problem,” Eva said. She whistled by putting her thumb and index finger between her lips.
Two of their “seating arrangements” sprinted out of the plane in bipedal robot form and moved monkey-like through the trees. Leaping from one to the other like flying squirrels. And bounding to the tops of the tallest ones better than professional loggers. Once high enough, they leapt at any chariot foolish enough to swoop down low enough within their bounding radius.
They soon brought back one of the chariots, along with its rider, each robot holding on to a side. The rider was protesting vehemently, jamming the rifle butt of his gun into their faces when they were just too close to fire at directly without hurting himself. Getting nowhere fast with that approach, he jumped out of the chariot and gave them just enough distance on him to fire at them with the lasers and plasma torpedoes. Having zero effect with this alternative attack method, he elected to run after his chariot, still intent on getting it back one way or another.
“Who the hell are you people?” the charioteer said, running headlong into the group. His eyes were going over the women almost to the exclusion of the men. He seemed able to smell the fact that they were the greater danger to him. He nodded. “Cool. A species where the females are the warriors. Five seconds with my wife told me long ago that that arrangement makes a hell of a lot of sense.” He seemed to relax his guard, and went to shake the women’s hands. They looked on at him amused, but took his hand in turn.
He was dressed in leather, the kind you make from killing animals in the wild, not the kind you picked up off a factory assembly line. And he was just large enough and built enough to be prickling the women’s interest in other areas. Definitely an Alpha Male for those women who read romance novels and nothing but.
Samson smelled Roman by sniffing him repeatedly. “Please, not on a first date,” Roman said.
Darya and Zoya were already pulling apart the hoverboard. Darya’s fingers had morphed into tools better able to inspect the thing’s avionics. While Zoya’s hand had become lost in a nano cloud that infiltrated the device far more microscopically.
“Hey, I need that!” Sa
mson crowed.
“Relax,” Roman said. “They’re just studying the technology to see if it can save me. They’ll put it back together for you better than it was.”
“Save you?” Samson said, still not able to relax his warrior’s posturing or take his hands off the women brutalizing his flying platform.
“Yeah, I’m a time traveler, but it’s killing me the more I jump time streams.”
That got Samson to shift his attention back to him. “A time traveler? No shit. Thought you were just one of those tribes from up north.”
“You seem pretty comfortable with people from another world showing up at your doorstep, speaking your language,” Roman said.
“Yeah, well, we were a bit more impressive once ourselves.” Samson inspected Preston. Sniffing him. “We used to have walking, talking tin cans like this one too,” he said, referring to Preston. He sighed and ambled back closer to Roman. “We had floating cities. That hoverboard is just a remnant of what’s left of that tech, from what we could salvage.” After throwing another concerned glance back at his singular mode of transportation, he returned his attention to the Sexy Six, noticing the other four were not exactly standing idly by. But whatever they were up to, he couldn’t exactly decide, judging from his quizzical expression. Finally, his eyes landed back on Roman. “As to taking your English-speaking in stride, let me guess, Chicago, right?”
Roman snorted. “Right.”
“Montana born and bred,” Samson said. “Probably why we survived. We were still pretty rural compared to what was going on in the cities. You can bet whatever killed our world, that’s where it came from.”
“What did kill it, you don’t mind me asking?” Roman said.
“Ah, it hardly matters now,” Samson said dismissively, evidently not wanting to talk about it.
“I’m afraid it might. Could offer us another clue as to why my neuronet took us to this parallel timeline at this precise time and none other,” Roman said.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 31