Time Raiders: The Seduction

by Cindy Dees

  The response was noncommittal, but it wasn’t a no. He kissed her again, taking his time and savoring the remnants of an excellent Piesporter Riesling wine on her breath.

  “I’m hurt. You drank a good bottle of wine without me.” He smiled against her lips to take any sting out of the comment.

  “I thought you liked your happy hours and cold beers.”

  He deftly shifted the covers out from underneath him as he answered, “That’s just good office diplomacy. I can take or leave beer, personally. I much prefer a nice bottle of wine.”

  “Duly noted.” She reached for his shirt and peeled it over his head as he unhooked his belt. “Hurry,” she urged him as he discarded the rest of his clothes.

  He grinned at her as he slipped beneath the covers. “Why? We’ve got all night. And I plan to use most of it, myself.”

  She laughed. “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Their joining was a homecoming, familiar and new at the same time. It was odd knowing her so intimately already, and yet reveling for the first time in the satin texture of her flesh, the gasps that caught in the back of her throat, the way her body molded so perfectly to his. Thankfully, she strained toward him as eagerly as he did toward her. Everywhere he touched her she was responsive, arching up into his hands and mouth, offering herself to his every wanton exploration.

  Somewhere in the rush of flesh on flesh and swirling tongues and traded moans, she maneuvered him onto his back and treated him to the same full-body exploration. It drove him half out of his mind. Finally, she relented, and he surged up over her, more than ready to take charge again. He pushed her hands over her head, guiding her fingers around the spindles of her headboard. And then he used his knee to nudge her thighs apart, rendering her largely at his mercy.

  The first order of business was to drive her out of her mind. To chase away all remnants of the rational, logical scientist and call forth the passionate woman hiding within. Hell, he wanted to make her forget her own name.

  He stroked her damp heat, circling and rubbing and probing until her breathing was fast and erratic. And then he increased the tempo, varying the pressure from deep and strong to light and teasing. A cry broke from her lips.

  “Do you want more?” he murmured above her.

  “Yes. Please. More.”

  Wow. Begging, and he different pattern, but when I figure that into the overall pattern, it will make the necessary corrections to the computer algorithm!”

  He sort of followed that. But not entirely.

  Athena leaped out of bed, gloriously naked, and he sat up to enjoy the sight of her while it lasted. She threw on jeans and a fuzzy sweater, and flew out the door without another word to him.

  So much for a lazy, romantic morning after.

  Frowning, he got up, hit the restroom, then pulled on his clothes. He gave it another thirty seconds before she’d figure out that he’d absconded with her car keys from the top of her dresser. He wasn’t kidding—she wasn’t going anywhere without him until she had round-the-clock security.

  Ten seconds passed.

  “Pe-ter?” Her voice rose in warning. “Where are my keys?”

  “In my pocket. I’ll give you a ride to the lab.”

  “That’s ridiculous. It’s broad daylight. Give me my keys!”

  “Nope,” he replied casually.

  She scowled.

  Surely she’d learned last night that, at the end of the day, he preferred to be in charge, and that she would have no luck forcing him to do much of anything he didn’t want to do. She didn’t argue any further about the keys, so maybe she had figured that out.

  He said, “We can swing by a coffee shop and get a bite of breakfast on the way to the lab. You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

  Her scowl deepened.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll make it a drive-through,” he conceded. “But you’re still eating breakfast. I didn’t get to buy you the obligatory pre-sex, date dinner last night, so you’re not talking me out of this.”

  He thought that was a grin that flickered across her face, but it was hard to tell beneath her impatience. She snatched up a notebook and pen and all but dragged him out to her car. Laughing, he went along.

  “Man. Remind me never to get in the way of a mad scientist,” he groused, as she all but bounced in her seat, so intent was she on reaching the lab.

  She didn’t reply. She was too wrapped up in scribbling equations. She chewed on the muffin he put in her hand, and drank down the cup of coffee he passed her, but Pete highly doubted she tasted either. He practically had to jog to keep up with her when they reached the science building.

  While she sat at the computer and commenced typing at light speed, he checked in with the morning watch. Sam Garvey was just coming on duty again. He was the senior NCO on the security detail and had seen plenty of combat over the years. He was a good soldier. A good man.

  Sam told him the previous watch team had reported a quiet night.

  “Stay sharp, Sam,” Pete replied. “I’ve got this gut feeling something’s about to happen. Soon.” Something he’d be deeply relieved to have all those guards around for.

  Sam nodded soberly. “I’ve got your back, sir.”

  It was a comforting thought.

  “Eureka!” Athena shouted, startling both him and Sam. They looked over at her sitting at the computer. “I’ve done it! I’ve cracked the code!”

  Pete stared in disbelief. “For real?”

  She laughed jubilantly. “Get the digital clock off the desk in my office. Synchronize it to the time on your watch and then put it in the booth.”

  While he did that, she fetcheudes when subjected to low-frequency sound waves.

  Athena stretched out in her recliner. “Do you know what to do on the computer?” she asked anxiously.

  He grinned at her eagerness. “Yes. And the directions are right here on the desk, anyway. You do your thing and I’ll take care of this end.”

  “Okay, here goes,” she murmured.

  He watched as she closed her eyes and seemed to go to sleep in the chair. Sam glanced at him questioningly and Pete nodded back reassuringly. Everything was on track.

  And then Athena began projecting her brain waves through the crown. The amplitude of the waves wavering across his computer screen jumped impressively. The red line, generated by Athena, began to come into alignment with the blue line created by the computer. The two lines drew closer and closer together, until only a faint blur between them indicated any disparity.

  And then, without warning, the two merged and the single sine wave turned bright green.

  “We are a go,” he called out to her.

  She didn’t acknowledge his words in any way, but all of a sudden, the green wave went wild before him. A bright flash of light exploded in the booth across the room, and a metallic smell abruptly hung in the air.

  He looked into the quartz booth for the dark plastic cube of the clock.

  It was gone.

  Chapter 6

  Athena sat up as Pete and Sam audibly gasped. She looked over at the time travel booth. “Well,” she commented lightly, “I either just sent that clock back in time, or we’ve spent tens of millions of dollars developing a state-of-the-art blower-upper of alarm clocks.”

  Pete laughed. “How will we know if it worked?”

  “Go check the desk in my office. I sent the clock there. If the experiment worked, it should be sitting on my desk, but reading about fifteen minutes ahead of the current time. It was 10:02 when I sent the clock back. I sent it back to 9:47 a.m., but it will keep moving forward from its set time. It’s 10:03 here now, but the clock will have run for fifteen extra minutes and should read 10:18 a.m. If the experiment worked, of course.”

  “Let’s go find out,” he said quietly.

  Athena took off the crown and got out of her seat. Her stomach flip-flopped so violently she thought she might throw up. This was it. The moment of truth. She and th
e two men approached the door to her office cautiously.

  A small plastic cube sat on her desk.

  Bingo.

  Pete reached out with a slightly shaky hand and turned the clock around to face them. Big red numbers read 10:18.

  “Hot damn!” he cried, startling her. He turned and swept her up in his arms, dancing her around the lab and shouting, “You did it! By Jove, you did it!”

  A lifetime’s worth of work. No one had believed it possible. And she’d just proved them all wrong.

  Sam grinned widely and thumped Pete’s back, too.

  Elation filled Athena. As if making one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time wasn’t good enough, she got to share the moment with Pete.

  “Call the staff,” she gasped between spins around the lab.

  “Heck, let’s call the President of the United States!” he retorted jovially.

  “Let’s duplicate the experiment with tighter controls before we go and do something that rash,” s through most of the police investigation of the latest break-in.

  The crown was safe in its hiding place—the intruders hadn’t searched the trash cans. But it was small consolation in the face of the day’s much larger loss.

  The police took pictures and interviewed the survivors until she thought she was going to scream. But eventually, they left, too, handing security over to the remainder of Pete’s team, all of whom had gathered at the lab when word of Sam’s death spread. The soldiers were grim. Furious. Ready to kick some ass and take blood revenge the next time the thugs showed up. And Pete, with his jaws clenched, had given them orders to do so.

  Athena didn’t doubt there would be a next time. The crown was still in her possession, after all. But the loss of the Ad Astra journal was devastating. It paled before the loss of Sam’s life, but it was a blow to her work. Regardless of whether the ringleader’s goal was to stop Project Anasazi or control time travel for his own nefarious ends, once whoever was after the scrolls actually read them and saw exactly what was at stake, Athena had faith that person would double his efforts to get ahold of the crown.

  Finally, the lab grew still and silent again. Just she and Pete were left, with a cordon of guards outside. The two of them sat down, physically and emotionally spent, she in her recliner and he in the nearby chair at the computer console.

  Into the quiet, Pete finally got around to repeating his question. “Is there a copy of the Ad Astra scrolls?”

  Athena sighed. “I’ve got rough sketches. But the parchment was too fragile to risk making photocopies. I have handmade copies of the text, of course. But the diagrams—the pictures of how to assemble the medallion…we have only my sketches to go on.” She thought in despair of the exquisite detail of the original drawings and how much information had been lost in tonight’s attack. “I think we have enough to get by, but I can’t be sure.”

  Pete nodded wearily.

  “Thing is…” she started reluctantly.

  He glanced up and gestured for her to continue.

  “…now someone else knows where to start looking for the first medallion, too.”

  “What about the other pieces?” he asked.

  Athena shrugged. “The journal indicates that when we find the first piece of the medallion, it will give us a clue to the location of the second piece, and the second piece of the medallion will lead us to the third, and so on.”

  Pete’s eyes opened wide in horror. “And now whoever is behind the break-ins and

  murder has enough information to go after not only the first medallion section, but all of the subsequent pieces, too.”

  “He’s only got to find one, Pete. The scrolls were specific. All twelve medallion segments must be recovered and assembled for the message to the rest of the galaxy to get sent. If our bad guy manages to steal even one piece of the medallion, mankind will not be able to make the contact with the Galactic Council. If he gets to that first piece before us, Project Anasazi will fail and Sam’s life will have been sacrificed for nothing—” Her voice broke and she couldn’t go on.

  They sat together in silence for a long time. It was surreal after the day’s incredible highs to have sunk so quickly to this abysmal low. The whiplash effect was almostwe could send someone back in time and leave a little surprise for our intruders.”

  She’d have laughed at the suggestion if it didn’t make her want to cry so badly.

  “Seriously, Thena. Think about it.”

  She sighed. “We’re months or even years away from human trials. Once other government agencies get involved in this work, we’ll have to jump through piles of red tape before any human lives are put on the line. And by then, for all we know, the time line of our history may have moved so far forward that to go back and change today’s events could cause some enormous rift in the time continuum.”

  “But if we sent someone back quickly?” he pressed. “Say, tonight? What are the risks to the flow of time for mankind then?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to research the downstream effects of time travel before I can answer that.”

  “Agreed. Let’s research that.”

  He spoke with such finality, such certainty, that she glanced up at him, frowning suspiciously. What was he thinking?

  “Send me back, Thena.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Do it. Tonight. I can save the scrolls and save Sam.”

  “The risks—” she began.

  He cut her off. “You said yourself that humans will be much easier to transport than machines.”

  “But—”

  He grabbed her by both shoulders in sudden, violent urgency. “Sam died tonight. One of my men. On my watch. It’s my fault. For the love of God, send me back. Let me save my guy’s life! I don’t care if my own neck is at risk!”

  The grief and pain in his voice were unbearable, and the furious agony in his gaze seared her soul like acid.

  “I can’t risk you, Pete,” she whispered.

  He surged to his feet. “If you give a damn about me, if you care for me at all, you’ll do this!” he raged at her. “If you ever want us to have a future together, you’ve got to help me now. We’re talking about a man’s life, dammit!”

  “We’re talking about your life, too.”

  They glared at each other in desperation. There was no right answer. Let Sam’s death go unchallenged, or risk Pete’s life to reverse it.

  He was first to speak. His voice was bleak. “It probably won’t work, anyway. You won’t generate enough power and I won’t go anywhere at all. But at least we’ll have tried. And I can face Sam’s wife and kids in peace.”

  “He had a wife and kids?” Athena whispered achingly.

  “Two children. Oldest one’s ten. Wife’s pregnant with number three.”

  She groaned in agony.

  When the words came, they all but tore her heart in two. “All right, Pete. Let’s try it.”

  Chapter 7

  It took only a few minutes to boot up the computer and get settled in her recliner, the crown clasping her head with its familiar and strange warmth. Pete turned one of the monitors to face her chair so she could tell when her brain and the computer were synchronized. And then he stepped into the clear quartz time travel booth.

  They didn’t speak. Didn’t question the wisdom of what they were about to do. Didn’t trade farewell kisses or even say goodbye. For her part, Athena wedged that this might be the last time she ever saw Pete alive. As it was, she was barely holding herself together enough to concentrate sufficiently to use the crown.

  Pete nodded grimly from inside the booth, indicating that he was ready.

  She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. Counted backward slowly from ten to one, letting go of all the tension in her muscles one at a time until she melted into the cushions beneath her. She cleared her thoughts. Envisioned a black screen before her mind’s eye. And against that backdrop, began to envision the events of that afternoon. Before the attack.
<
br />   She hadn’t even asked Pete where or when he wanted her to send him. He’d just demanded to go back. Two hours before the attack ought to be enough. She dared not pop him back into the lab. Nobody knew what would happen if a time traveler suddenly encountered himself in an earlier moment. Rather than risk blowing up his head or blinking him out of existence entirely in some weird time warp, she opted to put him on the front porch of the science building.

  The red and blue sine waves began to draw together on the monitor beside her. She closed her eyes again, concentrating on breathing deeply and evenly. There. The same abrupt tingle she’d felt in the earlier time travel experiments. It seemed to emanate from the crown and travel across the top of her skull and then radiate outward through her brain and eyeballs.

  She cracked one eye open. The computer screen showed a single green line. She was good to go. Athena took a deep breath, summoned all the power she could muster and imagined flinging Pete back in time.

  A light flashed, brilliant even through her closed eyelids. She jolted upright, peering across the lab at the booth.

  Pete was gone.

  The breath whooshed out of her and all of a sudden she felt violently ill. What had she done? Gasping for air, she sagged in the recliner.

  Had she just killed a man?

  She lifted her wrist to glance at her watch: 11:46 p.m. After all, every man deserved to have the moment of his death noted and remembered.

  Had anything changed at all from before? She looked around hopefully.

  The lab was empty. The police chalk marks on the floor indicating spots where evidence was picked up were still there. Stray papers from ransacked files littered the room, and the cabinet doors were still off their hinges, leaning against the far wall.

  Her heart sank. They’d failed. The attack had still happened. She’d sent Pete to God-knew-where, God-knew-when. And it had all been for nothing.

  Suddenly, the prospect of life without him loomed before her, too crushingly depressing and sad for her to bear. Tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes. How long she lay there and cried silently for what they had lost before it had hardly begun, she didn’t know.